Parabasis

Quote Of The Day

By Isaac Butler

"A public service reminder: Simpson-Bowles is terrible. It mucks around with taxes, but is obsessed with lowering marginal rates despite a complete absence of evidence that this is important. It offers nothing on Medicare that isn’t already in the Affordable Care Act. And it raises the Social Security retirement age because life expectancy has risen — completely ignoring the fact that life expectancy has only gone up for the well-off and well-educated, while stagnating or even declining among the people who need the program most."

-- Paul Krugman

Dealbreakers

by 99 Seats

Reasonable people can disagree about reasonable things reasonably. Absolutely.

But then some things make me totally unreasonable. This article is one of them. It's been bouncing around on Facebook for the last couple of days. I started reading it once, got enraged and walked away. Then I read this piece, which captured some of what I thought reading the Friedersdorf piece, but without the white-hot rage. Living in the land of sunshine and clear skies, less white-hot rage felt good. Then someone else posted it, a friend in New York that I know is very progressive, involved in women's issues, someone I know who worked very hard to get Obama elected in 2008. And so I read it again. And was again enraged.

Here are some key grafs from Conor Friedersdorf's piece (I'm quoting at some length):

Tell certain liberals and progressives that you can't bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes gay rights, or who doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution, and they'll nod along. Say that you'd never vote for a politician caught using the 'n'-word, even if you agreed with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand. But these same people cannot conceive of how anyone can discern Mitt Romney's flaws, which I've chronicled in the course of the campaign, and still not vote for Obama.

<snip>

I am not a purist. There is no such thing as a perfect political party, or a president who governs in accordance with one's every ethical judgment. But some actions are so ruinous to human rights, so destructive of the Constitution, and so contrary to basic morals that they are disqualifying. Most of you will go that far with me. If two candidates favored a return to slavery, or wanted to stone adulterers, you wouldn't cast your ballot for the one with the better position on health care. I am not equating President Obama with a slavery apologist or an Islamic fundamentalist. On one issue, torture, he issued an executive order against an immoral policy undertaken by his predecessor, and while torture opponents hoped for more, that is no small thing.

<snip>

There is a candidate on the ballot in at least 47 states, and probably in all 50, who regularly speaks out against that post-9/11 trend, and all the individual policies that compose it. His name is Gary Johnson, and he won't win. I am supporting him because he ought to. Liberals and progressives care so little about having critiques of the aforementioned policies aired that vanishingly few will even urge that he be included in the upcoming presidential debates. If I vote, it will be for Johnson. What about the assertion that Romney will be even worse than Obama has been on these issues? It is quite possible, though not nearly as inevitable as Democrats seem to think. It isn't as though they accurately predicted the abysmal behavior of Obama during his first term, after all. And how do you get worse than having set a precedent for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens? By actually carrying out such a killing? Obama did that too. Would Romney? I honestly don't know. I can imagine he'd kill more Americans without trial and in secret, or that he wouldn't kill any. I can imagine that he'd kill more innocent Pakistani kids or fewer. His rhetoric suggests he would be worse. I agree with that. Then again, Romney revels in bellicosity; Obama soothes with rhetoric and kills people in secret.

<snip>

The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans -- along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers -- just aren't valued. Alternatively, the less savory parts of Obama's tenure can just be repeatedly disappeared from the narrative of his first term, as so many left-leaning journalists, uncomfortable confronting the depths of the man's transgressions, have done over and over again.

To say I found this all unpersuasive would an understatment. I basically call bullshit on this. But not in the blinkered, blindered way he describes other leftists at the beginning.

First off, a vote is an affirmative thing. You are voting in support of something, not just in protest. Friedersdorf wants to have it both ways: he wants to tar all of Obama's supporters as callous, bellicose war-mongers who don't care about little brown babies, but he seems to only want to vote for Gary Johnson because of his policies on Afghanistan and the "war on terror." But what about all of the other things Gary Johnson believes? What about Medicaid and Medicare cuts and turning them into block grants? What about gun control and gun rights? What about unions and workers' rights? Health care for children? What about school vouchers? When you're pulling the lever for Gary Johnson, and asserting that he should win, as Friedersdorf does, don't those things matter, too? I went to Gary Johnson's website (you can, too...Friedersdorf, interestingly, doesn't link to his position on the issue) and I find the majority of his beliefs not just unpleasant, but an unacceptable vision for this country. Friedersdorf, and the other folks linking to his article, don't seem to find it so unacceptable.

Which brings me to my second point: it's just so much sophistry. An essential part of his argument is that President Obama doesn't care about the lives of children in Afghanistan. If you're willing to vote for Obama, in spite of the policies that we disagree with, then, by extension, you don't really care about kids or human rights or the Constitution. It's a bullshit argument. I do care about kids, and do care about civil liberties. Bradley Manning is absolutely unfairly imprisoned. And I find the Osama Bin Laden assassination extremely upsetting. But I also care about kids in America, kids in poverty, undocumented workers, about a lot of people. Gary Johnson isn't going to do too much for them. Could I say that Conor Friedersdorf likes to talk about liberties and protecting the innocent, but he has not follow-through. He's accusing me (and other people voting for Obama) of a sin, while committing the same sin and calling it virtue.

Like many, I'm disappointed by Obama's failure to live up to his promises and rhetoric in his first term. Friedersdorf plays on that disappointment. It's a palpable thing and a legitimate thing. But it's also rife with cynicism. It holds that a citizen's interaction with the political process comes only in the ballot box, once very four years and only in one vote. These issues should have a larger stage, I agree. But giving them a larger stage by not putting pressure on other legislators, leading protests, attracting attention. We like to think that we can't change things. But look at Occupy Wall Street. If anything has ultimately undone Mitt Romney's campaign, it's the spirit of Occupy Wall Street. Protest does matter. As do congresspeople and senators. The president is not king and shouldn't be expected to act like one.

Finally...I think so much of this smacks of privilege. It ignores the problems we face here in this country and the people who hurt here. I'm not saying that American children are more valuable than Afghan children, or a woman's right to choose is more important than Bradley Manning's right to free speech. But I do see that we have problems here at home, and major challenges facing our country. I see people out of work, children going without food. A lot of this is invisible to most here, as invisible as the terrorized Afghan children. It's also, apparently invisible to Conor Friedersdorf.

If voting for Barack Obama offends your moral compass, by all means, don't. Do what you feel is right. But please don't wear your rings all up on my nose about it, and imply that, by voting for Obama, I don't care about children or the Constitution. And don't pretend that it's just a choice of the lesser of two evils. It's a choice about the world and the country I want to live in. Does Obama have everything I want? No. I know that. But he comes closer to describing the world I want to live in. If you want me to take the bad with the good for Obama, I'm okay with that. Are you okay with taking the bad with the good for Gary Johnson? That's really the question.

Some Things What I Have Written

By Isaac Butler

I have some kind of horrible hypercompuglobalmegaflu right now that has afflicted most of the graduate students in my department. It's rough. This is the sickest i've been in years. I will not bore/gross you out with the details.

So in other words, sorry for the lack of posting, but it's actually pretty hard to concentrate for an hour straight on anything right now.  

In the meantime, I thought I'd roundup a few selected things by me that have been published elsewhere for your reading pleasure:

(1) The Soundtrack Series is a live storytelling event I've done twice. Here is my latest appearance (just podcasted yesterday!) in which I talk about Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick. 

(2) The Hooded Utilitarian. I've become a semi-regular contributor to them, writing about why V For Vendetta is the worst, why the Election films are the best and a two parter on the (often unfairly maligned) Jonathan Lethem novel Chronic City. You can find those articles here. 

(3) In The Heart Library. This is a short-but-sweet essay I wrote for PANK, a really great mostly-online journal edited by the insanely prolific, talented and wonderful Roxane Gay, whom you should really follow on twitter. The essay can be found here. You can read an interview with me about it here. 

(4) Here Come the Planes. Over at The Fiddleback, I wrote a piece about Laurie Anderson's "O Superman," 9/11 and cultural amnesia. 

(5) Nourishing the Commons. Here's the piece I wrote for Howlround about the public domain, intellectual property (both the thing itself and as a metaphor for how we think about collaboration) etc. in broad terms. 

I'll be back soon, as soon as I get these goblins out of my system.

Posted Without Comment

By Isaac Butler

 

Dispatches From An Alternate Universe

by 99 Seats

I want you to remember these two articles. Read them both now. I'll wait.

Did you read them? Okay, let's discuss.

In six months, if President Obama wins re-election, I will send these links to my liberal friends who don't understand why, after receiving a public rebuke at the ballot box, the right remains in thrall of the "crazies." They will wonder why there wasn't a purge of the fringe elements and why the congressional GOP, most likely a few members smaller, aren't moving to the center and compromising. These two articles explain why perfectly.

The first, the polling article (h/t Isaac), is basically gibbering insanity. But the kernel of it is this: any poll showing Obama with a lead is oversampling Democrats and therefore skewed and not can that poll not be trusted but the polling outfit is in the tank. This is the beginning of the "Obama stole the election" meme that we'll be dealing with. We got a small taste of that with the campaign against ACORN, but with no ACORN to blame, it will actually get larger and more elaborate.

The second, primarily about Sarah Palin advising Romney to "go rogue" (whatever the hell that means), is also indicative of everyone's old friend, epistemic closure. First off, it assumes that Romney's struggles have nothing to do with his policies and statements, but instead with how he's framed them, with the added implication that he's hiding some worse truth. We're talking about a candidate who has repeatedly implied that the US is on the path towards becoming Greece. I don't really seeing how he's underselling the state of our economy. (For the record, we are not in any danger at all of becoming Greece. Not even slightly.) In the world of dog-whistle, there is the idea that Romney needs to take the gloves off and start running Jeremiah Wright and birther ads. But more importantly, the machine is starting up with another hoary old chestnut: conservativism never fails; it is only failed. Romney, who advocates low regulations, low taxes on top earners, voucherizing Medicare, privatizing Social Security, turning Medicaid over to the states, a federal ban on abortion and marriage equality, self-deportation and war with Iran, is insufficiently conservative. If only he would publicly hold some conservative ideals and see how popular they would be.

The other part that amazes is this:

“They not only need to use [Ryan] out on the trail more effectively, they need to have more of him rub off on Mitt because I think Mitt thinks that way but he’s gotta be able to articulate that…. I think too many people are restraining him from telling [his vision],” Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker told a radio interviewer Friday.

Where’s the evidence of Romney’s so-called “bold choice” in picking Ryan? others ask.

“Even in Wisconsin, I think he’s being underused,” Charlie Sykes, the radio host who interviewed Gov. Walker, told Politico. “I guess what’s frustrating is especially now that we’re embroiled in this conversation about the makers versus the takers, where is Paul Ryan? He is eloquent, he knows the numbers, he can frame this in a very compelling way. The fact that he is not front and center on some of this is, I think, a lost opportunity.”

Um. There was a time that Paul Ryan has a chance to express his beliefs and ideas in a very public forum. Remember how that went? Remember this? Apparently GOP consultants don't. They seem to believe that Paul Ryan can be some kind of honest broker or straight-talker. This is simply crazy. And completely ignores reality. What kind of reckoning can there be when there is practically a cottage industry generating opinions that have nothing to do with reality?

So...remember this. Remember these stories when you're trying to understand what's happening in our politics.

Everything I Say Is A Lie. Including That.

by 99 Seats

I was thinking about posting a comment to Isaac's post here about believability and lies, but I decided to just do a separate post, because the issue of truth and lies is, well, important, especially in politics right now.

I have a few "libertarian" or "independent" or "apolitical"* friends in my FB and Twitter worlds (and I know we have a reader or two here from the right end of the spectrum) and I've noticed in recent weeks a common thread popping up. When the discussion about honesty in politics comes up, usually one of them chimes in with a dismissive post about how ALL politicians lie, so you can't trust anything any of them say at any time. This response usually comes up like this: a liberal or left-leaning person points out an outright un-truth that someone on the right has said, the "libertarian" says Obama lied about something, too and then it's pointed out that that "lie" isn't really a lie, then we get, "Well, everyone lies, so it doesn't really matter." Except it does. I think it matters a lot.

Isaac ends his post with this:

I guess the real question I have here amidst all of this is... how are we to determine what candidate statements we take seriously and which we don't?  Obviously, I like Obama so I'm inclined to believe him. I don't like Romney so I'm inclined not to. But that seems a very poor way to go about judging this whole thing. 

Here's the thing: it isn't really a matter of personal like or dislike. I'm a big ol' leftie, so I find Obama's arguments persuasive. I understand how someone who is right-leaning can find Romney's arguments persuasive. Those are things open to personal feelings. Facts, though, are not. When we're talking about whether or not something is true, it's pretty simple: it's either true or it's not. And that is often fairly apparent, if you take more than one second and do the minimum amount of research. Just Google it. And then (and this is actually key) read the things that come up.

The "independents" I'm talking about, as far as I can see, don't seem to want to do that. They make a statement, hear an alternate statement, then throw their hands up and walk away. That's also how our press acts. We're reaching a point, as many, many people have noted, where our political pundit class is helpless to confront outright lies. The push to remain "neutral" and "cordial" means not actually calling someone a liar when they are. But it also means that the very idea of lies has changed.

I'm not a Pollyanna. All of my life, politicians have bent, altered, sweetened, curved facts to fit the narrative they're selling. You couldn't quite trust what they said. In the most famous example ever, it depended on what meaning of the word is. They promised the moon, possibly knowing they can't deliver it. Okay, fine. Not exactly honest, but not lying. Not really. When people say Obama lied, they point to the claim that he created 4.5 million jobs, repeated regularly at the DNC. It's, at best, truthy. This is often paired with the Romney "claim"** that Obama has sought to waive work requirements for welfare recipients. By all objective measure, there is no truth to that "claim." It's an actual lie. Can we really say that both politicians are "lying?"

And yet...we do. Obama promised a number of things, particularly in the realm of indefinite detentions, Gitmo, Bush-era anti-terrorism policies and didn't follow through. Disappointing, yes. But not lies. Paul Ryan's RNC speech was full of statements that are objectively not true. Those are lies. There is a difference between those two. If we let liars continue to determine what is true, we do so at our peril.

 

*I use the quotes here because, in general, these people parrot right-wing memes and ideas, hold right-wing values, and yet claim not to be right-wing. I'm unconvinced.

**For obvious reasons, I refuse to honor that lie by using the weasel word "claim."

Apologies and Corrections

By Isaac Butler

Earlier today, I wrote a blog post in which I talked about a Village Voice hosted roundtable with playwrights David Henry Hwang, Amy Herzog and Thomas Bradshaw with writer Alexis Soloski. In this post, I responded to a quote from Bradshaw about one of his early productions and essentially accused him of taking credit from a collaborator who directed and produced the show. 

It turns out that my post was factually in error. He was talking about an earlier production of the play in question (Strom Thurmond Is Not A Racist) that played for one night a year before that I had not been aware of. Furthermore, he has communicated that his intent was not to deny anyone credit for his success, but rather to simply answer a factual question about how his early productions were produced.

We went back and forth about the best way to handle this correction. Normal blogging practice is to post an update, cross out the content of the post and leave it there. However, in discussing the issue with Thomas, it became clear that this was not the appropriate solution. I am retracting and deleting the post.

At the same time, I did not want to cover up my error. I believe accountability matters. I made a mistake and I want to own up to it and apologize to Bradshaw for alleging that he was doing something he clearly did not intend to do.

I maintain that it is very important that as a field we have the larger conversation about the indivdiual artist myth, and how important our collaborators, champions (and yes, funders) are. But from e-mailing with Bradshaw, it's clear that he  agrees that that acknowledgement is important and my harping on a quote answering a question specifically about how someone's early work was produced is not the best way to go about doing it.

The Believability Gap

By Isaac Butler

Until Mother Jones released the Boca Tapes, one of the problems Democrats have been having in this race is a believability gap.  For example, when pollsters told their random sample of voters about the Ryan budget, many people responded that they did not believe that the Ryan budget possibly could contain what it contains.  Multiple times stories have come out where the GOP has said something or done something that simply feels like it could not possible be true.

I'm a far hardercore partisan than my wife. And one thing that will often happen is that I'll alert her to some craziness on the part of the Romney campaign and she'll say "is that true? where did you read that?" for fear that I read it in some far lefty rag that spinning some perfectly innocuous story into crazyland territory.

I'm pretty sure the Boca Tapes, where Romney wrote off almost 50% of the country and insulted them--including by his own statistics all veterans and active duty mlitary and the elderly--have put an end to this.  But the still, the question of belief persists.

I'm a bit obsessed with belief right now, because of the book I'm working on, a large part of which deals with Christian Science (the religion in which I was raised) a religion that believes that thought and belief have the power to shape the world around us in an overt way.  In the particular case of the campaign, there have been a few moments where I wonder what really happened, and sans evidence, what I believe.

Take the announcement from Paul Ryan last night that in 2011 he accidentally failed to report 20% of his income. Now this is a minor issue, obviously. He's already gone back and paid the missing taxes with a $60 penalty.  But still... Did Paul Ryan simply forget to put the income from his mother-in-law's living trust in his tax forms?  I mean, $60K is a lot of cheese.  It's a full fifth of his earnings. You'd think he'd remember something like that or that his accountant would catch it. So I find that hard to believe. Similarly, I find it hard to believe that a guy with a rising national profile would deliberately cheat on his taxes thinking he would be able to get away with it. 

This is not a particularly important thing to be in doubt about. Far more important are the assertions that candidates make on the trail, the things they promise to do, the plans they develop and distribute. It's fairly clear that no one really know what Romney would do as President. he seems wholly captured by the tea party right now, but Scott Brown seemed so too when he was running for Senate in Massachusetts and essentially told them to go fuck themselves as soon as he was elected. Grover Norquist has said all the GOP needs is a stuffed suit that will sign whatever is put in front of him (they should've nominated Norm Coleman if that's what they wanted). 

I guess the real question I have here amidst all of this is... how are we to determine what candidate statements we take seriously and which we don't?  Obviously, I like Obama so I'm inclined to believe him. I don't like Romney so I'm inclined not to. But that seems a very poor way to go about judging this whole thing. 

Two Thoughts On The Secret Romney Tapes

by Isaac Butler

1. Romney: I don't know why people are going around and saying that these tapes reveal "the real Romney," or tell you anything about what Romney "really thinks" or "really believes."  If there's one thing we've learned about W. Mitt Romney, it's that he tries really hard to tell whomever he's talking to what he thinks they want to hear. The reason why this hamstrings him in a national election in today's media age is that he can't say radically different things to different groups of people.

But in this particular room, he had no other constituency that he thought might be listening in.  And so he's speaking this particular audience's language. Yes, what he said was abhorrent. I am absolutely not defending it. But if you watch all of the videos, it seems clear that this is a guy who is surrounded by wealthy donors who are asking him in no uncertain terms to take actions that would 100% suicidal to any chance he has (had?) at the Presidency. And so he says over and over, "Well, you know I agree with you but the American people aren't going to like that and so I can't do it because people like Obama."  

I see no evidence in these tapes that "The Real Romney" has been revealed, except to the extent that the Real Romney had already been revealed: A man without deeply held principles who well tell people what they want to hear in order to seek power for its own ends. I felt the same way when people claimed that "The Real Romney" was the moderate, technocratic Governor of Massachusetts.  There is no Real Romney, folks. He might be the world's most inept shapechanger, but he's mercurial nonetheless.

2. His Audience.   I hope that videos like this put the lie to most conspiracy theories.  In order for a conspiracy theory to work, you'd have to count on people like these idiots being able to pull off some kind of massive snowjob on the American people.

Seriously though, a friend of mine posted on facebook that the videos made him sad rather than angry. Sad because he had always assumed that super-wealthy folks knew how the world works and were lying to us for their own financial benefit.  That the audience there was stupid enough to really accept that 47% of Americans pay no taxes, live on welfare, and count on the Government for free housing was disheartening.   And it is very strange to see what kind of bullshit people will come up with to justify a lifestyle that most of us think is obscene. 

Me Hating On Things

By Isaac Butler

I was asked by Hooded Utilitarian's Noah Berlatsky to write an essay for their "Anniversary of Hate" in which I write about what I consider to be the worst comic book of all time. I chose "V for Vendetta."  To find out why, click thisaway. 

Cordelia and The Fool

By Isaac Butler

According to MetaFilter, there's a bunch of theories floating around about Cordelia and The Fool in Lear, including that they could've been played by the same actor, are doubles for each other, and that The Fool really is Cordelia in disguise.  

Has anyone out there seen a production of Lear where they made this choice? Where Cordelia disguised herself as The Fool? If so, what was it like? Did it work?

 

A Brief Brooklyn Monologue

By Isaac Butler

There is man.

He lives in my neighborhood.

He makes shoes from garbage.

He isn't homelss. He's French.

This is his profession.

He has a storefront with signs on the windows.

They say that he will teach you the fine art of garbage-shoe manufacture.

He wanders the streets at times.

Low-slung jeans, v-neck shirt, his blaack hair the exact shape of the Hindenberg on fire.

He's sometimes accompanied by his Chinese girlfriend.

She wears the hippiest of hippy clothes, just almost hiding her pregnant belly.

Across the street from the storefront, the Gowarnus Houses loom.

There, a mad Russian used to live.

He patrolled Hoyt shouting DA! DA! DA! riding his bicycle topless.

Going through everyone's  trash.

Leaving the blocks strewn with it.

They could've been in cahoots, but no.

Frenchy the Garbage Shoe Manufacturere showed up right as the economy was tanking.

And The Mad Russian was long gone by then.

Our Language, Ourselves

By Isaac Butler

The other day, a friend of mine told me that she had started shopping around her novel this week. She and I met through the coffee shop we both write from, so I've watched her working on this thing for a couple of hours every day for about four years, trying to sandwich it between raising her son and editing a well-trafficked website.  It is, in other words, a major labor of love, something she's worked very hard on.  I wanted to wish her well and let her know I was in her corner.

When you're an atheist, when, in particular, you don't think of yourself as spiritual, a lot of colloquial phrases seem strange.  What, exactly, is the value of praying for someone when you don't think prayer works?  What does it really mean to keep someone in your thoughts when you think that thought has no power in the world on its own?

What we mean when we say these things, of course, is simply I care about you. I want you to know that. I doubt everyone on facebook who says they're praying for someone is actually sitting there with their hands all here-is-the-churched actively beseeching the almight for some quickee results. Heck, many of the people I know who would say they're praying for a particular thing would not, when they had a moment to think about it, say they actually believe in an interventionist deity.  It's simply that saying you're praying for someone is what you do, what one does.

But language, of course, has meanin;  these phrases contain a worldview. We're told the problem with clichés is that they don't meaning anything. They're Orwell's Dead Language, an image or phrase devoid of meaning. The eye scans it, the ear hears it, and it moves on, unaffected.  That's true, up to a point.  For the cliché at some point meant something. It meant something so well, did such a good job of conveying an idea that everyone used it, and via using it, drained it of its signifiance.  So much so, that we can use these phrases now and not really think about what they mean, even when it means that we're essentially showing an inauthentic version of ourselves to the world.

Of course, in the moment when a friend just wants some good vibes sent their way, only a pedant or a jackass would post an exegesis about why they are not, in fact, going to keep the person in their thoughts on their facebook wall or whateveer. My point is simply that one of the things belonging to an out-group allows you to do is see more clearly the assumptions embeddded in the everyday clichés we use to communicate with one another. 

My atheism was born in the midst of an excoriating tragedy, a friend's death and my own cowardice in the face of it. Since then, I have experienced, as one does in life, other trials, other sadnesses.  A terrorist attack on the city I lived in and the city I was born in on the same day. The death of a mentor. The collapse of a first marriage into contempt and silence. The suicide of my childhood babysittyer. The near-death of one of my parents. These are the moments when those who believe in the divine reach for it. In each of these moments, and the others I've been through, I've had to find something else. 

I'd love to say-- it'd be so great, so comforting, so right-- to say that something was Art. But this is not true, and the nonfictioneer in my won't let me grasp for this easy, comforting answer. For while I believe in the power of art, in none of the above circumstances was there some moment, redemptive and cathartic both, as I listened to a piece of music or gazed on a painting. That, like Jesus saying Arise, and Walk, I pressed play on, say, Music for 18 Musicians and was healed.

Someone, I am sure, has actually had this experience, but I am not that person.  For me, comfort has come from being with other people and, perhaps as a negative side effect of all of this, the healing that other people speak so highly of has never fully come. I don't walk around grieving all the time, but some there's some grit of those experiences that refuses to pass fully through the sieve.

I don't think you can choose whether you believe in God or not.  You do or you don't. Your experience has lead you towards the divine or away. But, given the choice, I think I'd take my way, gritty sieve and constant tingling in the spine when I think about death an all. I like the urgency it gives me and the demand that I make my meaning every day with the people I am with. I don't believe in God. But I do believe in other people. And that's why, dear friend, of course I'll keep you in my thoughts. Of course I'll tell you that I am. Not because I think it will change the actual outcome of your day, but instead, because you asked me to, because it means something to you, and you are what matters, after all, after all. 

Back By Popular Demand... Tuesday Hair Blogging!

By Isaac Butler

Today, my hair had writer's block so decided to go back to outlining the section it needs to write instead edition.

Also, first discovered grey beard hair (not pictured) edition. 

Art and 9/11

By Isaac Butler

As it is 9/11, I thought I'd point you to this essay I published last year about Laurie Anderson's "O Superman," and September 11th. I touch on a point briefly in there that still bugs me which is, essentially, the failure of art to directly essay the event.  There are works of art, even quite good ones, where 9/11 is a presense (And Then We Came To The End for example) but I'm having trouble thinking of a single work of art other than John Adams On The Transmigration of Souls that actually suceeds even on a craft level.

Is it that art about 9.11 is impossible? And if so, why?

Laura Miller at Salon took a stab at this question last year, and says that the deeper problem is that 9/11 is essentially meaningless:

I realize that sounds inflammatory, but hear me out. The terrorist assault on New York and Washington, D.C., was historically momentous. Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six human beings died, most of them leaving behind devastated loved ones. Those deaths became the pretext for two wars, a major curtailment of civil liberties in Americaand human rights abroad, an orgy of patriotic chest-thumping and genuine soul-searching, the expansion of a largely unaccountable intelligence and security apparatus, the demonization of billions of peaceable Muslims by opportunistic demagogues, and so on and so on. Don’t even get me started on the economy. But all of these things constitute our response to those 3,000 murders and the hideously spectacular way in which they were achieved. They don’t change the nature of the deaths themselves, which were abrupt and unanticipated, as is the case with most disasters.

I think she's on to something. 

I find it almost impossible to write about 9/11.  The Laurie Anderson piece linked to above is one attempt. My other was here on this blog two years ago, where I talk about walking down Broadway towards the World Trade Center site the day after they reopened the zone to the public. 

The relentless desire to turn 9/11 and the deaths that occured that day, the horrorshow that gripped my city for what felt like months, into a symbol is distasteful. It isn't a symbol. It's a thing that happened. Real people died. Real lives were destroyed. Real people rushed in to help and still can't get compensated for their lasting health problems. And in the face of how we behaved as a nation in the wake of 9/11, the way that 9/11 hysteria still grips us (see: Mosque, Ground Zero), the smugness and self-satisfied tributes to our own nobility in the face of the disaster gall me. I am sorry, I truly am, for those who lost loved ones on that day.  Despite being in New York City then, I cannot begin to fathom what that was like and I hope the last eleven years have brought them some modicum of piece and healing.

So let me instead leave you with this.  It was an odd happenstance that Slate was hosting a week-long dialogue between John Lahr and August Wilson when 9/11 happened. It was by far the largest platform theater people had to address what was happening in our culture. I try to reread it every other year.  You can find it here. Here's August Wilson, sounding a moment of hope amidst the despair:

 America has always responded with great courage in the face of adversity. Whether we acquire a new sense of morality to guide our technology, whether we shoulder the grave responsibility to the annals of truth and the rigorous vigilance it demands, whether we achieve the cultural or spiritual maturity necessary to turn this evil and despicable act into a force for good, I don't know. I know that fate has decreed this defining moment to be in our hands and what we make of it will emerge in a baptismal spray that names and defines the kind of world my four-year-old daughter, given her three-score-and-ten, will live in for the next 66 years. Freedom from political tyranny and religious oppression are among the great gifts this country gives to all its citizens. If we add to that our pioneering, trailblazing spirit, that aspect of the American character that forges the new, if we don't squander our inheritance, that faith in man's ability to render out of his experience an indelible purpose blazoned with the high ideals of human conduct, then I think we can conquer any thing, person, or idea that would deny us the highest possibility of human life.

I hope this day is peaceful for you. 

Dangerous Myths

By Isaac Butler

Roughly a week ago while I was on the road, the wonderful playwright Mac Rogers and excellent critic Jason Zinoman (both friends of mine, duh) got into a discussion about how poisonous the myth of the individual artist is.

They didn't put it that way, of course. Instead, in response to talking about the "We Built This" GOP meme, Mac wrote "As a playwright, I feel automatically threatened at the idea that my scripts are collaborative achievements. My director Jordana basically deserves a co-credit on BLAST RADIUS, but I didn't offer her one.The need to believe that my scripts issue forth exclusively from my visionary brain is hugely untrue, and hard to let go of. This is my playwright's version of a widespread American feeling: 'There has to be SOMETHING that only *I* did, or who am I?'"

Jason chimed in to say that journalists (who of course work with editors) feel it too. And then mac hit on something really perceptive: That scarcity has something to do with this. When there are a huge number of people vyeing for the few slots availalbe in an industry, you want to be essential. You want to be the only one that does what you do, and the only one who needs to be relied upon to do it.

I really do feel that the myth of the individual artist is seriously damaging to our creative capacity and our humanity. People deny the influences that helped birth them, screw over their collaborators, and tell obviously BS stories to create a myth about themselves.  And one of the reasons why people do this is that we want to believe that the individual is the core unit of creating art.  But even in art with only one person's name on it, that's simply untrue.

I am writing a book right now. Should I be fortunate to have it published, it will say "By Isaac Butler" on it somewhere. But the list of voices that make up my voice in that book would go on and on. It would have to include at least twenty authors whose work was important to the book's creation. The interviewees who participated in the book. The circle of readers I get feedback from. And to some extent, the reader, as the work of art is actually created in their minds as they read it.

And yet, the idea that an individual artist-- and only an individual artist-- created this is still there. I feel that this is intertwined with another dangerous idea, the idea that artistic innovation is the highest thing a work of art can aspire to, the top goal, and if you aren't reaching that, you're just a hack.

I suppose on some level what i'm saying is that there are certain modernist conceptions of what an artist is that we still labor under and that I believe those conceptions to be both ahistorical and wrong. Or at least dated.  Arists do not, as a rule, stand outside society, critiquing it and sanctifying it simultaneously with their creations. The audience is important to a work of art.  Innovation isn't everything, Groups matter. Substance abuse rarely leads to good writing. Etc.

What are some dangerous myths about art-making for you? What are the myths you confront that get in the way of our own ability to get work done?

 

If It Bends...

by 99 Seats

While I'm not wading into the very worthy conversation about the validity of comedy or tragedy, one thing that comes up often is why is there so little conversative comedy. The realm of satire seems to belong entirely to the progressives and the left side of the ledger. Last week, we had a pretty good example of this, and, I think, an object lesson on where conservatism loses its comedy mojo. Via Yahoo! News:

Two spoof Twitter accounts for President Barack Obama emerged from speeches at the Republican convention last week. The first, @FadedObama, was inspired by this line from Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan: "College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life." As of Tuesday afternoon, it had been mentioned on Twitter 182 times and attracted 194 followers.

The second, @InvisibleObama, sprang (of course) from Clint Eastwood's interview with an absent Obama Thursday evening. That account has 66,797 mentions and 68,193 followers.

(Emphasis mine.)

The Yahoo! article says that the difference between the two was timing; the @FadedObama went up 13 minutes after Paul Ryan's speech while @InvisibleObama went up within seconds. Yeah, that may account for it. There's also a part of it about narratives: after Paul Ryan's speech, most of the conversation focused (rightly, I would add) around the many, many falsehoods and misrepresentations in his speech, not one small, throwaway metaphor, while after Clint's performance, well, the chair was the whole game, wasn't it? It was the key part of the event. But there's another part of this.

@InvisibleObama is funny. @FadedObama isn't.

I say this not as a progressive. I say this as a kinda-sorta funny person. I don't think there's any argument on this. Here's a typical @FadedObama post:

You know I'm going to fade. My hair literally faded during my first term

— Faded Obama Poster (@FadedObama) August 30, 2012

And here's an @InvisibleObama post:

On this Labor Day, take a moment to remember that today is the last day it's appropriate to wear invisible seersucker anything.

— Invisible Obama (@InvisibleObama) September 3, 2012

Actually, that wasn't fair. That was one of the funnier @FadedObama posts. I put my finger on the scale and it's still lost (sort of like arguing with an empty chair and losing, but I digress).

The @FadedObama Twitter feed is nothing but recycled Obama jokes and jabs: birther stuff, media star stuff, food stamp jokes, a Nancy Pelosi joke. Stuff that really only appeals to conservatives and re-inforces the conservative world view. And pretty much just stated outright. It's a collection of talk radio lines.

The @InvisibleObama feed? Yep, partisan jabs. But also a personality. And a personality that fits Twitter. The voice of @InvisibleObama is similar to the other Twitter faves, like @SarcasticRover: snarky, spiky and, well, sarcastic. But it's also a lot of regular comedy about being invisible.

Conservative comedy tends to be much more like @FadedObama: jokes that make conservatives laugh. Good satire, though, like good comedy, has further reach, builds better gags. Conservatives would do well to put comedy above party.

Intellectual Property Insanity, Hugo Awards Edition

By Isaac Butler

Copyright enforcement robots cut off the Hugo Awards livestream because it showed brief clips from television shows it had the right to broadcast. 

Journalistic Fair-Mindedness and The Post-Truth Campaign

By Isaac Butler

Ezra Klein has a post up at his WaPo digs talking about the Ryan convention speech. It's a facinating document as to the problems confronting the "professional left" as they-- as a result of their success- become more and more intertwined with mainstream journalism. 

It's worth reading the whole thing, but the basic thrust of it is that Klein worked overtime-- I'd thought about calling this post Klein Agonistes-- to find a "balanced" way to report on Ryan's speech. He wanted to, talking Ryan's arguments on his own terms, search out a way to list what was true and false about it.  He fine-toothed the speech looking for more factual claims:

 I sat down to read it again, this time with the explicit purpose of finding claims we could add to the “true” category. And I did find one. He was right to say that the Obama administration has been unable to correct the housing crisis... But I also came up with two more “false” claims. So I read the speech again. And I simply couldn’t find any other major claims or criticisms that were true.

I want to stop here and say that even the definition of “true” that we’re using is loose. “Legitimate” might be a better word. The search wasn’t for arguments that were ironclad. It was just for arguments — for claims about Obama’s record — that were based on a reasonable reading of the facts, and that weren’t missing obviously key context.

[snip]

 Ryan’s claims weren’t even arguably true. You simply can’t say the president hasn’t released a deficit reduction plan. The plan is right here. You simply can’t say the president broke his promise to keep your GM plant open. The decision to close the plant was made before he entered office — and, by the way, the guy at the top of your ticket opposed the auto bailout. You simply can’t argue that the Affordable Care Act was a government takeover of the health-care system. My doctor still works for Kaiser Permanente, a private company that the government does not own. You simply can’t say that Obama, who was willing to follow historical precedent and sign a clean debt ceiling increase, caused the S&P downgrade, when S&P clearly said it was due to congressional gridlock and even wrote that it was partly due to the GOP’s dogmatic position on taxes. [etc. also emphasis added is mine]

Basically, Romney and Ryan have been lying about their record, their sports achievements, their goals for the country, their proposed budgets, Obama's biography and Obama's record for months now. Yet Klein, a member of the "professional left" feels the need to bend over backwards to create a new definition of what "truth" is, after which the speech still fails the test. And after all this agonizing, we get:

Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation. Even if you bend over backward to be generous to them — as the Tax Policy Center did when they granted the Romney campaign a slew of essentially impossible premises in order to evaluate their tax plan — you often find yourself forced into the same conclusion: This doesn’t add up, this doesn’t have enough details to be evaluated, or this isn’t true.

I don’t like that conclusion. It doesn’t look “fair” when you say that. We’ve been conditioned to want to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame, and the fact of the matter is, I would like to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame...

It's hard to imagine the Ezra Klein who wrote for The American Prospect writing this. Which leads me to a series of questions:

(1) Is this just a rhetorical gambit to impress people who like it when you sound all pointy-bearded and series and you give people who disagree with you a lot of benefit of the doubt before coming to the (sad, sad) conclusion that they're wrong? In other words, is this about phrasing this argument in a way more centrist (and right wing) readers will hear it?  Or

(2) Is this really how Klein things now?  If it is really how Klein thinks now, and we can't imagine him writing this at the American Prospect, what does this say about the (unconscious) ways that the source of one's paycheck and the pressure of one's editors changes us as writers?

(3) Or is it that now that Klein is in a position where he has access to and regularly interviews people on the other side of the aisle including Paul Ryan, he personally likes and respects them enough that he finds himself unable to just openly call them liars?

I think that what is going on here is some mix of all three.  I don't think Klein is a bad guy, I actually think he's great at his job, and his outlining of his struggling with editing a piece about Ryan's lies is an example of why he's great at his job. At the same time,  I  think the pose of fair-mindedness is, at times, geniuinely harmful to our national conversation. And this kind of agonizing about Ryan's clear lying about just about everything is an example of that pose.