On Class Warfare

These are words that most Americans don’t want to hear. If they’re Republicans, they don’t want to hear them because they’re doing very well out of class warfare, thank you; if they’re Democrats, they are too, though some of them might feel a teeny bit guilty about it. The kinds of people who talk about it or even think about it are regarded as crackpots, holdovers from the sixties, or outright pinko commie bastards.

We were musing this morning on why Marxist rhetoric gets people so uncomfortable here, when the rhetoric of fundamentalist crackpot capitalists is hardly noticed. I think George Lakoff would argue that it’s because the Republicans have done a good job with their framing, but I think there’s more to it than that.

The stark images of destitute African Americans made homeless in the wake of the hurricane in New Orleans are a clue.

It’s tied to race, but it’s not just race. It’s tied to class, but it’s not just class.

We went to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe in Davis today. These people, at least, are not afraid to take on class warfare, or American imperialism, or the evils of globalization.

Refreshing.

What I Can Do

There has been no shortage of pieces in blogland over the past week about Hurrricane Katrina, who screwed up, What This Says About America, who screwed up, white guilt, what it means to be poor (in general, but mostly in the United States), liberal guilt, rich guilt, and who screwed up.

Enough with the handwringing already.

I can

a) give money to Habitat for Humanity and Heifer International, programs which will help people long after the Red Cross has moved out

b) make it known in my dealings with folks I work with, or talk with, or stand next to at the grocery store, that I do not consider the word “looter” an acceptable synonym for “African American.”

c) put pressure on my elected officials to ask hard questions, and not relent until they’ve been answered. They need to ask some easy questions too, like when is Mr. Brown going to get fired from FEMA.

d) seriously examine my lifestyle and curtail the ways in which it is wasteful, unmindful, unthinking. The ways in which it might, with or without my knowledge, exploit others. Focus on low impact environmentally, high impact socially. This will take some time.

e) offer to make it easy for someone whose skills might be put to good use in hurricane relief efforts to get there, like looking after their pets. UC Davis is giving employees who wish to volunteer paid leave. I think this is laudable and I’d like to support it however I can.

f) support community efforts on the ground to rebuild New Orleans and surrounding areas according to the needs of the people who live there, rather than according to the wishes of the government, developers or speculators, corrupt officials, and the rest of the corporate looting mob.

I’m still thinking, but this is a start.

Horses For Courses

This morning’s revelation was that the director of FEMA, Michael Brown (who yesterday didn’t even know that there were now tens of thousands of people at the Convention Center), was drummed out of his previous job as a lawyer for the International Arabian Horse Association for financially and legally running the organization into the ground. The correspondent reporting this doesn’t mince words:

I think I’ve told you that I’m into Arab horses. Well, for 3 years Michael Brown was hired and then fired by our IAHA, the International Arabian Horse Assoc. He was an unmitigated, total fucking disaster. I was shocked as hell when captain clueless put him in charge of FEMA a couple of years ago. He or the WH lied on the WH presser announcing him to FEMA. IAHA was never connected to the Olympic Comm, only the half Arab registry then and the governing body to the state and local Arabian horse clubs. He ruined IAHA financially so badly that we had to change the name and combine it with the Purebred registry.

Hmm, I can hear it now: “Sounds like he’d be great for the FEMA job, doesn’t he, Dick.”

Your Tax Cuts at Work

That would make a good sign for a particularly potholed stretch of road.

Or a levee in poor nick.

It has been well reported that part of the reason for the levee catastrophe in New Orleans was the diversion of funds from engineering efforts on the levees to the Iraq war. And it has been four years since 9/11—if anything this disaster proves is the uselessness of that stepchild the Department of Homeland Security, which has only obfuscated disaster preparedness in this country.

But the roots of this disaster certainly predate Bush, if not Bushism. I’m livid at the culture of the Tax Cut.

I graduated from a public high school in California in 1981, and always have felt I received a good education there. But that was a matter of timing. In 1978, the voters of the state passed Proposition 13, an initiative limiting property tax increases, all in the name of tax relief. Ever since then, funding for education, and many other things, plummeted, and the California public school system devolved into a sorry mess. My own school district would be bankrupt less than a decade after I graduated.

Infrastructure. You guys—that’s what government is meant to provide. And guess what, that takes tax money.

Pica tells me that the head of infectious disease at the UCD Medical Center has just headed off to New Orleans. I don’t even want to contemplate what our failure to invest in infrastructure has done to the public health system of the Gulf Coast. I imagine it has been barely getting by in normal times, and is now completely overwhelmed by this crisis.

The "M" Word

One of the advantages of working in academia, which I’ve done most of my professional life, is that you get quite insulated from corporate doublespeak, the scarily surreal world of Dilbert. This is changing, though. Universities in the U.S. are facing budget cuts and all compete for the best students. In upper levels of university administration this means that eyes are ever more fixed on the bottom line, and how to improve it. Strategic plans and mission statements pop up like Hello Kitty banners all over the place. Nobody ever pays any attention to them, but it’s important to be seen to be “doing” something. Style, not substance. Slick, not sweaty. Fluff.

And then, suddenly, right out of the blue, everyone’s a goddam marketing expert. Oh, but you have to have branding, a veterinary epidemiologist tells me. We need a logo, says another one, never mind that this contradicts university policy (there is already a UC Davis logo and an illegitimate Vet Med logo, and we need a third on top of that? Oy.). I’m a communications specialist and I agree, the message needs to get out there, but I get very weary of these pushes to corporateness when underneath it all it’s not about being better or more effective, it’s about looking good and staying on message.

Weary, and also suspicious. If we have an undergraduate drinking problem—which we do—surely the way to address it is not by marketing and advertising to the students but by trying to understand exactly what it is that makes them want to drink 21 shots on their 21st birthday (hint: it’s not because they’re a member of the “Millennial Generation,” a term coined by a clever dick marketing whizz). I wish more emphasis were placed on learning around here rather than how to attract more dollars. It’s rule by committee taken to glossy, ludicrous extremes.

Everyone protests that more dollars will lead to better learning, but I’m seeing that this marketing drive has taken on a life of its own, has become its own end.

Which, if you think about the most successful marketing campaign in history, is just about on the mark. It was a few unsavory characters in Germany in the 1930s who got it so very right, where the logo became the vortex leading to a hell never before seen. Logo? Check. Strategic plan? Check. Staying on message? Check, check, check mate.

If you need a marketing campaign to be so successful, though, where’s Osama Bin Laden’s? Where’s the logo? Where’s the strategic plan? Where’s the mission statement? Where are the ubiquitous ineffectual committees? Oh. Right. In Washington.

Fruit

Go and see Blaugustine for today (there is no permalink).

Right away.

Stone

Three things:

I’m sickened by violence, this violence, our violence, the spiral this creates.

I’m certain Bush is mentally ill.

And I’m furious that our so-called leaders seem so quick to make political capital out of this morning’s attacks. It’s grotesque.

A Pink Dinner

We had dinner at Natalie and Ben’s this evening, a small get-together to start organizing the next efforts of the Davis group of Code Pink. This will be a campaign to bring home the state National Guard from Iraq, a movement that has started especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the National Guard always plays an important role in summer forest fire control.

I have done nothing remotely activist since the elections, which surely sent a lot of us into deep torpor. Thankfully, there are those who have been carrying on the good work all along, and we left a bit more inspired, not to mention delighted to have met Natalie and Ben’s two new year-old kitties, who even have their very own scratching post trimmed in pink.

Middle Course

The Senate this afternoon reached a compromise over the filibuster standoff. Hard-liners on both sides are decrying it, which I suppose means it was a good day for moderation. Anyway, how can one not be a little pleased when Michelle Malkin is left sputtering “the GOP parade of pusillanimity marches on. With this pathetic cave-in, the Republicans have sealed their fate as a Majority in Name Only.” And more significantly, James Dobson is saying that the compromise was a “complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans and a great victory for united Democrats.” (Via Crooks and Liars.)

Frist lost for sure in this turn of events, and by extension so did Bush and the religious Right. The moderate Republicans are asserting themselves: let’s hope this marks the widening of the fissure between the moderates and the radical Right.

One final skirmish remains in this particular battle: it is by no means a sure thing that the three judges that the Democrats agreed not to filibuster are all going to win Senate approval. At least that’s what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is hinting.

Rule Creep

Back in 1982 Douglas Hofstadter in his Scientific American column Metamagical Themas described a game called Nomic which was invented by philosopher Peter Suber. Nomic is a game where play consists of modifying its own rules. Initially rules changes have to be by unanimous consent, but this rule itself can and usually does change. Play continues until one party twists things so that they are the winner, or the game mutates into something completely different. It was a game perhaps ahead of its time, and play of it spread on the ARPANET which then turned into the Internet. Nowadays the home for the game is at nomic.net.

Would that real life were as playful as games of Nomic. The Republicans are about to pull a maneuver which, if this were a game, would lead to shouts of cheating, an argument, and then one party storming out of the house not to return. Changing the parliamentary rules of the Senate takes a two-thirds vote. If the Republicans carry out their threat to eliminate the judicial filibuster through only a majority vote (which they can do in actuality since they are the majority, and nobody is in a position to call them on the rule violation), they will have effectively broken the rule system. Simply put, this deed would be an act of fascism. And as the changes in the rules creep on we find ourselves disintegrating ever more into the soup.