p m carpenter's commentary

Stupid is as stupid does

While recuperating later yesterday -- and no, I couldn't bring myself to watching "Morning Joe," which meant I may have lost my health but not my mind -- I heard this on Hardball's 'Sideshow' and made a note to check it this morning, which, still a bit shaky and fevered, I have done. And sure enough, from a Vanity Fair/60 Minutes poll:

Half the members of the Grand Old Party don't know what GOP stands for.

I wish there were some trenchant observation to be made about how shocking that statistic is. But of course there's nothing shocking about it, which rather maroons any trenchancy. Since half of Republicans don't even know what their own party's initials stand for, one can imagine the percentage that has even the vaguest idea of what the diabolical evils of, say, "quantitative easing" are, for which GOP stalwart Rick Perry would popularly treat Mr. Bernancke so "ugly."

Hell, I can't say my own idea transcends much vagueness, but at least I know what "GOP" stands for, and I know as well that "QE," whether in forms I, II or III, isn't exactly diabolical and it's a damn far cry from treasonous. Nonetheless, the GOPers -- whatever that means -- cheer.

A bit flu-ish today

From yesterday, still feeling a bit flu-ish today; have creaked and crawled to enter this much, shall now return to bed, where I'll probably turn on "Morning Joe" and thereupon feel even worse. Perhaps it will mentally inspire me to new heights of physical health. I shall return.

Nice job, Mr. Douthat

Ross Douthat today is a romp through incredulousness -- ours, in his feigned credulity. He bemoans right-wing populists' absence of a strong voice expressing their "important" and "meritorious" arguments of

the Republican leadership ... being too cavalier about illegal immigration, too forgiving of crony capitalism and Wall Street-Washington coziness, too promiscuous with overseas military interventions, and too willing to imitate Democrats and centralize power in Washington. Right-wing populists tend to argue that Beltway Republicans have lost touch with the party’s core constituencies: small-business owners, middle-class families and Main Street, U.S.A.

For starters, the grassroots of right-wing populism have, in this election cycle, settled on these political themes mostly because they smell Democratic vulnerability on them. Their disingenuity is breathtaking, but more so austerely personal and, notwithstanding Douthat's thesis, it indeed lies flawlessly in line with the Republican Establishment's "leadership": to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Nothing else really matters -- not foreign policy victories, not enhanced national security, not an improving American economy, and certainly not more jobs.    

Yet what is amusingly striking abut Douthat's delineation of the right's important and meritorious issues is that, aside from right-wing populism's indefatigable nativism, one could rather easily interpret it as a list of left-wing populism's important and meritorious issues: that the Democratic leadership is too forgiving of crony capitalism and Wall Street-Washington coziness, too promiscuous with overseas military interventions, and too willing to imitate Bushlike Republicans and centralize authoritarian power in Washington. Left-wing populists tend to argue that Beltway Democrats have lost touch with the party’s core constituencies: middle-class families and Main Street, U.S.A., which of course houses America's small-business owners.

Still, Douthat's lament is smart politics, in that it's reflective of what the right has been getting away with since the 1960s. It is exclusively the right, you see, that detests American politico-cultural corruptions such as crony capitalism; it is the right that despises all that Wall Street-Washington coziness; it is the right that singularly understands the proper deployment of military interventions; it is the right, as it centralizes Washington power and inflates authoritarianism, that sternly opposes centralization and authoritarianism; and naturally it is only the right that argues Beltway politicians have lost touch with the nation's core constituencies: small-business owners, middle-class families and Main Street, U.S.A.

Oh, and only the right loves God, too.

Not sure how you missed that last one; but otherwise, nice job, Mr. Douthat.

My technological hypocrisy

"Branding consultant" Martin Lindstrom reveals some rather disturbing (to me) results from an MRI experiment he conducted on 16 young men and women "to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games":

[M]ost striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.

I confess the feeling of a certain yet conflicted emotional superiority over these folks: I most decidedly do not love my iPhone, however that may only be because I don't own one. Indeed, I don't own any cellphone. I am blissfully out of touch when I'm in the car, at the grocery store (do we still call it that?), or on one of my rare walks (I'm trying to do better at this, really). 

My Taoist impulses compel me to accept change -- Don't fight it, said the old wise ones, because you'll lose -- but mine is an uneasy, even rebellious, acceptance. And I know I'm not alone when I hear myself screaming for the world to stop. The only thing that induced me to even buy a color TV years ago was the BBC series "All Creatures Great and Small"; I wanted to see Scotland in all its rolling greenery.   

I dislike even my home phone's (what is known somewhat disparagingly these days as a "land line") message machine. I figure if the call was important, they'll call back. In it inheres the marvelous feature, however, of knowing whom I'm ignoring when in fact I am at home. Hence I leave it "activated."

As you probably guessed, I also don't much care for even that technological word, yet its online appearance from me is merely an indication of my technological hypocrisy. So I'll shut up.

An eerie comparison

Joe Nocera's published reflections today on the Nuremberg trials are eerily allegorical, if you will, yet probably coincidental (which adds to their eeriness), coming as they do so soon after the possibly extralegal drone strike that killed the American Islamic radicals Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan.

"G.I.’s have one stock question," reads [the] very first script. "Why can’t we just take them out and shoot ’em? We know they’re guilty."

Again and again, [the] scripts try to answer that question. Because "the guilt of the German leaders should be carefully documented." Because "we of the four nations are devoted to law and order." Because "our system is not lynch law. We will dispense punishment as the evidence demands." Led by the Americans, the Allies were insistent that the Nazi defendants be treated fairly.... This postwar idealism was one of the Greatest Generation’s finest qualities. Today’s cynical, divided country sorely misses it.

The historical-journalistic deification of 'the Greatest Generation' is a hazardous intellectual exercise, in that once the common threat of global fascism was crushed, that generation almost instantly turned on itself in the protracted national agony and Cold War hysteria of communist witchhunting, stifling conformism, patriotic hooliganism and the ironic trashing of their own Constitutional rights.

Still, we take the point, however incidental it might have been.