10. I wonder how many Americans realize the community center is not intended for Ground Zero. What will be constructed there includes a 55,000 square foot retail mall. This mall will be deep enough to connect with subway lines — deep enough, that is, to theoretically be embedded in the ashes of some of the 9/11 victims.
…and 9 other things that Ebert knows about the mosque. Excellent stuff.
A very interesting read in the latest issue of GQ: Robert Baer—the former CIA officer on whom George Clooney’s character in Syriana was based—writes an elegy for the dying art of espionage.
There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. The debate over healthcare has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.
I’d like to record some thoughts about President Obama’s recent interview with Fox News Channel host Bret Baier1 before they’re lost down the memory hole.
Above all else, what struck me was Baier’s tenacious fixation on what could be called the process of healthcare reform. Which is to say, the closed-door meetings. The numbers. The kickbacks.
Baier repeatedly asked the President about particular things included in the gargantuan, 1990-page House bill, and did so in the terse insider-speak preferred by insiders and conspiracy theorists. Things like, “So the Connecticut deal is still in?” And, “OK, the Florida deal, in or out?” Obama seemed rankled by this crass oversimplification of things. So was I.
But in the wake of the so-called Cornhusker Kickback, such catchall terms have gained significant currency—especially in the cable news format, where making use of shorthand to describe incredibly complex concepts makes sense. It also makes sense in a blogging format. After all, I’ve done it here. I cannot reasonably expect a reader who has not followed the issue these past six months to understand nonsense like ‘Cornhusker Kickback.’ And I can’t spare the vertical space to treat this post as if it the very first dispatch from the center of the HCR storm.
Which is why the notion that a short television interview—an interview in which journalist and subject spent the full 19 minutes in antlers-fully-locked position—would be sufficient to explain a 1990-page bill, not to mention the flurry of developments that have emerged since HR2932 was unveiled in November, is absurd.
An example. Baier asked Obama to answer some viewer-submitted questions. Here’s one sent by Sandy Moody in Chesterfield, Missouri: “If the health care bill is so wonderful, why do you have to bribe Congress to pass it?”
A political science professor could spend a semester lecturing on such a subject, no?
There was a time when Obama would have relished such an opportunity. His professorial bent has been well-documented. He spent much of 2009 referencing how to bend the cost curve, and how to close the doughnut hole. But the 2010 Obama has made a return to the spirit of the bill. He has made an effort to channel the sort of anecdotal electioneering that the Republicans have made famous. Rather than force people to consider an abstract whole, Obama has chosen to ask them to simply consider themselves.
Of course, the Republicans have done the opposite. They’ve turned their focus to the trees, as it were, instead of the forest. Human misery has been displaced by budgetary paranoia.
There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. I believe we’ve reached that moment. The healthcare debate has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.2 It can no longer be unpacked or disentangled.
Where do you go from there?
In essence—and this is the point I’ve been approaching, slowly—the conflict is really over how easily the nuts and bolts of the issue have been slipped into a black box. Republican leaders have been quick to observe that the bill’s deliberations were supposed to have been televised on C-SPAN. Instead, they lament, much of it has taken form behind closed office doors.
It was a nice thought. However, considering the decentralized and often concurrent nature of such meetings, filming it all—and cutting the mountain of footage into a format understandable by human beings—would have been, at best, a logistical nightmare. At worst, it would have been impossible.
Black boxes are inherently polarizing. You either understand the appeals and shortcomings—i.e. average people do not need to replace the hard drive of their iPhone—or you reject the very notion of trusting that there are planets spinning outside the scope of your personal narrative.
Never has that juddering tension been more keenly felt than during Wednesday’s interview.
Eliot Spitzer wrote a lengthy essay on the the proper role of government in the market1 for the March/April issue of Boston Review.
via TMN
Jacob Weisberg‘s latest piece in Slate (the provocatively titled Down With The People), published this past Saturday, has been in heavy rotation these past few days.
And rightfully so. The subhed:
Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.
At first blush, it’s tough to disagree. And Weisberg offers some pretty compelling (anecdotal) proof of his theory—namely, that many Americans seem to be ruled by their emotional brains when it comes to passing judgment on federal policy. How else to describe the ongoing erosion of the wide-ranging support for 2008′s supremely popular stimulus checks?1.
Not to mention the absurd shift from demanding increased regulation of the financial industry in 2008 and growing leery of it by 2010.
Weisberg offers up the case of Senator Scott Brown, perhaps the most chronologically accessible avatar of this country, materializing before out eyes, that “simultaneously2 demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems.”
Weisberg wisely resists speaking in absolutes and offers no remedy. I’m not so sure there is one, short of either (a) leashing public figures with something more potent than implied dignity3 or (b) making hundreds of millions of people smarter.4
Nevertheless, I believe that what Weisberg has offered is a false dichotomy. Far more nefarious than an exploitable, restless, vindictive and contradictory electorate are the people who have managed to yoke it. People like Brown, Sarah Palin and Roger Ailes, who continue to ride the upswell of deranged populism.5
A more immediate example: an editorial in today’s New York Times describes how Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told Politico, with disturbing candor, that he wants to “block financing for civilian trials of terrorism suspects6 so Republicans can brag about it this fall.”
So it’s difficult for me to place the bulk of the blame on Dumb America for allowing itself to be steered, because that allegory requires the existence of coachmen, flailing away with rhetorical whips.
I think that Weisberg fails to give them the attention they deserve. Certainly, a large number of Americans want—paraphrased from Weisberg—for government to address modern issues while simultaneously shrinking, spending less and reducing their taxes.
But you can’t buy a fantasy if nobody’s selling it.7 Can you?
David Brooks speculates about the DNA of the Tea Party:
The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class.
The spooky picture he paints—after a little paranoid extrapolation of my own—is of a movement that fears knowledge itself.
An elegaic essay by Richard Rodriguez:
In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers—the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.
Fearing reprisal from angry proles, some employees of Goldman Sachs have apparently begun packing heat.
Goldman probably deserves a fake award for being on at the forefront of all the most ridiculous stories of our age (see also: H1N1 vaccines, Doing God’s Work, the bubble machine, &c &c &c).
Matt Taibbi, ever a favorite writer of mine, wrote last week on what has become a favorite subject of mine: the media’s endless takedown of Sarah Palin.
It’s worth reading—even (and, it pains me to write, perhaps especially) if you’re of the opinion that Sarah Palin would make a competent political figure.
