Urgh.

I find this -- a poll showing that the public prefers John McCain to Obama on foreign policy completely frustrating. Do people not recognize what an absolute disaster it would be in terms of foreign policy if John McCain were elected?

If you take a few moments to reflect on the stuff he's said during the campaign, the real and appreciable lack of knowledge he's demonstrated about the middle east, the advisors on his team -- Norman Podhoretz, Randy Scheunemon -- you've basically got an administration for whom war with Iran is a real priority and a Commander in Chief without the competence to manage the consequences of such an obscenely stupid action.

Obama is a young candidate, and, in the most literal sense, inexperienced in executive management of foreign policy, but he is at least, at least, as expert in foreign policy as we should expect a president to be. John McCain has not demonstrated that he's even close to meeting that qualification.

The Faces Behind the Voices

A Mother Jones photo essay on phone sex operators. I wish the written statements were less brief, but still -- hearing what phone sex operators have to say about their work, and seeing the faces behind the voices is really interesting. There is of course, the always striking moment of seeing the reality behind an object of fantasy -- I'm reminded of the sad episode in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (based on the work of Raymond Carver) -- but, in particular, I'm impressed with how thoughtful these folks are, how philosophical, about their work.

Candor

I can't help it. I just like Barack. Sometimes he gets policy wrong for the wrong reasons -- Cass Sunstein, for instance, needs to go -- but, I guess, I believe in him. I believe that he wants to do good for the country just as much as he wants to be president.

This exchange with David Cameron, which was picked up by a mic Obama didn't realize was on, reinforces that for me in an indirect way -- there's something very disarming about a super charismatic presidential candidate engaging in some earnest small talk when he doesn't know the press is listening.

What the Heck World Do I Inhabit?

So -- I was at the bookstore today and I'd picked out a novel to buy and read and I started looking at the non-fiction. I was looking for The Dark Side, by Jane Meyer, which is a book that tells the story of how the U.S. state came to torture and kill any number of men classified as detainees, suspects, enemy combatants. I didn't find it. But I did come across a book whose title I don't remember at the moment. The book purported to tell the story of a conspiracy to elect Ted Kennedy president. There's a distinct frisson that comes with the idea. Ted Kennedy has been a senator for decades, he last ran for the democratic nomination for president in, I think, 1980, hasn't been talked of as a potential candidate in ages, not even a potential VP, and he was recently diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.

His story, in other words, has mostly been told. It's not as if his life involved significant historical events which have gone unexplained. He was elected and he legislated. That's pretty much it. I suppose this doesn't make it impossible that there was a conspiracy to make him president, but his life has been so straight forward that it seems to me impossible for such a conspiracy to actually be interesting. It's a pretty bland conspiracy, in other words, that would result in events so inconspicuous that they have not even registered on the public imagination.

Most popular conspiracy theories have been imagined in order to explain events that actually happened. People like to explain the lunary landing as a conspiracy to delude the public. People like to explain John F. Kennedy's assassination as any number of things -- a coworker just yesterday told me it was the mob getting back at him for bucking their directives after they gave him the election in Chicago.

Ted Kennedy was never finagled into the office of the presidency through deceit and political maneuvering. So I just can't understand what would motivate the author of this book to write it.

I flipped through a few pages, trying to get a taste for the style of the book. Was it sober? Was it hysterical?

It wasn't hysterical -- the prose was intelligent and smooth. There weren't any explanation points, but it wasn't quite sober.

I read a sentence along the lines of the following: "With Watergate unfolding, the Kennedy's smelled blood in the water."

That's a little nuts. Whenever a narrative starts representing a group of people's state of mind in figurative terms, that narrative loses a great deal of my confidence. The sentence requires you to accept that the Kennedy family was as focused on dethroning Richard Nixon as a shark is focused on its prey. Now -- maybe the preceding parts of the book were filled with mountains of evidence that they were sending letters to one another detailing how they were going to get Nixon impeached -- but whether they were or not, lots of people wanted to impeach Nixon, once the facts about Watergate came out. I'm sure any number of Kennedies wanted Nixon to stop being president. Not only were they politically opposed to him, he broke the law, he cheated, he was a vicious political campaigner. To contend that their desire to content with Nixon politically and gain power for themselves is some sort of grave transgression doesn't make a lot of sense.

So the book was silly. I glanced at the back cover to learn about the author. He looked sober, kind of like a professor from the 1950s. He had a fair number of impressive sounding credentials in his bio, credentials that didn't seem to jib with the tone of the book.

I flipped through a few more pages. There was some commentary about John Dean and some other member of the Nixon administration. I don't remember the exact language, but the author's affection for these guys was obvious.

The narrative and its assumptions about the rightness and wrongness of the people and the events of that time period were so seamless that they didn't even admit the possibility of contradiction.

"What's that, you say?" the author might say if you were to suggest that the Kennedy's were not so much a dark and sinister cabal as your standard powerful political family. "I've never heard of such a thing. Sounds zany if you ask me."

I asked myself how a person could have such a different view of things from me and from what I understand as the historical record. I don't know the answer but the fact that it's so disturbs me for a number of reasons. One is that this guy represents some percentage of the population that is opposed to progress and which is very hard to talk to.

The other is that the mindset of this book is so deluded and so unconsciously confident of its assumptions that it brings into question the possibility of truthful understanding itself. I don't mean the sort of black and white truth and certainty that everyone knows is a pipe dream but the kind of established and qualified representations of history and facts based on evidence that you might share with a really good journalist, or professor of history, or a scientist.

I mean if this dude can right a whole book that demonstrates he's cleary living in lala land and he doesn 't have clue one that he's not living in factville, what the heck world do I inhabit?

Michael Berube is Feeling the World's Pain Too

EARTH, July 25, 2008 -- The entire world drafted an open letter to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) today, asking him to drop out of the U.S. presidential race and concede the presidency to Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois).

Those Poor Europeans

Imagine how disappointed they'll be if Barack doesn't win! They just had this whole wonderful taste of what it would be like to have him being president -- and they loved it, rightly so. Their minds must have been dancing with visions of a mature, cooperative, communicative, and productive relationship with an extremely powerful and influential nation. My god, they must be thinking, we might actually get something done. We might actually meaningfully improve the state of the world.

I have the same hopes myself, over on this side of the pond.

Do you -- does anyone -- think that such things would be possible with a McCain presidency?

Great Speech, Great Post

I've always understood the technical definition of dramatic irony -- ie when an audience knows something the characters, in whatever narrative, do not -- but I've never grokked it so well as I do now, after reading Isn't It Ironic by publius from Obsidian Wings.

The post is worth reading for the explication of dramatic irony on it's own, but it also contains some really sharp insight into Obama's nearly transcendent appeal as an orator.

Counting a Whole Lot of Chickens

I keep having to mentally correct the unconscious assumption that next January Barack Obama will be sworn in as president. I notice myself thinking things, like, "When Obama's in office..."

I feel like it's a good sign. But who knows?

Paul Krugman's feeling it too, apparently.

Why do we refer to ourselves as Americans?

So -- I understand the objections to the practice of referring to U.S. citizens as Americans and the United States as America. I also feel like it's no big deal, since it's just an established practice and more of a crime of verbal inspecificity than pure chauvinism.

One significantly mitigating factor in this usage, though, which doesn't receive that much attention, is that there isn't an easy way to refer to the state of being a U.S. citizen. What do you use in place of American in the sentence, "He's American"?

Actually -- it occurs to me extemporaneously that there are probably folks out there promoting alternatives. Usian or something. (Although in that, you have the immediate sense that the phrasing contains the assumption that everyone else is Themian, which seems at least as problematic as the assumption that the U.S. = the American continent.)

Maybe I'll have to look into what's out there. I bet there are some good ideas -- and some really ridiculous ones.

More on Josh

You know -- any number of players have gone from the NBA to Europe, American born and foreign born alike. I'm wondering what it is that sets Josh Childress apart from those others. I think the thing with him is that his decision utterly falsifies the assumption that all things being equal, and perhaps even if he'd get paid less in the NBA, an American-born player would prefer to stay here.

Globalization Realization

So, after years in which the NBA siphoned off the best european players, the first high profile, high quality NBA player has chosen to head east and play in Greece.

There's some ridiculous part of me that was sort of distressed by this -- not sure exactly why -- but after a small amount of thought, it's actually kind of exciting to think of where this trend is headed: a network of basketball leagues with players, nations, and teams overlapping the way they do in soccer.

In addition to the raw variety this will produce, the thing that makes it exciting is the unpredictability we'll start to see in the basketball tournaments. In the NBA, you kind of know which teams are best, or at least which four, with some measure of consistency. When teams are playing in separate leagues, you won't know with the same level of certainty who the top teams are. Teams will come from nowhere and surprise everyone.

Also -- the sheer number of teams and players competing will make victories that much more meaningful. Maybe we're on our way to a World Cup of basketball.

Majestic

This is from a film called Sizzle about global warming.

We're . . . Undeveloping?

US slips in development indicies.

Are we cooked? Can Barack turn us around? Only time will tell.

Fucking Luxembourg. Fucking Norway.

The piece is full of stunners like:

"Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living.

"For example, the state human development index shows that people in last-ranked Mississippi are living 30 years behind those in first-ranked Connecticut."

Conservative probably think this is awesome.  They owe us liberals big time. They've been riding on capital we built up over decades.

I like science

This is funny.

Is This What False Consciousness Means?

A dubious concept, false consciousness, in my opinion, or at least much abused, but after reading this, from Juan Cole, in which he states the following:

Despite all the talk about Iraq being "calm," I'd like to point out that the month just before the last visit Barack Obama made to Iraq (he went in January, 2006), there were 537 civilian and ISF Iraqi casualties. In June of this year, 2008, there were 554 according to AP. These are official statistics gathered passively that probably only capture about 10 percent of the true toll.

I find myself wondering if I shouldn't assume the phenomenon isn't more prevalent than I generally imaging. Here's why:

I keep myself relatively informed about politics and the state of the world, but a lot of the time I'm just tracking the narrative. I recognize that what I'm reading for reasons both cultural and practical is just a small sliver of what's actually happening. (This is so obvious, given the scale of the universe, when you say it explicitly, but we seem in our doings to assume something different.) So -- if you take my Iraq post from yesterday as a small sample of how a relatively well informed person saw things yesterday and then you read that Juan Cole quote just above, it's hard not to be struck anew by the size of the gap between what we represent as the state of things and the state of things.

I think it makes the point I was making yesterday about the unacknowledged cost of the war even more pressing.

Calculated Risk is a National Treasure

This post, Dueling Discourses of Debt, by Tanta at Calculated Risk should be presented whenever some idiot barks about blogging being some kind of lesser medium.

I never thought I'd enjoy reading so much concentrated argument, observation, and discussion on the subject of finance and credit, but I do. In fact, it occurs to me that my skepticism -- the idea that the deep lore of finance and credit are dry as dust, insignificant in relation to the real stuff of life, sex, love, art, politics, etc -- is misplaced. Maybe the sense I have that I'm understanding something important about the society I live in when I read a blog that mostly talks about real estate and the ways in which people make money off of money is not at all unwaranted.

Policy, Politics, Personality, and Good Data

I was as upset as anyone -- well actually maybe not quite -- about his FISA reversal, but this reminded me of why I like Barack Obama and why I think he'll be a terrific president.

After the FISA thing, I was trying to figure out why one still has a good feeling about Obama, despite some of his irrationally centrist positions. What do we need from a president besides good policy? The answer, I think, has to do with how he thinks and how he influences our sense of ourselves as Americans. Obama in this case is showing a preference for good data. It's a small thing, I suppose, but better data means better government and better government means more confidence in government and more confidence in government means more opportunity for implementing good initiatives.

PSD

Lots of democrats/liberals were in favor of the Iraq war when it started -- Howard Dean ran for the democratic primary as the antiwar candidate and people responded to him as if his ideas about the war were unserious, fringey, even perverse.

But now it's five years later and we find ourselves persuaded by all the IEDs and the sectarian violence that the war was a mistake. More recently its been quieter and you can feel the national media starting to wonder whether it should shift back to "pro-war".

What this says to me is that the only one which journalists (or perhaps I should say editors and television news producers and execs) seem comfortable using as a basis for judging the validity of the war seems to be the frequency of explosions and massacres. If stuff is getting blown up a lot and there is documentary evidence of slaughter, we tell ourselves, we can safely assert that it's going badly. If not, we owe the architects of this war some respect.

This is crazy. Even if the suicide bombings, the sectarian violence, and the IEDs never again resurfaced -- and they will, all of them, before and after we are gone -- the story of this war has already inflicted itself on the people of Iraq and the people of the United States. We will not escape that history.

The knowledge of those who died -- whether gained through abstraction or experience -- the wounded citizens, the dead soldiers, the destroyed infrastructure, the emotional trauma that the violence and the prospect of violence will have inflicted on the citizens of that country and ours -- these phenomena affect everyone and they affect everyone lastingly and acutely.

We have lost 4000 soldiers by violence in Iraq. Many more have been physically wounded. Some large percentage of all the soldiers will experience post traumatic stress disorder.

That's a clinical name for a collection of experiences and memories that to my mind to some extent defines the meaning of this catastrophe. It was stressful. It was traumatic. And the effects will linger -- in ways we are completely unaware of -- long after the last shot has been fired. We will never escape the history of this war.

Navel Gazing

Matthew Yglesias referenced this blog post while asking the question, "Is it possible that the writing scene in New York could possibly be as terrible as it sounds?"

I read the post. It's about a girl, an aspiring writer, who went to a party with literary types and found the people she met there sort of creepy and disappointing. She described the party a little bit. There were people in a house drinking, having stupid conversations, which isn't really any different from a lot of parties.

Anyway, she was sad. She thought they were all jerks. I was like yup, literature, novels, just one more damn thing. You can't be religious about it, but you can enjoy it's textures, the same way you can enjoy the textures of anything else.