Ok, two more obama things and then I'll stop

Dear non-existent reader, look at this nice photograph:

Also, you can play him in a game (via Wonkette)

WTF (the good kind)

Not that I have any readers left, but I just have to say, what is happening right now politically is remarkable. I don't mean all the "historic" stuff (as opposed that which is not historic, or a part of history). Maybe our expectations have just been lowered or maybe, despite paying attention when we were younger, we were not able to understand what Clinton was really doing. Either way, this past week stuff has been getting done, and it's good stuff: ending torture, increasing transparency, closing financial loopholes, increasing emission standards, and thinking about nationalizing the banks. These are things that I've been dreaming and obsessing about for the last few years, and now it seems so effortless.

It also seems that people don't know how to react. It is an undiscussed fact that people on the left are more wary of the government, particularly big government, than the small-government conservatives who have given us not only the biggest, most wasteful government in the history of the planet but also a fairly extensive police-state apparatus, all in the name of freedom. This means that the left is instinctively hyper-reacting to everything Obama does, such as this so-called "jack bauer" exception. They may be right to do so, but I'm increasingly confident that Obama is 'one of us', but more politically skilled. We'll see.

And on the right, well, it's pretty funny. Some are trying to silicon valley their way out of the contemporary situation. There is also the unintentional comedy of David Frum, he of the American We Have No Clue What We're Talking About Institute, trying to reorganize the right via blog. If you start reading these and other similar websites, it's clear that they don't know what hit them and don't understand how to live in a world where their scare-tactic racial politics (eg crime/drugs/terror, the "southern strategy," civilizational wars, "economic responsibility," etc) no longer work. When David Brooks says that Palin "is a fatal cancer to the Republican party," he is just afraid of what they've created since 1964.

Since fear always has a place in politics, Sarah and the Palins (the Republicans) will be back. There can be no myth of the permanent majority (plus, in a working democracy what would that even mean?). Still, the way in which Bush and friends have almost systematically discredited every single Republican idea and moreover managed to link the Republican brand to incompetence and political divisiveness in a generation of diverse voters cannot be underestimated. I also don't want to start sounding like the 22% group in talking about how the President is such a great man that everyone likes. But it's been a while since reading the news was the good part of my day.

didn't it rain

This is more like it. Today it rained, almost all day, and it was wonderful. There is a dogmatic conformity here to the notion that the blindingly sunny, 85 degree days in the middle of January are what count as "good weather," one of of the many things that make this place so wonderful. I've been resisting my own resistance to this myth, but this is not good weather. One friend described my inclination towards Colorado weather - which can only be described as involving a series of intense climates in rapid succession, as if in a political revolution - as similar to being in an abusive relationship. I reject this, because it still relies on some unthinking 'sun = good' logic.

The sun here feels like it is right on your face, that it is burning its way through your skin, attempting to render you helpless against everything, especially thought. I can't think in this heat (a problem especially for graduate school). Too many days start out foggy, with friendly clouds trying to offer us protection, only to be eviscerated by the Irvine sun that respects nothing. The worst part is seeing people bounce along, seemingly not noticing this or any other kind of violence.

On a related note, the other day I was traveling back from LA in the middle of the night not completely sober and with the air conditioning on when I ran into roadwork that forced me through a detour through La Mirada or some equally faceless part of southern California. I've come to understand Irvine and the more urban parts of LA, at least in the 'contingent' ways that are possible, but the areas in between, as Los Angles fades into Orange county, escape me. It truly feels like nowhere made into a place. One imagines oneself as if a character in a video game, that makes a running motion when controlled to move in a certain direction. Only in this case one has been directed into a dead end, and no pushing on the wall reveals a secret passageway to the next level. So you face a wall, more or less helpless, while still making a running motion.

At least it's raining.

san francisco

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