Been Busy but this . . . ?

I have been awash in responsibilities elsewhere and though much has been of (ridiculous) issue - whether it be a presidential bow or a Frenchman's hand - I simply have not had the collected time or spirit to drift here. But I simply could not walk away from this:


I am not at all sure why the pharmaceutically-aided master weeper is dressed in an East German military uniform and doing his best Col Klink, but I am pretty sure there is an idiot to be found somewhere around here.

-fp

A win for the "quantity theory of foreign policy"?

Such is the name the Economist has given the foreign policy actions adopted by the Obama administration in recent months. And the magazine's scribes have a point. It does seem as if, particulary of late, he has been nearly everywhere, meeting with everyone, and speaking on everything. Last week, President Obama gave a robust and deep-welled speech on global climate change and policy that also touched on world poverty, terrorism, more broadly those agents not willing to work for productive change. Only the night before he oversaw a meeting between the president of the Palestinian authority and the Israeli prime minister that might have been slightly less robust. He pulled the plug on a poorly schemed missle-defense system that was a charmed piece of the previous administration's foreign-policy plans, allowing the itchy Russians to stop scratching at least one spot and seemed to secure something of their support in dealing with the issue of Iran's controversial nuclear program. At the P5+1 meeting with Iranian officials in Geneva this past morning, according to late news from the NYT, Iran has agreed to ship the bulk of its enriched uranium to Russia for processing into nuclear fuel. Of course it must obviously be pointed out that "if Iran has secret stockpiles of enriched uranium, however, the accomplishment would be hollow, a senior American official conceded." Yes . . . yes, that would diminish the significance of the thing indeed and - oh, how does it go? - if "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts, it would be a wonderful Christmas - or some such rot. And if we really want to cut to brass tacks, recent history provides enough example that in the end, no matter the assurances to the contrary, one side at least always has overwhelming, bludgeoning force at its beck and call.

However, those risks are always there - and are so patently obvious on all sides that they bear little use in mentioning save for bet-hedging or scare-mongering - in diplomacy. I am no foreign policy expert, but at this first blush, I cannot see how this is not a victory for the quantity theory of foreign policy.

-fp

So that's what happened . . . or . . . History as Politics

I have spent the last couple of days struggling to find some pithy and deep-basined way to tie up all the nonsense that was spewed this past month in commemorations, or simply recognitions in print, of the start of WWII marked by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. After Russian President Medvedev signed a decree establishing a "commission to counter attemts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests", it really came as little surprise that while Prime Minister Putin was praising the bravery of the Polish soldiers at a September 1 commemoration in Poland, the Russian government was releasing what it said were previously unreleased confidential documents detailing prewar cooperation between Poland and the Nazis. Frankly, it stands to reason that there are to be odd, even painful, moments as the memory of WWII - as individually constructed in Western Europe, Central Europe, and Russia - is merged into a single whole (even if not seamless) narrative. But anymore on this should wait - it's more domestic issues that have burrowed in and become a bother.

Pat Buchanan has never been one to shy away from idiotic comments but this month, on the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, he simply took the cake as he insisted that "Hitler had never wanted war with Poland"! In fact, in an odd echo of the Russian government, according to Pat, it was essentially Poland's fault that the war started at all. If only the Poles would "negotiate" the hand-over of Danzig/Gdansk a "town the size of Ocean City, Md." -- WAIT! Stop, Gdansk is not the size of a now broken-down and kitschy town in the marshes of the Maryland seaboard (no offense to the citizens of Ocean City), it has long been one of Poland's largest and most important cities and has long played a large role in trade in the Baltic and North Seas - in short, an important part of any economy in that region and one that was central to a Poland caught between an aggressively rearming (and threatening) Germany and an evermore sure-of-itself Soviet Union under Stalin. For now we'll leave aside much of the weak-as-water evidence marshalled to continue the farce that Hitler did not want war and land on Buchanan's insistence that once it had begun "Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps." The implication here is simply that the Final Solution, the Endlösung vorgesehen in the German, was the fault of first the Poles for not giving over Danzig and then the Brits for not agreeing to peace, and perhaps even the Americans for getting involved at all. Not only is this absolutely ridiculous, it is patently absurd and borders on dangerous. Buchanan's comments championing the skills of good old Adolph as a leader, while recognizing his nasty, nasty antisemitism, have now - with this - become too leaden to be laughed-off* with a simple guffaw and an old-boy shrug. Not only is his history patently bad but he is, if not a denier, then an apologist.

-fp

*when first published the sentence read "too leaden to be supported . . ." - coming back for a reread "support" is not at all what was intended, "laughed-off" is at least a bit better.

But who is supposed to laugh?

There are some things that I have little truck with and some that I don't bother with and others that I simply let slide to the side. For a while at least I have tried to let this slide to the side and I have decided I simply cannot. Glenn Beck, self-professed "rodeo clown" of the media world, utilizing a strategy of throw it against the wall, see what sticks, has run through any number of right-wing conspiracies since before the election of Barack Obama last November. There was birth certificate-gate, but that was dropped (and not just by him) when it became simply and obviously and damningly-for-those-who-argued-it untenable. There was his self-serving 9/12 Project, so painfully and wittily and properly skewered by Stephen Colbert not long ago. And though I am sure I am skipping over any number of other ludicrous ideas offerred up there is this absolutely maddening and patently ignorant idea that the nation is being dragged down the road to fascism by the evil "them" that he so often decries. Such a steadfast belief is this new revelation of his that he was moved to apologize for getting it wrong when it was just encroaching socialism that he thought was the problem. Of course, the fascism he is so convinced we are heading towards is a "brand of non-violent fascism or . . . 1984" Leaving aside how ridiculous the idea of a non-violent fascism is, or the fact that despite his frequent invocations of Orwell's most famous work he has obviously never read it if he is to suggest that it is free of violence, we might simply ask if he actually believes this as all the footage that he shows in any of his near ubiquitous montages when he talks of these things is of Nazi Germany . . . certainly a non-violent state if there ever was one.

The turning point for me, however, was his recent round-table where he gathered a (very) select crew to discuss how the United States was headed towards fascism and revealed the moment that he knew something askew was up. Turning to footage from a relatively early debate among the Democratic candidate hopefuls he focused in on a clip of Hilary Clinton:

Clinton: "We are better as a society when we're working together"
Beck: "that is the key, 'we are better as a society when we'reworking together, [sigh] America do your homework." (roughly 6:40-7:00 minute mare of the above link)

Let me do my homework then, what does the word society mean? If we allow some heft for the Webster's dictionary definition, we might suggest that society means a voluntary association of individuals for common ends. Doesn't that sound absolutely dreadful? But because the issue for Beck is actually the New Deal (and if we want we'll turn to the issues of whether it worked or not at a later time) and government intrusion into the economy and the free market let us ask who Mr. Beck suggests stood up to this creeping fascism:

Beck: ". . . I want to go to the Depression, I want to talk about that. . . . Who is the person we should look to that stood up against this? Who are the people that were successful? I know Henry Ford was one of them . . . in FDR. He stood up against them and said 'This is wrong!'" (roughly 7:50-8:10 minute mark of the round-table link)

Let me get this straight. Henry Ford stood up against them - I mean he stood up against fascism?! Once again, let us leave aside the very nature of that which made Ford powerful and famous (besides head-breaking and strike-busting of course), the assembly line. Well, leave it aside after this -- as a means of manufacture there is no doubt that the standardization and uniformity of product of the assembly line brought (and continues to bring) higher production and even wealth to those who master the rote skills necessary but the best thing we can say about the assembly line is that it operates best when everyone is working together. The efficient mechanization of production was also a part of the Progressivism that has been so decried by Mr. Beck.

Now that that is out of the way let me try and get my head around this, Ford fought against fascism/nazism. This is the same Henry Ford who bought a dead newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and used it to publish the pernicious The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and any number of equally anti-Semitic articles about American Jews, many of which were collected and published in 1921 as Jewish Influences in American Life. This is the Henry Ford who, in 1938, was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi state's highest honor for foreigners - who no less than Adolph Hitler declared an inspiration. This is the Henry Ford, the overseas holdings and factories of whom likely played no small role in arming the Wehrmacht? To reference a periodic Saturday Night Live mini-skit on the blogosphere, bitch pleeeaase!

Beck recently announced a comedy tour "where," according to the NYTs, "he will mix topical comedy with his modern-day take on 'Common Sense,' the Thomas Paine pamphlet that argued for American independence from British rule." If his grasp of Paine's surprisingly meaty pamphlet is as utterly slipshod as his hold on any number of other concepts, ideas and literary works I wonder what his comedy will amount to? But that perhaps brings us back to his notion that he is a "rodeo clown". On more than one occasion I have seen him ward off questions about what such a declaration might mean by joking that he has received mail from actual rodeo clowns who say that they work much harder than he does. Laughing, or at least chuckling, ensues and the subject moves on to the next empty answer. But perhaps we should stop and ask. A rodeo clown's job is to distract an enraged bull from a cowboy who has been riding him against his will. Maybe we should all ask who the cowboy is and who the enraged bull should be in Mr. Beck's scenario.

Can a person get a glass of wine around here?

What's happening to the French cafe?
The historian W. Scott Haine has discussed the French cafe in almost inestimable social terms. As he has argued, the cafe referenced (and lauded) not private accomplishment but public community and sociability, and fostered the creation of “micro-societies” which contemporaries called “café friendships.” Men of differing social and economic stations milled about together, engaged in discussion and serving as (sometimes unsuspecting) pedagogues for one another in interactions that were “an ever shifting and intricate mosaic . . . of social relations . . . that was simultaneously intimate and anonymous.” The cafe was an almost indispensible part of the political and social shifts from an aristocratic society to a broad meritocracy. The cafe is, as de Balzac wrote, the parliament of the people but it is apparently slipping into the past. As a social and cultural institution it survived both the Nazis and Coca-Cola, apparently now a smoking ban is the current wrinkle to be ironed out, but that is hardly it according to the NYTs piece - “The way of life has changed. The French are no longer eating and drinking like the French. They are eating and drinking like the Anglo-Saxons.” (I beg license for the meager changes I made in the quotation before). It comes to it, a question of what the French from the 1930s to the 1980s would call Americanization and afterwards, recognizing that the US was as apt to fall before it as any other nation, simply globalization. Walter Benjamin noted that Paris was the capital of the 19th century but must we leave it all behind. It is not just deals that were made "behind the zinc" as it were, it is life.

Vital to the United States - so they have said

It seems that this past Friday Citigroup had its stock fall beneath $4 a share. Just some weeks ago they were floating plans to buy Wachovia, another embattled financial institution, now they are being lumped into the "too big to fail" group. I will freely admit that I do not understand much of the intricacies of the financial markets, I also admit to being less than heartened by the fact that those who are supposed to understand the whole thing apparently need frequent tutorials. Here is what I do know, in 2002 the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that the United States was the most unequal society of all industrialized nations and there has been plenty of time spent on discussion of a new gilded age where the top 1% control roughly 20% of the wealth (conversely, the bottom 80% manages some slippery control of about 17%!). But hey, as I referenced another time, in another context, as late as this time last year, there were those who were championing the idea that what was of importance was the "narrowing range of experience" - after all, "the distance between driving a used Hyundai Elantra and a new Jaguar XJ is well nigh undetectable compared with the difference between motoring and hiking through the muck."

It seems that much of that has changed with a growing global food crisis and a projected collapse of 1 in 57 banks. We have a massive banking bailout that is significantly higher than the $700 billion figure that is typically thrown about, a sum that left even those who are fans of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson concerned about the "prospect of unelected officials putting massive amounts of taxpayer resources to work without transparency or approval from Congress, and without a clear process at work, is indeed troubling." And it is the complete lack of transparency that troubles me most. Recently the Treasury released its "custodian" contract for implementing the lithely named Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 which expressly states that "the Treasury may designate [private] Financial Institutions as financial agents of the United States . . . " Buried at the end of the document, however, is the troubling bit.

For all the shoddy talk that has been spread about concerning golden parachutes and whatnot, apparently it is unnecessary for the American taxpayer to know what the designated financial agents are to be compensated for their efforts!

Of course, the plan has abruptly and awkwardly changed from the buying of "toxic assets" and it remains to be seen what is going to come of the whole mess - though the initial reaction has not been entirely to the good. But I would be surprised if there was an opening up of the accounting books in any later versions. Let me reiterate, I do not know much about many of the financial tools that are in play here (though I don't believe many other do either) but I see little to suggest in all of this that anything has changed from two years ago (almost to the day) when Warren Buffett went on record saying "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” The even more recent $25 billion tossed to the Big 3 auto makers doesn't even really try and hide any of this. The money has few strings attached to it and (at least as it regards Chrysler) it is being given to a private company.

Ok, so let's allow for the seasoning that golden parachutes and extravagant AIG retreats have added to this witch's brew, but the discussion for the great bulk of this whole thing has been about sub-prime loans and now (with the automakers) legacy payments. The former is financial speak for "overreaching poor folks" and the latter refers to health care and pension guarantees won by unions. We need not even consider that in the last twenty years the word "liberal" has become something akin to political poison but . . . in an environment when a community action organization has been accused of being at the heart of both the sub-prime crisis and a grave threat to the very fabric of democracy, I don't think the class warfare is over though I do know which side I would put my money (what little of it is left) on.

Not Quite Year Zero - or - Obama's in the buildin'

16 years, 6 months, and what, a week? ago I was on the streets of my small home town with my best friend and wondered, in that untouched - hell, untoughed - way that only a half-educated and half-conditioned and half-cultured boy from the half-sticks can, about the culture and state of his nation as I knew that nearly an entire coast of the coutry was ablaze in riots and across much of the radio dial there were calls that, to put it kindly, emphasized not only a difference of opinion but a difference of being. As I said to that very same friend tonight - it's a machete strike to the breadth of our lives no doubt, but it is a mere wink of things when it comes to the age, the deep knee bend breaths, of the nation. I had actually planned on more vitriol, more Snidely Whiplash, well . . . lashings of things like "Focus on the Family", James Dobson's 16-page nugget of all the fear mongering trip that has come up in the last 20 months of campaigning but I would rather not. I wait for more. This seems too empty, not enough - let us see what comes, we all know my vote.