God Rest You

I’m certainly not the first to observe that Christmas, the Season of Peace, becomes decidedly more peaceful after December 25th.  It’s also obvious that this observation was hastened by my transition to parenthood, when Santa performance anxiety is felt most keenly.  But two days out, it seems more and more that this, the calm after the storm, is really what the holiday is about.

I’m a de facto atheist; the pedant in me insists that I not claim to know for certain that all religious claims are false, but I also don’t begin to entertain the idea that my behavior should reflect this cavil.  Nevertheless, I often don pagan trappings if only because I recognize that seasons are important to people, and I like to mark their passage.  Agriculture has had its way with society for a long time, and only in the last century has the most technologically-sequestered fraction of humanity been freed from its seasonal cadence.  So of course now we fetishize the seasons and give them more weight than our great-grandparents did.

I particularly enjoy the frenzy that slowly builds starting with the equinoxes and then abruptly stops upon reaching the solstices.  If sowing and reaping have been humanity’s eternal toil, the solstices—winter in particular—have been our blessed moments of repose.

Dear Darcy

After having spent the past ten years residing in one of the most solidly Democratic districts in the state, I am pleased to be returning to the 8th at a time when you are running for U.S. Congress.  Although I expect to participate in my precinct's Democratic Party caucus, I am aware that your nomination is all but assured, a prospect that does not trouble me.  The choice between your candidacy and that of Congressman Reichert is simple and clear.

Nevertheless, I have a question.  In the year since the return of Congress to Democratic control after the 2006 election, the failure of the Democratic Congressional leadership to roll back or even contain the excesses of Bush’s erosion of civil liberties at home and arrogation of unilateral war-making powers abroad has left us with the dismaying choice between concluding that either the Democrats are too feckless to fight for democracy or they are too cynical to take any political risks prior to the 2008 election (or, perhaps, ever).  That there appears to have been no appreciable change in the Democrats’ behavior as they shifted from the minority to the majority challenges one’s faith in representative democracy.

The most recent and egregious example of this tendency was the revelation that Rep. Pelosi and other Democratic members of intelligence oversight committees were briefed on the CIA’s use of waterboarding in 2002 and did nothing to challenge it.  By accepting classified disclosures of illegal practices by the Bush Administration and failing to bring them to light is a dereliction of their Constitutional duty.  This is the political equivalent of regulatory capture.

Should you be elected next November, you will be a freshman member of a likely Democratic majority caucus in the House, and there may well be a Democrat in the White House.  You will be a female representative in a swing district, and you will be highly dependent upon senior Democrats (and Republicans) for assistance with legislation and fund-raising.  Running as someone from "outside the Beltway" is a tired cliche, and political naïveté is overrated.  Nonetheless, if you would like my vote, I should like you to state, clearly and unambiguously, if you think our national security interests require our government to engage in increased wiretapping and surveillance of American citizens, waterboarding and "enhanced interrogation" of suspected terrorists, military tribunals for "enemy combatants," or pre-emptive unilateral executive war-making (including cover operations).  I would also like to know what you envision your putative Constitutional duty to be were you to discover our government engaging in any such activities.

Thank you for your time.

A Parade Of Horribles . . . And Santa!

Traditionally, a return to blogging requires no more justification than does the absence that preceded it.  In my case, many of the factors are also too banal to report.  Nevertheless, with the solstice approaching, I’m finding myself reflecting on my impatience with the political topics I feel I’m expected to address.  I’m tempted to skirt this by taking refuge in more cultural and academic commentary, but the frustration must find an outlet.  Quite simply, almost nothing on the American political scene has surprised me for the last six years*, and reviewing headlines for blogfodder inevitably results in concluding, in the manner of a mathematician, that they all "reduce to previously-solved equations."  This is beyond outrage fatigue.  This is the malaise that comes from watching thoughtful and observant writers debate who collaborated with the chickenhawks in 2002 or 2004 (or 2006!).  I understand that—in theory—we ought to identify those whose judgment is flawed so that we might properly discount their statements in the future, but when the author of Dow 36,000 is tapped to replace Karen Hughes in charge of the US’s public relations in the Middle East and Alberto Gonzales is named ABA Lawyer of the Year, "Wake me in 2009" loses a lot of its slacker stigma.

The truly depressing effect of the totalizing warmongering by Bush and the right-wing noise machine has been the absolute narrowing of all political discourse, even on subjects unrelated to counter-terrorism and neo-imperialism.  I’m sure net-balkanization has contributed to this, but I often feel like everyone is spending their time and effort pacing off some kilometer-wide Plutonian moon when opportunities for more expansive and useful exploration are neglected.  That these developments have come at a time when I’m struggling with a resolve to become more articulate and engaged is both dismaying and seductive.  To paraphrase Teresa Nielsen Hayden, I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like an apathetic cynical burnout.  I have had impulses toward blogging certain cultural items, but I have let myself be thwarted by the musk of escapism and pretension that inevitably attach to such dilettantism.

So while I can’t pretend that this latest return to productivity isn’t the result of anything more profound than the fitful completion of other personal chores, I have remembered why we started this blog in the autumn of 2002, and it was for more than just personal satisfaction.  2008 promises to be every bit as rancid and disappointing as the preceding six years, but I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. 

* When pressed by an interlocutor for any significant political development that I couldn’t have straight-forwardly projected from 9/11, the best I could come up with was the election of the Governator (although I did manage a clever gag years before Davis’s recall).

BSG — Season Finale

Eric’s comments on "Crossroads, Part 2" (and the rest of the season) are now available through his Battlestar Galactica Fanboy Page.

BSG 3.08

Eric’s comments on "Hero" are now available through his Battlestar Galactica Fanboy Page.

BSG 3.07

Eric’s comments on "A Measure of Salvation" are now available through his Battlestar Galactica Fanboy Page.

Let This Acceptance Take

I find very little grace in political results.  I’m one of those teacher’s-pet liberals who not only hopes others vote in accord with my political views but asks that they do so for the right reasons.  In recent weeks, had I encountered a voter who said, "I normally vote Republican, but this whole Foley scandal has turned me off," I would have replied, "Mark Foley supported enormous tax cuts to the wealthiest fraction of society while government spending expanded beyond that of the Reagan Administration.  He unreservedly embraced the invasion of Iraq and every infringement of civil liberties Bush asked for.  He did his level best to increase the government’s role as cultural nanny and enforcer of social mores as construed by his narrow-minded constituency.  If your only objection to Foley was that he got caught sending racy messages to teenagers, then—please—go vote for Republicans with the other cowards."

I grant that it’s something of a relief to see evidence that, despite gerrymanders and Diebold, Rove’s "permanent majority" hasn’t yet been locked in.  And watching Bush contradict himself and accept Rumsfeld’s resignation was fun.  But looking over the "Blue Wave," I just want to shout, "Where the fuck were you people in 2004?"  More to the point, what do we know now that we didn’t know two years ago?  Nothing, of course.  And now we have Roberts and Alito on the bench, the Military Commissions Act suspended habeus corpus, and thousands more Americans and Iraqis have been maimed and killed.  So pardon me if I’m not very gracious.

Please remember Veterans Day.

No Exit

I used to despise exit polls because I felt there was no good use for the information and plenty of poor uses.  For myself, only the final result mattered, so why should I care who some network talking head projected to be the winner?  More vituperously, no model of voting behavior I could construct allowed for influence by exit poll reports, yet allegedly millions of people are so influenced.  I was never so jaundiced as to advocate that we follow the example of France and some other democracies by banning the publication of exit poll results before the polls closed, but I just shook my head at the waste of energy and money for which I had no use.

In recent years, however, I have acquired a new reason to dread reports of exit poll data.  In cases of election fraud, there are varying levels of evidence, from tainted or lost ballots to unaccountable electronic tallies.  It is impossible to conceive, however, of a serious challenge to an electoral result without widespread and rigorous exit poll data indicating that a plurality of voters voted for another candidate.  The result of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio featured just such data, contributing to a poisonous unease that I cannot foresee ever lifting.  We can fight for more accountable elections, but even if Diebold and similar systems are categorically rejected, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch live election returns again without an icy trickle of bile in my gut.

Instability

In his column at Slate, Christopher Hitchens takes on the unpleasant task of trying to distinguish the principles behind his support of the invasion of Iraq, now that the role of "little gargoyle" and Hitchens-nemesis Henry Kissinger in forming Bush’s Iraq policy has been revealed.  In so doing, Hitchens takes Kissinger (and his fellow-travelers in the "realist" camp of Iraq war skeptics) for being overly concerned with avoiding "instability."

The "instability" resulting from the invasion of Iraq that most worried me (and, I imagine, many others excluding, tragically, Hitchens) was not that of Iraqi governmental institutions, or even any of the local players in the Middle East, but rather that of the Bush Administration. All of the purported concerns that the Bushies allegedly had that necessitated regime change—WMD, pursuing al-Qaeda, fostering democracy—have been given systematic short shrift by Bush’s actual policies.

• Russian and Pakistani nuclear weapons remain unsecured due to willful neglect by the Bush Administration, both before and after 9/11.
• Osama Bin Laden was permitted to escape and the Taliban has reconsolidated control over southern Afghanistan.
• Safeguarding the Iraqi infrastructure and giving the Iraqi professional class reason to hope that strident political participation would not result in kidnapping and assassination have taken a back seat to force-protection and corporate graft in the Green Zone.

The best reason for opposing the Bush-led invasion of Iraq has always been that Bush clearly never believed in any of his stated war aims or principles, and that he valued the invasion and occupation solely to the degree that they created circumstances of domestic political advantage for (loyal) Republicans.

That’s instability.