Sic ’em. Wait! No biting!

26 01 2010

Shocked—shocked!—that an group which prides itself on its unruliness is. . . unruly.

Tea Party Disputes Take Toll on Convention

From a report by Kate Zernike  in today’s NY Times:

A Tea Party convention billed as the coming together of the grass-roots groups that began sprouting up around the country a year ago is unraveling as sponsors and participants pull out to protest its expense and express concerns about “profiteering.”

The convention’s difficulties highlight the fractiousness of the Tea Party groups, and the considerable suspicions among their members of anything that suggests the establishment.

. . .

Philip Glass, the national director of the National Precinct Alliance, announced late Sunday that “amid growing controversy” around the convention, his organization would no longer participate. His group seeks to take over the Republican Party from the bottom by filling the ranks of local and state parties with grass-roots conservatives, and Mr. Glass had been scheduled to lead workshops on its strategy.

“We are very concerned about the appearance of T.P.N. [Tea Party Nation] profiteering and exploitation of the grass-roots movement,” he said in a statement. “We were under the impression that T.P.N. was a nonprofit organization like N.P.A., interested only in uniting and educating Tea Party activists on how to make a real difference in the political arena.”

Mr. Glass said he was also concerned about the role in the convention of groups like Tea Party Express, which has held rallies across the country through two bus tours, and FreedomWorks, a Tea Party umbrella. He called them  “Republican National Committee-related groups,” and added, “At best, it creates the appearance of an R.N.C. hijacking; at worst, it is one.”

Ha. Emphasis added.


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Categories : Politics

Your Captain says: Put your head in your hands.

20 01 2010

There are days—many days, actually—when it sucks to be a student of politics.

This is one of them.

Not because Martha Coakley lost in Massachusetts to a nice head of hair (although that’s not really helping my mood), but because the crappiness of political analysis in this country has gone critical.

That’s called  a shitstorm, my friends, and we’ve been livin’ in it for too many years.

Given the constant effluvia, you’d think I’d be used to it by now, hunkered down in a cave of indifference and/or utterly uncaring of the stench of politics.

But no, if you care about politics, ain’t no way to plug oneself up against the raining—or shall I say reigning?—of nonsense.

Please note that this is not strictly or even mainly about partisan politics. I’m a pinko, so I know I’m always going to lose. Sometimes I get to vote for people who are within shouting (really loud!) distance of my agenda, and that’s nice, but, really, socialists don’t have much goin’ on in this country.

Nor is this (directly) about nasty language, gossip, hypocrisy, and the hypercompetitiveness of candidates.

Nooo, this is more about the structure of politics in the US, how we—left, right, and otherwise—do politics.

First: the nastiness. Well, duh. I may hold and Arendtian/Aristotelian understanding of politics as the sphere of the good life, but neither of them had much of a theory of actual governance. And actual governance is hard, performed by people with strong and conflicting opinions, people who had to scratch and spit and shed blood to get into the position to govern.

I don’t know that this is in every way the best way to find politicians, but if you want responsive government, then there’s election by lot, election through competition, and . . . what else?

Thus, given that competition is built into our system, you’d think that journalists and pundits and the politicians themselves would not be surprised when candidates compete! And that they would be similarly phlegmatic when those in the throes of competition get angry, trash talk, and otherwise behave as if they want and expect to win.

No. Instead of sobriety or stoicism, we get titillation, as seen most recently in Game Change, by the alleged journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Oo! Hillary said a bad word! Or famously temperamental Senator McCain yelled bad words at his wife! Or the other candidates really didn’t like Mitt Romney!

Over three hundred interviews with over two hundred witnesses/participants/soreheads on ‘deep background’ and we get Gossip Pols?

But the omnipresent irritation of the presence of pundits is not, however, the main target of this rant.

Nope, I’m just going to go ahead and smack all of us as lousy citizens.

Not because each of us individually is a lousy citizen, but because we have created a system in which it is very difficult to be a good citizen.

Politicians who know better say we can cut the deficit without raising taxes or reducing or eliminating popular programs or entitlements.

Pundits who know better ponder the re-election chances of a president three years ahead of the election.

Citizens who know better say we want lower taxes and less government and clean streets and good schools and safe cities.

We want one-hundred-percent protection against terrorism and cheap flights with easy check-in procedures.

We want excellent teachers and low property taxes.

We want cheap water and few regulations.

You see how this could continue; you could probably add your own 2 or 3 or twenty.

It’s not that Americans are more stupid than anyone else, or even more covetous. It’s that we’ve gotten so used to thinking of our wants as rights that we’ve neglected to do the hard work of accounting for our wants; instead, we demand, and castigate any negotiations over those demands.

(Oh, and when there’s any kind of inequality, we err in the other direction by confusing want and need, and punish those who are attempt to translate those needs into rights.)

Politicians respond to this, we respond to the politicians, and the pundits keep smug score.

The problem is systemic. Individual citizens may understand that if you wanna get, you gotta give, and adjust their expectations accordingly. I don’t like taxes, but am willing to pay them in order to create a more generous social-welfare net; libertarians might like some government services, but are willing to forgo them in order to lower their tax burden; social conservatives might be willing to trade liberty for authority. At that individual or local level, some of us, perhaps many or most of us, get it.

But since we are treated as a mass or series of masses by politicians and pundits, and are sometimes too eager to associate ourselves with some mass or another, we get a politics based on the ebbs and flows of the mass, and the reaction cycle between mass, politician, and pundit.

And that’s exactly what our system has become: reactionary. No thinking, no leading, no acting—only re-acting to the latest outrage du jour.

Irresponsibility, all around.

What does this mean? Not much, really. We can probably chug along in our politically-irresponsibly ways for years, if not decades, which means that it’s possible that something could happen in the meantime to break us out of this cycle.

But even a slo-mo degradation is still degradation.

Which helps to explain the occasional rants by those of us who do care about our politics.


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I am woman—hear me roar

12 01 2010

I am so fucking tired of having to generate outrage at yet another horrendously stupid or awful comment on or policy regarding women.

It’s not that I’m no longer capable of outrage—note the existence of the ‘Rant’ category (or see this post)—but JesusMary&Joseph can I not simply walk away from idiocy on occasion?

Look, I’m old—an old feminist, and shit that used to rile me is now far more likely to lead me to roll my eyes. Some dickwad thinks women can’t think and menstruate at the time and I’m supposed to engage in a point-by-point rebuttal of this so-called argument?

Can’t I just laugh in his face and move on?

C. and I were discussing our respective positions vis-a-vis feminism the other night; while her views generally might be described as feminist, she declines the term. I’ll leave it to her to explain why—she’s working on a post on the topic—but she was clearly weary of the ‘rules’ of feminism. Do I have to invoke ‘The Patriarchy‘ every time some guy acts like a douche? Can’t I just say, This guy is a douche?

I think patriarchy is a key concept in understanding the development of male-female roles and relationships across societies; I also think such understanding requires a sense of critical distance from the term itself, as well as an ability to distinguish between overarching/underlying structural dynamics and the idiosyncracies of individual behavior.

Translation: Yes, sometimes a douche is just a douche.

But even if I think that scripts for individual behavior are shaped (not determined) by those structural dynamics, it doesn’t necessarily mean I have to go nuclear every time someone tosses a dart my way. Sometimes I can just toss it back—bent, if I so choose. Sometimes I can just duck.

This is called judgment, and one of the benefits of aging is accumulating enough experience on which to base this discretion.

This does not make a bad feminist or a sell-out or blinded by privilege. (Grrrr, now there’s a word that sets me off. . . .) As a long-ago grad school colleague responded to a newly-out woman’s hectoring her on not being a good enough lesbian: I’ve been out since I was fifteen, so I don’t need any lectures from some baby dyke.

Was P. invoking privilege in her put-down? Yeah—an earned one. And P., an exceptional mild person, didn’t go any further in criticizing this woman’s zeal; rather, she made the practical observation that the way one relates one’s sexuality to the world changes over time. Such change, needless to say, can indicate development in as opposed to repudiation of an aspect of one’s identity.

So how I’m a feminist has changed over the last thirty years—which strikes me as a good thing. I was twelve or thirteen when I first identified as a feminist, and took to it with a teenaged zeal. I ain’t knocking adolescent views—they’re entirely appropriate for adolescents—but, really, how sad would it be for an old broad like me to ignore the fact that I am no longer thirteen?

It is true that in those intervening decades I have come to question feminism and to shift where I locate myself within the spectrum of feminisms. It’s not that I’ve abandoned my previous commitment to equality, but in recent years I have focused more intently on issues of liberation and domination.

These are big topics, but here I want simply to make the practical point that domination affects all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. Some people might focus on race or ethnicity or class or sexual orientation or gender identity or disability or any number of other boxes in which we find ourselves, but it seems to me that we can share the general goal of liberation, as pursued in our particular ways.

So while I might have to start calling myself a ‘libber’ to reflect that larger project, my entry into this project was as a feminist. It has formed my thinking and guided my development regarding liberation, and I see no reason to discard it, now.

(There’s also the little matter of rank oppression of women world-wide and the necessity of recognizing that however general the goal of liberation, it is in fact experienced in the particular. Women’s rights may be human rights, but you can’t neglect the former and hope to achieve the latter.)

Still, I share C.’s wariness to some versions of feminism, those which traffic in conversation-stopping jargon and which allow for no nuance in how we actually inhabit this world. We discussed a couple of websites and their contributors, and the constant jackhammering in their posts.

C. was pissed off, but I (uncharacteristically) took more of P.’s mellow line. Look, I said, those websites are geared toward a particular audience—a younger, academically-oriented one. They’re pounding away on stuff that we might already have learned to deal with. In and of itself that’s not a bad thing, but for those of us outside of that target audience, it’s bound to produce its share of irritation.

Then C. asked a very good question: Where the hell are those websites for women our age?

Beyond the mommy blogs, I couldn’t think of any. Katha Pollitt keeps on keeping on, but where is the Gen-X version of Feministing or Jezebel or Pandagon? (Could we call it BabyBust? Or would that just be too cute?)

We need a site which takes account of our nicks and scars, defeats and victories, and which doesn’t expect us to get riled up every damned time someone says something stupid about women, somewhere. Righteous Broads? Crone? Or, to call on an earlier post, how about Mormo, a.k.a. She-monster?

Something which encourages us to laugh and dance and not be perfect, but human, instead. Politics, liberation—yes, but life, too. Life, always.


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While I am trying not to die. . .

27 12 2009

. . . I recommend heading over to Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, for the latest on what’s happening in Iran.

If my brain weren’t sizzling from fever, I’d offer some commentary on the ways politics is cracking against authority, and that authority’s transformation of the most prosaic of activities (e.g., honking one’s car horn) into a sign of resistance worthy of violent suppression.

(Perhaps you are glad my brain is frying. . . .)

Politics isn’t dead. And liberation, however unlikely, however fraught, is just. . . barely. . . possible.

Politics: The art of the possible.


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Categories : Politics

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco

22 11 2009

I am not a Republican.

But, god help me, I agree with Republican Senator Lindsay Graham on at least one issue. In response to a question recently about Glenn Beck, he responded “Here’s what I worry about. How many people in my business are going to be controlled by what’s said on the radio or in a TV commercial?”

His business, of course, is the business of politics—or, more to the point, the business of governance.

It’s a key distinction, that between politics and governance, once which those who lack the responsibility for so governing find it convenient to overlook.

The NY Times notes that M. Beck, along with Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Mike Huckabee are all rallying the troops to do. . . something they want. It’s the usual boilerplate of a deracinated American conservative movement: low/flat/no taxes; low/flat/cut spending; stop illegal immigration/drug smuggling; energy independence—more drilling/mining/nuke-power production; responsible environmental stewardship; small government; victory in Iraq; keep Guantanamo open. . . are you noticing any problems here?

As in, complete incoherence? Close the borders but do so with less spending; win in Iraq and lower taxes; shrink the size of government and give it the power to torture and detain people indefinitely; no redistribution and give parents vouchers for education; tap your head and rub your tummy at the same time. . . oh, wait. . . .

There’s more, of course, and I could provide the links to their sites, but why give them the page views?

More to the point, why send you off to emptiness? There’s nothing at the Beck, Hannity, and Ingraham sites beyond a list of conflicting demands. At least Huckabee’s plans are tethered to reality, such as it is: he seeks to raise money for Republican candidates.

Then again, Huckabee is the only one of the Fab Four who has actually served in government, that is, who has actually had to take responsibility for his words and deeds.

This is what underlies Senator Graham’s lament: Beck can cry and Ingraham sneer and Hannity harrumpf and at the end of the day they leave the studio and let others clean up their kleenex and spittle. And if shit goes bad, well, it’s just fodder for tomorrow’s broadcast cannon.

I’m a big fan of the First Amendment, just as I’m a big fan of democracy, and I tend to think the fewer rules attached to either speech or participation, the better. And that goes for these bloviators and their followers, as well.

But I’m also a civic republican (note the ‘little r’), and think that politics works best as requires something more than tears and outrage from its participants; democratic politics in particular requires an engagement which goes beyond oneself.

A concept of citizenship, as it were.

This is an odd argument for someone as decidedly not-patriotic and anti-nationalist as I am, but I do recognize obligations to the those with whom I share a political space, i.e., my fellow citizens.

These obligations are basic, and don’t require much agreement with those fellows, and hardly demand one bow to to the government.

But it does require at the very least a recognition that one does share a political space, a space beyond one’s living room or therapist’s office or tavern booth, in which one might just have to set aside one’s personal concerns for a consideration of public matters.

I think most people in office get it, even the people who I’d rather not hold any office beyond that of dogcatcher (and some not even that—I’m lookin’ at you, Michelle Bachmann). They go through the hassles of campaigning because they actually want to accomplish something. Sure, they want to inflate their successes and evade their failures, but at least they put themselves through the process whereby they might in some way be held accountable for both.

But The Media Personality™? No, he or she mashes up resentment and principle and incoherence and general sky-pie-edness and then dances on by the difficulties of actual decision-making, policy-formation, and, oh, yes, governance.

This all-partying/no-hangover mentality is not, alas, confined to the right. But right now they’re the ones smashing open the kegs and spiking the kool-aid and inviting the  palin-drones and tea-baggers to Drink! Drink! Drink!

Designated drivers need not apply.


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Little pink houses for you and me

13 11 2009

Shocking.

Pfizer to Leave City That Won Supreme Court Land-Use Case

From the NYTimes story by Patrick McGeehan:

“Look what they did,” Mr. Cristofaro said on Thursday. “They stole our home for economic development. It was all for Pfizer, and now they get up and walk away.”

That sentiment has been echoing around New London since Monday, when Pfizer, the giant drug company,announced it would lead the city just eight years after its arrival led to a debate about urban redevelopment that rumbled through the Unites States Supreme Court, and reset the boundaries for governments to seize private land for commercial use.

Pfizer said it would pull 1,400 jobs out of New London within two years and move most of them a few miles away to a campus it owns in Groton, Conn., as a cost-cutting measure. It would leave behind the city’s biggest office complex and an adjacent swath of barren land that was cleared of dozens of homes to make room for a hotel, stores and condominiums that were never built.

Robert  Pero, a city council member who’s about to become mayor, noted that the city lost over a thousand jobs with the move, but retain the building.

Then again, he added, “I don’t know who’s going to be looking for a building like that in this economy.”

He also noted that he was unhappy that Pfizer didn’t contact the city before deciding to leave.

“I’m sure that there are people that are waiting out there to say, ‘I told you so,’ ” Mr. Pero said. “I don’t know that even today you can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

Hmmm. And yet many of those screwed over by their own city retain the ability to say precisely that.

Large swaths of barren land where neighborhoods once stood, driven out not for the public good (always a tough call, but if not always justified, at least justifiable) but because regular citizens living their lives don’t produce enough profit benefit to the city.

Not that that would even happen in New York. I mean, the Atlantic Yards project—it’s all good.

Right?


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11 11 2009

Gay Funeral Rights Bill Vetoed By Rhode Island Governor

AP – Gov. Don Carcieri vetoed legislation Tuesday that would give same-sex couples in Rhode Island the same right to plan the funerals of their late partners as married couples.

The socially conservative Republican said the proposed protection represents a “disturbing trend” of the incremental erosion of heterosexual marriage. Rhode Island does not recognize same-sex marriage.

“If the General Assembly believes it would like to address the issue of domestic partnership, it should place the issue on the ballot and let the people of Rhode Island decide,” Carcieri said in a letter to lawmakers.

(Filed by Elyse Siegel/at Huffington Post)


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Screwed

8 11 2009

Health care reform passes in the House—yay. . . oh, wait.

The Stupak amendment is included in final House bill. The amendment which not only reiterates the noxious Hyde amendment (which prohibits federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and threats to life of the woman), but extends the prohibition to the woman purchasing coverage for abortion, if said purchase is in any way subsidized (as in, any ‘affordability credits’ meant to make insurance, well, affordable) by the government.

[Side note: Stupak and his supporters state that offering a subsidy to individuals to use as they see fit—which, under the health reform bill, would apply widely—is the same as a direct subsidy to the institutions or practices which the individual uses. By this logic, then, all voucher and student loan money given to individuals which allows them to choose religious schools ought to be banned as unconstitutional support for religion. Don’t hold your breath for Stupak et. al. to make this connection.]

That’s right: a woman paying a premium for insurance which includes coverage for abortion is now considered identical to the federal government paying for the abortion itself.

Because, hey, there’s no such thing as a fertile woman who can make and act on decisions on her own behalf, so of course this is not an autonomous act, but an act of the state.

Therefore, the state has to act on behalf of such women, as opposed to removing those obstacles which allow them to act on their own behalf.

How does this work?

Well, because, hey, sometimes women have sex just because they want to, which means they can’t be trusted to control their sexuality;

And because, hey, sometimes these women who have sex just because they want to end up pregnant, which means that they can’t be trusted to control their own fertility;

And sometime these women who have sex just because they want to and end up pregnant choose to end the pregnancy;

And because, hey, one in four women in the US have at some point chosen to end a pregnancy, and you can’t know just by looking at them which one out of every four women has so chosen or how many more might consider so choosing;

And because, hey, [consideration of] such a choice means that women seek to escape the consequences of their actions;

And a woman who seeks to avoid the consequences of her actions is by definition irresponsible;

And  irresponsibility means the woman lacks the ability to choose;

THEREFORE, the only responsible action for the state is to insure that they do nothing to make it easier and in fact make it harder for women to be in the position whereby they could actually choose.

Yeah, that’s some goddamned reform.


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Let’s all give a big round of applause. . .

4 11 2009

. . . to Ta-Nahisi Coates for reading Rod Dreher‘s Crunchy Con blog today.

Because I could not.

This is very good news for you, since it spares you my utterly uninteresting cursing at the fucking idiocy and overall candy-assed-ness of Sir Dreher, who wants to be able to discriminate against queers without being called on it.

Hey, just because I think gay marriage will ruin civilization doesn’t mean I deserve to be called a bigot.

No, I don’t know what he actually wrote, because, honest to betsy, I haven’t been able to stomach his self-serving no-fair-for-calling-me-a-bigot-just-cuz-I’m-acting-like-a-bigot bilge.

Yeah, I’ll read him tomorrow. But today, today I’m content to skip the content and go straight to the comment: You want to treat some people as lesser beings, then FUCKING OWN IT.

But he won’t.

Candy-ass.

 


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23 10 2009

From the Archdiocese in Guam, in response to a bill to recognize same-sex partnerships:

The culture of homosexuality is a culture of absorption because it does not value self-sacrifice. It is a glaring example of what John Paul II has called the culture of death. Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture. That is why they repress such behavior with death. Their culture is anything but one of self-absorption. It may be brutal at times, but any culture that is able to produce wave after wave of suicide bombers (women as well as men) is a culture that at least knows how to value self-sacrifice.

(h/t: The Daily Dish)


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