Tim Stark's Open Salon Blog

No more .400 hitters, no more FDRs

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:08:29 -0400

In Full House (1996) Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist to the people, laments the passing of the heady days of multiple .400+ hitters in American baseball. His explanation for this, resting in a biology text (yeah!), is that creatures in the evolutionary systems they are in (including we self-aware ones) tend to reach a sort of detente of abilities and thus, once pitching caught up to early leads in batting, once the game reached a stasis under the way it was set up, the balance settled in to whatever the modern stats in batting percentages (below .400) and ERAs are. Outstanding performance (and, to be fair, abnormally extra-shitty performance) is not allowed by such a system (less variance in his terms). It just is what it is -- the way baseball is set up, you don't get the badass 400 hitters anymore. You get the usual suspects and their usual results.

Unless, of course, you change the rules. All organized sports have committees that, in order not just to address crises but also achieve desired (future) goals, change the dynamics of the game and thus its outcome or value as theater. My personal favorite is the recent deliberate move to make ice hockey more violent. It works.

We need a rule change in American politics if we ever want another FDR. Right now any variation towards excellence, towards progress, towards improvement in implementation of the stated goals of our social contract, is beaten in the face by a bully with a stupid citizen stick until it goes back to its dark corner to doubt itself. FDR was the most confident sonofabitch to grace the DC swamp and that didn't hurt, but now that neoliberalism and its BFF corporate power are arrayed against a hapless or worst citizenry that gets most of its information from its abusers (the same corporations), even FDR, I submit, couldn't get doctors and insurance company luckies to buy fewer Porsches.

Notice in print and blogs that progressives (Nobel-prize winning calm people like Paul Krugman, and the most deliberate considerer of facts to ever blog, Glen Greenwald) are so sad about prospects for the public option that they are turning on the president, questioning his intentions (in a way, just like the wingnut Fox News assholes have always done, but within the realm of earthly possibilities) and backing up their assertions with descriptions of a system that cannot permit what they desire. They want some variance in a system that allows none.

We cannot have improvements in the United States unless the rules are changed. And, since we don't know if we have reached the stasis point a la Full House, things may get a lot worse and then stay that way until the rules change. Only thing we can be sure of is that they are not going to get better.

Healthcare, stupidity, democracy, Churchill

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:08:09 -0400

Wow the times are rich for speculation on human limitations and their effect on American democracy!

Whenever my heroes are at odds with each other I, like Gene Lyons' horses, get a little scared.¹ I agree that people behave this way. But they don't have to and they shouldn't.

As an evolutionary biologist, I'm not given to denying my connection to all beings great and small (and that I am barely not a chimpanzee and such), but I observe that I am, or at least I can (and should?) be, a little more sophisticated in my assessment of my surroundings (especially over time and in the abstract) than the quarter horse I used to ride while driving cattle in Montana². So rather than run from a situation that, unlike a horse, I recognize as being designed to make me run I am going to try and address it. Horses aren't only not smart enough to lie, they aren't smart enough to suspect it in others. So do we fault people for being stupid racists (evolutionarily derived traits) or do we fault them for not employing critical thinking skills³ and imply that this is an excuse for being manipulated to act like stupid racists?

You can claim the latter isn't what is going on here but it is. Look around at the utterly innumerable examples of open, cynical pandering to human horses not just in the context of healthcare (I will not call it a debate) but in the very design of our economy and the practice of our government. Every now and then someone writes an article lambasting unnamed over-privileged (true!) liberals for not understanding the value systems of poor rural conservatives that would send there family members to war⁴, but they never leave the scene without letting you know that they are doing this to excuse the stupid behavior of these people with said misunderstood values. How is this evaluation superior? Does it allow you to not feel arrogant?

We all are influenced by biological drives. They are amoral. Our selection of their influence on our behavior, to identify the only remaining ground on which free will may stand (not for long!⁵), is not. For fuck's sake, the British created their national health service while hiding in bomb shelters. Why bother to excuse anyone's behavior when that person acts like a fool, not acknowledging the mental or physical structures around them? Even when that person is everyman. Said person either can't or isn't paying attention. The former means they should be excused from debate (and the associated privileges) and the latter means they are obliged to (and should be called out if they don't) address it better than a horse would.

It is stupid to believe that Obama is a fascist regardless of your story. A few dishonest people, accompanied by some bullies, are manipulating a big bunch of stupid people in this country. That we make policy this way is the thing to debate.

¹ Does it appear to anyone else that the primary theme of his story comes off not as intended (blame the sinister manipulation of available media, along with lazy (maybe stupid, maybe purchased) journalists and politicians who are supposed to oppose it) but rather leaves one with the idea that humans act stupid as we are simply innocent and ignorant like horses. Or maybe not we, just they.

² Name of Snort. OK so there is my horse street cred.

³ i.e. being simple in the head.

⁴ Good one in Harper's not too long ago. I habitually peel of my mailing label prior to registering my subscription so I am having trouble searching the site for the proper reference. I am not a horse, but I keep records like one.

⁵ Mathematicians such as Stephen Wolfram, and a bunch of philosophers that like to play with MRI machines (normal coursework for a Princeton undergrad) are among those at the gates.

Healthcare strategery?

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:08:22 -0400

Early CNN speculates (the graphics - I can't hear it in the bar where I eat breakfast) on the thing so many of us have been begging for: the White House may actually propose something and try to get it through sans Republicans.

Was Kathleen Sebelius' unscripted leak actually scripted? A weather balloon to see how many phone calls and emails the president could count on being sent to congress should he pull a bill out of his briefcase and send it to the Democrats?

The Hoover Dam and insurance today

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:08:35 -0400

The Hoover Dam, a controversial (mainly over division of the anticipated benefit) giant federal project, was completed under budget and two years ahead of schedule.¹ People with names died; enough concrete was poured (24/7 for over two years) to pave a highway from Seattle to Miami. A dog won a permanent, marked federal gravesite for his contribution to the mental health of the workers.

Physically bisecting the project, down the middle of the Colorado River that the dam controls, is the Arizona - Nevada state line. There being no obvious physical/logistical bias across that border, the fact that a nonrandom majority of the 96 corpses (not including surveyors) officially produced during construction came to rest in Arizona is explained in the mythology (by, for example, the tour guides) as a desire by the close-knit workers to see the grieving family receive the superior of the two states' competing death benefits. If you died in Arizona, said applicable law, you were worth more to your family than if you happened to kick it in Nevada. I will resist the obvious comment that life in Nevada is particularly cheap (oops, I guess I didn't). I had a nice time in Vegas last week anyway.

Life is competition wherever you live (and whenever that was or is). But in the US, like the song goes, life is a carnival. We keep trying to make baby steps forward by putting a few bits of anxiety-lowering security (civilization) in place. But we lag behind other western nations in most measurements. I explain this to european counterparts in the usual manner by invoking our winner-take-all political history and saying that every second of your day here is just another play in a relentless football game. Not just the life-and-death stuff. If you don't have your Safeway card, your groceries will cost a lot more.² Alliances, strategy, a good memory for (what should be meaningless) detail. Deadwood, I tell everyone, just watch Deadwood, and you will understand everything about this country.

Is healthcare ever going to not be part of the game here? What does it take to make something as obviously valuable as traffic control as valued as traffic control? Who has to die?

¹ Pre-post-modern crisis, I guess.

² I still can't get this sufficiently explained to my Spanish girlfriend ³.

3 Costco doesn't just make you join the club, but also, as she points out, shopping there is literally like being on the field during a game. At least you get to go to the sidelines for a hotdog.

Not PC, and cool.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:08:28 -0400

I apologize to my reader( s ) for disappearing without a trace into the desert last week.

Heading west from Durango on US Highway 160, one soon comes upon the name of the great Moctezuma, imprisoned by the Spanish and later stoned to death by his own people, now memorialized in the names of motels and car washes in the very same town named for his nemesis, Cortez. Poor Moctezuma, his courtiers murdered and his spies' (according to Cortés) hands cut off, his ghost is left to choose mostly between cheesy commercial references (as above) and being the invisible cause of cases of diarrhea among foreign travelers to Mexico. I remember learning about the Spanish and their cutting-off-hands thing during the 500-year anniversary of Columbus' visit to this continent. Would have loved to have seen the "Hands-Free Motel" while I was driving through.

But the cool discovery comes at Teec Nos Pos, just past the Four Corners monument in the Navajo Nation. Still on US 160, you come upon Red Mesa High, student population mostly (high 90%s) Indian, you read on the marquee that they self refer as the "Redskins." It seems that a lot of the regressive stupidity that was the first wave of political correctness has passed in this country. We see magazine ads, from Indian interests, titled "Think Indian," and it is still OK to refer to black people as black people. I always disliked "African-American" for its clunkiness and length, not even getting started on accuracy, precision, or installation of stiffness and fear issues. In Canada we teased each other for our backgrounds, biological and otherwise, indicating to me a great leap forward (over certain evolutionary drives) in our comfort level with ourselves and each other. I shake my head every time I hear an educated person use an appearance-based, hyphenated appellation for a person. The relatively underprivileged Indians out roasting their red skins in the Arizona desert are way ahead of you.

Lenny Bruce destroyed PC decades before it got started. Ask his good friend, the black dude Dick Gregory. But we still had to go through it, didn't we? Now we are torturing ourselves over health care. Early blogs today are predicting (declaring) the demise of the public option. We all know, intellectually, that it is the thing that must be addressed, but we have to go through the motions of bowing to one of the dysfunctional parts of capitalism for how many more years? Just enough of us have insurance to keep us from fighting for those who don't, right? So we stand there and actually call this a debate when on one side we have liars, plain and simple, some informed but most just fearful bullies (no need to elaborate), and on the other fearful apologists (those who have a decent health care deal already) and a whole lot of the just fearful (we must compromise with the bullies and the selfish). Not many advocates. There are real differences between those who do and don't want health care for all, just like there are real differences between races, but we will not get to talk about them in this country. Let's just keep shoveling on the PC.

Uncivilized and terrified citizens of the United States, you cannot go to the doctor unless you have money.