Boehner: Le roi fainéant

From the New York Times today:

Among those who placed him in his post and could conceivably remove him, the test of his leadership seems to be how little action he takes. In a closed-door meeting and subsequent news conference this week, Mr. Boehner said the House was done negotiating over spending cuts until the Senate “begins to do something.”

From Wikipedia:

Roi fainéant, literally “do-nothing king” and so presumptively “lazy king“, is a French term primarily used to refer to the later kings of the Merovingian dynasty, after they seemed to have lost their initial energy. They were considered and portrayed “useless” by Carolingian kings and even early modern historians, though current historical opinion is more nuanced.

Nattering Nabobs of Non Sequitur

Is it just me, or am I right in thinking that the Republican Right has reached new heights, plumbed new depths of pure illogic and nonsense?  I am thinking of two statements from two articles in today’s NYTimes that were on the same page of the printed version. First, we have the whiz-kid Paul Ryan shouting about how Obama wants to effect the “political conquest” of the Republican Party.  Well, here’s hoping!  Anyway, the article  goes on to say this:

On Sunday, in a stinging rebuke to Mr. Obama, he said that had Hillary Rodham Clinton beat him to win the Democratic nomination in 2008 and gone on to win the presidency, “we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now.”

“I don’t think that the president thinks that we actually have a fiscal crisis,” he said. “He’s been reportedly saying to our leaders that we don’t have a spending problem, we have a health care problem. That just leads me to conclude that he actually thinks we just need more government-run health care.”

Is Ryan speaking well of the same Hillary Clinton who made government controlled health care, single-payer at that, her top priority during her hubby’s first term?  And who was demonized by the Republicans for it?  Does he think she doesn’t think we have a major health care problem?  Or is he convinced that she would have dealt with our financial crisis better because of what she learned at the side of her similarly vilified husband, who happens to have run the only budget surplus this country has seen in recent history.  And who was a Democrat.

Then we have the other piece focused on the other intellectual leading light of the Right, Eric Cantor.

After successfully engineering the latest debt ceiling vote last week, Mr. Cantor flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he road-tested those themes as the lone House Republican leader rubbing elbows with the international élite.

Citing a struggling single mother with a gifted child in a poor city neighborhood, he told Davos attendees, “We need to create some type of competitive mechanisms” to help her escape the bad schools she is stuck with.

I imagine that a lot of those intellectually élite representatives of countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, China, Japan, and so on, are going to be thinking, “Why don’t you Americans just improve your public education system?”  I’d love to hear about the “economically competitive mechanisms” that are going to bring entrepreneurs running to serve the needs of communities with lousy schools, especially the run-of-the-mill students there.  (After all, it’s only in Lake Woebegone that everyone is above average).  Maybe the same corporations that are doing so well serving our out-sized prison population.

Deficit Scare Tactics

Yeah, that Krug.  When he’s right, he’s right!

To say what should be obvious: Republicans don’t care about the deficit. They care about exploiting the deficit to pursue their goal of dismantling the social insurance system. They want a fiscal crisis; they need it; they’re enjoying it. I mean, how is “starve the beast” supposed to work? Precisely by creating a fiscal crisis, giving you an excuse to slash Social Security and Medicare.

The idea that they’re going to cheerfully accept a deal that will take the current deficit off the table as a scare story without doing major damage to the key social insurance programs, and then have a philosophical discussion about how we might change those programs over the longer term, is pure fantasy. That would amount to an admission of defeat on their part.

Brooks be humble…

I hear David Brooks, the NYTimes conservative columnist, is teaching a course on humility at Yale.  There’s so much irony, I just won’t touch it.

I don’t read him these days unless something particular points me there, and I saw a reference to a column he wrote on his favorite topic these days, humility, mentioning Pauline Kael and how she didn’t “suffer fools gladly.”  Hah! I thought, who is she to suffer or not suffer fools?  (I don’t like her film reviews much.)  He dissects the meaning and use of the phrase, and I agree with him there. People who speak foolishly out of naivete, simple ignorance, and the like, should be treated with graciousness and respect.  We’ve all been in that situation, and will be again, but…

As with so much of Brook’s ‘deep’ commentary, I can’t help think that there’s something autobiographical here, some secret wound he’s nursing.  Heavens, did somebody not so nice maybe treat him shabbily, like a damn fool?  Maybe it was someone really smart, who knows a lot about something that Brooks was remarking on (and perhaps knew very little about.)  Maybe, could it be, somebody like Paul Krugman, or some other intellectual?

Let’s face it, people who treat badly the kind of fool I described here are not looked upon well by thoughtful people.  But there is also the other kind of fool, the kind who is ignorant, and prefers to remain so.  The kind who is quite arrogant in, even about his ignorance.  The kind who loves to hear him or herself talk, even when he or she knows nothing about the topic.  Yes, there’s that class, of which Brooks is a premier member, of the pundits, the pedants, and the talking-heads.  They often speak as fools, and you can hardly blame them; it’s their job to keep talking to fill up the air time.  Or to fill up those column inches.  And they do seem to get it into their heads after a while that they actually have powers of intellect which they consistently fail to display.

I’d put Brooks in this latter class of fool.  He’s also paid a huge amount for his chatter.  So if someone takes him down in print or on the air, I will not feel he’s been treated badly, despite his pleas for humility.  It just goes with the territory.

I Am Entitled

Time to revisit that “fiscal cliff” that everyone is blathering about.  Let’s get some clarity, and take a look at the data, the actual facts of income distribution in the USA.

The chart below, from the US Census Bureau, lays it all out.  It’s not a graph that you see much in the news, and certainly not one that politicians use:  I’m not sure which is the more significant reason for this – that they don’t want people to see the facts; that they are incapable of understanding data charts; or that they assume the public is incapable.  Well, here goes…

click to enlarge

As you can see, the Median Household Income is about $49,500.  That’s household income, not individual income, and the average household is about four people.  You know, parents, children, the usual deal, more or less…

So half of all households in America make less than that amount, with quite a lot of people concentrated in the bottom 1/5th of the income scale.  Of course, not everyone lives in NYC where housing is extremely expensive, but most people do live in metropolitan areas, and would you want to live with your family on $49K a year, or less…assuming that you don’t live on that now?

Sooo, in the negotiations over the ‘cliff’, the Republicans are holding out to keep taxes low for people making up to $1,000,000.  Those millionaires can’t afford more annual taxes!  Obama, because he’s a sap in negotiations, or maybe for reasons even worse to contemplate, gave in, and has proposed to raise the limit from $250,000, on which he campaigned, to $400,000.  Everyone making up to $400,000 gets a tax break again.

Meanwhile, he’s caving in on entitlements, i.e. payments to people through programs they pay into under specified ‘agreements’ worked out in Congress.  No freeloaders here:  you join the system and you get a described benefit.  These payouts benefit everyone who works, but they are obviously vastly more important for the people in the bottom 3/5ths of the scale than for the other 40%.

So here’s the thing…The negotiations are about giving a benefit to the top 2%, that grey bar on the right that represents everyone making over $250K (the chart isn’t wide enough to show each increment, so they lump them together), and cutting back on benefits to everyone else.  And the vast majority of the people who need those benefits being cut, really need them, to…er…live, you know…

About That Fiscal Cliff…

When I was a kid, I used to play a game with myself by walking around the house with a vanity mirror held in front of me, face up.  I’d look down at the mirror and see the ceiling above me, but projected downward.  By looking at the mirror as I walked, it seemed as if I were constantly on the verge of stepping off into the void – fun!

Yep, that cliff we hear about endlessly is not the real thing: it’s a manufactured illusion.  Just yesterday, I had the misfortune to catch a sound-bite of a Republican congressman jabbering on about “unsustainable deficits,” and the need for “spending cuts to protect our bond rates.”  You could read Paul Krugman almost at random to have that notion destroyed:  the so-called bond vigilantes have been predicting Armageddon for years, and it just never happens.  And I have a folder full of clippings about the deficit and the doom that awaits us, which also never happens.  I guess the deficit is sustainable, at least for quite a while.  (Oh, we did run a surplus for a few years, but that was under Clinton, so it doesn’t count, and Bush took care of it.)

Frequently, we hear that “we just cannot afford our current entitlement programs.”    Uh…strange.  So, these programs provide valuable, even essential services and support for millions of Americans, so we just have to cut back, right?  Good health care is just too damn costly, by gosh!  We’ll make do, some of us, without it.  In the most wealthy country on the globe.  Where wealth is more concentrated among a few than ever before.  And they’d like to keep it that way.

It’s really quite simple.

Updike and Out!

I have just read what is considered one of John Updike’s best novels, Rabbit Redux, the second of four telling the story of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom’s life.  I found it to border on revolting, almost claustrophobic in its ‘conservative’ resignation to…well, almost everything, misogynistic of course, smug and obtuse about race in America – I could go on.  Updike is obviously an extremely intelligent man, and he writes beautifully, but what is style without content?  What is intelligence without critical appreciation?  Writing a novel isn’t a practical matter, just laying it all out, like engineering!  If you really want a good take-down of the man’s work, you cannot do better than the Gore Vidal in this review of Updike’s memoir and (then) latest novel.

My first exposure to Updike was Roger’s Version, which seemed little more than trash to me, but I was assured by fans that it was the very worst of this prolific writer’s output.  I had read some of his literary reviews and found them sensitive and interesting:  I’d even liked a short story and poem or two that I’d run across.  Time to give him another chance I thought.  While Rabbit Redux is a world away from Roger’s Version, the themes and content are very similar, and I’m done with Mr. Updike.

I had to grit my teeth to finish Redux, it was so deeply boring.  Harry/Rabbit understands little, questions nothing, and acts on instinct, all the while claiming to feel guilt.  I think this is how Updike seeks to portray the beautiful ordinariness of peoples’ lives.  Harry also hits his wife and the eighteen-year old rich drug addict runaway whom he takes in after his wife leaves him.  He and a loony black radical, another house guest  the one pushing dope on the girl, use her as their sex slave while they read Frederick Douglas’ autobiography to one another.  Harry also has a kid who witnesses much of this, whom Harry give beer to drink, and before whom he swears profusely and smokes pot.  He also complains the world is going to hell and that hippies have no respect for their country – go figure.

It sounds melodramatic, and maybe even interesting, but it’s all so flat, so filled with descriptions of the material minutiae of the 1960s, and the people all seem on autopilot, that it is simply excruciating.  Updike is considered a giant of the realist tradition, but to me, none of it seems real: more like the fantasy of reality imagined by an overly literary and intellectual man who is for some reason preoccupied with religion and authority.  Consider:  Harry works as a linotype operator, and comes from a working class family.  His sister goes to Hollywood to become an actress but ends up as an expensive whore.  Everyone in the family seems fine with this:  not a peep about choices, lifestyle, disappointment, anger, whatever, when she breezes home for a few days.  She and Harry chat about fucking a lot.  Just like brothers and sisters everywhere, right?  Maybe I’m naïve…

I could go on a lot about everything in this book that I didn’t like, didn’t believe, or couldn’t fathom, it was so elaborately pointless – the extended descriptions of Harry’s masturbating for example.  The lame discussions of the politics of the Vietnam War.  The constant looming of sex as a instinctual drive that seems to give no one pleasure.  The fact that neither Harry nor anybody else seems to want to try to figure out a way to do something with their lives that satisfies them.  Harry’s love for his son that seems limited to his view of him as a biological extension of himself and that certainly does not involve any care for his welfare beyond asking the drug addicts he harbors not to shoot up in front of him.  And… oh, never mind.

He sure does write sentences well, though.

“Love It or Leave It” – Full Circle!

There has been a lot of discussion about the surprise, even shock, felt by ‘conservatives’ at the failure of Romney to win the presidency.  Some of it, such as this article in the NYTimes today, has focused on the discomfort of right-wingers with the ‘new’ America.

Well, during the Vietnam War protest era, there was a popular bumper sticker directed at those dissidents:  America-Love It or Leave It!  Now, what goes around has come around, and I say to those guys in Montana and Wyoming who just can’t see where they fit into the new multi-cultural, irreligious, liberal-welfare-state Democratic America:  Love it or leave it, and I’d prefer that you just get up and leave, period!

Shoot the Messenger: Comedy & Criticism with Nate Silver

Click for Richard Sala source.

Statistical reports and observed reality do not always correspond, as my favorite comics artist, Richard Sala, illustrates with the image above.  This gives an opening to right-wing critics of the statistician Nate Silver, who has consistently rated Obama the favorite in this election at his blog, 538.com.  I find the attacks on him to be laughable:  yes, he says he votes Democratic; yes, he has strong opinions on the importance of state as opposed to national polls; yes, he predicts the popular vote to be rather close but still rates Obama at more than 80% likely to win.

So what?  As they say in the pundit world, “Here’s the thing…”  In a few days the election will be over and we’ll see whose predictions and analysis were good, and whose were bad.  Let’s just wait and see, heh?