On Lieberman, or: The Inadequacy of Emotion

There are reasons why Joesph Lieberman should not have kept his chair of homeland security, just as there are reasons why Lawrence Summers should not be Secretary of the Treasury. Unlike what you might have heard from 90% of the media, those reasons are not entirely due to the fact that both have said some really stupid shit. The better reason is that Summers and Lieberman have not been good at their jobs. In fact, they've been terrible. Summers helped write NAFTA, supported the WTO, and aided fellow smartest guy in the room by not regulating the energy industry (seriously, click on the 'not regulating' link - it's the downing memo of the economy). He also helped McCain advisor Phil Gramm deregulate the banking industry - the same Phil Gramm who recently called America a nation of whiners.

Similarly, Lieberman has been an advocate for Bush's foreign "policy" including supporting the war, the spying, the torture and not using his position to investigate rampant corruption on the part of contractors. There are some people who take on corruption in their own party, and then there are people who manage to facilitate corruption in both parties. I know that the 'epic betrayal' angle plays well, but the point is that he has been as bad at his job as George Bush. The media (Maddow excepted) does not mention this, which is upsetting because when someone does bring it up, Lieberman supporters are almost a loss for words.

So this is change we can believe in. The only thing to do is to keep pushing Lieberman and everyone else to do what he/they haven't done in the past two years: investigate the contractors, the spying, the torture, and then stop the war. And then I'm still contributing to whichever liberal candidate challenges him in 2012.

Incidentally, while I promote a politics of policy over one of emotion, I certainly understand/identify with the visceral hate that so many feel for people like Lieberman (and I don't think 'visceral hate' is too strong). In fact, I think Bob Dylan summed it up best:

Against Gay Marriage

Right now, the headless monster known as the gay rights "movement" is protesting all across California against a proposition which has already passed. I find the sight of people campaigning two weeks after an election sort of comical, but I won't burn through the goodwill of the handful of readers I do have so quickly: I support equality. The main reason I'm not reacting to to prop 8's passing with shock and hysteria is because I see this as a lost battle in larger war. First of all, there is a strong-sounding argument to be made to the California supreme court, so it probably won't even be enacted. Second, if it is, we'll have this same battle again in 2010, and in the long term demographics suggest that the 80s/90s culture war is losing its fizzle and primacy in American politics. Lastly, as far as I understand it, most of the rights and benefits of marriage are federally derived, and so the practical effect of state recognition or state bans is minimal (which suggests that there should by a national movement to press the sympathetic president elect into making good on his promise to recognize gay marriage federally).

But the bigger problem I have with all of this is that I don't actually support gay marriage, in the sense that I don't support any kinds of marriage the way the institution is presently constructed. What strikes me about the laundry list of rights and benefits of contemporary marriage is not how many rights gay people don't have but how many rights married people do have. These are admittedly laws I don't fully understand, but it seems that many of them should not, as a matter of principle, be limited only to people who are married (such as extended hospital visiting hours for spouses). That is, to talk about equal rights for gay people is a little bit of a red herring in the context of marriage, as it takes for granted another inequality: the one between married and single people.

Furthermore, on a broader, historical level, the evangelicals are right: marriage is traditionally defined between a man and a woman, the latter typically not being asked about the matter, and the whole institution existing mainly for the patriarchal transfer and maintenance of wealth and power. This 'substructure' emphasis may be a bit overdramatic, but pretending that marriage is all about the recent invention of "true love" is simply ignorant. The modern gay rights movement has focused on gaining access to two of the most conservative and constitutively homophobic institutions in society: marriage and the military. They do this not even in an attempt to subvert them, as the religious right suggests, but on their own terms, for the sake of monogamy/'true love' in the former and for serving one's country in the latter. Why?

Some proponents of gay marriage like Dan Savage understand the institutional aspect of marriage but claim that it doesn't matter anymore:

The problem for opponents of gay marriage isn't that gay people are trying to redefine marriage but that straight people have redefined marriage to a point that it no longer makes any sense to exclude gay couples. Gay people can love, gay people can commit. Some of us even have children. So why can't we get married?... Ultimately gay people only want what straight people already have: the right for each couple to define marriage for themselves.

Through the lens of Savage's cosmopolitan sex life, even straight marriage doesn't mean anything anymore (I use cosmopolitan as a critical term, not in the sarah-paliny-sense). But marriage is not just an eclectic collection of idiosyncratic arrangements, all individually defined. It's an institution engraved in the legal code, it structures social relations, and many critics would argue it is a fundamental support to capitalism. (And consumerism - as evinced by the $30 billion per year wedding industry which includes everything from dresses and gift registries, to wedding planning, to Savage's getting "married in a tank full of dolphins," to mass weddings and reality tv shows, to, of course, blood diamonds).

So, in my view, the debate over gay marriage is not really between "true love" vs. the "moral sanctity of marriage." Rather, it is between unhinged consumer capitalism vs. bigotry. Similarly, the debate over gays in the military is about patriotic violence vs. bigotry. Do I have to choose sides here? And if, despite my vote and financial contribution to the campaign, I don't have the enthusiasm to stand with the FUCK PROP 8 types nor even read their emails, does that make me a bigot?

The eventual success of gay marriage will be either a Pyrrhic victory - if in the process the potential for a queer movement is lost - or a somewhat meaningless one, as it will achieve equality only by accepting all sorts of other inequalities.

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This post got too long, which prevents me from getting apoplexy while discussing modernity's most attractive fiction: "true love." For those of you who have a Harper's subscription, I would recommend this book review by Laura Kipnis. A couple good quotes:

The premise that love is a good enough reason for embarking on marriage took grip only in the late eighteenth century, and then only in Western Europe and North America, concomitant with other changes during the era, from the spread of a market economy and rise of individualism to the invention of the novel...

Today, submitting to such regulations seems entirely natural, but let's not forget that licensing our life decisions remains a tool of modern population management. So the next time you file for divorce, amidst the angst and sense of personal failure, take a moment to consider why the state wants to dictate the conditions under which love's dissolution may occur.

UPDATE: This is more like it: when I say bread and butter I mean bread and fucking butter.

UPDATE2: Gay marriage supporters quote Walter Benjamin, reach new levels of stupidity

"Bob Rubin and Larry Summers have got to go"

electing the first black president was only step 1...

UPDATE: sign the petition

The Day After

election day

There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls "the common good." Belief in the common good is the sole basis for hope. Without belief, there is nothing to be done. Such is the avowedly improbable basis for Obama's entire push for the presidency...

At the core of The Audacity of Hope is someone who lives at a distance, someone distanced from himself and from others and craving a bond, a commitment to bind him together with other Americans and to bind Americans together. There is a true horror vacui in Obama, a terror of loneliness and nothingness...

Obama wants to believe in the common good as a way of providing a fullness to experience that avoids the slide into nihilism. But sometimes I don't know if he knows what belief is and what it would be to hold such a belief. The persistent presence of the Mother's dilemma - the sense of loneliness, doubt, and abandonment - seems palpable and ineliminable. We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realization that nothing will change.

- Simon Critchley

I can't stop posting videos of crazy shit

via Wonkette

ps. I thought if you didn't get a treat you were supposed to do a trick. Kids need to enforce their candy rights more.

UPDATE: Shirley Nagel
465 Belanger St, Grosse Pointe Farms, MI
(313) 884-2598