Missing The Point

Someone seems to be, anyway. I'm not ruling out that it's me.

Common Dreams has an editorial up by a Theo Stein, who I'm not aware of having heard of, which is my fault and not his. I tend to agree with most of it, the premise of which is that the Bushies are a bunch of fuckups who couldn't organize a two-person parade to the end of the block with a compass, a map, and a yellow brick road. As premises go, this one is fairly inoffensive to anyone who still has half the wits they were born with (and is not in some way income-dependent on this administration). Hell, even I agree.

But at the end of it, Mr Stein has this to say:

Can’t these guys do anything right?

No, and that’s the point, gleeful liberals and progressive bloggers are saying. The Bush administration’s mighty implosion is the logical, inevitable result of entrusting ideologues who abhor government with the responsibility of governing.

It’s like handing the keys to your new car to a demolition derby champ and wondering what the heck happened when your ride comes back missing its bumpers.

Conservatives would have a tough time arguing government is the enemy of the people if Republicans actually made it work, they argue. Thus, this snarky take goes, Bush has been an extraordinary success.

Well, that's certainly an argument made by some snarky liberal bloggers. (You know who you are.) He goes on to say, however:

Count me among those who are hard-pressed to accept the notion that conservatives live in an upside-down world where spectacularly incompetent governance is a mark of success.

But these cowboys sure make you wonder, don’t they?

Which is where the missing of the point comes in. Either I'm missing it, which I'm not prepared to rule out, or Mr Stein is. Mr Stein, have you met Grover Norquist, by any chance? Mr Norquist, a leading thinker of the right--a group that admittedly considers Newt Gingrich a Man Of Ideas--has some interesting theories about the role of government in America's future. I believe Mr Norquist considers the Bush response to Katrina to be not inconsistent with success.

All of which actually seems to be rather beside the point. Snark aside, the people who make this point are generally making a slightly more subtle point, or at least I know I am when I say things like that.

The reality here is not that this administration, or any other going back at least as far as Reagan who governed under the theory that government is not a solution but a problem, actively goes out of its way to fuck up. They don't have to. People who don't believe that government can--or should--be used to help people do not go into government to make it help people. Which leaves a limited range of motivations: power is the biggest one, though running close apparently is "creepy Oedipal issues".

But it is not unreasonable, if you believe that government cannot be used to help people and you also believe that government is innately corrupt and wasteful, also articles of faith among the GOP, to figure that some of that money might as well come the way of you and your friends. It probably seems positively benign to use the power and money of government to pay back the people whose favors and money got you where you are. After all, it's either that or the money will just be thrown at poor people, which, apparently, is bad for their character.

So that's, to my mind, the driving dynamic of republican politics. It's all basically cronyism, though I suspect they'd object to the pejorative nature of the word and suggest that all politicians bring their friends with them and use appointments to return favors. Which is probably true, but I think it's fair to expect that people be selected for competence or expertise when it comes to positions where peoples' lives are on the line. FEMA is the obvious illustration of this, Defense, the Justice Department, CDC, and Homeland Security would be others. I'd consider things like OSHA to be too important to play with, too. The commission for overseas peanut butter marketing, feel free to appoint your lazy brother-in-law.

So I don't think I would seriously attempt to make the point that Bush has installed people in key positions with the expectation that they would fuck up and he could argue that government doesn't work--if only because he absolutely doesn't argue that. In fact, he says that whatever happened was pretty much the best possible outcome, and then backslaps and heckuvajobs and passes out medals and promotions like Mardi Gras beads.

Instead, I would argue that he simply doesn't care if the people he installs are incompetent and bad things result. The fact that conservative thinktanks can then use those bad results to argue that government doesn't work, and suggest that privatization would be the solution, is a benefit, but probably not the intent.

On the other hand, if we ever, God help us, elect Grover Norquist, I would expect him to install people he trusts and outright instruct them to fuck things up enough that anarchy starts to look like kind of a good idea. I think he's willing to take a hit to his legacy in favor of his friends with their pathological aversion to paying taxes. Bush? Not so much. He likes his rich friends and patrons well enough, but he likes himself most of all. It's sickening to contemplate, but I suspect he really does think he's doing a good job--at least for the people who matter.

Which, just for the record, isn't us.

Wish I'd Said That

If for whatever reason you value my opinions occasionally, believe me when I tell you you won't regret reading All The Rage by Paul Waldman. I found it on Common Dreams, and have no idea where it came from originally. Just... go read it. It's not that long, to be honest it's not long enough. He could have gone on longer, I think. But it's exactly right, and I'm going to memorize it for the next time some asshole accuses me of "Bush Derangement Syndrome".

Friday Catblogging

Look, catblogging.

This is Iala, which is pronounced "Yaw-law" and is a kind of bipedal Romanian cat vampire. She's got claws, you see. She's about thirteen, or so. She's a mutt, we really have no idea what she is. She is, though, extraordinarily furry. We sort of got her by accident. She was a little thing who hung around outside our door. My theory is that she had been tossed out from some second-floor apartment in our complex when she and her littermates weren't cute, tiny little kittens anymore, and she couldn't find her way home again, so she picked a different second floor apartment since they all look alike. We tried ignoring her for about two days while posting "Lost cat" signs, but she was skinny as hell, and she never left our doorstep, and she cried all night. It was summer, but she was clearly pathetic. When I left the house to do stuff, she'd try to follow me. I ended up grabbing her out of the path of a truck as she tried to follow me across the street, and that was that.

We put her on our enclosed balcony, gave her food and water and an aluminum-turkey-roasting-pan litterbox and some towels to sleep in,
and took her to the vet. No ID, of course, and they (the vet across the street, so theoretically the one her owners would have used) had never seen her before. We were told she was healthy, so
we started thinking about keeping her, though at the time I didn't realize how much my then-two-year-old cat Cypress would hate this idea. Cypress had spent all her time right on the other side of the door from this new fluffball, meowing plaintively back, so I had hopes they might get along. That was thirteen or so years ago. They still hate each other.

After a month, still no response to our signs. I was prepared to do some screaming at the jackasses who had managed to lose her, but no one ever showed up or called, and after a month we were increasingly reluctant to give her back to anyone who'd treated her like this anyway. She's a very affectionate cat, highly socialized, which leads me to conclude that the people who'd had her were delighted with a litter of kittens, and less so with actual cats that now have to have something done with them. All of this is a lot of conjecture based on very little, but it does seem to fit, and gods know it's a common enough story.

At this point, she's a huge fluffball, and a joy to our home, though she does think she's a puppy. She plays fetch, she's louder than you'd expect from a cat, she likes to carry her toys around in her mouth, she licks people. Also, she drools in her sleep, which is probably funnier than it should be. And she's really pretty clumsy. She used to like to go out for a walk around the pond on a leash, but one of the neighbors has a dog that barked at her once too often, I think.

She's my partner's cat, really, she doesn't like me quite as much. Possibly because I'm the one who's always taking her to the vet or brushing her fur or teeth or putting little clawcaps on her. My partner just pets her and doesn't twitch when she licks.

Anyway, this is a photo from a few years back. We're on the second floor again, and our balcony has a ton of frogs on it, since the pond is about twenty yards away and they like my plants. And yes, there really is a window between Iala and the frog.

Random Thoughts on Obscenity

This is the part where I start ranting and you guys realize I couldn't blog my way out of a paper bag and quietly unbookmark me. I'm cool with that.

All of this bullshit about "obscenity" has me thinking, though. Despite the entire concept of "PC", it's long been obvious to me that it's not the left that has issues with form. Over on the other side of the cultural chasm dwell people who feel that ideas are not obscene, only words. It's not all of them by any means, a good many on the right think it's immoral to not support Bush but perfectly okay to use words like "raghead" in casual conversation.

But for the most part, it's wrong to suggest people have died needlessly in a war, but okay to keep sending people to do it. It's wrong to joke about Cheney's close call with a suicide bomber, but perfectly fine to make "Rachel Corrie pancake" jokes, or to joke about poisoning a Supreme Court Justice. Also it's wrong to call Dick Cheney's daughter a lesbian, but okay for Alan Keyes to throw his daughter out for being a lesbian.


And apparently, it's perfectly okay to arrange things, through negligence and malice at the ballot box, so that children die without adequate health care, but it's wrong to use the word "motherfuckers" when referring to insurance company execs who spend millions annually to preserve our tangled and inadequate health care system, or the legislators who connive with them at it, or the racist bastards in this country who are so lacking in any sort of humanity that they cannot begin to imagine what being poor, really poor, is like.

It's that last one that gets me. Maybe it shouldn't be, maybe everything needs to take a backseat to the war in Iraq, and the brand new expansion set they're marketing for Iran. But the money that we're spending to kill people in Iraq who matter so little we can't even be bothered to count them, is money that can't be used here for LIHEAP and for Medicaid and for schools, and for all our other priorities we're ignoring.

I know, of course, that without the war in Iraq, none of that money would be spent that way anyway, mostly because it simply doesn't exist. It's debt spending, and if we weren't shovelling it into a hole in the sand, it wouldn't be in our budget anyway. But I also know that, even assuming it's possible, paying off those debts will keep us from doing anything about our own problems when the war has ended, assuming it ever does. And I know that this is, as the kids say, a feature not a bug. Grover Norquist has a lot to answer for.

I find that all obscene, which is probably what I was getting at. That we'd rather kill an Iraqi kid than save the kid down the block. That we'd rather give a tax break on investment income than on money earned by families working their asses off every day. That we'd rather pretend we're painting schools in a war zone than actually fix some here. That the nation is full of people who have always been so favored that they simply cannot conceive that it would be possible to have literally no legal way of getting your hands on fifty dollars, or that it would be possible to have no way of getting your sick kid across town without spending all day at it and losing your job.

The nation is full of people who've always been comfortable, who've never had to stitch two or three jobs together to make a living, who've been driving since they were teenagers and begrudge tax money spent on mass transit because, after all, they don't use it. (Which is not the same as saying they don't benefit from it. Their gas prices are lower because of less demand, their commute is shorter because they are not stuck behind extra cars, and they don't even have to deal with the inconvenience personally. Moral free riders who don't even have the grace to realize they're the lifestyle beneficiaries, not the tax victims, of public transportation.)

I digress, of course. I do a lot. If you're still reading, you're probably used to it.

But even more than the practical issues, these are people who simply don't know the most important thing, to my mind, about poverty: it is exhausting. Between the impossible decisions, and the long hours at jobs that are generally hard labor and at the very least mean you don't sit down, ever, and the sheer time it takes to get any random errand done, and the health issues that result from having no insurance and working jobs that can be dangerous and are certainly physically demanding, it will grind you down. Add in the well-founded fear that tomorrow's bills can't be met, tonight the family doesn't have much more than Top Ramen for dinner (just like last night), the kid telling you her classmates make fun of her clothes and your having no way to protect her from that, the pain in your wrist that makes you worry if you can hold onto your cashier job much longer, and the smug assholes who apparently lead us telling you that the economy is going great, and what the hell is wrong with you that you're still struggling? At about this point, a bill collector will call and try to convince you you own something you can sell so you can pay them. Now find someone you can ask for help, and know that you're going to have to endure a lecture on self-reliance. And then try to actually sleep with all of this going on in your head, because you have to be up again early to make two bus connections to get to your first job. Even the exhaustion is exhausting.

An extreme case? Not really. It can get worse. Your neighborhood is more likely to have more crime and pollution, your local grocery store is more likely to have higher prices since it's the only one people in your neighborhood can get to, you may be living in a "residential" hotel because you could never scrape together the money for a deposit on an apartment so now you're paying an absurd amount for rent and you don't even have a refrigerator or stove so what you eat is what you can buy pre-made and you're paying "tourist taxes" on top of it, you could easily have a teenage son who's planning to join the army because some recruiter lied to him about a desk job and how else is he ever going to get an education, you may have a serious medical problem that's going to kill you or disable you but not before it racks up hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills you can't pay, and your parents are just as likely to be suffering from the general gamut of supervision-requiring infirmities a suburban household's aging parents are but without the wherewithal to do anything about it.

And the most useful thing our government has to say to you is, "Well, go back to school so you can get a better job."

That's obscene. That and pretending it doesn't happen because you can't imagine it happening to you.

I don't wish these people poverty, though it looks more and more like the Bush administration kinda does (via Slacktivist), I wish them empathy. I wish them a glimpse at the realities they're lucky not to have to deal with. I wish them an understanding that it very much can be a matter of luck. Because while certainly having some asshole suggest that if you had cancelled your cable you wouldn't now have a dead child on your hands is not the worst thing that has happened to you, it makes things worse. Maybe only a tiny bit. But that should still be too much, and it is still more than anyone should have to bear in a country that thinks of itself as civilized.


(edited for that stupid font thing again.)