Libertarians are Mostly Useless....Again

Reason Magazine, the Libertarian movement's Pravda, published a book review about the United Fruit Company.  The only reason I read it is because the description included this:

It usefully reminds us of some of the wonderful things about capitalism, and some of the dangers, too.

That instantly piqued my interest because you will hear very little about "the dangers of Capitalism" from your average Libertarian. Most of the time, they embrace capitalism uncritically with an almost religious fervor. "There is no God but free markets." That kind of thing.

So I was curious to hear how they would interpret "the dangers of Capitalism" through the lens of the United Fruit Company, a notorious outfit that not only killed people but gave us the term Banana Republic. But do you think the review even mentions any of that? (I'm sure the book being reviewed does...) Nope.

We get a list of all the "pros," in order: Upward mobility, efficiency, bias-free marketing creativity, egalitarianism (defined as making products cheap, which, um, is not "egalitarianism"), technological innovation, decentralization, and philanthropy.

No joke, the "bias-free marketing creativity" refers to how the United Fruit Company handed out free bananas to immigrants at Ellis Island.

Oh, the creativity!

The cons merit a single paragraph that doesn't mention the worker abuse or the union-busting massacres. Nope, it harps on the old Libertarian "government bad" grunt.

And the United Fruit story also reminds us of some of the hazards when capitalism becomes cronyism. The book recounts all the Washington insiders hired by Zemurray as lobbyists, including Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran. A business that lives by Washington is finally at its mercy, as United Fruit learned when the antitrust cops came after it.

Yes, it's true, United Fruit corrupted (or attempted to anyway) every government they came into contact with, but don't chalk that up to their greed, their virtuous selfishness. Nope, it's the government's fault.

The truth is the United Fruit Company and how it operated is a perfect example of the "unfettered capitalism" Libertarians hold as the ideal economic system. This is why they talk about free bananas for immigrants, but don't mention that time the army machine-gunned workers protesting their exploitation. Libertarians believe, although they won't admit it so explicitly, that workers benefit from their exploitation, so I can see how this isn't their concern. But drop a Libertarian into a banana plantation in Columbia, he might change his mind.

Or maybe he'd stick with his principles with that machine gun in his face, say something like, "Oh, you're giving out free bananas in New York? Why didn't you say so? Here I thought I was living like a slave so you can live like Charles Foster Kane, but free bananas? Makes it all worth it."

What a joke.

The Power of the Big Book Compels You

I've been a disgruntled reader for a while now (Damn you, Ellroy!) and it kind of bothers me.  Reading is one of the great joys of life, I believe, one of the things that separates us from the beasts.  We have this amazing thing called language, and can communicate ideas and images almost magically with just a few black scratches on a white page.

And yet, I find myself reading old books published decades ago by writers who are no longer alive.  The new stuff?  Some of it is good, but a lot of it isn't.  Bookstores are filled with novels that have too much irrelevant detail, are too long, too concerned with filling the page with ink but not good, economical writing.

I suppose we could blame the printing press and the easy availability of paper.  It's hard to imagine Benedictine monks hand-copying, say, all 1088 pages of Stephen King's Under the Dome (which Amazon says weighs 3 pounds in paperback).  Maybe they would, but they better have a team of monks working on it and carve out a whole season for the effort.

This piece is mostly about non-fiction, but I think this paragraph applies to any book:

Why do so many writers feel compelled to write big books?

In part, it seems that big now equates with importance and value. That substitutes form for function, and frequently evidences a writer's ego—or perhaps an editor’s laziness—and indifference to a reader's limited time and attention. Life is a busy place, but don't tell that to those who write big books.

 Yep, sounds about right.  I'm no so sure about what the piece is saying about how ebooks and ease of online research contributes to the problem.  I think "Big=Important," Author ego, editorial laziness, and indifference to readers is sufficient explanation.

Hear We Go Again

A tropical storm is bearing down on the gulf coast, which means that the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore is standing out in the wind, right on the beach.


Can't report on a tropical storm unless you're standing out in it....

Oh, wait, Stephanie Abrams is doing it from the studio?  Man, her reporting would be so much better if she was squinting into the camera, shouting into the mic, clothes flapping in the wind.

Making it Official

It's taken me some time and reflection, but I am no longer a fan, or reader, of one Dan Simmons, visionary SF author and right-wing crank.

Oh sure, I still think the Hyperion Cantos is a good set of books, and I do still like the Olympos books, and I did enjoy The Terror.  But I have no use for their creator, and no, it's not the right-wing politics, per se.  I continue to believe that right wing politics has a legitimate place in our culture, and as long as it's intelligent, coherent, and of good intention, I generally have no problem with it.  (Unfortunately, I think the right wing circa 2012 is neither intelligent, coherent, or of good intention, but that's another post for another day.)

The problem with Dan Simmons the Political Commentator (and probably the reason he makes his living as a novelist) is that he's as dogmatic as he is incoherent.

Example from his forum (no link, sorry):

The first three Great Awakenings in American culture, since 1800, tended to be religious ones (although the third one was centered on abolition of slavery) -- the Fourth Great Awakening was in the 1950's and '60's with the REAL Civil Rights movement at its core (i.e. the guarantee of actual equal civil rights for people of all races and for women.) Since then, we've had a hundred ginned-up faux "civil rights movements" -- including the current gay marriage effort, since portraying one's opponents as bigots is a sure-fire way to gain at least verbal public ("I don't want to be called a bigot") support -- but each of these fake-rights efforts has opened the wound in the "coming apart" rift in our culture even wider.

Murray feels that a "Great Awakening" aimed toward re-creating the health of the family -- the real family, a man and a woman as parents both dedicated to raising and educating children properly (as opposed to the scores of faux-family "alternatives")-- could be the salvation of a culture that has been torn apart and made largely dependent upon government give-aways by half a century's misstaken idea of what actually constitutes both "rights" and "family".

Murray isn't deeply hopeful that such a fifth "Great Awakening" will occur -- given our ever-increasing factiousness and selfishness and glass-teat-enhanced solitude in our current culture -- but he is certain that only such a culture-wide awakening and change (or, in truth, return) to an attitude and obligation to both reality and responsibility in our society can put it back on solid tracks to social sanity.

Man, this is just bad writing. Granted...it's a throwaway on a forum, not meant to be a "publishable" piece of polished writing, but Jesus Christ, that's bad. And it would be even if Charles Murray's ideas had any merit.

Listen to him talk about the Great Awakenings as if they were actual historical occurrences as opposed to academic classifications of various historical trends.

Listen to him separate the Civil Rights movement into the "Real" and "Faux" camps without offering a single clue as to where he draws the distinction.  (And hey, the distinction may not actually be as arbitrary as I think it is, but how am I to know?)

Listen to him talk about the "rift in our culture," as if preferring Fox News over CNN means you participate in a totally different culture.

Listen to him talk about how "Murray feels," giving the reader the impression he's summarizing Murray's "feelings" rather than describing his own.

Listen to him offer a definition of "family" (sorry, the REAL family) that is so conveniently specific that it doesn't describe family life as it's actually lived by millions of people.  (Seriously.  "A man and a woman as parents both dedicated to raising and educating children properly," that's a "real" family?  No, Dan, that's a nuclear family, distinguished as such because that's only one type among many.)


And that last paragraph really rankles.  It's poorly worded, almost a parody of what a "smart" person is supposed to sound like, but what does it say?


A)  Our culture sucks.  (It's factious, selfish, and that glass teat?  That's a TV, the most culturally homogenizing invention ever.)  


B)  Only a Great Awakening will save it.  And I stress...ONLY.  Yes, there may be more than one way to skin a cat, but there's only ONE way to save the culture.....return (I'd like to stress that word as much as Simmons did) to the the good old days of "social sanity," whatever that means.



In a later post in the thread, Simmons has the gall to write:

The logic of the government creating all these new categories to divide and reify (and get rid of) the simple, 10,000-yr.-old idea of "marriage" between a man and a woman is irrefutable.

Now it must be understood that he's being sarcastic here.  As a commentator, Simmons is afflicted with a stubborn refusal to say what he means.  It must be sussed out and interpreted, and I suspect the reason is that he's scared.  He wants to be seen as a reasonable fellow, and yet he's not...not really...so he couches it in clever language meant to obscure rather than illuminate.  (Writers who do this drive me bugfuck insane.  But then again, I'm an unusually blunt and upfront person, which is no virtue...lemme tell ya.)

What is Simmons trying to tell us in this sentence?  The "10,000 years" provides the biggest clue.  It's a rough and inexact shorthand for "the Dawn of Man," or to be scientific about it, the neolithic revolution.  Simmons seems to be arguing that his preferred concept of "marriage" (using his quotes) goes all the way back.  It predates agriculture, animal domestication, organized religion, hierarchical societies, all of that, and not only is it old, but it's universal and unchanging.


And yet anyone who knows anything about history knows that's complete and utter bullshit.  If one appeals to history, it's important --no, necessary-- to get the history right. If not, it's garbage in, garbage out.

Which would explain this garbage.


So if you want your intelligence to be insulted by a cowardly, arrogant bigot...read Dan Simmons.

Doh!

For some reason, I thought of my Uncle Jim when I saw this picture.

Two Things I've Learned From Steve Lekson's Book

1)  Karl Marx and Freiderich Engels were inspired by naive interpretations of ancient societies in the southwest in forming their ideas. They saw the monumental ruins and read the ethnographers and concluded the Anasazi were classless, egalitarian, and cooperative.  It's one of those things that would be awesome if it were true...but it's not true.  Classes formed, elites were elevated, and cooperation was often coerced by the end of a club.  Pueblo Bonito, long thought to be Indian apartments, was a bourgeois mansion for a ruling dynasty. 

2)  Phoenix, Arizona was built on the remains of Hohokam villages.  The Hohokam, who had been farming the area for two thousand years, built a massive canal system to take advantage of the Salt and Gila Rivers for irrigation.  European settlers re-used the canals and started farming the area again.  The city founders settled on Phoenix as the name because, as Wikipedia says, " it described a city born from the ruins of a former civilization."

I'm hoping as I make my way through the book, I'll get this list up to "10 Things I've Learned From Steve Lekson's Book."

God is...Hate?

On Mother's Day, a pastor in North Carolina gave a sermon in which he said this:

"I figured a way out, a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers but I couldn't get it pass the Congress: build a great big large fence, 50 or 100 mile long. Put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified so they can't get out. And you know what? In a few years they will die out. You know why? They can't reproduce."

What can be said about this man's ignorance?  One could point out that the Nazis already tried that.  One could point to the Constitution and its promises of due process and such.

But I'll just point out that I'm living proof that gay people can indeed reproduce, and do.

Queer Eye for the Stereotype

Several years ago, my liberal tolerance bonafides were put in peril when I noticed the surprising number of lesbians at Denver's Pride Parade who were wearing jean shorts, t-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and full-on mullets.  None of these ladies would be confused for men, of course, but it was pretty obvious they were all shopping at the same store participating in a stereotype, whether they knew it or not.  It was, almost literally, a uniform.
 
And yet there's nothing about being sexually attracted to women that forces one to wear a mullet or jorts or to so studiously roll those shirt sleeves up. So why do it?

My theory was that it's a case of in-group signaling.  Since it's not really practical to go around all day saying, "I'm gay," it may be more efficient, not to mention subtle, to communicate that through fashion.  I think that not only accounts for the mullets, but for pretty much any gay stereotype out there, from the lisps to the overly dramatic theatricality.

This pretty much confirms my view:

When I came out in college, I was lucky enough to do so in the company of three highly experienced lesbian roommates, all of whom advised that I reconsider the long, shapeless locks I'd carried over from my high-school days. One of the gang, as odds would have it, owned all six seasons of The L Word on DVD -- 24 discs of the kind of soft-core, girl-on-girl action that only Showtime could get away with -- and we scoured each episode for hair inspiration.

I eventually settled on Shane's cut, the only style on the femme-heavy show that looked queer enough to help me land a date. I printed out a photo and brought it to a hairdresser in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C.'s original gayborhood, to take my first physical step toward assimilation into the all-welcoming queer community I imagined was waiting for me.

The joke I've often used is that these women go to the hairdresser and say "I'd like to look as gay as possible."  Of course, I always thought that was a joke, as in it's funny because it doesn't happen like that.  But now I'm not so sure.  Now I think there may actually be some "queer" hairdressers out there who have "The Gayest Haircuts In Town" printed in big block letters on their business cards as a selling point.

And that's sad, I think.  What's also sad is that the overall effect of reading this lady's piece about her gayborhood, my impression wasn't one of understanding or even empathy.  I felt more isolated and disconnected with every word. 

Queer this, queer that.  Thirteen times she used that word, sometimes as a noun, sometimes as an adjective, but never as a pejorative.  She can do that.  She's a lesbian.  The straight guy using the word "queer" thirteen times in a 950-word piece?   Well, he should be careful.

Because he's a straight man and he just doesn't know....

Breaking News

Operator of hydroponic store behind marijuana growing ring.

Also, water is wet and shit rolls downhill. Now here's Tom with the weather.

 The sad thing about this story is that my first instinct was to call this guy an idiot for playing out the stereotype.  Of course the hydro guy is growing weed.  If he was just growing tomatoes, that would be weird.  And of course the Feds are going to go after him.  He's industrial level, a kind of grow operation multiplier, and he's making money.  The Feds are very interested in money.

But then I thought about it.  I have no personal beef with marijuana or the people who grow it.  I actually lean more on the "they're doing a public service" side of the equation and while I don't idolize the mad scientist growers of the world, I do value their work.

I also think the Feds are wrong on this issue.  Prohibition and enforcement create more problems than smoking dope.  Is this guy stupid for using his hydro store as a front, or is it the whole Drug War that's stupid?

If this guy is stupid, it's only because he refused to play the game.

Drug Warriors

They're not fucking around down in Mexico...either side.

Leksonpalooza

Yesterday I watched all six parts of Steve Lekson's "A New History for the Ancient Southwest" and it was fascinating.  I knew a lot of this stuff, but there was a lot I didn't know, and it was nice to hear Lekson talk about it.  He comes off more confident in his ideas in this presentation than he did in his book, The Chaco Meridian, which has a "I know this is crazy, but hear me out" tone to it.

I'm not sold on the meridian idea, per se, but Lekson has convinced me on various other notions that most southwest archaeology considers absurd.

Among them:

A)  The "Chaco Phenomenon" was mostly political.  The Great Houses in the canyon and in the surrounding areas weren't "villages" like modern day Pueblos;  they were the palaces of elite ruling familes (ie, kings).  When they first excavated Pueblo Bonito, the largest Great House in Chaco, they were shocked to find very few burials, very little evidence that the 650+ rooms were actually occupied, and were left trying to explain what it was and why it was built.

Once the "domestic residence" theory was thrown out, it was replaced with the "center of religious activity" theory, which is not really incompatible with the idea that a ruling elite lived there.  As Lekson points out, there was no separation of church and state in the ancient world.

Whatever the Great Houses were, I've lost the notion that they were villages.  These buildings were erected for the few (the elite) by the many (the commoners).  This goes counter to the many ideas we have about egalitarian Native societies, but you have to follow the evidence not the angels of your better nature.

B)  "Kivas" were residences, not underground chambers of religious ritual.  And hey, I get it.  Modern Pueblo people use their kivas as chambers of religious ritual, so it must have always been the case...even though Modern Pueblo people deliberately abandoned their "old" way of life to the point of abandoning the geographic area where they lived it.  They're going to ditch their kings, ditch their religion (for the new Kachina faith they practice now), ditch their buildings, ditch everything....but they're going to keep the concept that kivas are for ritual?

Consider the history.  The earliest culture in the region, the Basketmakers, lived in underground pithouses.  A pithouse is just like a Pueblo-era kiva, except the later "kivas" were made of stone.  Same round shape (although in the southern Mogollon region they were square), same hole in the floor, same roof-entrance, same hearth under the ladder, same venting system.

And yet we have to believe they stopped living in them just as their society was becoming more advanced?

The key indicator of a room where people once lived is the presence of a hearth.  It's vital for keeping warm on cold nights and necessary for food preparation.  You want to know where the people slept and cooked?  Look for the hearth.  Not every roomblock in an Anasazi building has a hearth, but every "kiva" does.  Pithouse + hearth - ceremonial purposes = Anasazi home.

When I went down to Mesa Verde, we heard so much about "ceremonial purposes," it became a sort of running joke.  A gnarled piece of wood on the ground?  It was used for ceremonial purposes.  A feather blowing in the wind...ceremonial purposes.  It was absurd.  You started to wonder how these Indians can do so much construction (multi-story buildings, reservoirs, irrigation channels) if they're in their holes doing ceremonies all the time.  "Ceremonial purposes" almost became shorthand for, "I don't know what that is, but it was probably used for (everybody now) ceremonial purposes."

Gimme a break.  They were religious and ceremonial, but they were also practical human beings.

C)  Mesoamerican influence was a wee bit more influential than we thought.  The Anasazi grew a lot of maize, which originated in Mexico, as well as squash, which originated in the Andes and made it up to the Southwest through Mexico.  We also know they traded with Mexicans for copper bells, macaw feathers (as well as live macaws), and cacao.  Similarities in architecture and pottery styles have been noted, as well as language.  (Both Hopi and Nahaua, the language of the Aztecs, belong to the same language family, Uto-Aztecan.)

So the Anasazi can borrow Mexican crops, Mexican luxury items, pieces of Mexican mythology (ie, the progression of worlds and the emergence into this one from a lower one), but they can't borrow Mexican ideas on political structure?

Now I'm not saying that the Anasazi are Aztecs or should be considered a Mesoamerican people.  I'm just saying that they knew about Mesoamerican civilizations and Mesoamerican civilizations knew about them.  That border fence Joe Arpaio loves so much didn't exist back then.  Goods, people, and ideas flowed freely.  I think one of those ideas was the concept of class.  To people of the time, it would have been as natural as growing corn.

At any rate, I think I'm going to bite the bullet and buy Lekson's book to learn more. Everyone else seems content to parrot the conventional wisdom which, hate to say it, seems wrong.

The Great Ted Levine

This post exists for one purpose: To get "The Great Ted Levine" listed as a search term in Google.

A History of the Ancient Southwest

I'm debating whether I should buy this book or not.  I really want to read it --considering that it's written by Stephen Lekson and provides a "narrative" historical account of the ancient southwest-- but it's over $30.  I'm sure it's worth every penny, but I do think that's a bit steep for a single book. 

Knock ten dollars off the price and I'd still have to think about it, but not as hard. Yes, I'm a cheap bastard, but books should not be over $30 unless they come with something else, a T-shirt or a DVD or something.  I can appreciate the work Lekson put into the book and recognize the publisher's need to recoup costs after publishing a big academic book with little to no mass appeal, but at prices like this, they're pretty much guaranteeing that the only people reading this book are people with Pell grants.

The used prices are even more ridiculous.  New from Amazon, the book costs $31.54.  Seller "any_book" from Florida will sell you their two copies, one for $85.45 and the other at the "discounted" price of $80.53.  I'd like to believe these are pristine signed copies printed in gold-leaf on vellum paper, but alas...I suspect they're just trying to rip off some college kids.

The Last Outlaw

For some reason I was looking at Dermot Mulrooney's wiki page and it turned me onto an old western he was in called The Last Outlaw.  It was an HBO movie and I vaguely remember seeing ads for it way back when, but I don't think I'd ever seen it.  Wikipedia called it a "cult western," which sparked my interest, and then I saw the cast.

It's like the Pro Bowl of character actors I love.  Aside from Dermot Mulrooney, there's a pre-comeback Mickey Rourke playing the villain.  The guys in the gang?  Aside from two Platoon vets in Keith David and John C. McGinley, there's Steve Buscemi and the great Ted "It puts the lotion in the basket" Levine.

A good movie?  Not sure yet.  A great cast?  Definitely.

Truth in Advertising

I was at a Burger King the other day, which was unusual because I've pretty much sworn off all fast food type places. Not all, as there are a few --mostly local places with no franchising options-- that are quite good, and the whole "fast casual" franchises aren't bad. But I have no use for the McDonald's, Wendy's, KFCs, Taco Bells, Burger Kings, Arby's, Subways of the world.

No, it's not the Trans fats or the evil cooking oil. It's the soggy lettuce, the squashed tomatoes, the poorly mixed fountain drinks, the fact that the fries are often overcooked and oversalted, the hamburgers mashed together with all the care that a minimum-wage employee can muster in five seconds.

I'm not a foodie by any stretch of the imagination, but that shit is nearly inedible. It's poor quality food with poor quality preparation and the truth is that it's not much cheaper than real food from a place that gives a shit.

The only reason I went to Burger King on this day was that I had my niece with me and I didn't want to go to McDonald's. My niece, it should be said, doesn't like the food either, but she does like toys. Getting her to eat her chicken nuggets, though...good luck.

At any rate, on the wall of this Burger King was a photographic mural of a group of racially diverse, upwardly mobile young people, model-types of course, sitting at a Burger King enjoying their meal. Only instead of paper cups and messy wrappers, their food came on plates, their drinks in glasses. The fries? They looked magically delicious. The Whoppers on their plates? Looked like they got them at Red Robin, all big and fat and gourmet. 

The saddest thing about this mural was my emotional response:  It pissed me off.  Where's that Burger King?  In France?  Can I pay extra and get a good Whopper on a plate?  Why am I sitting here trying to nibble at this crap when I could be having the awesome experience the people in the mural are having?

And you know, I get it.  It's advertising.  Coors Light doesn't summon a frozen train.  Axe Body Spray doesn't cause random make-outs.  And Whoppers don't come on plates.

And while Coors could never deliver actual frozen trains and Axe isn't truly a pheromone, no one says that Burger King couldn't serve a decent hamburger, plate or no plate, except for, well, the honchos out at Burger King corporate.

Everything in life has a trade-off.  Like most fast food places, Burger King traded quality for quantity.  It was more important to them to have thousands of crappy restaurants than half as many good ones.  And they're probably sitting in their boardrooms, telling themselves no one is willing to pay for a decent burger, which one glance at the restaurant industry as a whole would tell you is a complete and utter lie.  People are more than willing to pay for a decent burger.

It's just that Burger King and their ilk are unwilling to provide one.

You Know It's Time to Quit When...

...you read the airport is closing three of its four smoking lounges and your first thought is "Another reason not to go to the airport!"

Lesson Learned

Don't shave when you're not wearing your glasses. Yesterday I had a little tuft on my chin that I had to wear all day because I was no where near a razor when I noticed it. Today I'm finding all kinds of stray little hairs I missed.

Obama Ain't no Chump

I guess I'm an unpaid representative of the Obama campaign today. Don't want to be. But this video is just too good not to post. Hitting where it hurts!