The Impossible Takes Longer

Once again RWA1 has come through for me (unintentionally, of course), this time with a link to a Wall Street Journal op-ed on the "GOP's Payroll Tax Fiasco: How did the Republicans manage to lose the tax issue to Obama?"

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

The writer labels Obama's payroll tax cut as a "tax holiday," which is fair enough. He could have done the same of Bush's tax holiday for the rich, which the Republicans have been so insistent on prolonging, but the writer chooses instead to see the expiration of the tax holiday as a tax increase. Such deliberate obfuscation don't help solve our problems, but they may help explain why the Republicans are in such trouble politically right now.

Most Americans favor higher taxes for the wealthy, and the Republicans have been vocal and self-righteous about opposing them. Obama has not been particularly clever in exploiting this, but he didn't need to. Most of us, regardless of our party, have seen the same people who nearly destroyed the world economy carry on almost untouched by the depression. While unemployment rose and people lost their homes by often dubious foreclosures, CEOs and other executives were given extravagant bonuses, even when their companies lost money or collapsed altogether. The Republicans called for more austerity, resisted extensions of unemployment benefits, blocked even Obama's tepid stimulus measures, and fussed over the deficit while many people lost hope for their future. Democratic operatives have been working themselves into a vindictive frenzy because Obama has been criticized from the left, but not to worry: the Republicans have worked hard to make themselves less popular than Obama.

Apart from the propaganda in pro-Obama media, I've been getting e-mail from the source, denouncing the Republicans for wanting to raise "a typical family's taxes by more than $1,000 next year" by letting the payroll tax holiday expire. Obama, by contrast, wants to "[e]xtend and expand the tax cut, helping 160 million people and letting that same family keep $1,500." That's all very nice, and I like extra money as much as anyone else, but even $1,500 is not that much money. It's just over $100 a month, which is not going to help a family with children very much. Of course Obama's playing politics with his tax holiday, but so did the Bush administration, which tried to distract attention from its service to the top 1% with a couple of "tax rebates" -- remember those? -- in 2001 and 2008, which gave the typical family a one-time payment of a few hundred dollars. (Three hundred in 2001, three hundred to 1200 in 2008.) Besides, lowering the payroll tax means lowering the amount of money that goes into the Social Security fund, which is not a good idea to put it gently. (According to Josh Bivens, though, "the legislation that cut the payroll tax also instructed Treasury to credit the Trust Fund for the lost revenue – but since when has being factually wrong defanged a political argument? And who’s to say that the next year of payroll tax cuts will maintain this commitment to hold the Trust Fund whole?")

The op-ed writer also talks about the huge tax increases that will happen in 2013 if the Republicans can't find a way to win the public's confidence. Nothing he mentions suggests that the top brackets are going to pay a lot more if their tax holiday expires, and with good reason: their top marginal rates weren't that high before the holiday, certainly compared to what they were in the 1960s. I'm also skeptical about the writer's claim that Obama has "spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases," which is familiar right-wing boilerplate. They were saying it in 2009, and it was false then. The WSJ editorial page has never been known for factual accuracy either, rather the opposite.

The writer had some recommendations for the Republicans, which RWA1 endorsed. Here they are:

At this stage, Republicans would do best to cut their losses and find a way to extend the payroll holiday quickly. Then go home and return in January with a united House-Senate strategy that forces Democrats to make specific policy choices that highlight the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation. Wisconsin freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been floating a useful agenda for such a strategy. The alternative is more chaotic retreat and the return of all-Democratic rule.

All-Democratic rule!? Oh, noes! While I was writing this post the news went out that the Republicans did cut their losses and extended the payroll tax holiday. ABC News reported that

A muted House Speaker John Boehner announced today that Republicans have decided to accept a short-term extension of the payroll tax cut, preventing a hike in taxes just nine days before the tax break expires for 160 million Americans.

Boehner has a mute button? Why weren't we told this before? But I don't think the Republicans are going to have much success highlighting "the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation," because the Republican "differences" are political concrete overshoes. Not that I'm concern trolling here, mind you. I'm perfectly happy to see the Republicans suffer a humiliating defeat on everything, so I can concentrate more on criticizing the Democrats.

By the way, the WSJ also features something I can't resist passing along: "How to Sneak in Sports on Christmas", by one Jason Gay (which must be a pseudonym). It's sort of like the op-ed piece: how to do what you want to do, no matter what anyone else thinks, while still feeling totally justified and put-upon.

There are 13 NFL games on Christmas Eve, and five juicy season-opening NBA contests on Christmas Day, and at some point, you're going to be following a game on your TV, or your phone, or your high-tech germ tablet, and a disapproving person is going to scold you and tell you to shut that thing off and show some respect. And you will feel ashamed, and promise to pay close attention for the rest of church, or your child's first Christmas.

"In church"? Jason Gay is visualizing some guy in the pews with an iPod plugged into his ear, hunched over the tiny screen as he pretends to be kneeling in prayer. Will Tim Tebow be playing on Christmas Day? Where are the War on Christmas partisans? Somebody call the American Family Association! It's hard to believe that Jason Gay isn't writing satire, but he seems to be entirely serious.

I count myself lucky, though. If I were attending a normal American family Christmas, I'd probably be stuck among people who made those games a family activity, and I'd be trying to sneak in some reading against their attempts to shame me for not caring about the "important games."

The Impossible Takes Longer

Once again RWA1 has come through for me (unintentionally, of course), this time with a link to a Wall Street Journal op-ed on the "GOP's Payroll Tax Fiasco: How did the Republicans manage to lose the tax issue to Obama?"

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

The writer labels Obama's payroll tax cut as a "tax holiday," which is fair enough. He could have done the same of Bush's tax holiday for the rich, which the Republicans have been so insistent on prolonging, but the writer chooses instead to see the expiration of the tax holiday as a tax increase. Such deliberate obfuscation don't help solve our problems, but they may help explain why the Republicans are in such trouble politically right now.

Most Americans favor higher taxes for the wealthy, and the Republicans have been vocal and self-righteous about opposing them. Obama has not been particularly clever in exploiting this, but he didn't need to. Most of us, regardless of our party, have seen the same people who nearly destroyed the world economy carry on almost untouched by the depression. While unemployment rose and people lost their homes by often dubious foreclosures, CEOs and other executives were given extravagant bonuses, even when their companies lost money or collapsed altogether. The Republicans called for more austerity, resisted extensions of unemployment benefits, blocked even Obama's tepid stimulus measures, and fussed over the deficit while many people lost hope for their future. Democratic operatives have been working themselves into a vindictive frenzy because Obama has been criticized from the left, but not to worry: the Republicans have worked hard to make themselves less popular than Obama.

Apart from the propaganda in pro-Obama media, I've been getting e-mail from the source, denouncing the Republicans for wanting to raise "a typical family's taxes by more than $1,000 next year" by letting the payroll tax holiday expire. Obama, by contrast, wants to "[e]xtend and expand the tax cut, helping 160 million people and letting that same family keep $1,500." That's all very nice, and I like extra money as much as anyone else, but even $1,500 is not that much money. It's just over $100 a month, which is not going to help a family with children very much. Of course Obama's playing politics with his tax holiday, but so did the Bush administration, which tried to distract attention from its service to the top 1% with a couple of "tax rebates" -- remember those? -- in 2001 and 2008, which gave the typical family a one-time payment of a few hundred dollars. (Three hundred in 2001, three hundred to 1200 in 2008.) Besides, lowering the payroll tax means lowering the amount of money that goes into the Social Security fund, which is not a good idea to put it gently. (According to Josh Bivens, though, "the legislation that cut the payroll tax also instructed Treasury to credit the Trust Fund for the lost revenue – but since when has being factually wrong defanged a political argument? And who’s to say that the next year of payroll tax cuts will maintain this commitment to hold the Trust Fund whole?")

The op-ed writer also talks about the huge tax increases that will happen in 2013 if the Republicans can't find a way to win the public's confidence. Nothing he mentions suggests that the top brackets are going to pay a lot more if their tax holiday expires, and with good reason: their top marginal rates weren't that high before the holiday, certainly compared to what they were in the 1960s. I'm also skeptical about the writer's claim that Obama has "spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases," which is familiar right-wing boilerplate. They were saying it in 2009, and it was false then. The WSJ editorial page has never been known for factual accuracy either, rather the opposite.

The writer had some recommendations for the Republicans, which RWA1 endorsed. Here they are:

At this stage, Republicans would do best to cut their losses and find a way to extend the payroll holiday quickly. Then go home and return in January with a united House-Senate strategy that forces Democrats to make specific policy choices that highlight the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation. Wisconsin freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been floating a useful agenda for such a strategy. The alternative is more chaotic retreat and the return of all-Democratic rule.

All-Democratic rule!? Oh, noes! While I was writing this post the news went out that the Republicans did cut their losses and extended the payroll tax holiday. ABC News reported that

A muted House Speaker John Boehner announced today that Republicans have decided to accept a short-term extension of the payroll tax cut, preventing a hike in taxes just nine days before the tax break expires for 160 million Americans.

Boehner has a mute button? Why weren't we told this before? But I don't think the Republicans are going to have much success highlighting "the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation," because the Republican "differences" are political concrete overshoes. Not that I'm concern trolling here, mind you. I'm perfectly happy to see the Republicans suffer a humiliating defeat on everything, so I can concentrate more on criticizing the Democrats.

By the way, the WSJ also features something I can't resist passing along: "How to Sneak in Sports on Christmas", by one Jason Gay (which must be a pseudonym). It's sort of like the op-ed piece: how to do what you want to do, no matter what anyone else thinks, while still feeling totally justified and put-upon.

There are 13 NFL games on Christmas Eve, and five juicy season-opening NBA contests on Christmas Day, and at some point, you're going to be following a game on your TV, or your phone, or your high-tech germ tablet, and a disapproving person is going to scold you and tell you to shut that thing off and show some respect. And you will feel ashamed, and promise to pay close attention for the rest of church, or your child's first Christmas.

"In church"? Jason Gay is visualizing some guy in the pews with an iPod plugged into his ear, hunched over the tiny screen as he pretends to be kneeling in prayer. Will Tim Tebow be playing on Christmas Day? Where are the War on Christmas partisans? Somebody call the American Family Association! It's hard to believe that Jason Gay isn't writing satire, but he seems to be entirely serious.

I count myself lucky, though. If I were attending a normal American family Christmas, I'd probably be stuck among people who made those games a family activity, and I'd be trying to sneak in some reading against their attempts to shame me for not caring about the "important games."

Reagan: The Other Third Rail

Thanks to my Tabloid Friend on Facebook, I know that Ron Paul was foolish enough to criticize Ronald Reagan some years ago. First below is the 1987 quotation from Paul, then Politico writer Ginger Gibson's commentary.

“I think we can further thank Ronald Reagan for doing a good job [on furthering the Libertarian Party]. He certainly did a good job in 1980 pointing out the fallacies of the Democratic liberal agenda and he certainly did a good job on following up to show the disaster of the conservative agenda as well.”

The first rule in modern GOP politics is that you do not diss Ronald Reagan. The Reagan embrace may not be as tight as it was, say, a decade ago, but he is still a revered figure in the party. Thus, the above line from Paul’s nomination speech at the 1987 Libertarian Party convention in Seattle may not go over well with GOP regulars.

Fortunately, some American presidential candidates are cannier and more cautious than Ron Paul where Reagan is concerned. Here's how you do it, Ron:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Yep, that was Barack Obama (via), during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Or was he aiming for the Republicans?

Reagan: The Other Third Rail

Thanks to my Tabloid Friend on Facebook, I know that Ron Paul was foolish enough to criticize Ronald Reagan some years ago. First below is the 1987 quotation from Paul, then Politico writer Ginger Gibson's commentary.

“I think we can further thank Ronald Reagan for doing a good job [on furthering the Libertarian Party]. He certainly did a good job in 1980 pointing out the fallacies of the Democratic liberal agenda and he certainly did a good job on following up to show the disaster of the conservative agenda as well.”

The first rule in modern GOP politics is that you do not diss Ronald Reagan. The Reagan embrace may not be as tight as it was, say, a decade ago, but he is still a revered figure in the party. Thus, the above line from Paul’s nomination speech at the 1987 Libertarian Party convention in Seattle may not go over well with GOP regulars.

Fortunately, some American presidential candidates are cannier and more cautious than Ron Paul where Reagan is concerned. Here's how you do it, Ron:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Yep, that was Barack Obama (via), during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Or was he aiming for the Republicans?

Grace in Division

I'm not really a good judge of these matters, but I think the South Korean government handled the question of condolences for the death of Kim Jong-Il rather well, as the Hankyoreh reports it:

Regarding the death of North Korean National Defence Committee Chairman Kim Jong-il, the South Korean government stated on Monday, “We offer our consolation to the citizens of North Korea. We hope that North Korea will swiftly regain stability and become able to cooperate in order to achieve peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula.”

The government also stated, “We have decided not to send a governmental delegation to North Korea. However, we will permit relatives of late former president Kim Dae-jung and late Hyundai chairman Chung Mong-hun to visit North Korea to offer condolences, in return for visits made by the North [when the two men died].” In other words, Kim Dae-jung’s widow, Lee Hee-ho, and Chung’s widow, Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, will be allowed to make visits to the North to express their condolences.

Given the churlishness of official American reaction, this was downright graceful. To say nothing of unofficial American reaction, which has been downright shameful. I hadn't intended to post a copy of the screengrab of Kim Jong-Un holding back tears as his father's body lies in state, but it might be a good counterexample to the video clips of wailing North Koreans that have gone viral in the US. Yes, Kim Jong-Il was a bad man, with a lot of blood on his hands, but so was Ronald Reagan, and any criticism of the circus that passed for his funeral was unwelcome in the US. So is Barack Obama, but his daughters will probably weep at his funeral. Yes, some of the public grief over Kim in North is staged (professional mourning is not unheard of, especially outside the West), and some of it is probably coerced, but a lot of it is probably sincere. A lot of the reactions I've been seeing seem to come from American discomfort with public displays of emotion not related to professional sports, plus the connected joy at being able to make fun of official enemies they know nothing about.

I still wonder, when I read mainstream commentary on North Korea and on Kim Jong-Il in particular, how many Americans have forgotten (or never knew) that South Korea and North Korea were one country until the US divided them, admittedly with the connivance of the Soviet Union. There are still families on both sides of the DMZ who were separated by the war and the endless state of truce, though more and more are dying off. It's been over sixty years, after all. I sympathize with my countrypeople's ignorance, since I knew very little more about Korea until the mid-1990s myself. All I knew until I met some Korean students and began to inform myself was what most Americans of my generation knew: that it was a country where college students seemed to be endlessly fighting the police in the streets. These clashes were shown every so often on TV news programs, though it was never explained what they were about. Oh, and there was a war there, named after the country, wasn't there?

It's because of that war, in which over 30,000 Americans and at least a million Koreans died (in much less time than comparable numbers died in Vietnam); because that war was deliberately forgotten in the US (we didn't "win" it, you see, and that's intolerably traumatic for us) though not in Korea; because of the continued presence of tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea; because of longstanding economic and political ties between South Korea and the US; and because the US continues to interfere in Korean affairs, often blocking rapprochement that might lessen tensions or even bring about reunification, that Americans should know more about Korea than we do. But hell, we hardly know anything about our own country, as American Korean War veterans could tell you.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, Americans are in no position to condemn other countries until they have condemned the crimes of their own government, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" as he called it in 1967. Imprisonment of vast numbers of its population? Torture? Militarization? Close surveillance of the population for traces of dissent or disloyalty? Let Americans take the log from their own eye first. That's about the only teaching of Jesus that has any real power to it as far as I'm concerned, and of course most Christians ignore it.

Grace in Division

I'm not really a good judge of these matters, but I think the South Korean government handled the question of condolences for the death of Kim Jong-Il rather well, as the Hankyoreh reports it:

Regarding the death of North Korean National Defence Committee Chairman Kim Jong-il, the South Korean government stated on Monday, “We offer our consolation to the citizens of North Korea. We hope that North Korea will swiftly regain stability and become able to cooperate in order to achieve peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula.”

The government also stated, “We have decided not to send a governmental delegation to North Korea. However, we will permit relatives of late former president Kim Dae-jung and late Hyundai chairman Chung Mong-hun to visit North Korea to offer condolences, in return for visits made by the North [when the two men died].” In other words, Kim Dae-jung’s widow, Lee Hee-ho, and Chung’s widow, Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, will be allowed to make visits to the North to express their condolences.

Given the churlishness of official American reaction, this was downright graceful. To say nothing of unofficial American reaction, which has been downright shameful. I hadn't intended to post a copy of the screengrab of Kim Jong-Un holding back tears as his father's body lies in state, but it might be a good counterexample to the video clips of wailing North Koreans that have gone viral in the US. Yes, Kim Jong-Il was a bad man, with a lot of blood on his hands, but so was Ronald Reagan, and any criticism of the circus that passed for his funeral was unwelcome in the US. So is Barack Obama, but his daughters will probably weep at his funeral. Yes, some of the public grief over Kim in North is staged (professional mourning is not unheard of, especially outside the West), and some of it is probably coerced, but a lot of it is probably sincere. A lot of the reactions I've been seeing seem to come from American discomfort with public displays of emotion not related to professional sports, plus the connected joy at being able to make fun of official enemies they know nothing about.

I still wonder, when I read mainstream commentary on North Korea and on Kim Jong-Il in particular, how many Americans have forgotten (or never knew) that South Korea and North Korea were one country until the US divided them, admittedly with the connivance of the Soviet Union. There are still families on both sides of the DMZ who were separated by the war and the endless state of truce, though more and more are dying off. It's been over sixty years, after all. I sympathize with my countrypeople's ignorance, since I knew very little more about Korea until the mid-1990s myself. All I knew until I met some Korean students and began to inform myself was what most Americans of my generation knew: that it was a country where college students seemed to be endlessly fighting the police in the streets. These clashes were shown every so often on TV news programs, though it was never explained what they were about. Oh, and there was a war there, named after the country, wasn't there?

It's because of that war, in which over 30,000 Americans and at least a million Koreans died (in much less time than comparable numbers died in Vietnam); because that war was deliberately forgotten in the US (we didn't "win" it, you see, and that's intolerably traumatic for us) though not in Korea; because of the continued presence of tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea; because of longstanding economic and political ties between South Korea and the US; and because the US continues to interfere in Korean affairs, often blocking rapprochement that might lessen tensions or even bring about reunification, that Americans should know more about Korea than we do. But hell, we hardly know anything about our own country, as American Korean War veterans could tell you.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, Americans are in no position to condemn other countries until they have condemned the crimes of their own government, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" as he called it in 1967. Imprisonment of vast numbers of its population? Torture? Militarization? Close surveillance of the population for traces of dissent or disloyalty? Let Americans take the log from their own eye first. That's about the only teaching of Jesus that has any real power to it as far as I'm concerned, and of course most Christians ignore it.

Wisconsin first grade teacher sets great example for dealing with gender variance among children

Thanks to Shannon Minter for alerting me to this heartwarming account of a Jackson County, Wisconsin teacher's experience with a gender variant first grader.  Melissa Bollow Tempel, in "It's Okay to be Neither," sets an amazing example of how to deal with gender issues in the classroom, including a girl, Allie, who was often taken as a boy.  Equally heartworming, the girl's parents were accepting of their child.  When the teacher called home to ask if she should correct children who said Allie was a boy, Allie's mom asked her what she wanted.  (She wanted the teacher to tell them she's a girl).

There's a growing number of custody disputes between divorced parents who disagree about how to deal with a gender variant child, including children who meet the diagnostic criteria for GIDC (gender identity disorder - children).  Judges are inclined toward the parent who wants to discourage gender variance.  I'd like this Wisconsin teacher's approach to gain ground among teachers and all who deal with children, in the hope that judges will catch on.

Wake Me When It's Over

After a bit of a lull, RWA1 has been linking again. Much of it of course was about the deaths of Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel (nothing about the death of Kim Jong-Il, though -- yet), but the fun part was this article at The New Republic, "Why Obama's New Populism May Sink His Campaign," by William Galston, a hack from the Brookings Institution. "Vain hope that this will be heeded," wrote RWA1, a single tear poignantly staining his cheek. (It did occur to me that the "vain hope" referred to was Galston's, but that's not RWA1's style.)

This, class, is a paradigm example of the phenomenon known as concern trolling, where a partisan pretends to be concerned that his or her opponent may be shooting himself in the foot. Oh noes! cries the loyal Republican: Obama might lose in 2012 if he pursues this self-defeating strategy! Usually I associate this tactic with the Right -- homophobes lecturing us that flamboyant Pride Parades will hurt our cause, for example -- but lately I've been seeing it on the Near Right, with many Democrats sincerely concerned that none of the current crop of Republican Presidential aspirants has a chance against the God-King, shouldn't they find someone electable?

Galston's argument is built on some recent Gallup polls which allegedly show, first, "that the number of Americans who see American society as divided into haves and have-nots has decreased significantly since the 2008 election"; second, "substantial majorities of Americans saw expanding the economy and increasing equality of opportunity as extremely or very important. Not so for reducing income and wealth gaps"; third, as "Obama nears the end of his third year in office, the people are more likely to fear government, and less likely to fear business, than they were at the beginning of his administration." The poll question was presumably put in terms of "big government," not just "government," but hey, what's the difference?

Since this was a magazine piece posted to the web, rather than a blog post, it contains no links to those polls, and it took me a while to find them for this post. And I noticed something interesting, which is why it's always a good idea to check claims at the source: Galston paraphrased the second question as "Respondents were asked to categorize three economic objectives as extremely important, very important, somewhat important, or not important." But the actual question was "how important is it that the federal government in Washington enacts policies that attempt to do each of the following" (italics added) -- that is, the respondents want the big government, which most Americans consider a greater threat than big labor or big business, to enact those policies.

That's a common problem with polling, of course: how the question is put will affect, and may even determine, the answers received. I'm not at all surprised that a majority of Americans would say they fear big government, and charitably understood it's not an unreasonable fear. Put in those terms, I and many another leftist would share that fear: of indefinite detention, surveillance of personal communication, and vast military spending in the service of empire. But most Americans also want big government and the services it provides: the social programs, like Social Security and Medicare and disaster relief, that the Right (including both my Right-Wing Acquaintances) hates and want to eliminate for the good of the American people, are very popular. That's why the same politicians who denounce the Nanny State are first in line to demand big government aid when disaster strikes their states. That's why you hear laments from both sides of the Congressional aisle about Social Security being a political "third rail" -- because politicians who touch it with hostile intent will get badly burned, not by lobbyists or special-interest groups, but by the public.

That's why, when polls ask more specific and concrete questions, they get results that appear to be at odds with Gallup's. A recent Pew poll, released at the same time, found (via):

Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. In a 1941 Gallup poll, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents assert that power is too concentrated among the rich and large corporations, but this view is shared by a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans.

Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy and just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents say the economic system is tilted in favor of the wealthy; a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.

The public also views Wall Street negatively, little changed from opinions in March. Currently, just 36% say Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts — 51% say it hurts more than helps. Majorities of both Democrats (60%) and independents (54%) say Wall Street hurts more than helps, while nearly half of Republicans say Wall Street helps the economy (49%)...

While there may be some cognitive dissonance here, I don't think it's serious. Most Americans, according to Gallup, want big government to enact policies to expand the economy and increase equality of opportunity. I admit I don't see how people can simultaneously reject the idea that America is divided into haves and have-nots and believe that there's too much power in the hands of a few rich people, but I also have to admit they are two different questions, and I think Pew's version is less abstract. I'm wary of big government, because I know how easily it can get out of the control of the people it was supposedly founded to serve. (And did you notice? There's not a word here about reducing the deficit, which obsesses the government and media elites, but doesn't concern most citizens that much.)

Anyway, these polls indicate that Obama won't be hurting his chances of re-election by talking a "populist" game; that's why he's doing it, after all. (Whether he'll do more than talk is another question.) Especially since it's well-known by now that Democratic politicians, including Obama, do best with their base when they sound "populist"; they only get into trouble when they demonstrate that it was just talk. So do Republicans, for that matter, who also pretend to be populists, but in terms that appeal to a different base. Don't all the Republican candidates claim that they are the ones who really care about the good of the people? The original Tea Party movement talked populism too, speaking for a Republican minority that hadn't voted for the Kenyan Usurper and never would, but still thought he should do what they wanted. But it's a safe bet that Obama is making sure that his real base, the corporate donors, know that the speechmaking is for the proles, and isn't meant to be taken seriously.

What surprises me, or would surprise me if I weren't used to it by now, is that RWA1 misses all this. Why doesn't he make fun of Obama for pretending to care about ordinary people, or if he must pretend that Obama isn't pretending, shouldn't he hope piously that Obama will be defeated next year so that he can't carry out his socialist, anti-business, anti-America agenda? It could be partly because of RWA1's elitism; he considers most of his fellow citizens to be rabble, yahoos who are flushing a great culture down the toilet, putting his NPR opera programs at risk. But if this country is in trouble -- and I certainly agree that it is, but in different ways and for different reasons -- isn't it important to understand what is going on? Especially if you consider yourself to be intellectually superior to the dirty canaille? The TNR writer Galston, by the way, doesn't seem to be concern trolling: he seems to want Obama's re-election. RWA1, like so much of the educated (or least schooled) Right, doesn't seem to know what he wants.

Some of it must be party loyalty. The rational thing for the Republican party to do would be to embrace Obama, nominate him their 2012 candidate, and end the game of pretending that there is a wide gulf between the parties; but more important than rationality is the brand name, which as with other commercial brands, necessitates inventing nonexistent differences. (The GOP! Gets your whites whiter! Produces a longer lasting shine without yellowing! Gives you fast fast fast relief from tension headaches!) Of course the Democrats wouldn't accept that either: they've spent the past three years cheering Obama as he embraced and extended the worst Bush-Cheney policies. Everything they attacked Bush for doing is now the proof of Obama's greatness. Now they've got their own websites defending him against his critics -- of the left; we may be crazy and numerically insignificant but we are still a threat -- in terms borrowed directly from the hydrophobic Republican fringe.

One Gallup poll result I can go with, though: 70 percent of Americans can't wait for the coming elections to be over.

Wake Me When It's Over

After a bit of a lull, RWA1 has been linking again. Much of it of course was about the deaths of Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel (nothing about the death of Kim Jong-Il, though -- yet), but the fun part was this article at The New Republic, "Why Obama's New Populism May Sink His Campaign," by William Galston, a hack from the Brookings Institution. "Vain hope that this will be heeded," wrote RWA1, a single tear poignantly staining his cheek. (It did occur to me that the "vain hope" referred to was Galston's, but that's not RWA1's style.)

This, class, is a paradigm example of the phenomenon known as concern trolling, where a partisan pretends to be concerned that his or her opponent may be shooting himself in the foot. Oh noes! cries the loyal Republican: Obama might lose in 2012 if he pursues this self-defeating strategy! Usually I associate this tactic with the Right -- homophobes lecturing us that flamboyant Pride Parades will hurt our cause, for example -- but lately I've been seeing it on the Near Right, with many Democrats sincerely concerned that none of the current crop of Republican Presidential aspirants has a chance against the God-King, shouldn't they find someone electable?

Galston's argument is built on some recent Gallup polls which allegedly show, first, "that the number of Americans who see American society as divided into haves and have-nots has decreased significantly since the 2008 election"; second, "substantial majorities of Americans saw expanding the economy and increasing equality of opportunity as extremely or very important. Not so for reducing income and wealth gaps"; third, as "Obama nears the end of his third year in office, the people are more likely to fear government, and less likely to fear business, than they were at the beginning of his administration." The poll question was presumably put in terms of "big government," not just "government," but hey, what's the difference?

Since this was a magazine piece posted to the web, rather than a blog post, it contains no links to those polls, and it took me a while to find them for this post. And I noticed something interesting, which is why it's always a good idea to check claims at the source: Galston paraphrased the second question as "Respondents were asked to categorize three economic objectives as extremely important, very important, somewhat important, or not important." But the actual question was "how important is it that the federal government in Washington enacts policies that attempt to do each of the following" (italics added) -- that is, the respondents want the big government, which most Americans consider a greater threat than big labor or big business, to enact those policies.

That's a common problem with polling, of course: how the question is put will affect, and may even determine, the answers received. I'm not at all surprised that a majority of Americans would say they fear big government, and charitably understood it's not an unreasonable fear. Put in those terms, I and many another leftist would share that fear: of indefinite detention, surveillance of personal communication, and vast military spending in the service of empire. But most Americans also want big government and the services it provides: the social programs, like Social Security and Medicare and disaster relief, that the Right (including both my Right-Wing Acquaintances) hates and want to eliminate for the good of the American people, are very popular. That's why the same politicians who denounce the Nanny State are first in line to demand big government aid when disaster strikes their states. That's why you hear laments from both sides of the Congressional aisle about Social Security being a political "third rail" -- because politicians who touch it with hostile intent will get badly burned, not by lobbyists or special-interest groups, but by the public.

That's why, when polls ask more specific and concrete questions, they get results that appear to be at odds with Gallup's. A recent Pew poll, released at the same time, found (via):

Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. In a 1941 Gallup poll, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents assert that power is too concentrated among the rich and large corporations, but this view is shared by a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans.

Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy and just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents say the economic system is tilted in favor of the wealthy; a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.

The public also views Wall Street negatively, little changed from opinions in March. Currently, just 36% say Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts — 51% say it hurts more than helps. Majorities of both Democrats (60%) and independents (54%) say Wall Street hurts more than helps, while nearly half of Republicans say Wall Street helps the economy (49%)...

While there may be some cognitive dissonance here, I don't think it's serious. Most Americans, according to Gallup, want big government to enact policies to expand the economy and increase equality of opportunity. I admit I don't see how people can simultaneously reject the idea that America is divided into haves and have-nots and believe that there's too much power in the hands of a few rich people, but I also have to admit they are two different questions, and I think Pew's version is less abstract. I'm wary of big government, because I know how easily it can get out of the control of the people it was supposedly founded to serve. (And did you notice? There's not a word here about reducing the deficit, which obsesses the government and media elites, but doesn't concern most citizens that much.)

Anyway, these polls indicate that Obama won't be hurting his chances of re-election by talking a "populist" game; that's why he's doing it, after all. (Whether he'll do more than talk is another question.) Especially since it's well-known by now that Democratic politicians, including Obama, do best with their base when they sound "populist"; they only get into trouble when they demonstrate that it was just talk. So do Republicans, for that matter, who also pretend to be populists, but in terms that appeal to a different base. Don't all the Republican candidates claim that they are the ones who really care about the good of the people? The original Tea Party movement talked populism too, speaking for a Republican minority that hadn't voted for the Kenyan Usurper and never would, but still thought he should do what they wanted. But it's a safe bet that Obama is making sure that his real base, the corporate donors, know that the speechmaking is for the proles, and isn't meant to be taken seriously.

What surprises me, or would surprise me if I weren't used to it by now, is that RWA1 misses all this. Why doesn't he make fun of Obama for pretending to care about ordinary people, or if he must pretend that Obama isn't pretending, shouldn't he hope piously that Obama will be defeated next year so that he can't carry out his socialist, anti-business, anti-America agenda? It could be partly because of RWA1's elitism; he considers most of his fellow citizens to be rabble, yahoos who are flushing a great culture down the toilet, putting his NPR opera programs at risk. But if this country is in trouble -- and I certainly agree that it is, but in different ways and for different reasons -- isn't it important to understand what is going on? Especially if you consider yourself to be intellectually superior to the dirty canaille? The TNR writer Galston, by the way, doesn't seem to be concern trolling: he seems to want Obama's re-election. RWA1, like so much of the educated (or least schooled) Right, doesn't seem to know what he wants.

Some of it must be party loyalty. The rational thing for the Republican party to do would be to embrace Obama, nominate him their 2012 candidate, and end the game of pretending that there is a wide gulf between the parties; but more important than rationality is the brand name, which as with other commercial brands, necessitates inventing nonexistent differences. (The GOP! Gets your whites whiter! Produces a longer lasting shine without yellowing! Gives you fast fast fast relief from tension headaches!) Of course the Democrats wouldn't accept that either: they've spent the past three years cheering Obama as he embraced and extended the worst Bush-Cheney policies. Everything they attacked Bush for doing is now the proof of Obama's greatness. Now they've got their own websites defending him against his critics -- of the left; we may be crazy and numerically insignificant but we are still a threat -- in terms borrowed directly from the hydrophobic Republican fringe.

One Gallup poll result I can go with, though: 70 percent of Americans can't wait for the coming elections to be over.

Boy Culture in the Nineteenth and a Half Century!

I've been reading H. Bruce Franklin's Future Perfect: American Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1978), which turns out to be more of an anthology than a critical study. It's worth reading because of the commentary he supplies; he's written a good many books on various subjects, including Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (Oxford, 1980), which is out of print but worth tracking down.

Franklin begins by suggesting what I agree is a "good working definition of science fiction": "the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence." He returns to that definition in the book's second section, on Poe, who has often been called the father of SF. Franklin treats him respectfully with appropriate skepticism, especially his program (in a "famous passage from his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales" [ 96]) for the writing of short stories:

The key word in Poe's argument, as his italics indicate, is "effect." The argument that fiction should be evaluated for its effectiveness, its success in achieving the objective correlative which the author desires, slides around the question of what it should effect. To say that the tale of terror is "effective" may not necessarily, in the long run, to praise it [97].

Franklin distinguishes two categories of science fiction in Poe's work,

the tale contrived like an electric coil to induce particular emotions in the reader and the tale contrived as a wheelbarrow to bring to the reader some scientific notion or knickknack. In the first, the science is merely a device; in the other, the fiction is merely a device [97].

Good enough, but Franklin goes still further:

Poe, then, may be the father not of science fiction but rather of what is so often associated with the term science fiction -- fiction which popularizes science for boys and girls of all ages while giving them the creeps [98].

He grants Poe more virtue than that, though, suggesting that Poe is better than his theory. I'm not so sure; I've never liked Poe myself, either as poet or storyteller. But Franklin makes a good point which connects to my own wariness of "extreme" horror movies in our day.

Yet surely those who find "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" of enduring value do not do so merely because they admire Poe for making a story which can horrify them. Would anyone who wants to be as horrified as possible turn to fiction? Or are horror stories merely safe escapes or releases from the terrors of the actual world? In 1854, the same year in which "The Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar" was published, appeared Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass, who had been a slave boy in Poe's Baltimore, describes the incident which awakened him into consciousness of Maryland social reality, the whipping of his aunt, stripped naked to the waist and hanging from a hook, by his master, who keeps snarling "'you d____d b___h'" as he tortured her until she was "literally covered with blood":

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.

The man who invented the horrors of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" preferred not to look at these other horrors. In fact he supported the slave system which produced them, as well as his own material comforts [98-9].

I'm not as sure as Franklin that Poe's fans don't necessarily admire him primarily for making a tale which can horrify them, though I would expect that his admirers value his tales for more than one reason. The fans of ultraviolent cinema seem to think that "effects" are all that matter, though. The late Thomas M. Disch, a poet, writer of sf and horror fiction, and swaggering leather boy, wrote a history of science fiction in which he attacked writers like Ursula Le Guin whose gore-and-creepy quotient didn't come up to his high standards. (Her feminism, he thundered, "is less overtly phobic of the male sex than that of Andrea Dworkin, but it is no less absolute. ... Ideology breeds nonsense and ... Le Guin's work has undergone a gradual PC ossification" [via]. Girl cooties, yuck!)

But I very much appreciate the questions Franklin raised here. He made me think again of the idea that Lawrence Block put into the mind of one of his characters, that the tears you shed while watching a movie aren't real tears, any more than the fear you feel while watching a horror movie is real fear. I have the same reservation about the genre that Franklin expressed: if you want to be horrified, why look to fiction? Something else is going on, but what? I'm certainly open to the idea that horror stories in any medium can point to some deeper (or at least other) meanings; I just don't know what they might be, because I haven't found any that work for me that way.

Boy Culture in the Nineteenth and a Half Century!

I've been reading H. Bruce Franklin's Future Perfect: American Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1978), which turns out to be more of an anthology than a critical study. It's worth reading because of the commentary he supplies; he's written a good many books on various subjects, including Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (Oxford, 1980), which is out of print but worth tracking down.

Franklin begins by suggesting what I agree is a "good working definition of science fiction": "the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence." He returns to that definition in the book's second section, on Poe, who has often been called the father of SF. Franklin treats him respectfully with appropriate skepticism, especially his program (in a "famous passage from his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales" [ 96]) for the writing of short stories:

The key word in Poe's argument, as his italics indicate, is "effect." The argument that fiction should be evaluated for its effectiveness, its success in achieving the objective correlative which the author desires, slides around the question of what it should effect. To say that the tale of terror is "effective" may not necessarily, in the long run, to praise it [97].

Franklin distinguishes two categories of science fiction in Poe's work,

the tale contrived like an electric coil to induce particular emotions in the reader and the tale contrived as a wheelbarrow to bring to the reader some scientific notion or knickknack. In the first, the science is merely a device; in the other, the fiction is merely a device [97].

Good enough, but Franklin goes still further:

Poe, then, may be the father not of science fiction but rather of what is so often associated with the term science fiction -- fiction which popularizes science for boys and girls of all ages while giving them the creeps [98].

He grants Poe more virtue than that, though, suggesting that Poe is better than his theory. I'm not so sure; I've never liked Poe myself, either as poet or storyteller. But Franklin makes a good point which connects to my own wariness of "extreme" horror movies in our day.

Yet surely those who find "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" of enduring value do not do so merely because they admire Poe for making a story which can horrify them. Would anyone who wants to be as horrified as possible turn to fiction? Or are horror stories merely safe escapes or releases from the terrors of the actual world? In 1854, the same year in which "The Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar" was published, appeared Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass, who had been a slave boy in Poe's Baltimore, describes the incident which awakened him into consciousness of Maryland social reality, the whipping of his aunt, stripped naked to the waist and hanging from a hook, by his master, who keeps snarling "'you d____d b___h'" as he tortured her until she was "literally covered with blood":

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.

The man who invented the horrors of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" preferred not to look at these other horrors. In fact he supported the slave system which produced them, as well as his own material comforts [98-9].

I'm not as sure as Franklin that Poe's fans don't necessarily admire him primarily for making a tale which can horrify them, though I would expect that his admirers value his tales for more than one reason. The fans of ultraviolent cinema seem to think that "effects" are all that matter, though. The late Thomas M. Disch, a poet, writer of sf and horror fiction, and swaggering leather boy, wrote a history of science fiction in which he attacked writers like Ursula Le Guin whose gore-and-creepy quotient didn't come up to his high standards. (Her feminism, he thundered, "is less overtly phobic of the male sex than that of Andrea Dworkin, but it is no less absolute. ... Ideology breeds nonsense and ... Le Guin's work has undergone a gradual PC ossification" [via]. Girl cooties, yuck!)

But I very much appreciate the questions Franklin raised here. He made me think again of the idea that Lawrence Block put into the mind of one of his characters, that the tears you shed while watching a movie aren't real tears, any more than the fear you feel while watching a horror movie is real fear. I have the same reservation about the genre that Franklin expressed: if you want to be horrified, why look to fiction? Something else is going on, but what? I'm certainly open to the idea that horror stories in any medium can point to some deeper (or at least other) meanings; I just don't know what they might be, because I haven't found any that work for me that way.

There Goes the Sun King

Kim Jong Il is dead, as I'm sure everybody in a position to read this blog knows by now. (Judging from what I've been reading online all day, it might be helpful to some readers if I explain that East Asian names usually put the surname first. So Kim was the dictator's surname or family name, Jong Il his given name; Jong Il Kim in Western order.) I certainly don't mourn him, but it's hard to know what to say when so many willfully ignorant people, people who know only that Kim was an official Bad Guy, are jumping for joy at the news -- especially in the US, where many people and our corporate media have been doing the Happy Dance over the guys it's safe to hate in the past year.

There are plenty of people on the Korean peninsula who have reason to hate Kim Jong Il; here in the US, not so much. He hurt a lot of people, but few if any Americans; so why are Americans so excited about his decease? Well, aside from Fidel Castro, we have hardly any Commies left to hate anymore, and for many Americans, Commies have a special place in what we laughingly call our hearts. Second, he was insubordinate, refusing to recognize that we are in charge of the world -- and worse, he played us rather effectively. This was a special slap in the face to American pride, given that we'd always thought him a joke from the day he succeeded his father in 1994, and have continued to treat him as a joke while simultaneously inflating him into a world-class threat to peace, justice, and the American way. Those are the only reasons I can think of, as opposed to pretenses.

It can't be because he was corrupt, as he undoubtedly was -- America gets along just fine with corrupt heads of state and their families. It can't be because he ran a viciously repressive state with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, and a failed economy that periodically collapsed into famine -- America gets along just fine with the rulers of viciously repressive states etc. No, it can only be because he wouldn't take orders from us; why, he wouldn't even take orders from his Red masters in what the deranged wing of the American Right used to call "Peiping." (It was the pronunciation used by Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists.)

My first thought when I heard the news and began to see Western reactions was Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia for over thirty years. Suharto took power in a spectacularly bloody 1965 coup, epitomized by the slaughter of uncountable ethnic Chinese designated as Communists. Estimates range from half a million to two or three million or even more. It seems certain that the US was involved (via) (though given our record, US involvement would be plausible even if we didn't have other good reasons to believe it), with the CIA giving Suharto the names of labor activists to butcher. At the time, FAIR has reported,

After the scale of the massacre began to be apparent, [New York Times writer Max] Frankel was even more enthusiastic. Under the headline "Elated U.S. Officials Looking to New Aid to Jakarta's Economy" (3/13/66), Frankel reported that "the Johnson administration found it difficult today to hide its delight with the news from Indonesia.... After a long period of patient diplomacy designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, and months of prudent silence...officials were elated to find their expectations being realized." Frankel went on to describe the leader of the massacre, Gen. Suharto, as "an efficient and effective military commander."

After having pacified the country,

Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into an "investors' paradise," only slightly qualified by the steep bribery charge for entry. Investors flocked in to exploit the timber, mineral and oil resources, as well as the cheap, repressed labor, often in joint ventures with Suharto family members and cronies. Investor enthusiasm for this favorable climate of investment was expressed in political support and even in public advertisements; e.g., the full page ad in the New York Times (9/24/92) by Chevron and Texaco entitled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

A decade later, in 1975, Suharto invaded the neighboring country of East Timor, initiating a quarter-century-long reign of terror, again supported faithfully by the US, which killed a quarter-million Timorese.

When Suharto left power, he received the harsh judgment you'd expect such a person to suffer at the hands of the American media.

In the months of his exit, he was referred to as Indonesia's "soft-spoken, enigmatic president" (USA Today, 5/14/98), a "profoundly spiritual man" (New York Times, 5/17/98), a "reforming autocrat" (New York Times, 5/22/98). His motives were benign: "It was not simply personal ambition that led Mr. Suharto to clamp down so hard for so long; it was a fear, shared by many in this country of 210 million people, of chaos" (New York Times, 6/2/98); he "failed to comprehend the intensity of his people's discontent" (New York Times, 5/21/98), otherwise he undoubtedly would have stepped down earlier. He was sometimes described as "authoritarian," occasionally as a "dictator," but never as a mass murderer. Suharto's mass killings were referred to--if at all--in a brief and antiseptic paragraph.

I believe Kim Jong Il deserves nothing less than the same kind of pitiless scourging Suharto got.

By all accounts, North Korea is a dreary, regimented society, with no civil liberties and little material security. (A good place to begin reading if you want to know more would be Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country [The New Press, 2004].) At the same time, I keep getting the impression that much of what is depicted as grim regimentation is simply normal for communitarian societies, including South Korea. I remember reading a sketch of a North Korean extended family, comprising at least three generations, out for a night of karaoke, which from the description sounded just like its South Korean working-class counterpart. The massed rallies and organizing chanting also sound to me like South Korean society in the days of its dictatorship: GoGo 70, a recent South Korean film set around 1970, began with archival footage of marching soldiers, cheering crowds, and martial songs that at first I took for the North, but it turned out to the freedom-loving South. And the standard of living was higher in the North than in the South until the 1970s, partly because until then the South was run by corrupt American-backed dictatorships more interested in lining their pockets than in raising up their people. Not until Park Chung Hee's Five Year Plans (did he deliberately take that label from Stalin's USSR?) did the South Korean economy begin to take off, though as with all modernizing industrial economies, at great human cost.

But despite the occasional concern trolling -- oh worra worra, what will happen to North Korea now that Kim is dead? is his young heir-designate, Kim Jong Un, mature enough at twenty-something to take the reins of power? surely he should invite the US to step in and guide him with the same benign wisdom we've exhibited everywhere else -- I don't believe that many of the people celebrating Kim's dead give a damn about the North Korean people, or about peace on the Korean peninsula, or about anything except venting the free-floating rage and hatred they don't dare express about anything that matters. The US government is no more interested in democracy in North Korea than it is in the South, which means (at best) hardly at all; and most Americans don't know enough about either Korea to have an opinion.

There Goes the Sun King

Kim Jong Il is dead, as I'm sure everybody in a position to read this blog knows by now. (Judging from what I've been reading online all day, it might be helpful to some readers if I explain that East Asian names usually put the surname first. So Kim was the dictator's surname or family name, Jong Il his given name; Jong Il Kim in Western order.) I certainly don't mourn him, but it's hard to know what to say when so many willfully ignorant people, people who know only that Kim was an official Bad Guy, are jumping for joy at the news -- especially in the US, where many people and our corporate media have been doing the Happy Dance over the guys it's safe to hate in the past year.

There are plenty of people on the Korean peninsula who have reason to hate Kim Jong Il; here in the US, not so much. He hurt a lot of people, but few if any Americans; so why are Americans so excited about his decease? Well, aside from Fidel Castro, we have hardly any Commies left to hate anymore, and for many Americans, Commies have a special place in what we laughingly call our hearts. Second, he was insubordinate, refusing to recognize that we are in charge of the world -- and worse, he played us rather effectively. This was a special slap in the face to American pride, given that we'd always thought him a joke from the day he succeeded his father in 1994, and have continued to treat him as a joke while simultaneously inflating him into a world-class threat to peace, justice, and the American way. Those are the only reasons I can think of, as opposed to pretenses.

It can't be because he was corrupt, as he undoubtedly was -- America gets along just fine with corrupt heads of state and their families. It can't be because he ran a viciously repressive state with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, and a failed economy that periodically collapsed into famine -- America gets along just fine with the rulers of viciously repressive states etc. No, it can only be because he wouldn't take orders from us; why, he wouldn't even take orders from his Red masters in what the deranged wing of the American Right used to call "Peiping." (It was the pronunciation used by Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists.)

My first thought when I heard the news and began to see Western reactions was Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia for over thirty years. Suharto took power in a spectacularly bloody 1965 coup, epitomized by the slaughter of uncountable ethnic Chinese designated as Communists. Estimates range from half a million to two or three million or even more. It seems certain that the US was involved (via) (though given our record, US involvement would be plausible even if we didn't have other good reasons to believe it), with the CIA giving Suharto the names of labor activists to butcher. At the time, FAIR has reported,

After the scale of the massacre began to be apparent, [New York Times writer Max] Frankel was even more enthusiastic. Under the headline "Elated U.S. Officials Looking to New Aid to Jakarta's Economy" (3/13/66), Frankel reported that "the Johnson administration found it difficult today to hide its delight with the news from Indonesia.... After a long period of patient diplomacy designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, and months of prudent silence...officials were elated to find their expectations being realized." Frankel went on to describe the leader of the massacre, Gen. Suharto, as "an efficient and effective military commander."

After having pacified the country,

Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into an "investors' paradise," only slightly qualified by the steep bribery charge for entry. Investors flocked in to exploit the timber, mineral and oil resources, as well as the cheap, repressed labor, often in joint ventures with Suharto family members and cronies. Investor enthusiasm for this favorable climate of investment was expressed in political support and even in public advertisements; e.g., the full page ad in the New York Times (9/24/92) by Chevron and Texaco entitled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

A decade later, in 1975, Suharto invaded the neighboring country of East Timor, initiating a quarter-century-long reign of terror, again supported faithfully by the US, which killed a quarter-million Timorese.

When Suharto left power, he received the harsh judgment you'd expect such a person to suffer at the hands of the American media.

In the months of his exit, he was referred to as Indonesia's "soft-spoken, enigmatic president" (USA Today, 5/14/98), a "profoundly spiritual man" (New York Times, 5/17/98), a "reforming autocrat" (New York Times, 5/22/98). His motives were benign: "It was not simply personal ambition that led Mr. Suharto to clamp down so hard for so long; it was a fear, shared by many in this country of 210 million people, of chaos" (New York Times, 6/2/98); he "failed to comprehend the intensity of his people's discontent" (New York Times, 5/21/98), otherwise he undoubtedly would have stepped down earlier. He was sometimes described as "authoritarian," occasionally as a "dictator," but never as a mass murderer. Suharto's mass killings were referred to--if at all--in a brief and antiseptic paragraph.

I believe Kim Jong Il deserves nothing less than the same kind of pitiless scourging Suharto got.

By all accounts, North Korea is a dreary, regimented society, with no civil liberties and little material security. (A good place to begin reading if you want to know more would be Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country [The New Press, 2004].) At the same time, I keep getting the impression that much of what is depicted as grim regimentation is simply normal for communitarian societies, including South Korea. I remember reading a sketch of a North Korean extended family, comprising at least three generations, out for a night of karaoke, which from the description sounded just like its South Korean working-class counterpart. The massed rallies and organizing chanting also sound to me like South Korean society in the days of its dictatorship: GoGo 70, a recent South Korean film set around 1970, began with archival footage of marching soldiers, cheering crowds, and martial songs that at first I took for the North, but it turned out to the freedom-loving South. And the standard of living was higher in the North than in the South until the 1970s, partly because until then the South was run by corrupt American-backed dictatorships more interested in lining their pockets than in raising up their people. Not until Park Chung Hee's Five Year Plans (did he deliberately take that label from Stalin's USSR?) did the South Korean economy begin to take off, though as with all modernizing industrial economies, at great human cost.

But despite the occasional concern trolling -- oh worra worra, what will happen to North Korea now that Kim is dead? is his young heir-designate, Kim Jong Un, mature enough at twenty-something to take the reins of power? surely he should invite the US to step in and guide him with the same benign wisdom we've exhibited everywhere else -- I don't believe that many of the people celebrating Kim's dead give a damn about the North Korean people, or about peace on the Korean peninsula, or about anything except venting the free-floating rage and hatred they don't dare express about anything that matters. The US government is no more interested in democracy in North Korea than it is in the South, which means (at best) hardly at all; and most Americans don't know enough about either Korea to have an opinion.

What If Bach Was One of Us, Just a Slob Like One of Us

An old friend of mine posted a link on Facebook today to an article on the worst pop song lyrics of all time. The article attempted to provide the top (or bottom) ten, but many deserving examples didn't make the cut. No Stevie Wonder? No Prince? No Neil Young? No Paul McCartney? No Ira Gershwin? All the examples were relatively recent, and thanks to the "Golden Age" program on our local community radio station I know a lot of stinkers from the pre-rock era too.

For that matter, why limit it to pop? Opera is famous as a genre where you're often better off if the libretto is sung in a language you don't know, and European art song for having proven long before Bob Dylan was born that poetry and music tend to go together like oil and water.

In the comments my friend, who by the way is a classically trained composer, turned the discussion in a different direction with this:

When I was a kid and a rock fan (another life!) I never knew or cared what the lyrics were, or what a song was supposedly "about". So it always shocks me how non-musicians hear music. I mean, if you ever play piano in a bar, you will be constantly pestered to play certain "songs" - no matter how musically worthless- on the basis of the appropriateness of some bit of lyric ("Excuse me, my wife is wearing a red hat, so could you please play that song "My Wife Is Wearing a Red Hat, Oh Yes She Is"?). I want to say, "Listen, mister, your wife is also beautiful. How about I play something that's beautiful -- like this Bach sarabande, which has no words and is 'about' nothing at all?"

One side effect of being gay was that when I first made my debut in the university gay community, I met quite a few classical musicians. I'm a musician, though not a classical musician, as well as a poet (in fact, a few of my poems were set by another classical composer I know), so I straddle some categories here. One of the things that surprised me was the way classical musicians think about music, and for awhile they persuaded me that their way was the right way.

But it's been several years since I hung out with classical musicians, and while I don't think their attitude toward music is wrong, it's just not the only right way. It's not even better than that of laypeople, since musicians' view of music is narrowed by their relation to it, as composers and performers. (I admit gratefully that I met some classical musicians who had a broader view of music, like the world-class pianist who assured me that I was a musician; he had no patience with the view that you had to be a virtuoso to qualify.)

When I was writing poetry, I learned to think about it as form and technique, but even so, I showed new poems not only to English majors, but to people who "don't know anything about poetry." Of course I hoped that trained readers would like what I was doing, but if it didn't work on the immediate sensual level, if a non-English student couldn't read it and get something out of it, I didn't consider it a success. Technique -- meter, rhythm, sound, form -- are important, but there's no reason why a non-poet should care about them.

On the other hand, I think that everyone should get some sense of how to write a poem, to write a piece of music, to play an instrument, to dance. It's like sports, really. Some people may think that children should learn to play basketball just on the off chance that they might grow up to be Michael Jordan; but the elite players will be better off, and I think happier, if the audience understands what they're doing, even if they can't play at that level themselves. Ditto for the arts: an artist needs a knowledgeable audience. Besides, making art is often a pleasure, even if you aren't a genius. Making music is intensely pleasurable, though like anything it can become an ordeal if it's turned into competition.

We tend to forget that European art music was primarily popular music for a lay audience, many of whom could nevertheless sing a little, play a bit of violin or flute or pianoforte. (Around the time Amadeus was fairly new and much-discussed, I had a strange conversation with a graduate student in European history who didn't know that in Mozart's day there were many composers, most of whom were forgotten in a generation except maybe by the churches or small orchestras where they'd played -- just as every small American town in the 60s had its own garage band, some of which recorded forgettable singles, a few of which had regional hits, and a very few went national. He really seemed to think that there were only about half a dozen composers in all of Europe, and most of them were in Vienna.) When Verdi died, for example, he got a state funeral, with thousands of people lining the streets and the best singers in Italy vying to sing in his funeral mass. There were always musicians (late Beethoven is one example, I think) who wanted to follow the internal logic of the music in their head, and to Hell with the listener. I think people should be free to make any kind of music they like, but I also have little patience when they complain that nobody else likes it.

Worse, though, is my friend's contempt -- I think there's no other word for it -- for the associations that non-professionals form around music they love. (This was also a sign that something was wrong with Daniel Harris's dismissal of the Names Project, the AIDS quilt, as "kitsch.") I'll leave aside the vexed question of 'pure' music that "is 'about' nothing at all," though I disagree that there is such a thing; I just don't think it's bad to like music that is 'about something,' even if it has terrible, maudlin lyrics and is sappy, sloppy, or syrupy. Sure, playing a Bach sarabande would have pleased the pianist, but the husband asked for a specific song because it had personal meaning for him and his wife, while the sarabande would have had none.

As a musician who doesn't play arenas and so has face-to-face interaction with audiences and their requests, I know very well how it feels to be asked to play a song you consider "worthless," but that's something every performer has to come to terms with. In his (unfortunately titled) book How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, the writer and folk-pop musician Elijah Wald spent a lot of time on this matter: how many musicians for a mix of reasons preferred to make music people couldn't dance to, for instance, or without tunes that people might hum on the way home. (Me, I've never been happier than when people heard my music and wanted to get up and dance, so I'm biased there. But I also like music that doesn't make me want to dance; I don't think I have to choose between the two.) As usual in these elite vs. masses conflicts, there are contradictions: the masses dislike my art because they're stupid, and only an artistic whore would pander to them, but I have a right to demand that the public support me so I can make my art and commune artistically with God. But if they began to like me, that wouldn't mean their taste had miraculously improved, it would mean that my art was no good after all.

I should mention that I don't demand instant accessibility from art myself: among the composers whose work I like are some fairly difficult, even forbidding types like Penderecki, Webern, Ligeti, and Messaien. It's possible that I like their music for the wrong reason, because I get pleasure from listening to it, and pleasure is as suspect in some artistic circles as it in some religious ones. (The idea is to disassociate art from the human body: from rhythms that stir us, from anything that might produce physical reactions like tears, laughter, or erotic arousal.) Certainly I don't claim to understand what they are trying to do technically, but I don't think it's necessary to understand the music technically to enjoy it, and I believe that the enjoyment by itself is enough.

If I want to play only music that I like, I can do that at home. (As a blogger, I write to please myself, but I also hope to communicate with someone out there.) If I want to perform, I need to meet my audience halfway; if I'm getting paid to perform, I will probably have to go more than halfway. The audience should never forget that there's a human being up there playing for them, either. But much of the point of performing in public is that mysterious interaction between performer and listener, a relationship you can't get from recorded music or playing solely for yourself: when you can feel that the audience is feeling what you hoped they'd feel. To use an analogy I've often thought of in this connection: masturbation is perfectly fine, but it's not the same as touching another person's body.

Replying to my friend's remarks, I said that the ox sees the plow differently than the farmer does. Like it or not (and few of us are compelled to be artists), the artist is the ox.

What If Bach Was One of Us, Just a Slob Like One of Us

An old friend of mine posted a link on Facebook today to an article on the worst pop song lyrics of all time. The article attempted to provide the top (or bottom) ten, but many deserving examples didn't make the cut. No Stevie Wonder? No Prince? No Neil Young? No Paul McCartney? No Ira Gershwin? All the examples were relatively recent, and thanks to the "Golden Age" program on our local community radio station I know a lot of stinkers from the pre-rock era too.

For that matter, why limit it to pop? Opera is famous as a genre where you're often better off if the libretto is sung in a language you don't know, and European art song for having proven long before Bob Dylan was born that poetry and music tend to go together like oil and water.

In the comments my friend, who by the way is a classically trained composer, turned the discussion in a different direction with this:

When I was a kid and a rock fan (another life!) I never knew or cared what the lyrics were, or what a song was supposedly "about". So it always shocks me how non-musicians hear music. I mean, if you ever play piano in a bar, you will be constantly pestered to play certain "songs" - no matter how musically worthless- on the basis of the appropriateness of some bit of lyric ("Excuse me, my wife is wearing a red hat, so could you please play that song "My Wife Is Wearing a Red Hat, Oh Yes She Is"?). I want to say, "Listen, mister, your wife is also beautiful. How about I play something that's beautiful -- like this Bach sarabande, which has no words and is 'about' nothing at all?"

One side effect of being gay was that when I first made my debut in the university gay community, I met quite a few classical musicians. I'm a musician, though not a classical musician, as well as a poet (in fact, a few of my poems were set by another classical composer I know), so I straddle some categories here. One of the things that surprised me was the way classical musicians think about music, and for awhile they persuaded me that their way was the right way.

But it's been several years since I hung out with classical musicians, and while I don't think their attitude toward music is wrong, it's just not the only right way. It's not even better than that of laypeople, since musicians' view of music is narrowed by their relation to it, as composers and performers. (I admit gratefully that I met some classical musicians who had a broader view of music, like the world-class pianist who assured me that I was a musician; he had no patience with the view that you had to be a virtuoso to qualify.)

When I was writing poetry, I learned to think about it as form and technique, but even so, I showed new poems not only to English majors, but to people who "don't know anything about poetry." Of course I hoped that trained readers would like what I was doing, but if it didn't work on the immediate sensual level, if a non-English student couldn't read it and get something out of it, I didn't consider it a success. Technique -- meter, rhythm, sound, form -- are important, but there's no reason why a non-poet should care about them.

On the other hand, I think that everyone should get some sense of how to write a poem, to write a piece of music, to play an instrument, to dance. It's like sports, really. Some people may think that children should learn to play basketball just on the off chance that they might grow up to be Michael Jordan; but the elite players will be better off, and I think happier, if the audience understands what they're doing, even if they can't play at that level themselves. Ditto for the arts: an artist needs a knowledgeable audience. Besides, making art is often a pleasure, even if you aren't a genius. Making music is intensely pleasurable, though like anything it can become an ordeal if it's turned into competition.

We tend to forget that European art music was primarily popular music for a lay audience, many of whom could nevertheless sing a little, play a bit of violin or flute or pianoforte. (Around the time Amadeus was fairly new and much-discussed, I had a strange conversation with a graduate student in European history who didn't know that in Mozart's day there were many composers, most of whom were forgotten in a generation except maybe by the churches or small orchestras where they'd played -- just as every small American town in the 60s had its own garage band, some of which recorded forgettable singles, a few of which had regional hits, and a very few went national. He really seemed to think that there were only about half a dozen composers in all of Europe, and most of them were in Vienna.) When Verdi died, for example, he got a state funeral, with thousands of people lining the streets and the best singers in Italy vying to sing in his funeral mass. There were always musicians (late Beethoven is one example, I think) who wanted to follow the internal logic of the music in their head, and to Hell with the listener. I think people should be free to make any kind of music they like, but I also have little patience when they complain that nobody else likes it.

Worse, though, is my friend's contempt -- I think there's no other word for it -- for the associations that non-professionals form around music they love. (This was also a sign that something was wrong with Daniel Harris's dismissal of the Names Project, the AIDS quilt, as "kitsch.") I'll leave aside the vexed question of 'pure' music that "is 'about' nothing at all," though I disagree that there is such a thing; I just don't think it's bad to like music that is 'about something,' even if it has terrible, maudlin lyrics and is sappy, sloppy, or syrupy. Sure, playing a Bach sarabande would have pleased the pianist, but the husband asked for a specific song because it had personal meaning for him and his wife, while the sarabande would have had none.

As a musician who doesn't play arenas and so has face-to-face interaction with audiences and their requests, I know very well how it feels to be asked to play a song you consider "worthless," but that's something every performer has to come to terms with. In his (unfortunately titled) book How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, the writer and folk-pop musician Elijah Wald spent a lot of time on this matter: how many musicians for a mix of reasons preferred to make music people couldn't dance to, for instance, or without tunes that people might hum on the way home. (Me, I've never been happier than when people heard my music and wanted to get up and dance, so I'm biased there. But I also like music that doesn't make me want to dance; I don't think I have to choose between the two.) As usual in these elite vs. masses conflicts, there are contradictions: the masses dislike my art because they're stupid, and only an artistic whore would pander to them, but I have a right to demand that the public support me so I can make my art and commune artistically with God. But if they began to like me, that wouldn't mean their taste had miraculously improved, it would mean that my art was no good after all.

I should mention that I don't demand instant accessibility from art myself: among the composers whose work I like are some fairly difficult, even forbidding types like Penderecki, Webern, Ligeti, and Messaien. It's possible that I like their music for the wrong reason, because I get pleasure from listening to it, and pleasure is as suspect in some artistic circles as it in some religious ones. (The idea is to disassociate art from the human body: from rhythms that stir us, from anything that might produce physical reactions like tears, laughter, or erotic arousal.) Certainly I don't claim to understand what they are trying to do technically, but I don't think it's necessary to understand the music technically to enjoy it, and I believe that the enjoyment by itself is enough.

If I want to play only music that I like, I can do that at home. (As a blogger, I write to please myself, but I also hope to communicate with someone out there.) If I want to perform, I need to meet my audience halfway; if I'm getting paid to perform, I will probably have to go more than halfway. The audience should never forget that there's a human being up there playing for them, either. But much of the point of performing in public is that mysterious interaction between performer and listener, a relationship you can't get from recorded music or playing solely for yourself: when you can feel that the audience is feeling what you hoped they'd feel. To use an analogy I've often thought of in this connection: masturbation is perfectly fine, but it's not the same as touching another person's body.

Replying to my friend's remarks, I said that the ox sees the plow differently than the farmer does. Like it or not (and few of us are compelled to be artists), the artist is the ox.