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Friday, October 28, 2016
Golden Oldies (4)
More tidbits from my
online notebook, which starting in 2005
became an archive and expansion of my blog.
On February 15, 2005, I wrote about North Korea's newly developed
nuclear weapons, and the American response:
North Korea's announcement that they possess nuclear weapons was
met first by some incoherent bluster by Condoleezza Rice, then by
a marginally more thoughtful U.S. threat: let's see if they can eat
their nukes. This is hardly America's first attempt to win hearts and
minds through empty stomachs. During the Korean War the U.S. bombed
dams to ravage Korean farmland. The many years of crippling economic
sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on North Korea ever since then
have resulted in chronic malnutrition and starvation. Now the idea
is to tighten up the sanctions even more. It's not really clear how
that can be done, but if it can be done one net effect will be to
punish a people even more for their misfortune in leaders. Another
will be to remind the world of how callous and cruel the U.S. can
be.
Following WWII the U.S. established a reputation as being a
gracious victor, but the stalemate at the end of the Korean War
left a sour taste in the mouth of American triumphalism. Since
then the U.S. has responded to each occasion where its will was
rejected with the petty vindictiveness of a sore loser: Korea,
Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq. After the shooting stopped in Korea
the U.S. proceded to punish North Korea with every weapon short
of invasion. North Korea's response was to internalize the threat,
developing a defensive posture that makes invasion a very risky
proposition and a deterence capability that could devastate the
South Korean city of Seoul, while occasionally making aggressive,
grimacing gestures. More recently, North Korea has made overtures
to normalize relations, especially with South Korea -- that seems
like the one way to escape America's death grip isolation. But the
obstacle to normalization is the U.S., especially the factions in
control of the Bush Administration -- for whom North Korea is most
useful as a threatening enemy: especially as a rationale for their
"missile defense" boondoggle, although one also suspects that they
find North Korea's threat useful for keeping Japan in line.
On February 4, 2005, I wrote a letter in response to an editorial
in the Eagle by a "Social Security reformer" named Jim Clark (you
may recall that Bush tried to redeem his "mandate" by wrecking Social
Security, a quest which didn't go over too well):
The big problem with the Social Security reform facts that
Jim Clark wants to get straight is that they aren't facts yet:
all he's done is speculate about the future. For instance, he
assumes that Americans in the future won't have the moral
backbone to increase taxes if necessary in order to fund the
Social Security needs of the old and infirm, even though ever
since the founding of Social Security they have done whatever
needed to be done. Moreover, he asserts that the federal
government of the future will default on its borrowing of
the excess taxes that workers have paid into Social Security
since the last time the politicians "fixed" it. If this is
true we have much more serious things to worry about than
pensions in the latter half of the 21st century. The only way
Social Security can go bankrupt is if the U.S. government goes
bankrupt first. Given Bush's tax cuts and exorbitant spending
on war and corporate welfare, the trade imbalance and the
sinking dollar -- that's the real threat we need to take
seriously.
From a post on May 29, 2005, on a couple Kansas politicians:
Todd Tiahrt, whose congressional district includes Wichita, was
one of twenty Republicans to vote against undoing the ethic rule changes
that Tom DeLay had tried to cover his sorry ass with. Tiahrt has spoken
repeatedly in defense of DeLay -- he even went so far as to reiterate
DeLay's threats against "activist judges" on the same day DeLay was
apologizing for them. Note the careful wording above to avoid saying
that Tiahrt represents Wichita. Tiahrt represents Boeing, but because
he occupies the district congressional seat, nobody represents Wichita.
I maintain that he's the worst congressman in the country, but on the
evidence of this vote he still has nineteen competitors.
Senator Sam Brownback has taken over the District of Columbia
committee in the Senate. His first act there was to make sure that
gay marriages performed in Massachusetts won't be recognized as legal
in D.C. While most of what Brownback does is obnoxious, please excuse
me if I take this one personally. I have a niece, born and raised
here in Wichita, who went to college in Boston, met a nice girl and
got married there. They've recently moved to D.C., where my niece
is studying law. Most people look at political issues as something
rather abstract, failing to recognize the real people impacted. This
is one case where I can fill in a real person, and in that context
Brownback is nothing but a priggish homewrecker.
In early May, 2005, I noted that I succumbed to my wife's entreaties
and started watching television with her, specifically the Jack Bauer
terrorism fantasy 24. Since then TV has become a nightly ritual.
I reckon you can date my mental rot from that date.
On May 27, 2015, I noted:
The Democrats caved in on Bush's activist judges. From day
one the Bush administration has sought to exempt itself from the
rule of law -- first attacking convenient international targets
like the World Court and treaties restricting their ability to
proliferate weapons of mass destruction, then moving on to the
PATRIOT ACT while trying to pack the court system with political
cronies. There's a word commonly used to describe people who try
so hard to evade the rule of law: criminals. However, in their
demagogic slander campaign against "activist judges" -- most of
whom meet any reasonable definition of conservative -- they're
moving beyond mere criminality. We need a fresher word for this,
but anyone who can recall history as far back as the 1920s will
know what I mean by the old-fashioned term: fascists.
On May 31, 2015, I published a piece in the Village Voice on
jazz labels. The
notebook adds a note on business models that I promised to return
to some day:
My first draft for the introduction sketched out an unconventional
economic theory. I discarded it (the draft, not the theory) after my
editor didn't understand it, but I hope to go back to it someday. I
regard businesses as important and vital, but I'm not an ideological
capitalist. I'm struck by the arbitrariness and inefficiency of most
businesses, and those same traits are in play here. But a couple of
things make jazz labels different from most widgetmakers: one is that
there's not a lot of money in the market, so there's not a lot to be
gained by being greedy; another is that success is mostly a matter of
survival -- it's more important not to lose a lot than to make a lot
when you can; a third is that most of the capitalists are in awe of
their labor; finally, in many cases the music is its own reward. By
and large, this sort of capitalism has served recorded jazz well.
Other businesses might learn something from their example.
On September 1, 2005, I wrote this in a letter about Katrina and
New Orleans:
I wouldn't say it was unnecessary, given that it was inevitable. Almost
happened a year ago, you should recall, but the storm was smaller, later
in the season, and turned north to hit the Florida panhandle instead.
Could happen next year. There will probably be 3-5 more hurricanes this
year, so it could even happen again this year. New Orleans wasn't designed
to be a death trap, but that's mostly because it wasn't designed at all.
It looked dry enough when the French set up camp there, but as the town
grew it expanded into more dubious terrain, plus it finally dawned on
people that the town was sinking. The levees and pumps and so forth were
added to protect what they had blundered into, and the whole system is
a stack of cards that at any moment could have been knocked down from
many angles. John McPhee covers some of this in The Control of Nature,
which is most of what I know, but not most of what there is to know. I
wonder what's going to happen to all that rain in Tennessee and Kentucky
when it drains down the Mississippi, but maybe that's manageable compared
to the usual annual floods. One thing that will become obvious over the
next few months is that flood in New Orleans is fundamentally different
from flood almost everywhere else. Right now Mississippi is getting as
much or more coverage, but they can start fixing things in Mississippi
now. New Orleans will be under water for months, and there's no telling
what will or won't be salvageable when they finally pump it dry. It will
be tempting not to rebuild it at all. One thing that's already started
is that everyone with an axe to grind is viewing this through their own
prism. Same thing happened after 9/11: I knew people who saw that as a
wake-up call to dismantle Israel's settlements or stop using foreign oil;
Eric Raymond thought the answer would be to let all airplane passengers
carry guns on board; dumber still, Bush invaded Iraq. No telling what all
is going to come out of this. Racism, for sure. The all-idiots team on
Fox news are already bitching about how federal disaster insurance lets
people think they're safe building in dangerous places, and complaining
about how people around the Great Lakes wind up paying for such stupidity.
Global warming has something to do with this. Unchecked, badly planned
development is another aspect. Long-term underinvestment in infrastructure
is another, and of course bankrupting the federal government doesn't help
in this regard -- and this shouldn't just include levees and roads and
such, the social and educational and economic deficits are coming due,
too. One thing this shows is that keeping 20% of America below the poverty
line packs its own hidden costs. People have already pointed out that the
helicopters and National Guard are all in Iraq -- don't you think that the
liberal argument about how we have to help poor Iraq (cynical as it is)
is going to wear thin pretty quick? The gasoline price stories seem to
have the jump on all else, probably because they were already a story,
so were easy to do. It's telling that Bush's first act was to suspend
air quality standards for gasoline blends. Stock market went up yesterday,
mostly people buying oil company stocks.
Several times this year I've written that one of the big issues of the
coming decades will be how governments respond to disasters. The Indian
Ocean tsunami was a distant example, but this (actually lesser) disaster
will make a more immediate impression on people here. It should scare
the hell out of us -- even if New Orleans is unique, much of the story
translates elsewhere. Marc Reisner has a sketch of a very possible CA
earthquake in A Dangerous Place, which makes for harrowing reading.
To the best of my knowledge, no one sketched out what could happen in
New Orleans, but that's no longer a question for the imagination.
On September 30, 2005, in the wake of Katrina, I wrote about
the Republican embrace of small and/or incompetent government:
I don't know about Norquist, but the key issue for some
Republican ideologues isn't the size of government so much as their wish
to break the poor, and for that matter the middle class, of the habit of
looking toward government to help solve their problems. Starving the
government beast is one way to do this, but more effective still is to
render government incompetent. Bush may have failed the straightforward
task of shrinking government, but he's done a bang-up job of making it
incompetent -- or at least making it useless to all but his political
backers. For Bush, this is a multi-pronged attack, but the main thrusts
are: 1) put political agents in charge everywhere, especially to maximize
the patronage potential of the government; 2) undermine the civil service
system and the unions; 3) muck up all regulatory processes; 4) start a
few wars to suck up resources; 5) pile extra security responsibilities
on top of all other government functions; 6) cut taxes on the rich,
driving the government ever deeper in debt; 7) push as much unfunded
work as possible onto state and local governments. In this framework,
greater debt does double duty: it provides discretionary rationale for
rejecting spending now, and it makes future spending more prohibitive.
The resulting government will, for most people, become so useless that
they won't mind drowning it in a bathtub. . . .
Ever since Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980, America has been in
denial, and the Republicans have capitalized on that denial by feeding
people fantasies. That worked because until lately it's never really
been tested. First Reagan then Bush put together improbable coalitions
of the rich and the foolish, and now that coalition is starting to
show signs of fracture. Polls show that Bush is losing support among
fringe groups like libertarians and racists. The more serious question
is whether, or when, the rich will abandon him. The rich have more to
lose than anyone -- do tax cuts matter so much that they're willing to
countenance such thoroughgoing corruption and incompetence?
On October 17, 2005, I wrote about Bush's ill-fated nomination of
Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:
The Miers nomination is one more instance of David Ogilvy's old
adage: "first rate people hire first rate people; second rate people
hire third rate people." Bush not only hires them. Once they've proven
their incompetence, he gives them medals and/or promotes them.
Also:
Saw a news story tonight on how Americans are feeling all tapped
out donating for disaster relief lately. The death toll in Pakistan's
earthquake has passed 50,000, but as Stalin might say, that's just a
statistic. Hurricane Stan killed more than a thousand in Central America,
but that's just a hurricane that missed the US -- someone else's problem.
(Unlike the remnants of Tropical Storm Tammy, which have caused extensive
flooding along the US East Coast. And while we're at it, note that
Hurricane Vince, the first V-name storm ever in the Atlantic, was also
the first hurricane on record to hit Spain. The world's disaster zones
are spreading.) There are so many lessons buried in this story that it's
hard even to list them. One is that disasters are not just nature --
they are compounded by human developments. One aspect of that is that
disasters in areas of widespread poverty take a much higher toll in
lives. (On the other hand, disasters in areas of wealth ring up higher
insurance claims.) Another is that private charity doesn't work very
well. Even in the best of circumstances it isn't very efficient, and
over time generosity wanes. But even governments are hard pressed to
respond to large disasters -- especially when they shunt much of their
spending off into military adventures, as the US and Pakistan have
done.
From October 22, 2005, I reminded readers I had opposed going to
war in Afghanistan in the first place (well, in 2001, although had
I given it any thought I would have opposed it in 1979 as well),
then noted:
Still, every now and then the US manages to do something really
stupid over there: bombing a caravan of tribal leaders, torturing
and killing a stray taxi driver, scoring a decisive firefight with
the Canadians, killing a NFL star wearing their own uniform. Last
week they pulled off another doozy: they burned a couple of killed
Taliban fighters, hoping to taunt their comrades into coming out to
be slaughtered. Even if such an act wasn't sacrilege to Muslims,
you'd think they'd remember how they felt when American contractors
were strung up and burned in Fallujah. Maybe if the whole thing
hadn't been videotaped they could have contained the outrage, but
unlike all those good old wars it's hard to hide what you're doing
these days. But the bigger problem lies in the mixed messages that
emanate from Bush, Rumsfeld, et al. (You'll remember the concept of
mixed messages from the 2004 presidential campaign -- it was what
Bush accused Kerry of propagating.) On the one hand, they tell us
that we're in Afghanistan and Iraq to help people achieve their
legitimate democratic aspirations with freedom and prosperity and
all the good things that go with it. On the other hand, they tell
us that our goal there is to kill or capture the enemy, which is
everyone who opposes us, an ever-increasing population. Soldiers
have a tough time reconciling these contradictions, but many of
them joined up out of blanket hatred of Arabs and Muslims, and
most have come to realize that shooting first is a policy that
the brass almost never comes down on -- even when it gets taped
and broadcast, as is the case this time.
On November 11, 2005 I wrote about Veterans Day:
But the problem with gunshy military and the trigger-happy
politicos in America isn't just about us. Most of the rest of
the world has learned to live perfectly well without war. The
best thing that ever happened to Germany and Japan was that
they lost WWII, and that they lost it bad enough they never
entertained the thought again. (As you'll recall, when Germany
lost WWI a bunch of hotheads like Hitler wanted another round,
which is what they got.) It's beginning to look like the worst
thing that ever happened to America was that we thought we won.
The truth is nobody wins wars, and while you may thankfully
beat some country that was worse than you at the start, in the
nasty brutality of war you become ever more like your enemies.
But war isn't obsolescent just because it's gone out of fashion
in places like once war-happy Europe. Even the soldiers in the
world's one undoubted superpower have lost their taste for war.
This even happened in the Soviet Union: the nation that almost
single-handedly beat back Nazi Germany was unable to quell a
bunch of goatherders and poppy-growers in Afghanistan. That
should have been a powerful lesson but we misread it. Just as
powerful states, like the Soviets in Afghanistan and the US in
Vietnam and Iraq, are increasingly unwilling to sacrifice to
conquer other people's lands, the people of those lands are
still willing to sacrifice to drive the invaders out. These
are the two sides of what Jonathan Schell has called "the
unconquerable world" -- the world we live in today, the one
that Bush ideologues cavalierly dismiss as "reality-based."
This would all be laughable if so many people didn't buy
into the myths. The right has the most at stake: their view of
human nature makes enemies inevitable, and their strategy for
dealing with those enemies is to intimidate them -- one of their
favorite maxims is Machiavelli's "it is better to be feared than
loved," so you can see how that leads to the dream of firing
lasers from space to instantly smite their foes. Insistence on
military might makes them look tough and spends money that
liberals might otherwise be tempted to waste on the poor. The
military and their business partners appreciate the dole. The
scam would end there, except that the right does indeed make
enemies, and once in a while one takes a pot shot at us. That's
when we finally wonder just how much defense all those billions
have bought us. But when you're talking a tightly organized cell
of fanatics with homemade bombs, you're talking something at a
scale the military can't operate at. Imagine a gnat on a rhino.
Imagine entering an Abrams tank in a Formula One race. Still
not close. There are only a few things the military knows how
to do. Incinerate a billion people in China? Hey, no problem.
Flush Osama bin Laden out of a cave in Afghanistan? No way. A
rational person would conclude that the military is useless for
that task and any other thing we might reasonably want to do,
and downright dangerous for all the things it can actually do.
But how tough can a politician look arguing the common sense
that $500 billion/year buys us nothing worthwhile? Especially
when so many soldiers have sacrificed so much to keep us free.
The problem with Veterans Day is that the veterans are the
designated cheerleaders for this kind of nonsense.
The tragedy of Veterans Day is that many veterans do get run
through the ringer. Something like 20% of the soldiers returning
from Iraq bring home physical and/or mental wounds. The casualty
rates for the brief and, from the American standpoint, almost
bloodless Desert Storm war were even higher -- of course, the
current war is likely to more than make up the difference as
time passes. It's ironic that despite all the photo ops and
propaganda ploys, despite the political instincts of many and
perhaps most of the soldiers, the antiwar movement is far more
concerned with their welfare than the people who cheered them
into war. That is largely because the antiwar movement is far
more concerned with everyone's welfare. But it's also a seductive
concern, in that many of us are tempted to bask in the warm glow
that the military and the politicos have spun around veterans.
That seduction, for instance, led many Democrats to the foolish
notion that a decorated veteran like John Kerry would be an
unassailable candidate against Bush's own dubious service record.
Kerry lost. So will the vets, unless we come to our senses and
figure a way out of these rhetorical traps. Veterans are little
different from anyone else, except that some have been put through
circumstances that no one should have to experience. They don't
need a day, and we don't do them justice by giving them one. Only
an end to war corrects the course. And that can't happen as long
as we glory in wars past, let alone present.
Might as well end this with my Pazz & Jop ballot, from
December 27, 2005:
- Amy Rigby: Little Fugitive (Signature Sounds) [15]
- Kanye West: Late Registration (Roc-A-Fella) [13]
- William Parker Quartet: Sound Unity (AUM Fidelity) [12]
- The Perceptionists: Black Dialogue (Definitive Jux) [10]
- Amadou & Mariam: Dimanche ŕ Bamako (Nonesuch) [10]
- FME: Cuts (Okka Disk) [10]
- Rachid Taha: Tékitoi (Wrasse) [8]
- Buck 65: This Right Here Is Buck 65 (V2) [8]
- Blueprint: 1988 (Rhymesayers) [8]
- Jerry Granelli: Sandhills Reunion (Songlines) [6]
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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