Can't Resist These Sock Puppets

Incredible film of two sock puppets discussing work and working conditions in the modern, white collar, "neoliberal" market. Its really funny to watch these Sock Puppets discuss Marx, Foucault, and everything in between. ( h/t Crooked Timber who linked to the original posting over at a marvellous site called Wicked Anomie.)

Its really worth watching because some issues we've been talking around politically (about how much any politically active individual can recognize their own agency, or lack of it, in a political contest) come up in the context of the sock puppets discussion of labor and work in the modern world. What struck me most was the sock puppet's explanation of the necessity for the creation of internal controls like anxiety, fear, and guilt in the modern white collar worker to take the place of brute force oppression in the regular factory worker. In a democracy we can see this issue being played out in this election with people encouraged to imagine themselves "freely choosing" among a variety of competing candidates offering them a smorgasbrod of policy choices. But are they really "freely choosing?" when the candiates and the issues and the coverage have been constrained and limited by authorities and powers beyond the control, or even the ken, of the individual voter? As Incontinentia Buttocks pointed out over at LGM the battle between Obama and HRC is, in reality, largely a battle over minute and even trivial differences in the delivery of the same product (she calls it the "narcissism of small differences"). And even where there are actual policy differences for voters to choose among they are encouraged or deluded into regarding the political/policy battle as being one of taste. Even worse, they are misled entirely as to the nature of the choices before them--see e.g. Kristof's skin crawlingly meretricious but utterly standard paen to McCain's honesty in today's Times.

Where this hits me is actually somewhere different--in my role as a parent. Anyone out there raising young children to be part of the ideas creating and marketing middle and upper classes will slowly come to recognize, in the sock puppet's discussion of labor and capitol some very interesting similiarities between child rearing and worker castration. The "ownership society" relies heavily on creating an anxious, frightened, submissive, self repressive "owner" who willingly and even eagerly performs his function as a cog in a machine that offers him (or her) the mere right to compete with other owners for basic necessities. That training starts very, very, young and much to my chagrin I recognize that I play an important part in it. Too gloomy for you? Watch the vid and laugh...and then cry.

Bunker Buster

And this time it's not (just) of the Archie and Edith variety.

The Protect America Act lapsed last night at midnight. Following a couple of press release-style posts (which basically regurgitated the political spin of McConnell and Bush) on that topic yesterday, it's now going on 18 hours since anyone at all has been heard from over at NRO's The Corner, a period of restraint and thoughtfulness heretofore unknown at the conservative blog. The final Corner post was Mark Steyn's 187th memorialization of his "human rights" persecution by the pesky Canadians. He also works in a joke about his vagina.

Then, nuthin'. Dead air. Crickets.

Come out from under your beds, folks. Isn't there something important you need to watch coming up on Fox News?

Update (10 minutes later): Oops! I posted too soon. Mark Steyn is back at The Corner this morning, the very definition of coyote ugly, with a stock-in-trade, borderline racist (and somewhat wistful, perhaps?) denunciation of the evildoers. And so the world turns.

Other update (yet two hours later): With this post mixing up the Loch Ness Monster, Global Warming and the ravings of some creepy dude with a compulsion to "call a spade a spade," Steyn completes the coveted natural hat trick of hatred and holds The Corner, for better or worse, his own private Idaho.

Sunday Sierrablogging

Crystal Creek canyon from the Middle Fork Kings River near Tehipite Valley, Kings Canyon National Park.

Reflections

Shiny metal art at the De Young Museum.

But in the Morning, Sir, I will be Sober

Old Joke:
Society Woman, to Winston Churchill "You, sir, are Drunk!"
Churchill "Yes, Madam, and you are ugly...but in the morning, I will be sober."

Or something like that. I don't want to beat a dead horse on this one but I do, do, do, wish that bloggers and Obama supporters would remember that the morning after the Democratic convention they are going to wake up in bed with a lot of people they've been calling ugly, and we will all be quite sober enough to be really, really, angry about it. Case in point. I wandered over to Kos this morning and found a highly recommended, many posted diary headlined "Hillary is Selfish." The following three hundred approving comments take for granted that all her motives are evil, and the evil-est portion of the whole thing is that her wishes run contrary to those of Obama and his supporters. Part of the fun, in these often two line posts, is to recapitulate things that "Hillary supporters" those poor, deluded, women, might say against these attacks. Female Obama supporters enter the lists to explain that something is never sexist if a woman says it--as though we hadn't just endured years of Ann Coulter and other femmes for hire offering cover for rampant misogyny.

Qua anthropologist I'd argue that we can't talk about the two candidates without sex and sexism intruding because we don't have a gender neutral language to begin with. Words have associations and meanings, histories and cultural backstops that give them a different valence depending on who is using them and who is being referenced. For example, while its trivially true that both men and women can be accused of being "selfish" -- they aren't accused of being selfish *for the same things.* And selfishness, too, is understood differently when applied to men and women. We have a long history in this society of seeing the singular male actor, acting selfishly for his own benefit, in fairly noble terms. We have *no* history or cultural appreciation for "elle, seule" the woman who makes her own way and does what she wants despite the needs and desires of those around her. Nevertheless, Kos and his commenters feel very comfortable continually demonizing HRC with sexist and sexed language while at the same time telling others that they are, essentially, crazy old biddies if they criticize it.

In a race where both candidates are performing the same political tasks can we honestly say that we can present any evidence about the two candidates that isn't sexed, or classed, or raced to a degree that makes it hard to grasp the political reality without at the same time commenting on it and shaping it? I don't think so. At this point the campaign to control the meaning of the campaign seems to me to be utterly focused on demonizing Clinton and her supporters by continuously transforming ordinary political acts into extra-ordinary forms of evil, anti democratic, selfishness. Another case in point? If you see a headline "Hillary outspends Obama on Ads" it is sure to come with an attached storyline that goes "Hillary's in trouble, needs to use paid advertisements to persuade the voter while Obama's authentic outreach enables him to reach voters directly." On the other hand, I saw a headline over at Buzzflash "Obama outspends Hillary on Ads" but we are merely to understand that as a strength of his fundraising--another knock on her.

Ezra Klein, I think, alluded to the phrase "conservation of virtues" in which what one candidate lacks the other is assumed to have and vice versa. If Obama is warm, Hillary must be cold, if Obama's supporters are X, then Hillary's supporters must be Y. I think of this more as the pathetically manichean model of political thought and action. But its certainly there, underlying a lot of commentary and a lot of ex-post facto rationale for how the candidates are doing and should do. The final manichean difference between the way Obama's supporters represent what is going on and the way the rest of the world may see it is the continued invocation of the idea that Obama alone, transformatively, represents the majority of voters. This underlies the accusation that Hillary is "selfish" while Obama is "unselfish"--- Obama's desires and actions are seen as unselfish because they are undertaken, we are assured, *for us* rather than for Obama. The more of "us" there are, therefore, the more unselfish Obama's actions become because the responsibility for them is shared among many. By contrast, if you believe (as many of Obama's supporters do as an article of faith) that Hillary represents a small number of deluded or angry or old line female supporters, well, her actions are deemed the more selfish because either she represents only herself or the voters she represents are too insignificant to dissipate the selfishness of her actions. Because Obama's supporters are assumed to be in the majority, and to be in the right, so--well, we can all do the math. When democracy has spoken, the one who speaks in opposition to the majority must be anti democratic.


But of course democracy hasn't spoken, yet, we're still in media res. And there is something quite disturbing to me in continually seeing the exact same behaviors lauded for one candidate and attacked for the other. As far as I can see Hillary's time has come and gone and she will go down to defeat and Obama will be the nominee. I don't quarrel with that and I don't even think its a bad thing for the party or the country. But there is something deeply disingenous about reading popular democratic bloggers and progressive bloggers continually smearing both Hillary and her voters when you know that tomorrow they are going to wake up in bed next to them and need to start pleading for understanding and forgiveness. And not only that, they are going to ask us to get up and make breakfast for them.

Quote of Two Days Ago

Matthew Yglesias:

It is fascinating that the Republican Party would rather allow what they believe to be a critical national security law lapse than allow it to be extended without the extension containing a rider immunizing large telecommunications firms from the consequences of prior illegal activity. It's almost as if the Republican Party exists to serve the interests of large business enterprises and very wealthy individuals, and tends to use national security and cultural anxieties as a kind of political theater aimed at securing votes so that they can better pursue their real agenda of enriching the wealthy and powerful.

Things Look Different From the Top

I know we're kind of a laid back blog site but this story is really an important one. I found it over at War and Piece, Laura Rozen's journalistic site, but I would have encountered it eventually because I know people who work for BAE and I was just talking to a Channel Four newscaster (hello Jon! If you are bored in Iraq and surfing the web!) about them. In a Nutshell, this is the story of how politics and political decisions really get made up at the top. When a bribery and military industrial complex scandal got too close to the House of Saud, they literally blackmailed the Prime Minister of England into dropping the case using the threat of major terrorism against an English city.

People have written a lot of silly stuff about what they would have done if they'd been, for example, HRC in the run up to the AUMF and what they think Obama will or won't do when he gets into power (g-d willing.) I've tried to point out something that democrats and the man on the street just don't seem to get--power and danger look differently to you when you are at the top of the power pyramid and not at the bottom. I have no doubt that on Obama's first day in office he will be shown, by some cabal of *&^% wise men that includes the corpses of Kissinger, Negroponte, and a host of the other undead militarists, jingoists, baby rapers, nun torturers, clapped out whores of the carlysle group and pimped up blackwell mercenaries a series of paper threats that will be a combination of true and untrue, very serious and utterly spurious. And Obama is going to have to sort them out and take the chance that he is wrong on some big thing even if he is right on a host of little things. None of us know what he will do. And for darn sure none of us know what we would do if we aren't strong enough to keep the cockroaches from the oval office in the first place.
aimai

Nevermore

Twin Peaks, Sunday morning just before dawn.

Friday Random Ten

Time for another coolness self-audit:

Slickee Boys - This Party Sucks! (10/10)
Zombies - I Remember When I Loved Her (9/10)
Zakons - Wasted! (8/10)
Shriekback - Open up Your (Filthy) Heart (to Me) (8/10)
Mekons - Darkness & Doubt (9/10)
Manu Dibango - Ceddo End Title (10/10)
Reptile Palace Orchestra - Little Wing (5/10)
Pine Box Boys - The Tardy Hearse (9/10)
Iggy Pop - The Passenger (10/10)
Modern Lovers - 96 Tears (live) (8/10)

8.6 overall. Rate your own lists in comments. And remember--the scale is 1 to 10; anyone caught giving themselves 11s will have their ratings adjusted by a factor of 0.90909...

Update: added links to album pages, where samples are available.

Man, I Wish I'd Gone Over to Obama Earlier

I feel like I just received all the goodies I was promised when I sent in my Chain Letter Obama Vote. It was worth it--I really mean that.

(From Tapped):
"Finally, just for fun... Obama. Also, he subscribed to your feed, carries a picture of you in his wallet, and wrote on your funwall."

aimai

Make of This What You Will

I'm standing on a pier watching fifteen mob guys have a sit down, a half circle of chairs facing the ocean. All of a sudden they stand up and, out of fear, raise their rifles and shoot into the air, where they imagine their enemy is. But accidentally, they shoot their feet off, and blow huge holes in the pier. All falls into disarray. I'm scared and wondering what is happening. Then I hear a voice over--its Howard Dean. Turns out, I'm watching a film about his campaign for the presidency. People are criticizing him for allowing the film to be made because it makes the dems look bad. But he answers, pleadingly "After all, a campaign isn't an administration, things wouldn't have turned out so badly."

The weird thing? I really did dream this.

No Day Without a Line

I'm trying to make a valentine's dinner for Mr. Aimai and also blotting my copybook over at LGM. here's where I'm coming from--I'm trying to make duck breast with cherry/fig/wine sauce; risotto cakes, asparagus, and a fresh cardamom pastry cream tart with some nice fruit for dinner. At the same time, I'm really tired of all the blogging about what a terrible person and a terrible candidate Hillary Clinton is. This is just one of those personal political preferences of mine--I'd rather see both my candidates an my fellow dems tearing up the republicans instead of guessing and second guessing each other. If I'm stuck with HRC it won't be the first time I'm stuck with a conventional candidate when I would have preferred an insurgent. If I'm stuck with Obama it will certainly be the first time I've been offered the chance to vote for a charismatic, progressive, black guy but it may not be the last time I get a chance to vote for a *losing dem* in a general election. I just don't know. And no one else does either. I'm tired of the endless piggybacking attempts by the pro-obama crowd to project ahead and find clinton the worse candidate and the worse person in order to prospectively legitimize obama as the best. they are both ok candidates. They are both claiming to get lots of votes and they both want to get lots of votes. can't we let the voters decide instead of trying to tell the voters over and over again that everything clinton does proves what a horrible candidate she is? I'm going to take the pledge about this now, over at LGM, and stop trying to discuss the underlying theme there to so many posts which is that HRC represents some evil hitherto unknown, or wholly associated with republicans, which Obama rises above. As Dr. Zen over there has posted--Obama is a politician, he is surrounded by politicians, he's not above politics. And we wouldn't really want him to be. Everything that HRC is excoriated for in this primary? We'd be shocked and enraged if Obama and his supporters didn't somehow use in the general. Because we want to win--dammit. And we have to win. Its too important for the Marquess of Queensbury rules.

aimai

Updated to say: What Sifu Tweety Said:

Tin Star showing

If my review this week of The Tin Star interested you, it'll be on TCM next Tuesday at 6:15.

Barney Bites Broder

Shorter David Broder: "Which of my paragraphs today doesn't belong?"

[Hint: the penultimate, with which the old fool painfully pwns himself.]

McCain: Big Fat Flip-Flopping LOSER

Following up on the question of defining McCain, here are a couple of items that caught my eye today:

• Matt Yglesias notes that McCain's voting scores tell an interesting tale: in the 107th Senate (just after the 2000 election) he was one of the most moderate Republican senators (after a reliably conservative career); in the 108th he shifted back to the right; and in the 109th, which includes his presidential run, only one other Senator has been more conservative. In other words, he shifted left (i.e., voted against Bush) when he was still angry about 2000, and shifted right again when he needed conservative support to run for president. Flip vs. Flop.


• Also: he was against torture before he was for it. Flip vs. Flop.


• And an article by Dana Milbank in today's WaPo suggests that the L-word might just get some traction:

  In a broader sense, there was a whole lot of nose-holding across the Commonwealth yesterday as McCain made off with much less of a victory than expected. The relatively tight race in Virginia, and widespread rejection of McCain in rural Virginia, told the larger story of McCain's effort to cement his all-but-official claim on the GOP nomination: Though the conservative establishment is slowly reaching for the nose clips, the McCain scent has proved stubborn and noxious....
  
  McCain clearly didn't beat the spread, even though he was playing against an unranked opponent, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who has no hope of winning the title. And this means grass-roots conservatives weren't following the plays called by Allen and other conservative leaders on the sidelines....
  
  The vote was undeniably a conservative protest against the candidate and the conservative leaders who lent McCain their grudging and half-hearted endorsements since the exit of Mitt Romney from the race last week. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), who last month said "the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine," this week endorsed McCain. So did Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), who last month asked why conservatives "shouldn't be physically ill at the prospects of a President McCain"....
  
  Using phrases such as "whether we like it or not," conservatives this week have steadily stepped forward to endorse the presumptive nominee. But it has been a joyless affair.

  Generally speaking, when you're running for high office, appearing as an object of pity in the national press is...sub-optimal.

Update: Welcome, Atriosi! (And thanks for the link, Thers!) Take a look around--we have a great crew here, and they post a lot of excellent stuff.

Other Update: the Milbank piece suggests an ad: a bunch of anti-McCain soundbites from Thad Cochran et al. (including Rush Limbaugh, if he ends up endorsing McCain) with the tagline "McCain: his supporters don't like him; why should you?"

Glenn Beck proves my point about voters and beta males

Beck: Tonight, here’s what you need to know. The war, immigration, the economy, the primaries have pushed the Democrats too far to the left, but how long before the American people figure it out, and will it be too late? This is the time in an election that, you know, it’s like young love. You’re wild. You’re impetuous and you’re up for just about anything, but when the flirting is over and it’s time to make a commitment the smart ones retreat back to what makes sense. You know, the girl you can take home to mom. You might date really really strong liberals, but you never marry them.

Don't you just want to say "Oh, like we'd have you anyway you loser."

Map Tourists

The map is not the territory, but it is the destination.

(Re-)Defining McCain

There is one advantage in having the Republican race be over before ours: they don't know which target to focus on, and we do. The most important thing to do right now is to define McCain before he has a chance to define himself. The Saint John media narrative that has taken hold is no more than a vague impression of fuzzy goodwill for most people; if we can create a more vivid (negative) narrative now, define him the way Dole was defined in 1996, we just might win this thing.

Off the top of my head, McCain is vulnerable to definition in several (non-exclusive) ways. In order of effectiveness, as I see it:

• More of the Same: More Iraq, more neo-con adventurism, more fiscal irresponsibility, more government by lobbyists. To that end, this picture is worth several thousand words.


• Flip vs. Flop: a man of no settled convictions who reverses himself as political expediency dictates. The Carpetbagger Report has an excellent list (more here); there's also a video, and another video (same attack, but from the right).


• Crazy John: a loose cannon, reckless and impulsive, who will lead us into more crazy self-destructive wars with countries that aren't actually a threat. Think bomb-bomb-Iran; think 100 years.


• Cranky Old John: the Bob Dole of 2008, with a nasty mean streak and an uncontrollable temper. And having himself made nasty jokes about old people, he can't well complain now that he's in a position to be the butt of them.

This is what I see as the basic framework for defining the persona of the candidate McCain. To the extent that right-wing criticism fits into this framework (as opposed to calling him insufficiently conservative), we should welcome and exploit it.

I have a feeling there's one more approach, although this one I'm less sure of (I'd be more certain if Huckabee had won Virginia): the L word. Elections in Gringolandia aren't about issues, they're about superstition: every contest is between the Lucky and the Doomed. People want to associate themselves with good fortune, and distance themselves from bad. Accordingly, there is no word more toxic in American politics than 'loser'.

McCain could be fit for the part. He lost to Bush in 2000, and was so peeved that he talked about joining the Democrats (see 'Crazy John', 'Cranky Old John'). In 2008, in a field of generally acknowledged losers, he came from behind to be the least loser of the bunch...and still couldn't seal the deal, denied majorities even after he was the presumptive nominee.

As you can see from the above, various people have painstakingly assembled the evidence against McCain. Now it's up to all of us to use it.

Quit Digging, Dweeb Derb

John Derbyshire followed up his controversial remarks on race and Barack Obama this afternoon with another similarly stupid post. In the second post, Derbyshire assures an inquiring world that he would have voted for the African-American Colin Powell for President in 1996, had Powell been the Republican nominee.

Although Powell "could 'talk black' when he thought it was required of him," Derbyshire helpfully explains, "Powell doesn't care about being black." Now, as for Obama?--he "cares a lot about being black" and would be a "race-obsessed President."

Basically black Presidents are like everything else in America: IOKIYAR.

Some of My Own Kids Are Minorities...

Peggy Noonan said it couldn't happen, but The Corner's John Derbyshire seems to have some racial issues with Barak Obama's candidacy:

All this emoting over Barack Obama's wonderful, wonderful personality is starting to trigger my gag reflex.

What are we electing here, a faith healer? What is Obama's view of the executive power? How, exactly, does he propose to "bring us together"? Just by being half-black?...

Derbyshire desperately needs to know, "What will Obama do?" Since he lacks any intention to learn about Obama by reading his books, he quite naturally turns for answers to noted racist pseudoscientist Steve Sailer -- who, turns out, hasn't read Obama's books either. But, Derbyshire reports, Sailer has blegged his VDARE blog's vast readership for "any paper trail for Obama's thoughts, ideas, and opinions." Sadly, nobody who reads Sailer has read Obama's books, nor can anybody turn up much dirt on him online.

Left to his own devices, Derbyshire summons up a dark and scary Obaman apparition:

And then there is the matter of ethnic triumphalism, which is shifting and murmuring in the background of Obama's campaign. Be interesting to get Obama's opinion on, for example, Justice Thurgood Marshall's remark to his colleagues in the Bakke case, that, "You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it is our turn."...

Which is not at all offensive when Derbyshire says it. You see, he's got hand:

As a white guy with half-Asian kids, is there an ethnic downside to me and mine in voting for Obama? Is this an improper question? Why?

As a decent American citizen reading you on the Internets, Derb, I can tell you that the primary "ethnic downside" to you and yours is coming from inside the house. Get out, John -- get out while they still have a chance.