Saturday, March 16, 2013
St Patrick Day and Alcohol
Our demented teabagger governor has signed the emergency bill that will allow bars in Maine to open early on St. Patrick Day, the emergency seems to be it falling on Sunday this year. As he has declared that he will hold all other bills hostage until he gets his way on a bill involving using the funds from the state alcohol contract and paying off the state debt to hospitals, this bill apparently was enough of an emergency that it overrides his tantrum on that topic.
I have always hated the American way of observing St. Patrick Day, getting drunk, having obnoxious "roasts" and otherwise doing anything but honoring St. Patrick's life, in the slim detail we know that in. The American observance would be more fitting for a day dedicated to his foe, Coroticus, who he excommunicated , than the modest "unlearned sinner" he more than once described himself to be.
Patrick had been enslaved in Ireland for six years before he escaped and returned home where he studied to become a priest. His intention was to return to convert the Irish to Christianity. From his experience of slavery he became among the first, if not the actual first, effective abolitionist, convincing the Irish to give up slavery. Only that would make him an important figure in the history of civil rights and justice, earning him veneration. That is the tradition of St. Patrick that is real and not based in absurd myths, that is what is worth remembering about him. St. Patrick day as a day of anti-slavery activity is something I could get behind with the greatest enthusiasm.
St. Patrick Day, American style, is a celebration of the opposite. I've written before about my brother dying from alcoholism, which makes all of the alcohol based revelry seem a bit other than jolly. As an atheist, my brother's most often resorted to excuse to not try Alcoholics Anonymous was his unwillingness to put himself in the hands of a "higher power". It is frequently echoed in the pseudo-leftist blogosphere when the topic of AA comes up. So while rejecting what he saw as slavery to a God he didn't believe in, he put himself in the hands of the ethanol molecule. He, as the disease took over him, became the devoted servant of alcohol, who couldn't get away from it. Driving to the liquor store to be there to join the others waiting in their cars for the 10:00 opening. Driving back to drink a half gallon of vodka sprawled on a couch in front of TV, almost every day for more than two years. I won't go into details about how he lived in those years except to say that it would match some of the worst descriptions in literature.
My brother liquidated his retirement in order to pay his bills and buy cheap vodka. My other brothers and I took that as a sign that he had resigned himself to dying before he would retire. He lost his job before he died. Alcohol enslaved him as completely as the worst slave holder could, it totally dominated his life, consuming him as it did. Having watched that as recently as the year before last, it kind of dominates my thinking on the early bar opening, the green beer, the drunken revelry and a bunch of Boston politicians obliged by dreary custom to do bad imitations of Dean Martin, making obnoxious jerks of themselves as they do. It's enough to make you ashamed of being Irish.
I have always hated the American way of observing St. Patrick Day, getting drunk, having obnoxious "roasts" and otherwise doing anything but honoring St. Patrick's life, in the slim detail we know that in. The American observance would be more fitting for a day dedicated to his foe, Coroticus, who he excommunicated , than the modest "unlearned sinner" he more than once described himself to be.
Patrick had been enslaved in Ireland for six years before he escaped and returned home where he studied to become a priest. His intention was to return to convert the Irish to Christianity. From his experience of slavery he became among the first, if not the actual first, effective abolitionist, convincing the Irish to give up slavery. Only that would make him an important figure in the history of civil rights and justice, earning him veneration. That is the tradition of St. Patrick that is real and not based in absurd myths, that is what is worth remembering about him. St. Patrick day as a day of anti-slavery activity is something I could get behind with the greatest enthusiasm.
St. Patrick Day, American style, is a celebration of the opposite. I've written before about my brother dying from alcoholism, which makes all of the alcohol based revelry seem a bit other than jolly. As an atheist, my brother's most often resorted to excuse to not try Alcoholics Anonymous was his unwillingness to put himself in the hands of a "higher power". It is frequently echoed in the pseudo-leftist blogosphere when the topic of AA comes up. So while rejecting what he saw as slavery to a God he didn't believe in, he put himself in the hands of the ethanol molecule. He, as the disease took over him, became the devoted servant of alcohol, who couldn't get away from it. Driving to the liquor store to be there to join the others waiting in their cars for the 10:00 opening. Driving back to drink a half gallon of vodka sprawled on a couch in front of TV, almost every day for more than two years. I won't go into details about how he lived in those years except to say that it would match some of the worst descriptions in literature.
My brother liquidated his retirement in order to pay his bills and buy cheap vodka. My other brothers and I took that as a sign that he had resigned himself to dying before he would retire. He lost his job before he died. Alcohol enslaved him as completely as the worst slave holder could, it totally dominated his life, consuming him as it did. Having watched that as recently as the year before last, it kind of dominates my thinking on the early bar opening, the green beer, the drunken revelry and a bunch of Boston politicians obliged by dreary custom to do bad imitations of Dean Martin, making obnoxious jerks of themselves as they do. It's enough to make you ashamed of being Irish.
Friday, March 15, 2013
Deep Night: Art Tatum
Art Tatum Piano
Buddy DeFranco Clarinet
Red Callender Bass
Bill Douglass Drums
Buddy DeFranco Clarinet
Red Callender Bass
Bill Douglass Drums
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
I know You're There
I'm curious to know who it is who reads these posts. I know someone does, having gotten the occasional e-mail (thinkingcriminal@gmail.com), and even the occasional comment.
Last week I looked at the blog stats, something I'd sworn to never do and was surprised to see I do really get readers. As I don't have the kind of blog that has a commenting community and some of my pieces are kind of long and involved, I'm wondering who reads it and what they get from it. Whether or not I find out, it probably won't change what gets posted, I usually write things based on what seems important that isn't covered elsewhere. Often it's a way for me to figure things out. There isn't anything like putting your thoughts down and reviewing them to bring your thinking into some kind of order.
Whoever you are, I hope you're finding it worth while to read these things. It's got to feel like work, at times. Sorry for the editing. I'm not very good at that.
Last week I looked at the blog stats, something I'd sworn to never do and was surprised to see I do really get readers. As I don't have the kind of blog that has a commenting community and some of my pieces are kind of long and involved, I'm wondering who reads it and what they get from it. Whether or not I find out, it probably won't change what gets posted, I usually write things based on what seems important that isn't covered elsewhere. Often it's a way for me to figure things out. There isn't anything like putting your thoughts down and reviewing them to bring your thinking into some kind of order.
Whoever you are, I hope you're finding it worth while to read these things. It's got to feel like work, at times. Sorry for the editing. I'm not very good at that.
Pope Francis
Know nothing about him, not unlike those on the blogs who are saying the typical stuff you'd expect. Really, talk about Catholics and the self-congratulating liberals all turn into Ian Paisleys and Bob Joneses.
I'm not expecting great changes, which you weren't going to get from this crop of cardinals. Not unless it turns out that he surprises them, perhaps himself, as well. Like that he's gone with Francis, one of the most justly loved saints. Like that he ditched so many of the trappings of office when he was cardinal. That could bode well. Especially like that he's not a Vatican insider hack. I'm especially glad he's not Dolan.
Anything better than worse than Ratzinger is on the way up. They say he's got some pastoral interest, which would be different. If he allowed married men to be ordained it would probably be about as radical as any probability. Will he? Who knows? They didn't expect John XXIII to change much. I expected great things from John Paul I.
I'm not expecting great changes, which you weren't going to get from this crop of cardinals. Not unless it turns out that he surprises them, perhaps himself, as well. Like that he's gone with Francis, one of the most justly loved saints. Like that he ditched so many of the trappings of office when he was cardinal. That could bode well. Especially like that he's not a Vatican insider hack. I'm especially glad he's not Dolan.
Anything better than worse than Ratzinger is on the way up. They say he's got some pastoral interest, which would be different. If he allowed married men to be ordained it would probably be about as radical as any probability. Will he? Who knows? They didn't expect John XXIII to change much. I expected great things from John Paul I.
Marc Cary's Focus Trio - Minor March
Having a really hard time getting going today. This should fix it
NPR IS Pushing The Six-Word Story Bunkum
The Real Story Behind Hemingway's Famous Story
Parents bought too many shoes, outgrown.
Critique of The Six-Word Story Game
Hemingway is overrated Tolstoy is not.
Update:
On NPR's Hemingway Haul Out Today Reheard In The Third Hour
Reporting's expensive. Recycle Hemingway's six-word, again.
Freudian Postscript:
Six words? Like "six-shooter"? Manhood failed?
Parents bought too many shoes, outgrown.
Critique of The Six-Word Story Game
Hemingway is overrated Tolstoy is not.
Update:
On NPR's Hemingway Haul Out Today Reheard In The Third Hour
Reporting's expensive. Recycle Hemingway's six-word, again.
Freudian Postscript:
Six words? Like "six-shooter"? Manhood failed?
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
A Quiet Kid Observed At A Distance
September, on the fresh playground looking at the weeds, till those are ground underfoot, then just walking around, master of camouflage, unseen, standing beside his body.
Then on the cold, bright October, in the smoky, low, angled morning sunlight, brisk in the morning wind, a quickened face sparked by fall.
Grey afternoons as the dark clouds pass by, smoke in the papery sky, walking on the sidewalks, blown with clean air. Contained, could be thinking of anything. You easily imagine it’s something good. Always alone. Confidence to move in the town based in his experience that he is invisible.
How many late afternoons sitting in the dry office, waiting for a ride. So familiar the old oak office chairs aren't less remarkable with this kid sitting in one, doing homework again. Sometimes while mid-problem, with pencil in hand, looking at the page to balance the equation, as if time rests for the consideration, then checks the work with quick confidence. Goes on to the next one. Office brat, though not a brat. Liked well enough. Once in a while someone notices and smiles at the serious face.
Home, there’s an older brother to live up to, they seem to like each other. A good kid, a loner you worry about from time to time. But who you expect will turn out all right. You hope so.
c. 1978 first published on Echidne of the Snakes
Monday, March 11, 2013
Note to my readers
I'm going to take a few days off. I'm finding dealing with the death of my husband difficult and need some time away from research. Please feel free to read my archive.
Update: Since someone asked, it was his sister who said that I should say he was my husband since we were together for a lot longer than a lot of straight married couples. I like what she said so I will.
Update: Since someone asked, it was his sister who said that I should say he was my husband since we were together for a lot longer than a lot of straight married couples. I like what she said so I will.
Answer To An E-mail
You will really know you're over a blog you used to frequent when someone e-mails you to tell you they're talking about you and you don't care enough to hit the link. I don't care. Hope you're well and doing something worthwhile with your free time. I have been.
yours truly,
AM
Sunday, March 10, 2013
"staunchly supportive despite all" The New York Times Review of Books Review of Mother Country
In the days as the Fukushima reactors were melting down, there were a number of blog fights on the topic at Eschaton blog, where I hung out quite a lot. I was involved on the anti-nuclear side. One of the the pro-nuclear antagonists, and in his case that word is a massive understatement, was one, Chris Tucker, a typical example of the frequently encountered angry atheist whose religion is scientism. Some of us brought citations from The Union of Concerned Scientists, George Kistiakowsky, other specialists I don't specifically remember to the argument. Tucker brought an xkcd cartoon asserting that the dilution of nuclear pollution in the general, background radiation, make it innocuous, harmless. As an aside, I wish I had ten bucks for every time some college educated disciple of scientism had turned to the authority of xkcd or the like to, as they believe, clinch an argument.
When I pointed out that the cartoonist included a disclaimer at the bottom that his drawing shouldn't be mistaken as a serious reference, Tucker, who was prone to enraged tantrums, had one. He had a number of them over the coming weeks at a number of us, as our predictions of meltdowns and pollution became lines in news stories, stories that were clearly pushing a nuclear industry line of minimization of the risks of what many scientists, some of them prominent figures in nuclear science, warned of.
When I pointed out that the cartoonist included a disclaimer at the bottom that his drawing shouldn't be mistaken as a serious reference, Tucker, who was prone to enraged tantrums, had one. He had a number of them over the coming weeks at a number of us, as our predictions of meltdowns and pollution became lines in news stories, stories that were clearly pushing a nuclear industry line of minimization of the risks of what many scientists, some of them prominent figures in nuclear science, warned of.
Believing that the truth merely has to be true in order to justify telling it, I'm going to tell the rest of the story. It would probably be called out of bounds and, somehow, outrageous to note that in the weeks after that, Chris Tucker announced that he had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and that he was reported to have died after several months of reportedly drastic therapy, the modern medicine he expressed a rather bleak hope in. It will be seen as unseemly to note this outcome to his story, though I, for the life of me, can't understand what is unfair about noting the extreme coincidence and irony of him very possibly serving as an example of what we were talking about mere months before. I will tell it to stand in for those people who will die of thyroid and other cancer deaths, the people who ingested or inhaled nuclear materials from the Fukushima meltdowns and will die of it, many of whom didn't promote nuclear energy on a leftish blog, sitting on North America as the Fukushima reactors were melting down, as it were, before our eyes, remotely.
-----------
The point that anyone can know enough about plutonium so as to know better than to pour it into the ocean is sufficient to support the case against doing that. The fact is that even scientists have to rely on nontechnical literature to inform them of things their professional competence doesn't prepare them to understand. The decisions of voters depend on that kind of information. That plutonium is, in fact, being pumped into the environment isn't denied by Perutz and other nuclear industry apologists, they have to rely on denying the science that indicates it is dangerous. As Robinson pointed out in her reply to his review:
Mr. Perutz’s argument, an argument which this eminent man clearly intends as a daunting and chastening demonstration of the scientific mind in action, suggests that scientific discourse is not what it claims to be, or what we must all wish it were. His essential tactic is to dissociate radiation from cancer and environmental damage, and to imply that an unsavory mix of hysteria and ignorance is the whole cause of my indignation.
and later:
And look at what Mr. Perutz concedes: Britain reprocesses wastes from its own and foreign civil reactors, and, in the course of producing plutonium, flushes plutonium into the sea, where a quarter ton of it has now accumulated. Plutonium and caesium 137, the only materials Mr. Perutz chooses to talk about in any detail, “were expected” to have no harmful effect because one is insoluble and the other highly soluble in water. After thirty long years these expectations were at last found to have been disappointed—there is plutonium in the surf and the wind, plutonium is highly concentrated in fish and shellfish, which people are allowed to eat. Children in the region of the plant develop leukemia at a rate ten times the national average. A government committee has considered that exposure to plutonium is a “conceivable explanation.” The government concealed information about the Windscale fire in 1957. The factories at Sellafield have produced misleading information about their discharges. When radioactive effluent is found on the coast, the government must be told to warn the public and to clean it up. The plant is shoddily built and technically primitive, characterized by “scandalous malpractices” which have shaken public confidence. The functioning of the plant through its whole history has been based on naive assumptions about the “harmful biological effects of radiation and the possible buildup of radionuclides in living creatures.”
------
As can be said of religion, there really is not a single thing that is "science" about which you can make accurate, unconditional universal statements. Science discovers good and useful things that enhance and extend life, it informs us of how we could try to save environments and species and, in fact, our own species. It produces a lot of information which is mainly valuable because it is fun instead of useful for anything. It also produces weapons, biological, chemical, bullets and bombs of increased killing power, it produces oil wells, pumping secret poisons to frack for gas and environmental toxins that probably will be bemoaned in the same media that is promoting them. What science has given to us with one hand it has taken, and more so, with the other. When any criticism is made of science, as in all professions, there is a circling of the wagons and they blast away at their critics with everything they've got. Much of that effect is enhanced by massive funding of public relations by the industries and the governments that the malignant science is produced for.
In order to kill a book dealing with a technical, scientific or scholarly topic, one of the most effective things is to give it a general air of unreliability with the casual, slightly informed reader who would likely pick it up or buy it. The kind of person who reads The New York Review. A bad review of the kind noted above can kill a book in that way. I think reviewers know that they have that power. They may not with movies or sensational garbage that can flourish on bad reviews, but for a serious book on a serious topic, which would never be likely to make any best sellers list, that power is a serious impediment to our intellectual life. In the case of this book, it was a danger to the ability of an informed people to make political decisions and the lives of many millions of people.
* As unsuccessfully resorted to most infamously and, luckily, ineffectively, by David Irving.
Update: After trying to justify those broken lines in the text a number of times, trying to tease out the HTML to fix them, I'm giving up. Please excuse the spaces.
-----------
I mentioned the New York Times review of Mother Country in my post yesterday. It was one of the cases when that most august of book reviews assigned someone with a clear, ideological agenda against the subject of the book to review it. Typical of scientists who want to shift attention from the argument, Max Perutz, began his review by putting the case Marilynne Robinson made against the Sellafield operation which was intentionally and knowingly and openly pumping nuclear wastes, including plutonium, into the ocean.
Here in Britain we are all criminals: guilty of conniving at a crime against humanity committed by a government that is polluting the Irish Sea, the British Isles, the entire globe with the radioactive discharges from its nuclear plants at Sellafield, a village in northwest England, on the Irish Sea.
Just to start, Perutz clearly lied about what the book said. As I've shown this past week, in one of the most detailed indictments ever given in a book of the type, Marilynne Robinson took enormous care to show that the large majority of Britains were innocent of the pathological indifference and selfishness that allowed the Sellafield plant. Even if the New York Times reviewer and eminent scientist, Max Perutz, had entirely neglected to read the long first section of the book, the second section that deals with Sellafield is largely concerned with showing how it was the British people, themselves, who were the first and most numerous victims of the criminal acts of the British government and the industrial-scientific elite which lied to them and duped them.
Having attempted to achieve the discrediting of the book by absurd exaggeration, Perutz immediately went in for the kill by noting that Robinson was a novelist, as he continues to mischaracterize a very detailed and carefully stated case.
According to Marilynne Robinson, the author of the novel House-keeping and now of the book under review, “The earth has been under nuclear attack [from Sellafield] for almost half a century.” This book is aflame with indignation at the diabolical practices of the British Atomic Energy Authority, at the irresponsibility of our National Radiological Protection Board, at the careless indifference of our venal members of Parliament and of the British public, at the American press for failing to warn unsuspecting tourists of the deadly dangers threatening their health if they set foot on these poisoned isles, and the American government for wasting its armed forces on their protection.
The effrontery of non-scientists in questioning what scientists do is a common and frequent resort in these kinds of confrontations. Especially, but not exclusively, those scientists with a financial and professional interest, what for most of us constitutes a likely impeaching SELF-INTEREST. It is interesting to note that a short review in arts section of The Times, the editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Len Ackland noted the same passage to an entirely different tone:
Sellafield, located in Cumbria on the northwest coast of England, is the sprawling industrial complex where Britain produces deadly plutonium for war and for profit. In the process the Irish Sea has been turned into a radioactive cesspool, untold damage has been inflicted on the human and natural environment. ''The earth has been under nuclear attack for almost half a century,'' in Ms. Robinson's words. She seeks to expose why this outrage has been allowed to happen.
I will take a step into the present to point out that even according to the British government, Sellafield today is the ongoing and developing disaster that Mother Country warned of almost a quarter of a century ago. Since it is part of Perutz's discrediting operation to fault the book for concentrating on Sellafield, citing that concentration on that outrage instead of on the American sites that were also releasing nuclear pollution, I will point out, in passing, that in the American context, the cult of national security could stand in place of the British class system in providing cover for the same kind of outrageous, criminal behavior in the United States. History seems to be vindicating the case Marilynne Robinson made in a way that it hasn't Perutz's review, it is also vindicating those who have been making similar arguments about the Hanford and other sites, to a similar reaction presented in the name of science, here.
Perutz's hatchet job on Mother Country, appearing in the extremely influential New York Times Review of Books, probably had a similar effect on its suppression that the lawsuit did in Britain. Being the land of the First Amendment, the means of suppression here take a peculiarly American form and a bad review in the NYTRoB probably is more effective than the suppressive British libel law* in achieving that end.
I will grant to the Review of Books that they published a response by Marilynne Robinson, with a reply by Perutz, and further exchanges with other letter writers. One by David J. Brenner, Ph. D.
Assistant Professor Center for Radiological Research Department of Radiation Oncology
Columbia University, New York City was a succinct refutation of Perutz's major scientific assertions in the review, claims related to the xkcd cartoon mentioned above. Since, as published, his letter ends in ellipsis, it makes you wonder what else he had to say which the NYTRB didn't think was fit to print. A further letter from Jay M. Gould, Director, Radiation and Public Health
Project, United Church of Christ, pointed out further problems with the pro-nuclear case Perutz made. All of those and Perutz's responses are still worth reading.
Here in Britain we are all criminals: guilty of conniving at a crime against humanity committed by a government that is polluting the Irish Sea, the British Isles, the entire globe with the radioactive discharges from its nuclear plants at Sellafield, a village in northwest England, on the Irish Sea.
Just to start, Perutz clearly lied about what the book said. As I've shown this past week, in one of the most detailed indictments ever given in a book of the type, Marilynne Robinson took enormous care to show that the large majority of Britains were innocent of the pathological indifference and selfishness that allowed the Sellafield plant. Even if the New York Times reviewer and eminent scientist, Max Perutz, had entirely neglected to read the long first section of the book, the second section that deals with Sellafield is largely concerned with showing how it was the British people, themselves, who were the first and most numerous victims of the criminal acts of the British government and the industrial-scientific elite which lied to them and duped them.
Having attempted to achieve the discrediting of the book by absurd exaggeration, Perutz immediately went in for the kill by noting that Robinson was a novelist, as he continues to mischaracterize a very detailed and carefully stated case.
According to Marilynne Robinson, the author of the novel House-keeping and now of the book under review, “The earth has been under nuclear attack [from Sellafield] for almost half a century.” This book is aflame with indignation at the diabolical practices of the British Atomic Energy Authority, at the irresponsibility of our National Radiological Protection Board, at the careless indifference of our venal members of Parliament and of the British public, at the American press for failing to warn unsuspecting tourists of the deadly dangers threatening their health if they set foot on these poisoned isles, and the American government for wasting its armed forces on their protection.
The effrontery of non-scientists in questioning what scientists do is a common and frequent resort in these kinds of confrontations. Especially, but not exclusively, those scientists with a financial and professional interest, what for most of us constitutes a likely impeaching SELF-INTEREST. It is interesting to note that a short review in arts section of The Times, the editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Len Ackland noted the same passage to an entirely different tone:
Sellafield, located in Cumbria on the northwest coast of England, is the sprawling industrial complex where Britain produces deadly plutonium for war and for profit. In the process the Irish Sea has been turned into a radioactive cesspool, untold damage has been inflicted on the human and natural environment. ''The earth has been under nuclear attack for almost half a century,'' in Ms. Robinson's words. She seeks to expose why this outrage has been allowed to happen.
I will take a step into the present to point out that even according to the British government, Sellafield today is the ongoing and developing disaster that Mother Country warned of almost a quarter of a century ago. Since it is part of Perutz's discrediting operation to fault the book for concentrating on Sellafield, citing that concentration on that outrage instead of on the American sites that were also releasing nuclear pollution, I will point out, in passing, that in the American context, the cult of national security could stand in place of the British class system in providing cover for the same kind of outrageous, criminal behavior in the United States. History seems to be vindicating the case Marilynne Robinson made in a way that it hasn't Perutz's review, it is also vindicating those who have been making similar arguments about the Hanford and other sites, to a similar reaction presented in the name of science, here.
Perutz's hatchet job on Mother Country, appearing in the extremely influential New York Times Review of Books, probably had a similar effect on its suppression that the lawsuit did in Britain. Being the land of the First Amendment, the means of suppression here take a peculiarly American form and a bad review in the NYTRoB probably is more effective than the suppressive British libel law* in achieving that end.
I will grant to the Review of Books that they published a response by Marilynne Robinson, with a reply by Perutz, and further exchanges with other letter writers. One by David J. Brenner, Ph. D.
Assistant Professor Center for Radiological Research Department of Radiation Oncology
Columbia University, New York City was a succinct refutation of Perutz's major scientific assertions in the review, claims related to the xkcd cartoon mentioned above. Since, as published, his letter ends in ellipsis, it makes you wonder what else he had to say which the NYTRB didn't think was fit to print. A further letter from Jay M. Gould, Director, Radiation and Public Health
Project, United Church of Christ, pointed out further problems with the pro-nuclear case Perutz made. All of those and Perutz's responses are still worth reading.
I suspect fewer people read the exchanges than read the original review and that those had far less of an influence in the reception of the book by the audience for such books. The role that the review had in the de facto suppression of what is an important book is worth considering. The Review, as all other influential book reviewing bodies, at times, assigns books to people with a known bias, as it did in this case. I don't believe that assignment isn't done without an intention.
Marilynne Robinson was clearly aware that her status as a lay person instead of within the hierarchy of science would be used against her. She was clearly aware that her status as a novelist would be used against her. In the first paragraphs dealing directly with Sellafield she made what is as clearly true a case as possible justifying her book:
Having come finally to my subject, Sellafield, I am forced to confront the epic scale of my narrative. My inability to invoke a suitable muse is really my only deficiency in treating this great subject. To the objection that I know very little about plutonium, I can reply that I know better than to pour it into the environment. On these grounds alone I can hope the British nuclear establishment will learn something from my work, so that I may repay them for the insights they have given me into the nature and prospects of humankind.
The point that anyone can know enough about plutonium so as to know better than to pour it into the ocean is sufficient to support the case against doing that. The fact is that even scientists have to rely on nontechnical literature to inform them of things their professional competence doesn't prepare them to understand. The decisions of voters depend on that kind of information. That plutonium is, in fact, being pumped into the environment isn't denied by Perutz and other nuclear industry apologists, they have to rely on denying the science that indicates it is dangerous. As Robinson pointed out in her reply to his review:
Mr. Perutz’s argument, an argument which this eminent man clearly intends as a daunting and chastening demonstration of the scientific mind in action, suggests that scientific discourse is not what it claims to be, or what we must all wish it were. His essential tactic is to dissociate radiation from cancer and environmental damage, and to imply that an unsavory mix of hysteria and ignorance is the whole cause of my indignation.
and later:
And look at what Mr. Perutz concedes: Britain reprocesses wastes from its own and foreign civil reactors, and, in the course of producing plutonium, flushes plutonium into the sea, where a quarter ton of it has now accumulated. Plutonium and caesium 137, the only materials Mr. Perutz chooses to talk about in any detail, “were expected” to have no harmful effect because one is insoluble and the other highly soluble in water. After thirty long years these expectations were at last found to have been disappointed—there is plutonium in the surf and the wind, plutonium is highly concentrated in fish and shellfish, which people are allowed to eat. Children in the region of the plant develop leukemia at a rate ten times the national average. A government committee has considered that exposure to plutonium is a “conceivable explanation.” The government concealed information about the Windscale fire in 1957. The factories at Sellafield have produced misleading information about their discharges. When radioactive effluent is found on the coast, the government must be told to warn the public and to clean it up. The plant is shoddily built and technically primitive, characterized by “scandalous malpractices” which have shaken public confidence. The functioning of the plant through its whole history has been based on naive assumptions about the “harmful biological effects of radiation and the possible buildup of radionuclides in living creatures.”
------
As can be said of religion, there really is not a single thing that is "science" about which you can make accurate, unconditional universal statements. Science discovers good and useful things that enhance and extend life, it informs us of how we could try to save environments and species and, in fact, our own species. It produces a lot of information which is mainly valuable because it is fun instead of useful for anything. It also produces weapons, biological, chemical, bullets and bombs of increased killing power, it produces oil wells, pumping secret poisons to frack for gas and environmental toxins that probably will be bemoaned in the same media that is promoting them. What science has given to us with one hand it has taken, and more so, with the other. When any criticism is made of science, as in all professions, there is a circling of the wagons and they blast away at their critics with everything they've got. Much of that effect is enhanced by massive funding of public relations by the industries and the governments that the malignant science is produced for.
In order to kill a book dealing with a technical, scientific or scholarly topic, one of the most effective things is to give it a general air of unreliability with the casual, slightly informed reader who would likely pick it up or buy it. The kind of person who reads The New York Review. A bad review of the kind noted above can kill a book in that way. I think reviewers know that they have that power. They may not with movies or sensational garbage that can flourish on bad reviews, but for a serious book on a serious topic, which would never be likely to make any best sellers list, that power is a serious impediment to our intellectual life. In the case of this book, it was a danger to the ability of an informed people to make political decisions and the lives of many millions of people.
* As unsuccessfully resorted to most infamously and, luckily, ineffectively, by David Irving.
Update: After trying to justify those broken lines in the text a number of times, trying to tease out the HTML to fix them, I'm giving up. Please excuse the spaces.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
The Third Option Has To Be Revived
a society based upon individual autonomy, to be achieved through policies of government that by act or omission enhance the specific, tangible material well-being of individual people, by creating or protecting conditions of life that enhance vigor and morale. These include education, fair wages, wholesome food and water, and reasonable hope for one's children
In several of my recent posts I've rejected the nearly ubiquitously political analysis that places fascism and Marxism as polar opposites on a line of political identity, calling to attention the numbers of corpses which those have both produced. You would think that mountains of murdered humans, numbering into the tens of millions would be the predominant feature of governments that produce them, overshadowing any merely theoretical assertions put forward as to intentions and motivations.
But in the academic analyses of political theory, it's the would be scientific abstractions and asserted intentions - even less often realized than under democracy - that rule the analysis. Our academic habits lead us to look past the carnage that governments do to something that is deemed to be more important in judging them. I think in that oversight there is a lot to be learned about the limited value of academic theory as compared to real life and practical politics. I proposed that real liberalism, that real democracy is characterized by its rejection of murder, by war, intention, neglect or mere indifference or it is not democracy in any meaningful way. A real democracy would include real and effective measures to prevent industrial murder of individuals through pollution, selling dangerous, poisoned and infected drugs and anything else which leads to death by profit.
Marilynne Robinson's third option outlined by her in the words above seems to be to be a far better description of the polar opposite of fascism and Marxism. If it were to be turned into a formula, I would add the word "equality" to it because without equality the equations will always tip to the side with more power and more money, though it is clear that equality is a given in her statement. The line of political identity should be based, first and always, on whether the results are of more people standing alive and well in an environment that can sustain life or people dying in misery in a depleted, poisoned, destroyed environment that risks extinction. Both fascism and Marxism, as practiced, are on an extreme opposite end of that from the best results of democracy. The line shouldn't be thought of as a segment ending at any status quo which has ever existed or which has been imagined by academic scribblers but of a progressive movement in the direction of equality, well being, of the moral obligation to respect the inherent rights of all people and the well being of the environment, which will be a challenge enough to match human abilities to partially achieve it.
The great question in the United States in 2013 is the extent to which Barack Obama and the congress will save our endangered democracy, our great liberal tradition of movement towards Marilynne Robinson's formulation of good government, and, in fact, the very basis of human life on our planet. The signs aren't good. Barack Obama has appointed a series of treasury and economic officials and an Attorney General whose every impulse is to the protection and promotion of oligarchy. His choices in replacing Geithner and Summers have confirmed suspicions that is what he intended to do. His continued support for Eric Holder and his Department of Justice, encode Holder's reluctance to challenge the enormous banks and the enormous fortune which are becoming the de facto government of the United States, to an extent they haven't since the most corrupt periods of our history.
The austerity which is presented by Barack Obama, as well as the majority in the congress and by the media, as the only obvious course in an economy in which a tiny but growing number of billionaires confiscate the largest, by far, percentage of the wealth produced by labor, amassing insanely huge fortunes in legalized theft on a scale that would make the ancient Roman super rich envious. There is no austerity at the top, that is left for the overwhelming majority of The People. To a great extent this has been accomplished through transferring jobs to foreign populations living under despotic governments, without real political rights or the ability to organize to demand their rights. Free trade has produced the dream of all aristocrats, the ability to amass wealth without having to have to deal with the laborers who produce that wealth. The mass of the American people are superfluous to the huge banks except as needed to bail them out when their plunder has been excessively undisciplined. The spectacle of nearly complete housing developments being torn down, never lived in, of houses repossessed to be resold at a loss or to be allowed to rot unoccupied, is a good example of the perversion of an oligarchic economy funded by the government with taxes payed by people whose ability to pay is diminished by the economic system they live under. Whatever relief that the government has provided to the destitute and those just above them is what the allegedly liberal government in office proposes to put on the chopping block in order to rescue the situation.
Barack Obama's economic policies are more like those of the opponents of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal than they have been any other Democratic president since Cleveland during the gilded age. He doesn't seem to be able to imagine really disturbing the tranquility of the super rich, the mega banks, the academic and media mouthpieces that they fund or the legal hacks who they have funded. In the fifth year of his presidency, for him to put the legacies of Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson on the cutting table while presiding over the continued enrichment of the already obscenely filthy rich, made legally impune by the disinclination of his Attorney General to prosecute, leads one to suspect he doesn't intend to do anything but participate in the destruction of that American political option that Robinson points out.
-------------------------------
Marilynne Robinson cites Lincoln's famous statement of a black woman's absolutely equal right to the bread that she earns by her own hand. A fuller quote will show that it was an extremely radical statement for his day, while one with troubling content for us:
Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.
In a statement, in answer to one of the typical assertions of racism, an accusation that he wanted to "mix the races" by asserting their equality, he begins by asserting agreement, stating that black women were "in some respects" "certainly not my equal." He did that, plainly, to diffuse what would have been a politically untenable idea in the 1850s, interracial marriage. Any discomfort we have to his assertion of inequality is due to our quite different thinking and a changed world. But Lincoln then turned the tables to say that in the crucial matter under discussion, economic justice, she was absolutely equal to all others by virtue of her having produced wealth.
Mary Frances Berry, the most prominent member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in its history among the best experts on civil rights as they really are in real life, wrote in 1980 about this and related passages to show how Lincoln advanced equality over the course of two of the most troubled decades of U.S. history.
Politicians in their speeches, writings, and actions must, as Kansas Senator Nancy Kassebaum recently stated, "strike the proper balance between a naive idealism and a craven pragmatism." Abraham Lincoln was a politician who understood that political action is compromise. But the highest calling of the expert—successful—politician is making compromise creative and not corruptive. It is proper that successful politicians have always wanted to be both popular and political. Being popular is easier; it is accomplished by telling audiences what they want to hear—something that touches a responsive chord because it is consonant with their own personal experiences and beliefs. Being political is more difficult. It requires telling people what the politician wants them to hear in a way that they will be inspired to think differently and more sensitively about things. As we consider Lincoln, the successful leader and politician, dealing with the civil rights of Negroes, let us ask two questions. How much did he tell people what they wanted to hear, and how much did he give them a new sense of direction? Did he strike a proper balance between idealism and pragmatism? I believe he did.
Since the matter is about politics, it is inevitably caught up in what was currently possible and achievable, the question is moving towards an ideal, not the impotent insistence on making it real immediately.
For the first years of the Obama administration it was still possible to suspect that he was trying to play some kind of chess game to move things forward, in the face of a Republican party, a Republican majority on the Supreme and other courts, and a corporate media which used the most primitive forms of racism to destroy him and his administration. It was possible to believe, even with Obama's obvious intellectual brilliance, that he was playing a weak hand in which he had to court and not alienate the very corporations and billionaires he could win over in order to make any progress at all. It has been a given since his election that his opponents would use racism as a tool to organize and to fight him, and they have. It was a given that they would use everything they threw down to impede and destroy President Carter and Clinton and even more.
As his first term continued, as he refused to use his position to force the Democratic Senate to move his own agenda, as his and Harry Reid's dithering left hundreds of bills the Democrats in the House passed to die, as he lost the House in 2010 and he faced an explicitly threatened, oligarchy financed, right wing insurrection, he continued on in the same way. Like Bill Clinton in 1996, Barack Obama's political luck in reelection was that Republicans put up an extremely bad candidate who a majority of voters rejected. Like his policies and appointments, the best thing that can be said for him was that the alternative was demonstrably worse on most issues, equally bad on others.
What Barack Obama and his administration has done so far isn't even adequate.
In order to save democracy, in order to save the middle class, in order to move things as entirely important as progress in halting global warming, more than what Barack Obama has done is necessary. His political gaming hasn't been to move things forward, when possible, it has been to move it to a slightly modified status quo. That new status quo will not allow even his signature achievement, a moderate, corporate friendly health care expansion, to remain as a good for the large majority of The People. As even Adam Smith acknowledged, private capital will always seek ways to extract money wherever they can. His health care system will be plundered as every other marginal attempt at reform has been in the absence of an effective countering force in government.
In all of this I see the erection of peculiarly American forms and, more importantly, cultural and intellectual thinking that are documented in Mother Country. That is why it is such an important essay, that is why it could not be allowed to become widely read. What the American oligarchy wishes to destroy, it, first, mocks, second prints a negative review of in the New York Times, thirdly merely marginalizes and ignores.
_______
I have asked some of my friends who consume enormous amounts of British literature and its history and culture as presented by the BBC and others who export the stuff to America if they'd ever heard of the Poor Law or the New Poor Law mentioned in any of those. Not a single one of those educated Anglophiles, devoted to all that is British, had, that they could recall.
Since the provisions of the Poor Law were a massive presence in the life of most of those in England and then Britain, that omission is, in itself, extraordinarily important to understand. In that clear effort to ignore or forget a major atrocity in the history of one of the major world powers, to suppress mention of it, we see a model for the imposed ignorance of the American People since the introduction of TV.
One of the most fondly, frequently recycled stories in the American media is how ignorant Americans are of their government, the world, history, etc. Those media corporations were given rights under the Bill of Rights in exchange for them informing The People, the only legitimizing force behind government and, in fact, the very constitution, so they could make informed choices. To have them mock the ignorance of The People, something that is the result of them reneging on their part of the deal contained in the First Amendment, should be intolerable. It would certainly be an intolerable situation to real American style liberals, who would see that the real good, an informed people governing themselves, as at least as important as the corporate right. A real liberal would see press freedom as an inferior right granted to artificial corporations as opposed to the right of that informed people to self-government. But liberals have been duped out of valuing things of real value in favor of entertainment. I blame PBS, the BBC, and the other media corporations for that as much as I do overtly commercial networks. I certainly blame them for promoting the likes of Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, the members of the corrupt D.C. based media and the Anglophile propaganda that has contributed in the corruption of the American common consensus, such as it is, in their audiences.
In several of my recent posts I've rejected the nearly ubiquitously political analysis that places fascism and Marxism as polar opposites on a line of political identity, calling to attention the numbers of corpses which those have both produced. You would think that mountains of murdered humans, numbering into the tens of millions would be the predominant feature of governments that produce them, overshadowing any merely theoretical assertions put forward as to intentions and motivations.
But in the academic analyses of political theory, it's the would be scientific abstractions and asserted intentions - even less often realized than under democracy - that rule the analysis. Our academic habits lead us to look past the carnage that governments do to something that is deemed to be more important in judging them. I think in that oversight there is a lot to be learned about the limited value of academic theory as compared to real life and practical politics. I proposed that real liberalism, that real democracy is characterized by its rejection of murder, by war, intention, neglect or mere indifference or it is not democracy in any meaningful way. A real democracy would include real and effective measures to prevent industrial murder of individuals through pollution, selling dangerous, poisoned and infected drugs and anything else which leads to death by profit.
Marilynne Robinson's third option outlined by her in the words above seems to be to be a far better description of the polar opposite of fascism and Marxism. If it were to be turned into a formula, I would add the word "equality" to it because without equality the equations will always tip to the side with more power and more money, though it is clear that equality is a given in her statement. The line of political identity should be based, first and always, on whether the results are of more people standing alive and well in an environment that can sustain life or people dying in misery in a depleted, poisoned, destroyed environment that risks extinction. Both fascism and Marxism, as practiced, are on an extreme opposite end of that from the best results of democracy. The line shouldn't be thought of as a segment ending at any status quo which has ever existed or which has been imagined by academic scribblers but of a progressive movement in the direction of equality, well being, of the moral obligation to respect the inherent rights of all people and the well being of the environment, which will be a challenge enough to match human abilities to partially achieve it.
The great question in the United States in 2013 is the extent to which Barack Obama and the congress will save our endangered democracy, our great liberal tradition of movement towards Marilynne Robinson's formulation of good government, and, in fact, the very basis of human life on our planet. The signs aren't good. Barack Obama has appointed a series of treasury and economic officials and an Attorney General whose every impulse is to the protection and promotion of oligarchy. His choices in replacing Geithner and Summers have confirmed suspicions that is what he intended to do. His continued support for Eric Holder and his Department of Justice, encode Holder's reluctance to challenge the enormous banks and the enormous fortune which are becoming the de facto government of the United States, to an extent they haven't since the most corrupt periods of our history.
The austerity which is presented by Barack Obama, as well as the majority in the congress and by the media, as the only obvious course in an economy in which a tiny but growing number of billionaires confiscate the largest, by far, percentage of the wealth produced by labor, amassing insanely huge fortunes in legalized theft on a scale that would make the ancient Roman super rich envious. There is no austerity at the top, that is left for the overwhelming majority of The People. To a great extent this has been accomplished through transferring jobs to foreign populations living under despotic governments, without real political rights or the ability to organize to demand their rights. Free trade has produced the dream of all aristocrats, the ability to amass wealth without having to have to deal with the laborers who produce that wealth. The mass of the American people are superfluous to the huge banks except as needed to bail them out when their plunder has been excessively undisciplined. The spectacle of nearly complete housing developments being torn down, never lived in, of houses repossessed to be resold at a loss or to be allowed to rot unoccupied, is a good example of the perversion of an oligarchic economy funded by the government with taxes payed by people whose ability to pay is diminished by the economic system they live under. Whatever relief that the government has provided to the destitute and those just above them is what the allegedly liberal government in office proposes to put on the chopping block in order to rescue the situation.
Barack Obama's economic policies are more like those of the opponents of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal than they have been any other Democratic president since Cleveland during the gilded age. He doesn't seem to be able to imagine really disturbing the tranquility of the super rich, the mega banks, the academic and media mouthpieces that they fund or the legal hacks who they have funded. In the fifth year of his presidency, for him to put the legacies of Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson on the cutting table while presiding over the continued enrichment of the already obscenely filthy rich, made legally impune by the disinclination of his Attorney General to prosecute, leads one to suspect he doesn't intend to do anything but participate in the destruction of that American political option that Robinson points out.
-------------------------------
Marilynne Robinson cites Lincoln's famous statement of a black woman's absolutely equal right to the bread that she earns by her own hand. A fuller quote will show that it was an extremely radical statement for his day, while one with troubling content for us:
Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.
In a statement, in answer to one of the typical assertions of racism, an accusation that he wanted to "mix the races" by asserting their equality, he begins by asserting agreement, stating that black women were "in some respects" "certainly not my equal." He did that, plainly, to diffuse what would have been a politically untenable idea in the 1850s, interracial marriage. Any discomfort we have to his assertion of inequality is due to our quite different thinking and a changed world. But Lincoln then turned the tables to say that in the crucial matter under discussion, economic justice, she was absolutely equal to all others by virtue of her having produced wealth.
Mary Frances Berry, the most prominent member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in its history among the best experts on civil rights as they really are in real life, wrote in 1980 about this and related passages to show how Lincoln advanced equality over the course of two of the most troubled decades of U.S. history.
Politicians in their speeches, writings, and actions must, as Kansas Senator Nancy Kassebaum recently stated, "strike the proper balance between a naive idealism and a craven pragmatism." Abraham Lincoln was a politician who understood that political action is compromise. But the highest calling of the expert—successful—politician is making compromise creative and not corruptive. It is proper that successful politicians have always wanted to be both popular and political. Being popular is easier; it is accomplished by telling audiences what they want to hear—something that touches a responsive chord because it is consonant with their own personal experiences and beliefs. Being political is more difficult. It requires telling people what the politician wants them to hear in a way that they will be inspired to think differently and more sensitively about things. As we consider Lincoln, the successful leader and politician, dealing with the civil rights of Negroes, let us ask two questions. How much did he tell people what they wanted to hear, and how much did he give them a new sense of direction? Did he strike a proper balance between idealism and pragmatism? I believe he did.
Since the matter is about politics, it is inevitably caught up in what was currently possible and achievable, the question is moving towards an ideal, not the impotent insistence on making it real immediately.
For the first years of the Obama administration it was still possible to suspect that he was trying to play some kind of chess game to move things forward, in the face of a Republican party, a Republican majority on the Supreme and other courts, and a corporate media which used the most primitive forms of racism to destroy him and his administration. It was possible to believe, even with Obama's obvious intellectual brilliance, that he was playing a weak hand in which he had to court and not alienate the very corporations and billionaires he could win over in order to make any progress at all. It has been a given since his election that his opponents would use racism as a tool to organize and to fight him, and they have. It was a given that they would use everything they threw down to impede and destroy President Carter and Clinton and even more.
As his first term continued, as he refused to use his position to force the Democratic Senate to move his own agenda, as his and Harry Reid's dithering left hundreds of bills the Democrats in the House passed to die, as he lost the House in 2010 and he faced an explicitly threatened, oligarchy financed, right wing insurrection, he continued on in the same way. Like Bill Clinton in 1996, Barack Obama's political luck in reelection was that Republicans put up an extremely bad candidate who a majority of voters rejected. Like his policies and appointments, the best thing that can be said for him was that the alternative was demonstrably worse on most issues, equally bad on others.
What Barack Obama and his administration has done so far isn't even adequate.
In order to save democracy, in order to save the middle class, in order to move things as entirely important as progress in halting global warming, more than what Barack Obama has done is necessary. His political gaming hasn't been to move things forward, when possible, it has been to move it to a slightly modified status quo. That new status quo will not allow even his signature achievement, a moderate, corporate friendly health care expansion, to remain as a good for the large majority of The People. As even Adam Smith acknowledged, private capital will always seek ways to extract money wherever they can. His health care system will be plundered as every other marginal attempt at reform has been in the absence of an effective countering force in government.
In all of this I see the erection of peculiarly American forms and, more importantly, cultural and intellectual thinking that are documented in Mother Country. That is why it is such an important essay, that is why it could not be allowed to become widely read. What the American oligarchy wishes to destroy, it, first, mocks, second prints a negative review of in the New York Times, thirdly merely marginalizes and ignores.
_______
I have asked some of my friends who consume enormous amounts of British literature and its history and culture as presented by the BBC and others who export the stuff to America if they'd ever heard of the Poor Law or the New Poor Law mentioned in any of those. Not a single one of those educated Anglophiles, devoted to all that is British, had, that they could recall.
Since the provisions of the Poor Law were a massive presence in the life of most of those in England and then Britain, that omission is, in itself, extraordinarily important to understand. In that clear effort to ignore or forget a major atrocity in the history of one of the major world powers, to suppress mention of it, we see a model for the imposed ignorance of the American People since the introduction of TV.
One of the most fondly, frequently recycled stories in the American media is how ignorant Americans are of their government, the world, history, etc. Those media corporations were given rights under the Bill of Rights in exchange for them informing The People, the only legitimizing force behind government and, in fact, the very constitution, so they could make informed choices. To have them mock the ignorance of The People, something that is the result of them reneging on their part of the deal contained in the First Amendment, should be intolerable. It would certainly be an intolerable situation to real American style liberals, who would see that the real good, an informed people governing themselves, as at least as important as the corporate right. A real liberal would see press freedom as an inferior right granted to artificial corporations as opposed to the right of that informed people to self-government. But liberals have been duped out of valuing things of real value in favor of entertainment. I blame PBS, the BBC, and the other media corporations for that as much as I do overtly commercial networks. I certainly blame them for promoting the likes of Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, the members of the corrupt D.C. based media and the Anglophile propaganda that has contributed in the corruption of the American common consensus, such as it is, in their audiences.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Electricity Flickering
We seem to be getting the snow storm they say we were going to miss and I'm not confident the electricity won't go out.
A year or two ago someone angrily asked me if I was telling them they had to be polite to "stupid, fat, NASCAR fans", the answer was that you had to if you wanted them to vote with you. Which is, it would seem, a point too subtle for so many leftists with clean fingernails and a college degree to understand.
I'm afraid that increasingly, people on what gets called "the left" in the United States are the same kind of elite snobs who have disdain and a hatred of poor people which, at times, more than matches the right wing desire to exploit and use them. One of the conclusions I've gotten from watching American politics, on the failure of the left to win over larger numbers of poor people, especially poor white people, that they have been successfully sold on the image of liberal elitism that looks down on poor people with "blue collar" lives. I'm sorry to have to say that, especially since going online and reading the unedited thoughts of so many on "the left" it's not entirely untrue. It's a disdain that is frequently expressed and those who express it clearly delight in the opportunity to declare their own superiority to poor people. Poor white people, most often, but I really can't imagine them putting themselves out for the garbage collectors who Martin Luther King jr. died for.
In those comments from the "left" as it is manifested on so many leftish blogs, I see the same attitudes and ways of thinking that allowed the British elite to do the terrible things they did while feeling such a sense of personal virtue and rectitude. It's a difference of accent, not of substance.
Here is a piece I wrote in my earlier, more innocent, days as a blogger, back when I believed so many of those I read wanted real progress more than to feel superior to the majority of people. Note that I still used the term "working class", I hadn't had my consciousness raised by reading Mother Country yet.
HOW DOES IT FEEL? CLASS AND THE LEFT
You've heard the question, why are working class people hostile to the left, the side who have brought them the five-day week and just about every economic benefits they have? Why do they think that we are elitist snobs? Well, some don't. Contrary to the Republican medias' line there are lots of working class people who do favor the left and are quite aware that we are the ones who support them. You might even want to prepare yourself to be stunned, there is no exclusionary principle that keeps working class people from being genuine, full-fledged, leftists. But we do have a problem with those who don't trust us. For starters, they are too often too many for us to win.
Like most everything favoring conservatives, a lot of working class hostility to the left is founded on a lie. As a life-long leftist from a left leaning, working class family I know that leftist snobbery is a lot less common than asserted. The policies are the best proof. Those are generally working class friendly, or used to be before the beltway triangulation fad took hold. But I'll tell you up front, there is way too much class snobbery on the left and unless it is dropped the charge will stick like 100% polyester on a humid day. The problem for the left is real, the political results are plain. It's not an easy issue to define so a complete analysis will take too long. We need to fix this quick.
Stop to consider how a remark or exclusion makes the recipient feel and if the perceived motivation for it requires the slight. Sometimes the slight is unintentional, sometimes given out of habit. I can guarantee you that things like correcting grammar or spelling, especially while ignoring the substance of what was being said, can buy you a life-long enemy, mocking religion even more so. I'm pretty thick skinned about my spelling, most people aren't. If there isn't any problem with the sub-standard usage or religious issue it's just not worth the price to point it out. To make it more complicated, sometimes it is worth it. I don't know when the cost of a grammar issue is a bargain but would fight for evolution to the end. One is formalism, the other is truth. I assume we can all agree that mocking taste in clothes and entertainment is clearly not worth the price.
Attacks from the likes of the blog trolls are the time to get the brass knuckles out. That's not a class issue. It's one of those brawls mentioned here a couple of weeks back and just about anything goes.
For some it's not as much a style issue as it is a problem of courtesy or respect for perceived inferiors. If that is true for someone it goes a lot farther down to the real commitment to the commonly held leftist agenda, I don't trust them. But if that isn't the case it's a matter of changing a bad habit. Getting it right without perceived condescension isn't always easy but, again, unless the necessary skills are mastered any slights will be taken as confirmation of the worst stereotypes. It paints us all. Common politeness, not dismissing the point that is being made, asking politely for clarification when needed and showing respect will get you a lot farther than the most brilliant and factual correction even when coolly delivered.
It's a question of what results you want. You want us with you or against you?
A year or two ago someone angrily asked me if I was telling them they had to be polite to "stupid, fat, NASCAR fans", the answer was that you had to if you wanted them to vote with you. Which is, it would seem, a point too subtle for so many leftists with clean fingernails and a college degree to understand.
I'm afraid that increasingly, people on what gets called "the left" in the United States are the same kind of elite snobs who have disdain and a hatred of poor people which, at times, more than matches the right wing desire to exploit and use them. One of the conclusions I've gotten from watching American politics, on the failure of the left to win over larger numbers of poor people, especially poor white people, that they have been successfully sold on the image of liberal elitism that looks down on poor people with "blue collar" lives. I'm sorry to have to say that, especially since going online and reading the unedited thoughts of so many on "the left" it's not entirely untrue. It's a disdain that is frequently expressed and those who express it clearly delight in the opportunity to declare their own superiority to poor people. Poor white people, most often, but I really can't imagine them putting themselves out for the garbage collectors who Martin Luther King jr. died for.
In those comments from the "left" as it is manifested on so many leftish blogs, I see the same attitudes and ways of thinking that allowed the British elite to do the terrible things they did while feeling such a sense of personal virtue and rectitude. It's a difference of accent, not of substance.
Here is a piece I wrote in my earlier, more innocent, days as a blogger, back when I believed so many of those I read wanted real progress more than to feel superior to the majority of people. Note that I still used the term "working class", I hadn't had my consciousness raised by reading Mother Country yet.
HOW DOES IT FEEL? CLASS AND THE LEFT
You've heard the question, why are working class people hostile to the left, the side who have brought them the five-day week and just about every economic benefits they have? Why do they think that we are elitist snobs? Well, some don't. Contrary to the Republican medias' line there are lots of working class people who do favor the left and are quite aware that we are the ones who support them. You might even want to prepare yourself to be stunned, there is no exclusionary principle that keeps working class people from being genuine, full-fledged, leftists. But we do have a problem with those who don't trust us. For starters, they are too often too many for us to win.
Like most everything favoring conservatives, a lot of working class hostility to the left is founded on a lie. As a life-long leftist from a left leaning, working class family I know that leftist snobbery is a lot less common than asserted. The policies are the best proof. Those are generally working class friendly, or used to be before the beltway triangulation fad took hold. But I'll tell you up front, there is way too much class snobbery on the left and unless it is dropped the charge will stick like 100% polyester on a humid day. The problem for the left is real, the political results are plain. It's not an easy issue to define so a complete analysis will take too long. We need to fix this quick.
Stop to consider how a remark or exclusion makes the recipient feel and if the perceived motivation for it requires the slight. Sometimes the slight is unintentional, sometimes given out of habit. I can guarantee you that things like correcting grammar or spelling, especially while ignoring the substance of what was being said, can buy you a life-long enemy, mocking religion even more so. I'm pretty thick skinned about my spelling, most people aren't. If there isn't any problem with the sub-standard usage or religious issue it's just not worth the price to point it out. To make it more complicated, sometimes it is worth it. I don't know when the cost of a grammar issue is a bargain but would fight for evolution to the end. One is formalism, the other is truth. I assume we can all agree that mocking taste in clothes and entertainment is clearly not worth the price.
Attacks from the likes of the blog trolls are the time to get the brass knuckles out. That's not a class issue. It's one of those brawls mentioned here a couple of weeks back and just about anything goes.
For some it's not as much a style issue as it is a problem of courtesy or respect for perceived inferiors. If that is true for someone it goes a lot farther down to the real commitment to the commonly held leftist agenda, I don't trust them. But if that isn't the case it's a matter of changing a bad habit. Getting it right without perceived condescension isn't always easy but, again, unless the necessary skills are mastered any slights will be taken as confirmation of the worst stereotypes. It paints us all. Common politeness, not dismissing the point that is being made, asking politely for clarification when needed and showing respect will get you a lot farther than the most brilliant and factual correction even when coolly delivered.
It's a question of what results you want. You want us with you or against you?
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Mother Country continued
Following on from the last excerpt posted yesterday, it describes situations in the late 1980s when the book was written but there is a lot that sounds like current discussions in the United States. A similar scheme of youth employment has been discussed in some states, even as education, social services and welfare are cut.
So very much depends on a poor man's wage. At present there is a Youth Training Scheme in Britain to absorb the energies of unemployed school-leavers. Industries are encouraged to take on trainees in place of regular hiring. These youths are paid by the government at wages that about equal the dole. In other words, the government donates to industry the free use of unskilled labor. Without reference to the wealth these young people produce, their subsistence is counted as welfare spending, and they are thought of as the beneficiaries of this arrangement, from which it is hoped they will learn the value of honest work.
People in their teens are historically the most coveted workers in the British economy. They are relatively healthy, and from the government's point of view, they are cheap, because they have no dependents and normally live with their families. This scheme merely reproduces the ancient pattern, severing work from pay, making the wage a charity, while reducing work to an escape from the opprobrium of idleness.
Britain invests more money abroad per capita than any other country, and invested more in absolute terms, util Japan surpassed it in this decade. Those who control capital, whether banks or industries of the government itself, have always had the means to punish or starve policies they disapprove of, or to crown with success policies friendlier to their interests simply by leaving money at home or by siphoning it off to the United States or to South Africa or elsewhere.
Mrs. Thatcher was described in an essay by Bernard D. Nossiter in The New York Times (June 15, 1988* as arguing to a church assembly "that abundance, the rich, were blessed while poverty, the poor were not, and Creation proves it."
She has her reward. Britain is experiencing economic growth, of the hectic, selective, up-market kind which does not threaten to drive upward the cost of industrial labor or the demand of social services. British economics is a game of keep-away. Whence all the jiggling of statistics - it is easy to get a big percentage increase from a very small base, as in calculating wages and pensions, and it is easy to take away with one hand what is given with the other, to raise wages a little and cut benefits more, and it is easy to increase rates of saving and contribution to private pension plans by reducing benefits for the elderly or cutting back on the administration needed to deliver them or adding to the obstacles involved in obtaining them or threatening to phase them out altogether, as the Thatcher government has done.
Ralf Dahrendorf, in his book On Britain, quotes respectfully as follows from a book titled Equality, coauthored by Keith Joseph, an important figure in the Thatcher government: "Ultimately the capacity of any society to look after its poor is dependent on the total amount of its wealth, however distributed." One might object that the way in which wealth is distributed determines, in a society, how numerous "its poor" will be. To distribute wealth away from employed people, as the British do, creates poverty, which must be looked after, perpetuating the ancient relation of those who work to those who employ, which has analogues, or cousins, in slavery and forced labor.
Marilynne Robinson's contention that the Poor Law is still present or, at least, always threatens to be resurrected in Britain is clear. The language of it seems to be almost unconsciously encoded in the way we talk about work, wealth and economic rightness. We seemed to be learning new ways to think about those and talk about them, to break out of the Poor Law form of slavery. My fear is that has been regaining a presence in American thought since the Reagan administration and that, now, our "liberals" in the Democratic Party sound like conservatives of the 1930s.
This week as Nancy Pelosi proposes to raise the minimum wage again, to certain opposition with the usual arguments that paying a fair wage inhibits employment, as the stock market floats to new highs over the stagnant unemployment figures and in a week after we found out who the worlds biggest billionaires are (with some having more than fifty billion dollars in personal wealth), How we've gotten to where we are and the kind of barely realized assumptions that allow us to tolerate it are worth thinking about very hard.
So very much depends on a poor man's wage. At present there is a Youth Training Scheme in Britain to absorb the energies of unemployed school-leavers. Industries are encouraged to take on trainees in place of regular hiring. These youths are paid by the government at wages that about equal the dole. In other words, the government donates to industry the free use of unskilled labor. Without reference to the wealth these young people produce, their subsistence is counted as welfare spending, and they are thought of as the beneficiaries of this arrangement, from which it is hoped they will learn the value of honest work.
People in their teens are historically the most coveted workers in the British economy. They are relatively healthy, and from the government's point of view, they are cheap, because they have no dependents and normally live with their families. This scheme merely reproduces the ancient pattern, severing work from pay, making the wage a charity, while reducing work to an escape from the opprobrium of idleness.
Britain invests more money abroad per capita than any other country, and invested more in absolute terms, util Japan surpassed it in this decade. Those who control capital, whether banks or industries of the government itself, have always had the means to punish or starve policies they disapprove of, or to crown with success policies friendlier to their interests simply by leaving money at home or by siphoning it off to the United States or to South Africa or elsewhere.
Mrs. Thatcher was described in an essay by Bernard D. Nossiter in The New York Times (June 15, 1988* as arguing to a church assembly "that abundance, the rich, were blessed while poverty, the poor were not, and Creation proves it."
She has her reward. Britain is experiencing economic growth, of the hectic, selective, up-market kind which does not threaten to drive upward the cost of industrial labor or the demand of social services. British economics is a game of keep-away. Whence all the jiggling of statistics - it is easy to get a big percentage increase from a very small base, as in calculating wages and pensions, and it is easy to take away with one hand what is given with the other, to raise wages a little and cut benefits more, and it is easy to increase rates of saving and contribution to private pension plans by reducing benefits for the elderly or cutting back on the administration needed to deliver them or adding to the obstacles involved in obtaining them or threatening to phase them out altogether, as the Thatcher government has done.
Ralf Dahrendorf, in his book On Britain, quotes respectfully as follows from a book titled Equality, coauthored by Keith Joseph, an important figure in the Thatcher government: "Ultimately the capacity of any society to look after its poor is dependent on the total amount of its wealth, however distributed." One might object that the way in which wealth is distributed determines, in a society, how numerous "its poor" will be. To distribute wealth away from employed people, as the British do, creates poverty, which must be looked after, perpetuating the ancient relation of those who work to those who employ, which has analogues, or cousins, in slavery and forced labor.
Marilynne Robinson's contention that the Poor Law is still present or, at least, always threatens to be resurrected in Britain is clear. The language of it seems to be almost unconsciously encoded in the way we talk about work, wealth and economic rightness. We seemed to be learning new ways to think about those and talk about them, to break out of the Poor Law form of slavery. My fear is that has been regaining a presence in American thought since the Reagan administration and that, now, our "liberals" in the Democratic Party sound like conservatives of the 1930s.
This week as Nancy Pelosi proposes to raise the minimum wage again, to certain opposition with the usual arguments that paying a fair wage inhibits employment, as the stock market floats to new highs over the stagnant unemployment figures and in a week after we found out who the worlds biggest billionaires are (with some having more than fifty billion dollars in personal wealth), How we've gotten to where we are and the kind of barely realized assumptions that allow us to tolerate it are worth thinking about very hard.
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