Henry Fonda, Bill Cosby and Elsa Lanchester Walk Into a Bar

Well, OK, they walk into an elevator.
Pedants.

Making Shapeless Prose

Once again giving writing by rote a bad name, Our Mr. Brooks pens a quick primer on one method of making a living by writing badly:

1. Settle on a meaningless word or phrase on which you will hang your entire thesis.

I’m borrowing the phrase “other-directed” from David Riesman’s 1950 classic, “The Lonely Crowd.”

2. Mention in passing that you really have no idea what you are talking about.

"I don’t actually know what sort of person Romney is. He’s a reticent man. He’s unwilling to talk about his roots, home and family history, so it is hard to understand what’s really going on in his head."

3. Unspool a list of declaratives detailing how he-who-you-really-have-no-idea-about can become he-who-you-wish-he-would-be if only he would quickly undergo a series of massive personality inversions and reversals:

If Romney is to thrive, he really needs to go on an integrity tour.


He needs to show...


He needs to trust...


He needs to tell his own...


He needs to tell us...


He needs to stop...


He needs to show that he is willing...


He needs to step outside...


He needs to find a policy...

And if invisible unicorns would just stop being so other-directed and learn to poop solid gold then they would be completely awesome.

Actually Williard Romney would be the perfect candidate for the GOP to select from a "creative destruction" point of view.

The GOP is an old company with a ruined brand run by lunatics, bigots, idiot nephews and a handful of oligarchs who are only interested in squeezing the last. few pfennigs out of the carcass of the Land of the Free before they fire-sale the whole thing and locust-swarm on to the next mega-grift.  And Romney has the skill set that every successful "loot and scoot" artist possesses: the ability to suppress his gag reflex so profoundly that he can wade through a chin-deep lake of flaming poo wearing a titanium smile while telling the gibbering, bug-eyed offal dwellers w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r they want to hear.

Whatever it takes to close the deal.

Because, in the end, the leaders of the GOP -- just like the delusional leaders of so many other ruined companies -- have no use for people who tell them the truth.  In fact, they actively shun and hate people who tell them the truth.

Like any other bunch of 3rd generation inbred senior executives, they want someone who will flatter them; who will tell them great, big, heroic lies about their genius and bravery and patriotism and the more gigantic you make your whoppers the better.  They don't want some dick lecturing them about the horrid decisions they have made -- horrid decisions that landed the in this spot in the first place.  No, they want Pecos Bill-sized tall tales about what studs they are: how powerful and canny they are and how everyone on Earth secretly envies them.

The Right has shown that people with little or no talent beyond being pathological liars can accumulated enormous wealth and influence peddling transparently ludicrousness fair tales to imbeciles.

In that environment, there is no reason why an accomplished vulture capitalist like Romney should not, in the end, be wildly successful.

An O-Bot

Since before O-Botting was cool.

Or nefarious.

Or whatever term the Supreme Bloviet is hanging around our necks this week.

Yes, this is a for-real "Thank You" note sent to me by then-State Senator Barack Obama me for my support in his ultimately-failed Democratic primary challenge for Illinois' 1st Congressional district. I'm pretty sure I have a "Rock with Barack" stub for the "Young Voter's Reception" thing I also dropped a little coin to attend.

The world as it was then, courtesy of the Chicago Reader, March 7, 2000:

...
Obama's detractors rap him because he didn't grow up on the south side. He points out that he's spent most of his adult life there, his wife is from South Shore, and he's raising his daughter as a south-sider. His enemies also say he's too white and too bright. Part of it--although they won't say it publicly--is that he grew up with a white mother. Part of it is his demeanor. His lanky, Lincoln-esque body is usually stiff and upright, and he speaks in a stentorian baritone that sounds like a TV newscaster's (Lester Holt's, to be specific). But the main reason is that he's associated himself with Harvard and the University of Chicago, two strongholds of white power.

"Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community," says Donne Trotter, who detests Obama. "You just have to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It's these individuals in Hyde Park, who don't always have the best interests of the community in mind."

Lu Palmer, a radio talk show host and chairman of the Black Independent Political Organization, dismisses Obama as arrogant and compares him to Mel Reynolds, who went from a Rhodes Scholarship to Congress to prison.

"When Obama first hit town, my recollection is that he came here running some voter registration drive," Palmer said. "He came to our office and tried to get us involved, and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn't like his arrogance, his air." Palmer had another run-in with Obama in 1996, when he tried to dissuade the young politician from running to replace state senator Alice Palmer (not a relation). Palmer was resigning to seek Reynolds's old congressional seat, which was won by Jesse Jackson Jr. "I said, 'Man, you sound like Mel Reynolds,'" Palmer said. "There are similarities. If you get hung into these elite institutions, and if you so impress white folks at these elite institutions, and if they name you head of these elite institutions, the Harvard Law Review, that makes one suspect."

Obama says that when "Congressman Rush and his allies" rip him for going to Harvard and teaching at the U. of C., they're sending a signal to black kids that "if you're well educated, somehow you're not keeping it real." He refuses to be ashamed of his education. In January he held a fund-raiser for black educators at Honeysuckle's, a nightclub on 87th Street. It attracted people who don't believe the Ivy League is poison. "I'm glad he went to Harvard," said Lula Ford, who used to be principal of Beethoven Elementary School in the Robert Taylor Homes. "I want all children to go to Harvard, especially from the south side of Chicago."
...

A lot has changed since then.

For one thing, I no long have the scratch to write checks to candidates like this -- ironic that I was never without more work that I could handle during the Bush Administration, but that since being laid off ten days after Barack Obama was sworn in I have not had steady employment, or any gig that paid more than 1/10th of what I was making back during the Dark Days of Dubya.

For another, this...

Professional Left Podcast #114

“All your vaginae are belong to us."

-- Pope Santorum I

Links:

• The Final Edition (Satire): "Roger Ailes: 'Fuck It, I'll Just Be President Myself'"


• Obama-Bush and the Auto Industry Bailout of 2008


• Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Da' money goes here:

There Once was a Man Named Bush

No, for real.

There really was.

Of course, if you stick to the major wingnut/CPAC media outlets, you know that details of his life and times are mostly lost to history but he appears to have been a "Republican" who -- despite of what this obviously Librul Media-doctored footage from the 2008 CPAC Conventions purports to show --

held some sort of public office in spite of the the remarkable fact that not a single one of his fellow Republicans ever voted for him or supported him in any way.

Weird, huh?

Well this Bush guy

has climbed back out of the wingnut memory hole just long enough to violate the Three Cardinal Rules of being a good, Limbaugh Conservative.

Violation #1:  Failure to vehemently deny the existence of George W. Bush.

From the Detroit News:

Las Vegas — Former President George W. Bush defended...

Noooooo!

Violation #2:  Failure to vehemently deny that it was George W. Bush who initiated the bailout of the American automobile industry.

Bush on auto bailouts: 'I'd do it again' 

BY DAVID SHEPARDSON DETROIT NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU Las Vegas— 

Former President George W. Bush defended his decision to bail out General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC at the end of his administration.

"I'd do it again," Bush told thousands of the nation's auto dealers, explaining approving a $700 billion bailout fund used to rescue banks, insurers and automakers. "I didn't want there to be 21 percent unemployment."

Bush said he believes in the free market and under normal conditions, automakers and other businesses should have been allowed to fail.

"If you make a bad decision, you ought to pay," Bush said. "Sometimes, circumstances get in the way of philosophy."

In late December 2008, after Congress refused to act, Bush agreed to a $17.4 billion bailout for GM and Chrysler using his broad authority under the $700 billion fund established to help the failing banks, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
...

And Violation #3?

Failure to jam a reference to Saul Aulinsky

into every fucking sentence.

Douglass on Lincoln -- UPDATE*

From Frederick Douglass' "Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln" delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of The Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1876.

...
I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.


Though Mr. Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery. The man who could say, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," gives all needed proof of his feeling on the subject of slavery. He was willing, while the South was loyal, that it should have its pound of flesh, because he thought that it was so nominated in the bond; but farther than this no earthly power could make him go.


Fellow-citizens, whatever else in this world may be partial, unjust, and uncertain, time, time! is impartial, just, and certain in its action. In the realm of mind, as well as in the realm of matter, it is a great worker, and often works wonders. The honest and comprehensive statesman, clearly discerning the needs of his country, and earnestly endeavoring to do his whole duty, though covered and blistered with reproaches, may safely leave his course to the silent judgment of time. Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without, and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by Abolitionists; he was assailed by slave-holders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war.


But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is, that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.
...

Today, I believe the technical term for Mr. Douglass would be "another goddamn, sell-out faux abolitionist L-bot" .

UPDATE -- I was mistake: today, the modern technical term would be "repulsive abolitionist hypocrite".  Management regrets this error.

Bluepillnation, Jasper and Several Others

Are having a rich and fecund discussion about the duties, obligations, agonies and upper limits of principled Liberal activism in the comment section below decks on this thread.

Well worth bringing a chunk of it up to the front page where everyone can see it.

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bluepillnation said...

@Jasper  As someone who also knows the "you don't belong here" look (though due to social class and means or lack thereof rather than melanin levels) I understand where you're coming from. But change in this media-centric day and age is going to be more gradual than it has been in the past. Every generation of western kids seems to understand more implicitly that racism is wrong - so we just have to keep the trend going.

I still think you're being a little over-sensitive regarding some blogs and commenters however. I'm not seeing accusations of immaturity or "whining" in response to criticism of President Obama per se, but I do see it aimed instead at a specific kind of criticism - namely the kind that demands actions that would be political suicide in the current climate and signs off with "...so I'm sitting out the next election/voting third party". *That's* immature, and not unlike a kid who won't eat their dinner or tidy their room unless they get what they want right now, even in the face of an honest promise that they'll get a treat later.

It seems a significant number of otherwise intelligent and empathetic people have yet to understand the concept of deferred gratification. In this case you have a political climate that has been dragged further to the right, inch-by-inch, for the last 32 years at least. Even Bubba Clinton only managed to slow the process down to some extent, and for that he was pilloried by the Right, who spent billions digging up dirt on him until they had something with which they could attempt to impeach him. The only reason their shellacking of Obama (who, as you say, is even less able to halt the slide) is so impotent is because they didn't think he'd beat Hillary to the nomination - what do you think they'd do to a President who gave you everything you wanted?

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Jasper said...

I view change (policy, social, etc.) in our media-centric era as something that comes more quickly than it once did. See: the Komen Foundation firestorm.

I'm not sure about your perception of race and western society, but it's still a contentious issue down this way. And the internet seems to be yet another flashpoint.

I'll accept that I am over-sensitive, in that I want someone to care about my political opinion and not dismiss it cavalierly. My specific demands of our President were promises he made during his campaign and certainly would not have amounted to political suicide of any kind; especially not when he and the Democratic party held the reins of power for two full years.

I know his critics play on this but what defense is there when he had 2 years of a Dem Congress, a populous tired of GOP malfeasance and his tactical decision was to try to reach some sense of accord with the lunatics on the right and take legislative baby steps? Some defenders put this down to a mysterious long form strategy but I cannot see it.

I agree with your charge our generation's want for immediate gratification, but it cannot be dismissed that Obama played to that desire with his "Hope" campaign and with his heady campaign promises—he didn't just lightly tease that bundle of neurons, he gripped it with both hands and yanked it like a friar tolling a church bell until it pealed far and wide. And then he rode that endorphin rush all the way to the White House. For him to do this and then a couple of years later say, "Whoa, whoa…slow your roll, everybody" and *not* expect cries of foul play from those fervently caught up in his rhetoric just seems unfair.

Again, civil liberties and social justice were the hill I chose to die on and as such it will be a bitter pill to swallow to vote for him again. But I probably will. I just wish the dialogue with those left disillusioned and (seemingly) disenfranchised were less of a dismissive, accusatory nature. There are legitimate complaints to be heard.

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bluepillnation said...

Of course there are legitimate complaints to be heard - however at the same time achievement is constrained by possibility, and it is a sad truism that the higher up the pyramid you get, the less room for manoeuvre you have.

Today Clinton is vilified almost as much by progressives for not doing enough during his two terms as he was by conservatives during his time in office - and yet those same conservatives howled from the rooftops that he was some kind of un-american socialist for the changes he did make. I suspect that a lot of the things progressives now vilify him for (passing NAFTA for example) were essentially a quid pro quo to get some leeway for small progressive reforms with a pathologically antagonistic Republican Congress - but his greatest legacy in office was turning a sizeable deficit into a respectable surplus, which I'm sure he intended to pass on to Al Gore to keep things moving in the right direction.

Instead, you had the Bush Administration piss the whole thing away on military and security boondoggles (most of which were resurrected Cold War projects - completely useless against terrorist cells), which has left Obama even more limited than Clinton was in terms of room for manoeuvre in terms of financial standing alone - and like Clinton, even the little he has managed to do has come at the expense of being called an un-american socialist by the Right, which has consolidated it's hold on media even more aggressively than it was in Clinton's day.

If President Obama were to do all the things being asked of him by progressives, I could guarantee you a one-term presidency followed by a lurch even further to the right. Both Clinton and Obama know this - they (and the Democratic Party as a whole) saw what happened to Jimmy Carter and changed tack accordingly - just as the Republicans did following Nixon's defeat in 1960 and resignation following Watergate.

The issue is that the very nature of progressives, being humanist in nature if not in name, is that they tend to take "First Do No Harm" as a baseline. Even self-proclaimed "fighting liberals" like the beloved and much-missed Gilly took the fight only to those who were causing harm and deserved to be rhetorically threshed and politically sidelined. Regressive conservatives don't care who they steamroller as long as the result suits them. This is why Democratic politicians try to find consensus even as the Republicans wilfully double down on the crazy - because the former care what's at stake and the latter clearly do not. Combine this fundamental drive with the woeful financial situation and the aggressive antagonism of the right-wing media and you have your answer.

Yes it's frustrating, but it may bring some comfort to remember Aesop's tortoise and hare. Push too far too soon and you'll get cocky and lose (which is particularly true of the previous administration). Slow and sure is the way...

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Jasper said... Fair points all around.

I have the Gilliard Doctrine tattooed on my heart and it's probably among the chief reasons reason I haven't checked out of the game.

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bluepillnation said...

Thank you sir.

Steve Gilliard was an exceptionally talented and visceral writer, and he was also a very concise and precise wordsmith. In the paean to being a "fighting liberal" that we all know and love he used the phrase:

"I want to stop them".

He didn't want to kill, annihilate, crush, dismember, maim or hurt them in a physical sense - even as he pointed out how destructive and morally bankrupt they and their creed were, and I like to think that was because he knew in his heart that to cross that line would be to become like them, and make any eventual victory over them an empty, pyrrhic one.

The Poor Feel Like a Bag of Sand

Watching David Brook trying to explain  "work" or "poverty" in the pages of the "New York Times" really is semantically indistinguishable from Steve Carell attempting to explain sex in "The 40-Year Old Virgin": every time he opens his mouth to show off his bed cred



what comes out are a string of embarrassing noises assembled out of the fragments of what he has heard other people saying :

The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it. 

There are a million factors that contribute to poverty, and they interact in a zillion ways.

and

The list of factors that contribute to poverty could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce poverty. The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem.

If poverty is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good programs as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood.

The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity.

...

Of course one really good, battle-tested anti-poverty program on which most of the golden age of Murrican Values was built is known as a "good-paying job" with "security" and "strong labor protection" that provides "Americans" with a "future" towards which they can "plan" and in which they can have "faith".  But for America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual it is neither fun nor safe to talk about that  stuff (mostly because just beneath the surface of that conversation lurks the ever-present danger of accidentally mentioning the 30 years of Conservative economic policies which destroyed  the golden age of Murrican Values.) Much easier for Mr. Brooks to lay down 800 words of faux badass rat-a-tat pop sociology jive about the po' that he picked up on the street.

Unfortunately the "street" on which Mr. Brooks picked up his urban blight slingo winds past the dull, dark, and melancholy House of Murray before cutting directly through beautiful, downtown Davos, and when he tries to sound like he knows what he is talking about all that shines through -- as bright and shiny as a new, fiat currency penny -- is his complete lack of any frame of personal reference:

Let’s say there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage.


You have no idea what factors have caused her to make this decision, and you have no way of knowing what will dissuade her. But you want her, from morning until night, to be enveloped by a thick ecosystem of positive influences. 

You see, as America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual, Mr. Brooks desperately wants to write big, heroic paragraphs about Centrism (which is all he ever writes about anymore) and the plight of the wee, downtrodden people of Supply Side Brigadoon, but since Centrism is a fraud and since Mr. Brooks hasn't the slightest fucking clue about poverty, what comes out of his keyboard sounds as idiotic as Willard Romney talking about being unemployed, or Newt Gingrich talking about morality.  And since Our Mr. Brooks definitely does not want to talk about the complete devastation 30 years of Conservatism has wreaked on the middle class, the working poor and America's manufacturing base, he instead  opts to lazily extrude 800 words of gabble-gabble nonsense out of the giant hole where his human experience ought to be.

Of course, over in the Better Universe, a fraud like Mr. Brooks would be collecting a paycheck by thanking me for shopping at Costco after swiping my receipt for tube socks, a pallet truck of mac and cheese and a ten gallon drum of maple syrup with a Magic Marker.

But in this Universe -- for reasons that passeth all understanding -- Mr. Brooks has been handed a "Guns of Navarone"-sized megaphone planted permanently atop a giant pile of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.'s money.

Which is a tragedy, because the essential truth about Conservatism is that we will never fully understand what causes it.

There are a million factors that contribute to  Conservatism , and they interact in a zillion ways, but at the root of this tragedy is our nation's broken wingnut welfare system.

Let's say there is a young Conservative male person who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the enormous wealth and influence that go with rolling out of bed twice a week and jerking 800-words of oligarch bait into the pages of the New York Times, rather that developing any real skills or doing anything resembling real work.

You have no idea what factors caused this young man to choose a life of telling lies about hippies and poor people to banksters and the Wall Street money changers, but you're pretty sure that trying to appeal to his conscience is never going to work, because this soul-dead plutocrat knob gobbler has discovered that there is big money in ignoring the grotty details of the real world in favor of abstract Conservative principles which he can mindless apply in all cases, consistently and uniformly.

Also don't bother throwing technocrats at him because it is a fact universally acknowledged as being true by  America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual technocrats are always wrong about everything:

Technocrats are in the business of promulgating rules. They seek abstract principles that they can apply in all cases. From their perspective, a rule is fair when it can be imposed uniformly across the nation. 

Technocratic organizations take diverse institutions and make them more alike by imposing the same rules. Technocracies do not defer to local knowledge. They dislike individual discretion. They like consistency, codification and uniformity.

But the tragedy of Mr. Brooks' choice to spend his life suckling the Wingnut Welfare teat are not confined to his life alone: by the nature of what he does and who he serves means that Mr. Brooks exerts a terrible and destructive influence over the rest of us.

So what to do?

Sadly, the list of factors that contribute to Conservatism could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce Conservatism . The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem.

If Conservatism is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good writers as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, blog-by-blog.

The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity.

Which unfortunately these days appears to consist of Paul Krugman, Charlie Pierce and me :-)