John McCain's Base Base

Perhaps you‘ve seen it, the near-precise moment when John McCain lost control of his campaign. The scene is a now familiar one, the bogus “town-hall meeting.” He’s passing the microphone around like a decrepit Donahue, standing before a woman who starts by saying she “can't trust" Obama; McCain is nodding along, intimately engaged for the moment in manipulating the neurotic angst that is the dwindling lifeblood of his campaign. About the time she says her fear is due to what she’s been reading, a look of worry creases his trademark frown of condescending concern; he’s contemplating preemptively snatching the microphone back from her, when she lays it on him: Obama is “an Arab”. She's managed to confuse her slander (assuming there isn‘t an “Obama is an Arab” email careening about the internet), but it matters not.

Election 2008: Bile vs. Guile

Regarding George Will's welcome broadside on the Straight-Jacket Express that Leon Hadar brought up over at the AmCon blog, even when Will's right, he's wrong:

It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency.

Some of us believe McCain is clearly unsuited for the presidency and no more due to "moralism", boiling or tepid, than to "bottomless" certitude, unless we're referring to a morality that places John McCain's advancement above all else and the ensuing certainty that anyone and anything getting in its way are fair game. It's ambition unrestrained by a modest or measured temperament, and the subsequent lack of morality, preachy or otherwise, that McCain displays, despite the fatuous theme of "service".

I'm reminded of Will misreading the minor controversy regarding Jim Webb's snub of President Bush at a White House reception for newly elected congressman. You'll remember Webb tried to avoid shaking hands with the president, only to be confronted and asked, "how's your boy?" Will, perhaps due to his own basic decency, was quaintly clueless as to what had actually happened:

...disregarding many hard things Webb had said about him during the campaign, [President Bush] asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another.

Will mistook the hostility of the president's disingenuous question, which was nothing more than an attempt to force an intransigent Webb to submit to the protocol of their power arrangement--to knuckle under--sharpening his attack with the indecency of bringing the man's son (who, it shouldn't be lost on us, was carrying a rifle and facing peril under the command of President Bush) into it. It was about as civil and caring as a mafia boss asking a recalcitrant union leader "how's the family?"

We should be able to discount personality, seeing as it's not only subjective but subject to the artistic mythologizing so nauseatingly on display in the current campaign. We'd all like to think our mature and advanced democracy guards against the vanity and jealousies of petty men--with the outsized power of the executive branch, make that one petty man--but the Bush administration is depressing evidence that personality and temperament are as operative as ever. And this year we choose between aged choleric and youthful melancholic. I don't know what is more depressing, the dismal choice or the fact that the latter is clearly superior. If irreconcilable misanthropes had slogans mine would be: Refuse to Choose.

Colossus, The Tribute

The Falling Sky's the Limit

It's remarkable how shameless our political leaders are regarding their state of hysteria (of course it wouldn't be hysteria if it wasn't without shame and decorum) and not a little disconcerting, suggesting (but by no means proving) that their collective panic is warranted. Last Thursday's convocation of politicians eager to impress upon the public how terrified they were (and by inference how oblivious they, tasked with overseeing the financial system, had been previously) was downright surreal. The sight of political leaders so disoriented they could barely prevaricate and dissemble inspires a mixture of revulsion and pathos, like seeing a turtle out of its shell. Less remarkable and more familiar is their lack of contrition regarding their decades of collusion that precipitated the crisis. First the combination of comedy and corruption that are the presidential tickets, the spectacle of the two mystified candidates scrambling to present competing facsimiles of leaderly competence, mimicking outrage while drawing on advisers complicit up to their elbows in the debacle, and now this, confirms it: the American political system has entered its late decadent phase.

The habitually ironic language Senator Schumer used to describe the reaction to Ben Bernanke's fire and brimstone sermon can speak for the bewilderment of the nation as a whole: “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.” Sort of like a moment. Perhaps when it all hits the fan in earnest we can at least reclaim spoken language from its flaccid state. I do hope when I'm tied to a stake by some feral, post-apocalyptic tribe I don't turn to see a fellow victim lamenting that it's all kind of like something, really.

Some of the language used brings to mind another incidence of grandstanding hysterics, that precipitating the Iraq war. This crisis is real, of course, and the content of this tragedy less fictional, but the form is the same: a sudden threat is identified, extraordinary actions and powers are deemed necessary post haste. Drastic measures will be accomplished through the mixture of cowardice and corruption that is sometimes called bipartisanship; they will likely be difficult to unwind, if not permanent. Questioning the consensus is all but forbidden. Now, as then, the details are too grim for the tender public: Senators Dodd, Schumer, et al, would not disclose them Friday. Back then it was classified information that couldn't be freely circulated; I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you. Now it's I could tell you but it'd probably kill you.

You'll recall the "crisis" precipitating the war also featured administration appointees briefing Congressional leaders and leaving no dry seat in the room. It makes me wonder what sort of prop Paulson might have used, a la Powell brandishing his vial of mock anthrax at the UN. Perhaps a toilet brush, to terrify them with the prospect of poverty and its indignities. As with the war, consequences for the powerful and responsible few will be deferred indefinitely, but will be immediate for the nation's integrity, prestige and pocketbook. The war may have not been necessary (though this question, and its moral implications, have been flushed down a memory hole capped with the illusion of "success"--as if we've gone through it all to deliver Iraq and its oil wealth to an Iranian-allied Shi'ite government) but even so it can be seen as a consequence of an extravagant society overly dependent on oil--just as the collapse of our financial system is a consequence of our dependence on borrowed money.

But however dislocated our leaders are from their constituents, it's still on us, the citizenry. The consequences of being a debtor nation have been well known, and one doesn't have to understand the complexities of credit default swaps or tranches to understand he can't borrow his way to wealth unless he plans on dying deep in debt. Our short-sightedness as a nation is the aggregate of our desperate decadence as individuals; no one seems to care anymore what will become of the world they leave behind (even as they flail away against mortality in the gym and in the plastic surgeon's office, as if they're going to live forever, and forever young). I'm sure someone has already used the metaphor, but as a nation we are a gambler on a losing streak, doubling down.

And out here in the provinces it all still seems so remote; nothing appears to have changed. Football was played on Sunday. The electronic menagerie of celebrity eavesdropping, reality television, the glib and soulless sitcoms; it all looks exactly the same. People are going about their business, carefree. Funny, I don't feel insolvent. But I am getting a sinking feeling: who, after all, is going to pay for this all? I'm not talking about taxpayers, either, but our foreign would-be benefactors. Foreign money is already looking for other places to go and the economy, coming down from the false stimulation of the last tax rebate scheme, can be expected to produce lower tax receipts; two sides of a vice. Meanwhile, the bill grows; foreign investment firms with offices and the attendant exposure in the US are clamoring for inclusion in the bottomless bailout plan. Another busy-work stimulus scheme with which incumbents hope to arm themselves for the coming electoral carnage is in the works.

There is one possible consolation: an attack upon Iran is probably off the table in the oval office. Of course, with certain messianic factions that don't concern themselves primarily with the health and viability of the US economy and the order that depends on it, and the fact that Israel and Iran themselves might not care that our schedule doesn't permit another war at the moment, having their own ideas and requirements, makes me feel a little like one of those trembling pols I started out here making fun of.

Preparing and Pining for the Apocalypse

Looking for silver linings (figuratively speaking, though literally speaking silver and gold are good redoubts at the moment) and not finding any. The fascinating (and by fascinating I mean inducing the same kind of dread one gets when his doctor prefaces his diagnosis by enthusing on recent advances in treatment options) thing about the current economic crisis is its many aspects; I've spent the last hour trying to retrieve something I read yesterday about how Asian investors started migrating out of US securities a couple of months ahead of the present difficulties--but retracing my steps through the informational thicket I find it has grown unrecognizable and unmanageable, like some nightmare jungle growing by the second, vines coiling about my ankles and unwinding down from above. I had set out in search of the headwaters of our economic torrent, only to get lost and disoriented in the bush.

Seriously; gold, silver and maybe oil, which in my worst-case scenario stays around a hundred dollars a barrel due to demand abroad despite the US lapsing into recession/depression, leaving us with negative growth and rising commodity inflation. I fear this more than the "global depression" which is the consensus worst-case, the US coming apart while everybody else continues to grow, learning how to thrive without us. Of course I have no idea where all that prudently saved Asian money will go, either, once our financial system implodes.

Someone compared this all to an economic Vesuvius, bringing to mind an image of unsuspecting modern Americans captured forever in three dimensional snapshots, like those unfortunate Pompeians cast forever in ash as they cowered beneath the pyroclastic onslaught. As we remain mostly oblivious to our impending fate, many of us will be caught in various ignoble postures, sitting in traffic or in cubicles, laying in tanning beds, getting tattoos, en flagrante delicto solus before the computer screen, pouring potato chip crumbs directly from the bag into my maw watching financial chat on (er, um, financial, uh, excuse me I seem to have lost my train of thought...oh yeah--sorry, I was transfixed briefly by the graceful, cascading arc of Becky Quick's golden mane) television.

As for me, I'm going to spend the weekend with a tall stack of DVDs of the post-civilizational dystopia genre, re-reading all my catalogued and annotated back-issues of Modern Survivalist magazine, looking for tips the television personalities (uh, television, um, the uh, what was I saying? oh yeah, sorry, I was helpless in the vortex of those limpid, almond eyes for moment) cannot provide; in the meantime I'll be outfitting my Honda with a swiveling gun turret and a Kevlar reinforced twenty gallon auxiliary fuel tank.
Okay, maybe my long-cherished fantasy of marauding through the post-apocalyptic hellscape at the head of a band of cutthroat brigands isn't going to come about at long last. But I do think that things are going to change for us all, just a bit; and it needn't be all bad, in the long run at least, should it mean retiring finally our ironic empire of consumption and conquest.

Financial News, Friday, Sept. 19; Play us out, Karl

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Gathering Storm

Unofficial video by Nickapottamus

Too Big to Bail

Some in clandestine companies combine;
Erect new stocks to trade beyond the line;
With air and empty names beguile the town;
And raise new credits first, then cry them down;
Divide the empty nothing into shares,
And set the crowd together by the ears.
--Daniel Defoe

Shana, they bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!
--Airplane!

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
--REM

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.
--Lenin

Correct Vladimir Ilyich above to read "debauch capital"--and it needn't be the subversive effort of committed revolutionaries. Those who've debauched capital, replacing it with purely theoretic value dependent on nothing more concrete than faith in the inexhaustibility of greed, are, or imagine themselves to be, the most fervent capitalists of all. It takes either sociopathic oblivion or absolute faith in the infallibility of our system to do it this kind of damage; anything else leaves room for those undervalued resources, doubt and modesty--room for decency to latch on. Every calamity is particular to its time, and our time is peculiar for celebrating confidence as its own justification, not to be contingent upon anything so limiting as truth or coherence. We've made a faith of self-confidence and a superstition of positive thinking. Odd for such irreligious times; or not so much odd as inevitable.

But don't chalk it up to the system or society; chalk it up to human nature. These competing means of ordering societies and economies that constitute the continuum from communism to capitalism are all just strategies to harness the power and mitigate the corruptions of human nature. Even our creativity has a dark underside, revealed whenever some human endeavor goes belly-up. Of course this sounds vaguely heretical to most on the right still, like suggesting tax rates can be too low or American power can be misguided. That a system is better than another doesn't make it perfect (or, to put it another way, an end in itself). But the belief in the perfectibility of systems--like the perfectibility of man--is a thing that will always be with us, playing out its familiar cycle of enthusiasm and folly, ruin and revolution.

Our curious system of selectively unrestrained and selectively rigged capitalism has become capitalism sans capital--degenerate, you might say. Traders (if this is an accurate term--things have gotten so involved that one can't be sure) are shamans of a sort, impressing everyone with the intricacy of their incantations. They bear a certain resemblance to postmodern literary theorists. The more opaque and dense their constructs the more successful they are, or were.

In fact these folks aren't so different from each other; they form a class dominant in some ideally situated corner of society or the economy, and from this privileged perch leverage their influence. They are, above all, dismissive of limits and tradition, seeing them as outrageously repressive. They each create their own closed, self-referential systems, forbidding to those uninitiated in their arcane language. They share a similar disdain for both physical reality and conceptual morality, leaving them curiously untethered, floating in the ether of their theoretic gases. They are in denial of nature, appreciating it with neither a religious nor empirical point of view.

Of course if one denies the existence of nature, he denies the existence of human nature, and comes to believe that human behavior is infinitely malleable and predictable, if one only devises a sufficiently exhaustive theory of it. Funny how right and left meet out there, around their respective bends.