I am agog, aghast, astounded, appalled at the Supreme Court’s decision of last week. It seems that many are underestimating the damage this will do to our democracy; well, of the few who heard about this thing. I assume that the perception of most is “Supreme Court decides… BO-RING! Where’s the sports page?” But that illustration requires imagining that anyone reads newspapers these days, which we know is simply not true. More probably, Joe Methhead is watching his ten minutes of CNN to make himself feel smarter, and hears “Supreme Court decides…” and changes to “American Choppers” and yells for someone to bring him more meth.

You may sense rancor, and that is because we allowed this to happen. By our complacency, by our opting for mass entertainment over mass communication, by caring more about the goddamn American Idol than the American president, by sedating ourselves with cheeseburgers and lattes and pornography. We are trained to believe that politics are impolite or boring to discuss, all the easier to make us manipulable. It’s our parents’ fault, too, for preparing a nation where meaning is defined by buying and selling, but just as much our fault for accepting this parody of history.

And in this country where buying and selling is not a means to an end, but the end itself, it’s no surprise that politicians can now be bought and sold. It is almost impossible to overstate the harm that this decision will wreak on our democracy; it is almost impossible to imagine how it will not outright destroy it.

For example.
How could the health care bill have gone to shit? At one point, 80% of the American public wanted a public option. The Congress represents us, right? Google “health insurance political contributions”. How much did you donate to McCain or (for fellow Texans) John Cornyn? Something between zero and zero dollars, is my guess. Why the hell should they listen to you? And so our ostensible representatives vote against our interests. That’s how it happens. It’s as simple as that.

We know from Obama’s trouncing of Clinton and then McCain that the campaign with the most money can reach the most people most effectively; but Obama’s money came from the people, from folks who contributed for the first time ever to a candidate in whom they believed. And he knows it. These were people busting open their piggy banks and sending in ten dollars, fifty, a hundred. Corporations give millions, hundreds of millions, even billions. There is no way that our contributions - and therefore the importance of our interests - can compete with theirs.

These days, corporations split their donations pretty evenly - Coca-Cola may give as much to the Democrats as to the Republicans. All this means is that both parties will be equally in Coca-Cola’s pockets. But wait! Does the equal contribution they get from Pepsi-Cola mean that they will cancel each other out? Not at all. Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola have several mutual interests. Neither wants to be taxed. Neither wants to obey environmental regulations that cost money and time. Neither wants to spend the time and money to treat its workers humanely. These things transcend party lines and become a matter of us and them. You are not a corporation. You are a human, and your worth is not determined by your intelligence, or compassion, but by the money in your pocket. The currency of you is devalued. This is the triumph of our weird government-capitalism coition.

I notice that the webpage for emigrating to Canada is bogged down today.

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I read a massive interview with David Simon this weekend. It took me an hour to get through and left me speechless. (Do yourself the favor of reading it. If you haven’t seen The Wire, there are spoilers; but if you haven’t seen The Wire, you’ve wasted your life. Go see it, now. It’ll make you a better human being.) Simon has an uncanny gift for cutting to the heart of incredibly complex social issues in a few sentences; in the course of the interview, he explains why Americans are addicted to drugs, why the drug war can’t be won, why reform is desperately needed but virtually impossible, why our popular representatives in government have no idea what the populace wants, and why this is unlikely to change. It’s deeply distressing.

He also calls out journalists; they are the watchdogs of society, and they are now toothless. He says that good journalism is what keeps us free. I always found this far-fetched, but one recalls that journalism brought down Nixon, journalism damaged Clinton’s political power, and it was the lack of good journalism that enabled us to tolerate Bush for eight years. (That’s not 100% true, is it? I remember reading Seymour Hersh’s scathing article on Bush and the Iraq War in a 2004 New Yorker; was it the irrelevance of the medium that let these truths go without a ripple? The stories that people need to hear about are out there, but the populace is too jaded/drugged on disposable pop culture/preoccupied with toys/uneducated to care. So, journalists and teachers are the watchdogs of society - but Simon has his say about teachers in season 4 of The Wire. Turns out they’re compromised by the very system they work for! Just like journalists.)

Anyway, it made me want to be a journalist. Not a for-real, works-at-a-newspaper journalist, because my personality is too retiring and subtle for the dog-eat-dog hustle and bustle of a newsroom, where the assertive thrive, but also because newspapers are, of course, dying. It reminded me of a project me and Joel have been kicking around for years; we want to travel through east Texas, talk to people, photograph them. We expect to have an excess of material, so some will be released via blog, with the best stuff saved for a book, wherein we will try to knit it into a narrative. We have no idea what thesis we are after; the region is not afflicted by any particular economic or cultural misery or stagnation; perhaps we will come up with nothing more specific than a portrait of life in this part of the country. I can say that we will be speaking mainly to working class citizens. Everyone loves to hear about the plight of the working man.

I’m excited because the work will be quite different from my usual output, and because it’ll give me a chance to work with a guy whose creative sensibilities are more in tune with mine than anyone I’ve ever met, even if our talents lie in different areas. I expect the project will yield artistic and personal satisfaction. If it’s fruitful, we’ll probably pursue similar projects. We’ll become a powerful, unique voice for change and hope in America, which no one will ever pay any attention to because what we have to say can’t be rendered into ten-second sound bytes or tweets or Call of Duty multiplayer maps.

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6. The Beijing-Brazil Naval Axis

China wants to build an aircraft carrier. Who doesn’t? Anyone can build an aircraft carrier. Not everyone can build a relationship. But they have. With Brazil, one of the four countries that maintains an aircraft carrier. Theirs is fifty-two years old. They bought it from the French. And they’re using it to train the Chinese. The Russians, French, and US weren’t interested in helping out, so they went to the sunny southern land renowned for its beef, rainforest fires, high rate of AIDS patients, and likely position as one of the most powerful countries in the world over the next few decades, what with its booming agribusiness and burgeoning population. What could this alliance between a current US-antagonistic superpower and a possible superpower in our hemisphere mean? Probably nothing. Don’t think about it.

Why are aircraft carriers important? Because they’re freaking awesome. And they allow a nation to project far beyond the reach of a navy (viz., the sea). A fighter/bomber launched from a carrier can strike a thousand miles or more inland, and a handful of US carriers (and support ships) have allowed the US to remain the dominant power in the Pacific for decades. China’s been growing its navy for the past decade and become gutsier in approaching US ships, but they can’t really hope to take the US on until they have carriers. Thus.

But I’m not worried about China. Sure, they’ve got a massive population and (historically) a sense of racial superiority (the Chinese word for Vietnam, for example, means “The Pacified South”, and in their negotiations with Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, they repeatedly referred to European kings and queens as vassals to the Emperor), and they’ve steadily subdued and supplanted their Muslim and Tibetan populations, and they’re economically powerful enough that they can score the Olympics despite their constant and famous human rights violations, and they can skew US blockbusters to portray Chinese positively in hopes of winning their box office dollars (see 2012), but you know what China doesn’t have? Oil. Gas. They have some coal. But as Germany proved in WWII, when you’re powering a huge military-industrial complex, there’s no substitute for sweet black gold. Global empire runs on dead dinosaurs, and China has precious little of those. Unless they invade Iran! Fingers crossed.

7. Dead man gets passport.

Eh, who cares. Fraud, forgery, and incompetence are nothing new.

8. Chechen murders go global.

The Kremlin’s Chechen murderer of choice, Ramzan Kadyrov, is killing his enemies all over Europe - a human rights activist investigating him, a former bodyguard accusing him of torture, a defected freedom fighter, a competing insurgent leader. But, with Moscow’s help, he has brought peace and stability to the region, and what’s a few thousand Chechens more or less? They are grist in the mill of history! I don’t even know where Chechnya is! Haha! It’s a fine example of Vladimir Putin’s new Russia. That man gets things done!

9. America joins Uganda’s civil war.

Here’s a doozy. You knew, of course, that Uganda has suffered from one of the world’s longest ongoing civil wars, between the government and the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Genuine Satan Joseph Kony, who claims to be a spirit medium and chosen of God. The man is openly diabolical and probably insane, and has fueled his army with kidnapped child soldiers, and paid them with the proceeds of sex slaves sold to his Sudanese paymasters. In Christmas 2008, his men hacked to death about 400 civilians, earning this stinging rebuke from the Secretary-General of the UN: “[he] condemns in the strongest possible terms the appalling atrocities reportedly committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in recent days.” Ouch! Joseph Kony instantly burst into flame and plunged to the depths of hell. Oh, no, wait. He went on kidnapping, mutilating, and raping. In fact, he’s kidnapped about 70,000 people so far, half of them children. Wow! Well, you know what the US does when it sees a brutal warlord abusing human rights! We wreck their shit, unless they’re Russia, North Korea, Cuba, China, Turkmenistan, Cambodia, East Timor, Chile, Venezuela, Iran, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, etc.

So we helped the Ugandan government plan and fund a mission to wipe out the LRA, and with the famous competence that captured Osama Bin Laden and recovered Saddam’s WMDs, Joseph Kony and his band of merry murderers were brought to justice. Oh, no, wait. They escaped and killed 900 civilians in retaliation.

The US’s role in Africa could certainly be expanded. There’s a question of how much responsibility we - AND EUROPE, COME ON YOU SLACKERS - have in rebuilding the continent after so thoroughly fucking it with a decade of colonialism. A good deal, no doubt, humanitarian issues aside. However, as in Iraq, there’s a sticky question of where military aid overlaps with neo-colonialism; the capital crime of colonialism is that it deprives populations of the chance to create their own history, and foreign management, beneficent and well intentioned though it may be, is a heavy hand.

(Happily, though, I can say definitively that most of Africa’s problems are Europe’s fault, not ours; American interference in the continent is nothing compared to that of Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium.)

Moral issues aside, there’s the concern that Africa is a pit into which we may throw money and lives forever without seeing improvement. Disease, famine, and lack of resources make many of the governments untenable without war and political unrest. How many quagmires can we handle?

10. An ROTC for spies.

A secret program in universities to train spies? Freaking awesome. It’s like Alias! I used to think Jennifer Garner was so hot. Now I can’t see past her giant square jaw. She looks like the Tick with breasts.

And that’s the lesser known stories of 2009! As you can see, hell in a handbasket.

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My friend Chris Coffman linked to the “Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009” on foreignpolicy.com. You missed them for a reason - most are relatively obscure matters of economics or ethninomics (neologism, copyright Jens Rushing), things which, let’s face it, no one cares about. But a few warrant discussion.

1. The Northeast Passage is open.

Two German ships traveled from Pacific Russia to Western Europe via the northern route, “over the top,” if you will, a route previously impassable due to polar ice. “There was virtually no ice most of the route,” said one of the captains. Hurrah! Now we can see a whole new era of exciting geopolitics as new shipping routes open up. Canada will continue to subsidize its impoverished and alcoholic Inuit population in order to maintain its claim over the northern reaches; despite, the claws of the Red Menace will stretch over the dwindling polar cap, seeking, seeking for capitalists ripe for the claw-raping. Exciting! And, as my Canuck friends never tire of telling me, they’re cheerfully dismantling what little navy they have, while paying way too much for obsolete British subs that they can’t maintain. And the Russians, who have traded Soviet imperialism for good old-fashioned Peter-the-Great capital-I Imperialism, couldn’t be richer or more powerful. They have a charismatic and beloved leader, and they have Western Europe by the teats - remember last winter when they “accidentally” shut off natural gas because of a “disagreement” with the Ukraine and the pipeline? And Western Europe went into convulsions? Yes, it looks like they’ll finally get to conquer the world. Bully for them!

Haha! I jest. In this age of contraction and dwindling resources, anything on a large scale - big box retail or global empire - is doomed to fail! So our affable neighbors to the north may be spared Russian hegemony, but they’ll be too busy scrounging for firewood and meat - whatever kind - to care.

2. A new flashpoint in Iraq.

So the leaders are corrupt or insane, and internecine war continues to tear the country apart, and civilians are still being blasted into oblivion in what was once the greatest city in the civilized world. Haha! What times we live in! No, that’s not enough. The Kurds, that Ethno-Iranian ethnolinguistic group that live in the north, have been feeling frisky and would like a slice of the oil-rich Nineveh region. You probably know the Kurds as the group that produced Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, or Saladin, that most famous sultan who fought Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, personally. “The Flower of Islamic Chivalry,” whose death represented a turning point in the fortunes of the Muslim world, whom Sir Walter Scott invented as a charming, liberal gentleman, and whom William Monahan and Ridley Scott made a ridiculous saint. I vomited in disdain at the end of Kingdom of Heaven when Saladin releases the defeated Christian army for free; in real life, his mercy, while certainly exceptional for the time, was not so unalloyed by human characteristics. No, he set them free for a hefty price, and those who couldn’t pay the ransom were sold into slavery. Hey ho! History is a series of disasters and enormities, and those figures that approach nobility are ballooned into saints. Anyway, Iraq? Totally fucked. It was always a hornet’s nest; we just gave it a good stirring. Next!

3. A hotline for China and India.

The heads of state can call each other whenever they want now, just to talk. I wonder if the US feels left out when nuclear powers confabulate without them. Nah, they’ve got a lot to talk about. A border Himalayan region really belongs to China, because it’s really a part of Tibet, which really belongs to China, because China isn’t big enough yet. They fought a war on this in 1962, which I bet you didn’t know about. I didn’t. You know who did? The families of the 2000 soldiers who died! Ha! Man, what a crazy world. Anyway, they’re both nuclear, both big and hungry countries, still growing; throw Pakistan into the mix, and we’ve got what one might call a plumb innerestin’ sitchiation. Yes, probably all of Asia will be a nuclear cauldron in the near future!

4. A New Housing Bubble?

I think it’s just wonderful that we live in a country where people not only can have a small mansion surrounded by a tiny strip of grass, then a hundred other duplicate mansions, but expect such a thing. It’s awesome to visit other countries such as Korea, where everyone lives in giant filing cabinet apartment towers, or Southeast Asia, where you have your choice between a filing cabinet and a shanty, or even Europe, where the wealthy have really nice apartments, but apartments still, and then to go home to the US where people complain that their house is only 1500 square feet and really they should be in the house they deserve. Who knows why they deserve it? Dammit, don’t knock this sense of entitlement. It built this country. Manifest Destiny is self-entitlement writ continental. It’s freaking amazing what we can do when we think we deserve something. We wouldn’t have Texas, or California, or everything in between. God gave us that half of the continent; God wants us to have a 3000 square foot McMansion, and the government is helping out. The new housing bubble, says the New York Times, is probably caused by the government backing loans to unqualified borrowers via the Federal Housing Administration. Remember how spectacularly the last housing bubble burst? Imagine that, but instead of leveling the banks, it levels the government. Wow!

Why does no one want to make realistic disaster movies? Disaster porn like 2012 is all well and good, apparently, but no one wants to chronicle the orgasmically destructive collapse of America’s banks and the economy thus powered. I guess it’s more uplifting to watch someone crushed by volcanic ejecta than, say, a retired couple staring down the bleak barrel of impoverished life after Wall Street vaporizes their retirement funds. Real disaster is even more poignant, Hollywood, and thus riper for exploitation! Get on it!

5. The Civilian Surge Fizzles.

Robert Gates and Obama would like to send you to Afghanistan. USAID is the government’s international development branch, and they send civilians to help development infrastructure in countries where the infrastructure has been bombed to shit.

Hard to be cynical about this! It’s not only humane, but necessary - as “Charlie Wilson’s War” pointed out, if we don’t do this, it’ll come back to bite us in the ass later. It’s a fine thing to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan (back in the 80s), but if we don’t build schools, teach them how to farm, try to move them out of preindustrial life, then they’ll be ripe and ready for, say, a scary unthinking fundamentalist hate group to take over the government.

Here’s the cynicism! No one signed up. The military has had to fill most of the roles that State Department or USAID might, and the military, as Tom Clancy pithily pointed out, is not good at these things; they are good at breaking things and killing people. We are failing the Afghanis on this front, and it’s unlikely to turn around. Would you like to be paid 40k a year to go to Afghanistan if you don’t even get to shoot people? Of course not. I guess we’ll leave national reconstruction in the hands of the increasingly thuggish Karzai government.

Fun fact: Afghanistan is often classified as a Fourth World country, meaning that it not only has no development, but no prospects for development. Also, I can’t wait until I move back to the states and buy a 2500 square foot house. I want to get one with a big garage so my band can practice there. (I need to buy a new guitar amp, too!) It’d be nice to have an office and a library, but I’m not greedy.

This is getting long. Let’s split it in two.

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Everyone’s interested in toppling governments these days. No one wants to topple my heart.

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Sarah Palin appears to have committed career suicide.

Remember when she ran, how everyone said she didn’t have the experience? She wanted to be VP with 18 months’ experience, and no one bought it. I highly doubt she’ll be able to sell President with 24 months under her belt. Now, in 2012, she’ll have three years of doing nothing on her record. I understand the urge to get out of Alaska, though.

Maybe someone will give her a daytime talk show as a consolation prize.

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I came across this transcript of ABC Radio host Mark Levin humiliating and insulting a caller. It’s almost cartoonish in its brutality. This is the way a very poorly written villain might behave if the writer said, “Screw believability, let’s make him as loathsome as possible!” Except it’s real, and the villain is a NY Times best-selling author.

Highlights, if you can’t be arsed with the link, include:

“WHY DO YOU HATE MY COUNTRY! WHY DO YOU HATE MY CONSTITUTION? WHY DO YOU HATE MY DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE?”
And:
“Well, I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here.”

This is not only hateful and indecent, it is absurd. Absurd that the right can spew this kind of ichor and call it rhetoric; absurd that people listen to this foulness. The awful thing is that this meets with success. You know that while a percentage of the listeners were mortified at what they heard, the majority were probably pumping their fists in the air and thinking, “You tell that goddamn Commie pinko hippie bitch!”

A different viewpoint.
Well said, Mr. Levin. Every time you substitute shouting for discourse, vitriol for reasoning, you lose credibility, alienate voters, and drive your party further into irrelevance. Parties cease to exist. It happens. It is hilarious, though bemusing, that the Republicans can’t see that they’re on this path. Part of me shakes my head in horror at this behavior; the other part cackles with glee.

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