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Reading Tea Leaves, a view from abroad
Charley Bravo - 11/4/10

Enveloped in hyped cacophonies, Americans try to sort out the deeper meanings behind Tuesdays elections. Many just want to turn off the narrative freak show. Others are obsessed with the multiplicitous angles, trying to discern the earnest from the cunning. So far, one of the most trenchant observations came last night when Jon Stewart displayed the wild contradiction between Republican 'tsunami' metaphors in a win of "bubonic proportions" and the simultaneous effacement where there is "no mandate", no real win for the GOP - where Obama is still "the Big Duke" (i.e. "his" war, "his" economy, etc). Has anybody found the "Earthquake Tsunami of Nothing" memo where this double rhetoric was spelled out in bullet points? But I digress.

Sometimes it pays to take a break from it all and just listen. Armed with the reminder that often the best historians of a culture were outsiders, it may pay to relax the instinct for insta-analysis and take in a view from abroad. Below are a range of views from the German press, reported first in Spiegel Online:

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"Europeans have to understand that America is different, and that means it is also different from how they would like it to be. And secondly any autopsy of the Democrats' massive defeat on Tuesday shows that the right did not prevail simply due to their own strength. This was a collapse of the Obama coalition -- because the president has lost the support of America's middle class."

"In Western Europe Obama still enjoys almost messianic approval ratings of 80 percent. Nowhere else on earth regards Obama's program as more self-evident. Reforms such as health insurance for all, an active state and more environmental and climate protection are seen as catch-up Europeanization, a simple normalization. Millions of Americans, on the other hand, see this... Read More >>

Chilean Miner Hot
XHerakleitos - 10/27/10

Scientists monitoring earthquakes for possible tsunamis were thrown off recently by a seismic torrent of out®age on Fox News over Juan William's firing. Current theory attributes the magnitude of the event to a virtual Spannungsbogen where built up resentment over the survival of actual journalistic standards finally snapped with a gaseous explosion of pyroclastic invective - with such hot magma as asking whether NPR is an agent of jihadist inquisition.

As usual Jon Stewart best nails the sense of it.

Unfortunately, the aftershocks will continue to eclipse other matters which might better deserve our attention. Head spinning unnaturally, Karl Rove unleashed a stream of projectile vomit rivaling Linda Blair's performance in the Exorcist with "45 percent of NPR listeners were Saddam Hussein." Somebody please let him know that Ketsup has natural mellowing agents.

Meanwhile, we're treated to hand wringing defenses of Mr. Williams which appear to buy into the Fox notion of tolerance and diversity. The firing of Williams is supposedly the "left wing" equivalent to the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. But whether comparisons are between Sherrod, Don Imus (who's firing Williams defended) or Mel Gibson, there's a glaring difference. Juan Williams is a journalist ... supposed to be a journalist.

When did fighting to keep that ideal real become a mere "leftist" sport? Is that really possible? If we find ourselves in a civil society where that's not a category mistake, then somebody else is probably going to find us, along with our stuff, frozen in the aweful repose of a future Pompei.

Taken in fuller context, Williams may have backtracked some degree by implication. Trouble is, there's a bigger context yet - the palpably anti-journalistic atmospherics of Fox News itself. Not only has Williams slipped into hosting and appearing on the O'Reilly Factor, he slipped into Fox's pandemic premium on registering and validating immediate, unreflective feelings.

Sure the continental drift edging away from science toward the abyss of sentimentality carries more than one network but Fox is on the bleeding edge of the subduction zone. Now perhaps journalism is more art than science, but ... Read More >>

Automatic For The People: Colbert, Stewart and the spacing of absurdity
XHerakleitos - 10/7/10

Somewhere deep in Fox News HQ there's a file on the disturbing phenomenon of Comedy Central's chief luminaries, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. One of the documents has to be titled The Humor Gap: Not very fair and balanced. Meetings no doubt wrestled with ugly implications, the embarrassing situation where good comedy appears to be a monopoly of the Left. Embarrassment was only underscored with wretched forays such as The 1/2 Hour News Hour and unearthing Dennis Miller's routine from its ironic fate in the comedy composte pile of the arcane.

Whatever the motivations for this botched attempt, Roger Ailes likely had to supress rolling his eyes more than once over memos and reports casting the problem in terms of left and right. For if there's an emergency here, it's a deeper threat to the illusion upon which Fox News insinuates itself into the tissue of a marketing demographic. "Fair and balanced" is the hook of a very successful advertising vehicle.

When Mr. Ailes was a chief marketing operative in the 1988 Bush Sr. campaign, he likely picked up a gem of an idea watching CBN, vehicle of then annoying primary threat, Pat Robertson. The CBN News set Pat up as Jehovah's arch commentator on all the "news". But the key here was recognizing the balkanization of the news consuming demographic, a scene where one could get away with framing reality in such a way that "standards" of journalism were fittingly transformed in the mind of the consumer as engaged in courting Truth. Tweaked a bit here and there...and Max Weber's thesis about modern capitalism gains another point of traction, as the formula of success moves beyond its inaugural religious impetus. The secular and religious alike can revel in "Fair and Balanced", given that political reality so cleanly cleaves along the natural fault-line of "conservative" and "liberal".

Now as Colbert & Stewart ride a popular wave into a Halloween Eve rally, one suspects Mr. Ailes shrugs off any sense of alarm. From all quarters, they and their fans are roped into the the liberal corral. The mere fact it all transpires in the echo of Glen Beck means it must be liberal, even leftist. Nothing appears to really challenge the spell of the deeper marketing schema. ...Read More >>

Truthiness Triumphal!
Charley Bravo - 9/17/10

In a beautiful testimony to the power of a single, inspired voice, Steven Colbert and John Stewart have announced a joint rally at the end of October.

The post inspired an internet frenzy ultimately focused through colbertrally.com and a real grassroots movement born of recognition that at long last, and not since the movie Network presciently anticipated the transform of network news into a steaming pustule of cerebral putrescence, two brighter lights stand before the whiter than white, steel belted radial herd and proclaim "this is not a psychotic episode - it's a cleansing moment of clarity".

Let me be the first to grovel and abase myself before this manifest motherlode of truthtacular spontaneity. Hope to see you there.

Feelings in the news: equivalency and the exception
Charley Bravo - 9/17/10

Media voices speaking against Mosques and Islam have cited feelings, claiming "gross insensitivity". Repeated in myriad venues, their point is that 9/11 families, New Yorkers or Americans at large have such strong feelings that issues aren't really about 1st Amendment rights but, rather, about a lack of sensitivity. The outsiders and minorities are neither respectful nor tactful in the presence of mainstream gut intuitions.

It is not presently known how many who advance this line have at some point attacked the phenomenon of "political correctness" or made snarky references to singing Kumbaya in the face of emotively driven sensibilities.

William Saletan asks What is behind those feelings? He argues that, while people are entitled to feelings (especially those based on suffering), such entitlement breaks down upon attempts to socially or politically restrict whole classes. Yet it remains unclear if anything rational is indeed behind these feelings such that those who hold them would acknowledge his subtle distinction.

William Dalrymple remarks that Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Sufi imam and, moreover, that Sufism is an esoteric, mystical form of Islam radical only in its severe opposition to jihadist Wahhabism. This and his point that this New York imam is part of a vanguard of Islamic opposition to extremism (risking their lives in a war on terror) all over the Muslim world has not been a talking point in any Tea Party or Republican presentations. Feelings, in fact nothing more than feelings, appear sufficient... Read More >>

Siren Song of Iran
Citizen Zed - 9/3/10

Flashpoint Iran. The next great catastrophe – or is it just the sordid cherry on top of a confection we've baked for ourselves? Groupthink usually gets its name by a majority only after things careen into disaster. Foresight gets even harder when we're caught up reacting in the wake of other calamities. Iran could well be the next.

“Iran, is going to have a nuclear weapon and it's going to throw it around like mad. And Israel will certainly be the first target. And the world's going to go to war over this. ... As sure as I'm sitting here, I know it's coming. ...if you remember how much this sounds like the workup to WWII, when everybody was letting things go by, letting things happen, and nobody was doing anything to stop what was clearly a track toward war”

So says Lawrence Eagleburger on the Fox Cavuto show, a face du jour for the cause. But what we're really letting happen, letting slide, is precisely the bassackward nature of the alarmist drive to intervention. For the real threat is not Iran. It's us.

It's not just lazy journalism failing to question Eagleburger's received wisdom. Deeper down, regardless of surface disagreements about how to deal with Iran, most of us are drinking the same kool-aid. Ingredient numero uno: “Iran cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons”.

Even the Obama Administration has a sugar high on that one. But this is simply absurd in a number of ways. For Iran will have a nuclear weapon if it wants Read More >>

What Comes First?
XHerakleitos - 8/20/10

Priorities are clearly out of whack, things aren't working. The slate is more blank than usual and here comes the question. We usually don't ask it so much as it comes at us with a harrowing, gut level aversion to creaking, rusty hinges swinging emergency's door wide open. Contingency can abound coarsely enough that no plan holds up, as if reality had a hole in every pocket. What comes first now? There's no quick answer. But if timing is everything, one can't tarry with it forever.

Sometimes you just have to move without a clear answer. And for the sake of the kids, one may need to pretend to know. When they're experienced, they'll understand that not even trial and error can gain purchase unless some moves are made.

One philosopher once made a similar point, characterizing another's fear of error as a fear of truth. In their own way each wrestled with first questions, what comes first, and how really to begin. Philosophy struggles to remain in the question... But, whatever that means, if we are really struck and stuck with this question now, what's more annoying than philosophy's inaccessible torsions, what's more obvious than its exorbitant irrelevancy?

Economic trauma nationally.. globally. The sublime confidence in markets and hyper-consumerism swept into a torrent of uncertainty. A climactic clusterfuck, where all of us catch up to scientific consensus that we've been unconsciously terraforming our own planet. Nuclear genies popping out of too many bottles - and a palpable sense that this is only one facet of a technological overload to any regulative faculties. Meanwhile, in a strange market for answers, religious extremism and slick bombast blooms in a petri dish bereft of any rational immunology. Science can't answer our deepest questions, 'politics' has become synonymous with 'bullshit', "breaking news" is broken news, and kitchens once alive in the art of healthy discourse are running wild with cockroaches and vermin.

"There's flies in the kitchen
I can hear 'em there buzzing
And I ain't done nothing since I woke up today.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say"

Can we fashion anything like an Angel from Montgomery, discover some transcendental pardon from this sentence, or are we doomed to believe in this living? Amidst bewilderment sliding into torpor, we want to believe there's a diamond hiding in the dust. I want to say there's an echo, maybe just a latent reverberation of what really makes us ourselves.

If we experience those unforeseen, beautiful moments were we see ourselves in another - and know with some crazy certainty that they see themselves in us, then we're both alive to something amazing. In the advent of that weird mutual ken, a kind of recognition we recognize even if we can't quite put a finger on just what it is, there's a solvent that cuts the rust of dogmatism and paint-by-numbers ideology. There's a catalyst for ritual, tradition, and language to rework itself. There's an answer to the question of what comes first now. We could be missing it, and dimly trying to find our way back to something we already know. But it's a damn good answer nevertheless. Because whatever the larger problems, getting out is going to take allies - or at the very least is in some manner connected to working with others.

Even with this provisional answer, we're thrown into philosophy like it or not. When things are so bad we're hit with terrifying intimations of the need to question and rework our most basic premises, philosophy throws itself at us. But oh no... its dated wardrobe of anachronistic costumes, the horror of the abstruse, of an alienated discourse inside museums where "infinity goes up on trial". And yet, insofar as philosophy tries to keep itself in the question, perhaps at its best it could mean nothing more esoteric than trying to hang on to a critically important pulse hitched alongside and running counter to any scheme of reason wherein we might get trapped - a cultivated infusion of the Mona Lisa's smile.

At some levels I think we all get this. Everyday we're moving in and about a constellation of ritual enactments, loose roles and figurative frames. Generally we see incompetence (and fear becoming prey to it) in two ways: Either someone is too engrossed in one frame, oblivious to shifting gears when appropriate, or too disengaged from any particular frame such that they can't get any traction into what is really going on. You can't get too drunk with the swill of any one joint, can't zone out altogether. We have to check either possible fate.

The secret sauce for that balancing act may be a challenge to talk about, but one can see it. It shows itself already in small children playing, almost naively able to negotiate the rules of role-play games, slide into the parts and bounce back out again. In one turn suspending and tooling the game, in another letting go and suspending disbelief. Amidst this dance, the kids who get stuck in either extreme aren't much fun to play with.

"You've heard the 11th Commandment haven't you?", my Grandfather would ask the bent out of shape Baptist Preacher in an oft repeated story. "No such thing", says the Preacher. "Oh yes there is: Thou shall not take thyself too damned seriously". Let's borrow a youthful spark of wonder and hold it like a vaccine against taking ourselves and any one story too damned seriously. Let's remember that mutual zone of recognition where the "we" happens, an ironic cogitamus ergo sum, a "we think therefore I am".

Up against all we face now, then we might really appreciate the truth of fiction, know ourselves better, and keep one step ahead of dogmatism. It could well be the first thing in learning to laugh again.

8/14/10

Nature loves to hide itself everywhere in secret packages ready to burst forth when the time is right. The whole of life can rebound again from the smallest, seemingly insignificant shard. From the stuff of dead stars we rise up and walk, curious over the odd law of gravity drawing us to one another...and the forces that blow us apart. It's the same force.

- XHerakleitos