While our politics is quite nasty and unproductive right now, we would be wrong to think it is an unprecedented moment for small-minded political crankiness.
It's not.
But this doesn't make explaining it any easier. I tried stepping back from the maelstrom and looked for a lead in science at things like Godel's "Incompleteness Theorem" and Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle," but the most accessible scientific thing I could find was some graffiti in a pancake house bathroom in Princeton that said, "Einstein peed here." Then below that it said, "Heisenberg MAY have peed here." That didn't help either.
Finally, going through old government books I rediscovered John C. Calhoun's plan for "Concurrent Majorities." The essence of the concurrent doctrine is that in order to pass law, Congress needed a super majority that consisted of a majority of the majority party and a majority of the minority party.
This raises an important question: What's the point of elections? More important, what's the purpose of representative government?
Nonetheless, the idea of concurrent majorities is always going to find a sympathetic ear from the party in the minority, whether is't the Democrats or the Republicans. While it would perhaps please the minority party, it didn't find support outside Calhoun's South Carolina back then. So, South Carolina introduced the Ordinance of Nullification that stipulated that states could decide what national laws would apply to them and which wouldn't. Again, this may well appeal today in some places; however, it simply failed to become law.
So, America has replaced the Ordinance of Nullification with the filibuster. The advantage of the filibuster is that the support of a state or congressional majority is unnecessary for bringing the Congress to a dead halt. It requires a super majority (60 votsd today--not as tough as Calhoun's plan) to stop a filibuster. The odds of many Democrats agreeing on anything is embarrassingly small. So the minority has decided to use the threat of the filibuster to stop or slow virtually every initiative of consequence before the Congress. It's their right and may be quite a clever technique. But as such, it also runs the risk of confirming that the only place in America where pouting is protected by law is the U.S. Senate.
That's what a filibuster is about most of the time. It is an honored technique because of Jimmy Stewart's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." And, yes, there have been some fine filibusters in life and in the movies.
But the filibuster is the strategy of a spoiled child pouting and threatening to stop anything and everything from happening in Washington because on a straight-up vote they would lose. A filibuster is like Little Lord Fauntleroy holding his breath as a punishment to an adult. As we all know this can only be a very short-term victory, especially if done all the time because one will eventually implode into what is likely to become a dishonorable splat on the Senate floor and on our TV and computer screens.
Why Democrats are so afraid of the filibuster threat is amazing. Even without a filibuster-proof Senate, they still have a bigger majority than President Bush had.
To get simple up or down votes the old-fashioned way, the first thing to do is to call their bluff. Whomever it is. Let them filibuster their brains out. The second thing is to see who tires of the game first, the parched senators of the American people who eventually demand that Little Lord Fauntleroy get over himself.
The mid-term elections typically go in favor of the "out" party and it's going strongly in that direction now. Why would the minority party risk that win by purposefully manifesting petulance and holding its breath?
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
New Biographies of Ayn Rand Resurrect "Selfishness" as a Courageous Philosophical Proposition
There are two new biographies of Alissa Rosenbaum, aka Ayn Rand, and there is something magnetically car accidental about them and about her, even for someone who thinks selfishness is not a virtue. We can't help but rubberneck her life simply from amazement. Rand beats reality TV because, whether or not you like her, she mattered.
A recent survey sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Monday Club discovered that after the Bible, Rand's work had the greatest impact on the live of those surveyed. She still sells about 300,000 books a year--best-seller proportions--long after her death.
I have read all her books (and three of her biographies) in the same way I watch right-wing commentators, fanatical religious preachers, and CNBC "Don't Regulate Me" financial news. I listen from time to time to country music and now and then even watch a soap opera or "The View." They are part of the culture and I feel the obligation to understand it and that effort alone would be condemned by Rand and certainly her intellectual precursor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, because it reflects an interest in what other people thing. Such things were a waste of time of Rand and Emerson because what others think, do or need is a waste; it "scatters and withdraws such force from your life...it loses your time...," as Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance. Good works are like penances and we are made invalids by them and they are "apologies for living in the world."
I like and admire Rand at a distance. She learned plotting by studying the work of Victor Hugo and this was a good choice because he moves a complex story well and satisfies the reading needs of the non-experts. Despite the opportunity, she did little for women's rights--quite the opposite in fact, as she believed woman's role was to serve men and she had some convoluted sexual ideas that played out in her fiction and in her real life. Her romantic models in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are for submissive women and manly, dominant, cold and rough men. That's a branch of thinking part from philosophy.
There is something absolutely compelling and alluring about Rand that is unavoidable to anyone who looks into the matter. You don't have to like or agree with her to be amazed at her unbending will, fierce confidence, and marketing skill to invent herself against the bad odds presented by a nation that imagines itself to be Christian. For religious people, especially Christians, she eliminates the thorny problem of sin because she believes in neither God nor the Golden Rule.
However, in a capitalist society she remains and icon. She made herself up and succeeded in making selfishness, cloaked in individualism and objectivism to be sensible, courageous and honest. The despised idea of anything collectives is at the heart of her absolutely dire opposition to Marxism (she's an immigrant from Soviet Russia) or any collective mentality to include church life. It is perhaps ironic that she named her philosophy "objectivism" considering that in the writings of Max, communism was to be an answer to the objectification of workers as capitalism eliminated their creativity and individuality. Marx believed that man was a creative being and that capitalism squashed this instinct--or need--into a mashed together pea soub combining man with his labor.
I do think Rand was courageious and honest. Her task was made easier perhaps because of her committed atheism. It was this atheism, along with her well-known and extended adultery that limited her p9olitical connection with her contemporary conservatives (especially William Buckley and his religious friends) who wanted to adore her. Adultery today is public and increasingly commonplace among our leaders, most ironically among right-wing Christian leaders in the Congress and in the churches.
In the end it appears that Rand's philosophy was not a philosophy at all but an entrepreneurial marketing tool for the institution of herself while giving her fancs and excuse for guilt-free self-centeredness. It's OK. Remember you're courageous and bold and the only person on earth.
These are both fine biographies (although I much prefer the one by Anne Heller) and are wroth rading in order to understand her intellectual resurgence that is periodic and tracks precisley with peiords of conservative political retrenchment.
Reading her intellectual and spiritual anti-matter predecessor, Emerson, is less entertaining for sure and I'd rather have dinner with Rand. I think she would have preferred Emerson's America of the mid-19th century when public financial regulation was essentially non-existent.
Emerson, the found of Transendentalsm, was described by Herman Melville after their 1849 meeting as a man who had a "defect in the region of the heart" and a "self conceit so intensely intelectual that at first on hesitates to call it by its right name." Such a man would be hampered, would he not, b the care of the world? At least Rand can be seen as a living reaction against a Soviet world she new too well. It seems, though, that the things she hated were a natural response in the extreme, to the very things she advocated.
A recent survey sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Monday Club discovered that after the Bible, Rand's work had the greatest impact on the live of those surveyed. She still sells about 300,000 books a year--best-seller proportions--long after her death.
I have read all her books (and three of her biographies) in the same way I watch right-wing commentators, fanatical religious preachers, and CNBC "Don't Regulate Me" financial news. I listen from time to time to country music and now and then even watch a soap opera or "The View." They are part of the culture and I feel the obligation to understand it and that effort alone would be condemned by Rand and certainly her intellectual precursor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, because it reflects an interest in what other people thing. Such things were a waste of time of Rand and Emerson because what others think, do or need is a waste; it "scatters and withdraws such force from your life...it loses your time...," as Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance. Good works are like penances and we are made invalids by them and they are "apologies for living in the world."
I like and admire Rand at a distance. She learned plotting by studying the work of Victor Hugo and this was a good choice because he moves a complex story well and satisfies the reading needs of the non-experts. Despite the opportunity, she did little for women's rights--quite the opposite in fact, as she believed woman's role was to serve men and she had some convoluted sexual ideas that played out in her fiction and in her real life. Her romantic models in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are for submissive women and manly, dominant, cold and rough men. That's a branch of thinking part from philosophy.
There is something absolutely compelling and alluring about Rand that is unavoidable to anyone who looks into the matter. You don't have to like or agree with her to be amazed at her unbending will, fierce confidence, and marketing skill to invent herself against the bad odds presented by a nation that imagines itself to be Christian. For religious people, especially Christians, she eliminates the thorny problem of sin because she believes in neither God nor the Golden Rule.
However, in a capitalist society she remains and icon. She made herself up and succeeded in making selfishness, cloaked in individualism and objectivism to be sensible, courageous and honest. The despised idea of anything collectives is at the heart of her absolutely dire opposition to Marxism (she's an immigrant from Soviet Russia) or any collective mentality to include church life. It is perhaps ironic that she named her philosophy "objectivism" considering that in the writings of Max, communism was to be an answer to the objectification of workers as capitalism eliminated their creativity and individuality. Marx believed that man was a creative being and that capitalism squashed this instinct--or need--into a mashed together pea soub combining man with his labor.
I do think Rand was courageious and honest. Her task was made easier perhaps because of her committed atheism. It was this atheism, along with her well-known and extended adultery that limited her p9olitical connection with her contemporary conservatives (especially William Buckley and his religious friends) who wanted to adore her. Adultery today is public and increasingly commonplace among our leaders, most ironically among right-wing Christian leaders in the Congress and in the churches.
In the end it appears that Rand's philosophy was not a philosophy at all but an entrepreneurial marketing tool for the institution of herself while giving her fancs and excuse for guilt-free self-centeredness. It's OK. Remember you're courageous and bold and the only person on earth.
These are both fine biographies (although I much prefer the one by Anne Heller) and are wroth rading in order to understand her intellectual resurgence that is periodic and tracks precisley with peiords of conservative political retrenchment.
Reading her intellectual and spiritual anti-matter predecessor, Emerson, is less entertaining for sure and I'd rather have dinner with Rand. I think she would have preferred Emerson's America of the mid-19th century when public financial regulation was essentially non-existent.
Emerson, the found of Transendentalsm, was described by Herman Melville after their 1849 meeting as a man who had a "defect in the region of the heart" and a "self conceit so intensely intelectual that at first on hesitates to call it by its right name." Such a man would be hampered, would he not, b the care of the world? At least Rand can be seen as a living reaction against a Soviet world she new too well. It seems, though, that the things she hated were a natural response in the extreme, to the very things she advocated.
The Pope's Dilemma
In politics, if a story runs continuously for three or more days, it has legs. If it's a bad story then whatever you've done to kill it has failed and it gains an independent life as it's released into the ether where it freely metastasizes.
Right now, Pope Benedict has such a story on his hands in the case of his recent revocation of the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a priest who went rogue long ago.
If you were the Pope's political consultant in this, the City of Man, what would you advise him to do in this now decidedly public matter?
If you're worth your salt, you have to be brutally honest with him in devising a public strategy. You can't b an ego cozy or adoring sycophant trying to protect him from or denying the relevance of public criticism. You have to help him understand the criticism and figure out how to most effectively absorb and then deal with it. You must be able to look in the eye and say: "On this matter, Your Holiness, you have not spoken ex cathedra, but ex ignorare.
Oh, and don't forget that just as it is with presidents, governors and mayors, a staunch cadre of loyal insiders are ever present and dedicated to protecting their own interests ad power in their relationship with the Boss. This means they will do anything to discredit you, the outsider, who doesn't understand the way things really work and who doesn't understand that they are different from everyone else.
Your Brief:
1. Richard Williamson, and Englishman and current resident of Argentina, is a 1971 Roman Catholic convert from Anglicanism who was ordained a Catholic priest in 1976. In 1988, he was excommunicated because he represented himself as a bishop in direct and willful contravention of a papal edict against it. He was excommunicated for violation of Canon Law for that act. This excommunication has now been reversed.
2. Much of the world has the impression that Williamson was excommunicated for his Holocaust denials and an additional string of ultra right-wing ideological pronouncements. This impression has complicated the public reaction to the revocation of the excommunication because it seems to them he had been cut off from the Church for those actions, not a procedural canonical violation. It, therefore, seems to the public that he has been fortiven his Holocaust denials and asociated views.
3. Among his publicly pronounced and recorded views are these samples:
This may be canonically accurate, but in the City of Man, perception equals truth and you and counselors are on the wrong side of perception on this one. While the world prosecuted and denounced Nazis and their sympathizers for crimes against humanity, the Church seem stuck with a morally indefensible position wherein they excommunicate and then forgive a mere violation of Church law but seem unaware of the big picture--crimes against humanity.
Right now, Pope Benedict has such a story on his hands in the case of his recent revocation of the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a priest who went rogue long ago.
If you were the Pope's political consultant in this, the City of Man, what would you advise him to do in this now decidedly public matter?
If you're worth your salt, you have to be brutally honest with him in devising a public strategy. You can't b an ego cozy or adoring sycophant trying to protect him from or denying the relevance of public criticism. You have to help him understand the criticism and figure out how to most effectively absorb and then deal with it. You must be able to look in the eye and say: "On this matter, Your Holiness, you have not spoken ex cathedra, but ex ignorare.
Oh, and don't forget that just as it is with presidents, governors and mayors, a staunch cadre of loyal insiders are ever present and dedicated to protecting their own interests ad power in their relationship with the Boss. This means they will do anything to discredit you, the outsider, who doesn't understand the way things really work and who doesn't understand that they are different from everyone else.
Your Brief:
1. Richard Williamson, and Englishman and current resident of Argentina, is a 1971 Roman Catholic convert from Anglicanism who was ordained a Catholic priest in 1976. In 1988, he was excommunicated because he represented himself as a bishop in direct and willful contravention of a papal edict against it. He was excommunicated for violation of Canon Law for that act. This excommunication has now been reversed.
2. Much of the world has the impression that Williamson was excommunicated for his Holocaust denials and an additional string of ultra right-wing ideological pronouncements. This impression has complicated the public reaction to the revocation of the excommunication because it seems to them he had been cut off from the Church for those actions, not a procedural canonical violation. It, therefore, seems to the public that he has been fortiven his Holocaust denials and asociated views.
3. Among his publicly pronounced and recorded views are these samples:
- During a 1989 speaking tour of Canada he stated that Jews, the "enemies of Christ," fabricated the Holocaust as part of a Zionist scheme to found the state of Israel.
- He called the claim that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime another fabrication and stated that no Jews were gassed to death in concentration camps. He gussied up this claim by saying that "no more than 200,000-300,000 died in the camps and that none of these were gassed." Somehow, murdering only 300,000 Jews by means other than asphyxiation was OK?
- He blamed Israel for the 1991 Gulf War and called it another consequence of their "false Messianic vocation of Jewish world domination."
- He condemned the film, "The Sound of Music," for "putting friendliness and fun ahead of authority and rules," which is to say ahead of the authority and rules of Nazism!
- Since "modern man does not want women to do what God wants them to do, namely have children, she takes her revenge by invading all kinds of things God intended only men to do." For example, women should not attend universities or seek formal education of any kind, and "if you want to stop abortion, do it by example. Women should never wear trousers or shorts."
- Women make poorly focused and incompetent lawyers because before going into court they would look in a mirror to check their hair and, if they did not do so, they would make poorly focused and incompetent women. Williamson holds in common with Islamic terrorists' views on the primacy of God in civic matters, misogynistic views of women, irrational resistance to "modernity" as if it could be prevented by opposing it, and virulent anti-Semitism.
This may be canonically accurate, but in the City of Man, perception equals truth and you and counselors are on the wrong side of perception on this one. While the world prosecuted and denounced Nazis and their sympathizers for crimes against humanity, the Church seem stuck with a morally indefensible position wherein they excommunicate and then forgive a mere violation of Church law but seem unaware of the big picture--crimes against humanity.
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