You took two parking spots!

The roommate, with whom I commute as well as live, had jury duty so I was sitting alone in the wee 86 Honda Civic SI which I alternately call Red or Czar, listening to the BBC News. In the rain, the rare, rare, rain. Counting the minutes until I made a short dash to the train platform under an elevated freeway to catch the 7:19 Baby Bullet Caltrain #314 to MRU, the major research university where I sort hayseeds for contributions to my wellness fund.

And there across the street is a gigantic planet-killing SUV, slowly, inexpertly, inauspiciously backing into a clumsy park and, characteristically, taking two parking spots. The young woman gets out of the car, and unloads sundry purses and bags, along with a tiny dog. I am a cranky old bugger and, as regular readers will know, I am occasionally given to expressing my crankiness at particular breaches of the social contract. So I open the door and lean my leonine head into the drizzle to shout, "Ma'am, you took two parking spots!"

She heard me, paused a moment, and then carried on with her yuppie unloading ... and walked away without apparently even given a second's thought to rectifying her self-absorbed assault on subsequent parkers. I was steamed, but I tried to put it out of mind to pay more attention to the latest update on the Sri Lankan operations against the Tamil Tigers ... I'm for the government in that one, by the way.

Not the worst crime, taking two parking spots, but emblematic of this me-me-me culture of giganto planet-killers and cell-phone Nazis and barren suburban sprawl. Riles me.

But that is not my point.


I got to thinking about a committee on which I serve at MRU ... in fact, a committee I chair. The committee has proposed an activity which I, in my majesty, think is a waste of time. I fret about such things ... fretting is genetically predetermined in me, and I inherit it from my sainted mother but not, I think, from old Dad whom I resemble in so many other ways. Fretting used to be nothing more than self-torture, but in my magisterial aging, I have found ways to put fretting to use. One factor in this is to have a ready made retreat from fretting available ... I learned how to do this during a particularly nasty academic hair-pulling and mud-wrestling exercise that took place all around me in the terminal years of my doctoral "process". I try to maintain, at ready head as it were, a salubrious or at least diverting topic to which I can turn whenever I find myself turning pirouettes over something I cannot control, leastwise in the immediate term. One of my favorite retreat topics is Mars exploration; another is imagining what it would be like to be abandoned on an island, comme Alexander Selkirk.

But I digress ... in fact, this entire blog is a digression ... in fact, there is nothing I like more than digressing ... in fact, I think I have digressed enough that I return to my main point which is ... digressing is how I manage to think about things, so given the threat of a committee not agreeing with me, I wonked around the Internet until I stumbled upon a Washington Post opinion by David Ignatius entitled, in classic self-congratulation, "The Death of Rational Man." You can read it for yourself if you want his point. My point is to make my point, not his point, so even pointing to his article is pointless if my point is to keep you on my point. Lord ...

The sentence that provided me with a strategy to explain my opposition to the committee's agenda was this one:

A pre-mortem analysis can provide a real "stress test" to conventional thinking. Let's say that a company or government agency has decided on a plan of action. But before implementing it, the boss asks people to assume that five years from now, the plan has failed -- and then to write a brief explanation of why it didn't work.

Thank you, Mr. Ignatius ... that thought has given me something to "keep in mind" for the rest of my life. It is always worth thinking through what it would be like, and what the factors would be, if your plan utterly failed. Glass half full indeed. I suppose this is something I do all the time anyway ... but it is gratifying, crystallizing to read it put so deftly.


I clapped and wrote a little script for Monday when the committee meets, and I have rethought all my previous thoughts, and fretted myself to the point where I think that I can make my objections rational and positive ... the key to winning one's point in most cases ... and to co-opting the intentions of those who proposed something else to a solution that includes all of us. Goody, goody.

Then I read this:

... a Japanese proverb ... "An inch ahead is darkness."

An inch ahead is darkness. From the corporeal present to the ethereal future. If the committee goes against me, it will amount to an annoyance and not much more. But those bastards taking two parking spots, driving planet killers, consuming like there is no tomorrow ... an inch ahead is darkness.

So my fretting now is no longer the immediate "committee" but the disasters that await us all.

That is so much more satisfying.


Tonight's beverages ... classics both ... a Tonga Zombie and a Long Island Iced Tea. I guess I am no longer a "cheap drunk".

Photos by Arod, all part of a set I uploaded today to Flickr.

Picking Winners

Giants win! Swept the hopeless Nats in Washington. Baseball is a zero-sum game (see principle number 1 in the header to this blog) ... I get one, you lose 1. No other way around it. Wins count, losses don't.

Now, of course, there is a lot more to baseball than wins and losses, and the joy of the game is precisely in that non-zero-sum game aspect. But at the end of the day, as the wee Scott McClellan likes to say, it's all about winning. And losing doesn't count.

I assert, contrarily, that in human affairs there is no such thing as a zero-sum game. Sometimes a difficult idea to defend. Look at the Obama-McCain race ... one wins, the other loses, and if McCain wins, we are in big trouble. But even in something as cut and dried as an election, there are so many factors at play that reducing it to one result loses the observer all perspective.

In my personal reading, I am now at the end of Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947), and as we all know, Prussia comes to a terrible end. It is hard not to look at Prussia in 1945 as the losing end of a horrible zero-sum game. Indeed, historiography has long held a singularly black/white view of Prussia.

Clark's strength as a historian is that he resists the black/white, off/on, winner/loser view. In that, he curiously represents another social contradiction often falsely seen, even here, as a zero-sum game. And that contradiction would be the rise of the theory-mongers in the academe and the terrible damage that they have done to thought and research. At least, that is the narrative preferred by many, again myself included in most contexts.

But it is a narrative that fails the moment it becomes universal. Take this as a proof. In looking to fill in a few of the date-type details about which a "social historian" such as Clark is sometimes lax, I managed to pick up 2 of the 3 volumes of a well-regarded and authoritative 60s history of Germany, Hajo Holborn's A History of Modern Germany; the Wikipedia page points out that the incomparable modern historian and biographer of ideas and thinkers, Peter Gay, was his student. This connection is a little ironic in the context which I will argue.

Holborn's book is hard core history for date lovers. It is clipped and chopped, neatly separated by subheads. It is authoritative and reliable, and this sort of reference work is valuable on the shelf of any history-buff. But one does not feel compelled to read the thing from cover to cover because ... and this in itself is an artifact in the changes in intellect over the last several decades ... the constitutive unity of enduring contradiction seems absent from the work. Holborn wants to pick winners and losers.

More to my taste is Clark who lives perpetually in the unresolved contradiction. One does want, from time to time in these social histories, a chapter that delineates the events in order. But this lack is more than amply repaid by the subtlety with which an author like Clark ... or Tim Blanning about whom I have written before ... brings the contours of an era to life. It is not just his persistent focus on the state and the contradictions that underlay it and from which it could never separate itself; it is also the way in which he describes the interplay among forces forged in that contradiction, and yet seemingly immune to the sorts of developments, obvious in hindsight, that might have saved their supporters.

I am going to try to return to the Prussian state in the next few days. What I want to address today is that the theory game that ravaged the humanities over the last three decades is itself also not a zero-sum game. It has, as I argue here, been the proximate cause of the rise of what I am broadly calling social history, and this has been very productive of new understandings. It might drive those who prefer winners and losers to drink because this is history that sees good in evil, and that sees redemption in defeat. But it is history that demands deeper reflection on what it is to be human.

In the literary zone, the "depredations of theory" are a little more difficult to champion, the more so because they had the tendency to draw attention away from the text. That is an unfair statement, as any graduate student will aver, because the new literary movement was precisely the force that opened up the notion of the text, such that genre conventionally defined could burst its boundaries. Literary theory has troubled genre and text, and notwithstanding the pointless obfuscations of the Julia Kristva's of the world, it raised challenges to parsed out traditional criticism that have enriched our ideas of what constitutes work and influence and meaning. As with Holborn, this is not to toss old critics into the trash bin, but rather to note that intellectual dialectic can never stop, even when it backs itself into a corner.

More than anything, my graduate student battles with the theory ninnies made me a part of an eternal evolution ... a punctuated evolution ... in which ideas about ideas, or tellings about tellings, always fall back into themselves the better to reconstitute themselves on the next level whatever that may turn out to be. My best graduate student friend, JS, who has drifted out of my life, called me a conservative formalist at one point. I took that as a high honor, but I think it is wrong now. I think I am a half-breed chameleon ... I want to be present and involved even as I grouse about it all. But you can't be present if nothing is happening, and whatever is happening is that at which you must choose to be present.

A little circular, I guess.

From such struggles we get the revolutionary work of my adviser at Cal, Amin Sweeney especially in his A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World ... about which I really must write something at some point ... and the pleasurable works of Clark and Blanning.

So much intellectual discourse is between the Weltanschauung ... one of my favorite words when I was 19 ... of those who want to pick winners and losers and those who want to live in unresolved contradiction. I am of the latter type, notwithstanding that I always pick the beloved Giants to win any given game.

Photo by Arod of a window on Castro Street.

The Possible and the Real

I am sore tired and a little cranky, but I want to post this now that I have written it. Tomorrow afternoon (Saturday) I will illustrate it with some pix from Frederick's Sans Souci.

Another chilling piece in the New York Times about the curious and bloodthirsty penchant of Americans for imprisoning their own. It got me thinking about an old rule of history, and a corollary: if it is possible, then it has happened ... and the corollary, the possible generates the real. I'll get back to the American lust to punish wantonly after an excursus into the 18th century.

I have finished Tim Blanning's excellent The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 and moved on to a biography of Frederick the Great, my favorite absolute monarch, which I last read in Berlin. Blanning's book is rewarding reading because he ranges across the period and the geography thematically before a rather short recitation of the events with which history buffs are much more familiar. He has a felicitous manner of expressing contradiction and dialectic, both historical and critical. In other words, he can see the Enlightenment, for example, both as a turning point or radical break and as a logical expression of all the forces which conspired both to create it and to attack it. I loved the way that he interwove the culture of reason and the culture of feeling, and I hope that my attempt to play with that through Judy Garland was not too oblique.

Blanning's period of history is goalposted by the end of the wearying and pointless slaughter that was the 30 Years War and the end of the wearying and rather more pointed slaughter that was the Napoleonic Wars. The 30 Years War was the last war of the Reformation, and the Napoleonic Wars were the first wars of the modern world. In between was a period of incessant but intermittent wars in Europe that were predominantly dynastic. Whether a Hapsburg or a Bourbon would reign in Spain (The War of Spanish Succession, 1702-1713) evidently mattered enough to massacre, slow bore, 400,000 people. Think of it, especially in the context of how much smaller the population was. 400,000 people. Precious few died in battle; vastly more died of disease and starvation and casual slaughter.

So this was the period of the rise of absolutism, such as it was, and absolutism had to cover its perks. Blanning does a good job of covering the notion of state and what I would call charisma, but he is much better at describing life and art and show and trade and livelihood. His first chapter alone is worth the price of the book ... he talks about transportation. I got to thinking that the slow rise of the West and the slow decline of the East might well hang on the different carrying capacities of horses in forests against camels in open ground and the manner in which Europe overcame its transportation disadvantage. It was a slow transformation, but by the time of Napoleon, Europeans could move human beings and materiel with an alacrity unimaginable 150 years earlier.

Absolutism was built on the back of new roads and forms of communication and organization that allowed genuine centralization and the accumulation of sufficient state power to undermine the centripetal tendencies of aristocrats. I think that the Reformation played a large role precisely by providing the centralized state with the opportunity to use religion quite independently of the church. But the key point is that absolutism became a reality because it was possible ... more precisely there could be no absolutism without the material preconditions for it. I think that is the difference between a teleological Marxism (in other words the notion that the possible leads inexorably to one reality) over a non-ideological materialist analysis (in other words the notion that you cannot grasp the real without looking at the possibilities that prefigured it).

This seems obvious, but we frequently forget it. Only my most dedicated reader will remember my rant against Michael Burleigh's Earthly Powers who is one of those lazy reactionary thinkers who titillates to sweeping blame with which he swaggers and nods to himself. So the Enlightenment is responsible for the Nazis, and Stalin to boot. Yeah, and Catholicism is still the peaceful dove of love. A Burleigh forgets the simple fact that the real arises from the possible. As I like to point out, Pope Ratzinger does not strive to burn me at the stake because he can't. If he could, well, he would ... and we have the long history of his sordid little religion as proof.

I guess I am ranting.

Blanning's work is impressive because his happy prose weaves the endless tiny details of a period into a tapestry of what it became. His is materialist history. Louis XIV could only become the king because he had the means to do it ... he had to have the will and the luck and the genius as well. But no amount of luck or will or brains can make up for a lack of means or possibility.

And so it is with the American prison system. We incarcerate because we can. With that same technological and material possibilities, we could also educate and ameliorate and even save the planet. These too are possible. But the possible only underwrites the real, it does not predict it. The American prison system proves that we have the means. It also proves that our souls are empty, and it points again and once again to the naked greed that has crippled this great civilization.

It will be our epitaph. We could have saved the world, but we preferred to imprison crack whores. We had the means, and we made the choice. It was possible, so we fall back on the plaint that it had to be that way. No, no, it didn't have to be that way.

Paradox

Is it paradoxical that I start this post with the concept of paradox even as I confess that I have given up on Roy Sorenson's A Brief History of the Paradox? I always feel a little guilty when I abandon a book mid-read, but alas this sweet little tour of the history of Western logical theory began to feel a little too theological and not quite as paradoxical as I had hoped ... by theological I mean that theology is bunk but the history of religion is fascinating, and that is true of philosophy too in my particular view ... philosophy is oh such a yawn, but the history of ideas has no bottom to its depth. Sorenson's review tends to lard a thick layer of philosophical musing on a thin skeleton of known philosophical history, and it left me in its dust. This raises both the sidebar question of whether lard and dust should ever be used in the same sentence, and the more central question of whether there is any utility to philosophy.

The answers would be no and yes, and it is paradoxical that while I answer no and yes, my practice in the event was yes and no. To whit, I did use lard and dust in one sentence, but I did not find any utility in this case for philosophy.

Sorenson argues that paradox is a question that has too many answers. I think of paradox as the poor sister of dialectic ... poor by reason of its having been stripped of context and content. Take the engaging paradox of the heap ... if you have a heap of sand, and you take away one grain, is it still a heap? Repeat this process. What is the line between heap and not-heap? In real life, people answer that I know a heap when I see one. And this suffices for everyday purposes, but it does not give us a grasp of deeper or inner reality. In that sense, every paradox points to the paradox of gawd and the stone. If gawd is all powerful, then he can create a stone that is too heavy for him to lift. But is he cannot lift it, he is not all-powerful. Is the everyday answer to that conundrum this: I know a gawd when I see one? Well, not quite. (I remind the irregular reader that I figure, as a die hard atheist, that the name of gawd is irrelevant given his omnipotence so I spell him however strikes my fancy, no matter how puerile such a conceit might appear to the religious.)

I prefer the notion of dialectic ... as simply put as I can try, dialectic is the notion that counterposed forces in history through their engagement with each other create new oppositions related to but not identical to those which spawned them. That such forces are incompatible does not prevent them from engaging, and it does not prevent a synthesis which contains the evolution of both even as it spins a new contradiction composed of but not identical to the opposition which generated it. It's not that paradox isn't fun and profitable especially during the latter stages of drinking parties ... no, it is that dialectic is the fascination that keeps on fascinating.


So I reluctantly left Sorenson's book in the dust (well, actually, I am still carrying it around in my man purse in case I change my mind and give it a reprieve), and I turned to Tom Reiss' The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, the story of a Jew born in Azerbaijan who masqueraded as a Muslim prince in the gathering gloom of Nazi Germany. A great read, recommended. It interests me here because it draws attention to the difference between paradox and dialectic. Lev Nussenbaum, the hero of the tale, is certainly paradoxical in the sense that he cannot be all or each of what he claims. But more to the point, his career draws its potency from its involvement in the most compelling contradictions of the period in which he lived, 1905-1942, or the first Russian Revolution through the middle of the worst war of all.

It reminds me of the paradox of the set of sets which do not contain themselves. Imagine a set of all things red ... I derive this from an interview with Sorenson on NPR ... because a set has no color, the set of all things red does not contain itself. So the set of all things red is a member of the set of sets that do not contain themselves. But is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves a part of itself? If yes, then no; if no, then yes. In other words, if the set of sets that do not contain themselves does contain itself, then it does not contain itself. But if it does not contain itself, then it does contain itself.

The impostor, the rake, the poseur, all are like the set that does not contain itself, for if they are who they are, then they are not, and if they are not who they are, then they are. The poseur's life in itself is only passing interesting, but the era which is his playground and which is the force behind his fraud, that is what we can view through the lens of the indissoluble contradiction that is his life. Reiss does a good job of revealing all of that, and so the dialectic that he explicates keeps me much more spellbound than the equally estimable efforts of Dr. Sorenson.


Photos by Arod of street art in downtown San Francisco, sometime last summer.

Collaborate

I mentioned two posts ago that I had a big presentation at MRU, the fabulous Major Research University at which I toil away day by day. I was fudgin' actually, since I did not have a presentation, but was rather the impressario for a big meeting with 6 presentations. All went well, as it is wont to do when you fret and worry and obsess about every little detail.

The 6th of these 6 presentations was one which I have seen before by one of my colleagues who overseas student computing services. He has put together a challenging presentation designed, so I would suspect, to jar middle-aged bureaucrats into a deeper encounter with how the tech-native students of today see the world.

One slide in particular struck me, and I trust that the student computing expert, RH, will forgive my brazenly appropriating it for this discussion ...

With reference to my argument in that same post mentioned above concerning Hodgson's argument about the constitutive differences in social outlook between the European high Middle Ages and Islamic early middle period, this slide instantly appeared to present a reversal. (For reference, Hodgson argues that in the Middle Ages, European society was corporative in which every person had a place and Islamic society was contractual in which broadly equal and relatively mobile people could make what they could of the common Islamic compromise of Shariah-mindedness. I argue that we need to start with that counterposition in coming to grips with why Europe exploded in freedom and creativity while the Muslim world ossified into torpor and thick-hidedness, a subject to which I plan to return severally in the future.)

Look at these oppositions ... I'll see tomorrow if I can make this into a little html table that will look so much prettier ...

Stable, physical artifacts <=> dynamic digital assets & databases

Expert gatekeepers <=> communities of practice, dispersion of authority

Working alone <=> sharing, collaborating

Discrete activities <=> recursivity of discovery, remediation, authoring, production, publication

"Stable, expert, alone, discrete" ... the paradigms of a corporatist world in which the person is tied charismatically to where he started out.

"Dynamic, communities, collaborating, recursivity" ... precisely what marked the flat, communitarian approach to religious law and practice in the long middle period of Islam in which religious discourse provided the medium through which those with sufficient initiative to break out of the millennia-long family trap (at least relatively "break out" by reference to their vastly more numerous stationery bretheren and sistern) could wander from place to place and yet still be at home.

Remember rule three ... any force given long enough turns into its opposite ... and then remember that that is a rule which continually turns back on itself.

It was the corporatist view of the person in the Middle Ages, I would argue, that provided the groundwork for the essential Protestant construction of the individual before gawd ... BTW, I know that it is juvenile to misspell god, so perhaps Huckabee will sue me ... and it was this individuation of the penitent before a really mean, nasty gawd that was the groundwork for the Enlightement, and for modernity ... but I get ahead of myself.

Meanwhile, the contractual character of Islamic society, and especially its thinking urban elites combined with its long dualist pattern of urban elite/military conqueror (which Hodgson calls the a'yan/amir complex, and which forms the core of the great historian Ibn Khaldun's 14th-century work) left it vulnerable to the heavier hand of the Turkic and Mongol hordes that slaughtered its cities in the 13th and subsequent centuries. (It is curious that our ever-present post-colonialists like to blame the British for everything ... but it is the Mongols who reduced what are now the 'stans to their decrepitude by a level of slaughter that colonialists could only dream about in drunken clubbish revelries.) It is that heavy hand whose long shadow has prevented the once realatively open society from re-realizing openness in the present period.

Our collaboration-savvy younger generation is awfully earnest ... and as a formerly undoubtedly annoyingly earnest youth, I must beware of complaining ... but there is a penalty for everything in this dialectical world, and the penalty for butter-does-not-melt-in-my-mouth collaboration may be unexpected and higher than one thinks. If youth can think on their feet in the future as fast as they appear to be thinking now ... perhaps, we'll be okay. But conversations about paradigm shifts need to be transparent, and they should avoid enthusiasm. Because history bites back!

All that said, the current challenges facing the species are such that lateral collaboration based on an incipient contractualism is likely to produce solutions to the problems to which a hierarchized and sometimes atomized individuation has mightily contributed here. But, say in China, it is precisely the lateral contractualism and lack of individuation that has led to a terrifying ecological brinksmanship. No simple answers, but thinking in terms of oppositions like this gives the opportunity to understand the unfolding history of our era and its epochal paradigm shifts.

Gotta think this out more clearly, and I will return to it ... but for now, the chicken is ready and I must uncork the wine.

More after New Hampshire

Postscript: as usual, Frank Rich nails it.

It strikes me that the main utility of John Edwards at this point in this pivotal primary battle is too hold off the left and let the center of the party decide. The unions, who often act nowadays like the right wing of the party, have in greater proportion lined up with Edwards, and it is a safe spot for them because they can leap onto the appropriate bandwagon once the issue is decided. Given their impotence and recalcitrance, I prefer that they play no role, and they are saitsfying us in that zone.

The Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco's gay news rag of record, came out on Thursday with its endorsement of ... ta da ... Bill Richardson. Yawn ... how's that for turning your back on what matters. Not to mention that he dropped out some time between when the BAR went to bed and when it showed up on the streets. Notwithstanding that I still find myself a Hillary kinda guy, I think that gay organizations ought to be pressing Obama on some language for us ... something like "America needs to remember its legacy of openness and individualism, and welcome all its gay citizens into the mainstream ... the new mainstream, the mainstream of hope and blah blah blah." See, the "hope" stuff just flows like chocolate syrup on a warm summer day.

One reason why I support Hillary still is that I fantasize her appointing Uncle Bill ... or 42, of Mr. President, as you prefer ... as Secretary of State. "Here, Bill", she says, "here's an airplane, here's a staff. Get your sorry ass off this continent, solve some problems, shake some hands, and don't come back until I need you for the primaries in 2012. Luv ya', Bill. But, seriously, rack up some miles on that ole crate." If Obama would promise to make him secretary of state, I'd be there in a Bronx minute.

Let's turn to the 'publicans. Leaving McCain aside, if you ground up all the rest of them and reshaped them into some kind of body, you still would not have a whole man. Romney is just plain phony, Giuliani is so corrupt that he leaves oil stains wherever he goes, Huckabee is less prepared to be president than Ed Jew and his only appeal is his gleeful superstition, and Ron Paul is a gasbag whose "phenomenon"is explicable only as the last oxygen-free gasp of right-wing youth and former youth who cannot face just how disastrous the legacy of their party will be.

McCain, though, is a real man. A real rage-o-holic, so they say. A real right-winger. A real militarist. But a real person. Just the wrong person at a time when America stands on the precipice of doom. There is always ... at least in the last half dozen campaigns ...  a sense among the 'publicans that one of their number "deserves" the nomination. It is on that liquid ground that McCain stakes his claim. This "straight talk" notion is obviously canned; maybe it had a brief moment in 2000, but dubya put paid to the notion that 'publicans ever want to hear straight talk, or, gawd help us, speak the truth. There is nothing in the notion of straight talk that means it oughtta be true. It just means that the sentences should be short and uncomplicated by subordinate clauses. So straight talk leads to things like "We most secure our borders" and "we are winning the war." Right. 

No doubt he is the least creepy 'publican, and no doubt he will be the hardest to beat. So the Democrats have to use the current Hillary/Obama thriller to galvanize a party to seize the changes. Otherwise, we will have a presidency that is the grumpiest in history, and the least able to move America into the chilling future.

New Hampshire and all that

As I write, CNN has the porous Larry King interviewing that quacking fool Laura Schlessinger ... I flip to it for a second and catch her saying "... and drugs and drinking and sex ..." I flipped the channel real quick. I enjoy those little vignettes you can get from channel surfing, and that line is just about all you ever hear from the Schlessingers of the world. Meanwhile, the faux-stentorian Dan Abrams is interviewing some crime expert about some poor pregnant Marine who has gone missing.

How soon they forget. Is the news world so totally bereft of originality that all this is all it can gather together in the middle of the most exciting presidential race since 1992? Last night, the talking fools ... they call it punditry, but they give pundits a bad name every time they open their gasholes ... looked peacock proud as they ate a whole bunch of crow. Turns out everything they said about Iowa was, in a phrase, a crock. Never mind ... insta-invent another zero-sum analysis. Who cares ... they never get anything right anyway.

I think that the present race for president, at this frozen juncture between primaries in minor states, illustrates with singular clarity the three rules that head up this blog. Let's see:

No such thing as a zero sum game: Anyone who wasted a single neuron on the pontifictions of the pundits after Iowa knew that the election in November was bound to be Huckabee against Obama. Five days later, who the hell is Huckabee? (Except for Ralph Reed whom Anderson Cooper has chosen to resurrect from the sepluchre of his corruption, nobody seems to know anything about this Huckabee guy today.) It turns out that things are much more complex, and that a single event or a single factor does not suffice to explain. So for the Democrats, the pundits think that this is hope versus experience ... only that experience is hoary and hope is chill. But in reality, it is about neither. I think that Democratic voters are thinking about two things: who can win and who can govern. When McCain won Iowa ... I know Huckabee won it, but everyone knows that McCain was the real winner ... I figure it made a lot Democrats think that Obama might be more likely to beat him than Hillary. But that did not translate into Obama winning in New Hampshire not because Clinton teared up but because the race is not settled, there are more issues than one (whichever single issue the pundit is mindlessly repeating), and sometimes winning gains an advantage for the loser.

Nothing in this race has yet convinced me that Obama would be a better president than Clinton, and I find his denatured "hope" cloying and evasive. He is certainly the better orator, and that counts for me. And if Clinton loses this campaign, then Obama is our guy. But that does not mean that this is a zero sum game. The experience of a genuine contest at least about style and approach is changing the party and the nation, and it will change the presidency if only we can grab it away from those monstrous 'publicans who only know how to push on a rope.

You can't push on a rope: Ever walk a dog on a leash? He's in front of you but you want him to move to the right. You do a little jerk to let him know where to go. If you and your dog are cocok (an Indonesian word meaning kopasetik, and I use the word because like all Indonesianists, I find myself thinking about the dying Suharto ... more on that anon), the dog groks your drift and moves to the right. If not, you just can't make him go by pushing on the rope.

American punditry has played dog to the 'publicans, panting and grinning as they eagerly grok the little leash jerks, and moving to where they have been instructed. But the public is beginning to understand in its majority that we are being leash-led down the garden path to perdition. So the 'publicans, going to where they figure they have been succeeding, keep trying to push on a rope, mouthing the contradictory platitudes of the three antagonistic wings of their temporary and corrupt coalition. Think of it this way ... do you believe that Dick Cheney gives a rat's patootie about rounding up homos and confining us to camps? Or, do you really believe that anybody who actually read and thought about the gospels feels that the most compelling issue of the day is to live the rich more tax breaks or to kill Social Security so granny can live out her life under a bridge?

But droning on with these incompatible slogans worked for them, so now they know no better. The grokking ... that is the putative dog listening and obeying ... has gone, but the leash remains, strangely with less and less effect.

I think that the Democrats for a long time tried to push on a rope ... mouthing the certitudes derived from nodding at each other in closed rooms. That's a large part of my problem with Obama ... I think he is speaking loud and sonorously, but the message is all form designed to satisfy without quenching, to give you the sugar rush of believing without the protein of proposals. But even so, he is not trying to push Americans to him with some rope of dishonesty like the 'publicans ... he is trying to entice them to his side with a proverbial cookie. Here, Fido, come and get your cookie.

Any force given long enough turns into its opposite, or things bite back: There's an easy one here ... the 'publicans are paying for the crimes of what will end up being 8 years of hubris and corruption and self-satisfaction. Well, maybe. Remember, it's not a zero-sum game, so gawd nose what'll actually happen. I don't believe that the 'publicans have turned into their opposite ... they have become more and more of the venality that is their root and branch. I don't believe that the Democrats have turned into their opposite ... they still rely too much on hoping and dissembling rather than thinking and acting. What I think may be happening is that Americans might in some measure turn into their opposites ... that Americans might be on the verge of demanding the enactment of their majority belief that climate change is real, that people should control their own bodies, that government has a duty to lead, that we are the stewards of the planet we live on, that basic decency requires that the privileged help the downtrodden. It is hard to imagine this nation giving up its hummers and parking lots and Walmart. But in our majority, we know things have to change.

So perhaps only in the sense of the things bite back rule does Obama represent something for me ... the indistinctness of the content of his message might allow that it be filled by spontaneous movements for environment and generosity. Perhaps the next generation, voting now in larger numbers so far than expected, might inflate the balloon of an Obama presidency.

Maybe. Still, Clinton seems the surer bet. As long as she can beat that old fart McCain.

Postscript: Nice piece on political rhetoric and the current campaign here by Peter Applebome.

The careful reader will note that I wrote this post over two days ... caught ... I am actually posting this on Friday night, 48 hours after the date stamp. Honesty, and a dollop of obsessive-compulsiveness, demands that I note this.

Bhutto and the Tiger

Three years ago, we were transfixed by the epochal tragedy of the great Boxing Day tsunami. This year, it is Bhutto, and Tatiana the tiger that could and did and paid for it. Tragedies both, but these victims unlike the innocents on the beach of three years ago, paid for playing. My point here is not to judge the fairness of any of this, but to look at the role of accident in history a bit.

Assassinations are quite common in history, tsunamis are very rare, and zoo-based tiger predation of visitors almost unheard-of. Almost. That's the key word ... almost. One in a million is not zero. So when the strangely unrattled parents stated that things like this never happened to people, they forgot that one .... one in a million.

Let's start with Bhutto. It seems odd to me that it took her enemies so long to get her. She's been back in Pakistan for a couple of months, after all, and this is a place where political murder has been a commonplace at all levels of society. It looked like a well thought out operation at first, but then we find out that there was essentially no security and that it is at least possible that she was killed by banging her head. Even if a bullet did kill her, scoring a hit even at short range would be a crap shoot considering the pressing mob surrounding her vehicle. If she's inside the vehicle, the suicide bomb doesn't get her. So my skepticism ... reeking, to use the phrase of a former colleague in the "movement", of coffee and upholstery ... enjoys the notion that she cracked her skull on an armored SUV sunroof knob. I do not enjoy the fact that she has been killed because in the darkness that is the Pakistani future, she was at least a 5-watt bulb of hope for some sort of ephemeral moment of stasis or quietude.

But the fact is that her assassination is an accident. It might not have occurred. If she hadn't cracked her head, maybe she could have shamed Musharraf into providing some security. Maybe she might have bought herself a pope-mobile. This is not a one in a million accident ... more like a one in a hundred, or in fifty.

There are definable, albeit highly volatile, forces at work in Pakistan. But the accident of this assassination is a wild card, and a deterministic view of history can't predict either the fact of accident or the effects. After the fact, we can point to the dominant factors. Before the denouement ... whenever that might be ... we can speculate based on the factors. But we can't account for the accident, and accidents do occur.

The press, and especially the droning reciters on television, provide no context and merely look about nervously to see if they can repeat what someone has said while appearing original at least to themselves. I have yet to hear anyone talk about the ethnic issues ... Bhutto is an aristocratic Sindhi, christian- and western-educated, and I recall that she is Shia but I can't confirm that. Musharraf is an Indian-born Mohajir, the first mohajir Pakistani head-of-state. Nawaz Sharif is a Punjabi. Punjabis plus Sindhis plus Mohajirs equal about 70% of the population; the tribal areas have about 15%, considerably less than 15% of the economy, and even less of the army which is what counts.

All that said, it is not clear who follows Bhutto. An accident trumps it all, at least until the accident becomes a stable part of the equation in the course of time's inexorable march. And that is part of the problem with understanding accident in history ... the accidents of yeteryear come to feel like they had to have been. Not so. Maybe it all would have turned out the same, but we don't, and can't, know that.

So to the tiger ... from tragedy to farce, as it were. I am convinced that the three little shits who paid with their bodies for the tiger's rage had goaded it into coming after them. The evidence seems to go there. The tiger was loose for 19 minutes, and only went after three people. The tiger grotto is 40 years old and no tiger has escaped before. Sundry projectiles are found in the moat ... by the way, is a moat still a moat without water in it? I think it's a ditch.

Even so, this is a one in a million accident. Little shits torment zoo animals all the time. I remember watching little Indonesian shits throwing lit cigarets at an orangutan who was mired on a treeless island surrounded by a watery moat. The orangutan ate the cigarettes. What sort of creep torments a zoo animal? How low can someone sink? Well, it turns out that the surviving Dhaliwal brothers are local tyrants who get drunk and act up and terrorize their neighbors. They have sundry drunk-and-disorderly type charges pending. Notwithstanding the valueless pronouncements of San Francisco's poster-girl police chief, this was a crime scene, and the tiger was the hapless victim.

Still ... one in a million. Sousa ... the dead one ... gets a Darwin award, but his elimination form the gene pool was not a result solely of stupidity ... stupidity has never been a bar to reproduction, alas ... but the result of dumb bad luck. Again, the coffee and upholstery skeptic in me wonders why a tiger with 19 minutes on his hands couldn't have saved the neighbors any further trouble with the Dhaliwal boys, but that too is accident.

You can't predict these things. The results will be reams of ink, as they say in the news biz, and at least three lawsuits. It will cost San Francisco and the nominally independent zoo a pot of money. And there will be breast beating about tigers in capitivity, and less attention to the fact that there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild.

All the result of an accident.

And then those poor sods washed out too sea three years ago ... I still think that the Indonesian death count is radically low. I have never seen a proper estimate of the number of people living on the northwest shore of Sumatra before the waves, or a reliable count of the survivors. I think ... again, coffee and upholstery ... that the Indonesian count is more like 300,000 than the official 170,000. To the victims, it was a bizarre accident, literally out of the blue. Maybe mother earth knows when massive earthquakes occur, but in history they come out of the blue even if we know that they must come sooner or later. That epochal accident cleared out the poor for Thai tourism developers, and it provided the basis for a settlement of the Acehnese war that has raged off and on for 150 years. It also gave a boost to the religious police who now wander about with whips and sticks to stick and whip insufficiently shrowded women and young folks sitting about and talking unchaperoned.

Out of the blue, one in a million. An accident. Never underestimate the accidents of history.

Photo by Arod: Street art at 14th and Valencia in San Francisco.

Three rules ...

Three rules for observing history:

- no such thing as a zero sum game
- you can't push on a rope (the mystical principle)
- any force given long enough turns into its opposite, or ... things bite back