Offshore oil drilling has, in the last two years, attracted more attention from the general United States public than it has had at any point in its history. Even before the April 20, 2010 disaster that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drill rig and unleashed a torrent of crude oil into the waters and beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, offshore drilling had developed into a significant battleground issue with economic, cultural, and political dimension.
Depending on one’s point of view, offshore drilling is a necessary evil, a legitimate exploitation of natural resources, a second-best option forced on the oil and gas industry by excessive regulation of possible onshore oilfields, or a dangerous process justified only by profit and the US’s dependence on petroleum.
The dispute over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska has recurred in Congress every few years since drilling was first proposed in 1977, and was a major rallying point for liberals after the Bush administration endorsed the idea in 2005. The chant of “Drill, baby, drill,” first heard at the 2008 Republican National Convention, likewise served as a rallying cry for conservatives during the latter part of the 2008 election and on through the first years of the Obama administration, right up until the news of the Deepwater Horizon disaster hit the world news on the morning of April 21, 2010.
This public tumult comes at a time when offshore drilling has, for all its hazards, become a vital part of the United States’ energy economy. A steadily increasing percentage of domestically-produced oil and natural gas comes from offshore sources: in 2009, 31% of the nation’s domestically-produced crude oil and 11% of its domestically-produced natural gas came from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone. Data gathered by NOAA and MMS accounts for 3,858 oil platforms in just two of the “planning areas” in US waters in the Gulf of Mexico. According to a 2009 Minerals Management Service report, “proved reserves in the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are estimated to be 20.30 billion barrels of oil and 183.7 trillion cubic feet of gas from 1,229 proved fields,” or roughly twice as much oil and seven times as much natural gas as the Prudhoe Bay cornucopia on the northern shores of Alaska was estimated to contain when that oilfield was first developed in the 1960s.
The complexity of offshore drilling has also grown immensely in the last several decades. In 1983, the deepest offshore well in the world was drilled in 760 feet of water, 13 miles off the coast of San Pedro, CA. A quarter century later, dozens of new wells are being installed each year in deep-sea locations (1 to 1.5 miles deep) and much further offshore; depths that were once extraordinary are now perforce normal. In 2009 alone, over three hundred new production wells were drilled in US waters in the Gulf, and nearly two-thirds of the active oil leases in the Gulf are in water more than 1,000 feet deep.
These deepwater locations are comparable to the one that blew out in April 2010 –designated MC 252-- during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, since most of them are being installed in the same oil and gas bearing geological formations. The deeper the water and the deeper the drilling, the more complex, expensive, and dangerous the operation becomes. Somewhat ironically, the last well the Horizon had completed prior to beginning the fateful one was the deepest well yet drilled at the time, a whopping 30,918 feet into the seabed under 4,132 feet of water.
The reason drilling in such difficult or sensitive areas has increased so dramatically is simple. The global oil economy is rapidly approaching “Hubbert’s peak,” a phenomenon first predicted by the scientist M. King Hubbert in 1956 and commonly known as “peak oil.” While new oil and gas resources can still be found, much of the accessible oil – the “reserves” or “proven reserves” in industry and governmental language-- has been consumed or is currently being extracted. In order to expand production or to replace wellfields that have ceased producing worthwhile quantities of oil and gas, the petroleum industry has to look to other sources, and what is left is more difficult and expensive to get. The days when a wildcatter in Texas or Wyoming could find vast new oilfields simply by looking for oil sheens on creeks are long gone. In many cases ‘new’ sources such as those in ANWR or the tar sands of western Canada have been known about for decades, but the cost/benefit balance that would render them profitable didn’t work out until oil became more scarce, driving up the worth of a resource that in earlier decades was of negligible value and making it cost-effective to exploit the resource.
On June 4, Sarah Palin complained on her Facebook page that “Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your [referring to ‘radical environmentalists’] protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it." This allegation is simply not true. What is true, though, is that most of the allegedly “safer” areas are already producing, already exhausted, or are too inaccessible, small, or difficult to be worthwhile. Most of them aren’t actually any safer, when all things considered.
The dilemma of whether to drill in ANWR or the ocean is a complex one. In either case, there is the potential for irreversible destruction of the environment—neither area is truly ‘safer’ than the other. Each area is home to numerous rare species of animal and plant life, who would be trampled and poisoned.
Other concerns include possible incompatibilities with other uses of the areas. The Gulf of Mexico, for example, is both a major commercial fishing area and crosshatched with scores of shipping lanes, and freighter captains enjoy navigating hundred-thousand-ton cargo ships through an obstacle course of oil platforms about as much as fishermen enjoy pulling up nets full of oil-poisoned shrimp.
Drilling in the ANWR or other remote areas is also not much simpler or cheaper than drilling in mile-deep water tens or hundreds of miles out to sea, or for that matter, not much easier than drilling at the South Pole. Consider the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, where a massive infrastructure of roads, pipelines, well complexes, oil storage facilities, supertankers, and company towns had to be constructed in a bitterly hostile arctic environment in order to extract the oil and get it to market. The 800-mile Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System alone cost $8 billion. All of this infrastructure is extremely expensive to operate and maintain. There is even a television show about the truck drivers who regularly ferry supplies north across the ice and tundra. The truth is that as profitable as it has proven, Prudhoe Bay wasn’t considered economically worthwhile until the gasoline shortages of the early 1970s drove petroleum prices up sharply.
The oil industry routinely weighs the costs of a offshore drilling against on-shore drilling, based on the amount and quality of oil and gas that could be extracted, and the cost to get it out of the ground and onto the market. A fifth-generation mobile drill rig such as the Deepwater Horizon—built at the cost of half a billion dollars, and with a billing rate of nearly half a million dollars a day for the rig, her crew, and all the support ships and other necessities—is a major item on any budget sheet. Add to that against the costs of having to fit out another arctic oilfield on the scale of Prudhoe Bay. BP is, in fact, contemplating exactly such a project, involving constructing an artificial island in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska.
Offshore drilling is an intrinsically dangerous and environmentally risky process. It can be done safely, if the proper safeguards are in place to prevent spills or to clean up pollution before it does too much damage. The problem is that the equipment and infrastructure to cope with oil pollution on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon’s simply does not exist. While a great deal of thought and effort has been put into devices such as blowout preventers and “Christmas trees,” which are intended to prevent spills, it is surprising to see how little the art and science of cleaning a spill up has advanced since the late 1960s, when the primary source of spills were leaks from ships in harbors rather than the relatively few and comparatively small offshore drilling and production rigs in use at the time. Despite the media attention given to “magic boxes,” “top hats,” and similar devices used in attempts to shut off the flow of oil and gas from the well, the primary tools for cleaning up spilled oil are still containment booms, skimmers, pumps, and brute manpower, and they are wholly inadequate for combating spills of the current magnitude.
Congressman John Culbertson of Texas described the Deepwater Horizon disaster as a ‘statistical anomaly’ in a June 18 open letter to President Obama, in which he protested the federal government reinstating its off-again, on-again moratorium on new offshore drilling. In one sense he is correct—only one of the thousands of wells in the Gulf blew out. On the other hand, consider the amount of damage this one well has done, the inability of BP and the federal government to cope with the disaster, and the amount of destruction that even three or four more blowouts of the same size could wreak.
In the long run, however, the choice between wildlife preserve and ocean will ultimately disappear, once scarcity and the inevitable depletion of existing oilfields has driven the cost of oil up and availability down. The situation will change from an either/or decision to a both/and situation, in which the US is forced by economic necessity to drill everywhere there is oil, regardless of the increasing costs to extract it.
Prudhoe Bay is estimated to be four-fifths depleted. Unless the US can reduce its dependence on petroleum, it will ultimately face the need to drill in both areas regardless of cost and consequences, simply because it cannot do without the oil. Bearing that sad truth in mind, the nation should seriously attempt on a large scale what has been often talked about over the last twenty years, but towards which nothing has been done—developing renewable energy sources and reducing the need for fossil fuels.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Some thoughts on Proposition 8 and gay marriage
Most of you have by now read about the August 4, 2010 decision on Perry v. Schwarzenegger, more commonly known as “The Proposition 8 case.” I am pleased to say I quietly rejoiced at Judge Vaughan Walker’s decision, and (rather foolishly) stayed up late into the night reading his 138-page findings. This made the following workday a little challenging.
Proposition 8 was a bad bit of law that should never have been passed in the first place, and which got as far as it did only because of a moral panic created in the last weeks of the 2008 election season by wealthy conservative religious groups, including the strange bedfellows of fundamentalist Christians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, who poured millions of dollars in from outside California to buy ad time and influence the state’s voters. It is, simply put, a mean, selfish, and vindictive attempt to take away a right, enjoyed from birth by everyone else, that a community long denied that right had recently gained after an exhausting struggle. It is also a conscious attempt to establish prejudice and discrimination in the law before which all humans are supposed to be equal.
It is also an outstanding object lesson in why some things are, in a sense, too important to be put to a vote. It sounds counterintuitive in a republic in which the popular vote is often seen as the ultimate expression of the peoples’ will and the country’s values. The popular vote is not perfect, nor is any other part of our electoral system. Some rights are, however, so important that they cannot and should not be subject to the variable whims of the electorate—for example, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment, and so on. The people should no more be able to vote away their own inalienable rights (or anyone else’s, for that matter) than they should be able to vote themselves ten feet tall and purple. In fact, most of our system of government is constructed as a system of checks and balances, such as judicial review, which are intended to put the brakes on popular enthusiasms, an intent that predates even the Constitution itself (c.f John Locke and Edmund Burke).
As an analogy, consider the hypothetical situation in which white Southerners (for example) had at some time in the past sponsored an amendment to the US Constitution that defined human beings as including white people only. They could quite easily have done this, as it would have reflected widespread popular sentiment at the time. The Commonwealth of Virginia, for that matter, for many years had invasive genealogical criteria for determining the race of an individual in support of laws against interracial marriage.
Referenda such as Proposition 8 are in a sense even more troublesome than simple elections, because they circumvent many of the other balancing organs of government. In this instance, a process that was originally intended to give people more of a direct voice in government was used by to strip part of the population of their existing civil rights and impose discrimination based on simple prejudice.
“Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," as Judge Walker wrote. In condensed language, “prejudice doesn’t make good law.”
That’s exactly the issue here. The law. Not religion. Not popular prejudice. Not rumor. Not some half-mythical rose-colored view of the United States’ past as a continent-spanning Mayberry.
When you strip away all the religion, the histrionics, and the flag-waving paeans to American culture and pare the matter of gay marriage down to the issue that really matters—equal protection under the law—what becomes clear is that there is no adequate explanation for why gay men and women should NOT be allowed to marry, any more than there was any adequate explanation for bans on interracial marriage. “Civil unions,” for their part, fail the equality test.
Marriage is, as far as federal, state, and local government goes, strictly a matter of civil law disposing a contract between two people. That’s strictly it. Legal rights. Leviticus is nowhere to be found in a court of law.
The Catholic Church, the Mormons, the Southern Baptist Convention, the conservative Islamic community, and the Hasidic Jews don’t have to marry homosexuals in their rites if they don’t want to, because they’re not the government and they don’t (and shouldn’t) deal in civil rights. Personally, I am of the opinion that any church that involves itself in politics should lose its tax-exempt status. Religion isn’t the government’s business (at least, it isn’t until someone gets violent about it, at which point the ghost of Matthew Shepherd will rise again). That’s the flip side of the separation of church and state—religion is to be protected from the government as much as the government needs to be separate from religion.
More to the point, if you’re interesting in marrying another man, you’re probably not likely to belong to one of those religious groups that so vituperatively disapproves of the practice in the first place, rendering the point of the objection moot.
Anyways, the dramatis personae in Perry v Schwarzenegger:
Plaintiffs (people bringing the suit): Kristin Perry, Sandra Steir, Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo, two couples who were denied marriage licenses because they were intent on same-sex marriages.
Proponents aka the Defendants (supporters of Proposition 8) included the official proponents of Proposition 8, organized as a group named Protect Marriage. Oddly, although the suit itself named Governor Schwarzenegger and a number of other state government officials (in their capacities as heads of state agencies) as defendants, California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, declined to defend Proposition 8 because in his office’s view the amendment violated the state constitution. None of the other state officials named in the suit lifted a finger to defend the amendment, which is probably a good metric for how much official support Proposition 8 ever enjoyed in government. The result was that Protect Marriage, an intervening defendant (someone not named in the suit but who asserts a right to participate in the trial process because it involves them) wound up as the sole defenders of the Proposition 8 amendment—which in my opinion is only as it should be. Proposition 8 was their baby—they should defend it.
It was, on the face of it, the proponents’ fight to lose, which they did in a most spectacular fashion. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the case is how it highlighted the intellectual bankruptcy of the Proposition 8 supporters, who offered no hard evidence, no real experts, no data, and no first-person testimonials from people affected by the issues at hand. As the proponents learned to their humiliation, prejudice will only get you so far. A court of law is not like an election. Every statement and fact is ruthlessly scrutinized and tested to the breaking point, so while it is easy to splash anti-gay falsehoods all over the commercial breaks in the 6 o’clock news, it is a different matter to attempt the same wholesale slander and demagoguery in a courtroom.
The plaintiff’s lawyers amassed a mountain of evidence to support their case, with nine expert witnesses and seven lay witnesses, addressing everything from economics to history, psychology, and the prejudices and obstacles encountered in everyday life as a gay person.
The proponents of Proposition 8 called only two witnesses during the entire process, and both of those received short shrift from the judge because they had no evidence for their testimony. Judge Walker singled out David Blankenhorn of the Institute of American Values for some particularly scathing criticism, finding that Blankenhorn “lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponents’ factual assertions,” and that Blankenhorn’s testimony “should be given essentially no weight.”
One would assume that in a case of this magnitude, the proponents would have called out their biggest guns and leading intellectual lights, men of the caliber of William F. Buckley or William Jennings Bryan, who understand law and society and who can have an informed discussion on the great issues of the day. Such brains were nowhere to be found on the proponents' side-- in the case of a cause as odious as Proposition 8, maybe they don't exist. Instead, with nobody in their camp to call upon but (apparently) a clutch of bigots and dupes, the proponents brought the proverbial knife to a gunfight.
Several of the expert witnesses the proponents deposed before the trial began subsequently refused to testify in support of the proponents’ case. The plaintiffs promptly entered these witnesses’ depositions as evidence on the plaintiffs’ behalf, since their testimony appeared to support the plaintiffs’ case better than the proponents’.
The high (or low, depending on whose side you’re on) point of the trial was when the plaintiffs called Mr. Hak-Shing William Tam, one of the proponents and an organizer of Protect Marriage, as an adverse witness. Mr. Tam, who is secretary of the America Return to God Prayer Movement, a fundamentalist Christian organization, did a spectacular job of showing himself to be an uneducated, theocratic bigot who could point to nothing more specific than “the Internet” as a source for his statements linking homosexuality to child molestation, polygamy, incest, and Satanism. Satanism is obviously a major theme of concern in civil rights. Consider it this way: Mr. Tam is one of the heavy lifters behind Proposition 8, but he is such a blatantly ungrounded religious fanatic that not even the proponents' lawyers wanted him to testify on behalf of Proposition 8.
In other words, the proponents got pwned, and pwned so thoroughly and dramatically that reading Judge Walker’s decision actually made me laugh out loud.
In the end, the proponents failed to prove that gay marriage caused any significant harm, while the plaintiffs proved that forbidding gay marriage was first, discrimination, and second, inflicted social, economic, and other harms on the people involved, and that it therefore violated the California State Constitution.
If you ask me, the good guys won this one.
Proposition 8 was a bad bit of law that should never have been passed in the first place, and which got as far as it did only because of a moral panic created in the last weeks of the 2008 election season by wealthy conservative religious groups, including the strange bedfellows of fundamentalist Christians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, who poured millions of dollars in from outside California to buy ad time and influence the state’s voters. It is, simply put, a mean, selfish, and vindictive attempt to take away a right, enjoyed from birth by everyone else, that a community long denied that right had recently gained after an exhausting struggle. It is also a conscious attempt to establish prejudice and discrimination in the law before which all humans are supposed to be equal.
It is also an outstanding object lesson in why some things are, in a sense, too important to be put to a vote. It sounds counterintuitive in a republic in which the popular vote is often seen as the ultimate expression of the peoples’ will and the country’s values. The popular vote is not perfect, nor is any other part of our electoral system. Some rights are, however, so important that they cannot and should not be subject to the variable whims of the electorate—for example, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment, and so on. The people should no more be able to vote away their own inalienable rights (or anyone else’s, for that matter) than they should be able to vote themselves ten feet tall and purple. In fact, most of our system of government is constructed as a system of checks and balances, such as judicial review, which are intended to put the brakes on popular enthusiasms, an intent that predates even the Constitution itself (c.f John Locke and Edmund Burke).
As an analogy, consider the hypothetical situation in which white Southerners (for example) had at some time in the past sponsored an amendment to the US Constitution that defined human beings as including white people only. They could quite easily have done this, as it would have reflected widespread popular sentiment at the time. The Commonwealth of Virginia, for that matter, for many years had invasive genealogical criteria for determining the race of an individual in support of laws against interracial marriage.
Referenda such as Proposition 8 are in a sense even more troublesome than simple elections, because they circumvent many of the other balancing organs of government. In this instance, a process that was originally intended to give people more of a direct voice in government was used by to strip part of the population of their existing civil rights and impose discrimination based on simple prejudice.
“Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," as Judge Walker wrote. In condensed language, “prejudice doesn’t make good law.”
That’s exactly the issue here. The law. Not religion. Not popular prejudice. Not rumor. Not some half-mythical rose-colored view of the United States’ past as a continent-spanning Mayberry.
When you strip away all the religion, the histrionics, and the flag-waving paeans to American culture and pare the matter of gay marriage down to the issue that really matters—equal protection under the law—what becomes clear is that there is no adequate explanation for why gay men and women should NOT be allowed to marry, any more than there was any adequate explanation for bans on interracial marriage. “Civil unions,” for their part, fail the equality test.
Marriage is, as far as federal, state, and local government goes, strictly a matter of civil law disposing a contract between two people. That’s strictly it. Legal rights. Leviticus is nowhere to be found in a court of law.
The Catholic Church, the Mormons, the Southern Baptist Convention, the conservative Islamic community, and the Hasidic Jews don’t have to marry homosexuals in their rites if they don’t want to, because they’re not the government and they don’t (and shouldn’t) deal in civil rights. Personally, I am of the opinion that any church that involves itself in politics should lose its tax-exempt status. Religion isn’t the government’s business (at least, it isn’t until someone gets violent about it, at which point the ghost of Matthew Shepherd will rise again). That’s the flip side of the separation of church and state—religion is to be protected from the government as much as the government needs to be separate from religion.
More to the point, if you’re interesting in marrying another man, you’re probably not likely to belong to one of those religious groups that so vituperatively disapproves of the practice in the first place, rendering the point of the objection moot.
Anyways, the dramatis personae in Perry v Schwarzenegger:
Plaintiffs (people bringing the suit): Kristin Perry, Sandra Steir, Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo, two couples who were denied marriage licenses because they were intent on same-sex marriages.
Proponents aka the Defendants (supporters of Proposition 8) included the official proponents of Proposition 8, organized as a group named Protect Marriage. Oddly, although the suit itself named Governor Schwarzenegger and a number of other state government officials (in their capacities as heads of state agencies) as defendants, California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, declined to defend Proposition 8 because in his office’s view the amendment violated the state constitution. None of the other state officials named in the suit lifted a finger to defend the amendment, which is probably a good metric for how much official support Proposition 8 ever enjoyed in government. The result was that Protect Marriage, an intervening defendant (someone not named in the suit but who asserts a right to participate in the trial process because it involves them) wound up as the sole defenders of the Proposition 8 amendment—which in my opinion is only as it should be. Proposition 8 was their baby—they should defend it.
It was, on the face of it, the proponents’ fight to lose, which they did in a most spectacular fashion. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the case is how it highlighted the intellectual bankruptcy of the Proposition 8 supporters, who offered no hard evidence, no real experts, no data, and no first-person testimonials from people affected by the issues at hand. As the proponents learned to their humiliation, prejudice will only get you so far. A court of law is not like an election. Every statement and fact is ruthlessly scrutinized and tested to the breaking point, so while it is easy to splash anti-gay falsehoods all over the commercial breaks in the 6 o’clock news, it is a different matter to attempt the same wholesale slander and demagoguery in a courtroom.
The plaintiff’s lawyers amassed a mountain of evidence to support their case, with nine expert witnesses and seven lay witnesses, addressing everything from economics to history, psychology, and the prejudices and obstacles encountered in everyday life as a gay person.
The proponents of Proposition 8 called only two witnesses during the entire process, and both of those received short shrift from the judge because they had no evidence for their testimony. Judge Walker singled out David Blankenhorn of the Institute of American Values for some particularly scathing criticism, finding that Blankenhorn “lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponents’ factual assertions,” and that Blankenhorn’s testimony “should be given essentially no weight.”
One would assume that in a case of this magnitude, the proponents would have called out their biggest guns and leading intellectual lights, men of the caliber of William F. Buckley or William Jennings Bryan, who understand law and society and who can have an informed discussion on the great issues of the day. Such brains were nowhere to be found on the proponents' side-- in the case of a cause as odious as Proposition 8, maybe they don't exist. Instead, with nobody in their camp to call upon but (apparently) a clutch of bigots and dupes, the proponents brought the proverbial knife to a gunfight.
Several of the expert witnesses the proponents deposed before the trial began subsequently refused to testify in support of the proponents’ case. The plaintiffs promptly entered these witnesses’ depositions as evidence on the plaintiffs’ behalf, since their testimony appeared to support the plaintiffs’ case better than the proponents’.
The high (or low, depending on whose side you’re on) point of the trial was when the plaintiffs called Mr. Hak-Shing William Tam, one of the proponents and an organizer of Protect Marriage, as an adverse witness. Mr. Tam, who is secretary of the America Return to God Prayer Movement, a fundamentalist Christian organization, did a spectacular job of showing himself to be an uneducated, theocratic bigot who could point to nothing more specific than “the Internet” as a source for his statements linking homosexuality to child molestation, polygamy, incest, and Satanism. Satanism is obviously a major theme of concern in civil rights. Consider it this way: Mr. Tam is one of the heavy lifters behind Proposition 8, but he is such a blatantly ungrounded religious fanatic that not even the proponents' lawyers wanted him to testify on behalf of Proposition 8.
In other words, the proponents got pwned, and pwned so thoroughly and dramatically that reading Judge Walker’s decision actually made me laugh out loud.
In the end, the proponents failed to prove that gay marriage caused any significant harm, while the plaintiffs proved that forbidding gay marriage was first, discrimination, and second, inflicted social, economic, and other harms on the people involved, and that it therefore violated the California State Constitution.
If you ask me, the good guys won this one.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Dispatches from the front line of the recession.....
My name is Tom, and I worry a lot. With the way the world is these days, I’d be a fool if I didn’t worry. In fact, I’m outright scared about the future.
I’m 31 years old, and probably typical of my generation. I grew up in the family construction business and am no stranger to hard work. I have degrees from a couple of good schools, at which I worked very hard and partied depressingly little, and had very good grades. Merit scholarships and federal student loans paid for most of my education. I work for an engineering company in a complicated and evolving technical field-- finding and cleaning up oil spills and toxic waste, a demanding and sometimes dangerous job. Through my job, I get a 401k and health insurance. I have a few other investments, but I play it safe--no risky high-yield CMBs or CDOs, just blue chips, CDs, and a few select tech stocks. I keep a budget and stay out of debt.
So why am I scared? I’ve worked hard, played by the rules, lived within my means, and generally been a good little capitalist trying to live the American dream. By the logic of the Republican Party and Tea Party, I’ve done everything right and kept the faith with the religion that is American-style capitalism.
I’m scared for three reasons.
The first reason I’m scared (and also very angry) is because someone else screwed up my future by playing drunken baccarat with the stock market and real estate. This country had a hell of a party between 2001 and 2008, but now the hangover has set in and the bar tab is waiting to be paid. The economic picture shows no real signs of improvement, and in fact promises to get worse. I’ve never had to collect unemployment—fortunately—but I don’t expect that lucky streak to continue much longer. Something like a quarter of my friends are unemployed, as one economic sector after another succumbs to the crippling starvation of the recession– manufacturing, construction, real estate, even professionals like engineers, architects, and lawyers.
The second reason I’m scared (and very frustrated) that the economy has me on a treadmill that makes it progressively harder for people like me to get ahead, or even to stay afloat.
The problem isn’t how hard I work, but that for most people the same amount of work gets you less these days than it used to. The Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that the average income for men in their 30s in 2010 is 12% less than it was than for the same age group in 1974. Real wages have remained essentially stagnant, rising only about 3% since 1999. Inflation for the same period was 28.5%. The median wage, when adjusted for inflation, actually declined 2% between 2003 and 2006, during the glory days of the Bush Bubble.
Case in point—it’s virtually impossible for a couple in their 20s or 30s to afford a home on one salary now, since real estate prices and inflation left salaries behind fast enough to leave Back To The Future-style flaming tire tracks. In 1975, a married couple could make it on one salary, but just try that now and you’ll see how much things have changed. For thirty years we bridged the widening gap between income and costs by turning to home equity loans, credit cards, borrowing against 401ks and IRAs, and shenanigans like second mortgages, trying to rob Peter in order to pay Paul, but none of that changed the bitter reality that our own economy was leaving us behind. Even our investments have gone fallow, as the artificially low interest rates which the Federal Reserve maintains in order to encourage lending have reduced the return on investments.
Out of those proportionately smaller wages, we have proportionately higher mandatory expenditures—taxes and other things that we’re required to shell out on. I’m not really that worried about taxes—I have a realistic idea of how much of my income goes to taxes and what I get out of them. Roads, for example. I like roads. I like sewers and snowplows and fire departments and clean drinking water too. I haven’t seen any of the supposed socialist overtaxation that has the Tea Party all worked up, and in fact I pay less percentage wise than I would have paid thirty years ago. The amount I pay in taxes is tiny when compared to health care, rent, and other necessities.
Of all my financial responsibilities, health care scares me the most, and not just because I spend on it several times what I pay in taxes. It’s hard to get treatment in the US if you don’t have health insurance, which most working people get through their jobs like I do, and premiums consume larger and larger chunks of our shrinking incomes. As it is, health-care premiums for families have risen 119% since 1999, while inflation has risen 28.5% and real wages are, like I said, essentially stagnant. Our company’s health care plan premiums increased by 40% in 2009. That’s hard to swallow. To make matters worse, if I lose my job, I also lose my health insurance. Since I live in Massachusetts, where health insurance is required by law, I would have to either pay out of pocket for private insurance at a migraine-inducing rate, or apply for public insurance. This is why I supported a public option, and still do.
This situation is why I have a good full-time job, but do not own my own home, and drive a ten-year-old car. I probably could buy a house now, but haven’t done so because if I lose my job, as is possible, mortgage payments would put me under sooner or later. I have no real security. One major illnesses, bad investment, or big risk could wipe out everything I’ve managed to save.
I’ve resigned myself to the truth, which is that I just won’t be able to afford the same stuff my parents could. Forget the vacation cottage (my favorite spot on Planet Earth). Forget the big house in the country, the boat, early retirement (or any retirement at all) and a couple of hobbies—all the brass ring stuff that’s supposed to be the reward Americans work towards. Unless things take a major, long-term change, my generation will be the first to have a standard of living that’s not as good or better than their parents’.
The third reason I’m scared (and pessimistic) is that I don’t know whether things will get better or worse over the next few years. This is where we step beyond my life into the jungle of economics.
The US economy is fundamentally consumer-driven these days, fueled by sales of consumer goods and services to ourselves—the US doesn’t really sell much to other countries anymore. What happens to the economy when consumers’ pockets and credit have been so thoroughly drained that they can’t afford to consume at the same rate? The whole economy runs out of gas. The laid-off construction worker can’t buy a new car, which leads to lower auto sales, layoffs of care salesmen and factory workers, and so on. That’s the sort of trickle-down economics that matter these days, not the Reagan-era wishful thinking. Robert Reich agrees with me on this.
To his credit, President Obama was refreshingly forthright when he warned the country to expect a slow recovery, since that’s the only kind we’re likely to get. The comparatively quick and stimulus-free turnaround of the early 1990s was an anomaly, not the rule. Still, there are ominous rumblings that that the Obama administration’s Keynesian “pump-priming” stimulus programs will be shut off at the tap by deficit hawks and politicians eager to score easy points by describing the unemployed as lazy drug addicts.
I have to say I’m extremely skeptical when it comes to the gospel of extreme free-market deregulation preached by Rand Paul and some of the Republicans in Congress. That’s what got us here in the first place. Capitalism is not perfect and the free market is blatantly fallible--most of the regulations that corporations find onerous were created in order to prevent a disaster like the Crash of 1929 from happening again. For example, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (repealed in 1999) required separation between banks investment and depository organs, and in doing so prevented exactly the sort of bad-investment apocalypse that happened in 2008.
If their god is ‘market forces’ and their religion is free-rein capitalism, then I’m sorry to have to say it, but their god failed, and turned out to be a real jerk in the process. It gave us stagnant wages at home, millions of jobs outsourced to China as a way for corporations to save a buck, and an economic system increasingly balanced against the middle class.
If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather lose sleep over nuclear annihilation than over my health insurance.
I’m 31 years old, and probably typical of my generation. I grew up in the family construction business and am no stranger to hard work. I have degrees from a couple of good schools, at which I worked very hard and partied depressingly little, and had very good grades. Merit scholarships and federal student loans paid for most of my education. I work for an engineering company in a complicated and evolving technical field-- finding and cleaning up oil spills and toxic waste, a demanding and sometimes dangerous job. Through my job, I get a 401k and health insurance. I have a few other investments, but I play it safe--no risky high-yield CMBs or CDOs, just blue chips, CDs, and a few select tech stocks. I keep a budget and stay out of debt.
So why am I scared? I’ve worked hard, played by the rules, lived within my means, and generally been a good little capitalist trying to live the American dream. By the logic of the Republican Party and Tea Party, I’ve done everything right and kept the faith with the religion that is American-style capitalism.
I’m scared for three reasons.
The first reason I’m scared (and also very angry) is because someone else screwed up my future by playing drunken baccarat with the stock market and real estate. This country had a hell of a party between 2001 and 2008, but now the hangover has set in and the bar tab is waiting to be paid. The economic picture shows no real signs of improvement, and in fact promises to get worse. I’ve never had to collect unemployment—fortunately—but I don’t expect that lucky streak to continue much longer. Something like a quarter of my friends are unemployed, as one economic sector after another succumbs to the crippling starvation of the recession– manufacturing, construction, real estate, even professionals like engineers, architects, and lawyers.
The second reason I’m scared (and very frustrated) that the economy has me on a treadmill that makes it progressively harder for people like me to get ahead, or even to stay afloat.
The problem isn’t how hard I work, but that for most people the same amount of work gets you less these days than it used to. The Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that the average income for men in their 30s in 2010 is 12% less than it was than for the same age group in 1974. Real wages have remained essentially stagnant, rising only about 3% since 1999. Inflation for the same period was 28.5%. The median wage, when adjusted for inflation, actually declined 2% between 2003 and 2006, during the glory days of the Bush Bubble.
Case in point—it’s virtually impossible for a couple in their 20s or 30s to afford a home on one salary now, since real estate prices and inflation left salaries behind fast enough to leave Back To The Future-style flaming tire tracks. In 1975, a married couple could make it on one salary, but just try that now and you’ll see how much things have changed. For thirty years we bridged the widening gap between income and costs by turning to home equity loans, credit cards, borrowing against 401ks and IRAs, and shenanigans like second mortgages, trying to rob Peter in order to pay Paul, but none of that changed the bitter reality that our own economy was leaving us behind. Even our investments have gone fallow, as the artificially low interest rates which the Federal Reserve maintains in order to encourage lending have reduced the return on investments.
Out of those proportionately smaller wages, we have proportionately higher mandatory expenditures—taxes and other things that we’re required to shell out on. I’m not really that worried about taxes—I have a realistic idea of how much of my income goes to taxes and what I get out of them. Roads, for example. I like roads. I like sewers and snowplows and fire departments and clean drinking water too. I haven’t seen any of the supposed socialist overtaxation that has the Tea Party all worked up, and in fact I pay less percentage wise than I would have paid thirty years ago. The amount I pay in taxes is tiny when compared to health care, rent, and other necessities.
Of all my financial responsibilities, health care scares me the most, and not just because I spend on it several times what I pay in taxes. It’s hard to get treatment in the US if you don’t have health insurance, which most working people get through their jobs like I do, and premiums consume larger and larger chunks of our shrinking incomes. As it is, health-care premiums for families have risen 119% since 1999, while inflation has risen 28.5% and real wages are, like I said, essentially stagnant. Our company’s health care plan premiums increased by 40% in 2009. That’s hard to swallow. To make matters worse, if I lose my job, I also lose my health insurance. Since I live in Massachusetts, where health insurance is required by law, I would have to either pay out of pocket for private insurance at a migraine-inducing rate, or apply for public insurance. This is why I supported a public option, and still do.
This situation is why I have a good full-time job, but do not own my own home, and drive a ten-year-old car. I probably could buy a house now, but haven’t done so because if I lose my job, as is possible, mortgage payments would put me under sooner or later. I have no real security. One major illnesses, bad investment, or big risk could wipe out everything I’ve managed to save.
I’ve resigned myself to the truth, which is that I just won’t be able to afford the same stuff my parents could. Forget the vacation cottage (my favorite spot on Planet Earth). Forget the big house in the country, the boat, early retirement (or any retirement at all) and a couple of hobbies—all the brass ring stuff that’s supposed to be the reward Americans work towards. Unless things take a major, long-term change, my generation will be the first to have a standard of living that’s not as good or better than their parents’.
The third reason I’m scared (and pessimistic) is that I don’t know whether things will get better or worse over the next few years. This is where we step beyond my life into the jungle of economics.
The US economy is fundamentally consumer-driven these days, fueled by sales of consumer goods and services to ourselves—the US doesn’t really sell much to other countries anymore. What happens to the economy when consumers’ pockets and credit have been so thoroughly drained that they can’t afford to consume at the same rate? The whole economy runs out of gas. The laid-off construction worker can’t buy a new car, which leads to lower auto sales, layoffs of care salesmen and factory workers, and so on. That’s the sort of trickle-down economics that matter these days, not the Reagan-era wishful thinking. Robert Reich agrees with me on this.
To his credit, President Obama was refreshingly forthright when he warned the country to expect a slow recovery, since that’s the only kind we’re likely to get. The comparatively quick and stimulus-free turnaround of the early 1990s was an anomaly, not the rule. Still, there are ominous rumblings that that the Obama administration’s Keynesian “pump-priming” stimulus programs will be shut off at the tap by deficit hawks and politicians eager to score easy points by describing the unemployed as lazy drug addicts.
I have to say I’m extremely skeptical when it comes to the gospel of extreme free-market deregulation preached by Rand Paul and some of the Republicans in Congress. That’s what got us here in the first place. Capitalism is not perfect and the free market is blatantly fallible--most of the regulations that corporations find onerous were created in order to prevent a disaster like the Crash of 1929 from happening again. For example, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (repealed in 1999) required separation between banks investment and depository organs, and in doing so prevented exactly the sort of bad-investment apocalypse that happened in 2008.
If their god is ‘market forces’ and their religion is free-rein capitalism, then I’m sorry to have to say it, but their god failed, and turned out to be a real jerk in the process. It gave us stagnant wages at home, millions of jobs outsourced to China as a way for corporations to save a buck, and an economic system increasingly balanced against the middle class.
If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather lose sleep over nuclear annihilation than over my health insurance.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Obama vs. Carville vs. BP vs. Me.
I saw this on the Huffington Post this morning, and since I generally find James Carville about as pleasant as an ingrown hair, I wanted to offer a few comments on some of his comments about President Obama.
Carville, a Louisiana political commentator who was an advisor to the Clinton presidency, has blasted the president for a “lackadaisical and naïve” approach to the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed eleven men, has shut down one of the nation’s largest fisheries, and threatens to ruin the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.
Whatever any of their other shortcomings may be, neither the President nor the federal government should be held responsible for what has happened to date, because up to this point (and probably continuing for the near future) the federal government has not been in charge of the situation-- BP has, because BP created the mess in the first place.
The federal government became involved for two reasons. First, certain federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, have jurisdiction over environmental disasters that occur in the waters of the United States. This, I should point out, in no way excuses Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen for his practice of simply parroting whatever BP says. The second reason is that the sheer scale of the disaster has made it into a problem for the entire region.
Fox News and other right-wing news outlets have given a great deal of attention to the concept of the Deepwater Horizon being “Obama’s Katrina,” a reference to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina which devastated the Gulf coast, rendered the city of New Orleans uninhabitable, and revealed the egregious and criminal incompetence of the Bush administration in so plain a fashion that it probably cost the Republican party the 2006 midterm elections as well as the 2008 elections. “Heckuva job, Brownie.”
The essential difference between Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon disaster is, of course, that the oil spill is manmade. More to the point, it is the result of man’s—whether BP, Transocean, or Halliburton is moot—negligence and complacency. The particular “men” involved are the private sector, not the government. This isn’t Obama’s Katrina, this is the oil industry’s Katrina.
Over the past month, since the explosion and fire which sank the Deepwater Horizon occurred, BP has continuously downplayed and obfuscated details of the magnitude of the spill, such that the quantity of oil and gas released per day is now known to be an order of magnitude larger than BP’s initial estimates. There is no excuse for that—any engineer could calculate the daily volume of oil simply by looking at the size of the pipe and the rate the oil was exiting it, which is child’s play when you have a camera-equipped robot staring right at the blown-out well. BP didn’t release footage of their observations of the well until three weeks after the blowout and fire, but even so it was plain even from just what was visible on the water’ surface that BP’s estimates were bogus.
Investigations and whistle-blowing have also revealed that much of the drill rig’s safety equipment didn’t work, and that BP and its contractors skipped important tests that would likely have warned of the impending disaster. That may sound like Monday-morning quarterbacking, but there is a very good reason that safety equipment and well logging are standard practices in the oil drilling industry—they prevent disasters and save lives. Likewise, there is no excuse for BP not having proven contingency measures ready to go, so that they would not have to resort to trying one bit of oilpatch jargon (“junk shot,” “top kill,” etc) after another, only to watch them fail because the water is too deep or the blowout too intense. Even relatively simple things required by BP’s permit, like as-built blueprints or having barges laden with spill booms and crews trained to lay them properly, turned out to be deficient or missing entirely.
The federal government’s error, as evidence has shown, lay in taking BP at its word, trusting the oil company to do (and to be able to do) what it said it would do. BP signed the lease for the oilfield, took out the permit, claimed it could drill safely, said it had contingency plans if anything were to go wrong, and assumed the responsibility for handling leaks or spills. Bear in mind, however, that BP arguably has the worst safety record of any major petroleum company in the United States—in just the last five years, it has had several major spills, one refinery explosion in 2005, and another refinery shut down out of safety and pollution concerns. Exxon was responsible for the Prince William Sound disaster, it is true, but at least Exxon learned from the experience and, for whatever its other faults, now at least walks the walk on safety and emergency preparedness issues.
None of this bears directly on the President—he is, after all, the President, and not a BP engineer or an EPA spill-response coordinator. While the spill has turned into a major regional disaster, the cleanup mechanisms are several dozen pay grades below the Oval Office. If Carville wants to vent his spleen at anyone, I would suggest BP, the Minerals Management Service, the Bush Administration (who authorized the drilling), or perhaps the Coast Guard. He should remember, however, that the sins of these various government agencies consist in that they trusted BP too much, and that the ultimate fault therefore devolves on BP.
BP doubtless has its own motivations here—to restore the immense damage to its reputation, which has turned the company into a pop culture laughingstock, and to save money by stopping the release in the most expeditious way possible. Some of these motivations are, at best, tangential to the desires of the government and the public, who want the spill cleaned up, the environment restored, and the fishermen and others whose livelihoods have been disrupted to be compensated. BP, meanwhile, wrote a blank check to its Gulf-area franchises and subsidiaries to deluge the media with advertising, ostensibly on behalf of gulf states’ tourism boards, advertising open beaches and fresh seafood.
It’s the very old story. Greg Palast recently summed it up thusly:
Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi. Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?”
I wonder…. If you give people enough rope, they can proverbially hang themselves with it. Does the same apply to giving BP enough boom?
Carville, a Louisiana political commentator who was an advisor to the Clinton presidency, has blasted the president for a “lackadaisical and naïve” approach to the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed eleven men, has shut down one of the nation’s largest fisheries, and threatens to ruin the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.
Whatever any of their other shortcomings may be, neither the President nor the federal government should be held responsible for what has happened to date, because up to this point (and probably continuing for the near future) the federal government has not been in charge of the situation-- BP has, because BP created the mess in the first place.
The federal government became involved for two reasons. First, certain federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, have jurisdiction over environmental disasters that occur in the waters of the United States. This, I should point out, in no way excuses Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen for his practice of simply parroting whatever BP says. The second reason is that the sheer scale of the disaster has made it into a problem for the entire region.
Fox News and other right-wing news outlets have given a great deal of attention to the concept of the Deepwater Horizon being “Obama’s Katrina,” a reference to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina which devastated the Gulf coast, rendered the city of New Orleans uninhabitable, and revealed the egregious and criminal incompetence of the Bush administration in so plain a fashion that it probably cost the Republican party the 2006 midterm elections as well as the 2008 elections. “Heckuva job, Brownie.”
The essential difference between Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon disaster is, of course, that the oil spill is manmade. More to the point, it is the result of man’s—whether BP, Transocean, or Halliburton is moot—negligence and complacency. The particular “men” involved are the private sector, not the government. This isn’t Obama’s Katrina, this is the oil industry’s Katrina.
Over the past month, since the explosion and fire which sank the Deepwater Horizon occurred, BP has continuously downplayed and obfuscated details of the magnitude of the spill, such that the quantity of oil and gas released per day is now known to be an order of magnitude larger than BP’s initial estimates. There is no excuse for that—any engineer could calculate the daily volume of oil simply by looking at the size of the pipe and the rate the oil was exiting it, which is child’s play when you have a camera-equipped robot staring right at the blown-out well. BP didn’t release footage of their observations of the well until three weeks after the blowout and fire, but even so it was plain even from just what was visible on the water’ surface that BP’s estimates were bogus.
Investigations and whistle-blowing have also revealed that much of the drill rig’s safety equipment didn’t work, and that BP and its contractors skipped important tests that would likely have warned of the impending disaster. That may sound like Monday-morning quarterbacking, but there is a very good reason that safety equipment and well logging are standard practices in the oil drilling industry—they prevent disasters and save lives. Likewise, there is no excuse for BP not having proven contingency measures ready to go, so that they would not have to resort to trying one bit of oilpatch jargon (“junk shot,” “top kill,” etc) after another, only to watch them fail because the water is too deep or the blowout too intense. Even relatively simple things required by BP’s permit, like as-built blueprints or having barges laden with spill booms and crews trained to lay them properly, turned out to be deficient or missing entirely.
The federal government’s error, as evidence has shown, lay in taking BP at its word, trusting the oil company to do (and to be able to do) what it said it would do. BP signed the lease for the oilfield, took out the permit, claimed it could drill safely, said it had contingency plans if anything were to go wrong, and assumed the responsibility for handling leaks or spills. Bear in mind, however, that BP arguably has the worst safety record of any major petroleum company in the United States—in just the last five years, it has had several major spills, one refinery explosion in 2005, and another refinery shut down out of safety and pollution concerns. Exxon was responsible for the Prince William Sound disaster, it is true, but at least Exxon learned from the experience and, for whatever its other faults, now at least walks the walk on safety and emergency preparedness issues.
It is not now, and has never been, the role of the federal government to hover over every well, refinery, pipeline, or filling station, or to immediately jump on every oil spill. The federal government is not a first-responder service. The government’s job is to set a standard of care (in the form of statute and regulations) that is intended to keep manmade disasters to a minimum, and the private sector is supposed to obey the regulations. Regulations are not in force only when the MMS or EPA inspector is onboard the rig—they are in force all the time, and drillers must obey them all the time. Blaming the government for BP’s failures and negligence is akin to the man who built a house badly, only to have it fall down, blaming the building inspector for not forcing him to build a better house.
None of this bears directly on the President—he is, after all, the President, and not a BP engineer or an EPA spill-response coordinator. While the spill has turned into a major regional disaster, the cleanup mechanisms are several dozen pay grades below the Oval Office. If Carville wants to vent his spleen at anyone, I would suggest BP, the Minerals Management Service, the Bush Administration (who authorized the drilling), or perhaps the Coast Guard. He should remember, however, that the sins of these various government agencies consist in that they trusted BP too much, and that the ultimate fault therefore devolves on BP.
BP doubtless has its own motivations here—to restore the immense damage to its reputation, which has turned the company into a pop culture laughingstock, and to save money by stopping the release in the most expeditious way possible. Some of these motivations are, at best, tangential to the desires of the government and the public, who want the spill cleaned up, the environment restored, and the fishermen and others whose livelihoods have been disrupted to be compensated. BP, meanwhile, wrote a blank check to its Gulf-area franchises and subsidiaries to deluge the media with advertising, ostensibly on behalf of gulf states’ tourism boards, advertising open beaches and fresh seafood.
It’s the very old story. Greg Palast recently summed it up thusly:
Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi. Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?”
In short, the federal government has to take over because the private sector failed…….. again. That should be quite clear by now, at least to anyone short of Rush Limbaugh or Rand Paul—the former has alleged that environmentalists blew the oil rig up, and the latter has, in a spate of fundamentalist libertarianism, called Obama’s supposedly harsh approach to BP’s actions “un-American” for assaulting a corporation that plays a big part in the American economy.
In one sense I agree with Rand Paul’s extreme syndicalist outlook—certainly not one unreimbursed cent of public money should be spent on cleaning up a spill caused by a private sector operation which was engaged in exploiting for profit resources owned by the public.
I wonder…. If you give people enough rope, they can proverbially hang themselves with it. Does the same apply to giving BP enough boom?
Monday, May 17, 2010
Iron Man II
I saw Iron Man 2 this past weekend.
I must admit that I used to be much more nervous about seeing movies made out of comic books. Batman—and by which I mean the ORIGINAL Batman, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson—was for many years the only decent example to come to mind. The latter few Batman movies, prior to the Christian Bale reboot, were just plain awful. The one-dimensional Eric Bana “Hulk” movie was one prolonged special effects fight scene orgy. Ghost Rider is best described in scatological terms. The two embarrassingly bad Fantastic Four movies had comic book fans and baby boomers furious at the pillaging of their childhood out for blood. The saccharine and trite Spider Man movies will not age well.
Iron Man is a little different. For one thing, even though he’s dying, Tony Stark comes across as anything but a sympathetic character. If anything, he’s the biggest asshole you’ve seen on the screen in a long time. Robert Downey Jr. has Tony Stark down pat—a hyperactive genius playboy with more tics and obsessions than he has substance abuse problems. The result is somewhere between Howard Hughes and Tom Swift. The movie version plays up Stark’s thinly-veiled contempt for most other human beings, while condensing his rather tiresome alcoholism problems into one scene at a birthday party. If you ever want to see Robert Downey Jr. mugging as a boorish drunk while wearing battle armor—this is the movie for you. Downey’s so good at playing a hyperactive, drunken asshole that I’m starting to wonder if he wasn’t typecast for the role.
Downey’s performance is, unfortunately not matched by all of the rest of the cast. Scarlett Johansson is irritatingly blank and robotic as an undercover intelligence operative, who very predictably massacres a platoon of hulking security guards in one of those precisely-choreographed bits of martial arts hyperbole of which Hollywood is so fond. Mickey Rourke hams it up, grunting and smirking as a metal-toothed and tattooed Russian expatriate with a vendetta against Stark and his family, and has maybe three coherent lines in the whole movie. Gary Shandling plays an oleaginous senator, a role for which he is uniquely suited. Samuel L. Jackson, recovering from his nadir in the Star Wars prequels, does a magnificently abrasive job of bringing Nick Fury to life. Sam Rockwell plays Justin Hammer, traditionally a malevolent also-ran to Stark, as almost a sort of comic relief. This is the part of the movie with which I had the most trouble. Even aside from the comic books’ depiction of Hammer as a sort of satanic Lee Iacocca, an eminence grise of the military-industrial complex, Rockwell’s Hammer is too young, pompously inept (the weapons he sells never work, in a gag that runs through the whole film), and stuffed with Wall Street buzzwords, malapropisms, and lame jokes to take seriously. This isn’t a nemesis, it’s a character from The Office.
The choice of villains may seem rather strange, particularly to those who know the comic books. For a character whose nature revolves entirely around technology, Iron Man has a remarkably diverse enemies list, running the gamut from industrial espionage through Cold War opposite numbers like the Soviet Crimson Dynamo to an ancient Chinese wizard. In this case, Rourke plays Ivan Vanko, a pastiche of Backlash and the Crimson Dynamo. Backlash generally floats in the lower regions of Stark’s enemies list, somewhere in the region of Count Nefaria, the Beetle, and Stilt-Man. Most of these guys date from Iron Man’s early days--by the time Stark had upgraded his armor to the point where he could give the Hulk a thumping or go toe-to-toe with an alien warlord, an organized crime enforcer with an electrically-charged whip hardly seemed a challenge.
Iron Man is and has always been an odd sort of hero— more than most, he has to change to keep up with the times. If anything, the problem for the Iron Man mystique over the last twenty years has been keeping far enough ahead of the Silicon Valley and Seattle avalanche to maintain the cutting-edge reputation. Tony Stark wouldn’t be caught dead running last year’s Linux (though, if so, why does the man who can build an armored suit that can fly across continents drive an Audi?)
The movie hits on a number of themes that not only resonate with the current state of the world, but which ran through most of Iron Man’s comic book life as well: the interdependence of humanity and technology in shaping the world; government paranoia, as equally present in the War on Terror years as it was in the Cold War; the unhealthily cozy relationship between the military-industrial complex and the federal government, the world of big business, and the moral tension between making money, and what the money comes from—in Stark’s case, he inherited a chunk of the military-industrial complex. It also deals, in one way or another, with many of the themes more particular to Stark himself—Stark is usually dying of one thing or another, he is a poor businessman who has gone bankrupt or faced hostile takeovers many times, and his inventions are constantly pilfered, copied, and pirated—in short, the “Demon in a Bottle” “Circuits Maximus,” and “Armor Wars” storylines from the comic.
The two Iron Man movies have also done an excellent job of planting Iron Man firmly in the here-and-now, which is a welcome challenge for a character created when solid-state electronics were mostly well in the future (yes kiddies, in 1963 Iron Man’s super-gimmicks were electromagnets and transistors). The movie itself is studded with modern pop culture references, from a cameo by Jack White to a Shepard Fairey painting of Iron Man. If this updating of the character means cleaning out the Augean stables filled to bursting with the leavings of almost fifty years’ of Marvel Comics, that may be a very good thing. It’s much like the recent Star Trek movie—if you bow and scrape to every precedent in a canon, eventually you so hem things in that Kirk has no room to be Kirk, or Stark has no more room to be Stark.
That aspect of storytelling hasn’t changed much since the Roman poet Horace published his Ars Poetica circa 18 BC. He advised:
Either follow tradition, or invent consistently.
If you happen to portray Achilles, honoured,
Pen him as energetic, irascible, ruthless,
Fierce, above the law, never downing weapons.
Make Medea wild, untameable, Ino tearful,
Ixion treacherous, Io wandering, Orestes sad.
If you’re staging something untried, and dare
To attempt fresh characters, keep them as first
Introduced, from start to end self-consistent.
What matters are not details so much as the essential nature of the character himself. Stark is a jerk and a genius. Superman is the ultimate boy scout. Batman is the brooding misanthrope. If you change that, you wind up with someone who isn’t Batman.
In the end…
…… there is an easter egg, about which I will not speak, save to say that it gave me a bad case of Kirby Dots.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Americans can be terrorists too
Americans can be terrorists too
Most national news agencies in the United States have by now reported that federal law-enforcement agencies raided the homes and other facilities of a militia organization, the Hutaree Militia, over the weekend. The raids, in which the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force cooperated, were staged in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.
U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade stated that agents took action the group because the militia members were planning a significant attack for an undetermined date in April. The plan reportedly involved murdering a law enforcement officer and then ambushing the funeral procession with explosive devices in order to kill more police officers. Nine persons, all members of the Hutaree Militia, were charged on Monday with seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence. Other allegations about the Hutaree included reports that several Muslim leaders, including Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on Islamic-American Relations of Michigan, that the Hutaree had made repeated threats of violence against them.
What little is known of the hitherto virtually unknown Hutaree group is not exactly flattering. News reports published in the wake of the raids, many of them citing the group’s own website, portray the Hutaree organization a small, secretive, heavily-armed and militantly fundamentalist Christian militia, whose primary focus lies in preparing to fight alongside a returned Jesus Christ during the supposedly imminent events which they believe to be foretold in the Book of Revelation. By way of a mission statement, the group’s website declaims:
“Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword and stay alive using equipment. The only thing on earth to save the testimony and those who follow it, are the members of the testimony, til [sic] the return of Christ in the clouds. We, the Hutaree, are prepared to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren’t. We will still spread the word, and fight to keep it, up to the time of the great coming.”
Several spokesmen of the South Michigan Volunteer Militia (SMVM) quickly denounced the Hutaree, stating that although members of the Hutaree group had on occasion trained with the SMVM, the two groups otherwise had nothing to do with each other. Michael Lackomar, a SMVM spokesman, referred to the Hutaree as a “cult,” “who believe that this is the end of the world as prophesized by the Bible and it is their duty to take up arms to fight alongside Jesus against the impending forces of Satan."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines ‘domestic terrorism’ as
“the unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States (or its territories) without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
As of this writing, the national media has steadfastly avoided calling the Hutaree Militia members arrested last weekend terrorists, instead employing a wide array of euphemisms ranging from ‘alleged militia’ to ‘Christian warriors,’ and Attorney McQuade has attempted to downplay the role of religion in the group’s intentions, the group’s own professed doctrine, objectives, and website notwithstanding.
This series of raids will, of course, do nothing to calm the increasingly frenzied and potentially militant right wing movements currently agitating in the United States, a population that includes innumerable organizations similar to the SMVM and the Hutaree. Other, similar organizations may well take the federal government’s raids as persecution of the right-thinking, as proof that the militia organizations’ beliefs about the feds’ dictatorial ambitions were right all along, much in the same way that the disastrous 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian organization in Waco, Texas stirred up a tide of right-wing resentment that culminated in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
There is nothing new about political violence in the United States. This country has a long history of violence born of political agendas and prejudices, including the Indian Wars, pitched battles fought during labor unrest (e.g. the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado), sectarian religious violence (e.g. the KKK’s attacks on Catholics and Jews), radical leftist violence during the 1960s, outright domestic terrorism such as the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and of course the American Civil War, which remains the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history. In more recent years, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization who track militias, white supremacists, and other racist organizations, identified some 75 instances of domestic terrorism between the years of 1995 and 2009.
The Indian Wars aside, many of these incidents can be characterized as clashes between conservative and liberal groups, whether it is the Weathermen’s bombing campaign of the late 1960s and early 1970s, racial violence by the KKK in order to intimidate African-Americans and preserve white political hegemony, or reactionary use by corporations of private armies of Pinkerton “detectives” to intimidate striking workers during labor troubles of the late 19th Century.
The early 1990s was the most recent previous heyday of right-wing domestic trouble. Although some militia groups such as the Posse Comitatus had existed as far back as the early 1980s, most (including the SMVM) were formed in the early 1990s in response to what many people saw as a series of unlawful actions by the federal government, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Brady Bill and other restrictions on private firearms, the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, the Ruby Ridge standoff, and the siege of the Freemen Militia compound in Jordan Montana. A further inspiration were the 1992 riots in Los Angeles and several other cities, which raised the specters of social collapse, race war, and similar issues.
The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the high-water mark of the antigovernment domestic terrorism movement during the 1990s, perhaps because the appalling carnage shocked many in the militia groups and other organizations into backing away from outright violence and talk of overthrow, and retreating into talk radio and the then-burgeoning Internet.
The movement was virtually quiescent during the Bush administration’s tenure in office, either because they perceived their great nemesis, the federal government, to be under the control of people more aligned to their own views than previously, and partly because of the patriotic pressure-cooker environment that enveloped the country for several years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. Fears of the Zionist Occupied Government (to use a term embraced by some militant fringe groups) suddenly took a back seat to fears of foreign terrorism and subversion.
One of the common themes linking together groups as diverse as the anti-communist and paleoconservative John Birch Society, the SMVM, the antiabortion Army of God, and neo-Nazi groups such as the Aryan Nations or the World Church of the Creator, is the belief that the federal government is either not to be trusted, if not outright illegitimate. The objective of many such groups is thus to defend themselves against excessive government intrusion, or in some extreme cases such as the Hutaree, to overthrow the government outright.
Conspiracy theories involving the federal government, the United Nations or secret government agencies became so pervasive during the 1990s that idioms such as “the tin-foil hat crowd” or references to black helicopters entered popular culture. The black helicopter meme, in fact, was the creation of Mark “Mark from Michigan” Koernke, a militia activist and talk radio personality who later served seven years in prison for assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.
The phenomenon of the conspiracy theory as a motivator in politics was recognized several decades ago in Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” an exploration of the circumstances of the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater’s victory over the more moderate Nelson Rockefeller for the Republican presidential nomination, and arguably the most succinct summing-up of modern US politics yet written. Hofstadter’s introduction might as well refer to the events of the present day:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
As Hofstadter recounts, ‘paranoia’ and the fear of political, social, or economic conspiracies have been a major theme of politics in the history of the United States, extending from a distrust of the Jesuits and esoteric quasi-Masonic groups in the early days of the Republic, to Freemasons in the 19th and 20th Centuries, to the military-industrial complex during the Cold War, to New World Order bêtes noirs like the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission and so on, even into the 21st century with allegations of corporate price-gouging on necessities such as gasoline.
Parenthetically, none of these ‘conspiracy theory’ ideas are new ideas in and of themselves—the allegations of FEMA-run concentration camps, for example, date back to the 1980s and the Reagan Administration’s “Operation Pegasus,” the black-ops continuity-of-government program headed by National Security Advisor Oliver North (himself now a Fox News television presenter), which would theoretically have placed the United States under martial law administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Operation Pegasus went through numerous drills, culminating in an operation codenamed Rex 84 (Readiness Exercise, 1984) that, as revealed during Lt. Col. North’s testimony on the Iran Contra affair, tested the preparedness of the federal government to detain large numbers of US citizens in the event of disaster or domestic unrest. Rex 84, in turn, had its origins in conceptual plans prepared by retired General Louis Giuffrida (who was later Reagan’s director of FEMA) for sequestering most of the African-American population (“21 million Negroes”) in the event of an uprising by the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, or other militant groups.
Much of the acute antigovernment sentiment of the radical fringe during the 1990s stemmed from their resentment of the Clinton administration’s pre-1994 policies, before the Democratic establishment was eviscerated by the Republican victory in the 1994 elections. The main worry stemmed from the fear that the “liberal,” activist, and overreaching government so thoroughly vilified by conservative pundits, talk radio personalities, and politicians would (possibly in conjunction with foreign powers) use federal power to strip people of their Constitutional rights and institute a totalitarian state. An alternative hypothesis is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the weakening of Japan as an economic power, certain social elements characterized by militant patriotism and other ideologies needed a new “other” to dislike.
The dichotomy between anti-government militancy when out of power and “for reasons of national security” when in power is a recurring theme for the right wing over the last three decades, but it is difficult to make generalizations about the militant right-wing fringe’s attitudes towards the government during the Bush administration’s second term. On the one hand, white male, conservative, and evangelical Christians were still nominally in charge and were saying all the right things, but the administration as a whole had ‘betrayed’ the cause on several fronts, notably failure to restrict legal and illegal immigration, one of the main hot-button issues of the day.
The more liberal elements of society at the time fretted over the increasingly intense and overtly Christian character of the political culture in Washington and the ‘red states,’ especially when it came to issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and the separation of church and state -- cases in point, the Defense of Marriage Amendment, the White House’s Faith-Based Initiatives, covert or overt religious litmus tests for public office, the teaching of evolution, and abstinence-only sex education in schools.
On the other hand, however, as the Bush administration staggered through its second term and as the election wars began, many in the right-wing fringe gave up on the Republican establishment, accusing them of having let the side down, so to speak. Much of this populist fury was subsequently given substance in the “Tea Party” organizations that arose in 2009.
The revival of the militant right wing after the election of President Obama was perhaps to be expected, given the tensions attendant on the election of a liberal black Democrat after eight years of notionally conservative government, and eight years before that of a Democratic president politically outgunned by a vigorous conservative block in Congress. President Obama receives about thirty death threats per day, which is a record number according to the Secret Service. The number of right-wing militia groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law center, has increased 240% in just two years, adding over 300 new groups in one year alone.
During the 2008 presidential campaign alone, various right-wing organs, some mainstream and some not, accused then-Senator Obama of being variously a crypto-Muslim, a socialist, and an outright Communist. Allegations that he is not by birth a US citizen persist on talk radio and in other conservative and fringe circles. He was further tarred with the brush of all the usual accusations—being a tool of the Bilderberg Group, United Nations, New World Order, or one of a hundred other ‘anti-American’ bêtes noirs, with alleged goals including wanting to nationalize the health care industry, ban private firearms, etc. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
The rupturing of the Republican establishment’s conservative hegemony in 2006, followed by its outright collapse in 2008, signaled that the conservative movement’s following had shrunk. Eight years of the Bush administration, with two stagnated and expensive wars, economic collapse, and revelations of rampant corruption and cronyism, had soured many moderated, independents, and fellow-travelers on the movement, and what was left in the cold light of January 2009 was a party and a movement that had shrunk like a dried plum, losing much of the malleable outer part but retaining the hard inner core.
This should not be taken to mean that all conservatives or Republicans are members of the radical fringe or espouse anything like the same ideas. If the Republican party and the conservative movement (and their respective national leadership cadres) are far more closely tied to and influenced by the hardliners and the radical fringe of the right wing in 2010 than they were ten years previously, however it is because most of the other people jumped ship after 2006, leaving the hardliners and fringe as a higher proportion of what remained.
The crowning irony of the right wing in the United States is, when you get right down to it, how ideologically diverse that end of the political spectrum is. It is a testament to the extent to which politics can make strange bedfellows that antigovernment libertarians, who resent every intrusion of government into their concept of a private sphere, with white supremacist or white separatist groups, or would-be theocrats who wish to see the government enforce Biblical laws and codes of morality for all citizens.
Theoretically, there are two common threads of conservatism in US society—fiscal conservatism, which is concerned largely with the role of government as an administrative and financial structure, and social conservatism, which has a notionally broader spectrum that includes views on race, morality, religion, social order, and the like. The two are neither distinct nor inherently opposed, however, and tend to overlap a great deal.
One of the most significant sea changes in modern-day politics in the United States is the increased influence of evangelical Christianity, if not as an outright ideology then as an organizing principle. Indeed, numerous polls by Rasmussen, Zogby, and others have shown that evangelical Christians, as a block, were instrumental in getting George W. Bush elected president and keeping him there, and played a similar role in the Republican domination of Congress that began during the Clinton administration.
The so-called “religious right” of the political spectrum in US society, a broad-brush term for social and religious conservatives as a subset of conservatism as a whole, and comprised, primarily evangelical Protestant Christians. The religious right is decidedly outspoken and ambitious, and is one of the primary motivators of the radical right. Between end-times groups like the Hutaree, other religiously motivated groups such as the antiabortion and would-be theocratic Creator’s Rights Party run by Neal Horsley and the Army of God, and the occasional fundamentalist outburst about or within government itself (Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, for example, or the role of the so-called “Family” to which a number of Republican legislators belong) there is a tremendous social and political pressure from the right for government and society to conform to their wishes.
The point is, you cannot easily separate religion as an ideology, meme, or motivator from a society of the religious, since religion is part of what makes a society what it is. This is arguably why the principle of a separation between church and state was important to the founding fathers of the US, drawing on the experiences of the Huguenots of France and the various non-Church of England sects in the United Kingdom—not only to protect the state from the influence of religion, but to protect religion from the influence of the state. This is also why Attorney McQuade’s attempt to downplay the role of religion in the Hutaree plans are, to say the least, quite disingenuous.
Some of the more significant religious concepts emphasized by the militant fringe of the right wing include:
- Antinomianism, or the belief that a supposed divine law supersedes the laws of a civil government, with the corollary in some circles that obedience to civil law is not necessary for one’s salvation. An inversion of this concept, also common in some circles, holds that Christians are obligated to resist civil law in instances where law and their interpretation of the Bible conflict, for example in cases in which religiously-motivated antiabortion protesters murdered physicians. Enforcement of civil laws that contravene supposed divine law—including protecting the civil rights granted to others—is often interpreted as oppression of Christians.
- Dominionism, also sometimes called Theonomy, or the belief that the sole appropriate law of the land is the divine law (as distinct from theocracy, government by a deity or by clergy), applied equally to Christians and to anyone else who lives there. This concept is sometimes entangled with religious interpretations of ‘American exceptionalism,’ such as the latter-day Puritan belief that America was founded as a divinely-sanctioned ‘city on a hill’ or the oft-uttered, baseless assertion that “America is a Christian nation.” One corollary to this theory, embraced by some groups such as the Army of God and the Hutaree, is that any government not founded explicitly on Christian principles is inherently illegitimate. Please note that this theory dispenses with the last 500 years of Euro-American political thought and social change, even Hobbes’ Leviathan, and kicks us back essentially to the Divine Right of Kings. The concept of dominionism, as taught by the Assemblies of God church to which Sarah Palin belongs, explicitly encourages Christians to enter politics and use their influence to ‘Christianize’ government and society.
- Various interpretations of Christian eschatology, which is that aspect of theology concerned with the end of the world. The belief in an imminent end of the world, complete with the rise of the Antichrist, the return of Jesus, tribulations, desolations, beasts, angels, the battle of Armageddon, and the like. 35% of Americans surveyed in a 2002 Time/CNN poll asserted that the Bible is the word of god and should be taken literally, and 59% believed that the events of the Book of Revelation would happen or were happening. More troublingly, 24% of Republicans responding to a recent Harris poll apparently believe that President Obama may be the Antichrist. It is no surprise that the Left Behind series of Christian fiction books dramatizing the end of the world has been so popular—at one point, the series was selling 1.5 million copies per week.
To the extent that there is an element of society in the US that intends to use violence to further religiously-inspired ambitions, an “American Taliban” does exist, but only in a loose and metaphorical sense, rather than as an organized entity.
The SPLC has recently expressed concern over the great increase in right-wing militant activity. According to the SPLC’s most recent report, Rage On The Right:
The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.
Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called "Patriot" groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight.
In terms of numbers of militia organizations, the SPLC found:
But last year, as noted in the SPLC’s August report, "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias," a dramatic resurgence in the Patriot movement and its paramilitary wing, the militias, began. Now, the latest SPLC count finds that an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244% jump.
The SPLC credits the rapid and dramatic increase in such activity to the influence of nationally-recognized politicians and pundits such as Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn), Lou Dobbs, and particularly the perpetually petulant and porcine Glenn Beck, all of whom blend religious and political vitriol in their rhetoric.
Some of the specifics cited in the SPLC’s report included:
· Glenn Beck’s insistent claims that that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is running concentration camps in the continental united states (even after he was humiliated by Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman on the subject).
· Former CNN host Lou Dobbs’ claims of supposed Mexican plots to take over the southwestern U.S.
· Rep. Michele Bachmann’s statements about secret political reeducation camps run by a supposed liberal establishment.
· Sarah Palin’s allegations of government "death panels" during the health care debate.
To these examples, I would add Palin’s most recent “Don’t Retreat—Reload” slogan, rolled out after the passage of the Obama administration’s health insurance reform legislation in late March 2010, and which was accompanied by a map of the U.S. targeting (politically, and possibly physically) vulnerable Democratic members of Congress with rifle-style crosshairs. I would also add Sean Hannity’s wholesale endorsement of the Tea Party on April 1, 2010 (sadly, this was not an April Fool’s Day prank), which received vigorous applause:
“When you think about the vast majorities that they have in Congress and they had to bribe, backroom deals, corruption, that’s all because the tea party movement, the people — all these Tim McVeigh wannabes here.”
It is entirely and reasonably foreseeable that the inflammatory rhetoric belched from these mouthpieces will start a fire somewhere. In the week following passage of the 2010 health insurance reform legislation, a number of Democratic legislators received death threats and offices were vandalized. In the worst such incident documented as of this writing, the gas service at the residence of the brother of Rep. Tom Perreillo (D-VA) was sabotaged in a manner that could have caused a lethal explosion after the property’s address was posted as Perreillo’s own residence on a right-wing website with the suggestion that Tea Party members “pay a visit.” Fortunately, nobody was injured, and the FBI is investigating.
Alarmingly, however, if matters follow the two most relevant parallels (the run-up to the Oklahoma City bombing and the superheated rhetoric about abortion), it is unfortunately only a matter of time before the violence becomes real and people start being murdered over religion and politics.
What responsibility will the bigmouths bear for the actions of their followers?
A further concern is how the other groups in the fringe will interpret the Hutaree raid; if the conventional wisdom evolves into a perception of innocents persecuted by authority, it could exacerbate problems in much the same way that the Branch Davidian disaster or Ruby Ridge inspired the Oklahoma City bombing.
We are as a nation, however, reluctant to call any sort of domestic political or religious violence ‘terrorism,’ perhaps because on some level we resent the connotations of religious fanaticism, indiscriminate violence, and other hallmarks of political and religious terrorism in other countries. Cultural or religious preconceptions also color the picture; we associate terrorism with militant Islam, with screaming mobs of grubby men in the streets of Baghdad or Gaza or Tehran, with an Orientalist view of the place, people, and phenomenon as the product of an alien, primitive, and unthinking fanaticism. We do not like to think that we may have it within ourselves to act like that. Small wonder, then, that we choose to call it anything else.
Admitting to a problem with domestic terrorism is, for a nation, akin to a person admitting that he or she has tertiary syphilis. It’s a terrible embarrassment and casts all kind of shadows over one’s moral character and fitness to exist.
The truth is, however, that Americans can be terrorists too. The sooner we admit that, and call a spade a spade, the sooner we can have a levelheaded discussion of what to do about it.
Thus we return to the FBI’s definition of the issue.
“Domestic terrorism the unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States (or its territories) without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
The real threat to public order and the republic in 2010 is not from black helicopters, secret police, extraordinary renditions, torture, politicized justice, bought-and-paid-for legislators, or corporate-sector leg-breakers such as Blackwater. Neither is the problem the prospect of a wholesale rebellion. The United States is unlikely ever to face the prospect of a legion of plucky Browncoat-analogues rolling down Main Street towards an encounter with the Third Marine Division, or the President frog-marched from the White House by a Tea Party mob like Louis XIV was dragged from Versailles.
The real threat is from bigmouths with big audiences and clever people with short tempers. Four people with a rented truck full of fuel oil and fertilizer blew a federal office building off the map in 1995, killing 168 people.
One of the more influential experiences of my teenage years was watching several years’ worth of news coverage of the Bosnian Civil War on television. Sarajevo was a nice city by the standards of Cold War era Eastern Europe (it hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics) became the center of the bloody and protracted civil war that gave birth to the terms “ethic cleansing” and “Balkanized.”
I particularly remember once, when I was driving down Maple Street in Springfield during a driver’s ed lesson, I looked out over the downtown area and thought to myself that one of the better things the United States had achieved was that no bombs had ever fallen from that sky. As decrepit as downtown Springfield was (and remains), it was nice to know nobody was bombarding it with heavy artillery, and that no snipers haunted the upper floors of apartment buildings.
Sarajevo ultimately withstood the longest siege in modern military history (generally reckoned as April 1992 through February 1996). It was strange to watch tanks firing at skyscrapers; it looked more like the sort of thing you would expect to see in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max movie than something out of the generally complacent and prosperous 1990s. It would be nice if the US could continue to avoid that sort of thing.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Haiku
Some recycled haiku I wrote in December 2006....
I went to do some relatively last-minute Christmas shopping tonight. I'm no great fan of shopping in general, and Christmas shopping is decidedly black or white for me-- either it's great, or it's horrible. The experience in Target tonight was bad enough to leave me without the words to describe it in prose-- I am forced to resort to haiku.
Christmas shopping hell
Fat wobbling everywhere
Get out of my way
Waddle waddle lurch
your thighs slap like wave on beach
Cellulite thunder
Fluorescent cavern
temple of cheap and shoddy stuff
souls not yet for sale
Herd your children, bitch
like sheep to the meat market
They're getting shorn too
Hey madam wide ass
Your butt is blocking the aisle
Put down the Big Mac
Christmas time is here
bright lights, bows, lots of bunting
Retail job is hell
Merry Christmas
Sales staff shove Santa in box
Time for Valentines
Two old men stand there
recall days now long gone by
wish for better times
I see no windows
no clocks, so time escapes me
got lost in housewares
Don't get things backwards
Holiday is time for fun
not to create stress
Warning I have nog
made of eggs, milk, other stuff
Deck the halls or else
I begrudge the world
stealing joy from holiday
drip, drop on a stone
wrong turn, lingerie
panties should not be so big
mainsail for tea clipper
Horde of shrieking gnomes
Running amok, soprano cries
I wish for a gun
Sign says ten or less
you must learn to count your items
express aisle my ass
Young man in track suit
thinks he is the mack daddy
tarnished bling, girls laugh
Gibraltar indoors
stream parts, circles, flows, rejoins
Dumbass stands like rock
Wonderbra wishes
girl in checkout line, flat chest
delusions of size
Stack of DVDs
on sale, picked over, pile of crap
nothing worth buying
throbbing with his angst
emopunk stares at world
still shops at the Gap
Transformers movie
trailer is out on the net
fans all spooge in pants
haiku are addictive
so simple, yet emotive
you can't eat just one
Five syllables is
an awkward length for poems
so bugger all this
I went to do some relatively last-minute Christmas shopping tonight. I'm no great fan of shopping in general, and Christmas shopping is decidedly black or white for me-- either it's great, or it's horrible. The experience in Target tonight was bad enough to leave me without the words to describe it in prose-- I am forced to resort to haiku.
Christmas shopping hell
Fat wobbling everywhere
Get out of my way
Waddle waddle lurch
your thighs slap like wave on beach
Cellulite thunder
Fluorescent cavern
temple of cheap and shoddy stuff
souls not yet for sale
Herd your children, bitch
like sheep to the meat market
They're getting shorn too
Hey madam wide ass
Your butt is blocking the aisle
Put down the Big Mac
Christmas time is here
bright lights, bows, lots of bunting
Retail job is hell
Merry Christmas
Sales staff shove Santa in box
Time for Valentines
Two old men stand there
recall days now long gone by
wish for better times
I see no windows
no clocks, so time escapes me
got lost in housewares
Don't get things backwards
Holiday is time for fun
not to create stress
Warning I have nog
made of eggs, milk, other stuff
Deck the halls or else
I begrudge the world
stealing joy from holiday
drip, drop on a stone
wrong turn, lingerie
panties should not be so big
mainsail for tea clipper
Horde of shrieking gnomes
Running amok, soprano cries
I wish for a gun
Sign says ten or less
you must learn to count your items
express aisle my ass
Young man in track suit
thinks he is the mack daddy
tarnished bling, girls laugh
Gibraltar indoors
stream parts, circles, flows, rejoins
Dumbass stands like rock
Wonderbra wishes
girl in checkout line, flat chest
delusions of size
Stack of DVDs
on sale, picked over, pile of crap
nothing worth buying
throbbing with his angst
emopunk stares at world
still shops at the Gap
Transformers movie
trailer is out on the net
fans all spooge in pants
haiku are addictive
so simple, yet emotive
you can't eat just one
Five syllables is
an awkward length for poems
so bugger all this
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