Lifefluff, 28 August 2010
28 August 2010
1. Why am I still keeping this blog? Is it some grand experiment in narcissism? Not so grand, anyway. I’m not Andrew Sullivan, masturbating into a napkin at dinner and posting the results for my many ideologically-pansexual followers. But then people pay him somehow for this. How does this happen? How do you make money at a blog? Frankly I haven’t figured out how anybody makes money at anything since being taught about economic profit through one flickering eye in 2006. Spoiler alert: in the long run there is no profit. Mind: blown.
2. One one day last week, six people here using the search term “good looking black boys.” Six people. I will give you six dollars if you can tell me how this would happen. I will give you six more if you can model, given the exponential growth rate of Internet use, how long before it makes everyone a pedophile.
3. Incidentally, the British spell it paedophile, and say it like pee-dough-file. Which both looks and sounds appropriately more virulent than our version, which, like most American language, is carefully scrubbed of hard edges and meaning.
Rather more incidentally, enjoy this highly-offensive example of how little important people know about the problems they froth over. And marvel at the fact that, fifteen years later, a satirical news report seems ever so slightly tame.
4. Besides the above, how do you know you live a morally-dubious existence? When your job gets shit on by Street Sense. Honest to God.
So much for Doing Good Work. Though of course I was mostly in it for the money. Wonder with me why I don’t have very much of it.
It might hurry me along the path to goodness if I had a real name. It’s been months since someone has called me by my name. Most days at work I’m Mr. Walder, Walderburg, Waldrich, Wallburn, Walker, Walter, Wilbur, Wilburn, Wilder. Or Mr. Roberts. Or Mr. Stiffenburg.
Mr. Stiffenburg. That was from a girl I spoke to some dozen times in three days; as her frustration increased she wandered further and further from my actual name until by the end, when I’d decided not to pay her while I still had a pulse, I was addressed only gutturally. I’m fairly certain I now exist only as a specially-designed symbol of hatred in her diary, like the little whip Gladstone drew whenever he beat himself for beating himself.
5. Strange things happen to me when I’m in Dupont Circle.
While I was standing on Eighteenth Street yesterday, shortly after walking past this
On which I will offer no further comment
a school bus trundled by. Inside loud music blared and three dozen people holding various mind-altering substances were engaged in what might charitably be called dancing or, more accurately, aggressive gyration. People waved at me as they went passed. Twelve hours later, I’m still not sure what they were waving.
I suppose this wasn’t as bad as the man on Sixteenth Street the week before. I was going on my merry way when I ambled in range of a homeless beggar. He turned, looked straight at me, and laughed. Explosively.
As I rushed past him I could only wonder to myself: How did he know?
Then I saw his little green bib and copies of Street Sense. And I smiled smugly to myself because, of course, there is no profit.
Barack Obama’s ground zero masterstroke
17 August 2010
I suppose Barack Obama has never been famous for his tactical subtlety.
You could argue otherwise – unlike many people he and his team saw through the clusterfuck that was Super Tuesday in 2008 – but Washington’s a pretty myopic town and the primary system is above all just an annoying long division problem. (If two trains leave New York at 8 and Chicago at 8:30, how much debt can Hillary Clinton rack up before they crash?) You don’t get points for remembering the primary campaign goes on after the first week of February.
He was always a brilliant communicator – but never a subtle one. The hope and change stuff and the Socialist Realist campaign posters, the Jeremiah Wright speech and the Inauguration – all very stirring, but for the unmoved it felt like being bludgeoned by a frozen sturgeon. The campaign took hold of the economic crisis with a certain deftness but between that and Sarah Palin the pieces settled themselves by election night.
Fairly, he’s not had the easiest time since, and accomplishing any policy goals in the face of the recession has to be rated a kind of success. But his administration has not been a study in effective communication or political artistry, especially considering just how powerless the Republican opposition was (and how risky the strategy of No). The White House allowed the debate on health care and (fatally) climate change to drag on and on and then seemingly capitulated at the last moment more from exhaustion than anything else. On gay marriage, Gitmo and even Afghanistan they haven’t engaged much at all. (That or they’re playing a game so deep and well-managed that not even their own people are aware of it.) In this he’s a victim of his own success. Government is about as much shady compromise as grand gesture but he was far too good at conjuring elaborate images of a grand political breakthrough embodied in his campaign. (Which the left especially thought meant it got to win everything.) It was as stupid to propose as it was to believe, but the bottom line is that once more the victories are measured in yards rather than miles.
You might think, then, that this Cordoba House Mosque issue is the latest in a long series of own goals by the Obama team. Certainly that’s the immediate consensus. The Post quotes a political asshole saying
He is right on principle, but he will get slaughtered on the politics.
Note the implicit divorce of the two. So heartening.
Certainly, the consensus is in favor of this conclusion. Harry Reid already jumped ship, as did that guy in Louisiana who can’t get traction in the Bible Belt against a Republican Senator who visited prostitutes. While Obama gets credit for standing on principle – expressed darkly, in embarassed whispers, because nothing in Washington is more socially uncomfortable than a principle – it is accompanied by heaps of opprobrium. Has he, indeed, decided the midterms are a lost cause? Has he gone off the reservation? Is there a civil war in the White House?
No. Somebody did their job, and in a way that united morality and Machiavellianism.
Consider that right now the Obama White House is a spent force. In a rush of activity since early 2009 it depleted the vast amounts of political capital accumulated in the election, most of it ironically a direct result of the decision it least wished to take – passing the stimulus and its resulting debts. What wasn’t lost in the policy pushes that followed pretty decisively disappeared in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Now we’re well into the midterm elections and far from ignoring Obama the fear is that he will be an albatross around the necks of Congressional Democrats, facing down a public who, though unsold on the New Coke Republican Party, feel they have the option of a broadly consequence-free vote against them. Big majorities have that downside. The left, professional or otherwise, are irritated at the White House’s weakness in the face of its own moderates and perceived lack of principle in enforcing its beliefs, let alone its campaign promises.
What’s a president to do? Take a stand in favor of the Ground Zero Mosque. At a stroke you recapture the moral high ground with your own supporters by doing something pure as new snow. You also provide a harmless wedge issue to to your own party, allowing embattled candidates in swing states to implant a dash of populism into their own campaigns and starkly illustrate their independence from the White House on an issue which, despite high salience and high emotions, they can’t effect anyway. You open up a juicy forum for Republicans or Republican supporters to say something racist on television and, since it’s a mosque, create the opening for renewed birther questions directed at GOP congressional candidates – or better still, accusations that Obama’s a secret Muslim (torrid break with his pastor notwithstanding). Any one of these is lose-lose for a politician who dares wade into the mix. It distracts from the debt, from health care, from climate change and from financial services reform, all issues for which Democrats have gotten stick on the road; and best of all it gives candidates for the perennially-unpopular Congress the chance to talk about something Congress didn’t do – and that nobody blames it for. How often does that happen?
The bottom line is Obama hit on a move at once shrewd, highly principled and politically selfless. If indications are correct he did so on his own instinct and without the intervention of advisors. If so he should keep going, the braying of the shriller parts of the commentariat notwithstanding. Given that his staff have come under near constant criticism for their style of management, and given the endless complaints about his Administration’s political opportunism, it might not be bad for Obama to, as Simon sneerily puts it, “[take] seriously all the ‘change’ stuff he promised during the campaign.” The American people certainly did.
And, by the way, it might just keep him a Democratic Congress.
Am I actually still writing this? Bah. Part 1 here. 2 here.
The night before the day after the night of
Speaking of elections-to-come.
British polling organizations rely on national polls of voting intentions taken via various means, much like national polls in the US. A few sources (Electoral Calculus and the UK Polling Report, principally) are available to translate that result into what really matters, namely seats in parliament. In that sense, individual parliamentary races function much like state-by-state campaigns in a presidential election. In Britain results are individually more or less important for the personalities they return, but the end result is the same: hit the magic number and win. The polls, therefore, are less an effort to see who will “win” – or what the British people are thinking – than to determine the difference between this time and last time. That’s the swing.
When there are two parties really competing for government and a third with some areas of strong localized support and steady but diffuse strength everywhere else, this is generally a useful exercise. But when all three unexpectedly start to poll the same nationally, the system goes haywire. This is especially true when you add regional differentiations, unevenly distributed turnout and the targeting of specific seats, at which LibDems and minor parties have grown adept. In the last election, which began to lay bare these predictive deficiencies, Electoral Calculus mis-predicted 74 seats, 52 of which resulted in an erroneous prediction. It suggested a Labour majority of 130 rather than the 66 which was actualized. The swing between Labour and the LibDems in key marginals was 6.7%: but Labour lost Cambridge on a 15% swing and Manchester Withington on 18.4%. (And these were not the only ones.) Strange, unexplained results in what was otherwise a relatively-average election. What happens when the same factors are at play but with all three parties even nationally? What happens when a relatively small number of three-cornered contests become four-sided or five-sided with independents and nationalists? What happens when talk of a majority is totally anachronistic? (And what happens when it isn’t?)
If you ask me, the models are crap, the polls no longer tell us anything – in marginal seats or nationally – and nobody will have much of a pot to piss in on election night. I think that fact in itself is meaningful. We’ll get there yet. (I’m not doing a fucking Part IV – if I do I’ll have to write about Toynbee tiles or something weird.)
Watch out, Radioactive Man!
Yes, that was a reference to a show nobody watches anymore. But more on Gordon Brown later. (Snap.)
On BBC America and similarly British themed broadcasts and bootlegged internet streams (which, if you know of one, I’d be obliged if you’d share) the election broadcast will start shortly before 5pm Eastern. British polls close nationally at 10, and shortly thereafter the BBC’s Election Night broadcast will report its exit poll, which will predict not merely share of the vote but seat totals, swings and a potential majority. Or not, as the case may be. For the next few hours after that, not much will happen – as counting proceeds only a few seats will declare their result before 12:00. This declaration consists of a returning officer, having concluded the final count, reading out the results for each candidate and then announcing who has been elected, after which each reads a speech. It’s wonderfully dramatic and avoids the disgusting back-and-forth we have in this country, but it’s trustworthy because the seats are too small to rig convincingly. (Though they do try.)
Here’s an example from 1997: (The creepy man whose picture opens the video is actually Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for the new seat of York Outer. Ouch. Fortunately he won’t win.)
For the past several elections, the first place to declare was Sunderland South, a urban riding in the North that was held from the darkest days of the 80s by Labour’s Chris Mullin. Mullin is not running again and the Sunderland has been broken up from two seats to three: Sunderland Central, Houghton and Sunderland West and Washington and Sunderland West. One of these three will be the first to declare, and chances are none of the three will take longer than three hours. If any of them fall it would open the curtain on a catastrophe for Labour – the most marginal, Central, needs a 13% swing to the Conservatives. It’s not likely, but they will be useful barometers for the rest of the night – pay especially attention to the Liberal Democrat vote, as they’re targeting heavily Labour areas for upsets.
Some of the other early seats, in a change of pace, may be from Northern Ireland. In the past these were only of regional interest – Northern Irish seats are dominated by local parties on either side of the sectarian divide. However the Ulster Unionists, the old ruling class of the northern provinces, saved just one seat in 2005 against the onslaught of the hardline Democratic Unionists and in an effort to stave off electoral oblivion announced a merger with the Conservatives. The result is the first credible candidacy of a national party there since the Sunningdale Agreement. It’s not clear whether the new Ulster Conservatives and Unionists, as they now are, will save the single seat they presently hold much less gain. Only two seats fall within a 5% swing, but David Cameron has been working Northern Ireland hard and the sympathies of the Democratic Unionists are also with him. (Though Brown won’t be counted out, in the entirely unreliable words of the Daily Mail. How this is a “bribe” but Cameron’s dangling of government jobs something more principled is beyond me.)
At that point some more results will start to pour in. Tis’ much to go over 650. But here’s a few things – both seats and trends – to watch:
Celtic Kittens: Scotland and to a lesser extent Wales have been largely closed to the Tories since 1997, when they were eviscerated in both, and since Labour have come to power they have prospered from vast new investment. The conservatives regained one seat in Scotland – with difficulty – in 2001, which they held – with difficulty – in 2005. The Scottish Nationalists saw their UK MPs increase to six and in 2007 won one seat more than Labour and formed a minority government in the Scottish Parliament. The LibDems did well, taking nearly 20% of Scottish seats, twice their UK average. In Wales Labour suffered slightly to the Conservatives and LibDems and lost a seat on a huge swing to an independent candidate, Peter Law. Shortly after he died of cancer – his election agent, Dai Davies, now holds the seat and is standing again.
Scotland has been one of Labour’s bright spots during the campaign – successive surges by the other three parties have been seen off, the luster is off the Nationalists and there’s surely real sympathy for Gordon Brown. It’s now a reasonable question whether Labour might actually gain seats. (At least one seat, lost in a by-election in 2008, is likely to return to the Labour fold, though this won’t count as a “gain” since Labour was the winner at the last regular election.) If Labour suffers but only slightly, as some polls have indicated, only the lowest of the low-hanging fruit is likely to fall. The Tories will continue to have a single Scottish MP.
Wales is tougher: it has a stronger native Conservative tradition, especially in rural areas, and fewer Nationalists and Liberals to act as a buffer. (Unlike elsewhere, the Liberal vote moved almost wholesale to Labour in the 20s and 30s and has infrequently looked back.) A referendum, held the same day, on increased powers for the Welsh Assembly are likely to focus the attention of locals on devolution of powers, an early and influential Labour reform. The Conservatives look likely to gain, but only because their vote before was so low. The Nationalists may as well. If the Conservatives gain fewer than six seats Labour’s had a good night. The reverse if they take more than eight. I think Labour will take back the independent seat.
Minor parties: Only a few seats are held by independents. (Excluding several MPs who’ve been thrown out of their parties; most of these are standing down.) We’ve already mentioned Blaenau Gwent. Bethnal Green and Bow in central London was taken by George Galloway in 2005 in protest at his expulsion from Labour (prompting this interview, which single-handedly proved to my 17 year-old mind why British elections are better – by the way, yes, their MP is Scottish). Wyre Forest fell in 2001 when Labour cuts threatened to close a local hospital.
I think all three are likely to fall. In the 2006 by-election in Blaenau Gwent, shortly after Peter Law’s death, the official Labor candidate came close to regaining the seat. By-elections are traditionally opportunities for an easy protest vote on a low turnout. So it was, but that Labour came so close says that the drama surrounding the 2005 result has faded greatly. With no real opposition from the other three Welsh parties, this looks a Labour gain. Same with Bethnal Green, where George Galloway has abandoned the seat to a lesser light. It should be an even easier take. Wyre Forest is a Conservative seat, but Dr Richard Taylor benefitted from both the old Liberals and the LibDems standing aside in his favor. This year both will feature, and even in 2005 the Conservatives gained 10% in a strong area. The presence of UK Independence Party (anti-Europe) and right-wing British National candidates may help or hurt him; but either way, he’s unlikely to survive.
Independents are unlikely to disappear from the Commons, however. In Brighton Pavilion Caroline Lucas, the spokewoman for the Green Party, has an excellent opportunity to gain their first seat at the expense of Labour. They’ll need a swing of only 7% in their favor, assuming the Conservative vote holds steady; but since 2005 this seat is a 4-way marginal between the three main parties and the Greens, and promises a cliffhanger of a result.
In Luton South, Esther Rantzen, who you would charitably describe as a television personality, is standing as a general anti-everything candidate and may win herself or let in the Tory or LibDem at Labour’s expense, while Labour may gain at Castle Point where expelled Conservative MP Bob Spink chose to fight on as an independent. If he takes a third of the old Tory vote, Labour takes it.
Each of these results may seem small-scale: but if no party wins a majority, especially if they’re only one or two a way, they take on new and specific importance.
How do the LibDems actually do?: One or two polls this week have shown the third party dropping back to their pre-debate numbers; others have them ahead of Labour. All polls agree the Tories will take first, but the relative success or failure of the Liberal Democrats in England will make the difference. Indeed the sole reason the Tories are not gaining a majority is because expected gains from the LibDems aren’t realizing.
They’ll gain seats in the Southwest, an area of strength for hundreds of years. But their strength here limits opportunities; there just aren’t many seats to take. Watch West Dorset, the seat of the Tory former Shadow Chancellor and a frequent LibDem target: if it falls, the Tories will be having a very bad night. The Southeast is ultrasafe for the Tories, but the areas in between – South of London and East of Portsmouth – are the key LibDem-Conservative battleground. Until recently the LibDems were danger of heavy losses. They may still be. Guildford is an ultramarginal that changed hands in the last two elections. Watch who wins and by how much for clues to the surrounding areas.
North of London, especially along the East of England, both Tories and LibDems will be fighting to exploit a drop in the Labour vote. The LibDems are at a disadvantage in that they didn’t expect to be targeting so many potential gains, but their candidates are generally solid, decent local people who can speak well in an electorate furious with the political class. A few specific areas stand out. The LibDems heavily targeted the city of Newcastle’s seats last time and narrowly failed to seize them, as they did with several key seats in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. They will need to make gains from Labour in such Northern urban and suburban seats to realize a total above 100.
And now, my final thought
It’s like writing a goddamn novel. I have to be in Congress Heights in the morning.
At the wire polls have swung the Conservatives’ way. If borne out, they may be in range of a majority.
I don’t think they will be. In fact, I think – against all reason – that Labour may yet have a good night. After the swings and the BBC gimmicks and the snotty interviews and the bad computer animation, and after all of the crap Gordon Brown has received, I think he’ll be right in his prediction that the people who haven’t quite decided – and they may be 40% – will come back.
The British press hate Gordon Brown. They hate him when he’s decisive and they hate him more when he waffles. They hate him for what he does and for what he doesn’t do – they hate not what he does with power but that he has it at all. They hate him because he’s ugly and half-blind and worst of all Scottish, the bad aftertaste of Tony Blair and the offensive reminder of the favoritism granted the regions for their loyal support of Labour. They hate him for good reasons and more often for bad ones. A lot of people agree with them.
But not all. Just like not all agreed that John Major was shit just because he came after Thatcher. In 1992 a “Shy Tory” factor kept him in power – disastrously, it turned out. Voting Conservative may not have been cool, but a lot of people did, to borrow Goldwater’s phrase, know in their hearts that he was right. I think the contrast Brown draws with Cameron and Clegg is precisely the sort that would encourage this sentiment – and this week in the campaign seemed to be the first time Brown himself believed it.
For a man who may not have a job tomorrow, he’s bounding around the country with something like a spring in his step. Maybe that’s the key difference: he can risk being effusive rather than dour precisely because nobody expects anything from him anymore. At the least they’ll be able to say he went out with something like grace. At the most…
Well. At the most I’ll need a Part IV.
Peter does the British election, Part II: “An asteroid… destroying practically all life on Earth”
2 May 2010
The equally-gratuitous Part I.
Trench foot-in-mouth
Last week Gordon Brown called a voter who strode up and gave him what-for about immigration from Eastern Europe “bigoted.” After forgetting to take out his microphone. Whether it counts for anything or not is totally unclear – in 2001 the famously surly deputy prime minister hit a guy and Labour got a huge majority. But it’s not for nothing that this is the first real coverage Brown has individually got in weeks. This fracas sadly encapsulates Labour’s war so far – they haven’t been able to catch a break, nobody’s listening and nobody thinks you matter.
(As a personal note, I agree with Gordon Brown. Really I like him better the more everybody else hates him. But more on that in Part III.)
It is a strange sort of revenge for Labour’s resistance to proportional representation that Gordon Brown is learning how it feels to be the leader of “the other party.” Though Labour’s numbers have held relatively steady and the resurgent Liberal Democrats are beginning to drop back, the race between two fresh, dynamic, not-grizzled leaders looks better when you don’t stick Mr Shrek MP up next to them. Labour, having developed a taste for the blood of its own leaders, is watching large chunks of its support drift away (to apathy and to LibDems – less to Tories) and indications are that the campaign is totally falling apart. Senior party leaders are apparently trying to convince Gordon Brown to stay on as a caretaker in the event of a loss in an attempt to prevent deputy leader Harriet Harman – whose abrasive style and overexact behavior as Women’s Minister earned her the nickname “Harriet Harperson” – from gaining an indomitable foothold.
As the tetchy campaign enters its final week, both Labour and Tories rounded on Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg on a promise of amnesty for illegal immigrants and extremely ill-advised declarations about his intentions should the Liberal Democrats hold the balance of power in Parliament. These have allowed Brown and Labour, with some success, to declare that a vote for the Liberal Democrats is by proxy one for Cameron – and certainly even Brown-hating Labourites will find irritating his attempts to dictate their choice of leader. David Cameron’s Conservatives have too late realized the danger of the LibDem surge and are only now turning their guns on Nick Clegg after generic attacks on a hung parliament fell flat. A strong performance in the final Leader’s Debate has helped Cameron – no poll since 20 April has showed a vote-winner other than the Conservatives – but the chances it will save him from electoral ambiguity are fading. The election’s had its big bang moment: the focus now shifts from the general campaign to contests in 650 individual seats.
The election-to-come
The quote at the top is from a commentator on election night 1997 when Labour won 418 seats and exterminated half of John Major’s Cabinet.
Derrida (in a random and slightly gratuitous philosophy reference that I’m probably going to fuck up) liked to talk about the “democracy-to-come”: how democracy doesn’t constitute anything intrinsically but is a perpetual work-in-progress, moving and shaping with the passage of time and the change of mores as people and elites assert control in new ways. It’s not going anywhere, as such: there’s no pre-arranged destination, no inevitable moment of completion and triumph. Democracy is a political system that meanders down the road, leaning forward, nervously eyeing its surroundings. If so, in Britain this week democracy is hurtling down an expressway. But where to?
The Liberal Democrat surge has guaranteed that this will be the key question in any new Parliament: not who will govern but how British government will be. If the Conservatives don’t win a majority the Liberal Democrats will hold the balance of power. It is a decades-long party policy that they cannot participate in a regime that does not pursue electoral reform, and for the first time they will be large and decisive enough to enforce that policy. Hungry for power though they may be after a hundred years out of government, they are not likely to break this commitment.
Labour will lose. Nothing can stop that now. But their ability to survive – not as a party of government but as a party at all – now hangs in the balance of this vote. If Labour does indeed drop into third and 100 seats or more fall, a massacre of Labour’s leading lights could follow. It is, ironically, like an asteroid is coming towards the Labour party. What they need in the event of a loss is enough diversity so that the gene pool of potential leaders and their supporting personalities remains robust enough for them to quickly rebound. Two factors are working against this.
The first is that low turnout, high profile Labour safe seats, like David Miliband’s South Shields, are precisely the ones likely to give up a larger-than-average swing should the election go horribly wrong. Labour’s strongholds in the North are the most likely to suffer in such a situation, and given independent interventions and a large swing towards one challenging party could overtop the superficially large majorities held by several Labour ministers like brothers Miliband or the family Balls–Cooper. (Teehee – Balls.)
Labour may also suffer because of Brown’s reliance on peers in government, who are unelected but can still occupy most government positions. Three peers sit in Cabinet positions which can be held by MPs – two as Secretaries of State and one, Lord Mandelson, as Gordon Brown’s right-hand. A larger number are junior ministers at the highest profile departments – 3 of 9 at Business, excluding the Lord Mandelson; 2 of 5 at Defence; 3 of 5 at the Foreign Office. The competence of these officers aside, these are all positions which are not being used to blood MPs who will be the beating breast of a Labour opposition (and the core of future Labour leadership teams). With the attrition likely if a severe loss comes on Thursday and the potential loss of many junior ministers who sit as MPs, including the most politically sensitive in marginal seats, a rump Labour party would likely fall into the hands of its safest and most hardline members, possibly under an unexpected and inexperienced leader. The Conservatives know how this feels. But they will not share Labour’s pain.
Any hung parliament is unlikely to last long, especially if it results in any kind of broad electoral reform – a new poll will have to follow any alteration in the governing system. If so – and if Labour is unlikely to be a party to the decisions that shape such a reform – their concern should not now be this Thursday. It should be election night November 2010, or May 2011, or whenever this Parliament teeters to its conclusion. By then Tories and LibDems alike will truly have dipped their hands in the blood and they will suffer the burden of having no time for any proposed remedies to take effect (which is why Cameron is so desperate for a majority government – he’ll need his full five years, at least). Labour could profit from this, especially if any Conservative-LibDem regime tears itself apart over reform.
So this was supposed to be 2 parts. w/e. I have a lot of opinions.
Many of you have come up to me – in the street, in bars, during my wheatgrass colonic – and asked, “Peter, I have to know – what do you think of the British election?” Normally I don’t like to comment on politics, as my friends know. Religion and sex acts with clowns are spicier conversation. But – oh, what the Hell.
Beforehand: since the six of you who read this are almost entirely American, you might ask, “Why should I care?” If “because I tell you to” is an insufficient answer, consider: the United Kingom is one of America’s ten largest trading partners and London stands shoulder-to-shoulder with New York as a global financial center; next to the United States, Britain is one of the four or five countries whose fiscal decisions reverberate through the world; and this will be the first time a democratic government under a market capitalist regime will be judged on the economic crash and its response to it. (Remember Obama was elected before ARRA and TARP really hit home.) With a skeptical free-market Conservative government challenging an interventionist Labour, this election is arguably a dry run for November here. You might not be surprised to see some of the same themes bleed in: it wouldn’t be the first time.
Baby got back… ground
Yeah, not inspired.
Gordon Brown has been the Prime Minister since summer 2007. He was originally Chancellor – keeper of the purse strings and holder (slash-frequent squeezer) of the Prime Ministerial testicles. That he became Chancellor and Tony Blair party leader and shoo-in for premier despite the latter being nominally the junior partner is said to be down to a mickey slipped him at a Italian restaurant called Granita, which is a singularly inappropriate place to decide the fate of a country. (At least one without a romance language). Despite getting unprecedented control over government policy for someone not actually responsible for making it, Brown was not a happy camper. He got no happier when – if the deal is to be believed – Tony Blair stayed on past and then well past the agreed time. Gordon Brown learned the hard way that though the banker’s offer may be the smart move, you could still be giving up the $1,000,000 briefcase. (649,875 GBP.)
Brown eventually hounded Blair out a decade after he took office after Blair was forced to deputize him to save the last election campaign in 2005. Brown thought the popularity he’d built up as a surly, hard-charging, hard-spending Chancellor would continue when he ascended the throne himself – and for a time it did. Then came the election that wasn’t. To be fair I don’t think it was really Brown’s fault – but speculation about a snap poll in late 2007 got out of control and he did nothing to stop it. In Britain the date of the election is not fixed, so to dangle the prospect of going to the people and then pull back at the last moment is a most dangerous electoral cocktease.
He’s been sleeping on the couch ever since. But the swarthy Scot is lucky that there has been no grand adversary to match the depth of his own party’s despair. No Margaret Thatcher, no Tony Blair, indeed no Ronald Reagan waits in the wings, ready to cruise onstage as the growling saturnine Scot departs. David Cameron’s Conservatives have failed to convince a skeptical public that he’s not Margaret Thatcher, whom the entire country appears to have retroactively decided was an LOL they turned into a great big OMG. Until recently, the third-party Liberal Democrats – alternatively left-liberal, free-market libertarian and a little bit country – were set to draw 20% of the electorate no matter what happened, ensuring that any winner would form a government on a very low vote total. (I am going to link relatedly to myself again. I have absolutely no idea where I found the time to write all this garbage. Unemployment? I kind of miss unemployment.) Short version is that because Parliament’s elected like the US Congress, if the Speaker of the House ran the fucker, a party which gets 20% of a 3-sided vote everywhere will not win anywhere, even if a proportional result would give them a far bigger seat at the table. In 2005 the Liberals won 62 seats on 22.1% of the vote while a numerically proportional result would have seen them take 142. Most of these were in Southwest England, Scotland, and a few scattered urban seats (most often with heavy college populations or young, affluent outer cities).
Another 35-40 seats, occupied by the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, single-issue independents, vanity MPs and the inevitable Irish constitute a wedge which in years past counted for no one. Practically, then, to form a government one party has to win 326 seats out of only 550-575, while the remaining 70-100 aren’t going to be in play at all. This in a country in which government by more than one party is basically unthinkable. (At least, as unthinkable as German rearmament.)
The only thing missing was Jim Lehrer… and “that one”
For the first time in British political history, the cancer of American-style politics spread to the concept of a televised leader’s debate. They do it in Australia, they do it in Canada – it was only a matter of time. It was refreshing to me that starting it with the benefit of all our experience didn’t mean it was any better; while the Brits themselves seemed to be frothing at the mouth over this particular to-do, the parts I watched were just as much a pointless robotic clusterfuck as any presidential clash. It was rather like watching three middle-aged men play Trivial Pursuit, except all the questions were People & Places and nobody ever got a wedge. (“I talked to Wanda, in Bournemouth…”)
But the result was nonetheless remarkable: the Liberal Democrats surged from distant third to close second. They’ve always consistently struggled less with their message than getting anyone to hear it, despite a series of seasoned, well-spoken parliamentarian-leaders and broadly popular liberal policies. The election of Nick Clegg as their leader in 2007 looked for a long while like a major error – a 40 year-old former European MP only elected to Parliament two years before, Clegg never seemed very comfortable in the House Commons and was regularly put aside by a flagging Gordon Brown and his own seasoned deputy, shadow Chancellor Vince Cable. For two years Clegg polled behind the other two leaders and his own predecessors (who had the added disadvantage of also being Scots). He was always shit.
And yet neither Labour, digging in against a televised leader’s debate, nor the Conservatives clamoring for it, realized that they were in fact drinking a nice big draught of hemlock. From here it looks like Clegg’s secret weapon has turned out to be that he’s the most American of the three – he’s good-looking and easy with the camera, exudes congeniality and above all else he’s seen to be calm, clear and level-headed. If the little worm bastard is any indication (sadly, they have that too), people don’t particularly like conflict in these debates – because, unlike Prime Minister’s Questions, viewers have the impression of being spoken to directly rather than watching others debate. Nobody likes to be yelled at, which is why Brown and Cameron have stumbled when they’ve tried to mix it up – they’re schooled and skilled in parliamentary swordplay. You wonder if even Tony Blair, the talk show Mr. Cool, would have been as well-suited to this format as Clegg.
He’s also a novelty. After three years people seem kind of tired of Brown and Cameron – the drawbacks of 24-hour saturation media is that a lot of people are seeing a lot more of you than they really ever wanted. Having had very little opportunity to speak to a mass audience, Clegg and the LibDems not only appears fresh and their ideas more interesting and innovative but, most importantly, they haven’t yet had time to annoy the entire world. He gets the sort of freshness of the Obama effect without the sixteen months of campaigning that slowly wore it away.
The proof is in the pudding. After the first debate Nick Clegg was unanimously thought to have won, in most cases by margins in double digits. Brown and Cameron alike polled about equally-poor second places. The LibDems’ numbers floated around 20% and hadn’t poked above their 2005 result in many months – after the debate they have not dropped below 26% and regularly top 30. For the first time in – awhile? Ever? – the third party came top in the polls. New numbers haven’t come out since the second debate, but while instant reaction registered a closer result, it still gave a Clegg win. At a stroke, the question became not whether the Conservatives could gain a majority but who would even be the largest party.
I’ll probably publish a part two when I feel like it. Or not.
If the Army had a 2009 like the rest of us
27 February 2010
ORDER OF THE DAY
TO THE OFFICERS AND ENLISTED MEN OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY NORTH:
Wear sunscreen.
No, I’m kidding. It’s actually pretty cold.
It’s been a busy week here at HQ. We’ve recently finished updating our computer systems to operate on entirely 3G wireless systems, so from now on we will always be in touch! This is just the first step in our effort to redress the issues raised during the engagement at Hill 382 last month. In related good news, I’ve just seen the latest reports and almost half the forces of the old 120th Infantry Brigade will soon be available for reassignment to other units. Thanks to the Medical Corps for more great work!
On a less happy note we’ve received some disturbing reports of missing food across a number of units from battallion level on down. It goes without saying that such thefts are court-martialling offenses and will not be tolerated anywhere in the Army. We will not be able to continue promotions such as “Five Courses with a Five Star” (congratulations to this month’s winners CPL Jeffries and PFC Wosckowski of Charlie Company, Brigade Support Battalion, 13th Infantry) if our generosity is rewarded with this sort of behavior. We understand the food shortage is acute. We are actively addressing it.
Enlisted personnel are reminded that disturbances, food-related or otherwise, are a capital offense.
Additionally we understand that tempers are running a bit high as we continue to withdraw forces from New York to other parts of the front. As a result the C/Os of all of our brigade support batallions have come together to organize a General Funtreat, with prizes, requisitioned carnival rides and air raid drills. The winners will receive three-day passes behind the lines, with transportation to Pittsburgh.
Entrants are reminded that desertion is a capital offense.
More than ever it’s important to remember that we’re all in this together. It’s been a tough year – no one denies this – but the Army’s fundamental strength is as good as it has ever been. With the American spirit in our hearts, funding as high as its ever been and the latest and best resources, we will defeat our enemies and build a nation bigger, more enterprising and more vigorous than we have ever seen before. For that the commitment of every man and woman among you is indispensible.
Enlisted personnel are reminded that disobeying orders is a capital offense.
Chief of Staff, US ARMY NORTH
A reply to Jacob Weisberg – a true public man
11 February 2010
When I write on this blog for the benefit of my readers – I’m thinking of christening you Wahlberg’s Wankers – I’m always pleased when I produce something I think to be frantically, gallantly unpopular. The ability to anonymously slag off the Greats and Not-So-Greats of society may be the great scourge of the Internet, but it must be a little counterbalanced by the chance to stick unsuspecting masses in the eye with total impunity. Hitting the “Publish” button feels a bit like embarking on the Charge of the Light Brigade – mad, but bold, and potentially poetry-inspiring.
Though on reflection I usually wish I’d left the Russians alone.
I came upon a brilliant example of that low art today. I don’t read Slate often, as it’s usually both bougeois and wetly revolutionary and I find it annoying. But Jacob Weisberg’s attack on, well, Americans was a bit too much to pass up. And I must say that it was an immensely satisfying read. It feels good sometimes to, as my grandmother would say, “have a bit of a carry-on.”
As long as you leave it there. I’m not sure Weisberg does.
He takes aim at “the childishness, ignorance and growing incoherence of the public at large,” and marshals to this end… polling numbers. But for a certain masochism about me I probably would’ve stopped here, as he bangs on about the expressed desire of the public at large to have lower taxes, lower deficits, and smaller government combined with maintained (and indeed enhanced) public services across the board. An American Idol-obsessed America, he suggests, basically lives in Candyland, expecting everything but willing to pay for nothing.
Incidentally, I’m thinking of changing the title of this blog to “I think South Park did an episode about that“. So much of what I say could be avoided by keeping up with it.
To be fair to Weisberg, here’s his argument as best I can summarize it. What he says is:
1) When polled, broad majorities of the American people endorse measures X Y Z;
2) When polled, broad majorities of the American people reject measures A B C;
3) Without measures A B C the realization of measures X Y Z is impossible;
4) There must be something wrong with those polled as they fail to connect the necessity of A B C in view of the desirability of X Y Z.
Now this chain of argument fails Occam’s Razor. Simpler if more obscure than the explanation that “People are stupid” is one that lays the blame at the feet of polling. Any pollster will – should – tell you that a given poll is at best an imperfect snapshot in time and that one man’s poll is not necessarily comparable to anybody else’s. Pollsters are themselves people, remarkably fallible ones than that, and worse are concerned with distilling broad and heterodox currents of opinion into a result – a vote for X or Y. This sort of compromise is electorally necessary and a fact of all politics and hence all life; but it does not justify painting 300,000,000 people with such a very broad brush.
Let’s tap into that logical chain again. The immediate problem I see is that the form of measurement – the poll – is badly unequal to the task Weisberg’s given it – the construction of a system of ideas. I think a video from Yes Minister illustrates this best:
The problem is this: a person can’t respond to the questions you don’t ask. Most pollsters are not asking, in sequence, “Would you support measure X?” “What if measure A was necessarily to realize it?” “What about measure B?” They’re asking things like Gallup’s question: Do you think President Obama is spending too much money in his attempt to address major problems?
It’s a compound question. Left unanswered are “What are the major problems?” “How much money is being spent?” “How much is being proposed?” “How much is Obama himself spending?” “Where is the money coming from?” Failing to ask these questions, or separate them, mean that even a citizen cognizent of these problems are forced to pack them up to distill a specific answer. And indeed, in this struggle to reduce the specific to the general, I think a person usually will do their best to pick the specific – and since “too much money” is a more specific idea than “major problems,” I’d be likely to answer yes.
When you ask a different question – “Do you favor or oppose Congress passing a new $775 billion economic stimulus program as soon as possible after Barack Obama takes office?” – you get a different answer. Packed in here are questions like, “What has the effect been of the first stimulus?” “On what is the money to be spent?” “Where does the money come from?” “Why is it necessary to wait until the inauguration of Barack Obama?” “Why must it be immediately upon his accession?” But you need an answer, so the specificity of the proposal lends itself to a yes on this diametrically opposed inquiry.
Follow the logic of each in turn. The latter:
1) The country is faced with a great recession (I think it’s safe to assume people knew this regardless of the question);
2) The problem is urgent and escalating;
3) A $775 billion stimulus is proposed as a countermeasure;
4) I should answer yes.
The former:
1) The country is faced with “major problems”;
2) A great deal of money is being spent in an effort to combat them;
3) I don’t know where this money comes from;
4) This threatens to itself become a major problem;
5) Fewer major problems are better than more major problems;
6) I should answer yes.
One finds it difficult to argue with either line of logic – without more information. But a pollster certainly isn’t there to inform you. They’re there to count heads. So you do the best you can and lodge your answer.
This is the criteria that Weisberg uses to condemn America as an inconstant, fickle mob. It is a strangely technical, technological and deterministic one. Even passing conversations – with people I agree with and don’t – convince me that the diversity of opinion is far greater and that people do realize that we face broad, compound choices with uncertain outcomes. People broadly divide based on their opinions of these choices. In the so-called “mushball middle” are a few who through indifference, ignorance or lack of time don’t have enough information to process these complexities. Pollsters call these people, though the system has a way of segregating them itself: They don’t participate. They don’t vote, they certainly aren’t at Glenn Beck rallies and their access to news is passing at best. They’re susceptible to giving conflicting answers based on who’s asking, but we’re all like that sometimes, and most make up for it by not really pursuing one issue or another. When not being polled, they’re generally let alone. Call them what you will, but it’s not inconsistency.
What Weisberg is offering is an overdetermined conception of the “people” – semi-detached, roboticized “voters” – which looks more like a natural disaster to be weathered than an active force shaping the political landscape. It’s an egregious remnant of the technical underpinnings of the Rational Man of liberalism that can only admit or decline singular, atomized participants in a society rather than dealing with variations in people. But this is ridiculous. Like any active, human force, voters are subject to their power being harnessed or diffused; like any group of people, it’s subject to varying degrees of passion or diffidence, conviction or uncertainty, depending on the character of its members and their own state.
Like any such force it’s public, not private. My Mom, and several family friends of varying closeness, direct their questions about how to vote towards me. This is up to and including big offices – Congress, President – and despite my being 1,000 miles away. Are they stupid? No. They’re busy and nobody gives them time to vote, much less be constantly politically involved, so they figure that I’m bright and honest and politically aware and they trust me to advise them true. Here’s the key – trust. This is what politics are all about. But too often neither do people trust politicians nor politicians their people.
I sense that Jacob Weisberg was an Obama voter. More than that I think he was probably an Obama crusader, preaching to his friends and donating money and knocking on doors and quietly sniggering about Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits. I think this not from bias, though I’ve got a lot of it, but because Obama voters were true believers who by and large abandoned their conceptions of the possible. They had been waiting their whole lives for a Kennedy and Obama gave them that, dare I say, hope. Now the dream has come crashing down and blame must be assigned. You cannot blame yourself – I didn’t do it – nor can you blame Obama, which is tantamount to admitting you were at fault. Can’t really blame Republicans, either. Only the darkest shroud of cognitive dissonance could camouflage their irrelevance throughout most of the last sixteen months. There’s no one left to blame but America itself.
Need I say this is as dangerous as it is wrong?
Weisberg doesn’t have it all wrong. I think he’s right that people – in general – have an ability to blame their leaders without looking inwards. Anyone who says “Well what do you expect; they’re all crooks” is saying only that they live in and contribute to a society so reprobate that it’s impossible to deliver from its number a sufficient number of good people to lead, and ought to ask themselves why they don’t step forward. Weisberg is right to suggest that we stop blaming officeholders but rather look to ourselves when the question is “What’s happened to America?” But to say instead that America itself is the answer is not just meaningless, it’s reactionary. It fails the same test a pollster’s answer does: There can be no response to the constructive reply, “What do I do about it?”
It’s one thing to offer a modest proposal. It’s another entirely to toss into an article a barrage of the most silly drivel that is as poor at apportioning responsibility – not blame – as the phenomenon you are yourself railing against. It’s still worse to be snooty about it. Weisberg manages to be as irrational as the people who – well, as the people. And he’s only got one to bring in line.
Winter weltanschauung
3 February 2010
In the District of Columbia significant quantities of snow fall only on the weekend. Invariably it has receded enough by the following Monday for the drones to return to work. Even the weather is anti-worker.
It rather makes me wonder if Marx ever took into account how bad the weather is when planning the Revolution. I suppose he didn’t plan it, really. He wrote books. He was like the Jack Ryan of international communism, but the pre-Hunt for Red October Jack Ryan. Would this make Engels James Earl Jones? I need to get clarity on this.
(This is a nonsensical phrase. People at work say it to me frequently. I will one day reply, “Sure, let me just go buy a little clarity from the pusher two doors over,” and be immediately sacked.)
Imagine that you’re the proletariat. I’m not, but let’s say you are.
Are you really going to wear that? The proletariat, while dirty and frequently ill-mannered, are generally impeccably-dressed in situations of great political tension. Have you ever seen a picture of Churchill addressing a crowd? Bowler hats all around. You’re in jeans. I mean it’s fine, I guess. I just – whatever, your call.
So imagine. Proletariat. What are the sort of situations likely to awaken you from your vodka-induced class slumber? Famine sounds good. Mass deprivation of a basic service like heating or electricity. A major mutiny, perhaps, or a rout in a war. Perhaps a general breakdown in communication caused by the loss of critical air, road or rail networks.
And when would something like this happen? Winter.
That hot dog is the mass-man
See nobody’s ever become a communist on their own. Some kind of shit has to go down first. Now if this shit goes down on a lovely spring day – say May 11th, because the end of the month can get a bit hot but the beginning can be rather rainy and of course you have to adjust the time for your own area, like when Al Roker kind of uselessly drones on about the weather and then goes, “Now what’s happening in your neck of the woods!” and you get real information. In fact, I’ve changed my mind. I think Marx is like Al Roker.
So the electricity’s gone, communications are breaking down and Al Roker’s all like, “Hey, let’s overthrow Matt Lauer and seize control of the means of production.” And I suppose it sounds like a good idea, because whenever anybody says, “let’s XYZ” it generally sounds good. But then you actually go to do it and it’s not. Sure I’d like to check out the new restaurant. No I don’t want to go to Silver Spring. But Al Roker’s all, “Hey, come on, Silver Spring’s not that far” and so we go, and I’m a bit grumpy about it.
But then it’s cold. Maybe it’s still snowing. And the wind chill! And there’s “the forces of law and order,” as I once heard them described by a Russian colonel serving in Chechnya, and there’s really a lot of them. And Al Roker’s like “They have sliders!” but by then you just don’t care anymore. That’s what revolution is like.
A case study. Take England. England has never had a Revolution that wasn’t somehow queeny (both in subject and participants). Why? Elections are almost always in May. Just at that moment when the sun is shining, you’re emerging from the gloom and you can’t believe how badly the ruling class has misappropriated the capital provided for by the labor of the masses, they give you a chance to choose! Maybe a frivolous choice, to be sure, but it takes the wind right out of your sails because you immediately feel like you’re doing something. Why go all the way to Silver Spring when there’s a Fuddrucker’s in Friendship Heights? I think it’s a Fuddrucker’s.
In America the strategy is different. Elections in November lock in the choice just as the winter’s hitting hardest and frustration’s building, and then we don’t actually change hands until January. Used to be March but, I don’t know, fabulous advances in winter coats or whatever. By the time spring hits the new people have barely had a chance to get started and you feel bad making a fuss and this time they really might make it work. (They won’t, but the proletariat is not known for critical thinking.)
Not much fun, especially when Poland turned out to be closed for the season
This is where Russia went wrong. Russia was getting in the dead of winter (February) and they were getting their ass beat by Germany and there was a shortage of food in the cities and vodka was outlawed by the not-very-thoughtful authorities. No more czar. They got a provisional government and by November they blew so hard that nobody could imagine tolerating them through another winter. No more provisional government.
China probably fits my example too. I’m kind of lazy.
I think the lesson is that America will never have a revolution because all of the cities are too cold and there’s never any reason to do it in the Spring. The only real threat comes from the expansion of Virginia and their inability to plow those tiny country roads. That way lies danger.
But now a look at what’s happening in your neck of the woods.
Why we are a failure
2 February 2010
“If you mind your business, nobody will give you problems,” said a woman to me last week. “All they do is say ‘What the fuck that white boy doing here?’ By then, you’ll be gone.”
Indeed.
I’m not sure if actually working for government has yet fully deadened my interest in government. The two are actually pretty easy to keep separate, not least because, as a friend and fellow veteran pointed out recently, “Nobody who works in the government ever thinks about it.”
With the usual caveats.
My excursion into the industry of professional helping has been interminably brief and, on the whole, intolerably busy. I suppose I didn’t take government to be the sort of place which left little time to catch one’s breath – or at least government at the sort of level attended by a 22 year-old of no particular credentials or repute. From my observations and understanding it’s not. Yet there are two sides to government. The glam side – frenetic but easy and carefully circumscribed – are the people in Congress, the executive offices. You know: “the top.” The ones who made it and are “changing the world.” Then there is the underbelly, where that fact is really, tragically, true.
The top half – although it is not a half but a tiny minority – live in a properly philosophical world. Most of them would hate this idea, but it is just that. The “big ideas” are invariably functions of values and the reconciliations of them, determinations based occasionally on conviction but more frequently on calculation of the basic questions of who is part of the club – “one of us” – and what that fact means. Decisions about taxation, schools, and the environment are not merely marginal adjustments to a basic framework but fundamental decisions about the shape of the world to come. These decisions are invariably thin – all decisions are – but unquestionably if ambiguously weighty.
The world which is my daily joy is far from that big blue sky. Like a general who decides how the enemy is to be defeated but leaves the deed to others, so does a Mayor or a President and the people who trail behind them decide how the people are to be made wealthy or happy or good and send down the order. There are grunts far below responsible for realizing it in the shape of a idle march or a frantic siege.
This of course is the limit at which war illuminates the subject. Its task is quite simple – defeat an enemy. You reduce a people to a level at which their own resistance becomes incomprehensible. The reason government is so difficult – and the reason every “war on” a social problem necessarily fails – is because it is in its likeness with war precisely its opposite. Government is the creation of a world in which giving up in the face of adversity is incomprehensible. Like war, it is a response to human terror. War attempts to turn it to use. Government attempts to banish it. Both end up being defined by it. The result for the latter is unsatisfying to an amazing extreme, because such upbuilding – even when ideally realized – is necessarily repetitive, incomplete and ceaseless. Creation is never permanent in the eay way destruction is.
I imagine that in a good number of places the business of government is not much of a struggle. In a close-knit community – what one might snootily call “rural” but which could be anyplace with the character of a village – the people are resistant to adversity by nature; in the sanitized suburb the mere whiff of adversity, while socially disgusting, is slightly romantic, the idea of poverty unpleasant but unthreatening and always surmountable. Problems here are more often a matter of the neighbors daring to intercede in my life rather than any violent disruption from the outside. It is not difficult to see why the number one concern to suburban life is crime, and why it’s so much less frequent when suburbs themselves are not a feature of that life.
And then there is the city. In the modern world the city has always been the problem. The reason is simple: people live in proximity like villagers with the interpersonal skills of suburbanites. It’s the perfect storm of “social decay,” “urban blight,” whatever you want to call it. It only really takes one addition – an admittedly hefty dollop of “want” – to bring to full heights human cruelty in its many forms. It is something we have become reasonably expert at in this country, perhaps nowhere more than in the capital city.
But this is what makes the city so ripe and fascinating. (When you’re from the suburbs other people’s want is almost as sexy as the idea of your own.) The city is both the birthplace and graveyard of ideology. The city gave us both liberalism and Marxism, the two defining ideologies of our time, before promptly devouring its children like Cronus. It is a novelty to have an environment – at once so perfectly alien and so peculiarly human – both give and take away the last best hopes for organizing a world without one God. Never before has mankind been faced with a thing so bipolar and fraught. For in the city there is no escape. It will always make a lie of the well-meaning and zealous. Here philosophies mighty and petty are waylaid everywhere; hidden in the bushes and the alleyways they’re mugged and raped and killed by the dark forces of real life. All of the systems we have are built in reaction to the city, and they all are made worthless here. We are simply too many; we have too many ideas. Where is the space for the gudwara in Walden Pond?
This is where government comes in. We have it because philosophy fails. It is the awful compromise we make with ourselves, the deal with the devil that assumes problems will be taken care of so long as they are pushed as far away as possible, so that we might be spared the awful sight of the death of our ideas. But government is simply the tragedy of the failure of all our grand designs built into an awful whitewashed edifice. The people in this country who cry out with revulsion at the erosion of their freedoms are so laughable precisely because the government they hate is so puny and sad. Its programs are wasteful not out of malice or caprice but because, by their nature, they have to be.
This is my job: spaghetti tactics. You throw it at the wall and you see what sticks, but what you’re throwing at the wall are not programs but people. Living and breathing, with names and hopes and stupid clothes and bad breath and four kids at the age of 22. You make a program and you do not give it to them but give them to it, and see how many it “saves” – whatever that means. And then you make a new one and do it again. And again. And again. And again. Eventually, you hope that everybody gets stuck to – with – something. That you save everybody.
Of course you don’t. The city is laughing at you and your feeble attempts to save the world, always. Every program fails people, including mine; some people are failed by all programs. They stick to nothing, and the tragedy is that in the end you’re not surprised. They’re not the kind of people you want to help. It’s easy to get my liberal hackles up against the abandonment of the decent, the hard-working, the “unfortunate”; but what about the people who are lazy and obnoxious, the ones who don’t want to be helped or if they do will never let you close enough to do it? What about the ones the civil servants, well-meaning as we always are, look straight in the eyes yet cannot see?
This is the problem with government. It’s so personal.
At the end of last year I took a class on Marxism. Philosophy, of course, so there’s always an air of inevitable pointlessness about it; but at the very end of the class I got the professor’s hackles up because I asserted boldly that if there was a difference between Marxism and liberalism I didn’t see it. Marxism is at best the other side of the liberal coin, the equal and opposite reaction its unique failures had to engender; at worst its a simple correction of it inappropriately couched in apocalyptic terms.
Take the program I work in. It could just as easily be compared with the best sort of New Deal initiative as with the workshops of the Paris Commune. The objectives are much the same either way: to take someone who has nothing, not in terms of resources but in terms of skills, or qualities, or consciousness, and engaging in that so characteristic upbuilding. In the process it’s hoped that a measure of personal power and the ability to similarly draw up others is imparted to them. It is to draw them into society. The objective is, through wholesome and empowering work, to be de-alienating. This is something at once perfectly liberal and perfectly Marxist – a reconciliation of devout opposites.
But there are some people. I’ve met them, talked to them, listened to them rant. They’re loud. They’re angry. They’re bitter but yet entitled. They have no skills or pretension to skills; they want for everything but want nothing. They are always unpleasant to deal and no effort is sufficient to make them fit. Their antics are tolerated for months on end, they’re brought in, talked to – and, when it’s finally too much, unceremoniously dropped.
But they’re someone’s – aren’t they?
What does Marxism have to say about them that liberalism doesn’t? A liberal would have called them the “residuum” or “undeserving poor,” would say they’re lazy and have no work ethic and would have to shrug his shoulders and say: some people can’t be helped. A Marxist would call them the “lumpenproletariat,” uninterested – as they surely wouldn’t be – in the virtues of collective action because of their contentment living off the fat of the state. He’d say they’re blind and mired in false consciousness and – at length – some people can’t be helped.
But what happens then? You can’t just ignore them. They’ll still be there. Part of the reason they are there is because you ignore them. They don’t fit into your system, or any system; so now what? When do you make that great leap to say – they are human no more? And how do you know when that leap happens not because of the people but because of your system? This is the leap that both liberalism and Marxism, in the end, find themselves forced to make. Neither are ever shy.
I think this is why civil servants don’t think. It’s hard, day after day, to stare into the faces of the person you don’t like and can’t help and don’t think anybody can – and to follow the fact to its logical conclusion. It’s hard to see from the inside the way your grand ideas are brutally parodied by your work. For in a city people are paid to decide if you matter. This is the bargain. I am paid to sort lives into useful and unuseful piles, and dispense with them as quickly as possible. There are many others like me. And we do this – I do this – for the same reason they keep coming to us: a paycheck. I too need; I too want. And so not because I am powerful but because this role lays bare my own powerlessness do I sort lives as I see fit. Maybe I do it with more or less charity; but it’s a thin kind of charity.
And someday I’ll leave, as quickly as it would take to wonder what the fuck that white boy was doing there anyway. I won’t have had a good answer. Today I didn’t when with an affected air of smug satisfaction I listened to fifteen people describe eloquently and rightly how I’m failing them, led on by two people who themselves did far less and knew no better. They didn’t mean it personally – but the problem with government is that it is personal, to each and every one of us, because it is the living manifestation of the terror that comes from our own social bankruptcy. It is a bundle of all the failure we cannot admit and survive, a great church which – for a tithe – hides away the crimes we commit against each other. For all the spaghetti that stuck there will be some that got away. Maybe some other me, secreted away in a similarly dingy building somewhere else, will catch them. But not all. Some will get away, and sit there, and by their existence laugh at our philosophies which are no more different than two sides of a sheet of paper.
Until the next throw.
The blog title can be changed at any time 