Your Humble Blogger has spent a good deal of time this week working on a blog note about the credit crisis. What I wanted to do was—wait, let me paste this in:
So. Let’s start with finding out what the actual effects [of the crisis on individuals] are. Then, for each major effect, let’s look at (1) why that constitutes a governmental problem, rather than a problem for individuals to address, (ii) how the proposed bailout would help avert or ameliorate the problem, and (c) what other possibilities might address the problem, and then perhaps a comparison of the costs and benefits of those possible solutions.
Well, that note just kept getting longer and longer, and less and less useful, and less and less accurate (because YHB knows almost nothing about macroeconomics and the details of the situation). There are lots and lots of possibilities for dealing with the problems, and each potential course of action has a variety of predictable consequences and of course an infinite variety of unpredictable ones. Almost everything the US government could do at this point will (a) have a lot of bad consequences, and (2) benefit a lot of people who have been dishonest and greedy, and besides (iii) won’t work. So I am not posting the whole note, but I will pass along the one thing I have learned from the exercise.
Just seen in the Guarniad: when the examination board in England had a poem by Carol Ann Duffy removed from the standardized tests because of its violent imagery, Ms. Duffy viciously and with malice aforethought wrote a poem about it.
The poem is called Mrs. Schofield’s GCSE. The GSCE is the General Certificate of Secondary Education. Pat Schofield is an invigilator, which is an awesome word, and is what we might call an external examiner. Or a tester. I prefer invigilator. The Invigilator. Well, never mind. Ms. Schofield was the person whose complaints about the earlier poem caused the ruckus in the first place.
I haven’t read that poem, which is called “Education for Leisure” and is (from analyses available on-line) a first-person narrative of a profoundly disturbed person who, faced with another day of unemployment and general worthlessness, and without any other way to fill up his day, begins by killing the household animals and then takes a knife to go out into the streets. The poem’s main figure shrugs at the first killing (of a fly), connecting it vaguely to King Lear (IV,i Gloucester: As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods/They kill us for their sport) which he had studied in school; one of the points of studying such a poem in school seems to be to bring up the entire concept of education, of why we study Shakespeare at all, or Ms. Duffy for that matter.
Our current poet’s current poem is also about Shakespeare and education. It consists entirely of questions, as it might be an exam. The first seven are short-answer questions, to make sure that the pupil has in fact read the plays, or at least the Cliff Notes. That seventh—To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu?—is followed by an open-ended eigth: and why? The ninth is also open ended, and a bit disturbing, but although one could apply it more widely, it could be taken as narrowly asking about the quote from a Shakespeare play and its meaning. The tenth, then, starting in the tenth line and extending to the thirteenth, the longest question in the poem, ends with a full stop rather than a question mark, and begins with a command: Explain. The line to be explained is not Shakespeare’s, though, but is the poet’s own metaphor for poetry itself. Then, without transition, we are in King Lear; the quote is given and followed by the eleventh and last exam question, to identify who said them.
It is the King who says it to Cordelia, in the very first scene, when he is giving is own and very nonstandard test to his daughters: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?/That we our largest bounty may extend/Where nature doth with merit challenge.” The first two pupils give pat answers, telling the examiner what is needed to get the certificate. The last, Cordelia, finds she cannot speak. “What can you say,”asks her father, and she says “Nothing.” He repeats the word, and she does as well, and then the invigilator king says the line that Ms. Duffy puts near the end of her poem: Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
I generally dislike exams. I was good at them; I was a Goneril rather than a Cordelia. I could tell the invigilator what was necessary for a grade. It seemed pointless, though, other than that grade, and it still seems largely so. I’ve come to accept that of the ways for teachers to determine whether the students have mastery of their subjects, it is moderately efficient in a cost-benefit sort of way; it only somewhat works, but it’s comparatively quick and easy, and the better ways are prohibitively difficult and time-consuming. The test is a tool, and a clumsy one at that, for measuring the thing that’s important, which is the mastery.
Or, perhaps, not. Perhaps the test and the reward and punishment that follow on it are the tools for getting the students to master the subject, not the tools for measuring whether they have. Perhaps when Cordelia was a child and her not-yet-old father held her to his embrace and said I love you, daughter, she should have replied, Is this going to be on the test?
We are, of course, educated for leisure all our lives. We are trained for it, poorly or well, by whatever we do and see, whatever we read and hear. On those occasions when we get leisure, we make of it what we can. That’s the test. When the children are in bed for the evening, or when you have a lunch break. We face a series of Sunday afternoon tests, one a week, for the rest of our lives. There is a pop quiz when the waiter has taken your order and you look at your spouse across the table and silence falls. And there’s the long, dark teatime of the soul, which is self-graded. And the tests prepare you for more tests, too, just like in school. You can develop techniques and study habits for your life. A truly general certificate.
I can’t get too excited about removing “Education for Leisure” from the curriculum, perhaps because I haven’t read the poem. I do get upset about removing education for leisure from the curriculum, because I do have some of that, and I think it’s important.
Oh, and you know where I said up there that “Mrs. Schofield’s GCSE consists entirely of questions”? That’s not technically true. After the eleventh question is a sentence that is, perhaps, permission, or a command, or a ritual utterance, or even a prediction. You may begin. Or, perhaps, it is a question after all.
A note by Blake Hounshell over at the Foreign Policy blog Passport praises Biden’s refreshing lack of ideology. Mr. Hounshell reflects the scare-quotes “realism” that seems to have become dominant again in sane foreign policy discussions, presumably as a result of two terms of an administration (largely backed by the Legislature) which pushed an insane, unreal foreign policy.
It does seem a bit odd to me to have that (again, scare-quoted) “realism” adopted so enthusiastically by FP, a journal that has in the past prided itself on being the place where foreign policy ideology gets argued out. Well, no, that’s Foreign Affairs, but I get the two confused, sometimes.
But what I started wondering was whether, really, you want a person in the executive who impresses analysts with his ability to surprise them by coming to different conclusions than they expect. I understand that cases are different, one to another, and someone setting or even influencing policy should be looking at actual facts, rather than at preconceived narratives. I get that when you do that, you are not always going to come to the conclusion you expect to reach, much less the one other people expect you to reach. And I understand, as well, that when we are talking about policy, it’s often better to support a policy that has some chance of working (or for that matter, of being executed) than to support a policy that meshes with your big picture of American interests and global whatnot.
On the other hand, there’s some benefit to having a well-thought-out ideology that includes a set of aims (and the priorities thereof) and a set of preferred methods (and the priorities thereof); when the actual cases arrive, you have some way to process the aforementioned facts. And if you have thought out those aims and those methods, then there’s a good chance other people will be able to predict what conclusions you will reach.
And that’s a good thing. For our own people, for the leaders of other nations, for everybody. Except foreign policy analysts.
Well, and I mean, if the policy is good. I’d rather have somebody with good judgment and little ideology than somebody with bad ideology and worse judgment. And I think Sen. Biden, taken one thing and another, has the makings of an excellent Vice-President, and (the Divine forbid) a reasonably good President. But not, perhaps, predictable enough for my tastes.
Your Humble Blogger isn’t some sort of Caucasus maven, but it does seem to me that the NPR people are doing a bad job of explaining this war between Georgia and Russia. Anyway, since the Georgians opened up a can of epic fail on the residents of their own nation, and the Russians (who seem to have had much more advance notice than the Americans) beat the crap out of them and sent them crying home to mother, there seem to me to be only a few really distinct outcomes.
The formerly Georgian regions will become part of Russia proper, allowing Russia to essentially annex them by a referendum held during Russian occupation. Not a good outcome.
The formerly Georgian regions will become nominally independent entities, with Russia providing all the infrastructure, enforcement and security. They will be satellite countries (or autonomous state-like things) totally under the control of Moscow. Not a good outcome.
The formerly Georgian regions will be some sort of demilitarized zone, with international peacekeeping forces providing structure, enforcement and security, technically within fictional Georgian borders but with no Georgian law enforcement, infrastructure or security forces. Presumably, there would be an autonomous government-like thing that will be unable to make any foreign policy decision, borrow money or manage trade over the borders. Not a good outcome.
The entire nation of Georgia will become a vassal state, with Russian forces moving unimpeded and a theoretically autonomous government that has its foreign and domestic policies dictated by Russia. Not a good outcome.
I think that’s it. There’s no plausible path back to the bad situation that they had before Georgia invaded itself, because there is no way that Georgian forces are going back into South Ossetia or Abkhazia, and there isn’t any plausible way that anybody else is going to commit enough forces to keep Russia out of those areas. It’s just possible that NATO (f’r’ex) will commit defensive forces to keep Russia out of Tblisi, but a push forward? Not so much. Oh, I should probably add the last plausible outcome, although I don’t really like to think about it:
NATO goes to war with Russia. Not a good outcome at all.
Two points come to mind immediately, or at least to YHB’s mind. First is that this was a notable and remarkable failure for Georgia. Yes, Russia is bad and should not have been, you know, arming the separatists all along, and shouldn’t have sent forces into the heart of Georgia, and shouldn’t have provided cover for Ossetians killing civilians and running amok. Yeah, yeah. Russia bad. But whether Georgia is sympathetic or not, the fact remains that they sent in troops to lay siege to a city within their own borders, were immediately repelled, left their armor on the field and are now in substantial danger of losing their independence. They have had to sign an agreement that gives the Russian not only unlimited power within South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but also the right to bring their tanks out of those regions and patrol the previously uncontested parts of their country. That’s just embarrassing.
Now, the U.S. has had a strong relationship with Georgia. Our Only President has spoken up for Georgia many times, has visited Georgia and met with President Saakashvili several times. Sen. McCain has a personal relationship with the President of Georgia, a close working relationship with Georgia’s lobbyist state, and he has visited Georgia many, many times. What the hell were they doing? I don’t mean that I blame Our Only President for Georgia’s failure. President Saakashvili is a big boy, and Georgia is (or was) an independent nation, and they get to claim responsibility for their own catastrophic failures. But if Sen. McCain is some sort of foreign policy genius, and he has a long and close relationship with the most outstanding pants-crapper of the last five years, well, how does that work exactly?
The other thing that came to mind is that for me, and I suspect for almost all of us who grew up in these United States, we forget that there are lots of places in the world that are not functionally parts of nations. They are within the internationally recognized borders, but the notional national government doesn’t send in the tax collectors, or if they do send them in, the tax collectors don’t come back. Perhaps because of our federal system, and perhaps because we really do have a strong government that isn’t on the verge of collapse, even a few houses anywhere in this country holding out against the revenooers constitutes a major news story, and is recognizable by name (Ruby Ridge, Waco) for a long time after.
Before the invasions last week, Georgia’s internationally recognized borders were largely fictional. The two regions called breakaway republics were largely outside the control of the supposedly sovereign government. That happens a lot. There are parts of Pakistan where the government doesn’t govern. Parts of India. Parts of many African countries, and a few South American ones and some Asian ones, too. For a decade or so, there was a province of Mexico that was governed by a guy in a ski mask. The Russians didn’t so much collect taxes in Chechnya for a while. And so on. China doesn’t send tax collectors into Taiwan, but the internationally recognized borders include it.
The thing is, we tend to think that the map is the territory. And the map doesn’t have blank spaces. It’s either in this country or it’s in that one. It’s either in Georgia or Russia, right? Depending on which side of that line it’s on. But the map isn’t the territory. It’s just the map.
Once in a while, a politician will say something dumb. Are you with me so far? Once in a while, the dumb thing will become news and take over the airwaves and column-inches to a really horrifying extent. We’ve got an example of it this morning, and I think it’s worth us all taking a look at it and talking about the phenomenon.
Let’s start with the dumb thing. Here’s Hillary Clinton, in response to a question about whether she should drop out of the race now, rather than waiting until the primaries are over in June:
Between my opponent and his camp, and some in the media, there has been this urgency to end this. And, you know, historically that makes no sense. So I find it a bit of a mystery. [interviewer: you don’t buy the party unity argument?] I don’t, because, again, I’ve been around long enough. My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just, I don’t understand it. There’s lots of speculation about why it is, but [interviewer: what’s your speculation?] You know, I don’t know. I find it curious.
…and just so you have a good sense of the inflection, go and watch the video and then come back. Oh, hell, let me try to embed the bastard thing.
This made the front page of the Hartford Courant, made the above-the-fold part of the New York Times on the web (and I think made the front page of the print below the fold, but I’m not sure about that), made the Guardian, and of course made all the blogs and web sites, too. Sam Boyd, over at TAPped, in a note called Oh No She Didn’t says “Hillary Clinton suggests, elliptically at the very least, that she’s staying the presidential race in case Barack Obama is assassinated.” Hunh? But yes, that’s how it seems to be playing. Katharine Q. Seelye, in the New York Times article, says that “the comments touched on one of the most sensitive aspects of the current presidential campaign—concern for Mr. Obama’s safety.”
I’ll try to be brief here with my analysis of the actual statement, since I don’t think the actual statement is terribly important. It’s obvious to me that Senator Clinton was invoking a historical argument to say that it is perfectly fine to have a nomination contested until June, because it has been so contested in the past without problems. And we remember about June, because it was June when Robert Kennedy was killed, which we remember. This is unpersuasive as an argument because (a) the calendar, news media, and cultural context is very different than it was in 1992 and even more different than it was in 1968, (2) 1968 was a disastrous year for the Party, even before the assassination, and (iii) the nomination fight in 1992 was essentially over after New Hampshire, when the Comeback Kid took second and was assumed to romp on Super Tuesday in his home South, which he did, and that took care of Paul Tsongas. You could make an argument that, independent of anything else, June is plenty of time to pick a nominee for an August convention, much less a November election, but the historical stuff is irrelevant to that. Or you could make the opposite sort of argument, from uniqueness, that there has never been an election so close, where two candidates had so many pledged delegates, and where both were still winning primaries so far into the calendar, and that for that reason we should savor it and see it through, rather than rushing to stop it. But nobody who wants the Senator to withdraw now, or who wanted her to withdraw after the Texas primary, will be convinced by a historical argument, nor should they be.
OK. Fine, it was a bad argument, and like the arguments about which states count and which methods for counting the total number of votes cast count, and most of the other arguments about how she could realio trulio be the nominee, is both unpersuasive and a trifle embarrassing. In my opinion, the stuff that implies that pale-skinned voters should be the deciding factor in our Party’s nomination is more offensive than the reference to a historical event, but evidently that’s just me. This one is the big news. Why?
I think it’s because the dominant narrative—the story of what happens, rather than what happens—has become Senator Clinton’s desperate struggle to stay afloat. In this story, she is lashing out, trying anything, no longer caring who gets hurt, grasping at the lowest-probability straws. The thing about this story is that it ends with her utter destruction. Not just her losing the nomination, mind you, but abandonment by all her political friends and allies, and the total loss of power over others and control over herself. I’m not saying that will actually happen, mind you, just that it’s the way the story goes, and that if that’s the story that we are telling ourselves nationally, that’s the story we will see. Fortunately, there is always the chance that in a couple of years we will be telling ourselves an entirely different story. A couple of months, even. We’re easy that way.
The other narrative that I think is making this whole thing click is the Camelot story. Handsome young man goes to Washington, bringing fresh energy, new hope and a generational change, and They kill him. That story, combined with the deeper but vaguer fear of racial violence, leads us to be very sensitive to the idea that Barack Obama is peculiarly vulnerable to assassination. Honestly, I think there’s something to that, in that I know there are a lot of violent racists in this country, but then I think that there are a lot of violent misogynists in this country, and Hillary Clinton has been vilified for more than fifteen years. A disturbed young fellow in his early twenties may not remember a world without people saying on the radio that Hillary Clinton was a murderess. Of course, I am astonished that there haven’t been close calls with Our Only President himself. He is mildly disliked by a lot of people, but he is actively hated by quite a few as well, some of whom have never accepted his legitimacy in office, and some of whom fear that, having disregarded many provisions of the Constitution, he will not leave office in January 2009. I am pleased that nobody, domestic or foreign, has made serious attempts to murder the man, but I am surprised. Particularly since there were two or three attempts on the life of Our Previous President, some sort of foreign conspiracy to take the life of the President Before That, the One Before That was actually shot, and in fact most of the Presidents of my lifetime have had attempts on their life, from Squeaky Fromme to the guy who tried to hijack an airplane.
Anyway, I think a lot of us have a real and only somewhat irrational fear that Barack Obama will be assassinated. And, of course, a Kennedy has been in the news recently; that’s presumably part of why Senator Clinton had it in mind and repeated the comment (which she has evidently made more than once). I think it’s not altogether shocking that our pattern-matching brains put the two together.
The problem is that I want my journalism to be smarter than that. I want my newspaper editors and yes, even my bloggers to be aware of the temptation to go along with the narratives, and to resist it as much as they can. It’ll still happen, of course, but maybe it’ll be less annoying in between times. At least for me. What do you think, Gentle Readers? Are you seeing a different set of narratives? In what context does the placement of this story on the front page make sense to you?
It's Schoolhouse Rocky, a chip off the block of your favorite Schoolhouse, Schoolhouse Rock!
With apologize to the great Dave Frishberg:
I’m just a bill Yes, I’m only a bill And if they vote for me on Capitol Hill Well, then I’m off to the White House Where I’ll wait in a line With a lot of other bills For the president to sign And if he signs me, then I’ll be a law. How I hope and pray that he will, But today I am still just a bill.
Boy: You mean even if the whole Congress says you should be a law, the president can still say no?
Bill: Yes, that’s called a veto. If the President vetoes me, I have to go back to Congress and they vote on me again, and by that time you’re so old...
Boy: Say, Bill, you look a little different now than you did back on the Hill.
Bill: I do?
Boy: Yeah, you’re a lot shorter!
Bill: Ah, shit. I told them not to stuff all that corn in me. Now my seams popped, a whole title fell out, and I don’t even pass constitutional muster.
But how I hope and I pray that I will, But today I am still just a bill.
Congressman: There was a clerical error, Bill! Now you have to go back to the Hill and start over!
Bill: Oh no!!!
Congressman: Don’t worry, Bill, we’ve got a veto-proof supermajority. Now hold still while I cram some more corn up your ass.
Boy: Look over there, somebody’s cheating at football!
Bill: Owwwwww!
Well, I suppose I should apologize to Gentle Readers, too.
So. I haven’t read any of the details about the state versus the Yearners for Zion, so I will state up front that my half-formed views are probably wrong. But I think there’s stuff in there that’s interesting about our attitudes toward the state, the courts, individuals and communities. So I’ll ramble a bit, and y’all can come back with more well-informed shit. Like we do.
The thing I find most interesting is that the state clearly thought that the cult-community-compound was far too icky a place to be allowed to bring up children. Icky, icky, icky. That’s not wrong. But the state appeared to think that ickiness absolves the state of its constitutional and statutory obligations. The court disagreed, and so do I.
Look, I’m told that the children, particularly the girls, were being brainwashed and intimidated for the purposes of sexual, economic and domestic exploitation. That’s a bad thing. If there are laws on the books about it, we need to examine their application, and if there aren’t, we need to consider some. But real carefully. Because I don’t think that the exploitation is why the state took the kids away, really. Icky, icky, icky. Strange customs, strange clothes, strange hair.
What about young hasidic women in those towns in upstate New York? Lots of people find those towns icky. Not quite icky enough for the state to intervene, at least not in New York. What about polyandrous households whose icky hair is bald-old-hippies-with-ponytails? Should they get to raise kids? Who gets to decide that?
Hard cases make bad laws, everybody knows that, and one of the reasons that’s true is that people like me say things like if there aren’t laws on the books about this, we need to consider some. It’s a balancing problem: we do need to consider laws about parents brainwashing, intimidating and exploiting children, but we also need to consider the application of those laws against the icky. I look at these situations and am baffled. What mechanisms could be sufficient to protect differences in child-raising and also protect children? How could we have laws that are broad enough to apply to everybody (and the glory of our system is that laws do apply to everybody), but that aren’t so vague as to leave the actual enforcement open to discrimination, which history tells us most often benefits the privileged and burdens the weak?
One answer, possibly the best answer, is that the courts watch the watchmen. Better than that, the legislators make the laws, the cops enforce them, and the courts judge them: each group can effectively veto the previous one’s actions. I like that. On the whole, it works, or at least it fails less spectacularly than most other structures. But the results sure are inconsistent.
That’s what I’m taking away from the story at the moment. There are injustices all over, and we should strain to catch them, slow them, reverse them, all while trying just as hard to avoid committing new ones. We’re trying to walk between the raindrops, and the thing is that it never completely works, and it gets the just and the unjust a little wet. But maybe it’s the best we’ve got.
Maybe, in other words, sending those poor saps home to their families, while awful and dangerous, is less awful and dangerous than the alternatives.
At least alongside fighting the cultural battle, the one that makes our children think that exploitation is ickier than strange hair.
So, it is once again Loyalty Day, which we’ve discussed before here. This year’s proclamation seems particularly bad, but then, he’s been busy. After all, today is also Law Day, which involves the rule of law somehow, and for which the proclamation invokes the Magna Carta, without ever mentioning the idea that all men should be held equal under the law, without regard to wealth, family or office. That’s got to be a tricky one for Our Only President and his secretive cabal of crooks and incompetents.
And then it’s also the National Day of Prayer, also known as the National Day of Spitting on James Madison’s Grave. There’s been a bit of a controversy because the National Day of Prayer Task Force are a bunch of jerks. You see, if you want to apply to be a coordinator for the NDPTF, you have to fill out an application that asks for a Statement of Belief, as follows:
I believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God. I believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, his virgin birth, his sinless life, his miracles, the atoning work of his shed blood, his resurrection and ascension, his intercession and his coming return to power and glory. I believe that those who follow Jesus are family and there should be unity among all who claim his name. I agree that these statements are true in my life. Yes/No
Here’s the thing about that: this is an independent organization of Christians who want to do their Christian thing, and that’s fine. I mean, it isn’t fine, because you know, some people think that people being different one to another makes the world interesting and fun, and some people think that people being different one to another makes the world scary and dangerous, and that second group causes a lot of trouble. But fine. Because part of what makes the world interesting and fun, you know, is that people are different one to another, and they are different from Your Humble Blogger.
And here’s the Official Policy Statement, from just above that other bit:
The National Day of Prayer Task Force was a creation of the National Prayer Committee for the expressed purpose of organizing and promoting prayer observances conforming to a Judeo-Christian system of values. People with other theological and philosophical views are, of course, free to organize and participate in activities that are consistent with their own beliefs. This diversity is what Congress intended when it designated the Day of Prayer, not that every faith and creed would be homogenized, but that all who sought to pray for this nation would be encouraged to do so in any way deemed appropriate. It is that broad invitation to the American people that led, in our case, to the creation of the Task Force and the Judeo-Christian principles on which it is based.
Now, other than my complete rejection of the term Judeo-Christian, which I think doesn’t mean very much—replace it with evangelical Christian, which I think is more honest, and I’m very nearly in agreement with it. This group is doing its thing, and other groups are doing their thing, and it’s all good; YHB thinks the whole idea of a National Day of Prayer is stupid, unconstitutional and offensive, but since we have one, the idea that different groups should observe it in different ways is a positive, not a negative.
The problem is that the Task Force (and ugh, that’s a hostile name for their group, isn’t it? I mean, let’s go and meet with the Task Force, or perhaps we’ll just wait quietly in the ditch until the Task Force passes by) does not seem to actually encourage that broad invitation. There isn’t a long list of links on their page to Muslim or Hindu or Native American organizations promoting their Day of Prayer festivities. There isn’t a joint appearance to publicize the event in its heterogenic glory. There isn’t an exchange of courtesies with other organizations. They aren’t obliged to do any of that. But they don’t, and it’s because they don’t, really, want other groups to participate. And again, that’s their thing. It just seems a little creepy. If that is the group that is most associated with the National Day of Prayer across the country, then I feel even more strongly that we should get out of that business, because endorsing the National Day of Prayer isn’t just endorsing prayer, which is bad enough, but also endorsing the Task Force, which is just awful. And predictable, which is one of the reasons having an established religion is a bad idea to begin with.
To get back to Our Only President, though, it looks to me as if he thought that Law, Liberty and Prayer were enough for one day, and utterly failed to proclaim International Workers Day, or say anything about Morris Dancing, strawberries and Maypoles. Or to proclaim, that hurray, hurray, it’s the first of May, and the Congress, by Public Law 000-000, as amended, has called on our Nation to reaffirm the role of nature in our society by recognizing that outdoor fucking begins today.
Your Humble Blogger has been intending, since the interesting chat that my mention of inflation the other day went all happy, to write more generally about money and inflation. Money, as I’ve mentioned before, is a kind of mass hallucination. A wonderful one; our civilization depends on our ability to all pretend to believe that money exists and is valuable. Not just the little pieces of paper that, as Douglas Adams pointed out, aren’t generally the ones who are unhappy, but the whole deal. When my employer directly deposits my pay into my bank account, nothing at all moves or changes hands; there is a tally that changes at my employer’s bank, and a tally that changes at my bank. But that’s enough, because everybody thinks that it’s enough. Aren’t humans amazing?
Anyway, because money does not, in any significant sense, exist, and its value is a mass hallucination, the concepts of inflation and deflation and so on are essentially psychological ones. Which is fine, and in fact a good thing. You see, the easiest way to pretend to believe that money exists and has value is to actually believe that money exists and has value, and as everybody else is also acting as if money exists and has value, that’s fairly easy to do. And if everybody acts as if money has more or less the same value, it’s even easier. But they don’t, not quite, or not really. If you’ve ever been in a poker game with six people with completely different affluence levels, you have experienced something like this. A ten-dollar buy-in for a graduate student is the whole discretionary income for the week; a ten-dollar buy-in for an insurance broker is a tip. The game doesn’t work, until and unless everybody starts treating the chips as having the same value, the mental switch flips and then little plastic discs are valuable, because we treat them as valuable.
But all that wasn’t my point. My point was this: on April 25, the Hartford Courant printed a graph titled Gas Pains: The Worst Ever (pdf), which shows thirty years of gas prices. The top line, the yellow one, is labeled price adjusted for inflation; the bottom line, the red one, is labeled actual price. Actual price? In what sense? The occasion for the graph is that the inflation-adjusted price of gasoline at the pump has just surpassed the inflation-adjusted price in 1981, after being quite low for fifteen years or so. If the red line is the actual price, then who cares?
But it isn’t. You could label that red line the nominal price, or the unadjusted price, or some other phrase that indicates what you are talking about. Because there is no sense in which that red line indicates anything actual.
This morning an article in the Guardian about Martin Baum’s new modern-Shakespeare parody To Be or Not to Be, Innit, which looks absolutely dreadful (but then, I don’t speak chav), reminded me of The Skinhead Hamlet, so I looked it up on-line and found the full-text, as you can do, and was reminded of how brilliant it is:
ACT II SCENE I
A corridor in the castle.
Enter HAMLET reading. Enter POLONIUS.
POLONIUS: Oi! You!
HAMLET: Fuck off, grandad!
(Exit POLONIUS. Enter ROSENCRANZ and GUILDENSTERN.)
ROS & GUILD: Oi! Oi! Mucca!
HAMLET: Fuck off, the pair of you!
…and so on.
And it occurs to me that I had no idea who wrote the thing. It was in the Faber Book of Parodies, which I had picked up at a library, when I was competing in huminterp in high school and looking for material, but for some reason, my coach didn’t think it was a good choice. I haven’t seen a copy of the Faber Book of Parodies for years; I looked for it recently, wondering if I would appreciate a larger percentage of the book, now that I am more widely read.
Anyway, the places I found the full text on-line didn’t have the author, but Wikipedia lets me know that it was none other than Richard Curtis, of Blackadder, Vicar of Dibley and Four Weddings and a Funeral fame. That’s the problem with the internet, you learn something new every day.
George F. Will, in What The Fed's Job Isn't, suggests “Congress could pass a law saying: No company benefiting from a substantial federal subvention (which would now include Morgan) may pay any executive more than the highest pay of a federal civil servant ($124,010). That would dampen Wall Street's enthusiasm for measures that socialize losses while keeping profits private.” I suspect he thinks that's a joke.
More seriously, he says that the Fed's job is purely and simply to keep inflation down. I am afraid that it might be true.
I've been saying, for a week or so now, that I think we're in for an extended period of high inflation. If I'm right, and there's no reason to think I am, the value of the dollar (domestically) would be down by about third in five or eight years. In the short term, the race between a gallon of gas and a gallon of milk will tilt to the milk side for a while. That sort of thing.
As long as wages keep up with that inflation, it doesn't seem so bad to me. Mr. Will is terrified that that a “ surge of inflation might mean the end of the world as we have known it.” That might be true. The world as we have known it always ends. But one of the structural problems in America is that we have a substantial amount of dollar debt: families do, businesses do, states do, the nation does. Deflating the value of that debt would be a Good Thing, if we could get away with it. Yes, it would hurt in a variety of ways, and I'm concerned that the tax crazies would go bugnuts about raising taxes 7% annually, even if the value of the taxes remained essentially constant. If we couldn't raise taxes, particularly local taxes, to cover the inflation, we could be in deep shit. But aren't we in deep shit now?
Of course, by the end of my imagined inflationary period we will be dealing with the effects of the climate change, which I don't even pretend to predict (Asian Bird Flu saves North American Economy! Cubs win!), so there's little point in worrying about the debt issue. But then, I've never really worried about the debt issue, much.
Except that our nation seems to be fundamentally neurotic about inflation, as if what this country really needed was a good five-cent cigar. If wage inflation keeps pace with price inflation, the losers are the people with capital. Now, I've got nothing against capital—I've often wished I had some myself—but I've got to think that if, as Mr. Will reports, the middle-class (vaddevah dat means) debt-to-income ratio is now 141 percent, then who's voting for capital?
I suspect that not every Gentle Reader is reading the fishkettle het’troph, which is OK, because, you know, not for everyone. Not for YHB, even. I mean—you know the idea of the Apollonian/Dionysian divide? And how this Tohu Bohu, for all its tohu-bohitude, is on this side? And way, over there, way on the other side, that tiny far-off speck of a spot of a thing… well, that’s a guy who claims that he once met a mighty wanderer who claimed that he once saw the fishkettle het’troph from the top of a mountain, after many years travel, and fasting, and then eating some fruit that had kinda half-fermented.
But I was reading it anyway, the way I do, through these rather attractive 3-D field glasses, and a voice! spoke! and said CO2 in the air should be stabilized at 350 ppm and it’s perilous to exceed 450 ppm in the interim. And I thought to myself, you know, buddy (I call myself buddy, ’cos I’ve known myself since I was in school), that’s the sort of thing that I would expect to read over here on the A-side. Why doesn’t that line, just that one line, get repeated over here. Over and over again. Everywhere over here.
It’d be like rickrolling, only (a) funnier, and (2) a binder full of trousers.
How’s that, batacuda?
Oh, and a bumper sticker idea: CO2≤350ppm: it’s just just a good idea, it’s the law of the jungle.
Because, you know, it’s a good idea to slash, but that’s a fucking number, right?
Gentle Readers who listen to really good NPR stations will find Charlotte Green’s voice familiar, although they might not have heard it quite like this.
This is the sort of news that gets into me all slantwise. I come away from it not thinking How unprofessional Charlotte Green was at that moment but hunh, I’d expect that sort of thing to happen all the time, imagine how professional you’d have to be for how long for this to be news.
Similarly, the news from the New England Genealogical Society about how all the Presidential Candidates are distantly related to famous people reminded me how great it is that for all the political dynasties, political participation at the top level really isn’t restricted to the Forty Families. John McCain has only one great-great-great-great-grandparent in common with Laura Bush, and none with Our Only President, and that doesn’t disqualify him from office. Even the incredibly well-connected and dynastic Hillary Clinton shares no great-great-grandparents with recent presidents, nor great-great-great-great-grandparents, either. She does have one great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent in common with Camilla Parker-Bowles. Barack Obama is more closely connected with our countries powerful, being connected to nearly everybody through one or another great-great-great-great-great-great—look, isn’t it obvious that there’s no Debrett’s here?
Support for support (for supporting the supporters)
So. Here in the Nutmeg state, we have Civil Unions for those couples who are just too fabulous to allow to marry. YHB wrote about this a while ago, in reference to State Rep. Bye's moving speech in the Connecticut House. Rep. Bye talked about the difference between being married and being in a civil union, based on her own experience with both.
Now, according to the Hartford Courant's story Same-Sex Couple Blocked By H & R, by Mark Pazniokas, it seems that a couple in Guilford attempted to use H&R Block's on-line tax filing service and got the message We don't support Connecticut Civil Union returns.
Support, you know, in the computer sense. Not politically.
I've talked about what I perceive as two kinds of bigotry, what I might describe as the vicious kind and the negligent kind. I think this is a nice illustration of how the negligent kind does actual damage, and why it's not enough to stop at driving the vicious kind out of the public sphere. Clearly, somebody brought up to H&R Block the problem of Connecticut civil unions, who can file jointly on the state level but must file separately with the IRS (and must in addition file another federal form dealing with the discrepancy). Someone high up in the business presumably said something like How much is it going to cost to accommodate that? Really? Ah, screw it. They can come into an office if they want to. This decision was handed down to a programmer with a tin ear (or possibly a nasty sense of humor), who came up with the error message. And nobody thought about it any more.
Except, you know, the gay people. Who don't count.
I suppose every blogger has to, upon learning of the demise of Gary Gygax, post a reminiscence of happy days spent rolling 2d8. I have no such.
Oh, I played a couple of games, but I never enjoyed them, much. I liked the role playing aspect, but I didn’t like the mechanics, and the mechanics were what Gary Gygax (and Dave Arneson) actually contributed.
I wonder, sometimes, to what extent Dungeons & Dragons just happened to hit a moment, or rather a succession of moments, appropriate for the game first becoming a nerd commonality, then a mainstream byword for nerdocity, then a part of mainstream culture. Or to what extent the mechanism, the imposed structure and the vocabulary that they codified were in themselves responsible for creating those moments. There were always other role-playing games; none of them became the name for that type of play. Why D&D?
There were so many dice. They were cheap, but then you had to keep them in a little velvety sack with a drawstring so you wouldn’t suddenly discover you were missing a four-sided die and be unable to do some sort of thing. There were so many books, and they were big, and fairly expensive. It’s true you didn’t have to buy them, but it wasn’t actually easy to run a game without them (I’m told). And the game play, with charts and turns and figuring out who went when, and mapping as you went, or not mapping and having to deal with not having a map, and keeping track of so much crap, all on pieces of paper. Role playing doesn’t require any of that. D&D does. But role playing games, although they did have some currency, particularly those host-a-murder evenings that I quite liked, didn’t become a huge deal, and D&D did.
Now, there are computers, and it’s all much easier and nicer, and the people who liked the combat can find games that feature the combat, and the people who liked the story-telling can find games that feature the story-telling, and the people who liked mapping can find games that feature the mapping, and the computer keeps track of it all. Not that people can’t enjoy the dice and paper, but for people who couldn’t enjoy the game because of the dice and paper, there are options.
I suspect that there will be a lot of stuff written this week that gives Mr. Gygax credit for people pretending that they kill dragons. That’s just silly. My Perfect Non-Reader pretends she kills dragons (or that she is a dragon, or that she’s a half-dragon half-knight with a magic hat) because dragon slaying is an important part of our cultural heritage. D&D exploited that, it didn’t invent it. On the other hand, people playing games with complex rules and nearly infinite options, pretending to kill dragons, that’s the D&D thing, and there’s a lot of it about.
I am fond of Garry Wills. I don’t always agree with him (heck, I don’t always agree with me) but I think his writing is generally informative, insightful and entertaining. So I found his op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times not just frustrating but infuriating.
Mr. Wills writes that Two Presidents Are Worse Than One, essentially saying that it would be a disaster to have a co-president, and that should Senator Clinton win the White House, Our Previous President, as the spouse of the President would be in effect a Co-President, unelected, unimpeachable and uncontrollable. I do understand that this is a new situation, but it isn’t that new. Mr. Wills gives the bad example of Our Only President and his vice-president; giving the vice-president so much power he sees as detrimental to our constitutional government.
It seems odd, in that context, not to bring up the fact that Our Only President does have someone in his immediate family who held the office. You know, his father. Why is it OK to have an elected President whose father is an ex-president, and would therefore (potentially) act as a sort of unelected, unimpeachable and uncontrollable co-president? Surely a father has as much influence as a wife? Or a husband?
I’m trying to see this column as anything other than pathetically chauvinist. I’m not succeeding. I think he sees Senator Clinton as particularly susceptible to influence; nothing about her other than gender stereotypes seems to bear this out. I think he sees a husband as particularly influential; much more so than a father, or a mentor, or a close friend. I think that, also, is more evidenced by stereotype than fact. The idea that we would have a co-Presidency seems odd to me, too, although of course there’s no question that Bill Clinton has the potential of being as influential and attention-getting as, say, Karl Rove or Eleanor Roosevelt. And of course it is in some sense regrettable that Senator Clinton, her candidacy and her (putative) presidency may be overshadowed by one of the towering political figures of our generation. And it is in another sense regrettable that the former President is caught up in electoral politics again. On the other hand, it was regrettable that Our Only President rode his family into political office, and that his father rode his family into political office; once in office, though, they were their own men (not to say women), for whatever that was worth.
Had his start been fifteen minutes longer, he would not have required a presidential pardon
In one of those too-good-to-be-true stories about Our Only President that Jacob Weisberg seems to come up with, it seems that OOP likes to direct people's attention to a painting by W.H.D. Koerner called A Charge to Keep. He brought the painting with him from Texas and hung it in the Oval Office; he tells people about its inspiring story and its connection to the Methodist hymn of that name. His campaign autobiography is also called A Charge to Keep. It’s an awful painting, but that’s not the gotcha here.
The gotcha is that Mr. Koerner originally painted the thing as an illustration of a horse thief, and it originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post accompanying “The Slipper Tongue” with the caption Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.
As was fairly common, the image was used again to illustrate a different story. This time, the caption read Bandits Move About From Town to Town, Pillaging Whatever They Can Find.
Third time is the charm, and evidently the third time the image illustrated a story, it picked up the title A Charge to Keep.
Now, to be fair: It is not a sign of stupidity or ignorance or incompetence to believe the title and background story of a painting when that title and background story are, in fact, accurate if not the original title or background story. Nor is it appalling for a person to invest a work of art with meaning unconnected to the intention of its originator, or to draw inspiration from that new meaning.
You know what’s appalling? Moving about from town to town, pillaging whatever they can find.
So, Your Humble Blogger was listening to John Edwards on NPR, and James Hattori asked flat out whether he was the most electable candidate. Then, after he said he was, he was essentially asked if electable was a code meaning white man. The Senator remained unperturbed, and stated (reasonably well) that he felt that his life and his history were what made him the most electable: small town, rural, son and grandson of mill workers, elected by a red state, etc, etc. And it bugged me, and I kept thinking (in the spirit of the stairs) what he might have said, and might say the next umpty-’leven times he is asked the same thing. I came up with this:
First of all, let’s take care of that right now. A few years ago, people were saying that there was no way, no way on Gd’s green earth that a black man could be elected president. And now, well, if Barack Obama is the candidate, I do think it’s possible that he will win in November. And if he did win, I think he would make a fine President. And a few years ago, people were saying that there was no way, no way at all, that a woman could be elected president—heck, it’s not that long since people were saying that a woman couldn’t do the job! And if Hilary Clinton is the candidate, I do think that it’s possible for her to win in November. And if she did win, I think she would make a fine president. So let’s let that be the end of that, nobody should say anymore that there’s anybody who can’t become president because they’re the wrong color or the wrong gender or the wrong religion. Not in America. Not anymore.
Now, that’s all true. But it’s also true that you asked who was the most electable. The most. And there’s only one most. And I think it’s me. The polls will tell you it’s me. But don’t look at the polls. My history will tell you it’s me. My life will tell you it’s me. And most important, the people will tell you it’s me. You walk around Iowa, you walk around New Hampshire, and you ask them who is the best Democrat to fight the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies who are holding our health care system hostage, who’s the best to fight for a fair and honest tax system that doesn’t penalize the middle class to benefit the wealthy, who’s the best to fight for our future and the future of working men and women, so that we can give our children a better life, just like our parents did for us—you ask them and they will tell you John Edwards is the best fighter we’ve got.
That’s why I’m going to win in November. That’s why I’m the best candidate.
It’s not a great answer, but it (I think) acknowledges that there are issues there, insinuates (I think correctly) that although either Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton could win, that he will have a bit of an easier time than they will, and turns the question back to his rhetorical strength. It also should gently wrongfoot the reporter for bringing the issue up in the first place, although of course the candidate may not want to do that at all. And I know that Mr. Edwards does not (this cycle) like to say that the other candidates are fine candidates, but I think he’s now at the point where he can reach back to the positive vibes he had last time around.
The thing that I dislike about my answer is that it repeats the word electable, which I think is a word John Kerry’s running mate should try to avoid. But I wanted to point out that he was asked the question directly—maybe he should just say You asked me who is the best candidate, and there’s only one best, completely (misleadingly?) paraphrasing the question. I don’t know. I do know that if I were John Edwards, I would not want people to be talking about my electability, but I would want people talking about what a good candidate I am. There may not be a difference in meaning, but there’s a huge one in connotation.
Your Humble Blogger does not wear T-Shirts, but I would totally buy a T-Shirt with the slogan Blackwater Shot Our Dog. I know plenty of people who would wear it. Although, you know, my is funnier. Or include the source: New York Times: Blackwater Shot Our Dog in the headline font they use. Maybe on the back, it could say w00f.
Anyway, Your Humble Blogger is unlikely to write anything very long and clever in the next, oh, let’s just say through the end of the year. I’m sick, and I’m tired, and I’m distracted, and I’m traveling, and I’m cranky. So. Expect a barrage of Short Takes, and feel free to use the comments to talk about whatever is interesting these days to people who are interested in things. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, just don’t shoot the dog.
secondhand quote, on Second Avenue, secondhand quote
I haven’t read The Economist’s new survey of religion in public life, but Joshua Keating over at FP Passport in a preview (The Economist admits that God is not dead) quotes them as saying:
Islam has always left less room for the secular. Unlike Jesus, Muhammad was a ruler, warrior and lawmaker. Islam, which means submission, teaches that the primary unit of society is the umma, the brotherhood of believers, and it provides a system of laws, sharia, for people to live by.
Now, I know that there are both geopolitical and marketing reasons to compare the two religions, but my immediate thought was that Moses was a ruler, warrior and lawmaker. As was Saul, to some extent, and David. And there are Christian saints who are rulers, warriors and lawmakers, and they are venerated more or less on the same level as Moses, Saul and David. I don’t know enough about Islam to speak definitively, but my impression is that Muhammad within Islam is about on a par with Moses within Judaism, that is, holy, righteous, important, and not part of the Divine, at least not in the sense that Jesus is part of the Trinity.
Furthermore, Judaism teaches that the primary unit of society is the people Israel, and it provides a system of laws, mitzvot, for people to live by. I think you could argue that Christianity teaches that the primary unit of society is Christendom, and that it provides a system of laws to live by; I’m guessing that there are plenty of church fathers to quote on those issues.
I’m not saying that there are no differences between the three religions (or any others). I’m saying that the quote that Mr. Keating pulled is such an egregious simplification that it is entirely useless. And I hate that.
OK, and Your Humble Blogger has not recently indulged himself in giving worthless advice to future presidents, but here is a nice bit to be distilled, kept in a bottle, and opened when the time is right.
First of all, keep in mind that your party may lose the Senate at the midterm. That’s assuming you have the Senate for the first two years, in which case make use of it to get things passed. But assume that for the second half of your (first) term, the opposition party will be in control of oversight and subpoenas and hearings and all the mechanisms of troublemaking. Also, assume that the opposition party will be controlled by crazy, vicious, partisan bastards facing primary challenges from even crazier, more vicious, more partisan bastards, and that screwing you over is the best thing they can do for their careers. It might not happen, but you plan for contingencies.
OK, now assume that your attorney general will have to resign, while the opposition party is in control of the Senate. You don’t have to assume that he will be forced out in disgrace. He could be hit by a bus. He could be shot by a crazy person. He could be directly assumed to heaven by a golden chariot. You’d still have to get a new one confirmed.
Now, the advice. When you are deciding on policies, if at any point you are considering embarking on a policy that—let’s call it policy A—a policy that will, if the Senate finds out about it, come up in a hearing with confirmation hinging on the question Is policy A legal?, then reject that policy. If the nominee is put in a position where he has to either state that policy A is legal and be rejected, or state that it is illegal and expose you and your staff to prosecution, then you have made a serious error. If any newspaper prints that “Fear of opening the door to criminal or civil liability for [policy A], whether in an American court or in courts overseas, appeared to loom large” in the confirmation process, then you have made a serious error.
This is independent of Policy A being a bad and useless policy, which Our Only President’s policies are. This is also independent of the actual legality or illegality of the matter. Your Humble Blogger was struck by the Schroedinger’s Cat sense in the New York Times that waterboarding is neither legal nor illegal yet, that the President was not liable, nor was he free from liability, whilst the nominee dithers. And, of course, that is how the legal system works; actions are legal or illegal when they have been found by a court to be in violation of a law, and before then they are not anything. Which does let anybody off the hook. No, the point is that having your buddy tell you that Policy A really is legal, if you look at it right does not mean that it’s legal. And the real point is that when you become President of the United States of America, you should hold yourself to a standard of can those bastards nail me for this, because they will.
You know, if the broadcast media, particularly the news services, were genuinely economic liberals, some debate moderator or Sunday show panelist would start saying things like this:
What does fiscal responsibility mean? I keep hearing you say it, and the other candidates, it comes up a lot, but I don’t actually know what it means. Do you just mean debt reduction, and avoiding deficit spending? Is there somebody else the government is fiscally responsible for, or responsible to? Does having a weak dollar have something to do with fiscal responsibility? Does unemployment? There are an incredible number of foreclosures and bankruptcies; is it fiscally responsible to help those people, or to help the creditors, or neither? I’m asking, Senator (Mayor, Congressman, Governor, Mr. President), because I really have no idea what you or anybody else means by fiscal responsibility, and I’m hoping you can tell me.
And whoever that would be, Bizarro Mr. Russert, or Bizarro Mr. Lehrer, or Bizarro Ms. Clift, or Bizarro Ms. Roberts, would ask it again and again, until we either knew what people meant when they said it, or they stopped giving fiscal responsibility as an excuse to pass only the stuff they wanted to pass.
I’m not, by the way, completely against the idea that we should keep deficit spending down, particularly in good economic times, and I certainly think we should have some long-term economic plans (or, rather, long-sighted economic thinking, since plans are not useful long-term unless they have enough flexibility in them to no longer be plans), and I think the government should be responsible, fiscally and morally and bureaucratically and ethically and pragmatically and rhetorically. But it’s become far too easy to say that a candidate, a policy or a program is or is not fiscally responsible, without that phrase meaning anything at all. Education bonds, for instance, are fiscally responsible because of the long-term benefits that outweigh the costs. Or they aren’t, because bonds mean debt, and debt isn’t responsible.
Oh, there are plenty of words and phrases like that (security, diplomacy, leadership, terrorism, sacrifice, special interest, reform), but even in my fantasy world with socialist news anchors, there are limits.
and I mees you most of all, mah darleeng, when ...
Your Humble Blogger has been writing a lot more hatchet jobs than puff pieces lately, huh? Well, I was actually thinking about writing a hatchet job about my local NPR station, because I’m not satisfied with their weekday Yes, All Things Considered, and yes, Morning Edition, but the two local shows are very weak and I don’t like Talk of the Nation anymore. So I was thinking about grousing for a note, when the station caused me to Learn Something Interesting, which is kinda cool, ain’t it?
This comes from putting together two things, one of which was a news item by Nancy Cohen called New study links fall colors with soil nutrients, which makes the point that trees in crappy soil need to drain all that last drop of sweet, sweet chlorophyll from their leaves before shutting down for the winter, which makes (through chemical processes I fundamentally don’t understand) the leaves redder, yellower, oranger, brighter, vibranter than the crappy autumn leaves you get in places with good soil.
Now, I put that together with some stuff I heard in an episode of Where We Live, Connecticut's changing forests, with John Dankosky's guests Don Smith and Les Mehrhoff. One of the ways that Connecticut’s forests have changed is that, well, three hundred years ago, the whole state was forested, because hardly anybody lived here, and the people who lived here weren’t farmers. As more people moved here and farmed, more of the land was cleared. Eventually, most of the state was farmland, with (comparatively) hardly any trees.
The problem is that Connecticut’s soil is crappy. Oh, how crappy it is. Seriously. I know, I grew up in the desert, and couldn’t tell arable land from a hole in the ground, except for the hole, obviously, but even I can tell that the clay, sand and rock in the soil around here makes for crap farmland. And, in fact, the moment the dark satanic mills started employing people, the farms were abandoned and went to forest. Now, the state is mostly forest again, although with different trees.
As I understand it, the trees around the state now are mostly trees that are good at getting that last drop of sweet, sweet chlorophyll from their leaves before shutting down for the winder, trees that won the fight for scarce resources, trees that look really, really great in October.
Now, follow the economics. First, we cut down the pine trees, make houses and furniture out of the wood, and live off the (crap) farmland. Then we abandon the farmland, and live off the mills, while we let the maples take over what used to be farmland. Then, we close the mills and open B&Bs and antique shops and live off the tourists who want to see the maples turn colors. It’s all connected. Now, if it turns out that abandoned mills become the best places to make matter transport devices or that old maples are the secret to living with climate change, we’ll be getting somewhere.
So, Your Humble Blogger does not usually make the mistake of taking Ted Rall seriously. In fact, I don’t usually make the mistake of taking Ted Rall at all. My local newspaper doesn’t print his stuff, and I certainly am not going around seeking it out.
Today, however, for some reason I cannot explain, the Hartford Courant chose to publish the cartoon for October 25th, along with a paragraph from his blog, which reads as follows:
Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut unwittingly exposed the Democrats' Big Lie on Iraq: that they need support from Republicans to stop the war. In fact, any senator can place a "hold" on any piece of legislation. They can even do it anonymously if they're afraid of the political ramifications of their action! So, the next time you hear on TV that the Democrats "need" 60 votes in the Senate to override Bush's threatened veto, don't believe it. And write to the network to demand an immediate correction.
In the Hartford Courant, the 60 was changed to 67, as of course in our actual political system, it requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate (and the House) to override a veto. They did not, however, correct the idea that there is no difference between passing a law and not passing a law.
Passing a law requires a majority, and due to the somewhat strange state of the norms currently in place in the Senate, really requires a supermajority of 60 in the Senate. If the President vetoes a bill, it goes back and requires two-thirds. One Senator cannot pass a law.
Not passing a law in theory requires a majority as well. However, due to the aforementioned norms, a large minority of 40 in the Senate can block a law. A minority of 34 can block a law if they work with the President. There is also the previously little-known Senatorial “hold” where one Senator can, essentially, ask the Senate Leadership to keep a bill from coming to a vote.
There are actually lots of ways a well-placed minority of Senators can keep a bill from getting to a vote. The previous Senate Leadership of Republicans made no bones about the fact that a bill would only get to the floor if it had a majority of Republicans supporting it; a bill supported by all the Democrats and a handful of Republicans was dead. Outside the leadership of the full Senate, a committee member can manage the schedule to keep a bill out of commission, and a majority of the members of the committee can kill a bill even if the bill has the support of a majority of the full Senate. There are always consequences, though; a Senator can be reassigned or removed from committee chairmanship if he is intractable, and a Majority Leader who prevents popular legislation from being passed runs a risk of not being the leader anymore, and his party not being in the Majority.
Now, as to the hold. I am not an expert on this, but I have read about it, and my understanding is that it’s what we at this Tohu Bohu call a reciprocal norm. And as with these norms, they work only if they within a particular context. Let’s say, for instance, that your brother-in-law asks you to help him out with a household task of some kind, say, painting the garage. You may well feel obliged to help; I would. And then, if I need a hand with, say, schlepping that old sofa to the dump, I might ask him for help. It’s reciprocal. Now, if my brother-in-law asks me to burn down the house across the street, I won’t do that. Nor would he ask me, not only because he knows I won’t do it, but because he knows that asking me would pretty much end our relationship, and I wouldn’t help him paint the garage next time.
Senators do not block major bills. One Senator cannot block one of the thirteen appropriations bills. If he tries, his leadership will tell him to get stuffed. Which is, essentially, what happened with Sen. Dodd and FISA. He put a block on it, and Harry Reid took it off again. Now, by doing that, Sen. Dodd drew attention to the bill (and to himself), and then by threatening to filibuster, he drew more attention to it, and even got some support from other Senators, and he’s managed to slow down the whole process to the point where he might just manage to kill the thing after all. The point that Sen. Dodd has embarrassed Sen. Reid (and Speaker Pelosi) by highlighting that they could be doing much more to oppose Our Only President would be valid; the point that “a single Senator can stop any bill” is not. And as for writing to the network to demand correction, well, that’s just embarrassing, isn’t it?
Your Humble Blogger discovers (via an AP story) an article by Richard Lazarus called Advocacy Matters Before and Within the Supreme Court: Transforming the Court By Transforming the Bar. The article is a hundred pages long, as is often the case with Law Review articles, and I certainly haven’t even skimmed very much of it. But the point is (as you would imagine) in the abstract, and even in the first sentence of the abstract: During the past two decades, the Supreme Court has witnessed the emergence of an elite private sector group of attorneys who are dominating advocacy before the Court to an extent not witnessed since the early nineteenth century.
Essentially, for much of the twentieth century, it appears to have been common for a case that reached to Supreme Court to be argued by the attorneys who had argued it at the previous level. Now, though, it is far more common for the people handling such a case to hire attorneys who are sort of Supreme Court specialists. And they are good at what they do: “The Court grants the petitions filed by the expert members of the Bar at a significantly higher rate and they also prevail on the merits more frequently.” Which means you would be silly not to hire one of them. Pretty much no matter what it costs.
And, to no-ones particular surprise, this is a group of white men. Many of them have been in the Solicitor General’s office, where they acquired the expertise. Although of course they are in theory available to any group with the money to hire them, they generally work for corporate clients. That’s how it goes.
Reading about this, Your Humble Blogger couldn’t help thinking about a recent(ish) conversation about lobbyists. If you recall, I don’t mind the existence of lobbyists, and generally feel that they do a valuable service. But, over more or
