My Theory of the Brontosaurus

Obviously, I have less to say since the craziest of the crazies are out of power. Berube, as usual, puts it succinctly:

People have been telling me how much domestic US craziness I’ve missed in the past two weeks, but I just don’t see it.  Obama continues to disappoint on some critical fronts and to offer reasons for guarded optimism in others, and his opposition on the right continues to be utterly and completely batshit.  Looks like things are just where I left them: on one side, the usual exasperation with feckless Democrats and obstructionist Blue Dogs and the Higher Broderism; on the other side, vast and visceral and very profound relief that John McCain and Sarah Palin do not occupy the White House.

To be less succinct, the only attractive interpretation of O so far is that he is making a trade between national security suck up and domestic progress.  But I find this harder and harder to believe. I think he believes he is the decider, the one with the burden of the defense of the US, and that he must, therefore, be above the partisan. One could argue that his leaving legislation writing to congress is simply appropriate and politically savvy, giving them incentive to pass it; but I think it also abets his withdrawal from the Hope he promised. Personally, I would sacrifice health care reform to an indictment of Cheney--or at least a complete and honest history of the governments actions.

The Times said it agreed with Obama's threat to veto legislation requiring him to obey the law and provide information on intelligence activities to the oversight committees.  They don't bother making an argument. Apparently it is blindingly obvious.

The motto of this administration is 'dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good'. Better than Fuck You. But still.

When I think about Palin, I recall that no one took Reagan seriously either. Although Reagan had a weak economy, a weak incumbent, anger over Vietnam and anxiety over race and gender.

There is something ludricrous in the thought of William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer as kingmakers. Isnt there?

UGH

Charlie Savage in NYT

In any case, Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor, said Mr. Obama’s ratification of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan acceptance on them, Mr. Balkin said, Mr. Obama is consolidating them as entrenched features of government.

the issue with Seidel is the representation of violence

The first review of Seidel I've seen, in NYRB by Dan Chiasson. Pointless opinioning about the influence of Lowell, praise for Seidels "phrase", which is meaningless. Then the point: "His is therefore not an unsympathetic art: it is , rather, and art of deliberately refused sympathy. This is a large difference. Because Seidel runs his imagination through only one channel, the id, being nasty, impolite, rude and so on sustains him. Whether his poems are meant to offend or, by being offensive, to shine  a bright light the awful things people do to one another: this dog chases its tail in nearly every serious discussion of Seidel." But there is no conclusion, no resolution to the circle. So unwilling to be deceived that he must be deceived. Incapable of moral distinction and therefore of aesthetic distinction (what we call taste). Do we let him get away with the circle, with the ambiguity as to whether he is speaking for our worst selves or enjoying our worst selves. That man feeds on man is food for poetry, or something to be abhorred? Are we to forgive his wealth and leisure because he writes about it, his honesty circumscribed to the inexpensive? Ie is this the bad faith, the dishonesty: that he invites the moral discourse, within the aesthetic,  but claims abstemtion from it, on behalf of the aesthetic.

Consider people who want to bring guns to church. Who want to bring guns everywhere. I mean consider that they are so different from me. Are they a not so silent majority? Are they as weird as I think they are? Are their fears rampant and groundless? Is this a particular paranoia, or a symptom of a general paranoia, of paranoia as a lifestyle? Is the latter derived from a conservative manipulation that insist you are not, cannot, be represented. That democracy is deceit and usurpation. You are the majority, yet you are ignored. You are a victim, or will be. Clearly, it's written in the constitution, guns are emblematically American. So there is a temptation to wonder if my lack of enthusiasm is un-American. But these people really are paranoid, about crime, about the government, about O.

The Times today notes that the commemoration of MJ is in part a black phenomenon, that they are so desperate for heroes that they forgive a child molestor who wanted to be white. Strange post Obama, but the world is bigger and more complicated than we realize. As someone said. One could see MJ as a martyr to the lack of positive black images, that he believed the only beauty was white because he never saw any black beauty, or anything black recognized as beauty. That living his whole life in the public eye the plasticity of his body/appearance was normal to him? Did blacks not find any of the caricature of him before he died funny? (Family Guy, TV Funhouse, etc etc.? ) And not jsut race but sexuality, and not just sexuality of homo vs. hetero but of adult vs. child. He was the medium for all of our anxieties, or did he embody, in the sense of suffering, them? For some (blacks) he was a hero because of his success, which was mammoth, but that superstratospheric success enabled him to retreat into a privacy without limits? This episode echoes the OJ trial. Is there a black reality and and a white? Where is the line between the frosting and the cake? But I would not concede the fact that OJ did it, or that Michael (probably) did it. Yet I would refuse the difference here as loss of fact. The question of what is and can be taken for granted, the fictionality of some of it, is what interests me.Is it ludicrous that he wants to be white, or that he doesnt want to be black?

Home schooling is the American madrassa.

from Krugman's column today:

But on the other side there’s Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak.

Dear Chris Caldwell:

Anthropomorphic talk of cultures went out with WWII. I know Huntington did it, but no one took him seriously and he's dead.

Which reminds me of the thought that a democratic culture would be different in that it would not look for the magnum opus. The grand unifying work, since there is no unifying to do. This might mean a weaker culture, to anthropomorphize, a culture with less depth of resource and resonance. That thought occurs to me when I think about digitalization and the shrinking of the attention span, including most importantly my own.