Is Huckabee’s Misplaced Mercy Responsible For Maurice Clemmons’ Actions?

No ceremony that to great ones ‘longs,

Not the king’s crown, nor the deputed sword,

The marshal’s truncheon, nor the judge’s robe,

Become them with one half so good a grace

As mercy does.

-A favorite quote from a favorite play, Measure for Measure

—~—

Timothy Egan of the New York Times:

If Huckabee were a liberal and a Democrat, he would be a punching bag for right wing blowhards an example of clueless, soft-on-crime politicians at their worst. Fox News would be stalking him, as they have others responsible for letting criminals out early.

First off, the self-defeating argument pretty much leaps off the page and out the window.  Egan (frankly, a liberal) is premising that soft-on-crime politics were the cause of Huckabee’s pardon of Clemmons, a pejorative argument which ultimately harms such “soft-on-crime” politics more than it really harms Huckabee.  But recidivism (and in this case, much worse) is an institutional risk faced by legal officials every day, whether it’s a pardon, a probation hearing, or an inmate release review.  There is not a judge in this country who does not worry that someone they release will commit some worse crime; but given the volume of cases they process, such incidents are also an inevitability.  That is the gritty and thankless side of the legal profession.  Likewise, as I will articulate further on, plausible deniability is still squarely within Huckabee’s defensive strategy, and for no trivial reasons.

More:

These failures reveal institutional and human flaws. Some are inevitable products of a strained system, with legal protections often at odds with community safety. But none stands out more than the intervention of Huckabee to put Clemmons back on the street.

Do I agree with him?  Is Huckabee’s misplaced mercy responsible for Clemmons’ actions?  Frankly, I don’t know—I have no determination.  And no one else should either, because anyone short of a Pierce County investigator lacks sufficient information in order to understand Clemmons’ actions, his past offenses, or other institutional antecedents, without ALL of which one cannot make qualitative judgments about either Clemmons or Huckabee’s decision to pardon him.

What the heck does that mean?  Well, first it means that no one can possibly argue that if Huckabee had known of Clemmons future-potential to commit mass murder that Huckabee still would have pardoned him.  That’s unconscionable, and implying it by calling it “Huckabee’s Burden” (the title of Egan’s post) is just really freakin low, in my opinion.  Secondly, it means that you cannot pass judgment on the past based on information that came out at a later time and could well have been the result of any number of extraneous causes.  In our legal system, one could easily locate another similar pardon in which the outcome was drastically more positive, and thereby still justified as a general rule.  Point bein’, there is simply no predictive value in a pardon, it is simply a release from obligations incurred as a result of past offenses and is based on mitigating circumstances (of which adolescence is commonly recognized).  Legal officials are not omniscient; pardons are not based on future circumstances or events.

So, as Egan assumes, is this a case of “If A, then B, then C: therefore, If A then C”?  Absolutely not.  Such rigidly teleological assumptions about legal courses of action are the substance of ideological or religious assumptions claiming that causality follows some hidden or malicious compact of events, some inevitability between highly relative events and moments.  But the assumption speaks to the likelihood that this is just another hyped-up media narrative, a news cycle commodity; another preloaded storyline, lying in wait for its appropriate referents, simply to slime some hapless conservative.

As such, I find it stumbling and foolhardy that Egan has to suppress his contradictions in order to make qualitative judgments about Clemmons actions and to transfer those onto Huckabee.  And I doubt that anyone would disagree that Huckabee’s decision to pardon Clemmons was rather liberal in character; and if not so, at the very least hardly conservative (hang ‘em high!).  As a Democrat and, in fact, a staunch believer in the redemptive power of legal mercy, I would have at least given the pardon some serious thought, as in just about any adolescent case.  In part, this is because I think people prefer to believe that they can distinguish the innately “bad ones” a priori as merely one facet of a projected psychological duality between “good” and “bad/wrong” which they deploy to naturalize their own projections about the world.  The reasons people lend to their suggestion of someone’s identification as a “bad one” usually has more to do with using that “bad one” as a rationale for their beliefs about how the world works, or “ought” to work, and much less to do with any truly coherent view of law or society.  (Oh, these stupid, loutish “ought’s”…)  Given that most people’s beliefs about how the world works and how the world actually works rarely mesh* (some analytic philosophers suggest such beliefs do not exist, and hence will never mesh), it is simply outrageous to cite some easy, predictive mechanism for declaring this or that person or entity as categorically “bad” or “good.”  Likewise, it is incredibly presumptuous to make such declarations based on information that was unavailable in the past, but to retroactively asssert some responsibility anyway.  It’s like blaming the salesman who sold you a car that died because of fouled oil or poor maintenance.

However, I don’t disagree with Egan’s broader historical argument so much as I just don’t agree.   Which makes me glad, because I don’t want to risk of ad-hominizing what I believe are the broader problems within the Democratic party as manifested by guys like Egan.  Which in itself is still a pretty lame blog theme, I fully admit.  But I mean the thought-beggaring theme of “conservatives are hypocrites” as some pseudo-justification for liberal policies?  Now that’s just the kind of lazy, Stewart-Colbert reductionism that I despise, much as I despise instant coffee, automatic cars, and dolts who strip bolt heads.  Of the Dukakis parallel I have no knowledge—I was not a precocious two year old.  Still, people should support certain concepts or political propositions because of an educated, inward persuasion regarding certain policy preferences; precisely the opposite of which would be suppressing educated discourse by blaming one’s ideological opponents and pounding the table for special pleading.

So what the heck, is Huckabee responsible in some way?  I don’t think so, whether or not I share anything else with the man.  And besides pouring salt in fresh wounds and tenderizing them with a meathammer, it doesn’t get us anywhere to pretend we know that he could be.

Running From It All

Timothy Egan on arrogant douchebaggery running:

I’ve been a runner all my life. My view of the world, those random glimpses, was in part shaped by bouncing along back roads at dawn, prairie trails at sunset and thousands of urban alleys and neighborhood sidewalks in between…  My mother thinks I’m nuts, setting myself up for a breakdown of joints and bone, or getting shot at night by some heavily armed tea-bagger on a Glenn Beck binge.

Note the easy dove-tail from hobby narrative into the usual self-loathing snipes at right-wing phantoms.  Uh, if I’m not mistaken, Sarah Palin is a liberal sex symbol runner.

He also discusses Christopher McDougall’s recent book, Born to Run, which breaks down some of the stereotypes about running stubbornly withheld by Western commodity culture.  I find it curious that Egan has to qualify this tired, cynical West-bashing with the usual pretentiousness:

It’s good to be skeptical whenever some Westerner claims to have found a Shangri-La lifestyle hidden away in the mountains. These ‘discoveries’ are often little more than projections based on the outsider’s perceived shortcomings, or cultural misunderstanding.

That’s plain silly.  The Modern western fetish for things ‘Eastern’—whatever this even refers too, from Moscow to the Pacific Islands, and all hundred-eighty latitudes between—through some claim to unique, arcane, and secret knowledge is what guides and hones the obsession with “authenticity” in a highly commoditized culture, a culture immersed in visual signifiers.  In a nutshell, that’s globalized Modernism in all its dialectics; and a bourgeois, supposedly “rustic” liberal author from Seattle writing for an urban east coast audience is probably one of its most fitting instances.   So my tongue may bore a hole in my cheek when I read these supercilious affectations of care when the mode of Egan’s writing itself borrows heavily from the same fetishizing reflexes of postmodernity, media culture, and the usual liberal claim to some sort of elevated or unique knowledge of the world.  Given that my environs are heavily liberal, do they not see that it’s all just a shell game?

Although I’ve been a runner and a biker for all my life, according to Egan and thousands of other local pomo-lib drones, I can engage in neither without engaging in political acts.  I actually have a fleet—yes, a fleet, lest you prefer armada—of six salvaged and freebie bikes that I built from recycled parts, two with trailers, one of which I fabricated out of a jogging stroller, and one bike with front and rear rack/fender combos built out of discarded political signs.  Am I an enviro-nut?  A quirky freetarian?  Not really, although I welcome the comments—I just enjoy building things and prefer riding for local errands.  I have to eat, I have to save gas, I have a budget, I just like dynamism and motion—none of these things even skim their understanding, apparently.

As such, I cannot ride to the store to pick up a sixpack and a little soma without being a greenie, some ironic douche, or some twenty-something Keruoac wannabe who could scarcely change a tire, true a rim, or fill out a job app.  Furthermore, in a county with a history of dog violence that recently axed its animal control program, a county where my pepper-spray-in-hand five mile run traverses the territory of no fewer than a dozen free-range suburban heel-biters, and another dozen imindless stop-sign-disregarding Subaru drivers, Egan claims the biggest danger he worries about is being shot by a Glenn Beck nut.  Uh, misplaced-ignorance-what?  If I’m not mistaken, there has never been any such instance, and the last shooting in our county involved an educated, liberal-anarchist who assassinated a police officer in a chillingly conscientious act of premeditated murder after fire-bombing several police vehicles a few weeks prior.

If this isn’t the age of stupid, I don’t look forward to what’s down the road.  Egan’s thesis, and the usual liberal meta-thesis, only affirms that nothing exists outside of consumerist systems for signification, and the only lingua-per-existence is the language of ressentiment, of simplistic cultural binaries and exhausted civil-rights era progressive mythology.  Everything is a political act.  Everything exists in a mode of static consumer signifiers and political nomenclature.  There is no world other.  Drive a hybrid, never mind they’re actually worse than a Hummer.  Affirm capitalism in one hand, and claim to fight it with the other.  Don’t pick your nose.  Big brother Ideology marks your every step.

And the world beyond language, beyond the lazy rhetoric of piss-poor liberal authors?  Doesn’t exist.  The world in which storms blow, seasons pass, animals go to and fro in a ceaseless struggle for persistence, where ancestors pass away and dreams rise and fall with the swaggering of a loose pendulum, and where folks strive to scrape together a hardscrabble living against the absurd tax burdens liberals impose on them—yep, doesn’t exist.

Good grief.  I think I need a run…

Finally. But time to ready the lifeboats?

Buried in the subterranean catacombs of its Money section, the New York Times covers the fact that proposed health care reform mandates—the lynch pin of reform, and a stealth hand-out to industry lobbyists—will harm the very groups and individuals whose interests are the proclaimed “moral” core of reform:

“The paradox is this: Reform advocates start with anecdotes about the underprivileged who are uninsured, then turn around and propose something that would hurt at least some members of that group…

“Defenders of a broad health insurance mandate argue that it will lower average costs in the health care market. The claim is that many of the uninsured are young, healthy or both, and that bringing them into the insurance pool might lower average premiums by spreading risk across low-cost groups. Yet Massachusetts has had a health insurance mandate for several years and this cost-saving mechanism does not appear to be kicking in…

“We’re often told that America should copy the health care institutions of Western Europe. Yet we’re failing to copy the single most important lesson from those systems — namely, to put cost control first. Instead, we’re putting our foot on the gas pedal and ratcheting up the fiscal pressures on the system, in the hope that someday, somehow, it will all work out.

As it stands, we’re on the verge of enacting a policy that is due to explode, penalizing many of the very people that it was ostensibly designed to help.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, as an uninsured student with asthma and a somewhat risky outdoor life, but this reform is a farce.  And no, I aint no Birther, Bircher, nor any manner of Fox News spongecake.  The article (and only a guest article, it ought be mentioned) discusses the fact that mandating health insurance will tax the poor and the young more than it will be any benefit in the long term, forcing the young and healthy to pay for fat old laggards, thereby collectivizing the irresponsible health choices of others, and creating yet another systematic disincentive to take responsibility for one’s own health.  They say this disparity will be covered by subsidies, but 1) no one ever actually says who or how much these will cover, and 2) such a system creates a glistening, lard-polished slope toward spiraling subsidization (see the article).  I’m sorry, but I will probably never pay for mandated health insurance, and I would encourage others to take up the same civil disobedience.  I mean hell, what’s the punishment if you don’t pay for mandated insurance?  God bless America, do they stick you in a cell, force you to smoke cigarettes, feed you from value-menus, and prohibit all forms of exercise?  Because that is to be the mold which this “reform” inherits.

R71 and the Right to Privacy: A Democrat’s Appeal Against the Party of Dan Savage

R-71 and the Right to Privacy:

A Democrat’s Appeal Against the Party of Dan Savage

—~—

If you require the identity of another party in the traditionally-anonymous public forum on some political issue, it is to be regarded as tacit admission (and rather insecure, to boot) that you can’t argue your case; because the only use of another’s identity in such a context is to promulgate bigotry and to incite retribution against those with whom you do not agree.

As a supporter of R-71 and gay-union rights, it is clear that my own views pertaining to the initiative—or any Washington State initiative—have no bearing on my discomfort with the argument that initiative-supporter signatures ought to be made public.

Bearing that disclaimer in mind, I am in utter disbelief at the disgusting perversion of democratic rights forwarded by liberals and (fellow) democrats who support releasing the signature list purely for politically-vindictive ends.

Until only 10 years ago, historical precedent in Washington State affirmed an initiative-signer’s right to privacy, the same as any voter’s right to privacy.  The reasoning behind this is because the voter’s right to privacy is one of the essential bulwarks of truly free elections.  People cannot fairly participate or compete in democratic elections knowing that their actions may be used against them, in the form of prior coercion or retaliation later on.

Seattle liberals have argued against this essential right to privacy, for reasons I can’t possibly fathom except a total neglect of history and foolhardy hubris.  Hell, Christine Gregoire’s Secretary of State appointee Sam Reed, a FRIGGIN REPUBLICAN, is the key link in the chain who could have stopped this nonsense waste of taxpayer money before forwarding it to the courts, then the appellate court, and now it’s going its merry way all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.  The best arguments against a political right to privacy—professional and layperson—amount to saying that initiative-signer’s have no prior identity protection, and that because democratic participation (e.g. voting) is a public action, the public has a right to know the identities and political actions of democratic participants.  Subsequently, and with absolutely no substantive legal ties to individual rights, they cite government transparency laws as sufficient reason that individual protections should be lifted.  Uh, since when did “government transparency” pertain to sovereign citizens?  I can’t even begin to describe the pupil-hemorrhaging myopia of this argument, and I am disconcerted by the sheer volume of professionals who earnestly follow such specious reasoning.

It should be obvious (either implicitly or by open admission) is that Seattle liberals and R71 opponents support these arguments simply on ideological, and not legal, grounds.  If the matter was reversed, and R71 pertained instead to something like a woman’s “right” to choose, can you believe the shrill outcry one would hear if any opponent of such an amendment were to forward formal arguments toward exposing the supporters of such an initiative?  This is the utter short-sightedness of the liberal argument, because essentially they seek to affirm or deny one’s fourteenth amendment right to due process only when it suits a given ideological agenda, which supports no broader view about the enduring stability and coherence of democratic law.  I will say, however disagreeably, and for whatever reason, that this sort of foolhardy ignorance in the name of some progressive mythos has become characteristic of the LGBT rights movement as a whole, if not the entirety of contemporary American liberalism.

Not as a matter of opinion, but sheer fact, releasing the identities of initiative supporters amounts purely to an ad hominem, which ought to be far more worrisome than people care to understand.  When debating an issue, the identity or identities of one particular position on the issue bears no substance on the issue itself.  What does it tell me that Joe White-Conservative-Workingman votes a particular way?  Does one’s ironically-bigoted egalitarianism bear out one’s spiteful nature toward about a specific social group?  Doe Joe’s views thereby affect my interpretation of a given issue?  Well, if they do, then frankly you’re an anti-democratic dumbass.  The proper American response to how Joe voted is to ask, why the hell do I care how Joe votes?  Does he not have a right to his own views, no matter your own potential disagreement with them?  If you cannot refute his views in public discourse, then has “the system” failed, or have you?

If you require the identity of another party in the traditionally-anonymous public forum on some political issue, it is to be regarded as tacit admission (and rather insecure, to boot) that you can’t argue your case; because the only use of another’s identity in such a context is to promulgate bigotry and to incite retribution against those with whom you do not agree.  Emphasizing someone’s identity asks us to forego analysis of the issues themselves, and to instead place emphasis on someone’s biography, their potential failings, their identification with certain political party, their commercial interests, etc.; as just so Janet I. Tu and Lornet Turnbull of The Seattle Times affirmed when they wrote an article on the personal lives of two R71 proponents, Larry Stickney and Gary Randall.  The Times of course, in its infinite banality, ran the article on its front page edition on 10/14, mug shots and all. Since then Larry Stickney has commented that he has his children sleep in the hall at the middle of his house, away from the street.  The New York Times has even followed up on the matter, stating in its article that, “the [Secretary of State's] office has released names of petition signers on other ballot measures in the past,” but neglecting to mention that the historical precedent until only ten years ago was to keep initiative signatures sealed. I mean honestly, these folks call themselves journalists?  It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that supporters of R71 (Dan Savage, The Seattle Times, et al) have openly described that they seek to bring economic and physical harm to the initiatives signatories, as well as public embarrassment, harrassment, and personal humiliation.  In the case of whosigned.org as well as knowthyneighbor.org what you have are basically hate-groups hiding behind the scrim of “equality,” demonstrating, once again, how aptly such ideals may be co-opted by ideologues with ulterior motives.

Given these circumstances, it becomes clear that the right to privacy found in the fourteenth amendment’s due process clause is inherent in contexts of formal democratic participation, because the exposure of one’s identity necessarily begets retribution and coercion, contrary to the guarantee of equal protection under the law.  Not only is there potential for wrong to occur by exposing voters identities, but in light of current circumstances, sadly enough, apparently it is the only available outcome under the disgraceful leadership of Seattle’s pseudo-liberal political regime.  Keeping initiative signatories’ identities sealed is simply the most expedient and safe way of avoiding law enforcement  and court costs later on, and far more importantly, for keeping democratic participation open, fair, and safe.  But this, of course, is the least of worries for the Seattle political regime and their counterparts in local media.

The struggle of modern democracies is not to affirm the hegemonic power of these sorts of ideologies—as inevitable as they may be, given their agency—but to correct and counteract their pernicious effect.  As stated prior, I supported and voted to affirm R71, and yes, I am a democrat—albeit, no longer a fan of most of my venal local dem’s when it comes to issues like this one.  But I am in total disbelief and shock that gay-rights activists and other liberals so openly endorse inherently anti-democratic views of privacy and political participation.  What does it say about modern constructs of political identification, that instead of debating the actual issues in a civil manner, Seattle liberals themselves blithely endorse legal actions to expose individuals in a manner that is tantamount to prioritizing political sectarianism as the primary, elevated, and supposedly “cosmopolitan” mode of political recourse?

The Sheared Threads of Contemporary Wingnuttery: A Non-Legume Review of James Wesley Rawles’ Patriots

The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath: I swear by my Life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.

—John Galt, from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

I confess I am not one to buy political books and books written by pundits, whether or not they even remotely intimate my own views.  And the reason is that these sorts of books are (1) purely for-profit and (2) subsequently they are bleeding heart, ultra-ideological polemics composed by hired teams of writers.  However, just as a book like Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries may acquire historical precedent because of the events following it, so too does one occasionally manage to guiltily lift the cover of any contemporary political book (liberal or conservative, fiction or “non-fiction” fiction) to examine meaningful moments in historical antecedents.

Just so, I found myself at Barnes and Noble, that ‘ole pulp mill, when I noticed about ten on-shelf copies of James Wesley Rawles’ Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse.  Given the current climate among Glenn Beck fanatics and brow-beaten conservatives simmering in social ressentiment and political oblivion, I decided to leaf through a few pages of high-brow drivel from a local Survivalist-cult leader.  I was a little in awe that this post-apocalyptic/Survivalist/neo-con/shout-at-the-moon novel contained rather accurate descriptions of the outer Palouse region and its flowing geography, where I have lived for many years.  When I remembered just the sort of individuals the Palouse Empire attracts—the Old Testament cults, the Survivalists, the Apocalyptics, the flaming racists, and all combinations therein—my awe subsided into a kind of vindicated grief.  Others must have known it would come to this.

What immediately struck me about the novel is that it didn’t make any sense, a pattern which only reiterated itself with each page.  It’s about a band of white collar city dwellers (all white, ultra-religious, neo-conservative) who set-up a survivalist compound (a la Ruby Ridge), because of what they see as the inevitable unraveling of modern civilization.  Curiously, Rawles never clearly articulates the why of this inevitability, it is just supposed to be accepted as-such.  But if it’s any hint, the signifying matrix for each character is based on their religion, race, and gender.  Similarly, the economic collapse upon which the entire plot depends is glossed over in media buzzwords and shallow understandings of currency markets, resulting in a discourse that continually loops back upon itself—not unlike itinerant degenerates conversing with themselves in languages only they comprehend: “the world was collapsing because money was overvalued, and then there was like inflation or something, and therefore the world was collapsing.  But you don’t really need to understand why, except to know that cliche male hero John Galt Texas Wayne was so informed by Fox News, and was right all along, not like those liberal pussies and their Academy and their post-middle school degrees…”

Compounding this confusing spiral of neoconservative delusions about historical loss and violent alienation, the novel ends with a professor who affirms that all along, the cause of collapse was the government’s tampering with the second amendment.  This had not been elaborated any time prior in the book.  Granted—and I’m no economist—but gun rights and economic collapse don’t strike me as sharing a strong causal connection.  Unless, that is, you either live in some East-bloc country, or you are a fringe lunatic who colonizes Mountain-Western towns with anti-government rhetoric, cults, separatism, and every legitimizing myth of masculinity in the Book of Stupid Ideas.

So yeah, the plot is top-to-bottom crazy, a kind of crazy that just keeps multiplying with itself and leaving the reader with a sense of, “Hhhhh-what?“  The characters claim some inheritance to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and yet their “belief system” (as this is often emphasized) is just a pastiche of cherry-picked Bible passages, Ayn Rand sentiments, military acronyms, and erroneous libertarian concepts disclaiming any and all legal responsibility.  There is, however, a kind of meangfulness in terms of the unintended that every political book purports to resolve, but ultimately fails; the contradictions and dualities pressing for oxygen at the seams of a thematic straight-jacket.  Along this line, the entirety of this book can be dissected in a poem Rawles borrows from Rudyard Kipling as a chapter heading:

A stone’s throw out on either hand

From that well-ordered road we tread,

And all the world is wild and strange;

Churl and ghoul and Djinn and sprite

Shall bear us company tonight,

For we have reached the Oldest Land

Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.

—In the House of Suddhoo

An excellent poem, a description of the precariousness of human reality, shrouded in strangeness and wrought with danger, desire, and ephemeral agents of “good” and “evil.”  Darkness absolute and unknowable.

What Rawles fails to realize is that Kipling’s poetry complements his own book in ways he could not intend.  What Rawles does not know is that Kipling’s “oldest land” of darkness and danger was born out of his Orientalism, the turn-of-the-century Modernist obsession with the racially and geographically “exotic.”  Kipling’s “oldest land” is derived from the Asiatic racial “other” as a cultural and highly Modernist fetish, a fetish which occurs because such “other” races must be used as plot devices to forward the “complexity” and arcane knowledge for which all Modernist novels must strive.  The “darkness,” the threatening uncertainty of Kipling’s “oldest land” is every uncertain thing in the world reified and transferred onto Rawles’ other: racial and social minorities, liberals, technocrats—well, you get the idea.

It should be noted, with great apprehension, that the construct of Kipling’s Oriental other was remarkably evident later on in the comparative brutality seen in the Pacific Theatre of WWII and the war in Vietnam.  During World War II, Anglo-American G.I.’s in Europe tended to take military souvenirs: bayonets, medals, Nazi paraphernalia.  Contrast this with battles with the Japanese, and the North Vietnamese thirty years later, where G.I.’s often descended into primal brutality by collecting ears, fingers, and even the severed heads of their vanquished enemies.  Of note here is that the mode of signification shifts from administrative trinkets of honor to a mode of carnal blood lust, terror, and racial domination.  (And likewise with regard to the perception of expendability which brought Vietnamese carpet bombings, the first and only combat use of atomic weapons on civilian populations at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as well as the use of incendiary bombings on civilian centers like Tokyo.)  Likewise, in Rawles’ book, urban dwellers and liberals are presented as “communists,” and “fags” who descend into cannibalism on the drop of a dime.  (Yes, Rawles actually says this.)

In this way, the “other” is double: it entices, but it also threatens because of the spatial authenticity it occupies.  It is a mirror of the Lacanian real; but a mirror which mediates the real, thereby providing an artifice for the bad things which one does not like about reality.  Inevitably, this other must be mapped and claimed before being routed, destroyed, and erased from existence.  However, the other is also necessary as it facilitates one’s gaining of some exclusive knowledge or understanding of the world, through co-optation.  And thus, we begin to see the sociopathic side of early Modernist novels, wherein the colonization of the “other” is necessary for the creation of an authentic identity, but—paradoxically—the threat posed by the authenticity of this other mandates its total destruction, its erasure.  This is precisely the dynamic which Joseph Conrad understood when he created Colonel Kurtz, whose tragedy demonstrated that at the heart of Modernist European culture was a sordid truth.  In Conrad’s novel, in contrast to Kipling, this tragedy lies in the final revelation that Kurtz is in fact not insane, but instead the very fulfillment of the Modernist cultural ideals of his time.

The whole of Rawles plot demonstrates that this “other” can be fled from for only so long, but conflict is inevitable, and thus, so too is the genocide of the “other,” by incidence or consequence, whatever its (non-white, non-Anglo) referents.  Rawles’ “other” is free-floating and malleable, so long as it ultimately depends on some signification of difference: religion, race, and sex.  But as Joseph Conrad recognized in Heart of Darkness, this “other” does not truly exist in the world as-such, but solely in the Romantic-imperial ideology of its bearer: in Kipling, and Rawles, and other tribalist conservatives.  For Rawles, as for Kipling, the strangeness of “the Old Land” inheres not in the world of the real, but in himself.

The creepiest part about reading this book (aside from its many antisocial underpinnings), is the genocidal aura drifting over this moral psychology: the presupposition of and the desire for complete social denigration into violence, want, and exclusion.  Rawles misses no opportunity to swat at neo-con phantoms, such as “BATfags” (a pejorative acronym for the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms) and pretty much any other minority category in the popular social or political vernacular, nor does he miss any opportunity to make laborious and incredibly arrogant lists of militia-oriented equipment and tactical operations.  You simply cannot read a page of his book without having to slog through many a preening soapbox, nihilistic anti-government rhetoric, or inane lists of equipment and combat methods (though for many, the latter is an important function of the book).  This is where the creepiness comes in, because the ideology structuring the book (essentially a pseudo-Jeffersonian fascism) is so ubiquitous and all-saturating it overwhelms the book itself, becoming the real psychodrama underlying “the group” and all their paranoid preparations for a future that is unknowable except through exclusion, domination, and self repression.

Surely, however, fans of Rawles and other far right nuts will read into this novel some sort of “patriotic” message—it’s the damn title, after all.  A message about the encroachment of government on civil liberties and the individual, and so on, and on, and on with the projections of Ayn Randian self-victimization.  But the operant assumption in this novel is the same as any other artifact of American political sectarianism: the assumption that rights are absolute, homogeneous, and oh yeah, highly dependent on racial signifiers.  What makes this view anti-American is not just its anti-philosophical outer works, or its anti-intellectual lignification, it is the fact that any notion of social contract is utterly absent from its many polemics.  Nowhere in the novel is any mention of an individuals’ responsibility to society, the counter ballast to individual liberties.  And Rawles’ concept of democratic society is equally absurd, as it continually endorses the constant division of the institutions of civil government to the point that they would be unable to serve any social function whatsoever.  And thus, dominance by the strongest—which as we know, means the most stupid.

The presumption of Rawles’ view is that governmental institutions are *all* institutions of control, that they do not derive their authority from the will of the people, nor that they exist to serve common social goals, nor to protect people from corruption, nor to passively regulate and thereby protect INIDIVIDUALS from negligence and fraud.  Likewise, Rawles’ view of the individual’s responsibilities toward the society from which he/she derives his/her well-being is that he/she has no responsibilities whatsoever.  The contract between men and their government is nullified.  And since we Americans reify that contract in the form of our Constitution, it becomes rather disturbing that fellers like Rawles and other 912 loonbags identify themselves as “constitutionalists” when they are extrinsically against the Constitution, against democratic rights.  As a native of the mountain regions where these guys most often come with their guns, male-consumer signifiers, and do-it-yourself religions, can’t you guys just go some place else?

Cash for Clunkers: Myth and Reality in the Misinformation Age

Cash for Clunkers:

Myth and Reality in the Age of Misinformation

I’m ever a sucker for analyzing the politics of various misinformation campaigns.  But the “Cash for Clunkers” bill seeks a whole ‘nother realm of untruth, the realm of 19th-century American vaudeville.

Proponents claim, inaccurately, that the bill gets old, fuel-inefficient cars off the road whilst stimulating new car sales for a decrepit American auto industry.  The bill, they say, requires people to buy cars that get, say, 6+ mpg more than their old cars.  Hallelujah!

But oh yeah: that isn’t the case at all.  While the original bill was supposed to require cars bought to have at least 5mpg more than cars traded-in, the bill was modified such that the bought cars need only get at least 22mpg.  In my research of this bill, this is precisely where I thought I’d get snarky and post some pics of autos which our government deems “fuel-efficient” for getting 22mpg: trucks, large SUV’s, and other gas hogs.  And then I discovered that even the sedans and light-SUV models these days get 22mpg, but only on the high end of their mpg rating (highway).  Even twenty years ago, the numbers for this class of automobile was much higher.  Current figures are comparable to cars from the fifties.

Total insanity.  22mpg is absolutely nothing to be proud of in the 21st century.  My own truck, an extremely useful, repairable, and reliable 1987 2wd Toyota pickup gets 30mpg (highway) with a goddamn carburetor.  I bought it for seven hundred dollars, and spent no more than four thousand dollars turning the odometer from 300k back to zero.  What the heck has happened?  Why have mpg’s gone down in the last thirty years, while engine technology has become more sophisticated?  Why have cars become more difficult and expensive to repair?  What gives?

The answer: collectively, Americans are suckers for marketing ploys, and Cash for Clunkers is simply an extension of the idiotic, consumerist plasticity of American standards.  And congress has followed suit, opting instead to destroy reliable cars and trucks like my own, to replace them with shoddier and shoddier piles of showroom scrap.  I bid luck to those who ought to be diverting clunker inventories to greener, more economical, and far more socially responsible purposes.

Re-Establish Wolves in Seattle? Why Bother, We’ve Plenty.

Dude, Where’s My Party?

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The old man went on to say that the hunter was a different being than men supposed.  He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better.  He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there.  Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do.  He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so.  Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see.  They see acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.

-The Crossing

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Since the election of our nation’s first black president—a write-off during nominations against the Clinton democratic aristocracy, and a politician for whom so many (including myself) worked diligently to nominate—I can’t help but wonder why it has become such a nauseating affair to read the opinion pages of the New York Times.  Let not the cable punditocracy sully our discourse with its banal stupidity, goes the choral chant, but to open floodgates of ink for Maureen Dowd’s obsessive and self-reflective rants on Sarah Palin, David Brooks’ token conservatism, Roger Cohen’s dogmatic secularism, Friedman’s liberal observations of the absurdly obvious, and Bob Herbert’s quasi-racial-but-usually-redeemable prejudice.  While each of these narcissists has their occasional glimmer of insight, as an editor I would sooner pull a Stalin and have them all liquidated:

…Then rose the mighty Paul Krugman to survey the wreck of battle ‘midst the pink-fingered dawn: sayeth he,  ‘All dead save me.’

Now do you see what I did just there?  Literally I made an entreaty to have the NY Times editorial staff assassinated for high crimes of banality and inane chattering.  (Sparing the Great Krugman, seemingly the only mind in their bawdy midst.)  But of course, such entreaties are anything but literal.  They exist solely in the realm of the rhetorically hypothetical, in their proper space of jouissance: the hypothetical enjoyment of acts which no person would consciously undertake.  And there they remain, along with every gay, Jew, white, black, purple, or chicken joke from which I ever gathered myself from the floor.  Because, my dear liberal ideologues, laughter is the stuff of life, wholly apart from those who might be negligibly and only laterally harmed by some mere pun, the not so tasteful and the deliciously not-so-tasteful.

Timothy Egan, however, takes the contrary view beholden to all hypocritical tools, such that every relaxation into laughter should be taken utmost literally, and that—under the scrim of egalitarianism—no one must feel the crack of a good joke unless that joke happens to involve inventive epithets for Christians, whites, conservatives, or working class males.  And thus, a dubious and somewhat stupid remark by a candidate for Idaho’s governorship is equivalent to wiping the sweat from Lee Harvey’s brow on a Dallas summer afternoon:

A Republican candidate for governor of Idaho, Rex Rammell, was at a political barbecue last week when somebody brought up the tags used by wolf hunters, and then made a reference to killing the president of the United States.

“Obama tags?” Rammell replied, to laughter, according to an account in The Times-News of Twin Falls. “We’d buy some of those.”

In the Idaho of the past, jokes about shooting a president could sometimes be dismissed without consequence. Indeed, the comment was buried in an initial news story about the gathering, and Rammell sloughed it off later, saying on his Web site that “Obama hunting tags was just a joke! Everyone knows Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue tags in Washington, D.C.”

Ha-ha. What a knee-slapper, these assassination jokes. And besides, he couldn’t hunt down Obama with out-of-state tags. Get it?

I certainly do not endorse Rammell’s insensitivity (after the fact anyhow), but Egan’s response reflects a total lack of understanding of the social context shoring Rammell’s ability to quip without the wildly unconstrained backlash.  It is a context in which any person can be subjected to any degree of joke, and yes, even especially the coarse and insensitive ones.  As any comedian worth their craft will attest, to enshroud this or that group or individual as inviolable only begs that one do so.  During the Bush years I could rattle off a hundred puns about what a glue-huffing dumbass our president was, is, and forever shall be unto all posterity.  Life was swell, and I don’t recall being accused of sedition.  Out here in the West, we still hold to the axiom that all’s fair in love and politics.  But what’s that?  Egan claims some sort of elevated knowledge of things western?  Ah, give me a break…

Since Egan believes that Rammell is endorsing assassination, an act subject to sedition and conspiracy laws and punishable by death, I wonder if he happened to attempt contact with Rammel’s office for any manner of explanation or apology?  After all, it would be a great journalistic scoop prior to those historic and controversial sedition trials.  But since an attempt to contact Rammell is nowhere to be found in Egan’s column, it appears not so, and thus Egan’s behavior falls into the legal category of “telling non-acts: things I could have done, but tacitly did not and—by extension—would not.”  Instead, Egan suppresses such an accusation by spinning it into a trite narrative about the “real West,” hunting, wolves, and cartoon rednecks bearing guns and good-books.

Subsequently, he calls Rammell a “nature-phobe” for operating an elk ranch (I don’t really “get it” either), deploys the rote stereotype that conservative outdoorsmen are ideologues hell-bent on the extermination of nature, and concludes his piece with the puzzlingly ironic statement that, “…the four-legged hunter is back in the West to stay. Still, it would help all concerned if what we talk about when talking about wolves was just that.”  You mean, such as not groundlessly accusing political candidates of sedition and conspiracy to commit murder against the president, nor meddling in the elections of states not one’s own?  You mean, not filling in the vacuums of these stupid “western-ness” narrative columns with equally stupid and superficial understandings of Northwestern conservatives—that  ‘ole “walmart-redneck” cliche?  Or, pray, perhaps you mean by not responding to wingnuttery, and thereby legitimizing these sideshows?

It’s a transparent rhetorical strategy exemplary of why Egan is such an awful writer, and yet also prototypical of his political (and white) contemporaries.  Common to such columns are claims to some fleet environmental insights about the socioeconomic nature of the West, specifically Northwest and Northwestern politics, but frankly his understanding doesn’t reach east of the Cascade Mountains.  Hell, for that matter it doesn’t even reach east of the 520 bridge.

Egan’s claims to knowledge of the “new West” (therein rendered into a vacuous buzzword) contradict his rhetorical appeals to the very paradigms of authenticity transcribing social identity in the new West, and the oppressively alienating identities dispensed by such paradigms.  His last column reaches into the yeoman myths about the authentic “real” West in a glorified narrative of living in a cabin at Lake Chelan without internet access for a single summer.  For crissakes, honestly?  That’s it?  That’s authenticity?  A daily eighty-five degrees with the breeze combing the tips of the pines at the center of Washington’s playground for white snobbery?  You gave up your access to the alter-reality of mass media, and that’s some holy sacrifice for the New Age altar?  That’s rustic?  Organic?  Real?

For the truth about the new West—as much as the old—isn’t defined by who can do such things, but who cannot.  If someone wanted to “really” experience the new West, they would have to shred their identity, learn Spanish, and pick apples for a year on subsistence wages; or work at a relative’s contracting business to save money for the unlikely opportunity that you might pay for a semester of books at WSU; or better yet, camp out in Nickelsville and look for recession employment after declaring yourself a sex offender.  That’s the “real” West.  You can take it or leave it, just don’t condescendingly pretend to know it intrinsically by way of some greenwashed cosmo-consumerism.

The point about Egan’s writing, and the culture of people by whom it is written and for whom it is intended (yes, self-exceptionally progressive and liberal), is that it is tragically contradictory.  At bottom, it is pure commodity.  The construct of “nature” upon which it depends is little except an abstraction, a parallel allegory of self-actualization in stark relief with the heterogeneous social reality engulfing it.  Egan’s “nature” is a simulacrum, an independent and non-contiguous space that is perpetually out-there; it is being beyond the matrices of the consumerist alter-reality. Thus, nature is a separate space “abroad” rather than an immanent actuality amidst which people (you lowly rubes, you) may actually live and directly compete with the elements of nature—people for whom 150 lb pack predators might, just might reasonably represent a threat to their livelihood.  “Nature” in Egan’s context is delineated as some bifurcation of the real and the experienced, gesturing to “the real” as a substitute and merely the denaturalized simulacra of late capitalist technocracy, a mere aberration of suburban, mass media normality:

What’s ‘nature,’ Daddy?

Nature?  It’s about two hundred air conditioned miles and two tanks of gas on a socialized highway, to the unspoken exclusion of minorities, under the arms of a missile defense shield, with the promise of a tomorrow, and with the protection of a civil security force to preserve upper class property while we’re absent.

Paradigms of authenticity guide and hone a sense of identity and “western” experience available only to the enclosed cabal of wealthy, white, bourgeois individuals who possess the cryptic ideological key for interpreting the romanticized ’separateness’ of nature as a political construct.  Thus, the noon of Egan’s expression is also its darkening: to be ‘in’ or ‘with’ nature is rooted not in this separate reality but rather is localized in a revulsion against the heterogeneous nature of its times.  And thus, since nature is merely distant or peripherally evident, it is permissible to unilaterally impose “environmental” policies on communities who may in fact be greatly harmed by those policies, and who in all probability will be justified in their searing resentments toward such urbane hubris.  These paradigms of authenticity, whether iconoclastically anti-conservative, anti-X, or otherwise, are the very stuff perpetuating the oppression demarcating the spatial boundaries of new Western identity.  It is the same political economy by which Hybrid consumers sneer at SUV’s when Hybrids are the more demonstrative artifacts of the same fetishizing economy of disposable automobilia and waste.  Egan isn’t against the oppression of the new West, writers like him are postmodern formulations of that very oppression; he is not independent from it, for that phallogocentric claim to independent grace is the self-exceptional myth itself.

Indeed, one need not speculate for very long as to how well an ideology with teeth in its own tail might fair when mapped onto differing locales.  Say, when Egan gives his take on the wolf situation in Idaho: is he an Idaho resident, a biologist, a hunter, or a rancher (such as *ahem* Rammell himself)?  Did the sole re-printing of the article reach only as far west as Dayton, Ohio?  Then to what shall we credit his jurisdiction over such concerns, if not just the mindless din of national politics and its colonizing effects?  The immediate assumption with these eastward glances is such that while “authenticity” is the prerogative (to the boon of all urban outdoor equipment retailers and, not coincidentally, the bane of Northwest Search and Rescue teams), communities with red leaning political tendencies are not granted the same cultural autonomy as corn-dancing natives and the white voyeurs observing nature from afar.  For after all, conservative communities do not represent the intersection of various fundamental beliefs about social virtues and the individual’s responsibility toward society, but rather they are the flattened ideological mechanisms of Rupert Murdoch, Walmart, and the Newt Gingrich gang.  What with their guns, their religion, and their occasional lapses into policies of natural despoilment, wherefore the individuals among them?  Where are the finer contours, the tensions, and the struggles in their midst?  With so much enviable authenticity, how could they possibly be so?

And thus my ambivalence toward contemporary environmentalist liberals: in calling conservatives racists, rubes, ideologues, and the like, they have replaced conservatism with the very same flattening and overtly bigoted “other,” in which case the levers and gears of ideology are far more apparent within liberal politics (of a particular-but-prevalent-sort, no less).

The most telling inconsistency of the liberals-attacking-conservatives cliché is that by delegating moral responsibility to the great conservative “other” many liberals seem to get off for concealing their own ideological rigidity, for suppressing deliberative philosophical debate about the priorities of a society, and for the impotence perennially afflicted on the Democratic party by these vain, mainstream, suburban elites.  Instead of engaging communities in the “new West” through an inward persuasion of their national and local priorities, the perpetual mode of communication is one of reciprocal derision, indignation, and scornful reprisal.  It is a purely dialectical repetition measured in cable news cycles and blog rants (*ahem*).  All one takes from these discourses is a sense of perplexity as to how much kitch liberals and post-Bush neo-conservatives are merely two parts to the same repressive dialectical whole, two joyless and vindictive tyrants rending their kingdoms apart because they have narrowed their vision such that they only perceive one another and not those whom they serve.  And thus, the world must wait on the baby-boomers and their binary, 1960’s Culture Wars logic, because so and so keeps looking at me, and such and such broke my toy truck, and all of American discourse must yield to the petty concerns of entitled byproducts of the anomalous fifties, et cetera, et cetera.  Please, get over it.

There is a sentiment among serious conservative ranks that America’s fickle and spineless middle-left yields them only supercilious and patronizing concern.  As a far-left democrat enduring the intellectually and morally bankrupt suburban liberalism of Egan’s “new West,” I know just how they feel.

Flow Chart for Vetting King County Exec Candidates

1) Do you represent the views of the super-majority of county residents living outside Seattle, in rural legal and social contexts?

a) No. Load up the rust-eaten pickup, it’s back to old trailer alley, you provincial bumpkin. We’ll see you when we’re being “green” and “organic” on Sunday Hummer drives to Carnation—or rather, Carn-aaawwww-shun.
b) Yes. Proceed to 2).

2) Do you endorse re-re-naming the county “Optimus-Barack-King-Kennedy-Woodstock-Subaru-Cannabis-Sprawlsville-Dot-Com”?

a) Yes. Well, you’ve got the vote of the novelty, over-sized road sign union. Proceed to 3).
b) No. What are ye, one o’ them intolerant, homo-phobe, race-mongrin, hyphena-phobes?

3) Can you speak purely in platitudes, abstractions, and partisan code?

a) Yes. Proceed to 3).
b) No. Lookin for a medal? Join the second grade science fair. Till then, I’m deficitly going to spend my foot kicking you out the door.

4) Do you support bussing Seattle-manufactured sex offenders, thieves, and drug dealers to the backyards of residents on the outskirts of the county?

a) No. Hope you can figure out how to put a padlock on a tent!
b) Yes. 5).

5) Do your paid operatives/trolls invade and obscure any substantive discussion about the distinctions of each candidate?

a) Yes; 6). Almost there!
b) No. Uhm, do they have, like, blogs outside of Youthanasia—or is it all stone carvings and bone fragment divination?

6) Does the candidate make third-person self-endorsements of the following: outdoor showers in public parks, public nudity, fringe libertarianism, and/or space colonization?

a) No.
b) Yes. Ladies and gentleman, I give you our new county exec!