Where the Battle of Algiers rages on ...Rick's Cafe Americain

Paul Begala’s apparent inability to understand Stewart’s criticism was vexing. He (and to a lesser extent, Tucker Carlson) seemed to think that Stewart thought that they were too “tough” on their guests.  Stewart’s criticism is precisely the opposite.

The “tough questions” aren’t meant to be answered; the entire premise is a charade. The point of a show like Crossfire is to watch the shouting, not to resolve issues. Begala and Carlson spoke of “debate,” but shouting “Yes” and “No” isn’t a debate. Begala defended “spin” as an attempt by sincere people to convince people of their views, but Stewart promptly called bullshit on that also.  Sincere belief is “We need to bring democracy to Iraq to stabilize the Middle East and protect America.” Spin is “We have organized an international coalition to do so.” Begala has spent so much time as a spin coordinator that he doesn’t know the difference.

Tucker Carlson is even worse.  I happen to be in the middle of reading his autobiography, which is intermittently amusing, and it almost predisposes me to liking him. Not anymore. His version of “tough questions” is to ask the host of a parody talk show why he didn’t grill Kerry.

Jon Stewart didn’t grill Ralph Reed, Bill O’Reilly, some official high in the Bush campaign food chain who’s name I don’t know, Pat Buchanan or Vin Diesel. Grilling guests just isn’t what the Daily Show is about. Maybe it should be when political guests are on, but it isn’t. The Daily Show is simply a place for guests to speak to a specific audience. Maybe Martha Stewart should have given up her Today show spot when she was indicted for securities fraud, but the only thing more ridiculous than Martha “focusing on her salad” was the idea that Matt Lauer or Katie Couric would do a hard hitting interview. Expecting hard hitting journalism from a Daily Show interview is a similar offense.

Carlson’s frustration boiled over when he criticised Stewart for not being “funny” enough. Stewart said “I’m not going to be your monkey,” which was an almost perfect answer. He could have perfectly summed up his point if he had said “When you come on my show, we can be funny. This is a news show on CNN. Treat your audience with respect and apologize to them for wasting their time and rotting their minds.”

It warmed my heart when Stewart called Carlson a dick.

Now, I’ve had issues with the whole “What can Brown do for you?” slogan for a long time.  I won’t go off on the rant this usually inspires, but I will state that I don’t think that the words “brown” and “do” can be used in the same sentence as an effective marketing tool for anyone over the age of 6.  I also don’t find “brown” to be a color that invokes any real positive attributes.  Whatever.

The purpose of this post is to ask the following question:  Where have we arrived in our society when a company can purport to trademark the color brown?  Will other package delivery services soon be enjoined from using cardboard boxes of that color, lest they benefit from the invocation of the “Brown-ness” of UPS?

Now, I realize that what UPS is protecting is the distinctive color of their vans, uniforms, logos, etc.  They want to prevent competitors from dressing their employees up in ridiculous chocolate parodies of the Cub Scout uniform and sending them out in giant turd-mobiles in an effort to capitalize on UPS’ established presence and good will.  However, it is still a little jarring to see that UPS now claims to own the Color Brown.  Still, I’m sure I’ll adjust.

Rick’s Cafe is the exclusive owner of every word on this page, including the phrase “the Color Brown”.  We reserve the right to come to your house and beat you up if you use any of these words without permission.

The Pentagon has turned a blind eye to this practice since at least the Vietnam War, when an Army reporter broke the story, and despite repeated internal investigations that have shown rampant improper practices has consistently refused to do the one thing that would ensure that this not happen: ban the insurance agents from the bases.  The most recent report, in May 2000, caused the Pentagon to appoint a commission, whose final report is due soon, but whose draft report, the New York Times reports, says banning the agents “is not an option.”

. . . barring sales agents from bases is not the solution, said Frank Keating, the former governor of Oklahoma, who is president of the American Council of Life Insurers, a lobbying group.

“Anything that is unethical or inappropriate should not exist, period,” Mr. Keating said. But “someone who is mature enough to fight and quite possibly die for their country,” he added, “should be freely able to decide how much and what kind of life insurance they should have.”

That argument does not satisfy people like Capt. James A. Shaw, commander of the Second Battalion’s 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment at Fort Bragg, N.C. In his experience, he said, the training that produces competent soldiers may make them vulnerable to a disguised pitch from a friendly agent in the classroom who is a veteran.

“It’s an environment where you do what you’re told,” Captain Shaw said. “They are learning stuff that will save their lives in combat. Those classes are the law.”

When the topic switches from weapons maintenance to personal finance, he said, “there’s no real reason to suspect otherwise."

These insurance companies and their agents are the scum of the earth, and the Pentagon is worse for not taking immediate appropriate action.  I wonder if there’s a class action lawsuit here . . .

Read the whole thing.

The young have a well-documented tendency to resist the dominant paradigm and rebel against the perceived status quo.  We also share an equally strong (and often competing) desire to be part of something, to identify with some group.  At the younger end of the spectrum, this produces the often starkly segregated cliques, clubs, and gangs that define most junior high and high school communities.  In the later teens, twenties and thirties, it often results in a sort of “conversion”, usually triggered or defined by social tectonics.

I submit that many young people, exposed to the (unquestionable) liberal bias of many high schools and most universities, reacted in the typical young-person manner: they became conservatives.  In a sense, being a Young Republican is the equivalent of being one of the Goth kids in high school.  The individual defines him or herself in contradiction to the dominant paradigm, and joins with others, similarly rebellious, to form a subversive, yet supportive, identity.

Now, what happened when these young upstarts left the ivory tower and found themselves in the—gasp—mainstream?  The “Conservatives” took over Congress, then the White House.  The “liberal media” is so jammed with conservative mouthpieces it’s developing TMJ.  Why, you can’t spill a tall Toffee Nut Latte without splashing a conservative blogger anymore!  So, for a while, the conservatives pretended they were still oppressed.  Many are still doing it—turn on Fox, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, or pretty much any AM station and see if you don’t hear someone complain about the liberal media.  But for the more intelligent ones, the deception couldn’t last.

But is it so bad to be part of the mainstream, part of the dominant class?  You can’t be a rebel forever, right? Once these people hit their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, its often too late to switch tracks.  You may gaze longingly at your liberal friends, in their “Kerry-Edwards” t-shirts, passionately talking about the comeback trail, planning and plotting and hoping.  And you, what do you have, smugness?  Not really.  And that’s not nearly as much fun anyway.  Admit it—it’s more exciting to be the underdog, and youth wants excitement.

Of course, we “liberals” aren’t much more well-defined than you “conservatives”.  So much so that the “we” and “you” in the last sentence are probably out of place.  In fact, the only thing holding us together as “liberals” is a desire to see Bush gone—more on that in a moment.

But its not being mainstream that’s hurting conservativism, it’s that conservatism has lost its way, has lost itself.  I believe the main problem facing young conservatives today is that nobody knows what the hell a conservative is anymore.  What does a conservative stand for?  It used to be easy.  Conservatives were against Communism, the Federal Government, and Hippies.

But the Evil Empire was hoisted by its own petard, the hippies all bought Hummers, and the “conservatives” in the White House are pumping up the federal government so hard that Barry Bonds is looking to get in on the action.  So what does it mean to be a conservative?

Are conservatives for or against gay marriage? stem-cell research?  abortion?  government spending?  government regulation of the private sector?  socialized medicine?  the invasion of Iraq? the environment?  These are surely complex issues susceptible to a variety of reasoned views—but what’s the point of calling yourself a “conservative” if you don’t share at least some of the views of other conservatives?

The “conservative movement” just isn’t.  I bet if you put twenty randomly-selected conservatives in a room, they would align themselves in a hundred different ways depending on what issue you gave them.  And I bet there wouldn’t be a single issue on which they all agreed, with one possible exception: supporting Bush.  Because—just as liberals are tied together most strongly right now by their desire to see regime change in the White House—“conservatives” can only define themselves by the tip of the pyramid.  Bush says he is a conservative, and that he speaks for conservatives.  How, then, can you be a conservative if you do not support Bush?  (This solipsism seems to work remarkably well, although I think it has and will continue to lose Bush votes among the more intelligent young conservatives).

Bush has fulfilled his promise of being a “uniter”, but he has done so in the only way he knows how: by dividing.  You’re either with him or you’re against him, and few have the courage to stand against him if it means standing against their own.  What the conservatives need to realize is that, at least for the moment, there is no “conservative movement.” The Bushites have so trampled and distorted any defining ideology or policy with their political juggernaut that there is no meaningful connection between the spectrum of views and the schema being applied.

I’ll bet a whole lot of “conservatives” have spent the past four years feeling like they should feel like they’ve won, but wondering why, deep down, they don’t feel that way.  The answer will come from asking the right question:  what have you won?  I’d venture to say that the previous administration was a far more representative—and effective—“conservative” government than what we have now.

So get over yourselves.  Get over the label.  Figure out what you believe in, and what you want—and what you need, and what your children will need—and think about who is more likely to give you that.  If you need to find new labels, as you probably do, reorganize.  Identify yourself with a coherent group, and call yourself whatever you want.  Get about making choices based on what you think is right, not what you think you’re expected to do.  And if you can’t quite get over the high-school mentality, relish this thought: once Bush is out of the White House, we liberals will go back to being a fractious bunch of whiners tilting at windmills. 

As a litigator, I have spent a fair amount of time looking through evidence—not in a search for the truth, but in a search for a “colorable argument”.  That is my job—to find and make the best, non-frivolous arguments in support of my clients’ position.  It is my job to do that even when I personally may not be persuaded that such an argument, if accepted, will lead to the truth, or even to the right result.

I submit that this is NOT the job of our government.  Our government is (or is meant to be) a participatory democracy, not an adversarial system.  Especially where national security is at stake, the focus should absolutely be on a search for the TRUTH, not on finding “colorable arguments” to support the administration’s position or goals.

Bush, et al have been at the vanguard of a conservatism that prides itself on a manicheist approach to issues, most notably the categorization of virtually everything as either Good or Evil.  This is hardly a realistic or useful approach, and it is unfortunate that so many are attracted to its superficial simplicity (but then, look at the popularity of the Atkins diet).  What is most pernicious is that these “compassionate conservatives” do not even act consistently with their oft-asserted world-view, precisely when it is perhaps most important to draw bright lines.  Either Red River was lying, or he was telling the truth.  Looking for a “false positive” rather than searching for the truth smacks of moral relativism and—gasp!—postmodernism.  What are they, liberals?

Seriously, to the extent that the “search for truth” has any meaning left, it should be heavily apportioned to our government.  Not only is there far more at stake here than in the average litigation, but the systematic and institutional protections (such as they are) that exist in our adversary system of litigation are not present in the operation of the federal government. 

One of the more positive (if frustrating) themes I see forming in the Kerry-Edwards campaign is a desire to focus on policy and government over criticizing the outgoing administration, despite the bountiful political fodder there.  Let’s hope its more than mere lip service. 

Fuck that. Going out and clubbing an infant creature to death in order to make nice clothes is simply not something civilized people should be doing (insert Canada joke here).  If you agree, go to this site and maybe you can help do something about it.

Fuck that. Going out and clubbing an infant creature to death in order to make nice clothes is simply not something civilized people should be doing (insert Canada joke here).  If you agree, go to this site and maybe you can help do something about it.

The WSJ article cited to by Dawn begs the question: why can Colin Powell, son of Jamaican immigrants, call himself African-American, but Teresa Heinz, who was born in Africa, can’t?  The answer is, because the term has been co-opted to mean something other than what it literally refers to.

“African-American” has come to replace “black” in common parlance to refer to those people who have inherited the dark (pun acknowledged) legacy of slavery, either by descent—or, more commonly—by operation of the bigotry that continues to exist in the wake of emancipation.  It refers to Africa only in a very attenuated way.  Many—particularly hip hop fans—will remember the emergence in the ‘80s of what I will call “Africanism”—the adoption of African themes and cultural signifiers as a new “black” identity.  This Africanism, and the term “African-American”, are only tenuously connected to the actual continent of Africa—what they represent is an attempt to create a new, positive cultural identity for a group of people whose history in this country is one of undeserved degradation and shame.  But in the end it is neither truly African nor truly American.

Witness, for example, the “African American” man who’s DNA never saw the Dark Continent.  And, of course, the lily-white ketchup heiress born in Mozambique.  Which of them is truly “African American”?  What about the white man whose parents and grandparents were born and raised in South Africa?  Or the great-grandchild of slaves whose skin is just as white?  Or my friend, the first-generation Brazilian-American whose skin is as dark as that of my other friend, the first-generation Nigerian?  The Brazilian almost certainly descends from slaves, while my Nigerian friend descends from (unenslaved) royalty.  To many, they are both “black” (or to the more polite but equally simple-minded, “African American").

So now I see two problems:  First, if we accept this (ambiguous) definition of “African American”, then what do we call people from Africa who most clearly don’t fit that definition, like Teresa Heinz?  White Africans?  Second, and as underscored by the hypothetical answer to my first question, what is the effect of this appropriation of the term today?  With miscegenation and globalization blurring the biological and cultural lines between peoples, does it make sense to keep trying to draw lines where there should never have been any in the first place?

It is nice to see that as a sign of divine intervention.  It provides Easterbrook solace and, well, bully for him.  I’d like to find solace also, and I won’t begrudge him his.  But I think that he goes awry when he says that there is no evolution-driven reason for the body to release all of its endorphins upon death.  I concede that a dying creature is unlikely to reproduce, and so any strictly death-related adaptations would not be reproductively successful adaptations and would therefore not be expected to ripple through the entire population.  But isn’t Easterbrook looking too narrowly?

The body releases endorphins in response to extreme pain and extreme stress.  It does this even when the body isn’t in the process of dying.  This is precisely the type of trait that would respond to selection pressure.  Endorphins may encourage a person to keep fighting to survive, to make post-trauma recovery easier or to allow people a clearer head to make better decisions in high-stress times.  All of these things would allow a person to soldier on to breed another day.  This is a blunt instrument, however.  Death probably feels to the body, more or less, like an extremely high-pain, high-stress event.  Just the sort of thing that would cause your brain to fire off all endorphin cannons in a futile, last-ditch effort to survive.

In any event, when you die you also shit your pants.  Another sign of the divine?