We Can Only Hope

We can only hope that this election is the last gasp of white supremacy (the Republican Party) in this country, that the white backlast to the civil rights movement will end, and that competence over identity politics will finally prevail again. We can only hope.

How We Vote Matters

By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 10, 2008
The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.

Voting has consequences.

I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.

The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.
Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush used for Ronald Reagan’s fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with Mr. Bush as his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.

In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.

These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the “fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on.

Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms, were repeatedly told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down to them. Someday.

Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.

When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the “Nobel Appeasement Prize.”

Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.

“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.

The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey the wreckage of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with the financial crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons of history and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they may cast in the future.

John Podesta - The Power of Progress

John Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff under President Clinton, favors us with a vision of the progressive future we need in this country, based on lessons learned from the great Progressive Era from 1890 to 1920. This is the book I've been waiting for: a call for a progressive future based on the heyday of progressivism 1890 to 1920.

In these hard economic times, we need the power of progress once again as we mainly concerned these days with our economic well-being. At the turn of the 20th century, the American Dream was threatened by growing inequalitites in wealth and the country was run by Republicans tied securely to priviliged industrialists and their allies. But that era also gave birth to a renaissance in American political thought that forever changed our nation.

It's amazing how those times are just like today as the conservative ideology served as an excuse for the accumulation of welath and privilege to detriment of the middle class. Just like in the early 20th century, we need a new progressive era that stresses justice and equality for all, economic opportunity for all, and a renewed commitment to the common good, a foreign concept to Republicans.

It is time to begin the work.

50 Greatest Villians in LIterature

From the Telegraph:

50. Helen Grayle/Velma Valento from Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler

49. Steerpike from Titus Groan and Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake

48. Shere Khan from The Jungle Book stories, by Rudyard Kipling

47. Long John Silver from Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

46. Moriarty from The Final Problem, by Arthur Conan Doyle

45. The White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis

44. Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

43. Fred from The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

42. Grendel's Mother from Beowulf

41. O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

40. Captain Hook from Peter and Wendy, by J M Barrie

39. Moby-Dick from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

38. Gil-Martin from The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg.

37 Surtur in A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay

36 The Judge from Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

35 Mrs Coulter from the His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman

34 Clare Quilty from Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

33 Count Fosco from The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins

32 Signor Montoni from The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe
31 Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith

30 Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

29 Marquise de Merteuil from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

28 Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens

27 Alec d'Urberville from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy

26 Cthulhu from The Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft

25 Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, by J R R Tolkien

24 Don Juan in (among others) El Burlador de Sevilla, by Tirso di Molina

23 The Joker from Batman, by Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jenny Robinson

22 Ernst Stavro Blofeld from the James Bond novels, by Ian Fleming

21 Augustus Melmotte from The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope

20 Mr Hyde from Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson

19 Edmund from King Lear, by William Shakespeare

18 Mrs Danvers from Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
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17 Patrick Batemen from American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis

16 Ferdinand from The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster

15 Svengali from Trilby, by George du Maurier

14 Hannibal Lecter from Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris

13 Count Dracula from Dracula, by Bram Stoker

12 Barabas from The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe

11 Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene

10 Vindice from The Revenger's Tragedy, by Thomas Middleton

9 Mr Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

8 Claudius from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

7 Ambrosio from The Monk, by M G Lewis

6 Robert Lovelace from Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson

5 Voldemort from the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling

4 Iago from Othello, by William Shakespeare

3 Cruella de Vil from The Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith

2 Samuel Whiskers from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, by Beatrix Potter

1 Satan from Paradise Lost, by John Milton

Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals (3)

This is the best book on Lincoln I've ever read. It provides the clearest account of Lincoln's rise to power, his views on slavery, the path to the Civil War, and how he governed. How Lincoln guided the North through the war is amazing. I never ceased to be amazed at how this country endured a war in which we killed 620,000 of ourselves.

Lincoln is the greatest American. No Lincoln, no country as we know it today.

Will we ever be blessed by another Abraham Lincoln?

Does Google Dumb Us Down?

By DAMON DARLIN
Published: September 20, 2008
EVERYONE has been talking about an article in The Atlantic magazine called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Some subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article, by Nicholas Carr

To save you some time, I was going to give you a 100-word abridged version. But there are just too many distractions to read that much. So here is the 140-character Twitter version (Twitter is a hyperspeed form of blogging in which you write about your life in bursts of 140 characters or fewer, including spaces and punctuation marks):
Google makes deep reading impossible. Media changes. Our brains’ wiring changes too. Computers think for us, flattening our intelligence.
If you managed to wade through that, maybe you are thinking that Twitter, not Google, is the enemy of human intellectual progress.
With Twitter, people subscribe to your “tweets.” Those who can make life’s mundane details interesting garner a large audience. Several services have been created to compete with Twitter. Others have been started to help people manage the prodigious flow of information from Twitterers.
There is even a version, Yammer, for use inside companies. You follow the word bursts of particular employees. (“In the weekly staff meeting. Good bagels. Why is everyone wearing khakis? All staff must file their T.P.S. reports on time, O.K.?”) As if there weren’t already enough to distract us in the workplace between meetings, phone calls, instant messages, e-mail messages and those Google searches.
If people question the benefit of Google, which has largely liberated us from the time-wasting activities associated with finding information, there is outright hostility to a tool that condenses our lives into haiku. The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was asked by M.I.T.’s Technology Review magazine — in a tweet, of course — why when people who aren’t familiar with Twitter are told about it, they are “uncomprehending or angry.” His response was brief and unsatisfying: “People have to discover value for themselves. Especially w/ something as simple & subtle as Twitter. It’s what you make of it.”
It is hard to think of a technology that wasn’t feared when it was introduced. In his Atlantic article, Mr. Carr says that Socrates feared the impact that writing would have on man’s ability to think. The advent of the printing press summoned similar fears. It wouldn’t be the last time.
When Hewlett-Packard invented the HP-35, the first hand-held scientific calculator, in 1972, the device was banned from some engineering classrooms. Professors feared that engineers would use it as a crutch, that they would no longer understand the relationships that either penciled calculations or a slide rule somehow provided for proficient scientific thought.
But the HP-35 hardly stultified engineering skills. Instead, in the last 36 years those engineers have brought us iPods, cellphones, high-definition TV and, yes, Google and Twitter. It freed engineers from wasting time on mundane tasks so they could spend more time creating.
Many technological advances have that effect. Take tax software, for instance. The tedious job of filing a tax return no longer requires several evenings, but just a few hours. It gives us time for more productive activities.
But for all the new technologies that increase our productivity, there are others that demand more of our time. That is one of the dialectics of our era. With its maps and Internet access, the iPhone saves us time; with its downloadable games, we also carry a game machine in our pocket. The proportion of time-wasters to time-savers may only grow. In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time.
THE pessimistic assumption that new technologies will somehow make our lives worse may be a function of occupation or training. Paul Saffo, the futurist, says he could divide the technology world into two kinds of people: engineers and natural scientists. He says the world outlook of the engineer is by nature optimistic. Every problem can be solved if you have the right tools and enough time and you pose the correct questions. Other people, who can be just as scientific, see the natural order of the world in terms of entropy, decline and death.
Those people aren’t necessarily wrong. But the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement. Certainly there have been moments when that thinking has gone horribly awry — atonal music or molecular gastronomy. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals (2)

I continue to enjoy this Lincoln book. Especially have I enjoyed Goodwin's account of the tense days leading up to the firing on Fort Sumter. This is the clearest account I've read, reinforcing the point of view that Lincoln acted correctly and in accordance to what he said he would do in his inaugural address.