2013-05-25T10:04:03-04:00 Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=thomas-de-zengotita Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Thomas de Zengotita Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2035137 2012-10-29T13:57:46-04:00 2012-12-29T05:12:02-05:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/
Yes, it is a gift, this glimpse of the truth about the Republican right that the looney Richard Mourdock has provided -- and with Akin's "legitimate rape" remark still fresh in many minds. And it is so much fun (for us) to talk in tones of faux amazement about these guys. Their boundless sanctimony is mesmerizing. It is a well nigh irresistible topic (for us).

But let's not take our eye off the ball. For a lot of low-information young women voters in swing states who are STILL undecided (which tells you a lot about what "low information" means), Romney could come out of this little binge looking like the "moderate" he is now selling himself as. I'm not kidding. We are in danger of collaborating with cultural-political moment in which ONLY wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade might look to some people like the "middle" on abortion.

That must not happen. If it does, Romney could get a pass on the one issue that has always been most likely to sink him.

So let's get back to his position on Roe v. Wade going into the final days. Wanting to undo a woman's right to choose is the radical right position -- and Romney has taken it.

Period.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1907501 2012-09-23T16:20:19-04:00 2012-11-23T05:12:02-05:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/
Another pious gem from Focus on the Family? There is that distinctive quasi-pornographic pleasure Dr. Dobson took in the idea of obedience -- for a sample, see his detailed descriptions of how to punish defiant children in his classic Dare to Discipline, certainly a more straightforward title than Fifty Shades of Grey. But no, as it happens, this particular piece of pseudo-psychology comes from Dr. Abou Salama of Cairo University and The Muslim Brotherhood -- from an address he was making to a premarital counseling class. And women in the audience met expectations, demurely shaking their heads when he later asked, "Can you as a woman take a decision and handle the consequences of your decision?"

Ah, yes -- fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Christianity. So much in common...

Looking forward to the day when the far right nightmare of a global social order looms larger on the horizon of the possible than it does now -- here's a modest proposal for how world politics might be organized during the transition: on the one hand, the Grow Up Party, running under the slogan "Our Lives are Utterly Contingent and the Universe Doesn't Care -- So Deal With It"; on the other hand, the Prop Me Up Party, running under the slogan "Feeling Really, Really Sure is Knowledge."

Imagine the conventions! The various delegations! Talk about postmodern pastiche!
I want to thank Ben Elga and Maura O'Conner for stimulating input on this topic.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1812713 2012-08-21T09:34:42-04:00 2012-10-21T05:12:12-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/ Leona Helmsley? Among other notable items on her resume, she once justified cheating her country by observing that "only the little people pay taxes." And it was the tone that told the tale, as much as the substance, the same tone as in that more recent reference to "the nail ladies." Romney's chutzpah on the tax return front has brought this issue into focus -- and presumably, come debate time, Obama will nail him. But meanwhile there has been more and more coverage of this issue ever since Warren Buffett and his secretary let the cat out of the bag so dramatically, and made the ethics of the thing so obvious. For example, there is this dramatic display and this little gem.

But my question is -- with the ethics of the thing so obvious -- how do these very wealthy people (loving friends and family members, no doubt) justify it to themselves, in their heart of hearts, how do they convince themselves that it's OK? Because that's what most of them do. Sure, there are some cynical Gekko-esque crooks and predators out there who just take everything they can get. But most people -- including very rich people -- like to feel right with themselves.

Perhaps some light can be shed on this question if we put another one alongside it: How do Republican proponents of all these new voting requirements justify what they are doing when they know that Pennsylvania's Mike Turzai revealed the truth about their motives -- nothing to do with voter fraud. The aim is to suppress the Democratic vote, largely in relatively poor minority communities. If any shred of doubt as to motivation remained in anybody's mind, it could not withstand the example of the voting commissioners of Ohio systematically restricting early voting in Democratic areas while allowing it in Republican areas -- and that was, until the pressure got too great, with the support of the Republican Secretary of State. So, somehow, these people -- in this case, not just decent family men and women, but many committed Christian patriots as well -- how do they justify disenfranchising voters in those districts in particular?

A bit of history (just a bit, I promise): When we think of the right to vote, we pay so much attention to women's suffrage and civil rights movements we sometimes forget that the original and most characteristic restriction on voting rights in the Western bourgeois democracies was the property requirement. In Europe, such requirements were widely enforced until after 1848. In the U.S., until Andrew Jackson's democratic movement and right up until the Civil War, voting in most states was restricted not merely to white men but to white men with property. How interesting, then, to discover that among the ideas floating around on the radical right (which has pretty much taken over the Republican Party) is -- you guessed it, a return to the property requirement on voting.

And you thought they only wanted to gut the New Deal and repeal Roe v Wade?

Here are the original principles behind the property requirement:

(Skimmer alert: what follows is NOT my opinion. It is a DESCRIPTION of an opinion I oppose)

First, the "stakeholder" principle: The idea here is that property owners are the owners of the nation. They literally own the material stuff that constitutes the nation. They have a stake in the welfare of the whole property that is the nation. Therefore they will be responsible voters.

Second, the "proof of rational responsibility" principle: The idea here is that property is evidence that owners possesses the rationality needed for successful self-government. If you don't own anything much, if you haven't accumulated "assets," if you live from day to day dependent only on a salary and a lease or welfare or charity and you continue to live that way over time -- then, ipso facto, you are not doing a very good job of governing your own life. So why should the nation entrust its well-being to your judgment?

That's why bourgeois democracies were called "bourgeois."

Now I'm not saying that all the rich people who don't pay their fair share of taxes and all the politicos maneuvering to deny the vote to certain communities are consciously thinking: "Let's take away the vote from everyone with a net worth below X and at the same time make them pay a higher tax rate than the rich." But I am saying that -- if only in their "ideological unconscious," as they used to say at the Frankfurt School -- they do have a sense that the random hordes who populate "those neighborhoods" in evil Chicago and LA and New York don't really, well, -- belong to my America. And the root of that feeling --besides the outright racism that is also involved in many cases -- is the property principle, which implies that America doesn't really belong to them.

Imagine being one of the 1%, the super rich -- what do they see as they make their way through an average day in this world? They see it as literally made up of entities that they and their friends own. Walking in and out of their towering buildings, driving past their huge factories and malls, how do they actually see things? This goes deeper than mere belief, its at the level of apprehension, even perception. If you own a couple of the great office buildings in lower Manhattan, say, and you take off for the Hamptons from the Wall Street Pier 11 heliport late on a Thursday evening and your eyes wander appreciatively over the glass and steel cliff sides of your properties and through the windows of the still-lighted offices you see the little brown "cleaning people" (compare "nail ladies") busy with their vacuum cleaners and Windex spritzers -- and you muse half-consciously about the whole situation, what you think is that, if not for you, those people would have nothing.

You perceive them as dependents and in your heart of hearts what you expect from them is gratitude. And not just the little brown cleaning people. There are the people in all the small businesses in the canyon streets on the retail levels of the great buildings that you and your friends own -- those jolly (though often anxious) Asian proprietors of all the delis and cleaners and newsstands and their families and other little employees, but also the chains -- from Pret A Manger to Duane Reade -- and all their little employees. They are also your dependents. But not only them. There are the people that open doors for you, guard you, serve your food, groom and massage you, tend to your residences and vehicles, and care for your children. All such people are dependent on you and others like you because -- by the millions, all over the world, in places you own that you've never even seen -- their very lives depend on the productivity of what you own. And then there are the consumers of the products you provide, the cars and refrigerators and clothing and food and fuel -- and, well, everything they need to live.

The very existence of those things is owing to what you, and others like you, do with what you own. So everybody should be grateful -- every time they turn on the dishwasher or pile in the family van for a trip to the movies, they should be mindful of who provides. And that doesn't even begin to touch the gratitude you've got coming, if the little people would only stop to think about the museums and libraries and university and hospital buildings that you have bestowed upon the world. There is your name inscribed on plaques beneath the vaulting classic columns which, by implication, extends your claim to the whole of Western civilization -- and justly so when you stop to think about it. After all, what would the Renaissance have amounted to without the Medici and their kind? I mean, come on people, how could you possibly be whining because I only pay 13 percent of my billions in taxes?

What trickles down to the level of what used to be called the petit bourgeoisie, the base of the Republican Party, is the felt experience of proprietorship. Sometimes coupled with straight-up racism, this explains why the "take back our country" trope works so powerfully. What these smaller owners see when they look at the 1% is a possibility for themselves. What they see when they drive by "those neighborhoods" they are willing to disenfranchise is people who look like they don't own anything and have no stake. They might have some abstract legal "right" to vote -- but not the deeply rooted right to vote that only comes from the exercise of responsible proprietorship. And besides, what does not having a photo ID in this day and age testify to if not an absence of that responsibility?

That's what they're thinking. That's why they can justify voter suppression and let the super-rich rig the tax system. It's all about owning.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1584886 2012-06-10T17:50:46-04:00 2012-08-10T05:12:07-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/ exit poll statistic he couldn't get over was that 37 percent of union households in Wisconsin voted to keep Scott Walker. He thinks Wisconsin is a "wake up call" for unions in general and that they need to get "back to the classroom" with their members and educate them on this issue.

Well, maybe -- but which issue exactly? Consider this little gem from New York, the most unionized state in the nation.

His rhetoric isn't as rough as Chris Christie's, and he's not trying to strip public sector workers of collective bargaining rights, but Andrew Cuomo -- like Jerry Brown in California -- has to take them on regardless. State and local economies just can't keep up with those benefits -- forget the history, forget the reasons, that's the situation now. The scary news in this piece is how some New York building trade unions lined up with real estate developers and put down real money to oppose their public sector brothers and sisters. It's no accident that, right after the Walker victory, Mitch Daniel came out and said that public sector unions should be banned while private sector unions "remain necessary." As always, these guys know exactly what they're doing. And to say they are dividing the labor movement, while true, only scratches the surface. There are deeper implications.

Consider this: the Service Employees International Union is the fastest growing in the country. 2.1 million strong, it represents the largest number of workers in health care (nurses etc.), in property services (janitors etc.) and second largest in public services (bus drivers, cafeteria workers etc.). Also growing by leaps and bounds, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is the second or third largest union in the country. It represents nurses, corrections officers, child care providers, EMTs, and sanitation workers, among others. Private sector unions, on the other hand, have been in decline for decades.

You can sum it up with this statistic: public-sector workers have a union membership rate (37.0 percent) more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.9 percent).

I can't find statistics to tell me what proportion of the public sector union membership is black and Hispanic (and female) as compared to private sector membership. I can't find the statistics -- but when I see a list of occupations like cafeteria workers, child care providers, janitors, and nurses and then recall the genders and complexions of the workers I see at big construction sites in New York City -- well, let's say I bet those statistics would be interesting. Put it this way: what percent of the 37 percent of union households who voted for Scott Walker were private sector union households, I wonder? Ed Schultz should look into that.

There are also more immediate implications. Consider this. Among the scary facts to choose from here, the scariest is the geographical distribution of the under-the-polling-radar racism that may bring Obama down in November: West Virginia, east Ohio, western Pennsylvania, upstate New York. I'm reckoning that will correspond pretty closely to the demographic that made up Ed's 37 percent. If I am on the right track, it is going to take more than a few workshops to counter what's amiss in Laborland. It goes way back, of course. What's discouraging is that it looks likely to go on and on.

The big picture: a lot of blue state liberals may not have noticed, or just shrugged off, the news that white births made up less than half of U.S. births as of July 2011. But you can be sure that news will not go unremarked among those determined to replace "welfare queen" with "public sector queen" in the national pantheon of invidious stereotypes. The "take back our country" theme is just getting under way in American politics.

That's why voter registration vs. voter suppression is the most important practical political issue on the table -- in 2012, and beyond.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1345797 2012-03-14T17:22:27-04:00 2012-05-14T05:12:01-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/ Gore vs Bush Florida decision. A more recent example is the Texas redistricting decision in January 2012. But -- the one I am getting to love more and more with each passing primary -- there's also the Citizens United case of January 2010. The "Justices" decided (5-4, natch) that there's no limit on what individual gazillionaires can contribute to political committees supporting particular candidates. Free speech. But expensive too. Hmmm...

Ah, but those lovely unintended consequences, so dear to the hearts of government-haters on the right -- they are kicking in for this Republican primary season. What a spectacle! What a harvest of video clips for democratic ad makers come November! Above all, how sustained and searing the insight into how bigoted and ignorant the core supporters of the Republican party really are and how craven and/or ignorant and bigoted the candidates are. Did you see the numbers on whether Obama's a Muslim among Mississippi Republicans? And then Rush chimes in with slutgate. It's a perfect storm. The Republicans that run the show -- including the ones on the Supreme Court -- have always been happy to exploit that ugly crowd they pander to each election cycle. But, until now, it was manageable at the presidential level. Why? They didn't have the big bucks.

Be clear: if it were not for the whims of two rich men, Romney would now be cruising for a coronation in Tampa in August. Thanks to this upstanding citizen of Las Vegas and Macau, Newt is still in the running. Thanks to Foster "aspirin-between-your-knees" Friess, that boyish voice of hate, Rick ("what's next... man on dog?") Santorum is closing in on Mitt. If Newt leaves, Rick might actually have a shot at it.

So. Thanks to the Supreme Court and those two Neanderthal moneybags, we are getting a 24/7 revelation of what the Republican Party is about, and has been for a long time -- behind facades thrown up by the likes of McCain and Bush. And it will probably go on until August! Even a people as congenitally blockheaded (not seriously bigoted) as the average American demographic has to notice this, right?

We should all hope that Rick gets that nomination. He isn't just a panderer -- he is one of them, one of the haters. Watch his eyes and his gestures when he lets his feelings show. Rick won't be able to tack to the center if he wins the nomination, his real self will out. He was lucky in Alabama and Mississippi. Old fashioned anti-Catholic bigotry was trumped by anti-Mormon bigotry and anti-black bigotry was postponed -- a convergence of bigotries has to be balanced, one against another, whenever the Republican base votes. Imagine the refinements! Anyway, let's hope they get their man, so everyone can see what they are.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1156612 2011-12-18T19:54:50-05:00 2012-02-17T05:12:01-05:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/ Lars von Trier oeuvre -- stunning in the original sense of the word, Melancholia, I mean, a merciless cosmic bookend to Terence Malick's salvational Tree of Life. Both films show an unprecedented metaphysical audacity, first of all, but they also share elements of style, pacing, scoring -- the very feel of them is one. Something in the zeitgeist, no doubt.

Enter Newt Gingrich -- Herald of a Dreadful Hour.

The night after I saw Melancholia I had an awful dream. The dream, like the movie, featured a hitherto unknown planet, called Melancholia, whose uncertain orbit round the sun might or might not result in apocalyptic collision with the earth. Except, in my dream, the planet was Newt. It looked like the planet in the movie -- but it was Newt. You know how that happens in dreams.

The movie goes back and forth between that gigantic alien's journey across our familiar skies and Kirsten Dunst's psychological state -- maximum severity depression, observed in enervating clinical detail (and maybe the best depiction of mental illness ever filmed, by the way). The planet's the objective correlative, as they say -- the best tradition of modernist poetics realized on the screen. The metaphor's pervasive, but not too obvious, the very best kind.

But why Newt?

Well, the shape first of all. The swollen rotundity. Every symbol needs its associative link, and resemblance is a classic. But powerful symbols go further; they are infused with meaning and feeling -- and this was a very powerful symbol, in the movie and the dream. I used to think I knew what "looming" meant, but now I really do. "Impending," also. The way that planet began to fill the sky as it drifted closer to earth -- the sense of an infinite capacity for expansion, for inflation. As if the sky had met its match. As if the sky could be smothered.

There's a moment in the movie where the planet, having been quite close, moves away. You can tell because it gets smaller. Relief abounds. But then, it comes back. You can tell because it gets bigger. Only this time you know the iffy orbiting is over. This time it's coming straight at us.

Then I woke up.

It was only a dream, an anxiety dream.

It can't really happen, right?


]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1011393 2011-10-14T17:04:41-04:00 2011-12-14T05:12:02-05:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/
Republicans understand this, of course, and they are going to make sure that the economy doesn't improve -- which would be unlikely even if Obama's latest round of half-measures were to take effect. So that's a double whammy.

But Obama is in deeper trouble. His significance, the very meaning of his being, has settled itself in the national psyche and a couple of remarks in Romney's recent speeches on foreign policy play skillfully upon it. Here's first one:

"I will not surrender America's role in the world," Romney said in a carefully-crafted speech at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, an early primary state. "This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your president. You have that president today."


"Carefully crafted" is right. A whiff of Bush-Cheney jingoism, yes, but just a whiff for the remaining yahoos -- the lethal dose is in the negative "do not want" and the loaded "You have that President today." Obama is weak. Obama can be rolled. That's the message. It resonates with a deep anxiety abroad in the land, the feeling that America itself is getting weak--dependent on the fate of the Euro, yielding to an ascendant China, paralyzed politically. Images of a weak Obama and a weak America are fusing.

This fused image fits with Obama's conduct of domestic politics, with all the situations in which he seemed to cave before the battle was even joined. The sad fact of the matter is that people who were once his ardent supporters cannot help but share this sense of him. Their half-hearted applause for the much touted toughness of his tone in recent weeks betrays the fact: it looks like an act. Obama has secured his coveted bipartisan consensus at last -- in this ruinous assessment of his character.

Here's another ring on the same bell from Romney's website: "Instead of apologizing for America abroad and 'leading from behind,' Mitt Romney will pursue a strategy of American strength."

As for "apologizing for America" -- well, once again, a bipartisan consensus is achieved. The election of Obama did represent, among many other things, an apology for America. And a good thing too, many of us felt. It was an apology for the America that re-elected the Bush-Cheney regime after having been directly confronted with irrefutable evidence on a massive scale of their brutal indifference to life and truth. So again, with this theme, Romney will be tapping into something real and deep in the national psyche, however divergent evaluations of it may be.

As for "Leading from behind," -- well that is right up there with "I was for the war before I was against it" on the top 10 list of phrases uttered while committing political suicide. It fits so perfectly with how people have come to view Obama that most of them have probably forgotten -- if they ever knew -- that he never said it. But that's how it goes in politics, once the image congeals.


]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.853305 2011-04-25T13:22:52-04:00 2011-06-25T05:12:01-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/ got off scot free -- and then managed to bounce right back while the rest of us were left holding the bag. "Responsible," in some cases, even means criminally responsible for outrageous acts that any individual person would go to jail for.

(Don't you just love how, legally, corporations are "persons" when it's convenient, but the persons who run corporations are not personally responsible for corporate misconduct even as they stuff their personal pockets at the shareholders' expense?)

In other cases, we aren't talking about outright criminality -- take the recent shocker about GE not paying any taxes at all. And their PR response was to boast about how efficient they are as a company! All perfectly legal, of course, all in accordance with the laws -- "laws" that lobbyists for GE and its ilk make sure get written in the first place; now that is efficient.

Everybody knows these stories and a lot of people are mad -- but somehow, unlike back in the Progressive era, say, popular opinion has not coalesced around a genuine reform agenda. Somehow, spinmeisters who serve big money have been able to blur the difference between petty bureaucratic annoyances that ordinary people put up with and, say, food and drug inspection and clean air legislation. How do they get away with that? How do they manage to frame someone like Elizabeth Warren -- obviously working in the interests of ordinary citizens -- so that she reminds people of the Assistant Principle responsible for enforcing the dress code in High School? What is it in the culture that has a critical mass of people half-consciously confusing their personal freedom with "freedom" for, say, Bank of America?

That's been puzzling me for a while. And then, the other day, I ran across this little tidbit, a piece called "Grab a Brew While They Face Death." The gist of it is that Spike TV "has identified the audience for "Coal" and its brawny brethren like "Deadliest Catch" and "Ice Road Truckers." It's the "mostly white-collar guys who go to Knicks and Rangers games, the baby-handed men who commute between Penn Station (beneath the Garden) and the suburbs." That took me by surprise. Since my work on my book I've developed a pretty good feel for cultural dynamics -- but this one got right by me. My first thought was how macho the personal style of so many Wall Street types actually is. That's on display during happy hour at any bar in downtown Manhattan of a Thursday or Friday evening. And that makes sense. The hunt for money, it's a hunt -- the risks you run pursuing that catch, what it takes to play that game. Teachers and nurses and postal employees -- all those "public sector workers" -- they're wusses by comparison, slaves to a pathetic security.

Then I remembered a benchmark moment from early in the financial crisis. The revelation comes at the end of the segment, when Rick Santelli starts getting support from the other "winners" on the floor. Those guys are so tough. Clearly they don't need Elizabeth Warren's help -- that's for losers:

But this phenomenon finally gelled while I was perusing a segment of Mad Money. I realized that Jim Cramer is the flip side of the dynamic that has commodities traders watching "Ice Road Truckers." He's out to bring the thrills of free market capitalism to the average Joe with an E-trade account: the key here is not just Cramer's low-brow style -- it is the cultural niche/social class of so many of the men who call in to the show, not all, but a lot of them. Cramer is peddling a me-first cynicism packaged as in-group savvy along with his hot tips. Here's how you're supposed to think about "health care" and WalMart if you're a Mad Money tough guy (watch for the "including humans" throw-away line).

And the camaraderie, the team spirit!

Wouldn't most of those callers say that if Angelo Mozilo, son of a Bronx butcher, built CountryWide Financial on the backs of suckers (probably "public sector workers") dumb enough to fall for subprime mortgages, more power to him? And if CEO's of major banks hung on to the leverage they needed to get those outrageous bonuses a couple of years after they brought the world economy to the brink of disaster -- well, what the hell. Boo-yah!
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.808354 2011-01-12T22:08:18-05:00 2011-05-25T18:25:24-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/
Applause rocked the house for Professor Gonzalez, who gave the Native American blessing (it seemed endless) at the beginning. He stuck in a couple of digs in the direction of ancient history (pronouncing "Tucson" in the old Indian way, before faux correcting himself, also to applause (but not so much)).

And the president of the University never missed a chance to hype his school, going so far as to cite the "outstanding leadership" of Governor Jan Brewer as he introduced her. And the kids in the bleachers again broke out in applause that was utterly indistinguishable from what they might have done if they were in a TV studio for a live game show. I was getting disoriented. I couldn't believe that this applause was as mindless as it sounded. Then Jan Brewer was saying we will go forward unbowed and undefeated and there was a HUGE outburst of applause. So maybe the applause was defiant? Were they applauding themselves for being there? Nowadays, when we get together to "heal" after a "great trauma," do we clap for our own courage?

Then the Prez of U of A laid it on for Obama -- he knew that this was his big draw, he knew that this is why there are 14,000 people in the building and 13,000 outside, taking it in virtually. And indeed the clapping and yelling knew no bounds at that point. Obama said something like there is nothing he could say that "could heal the hole torn in your hearts." They didn't exactly clap for that -- but within a couple of sentences, when he said that Gabby is a fighter and will prevail, the hole in their hearts seemed to fill pretty quick, and they clapped and clapped again.

Then Obama mentioned that Judge Roll was a graduate of the U of A Law School -- and there was a wave of applause for that shout-out to the good old alma mater. Then he mentioned a man who covered his wife's body with his own and was shot to death as a result. The dead man got a round of applause too.

Then came the semi-climax. With the husband's permission, Obama shared the private information that during his brief visit to Gabby's bedside -- she opened her eyes! That meant, Obama said, that she "knows we are rooting for her." The applause busted out big time on that. Then he did a Reagan shout-out to every ordinary person who helped out on that day and the place went nuts -- clapping and yelling for everyday heroes. Obama knew what he was doing. That much I was clear on.

Then Obama went on to tell us how we can see ourselves in these people who were shot and died. He went through the victims one by one and made the identifications specific -- our husbands and wives (and "life-partners") and children, one by one.

So what I wondered was if all this applause testified to unprecedented depths of narcissistic shallowness -- or was it some new way of defying death and despair, some postmodern Irish wake sort of thing? Or both?

But then came the old Obama from 2008, for the real climax. Front and center, he gave us Christina-Taylor Green -- the slaughtered 9-year-old who was born on 9/11/01 and was an enthusiastic member of her student council in elementary school. In her innocence, Obama told us, she imagined a politics and a country through her child's eyes. He then told us -- again to great applause, huge applause -- that we should come together and try to live up to this 9-year-old child's image of our country.

Well. What can I say? Ronald Reagan, the greatest of identity politics practitioners, couldn't have done better.

Is that a good thing?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.739718 2010-09-26T18:57:41-04:00 2011-05-25T17:50:22-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/ Teenage Paparazzo. It was directed by Adrian Grenier, the star of Entourage on HBO. Adrian is also featured in the movie, which shows in a very personal way what it has been like for him, becoming famous playing someone famous.

Teenage Paparazzo was a special entry at Sundance last winter and will be shown on HBO tomorrow, Monday, September 27, 9pm Eastern Time.

The story revolves around Adrian's relationship with Austin Visschedyk, the teenage paparazzo he met on a rope line. The movie tracks the boy's involvement in that world and goes on to explore the nature of our society's fascination with celebrity. It includes interviews with other celebrities (Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Whoopi Goldberg) and some experts on media (yours truly, Henry Jenkins of MIT's Media Lab, Jake Halpern).

What makes this film completely unique is that it is presented through the eyes of this teenager and his family. We see, from their point of view, the compelling attractions and insidious risks of celebrity culture, shown in a format that is experiential, not didactic. Celebrities tell us what their lives are really like and encounters with paparazzi and tabloid editors and writers show us how the celebrity factory packages their lives. I don't think there is a document out there that gives a more insightful, sympathetic, and balanced account of that particular dynamic.

I co-wrote the narration with Adrian and my book was the source of some of the ideas that shaped the movie.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.708281 2010-09-07T19:59:28-04:00 2011-05-25T17:35:19-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/ Taylor Branch is a progressive to be reckoned with when it comes to documenting the history of the American civil rights movement. That's why I was so shocked to read his account of Glenn Beck's Fox-hyped rally in Washington on the anniversary of King's historic "I have a dream" speech.

The piece is titled "Dr. King's Newest Marcher" and the pull-out says "Why Glenn Beck is in sync with the ideals of Martin Luther King" and, although Branch enters many caveats, the overall thrust is that he thinks Beck had a genuine epiphany that led him to depoliticize the event and emphasize religion.

When I first read about Beck deciding on that religious emphasis I assumed that it was yet more evidence of cynical market-driven manipulation. But Branch describes an interview Beck did with Alveda King, MLK's niece, who is pro-life and anti-gay marriage (Branch says he was cringing as he did the research). The way Branch describes it, Alvida introduced Beck to MLK's commitment to non-violence and this somehow dovetailed with his religious inclinations and led him to his epiphany. She gave him a copy of the original 10-point pledge of nonviolence, the form signed by demonstrators preparing to face persecution and jail, and it seemed to strike Beck with the force of revelation, says Branch. "These people were serious about nonviolence," Mr. Beck told his cable audience.

The most relevant quote from the Branch piece (but you should read it all) is: "Mr. Beck himself described undergoing a stark conversion as he organized the rally. 'When I put this together, in my head,' he told the crowd, 'I felt it was supposed to be political.' His promotional announcement had put him 'into a cold sweat' of doubt, however, until personal crisis made him grab an assistant by the lapels, Mr. Beck declared, 'and I pulled him in close, and I screamed in his ear, 'I don't know how, but we're wrong!'' He said an inner voice had told him to drop his slashing polemics, then politics entirely, for an unspecified new theme grounded in spiritual values. 'I don't understand it,' he said he had told his flabbergasted staff, 'but this is where we're going.'"

I frankly can't believe this. I feel like Taylor Branch has been snookered. But, whoa, it would be quite a thing if Glenn Beck, a really dangerous culture warrior, went through anything remotely like this -- if it has lasting effects. Let's see.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.688375 2010-08-19T18:50:24-04:00 2011-05-25T17:25:21-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/ hyper-real--as old-fashioned real issues like tax policy and war. The reason it's so hard to sustain that distinction is that these hyper-real symbolic issues immediately become real just insofar as they move voters. As a result, that becomes the "reality" serious players pay attention to much of the time. And they control the game, so that's what the public gets--the various ways they play the game in an effort to manipulate opinion.

Even when the issues are very real, as with the recent health care and financial reform debates, almost all the energy in the public arena is devoted to "framing" the real issues to that they can be reduced to effective symbols. So, even though the public option on health care was dropped and the bill actually proposed was more or less the same as the one Romney supported as governor of Massachusetts, "socialized medicine" and government "death panels" were still the tropes of choice for its opponents.

Now, there is no question that the Republican/Tea Party Right is way out front when it comes to outrageously misleading symbol-spin. They happily "just make stuff up," as poor Obama once put it when he still thought he could somehow put a stop to it.

But of course, nowadays, you can just make stuff up--and they do, shamelessly. Trust me, they are laughing at the gullible media as they do it, knowing it will get reported equitably as this side/that side. One of the main reason Democrats are in such bad shape is that they still have some respect for truth when they play the game of symbolic politics.

In the case of this purely symbolic mosque issue, for example, defenders of the mosque have nothing to match the disgusting Gingrich and Palin analogies with hypothetical Nazi installations near the Holocaust museum or Japanese installations at Pearl Harbor. A moderate Sufi Muslim is leading the mosque project, for heaven's sake! Gingrich, who fancies himself a serious historian and intellectual, either knows what that means and is ignoring historical fact for the sake of polemic or he's an ignoramus. But he doesn't care which. He has no integrity.

It's disgusting, but oh-so-clever, because for ordinary people with no investment in historical and cultural accuracy--especially people who lost loved ones on 9/11--the comparison seems valid at the level of visceral emotion. They just deal with images because that's all their culture offers. Swastika juxtaposed with Holocaust--Japanese something with Pearl Harbor--mosque with ground zero. That's all it takes. That's how mediated politics works--it has to: there is so much to process and so little time and, for most people, so little interest.

That's why Mayor Bloomberg and Ted Olson and so many others who have courageously taken principled stands in support of the mosque project, at considerable risk to their political viability, are in such a difficult position in this symbolic battle. They are, of course, just plain right as a matter of principle and historical fact. But droning on about principle and factual differences between wars with Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan, as opposed to the fanatical acts of a tiny minority of Muslims--droning on about such matters becomes just that, droning on, if you are up against the power of imagery in the maelstrom of a mediated culture.

And poor Obama has once again been fumbling around this fine line. He tried to split the difference between the right to build the mosque and the wisdom of building it and came out looking like a wimp to both sides. That is such a shame, a perfect coda to this depressing spectacle. Because, of course, there is a difference. Just fantasize for a moment. What would have been the consequences if the good folks behind the mosque project--perhaps after some outreach to 9/11 families, perhaps in a public setting with some 9/11 families--had announced a decision to move the mosque early on? Not based on principles or historical and cultural facts, but based on simple courtesy towards other members of their community (by which I mean New York City), courtesy toward people who would be, as we say, "offended" by a mosque in that location. What would have been the consequences if that decision had been made on the simple basis of consideration for the feelings of those 9/11 families, however irrational? Feelings just are irrational, after all--but we still need to respect them somehow. As a matter of courtesy.

But after the symbolic politics we've been seeing, a simple and humane gesture like that would have to be interpreted as a loss--as backing down in the face of bigotry and etc. And, in a (symbolic, postmodern) way, it would be just that. So that's why, if I had to choose, I would be for hanging tough and building the mosque. But that's also why this whole spectacle has been so depressing. I feel trapped into supporting something that will in fact offend and hurt so many of those people who lost loved ones on 9/11, something I don't want to do from the bottom of my heart. At the same time, I recoil from offending the earnest New York City Muslims who are behind the mosque project, with the best of intentions. So, unless some genius of humane compromise can intervene, it's hard to see how this symbolic issue doesn't end up offending and hurting someone, with all the poisonous consequences, either way.

Whatever the outcome in this particular situation, in the long run we need to get to a saner and more humane politics--a post-postmodern politics. And it might help if we distinguished systematically between courtesy and principle when these symbolic identity issues arise. Courtesy is very deep in human being, after all. Anthropologically speaking, you could argue that principle derives from courtesy. Principle is what courtesy becomes in a mass society composed of people who are strangers to each other. That's why I had to say above that by "their community" I meant New York City--otherwise it would have been read as meaning New York Muslims.

In a postmodern mass society, defined by diversity, we need to recover courtesy when we deal with political correctness issues. If you think about it, the very currency of the term "offended" in these contexts implies exactly that.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.586652 2010-05-23T22:14:12-04:00 2011-05-25T16:35:20-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/ Bravo Rachel Maddow. And of course that is the most offensive of his loony libertarian literalisms. But that's not what Democrats should focus on going into the November elections. That issue invites Paul and other Republicans to insist, yet again, that they are not racists, while acknowledging a few seemingly nuanced differences on how best to counter racism and, anyway, whatever--those civil rights laws are ancient history.

In fact the Paul campaign and the Republican satraps (after multiple conference calls, you may be sure) are already doing exactly that. And it will pass muster with the swathe of Middle American voters the GOP is counting on in 2010. They don't care that much about racial justice, trust me. So let's not fall into that trap. Call me paranoid, but I'm even wondering if they didn't put Michael Steele out on the Sunday talk shows to keep the focus on the civil rights issue while Dr. Paul in his fullness disappears into the news cycle maelstrom.

Because what the voters the Republicans covet do care about is their food and medicine and family members with dangerous jobs and stuff like that. Those are issues that federal agencies like the FDA and OSHA address, and those are the issues Democrats should focus on with a vengeance--in Kentucky and all over the country. Because on those issues Rand Paul is so far out there he might as well be on another planet. And those are national issues and Rand Paul is a candidate for national office who is openly and avowedly bringing Tea Party ideas to the national stage under the Republican banner.If the Tea Party issued cards, he said in an interview last month, "I'd be a card carrying member."

In his victory speech he said: "I have a message, a message from the Tea Party. A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We've come to take our government back."

He is not referring to the Kentucky state house. So that's that. He's stuck.

Grown-ups in the Republican party (it's relative thing) understand the danger of the Rand Paul candidacy going national. That's why they opposed him in the first place. That's why they talked him out of going on Meet the Press this Sunday (you can be sure they mentioned Palin's interview with Katie Couric). And that's why they are urging him to please, please, just focus on Kentucky and, in Senator John Kyl's words, avoid philosophical debates "like you had at 2 a.m. in the morning when you're going to college."

There are signs in that last link and this one that Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, Dr. Paul's Democratic opponent, is sensing which way to go in his election.

But here's my point: it's not just Conway who should laser in on the role of government in protecting the public against corporate carelessness or malfeasance. Every Democrat in the country who is running against a Tea Party Republican--or even just one who is kowtowing to them--should be focused on Rand Paul's libertarian views and pushing opponents to answer questions like this:

What about salmonella in spinach and chicken--do you think government has a role to play in preventing that? What about E coli bacteria in ground beef--do you think government has a role to play in preventing that? What about new drugs from big pharmaceutical companies--do you think government has a role to play in ensuring their safety? What about the language that banks use when they peddle mortgages and credit cards--do you think government ought to set some standards of clarity there? What about sticky accelerators in cars?

And so on. It's especially important to get in phrases like E coli bacteria. It's automatically bad, in a Frank Luntz sort of way, to be put in a position of shrugging off those bacteria. But, on that question, as on all the others, the position of loony libertarians like Rand Paul, the Tea Party candidate, is that the federal government has little or no role to play in such matters. Leave it to the states. Given the reality of interstate linkages in the marketing of food and drugs--hell, international linkages, think Chinese toothpaste--in today's economy, that position is more than loony. It is a fundamental challenge to any conservative with a brain. It's an application of abstract principles that Edmund Burke might expect of Robespierre.

Well, OK, Let's not get too high falutin' here. The point is that many Tea Partiers and most of their sympathizers love their Social Security and their Medicare. And so do the voters they are hoping to enlist in the Republican interest in 2010. How will they feel about protection from E coli?


]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.564294 2010-05-05T11:28:25-04:00 2011-05-25T16:25:21-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/
And they belong to a church, which promulgates that idea--in proclamation, in ritual, in doctrine. The institutional claim of the clergy to actually be emissaries of the Lord is made more categorically in the Catholic Church than in any other Christian denomination and the same holds, as far as I know, for other established religions as well.

What Church authorities--caught by surprise in the multimedia spotlight, speaking without much PR guidance--have been revealing about themselves, in their very words, is this: they believe they are what they say they are. One needs to dwell on this fact. It's so big, it's easy to miss. It explains not only what they have been saying, but what protectors of the abusers were doing.

Consider first a recent example from a Vatican Spokesman addressing a council of Bishops: "This is the age of truth, transparency and credibility," said the spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi. "Secrecy and discretion, even in their positive aspects, are not values cultivated in contemporary society. We must be in a position to have nothing to hide."

This contrasts sharply with earlier comments, as we shall see. It shows some willingness to learn. But the adjustment is so painful. After all, this is a Papacy that defined itself in opposition to "contemporary society," to its relativism and secularism.

How anguishing to adapt to it, even if only at the level of damage control politics. And Rev. Lomabardi is manifestly longing for the good old days when "secrecy and discretion...in their positive aspects" were values. Even in a wake up call to a council of bishops, he can't control himself--the reference to those "positive aspects" slips in as he oh-so-smoothly blends "secrecy" with "discretion." In the good old days those in authority could decide what should be known--as when then Cardinal Ratzinger urged a California Bishop to postpone action against an abusive priest and to bear always in mind the "good of the Universal Church" in dealing with such matters.

Two more years went by before that priest, a serial abuser, was defrocked.

Now, it is important to remember that it was revelations of abuse and cover-up in Europe that threw this story back onto the front pages. Until then, the Churchmen were claiming that the scandal was an American problem, an argument that converged happily with ongoing efforts to blame the '60s and popular culture for the generally decadent atmosphere. Which takes us to the earlier case of Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland and the conduct for which he expressed shame and apologized "with all my heart... to those who feel I have let them down," an apology that preceded Pope Benedict's letter to the Irish bishops which was, the Pope said, intended to help with "repentance, healing and renewal." Cardinal Brady, having repented, kept his job--but what exactly had he done?

"Cardinal Brady has faced numerous calls for his resignation in the wake of revelations that he took part in an abuse investigation in 1975 in which a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old were forced to sign secrecy oaths. Cardinal Brady, who was a priest at the time, never went to the police; the priest who had been accused, the Rev. Brendan Smyth, was convicted in the 1990s and admitted to molesting and raping about 100 children in Ireland and the United States."

"Repentance, healing and renewal"? After letting a serial abuser walk away into a future of continued abuse on a massive scale and forcing two frightened boys to sign secrecy oaths? How can that be? How is that possible? How could the sheer awfulness of that picture not register with the Churchmen?

The answer to that question emerged on Easter weekend, back when Church spokesmen were not showing as much discretion in expressing themselves as the good of the Universal Church required:

"A senior Vatican priest, speaking before Pope Benedict XVI at a Good Friday service, compared the world's outrage at sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews... the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, took note that Easter and Passover fell during the same week this year, and said he was led to think of the Jews... "They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence..." said Father Cantalamessa, who serves under the title of preacher of the papal household..."

This mind-boggling comparison, so openly made on so public an occasion, exposed the basic architecture of this special form of arrogance, in the literal sense of the word. On the basis of his intimate association with the Papal entourage, Cantalamessa obviously took for granted that the analogy would resonate with his immediate audience, his fellow Churchmen--the only audience that really mattered. But the comparison is, by any objective measure, borderline delusional--which is why it's so revealing. And what it reveals is how these men think of themselves, compared to ordinary mortals--be they Jews or their own choirboys. The Jewish experience of the holocaust is on a par with their own experience of being publicly investigated and criticized. The violations are somehow proportional. The ultimate source of this monstrous distortion is, of course, the conviction that an attack on them is an attack on God. It all comes back to that.

And so, when they circle the wagons around themselves, they believe they are defending God Almighty. No wonder they don't get it. When one of their own succumbs to temptations of the flesh, well, it is regrettable, no doubt--but the victims are part of a flock, you see, one sheep is much like another, the same ancient rituals and formulas conduct every one of them from cradle to grave to the life beyond. Their little joys and sorrows, their trials and tribulations on this earth, are all of a kind. It is a flock of millions and millions, after all--the world over, for thousands of years, all of them consigned by Christ himself to the care of... Us.

From the upper reaches of the Universal Church, the flock appears as a homogeneous mass; only the shepherds are individually visible. Which is why we get things like this:

"Meanwhile on Thursday, the Vatican confirmed the authenticity of a 2001 letter written by a top cardinal, Darío Castrillón Hoyos, praising a French bishop who was jailed for three months for not reporting a pedophile priest to civil authorities. "I rejoice to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and all the other bishops of the world, preferred prison rather than denouncing one of his sons, a priest," the letter to the bishop, Pierre Pican, read."

A private letter, from one Prince of the Church to another--a stunning glimpse into their hearts and minds. It shows how, in the last analysis, these men value themselves above others. They are outraged, not at the abuse, but at the very idea of a secular authority intruding on sacred precincts over which they have presided for 2000 years. For them, that is the real issue. The Middle Ages never ended.

Quick clarification. While I am sometimes tempted, in angry moments, to concur with dogmatic opposition to religion in the manner of Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchins--that is not where I come down in the end. There is something deep and genuinely universal about religion, something that goes to the core of what it means to be human--something that escapes Enlightenment critique. Personally, I incline to metaphysics of silence, like Wittgenstein, but--like Wittgenstein again--I cannot bring myself to scorn other ways human beings cope with finitude, not with a blanket indictment. So I wouldn't dream of questioning, for example, those heroic nuns and priests whom Nicholas Kristof so justly celebrates and there is no doubt in my mind that they are motivated by their Catholic faith. I've been talking only about the authorities in the Church whose arrogance I have just described--in the hope that those who serve with genuine humility, rather than that bogus piety Nietzsche unmasked so effectively, will move for reform. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.516395 2010-03-28T17:31:20-04:00 2011-05-25T16:00:23-04:00

Thomas de Zengotita http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/
Republican Attorneys General planning lawsuits are featuring this response: you aren't required to buy a car, that's a choice. So, if you choose to buy a car you can be required to have insurance, to protect others from the cost of accidents you may cause. But with health care, they say, the government is directly requiring that people purchase a product and that's what makes it different.

Leave it to the experts to decide how this plays out legally--state vs. federal jurisdiction, interstate commerce, whatever the technical issues are. But as a matter of sheer logic there's this:

Someday you will get sick or injured. That's not an option. It will happen. And if you are not insured other people will have to pay for your care. So the real analogy with auto insurance is this: you are driving a car from the day you are born.


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