Monthly Archives: December 2010

I’m not in favor of illegal immigration. I think it’s acceptable for our country to set limits on who relocates here, and how many relocate here. Nevertheless, I can’t think of anything to do with the current anti-immigrant movement than oppose it.
Why? Because if the same number of Latinos entering this country were doing it legally, I’d be fine with it. And there are too many people on the other side who wouldn’t.
Some of them are outright white supremacists and bigots who’ve flocked to the anti-immigration movement like flies on rotting meat. Some are less hate-filled—they simply don’t want that many Latinos around.
I won’t work with category A. And category B are just plain wrong.
I have good, non-bigot friends who sincerely believe that Hispanic immigration represents something totally unprecedented in American history. What I hear when they warn me about it is “blah, blah, blah THE IRISH! … blah, blah, blah THE POLES! … blah, blah, blah THE CHINESE! … blah, blah, blah THE JAPANESE (believe me, warnings about how Mexicans will take over the country are little different from what was said about Japanese immigrants a century ago) … blah, blah, blah THE GERMANS! … blah, blah, blah THE JEWS!”
In short, anything but unprecedented.
Me, I believe that if there is such a thing as American exceptionalism, being a nation of immigrants is part of that. Taking in the poor, the hungry, the huddled masses yearning to be free. People believing that leaving their home for the US will fix everything, if not for them, then for their children.
Being told they’re not welcome, that they’re not fit to breathe the glorious air of freedom, that this country belongs to white people and will fall apart of non-Anglo-Saxons run it (a recurring theme in bigot literature for the past century) is not exceptional, though it certainly is American.

Unlike greed, aka avarice, pride is not always a deadly sin. Or a sin at all.
Pride in a job well done. In raising good children. In doing the right thing. Pride in your craft and in the use of your talents. Pride in being on the right side (admittedly something a lot of people falsely assume).
Without pride in our work, we’re likely to produce crap (the slacktivist blog has discussed this quite frequently, though I don’t have links to specific posts). Without pride in ourselves, we’ll be miserable, believing we’re not good enough, worthy enough, that our evil will outlive us while our good deeds will be interred with our bones.
I see a fair amount of punditry bitching about “self esteem” these days, arguing that by teaching kids that they’re wonderful when they haven’t done anything, we give them inflated egos and an exaggerated sense of selfworth. Maybe, but I think the risk, of leaving them feeling inadequate is a lot greater; as T.H. White once said, it’s dreadfully easy to convince small children they’re horrible.
The flip side, of course, is excessive pride that truly isn’t warranted, as witness this post by Digby. The gist of it is that Wall Street is outraged that Obama has actually criticized them and stated that their antics have contributed to the economic mess we find ourselves in; even though his policies are pro-business and his financial team is drawn from that sector, the Masters of the Universe are outraged that they’re actually not being acknowledged as financial geniuses. That he’s not consulting with them and asking them for their wisdom and advice about the economy (this is not a new theme for Digby, who’s touched on this topic before).
And … why would he? We’re talking about people whose only skill is enriching themselves; they’ve proven so incompetent at managing their companies the government had to bail them out, they’ve helped tank the economy by their financial decisions—what exactly qualifies them to make judgment calls?
But the possibility they’ve made actual mistakes seems to slide right over them (at least based on their public statements). Never mind that there’s absolutely no connection between CEO pay and company performance (according to Business Week, which has tracked this for years), or that they get raises and better stock options even when the companies tank. As Digby puts it, “they also think that mummy and daddy should kiss them on the forehead and tell them that they are good little boys and that they can do no wrong. Even the slightest hint that they may not have behaved perfectly is met with spittling rage.”
Some critics have blamed this on Ayn Rand, by whose code enriching themselves without regard for the effects on anyone else would indeed prove their superior ability. But I think it goes deeper than that. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in Fooled by Randomness, there’s an automatic tendency in people to assume that success links to skill; if you’re making pots of money, that proves you must be better than the hourly wage slaves.
Curiously, the self-esteem police don’t seem bothered by this at all.
I don’t think pride is the word for this. It’s more arrogance, or hubris, both of which would probably fit better as a deadly sin.
In Greek myths, hubris was punished by the gods; if you grew too arrogant, if your reach exceeded your grasp by too much, you’d be brought low.
In the modern system, unfortunately, the game is rigged and the gods are hands off.

Bradley Manning, the American soldier accused of giving information to Wikileaks, has been held without trial in solitary confinement for three months. He leaves his small cell for one hour a day. He can’t talk to anyone. And he hasn’t been charged with anything, just held.
And he’s an American citizen.
Not that I think anyone should be held without trial; it’s a violation of a fundamental right. But it’s a useful reminder that all the extreme measures our government would supposedly only use to stop foreign terrorists continually edge closer to standard operating procedure.
•Gov. Haley Barbour, in a recent profile, explained how the Citizens Councils in the 1960s South were really fine, upstanding people and not racists and how there really wasn’t much racial trouble growing up in his Mississippi town. Rick Perlstein grinds Barbour’s nostalgia to dust here.
As I wrote a few months ago, nostalgia for the days when white men ruled America seems to fuel a lot of conservative policy and politics. Barbour’s view of his youth (assuming he’s not out and out lying) seems closer to what Lance Mannion talks about: Some people assume that because their life in the fifties (or whenever) was wonderful (at least in memory), therefore life was wonderful period (I have a seventysomething friend who insists her view the 1950s were Better is objective fact, not nostalgia).
The conviction turning back the clock would fix all our problems is, unfortunately, far more likely to make them worse.
•Christian Science Monitor, my favorite major newspaper, tells us in a headling that “Hugo Chavez Tightens His Grip in Venezuela. Can the U.S. Do Anything About It?”
Not should we do anything; that question isn’t even asked; the article just discusses whether we have any options. That it’s perfectly reasonable for us to intervene in Venezuela if we so choose is taken as a given.
Okay, maybe it is logical. Chavez is left-wing, which means the USSR could use him as a launching pad for attacks on … wait. No USSR left. No vast international Communist conspiracy.
Ah, but Chavez is an autocrat, albeit he’s using constitutional means to increase his power. And the American press hates autocrats—remember when Bush started asserting that he could waive any law or Constitutional rights, we had all those newspaper headlings going “What Can We Do To Stop Bush?”—oh, wait. We didn’t, did we?
But we’ve always, always felt it our duty to defend democracy in Latin America—well, if you discount overthrowing elected leftist governments in Guatemala and Chile, and supporting dictators in Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador and Argentina. Or turning a blind eye to autocracy in our ally, Columbia (for that matter when Mexico was one-party rule for decades, we didn’t say much).
My guess is that Christian Science Monitor is simply reflecting the standard Washington wisdom that we have to do something about Chavez, which stems, I think, from several sources:
–Washington is still populated by aging Cold Warriors whose visceral response to any left-wing government in this hemisphere is hostility. Never mind whether Communism or socialism pose a threat to us in the 21st century, it’s existence has to be stamped out, ASAP!
–Sure, we’re entitled to democracy, Western Europe is entitled to it, but pissant third-world countries? The only rights they have are the ones we give them.
–We are good. Any government which opposes us must be evil. This was also an attitude formed in the crucible of the Cold War where we and International Communism were assumed to be in an apocalyptic clash where whatever we did was justified by our enemy’s vileness.
–The only real sin a foreign government can have is refusing to obey us.
Sure, plenty of people in Washington will scream about Chavez’ power grab—and he certainly is grabbing power. But we had no problems with Guatemala not only operating as a dictatorship but killing thousands of natives in a campaign of genocide (Americans there have also alleged the CIA participated in torture). Or El Salvador murdering nuns and priests who did evil things like teaching the peons to read. Or pretty much any other despot so long as they kowtow to their masters.
The standard right-wing response (in fairness, also echoed by some liberals) to such criticisms of our bloody history in South America (brilliantly parodied in the mockumetary Tribulation 99) is that well, it’s very nice for me, sitting at home, to demand the moral high-ground, but America has to live in the real world! We have to be pragmatic, and that means dealing with nasty people in our own self interest!
Jeane Kilpatrick, former UN ambassador once expressed it this way: Right-wing governments are more stable because they don’t try to fix injustice, redistribute wealth or help the poor, all of which create instability; all they want is to leave the power structure as it is, except with themselves on top. Sure, the poor will get screwed over even more, and regime enemies will die horribly, but you can’t create a stable society without breaking a few skulls, right?
This is, of course, not only hideously immoral, it’s nowhere near as smart and realistic as Kilpatrick and her ilk like to think. We pragmatically supported Saddam Hussein and ended up fighting two wars against him; we pragmatically supported Noriega in Panama and fought a war against him; we pragmatically supported the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion which transformed into al-Qaida (we also turned a blind eye to Pakistan getting nukes because we needed them, pragmatically, to support the Afghans).
Yes, we have to do business with nasty people and ugly nations—but there’s a difference between dealing with them and actively supporting them against legitimate pro-democracy movements or assuming that their enemies are our enemies. There’s a big difference between dealing with them and overthrowing a legitimate government to put them in place.
There’s also a huge difference between being “pragmatic” and “screwing other nations over to put a few more millions into American pockets.”
So no, even if we did have a way to take Chavez out, we shouldn’t.
As the blogger hilzoy once put it on Obsidian Wings, “Devastating a country for the sake of keeping one set of thugs in power and another set of thugs out of power is not worth it.”

Political correctness is a concept with a lot of potential—that goes unfulfilled.
The term (in anything close to its current usage) dates back to left-wing ideological discussions in the early seventies, or so I’ve read; being only 13 in 1971, I didn’t participate in a lot of radical activism (heck, about two years earlier, or so I’ve been told, the school district was still checking guys hair with a ruler to make sure it wasn’t going too hippy—yes, Fort Walton Beach was that conservative). This was parodied in a comic-strip in the early eighties (IIRC) in which the politically correct protagonist insists he can’t call a nine year old girl a girl; when she objects to “woman,” he settles on “pre woman.” In other words political correctness meant obsessive fuss about what political dogma says is correct, regardless of whether it works in the real world.
This concept penetrated into the mainstream in the eighties, but not in a good way. Rather than satirizing the “pre woman” kind of thinking, it became a shorthand for anything that was liberal or deviated too far from a white, conservative male norm. Female sidekick to Prince Valiant in an eighties cartoon? Politically correct! Never mind it was on a conservative Christian channel (or that even the authentic legends of Charlemagne had a female knight in them).
And then it mutated into its really ugly form where “politically incorrect” has become some sort of shield for racism—asserting that blacks are inherently stupider than whites only offends people because it’s “politically incorrect” for example (speaking for myself, I’m offended because I really loathe racist arguments cloaked in bad science).
What conservatives don’t want to admit is that political correctness—in the sense of adhering to dogma that doesn’t fit reality—is a universal concept. As witness that conservatives cling to The Truth regardless of the fact it isn’t: Tax cuts always create more revenue and boost the economy! The free market regulates without government intervention (tell that to the people who died of tainted peanut butter a few years ago)! Government is never the solution, always the problem (of course, if they really believed that they’d be a lot less enthused about government that tortures people and, under Obama, orders American citizens executed without trial).
Which is why, back in my Destin Log days, I often made use of the phrase “conservative political correctness” or “libertarian political correctness”—it’s a term that helps people understand what I’m targeting even if they’re not used to seeing it in that context (or possibly they just scratched their heads and thought I’d given them an oxymoron). I’d like to see it used more in that context, and less in the racism-is-political-incorrectness vein.
The extreme PC wing are the serious Marxists and the hardcore objectivists, who have more in common with each other than they’d think. Both are acolytes of secular prophets who revealed The Truth, and reality must be made to conform to it. I knew Communists in college in 1980 who assured me that the USSR had not, in fact, invaded Afghanistan. Likewise, I’ve read objectivist columns explaining that the United States is so noble that it has never taken or conquered land belong to anyone else, which is bull even if you discount the Native American tribes (and objectivists do—Ayn Rand having dismissed the tribes as savages who had no right to their own land, they have no choice but to agree.
Oh, the title of this piece? Back in an old Gilligan’s Island episode, the castaways are trying to piece together a stone-age map that will show them how to catch a current taking them off the island (except as it turns out, it’s a record of how the tribe arrived on the island, not how it was going to leave). When the Professor tells Mr. Howell that his attempt to put the pieces together is wrong—well, Howell insists that the reality should be rejiggered to fit his opinion.
And that sums up political correctness of any stripe.