-Nancy Pelosi

And so it seems!  In the afterglow of the Health Mandate Bill’s passage, a curious dynamic seems to be occurring.  Whereas information about the bill was scarce before its passage, suddenly there is a cascade of information in the media, in the form of many articles directly indicating who the bill will most harm: the healthy and the working class.

As with literary research, the truth of any document lies not in the body, but in the footnotes, where the contradictions and suppressed bits are harried from public view.  While this still seems to be the case, the footnotes have suddenly hit mainstream.

As the Times analysis argues, Health Care Reform Mandates will positively effect wealth equality in the U.S. because… uh, because…

“In effect, healthy families will be picking up most of the bill — and their insurance will be somewhat more expensive than it otherwise would have been.”

Huh.  I worked with a guy who always said “you gotta push a turd out to git one in,” a saying that fits this legislation to a tee.  So, basically what the Times argues is that equality is improved by simply spreading the burden of an unhealthy population.  But if equality is the standard, then why does this bill punish the healthy to reward the unhealthy?

The Guardian newspaper picked this up recently, and it also makes an appearance in the most recent issue of Conservation magazine: people who buy green products may be, on the whole, more likely to steal and cheat when given the chance.

This claim comes by way of two researchers at the University of Toronto, who were probing a more widely known psychological phenomenon in which people who pat themselves on the back for a good deed often feel entitled to a bit of selfishness later on.

I love the soft language.  It’s not that Green consumers show a higher propensity to steal and cheat, it’s just that they are “less trustworthy.”  It’s not that they are more likely to commit theft, it’s that they “may be, on the whole, more likely to steal and cheat when given the chance.”  I know, it’s tough reading—that was more qualifiers than a Palin interview.

“Green products do not necessarily make for better people,” the Toronto researchers told The Guardian. They also said that while much time and treasure has been spent trying to identify green consumers, relatively little research has gone into “how green consumption fits into people’s global sense of responsibility and morality.”

Green products do not necessarily make for better people?  Who or what are they rebutting with such a statement?  Then the statement about, “how green consumption fits into people’s global sense of responsibility and morality,” a rather presumptuous statement on behalf of others—what, or rather, whose monolithic “morality” are they referring to?  The thing that is skewed about the study, and the article, is that what it calls “green” consumers are just those that wear it on their shirtsleeve.  But one knows many hundreds of people who are environmentally sensitive in their everyday lives, who don’t drive Hybrids and Subaru’s with the requisite ten or so glib bumper stickers.  And yet, the article tends to affirm, especially in its subtle defensiveness, that such individuals are the only such “green” consumers.  What gives?  Why don’t liberals understand the scientific method if it does not suit their ideological preconceptions?  Are there class considerations underlying the assumption that those the article refers to as being “green” are only those who can afford to do so as some central, public identity?  Can working class people share in that same identity, or are they systematically excluded from such mobility?

It seems very reminiscent of a different study which concluded that abstinence education was more effective than other methods for preventing teen pregnancy.  Unlike the “green” study, the abstinence study’s writers themselves went to extensive lengths to use soft-language and disqualifying predictions against their own evidentiary conclusion that abstinence-only education is, in fact, a far more empirically effective instrument for controlling the problem of teenage pregnancy.

Is this science?  Does science need to appeal to political dogma to give its meta-theoretical conclusions coherence?  Or are those conclusions limited to the sphere of evidence and methodological inquiry from which they were derived?  If so, does this allow or disallow qualitative speculation as to why “green” consumers are more likely to cheat and commit theft?  Or, did the study single out the subset “green consumers” for a truth that applies to this class of consumer’s (wealthy, narcissistic, uninformed) more generally?

Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich

If a mandate was the solution, we could try that to solve homelessness by forcing everybody to buy a house. The reason they don’t have a house is because they can’t afford it.

President Barack Obama

—~—

Every so often, even the most ideologically-polarized media outlets relent to some semblance of lucid reason.  As with many a major newspaper, The Seattle Times is a newspaper deeply in the red—one wonders whether or not this is because the paper is basically a proxy for the New York Times, with New York Times articles averaging about 1 out of every 3 front-page articles.  (Go figure.)

Showing us a rare, redemptive glimpse of reasoned discourse, its editorial page has been the site of several demurrals from lock-step conformity with the health care reform agenda of the Democratic party, despite astronomical unemployment rates and projections for a long, painful recovery:

“Right now the government’s goal should be the revival of business investment and the creation of private-sector jobs. This cannot be put off. It has to be pursued now, and it has to be President Obama’s major concern.

A good health insurance bill might help the economic recovery. But it would do this only if it controlled health care costs, so that when an American worker received a raise, he or she might actually see some of it. But this bill offers no real control of costs. It is all about coverage.“

The U.S. House Should Reject the Health Care Bill and Start Over

What is remarkably rare about the Times’ honesty is that it is offered in an instance of political consequence, rather than in the instance of some modicum of “bipartisanship” or other political double-speak.  This is because one of the primary swing votes on the Health Care Bill is Brian Baird, a U.S. congressman in the House of Representatives, a democrat from Vancouver Washington, who probably (and hopefully) stands to be persuaded by the statements of such a major newspaper, especially one as liberal as The Seattle Times.

However, the the editorial is noticeably truncated and reticent of blame, making fine points while assuming evidence which the media has utterly failed to report.  Frankly, it should be obvious that the issue at-hand is the health insurance mandates contained in the health care bill, despite the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  The media has thus far suppressed the presence of health insurance mandates in the health care bill, and precisely how much unilateral (and unconstitutional) mandates compose what the democrats are calling “reform.”  The reality is that fiscally they compose the largest part of “reform.”

In fact, while the democrats have busied themselves with a moralizing narrative about the cartoon villainy of “the industry” and the “evil insurance companies”, their own proposal stands to increase the insurance companies’ billrolls by the BILLIONS though unilateral health insurance mandates.  This is what shows their arguments over cost control are artificial because instead of truly controlling costs, the democrats (with full industry backing) seek to simply expand the burden.  As such, since health insurance mandates compose the overwhelming majority of fiscal and systemic change to the health care system, it renders moot any argument that the bill will really change the inherent problems of the system or “expand coverage” when in reality all it does is expand the burden.  On top of such implicit deal-making, the democrats removed an amendment that would have allowed the importation of much cheaper drugs to the US, a move that would have reduced health care costs by a cool $13 billion, all at the bidding of the Pharmaceutical lobby.  Likewise, they have also backed down from an excise tax on high-end insurance policies, because it was opposed by the unions who provide enormous funding to their party (apparently it is okay for the rest of the working class to foot the bill of those “Cadillac insurance policies,” as Obama himself called them).

My question for Brian Baird would be, is it morally or politically justifiable to vote against the popular will of your own constituents when the changes that act introduces will only harm the young, the healthy, and currently jobless in your district, and when the present system of health care in the U.S. will only become even less sustainable?

—~—

Here is a link for contacting representative Baird:

https://forms.house.gov/baird/webforms/issue_subscribe.htm

Sayeth the Great One, the Imbiber, and the Knowing Inhaler of Carcinogens:

“If a mandate was the solution, we could try that to solve homelessness by requiring that everyone buy a house.  The reason they don’t have a house is because they don’t have the money.  And so our focus is on reducing costs, making it available—I am confident, that if people have a chance to buy high-quality health care that is affordable, they will do so, and that’s what our plan does and nobody disputes it.”

Oh, how far they have fallen…

The limousine liberals that have co-opted the democratic party can rant about conservative hypocrisy and oblique charges of racism until their jaws go numb (and they will), but how then, can they suppress the most glaring hypocrisy of all?  By an obscure procedure they once called unAmerican, the President and his party knowingly intend to circumvent the will of the people in order to force through an unpopular and unconstitutional health mandate bill.  Ask them why they are doing so, and they will throw out a bunch of poll numbers claiming that while the bill is unpopular, some* Americans endorse it when they have a little more information than what little they do in the first place (which is, tragically, often no information at all).  It doesn’t take a genius to read the hubris in an argument which effectively  translates as, “Americans are stupid and therefore they will believe what we tell them to when the wonderful fruits of entitlement fall from the fiscal heavens.”  While I don’t necessarily think this shameless debacle is Obama’s fault, is it not hypocritical for a suicidal smoker to lead the agenda on health care reform?  Likewise, as much as liberals try to downplay the drinking thing, is that not hypocritical as well?  I’m a drinker, and as such I know that it would take an extraordinary amount of drinking for a doctor to intervene and tell me, on paper, that I should moderate my behavior.

*and only “some”, although I’ve heard many Democrats falsely say “most”

But perhaps it will be all she wrote on Democratic attempts are health care reform.  The foremost reasons for the exorbitant costs of health care in this country aren’t caused by Republican villains, shadowy insurance CEO’s (who now figure squarely in the Democratic party), or the uninsured, but because of  the unnecessary costs of caring for an insanely unhealthy population.  Just so, an unhealthy man and his unhealthy legislation propose stealing from the healthy (and jobless) in order to perpetuate the status quo of a broken system.  How fitting.

Behold, Ye! and Beware! The Face of Evil Itself! Reee!Reee!Reee!

—~—

Don’t take from the title that I’m some crazy Bircher/Birther/Paneler loon, I’m just a guy who regrets the fact that my party has been co-opted by insane, arrogant, conceited, narcissistic, self-loathing, elitist, priggish, snide, corrupt, glib, foolhardy, zealous primadonnas, charlatans, and shills.

Worsening that disaffection, Timothy Egan on Laura Silsby (the woman responsible for attempting to illegally remove orphans from Haiti) and Christians who give aid to the third world:

At the least, the curious case of Laura Silsby raises questions about cultural imperialism: what makes a scofflaw from nearly all-white Idaho with no experience in adoption or rescue services think she has a right to bring religion and relief to a country with its own cultural, racial and spiritual heritage?

So turns the neurosis of a perpetual ad-hominizer in his latest post, “The Missionary Impulse.”  As usual, Egan’s fluff houses his most recurrent errors.  Firstly, that Idaho is “all-white,” a description deeply at odds with my own experience in the state.  Secondly, that “whiteness” is presumed (go figure) as some coherent go-to axis-of-evil card at the bottom of the deck.  (Bigot?  I surely think so.)  Last of all is Egan’s criticism that people from developed countries shouldn’t help those in the third world because it constitutes his incredibly shallow concept of cultural imperialism.  By his standard, why should anyone from the “developed” world do anything at all to help the rest of humanity?

The rest of the article reiterates the same tedium of bluntly defamatory stereotypes about Christians, whiteness, and cultural imperialism (apparently Egan didn’t see Avatar), and you could rightly spend a day or two pursuing each flaw, historical error, and logical fallacy.  But one thing stands out above the rest, and it is the overarching suggestion that Christian aid accounts for a small percentage of worldwide aid (an outrageous lie), and likewise that Christians cannot act toward some good except with ulterior motives.  I don’t say this because I’m Christian (sorry, but I’m not), but because it is such a disturbingly bigoted assertion.  One might even venture it is the culturally-imperialist rationale of every preening pseudo-rationalist in history.

And yet, only days later Nicholas Kristof furtively begins his own column on religious-aid with this statement:

For most of the last century, save-the-worlders were primarily Democrats and liberals. In contrast, many Republicans and religious conservatives denounced government aid programs, with Senator Jesse Helms calling them “money down a rat hole.”

Over the last decade, however, that divide has dissolved, in ways that many Americans haven’t noticed or appreciated. Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.

A pop quiz: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?

It’s not Save the Children, and it’s not CARE — both terrific secular organizations. Rather, it’s World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has roughly tripled over the last decade.

…Pause.  WTF?  Was that first sentence a kick in the statistical face or what?  On the one hand, these two clowns are criticizing Christians because their aid hides pernicious motives, and that since this aid is so pervasive, we should be concerned.  However, they then belittle or outright lie about the fact, subsidiary to their argument, that religious aid is and always has been inarguably enormous in proportion to other types of aid.

Egan: Christian aid is small, suspect, and only performed in the name of cultural imperialism.

Kristof: Christian aid is both big and small, and something we should either support or not-not-unproscribe.

Mmmkay…  Something tells me the editors have one hell of a time keeping this ship of fools from drowning in its own ink.

However, given that Kristof is casting Christians in an even remotely favorable light, he had to do as so many others before him at the NY Times, which was to offer a backpedaling defense only a few days later.  Why does it so offend the readers of the Times, that yes, religious folks do in fact account for a disproportionately enormous amount of domestic and international aid?  This is a bad thing?  Is it because it violates the secular ethic of selfishness?  Do people really not see the rigid doctrinal authority at work here, when saying group X is not Satan-incarnate and having to defend oneself for it?  Doesn’t that sort of mock religious doctrine for its own rigidity, its own institutional presumptuousness?

But the quasi-historicism of a sophomore Education of Little Tree reader is what really irks me.  Egan injects some oblique and superficial references to the American West about the old cliché of Christians taking away native people’s culture and attempting (by force) to inculcate them with American values.  Surely, no one can argue against the fact that this happened, but also no one can argue that as a whole it was a general rule, and lastly it hides a false idealization of many native cultures.  For the rational myth of American-Western ideology is the very moralizing that Egan’s columns entertain: old, conservative ways and cultures are inferior, and ought to be deracinated replaced with the moral, progressive myth of American teleology.  I mean Egan’s writing is a rhetorical roadmap for American colonialism in the 21st century.  But if he knew thing-one about the history of the American West, he would at least know that it wasn’t dapper, wrist-beating, ponytail-cutting bogeywomen conservatives from Idaho trying to domesticate the frontier.  On the contrary, it was social progressives like Sarah Borginnis (so expertly parodied in Blood Meridian) who accounted for the largest majority of these baptismal institutions, precisely because their moralizing myth of rational benevolence brought fulfillment to the ideological justification of American-Western progress and its inherent problem of hewing multiple wrongs into a right that surpasses its responsibility for those overt wrongs.

As such, it is difficult to argue that Western liberals like Egan are anything but the most recent generation of American ideology, given that his column pinions itself to every facet of a bigoted rhetoric.  Intrinsically, it is merely the latest incarnation of a classically-American frontier racial rhetoric, of the progressive white male author with Eastern ties speaking on behalf of the (his) silenced minorities.  So, honestly, wherefore this consistent drama over “whiteness” when Egan’s column is pure Clorox?

Modern high schools do little if anything to prepare students for the “real world”—instead, they threaten students with this “real world” like its some abstract day of apocalyptic reckoning.  (Though for many of the students produced by these institutions, I doubt this is an inaccurate assertion.)  Sure, the “real world” has its down moments, but its promises and its unlimited liberty are worth every ounce of patience you invest in it.  And yet I vividly recall ominous threats about this veiled “real world” from my high school instructors (when I was already working near full time anyway).  Now I realize that the self-loathing fears in this “real world” complex are the stuffs of those who never learned, or never even tried, to deal with that world on its own terms.

If I could give one piece of advice to young, struggling students it would be to internalize this very fact as early as possible in your life: throughout life, others will try to sandbag you with their fears of the world.  Occasionally, they will even succeed, whether or not it is within your control to prevent them from doing so.  With a misplaced but strangely dedicated ethic, people will shovel their shit at your door step until you can barely push it open.  But as soon as you realize the futility of their labor and the self-defeating, self-sabotaging trap in which they have made themselves slaves to their moralizing projections, the shit will evaporate and the door will swing wide!

So given the coercive and yet failed nature of the American educational system, at least young students now have the option of opting out of those failings in favor of a path that will greatly help their chances in the real world by providing them with applicable career skills rather than needless exams and endless reiterations of the same learning material.  If anything, the modern high school is one’s introduction into a society of the least common denominator; a society in which, by some unspoken standard, everything is made to appeal the crass imagination of a bourgeois, suburban nation.  The purpose of American high school is to produce dull worker-consumers, not highly skilled professionals.  Foucault would have a field day with the institutional design of high schools as factories of cultural ideology, regimenting their experience of time and the physical bodies of attendees in arbitrary orders of rank and aptitude according to social class.  From personal experience, I can honestly say my four-year high school diploma was one of the most useless pieces of paper I ever received in my life.  By tenth grade, already working long hours at my first job, I despised the obvious uselessness of high school pursuits and was ready to be on my way.  I was bookish and strong, which only led me to the realization that a modern high school is the least helpful and most inept of environments for an eager student.

So I dropped out, and only returned to school when I was threatened with jail time after a long episode of unnecessary harassment by the school I attended.  And I did what any other savvy student does who simply doesn’t care about the tedious ordeals of high school: I squeaked by for the remaining two years, working but not really caring about school, writing myself and my friends sick notes so we could ditch and go to the river, the mountains, wherever it was that day.  Surrounded by doubts, I aced the SAT’s and went on to the university where I graduated with a near perfect 4.0 GPA.

In spite of my own success, I’m still struck by the fact that my life has been irreparably altered by the slow, even arrested progress that my high school imposed on me and retarded my personal growth.  Much the same for my peers, all of whom are now mid-twenties and Mid-Recession, and have yet to get even a glimpse of the opportunities others take for granted.  I’m struck by the fact that not only did those extra years cost me a great deal of time, but in a hidden way they can cost one a great deal of money in the form of foregone wages and foregone academic accomplishments in one’s career field.  In light of all these issues, the tenth grade diploma is just what (smart) kids need so desperately, and its just what our country needs as we enter a highly skilled economy in which our outmoded, 1950′s styled system of public education flails like the red-headed stepchild of real education that it has become.

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…

*

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!”

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.