Premature Exaltation

I don't feel much like writing tonight, or doing anything much tonight for that matter, probably because I have too much I need to do.

But anyway, President Obama apparently delivered a campaign speech the other day that has his fans all aflutter. Steve Kornacki was so worked up that he posted two pieces on Salon, Monday's "What a president with a strong hand sounds like," and today's "The evolution of a populist." Robert Reich chimed in with "The Obama we've been waiting for."

Understand, what got them all hot and bothered was a speech, not any kind of action. You would think that they'd know better: Obama has talked tough before, usually when an election was involved, and each time retreated to his centrist Fortress of Solitude as soon as the votes were in -- except to scold the insufficiently loyal among Democratic voters.

Reich's piece might just be the worst of the three.

Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008. Since then we’ve had a president who has only reluctantly stood up to the moneyed interests Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin stood up to.

Hopefully Obama will carry this message through 2012, and gain a mandate to use his second term to take on the growing inequities and game-rigging practices that have been undermining the American economy and American democracy for years.

"Hopefully"? I think "hope" and its derivatives have pretty much lost their luster over the past two and a half years. The notion of a mandate is interesting too: Obama had a mandate in 2008, but he pissed it away. And let's not forget, as both these writers seem to have done, that simply securing a second term for Obama is not going to solve his political problems: the Democrats will also have to regain control of Congress. It could happen, but I don't see it happening unless the economy improves dramatically in the next year.

Kornacki was dishing out the same swill, though.

Apparently, Democrats in the Senate will soon call for a vote on a tweaked extension plan, one that would impose a smaller surcharge on millionaires and make up the difference with an assortment of revenue enhancers that Republicans have previously backed. Maybe this will attract more Republican support; but even if it doesn’t, Democrats are making it clear they’ll keep pressing their case through the end of the year if need be. This is a new phenomenon in the 112th Congress: Obama and his party seem to have the upper hand — and they know it.

We've heard this sort of thing before. I'm not persuaded, let alone convinced.

In a way, Obama is still playing uniter-in-chief. But instead of trying to coax Capitol Hill Republicans into compromise, he’s now more interested in rallying the 99 percent against them.

Oh, really? And how do you think he's going to do that? A good many of the 99 percent have learned to distrust Obama the hard way, through his betrayal -- whether by design or through incompetence -- and it's going to be very difficult for him to win them back. Even if we don't blame him for the Republicans' successful intransigence, why should we believe that he'll be any more effective against it in his second term?

As Ari Berman wrote at The Nation,

That will entail, however, a shift not only in rhetoric, but also in policy for a party and president that has too often been seen as prioritizing Wall Street over Main Street. Nor is it realistic to think that the Obama campaign will suddenly win over disaffected former supporters with a series of speeches. Indeed, Occupy Wall Street is aimed as much at the president and the rigged political system in Washington as it is at the nation’s largest banks. As one OWS leader told New York magazine: “These [protesters] aren’t out here because they’re offended that they haven’t been spoken to nicely. They’re out here because they owe shitloads of money in student-loan debt and can’t find a job. Or they can’t afford their mortgage. And if Obama thinks that they’re gonna be able to divert this energy by talking about doing something, he’s got another think coming.”

Obama may not be able to divert the attention of the mass of the population by talking about doing something, but the ploy clearly works on Democratic pundits.

Kornacki also posted a piece today about Rush Limbaugh and his "crush" on Newt Gingrich. Kornacki is really not in a position to cast the first stone.

Incidentally, Obama kicked off his new populist offensive with a decisive move against the People, or at least 51% of them: his Secretary of Health and Human Services overruled an FDA decision to allow emergency contraception to be sold on pharmacy shelves, and without prescription to women under 17. And if you think that one of his Team of Rivals went sneaking behind his back and violated his wishes, Obama has confirmed that, while he was not "involved," he supports the decision:

President Obama said today that “as the father of two daughters,” he supports his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of the Plan B “morning after” birth control pill to girls under 17 years of age.

Which is not exactly surprising: Obama's the guy who joked that if some guy makes a pass at his daughters, he'll take him (and probably his whole family too) out with a predator drone.

This lends support to Katha Pollitt's concern that he will "yield to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which has lobbied fiercely for a broad religious exemption from new federal regulations requiring health insurance to cover birth control with no co-pays—one of the more popular elements of Obama’s healthcare reform package. Talk about the 1 percent and the 99 percent."

Premature Exaltation

I don't feel much like writing tonight, or doing anything much tonight for that matter, probably because I have too much I need to do.

But anyway, President Obama apparently delivered a campaign speech the other day that has his fans all aflutter. Steve Kornacki was so worked up that he posted two pieces on Salon, Monday's "What a president with a strong hand sounds like," and today's "The evolution of a populist." Robert Reich chimed in with "The Obama we've been waiting for."

Understand, what got them all hot and bothered was a speech, not any kind of action. You would think that they'd know better: Obama has talked tough before, usually when an election was involved, and each time retreated to his centrist Fortress of Solitude as soon as the votes were in -- except to scold the insufficiently loyal among Democratic voters.

Reich's piece might just be the worst of the three.

Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008. Since then we’ve had a president who has only reluctantly stood up to the moneyed interests Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin stood up to.

Hopefully Obama will carry this message through 2012, and gain a mandate to use his second term to take on the growing inequities and game-rigging practices that have been undermining the American economy and American democracy for years.

"Hopefully"? I think "hope" and its derivatives have pretty much lost their luster over the past two and a half years. The notion of a mandate is interesting too: Obama had a mandate in 2008, but he pissed it away. And let's not forget, as both these writers seem to have done, that simply securing a second term for Obama is not going to solve his political problems: the Democrats will also have to regain control of Congress. It could happen, but I don't see it happening unless the economy improves dramatically in the next year.

Kornacki was dishing out the same swill, though.

Apparently, Democrats in the Senate will soon call for a vote on a tweaked extension plan, one that would impose a smaller surcharge on millionaires and make up the difference with an assortment of revenue enhancers that Republicans have previously backed. Maybe this will attract more Republican support; but even if it doesn’t, Democrats are making it clear they’ll keep pressing their case through the end of the year if need be. This is a new phenomenon in the 112th Congress: Obama and his party seem to have the upper hand — and they know it.

We've heard this sort of thing before. I'm not persuaded, let alone convinced.

In a way, Obama is still playing uniter-in-chief. But instead of trying to coax Capitol Hill Republicans into compromise, he’s now more interested in rallying the 99 percent against them.

Oh, really? And how do you think he's going to do that? A good many of the 99 percent have learned to distrust Obama the hard way, through his betrayal -- whether by design or through incompetence -- and it's going to be very difficult for him to win them back. Even if we don't blame him for the Republicans' successful intransigence, why should we believe that he'll be any more effective against it in his second term?

As Ari Berman wrote at The Nation,

That will entail, however, a shift not only in rhetoric, but also in policy for a party and president that has too often been seen as prioritizing Wall Street over Main Street. Nor is it realistic to think that the Obama campaign will suddenly win over disaffected former supporters with a series of speeches. Indeed, Occupy Wall Street is aimed as much at the president and the rigged political system in Washington as it is at the nation’s largest banks. As one OWS leader told New York magazine: “These [protesters] aren’t out here because they’re offended that they haven’t been spoken to nicely. They’re out here because they owe shitloads of money in student-loan debt and can’t find a job. Or they can’t afford their mortgage. And if Obama thinks that they’re gonna be able to divert this energy by talking about doing something, he’s got another think coming.”

Obama may not be able to divert the attention of the mass of the population by talking about doing something, but the ploy clearly works on Democratic pundits.

Kornacki also posted a piece today about Rush Limbaugh and his "crush" on Newt Gingrich. Kornacki is really not in a position to cast the first stone.

Incidentally, Obama kicked off his new populist offensive with a decisive move against the People, or at least 51% of them: his Secretary of Health and Human Services overruled an FDA decision to allow emergency contraception to be sold on pharmacy shelves, and without prescription to women under 17. And if you think that one of his Team of Rivals went sneaking behind his back and violated his wishes, Obama has confirmed that, while he was not "involved," he supports the decision:

President Obama said today that “as the father of two daughters,” he supports his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of the Plan B “morning after” birth control pill to girls under 17 years of age.

Which is not exactly surprising: Obama's the guy who joked that if some guy makes a pass at his daughters, he'll take him (and probably his whole family too) out with a predator drone.

This lends support to Katha Pollitt's concern that he will "yield to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which has lobbied fiercely for a broad religious exemption from new federal regulations requiring health insurance to cover birth control with no co-pays—one of the more popular elements of Obama’s healthcare reform package. Talk about the 1 percent and the 99 percent."

How Are the Pollitt Fallen

Oh, dear; this is very sad. And painful to watch.

Katha Pollitt's latest column in The Nation is one more painful exhibit of the damage that the Obama administration, following hard on eight years of Bush-Cheney, has done to liberal brain cells. Could it get much worse? I fear it will.

During the Clinton years, Pollitt delivered a series of attacks on the man's policies, especially where women's issues were concerned, while most mainstream feminists were still fawning on him, hoping for access, invitations to the White House, recognition and respect. (A lot of those columns can be found in Subject to Debate [The Modern Library, 2001].) Not all were fooled -- I still treasure this ringing denunciation of Clinton and Gore and Leiberman by Barbara Ehrenreich, for example -- but Pollitt was one of those who most steadfastly resisted the Clinton allure.

Still, Pollitt was one who took Bush's accession really hard; I remember how dispirited, even despairing, her columns from early 2001 were. She recovered, though, and was doing all right until Barack Obama came along, causing an embarrassing relapse as she tried to persuade herself and others that this guy was different, and that "An Obama victory could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." (Ehrenreich also fell for the Obama shuck.) Pollitt even sank to dissing Cindy McCain's looks, a sexist move she'd properly have savaged anyone else for doing. She rallied briefly, criticizing Obama's support for "faith-based" initiatives, which suggests that anti-religion had come to trump even feminism for her. But before long she was flailing desperately away at a Naomi Klein column that once would have been easy meat for her, trying to defend Obama but bereft of anything to defend him with. Except Hilda Solis, who's looking lonelier and lonelier these days in that hornet's nest of DLCers we call the White House.

But today, ah, today, she declared her support for the Senate "health reform" bill in terms of political and even moral exhaustion. We feminists caved in and let you Democrats turn the bill into "a major blow against abortion rights." So don't accuse us of political purity! (That's what Pollitt accuses others of, we who sit in our cabins on Mount Disdain and sneer cruelly at the true believers.) We are team players! It's those Republicans who are the purists! And they don't play fair! So now, "The way I see it, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration owe supporters of women's rights a huge payback for cooperating on its signature issue." She provides a wish list. Item: "Full funding for Title X. ..." Item: "Full speed ahead on the Paycheck Fairness Act. ..." Item: "Confront maternal mortality. ..." Item: Ratify "the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women." Item: "Fully fund the Violence Against Women Act ..." Finally, she gets so het up she lets loose a dainty semi-expletive: "Speaking of violence against women, Dems, would you look in the effing mirror?" Whoa there, little lady! Don't let your emotions get the better of you. Better sit down. Would you like a glass of water?

I am not saying this to derogate Pollitt's concerns; I agree with her priorities and demands completely. I'm simply unable to believe that she thinks anyone in the Democrat Party is going to listen to her. This is not the first time that writers at The Nation have issued fatwas to the Democrats, or to Obama himself (Pollitt signed her name to that one too, as did Ehrenreich). You can see how much they've achieved. They don't seem to have noticed that not only is the rest of the left laughing at them, so are the Democrats and particularly the White House.

It's not for me to say what Pollitt should do. This is not an open letter from a formerly devoted reader, begging her to listen to the voices of the people who lifted her to an editorship at The Nation and urging her to return to the core values that made her one of the reasons I kept my subscription going longer than I should have. Nor is it a long-distance poultice, telling her that I feel her pain. I really don't know what it is, except maybe my own cry of pain at seeing a very intelligent woman stuck in an abusive relationship with a rotten politician. Only she can extricate herself from it, though.

How Are the Pollitt Fallen

Oh, dear; this is very sad. And painful to watch.

Katha Pollitt's latest column in The Nation is one more painful exhibit of the damage that the Obama administration, following hard on eight years of Bush-Cheney, has done to liberal brain cells. Could it get much worse? I fear it will.

During the Clinton years, Pollitt delivered a series of attacks on the man's policies, especially where women's issues were concerned, while most mainstream feminists were still fawning on him, hoping for access, invitations to the White House, recognition and respect. (A lot of those columns can be found in Subject to Debate [The Modern Library, 2001].) Not all were fooled -- I still treasure this ringing denunciation of Clinton and Gore and Leiberman by Barbara Ehrenreich, for example -- but Pollitt was one of those who most steadfastly resisted the Clinton allure.

Still, Pollitt was one who took Bush's accession really hard; I remember how dispirited, even despairing, her columns from early 2001 were. She recovered, though, and was doing all right until Barack Obama came along, causing an embarrassing relapse as she tried to persuade herself and others that this guy was different, and that "An Obama victory could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." (Ehrenreich also fell for the Obama shuck.) Pollitt even sank to dissing Cindy McCain's looks, a sexist move she'd properly have savaged anyone else for doing. She rallied briefly, criticizing Obama's support for "faith-based" initiatives, which suggests that anti-religion had come to trump even feminism for her. But before long she was flailing desperately away at a Naomi Klein column that once would have been easy meat for her, trying to defend Obama but bereft of anything to defend him with. Except Hilda Solis, who's looking lonelier and lonelier these days in that hornet's nest of DLCers we call the White House.

But today, ah, today, she declared her support for the Senate "health reform" bill in terms of political and even moral exhaustion. We feminists caved in and let you Democrats turn the bill into "a major blow against abortion rights." So don't accuse us of political purity! (That's what Pollitt accuses others of, we who sit in our cabins on Mount Disdain and sneer cruelly at the true believers.) We are team players! It's those Republicans who are the purists! And they don't play fair! So now, "The way I see it, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration owe supporters of women's rights a huge payback for cooperating on its signature issue." She provides a wish list. Item: "Full funding for Title X. ..." Item: "Full speed ahead on the Paycheck Fairness Act. ..." Item: "Confront maternal mortality. ..." Item: Ratify "the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women." Item: "Fully fund the Violence Against Women Act ..." Finally, she gets so het up she lets loose a dainty semi-expletive: "Speaking of violence against women, Dems, would you look in the effing mirror?" Whoa there, little lady! Don't let your emotions get the better of you. Better sit down. Would you like a glass of water?

I am not saying this to derogate Pollitt's concerns; I agree with her priorities and demands completely. I'm simply unable to believe that she thinks anyone in the Democrat Party is going to listen to her. This is not the first time that writers at The Nation have issued fatwas to the Democrats, or to Obama himself (Pollitt signed her name to that one too, as did Ehrenreich). You can see how much they've achieved. They don't seem to have noticed that not only is the rest of the left laughing at them, so are the Democrats and particularly the White House.

It's not for me to say what Pollitt should do. This is not an open letter from a formerly devoted reader, begging her to listen to the voices of the people who lifted her to an editorship at The Nation and urging her to return to the core values that made her one of the reasons I kept my subscription going longer than I should have. Nor is it a long-distance poultice, telling her that I feel her pain. I really don't know what it is, except maybe my own cry of pain at seeing a very intelligent woman stuck in an abusive relationship with a rotten politician. Only she can extricate herself from it, though.

But Mom! All the Other Kids Are Going to School in Thongs!

Katha Pollitt has a good column at The Nation about the supposed Second Wave / Third Wave rift in feminism, between the supposedly sexless hippie chicks of the Second Wave and their supposedly riot grrls-gone-wild Third Wave daughters.

This division only holds up in a few cases, if at all, like Katie Roiphe and her mother Anne. In general, as Pollitt says,

it's chronologically off. If second wavers are those who made the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and '70s, they are not the mothers of today's young feminists but their grandmothers. ... The wave construct obscures the perspective of women ten or even twenty years younger, like, um, me--in 1966, when NOW was founded, I was a junior in high school--or Susan Faludi (b. 1959), bell hooks (b. 1952) or Anna Quindlen (b. 1952).

The same thing happens at the other end. "Third wave" was indeed intended to define a new generation--it was coined by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's daughter--in 1992. The original third wavers, with their reclaiming of "girl culture" and their commitment to the intersectionality of race, class and gender are now touching 40; they hung up their Hello Kitty backpacks some time ago. Many, like Walker, have children: they are the mothers who, today's "young feminists" complain, use up all the air in the room, according to Nation writer Nona Willis Aronowitz. But the term continues to be used to describe each latest crop of feminists--loosely defined as any female with more political awareness than a Bratz doll--and to portray them in terms of their rejection of second wavers, who are supposedly starchy and censorious. Like moms. Somebody's mom, anyway.

Good stuff, and worth reading in its entirety. It reminded me, first, of similar confusion I've encountered about the gay movement. "Back in your generation, they were all activists!" some younger gays have told me. Not by a hell of a sight, unfortunately. I suppose it's not surprising that people believe such things, since by definition the people who turn up in old video clips about Gay Liberation were activists; and those who don't, though not all were closeted, are invisible. But the movement was the tip of the iceberg of queers in America, and I think that's still true, though probably the gay marriage issue has gotten more of us involved than ever before.

Pollitt's remarks also reminded me of this bit from a 1979 article by Joanna Russ, which I think supplements Pollitt's arguments nicely. It's this dynamic that the media try to exploit with the Second Wave / Third Wave trope:

Every women’s studies teacher, for example, knows the female student who comes into her office and announces defiantly that she’s going to get married – the world is still full of girls who think that heterosexual alliances with men represent a form of rebellion against sexless Mommy. How do these young women imagine their mothers ended up where they were? Yet the hope persists that heterosexual activity (a little wilder than stuffy Mom’s) will provide access to the men’s freer, wider world. Mother’s function as the forewoman who polices Daughter’s sexuality, in many American families, gives some color to this notion – that an alliance with men is an alliance against Mother – and yet these girls must have at least the suspicion that Mom made the same bargain. And surely they know that heterosexual alliance can’t confer membership in the men’s world but only a place (Mother’s place, in fact) on the sidelines. But they don’t. And so they end up married, leading the same life as Mother, or – if unlucky – a worse one with less bargaining power. And their daughters repeat the process.

(From her review of Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur, reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen [University of Liverpool Press, 2007], page 162.)

But Mom! All the Other Kids Are Going to School in Thongs!

Katha Pollitt has a good column at The Nation about the supposed Second Wave / Third Wave rift in feminism, between the supposedly sexless hippie chicks of the Second Wave and their supposedly riot grrls-gone-wild Third Wave daughters.

This division only holds up in a few cases, if at all, like Katie Roiphe and her mother Anne. In general, as Pollitt says,

it's chronologically off. If second wavers are those who made the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and '70s, they are not the mothers of today's young feminists but their grandmothers. ... The wave construct obscures the perspective of women ten or even twenty years younger, like, um, me--in 1966, when NOW was founded, I was a junior in high school--or Susan Faludi (b. 1959), bell hooks (b. 1952) or Anna Quindlen (b. 1952).

The same thing happens at the other end. "Third wave" was indeed intended to define a new generation--it was coined by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's daughter--in 1992. The original third wavers, with their reclaiming of "girl culture" and their commitment to the intersectionality of race, class and gender are now touching 40; they hung up their Hello Kitty backpacks some time ago. Many, like Walker, have children: they are the mothers who, today's "young feminists" complain, use up all the air in the room, according to Nation writer Nona Willis Aronowitz. But the term continues to be used to describe each latest crop of feminists--loosely defined as any female with more political awareness than a Bratz doll--and to portray them in terms of their rejection of second wavers, who are supposedly starchy and censorious. Like moms. Somebody's mom, anyway.

Good stuff, and worth reading in its entirety. It reminded me, first, of similar confusion I've encountered about the gay movement. "Back in your generation, they were all activists!" some younger gays have told me. Not by a hell of a sight, unfortunately. I suppose it's not surprising that people believe such things, since by definition the people who turn up in old video clips about Gay Liberation were activists; and those who don't, though not all were closeted, are invisible. But the movement was the tip of the iceberg of queers in America, and I think that's still true, though probably the gay marriage issue has gotten more of us involved than ever before.

Pollitt's remarks also reminded me of this bit from a 1979 article by Joanna Russ, which I think supplements Pollitt's arguments nicely. It's this dynamic that the media try to exploit with the Second Wave / Third Wave trope:

Every women’s studies teacher, for example, knows the female student who comes into her office and announces defiantly that she’s going to get married – the world is still full of girls who think that heterosexual alliances with men represent a form of rebellion against sexless Mommy. How do these young women imagine their mothers ended up where they were? Yet the hope persists that heterosexual activity (a little wilder than stuffy Mom’s) will provide access to the men’s freer, wider world. Mother’s function as the forewoman who polices Daughter’s sexuality, in many American families, gives some color to this notion – that an alliance with men is an alliance against Mother – and yet these girls must have at least the suspicion that Mom made the same bargain. And surely they know that heterosexual alliance can’t confer membership in the men’s world but only a place (Mother’s place, in fact) on the sidelines. But they don’t. And so they end up married, leading the same life as Mother, or – if unlucky – a worse one with less bargaining power. And their daughters repeat the process.

(From her review of Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur, reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen [University of Liverpool Press, 2007], page 162.)

Hope-alicious

Naomi Klein's column in the latest Nation, "A Lexicon of Disappointment," indicates that satire isn't one of her strengths. As the title suggests, it's basically a list of terms based on the root of "hope": hopeover, hopesick, etc. Not one of her better efforts.

To add to the fun, Klein's piece gave Katha Pollitt an opening for a blog post in defense / support of her guy. "All is not well in Obamafanland," Klein wrote. A "growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard." I think Pollitt strategically misread Klein:

I have a lot of respect for Naomi Klein, but I think her own hopes for a mass radical movement are getting in the way here. According to polls, after all, Obama is wildly popular. A Harris Interactive poll released on April 7 found that 68% of Americans have a good opinion of him. That doesn't necessarily mean they approve of everything he's doing, but it means that a heck of a lot of people who didn't vote for him like him now. Is there any evidence that "a growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard"? And by the way, did anyone over the age of 21 ever really believe this? That hope, an emotion, was going to "save the world," the way children clapping their hands saves Tinkerbell? Are Americans really such idiots? Hmmm, better not answer that.

It seems Pollitt realizes she wrote herself into a corner here. Did anyone over the age of 21 believe that faith in Obama would save the world? Well, yeah, though I'll concede that that belief seems to have been concentrated among the younger voters, the ones who got their first taste of electoral politics working for Barack. Like the student I quoted here, who said "For me, I think it's the idea of change ...", though maybe she doesn't actually expect real change to happen. Or the people in this video with their wishlists that Santa Obama was supposed to consult when he filled their stockings. Or the student who, confronted with Obama's actual positions during the campaign, told me that that he needed to have hope, and if he couldn’t have faith in Obama he might as well not vote at all.

Naomi and I must talk to different people. For example, I don't know anyone as stupid as the hopefiendish "Joe" who "actually believes Obama deliberately brought in Summers so that he would blow the bailout, and then Obama would have the excuse he needs to do what he really wants: nationalize the banks and turn them into credit unions." Think what you're saying, Joe! Had Obama intentionally put in someone he knew would fail, he would not only be a clairvoyant and a psychopath-- callously indifferent to the ruin of possibly millions of people-- he'd also be risking political suicide. Because had he first chosen a course he knew would fail he would not have the political capital to "what he really wants."

One commenter, beingalam at 04/20/2009 @ 8:18pm, responded neatly:

Note that hypothetical "Joe"'s reasoning is really not all that different from the "Obama is appointing establishment moderates to cabinet positions so that he can, under cover of establishment authority, really pursue an aggressively progressive agenda" line that was pushed by many liberal commentators when Obama was announcing his cabinet nominees. So I'm not sure that Klein is really all that off in terms of the characterization of Joe.

I agree, although "moderates" doesn't really describe Geithner, Summers, Gates, or Clinton. Maybe Klein's rather hamhanded attempt at satire failed to register on Pollitt's irony meter, or maybe being an Obama supporter has turned her irony meter off. She went on to finger the real culprits:

The only people I've found who've given up on him, who feel betrayed, misled, and foolish, are those leftists who didn't like him in the first place and voted for him in a weak moment as the lesser evil. They, predictably, went back to their cabins on Mt. Disdain before Obama had even been inaugurated.

This may be true among the people Pollitt knows, but it isn't always true. I voted for Obama as the lesser evil, but I don't feel betrayed, misled, or foolish; I knew exactly what I was voting for, but did so anyway so that Obama fans couldn't attack me as a Republican or a vote-waster when I criticized him. (And maybe we were right about Obama to begin with, unlike so many Obama fans?) Perhaps Pollitt is thinking of someone like Glenn Greenwald, who's become increasingly critical of Obama's embrace of Bush administration rationales for executive secrecy and arrogation of powers:

It is becoming increasingly difficult for honest Obama supporters to dismiss away or even minimize these criticisms and, especially, to malign the motives of critics. After all, the Obama DOJ's embrace of many (though by no means all) of the most radical and extremist Bush/Cheney positions -- and the contradictions between Obama's campaign claims and his actions as President -- are now so glaring and severe that the harshest denunciations of Obama's actions are coming from those who, during the Bush years, were held up by liberals and by Obama supporters as the most trustworthy and praiseworthy authorities on these matters.

As examples, Greenwald goes on to list the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Keith Olbermann, Senator Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi, and libblogger Digby, among others. No doubt Pollitt will manage to malign their motives; but maybe she just needs to get out more.
Pollitt protests:

Like everyone, I'm worried about the bailout, Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm appalled that he envisions no prosecution of those who set up the legal framework of torture and those who carried it out. And what about Bagram? On the plus side: he's been terrific on women's rights and reproductive rights here and abroad, made some excellent appointments (Hilda Solis at Labor), reached out to the Muslim world, opened communications with Cuba and Iran, said he'll close Guantanamo, declared an end to torture, and, with the stimulus, successfully challenged the notion that government spending (except on the military) is bad. He's made it less embarrassing to be an American. I think he'll make good judicial appointments. If another Katrina happened tomorrow, I think he'd handle it well.

I couldn't help noticing that the only "excellent appointment" Pollitt could name was Hilda Solis, who was indeed an excellent choice, but who stands out like a sore thumb in his Cabinet among the Bush holdovers and Democratic Leadership Council hacks. And it appears that Obama's support for labor ends with having appointed Solis; he seems to have lost interest in the Employee Free Choice Act, for example. Yes, Obama has done well on women's rights and reproductive rights here and abroad, though I think "terrific" is a slight overstatement. But Pollitt's other points aren't terribly convincing: they are mostly symbolic gestures ("said he'll close Guantanamo"and "declared an end to torture" while leaving other torture sites intact; "reached out to the Muslim world" while continuing to kill Muslim civilians; his openings to Cuba and Iran have been half-hearted at best, still laden with his predecessors' propaganda. As Mike Whitney wrote at Counterpunch yesterday:

Foreign leaders are clearly relieved to see the last of George W. Bush, and they appear to be willing to give Obama every opportunity to mend fences and break with the past. But Obama has made little effort to reciprocate or show that he's serious about real change. The emphasis seems to be more on public relations than policy; more on glitzy photo ops, grandiose speeches and gadding about from one capital to another, than ending the chronic US meddling and militarism. Where's the beef or is it all just empty posturing?

Dude! Barack totally shook hands with Hugo Chávez! Is that change, or what? ... "Less embarrassing to be an American" is still embarrassing. I remember the early 90s, when Pollitt lay into liberals who were excited by Bill Clinton's every burp; but if she was a Clinton partisan, she managed to hide it better then. Pointing to Obama's great poll numbers, fixating on the single token liberal in his cabinet, celebrating his symbolic send-a-message reach-out-and-touch-someone gestures -- these are not strong responses to Klein, especially granting how easy Klein made it for her.

Last summer Pollitt wrote hopefully, "An Obama victory could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." Now she's reduced to insisting that he was the lesser evil, and scolding those on the left who aren't satisfied by him: "FDR didn't satisfy the left either," she sniffs. Be glad for what you have, Glenn and Digby and Russ and Noam! Surely, comrades, you do not want Bush back?

Hope-alicious

Naomi Klein's column in the latest Nation, "A Lexicon of Disappointment," indicates that satire isn't one of her strengths. As the title suggests, it's basically a list of terms based on the root of "hope": hopeover, hopesick, etc. Not one of her better efforts.

To add to the fun, Klein's piece gave Katha Pollitt an opening for a blog post in defense / support of her guy. "All is not well in Obamafanland," Klein wrote. A "growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard." I think Pollitt strategically misread Klein:

I have a lot of respect for Naomi Klein, but I think her own hopes for a mass radical movement are getting in the way here. According to polls, after all, Obama is wildly popular. A Harris Interactive poll released on April 7 found that 68% of Americans have a good opinion of him. That doesn't necessarily mean they approve of everything he's doing, but it means that a heck of a lot of people who didn't vote for him like him now. Is there any evidence that "a growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard"? And by the way, did anyone over the age of 21 ever really believe this? That hope, an emotion, was going to "save the world," the way children clapping their hands saves Tinkerbell? Are Americans really such idiots? Hmmm, better not answer that.

It seems Pollitt realizes she wrote herself into a corner here. Did anyone over the age of 21 believe that faith in Obama would save the world? Well, yeah, though I'll concede that that belief seems to have been concentrated among the younger voters, the ones who got their first taste of electoral politics working for Barack. Like the student I quoted here, who said "For me, I think it's the idea of change ...", though maybe she doesn't actually expect real change to happen. Or the people in this video with their wishlists that Santa Obama was supposed to consult when he filled their stockings. Or the student who, confronted with Obama's actual positions during the campaign, told me that that he needed to have hope, and if he couldn’t have faith in Obama he might as well not vote at all.

Naomi and I must talk to different people. For example, I don't know anyone as stupid as the hopefiendish "Joe" who "actually believes Obama deliberately brought in Summers so that he would blow the bailout, and then Obama would have the excuse he needs to do what he really wants: nationalize the banks and turn them into credit unions." Think what you're saying, Joe! Had Obama intentionally put in someone he knew would fail, he would not only be a clairvoyant and a psychopath-- callously indifferent to the ruin of possibly millions of people-- he'd also be risking political suicide. Because had he first chosen a course he knew would fail he would not have the political capital to "what he really wants."

One commenter, beingalam at 04/20/2009 @ 8:18pm, responded neatly:

Note that hypothetical "Joe"'s reasoning is really not all that different from the "Obama is appointing establishment moderates to cabinet positions so that he can, under cover of establishment authority, really pursue an aggressively progressive agenda" line that was pushed by many liberal commentators when Obama was announcing his cabinet nominees. So I'm not sure that Klein is really all that off in terms of the characterization of Joe.

I agree, although "moderates" doesn't really describe Geithner, Summers, Gates, or Clinton. Maybe Klein's rather hamhanded attempt at satire failed to register on Pollitt's irony meter, or maybe being an Obama supporter has turned her irony meter off. She went on to finger the real culprits:

The only people I've found who've given up on him, who feel betrayed, misled, and foolish, are those leftists who didn't like him in the first place and voted for him in a weak moment as the lesser evil. They, predictably, went back to their cabins on Mt. Disdain before Obama had even been inaugurated.

This may be true among the people Pollitt knows, but it isn't always true. I voted for Obama as the lesser evil, but I don't feel betrayed, misled, or foolish; I knew exactly what I was voting for, but did so anyway so that Obama fans couldn't attack me as a Republican or a vote-waster when I criticized him. (And maybe we were right about Obama to begin with, unlike so many Obama fans?) Perhaps Pollitt is thinking of someone like Glenn Greenwald, who's become increasingly critical of Obama's embrace of Bush administration rationales for executive secrecy and arrogation of powers:

It is becoming increasingly difficult for honest Obama supporters to dismiss away or even minimize these criticisms and, especially, to malign the motives of critics. After all, the Obama DOJ's embrace of many (though by no means all) of the most radical and extremist Bush/Cheney positions -- and the contradictions between Obama's campaign claims and his actions as President -- are now so glaring and severe that the harshest denunciations of Obama's actions are coming from those who, during the Bush years, were held up by liberals and by Obama supporters as the most trustworthy and praiseworthy authorities on these matters.

As examples, Greenwald goes on to list the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Keith Olbermann, Senator Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi, and libblogger Digby, among others. No doubt Pollitt will manage to malign their motives; but maybe she just needs to get out more.
Pollitt protests:

Like everyone, I'm worried about the bailout, Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm appalled that he envisions no prosecution of those who set up the legal framework of torture and those who carried it out. And what about Bagram? On the plus side: he's been terrific on women's rights and reproductive rights here and abroad, made some excellent appointments (Hilda Solis at Labor), reached out to the Muslim world, opened communications with Cuba and Iran, said he'll close Guantanamo, declared an end to torture, and, with the stimulus, successfully challenged the notion that government spending (except on the military) is bad. He's made it less embarrassing to be an American. I think he'll make good judicial appointments. If another Katrina happened tomorrow, I think he'd handle it well.

I couldn't help noticing that the only "excellent appointment" Pollitt could name was Hilda Solis, who was indeed an excellent choice, but who stands out like a sore thumb in his Cabinet among the Bush holdovers and Democratic Leadership Council hacks. And it appears that Obama's support for labor ends with having appointed Solis; he seems to have lost interest in the Employee Free Choice Act, for example. Yes, Obama has done well on women's rights and reproductive rights here and abroad, though I think "terrific" is a slight overstatement. But Pollitt's other points aren't terribly convincing: they are mostly symbolic gestures ("said he'll close Guantanamo"and "declared an end to torture" while leaving other torture sites intact; "reached out to the Muslim world" while continuing to kill Muslim civilians; his openings to Cuba and Iran have been half-hearted at best, still laden with his predecessors' propaganda. As Mike Whitney wrote at Counterpunch yesterday:

Foreign leaders are clearly relieved to see the last of George W. Bush, and they appear to be willing to give Obama every opportunity to mend fences and break with the past. But Obama has made little effort to reciprocate or show that he's serious about real change. The emphasis seems to be more on public relations than policy; more on glitzy photo ops, grandiose speeches and gadding about from one capital to another, than ending the chronic US meddling and militarism. Where's the beef or is it all just empty posturing?

Dude! Barack totally shook hands with Hugo Chávez! Is that change, or what? ... "Less embarrassing to be an American" is still embarrassing. I remember the early 90s, when Pollitt lay into liberals who were excited by Bill Clinton's every burp; but if she was a Clinton partisan, she managed to hide it better then. Pointing to Obama's great poll numbers, fixating on the single token liberal in his cabinet, celebrating his symbolic send-a-message reach-out-and-touch-someone gestures -- these are not strong responses to Klein, especially granting how easy Klein made it for her.

Last summer Pollitt wrote hopefully, "An Obama victory could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." Now she's reduced to insisting that he was the lesser evil, and scolding those on the left who aren't satisfied by him: "FDR didn't satisfy the left either," she sniffs. Be glad for what you have, Glenn and Digby and Russ and Noam! Surely, comrades, you do not want Bush back?

Cooperation, Not Obedience

I hadn’t planned to read Nicholson Baker’s new book , Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, but I’m beginning to think I should. Reviewing Human Smoke in the New York Times, Colm Toibin called it “a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified.” “The debate about pacifism”? Where is that going on?

Katha Pollitt began her attack on the book in The Nation by declaring, “By the time I finished the book I felt something I had never felt before: fury at pacifists.” Damn, girl! Before I can judge her reading, I’ll have to read the book, but Pollitt’s wrath is mild compared to the New Republic reviewer, one Anne Applebaum (“a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post” -- not the greatest recommendation nowadays). Applebaum seems to be even more angry at the book’s form, which she uses as a springboard to rant at length on some of her (presumably) personal hobbyhorses, Wikipedia and “the contemporary cult of the non-expert, or rather the anti-expert: the bloggers who assume that the “ ‘mainstream media’ is always wrong, the Wikipedia readers who think that a compilation of random anecdotes is always preferable to a learned study, and of course the college students who nowadays prefer to get their news in emails from friends because it is too bothersome to read a newspaper.” Baker is on record as liking Wikipedia, so he’s fair game I guess.

In a display of typical mainstream media balance, Applebaum allows:

It is true that there are many excellent, well-educated bloggers, whose contributions to public debates are invaluable, and who have served to prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder. At the same time, there are also many bloggers who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the "mainstream media, " or the "conventional histories," simply because they are self-appointed "critics," whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts. The result of their efforts is that quality -- accuracy, truthfulness, learnedness -- is disappearing beneath the sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information.

You know, Applebaum has picked a bad time to trumpet “the establishment institutions” of journalism. During the leadup to the Iraq War, the Washington Post and the New York Times functioned as propaganda arms for the Bush administration. This is not just the gripe of a disaffected anti-expert blogger: the Post and the Times have both admitted as much. And this was nothing new; the corporate media have been coasting on the Post’s Watergate coverage and the Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers for decades now, to cover up their generally craven collaboration with the state. Thanks to the concentration of media ownership which left most American cities with only one major newspaper, conditions have probably worsened since the 1970s, when those last gasps of rebellion took place. But most of the mainstream media’s war coverage, before and since, has consisted precisely of a “sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information”, most of it generated by “experts”: government officials speaking on and off the record, political scientists in the pay of mostly right-leaning think tanks, high-ranking military, and the like. It really is the most sensible course, when faced with mainstream media coverage of important political issues, to treat them with extreme skepticism.

Just for the hell of it, Applebaum lumps Baker in with Dan Brown, author of the dread Da Vinci Code, which I’ll certainly agree is one of the dumbest books I’ve ever read, though I don’t think that’s really Applebaum’s objection to it. What she means by expertise is really authority, the people who somehow know what’s best for us and whom we should obey without question. But why? It’s false to call Brown “anti-expert” – he appeals to an expertise based on conventionally serious scholarship that comes to unorthodox conclusions; his main character is an Ivy League academic, and one of the (inadvertently) funniest moments in that leaden book was when Sir Leigh Teabing impressed protagonist Robert Langdon with his ability to write the entire Hebrew alphabet from memory. (An intellectual feat which any Israeli schoolchild can probably match – it ain’t rocket science.) What enraged so many Roman Catholics about the book was its disrespect for Church authority, which is augmented by but not built on expertise: its scholars and theologians are servants answerable to the church, and with the resurgence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Wojtyla and Ratzinger it’s hardly a radical observation that their expertise is limited by the “establishment institution.”

Brown’s alternative Christian history is bogus, but so is much of the standard version. Outside of Catholicism, credentialed Christian academics who wander too far from mainstream positions can expect to be attacked, viciously and largely inaccurately, by their more conservative and conformist colleagues. One thing that struck me while I was studying early Christianity in the 1980s was how much sheer nonsense a mainstream Bible scholar could publish without real consequences. (Of course, picking each other’s work apart in journal articles is the fun part of being an academic.) Outside of academia, who even cares that a right-wing evangelical like D. James Kennedy publishes outrageous howlers in his apologetics? What counts is that he accepts the authority of orthodoxy. No one complains when a layperson like Anne Rice attacks the expertise of perfessors who don’t think the gospels are historically accurate, because she does so in the context of her return to the Roman Catholic fold, submitting to its authority. (It’s worth remembering that Jesus and the early Christians challenged the religious experts of their day without expertise, relying instead on the charismatic authority of the Spirit. And they were derided for it, dismissed as unlettered and rebellious – which they were. Ironically, the authority of the Church is founded on its founders’ rejection of authority.)

The democratic movements of the 1950s and later, which as Noam Chomsky says terrified rulers in the US and around the world, also refused to defer to duly constituted authority, and rightly so. The Civil Rights movement, for example, defied experts who cautioned against too-rapid change (that is, any substantive change at all) and urged African-Americans to be patient; after all, such people said in the mainstream media, it wasn’t certain that “the Negro” was ready for equal rights. (Male) experts also delineated Woman’s proper place, tut-tutted the crazy notion that homosexuals weren’t sick, and so on. Similar problems turned up during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when straight doctors, mostly ill-informed and often downright bigoted, were challenged by people with AIDS who developed their own expertise. (This example shows another side of the problem, as many AIDS activists were co-opted by the establishment.)

I, of course, belong to the 60s generation that attacked not expertise so much as authority, though some of us did confuse the two, because we’d seen expertise abused so much. Women and gay men challenged the authority of the medical and psychiatric professions to declare us sick and then hold out the offer of “cure.” When women did so, however, they set out to construct their own expertise: Our Bodies, Ourselves didn’t throw out medicine, only pointed out its masculist bias and argued that it should serve women rather than control them. There were psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who questioned the sickness consensus about homosexuality, but they didn’t control the discourse; gay men and lesbians decided that we would decide whose expertise to use.

Experts aren’t always wrong; they aren’t always right either. So how to decide which expert to believe? Applebaum wants laypeople to wait quietly while the professionals duke it out, perhaps assisted by a few exceptional but deferential critics who “prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder.” Professionals generally don’t take well to criticism by outsiders, no matter how well the latter have done their homework; after all, they don’t even take well to criticism by other insiders. They’re much happier if they’re in charge, which is humanly understandable but not acceptable. (See Nina Eliasoph’s Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life [Cambridge, 1998] for an exploration of this problem.)

I can relate somewhat to Applebaum’s distaste for people, not just bloggers, “who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the ‘mainstream media,’ or the ‘conventional histories,’ simply because they are self-appointed ‘critics,’ whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts.” But those people’s skepticism is justified, and again, laypeople who accept authoritative lies and obfuscation are no better, though authorities seldom criticize them. It may be that relatively few people are willing to make the effort necessary for an informed critique; what if anything can be done about that, I don’t know. But I’m sure the answer is not more deference to expertise and authority. We’ve already seen the results of that.

Cooperation, Not Obedience

I hadn’t planned to read Nicholson Baker’s new book , Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, but I’m beginning to think I should. Reviewing Human Smoke in the New York Times, Colm Toibin called it “a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified.” “The debate about pacifism”? Where is that going on?

Katha Pollitt began her attack on the book in The Nation by declaring, “By the time I finished the book I felt something I had never felt before: fury at pacifists.” Damn, girl! Before I can judge her reading, I’ll have to read the book, but Pollitt’s wrath is mild compared to the New Republic reviewer, one Anne Applebaum (“a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post” -- not the greatest recommendation nowadays). Applebaum seems to be even more angry at the book’s form, which she uses as a springboard to rant at length on some of her (presumably) personal hobbyhorses, Wikipedia and “the contemporary cult of the non-expert, or rather the anti-expert: the bloggers who assume that the “ ‘mainstream media’ is always wrong, the Wikipedia readers who think that a compilation of random anecdotes is always preferable to a learned study, and of course the college students who nowadays prefer to get their news in emails from friends because it is too bothersome to read a newspaper.” Baker is on record as liking Wikipedia, so he’s fair game I guess.

In a display of typical mainstream media balance, Applebaum allows:

It is true that there are many excellent, well-educated bloggers, whose contributions to public debates are invaluable, and who have served to prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder. At the same time, there are also many bloggers who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the "mainstream media, " or the "conventional histories," simply because they are self-appointed "critics," whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts. The result of their efforts is that quality -- accuracy, truthfulness, learnedness -- is disappearing beneath the sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information.

You know, Applebaum has picked a bad time to trumpet “the establishment institutions” of journalism. During the leadup to the Iraq War, the Washington Post and the New York Times functioned as propaganda arms for the Bush administration. This is not just the gripe of a disaffected anti-expert blogger: the Post and the Times have both admitted as much. And this was nothing new; the corporate media have been coasting on the Post’s Watergate coverage and the Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers for decades now, to cover up their generally craven collaboration with the state. Thanks to the concentration of media ownership which left most American cities with only one major newspaper, conditions have probably worsened since the 1970s, when those last gasps of rebellion took place. But most of the mainstream media’s war coverage, before and since, has consisted precisely of a “sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information”, most of it generated by “experts”: government officials speaking on and off the record, political scientists in the pay of mostly right-leaning think tanks, high-ranking military, and the like. It really is the most sensible course, when faced with mainstream media coverage of important political issues, to treat them with extreme skepticism.

Just for the hell of it, Applebaum lumps Baker in with Dan Brown, author of the dread Da Vinci Code, which I’ll certainly agree is one of the dumbest books I’ve ever read, though I don’t think that’s really Applebaum’s objection to it. What she means by expertise is really authority, the people who somehow know what’s best for us and whom we should obey without question. But why? It’s false to call Brown “anti-expert” – he appeals to an expertise based on conventionally serious scholarship that comes to unorthodox conclusions; his main character is an Ivy League academic, and one of the (inadvertently) funniest moments in that leaden book was when Sir Leigh Teabing impressed protagonist Robert Langdon with his ability to write the entire Hebrew alphabet from memory. (An intellectual feat which any Israeli schoolchild can probably match – it ain’t rocket science.) What enraged so many Roman Catholics about the book was its disrespect for Church authority, which is augmented by but not built on expertise: its scholars and theologians are servants answerable to the church, and with the resurgence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Wojtyla and Ratzinger it’s hardly a radical observation that their expertise is limited by the “establishment institution.”

Brown’s alternative Christian history is bogus, but so is much of the standard version. Outside of Catholicism, credentialed Christian academics who wander too far from mainstream positions can expect to be attacked, viciously and largely inaccurately, by their more conservative and conformist colleagues. One thing that struck me while I was studying early Christianity in the 1980s was how much sheer nonsense a mainstream Bible scholar could publish without real consequences. (Of course, picking each other’s work apart in journal articles is the fun part of being an academic.) Outside of academia, who even cares that a right-wing evangelical like D. James Kennedy publishes outrageous howlers in his apologetics? What counts is that he accepts the authority of orthodoxy. No one complains when a layperson like Anne Rice attacks the expertise of perfessors who don’t think the gospels are historically accurate, because she does so in the context of her return to the Roman Catholic fold, submitting to its authority. (It’s worth remembering that Jesus and the early Christians challenged the religious experts of their day without expertise, relying instead on the charismatic authority of the Spirit. And they were derided for it, dismissed as unlettered and rebellious – which they were. Ironically, the authority of the Church is founded on its founders’ rejection of authority.)

The democratic movements of the 1950s and later, which as Noam Chomsky says terrified rulers in the US and around the world, also refused to defer to duly constituted authority, and rightly so. The Civil Rights movement, for example, defied experts who cautioned against too-rapid change (that is, any substantive change at all) and urged African-Americans to be patient; after all, such people said in the mainstream media, it wasn’t certain that “the Negro” was ready for equal rights. (Male) experts also delineated Woman’s proper place, tut-tutted the crazy notion that homosexuals weren’t sick, and so on. Similar problems turned up during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when straight doctors, mostly ill-informed and often downright bigoted, were challenged by people with AIDS who developed their own expertise. (This example shows another side of the problem, as many AIDS activists were co-opted by the establishment.)

I, of course, belong to the 60s generation that attacked not expertise so much as authority, though some of us did confuse the two, because we’d seen expertise abused so much. Women and gay men challenged the authority of the medical and psychiatric professions to declare us sick and then hold out the offer of “cure.” When women did so, however, they set out to construct their own expertise: Our Bodies, Ourselves didn’t throw out medicine, only pointed out its masculist bias and argued that it should serve women rather than control them. There were psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who questioned the sickness consensus about homosexuality, but they didn’t control the discourse; gay men and lesbians decided that we would decide whose expertise to use.

Experts aren’t always wrong; they aren’t always right either. So how to decide which expert to believe? Applebaum wants laypeople to wait quietly while the professionals duke it out, perhaps assisted by a few exceptional but deferential critics who “prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder.” Professionals generally don’t take well to criticism by outsiders, no matter how well the latter have done their homework; after all, they don’t even take well to criticism by other insiders. They’re much happier if they’re in charge, which is humanly understandable but not acceptable. (See Nina Eliasoph’s Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life [Cambridge, 1998] for an exploration of this problem.)

I can relate somewhat to Applebaum’s distaste for people, not just bloggers, “who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the ‘mainstream media,’ or the ‘conventional histories,’ simply because they are self-appointed ‘critics,’ whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts.” But those people’s skepticism is justified, and again, laypeople who accept authoritative lies and obfuscation are no better, though authorities seldom criticize them. It may be that relatively few people are willing to make the effort necessary for an informed critique; what if anything can be done about that, I don’t know. But I’m sure the answer is not more deference to expertise and authority. We’ve already seen the results of that.

Katha Comes A Cropper

Oh, dear. I knew that liberal/progressive Democrats’ heads would explode when Nader declared his candidacy once again. I shouldn’t have been surprised when declared Obama partisan Katha Pollitt splattered her brains all over the page in the latest issue of The Nation, but still, it doesn’t make me feel any better to know that I could have predicted it.

Ralph Nader has a perfect right to run for President. And anyway it's hard to imagine that he will have the same effect in 2008 he had in 2000--which, he told Tim Russert, was very little, because the Republicans stole the election, which Gore rightfully won. Be that as it may, we've all had a seven-year crash course in just how much difference there can be between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

I’ve heard this line before. If Al Gore had taken the oath of office on January 20, 2001, there would have been no terrorist attacks on September 11, global warming would have been abolished, the economy would have blossomed and poverty would be no more, Republicans would have seen the error of their ways and become Democrats, the Israel/Palestine conflict would have ended in peace and brotherhood, Saddam Hussein would have resigned and petitioned for Iraq to become our 51^st state, there would be freedom and equality for everybody, and the New Jerusalem would have descended from Heaven to establish itself in Washington D.C. In addition, we would meet a tall, dark stranger and go on a long trip in the coming year.

Nobody knows what would have happened if Gore had become President. But we do know what Clinton-Gore gave us during their tenure: NAFTA (which Pollitt, for some reason, dismisses as a concern of Left Coast elitists, instead of the ordinary citizens who gave Congress to the Republicans in 1994 as payback), DOMA, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (followed by greatly increased numbers of queers ejected from the military), welfare “reform,” the erosion of abortion rights, the blocking of the Kyoto Treaty, the gutting of the National Labor Relations Board, the Telecommunications Decency Act (fortunately overturned by the courts), the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (which increased domestic spying and wiretaps), more prisons, the terror bombing (twice) of Baghdad, the terror campaign in Serbia/Kosovo, a million Iraqis killed by sanctions (but "we think the price is worth it"), thousands more East Timorese killed by Clinton’s continued support for the Indonesian invasion, torture in Latin America and elsewhere, and a vast financial bubble which primarily benefited the already rich while most Americans slogged along, and which popped just in time for Clinton's successor to deal with it. The Clinton/Gore years were not good for most of us, or for the world. Since 2001, the Democrats in Congress have mostly been all too willing to go along with Bush’s worst, and the new day that was supposed to begin after the 2006 elections somehow never dawned, because the Dems were afraid the Republicans would call them bad names if they did anything with the mandate they’d been given.

Pollitt knows all this – she wrote some strong columns criticizing Clinton in the day – but now she seems to have forgotten it. Well, seven years of Dubya have been hard on Democratic brain cells. In the current column she’s making much of the differences between McCain and her guy Obama, which are real enough, but she’s a partisan now, which means she can’t be trusted to admit, or even recognize, her guy’s limitations. I’m worried by his evasive statements on Iraq, his bellicose noises toward Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, his desire to expand the US military. Is his health plan any good? Probably not; remember how badly the Clintons’ health plan, which was essentially a public subsidy for the HMOs, went down in 1993. If Obama has anything better in mind, it will be shot down even more handily, Democratic Congress or not; and if his plan is no better, then we don’t need it.

As for Nader, I’m not a fan or an apologist, and I concede the justice of some of Pollitt’s critique. I don't think Nader will make a dime's worth of difference in 2008, but I may vote for him in November anyway; or maybe I simply won’t vote for President at all -- there are other offices on the ballot, remember. Here in Indiana, it probably will make no difference, the electoral votes will go to McCain. I wish there were a real alternative, but I don’t see one.

P.S. A good piece, saying much the same thing but with less snark, at Counterpunch. Matt Gonzalez, Nader's running mate, weighs in at the same place.

P.P.S. Supporting Obama is already having an effect on Pollitt’s principles, it seems. Was a time when she took down pundits who made fun of (especially older) political women’s appearance, but if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em: “Besides, McCain's not so old that he couldn't get himself a much younger trophy wife, and even if Cindy McCain looks brittle and unhappy and like she hasn't eaten in a decade, she is always there by his side, a visual reminder of his manly prowess.” Before you know it, she’ll be talking about Hillary’s wattles and her unevolved heavy lower body. Well, all’s fair in love and elections.

Katha Comes A Cropper

Oh, dear. I knew that liberal/progressive Democrats’ heads would explode when Nader declared his candidacy once again. I shouldn’t have been surprised when declared Obama partisan Katha Pollitt splattered her brains all over the page in the latest issue of The Nation, but still, it doesn’t make me feel any better to know that I could have predicted it.

Ralph Nader has a perfect right to run for President. And anyway it's hard to imagine that he will have the same effect in 2008 he had in 2000--which, he told Tim Russert, was very little, because the Republicans stole the election, which Gore rightfully won. Be that as it may, we've all had a seven-year crash course in just how much difference there can be between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

I’ve heard this line before. If Al Gore had taken the oath of office on January 20, 2001, there would have been no terrorist attacks on September 11, global warming would have been abolished, the economy would have blossomed and poverty would be no more, Republicans would have seen the error of their ways and become Democrats, the Israel/Palestine conflict would have ended in peace and brotherhood, Saddam Hussein would have resigned and petitioned for Iraq to become our 51^st state, there would be freedom and equality for everybody, and the New Jerusalem would have descended from Heaven to establish itself in Washington D.C. In addition, we would meet a tall, dark stranger and go on a long trip in the coming year.

Nobody knows what would have happened if Gore had become President. But we do know what Clinton-Gore gave us during their tenure: NAFTA (which Pollitt, for some reason, dismisses as a concern of Left Coast elitists, instead of the ordinary citizens who gave Congress to the Republicans in 1994 as payback), DOMA, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (followed by greatly increased numbers of queers ejected from the military), welfare “reform,” the erosion of abortion rights, the blocking of the Kyoto Treaty, the gutting of the National Labor Relations Board, the Telecommunications Decency Act (fortunately overturned by the courts), the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (which increased domestic spying and wiretaps), more prisons, the terror bombing (twice) of Baghdad, the terror campaign in Serbia/Kosovo, a million Iraqis killed by sanctions (but "we think the price is worth it"), thousands more East Timorese killed by Clinton’s continued support for the Indonesian invasion, torture in Latin America and elsewhere, and a vast financial bubble which primarily benefited the already rich while most Americans slogged along, and which popped just in time for Clinton's successor to deal with it. The Clinton/Gore years were not good for most of us, or for the world. Since 2001, the Democrats in Congress have mostly been all too willing to go along with Bush’s worst, and the new day that was supposed to begin after the 2006 elections somehow never dawned, because the Dems were afraid the Republicans would call them bad names if they did anything with the mandate they’d been given.

Pollitt knows all this – she wrote some strong columns criticizing Clinton in the day – but now she seems to have forgotten it. Well, seven years of Dubya have been hard on Democratic brain cells. In the current column she’s making much of the differences between McCain and her guy Obama, which are real enough, but she’s a partisan now, which means she can’t be trusted to admit, or even recognize, her guy’s limitations. I’m worried by his evasive statements on Iraq, his bellicose noises toward Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, his desire to expand the US military. Is his health plan any good? Probably not; remember how badly the Clintons’ health plan, which was essentially a public subsidy for the HMOs, went down in 1993. If Obama has anything better in mind, it will be shot down even more handily, Democratic Congress or not; and if his plan is no better, then we don’t need it.

As for Nader, I’m not a fan or an apologist, and I concede the justice of some of Pollitt’s critique. I don't think Nader will make a dime's worth of difference in 2008, but I may vote for him in November anyway; or maybe I simply won’t vote for President at all -- there are other offices on the ballot, remember. Here in Indiana, it probably will make no difference, the electoral votes will go to McCain. I wish there were a real alternative, but I don’t see one.

P.S. A good piece, saying much the same thing but with less snark, at Counterpunch. Matt Gonzalez, Nader's running mate, weighs in at the same place.

P.P.S. Supporting Obama is already having an effect on Pollitt’s principles, it seems. Was a time when she took down pundits who made fun of (especially older) political women’s appearance, but if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em: “Besides, McCain's not so old that he couldn't get himself a much younger trophy wife, and even if Cindy McCain looks brittle and unhappy and like she hasn't eaten in a decade, she is always there by his side, a visual reminder of his manly prowess.” Before you know it, she’ll be talking about Hillary’s wattles and her unevolved heavy lower body. Well, all’s fair in love and elections.