Monthly Archives: September 2010

United We Stand, So, Bend Over

The Orange Man announces another fatuous documentation–in a long line of such productions–of things the Republican Party will never, ever, manage to do. I’m not sure it would be politically wise for them to execute any of their plans. For decades, they’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of not walking their talk, yet, at the same time attaching themselves as benefactors in the wake of the disgruntlement which comes from their constituencies not ever having their dreams come true.

I might except from this collection the Republican’s core constituency: the so-called country club, chamber of commerce, club for growth, Republicans. The GOP has worked trickle down economics so as to realize its actual goal: to grab the middle class by the ankles, invert each member, and vigorously shake so the smolians come trickling out. Still, even though the concentration of wealth has accelerated viciously over 30 years, I can’t call the GOP maestros of plutonomy in the aftermath of their latest experiment. After all, the GOP helped wipe out several trillion dollars of wealth, including a big chunk of ‘plutonomical’ wealth, over the last three years.

Anyway, their magic wand, if they had one, would presumably be waved to accomplish longstanding objectives. First, end by privatizing all elements of what the Tea Party brethren call the nanny state: social security, Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, the new health care laws, TARP, Fannie and Freddie, EPA, and, so much more! I’m not sure if this is to include farm and trade subsidies, and the SBA, but both are elements of the nanny state. To this prescription, (named years ago, ‘drowning the government in a bath tub,’) other stuff needs to be quickly terminated. All the regulatory bureaucracies get bounced out of C town. I’m not sure what the Tea Party GOP’s attitude is toward subsidies for scientific research, but let’s face it, they’re sucking at the Federal teat too. And, they’re probably atheists!

Then there is the matter of what counts for fairness in the tax code. There’s a mountain of subsidies built into the current code. Why not end each and every one? And then, implement a one size fits all consumption tax which would finally enshrine the principle: no penalty, (thus no demerit,) for achievement.

So much purported ill is cured in all this, I indulge myself by turning to fix what’s wrong with the two year old attitude toward the Constitution. Why not elevate nullification via the enumerated powers and provide a good state’s rights sanction against any eruptions of innovation? Other fixes would probably have to be deferred because you’d need a Constitutional convention to purge the fine old founding document of its mistakes, and this would have to happen before the economic treatment. But, the economic treatment carries with it an adjustment period and you can’t be sure the mood of the sovereign citizens would be receptive during this period of adjustment. I guess the restoration will have to wait.

Social issues aren’t the toughest to solve. Abortion, of course, is ended as soon as possible. And the queer menace will have to be vanquished on a state-by-state basis. Masturbation, I’m not so sure about it. (Personally, I’m sure about it, but, whatever.) Evolution? Heck, its for suckers anyway. As for immigration, you just toss ’em all out on their keister. Enforce the law–that’s what laws are for. As Eric Cantor said about the first amendment, ‘Come on!.” There’s not much one can do about the pesky amendment itself. Still, it’s time to re-enshrine the Judeo-Christian values the various deist and Unitarian founders intended to be absolutely front-and-center in the entire democratic experiment.

Foreign policy is simple. The GOP just has to find its inner Curt LeMay. Turn Iran into a glass parking lot. Go after Islam in-country using RICO. Build the star wars stations wherever necessary. And, by all means, send the UN to Denmark where it belongs.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Postcards From the Pledge
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Once all of this has been realized, a good tag line will be needed for the history books. I think its main bent has to amplify how it came about that main street triumphed over the pointy headed secular humanist ivy league jazz-loving social engineering tax-and-spend atheistic tree-hugging hollywood beholden Darwin worshipping green community organizing sodomy loving marxist coloured Volvo ensconced elites.

I’m working on it.

My main point is if you ask the Grand Old White Tea Party’s best and brightest what’s required, there can’t be any doubt about how overmatched those progressive elites in fact are; and, let’s face it, for their to be an American exceptionalism, there has to be exceptional Americans.

The choice is obvious.

A few notes.

The Pledge for America states the following:

An arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites makes decisions, issues mandates, and enacts laws without accepting or requesting the input of the many.

Over the 42 years since Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, the Republican have controlled to White House for 28 years. For 10 years the GOP controlled the Senate, and for 6 years they controlled the House. Veto pens were kept sharp. Assuming there’s no wish to have it both ways, the record of Republican accomplishment over this time period was not a glittering showcase for requesting and accepting the input of the many. Nor was it a showcase for something other than self-appointed Republican elites doing their thing while being advantaged by having at least some of the reigns of power.

What is happening in our current political era is a spectacle. I have schematized it accordingly.

Although the Bush II reign provided ripe opportunities, overall the ruling ideology for three decades, Reaganism, has produced Conservatism-light. (This is bad enough, as the economic metric demonstrate.) But, now we have the inchoate anarcho-communitarian Tea Party vigorously pursuing an incoherent but powerful version of Conservatism-heavy duty. The Republican elite have been taking a beating–even as they have been working hard to ‘quadrangulate,’ and, in doing so, co-opt the vigor of the Tea Party brethren.

The optimal goal for the self-absorbed insider GOP elites would be to join together the Tea Party with the old line Club for Growth/Christian Conservative factions.

You can see well enough where the fault lines are. For example, you have the libertarian, individualist faction up against the traditionalist God-fearing faction. One is against social engineering, and the other would welcome some focused, engineered, moral compliance. Meanwhile, the Tea Party is suspicious of “top down,” while in their different ways, the other other three factions are all about top down. The country club elites believe a little decadence constitutes earned rewards, while the Christian conservatives decry extra-familial eroticism–even if they sneak out to the clubs or corner now and then. The Tea Party folk want the government to take its hands off their medicare, while the country clubbers would like to shift medical risk entirely onto those same Tea Party folk.

To reduce this all, how do you square individualism, personal responsibility, cheap labor, risk shifting, moral rectitude, unfettered capitalism, with, on the part of the insider GOP elite, their absorbing desire to be restored to the top of the political food chain? Read the pledge and see how this all gets tangled up.

(I continue to find it astonishing that any citizen of our fair country can claim in the same breath that he or she understands what the founders knew for certain was the point of America, and, that all of sudden our country is in a pitched ‘Manichaean’ battle between good patriots and evil leftists.)

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Teaching Cartoon: Indecision

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The Precision of Imprecision


Charles Sanders Peirce

Louis Menand’s capsule intellectual history of American pragmatism’s initial development, The Metaphysical Club, was an enjoyable read. But even little ol’ me could note he advanced a highly selective narrative, where he chops off C.S. Peirce’s technical discoveries, and, just about erases William James’s “post” transcendentalism. (The latter move was surprising because the only work of James that is widely read is The Varieties of Religious Experience.) Years later, a few weeks ago, I happened upon a discussion at The Valve.

Here the criticisms follow in the comment thread to a review by Andrew Seal in August, Invidiousness and Parentheticals: Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. I came across this while searching for something else, and was first surprised to see Menand’s book get any kind of notice eight years after it was published, and then was amused by the interesting thread the late-out-of-the-gate review evoked.

I noted Mr. Menand gets whacked around freely, and, Richard Rorty get dragged onto the firing range too. I’ve clipped a few interesting fragments.

CW – But that position is not the same as saying that the quest for more knowledge should cease. I understand Rorty to be arguing that viewing that quest as having “objective truth” as an ultimate goal has some unfortunate consequences which can be avoided by instead viewing it as seeking new and hopefully better (in the sense of more useful in achieving one’s immediate objectives) “vocabularies”. That view can perhaps be seen as more-or-less consistent with what Peirce might have meant by “chance will remain ‘until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational and symmetrical system in which mind is at last crystallized in the infinitely distant future” (from the Haack paper you suggested as a more palatable intro to her work – which it definitely is! Thanks.) Except I suspect that Rorty would have questioned the convergence implicit in Peirce’s quote; he argued against the hopeless quest for a “final vocabulary”, the one supposedly “spoken” by nature.

O – I really like your argumentation here, and I do not entirely disagree with your conclusion. Moreover, I think you are quite correct in your dissection of the ‘truth’ of the issue, however, you do mischaracterize Peirce’s position, which is not far removed from James’ argument that “truth happens to an idea”, truth has no ontological status – then again, to Peirce, nothing has ontological status except process itself, as seen in his cenopythagorean categories. The common claim that truth is what is, confuses being and truth. What is, is; a ‘truth’ is merely a functional (i.e. useful) depiction of the ongoing process, the interaction that is all that actually is. Here I generalize across several arguments. There are differences between James and Peirce on the issue, however, both agree with Wright in that the greatest possible certification of the ‘truth’ of a notion is its usefulness in the furthering of both knowing, and life itself.

So–

Peirce: “Knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it.”

This statement strikes me as a kind of American koan. Can a track be grooved between this and the sort of generative process able to elicit more robust vocabularies, as per Rorty?

Peirce, “The first proper significant effect of a sign is a feeling produced upon it.”

I come upon this philosophical thread and I’m immediately the voyeur who has landed in the territory of scholarly marginalia. In its direction, and in one direction, the subject matter is well beyond me. Yet, in the other direction, in the direction I can forge myself, I reckon with really ‘surface,’ intuitions, albeit this is my surface. So, for me, Rorty wanders through Pragmatism; he is a wanderer. He can argue against anything, say representationalism. And, there are sober secondary scholars of the–in actuality–varieties of pragmatism. There is, again, in actuality, a scholarly industry for and against, in this case, ‘Rorty,’ and this is about what he said and wrote.

It’s funny (to me.)

Yet, in this other direction I recognize the connecting thread, what I would call the urging upon provided by the, as Peirce offers, the effect and the incumbent feeling, the incumbent urging upon. The connecting thread is: that which, unknown to us, urges upon us a groping for knowledge, and, granting this as exemplar, the common instance where what is to be useful, what is to be begun to be known, what is not yet reliable, nevertheless comes to be begun to be known. With this turn, or initiation, the terms are not yet precise, fixed, let alone complete.

The secondary appropriation of somebody’s body of work sometimes, maybe often, gets bogged down in interpretation fused to the assumption the work is complete. ‘This is what Coltrane gave us.’ Or,’ this is how we’ll describe Yeats’s journey.’ The echo of provisionality and contingency is silenced. This is a kind of narrative or linear fallacy.

“Knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it.” seems to me, (again from the other, ‘surface,’ side,) to be the sturdy connecting thread, and it even allows for, loops in, Louis Menand. The urging upon, the deeply real desire, quickens exploration proximal to that which is not to be completed. This pragmatism is then, a work in progress–always.

I’m not arguing against locating and getting the terms right. My suggestion is that those terms are also, at once, opened up to their own, as it were, future. And this follows from the feeling produced upon their dynamic ‘it.’

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The Sting And its Habitus

The election September 7, in northeastern Ohio, “NEO,” marked a dramatic turning point in the region’s model for self-governance. A new county charter was passed in 2009. It was a rush job, and its opponents either argued to retain the current, corruptable, structure, or, study the issue of optimizing county governance longer. Ironically, a prominent exponent from the latter group, Ed Fitzgerald, won the Democratic slot for county executive.

The new set up is an experiment. How many Cuyahoga County residents voted to bring their candidates to the final round in November? …something like 17%.


src: Visualizing the Invisible. towards an urban space (Read & Pinilo, eds.)

One of the ways I enjoy myself is to drive around Cleveland, sometimes get out and walk around, stick my noise in an unobtrusive way in the various neighborhood, especially those of Cleveland proper. I was raised on Cleveland suburban east side. After living 18 years elsewhere, I came back for good in 1992. One of the first things I took up upon my return was visiting all the local libraries. Cuyahoga County is home to two of the country’s largest library systems, and, one of its best single suburban libraries, (in Lakewood.) So, I got around. For the first time in my life, upon coming back, I acquainted myself–deeply–with the “lay of the land.” I dug into the history. (There’s an excellent compendium of historical and biographic articles about Cleveland too. I read the hardback, but the materials are online.) Later, between 2004 and 2006, with Ken Warren and others in Lakewood mentoring me on new ways to look at the urban space, I became a student of the, (if you will,) the grain of the city.

When I wander around residential neighborhoods, one question dominates: ‘What do the folks who live here do for a living?’ This is directed at the individual houses. In each house lives people, so what do they do? Garage sale season is petering out, yet the garage sales provide a good opportunity to learn a little bit about what people do.

I mention this because, for me, a city is a place where people, in effect, live to be able to do.

My usual soft response to reading the bright ideas for development promoted by candidates and institutions is to wonder if the authors have any reasonable ideas about what is the current baseline. In other words, do they have any idea what people are currently living to do? Here?

Cleveland has been de-industrializing for fifty+ years. I listened to the two city club debates, one for each party. It was depressing. I didn’t expect any of the candidates to speak directly to the causes of the region’s predicament. I’m not even confident the ambitious men and women know much about those causes. One thing I feel is that the corrupt spoils system is the tip of the iceberg of a legitimized spoils systems, and, this was the result of failed neo-liberal experiments promoted over decades by lots of big fishes swimming in the shrinking pond.

The situation is nowadays straight-forward: what do you do when you know your region is going to keep on shrinking? One thing is, you can figure out how to do so humanely, if not elegantly. For example, if you acknowledge this fundamental fact, then you have a lot of houses to tear down and a lot of parks and urban farms to build. Example: the transportation infrastructure is no longer commensurate with the current dynamics.

“Part of what you have to do is think about ways to use land that help improve the quality of life but don’t involve actual building.” Alan Mallach, an urban planning expert at the Brookings Institution, How to shrink a city. Not every great metropolis is going to make a comeback. Planners consider some radical ways to embrace decline.

The sting in history’s tail is the profound unreliability of the past as a test for the future. “Trauma” via Post-traumatic.urbanism.com


See also:

Urban Plight: Vanishing Upward Mobility – Joel Kotkin

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A Hopeful Leader

Sarah Haile-Mariam. While earning her B.S. in Communications at New York University, Sara volunteered as a grassroots organizer, surrogate and out-of-state coordinator for the New York Obama campaign. Sara spoke on behalf of the campaign at rallies and town halls in New York City and on television, emphasizing the importance of young people’s participation in politics. Since the campaign, Sara has continued to write about youth activism, contributing to Global Grind and the Huffington Post. She also served as campaign coordinator for David Yassky’s campaign for New York City Comptroller. (soure: bio @campusprogress

Ms. Haile-Mariam’s other interviews at the recent Glen Beck Washington DC festival can be found at the bottom of her bio page, along with her other contributions.)

Here’s her address to the Campus Progress organization.

Finally, she was on CSPAN June 10, 2010, speaking about youth activism.

She’s my new heroine. In a better world, over-matched idealogues and the regularly ignorant would surrender. But, such a world wouldn’t be very amusing. By all means, checking out her other videos from the Beck rally, Birther Speaks out at Glenn Beck Rally, Black Tea Party Leader Speaks Out at Glenn Beck Rally, We’ll Always Have the Memories of Glenn Beck Rally.

During this Tea Party summer-into-fall, I’m reminded how different things would be if just the millennial generation would get out and vote. Generally, voting participation increases the more educated, affluent, and, older a person is. The high school degree carrying, and high school drop out, under-30 segment votes the least of any segment.

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Where’s Werner?

Werner Herzog {Wikipedia}

Much to my delight, I discovered the series of youtube videos featuring German film director Werner Herzog reading excerpts from children’s books. Probably the full impact of these films is only accessible if one is familiar with Herzog’s art. Still, lacking this background, I suppose their deadpan existential content would be amusing and rewarding.

Also: When Werner Rescued Phoenix

(For me, Werger Herzog is cinema’s most provocative humanist, and, he’s also–by far–my favorite director on today’s film scene. If you haven’t received one of his transmissions, The White Diamond (2004), is my own pick as a good all-round starting point. Herzog has directed many a masterpiece, so my advice is to start with this recent film and keep on going. In fact, there are only a handful of directors with a comparable output. And no director ever ripped off a string over ten years as Herzog did with Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck, and Fitzcarraldo. )

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Hammer Time


Pete the hammer.

New gear, celebrating next year’s 20th anniversary of Free Play softball.


The Free Play Softball League convenes its open system every Sunday at 10am, at Forest Hills Park-Cleveland Heights, on field #8. If you need to loosen up, or take a few batting practice swings, 9:45am is a good time to show up.

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The Big Uneasy

Harry Shearer’s The Big Uneasy is about bad engineering, mendacity, and future walls to nowhere.

Harry’s been busy. Harry’s videos occupy a channel over at My Damn Channel. He’s lucky because he can partner with his wife, the almost illegally talented singer/songwriter Judith Owen.

Judith Owen is obviously a good sport too.

The videos with a message she makes with her husband don’t showcase her main talents because she’s a astonishing vocal artist. I’ve posted a taste over at nogutsnoglory.

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