FunctionalAmbivalent

Bring On the Slavery Reparations!

I'm not entirely sure that, 10 years from now, Democrats are going to think having unbridled power was such a great thing. I mean, I think the hacktastic Bill Kristol is nuts to conclude that the departure of Arlen Specter for the other side of the aisle is good for Republicans, but I'm also intensely aware that Democrats are capable of all kinds of nuttiness.

And then there's that broadly applicable rule about absolute power...

Quick Question

It occurs to me that for all the arguing I've heard and read about torture, I haven't heard a single torture enthusiast advocate changing the law to make torture legal. Why is that?

We've got plenty of defenders of President Bush's torture policies who read this blog. Any of you guys who think torture is so necessary want to legalize it?

Caught In the Middle of a Thought Process, I Post a Highly Disjointed Sketch of Thoughts To Come

As we all contemplate how far down "down" is in our economy, I find myself thinking about one of the things I marvel at in American life: how few of the things that most of us consider the necessities of life are really necessities. I think these deep thoughts as someone who just ate a $3 bran muffin.

When I left my job at the end of the year, my wife and I cut back our spending -- the entirely natural thing to do, and exactly the thing everyone is doing that is contributing so mightily to our economic death spiral. We're all cutting back, even those of us still gainfully employed, because there's no telling what the future may bring.

After a month we took stock. I looked at our checking account and said: "Man, when we cut, we can cut a lot." And we did. We cut expedient, I'm-too-tired-to-cook carry-out meals. We stopped buying books and re-introduced ourselves to the library. I stopped buying wine. We skipped a couple of trips to nice restaurants and cut down on the recreational trips to shopping malls. Little things, big things, in between things: we cut them all -- except, apparently, $3 bran muffins. The result was a balance sheet that, despite my career predicament, was holding its own.

Anyway, the point of this is not that we're such fabulous financial managers; we're not. The point is that if my own little micro-economy is any indicator, the macro-economy may be in for a long slide. If Americans cut back to even a laughably opulent version of "the essentials" (I'm not giving up my $3 bran muffins!) that translates into huge changes in life as we know it, because so much of our economy is built on things that most of us now are considering primarily as ballast that can potentially be thrown overboard. 

I believe, personally, that we could do with less self indulgence. I have believed for a long time that materialism is a cancer on our society and that we are literally killing ourselves in a quest for things that ultimately don't matter. I don't know why childless couples want 5,000 square foot houses, or why people need new cars every couple of years, or why dinner at the casual dining concept-of-the-moment once a week is mandatory for people's sense of well-being. I don't get big screen TVs as something worth going into debt for and I don't think the ability to spend $500 a day at Disneyland should be part of anything called "standard of living."

My underlying personal belief in simple frugality, of course, doesn't extend as far as good wine (or $3 bran muffins) and I'm sure that there are plenty of big-screen TV owners who think spending $50 on a solid Chateauneuf du Pape as the height of decadence. I seriously don't intend to hold myself up as any kind of example and do not for a minute imagine myself some kind of neo-Thoreau living in my own private Walden.

What I do mean to say is that, with rare exception, each of us is undergoing our own belt-tightening, confronting our worst-case scenarios, being forced to prioritize in a way we haven't in a couple of decades, at least. We're each acquiring our own economic scar tissue, whether from opening our 401(k) statements or going through foreclosure.

I just find myself wondering: when this is over, where will be our new equilibrium? How will our expectations have changed? What will be our new definition of The Good Life? How will we have changed, and will it be for the better?

So here are some predictions:

• Financial stability will be the new status symbol. Forget the big house, the boat, the expensive car; sexy is money in the bank and the monthly statements to prove it.
• Jobs will be seen more as jobs and less as vehicles to self-fulfillment.
• Several professional sports franchises will fold or be sold under financial duress -- hopefully hockey, but you never know.
• Society's tolerance for ridiculous bullshit of all kinds will decrease. Marihuana will be legalized, gay marriage will be recognized, and schools will stop teaching self-esteem, just to name three.
• People you know will take jobs in China.
• Plans for the George W. Bush library will be scaled back until it is exactly one square foot bigger than his father's.
• No one will buy $3 bran muffins.

Feel free to add your own.

What I'm Worried About Today

At what point do I remove the snow shovel from the trunk of my car and replace it with my golf clubs? And is the chain saw -- left in the trunk since a clean-up day at my church last weekend -- something that should remain in the trunk year-round? There are times it would come in handy on the golf course...

Serious Question For You Conservatives Out There

Is there any problem for which tax cuts are not at least part of the solution?

When President George W. Bush took office, he vowed to cut taxes because the economy was going so well, and then when the economy tanked he vowed to cut taxes because the economy was going so badly. When deficits are high, the answer is to cut taxes because tax cuts increase the amount of money that flows to government. When the government is in surplus, the answer is to cut taxes to decrease the amount of money that flows to government -- an apparently contrary position that nonetheless enjoys wide support.

I'm seriously at a loss: is there a single economic circumstance in which Republicans think raising taxes is necessary?

Innauguration Day

I've been trying to figure out what to say today. I've been thinking about it for a long time, maybe a month. I've come up completely empty.

I considered making a list of the reasons President Bush has been terrible for this country. I could have done self-referential research because I wrote something a long time ago about impeaching the President based not on his conduct of the war but on his abuse of the Constitution. But I never got around to tracking it down. It seemed, in a way, small to whack W on the way out the door.

I also considered trying to write something about what he did right, because there are a few significant things in that column, too. (I absolutely don't give him credit for The Surge, a change in military strategy that was a couple of years overdue when he finally got around to it and that, if all goes well, may salvage something of the war while not exactly making the war worthwhile.) He did the AIDS in Africa thing and...and...well, there must be something else.

I considered taking the day off and hanging an American flag here, bright and shiny again after years of being used to bludgeon internal enemies for political gain. But that seemed too easy, or glib, or something.

I listened yesterday to a conservative friend bitch about the media's coverage of the coming of Obama. He said they never covered Republicans like this. So I considered writing a rebuttal to that, except I couldn't because it's true -- with the understanding that we've never had a President this unpopular leave office on schedule before. The sigh of relief you're hearing is universal, not partisan. I don't think even President Bush's defenders wish he'd stick around for another term, or even for another few days. The time has come.

What remains to be said about President Bush, it seems, is this: he was a man who should never have been President, a creation of an era of American politics where substance mattered not at all. He was a symptom of bitterness and resentment on both ends of the political spectrum that made what had previously been the sustaining virtues of our country -- moderation, accommodation and tolerance -- into political liabilities. He saw the world in black and white during a period when almost everyone saw the world in black and white. He was dishonest during a time when we were dishonest with ourselves. He was the culmination of a politics of resentment that started with Nixon, or maybe even before that with the race hustlers of the Civil Rights denouement. He was the point where the anger of the 1960s came amorally together with the advent of the 24-hour television news cycle and a society so self-indulgent it would rather send its children to die in a war than give up it's heated car seats.

Nature needs its disasters. There are trees that shed seed pods that only crack open in a forest fire, swamps that only regenerate in drought. President Bush, I think, may be just the disaster this country needs. His failures -- which are our failures, really -- are teaching us the very lessons we need to learn. They're lessons, mostly, about limits. A generation raised on American supremacy has learned the consequences of hubris. Political parties prone to the belief that government can enforce an alternate reality have learned -- or are learning -- that government is a weak sister when confronting the glacial power of cultural shifts. And we, the people, are hopefully learning that ignorance and indifference will not protect us or our Constitution.

President Bush has been, without question, a terrible President. Perhaps paradoxically, he may also have been just what we needed.

Just Something To Talk About

There's no question but that much of our economic slump is due to various levels of psychological depression. Banks aren't lending because they don't know what's going to happen next; consumers aren't committing to time payments because they're not confident they'll have jobs.

My question is: how much of that funk lifts the day George W. Bush leaves office? Certainly, some quotient of dourness will no longer be with us, some fresh-start-factor will boost our morale. The question is, how much?

Creative Destruction

I've rewritten this sentence six times because anything that  sounds like "we live in times of massive change" sounds like it's belaboring the obvious. And it is, except that the reason for that is not, I think, that we've all embraced the inevitability of change but because we've devalued the world "massive." We've used too many of our big words to describe small things, and at this moment that leaves me without the worlds to express what now feels like.

It feels like we're crossing some threshold of history over which we can never return. It feels like that moment when an avalanche breaks loose, when the cracks appear but movement hasn't quite started. It feels like 10 years from now, the world is going to be a very, very different place.

Think of the scale of the change that took place between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, as Europe shed its structure of principalities and kingdoms for the nations of the modern world. Think of the change wrought in the few years it took to construct the transcontinental railroad, when travel from one coast to the other went from being a life-threatening three month journey to a few days on a train. Think of Columbus, starting the biggest land-run in the history of mankind.

Obama ran on a platform of change, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about something that comes out of Congress or the White House. I'm talking about deep, fundamental economic and technological and cultural change. I can't put my finger on it, exactly. If I were smarter I'd be able to look out over the horizon and see what it's going to be. Instead, I'm able to detect it's coming by implication, by looking around at all the unsustainable structures we have in place and marveling at how they all seem to be teetering at once.

The consumer culture as we've known it -- the culture of value-defined-by-consumption -- is over. Easy debt is over; anyone can see that. A look at California's massive budget deficits suggests that big, expensive government is over, too. Oil is going to go back through the roof soon enough, environmental concerns are going to grow more pressing, and our whole world of energy is going to change to something substantially different. Our medical system isn't sustainable; one of the reasons American car companies are in such trouble is that they're the only car companies in the world that are expected to pay for their workers' and retirees' medical care. Big media are collapsing; daily newspapers are only a few years from stopping the presses in favor of no-one-knows-quite-what. And government -- poor, pathetic, helpless government: we're watching a run on the government bank right now, and bank runs never end well. Government, as it's been conceived for nearly 100 years, feels like it's about to be over, too.

We're all talking about recession, but it feels bigger to me than that. It feels like a giant cultural shift, a change in not just economics but psychology.

I'm excited by it, though I can't say exactly why. I'm pretty comfortable in today's world; the odds that my life will improve a lot in a new world aren't high. But still...

I was talking with my nephew over the weekend, a recent graduate of an Ivy League school now working as a Congressional aide and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He thinks the place to be is energy, that Wall Street is done, that show business is done, that real estate and manufacturing and politics are done. He and his cohort are walking into energy companies on the cutting edge and asking for a job, any job, just to be where the action is.

And then this:

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The game-changer, the paradigm shift: it's out there somewhere close. We're going to read about it one morning in the newspaper, if there are still newspapers.

The stuff we're messing with now...doesn't it all feel like those Internet start-ups who were going to make money by sending people email? You know, back when email was new and getting a message was exciting, there were venture capital start-ups whose business plan was to send out little fun facts about gardening and sports and movie trivia because people weren't getting enough email. It was the brave new medium! Think about that today when you open Outlook and come face-to-face with a whole bunch of crap you'd rather not deal with, that has nothing to do with you, that is waiting for your input entirely because somebody invented the "Reply to All" button. Think about what it must have been like back in the days when people didn't get enough email.

Every time anyone talks about ethanol or offshore drilling, it feels the same to me as when people used to talk about subscription email services. "Enjoy your moment," I find myself thinking, because that's what it is, a moment that will be gone before we know it. And we don't know what's coming to replace it.

Energy is just one example, an easy example. Everywhere I look I see the same things, the same symptoms of impending doom, at least for the established order. The principle of creative destruction, of course, is the same as the principle of the forest floor. That is, the death of one set of organisms creates the environment necessary for the rise of the next set of organisms. Look up into the canopy and notice that the biggest trees are all heavy with dead limbs, that one good gust of wind could bring everything down. The change is going to be -- here's that inadequate word again -- massive. When I was a kid we had an ice storm, and I remember laying in my bed listening to the limbs crack and the trees falling in the woods out back. When we walked out the next day it was as if a bomb had gone off, but I remember the next spring being the greenest ever, with new growth soaking up the sunlight the old trees had been monopolizing.

A dozen years from now we're going to be living in an entirely different world, a world built on the broken limbs of the world we live in right now. I'm convinced of that, and I'm excited.

Quick Question

Assuming Obama wins the election, how much do you think Sarah Palin's book contract is going to be worth? I'm guessing $6 million.

Say Goodbye to the Sixties

I was watching video of Sarah Palin out on the campaign trail givin' 'em heck, and it occurred to me that the McCain campaign's recent decision to go after Barack Obama's past associations was not just a tactical political decision. It occurred to me that the McCain campaign actually believes that Obama's past, peripheral associations with 1960s detritus William Ayers are significant.

This is what it has come down to: in the midst of two wars, an economic collapse, and a looming environmental crisis, the old guy wants to argue about something that happened 40 years ago.

What we're watching here is the last gasp of the Boomer argument that started a half-a-century ago. It's jocks versus freaks, the kids with the crew cuts and the letter jackets against the long-hairs. Screw the future, MCCain is saying, we still haven't settled the past.

John McCain, it has become apparent, is a bitter, angry old man. The amused condescension he displayed as a young naval officer seeing the beginnings of the counter-culture has hardened into hatred. His feeling of entitlement is vast. In his first debate with Obama, McCain could barely bring himself to even look at Obama, who has somehow become the personification of all of the unworthies he's scorned for so long. "Senator Obama just doesn't understand," he said again and again, oh so disappointed that Obama doesn't see the world the way McCain does.

And he's right. Obama doesn't understand. He doesn't understand why McCain and his cohort are still mad about Vietnam. He doesn't get why conservatives are trying to reconstruct the Cold War. He doesn't understand politics that is geared toward division rather solution.

To his credit, Obama doesn't seem to understand either side of the Boomer argument. Jesse Jackson wants to "cut his nuts off" for not being attentive enough to the needs of the Civil Rights old-timers. Spend a little time on the rad left blogs and feel the scorn for Obama's lack of adherence to far left orthodoxy.

McCain had a chance to look toward the future. He could have decided, a couple of weeks ago, that his best chance was to put an economic vision on the table, a going-forward plan to rebuild our economy and engage with what Fareed Zakaria has called "the rise of the rest."

But McCain doesn't have that in him. He chose instead to fight wars in the past, to spend what little is left of his honor smearing Obama as a friend of hippies and flag burners, and he's sending out his homecoming queen to do his dirty work.

I watched this argument begin back in middle school. It's going to be interesting, in the next few weeks, to watch it end.