Patience, Ticklerites!

I know I have been a terrible blogger lately -- profoundly do I repent. Aside from the post-election-debacle blues, I have been utterly swamped with work and grad school applications, two things I used to boast about never having to do. (Oh how we grow old and jaded)

Please, I beg you, don't give up on the Tickler.

Soon I will be in sunny San Juan, gearing up for the New Humanity Forum, (some crunchy event I have been invited to present at, set up by the Alliance for a New Humanity, which, their homepage informs us, is "not an 'organization'" but rather a "substratum". Now let's see if we can use that in a sentence: "Hey pal, I tink you got a little hermeneutical hanging outta your substratum...")

So yeah, Tuesday there I'll be working up my presentation, having a drink by the pool, conjuring brilliant and confounding new bloggets of wisdom, and firin' em off with some wicked broadband poolside connection. But right now, as dawn breaks and I still have to cut my Statement of Purpose down by 1,300 characters to fit on Berkeley's infernal online application page, I will be brief.

Happy Thanksgiving, turkeys.

Mall of America, or The Glutting Unto Death

As I feared, it has been hard to get back into the swing of things since the election fracasso. I feel like I’ve gone through all the stages of loss: denial (the provisional ballots will save Kerry), rage (fuck the south), grief (it really is the end of the world), and then acceptance (we were close, and hey, we won some state legislatures...). Of course the only thing to do now is focus on the future, build off of what we accomplished, etc. and if we go belly-up or flee to Canada (or, say, Brazil) then the right will have already won. So to everybody out there crunching exit polls, strategizing, finding the openings in the new swing states, looking out for 2008, I doff my hat.

But I have to say that beyond acceptance, there is another phase, and it ain’t pretty: a deep and unremitting remorse for America.

One man is responsible for that remorse, and his name is David Brooks.

It wasn’t his hack jobs during the election, though they riled me up enough (calling Kerry “Castroite” because he gives long speeches is pretty despicable. So I guess it’s o.k. to call Grover Norquist “Marxist” because he wears a beard?). It was last week’s article on the ex-urbs. And it wasn’t any of his typical obfuscation or dishonesty that got to me; it’s that I think he is right.

America’s rural population may have actually swung a bit to Kerry, but it is shrinking; the cities are reliably Democrat, but on the whole they are yesterday’s story -- a demographic wash. The ex-urbs are growing: they are the future. I have no more hard data to support this than Brooks, but it fits with my own experience of America: once a land of big cities and small towns, now a place where a franchised, consumerist monoculture grows in clumps along interstates, overtaking everything in its path. The strip malls are meeting up in the Great Plains – just as the Eastern and Pacific railways once did – bumping up against each other and fusing into one giant, endless strip, a highway to nowhere and everywhere.

Full disclosure: deeply do I loath the culture of suburban sprawl. Perhaps it is impossible to objectively establish that its lifestyle is sick (or at least more sick than urban life). But it seems uncontroversial that sprawl, exurbia, etc, is a new kind of “living technology”, a set of best practices for organizing habitation, work, leisure; in a word, life. And this new technology, spreading fast as all new gadgets do, is based on a single, guiding principle: everyone will drive everywhere. This axiom would be utterly insane and patently unviable were it not for a fact that goes criminally unreported: the price of gasoline in the U.S. is one third of the average world price. Here in Brazil, a major oil producer and a country with a per capita GDP of $7,600 (about 1/5 of that of the U.S.), people pay almost $4 a gallon.

(I’m not taking aim here at SUV moms. I’m taking aim at a system that makes it logical and appealing to purchase an SUV and drive it down the block to rent a movie.)

I’ve always thought that suburban, exurban culture was based on a false premise: move away from the problems of the polis, instead of solving them. Shut your eyes and ears to unpleasant social realities and flood yourself with the endorphin rush of mass consumption. Perhaps in the past a smidgen of guilt weighed on the old conscience, and you’d vote to fund inner city schools or day-care programs. But now a political force has come along that has you entirely pegged; it tells you not to feel guilty, but proud: you are the heartland, the real America. You have the inviolable right to buy gas cheaper than the Nigerians or Venezuelans who produce it. Your strip malls and factory outlets are the envy of the towel-heads, so be a beacon of freedom and shop away! You shouldn’t feel bad if you don’t know where Sudan is on a map: the president doesn’t either. You shouldn’t feel bad if you haven’t ventured into the city for 5 years: neither has the president. You shouldn’t worry if you’ve taken out massive loans to pay for your TV, your appliances, your car, your children’s education on credit: after all, that’s how the president does it.

Hence my remorse: a sick and untenable way of life is quickly becoming the dominant culture of our country, and a political machine hell-bent on destroying the pillars of our polity as we know it has learned to reward that way of life, to gratify it, to nurture it. A vicious feedback loop driven by the world’s biggest internal combustion engine.

Alas, whither my country? In the Roman orgy of consumption, arrogance, corruption, and dissipation of our nation’s financial, diplomatic, and moral wealth that is Bush’s presidency, the election – which held out the hope of a call to sensibility, an end to the gluttony, a sobering up and returning to the duties of leadership – turned out to be nothing more than a trip to the vomitorium. Now, feeling perhaps not exactly refreshed, but at least hungry, unnaturally and unhealthily hungry for more of what has already made our nation sick, bloated, and weak, the citizens of Rome, inspired by the example of their inbred emperor, return to the feast.

War au Jus

Interesting reading from the NY Review of Books. Garry Wills reviews Michael Walzer's new book on just war. A strange topic, but one dealt with in an interesting way. Being a 24/7 pacifist isn't really tenable morally, not with the "Wouldn't you have gone to war against Hitler" ringer out there, so you are left with having to come up with some measure of what justifies a military action.

Like many moral issues, I think we all have an unarticulated individual sense of what those measures might be, but it is always edifying to see the clear-minded grapple with the issues out loud.

Not to give away the ending or anything, but I found the ending particularly good:

Since democracy is impossible without accountability, and accountability is impossible if secrecy hides the acts to be held accountable, making a just war may become impossible for lack of a competent democratic authority to declare it. A president who can make a war of choice, not of necessity, at his pleasure, on the basis of privileged information, treating his critics as enemies of the state, is no longer a surreal fantasy. Walzer has moved the concerns over just war from the periphery of political theory to the very center of our democratic dilemma.

But maybe I'm just moody today.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Yesterday I received at least 4 e-mails, depending on how you count, from friends or family wondering out loud if they should leave the U.S. ("Any room down there?" read one).

First off, yes, there is room down here, and the weather is lovely.

And I would be lying if I said that I have never thanked my stars for being light-years away from whatever shitstorm happened to be brewing on the home-front. I remember hearing about the whole Monica Levinsky thing from some Brits at a cafe in Prague, and then promptly and blissfully forgetting about it for the next several months.

But this only goes so far. With democracy on the march and all, it's hard to truly tune out. And you wouldn't really want to. Me and my gringo friends here all experienced a desire to be in the US yesterday, just because nobody here could relate to what we were feeling (the exact same thing happened on 9/11).

I've been an ex-pat for 8 out of the past 9 years. I've never felt more American than I do now. Since Iraq, there is sort of nowhere to hide from it all.

And yet, and yet... I had been planning for a year to begin a doctorate next year in the states. Now I am looking at European universities too. If I look at the States objectively, not as my home but as a country like any other I might choose to live in, to learn about, to be influenced by, I gotta say it doesn't look so good.

Then again, there is the horrible irony of it all: if all the good liberals and progressives leave, the right really will have won.

On a deeper level, there is a related question which all of us, ex-pats and pats alike, must ask ourselves: Will we stay engaged, keep fighting, take to the streets, the internet, whatever, or will we hole ourselves up and wait for the storm to pass?

There is the wonderful story of George Orwell, stopping in Paris on his way to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and looking up Henry Miller. Two of the most different writers imaginable, but Orwell quite respected Miller. Miller thought Orwell was crazy for going to Barcelona: "You're going to get yourself killed, man." Miller's idea of liberty was entirely personal, and he had a Buddha-like lack of desire to change the world around him. Orwell of course saw the fight against fascism as the fight of a lifetime. Miller gave Orwell a corduroy jacket to keep him warm on the front, and the two parted friends. In 1940, Orwell, already quite disillusioned with his efforts in Spain, wrote Inside the Whale, whose title refers to what he saw as Miller's strategy: ride out the tempests of human idiocy and hatred by insulating oneself, keeping your humanity alive, hoping that one day you will be able to emerge.

I don't think there is a right answer to this. I think each of us, over the next 4, 8, 24 years will have to do a little bit of Orwell and a little bit of Miller. I think even Orwell saw this.

To my friends on the front: I offer you a corduroy jacket of words to keep you warm. And when you've had enough of the trenches, come visit me in Vichy, or Big Sur, or wherever I am hiding out these days.

Day of the Dead

November 2, in Brazil, is Dia dos Mortos, day of the dead. Some had been whispering that it also meant a day of transformation, of going over threshholds. But no, it was really about the dead, the dead walking the earth, taking away from the living.

I have no doubt that each of us felt inside a pure pit of blackness and despair. The sickness unto death. Nowhere to go from here. A friend writes:

I have always considered myself a small "d" democrat, one small soul who was naive enough to dedicate himself tostudying and thinking about and teaching about andtalking about and being a part of the many strugglesfor justice in this country, one who saw himself asprofoundly AMERICAN and in a progressive, moraltradition that strove to push our nation to live up toits best, most lofty ideals, a person with the sillyidea that my efforts might make some small difference,that it might contribute - with others - to somethinggood and decent and humane... but who now findshimself increasingly, utterly and harshly out of stepwith an imperial rightward march of inequality,intolerance, arrogance, selfishness, greed, andpower... a conservative movement dedicated to destroying everything I feel most deeply about...

I am embarrassed for my country... I am wondering how I get back up again from this, and even if I rise, I have no idea where I fit any more. I am lost and irrelevant in my own country.

That sounds about right. For me, well, you know when Bill tells the bride that he's not being sadistic, he's actually at his most masochistic, then shoots her? That's sort of how I felt, as I pumped a shotgun shell into the head of some dreamy, flashbacky notion of America that I had been, up till that moment, carrying around inside. I really thought that when the chips were down she would see what a terrible mistake she was making, she would look into herself and know, with crystal clarity, that the path she was aiming herself down was a dead-end, that the man she was about to get hitched to was worse than a mullet-wearing know-nothing hic: that he was a drunk and a wife-beater who would lock her up and cut her down and violate her when the mood struck him and after a few short years she would be no more the beautiful bride she'd been but a tattered, scarred, broken, bitter old woman. I thought she'd see through him. But the dumb bitch just went ahead and tied and the knot.

But for me, the darkness spread beyond America, to the very heart of democracy and society. The task before us just seems so Sisyphean, man by his very nature so base. Not so much individually, but collectively. Left to their own devices, these corrupt, scheming, hate-mongering elements inevitably take over, and things sink to such a disgustinly brutish level that mankind might as well not even exist. So you fight and you organize and you debate and you convince until little by little you restrain man's darker urges and build a society with some little bit of fairness and equality. You establish, after centuries, the idea of democracy, of universal sufferage, of constitutional law, of civil rights, only to find that the powers of greed and hypocrisy have managed to game the system entirely. Then the tide comes in and sweeps away your baluartes, and forcefully tugs you and the whole nation back to the primieval sea of the rabid right.

(It's not only in the States: look at Italy, or Spain under the PP: the far right, the right that offers itself as a protection against some imagined leftist threat, the right that once relied on brownshirts and cinematic rallies, has discovered that it doesn't need the trappings of fascism, it just needs to control the media.)

So great, we take solace in the fact that this kind of thing has happened before: there was McCarthy and McKinley, and if we built social security from scratch in the 30s we can rebuild it again in the 10s. Things got pretty dark in the world in the 30s and 40s, but we all pulled through. We'll get through this, I suppose. But why must it be like this? What is wrong with us humans, with us citizens of democracy, with us human beings, that we cannot take two steps forward without a devastating, terrifying step and half back into the muck?

The Long Goodbye

In the past few days I've seen some interesting pieces on how Bush controls his public events: in addition to written oaths, some crowds have been made to recite a "Bush Pledge": "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

Meanwhile ABC reporters were churlishly thrown out of an event for simply sporting Kerry t-shirts, told "this is a private event" and threatened with police action.

Now, if you are Bush, and your re-election campaign is based on a mix of falsehoods about how your opponent is unfit for the presidency and falsehoods about how the war in Iraq is going and what the justification for it was, it makes sense to preach to the converted.

But what is it like for the converted? Something that has fascinated me this campaign season is how so many people can support Bush so avidly. That avidity, it turns out, is not accidental. It is part of the picture.

Think what today's GOP asks of its supporters: you must set aside objective reality both as it is presented by the vast majority of reliable media outlets and as you yourself experience it (the economy, health care, friends or family lost in Iraq, etc.) and instead trust in an alternate reality expounded by party loyalists. You must be resolute in not questioning what you have been told by these loyalists about the president, because if you start to question, all his supposed strengths begin to unravel. You must, in short, have an unshakeable faith, not only in his goodness, but in his inevitable victory. Otherwise you will end up peeking behind the curtain and see the feeble man behind the powerful wizard.

And as shamans, priests and prelates have known from time immemorial, the best way to keep people from peeking behind the curtain is with massive public displays of faith.

Just as the conservative press needs the liberal media myth (to explain why Fox's version of reality is so different from everyone else's), Bush hardcore supporters need this cocoon of zeal. It's not just wanting to jump on a bandwagon; it's a feeling -- deeply gratifying -- of letting go, of putting your faith in someone and trusting that they have your deepest interests at heart, of shutting down your own critical faculties when they tell you that this man is a faker, of no longer worrying about all the troubling news about Falujah or Abu Ghraib or the economy or anything else because it's all liberal bias and the truth, Bush's truth, your truth, will win out.

So, what happens when that truth doesn't win out? What happens when your savior takes a pounding on election day?

Take a long last look at Bush and his messianic antics, my friends. Savor these last moments of solipsism and doublethink. Because this may be their swan song.

Of course, in all probability Rush and Drudge and Fox and everyone else will go right on, attacking Kerry at every turn and trying to get him impeached for jacking off into the White House toilet. Bush's hard core won't disappear.

But I truly believe that there is a huge bubble, a sense that this race is closer than it really is, that Bush's support is all as strong and committed as the hard core that pledge allegiance at his rallies. When that bubble pops, and Bush goes down by 100 electoral votes (you heard it here first), the scales will fall from people's eyes. Who was this moron they were following all this time? Why did they ever believe a single word out of his mouth?

This is crucial for Kerry, if he wins. He cannot be conciliatory, cannot try to be a unifier by catering to the rabid. He must tear down the curtain entirely, show just how disastrous Bush's presidency really was, and make his brand of conservatism a no-go for the GOP for years to come.

Because along with the zealots, there are the millions of moderate Republicans, the Clinton Republicans, who hate what Bush has done to their party. They will be Kerry's allies in this, because they want their party back. They, and they alone, can marginalize the voice of the radical right.

The time has come to shift the pendulum back.

Heart of Darkness Roundup

The last few days have been a real grind, for me personally, because of work, but for most Americans too, I'm betting. In the free moments when we weren't presenting a year's worth of research to our Swiss funders, I'd sneak away to check the latest news from the campaign trail, only to be surprised at each new low reached.

There was the absurdity of the Al Qaqaa mess, with the GOP howling that 1) it didn't happen on their clock, 2) if it did, it was the troops fault, and 3) that anyway it was unfair for the press to bring this up during the election. There was the Osama tape, with the GOP saying 1) it wasn't fair for Kerry to politicize it and 2) it was really an endorsement for Kerry. (A Fox news anchor said he thought he saw Osama wearing a "Vote for Kerry" button.)


The truly craven gay-baiting push polls going in my own home state, where voters received automatic phone calls that said, “When you vote this Tuesday, remember to legalize gay marriage by supporting John Kerry. It’s what we all want. It’s a basic Democratic principle.”

And of course the ingenious, Orwellian tactic of accusing the dems of exactly what the GOP is doing (from a automatic phone call going out in Pennsylvania): "John Kerry's trial lawyer allies have a scheme to keep you away from the polls tomorrow as part of their hardball strategy. Democrats are trying to intimidate Republican election workers. They're hoping to win through fraud, harassment and law suits what they know that can't win at the ballot box. Don't let them get away with it... Only you can make sure that the American People—not trial lawyers, not foreign leaders—decide our next president."

And, though its desperateness was encouraging, the outlines of a pathological blame-the-liberal-media narrative for explaining a Bush defeat were appearing: "Rep. Peter King, one of our "moderate" Republicans, just said on Crossfire that there's a 'new axis of evil' composed of 'UN 'bureaucrats, The New York Times, and Dan Rather.'"

But then there were the moving images of people lining up to vote, the thousands of volunteers going out to act as observers, the sense of solidarity that I can feel even from the other half of the globe. Not to mention the upticks for Kerry in the polls.

All this tells me that a great battle is taking place, not only in the swing states and the polling booths but, if I may use tired but necessary language, within America's soul. It's not that half of us are evil and half are good, it's that our political process, our public debate, our discourse, our press, and our sense of ourselves, have been under siege. A minority group with a radical agenda and a ends-justify-the-means vanguardism have pulled out all the stops to try and retain power. Their supporters are not (necessarily) bad people, they are simply misled. (58% of Bush supporters said they wouldn't support the war in Iraq if Iraq didn't have WMDs or links to Al Qaeda. But 75% think Iraq supported Al Qaeda!). The question is not, in the end, Kerry or Bush, not Democrat or Republican, but simply whether our democracy, our nation, is strong enough to push back against all this manipulation and vote out an administration that has crossed the line.

I am confident that it is.