Squarespace

This blog, for the moment, remains available despite the fact that it's hosted in a flooded datacenter in Manhattan. Folks from Squarespace, my hosting and platform provider, and their datacenter partners are literally doing all they can to keep us on the Internet. They're manually carrying fuel to feed to generators, ensuring the pumps remove floodwaters from the building's basement, and troubleshooting any number of other problems arising when a sophisticated datacenter floods and loses power.

The threat of downtime for blogs and other websites (many that are far more important than mine) is hardly the most critical impact of the devastating hurricane. It is, though, one of the many disruptions, small and large, that sum to a major disaster. And the determined efforts of my hosts are small reminders of the grit and ingenuity humans so often show in the face of unexpected adversity, when the normal rules, the ordinariness of the everyday, disappear in an instant. Thanks my friends!

Viewer Mail

Normally my blog scribblings manage to attract literally fours of readers. I did have one post, attacking the idea of true love on the occasion of my wedding anniversary, that was passed around a fair bit. Not exactly viral, more like a topical rash. I use this forum to work out ideas in my head on all kinds of topics. I learned as a math student the difference between thinking you have a good idea and actually having a good idea. Writing down a proof can reveal that you’ve done nothing at all, whatever the sensation of reason and accomplishment you might have had in your head. And my one rule is that I just write what’s on my mind in no more than a couple of hours or so. A bit more than a scratch pad, quite a bit less rigorous than an academic article or book.

My latest post, a letter to my Republican friends, attracted quite a bit more attention than normal. It was passed around on Facebook and Twitter before attracting a lot of attention on reddit.com. It’s now been read by almost 25,000 people and still getting about 1,000 hits per hour. About half of my new readers hate it. Some took the effort to drop me a line:

Subject: Your Obama speech,…

Message: You sir are someone who is grossly drunk on donkey fluid…no RATIONAL person would truly believe your pile of utter BS on Obama would had been so great if it weren’t for those scumbags who voted against him in 2010. So clueless and naive.

Happily, Crimefighter, as he likes to be called, is not representative of the feedback I’ve gotten. The discussion on reddit has been very good, if highly critical. Take this comment, by masterwit, who took exception to my reference to pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz as one of the world’s most repulsive humans:

I do not care what party an individual may attach themselves to… but referring to the political opposition as repulsive humans is intellectually immature. Granted there are repulsive humans in this world, but this sort of dialect is not healthy in trying to persuade “a Republican”.

Terrible article regardless of one’s political view.

I think masterwit is correct. While I am not strategically trying to persuade anyone and therefore not bothered that my language might sabotage some political aims, it’s no way to talk about another person if interpreted naturally. Of course, I didn’t mean literally to denigrate Luntz as a human being. In a conversation with friends, of whatever political stripe, this reference would be accompanied with laughter and the unspoken humility that makes it possible to love and respect ideologically disparate friends. Luntz, in my view, is partly responsible for some of the more regrettable features of our politics. But when read by strangers, this bit of hyperbole stands on its own. And on its own it sucks.

From flashmedallion (and echoed in other form by colorlessgreenidea):

This article kind of undermines itself a little; the author talks about how he’s not interested in getting Republicans to vote against Democrats on account of policy… but he keeps getting sidetracked and bashing policies.

There are indeed two paragraphs of the post that focus on substantive policy differences. I included these because I do think there’s a connection between the rigidity of the procedural obstruction and the unyielding ideology the Republicans have practiced in the last few years. This article by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein makes that point far better than I could.

I also wanted to highlight that I have serious policy disagreements with the Republican leadership. Let’s not hide this. I’m not trying to tell Republicans that our political positions are close. But I made sure to add explicitly that I was offering no supporting argument in the post for any of my preferred policies. It might be that many readers will be turned off when I suggest it’s “inexplicable” to insist on immediate spending cuts in the middle of a demand-induced recession or that Republican foreign policy is “wild-eyed and unrealistic.” That’s ok. We don’t have to agree, and my goal is not to coax you to my position with soothing language. Rather, I’m saying we need to figure out how to govern effectively despite the fact that we vehemently disagree.

Pakyaro says I “lost [him or her] at ‘EVAR’” and Ganonderp_ says:

How the hell did he become a law professor? This reads like an editorial in a high school newspaper.

Look, I’m a total goofball. I admit it, and I encourage my students to challenge me by telling them that I say stupid things all the time. Anyway, I wasn’t hired as a teacher or scholar for my admittedly random blogging. Some people seem to like it, and some don’t. The point was to emphasize that while it’s shrill to suggest that this election involves the most important issues ever to confront our Republic, we do face a critical structural problem — at a time when we need to get things done. Maybe it was a goofy way to say it. If you want academicky sounding things, go download my papers here. No, really, please go there!

Perhaps predictably, a fair number of comments (many on reddit, one by email, and one over twitter) suggested I’d been too quick to reject the idea that a third party is a better solution than rewarding one of the two we have. (I’m beginning to think there may be an unusual concentration of Gary Johnson among the internetterati…. Joke. As a long-ago slashdot, digg, and usenet participant, I’d have been disappointed to find otherwise.) Yes, the paragraph in which I discuss this is hardly conclusive. @ariel_kirkwood on Twitter pointed me to this interesting article on score voting by Andrew Jenings, Clay Shentrup, and Warren D. Smith. On the reddit discussion, there are several good threads discussing third parties.

I just don’t have a well-formed opinion on the issue. I’m not at all opposed to altering the Constitution, which has many flaws. (See Sandy Levinson’s work for an example of what a fresh reconsideration of our Constitution might reveal.) My brief point, which is really all I can say at the moment, was that without constitutional amendment, norms are our best shot at preventing damaging obstruction as election strategy. Failing to achieve one’s goal, election, may cause a re-examination of strategy, unyielding obstruction. Absent more fundamental reforms, I think our best chance is electoral defeat of obstruction.

A few took issue with the premise that obstruction could even have been effective since the Democrats enjoyed a filibuster-proof majority. There’s not much to this claim, though. Despite a big election win in 2008, the Democrats managed sixty senators for only a couple of months following the extensive litigation to prevent the seating of Al Franken and before the death of Ted Kennedy. It also counts Arlen Specter and Joe Lieberman among the sixty. In any event, I’m not making an abstract argument but citing to what a number of Republicans have said the strategy was.

Finally, there are a number of people that I know I’ll never convince. That’s fine! We don’t have to agree. Come hang out with me at Two Story Coffeehouse here in Athens and we can debate and share some laughs. For example, funfsinn14 writes:

So vote for Obama because institutional gridlock is present? I like institutional gridlock, the less things the sociopaths in govt can get done the better.

I’m happy to have the election run honestly on those grounds. If you have a majority that desires to vote for gridlock, I’d be surprised. But I appreciate the forthrightness.

On the other side, I’ve been told that I should know this is an assymetrical fight, for reasons similar to what funfsinn14 said. If one party is basically fine with getting nothing done but the other is not, then only one will practice obstruction as an electoral strategy. Two responses. First, I agree this asymmetry exists, and I guess I appeal to my Republican friends’ sense of fairness more than fear. I’m optimistic enough to believe that if it were perfectly clear to everyone that one party had intentionally obstructed in order to run on accusations their opponents were not able to get anything done, then the public would soundly reject them at the polls. Second, though, even if it’s true that a Romney win would lead to the Democrats’ rolling over and compromising like they did during the W. Bush administration, I’m not sure this will continue. Eventually, the party will lose its taste for being bloodied. And the structural exploits that will be used to level the playing field will be at everyone’s expense.

That’s why my central points are: (a) the Republicans themselves have said that obstruction was the strategy to win election, (b) they are in fact running on accusations that Obama has been ineffective in passing things and getting bipartisan consensus on what he has passed, and (c) that strategy must lose.

Dear Republican Friends

Dear Republican Friends,

Look, we need to talk. We can’t keep going like this. No matter how much you dislike President Obama and no matter how much you disagree with his policies, you need to vote for him in November. I’m not saying you have to like it or that you can’t go back to voting even for extreme conservatives in the next election, but this election is different.

The problem is not that the issues involved in this cycle are THE MOST IMPORTANT ONES EVAR. No, they’re important, but many elections have involved similarly important issues. I think you’re wrong about taxes, spending, healthcare, foreign policy, the judiciary, and regulation. But I’m happy to keep disagreeing on these subjects in the normal course of our politics.

Here’s the thing: if Romney wins, it validates a strategy that, if adopted by my team too, will make America pretty much ungovernable. From the day Obama was inaugurated, the Republican strategy has been to refuse to cooperate on virtually every issue, to fight every piece of legislation, to block every nomination, and even to threaten to kill clearly needed legislation in the style of a hostage taker.

And when I say “from the day Obama was inaugurated,” I mean it literally. That night, at a strategy dinner organized by one of the world’s most repulsive humans, Frank Luntz, and attended by House and Senate Republican leaders, including Paul Ryan, key Republicans discussed the need to “challenge [the new administration] on every single bill.” Killing everything, running on a lack of progress to take back the House in the midterms and the White House in 2012, that was what mattered. Newt Gingrich told the assembled crowd: “You will remember this day. You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.”

One attendee, Texas rep Pete Sessions, explained shortly after this and after the House Republicans had unanimously voted against the stimulus bill:

Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban. And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person’s entire processes. And these Taliban — I’m not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that’s not what we’re saying. I’m saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.

In 2010, Senator Mitch McConnell famously declared that his most important priority was to ensure that President Obama would be a one-term president. Supposed fact checkers have pointed out that, in the context of that interview, McConnell perhaps showed more flexibility. But in the context of everything else we know, it could not be clearer that winning the White House in 2012 using a strategy of unyielding obstruction was precisely his top priority. That mindless, nihilistic obstruction has been a means to that end is obvious not only from the record but also from what other senators have said. We know this both from off-the-record comments and also from on-the-record statements. Here’s former Senator George Voinovich:

If he was for it, we had to be against it. … . He wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.

Vice President Biden claims he was told by several Republican Senators, before taking office, “For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back.” You may generally disbelieve Biden, but the gist of these conversations was confirmed by Republican Senators Bob Bennett and Arlen Specter. (The source here is the same link as above, an article by Greg Sargent reporting on the contents of Michael Grunwald’s book, The New New Deal.)

And obstruct they have. I won’t recite the list of bills and appointments Republicans have blocked. Loud, obnoxious, and illogical opposition in the House is paired with efficacious holds and filibustering in the Senate. Take a look at this chart showing that the number of filibusters more than doubled when Democrats took control of the Senate. It is to the point where absolutely nothing gets through the Senate without sixty votes, which means Republicans can and, more importantly and tragically, do veto everything. The Democrats did indeed maintain a sixty-vote majority for a brief period, counting two independents who normally voted with them, but any sensible person quickly understands that’s not enough, given the way that a single Democratic vote could be easily peeled off. (Obstruction could provide the appearance of division that would be used as a bludgeon in races in vulnerable districts.)

This strategy combines toxically with a party ideology that moderates of all stripes have observed growing increasingly inflexible, increasingly unmoored from the facts and pragmatism, and ever more fond of insane litmus tests like Grover Norquist’s tax pledge (guaranteeing in advance that no matter what happens candidates will not vote for any income tax increase of any kind).

But, my fellow American, I’m not asking you to vote against your party because of its policy choices. I do find inexplicable their insistence on dramatically cutting spending in the wake of a demand-induced recession despite record low interest rates and no real inflation, their dogged determination to maintain historically low levels of taxation on the richest Americans, their obsession with eliminating regulations, their preoccupation with controlling female sexuality, and their attachment to wild-eyed, unrealistic foreign policies. I’m not giving you any arguments on those here, however. But pointing out just how extreme your party has become goes some way toward explaining why they’d be willing to engage in unprecedented levels of hypocrisy (fully aware how hyperbolic that can sound when discussing political bodies) to defeat a president:

The results can border on the absurd: In early 2009, several of the eight Republican co-sponsors of a bipartisan health-care reform plan dropped their support; by early 2010, the others had turned on their own proposal so that there would be zero GOP backing for any bill that came within a mile of Obama’s reform initiative. As one co-sponsor, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn’t have voted for it.”

And seven Republican co-sponsors of a Senate resolution to create a debt-reduction panel voted in January 2010 against their own resolution, solely to keep it from getting to the 60-vote threshold Republicans demanded and thus denying the president a seeming victory.

Now stick with me. It’s perfectly fine for the opposition robustly to fight the President’s agenda. Especially after losing a high profile election, it’s natural to get together, to strategize about how to protect what matters most in your own agenda, even to make plans to win the next election. And normal politicking involves caricaturing your opponents, tough negotiations, and rough rhetoric. Our politics, though, have gone well past this.

The President has compromised endlessly only to attract zero Republican votes and face, again no matter how compromising, charges that he was partisan and uncompromising. If we liberals had our way, we’d have single-payer healthcare, an adequate stimulus (twice as big as what was done and as all reasonable economists indicated was necessary - and as interest rates are virtually begging us to undertake), bankruptcy cramdown, no prison in Guantanamo, much higher marginal rates on top earners, and the list goes on. But we never expected to get our way on everything. People disagree about things, especially important things. That’s fine. And it’s why the president’s healthcare plan took as its model a conservative proposal that had managed to unite the parties in the past.

The immediate and urgent problem here is not what Republicans believe but the two-fold strategy they have chosen to pursue: (1) Make sure nothing gets done. (2) Run a campaign criticizing President Obama for not getting anything done.

This can’t be allowed to work, and I think this is a point on which we both can agree. This is so important that I want to say it again: This can’t be allowed to work. Imagine your party’s candidate does win. What is my party supposed to do? If we adopt your strategy, Romney will fail. Winning an election does not mean you should be able to get your way without compromise. But at the very least everyone in our system should be accountable. You don’t get to obstruct everything and then run a campaign accusing your opponent of failing to reach across the aisle to get things done. If you think that’s an acceptable strategy, then ask yourself if you want my party to adopt it.

Wait a minute, some of my independent-minded friends may say! The problem here is the two-party system. We just need a viable third party. Nonsense, unless you’re plan is (a) to replace the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system we have, with, say, a parliamentary system or (b) to destroy and remake one of the two parties you generally favor. Believing that a three party system is viable in the presidential context under our current election rules is like believing the moon is made out of cheese. I’m quite open to thinking about (a) — though not at all sure how realistic such a radical change is. And on (b), well if it leads to the remaking of a more pragmatically minded conservative party, I’m all for it. But it’s a method for realigning, maybe even renaming!, the two parties, not for stably adding a third.

I understand the stakes here. The economy is likely to improve over the coming years (at least in the short term), regardless of who is elected. If Obama is re-elected, he will probably go down as a great president, for many reasons. If not, Romney will get credit for rescuing the economy. But more important than any particular policy is our continued ability to make policy at all. The model of governance and campaigning demonstrated by the Republican party over the last four years, if adopted by everyone, would be a suicide pact. Let’s not sign it.

Exile

For what felt like the first time, he saw the sun for what it really was. All at once, a distant star, a comforting ball, an ocean of hell, an impossibly dense core. Jets of plasma exploding out of a nonexistent surface streamed into space above him, and it all owed to the simple fact that there was so much of it. He could feel himself there, part of the source, not just a distant bather in brilliant radiation. And he was also able, lying there on the rough ground, to stare right into it without pain or even the need to blink. I know what you are, he thought. I’m made of your exploded sisters, and I’ll outlive you.

It was a great comfort to the old man that he would soon be dust, which would then be so many unjoined atoms in space temporarily blown apart before, maybe, transmuting in the heart of a future star, before bursting forth as heat and light shining down on a future world and a future dying man.

But the thirst! The agony was still agony though accepted willingly. This is right, he thought. This is good. The sun’s disk in and out of focus. He was aware of the dust covering the dried blood on his peeling lips.

He no longer knew why he was out here, unable to move, miles from his car in the Chihuahuan desert, Elephant Tusk in front of him appearing like his own worn down, rotten molars. He was naked and lacked any possessions. Without wind, it was as if there was no air at all. The man didn’t care to breathe. He knew he’d forgotten why he was here but not the paramount importance of his own death, which had to be in this spot in the desert of his dreams. He knew he wanted it more than anything.

Regularly, time would speed up, and the clouds would stream across the sky, dipping down to the Tusk, the sun dropped from the sky, and all the other stars would roll over him tilt-a-whirl. Then he was gone and flying over the cracked ice of glaciers, perfectly serene as the resultant static image of eons of geological causes yawned at him from below. Ice and rock cast together by a universe that mercifully let them lead just separate enough lives that still other bits of matter would call them by different names.

When he roused, as he always did, he was staring again at the sun and suddenly aware of his thirst and his pain. He’d linger in the oppressive stillness before finally weakening in spirit and calling out to people he could no longer remember. He used made-up names out of desperation. It felt safe, for while he knew he must die alone, no one would hear him scream. And so his yearning for the full presence of love could be given his weak, gurgley voice, even his full conviction, but only because that voice would assuredly fail to find a listener. Only so much vibrating air. He was becoming more sure all the time that there wasn’t any air anyway.

The Tusk stood there, indifferent. His whole life, he felt, he’d thought of himself as wholly unlike the rocks, dust, water, and even maggots and flies of this world. Now that he was seeing clearly, he regarded himself as a virus refined just enough to grow a body and brain. It would become unbearable, the thirst and the pain. His gut was wracked with wave upon wave of empty, twisting torture. The only fluid in his body was rattling in his lungs.

Eventually, he’d have to cry out. It escaped his lips as whimpering, or at least the motions of lips and chest of a whimpering man. There was no air and so no sound. And in the sun, he’d finally see relief. With his pain, so grew the sun. At the zenith of both sun and pain, our star was everything, and in its heart he’d see a human face. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man, always a stranger. But a stranger with a look of compassion. Their mouths would move, all intent but without effect. The world was the sun, mouth moving. They exuded distant compassion, but the people of the sun were consumed with their own troubles. There to help but not the ones for whom he called.

He felt his hand grasped, though no one was there. The world was fully illuminated and baking and now hands were on his shoulders and forehead and at both his hands and he was crying without tears and asking why he had to do this and no answer came. The sun, smiling serenely, and finally the slightest yet overwhelming sensation of liquid in his mouth, sweet and blissful.

Everything recedes, the intensity of existence retreating even faster than it had come upon him. And he’s dreaming again.

This Bitter Earth

Last night, Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three embassy staff members were killed in a senseless attack. An idiot in the U.S. made a ridiculous film disparaging all of Islam. And some other idiots in Libya felt the proper response was to attack and murder people who disagree with said idiot but who happen to be Americans.

The human mind is capable of such compassion, such creativity, and perseverance. It can be goofy, selfish, or overly proud. But it need not be filled with hate. We’re here for such a brief time, in the midst of uncertainty over just about everything but our own eventual demise. Whatever life is about, and however certain you are that you think you have the answer, it has to be about more than rage.

My mind, at times like these, invariably goes to the most moving music I know, a mash-up of two wonderful compositions, songs that could hardly be more different but which combine in a way that transcends them both.

This bitter earth,
well, what fruit it bears,
this bitter earth?

And if my life is like the dust
that hides the glow of a rose,
then what good am I?
Heaven only knows.

This bitter earth,
yes, can be so cold.
Today you are young.
Too soon you’re old.

But while a voice within me cries,
I’m sure someone may answer my call.
And this bitter earth,
may not be so bitter after all.

This bitter earth,
Lord, this bitter earth.
What good is love
that no one shares?

And if my life is like the dust
that hides the glow of a rose,
then what good am I?
Heaven only knows.

The Men and Women of ...

Why do we so often refer to members of the military as our “men and women in uniform”? It’s not the “uniform” part that has me thinking about this. We do the same with many other institutions — the “men and women of TransExpress Airlines” or the “talented men and women of Central State University.” For that matter, why do we address a kindergarten class as “boys and girls”? I’m not looking to suggest that each utterance of such phrases reveals the latent gender biases of the speaker. I only want to ask why. In doing so, I’ve been led to consider the descriptive power of terms of sexual identification, beliefs that men and women are essentially different and yet inseparable types of beings, and how attempts to be inclusive can also reinforce the distinction among groups.

But maybe you think it’s ridiculous even to question this turn of phrase. It’s just a colorful way of saying “people,” right? To see how odd gendered phrasing is, in the abstract, try it out on other social groups: “our blacks and whites in uniform,” “the Latinos and non-Latinos of Widget World Industries.” No one talks that way. The phrasing is offensive for what we would think it reveals about the speaker — that he or she found the classification into social groups somehow relevant, so relevant as to be the fundamental way to sort the employees of an entire organization. And yet the audience understands that the distinction drawn is not at all relevant in the context used. The speaker, therefore, must be resorting to faulty stereotypes. Shame on him … or her.

But even where a classification is not offensive, it just seems bizarre when it’s not directly related to a functional categorization within the organization. “The black-haired, blondes, and brown-haired of Central High School” is a patently stupid way to refer to a student body, whereas “the pilots, flight attendants, maintenance, and other professionals of Pacific Airways” is intuitively sensible.

So why is a top-level gender classification of an organization seen as rhetorically acceptable and perhaps even the preferred way to refer to the organization’s members? There are a number of possibilities. First, perhaps this usage reflects the pervasive belief that men and women are essentially different in ways relevant to just about every aspect of life, including jobs both genders share. This is a first step toward arguing that the common rhetorical phrase, “men and women of,” is an invidious one. And there is certainly lots of evidence in our society that many, many people believe the distinction between men and women is almost always relevant. That’s not to say that relevance is thought automatically to imply the acceptability of unequal treatment. It’s a weaker thing to assert that a classification among, say, workers is relevant to appreciating the social dynamics and character of a workforce than to claim that a classification should be the basis of different treatment. But, often enough, people also believe that gender justifies different, but perhaps not what they would recognize as unequal, treatment.

As the father of a young girl and a young boy, I’ve lived under the social pressures to give boys and girls different childhood experiences. From colors (pink and blue), to varieties of play, to dress, children grow up with profoundly different kinds of reinforcement and opportunities depending on their genders. There’s a debate over how much of this is innate and how much kids’ tastes are shaped by marketing, expectation, and peer-group pressure. Other social animals exhibit sexual segregation or at least inhabit different roles within groups. I know almost nothing about research into the social expression of innate human sexual differences. But I would very surprised if evolution has not resulted in at least some different social proclivities among the sexes. After all, the struggle over the eons has been to attract one another.

Whatever payload natural selection has left in my own children, I see no reason to reinforce gendered distinctions that have no obvious relevance to modern society and which are hindrances to affording others opportunity and respect. So my spouse and I never forbade, but did not selectively encourage, princess play or truck play or superhero play or pink markers or blue markers. My son fell in love with Star Wars, true. And my daughter developed a particular kind of interest in animals that is more often associated with girls. She also has been more attracted to sparkly things and, more recently but to some extent for a long while, clothing, hair styles, and nail polish. (She also loves the Lord of the Rings, great white sharks, and videogames more associated with boys.) I have no way of saying how all their tastes have come about. This is a massive topic that to discuss would take a book-length treatment and knowledge I don’t have. You quickly learn as a parent, though, that while you can do your best to impart values and taste, your children will substantially be a product of the culture in which they live, just as you have been. That felt understanding leads to a critical appraisal of what that culture is telling them.

That’s why I’ve balked when a politician acknowledges a debt to our “brave men and women of the armed forces.” Why should my kids believe that one’s gender has anything to do with one’s place in the armed forces? The obvious rejoinder is that the phrase does not mean to imply any difference in status. Kind of like the judicial rationale for upholding the appearance of “in God we trust” on our money and “under God” in our pledge: The Supreme Court has told us that these are only secular acknowledgments of the role of (non-sectarian) civic religion in our history but have no religious expressive value. In other words, they’re ok for the government to say because they do not mean at all what they purport to say (and, ironically, what the zealous advocates of theocracy believe them to say). So too, the justification for “men and women of” might be that it means nothing, only another way of saying “people.”

Perhaps we can take a cue from the religious example, though, and give an even more charitable reading to the phrase. At one time, one could accurately say, without imparting to the word “man” a universal quality, “the men of the armed forces” or “the men of Central College.” Adding “and women,” far from having any discriminatory intent or effect, signaled the importance of the recent inclusion of women in formerly male-only institutions. When I was growing up, people started saying “our forefathers, and foremothers” in speeches, orally set off in commas, inducing a knowing chuckle at the then-common tendency to undervalue the contributions of women in the early days of the Republic. It was a reminder of the undesirable exclusivity of the word “forefathers.”

A CEO who praises the “men and women” of the company does not, under this view, communicate a different appraisal of their roles but respect for their equal contributions. There’s a problem with that, however. Why would the same CEO not open a speech by praising the “blacks and whites” of the company? Surely, African Americans have struggled to overcome systematic exclusion just as women have. And as surely, it’s still important to signal their equal status, the rejection of discrimination, and to welcome the arrival of policies of inclusion. But we don’t do that in this way. Why not?

Highlighting the social groups that compose a company is a double-edged sword. It can signal the presence and importance of those groups within the organization even as it reinforces the relevance of the distinction. Some conservatives have taken the irrelevance of racial and gender distinctions to mean that no policies should ever turn on them, even those policies meant to achieve greater inclusion in areas of life where women or minorities are underrepresented and have been excluded in the past. This is a mistake, in my view. But it’s a bit curious that the zeal accompanying the insistence on the irrelevance of the distinction, to the point of abject hostility to “identity politics” and the Colbert-like insistence that we just not see race at all, does not cause a moment’s hesitation at “the men and women of.” In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find empirically that the phrase is more often be used by CEOs who are otherwise allergic to group-based politics.

Just to be clear, I don’t mean this to be personally critical. I don’t think that saying “the men and women of” means the speaker holds essentialist and incorrect views about the capabilities of the sexes. It’s embedded in modern rhetoric, and I’m rambling along thinking about why that might be. So let’s consider another possibility that is yet more charitable to the phrase, one you might consider when trying hard to be fair to such speakers’ intentions. I’d call this aspect of the phrase “vivification.”

Why, after all, did we ever use the phrase “the men of”? When I hear the word “man,” I summon a picture more specific than that when I hear the word “person.” When you hear “men and women,” if you’re like me, you sometimes summon an image of a somewhat generic group but made more flesh and blood by the admittedly weak visual cue the gendered words carry. If I want you to think of the laboring and helpful human beings staffing my organization, perhaps saying “men and women” instead of “people” makes it more likely you will imagine a group of actual human beings than a faceless bureaucracy. Specifying gender is a gentle, subtle cue to physical features — secondary sexual characteristics, to be sure — that distinguish us from the cogs of a machine. We could as well say “the hard-working, tall and short people of Skyways Airlines,” but it would be such a novel way of injecting human characteristics that it would quite obviously not have the desired effect. And so, maybe “men and women of,” born of a purpose to be inclusive in a world of very recent exclusion, is now an available means in rhetoric of humanizing an institution. If this is its purpose, we should recognize that we’re piggybacking on cultural understandings of the stereotypical physical differences of the sexes.

Well, I don’t have any answers. I admit that I don’t particularly like the phrase “the men and women of.” My perception is that it tends to be delivered to achieve a solemnifying effect by politicians and corporate officers. At this point, I think its effect, if not its purpose, has shifted away from laudably signaling inclusion and toward reinforcing distinctions that should not exist. By now, inclusion should be a given. Just as obviously, its binary phrasing is problematic as transgender individuals achieve greater social acceptance.

I’ve found it funny how, in all the wars over gendered products and the sexual politics of the workplace, some uses of sexual differences go unremarked. It just seems like a pretty big deal to me when a leader of a large organization introduces it by asserting, right from the beginning, that it’s a union of sexes. Weird, huh?

Call Me Maybe

I can’t stop thinking about this video (warning, if you have a terrible workplace, this may not be safe for work):

Carly Rae Japsen - Call Me Maybe (Chatroulette Version) from ePlay TV on Vimeo.

Lots of people have linked to it and even written about it. But my mind keeps tracing back to it as the weeks go by. I love the obvious things about the video: the confidence, freedom, and kind heartedness of the dancer, the sheer joy of the viewers, and even the music, which if we’re honest is very hard to dislike even if it doesn’t run toward my usual tastes.

What really has its hooks in me, though, is the way it so crisply reminds us of the fullness of human nature. The guys, many with shirts off, are almost surely online for reasons they’d not discuss with their mothers. And the dancer plays to this prurience, makes a kind of mockery of it. Just as we’re repulsed by the viewers’ intentions, they smile and are won over by the dancer. As that smile crosses the face, we see a kind of openness in them, and we’re won over as we see a fuller picture of them. There’s such optimism in this. People aren’t just creepy, just hateful, just professional, just deviant, just straight-laced, just addicts, just conservative, just liberal, just angelic, just gross, just clean, just thoughtful, just thoughtless. We’re this whole, wonderful bundle of contradictions, and I’ve rarely seen it expressed so succinctly, in a way that makes me feel such unabashed happiness. Kudos internet.

In Defense of Titanic

Titanic is a movie about what it means to save someone and what it means to be saved.  It’s a cartoon, yes, the characters archetypes, if not quite caricatures.  And it’s otherwise easy for some to hate.  In fact, it seems fashionable to show disdain for it.  Doing so misses something important about our openness to art, defined simply as the portrayal, rather than raw transmission, of ideas.  For me a film is a success if it’s authentic and provides a new space, or maybe a new reason, to turn over thoughts.  Is someone actually trying to tell me something, and have they provided space for me — emotionally, intellectually, whatever — to think and feel?  Titanic does.

It wouldn’t be hard to describe the film in an unflattering way:  “A teenaged brat, who all too typically has issues with a controlling mother, gives everything up for a dashing young free spirit who could be a boy-band member and who takes her innocence and saves her life.  The tragedy of the Titanic itself is both eye candy and a mere backdrop for teenagers in love.  There is a ridiculously stereotypical and unredeemable villain and even a chase scene involving a gun.  The dialogue fails to develop instances of complex and real human beings.”

All these things are somewhat true but miss the point.  The cartoon characters that compose the plot are isolations of human tendencies — not false so much as incomplete.  The film is a sketch of emotions and our own conflicting ambitions cast over a transformative event.  The sinking is this one, small funnel through which everything that was before swirls downward to a point, and from which everything emerges as a gift and a matter of pure choice.

It’s not that Titanic makes us actually fret over how to balance comfort and security (Rose’s beginning) against daring, truth, and intentional living (Rose’s end).  No, Cameron never makes us really feel that Rose is throwing away anything important when she leaves wealth and status behind.  Even when she climbs back on board the sinking ship, we surely admire it.  Internal, ethical struggle is not what this movie is about.

One could make a wonderful film that captures the essence of that dilemma, that makes the viewer feel the torment of trading away comfort for freedom.  An easy lesson in the abstract, the singular nature of life and the importance of mustering the courage to throw off our shackles could, in the hands of committed actors, writers, and a director, be felt as horrifically difficult and agonizing.  The obvious abstract lesson, glorified in many lesser films, could be cinematically rendered to show the internal conflict of fear, logic, hope, and desperation that rages in our meat-bound brains.  But Titanic is not a lesser film for not doing this.  

The beauty of the film lies in the passion of its large scale historical depiction and in the very small scale revolution it worked in the lives of Jack and Rose. Rose saved Jack as much as Jack saved Rose.  And against the epic backdrop of the sinking of a massive ship, the event that just makes you wonder what you’d do at the end of all things when all the usual rules die away, we appreciate a life well-lived as consisting both of freedom and of freely chosen but deeply felt obligation.

Freedom and obligation, each seems to be the other’s absence.  That’s true of course. I’m free to choose if I’m not obligated to make a particular choice. And I’m obligated if I’m not entirely free.  But as the opposing forces of the electron and proton draw them together to create the matter of our world, simultaneous obligations and freedoms are essential to the complete human being. 

Our main characters arrive on Titanic as distillations of these pure states.  Jack, seemingly very happy to drift through life beholden to no one, relishes adventure and not knowing even where he will next sleep.  He is the embodiment of the spirit we long for when obligation piles up into a twisted mass of metal, looming large as fully ground and seized gears.  Who wouldn’t want to be absolutely free of obligations?  Happiness, as Hitchcock said, is a “clear horizon.”

Rose arrives with the opportunity to want for nothing.  She is unburdened of choice.  She need have no fear of the panoply of acute and very real dangers that have threatened all the beings from whom she is descended, the poverty, the not knowing, the struggle, the warring tribes, the famine, the battle for survival and violence of the primordial pools.  Her unprecedented security would come at the price of an obligation to accept her place in the complex social structure that makes it possible.  The Jewel of the Sea is everything most people seem to desire all their lives, but it is locked in a box, the manifestation of the quid pro quo. (And the jewel, like the unobtainium in the equally misunderstood Avatar, changes its meaning as the characters change.)

Jack and Rose are incomplete.  Anyone who has experienced the joy of children, of family, of the best of friends, and of honest love can intuitively understand how obligation can enrich a life.  It’s the awesome power of voluntary obligation, to live in part for someone else, that Rose gave Jack.  The special kind of saving that we provide one another in little bits over the course of our lives, it was all channeled into a few hours during which Jack was himself saved by saving Rose.  It probably sounds corny, but I was moved watching Jack find the worth of that something worth dying for.

So too, anyone who has spent weeks in the wilderness, climbing high peaks, crossing deserts, or even lounging on exotic shores understands the kinetic energy of freedom felt in the gut.  As I write this, I’m flying over the Arizona desert, desperately longing to be exploring canyons and climbing mountains, to be in my sleeping bag with hood drawn and looking up at my own breath and the slow stars that are satellites in the pure, dark sky.  One image I always remember from Titanic is the photograph of a young but emancipated Rose in a pilot’s outfit, standing next to a plane.  Also, in that postscript of a scene, ranging over Rose’s memories, there are all around reminders of the family she later made and the implicit constraints and obligations that came with that.  Not least of all these is her own aged body.  Sure, these are symbols, and they are cliché.  But that doesn’t make it false: “This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.”

That is my Titanic.  Yes, it’s the backdropped story of hubris, adventure, and terror.  It isn’t Shutter Island. But there at its core is an opportunity for me to think, on a more emotional level, of the integral values that make this precious and all-too-short life worth living.

Dark Sky

About a year and a half ago, I was ready to leave the law school for the day, and so I packed up, glanced outside, and noticed a light drizzle. I ride my bike to and from work, about two miles from my home. I have no real problem being rained on, but if I could wait a few minutes and ride in mist or drizzle, I’d prefer it to riding in what might become a downpour. Glancing at the weather, you get something like this, which gives you a rough probability for rain for the “afternoon” or “evening.” Yes, weather.com does give forecasts in fifteen-minute increments, but I’ve never been a fan — having always been partial to the National Weather Service site and, especially in winter storm season, the forecast discussions.

I wanted an app that would quickly tell me what the chances were for rain, at different intensities, over the next half hour or so. An app that would quickly tell me whether to go home right now or wait it out a bit. I had this idea that you could scrape the NWS radar images, use an algorithm to detect the edges of the colored shapes that are the storms, and extrapolate to predict where the colored shapes would be over the next hour (maybe getting a little fancy by pulling in other data). While weather prediction is very, very hard and especially difficult to get right at particular places, perhaps it wouldn’t be so difficult to get reasonably accurate (for my purposes) forecasts for only an hour in the future.

Needless to say, I never made the app. But Adam Grossman and Jack Turner (no relation) had a similar idea and an absolutely terrific concept for implementing it. They raised money on kickstarter and have now shipped Dark Sky. It’s a fantastic application. Far better than the one I’d had in my head and just beautifully designed to do one kind of thing excellently.

On the iPhone, it comprises essentially two views. In one, you see text that tells you what the temperature and state of precipitation is right now and, below it, what will happen in the next hour. This view also shows a very clever graph. On the x-axis is the time, from now to an hour from now. On the y-axis is the level of precipitation, ranging continuously from none to low to medium to heavy. The yellow curve representing this wiggles to show uncertainty. The more it wiggles, the less confident you should be. Of course, this portrayal elides two distinct concerns: confidence that it will rain at all and heaviness of precipitation. But for the purposes for which you’ll use the thing, collapsing that into one nice graph is somehow perfect.

Just today, I was wondering whether it would rain while I was out for a run. I wanted to know whether it was likely to pour so hard that I needed a sandwich bag to encase my iPhone and whether I should encourage my father-in-law to go out for a walk. The app told me it would continue to rain lightly for a few minutes, not rain for about thirty, and then rain moderately to heavily after that for the rest of the hour. So I grabbed the sandwich bag, encouraged my father-in-law to walk into town (with an umbrella and having thought I could pick him up after the run if need be), and headed out. For the first few minutes, it drizzled lightly. It stopped for the next thirty minutes, and I was drenched for the last fifteen minutes. The app nailed it. Smells like the future.

Roles

Let’s suppose that President Obama has long believed that same-sex marriage is a civil right. What should we make, in that case, of his recent announcement that he believes gays should be able to marry? In my view, the President, no matter how longstanding his opinion, was right, or at least justified, to wait until now to announce it. And further, the Supreme Court ought to wait just a bit longer, if it can, before enshrining that understanding in the constitutional pantheon, as much as it belongs to be there.

First, I should emphasize that it may well be that Obama has only recently come to the personal conclusion that the law ought to recognize such marriages. He may even believe now that there is no federal constitutional right that would trump the many state statutes and constitutional provisions to the contrary. I doubt it, but I don’t mean to imply in what follows that his true, personal beliefs are other than how he has described them.

Instead, I want to emphasize the obligations and considerations in taking a position as a representative. There is and should be a difference between an individual’s wants, even concerning the law itself, and his or her wants for the institution he or she represents. In short, any representative must understand the importance of roles.

As a relatively unimportant assistant professor, I can express wants for my law school or university that I would not and should not express were I the president of the university. That’s not at all because a president must act in craven, political ways. Rather, my role as an individual faculty member includes an obligation to voice my opinions, adding to the menu of options offered up by others that will inform but not determine the ultimate decisions. As president, this option-producing function is not what’s most important. The university president is both a decisionmaker and a representative. He or she must indeed exercise independent judgment, but for the president to say, in this role, that something should happen or should not happen is a statement about the institution’s intentions, not simply his or her own.

When the President of the United States announces what he believes the law requires, he states something much more than a personal view. He has an obligation to represent the People and in doing so to announce not his own opinions on the controversies of the day, but his view of the proper role that the United State should play in understanding and resolving them. Balancing the need to be a good agent of the People (and not only those in your political base) while also being a good leader is the most difficult act that any scrupulous and well-meaning president must undertake. One must simultaneously give voice to those you lead and actually lead them.

“Do you believe in gay marriage?” becomes, when posed to the President, “How does the Executive Branch view the question of gay marriage?” These questions are not hermetically isolated, but they are nonetheless different questions.

The people of the United States have radically changed their mix of views on the sources of, morality of, and acceptability of homosexuality. However one dates this change, from early activism to the AIDS crisis (Philadelphia) is under-appreciated in this regard) to hum-drum, contemporary sit-coms, the normality of homosexuality and the humanity of gays have now been fully revealed to all who participate in popular culture. This has had the effect of encouraging more people to come out of the closet, which has led to more people having friends and family they know are gay, which only reinforces personal perceptions that gays are, in fact, ordinary people like the rest of us.

It’s a virtuous cycle and the engine of the inalterable trajectory of this issue: People who change their minds are changing it in favor of gay marriage. The population most hostile to homosexuality is dying off. The result of these fundamentals has made the ultimate outcome of this “debate” clear for a long time now, and the trend will only accelerate as people rush to get on the right side of history.

And so, the question has been at what point should the President announce his support for gay marriage. Last year, the White House decided not to defend the section of the creepily-titled Defense of Marriage Act that prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriages performed in states that permit it. That was a statement that the federal government, if the Executive has its way, will bow to the determinations of states on either side of the issue in determining federal benefits. It did not state that the Executive had taken a position on how a state should resolve that question.

With his recent personal “affirm[ation],” the President has expressed that he, in his role, would like to see gay marriage approved, while explicitly suggesting that the question should, for now, be left to the states. This affirmation is, effectively, suggesting that the states should determine not whether but how quickly gay marriage is legalized throughout the nation. And, incidentally, he suggests they should kind of hurry the hell up, lest your state be one of the stragglers that is ultimately cleaned up by federal fiat - Loving v. Virginia style.

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The same is true of Supreme Court justices as is true of the President. The questions they resolve are not identical to the ultimate ones: what does the Constitution require? Rather, a justice must decide what the Supreme Court should do when hit with the question of a law’s legality. Because the Constitution rarely provides clear answers to such questions, it is all the more crucial that a justice understand what role the Court should play and how the Constitution is addressed to that role.

Viewing the Court in this way makes it much clearer why the Court most typically ratifies rather than forges social movements. The “under God” part of the pledge — a red scare-era addition meant to distinguish us from godless communists — seems quite obviously an unconstitutional act of Congress. But that does not mean that the Court had an obligation in the Newdow case to decide as such. While it might have been illegitimate to decide, substantively, that Congress had no sectarian purpose in adding the reference to the Abrahamic deity, punting on standing grounds was probably the better way to permit our society to work out the meaning of the Establishment Clause, that is, the proper role of religious reference and motivations in the public sector.

The choice the Court faces in the gay marriage cases may be more difficult. It would be better if marriage equality won out democratically — if we all owned the decision to be more inclusive. The Court would still be needed to pick up the pieces in a few years, compelling the handful of recalcitrant states as it did in Loving v. Virginia. But its hand may be forced by litigation, such as that in the Ninth Circuit pursued by Ted Olson and David Boies (and countless others, like the rather awesome San Francisco city attorneys).

Perhaps the Court will find a way to let these victories stand while giving the states another couple of years. Honestly, I think that’s all it’s going to take.

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When Obama suggests that the marriage question should be left to the states but that he believes gay marriage should be legal, he has made a profound move. The statement more or less consolidates some of the administration’s existing positions and provides signals concerning the future. It tells us that he believes the role of the federal government should be to remove any federal barriers to marriage equality and that it should encourage states to do the same. It also tells us that the day is coming when the federal government, through the Court, will ratify the changes in public acceptance of gay marriage that are not only ongoing but accelerating. Making such a statement is a weighty responsibility, and the President did nothing wrong if he delayed, even if for a long while, before doing so.