Or I’m taking one, anyway. Today, we begin the move out of the motorhome, out of storage, and into the new apartment. It is reorientation time. Then, next Sunday is my birthday. (I will be thirty-five. Or twenty-five. I forget. But either way I look much younger, and I have a head of hair like Rita Hayworth.) The morning after, I leave for Indian Wells in the California desert with my brother and nephew (a year closer in age to me than his mother, he is like another brother) for our yearly ritual of the BNP Paribas Tennis Open: four days of close-up Federer, Nadal, and Murray, dining and drinking, and the kind of non-stop New York wise-guy humor, in triplicate, that sets Julia longing for the sand hills of Nebraska.

It is a good time for a break. I’ve been blogging steadily since I began over fifteen months ago, and the timing is propitious for discovering exactly how out of control the world will spin without my commentary upon it. I’ll be back in about ten or eleven days. I hope you will be too. If you’re relatively new, the horizontal menu bar and the last couple of months’ archives, not yet added to it, are the places to explore in my absence, if you care to, so as not to have missed a word of my indispensable wit and wisdom.

Now, where was I…

AJA

No Comments Yet, Comment On This

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 4:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under On The Road.

Shopping for Pomegranates at Wal-Mart on New Year’s Day

by Campbell McGrath

from The New Yorker, January 11, 2010

*Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry,” Reasons for Moving, 1968

No Comments Yet, Comment On This

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 4:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar, Culture Clash.

I believe in American exceptionalism.

There, I said it. Now let me make clear what I mean.

I believe the American advent, the American idea, and the American experience are exceptional: a nation of laws, and not of men and women, a constitutional democracy founded in and devoted to the liberty of its people, a culture and nationality not of ethnicity or spiritual uniformity, but of the motley assemblage of ever broadening immigrant populations and their descendants, with the constantly renewable spirit to create and recreate their lives. No other nation is quite like this, and everyone knows it.

American exceptionalism should not mean that Americans are in anyway inherently superior to other peoples. How could they be? There is no natural American people to hold inherency: the American people are a construct of many other peoples. The United States has no inherently greater rights than any other nation. And as the American experience has often fallen far short of the American idea, so, too, do Americans, like all other people, fall short of human ideals.

Case in point: the recent Justice Department report declaring John Yoo and John Bybee guilty of exercising poor judgment, but exonerating them of professional misconduct – rejecting thereby the recommendations of the department’s own ethics investigators.

Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis said that Yoo’s

loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, views of executive power.

According to the Washington Post, Margolis believes

…the memo authors did not intentionally violate ethics rules. Instead, he said, they were struggling to prevent another terrorist strike on U.S. soil.

Since when, one wonders, did the sincerity of one’s views excuse the extremity of one’s beliefs and actions? This can excuse anything. What a paltry excuse for reasoning. They were struggling to prevent another terrorist strike on U.S. soil? And Jaruzelski was struggling to forestall a Soviet invasion, and Pinochet and the Argentine generals were struggling to beat back the Marxist threat, and Franco was struggling to stave off the communists and the anarcho-syndicalists and the republicans, and Trotsky the counter-revolutionaries. The universal excuse for every kind of human, legal, and democratic violation is the struggle to prevent. This is not the reasoning of democrats; it is the rationalization of tyrants. As Norm Geras wrote last week

It hardly seems appropriate, either, to propose that the holding of certain ideological views, whether about executive power, civil emergency or anything else, might be a basis for exonerating a lawyer when he or she provides validation for committing a grave political crime now all but universally regarded as a crime against humanity.

Count bad argument 1 for torture

Bad argument 2

It isn’t torture! Sure their struggling, screaming, and succumbing – they’re uncooperative. If they were being tortured, they’d be dead.

Well, somewhere around 100 people did die in U.S. custody while not being tortured. I’ll repeat that: 100 people in the custody of U.S. forces or agents – not in any kind of combat, not after any kind of military or legal proceeding – have died.

If, as Oscar Wilde slyly informed us, “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue” (and we know how most defenders of torture love to be instructed by Oscar Wilde), then Euphemism is Hypocrisy’s chief of staff. Euphemism sits on the other side of the Decider’s desk and offers, “We’ll just tell them it’s not torture. We’ll call it robust interrogation. No, better, we’ll call it – what term did the Nazis use? – we’ll call it enhanced interrogation.”

Enhanced with torture, of course. And why let the adoption of Nazi euphemism give us any kind of moral pause. We are, in these conversations, speaking of practices acknowledged – in some cases, for centuries – as forms of torture, acknowledged universally in military practice, law and convention as torture. In 1988, Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the conservatives and neoconservatives who support torture, signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment [emphasis added]. He stated

The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

Well, not just in the world, but by the United States. Not in Reagan’s time, but now. Everyone can know a rationalization when they hear one: it hems, it haws, it squirms, it cavils. It tells you why it isn’t what it appears to be. The way Clark Kent wasn’t Superman. Fooled you, didn’t he?

Bad argument 3

Quotation marks. Don’t write torture. Write “torture.”

This is the employment of quotation marks that, rather than simply uses a word, calls attention to the word as a word, in one kind of usage – this one, I’m afraid – challenging the very appropriateness or “meaning” of the word, as in the United States, was, you know, “attacked” on 9/11. By “terrorists” who hate us because of our “democracy” and “freedom.”

This is the typographical argument, long on the short of it, short on the long.
Bad argument 4

The no-reciprocity argument. Islamic terrorists cut our heads off; why have any compunction over how we treat them?

First, the various conventions prohibiting torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment are not encoded in tit-for-tat reciprocity. A signatory isn’t committed to abiding by them only if others follow the conventions. That is a sure way, obviously, to the quick dissolution in effective force of any agreement. You don’t get to run red lights or break into a house because someone else did it, even if to you. Then Ten Commandments, which I’ll wager large numbers of torture proponents hold dear as the foundation of something or other, are not “thou shalt not” unless the other does, in which case have at it.

Second, the greater reason and purpose for humanitarian principle is not to be found in treating well an adversary you might well wish not to, but in overcoming that wish, that base if righteous desire to cut him up or fry him because he done you wrong. I only abused him because he did it to me is not a foundation on which to build our own human dignity or by which to establish the superior values that separate us from such an enemy.

We do not base torture prohibitions on reciprocity. We base them on principle. Of the kind that supposedly make us different.

Bad argument 5

The emotive argument. You feel sympathy for them?

As in the counter to the no-reciprocity argument, the counter here need not be based in any specific human compassion for, let us say, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We do not, fundamentally, refrain from torturing out of compassion for the potential victim of torture – though I’ll wager, again, that large numbers of the less tough amongst us, were they compelled to wield the torturer’s instrument, could not overcome their compassionate response to the pain and cries of even KSM.

We do not torture out of the expression and creation of, by the very act of our restraint, our own humanity, the values by which we claim to stand above our enemies.

Bad argument 6

The defense in political judgment. This is the defense, essentially, in other words, for Yoo and Bybee, and for the Bush administration, just in case you don’t buy the euphemisms. It was a tough situation. They made a judgment call. We don’t want to condemn people for, even criminalize, political judgments.

How long do we need to consider that in government and politics everything is a political judgment, and by this argument, any act would be defensible, no act would be wrong, and our political leaders would stand above the law and be answerable for their acts only at the ballot box? But, then, why rely on that latter? It might be their political judgment that we need for some unspecified period, because of the threat against us, suspend elections. It might be that they would decide that additional American citizens like Jose Padilla, perhaps thousands, need be arrested and held without charge or trial and rendered effectively senseless by years of sensory assault and deprivation. That would be our leaders’ political judgment; however, these would all be political judgments that the Constitution and law do not provide for them to make without being held to account and liable to penalty. “Political judgment” is not a legal escape clause, though it is an escape from fundamental logic for far too many who should be able to reason better.

Bad argument 7

The action in extremis argument. The first duty of any government is to protect the people. If torture, then, is necessary, so be it.

This argument is in fact two, one nested in the other. One is that the torture was necessary. We’ll deal with that next. The first is that “first duty” argument. Immediately, most people would agree with it. The social contract most of us theoretically presuppose as the foundation of our joint national projects begins in mutual self-defense. If not that first protection against the state of nature, what’s a nation and government for? Consider, though, that torture proponents like to challenge opponents with the ticking-clock scenario. This seems to opponents old hat already, and they have become too readily dismissive of the hypothetical unlikelihood as being germane to the argument. As I argued in Tortured Argument, it is not. The purpose of such hypotheticals, however unlikely – and many torture proponents think the ticking clock not as unlikely as do opponents – is to test the absolute nature of our principles and to modify them if necessary by introducing the complexity of the real. However, if one accepts the modification compelled by the ticking-clock hypothetical, as I do, then one may still distinguish extreme circumstances from standard policy prescription and practice.

The first-duty argument can be put to the same test. Does this argument entail as a further conclusion that we hold no value greater than our own lives? Will we, acting nationally out of that duty, do anything to defeat our enemies and survive? Some many answer immediately, yes, and there we are, but what are the further entailments of that answer? Will we, as a nation, but also as individuals, torture? Torture the innocent? Torture children? Serve as guards in concentration camps? Machine gun rows of naked people standing at the edges of ravines, more readily to fall in for disposal. Place heads back to back so as to kill two with one bullet. Cut off heads? Ourselves enslave and terrorize?

These apparently extreme hypotheticals are, in fact, less hypothetical than the ticking clock – nations and peoples have done them all. Answers are germane to reasoning along this line. Libertarian blog friend ShrinkWrapped raised the question a little while back, “What are you willing to die for?” Young men and women answer this question regularly in their military service and combat. There are values they hold dearer than their own lives. Champions of torture are among those who tend to wax most openly patriotic, singing the song of the American strain worth dying for. So what is that strain? Is it only American, or is it more fundamentally human? To die in active combat for values higher than life at any cost may seem more gloriously assertive than to risk all for what one will not do, but they are in the final analysis the same.

Those who make the first duty claim believe they have reached the end of an argument, when in truth they are only at its beginning. They have not yet really begun to reason.

Bad argument 7

The vital information argument. This is the necessity argument nested in the first-duty argument. It is, note, an extension of – more importantly, the relaxation of – the ticking clock argument.

In the ticking clock hypothetical, mass death is imminent. We know that. Without that knowledge the clock is not ticking, or, if I may say so, it is ticking all the time. That is the human condition. But that is not the ticking clock scenario. In the vital-information scenario there is only the threat of a ticking clock, not actual knowledge of one. By such imagining, every enemy is potentially, mysteriously, like a black box, in possession (or not) of information that holds lives in the balance. This is the constant condition of warfare: every captured combatant, every prisoner, is such a hypothetical fund of vital information. However, it has not before been U.S. policy to torture prisoners on the possibility that they might know something of value.

Yet this is what many torture proponents would now institute as policy. So far removed are we from the ticking-clock scenario into the all-purpose, always-applicable, potential vital-information scenario, that not only nationally-known torture proponents, but a majority of the American people, according to a Rasmussen poll, supported waterboarding as low-level a figure as Detroit in-flight bomber Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab. In fact, according to a GFK-AP poll, the American people have now sustained for the past nine months at least majority support for the use of torture on “suspected” terrorists more often than rarely.

That’s the consequence. And that’s not exceptional. Not exceptional at all.

AJA

One Comment

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 9:12 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

Julia and I took an apartment yesterday. Just over sixteen months ago we rented our home, uprooted nearly every element of our lives, and hit the road in our thirty-seven foot motorhome. We spent four days with the coach parked in front of our house moving about a half percent of what we own into it. I haven’t missed a thing. Of course, I didn’t give up my tenure. I simply took my sabbatical. And Julia didn’t sell her business, though she did take on a partner. (We’ll call him Deep Pockets.) But we did disconnect our lives and travel, just as we both love. Julia returned to Los Angeles periodically to teach classes at her school, while over twelve months, I returned for one night only, early on, to help close the deal with DP. I never wanted to come back. But I did have to teach again, and the Workshops finally required more complete attention from Julia. Everything ends. Everything transitions into something else.

For the past four months we have been living in RV parks around Los Angeles – whenever we could, right on the beach, right at the Pacific. However, the pleasures of motorhome living have been less without the daily excitement of travel and new places. The disruption to our lives became more pronounced. Most people who fulltime it – that’s what it’s called – are retired – you know, the gray-hairs everyone thinks of when they hear of motorhome travel. But those older RVers are not all fulltimers. Some are snow birds, heading south for the winter. The gray hairs are what Julia thought of when I first talked to her of motorhome travel well over a decade ago. I had some little experience, and already knew the joy.

Those older travelers are much misunderstood by the people who capture them in a cliché. On one of the countless occasions along the way that I observed some back-bent codger emerge from a forty-footer, and his maybe spryer but plumper spouse head for her own work in parking, setting up, maybe unhitching what’s called a fifth wheel, leveling it, and connecting it to the grid, I turned to Julia and said, You know they’re actually very impressive. Most people their age are rooted like plants in front of a television. These people are out there seeing the world, traveling the roads, engaging life with all they’ve got left. They’re something. And so they are.

One of the rich rewards of travel is the regular encounter with lives, kinds of lives, whole subcultures of which you would otherwise never have known. It’s like discovering new planets, populated planets, right there around the bend, over a mountain, deep in a wood. The fulltimers and the snow birds are two kinds of motorhome traveler, and there are many who are younger, younger than Julia and I, and the family vacationers with their kids. There are the people, too, old and not so old, who are not travelers, who are a different kind of fulltimer. The RV may be a twenty-year old motorhome worse for wear and time, or maybe a fifth wheel, up on its blocks, an apron around its base like a foundation to a house, a makeshift yard of chairs, tables, bird feeders crowding the site. There are many variations, but in each case, not in the resplendent motorhome resorts on lakes and oceans that are condoed and timeshared, but in the small, meager parks stuck back in the rural trees, tucked away on lots off the interstate, they may rent monthly for three or four hundred dollars, and they are not recreational or much of a vehicle, but they are a permanent home, twenty-five feet by ten or even eight, for someone old, or veteran, or attached to reality a little differently, and its better, by far, than a big-city street or some charity hotel, and you’ve got some propane for heat and maybe a pet and your own blue sky, and life is always a road to somewhere you didn’t know you were going.

So finally, for Julia and me, after sixteen months and no longer traveling, fulltiming became too much. She has this business to help guide, I have several book projects in progress and too long in coming, and life is joy if you can make it and let it be that, and if you are lucky, but it is also work, and we just need more space and to be settled again. We needed to land somewhere for awhile.

Among the oddly contradictory feelings of preparing to land, is my reluctance to give up the Allegro Bay, our motorhome, just as we prepare to sell it. (If you’re interested, by the way, the asking price is $125,000 for a 2009, with many extras and a Hydralift, hydraulic motorcycle lift, the best on the market and adaptable for an ATV, welded to the rear, an $8,000 value newly installed.) All my life, whenever talking with friends about the fantasy of wealth, I always said my definition of the kind of rich I’d like to be is the ability to travel wherever I want whenever I want. If you are intrepid and disentangled enough a person, that doesn’t have to be that monetarily rich. For me, though it doesn’t yet cross oceans, the motorhome, has been that freedom, that rich, and while I have longed these past couple of months to be landed, I feel, too, like a cowboy about to give up his horse.

Julia and I both love and embrace change. It comes to you anyway, and we make our own. Our apartment is little more than a mile from the home we own, still rented out, and which I never wanted to live in again when we left it. We expect to stay in the apartment for a couple of years, do some traveling by air and auto to continue our work in Indian country, and then see where the economy and work and circumstance have delivered us. We anticipate another year of motorhome travel in four or five years. This time around with only a very little experience driving RVs, I was reluctant to go above the 37 feet. Now I’ve driven through mountains and over narrow country roads and barreled along interstates amid crowds of trucks and trailers, and loved every second of it. Next time, I’m going 44 feet – the king size bed, the second bathroom, the kitchen island. (Some cowboy.)

We’ll see where we are in four or five years. We are all held out into our existential space, deep into the unfathomed universe. It is cold there, and dark, and in the very dead of night it is frightening. So we seek connection, in love and family and faith, in culture and tradition, in the comfort of habit and routine, as if to believe there is no wonder that anything, a tree or a walk in the park, is the way it is – even though we know our end is to separate from most or all of those connections.

In these final days before we move next week, I walk the dogs along the low bluffs of Playa del Rey, overlooking the Pacific. The ocean and the beach are my heaven, what I hope to see at my end, if not after. I grew up in several communities in New York City, but mostly in Rockaway Beach, a collection of communities, actually, along a peninsula in the Atlantic that many New Yorkers don’t even know is part of the city, or think is in Brooklyn, though it is Queens. My parents moved us there, twice, because they loved the seaside too.

My father, who was born in Ukraine, a cold and unforgiving clime – especially in the first half of the twentieth century, and before, for a Jew – loved three things in the world: his family, everything new and clean (because in his youth everything had been old and of the earth), and the sun. He worshiped the sun, and so he worshiped the beach, and on his restful Sundays, while his indolent children still slept, and when we didn’t live in Rockaway, he would make the drive to Jones Beach, farther out on Long Island, and lie for hours with a reflector, be home before we had risen yet. In the painful days after he died, and now, several years later, every time I sit on a beach, whenever I feel, simply, the heat of the sun on my skin – feel that the universe is not empty space surrounding me, but something touching me – I think of my father. In that inexplicable communion of heart and memory, I am my father.

My mother’s love of the sea was more melancholy, as she was. She loved to sit at her window beside the Atlantic on stormy days and watch a dark Caribbean mood travel up to New York’s southern shores. She swam in sorrows that were buoyed by the love of her family.

On the day before we took the apartment, I walked Homer and Penelope amid those kinds of stormy seaside colors. The ocean was steely beneath dark clouds, the wind blowing, the white caps churning, light, though not sun, cracking the clouds for contrast. On this day, thinking of beginnings and ends, and the distance in between, I was not my father but my mother. In contrast to seasides, mountains, and great plains, cities like New York are great works of imagination, architectural installations, stages of human drama, the worlds of the novel a reader enters to live on its streets and know the merchants and neighbors. But on a bluff above the ocean, one returns to the original creation. There is the sea, the sky, the land, where they all meet, and one can feel, originally, how one connects to them, to the sphere they embody, and what lies beyond.

I walked ahead of Penelope, who these days, no longer hunting in woodlands, does not forge maniacally ahead anymore, and followed behind Homer. When he was a puppy, Homer was frightened of the world itself. I had to pull him down the stairs of the three-story Venice loft we lived in then, and out the door, just to get him to do his business. He was not unlike the shy, timid, frightened child I was, who in my infancy, through a long week in the Catskills, would not go potty until my father drove up for the weekend to hold my hand.

Now Homer has seen the country and peed on it all. He was about my age when we left, our gray about the same, but is older than I am now, aging faster, though I’ll get there. On the Playa del Rey bluffs, he lumbered through the gusts ahead of me, each slow step rippling through his body to the hind haunches. He turned to look back at me, his eyes wondering.

“I’m coming,” I said.

AJA (photos from my Moto Q)

6 Comments

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 10:56 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under On The Road.

John Curran is a reader who lives in Oakton, Virginia. Not long ago, John and I had a spirited exchange over two posts on the recent Supreme Court decision regarding corporate campaign spending. It turns out John is a federal computer security officer, and I’m not allowed to tell you anything else under threat of obtaining an Irish passport and being flown to Dubai for a tennis match. Annoyingly (he can do English, I can’t do tech security) John had his B.A. in English, is a lover of Shakespeare and opera, and is a photographer. I hate him.

While others were doing whatever it was they did during the great Mid-Atlantic blizzard of 2010, John was out capturing how the storm beautified his home landscape. A little something for those who missed it or were not delayed returning home from Argentina because of it, and who love snow.

Early In The Storm

Everything In A Blanket

Sculptures On The Deck

Birds Stocking Up

The Next Morning

The Sun Comes Out

A Path to Feed The Birds

No Comments Yet, Comment On This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 5:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Uncategorized.

Music: “In the Painted Room,” by Karenn Gibson Roc, from the album Touching the Soul

Video: Phil Roc:

Label: Lemon Grass Music

No Comments Yet, Comment On This

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 8:28 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar, Culture Clash.

Shrink sounds like an enlightened, empowering doctor, the kind I certainly want myself. Do not condescend. Explain everything I wish to know, which will be a lot. Enable me, and provide me with options. And please – please – know more than I do.

And the pilots shall fly the planes, and the aeronautical engineers build them. The programmers shall program. The biomechanics shall manipulate genes. And the surfers of the sea shall not aim protons at one another in the Large Hadron Collider like bottle caps in a game of skully along the Pacific Coast Highway. For knowledge is a awesome thing. Unless it is of something soft like political science. (Science? Really, please.) Or sociology. Or history. Or government. Or – good God, man, watch out for the quicksand! – English.

We are all philosopher-kings in the realm of our own perfect wisdom. The tenants do not complain, and no court can seek to impeach us. Our rule is like a pure, sturdy blanket o’er the land, and it is without blemish. The citizens even get rebates. All hail the imaginary land.

It is a truth of human nature that what we can do at all, we will often imagine doing better than others. Familiarity breeds proverbial contempt. After all (in those societies that do), we all speak English. We’re all observers of society and political calculation, and know a tyrant is just a bully with an army. We’ve all read our Federalist Papers, our Smith and Marx and Keynes. (Oh, all right, and Friedman. So Krugman, neah.) We even know our W. Edwards Deming. And we’ve got ourselves a heap of street smarts, as Jimmy styles and praises it.

We can run a country.

It may even be that, roiled enough by the incompetence around us, we seek the mantle of leadership. We have the requisite political or networking skill (already we rise above), we achieve positions of responsibility, elected or other, and with a P an h or a D or some other alphabet soup after our names or none at all, we are become what we despise: we are elite. We are – how do you say? – anointed.

This discussion of elites confuses one concept in three attitudes. Of the first, that toward elites, Nightelf says, “Jay seems to get bogged down in ‘what is an elite?’ The problem isn’t ‘elites’, it’s elitism.” Well, yes, actually, I focused on elites because that is the subject I chose (thanks for noticing) and I chose it because that is the word Shrink and so many conservatives keep using – not elitism. Were there an actual problem with elites per se, it would, indeed, involve elitism. As I wrote

Elitism is “leadership or rule” by an elite, “consciousness of being or belonging to an elite.” These are more or less problematic notions depending on how we unpack, and again, validate them. The core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence. The offensive culmination is in a sense of social or moral superiority.

However, Nightelf, and Jimmy, and Shrink, all go on immediately to complain against the “insufferable arrogance,” the constitutional deviance, and the “statist” beliefs of, not elites, but liberals, even if styled as “liberal elites.” Which is my point exactly. Their complaints are properly lodged against liberalism, not the reality that leadership and governance will always be exercised by some kind of elite – the bus driven, for the trusting and hopeful, by someone who at least knows how to drive, maybe even, pray, by one who can drive at least somewhat better than the others, and who will probably, since it is good and responsible to regulate matters of safety and entrusted lives, have a commercial driver’s license, a kind of professional certification, an established imprimatur of elite status as a driver of commercial vehicles.

This conceptual confusion of what are perceived as liberal ideas and behaviors with the nature of elites mixes, secondarily, with the fact that the latter generally in our meritocracy (though always with exceptions), reach their professional or public state as the consequence of formal education and accrediting and certifying systems. (Imagine, please, the justifiable outcries were matters of professional guidance and public trust not in some way regularly established, reviewed, and certified – how the buses then would drive off cliffs and into walls. But perhaps some conservative, after centuries now, has conceived some better idea than the university and the professional school. Perhaps righteous dissatisfaction and outrage.)

From this mix follows the anti-intellectualism. Shrink offers a definition of “intellectual” serviceable for my purpose here:

The intellectual class is composed of that class of people who make their living, often a very good one, by manipulating language.

One manifestation of a class so represented is that it is, by definition, ubiquitous and vocal: it ratiocinates, writes, speaks, educates, broadcasts, pronounces, declares, informs, congregates and issues statements and reports. You get the idea. It is all around us – what Jimmy calls the “three legged stool (Academia, MSM, Washington DC)” – and if one feels just a little misaligned with this class and its unavoidable voice, ubiquitous can come to seem oppressive. The desire for heads can rise in the blood.

Even many of those who think themselves not of this class recognize the centrality of the idea to human history and achievement – the idea, by nature, manipulated as some form of language. Inherent in this recognition, for some, is a kind of, not class, but status envy. Economic class resentment is anathema to conservative thinking, but the substitute of status resentment is not. Even Shrink, clearly of the intellectual class as he defines it, feels obliged, and apparently comfortable, to state of “Engineers, who actually build things” and “Entrepreneurs, who actually create new products and wealth that enrich all of us” – all of which is, of course, true – that “[t]he average Engineer or Entrepreneur contributes far more to society, and far more that is lasting, than the average intellectual.” We know that the contrary statement of comparative value – the terms reversed – would strike as immediately superior and offensive, but because the acceptability of status envy and resentment, particularly against intellectuals, Shrink’s statement bats no eyes. And so, too, amongst the comments to Shrink’s rebuttal in this debate we are treated to condescending, demeaning and clearly ill-spirited stereotypes of members of the “intellectual class,” some of whom referred to are contingent workers who struggle to cobble together an income of, if they are fortunate, $20-30,000 per year (without, generally, and by the way, health insurance), but who, because shitting on the life of the mind is always in vogue in some quarters, don’t qualify as “the people.”

What Shrink flirts with here is what Massimo Pigliucci labels “a third form of anti-intellectualism, unreflective instrumentalism. This is the idea that if something is not of immediate practical value it’s not worth pursuing.” Of the rejection of intellectualism Pigliucci writes

One can be anti-intellectual also by rejecting intellectualism because it is elitist. Anti-elitism is very peculiar to the American psyche, and it is virtually unknown in the rest of the universe. Most other people recognize that in matters of the intellect, as in any other human activity, there are people who do it better and others who are not quite as good. That does not—and should not—imply anything about the intrinsic worth (or lack thereof) of such people. Astonishingly, Americans don’t have any problem with elitism per se: just watch the adoring crowds at a basketball game and the recursive tendency to set up athletes as “role models” for our youth. The underlying assumption seems to be that everybody can become an Olympic athlete, but that the way to science and letters is only reserved to the lucky few. Ironically, the truth is quite the opposite: while the chances of making it in professional sports are almost nil, a country with a large system of public education and some of the best schools in the world can give the gift of intellectual pursuit to millions of people.

MaxedoutMama (who sends me verbal flowers when she agrees with me and calls me dolt when she doesn’t – but that’s okay, I like her all the time) states

the idea that anti-intellectualism is a necessary consequence of observing that our leadership is incompetent is just plain stupid.

Well, of course, I didn’t say that because it isn’t my thought. I have not said a word about the competence of our leadership, which MoM acknowledges, in her own grievances, encompasses liberal and conservative. I have been arguing that anti-intellectualism is a factor in a misconception of the notion of elites. We can argue about competence and how we strayed from the Constitution in, like 1793, and are now virtually a Soviet republic another time. That is not the topic I chose for our fifth go around. However, MoM does state

You discuss language. The people on SW’s blog are probably looking more at data and results.

She goes on to ask, “What data can you present to show that our leadership (not just political) is mostly competent?” As I say, I am not arguing here about the competence (or lack of) of our leadership, and, anyway to meaningfully respond to her question we would need to – you should pardon the expression – define what we mean, in this context, by competent and mostly. As to the opposition set up between language and data, with – I can’t help but feel – some implied derogation of language in the comparison, even statistical studies and reports, never mind political argument, are dependent upon clearly conceived terms of analysis, consideration, and discussion. Clarity of conception is the foundation for all, and we conceive in language.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to uselessly read a poem. I’ll get back to you with the data on that later.

AJA

21 Comments

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 8:30 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff and driving force behind the now fourteen-year-old Individual Indian Money Trust Fund suit has been issuing periodic reports since news of a settlement of the case back in December. I wrote about it in The Nature of Things.

Although the “Ask Elouise” letters, sent to those on the litigation listserv are intended to keep the members of the litigation class informed, they provide important information about matters of importance to anyone who has taken an interest in this case. To begin, the settlement is not complete, and still in danger of being lost, until Congress ratifies the settlement agreement.

Why must the settlement approval process occur so quickly? Time is of the essence. If settlement is not approved in the short term, there is a very real possibility the settlement will fail and the parties will return to active litigation. First, Congress must ratify the settlement agreement before the Court can act to preliminarily approve it. In this election year, further delay will create a more challenging political environment for enactment of the necessary implementing legislation. Congress is a body made up of diverse and varied views and not all have an interest in a successful resolution of this case. Further delay will increase the likelihood that our allies on Capitol Hill focus their attention on other matters. Secondly, the Supreme Court has granted an extension of the time for the parties to submit briefing in connection with its review of the Court of Appeals decision that limits the accounting duty to “low hanging fruit.” It is unlikely that further extensions will be granted by the Supreme Court and further court activity is likely to kill the settlement.

Any settlement of a lawsuit involves compromise, sometimes the very painful and disappointing acceptance of terms far from true justice. Cobell, without whom there would have been no suit and no measure of justice in this matter, had to make a very difficult decision. She explains it again.

How did we get from plaintiffs’ calculation of almost $40 billion a few years ago to $1.4 billion today? The $1.4 billion settlement fund for the accounting claims was the product of negotiations between the parties and is, in my estimation, a fair resolution for plaintiffs’ accounting, restitution and damages claims after considering the risk associated with further litigation, the refusal of the Court of Appeals to order the government to provide a full accounting of all funds, and the absence of any time limit for final judgment in this case. It has long been plaintiffs’ position that more than that is due. But what matters is what is recoverable in Court. The litigation could continue another decade or more with no assurance that we will prevail on the merits. Other factors could not be quantified, including the deaths of tens of thousands of beneficiaries since the filing of this case. Those class members will never see the resolution of this case and the prospect of another ten years of litigation means that thousands more will be denied their rights too. It is important to also consider that the district court limited the award following the 2008 trial to only $455.6 million for plaintiffs’ accounting claims – significantly less than the almost $40 billion plaintiffs had requested.

AJA

No Comments Yet, Comment On This

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 11:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country.

Tom Garafalo, The Havana Note – Orlando Zapata Tamayo, 1967-2010

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a 42 year old political prisoner arrested by Cuban authorities in the crackdown of Spring 2003, has died after an 83 day hunger strike.

Jonathan Chait, The New Republic – A Brief Reconciliation Primer

As Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman, everything the GOP says is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

Mitchell Cohen, The Huffington Post – The Shock of Dubai (H/T Yaacov Lozowick)

I am shocked – shocked – to discover there is killing going on in war. (And spies spying?)

ChristopherHitchensWatch – We Watch the Hitchens So You Don’t Have To

There is also The Daily Dishwater leeching off Andrew Sullivan. What am I, second rate Pâté? Where is the Obscure Writer Observer making a name off my, ah…name.

Eve Garrard, Normblog – Once more on Amnesty and Gita Sahgal

The real issue – and Amnesty must know this to be the case – is whether Amnesty should be partnering with, and thereby lending credibility to, people whose own commitment to universal human rights is in doubt. No adequate defence has been offered for this, and no adequate defence has been provided for suspending the employee who has blown the whistle on this topic, and whose own long-term commitment to universal rights for women is not in doubt.

No Comments Yet, Comment On This

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 8:07 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Uncategorized.

ShrinkWrapped has offered his response to my The Open Mind V: the Language of Black and White. Comments are closed here at the sad red earth and should be made at ShrinkWrapped. Earlier installments of this series can be found on the horizontal menu above.

The Open Mind V: Riposte

Let me see if I can touch on the key elements of Jay’s post.  First he points out that it is not the elites that I object to but their ideas, ie, not the idea of elitism, per se:

What Shrink and other conservatives object to is not the elite nature of these elites – were it not them, it would be others – but a set of modern and liberal beliefs that over recent decades they consider to have taken hold as the prevailing cultural zeitgeist. Fair enough. But characterizing the prevailing beliefs to which they object as “elitist” does not merely mischaracterize the nature of their adversary, it stokes a malformed amalgamation of class, cultural, and social conflict that can have dangerous consequences.

That’s certainly fair enough, though incomplete.  I do object to the “statist” ideas of the liberal elites.  I also do wonder how “characterizing the prevailing beliefs to which (I) object as “elitist” … mischaracterize{s) the nature of (my) adversary” but I’ll read on.  Jay warns about the anti-intellectualism that can be a component of populism and points out that liberals do not have a monopoly on condescension:

What conservatives fail to observe in themselves – and I have had opportunity to experience this in large doses in recent months – is their own condescension toward their political adversaries, upon whom they heap an array of demeaning and otherizing labels and perceptions, including the deluded belief that they’ve got liberals’ number, while liberals don’t have a clue about them. Accordingly, they tell themselves that liberal objections to Sarah Palin arise profoundly on the level of cultural snobbery, and there is, indeed, an element of that.

As a member in good standing of the intellectual class* and a Jew, I am sensitive to the ease with which populism in the hands of unscrupulous politicians/leaders can become suffused with envy and arouse hatred toward designated scapegoats.  Jay is correct to warn of such proclivities, though to my perceptions attempts to scapegoat have been more prevalent thus far on the left than the right in recent years.

[*My definition: The intellectual class is composed of that class of people who make their living, often a very good one, by manipulating language.  This is in opposition to the masses, which include such "lesser beings", like, oh, I don't know, Engineers, who actually build things or Entrepreneurs, who actually create new products and wealth that enrich all of us.  For those who are immune to sarcasm, please note that I value the productions of Engineers, Entrepreneurs, et al, much more highly than most of what passes for intellectual ideas these days.  The average Engineer or Entrepreneur contributes far more to society, and far more that is lasting, than the average intellectual.  (My singling out of Engineers and Entrepreneurs has almost nothing to do with the fact that my beautiful and very smart daughter-in-law is an Engineer and my less beautiful but equally smart son-in-law is an Entrepreneur; occasionally these kinds of coincidences just show up; go figure.)]

I haven’t written much about Sarah Palin.  My initial reaction when she was nominated by John McCain was positive.  Here was a seemingly genuine person who had, through grit and determination, made her way to a Statehouse and apparently done a pretty good job.  During the campaign, she showed herself to be not-ready-for-prime-time, which was a concern for someone “a heartbeat away” but she didn’t seem any less prepared than Obama (who I was told repeatedly was brilliant, his comment that he visited 57 states notwithstanding), with his lack of actual accomplishments in the real world, and Sarah Palin was clearly less of a buffoon than Joe Biden. (One need only consider Biden’s comments about FDR going on TV after the 1929 stock market crash to reassure the country or his host of inane comments before or since.)

In any event Jay goes on to assure us that the liberal elite’s objection to Sarah Palin was not because she was a political threat or represented something that was anathema to prevailing liberal elite ideology but because of ”her deep and disturbing ignorance.”  Now, I am not all that interested in Sarah Palin at the moment.  I think she was treated terribly by the Media, a treatment that stood out for its contrast with the kid gloves with which they approached Barack Obama (and had the MSM done their jobs a bit more assiduously, Barack Obama might have actually been tested more on the campaign trail, which would have stood him in good stead for his current travails.)  Sarah Palin is apparently a decent speaker, seems to have decent political instincts and may, if she does her homework, be a viable candidate in the future.  I don’t think she is a viable candidate yet because, whether warranted or not, the image of her as an ignoramus has stuck; only she can change that and it will take time.  (I can’t help noticing how similar her experience has been to Dan Qualye’s experience; he never escaped his image.  We shall see if Sarah Palin can.)

The one place I might take issue with Jay’s post is his representation of “elites”; in three places Jay delineates what he means by elite:

An “elite,” by definition, is the “choice part,” of something, the “best of a class.”

Elitism is “leadership or rule” by an elite, “consciousness of being or belonging to an elite.” These are more or less problematic notions depending on how we unpack, and again, validate them. The core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence. The offensive culmination is in a sense of social or moral superiority.

It is the pride of American history, culture, and society that more than any nation ever, we live in a meritocracy.

I actually agree in part with all three statements but I do not think the “core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence.”  The core problem is that what defines our elites is only quite peripheral to what is actually importnat in our scoiety.  This is an important point that I alluded to in my humorous (well, at least the intent was to be humorous) aside about the intellectual class.  The “elites” and this includes Republican elites and Democratic elites, are defined by their belief that they know what is best for all of us (just look at the ongoing insistence by the Obama administration to jam a top down, healthcare “reform” down the throats of a resisting populace) at the very same time that they have become far removed from the lives of the people they deign to represent.  Historian Walter Russell Mead suggests the Tea Party movement is the heir of a long and honored American tradition of anti-elitism. [All emphases mine-SW]

Do Soldiers Drink Tea?

The Tea Party movement is the latest upsurge of an American populism that has sometimes sided with the left and sometimes with the right, but which over and over again has upended American elites, restructured our society and forced through the deep political, cultural and institutional changes that from time to time the country needs and which the ruling elites cannot or will not deliver.

… you don’t have to buy every line item (or even any line item) in the emerging Tea Party program to see the movement’s potential.  Its ruling passion is a belief in the ability of the ordinary citizen to make decisions for himself or herself without the guidance or ‘help’ of experts and professionals. No idea has deeper roots in American history and culture and by global standards Americans have historically distrusted doctors, lawyers, bankers, preachers and professors: everybody who presumes that their special insider knowledge gives them a special right to decide what’s best for the rest of us and historically no political force has been stronger than the determination of ordinary Americans to flatten the social and political hierarchy.

The United States has rarely been in greater need of rapid transformation than we are now. The information revolution, the rapid development of the global economy, the shift of cultural and economic power from Europe toward Asia, the enormous wave of immigration that since the 1960’s has been remaking the body politic once again, the breakdown of the progressive or blue social model as industries and financial markets rise and fall with a velocity not seen in the last 100 years: these changes are taking place all around us, but our institutions and policies are very far from keeping up.

Elites are becoming much less necessary as people become more and more empowered.  For just one example, at one time patients came to a Doctor unsure what was wrong with them and ignorant of their treatment options.  They hoped to be referred to someone competent who could offer them an appropriate treatment so that they could regain their prior functioning and good health.  Today we expect patients to come into the office armed with knowledge of their condition (or what they believe they are suffering from) and with great knowledge of their treatment options.  When patients suffer from rarer disorders, they often know more than their Doctors about their ailments.  The wise Physician sees his job as assisting his patient in finding the proper treatment and managing that treatment rather than as dictating from “on high” how the patient must behave.

Our patients are not passive recipients of treatment but active participants who must be made allies against their disorder.  No one can ever know more about your life than you can and with the increasing complexity of the modern world, this aphorism can be extended.  We are flooded with information.  Markets, even when they work poorly, remain our best tool for summing information.  Nothing so much defines our present day elites (on the left and the right) as the belief that they understand current conditions well enough to legislate solutions to social problems.  This was a fantasy even in the good old days of Progressive rule; it is nonsensical now.  Accelerating change means that top down approaches cannot possibly incorporate enough information to predict chaotic systems.  Not only can initial conditions never be adequately established, but by the time our cumbersome bureaucracy has measured conditions they are already far different than predicted (which is why so many government statistics include gigantic fudge factors, ie corrections and assumptions.)

If the Tea Party movement succeeds it will because it has been able to articulate a program designed to minimize government intrusions into markets and facilitate the return of power to the people.  Now that I think about it, “Power to the People” could be a terrific, catchy slogan for the Tea Party movement!  I wonder what Jay would think of it?

No Comments Yet, Comment On This

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 10:43 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.