Git Them Terrorists, Gew Gew

I was rudely awakened the other night by the sound of something scuffling around my henhouse in the farmyard, so I threw on my robe, grabbed my shotgun, and headed outside to see what was the problem. Lo and behold, it was them dad-burn terrorists again messin' with my chickens! Well I larned them a few lessons. Not only did I round them up, but I trussed them up in my barn all sexy like, dressed 'em in lingerie, then rolled 'em around in dog shit while I diddled myself silly. Ha, those terrorists. They'll think twice about comin' 'round here agin. At least, I think they was terrorists. They sure enjoyed it like they was terrorists, if you get what I mean.

Addiction and Hope

President Bush said in the State of the Union address yesterday that America is addicted to oil. This is like the world's worst heroin addict blaming everyone else for his problem. Surely if there's ever been a poster-boy for the caption, "Addicted to Oil," it is George W. Bush. If Bush had said these words four years ago and actually meant them, there would never have been an Iraq war. If he means them now, then he's announcing that every single thing about his personal beliefs, his way of life, his governing philosophy, the friends and associates he has kept for life, is completely wrong. For these words to be true, Bush would have to immediately fire everyone in his administration. He would have to renounce his family fortune. He would have to become a totally different person. So we know that Bush doesn't really mean what he says, which shouldn't come as a surprise.

Of all the rich ironies in Bush's statement, I would like to focus on only one. During the speech Bush gave his impressions on the economy and he revealed that his is a pro-growth philosophy. Bush is a firm believer in the age-old capitalist principle of eternally expanding markets. For Bush, growth is the single condition which best defines national and economic well-being. So Bush is proud that the American economy has kept on growing during his Presidency. But, why has it been growing? What does it actually mean when "the economy" (which is an abstraction) "grows" (which is a metaphor?) The answer to that question deserves a great deal of further study but one very plausible, consensus answer might be "consumption." The American economy is powered by the American consumer. In fact, this is an understatement. Americans consume far, far more than we produce. The evidence of this is the trade deficit, which for the year 2005 is believed to have reached a record high of $710 billion. No other global economy has ever worked this way before. Industrialization, not consumption, has always been the key to global dominance. The current state of affairs - what appears to be American prosperity - is really a bubble sustained by foreign investors who accept less than market value for their investments solely for the privilege of being associated with the world's only economic superpower. So our current prosperity is really based on reputation more than performance. The economy continues to grow because Americans consume so much, and we can afford to do so because our habits are being financed by overseas investors in China, India, and Europe. This appears to be a classic case of what goes up must come down. Eventually, the economic balance will tilt back towards production, and when that happens, it will be the producing nations who find themselves in control.

But I want to get back to my point about the President's remarks. My point is that American prosperity as Bush defines it - his fideist belief in continuous, eternal growth - is precisely our addiction to oil. There is no difference. Back in 1973, America imported 35% of its oil. By 2003, that had increased to 55%. Where does Bush think American prosperity comes from? It comes from ever greater consumption of the world's energy supply. It comes from Americans driving more, eating more, buying more cars, building more homes, consuming more media, and fighting more wars than ever before. This truth is not lost on the energy industry. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, for one, chastised the President after his speech with this statement: “As bad as the policies proposed by President Bush are, the addiction rhetoric is much worse. President Bush might as well have said, ‘we're addicted to prosperity, comfort, and mobility, and I've got the policies to do something about it."

Yet oil is really not even the tip of the iceberg. If Bush really was serious about curbing America's dependence on foreign energy, he would have to tell us to change our entire way of life, our whole way of viewing ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. We would have to own fewer cars, build smaller homes, drive less, eat less, and stop fighting so many wars. This would cause a great deal of change in the world. For one thing, the American economy would slow considerably. (The American waistline, which has followed a parallel destiny, would also slim down!) The character of the economy would also change, as the balance would begin to tilt away from consumption and towards production. American life would be much less dominated by media, as we would have fewer dollars to spend on entertainment, and much more focused on craftsmanship. Doing more with less, the hallmark of virtue for millennia, would come back into style. Also, terrorists would stop attacking us, as our aggressive expansion into foreign lands would greatly decrease.

Taking the President at his word might seem like too much to ask, and the hypothetical sacrifice, too great to bear. Yet, there are no real alternatives. Our current lucky state of prosperity will not last for much longer. Reducing our consumption would be painful, but not as painful as the crisis which will inevitably befall us if we continue in our present path. America really is addicted, but it is an addiction to a base and corrupt set of values and a consequently unsustainable way of life. The President may not have meant his words truthfully, but he knows of what he speaks: every addict must eventually face the necessity of change. And every addict has the hope of grace.

Unsolved Spying Mysteries

We are all used to hearing some whoppers told by President Bush whenever he stands up to talk. I for one look forward to them. There is one Presidential lie in particular which weighed on my mind, however, as I heard it being told. It was the story, told repeatedly in recent weeks, about how the CIA failed to monitor or catch two of the 9/11 hijackers who were living in San Diego before the attacks. Bush says they could have been caught if the NSA had been allowed to wiretap them. This claim is untrue on a number of levels(a Bush specialty,) as 1) no existing law would have prevented the NSA from wiretapping the plotters with a court order as FISA requires, and 2) the CIA already knew of their existence yet failed to disclose it to the FBI. What is really suspicious about this story though is the unanswered question of why the Bush administration first began to circumvent the FISA court in the weeks after 9/11. I don't believe that it's because the President didn't understand the law (though he now pretends not to) or out of sheer willfulness just decided to ignore it. Rather, the only plausible explanation is that the President started asking for warrants which the FISA court rejected. This would be truly extraordinary since the court exists for the simple purpose of oversight and has hardly ever interfered with any request for a warrant which a President has requested. There would have to be a truly exceptional reason for the court to refuse such a request, especially in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. What could that reason be? The only possible explanation is that the President was requesting the power to spy on purely domestic individuals and organizations who were unrelated to any terrorist threat or national enemy. That means, most likely, peace groups, activists, and political opponents. Knowing what I know about the Bush administration, i.e. that it has no scruples and makes no difference between political opponents and enemies of the state, and given the tantalizingly unanswered questions about this case, I would be willing to bet that this is close to the truth.

The Twilight of Legal Abortion

The swearing-in of Samuel Alito as the newest Supreme Court justice was a somber day for abortion-rights advocates, some of whom spoke very eloquently about what is likely the end of the era of legal abortion. Here was Catholics for a Free Choice President Frances Kissling, as reported in Salon:

"In a way," she mused, "Roe was a socially transformative decision made in a country that was not socially transformed. In terms of social values, in terms of attitudes towards women, it was a profound anomaly. And it's not surviving. Whether it gets overturned or continues on the road to restriction, the concept of women as moral agents in relation to their own bodies is being rejected year by year by year.

"It was so far ahead of its time," she continued. "It was a visionary decision. The failure, the sad part of it, was that we weren't ready for it. The sad, sad, sad thing is society is less ready for it than it was 30 years ago, but that's not the fault of Roe." Roe, and the larger philosophy behind it -- that women are capable of moral agency -- Kissling said, "was never really realized. But maybe what one can say is that in history, 100 years from now, or 200 years from now, when Roe is looked at, it will be looked at as one of the most-forward-thinking, principled decisions for women. Whether it survives or not, it existed. And it will be looked at as an important moment."

Those are serious, heartfelt words which bear careful thinking about. Kissling is probably right that Roe really did raise the cultural consciousness of "a woman's body" in a way which had never been done before, and gave women unprecedented power (executive, veto-power) over their own bodies even when that autonomy collided with that of other, even less visible bodies. However, that wasn't entirely a good thing. The pornography boom of the 1970's also heightened the awareness of women's bodies, and demeaned them for the sake of the same principle of autonomy. As I have written before, I don't believe that criminalization is a just or reasonable solution to the problem of abortion, especially when it is coupled, as it surely will be, with an insanely contradictory push to limit access to birth control. It is the anti-birth control fanatics who are the real danger, and they are also the ones who will be emboldened by future anti-abortion rulings.

So Kissling is right that something is changing, and something is being lost. An important era in history really is coming to a close. An experiment in women's rights is being concluded. It's hard to say if Roe was ahead of its time or if it was fatally flawed. Perhaps no one should be given as much power over their own bodies as Roe attempted to give pregnant women. Nevertheless there is little doubt in my mind that the confirmation of Samuel Alito is a bad thing for women, and that the consequences will be dire.

Perhaps what is really being lost with the passing of Roe is the possibility of a just and lasting solution to the abortion problem, one which would have balanced the right of women to determine the course of their own pregnancy with the objective reality of the fetus as a developing person. That solution was taking shape during the Clinton years, with the goal of making abortion "safe, legal, and rare." Like Roe, it's quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Hold Your Breath, The Big One's Coming

Anyone who doesn't feel a chill down the spine hearing about the NSA spying case doesn't have a pulse. The more details that come out, the more I feel like we're reaching the "Revenge of the Sith" part of the epic, the part where all the pieces fall into place and everyone realizes what's been happening all along but it's too late to do anything about it. Am I in a paranoid mood today? It's hard not to be. The takeover of this country may really be about to happen. For anyone who thinks that's impossible, let me float a few thoughts your way. First of all, I was never fully convinced that the Bush administration would have actually abided by the results of the 2004 election if it had gone John Kerry's way. When you work this hard to consolidate power, break this many laws, cover up this many secrets - in short, when you go this far down the road of authoritarian rule, you don't just hand over power at the results of one little election. We never got to see the Constitutional crisis which could have erupted in 2000 had the vote-counting in Florida gone Al Gore's way, and the same goes for 2004. Two close misses in five years might mean time's up. So my question is, will there be a Presidential election in 2008? I am deadly serious when I say that I have no idea.

Secondly, it is very important to remember that the central principle being debated in the NSA case is not civil liberties versus national security. An accurate news item summing up the debate would read like this: "Sharp debate has issued from Washington lately on the question of whether the President has the right to break the law in matters relating to war and terrorism. President Bush's critics in Congress have argued that the President must abide by laws which govern his conduct of the war on terror. The President, in contrast, has argued that the laws do not apply to him in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief." So I ask you again whether I am being paranoid in wondering whether we are really approaching a watershed moment in American history. I know that past Presidents have often sought extraordinary powers, and usually been denied them. I know that Presidents have tried very hard to change laws that they don't like, sometimes unethically. I know about how Lincoln suspended habeus corpus during the Civil War, how FDR packed the Supreme Court, and of course about Nixon and Watergate. But I don't ever remember a President arguing before that the laws simply do not apply to him, which is the same as saying that the Executive branch is not compelled to respect any decision or any action of Congress.

So there's an unprecedented fissure opening up between Congress and the Presidency, which will almost certainly provoke a major crisis. But that's not even the bottom of where this is heading. There's also an Executive war against the press which is about to boil over. A White House decision to take on the New York Times over its decision to publish the NSA story could light that powder keg. Will we see the government suspend freedom of the press in the name of national security?

All of this points to the fundamental social and political change which the Bush administration is seeking, ever so methodically, to bring about: the President's actions are to be deemed as always legal and always secret, and to report them or criticize them is to be deemed as always illegal. This is what the White House is basically arguing in its case against the New York Times and in its determination to find and punish those who leaked information about the NSA spying program to the press. National security depends on the President being able to act in secret above the law, and therefore it is a crime against national security to reveal any of these secrets. We are just beginning to see the outline of that argument as it appears.

Of course, this leads to the final war being waged by the administration which is the one against the American people. If Congress fails in its attempt to impeach the President or to compel the Executive branch to comply with elections in 2008 or to prevent the Executive from suspending freedom of the press, then we can expect to see an all out assault against the Bill of Rights, i.e. the freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, etc. Life in America will change in ways that are for the moment impossible to predict. I'll offer one prediction though, if this worst case scenario really does come true. Sometime after 2008, the government will outlaw the Democratic Party, and rename it al-Qaeda.

Weird Future Coming True

My prediction that redneck conservatives would slowly come to embrace and support the Shiite majority in Iraq, perhaps even sporting "Go Shiites" bumper stickers on their pickup trucks, may be coming true. The other day President Bush had this to say on the topic of cultural diversity:

"One thing America must never do is lose our capacity to take people from all walks of life and help them become an American first and foremost. That's what distinguishes us from other cultures and other nations. You can come from wherever you are and I can come from Texas, and we both share the same deal: We're Americans first and foremost. I happen to be a Methodist, you're a Sunni."

Million Dollar Baby, Two Cent Ethics

Warning: If you haven't seen the film, I am about to give away the ending.

Clint Eastwood's Academy Award-winning film Million Dollar Baby is in many ways everything a movie should be. Its period aesthetics, inspiring story, and wonderful screenplay are the stuff film-makers dream of. It would be hard to think of a movie in recent years with better performances. For its first ninety minutes or so, this film is perfect. And then comes an ending so cruel, so manipulative, so morally bankrupt, that it left me not just disliking this film but seriously questioning Eastwood's judgment as a film-maker. This film is gorgeous from an aesthetic perspective but it is an ethical disaster.
The viewer is clearly supposed to believe that the decision made by Frankie Dunn in the end to assist Maggie with her own suicide is heroic, because Maggie's desire to commit suicide is also heroic. I find this repellent but it gets worse. Why is Maggie such a hero for wanting to commit suicide? Because she has become disabled. This amounts to something like the following argument:

It is heroic to commit suicide if you can't live life on your own terms.
The disabled cannot live life on their own terms.
It would be heroic if the disabled were to commit suicide.

Let me clarify one aspect of the movie's ending which is deliberately obscured. Many viewers watching the movie the first time through get the impression that Maggie is terminally ill. After all, she is never shown outside of her hospital bed, and she breathes with the assistance of a ventilator. She is deliberately made to look like she is terminally ill, even though she isn't. The tactic is a bait and switch. If the film showed Maggie in her wheelchair, enjoying the outdoors or returning to her old gym, the viewers' emotions surrounding her suicide would be completely different. This is why the movie subtlely feeds the impression that Maggie's disability is the equivalent of a terminal diagnosis. The business about the ventilator only confuses the issue further, especially because Frankie Dunn kills Maggie by removing it at the end, which reminds viewers of end-of-life type situations. Yet Maggie's condition is no different than that of many paralyzed persons who must breathe through ventilators. Christopher Reeve lived that way for over a decade, and no one considered him to be terminally ill or receiving life support. Thus the film builds its case on the premise that becoming disabled is a death sentence.
The rest of the argument follows from there. Maggie is a hero because she recognizes that the life of a disabled person is not worth living. Dunn is a hero for accepting her insight and acting on it. This is morally repugnant. Maggie's suicidal ideation would be seen by any compassionate person as a cry for help. She feels her life is not worth living because she has suffered a great loss, the loss of her freedom, physical wholeness, and independence. What she needs at this point is intervention by the medical team and by her friends and community. She needs to feel their support and know that they will not reject her because she has become disabled. She needs to see that there are many things she can still do with her life which would be of great value to herself and others. She needs to feel that she is not a failure and not to blame for her condition. What she doesn't need is someone who ostensibly loves her to actually assist her with her own demise. What kind of human being, when confronted with a loved one's expressed intention to commit suicide, would actually help them go through with it? To cite the principle of autonomy here is to show the clear limitations of that principle. There are some decisions no one has a right to make for themselves, and suicide is one of them. It is my belief that suicide is never a rational choice, and that a society which permits it is a society which encourages it. To phrase the issue of assisted suicide as pertaining particularly to the disabled, as if the lives of the disabled are truly not worth living, is really an awful thing to say. In fact what Million Dollar Baby amounts to is an able-bodied fantasy. It is a fantasy about getting rid of the disabled, rationalized by the premise that to do so would in fact be heroic: we would be doing them a favor. How convenient.
What is really heroic, what really deserves to be celebrated on film and everywhere, are the lives that many disabled persons live every day in the face of insurmountable difficulties. There are hundreds if not thousands of people just like Maggie who instead of turning their faces to the wall get up every morning and meet life's challenges with dignity, perseverance, and courage. The value of their lives is not an illusion. It is not on loan from the able-bodied. It is strictly a fact. For his slick piece of propaganda, Eastwood received an Academy Award. He should have been ostracized.

Let's Settle the Civil War in Iraq

There's a lot that's wrong with the Iraq war, but I still don't feel as if we've quite gotten to the bottom of it. Put aside for a second the phony weapons of mass destruction, the civilian casualties, everything that on the surface makes this war so wrong. Now focus only on the political element as it has developed since the war began: the minority Sunnis battling U.S. backed Shiites and Kurds. Recall that at the start of the war, coalition forces were fighting against the Iraqi army, Saddam's Elite Guard, and other assorted rag-tag militias. The Iraqi army ran away and then was disbanded after the fall of Baghdad, the Elite Guard never did much damage, and after initially getting bogged down by the militias, the U.S. forces moved on to Baghdad and left the British to mop up. Yet, after the fall of Baghdad, coalition forces continued to face an enemy and still do. The logical assumption then, is that it is the same enemy - the one we came to fight, and therefore, an enemy we must continue to fight until it is defeated. Yet, is this really true? It may be true in one sense that many of Saddam's loyalists were Sunnis and they comprise the core of the insurgency. The reasons that they are fighting, however, have changed completely. They are now fighting not to resist a foreign invasion but to oust the foreign backers of the ruling government, to reclaim control of territory that once belonged to them. Notice how the cards have changed. Setting a great deal aside, one could plausibly claim that the coalition forces fought the Iraqi army because Saddam was bad and deserved to be ousted, but why should we now be fighting the Sunni insurgency because it wishes to reclaim territory from its Shiite rivals? In other words, the U.S. never set out to intervene in a local dispute between Sunnis and Shiites, nor can I even imagine any politician suggesting that we do so. But that is what the Iraq war has become. Strangely, no one questions this. Democrats such as Hilary Clinton and John Kerry have stated repeatedly that the primary "exit strategy" for the U.S. must be the successful training of a new Iraqi army - i.e., a Shiite army capable of repelling the Sunni insurgency. This is the new mission of the coalition. Everything is predicated on the success of equipping and training this force. But why should we? One might argue that the tactics of the insurgents are evil and this is certainly true, but from the perspective of U.S. interests the dispute between the parties is purely political, and their current alignment is aribitrary. The Shiites have welcomed the American backed political process, knowing it would benefit them, the Sunnis have rejected it for the same reason. There is no difference between this rather mundane local affair and any number of conflicts around the world, most of which the U.S. takes no side in. Rather than waste our time and resources equipping one side against the other, the results of which will surely be a bloodbath, we ought to be trying to settle the conflict. If we could convince the Sunnis that a reasonable political settlement awaits them, the culmination of which would be the withdrawal of coalition forces, why wouldn't they agree to it?

Remind Me Again Which Side We're On

I've never heard a good explanation as to why the United States is fighting for the Shiite majority against the Sunni insurgency in Iraq rather than the other way around. Would anyone really mind or even notice if tomorrow we just switched sides? I personally don't care whether Shiites or Sunnis rule Iraq. I can never even remember what the difference is between them, and I've taken a few world religion classes in my day. Which side claims to be the successors of Mohammed's brother-in-law again? I can't remember, but why should I care? Much less sacrifice the future of my country on behalf of this inane conflict? Just divide the bloody thing in half, declare victory, and come home, no? I have these thoughts every time I hear the politicians and analysts talking about how progress in Iraq is measured in terms of Iraqi security, i.e., our efforts to train and equip the Shiite majority to effectively fight the insurgency on its own. There is no good reason I can think of for us to want to do this. Getting involved in other countries' civil wars is never a good idea. What we should be doing is negotiating a cease fire and a peace agreement between the two sides. What we need to be is an honest broker in the region, a force for peace and justice rather than division and conflict. If we could actually settle the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shiites and bring peace to Iraq, that act alone would probably do more than anything towards repairing our damaged reputation and our long term goals vis a vis the Muslim world.

Rewriting History -- the Devil's Game

One of the games the neo-conservatives like to play is to accuse their opponents of doing exactly what their opponents are trying to stop them (the neo-conservatives) from trying to do. For instance, if the White House urges Congress to pass an anti-regulation bill that would weaken environmental protection, and Democrats oppose that, then the White House will accuse Democrats of being anti-environmental. Note that they don't accuse Democrats of being unfairly biased against industry, or something logical like that - no, they make it out to look like they are the ones protecting the environment and the Democrats are against them. This strategy doesn't have to be 100% effective - it just has to fool a minority into believing that it's true and not offend the majority that knows it's not. If I recall correctly, in 2004 John Kerry barely won a majority of voters who said that the environment was their most important issue, which shows the effectiveness of the strategy. All this is to say that when Dick Cheney accuses Democrats of trying to rewrite the history of the Iraq war, he is really saying that its history has already been rewritten, that the war began as a rewriting of history, and that this history can't be unwritten. Cheney is playing the old sophist card of saying that a well-told lie is better than the truth, so much better that the truth can never dislodge it. He is trying to give his lies ontological permanence. The real history of the Iraq war, as Cheney knows, starts with his decision back in 2000 to select himself as Bush's running mate. The Iraq war is Cheney's personal legacy. It is his gift to us. So it makes sense that when the history of that war is criticized, Cheney takes it personally. It is this history, the truth about the war, which has yet to be fully written, and it is Cheney's task right now to ensure that it is never written. Cheney wants us to believe that it's too late to tell the truth now, that the fledgling lies he started telling back in 2000 have turned into such healthy, full-grown critters that we dare not oppose them now. But why should we believe him? That's the problem with the sophist's argument. It falters on the liar's paradox. Cheney is a proven liar, so I take his musings about the "truth beyond the truth" or however he thinks about it when he's falling asleep at night to be just that - more lies. A really skillful liar like Dick Cheney, someone who can lie openly to the entire world and remain almost entirely unnoticed, only comes along once in a generation. That's Dick Cheney's secret, that's the game he's playing with all of us. This whole time Cheney has been rewriting our history, rewriting us. His last trick before he disappears is to make sure we never rewrite him.

What a Journalist Should Be

I've just watched George Clooney's marvelous new film, "Good Night and Good Luck" and I cannot commend his courage and skill highly enough. The movie tells the story of newsman Edward R. Murrow's expose of McCarthyism at its peak in the early 50's. It is a wonderful piece of drama - beautifully photographed, note-perfect performances, and of course so deliberately relevant to our own times. It is not often that a movie is this educational and yet entertaining at the same time. The film offers a trenchant critique of the declining state of journalism which was already evident to Murrow in 1958. Trivializing, superficial, insulating, cosmetically obsessed with balance but lacking all substance, these are a few of the not so subtle characterizations of the field. In its place the movie hopefully lifts up another, entirely different philosophy of journalism: moralistic, truth-seeking and truth-telling, a friend of justice, holding itself to the highest ethical standards, educating, courageous, principled, full of conviction. Murrow says, in effect, that journalism is and ought to be a public service which serves the common good, which preserves democracy by guaranteeing the free and accurate flow of information, which ceaselessly exposes corruption and lies, which facilitates the democratic union of the government and the governed by protecting both from each other. My favorite line in the movie is when Murrow says, "We are not descended from fearful men." I felt like standing up and cheering when I heard that line. Murrow is right. This country wasn't founded on timidity. It was founded by complex individuals who made difficult decisions based on the best knowledge that they had, who made the most out of the humanity they had to offer, who willingly made sacrifices, took risks, and accepted challenges. That's what Murrow represented in this film. It's what Murrow believed a journalist should be.

Bush to Base: Pipe Down Already

President Bush's right-wing base is blowing his cover. The deal forged between Bush and his base, going back to 2000, is that Bush would bring conservatives to the table like no President had ever done before, but they had to keep quiet about it. No open communication in the mainstream media, period. To facilitate this, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes invented a code for Bush to use in the media and in his major speeches, consisting of quotes and allusions beloved by the right, including evangelical hymns, doctrines, and imagery. For those not in the know, this has sometimes resulted in some puzzling responses - recall the debate last fall in which Bush was asked about a recent Supreme Court ruling that he disagreed with and he answered, "The Dred Scott decision." But all that is changing now. The religious right is tired of being the other woman. It wants a public committment from the President. For Bush this could not be any more unwelcome than if his mistress had suddenly started calling him every night at dinner. By forcing Bush to withdraw the nomination of Harriet Miers - whom Bush desperately pleaded and hinted with the right to accept - the religious right is demanding that Bush choose between it and the rest of the country. The contradiction of "compassionate conservatism," the cornerstone of Bush's political genius, is unravelling, and Bush has nowhere to turn, and nowhere to hide.

Squeezing Harriet Miers Till She Talks

Charles Krauthammer’s comments in today’s Washington Post give some insight into the real reason why conservatives are now gathering in force against the Harriet Miers nomination. The nomination must be withdrawn, Krauthammer argues, not because Miers is unqualified, though he admits that she is, but because of what she knows about the Bush administration and about the President personally – information which she could conceivably be compelled to testify about under oath during the confirmation hearings. This would hand Democrats a golden opportunity to ask questions that President Bush in his ten years in politics has never answered. Imagine the possibilities. For starters, why did Bush’s 1998 re-election campaign for governor pay Miers' law firmthe unheard of sum of $140,000 for routine legal work, in addition to the $23,000 paid by Bush to Miers in 1994? At the time of the 1998 payment Bush was leading his opponent by 35 percentage points in the polls. What projects was Miers working on for Bush? Just to speculate, could it have had something to do with recurrent issues from Bush’s past – his avoidance of the draft during Vietnam, or his history as an addict? What does she know about Bush’s relationship with Ken Lay and the other Enron insiders who secretly helped Vice-President Cheney rewrite the nation’s energy laws? Does Miers know anything about the phony case for war in Iraq and the subsequent cover-up still under investigation? What about 9/11? Could Miers clear up any lingering doubts about the President’s response to warnings of an imminent terror attack in the summer of 2001? The list could go on and on. As Bush’s most trusted lawyer, Miers is a potential gold-mine for anyone interesting in unraveling the vast, intricately-linked criminal conspiracy which in essence is the Bush administration. (With an hour’s testimony, Miers could accomplish what it will take historians a generation to achieve.) As Krauthammer indicates in his column, that possibility has just occurred to him as well, and the image of a stage-struck Miers fumbling around under oath while trying to protect the President’s decades of secrets doesn’t sit well with him. Already, Krauthammer says, there’s the expected petty lies and malfeasance around the nomination process itself:

John Fund reports that in a conference call of conservative leaders, two Miers confidants explicitly said that she would overturn Roe v. Wade . The subsequent denial by one of these judges that he ever said that, and the subsequent affirmation by two of the people who had heard the call that he did say so, create the nightmare scenario of subpoenaed witnesses contradicting each other under oath. We need an exit strategy from this debacle. I have it…

Just imagine what Democrats could do with this kind of power, Krauthammer seems to be saying. He’s had enough of Harriet Miers. He’s telling the President to pull the plug on this one.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My...What?

Like the GOP base, I'm all in a dither over Edith Miers. On the one hand, I like the name Edith. On the other hand, she kind of disgraces it. And she reminds me of my third grade teacher, but in a bad way (in case she is reading - I will always love you, Mrs. Fea.) Bush might as well have nominated his third grade teacher. There is barely any difference. Granted, who among us wouldn't have done the same thing? If I ever become President, I too want to be able to place all of my friends and family in positions of power, just like Vito Corleone did. Now, I just don't know whose side to take in this internecine fight. On the one hand, I know that the religious right (just like Ayn Rand) are always wrong. It's almost an axiological certainty. And they oppose this nomination. So, taking my cue from them as always, I support it, right? This seems to be the thinking of many Democrats, who would probably put Satan on the bench if they thought it might bug the Republican majority. And if Miers nomination is defeated, who's next? After all, these conservatives have been saying they oppose Miers for not being conservative enough! I don't relish the prospect of seeing the arch-torturer Alberto Gonsales on deck, or the rightist lunatic Janice Rogers Brown. Maybe having our family realtor interpreting Constitutional law for the next generation isn't such a bad idea. On the other hand, what an absolute toilet of a judge. Does Miers even, like, have any idea what she's doing? Does she even know which way the robe goes on? This is going to be like sitting through Legally Blonde III for the next twenty years. And the thought of seeing Bush out there in the courtroom passing her winks about how to rule turns my stomach as well. It's kind of like we're seeing the very worst and the not so bad of Bush cronyism at the same time. On the one hand, it's so blatant, it makes you want to cry. On the other hand, it's so inept and stupid it makes you want to laugh. I mean, is there anybody left from Crawford that Bush hasn't given a federal job to yet? Couldn't Bush find some work for the former grounds-keeper of Ameriquest Stadium, or maybe his old plumber? We'll know we're at the end of the Bush administration when the President runs out of nicknames for his relatives and old college buddies. Or maybe, as Dr. Strangelove would have it, the end of the world. ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." "Yeeeee-haw!")

Science, Truth, and the Politics of Deception

Andrew Hehir, writing in Salon, makes some very important points about the current conflict between science and politics ("The Know Nothings," September 14, 2005.) What does it mean that the current administration rejects science not just in practice but in theory? And what vulnerability has the administration exploited in its surprisingly successful attempt to block scientific information from the public? Hehir is right to call this an "epistemological crisis," so right, in fact, that I would take it even further and name this the great philosophical problem of our time. (Of course as something of an idealist I tend to view social problems as symptoms of philosophical errors - please forgive me that bias.)
First, it is clear to me that the discipline of science as a public service, one whose purpose is to establish the public as an authority competent to govern itself, has stalled and even reversed. In May 2004 a report of the National Science Board, An Emerging and Critical Problem of the Science and Engineering Labor Force, sparked alarm among educators by predicting shortfalls of scientists and engineers based on current trends in education. (For the debate over this issue, see the following articles.) Even if it is unclear, however, as to whether science as a specialized profession is in decline, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence as to the decline of scientific knowledge among the general public. It is this state of affairs which the neo-conservative movement has actively exploited in pursuit of its anti-regulatory agenda, as Hehir chronicles. On matters of vital public interest, including global warming, public health, stem-cell research, sexual education, and the teaching of evolution, the Bush administration has repeatedly obscured the findings of science through a particularly effective and vicious new form of propaganda: the fake scientific debate. To use Al Gore’s phrase, the Bush administration uses an echo chamber which bounces manufactured debate between the walls of industry-sponsored think tanks and the conservative media, then baits the supposedly mainstream press into covering the "controversy." Once this false notion of a scientific controversy has been generally established in the public mind, the administration can then use the public’s confusion as itself further evidence of the existence of an actual debate. For instance, if only half of Americans "believe" in evolution, then this can be taken as evidence that the legitimacy of the theory of evolution may still be plausibly regarded as an open question. If the goal of science is to establish a public consensus of verifiable facts, then the goal of the Bush administration is to break that consensus through constant suggestion of uncertainty.
This suggests that the current epistemological crisis and the much discussed crisis in journalism are one and the same. The media appears to be functionally incapable any longer of distinguishing between good and bad arguments, information and propaganda, truth and fiction. So-called "balance," which is understood as being neutral to matters of truth, is the self-proclaimed goal of today’s media ("fair and balanced.") Once again this is a turn of events which has been ruthlessly exploited by the ruling conservative party. For instance, consider the recent political acts against public television, ginned up as an effort to provide "conservative balance" to PBS. Even more chilling is the conservative campaign against objectivity in higher education. The libertarian commentator Cathy Young has written about the need for "intellectual diversity," meaning a balance of conservative and liberal faculty appointments, at colleges and universities. Apparently there is nothing contradictory to Young about this kind of merging of the scientific and the political – as if research should be judged not simply on its empirical merits but on its political affiliation as well.
But we are not yet to the bottom of the current epistemological crisis. It’s no surprise that a powerful authoritarian regime would attempt to manipulate science for its own purposes, but what weakness has it exploited in doing so? The Bush administration could not have succeeded in its misinformation campaign unless the public had in some sense willingly assisted in its own deception. I would like to make the case that the prevailing conditions exploited by the Bush administration are the result of a set of epistemological errors resulting from a popular (and populist) misunderstanding of post-modernism, first introduced into politics by the left in the second half of the 20th century and now adapted and perfected by the new right.
Hehir hints at this when he says that the work of philosophers of science such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Feyerabend (I would add Thomas Kuhn) has contributed to a general sense of epistemological uncertainty which has arisen in the public mind in the past half century. A generous philosophy of relativism has become common property; science has become popularly regarded as an arena of dispute rather than of clarification and consensus. It’s beyond my intention here to mount a thorough defense of the work of these philosophers, but I will say that all of them would have been appalled at the appropriation of their work by a radical, authoritarian regime. Far from intending to undermine science, the purpose of their work was to bring about its advancement by liberating the western tradition from its foundationalist and idealist impulses and re-grounding it in the organic processes of language and culture. I’ll concede however that the failure of post-modernism to clearly articulate its liberal intentions has been one of the chief sources of the sloppy and nihlistic relativism which now pervades the popular understanding, and further, that skeptics such as Foucault either failed to realize or didn’t care that an unbridled skepticism is easily converted by the skilled sophist into the precise metaphysical authority it claims to be resisting.
The Bush administration’s mastery of post-modern sophistry deserves a closer study than I can provide here. At its most effective, it flattens discourse into a an exercise in futility, marked by absurdist non-sequiturs, flights of cynical fancy, and passive-aggressive posturing, all scored with a numbing fatalism. It is impossible to get a straight answer from the Bush administration and yet, until very recently, its reputation was always just the opposite. This is the mark of the truly exceptional sophist: when the weakness of one’s argument is so artfully presented as to be universally accepted as its greatest strength. In the case of the Bush administration, a record of stunning dishonesty and manipulation masquerades, successfully, as unvarnished candor. Which brings me to the greatest triumph of the Bush administration, and that is its masterful subversion of American values. The character played by the President is a composite of 19th and 20th century American archetypes: the evangelical preacher, the self-made man, the recovered addict, the lone ranger, and the WWII soldier. Each of these figures is meant to evoke an American value: selflessness, humility, earnestness, folk-wisdom, independence, piety, determination. Bush is adept at turning arguments on their head by retreating to one of these values and then accusing his critic of betraying it, forcing his critics to defend their patriotism rather than focus on objective arguments.
This brings the conflict between science and politics into sharper focus: if the goal of science is to clarify discourse so as to establish the public as its own authority, then the goal of the Bush administration is just the opposite. Its power derives from general confusion and ignorance, from a deliberate heightening of the general sense of indeterminacy (from an epistemological perspective) and anxiety (from a psychological perspective) which are the defining characteristics of capitalist societies.
Finally, let us delve once more into the history of philosophy to try and make some sense out of what brought the western tradition to this point. Why has the progress of science been so drastically halted? What factors have contributed to the philosophical and social impasse at which we now find ourselves? If post-modernism is a kind of black hole at the bottom of western metaphysics, then it is one whose existence has long been suspected and feared. From Plato’s dialogues the need for a foundationalist super-structure with which to buttress scientific inquiry is already apparent. This is the beginning of the essentialist strategy which becomes omnipresent in western philosophy. The reasoning goes that only a self-validating (or self-transcending) foundation would be capable of withstanding the skeptical assault; without it, science collapses into meaningless parody and self-reference. The long-noted problem with this strategy is that like any makeshift barrier, essentialism only provides a temporary fix. If essences themselves are proposed as part of a visibly material discourse, with all of the telltale signs of human construction, then what permits them to operate so exceptionally? The result is an infinitely repeated recourse to allegedly purer and purer regions untainted by the fallibility and temporality of human institutions. This problem was not solved by the Enlightenment, which only converted essentialism into a cult of personalized metaphysics – the individualist values of autonomy and self-determination. The Enlightenment project already foretold the failed state of post-modernism.
Yet if both essentialism of the classical variety and anti-essentialism of the post-modern variety lead to the same impasse, is there a future for science as a public discipline? Might we ever hope to live in a world in which the findings of science are cherished as the consensus beliefs of an informed public, and George W. Bush is known only as his father’s miserable son?
The answer, I submit, lies in the other great western philosophical tradition most articulately represented by Aristotle: naturalist in method, constructivist in its anthropology, pragmatic, adaptable, process-oriented, transcendental. If science is regarded not as the procurement of a fixed state of knowledge with reference to some theoretical essence, nor as a continual contest between equally arbitrary perspectives, but rather as a natural process unfolding through the fallible but nevertheless self-transcending institutions of language and culture, then science is as imperfect as the human life which temporarily possesses and proclaims it. What post-modernism should have taught us, but didn't, is that science doesn't take place in some theoretical, abstract realm but rather in the here and now. Consensus is gained through compromise, persuasion, and cooperation, not rationalist fiat. Progress is unpredictable, depending on the imaginative breaking and rebuilding of paradigms. Science is a creative process, a truly human activity. As anyone who has ever pursued science knows, truth and wisdom are rare gems indeed, gained only through struggle. Perhaps then science is a kind of revelation of a fragile and fleeting beauty which arises only briefly, like a flower, in the midst of great difficulty.

Good News For Everyone?

"We're breaking out the champagne," Dr. Eliav Barr, Merck's head of clinical development for the new cervical cancer vaccine told the Associated Press today. He's not the only one. The vaccine, which works by blocking infection from the human papilloma virus, proved 100% successful in its initial trial phase. Merck hopes to bring it to market next year. One would think that such news would be welcomed from every quarter. After all, who would want to deny a life-saving cure to today's and tomorrow's women? Try Bridget Maher of the so-called Family Research Council. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," she said. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex." It turns out the Family Research Council is annoyed at potentially losing one of its pet arguments for abstinence - that the human papilloma virus can be transmitted even when condoms are used properly. This, weirdly, makes the disease an ally of the Council, much like a biological weapon. The Family Research Council claims to be a Christian organization but it's hard to see how this stance is at all consistent with the gospel. Jesus came to heal the sick, not to with-hold needed care or use illness as a weapon. In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus instructs his followers to offer healing without judgment. In Jesus' ministry, healing is a sign of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. From Genesis 1, we learn that God has given nature and all of its gifts to human beings to be used for the good of everyone. God commands human beings to be stewards over creation, to cultivate and transform and bring to fulfillment the potential of things. The scientists who worked on the human papilloma vaccine were obedient to that purpose. Their success ought to be good news for everyone.

Thinking Through the Neo-Conservative Challenge

Sidney Blumenthal in Salon has done a fine job of chroncling the tangled web of conservative malfeasance which effectively constitutes the Republican party as we know it today. I especially admire his insight into the corrupt and exploitative relationships between lobbyists, corporations, conservative religious organizations, and political players. This is indeed, as he puts it, a "pay to play" game. I don’t entirely agree with Blumenthal’s assessment that this type of conservatism is an entirely new political and economic entity. It bears more than a passing resemblance to a crime syndicate, of the type which controls politics throughout much of the developing world. This leads to an important and often misunderstood point: organized crime is not chaotic. To the contrary, it is intensely bureaucratic. Such pseudo-political institutions always mirror the bureaucratic nature of their host systems. They are a repressed instinct of capitalist societies. To argue that the Bush administration represents an entirely new way of "doing business" in America ignores the instrumental role that organized crime has historically played in American economics and politics (for a wonderful literary example, read Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.) It was Max Weber who argued that the twin impulses of revolution and bureaucracy co-exist at the unsteady core of capitalism. What we are witnessing in the rise of neo-conservatism is the validation of that argument, the fulfillment of a capitalist impulse towards bureaucracy which, if completed, might rival the great Prussian and Stalinist regimes of the past three centuries. Liberals (of all types) are liable to be confused and frustrated if they operate under the mistaken belief that their government remains in the broad stream of the liberal tradition: deliberative, representative, transparent, responsive and accountable to the public (not to be confused with populist, which the Bush administration definitely is.) Thus to view the Bush administration in the light of its true lineage explains a great deal. Like any bureaucracy, its goal is to build the party of the future by monopolizing resources. Loyalty to the party determines access to these resources and to the lucrative schemes which advance the party’s agenda. The proprietary stance taken by the Bush administration towards information which would be considered public in a liberal society – the records of Vice-President Cheney’s energy task force, to take one obvious example – indicates that it simply does not regard itself as accountable to the public in any traditionally democratic sense. Rather, the party is fueled by populist sentiment (as for instance in the 2004 elections) which is generated through grandiose nationalistic pageants, suppression of information, strategically timed threats, official investigations of sexual impurity, and concealed propaganda distributed through the quasi-state outlets of the conservative media. Likewise, the Bush administration does not operate in the deliberative manner of a liberal government, i.e., one founded on a consensus of publicly verified facts. Instead it has waged a determined campaign to undermine and distort scientific findings whenever they come into conflict with the party ideology. Again, this infuriates the scientific community and the grass-roots democratic activists whose political credibility is staked on the premise of their research, but the Bush administration simply will not budge. It is a wholly political animal, and as such its founding principles of hierarchy, loyalty, and organization stand in sharp contrast to the objective correlate philosophy of empirical science. Finally, I would like to expand on my earlier comment that the true goal of the Bush administration, consistent with its principles, is the creation of a new social class, a "new man," as it were. I envision this man of the future as being raised and educated in strict conformity with the mandates of the party. He will show in his beliefs and his attitudes a deep loyalty to the party upon which his livelihood and reputation entirely depends, and an equally deep suspicion of potential heretics. In all likelihood he will work in a corporate office overseen by quasi-government officials and dependent on government favors for its continuing share in the market-state. He will be of the official denomination of the Christian faith, which is simply another manifestation of allegiance to the party. He will depend throughout his life on a network of patronage and graft which he will simply take for granted as the hallmark of respectable society. He will be a man made in the image of the party founder, George W. Bush.

Bush Keeps on Ticking

President Bush's decision to nominate Harriet Miers as the next Supreme Court justice proves that neo-conservatism is still the great indestructible philosophy of our time. It was only last month, after all, that in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina and the FEMA disaster the President's philosophy of unabashed cronyism had been revealed, exorciated, and seemingly extinguished. Yet Bush will be Bush, and his single-minded focus is legendary. Hence, Miers, his long-time associate and confidante with no qualifications for the Supreme Court save for her close relationship with the President. Public opinion has never mattered to Bush except insofar as it can be manipulated, and neither do the views of those who oppose him. Now the President's undisguised intention of gathering together all three branches of government under the authority of a single all-powerful partisan executive is meeting with rebellion from within the ranks of his own party. That appears to be just fine with Bush. He has always been more focused on purging the Republican party of its moderate and movement-conservative heretics than in anything happening outside of the party anyway. If Republicans break ranks, that just starts a fight Bush is confident he will win. Like any good authoritarian, Bush loves to test the limits of power, to set traps that divide the loyalists from the realists. This points to one of the least recognized traits of neo-conservatism: it is a party-building movement. Yet this nascent party is not necessarily synonymous with the Republican party, and it may even be hostile to it. The Miers nomination as well as all of the other intra-Republican wars of the past five years (Colin Powell's State Department, George Tenet's CIA, etc.) demonstrate that the goal of neo-conservatism is to overthrow the Republican party from within, to free it from its traditionalisms and loyalty to Constitutional principles such as the separation of powers and its grounding in the liberal traditions of limited government and fiscal conservatism. In other words, the goal of neo-conservatism is to establish a party with the means of opposing the liberal tradition in its broadest and deepest sense - to effectively uproot the bedrock principles of constitutionalism and representative government upon which America was founded. That may seem far-fetched, but if history has anything to teach, it's that tyranny is never implausible.

Candles in the Dark

I read an article in the Boston Globe recently about a blogger who blogged nothing but good news about the war in Iraq. Apparently he found enough good news to keep him working for a year and a half, and then he quit. Now I’m aware that I’ve written at length, quite cynically, about the decline of the humanities and about the efforts of the Bush administration to kill off the arts and sciences once and for all in the name of almighty corporate capitalism. I write books in my head with titles like "The Decline of Language." I reverse engineered the joke behind "Eats Shoots and Leaves" and laughed to myself out loud (my version had a Panda.) I’ve often been accused of pedantry when I’m not being accused of being a slovenly, half-educated philistine (both are sadly close to the mark.) But enough is enough. I’m turning over a new leaf. I’d like to begin a series dedicated solely to good news in the humanities. These are the stories that bring tears to my eyes, which make me feel like, dammit, something good is happening out there, even though the news won’t report it. I would like to call this series, "Candles in the Dark." And so I offer for recognition the preservationists from the Chicago Conservation Center who risked their own lives to save priceless works of art in New Orleans and the rest of the hurricane-damaged areas of the Gulf Coast. These dedicated servants of the arts literally donned rescue gear, complete with hoods, gloves, boots, and respirators, and made their way through the floodwaters to rescue the city’s artistic treasures. Let’s also honor the steady hands at the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, and the workers at the New Orleans Museum of Art, who kept their post in the museum when all hell had broken loose outside. What this proves to me is that there are forces at work in the world more powerful than brutality, more formidable than cynicism, more brilliant than sophistry. There are still educators, and scientists, and poets, and painters, and musicians, and scholars, who care deeply about what is most precious, who know intimately the fragile beauty of artistic creation. It’s that spirit which has gotten humanity out of some of its toughest scrapes, which kept singing even when the guys with the guns showed up, which preserved light when darkness had fallen on all sides. And it’s their work which will emerge out of all the chaos, greed, stupidity, corruption, venality, cruelty, and petty strife which counts for news in this day and age, and it’s their work which will be preserved, and remembered, and honored by future generations.

Is This What They Call Bipartisanship?

The nomination of somebody named Harriet Miers to be the next Supreme Court justice has been greeted with disapproval by both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are upset that Bush did not nominate a "lock" for advancing their radical agenda, and Democrats would not have had cause to celebrate any of the candidates among whom President Bush was deciding. This stunning salute to mediocrity, the promotion of a career Bush operative and political crony to the one job George W. Bush hasn't yet given her - a judge - may fit the President's style like a glove but offers little for the others who feed at the same trough. No one in Congress has yet come out in strong support of the nominee. Instead we have been greeted with the delightful sound of the conservative echo chamber fallen suddenly silent. Is the impossible possible? Could Miers really fail to be confirmed? Has Bush's base finally abandoned him? The most bizarre, and unexpected outcome of the Miers nomination may be a weird bipartisanship arising out of a unanimous disregard for the President. Under the pressure of Bush's repeated failures of leadership, supporting the President has now become a career hazard. The crass hybrid philosophy of a bloated government funneling profits to ever more exotic and corrupt locales - part Warren Harding, part Lyndon Johnson - has never pleased by the book fiscal conservatives, and it's now starting to enrage them. The evolution and now spectacular downfall of the Bush presidency is taking American politics to a weird place it's never been before, a place where liberals and conservatives alike agree that their coalition of the moment is anybody but Bush.