Activist Judges! Oh No!

Funny, with a great point, and educational!

The Post-Partisan Mirage

Blue Texan at Firedoglake:

But there was always a problem with Obama’s “post-partisan” positioning and it had nothing to do with whether he had to be a “legislative president.”

It had everything to do with the fact that the people Obama said he’d reach out to are batshit crazy, and finding some workable middle ground with people who think tax cuts increase revenue, global warming is a hoax, saving General Motors is Hitler-esque, whose policies ran the country into a ditch–and who think Sarah Palin was qualified to be president–was always a flawed premise, to say the least.

Some of us believe that there really has been and can be progress in human affairs. Examples are plentiful: the development of democratic government, the abolition of slavery, the improvement of working conditions, civil rights for oppressed groups, universal suffrage, national independence from colonial powers, a social safety net, and great leaps forward in scientific understanding. Other people seek to undo many of these changes because they limit the power of elites. Of course there will be compromises along the way, but to elevate compromise, without regard to the merits, to a primary goal is both bad policy and in the long run a political loser.

GPS Rocks!

OK, I know, GPS is nothing new, but it’s new to me. I have relied on Internet maps for years to get from one place to another. I have a tendency to get lost, and the directions definitely helped. But sometimes things go wrong — being in the wrong lane, missing a turn, and so on. Lately I have been looking for a new place to live, so I thought a GPS might be a great help. I found a TomTom XXL on sale at BestBuy.

The best thing is the voice, which lets me keep my eyes on the road. The unit gives me plenty of warning before turns. If two turns come close together, it will tell me about both turns in the same sentence. It knows which lane I am in and which lane I need to be in for the next turn. When I get off the route, TomTom instantly adjusts the travel plan to get me back on track. Overall, excellent purchase!

Patience for the Devil

Unqualified Offerings gives an excellent insight that applies across so many issues (emphasis mine):

Across a whole range of problems there’s a class of responses I’ll dub the “low road” and another class I’ll call the “high road.” Examples of the former include war, torture, sanctions and blockades, imprisonment, aversive conditioning of all types (spanking; “dominance”-based animal training). Examples of the latter include diplomacy, rapport-building, civil disobedience, the free exchange of goods and ideas, decriminalization and rehabilitation, positive conditioning (of humans and animals).

I don’t presently care to argue that there is never any “need” to go down any given low road. In some cases I may support some low roads for some purposes. Locking up murderers, for instance. In other cases – torture – I have a much easier time saying “Never go there.” But what we see over and over again is that we judge high-road approaches as failures unless they produce nigh-instant and complete favorable results, while we show nearly infinite patience for journeys down the low road.

So true!

Music Finds

Last week I saw Un Prophète (A Prophet). One song on the soundtrack really grabbed me: Corner of My Room. I was sure that it was by Bob Dylan, circa Highway 61 Revisited. It turns out the song is by Turner Cody. The rest of his stuff is different, but for that one song he was definitely, purposely channeling young Dylan.

A few weeks ago, I saw a YouTube video by way of a Firedoglake After Hours post. It featured a living room jam by bluegrass prodigy Sarah Jarosz and friends. The song was Look at Miss Ohio, with bare-bones lyrics that sounded like a decades-old classic. Fooled again! I tracked down the original, by Gillian Welch, and saw that it came out in 2003. (It’s been covered a lot since then, so I guess I’m not alone in considering it an instant classic.) I bought it together with Corner of My Room from iTunes. I haven’t gotten anything by Jarosz yet, but I am sure I will eventually.

Toyota Hearings: Return of Regulation?

I don’t expect much from the Congressional hearings on the Toyota accelerator problem. It’s just the obligatory dance that Representatives and corporate barons do for their audience of voters and consumers.

However, I hope that it is a subtle sign that serious regulation is back. For decades, Republicans worked to dismantle and cripple the regulatory regime that protects consumers, and Democrats too often lent a hand. Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress have disappointed progressives in almost every way, but perhaps they will return to pre-Reagan values on regulation.

Republican Gomorrah – A Review

Republican Gomorrah, a new book by Max Blumenthal, examines the Christian Right’s growth, its domination of the Republican Party, and the scandals of its prominent figures. Every group has its scandals, but what is intriguing about the Christian Right is that its scandals tend to involve exactly those behaviors that it most stridently denounces. Again, no party or philosophy has a monopoly on hypocrisy, but Blumenthal shows how core ideas are responsible for both the Christian Right’s success and its problems.

Blumenthal bases his analysis on the work of Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst who left Germany after the Nazis came to power. In Escape From Freedom, Fromm wrote that having freedom is not always pleasant. Sometimes it can be a burden because you have to make your own decisions and you are responsible for the outcomes. Many people gladly give up their freedom by submitting themselves to obey without question a trusted authority figure. In the political realm, this can lead to a mass movement such as the Nazis created.

Christian theology has similar dynamics with respect to freedom. On the one hand, free will means you are responsible for your sins and will be punished for them – with hellfire according to the more conservative sects. However, there is an out. If you accept Jesus as your Savior, all your sins are forgiven.

A modern twist involves the industry that offers therapy/treatment for personal crisis. People make mistakes in their personal lives or simply don’t know how to handle certain things. So they turn to the therapy industry to tell them what to do about problems such as addiction, abuse, and infidelity. There is a promise that parallels the promises of political authoritarianism and religious salvation: obey the therapist and all your problems will be solved.

The Christian Right has put together all these modes of escaping from freedom into a single movement. A pioneer and the most successful practitioner has been James Dobson, a child psychiatrist who founded Focus on the Family. His newsletter gives advice about how to deal with problems in the family. His organization now gets so many requests for help that it has its own zip code. All these people mailing or calling in for help get put into a database, which is used to send out calls to political action. Dobson and similar figures function as what Fromm calls “the magic helper,” who then exploits this dependent relationship to further both a political movement and their own finances.

Unfortunately, many personal problems cannot be prayed away or otherwise cured with a simple fix. These people become involved in the movement, which distracts them momentarily from their personal problems. However, problems such as addiction are still there and not being effectively addressed. This is especially true for gay Evangelicals, who believe that homosexuality is a sin, a personal choice (“lifestyle”), that can be cured by prayer and spiritual counseling. So gays, alcoholics, drug addicts, gamblers, and others lead double lives – preaching against the actions by day and overdosing on them by night. (I bet a similar analysis would apply well to the problems the Catholic Church has had with deviant priests.)

Viewed in this light, all the scandals involving Christian Right leaders – and the list is huge! – make sense. It also makes sense how the followers tend to forgive these lapses, and often the leaders are able to resume their leadership roles after a period of public repentance. Instead of seeing virtue as something that can be attained and maintained, it is a constant struggle, a war against Satan, and they expect (and have personally experienced) many setbacks. As long as the disgraced leader frames his personal failure in terms of a cosmic religious war, he is treated as a good soldier who suffered a wound in battle.

Although “faith-based” and “reality-based” approaches were coined in other domains, the terms also make sense in the area of personal problems. Most personal problems can’t be solved in a single moment of insight; they have to be managed and moderated over years, maybe a whole lifetime. (And in the case of homosexuality, it isn’t a problem in itself; the problem is the self-loathing and denial caused by the hateful position of the Christian Right.) Instead of a slow and steady course of treatment, the Christian Right has institutionalized an approach that almost guarantees a roller coaster ride, from euphoric highs of participating in a mass movement to self-loathing lows of indulgence.