De Bah Bah Blague

Mass Shrink Required

1/13/2018

       I hate to add to the deluge under which media discourse today is submerged, with only the tips of a few non-Trump-centered news stories appearing briefly above the surface from time to time. My excuse is that this isn’t about Trump. He’s just the catalyst. It’s about the ineptitude, the wrong-headedness, the downright malfeasance of the Left.

       Trump may or not be a racist. (My own view is that Trump is devoid of any general principles, good or bad.) His referring to Haiti and Africa as “shitholes” in a conference that included many Trump-detractors, was another sign of his unfitness for office; not of racism.
       I could imagine myself, in a free-wheeling conversation among a small group of close friends, referring to Haiti and Africa as “shitholes.” I would immediately be challenged about Africa, and I would have to amend it to “parts of Africa.” Otherwise, yes – these days, they are crappy places to be: Haiti, Somalia, the Congo, Eritrea. They’re shitholes.
       Shitholes have been our country’s main source of immigrants. Ireland was a shithole in the 1840’s. The pale of settlement was a shithole in the 1890’s. Germany was a shithole in the 1930’s. If it hadn’t been for the Marshall Plan, Europe would have been a shithole after the War. Arguably, Greece beneath the thousand lashes of austerity (You! Will! Never! Stiff! the Banks! Again!) is a shithole. Venezuela, too.
       The difficulty of claiming that “shithole” conclusively was a racist remark is clear to anyone whose mind is still in working order.

       We have known from before the election that 1) Trump is an eternal font of outrageous remarks and 2) for some reason (an important one to figure out, it seems to me) he is impervious to any fallout from them. Trump’s actions, as President, have consequences, and thus affect his level of support. After another of his outrageous remarks has been revealed, reviled, reported ad-infinitum, and discussed by serious political analysts, the same number of people as before love him and hate him.
       Why has the Left, from the center outwards, yet again wasted its energy and bored the country by excoriating vituperously, shrilly, simplistically and, worst of all, incessantly, one more stupid remark by a stupid man?
       My pop-psy diagnosis: The Left is suffering from a psychological malady – mass hysteria, mass obsessive-compulsive disorder, or mass paranoia – whose symptom is mass self-harming.

P. S. - If you want to indict the Trump administration for racism, why not harp on its failure to succor Puerto Rico?

e-Nihilism

11/19/2017

       I have a love/hate relationship to the internet; rather, a hate/love relationship (instead of a perversion of a love, a perversion of a hatred).
       I like to think that I use the internet, but don’t indulge in it. Not strictly true. I have been known to pig out on YouTube. And the attention I pay to Google News ranges beyond utility into indulgence.
       But, just as in a love/hate relationship love is the default emotion, in a hate/love relationship, like my ambivalence toward the internet, hatred is the bottom line.
       Sometimes I have the fantasy (talking about indulging oneself) that I win $5 million in the lottery (pure fantasy, since I never buy lottery tickets) and find a bored 14-year-old in Riga, or a Russian ex-con in Brighton Beach, a Wikileaks nihilist, or a 30-year old adolescent in Silicone Valley who owes millions to a Mexican cartel after his entire stock of cocaine, which he was supposed to retail to other 30-year-old adolescents, went up his nose to give him the get-up-and-go to come out tops in the corporate ping-pong tournament, who, for $5 million, would shut it all down - all of it – would press a key and fry every server on earth, scramble every satellite algorithm.
       Would it be that hard to do? What about a virus with a program that turned every “1” into a “0”? That doesn’t sound so difficult, and it would do the trick.
       Sure, I’d miss it: e-mail, especially; Google Search, too – although when I use Google Search I can’t overcome a twinge of, somehow, cheating.
       But if it really were to happen – and, my fantasy aside, a catastrophic sabotaging of the internet is not all that improbable – I would break open a celebratory bottle of Champagne, put on the Rolling Stones (if the power had not already gone out), and wear myself out in a dance of thanksgiving. Then I would go and look out my window.
       Outside my window would be a new world – fresh, clean, and ours again.

Conspiracy Theory (When Harry Met Sally II)

11/17/2017

         I’ve said this before; it’s not a conspiracy theory; but to reiterate:
       The only beneficiary of driverless cars (outside of those who make and sell them) will be Silicone Valley. Will driverless cars give drivers leisure time in which they can read War and Peace or master Intermediate Hydraulics? No, sorry. Driverless cars – the first generation, at least – will require that the driver emeritus keeps an eye on the road, glancing from time to time at a video feed of the surrounding traffic.
       I’d give, oh, 25-to-1 odds that that video feed will appear in a corner or a quadrant of a large screen offering full i-Phone capabilities.
       Basically, whatever you do, as you tootle down the highway in your Tesla or Googlecar, including reading War and Peace, will be done on the internet.
       Not only will internet providers and websites profit from the increase in users, which helps justify increased advertising rates, but driverless cars will represent a tremendous leap forward in the continuing infantilization of humanity (at least, of 99.99% of humanity).
       I don’t have to spell out how valuable it is to the corporate sector to have an increasingly infantilized customer base.

       I was thinking about my previous post, in which I drew a parallel between onanism and indulging in mockery of Trump, which I called political onanism; then I was thinking about driverless cars. And I came up with a conspiracy theory – that is, an improbable, but still not impossible, explanation for an otherwise perfectly intelligible occurrence, involving the covert machinations of some wily group of powerful people – about the current frenzy, whipped up by the media, over sexual harassment.
       The effect of this harassment hysteria on people’s sex lives – especially men’s – will be catastrophic.
       As male-female relationships become more and more of a minefield, more and more people, of all genders, will rely on masturbation when they are feeling horny.
       Just like driverless cars, that – via on-line porn – will add to the internet click-rate.
       Of course, men and women will still find ways to get together. But how?
       “How will a man even be able to approach a woman now?” as a friend of mine put it.
       “The internet,” I replied without thinking.
       The only safe flirting – that is, flirting with someone you can be sure wants to be flirted with – will be through dating websites or other on-line lists of available partners.
       So, to shopping, banking, politics, entertainment, friendship, community association and, in due course, transportation, education and health care, as primarily internet-administered human activities, we now can add sex.

Donny Does Washington

11/3/2017

        Trump gags continue to proliferate as fast and furiously as ever. From Saturday Night Live to cleverly photo-shopped images to elaborate, seamlessly edited, YouTube extravaganzas, the comic ingenuity of the Left seems to have surged over time, instead of subsiding.
       This titillation of the Left by a continuous stream of mockery of Trump is an onanistic exercise – political onanism, let’s call it.
       A witty burlesque of Donald Trump does for the politically frustrated exactly what an inspired erotic fantasy does for the sexually frustrated: it generates a fleeting release from frustration and a brief, hollow pleasure.
       Just as fuel for erotic fantasies is available with the click of a mouse or the swiping of a screen, so is the fuel for Trump gags. Every day brings a new, tantalizing episode of Donny Does Washington.
       Laughing at Trump is easy – but it gets us nowhere. Worse, laughing at Trump seems to give some people the feeling that they are doing their part, that their laughter is a political exercise, that all our accumulated laughter will, somehow, give a boost to the anti-Trump movement.
       No. Sorry. The only effect of Trump gags is to make us feel better, relieve our political frustration, unburden us for a few moments, before we again have to face our lonely fate.
       Lonely, even though there are millions of us; lonely in the same way that an abandoned spouse is lonely. Here we are, rattling around in this lovely progressive edifice still under construction, completely abandoned. Obama is gone (sorry, occasional encouragement from the sidelines doesn’t help) and no one has taken his place.
       I won’t try to analyze why Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren have failed to play the role that Obama played, that Teddy Kennedy once played, that even Al Gore played, for goodness sake. Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that the Left is leaderless.
       A political movement without a leader hardly deserves to be called a political movement. We’re just a bunch of unhappy, dissatisfied kvetchers. All we can do is relieve the embarrassment of our powerlessness by endless mockery of the other side.

Sweet Exploitation

10/25/2017

        I was feeding my Slavoj Žižek podcast habit (I listen when I’m in my car) when he began developing some ideas about the internet age. We are being exploited, he said, not in the classic, Marxist sense, but as renters – as serfs (that’s my interpolation) instead of workers.
       Clearly, Žižek had not yet thought through his analysis of the internet. We – internet users – are not renters, we are the rented.
      Rather, we are the raw material which is refined by internet providers into products (demographics). Access to these products is rented by marketers, politicians, ideological promoters, charities, et. al. We are the ore, ore in the ether. Some of us are composed of a more valuable amalgam of personal data than others, depending on how absorbent, how malleable, how transparent we are and how narrowly we can be refined (i. e., defined). For example, someone wracked by anxieties with a large disposable income is more valuable than the busy head of a household that is surviving hand-to-mouth who, in turn, is more valuable than a reclusive OCD stamp-collector.
       So, yes, we are exploited – not as human beings are exploited, with the kind of cruel exploitation that put Marx’s knickers in a twist, but as a natural resource is exploited; and a renewable resource, at that.
       It is a painless exploitation. (Among all the sorrows that burden the human condition, having to deal with pop-up ads counts for very little.) Many people even find pleasure in being exploited by Silicone Valley.
       So, what are we looking at? A humane capitalist exploitation?
       (Note: I’m referring only to internet exploitation. We remain the victims of ruthless, painful capitalist exploitation – some of us as workers; all of us as consumers.)
       If the exploitation of our personal data is not a burden to us, and even, sometimes, is useful, is there a moral aspect to our being exploited? Or is it morally neutral, morally moot?
       While dyed-in-the-wool humanists may be outraged that their IP addresses appear on lists of depressives, flatulence sufferers, chocolate lovers, Angelina Jolie fans, etc., etc., most people don’t care at all.
       Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
       Maybe, as a capitalist phenomenon, as an economic exercise, the monetization of personal data is a bubble – more like tulips and Beanie Babies than gold and oil. Maybe some day market researchers will discover that demographics are not as profitable a marketing tool as they had been told, that unlike a physical resource, natural or manufactured, human natures are constantly changing in ways which cannot be rationally analyzed or accurately foreseen.
       Maybe.
       It is a pleasant thought. As one of those dyed-in-the-wool humanists, I feel a frisson of anticipatory schadenfreude when I imagine that bubble bursting.
       But something tells me that it isn’t a bubble. It’s something else – unique and unprecedented.
       The relationship between internet providers and internet advertisers is an economic one, certainly, but is the relationship between internet providers and internet users also an economic one? Unlike the tug-of-war between buyer and seller, capitalist and worker, landowner and serf, there is no tension, no conflict, no clash of interests, between internet exploiters and the internet exploited.
       Our use of the internet and the exploitation of that usage is a symbiotic relationship, not a contractual one, an organic process, not an economic one. Unlike the vagaries of economics and politics, which waft this way and that with the winds of the zeitgeist, our tranquil interdependency with the internet is evolutionary, irreversible. As our lives, our personalities, even our subconscious impulses, commingle with those of everyone else, humankind takes a giant step in society’s progress toward the hive state.

The Russian Occupation

10/6/2017

       Wars of conquest are becoming rare. With the start of the Cold War, more and more conflicts were about expanding spheres of influence, not occupying real estate. The aim of most of the armed conflicts of the Cold War was to change a government’s allegiance – from the Soviet Union to the West, or vice versa. The combatants were surrogate armies – usually the “rebel” outs vs. the entrenched ins. Any direct and active role in the conflict by a Great Power was in the form of covert operations.
       During the 65 years of the Cold War, the CIA proved itself more adept at covert operations than the KGB.

       Following our victory over the Soviets in 1989, the CIA lost its focus. It needed a new raison d’être. (Terrorism, at that point, was something other countries had to worry about.) Considering that covert operations fall under Clausewitz’s definition of war – the continuation of politics by other means – the CIA found a fitting role for itself as a contractor for the Pentagon. With the post 9/11 operations in Afghanistan (a country already familiar to the Agency) the CIA became, for all intents and purposes, a branch of the military – the branch which, for example, has the responsibility for flying armed drones.
       Just like any branch of the military, the CIA openly maneuvers for control of certain operations, and will just as openly take credit for its successes. The “covert” aspect of the CIA has become ceremonial. Its “no comment” stance on its drone operations comes with a grin and a wink.
       With Russia’s resurgence and China’s emergence, spheres of influence again have become an object of international anxiety. (Same old same old: US, Russia and China.) Will the CIA make its covert capabilities available to the American financial/industrial complex, which is on the front line of the battle for spheres of influence? Or has it been thoroughly militarized? Who knows?
       Whatever covert political actions – as opposed to military ones – the CIA decides to undertake will be – at first, anyway – clunky and amateurish compared to the polished covert political operations of the FSB.

       For a decade or more, social scientists, political scientists, philosophers, psychologists, pedagogues, public relations consultants, spiritual leaders, journalists and op-ed writers, broadcast personalities, and advice columnists have been telling us that we have lost our grasp on reality, that – thanks to a relativistic education system or the limitlessness of the internet or mass narcissism or the loss of traditional values or fluoridation, or to some or all of the above – people no longer can tell the true from the untrue and have fallen back (comfortably) into believing what they want to believe.
       Marketers, political campaigners, technical entrepreneurs, have taken advantage of this new soft reality, but it has not had an effect on statecraft – with one notable exception. Whether its source is a characteristic of the national personality or habits of systemization formed in the mills of Marxism, the Russians understood the strategic potential of what, in other capitols, was still regarded as an only academic formulation.
       Politically destabilizing your adversaries is an old tactic. Athens and Sparta used it against each other. With a technical aptitude not much more advanced than that of the Geek Squad, the Russians have turned our new fungible reality into a weapon for undermining democratic electoral systems. Virtual Russian spies worm their way into social media, virtual Russian agents provocateurs incite discontent and fanaticism among partisans (on both the left and the right), and Russian propaganda organs sit squarely in the midst of our cable TV news channel line-up, and are blandly cited on Google News.
       The Russians are just as skilled, or just as brazen, in manipulating soft reality for defensive purposes. With their brilliant grasp of the consequences of the disintegration of truth and knowledge into belief and information, they have understood that deniability is no longer only a rhetorical exercise. Even the most obvious, clearly documented facts, such as the presence of Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine and the Russian manufacture of the rocket that shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, can be undermined by a few doctored photos and a few “eyewitness” reports. Those who – for one reason or another – want to believe the Russian denials will believe them. That is enough to tarnish all news about Russian activities in Ukraine with the taint of fakery.

       Political destabilization by a foreign power is, arguably, an act of war. At least, it falls under the heading of aggression. Deterrence may be an effective strategy against conventional military attack, but we obviously are helpless against attacks via the internet, be they instigated by the Kremlin or by a cell of stoned adolescents in some boring little city in Estonia.

The Eclipse of the Eclipse

8/21/2017

       In the dozen or so conversations about the eclipse, which I have had over the last ten days, I can’t think of one in which eclipse glasses were not mentioned. That’s not counting another five or six that were only about eclipse glasses; the eclipse itself didn’t come up.
       From a solemn celestial event to a marketing opportunity. Whenever I think about it, makes me laugh. What a bunch of boobies you all are! The media pressed your buttons, and off you went.
       An argument could be made that with eclipse glasses you could safely observe the eclipse directly – instead of as a projection through a pinhole in a piece of cardboard, as we were instructed in 1954. That’s a better rationale than any I’ve heard for self-driving cars.
       The funny thing is, though, none of my acquaintances seemed much interested in eclipse glasses as enhancers of their eclipse-watching experience. They saw eclipse glasses as a health care product – something you might pick up at a CVS, rather than a Sharper Image. Oh, sure, eclipse glasses would allow you to look directly at the eclipse, but the main thing – evidently – is that they kept you from going blind.
       Well, of course! They know what buttons to push. (By “they” I’m referring to a huge amorphous agglomeration of people and computer programs.)
       The hypochondria button was a sensitive button to begin with – just look at the ads at the back of 100-year-old periodicals. In the last decade it has been so exquisitely massaged that it will react to almost any stimulus. If eclipse glasses had been marketed as a way to increase one’s pleasure, quite a few may have been bought. As a blindness-prevention device, they sold in the zillions.
       In our neck of the woods, today we had a 75% eclipse.
       I remember a couple of other partial eclipses. (Those must have been in 1954 and 1979; I was out of the country in 1970.) Back then, everyone knew that you shouldn’t look directly at the sun. People reminded each other, just in case. In news stories about the eclipse, a single sentence was devoted to the risk. A conscientious county health department might have had radio stations air a public announcement the day before. Science teachers demonstrated the pinhole method, or some other way of safely viewing an eclipse. Some newspapers might have run educational articles, with diagrams.
       Perhaps some poor benighted entrepreneur had the brilliant idea of marketing eclipse glasses. If so, it turned out a dud.
       (Oddly – and just to show that they are not completely in control – the total eclipse of the sun was itself eclipsed by the phenomenon of Amazon having to refund money to customers who bought fake eclipse glasses. Amazon coyly refused to say how many refunds it made. It could have been a million; it could have been a hundred. Either way, Amazon’s demonstration of cheerful conscientiousness will go a long way towards making up for any profits it might have sacrificed by the refund.)
       The eclipse of 2017 is another reminder that the Age of Enlightenment is well behind us. Just as it was in the middle-ages, just as it is still in primitive, uncivilized societies, the 21st century solar eclipse has again become a fearful source of mass hysteria.

Great Show!

6/16/2017

        I didn’t consciously decide to see current American politics as a sit-com. It just happened.
       I look forward to reading the morning’s Times even more than I used to. I can’t wait to see tomorrow’s episode.
       A situation comedy involves a small cast of characters in a set “situation” that carries over from episode to episode – a dysfunctional family, a pair of mismatched roommates, some crotchety inmates of a nursing home which really is a Mafia money-laundering operation, e. g. – and entertains us with a never-ending stream of odd-ball crises and their comic resolutions.
       For example, a typical dysfunctional family trope might include a father, a blustering blow-hard whose nutty touchiness and verbal incontinence bring on one hysterical crisis after another, a whimsical, out-of-touch, heavily tranquilized mother, and a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, who must juggle dealing with personal issues with trying to play the adults of the family and keep their father out of trouble. A bevy of incongruous secondary characters - the unctuous, ineffective family lawyer, the low-life in-laws, the parade of bimbo secretaries, the absurd, neo-Nazi uncle - provides further comic possibilities.
       Some plot lines continue through the entire season. For example: the father goes bowling with a guy whom everyone suspects is a member of the Mafia; the father starts boasting about his mob connections; the FBI becomes interested. Every episode includes another cockeyed evasion, by the family, of a new attempt at scrutiny by an earnest, but bumbling, trio of local FBI agents. Other plot lines carry through for a just a few episodes or may even be resolved in one. For example, the father (who is in some sort of unspecified business) drives past one of his customers, who is changing a tire by the side of the road; he honks cheerily as he passes, then later phones the customer and berates him for not waving back. The twins have to smooth it over.

       Some of my friends are upset that I do not take President Trump seriously. First of all, I am just following the lead of many seriously important people – you can find their names in the news. Europeans were the first – perhaps because Europe was the cradle of absurdist drama – but now it is beginning to dawn on others abroad: President Trump is irrelevant. The word is out: humor him, but pay no attention to anything he says and does.
       Immigrant ban? squelched by the courts, and watered down (to the extent that made Trump rail and rant) in hopes of getting the Supremes’ nod. The Wall? You must be kidding. Anti-Obamacare legislation? The Republicans were going to do that (or go through the motions) no matter who was president. Look at the President’s pro-Saudi plunge into the Saudi-Qatar crises. Tillerson quickly repudiated it, and none of the feuding parties seemed to pay much attention to it. Since Trump will say one thing one day and the opposite the next day, it’s safe to say that he doesn’t take what he says and does all that seriously either.
       My friends ask, what if, in just another fleeting, impulsive act of bravado, Trump presses the button?
       First of all, this is a sit-com, not The Walking Dead. And – well - we just have to trust the writers not to jump the shark.

What Peril?

6/15/2017

          A letter written today to The New Yorker:

        Throughout his review of current books on China, Ian Buruma, like the authors whose books he discusses, accepts as a given – as if it were some sort of natural law, as incontrovertible as the law of gravity – that the United States and China are doomed to be rivals. Why is he, like every pundit who has something to say about China, stuck in that 19th century mindset? This is a new world. We can complain about the evils of globalization and multi-national corporations, but there is no sane rationale whatsoever, either in terms of world peace or the self-interest of the United States, for China and the United States to be at loggerheads.
        “The surest way to court disaster,” Buruma ends his essay, “is to have no coherent plan at all.” How’s this for a plan? 1) China is to be congratulated on its success in overcoming daunting handicaps to become, in the last fifty years – without going to war even once – a world power. 2) The United States will encourage the symbiotic economic relationship that already exists between the two countries, which has proven advantageous to both. 3) As long as China continues to respect the political sovereignty of other nations, the United States welcomes the expansion of Chinese economic interests in the Pacific and elsewhere, recognizing it as a mechanism for increased global prosperity.
        As for excoriating China for its abuses of human rights: considering the chaos that the United States government has caused, and has enabled other countries to cause, in the Middle East and elsewhere, it has no moral authority whatsoever.

        Left unsaid, because the letter was already too long:

        The increase and decrease of territory no longer is the measure of national power. Now that markets and resources are controlled by large, often multi-national, corporations, the expansion of markets and access to resources no longer requires the expansion of borders and colonization. Commercial clout, which is nothing more or less than most-favored-customer status, is the 21st century measure of national power.
        Territory still is being disputed only because armies – massed agglomerations of armaments and armed personnel – still exist. Mobile armed forces are monstrous anachronisms, whose only raison d’etre has devolved into the policing of rogue states. China wants to cut in on the American hegemony in the Pacific, it does not want to invade Japan and the Philippines. Its demonstrations in the China Sea are reactions to the armed forces, equally anachronistic, of its neighbors in the Pacific. (If there are oceanic oil or gas reserves near the islets China is claiming as its own, access to them by China would be more easily gained through the rough and tumble of commerce, than the primitive and dangerous conduct of warfare.) NATO does not want to invade Russia, it simply wants American and European oligarchs to be allowed to operate there. Its construction of missile bases in Eastern Europe is only a reaction to Russia’s military.
        Should we say good-bye, then, to Clausewitz’s dictum that war is “the continuation of politics by different means?” No. The nature of war simply is in transition. Taking control of the computers by which a country is administered is now the aim of meaningful warfare – that is, warfare which can really make a difference. Taking control of territories under that country’s administration is just a needless and expensive headache.
        If anything is to be learned from history, it is not that territorial expansion is the inevitable extension of power, but that power is always in flux. Nations, which are static, can last forever (so to speak); empires, which are dynamic, ebb and flow, expand and contract.
        Imagine if the United States took a practical, businesslike approach to the obvious fact that American power, at least for the nonce, is on the wane, and China’s is increasing?
        With a few exceptions in the area of heavy manufacturing, the interests of China and the United States are interdependent – in many case, intertwined. Instead of the United States railing against the historically inevitable, why not give historical inevitability a Nietzschean kick in the pants and join forces with China? In some ways we are more compatible with China than we are with Europe. Our socio-economic principles – what we regard as the proper relationship between employers and employees – are closer to each other’s than they are to Europe’s, in which labor plays a moral and political role it does not play in China and the United States. Unlike those who control the wealth of Europe, those who control the wealth of China and the United States are not hindered by a vague, inhibiting sense of guilt, left over from the Enlightenment. China and the United States each possess a strong national mythology and solid self-image, which Europe, a messy bunch of unfederated states which have been feuding with each other for centuries, does not possess.
        The rivalry between the United States and China, which everyone takes for granted (at least in the American camp – I don’t know what the pundits say in China) is stupid, senseless, short-sighted, entirely reflexive and, I’m sorry to say, will only end in tears.

Cultural Illiteracy in the Ivy League

3/21/2017

         In encounters with undergraduates at Yale, where I teach, it occasionally comes up in conversation that until 1969, when 284 women were admitted to the class of 1973, Yale College was for men only. The response I get, from young women and men alike, is one of incredulity. We had no idea, they tell me.
          And indeed, why would they?
Linda Greenhouse, “How Smart Women Got the Chance”, The New York Review of Books, April 6, 2017

      Why? Hmm, let’s see.
       Because they are culturally literate enough to know that Harvard and Yale and many other American colleges and universities were single-sex schools until the social revolution of the Sixties?
         Because they are interested in the history of the women’s movement in the US?
       Because they learned from reading novels and biographies, and perhaps from watching Hollywood costume dramas, that Harvard and Yale once were all male?
       Because they were curious enough about the university they were going to attend to read a thumbnail sketch (at least) of its history.

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