Jeff Strabone

one simple message

2011-07-19T06:40:00.003-04:00

This political ad is part of the campaign to recall Luther Olsen, a Republican state senator in Wisconsin, but its visually effective message applies to the GOP as a whole: they take from the poor and middle class and give to the rich. It's such a simple message, yet few Democrats can articulate it.

break it on down

2011-07-12T18:54:00.005-04:00

This video helpfully explains to the layman some of the things that have gone wrong in the States over the past thirty to forty years. I don't know what they have in store for their 'meetups' later this month, but this would make a good video to share with your friends who say they are 'not political'.

abstract classicism

2011-07-12T09:25:00.007-04:00

Cy Twombly continued to produce extraordinary work right up until his death last week. Although his paintings often included text, they challenge one to find the words to describe them. I have tried to do that in my latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily, which I submit for your reading pleasure.

Meanwhile, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London is exhibiting works by Twombly and Poussin side by side. I will head down there this weekend to see what comes of pairing two such devoted classicists of such different eras and styles.

frack that

2011-06-14T08:50:00.004-04:00

My latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily is now available for your reading pleasure. The subject is hydraulic fracturing, 'fracking' for short. Do feel encouraged to read it. Meanwhile, enjoy a nice, tall glass of cool, refreshing water.

'I think art is difficult'

2011-05-16T00:43:00.006-04:00

A very fine artist whose work you should see has just forwarded me a link to Charlie Rose's interview of Richard Serra, broadcast April 21, 2011. Serra speaks only in beautifully complete, hyper-articulate sentences. Whether you have seen the exhibition of his drawings at the Met or not, I am sure you will be moved by listening to Serra talk about his art and questions of making in general. People who teach should especially watch this interview, for Serra's habits of mind are exactly what we need to inculcate in our students.

Our Man in Panama

2011-04-27T21:56:00.018-04:00

Earlier today, President Obama released his 'long-form birth certificate' on the premise that doing so would enable American political discourse to move on to more important matters. Here is his explanation from the official White House transcript:

We're not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.

Before we put the 'birther' issue to rest forever, I would like to offer my thoughts on how this rubbish started during the 2008 campaign. You see, one of the two major-party candidates for president had the problem of being born outside the United States. I am speaking, of course, of John McCain, native of Panama.

What's that you say? You did not know that John McCain was born in Panama? I wonder why. Every reference source agrees. According to Wikipedia, for instance, John McCain was born on August 29, 1936 at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station, Panama Canal Zone, where his father, John Sidney McCain Jr., was stationed. I should point out, for what it's worth, that McCain has always refused to release his birth certificate. [Update: McCain did provide his birth certificate in 2008 to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire in the case of Hollander v. McCain (2008), which challenged his eligibility to serve.]

Although Panama is obviously not part of the U.S., are U.S. military installations abroad in any way, under any statute or provision, 'part' of the U.S.? Is someone born at a U.S. military installation abroad somehow 'in' the U.S.? In a word, no. Let's take a look at the United States Foreign Affairs Manual, Volume 7, §1113, entitled 'NOT INCLUDED IN THE MEANING OF "IN THE UNITED STATES"'. According to paragraph (c)(1),

Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities abroad are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not born in the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.

Why is it such a problem for a presidential candidate to have been born outside the U.S.? According to Article II of the U.S. Constitution:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

The truth is, no one knows for sure what this clause means. No court has ever ruled on it regarding presidential elections, and legal experts are divided. (See summaries of facts and opinions here and here.) In the absence of clear constitutional or jurisprudential guidance, a president born outside the U.S. could be subject to suspicions of constitutional illegitimacy.

Aside from the obviously racist intent, the point of accusing Obama of being foreign-born in 2008 was to draw attention away from McCain's foreign birth. And it seems to have worked. Far more people have heard the lies about Obama's birthplace than the truth about McCain's. Once Obama won the election, the lie took on a life of its own.

I doubt that Obama's statement and document release today will be the final chapter in the history of the 'birther' conspiracy. But I do believe that the need to draw attention away from McCain's 'birther' problem was the first chapter.

Richard Serra at the Met

2011-04-26T00:31:00.003-04:00

Last week I contributed an article on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of Richard Serra's drawing to 3 Quarks Daily. Do feel encouraged to read it.

Egypt etc.

2011-02-21T20:06:00.003-05:00

My latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily provides fresh thoughts on the nascent Arab revolutions. Do feel encouraged to read it.

more for us

2011-01-27T02:03:00.006-05:00

More evidence of Republican zealotry/insanity, as if more were needed: Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas wants to eliminate the state arts commission by spinning it off into a private entity. This would make Kansas the only state in the Union without a state entity to promote the arts. Even [fill in the state you like least] has a state arts commission. The state's annual budget for the arts: $574,000. The Kansas Arts Commission, which is not taking the governor's plan lying down, reports that the state would consequently lose

•$778,300 in direct funding from the National Endowment for the Arts

•$437,767 in indirect grants and services from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Kansas Arts Commission's regional partner[.]

My math says that would be a net loss to the state of $642,067. Add the $200,000 that the state expects the spinoff to cost, and the total rises to $842,067. That's before taking into account lost jobs, lost taxes on those jobs, and so on, not to mention the impoverishment of Kansan society as creative professionals flee the state. I could, if I were inclined, supply copious, convincing data demonstrating the revenue boost that the arts supply to cities and states across the country, but that's not really the point today.

I am more interested in seeing this as an example of ideological opportunism by the Republicans. We don't need any more data to know that Brownback's costly plan forms no part of a genuine budget-cutting effort. He is simply using the state's economic downturn to carry on the Republican culture wars. (Let me also take this opportunity to remind readers that, as a U.S. Senator, Brownback supported a far-right Israeli plan to annex the West Bank and Gaza deport all Palestinians therefrom.)

In the past, I might have written letters to whomever in Kansas in defense of the arts commission. In college, I organized a postcard-writing campaign to support the National Endowment of the Arts. We generated over a thousand postcards to students' individual members of Congress, and this was during a summer term. And now? 63% of the Kansas electorate voted for Brownback last year. After his fourteen years in the U.S. Senate, they surely knew what they were getting. Making matters worse, the comments from local readers at the Topeka Capital-Journal's website mostly support Brownback's plan and sneer at the arts.

I feel for the good people of Kansas who may now lose the Topeka Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1946, and other cultural riches. But my sympathy is fairly limited, for this is exactly what the people of Kansas chose in their elections. This is democracy at work. If the people of Kansas want to be governed by anti-arts, anti-math maniacs, that is their right. The one note of solace that we can take from this sorry episode: there may be more arts funding for the rest of us, who support the arts not just in the comfort of our seats at the symphony but at the ballot box as well.

shout it from the mountaintop

2011-01-15T15:08:00.008-05:00

I have grown as weary of President Obama's premature compromises and bad salesmanship as the next Democrat. As I have pointed out elsewhere, his failure to trumpet his achievements is particularly keen in the matter of mining regulation. Case in point: the New York Times reported yesterday that the EPA has revoked the permit for a massive mountain-top removal coal project in West Virginia. According to the Times, 'It was the first time the agency had rescinded a valid clean water permit for a coal mine.' Yet somehow this major eco-political event has failed to become a major news item, nor should we expect to hear Democrats talk about it.

The permit was issued in 2007 by the Bush administation to the Arch Coal company to blast off the mountaintops over an area of 2,278 acres in order to mine the coal underneath. The millions of tons of debris would fill valleys, block streams, and pollute drinking water. The EPA's revocation comes in the form of a 99-page 'Final Determination' which you can read here.

Mining companies and West Virginia's 'Democratic' Senator Joe Manchin have unsurprisingly expressed outrage at the EPA's decision. Less interested parties have also objected, including the National Realtors Association, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association on the grounds that the government ought not revoke permits, i.e. do its job.

The authority for the EPA's revocation comes from 33 U.S.C. §1344(c), also known as §404(c) of the Clean Water Act:

(c) Denial or restriction of use of defined areas as disposal sites

The Administrator is authorized to prohibit the specification (including the withdrawal of specification) of any defined area as a disposal site, and he is authorized to deny or restrict the use of any defined area for specification (including the withdrawal of specification) as a disposal site, whenever he determines, after notice and opportunity for public hearings, that the discharge of such materials into such area will have an unacceptable adverse effect on municipal water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas (including spawning and breeding areas), wildlife, or recreational areas. Before making such determination, the Administrator shall consult with the Secretary. The Administrator shall set forth in writing and make public his findings and his reasons for making any determination under this subsection.

To the EPA's credit, its Final Determination includes, amidst all its ecological and statutory data, a section on 'Environmental Justice'. In addition to noting the relative poverty of Logan County, West Virginia, it also sticks up for the idea of the commons:

The mountains affected by Spruce No. 1 Mine are an important cultural resource for many residents. In many cases the mountains have helped define their culture, and they are an integral part of their daily lives. For example, the mountain ridges of southern West Virginia have for over two centuries been viewed largely as a 'commons', where local residents have gathered wild medicinal herbs such as American Ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) and Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) (Hufford 2003). In many cases, collection of these wild herbs provides much needed extra income to local communities during times of unemployment or economic hardship (Bailey 1999). Removing these mountains may have profound cultural changes on the residents in the area, and so it is important that cultural impacts be considered as well.

What dumbfounds me about all this is why the Obama administration allows stories like this one to be buried on page A14 of the newspaper and absent from television news. The mining interests are surely blasting this news to their constituents. Every mineworker who was hoping for one of the project's promised 250 jobs has surely heard from aptly-named Arch Coal that the project has been blocked by a tyrannical, overreaching government run amok. The people not getting the story are the everyday eco-friendly liberals whose votes the Obama administation will need in 2012. And so it goes.

cut and paste to ABC 'News'

2010-10-29T20:44:00.003-04:00

Incredibly, Andrew Breitbart, the pedlar of falsely edited footage of former federal official Shirley Sherrod earlier this year, has been hired by ABC News. Although I don't expect much from a broadcast network that considers 'Good Morning America' a news show, this hiring strikes me as a new low in what was once known as journalism. The man is famous only for lying, hysteria, and ill-temperedness.

Do feel encouraged to join me in expressing objections to the American Broadcasting Company. The form for doing so is located here. My remarks, within the complaint form's 500-word limit, appear below.

I object to your hiring of Andrew Breitbart not because I disagree with his opinions but because he has a long history of willful dishonesty and misrepresentation. Kooky opinions are one thing, particularly in a setting where he would be one voice among many. Lying is another thing entirely. Known liars do not belong on the payrolls of news agencies. As a result, I will not watch your coverage. You should be ashamed by your abandonment of journalistic standards.

Mad Men season four, episode 12: Blowing Smoke

2010-10-10T23:17:00.012-04:00

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read any further if you have not seen tonight's episode of Mad Men.

Just one thought to share about tonight's episode of Mad Men. With his full-page ad in the New York Times—'Why I'm Quitting Tobacco'—Don used his pain much the way he did in the classic season one finale, 'The Wheel': he gave its raw material creative form by making it into a sales pitch.

At the end of season one, he projected his own family photos—at exactly the moment when he feared he had lost his family—to explain why Kodak's Wheel should be renamed the Carousel. Tonight's episode, set in September 1965, featured the return of Don's season one boho mistress Midge, played by Rosemarie DeWitt. She's married now but not to Roy, the beatnik whom Don saw she truly loved back in episode 8. Now she's a heroin junkie living badly with the guy who got her hooked and who is clearly willing to pimp her out for a fix. Don discovers this on the night before a pitch meeting meant to win the account to market a new cigarette intended for women.

Don, who has only recently come to loose grips with his own alcoholism, tries to keep his feelings tightly held under his steely exterior, but he cannot bring himself to throw out Midge's painting. When he turned to his recently begun journal, I know I was not the only audience member who expected more earnest self-reflection of the kind we have seen since his post-Clio crash. That he began by tearing out his earlier pages should have told us how he would turn this new pain into work. He begins a new composition: the open letter that, when we first hear it, sounds like a conscience-driven rejection of addictive tobacco. 'Here was my chance to be someone who could sleep at night,' he writes, instead of someone addicted to the money from luring people towards death by cigarette. Surely, he means what he is writing, no?

Don's voiceover proceeds through shots of him swimming—his meditation—and into the next morning when his stunned colleagues at SCDP continue the recitation as the letter's contents transition into statements about the firm's intentions: the private journal has become the full-page ad. Confronted by puzzled ad men, Don leaves no uncertainty about the letter's purpose: 'It's an ad for this agency.' He corrects star-struck secretary Megan's awe at his courage: 'That's really not what it was about.'

But does that necessarily make the content any less sincere, and is that even a question we should be asking? Did Don mean these words any less than when he spoke of being taken back 'to a place where we know we are loved', words that made Harry Crane flee the room in tears back in 1960? Do we doubt that Don hates what addiction has done to his old flame and that, sitting with his pen and pad, he recognizes his own culpability in related enterprises?

Why then should he not use this moment to drum up new business for the firm? Hasn't his creativity always been the self-therapy by which he sublimates his suffering, turning it into something more? Here then is an instance, albeit fictional, to corroborate T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent: 'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.'

Was Don sincere or insincere in what he wrote about tobacco? Whether the letter expresses Don's true feelings is no longer the question once it becomes a public act. We cannot draw clear lines through the work between the sincere and the insincere. The impossibility of certainty—the endless multiple readings that the show engenders—is one of the things that makes Mad Men great. Although tonight's episode did not feel like the Carousel speech, it came from the same place: not the place where we know we are loved, but the place where the pain from an old wound becomes art, advertising included.

cause for enthusiasm

2010-10-10T23:15:00.002-04:00

My latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily is available for your reading pleasure. It is on the question of the so-called enthusiasm gap among Democratic voters.

Don't laugh: saying the same old thing works

2010-09-24T15:14:00.005-04:00

The Repulican Party released a new campaign document this week called 'A Pledge to America'. It is nothing more than the usual boilerplate Republican rhetoric, as demonstrated by John Stewart's cleverly edited segment showing House Republicans using the exact same words in years past. That repetitiveness is what makes it an effective propaganda tool.

The last time the Congressional Republicans made such a fuss about a document rollout was in 1994, when they launched their 'Contract with America' en route to taking over both houses of Congress for the first time in decades. Like the Pledge, the Contract also parroted earlier material, specifically President Ronald Reagan's 1985 State of the Union Address, its main source. The joke, unfortunately, is on the Democrats, who, year after year, fail to articulate a consistent message.

It is easy to make fun of the Republicans' rhetorical recycling, but nothing wins campaigns like memorable catchphrases and the appearance of consistency. The content of that consistency is almost irrelevant. Many people will vote for the candidate about whom they can say 'I know what he stands for' even if what that candidate stands for is inimical to a voter's self-interests. That was one big reason that people found it hard to pull the lever in 2004 for John Kerry, the presidential candidate who had trouble getting a consistent message out: people went with the known rather than the unknown, even if they knew that the known was quite bad. It also worked for the guy who said little more than 'Hope' and 'Change' in 2008.

The Democrats' biggest problem is not that they think too much but that they do their thinking in public. Yes, the problems we face are complicated, but most voters don't want to be reminded that their leaders are full of doubt and circumspection. I, for one, am a big fan of doubt and circumspection, but it doesn't sell well on the national stage.

Self-fashioned thoughtful types can go on laughing at the Republicans' same-old, same-old tactics, but they work. If ever the Democrats started using Republican tactics to sell Democratic policies, the Republicans would be finished.

Update: the upcoming Congressional elections

2010-09-22T01:16:00.009-04:00

I stand by the spirit of my blog posting of June 30: the Democrats will not face disaster in the 2010 Congressional elections in part because the Republicans are running a pack of clowns. After last week's final round of primaries, now is when predictions can be based more on data and less on speculation. What have we learned so far this year?

1. The Teabaggers did indeed cost the Republicans potential opportunities to pick up seats in the Senate or securely hold them. In Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, and Nevada, RNC-backed candidates, including some incumbents, lost to Teabaggers with lower electoral prospects. (And Republican Senator Bob Bennett lost his primary to a Teabagger in safely red Utah.) Democratic interim-appointed Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado could still lose his seat, but the Democrats could also make otherwise unlikely gains in Alaska and Kentucky.)

2. Generic Congressional polls are worth a lot less than polls about specific candidates. Because most Americans have weak-to-non-existent party identification, one would think that professional commentators would disregard generic polls and that there would not be much of a market for such polls. One would be wrong. Some people seem to be discovering this fact fairly late in the game.

3. No one knows what is happening in Florida. Despite early hopes that Governor Charlie Crist's independent, Lieberman-esque campaign would overtake Republican Marco Rubio's, the worst possible scenario is emerging: Crist and Democrat Kendrick Meek are splitting the left-of-center vote. Someone will have to step down or Rubio will step over both of them on election day.

4. Expected Democratic strengths in North Carolina and Ohio have dissipated. I expected Ohio to follow the Northeast in its regional red-to-blue purge, a long-term trend matching the South's earlier blue-to-red purge. That no longer seems likely. Nor can we count on North Carolina's oddly cursed Senate seat to flip for the sixth consecutive election.

5. The so-called Democratic enthusiasm gap remains to be demonstrated. The states with competitive Democratic primaries that I checked had respectable turnout. In Kentucky's primaries, for instance, 514,173 Democrats voted, compared to 350,783 Republicans.

I remain optimistic, despite the polls, that Pennsylvania will not go red, let alone to a candidate, Pat Toomey, who could not beat Arlen Specter in the 2004 Republican primary. Likewise, I expect New Hampshire's Democratic transformation to continue. As Wikipedia reminds us, the 2006 New Hampshire state legislative elections 'gave Democrats majority control of both chambers for the first time since 1874, 14-10 in the Senate and 239-161 in the House'. After the 2008 elections, New Hampshire's State Senate became the first state legislative house in the U.S. to have a female majority. New Hampshire is set to take its proper place in the coming all-blue New England, preferably sooner rather than later.

I don't take seriously concerns about California and Illinois, although I confess to being bewildered and worried by the suddenly declining poll position of Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. Let's hope the most recent poll proves to be just a blip.

The race to watch: Lousiana, where Republican Senator David Vitter's sordid past looks like it might be ready to catch up to him at long last.

What really matters in the end is not predictions but actions and dollars. I will be contributing money to Senate campaigns in the closest states, as should you. Here are some suggestions:

Wisconsin, Russ Feingold

New Hampshire, Paul Hodes

Pennsylvania, Joe Sestak

Kentucky, Jack Conway

Colorado, Michael Bennet

American elections are all about money. If a better Congress is worth paying for, then let's have the best Congress our money can buy.

defying history

2010-06-30T03:42:00.009-04:00

I wish I had said this publicly in 2009 when it would have been rejected by far more people as preposterous: the Democrats could very well wind up with sixty or more seats in the U.S. Senate after the 2010 elections. And while I'm at it, I may as well go on the record with this prediction, too: there is no way that President Obama loses the 2012 election.

Everyone loves to repeat the conventional wisdom that the Democrats will lose this year either because the president's party almost always loses the first midterm elections or because so many Americans face hard times. But in order for Democrats to lose, someone has to win. The problem for the Republicans is that they are not running winners this year. The Republicans suffer from what I call the talent gap: they don't have the talent to win voters' confidence, even with purportedly high levels of dissatisfaction with incumbents.

The Republicans will definitely win some Senate seats currently held by Democrats. These are the Democratic-held seats most vulnerable to flipping, in order of probability of flipping:

North Dakota
Arkansas
Indiana
Nevada
Colorado
Delaware.

That's a total of six seats. Of the six, North Dakota and Arkansas appear to be certain losses. Indiana is likely to go red, but Republican Dan Coats's recent past as a bank lobbyist won't help him win votes. Nevada looked like a loss for Harry Reid until the Republicans nominated crazy Teabagger Sharron Angle. Colorado has yet to hold its primaries, but the same outcome is looking likely there, too, now: Teabagger Ken Buck may defeat the Republican establishment's choice, Jane Norton. Delaware is unusual this year. The state has only one House district, held by Republican Mike Castle since the 1992 election. That means that Castle, despite being a Republican, has a history of winning statewide election in Delaware. But Delaware is a solidly blue state, and Biden will campaign hard to keep his former seat blue. (I don't consider California or Pennsylvania at all likely to flip, despite what other bloggers are saying.)

Now let's consider the states with chances of flipping from red to blue this year:

Ohio
New Hampshire
Florida
Kentucky
Missouri
North Carolina.

That is also a total of six seats. From Ohio to Maine, every open seat for the past decade or more has gone from red to blue, and some incumbents have even been defeated (Al D'Amato in New York, Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island, off the top of my head).* This is a long-term trend that I will discuss in greater detail another time. Suffice it to say for now that both states are highly competitive this year. In Ohio, the Republican nominee served as George W. Bush's director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2006 to 2007. I envy anyone who gets to run against Bush's former budget director. In Florida, Charlie Crist looks set both to win and to caucus with the Democrats: another case of a Republican sent into exile by the Teabaggers. Kentucky's Republican nominee, Rand Paul, is also too much of a Teabagger nut to win statewide election. In Missouri, the Democratic nominee is a Carnahan, part of the state's leading political dynasty. The seat in North Carolina is the famous cursed seat, which has changed hands in each of the last five elections, and the Democratic nominee is Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, thus someone with a history of winning statewide elections.

Realistically, I can see the Republicans picking up North Dakota, Arkansas, and Indiana, with any other state being a stretch. The Democrats, meanwhile, could realistically pick up all six states on my list. Could the next Senate wind up with 62 Democrats? If it does, you heard it here first.

*Update: Yes, I forgot about Scott Brown when I wrote this yesterday. If the Democrats run inferior candidates, as in Massachusetts this year, they should indeed expect to lose.

thought of the day

2010-06-17T22:50:00.001-04:00

The following thought occurred to me this evening, and I wonder if I have unconsciously stolen it from somewhere:

Suffering does not make one interesting. Overcoming suffering is what makes one interesting.

Is that my own original saying, or am I repressing the source?

they will do whatever the law allows

2010-06-14T11:35:00.003-04:00

My latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily is now available for your reading pleasure. It is part of a larger project of mine to generate the new rhetoric that will push the enduring Ayn Rand-inspired madness of the Reagan era off the stage and return the country to a point where it can, with fresh eyes, assess what government should and should not do with regard to economic matters. Our choices should not be restricted to the bad electoral decisions made by the previous generation thirty years ago when they were spooked by the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan's legacy has been to tie government's hands behind its back in the name of a nutty idea of 'freedom' that equates spending money to pervert political and economic processes with First Amendment rights. Let's push these ideas out of respectable discourse by replacing them with better ideas. Ready, set, go.

The Official Dance of the Ministry of Information

2010-06-13T20:00:00.000-04:00

Learn these moves.

long-delayed light-bulb moment

2010-05-04T17:40:00.007-04:00

Was Richard Nixon on drugs when he introduced the term 'war on drugs' to the world in 1969? It only just occurred to me today that it is an accidental pun. To be 'on drugs' is to be under the influence of drugs, as in, 'That dude's on drugs.' A 'war on drugs' is not just a war against drugs but also a war conducted while on drugs. I am sure there are many people who would sign up for such a war, and thus a powerful recruitment campaign has been squandered. Any questions?

home

2010-04-24T00:24:00.000-04:00

Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros
'Home'
2009

reminder

2010-03-25T22:46:00.002-04:00

I am not responsible for selecting the ads that appear at the top of my blog. They are chosen by robots at Google. Sometimes the ads are quite dreadful, as in the case of the one I see now. I hope that readers elsewhere are seeing ads that promote peace, love, and intellectualism.

I'll have the Beef Wellington, courtesy of the GOP

2010-03-24T00:06:00.018-04:00

With the passage of H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, by the House of Representatives on Sunday, many commentators have been quick to say that Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) was wrong last July when he referred to health care reform as President Obama's Waterloo:

'If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him and we will show that we can, along with the American people, begin to push those freedom solutions that work in every area of our society.' (audio link)

DeMint may be demented, but he was right about one thing: health care reform is indeed Obama's Waterloo. DeMint was just wrong about which side had the Napoleon complex.

In warfare, there is typically a winning side and a losing side. Pacifists may prefer to think that in war everyone loses, yet ABBA grasped the essential zero-sum nature of war in their 1974 hit single 'Waterloo': 'Waterloo—I was defeated, you won the war.'

The British military leader credited with the victory at Waterloo was Field Marshall Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington. So epic was the victory that a dish was named for him: Beef Wellington.

As at Waterloo, someone had to win the epic battle to determine whether Americans deserve, like their counterparts in the other industrialized democracies, to receive medical treatment when they are ill. Waterloo was not just an epic defeat; it was also an epic victory. And like Wellington, Obama's name has already entered everyday speech by being attached to his unprecedented achievement in law: Obamacare.

Yet the Republicans in Congress still don't get it. Today they continued to try to impede passage of the so-called Senate reconciliation bill, intended by the Democrats to fix the shortcomings in H.R. 3590. Here, too, they would be well-advised to learn from the lyrics of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus:

'My my, I tried to hold you back but you were stronger.
Oh yeah, and now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight.
And how could I ever refuse?
I feel like I win when I lose.'

Let's hope the Republicans keep on feeling like winners. Their delusional behavior only drives them deeper into defeat at the hands of President Obama, our modern-day Duke of Wellington.

Props also to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, our Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.

overtake the takeover

2010-02-28T02:25:00.008-05:00

Often when I hear Democrats respond to Republican rhetoric with deafening silence I wish I could push them aside and do their talking for them. Over and over we hear Republicans rail against what they call a 'government takeover' of health insurance. Representative Michelle Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, for instance, refers to a 'Washington takeover of American health care' in her so-called 'Declaration of Health Care Independence'. The phrase 'government takeover of health care' yields 11,600,000 hits on Google. There is even a 'book' for sale at Amazon entitled Why Obama's Government Takeover of Health Care Will Be a Disaster. (The quotes are there because it's only forty-eight pages long. Perhaps the product is not intended for people with a habit of reading.)

Too often, when Democrats bother to respond, they simply deny the validity of the other side's point. If Republicans accuse Democrats of, say, being 'soft on terrorism', whatever that means, the Democrats will simply say, 'We are not.' This is not my idea of a robust defense, let alone an offensive turn. 'It's not true' is simply not a persuasive talking point.

The proper response to the 'government takeover' meme is to rail against the corporate takeover of health care, as in, We have got to roll back the corporate takeover of health care and restore freedom and choice to the American people.

See how easy that is? Without producing any new language, I have just come up with a rhetoric-generating meme with popular and populist appeal.

Republican talking points tend to be easy to flip, yet professional Democrats rarely even try. If they did, they could play offense a lot more. I would like to hear the Republicans in Congress have to explain their support for the ongoing corporate takeover of health care. Why do Republicans hate freedom from corporate tyranny and bureaucracy? Do they just hate America?

The phrase 'corporate takeover of health care', in case you're wondering, yields a measly 390,000 hits on Google. Gentlemen, start your engines.

very afraid

2010-01-26T23:46:00.004-05:00

The comments to my 3 Quarks Daily article on the shamelessness of the post-hegemonic state have been lively.

Here are my four suggestions so far for tactics for punching back against the big banks and other assorted bad guys:

1. Shareholder activism, as I have outlined at 3QD.

2. The Move Your Money campaign.

3. Lobbying local government to do as New York is doing: moving $25 million (more preferably) in public funds to local credit unions.

4. Civil disobedience, particularly directed at the offices of the largest banks and health insurance companies.

Now that winning elections is not enough, it is time to rethink tactics.

Finally, here is the quotation of the day, from today's New York Times:

'I can't tell you how often I heard the phrase, "reputational risk." "Oh, the banks wouldn’t do that." This is trying to shame the shameless.'

Who said that? Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General for the TARP.

make them afraid

2010-01-25T11:43:00.009-05:00

My most recent contribution to 3 Quarks Daily is now available for your reading pleasure. I ask the question, what can we do when the powers that be can no longer be shamed into appeasing, even if only cynically, the powerless. It draws on Antonio Gramsci, J.M. Coetzee, Jenny Holzer, and Eva Cherniavsky. I invite you to check it out.

[Note: comments will be moderated until further notice because spambots have been colonizing my blog, as you may have noticed. All comments from real people will be allowed.]

2010-01-20T12:22:00.002-05:00

He deserves better.

getting paid

2009-11-02T12:21:00.004-05:00

Back in March 2009, I wrote a brief 'just wondering' blog item about the misdirected furor regarding executive pay—misdirected not because such furor is not justified but because it seemed to me to misunderstand the nature of the problem. In my latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily, I take on the problem of executive pay at greater length and what we might do about it now that we are turning into a shareholder nation. Do we have more power than we realize? Is there a way to activate the latent political power of our 401(k) plans and other investment vehicles? Let's get paid, yo.

rebranding

2009-10-21T21:00:00.001-04:00

'Public option' or 'Medicare Part E'? What member of Congress wants to be known for voting against Medicare?

it takes one to know one

2009-10-18T12:02:00.003-04:00

On today's New York Times op-ed page, 'contributing columnist' Bono explains why President Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

nothing but flowers

2009-10-14T11:05:00.008-04:00

David Byrne is featured in a short bicycling video at the New York Times's website. It's always comforting, although not necessary, when one's favourite artists share one's politics. I am proud to say that I have never operated a motor vehicle in my life, and I intend to keep it that way, even in Tampa where I am teaching this year. I'm also proud to have voted for more bike lanes (in surprisingly close votes) when I served on Community Board 6 in Brooklyn.

My students here in Tampa have noticed me biking around campus. Let's hope that some of them get the message and say no to the madness of enclosing themselves in those poison-emitting, muscle-wasting, anti-social pods known as cars. Better yet, let's hope that those of them staying in Tampa longer than I am will organize to demand more bicycle infrastructure from local government. The future is in their hands, or, in this case, their feet.

not responsible for the ads

2009-10-14T10:43:00.003-04:00

Just a reminder: I do not choose the ads that appear at my blog. They are chosen by robots at Google. The one that I see right now is especially heinous. (I don't want to refer to it by name lest I cause it to stay longer.) The ads are based in large part on the words that appear at my blog. I am now going to try to influence the adbots to go in a different direction:

peace, love, understanding, funk, art, beauty, sex, painting, music, literature, comic books, compassion, intellect, carnality, friendship, karaoke, humour, wit.

That should do it.

stuck in a moment you can't get out of

2009-10-10T01:19:00.020-04:00

I love President Obama. Last year I volunteered for him in Pennsylvania, I took on extra work so that I could contribute more to his campaign, and, as we all know, I took the middle name Hussein for nine months. I would even take the assassin's bullet for him if it came down to it. That is how strongly I believe that the world needs his unique talents. But even I have to admit that he does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, not yet anyway.

Now that he has won, what are we to think? Others have won the prize without deserving it, chief among them the unconvicted American war criminal Henry Kissinger (1973). Such comparisons are preposterous and insulting. Nothing that Kissinger could ever do could wash the blood from his hands. (I can think of a few others in that category.)

The better comparison is to Oscar Arias (1987), president of Costa Rica. Arias, who again became president in 2006, is probably the greatest statesman that Central America has produced in our lifetime, although I admit the competition is not great. In the 1990s I heard him speak very astutely at Dartmouth about international development and the neo-colonial wealth transfers caused by Third World debt, an issue later popularised by Bono of U2. In 1987 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a multi-nation peace plan for Central America. The only problem was that the plan never went into effect. Arias essentially won the prize for something that might have been.

The Nobel committee does that sometimes: they will use the award in order to help push something into being. Thorbjorn Jagland, the Nobel committee chairman, said as much in today's New York Times:

"It's important for the committee to recognize people who are struggling and idealistic," Mr. Jagland said in an interview after the prize was announced, "but we cannot do that every year. We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik. It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world."

I'm assuming that Obama was an instance of 'realpolitik', not someone 'struggling and idealistic', but who knows?

Whatever the case, the Nobel committee's statement on this year's peace prize does make some cogent points. Here it is in part:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Premature or not, the committee is factually correct—Obama has done what they say—yet I can't help but read the invisible words 'Unlike Bush' at the start of the second paragraph.

Obama's public statement about winning the prize reminded me of the title of a U2 song, 'Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out of'. Saying he was 'both surprised and deeply humbled' and that he did not deserve the honour, Obama looked genuinely uncomfortable. Tonight, the homepage of the White House's website almost wholly ignores the award. I had to use my web browser's Find command to locate the word 'Nobel' on the page. Here it is, in the sub-headline to a story about the Obamas' dog.

Many American conservatives are griping about Obama's Nobel, just as they cheered last week when the International Olympic Committee chose not to award the 2016 summer Olympics to the U.S. Wingnuts aside, who in the world has reason to regret Obama's award? The three governments most at odds with Obama's diplomatic goals: Iran, Israel, and Russia. If the award strengthens Obama's hand on the world stage, the Israeli government will have a harder time resisting Obama's calls to end settlements in the West Bank and to achieve a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Perhaps that was the 'realpolitik' on the committee's minds.

Who then does deserve the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009? By coincidence, I was in the presence, albeit at great distance, of a leading candidate just a few hours ago at a rock concert by the band U2. Yes, Bono deserves the peace prize. He has involved and educated people around the world in movements for human rights and debt reduction; he has raised money for antiretrovirals in Africa; he has added the relief of suffering to the agendas of international meetings of the world's most powerful governments; and his work as a singer and songwriter imbues millions with the spirit of peace and love that we all want to believe is the foundation of rock and roll. Their music makes me feel the spirit, and I don't even believe in spirits. The prize has been issued at least once before to someone whose main achievements were in the arts and humanities: Elie Wiesel (1986). The only problem with giving it to Bono would be that his ego would grow so large that it would block out the sun and cause worldwide destruction.

I can't say I mind that Obama won the prize. I just think the Nobel committee did him no favour by giving it to him before the great achievements that may or may not lie ahead. Those who believe that Obama won the presidency on the flimsy basis of a few eloquent speeches will seize the award as Exhibit A.

Filmmaker Michael Moore released a clever statement at his website today: Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize—Now Please Earn It! For everyone's sake, I hope he does. In the meanwhile, the Nobel committee should avoid premature salutations. I don't like being stuck with having to admit that the conservatives are right.

the book I read

2009-09-21T02:04:00.005-04:00

I am such a bad blogger. I keep promising to do a certain thing, yet it remains to be done. In the meanwhile, David Byrne has a new book out called Bicycle Diaries. That should focus the mind. Let's all read it together. (No, I have not read it yet. I just couldn't resist using another DB song title as a headline.)

'You lie'? Bye-bye!

2009-09-09T22:48:00.017-04:00

As Republican scare tactics against health insurance reform have reached new extremes of disgrace, I have taken comfort in the hope that such outrageous behavior would only sully the fearmongers and make President Obama shine all the more by comparison. Nothing they have done so far, from the lies about 'death panels' to the parade of forged foreign birth certificates, has surprised me. Tonight, during Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress, I was finally surprised. In the midst of refuting a lie that his reform would insure undocumented aliens, Obama was interrupted by Rep. Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, falsely shouting 'You lie!' See the picture above for a mid-outburst shot of Wilson's angry snarl. For proof of Obama's statement, see the bill, H.R. 3200. Here is the relevant section in its entirety:

SEC. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS.

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

Someone definitely lied during the speech, but it was not President Obama.

Besides Wilson's lie about lying, what kind of savage shouts at a president speaking before Congress? The incident reminds me of the despicable conduct of another South Carolinian, Senator Preston Brooks. On May 22, 1856 on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death, trapping him under his Senate desk and bashing his head with a cane. Sumner was unable to return to the Senate for three years. Brooks's constituents back home saluted his crime by sending him new canes to replace the one he had broken on Sumner's head.

How will South Carolinians respond to Wilson's disgrace? Will they applaud the shame brought on their state, or will they reply to Wilson's 'You lie!' with a resounding 'Bye-bye!' come the next election? I say, let's help them restore their state's good name.

Rob Miller is a Democrat and an Iraq war veteran running against Wilson for the U.S. House seat in the Second Congressional District. I just contributed money to Miller's campaign, and I urge you to do the same by clicking this link. Miller's campaign website provides more information on his positions and his career. NPR fans may want to listen to him in the January 7, 2005 episode of This American Life.

Whether you are from South Carolina or, like me, not, we all have a stake in restoring civility and respect to public dialogue. Please join me in ejecting a caveman from the halls of Congress and replacing him with a distinguished veteran of the U.S. Marines who served in Iraq and Liberia.

what kind of space is cyberspace?

2009-09-07T12:49:00.006-04:00

In episode 160 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise discover that warp engines, the sine qua non of twenty-fourth-century exploration, are stressing the fabric of space. The problem has advanced to the point of threatening the safety of the Hekaran homeworld.

What would the cultures of the United Federation of Planets be without the ability to travel at warp speed? Science and trade and cultural exchange would all but cease. The vision of the galactic village would come to an end.

In my latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily, I confront a similar problem in cyberspace, the problem of the ever-worsening carbon dioxide emissions due to internet server farms. What is to be done? Click the link to see my suggestions.

works every time

2009-08-19T15:58:00.009-04:00

How long before Congressional Republicans catch on to President Obama's favourite tactic? My guess is never. Today's New York Times headline says it all: 'Democrats Seem Set to Go It Alone on a Health Bill', the implication being that they had no choice. Here's how Obama's brand of rope-a-dope works:

-First, he goes out of his way to appear bipartisan.

-In response, the Republicans, being Republicans, don't give an inch and in fact trip over themselves sprinting further rightward.

-Finally, Obama gives up on working with the other side and does what he has to do: he goes it alone, like the headline says.

Now that there are reports of self-appointed militiamen carrying assault weapons to the president's public events, can you blame him?

I know that many on the left are concerned that the Democrats will be sold out by their conservative wing, the so-called 'Blue Dogs'. Given the public stage for a couple of weeks, they, too, have shot their load and come up empty. Witness the other heavy-saturation news angle of the week, from yesterday's Times:

Headline: 'Alternate Plan as Health Option Muddies Debate'

First paragraph: 'WASHINGTON — The White House has indicated that it could accept a nonprofit health care cooperative as an alternative to a new government insurance plan, originally favored by President Obama. But the co-op idea is so ill defined that no one knows exactly what it would look like or how effectively it would compete with commercial insurers.'

Indeed.

Even if the Blue Dogs persist in opposing the 'public option', i.e. a proposed system of government-provided health insurance to those who want it, the numbers are irrefutable: the Democrats have sixty seats in the Senate and, most importantly, although the five or six Blue Dogs in the Senate may vote against the legislation, they would not dare vote against cloture. How could they? Congressional Democrats will never be as disciplined or uni-minded as their Republican counterparts, but not a one of them would dare support a Republican filibuster. For those Blue Dogs who fear that a vote in favour of the public option would hurt them in their home states, the chance to vote No is exactly what they need to prove their conservative bona fides to both their supporters back home and the insurance-company overlords who bankroll their re-election campaigns.

President Obama is the Iceman. No one in American government has more sangfroid. He lets a few weeks go by, acts like he's willing to compromise, allows people to think he's being indecisive; then when it's all over, his enemies have slain themselves, he gets to do what he wants legislatively, and he ends up looking like Mr. Nice Guy. That is tactical genius. After Obama's inauguration, people were quick to compare him to FDR. Time may prove that the better comparison is to the great political tactician of the twentieth century, LBJ.

I need a ticket to see the Arctic Monkeys on August 3

2009-07-29T13:50:00.002-04:00

The title pretty much says it: I need a ticket to see the Arctic Monkeys on August 3. Even Stub Hub is sold out. If you have a spare ticket, please contact me.

the greatest

2009-07-27T01:00:00.005-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I was at the new Yankee Stadium watching the Yankees beat the Oakland Athletics, but my thoughts were in Cooperstown, New York, where my favourite player of all time, Rickey Henderson, was being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

No one played the game with as much gusto or bravado as Rickey. And no one ever referred to himself in the third person as much as Rickey. Besides his many achievements, he probably holds the record for the most head-first dives as well. We should all live our lives with as much reckless joy as Rickey Henderson, the greatest.

a gap in the rules of Major League Baseball

2009-07-21T13:03:00.015-04:00

I have reached the limit of my baseball knowledge and must ask the help of my readers in resolving a bothersome question. In last night's game at Yankee Stadium between the Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles, a play occurred that I cannot figure out what to call. It was the top of the eighth inning with two outs and a runner on third base with Baltimore's Brian Roberts at bat and New York's Phil Coke pitching. Coke threw a wild pitch past catcher Jose Molina. Roberts ran home, Molina retrieved the ball and tossed it to Coke who was covering home plate, and Roberts was tagged out by Coke. As a defensive play, it's simple: catcher to pitcher, 2-1. But what is the action of the runner called?

Let's start by figuring out what the play was not. First of all, Coke's wild pitch was not scored a wild pitch because there was a putout on the play. (The same holds true for errors without adverse consequences for the team on defense: if the first baseman drops a fly ball but gets the batter out at first base anyway, no error is charged.) Second, the runner's action cannot be ruled caught stealing because attempting to steal on a wild pitch is not an attempt to steal.

ESPN's detailed play-by-play summary of the game refers to the play this way: 'B Roberts out at home on runner's fielder's choice.' What the hell is a 'runner's fielder's choice'? How can there be a fielder's choice when the ball was not put in play by a batter? My search last night, via Google, of the phrase 'runner's fielder's choice' yielded 166,000 hits, several of which were people asking, what the hell is a runner's fielder's choice?

That leaves me with two questions:

1. How would you name the runner's play?

2. Do you accept the term 'runner's fielder's choice', and, if so, what does it mean?

Many thanks to anyone who has insights about these important matters.

Update: I have corrected an error in my description of the play.

this guy's on crack!

2009-07-16T19:51:00.003-04:00

I've always wondered whether certain Republican wingers like Senator Jefferson Sessions (R-AL) were on crack. We may now have the answer.

Kiarostami's new film 'Shirin'

2009-07-13T11:27:00.003-04:00

I have reviewed Abbas Kiarostami's new film Shirin for my latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily. It is an amazing film that should be seen by all. In my review, I suggested a connection between Kiarostami and, improbably perhaps, Pedro Almodóvar. Do feel encouraged to click the link and read it at 3QD. Thanks.

never fly Ryan Air

2009-07-06T05:04:00.009-04:00

Yesterday, I travelled by train from Saint Andrews, Scotland to Glasgow-Prestwyck Airport in order to catch a flight to Stockholm on Ryan Air. By the end of the day, I was back in London fuming. What happened?

When I arrived at the airport, Ryan Air's check-in staff informed me that I would have to pay £225 to bring my luggage with me. That's about $380. I would then, of course, have to pay the same amount to bring my luggage back from Stockholm for a total of $760. How much luggage did I have with me? It was less than I carried from New York to London in June on American Airlines with no extra fees for weight.

I tried to be imaginative about other options, but there were none. I either had to pay $380 twice or allow Ryan Air to destroy my belongings. They put a figurative gun to my head and said: give us your money or your belongings if you want to get out of here.

At the moment, their website advertises fares of £4 from London-Stansted to as far away as Bratislava, Krakow, and, yes, Stockholm, not including 'optional fees/Charges'. I don't see how protecting oneself from criminals, i.e. Ryan Air, could be 'optional', but that's what they call it. According to Wikipedia, Ryan Air's business model depends on what is called 'ancillary revenue', which means revenue from sources other than the ostensible main service provided, e.g. baggage fees rather than air travel tickets. In Strabonapedia, their business model is called 'extortion'. If you fly with them, you are directly supporting organized crime.

fearless leader takes on fearmongering

2009-05-21T18:35:00.003-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Does anybody have any questions?

man and superman

2009-05-20T00:14:00.018-04:00

I normally try to avoid blogging about obvious things. We know, for instance, that thoughtless people say silly things on talk radio. You don't need me to point that out. I try to save my attention and yours for the odd occasion when I think I have a rare insight to share or a piece of information too little noticed elsewhere.

The recent hysteria against transferring Guantánamo detainees to prisons on the U.S. mainland is so obviously silly that I should ignore it, shouldn't I? There is nothing sensible to say about it that a million others have not already said more cleverly than I. And yet, the matter bothers me so keenly that I must say a few words, however unoriginal, about it.

It was understandable to be shaken up by the terrorist attacks of 2001 and even to overestimate the people responsible. This panel from one of the first installments of David Rees's comic strip 'Get Your War On' typified that scared sentiment.

Bush and Cheney did their best to prolong people's exaggerated fears of the enemy, but thoughtful people eventually put things back in perspective.

That perspective has gone out the window in the debate over where to house the detainees after the closure of the prison camp at Guantánamo. One way to understand the hysteria is to think of contamination models. It's as if, in the minds of the hysterical, the detainees were a virus which could only be contained on a remote island somewhere. If the prisoners are brought here, to a land known since September 11, 2001 as 'the homeland', all hell will somehow break loose.

Another helpful frame of reference is comic books: the remaining detainees—'the worst of the worst' according to Donald Rumsfeld—have come to seem like super-powered villains, hence Rees's invocation of Lex Luthor. No prison on earth can hold them, if you believe the fearmongers. Like General Zod, Ursa, and Non in the first Superman movie (1978), we have no choice but to banish them to the Phantom Zone and pray that they never come to Earth where their Kryptonian physiology will be unbound by our planet's weak gravitational pull. We somehow have to convince the American people that the detainees cannot fly, punch through walls, or use their X-ray vision to destroy the republic.

Historical examples should work: the German and Japanese prisoners held on U.S. soil during World War Two, Soviet spies during the Cold War, and so on. Better still, perhaps we ought to remind people that U.S. prisons currently hold quite a few who fit the description of terrorists. Let's consider a few cases.

1. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols

McVeigh was convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and executed in 2001. Not only did he serve time in the federal 'supermax' prison in Florence, Colorado in the same cellblock as the Unabomber and Ramzi Yousef, but he was moved, without incident, to Indiana for his execution. So much for terrorists breaking free in transit. Nichols, serving a life sentence without parole, was convicted on 161 counts of homicide and other charges.

2. The 1993 World Trade Center bombers

Mahmud Abouhalima, Ahmad Ajaj, Nidal Ayyad, Eyad Ismoil, Mohammad Salameh, and Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, were all convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. They are the only people who have bombed the WTC and lived to tell the tale, yet U.S. prisons are somehow able to hold them. If we follow the comic-book reasoning of the hysterical, should we transfer them to Guantánamo just to be on the safe side? Note that these guys were held in NYC during their trials.

3. The 1998 embassy bombers

Wadih el-Hage, Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed are all serving life sentences in U.S. federal prison for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

4. Recent al-Qaeda characters, 2001-2009

All of these al-Qaeda-affiliated convicts rounded up in this decade also reside in U.S. prisons: Zacarias Moussaoui (not 'the twentieth highjacker'), Richard Reid ('the shoe bomber'), Jose Padilla ('the dirty bomber'), John Walker Lindh ('the American talib'), et al.

(For more notable prisoners at the Colorado 'supermax' prison, see Wikipedia's list.)

How is it that we can sleep safe and sound every night with these bad guys on U.S. soil, but the detainees at Guantánamo are too—too what exactly?—to be brought here? If they really have super-powers, wouldn't they have busted out of their cabanas by now? Are they really more secure in a camp set up in a couple of weeks than they would be in a federal prison? It's time to put down the comic books and act like reasonable people again. America's supermax prisons could probably hold Superman. Fortunately, Kal-El is not among the detainees at Guantánamo and neither is Lex Luthor.

As an institution, the supermax stands as a monument to a generation whose politics and priorities were warped by fears of crime. Now, at a time when a different set of fears has done great damage to the republic, putting our faith in the prison-industrial complex might actually bring us back to our senses. In the end, the Phantom Zone could not hold General Zod and his cronies, as we saw in Superman II (1980). Yet, thanks to the billions we spent on prison construction rather than schools over the past twenty years, no one has ever broken out of ADX Florence, the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Colorado.

The men at Guantánamo—men, not supermen—are not going to break out either. If we don't trust our prisons to hold them, then I think we should get those billions of taxpayer dollars back and build schools instead. Perhaps if we educated our children better, they would build better prisons, or better yet, not need as many.

demand the facts on al-Libi

2009-05-18T00:09:00.004-04:00

In my blog item of Friday, May 15, I connected some dots to the curiously timed alleged suicide of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda member captured by the U.S. and, for reasons not at all clear, imprisoned in Libya. Newsweek has now uploaded an article dated May 16 that takes the story further. According to the article, my suspicions were well-founded:

'Two weeks earlier, al-Libi was visited for the first time by human-rights workers investigating allegations that he had been tortured into making false claims connecting Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda. (Those claims, which al-Libi later retracted, were used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for the Iraq War.) Al-Libi also had been identified recently by U.S. defense lawyers as a possible key witness in upcoming trials of top terror suspects.'

The article also says that the Obama administration is demanding answers from the Libyan government about al-Libi's death. One question I would like answered is, did any members of the Bush-Cheney administration communicate with Libyan authorities about al-Libi since January 20, 2009, the date of President Obama's inauguration? Any such contacts should be catalogued and investigated. Another is, what information did al-Libi share with his recent visitors, and who had access to that information?

Closer to home, and regardless of the truth or falsity of the suicide, we should demand answers to the following questions:
—Why was al-Libi, a high-value detainee, never brought to Guantánamo?
—What so-called CIA 'black sites' was al-Libi brought to before being turned over to Libya?
—Whose decision was it to transfer al-Libi from a U.S.-controlled 'black site' to Libya, and what were the official reasons for doing so?

I have e-mailed Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, to get some answers to questions about al-Libi. I will follow up with phone calls to him and other senators this week and will report on my progress, if there is any.

We have a right to know the truth and to demand justice. If it turns out that anyone acted to induce the Libyan government to kill al-Libi in order to thwart justice and accountability in the States, that person must be tried and punished in a court of law. President Obama has regrettably shown reluctance to allow anyone to be prosecuted for illegal torture-related actions undertaken in government service. Would that same reluctance apply to actions possibly undertaken after individuals have left government service?

I have a bad feeling that the worst revelations are yet to come. Will they be matched by commensurately serious investigation? That depends in part on us and how forcefully we demand justice.

the long arm of the lawless

2009-05-15T01:07:00.006-04:00

New facts about torture in the Bush-Cheney years continue to emerge, thanks in part to Dick Cheney's unending torture roadshow. Cheney himself has nothing new to add. Instead, he has provoked others to come forward, like Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired army colonel and Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was secretary of state. On May 13, Wilkerson wrote an article for The Washington Note which included the following passage:

'Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002—well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion—its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.'

Why is that significant? If true, it demonstrates that torture was not used simply by supposedly well-meaning agents and contractors trying to stop the supposed ticking timebombs, but that torture was used to provide cover for one of Bush and Cheney's bogus arguments for war: that Iraq bore responsibility for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

That much is plain from what Wilkerson himself said. But that's not all we learned on Wednesday. Meanwhile in Washington, the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts held an important hearing called 'What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration'. I watched it on C-SPAN and will try to post a link to the transcript when it becomes available.

One of the witnesses at the hearing was Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism agent who interrogated Abu Zubaydah, the high-value al-Qaeda detainee recently revealed to have been waterboarded eighty-three times in one month. Soufan testified that he got Zubaydah to reveal extremely valuable information without using torture. His interrogation was then stopped and contractors were brought in who then used torture on Zubaydah. The result: the contractors did not get anything valuable out of him. In short, the introduction of the ineffective torture techniques impeded the collection of information from Zubaydah.

The walls are closing in on Cheney and his gang, and there's nothing they can do about it—or is there? There was one more major piece of news this week, one that has received the least public attention but may deserve the most. All but one of the major captured al-Qaeda members are in U.S. custody: Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, and, at a federal 'supermax' prison in Colorado, Ramzi Yousef. The only one missing from U.S. custody is al-Libi, the guy whose torture produced the bogus information about Iraq's links to al-Qaeda. Where have they been hiding al-Libi? According to Newsweek for May 28, 2007, al-Libi was secreted away to Libya. Libya?! From the Newsweek article by Michael Isikoff:

'But Noman Benotman, a former Afgan jihad fighter who knew al-Libi and who is now a London-based Libyan political opposition leader, told NEWSWEEK that during a recent trip to Tripoli, he met with a senior Libyan government official who confirmed to him that al-Libi had been quietly returned to Libya and is now in prison there. Benotman said that he was told by the senior Libyan government official-whom he declined to publicly identify-that Al Libi is extremely ill, suffering from tuberculosis and diabetes. "He is there in jail and very sick," Benotman told NEWSWEEK. He also said that the senior official told him that the Libyan government has agreed not to publicly confirm anything about al-Libi-out of deference to the Bush administration. "If the Libyans will confirm it, it will embarrass the Americans because he is linked to the Iraq issue," Benotman said.'

Do you suppose al-Libi has been in Libya these past few years so that he could not answer anyone's questions? They could always call him back, no? No. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that al-Libi had just, ahem, committed suicide:

'A Libyan militant whose false information about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda was used by the Bush administration as part of its justification for war in Iraq has died in a prison in Libya, a Libyan newspaper reported. The militant, Ali Mohammed Abdel-Aziz al-Fakheri, known by his nom de guerre, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, hanged himself late last week, the newspaper, Oea, said.'

The one person whose existence most deeply contradicted Bush and Cheney's lies, whose continued torture was personally demanded by Cheney, whose story could potentially wreck their defense in a criminal trial if it ever comes to that, just happened to commit suicide in a Libyan prison just as the Congress begins its investigation and as the facts about torture come cascading down on the heads of the previous administration. Draw your own conclusions. All I've got to say is, Dick Cheney is a very dangerous man.

everything happens again

2009-05-14T01:24:00.005-04:00

David Byrne has released a live EP from his current tour. Proceeds benefit Amnesty International. Buy it here. The live songs are great, but you knew I was going to say that.

Once more, here is my review of the tour.

new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan

2009-05-12T00:26:00.012-04:00

Two news reports this week got me thinking about what sort of rethink is necessary in U.S. strategy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. The first, in the New York Times for May 10, 2009, explains that disrupting Pakistan is now a key goal for al-Qaeda. The second, in the Times for May 11, covers the sudden dismissal of General David McKiernan (or, as Sarah Palin called him last year, General McClellan) as the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan. Okay then. Let's play commander-in-chief. What should Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, McKiernan's replacement, do?

In no particular order, here are my broad proposals for the way forward.

1. Understand motivations better.

Should the U.S. have more or fewer troops in the region? It almost does not matter. U.S. forces cannot kill their way to victory in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. Native belligerents have to stop wanting to fight. Until they feel that their needs can be advanced without violence, or until they can frame a new set of needs, they will keep on fighting without end.

2. Remember that fanaticism is often politics by other means.

Point two proceeds from point one. Not everyone who joins an extremist movement is necessarily an extremist. Is every American who voted Republican in 2004 a nutjob? Pashtuns and Pakistanis who join Taliban-type groups may be exasperated by the lack of alternatives. The Taliban in Afghanistan are largely an ethnic movement. Again, think about what else these people want and try to give it to them. One of the many failures of the Bush administration was imagining that the bad guys over there had no traditional interests and instead existed solely to destroy the United States and freedom itself. The truth is usually much simpler.

3. Build more stuff.

I don't know have any data on how many roads, bridges, hospitals, electricity grids, etc. the U.S. has helped build in either country, so I won't point any fingers. Suffice it to say that there is always room for more.

4. Go to the source.

Native belligerents may or may not be amenable to stop fighting depending on the incentives and options presented to them. The region's foreign fighters, i.e. al-Qaeda, can never be convinced not to fight. Every native fighter that the U.S. kills is a failure of sorts; every foreign fighter killed is a success. Even better would be to stop the foreign fighters from coming. How? That work has to be done in their home coutries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc. I don't know how possible this would be, but religious and other leaders in the countries that produce the most fighters should be encouraged—bribed, if necessary—to discourage young men from travelling to Afghanistan and Pakistan. George W. Bush liked to say that we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here. By the same reasoning, if we can stop some of them from leaving home in the first place, we won't have to fight them at all.

5. Turn the natives against the foreigners.

As the Sunni Awakening strategy showed in Iraq, locals don't necessarily like foreign fighters. U.S. military planners need to adapt that insight to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

6. Link Kashmir to U.S. goals.

The Pakistani military and intelligence services are only variably answerable to the country's political leadership. That is not going to change as long as feudal lords own the land, the military treats the economy as its own investment portfolio, and the political elites are led by weaklings and twits like Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. Those problems are not going away, so the military will have to be lured to cooperate on its own terms. What do they want most? They want a resolution in Kashmir. The U.S. should involve itself more directly in negotiations between India and Pakistan and pressure both sides towards a final settlement. In doing so, the U.S. should make it clear that a Pakistan-friendly outcome must be linked to earnest cooperation by the Pakistani military in the west of the country. Make it plain to them: help us with our problem in the west, and we'll help you with your problem in the east.

In offering these suggestions, I am under no illusion that Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to become stable democratic republics anytime soon. But do they have to be? The U.S. cannot 'fix' their problems. The goals going forward should be more modest: a reduction of violence in both countries, the withdrawal of hospitality to foreign fighters, a Pakistan stable enough to secure its nuclear material and conduct parliamentary government, an Afghanistan where fewer Pashtuns feel alienated from power, and the capture or death of Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri. That's as ambitious as anyone ought to be at this point. The U.S. will not make any progress in achieving these goals, or any other, until it understands the internal politics of the region far better than it has demonstrated so far in this decade.

what the Supreme Court needs now

2009-05-11T11:37:00.004-04:00

In my contribution to 3 Quarks Daily this month, I consider the retirement of U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter and make the case for his replacement. Who is it? Read the article to find out.

loving the album cover

2009-03-24T02:08:00.002-04:00

I had a million more things to say about David Bowie that I regrettably had to leave out of my most recent 3QD item. One thing I wanted to say about his output in the 1980's was that Tonight (1984) is one of the great album/cover mismatches: I love the cover but find the album mediocre. Which got me thinking: what are some other albums whose covers are far better than anything inside? Here is my question to you, Reader: what is your favourite album cover for a bad album?

more than zero

2009-03-23T09:45:00.004-04:00

It's time for another installment of my monthly column at 3QD. This month I have written about David Bowie's work in the 1980's and whether it is better for great artists to make bad art or no art. I proudly call for more bad art. Check it out.

it's your money

2009-03-22T14:43:00.002-04:00

Bailout or no bailout, why is there such populist furor against million-dollar bonuses and exorbitant incomes paid to corporate executives yet no comparable outrage by shareholders? The people being robbed by eight- and nine-figure compensation packages are the shareholders in the companies whose executives pay themselves so lavishly. If members of Congress voted to pay themselves millions of dollars, they would be thrown out of office. Why do people tolerate as shareholders what they would never tolerate as voters? Just wondering.

Jeff is pulling the plug on the status update

2009-03-01T18:33:00.009-05:00

As my Facebook status announces, I will no longer be updating my status. When I opened my Facebook account in 2005, it was a more modest alternative to networking sites like MySpace and Friendster. Early Facebook was more ruled: it lacked the visual clutter of the many cacophonously customized pages at MySpace. And since it was limited to people with .edu e-mail addresses, there was much less chance that people I forgot about twenty years ago would try to be my 'friend' again.

The best feature of Facebook, the status update, was such a success that it has spun off its own industry. I welcomed this innovation as an opportunity to revive a forgotten genre of writing: the epigram. Here was the chance for millions of people to release their inner Oscar Wildes on an unsuspecting world. Many of my status updates were generated by the rule of using whatever song lyric struck me that day. For people who followed my status, it became a game of Name That Tune. 'Jeff is a stonewashed damsel on a junk food run.' 'Jeff says, we're the heirs to the glimmering world.' Or my favourite, 'Jeff has been breaking glass in your room again.' Props to anyone who gets all three songs without using Google.

Twitter is like Facebook without the Face; it's just the status update. The problem? As reported everywhere lately, the Republican Party has signed on to Twitter. A New York Times blog for February 20, 2009 puts it most distressingly: 'Republican lawmakers in Washington have been embracing Twitter with particular zest.' I don't know about you, but I have had enough particular Republican zest for one lifetime. The status update has instantly become uncool.

What's next then? May I suggest that the next cool thing be online modesty accompanied by in-person intimacy? In other words, out with Facebook, in with facetime. Along similar lines, the Times's Dining section for February 25 reported on 'Brooklyn's New Culinary Movement': handmade food. The foodoisie in Brooklyn are making, selling, and bartering their own handmade chocolates, handmade pickles, and so on.

What if we did the same thing with our personal news? One way might be to create social micro-networks where personal information flowed in a narrower circle. We could use only non-internet means of transmitting our epigrammatic status updates to single individuals. One day you might get a text message from me that says 'Jeff is His Imperial Self.' Cooler still would be if we slowed down the delivery of such information by only using postal mail. One day you might get friends' status updates by handwritten postcard with original art. Extremists will insist on only hand-delivering the postcards. That would be very cool. What's my status today? Check your mail later this week.

remain in fear of songs about ghosts today

2009-02-27T23:29:00.009-05:00

(Spoiler alert: if you plan to see David Byrne on his current tour, do not read this until after you see the show.)

Earlier tonight I saw David Byrne perform live for the nineteenth time, but this one was even more special than usual. The conceit behind his current tour is that he is playing the 'Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno'. With only two exceptions, that's exactly what he played: songs from More Songs about Buildings and Food (1978), Fear of Music (1979), Remain in Light (1980), My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1980), and Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008).

Aside from the brand-new songs, tonight's program was the soundtrack of my life, music that I grew up playing and never stopped. A few of the songs, like 'Heaven' and 'Life during Wartime', I had seen DB perform live on previous tours, but most were lifelong favourites of mine that I never expected to hear live. For me, this was as great a concert as I can ever expect to see. The performance was tight, funky, swelling, and smart. One thing it was not was nostalgic. At times, the style of a song or the musicians' movements recalled Talking Heads' live shows of the early 1980's but always in a layered way that combined new ideas with the old.

The band had five pieces: DB on guitar, Paul Frazier on bass, Mauro Refosco on percussion, Graham Hawthorne on drums, and Mark Degli Antoni on keyboards. There were three backup singers: Redray Frazier, Kaïssa, and Jenni Muldaur. And three dancers: Lily Baldwin, Natalie Kuhn, and Steven Reker. Several of the songs were fully choreographed for the dancers and the band. The choreographers were Noémie Lafrance, Annie-B Parsons, and robbinschilds.

Before I get to the setlist, here is the breakdown of where the songs came from.

Talking Heads albums
More Songs about Buildings and Food: 1
Fear of Music: 4
Remain in Light: 5
Speaking in Tongues: 1*

Byrne & Eno albums
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: 1
Everything That Happens: 7

Byrne albums
The Catherine Wheel: 1*

The asterisks mark the non-Eno songs.

1. Strange Overtones (2008, DB & BE)

This is the catchiest song on the new album thanks to the infectious 'out of fashion' groove that runs through it. The one problem I have with the new album is that I don't agree with some of DB's choices as vocalist, as on this song whose verses he sings almost in a falsetto which suits neither his voice nor the song. Not tonight. Live, he sings the song in a lower, more typical register for him and it sounds great. All through the concert, the new songs, with one exception, hold up very well and outshine their recorded versions.

2. I Zimbra (1979, TH)

The dancers come onstage for the first time. They direct a lot of their attention to the backup singers who enact a scenario of being tempted or lured by the dancers. This is the one song where the choreography seems detached from the song rather than adding to it, but that could be because this is their first number and I did not pick up on the dance themes yet.

3. One Fine Day (2008, DB & BE)

SW and I saw DB perform this song last March at St. Ann's Warehouse with Norah Jones, Damien Rice, and two of the Scissor Sisters doing backup. Really. It's still a gentle-sounding song, although the lyrics could be read more melancholically than they first seem. At this point the crowd was still quite still and sizing up the new songs. That changed very quickly.

4. Help Me Somebody (1980, DB & BE)

This was funky genius on DB's part. The recorded version of this piece on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts consists of found vocals from a radio sermon by Reverend Paul Morton of New Orleans in 1980, over guitars, bass, congas, metal objects, and drums. Live, however, DB does the vocal parts spoken by the preacher, including the shouts. It's very cool. Is there a term for performing found sounds live?

5. Houses in Motion (1980, TH)

The first of many songs tonight from Remain in Light. What was a wailing synthesizer solo on the album is played by DB on guitar. He and the band totally nail it, and the crowd rises to its feet. They will remain there for nearly the rest of the show.

6. My Big Nurse (2008, DB & BE)

This is a great song that everyone should listen to. Bad things happen, good things happen, and after recounting them, the voice of the song says, 'I'm counting all the possibilities / For dancing on this lazy afternoon.' This is at least the fourth DB song with 'big' in the title, after 'My Big Hands (Fall through the Cracks)', 'Big Business', and 'Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open)' although none of those were produced or co-written by Eno. Even so, keep it in mind. The song is played with three acoustic guitars added by Mauro the percussionist, one of the backup singers, and one of the dancers. The two other dancers move lazily, as the chorus instructs. The song sounds lovely and gentle live.

7. My Big Hands (Fall through the Cracks) (1981, DB)

I am very happy to hear this particular non-Eno song from The Catherine Wheel. Was it included just because it has the word 'big' in the title? That's a good enough reason for me. DB's vocals and the arrangement sound like they are based not on the 1981 recording but on Talking Heads' live version of the song from the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982, which still circulates as a bootleg. Hearing the song in this alternative form is an unexpected delight.

8. Heaven (1979, TH)

This is a song SW and I have heard DB and even Jarvis Cocker do live before. In tonight's rendition, the keyboard sounds more like a piano to me that it has in any other version I know. Ah, someone should arrange this song with a piano in the lead or perhaps for piano only. That would totally reimagine the song.

9. Poor Boy (2008, DB & BE)

This dark song may be about a country that is about to reap what it has sown. My favourite line: 'They trust market forces. / It’s the only song they know.' Live, the percussion does a lot more work than on the album and DB busts out the tremolo arm in a very rocking guitar solo. In this arrangement, the song sounds like it came from the Remain in Light sessions.

10. Life Is Long (2008, DB & BE)

This new song is full of ambivalence about relationships: 'Chain me down, but I am still free.' The dancers perform in wheeled chairs. Live, it sounds a little flat and slow, which makes it the only new song that suffers in concert.

11. Crosseyed and Painless (1980, TH)

Another favourite from Remain in Light. I am ecstatic just to be hearing it live. They begin with the misleadingly easygoing prologue that one hears on the Stop Making Sense version of the song. Then it kicks into overdrive. This is one of the all-time great songs for backup singers. DB rocks it on guitar.

12. Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) (1980, TH)

Another great song from Remain in Light. As with the previous song, the audience is emphatically into it and grateful. I judge from people's responses that they share my delight that these amazing songs are being played live again. The many live recordings of these songs, bootleg and otherwise, from the early 1980's are so tantalizing because Talking Heads were the best band in the world at the time and these songs beg to be played live. Finally!

13. Once in a Lifetime (1980, TH)

At this point I'm beside myself with joy. DB has played this song live before, most recently on his 2004 tour, but this band came ready to play songs from Remain in Light in all their funked-up glory and they do.

14. Life during Wartime (1979, TH)

One great song after another. I made a note to myself which I will have to clarify when I see the show again tomorrow night. I think there was an interesting electronic buzz-like sound on the fourth beat during the choruses. Whatever the case, it was good to hear a song from Fear of Music, which has been nelgected for over an hour. And what about More Songs about Buildings and Food? This was the point in the concert where I started to run through the many, many songs still not played that might be played. Anyone who attends a concert by someone whose career spans more than a decade enjoys doing this in the last third of a show. You know what I'm talking about.

15. I Feel My Stuff (2008, DB & BE)

I have yet to work out a reading of this troubling song from the new album. The opening verses of this song are the only time tonight when DB resorts to the higher vocal register heard on the album. Despite that, the live performance communicates the anxiety of the recording and then some.

--------------
Encore no. 1

16. Take Me to the River (1978, TH)

This is the only song of the night from More Songs. The backup singers got down low at one point, both vocally and physically. Why neglect this great album? Maybe because it's the Talking Heads/Eno album that emphasizes their art-school days over their funked-up sound. Just a guess. Favouring Remain in Light over More Songs gives one impression about DB's early years; programming the concert the other way would create another. And also, it is an Al Green song. Hmm.

17. The Great Curve (1980, TH)

Wow. A fifth song from Remain in Light. This is too good to be true. There are still three songs left on the album, but they probably would not work at this frenetic point in the concert. Paul Frazier's bass is more up front than was Tina's on the album. DB's guitar is loud and screeching. This is an ecstatic performance in the way that only funk and religion can produce, i.e. 'Of the nature of trance, catalepsy, mystical absorption, stupor, or frenzy'. (OED)

--------------
Encore no. 2

18. Air (1979, TH)

'Hit me in the face!' Another great song from Fear of Music. This song soared, particularly at the choruses when he draws out the word 'Air'. The guitar playing is tight and percussive [is that the word I want?], and then DB nails the solo as on the album.

19.Burning Down the House (1983, TH)

The lights were not down long, but the band now appears with white ballet tutus. Menacing, angry sounds are heard. I have no idea what song the band is heading into. My first thought was 'Swamp', so I was not totally off. Mid-song, about thirty young dancers in tutus joined the band onstage and everyone formed a kickline. Why? Presumably because this was Radio City, home of the Rockettes. That probably sounds silly, but everyone enjoyed it, including me. As great as the performance of the song was, I remember the dancers more. It was quite a sight.

--------------
Encore no. 3

20. Everything That Happens (2008, DB & BE)

The title track from the new album and a fitting finale. The song sounds beautiful and, again, DB sings it better live than on the record, with a lot more confidence and more emotional commitment. This is a song you have to sing like you mean it:

'I ride on a perfect freeway,
Many people on that road.
I heard the sound of someone laughing.
I saw my neighbors car explode.
Just up ahead,
Against the sky,
Quicker than you blink your eye.

Like 'My Big Nurse', the song acknowledges suffering and loss and then reminds us that there is more to this strange life:

'Oh my brother, I still wonder, are you alright?
And among the living, we are giving, all through the night.

[...]

Everything that happens will happen today,
And nothing has changed, but nothing’s the same.'

--------------

The concert's choreography was unlike anything I have seen at a concert of popular music. It was athletic and modern, for one thing. When I think of concerts where dancers interact with the band, I think of unfortunate clips I have seen on cable television of Janet Jackson or Britney Spears. That kind of pop-music dancing tends to be brain-dead, as if all anyone could think to do was re-enact the literal content of the lyrics. Here, the choreography was chasing ideas, not words. They were trying to embody the spirit of the songs in the present. There were a couple of clever moments where the moves mimicked the past, as when everyone on stage did that running-in-place motion seen in Stop Making Sense. Other than those few moments, this was a fresh reading of the music in dance form.

What a great concert. I can't wait to see it again tomorrow night.

renaissance of the repressed

2009-02-23T11:57:00.003-05:00

I have a new item at 3 Quarks Daily. It's called 'Renaissance of the Repressed'. Please feel encouraged to check it out. It addresses current questions about changes in the way our new century regards the past.

SW and I are seeing David Byrne perform the songs of Eno and Byrne at Radio City this weekend. That will be the occasion for re-launching my blog.

I smell change

2009-01-22T14:58:00.006-05:00

There it is. Just like that, President Obama has signed the order to close the prison at Guantánamo. From the New York Times:

Saying that "our ideals give us the strength and moral high ground" to combat terrorism, President Obama signed executive orders Thursday effectively ending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program, directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp within a year and setting up a sweeping, high-level review of the best way to hold and question terrorist suspects in the future.

"We intend to win this fight," Mr. Obama said, "We are going to win it on our own terms."

As he signed three orders, 16 retired generals and admirals who have fought for months for a ban on coercive interrogations stood behind him and applauded.

I am of the opinion that the United States should not torture people simply because this should not be a country that tortures people. But for those who think torture 'works', here is a previous blog item that makes the case for torture being an ineffective investigative tool.

losers

2008-12-29T18:48:00.010-05:00

As in the recent, brief war between Russia and Georgia, Israel's ongoing bombardment of Gaza is a lose-lose scenario for everyone: the Israelis, the Palestinians, and what is left of the U.S.'s reputation as a major world power.

First of all, the Hamas members responsible for the homemade rocket attacks against southern Israel are idiots. I cannot imagine what results they expected their barely lethal actions would achieve. Did they think a massive retaliation would bankrupt Israel, as Iraq did the United States? Surely, they were not naive enough to think that other Arab or Muslim states would intervene militarily. Saakashvili made that mistake in Georgia by thinking the U.S. would stand up for its ally. Ha.

Second, Israel's retaliation is out of all proportion to the provocation and is punishing all the people of Gaza, not just the idiots with the rockets. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, in place since 2007, has two main effects. One is that it reduces Gazans to abject poverty. According to the UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), 51.8% in Gaza are now living below the poverty line, as reported in the Guardian for December 21, 2008. The second effect of Israel's actions is that they strengthen Hamas, as Tony Blair acknowledged in an interview published in Haaretz on December 21:

'"We have to be very clear on one thing," he says. "The present situation is not harming Hamas in Gaza but it is harming the people."'

See the article for the effects of the blockade on the Gazan economy. Blair does go on to say that 'Israel's options are difficult', but surely the scale of the current bombardment is the worst option of all. Together, the blockade and the bombardment are a one-two punch: the blockade prevents the delivery of medical supplies, and the bombardment fills the hospitals with the wounded and the dead. Both campaigns strengthen Hamas by reducing the capacity of any other entities in Gaza to deliver services and to compete for Palestinian hearts and minds. Bullies thrive in times of lawlessness and desperation.

The timing is interesting. Yes, a truce between Israel and Hamas has just expired, but the leadership vacuum in the States probably plays a role, too. Were both sides trying to get in their last licks before President Obama takes office? Does the Israeli government expect less of a free hand after January 20? That very well could be.

Events in Gaza and elsewhere remind me that the U.S. is no longer the world's policeman, something I never thought I'd be nostalgic for. The New York Times reported the following on December 18:

'In what would be the first modern active deployment of its warships beyond the Pacific, China appears set to send naval vessels to help in the fight against hijackers in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden.'

Did you ever think you'd see the day when the U.S. could not or would not act decisively to defend petrol supplies from Somali pirates and the Chinese navy had to step in? And it's not just China:

'To help combat the sharp rise of increasingly brazen pirate attacks in the gulf, the European Union deployed its first-ever naval mission this month, a six-ship flotilla. The union’s operation, code-named Atalanta, joined other navies already patrolling there, including those from the United States, Russia and India.'

Will there be more or less warfare and chaos without the U.S. playing global cop? American indifference in Liberia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the 1990's led to disaster; American action in Bosnia (too late!) and Kosovo stopped wars. If the U.S. withdraws from its twentieth-century leadership role in the world, will the world be better or worse off? Right now, the prospects don't look so good.

JS @ 3QD

2008-12-29T02:55:00.005-05:00

The Ministry of Information and 3 Quarks Daily have joined forces. Starting today, I will write a column for 3QD every four weeks. (Note: not monthly but every four weeks.) Thanks to Abbas Raza and the 3QD posse for the opportunity.

My first installment is called 'The Jennifer Aniston in All of Us'. Do feel encouraged to read it and to read widely at 3QD, the best collective blog I know.

Remarkably, I had never seen Jennifer Aniston in a single thing: not one movie, not one episode of her sitcom. I had to borrow a dvd of Office Space (1999) while writing my article. Yet somehow I seem to know all her business despite being an infrequent, though avid, reader of celebrity magazines. Then again, I don't actually read the magazines; I just like looking at the pictures. How is it that we know so much about people we don't know at all?

I also finally bought a dvd of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), one of the most influential films ever made and a favourite of mine. The way we think about film editing, narrative, and memory—either separately or all together—owes a lot to this film. The flashbacks to Emmanuelle Riva's memories really are how we imagine memory today, and not just the flashbacks written in Marguerite Duras's screenplay but also Resnais's editing together of newsreels, re-enactments, and vérité street scenes with the actors' performances. And as for the film's approach to romance in transit, where would Wong Kar-wai and his contemporaries be without Resnais?

Having written my first piece for 3QD makes me want to re-commit to my own blog. I have mentioned before that I had promised Daniel F. that I would do a series on the entire discography of David Byrne. The instruction he gave, which I accepted, was that I have to rank all of Byrne's albums, with and without Talking Heads, one by one without any ties. I hereby promise to begin the series before the end of 2008, so come back soon for this special series.

if only

2008-11-16T02:25:00.007-05:00

I'm reading yet another Jean-Michel Basquiat catalogue, as I usually am, a little bit each day. The one I'm working on right now is a stand-out volume that everyone who cares about Basquiat or the early 1980's must have. It's Jean-Michel Basquiat 1981: The Studio of the Street, edited by Jeffrey Deitch, Franklin Sirmans, and Nicola Vassell. What makes it special is that has substantial interviews from 2006 with Basquiat's old running mates: Glenn O'Brien, Fab 5 Freddy, and so on, even Suzanne Mallouk. Their recollections, particularly about the importance of music to JMB, are full of insights not found in other sources.

Just now I came across a tantalizing tidbit that I have to share. It's from Deitch's interview with Arto Lindsay.

Lindsay: There's another story which is pretty wild: You know the painting Famous Negro Athletes? He [JMB] tried to form a band, Famous Negro Athletes, which was going to be him, David Byrne and myself.

Deitch: Amazing!

Lindsay: We actually had a rehearsal, but it was just too cocaine-addled to get anywhere. I mean, we had the one rehearsal and all got so messed up that it was really difficult to communicate once we actually tried to play. That would have been a wild band...

Deitch: Great name for a band.

Lindsay: Yeah, great name for a band, and to not have all black guys in it was pretty brilliant.

Deitch: So that's something fresh. I never heard that before.

Lindsay: Well, I don't think anybody would remember that except for David, myself, and the person that lent Jean-Michel the loft where we rehearsed, or at least tried to rehearse.

I almost wish I had not read that. My two favourite cultural figures tried to form a band and no one recorded it?! I don't care how coked up they were; I want to hear that!

Here is a strange coincidence: I also read today for the first time of the Beatles' unreleased experiment of 1967, 'Carnival of Light', in the Guardian/Observer. At least that survives. We may actually get to hear it one day.

I'm assuming that the lost Byrne-Basquiat session occurred c. 1980-1981, the period of Remain in Light and Eno & Byrne. Basquiat pretty much stopped making music after that and concentrated on painting. But what if things had gone differently? What if they had tried again? What if Basquiat had survived the 80's and taken up music again and done an album with Byrne at some later date? True, it would not have been part of that brilliant, irreplaceable moment at the start of the 80's, but it would still have been something special.

That's the stupid, useless thing about dying young: the work that never gets made. What would Basquiat have painted, Keats have written, MLK and RFK have achieved? All we can do is be glad we're still here, redouble our efforts to do something ourselves, and, about the things that never were, ask, heart-breakingly, what if?

the blogger formerly known as Hussein

2008-11-15T19:08:00.007-05:00

Back in February, I was so disgusted by the insulting way that Republicans abused Barack Obama's middle name Hussein that I announced here and elsewhere that I would change my name to Jeff Hussein Strabone for the duration of the campaign, and I invited others to do the same. While I was certainly not the only person with the idea, my manifesto caught on and was picked up by news sources around the world. Whether my words made any difference is doubtful, but it was certainly fun while it lasted.

Barack Hussein Obama is now the president-elect of the United States. For the first time, I feel like the next president is going to be my president, someone who shares my values of intellectualism, civility, thoughtfulness, worldliness, competence, dialogue, and decency. Jimmy Carter embodied many of these values, but he was not, back then, the worldliest of men, and anyway I was far too young to feel much about him one way or the other. My one recollection of the 1976 campaign was that I favoured Carter because I associated him with the television programme Welcome Back, Kotter.

I have enormous confidence that Obama has the ability to be a great president. But I am skeptical that our adulation will help him live up to his potential. In fact, I am certain of the opposite: if we fawn over this man, he will, like all men (and women, too), take our love for granted. With that timeless truth of romance and politics firmly in mind, I hereby announce that I will no longer call myself Hussein.

Think about it: in just over two months, Obama will be the most powerful man in the world. Is it ever responsible to identify too closely with the powerful? I'm with Chuck D, circa 1989, on this one: we've got to fight the powers that be, and Obama is about to assume those very same powers.

Don't get me wrong. I expect to go on supporting Obama's overall vision because it is similar to my own. But if we want Obama to be as great a president as we think he can be, then it's time to become his critics. No president ever suffered for hearing the constructive criticism of those who elected him. With innumerable forces trying to pull him in the other direction, the best thing we can do for Obama is to criticize him—from the left—when he lets us down. And he will.

When the ignorant called critics of the war unpatriotic, our response was uniform: dissent can be the highest form of patriotism. My fellow Americans, I call on each and every one of you to accept your patriotic duty and join me in standing ready to criticize the most powerful man in the world, our next president, Barack Obama.

election night drinking game

2008-10-27T02:02:00.002-04:00

This weekend on the drive back from campaign work in Pennsylvania, my friends and I wondered what would be the best word for drinking games during election night coverage, i.e. the word that, when said by someone on television, would be the prompt to take another drink. Although I myself have never played a drinking game, I came up with what I thought was a good answer: 'landslide'.

What do you think, Reader? What should be the word for drinking games on election night?

everything you need to know about the election

2008-10-11T02:11:00.001-04:00

Here is what the Republican base has become: a mob of pitchfork-waving, low-information voters who boo when their candidate, for once, plays down their fears and who are stunned to learn that Barack Obama is not 'an Arab'. 'He's not?' the McCain voter incredulously asks. Oy.

requiem for the Rockefellers

2008-09-29T17:58:00.005-04:00

When I was a kid, the Republican Party stood for two things: greed and Cold War hawkishness. That is no longer the case, and the rejection of the financial bailout plan by House Republicans today confirms it.

Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980 by luring religious and racist conservatives into supporting deregulation and tax policies that benefitted the rich. Logically, the Republican coalition never made any sense. Entrepreneurs and people in business depend on ambition, ideas, innovation, science, technology, and so on. They tend to value talent, education, and the willingness to overturn tradition when something new and risky dangles the possibility of greater profits before their greedy eyes. Religious conservatives are the opposite. At their worst, they elevate tradition over innovation, fear over science, and the narrow narcissism of 'small-town values' over education and cosmopolitanism. And let's not forget that they profess a religion full of prohibitions against usury. The party leaders who hatched this coalition of opposites were strategic geniuses, but now the party is over.

Mike Huckabee was the sign of things to come. His presidential campaign of earlier this year was exciting because, had he won the Republican nomination, it would have torn the party apart. Here was a conservative, small-state Republican who appeared ready to follow Jesus's populist gesture of overturning the money-lenders' table. His candidacy represented an emergency to the Bush Republicans and the coalition that kept them in power.

The rich-religious Republican coalition finally ended today. Today's 777-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a new record, and Wall Street knows who is to blame: the Republicans in the House of Representatives who rejected the Paulson plan because bailing out 'the Wall Street elite' violates their insane ideology.

The Rockefeller Republicans, what was left of them, were already becoming Obama Republicans. Now I wonder if they will even stay in the Republican Party much longer. People in business know that homophobia, fanaticism, anti-science, and anti-elitism are bad for business. Their tolerance for conservative excess has expired.

That the Republican Party will soon be little more than a regional cabal of conservative anti-elitist fanatics is good for the Democrats but bad for the country. Today, September 29, 2008, we are all in the clutches of the most militantly ignorant political faction that Republican machinations have spawned: men and women of zeal who know nothing of economics but believe in giving the 'elites' their comeuppance. These maniacs will bring the republic and the national economy crashing down in order to teach the rest of us a lesson in responsibility and the magic of the market.

During the past seven years of misrule by Bush and Cheney, I have had frequent recourse to these famous lines from Yeats's poem 'The Second Coming':

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.'

Little did I know that the worst was yet to come. Whatever their misgivings about the Paulson bailout plan, Democrats have had to make common cause with Bush and Cheney against an even graver threat: the economic suicide that Bush's former shock troops stand poised to visit on all of us. Now we will all reap what the Republican 'geniuses' have sown.

John, do you need a ride to the airport?

2008-09-25T01:18:00.003-04:00

Trust me. This will be worth your time.

Click the link and watch all nine minutes of this. Then tell me whether it's over.

punching

2008-09-18T04:38:00.001-04:00

The Republicans' convention bounce is over, and our guy is coming out punching, as predicted.

the master of deception chastises his bad apprentice

2008-09-15T01:14:00.016-04:00

Last week, in a blog comment thread, I noted deep differences in McCain and Palin's style of lying, as opposed to Bush, Cheney, and Rove's, and I predicted that McCain and Palin's lies would ultimately hurt them. Here is part of what I said:

'Bush and Cheney don't lie like McCain and Palin. Bush and Cheney obfuscate, evade, obscure, and so on. Example: they say they don't torture and they get away with it because they redefine the word and Democrats roll over and let them do it. The actions of Bush, Cheney, and Rove can be shown to be lies, but it takes some work. They lied about John Kerry, and he let them.

McCain and Palin are stupid liars. They lie about selling a jet on Ebay or being a friend of special-needs families or opposing the so-called Bridge to Nowhere: all unsophisicated lies and with no veneer of national security as cover.'

(Correction: The above suggestion that Palin is not a friend of special-needs families was based on a misreported story about budget cuts in Alaska to special-needs programs. In fact, she appears to have increased such spending.)

How unsophisticated is McCain's lying? Even Karl Rove, the master of deception, has publicly faulted McCain's lies. Here is the video and the relevant transcript from Rove's appearance on Fox, as provided by Talking Points Memo:

WALLACE: All right, and for fair game, what is McCain doing that goes a step too far?

ROVE: Well, McCain has gone in some of his ads—similarly gone one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test.

Rove does not object to lying per se. What he objects to is bad lying, i.e. lying that makes the liar look bad, which is what McCain has done.

I have been saying it from day one and I will repeat it again: John McCain is too stupid to win this election. He is not pretending to be stupid like George W. Bush, alumnus of Yale and Harvard. McCain is the real thing. His choice of running mate looks to some, in the immediate term, like political genius, but time will soon tell how smart it was to pick someone whose X-ray vision from Alaska to Russia invites ridicule.

I have heard people wonder whether McCain's innumerable contradictory policy statements indicate senility or Alzheimer's. What the question misses is that this man, even in his youth, was never sharp. He contradicts himself because he does not have a head for policy or detail or knowledge in general.

I expect Barack Obama and the liberal 527 groups to come out with a barrage of McCain (and Palin) flip-flop ads showing, with video clips, all the things they were for before they were against—and some that they were later for again. If Obama and company fail to do this, then they will not deserve to win. If they do it, the election will be won in large part on the stupid lies and dull-wittedness of John McCain. Enough is enough.

time to change the subject

2008-09-13T03:54:00.001-04:00

Check it out: a presidential candidate who talks about tax policy and the middle class. And he said 'Enough is enough' again.

527's unleashed

2008-09-12T16:47:00.002-04:00

Presidential campaign ads by liberal 527 groups have started to appear. If this ad about Palin's support of aerial wolf-hunting is any indication of what's to come, it looks like the left is bringing a gun to a knife fight.

Barack Obama said he would do this back on June 13, 2008, as reported by the New York Times:'"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."'

Sarah Palin a wildlife-hater? Release the hounds!

Palin's cruelty to women

2008-09-12T02:02:00.016-04:00

I know that every time we mention Sarah Palin's name we are playing into Republican hands by falling for the politics of distraction. Even so, I want to put a few more facts out there for your consideration.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that quite a few non-conservative women favor Palin. What they need to know is that Palin does not favor them. Consider two cases.

1. No friend to pregnant teens
As I reported earlier, Governor Palin used Alaska's line-item veto power to slash funding for homeless pregnant teens from $5 million to $3.9 million. You can see her actual handwriting on the budget document in this article by the Washington Post.

2. No friend to rape victims
While Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, her town was apparently the only one in Alaska that charged rape victims for police rape kits. The practice only ended in 2000 when the Alaska state legislature passed a law prohibiting local governments from charging for the kits. From the Boston Herald for September 11, 2008:

Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla prompted the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill—signed into law by [Alaska Governor Tony] Knowles—that banned the practice statewide.

"There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla," Knowles said

A May 23, 2000, article in Wasilla’s newspaper, The Frontiersman, noted that Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies regularly pay for such exams, which cost between $300 and $1,200 apiece.

"(But) the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests," the newspaper reported.

It also quoted Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon objecting to the law. Fannon was appointed to his position by Palin after her dismissal of the previous police chief. He said it would cost Wasilla $5,000 to $14,000 a year if the city had to foot the bill for rape exams.

"In the past we’ve charged the cost of exams to the victims' insurance company when possible," Fannon told the newspaper. "I just don’t want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer."

No one wants high taxes, but this really takes the Republican anti-tax dogma too far.

Here is the actual statute from the Alasaka state code:

Sec. 18.68.040. Sexual assault victim may not be required to pay for examination

A law enforcement agency, health care facility, or other entity may not require a victim of sexual assault under AS 11.41.410 -- 11.41.425 who is 16 years of age or older to pay, directly or indirectly, through health insurance or any other means, for the costs of examination of the victim necessary for

(1) collecting evidence using the sexual assault examination kit under AS 18.68.010 or otherwise; or

(2) determining whether a sexual assault has occurred.

(The law, 2000 AK. ALS 57, was signed by Governor Knowles on May 16, 2000.)

Isn't it embarassing that a state even needs a statute like this to rein in a rogue town like Palin's Wasilla that shortchanges rape victims? It would be a much bigger embarassment if John McCain and Sarah Palin win the election thanks to the support of American women.

============

Update

There is new evidence today that the policy of charging rape victims for their police rape kits in Wasilla was initiated in the 1998-1999 fiscal year, i.e., during Palin's mayoralty. That rules out any possibility that the policy existed before Palin and that she simply continued it. No, she implemented it.

That means the Republican presidential ticket this year consists of a man who voted against the Violence Against Women Act, drafted by Senator Joseph Biden, and a woman who charged rape victims for rape kits. At least they're in sync on the issues.

rope-a-dope

2008-09-10T22:20:00.008-04:00

The verdict is in: Barack Obama is smarter than the rest of us. Throughout the 2008 campaign, many of us, including me, have wondered whether Obama had the anatomical-metaphor-of-your-choice to give as good as he gets from his opponents, be they the Clintons or John McCain. Two days into the Democratic National Convention in Denver, we were still wondering whether the party was going to play nice or play to win. John Kerry and Al Gore offered fighting words against the Republicans, but Obama saved the hardest blows not for his surrogates but for himself. He not only hit hard but he demonstrated his fire more convincingly than ever before. In that one standout word in his Denver speech—'Enough!'—he announced he was ready to throw down.

Today, amidst all the lipstick traces, he went one better by declaring 'Enough is enough!' Not by coincidence, he has now given the green light to liberal 527's to hit McCain with everything they've got. I, too, was skeptical when he tied their hands earlier this year, but consider the advantages of forestalling the attack until now:

1. By waiting until McCain's attacks reached new depths of disgrace, Obama can claim he was forced to release the hounds: the Republicans made him go negative.

2. By holding all his attack cards until now, Obama has not yet begun to fight, which means the best anti-McCain weapons are all still in the Democratic arsenal and will be deployed in the final weeks, when they count most.

3. Following from point two, the Republicans have exhausted their most potent weapons against Obama: there is nothing left to say about Jeremiah Wright, 'Hussein', 'present' votes, Bill Ayers, and so on. What is left to say against Obama?

Obama may have looked soft up until now, but I predict that all those soft-spoken weeks are about to seem like strategic genius. When the final chapter of this campaign is written in the history books, its title is likely to be 'Rope-a-Dope'.

new lipstick meme

2008-09-10T17:34:00.004-04:00

We need to control the rhetoric better. With that in mind, here is my suggestion for a new lipstick meme:

Q: What is the difference between Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney?

A: Lipstick.

Spread the word.

they hate learning, or, in defense of the E-word

2008-09-07T00:06:00.018-04:00

Anti-intellectualism is alive and well in the Republican Party. Political campaigns typically try to convert an opponent's strengths into weaknesses, as when a candidate's thoughtfulness is cast as indecision or when, as in 2004, military distinction is disrespected. This year the Republicans have gone beyond attacking their better-educated opponents and are attacking learning itself. Consider day three of this year's Republican National Convention.

Republican State Senator Abel Maldonado of California gave a speech about his father, who had risen from immigrant farmworker to independent farmer. In the midst of telling this story, he then turned to the subject of Barack Obama's education:

'My father knows more about economics than Senator Obama does with his degrees from all those fancy schools.'

All those fancy schools? I thought that was part of the reason that immigrants like Maldonado's father worked so hard: so that their children could earn degrees from fancy schools. Is there something contemptible about having degrees or going to fancy schools? Are those of us whose families sacrificed so that we could get those degrees the enemy?

Then Mitt Romney spoke. His speech identified America's supposed enemy more precisely: 'eastern elites'. Since Romney is a venture capitalist and a former governor of Massachusetts, I wondered whom he meant. I was all the more confused when I learned that Romney graduated as valedictorian at Brigham Young University in 1971 and then earned a joint JD/MBA from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. What does it mean when an über-elitist like Romney bashes elites? Could it be that well-educated Republicans like Romney want to turn the less-educated members of their party against learning itself?

Then Rudolph Giuliani spoke. Longtime readers of my blog will recall my antipathy for this man. Last year I even said, in all sincerity, that I would rather have Dick Cheney—Dick Cheney!—as president than Giuliani. His speech carried the theme even further:

'On the other hand, you have a résumé from a gifted man with an Ivy League education. He worked as a community organizer. What? He worked—I said—I said, OK, OK, maybe this is the first problem on the résumé. He worked as a community organizer.

[...]

Not a personal attack, a statement of fact. Barack Obama has never led anything, nothing, nada. Nada, nothing.

[...]

I'm sorry—I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her [Palin's] hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough.'

Again we see the accusation of fancy schools. Obama's leadership of the Harvard Law Review is discounted as nothing. And one has to see the video to appreciate the contempt with which Giuliani pronounced the word 'cosmopolitan', this from a former mayor of cosmopolitan NYC.

The new Republican rhetoric goes beyond the presidential campaign. It is a culture war against learning itself. The Republicans have always been good at speaking bluntly, but they never used to bash learning. The conspicuously inarticulate Bushes hid their Yale and Harvard degrees behind their peculiar art of speaking badly, but they never spoke badly of the Ivy League.

If it's culture war the new Republicans want, then I say it's culture war we ought to give them. Collectively, we have done wonders for the name Hussein, no longer spoken as a cuss word by the Republicans. Now it is time to do the same for education and elitism.

Stand tall, intellectuals and lovers of learning. Rally around your eloquence and ideas, for today's Republicans possess neither. To aspire to the condition of an educated elite is to reach for the best in oneself. It means making the most of every opportunity for achievement. It means loving the life of the mind and sharing it with others. It means believing that by cultivating and uniting our intellectual powers we stand the best chance of solving our nation's and our world's problems.

When I say it is time to stand up for education and the elite, I don't mean the elite of wealth and privilege, i.e., how George W. Bush got into Yale and John McCain into Annapolis. I mean the elite of talent achieved through an individual's hard work and sacrifice. Most of us do not earn our degrees from fancy schools the Bush-McCain way. Some of us have had to fight against the odds—financial, cultural, and otherwise—to be where we are. And the Republicans want to shame us and scapegoat us for this? Not while my over-educated brain is on the job.

Let's go even further than vindicating education and elitism. Let's take the fight to the enemy by going on the offensive. As I argued a few days ago, our elected leaders should be freakishly talented men and women of daunting achievement and visionary intellect. The Republican candidates for president and vice-president this year are anything but, and we should reject them for precisely this reason. John McCain graduated 894th out of 899 in his class at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Sarah Palin's record is even worse: she attended five different colleges (one of them twice) before graduating from the University of Idaho. Here they are:

1982, University of Hawaii at Hilo
1982, Hawaii Pacific University
1983, North Idaho College
1984-1985, University of Idaho
1985, Matanuska-Susitna College (Alaska)
1986-1987, University of Idaho

(Sources: ABC News and the Daily News of New York.)

It is one thing to transfer schools because of economic hardship. It is quite another to do so for the weather, as the Daily News reports:

'Upon arrival in Hilo, it rained for three weeks straight. She and her friends quickly realized that Hilo is located on the rainy side of the Big Island.

"Once we got there, we hated it," Tilly Ketchum, one of Palin's friends, recalled in the bio, written months before she was named the GOP's vice presidential nominee.

To get away from the rain, Palin and her friends quickly transferred to Hawaii Pacific University on sunny Oahu. When they weren't studying, the women visited the set of "Magnum P.I.," the biography noted.

Oahu's unlimited sunshine quickly lost its appeal for the Alaska girls.

"It was always 82 degrees," Ketchum said. "When Christmas comes around you want cool temperatures and a change of season."'

Palin's husband does not take higher education seriously either. According to the New York Times for September 3, 2008:

'Mr. Palin took classes in college but did not complete a degree, learning on the job at BP. His on-the-job training shaped his choice of a pet cause when he became first spouse: vocational education and encouraging young Alaskans to get stable jobs in the oil and gas industry.'

Is that what we want in a potential first spouse: someone who steers young people not to so-called fancy schools but to jobs in the oil and gas industry? Really?

Democrats' and liberals' first resort when attacked is always to cut and run. When George H.W. Bush and Lee Atwater vilified the L-word in 1988, who stood up for liberalism? No one, and the word has now been distorted beyond belief by the most illiberal.

Now they are coming after us for our education. Will we let the E-word—whether 'education', 'elite', or even 'the East Coast'—suffer the same fate as the L-word? We can stop this if we stand up for who and what we are and if we remind our fellow Americans that education and the elitism of talent are what every American hopes to achieve for themselves and for their kids. Education and elitism are core American values for which the generations before us sacrificed so that we might attain these things more easily and with more equal access. Education and elitism are the American way. Fellow patriots, stand up for our country and its way of life and join me in defending education and elitism.

Palin, pregnancy, and parenting

2008-09-03T02:53:00.006-04:00

In five short days, Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate, has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving. Choosing her without vetting her first puts the Republicans in a lose-lose situation: either McCain chose her without vetting her, which appears to be the truth at this point, or they vetted her incompetently.

Strangely, two of the many stories emerging about Palin have to do with pregnancy and parenting. When I first read online that 'bloggers' were spreading rumours that Palin's reputed fifth child was not her own but that she faked a pregnancy to cover up for her teenaged daughter (reports don't say which one), my first reaction was a mixture of disbelief and concern. False reporting, as in the 2004 case of CBS's forged memos about George W. Bush's 'service' in the Air National Guard of Texas, tend ultimately to raise the fortunes of the victim.

The story gained credibility yesterday when it made the New York Times, which soberly considered the evidence:

'And she [Sarah Palin] had waited until she was seven months pregnant to make public news that she was expecting a fifth child this year, a pregnancy that was complicated by Down syndrome.

[...]

Some claimed that Ms. Palin had not actually given birth to Trig, but that Bristol had, and that the family had covered it up. Various Web sites posted photographs of Ms. Palin in the months leading up to his birth this year, and debated whether her physique might have been too trim for her stage of pregnancy. The McCain campaign said Ms. Palin announced Bristol’s pregnancy to stop the swirl of rumors.

Ms. Palin’s own pregnancy took Alaska by surprise this year. Even those who worked for her in the governor’s office said they were surprised. Her announcement, in March, was reported in The Anchorage Daily News, which noted at the time that Ms. Palin "simply doesn’t look pregnant."'

These are all fascinating suggestions but inconclusive. What we do know for sure is that the eldest of Palin's daughters is seventeen years old and currently pregnant. That in itself is nothing special and does not rise to the level of political debate. Mothers of any age deserve our support and encouragement, and that goes for Palin's daughter as well. As Barack Obama pointed out, his own mother was a teenager when she had him and some of us can say the same. Young people get pregnant. I believe that is what we call one of the facts of life.

What should concern us is Palin's announcement that her daughter will marry the eighteen-year-old young man in question. This, Reader, is bad judgment and bad parenting. Pregnancy is no reason to get married, especially for teenagers. No sensible person lets their seventeen-year-old son or daughter get married. Doing so indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of human relationships.

Everything about Palin as a politician is wrong: her support for abstinence-only sex 'education', her belief in creationism, her support for a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. We can add to that list her belief that shotgun teenaged weddings are wise family decisions.

============

Update

This just in: a few minutes after posting the blog entry above, I found this gem of a story in the Washington Post:

'Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.

After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation—"SP"—Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.'

Brilliant.

spunk is not enough

2008-09-03T01:32:00.010-04:00

Why have Republicans welcomed John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate? We know that he chose her after meeting her only once, in February. We know that she was mayor of a town of only 6500 people before being elected governor of Alaska, population 680,000, in 2006. We also know that her husband was a member of an Alaskan secessionist party until 2002. It is one thing to think that women are dumb enough to support Palin just because she is a woman. But many Republicans genuinely seem to like Palin and to think that somehow the rest of us will, too. What are they thinking?

Today's Republicans don't seem to care about competence, intelligence, or achievement. To them, ideology is the one and only measure of a candidate's worth. Yes, many Republicans share Palin's opposition to abortion under any and all circumstances, her refusal to believe in global warming, and her belief in creationism, but that is true of many in the party these days. Most Democrats support Barack Obama because of his Democratic agenda, but he is also an impressive individual who, by his achievements and special talents, inspires confidence. The Democratic Party generally does not run unqualified, unintelligent people for national office.

Let's look at the tale of the tape. Obama, with no connections and only one parent, graduated from Columbia and Harvard Law, where he was president of the law review. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for twelve years. He mastered the bare-knuckled politics of Chicago and served eight years in the Illinois state legislature. Joe Biden similarly made his mark on the world by his own efforts and at a young age. Elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of twenty-nine, he has distinguished himself on both the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees.

John McCain, as the son and grandson of navy admirals, relied on the affirmative action of his connections to get into the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he graduated 894th out of 899. His ignorance and embarassments in economics and international affairs are widely known. Palin has no valuable experience to speak of and professes to know nothing about Iraq or the office of the vice-president. Like McCain, she appears to have been a lackluster, uncommitted student, in her case bouncing around a number of schools without distinction. From Wikipedia:

'Palin attended Hawaii Pacific College — now known as Hawaii Pacific University — in Honolulu for a semester in 1982, majoring in Business Administration. She transferred in 1983 to North Idaho College. In 1987, Palin received a Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism from the University of Idaho, where she also minored in political science.'

McCain and Palin are mediocrities in every way, and mediocrities have no business leading the free world. I see voters on television and in the press speaking about how they identify with Candidate X or Y, but this is not a suitable way of choosing elected officials. We don't need the common man or woman in positions of national leadership. What we need is the uncommon man or woman. The president and vice-president should be total freaks: individuals of daunting achievement and visionary intellect. We should be in awe of their talents, not ridiculing their eloquence and intelligence.

From what I can tell, Republicans really seem to think that Americans will support Palin just because she looks like a crazed Tina Fey. One word that has been repeated a lot is 'spunk'. Here is an instance from the Los Angeles Times for September 1, 2008:

'"She's spunky," said Gail LeMay, 58, a retiree. "She really brings life to the campaign." LeMay marveled that McCain looked "to the tundra" to pick his running mate.'

We don't need a president who is spunky and we don't need a president who is funky. We need a president who is smarter than the rest of us because the problems we face will require intelligence, judgment, and skill to solve. Spunk, alas, is not enough.

keep going

2008-08-27T01:25:00.009-04:00

Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention last night may prove to be an important event in party history. She has given spotlight speeches before, yet they were always utterly forgettable. Bill Clinton or Barack Obama can give a speech, and their phrases instantly enter political discourse and stay there for years: the bridge to the twenty-first century; there are no red states or blue states; a skinny kid with a funny name. Do you remember a word of her 2004 convention speech? Me neither.

H. Clinton's speeches have always struck me as litanies of complaint without anything catchy and hopeful, a key ingredient. My favourite instance of the catchy and hopeful hook to the end-of-the-world speech is Al Gore's trope of the Chinese translation of 'crisis', which even has its own Wikipedia entry. I always thought it was Al Gore who first said that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is formed by two characters meaning 'danger' and 'opportunity'. Apparently, John F. Kennedy said it way back in 1959. I feel cheated.

Last night, practically everything that H. Clinton said was memorable: we can't have four more years of the last eight years; no way, no how, no McCain; the Twin Cities joke. I could not help but think it was B. Clinton's speech. When it comes to most things, she is probably smarter than he is, but not when it comes to rhetoric. Her mind does not frame her thoughts into rhetorical figures the way his compulsively does. (He did seem to be smiling a bit too proudly during her speech; didn't he?)

Whoever wrote it, I was relieved to see the force of her argument to her supporters that they must support Obama because this is about more than her. I expected calls for party unity and so on, but what she said was what those of us not enthralled to the Clintons needed to hear: that it was not about her but about the larger cause.

If my suspicion is right that this was a Bill speech, at least in spirit, then I have to think he is going to trot out an even grander speech for himself tonight. Finally, for the first time in this campaign, I am looking forward to a speech by Bill Clinton. Perhaps he may even restore the family name.

online radio interview with Dr. Mo

2008-08-23T00:15:00.003-04:00

On Tuesday, August 19, I was the guest on Dr. Mo's Danger Zone Show, an internet radio program. The interview lasts an hour and ranges over everything from 'I am Hussein' to corn ethanol to the mortgage crisis. Here is the link.

I was not familiar with Dr. Mo, but he runs a good show. He asks timely questions and wants to hear the answers, unlike some people in media. Check it out.

welcome, Dr. Mo listeners

2008-08-19T22:00:00.002-04:00

Thanks to everyone who is checking out my blog for the first time after my appearance on the Dr. Mo show. I have been on summer blog hiatus and will resume blogging next week, just in time for the Democratic convention. Add me to your RSS readers, and we will have something new to talk about in one week's time. Thanks.

on the road again

2008-07-01T20:52:00.004-04:00

Thanks to everyone who sent me kind words after my appearances on Monday on MSNBC. If anyone finds a link to the spots online, please pass it on. I seem to be the only one who has not seen them. (People in Televisionland call them 'hits', but I prefer to think of them 'spots of time'.)

Meanwhile, I am now in London, and the blog will turn partly into a travelogue (travelblog?) for the next four weeks. I am planning to visit Exeter, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stockholm, Malmo, and Copenhagen. Tomorrow Dan and I plan to see new work by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tom Friedman, and Bob Dylan. Apparently, Bob Dylan produces visual art as well. The conversation afterward will surely be entertaining as we will no doubt compare Dan's rock hero's visual output to my art-rock hero's work. Then again, perhaps the deck is already stacked. After that, The Merry Wives of Windsor at Shakespeare's Globe.

Hussein fashion

2008-06-30T16:22:00.008-04:00

Mark Hussein Montalbano has a Hussein t-shirt for sale. I don't have one yet, but we agreed to swap a blog post for a shirt. So here it is. Mark says the following about the shirt:

Barack Hussein Obama. It's a beautiful name, which means handsome or beautiful. Barack Hussein Obama, despite the birth-given name, is not Muslim, though, the name symbolizes his openness to all walks of life. Acceptance. This Obama t-shirt was designed to celebrate his birth-given name. It's more of an effort to celebrate acceptance of anyone's name, but it was created mainly because of the fact that our soon-to-be President has many times been unfairly smeared because of the name he goes by. The suggestion that he should not be our President because of a name, which happens to have a beautiful meaning, is the very reason to celebrate it and let the country know that we're not going to stand for these prejudices.

Here's the story behind the shirt. This is inspired by the many beautiful people who blog on barackobama.com, Facebook, and the many other individual blogs who have made this very statement by putting "Hussein" in between their real names. It's such a beautiful gesture to expose us all to the fact that it is a very nice name...and that it just so happens to mean "beautiful".

Here is the link to Mark's shirts.

I am Hussein

2008-06-29T17:11:00.006-04:00

Here is a link to the original 'I am Hussein' manifesto of February 28, 2008. Meanwhile, I am doing two brief interviews at MSNBC tomorrow morning at 9.30 and 11.00 a.m. ET. You can also join the 'I am Hussein' Facebook group.

If you're here for the first time, welcome. Here are some non-political greatest hits from my blog:

Dizzee Rascal
Burger King
My defence of gangsta rap
The Sopranos' finale

If you happen to be a fan of David Byrne, use the search box on the right. I blog about his work on a regular basis. Thanks for visiting.

Hussein made me do it

2008-06-28T21:04:00.010-04:00

I know that when Barack Obama becomes president he will disappoint us. That's what politicians do: the best ones try their best to live up to their promises and our expectations, but the one thing we can say about every leader is that he or she has disappointed us at one time or another. Obama is not even president yet and already I'm disappointed that he has joined his party's capitulation over telecom immunity in the FISA bill. And don't get me started on his worse-than-McCain corn-heavy energy policy.

What Obama does that is rare is inspire people. There are skeptics, as there should be, about a man whose greatest talent may simply be saying the things that motivate others, but would it be so bad to have a president who brought out the best in the people? What other leader have we ever been able to say that about?

Some of the Obama-inspired undertakings are just for fun: posters, online videos, and so on. But does anyone know of an instance where someone was inspired to creativity or commitment by John McCain? I mean besides It's Raining McCain.

Tomorrow's New York Times has an article by Jodi Kantor entitled 'Obama Supporters Take His Middle Name as Their Own'. Apparently there are a lot more of us out there all with the same idea. Next up: let's all do the terrorist fist jab.

I have not seen anything like this before, so I don't know whether all this inspiration will amount to a renewal of the republic whereby people all over the country from sea to shining sea start to care about things like the rule of law and civil discourse again. The worst that could happen is that people around the world will sharpen their digital video editing skills. The best that could happen? It is a very healthy thing when that is the question we find ourselves asking.

Huckabee wins West Virginia

2008-05-14T00:56:00.012-04:00

It's no small thing that the Clintons have beaten Barack Obama by a big margin, 67% to 26%, in yesterday's West Virginia primary, but if losing West Virginia means danger in the general election, John McCain has at least as much to worry about as Obama.

West Virginia is one of those quirky states where the Democrats and Republicans follow different procedures for choosing their party's presidential nominee. As the New York Times website shows, West Virginia held a Republican caucus on February 5 and a Republican primary yesterday. The results deserve our attention.

In yesterday's Republican primary, which determined nine pledged delegates, McCain won 76% of the vote. That means that in a completely uncompetitive primary, 24% of Republican primary voters showed up just to vote against their party's presumptive nominee. (I noted the same trend last week in Indiana and North Carolina.)

But in the February 5 Republican caucus, when McCain faced active competition with eighteen delegates at stake, the results were staggering. These are the vote totals of the delegates at the state convention, as shown by the New York Times:

Candidate	Vote	Percentage
Mike Huckabee	567	51.5%
Mitt Romney	521	47.4%
John McCain	12	1.1%

Some readers may say that it is a cheap parlor trick to compare Obama's 26% in the West Virginia primary to McCain's 1.1% in the same state's caucus. And maybe it is. The better comparison may be to the Republican primary in Utah, a reliably Republican state where one candidate, Mitt Romney, was favored by voters from the start. In Utah's February 5 primary, McCain got 5.4% of the vote to Romney's 89.5%. Does this mean that, having lost Utah so dramatically, McCain cannot hope to carry it in November? Certainly not. And neither does the Clintons' lopsided victory in West Virginia rule it out for Obama. Keep these facts in mind when you hear all the silly talk about Obama's 'electability'.

So that's what Obama's big defeat in West Virginia doesn't mean. As for what it does mean, your guess is as good as mine.

still true

2008-05-12T01:40:00.010-04:00

Longtime readers of my blog may recall that I have in the past requested, of no one in particular, that Sounds from True Stories, David Byrne's only album never released on cd, be reissued. (This is the motion picture score, as opposed to Talking Heads' True Stories album.) Last night I asked the man himself.

The occasion was a screening of True Stories (1986) as part of a film series at BAM called 'The Cinematography of Ed Lachman'. Lachman and Byrne appeared in person and spoke with the audience for about forty minutes. They said quite a lot that will be of interest to fans of the film.

Byrne brought several books of photography with him and held up some of the images for the audience to see. The photographers whose work he identified as the film's visual sources were William Eggleston (whose photos appear in the True Stories book), Chauncey Hare, Stephen Shore (Uncommon Places), Joel Sternfeld, Lewis Baltz, and Larry Fink. As in Byrne's own photographs of corporate signs and office settings, what fascinated him were the images of mundane places and suburban developments, not to mock them but to marvel at them.

He also said that the film originally ended with the death and funeral of the Cute Woman but that this proved to be a downer of an ending. It sounds to me like a special edition dvd is in order.

Screenplay-wise, seeing the film for the first time since its original release, I found myself recalling another 80's film which, while probably not an influence on Byrne at the time, was constructed from similar written sources: Pedro Almodóvar's Laberinto de pasiones (1982). Like True Stories, Almodóvar's screenplay, with its tales of artificial insemination, nymphomania, and the former royal family of Iran, was constructed in large part from the tabloid press.

Lachman talked a lot about the framing of the film and how he tried to photograph it the way an amateur or a resident of the town of Virgil, Texas would. Before the screening and before Byrne's arrival, Lachman also said, rightly I think, that Byrne was way ahead of the curve in articulating how the shopping mall had replaced the village green as the gathering place for the social life of many towns.

Hearing the songs, I was struck by another early insight of Byrne's. Last year, while blogging about the Carnegie Hall performance of his song cycle about Imelda Marcos, I praised his new song about martial law in the Philippines, 'Order 1081'. It takes a person of great sympathetic imagination to be able to depict in song people's welcoming of martial law (unless, of course, one is a fascist, but that would be a different kind of song altogether). When John Goodman sang 'People Like Us' in the movie, I was struck, not necessarily by a new revelation about the song, but by a connection between the Marcos-themed song about martial law and the lyrics of 'People Like Us':

'We don't want freedom.
We don't want justice.
We just want someone to love,
Someone to love.'

As early as 'People Like Us' in 1986, Byrne had written a song that tried to reckon with people's apparent preference for emotional security over abstractions like rights and freedoms. This is a valuable insight for those of us who care about human rights and wonder why we often seem so few in number.

Getting back to what I asked during the Q&A, I posed two questions. The first was why he had not made more fictional films. He replied that he had pitched other ideas but that Hollywood had shrugged at them and asked him instead for True Stories 2. My second question was about the missing album. His answer: that the album is tied up at Warner and would require all kinds of permissions to be obtained and whatnot. Someone in the audience (not me) shouted, 'Start a petition!' but Byrne did not seem too interested in the prospect of reissuing the album.

That's too bad. I have the album on cassette, and parts of it are as clear an intellectual and æsthetic statement, in musical form, of Byrne's ideas in the mid-80's as anything else he did at the time. Hopefully this will not be the last word on Sounds from True Stories.

imaginary presidential art

2008-05-08T02:16:00.006-04:00

It may be an idle thought of no interest to anyone but me, but I sometimes try to imagine what Jean-Michel Basquiat would have made of Barack Obama. Being a great admirer of both, I naturally imagine that Basquiat would have been inspired to add Obama to his pantheon of crowned heads, which included Joe Louis, Cassius Clay, and Charlie Parker. (Yes, that's an actual Basquiat crown that I added to Obama's image at the left.)

Although the similarities may be broad, the more I think about it, the more the two seem to have in common. Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, just 225 days before Obama on August 4, 1961. Both rose like rocketships to dominate their fields, painting and politics, with a youthful vigor more desperately needed than we had thitherto realized. And both confounded the usual American racial categories by having black parents from outside the U.S. (in Basquiat's case, from Haiti and Puerto Rico), which may have something to do with a worldliness of vision uncommon to Americans of any color.

For what it's worth, I don't think for a second that Basquiat would have produced campaign-suitable propaganda, like Shepard Fairey's Obama posters, but I'm sure he would have painted something striking. That's the problem, among others, with people who die young: they stop making new work.

In lieu of producing anymore fake Basquiats for the campaign, I have a question for my readers: what artists do you imagine depicting the 2008 presidential candidates? Here are mine.

Barack Obama: Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Hillary Clinton: Lucian Freud.
John McCain: Goya.

Post your presidential artists in the comments.

back to the future

2008-05-08T01:15:00.015-04:00

I'm tempted to say nothing at all about Tuesday's Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. They don't deserve much more attention than Tuesday's Republican primaries. In Indiana, 22% voted against McCain; in North Carolina the percentage was 26%. It is mildly interesting that a quarter of the people who bothered to vote in a primary whose party's nominee is a foregone conclusion voted against their nominee, but none of that will prevent McCain from standing in the general election.

The same is true for the Democratic primaries at this point. Even to imagine their importance is to give credence to the Clintons' claims that there is still a competitive contest between them and Barack Obama, and there flatly is not. Forget the meshugas about metrics and Michigan. It's past time for Democrats who want to win in November to take rhetorical control back and to frame the campaign in meaningful terms, i.e. how to transition from the primary campaign to the general.

The aspect of the Clintons' perseverance that merits attention is the mystery: why are they doing this? I don't find much of anything that television personality Tucker Carlson says worth listening to, but he said one thing in March or April on MSNBC that has stuck with me. He hypothesized that the Clintons are trying to beat up Obama so badly that he would lose to McCain and the Clintons could then run again in 2012. Could they really be so devious?

The Clintons are dedicated to one thing above all others, and it's not governing, movement-building, or even health care: it's winning elections. They will do anything to win. I've never forgotten the fanfare with which Governor Clinton returned to Arkansas at the start of the 1992 primary campaign in order to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, an African-American convict whose guilt was indisputable but whose brain had been lobotomized by a bullet. In those days we did not yet have the term 'dog-whistle politics', but the message and its targets were clear.

While all of that is true, I would still prefer to find a less exotic explanation, one where the Clintons' actions make sense without having to call them finks to the Democratic Party. Someone would have to show me that they demonstrably under-supported John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 for me to say that they are trying to bring down definite-nominee Obama. So what could they be up to instead?

While they may not be trying to knock out Obama themselves, they could still be preparing a 2012 campaign in the event that he somehow loses to McCain. And if that is the plan, they seem to be doing a good job of executing it. They have used emotion, class-based resentment, white-liberal feminism, and anti-intellectualism to build strong bonds of identification with less-educated whites, working-class whites, Catholics, and white women. [A better way of putting it: For better or for worse, they have built strong bonds of identification with their target voting blocs—less-educated whites, working-class whites, Catholics, and white women—through a combination of displays of emotion, class-based resentment, second-wave feminism, and even anti-intellectualism.] The Man from Hope and the Girl from Scranton (who knew?) are bulding a base for the future. And if the Democratic Party lives down to its recent past, it will find a way to lose come November 2008. I can already hear the Clintons' 2012 I-told-you-so's echoing from that alternate future universe, dog-whistling Dixie.

[Update: A number of readers read the original final paragraph in ways that I did not intend. Hopefully my comments and my revision clarify what I meant.]

typing fingers crossed

2008-05-03T00:11:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago I applied to cover the Democratic National Convention as a blogger. If accepted, I would have press credentials and I would blog directly from the Convention in Denver. Today, I received a followup message from the Democratic National Convention Committee asking me for more information because they are considering my application.

I know that I don't have the eyeball counts of the big blogs like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo, but perhaps there is room for my, for now, modest little blog. I'd like to think that I provide keen analysis that is well-written and that one will not find elsewhere. I don't repeat what everyone else is writing and blogging about unless I think I have something particularly insightful to add to it. Like the big blogs, I do original research into Congressional hearings, judicial decisions, and United States law, not to mention my many blog entries drawing on my knowledge of Islam (and hip hop).

I've long thought that a big problem with news and political commentary in this country is the narrow range of expertise that it draws on. Turn on any news or chat show and, ten times out of ten, you will see journalists interviewing other journalists or party apparatchiks. Turn on the equivalent program anywhere else in the world and you will often see—hold on to your hats—historians, political scientists, and regional experts offering their own insight and analysis. What is interesting about watching one journalist talk to another about the election when both of them have the same knowledge, come from the same professional background, and share the same paradigms and assumptions?

I want this opportunity not just because it would be a blast to probe the convention for the angles and insights less covered elsewhere, but also because, at a time when one of our candidates is under attack for having an elite mind, I would like to show American news readers the difference that serious, rigorous analysis can make, particularly when it is written in highly readable prose with healthy dollops of wit. There is a market for what I am doing, and going to the convention can help me find it.

torturers need not apply

2008-05-02T00:21:00.010-04:00

According to news reports yesterday, Nelson Mandela and other members of the African National Congress appear on U.S. terrorist watch lists. What makes the situation even more ridiculous is that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice apparently has no idea of how to get them off the list:

'"This is a country with which we now have excellent relations, South Africa, but it's frankly a rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela," Rice said.'

With the executive branch mired in such incompetence, Representative Howard Berman (D-CA) has proposed legislation, currently in the House Foreign Affairs and Judiciary Committees, to remove them from the list. The bill is H.R. 5690, 'To exempt the African National Congress from treatment as a terrorist organization for certain acts or events, provide relief for certain members of the African National Congress regarding admissibility, and for other purposes.'

My original intention in starting this blog entry was to revisit Dick Cheney's pro-apartheid votes in the U.S. House in 1986. He did indeed vote against a resolution calling for Mandela's release and against economic sanctions, but I was unable to corroborate a recollection I had from the 80's about something he may have said about Mandela in particular.

Instead, I found something more interesting in the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182), the law which Berman's bill would amend. Here it is:

'§ 1182. Inadmissible aliens
(a) Classes of aliens ineligible for visas or admission. Except as otherwise provided in this Act, aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States:[...]

(3) Security and related grounds.[...]

(E) Participants in Nazi persecution, genocide, or the commission of any act of torture or extrajudicial killing.[...]

(iii) Commission of acts of torture or extrajudicial killings. Any alien who, outside the United States, has committed, ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the commission of—
(I) any act of torture, as defined in section 2340 of title 18, United States Code; or
(II) under color of law of any foreign nation, any extrajudicial killing, as defined in section 3(a) of the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 (28 U.S.C. 1350 note), is inadmissible.'

How about that? Aliens who have committed, ordered, or even incited torture are not allowed to enter the U.S. I guess certain privileges are reserved for citizens.

suggestive oxymoron, or, nocturnal reverie

2008-04-29T02:28:00.004-04:00

I made a stunning discovery today: 'Burger King' is an oxymoron. No, not because burgers are distinctly non-regal meat products, but because a burger is a commoner, and a commoner cannot be king.

According to the OED, a burgher is:

'An inhabitant of a burgh, borough, or corporate town; a citizen. Chiefly used of continental towns, but also of English boroughs, in a sense less technical than burgess. Now somewhat arch.'

I do recognize that the fast-food chain spells the word without the letter H, but that variant is included among the quotations provided in the OED's entry. Shakespeare used it in act 1, scene 1, line 10 of The Merchant of Venice:

'Your minde is tossing on the Ocean,
There where your Argosies with portlie sayle
Like Signiors and rich Burgars on the flood,
Or as it were the Pageants of the sea,
Doe ouer-peere the petty traffiquers
That cursie to them do them reuerence
As they flie by them with theyr wouen wings.'
(Quoted from the First Quarto, 1600)

In 1660, in what may be an inadvertent precursor of the dollar menu, economist Roger Coke wrote, 'A Burger who hath...half a mark, let him pay a Peter-peny.'

Taking the idea of the 'burgher king' seriously, what could it mean? Perhaps it is meant to imply the dignity of the common man, in the tradition of Huey Long's famous 'Every Man a King' speech of 1934:

'Those are the things we propose to do. "Every man a king." Every man to eat when there is something to eat; all to wear something when there is something to wear. That makes us all sovereign.'

The promise of ubiquitous food at any hour of the day that one desires it is, after all, the promise of fast food. And it is this promise—of the uninterrupted satisfaction of consumer wants—that Burger [sic] King would have us believe will make us sovereign.

But I ask you, Reader, will it? Or will it enslave us to manufactured desires and drive us to a level of overproduction and overconsumption that will lead to mass obesity and global warming? I will have none of the Burgher King and his false promises. Down, I say, with the Burgher King and all tyrants everywhere!

Bill knows politics

2008-04-22T01:30:00.001-04:00

I couldn't agree more.

Obama has already won

2008-04-22T00:42:00.003-04:00

Here is something to keep in mind as we wait to see which Pennsylvania prevails in today's Democratic primary election: the Clintons were supposed to win from the start. The story here is not Barack Obama's inability to knock them out, despite lacking the winner-take-all formula of Republican primaries. The real story is that Obama has already defeated the stranglehold of the DLC over the Democratic Party.

Here, thanks to Wikipedia, is the list of DLC chairmen since its founding in 1985:
Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri (1985–1986)
Gov. Chuck Robb of Virginia (1986–1988)
Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia (1988–1990)
Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas (1990–1991)
Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana (1991–1993)
Rep. Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma (1993–1995)
Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut (1995–2001)
Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana (2001–2005)
Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa (2005–2007)
Former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee (2007–present)

For those who follow American politics closely, the names on that list speak for themselves. The DLC approach to politics is to follow the Republicans ever rightward on the false assumption that the country is going ever more conservative. DLC candidates generally forgo the party's progressive legacy, repudiate appeals to the poor and working class as 'class warfare', and beg conservative voters to trust Democrats again by 'getting tough' on core Democratic constituencies. Bill Clinton did this in 1992 by executing Ricky Ray Rector with great fanfare and scapegoating Sister Souljah. And what did it get him? 43% of the vote in 1992 and a Republican Congress two years later.

The Democrats cannot win with 43% of the vote anymore, at least not without Ross Perot. And the party won't win the electoral college with the Kerry-states strategy of the Clintons.

Obama has already slain the beast inside the party and will win the nomination. What matters is not whether the Clintons beat him in safe Democratic states like Pennsylvania but whether, in line with Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy, his insurgent campaign can energize the party in the western states and other places outside the tired DLC playbook. I think we already know the answer to that.

question: incompetence or genius?

2008-04-15T01:50:00.004-04:00

News that Stephen Hadley, Bush's National Security Adviser, repeatedly called Tibet 'Nepal' on the Sunday blab shows reminded me of a conversation I had over dinner with SW and OS Saturday night after David Byrne's appearance at BAM. (He sang Paul Simon's 'I Know What I Know' and 'Call Me Al'.)

Nepal held elections on April 10 for a constitutional assembly which will abolish the 240-year-old monarchy, as explained in this BBC Q&A. As of tonight, the Maoists have a majority of the seats decided thus far. Tibet, ruled by feudal theocrats until 1950 and by Chinese communists since then, has recently broken through the world's indifference again thanks to a fresh campaign of protests in Lhasa beginning last month. The decision to hold the 2008 Olympics in Beijing is having the unintended benefit of shining a bright light on China's many sorrows and shames. A competent national security advisor would know the difference between Nepal and Tibet, but then again Bush's party will nominate a presidential candidate this year who still cannot tell Sunni from Shia.

The conversation in question was about competence. The main question was this: Are the many disgraces of the Bush administration [sic] more the result of incompetence or design? If the various messes of the Bush years were the result of design, that would presumably make Bush and company quite competent indeed.

What do you say, Reader? Which is it? Which examples make your case best? Has it all been part of a master plan or a long series of blunders? Enquiring minds want to know.

ready on day one

2008-03-27T02:23:00.001-04:00

Sinbad was there, too.

ready on day 5,865

2008-03-25T16:36:00.005-04:00

John McCain assumed office as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 3, 1983. Exactly four years later, he assumed office as a U.S. Senator. If, somehow, he wins the 2008 presidential election, he would be inaugurated on January 20, 2009. I wonder if by then he will have found the time to learn about economics.

Five years after his first presidential campaign, McCain told this to the Wall Street Journal, as quoted in their November 26, 2005 issue:

I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.

Brilliant. A presidential candidate who does not understand economics and says so to the world.

Today McCain gave his first major speech on the current housing crisis, and it is stunningly void of anything but platitudes. From the transcript at McCain's website, this is as specific as McCain gets about banking reform:

'When we commit taxpayer dollars as assistance, it should be accompanied by reforms that ensure that we never face this problem again. Central to those reforms should be transparency and accountability.'

Transparency and accountability? Is that the best he can do? I'd say his education is off to a slow start.

Later today I saw Jack Kemp, a McCain supporter and Bob Dole's running mate in 1996, on MSNBC talking about McCain's speech today. Talking to host Andrea Mitchell, he said of McCain:

'John is a quick study.'

I recognize that most U.S. presidents in my lifetime have not been particularly bright, but, given the economic exigencies of the moment, perhaps we should be unusually vigilant against electing someone who, not only cannot tell Sunni from Shia, but also may not know the difference between fiscal policy and monetary policy.

Reader, I don't know about you, but I think twenty-five years in office is enough time to learn about economic policy. The kindest thing to do for McCain might be to send him back to Arizona so that he can get the education he so sorely needs. In another twenty-five years, he might be ready to run for president.

McCan't tell the difference

2008-03-19T00:49:00.006-04:00

One of the bugbears of this blog is American politicians' inability to distinguish between Sunni and Shia. In the past I have criticized Democrat Silvestre Reyes of the House Intelligence Committee and Republican George W. Bush of the White House Unintelligence Committee for either not knowing the difference or conflating the two. I have also written a two-part series (here and here) on the peculiar nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Shia theocracy.

Yesterday, Daily Kos reported that Senator John McCain can't tell the difference either. While in Jordan with Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joseph Lieberman (CfL-CT) at his side, McCain said this:

'We continue to be concerned about Iranian taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back [into Iraq].'

You can watch it yourself at 2:10 of this video, after the advertisement. As anyone who knows the first thing about Islam understands, Sunni al-Qaeda and Shia Iran are utterly incompatible, not least because al-Qaeda sees all Shias as apostates who deserve to be killed.

I expect a conservative Republican to stand for policies that I disagree with, but this revelation of McCain's global ignorance is depressing. This from a man running on a platform of national security and war-mongering. There is really nothing more to say about it other than this: the Republicans are running a foreign-policy idiot in a time of war.

Will American journalists warn the voters of the threat to international security that such ignorance in a potential president poses, or is that a silly question?

more perfect

2008-03-19T00:24:00.001-04:00

I don't recall where it appears, but Ben Jonson said something that has always stayed with me: 'Language reveals the man. Speak that I may see thee.' With that in mind, I invite you to watch Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia yesterday in its thirty-nine-minute entirety.

Journalists and those who play them on TV may try to tell you that it is a speech about his former pastor. It is not. It is something else entirely: an honest speech about the contradictions of our Union. Fittingly, it is called 'A More Perfect Union'. The speech tells truths rarely heard in public discourse. And it tells us that Barack Obama is a man of uncommon intelligence and candor.

McCain's new running mate?

2008-03-12T18:21:00.005-04:00

It looks like my February 11 blog entry was way off in predicting Senator Joseph Lieberman (CfL-CT) as John McCain's running mate.

divine mystery

2008-03-06T01:08:00.009-05:00

Here's something I have noticed that I have not heard anyone talk about: eight of the ten most Catholic states by percentage have chosen Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. The following list shows each state's Catholic percentage of state population, followed by the primary winner and outcome.

1. Rhode Island, 63%, Clinton by 58 to 40.
2. Massachusetts, 47%, Clinton by 56 to 41.
3. New Mexico, 41%, Clinton 51 by to 49.
4. New Jersey, 39%, Clinton by 54 to 44.
4. Vermont, 39%, Obama by 60 to 38.
6. New York, 38%, Clinton by 57 to 40.
7. New Hampshire, 35%, Clinton by 39 to 36 (to 17 for Edwards).
8. California, 34%, Clinton by 52 to 42.
8. Connecticut, 34%, Obama by 51 to 47.
10. Arizona, 31%, Clinton by 51 to 42.

So far, I have seen only one other blogger notice Catholic trending against Obama, and yesterday The Votemaster at electoral-vote.com noticed the disparity in Texas.

Clinton has only won four other states delegate-wise (plus Nevada and Texas where she 'won' but lost in delegates). Two questions then for readers:
-Why are states with large Catholic populations not voting for Obama? and
-Why hasn't anyone noticed this yet?

we are all Hussein

2008-02-28T23:57:00.009-05:00

I don't know about you but I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama's name like it was some sort of cuss word. It is a national embarassment that American political discourse stretches so far to the extremes of xenophobia and puerility that a candidate's name can become an object of propaganda. I'm not worried about the influence of such people. Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Republicans will learn that Obama is a bright, shining piece of rubber, and they are the glue. It just disappoints me to no end to hear it on the news day in and day out.

Jon Stewart made a clever joke about it when he reminded the audience at the Oscars of 'the ill-fated 1944 presidential campaign of Gaydolf Titler' (at 8.10 of this clip at YouTube). Shamelessly repeating his name over and over with seven months to go before the election will wear out whatever rhetorical force it might otherwise have in certain quarters. It's also a good example of what I like to call the 8 Mile defense, i.e. claiming one's own possibly vulnerable traits before one's opponent even opens his mouth, as in the Eminem film.

I think we can do even better than that. It's not just people named Hussein who are being insulted by the racist xenophobes among us. It's everyone who respects human dignity and who values things like courtesy and etiquette. There's a tradition on the left of identifying with the targets of injustice by saying, I am [those people you hate]. It shows up in popular culture sometimes disguised as comedy, as in the 1997 Frank Oz film 'In & Out' starring Kevin Kline. When Kline's character, a high school teacher, is fired after being outed as a gay man, his students rise to his defense, one after another, by declaring, 'I am gay.' More recently, and more apt in this case, Le Monde declared in its front-page editorial headline on September 13, 2001, 'Nous sommes tous Américains'.

'Dans ce moment tragique où les mots paraissent si pauvres pour dire le choc que l'on ressent, la première chose qui vient à l'esprit est celle- ci : nous sommes tous Américains ! Nous sommes tous New-Yorkais, aussi sûrement que John Kennedy se déclarait, en 1962 à Berlin, Berlinois. Comment ne pas se sentir en effet, comme dans les moments les plus graves de notre histoire, profondément solidaires de ce peuple et de ce pays, les Etats-Unis, dont nous sommes si proches et à qui nous devons la liberté, et donc notre solidarité.'

It's time for some good old-fashioned solidarité. With that in mind, I am changing my name for the rest of the campaign to Jeff Hussein Strabone, and I will urge others to do the same with their names. Between now and November 4, I will always try to include my new middle name, even when it might be difficult to do so.

In a broader sense, the law-haters have been coming for the Husseins for the past six and a half years. Right now I think we've got the haters on the run, but we can't let up. Many Americans can be proud of their activities in the fight for justice and the rule of law in this decade. If we recall the famous 'First they came' speech of Martin Niemöller, we can say that many among us did speak up and, if nothing else, at least put our money where our mouth was by giving to the ACLU and other groups. What if they came for the Husseins, and everyone was named Hussein?

In the modern era, we have an exaggerated sense of the fixity of names because of the legal exigencies of having definite, unchanging names. It was not, of course, always the case. Just a few centuries ago, people would spell their own names differently with each signature, as is the case with all of William Shakespeare's surviving signatures. If we adopted a more flexible approach to our names, we might be more awake to the possibilities of self-reinvention.

The name Hussein comes from the Arabic noun husn, which the Hans Wehr dictionary translates as 'beauty, handsomeness, prettiness, loveliness; excellence, superiority, perfection' and so on. Reader, do you feel beautiful? I surely do, and I invite you to feel the same way. For the next seven months I hope you'll join me in saying, 'I am Hussein.'

[Update: here are some pro-Obama sites that have reached out since I posted this blog entry. Check them out.

The Obama Minute posts action instructions and news for Obama supporters.

I Am Hussein is a proposal for YouTube videos of people adding Hussein to their names.]

baseball, too?

2008-02-17T23:14:00.011-05:00

As I watched Wednesday's hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, I was stunned by what I saw. There was Roger Clemens, one of baseball's greatest pitchers of all time, implausibly denying accounts that he had used steroids and human growth hormone. And two seats to his right there was Brian McNamee admitting that he had supplied the substances to Clemens. What stunned me was not the charges or Clemens's denials but, rather, the conduct of the Republicans on the committee. Were they really turning steroids into a partisan issue?

Almost without exception, the Republicans on the panel embarassed themselves by one-sidedly praising Clemens, the accused steroid-taker, and attacking McNamee, the admitted steroid-supplier. Here is Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, questioning McNamee:

'You know, Roger Clemens, unless it's proven that he used steroids—and so far I haven't seen anything like it, if he did, he ought to be held accountable. But Roger Clemens is a baseball—he's a titan in baseball. And you and with all these lies, if they're not true, are destroying him and his reputation. Now how does he get his reputation back if this is not true? And how can we believe you because you've lied and lied and lied and lied?'

Yes, that's the same Dan Burton who promoted the conspiracy theory that Vince Foster was murdered back in the Clinton years.

Alarm bells should have gone off when Clemens said this in his opening statement:

'I have had thousands of calls, e-mails from friends, working partners, teammates, fans, and men that have held the highest office in our country telling me to stand strong.'

If we take him literally, and we should, he meant that some plural number of U.S. presidents have, amidst his accusations of illegal conduct, called to offer their support. Later in the hearing, Clemens brought up his presidential support a second time:

'When all this happened, the former President of the United States found me in a deer blind in south Texas and expressed his concerns, that this was unbelievable, and to stay strong and keep your—hold your head up high.'

Lest there be any doubt about which presidents went to bat for the Texas native, the New York Times for February 15 quoted Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana, as saying:

'It wasn't an accident that word got to me that he's a Republican, or he said that President Bush called him.'

Clemens has not been charged with a crime, but the facts against him are considerable: other players accused by McNamee have confessed; one such player, Andy Pettitte, said in a sworn deposition that Clemens told him of his steroid and hormone use; and Clemens admits that his wife was injected with HGH by McNamee.

My point here is not Clemens's guilt or innocence. It's the dual obscenity of the partisanship shown by the committee's Republicans and the conduct of the Bush family. Apparently, if one is a friend of the Bushes, one is entitled to the support of the entire Republican team without being seriously questioned, no matter the accusations or the strength of the evidence.

What makes this incident even more offensive is that the Bushes are supposedly baseball fans. Bush père played at Yale and roots for the Houston Astros. Bush fils owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before running for governor. Why would they tell their cronies on the committee to go soft on a player accused of sullying the game? I knew that George W. Bush had no respect for the rule of law, but I did not know that he had no respect for the rules of baseball either.