Is the U.S. Too Big to Fail?

Attempting to compare the United States to a large bank which was deemed a ‘systemic risk’ to the financial system in the latter half of 2008 is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. While the former can print money and raise an army to achieve its aims, the latter is hamstrung by regulators and pushy investors looking for returns and ubiquitous services. But there is something to the comparison I find nonetheless intriguing: If, for example, we take an ‘expendable’ bank and compare it with a Mediterranean country which will also (ultimately) be deemed expendable, there are some telling similarities. Lehmann Brothers failed because its outstanding obligations were greater than any support it could marshal from the United States government or other banks (or, perhaps it blinked first). Likewise, German impatience with Greece will ultimately force it into default. What result, though? Many economists see taxes as an example of imperfect competition which keep one country like the U.S. from raising its tax rates: the possibility of capital flight to other equally safe and porous jurisdictions (say, Jersey). If a country is pressed from without towards fiscal discipline, it is trivially correct that it will do more to implement austerity measures than the country which issues its own currency and is not accountable to any supra-national federations.

But what of the U.S.? Will it, like, say, Citibank, become another zombie, paying welfare and waging war and doing both inadequately? My hunch is that this will be the case, and that no one will win. People talk about the rise of China, but this scenario discounts the possibility that the U.S. will not let itself collapse.

some thoughts on the supreme court’s consideration of the ACA

Much ink has been spilled this week about the Solicitor General Donald Verilli’s appearance before the Supreme Court to argue that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is constitutional. If you haven’t listened to the oral arguments, you can do so on the C-Span website–they also include helpful on-screen indicators of which justice is asking questions. As a law student it’s tempting to see this case in terms of the legal issues involved, and of course there are merits to the arguments on both sides of the issue. If you’ve paid any attention to this case, you might know that the chief argument for the side which is seeking to have the individual mandate ruled constitutional is as follows: the individual mandate forces market non-participants to participate in a market. Forcing people to participate in the market for health insurance is an unprecedented expansion of Federal Government authority. Because the constitution only allows congress to regulate interstate commerce, there is no purview for the individual mandate, because the mandate regulates non-commerce. This line of argument is furthered along by the seeming absurdity of the proposition that someone may be forced to buy something that they do not want or need. As Justice Scalia said in oral argument:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Why do you — why do you define the market that broadly? Health care. It may well be that everybody needs health care sooner or later, but not everybody needs a heart transplant, not everybody needs a liver transplant. Why-

­GENERAL VERRILLI: That’s correct, Justice Scalia, but you never know whether you’re going to be that person.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.

Justice Roberts jumped in on Scalia’s reductio ad absurdam moments later:

You say health insurance is not purchased for its own sake, like a car or broccoli; it is a means of financing health care consumption and covering universal risks. Well, a car or broccoli aren’t purchased for their own sake, either.

What’s interesting to me about this exchange isn’t the constitutional issues that will be decided on whether or not health insurance enjoys the ontological status of being something you buy for its own sake or merely as a conduit to health care; the distinction seems pretty abstract and destructible, as Roberts points out. What strikes me about the exchange is just how many implicit assumptions the government and the justices make about how real life is lived in this country. As Dahlia Lithwick points out in her excellent piece in the New Yorker about a different supreme court decision which struck down state laws criminalizing sodomy,

National gay-rights advocates certainly got a boost of confidence when, on the day of oral argument at the Supreme Court, someone in the audience whispered to Smith that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—one of two potentially “gettable” swing voters on the Court—had recently sent a baby gift to a former clerk and her same-sex partner. That’s how much sentiment at the Court had shifted. Justice Lewis Powell, Jr., the swing vote in the 1986 Bowers decision, was seventy-eight when the case reached the high court. Baffled, he told his clerk, “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual.” That clerk, as it turns out, was gay. But by the time that Lawrence arrived to challenge Bowers the Justices had openly gay clerks, and prominent lawyers who were gay were arguing major business cases at the Court. Insofar as this case could be packaged as a fight for the dignity and respect of a class of successful clerks, advocates, and lawyers now well known to the Justices, it was much easier for Kennedy to conclude, as he did, that “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.”

Perhaps the government is hemmed in because of precedent, but I don’t see why the argument that the government cannot force the creation of commerce is so implausible. Anyone who knows half a lick about the thought that does (or, more often, does not) go into designing cities like Albuquerque knows that the government has a hand in creating involuntary commerce. In Albuquerque, where it is nearly impossible to go from the place you live to the place you work (much less the places your friends live or places that sell broccoli) without owning an automobile, it is almost laughable that what bothers the Supreme Court most is the controversial idea that owning a car is no different from driving a car, that eating broccoli is no different from buying it.

Of course, in a city like Albuquerque you can choose to go without a car. If you choose to do so, you will either pay more to rent a house that is closer to where you work or you will spend more time getting to work, which (in economic terms) will cost you an undetermined amount of money in lost productivity. You can choose whether to purchase food or beg for it off the street. What boggles the mind is that you can still find people willing to argue (seriously) that your choice as to whether you want to be given medical treatment or go without is made sacred and inviolable by the constitution.

The Court doesn’t rule on moral debates, which is a shame; if they throw out the individual mandate, they should also be allowed to render illegal the quasi-social, quasi-political obligation that Hospitals must treat anyone who walks into the emergency room with a problem.

is 99 an irrational number?

Remember when Steve Jobs died? Remember how Apple itself announced his death? We might come to see the late company man’s disintegration as his crowning managerial achievement. A less notable CEO’s family might have announced his passing through a friend or personal representative; Jobs’ own death was conveyed in much the same way a new iteration of the MacBook Pro might be: no more ‘Hot News’ ticker on the bottom of the Apple homepage, only a tasteful black and white Steve Jobs in his later, more statesmanlike repose–perfectly trimmed stubble transitioning into an eccentric but nonetheless measured bald pate. I wonder whether Jobs, as death crept ever closer, made it his last ‘revolutionary product’–the transubstantiation of his soul from the mortal plane to the realm of industrial design.

Alas, unfortunately for us, Steve Jobs could not manage the country he lived in: we are forced, through news channels and text commentary, to impose a simple, rational meaning on a cacophony of events and developments, each more alarming than the last, none revealing a final, determinedly coherent ‘result’ that can be mused over. Although the iPad marvelously subtle, beautifully simple restatement of our ability and desire to perceive and digest information, the news it brings into my minor living space cannot be so described.

Take, for example, the protests taking place in Zucchotti park against “Wall Street”. The ever-more-dismal margins and results recently posted by the very banks the protesters seem intent on shuttering has not caused the agitators to consider whether 100% of the population is about to have its expectations revised downward. Instead, perception rules, and the conservative component of the national equation is only too happy to join the fray.

Michelle Bachmann said that the difference between the Tea Party and OWS was that the former “Picked up its trash after a demonstration.” The New Criterion, ostensibly a more high-brow reporter of the conservative weltschaft, was even more eager to revive the time-honored trope of the dirty hippy:

The 1960′s certainly had its tragic elements, and the passage of time, we suspect, mutes the bitterness of the many blighted lives and botched futures which that farcical repetition of earlier revolutionary idealism involved. Now, from our perch forty years on, it all seems faintly ridiculous: the incense and love beads; the imbecilic pseudo-radicalism; the bad taste in haerdashery, heroes, and haircuts; the mindless mantras of indemnified insurrectionists whose “idealism” was little more than an alibi for unfettered selfishness and insatiable hedonism. “We’re permanent adolescents,” boasted Jerry Rubin, a high priest of the movement.

This kind of ad hominem argument really isn’t worth noting except as a dull reminder that conservatives cannot and will not abide by ‘new ideas’. As Orwell said in a review of Chesterton’s introduction to Hard Times,

The claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries…It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come – since it has never come before – is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal human beings.

There is a kind of comedy to the facile alliteration in The New Criterion‘s comment on the protests on Wall Street, accompanied by its leader, titled “Promethius Bound”, in which the stock “American exceptionalism is on the wane, and we have only ourselves and our growing moral weakness to blame” argument is dutifully laid out to its aging subscribers.

I am myself no great believer in the purposefully ambiguous message of the protesters at Zucchoti park, but the great mistake of most Americans on both sides of the political spectrum is to suppose that History pays heed to national boundaries. As Orwell concluded, even if the moral about there being no new ideas were true, “it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly.”

managing expectations downward

One wonders whether the past week or so will go down as a watershed moment in early 21st-century history. The death of one of the avatars of late-20th century electronic consumer culture, the attempted assassination of a Saudi ambassador, and of as-yet-undetermined importance the ongoing protests in city centers around the Western world. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ purposefully evokes the violence of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; It also harks back to the ‘cold war’ occupation of Germany and Eastern-bloc countries. Left-wing activists have long tried to tie American corporate interests to the government’s imperial forays into faraway lands: this much is not new. But the renewed sense of urgency conveyed by ‘Occupy Wall Street’ instead attacks the government and its corporate allies’ failure to fulfill its side of the social contract. This is a far more important issue to most Americans than the legitimacy of a war of aggression; politicians should be concerned with the protests’ impact.

While in some ways I agree with the aims of the protesters in Zuchotti park, I find their rhetoric alarming. Just today, someone posted a kind of inchoate call-to-arms on the popular social news website Reddit:

We as americans, as brothers and sisters of our country, need to open our eyes to the truth. We can only ignore our problems for so long before it comes to a head. The way things are going right now, there will be riots in the streets, and we will see how quickly our government reacts to protect their interests.

Perhaps we will look on this moment as the true failure of the internet to bridge the yawning social and cultural divides that define our political conversation today. There was once such inherent promise in the motivations and projects of the internet pioneers of a generation ago: Collaborative efforts at conceiving of the ideal demographic government’s laws in their totality, free encyclopedias that paid heed to no one source of authority. There was a kind of inherent value to the creative chaos that defined the last decade. By bringing down established totems of commerce and politics, the small but nonetheless quite loud emerging class of the internet-adept were able to change the conversation in ways that instilled a new sense of promise in the generation growing up under the groaning burden of identity politics and the corporate-welfare state.

But Capitalism eats itself: It is perhaps ironic that one of the founders of MoveOn.org, the first successful effort to convert liberal sentiment on the internet into real political clout, should also be the first to see that the internet was just a giant echo-chamber. Briefly, I hoped that the internet would alleviate the sub- and ex-urban solipsism that is the Font of All Our Discontents.

But as the quotation above shows, the internet has instead accelerated a trend that began with the compartmentalization of the American Experience. The great promise of sites such as Wikipedia was that your personal opinions had to be vetted before the community would allow them to influence the truth it crafted (nevermind whether this ‘truth’ was actually True). It seems natural that the decline of debate on Wikipedia should be accompanied by the rocketing popularity of sites like Reddit and its predecessor Digg. On these sites, there is no real difference between the often inane, often incoherent subjective ramblings we all experience as we go about our lives and the collective gospel which defines the tenor and direction of our national conversation. If your view is not shared by the masses, it is simply ignored; if, however, your own personal view happens to coincide with the un-shared, un-inhibited views of thousands of others, you will find instant popularity.

There is no place for moderation in this process: either you are in or you are out. Perhaps the defining sentiment of our times will be the one popularized but not invented by George W. Bush: Either you are with us or you are against us.

the soon-to-be-eviscerated underbelly of the dream american

Much ado about the ‘occupy wall street’ protests in Zucchotti park in lower Manhattan. As a way of expressing class resentment it’s only a difference in type (not kind, if the distinction matters to you) from the tea party protests and the muffled groans heard during John McCain’s concession speech at an Arizona country club.

I don’t say this because there is any real reason to pity or belittle the disheartened, disillusioned (by in large college-educated) New Yorkers who have decided to make a statement against the most visible and logical cause of the current malaise. Similar protests have cropped up in major urban centers–the defining characteristic of the ‘occupy x’ is revealed by their name: this is not an outpouring of collective rage or resentment, but a targeted, strategic effort to steer the national discourse in a different direction.

There is something noble in this; the heartfelt collections of ‘we are the 99%’, explaining how crappy indeed it is to be a part of the losing 9/10 of the last ten years of American economic history. But implicit in the rhetoric of these statements is that the set of problems facing Americans are somehow unique.

After the financial crisis there was a moment where everyone seemed to ask, “Is the American dream finally dead?” Of course the answer to that question for politicians was a resounding ‘No!, at least so long as you vote for me!’; most people suspected that it was. But what was it about the ‘American dream’ that was so special anyway? Insofar as it captured a notion that America appreciated equality of opportunity above all other countries, the American dream was only ever alive when historical contingency dictated that to be the case: why, then, did it so often go hand in hand with American exceptionalism? There is a kind of sentimental association between these two different ideas–that American economic opportunity is closely related to the American monopoly on freedom and other liberal values.

But did anyone ever consider the obverse of these two ideas? The idea that perhaps America did not have a monopoly on equality and freedom? Of course, most Marxist historians have been saying something of the sort all along, but the question has resonance here because the social unrest in New York City and other areas doesn’t seem to take issue with the same thing that protesters in Spain and Chile have; i.e., the tone of Melancholy in most of the signs and messages you see evokes a sense of loss and longing that probably doesn’t occur to someone who is in abject poverty and is choosing to voice his dissatisfaction through protest.

Perhaps this is all speculation based on false premises, but it seems that tea party sloganeers and the Occupy Wall Street protesters are united around the shared sense of disillusionment with American life. Similar to the point Zach made a few months ago, I wonder if the shared experience of taking part in prosperity or exercising shared political rights has been lost forever, and because there is no longer any kind of shared truth to appeal to in a time of need, we are left only the poor consolation of melancholy and nostalgia.

The ouroboros-like quality of discourse surrounding politics, religion, and economy today echoes earlier debates about Christianity and Science: if we take as true criticism of the new atheism that its near-incessant appeal to scientific fact stems from the same truth-worship found in Christianity and other monotheistic religions, then the analogous conclusion about the protests on Wall Street and the tea-party dissatisfaction with the political caste is that they both stem from a shared worship of the American Exception. If anything, this explains the almost universal hatred towards investment bankers; after all they, just like god, stand behind curtains and pull certain unknown levers; if you allow me to belabor my allusion to the Wizard of Oz, the real danger is that we will finally turn aside the curtain and see only ourselves standing at the controls of our own fate.

Meme of the week: guy on a buffalo

At first glance it’s difficult to tell what you’re watching with “Guy on a Buffalo”.  Is this footage taken from some strange documentary or is it something made using the voodoo of Premier and After Effects?  At one point he appears to punch a live cougar, let’s not forget riding a damn buffalo throughout the clip.  Well apparently “Guy on a Buffalo” is just a brilliant re-dubbing of highlights from an actual movie called Buffalo Rider.  ”Charging on 2000 pounds of revenge!” is the apparent tagline.  Amazon is the one of the few sites with an actual description of the movie, information overall is quite sparse surprisingly, little to no information exists even on Wikipedia regarding this film.  I for one can only hope a remake of this movie is in the works, preferably directed by someone worthy.  I’ll leave you with the two “episodes” of Guy on a Buffalo and a link to the WHOLE movie on YouTube (it’s actually just plain terrible from what I can tell).



Google’s plateau of the supra-corporation

Six months ago I wrote about how Google defies the traditional boundaries between corporation and public entity:

Google as a corporation defies the traditional hierarchical notions of control because of its seemingly self-consciousness moral behaviour (“Don’t be Evil” as a corporate dictum). Deleuze believes this to be a “horrifying” development, because it implies our collective acceptance as the corporation as a being in possession of a soul. This neatly resolves concerns about the juridical status of personhood that corporations enjoy in the United States (for example, the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission in which it ruled that the Government was improperly restricting the free speech rights of corporations). But it does not really speak to Google and other corporations’ enabling role in society. Like other public goods, Google can be used for any purpose that the individual can conceive. Google is regularly used to pirate copyrighted material, to enable subversive political actions, and discover forgotten ideas. Whereas before large corporations dominated the distribution and consumption of news in Europe and America, Google and other information corporations have transformed some habits of information consumption to the public itself.

Today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt went before the Senate Judiciary committee to prevent anyone from concluding that Google was a monopoly. The Guardian notes that he succeeded on that count. But the most interesting statement came from the former FTC lady: “It’s free and instantaneous to try someone else,” she says. “There is no impediment to switch.” She is here referring to the classic test of whether a monopoly stifles competition, by determining whether consumers can switch to other, equivalent services. The Justice department argued against AT&T’s planned purchase of T-Mobile by arguing that the monopolistic entity it would create cannot be avoided: there is no alternative to wireless phone service for communicating in today’s modern, essentially wireless world.

While Creighton might be correct in a superficial way in her argument that it is easier for me to switch from Google to Bing if I don’t like them, there is little practical truth to her statement. No one noted at the hearings that Google’s ‘Search’ function is actually quite insignificant. Of course, market analysts and others will say that Search is the be-all-end-all of Google’s operations: all of its revenue comes from advertising on search results. But this says nothing about what makes people use Google. I do not use Google for my search needs because it is impartial or better than Bing, Yahoo!, or any of its other ‘competitors’. I use it because most of my online life is hosted by Google. As I argued earlier, Google is today more of a public service entity than a corporation: by offering to store peoples’ e-mails, photos, documents, medical data, financial information, library books, etc., it is not so much competing with other, similar technology companies, but competing with time-honored practices of personal privacy and identity.

In a sense this shows the failure of the early 20th-century antitrust regulations: strictly defined, the ‘products’ that Google offers are fungible; therefore its presence in markets for these products is non-monopolistic. Taken as a whole, however, Google’s stranglehold on the quasi-public services it offers creates an extremely high barrier to switching to another competitor.

Ironically, Google is not so different from Microsoft on this count: Bill Gates’ original insight that something that is seemingly unprofitable and worthless can be the key to a profit-driven company’s success still holds: What was Internet Explorer to Microsoft is Gmail to Google. Of course the reason Google is so loath to come up against antitrust regulation is because it knows that if, for example, it were required to allow Microsoft, Yahoo!, and any other competitor to access Google account credentials and data, so that for example I could migrate my e-mail messages (and address!) to Hotmail or another provider, then there would be no need at all to maintain my loyalty to Google search beyond its marginal improvements in accuracy.

And thus we arrive at the crux of the matter: Google does not really provide a ‘public service’; it is merely offering various conveniences in exchange for your personal data. Google’s nightmare is that Microsoft will offer to start paying checks to people who promise to conduct 100% of their search, e-mail, and research activities on its platforms instead of Google’s. How’s that for innovation?

unasked questions, unwelcome answers

How much is it fair to ask from our nation? Mere freedom? A job? A welfare check? For me this question isn’t so much difficult to answer because of politics but because of nostalgia. I do not think that I am unique for consulting my perceptions of the past in arriving at an opinion about the present: arguably this is the only way opinions are formed at all.

Likewise, I find it difficult to understand arguments from politicians like Sarah Palin and others of the ‘Tea Party Caucus’ to the effect that everything went to shit in the United States after Hoover was elected. My confusion here is down to, once again, perception. I used to think that where liberals harked back to the ‘roll-up-your-sleeves and kick the shit out of the trusts’ mentality of FDR, Republicans saw the studied prosperity of Eisenhower as a model. But Republicans today seem to argue that this is untrue, that the real fall from grace happened much earlier.

While many liberal commentators deride Republicans’ views as ridiculous, I have a much larger conceptual difficulty even understanding what life must have been like before World War II (much less what life was like afterwards). Many people talk clumsily of inherited memory as modifying and reinforcing the views we come to espouse; perhaps it is true that my parents’ life experiences shaped the way that I have come to view my own. But when I look back at old photographs from the Great Depression, searching for some way to attach a visual significance to the time most arguably like the one we are living through today, the effort fails. Where is the simplicity of suffering and yearning for hard work, so readily apparent in these photos, today?

 

Perhaps it is the temporary amelioration of nice clothes and modern surroundings; water in pitchers, carpeted floors, and color placards moderate what would otherwise be austerity unadulterated. Or perhaps it is the consumer culture that has developed since the Great Depression: when the chief mode of expression is consumption, it is difficult to articulate hard financial times through mass media. I am reminded of a video of Steve Jobs from 2003:

In it, he explains that there are technology isn’t good enough to make tablet computers viable in the marketplace. His interviewer asks him about whether or not the devices could be used as reading devices. Steve Jobs said something prescient: “If you’ve got a bunch of rich guys who can afford their third computer…that’s your market. People accuse us of niche markets!”

The irony of this phrase given today’s events is less important than the truth that Jobs knew even then: that the irony would be lost on everyone in less than 10 years. It is not a gross display of wealth for the president to be seen carrying around a practically-useless consumer electronics device in public:

It is sound politics. Thus the logical question becomes: which austerity? Yours? Mine? Ours?

 

 

meme of the week: Gaddafi Loot

This week’s meme is one I wish had grown a bit more popular, or even evolved somehow.  However, it’s limited to just a picture and a video, both of which I found to be pretty amusing in their raw state.

A Libyan rebel found his way into the royal compound and into Muammar Gaddafis bedroom.  He then proceeded to loot a hat, what appears to be a gold chain, and a golden elephant staff.  Some memorable youtube and reddit comments include:
“I bet that hat costs a lot in TF2“
“It’s like he’s playing Fallout in real life”
“Libyans should just proclaim him leader now, he does have the hat“
The original news report:
A warning to any dictators out there.  Goof up and someone might end up stealing your sweet threads:
Insulated lunch box might have also been Gaddafis:

no status

Hometown politics: the truth is quite close to the surface in places like Albuquerque. An Albuquerque resident (and illegal alien) saved a 6-year-old girl from abduction last week. As his status came to light, the usual theatrics of hometown diplomacy (key to the city, first pitch at minor league baseball match) were surpassed by the national debate on immigration and the liberal desire to make Antonio Chacon an avatar for a political cause. He’s an illegal immigrant, but he still jumped at the chance to help his community. But this begs the question about heroism in general. If you are against illegal immigration, are you also denying an illegal immigrant’s ability or desire to be a hero? This is the argument made by people calling in nationwide to find out how to help Chacon.

It seems like Chacon is more than a little bewildered by the attention.

“Yeah, he said of course he would like to be here as a U.S. citizen. He’s always had that in his mind and heart,” his wife said.

But if the liberal attempt to hijack the story is undermined by Chacon’s apparent ambivalence towards becoming a U.S. citizen, then his ambivalence itself undermines the conservative counter-argument: if the state’s only job is to deport illegal immigrants, not, say, to provide a social safety net for the unemployed, then what good reason does a citizen of another country have to live here? If the only reason is to work, then the best way to stem the flow of illegal immigrants is an economic solution. Just as the ‘War on Drugs’ successfully eliminated the supply of illegal drugs, in so doing addressing the demand in America, so too the Republicans can address the demand that illegal immigrants have for American jobs by eliminating the supply.

Now that’s what I call problem solving!

the idea–Who killed it? I killed it. I shot him dead.

I was annoyed by this piece in the opinion pages of this weekend’s New York Times:

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.

The piece goes on to argue that the reason we no longer see any ‘big ideas’ or ‘public intellectuals’ is because of this trend towards knowledge instead of thought. The guy has a point, but his academic credentials are the red flag here: It is difficult to imagine a tenured academic writing such a piece for anything other than the following two reasons: he is annoyed that no one pays attention to his ideas and he is a snob. There have always been snobs, of course, but the true measure of a snob (and the reason there are so many more today) is his or her remove from high-brow society. Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Chicago, Austin: all these cities and cities like them are, in varying degrees, not New York City.

Because this guy and so many like him are unwilling to engage with their local surroundings (and I mean this in a fluid, not geographic sense), they are unable to transform their ideas into coherent local action. Faced with this inability to act, gifted individuals like the other project their impotence to culture at large. But this is just another big idea, the biggest idea: that what someone writes into a Macbook Pro in Los Angeles and gets published in the New York Times is, ipso facto, interesting to read and worth considering. But as I read more of this “society is dead, where have all the thinkers gone” garbage, I become more skeptical.

Lastly, who’s to say that any of the ‘ideas’ that have changed the world over the past century are original? Usually they are adaptations of older ideas, making use of new empirical or experiential data. Perhaps it’s just a growing impatience among the academic caste for original ideas that gets them to write garbage like this.

the alternate reality in which michelle bachmann becomes president of the united states

A delightful piece in last week’s New Yorker about Michelle Bachmann. She’s quoted:

He [God] is the Lord of all of life. Every bit of life, including sociology, theology, biology, politics. You name the area and walk of life. He is the Lord of life. And so, as we went back to our studies, we looked at studying in a completely different light. Not for the purpose of a career but for a purpose of wondering, How does this fit into creation? How does this fit into the code and all of life that is about to come in front of us? And so we had new eyes that were opened up as we understood life now from a Biblical world view.

She’s also heavily influenced by Francis Schaeffer, a wingnut American christian who pronounced the death of Western Civilization from a high-quality-of-life pulpit in Switzerland. From a tract he wrote shortly before his death:

You must realize that when we speak of man being the measure of all things under the Humanist label, the first thing is that man has only knowledge from himself. That he, being finite, limited, very faulty in his observation of many things, yet nevertheless, has no possible source of knowledge except what man, beginning from himself, can find out from his own observation. Specifically, in this view, there is no place for any knowledge from God.

But it is not only that man must start from himself in the area of knowledge and learning, but any value system must come arbitrarily from man himself by arbitrary choice. More frightening still, in our country, at our own moment of history, is the fact that any basis of law then becomes arbitrary — merely certain people making decisions as to what is for the good of society at the given moment.

How did the belief that God is speaking personally to one’s self come about in modern times? Both the Catholic Counter-Reformation as well as the Protestantism that it was trying to cope with were vigorous in finding quacks and heretics who believed to be in personal communication with god. God could manifest himself in more impersonal ways, such as through Calvinist ideas of pre-ordained fates. But somewhere between then and now, people like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann started cropping up.

Not knowing very much about religious matters, I won’t speculate about the theological underpinning (or perhaps lack thereof) to Palin et. al.’s thought. More interesting to me anyway is the urge to minister Christian truths. I am not one of the tut-tutting Atheists who sees Christian proselytizing as radical oppression. “There is a flow to history and culture,” Schaeffer says at the beginning of his hare-brained documentary on (no points if you guessed it) the decline of Western Civilization. “This flow is rooted in what people think. And what they think will determine how they act,” Schaeffer ends ominously. My intuition is that Schaeffer, Bachmann, and any number of other hysterical Christian fundamentalists are bothered by just that, namely what is going on inside people’s heads. It is impossible not to observe–that is, to remain ignorant of, even willfully so–the diversity of thought and speech which occurs in a modern democratic country. Regardless of whether crime goes up or down, or if the economy is in recession or expansion, the depravity of available thought remains constant.

But this shouldn’t motivate action: The music young people listen to or the gay rights movement is normally the domain of dyspeptic old men who are at least half-aware of their own increasing irrelevance. In a sense the reason we have snobs is the all-too-common fear that culture is in decline and that there is nothing we can do about it but carve out our own small islands of enlightenment from the crumbling walls of culture. I’m sure that people have speculated about the Christian tendency to evangelize, but what gives someone a worldview susceptible to an evangelizing attitude? The New Yorker‘s article intones that Bachmann’s lack of a father figure could be the cause.

This makes sense, since religious zealots often cast god (and if they are women, poor beasts, their husbands) as sources of paternal authority, giving order to what was once disorder. But this is to psychologize a trend, that is to accept Schaeffer’s inchoate half-truth about thought determining action. Yes, in many senses, thought does influence acts. But there is something even more primary to thought, and that is situation. My hunch is that, in America at least, the often-uttered falsehood that rich people are rich because they are clever is now more false than ever before. We are dealing with a demographic-scale glut of stupid, rich, and idle people: watch out, world.

on the new apple campus

Take a look at these renders of Apple’s proposed new ‘campus’ in Cupertino. Boy, would I hate to be the planning commissioner forced to decide whether to approve or disapprove. I’m surprised no one has made aesthetic comparisons between the new building and the Pentagon: take away the tasteful synthetic Savannah and replace it with more hardened government buffalo grass and the joggers with bureaucrats and you have the nerve center of a slightly more cash-flush organization than the current Department of Defense.

Joking aside, the comparison is interesting. Apple seems to want to declare its cultural dominance in the same fashion as the United States wanted to declare its military preeminence. Where for leaders of the past this usually involved a triumphal arch or a glittering memorial to those who died in wars of conquest, Apple (as well as the United States, and, come to think of it, any other successful late 20th-century capitalist organization) marries form with function, under the reasonable albeit self-conscious assumption that their dominance will only end when the building stops serving its purpose. In the U.S. government’s case that purpose is the logistical domination of the World’s Air, Sea and Land; for Apple it is merely the domination of the world’s minds.

on riots and nutrition

I can’t help but be somewhat unimpressed with the riots in London. There seem to be more news photographers than there are actual hooligans. My first thought (like any good ‘local, nutritious food’ fascist) is that the rioters’ relative lack of panache is down to their food. London in the 1970′s ate sausage and beans. The London of today eats a Pret sandwich, if it’s lucky. No surprise then that even a Ladbroke’s seems like an ironclad fortress to would-be looters:

edit: more video:

beyond our means

Last week, I wrote that Public Organ would be taking a permanent siesta. Of its old form, this remains true. But even though I’m about to start Law School and as most of the old contributors pursue other things, my need to give aphoristic form to my assorted thoughts remains. Even though I promised Public Organ would never turn into that bane of the internet, the blog, here it is. That social theorists even debate the internet’s importance to public life is repellent enough to make me want to boycott the damn thing. But while the internet hasn’t really changed much in politics or society, for people like myself it has replaced consumption as a way to express oneself in times of leisure and idyll.

Probably more well-noticed than the fallow state of Public Organ‘s home page was Standard & Poor’s downgrade of U.S. debt to AA+ from AAA. This has led to a few guffaws from across the Atlantic, as now even France (embroiled as it is in Euro-zone sovereign debt tensions) has a better credit rating than the stars and stripes. However if S&P really is the kingmaker the news media is making it out to be, even France should be afraid:

in a June 10 report, S&P stated: “If French authorities do not follow through with their reform of the pension system, make additional changes to the social-security system and consolidate the current budgetary position in the face of rising spending pressure on health care and pensions, Standards & Poors will unlikely maintain its AAA rating.”

There are many on the left who say that the credit downgrade is little more than a cynical ploy by the ratings agencies to re-enforce a trend of concentrating wealth in the hands of the already wealthy. These commentators are quick to point out the value of shares is a function of investor confidence, not a reflection of objective reality. This view makes sense at first: As I write, the NYSE closed down 6% today–almost but not quite the kind of ‘black mondays’ that shook the roots of American society in the 1930′s. Investors are spooked not because they see a fundamental decline in American economic prowess (although there is a bit of that). Most people will say that the sell-off is the result of investors reacting to their peers’ own decisions.

But this ‘herd mentality’ theory only explains so much. If it is true that investor confidence is the only thing that determines the price of a stock, then fixing the economy would be as simple as gathering everyone into a room and making them speak mantras: “The U.S. economy is headed for an expansion. The U.S. economy is headed for an expansion.”

Perhaps this might have worked when the economy was just beginning to wobble in 2008, but people do care about fundamentals, and the crisis of confidence in the U.S. government has to do with fundamental problems in the political process. Everyone is milling about in the great beer hall that is the forum on the U.S. economy. People want to drink as well: but no one wants to buy unless someone else goes first, and that just isn’t happening right now. Call it a crisis of confidence.

As the debt ceiling debate was taking place in Washington, people all over the world were offering their own, competing views of how the economy should work, why it isn’t working now, and what we should do to try and fix it. Tea party neophytes competed with old-school Keynsian liberals for airtime. This debate on the ground was reflected in Congress, as leaders jockeyed not to create a viable deal but to paint the other side with the inevitable failure in the process. (Nevermind that the failure was caused by the politicians’, and by extension their electorates’, inability to see eye-to-eye on fiscal responsibility).

So, what to do? Cut entitlements? Raise taxes? None of these questions seem to get at the basics, which is how to agree again on what matters. People are so lost in their own web of self-congratulatory theorizing (This blogger is aware that his choice of forum for this statement amounts to irony). For the moment, there aren’t any tools at hand. So long as investors’ and credit agencies’ decisions are derided as partisan chicanery or lauded as truth from on high, our political calculus will likewise suffer from an identical solipsism: What I have to say is true, but the only reason reality doesn’t bear it out is because you don’t believe it’s true.

 

the long sleep

You probably haven’t noticed that there haven’t been many new posts on Public Organ, probably because you haven’t been reading it. To the assembled non-audience, however, I offer this apology. Like Rabbi Loew’s famous Golem in the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Public Organ will rise again when marginally-educated and high-brow audiences have nowhere to go, and masses of simpering philistines knock at their gated communes.

That day is not today. Nor is it tomorrow. So long as the New Mexico desert can be converted into partially self-sustaining agro-communes, there will be addresses that the New York Review of Books may be forwarded to. In this sense, Public Organ leaves the world just as it wanted it to be, as well as just how it found it: discordant, perhaps, but not as oppressive as most people imagine it to be. If you’re still sad, we recommend donating to the various aid efforts that are (and if not, should be) doing work to relieve the famine in the Horn of Africa.

it takes a certain kind

Perhaps by dint of my age or station, or perhaps by neglect or a concerted outpouring of will, I have arrived at a life philosophy. I think about certain things during the day, sleep mostly dreamless nights, and live an unarguably comfortable existence, at a safe distance from my fellow man.

My philosophy is this: you could be wrong. It is like a mantra. “Om nava shiva ya”, “Nam yo renge kyo”, it has the same hollow resonance as more famous incantations of self-contemplation.

you could be wrong.

I have often found myself wrong about important aspects of life. Sometimes I treat a friend in a way that at the time I consider to be most proper; days, weeks, months or years later I will be forced to reconsider my position. Decisions I made when I was 15 still make me wince as I lie down before sleep. Perhaps this is just a relic of immaturity; I imagine that most people reconcile themselves to their choices, file a few away as ‘mistakes’ and then get on with their lives. For whatever reason, this kind of self-consolation doesn’t seem to work. The only thing that comforts me is that my discomfort at past improprieties is itself based on faulty reasoning.

But then the real question comes up. If I treat each decision as if it is no better or worse than any other decision (as any decision is based on the best but still fallible reasons), then the logical question is why anything happens the way it does. Am I just some sort of existentially-bored non-entity who goes with the flow? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Even if it were, I could be wrong and would therefore be forced to examine my assumptions. Likewise, positive belief in something only yields so much peace of mind. If I were to think that I were fully in control of my decisions, let alone making them based on correct belief, then the same question pops up, whether my beliefs are really my own, or just a positive aspect of something even greater.

And yet, things did turn out a certain way. Here I am: I am not dead, but in several contingent worlds, I could well be.

The only alternative is to contemplate the idea that there is a man up above (definitely not down below) calling all the shots. What are the odds, though?