One-Way Street

Big

I am extremely pleased that Barack Obama finally clinched the Democratic nomination. During the evening commute people were reading about it from well-creased morning editions, as if they still couldn't believe our state senator won the nomination. And I'm relieved that Clinton seems poised to end her candidacy, just when it looked like her supporters were prepared to scream "Denver! Denver! Denver!" for the rest of the summer.

As Obama takes a detour through NASCAR country before huddling up with his advisors, "Will she marry Big?" has been replaced as question of the moment by "Will Big ask her to be the VP?" Clinton's churlish "I'm the one you want!" speech on Tuesday, by common consensus, didn't help her chances. She would bring millions of reluctant Bubbas to the ticket and chase away millions of people turned off by her beady-eyed self-righteousness. And she comes with the original Big, her husband, who draws his life force from the handshake lines--and becomes unhinged when he's denied access to them for long.

My guess is that Obama appointed Caroline Kennedy appointment to the Vice Presidential search committee to lay the groundwork for a John F. Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson type of reconciliation, meaning Hilary will walk down the aisle in August. But she will be elbowed aside by Bill, who will work hard to ingratiate himself with Barack. For his part, Barack will let him tag along on a few passes down the handshake lines.

Vote for Iron Man

As of last night Hilary Clinton's candidacy has run out of momentum, money, and plausibility. Just two weeks ago she'd swept the deer hunting counties in Pennsylvania and she seemed like she was going to elbow her way into the White House after all. Then, suddenly, Iron Man was released to rave reviews and blockbuster box office, and the zeitgeist either tilted away from her, or righted itself, depending on how you look at it.

Iron Man is witty and fun, which Clinton is not. It's also hypermasculine in the Hollywood summer blockbuster way, with a few twists. The film is one part comic book extravaganza, one part ED ad, and one part testimonial to the redemptive power of good public relations. The film stars Robert Downey, Jr., who has been welcomed back not only to the executive office suites of the major studios, but also to the good graces of insurance underwriters. He plays a character that dates back to the Quiet American period of the Vietnam War, when it was still possible for men of conscience to believe they were doing something worthwhile for their country while drinking excellent martinis in exotic settings. For the film the character has been updated to the Afghan War during its own Quiet American phase, when a man could sip scotch on the battlefield, secure in the knowledge that the Taliban were scurrying back to their caves.

Tony Stark is a defense contractor, but a good one. (This is fiction, remember.) His rusty, damaged heart has been  fortified with a metal cylinder and his aging body revived by the loyal presence of Gwyneth Paltrow. Villains and other nuisances are thrown at him, but he keeps his good cheer. Unlike some other armor in another, much less cheerful war, the Iron Man's guts of steel serve him well. He's a figure of early middle-aged American masculinity ready for action but freed of the phony machismo and vainglorious dreams of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd. The film also firmly rejects the callow abstinence of George Bush, who had his own rough patch with alcohol. Iron Man is about the triumph of geniality and a bon vivant approach to solving world problems. This doesn't describe any of the current presidential candidates, not even Ralph Nader. But if the film's box office receipts are any indication, the American electorate is looking for something more diverting this summer than a gas tax holiday.

Fitna

Get ready for more mob violence in the Middle East.  Geert Wilders, a right-wing member of the Dutch Parliament, will soon have the world premier of his film Fitna, and tempers are rising in anticipation. Wilders' film is short but incendiary, a paranoid broadside again Islam and everything associated with it. After filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by a militant Islamist and mobs across Islamic world went berserk over some Danish cartoons, the Dutch government is frantically trying to contain the potential damage. The government persuaded Dutch television not to broadcast the film, but some Internet site will post it. From there, no doubt, it will go viral in the right wing-nut margins of the Internet. Otherwise, the domestic front looks ready; Dutch Muslim groups have been cooperating by urging Muslims not to let Wilders get under their skin. A loner jihadist may do something rash, but that's a more or less constant risk anyway.

Beyond the Netherlands the situation isn't so secure. Last month the Cairo International Film Festival for Children held the Dutch animated short Where Is Winky's Horse? hostage until the Dutch government apologized and did some symbolic slapping around of a certain right-wing parliamentarian. But l'affair de Winky may not be the last word from the Islamic World. Protests have already started in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where, you would think, they would have more important things to worry about. Judging from the Danish cartoon episode, the current penalty for graven images of the Prophet created in a small European country seems to be 50 deaths, and that has a lot of people concerned.

Fitna may be a waste of bandwidth, but you can insert your standard defense of freedom of speech here. The film's release is yet another example of the mutual misunderstanding between Islam and the West. No one believes Wilders' film will be the last provocative episode, but one can hope that the reaction will be relatively subdued, and Wilders' hateful bluster will end up little more than a 20-second segment on the BBC World News.  After all, the long tail of sectarian hysteria has to start diminishing some time, right?

Fauxbama

Tomorrow night Saturday Night Live will debut its new Fauxbama, played by Donald Glover. In terms of true misanthropic rage so crucial to the genre, SNL's political satire was surpassed long ago by The Daily Show. Nevertheless, the SNL presidential caricature is a tradition in American television, and the choice of the actor to play the president has more cultural importance than the president's choice to serve as, say, the Secretary of Energy.

Although SNL has always satirized the candidates in the presidential campaigns, Fauxbama seems to be debuting prematurely. Obama still seems like an undefined figure, and because he's the only Democratic presidential candidate with any wit (the usually wit-challenged Republicans have two witty guys on their side, McCain and Huckabee), Obama has already co-opted any comic foibles that may have emerged so far. Here in Illinois Obama has been visible as a workaday politician for years, and so far the comic material is pretty thin. In fact, Obama can be kind of boring. His acceptance speech after winning his seat in the US Senate in 2004, for instance, was notable mostly for poor Michelle Obama holding her exhausted daughter as Obama droned on about airport expansion, or whatever he was talking about. Michelle looked like she wanted to say out loud, "Let's wrap it up, Barack. This kid's getting heavy."

What hasn't emerged yet in Obama is that kernel  of identity around which a comic persona can be formed. By kernel of identity I mean something more existential than a mere foible. Rather, the basis of SNL political satire is usually some personality trait that can't be reduced any further: Gerald Ford's clumsiness, George H.W. Bush's unpredictable syntax, Bill Clinton's body. At first glance this trait functions to deflate an important political figure--a classic strategy in political satire. But on SNL this trait takes on a different dimension. Through repetition the trait becomes less familiar and more mysterious. Will Ferrell's George Bush prompts us to ask, What's that smirk really trying to tell us?

The deep structure of SNL's political satire becomes clearer when one considers its least typical presidential caricature, Phil Hartman's Ronald Reagan. Every other presidential caricature is built upon a minor but immediately visible quality. Only the faux Reagan appeared as somebody completely different from his public persona. Hartman played Reagan as both a vague, genial fool and, as soon as the cameras moved on, as a crack schemer, directing his underlings with all the gruff certainty of a mob boss. It's significant that the most genuinely transformative president we've had since 1975 had, as his SNL comic identity, a political figure who actually changed things.

By contrast, every other president's caricature expresses the futility of trying to change American political culture. Every joke starts off in a different place, but always comes back to that mysterious, unchanging kernel of selfhood: Gerald Ford always falls down. A Saturday Night Live broadcast is a microcosm of the modern presidency. A commanding figure dominates a very small stage for a brief period of time, offering the promise of something new when all we're looking for is the same joke repeated over and over again. Then it's cut to commercial, and the next cliché is trotted out and ridiculed for our reassurance.

The Illinois Primary

Today I will be blogging on the Illinois primary, because no one else is going to bother. We move our primary up six weeks so we can have a say in who the leader of the free world will be, then half the country does the same thing, so we're right back where we started from--completely taken for granted.

5:59 AM: My alarm clock goes off, and Lisa Labuz of WBEZ, the local PBS station, announces breathlessly, "The polls are going to open in one minute!" I'm registered to vote 24 miles away, so I can't participate in the primary. I make a mental note to register in Wilmette in time for the general election, and go back to sleep for one minute.

6:08 AM: The weather forecast calls for thundersnow this afternoon, which will be bad for turnout.

8:02 AM: I want to know how Red Eye is going to cover the primary, if it notices that there's an election this year. Red Eye is the Chicago Tribune's free daily. It seems to be read only on El trains, and only there because it's easy to read standing up. It's also easy to read half asleep. A woman standing next to my seat has a copy. There it is--on the front page no less. Fantastic Fight! The four major candidates depicted as cartoon superheroes. Very understated. I'm betting Red Eye hasn't endorsed anyone because the in-depth coverage of the democratic process is, like, so old media. Red Eye isn't distributed at the Linden Station, so I can't check for the feature on the best bars to go to after voting. I know it has to be there someplace.

9:08: I use the Chicago Tribune's Super Tuesday online guide. I see that the Tribune has the Campaign '08 link grouped with a shopping center shooting and "Man Crushes," which makes me think the Tribune isn't taking the primary very seriously, either.

I see the Tribune has endorsed Barack Obama for president on the Democratic side. I wonder why. The Tribune endorsed George Bush for president, twice. Ah, here's the explanation: "many Republicans in Illinois have warm words for Barack Obama." A Democrat Republicans can love, at least until he opposes tax cuts for the wealthy. 

I haven't registered to vote in Wilmette yet, but I'm curious to know where I will be voting in the fall. The site takes in my address and zip code . . . Then can't find my nearest polling place. It doesn't seem to have tried very hard. I try the voter guide function, choosing the Democratic primary. It asks me, "Do you want to review the judicial subcircuit candidates?" Good Lord, no.

First I get the presidential candidates. In addition to Clinton and Obama, somebody named Mike Gravel is running for president. Well, good luck to you, Mike, whoever you are. I discover Dick Durban is up for re-election. Nobody told me that. I've always liked Dick Durban. Nice, steady guy to balance our state's tendency to elect flash-in-the-pan Senators, like Carol Moseley Braun and, um, Barack Obama, who seems pretty anxious to dump his gig as our junior Senator.

10:07: I get bored with the Tribune voter guide as it wades into the state representatives, so I check out what's going on in the Sun-Times, which has finally washed off the stink from its years under Rupert Murdoch's ownership. The Sun-Times has endorsed Barack Obama, he of the "curiously poetic name." The editorial is curiously poetic itself. "Obama is right on the issues, right in daring us to believe in a goodness greater than ourselves, and right in having the confidence to appeal to all of us as one America." The Sun-Times endorsed John McCain on the Republican side, then they blow it by suggesting Mitt Romney should be vice-president. Then again, maybe that makes sense, now that Dick Cheney has made the office a vehicle for partisan bile and underhanded business dealings.

10:49: I'm trying to measure the pulse of Illinois voters by taking an informal poll of my co-workers, but it's going to be a challenge because the threat of thundersnow this afternoon means several people are working from home. A fellow Wilmette resident made it into the office. I noticed several Hillary signs in town on my way to the train station, evidence that her brand of prickly entitlement is playing well on the North Shore. Sure enough, my co-worker says he intends to vote for Hillary Clinton when he gets home. He says he has questions about Obama's lack of experience. Based on this sample of one person, I'm calling Wilmette for Hilary Clinton.

11:25: I asked another co-worker who he was going to vote for, and he informs me he is now a citizen of the Republic of Ireland and therefore won't be voting today. He will vote for Bertie Ahern for prime minister in the next election. Huh? Turns out he's undergoing some sort of ethnicity transplant.  Uh-oh. Another co-worker who is actually Irish tartly corrects him on his pronunciation of Ahern and informs him that Ireland doesn't have a prime minister. She gives the Irish word for leader, which she can pronounce but can't spell. She tells him, "You have a lot of work to do on being Irish." Poor guy. I let this alone for now, but later on I'm going to ask him for his Green Card. Results among people who have emigrated without leaving their desks: too close to call.

12:12: Tempers are flaring already at The Swamp blog, at least among the commenters. Jeff begins the discussion by declaring, "Romney has shown his true colors again, and they're the New England colors of a classless piece of human filth." Jerry from downstate responds, "I suggest John McCain should apologize to the GOP for being a Democrat/Liberal/Socialist. Mitt Romney is right just standing in line." That's just the first two comments.

12:23: Jerry from downstate is throwing flames everywhere. At Lynn Sweet's blog he comments with a note about last night's Hannity & Colmes, in which "the Obama con game" is uncovered.

In somewhat more useful news, Sweet reports that later on this afternoon Obama is going to play basketball with his brother-in-law, the head basketball coach at Brown, and the state treasurer, Alexi Giannoulias. Sweet also says that neither the Clinton or the Obama campaigns think today's results will be conclusive. So what's the point? I knew this monster primary was a bad idea.

2:36: I polled another co-worker about his voting intentions. He's the one who moved to Indiana to avoid the open office arrangement. Indiana won't hold its primary until May, so he says he'll just vote for whoever we choose. He's looking on the bright side, though. The May ballot will include a referendum to move Indiana to Central Standard Time. That'll be a good thing. He never seems to know what time it is.

Results among people who write computer code in their garages in small towns in Indiana: Whatever.

4:02: More tempers are flaring: Two female election judges traded blows on the city's west side. Early turnout is reported to be high statewide, but forecasters are predicting up to a foot of "heart-attack snow," the really heavy stuff that'll kill you to shovel, with the possibility of embedded thunderstorms--"thundersnow." Most of the really nasty stuff--up to an inch an hour snowfall--will occur overnight, long after the polls close at 7:00 PM, but according to one person working from home in the far northwest suburbs, the snow has already started. As a result, she's not heading out to vote. One lost vote for Clinton.

7:40: The networks gave Illinois to Obama at two minutes after seven. This wasn't a surprise. On the train ride through Chicago's North Side I saw some graffiti supporting Obama, so I knew Obama had it in the bag.

If Obama wins California, he's pretty much unstoppable.

Biography and Ambition

Tomorrow is the Illinois primary, and no one here seems to care. On the one hand, this indifference isn't surprising. Illinois hasn't played a significant role in a national election since 1960, and there are no statewide offices up for grabs this year. On the other hand, the state should be getting more attention this year from national politicians this year, because the two Democratic nominees both spent significant portions of their lives here. And yet, the weekend before the primary and only Mitt Romney, of all people, has bothered to pay a visit to Illinois.  We didn't even get an Obama Super Bowl ad this year.

I guess Barack Obama had other, more pressing needs elsewhere. He's ahead in Illinois by something like 40 percentage points, even though Hillary Clinton was born and raised in Park Ridge, which is very near where I live. The gap in the polls can be explained any number of ways, but I can't help but think Clinton's poor showing in the state of her birth is a bad sign for her prospects in the rest of the election. Clinton seems to have immediately entered Wellesley College shortly after birth. It was there that her personality and ambitions were formed. At least, this is how her campaign biography portrays her. Obama's childhood, by contrast, has been well documented, and there's a narrative arc from his unusual upbringing to the message of hope and change that are the centerpieces of his presidential campaign.  The differences between Clinton's and Obama's biographies account for the ways their ambitions are perceived, and why Clinton is seen as coldly calculating but realistic, while Obama seems genuine but vulnerable--a reversal of the usual gender roles, as several people have already pointed out.

Because her Park Ridge years contribute so little to who she is, Clinton's ambitions seem to have come from nowhere. They have no grounding in childhood innocence, like they did with her husband. We're all familiar with George W. Bush's oedipal issues and John Edwards' poor boy origins. Whatever one may think of Bush and Edwards, at least we understand what drives them. Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions seem both an act of adult will and oddly opaque.  Mitt Romney has a similar burning desire from nowhere biography--and similar problems convincing people he understands their troubles. Similarly, Dick Cheney's conniving lust for power is a late manifestation and, as a result, seems positively cancerous.  John McCain is a special case: wartime experience is a kind of second birth, so he seems genuine in ways that even Mike Huckabee can't match.

Much has been made of Hilary Clinton's carpetbagger Senate runs in New York, but if New Yorkers don't care, neither should we. And she can be likable when she wants to be. In fact, Clinton appears most likable when she's sharing a stage with Obama, as last week's chortle-fest debate demonstrated. But her ambitions are too naked, too contrived. Obama is a supremely confident man. He can also be a jerk, as we saw in his testy response when Hillary Clinton was asked in a recent debate about her likability, and Obama churlishly commented, "You're likable enough, Hillary."  And I'm not too sure about the recent tendency to graft Obama's life story onto John F. Kennedy's.  Obama is supposed to be the candidate that will take us out of the ideological battles of the 1960s, but Obama's invocation of hope recalls not just the optimism offered by John F. Kennedy, but also the brutal dashing of those hopes later on in the decade.  There's something disheartening about imagining hope using a 47-year-old ideal. Finally, John F. Kennedy isn't the only specter in Obama's candidacy invokes, for there's another famous Illinois politician whose life story serves as a cautionary tale.  I hope that Obama turns out to be John F. Kennedy and not Adlai Stevenson.

Speaking in Tongues

Part of life in an uncontested blue state like Illinois is that you're reduced to being a spectator in the national political process until Election Day. So at this point I can do little more than root for Barack Obama to win. His victory in Iowa means everything or nothing at all, depending on which pundit you listen to, but it could turn out that I'll be able to vote for a Democratic candidate for president without ambivalence for the first time since 1992.

Meanwhile, the cornpone populist minister from Arkansas won the Republican caucus. With the exception of John McCain, all of the messages the Republican candidates sent were disturbing, and Huckabee's may be the most disturbing of all. All the GOP candidates are running away from the current incumbent, but they're sneaking some of Bush's rhetoric in the back door. Huckabee seems to have laid claim to Bush's rhetorical strategy of speaking in barely veiled allegorical terms to Evangelical Christians. This approach is Bush's only sophisticated form of public address. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg spots the same strategy in Huckabee:

Huckabee's sensational rise has been made possible by his success, so far, at speaking in tongues that evangelicals and non-evangelicals understand differently. "I always tell the story of a lady who asked me, was I a narrow-minded Baptist who thinks only Baptists go to Heaven?" he likes to say. "And I told her, 'No, ma'am, I'm more narrow than that. I don't think all the Baptists are going to make it, either.' " Does he mean "Let's not take this eternal damnation stuff so darn seriously"? Or is it "Everybody roasts in Hell except selected evangelicals"?

This interpretive ambiguity, as subtle and complex as anything in T.S. Eliot, is enough to catapult someone into the presidency, as we've learned. The thought that we'd get another fundamentalist Christian president--even after the current one proved to be a corrupt, delusional moron--is unsettling, to say the least. The rhetorical first cousin of speaking in tongues is bullshitting, and for the last seven years we've been saddled with a world-historical bullshitter.

But listen to Obama's speech last night:

You have done what the cynics said we couldn't do. You came together as Democrats, Republicans and independents to stand up and say that we are one nation, we are one people and our time for change has come.

For liberals, "change" is a code word for running the entire Bush-Cheney crew out of Washington and back to Texas--preferably back to a federal prison in Texas, or better yet, some sort of divine retribution. (Believing in God isn't a prerequisite for holding this desire.) Presidential candidates are famous for speaking in vague generalities so that we may fill in the details with our own hopes and desires. Most of what the Democrats are saying is meant to be interpreted as "let's erase the last eight years." It's just another allegory.

What sets Obama apart, though, is that his message is so asymmetrical. The Republican correlate to "change" is "so far so good on the domestic terrorism front." There's a whole army of sinister operatives ready to pounce if Clinton emerges as the front runner, but the right has no counter message for an Obama candidacy. The few attacks I've heard on him from conservatives have been laughably off the mark. Maybe Obama's free ride so far reflects the current state of prejudice in which it's OK to be misogynistic but not racist. Or maybe when Obama says "our time for change has come," he's actually tapping into a desire for change in the electorate at large.

Cheney's Law

Last night's Frontline documentary "Cheney's Law" was a chronicle of horrors, to be sure, but there were no new revelations about the Vice President's implacable assault on the Constitution. The dramatic tension of the documentary was provided by Jack Goldsmith, a conservative law professor from the University of Chicago who served, briefly, as the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel before he ran into the David Addington buzz saw. It was Goldsmith's legal analysis that set off the near-palace coup surrounding the renewal of the warrantless wiretapping program. By demonstrating how Cheney's legal team had stepped well beyond conservative legal principles--well beyond any recognizable legal principles--Goldsmith revealed how monadic, not to mention fanatic, Cheney's claims for executive privilege have become.

Cheney's version of events was provided by a series of black and white photographs of the vice president in which he displays his entire emotional range, conveyed in exactly two expressions: the beady-eyed stare of the monomaniac, and the cagey smile of a man who has the entire nation bugged. David Addington, Cheney's Cardinal Richelieu, looks as innocuous as a stamp collector. Strung together in a narrative, Cheney's machinations enhancing presidential power are mortifying, but the documentary didn't do much to solve the essential mystery of the man. "Cheney's Law" doesn't convey the grandeur of his secrecy and fanaticism, or why the issue of executive power, which he can never enjoy directly, became his reason for being. While there are plenty of logical explanations for the policies of the Bush Administration, none to them, to my mind, satisfactorily explain the vehemence of Bush and Cheney's beliefs or the magnitude of their failures. It seems that the more we know about what goes on inside the Administration, the more baffling it appears.

Sprezzatura

My son and I are home with stomach flu, so I'm unable to process anything more complicated than Word Girl. Here are some links picking up on stuff I've been writing about recently:

Steven Clemons says we're not going to attack Iran, despite the current buzz in Washington that indicates we are. Bush is gun shy, for once, and he's dispatched Condi to find a third way between an aerial attack and "appeasement." Meanwhile, Cheney is plotting to force Bush's hand into an attack. Clemons' article is a rare account of Bush actually learning from his mistakes.

I'd rather see Stephen Greenblatt write more directly on Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, but he invokes the Renaissance concept of sprezzatura (nonchalance) in a highly personal reflection on sports, writing, and his own entry into college, complete with a sly contrast to Kaavya Viswanathan's more mercenary approach to making one's way through Harvard.

Salman Rushdie, with uncharacteristic brevity, crashed the National Book Critics Circle symposium on the future of book reviews and proclaimed, "I think it's rather unfortunate that some of the coverage tries to pitch print reviewing against the new media. I think they complement each other very well." By the way, the NBCC event shows that the newspapers v. blogs debate remains stuck in place.

Why didn't this collection stay home? It could have gone in the new Renzo Piano addition to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Marketing a War with Iran

I'm back from a weekend in still drought-ridden Wisconsin. Now that we're past Labor Day I can look forward to a Cubs meltdown and the Bears fumbling and stumbling their way through another season. I'm also looking forward to the marketing campaigns for the next generation of iPods and the next generation of interventionist disaster: a war with Iran.

According to the blog Informed Comment Global Affairs, a spin off of Juan Cole's important blog Informed Comment, this week the Bush administration will begin its marketing campaign for an attack on Iran. Barnett Rubin reports that a friend "who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient" that a source in "one of the leading neo-conservative institutions" has been told

They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

The third hand account, complete with a comma splice, warrants skepticism. Rubin has some other circumstantial evidence of new preparations for a war with Iran, but he's skeptical about the reports as well. After all, there have been alarmist reports about an impending attack on Iran before. (I heard about one that was supposed to occur just before the November 2006 elections, and another that was to take place last spring.) Besides, the war talk could be a bluff designed to increase pressure on the Iranian government to discontinue its nuclear weapons program. Rubin writes,

I hesitated before posting this. I don't want to spread alarmist rumors. I don't want to lessen the pressure on the Ahmadinejad government in Tehran. But there are too many signs of another irresponsible military adventure from the Cheney-Bush administration for me just to dismiss these reports.

It seems hard to believe that the Bush administration honestly believes it has the political capital to launch an attack on Iran. It's even more difficult to believe that the administration believes it has the troops to invade Iran if the Air Force bombing campaign doesn't work. (From what I've read, the Air Force has assured Cheney that they can destroy Iran's nuclear capability with precise bombing--the generals refused Cheney's request for a nuclear bombing option--but the Army and the Marines are dubious about the plan, since they're the ones who will have to clean up the Air Force's mess.) The American military will start running out of ground troops this spring, and public patience with combat in the Middle East has already run out. Finally, the whole marketing campaign metaphor should have been discredited after the Iraq war. Maybe Fox and the rest of the conservative press will finally do a public service and refuse to sign up for this particular campaign.

Caught in the Matrix of the Housing Bubble

Cult films are a distinctive feature of post-modern cinema. In an earlier post I argued that Napoleon Dynamite is a recent example of the phenomenon. One could list others, of course, but one in particular stands out: the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix. The cult film phenomenon involves, among other things, appropriating a public text for private, yet still shared, means, sometimes far beyond what the original filmmakers may have envisioned. The Matrix has inspired all kinds of speculation on the nature of reality--some of it interesting, some of it silly. The filmmakers themselves supposedly based the series on a misreading of a philosopher with a cult following, Michel Foucault.

Now the Matrix as metaphysics idea has come full circle. John Tierney reports in today's New York Times on an Oxford philosophy professor named Nick Bostrom who argues there's a good chance that we may be living in a computer simulation. Tierney explains,

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

Bostrom's theory is unprovable, but Tierney goes so far as to claim he has a "gut feeling" there's a better than 20% chance that our world is just a computer simulation. I guess it takes a more sensitive gut to detect this possibility than the one I have, because my gut has no inkings about being trapped in a computer simulation.

It's probably just a coincidence that Tierney raises the virtual world question during a financial crisis in which vast sums of money were made based on the fiction that the housing market would expand well past Americans' means to pay for housing. Still, if one wants to conduct a thought experiment about the nature of reality, then this is the direction I'd head toward.

Although Foucault is well known for his musings on the constructed nature of reality, Jean Baudrillard is our most systematic theorist of simulated worlds. His most famous concept is the simulacrum, i.e., the endless repetition of copies with no originals. Contemporary culture, according to Baudrillard, consists of the free exchange of signs without any referents. In earlier stages of Western culture the place of the referent was occupied by nature--raw materials and direct industrial production (e.g., turning raw rubber into tires), as well as artisan and craft modes of production. Now cultural products refer to nothing more than the circulation of commodities in late capitalism.

The recent housing boom saw a new phenomenon: flipping a house. At one time a private home was a middle class person's last tie to a specific territory, a small, but very specific slice of nature. During the housing boom the home became just another commodity to be bought and sold on a global scale. The "California Dream" is now the LA housing market, where one's mortgage starts off as a signed contract but quickly ends up as a chit in some vast investment portfolio in New York, Paris, Frankfurt, or Tokyo. The tangible reality of the home, where Bachelard tells us houses our daydreams, is like the bodies suspended in liquid in The Matrix: just a husk, its intrinsic value is determined in some obscure and complex marketplace few people truly understand. Life in today's real estate market is a gut-wrenching experience that may very well account for the intuitive sense that somebody out there is controlling our lives, and doesn't really care what happens so long as the lindens pile up.

The Body Politic

Ready to be irritated by anything their new conservative president does, the French Left is up in arms over Nicolas Sarkozy's jogging--in an NYPD tee shirt, no less. Libération wondered aloud, “Is jogging right wing?” Commentators on the Left have declared not only is jogging right wing, it's also un-French and, therefore, pro-American. François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Charles de Gaulle, Marshall Pétain--all non-joggers. According to this view, jogging is about bodily control, a fascistic celebration of the body beautiful and the triumph of the will. Media coverage of Sarkozy's workouts are hypnotizing the French public. Walking is a more dignified and properly French activity. Walking is ruminative. Never mind that the young Jean-Paul Sartre worked out while studying Heidegger; Frenchmen should never break a sweat, soccer players excepted.

The French Left should be careful: Fretting over the king's body is a leftover from monarchist times. The current fuss over President Sarkozy's jogging says more about the impoverishment of left-wing political discourse than it does about the politics of running. The American Right was in a similar position when Bill Clinton went jogging early in his administration. Right-wingers were transfixed by Clinton's chunky thighs chugging around Washington. Eventually, the Right moved on to a fascination with other presidential body parts. 

The question of which is more liberal, walking or jogging, is a false choice. It is perfectly possible to jog in the morning and take a ruminative walk in the afternoon. I do it all the time. Is jogging while listening to the Clash and Rage Against the Machine still right wing?

The real question is the role of the body in politics. Historically, this has been an extremely tangled issue. Walter Benjamin's flâneur, a nineteenth-century dandy who walked the streets of Paris at a leisurely pace, cut through the hectic urban masses, resisting getting incorporated into some alien identity. In this sense, flâneurie is inherently political, but in his foppishness (flâneurs were known to lead turtles on leashes) and his resistance to the collective, his politics were ambiguous. Benjamin's thoughts on the body in politics don't end with the flâneur. In his writings on surrealism Benjamin declared, "The collective is a body, too." The collective body is constructed out of images, which are, in Benjamin's formulation, material things. Actual bodies are things to be organized into higher social forms. Mikhail Bakhtin, by contrast, based a leftist politics on a body in all its gross particularly. The drinking, farting body in the carnival (and the sweating jogger gasping for air?) undermined the polarities of authority.

Whether running or walking the body is a slippery thing, politically. All I know is that I'm going to get a Libération tee shirt so I can go jogging in it.

The Dictatorship of No Alternatives

This past weekend I was talking to a neighbor who is a commercial real estate agent. I asked him how business was. He just shook his head. It had been a weird first quarter, following a weird 2006. He went on to say there was lots of money available to buy real estate. After 9/11 the big-money investors had taken their money out of equities and put it into real estate, and there were still well-heeled buyers and sellers in the marketplace. The problem was that no one was leasing. Retail and services were stagnant because people didn't have much discretionary money to spend.

I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that the state of the commercial real estate market is a harbinger of some really bad things to come. Billions in capital float around looking for a place to rest while people don't have the discretionary income to buy books or CDs. This economic imbalance is indicative of a time in which labor is taxed but capital is not, leading to an uneven distribution of wealth the US has not seen for a century, maybe ever. Paul Krugman has some depressing statistics about the astonishing pay inflation at the very top of the American economic order. In 1894 John D. Rockefeller, then the richest man in the country, made $1.25 million, or about 7,000 times the average per capita income in the United States at the time. In 2006 James Simons, a hedge fund manager, earned $1.7 billion, more than 38,000 times the current average income. Two other hedge fund managers pulled in more a billion dollars in income. Combined the top 25 made $14 billion.

So what to do about this situation, besides becoming a hedge fund manager? Michael Bérubé looks at Roberto Mangabeira Unger's What Should the Left Propose? for answers, and doesn't really find any. Although only recently translated and published in the US, Unger's book is over ten years old, but many of his observations still hold true. He declares,

In no democracy, rich or poor, has the position of labor—its share of national income, its degree of internal segmentation, its level of organized power, influence, and security—degenerated more dramatically over the last forty years than in the United States.

Unger calls global free trade, which is supposed to float all boats, a "program of permanent insecurity."  But rather than rein in the global economy, an unlikely prospect, Unger proposes another wildly impractical but nevertheless intriguing proposal, with just enough sense of anarchy to satisfy class resentment. Unger thinks everyone--James Simons and the poor guy sweeping up at Quizno's--should be subjected to unmediated fury of a radically open marketplace. That's the only way we can escape the Dictatorship of No Alternatives under which we all live. Bérubé describes Unger's proposal as a  means to make

market dynamics more dynamic than even the most exuberant cybercapitalist has yet imagined, in order “to produce a series of repeated breakthroughs in the constraints on economic growth.” At the same time, we will set about creating a form of “high-energy democratic politics” that “requires a sustained and organized heightening of the level of civil engagement,” including plebiscites and other instruments of direct democracy that will override fusty old constitutional strictures and the friction-generating effects of that pesky Madisonian separation of powers.

It's here that Unger's postmodern anarchism begins to show its age. As Bérubé points out, in 2006 we have good reason to be chary of a presidential administration that shares Unger's disdain for "the cult of the Constitution." Besides, all that dynamic change is exhausting. As Bérubé puts it, "it doesn’t require too much imagination to suppose that some people, offered the opportunity to live a big life transfigured by ambition, surprise, and struggle, might prefer simply to have a decent, stable job, health care, a couple of weeks’ vacation to go fishing, and a reliable pension fund that will allow them to retire and spend some time with the grandkids."

Yes to all that, but without the wiretaps. However, if our top-heavy economy starts to teeter--2007 is the year it could happen, or so say the more pessimistic economists--Unger's utopian Permanent Change could lead to Permanent Vacation for a lot of hapless souls. Maybe when the banks foreclose on our mortgages we can sleep in all those empty office buildings. See? The possibilities are opening up already.

Presidential Books

I returned home early Sunday evening after enjoying a beautiful spring day to find that Michiko Kakutani  had read the books written (more or less) by all the major presidential candidates. At first I felt an outpouring of pity for her until I realized that she probably read them now before anyone dropped out or, worse, joined the campaign.

As much as I'd like to hasten the incumbent out of office, it's simply too early to get emotionally and cognitively invested in the 2008 presidential race. I don't need an entire year and a half to make up my mind about who I'm going to vote for. Besides, with the extended campaign season I'm concerned that the candidates I like will flame out, say something irrevocably stupid, or lose to someone with a better long-term strategy. I'm also worried that none of the current field of candidates will be elected, that the democratic process will break down like it did in 2000 and Newt Gingrich will somehow become president. Or Dick Cheney will seize power in a putsch.

Until now I've never been seriously tempted to read a book by a presidential candidate. Besides political junkies and hapless book reviewers, who reads them? I once read a biographer of a billionaire who observed that extremely wealthy people were shallow and uninteresting. Usually the only interesting thing they've ever done is accumulate piles of money. I think most high-level politicians are the same way. Take away some electoral successes and what would you have left of Bush I or II? Lyndon Johnson? Calvin Coolidge? No one has found any evidence of an interior life in Ronald Reagan. No one wants to find the interior life of Richard Nixon. The only book-length biography of a president I've read is David McCullough's John Adams, and even Adams was surrounded by more interesting people than he was--his wife, for instance. As for the current crop of candidates, none of them are literary in any meaningful sense. None of them will quote Aeschylus, Emerson and Camus like Robert F. Kennedy used to, although Barack Obama has read Frantz Fenon and at one time ran around with "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."

At this point there are only three candidates in my personal primary: Obama (definitely the front runner, but see the worries expressed above), Clinton, and Edwards. My opinions of them are vague and insufficiently informed. Perhaps I should read a candidate's book or two, if only to avoid being surprised when they don't turn out to be what I'd been led to expect from the contrived process by which we choose the most powerful person on earth.  But the weather is finally turning nice, and right now I've got more urgent matters to worry about, like the Cubs.  As for doing my duty as a citizen and becoming more informed about the 2008 presidential candidates, I have plenty of time.

Virginia Tech and the Exhibition of Madness

The media coverage of the mass killings at Virginia Tech is following a depressingly familiar narrative. The first 24 hours were a mystery novel: who did it? Clues pointed to an Asian male around 19 years old. Someone who'd just arrived in the United States. From China, someone suggested. The solution to the whodunit mystery turned out to be more disturbing than the original speculation, which revolved around the image of a deranged foreigner. The accused killer is a 23-year-old senior named Cho Seung Hui. He'd come to the US as a grade schooler. He'd grown up in Virginia. On his arm he had scrawled the gnomic message "Ismail Ax."

And he was an English major. This shouldn't be so shocking, but it is to someone who still is, in a way, an English major. No discipline, of course, is any more or less prone to attracting psychopathic weirdos, but horrific nature of Cho's act is utterly contrary to the humanist tradition in which literary studies fits. This morning Matt Lauer interviewed Cho's poor creative writing professor, Lucinda Roy, on The Today Show. She had to read his deranged writings. She responded humanely but ineffectually. In keeping with The Today Show's lurid and mawkish approach to tragedies large and small, Lauer insisted on quoting from a play Cho had written--"Dick must die" and rantings along those lines--a passage that could have been pulled from a Mamet play. Naturally Cho isn't going to be rewriting The Sound of Music in his dorm room with a Glock in his desk drawer. I'm curious about what he read. What kind of literature speaks to a mind like Cho's? Had he read that great tome of madness and unreason, Mody-Dick?

Now that we know the identity of the purported killer, we're in the display of madness stage of the narrative. Today's edition of the Chicago Tribune carries the banner headline "A Monster Revealed." Two memes run through the accompanying story and most of the others I've seen so far in the press: implied rebukes of authorities for missing the warning signs and detailed recreations of Cho's physical appearance and his actions on April 16. Michel Foucault would have recognized both. In his newly retranslated (and newly controversial, judging from the reaction to my earlier post and commentaries from others) History of Reason Foucault discusses the exhibition of inmates European asylums, most famously Bedlam Hospital in London.  These exhibitions, Foucault wrote, "assigned to . . . madness a special sign: not that of sickness, but that of glorified scandal." In the eighteenth century "[m]adness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since suppressed."

According to Foucault the exhibition of madness was an attempt to control and ultimately banish unreason from civilization. He defines unreason as "reason dazzled," the experience of being overwhelmed by a contrary and repressed variety of reason. The Enlightenment banished unreason from everything but its art and literature--Moby-Dick, for instance. Not surprisingly, unreason can't remain repressed for long, and its reappearance still fascinates and horrifies us. That this violence broke out at a technical institution--in the engineer building, no less--is telling. The exhibition of madness allows us to locate the derangement of reason in other people. Otherwise, we might find it lurking within ourselves.

Iago at Number One Observatory Circle

I remember the first time I saw Bill Clinton interviewed after his successor came to power. I was struck by the contrast between Clinton's energetic yet thoughtful responses and the inarticulate buffoon who currently occupies the office of president. Allegedly a prolific reader--he even read Camus' The Stranger--it's hard to think of a single instance in which an utterance or act by Bush that reflects his reading. Clinton, for all his wonkiness, is a serious student of literature. Stephen Greenblatt tells a story of meeting Bill Clinton after a poetry evening at the White House.

I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President's hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. "Mr. President," I said, sticking out my hand, "don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?" Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, "I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object."

Greenblatt is taken aback by "the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth's anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland's legitimate ruler." Forever the English professor, Greenblatt submits the president to a pop quiz, and ever the star pupil, Clinton obligingly delivers 10 lines from Macbeth.

Greenblatt goes on the explicate Shakespeare's meditations on the ethics of power, but without drawing any explicit connections back to the current administration. Greenblatt observes that "in Shakespeare no character with a clear moral vision has a will to power and, conversely, no character with a strong desire to rule over others has an ethically adequate object." All the characters who lust for power have dubious motives (think of the Macbeths, Richard III, Goneril, Regan, Fortinbras, Henry V) and generally bring misery upon themselves and others. Shakespeare himself favored the characters who tip-toed around power: Richard II, Antony, Coriolanus, Lear. They generally come to bad ends as well.

Clinton's fall from grace was Shakespearean, but Clinton himself doesn't neatly correspond to a specific character in Shakespeare. The same could be said for Bush, albeit for different reasons. Bush is too shallow and one-dimensional a political figure to be called Shakespearean at all. King Lear is perhaps the closest analogy if one regards the play as a tragedy of delusion and ineptitude. Greenblatt doesn't discuss Iago, but Iago's "motiveless malignancy," as Coleridge described it, lacks an ethical object of any kind, let alone an adequate one. This describes Dick Cheney, who I'm convinced is a sociopath. (I also think he would have made an excellent Nazi.)  Cheney's role in the Bush administration--to Bush himself--is the same as Iago's role in relation to Othello. Cheney and Iago are anti-therapists; they disintegrate the personalities of those they serve, whispering outrageous falsities in the ears of those who have less power than they think they do. Through the subtlest of means, the anti-therapist reverses the self-image of the powerful man to the point of self-annihilation. Othello comes to assimilate Iago's relentless animal imagery. At the end of the play, Othello says as he plunges a knife into himself, "I took by the throat the circumcised dog,/And smote him, thus." One shudders to imagine what Cheney's ministrations will end up doing to Bush, not to mention the rest of us.

Crazy

One of the most interesting aspects of keeping a blog is watching a story as it develops over time. Last summer I noticed a distinct change in tone in the reporting and commentary about the Iraq War. As the weather got increasingly hot, commentary on the Iraq War turned gloomy and despairing as more and more writers came to the conclusion that, for all practical purposes, the war was lost. The tipping point, at least in my reading, was Thomas Friedman's August 4, 2006 NYT column "Time for Plan B," which opened, "It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war."

Now that the winter has turned bitterly cold and snowy, the punditry is gloomily reading the tea leaves for another disheartening and potentially catastrophic development: a war with Iran. "Scary Movie 2," as Paul Krugman calls the scenario, is based on the premise that whenever George Bush says he isn't planning a war, you can be certain he is. As Karen DeYoung reported in yesterday's Washington Post, "Much as the Vietnam Syndrome dogged the foreign and military policies of a generation of U.S. presidents, the Iraq Syndrome has become an ever-present undercurrent in Washington. 'Everyone is reliving the whole thing again in everything we do,' said one administration official." Determined not to be taken in again, the press openly scoffed at the Pentagon's claims of Iranian meddling in Iraq presented in Monday's strange news conference in Baghdad. A New York Times editorial archly observed, "The extraordinary briefing in the Green Zone pointed a finger but it wavered." Fox News is once again being monitored for credulous reporting, and people are eying The Weekly Standard with renewed trepidation for clues about the demented state of the Neocons.

The origin of the current speculation about an impending war with Iran is Seymour Hersh's January 2005 New Yorker article "The Coming War" about Pentagon planning for an attack on Iran. Last fall there were rumors of an "October surprise" to save the Republican majority in Congress when it was reported that a second aircraft carrier was being dispatched to the Persian Gulf  by October 31. That the hurried deployment of the aircraft carrier turned out to be true has only fueled more connect-the-dots reporting on an impending US attack on Iran. Since Monday's Baghdad briefing The Nation has been sounding the alarm bells.  Tom Engelhardt purports to say aloud what everyone in the know is saying behind closed doors:

Is there anybody in official Washington--other than our President, Vice President, the Vice President's secretive imperial staff, assorted neocon supporters, and associated right-wing think tanks--who isn't sweating blood, popping pills, and wondering what in the world to do about our delusional leaders?

Engelhardt's breathless warnings about a "bloodcurdling scenario" about to play out in Iran could just be dismissed as another left-wing polemic, and despite his dark warnings about a possible nuclear attack on Iran, Hersh has already reported that that option is off the table. But The Nation was one of the few print media outlets that dared to challenge the assumptions about the build up to the Iraq War, and Engelhardt is only repeating two tropes that currently shape the discussion about Iran: One is the Iraq Syndrome, which could be summed up as "believe the worst when Bush and Cheney are involved." The second trope is the darkest of all: that Bush and Cheney are insane. Adjectives like  "kamikaze," "delusional," "beyond delusional," and plain old "crazy" are beginning are beginning to pop up. Cheney's now infamous CNN interview, which prompted Illinois Senator Dick Durbin to call Cheney delusional on the Senate floor, is exhibit one for the case that the Bush administration has lost its mind and is therefore capable of pulling the trigger on Iran. Administration equivocations on the evidence concerning Iranian IED's in Iraq haven't reassured anyone.

I've not yet seen anyone in the press declare we're going to attack Iran.  Circumstantial evidence of  an impending American attack continues to be documented, but watch for fretting about the metal state of Bush and Cheney in the media, especially toward the political center. One bellwether is Thomas Friedman, and he's still trying to appeal to reason, reminding us Iran "helped the U.S. defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and replace it with a pro-U.S. elected alliance of moderate Muslims." But if a centrist figure like Friedman starts publishing Maureen Dowd-like columns entitled "Daffy Does Doom," watch for a consensus on the insanity of Bush and Cheney to emerge. At that point, it truly will be a scary movie.

Same as the Old Boss

Maybe my perspective on these matters is a bit skewed--after all, I live in Oak Park, IL, where people have Impeach Bush bumper stickers on their baby strollers--but I thought the November elections were a sign that some sort of communicative rationality was being restored to American political discourse. But the spirit of bipartisanship in Washington lasted for two beats of Dick Cheney's heart--about an hour. The opportunity for a free and realistic discussion about Iraq seems to have passed. We'll never agree on a face-saving explanation for our withdrawal from Iraq while it's in flames. ("Now that the Iraqi Olympic team can compete without fear of getting shot by Saddam Hussein's son Uzi or whatever his name was, it was all worth it as far as I'm concerned.") Bush is busy dismissing every reasonable proposal to get American troops out of the way of the Iraqi civil war--which, by the way, doesn't even seem orderly enough to be a civil war. Call it anarchy aspiring to the condition of a civil war.

In the past week or so a distinct tone of despair has emerged in the punditry. Fred Kaplan is predicting that the Iraq Study Group's "blue-ribbon salvage job" will fail as soon as it's made public. Thomas Freidman, an early if qualified supporter of the war, is wagging his finger at Bush, declaring the US has to either get out now or invade Iraq all over again. Yesterday at Salon Tim Grieve worked himself into such a frenzy cranking out posts denouncing the war that I notice he's been replaced today. I worry that Grieve has been hospitalized. As for the hard-core conservatives, I don't read them, but I hear that Ann Colter is running away from the Iraq war as fast as her nicotine-charred lungs will allow. Rush Limbaugh seems to be keeping close to his Dittohead posse these days. William Kristol continues to publish advice meant for Bush, but the president isn't listening to him, either.

Now Beirut is threatening to become the new Baghdad. As David Ignatius says, "That's how bad it is right now in the Middle East -- when the Palestinian morass is regarded as a bright spot." With the American people clamoring for change, the White House will be serving Red Hat Box Mascarpone Cake on Christmas.

The Netherlands after Theo van Gogh

Today is election day in the Netherlands, and while Americans don't necessarily pay any attention to our own elections, the Dutch elections are worth keeping a wary eye on, if only as a means to gage the mood in Europe, especially after the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Immigration issues have dominated the debate; as recently as last Friday the Dutch cabinet backed a proposal to ban Muslim face-covering clothing, including the burqa. The conservative Christian Democrats, led by Jan Peter Balkenende, are expected to emerge as the largest party, with the Socialist Party expected to attract a larger portion of the liberal vote. However, as Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber informs us, there are some far-right parties participating in the election. They're hoping to cash in on the anti-Muslim sentiment festering since the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. Robeyns writes,

In general Dutch politics has moved to the right; even prominent members of center-right parties are making statements which would be considered racist or discriminatory only a decade ago; the general political climate has become much more anti-immigrant and anti-Islam.

For Dutch voters who are also cranky about the treatment of animals, there's the Partiv voor  de  Dieren (Party for the Animals), a well-financed party dedicated to defending the interests of animals. According to Robeyns, they've "received the support from several well-known Dutch writers, such as Harry Mulisch." You'd think that a party with such literary support could come up with a name that won't prompt snickering from the mobs of Brits and Americans coming over for the legal drugs.

Update, 5:40 PM CST: How Europe has faded from the American political consciousness; the American press is ignoring this election, focusing instead on weeping Lebanese. According to the BBC,  the Party for the Animals landed a pair of seats in the Dutch parliament, the first animal welfare party in Europe to win representation in a national legislature. Labour and the Socialists split the left vote, and the ruling Christian Democrats got 41 seats, not nearly enough to control the 150-seat parliament by themselves. There's talk of a righty-lefty "monster" coalition. No word on whether the Party for the Animals will be included.

Election Hangover

I'm still a little groggy this morning from yesterday's exertions in civil responsibility. After working all day I stopped off at the polling station on my way home. I got to use a new touch-screen machine, which only slightly eased the arduous task of clicking "yes" to the retention question for what seemed to be 700 Cook County judges. I clicked "yes" for every last one except for the guys with nicknames. I have a rule against voting for a candidate with a nickname on the ballot--it's surprising how often they sound like jail names. Then I was presented with a decision on the fate of the Iraq War. Oak Park had an annoying resolution calling for the "immediate and orderly" withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. I'm against the war, but I wasn't pleased to be presented with a resolution--non-binding, I'm assuming--worded in this way. I've decided an orderly withdrawal is best, but I'm still trying to make up my mind on a timetable. Why was an immediate withdrawal my only choice?

This morning I'm having a hard time keeping up with all the Democratic gloating. So far my favorite commentary comes from . . .

A Round of Boos for the GOP

It's Election Day, finally, and soon I'll be trudging off to the polling station to vote for the lackluster list of candidates on our local ballot, including our sleazy governor Rod Blagojevich at left; I don't even get to vote for Tammy Duckworth because I'm a few municipalities away from her district. I'll have to check Wonkette for a good drinking game for watching the returns. Then, if it looks like the Republicans remain in power, continuing to run quite possibly the worst American government I'll know in my lifetime, I'll start throwing back the bourbon with abandon. Here's a few voices, two of them from surprising places, to remind us what's at stake today.

Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter says a Republican victory will spell the end of the Democratic Party and, therefore . . .

Our Wild Ride to November 7

I've been bracing myself for a vicious political season, and sure enough, it's happening. The Washington Post has a compendium of vicious political attack ads, most of them coming from the GOP. Taken together, they are a catalog of outrage. Admittedly, the story is a bit distorting; we don't usually see all the political fisticuffs that occur in obscure congressional districts in mid term elections. However, the outlandishness of the attack ads are a wonder to behold. They're like prying open the unconsciousness of right wing evangelicals and revealing the roiling fears and desires inside. Although there are exceptions, like Wisconsin, generally speaking the redder the state the more outlandish the smear tactics. Here in the Chicago area, the bluest part of blue state Illinois, we've been subjected to relatively sly attack ads accusing Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who lost both legs in combat, of cutting and running on the war. Who knows what kind of mayhem is going on downstate.

The most dismal aspect of these smear tactics is that they are explicitly aimed at the GOP's conservative base--the so-called values voters. The GOP has nothing to offer these voters except jacking up their fears, which is starting to look like an end in itself for everyone involved. The feckless and irresponsible Republican Congress can't promise anything useful for the republic with a straight face. His feeble exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the cruise ship Iraqi Freedom now over with, George Bush is running like a bride late for her wedding to the specter of gay marriage  in New Jersey. With its grotesque imaginings, anarchic disregard for the mores of middle class life, and general semiotic emptiness, this election is starting to look less like an exercise in democratic processes than a Halloween episode of The Simpsons.

Staying the Course

So the White House has reprogrammed the remote control device Bush was seen wearing during the 2004 presidential debates (now shrunken, like the iPod) to give a little electrical shock every time the phrase "stay the course" pops into the presidential head. Now Bush talks blandly about "timetables" in Iraq, implying some sort of draw down of American troops in the near future, a plan long advocated by Democrats and others exasperated by Bush's deluded stubbornness. Freed from the constraints of the metaphor he's used to characterize his Iraq strategy, you would think he'd use this morning's press conference to showcase some genuine changes in strategy. Or not.

The Kim Family Regime

Kim Jong Il has taken a break from his film producing career to develop a nuclear bomb. Both endevours have yielded curiously similar results: lots of publicity over substandard products. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Robert D. Kaplan has an excellent analysis of North Korea that contradicts several assertions made in the media discussion of yesterday's nuclear test. Among the points of common wisdom he debunks:

1. Kim Jong Il developed nukes to prevent the US from invading. According to Kaplan, Kim is a lot more worried about China taking over his country than the United States. While the Chinese are worried about a refugee crisis should Kim's regime collapse, "the Chinese have plans for the northern half of the Korean peninsula that do not include the 'Dear Leader.'" The Chinese like Kim's warm water ports, which are tantalizingly close to Russia.
2. Kim's missiles aren't any good, so he can't deliver a nuclear warhead to the US. The Taep’o-dong-2, or whatever it's called, experienced a widely-publicized test launch failure last July. However, the rocket failed "the point of maximum dynamic pressure—the same point where the space shuttle Challenger exploded." The North Koreans would seem to have all the other problems solved except this one, and it's evidently not an insurmountable challenge to fix.
3. North Korea is such a brainwashed nation that internal dissent is impossible. There are reports that outside the capital boys have organized into kind of Stalinist street gangs. Kaplan compares the situation to Albania before it melted down. Kaplan also says that the 100,000-man army is underfed and underpaid, suggesting that Kim may not be able to count on it to quell an internal rebellion.

The other interesting aspect of Kaplan's article is the caustic, at times surreal, language that has developed since the end of the Korean War. For instance, American soldiers refer to that war as the First Korean War and the KFR, the official name of North Korea, the "Kim Family Regime." (South Korea is pronounced "rock," for ROK.) Kaplan describes the game of symbolic one-upmanship the Koreans have engaged in over the years, including an inverse pissing game--two negotiating teams sat for 11 hours without a bathroom break. Needless to say, the Battle of the Bladders, as the incident is called, didn't yield any results.

The Black Helicopters Come for Helen Chenowith

Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber has an obituary of sorts of one of America's leading wingnuts, the incomparable and thoroughly deranged Helen Chenowith (R-Idaho). McLemee solemnly notes, "She died yesterday while bravely defying the nanny-state’s intrusive expectation that its charges wear seat belts."

Newsweek's Cover(s)

ThinkProgress notices that this week Newsweek varies its cover by region. When the leading topic of the week is the National Intelligence Estimate and its conclusion, which everyone already suspected, that Iraq has become a breeding ground of hardened terrorists, in the USA we get distractive pablum about Annie Leibowitz, a photographer of the famous and the vapid. The rest of the world gets a real news story entitled "Losing Afghanistan." It's as if Karl Rove called up the editor of Newsweek and cut a deal.