Debate of the Living Dead

I think it’s safe to say that if a geologist decided it would not be worth his  time to engage in a staged discussion with a hollow-earth cultist, you would not hear people of average education accusing him of being pissy or trying to stifle scientific debate. That’s because people of average education and intellect understand that the interior of the earth is not a vast cavern with its own sun, and that the Pellucidar novels are pulp fantasy, not scientific speculation. They also understand that for a scientist, getting into a “debate” with a scientifically illiterate crank has no upside — it is simply a time-suck that will keep him away from career-advancing research, while giving the crank a spurious air of authority.

So why is it that somebody who is demonstrably well-educated in many areas fails to grasp that evolutionary biologist Nick Gotelli has better things to do with his time than engage in yet another “debate” about creationism and evolutionary theory with somebody from the Discovery Institute, that wellspring of bad-faith argument and impenetrable ignorance? And that Gotelli’s elegantly phrased and utterly scathing rejection of the offer of debate is not “posturing” or pissiness, but simply streetwwise recognition of the fact that the Discovery Institute is interested only in grubbing for publicity.

“Debate” implies an exchange of arguments that leads to a conclusion and an adjustment of opinions in the face of the stronger argument. Gotelli knows that he can spend hours demolishing creationist arguments, like other scientists before him, without changing a single mind on the other side. When a creationist’s points are refuted, he simply reshuffles and restates them. If George Romero makes another zombie movie, I humbly suggest he clothe the undead in t-shirts with terms like “Irreducible Complexity” and “Intelligent Design” across the chests. No matter how many times you shoot them down, they get back up and keep coming.

There is plenty of debate taking place every day about the nature of evolution. Creationism — or intelligent design or whatever new bottle is fashioned to hold the old whine — is not a part of that debate. The staffers at the Discovery Institute are either half-smart religious cranks, or fully sleazy operators who know better but keep pushing discredited nonsense because they want to keep cashing their wingnut welfare checks.

Got Biblical?

Do you have morals worthy of the Bible? Take the quiz and see.

Weekend Bookchat

 

“The more I see of America they less I think it is a land of laughs,” said Louis Adamic (above), one of the great forgotten American authors of the mid-20th century. In a way, Adamic was to Los Angeles what Studs Terkel was to Chicago — he watched its transformation under the hands of hucketers, oil men and land barons.  AK Press has just reissued his 1931 classic Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, an epic which examined why so mmuch blood was spilled in the struggle to organize American workers. Adamic’s politics got him in trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he died under what can only be called mysterious circumstances: he was found in his head in his burning New Jersey farmhouse, a bullet in his head that may or may not have been self-inflicted. Adamic’s other books are overdue for revival, but Dynamite is a terrific place to start. Here’s a fine writeup in the Los Angeles Times, and Wikipedia has a pretty decent entry.  

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Frederik Pohl is renowned as a master of science fiction, but recently he found himself living in a horror story when he discovered that he would be spending weeks on a South Seas cruise with nothing but FoxNoise for information.

Pohl, an intrepid man, found a way to rise above such adversity:

Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the sound down to zero, I would never have to hear the crazy-making utterances of Hannity, O’Reilly, et al anymore but could get a rough idea of what was going on in the world from the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which, relatively speaking, was only mildly toxic.

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It is usually the case with Washington scandals is that the real outrage is not the transgression, but the behavior that is considered normal. This is the subject of Robert G. Kaiser’s So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, which focuses not so much on the spectacular excesses of the likes of Jack Abramoff  as the steady erosion of democracy by the need to find money for hugely expensive political campaigns and the eagerness of lobbyists to provide that money. Kaiser follows the rise and fall of Gerald Cassiday, who started out as a lawyer for migrant workers and an aide to George McGovern, then ended up as a high-rent shill who pioneered the use of earmarks. Here’s a podcast interview with Kaiser on The Bat Segundo Show, an NPR radio feature and a Book TV feature from C-SPAN 2.

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From the commanding heights to the bottom of the barrel — watch Milton Friedman’s legacy collapse. Calling all theorists — it’s time to read Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galatica. Or maybe not.

The Iraqi Prisoner

I’ve already noted how closely the actions of the Bush administration, and conservative fiscal policies in general, correspond to a venerable con game called the “Bust-out,” in which fraudsters pretending to take an interest in running a business use a down payment to gain access to the company’s credit lines and assets, then max out all the credit lines, sell off assets at fire sale prices, then clear out just before the deposit check bounces, leaving a bankrupted company hollowed out by unpayable debt.

Readings new stories of how U.S. contractors and military personnel appear to have siphoned off billions of dollars supposedly targeted for Iraq reconstruction projects, an even more venerable con game comes to mind: “The Spanish Prisoner,” in which the mark is induced to pay out large sums of money to secure the release of some unidentified prince being held overseas, in some vaguely defined location, with the understanding that the contribution will be returned tenfold when the grateful prisoner wins his freedom and showers his supporters with royal largesse. A variation of this con, known to police as “419 Fraud” or “Advance Fee Fraud,” has probably turned up in your e-mail – instead of liberating a prisoner, the pigeon is asked to help broker the release of a big pot of money in a West African bank. The target usually expects to get a phat return on the initial investment, but sometimes the con men are also milking the target’s idealism or charitable impulses. To get a picture of how it works, watch House of Games, David Mamet’s first and best film, in which the psychologist heroine is drawn into a long con with the promise of helping her patient get free of his gambling debts. (Though Mamet went on to make another film called The Spanish Prisoner, that con actually doesn’t figure in the plot, curiously enough.) Michael Caine’s character in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is also running a similar scam by convincing rich widows he’s a deposed prince trying to raise money for freedom fighters back home. 

The designation of Bush’s little Middle East killing spree as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was already a museum-quality specimen of Orwellian Newspeak when he rolled it out, but it becomes even more richly ironic when we consider how the American people were gulled into thinking that by throwing open their coffers to the Bush banditos, they could secure the liberation of the Iraqi people from a cruel dictator in a place many of them couldn’t have found on a map if they had a three-day head start. In return for pretending the whole thing was a John Wayne movie with extra sand on the sets, they would get cheap oil and a nice friendly regime that would recognize Israel and provide us with free military bases, along with the promised cascades of candy and flowers. Remember how we were told the whole thing would pay for itself once the good guys got their hands on all those oil wells? Those were the days, huh?       

Meanwhile, while Bush’s cronies went on looting with both hands here in the States, another team of con-men (maybe even some freelancers — who could tell, with so much money flying around?) tapped into the tsunami – one might even call it the surge — of unmonitored cash flowing into the country. In return, we got a taxpayer-funded training ground for aspiring Islamist terrorists, a pseudo-government composed of crooks, religious fanatics and terrorist sympathizers (kind of like the GOP, when you think about it) and a host of brand-new regional worries that will plague the world long after Bush has strutted off to that great gated community in the sky.  

The only upside I can see to any of this is that political science students attempting to grasp the nature of conservatism need no longer waste any more time studying Friedman, Oakeshott or any of the other great minds of wingerdom. They need only read the latest e-mails from Nigeria, and everything they need to know about conservatism will become crystal-clear.

Weekend Bookchat

This space is frequently used to ridicule conservatives and Republicans, but in honor of the atmosphere of love and affection generated by the Valentine’s Day weekend, Weekend Bookchat will take this opportunity to step forward and praise Wingnut Nation for its leadership role in recycling.

 Because when one surveys the illiterary annex of the winger aviary, it becomes clear that there is no conservative argument so tired, so lame, so overworked or so played out that some ambitious illiterateur won’t scrape it off the bottom of the aviary and repackage and yet another bold, fresh pile of right-wing thought. Consider, for example, Andrea Peyser’s suavely titled new — that is, “new” — book Celbutards, an attack on Hollywood  liberals. As Steve M. puts it:

Wow, a right-wing attack on the likes of Rosie O’Donnell, Barbra Streisand, and Sean Penn. What a blazingly original book idea.

No, seriously — I bet this is a great book. After all, it was a great book when Bernard Goldberg wrote it and called it 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37). And it was an even greater book when Laura Ingraham wrote it and called it Shut up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America. And it was an even greater book when Michael Savage wrote it and called it The Political Zoo (“Serving as resident biologist and zookeeper, Dr. Savage asks that you watch your step when approaching the widemouth copperhead Ted Turner [also known as Mouthus desouthus], do not feed the ego of stuffed turkey Alec Baldwin [Notalentus anti-americanus], and please keep your children with you at all times around wolf boy Bill Clinton [Fondlem undgropeum]“).

Bloody hell, do these people have any new thoughts? Do they think this stuff is funny? Still? “Hanoi Jane”? Still?

“Still”? Of course still! If there’s one thing you can count on parrots to do, it’s take to the air in a flock to fly around in circles making identical screeching noises. No sooner have you wiped away the wingnut complaints about press being biased in favor of Barack Obama than Bernie Goldberg’s A Slobbering Love Affair:  The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media is deposited on the shelves of your local big box.

Which is why I can predict that  no matter how great Peyser’s book may turn out to be, it will only be dwarfed by the sheer awesomeness of aspiring New Media tycoon Roger Simon’s Blacklisting Myself, an attack on – yes! — Hollywood liberals. Because after conservatives have lied us into a disastrous war, destroyed the economy and laid the foundation for future disasters, what else is there to do but wheel out some creaky Jane Fonda jokes? Or tell everybody that Michael Moore is fat? After all, Dinesh D’Souza did it ahead of them all with The Enemy at Home, and he can leave his gated community without being pelted with eggs, so where’s the downside? 

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A look at conservative labor relations. Is jazz dead? Like the man said, that depends on what you know. And leave it to a science fiction writer to come up with a big new idea for writers and authors.

A Dope on Dope

I’m not much of a sports buff, so it’s taken a little while for the nationwide hissy fit over Michael Phelps’ civilization-threatening (and, apparently, career-killing) faux pas with a marijuana pipe to reach my oblivious ears. Reading this foam-flecked columnist carrying on about the incident, I had to wonder who was smoking dope — the swimmer or the writer:

Phelps has not denied or confirmed anything. He has instead apologized for setting a bad example, which it most certainly was. No matter how many people defend marijuana and extol decriminalizing it, there are studies that say the stuff is bad for important functions like reasoning, and can lead to worse abuses.

On one side, an athlete who has managed his career climb so well it netted him eight Olympic gold medals; on the other, a copyhack reciting the kind of drug-war propaganda that has sixth-graders snickering behind their hands as the DARE officer wastes their classroom time. “The stuff is bad for important functions like reasoning”? Maybe Phelps’ dealer should send a couple bales of his finest to the New York Times sports desk. It can’t do much harm and it may help.     

I don’t have any truck with marijuana — my vices are strictly off the shelf — but the only impaired reasoning I can see here belongs to George Vecsey. Dopes shouldn’t write about dope.

Weekend Bookchat

Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East surveys the actions of eight presidencies — from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush — and finds an almost unbroken line of ineptitude, mendacity, bad faith and hubris, from the Suez Crisis to Bush’s lie-driven campaign in Iraq. Tyler draws on newly available archival material and offers some jaw-dropping anecdotes from the history of America’s role in keeping the Middle East ablaze. The sainted Henry Kissinger, who still enjoys a baffling reputation as a master politician and diplomat, comes off particularly badly:

. . . Henry Kissinger, entrusted with a message from Nixon to Brezhnev calling for joint superpower action to end the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and then proceed to a just settlement of the Palestinian question, simply decided, in mid-flight to Moscow, not to deliver it. Nixon’s message, Tyler writes, “threatened to undermine the record Kissinger was seeking to create; that he and Nixon had run the Soviets into the ground and they had protected Israel”. The truth was that the Russian leaders had reacted cautiously and moderately when war broke out, and that Nixon himself had a statesmanlike grasp of what was necessary. But a joint US-Russian initiative “would have thrust Kissinger into the thankless and perilous task of applying pressure on Israel”. So he simply dumped the message. He later encouraged Israel to violate the ceasefire that was supposed to end hostilities so that it could better its military position. With these acts of disobedience – acts which were also, as Tyler says, arguably unconstitutional – Kissinger closed off the possibility that the 1973 war could have been ended on terms which would have left Israel in a less powerful position, making it more amenable to an ensuing push for a settlement by the Americans and the Russians.

Tyler also demonstrates  the problems caused by the ”special relationship” between America and Israel:

Tyler does not go quite as far as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, for whom the Israel lobby lies at the heart of American foreign policy; but he is nevertheless a keen critic of the special relationship between the United States and Israel. Indeed, what is perhaps most striking is the constant American appeasement in the face of Israeli aggression. “Don’t lie to me! I’m sitting here watching it on CNN!” Reagan yelled down the telephone to Menachem Begin in 1982, after the Israeli leader had reneged on a promise not to bombard Beirut. But in typical fashion, Reagan did nothing about it – a pattern that has been repeated, by and large, ever since.

Meanwhile, Tyler writes that Bill Clinton fumbleda one-in-a-lifetime chance to capitalize on  ”a great convergence: the end of the cold war, the advent of Yitzhak Rabin’s premiership and the PLO’s decision to recognise the Jewish state.” By letting himself be manipulated by Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, Clinton tried to force a settlement and had the whole thing blow up in his face. He then blamed Yassir Arafat and everyone except himself for the collapse.

The manifold failures and disasters of the Bush administration have left Barack Obama with one hell of a mess to clear up, but one can only hope he might find time to read Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble. He might not be able to improve the situation, but as Tyler makes clear, simply not making things worse will put him miles ahead of his predecessors.

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How did so many public fixtures come to be named after Ronald Reagan? How did so many people come to believe that this dozing fantasist, whose administration was a carnival of corruption and who presided over embarrassing military failures ,  single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union, reduced the size of governmentand revived the American economy through tax cuts and positive thinking?

Why, the  way just about everything else beloved of conservatives, from crackpot economic theories to fake bestsellers, comes into being: a small group of dedicated crusaders with access to wingbucks lobbied for them round-the-clock, then created the illusion they had come about through overwhelming public demand. Will Bunch, in his new book  Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, chronicles the rise of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997, and argues that its rewriting of history (a creation of a fantasy version of a president whose legacy is, at best, highly debatable) is a hindrance to the present and fitire of America

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The memoirs of a renowned editor give us a glimpse of a vanishing era in American publishing — and an amusing look at how a neocon blowhard got wild-man lessons from Norman Mailer. A cultural history of Americans and their automobiles.

Police States ‘R’ Us

It’s never too early to start training your kids in lifelong habits of acquiesence to authority and the presumption of guilt, so remember this Playmobil Security Checkpoint set whenever you get clutched up on a gift idea for the lil’ sprouts. Set it up with this Playmobil Police Checkpoint and the Scan-It Operation Checkpoint Toy X-Ray and your rumpus room will be like a window into the mind of Dick Cheney. All I want to know is, when does the Playmobil  Waterboard Interrogation set come out? (Thanks, Marc.)

Librul Media Bias

It’s just so insidious, I tell ya.

Twilight of the Clods

Far be it from me to stand back and keep a straight face when everyone else in the progressive blogger ranks is chortling about the woes of the wingnut web: Dignity Pants Media is switching from one losing business model to another, losier model (i.e., expecting people to pay for something they didn’t even want when it was free); and Culture 11 has proved to be a bad bet, as should have been expected from any venture launched with the help of Diamond Bill Bennett. Schadenfreude, do you say? Damn right it is.

The problem with right-wing blogs is not so much their crack-brained content or their delusional business plans, but the fact that they simply aren’t necessary. The progressive blogosphere grew directly in proportion to the insanity unleashed by conservatives, starting with the Clinton impeachment farce and the hijacking of the 2000 election  and continuing through the Iraq War fraud, spurred along by  the wingnut  infestation of mass-market punditry, and the cluelessness of respectable columnists like David Broder who mumbled about bipartisanship while the Visigoths ran riot in the halls of government.

 Daily Kos, Eschaton and Crooks and Liars,  as well as the lefty blogs that followed in their train, didn’t spring into being because some daddy wingbucks wrote them  phat checks. They developed and thrived because they trafficked in reality, and in a media realm dominated by the likes of Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh and Thomas Friedman, reality was and is  a scarce and valuable commodity.

Wingers have no shortage of propaganda spigots to sup from, and while they are a breed with a seemingly endless capacity for hearing the same nonsense over and over, there are only  so many hours in a day, and one cannot live at one’s computer. When the airwaves and op-ed pages are full of professional ranters, amateurs can’t expect much of a crowd for their flea-circus versions.  

That’s why the smart money is  betting on the amount of time it takesfor  Big Hollywood, the latest methane-pumped conservative ego balloon, to settle to earth with a long, flatulent hiss. No, I’m not going to link to it, but if you scout it out you’ll find a Web site devoted to . . . wait for it . . . complaints about liberal bias in the movie industry – a theme so tired  even Z-list wingers like Michael Medved resort to it only on exceptionally slow news days. The last time I checked, their spotlight post was a long whine about the revamped Battlestar Galactica from Dirk Benedict, a talentless refugee from the original series  who’s been  over-the-hill for so long that the hill itself has eroded away. Oh yeah — that’ll bring the masses in at a gallop.

Keep the Schadenfreude pot brewing, folks.