For some reason I’ve felt unusually snarky this week, so both of this week’s featured articles will have a high snark quotient.
The first one is pretty much done, so it should appear in just a few minutes. All week, I kept running into over-the-top quotes: Mike Huckabee claiming he was fighting a “war for women” to protect them from the “insult” of insurance-covered contraception, that Shark Tank guy saying it was “fantastic news” that the world’s 85 richest individuals have as much money as the bottom 3.5 billion people do, the Family Research Council guy blaming the campus sexual assault problem on Sandra Fluke, and so on. I was despairing for my gender when I finally found evidence that women are crazy too: A Republican candidate for Congress blamed dementia and autism on same-sex marriage. (“God is angry.”)
Finally I decided you just have to laugh, so I collected it all in “One Week’s Worth of Crazy”. I use two phrases (Google says I didn’t coin them) that I hope catch on: God’s ventriloquists for people who keep putting their ridiculous words into God’s mouth, and guillotine bait for rich people displaying let-them-eat-cake cluelessness.
My second snarky piece is “The Fall of Governor Ultrasound”. I read the 14-count Bob McDonnell indictment, and now believe the federal indictment is a literary form of unappreciated potential.
As usual, I’m going to try to get the weekly summary out by noon.
Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those in power.
— President Obama, Friday at the Department of Justice
This week everybody was still talking about Bridgegate
or at least MSNBC was. Rachel Maddow has been talking about little else. (It’s been working for her. Fox News usually outdraws MSNBC by a considerable margin, but in recent weeks the Rachel/Megyn Kelly match-up has been noticeably closer.)
In its general form, Bridgegate is a Watergate-type scandal: The story starts with an event that is clearly wrong (a bungled burglary, an engineered traffic jam), but not all that consequential for most people. The event is only interesting because it is so incongruous with a civics-textbook view of government: If this happened, and if officials reacted so automatically to cover it up, then the (Nixon, Christie) administration clearly views itself and its mission very differently from the vision of government the public believes in. And if that is the case, what else has been going on?
If the answer is “nothing”, then the story will largely die out, unless there’s clear proof Christie himself committed a crime. (So far there isn’t.) But we now enter the Chinese-water-torture part of the narrative, where thematically (but not directly) related charges drip-drip-drip down on Christie’s head.
Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration warned [her] earlier this year that her town would be starved of hurricane relief money unless she approved a lucrative redevelopment plan favored by the governor.
Probably there will be more drips. And rather than defend, I expect Republicans to counter-attack. In the same way that Republican congressmen’s extra-marital affairs started coming out during the Clinton impeachment, the corruption of New Jersey Democrats is likely to make headlines soon. (I don’t know anything; I’m just reading the signs.)
If Bridgegate does follow the path of Watergate, MSNBC better pace itself. From the Watergate break-in to Nixon’s resignation was two years.
Bridgegate has also been a Rorschach test, in which a pundit’s reaction says as much about him as about the story. For example, the question of whether Governor Christie is a bully evoked this from Britt Hume.
In this sort of feminized atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct, kind of old-fashioned tough guys, run some risks. … Men today have learned the lesson the hard way that if you act like kind of an old-fashioned guy’s guy, you’re in constant danger of slipping out and saying something that’s going to get you in trouble and make you look like a sexist or make you look like you seem thuggish or whatever.
Let me translate this into 21st-century English: “If you talk the way men used to talk when women either weren’t in the room or had to keep quiet, some woman is bound to point out that you’re being a jerk.”
And you know who the conservative media thinks is the really bully here? Bruce Springsteen. When he went on Jimmy Fallon’s show and sang this song:
he was “mean, small, and petty“. He was “piling on“. Poor Chris Christie. He loves the Boss, but the Boss doesn’t love him back.
and poverty
The 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty (which I mentioned last week) has made a lot of people take a step back and look at the longer view.
Barbara Ehrenreich revisits some of the territory of her book Nickel and Dimed in an Atlantic article “It’s Expensive to be Poor“. The point she’s making is not new, but the wealthy and professional-class folks who monopolize the national political conversation have a way of forgetting it.
We hear again and again how anti-poverty programs just make the poor dependent on government and encourage laziness. But the biggest obstacles to getting out of poverty are the poverty traps: situations where the poor don’t have enough money to live cheaply or look for better jobs. If you can’t afford security-deposit-plus-first-month’s-rent for an apartment with a kitchen; if you don’t have access to a car; if you can’t make appointments in advance because your part-time minimum-wage job has unpredictable hours — then your chances of climbing out of poverty are not very good.
If you happened to see David Brooks’ enough-with-this-talk-about-inequality column, you should read Dean Baker’s answer. To Brooks’ point that the growing income of the rich is a different phenomenon than the shrinking opportunities of the poor and the destruction of the middle class, and that only a “primitive zero-sum mentality” connects them, Baker responded:
Fans of arithmetic everywhere know that if the rich get more, and the economy is not growing faster, then everyone else gets less. (It might be primitive, but it’s true.) And the economy has been growing very slowly for the last thirteen years and actually pretty slowly for the whole period in which inequality has been increasing.
and President Obama’s new tone on the NSA
Friday, President Obama gave a speech at the Justice Department “On Review of Signals Intelligence” (text, video, summary of new directive).
As I’ve admitted before, I’m having a hard time staying on top of this issue. New revelations, new policies, and new rhetoric appear faster than I have been able to process it all. So for now I’ll defer to The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza. Lizza is skeptical that the new rules will be more than “cosmetic changes”. But he does believe that a more subtle tipping point has been reached: Up until now, the administration has been dismissive of critics.
Indeed, in my conversations with intelligence officials this past year, their general attitude was that smart, well-meaning, Ivy League-educated lawyers were on the front lines at the intelligence agencies making sure that the privacy rights of Americans were protected, and, therefore, the concerns about abuse were not only unfounded but also bordered on paranoia. … Today, Obama reversed course, acknowledging that all of that wasn’t enough. He has now adopted the language of the reformers.
Lizza concludes that Obama has undercut status-quo supporters in Congress, while empowering those who are more skeptical of current arrangements:
Obama’s cautious, infuriating speech won’t reform the system in all the ways that N.S.A. critics want, but it just might help Congress do so.
but I wrote about court decisions
The Supreme Court has been relatively quiet lately, but lower courts have been busily ruling on same-sex marriage, the NSA’s domestic spying, net neutrality, and many other issues. This week I tried to catch up. I covered net neutrality and same-sex marriage, and I hope to get to the rest next week.
While we’re talking about voting rights (or putting off that talk until next week), it’s worth mentioning that two Democrats and a Republican have agreed on a formula for fixing the part of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court torpedoed last summer.
Where the revised bill goes from here is an open question. Renewing the VRA has been a no-brainer in the past, passing by wide margins. So Congress could just pass it.
On the other hand, the VRA could follow the path of immigration reform: The Senate passes it with a bipartisan majority, and Republicans in the House claim to support it when they talk to minority audiences, but Speaker Boehner keeps it from coming to a vote so as not to offend the extreme right wing. Too soon to tell.
and you also might be interested in …
When my Dad was alive, he was always mystified when I omitted the “Dr.” title that my Ph.D. in mathematics gives me the right to use. My policy is that I’ll call myself “Dr. Muder” when I write about mathematics, because that’s where my credentials are relevant. But on subjects where I’m just another guy with an opinion, those opinions have to stand on their own. I won’t imply that I’m an expert by styling myself as a doctor.
I came to that policy as a graduate student in the 80s, an era when Milton Friedman was using his legitimate prestige as an economist to give heft to his oracular pronouncements about the morality of various political policies. On political and moral issues, Friedman was just a guy with an opinion, and his Nobel prize was as irrelevant as my eventual doctorate would be.
Climate scientists today have a more difficult line to walk, because their scientific prestige is relevant up to a point, but the more politically active they get, the more they’ll be tempted to exaggerate the extent of their expertise. Penn State’s Michael Mann (creator of the “hockey stick” graph and a main target of the Climategate smear) wrote a thoughtful article about this in the NYT’s Sunday Review.
It is not an uncommon view among scientists that we potentially compromise our objectivity if we choose to wade into policy matters or the societal implications of our work. And it would be problematic if our views on policy somehow influenced the way we went about doing our science. But there is nothing inappropriate at all about drawing on our scientific knowledge to speak out about the very real implications of our research.
He sums up the right balance by re-purposing the Homeland Security slogan: “If you see something, say something.”
Ya think? Nobody would stand for a team named the Memphis Niggers or the Arizona Wetbacks. As Clem Ironwing of the Sioux put it:
The only way “redskin” was ever used towards my people and myself was in a derogatory manner. It was never, ever, used in a show of respect or kindness. It was only used to let you know that you were dirty and no good, and to this day still is.
Defenders of the NFL franchise have tried a few points. First, they want to lump “redskin” in with other Native-American-related team-names, making common cause with fans across the country. But while there’s also an argument for renaming some other teams, calling someone a “brave” or a “chief” is not inherently derogatory. (Degrading mascots and logos can be a separate issue.) And names that commemorate the pre-European inhabitants of a region — the Florida State Seminoles or the University of Illinois Illini, say — may or may not have been chosen respectfully, but they can honor the local history now, if the schools make a legitimate effort to do so. But what “redskin” mainly commemorates is the genocidal project directed from Washington. Picture the Berlin Jews (or maybe Kikes) wearing a yellow star on their jerseys. Could that ever be acceptable?
Another defense is that a few Native American communities have chosen to name their own high school teams the Redskins. Yeah, right. And it’s OK for whites to say “nigger” now, because black rappers say it. If members of a historically oppressed community want to reclaim the words that were used to put them down, that’s up to them. If they want our “help”, they’ll ask for it.
While the Supreme Court has been relatively quiet lately, a lot has been going on in lower courts. This week I’ll tackle the recent net neutrality and same-sex marriage cases. In future articles I plan to address cases related to the NSA, voting rights, and drug-testing welfare recipients.
Net neutrality. The headlines about this decision said things like “Verizon Wins, Net Neutrality Loses“. But the overall impact of the D. C. Court of Appeals ruling is a little more ambiguous and complicated. Reading it was like watching the tape of a football game where my team gets way ahead, but I’ve already heard that they lost. On its way to ruling in Verizon’s favor, the court trashes one Verizon argument after another. “We lose this?” I kept asking myself.
Net neutrality is one of those important-but-somewhat-technical issues that it’s hard to get the public excited about. The issue will go months at a time without making headlines, so when it comes up again even people who have read about it before are likely to say, “Wait, I know this. What is it again?” Wikipedia defines it pretty well:
Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.
The practical problem is that you don’t have a lot of choices if you want fast broadband internet access in your home. The local cable monopoly may be the only option if you aren’t near a major city. If you are, you might have a choice between Comcast and Verizon FIOS — a Coke/Pepsi choice where competition is tightly confined to battlefields that don’t rock the corporate boat too much.
In short, broadband providers have a lot of market power. And the technology has shaken out in such a way that they have the power not just to impose a bad deal on you, but also on “edge providers” of services like Netflix or Google. Comcast has its own video-on-demand service, for example, so what if it decided to block its users from accessing Netflix? Or maybe Netflix connections could be inexplicably glitchy, unless Netflix paid Comcast a big fee. (Nice service you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.)
Verizon could decide to compete with Comcast by charging smaller fee (or no fee at all) so that its users got Netflix cheaper. But why not just charge the same fee, give your own on-demand service the same advantage, and make money hand-over-fist? If there were five or six broadband providers, one of the smaller ones would probably break ranks. But with two or three, probably not. (BTW: That’s the same logic why none of the larger wireless companies should be allowed to take over T-Mobile.)
Until Tuesday, FCC rules made that illegal. Those are the rules that got thrown out by the D. C. Appeals Court. But along the way, the Court rejected almost all the arguments Verizon made for why it should be allowed to do whatever it wants with its network and charge whatever the market will bear.
The relevant law is Telecommunications Act of 1996, which gave the FCC the mission to promote the spread of broadband internet access. The main argument is over how to do that: Verizon thinks that making things as profitable as possible for broadband providers (like itself) encourages the providers to build out the broadband infrastructure. Net neutrality advocates argue that letting a few big corporations essentially “own the internet” discourages the real creativity in the system, which comes from edge providers trying to create the next gotta-have-it service like Netflix or YouTube. A Verizon-owned internet will be less interesting than a net-neutrality internet, and hence will inspire less consumer demand.
In short, it’s yet another version of the eternal supply-side vs. demand-side argument.
Anyway, the TCA classifies internet companies into two bins: telecommunications carriers and information-services providers. Telecommunications carriers are regulated like the wired phone companies: They have to offer their services to everyone on a more-or-less equal basis. Information-services companies have more leeway.
The gist of the court ruling is that the FCC has classified cable companies as information-services providers, but that its net-neutrality rules regulate them like telecommunications carriers. So the FCC’s net-neutrality rules can’t stand. But — and this is the observation that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat — it’s totally within the FCC’s current powers and mandate to just reclassify the cable companies.
So net neutrality is dead. But if the FCC wants to revive it, all they have to do is issue new rules. Judge Laurence Silberman dissented from the majority opinion that the FCC has this power, but since Verizon technically “won”, they can’t appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court unless and until the FCC tries to use the power that the Court says it has.
In short, this is all a long way from over.
Same-sex marriage. A month ago, if I had to guess which two states would be the last ones to legalize same-sex marriage, I might have picked Utah and Oklahoma. Since then, though, federal judges have struck down the amendments to both state constitutions that restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples. Both judges build on the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision that struck down parts of the Defense of Marriage Act last summer, but they do it in somewhat different ways.
You may remember that while I liked the outcome of Windsor, I was no fan of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, which I labeled “mush” and lumped together with Chief Justice Roberts’ voting-rights-act decision in a subtle, soft-spoken article I called “This Court Sucks“.
Here’s why Kennedy’s Windsor opinion sucked. Same-sex marriage cases all revolve around these three questions:
Does the right to marry (which the Court has often affirmed as a fundamental right protected by the Constitution) apply to same-sex couples?
Are laws targeting gays and lesbians (like laws targeting blacks or women) inherently suspicious as vehicles for irrational prejudice, and so subject to some form of heightened scrutiny from the courts?
Whatever standard of scrutiny you choose, do the laws serve legitimate purposes that outweigh the limitations they put on the couples’ rights?
Kennedy dodged all that. He waxed eloquent for a while on the plight of same-sex couples and the unreasonable prejudices against them, and then announced that DOMA was struck down.
That’s exactly the result I want, Justice Kennedy, but how did you get there? The purposes Congress imagined DOMA serving — whatever they were; you don’t list them or examine them — don’t “overcome”, but are they failing to overcome a high standard or a low standard?
The victims of Kennedy’s judicial malpractice are lower court judges like Terence Kern and Robert Shelby, who have been left to rule on similar-but-not-identical cases without any clear guidance. In his Oklahoma ruling, Kern avoids technical legal terms like sucks and mush, but makes more-or-less the same point I did:
The Windsor Court did not apply the familiar equal protection framework, which inquires as to the applicable level of scrutiny and then analyzes the law’s justifications. … Thus, Windsor does not answer whether a state may prohibit same-sex marriage in the first instance. Nor does Windsor declare homosexuals a suspect class or discuss whether DOMA impacted a fundamental right, which would have provided this Court with a clear test .
So Kern does his best to puzzle out the WWJKD question:
This Court has gleaned and will apply two principles from Windsor.
Ordinarily, a lower-court judge just “applies” principles from a higher-court ruling, rather than having to “glean” them first.
Lacking clear guidance, Kern avoids declaring either a fundamental right to same-sex marriage or that gays and lesbians are a protected class. That means that Oklahoma’s same-sex marriage ban only needs to have “rational relation to some legitimate end”.
Shelby took a somewhat different path to the same destination in the Utah case. He made an insightful observation about what exactly has changed in recent years: not the Constitution, but our understanding of what it means to be gay or lesbian.
The State accepts without contest the Plaintiffs’ testimony that they cannot develop the type of intimate bond necessary to sustain a marriage with a person of the opposite sex. … Forty years ago, these assertions would not have been accepted by a court without dispute. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association still defined homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), and leading experts believed that homosexuality was simply a lifestyle choice. … The State presents no argument or evidence to suggest that the Plaintiffs could change their identity if they desired to do so. Given these undisputed facts, it is clear that if the Plaintiffs are not allowed to marry a partner of the same sex, the Plaintiffs will be forced to remain unmarried. The effect of Amendment 3 is therefore that it denies gay and lesbian citizens of Utah the ability to exercise one of their constitutionally protected rights.
So Shelby is in a position to demand a higher standard of the state, that their ban on same-sex marriage is “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest.” But ultimately, both Kern and Shelby end up arguing that the ban does not satisfy even the lowest standard, the rational-basis test.
In each case, the state trotted out the same justifications: that the state has an interest in promoting “responsible procreation” among “naturally procreative” couples, and that opposite-sex couples provide the ideal setting for raising childrent.
Both judges make basically the same counter-argument, but Shelby says it best:
[T]he State poses the wrong question. The court’s focus is not on whether extending marriage benefits to heterosexual couples serves a legitimate governmental interest. No one disputes that marriage benefits serve not just legitimate, but compelling governmental interests, which is why the Constitution provides such protection to an individual’s fundamental right to marry. Instead, courts are required to determine whether there is a rational connection between the challenged statute and a legitimate state interest. … The State of Utah has provided no evidence that opposite-sex marriage will be affected in any way by same-sex marriage. In the absence of such evidence, the State’s unsupported fears and speculations are insufficient to justify the State’s refusal to dignify the family relationships of its gay and lesbian citizens. …
Applying the law as it is required to do, the court holds that Utah’s prohibition on same-sex marriage conflicts with the United States Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process under the law. The State’s current laws deny its gay and lesbian citizens their fundamental right to marry and, in so doing, demean the dignity of these same-sex couples for no rational reason. Accordingly, the court finds that these laws are unconstitutional.
Both cases are being appealed and will undoubtedly end up before the Supreme Court. But what’s clear from the rulings is that the opponents of same-sex marriage will have to come up with a new set of arguments if they hope to prevail: It’s not enough to argue that opposite-sex marriage is good; they’ll need to argue that same-sex marriage is bad, which they have not done and may not be able to do, particularly when the person they need to convince is the Supreme Court’s swing vote, Justice Kennedy.
The Supreme Court has been relatively quiet lately. (Like freshmen, they finish most of their assignments at the end of the term in June.) But lower court judges have been issuing important rulings on net neutrality, same-sex marriage, the NSA, voting rights, drug-testing welfare recipients, and a variety of other subjects.
I’ve gotten way behind in covering them, so this week’s featured article will be: “Catching Up With the Judges: Net Neutrality and Marriage”. (I’ll try to catch up with the rest next week.)
The D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, but the majority opinion suggests that the FCC could fix the problem without new legislation. So in a weird way, the winners (Verizon) were losers and vice versa.
A month ago, if you’d asked me to guess which two states would be the last to legalize same-sex marriage, I might have picked Utah and Oklahoma. Well, just before Christmas a federal judge struck down Utah’s constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman, and this Tuesday Oklahoma’s bit the dust. The cases had nearly identical facts and the states made nearly identical arguments, which the judges destroyed in similar ways, as if the standard anti-marriage-equality arguments have become fat pitches easily hit out of the park.
Both cases will be appealed and undoubtedly the issue will wind up at the Supreme Court, maybe next year. I’m having a hard time imagining what the four conservative justices can possibly say to persuade Justice Kennedy.
The weekly summary will bring you up to date on the Bridgegate scandal and President Obama’s change of rhetoric on the NSA. Michael Mann also wrote an interesting article about how climate scientists should approach the politics of global warming. The 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty is continuing to generate good discussion about inequality. Pressure continues to build on the Washington NFL franchise to change its name. And I’ll end with a great dance video.
Expect the legal article around ten (New Hampshire time) and the weekly summary about noon.
By now you may have heard too much about Bridgegate, or the same basic information repeated way too many times. So let me do a really quick sort:
What happened? Wikipedia has the essential facts. In September, Governor Christie’s appointees cut down access from Fort Lee, NJ to the George Washington Bridge into New York, causing massive traffic jams several days in a row.
Who were Christie’s people trying to punish and why? That’s the mystery. The original claim was that they were taking revenge on Fort Lee’s mayor for not endorsing Christie’s re-election campaign. But that case seems really weak, given that many more important people didn’t endorse Christie and weren’t similarly punished. Maddow floated an alternate theory about judicial appointments and Fort Lee’s state senator, but Democrats in the NJ Senate have shot that down too. The latest theory has to do with Fort Lee’s billion-dollar development project whose value depends on its access to New York.
As always, the media is doing way too much speculating about whether Christie was really as disconnected from the wrongdoing as he claims. Basically, we’re all just predicting that the facts will eventually validate our prior opinions about Christie, whatever those happen to be. Better to just wait: Real investigations are happening, and they’ll probably produce solid information long before anybody has to vote on whether Christie should be president.
After all the phony scandals they’ve tried to drum up about President Obama (IRS, Benghazi, his birth certificate, etc.), you’d think an authentic Republican scandal would be difficult for the conservative media to deal with. But they’re up to the job. Media Matters explains their game plan:
and the weather
The polar vortex came and went, and now the east coast is unseasonably warm.
Here’s the right point to make when deniers advance the global-warming-is-false-because-I’m-cold argument: Even when 2014 was just a few days old and wind chills were below zero for most of the country, there was a bet you could make that was almost a sure thing. No matter how it started, by its end 2014 will be yet another warm year. And by warm I mean: The global average temperature will wind up well above the 50-year average and the 20-year average. (When you get down to the five-year average, short-term randomness makes the bet iffy, as the graph below demonstrates.)
Deniers will tell you global warming is a religious belief that contrary evidence can’t touch. But in fact I can tell you exactly what would make me doubt: a genuinely cold year. If we had a year where the average global temperature fell below the 100-year average, with no obvious explanation like a massive volcano or a nuclear war, I’d have to rethink.
A decade cooler than the one before it would also impress me. Ezra Klein got this graph from the World Meteorological Association:
When Klein tweeted the quote at the top of this article, various conservatives tweeted back some version of:
no, it’s like saying “global warming is real because there’s a heat wave”
And that would be an excellent rejoinder if anyone ever made that argument.
In fact, if you look at environmentalists’ discussions of whether Hurricane Sandy or the Colorado brush fires or the Oklahoma tornadoes or any other weather event could be related to global warming, they are filled with nuance and explanations and acknowledgements that the connection between climate and specific weather events is probabilistic at best. And if you look at how the liberal portion of the mainstream media covers those discussions, as a rule they are likewise cautious and judicious. Unless you edit deceptively, you won’t find clips of top liberal pundits and spokesmen and political leaders saying anything remotely equivalent to this:
Which raises another interesting question: Who is the liberal equivalent of Donald Trump?
and Al Qaeda taking over Fallujah
The news that Sunni militants linked to Al Qaeda had taken control of Fallujah, the site of “the bloodiest battle of the entire Iraq War” — nearly 100 American troops died taking the city — re-opened a lot of the wounds of that struggle.
If you were against the war, it made you reflect on the pointlessness of it all. Thom Hartmann commented:
The freedom Bush promised the Iraqi people now looks like the freedom to die in a region-wide sectarian civil war that’s rapidly spiraling out of control.
War supporters, on the other hand, blamed President Obama for pulling our troops out and thereby squandering the gains they had made. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham released a statement:
When President Obama withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011, over the objections of our military leaders and commanders on the ground, many of us predicted that the vacuum would be filled by America’s enemies and would emerge as a threat to U.S. national security interests. Sadly, that reality is now clearer than ever.
It’s given me an I-didn’t-want-to-be-right feeling.
Lots of folks were against starting the war. But after it got going, I kept hearing people say, “I want to get our troops out, but we can’t just cut and run.” So in 2005, when “only” 1800 or so American troops had died in the Iraq War and the price tag was still only in the hundreds of billions, I wrote a piece called “Cut and Run“, where I advocated exactly that: Don’t wait until something-or-other happens that will allow us to save face and make a graceful exit. Just get out of Iraq as fast as possible.
What are we fixing? What do we expect to get better if we stay for another year or five years or ten years? …
It is hard to let go of the fantasy that some good can salvaged from the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars that have already been sacrificed to this war. Americans like to believe in happy endings. We want to be told that one more push will make it all worthwhile.
But we need to face reality. The dead soldiers and spent dollars are gone and they have accomplished nothing. We are like the gambler who stays at the table because he cannot admit that he has already lost more than he can afford. One more game, we think, and we can win it all back. Or at least some of it.
We could have followed the McCain/Graham plan and kept troops there for many years more, and lost many more of them. And when we eventually left and things fell apart, they could still say, “We didn’t stay long enough.”
Anyway, here’s the lesson I want us to learn from Iraq. When we as a country make a mistake, the right time to stop making it is now, not “in six months” or “after we stabilize the situation” or whenever. Now. Cut-and-run was the right answer in 2005 in Iraq. It often is.
and the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty
LBJ declared the war in his 1964 State of the Union address. Watching the movie newsreel coverage brings home just how long 50 years can be.
The anniversary evoked a longer-term look at poverty and the programs that are supposed to fight it. The best retrospective, I think, was Paul Krugman’s.
For a long time, everyone knew — or, more accurately, “knew” — that the war on poverty had been an abject failure. And they knew why: It was the fault of the poor themselves. But what everyone knew wasn’t true, and the public seems to have caught on.
The narrative went like this: Antipoverty programs hadn’t actually reduced poverty, because poverty in America was basically a social problem — a problem of broken families, crime and a culture of dependence that was only reinforced by government aid. And because this narrative was so widely accepted, bashing the poor was good politics, enthusiastically embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, too.
But in recent years something has changed: It’s become obvious that people are poor because wages don’t track productivity any more. People who have strong values and work hard can still be poor, and lots of lower-middle-class people now see their jobs as vulnerable and their economic security virtually non-existent without a government safety net.
On its 50th birthday, the war on poverty no longer looks like a failure. It looks, instead, like a template for a rising, increasingly confident progressive movement.
Over at The Atlantic, Peter Beinhart looks at the conservative approach to poverty.
the new Republican anti-poverty speeches have a depressingly theological quality. They usually begin with a catechism: Washington can’t effectively fight poverty. … Rarely is serious evidence offered for these assertions, because they are not statements of fact; they are declarations of faith. In truth, there’s ample evidence that some Washington programs significantly reduce poverty.
Starting with ideology leads to proposals that are “epistemologically backward”.
They don’t start with the assumption that since poverty is bad, any method of fighting that has proven effective has merit. They start with the assumption that since the federal government is bad, the only anti-poverty measures with merit are those that circumvent it. That doesn’t mean all the ideas Cantor and company propose are ineffective. But they’re disproportionately ineffective because proven effectiveness wasn’t the key criteria for their selection. Ideological comfort was. Until that changes, the GOP’s new focus on poverty won’t improve its own fortunes or those of America’s poor.
But more people should be paying attention to … lower healthcare inflation
Yeah, I know, it’s not as juicy as the bridge scandal. But Salon’s Brian Beutler makes a good case that
The furthest-reaching political news of the week … came in a seemingly boring actuarial report from a government agency most people probably have never of, showing that for the first time since the 1990s, total U.S. healthcare spending grew at a slower rate than the U.S. economy at the beginning of the current decade.
That’s important for two reasons: Specifically and in the medium term, ObamaCare. The fear was that getting more people covered would be too expensive, and the cost savings the law promised would never appear. But if the ACA is responsible for healthcare costs slowing, then it’s already a success. And even if it’s not, if the inflation slowdown is caused by something else entirely, ObamaCare still avoids its nightmare scenario.
And that, in turn, is based on projections of runaway healthcare spending. As Kevin Drum puts it: “Washington doesn’t have a spending problem. It has a health care problem. Period.” Beutler elaborates:
the slowdown [in healthcare inflation] threatens the pretext for key elements of the conservative policy agenda. If it’s permanent, it destroys the pretext completely. In a perverse way, the right needs healthcare inflation to return to unsustainable levels because without it, the enormous challenges of privatizing Medicare and crushing Medicaid become impossible.
and I wrote about atheism.
I’ve written before about the myth of Christian persecution in America. One reason that myth is so easy to sell to Christian fundamentalists is that many of them have no clue what it’s like to belong to a religious group that actually does suffer discrimination — atheists, for example. Two recent stories bring home the routine disapproval that atheists face in America. (A Christian pastor is surprised how quickly things get serious when he starts “a year without God”, and an atheist trying to give money away is compared to the KKK.) I discuss them in “To Experience Real Religious Discrimination, Turn Atheist“.
While researching that article I scanned the Friendly Atheist blog and ran across this hilarious video by dancer-turned-biologist Dr. Carin Anne Bondar. I’m sure you were all wondering: What if Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” hadn’t been a metaphor for the disruptive impact of breaking up with someone, and instead had symbolized the shock of discovering that evolution is true?
In other religious news, AlterNet’s Amanda Marcotte explains the logic of a Satanist group proposing a statue of Baphomet for the Oklahoma capitol grounds.
Christian fundamentalists in Oklahoma managed to get a Ten Commandments monument placed on capitol grounds in 2012. Though the supporters of the monument deny it, it’s an obvious attempt by fundamentalists to get the state government to endorse Christianity above all other religious beliefs, in a direct violation of the Constitution’s ban on state establishment of religion. … No doubt the Satanists expect Oklahoma to reject their petition, which is the point, of course. By rejecting the petition, the legislature will make it clear they really are elevating one religion over another, strengthening the ACLU’s case against the state.
Here’s the weird thing about this issue: It’s the conservatives, the people who claim to respect government the least, who want the government to endorse their religion. That’s the question we should keep asking the right-wing Christians: Why is it so important that the government endorse your religion?
You also might be interested in …
Coal is supposed to be the cheap form of energy. But that’s only if you ignore the cost of stuff like nine counties of West Virginia going without water since Thursday, due to a spill of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol (a chemical used in processing coal) by the Elk River “near the intake facilities for the West Virginia division of American Water Works.”
The chemical is so dangerous that “American Water customers are being advised not to drink, cook with, bathe in or boil their water … to stop using water for everything other than flushing toilets and fire suppression.”
In a twist that would be cheesy in a movie, the corporation behind the spill is called Freedom Industries. Freedom didn’t find the “leaking storage unit” itself, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection did after it received reports of a “strange odor” in the area. So this is a story of government regulators interfering with Freedom.
If you’ve been worrying that maybe you practice (or suffer from) reverse racism, it’s good to know that comedian Aamer Rahman has been thinking it through.
Normally my book reviews don’t get a lot of page views, but last week’s review of Angry White Men is over 3000 hits, making it #7 on the Sift’s all-time list. And that brings up a curious thing about viral posts: In my experience, the region between 3000 hits and 8000 hits is virtually unpopulated. There are four posts between 3145 (where AWM was at last count) and 2662. The next post up is at 7957. No idea why.
and let’s end with a cartoon too good not to mention
(This one is pretty good too.) You want an apt metaphor for sexism and racism and all the other forms of institutionalized privilege? They’re like The Matrix.
From the War on Christmas to the ObamaCare contraception mandate, the media gives a lot of respect to the idea that Christians might be persecuted in America, or at least that their religious freedom might be in danger. But two recent stories underline a contrasting point: If Christians really want to know what religious discrimination is like, they should try being atheists.
Christian pastor Ryan Bell is literally trying, and it’s not going well. In the spirit of A. J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically, Bell announced that he would live 2014 as an atheist and chronicle his experiences on his A Year Without God blog. In his announcement post, he portrayed his experiment partly as a religious identity crisis and partly as an attempt to answer a friend’s question: “What difference does God make?”
How could Bell explain the difference unless he had tried both? So:
For the next 12 months I will live as if there is no God. I will not pray, read the Bible for inspiration, refer to God as the cause of things or hope that God might intervene and change my own or someone else’s circumstances. (I trust that if there really is a God that God will not be too flummoxed by my foolish experiment and allow others to suffer as a result).
I will read atheist “sacred texts” — from Hobbes and Spinoza to Russell and Nietzsche to the trinity of New Atheists, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett. I will explore the various ways of being atheist, from naturalism (Voltaire, Dewey, et al) to the new ‘religious atheists’ (Alain de Botton and Ronald Dworkin). I will also attempt to speak to as many actual atheists as possible — scholars, writers and ordinary unbelievers — to learn how they have come to their non-faith and what it means to them. I will visit atheist gatherings and try it on.
No doubt Bell anticipated writing about challenges like: Could he really “live as if there is no God”, or would his sensibilities rebel at the vision of a godless universe? Would he get depressed without God to give him hope? Would his moral character weaken? Would he have to abandon his experiment if he faced a true life crisis? Near the end of the year, would he look forward to the day when he could return to religion? In 2015 would he, like King David, be “glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord”?
I was an adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University (APU) teaching Intercultural Communication to undergrads, and Fuller Theological Seminary, coaching doctoral candidates in the writing of their dissertation proposals. Both are Christian institutions of higher learning that have a requirement that their instructors and staff be committed followers of Jesus and, obviously, believers in God. They simply feel they cannot have me as a part of the faculty while I’m am in this year long process. … The other work I do is consulting with congregations … the fact that I was embarking on a year without god was just too much for them.
His friends have not ostracized him, but he hadn’t realized that was even a risk. Apparently it was.
We still love you!
So many of my closest friends and colleagues have said this to me in the past few days. My initial, unspoken reaction was, “Well, I certainly hope so.” Now I understand that this is not a forgone conclusion. I didn’t realize, even four days ago, how difficult it would be for some people to embrace me while I was embracing this journey of open inquiry into the question of God’s existence.
The lesson seems pretty clear: If you’re having doubts about God’s existence, don’t tell anybody.
The second story concerns Hemant Mehta, author of the Friendly Atheist blog. Mehta lives in Naperville, Illinois. In October, the local American Legion post in nearby Morton Grove stopped giving financial support to the Morton Grove Park District because one of the district’s board members was refusing to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance. Mehta asked his readers to make up the difference, and raised $3000 to more than replace the Legion’s $2600. There were no strings. Mehta says, “the only ‘ethical implication’ of accepting money from atheists is that you get money.”
The Park District turned it down. So did the library, after the library’s treasurer referred to Mehta and his readers as “a hate group” and backed up that accusation by reading “a couple of the religiously-inflammatory and expletive-ridden comments posted on Mehta’s Friendly Atheist Facebook Page.” (As if you couldn’t find offensive comments on any popular Facebook page, including Christian ones.) She asked the other trustees: “Would you take money from the Klan?”
The program provides advertising for sponsors who agree to clean a stretch of road on a sign posted along the stretch.
Mehta, on the other hand, was asking for nothing: no plaque, no mention in the newsletter, nothing. Just take the money. He comments:
I firmly believe that if the money came from the “Friendly Christian,” none of this would be an issue. The “A” word is just freaking everybody out.
Finally, the Niles Township Food Pantry cashed the check. If any of the food it bought burst into flames when the needy said grace over it, I haven’t heard.
But still, Christians can give no-strings-attached money to the local library without worrying that they might be likened to the KKK. Compared to the alternatives, being Christian in America is still a pretty cushy gig.
It’s been a busy week for news. The Chris Christie Bridgegate scandal broke open. The polar vortex came and went. An al-Qaeda-linked group claimed control of Fallujah, a town that was a memorable Iraq-War battlefield for American troops; in this country that news pulled the scab off arguments that had been quiet since the last American combat troops left Iraq: What did Bush’s whole Iraq excursion accomplish? Or did Obama screw up Bush’s accomplishments by pulling out too soon?
Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of another war: President Johnson’s War on Poverty. That touched off a similar debate: Was the War on Poverty an example of misguided liberal over-reach? Or was it working until conservatives managed to sabotage it? What about poverty today? And what about growing inequality, which is pushing the lower middle class towards poverty?
At least one pundit claimed that the most important news of the week was something boring that nobody was paying much attention to: Inflation in the healthcare market slipped below the overall inflation rate for the first time since … well, maybe ever. If healthcare inflation starts behaving itself, then those scary exponential-growth-in-government-spending graphs go away.
With all that to discuss, most of this week’s Sift is devoted to the weekly summary. I did split off one short article to connect two stories related to atheism: A Christian pastor announced his intention to live 2014 as if there were no God and blog about the results; he got results much faster than he expected. And an atheist blogger tried to raise funds for charity and discovered nobody wanted his money; his attempt to do a good deed got him and his readers compared to the KKK and denounced as a “hate group”. The lesson I draw is that prejudice against atheists is alive and well. Christians who imagine they’re being discriminated against really have no idea what atheists go through.
The atheist article should be out in the next hour or so, and the weekly summary before noon.
There underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.
This week everybody was talking, yet again, about Benghazi
Maybe the New York Times can finally lay it to rest as a “scandal”. What the Times found in its exhaustive investigation was “months of American misunderstandings and misperceptions about Libya and especially Benghazi” leading up to the attack. The lesson it draws is that “an intensive focus on combating Al Qaeda may distract from safeguarding American interests.”
This all resembles nothing so much as the Cold War, when Americans tried to evaluate every new player on the world stage — Castro, Mao, Nasser, Saddam, bin Laden, and countless military juntas from South America to Pakistan — in terms of the cosmic struggle between us and the Soviet Union. We had a hard time grasping the possibility that, rather than being for “us” or for “them”, leaders of other nations or national movements might be for themselves or for their own countries or causes.
Likewise today, we see everything in the Muslim world as polarized between ourselves and Al Qaeda. Benghazi appears to have had little to do with all that. The Times
turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. … The fixation on Al Qaeda might have distracted experts from more imminent threats.
So most of the national discussion of Benghazi has been based on false premises. Sometimes that was intentional; I recommend David Brock’s book The Benghazi Hoax, which chronicles Republicans’ ever-shifting accusations about Benghazi, and how little basis any of them ever had.
CONSERVATIVE: Unemployment is supposed to be short-term help while you find another job.
LIBERAL: What if there are no jobs?
Each side has an additional, more complicated point to make. Liberals take a macro-economic view: If there aren’t enough jobs for everybody who wants to work, and then you make millions of families drastically cut their spending, the economy will shrink and there will be even fewer jobs. Conservatives counter that long-term unemployment benefits create dependency: People get used to the idea that they don’t have to work, so they’re less and less likely to find a job.
When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you’re causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy. And it really — while it seems good — it actually does a disservice to the people you’re trying to help.
Senator Paul justifies his conclusion by mentioning a study showing that employers would rather hire a worker who has been unemployed only a short time, rather one unemployed longer. One of the study’s authors responded:
Paul cites my work on long-term unemployment as a justification—which surprised me, because it implies the opposite of what he says it does. … Paul thinks that “extending long-term benefits will only hurt the chances of the unemployed in the job market,” because longer benefits will make them choose to stay unemployed longer—at which point firms won’t hire them. But just because companies discriminate against the long-term unemployed doesn’t mean long-term benefits are to blame. Paul might know that if he read beyond the first line of my paper’s abstract.
People with marketable skills tend to get snapped up right away, but the long-term unemployed would be even less likely to find work if they had no income at all. The longer you are unemployed, the more likely you are to fall into poverty traps: situations where lack of money prevents you from mounting an effective job search. Without money, it’s harder to arrange child care and transportation for job interviews, and harder to present the fresh-and-confident image employers are looking for. At the extreme, homeless people have difficulty maintaining basic hygiene, and so become almost unemployable.
The test case is North Carolina, which on July 1 cut unemployment compensation so drastically that its citizens became ineligible for federal extended unemployment benefits. By one measure the results look good: NC unemployment fell from 8.8% to 7.4%, more than twice as fast as unemployment was falling nationwide. But a closer look tells a different story: The state counted 102K fewer unemployed because the labor force shrunk by 95K. In other words, people stopped counting as “unemployed” because they gave up on finding a job.
Being unemployed or making minimum wage is bad enough on its own, but the injury is compounded by the insult of being treated like a loser. Noah Smith recalls his experiences in Japan, and imagines Americans calling fast-food workers “sir” and generally treating every worker with respect. I like the phrase he coins: redistribution of respect.
Last week I discussed Phil Robertson, who was briefly suspended from Duck Dynasty for, well, being an idiot in front of a journalist. His cause was taken up by Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, and countless others who said his “First Amendment rights” were being violated, which wasn’t true and showed a grave ignorance of the First Amendment.
Well, where are all those people now? Are they rushing to Dick Metcalf’s defense?.
The rich are trying to turn the screws on Pope Francis. Home Depot mogul Ken Langone has warned New York’s Cardinal Dolan that rich donors might be reluctant to provide the $180 million needed to restore St. Patrick’s Cathedral if the Pope keeps saying mean things about capitalism. “You get more with honey than with vinegar,” Langone told Dolan.
Langone says he’s trying to explain “the vast difference between the pope’s experience in Argentina and how we are in America. … Rich people in one country don’t act the same as rich people in another country.”
That last idea has become the standard right-wing talking point about the Pope: his limited experience makes him ignorant about economics. Arthur Brooks of the conservative American Enterprise Institute says: “In places like Argentina, what they call free enterprise is a combination of socialism and crony capitalism.” And that’s almost word-for-word what Paul Ryan said:
The guy is from Argentina, they haven’t had real capitalism in Argentina. They have crony capitalism in Argentina. They don’t have a true free enterprise system.
I wonder how that spin technique would work for liberals. Catholic women could try to explain how the Pope’s opinions on birth control and abortion are invalid because of “the vast difference between the pope’s experience as a man, and how we are” as women. Why didn’t anybody think of that before?
Of course, if you read Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium (I did), you’ll see there is nothing Argentina-centered about his economic analysis, which is about capitalism itself, not crony capitalism. Francis’ economic thought is right in the middle of a Catholic tradition that goes back to the 1890s and has been re-affirmed by every pope since — Italians, Germans, and Poles alike. It fits the U.S. like a glove.
Bill Nye the Science Guy is going to the Creation Museum in Kentucky to debate the topic “Is Creation A Viable Model of Origins?”. Like Greg Laden, I can’t help thinking that no good can come from this. I hope Nye understands how much easier it is to make stuff up than to debunk it, and has some strategy in mind that I don’t grasp.
Speaking of people who reject science, this week we heard the annual claims that global warming must be a myth because it’s cold outside. I must have been getting popcorn during the part of An Inconvenient Truth where Al Gore said it wasn’t going to snow any more.
And then there are the people who get angry when confronted with facts they don’t like. Josh Marshall reports: “As Obamacare Sign-Ups Surge, So Does Conservative Rage“. He calculates that around 10 million people now have coverage because of the various provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and the number would be 15 million if the Supreme Court hadn’t allowed Republican officials to block Medicaid expansion in red states.
These are the numbers. Lots of people have partisan or ideological or in many cases deeply emotional needs not to believe them. But these are the numbers.
An NYT article Thursday about the Israeli/Palestinian negotiations calls attention to the centrality of a point that might seem obvious: Israel insists that the Palestinians recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state.
Usually, American news coverage focuses on the “right to exist” part. Of course you can’t make a deal with somebody who won’t admit you have a right to exist. Denying Israel’s right to exist conjures up images of Hitler’s attempt to annihilate Europe’s Jews, which is what convinced the world that Jews needed their own homeland in the first place.
But Israel’s right to exist “as a Jewish state” is a little different. (Imagine how American Jews, Muslims, and atheists would feel about recognizing the United States as a Christian nation.) To Arabs whose families have been living for centuries in the region that is now Israel and who know no other homeland, recognizing Israel as a Jewish state means agreeing that Jewish Israelis are permanently tied to the identity of the country in a way that Arab Israelis are not. It ratifies a Jewish-centered national narrative in which the Palestinian refugees of 1948 are collateral damage.
Esquire provides some relevant backstory to Dr. Eben Alexander’s best-seller Proof of Heaven. Dr. Alexander has a long history of making up convenient details after the fact.
The House Republican leadership has a plan to improve the do-nothing Congress of last year: They plan to do even less.
They may not feel powerful, but they do feel entitled to feel powerful.
One of the privileges that still comes with being white or male is that you get to be an individual. When you do something unusually good or bad, the media doesn’t take you as a representative of all whites or all men. You’re just you; you did something; it’s news.
So nobody remarked on George W. Bush being the United States’ 43rd consecutive white male president, but 2008 buzzed with speculation that the 44th might be black or female. For example, pundits questioned whether a woman could be tough enough to be commander-in-chief of the military, but nobody has ever successfully made an issue of whether a man can be compassionate enough to be nurse-in-chief of Medicare, or understand small children well enough to be teacher-in-chief of Head Start.
Nobody ever asked why a white man had killed President Kennedy or tried to kill President Reagan. The gunmen had names; their stories were presumed to be personal. When Bernie Madoff conned his investors out of billions, nobody asked “What makes a white man do something like that?” or “What should be done about the white male swindler problem?”
Sikh temple shooter.
Even when the perpetrators themselves frame whiteness or masculinity as an issue, the media tends not to pick it up. Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 69 people at a camp for liberal youth in Norway, saw himself as a crusader against a Muslim takeover of Europe. His manifesto advocated a restoration of European “monoculturalism” and “patriarchy”. Wade Michael Page, killer of six in the Sikh Temple shooting in Wisconsin, was acting on his long-held white supremacist views. In each case, this motivation was spun mostly as a symptom of personal instability, and not of a dangerous cancer in the white community.
Mad as hell.
The upshot is that although we are surrounded by angry white men — on talk radio, on the internet, on the highways, in the workplace, in the NRA and the Tea Party, in the “men’s rights” movement, and in countless acts of domestic violence or public mayhem from Columbine to Sandy Hook — we aren’t having a national discussion about the anger problem of whites or men or white men. That’s because we don’t see them as “white men”; we see them as individuals whose stories reflect unique psychological, political, or social issues. (By contrast, consider how little Michelle Obama has to do to evoke the angry-black-woman stereotype.)
Chapter by chapter, Kimmel calls attention to angry white men wherever they are found: the loudest voices on the radio, the school shooters, the anti-feminist men’s-rights movement and its Dad’s-rights subculture, the wife beaters, the workers who go postal, and the white supremacists. He asks and answers the question you seldom hear: What makes white men so angry?
What links all these different groups … is a single core experience: what I call aggrieved entitlement.
Aggrieved entitlement is the belief that you have been cheated out of status and power that should have been part of your birthright. (It’s a close relative of what I have called privileged distress: the feeling that advantages you never consciously acknowledged are slipping away from you.) White men are angry, Kimmel claims, because
They may not feel powerful, but they do feel entitled to feel powerful.
How it was supposed to be.
High standards and failure. White men also feel judged (and judge themselves) according to the standards of fathers and grandfathers who received the full white-male birthright, who didn’t have to compete with other races on an almost-level playing field, and who could count on subservient wives, mothers, daughters, and Girls Friday at the office to rally behind their leadership rather than outshine them or make demands.
You want a recipe for anger? Here it is: I’m a failure and it’s not my fault.
The seldom-examined setting for white male anger is failure, or at least failure according to the standards of another era. Dad and/or Grandpa supported a family on one job, and when he got home he commanded respect from his family. His marriage lasted, and his kids were not being raised by a resentful ex-wife on the other side of the country. When Dad or Grandpa was young, he was comfortable in his masculinity. He hunted deer and lettered in football. Girls waited by the phone for him to call, and when he paid for dinner they knew they owed him something.
It’s not that way any more, and it’s not my fault. Don’t look at me like that.
The rich and powerful speak for me.
The visible spokesmen for angry white men may be millionaires like Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump. But such success is what their listeners wish they had, not what they do have or will ever have. Kimmel observes:
It’s largely the downwardly mobile middle and lower middle classes who form the backbone of the Tea Party, of the listeners of outrage radio, of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists— in many cases literally the sons of those very farmers and workers who’ve lost the family farms or shuttered for good the businesses that had been family owned and operated for generations.
Violence. This sense of being cheated out of what was promised — and being judged as if it had been delivered — interacts badly with another part of the traditional male identity: Men have the privilege/right/duty to make things right by violence.
I don’t want to be violent, but I can be.
That is the plot of just about every action movie with a male hero: A man who would rather be left alone to live his life and take care of his family is confronted with an injustice that can only end if he becomes violent and defeats it. If he successfully wields violence he is a hero. If he remains peaceful he is a wimp.
And so, while many women also feel cheated and judged unfairly, they tend not to snap in a violent way. Kimmel observes that all the recent rampage school shooters (other than the Korean Virginia Tech shooter, whose race evoked a discussion, and another Korean shooter since Kimmel finished writing) have been white males, mostly from rural and suburban areas. Kimmel imagines what would happen if they’d all been, say, inner-city black girls
Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago.
Likewise,
In my research, I could find no cases of working women coming into their workplaces, packing assault weapons, and opening fire, seemingly indiscriminately.
The explanation is simple: When a man feels disrespected — on the job, in his school, in his family — the disrespect threatens not just his personal identity, but his identity as a man. (The archetypal Man is entitled to respect; if you are not being respected, you are failing as a man.) The obvious response is to re-assert manhood through violence, simultaneously righting the scales both socially and psychologically.
The Real and the True. One point I made in “The Distress of the Privileged” was that the “distress” part of privileged distress is very real: If you have convinced yourself that you don’t have any unfair advantages, and then those advantages start to go away, it feels like persecution. You’re not making it up; there are real events you can point to.
Kimmel covers this ground by distinguishing between what is “real” and what is “true”.
White men’s anger is “real”— that is, it is experienced deeply and sincerely. But it is not “true”— that is, it doesn’t provide an accurate analysis of their situation.
And what is most likely to be untrue is the object of the anger. When your well-paid factory job is shipped overseas and you can’t find another one, the villain isn’t the teen-age Chinese girl who does your old job for fifty cents an hour. If you can’t support a family on your income, the villain isn’t your working wife or her reasonable demand that you share the housewife duties she doesn’t have time for any more. If the value of your house crashes, the villain isn’t the black family that got talked into a sub-prime mortgage it couldn’t afford. If you judge yourself by the standards of another era, the villains are not the people whose fair competition keeps you from meeting those standards.
The collapsing pyramid. Patriarchy and racism are both systems of dominance that are coming apart. The white men who feel the change first are the ones just one step up from the bottom: Their step collapses, throwing them in with the “lesser” blacks and women, and the pyramid resettles on top of them. The white men higher up the pyramid want the victims of this collapse to identify with them and with the pyramid that gives them their status: What’s wrong isn’t that the pyramid itself is unfair — as you now can clearly see, being at the bottom of it. What’s wrong, they want you to believe, is that the pyramid is collapsing. You should defend the pyramid, blame the other bottom-dwellers for your loss of status, and maybe one day your one-step-up can be restored.
They know that’s not going to happen; they’re just counting on you not figuring it out. The Masters of the Universe are not going to bring your job back from China. Wal-Mart is not going to make room for your family shop to re-open. Bank of America is not going to forgive your underwater mortgage. Agri-business is not going to rescue your family farm.
The rich white men are not going to rebuild the lower step of the pyramid, no matter how much power they get. And nobody is making room for you on the upper levels.
If you have to blame someone, blame the people who promised you something they couldn’t (or decided not to) deliver. They sold you a bill of goods. Don’t buy another bill of goods from them.
But the best solution of all would be to get past the anger, forget about how things were supposed to be, and just start dealing with the situation as it is. Like a lot of people you never expected to have anything in common with, you find yourself at the bottom of the pyramid. It’s an unfair pyramid.
Late start today. (Last night I stayed up to finish The Goldfinch, which is a fabulous novel.)
This week’s featured article will be a review of Michael Kimmel’s book Angry White Men. What do school shootings, talk radio, the Tea Party, the men’s-rights movement, domestic violence, and workers going postal all have in common? Angry white men. We’re not used to grouping those events together, so we hardly ever ask the question: What makes white men so angry, and what can be done about it?
Central to Kimmel’s thesis is a concept that is a close relative of my notion of privileged distress: aggrieved entitlement.
The weekly summary focuses on the NYT’s revelations about Benghazi, the debate over unemployment insurance, new laws that kicked in on January 1, Israel/Palestine, Esquire’s critical examination of the author of Proof of Heaven, and a few other things.
I expect everything to come out about an hour later than usual. I blame Donna Tartt.
Coal is supposed to be the cheap form of energy. But that’s only if you ignore the cost of stuff like 
The Weekly Sift 