And then the author of the post says:

“Although the partisans on both sides look like dolts here, obviously on this issue Democratic hypocrites outnumber Republican hypocrites. (This may be a case where Republican skepticism of the Federal government’s ability to do anything has served them well.)”

I disagree with this statement. I don’t think that this shows hypocrisy at all. I think that discrepancies like this are natural whenever you ask people to make a decision about something on which they’re not fully informed (and why would an ordinary person ever be fully informed about the policy levers that the government can use to affect gas prices).

In the absence of detailed information, a question like this boils down to trust. Do we think that the government would do something if they could? If we trust the government to do something about this problem, then the fact that they have done nothing must mean that they are unable to do anything.

It makes sense that Democrats would not trust Republicans to do anything about gas prices. Thus, even though they had done nothing, there remained the possibility that there was something that the Republicans might be able to do which they simply chose not to do. On the other hand, Democrats are more likely to trust Obama to do something about gas prices. The fact that he’s done nothing, is, to them, confirmation that there is nothing that can be done.

To me, this does not seem like hypocrisy or irrationality to me. Rather, it seems like perfectly sound thinking.

I think that people who are very interested in something are often very prone to overestimating how much the random person on the street actually thinks about that thing. In the case of politics, I think this is a particularly egregious problem. To political commentators (even amateur ones), politics is everything. But to the ordinary person, it’s pretty much nothing. Any political question is likely to be given less than ten minutes of thought during a given year.

And that’s the way it should be. For an ordinary person, there are only two politically relevant questions that need to be asked. 1) Am I going to vote Democrat or Republican? and 2) Am I going to engage in radical political action?

The answer to question one can be disposed of by most people in less than thirty seconds of thought. The second question is one that most people answer in the negative. Any political thinking that does not affect the answer to either question 1 or question 2 is a waste of time. This ‘gas price’ question is the definition of an irrelevant question and it deserves the lack of research that these respondents displayed when they responded to it.

All of these articles seem to take it for granted that a New Jersey prosecutor will somehow be  able to influence the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and/or a federal judge to avoid deporting a convicting criminal. To me, this seems like an extremely fragile guarantee. We live in a country where people are routinely scooped up and held without trial in immigration lockups and deported. A country where legitimate visa-holders are denied entry to the country for no stated reason. A country where people of South Asian descent are added to mysterious no-fly lists or terrorist watchlists or even targeted assassination lists without any sort of judicial review. This is a country where mentally handicapped American citizens have been deported to Mexico merely because they had hispanic names. Its a country where American-born children are deported along with their illegal parents. This is a country whose authorities are brutally unforgiving to both criminals and to immigrants.

If Ravi takes a plea, then his fate will not be adjudicated by his fellow Americans. It will instead be left entirely to the doubtful sympathies of (largely white) prosecutors and judges who tend to build their careers by fostering hard-line nativist sentiment. To me it’s not surprising that he would be willing to trust himself to a jury that will almost certainly include people of color, recent immigrants, and the descendants of recent immigrants. Sure, his juvenile activities might have had horrible consequences, but I think it’s not impossible that a jury of ordinary Americans might think that ten years in prison and a lifetime in India is too steep a punishment for those actions. Furthermore, I also think that it’s entirely possible that he sees avoiding deportation as being worth risking the possibility of a few years in prison. What is a 19 year old American kid going to do in India? What kind of life is he going to have? In fact, I wonder that more people have not emphasized the racial element in this case. Because of his race and immigration status, Dharun Ravi has to suffer more punishment for this same crime than an American citizen or someone from a less impoverished country would have to. If it wasn’t for that, then I am pretty sure he would have settled and this would all have been over months ago.

I found the whole thing rather boring.

The main thing I’ve gleaned from Banned Books Week is that book banning is not a real problem: their own website says that there were only 348 challenges (that is, individual books challenged at individual libraries / schools) in 2010. There are 122,101 libraries in America (including school libraries). That makes one book challenged per 350 libraries. Even if the ALA is right in saying that their methodology for measuring the number of challenges only manages to capture 10-20% of the total, that would still mean that (at worst) there’d be a challenge at only 1 in 50 libraries.

I mean, sure, banning books is bad. I agree with that. But everyone (especially librarians) agrees with that. That’s why no books are banned (in the sense of their publication being forbidden) and so few books are removed from libraries (i.e. are not provided, for free, by the government).

Banned Books Week is emblematic of the progressive tendency to refight battles that were won in the 50s and 60s. Speaking out against book banning is uncontroversial and it feels good. I have no problem with that (well, except that it’s boring).

But there is a tone of triumphalism to the whole book-banning meme that is somewhat at odds with reality. The effect of Banned Books Week is to suggest that we’re freer today than we were in the past; that once upon a time, James Joyce might have been unable to publish Ulysses, but nowadays, the worst impingement of government into literature is that a middle school library in Huntington Beach, CA decided to require permission from a parent before allowing students to check out Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

And we are better off, if all we care about is banned books. But in many ways, it’s much harder to access public information than it was 5, 10, or 15 years ago.

That’s because the funding for libraries is being chopped as a result of this recession. Here in Oakland, several branches have closed. Almost every municipality is slashing library hours and operating budgets. I understand that. A library is not something that a city or county absolutely owes to its citizens, the way it owes them decent firefighting, policing, and schooling.

But curtailment of library services seems like far more of a challenge to the printed word than the banning of books. The books that get banned tend to be amongst the most widely circulated books and popular books in America (err…and children’s books with homosexual themes). They’re the books that it’s fairly easy to get.

But when library services are curtailed, it becomes harder to get every book. Shorter operating hours means that working people find it harder to get to the library. Fewer branches means that people without cars (like kids) can’t go to the library. Smaller budgets means fewer books, which means that the less frequently checked out books (by definition, the minority viewpoints) get sold off or thrown out.

Libraries are a very intensively utilized resource. I’ve never been in a library that has not been full of people. Some library services, like internet access on their computers, seem pretty essential to the people who use them. Whenever I go to the library, I see people checking out books that they need: cookbooks, religious books, diet books, books on searching for jobs, and, of course, fiction.

Personally, I could not read the way I do without the library. About half the books I read nowadays come from either Oakland or Berkeley’s library system. When I became a member of Berkeley’s library, I experienced first-hand the difference that a well-funded library system can make.

Previously, I had been at the mercy of the rather limited collections of Oakland and D.C. I mean, the number of books these large metro libraries possessed was large, but their collection did not include numerous out of print or small print run books. If I wanted those books, I had to buy them. Now, that was not a hardship, for me, but it did discourage a spirit of adventure. I couldn’t take a chance on the book that I didn’t know much about but which might have been really great. In many cases, I didn’t read the books that I was interested in.

However, with Berkeley’s Link+ online interlibrary loan system, I can read pretty much any book that has ever been published. Seriously, I have not yet encountered a single book that I can’t request, online, from an affiliate library. Whether it’s a small-press poetry collection or a scholarly ethnography from an academic press, I can have it delivered to the closest branch of the Berkeley library (usually from some university library).

This is an incredibly useful service. But it must also be fairly expensive. Librarians in distant cities are putting books on trucks or planes for me and sending them hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of miles just so I can read them. For free.

And I’m not even a resident of Berkeley. I live in Oakland. The city of Berkeley is extending me a very generous subsidy. I earn enough money to buy the books I want. But Berkeley feels that it’s important for me (some random guy) to have access to every book ever written.

That’s a huge leap of faith. It is stunning that the government possesses so much belief in the power of books. And there’s something very weird and atypical about this (and about the library system in general).

There’s something about the library that is out of line with the current spirit in America. Libraries are too generous. They are too free and too open to everyone. In many communities, the library is the only building where every person can come inside and spend time without time limits or monetary expenditures. There is nothing else like the library in modern society. There is no government service (save possibly the roads) that you can use without expenditure and without restriction and regardless of your income level. Everything else the government provides is yielded up at a mean, subsistence level. It’s designed to keep you alive, rather than to nurture you.

Libraries aren’t like that, yet, but it’s easy to imagine a day when will be. On that day, we’re not going to be worried about Twilight being banned from the library. We’re going to worry about it being the only thing left in the library.

            Being not-in-America makes me really miss America. I sometimes surrender to the temptation to kiss the ground upon returning home. There’s really no other place in the world in the world where I want to live.

            But I also find that feeling so paradoxical. Because I know that life in America is not better than it is in other developed countries. In many respects, it is significantly worse and its people are significantly unhappier. Which makes the 4^th of July kind of a weird holiday. Down here, we have a country celebrating a war that killed 26,000 people in order to liberate it from….Great Britain? North of the 49^th parallel, there is a country that expended no lives and is also a free and stable democracy.

            If anything, we’d be better off right now if we were part of Canada. From the modern standpoint, it seems like the main results of the Revolutionary War are a lack of healthcare and millions of innocent people, from across the world, directly and indirectly murdered in our name.

            Given that, what does it even mean to say that I love America? I certainly don’t think it is more moral or provides a better life for its people than most (or any) other developed nations.

            The only rationalization I could think of is that I love America in the way that most people love their families. You know that your family is not really better than the millions of other families around you. But you love them anyway. You see their good points and downplay the significance of their bad points.

            And sure, I can name a hundred and one things that I love about America. In fact, I delight in most of the things that are generally held to be negatives. I could go on and on about it. But those are not really real things. I like those things because I grew up with them, because they’re familiar to me. America is the scenery for every major event in my life, and so of course American things will have an emotional resonance for me that other things will lack.

            But…even that is kind of unsatisfying as an explanation of my love for America. You love your family because they’re people, because they love you, and because you need to love them in order to interact with them and grow up with them and put up with their various impositions. Love lubricates the entire setup.

            But…America doesn’t love me. America is not capable of emotions. America is a place. Or a collection of people. Or a system for organizing people. Or a shared set of customs. If the purpose of a nation is to create an environment conducive to the material well-being and happiness of its people, then America is not that great of a success. The solution is to move somewhere else, or, if that’s too much of a hassle, to deal with it. What purpose do all these extraneous emotions serve?

            If anything, it makes the things America does feel worse, and seem more egregious. Especially when it’s things that directly affect me. The way that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Travel Security Agency act at airports is not actually that bad. I don’t mind it when other countries hassle me. But receiving even minor hassling by your own country upon coming home…that just really sucks.

            I’m pretty sure that love is not the right word. Maybe I’m just using it as a synonym for, “I’m comfortable here” or “I’m happier here than I would be somewhere else”. That feels righter, since it puts the emphasis on me and on some chemical stuff going on inside my head, instead of on America, an object which is not, on its own merits, capable of supporting these emotions.

            But I don’t know if that’s really quite true either. I feel much more positively about America than many people I know, including people who would be much, much unhappier in some other country.

            And that’s where I’ve gotten on this topic. I think my problems here are mostly linguistic and semantic. I haven’t really defined what I mean by “America” or what the emotion I feel is. And I’m not really sure what the question is either. Is the question, “Why do I feel this way?” or is it “How should I feel?” I don’t know.

            Now that I have a reader or two, feel free to chime in with your own mild America-related angst.

Now, the kid is probably going to be prosecuted, and I would not be surprised if he ends up in jail for fraud. But that’s what civil disobedience is. The whole point is to get arrested. You’re supposed to break unfair laws, and in being punished, expose the government’s moral shortfalls. You’re supposed to martyr yourself.

That’s the kind of conviction that I rarely see mustered (and that I will probably never muster for anything), because it’s alot harder than writing a letter to your congressman or attending an anti-war protest. Not that those things can’t do a little bit of good…but this shows that there’s a whole lot more good out there that can be done, by a sufficiently committed person.

I went out to the festivities in an effort to try to stir up a little bit of this Obama-related sentiment in my heart. I mean, I’m fairly happy and excited that he’s our president, but I’m still a bit mystified by the entire Obama phenonemon. And after those four days I can safely say that I am more confused than ever.

This mass of people had to be the most earnest, least ironic group that I have ever been a part of (and, after Synergy, that’s saying alot).

I resorted to spending the entire weekend making St. Obama jokes to Will (who was in town, with his girlfriend Leah). But even that sometimes backfired.

For instance, as I was walking out of the Inauguration concert I said to Will, “Don’t they know that we’re not going to need music after we’re touched by Obama’s light? Because the music will be in our hearts.”

The woman next to us turned and said, “That was beautiful.”‘

I will say that I am glad I went to the inauguration. I had my doubts during the endeavor, particularly when I had just spent four hours standing on the Mall in 20 degree temperature, lost feeling from my toes, and been berated by two yuppies for smoking…and Obama was still two hours away.

But I’ve listened to, and been deeply touched by, so many recordings of great speeches and I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be there when one was made. And while I’m not sure Obama’s speech will go down in the annals of history, it was certainly more meaningful to me because of the six frozen hours I had to wait for it.

I also thought it was the right speech for the moment. Obama’s talk about having to make hard decisions, and by implication, give up some things now in return for future prosperity, rang true for me. So many of our modern disasters have come about becuase we sought easy, soft solutions in the past. I’m not sure whether the speech will be remembered by the ages (as Obama’s DNC speech certainly will be). I think that depends on whether his presidency is remembered as one that not only weathered the current crisis (as I think it will), but put in place stable and long-lasting institutions that make such crises less likely in the future.

Blow-bama

The book “Obama Nation” (which is a great title, just say it out loud) starts to go down this path by providing a layer of sly insinuations as mulch from which harmful storylines about Obama can grow nice and strong. Personally, I think that Obama’s drug use has not been played upon nearly enough.

The man has already admitted to doing blow back in college. And that’s basically all we know. The New York Times ran a story where they went back and interviewed his high school and college buddies. But most of them seemed to indicate that Obama had, if anything, exaggerated his drug use. None of them could recall him doing cocaine. But that’s the New York Times! Of course they’re not going to unleash the first volley against Obama’s shady past. Look what a great job they did with the Edwards baby story.

Anyway, there’s this vast information deficit out there. What drugs did he do? How often? How much money did he spend? Was he cashing checks his hard-working single mom sent him and spending the money on booze and snow*? Did he ever sell drugs? Did he ever get a [white] woman high and have sex with her? How did he act at these parties? What kind of remarks did he make? And, most importantly, how many white women has he had sex with?** Most importantly, when did he stop using drugs?

We don’t actually need or want the answers to those questions, since they are likely to not be as horrific as what we can otherwise insinuate. What we want is to use these gaps in the record to build up a picture. And the key picture we’re trying to go for, the Big Lie…is that Obama is using drugs right now. We want people to think he’s cutting out a line at this very minute!

What we have to do is shade this ridiculous allegation with these very selective (and possibly made up) hints. For instance, “Obama has always been very skinny. But sources close to the senator say that he lost alot of weight right after he became good friends with [some shady democrat]“

Cherry-pick newspaper sources that describe him as having inexhaustible energy and getting by on very little sleep (there are bound to be some)…and then say “I wonder where he found that energy?” Also find sources that describe him as irritable. Show those great photos of him with lines under his eyes, and say “Guess it’s finally getting to him, ehh?”

Ooh, and play up on the appeal he has to young, white coeds. You’re bound to be able to find tons of pictures of blondes swooning for him. After all, Slate recently ran a quote from Scarlett Johannsen talking about how “approachable” Barack is and how he always returns her messages. And they suggested, as an explanation, that he had a crush on her. Sensing dynamite, Barack turned on her and said that she’d exaggerated their relationship.

Ooh, you know who would be perfect to use as “an anonymous source”…a secret service agent. Talk about how this agent, assigned to Obama’s detail, is sworn to protect his charge and his secrets, but he’s become sick at the thought that he’s putting his life on the line for a drug-addicted sex-fiend.

McClown

Alot of the democratic joking about McCain revolves around how old and out of touch he is, for instance the site thingsthatareolderthanmccain.com. This is an alright tactic. But every time you make a joke like that, it reinforces the idea that he is old and wise while Obama is young and callow. Instead, I think democrats will start cutting him down to size. Let’s attack that Prisoner of War biography that he’s so proud of.

Here’s how a potential McCain storyline might go. He was a terrible student (nearly last in his class at the Academy) who only got into the academy and into pilot training because his pappy and grandpappy were four-star admirals. He only got into flight-training by hanging onto their coat-tails. He was a terrible pilot who ditched out of his craft several times, finally getting captured through his own ineptitude. Once he was in the camps, he broke under torture (as he has admitted he did), and cooperated with the North Vietnamese.

Once he got back to America he cheated on his wife, who had just been through a crippling car accident and had waited for him, faithfully, for seven years. He divorced her and married someone much younger and richer. He demanded a soft, cushy job as the navy’s liason with Congress. And finally he ditched the navy entirely, moved to Arizona (a state he had no ties with), and ran for Congress. He pulled strings to get his wife’s theft of drugs, an offense punishable by twenty years in state, down to probation.

Once he got into the Senate he almost immediately caught up in a bribery scandal (the Keating Five) and only narrowly squeaked by. He’s spent the last twenty-five years in the Senate not really doing much, mostly just talking a good game, until he finally saw the chance to be President and turned his back on everything he had claimed to believe.

You paint McCain as a phony hero, little kid who always wanted to be like the heroes in his family but could never quite match up. A guy who cares more about the swash-buckling maverick image than he does about actually accomplishing something worthwhile.

*That’s another trick, never say ‘alcohol and cocaine’. Always use slightly-dated street names. They need to be slightly dated so old fogeys get them and they need to be street so we can associate Barack with the people who scare you in metro stops.

**White men percieve black men as being more virile than them (and having larger penises). I think this old-fashioned fear of miscegenation kind of has its roots in a sort of inadequecy.

When the president is currently serving, what you mostly want is a nice quiet country and a decent economy. In short, you want your own life to get better. But the future-people who are making historical judgments don’t give a damn about your life. They care about their lives.

For instance, you might be out there cursing up a storm about George Washington because you just wanted to get the crop in and then whoops, suddenly the nation is being blockaded and either the British or your own side is out there burning down your crops. We, on the other hand, are all “Yay, George, we’re really happy not to be living in Canada.”

The Economy is number one in things that don’t matter at all for historical judgment’s sake. Andrew Jackson is on our twenty dollar bill, but the man wrecked this nation’s economy and thrust us into a severe depression. Thomas Jefferson absolutely crippled our economy with the Embargo of 1907. It doesn’t matter now, though. The economy is all in the past.

Similarly, losing wars ceases to matter as soon as the veterans of that war start to die off. Truman was tremendously disliked during his time for botching the Korean War. Now people talk about how great he is for something to do with civil rights. Or whatever it was. President Johnson’s reputation has also risen as the war he botched fades from memory. Now he is justly remembered for his civil rights legislation. And can anyone remember that founding father Madison started the War of 1812 and then got our nation badly whupped? On the other hand, if you win a war you get mad props. Wilson is remembered for WWI, FDR for WWII, Abe Lincoln for the Civil War.

All the costs of losing a war, in terms of dead men and wasted money, are in the pasts. But the benefits of winning a war are in the future. For instance, the Spanish-American and Mexican-American wars were immoral wars that cost people their lives. But we still remember the fucking Alamo (and yes, I know the Alamo predated the Mexican-American War).

Repressing your citizens also does not matter. John Adams passed the blatantly unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts, now he’s a hotshot founding father with an HBO special. FDR very nearly destroyed our entire system of government with his court-packing agenda, and he interned the Japanese. Doesn’t matter. It’s the same principle. Sure, it’s terrible to oppress people. But in the view of history, those people are already gone. All that matters is what the president has done to affect the lives of those people, looking back from history.

Which brings us to the most important criteria for being regarded as a great president: legislation. Preferably legislation that is still around and helping us out today. The Civil Rights Act of ’64 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65 were landmark, as were many of Johnson’s other Great Society initiatives. FDR’s New Deal stands out as one of the planks of his greatness.

So, in view of this, what should a president who wants to achieve greatness do? Clearly he should start a few wars and pass alot of legislation (powered by deficit spending, which is how Lyndon Johnson did it, too). If the legislation sticks, you win. If you win the war, you win. But if you lose, it’s really not gonna be a big deal 60 years from now.

Basically, we expect rumors to filter upwards from the population and then leak into mainstream media through the blogs. However, this example shows how the entire process can be circumvented by putting the idea that there is such a rumor in a prominent opinion-makers head.

And what better place to get a rumor directly into the national consciousness than using that all-purpose urban legend debunker, snopes.com. It seems that one could send a rumor that one has composed oneself to that repository and then, once it was debunked, the fact that it has been addressed by a prominent news source will lend it credibility. Of course there are alot of people passing this around, or why would there be a need to debunk it. Then, Obama’s website (fightthesmears.com) will be forced to address the rumor, and then the national media will be forced to pick it up.

The real question is, which side does this benefit? Is it good for the democrats to think that Republicans are out there secretly slandering them (to fire up the base and get back a little bit of that “underdog status”)? Or is that benefit undercut by the massive free media attention that the rumor will get? For instance, I doubt many people came away from that debacle thinking that Obama uses terrorist gestures. But it is possible that a little whiff of unpatriotism and alien-ness was attached to him from the whole thing, a whiff that subconsciously influences more voters than the anger over its falseness influences those on the other side.