Gail Collins in the NYT - must read

While it's nice to see the media at long last cover the Presidential Election like they should - i.e. call a lie a lie - this is one of the best and funniest pieces I've read recently. It's Gail Collins in the NYT. I'll try not to put the whole thing here, but it's difficult when it's so uniformly good.

“The people of Ohio are the most productive in the world!” yelled John McCain at a rally outside of Youngstown on Tuesday. Present company perhaps excluded, since the crowd was made up entirely of people who were at liberty in the middle of a workday.

.....

And when McCain took the center stage, they were itching to cheer the war hero and boo all references to pork-barrel spenders.

Nobody had warned them that he had just morphed into a new persona — a raging populist demanding more regulation of the nation’s financial system. And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.

Really, if McCain is going to keep changing into new people, the campaign should send out notices. (Come to a rally for the next president of the United States. Today he’s a vegetarian!)

.....

(I was laughing out loud at work at the last line there.)

.....

“We’re going to put an end to the abuses on Wall Street — enough is enough!” this new incarnation yelled, complaining angrily about greed and overpaid C.E.O.’s. Slowly, people begin to peel out of the crowd and drift away. Even in these troubled times, there are apparently a number of Republicans who think highly of corporate executives and captains of high finance.

....

It was a rather jumbled message, but the new story line was firm. The fundamentals were not things like employment rates or trade statistics. The fundamentals were the workers.

We are the fundamentals!

And, naturally, the humble, hard-working fundamentals are good. Who could doubt it? Was Barack Obama trying to say that he didn’t think the American working man and woman was good? Was this the sort of thing they talked about at those fancy-schmancy Hollywood fund-raisers? Which, of course, John McCain hates. Give him some hard cider and a log cabin, and he’s happy as a clam.

But wait! The fundamentals are in danger! At risk because of “greed.” Which John McCain was shocked to discover has been running rampant in the canyons of Wall Street.

......

McCain has always, genuinely, believed in dismantling government regulations, and there he was, vowing to create new “comprehensive regulations that will apply the rules and enforce them to the fullest.” It makes you think that he’s trying to impersonate something he’s not. Or wasn’t. Or might not be. The image is getting fuzzy.

This week, while McCain’s chief economic adviser was telling reporters that it was wrong to “run for president by denigrating everything in sight and trying to scare people,” McCain’s ad people were unveiling a new spot announcing “Our economy in crisis!” and calling for “tougher rules on Wall Street” along, of course, with more offshore drilling. Mournful unemployment-line music swells.

I have absolutely no idea of how John McCain would handle a financial crisis if he were president. But on behalf of all the nation’s fundamentals I would like to say that he now has me ready to stage a run on the first bank in sight.

Excellent stuff! Please go read the whole thing and then pass it on. After all, it's not like the rest of the newspaper is going to make you laugh ... for a few years ...

The End of Empire - required reading

This book is essential reading, as is anything written by Matt Taibbi in general.

To take you back a bit, I first discovered him when he was reporting on the Kerry campaign in 2004, out of which came this excellent book - Spanking the Donkey. Required reading for anyone who, like me, woke up on the morning of the 3rd November 2004, wondering how the Democrats had managed to bollix up another election against Dubya.

But then, I became a fan for life when I read this piece of his, featuring The Moustache of Mediocrity, aka Thomas Friedman. Apart from anything else, I loved this bit:
On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

And there's more:

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

I know it's brutally unfair to him to say this, because it's been said of so many posturing typewriter operators with just a handful of brain cells among them, but if ever there was a successor to Hunter S. Thompson's mantle as an intelligent, outraged and raging chronicler of our strange and stupid times, it's Taibbi.

The book is a thoughtful and considered delve into some pretty strange avenues of American behaviour that are almost mainstream - as Taibbi says, far from coming to their senses and trying to figure out how to get the US out of the mess that their lying, thieving and downright criminal politicians have landed them in, the great American public seem to be chasing even stranger rabbits down even weirder holes. He doesn't even bother to add the obligatory positive ending last chapter - he lays it out like he sees it, and it ain't pretty!

The End of Empire - # 1 in an occasional series

One of my favourite hobby horses has been the impending end of the American Empire and how we would recognize it. It is an utterly unscientific and totally anecdotal theory, rather like one of those strange houses designed and built by eccentrics in their spare time, over decades. Without going into all the nooks and crannies of my reasoning, I usually hang facts on a framework of two or three basic points:

- All dominant civilizations and empires - Greek, Roman, Mughal, the Caliphate, British, Soviet etc - inevitably decline and fall. The inflexion point is usually not detected at the time and in retrospect, is usually found to have occurred around the time when common wisdom suggested its utter and total infallibility. 'The End of History', while looking like a particularly foolish statement of hubris for our time and which will damn Fukuyama to the laughing stocks of history, is not a new idea; even as late as the 1930s, a variant of it could be heard as 'The sun never sets on the British Empire'

- The rate of change is only increasing - while the Roman Empire lasted anywhere from 600+ to a thousand years, based on your point of view, the Mughal Empire lasted around 400 years, as did the British Empire and the Soviets found themselves slung out after a relatively brisk 70 odd years. Therefore, to suppose that the American Century is well past us is a perfectly acceptable hypothesis.

- The seeds of decline are varied and not necessarily external - while external events can precipitate dramatic changes, the rot is usually from within. The madness of the Romans had as much to do with their collapse as the Goth invasions; the Mughals alternated between fanatical religious fervour and world-class dissoluteness while the British empire crept up on it while the British empire was becoming an infeasible enterprise given the aspirations of its subjects and the march of the technology and resource driven American nation. The straws in the wind in America are beginning to accumulate - healthcare and the proportion of Americans without access to it at an affordable cost, the raging battles over whether or not Darwinism should be taught in school, the frantic battles in some sections to deny the impact of man's activities on the environment and the unsustainability of our current way of life, the use of Katrina by Republicans to carry out some convenient bleaching of the city's racial makeup, the seemingly ever-constricting grip of frankly loony evangelicals over the public discourse and the levers of power and the unshakeable belief that every war can be fought and refought till they are won. Even if they are lost. But with nukes next time.

Having said all of this, then, I spotted something in the New York Times today that really made me sit up. Given the carnage in the financial sector and the bloodbath going on, none of which contradicts my hypothesis in any way (especially given that I give it exactly 48 hours before some talking suits will pop up on TV to say that we should guard against the knee-jerk impulse to make regulation stronger as that would only harm the working man...), what caught my eye was rather surprising. It was this.

Let me extract some bits:

WASHINGTON — Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.

“One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.”

Remember 'soft power' ? Defined as 'its ability to attract others by the legitimacy of U.S. policies and the values that underlie them'? Well, this is exactly what the NYT article is talking about - take a good look, 'cause the tide seems to be running out.

The causes cited in the article should not be unfamiliar to anyone who goes past the daily Britney-Paris Hilton-Sarah Palin crap in the news. The extreme right-wing conservatism of the Supreme Court, America's foreign policy being increasinly unpalatable abroad, the insularity of American courts and their unwillingness to accept foreign law, none of these should be stunning front page news.

What is certainly surprising, is to read a statement along the lines of this one: 'America is in danger of becoming something of a legal backwater'.

And who's the filthy, communist, terrorist-loving radical who said this?

Justice Michael Kirby, of the High Court of Australia!

Oh.