The Lip

It's been a lousy year for me and reading books, so I've got to claim this one, even though it's a cheapie: Nice Guys Finish Last, by Leo Durocher as told to Ed Linn. It's a 1975 publication, apparently out of print. I came across it at a used book store in Chapel Hill.

I had heard this was one of the better baseball memoirs, and I would agree. Durocher was a really vivid character, and he was present for a huge swath of baseball history. His early life fits what to my mind is the dominant mold of the early days of major league baseball: he was an "ethnic" kid from New England. Durocher's family spoke French at home in Springfield, MA, and an early mentor of Leo's was Rabbit Maranville, a fellow French-American from Springfield. But his career reaches forward into the modern era: the 40s-50s heyday of baseball in New York City (definitely the heart of the sport in the literary imagination), network television and West Coast expansion. Leo was on the spot for many of the big episodes of baseball history: Murderers' Row, the Gas House Gang, Jackie Robinson's debut, the Shot Heard 'Round the World, the Miracle Mets. Early on in the book Leo is a wiseass rookie getting cussed out by Babe Ruth. By the end he's the sexagenarian manager of the Astros getting cussed out by Cesar Cedeno.

The narrative voice is so lively and there are so many good anecdotes in the book, it carried me along for quite awhile before I stopped to wonder whether Durocher was sanitizing his own story at all. In the first chapter Leo explains that, unaccountably, despite his humble son-of-a-railroad-man background, he got a taste as a teenager for fashion and expensive tailor-made clothes. From that I guess we're supposed to infer a whole lot about Durocher's life, the whole high-living and envelope-pushing strain: the pool sharking, the high-stakes gambling, his close friendship with George Raft, dating and marrying Hollywood actresses. There's got to be a lot that was left out of the story. What broke the spell as I was reading was Durocher's long, impassioned defense of Frank Sinatra's reputation. (Sinatra was a friend who offered to invest in the Los Angeles Angels if it would help Durocher land the Angels' manager's job. I suspect there is more to the relationship than that.) Then later Durocher resorts to some fairly crude score-settling with umpires and some of the players from late in his managerial career with the Cubs and Astros. He has some harsh words about Ernie Banks, which are striking since Banks was Mr. Cub, and which was exactly Leo's problem: Banks was such a favorite of the Cubs' owner, fans, and beat reporters, that it was hard for Leo to bench him even if he deserved it.

It would be interesting to check out a good Durocher bio, as opposed to autobio, and try to reconcile the rakishly charming hero of Nice Guys Finish Last with the ruthless SOB that others have portrayed Durocher as being. In his book on managers Bill James relates how the sportswriter Dick Young characterized Durocher:

You and Durocher are on a raft. A wave comes and knocks him into the ocean. You dive in and save his life. A shark comes and takes your leg. Next day, you and Leo start out even.

Of course, Dick Young was one of the meanest sons of bitches who ever lived himself, so factor that in.

As a footnote, the title of the book is the famous saying of Durocher's that he didn't exactly say. It seems he was actually discussing at some length Mel Ott and the New York Giants, a bunch of nice guys who didn't win as many games as Leo thought they ought to, and a sportswriter punched the quote up. And Durocher embraced the inaccuracy; he appreciated good PR as much as anyone. The pedigree of "Nice guys finish last" made it into this Luke Menand review in the New Yorker, of the Yale Book of Quotations:

“For lack of a better word” spoils a nice quotation—the speech is about calling a spade a spade, so there is no better word—and “Play it again, Sam” is somehow more affecting than “Play it, Sam.” But not all emendations are improvements. What Leo Durocher actually said (referring to the New York Giants baseball team) was “The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.” The sportswriters who heard him telescoped (the technical term is “piped”) the quote because it made a neater headline. They could have done a better job of piping. “Nice guys finish seventh” is a lot cleverer (and also marginally more plausible) than the non-utterance that gave immortality to Leo Durocher. But Leo Durocher doesn’t own that quotation; the quotation owns Leo Durocher, the way a parasite sometimes takes over the host organism. Quotations are in a perpetual struggle for survival. They want people to keep saying them. They don’t want to die any more than the rest of us do. And so, whenever they can, they attach themselves to colorful or famous people. “Nice guys finish last” profits by its association with a man whose nickname was the Lip, even if the Lip never said it…

“It’s Not Just About Knocking Bitches Down”

Prompted by my sister-in-law, a bunch of us packed up the kids Saturday night and headed over to historic Dorton Arena to enjoy the spectacle that is the Carolina Rollergirls. It made for a fun evening, and I was struck by the aesthetics and ethos of the event—struck well enough to want to sound off about it.

The first thing to say is that Roller Derby Night is a festival of over-the-top fun with gender roles. There’s a distinct Riot Grrl vibe, and some of the skaters affect a self-conscious trashy-slutty image. I ain’t no lady, all of these athletes would affirm, I’m certain. This attitude is perhaps most obvious with the punning team names (e.g. the Trauma Queens, the Debutante Brawlers) and the alter-identities that the players adopt (e.g. Tsunami Sue, Sweet and Lowdown, Trudy Struction, and omigod, I just came across the best roller derby alias ever: Harlot O’Scara). There are cheerleaders of a sort who, far from being eye candy, tend to be scruffy guys who run around like maniacs holding hand-lettered poster board signs. One of the team mascots, for the Tai-Chi-Tahs, was a man who seemed to be dressed as a James Bond villain, petting a stuffed cheetah held in his lap.

I’m far from the first person to comment on the roller derby revival. It’s a pretty big phenomenon. The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association boasts 30-some member leagues around the country. There’s a book and a TV show, evidently. Additionally, roller derby was the subject of some controversy in the feminist blogosphere a year or so ago. A good discussion took place at I Blame the Patriarchy, where Twisty made an anti-derby post (“proto-porn,” “kindergarten burlesque”) but then got some pushback from pro-derby commenters, including some women who play the sport.

I am loath to get embroiled in an argument about sex-positive feminism; I get exhausted just thinking about it. (The argument, not the sex-positivity.) Suffice it to say I come down much closer to the perspective of Robust McManlypants (fellow Carolina Rollergirls fan) and The Bellman (who relates what the Patriarchy wishes roller derby was like).

Maybe I haven’t been to enough matches to have a complete picture, but superficially, the skaters were really not very titillating. In helmets, knee pads, and elbow pads, they were outfitted for action at least as much as for display. (Some of them wore leggings. There may have been fishnets. Did they wear miniskirts? Maybe--I’m honestly not sure, but if so they were worn over their spandex workout shorts.) The most obvious thing to say about the skaters is that they were hard-working athletes, and they exemplified the fact that athletes come in all shapes, sizes, and numbers of visible tattoos. They projected toughness and confidence and determination, all attractive traits, but not ones that reinforce the patriarchy, seems to me.

Contra Twisty, I saw no fake fights a la WWF wrestling. There were some fouls called, and some hits that, even if they were legal, were a little more enthusiastic than was strictly necessary. I never got a firm grasp on the rules, so the climax (the Tai-Chi-Tahs came from way behind to snatch victory from the Debutante Brawlers) felt like a somewhat arbitrary result dictated by the officials. But that’s down to my ignorance. The match was a legitimate competition.

I will say, the two women who were hawking popcorn in the stands were eye-catching in their short skirts, plunging necklines, and loads of makeup. But these women were not Barbie dolls; while pretty, they were closer to Lane Bryant models. And given the anti-sexy profile cut by the popcorn vendors at a “mainstream” spectator sports venue, I read these gals as another variation on having fun playing dress-up. Opinions may vary.

Being a straight white guy, there’s nothing much good that can be said for me, but one of my trump cards is that I am the father of daughters, hence a prospective future feminist-by-proxy, or something. Bottom line, I was happy to bring my girls to the roller derby. It was to a remarkable degree a family affair, albeit one like a Bugs Bunny cartoon that the kids could enjoy on one level, and the adults could enjoy on a less innocent level. The kids supplied our rooting interests: one of the skaters is my oldest daughter’s hair stylist; another is the mother of a classmate of my middle daughter (who actually went and got skaters’ autographs afterwards).

The case of the popcorn vendors brings me to the other point I wanted to make. To an ESPN-watching guy like me, roller derby is an ongoing ironic commentary on big-time sports. I found it thoroughly refreshing. I went to two games at Raleigh’s RBC Center last winter, a NC State men’s basketball game and an NHL hockey game, and believe me, nothing happens at RBC that is the least bit spontaneous or un-slick. By contrast, I was charmed by the Andy Hardy, “hey gang let’s put on a sports event!” character of the Rollergirls. All the challenges of mounting an event were met in impromptu ways (albeit often clever and computer-savvy ways). The tickets you buy (generated by etix.com) seem DIY. The uniforms are homemade, the play-by-play announcers are voluble and endearingly silly, the “scoreboard” is a PowerPoint-type setup projected onto a plain white panel on one side of the rink. The halftime contest was a gurney race around the derby track. In place of the big Zamboni machine that resurfaces the ice at a hockey game, the Rollergirls employ a dude pushing a dustmop to clean the track.

Carolina Rollergirls does have corporate sponsors, barely: they include some local bars and restaurants, a fair trade coffee distributor, a tattoo parlor. Anti-derby blogger Vicky Vengeance wondered whether someone is profiting from the exploitation of the rollergirls; personally, I can’t believe anyone really makes money on the deal. The sponsor list mostly represents a convergence of the hipster alt-community in Raleigh. Players, coaches, referees, and everyone else volunteer their time.

Incidentally, Dorton Arena itself is a kick to visit, a piece of futuristic kitsch like something out of “The Jetsons.” Someone once described it as “industrial origami.” The Carolina Cougars of the gloriously tacky, long-defunct American Basketball Association played there in the 70s. It sits on the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, and its most active function nowadays is to host 4-H exhibitions and livestock shows and the like. Different areas of the grandstand are labeled Poultry Science, Integrated Pest Management, etc. A nice touch for roller derby, in my opinion.

I certainly don’t know much about the history of roller derby; I prefer to believe there isn’t much history to it. I was reminded of the phenomenon of adult kickball leagues; it just seems like a bunch of friends who took roller skating, an aimless and unprofitable pastime from childhood, and decided to have fun with it, dammit, maturity and respectability be hanged. The Rollergirls crowd felt quite different than being at an RBC Center event, which is a little like a frat-house mixer--well-scrubbed, pro-corporate, pro-establishment and, yes, patriarchal. The roller derby crowd is more like a coming-out party for the kids in school who hated pep rallies, who may have liked games but hated jocks. The game is the thing, and all the surrounding trappings of the game are there to be laughed at and winked at.

That Guy

Fred Thompson? An instant contender for the Republican presidential nomination? You have got to be kidding me.

Let's not pretend he's being pushed for Prez because of his Senate tenure (which was lackluster) or his record as Watergate counsel (we're way, way past the time when anybody gets a boost from what he did in Watergate, especially if he's a Republican). Fred is a recognizable face from TV and movies, that's pretty much it. I know this is driven by nostalgia for Ronald Reagan, but at least Reagan was a real film actor. Fred Thompson is like human furniture; he just plays himself over and over again.

I wonder if we'll see an update on the Bush-Cheney scenario where Fred is the front man and Sam Waterston is in the back room doing all the heavy lifting. (Think about it a second: how much charisma can Fred Thompson have when he is a supporting player to the immortal Sam Waterston?)

Also, if Fred Thompson were POTUS then Dick Wolf ought to be Emperor of the Entire Known Universe.

It's a sad commentary when "Tall White Man with Southern Accent" describes a plausible candidate for President, such that a semi-competent character actor can fill the bill. It's almost completely arbitrary. Too bad "Lazy Eye" is not considered a presidential trait, we could have had Jack Elam stumping in South Carolina.

"I understand the problem. In other words, the problem is understood by me."

I really shouldn't bother linking Yglesias except on the rare occasion when I disagree with him... and it's mighty hard to argue against the proposition that the White House wants to be judged by its words and given a free pass on its deeds.

The administration, from Dubya on down, has a misfiring neuron when it comes to the connection between words and action, or words and intention. In some part of Dubya's brain he really believes that saying something makes it so, or announcing your intentions in a situation is the same as accomplishing those intentions.

My favorite Bush soundbites aren't the ones he mangles Norm Crosby-style. They are the absurdly amusing ones such as these (from memory, not verbatim):

• In announcing his plan for a $50 billion anti-AIDS initiative in Africa, Bush says, emphatically, as if he's adding an innovative new wrinkle: "This money will be spent wisely."


• In announcing Robert Zoellick as his choice to head the World Bank: "He understands the problem of Third World poverty."

These are trivial examples of a serious issue, a serious lack-of-seriousness, but it cracks me up when Bush says something that's instantly self-refuting. I mean, it didn't occur to me that Bush might embark on a plan to spend a lot of money unwisely, until he implanted that possibility by gravely assuring me he would be wise about it.

As for Zoellick, I was even starting to feel he might be an okay choice; he has a background in international finance, which Paul Wolfowitz certainly didn't. Then I hear Bush state what should be blindlingly obvious, that his World Bank chief understands the mission of the World Bank. Then I read via Josh Marshall that Bush and Rice respected Zoellick's work at State but his arrogant and pedantic style "drove them slightly bonkers....'Condi let's Bob do whatever he wants, so long as she doesn't have to talk to him about it.'" And now I'm grinning privately, and imagining Dubya at the podium, presidential as a heart attck, intoning: "There were other people who would have accepted this job offer. The World Bank is not, repeat not, a soft landing spot for all my inconvenient cronies."

This may be a too-roundabout way of saying that Bush is a dumb guy trying to play smart. I also enjoy Garry Trudeau's way of portraying Bush, e.g. "I find it curious that they would offer comfort to our enemies instead of to our warriors. In other words, offering comfort to our enemies instead of our warriors is something I find curious."

Sunk in the Sand

It’s been a mighty long time since I’ve reviewed a book in this space. That might be because it’s been a mighty long time since I’ve finished a book. I finally finished one that had been a Christmas present, Fiasco by Thomas Ricks. It’s about the Iraq invasion and occupation, especially from the point of view of the uniformed military. As the title suggests, Ricks catalogs the lapses of planning and execution that got us to where we are.

I give it a B. Ricks is a solid conventional reporter, and the book is a product of the Bob Woodward school of Instant History, which of course has shortcomings. Ricks uses some anonymous sources, and it’s generally easy to guess who the helpful sources were, because they come off better in the narrative. The book didn’t change my mind about many things, and it didn’t have much in the way of structure. It tends to alternate between a good operation and a bad one, a smart commander and a clueless one. But the overall tone rings true, it collects a lot of information in one place, and the book has a few haunting quotes and scenes that will stay with me. Our military officers naturally are a mixed bag of humanity, and only some of them had a full understanding of the challenge they faced in Iraq: in a word, counterinsurgency. The ones with a full understanding ran into systematic obstacles to enacting their vision. The stubborn, blinkered ones often were given their head. Even though Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld are mostly absent from these pages, the fact that the Iraq War couldn’t sift the ingredients correctly, couldn’t make these lemons into even barely-palatable lemonade, is an implied indictment of the leadership. (Ricks does editorialize, mildly, that the strategic confusion at the top may have led U.S. soldiers to treat ordinary Iraqis as terrorists, an attitude which poisoned the well.)

Matt Yglesias has a post today, prompted by a David Ignatius WaPo column which states that the Bush Administration has finally adopted the Iraq Study Group’s findings – only about six months after Bush’s initial reaction, which was to call the ISG report a "flaming turd" and treat it accordingly. Rather than call this a case of "better late than never," as Ignatius does, Yglesias deems this typical of the Bush M.O. in Iraq, to adopt a policy 6 to 12 months after it was proposed, at a time when a new set of facts on the ground make the policy useless.

Fiasco bears out Yglesias’s view. There are numerous examples of opportunities lost, and Ricks calls 2004 "a Sisyphean year" for the U.S. in Iraq, a year when we had to re-fight many battles and re-take many landmarks (most notably Fallujah). Our apparent strengths in technology and firepower sometimes led us down the wrong path. U.S. military intelligence became focused on foreign fighters in Iraq, because foreign fighters were detectable by means of signal intelligence. Unfortunately, sectarian violence was the much bigger problem, but recognizing the burgeoning insurgency would have required human intelligence capabilities, which the U.S. lacked.

Here are a few of the haunting parts:

The insurgency was created in 2003, largely by the American practice of raiding households in the middle of the night without good intelligence guiding the raids. (The Abu Ghraib scandal is attributable to the prison being swelled with men swept up in haphazard raids who weren’t guilty of anti-U.S. activities.) The 4th Infantry Division operated in the northern Sunni Triangle and in the book they come in for particular criticism for these tactics ("The 4th ID—what they did is a crime"). Iraqi men’s tribal sense of honor was insulted. One military historian believes that in the summer and fall of 2003, many of the episodes of Iraqi ambushes firing on US troops, were "honor shots" aimed over troops’ heads, intended not to kill Americans but to restore Iraqi honor. The U.S troops concluded that Iraqis were lousy marksmen.

A Special Forces officer spoke of the fiasco of the Fallujah Brigade, a real case of our not being able to tell our friends from our enemies, where the U.S. handed control of Fallujah to an officer who entered the city wearing the uniform of Saddam’s Republican Guard:

I looked Iraqis in the eye and they were thinking, ‘We can get rid of these
guys’… That was the day we lost the initiative. The Iraqis realized that they
could kick our ass—they had the option to bring the fight to us. (p. 349)

Special Forces, who train in counterinsurgency tactics, experienced a lot of attrition to private contractors, who paid much better and gave individual soldiers more autonomy and respect. Ricks discusses the deleterious influence of these contractors. Marine Colonel Thomas Hammes recounts a story of driving in Baghdad one day while wearing civilian clothes, and being detained by a group of private security troops, one of whom stuck his automatic rifle in Hammes’s face:

I was trying to see if his finger was on the trigger guard, because then you’re
four pounds of pressure from being gone…

These shooters, you’d see them in the gym. Steroids, tension, and guns are not a good mix. […]

The contractor was hired to protect the principal [the person being bodyguarded]. He had no stake in pacifying the country… [The U.S. has] loosed an unaccountable, deadly force into [Iraqi] society, and [Iraqis] have no recourse. (p. 370-371)

A Monday post --- just because.

Here is Charlie Pierce @ Altercation, saying something worth repeating. The presidential primary campaigns start too early, they are too crowded--you hear those complaints a lot--but here is another major reason why they are so unsatisfying right now:

For me, the biggest problem I have with the ongoing presidential campaign is that it is a context in which the most serious issue arising from the last seven years can't be seriously debated -- namely, the egregiously anti-constitutional expansion of executive power based of legal theories that seem to be derived from whatever Prussia has for magic mushrooms. It hasn't even come up, as near as I can recall, in either debate, and it's manifestly more serious than, say, abortion. It is the central place from which all of the depredations of the Avignon Presidency have issued -- whether that be unlimited warmaking power, the misuse of signing statements, the politicization of the Department of Justice, Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the old energy task force and on and on. Only by breaking that power, and by burying forever the legal philosophy on which it's based, can you begin to clean up the wreckage. The problem is that there's no way to run for president on a platform of weakening the office. All you can do is say that you'll handle the power better and more responsibly than this guy did -- which is exactly the same as saying your seamanship's better than Captain Joe Hazlewood's is. I've long felt that the Constitution sadly lacked a serious voting constituency, largely because we've become so illiterate about our political and philosophical heritage. This campaign is going to be the grisliest evidence of that yet.

Emphasis added. My effort to say something similar once was here. Thinking about it, I wish there was a way to run for President that touts the symbolic or intangible strength of the Oval Office but rejects the unitary-executive theory (that's an arcane enough phrase that it might have dog-whistle properties) and endorses the idea that Congress has a job to do and the branches ought to work collegially. But certainly nobody is campaigning that way; and no Republican ever would due to their reliance on fear and authoritarianism and the Strong Daddy model of the presidency. The Constitution remains an unloved but wounded constituent.

Atrios reports on a controversy in the Philadelphia mayoral race: "quien es mas Catolica." Putting on my religious-lefty hat for a moment, this doesn't disturb me unduly. What Knox has done is rather sleazy, IMO, in the classic manner of last-minute attack leaflets that leave no fingerprints and little time for the target to respond. But sure, if religiosity is going to be deployed in the campaign, then questions of sincerity or phoniness are basically fair game.

Look what Atrios got me mixed up with

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The Offline Life

There's some really good advice in this article by Stephen Elliott.

Niceties

Okay, not that anyone else cares, but I can't resist responding to Jonathan Chait's article in The New Republic about the Democratic netroots.

Chait starts his piece with an account of the 2000 Bush-Gore Florida fiasco, and Markos Moulitsas's pointing to Florida '00 as a prime motivating experience for his entry into online activism. This is a not-unreasonable approach for Chait to take--Kos is the 800-pound gorilla, and Bush v. Gore was important in the rise of the liberal blogosphere. (Chait doesn't mention it, but Talking Points Memo started as an effort to organize Democratic action in the Florida controversy.)

But to focus exclusively on Kos and on the Florida recount oversimplifies things. It makes Chait's narrative all about the political spectrum, about pulling the national conversation farther left, regardless of policy debates taken on merit. It makes it all about wanting to create a Democratic machine that is as formidable and ruthless as the GOP machine. And that's not all the netroots are about. I'm sure I don't speak only for myself as a netroots denizen by naming two other experiences that outraged and lit a fire under me: I was shocked by the performance of the political media in 1998 with regard to Monicagate. And I'm continually horrified by the Bush Administration's ongoing refusal to govern in good faith, to play any issue straight, rather than treat issues merely as political footballs. Iraq and anti-terrorism are the number one example, but it's lots more than that. I would like the Environmental Protection Agency to, y'know, protect the environment. I would like the Justice Department to behave justly. I would like the FDA to regulate food and drugs in the public interest. I could go on and on.

I realize there is an ideological debate over, for instance, whether there should be an EPA and what its role should be. But the Bush GOP has not engaged that debate--it pretends to support the EPA's mission, while it ignores or suppresses the work of EPA professionals. That's an example of bad-faith governance.

Integrity and truth-telling and fairness and perspective and responsibility--all have become scarce commodities in elite American political discourse. That, to me, is what necessitated the blogosphere. In the wake of 9/11 it was probably inevitable that the U.S. would veer in a "conservative" direction. (Scare quotes are because it rankles me that national security is considered the pet issue of the right, but in fact it is.) What was not inevitable were the deceptions and the censorship (often self-censorship) and the bad faith and the buck-passing.

In similar fashion to the focus on Kos and Florida, Chait overstates the extent to which Rick Perlstein's Goldwater book is the Bible of the netroots. Important, yes, and universally admired, but I honestly don't see the uncritical desire by the Internet Left to emulate the "Direct-Mail Right" that Chait sees. It's not all about realpolitik, it's very much about restoring truth-telling to American political culture, and Grover Norquist is a poor role model for truth-telling.

Chait's strategy is understandable to the extent that it clarifies his thesis, but what's galling is how self-serving the article is, to the political journalism establishment and especially to The New Republic itself. Instead of repeating my rant from last night, I'll point to Eric Alterman and Matthew Yglesias, who were given space at the TNR website to respond and do a nice job of skewering TNR's disingenuousness. In light of how Chait portrays bloggers as envious and ungrateful toward the Dem establishment and, above all, a bit dumb (unsubtle, unsophisticated) it's interesting that Chait misses a few subtleties about the bloggers. Yglesias corrects one mischaracterization of himself, and surely Matt Stoller was being ironic when he called Grover Norquist his political hero.

Chait's sharpest insight is this, about the contrast between conservative and liberal intellectuals:

The worst thing that can happen to a conservative is to be seen as disloyal. The worst thing that can happen to a liberal is to be seen as "in the tank."

This is a great observation, as far as it goes. The range of acceptable opinions among conservatives is really narrow, while liberals are more concerned with at least appearing independent and with distinguishing themselves from the pack. (Gen-X liberals even more so, I'd bet, due to pop culture's mass neurotic dread of "selling out.") But it is wrong and distorting (due to the Kos/Florida problem) to treat the netroots as the funhouse-mirror counterpart to the conservative movement--as being as slavishly devoted to left-wing loyalty as the Weekly Standard is to right-wing loyalty.

Allow me to point out, again, that it's quite possible to be in the tank without being seen to be in the tank. The DLC - TNR mode of liberalism has given us the phenomenon of "liberal contrarianism," which is cleverness passing as originality -- a highly predictable sort of originality.

In the latter pages Chait makes several assertions that are just ass-backwards: that a blogger in Flyoverville is a starfucker as if a starving young J-school grad in Dupont Circle isn't one; that bloggers are intellectually dishonest (and magazine writers are honest? Mr. Chait, do you really believe there's no difference between the U.S. case for war in Afghanistan and in Iraq?). Atrios declares that he is not "above the fray," and Chait portrays that as a confession that he is not objective. What Atrios is doing is accepting responsibility for the consequences of what he writes. By being "above the fray," Jon Chait is evading responsibility. What Atrios is refusing to do is pretend politics is a parlor game or that words in print don't matter. Incidentally, the talk in the blogosphere of "memes and frames" is in the service of being responsible--of seeking to understand how words and ideas impact the political realm.

The crazy thing about this article is that I'm sure TNR will portray it as a glowing profile of the left blogosphere. Holding his nose in disdain, Chait concedes that the Democratic Party is being reformed by the netroots. From the penultimate paragraph:

At the end of this reformation, what will the left look like? It will look a lot more like the Republican machine that prevailed in Florida. It will be nastier and more ruthless, and less concerned with intellectual or procedural niceties.

On the contrary, I've been thinking lately, partly in relation to the U.S. attorneys scandal, that there are a number of fusty old traditions -- intellectual and procedural niceties, you could call them--for which I have a newfound appreciation. I'm for the government making personnel decisions in a orderly and transparent way, on merit. I'm for not deleting your e-mails. I'm for confirmation hearings, rather than recess appointments. In fact, I'm for hiring attorneys from the finest law schools, and not just from Pat Robertson's crackerjack-box, Draw The Bunny correspondence school of Who Would Jesus Investigate.

I could go on and on. I'm big on niceties and on due diligence. I'm for search warrants. I'm for WMD intelligence being analyzed and filtered in a careful, time-tested way, by the professionals, rather than stovepiped and cherry-picked. I'm for planning for the occupation, not just the invasion. I'm for not placing much trust in an informant named "Curveball."

You get the feeling from this article that in progressive political discourse, what's at stake is bragging rights, Valedictorian vs. Salutatorian, an epic contest between Marshall Wittman and Amanda Marcotte. The Republican radicals Bush and DeLay and Rove are absent from Chait's story; Left and Right are abstractions. There are certain precious goods in American civic life, including that set of procedural niceties that we call the Constitution, that are under threat, and not from some bullshit abstraction like "incivility," but from the Republican radicals.

TNR has made some real lulus, some real wingdings, in its editorial decisions the last few years. Backing the Iraq War, endorsing Joe Lieberman, etc. I wonder what sorts of intellectual and procedural niceties they observed.


Check out the responses by Atrios and Digby if you haven't already.

Gopnik >>> Leader >>> Amis

I enjoyed this New Yorker review of the new Kingsley Amis biography.

Imus

My father used to be an Imus listener back when my family lived in New Jersey, so I’m aware of him, though I was never a fan. Referring to “nappy-headed hos” should be a ticket to the unemployment line and permanent Media Untouchable status, in my opinion. What I find most interesting is the fact that people like Howard Fineman and Tom Oliphant—people with standing in the political punditocracy, people who are old enough and smart enough to know better—refuse to cut Don Imus loose. Indeed, they go out of their way to commiserate with the I-Man, Fineman bemoaning the fact that guys can't get away with telling racist jokes like they used to. (This Digby post pointed out the raw economic motivation for many pundits to appear on Imus: he can really help sell a book. At one point Cokie Roberts swore she would never appear on Imus’s show again, and her promise held up for a few years, until she had a new book to promote.)

Being "in" with Imus's zany crew is pretty intoxicating, evidently. It occurs to me that the appeal of Don Imus for some people is pretty similar to the appeal of George W. Bush for some people, even supposed skeptical and jaded reporters and columnists. Both Imus and Dubya come off as confident, tough-talking, shoot-from-the-hip Westerners. Just looking at Tom Oliphant (slight, bespectacled, visibly part of the East Coast intelligentsia), I can envision his being star-struck in the presence and good graces of a Don Imus. And maybe even a little intimidated, afraid to risk falling out of those good graces.

The appeal of frat-house camaraderie, the pleasures of “talking shit”—you’d think people would outgrow it. Not all of us do. Lately I find myself flashing back pretty often to college days and the needling conversations we used to have in my predominantly male circle. For better or worse, I miss that stuff. The inside jokes, the private language, “just kidding” (but not really), “just between us” (but not really). The political incorrectness of it is not the part I most miss, but it is a part of it that I used to accept, back in the day.

Imus tries to have his cake and eat it too, along a number of dimensions. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post points out that being a shock jock and being a respectable political commentator are incompatible. Imus’s show gives listeners the ingratiating feeling that he’s saying something shocking, something that shouldn’t be repeated outside present company—forgetting for a moment that it’s being broadcast live to hundreds of thousands of listeners. And many have pointed out how, repeatedly, Imus has transgressed, then grudgingly repented, then transgressed again. He occupies a no-man’s land between nice and naughty, reliable and volatile. (Again, like Dubya, who for all his righteousness likes to play the semi-reformed rogue occasionally.) Even this week, he apologizes with one breath then makes veiled threats with the next.

More from Eugene Robinson—I found this a compelling description of the appeal of talk radio:

Drive-time radio has become a free-fire zone, a forum for crude and objectionable speech that would be out of bounds anywhere else. There's an intimacy about radio. The medium creates the illusion of privacy -- it's just the jock and his or her entourage speaking to you, the listener, alone in your car where nobody else can hear.

Maybe, in your heart of hearts, you think some of those stereotypes are true -- about black people, or white people, or Latinos or Asians. Somewhere on the radio dial you'll find some jock who not only agrees but is willing to say so out loud, willing to ridicule those "others" and thus cut them down to size. You can have all your prejudices confirmed on your way to work. It's almost like putting on a suit of psychological armor. [emphasis mine]

Two months ago when I was writing about FM radio, I thought about the power of radio as a medium, the sense of intimacy that it carries. I also thought about the advent of shock jocks reflecting a movement in which that intimacy was exploited for unfortunate ends. (I had in mind Howard Stern as well as the Greaseman, a Washington-area DJ who eventually met a premature career death due to his fondness for racist jokes.)

Thanks, Great Britain

For keeping the United States out of war with Iran, despite our government's wishes.

"it's the rhetoric, stupid"

At TPM Café Michael Berube takes up the subject of Democrats and their supposed hostility to religious faith. He discusses the electoral prospects of a generic atheist candidate for POTUS, which polls show are not good. Citing Richard Rorty, he discusses the asymmetrical use of religion as a “conversation-stopper” in political discourse. He acknowledges that snarky liberal bloggers are sometimes inadvertently insulting and that “some atheists can get downright annoying in their insistence that they have objectively demonstrated the nonexistence of God using simple algebra and a household magnifying glass.” Heh.

Then he concludes:

But I see no evidence whatsoever that “persons of faith” are discouraged in any way from testifying to their faith in American political life, which is why complaints about Democrats’ indifference or hostility to religion strike me as so very disingenuous. These complaints can’t possibly be about hostility to religion in American politics, I think. And when they come from the left side of the spectrum, they can’t possibly be about trying to win over voters on the religious right. Nor do they seem to be centrally concerned about issues of war and peace -- or even the minimum wage. Nor do I see religious progressives arguing for greater discrimination against gays and lesbians. So I’m left to wonder: is this conversation-stopping conversation all about abortion, in the end?...

Okay. About the abortion part, I imagine he’s thinking of Amy Sullivan and Mara Vanderslice, party activists for whom having the Democrats moderate their pro-choice stance is a preoccupation. As for me, it was as a 16-year-old youth delegate to a church conference that I became pro-choice. I would like a chance to make a theological argument in favor of reproductive choice. Are religious liberals concerned about peace and a living wage? A lot of us are; who’s to say if we aren’t getting the message across well enough or if Berube isn’t paying close enough attention.

Are we “discouraged from testifying to our faith” in American political life? If you mean fired from jobs, forcibly ejected from places, locked up at Guantanamo Bay, then of course not. The way I would put it is, we are sometimes patronized or belittled in high-level discussions about Democratic strategy. It strikes me as somewhat akin to the “dirty fucking hippie” syndrome that Atrios and others describe--where opponents of the Iraq War, people who simply abhor modern warfare and/or have a non-hubristic view of America’s place in the world, are dismissed as unserious. Atrios isn’t having his livelihood taken away or being thrown in the gulag, he’s just being subtly marginalized in certain elite arenas. Which is not totally insignificant.

Am I disingenuous? I don’t believe so. Overly sensitive, probably, at times. (Are atheists ever disingenuous? Can Berube and Richard Rorty possibly be aggrieved that they can’t get conscientious objector status in the U.S. military?)

Anyway, the main reason for this post is to highlight the wonderful comment left in the Berube-TPMC thread by “Abby Kelleyite.” She (?) starts by quoting Sam Harris, who holds that faith and reason are mutually exclusive and that self-defined religious moderates are simply useful idiots for the fundamentalists.

By construing religious faith as not merely separate from, but also "in conflict" with, reason... Harris demands devaluing faith by anyone who claims to value reason, which, given the poll data you presented, poses a bit of a problem in the electoral arena. Must we really force people to choose between faith, on the one hand, and reason and science on the other? People also do not generally respond well to arguments that they are engaging in "self-deception," and I expect they will not be thrilled to discover that atheists think that moderation in the opposition of fundamentalism is no virtue.

All well and good, so we shouldn't overtly invalidate the role of faith in moral reasoning or liken belief in a particular religion to false consciousness, but how does one respond to the conversation-stopping religious argumentation in your examples? I suggest that we merely and politely acknowledge the incommensurability of our systems of evaluating the validity of faith-based arguments, leave them our literature on why we support, e.g., abortion rights, shake hands and part ways on those issues while still making use of the valuable, religious concepts we can reach via secular reasoning, such as caritas and agape, of which you have written elsewhere.

Is this the respect that adherents of religion themselves want? No. As Stanley Fish has recently written (from behind the NYT subscription wall): "But religion’s truth claims don’t want your respect. They want your belief and, finally, your soul. They are jealous claims." We cannot give the religious right any respect that it will value. As for our leftward of the religious right friends who want us to grant religious claims more respect in the political marketplace, I suspect that they have little interest in our souls or even the souls of swing voters, unless souls get votes in addition to the ones bodies get. They just want us atheists to stop offending the rather large number of voters who value both faith and reason--ours is not to reason how... For example, if we don't force people to choose between their Catholic faith and supporting access to birth control for all the rational reasons, they might somehow find a way to choose both of the above, and, somehow, they did just that.

I think you may have underestimated the appeal of, and need for repeating, the "usual arguments about competing for swing voters and trying not to piss people off unnecessarily." While trying to gain the votes of the religious right is a hopeless prospect, not losing the votes of the religious middle seems like a valuable goal.

Gator Love

Remedial NCAA basketball blogging—I would be remiss not to call attention to the fact that my bracket earned first place in all three of the pools I entered, including the illustrious Lawyers Guns & Money challenge. I raked in $41.25 from my wife’s office pool (how it came out to this amount, I have no idea), a delicious complimentary breakfast here at my office, and the jealousy if not outright resentment of the Warren Zevon geeks over at Lefarkins.

It was sheer dumb luck. I did do a modicum of research: the “pick up a copy of USA Today the Monday morning after seeds are announced” approach. But I think my formula for success came down to a distrust of North Carolina and all ACC teams (because familiarity breeds contempt) and a glimmer of confidence in UCLA and especially Florida (because, what the hell, they did it last year, with basically the same players). I didn’t do that well with my early-round picks, but I nailed the Final Four, then the Final Two, then hit the jackpot with Florida.

I'd call it a decent tournament, although it’s sad the way college hoops is haunted by questions of how long this or that star player is going to stay in school. It was great to see Georgetown do so well, marrying the Princeton offense with an athletic group of players. It was good to see such good low-post play out of Greg Oden and Roy Hibbert and the Florida guys. I don’t care for Joakim Noah’s hairstyle but I like everything else about him. I compared him to Marcus Camby earlier this year, and meant it as a compliment, but I don’t think Camby can put the ball on the floor like Noah did a couple times in Atlanta. I remember Al Horford’s dad Tito was an awesome physical specimen with no basketball smarts, but Al is a shrewd player; it’s nice to see the son outdo the father.

My main college hoops related emotion right now is, I’m a little bummed that John Beilein left West Virginia University to become the coach at Michigan. Bummed but not shocked: this is the lot of a WVU fan, plus Michigan was a great opportunity, a place with a fine basketball history and great resources, but also a program that has been humbled the last several years. I expect Michigan will be patient with Beilein while he gets his feet wet in the Big Ten. Contrast with Billy Donovan turning down the Kentucky job, where 20+ wins a year like clockwork under Tubby Smith was considered not good enough.

To take Beilein’s place, Bob Huggins is returning to WVU, his alma mater. I have fond memories of seeing Huggins play for the Mountaineers back in the 70s, but he left Cincinnati in 2005 just ahead of the posse, and now he is leaving bad feelings in his wake at Kansas State, where he spent only one year. I just hope Huggins stays on his best behavior and doesn’t land the Mountaineers in NCAA jail. It’s a concern.

FOD (Friends of Darth)

Here was something sort of creepy-funny: in his L.A. Times column over the weekend, Jonathan Chait passes on a quote about the GOP presidential sweepstakes.

"THIS IS NOT Luke Skywalker here," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), discussing his friend and Senate colleague John McCain's second run for the presidency. "This is a totally different campaign."

Graham was looking for a way to reassure his fellow conservatives that they no longer had anything to fear from McCain. His choice of metaphor is one of those windows into the fundamental cultural gap that separates hard-core conservatives from the rest of humanity. To most people, who think of Luke Skywalker as a hero battling an evil and immensely powerful empire, Graham's implication would be seen as an unmitigated insult. In the world of the GOP elite, though, it's a form of praise: No, no, don't worry, McCain's with the empire now.

Interesting that Jonathan Chait is writing this way about McCain now. Once upon a time (spring 2002) he wrote a New Republic feature about why it would be a great thing and even plausible for John McCain to jump parties and run for President as a Democrat. I actually found that piece persuasive and talked up a McCain-jumping-parties scenario right up through 2004. I got carried away with that "maverick" business, just like most of the national media is still carried away. The specific thing I wanted McCain to revolt against was the dirty Rovian campaign politics that hold sway in the GOP now, and which McCain got the full brunt of in the 2000 South Carolina presidential primary. It took a while for me to see that McCain was determined to pander wherever and to whomever it took to get the inside track in the GOP presidential race. There's nothing very maverick about that. And McCain is in the process of finding out that the far right of his party is only interested in rooting out and punishing mavericks.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. The startling implication that Republicans are people who root against Luke Skywalker and in favor of the Empire, actually dovetails with something I've been thinking about on the home front--something I encountered at church, actually. I'm in an adult Sunday school class where we are currently studying some of the parables of Jesus; yesterday it was the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18). The week before it was the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). Anyway, I am learning that many people in my class identify primarily with the figure of propriety in these stories: with the Pharisee, for instance. Or with the older brother of the Prodigal, who has always been a dutiful son, and who has to grin and bear it when the father welcomes the Prodigal home.

These people baffle me. Not on a spiritual but on a visceral psychological level, I just can't imagine identifying with the goody-two-shoes instead of the anti-hero. How can you not love the Prodigal Son--profligate, rebellious, scoundrelly--who has screwed up as big as life, ruined himself and shamed his family, and is in flight from the day of reckoning. Until he hits bottom, as the 12-step people would say, and the story pivots. The father might be the most appealing figure of all, granted, but that aside, how can you like the Stable Boring Son more than the Prodigal Son? Or prefer the smug hypocritical Pharisee over the Tax Collector, the chiseler and flim-flam man who, in the darkest hour of night, knows himself for exactly what he is? Have these people been sheltered from pop culture ever since the 1960s? Some of them are my age (40-ish, so somewhere on the cusp between Baby Boomers and Gen Xers), but it's as if they are part of the WW2 Generation. I'm not going to quit this church, but I might try out a different Sunday school class.

Eating Their Own

There's a growing controversy this week over a rash of firings of U.S. attorneys around the country. The common thread seems to be that these prosecutors were fired for building cases against GOP politicians, or in a couple of instances, not pursuing cases against Democratic politicians.

The substantive thing that disturbs me the most is that these actions were not illegal--like the late great Molly Ivins used to say, the worst scandal isn't the illegal behavior, it's the behavior that passes for legal. The Executive Branch was given this new power, to fire U.S. Attorneys at will without Senate approval, by a clause in the Patriot Act, or as I like to call it, The Chronic Festering Disease That Keeps On Giving. As Michael Moore famously pointed out, Congress passed this huge sweeping omnibus anti-terror law in such a rush that many reps didn't know what was in the thing. We're saddled with this fucker, and there are new toxic irruptions here and there on a regular basis, and the most depressing idea is I don't know if any future president, even a Democratic one, will have the brass statesmanlike balls to revoke or reform the Patriot Act. When does a president voluntarily reduce the scope of his or her powers?

But in a darkly amusing twist, it's been pointed out to me today, the Republicans would have gotten away with this if they had just been able to resist the urge to fuck over other Republicans. These U.S. attorneys were political appointees, Republicans themselves, and though they surely didn't like being relieved of their jobs for showing an excess of integrity, all of them took their medicine and said tactful things on their way out the door, of the "want to spend more time with my family" variety. But the Bush Administration fixers had to gild the lily.

Kevin Drum:

And the fired official themselves, who are all Republican loyalists in the first place, would have packed their bags and gotten other jobs. They know how politics works.

But no. This administration is so dedicated to spin and deceit that they just couldn't leave it alone. They figured maybe they could avoid any criticism by claiming the firings were for performance-related reasons. That should shut everyone up! But of course it did just the opposite. The fired attorneys, who were originally willing to suck it up and accept their political fate, were unhappy over being called incompetent. Who wouldn't be? And so the whole thing unraveled. Now it's a case of U.S. Attorneys being fired because they were too zealous about prosecuting Republican corruption, and the Department of Justice is reduced to feebly arguing that it's just a coincidence that so many of the Pearl Harbor Eight were investigating corruption cases.

It's the Bush administration in a microcosm: a too-clever-by-half expansion of executive power, spin and deceit when it's discovered, followed by a storm of backtracking and protestations of innocence that no one believes. It wouldn't be so bad if this weren't also the Bush administration in a macrocosm. But it is.

Lance Mannion:

...Moschella appears to have expected that Cummins would continue to play the patsy. Or he thought, or at least hoped, that people would think Cummins was lying.

This is how the Bush Leaguers treat their "friends." Cummins was trying to help them out and Moschella was willing to either use him as a stooge or throw him under the bus....

For all these guys, the point of politics is power. You go into politics in order to be the guys in charge. And you want to be in charge so you can do whatever you want. Everything in the Bush Administration is politicized because everything is about the people running the show having the power to run the show.. That's what the man meant when he called them the Mayberry Machiavellis. They don't do anything for the public good.

Fitzmas -- Libby guilty on four counts

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. I guess this was published a couple of weeks ago; the Libby verdict just came in today.

In a way, the Beltway's tawdry interest in the "Inside Baseball" bullshit
emanating from the Libby trial perfectly mirrored the Democrats' half-serious
attempts to pass an anti-war resolution. For the portrait of both the Bush
administration and the press corps that is emerging from this trial is that of a
group of craven star-fuckers with their tongues so far up each others' asses
that they scarcely even realized that their high school gossiping was helping to
start a war. Like the Democrats with their legislative dawdling, they were doing
something other than their jobs at the moment of truth and were too stupid to
not be proud of it.
In the end, the jury may be too confused to figure out
whether it was Russert, or Miller, or Bob Novak, or Bob Woodward, or Dick
Armitage, or Karl Rove, or Santa Claus who outed Valerie Plame.
But the
public will conclude that they were all trading stories about Joe Wilson's wife,
and getting off on it, and not one of them thought to step back and realize the
gravity of what they were doing. At each turn both the reporters and the
administration went weak in the knees every time they had a secret to share --
the classic example being Armitage's when he spoke to Woodward about Plame. "His
wife is in the agency. . . . How about that shit?" he bragged.
This image of
overpaid Washington insiders giddy with the game of power politics, using the
lives of eighteen-year-olds as poker chips, is what has inspired so much hatred
and disgust for mainstream politics in the past half-dozen years or so. It was
no accident that the gallery of the Libby trial was filled with correspondents
from the blogging world filing daily reports -- Firedoglake, the Huffington Post
and BlogHer were represented, among others. They had to be there because . . .
well, because there had to be some real reporters there. At least the bloggers
know who they're representing. As the trial showed, no one can be all that sure
anymore about the Washington media, or the dingbat politicians they hang around
with.

Trinity UCC

Via Atrios, I see Sean Hannity did a segment that tried to paint Barack Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, as "scary" and "like a cult." The supposedly "scary" part is that Trinity UCC promotes "The Black Value System", a mission statement that outlines a vision of black excellence, integrity, and social justice.

Read the BVS for yourself and see how militant or separatist you find it to be. The UCC denomination is the inheritor of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards; it doesn't get much more musty-respectable in American Christianity. Trinity is a black congregation in a majority-white denomination, which is bound to create some added identity issues around "blackness," but also indicates a history of racial accommodation, not separation. Trinity's senior minister, Jeremiah Wright, is nationally known and respected. Trinity's a huge, booming, apparently exemplary church.

I realize none of the above is proof positive of TUCC's non-heresy or benignity, but read the values statement, as a fair-minded person with a smidgen of understanding of American history and culture. (Pretend if necessary!)

The Hannity report is pig-ignorant and unfair. It's also following the classic progression of a right-wing media smear: it starts on a fringe web site like World Net Daily, then a conservative talk show picks it up. Look for it to be mentioned next by Chris Wallace or Brit Hume, one of the "more reputable" Fox News talking heads. After that, I predict, will be the jump to ABC News.

It's hard to push back against this kind of slur, but I hope TUCC (and, maybe more importantly, some of its friends in Chicago) will respond soon.

The Muskogee Manifesto and much much more

This American Prospect article was published just after the Dixie Chicks' Grammy sweep two weeks ago. The article traces the political history of the country music business: Nashville was New Deal populist before becoming Republican, and a key turning point was the release of Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee." Haggard himself intended the song as a bit of a goof, but its popularity revealed, maybe for the first time, that there is a sizable market for cultural reactionaries out there, who want to stand up for patriotism and tradition against hippies and smart-alecks. I'm tickled by the idea, and even think it has some merit, that the conservative swing of the US in the last generation really started not with William F. Buckley or Barry Goldwater, but with Merle Haggard.

"Okie from Muskogee" itself doesn't refer to religion, but country music boosters promoted it as an example of

how homages to the hard-working farmer, love-rich poor folk, patriotic
fighting men, and devoted Christians make the music "the voice
of [Nixon's] 'Silent Majority.'"

In Left Blogistan lately there's been a lot of talk about the privileged rhetorical position of "people of faith." Atrios complains that it begs the questions, Whose faith? Faith in what? My response is that for middle America, faith operates as political shorthand. It fits into a tableau: a candidate standing on a dais festooned with bunting, a flag lapel pin, the spouse smiling and waving, the fresh-faced children. The language of faith helps to signify cultural conservatism. That's the main thing. In fact, it does so in a potent and intimate way. Now you may well be a Democrat and not a cultural conservative, but there are a lot of cultural conservatives in this country, including African-Americans and Latinos who are key Democratic constituencies. You need those people. Democrats need an avenue of appeal to cultural conservatives, and faith is an important part of it.

(I happen to think cultural conservatism can be defined in a more democratic/populist way than we commonly think of it, but that's another post.)

Faith is not equivalent to religious doctrine. Loads of Americans are all hopped up on faith but give hardly a damn for theology or doctrine. Pundits debate whether Mitt Romney's Mormon background fatally harms his presidential ambitions. I say no. I find the LDS church to be doctrinally weird if not incoherent, but look: the Mormons stand for patriarchy, sobriety, the pioneer spirit--heck, the Mormons' long exodus in search of their eventual home in Utah has echoes of the Israelites and the Pilgrims, crossed with a John Wayne movie. Romney's Mormonism is awkward, but not crippling. Some leaders of the Religious Right disdain Mormonism, but the average religious conservative voter will not have a problem with it. (Romney's bigger problem is living down his socially moderate positions as governor of Massachusetts.)

Riffing on Romney in the Boston Globe, Paul Waldman commented:

Listen to candidates talk about religion and they seem to be following two
rules:
1) Profess that nothing is more important to you than your
religion.
2) Be as vague as possible about your religion.

Waldman's right; for instance, Romney wants credit for being a good church-going Christian but resists discussion of the details of Mormonism. But this is what politicians do on many fronts: aligning themselves with a popular theme (tough on crime, compassionate on health care, etc.), but skimping on the details. Organized religion just has a special power to get under the skin of liberal writers. If Romney had a vision for health care reform but as yet no detailed program, a pundit might cut him some slack for strategic reasons. No such benefit of the doubt with religion; Waldman wants to interrogate Mormon doctrine, right now.

The peerless East Coast smart-aleck HL Mencken once wrote: "We must accept the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." I'm not sure Mencken meant to be giving campaign advice with this quip, but that's a good attitude for Democrats to adopt. A pol declaring himself a "person of faith" is akin to trotting out the spouse and kids to demonstrate strong family values. It's pro forma political theatre.

It's regrettably true that one cannot be bluntly atheist and have presidential ambitions. One cannot speak in opposition to baseball or motherhood or golden retrievers either. There's a whole set of characterological requirements for political candidates that are silly or unfair, but that Americans haven't yet evolved beyond. C'est la vie, as Chuck Berry used to sing.

Well, this is a whole mess of thoughts, but at least let me pile them in this one place. A few more:

I still intend to say something about "Whistling Past Dixie," and here Pastor Dan of Street Prophets says something I agree with, that these are overlapping questions for Democrats, whether to court religious voters and whether to court the South. Southern Democrats are more acclimated to the language of faith, and they (we) tend to assume that "you don't break covenant with someone simply because you don't agree with them."

I should acknowledge the sad news that Amanda and Shakes did not survive with the John Edwards campaign. The infuriating thing is that this Donahue character is treated as a Catholic spokesman; he's nothing but a far-right goon, Frank Nitti with rosary beads. A lot can be said and was said about blogs vs. the Establishment, but at the end of the day it was a power play. Bill Donahue had more of it than Shakes and Amanda did.

That said, while none of Amanda's supposedly objectionable posts pushed MY buttons, they were gratuitous and it's clear they pushed some people buttons. Ed Kilgore is consistently smart about religion and politics, and here he points out that one line you shouldn't cross is questioning the sincerity of someone's beliefs. For anti-woman, anti-gay Christian conservatives, which came first, the bigotry or the "faith"? Which has precedence, which follows from the other? Oftentimes, I believe, the bigotry comes first. (Look how many Episcopalians have switched denominations, to places where anti-gay sentiments are more at home.) But you can't say that in public political discourse; as a practical matter you just can't.

In tracking the Amanda-Shakes discussion, I discovered a blog I really like called Adventus. I'm predisposed to relate to the guy because he's a burned-out Episcopal priest. Anyway, he had an unstinting rebuke of Amanda:

If you want to engage in politics, truly engage in it rather than snipe at it
from the sidelines like the Washington pundits and talking heads and columnists
across the country and political spectrum, you have to take responsibility for
what you say. If you want to engage in public life at all, beyond shouting
opinions and spouting your preference and gathering to you people of like mind
who nod at your "sage" pronouncements, you have to take responsibility for what
you say. It doesn't mean "they" get a free pass for threatening your life or
simply your job; but it does mean they get to swing back, and you can't retreat
behind complaining about their "hurt feelings." If that's the best you've got,
the kitchen's gonna be too hot for you.

Unfogged had a really good comments thread about the Mormons and whether they should be considered Christians or not.

I found that Mencken quote in this Stuart Jeffries piece in the Guardian. Thanks once again, Ophelia!

Happy Mardi Gras

A friend just linked me to this: ParadeCam, St. Charles Avenue.

I was in New Orleans for Mardi Gras once. I was 22. Huge crowds. A party, someone's house, some friend of a friend. Balcony perch, overlooking a gay parade down Bourbon Street. Leather queens. Should have anticipated this scene, but hadn't. Me yelling at a guy because I didn't like the way he looked at me. Me = 22-year-old asshole. Later: A gorgeous woman, topless except for body paint and glitter, stumbling through the French Quarter, blind drunk. Me worried about her. More crowds, parades, grabbing for beads and coins. Walking for miles, drunk, with my friend Alan, trying to find our car.

It was a bumpy ride of a day, actually. And yet I feel it would be nice to be in New Orleans today.

Here in the Bible Belt, 20 years later, I have two invitations to pre-Lenten celebrations, both of which are centered around eating pancakes. Sheesh. Protestants.

Uh oh, somebody's off message

The Spirit of Radio

WNEW, broadcasting from New York City at 102.7 on the FM dial, was in my life starting in 1979, the year I turned 15, a ripe age for first love, and for a couple of years after that.

Anglo-American rock music was important to me when I was a teenager; many of you can say the same. Lonely and awkward, parents don’t understand me, sexual longing, wish to be cool; verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, fade out. There are a dozen or so rock artists I could semi-plausibly name as my first love. You know them as well or better than I do. Instead, I would like to write about the radio station through which I heard them.

Of the thousands of late, mostly unlamented AOR stations, my WNEW had two big things to recommend it: the time and the place. The late 70s were a propitious time for FM radio, a time of thrilling disorder, when commerce and creativity seemed to be allies, not opponents. A land rush was on, an early rehearsal for the dot-com boom of the 90s. And New York was a propitious place, as a capital of the record industry as well as of the counterculture.

So at WNEW you had guys like Scott Muni, a seasoned pro from Top 40 AM radio, coming together with people like Vin Scelsa and Pete Fornatale, who were products of the dynamic late-60s college radio scene. To the young rock-n-roll legions scattered across the tri-state area, WNEW’s disc jockeys were gurus. Not entertainers—this is an important point to make since the advent of shock jocks. WNEW’s DJs were never “outrageous,” they were rarely even funny. The secret of their allure was simple hospitality, plus a gentle didacticism. While not neglecting to spin the familiar favorites, they also considered it their mission to turn listeners on to new or neglected music. While respecting the audience’s tastes, they sought to inform and broaden those tastes. This generation of DJs were the original mix-tape obsessives; they paid close attention to the selection and sequence of tracks, testing the power of their medium to create a mood or explore a theme. They were collage artists, assembling musical bits and pieces into something new and sometimes surprising. Confident of themselves and trusting of their audience, they kept the focus on the music they were playing.

In Googling around for this article, I came across an online bio of Pete Townshend, which I commend to you if you’re interested in the subject; it’s a serious piece of work. An important primary source for the biographer was a 1978 interview Townshend did with Scott Muni on WNEW. I don’t believe it could happen today, for a commercial radio station to do an artist interview that will stand up as a scholarly resource in years to come. The DJs were journalists at WNEW; they educated us and supplied context about the music they were playing. They made room for kids to be geeks, not just trend followers.

What was the music they were playing? You already have a general idea: they played many of the white artists currently enshrined up in Cleveland, and they had most of the same blind spots and selection biases that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has. I don’t mean to make our tastes, WNEW’s or mine, out to be better than they were. I didn’t hear much punk music on WNEW; even today I’m still filling in those gaps. I did hear a fair amount of prog rock, though, a subgenre that is not much represented up on Lake Erie: bands like Yes, Rush, and Jethro Tull were big on the station. Prog pomposity was a less grievous sin than punk rebellion was. Also, apart from the arena rock dinosaurs I remember a category of mostly English artists, post-hippies but not-quite-punks: Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Squeeze, Rockpile, the Pretenders. They were smart and incisive, yet life-sized, and they got airplay on ‘NEW, and I like to think they were valuable to me, as I listened on the clock radio in my bedroom, and did the collage-artist work of cobbling together a public persona from bits and pieces.

The thing that cemented my bond to the station was its response to a senseless crime. A great many Metro New Yorkers vividly recall getting the news of John Lennon’s murder, minutes after it happened, from Vin Scelsa on WNEW. John and Yoko were familiar faces in the city and been particular friends of the station (John was tight with Scott Muni). The grief-stricken staff went to all-Beatles-and-Lennon programming for the next several days, sharing music and reminiscences and unfolding news. The culmination was a live broadcast of the Lennon memorial vigil held in Central Park the following Sunday.

I don’t remember the moment I got the news of the shooting, but I have a strong memory of sitting on the floor of my bedroom and listening to the Central Park broadcast. The focal point of the ceremony was a long moment of silence, ten minutes long. I kept silent too; I remember my mother coming into my room wanting to ask me something, and I turned my head and gave her a look, and she left me alone. She understood. Listening to a radio broadcast of near-total silence might seem odd; for that matter, my feeling grief for the death of a rock star I’d never met might seem odd. But I was 16, and a Beatles fan, and the circumstances were especially cruel at a moment when Lennon’s career and life seemed to be on an upswing. And the broadcast was haunting and affecting, like a needle stuck in a run-out groove. I felt present with the friends and family, with the thousands of mourners in Central Park and others keeping vigil around the world. It’s the most memorable funeral I’ve attended, and WNEW was uniquely situated to make my participation possible. Whether one reveres the Beatles or not is somewhat beside the point. It was a rare milestone in broadcasting history, and a remarkable coalescence of a virtual human community.

And some say Lennon’s death marked the apex of WNEW’s distinctiveness and influence. It was downhill from there. MTV arrived on the scene, and strict demographic formats encroached more and more. FM radio was being fenced in. It was just as well that I began to listen less avidly. My social life picked up; I found my flesh-and-blood first love. The next fall I left for college 500 miles away.

First love is naïve by definition, and should not have to be explained or apologized for. WNEW cared about us, and we cared about it. The station stayed true to its mission: anchoring us in the familiar, but reaching out and restlessly searching for the new. WNEW formed my tastes, and even influenced my way of enlarging my tastes. I still have a proclivity for seeking gurus or guides to new stuff; newsreaders and weblogs are online updates of the hip-yet-reassuring DJ, helping separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe there’s a latent desire for authority in that habit. And yet, through WNEW I glimpsed the potential for electronic media to forge something like a community, out of people dispersed in space and maybe even in time, but united by shared interests.

My teenage daughter is an iPod listener. She has no use whatsoever for commercial broadcast radio. She would find it baffling that I have the slightest affection for a radio station; she would sooner have sentimental feelings about our neighborhood Target store. As terrestrial radio struggles to survive, it is designing formats that emulate iPod shuffle mode. The very existence of a human being in a studio, carefully shaping a music-listening experience, may be obsolete and endangered. From a certain point of view, freeform radio was an evolutionary glitch, a cultural and technological anomaly, a transitory eddy in the mighty stream of history.

Aren’t we all? Certainly, my brief encounter with WNEW was a lucky accident of geography, timing, and “term limitation.” But it worked. WNEW enjoyed a heyday as a great radio station, it and I shared a special time together, and it never let me down.

Critics of Religion

Atrios made a post Saturday, inspired by the Marcotte-McEwan controversy, where he lays out his views on commenting about religion. It’s a thoughtful statement that I respect and largely agree with.

He starts in a funny place, though:

To me, one of the biggest barriers to having any kind of honest discussion about religion generally and religion in politics specifically has been in the rise of ecumenical and interfaith alliances of all kinds. While these things were probably well-intentioned, they tend to first divide people into "faithful" and "faithless" camps, and work to obscure the wide differences in religious belief and practice among the "faithful."… The substitution of largely meaningless and undefinable words like "faith" and "spirituality," which merely point to an undefined belief in something, for the more concrete "religion," which connotes a specific set of beliefs, traditions, and practices, has prevented an honest examination and understanding of what religion actually is, in its many forms, in this country.

I’m not sure of the relevance of this to Marcotte-McEwan; maybe there is a connection in Atrios’s mind that he doesn’t make explicit. But I have a couple of objections. One, substituting “spirituality” for “religion” is a real problem for organized religion. It has to do with the ascendancy of individualism over institutionalism. (“Sheilaism” is one term for a belief system that is spiritual but not religious.) Atrios implies that it’s a plot, or deception, or other incursion by religious authorities into mainstream life. If anything, it’s an incursion of pop culture into religion. Two, the complaints about interfaith alliances and shifting terminology—I fail to see the point, other than it complicates the reality of lived religion and makes things harder for Atrios to understand. He takes a defensive attitude: Somebody’s obscuring things. A better attitude would be: This is complex, I might not see all the angles, maybe I ought to tread lightly, ask for clarification, etc. Duncan would probably never make a blunt value judgment about African-American or Latino culture, partly for fear of giving offense unintentionally. Well, the same potential exists when you comment on a religion that’s not your own.

The post of Amanda's that generated the most outrage was the one about Plan B, the Virgin Mary, and the “hot white sticky” Holy Spirit. That one didn’t make me mad when I first read it; didn’t push my buttons. On reflection, though, I think I see how it could have made other people sincerely angry. It was funny, and it made a legitimate debate point about Plan B contraception. It was also a big fat finger in the eye to Christians who care about the Virgin Mary and the Trinity. And those are central to the faith life of many if not most Christians. The Vatican's views on birth control are not nearly so central. (Here is another tentative observation: the Trinity and the Virgin Birth are among Christianity's most irrational or abstruse beliefs, and just as they appear the most ridiculous articles of faith to outsiders, they are particular sore spots for insiders--the hardest items of doctrine to sign on to, the biggest source of doubt or ambivalence. Best to steer clear of those if you can, Mr. or Ms. Politician.)

Maybe I'm guilty of pushing my pre-existing agenda, and probably I'm in the dreary albeit familiar position of stressing the tone of criticism over the content. But it's a fundamental political task, finding common ground between groups of overlapping but not identical priorities. Establishing trust and good will is a major part of that task. And when you attack religious differences recklessly,you risk destroying good will by treading on tenets or practices that are precious and intimate to many, many people.

Duncan B. recognizes a crucial distinction, between the “many paths to God” viewpoint and the proselytizing, judgmental, one-path-only viewpoint. The latter approach is the one that most often merits criticism, precisely because it involves imposing Tom’s beliefs on Dick and Harry. I don’t think Duncan sees, though, that the “many paths to God” posture is the one that leads to interfaith alliances. There are reasons not to hold out much hope for interfaith dialogue, but I think it should be encouraged.

Incidentally, Butterflies & Wheels pointed me to this opinion piece by a Mark C. Taylor, who teaches religious studies at Williams College. (As usual, I take a slightly different point from the piece than B&W does.) Taylor is troubled by the increasing resistance to a comparative-religions approach among undergraduates, and argues that critical and comparative study of religions is a key to meeting the challenges of the next century.

Until recently, many influential analysts argued that religion, the vestige of an earlier stage of development, would wither away as people became more sophisticated and rational. Obviously, things have not turned out that way. It is now clear that religion is not going to disappear. Indeed, the twenty-first century will be dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable a few short years ago. These conflicts will be less struggles between belief and unbelief than they will be clashes between believers who have the faith to doubt and those who lack it. The warning signals are clear: unless we establish a critical dialogue within and among all kinds of belief, ranging from religious fundamentalism to secular dogmatism, the conflicts some people welcome and others fear will surely become even more deadly.

One more on the Edwards bloggers

Well, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan still have their jobs, which is good. They had to humble themselves a little, but in a way it’s nice to see progressives using the “non-apology apology” that right-wingers so often turn to.

Via Ezra Klein, I see this piece at politico.com quoting a couple of religious Democratic “leaders” (neither of whom I’ve heard of before) who feel Edwards should have dumped the two bloggers.

Democrats -- and Edwards in particular -- have embraced the language of faith and the imperative of competing with Republicans for the support of religious voters. His wife, Elizabeth Edwards, even sits on the board of the leading organization of the religious left, Call to Renewal. But in private conversations and careful public statements today, religious Democrats said they felt sidelined by Edwards' decision to stand by his aides.

"We have gone so far to rebuild that coalition [between Democrats and religious Christians] and something like this sets it back," said Brian O'Dwyer, a New York lawyer and Irish-American leader who chairs the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council, a Democratic Party group. O'Dwyer said Edwards should have fired the bloggers. "It's not only wrong morally – it's stupid politically."

O'Dwyer e-mailed a statement to reporters saying: "Senator Edwards is condoning bigotry by keeping the two bloggers on his staff. Playing to the cheap seats with anti-Catholic bigotry has no place in the Democratic Party."

“Stupid politically”—hmm. I disagree, given the circumstances. It would’ve looked terrible for Edwards to knuckle under to Michelle Malkin and William Donahue. Here, though, are some tougher hypothetical questions. What if Mr. O’Dwyer had publicly called for Amanda to be fired? What then would be the politically smart move for Edwards to make? Who is a more important constituency, religious liberals or the blogosphere?

Personally, I identify with both constituencies, but that overlap is perhaps small. The question points to a more fundamental one in politics: reach for the center or energize the base? One could quibble, but most people would place open-minded religious believers in the center, and the readership of Pandagon on the left.

It pains me to pose the question this way. I find that trying to occupy the slot of “religious liberal” is exhausting; there are roadblocks, misunderstandings, frustrations every direction you turn. Being a resident of the blogosphere is more energizing. Correspondingly (I don’t know what the causal relationship is, it’s a chicken-egg thing) the religious left is weak in getting things done. The blogosphere—it sounds funny to say it, but it does have a shaggy kind of organization and is growing in influence. If I do the math, I come out in favor of the blogosphere.

Marcotte “playing to the cheap seats?” I guess he means crude reflexive atheists, and/or people who like a good jizm joke no matter what. Marcotte and McEwan also play to smart people--young, smart, passionate people out here in Flyover Country.

This whole stupid thing with McEwan and Marcotte pushes several of my buttons. I realize it’s a tempest in a teapot and ought to die a quick death as a news story. Yet I'm flashing back to a summer when I was in my 20s, between jobs, hanging out with friends in Dupont Circle, having vague thoughts about trying to get work in Washington, then discovering to my disillusionment that these people were unprincipled, or if they had principles they were invisible under layers of intrigue. They thought about their careers 24/7 and I was unlikely to ever get on their wavelength. It wasn’t that these people flat-out rejected me—I’d let it slip out that I might be job-hunting and they were trying to be helpful. But they turned me off with obnoxious networking behavior, pressing business cards on me when I was standing in line to get a beer. I was lacking in ambition, sure, but they were lacking in perspective.

There needs to be more room in politics for people who are smart and passionate, yet sometimes irreverent and not laser-like in their focus. People with a sense of humor. People who get context (which was the first casualty when people were ripping sentences out of Pandagon for scrutiny). Room for regular people, in other words.