(Originally published on
www.earthlightbooks.blogspot.com.)
Your blogger is a devoted and longtime fan of
Harper's magazine. I love the periodical for its trenchant
political analysis and
investigative journalism, its
legitimately thoughtful essays, its
legitimately funny cartoons, and its old-fashioned refusal to talk down to its readership.
Harper's is like
Time, but for adults.
That said, recent content of the magazine and its website merits some criticism.
I. Baker
First,
the website. Commenter Kevin Baker devotes not one but two posts to
various complaints about the recent political conventions. In "
The Path to Genuine Political Change" Baker begins:
President Barack Obama’s speech to the 2012 Democratic Convention was
one of the best he has given, and one of the best in recent history. It
was an almost word-perfect defense of the liberal idea and American
exceptionalism. I just wish he’d meant half of it.
(Note: Obama's speech was lame.)
In
the first half of his post, Baker lauds the ferocity of Obama's
"skewering" and "dissecting" of his GOP adversaries. In the second half,
he bemoans Obama's moderate record. If only Obama were a
real liberal, Baker laments, instead of just playing one on TV.
His other post, on the RNC and DNC, is much weirder. In "
Party Like It's 1984," Baker describes how he was "struck...how
[sic]
woefully inadequate the two southern host cities [i.e. Tampa and
Charlotte] were to the task." The bulk of the post is dedicated to
describing this inadequacy in detail, from the understaffed bars to the
inconvenient schedules of restaurants and the lightrail. Also, Tampa is
ugly, evidently. Only in the last 3.5 paragraphs does Baker turn to his
titular subject and describe how party leaders live "in sterile,
luxurious enclaves, protected by steel, barbed wire, and heavily armed
security guards." He expands:
In each city, the merest whiff of dissent attracted a swarm
of police on bike and foot, hemming in the protesters and trying to
direct their every movement. We witnessed this up close, outside a
downtown hotel, when a small band of Occupy demonstrators tried to
rally. Instantly, they were surrounded by the Swarm, the sort of wild
security overkill that now accompanies every political convention, major
economic summit, or military conference held in the United States.
This
kind of firsthand reporting on silenced dissent--an increasingly
widespread phenomenon which ought to send shudders through the nervous
system of any halfway civic-minded American--seems to me to be obviously
superior material for political journalism, at least when compared to
Baker's long complaints about the conventions' logistics. E.g.:
For more than five hours before the president’s speech, a large crowd
of media and others was left to mill about aimlessly in the dripping
humidity outside the entrance to the arena, with no announcements about
what was happening or what their chances of gaining egress were likely
to be.
Or:
Yet for some reason, the outgoing [lightrail]
never managed to anticipate the
end of the night’s speaking, always forcing a long wait on a crowded
platform.
Or:
Nevertheless, at one point the bar managed to run out of vodka.
The contrast between Baker's eloquent, personal whining and
his
straightforward coverage of First Amendment repression confuses me. It
doesn't seem plausible that he couldn't find enough material on the
collusion of police and Big Politics to silence protesters to fill an
entire post; less plausible still that there was
nothing else to
write about besides how long he had to wait at the hotel bar. This
problem is especially weird considering that Baker clearly has an ax to
grind: his previous
Harper's titles include "The Vanishing
Liberal: How the left learned to be helpless," "Barack Hoover Obama: The
best and the brightest blow it again," and "High Noon for the
Republican Pary: Why the G.O.P. must die." When you already know what
you're going to write ("Republicans, evil; Democrats, lame"), it's much
easier to find material to write
about.
So the
presence of this well-written, irrelevant material in his otherwise
well-written, relevant post is bizarre. My best guess is to blame Hunter
S. Thompson for introducing witty, pointless Gonzo-journalism to the
mainstream.
II. Frank
Let
us begin by reviewing the fact that any article which begins with the
sentence "Let us review" is at high-risk for excessive smarm. Regular
readers of Frank's column, "Easy Chair," will be used to his clever and
sometimes insightful pedantry, but this month's "
Easy Chair: Compromising Positions" ups the ante re: Frank
qua a geriatric curmudgeon shouting from his front porch (or so it seems to me).
Frank
first notes the paradoxical fact that even as 1) Obama has perennially
stayed the middle course throughout his presidency, he 2) is
continuously branded by the Right as a Red extremist. Frank provides
exhaustive examples of Obama's centrism, such as his refusal to
prosecute Bush-era crimes and his adoption of right-wing rhetoric
against 'red-tape.'
Frank's central contention is that
GOP extremism plus Obama's toothless moderation has pulled the American
political spectrum sharply to the Right. Echoing Baker's contention in "
Path" that Obama is "an inadequate and often nebulous protector of the commonweal," Frank writes:
The
president is a man whose every instinct is conciliatory. He is not
merely a casual seeker of bipartisan consensus; he is an intellectually
committed believer in it. He simply cannot imagine a dispute in which
one antagonist is right and the other is wrong.
This instinct to conciliation, in turn, allows Republicans to drag Obama toward their own (real) position by exaggerating it:
Republicans
have grasped that if the contest is not about issues but about the
relative position of the two parties, then they are free to move
ever-rightward, dragging the center with them, always keeping it a few
inches away from the president's anxious, conciliatory grasp.
Frank uses
The Audacity of Hope, Obama's memoir, as evidence that Obama's nice-guy approach is philosophically motivated:
Read
the book and you will find Obama's pronouncements to be the
standard-issue let's-all-get-along stuff of the sort that Beltway
thinkers have been cranking out for decades.
Thus
the problem, according to Frank, is that Obama's commitment to
bipartisan centrism nullifies his putative commitment to liberal
leftism, and makes him the perfect mark for Republican negotiation
tactics. If only, Frank cries throughout the piece, Obama was a
real liberal, instead of only playing one on TV.
III. Sullivan
For the record, yours truly is a full-blooded leftist.
I waver
somewhere between union-style liberalism and storm-the-Bastille
radicalism. By no means do I generally approve of Obama, as you can see
in the third-to-last paragraph of
this post. So Frank's and Baker's criticisms of the POTUS are not
a priori unacceptable to me. I am at the forefront of the socialist cabal.
However,
it's hard for me to see how attacking Obama for the very same
conciliatory centrism upon which he campaigned in 2008 is better than
attacking the alternately fanatical/cynical GOP which, say Frank and
Baker, is exploiting Obama's naive weakness. Better still, why not argue
in support of those very same liberal policies which they fault Obama for not sufficiently supporting? Wherefore Obama the pinata?
(I
recognize the irony of yours truly unconstructively criticizing Frank
and Baker for the fact that they unconstructively criticize Obama; I
have no defense.)
Moreover, it's not clear that Obama
is being taken advantage of. Back in January Andrew Sullivan wrote
this piece for
Newsweek,
in which he argues that nothing Obama does makes any sense unless you
see that he's playing a "long game," planning his moves with the
assumption of an eight-year presidency and judiciously building a legacy
that will outlive him.
Sullivan correctly sees
right-wing attacks on Obama (at least those fashionable among Romney et
al) as "unhinged." It's not that there aren't thoughtful conservative
arguments to be made against Obama and the Dems; it's just that the GOP
has, for my entire adult life, eschewed substantive debate for
emotion-exploiting cynicism.
Sullivan sees Democratic-base whinging against Obama as saner but still mistaken:
What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a
show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to
him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit
for.
Sullivan's analysis speaks so elequently
to the gripes raised by Frank and Baker that, rather than summarize,
I'll simply quote at length:
To use the terms Obama first employed in his inaugural address: the
president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond
by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the
problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate
liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an
ideologue or a divider. This kind of strategy takes time. And it means
there are long stretches when Obama seems incapable of defending
himself, or willing to let others to define him, or simply weak. I
remember those stretches during the campaign against Hillary Clinton. I
also remember whose strategy won out in the end.
Sullivan goes on to note the substantial achievements
of this presidency, such as averting another Great Depression, the
withdrawal from Iraq, the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and above all
Obamacare.
Whether or not Obama's politics are
far enough to the left (and if by "left" we mean "concerned with civil
liberties and economic equity," then no, they're not), it's simply not
plausible to take seriously claims that he's letting himself be taken
advantage of or pushed around
by the GOP
. Neither Frank
nor Baker address the fact that, whatever his 'real' sympathies are,
Obama is in a position of perpetual negotiation with his own party, his
opponents, and the US and world at large. Their critique seems to boil
down to a severe distaste for political moderation; they want a liberal
version of Bush.
My guess is that Sullivan's right:
Obama realizes how quickly the appeal of an idealogue passes, and he
doesn't want to be remembered as The Liberal Bush.
Happy Barely Belated Birthday 
From Wikipedia:
Heard an amazing show and interview with Bernie Krause a couple weeks ago. He's recorded over 4000 hours of natural soundscapes, over half of which are either entirely gone or irrevocably altered by man. Did you know insects are drawn to trees when the sap is ready for them by the sound of individual tree cells popping when they die (that's when they form the rings too!). Then the sound of the insects brings the birds and larger mammals, etc. So, if big-bad-man comes in and 'selectively' logs a forest... it takes multiple generations for that ecosystem to recover, and until it does, all the larger animals will eventually leave... So basically, our world operates on a bandwidth/frequency which the human ear can simply not detect.
The study of biophony falls under the discipline of biophonics that takes into account the collective impact of all sounds emanating from natural biological origins in a given habitat. The realm of study is focused on the intricate relationships – competitive and/or cooperative – between biological sound sources taking into account seasonal variability, weather, and time of day or night, and climate change. It explores new definitions of territory as expressed by biophony, and addresses changes in density, diversity, and richness of animal populations.
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 [O.S. 7 September] – 13 December 1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history".[1] He is also the subject of "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature": James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.[2]
/ˈroʊ.ɑːl ˈdɑːl/,[2] Norwegian: [ˈɾuːɑl dɑl]; 13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter.
Like her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, Edith reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents, and lived for much of her life with her governess. Never married, she became passionately attached to the gay Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was unfailingly generous and helpful.
