The Myth of the Reclusive Author: Jennifer Finney Boylan on the Death of J.D. Salinger

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The Times has a reputation all its own when it comes to editorializing pivotal events in the way of the Monday morning quarterback, of shouting Eureka! when the facts are already plain.  It works quite simply:

—People generally feel X about the life and death of Y, and its meaning for the completion of Y’s cultural significance.

—Ergo, take the contrarian view of X, sensationalize and throw some vacuous and pseudo-Enlightened shoring beneath, and live to be fashionably-liberal another day.

—Eureka!

Just so, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s deplorably titled op-ed “Raise High the P.R. Blitz,” chimes in about J.D. Salinger’s reclusiveness in light of his recent passing:

[...] “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” Mr. Salinger told The Times in 1974. “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy…. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

As a teacher of writing, I frequently hear young authors echo Mr. Salinger’s words, that they’re writing primarily to satisfy themselves. It’s hard to disagree with that on the surface; writing can be great fun. But to create fiction — or nonfiction, for that matter — without any thought of a reader seems creepy to me, the ultimate exercise in self-indulgence. [...]

That last sentence is of particular interest, because while Mr. Boylan argues for the media saturation of popular authors, such engagement is somehow not the highest example itself of authorial self-indulgence.  Self-indulgence, such as, say, opportunistically seizing on the death of an author for the sake of one’s worn-out iconoclasm.

There is something askew with Mr. Boylan’s editorial—besides the hyperventilating use of ‘I,’ me,’ and ‘my’—in that it it attempts to take the reclusiveness of certain authors and turn it back upon them. While the polarizing narcissism of the media and the critical community are often the driving forces of their reclusiveness, Mr. Boylan somehow sees such reclusiveness as its own form of narcissism. But with regard to more public authors, he sees their narcissism as mandatory, pleasurable, and neutral.  Never mind the works of Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka, or historically-pseudonymous authors in their thousands—that old pack of vain, unqualified baboons!!  (Well, perhaps McCarthy is a newly-christened exception.  I enjoyed his release into the media wilderness primarily because his interview revealed the shallowness of the media—a fact which Mr. McCarthy prodded mockingly for a good hour or so, on, of all personality-cult programming, The Oprah Winfrey Show.)

Like I said, there’s something amiss here, and it has to do with 1) the reciprocation of media narcissism from social illness into some normative and ubiquitous value, 2) that this insulated, Post-gender, Post-privacy, Post-everything rhetoric gains its loftiness only by appealing to the very norms of authenticity it claims to interrogate, and lastly, that 3) as Don Delillo’s Mao II explored, the cult of the reclusive author is informed more by cultural mythos than reality, albeit a myth with a violently obsessive face.

So I don’t know why, but Boylan’s conceited brand of grandstanding has become strikingly characteristic of liberal and Post-_____ authors in general. Subsequently, readers of these pieces must suffer through the usual caustic beltshots at constituencies by whom they feel threatened, yet somehow they are granted a pass for the arrogance contained therein, even while their actual letters are equally-poor tomes which read more like psychiatric evaluations of the structure of modern ressentiment.

But who knows?  I suppose I’m just being self-indulgent…

*

Seriously, Toyota–Chill. Everyone Gets a Free Pass. Ford, Chevy, and Dodge Have Had Hundreds.

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A persistent story in the media lately has been the recall of millions of Toyota vehicles, a recall so serious they have decided to halt the production of numerous models. What is the fault with these millions of vehicles? A friggin loose car mat might get lodged in the footwell in such a way that, according to hearsay, might cause the accelerator pedal to be pressed.

Oh boo-freakin-hoo. A loose car mat? Seriously?  Have these consumer primadonna’s never driven a used car?

Several things come to mind. Namely, that on my old s*** beater 300k truck, and nearly every other heap I’ve owned, the car mat thing happens, and it’s no big deal. For one, that’s why there’s that other pedal–you know, the brake pedal.

But for new production cars, it’s probably fair to say, sure, maybe that’s an issue, especially when you’re selling cars to a society dictated by the least-common denominator of operators. It’s not necessarily a crisis, but something to correct, improve, and move on.

And yet, Toyota is being brow-beaten over this stupid non-issue, and Toyota itself has expressed shame over the recall. Something smells fishy, and I’ve little doubt that the American automakers—whom Toyota outcompetes like a cheetah in the Special Olympics—have been busy keeping the story alive.

But the thing is, at least Toyota has the sense of responsibility to recall vehicles on such a massive scale, at such great loss of profit, for such a minor issue. If this were any American automaker, there would be no recall. The calculation would work something like this:

“Query: 3 billion in profit losses, or simply fight the matter in court for a mere 25 million and perhaps a few out-of-court settlements for those affected?”

So why is this stupid story lingering in the media? Is it really intended to slander Toyota, inarguably the worlds best and most efficient automaker? Are the American automakers really that desperate?

Well, let’s take a look at another budgetary memo:

“Stealth corporate media campaign encouraging bad publicity for a better competitor versus designing and producing a better car, one that people can actually use.

-Net loss of media campaign: 10 million in court costs in suit with Toyota.

-Net loss of producing a better car: A few bar napkins, one of those squeezy stress balls, and four years to get a bachelor’s in engineering.

Conclusion: Screw em! Slime those stinky Sushi-mongers and build another Hummer!”

James Wood, Witless Atheist Extraordinaire, on Pre-Emptive, Post-Colonial Interventionalism

In a NY Times editorial, James Wood, totally-not-pretentious author of such failed books as “My White Teeth” and “How Fiction Works,” mounts the soapbox in order to flatter his staggering ego interject Anglo God politics in the Haitian-earthquake tragedy:

In the 18th century, the genre of “earthquake sermon” was good business. Two small shocks in London, in 1750, sent the preachers to their pulpits and pamphlets. The bishop of London blamed Londoners’ lewd behavior; the bishop of Oxford argued that God had woven into his grand design certain incidents to alarm us and shake us out of our sin. In Bloomsbury, the Rev. Dr. William Stukeley preached that earthquakes are favored by God as the ultimate sign of his wrathful intervention.

…

We should expect nothing less from the man [Pat Robertson] who blamed legal abortion for Hurricane Katrina. But even when intentions are the opposite of Mr. Robertson’s, and in a completely secular context, theological language has a way of hanging around earthquakes. In his speech after the catastrophe, President Obama movingly invoked “our common humanity,” and said that “we stand in solidarity with our neighbors to the south, knowing that but for the grace of God, there we go.” And there was God once again. Awkwardly, the literal meaning of Mr. Obama’s phrase is not so far from Pat Robertson’s hatefulness. Who, after all, would want to worship the kind of God whose “grace” protects Americans from Haitian horrors?

…

Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are, at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.

Numerous things are going on here.  Firstly, he cherry-picks a few quotes like a sophomore writing a twilight essay for an 18^th century-lit survey, implying that the views contained in those quotes were universal in their day, while simultaneously misinterpreting the philosophical meaning their speaker’s wished to convey.  Next, he quietly reifies God as some imaginary friend or superhero whom we submit to judgment at every turn of personal misfortune, despite this utterly contingent existence of ours (without this most common of Atheist fallacies, his entire argument disintegrates).  Then Woods’ linguistic economy refers to a right-wing loon like Pat Robertson, and the expectantly crazy statements of such a man, from which to generalize a standard against which all theological views cohere.  In fact, he actually compares them with the statements of Barack Obama, saying their statements share something of the same theological program.

Duh… what?

While these are the usual rhetorical strategies of a sophomoric Atheist like Woods, the irony is that the truly neo-colonial infection is that of a limousine liberal like himself injecting an Anglo-American religious dialectic into a tragedy so great it has decimated an entire nation.  The thing about Haiti is that it has become the ultimate media stage upon which to strut and fret one’s international views while referring to a national tragedy in circular fashion as both evidence and conclusion of that view.  Meanwhile, Haiti stills suffers direly, and nothing is gained but by the ego’s of a few selfish, narcissistic Americans for whom editorializing has priority over the facts of the day.  Anybody who’s anybody has alluded to Haiti as evidence of their own grandeur—so who are you!?  Some hack giving your money and help in service to your beliefs, or like Woods, an impotent, do-nothing primadonna who’s found a cheap spotlight?

How is Wood’s ethos not colonialism in its properly exceptional, fashionably pseudo-Rationalist garments?

Woods, for example, is little more than a book salesmen, and a perfect example of both an Atheist practicing religion (poorly) and a literary blowhard practicing philosophy (very poorly).  But the thing about American post-colonial literary buffs is that while they can very easily point to internal examples of their theories, somehow their own position as American pomo lit buffs is not equally arbitrary and circumstantial—somehow their socio-economic position evade its own criticisms (the case of one Henry Louis Gates springs to mind).  And in the end, what began as an inquiry into the world turns, instead, to the very same shallowness it was brought forth the understand.  All the while, American cultural hegemony is congealed and reaffirmed in yet another theater of the world, and America can go forth again, resting peacefully in the death-abhorring consumerist illusion that contingency is no part of our hyper-real existence.

Fish Fertilizer

Another of Stanley Fish’s Weekly Parries

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I’m always a fan of Stanley Fish, an academic whose neutral and forthright analyses do not strike fancy with any of America’s ideological camps, whacky conservative or new-age liberal. He’s made many enlightening contributions to the God debate in his NY Times column, and continues that tradition of bringing thoughtful analysis to a deprived vox populi:

Thus the argument made by some champions of religion that were science to turn its naturalizing lens on itself, it would discover that “its theories reflect nothing more . . . than the biologically . . . shaped ideas and activities of mere mortal humans” is damaging only if science’s procedures come to nothing once the claim to transcendence of the human is abandoned or debunked. And in fact, says Smith, science and everything we appropriately value about it do very nicely even after such a debunking has been performed. For “what gives the cultural form (or set of ideas and practices) we call science its epistemic authority is not the putatively transcendent truth of its theories, but the fact that its models of the operations of the material-physical world enable us to predict, shape, and intervene in those operations more effectively in relation to our purposes.” (Richard Rorty often makes the same point.)

…

Once the shift is made from asking “what is and should be the ultimate ground of our actions?” to asking “what resources are available to us for dealing with these problems and opportunities?,” the question of which model or way of conceptualizing things is true or truer becomes, Smith observes, less urgent and less interesting. The inability of science to demonstrate its truth by standards not internal to its practices is not something to worry about because science “as a method is not the sort of thing that can be thought either true or false.” Rather, it works (with works being defined by our needs) or it doesn’t: “[L]ike using low-octane fuel or following a low-fat diet, the minimalism and self-restraint that defines it can only be thought more or less appropriate for the purposes at hand.”

As usual, good nuanced analysis that does not comport well with most NY Times readers, or most hardline religionists. I particularly enjoy the taxonomical criteria he applies to contemporary God literature and its thriving market of charlatans:

“…would seem to identify the book as an addition to the ever-growing body of studies that explore the relationships and tensions between religion and science, usually with the intent either of declaring one epistemologically or morally superior to the other, or of insisting (somewhat piously) that the two are compatible if we avoid extreme claims and counterclaims, or of triumphantly announcing that science is a form of faith, or of purporting to demonstrate that religion can be explained in naturalist terms as an expression of the instinct to survive and propagate.”

So true. Fish’s arguments lend to the notion that religious fundamentalism and fundamentalist scientism are merely two parts to the same dialectical whole, each trying to subvert the other and lay claim to some static point of reference whereby to declare “this is the ultimate truth, and no other.” The unfortunate implication is that such an ideal point of reference is more or less the founding ideological assumption of the Western Rationalist tradition since Newton, and leaving it behind opens far less secure possibilities than today’s consumer-analytic philosopher prefers to admit.  It is the starting point for any and all ideological maps of the world, against the ineffable pluralism and contingency of experience—very reminiscent of the theme of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and its sustained meditation on cultural violence. Moreover, it means the sordidness of the God debate, and its many ressentiment-soaked messiahs, are likely here to stay as an ingrained facet of our culture, while the rest of society’s political and social ills go by the wayside of its organizing principles. And thus, we go on, amidst the culture of feuding spouses.

Still, I think Fish is contributing a unique and beneficial insight into the relationship of both religion and science to desire.  As he articulates, just as Stephen J. Gould did, the epistemic and ontic statements given by religion and science belong to different modes, and thus, contrasting them is not the proper way of understanding either science or religion.  Which is precisely where desire intervenes on our experience of the real, reifying abstractions as concrete entities to be caricatured and transferred into so much Barnes and Noble pulp.

Of Floaty Mountains, The Rights of Unborn Na’vi, and James Fenimore Cameron: Is Avatar an Expression of a Racist Cultural Ethos?

Of Floaty Mountains, The Rights of Unborn Na’vi, and James Fenimore Cameron:

Is Avatar an Expression of a Racist Cultural Ethos?

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As I shall elucidate below, yeah. Indeed, it is pretty much our culture’s highest expression of racial exceptionalism. Inarguably, the movie satisfies every classical criteria for identifying racist works of art.

But first a few points. I didn’t want to see the movie, but got dragged into it, and it ended up being even more kitschy and crass than I could have imagined. However, a number of issues arise before we can establish that the movie is some gratuitous expression of a racist cultural ethos:

1) It is a friggin two hour, migraine-inducing video game, folks. I damn near pissed myself and our entire section of the theatre burst out in laughter when the floaty-mountain scenes began. About the same time I started fondling my car keys.

2) Does its plot reinforce the white-savior construct? As one of Hollywood’s foremost political commodities, of course it does. Such a construct is the most easily traceable trait of nearly all liberal-leaning films: Costner’s Dances with Wolves, Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, and a slew of Iraq-war movies. The rational white guy gains acceptance into the native cultural, saves the natives better than the natives could ever have done by themselves, and the story ends with the acceptance of said white-dude’s pre-eminence as the greatest native and the fulfillment of a messiah prophecy… et cetera.

That the movie is “just kitsch” does more to justify an analysis of the movie’s racism than it does to preclude it. In our day, kitsch is often the initial driving force behind some of our culture’s most heinous acts of violent racism. And secondly, the repetitive superficiality of the whole white-savior construct is activated by the movie’s deeper, ideologically-racist ideas.

What are those ideas? Well, to me it is the collection of cultural insecurities embedded in the technocratic avatar construct. A leading identity theme propagated by the movie, and one which primly coincides with our concepts for analyzing race in literature, is this idea of vicariously becoming a different identity. In a grossly eugenic scene from the movie, two Na’vi (the natives) are grown in a lab, and the “users” enter these bodies parasitically through a kind of MRI machine. Very little is mentioned about whether or not the two Na’vi bodies have prior identities of their own, or by what eugenic means they were procured, which I thought was a pretty creepy plot point that was swiftly pushed beneath the rug.

The characters then use these bodies to gain admittance and eventual acceptance into the native’s cultural, and thus begins the white savior story that has been covered so widely on the web. But the important exploration of the movie, to me, is this heavily liberal, and, not coincidentally, highly consumerist relationship between the whites and the avatars (not “their” avatars, mind you). It is a relationship rooted in some insecurity with the real of the self, and the self-loathing inability to become anything other than one self. A relationship rooted in the classical racist construct of becoming “the other” so completely that “the other” itself is deracinated and scappled away from all memory of existence (the prior identities of the two Na’vi bodies).

As such, the avatar’s become symbols of a consumer society’s constant feelings of inauthenticity, in very much the same fashion of other historical racial epics. The “other” is ultimately destroyed as a result of the white’s final mediation with the equivocal and ambiguous feelings of identity inherent of late capitalist ideology. The white’s ultimately become “more” authentic than the original natives themselves, saving the natives as a result of their superior intellectual powers. And thus, the classical racial-allegory template is satisfied and moves forward once again, onto new maps of racial and national exceptionalism.

Of Consent and Coercion: The Ethics of Health Care Reform and Why It Is Democratically Insupportable

On Consent and Coercion:

The Ethics of Health Care Reform

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So much hokum passes for sound logic in the health debate, one longs for some semblance of reason to intervene on the day-to-day drone of the melodrama between America’s feuding ideologies and the stupid, feckless individuals such dramas elicit. It never ceases to amaze me that liberals and conservatives alike are too smug to admit that they prioritize an ideological template over an analytical approach, and subsequently, the proposed legislation has suffered greatly, some say fatally. Death panels, insurance for illegals, the tragically short biography of Suzie Whitetown who was denied insurance for a cold, etc, etc, etc.—what hasn’t passed that marks the usual absurdity debates of this nation?

But as an opponent of health care reform, I feel I’m obliged to explain why:

1) No federal dollars for abortion. (Putting this one first to get it out of the way.)

2) The current bill contains purely superficial cost-controls, if any.

3) Not one scintilla of political-media blather has been dedicated to this country’s health crisis, a crisis that is a product of personal choices.

4) Mandates.

5) Mandates.

6) Mandates.

…

466) Mandates.

467) Someone save me, I’ve lost my party.  And when I see television Democrats, all I see are insulated Plutocrats, narcissistic talking heads, and their retinue of vacuous follow-the-leaders.

[Long, lamenting sigh]… Well, so it goes, as America hammers forward in the post-industrial march toward the obliteration of personal autonomy.

1) No federal dollars for abortion.

In full disclosure, I’m ambivalent about abortion but tend to be against it.  Not in the usual fire-and-brimstone manner, although I find those who argue for abortion as creepy and detached from real life. But this one applies whether or not you support abortion, or whether or not you wave silly protest signs against it. The issue is whether or not it is right to take money from people who may find something incredibly morally-repugnant and to disperse it to people for those very purposes. For example, whether or not it is right to take money from someone who sees great horror in abortive procedures, and to give that money to someone who can’t otherwise fund their own abortion. Firstly, it is someone’s personal responsibility to not get pregnant if they don’t want a child, and secondly, it is clearly not a responsibility of government to provide those means. American liberals have exhausted vats of ink over how this is a feminist/woman’s rights issue, but clearly it is an ethical issue about the dispersal of government funds. Saying it is about Women’s Rights, in my mind, only cheapens the cause of expanding those very rights to coerce tax payers into paying to have their funds allocated for things they find direly repugnant.

2) No cost-control.

The writer’s of this bill clearly and especially saved all of the increased burdens for you, the working taxpayer. What a surprise! When you read the bill itself, you can tell right away that cost-control was merely an afterthought, a straw-filled horse to be trotted out at the appointed time. The biggest cost-control measures that ought to have been made would have been to force out profiteering insurers, and (gasp!) to get Americans healthier in their personal lives, which would mean tying their right-to-insurance to their prior responsibility to be healthy—language which is found nowhere in the proposed bill. Bringing me to..

3) The problem of the unhealthy.

The statistics on health in America are so staggeringly embarrassing that they render null and void all comparisons with Western European nations. I don’t give one one bugling laderhosen-slapper how Switzerland’s health system is run when Americans are just so obscenely fat. Seriously, and I hate to offend anyone, but it’s a matter of principle. The top three causes of death and health expense in America are related to smoking and heart disease-related to obesity. Those are all matters of personal choice.  They are also a realities mentioned nowhere, neither in the media, nor the bill itself. No one is forcing a value-menu cheeseburger down any one’s throat. No one is forcing anyone to that next excuse for a work-break, aka, a stick of tobacca clearly labeled as containing not just one but multiple carcinogens certain to eventuate in death.

4) Mandates.

Mandates are the most flagrant abuse of the proposed legislation. Under the proposed bill, those who cannot afford insurance (because the insurance system is overrun by profiteers and unhealthy, smoking, fatties) are going to be forced to buy into it somehow. This might have been justifiable with a generous public option, but that recourse already had its date with the guillotine in the office of one Nancy Pelosi. The great thing about mandates is that experts predict they will bring the greatest harm to the very folks who are supposed to be the moral core of health care reform, working class people (especially the young) who can’t afford insurance and whose employers cannot afford insurance either. The not-so-great thing about mandates is that, as a few muffled legal scholars have mentioned, they aren’t really constitutional. Ooops… and hello court costs, old friend.

The present legislation breaks open the Interstate Commerce Clause so widely that you could pass a herd of steer through it and not chaff your view of the sunset.  The widened interpretation it imagines is so generous one might as easily argue the ICC requires Americans to buy shares in Halliburton, yearly.  And hey, the American auto-industry ain’t doing too good, so might as well throw in a Chevy.  And the free-riders and folks unwilling to work will need methadone, housing, and insurance too, so req that up too.  But oh yeah—the government has no prior authority to force citizens to buy a specified commodity, and at that, one so rife with special interests and corruption as the health care industry proposed by this bill.  We done been hosed, Johnny. And there’s not a rational political party in sight.

At this point in the Great Health Debacle Debate is, hey—isn’t there like another Great Depression going on? Oh yeah. That. Cigarette?

Get Out While You Still Can: Transferring Your Money From Bank of America to Local Credit Unions

I’m not really the hard-boiled type.  But like most people, I don’t like being told it’s raining when I’m being pis—well, you know.  This is why I find it so difficult to understand my bank.  Originally, I banked with SeaFirst, a Seattle area bank that was bought out by Bank of America, transferring my account to Bank of America.  In the time I have been with Bank of Bailouts America, I have been exposed to more overt corporate greed than I can possibly fathom.

In the last few months, as has been widely reported elsewhere, my monthly statements yielded no fewer than at least twenty dollars in fees on a fairly large checking and savings account.  I don’t overdraw, and as a saver, I don’t even use my account very often, using cash whenever possible. I visited my local branch a half dozen times, explicitly asking them to explain the fees, to provide a fee schedule, and to provide me with materials so I can understand the limits of my account better.  On every one of these visits, I left without any such information.  Instead of providing me with the information requested—a duty which they are legally required to perform—they provided me with offers on other accounts, ones which often included even more hidden fees and higher rates than my present account.  It’s a ridiculous, yet common experience for students.  Such a simple inquiry, and they all go into pitch-mode—warm salesmen, selling you access to your own money!  No wait!  They’ll give you a great discount!  And no less, but in the scripted and patronizing manner of every personal banker with whom I’ve dealt at B of A.

If I understand Bank of America correctly, the relationship of modern, corporate banking is one in which fiduciary duty is completely dissolved by the secular impulse for profit.  Banks rely on the money of their depositors to make money, and hence they have a mutual relationship with their clients.  Their clients give them money, and in return they give their clients interest payments.  Or, they lend money based on a market of competitive interest rates, say, on a home or car loan.  And thus, the system is held together by a contract of good faith.

But in the year 2010, you give a bank your money, and they charge you for it.  Their clients provide them a service, and in return they are punished.  Often, they force people from their homes because of their refusal to simply refinance a better rate in their eagerness to foreclose homes and reclaim assets, and to resell them at destructively low values.  Having worked in a range of service industries, I have never encountered an institution either as structurally unscrupulous, or as shamelessly crude as Bank of America, and I am continually astounded with their conduct as a bank.  Honestly, it’s reprehensible, and it is guaranteed to only get worse as banks find ways to dump increased regulatory burdens on their clients.

I understand that this is because of changes in the nature of money, the nature of the financial markets, and the nature of corporate follow-the-leader employees: federally-deflated savings rates, better profitability in the shuffling of financial assets than in the day-to-day services of banking, arcane corporate policy, things of that sort.  But then you have to ask yourself honestly, as a member of your community, as a worker, and surely, as a cajoney’ed American: so what?  Does that justify treating people like numerical assets?  Does it justify abolishing any notion of the company-client contract, when people are free to put their money elsewhere?

But there’s a saving grace here, and it’s called the free market.  Albeit, a different, and truer “free-market” than that which brought about the nihilistic deregulation of the financial market that caused the Great Recession, a chain of crimes in which Bank of America frequently stands as the greedy Shylock demanding pounds of flesh from the very debtors to whom they owe their wealth.  This is the “free” market in which I am firing my bank and transferring all of my funds to BECU, a local, not-for-profit credit union. With the money I save, I will contribute to political organizations that counter the banking lobby’s ability to stifle credit unions purely for the sake of skinning a cheap buck off the back of the working Americans.

There’s an ethical concern here, but not the one you may think.  Surely, Bank of America has failed to fulfill even the bare minimum of its ethical duties toward its clients (and as a result of the bailout, this now includes the entire tax paying public).  But the ethical concern I see is that of the consumer/client.  If a consumer believes that a party with whom they hold a contract has failed to meet their obligations, that consumer isn’t just entitled to seek those services elsewhere, they are obligated to do so.  I wish more folks embraced the principle.  We are responsible to continually seek the service institutions that best fit our interests, lest we be somnolent whiners unwilling to change even the most glaring schemes of our society.  For that reason, those who see consumer’s as numerical sheep (be they corporations or nasal culture critics) are the dolts, because consumer’s are the real economic innovators.  If anything, maybe the worst effect for corporate America is that the Recession has entrenched this very fact in the American household, this power to evenly declare, “You’re fired.”

So, hasta luego, Bank of America.  It was, well, mediocre, only when it was not horrible.

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.