Fascists always get the best stuff

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For us progressive amateur aesthetes, it's always been somewhat unsettling that so much top-drawer design has emerged from 20th century European fascist regimes. Does anybody have any insight into why that might be? My first guess would have something to do with repressed homoerotic urges.

Meanwhile, Behold the 1938 Hispano-Suiza Dubonnet Xenia:

I wonder what Franco's army tanks looked like. We do know that his son, a military pilot, thought that the bombs he dropped on unarmed Ethiopians looked like flower blossoms when they exploded.

The only company I'm aware of that consistently produces world-class industrial design today is Apple, which thrust itself into the public mind with it's "iconic" (and in my opinion overrated) 1984 Superbowl commercial. Old-timers will remember that the archetypal living symbol of Freedom and Justice For All---noted war hero, business executive, and human-rights crusader Ronald Reagan---was presiding over the American Experiment at that very moment in history.

It may be hard to believe that, at one time, high design in computer technology could be achieved with putty-colored plastic, a 9 in. monochrome TV picture tube, and a handful of simple picto-glyphs and 16-bit screen fonts. You had to be there; your mainstream business-grade alternative was an IBM (or clone) PC box about the size of Francisco Franco's tombstone displaying its data on a bile-green 8-bit VGA monitor, or amber if you were really uptown. No mouse necessary, or available! (And, yes, Amiga fascists, I do know about your pet machine. Highly respectable, but no design awards from this amateur aesthete.)

Mac 128 image above ganked from this blog, but it certainly doesn't belong to him!

The Cheesehead Revolution

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From completely off my radar I'm now reading about a state governor who has ordered the state police to round up members of the Wisconsin legislature. TPM reports:

...the state's Democratic senators have left the state entirely, putting them out of the reach of the state police who have been ordered to round them up so that Republicans have a quorum and can take up Gov. Walker's union-busting budget bill.

There's a whole separate discussion we might have about the state's power to legislatively "bust" labor unions. But the thing to think about is this: since when in the United States can the executive branch of any state "round up" members of the legislature and make them participate in a session? That is how a junta works, not a democracy.

Can the governor also order the state police to round up members of the opposition party for any other reason? What is the legal theory that justifies an apparent violation of the separation of powers in any state of this union? Does the 10th Amendment permit states to establish forms of governance that are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution? What specific law are the Wisconsin legislators violating here?

An interesting aspect of this executive coup against workers' rights in Wisconsin, again according to TPM, is that

...Scott Fitzgerald, who is ordering the state police to track down the wayward Democratic senators is the son of the head of the state police, Steve Fitzgerald, who in turn was appointed to the top spot by Walker. Steve Fitzgerald is also the father of the state's speaker of the House, Jeff Fitzgerald.

The denial of a quorum by a minority group of members is a legitimate parliamentary maneuver. It's no more obstructionist than what happens in the U.S. Senate when the minority party filibusters bills that clearly have support of the majority. It's no more obstructionist than Ronald Reagan's famous "veto pen," which he smugly wagged into the Kliegl lights the many times he shot down laws passed by both chambers of Congress in the 1980s. So the issue shouldn't be whether obstructionist tactics are legal, because they are, and Republicans are much more adept at using them than Democrats.

The issue is this: is an obstructionist parliamentary maneuver by members of a state legislature illegal in the State of Wisconsin? How about in other states?

This is going to be really interesting. Wisconsin was an incubator of American progressive politics in the first half of the 20th century, and the tradition persists. Nobody knows how this will play out in terms of union busting, but it should give a significant stimulus to the concept of union solidarity in the Cheesehead state.

And in my opinion there is not a single working man or woman in this nation who has any smidgen of "enlightened self interest" in rooting for "Governor Scott Fitzgerald." "Governor Scott Walker" (duh).

Nonlinearity and Future Shock

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I stumbled on the post I quote below via the interesting Technoccult blog. It makes some points I've been wanting to get to, as touched upon in this recent post and this one and others. Specifically, I've been working toward some synthesis based on Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. I heard Klein lecture at the University of Illinois about a year ago, but since her book hasn't risen to the top of my reading list yet (it's very close, though), I've avoided referencing her thoughts directly. But here's an author named Charlie Stross, with whom I'm not familiar, that neatly draws connections between themes from those two books and the nonlinearity I've started trying to understand:

The term Future Shock was coined by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in the 1960s to describe a syndrome brought about by the experience of "too much change in too short a period of time". Per Wikipedia (my copy of Future Shock is buried in a heap of books in the room next door) "Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a 'super-industrial society'. This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from 'shattering stress and disorientation' — future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also popularized the term information overload."

It's about forty years since "Future Shock" was published, and it seems to have withstood the test of time. More to the point, the Tofflers' predictions for how the symptoms would be manifest appear to be roughly on target. They predicted a growth of cults and religious fundamentalism; rejection of modernism: irrational authoritarianism: and widespread insecurity. They didn't nail the other great source of insecurity today, the hollowing-out of state infrastructure and externally imposed asset-stripping in the name of economic orthodoxy that Naomi Klein highlighted in The Shock Doctrine, but to the extent that Friedmanite disaster capitalism can be seen as a predatory corporate response to massive political and economic change, I'm inclined to put disaster capitalism down as being another facet of the same problem. (And it looks as if the UK and USA are finally on the receiving end of disaster capitalism at home, in the post-2008 banking crisis era.)

My working hypothesis to explain the 21st century is that the Toffler's underestimated how pervasive future shock would be. I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. Symptoms include despair, anxiety, depression, disorientation, paranoia, and a desperate search for certainty in lives that are experiencing unpleasant and uninvited change. It's no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate.

I'll quibble about the last clause in this quote, because there are also conflicts between "scientific certainty and the nuanced complexities of religious debate" (to use Stross' construct), and also between dogma versus open-mindedness in both "communities." But his working hypothesis, as his post is entitled, corresponds to key points of my own, so I'm happy to have him do some heavy lifting to help me progress on my own synthesis.

Incidentally, these Stross bon mots are extracted from a more specialized question that his post directly addresses: is religious tolerance beneficial? And his answer, similar to mine, is mixed. Yes, religious tolerance is beneficial because the opposite of tolerance never is. But tolerance should not venture up to the point where a "religion" adopts dogmas that dehumanize women, children, and The Other; or where religious proselytizing becomes intrusive, coercive, or mandated by law.

Accessories to terror

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Apropos of the hideous Unitarian church shootings in Tennessee over the weekend, R.J. Eskow makes a point about right wing media that I've made for years at neighborhood happy hours and elsewhere. The basic point is that words matter, especially when they are scripted subject to editorial review by media corporations before broadcasting to a mass audience.

The corporate infotainment industry has long-since debased the journalism profession to the point where reporters simply cannot be assumed to have their facts straight or to be working impartially. But it's much worse than that: millionaire propagandists posing as journalists have drifted over into packaging hate speech and calls to violence as conservative political punditry. This is simply not an exaggeration and cannot be denied in good faith: it's an obvious fact. Eskow cites some examples:

...right-wing rhetoric toward liberals and humanists like those who attended the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church has been exceptionally violent for years. Liberal groups are often called "Nazi" or "Nazi-like" by [Bill] O'Reilly.... [Michael] Savage says he'd "hang every lawyer" who tried to establish constitutional rights for Guantanamo prisoners, describes Obama as an "Afro-Leninist," and said the folks at Media Matters were "brownshirts"....

He reminds us that Sean Hannity has said "there are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of 'em is making sure Nancy Pelosi doesn't become the speaker (of the House)." And that Ann Coulter has shared her considered opinion that "liberals should be beaten with baseball bats and tried for treason." Soulless, whoring, tax-evading former Bill Clinton advisor and Republican hater Dick Morris says "liberals are 'traitors' who should be decapitated," according to Eskow.

Commentary on this sort of right-wing incitement to violence against liberals has been easy to find on lefty blogs for years, and Media Matters for America frequently documents prominent national examples. It's not a secret.

So how do the networks who employ Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilley and Ann Coulter retain their sponsors? How does this content make it past network Standards and Practices departments when an extemporaneous "fuck" issuing from Bono's mouth can cost a network half a mil in fines (until the ruling is laughed out of court on appeal)? As "Stone Cold" Steve Austin would say, "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHY THESE THINGS HAPPEN!" It mainly matters just because they happen. (See keywords below anyway.)

I wonder how long many of these right-wing pricks would keep their jobs if broadcast executives were held liable as accessories to terrorism in cases such as the Knoxville church shootings.

Note about image: found on Bob Cesca's blog, it's an actual McCain political poster curently marketed by an outfit called ConservativeBuys.com. Yours for 18 bills.

Dodd's an Obamaniac

This morning I received an email from Senator Chris Dodd informing me that he is endorsing Barack Obama for President. What's that? You haven't received your email from a U.S. Senator today? You must be a bad citizen!

I hope that Senator Dodd has extracted a promise from Obama to support all of his (Dodd's) efforts in the Senate to avoid further erosion of the Bill of Rights, and to withdraw the carte blanche for domestic surveillance that the Congress has "granted" the Executive Branch in recent years. (I put scare quotes around granted because the Congress has no more authority to "grant" the Executive Branch permission to ignore the Constitution than the Judicial Branch has to "grant" the presidency to its favorite candidate before all the votes have been counted. But, whatever.)

Anyway, Senator Dodd urges me to become involved in Obama's campaign. We'll see.

Why criminals need immunity from prosecution

The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, one Mike McConnell, believes that telecoms need blanket retroactive immunity for breaking federal eavesdropping laws because "[t]he issue is liability protection for the private sector. We can't do this mission without their help."

That's correct: our right-wing U.S. government, despite controlling all three branches of the federal government (including Republican-loving Democrats in both houses of Congress), cannot successfully implement a permanent police state without the "help" of the private sector.

Interesting. I wonder how these people would like it if our "unitary executive" (i.e., Fuehrer*) is a brown man or wears control-top panty hose. Maybe Final Call will get to "eavesdrop" on Dick Cheney's business dealings, or Bust can perform a warrantless investigation on the office wives of George Bush.
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* Fuehrer is German for "Leader." What did you think it means?

Bear with me

As seen through a link on Eschaton. But he doesn't need the traffic, so thanks to me you can just click through to the original source.

Corporate media: not "mainstream"

Big Otis sent me this link from CommonDreams. The article makes what I think is a critical point about the predicament Americans find themselves in today. The lunacy of right wing extremist politicians and insane free-market economic policies could not have dominated the U.S. landscape for a generation without the systematic intervention of corporate mass media. Specifically, there have been two principal corporate interventions: (1) withdrawal of support (in the form of funding and employment) from impartial investigative reporting units, and (2) the staffing of high-profile celebrity journalism positions with corporate apologists and their political fellow-travelers. Reagan Administration officials helped to make this possible by undermining, then revoking, the Fairness Doctrine. Throw in the concentration of media ownership under a handful of transnational corporate logos, and the consequence is that American society today bears little resemblance to the mid-20th century version. Thanks, "liberal media"!

Yes, we should expect to hear from political extremists from either side (or no side) of the spectrum in a liberal democracy, because that comes with the territory where there is freedom of speech. And sometimes we may even expect extremists to hold sway over the discourse, especially in time of national hysteria. But the genius of the system always has been that it self-corrects --- something that many of us have taken for granted, but never should have. The rise of malignant corporate media has just about annihilated this feature of our system, like a virus can do to an organism's immune system.

The first step toward a cure is to recognize the problem. Huge step... and huge problem.

Liberal claptrap

I came upon a short, instructive film from 1946 that basically explains everything about the past 28 years in U.S. political devolution. Not kidding. It runs about 9 minutes, and is about as awesome as a civics lesson gets. Or at least that's what I think.

For purposes of scholarly integrity, I disclose that I was pointed to the link for this film by Sadly, No! via Eschaton. For what it's worth, I don't really know who Jonah Goldberg is beyond what I read about him in mighty blogs like my own, but it's hard to believe that he influences any thinking whatsoever in this country. More probably he's something like a noisy, fetid bolus of think tank white papers seasoned with salt and cocoa butter, stuffed into a pale latex sheath and animated by stem cells harvested from Dick Cheney's denture linings.

Don't miss this little film. You may be highly impressed by its prescience and explanatory power. But then again, you may just think it's liberal claptrap. After all, who exactly would benefit from a civil, well informed society in which community power is shared and differences of opinion are respected? The proletariat, of course!