Chicken House

I watched a re-run of House from earlier this season last night.  In a scene, Dr. House is supposed to be babysitting Cuddy’s daughter, which of course he doesn’t want to be doing, so he calls up his old pal Wilson to pick up some Chinese food for him, and when Wilson arrives, House tries to leave Wilson there watching the kid.  Wilson defiantly refuses and walks out the front door to his car, as House also walks out the front door to his motorcycle.

House’s gambit is that Wilson is too decent a person to leave a 2 year-old home alone.  House is able to play the fact that he’s kind of crazy and would simply take off, and is betting that Wilson will fold and stay with the kid, because he knows that Wilson is too good a person to ever allow the kid to be left alone.  House is right, and it would have worked exactly as he'd planned, had House not been dating Cuddy.  Wilson is able to play his ace-in-the-hole, and threatens to tell Cuddy about House leaving him there babysitting, thus guaranteeing that House would not get sex from Cuddy.  Wilson wins, and both men return to the kid, who has in the three minutes they left her alone strewn popcorn and Chinese food all over the floor, and ingested a dime.

This is how I see the current budget negotiations in Congress and the threatened government shutdown.  House is the Republicans, part calculating, part crazy, all dickish petulant child.  Wilson is the Democrats, a patsy pushover, but a decent responsible adult.  The crazy part of the Republicans actually WANT a government shutdown.  The calculating part (the leadership) knows that it would be a) dangerous, and b) politically stupid (hard to get laid later) to allow a government shutdown to happen on their watch, but they are somewhat held hostage by the crazy part.  So the Republicans are playing a game of chicken with the Democrats, who they figure, being the responsible suckers that they are, will flinch first and “compromise”, which in Washington, D.C. seems to always mean “Democrats cave on their core values while Republicans get everything they want”.

But the Democrats have an ace themselves.  There is no way that a government shutdown is going to be blamed on the Democrats by the American people.  In addition to the facts being on their side (which is certainly not dispositive of anything in politics), the propaganda is on their side as well.  As everyone “knows”, the Democrats are the party of “big government”, and the Republicans are the party of “limited government”.  Who shuts down the government?  The limited government guys, of course, not those evil socialists who want to control every aspect of your lives.

Plus, with the recent actions of the radical governors elected in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Maine and elsewhere this past fall, the American people are beginning to get a nice big spoonful of Tea Party Crazy, and to understand what it actually means to their lives when the Republicans get to live out their wet dreams in public.   

All political momentum is with the Democrats at this moment.  Democrats are more motivated right now than Republicans, a major switch from six months ago.  Independents, especially in the states that had Teabag Revolutions in 2010, are running in droves towards the Democrats and away from the Republicans.  Full right-wing crazy is on full display right now, and to such a grand extent that it’s hard to avoid seeing it, even for the average casually ignorant American (as opposed to the aggressively ignorant Teahadists, who just LOVE the idea of destroying the government from the inside out and/or using it to oppress liberals, women, the poor, unions, etc...).

Now, if only the Democrats have the courage and foresight to actually play their ace and not only let the Republican trump their scared and overwhelmed leadership, but to press the point home to the American people when it happens and not let the Republicans somehow take political advantage of it, then the Democrats could be back in business, and rolling in 2012.   “Flip the track, bring the old school back”.  This is how we do it.

Honestly, I just don't want them to make me eat a dime.

Don't Feed The Trolls

 

http://www.marriedtothesea.com/030709/

It's a continual source of frustration to me that commenters on blogs and message boards have not figured out to not feed the trolls.  We're talking about smart people, many of whom seem to have been on the internet for a long time, and have not figured out this basic lesson.  It's a rare reply to a troll that is that combination of razor wit with a complete and utter dissemblance of the idiot's position that people are always shooting for, but almost never achieve.  The vast majority of the time, it just allows a discussion to devolve into either a flame out or else spending a bunch of wasted time arguing about something so stupid that it should never even be an issue to a sentient being.  Click on the link to TPM over on the right there, and read the comments section of a story.  There's usually a troll who ends up being the subject of nearly half of the comments.  Troll Mission Accomplished.

And yet, ironically, I spend a large amount of time reading political blogs and news sources on the internet where the subject of the story itself is a writer pointing out something ridiculous that some well-known conservative personality has done or said, and then either making fun of it, or taking apart the position point by point.  It's very entertaining, and it validates your worldview to see idiots who hold a radically different worldview put in their place by an intelligent and witty writer.  But really, it's just feeding the trolls in real life.


Yesterday, I read a diary on Daily Kos that really blew my mind and put this in perspective for me.  It's long, but if you are frustrated with the state of political discourse today, I highly recommend you read the whole thing (a "long" diary on DK takes maybe 10 minutes to read, so it's not like I'm asking you to read a book).

Ignore the Hard Right: Hit The Mainstream Right Hard

I generally think that the people on the left who document the ravings, lies, hypocrisy, hate,and general cognitive dissonance of the American right are doing the world a great service.  I know that I can't stand more than about 45 seconds of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News before my bullshit alarm is making me feel physically ill, but there are people who listen to their shows every day and publicize their venom to the wider world so that they can know how batshit these people are.

But has it ever really helped anything?  Really?  In the grand scheme of things, does it help to be able to easily find an example of something idiotic that Newt Gingrich said a few weeks ago that totally contradicts something equally as idiotic that he said yesterday?  Is it good for the world to know what paranoid nonsense Bryan Fischer said on his radio show the other day?  Or does it just help to lend legitimacy to people who in any kind of sane world should be relegated to the fringes, standing on boxes in a park with a megaphone, if not screaming at the padded walls of their cell.

In martial arts, it is very important to stay focused on your opponent, and not become distracted by the motions of their weapons (i.e., hands and feet): Those are just extensions of their core, and their entire purpose is to create both a barrier and a distraction away from that core.  If you allow yourself to become overly focused on the opponent's weapons, then they are safe while you are left desperately moving your core in response to movements that are trivial for them.  This quickly becomes exhausting and unsustainable, and you either get knocked down or are forced to take a step backward to increase your safety zone.  Pretty soon, all you're doing is retreating.

This is more than an apt analogy for the various radical "movements" that have defined Republican politics since Reagan - it's practically an identical phenomenon.  From Reagan himself, to the emergence of Hate Radio, to the bellicose Gingrich Congress, to the Buscists, and now teabaggers, they are essentially all convenient tentacles of the main body whose purpose is to grab our attention and divert our actions away from the GOP core.  And so far, they have succeeded completely: They cause the energetic, activist left to become obsessed with debunking irrelevant noise-makers; mainstream Democrats to become afraid of being targeted by them; and the two halves of the Democratic community to become estranged and mutually suspicious as a result.  Those of us who remain focused on achieving substantive results are thereby diminished in number, and our efforts dampened rather than magnified by the rest.

The author proceeds to present an amazingly simple and yet complete dissection of how an economic debate circa 1970s about whether to raise taxes for education reforms could have devolved into an argument today about whether the government should have any role in providing public services at all.  That's really how far we've come in the modern debate with the Republican Party.  It's sheer madness.  It's past the point of going back to the roots of our country.  They're practically advocating feudalism and serfdom at this point.

But reality-based intellectual liberals are suckers, and we just can't help ourselves.

Making a logically specious argument to a liberal - especially when it's dressed up in the shallow accoutrements of intellectual theorizing - is like waving a red cape in front of a bull, and we just cannot help ourselves: We must correct it, dissect its fallacies, and illustrate in detail how it fails to validly reflect reality.  But all the public sees is that both sides are talking about this "new idea," and that means - regardless of the content of one side's arguments - it has become "debatable" rather than the plainly false kookery of some fringe headcase.

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I had found that I just couldn't take the "debate" anymore on the messageboard that I had frequented and moderated for many years.  I had lost interest in playing whack-a-troll, and the impossibility of ever truly "winning" the game disheartened me to the point that I no longer even had interest in educating the willing and open-minded.  Of course, my favorite tactic was to post snarky commentary or links to other snarky commentary that belittled the absurdity of the modern "conservative" movement.  So, as you can see, I was being part of the problem.

I realize that it's very entertaining to just react to craziness: It's such an easy, satisfying target for mockery and intellectual dissection.  But ultimately there comes a point where self-discipline is necessary, and where you have to decide that your attention is more responsibly employed generating and proposing real solutions to real problems rather than arguing with lunatics.  This was one of the biggest reasons for the success of the Obama campaign: While some pundits on the left insisted that he was "losing the message war," and that he was being weak on the hard right, in fact he was consciously ignoring the GOP's meat-puppet crazies and instead attacked the core of the Republican edifice.

Here is the truly amazing thing: If we employ this principle on a broad, grass-roots basis, we have a real chance to restore the window of public perception toward reasoned debate and sane priorities.  The media would resist tooth-and-nail, but its efforts would be in vain: People just stop paying attention to what it says when coverage loses touch with them, and they end up losing viewer share, ad revenue, and everything else that supports them as an institution.

Sooner or later, much as happened toward the right after Reagan, the media must follow the public, even if only in the most superficial ways - it cannot do otherwise and remain viable as a business.  So ignore them too: They are merely echoes, and it does not matter whether they portray a newfound Eisenhower-era liberalism as Kommunist Radikalism - direct experience of it will immediately debunk such lunatic portrayals without ever having to legitimize them by arguing with them.

[...]

The whole point of political extremism is to get public attention, so rationally the way to deal with it is to deny public attention while dealing with the phenomenon on a grass-roots level (i.e., by talking to individuals).  By doing this, you treat political craziness as what it is: Not something to be argued with, persuaded, or even really opposed, just dismissed and people not closely affiliated with it made to understand that it's illegitimate and will cause them to be ostracized in the public space.

This is basically how societies function: Common values and common perceptions are upheld because deviating too greatly from them will cause you to be viewed as a weirdo who doesn't belong.

It's "Don't Feed The Trolls", in REAL LIFE.

Comments Policy

I've opened up a bit for comments. You may now post comments if you are a "registered user" (not sure exactly what that means, but it was less restrictive than "anyone with a google account" and more restrictive than "even anonymous posters").

So, please join in, and welcome.

...We'd Like to Stop Playing this Rubbish...

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - "Voodoo Child", "Hey Joe/Sunshine of Your Love" (live on A Happening for LuLu, 4 Jan 1969)

Imagine if The Beatles were on a TV show in 1967, in the middle of their psychedelic experimentation phase, and the hosts of the show asked them to play "She Loves You".  That's pretty much what happened here, in the Experience's last UK television appearance.

By early 1969, The Jimi Hendrix Experience was nearly through, with the members seeking to go their own ways.  Much as had happened (in a band life of almost exactly the same length) with Cream, which had announced to the world earlier that week that they were officially calling it quits.

Jimi and the band were invited onto A Happening for LuLu, which was a pretty mainstream British variety and music program of the time.  LuLu may have fancied herself hip and "with it", but she was pretty square for someone in the middle of the British psychedelic rock scene.  This is probably pretty obvious from the introduction she gives the band before each song in the video below.

For their first number, Jimi played "Voodoo Child", which was a powerhouse jam from their final album, Electric Ladyland.  Awesome, but uneventful.

For the second and final song, they were asked to play "Hey Joe", which was their first single from about two years earlier, and which was not even a Hendrix composition.  Jimi, ever accommodating on the outside (and mischievous on the inside), assented.


(you'll have to click through to youtube to watch, but it's worth it)

Apparently Jimi was told that he had 3:30 to work with until the end of the show, and you can see how that turned out.  I can just imagine the director and LuLu pulling their hair out at what Jimi was doing, but as you can see, Jimi was having a wonderful time.

In my opinion, this ranks right up there with the greatest televised musical performances of all time, for its musicianship, but more so for its historical value.

True Anecdotes of the Mortgage Crisis Part I: Negotiating from a Position of Power

So, I was thinking that maybe I ought to write a bit about something that I actually have a good deal of first-hand knowledge about: real estate and the mortgage crisis.

I'm an attorney, and for the better part of the last ten years I've been practicing real estate law in a variety of capacities.  I've represented real estate developers, and I've been a title closer.  I've worked in-house with developers in a strong market, and worked in-house with real estate vultures in a weak market, and now I'm investigating title claims on loan policies (which I love, BTW).  I was there in the early 2000s when interest rates were dropping and housing prices were climbing, and I was there when people were investing millions of dollars in huge tracts of desert in Arizona.  I was also there when it all came crashing down and the ganefs scrounged to pick up foreclosed homes from banks by the dozens at forty cents on the dollar.  I've seen the tricks that the lenders and brokers used to get us into this mess, and I've seen the tricks they're using to try to get out it (for themselves, not for you).  I even lost my entire investment in the real estate market myself.

I've spoken to many people about the mortgage crisis, and read a lot of people's opinions about who is to blame and what should be done.  Everyone seems to be interested in it at some level, especially if they are homeowners, and when they find out what I do for a living it's often a topic of conversation.  There's a lot of misunderstanding out there, as well as a good deal of flat out misinformation.  I certainly don't have all of the answers, but I am a smart guy who pays attention, spots bullshit pretty well, and has been up close and personal with many people on all sides of the real estate business throughout the last decade.  I think I've mostly got the right idea, and I've got some stories.


I'll start at the beginning, because although my first gig in real estate law was pretty short, it did yield one great story that has amazed friends and business associates alike for the past 10 years.  In 2001, I was living in Chicago, and I was working legal temp gigs (they call it "contract work", but it has nothing to do with contracts) after losing a job with a dotcom.  One job I got was with a small firm in The Loop that was representing the developer of a new high-rise condo project on the near South Side.  The construction was just about finished, and they were in the midst of closing all of the sales of the 300 or so units.  In this heady real estate market, all of the units had been sold about 18 months earlier, when the project had barely broken ground, and I'm sure the competition was hot to get in.  My job was to draw up the closing documents and then spend all day at the main office of Chicago Title walking around from closing to closing delivering the seller's docs, signing the closing statements and then returning to the office with the checks.

So here's where the story gets good.  Because there was so much competition for these units in this building, I don't think the buyers had ever read their purchase and sale agreements very carefully before they signed them, and the ones that had their lawyers look at them apparently didn't do much better.  Out of all of the closings I attended over those couple of months, only 4 buyers, 3 of whom were represented by the same attorney, caught the little nugget that the developers had dropped in the contracts to make themselves a little extra cash.

When you buy a property, one of the charges on your settlement statement is for the proration of the real estate taxes.  This is usually a pretty simple calculation where you figure the taxes for the current year (or other tax period), divide it up between the buyer and seller based on how many days each party owned the property, and then one party gives the other a credit to pay for the taxes they owe.  95% of the time, it's the seller that gives the buyer the credit, because the tax bill will come out later in the year and the buyer will have to pay the whole thing.  Occasionally, the seller has already paid the taxes for the year, so the buyer has to give the seller the credit, but that generally only happens within the month when the tax bills are released and closers try to avoid that situation if they can by having the taxes actually paid on the closing statement.

With a new development however, there is an additional twist.  Undeveloped land is worth much less than developed land, and is often taxed at a different rate, so the taxes are much lower.  If you buy a newly constructed home, it is very likely that the taxes will go up quite a bit in the first year from the assessment the previous year.  The slimebag developers that I was representing saw this as an opportunity.

The language of the purchase and sale agreements in this deal addressed the proration of taxes by making it the responsibility of the seller to pre-pay the taxes for the year, and for the buyers to give the seller a credit of the prorated portion of 2% of the sale price of the unit (which was an estimate of the property taxes based on the City of Chicago's "mill rate" at the time).  This would be a relatively fair way to estimate an unknown tax bill, except that the tax amount was known by the developers, and they had paid the taxes based on the undeveloped value of the vacant lot that the high-rise was built upon.  The developers paid approximately $90,000 in real estate taxes for the year the closings took place.  But the 300-some-odd units, selling at an average of about $350,000 each, yielded well over a MILLION dollars in tax proration overpayments to the developers!  If you ever need to define the term "windfall", just remember this story.

The kicker was that the contracts specifically stated that there would be no re-prorations of the taxes after the closing (a remedy that is sometimes used when estimating taxes that are very difficult to ascertain).  Like I said earlier, only those 2 attorneys representing 4 buyers caught this trick, and even they were only able to negotiate the tax proration down to 1.5% because the properties were so in demand.

That gig ended after about two months, but I learned something very important for my future career path.  I learned that I would rather be the closer working for the title company than represent the interests of a party that I found distasteful in a real estate deal.  It would certainly not be the last time that I would advocate for a position or client that I found unseemly, but I decided to pursue the path of the poorly paid referee in the real estate world rather than the highly paid player.

In the next chapter, "Who is the customer here, anyway?"

The Prolifieration of Gay Marriage

I've been pretty down about the grand state of politics today, despite the encouraging signs of life from the pro-democracy movements in the Middle East and the pro-union protests in Wisconsin.  Mainly it's because I learned today that Wisconsin has already been killed by the teabaggers, and they don't even know they're dead yet.  The shameless lying and hypocrisy out of Washington is worse than ever, to the point that it would be hilarious if anyone in the major news media ever actually called them on the bullshit.  But there was one story today that perked me up a bit about the future, so I'm going to run with that tonight.


Social conservatives are terrified of the creeping specter of gay marriage taking over the United States, as well they should be.  All indications are that they are on the losing side of history, just as they were with civil rights for women and blacks and other minority groups throughout American history.  Honestly, they should be used to it by now, especially because "being on the losing side of history" is pretty much the definition of conservatism.

But in the recognition that the roller coaster of life goes faster than their delicate fear centers can handle, social conservatives have endeavored to head the gays off at the pass over the past two decades.  To give the political architects of the right their maximum amount of credit, the lawyers among them have to have known that all of the same arguments that destroyed Jim Crow would eventually come to destroy discriminatory laws against homosexuals as well.  I mean, anyone who has read the Supreme Court decision in Loving v Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), could plainly see that substituting the issue of race for gender would eventually lead a court to find that laws restricting same-sex couples from marrying were plainly unconstitutional. 

The first major salvo in the fight did not secure the unconstitutionality flank, however.  The "Defense of Marriage Act" ("DOMA"), passed by the Republican controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1996, sought to allow states to avoid recognizing same-sex marriages or civil unions performed in other state (which at the time was being done in no states), and it also defined marriage as "only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife". 

For a variety of reasons, DOMA does not solve any of the constitutional issues that it sought to block.  The avoidance of recognition is designed as a direct challenge to the "Full Faith and Credit" clause of the Constitution, which among other things, is what requires a marriage performed in one state to be recognized by the government and courts of another.  I've always believed that it was beyond the power of the Congress to legislate this clause away, and that it would require an Amendment to accomplish the goal of DOMA.  Of course, just as it could not happen now, it was already too late in the mid-1990s to get the required votes in Congress or in the state legislatures to pass a federal marriage amendment.  It's also very contentious legally whether the federal government is within its authority to define marriage and whether attempting to do so violates the10th Amendment (which should always be taken with a pound of salt), and/or the "Due Process" and "Equal Protection" clauses of the 14th Amendment. 

Earlier today, the White House and Department of Justice announced that they would no longer be defending DOMA's 3rd clause in future lawsuits because it was their legal opinion that the clause was unconstitutional.  For the time being, they will continue to defend suits challenging the 2nd clause, but I believe it's merely a matter of time before that too will fall.


While a few states had enacted domestic partnership laws granting some legal protections of marriage to non-married couples (gay or straight), the fireworks really began in 2004 when the Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled that the hundred year-old state law banning same-sex marriage in Massachusetts was unconstitutional under the Massachusetts Constitution.  This is what the social conservatives had feared, and what they had been waiting for. 

In a well-coordinated attack, measures amending the various constitutions of many states to define marriage as "one man and woman" were placed on the ballots in time for the 2004 general election.  All passed with wide margins, and some credit George W. Bush's reelection to the huge turnout of social conservatives in Ohio, the electoral votes of which were the difference in the election.  In fact, in all of the ballot measures put up for vote, only the 2006 measure in Arizona has failed to pass (and a barely watered down version did pass there in 2008).


With today's DOMA decision from the DOJ, I saw a question asked on a blog about how many people have actually voted to ban gay marriage in their states.  The implication was that since many of the states banning gay marriage are small in population, that they may actually be outnumbered by those enjoying same-sex marriage rights.   So I set to work crunching the numbers.  Unfortunately, the comment section had become such a flame war by the time I got back, that I couldn't even find the original comment that I wanted to respond to, not that anyone would see my response anyway.  Actually, it wasn't a flame war, because a flame war involves armies on both sides.  This was just a single troll that completely fucked up the comment section of a blog posting.

Anyway, I found that there are several ways to look at the data.  Let's begin with a map:

As you can see, it's a rather complicated patchwork of laws these days.  I also needed some census data to estimate populations, and I used the July 2009 estimates based on the 2000 census, since the numbers from the 2010 census don't appear to be available yet in neat Excel format.

Now, if you want to look at the numbers in a simplistic way, sort of a red state/blue state kind of way, here are the numbers broken down into a "same-sex marriage is banned" vs "same-sex marriage is legal" spreadsheet.

Here we see that 82.84% of Americans live in a state where there is either a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage, or a statute doing so.  Only 16.82% live in a state where same-sex marriage is legal, or where a civil unions law is in effect that grants all of the legal rights of marriage.  Clearly the conservatives have won and set up their firewall against teh gayz, right?

Well, let's look at those numbers with a bit more subtlety, and see what is really happening on the ground (my colors do not match the map above):

When you break it down into all of the categories shown on the map, the picture becomes much more nuanced.  Now, there are only 59.83% of Americans who live in a jurisdiction where same-sex unions are completely non-existent, and 37.34% who live in a jurisdiction where either same-sex marriage is recognized, or civil unions with full legal rights of marriage are recognized.  Not quite so bleak.

There are several other subtleties that should be addressed as well.  I counted Wisconsin in the most restrictive group, even though there are domestic partnership laws on the books there.  The question of whether those domestic partnership rights would be trumped by the Constitutional amendment has not been decided by the courts there.

Then there are the states that are actively in motion and could change at any time.  One is Maine, which enacted same sex marriage by legislation in 2010, only to have the law struck down narrowly by a voter initiative later in the year.  Maryland and New York are strong candidates to have same-sex marriage laws on the books within the current legislative session, as is Hawai'i. 

Perhaps most critically, California is now the center of the judicial universe when it comes to gay marriage.  The CA Supreme Court had ruled that the state's marriage ban statute was unconstitutional in 2008, only to have a full Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage pass by the slimmest of margins that fall.  On a night of celebrations for liberals, this was by far the toughest blow.  However, the ballot measure's constitutionality was immediately challenged, and has been found to be unconstitutional by a US District Judge under California law.  That verdict is currently under appeal to the 9th Circuit, which has stayed the ruling pending its decision, which may take months, since they have certified a standing question back to the CA Supreme Court.  If the standing issue goes one way, the case is over and gay marriage is legal in California.  If it goes the other way, the 9th Circuit could potentially make a ruling that could affect nine states.  If the 9th Circuit ends up ruling on this issue, it's a virtual guarantee to be in front of the Supreme Court of the United States within a couple of years.

I believe that the victory of Prop 8 in California in 2008 was the high water mark for the anti-gay marriage people.  Anything that happened in 2010 was more the result of the generally low turnout of the left across the country (such as in Maine).  All the momentum in the future is against the conservatives, and their walls will eventually crumble, because they have never managed to get their federal marriage amendment, and they never will.  As strong as these state bulwarks are, they will not stand forever.  On top of that, younger people are much more open to gay marriage than older people, and to be blunt, older people will die sooner.  You can't fight those demographic changes (note to conservatives: learn to speak Spanish).


This has been a bit dry as a posting, I know.  Lots of history and legal stuff and figures and graphs.  Not much ranting or even opinion from me.  So I'll just finish with a challenge that I have made to people for several years.

As my views on gay marriage evolved from the adolescent "ick" factor, through the post-collegiate libertarian "the government should just get out of the marriage business" stage, to "if everyone has equal legal rights, who cares what it's called", to the ultimate "civil unions are like separate drinking fountains for second class citizens", I have solidified my arguments in favor of gay marriage and accepting nothing less as enough. 

In my experience, there are some political issues that the more your think about the two sides, the more you come to a moderated understanding of the competing merits of the arguments.  This is NOT one of those issues.  I find that the more people think about it, the more they tend to shift towards the side of gay marriage rights, and that is because this is a rare case where one side is completely right, and the other is completely wrong.

So, here's the challenge.  I have asked friends and political debate opponents to give me one good argument against gay marriage that is not based in religion, emotion, or some other sentimentality for a past that probably never was in the first place.  In six or seven years, I've never had anyone come up with one that could not be completely dismantled, not merely countered or outweighed, but utterly laid to dust. 

That is my challenge to you.  Think about it.  Be honest with yourself.  Examine your feelings and your arguments.  And then do the same for everything else you think or believe.


Now how about some music celebrating gay love!

Propheteering

Bill Hicks, Prophet (1961-1994)


Through the millennia, there have always been people who "got it" in a religious and spiritual sense.  They have been known by many names, and held many different positions, in many cultures all over the world.  Sometimes they were given positions of great honor, such as the medicine man in a tribal group, or allowed to express their gifts in positions supported by others in society as artists or musicians or poets.  At other times, they are reviled as madmen, apostates, or as radicals or terrorists.  In rare cases, they have been revered as religious leaders whose every word and deed are seen as directed by God himself.

My preferred term for such people is Spiritual Adept.  But for short, I will call them Prophets.


Prophet, of course, is a loaded word for those raised in the western religious traditions (or near them).  But that is useful to my point, because I want everyone reading this to have in their minds their idea of what the word Prophet means to them.  My personal understanding of the word evokes images of the men of the Old Testament who heard the voice of God and were usually in some way directed by Him to do something, or spread some message to the people.  I'm going to guess that your idea is probably not too far off from that.

At this point, I wanted to pull a few ideas from a sort of open letter I wrote to my closest friends a little over a year ago about my feelings about my Jewishness.  I've clipped just the most relevant few paragraphs below, but I've also reprinted the entire thing at the end of this post (with a few minor edits from its original text), because it's something I'm very proud of, and which I'd like to share now with a wider audience.

One of the problems with religion in general, and especially “religions of the book”, is the book itself. You see, over the course of history, there have been people all over the world who have “gotten it”. For lack of a better term, we’ll call those people Prophets. The problem with Prophets is that in order for them to make their deep spiritual and philosophical understanding at all accessible or useful to people who have not “gotten it”, they need to dumb it down quite a bit.

The most successful method for imparting deep ideas to shallow people is in the form of allegorical stories. These allegories must be finely tailored to the intended audience to maximize their effectiveness, as allegory and metaphor are nothing without context. You talk about things that your audience knows from their everyday lives, so if you’re speaking to Bronze Age goatherds, you talk about wolves and the life cycle of a goat. If you’re talking to fishermen, you talk about the sea and fish and boats and other things they will understand.

The problems begin to grow when such stories are written down, and especially when some scribe or priest decides that he needs to tell people that these allegories and metaphors are important because they are the “revealed word of God”, or worse, the literal word of God. Then suddenly, a story told in such a way that prehistoric illiterates could grasp even the tiniest bit of deep wisdom about the nature of the universe and God becomes the unerring literal revealed word of God and the actual history of the world, and that story is now supposed to be just as important to people today as it was when it was first told 2500 years, and several language translations, ago. This is why I consider any religious orthodoxy or fundamentalism to be useless. The potential for missing the forest for the trees is tremendous, and can sometimes go so far as to be an actual distraction from the basic message.

I believe that there are Prophets walking among us today in vast numbers.  Considering that there are about as many people living on earth today as have died in the entire history of humanity, and the people alive today are FAR more educated than at any other time, it is not unreasonable to believe that there are as many Prophets walking around today as in the whole of human history before us.  So why in God's name do people continue to hold the words of men who lived thousands of years ago in higher esteem than those of people living today who have tremendous advantages in their ability to understand the universe as it truly is?

Think about this for a minute.  Imagine the wisest man on earth 2500 years ago, the man with the greatest understanding of science and of human cultures, as well as spiritual and religious beliefs.  It is unlikely that this hypothetical man would have any actual knowledge of any cultures further than a few hundred miles from his place of birth.  He would have no understanding whatsoever of chemistry or electromagnetism or particle physics, if he had any understanding of the mathematics understood by every moderately intelligent 16 year-old of the 21st Century.  These are topics that literally millions of modern people are very well-versed in, and if only a small percentage of those have the gift of spiritual aptitude, and the interest to pursue it even a small amount, you should have thousands of higher quality Prophets in the world today than the best possible Prophet of the first millennium B.C.

Now, remember that the words used by those ancient Prophets were a) allegories and metaphors for a specific ancient audience, many of the subtleties of which must certainly be lost on the modern reader, b) dumbed down for audiences that were neither educated nor spiritually adept, and c) translated several times through the centuries into languages that were not of the same language group, in parts of the world where the metaphors and allegories may have made little sense, by other men who were also not particularly well-educated or spiritually adept.

You are left at the end with some manner of sausage, and it's probably not kosher.

There are voices worth listening to all over the world today.  As Bill Hicks said in the video above, "We always kill the good guys who try to tell us that, and let the demons run amok."  But they can't get all of them, not in the age of digital information, and not before they can get some of their words out to us.


Jesus (a Prophet) said (rough translation from Aramaic to Greek to 17th Century English), "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.  For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened."

I believe this very strongly.  Seek, and you shall find.  But what do you seek?  Faith is a powerful, powerful and dangerous thing.  It can make you believe with every fibre of your being things that are patently untrue.  I give as an example my small son.  Last summer, he was about 16 months old, and he believed with everything that he was, that he could swim.  He would jump into the swimming pool, I'd hold a hand under his belly and he'd paddle and kick and stick his face in the water think he was getting around the pool on his own, and it just was not so.


If you seek Christ, you will find Christ.  You will find him in everything.  You will be shocked at how you find him in everything, and each time you find him, it will further affirm your faith in Christ.  And it will be mostly a figment of your fallible human mind that has been seeking him.  If you seek God, you will find God.  If you seek wealth, you will find wealth.  If you seek power, you will find power.  If you seek sex, you will find sex.  If you seek love, you will find love.


I seek TRUTH.  Often I find lies.  Often I am wrong.  Often I have told lies, to myself and others, and that is obviously not the path to Truth, but I am fallible and weak.  But when I focus on seeking Truth, when I make that the priority, I tend to find it.  I may sometimes be fooled into believing a lie, but I also believe that the best way to avoid being deceived is to make Truth your goal.


What is your spiritual goal?  If it is not to know the ultimate truth of the universe, then what is the point?



Terence McKenna, Prophet (1946-2000)


On Being Jewish (Oct. 2009)

[In September of 1999], I spent an evening with [2 friends] at their apartment in the Bronx, and among other things, we had a very deep discussion about ethnic and cultural identity. I talked about how I’d never really felt very much a part of any religious or ethnic community because I came from a diverse background and it was not something that my parents emphasized. I knew I was not ever a Christian, but I never really felt like I was a Jew either, at least not in the eyes of my many Jewish friends.

I can recall quite vividly that [my friend] asked me if I considered myself a “musician” because I played guitar. I said I did not, because I was not a very good player, not good enough to perform for others, and that people probably wouldn’t consider me to be a musician. [He] responded that if I considered myself a musician then I WAS a musician. He said he considered himself an artist and musician because he made art and music, and the opinions of others were much less relevant than the weight to which I assigned those opinions. He told me that if I wished to embrace my Jewishness, then I could be a Jew.


This past week was Yom Kippur, and again I have been contemplating what it means to be a Jew, and what Judaism means to me. Fasting on Yom Kippur is one of the very few Jewish rituals that I have regularly practiced over the years because I believe that fasting is a valuable experience for focusing the mind on oneself, one’s needs, and on specific topics of choice, in this case one’s transgressions and how to improve as a person in the next year.

This year, my experience was different, and it has caused me to evaluate what I do as a Jew and why. I was extremely busy at work the past few weeks, including quite a bit of time spent in the office on weekends. I had three closings that I had to manage over the three business days surrounding Yom Kippur. As a result, I lost track of which day the holiday even was. I thought it was on Tuesday, and it wasn’t until I had eaten lunch on Monday that I realized that it was in fact on Monday. I regretted this, but I also knew that my work would have suffered for me not eating that day, and it was not a day that I could afford to have my work suffer.

I work closely with three other Jews. The President of my company is a very reformed Jew in his mid-40’s from Chicago. He’s married to a woman of Mexican descent, I don’t believe he has raised his kids Jewish (or Catholic for that matter) and while he certainly self-identifies as a Jew, he does not practice much at all. Our sales manager is about the same in his practice, although he seems to observe the high holidays and embraces the ritual a little bit more.

The third guy is our CFO, and he’s in his early 30’s and has really embraced his Jewishness so that he and his wife have decided to live an Orthodox Jewish life. He was not raised Orthodox, but began on this path around the time he was in college, and has progressively become more Orthodox over the course of his adult life. They lived in Israel for a year, he speaks Hebrew to his children, he eats almost perfectly kosher, and he observes Shabbat strictly. He takes his practice to what I would consider extreme lengths, and I say that with the experience of knowing many conservative Jews who engage in regular practice and ritual.

So, in addition to forgetting my Yom Kippur fast, a couple other things happened this week that have highlighted Jewish practice and identity and led me to put my thoughts and feelings down on paper. The first thing was that while I was in the midst of preparing for all of these closings this past weekend, our CFO was home with his family in Phoenix from midday Friday, and wasn’t back in the office until Wednesday. I don’t normally begrudge his Sabbath observance at all because this is a guy who regularly puts in 15 hour days so that he can turn off his phone on Shabbat and do what he does. But when it’s crunch time for work, it’s pretty tough on all the people who are working [for him] to be off for four days in a row. The result of this turned out to be that he had not performed all of the general accounting on the several closings and forgot to send a wire so that on Wednesday afternoon, the company, and particularly the President of the company, was embarrassed by looking incompetent. I was personally upset because I had put a lot of time and effort into making sure that these closings all went off smoothly, and then in the end, they appeared sloppy. Rightly or wrongly, I blamed his strict religious observance for the errors that took place.

A couple days later, I overheard him explaining to someone else in the office about his views on religious observance. He described time as a series of circles and spirals and cycles and the observance of holidays as being a harmonic resonance with Jews throughout history. From a metaphysical standpoint, these are all concepts that I fully agree with. The idea of time as a spiral is actually central to my entire philosophy of life and the universe, as are the ideas of harmonics and history. Perhaps that’s why I reacted so strongly to his words; because his philosophy is so similar and yet so diametrically opposed to my own.

To him, being a Jew is about doing things, saying words, and practicing rituals that Jews have done continually for 3000 years so as to feel a part of something that has endured throughout history and across the face of the Earth. This is obviously a common sentiment among Jews, and I’ve observed that very idea explicitly discussed at the Passover Seder, and when reciting the Shema. However, that is only a very small amount of what I identify with in Judaism, and it is the part which I find is most in opposition to the parts that I do identify.


To most, I would be considered a convert. I was not raised in the religion, my mother is not Jewish, and neither was my father’s mother. My father’s father was Jewish however, and I have always had a strong presence of Jewish culture in my life. My aunt “converted” [upon her marriage] and raised her son Jewish, my step-father is Jewish, many of my best friends from childhood are Jewish and it is the part of my background that I have always most identified with. When I married, I went through a very liberal conversion process so we could be married by [my in-laws'] rabbi. But I must say, that ever since my conversation with [my friend in 1999], and my meeting [my wife] a couple weeks later, I have considered my Jewishness to be mine, a birthright to which I required only formal recognition. I could not have gone through even the most superficial conversion to another religion because I have a well-defined and explored personal philosophy of the universe and the divine. The core beliefs of Judaism do not conflict with or offend my own sensibilities, even if I am not as certain of those core beliefs as some may be.

Which brings me to  that with which I most identify in Judaism. I can agree with the most central ideas of one God, and a chosen people and a revealed word and law. And the history of Judaism is one of scholarship and interpretation of God’s word and argument amongst wise men about the meaning of the law and how it should apply to our lives. Questioning orthodoxy is respected, so long as one has a strong argument for an alternative interpretation. Perhaps it appeals to me as a lawyer, but it certainly appeals to me as a liberal and an intellectual.

One of the problems with religion in general, and especially “religions of the book”, is the book itself. You see, over the course of history, there have been people all over the world who have “gotten it”. For lack of a better term, we’ll call those people “prophets”. The problem with prophets is that in order for them to make their deep spiritual and philosophical understanding at all accessible or useful to people who have not “gotten it”, they need to dumb it down quite a bit.

The most successful method for imparting deep ideas to shallow people is in the form of allegorical stories. These allegories must be finely tailored to the intended audience to maximize their effectiveness, as allegory and metaphor are nothing without context. You talk about things that your audience knows from their everyday lives, so if you’re speaking to Bronze Age goatherds, you talk about wolves and the life cycle of a goat. If you’re talking to fishermen, you talk about the sea and fish and boats and other things they will understand.

The problems begin to grow when such stories are written down, and especially when some scribe or priest decides that he needs to tell people that these allegories and metaphors are important because they are the “revealed word of God”, or worse, the literal word of God. Then suddenly, a story told in such a way that pre-historic illiterates could grasp even the tiniest bit of deep wisdom about the nature of the universe and God becomes the unerring literal revealed word of God and the actual history of the world, and that story is now supposed to be just as important to people today as it was when it was first told 2500 years, and several language translations, ago. This is why I consider any religious orthodoxy or fundamentalism to be useless. The potential for missing the forest for the trees is tremendous, and can sometimes go so far as to be an actual distraction from the basic message.


My CFO friend explained a project he has been working on in Phoenix over a dinner one night this summer. Apparently, there are many activities that may be done on Shabbat only within the confines of the home, but cannot be done “across property boundaries”. These include carrying or pushing anything, including children or a stroller, or any other number of things that are pretty much essential if you do not want to spend your entire day indoors in your own home on the Sabbath. So some Orthodox Jews have come up with the brilliant idea of creating a virtual wall, or “eruv” around their entire community to allow for such things. He was quite animated in his explanations about how this is constructed and how it deals with such things as roads and canals, as well as the logistics of dealing with the Department of Transportation and building even a small flagpole type erection in their right of way.

It was all very fascinating in a “do you have any idea how crazy this is?” kind of way. [My wife] summed it up perfectly. “Isn’t that an awful lot of mental energy dedicated to essentially cheating on God’s law?” I saw it more practically. For all of the time and energy that he and his friends spent on this Jewish jerk-off, they could have actually done something positive to help the world. I’m no Talmudist, but I think that God probably cares more about “heal the world” than “please, imaginatively skirt My rules.” This is pure self-indulgence, and as my Jewish boss said the other day when the CFO was out for a couple hours for a meeting on the project, “What a fucking waste of time.”


So after 10 years, I think that I’m finally completely secure in my Jewishness. I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks of my beliefs or my practices, and I don’t care “how Jewish” they think I am. I am every bit a Jew as anyone else is.

My CFO friend explained to me one day how he learned that he was a Levite, and how cool he thinks it is that he so often gets to read the Torah in the synagogue. Personally, I think the entire Kohanim/Levite thing is bullshit, and that there is no way that people could have accurately kept track of such things over 2000 years and thousands of miles of Diaspora. My traditional family name [before my great-grandfather changed it] was Usilevsky. For all I know, the “lev” denotes a connection to the tribe of Levi. But I would much rather embrace and carry on my [Jewish] grandfather’s lifetime dedication to social justice and equality, than to abjure his absolute rejection of nobility and privilege, Jewish or otherwise.

Planting Seeds

I'd hand it to time if I knew where the time had gone.
The connoisseurs were wrong,
And so was everyone else.

I know what they're saying 'cause that's all they talk about.
Just need to figure out,
Some shit for myself.

And just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's even true.
Heard it all and I believe that we deserve another point of view.

We can make it if we try,
And if we don't it's gonna still be alright.
'Cause our minds are still alive.
And we can decide,
Why...

Make up your mind make up your own mythology.
Afraid of finding me,
And of defining you.

Take what you want but you won't want it where your at.
I know this for a fact,
Just because it's so true.

The first place my mind goes is where I never want it to.
Like where it hurts the most or all the stupid shit I say and do.

You can make it if you try,
And if you don't it's gonna still be alright.
'Cause our minds are still alive.
And we can decide,
What's right...

Telling me thousands of times what's next to want.
Just doing their job but you know that's a dirty job.
Can't stand this game still we're bullied to play along.

When bullies grow up they get meaner.
Yeah, they really get it down, oh yeah...

They think that they get it but they always get it wrong.
They'll play your favorite song,
Just to sell shit to you.

I've heard that they'll sell anything and I think they might.
I think Bill Hicks was right,
About what they should do.

And just because you love something doesn't mean it's yours to buy.
Been selling it so long that no one even knows the reason why.
You've been messing with our minds,
Gettin' rich wasting our time...

Hallelujah

by Leonard Cohen.


I heard there was a secret chord,
That David played and it pleased the Lord,
But you don't really care for music, do ya?
Well, it goes like this:  The fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall and the major lift,
The baffled king composing Hallelujah.

hallelujah...
hallelujah...
hallelujah...
hallelujah...

Well, your faith was strong but you needed proof,
You saw her bathing on the roof,
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to her kitchen chair,
She broke your throne and she cut your hair,
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.

hallelujah...

Baby, I've been here before,
I've seen this room, and I've walked this floor,
I used to live alone before i knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch,
But love is not a victory march,
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.

hallelujah...

Well, there was a time when you let me know,
What's really going on below,
But now you never show that to me, do you?
But remember when I moved in you,
And the holy dove was moving too,
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

hallelujah...

Well, maybe there's a god above,
But all I've ever learned from love,
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.
It's not a cry that you hear at night,
It's not somebody who's seen the light,
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.

hallelujah...
 

Gabrielle Giffords, Violent Rhetoric and Stochastic Terrorism

I won't soon forget the stifled shriek my wife made on Saturday afternoon when we got home from the health club and she turned on the laptop to discover that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been shot.  Until this fall, we had lived for the past year plus in Tucson, Giffords's district, only about five miles from the site of the shooting.  I won't recount the details, which all have sure read a hundred times already, plus I don't like listing the numbers of dead and wounded as "statistics".

In addition to the upset felt by all, I felt particularly aggrieved.  It always feels more personal when a tragedy hits a place you know well, whether you know the particular people involved or not.  But I'm a political junkie, so I know about political figures and where they stand on issues.  Giffords is not a firebrand liberal, but she is not the kind of "Blue Dog" that most people think of when they hear that term for moderate/conservative Democrats either.  She is not a corporatist, or a Wall Street enabler, or a slave to the health insurance industry like so many of the people whom the progressive left consider traitors to their causes.  She is a defender of the right to bear arms, and she is a fierce advocate for increased border security.  These are her "conservative" credentials, quite unsurprising for a representative from a district with as much illegal immigration and frontier heritage as the Arizona 8th.

But what I liked best about Giffords, and liked the more I got to know her from watching her as my Representative, was that she was simultaneously able to always do what she felt was right, and take difficult stands on progressive issues that she knew would help her country and district, and yet still be a true representative of the people of her district, whether they always agreed with her or not.  Giffords was not one of the rare Democrats who won a close election in 2010 because she wavered and shifted rightwards, as the media narrative would like you to believe.  She won because she did what she believed in and had the certainty of her convictions to be able to forcefully defend her actions, but in such a way that even many who disagreed still respected her for her reasoning and her strength.  Democrats in 2010 failed to capitalize on the discontent among moderate Republicans with their lunatic tea party candidates not because they were too liberal, but because they were too spineless, and moderates and other independents admire strength of reasonable convictions as much as any other characteristics in their politicians, regardless of whether they are in 100% lockstep agreement on all of the issues.  Giffords has a lot of moderate Republican support in her district.  Witness Judge John Roll, a GHW Bush appointee, killed on Saturday in that Safeway parking lot.


Anyway, the burning question in the media following the shooting is, as always, who is to blame for this?  Whether a direct connection can be made or not, the irresponsible, violent and apocalyptic rhetoric from politicians, pundits, and other leaders on the right is an obvious place to begin a discussion.  It is especially obvious when you have lived in Arizona, as I have, for the past five years, and have followed politics closely on both the local and national levels.

This post could easily turn into a very long rant that goes off in all different directions, so I want to try to keep it corralled a bit.  That said, the idea behind this post was to bring together links to some of the best commentary I've read in the past three days.  I can't remember the last event that brought so much excellent insight and impassioned righteous indignation from liberals, but it has to have been before Obama was elected.  It's unfortunate that it took the deaths and maimings of many innocent people to wake them up from their slumber. 

Some of these articles are long, but every single one of them is worth your time to read, I personally guarantee it.  You will be smarter, more informed, and more immune to bullshit and false equivalencies from the apologists in the national media, and especially from the villains who provide the bulk of the hate and violent provocation in the political debate in America today.


This article was written last summer in Harper's Magazine, and is without a doubt the best picture of the current governmental and political environment in the State of Arizona that I have ever read.  You really get a taste of how far ahead of the curve on the tea party crazy the Arizona GOP is compared with the rest of the country, which really just got its first solid taste of it in the past two years.

Any way out of Arizona’s crisis will require raising taxes, a move that is tantamount to heresy for most lawmakers. For nearly a year, the legislature refused to approve the emergency sales-tax increase (of just one cent per dollar) proposed by Governor Jan Brewer, a Republican who had been elected as secretary of state but assumed the top job in 2009 when Janet Napolitano joined the Obama Administration. Eventually, lawmakers passed the buck to voters by authorizing a May 18 statewide ballot on the sales tax—which passed, after a $2.2 million marketing effort by education and business groups—but before doing so they enacted tax cuts that over four years will deprive the state of more money than the sales-tax increase is estimated to bring in. 

Instead, to raise cash, the legislature has pursued a series of wild sell-offs and budget cuts. It privatized the capitol building and leased it back from its new owner, an arrangement that brought in substantial revenue but over time will cost Arizona far more. The legislature has sold off numerous other state properties at bargain prices, and has put up future lottery revenues as collateral on a $450 million loan. Meanwhile, Arizona removed more than 300,000 adults from state health coverage and terminated one health-care program for 47,000 poor children. Funding was slashed at the agency that deals with reports of child abuse and neglect, and also at Children’s Rehabilitative Services, so that parents of children with cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, and a number of other conditions are now required to pay 100 percent of treatment costs. 

All totaled, the cuts amounted to roughly $1 billion, which came on top of a similar amount that had been slashed the previous year. These cuts, in combination with the sale of state assets (which raised more than $700 million) and the securitization of the lottery, plugged a massive hole in next year’s budget. But the deficit for 2011 is already projected to be at least $1 billion and possibly double that, on a total budget of only $9 billion. The situation will only worsen from there, as federal stimulus money dries up and the state runs out of short-term sources of cash. “Could we cut our way out of it mathematically?” Dennis Hoffman, an economist who has forecast revenue for Arizona governors since 1983, mused when I asked him about the crisis. “Anything is possible on paper, but for practical purposes it can’t be done, unless you want to start releasing prisoners, shutting down universities, and eliminating extracurricular activities in the schools. We’ve already had a $2 billion haircut over the past two years. Try another $2 billion and see what the state looks like.”

 What you have in Arizona is a state legislature that is dominated by the most unserious and unhinged people in the state, and despite the population of the state being reasonably moderate, the government is as far right-wing as mathematically possible.

Then there was Sylvia Allen, a real estate broker from the town of Snowflake, who, in 2008, was appointed by the local Republican Party to finish the term of a respected conservative who had died in office. Allen, who retained her seat in an election that fall, has since gained minor notoriety after calling for more uranium mining, saying in a speech that “this earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.” She also has complained that trees are “stealing Arizona’s water supply” and sponsored a new law that allows carriers of concealed weapons to forego safety training and the indignity of background checks.

Anyway, let's get back to the news term of the week:  "Violent Rhetoric".  The folks at Lawyers, Guns & Money have provided the service of reminding the world that not all offensive speech, or even all hateful speech, qualifies as "violent rhetoric".  But some of it, some that has had a flashlight shined upon it in the past few days, most certainly does.

Typically, then, we are left in a situation in which politicians, as rhetors, design speeches whose pathos is general enough to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.  It stands to reason that if we want to understand what “violent rhetoric” entails, we must focus on whose images and stories are stoking whose imaginations and to what effect.  Pointing out that Keith Olbermann associated Fox News with terrorist organizations foreign and domestic does nothing of the sort because the audience and intended effect of his statements is unclear.  How unclear?

If we posit his intended audience is liberals and leftists who believe President Obama is a centrist—which strikes me as a fairly accurate assessment—then we need to ask what the intended effect on that particular audience of associating Fox News with al-Qaeda would be.  Keeping in mind that we are currently at war with al-Qaeda, are we to believe that Olbermann is encouraging liberals and leftists to join a military-like organization and wage an Afghanistan-type offensive against Fox News?  Given that his audience is composed of people who are, generally speaking, opposed to war, does that make any sense?  Or is it more likely that he is simply attempting to create an association of like-with-like in which the likeness is supremely unflattering?  His rhetoric here is pathetic and inflammatory, but from the perspective of what it is intended to persuade its audience, it is also incoherent.  It can’t be considered “violent” because it in no way encourages its audience to have its imagination stoked by reference to violence.

Consider a slightly more infamous example:

Here the intended audience is those who believe President Obama is a radical leftist and associates itself with the center-right.  Unlike the audience of liberals and leftists, who oppose war and favor a restrictive interpretation of the Second Amendment, this audience is more hawkish and more likely to support of an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment.  I would contend that this is an example of “violent rhetoric” not because it contains crosshairs aimed at “the candidates” who represent “the problem” in need of “solution,” and despite the fact that talking about “solving” human beings has a rather untoward history, but because its violence is a product of whose imaginations are being stoked and how it is being done.

While definitionally correct, and certainly gratifying to liberals, it is a bit convenient that the author's framing of the above makes it virtually impossible for liberals to engage in "violent rhetoric" because of the fact that liberals in general do not like war, violence and guns.  It's kind of a truism, circular reasoning, whatever it might be called.  The author is a teacher of rhetoric not logic, and neither am I.

So, we will need something a bit more concrete to demonstrate that "violent rhetoric" is coming overwhelmingly from the right of the political spectrum.  Fortunately, there have been a wealth of articles written in the last two days that painstakingly document the multitudes of examples of such speech and acts on the right, and the paucity of such on the left.

Melissa McEwan at Shakespeare's Sister wins the prize for the best "No, both sides DO NOT do it" posting of the past few days.

Both sides are, in fact, not "just as bad," when it comes to institutionally sanctioned violent and eliminationist rhetoric.

An anonymous commenter at Daily Kos and the last Republican vice presidential nominee are not equivalent, no matter how many ridiculously irresponsible members of the media would have us believe otherwise.

There is, demonstrably, no leftist equivalent to Sarah Palin, former veep candidate and presumed future presidential candidate, who uses gun imagery (rifle sights) and language ("Don't Retreat, RELOAD") to exhort her followers to action.

[...]

There is no leftist equivalent to Glenn Beck, host of a long-running nationally syndicated radio show, former host of a show on CNN and current host of a show on Fox, best-selling author, DC rally organizer, and longtime user of eliminationist rhetoric, including equating universal healthcare to rape, joking about victims of forest fires being America-hating liberals, comparing Al Gore to Hitler, condoning the murder of Michael Moore, accusing Holocaust survivor George Soros of being a Nazi collaborator, joking about poisoning Nancy Pelosi, equating immigration reform with burning US citizens alive, publicly endorsing violent revolution, and winkingly telling his viewers not to get violent, all of which amounts to a speck on the tip of a very big iceberg.

[...]


Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This is not an argument there is no hatred, no inappropriate and even violent rhetoric, among US leftists. There is.

This is evidence that, although violent rhetoric exists among US leftists, it is not remotely on the same scale, and, more importantly, not an institutionally endorsed tactic, as it is among US rightwingers.

This is a fact. It is not debatable.

And there is observably precious little integrity among conservatives in addressing this fact, in the wake of the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Palin takes the absolute cake for audaciously asserting that her rifle sight imagery was really "a surveyor's symbol," and not even having the decency to sheepishly acquiesce that, even if that were true (and not evident bullshit), it's understandable how a reasonable person could look at her "surveyor's symbol" alongside the word "target" and get the wrong, ahem, idea. No, it's all just a wall of total denial in the Palin camp, when she's not whining about being a victim herself of people who have the temerity to actually hold her accountable for her carelessly casual violent rhetoric. It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. And then it's deny and play the martyr.

This list of instances of gun violence by "insurrectionists" and comments by the people who encourage them from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence is long and thorough and frightening, and doesn't need to be quoted.  If you read the whole thing, you might find a couple of people who may be considered "leftist" (the one who the right will be endlessly flogging over the coming weeks is that guy who took hostages at the Discovery Channel a few months ago, mainly because there aren't many other examples), but nearly all are ultra-conservative or libertarian types.


Apart from the "both sides do it" deflection (which is the slightly more sophisticated cousin of "but he started it"), the most common non est mea culpa you're likely to hear regarding Jared Lee Loughner is that he is a "lone nut".  As Matt Bai said in his widely read op-ed in The New York Times on Sunday, "It wasn't clear Saturday whether the alleged shooter in Tucson was motivated by any real political philosophy or by voices in his head, or perhaps by both."  

Of course, Bai presents us with a false choice (a favorite pastime of national political pundits, it seems).  There is no reason to believe that the shooter cannot have been motivated by BOTH a real political philosophy and voices in his head.  In fact, the knowledge that there are lunatics out there who may take "metaphors" and "jokes" seriously should make it so that public figures are even MORE careful about what sorts of things they say, especially when employing fear and violent imagery in rants about important topics like national and global politics.

I've seen two excellent metaphors employed to illustrate this connection.  The first was by Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post on Saturday night on Keith Olbermann's show (sorry, can't find video of it).  He compared violent rhetoric to a flu epidemic.  Just as epidemic illness mostly kills the young, old, sick, and weak, so does violent political rhetoric most influence the already mental disturbed. You wouldn't say that the flu was not to blame for killing an old woman just because she was old and probably going to die soon of something anyway.  Well, unless you were an asshole.

The second metaphor came from commentator "NC Steve 3.0" at TPM (I have to give Steve his props.  He is the best commentator at that blog, bar none).

Murdoch, Limbaugh, Beck, Malkin, Freep.com--the whole bunch of them--are like the tobacco industry in the 60s. They make millions selling people addictive poison. When confronted with the fact that their product is addictive poison, both the pushers and most of the addicts reacted with all-too-predictable fury. Just as the television networks made millions off of cigarette ads, the modern MSM today makes millions by using the poison spewers to generate "content" to fill up the time between commercials.

But better than these two simple metaphors is this incredibly insightful and eye-opening piece that has acquainted the entire progressive blogosphere with a new meme in the past two days:

Stochastic Terrorism.

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.

This is what occurs when Bin Laden releases a video that stirs random extremists halfway around the globe to commit a bombing or shooting.

This is also the term for what Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, and others do.  And this is what led directly and predictably to a number of cases of ideologically-motivated murder similar to the Tucson shootings.

[...]


Here's the mechanism spelled out concisely:

The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts.  

One or more unstable people responds to the incitement by becoming a lone wolf and committing a violent act.   While their action may have been statistically predictable (e.g. "given the provocation, someone will probably do such-and-such"), the specific person and the specific act are not predictable (yet). 

The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: "Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I'm not responsible for what people in my audience do."

The lone wolf who was the "missile" gets captured and sentenced to life in prison, while the stochastic terrorist keeps his prime time slot and goes on to incite more lone wolves.

Read the whole piece, it will change the way you look at al Qaeda as surely as it will change the way you look at Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.


Most likely, we will see virtually no change in the violent rhetoric of the right after this event.  It may, sadly, take several similar events to have anything change.  More likely, we will see a hardening of the already self-righteous victimhood and lack of any accountability we have gotten used to from the right ever since the ascendancy of George W. Bush.  They may even accuse those on the left of "waiving the bloody shirt" and making political hay out of a tragedy. 

Waving the bloody shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South in those years. The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities. 

That the Southerners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.

[...]

Right wing victimization is definitional. In the wake of politically inspired right wing violence, their first instinct is to rise up in anger and accuse the other side of waving the bloody shirt --- without ever acknowledging where the blood came from in the first place. It's as American as apple pie.

On a rare occasion, if you listen closely enough, you may hear the rare sounds of a Republican (half) admitting some level of guilt or culpability about this tragedy.  But listen more carefully.  Listen to what is NOT being said, and you may learn more than you did from the words...

A senior Republican senator, speaking anonymously in order to freely discuss the tragedy, told POLITICO that the Giffords shooting should be taken as a “cautionary tale” by Republicans.

“There is a need for some reflection here - what is too far now?” said the senator. “What was too far when Oklahoma City happened is accepted now. There’s been a desensitizing. These town halls and cable TV and talk radio, everybody’s trying to outdo each other.”

The vast majority of tea party activists, this senator said, ought not be impugned.

“They’re talking about things most mainstream Americans are talking about, like spending and debt,” the Republican said, before adding that politicians of all stripes need to emphasize in the coming days that “tone matters.”

“And the Republican Party in particular needs to reinforce that,” the senator said.

Much has been made of that comment. But few have focused on what I would argue is the most telling aspect of that commentary.

Why did the "senior Republican senator" in question feel the need to remain anonymous?

The stated reason (to speak freely about the event) seems a bit silly. Pretty much every elected official in America is on the record with comments about the events.

There would seem to be only two reasons for the Senator in question to wish to leave his/her name out of it. Either the Senator was afraid of political retribution from colleagues for calling out his/her own party on the matter of tone and rhetoric. Or the Senator was afraid of retribution from the political base of the GOP.

Either reason, it would seem, is awfully telling.

In conclusion, I'll leave you with one final article, by Kai Wright in The Nation, that addresses the broader question of whether the Republican Party's "Government versus The People" ideology may have run its course.

The question is not whether Palin's rhetoric has gone too far; plainly it has. The question is whether the right's government-vs.-the people ideology has reached its natural climax: a government that cannot function enough to keep us safe and a nation defined by anger at itself. At what point will that be understood for the self-destruction that it is?