Who needs them?

I took the Kraken Hatchling to the Shrine Circus the other night. We had a great time seeing the acrobats, the tigers, the elephants, the clown, and his baby elephant/puppy. We ate popcorn, cotton candy, had a snow cone that has left my entrails green, and even got to ride on an elephant. Well the Hatchling did, I took pictures. A friend came along too, and despite being half my age I think he had an alright time. Mrs. Kraken was working so she couldn't make it but was glad we went.

So my friend, let's call him Rakdos, is a young man with a good heart who really wants to make a difference in the world. We were chatting quite extensively about "direct action," considering the chaos going on around us, and the ever present possibility of right-wing vigilantes within earshot I was a little apprehensive about it. The word "sabotage" even came up. Personally, I'm not a fan of that word, and even less for the frames it evokes. Maybe I'm just too old now to believe that any sort of violence will help our situation. In fact, I'm very worried that any destruction of property carrying even a whiff of leftist action will set off the powder keg of right-wing vigilantism and cause the random mass murders of innocents by psychopaths to focus into a directed effort of posses, hunting down any young radicals they feel like. Ergo, direct action of the Weathermen style is to be condemned and discouraged. Utterly futile I know, but until it is absolutely and irredeemably certain that our democratic system is irretrievably broken there is still a chance to make it work for the public good. Eeek! Is that a sliver of optimism showing? Quick! Get the net!

The other topic we discussed, briefly though it was far more interesting from my perspective, was intellectuals. Hence the title of this post. Obviously disdain for thinkers by right-wingers and especially authoritarians runs very high, but our exchange was on different grounds. Rakdos brought up a rap song called "You can't be neutral on a moving train" and was actually surprised when I told him that is something of a classic of dissident literature by the late historian/activist Howard Zinn. I cannot remember the exact exchange from then on and I want to be fair to Rakdos but his argument seemed to sum up as "what have they ever actually done?" Specifically he was referring to Noam Chomsky. Now, putting aside that Professor Chomsky actually did march, demonstrate and work vociferously toward ending the war in Vietnam, yes, his main contribution has been intellectual and theoretical. "What has he done?" In the abstract I suppose this is a good question. I rarely venture beyond the idea of spreading the knowledge of problems. Pick and rank issues, joust with individuals and try to change their minds through persuasion or at least debunk the incredible misinformation out there.

The question I pose is often framed as "what can we do?" Hence where Rakdos and I started talking, he missed going to a camp out in the woods to learn about and practice this elusive concept of "direct action" and fretted about the lost opportunity. The answer to my question is to withhold, boycott, or avoid elements of corporate power as much as possible. Turning off the spigot of money, labor, and attention to these totalitarian institutions seems the safest way to reduce their power and the power of their owners/managers. The economic elite is the wellspring of most of the problems in our world and it takes an incredible amount of money to keep their little game going. Perhaps that is wishful thinking.

How I was first exposed to leftist activism was through the works of Jello Biafra, former lead singer of Dead Kennedys. His spoken word albums held a great deal of content and led me to like-minded individuals, helping to end some of the alienation and apathy I felt as a young crustacean. Biafra also referenced Chomsky, Zinn, and "the guy who runs The Baffler magazine." That of course was Thomas Frank, an historian and great chronicler of both ends of the right-wing "conservative" movement. I put that word in quotation marks because there is really very little this movement is trying to conserve, a better word is the authoritarian movement but no one wants to think of themselves that way in the same way that racists get quite annoyed when you call out their racism. Fifteen years later and I have moved from listening to punk rock to audiobooks of serious issues by real scholars. Perhaps I am an anomaly. Perhaps we really do need more direct action and less intellectualism. If a loud minority of authoritarians can catapult their leaders into positions to really wreck things, maybe what the larger society needs is a few dedicated miscreants to wreck the twisted desires of the corporate elite; democracy be damned.

Then again, maybe not. I just hope my friend Rakdos and others whose youth clouds the larger picture or makes problems old-schoolers like Zinn or Chomsky have been dealing with for decades seem so urgent do not do something they will regret. To be continued, I hope.

Founding Fathers, misquoted.

Thomas Frank, writing in Harper's, takes teabaggers to task for mythologizing quotes from the Founding Fathers to suit their agenda.

I share a sentiment with the Tea Party movement, and it's not a trivial one: Historical illiteracy is a threat to the health of the republic. Our ignorance of the key events and basic concepts of the nation's development is a matter of statistical fact, and despite years of warnings we continue to show little interest in how the past determines contemporary choices.

Where we differ, the Tea Partiers and I, is on the question of what historical literacy looks like. For them, it is strictly a matter of everyone else acknowledging that the Founding Fathers would take their side in the present-day debates; that Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington were "rightwing extremists," as a popular T-shirt puts it. At Tea Party rallies, quotes from Founding Fathers are emblazoned on protest signs and declaimed from podiums; audiences recite them right along with the speaker; and, of course, there are always a few people on hand who feel such a surge of enthusiasm that they are moved to dress up in the manner of late-eighteenth century Bostonians.

Historical ignorance is bad for several reasons, first of which is that rewriting history to suit the needs of the present is a horrible fallacy. But more than that is how the manufactured quotes invented by the right-wing have taken on a quality of gospel. "Bible bullets" is how a professor of Christian history I know put it. Gospel quotes are used by uncritical thinkers to shut down and get shut down in debates over scripture. Manufacturing quotes by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington create a secular version of bible bullets, ready to be aimed at anyone who disagrees with the teabagger crowd.

Frank, a Ph.D in history, analyzed two telling phrases used by teabaggers to gain historical approval from the revered founders. It does not matter how mangled the intent of the founders has become in modern America, the point from an authoritarian view is to win, period.

The first is from Franklin, Dr. Frank pulled this one from one of his favorite teabagger authors, but it appears all over the place. "Benjamin Franklin said, 'The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."' Sounds good right? Only thing is that it is the Declaration of Independence that produced the non-legally-binding "right to pursue happiness," and that was only because TJ did not like the idea of a "right to property" as why the revolution was carried out. Frank then traces the history and finds that the "catch it yourself" comes from 1970s self-help books.

The second was from Jefferson himself. "The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." This quote is so popular it makes facebook regularly. Trouble is that while Jefferson did rail against tyranny, this "quote" is actually the interpretation of TJ's work by a law professor in 1980. The teabag movement has a very different understanding of elitism than say, anyone who has ever had a job and stepped back even for a moment to critically examine why bosses are such jerks. But beyond that, these secular bible bullets have only the amount of power as we give them. This is the reason bible bullets hold such sway over fundamentalists, and why teabaggers are so eager to believe them. Quoting founders to support their authoritarian vision is a simple way to shut down debate. Outsiders hold the founders in high regard as well, transferring "truth" of tradition to narrow interpretations gives them inordinate power over popular beliefs.

"One reason these quotations have multiplied is that they seem true to Ben and Tom as we all know them through their appearances over the years in movies, musicals, and schoolbooks: the earthy Founder, cracking wise; the rebel Founder, seething against tyrants. Those who use the mysterious quotes do not mean to deceive. In nearly every case, they are merely repeating something they've read numerous times in what appear to be authoritative works. All journalists, myself included, have made similar mistakes.²
On the other hand, when you set the Founders up as infallible oracles of democracy, when you claim clairvoyance with their political spirit, when you dedicate yourself to remedying the nation's historical illiteracy, you put yourself under a special obligation. And given that it is only a little more difficult to use the Internet to check fake quotes than to reproduce them, one wonders: Why don't the guardians of Founder purity take that step? Why do fakes proliferate instead of disappear?"

My hat is off to Dr. Frank for diving into this novel subversion of our freedom to make our own destiny.

Thomas Frank to the rescue

I was having a pretty lousy day until running into this ode to the deranged teabaggers by my favorite recovering historian.
I don't believe I've ever just cut and pasted an entire article before, but I kept all the source material so hopefully the thought police won't jump through my window tonight.
Originally posted at TomDispatch.

Pity the Quarter-Billionaire
Take a Ride on the RINO in 2012
By Thomas Frank
Dear Tea Party Movement,
For the last few months, the world has been fascinated by your frenzied search for a presidential candidate who is not Mitt Romney. We know that you find the man inauthentic and that you have buoyed up a string of anti-Mitts in the Iowa polling -- Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich -- buffoons all, preposterous figures whom you have rightfully changed your minds about as soon as you got to know them.
It was quite a spectacle, your quest for the non-Romney -- and I think we all know why you undertook it. In ways that matter, Romney is clearly a problem for you. His views on abortion, for example, change with the winds. Ditto, gay rights. He designed the Massachusetts health insurance system that was the model for Obamacare. And he’s even said that he approved of the TARP bank bailout, the abomination that ignited the Tea Party uprising in the first place.
Grievous offenses all, I have no doubt. Still, my advice to you idealists of the right is this: get over it. Not for sell-out reasons like: Romney has the best chance of beating Obama. No. You should get behind the charging Massachusetts RINO (your favorite term for a Republican-In-Name-Only sellout type) because, in a certain paradoxical way, he may turn out to be the truest of all the candidates to the spirit of your movement.

After all, given everything you represent, why wouldn’t you line up behind this quarter-billionaire who’s calling for just a little human love and sympathy for billionaires? I’m sure you already understand me perfectly well, but just to be certain, let me make the case.
The Gimme Candidate of 2012
Start with those issues where Romney’s positions so offend the sensibilities of you Robespierre Republicans. First, of course, the social issues. If nothing else, you in the Tea Party movement have spent the last three years teaching Americans that they no longer matter -- not when we’re supposedly in a battle for the very soul of capitalism.
And here comes Mitt Romney, the soul of American capitalism in the flesh. Look back over his career as a predator drone at Bain Capital: Isn’t it the exact sort of background you always insist politicians ought to have? Isn’t it the sort of titanic enterprise for which you lust, as you wave your copy of Atlas Shrugged in the air?
You accuse the former Massachusetts governor of opportunism, but from where I stand, the bad faith is all on your side. What offends you about Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare plan, for example, isn’t that it crushes human liberty, but that it provided the model for President Obama’s own healthcare overhaul, which you spent the last two years decrying as the deed of a power-grabbing socialist.
If the public ever learns about the Republican provenance of Obamacare -- and if Romney is the candidate, they most certainly will -- it will become obvious that your movement was not telling the truth about all that Kenyan Stalinist death-panel stuff. It is indeed a moment to fear, that day when the nation finds out that you were, ahem, exaggerating in your bullhorn pronouncements about the communist in the White House. Still, if the Tea Party movement is all about truth-telling and straight shooting, then you need to face it like a patriot.
And yes, Mitt Romney has also said that the bank bailouts of 2008-2009 were necessary, while you regard them as a mortal sin against free-market principles. (To his credit though, at least in your eyes, he was also a total hardliner about the auto industry bailouts, displaying the pointless meanness you seem to admire in nearly any other politician.) In truth, though, the candidate’s only offense on the bailout question was his candor. He merely admitted what should be obvious to any billionaire from a study of bank history: that conservatives have no problem doling out, or grabbing for, government money when the chips are down.
After all, President Herbert Hoover himself distributed bank bailouts in the early years of the Great Depression. Calvin Coolidge’s vice president, Charles Dawes, helped out in Hoover’s bailout operation, later changing hats and grabbing a big slice of the bailout pie for his own bank. Ronald Reagan’s administration rescued Continental Illinois from what was then the largest bank failure in our history.
Citibank’s market-worshiping CEO Walter Wriston begged for (and of course received) the assistance of big government when Citi needed it -- after making loans to the troubled Penn Central Railroad. And don’t forget, every single one of you is guilty of taking a government bailout any time you make a withdrawal from a bank that’s been rescued by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The reason they -- I mean, you -- do these things should be as obvious as it is simple: “free market” has always been a high-minded way of saying “gimme,” and when the heat rises, the “market” is invariably replaced by more direct methods, like demanding bailouts from the government you hate. Banks get bailouts for the simple reason that they want bailouts and have the power to insist on them -- the same circumstances that got them deregulated in wave after wave in the Eighties, Nineties, and Aughts.
In this sense, Romney, who is loud and proud when it comes to the need for further deregulation, has actually been more consistent than you. He’s the gimme candidate of 2012 and so he should really be your guy.
Promethean Job Creators and Heroes of Venture Capital
You say Romney is an unprincipled faker. Fair enough -- he is. He’s so plastic he’s almost animatronic. But have you looked in the mirror recently? Aren’t you the ones who fall for it every time Fox News wheels out some Washington hack to confuse this or that corporate issue with the sacred cause of freedom or states rights or man’s inalienable right to mine uranium in his backyard? Aren’t you the ones who thought that Glenn Beck’s tears were markers of emotional sincerity? And for Pete’s sake, your populist Tea Party movement was actually launched from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade!
I know, I know: for almost three years now you’ve dazzled the world with your proclamations that we’re being dragged into “tyranny,” that the country is being “destroyed,” that America needs to be “saved” -- and now here comes Mitt, with his fondness for workaday compromise, ruining your carefully contrived atmosphere of panic.
That must be disappointing, but don’t lose the faith! Give the man credit: he has tried. He’s no stranger to the core Tea Party myth of the noble businessman persecuted by big government. Indeed, at the Conservative Political Action Congress in 2009, he opened his talk as a stand-up comic this way: “I gotta get through this speech before federal officials come here and arrest me for practicing capitalism.”
Meanwhile, he has the perfect Tea Party sense of social class. A centimillionaire who made his pile as a venture capitalist, Romney has both deplored class warfare -- meaning, certain criticisms of Wall Street -- and practiced it, taunting President Obama as a modern version of Marie ("let them eat cake") Antoinette.
There’s no contradiction in any of this, either for him or you. When someone has made his way in life via academia, like the president, he is, of course, a snob, and part of the ruling elite. When, on the other hand, a person’s multi-millions were visited upon him by open-market actions directed from the C-suite, he is automatically a man of the people, a horny-handed son of toil. In fact, Romney takes this kind of market populism a step farther than you ordinarily dare: corporations, he has famously announced, are themselves people.
And keep in mind that, with Mitt Romney, venture capitalist, carrying your banner in 2012, you will finally get to submit your capsized vision of social class to the verdict of the people -- the actual flesh-and-blood people, that is, not the corporate “people” who make up the S&P 500. You will get to defend exactly the sort of “person” your movement has longed to defend since it was birthed by a CNBC reporter almost three years ago to the cheers of a bunch of derivatives traders in Chicago.
You will get to explain your peculiar conviction that the way to react to a gigantic slump brought on by frenzied finance is to unshackle Wall Street. You will get to line up behind a heroic businessman, like those rugged, resourceful fellows in the Ayn Rand novels you love. You will get to go into battle for the job creators, which is what all capitalists are, right? (Well, okay, maybe not the guys at Bain Capital, the particular outfit where Romney made his pile, but the theory is all that really matters, isn’t it?)
Indeed, your leadership cadre is already playing up the inevitable criticisms of Romney as a job decimator as a way of launching a grand debate about capitalism -- by which they mean, of course, freedom itself. When Newt Gingrich criticized Romney a few weeks ago for his career in private equity, the airwaves of your winger-tainment world exploded with outrage. “This is the kind of risk-taking, free-market capitalism that most people who call themselves conservatives applaud,” intoned Brit Hume on Fox News. If Newt had a problem with Bain’s operations, announced syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg, “then Gingrich really doesn’t believe in capitalism at all.”
Washington Post columnist George Will declared that what Romney did in his venture capitalist days was an “essential social function,” that his company was “indispensable for wealth creation.” (Just whose wealth was being created he left discreetly undefined.) Yaron Brook, head of the Ayn Rand Center and a familiar figure at Tea Party events, is no fan of Romney’s, but he had this to say about Romney’s career: “private equity serves an incredibly important productive function in our economy… Private equity is in my view a heroic activity.”
“Heroic”: that’s exactly the word! In Romney we have finally found a quarter-billionaire to cry for. And so Suzy Welch, author and wife of Jack, appeared on Fox Business to wonder why Romney wasn’t defending himself aggressively against criticism of his business career. Romney, she announced, is “an American hero to people who believe in free enterprise, or he should be.”
And that combination of tragedy and heroism, my friends, is why you will soon be signing up for the Romney juggernaut. In him you will see the saintly victimhood of Sarah Palin melded with the Promethean job-creator who was the cult object of your 2010 efforts. Social issues be damned! Romney will ensure that we get the one thing that this country can’t do without on its path to hell: further deregulation of Wall Street.
The nation’s all-powerful elitist socialists will, of course, disagree, and you’ll have a field day, raging and weeping at the way they are going to set out to persecute this noble, wealth-creating soul.
Pity the billionaire: it will be a powerful rallying cry for 2012.
Yours in petulant individualism,
Tom
Thomas Frank is the author of the just-published Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (Metropolitan Books). He has also written The Wrecking Crew, What’s the Matter With Kansas? and several other abrasive volumes. He is the “Easy Chair” columnist for Harper’s Magazine and the founding editor of The Baffler.
Copyright 2012 Tom Frank

 At some future date I want to review Frank's latest book Pity the Billionaire, but I can't stop listening to it long enough to write. If you need a good book to listen to on your awful commute or job search, I highly recommend getting the audio version, read by the author.