Is This Man Worth Two Presidents?

Wallace: Hamilton? He ain't no president.
D'Angelo: ...Ain't no ugly ass white man get his face on no legal motherfucking tender, 'cept he president.

-- The Wire, Episode 1, "The Target" *

Via boingboing, I learn that the U.S. Mint is planning on releasing a new series of dollar coins -- a third attempt after the earlier unsuccessful Susan B. Anthony dollars and Sacagawea dollars.

The first interesting thing I learned from this article was why the Sacagawea dollars didn't go over. Everyone** knows that the Susan B. Anthony dollars didn't work because they were too much like quarters: people would get confused, and be shortchanged by a factor of 75%. Apt to make anyone cranky. But they learned from this experience, and the Sacagawea dollars are quite distinct in size, feel and color. So what went wrong that time?

Well, there's the fact that the U.S. population seems to be plain old resistant to using dollar coins. (For what it's worth, I'm for it: the dollar has dropped to coin-level worth some time since. England, for instance, uses a pound coin even though a pound is worth almost $2. But it's hardly one of my major concerns.) But the other factor apparently was that "limited Sacagawea quantities led to too many being stashed away by collectors, reducing circulation and thus familiarity." That's a pretty silly mistake: if you're going to roll out a new coin, do it right.

Anyway, we're up to take three here... except it's sort of like take three, four.... up to at least thirty-nine, and probably beyond. Borrowing an idea from their (apparently successful) "50-state" quarters, they are going to start releasing a coin for every U.S. President, in order, at four a year.

Or almost every President, I should say: U.S. law (quite properly and wisely) forbids the putting of any living person on currency. So, as of now, Ford, Carter, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 are off-limits. Which is presumably why, if you examine the schedule, you see that the last currently announced coin is the 37th President, Richard Nixon, scheduled for roll-out in 2016. This is what drove boingboing batty: that "Richard 'Lying Scumbag' Nixon" is getting his face on a coin.

And while I certainly appreciate the accurate historical memory of Nixon as a lying scumbag, the truth is that far too many Presidents have been liars; and not a few have been scumbags. After all, when the current President finally goes to his eternal reward -- and if there is any justice in the universe*** he'll go from a jail cell to a far worse place -- he'll also presumably be stamped on a shiny new dollar, and then someone who -- astonishing as it is -- outdoes Nixon in both the "lying" and the "scumbag" departments.

No, what gets me is another thing. You see one President is going to have two different coins in the series with his shinny face on them.

I'm speaking, of course, about Grover Cleveland.

I wouldn't really be surprised if some non-trivial proportion of my Noble Readers said Who?

Grover Cleveland comes from the list of Presidents between Lincoln and Roosevelt 26 (as opposed to Roosevelt 32, natch) -- in other words, the Presidents no one ever remembers -- largely deservedly so, really: they're a fairly undistinguished bunch all around, although you can make cases for the odd one here and there.****

But what distinguishes Grover Cleveland, in a one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others sort of way, from all the other Presidents, is that he served two nonconsecutive terms, 1885 - 1889 and 1893 - 1897.

Parenthetically, the reason he served two non-consecutive terms is the same reason that the current lying scumbag had the opportunity to toss our country down the toilet: the Electoral College. Cleveland actually won the popular vote in the 1888 election, just as he did in the 1884 and 1892 elections (thereby being one of only three men ever to win a plurality of the popular vote more than twice.*****) So to the Electoral College -- which has so many other negatives to its credit -- this minor irritation can also be ascribed.

In any event, once this occurred, the inevitable question occurred: how do we number Cleveland among the Presidents?

The first 23 are easy, Washington to Harrison (and how's that for a diminution?) But should Cleveland be simply the 22nd President, Harrison the 23rd -- with the quick-step to the 24th, William McKinley, interrupted by a brief return to the 22nd... or was Cleveland actually not only the 22nd, but also the 24th, President, with McKinley therefore actually the 25th?

Congress, leaping into action on important matters, officially declared****** that Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th President.

Well, I think they blew it.

Obviously there is a good case to be made that Grover Cleveland was the perpetrator of both the 22nd and the 24th Presidencies. But honestly, when do we think about that?******* If you're going to think about that, you might as well talk about Presidential terms, which admittedly gets you instantly tangled up in fractions given the nine Presidential terms that were divided between two people,******** but still, they're more important.

Usually, when we're not talking about Presidential terms, we're talking about Presidents. As in the people. As in the ugly ass white men who get their faces on legal motherfucking tender.

And Grover Cleveland, say what you will about him, was one guy.

So I think Congress made the wrong call. *********

Here's the best argument against their position, though. If you say that Cleveland was just the 22nd (individual to hold the office of) President, you get the odd situation that the 22nd President was after as well as before the 23rd. But that is a localized oddity: it will only come up when you're thinking about the Presidents between Lincoln and Roosevelt 26. Which, let's face it, people hardly ever do, since they were an undistinguished bunch, as mentioned previously. But if you hold to the Official Position Of The United States Government and say that Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th President, then it comes up every time you think about any post-Harrison Presidential ranking, and you need to constantly include footnotes********** to the effect that Bush 43 might be the 43rd President, but there were still only 42 people to hold the office. It's a choice that instead of localizing the oddity -- an oddity that is, after all, real and odd but also local -- distributes from now until the end of time, the end of the Presidency as an institution, or the next time the Electoral College decides to fuck us in our collective ass, depending. In other words, given the choice they made, you get more oddities than you would otherwise.

Including not one but two dollar coins for Grover Cleveland.

And not because he deserves his own coin, like Lincoln on the penny, Jefferson on the nickel, Roosevelt 32 on the dime, Washington on the quarter or JFK on the half-dollar. But because... well. Because.

It's silly.

I readily admit that this is an issue on which intelligent people can disagree. In fact, it is pretty much a good candidate for the archetypal issue on which there is no "correct" decision. For instance, my beloved wife, who is usually right about everything, is wrong about disagrees with me about this.

But I think the localized-versus-distributed-oddity argument is a clincher, personally.

But Congress disagrees, so in 2012 we'll get two separate Grover Cleveland dollars. (Kevin Drum points out that 2012 will be a banner year all around for dollar coins, what with Chester Arthur and Benjamin Harrison joining Cleveland 22 and Cleveland 24 as their poster boys for the year.)

Otherwise, I have to say, the dollars look pretty well designed. They will be designed like Sacagawea dollars, so that the millions... er, thousands... well, all the machines that were re-designed to accept those will accept the new ones. And they will have three of the traditional inscriptions for coins -- the date, "E Pluribus Unum" and "In Ba'al We Trust"*********** -- on the coins' edges, which is frankly pretty cool. Anyway, I, for one, am looking forward to them.

But a lot of Presidents -- possibly a majority of those who weren't firmly in the lying scumbag category (and some who were in the "lying but not a scumbag" category) -- already have their faces on coins. It might be fun to put out a series of forty coins with other notable Americans on them, joining Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea with non-Presidential currency portraits. Martin Luther King might be a good place to start, since today everyone either admires his work or has to pretend they do. *********** At any rate, it would be more fun than all forty-three of the forty-two men who have served as President of the United States.

But I suppose that ain't no ugly ass white man get his face on no legal motherfucking tender, 'cept he president.

And people other than white men -- particularly after the failure of the Anthony & Sacagawea dollars -- need not apply at all.

Update: Matthew Yglesias says that the mining lobby was the force behind the new coins.

______________________________
* I really hope I don't need to point out that Wallace, not D'Angelo, is correct here -- Alexander Hamilton never was President? (He was Secretary of the Treasury, and an important pre-Constitutional figure too.) For that matter, Benjamin Franklin, on the $100 bill, wasn't a President either (he died in 1791, during the first term of the first President, (who is currently gracing the $1 bill and the quarter.)) And it somehow seems typical of The Wire that they let the character who is wrong get the last word...

** Defined tautologically as those who actually know the information in question.

*** There isn't.§

**** You can make a case for almost anything, really.

***** Andrew Jackson, who was cheated of the Presidency by a combination of the Electoral College and the odd constitutional procedures for when there isn't a majority within it in 1824 (and then went on to win outright in 1828 and 1832), and Roosevelt 32, who of course did so not thrice but in quadruplicate. §§

****** I've known this for years, but a brief Google doesn't turn up the actual date of Congress's important decision on this matter. And I don't care enough to do a prolonged Googling.

******* I mean, even those of us who think about these things.

******** Sigh. 1841-1845, 1849-1853, 1865-1869, 1881-1885, 1901-1905, 1921-1925, 1945-1949, 1961-1965 and 1973-1977. Four natural deaths, four assassinations, and one lying scumbag. And no, I didn't need to look anything up to type all that out; I do this for a living. §§§

********* Shocking, I know. Try to control yourself. (As Orson Scott Card might say.)

********** And footnotes, as everyone knows, are an incredible nuisance. §§§§

*********** What? Why would that bother you? It's just ceremonial Ba'alism, which, as everyone§§§§§ knows, is not any sort of violation of the first amendment. Really. The Supreme Court has said so. Would they ever get anything wrong?

************ Otherwise, they might end up demoted from Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate to Minority Whip -- a shocking fall from being the most powerful Republican in the Senate to the second-most powerful Republican in the Senate.

_________________________________
§ Except what we put there. We could do the jail cell part, if we want. I, for one, am for it.

§§ There really isn't another in the sequence "once, twice, thrice..." is there? Or am I just not thinking of it?

§§§ Which means that I probably made a mistake somewhere. So you'd better look it up yourself if you care. You're always safer looking things up. Well, depending where you look.

§§§§ Don't you think?

§§§§§ Yes, tautologically defined. Wasn't this where we came in?

Regular Blogging to Resume Shortly

I know that for the first half of November, I was posting more-or-less daily, but that was mostly due to the election, plus a few non-political posts I'd had in the pipeline which happened to be ready at the same time. I will probably be resuming a more normal one-to-three-times-a-week schedule now... and, indeed, it might be even less through Thanksgiving weekend.

Meanwhile, if you haven't stopped by recently, there's some new stuff below (and from October too), so take a look.

Back soon --

Why "Attempts"?

No one's ever asked why I decided to call this blog "Attempts".* But then, no one ever asked me to blog, either. So I thought that, unbidden -- as a celebration of my 200th post (which this is) -- I would tell you.

Blogs are, of course, a medium more than a form: oh, there are blogospheric traditions and customs, to be sure. But basically blogs are a vessel with which one can do what one wishes; as Fred Clark once suggested, talking about blogs in the abstract is as silly as talking about paper in the abstract: "I know all the buzz about paper suggests its about politics and journalism, but many people only use it for personal diaries and as an outlet for expression." So blogs can be -- and are -- about anything, and for anything.

But for me, the best of the blogophsere approaches the literary form of the essay.

I'm far from the first to think this, of course. Christopher Lydon suggested that the "god" for bloggers should be Emerson: that preeminent American essayist, who "taught one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man".** And Holly says in the margins of her blog that "If Montaigne, father of the essay, were alive today, he'd keep a blog." (Which quote will give away my punchline to some of you!) So yes, the idea of the blogosphere as, at its best, the new home of the essay -- that strange and wonderful form, literary but spilling every boundary into the political and the philosophical and all sorts of other non-literary (or, as Samuel R. Delany would say, the paraliterary) forms -- is an old one.

Well, when I sat down to start a blog, I used the title that I had, for many years, thought I would use if I were ever fortunate enough to publish a book of essays: why save the title for a hypothetical volume when I was about to put real worlds in a genuine (if virtual) public place?

So I called it "Attempts".

Why Attempts?

Because Montaigne -- the first, and some claim still the greatest, essayist -- called his works essais: a French word meaning "attempts" or "tries".*** (We still have this verbal meaning for the word "essay" -- one can 'essay' something -- but I think it strikes most people as a little archaic.) His essays were meditations on diverse topics; they were deeply personal; but they were, above all, preliminary. Essays in a direction, not the final word on subjects.

Well, these are my essays: meditations on diverse topics, deeply personal -- and, above all, preliminary. But, since I speak 21st century English not 16th century French, I call them by a translation of Montaigne's name for them, in hopes to better recover the spirit with which he bestowed the name.

This is not to say that all my blog posts are up to this standard; I know they're not.**** This is, well, my blog, so I often use it the way that others use their blogs. So of course a lot of what I post are simply link collections or quotes or memes or whatever. Of course they are.

But I think the best of what I write are essays -- that is, at any rate, what I consider to be my goal here. To make forays into odd patches of personal, intellectual terrain. Those are the ones which I put up in the sidebar as "favorites". Those are the ones I hope that people will really read. Those are the ones I take to be, not typical, but proto-typical: what I want to do here.

To essay.

To attempt.

_______________________________
* Well, okay, my Aunt did; but no one else.

** Emerson also, as Lydon quotes, said "I hate quotations"; indeed, in "Self-Reliance" Emerson wrote that "Man... dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage": quoting, as Stanley Cavell has pointed out, Descartes. -- Yes, he was: just the Meditations, not the Discourse (which is where the more famous version, with 'therefore' ("ergo"), comes from.)

*** Yeah, that Wikipedia entry gives "attempts" as a translation of Montaigne's "essais". I thought of it independently, years before I ever saw it. But it was on seeing that that it occurred to me that I'd never explained why I called this blog "Attempts" -- and thus sparked this post. (Coming across Holly's invocation of Montaigne was another impetus behind it.)

**** That is, the standard of being "essays" in the literary sense; I know that none of my essays are up to the standards of Montaigne. I just hope, at my best, to be playing the same game, even if not in the same league.

God and the Masculine Pronoun

Some of my favorite people in the world resolutely speak about God in non-gendered terms; others use "She", "Her" and so forth for God, as a counter-linguistic move to try to undermine the traditional (masculine) notions of God. I understand what they are doing and why, and once upon a time I used to (inconsistently) follow their example. But recently I am finding that I don't anymore; I am calling God He.

Now I should say that in general I am a big supporter of gender-neutral language. I wasn't always, but I have come around. Of the two counter-arguments that once seemed persuasive to me, I think that the "it's just grammar" argument is both clearly fallacious -- both studies and individual reflection show that people simply don't equally think of men and women if "he" is used (purportedly) for both -- and also begs the question, since grammar changes and the question is what language ought to be rather than what it has been (which, in any event, itself supports such things as the singular they). The other argument is the aesthetic one -- that locutions such as "he and she" are simply clumsy -- and I still think that that's a valid point, but the claims of both accuracy and justice simply override it -- or, rather, compel us to do aesthetic work to find better-sounding formulations for what accuracy and justice demand. So yes, in general, I am definitely on board with not using "he" when we mean "he or she" or "one" or "they" or whatever.

But with God I am still using He. Why?

I think it's because I am an atheist.

If I were a theist, I would probably try hard to use gender-neutral language about God.* Certainly the theology that I (albeit as an atheist) find most interesting and compelling include the notion that God is neither female or male. There is good biblical justification for it too in various places (although of course there is biblical justification to the contrary also) -- the very text of Genesis 1:27 -- "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He Him; male and female created He them." -- can be read as saying that what it means, or at least a part of what it means, to create man in God's image precisely is to make man both male and female. (Although even here the language, at least in translation, is sending decidedly mixed signals, with its "man", "His" and "He Him"; and even if one notes that the Hebrew word for "man" is "Adam" which has the meaning of "human" not "man" (which is "ish"), the same can't be said for the pronouns, which are male -- as are, for that matter, the verbs.) In any event, I won't go into further details of theologies and interpretations which I don't, in fact, believe; but I do have more respect for (or at any rate interest in) theologies which describe a gender-neutral God than I do with theologies that hold -- at least implicitly -- God to be male. And certainly I agree with the politics of those that describe God in gender-neutral terms -- their ends, insofar as they are political (in the sense of cultural politics) are ones with which I agree.

But here's the thing: I'm not a theist. I'm an atheist. And as an atheist, the only God I believe in is the fictional character believed in by actual believers. When I talk about God, I am no longer talking about a being which I believe exists; I am speaking only about a hypothetical object. Sometimes I talk about God as an abstract concept which, I happen to think, corresponds to no reality -- as I might speak of vampires or unicorns or the analytic philosophers' beloved current Kings of France, say. At other times I talk about God specifically referring to the entity believed in by others but which I happen to think they are mistaken about -- as I might speak of astrology or the valid justifications for the war in Iraq. But either way it is no longer a case of my language asserting what I believe: I am talking about others' beliefs -- they, and not I, get to define the concept under discussion.**

And most people talk about God as male.

I admit that this isn't a clear-cut case. The God of the theologians -- the abstract-concept use I referred to above, God as defined as the Unmoved Mover, or as an omnipotent omnibenevolent being, and so forth -- is pretty clearly not gendered. But the God of popular belief and language is -- in the vast majority of cases -- male. (And here I think that one has to include in "cases" the history of the concept, i.e. historical uses not just current ones. If the current conception were divorced from the historical ones, this might not be true; but since the current conception is specifically, overtly and deliberately grounded in the historical one -- even by those who deny some aspects of the historical one, such as its gendered character -- I think that the historical voices should count equally (not more, but not less) than the present-day ones.) That I may sympathize (for political and intellectual reasons) with my friends who use non-gendered neutral language for God doesn't change the fact that they are, clearly in the minority. They are endeavoring to change the culture -- a culture with millennia of inertia on the other side, but which (at the same time) they are not willing to simply discard (which would make the inertia irrelevant) -- but they haven't yet changed the culture, not by a long shot.

Why shouldn't I then help them in their quest to change the culture? Again: because I am an atheist, not a theist: it's not my place. As a comparison, I sympathize with those Catholics who wish their church to be more inclusive of gays and lesbians -- mostly for political reasons, although I might be able to come up with some theological ones as well (talking about the portrayal of Jesus in the bible being strongly focused on inclusion, for example). But the point is, I'm not Catholic; I'm not even a Christian (I'm not even a cultural Christian the way I am a cultural Jew); it's not my fight; and clearly, as it is constituted now, the Catholic church is not accepting of gays and lesbians. And if it is to be made so, I can't be part of that: again, it's not my fight.

And I think that the same holds true for the gender of God.

I think that non-gendered notions of God bear something like the same relationship to the mainstream of religious tradition that Kirk-Spock pornography does to the rest of Star Trek. By this I mean both that it is arguably implied in the more mainstream canonical literature; that it is an interesting and subversive reading that makes the resulting fiction even richer and more interesting; and that the proportion of Star Trek fans who think about Kirk and Spock getting it on is roughly the same as the proportion of the theists who think of God in gender-neutral rather than masculine terms. There is, to be sure, a difference insofar as the Star Trek universe is owned (by Paramount) and its owner resolutely denies the validity of the K/S tradition, whereas religious traditions are endlessly multiple and some of them actively promote the reality of gender-neutral language for God. Nevertheless, I think the points are more similar than different: in both cases the minority view is compelling but overwhelming denied, or even more ignored, by the majority of those involved with the fictions in question. And it would be bizarre to launch into a serious discussion of Star Trek -- not as a cultural phenomenon, and not focusing on K/S fiction, but speaking about the fiction as a whole -- with the presumption that Kirk and Spock were lovers.

Okay, perhaps I exaggerate a bit. But the point stands.

If in talking about an abstract conception we're talking about a reality, or what I believe to be a reality, then I can argue for my view of it. But if in talking about God we're talking about a fiction -- and I believe that we are -- then the fiction is what its authors -- believers en masse -- make it. And, mostly, they talk about God as male. The God I disbelieve in -- the God that I am saying they are wrong about -- is the one they are asserting; and for the most part, that God is referred to as He. So I will continue to say, of God, that I disbelieve in Him; since it is (mostly) He, and not She or It or other language that is offered, to which I am asserting my skepticism.

A parallel might be made for other minority traditions about God. I disbelieve in the God who is morally imperfect just as much as I disbelieve in the traditional omnibenevolent God; but since the latter is more usually what is talked about, the latter is what I will be more usually denying if the subject arises. Mutatis mutandis, I disbelieve in Odin just as much as I disbelieve in YHVH; but the latter is what believers today mostly assert. And I disbelieve in the genderless, or feminine, God just as much as I disbelieve in the masculine one. But when theists discuss God, they usually mean the latter; so I must do likewise.

I suppose the one exception that might be taken to this is that, by my own admission, the most interesting theists assert a gender-neutral God, so that while (in sheer numbers) theists are biased towards God-as-He just as they are towards God-as-omnibenevolent, in terms of the people one might actually be most interested in engaging with they are far more likely to assert God-as-genderless. This is a fair point, and in some specific cases -- were I to discuss some particular theologian, say -- I would probably try to follow their example. But the point is that when theists talk about God, they are generally talking about a shared concept, albeit one that they have a particular take on. So mostly I need to talk to the shared concept to.

So when I speak of God, I shall continue to say that I don't believe in Him.

______________________________________
* I think; as I say above, the theologies that I currently, as an atheist, find most compelling are those that view God in gender-neutral terms. But, of course, I don't find those theologies compelling enough to believe them. It's hard to say whether a hypothetical theist me should be imagined as believing the theology that seems (to my actual atheist self) most compelling, or if instead the very act of my conversion would lead me to some strange other place -- an orthodox Roman Catholic, or something -- which is as likely to have a gendered as a non-gendered view of God. My inclination is to say that personality, culture and viewpoint tend to remain consistent even through religious conversions, and so that the former is more likely... but that answer is basically begging the question, since it assumes a natural rather than a supernatural conversion. If God were to truly speak to me, and convert me, who knows what form that conversion would take? -- But, of course, I consider this impossible. -- And since I could keep going around this bend endlessly, I'll stop here.

** This is not to say that anything goes; "that's not what 'God' means" is still a perfectly fair reply, and one I might make to (to take a random example) Mordecai Kaplan. But I would justify it not by claims about God (since I don't think that that word corresponds to anything real) but to other people's beliefs about God. It would be not like saying "whales aren't fish" (which one would back up by giving facts about the world) but would be like saying "unicorns don't have two horns" -- one would back that up by pointing to other imaginary depictions of unicorns in fiction, art, myth, etc. That's not to say that someone couldn't write a perfectly good book about a two-horned unicorn. But it would be deliberately altering the concept -- fair in fiction, unfair in philosophical debate (at least without admitting it explicitly).

Tangentially related announcement:The 53rd Carnival of the Godless has now been posted, including both my post Fruitful Inconsistencies (which I personally wouldn't have categorized as "debunking theism" -- it's about the role of inconsistencies in both religion and literature -- but whatever), and the post of Sean Carroll's that inspired mine, The God Conundrum, and lots more besides. Take a look.

Poems for Armistice Day

Eighty-eight years ago today World War One ended: after four mad years, the guns at last fell silent.

November 11, therefore, is Armistice Day -- re-named Veterans Day in the U.S. to extend its meaning. But it comes from the Great War, the war that should have taught us the madness of all wars. The war we did not learn enough from.

Some bloggers are posting In Flanders Fields to mark the day; but a few other poems come to my mind. So I give you three poems to mark Armistice Day.

The first is by Wilfred Owen, who died in combat November 4, 1918 -- just seven days before the war he wrote about was finally ended. (LGM has a good post today about the very last person to die in the war -- two minutes before the armistice took effect.)

THE PARABLE OF THE OLD MAN AND THE YOUNG

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

-- Wilfred Owen

Next we have a poem by an older man who survived the war:

A DEAD STATESMAN

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

-- Rudyard Kipling

And, lastly, a poem which I posted once before, but which is quite appropriate for today. Its author, W. D. Ehrhart, is a Vietnam Veteran.

THE INVASION OF GRENADA

I didn't want a monument,
not even one as sober as that
vast black wall of broken lives.
I didn't want a postage stamp.
I didn't want a road beside the Delaware
River with a sign proclaiming:
"Vietnam Veterans Memorial Highway."

What I wanted was a simple recognition
of the limits of our power as a nation
to inflict our will on others.
What I wanted was an understanding
that the world is neither black-and-white
nor ours.

What I wanted
was an end to monuments.

-- W. D. Ehrhart

To the dead of the Great War; to the dead of Iraq -- Rest in Peace.

To the rest of us: may we learn to better serve those who serve us in days to come.

Update: As she reminds us, Teresa Nielsen Hayden had an extraordinary collection of WW1 links last (and previous) years. Well worth checking out.

One link from her collection that struck me in particular this year was Will Longstaff's painting Menin Gate at Midnight (Ghosts of Menin Gate), painted in 1927 by an Australian vetran of the Great War. Here's a picture of it:

(The link goes to the Wikipedia page, from where I got the image; TNH had linked to it on this page, where they have a very different reproduction of the same painting; worth looking at both, really: first, second.)

Snark and Boojum: Friday Bird Blogging

Posting pictures of one's pets is a blogosphere tradition -- one which I even participated in once when we were birdsitting some friends' cockatiels.

But something new came into our lives this week. No, not the Democratic Congress -- something else.

I'm speaking of a pair of lovebirds which we (re)named Snark and Boojum.

These are the first pets my wife and I ever adopted together. (She had a fish when we began dating). They seem, so far, happy and very loud. They seem to be constantly either snuggling contentedly or squabbling -- an old married couple, in other words. They're both male (we think), and they're something like 2 - 3 years old.

So, by way of both introduction and Friday Bird Blogging, here are Snark and Boojum:

That's Snark on the right and Boojum on the left.

How did we get them? We charmed them with smiles and soap, obviously.

So I hope you'll all join me in giving an enthusiastic welcome to Snark and Boojum...

(You can read about their namesakes here or here.)

The Care and Feeding of Memes

Memes survive by reproduction: in human brains, in print, in any medium they find hospitable. And as with all reproducing creatures, there are some memes ought to be encouraged in their reproduction, for they are helpful -- in the case of memes, "helpful" means roughly "true and important". So allow me to pass on some points that others are making that deserve to be spread far and wide. Because they're important. And true.

Investigate the Electoral Cheating. Rick Perlstein: Despite the fact that the Democratic wave was too big for Republicans to cheat their way around, they did try to cheat, and this fact desperately needs to be investigated, prosecuted, reported widely and anticipated in future elections, since they'll clearly try again. (More here.) I would add: and clean and fair elections laws should be a Democratic priority; there is no more important issue than this, since failure on this means failure on every other conceivable issue. (Update: And just because they didn't cheat enough to win the House, their vote-suppression may have won them some races.)

Winning Through Conviction. Greg Sargent: We won because we stood up to the Republicans on the failures of Iraq, the horrors of torture, the illegality of warrantless wiretaps. Do not let the Republicans -- or the "sensible" pundits of the MSM -- sucker us into retreat on these matters. Stick to our guns. We are not here to enable Bush's policies on Iraq, but to try and change them.

Hold them Accountable. We must, must, must find out more about what the Republicans have been doing while in power -- prosecute the illegality to the fullest extent of the law, and hold them politically accountable for the things that are merely immoral but not illegal. Digby:

None of that means that there isn't ample room for legislation on which we can all agree. The door should always be open to those who want to negotiate and compromise. But unless the last decade of Republican mendacity, malfeasance and corruption is exposed, the lesson republicans will take from this is that they can promise everything, do anything and the only repurcussions will a couple of years out of power when they can blame the Democrats for their failures. To not require some sort of accountability for this is a very serious moral hazard.

And, unsurprisingly, Glenn Greenwald is also all over this; see for example this and this. Corruption was a big issue this election; we need to clean out the Augean stables. It's our mandate. (And it should go without saying that the first step is not to let them pour any more filth in.)

(More to come, FSM willing. (Update: yep.))

Further Brief Thoughts on the Revolution of 2006

• The "Revolution of 2006" is not a term I've yet heard, although I'd be astonished if I were actually the first to use it. But calling change-of-party elections "revolutions" has a long and storied history in the U.S., back to Jefferson's "Revolution of 1800" and most recently with Gingrich in '94. This one surely qualifies: we have deposed -- or begun the work that will be needed to depose -- another King George. (This isn't meant to imply impeachment -- although I'd be for it, since he deserves it a dozen times over (at least!) -- but simply holding his powers back to that of a President, from his assumed monarchy: one of the more important tasks for the new Congress.)

• Several people have pointed out that Rumsfeld's departure means that the Democrats are already improving things, even before assuming office. And I agree. Still, those who think that Rumsfeld's resignation is going to improve Iraq are in for a rude disappointment, I fear. The problem, all along, has been Bush, whose policies Rumsfeld has been implementing -- and, of course, the initial crime of the invasion. And, at this point, the choices are between terrible and even worse. Changing Rumsfeld won't change that: at best it will mean that Bush has decided to choose "terrible" rather than "even worse". But Bush isn't known for his respect for evidence, the voters, the lives of the troops under his command (let alone civilian Iraqis) or his ability to change course. So I wouldn't be surprised if Robert Gates simply put a new face on what Rumsfeld would otherwise have done -- if this was mere politics. But, again, even in the unlikely case that this isn't true, there are no longer any good options left. Only different terrible ones. And that's the fault, ultimately, not of Rumsfeld, but of Bush.

• A home-state note: I'm disappointed about New York's State Senate, which, despite the massive gains of Democrats in other races in this state, will remain in Republican hands. I'm disappointed not only because, as Jerome Armstrong notes, some senior Democrats didn't do all they could to push this (although I wouldn't draw such absolute conclusions about them that he does from that fact alone), but because I don't know if overall enough effort was made.

Yesterday when I walked into the voting booth to vote the straight Democratic ticket, I noticed that for one office there was no Democratic candidate -- namely, for our local State Senator. Now, given that Ithaca is an island of blue in a sea of red, I can well believe that for whatever the precise district is, any such challenge would have been purely nominal. Nevertheless, all our other representatives -- US House, US Senate, NY House -- are Democrats; and I would have bloody well liked a chance to vote against the current louse. (He's a sponsor of a pro-discrimination marriage amendment here.) I looked about the ballot, hoping for a chance to vote for someone, anyone, else -- but he was the only guy on the ballot (albeit, due to New York's cross-endorsement laws, for three different parties!). So I abstained in that race. (If I had known how to write-in someone, and there hadn't been a line behind me, I would have written someone in.) But why couldn't we at least have someone on the ballot, even if they didn't campaign a lick?

• A lot of conservatives are now admitting that they have been carrying water for people whose governing they dislike. (More.) What they aren't yet admitting is that this ought to destroy their credibility even for those who are still so gullible to grant them some (for reasons that are self-evident: why admit it, given that only the gullible do still grant them any?) It would be nice, however, if the MSM would start treating these people as the admitted liars and principleless hacks that they are. (Update: Adding--) And you wonder if they will now openly admit what a disaster Bush has been? Or will they continue to lie about that until after he leaves office?

• Pre-emptive meme immunization: If, as some are suggesting, Allen does not challenge the results in Virginia, expect a lot of bloviating about how this shows that Allen is a gracious looser, and Gore was a sore looser -- etc, etc, ad nauseum. This point is entirely invalid, for one overwhelming reason: Gore actually won while Bush stole the election, whereas Allen was the one trying to steal the election he would be challenging. It's not just that Gore won the popular vote, giving him moral legitimacy; it's not just that more people went to the polls intending to vote for Gore than Bush but weren't counted, from overvotes to butterfly ballots; it's not just that the Republicans used blatantly illegal means like "fixing" absentee ballots after the election was over: it's that if it had not been for Jeb Bush & Katherine Harris's illegal, immoral and racist program of using a private company to cut African Americans who had names vaguely similar to those of ex-felons off the voter roles in advance of the election, Gore would have won Florida despite all the rest. Gore had no obligation to be a gracious looser, because he actually won. Allen does have an obligation to be a gracious looser, because he not only lost fair and square, he lost despite his best efforts to cheat.

[Update: final point added.]

Reactions: a Round-Up in Five Parts

Part One: Celebration

Part Two: Snark

Scott Eric Kaufman (via):

Emails obtained by the Associated Press indicate that top Republican officials now believe that the margin of victory will be too high to rig the results. "A four or five percent margin, we can handle," said a GOP official from Connecticut. "But eight or higher? That's asking the implausible."

LieparDestin:

"John McCain joked on Wednesday he would 'commit suicide- if Democrats win the Senate in November." -- October 19, 2006
I wont get all nitpicky and ask for a 'real' suicide. A political suicide is good enough. Stand up, and admit that you've been a rubber-stamp crony for this administration, that you're a man who allowed torture but have no problem criticizing the looks of Chelsea Clinton. That you've enabled Karl Rove, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, to commit crime after crime against this country.

Josh Marshall: "Bush: for Rumsfeld before he was against him."

Part Three: Analysis

Quick, same-night list of firsts from Chris Bowers.

Kevin Drum, also last night:

So what caused the Republican meltdown?...
Iraq, of course....
Terri Schiavo and Katrina....
The economy....
Sleazy campaigning....
Extremism....

(Read the rest for comments on each. I think the most prominent item missing on that list is "Corruption".)

Rick Perlstein chez Atrios on the victories of the netroots. Chris Bowers adds his thoughts on this too.

Important underemphasized story: Dems gain in state legislatures too. (More here and here.) Other non-Congressional good news:
- South Dakota rejects abortion ban
- Arizona rejects amendment enshrining marriage discrimination
- Specter wins in New York
- Patrick wins in Massachusetts

Mark Schmitt casts a hopeful eye towards 2008's Senate races.

Rebutting conservative spin that it was "conservative" democrats who won last night: one, two, three, four, five. Even worse is this same (clearly false) spin from a Democrat. But ultimately Ben Adler notes (see also this follow-up post):

Donald Rumsfeld's resignation will spin very much to the Democrats advantage vis-a-vis the midterms. That is to say, all those talking heads on cable news saying that the Dems won on the strength of moderate and socially conservative candidates will not be able to spout that canard much longer. Clearly the Bush administration recognizes the midterm results as a rebuke of their Iraq War policy.

Glenn Greenwald tackles a whole slew of emerging conservative myths. So does Charles Pierce.

Eric Kleefeld: "if Joe Courtney's lead holds up in Connecticut 2nd, this election will leave just one Republican congressman in all New England."

Brad DeLong (via):

...the implicit gerrymandering of the Senate and the in-the-tank-ness of the press corps are keeping people from realizing how big the blowout was. Consider this: it looks like 32,100 thousand Americans voted for Democratic Senatorial candidates, and only 24,524 thousand Americans voted for Republican Senatorial candidates. That's a 13.4% margin of Democratic victor.

Follow-up post here.

Kevin Drum on what's to come:

For some reason, the talking heads last night were consumed with speculation about whether Bush would suddenly turn into a friendly, compromising, bipartisan wheeler-dealer now that he has to deal with a Democratic Congress. Have they learned nothing? That's just not who Bush is. I expect his speech today will contain a few well-crafted platitudes about the will of the people, moving forward, etc. etc., but it will also contain plenty of tough talk about protecting the American people and standing up for what's right. More to the point, Bush's actions over the next few months will almost certainly be as combative as always. He just doesn't have anything else in him.

This same post also has a bit on the failure of what Billmon's called Rove's 51% solution.

Publius has the list of the incoming Senate committee chairs.

This does not help McCain's 2008 chances. This is a good thing.

Zachary Roth on what may have turned the tide:

Ed Goeas... noted that, according to his numbers, the movement toward Democrats in the campaign's final weeks came not as a result of the Foley scandal, but instead after Bill Clinton's combative appearance on FOX News -- in which he lost his temper with host Chris Wallace -- a few days before Foley broke. Goeas said that his measurement for Democratic "intensity" skyrocketed after the interview, and that it seemed to act as a signal to Democrats not to back down.

If the dems don't learn from this, they are really, really, really stupid.

And Nathan Newman adds a bit of historical perspective:

Let's be clear-- this wasn't just a good night for Democrats. It was a good night for progressives, and no media spin that these new elected officials are "conservatives" changes who they are.... Let's remember-- those massive Democratic majorities of a generation ago were fake. In 1981, Ronald Reagan was able to control the agenda in Congress because 67 Boll Weevil Democrats essentially caucused with the GOP. In 1993, the Democrats had a "majority" of 258 but Clinton was only able to pass his initial budget by one vote, so he had a de facto majority of 218 votes. I actually am more confident in the present 228-230 Dem majority we are getting this round to support progressive initiatives than those fake-larger majorities of the past.

Tom Englehardt takes a broad view.

Part Four: Some People Are Just Never Happy

Michael Bérubé:

And all it took was the Abramoff scandal, the Foley scandal, the Haggard scandal, the suspension of habeas corpus, the creation of the Cheney Archipelago of secret torture sites, a criminally incompetent response to one of the worst natural disasters in US history, and a hopeless war that has killed thousands of US troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and may well go down as the single worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the republic. I can’t wait for ‘08!

P. Z. Myers:

...It's good news, right? So why am I not particularly happy?
One reason is how they won. Republicans were just plain vile: they stunk up the joint with corruption, incompetence, greed, and viciousness, and they are saddled with an unpopular president and an unpopular war. They should have been easy to beat, and the Democrats relied on winning by default. There was little attempt to campaign on progressive values, just an expectation that the discontent of the Republican voters with their ugly party would scrape away enough voters that we'd come out on top. And we did. Rah.
A perfect example: we threw Rick Santorum, one of the worst senators ever, onto the rubbish heap, to gain…Robert Casey Jr, a bland, boring, pious middle-of-the-road Democrat who is anti-choice... (penultimate ellipsis in the original)

Part Five: Calls to Arms

Tristero:

What is the most important issue facing the country that the Democrats must tackle? The rogue presidency of George W. Bush.... I think it's a pretty safe bet, even for William Bennett, that Bush will try to precipitate a constitutional crisis over the limits of presidential power (from his standpoint, none) in the next two years.... this is what I think the position should be for the new Congress. Bush can, and will execute the duties of the office of the president but Congress should let him get away with nothing that exceeds the power of his office. No matter what he does or threatens to do.

Josh Marshall:

...a lot of the names in DC have built their reputations, meal tickets and most importantly their world view around the Republicans. I mean, Mark Halperin needs someone to abase himself to, right? Don't expect that to change overnight. That's a battle to be engaged.

Lerxst: "In the euphoria of yesterday's results we should not forget about the NRCC robocall scandal.... it is essential that the Democrats fight back on this HARD."

Glenn Greenwald:

The President is going to include all sorts of flowery odes to the beauty of bipartisanship in his upcoming speech this afternoon -- much to the inevitable delight of the wise Washington pundit class, which will excitedly take him at his word and demand that Democrats "work with" the President rather than oppose and investigate him. But what the Bush administration really means by "bipartisanship" -- as they are already making quite clear -- is that the Democrats in Congress do nothing to stand in their way and, most especially, that Democrats recognize that there will be no looking into what the Leader has done or subjecting his Decisions to any scrutiny...

It is vital to remember that we already have a constitutional crisis in our government. The choice is not whether to create one (since it already exists), but whether to confront and battle it, or acquiesce to it (as the Republican Congress has done). While it is nice that Democrats have taken over the Congress, it is vital to remember that we have a President who has repeatedly made clear that Congress is irrelevant in our system of government and cannot limit the President in any way. Re-establishing the rule of law -- and the principle that the President is not above it -- is still the most compelling priority for our country.

And while Amanda Marcotte sees gains in other areas as well, I think her most important point is her first one:

There’s no doubt that this election was a mandate and it was a mandate on two major issues: 1) Massive Republican corruption and 2) the war in Iraq. So the Democrats need immediately to start investigations plus demanding that we get the hell out of Iraq as fast as we can.

Word.

Coda: Celebrations (Adagio)

Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

He didn’t have to make the run. When he started out, it was the longest of long shots. All political races are fueled by ambition, but he seems to have been equally motivated by a sense of what was needed and what was right.... Ned Lamont helped reframe the storyline and shake up the complacent. For that, he’s one of this morning’s heroes, and so are all the people who worked their hearts out for him.

John Podhoretz (via I-forget-where, sorry):

Happy or suicidal with tonight's results, something colossal and profoundly important has happened in the United States beginning in 2000 — the re-engagement of the American people with politics. We have had four enormously consequential elections in a row now in which voters have cast their ballots in numbers that we were told we'd never see in our lifetimes. I don't see how you can view this as anything but a wondrous development for the United States.

More may be added as I see 'em. (Update: Yep.)

In Which Your Intrepid Blogger Reacts To Last Night's Events With Sober Analysis

...more later, FSM willing.

They're Trying to Steal the Election Again And They May Be Succeeding

...this is true in more ways than I can count.

Kevin Drum links to a Greg Palast article about the pre-election schemes the Republicans have used to pre-steal or suppress up to 4.5 million votes.

TAPPED is reporting that the vile robo-calling scheme is, in fact, working. (In case you haven't heard about it, this is the thing that the Republicans are doing -- in multiple states -- where they call repeatedly, often in the middle of the night, with a message whose opening makes it sound like it's the Democrat behind the calls. Hilzoy has a good piece with the basic information & links to more here.) Of course the !@#$% MSM isn't reporting it, so people fall for the trick, get pissed, and vote Republican...

Josh Marshall is doing extensive coverage of problems with voting machines and the like; he's also been covering the Robocalling story extensively.

It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

As Patrick Nielsen Hayden put it yesterday:

I’m voting the straight Democratic line. Not because there aren’t Democrats who are hypocrites, cowards, idiots, and fools. But because the Republican Party, nationally and locally, is in 2006 nothing more or less than a criminal conspiracy to destroy our democracy and loot our country. Their candidates, for every office, need to be defeated wherever they run.

Stolen elections and dirty tricks are only one of the many ways in which the Republicans are attempting to destroy our democracy; but it's in the running for the most pernicious. They have undermined the fundamental trust in democracy -- and, I hate to say it, deservedly undermined, since they have made our democracy untrustworthy.

If the Republicans hold on to the House, it will be because they stole the election. Just like they did in 2000. Just as they may have done in 2004.

Of course this simply makes it all the more important to vote, and to vote Democrat: we need not only to win, we need to win by such a large measure that their attempts at theft fail.

So VOTE.

Or, to swipe even more from Making Light, this post by Jim Macdonald, which I am reprinting in its entirety (I hope he can forgive me):

Today it’s important to go to the polls and vote.
Vote straight-ticket Democrat.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for torture.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for corruption.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for cronyism.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against habeas corpus.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against our troops.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against liberty.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against the Constitution.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against being secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against Social Security.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for “preemptive” war.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for incompetence.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for Bush.
Go out today. Vote Democratic.
Today is the first day of the struggle to take our country back.

Do anything and everything you can. Let's see if we can keep them from stealing the election this time.

The Next Morning: They're going to keep trying, with Montana and Virginia the battlegrounds. (Later: Montana's over.) (I don't know about Montana, but it's worth bearing in mind that the Virginia victory was on top of the multi-pronged efforts of the Republicans to steal that election. (via)) Nevertheless, this morning things are looking pretty good. We have to keep fighting to keep what we've won: but that's a better battle to have.

On to '08!

From the Annals of Self-Parodying Overhype

We have:

"Classic"



"Essential"



(Just a little it's-election-day-I-thought-I'd-try-to-relieve-the-tension humor... If you haven't yet, remember to vote!!)

Election Eve Reading Round-Up

Once more around the blogs:

• Scott Horton puts on his medium hat, and Kant Critiques Bush:

Kant welcomes the political moralist, but he warns us ardently of the moralizing politician... How can we identify the wolf in sheep's clothing who presents himself on the public stage as a man of morals but in fact is morally corrupt? There is, writes Kant, a three-part test that gives us an unfailing peek at the political scoundrel. First, does he seek every opportunity to assert the right of the state he controls over its own people and over other peoples?... Second, does he accept the principle of accountability for his own misdeeds – or does he in fact try to pass off to others every mistake that occurs?... Third, does he rule through the sowing of discord and division? After coming to power, does he identify other potential rivals to power and attack them or set them to battle, one against the other? ... But in its entire history, America has had only one leader who clearly passes Kant's three-point test to detect the political scoundrel. His name is George W Bush. Is it even necessary to rehearse the test?

• And from the same blog, Jack Balkin talks about Ted Haggard:

Many progressives have never quite understood why the most vehement religious opponents of homosexuality view it as such a threat. I myself have always assumed that it is because religious opponents are devoted to the preservation of traditional gender roles, which sustain a male/female hierarchy. But the Ted Haggard story suggests a different reason-- at least for that segment of religious opponents who, like a significant proportion of the population generally, share same-sex or bisexual orientations and desires. Viewed from Ted Haggard's perspective-- a man who, despite his shame and guilt, is attracted to other men-- gay marriage and the gay lifestyle really are a threat to heterosexual relationships and heterosexual marriage. That is because they are a threat to his heterosexual identity and his heterosexual marriage. He knows the Devil is always tracking him, waiting for him to slip up. That is because he conceptualizes his sexual desires as sin and as alienation from God, and not as the expressions of something that might actually become valuable to him if accepted them as part of himself.

• Jim Henley reacts to the Saddam verdict:

When I say the Dujail case is “bullshit” I’m not saying that the crime itself was no crime. It was a mass reprisal based on evidence collected under torture with little in the way of a fair chance for the accused to exonerate themselves, a punishment designed as much to terrify onlookers as bring justice to the guilty. All bad stuff. No matter who does it. We are already doing some of the kind of thing ourselves. Too many people in this country want us to do more of it.

• A lot of people are talking about this just-released government study from 1999 estimating that 400,000 troops would be necessary to secure Iraq -- approximately three times as many as we've ever had there. The key fact is simply in that headline, but a good overview of the rest is this one by Jim Macdonald at Making Light, although he leaves out what Matt Yglesias reasonably calls the most interesting conclusion of the study, that "we would have ended up with a failed state even with 400,000 troops on the ground" (emphasis added).

This was always a disaster in the making -- and they either knew, or damn well should have known.

• ...but since, along with the administration, the neocons ignored this fact, they are now trying desperately to salvage something of their justifiably-ruined reputations. Everyone's blogging this one too, but a good basic take is Kevin Drum's suggestion that "This is one rehabilitation project that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks." Meanwhile Glenn Greenwald focuses on Michael Leden's lies in reaction to the piece; Shakespeare's Sister offers snark; and Scott Lemieux notices the misogyny.

• Too much outrage to talk about! A mini-round-up within the round-up:
* Army recruiters are telling kids that the Iraq war is over and they won't be sent there.
* Being tortured by America disqualifies you from having a trial, because the torture methods used are state secrets & in a trial you might mention 'em.
* Government permission will soon be needed for any overseas travel. (More here.)

And finally, because I imagine that we could all use some humor today, two funny and totally apolitical items:

• Rabbi Jack Moline watches Abbot and Costello Learn Hebrew (via):

ABBOTT: Fine. Let’s start with mee.
COSTELLO: You.
ABBOTT: No, mee.
COSTELLO: Fine, we’ll start with you.
ABBOTT: No, we’ll start with mee.
COSTELLO: Okay, have it your way.
ABBOTT: Now, mee is who.
COSTELLO: You is Abbott.
ABBOTT: No, no, no. Mee is who.
COSTELLO: You is Abbott.
ABBOTT: You don’t understand.
COSTELLO: I don’t understand? Did you just say me is who?
ABBOTT: Yes I did. Mee is who.
COSTELLO: You is Abbott.

Whether or not you do for any of the others (which I recommend in each and every case), you'll definitely want to read the whole thing this time, eh?

• And a scientific study with statistical evidence on the non-existence of vampires:

In short, the authors conclude, it would take surprisingly little time for vampires to rule the earth:
[chart showing complete vampirization of the Earth in c. 30 months omitted]
Relying on the anthropic principle -- which declares that any condition essential for human existence must indeed be true -- the authors conclude that because the non-existence of vampires is necessary for human survival, vampires cannot in fact be real.

I grant you that the assumptions of the study omit the well-known fact that, rather than turn humans into vampires, "mostly, they're just going to kill you"; but nevertheless, this is a study worth careful consideration.

I'll probably add more quotes & links as the day goes on. (Update: Yep.)

Grim Thoughts at a Time of Hope

A glance at the categories in the sidebar of this blog will demonstrate that I am interested in politics: that category is twice the size of the next largest one. Yet in the past two weeks, I have posted about inconsistencies in literature and religion, Walt Whitman, musician Jonathan Coulton, Battlestar Galactica -- and only posted once about politics, and then briefly. Is it that I don't care that we have a monumentally important election in just a few days?

No, not at all. I care deeply; it is preoccupying my thoughts to a probably unhealthy degree. Nor is it quite that I have nothing to say, although I am more a fan than a perpetrator of political wonkery. But I am not sure I have anything positive to say. I have spoken before about optimism as a moral position -- something I believe strongly on rational grounds, although as a fallible being in a fallen world, I have trouble putting into practice within my own heart. So part of me feels reluctant to speak grim thoughts at a time when morale and energy is so important to securing for ourselves a better future. Those who have hope and fight in them are right, and heaven forefend I should do anything to dampen their spirits.

And yet --

It's not that I don't think will win next Tuesday -- at least the House, and hopefully the Senate too. The polls indicate this, and while certain long-scheduled last-minute "surprises", or the Republicans' built-in advantages, or simple happenstance (or all three) might always change matters at the last minute, I will admit that I not only think we will win, but I have my heart set on it -- emotionally, I've banked on it, and if things should turn out unexpectedly -- or, even, if we garner a weak rather than the strong victory that our country (and world) so desperately needs -- I will unquestionably be crushed. So yes: I strive always to be reality-based, the polls look good -- and my hopes are if anything beyond the polls, my attempts to restrain them notwithstanding.

Why then so grim?

It's not that I don't think it will matter if we win. Even apart from the horror that our loosing would imply -- that American democracy is truly broken beyond any ability to register the public will -- a Democratic congress will be able to do some extremely important things. Just the often-cited investigations would be an extraordinary step forward: one of the central problems with our government now is an unaccountable and unhindered executive branch, and holding Bush and his henchmen to account for their crimes, their lies and their blunders -- and exposing those crimes, lies and blunders which they have heretofore kept secret -- is of the utmost importance. If we win and get nothing else out of it, it will have been a huge step forward. And beyond that, the Democrats positive program, modest as it is, is nevertheless important and valuable. So yes, it will matter. It will matter a lot.

I'm just not sure it will matter enough.

In large measure this is simply because the extraordinary damage -- to our country and to the world -- done by the Bush regime will not be easily undone, and cannot be undone completely whatever political victories we shall secure. As Publius put it,

...the 2000-through-2004 elections were the really important ones. The consequences of those elections simply can’t be undone. I think there’s a Billmon post on this somewhere, but even if the Dems win, Iraq will still have been invaded, torture will still have been approved, and, well, I could go on. It’s the whole “you can remove the nail but not the nailhole” point.

Bush's evil "cannot be wholly cured nor made as if it had not been," no more than the evil to which this phrase was first applied. And even that evil which can be cured will not be cured without enormous -- nearly impossible -- effort. ("...But to such days are we doomed": yes, I understand that too.) So that's part of it: even if, as I dearly hope and fully expect, we win Tuesday, it will be too little, too late. If nothing else, then for the dead.

But I have more practical -- which, I think, is to say, more future-oriented -- foreboding as well.

To begin with, there is the powerful fact that the Republicans work best in opposition. The pent-up force of the right wing's anger and paranoia and hatred and contempt, the sheer motivating power of its urge to destroy, will be upon our throats within seconds -- seconds -- of a victory. Their extraordinary willingness to use any means, however foul, to hold on to power will, I fear, seem as nothing next to their willingness to use foul means to attack those to whom they lost it.

The dishonesty of the attacks will not stay them. Let us take the single most pressing issue: Iraq. America's choices, now, are between the horrible and the even-worse-than-horrible: not only are there no longer any good outcomes, there are no longer even any merely bad outcomes. As of now -- November 4, 2006, before the election -- there are no options remaining which will not mean terrible things for the United States, and far, far worse for the Iraqis. And this is because of the Republicans. The entire time of the war they have had unquestioned dominance of the United States government: they began the war, the prosecuted the war, and the have lost the war. Whether such outcomes were inevitable from the moment the war began, or merely became inevitable due to the extraordinary incompetence and venality with which the war has been fought, is at this point academic: it's lost. And they lost it.

But this will not stop them -- it will not hinder them for as long as a nanosecond -- from blaming the end of the war on the media, the Democrats, the left. We know this for a fact because they are already doing so: the venerable stab-in-the-back theories long beloved of authoritarians everywhere have already been trotted out repeatedly. The Democrats will have come to office with a mandate to end the war -- indeed, with the public expectation that they will end the war: "A substantial majority of Americans expect Democrats to reduce or end American military involvement in Iraq if they win control of Congress" as the New York Times put it a few days ago. But if they do, terrible things will happen -- because at this point, terrible things will happen whatever we do -- and the right, without the least shame or historical honesty, will blame us. (And it goes without saying that our lapdog media will largely let them get away with it.)

The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the economy; to the budget; to the degradation of our political institutions; to the damage done to our civil rights and liberties; the slow, ongoing catastrophe of global warming; and on and on.

Then there is the question of whether the Democrats even will stop the bloodshed -- or, at least, the American role in the bloodshed -- in Iraq. That they will have (assuming they win) a mandate to do so won't mean that they will. Fools and cowards and idiots and David Broder (but I repeat myself, as the old joke goes) are already saying that the Democrats should walk softly if they win. They would be themselves fools and cowards and idiots if they did so; but that is hardly reassuring, given that the Democrats have long demonstrated a positive genius for political foolishness, idiocy and, above all, cowardice. They have been better of late; they are many orders of magnitudes better than the deliberate, positive evil that is the opposition; but all that that means is that the Democrats too are better in opposition. And I fear a return of their weak-kneed and spineless tendencies should they actually win. -- All of which will just be made worse by the fact that the issue will come to the fore simultaneously with the vicious and dishonest Republican attacks I have already predicted.

And finally there is Bush -- or perhaps I should say, Bush and Cheney. They have already made it perfectly, crystal clear that any victory will not change their minds about their policies. Cheney said just the other day (h/t) that its not their job to change their minds just because, y'know, the voters want them to. And they won't.

But -- and this is my last, deepest, and greatest fear -- that this applies not only to what they have done and what they are currently doing, but to what they intend to do.

Put simply: Is Bush planning to wage an aggressive war -- possibly even a nuclear war -- against Iran? There is ample evidence that they have been making preparations for the possibility -- indeed, some feared they might do so before this current election. That, it seems, is now not going to happen (surely even they aren't fool enough to do it in the last day or two before...). But what about right after? Will Bush simply push forward with his attack even if the country votes for the Democrats -- even if the country votes overwhelmingly for the Democrats?

The only honest answer to this is that I haven't the slightest idea. But I do know that the theories of executive power, particularly in matters of war, that this administration have relentlessly championed means that they will feel no need whatsoever to get authorization from congress. It is certainly rumored that Bush feels he must "deal with" -- i.e. wage aggressive war against -- Iran before his term ends. And it may well seem to them that an attack on Iran would not only do well in reclaiming the agenda, but would be simplest if begun before they loose control of congress -- if only to avoid annoyances from those whose readings of the constitution are different from theirs.

I trust that I don't need to add that such an attack, in addition to being grossly immoral, would be catastrophic in its consequences.

Of course none of this means that I don't want -- desperately, desperately want -- the Democrats to win. Partly this is because, if Bush intends to wage aggressive war against Iran, a Democratic victory will simply change its timing, not its likelihood. And partly this is because 'vote-for-me-or-I-will-kill-many-people' is simply not an appeal that a free people should listen to, under any circumstances. And partly this is because, however cowardly or inept they might be in their response, the response of a Democratic congress to such an attack would at the least be clearly better than that of a Republican one.

But it means that, for this reason and all the others, while I am utterly wrapt with hope, I am at the same time filled with fear and foreboding and worry.

So then what?

Why, we keep on fighting. What else? This is part of why optimism is a moral position. Whatever the odds or possibilities, despair will not improve them. "There is naught that you can do, other than to resist, with hope or without it," to quote again from that same literary work. It is precisely the same as our choices in Iraq: if we must choose between the horrible and the even-worse, let us choose the horrible. If there is no hope, let us go down struggling to improve the world anyway. In the words of the old song:

I know the one thing we did right
Was the day we started to fight:
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on.

Which is why, at the end of the day, all these grim thoughts should not deter us from doing what we need to do. Anything you can do, Noble Reader, to ensure that we win Tuesday -- that we win in as big a manner as possible -- will only be for the good. Even if I am right -- especially if I am right -- in my worries and fears, we need as large and strong a party on our side as possible. And perhaps -- fortune willing -- I will be proved wrong. I dearly hope so.

So vote. Vote with your eyes open: vote with an understanding that it will be but the first, small step on the road to the recovery of our country. But vote.

And then we'll see.

Update: John Holbo has some grim thoughts of his own on the forthcoming election:

Assuming the Dems win there will be a Constitutional crisis when the President claims privilege and refuses to cough up documents for investigations into corruption and cronyism in Iraq reconstruction, bad intelligence, etc, in response to congressional subpoenas. Does that seem likely? But I don’t know enough to guess what form it is likely to take – the legal wrangling, that is. What is likely to happen? (I can’t say I’m depressed at the thought of the investigations. Far from it. But I don’t relish the prospect of the wrenching legal struggles that will be necessary...

As I said in comments there (echoing what several others had already said), a Constitutional crisis and “wrenching legal struggles” is very much a best case scenario; far more likely is that the Dems simply roll over and play dead when Bush refuses to comply with perfectly legal subpoenas. So I am put in the odd position of hoping for a Constitutional crisis… since the alternatives are no meaningful investigations into the crimes of this administration at all. (Since Bush obeying the law is clearly not a possibility.) And this is what flows out of the most likely positive outcome of a victory in this election!

But, of course, far better a Constitutional crisis than simple acquiescence in Bush's ongoing evisceration of the Constitution. So go, do what you can, keep your eyes on the prize... and vote.

Wacky Tolkieny Goodness

While searching for an appropriate link to footnote a casual literary reference in the above post (and yeah, contrary to blogospheric tradition I'm fiddling with the time-stamp on this post so as to leave the older (by a few minutes) post above the brief footnote to it... sue me), I stumbled across two wonderfully wacky Tolkien links.

First, we have Tolkien Geek: some wonderful fellow who blogged the entire !@#$% The Lord of the Rings. I haven't delved too deeply into the site yet, but it looks splendid and wonderful -- yet another example of what I love about the blogosphere.

And second, we have The Lord of the Rings in Legos. Yes, some enterprising chap is in the process of illustrating the entire novel in Legos. How wonderful is that! Best use of Legos since The Brick Testament (which, in case you don't know, is some other enterprising chap who is illustrating the entire Bible in Legos... which, with all due respect to the LOTR in Legos site, is even more wonderful, and if you haven't seen it before you should go enjoy it immediately.) But the LOTR Lego site is charming enough. Here is a picture from the flight to the ford:

And here is Frodo at the Council of Elrond accepting the burden of the ring:

...And, lastly, the LOTR Lego site has an entire page of links to other LOTR Lego sites. Yes, it turns out, there are a lot of people, not only who have gone so far as illustrate this (extraordinary and wonderful) novel, but a lot of people who have gone so far as to illustrate it in Lego.

What can I say? It's a strange and wonderful world.