Kevin Speaks

Trust me, it all makes sense!

Archive for category Politics

Political Annoyance

Feb 6

Posted by Zero in Nonsense, Politics | No Comments

Madison puts that uppity boy in his place

So, I once again got embroiled in a facebook political diatribe *mostly against my will* because of this ridiculous cartoon. It immediately struck me as insulting — in part, because it mistakes sanctimonious asshattery for being funny.  Beyond this initial annoyance I found the bitter core of my indignation: it’s bloody well racist, that’s why (not the only racist attack in recent memory, I might add).

Before I tell you why, let me admit that I am not a raving fan of Mr. Obama’s presidency. I have nothing against the man himself: he’s broad-minded, well-read, genteel, moderate, and reasonable. But his presidency has certainly disappointed liberals almost as much as it has conservatives.  Given the hysterical historical timing of his election, I don’t believe this was really avoidable, and my critique is but a droplet of water amongst of sea of better argued ones (like this one).

That does not excuse this cartoon, which is guilty on two scores:

  1. Factual inaccuracy: Obama never said these words. Many people have confused the idea of progressive taxation with “confiscation” or “class warfare.” In actually, Obama’s presidency has actually shrunk the federal budget for the first time since 1987. Better yet, the administration has done so in the midst of the mountain of debt created by his Republican predecessor. That’s right: the Government Accountability Office (surely a socialist or even a communist facade) calculated that GW’s Medicare Part D created a greater fiscal burden than Social Security.
  2. James Madison owned more than 100 slaves for most of his life.  While he was a good owner (no irony intended) by most accounts, and critiqued the idea of slavery on principle, he didn’t do a damned thing to confront the institution while it burgeoned during the early days of the Union (in his defense, even Lincoln didn’t get behind emancipation until it aligned with his principle purpose of ending the rebellion).  Nevertheless, the fact of this history puts a different spin on this cartoon.  Here on the one hand, we have a man of compound heritage, a largely self-made man, who has had words of confiscation and theft artificially placed into his mouth.  On the other hand, we have a white slaveholder who was born to the richest family in Orange county and was raised as the primary heir of a Virginian tobacco farm.  Unlike Washington, he did not voluntarily free a single slave during his lifetime.

But the ultimate irony of misrepresentation is, as usual, found in the crinkles and recesses of historical context. Madison’s home state of Virginia (the land of tobacco and freedom!) was one of the most regressive in the union. It wasn’t until the constitutional revision of 1851 that Virginia even got around to dropping the requirement allowing unpropertied white men to vote — the poorer, Western half nearly seceded over this issue even before the Civil War.

To review the state of voting rights in Madison’s home state during the time of his political career:

Do you have a vagina? So sorry, you're disqualified.

You may actually be worth 3/5ths of a vote.

If your job description involves any amount of sweat, you should leave statesmanship to the pros.

Are your children obnoxious in restaurants? Sorry, but we don't grant political representation to your kind.

Do you smell bad or live with livestock, or even (god forfend) name your livestock? Sorry, you're out.

You're *sure* you're not the sparkly kind? Okay, you're in.

I’m not saying Madison was bad — he wasn’t at all, by any measure. Like Obama, he was broad-minded, well-read, genteel, moderate, and reasonable. He was, I think, more idealistic than Obama in his thinking — or at least his idealism had a broader scope — but that was coupled with a greater pragmatism in accepting the injustices of his time period. Those injustices were certainly greater than the ones we are confronted with in our own time period. That is why Madison was able to build a political legacy around the topic of “Freedom”, earn the title “Father of the Constitution,” and two centuries later be referred to as “an architect of Freedom” — despite the fact that he personally owned a hundred or more slaves, governed a population that systematically displaced the entire native population of an eastern quarter of North America, and lived in a state that didn’t universalize even white male suffrage until 15 years after his death.

Tags: , , , , ,

Occupy What, Exactly?

Oct 27

Posted by Zero in Bad Personal Philosophy, Events, Politics | No Comments

The Occupy Wall Street movement (or the larger movement formerly known as Occupy Wall Street) has drifted on and off the front page so many times now it’s almost like deja vu.  I mean, didn’t we already read this headline?  But it refuses to die (2 of CNN’s “Latest News” category are devoted to it as of five minutes ago) and I for one am glad.  NOT simply because the opposition movement has generated such an excess of amusing imagery and countermemes:

I Am the 2%

My Father is with the 1%

99% of us died in the making of Episode VI

Although, obviously, it’s done plenty of that.  I approve of this movement because, if you peel back the thin layer of frivolity and pseudo-anarchist revelry that reflects back so much of the media light thrown its way, there are some truly novel features underneath. This movement has a sense of ambition I haven’t seen in public protests in my lifetime: they want to occupy EVERYTHING! And not just occupy it; they want to humanize it, make it serviceable, and to declaw and domesticate the systems they perceive as preying upon the masses. The confused but consistent impetus towards fundamental social and economic transformation in this movement is really quite quixotic. And quixotic is charming!

I have not slurped the delicious milk of humankindness for a long long time and I'm going to make sure you know it, punks

As always, idealistic missions collectively pursued are ready fodder for specific types of attacks: to individualists, they are often seen as “lazy,” to traditionalists, generally “impractical” or “wasteful,” and to political conservatives, they often appear (shudder) “socialistic.” Which is why counterattacks against the 99% meme tend to be so dour, so stingy, and so darn tootin’ self-righteous: they are usually aimed by very serious, generally self-sufficient people at folks perceived to be frivolous at best, and thieves and highwaymen at worst. Yet another example of the old robbers-of-the-republic myth. It is a sad disservice to the multitude of legitimate victims of one of the worst economic climates of the century that merely voicing their woes can lead to accusations of fundamental worthlessness, communist leanings, and congenital warts.

One of the hallmarks of the Occupation movement to date has been its vagueness about what, exactly, is being occupied, what exactly is to be accomplished. I must admit that I doubt the possibility of “success” in the terms an activist might paint them: the banks and moneyed interests will probably not be overthrown, recessions will probably prove immune to political exile, and the Universe will almost certainly not become a fundamentally kind and gentle place. Most likely, nature will remain not only amoral but generally damp and clammy as well. Even worse, regardless of innovations in antimalarial technology, mosquitoes will definitely continue to thrive somewhere on the planet.

However, I also doubt the movement’s detractors’ implicit claim that talk is cheap, useless, or even dangerous. We should talk about things, and at great length. And working together to make the world a better place isn’t just something for college students to theorize about between liberal arts classes: it’s an obligation of every major thought system the planet has ever seen, including capitalism. Experimentation is part of the imperative of our humanity in just the same way that self-improvement is a mandate of the gods of our mothers and fathers. On these precepts, any voice that says or implies “put your heads down and work” should be rejected. The work of free people should be done with heads up and eyes open. And any voice that says “be quiet, you have no right to speak” should be reviled. Speech is our birthright, and silence is death.

If the occupation has done nothing else, it has occupied our collective thoughts for a while — and that is, perhaps, the only important thing. May the Occupation remain thought-provoking.

Tags: , , , ,

Change I Wish I Could Believe In

Sep 13

Posted by Zero in Bad Personal Philosophy, Nonsense, Politics | 1 Comment

Cathy is back to school this week, so we’re both spending evenings in our cozy home office which, thanks to some sweat and cursing this spring, no longer reeks of cat urine. Hurray!

Pandora brought up Etta James’ At Last, which led us into a discussion of dancing and measures (she claimed two step, I claimed rapid waltz, and the tune could of course have been penned in either 3/3 or 6/4, so we both could hypothetically be correct).  This in turn led us to this video:

This, in sequence, depressed the hell out of me. 2008 was the first time in my entire life I briefly set aside my political cynicism, and dared to hope for and contribute to change (yep, I voted with hope in my heart, despite my lower intestines suggesting that participatory democracy is a scam and a delusion of the controlled masses that they do, in fact, have a hand on their own leashes!).

Ivan Aivazovsky got it

I am sorry to say that, even allowing for the quite crappy circumstances, Obama has disappointed me greatly. It turns out we didn’t need an idealist, after all. We needed an experienced politician. By which I mean someone who can get more of what they want than they have to give away, and can make shitty circumstances look like the other side’s fault. Or something.

It is quite likely that presidents don’t make their own fate — that they are really, like captains of seagoing vessels, at the mercy of whatever combination of weather, currents, and piracy they happen to travel through. George Washington was not a great president because he was George Washington; he was a great president because he was the FIRST president of a country that had just overthrown a much larger and better armed imperial power.  If the colonies had lost and remained colonies, it is quite likely that a sense of his incompetence would have outweighed a sense of his accomplishments, and indifference would outweigh sympathy.  Conversely, Hoover was probably not a really terrible president; he was just a terrible president because the shit hit the fan 8 months after he got into the office, and he couldn’t fix the Great Depression in the three years he was alloted.

Not an Ear Whig

Not an Ear Whig, but kind of creepy

Now, William Henry Harrison?  Probably a bad president.  And a Whig, the political party that always makes me think of ear-wigs.  Ick.

I still hope that things will turn around: that the economy of the world will pick up a little lift, that a few fronts in the War/Terror can be closed down and a few tens of thousands of troops can come home; I hope that anti-Western jihadism will wilt on its dusty vines and that paranoid militaristic wingnuts will get onto the anti-depressants they need.  I hope that the world will become a marginally more productive and happy place in the next year.  And I would be pleased to see Obama get more than his fair share of credit for it.  Oh, and I’d love to see him dance with Michelle like in that video…  at his reelection party.

George W, Looking Silly

At least, I'll try

But if that happens, I will learn to think less harshly of GW — on behalf of the last two years with Obama. George, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt!

But I will continue to despise William Henry Harrison.

Tags: , ,

Political Grievance – The Budget Deficit!

Jul 14

Posted by Zero in Bad Personal Philosophy, News, Politics | 2 Comments

This appears to be the second in what is destined to be a series of self-righteous gripe sessions.    I have noticed recently that my bouts of moral indignation are almost *always* immediately preceded by a hefty dose of news. Last time I read alternet.org or foxnews, I had to go spend some *serious* quality time getting it all out of my system.

“The reason default is no better idea today than when Newt Gingrich tried it in 1995, is it … would give the president an opportunity to blame Republicans for a bad economy…  If we go into default, [Obama] will say Republicans are making the economy worse…  and all of the sudden, we have co-ownership of the economy. That is a very bad position going into the election.” (italics mine)

Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader

I actually think highly of a number of McConnell’s moderate stances, and I don’t mean to single him out.  But I mean, c’mon.  I know this is pointed out consistently, but it is one of those metrics that seems to evaporates on contact with the human brain.  I have little faith that endless repetition will make much difference, but the numbers deserve to be repeated.  Consider wikipedia’s breakdown of national debt by presidential term, going right back to the beginning of the New Deal (those socialists!).  If you evaluate it by party, your brain will probably pick up intuitively on the fact that the national debt has actually increased substantially less under democratic presidents than it has under republican ones.   In fact, crunching the numbers will indicate that the debt has actually decreased under democratic leadership in aggregate, and increased under republican guidance.  So, if you bought the whole equation linking democrats with big government and pork barrel spending, you need to go listen to this youtube clip, like, stat.  Sorry.

Now, for those among you — party faithful to the hilt, card carriers, perhaps — who now feel vindicated in your faith in the democratic party: please listen to this youtube clip here.  That’s right.  Take it like the liberal, bleeding heart humanists you are.  Again, the numbers speak clearly: democrats has overwhelmingly been in charge of both congress and the senate over the last 65 years.  AHA!

These numbers indicate two things: first (and less importantly), neither party represents the qualities the other thinks that it does.  Comparatively, democrats are NOT big spenders and mainstream republicans are NOT business-focused, belt-tightening spendthrifts.  In many ways, they are the Pepsi and Coke of politics: everyone (except this guy) can tell you what their preference is, but they are only trivially different in nutritional content (oh, I’m sorry — Pepsi does have less sodium).  What they have in common radically outweighs the difference between them but still makes people swear, fume, and argue.  Personally, I prefer Belgian beer — I suppose that makes me an independent.

The second thing I would draw from these numbers — and you should too, by gum — is that we all have co-ownership of the economy.  McConnell was obviously speaking “politically” — as if that’s any excuse — when he warned against creating the appearance of Republican ownership of economic problems.  In a more pragmatic sense, though, both parties own this debt.  Any focus on finger pointing, one-upmanship, or political posturing is simply a waste of time.  Remember the old patriotic axiom from elementary school history that “divided we fall, united we stand”?  It is probably just as reliable as most axioms (which is to say, not at all) but does underscore the point that division, political or otherwise, is good for conquest but bad for survival.  We should not have to decide between increasing taxes and reducing spending; we should do both — just like the vast majority of qualified economists have been saying for years.

I don’t imagine qualified economists are very popular in Washington.

The temptation to take a side, externalize all failure and error to the other side, and stand back with a sense of damaged righteousness — must be a very ancient human instinct. How can we possibly face the unexplored complexities of the modern world if we cannot put aside such a childish sensibility?

Tags: , , , , ,