Heartache With Hard Work

Mark Halperin gives odds on the GOP nomination.

Romney is his prohibitive favorite at 3-1, with Huckabee at 9-1, Daniels at 10-1, Pawlenty at 18-1, Huntsman at 20-1, Gingrich at 40-1, Palin at 60-1, and Crazy Michelle Bachmann at 1000-1.

A couple comments.

First, those numbers add up to a 69.2% chance of someone getting nominated. I’m curious who Halperin thinks makes up the rest of the 30%.  I’m guessing he just didn’t bother to add up the numbers, which is pretty irritating.  If you assume he thinks those are the real candidates and ramp it up to 100% odds Romney comes in at basically 2-1 to win the nomination.  Which is pretty bold.

Second, that’s a preposterously low number for Pawlenty, who I still think is the favorite to get the nomination.  Romney has some really serious problems, and most of the rest of those people are not real candidates (either because they won’t run or because they are vanity runs – like Gingrich).

Pawlenty has fairly limited baggage, and for whatever reason people seem to be willing to write off his flip-flops as genuine changes of heart rather than evidence of cravenness. He’s a reasonably good looking white guy of medium age.  He was a governor of a blue (but not too blue) state.

In a year when almost everyone else has gaping wounds, what’s the reason for him NOT to win?

Celebration Guns – Stars
Regret – New Order
Calm Americans – Elliott

So: the celebrations about the death of Osama bin Laden. What are we to think of them? There are a couple of strands of thought here. Some people want to criticize them for finding joy in murder. And there is a certain ghoulishness to the whole thing. Others want to say that people should feel free to express themselves in whatever way felt right. That there is no accounting for the sort of visceral reaction that the news might provoke. Others see nothing shameful at all in the celebrations. Some of these lament the immediate politicization, discussions about what it means, etc. They simply wanted to feel the unity of the moment.

My own reaction was somewhat muted. In general I am deeply skeptical and unhappy about the state wielding deadly force. That said, I’m no longer the total pacifist I once was. At least, I don’t think I am. And if there is anyone that a state has justification to kill, bin Laden has to be high on the list.

That said, I certainly did not respond with high-fives or any real sense of joy.  There was that fake MLK quote floating around, which has a sentiment that I can certainly get behind. But my thoughts actually turned more to a bit from Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five:

[T]here is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?
* * *
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

The thing I like about the Vonnegut quote (and the book as the whole) is that it doesn’t limit itself to simply making a moral judgment on the act itself. Massacre is certainly a bad thing, but that’s a pretty banal point.  For Vonnegut, the really complex problem isn’t the fact of massacres as much as it’s the glorification that it receives back home.

Must our enemies be killed? Perhaps. But if so, I tend to think the proper response should be Vonnegut’s quiet “so it goes” as opposed to cheers.

All that said, I don’t feel particularly comfortable criticizing those who responded differently. 9-11 never hit me with the same sort of pre-rational force as it seems to have struck many others. And while I do feel comfortable criticizing a lot of the policy choices that were legitimated or grounded in that primeval set of emotions (the war in Iraq most prominently, but there’s plenty more), I don’t want to necessarily challenge the validity of the momentary feeling itself.

Obviously, it’s difficult to disentangle those things. But in this case the line between valid outpouring of emotion and problematic appropriation of that emotion is found in the “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chants.

To celebrate the death of bin Laden leaves me feeling more than a bit uncomfortable. But I can deal with that.  It’s the immediate translation of that celebration into the language of American dominance and hegemonic empire-building that concerns me.  I think that passes into the realm of destructive and vaguely disgusting political ideology.

To simplify: I don’t feel the desire for revenge as a sort of affective need, but I can understand those who do. I cannot find any modicum of respect, though, for those who immediately jump to nationalism as the filtering mechanism for this.

There is danger in framing bin Laden as having committed crimes against humanity (in terms of what then becomes possible and/or necessary as a political response). But that formulation at least implies the idea of a principle upon which our search and destroy mission was conducted. To chant “U-S-A! U-S-A!” is to declare that this whole thing has only ever been (and will always be) about nothing but naked aggression and power. It is, in short, to validate every criticism of the US as a hypocritical, tottering, imperial force.

The death of bin Laden does not prove the worth of the United States. If the US is great, it is in spite of our desire for vengeance and our capacity to wield mass death. It is in our capacity for restraint, in the fact that if we must kill we do so with some sense of regret.

All of which is to say: the expression of unfiltered joy at the death of bin Laden by itself doesn’t strike me as a serious problem. It is the celebration of that joy, its reification through self-congratulatory forms, that fills me with dread.

Fight Test – The Flaming Lips
Where Is My Mind – The Pixies
Fighting In A Sack – The Shins

Fight Club is a faux-intellectual, faux-authentic valorization of masculinity, hiding behind some sleek packaging. It’s the sort of film designed to make people feel like their socially regressive inclinations are actually hyper-cool and postmodern.

I’m not trying to make the facile critique: that it’s a violent movie trying to glorify that violence. This seems easy to refute.  You’re clearly meant to understand the main character as insane, and the eventual consequences as indicative of an out-of-control personality. And if you want to be especially generous, you might argue that the real point of the movie is to complicate all sides of the equation. That is: the fight club clearly goes off the rails, but it is a necessary product of bankrupt consumerist society. So there is a component of chickens coming home to roost, where the insanity of each element only feeds off the other and leads them both toward catastrophe.

There is something to all of this, but here’s the thing: it’s a really banal point. The world is absolutely stuffed with this sort of faux-critique. And it’s only become that much more of a cottage industry in the world of the War on Terror, which almost seems designed to elicit this sort of crap from Hollywood.  There’s clearly something far more substantial going on with Fight Club.

In my mind, the real message of the film is the following set of observations:

• Look how COOL it is to be authentic
• Being authentic means going back to nature, where everything is violent
• Society sucks SO MUCH that it can pervert even something so freaking awesome as this.
• The problem with the fight club is that it quickly becomes organized. That’s what paves the way for its corruption. Therefore, a blank slate of violence for its own sake and nothing else is the only genuine form of existence
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, women couldn’t possibly understand. In fact, femininity is really dangerous because it exemplifies the weak-willed sort of liberal order, where people talk about feelings and are good consumers. It’s what makes us so crazy in the first place as well as what ruins us when we try to break out.

For its proponents, the takeaway point of the movie is either vaguely progressive or vaguely critical. If you parse out the plot, you can certainly make a case that the fault lies with excessive masculinity. Or you could argue that it exposes some deep-rooted incapacity for liberal society to eradicate violence. And so on.

But the vagueness, and incompatibility, of these points is precisely the problem. The conjunction of a somewhat progressive perspective with this sort of aesthetic nihilism ends up producing a massively regressive artistic object. As I wrote a few years ago, regarding a particular style of violent artistic depiction:

I don’t mean that they uncritically support this stuff, although there is some element of that. It’s just that if they are critical, it is only in the details – they still buy into the general ethos that there is something unutterably cool about violence, addicts, and the general wreckage of human lives. Sure, you’re not supposed to idolize these people, but you are supposed to get off on the catastrophe of it all. It’s like Fight Club, which wants you to think it’s a progressive movie, but is far too in love with how awesome all the violent scenes are to ever really get around to making an actual point. And when the movie’s over, all you really walk away with is a sense that fascism is kind of sweet.

I would amend that a little bit now. It’s not that the only message you end up with is ‘fascism is sweet.’ You also might read it as saying ‘fascism is bad! (but only because it keeps having to deal with liberalism. If you could really eradicate all the ‘fake’ parts of society, we could all be happy fascists together)’

Fight Club is the perfect mirror-image counterpart to gung-ho action movies where violence is awesome, but only when deployed by the hero and in the name of justice. In either case, the essential point is the glorification of violence and the condemnation of weak-willed (feminine) values which get in the way. That this perspective is more oblique in Fight Club only makes it more dangerous.

Kinder Words – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

I think I’ve made a variant on this before but I’m too lazy to scour the archives to figure it out. So I’ll just say it again:

It strikes me as strange that liberal folks tend to be in favor of negotiating with enemy regimes. They push grand bargains where both sides give up something in exchange for concessions from the other side. It’s a very liberal form of internationalism, with actors driven by rational interest rather than by implacable, pathological hatred. On the domestic front, however, the same general class of people are deeply skeptical of the value in negotiating with Republicans.

I’m not saying it’s hypocritical or necessarily incoherent. I get that there are differences. But it still seems a little weird. If you’re willing to believe that Saddam Hussein or Khamenei or Kim Jung Il can be dealt with, is it really so difficult to think the same of Boehner?

You saw it in the debates over the budget and forward-looking discussions about the debt ceiling. Commenters argued that the Republicans were taking the American society hostage. Claims of ‘we shouldn’t negotiate with hostage-takers’ rang out. But wouldn’t some of these same people support negotiating with ACTUAL hostage-takers?

And if the appeasement argument is true, where giving in only emboldens Republicans to keep demanding more, then why isn’t the same true of rogue states? Won’t they just pocket concessions and leave America weaker?

Again, I’m not saying this is an impossible problem. There are clear differences, and it’s also surely the case that all-or-nothing approaches in either case would be bad. I personally find myself very much on the side of grand bargains in IR and much more skeptical of them with Republicans. So I include myself as someone who should make more effort to think through these issues.

Alabama Pines – Jason Isbell
Codeine – Jason Isbell

I used to think I liked the Drive-By Truckers. In the last several years I’ve realized that I never really did. It turns out that what I like is Jason Isbell. Most of the Truckers songs I really loved were his. And while I don’t hate the work of the others in the band, they have very few songs I come back to with any regularity.

This distinction has become blindingly clear this year, as both have released new records. The DBT record is fine, but seems very rote in its application of their existing form. On the other hand, Isbell’s Here We Rest is fantastic, full of energy and passion and pierced through with the sort of raw emotion that defines the very best of the genre.

The general theme of the album is loss. Each song offers a vignette on the subject. Sometimes the loss is positive, and often it is complicated. The loss of childhood, giving up on a broken dream, the abandonment of fear. There’s “Tour of Duty” which tells the story of a soldier returning home, and the awkwardness of coming back into the normal world of everyday life. “We’ve Met” is about meeting a long-forgotten love, and the self-reflection it demands. “Stopping By” gives us a peek into the heart of a long-absent father trying to make amends. He doesn’t ask us to fully sympathize with the father, simply wants us to see the pain of someone who knows they’ve done wrong. And “Codeine” is a tour de force, an ambling country-tinged ballad about getting dumped because someone else can get access to better drugs.

Isbell says very little that we haven’t already heard. Which isn’t the worst thing. There’s something to be said for doing something well and not worrying about trying to guss it up. In particular, Isbell’s voice is pretty limited. And the album’s best songs are the ones which work with that fact, rather than trying to step beyond his range. His weary utterance of the chorus in “Alabama Pines” (‘somebody take me home, through these Alabama pines’) is glorious for its capacity to evoke a disenchanted southern spirit. The limitation in his voice betrays a larger limitation in worldviews and possibility. And it’s perfectly counterpointed by some achingly sad guitar work.

The album’s weaker tracks fail to walk this line so well. “Heart on a String” is the sort of straightforward contemporary rock music that 30-somethings ate up in the 90s, which is a bad place to start. But then it’s combined with a terribly unfocused vocal performance from Isbell. Elsewhere, “Never Could Believe” is roots-honky-tonk-by-number. It’s not terrible, just dull. And “Daisy Mae” is just Isbell and his guitar, and verges on genuine pathos but can’t quite connect.

These few tracks aside, this is a very composed work from one of the best performers of good old fashioned country rock out there these day.

Taegan Goddard asks: “Did Obama’s Speech Backfire?”

Short answer: no.

Slightly longer answer: it’s a pretty silly question to be asking at all. Here’s the context:

First Read notes that recent polls showing a sharp drop in President Obama’s approval rate seem to confirm that his speech last week on the national debt “might not have played well.”

This is an Occam’s Razor moment. What’s more likely? Option A, where popularity fluctuates, but mostly is indexed to the state of the economy – which people are very pessimistic about. Or Option B, where speeches watched by almost no one (except for the political class) can somehow drive literally millions of people to change their minds overnight?

People love narrative, and there is absolutely a place for it. But using narrative as an explanatory tool is almost never appropriate.

Presidential speeches may have some role in setting agendas, defining terms of engagement, etc. And those things might well matter for long-term shifts in popularity, or other large political shifts. It is almost inconceivable to think they have a meaningful, direct relationship. And even if it’s true that millions of people changed decided to shift their position on Obama based on him saying vaguely mean things about Republicans in one speech, the only thing it could possibly prove is that voters are idiots when considered en masse.

But that’s not exactly news, is it?

Or, to quote Kevin Drum:

This will probably satisfy no one, but I think the answer is pretty simple. First: the vast, vast majority of independents don’t really have any idea what Obama’s plan to handle the deficit is. They just know that (a) the deficit is high and (b) Obama is president. Beyond that, there are kids to get to school, laundry to be done, bosses to be pleased, and leaky faucets to be fixed. The details of the deficit debate are just a bit of partisan background noise that they haven’t really parsed yet.

Crazy Races – The Dirty Diamonds

This debt ceiling thing is crazy. Virtually everyone agrees it would be total catastrophe to not increase the debt ceiling. I get that it’s a contentious issue given the broader milieu of spending concern and so on. And it’s clearly a political cudgel. The out party has traditionally used the vote to draw a distinction – some enterprising folks vote against the increase in order to make a political point, etc.

Obama himself did this during the Bush administration. It’s stupid, but it’s just part of politics. I get all that.

And maybe that’s all that will end up happening here. The flames will rise a little higher because of the specific context, but ultimately it will stay fully constrained. The Democrats in the House will get a reasonable number of Republicans who will provide cover to their more angry colleagues, and all the sturm und drang will turn out to have been mere show. That’s quite possible. I hope that’s what happens.

I’m worried, though, that Boehner will be forced to hew to the line imposed by the more vigorous wing of the Party, and will simply refuse to allow a vote on the debt ceiling without serious concessions.

The question, of course, is why there must be concessions in order to pass something that virtually everyone agrees is 100% necessary. It would be the equivalent of demanding concessions from your fellow passengers to not drive directly into a brick wall. Sure, they don’t want to die, but presumably you don’t either. The language of ‘concessions’ usually implies deal-making and compromise, where in order to get one thing you make a concession on another. In this case, everyone already agrees on the appropriate policy.

The troublesome thing is that I do see the Republicans as more willing to drive into this particular brick wall. But even that isn’t quite right. ‘Willing’ implies some clear decisive agency. And I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. The problem is that the Republicans are extremely divided, in a way that makes crisis more likely. For one subset of them (and a reasonably hefty one) the prospect of debt default is just not that scary. The potential gains to be had for their specific agenda MATTERS to them more than the consequences. Even further, the political costs of potentially being portrayed as endangering the economy for their particular goals don’t seem to scare them very much.

It’s a deadly mix. I think it’s almost certainly a winning position for the Democrats to simply hold the line and say: “look, we all know the debt ceiling must be raised. It’s not a partisan issue. We just need to do it. If you want to get your other agenda, feel free to bring it up independently and we can debate it.” But what if I’m wrong? Or, even if it is a winning issue in itself, what if the Republican base is really willing to shoot the country in the foot to make their point? A winning political issue combined with serious economic damage to the nation is a) bad for Obama’s political chances – the president gets the blame for a bad economy even if it’s not his fault and b) terrible for the nation.

The game theory is icky here, because Obama and the Dems can’t really anticipate dealing with a rational decision-maker. Boehner on his own would be fine in this case. But Boehner is representing a schizophrenic caucus.

It’s an unfortunate truth that when you’re bargaining with the potentially crazy, it’s far less risky to simply cave a little bit, give them some of what they want, even if it makes no actual sense.

I fear that is what is going to happen.

Heavier Than Heavy – The Natural Shocks

This is some fun music for a sunny Northern California afternoon.  Which unfortunately is not exactly what we’ve got going on here.  Still, listening to this little romp is almost enough to drive away the cloud cover and warm everything up.

It also makes me tremendously nostalgic for the mid 90s, when the world seemed stuffed with guitar bands happy to make simple power pop song. Bands with no care for the arch-irony that seems stuck with such projects in this more cynical age of hipsterdom.  Witness the little guitar bit that starts at about 1:20.  Sheer joy, without the slightest hint of artifice.

RIYL: Sebadoh, Teenage Fanclub, Sloan, etc.

The Natural Shocks are an indie band out of Toronto, who will be releasing their debut record Complete With Comfortable Lighting on June 9th.

1. Let the Bush tax cuts expire like they should have done already.

2. Cap and trade for carbon emissions with auctioned permits.  Recycle about 2/3 of the revenue back to help low-income people deal with cost increases, and to fund transition technologies.  Put the other 1/3 of revenue into the general fund.

3. Single-payer health care

4. Don’t start any NEW wars, and seriously limit our involvement in our current (4) wars.  Also, massive cuts to military spending.

Unfortunately, this idea doesn’t involve screwing over poor people, or giving big new tax cuts to rich people, so there’s no chance it will be called “courageous.”

Shine (feat. Cate Ferris) – Nordic Giants

There are certain words that you reach for when trying to write about music. I’m not entirely sure they MEAN anything – but they are suitably evocative. They communicate the feeling of listening, if not anything substantive. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I use them, because I don’t want to believe that I’m just writing nonsense.

In the case of “Shine” the word I can’t help but use is ‘liquid.’ The instrumentation is sparse, like the very lightest sort of rain. And the vocal performance from Cate Ferris moves with an suppleness that seems impossible to picture in solid form.

The first four minutes are beautiful, the final minute is epic. The whole thing is wonderful. The band is Nordic Giants – and a h/t to Knox Road for turning me on to them.