Bryan Joiner

Why then I

Month: January, 2010

January 22, 2010

Understanding the Citizens United Decision (UPDATE)

So I’ve done quite a bit of reading on the Supreme Court decision to lift the ban on corporate donations to campaigns, and I have an honest question: What’s the enormous fuss about? Keith Olbermann asked on the show tonight if it was the end of American democracy. I think that is, to put it mildly, an overstatement of whatever point he’s trying to make. Elections are already bought and sold to an absurd extent, and for this to push the situation far over the line, to me, seriously underestimates how bad it is now. How much worse can it get? How good were the rules that were stopping corporations from making donations in the past?

I’m not asking to antagonize; I honestly want to know.

What I do know is that to suggest that the Supreme Court decision rooted in First Amendment principles and suggest that it signals the end of American democracy is to almost certainly obscure the point with rhetoric. The Supreme Court is not perfect, and I’m not claiming it is. I just don’t see how the future is going to look that markedly different from the past. The Times says it’ll go like this:

If you vote wrong, a lobbyist can now tell any elected official that my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.

“We have got a million we can spend advertising for you or against you — whichever one you want,’ ” a lobbyist can tell lawmakers.

What in God’s name do you think lobbyists were doing before?

The central concern of Democrats seems to be that Republicans are on the side of big corporations, so this favors them. That may be true, but that’s not ever going to change. The solution isn’t to attempt to cap the Republican institutions, but to build up those favorable to Democratic ones. Do you think the Republicans give a flying f*ck that the Unions model has crumbled? No! It’s not a even fight, but the Constitution doesn’t guarantee an even fight, it guarantees a fair one. For a group that’s spent the last year complaining (correctly) that the GOP politicizes everything, the Democrats seemed to have wasted no time politicizing this.

Now, do I think that Congress should fight against this, as President Obama has urged? Sure, but I see it as a band-aid, not a permanent fix. Democrats emboldened by the righteousness of their cause have to remember that no one gives a sh!t about their cause, and that America always has, and always will, run on money. You want to fight the GOP? Get your institutions to work. You have the right institutions to make this happen. The GOP is the military party, the party of big oil and the health care companies. The first is unlikely to change, just as the Democrats will likely forever remain the party of the intellectual aristocracy (and never, ever underestimate the higher education infrastructure we have in this country). The health care thing we’re working on. Big oil? Big oil is a dinosaur. It’s going away, if not tomorrow or next year, in the next 10 years, and Democrats are on the right side. Own green technology and restructure unions to make them an attractive option—and do it before the Republicans try—and you own the future.

All this is easier said than done, I know, but please don’t tell me that the Supreme Court decision is unfair because it favors one side. That falls directly into the narrative of “Who won today?” versus “What happened today?” that our President spoke against at Walter Cronkite’s funeral. I don’t want to know why the GOP won or lost; I want to know how I won or lost. As of now, I don’t see what I lost. The system is the system, and whether you think it’s ridiculous, great, or abhorrent, it’ll now be any or all of those things and transparent. I want to know what’s happening in my country so I can make better choices. I don’t mind a free-for-all if I get to see it unfold.

That’s my instinct, at least. Am I wrong?

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald wrote basically the exact same thing — with more words, and far more detail — in his post today. Also: Moacir, who told me about it.

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January 22, 2010

Salsa Verde: An Appreciation

If you don’t like salsa verde, I don’t like you.

And I like everybody.

It was written.

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January 21, 2010

The Design of the Quake

George Packer in The Talk of the Town:

The earthquake seemed to follow a malignant design. It struck the metropolitan area where almost a third of Haiti’s nine million people live. It flattened the headquarters of the United Nations mission, which would have taken the lead in coördinating relief, and killed dozens of U.N. employees, including, reportedly, the mission chief, Hédi Annabi. In a country without a building code, it wiped out whole neighborhoods of shoddy concrete structures, took down hospitals, wrecked the port, put the airport’s control tower out of action, damaged key institutions from the Presidential Palace to the National Cathedral, killed the archbishop and senior politicians, cut off power and phone service, and blocked passage through the streets. There was almost no heavy equipment in the capital that could be used to move debris off trapped survivors, or even to dig mass graves. “Everything is going wrong,” Guy LaRoche, a hospital manager, said.

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January 21, 2010

Unpublished Posts Theater

Most of the time, I write the posts for this blog in one sitting. Sometimes, albeit rarely, I will write half of a post and come back to it later. Often, though, I’ll write something that I ultimately don’t think is worth posting or completing. These posts will loiter in the “Drafts” folder until there are four or five of them, at which point I will flush them into the void, their underlying ones and zeros erased forever. Today, I pay homage to four posts that are likely about to meet their demise:

“Dog is in the Details”

I never used to be able to finish writing a sentence without reading it over three times first. I needed to make sure everything was spelled correctly and the words went together well. I didn’t realize at the time that I was performing a fundamental act of good writing. By making sure everything was in the right place, I gave myself time to think over the next sentence, and maybe the one after that as well. I minded the process and the results were good. That’s why you mind the process: you get better without realizing it, like a runner who relentlessly chases cars. Even if she never catches the car, that runner’s getting faster and stronger.

“The Nets”

I am confounded by the Nets. I have started to watch them play, at first mostly because I had Devin Harris on my fantasy team, but I’ve continued to watch as Harris’ play has deteriorated to the lowest point yet this season—and he’s still kind of a badass. The team is pretty fascinating because they have some good basketball players—Harris; Brook Lopez, who is just f*cking awesome; Courtney Lee and Chris-Douglas Roberts, all of whom who will be far above-average NBA players, except for perhaps Lee, who may simply be above average. That’s a long way of telling you they’re actually pretty good, except they’re not. They are 2-23 as I write this. And yet.

“The Top Ten Years of the Last Ten Years”

2006: I get a job at a trade magazine. I think I am “better” than it. I am not.

“Bad Decisions”

And then… well, a summit meeting was called to discuss how the terms had been altered. The other party was unhappy with how it had gone down. Being fine with everything, it was my inclination not to attend. I attended anyway. This was a mistake. This wasn’t like a guy in the desert headed for a mirage in the hopes of getting water; it was like heading for a mirage knowing full well that he was going to get a face full of sand.

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January 20, 2010

The Caffeinated Internet

I will resist the urge to post the Humpty Dance below.* Too annoying unless you’re under the  spell of one John Jameson or one of his contemporaries.

Rarely is there a time where I need coffee to become “human,” as the T-shirts say, but today counts. Those shirts are an indication of coffee abuse, by the way. No one’s plunking down $19.99 to inform the world of their caffeine dependency unless they’re pumping enough joe into their bloodstream to wake a wolf that Sarah Palin just shot dead from a helicopter. And no one’s buying those shirts unless they’re in the throes of a caffeine binge. Caffeine plus the Internet has spawned more bad decisions than pride or envy could ever aspire to. Stripping the Internet of its caffeine addicts would be like stripping a caffeine addict of her coffee.

I was searching YouTube for the newest McDonald’s coffee commercial, where a guy makes a morning out of telling people he can’t talk to them before he drinks his coffee, but I found this instead and I have to say it’s pretty good:

* The original title of this post was “Hump Day.” So yeah.

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January 19, 2010

Connecting the Dots on Health Care

If Martha Coakley loses today, and if Scott Brown effectively scuttles the Obama Health Care bill, someone’s eventually going to connect the dots and conclude that it might be Ted Kennedy’s fault. I’m going to do it first.

The facts are these: Ted Kennedy’s wish was to see a health care bill passed. He died while it was being constructed, and it has taken longer than expected to get to the final stages before some version of it is signed into law. None of this, nor the fact that the exuberance of the 18-month campaign has fizzled under the work of actual governance, could really be considered a momentus surprise. Nor is it incredibly surprising, despite what most national news outlets make you think, that a Republican could mount an effective campaign in Massachusetts. I lived there almost exclusively under Republican governors, and more recently, Mitt Romney held that position. I knew far more Republicans when I grew up in Massachusetts than I do now because I chose to be in a place teeming with liberals, just as political pundits seek out other political pundits and create a self-serving narrative where it’s a “shock” that a GOP candidate can compete in the Bay State. Both classes of people — the blue establishment and the punditry — underestimate Republicans at their own risk.

My friend Robb, who is a Republican living in Massachusetts, is pro-Scott Brown. To him, and to others, I sense that they see his insurgent candidacy as a vindication of sorts; Robb parrots tea-party rhetoric on his Facebook page, and while I don’t get the sense he actually believes Barack Obama is a socialist, there’s a certain resentment there that’s exacerbated by living in Massachusetts, which is sort of a Petri Dish for blue ideas. For all I’ve just written, Massachusetts is obviously solidly blue; it’s just that the state has never been afraid to elect a single member of the GOP at any given time. The Republican Party is Massachusetts is always ready to send a message, and the Democratic Party is able to stay in “bend-but-don’t-break” mode and flourish. One loss, for them, isn’t worth crying about—usually.

If Scott Brown wins, it will certainly disrupt the health care bill and possibly scuttle it altogether. Is that worth crying about if you’re a Democrat? Absolutely. Is that worth beating a drum over if you’re a Massachusetts Republican? Strangely enough, I don’t think that’s the motivation here. I think the motivation is far more provincial than that. This move is really meant to stick it to Massachusetts Democrats, and my reasoning is this: If Ted Kennedy was still alive, and this election was still happening, Martha Coakley would wipe the floor with Scott Brown.

Robb posted this Brown quote on his Facebook page the other day—one that I happen to agree with:

“With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy seat and it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.”

… but as true as that is, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference if Kennedy was still alive: If he had resigned early in the Obama term, that would have pegged a special election somewhere between 145 and 160 days from the time of his resignation. Obviously he didn’t know when he was going to die, but having taken the Senate seat with him, he didn’t get to throw his support behind a candidate while he was still alive. Scott Brown tore down the perception that the seat belonged to Kennedy, but he did so because the perception was strong. He has done so as effectively as he could have done, and Martha Coakley has fought back as weakly as anyone could have done. But suppose Ted Kennedy has resigned and his office spent his final weeks urging his supporters that the cause endured, the hope lived, and the dream would never die with Martha Coakley in office. Are you telling me that a guy who posed naked in Cosmo would beat that?

So to any voters in Massachusetts who read this: If you think Scott Brown is a better representative of the people of Massachusetts than Martha Coakley, vote for him. But if you’re voting for Scott Brown as a referendum on Obama, think about this for a second. Obama was a objectively great campaigner, and you likely think he’s a bad President. Scott Brown is objectively a good campaigner… but that doesn’t necessarily make him a good Senator. What you’re taking away from with this vote has the strong, strong potential to affect every American and their children, and their children’s children, for decades. If no one has explained to you why that’s so important, imagine Ted Kennedy is doing it as you enter the voting booth. He might have messed up: He wasn’t there to help you through it, because he didn’t foresee the sequence of events that got us here today. That may be his mistake, but it’s one that hundreds of of millions of Americans will pay for. Health care might die because Ted Kennedy, of all people, miscalculated. It’s my hope that if your mind isn’t made up, you can find that mistake worth forgiving.

That’s the best I can do.

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January 18, 2010

East Pakistan

So this 1970 atlas is really a treasure trove, and I found something I never knew about just now: East Pakistan. Now it’s Bangladesh, but when this book came out it fell under the government of Pakistan, many, many miles to the west. From Wikipedia:

East Pakistan was a former province of Pakistan which existed between 1947 and 1971. East Pakistan was created from Bengal Province based on a plebiscite in what was then British India in 1947. Eastern Bengal chose to join the Dominion of Pakistan and became a province of Pakistan by the name East Bengal. East Bengal, also comprised East Pakistan in 1956 and later became the independent country of Bangladesh after the bloody Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, which took place after General Elections of 1970. Large sections of East Pakistan’s people felt that they were colonised and suppressed by the West Pakistanis.

It’s things like this that I have trouble wrapping my head around. How were these places supposed to be the same place? I realize that this isn’t a unique situation, as I only need to look as far as Alaska to find a modern equivalent. I have, however, always considered Alaska a special case because its terrain relatively inhospitable compared to most places on Earth, and I understand how the land would once be considered “available” to some group or nation. (Thanks, Seward!) I’m not saying all of Pakistan is hospitable, just that the band of terrain that stretches from Pakistan to East Pakistan seems like a much more traditionally forgiving landscape than that beyond the Great White North—as many of India’s more than 1 billion people, including 16 million in greater Kolkota (Calcutta) can attest.

It’s  likely that my edition of the atlas is the second-to-last one that features East Pakistan. This is from the Bangladesh Liberation War Wikipedia entry:

The Bangladesh Liberation War was an armed conflict pitting West Pakistan against East Pakistan (two halves of one country) and India, that resulted in the secession of East Pakistan as the independent nation of Bangladesh.

The war broke out on 26 March 1971 as army units directed by West Pakistan launched a military operation in East Pakistan against Bengali civilians, students, intelligentsia, and armed personnel who were demanding separation from West Pakistan. Bengali military, paramilitary and civilians formed the Mukti Bahini (or liberation army) and used guerrilla warfare tactics to fight against the West Pakistan army. India provided economic, military and diplomatic support to the Mukti Bahini rebels leading Pakistan to launch Operation Chengiz Khan, a pre-emptive attack on the western border of India which started the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.

On 16 December 1971, the allied forces of the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini decisively defeated the West Pakistani forces deployed in the East, resulting in the largest surrender, in terms of the number of prisoners of war, since World War II.

After watching six episodes of Jersey Shore tonight, I needed something like this to get the brain working again.

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January 15, 2010

My Book of Maps

Among the many things that make me a festering nerd of the highest order, I have a giant National Geographic Atlas of the World that I’ll occasionally study over meals. Not only that, I’ve done it since I was a child. Not only that, I’ve done it with the exact same book. The book I own is the 1970 National Geographic Atlas of the World, and I see no reason to update it. I can always find a current map of the world, but what I didn’t know until the fall of the Soviet Union, and what is more pronounced now, is how much a map is just a snapshot in time when the word “map” is commonly used to signify the exact opposite. (This phenomenon is what my friend over here has basically devoted his recent life to studying, and which I wrote about here.)

Last night I thought about going through the book and pulling out the examples of countries whose name had changed, a change which usually precipitates a host of similar changes. Off the top of my head, you’ve got Rhodesia, Burkina Faso, Benin, North/South Vietnam, East/West Germany, the USSR, the borders of Israel/Palestine, Yugoslavia, Egypt (listed as the United African Republic; is that still so), Namibia, NOT “Zaire” (which went to and from that name between then and now), Guinea-Bissau is listed as “Portuguese Guinea” (that could be a technicality) — and I realize I’m only scratching the surface here. I find the whole thing compelling. It’s like a treasure map. A colorful, vibrant treasure map that costs $150 new. So yeah, I like my old map.

I think Ben would kill me if I did all this talking about maps and didn’t do this, so here it goes. And FWIW, as I’ve caught up on about a decade’s worth of music in the last 10 months, the YYY’s are at the absolute top of the list:

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January 15, 2010

Happy Birthday to this guy

Well we’re here again, aren’t we? That’ll happen. Gonna have a good day today. I can feel it.

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January 14, 2010

The List

The list of stuff I need to buy for my apartment is staggering. This is the first time I’ve been living by myself, so I lack many of the basic possessions of a household. A hammer, for instance. I didn’t have one of those until a couple months ago, and until about a month after I needed it (I’m good at putting things off). After years of buying things in the moment for the moment, it’s odd that I’m buying things that will belong to me, potentially, forever. I feel like I’m in high school again. It’s bizarre. At the same time, I’m wary of valuing my possessions too much. What I value now is motion. What the last couple days have taught me—or reminded me of, as this happens several times per year—is that I need to stay focused on working through things like, well, work blowouts. I didn’t end up going in to the office today, handling a minor early morning crisis that could have easily been avoided (by myself, but mostly the other party, if they had done their job in a timely manner) before spending the rest of the day “recovering.” This meant watching Capote, which I had DVR’ed off IFC, and drinking Green Tea until I ran out, which prompted a Trader Joe’s run at around 8 p.m. that finally got me up and moving for the day. I don’t like going to Trader Joe’s after work, and as such rarely go, but today the whole thing flowed very nicely and I just saved myself a bunch on lunch for the next week or so.

That motion eventually pushed me to the gym, where I had a workout the vigorousness of which I haven’t had in years. Honestly, I started thinking of Sarah Palin. I thought: If she is inspired to be her dumb idiot self and it works that well for her and she gets her inspiration from running, why am I half-assing it here? And soon enough, I was flying around a fake track conscious of the scowl on my face. The whole thing was cathartic. I wonder if it’s what my friend Ravi has gone through in the last couple years, as he’s transformed himself from a beer-guzzler into a lithe semi-triathalete who beat the tar out of me in a four mile race last month. I’ve committed to three races with him this year. I have to do better, especially at $40 or so a race. You get fun shirts though.

Anyhow one thing I need to buy is a bedframe, and about $200 worth of other stuff for my bed. And a new comforter, because mine leaks fluff (which has a nasty way of infesting the apartment). So I’ve got all the stuff here (on the bed from which I’m typing), and then you move onto the bedside table, which doesn’t exist and probably should, and you put it on the list… and it reminds me of an old joke a friend used to make about Chicago construction. As soon as they were done with all of it, he said, it would be time to start again. The list never ends.

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Also on the list would be writing something eloquent about Haiti, but I don’t know what to say.

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