Gypsy Advice

Here's one for Al Filreis's 1960 blog: Muddy Watters's barrel-chested rendition of "Got My Mojo Workin'" at the Newport Jazz Festival. The crowd shots are great.

And clearly, what we miss most from that time is drummers in white tuxedos.

Original Sin and Democracy

Here's something about me that you probably didn't know: I consider original sin to be THE philosophical concept most important to my life and to Western thought.

This stems mostly from my love of two great, weird philosophers: Saint Augustine of Hippo and Martin Heidegger.

In Saint Augustine, original sin forms the basis not just for a religious apology for the existence of death, the problem of evil, and the universal need for an intercessor, but also an ontology (evil is not a positive existence but a lack, all creatures are lacking in perfect goodness except God) and a semiology (since no creature or thing but God is self-sufficient, all things but God refer in some way, however hidden, to Him) and even a teleology (at the Resurrection, we will all be made complete and perfect).

In Heidegger, it's a kind of terminal background concept that recalls what modern philosophy has forgotten, at least since Descartes: that the self is not a purely self-sufficient ego, but a flawed, finite, determinate being, split against itself and thrown into a similarly finite fallen world.

So I was a little surprised to read this claim by Alan Jacobs reflected by Jeffrey Russell and quoted by Andrew Sullivan:

Jacobs’s most original and provocative argument is that original sin has strong democratic impli cations. Denial of original sin leads to elitism: Take, for instance, the duchess who simply refuses to believe that she shares a common nature with the unkempt commoners of field and street, or the self- righteous people who believe that they can make themselves good by stacking up a higher pile of good deeds than of bad ones. Their underlying assumption is that some people have exempt status, or higher virtues, or brighter minds, that others lack— plainly speaking, that some people (usually us) are better than other people (them). Original sin, on the other hand, is egalitarian because it means that everyone is alienated from God and has an innate tendency to sin. Equally egalitarian is the belief that Christ died in order to give everyone the liberty to escape sin. No one person can dare to consider himself or herself better than others, and no nation or race should dare to do so either.

I haven't read the book and Russell's review doesn't say a whole lot more, so I don't know whether Jacobs walks this back a little bit. But I would argue that original sin isn't so much democratic as it is a problem that democracy has to either ignore or adopt some peculiar formulations to attempt to overcome.

Part of the problem of the argument of original sin is that it encourages all sorts of other hereditary arguments that are anything but democratic. Just as we all inherit Adam's curse, we may inherit the obligations of the Mosaic law, some of us inherit the divine right of kings, others the priesthood, others the obligation to obey, others the curse of Ham, the guilt for Jesus's crucifixion, and so on. Hence Filmer's arguments for patriarchal authority, which Locke really quite valiantly strove so hard to refute. Original sin may be universal, but considered by itself it establishes only a pro forma identity between human beings; there are plenty of other compatible ways to draw distinctions without stepping out of the economy altogether.

And it has largely been experiments in democracy that precisely for this reason, HAVE attempted to step out of that economy. After all, if everyone has likewise sinned and is doomed to die -- and more to the point, is capable of real acts of evil -- than a good deal of the utopian dimension of democracy has lost its sheen. You see 19th-century socialism struggling with this idea, whether human beings can just slough off their distorting capitalist social relations and live together in harmony. There's one strain of anarchism that really seeks to abolish violence in the form of the state, and another that just wants to break the state's monopoly on violence. This is a rough but I think fair way to describe the gap between Proudhon and Bakunin, for example.

The real question is what mechanisms, religious or secular, you have in place to address the problem of original sin, the universal capacity for evil, the flawed and fragile nature of human beings. You can have a deeply hierarchical mechanism, a deeply traditional one, a deeply totalitarian one, or a profoundly democratic one. As with so many other things, the concept alone does not do our thinking for us. We are left to do that for ourselves.

Hockey As Political Allegory

Sean Quinn at FiveThirtyEight tells the Democrats to suck it up:

Once upon a time, I applied an NFL-replay mentality to hockey playoffs, holding on to outrages over missed calls, blatantly unfair officiating, double standards, and outright getting-away-with-stuff (which always led to an early spring exit for my beloved Blues). I wanted – and unreasonably expected – bad behavior to be proportionally punished.

And then several years ago I had an epiphany about the hockey playoffs – nobody is coming to save you. Initiators win, reactors lose. Expect adversity, because it's built in. The fourth-line, no-scoring-talent, pest agitators (or as we now call them, “energy guys”) have a specific job. Skate in, take a cheap shot, make it after the whistle. Make it against the rules. Stir something up. Put a wet glove in the other guy's face and rub it. Get the outrage flowing. Get the opponent not thinking about the game, get them thinking about your shenanigans. And what happens? The “victimized” team loses its composure, hitting back. The guy who hits second is always the guy who goes to the penalty box...

Sarah Palin is a person who by her own admission found out about the Iraq surge – the centerpiece of the McCain judgment argument – from television. Apologies to conservatives, but technically, objectively, inarguably, this alone makes her unqualified to be President. But we don’t live in that technical or objective world. Political campaigns – as distinct from policy and governance – are the NHL playoffs. It’s only about who survives the war of attrition to the finish line first. Is Brett Hull’s skate still in Dominik Hasek’s crease and was that same situation disallowed in every previous instance throughout that season? Yes, but so what? Dallas had a parade.

He then invokes the sacred names of Red Wings Kris Draper and Steve Yzerman to show that you don't just need guys who mix it up, you need scoring talent who can win in the clutch. In football, we'd call this the Joe Montana/Ronnie Lott dichotomy, where you need one guy who naturally envisions himself winning and another guy who will run from one corner of the field to the other to knock down a pass because he absolutely refuses to lose.

I'd also note, re: the Wings, that Detroit had a whole line of those guys, Draper, McCarty, Tomas Holmstrom, plus Joey Kocur, who (besides Kocur) were also great at faceoffs and scrapping in the crease and the corners. Also, the thing about Steve Yzerman, unlike the other great goal scorers of his era, is that when guys like Claude Lemieux got in his shit he would drop his gloves and work those Canadian fists of his, all 5'11" of him. Yzerman wasn't Gretzky or Mario -- he didn't need his tough guys to have his back. Just to take it to them the next time they came on the ice.

How It Happened

Narratio Fabulosa

I would simply be remiss in my blogly duties if I didn't link to Rachel Leow's amazing journey-via-Google-Maps through The Travels of Marco Polo.

As I commented over on that blog:

There have always been two great moments for me in Marco Polo’s travels.

1) The account of the Khan’s fiat paper currency, which he exchanges for all the gold and silver and jewels in his kingdom, and which everyone honors on pain of death;

2) The Khan’s network of recruiters and inspectors who likewise gather the most attractive maidens of every kingdom conquered by the Khan, who then keeps them as sexual and body servants before marrying them off to other nobles (usually his relatives). There’s a single Y chromosome signature that is overrepresented throughout most of Asia, suggesting a single common ancestor. Scientists believe that ancestor may be Genghis Khan.

A Second Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Two years ago, Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland appeared on The Colbert Report's "Better Know A District." Westmoreland had proposed a bill to display the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives. Colbert asked him to name all ten:


Now, the same Lynn Westmoreland has called Barack and Michelle Obama uppity:

"Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

Asked to clarify that he used the word “uppity,” Westmoreland said, “Uppity, yeah.”

Other Democrats have charged that the Republican campaign to paint the Illinois senator as an “elitist” is racially charged, and accused them of using code words for “uppity” without using the word itself...

Political consultant David Gergen, who has worked in both Republican and Democratic White Houses, said on ABC’s "This Week" that “As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for, 'He's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a Southern background.”

Defending Peggy Noonan

There's an awesome live mic moment with Chuck Todd, Mike Murphy, and Peggy Noonan where each of them take turns bashing voicing their concerns with the Palin VP pick. TPM has the video and transcript.


Okay, everybody caught up? Good.

Now, Scott Rosenberg at Wordyard (via Romenesko) takes Noonan to task, since her column on Palin today hedged its bets. Rosenberg writes:

Now, if Peggy Noonan wrote a column every week that was as honest with her readers as she is here, with her colleagues, when she thinks the microphone is off, I would read it religiously. She’s part of a world that I don’t inhabit. But now I have a bright picture of the fact that she’s not writing what she knows and believes...

How can anyone ever read a word by Peggy Noonan again and take it seriously? (And she’s been around the block long enough not to get too much sympathy for, you know, not knowing that microphones can betray you.)

If her editors had any respect for their readers, they’d fire her.

Now, I'm inclined to stick up for Noonan, for the following reasons:


1) I think the "it's over" comment came in the context of Murphy's comment that the Republicans were trying to run McCain "like a Texas governor" by running up the base. That is, if the Republicans continue to run this way, it's over.

2) Noonan is a pretty good opinion journalist precisely because she's thoughtful and complex. It's not as though she directly refuted what she said in her column; she just introduced some negative capability.

3) I think this is a good thing to do in writing. You know, I wrote a post the other day that pretty strongly argues against the whole conspiracy-theory view of Sarah Palin, but chatting with friends on IM, I was up to my neck in just that kind of speculation. Journalists aren't paid to hide what they're thinking, but they're not paid to spout off whatever's on the top of their head either.

4) Speaking of which, why no co-criticism of Mike Murphy? Murphy's on TV news All. The. Time. talking about the McCain campaign, and gets quoted in print stories too. He's hardly ever been quite that frank on the record about his opinion of the McCain campaign's strategy. Do we just expect partisan TV pundits to toe the line? If so, how exactly is Noonan (a former Reagan speechwriter) different from Murphy (a former Republican campaign manager)?

In the Armchair Again

I thought Barack Obama's reaction to the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy was classy:

I have heard some of the news on this and so let me be as clear as possible. I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people's families are off limits, and people's children are especially off limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics, it has no relevance to governor Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18. And how family deals with issues and teenage children that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that is off limits.

Especially by including his own mother, it felt sincere, coming from somewhere deep within Obama: don't you dare attack a teenage mother! It is almost a defense: Look at me, my mother, the loving care of my grandparents, and how our family turned out.

The craziness of this story is that it combines Americans' two great democratic loves with respect to the news: getting into our politicians' shit, and judging the parenting and romantic choices of people we don't know. Call it People magazine politics.

The intimations and rumors of a possible sinister conspiracy invokes the third, rooted in the American system of trial by jury and brought into full bloom by detective fiction and Court TV: our collective capacity to invent and imagine scenarios to fit the facts or the absence of facts.

Normally, the problem with American consumption of mainstream political media is its uncritical, uninterpretive assumption of what one is being told -- with its color negative being the paranoid refusal on the political extremes to believe anything said by a media or political authority. The third mode is the hyperinterpretive imagination, the belief by ill-informed pundits and amateur TV-watchers that one can, with a limited amount of information, reconstruct what really happened, from matters of fact to individual motives. In this way any Nancy Grace or Grace Nancy can decide that a parent with a missing child in fact murdered that child and hid the body, that Saddam Hussein secretly orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center (in collusion with the CIA, the Illuminati, and the state of Israel), or that a governor's brother-in-law is secretly the father of her/her daughter's baby.

The assumption is always that all the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle fit, that there is no interpretive remainder, and that lying beneath the surface is not sloppiness or accident but a masterful and sinister lie hiding in plain sight, which only the amateur can uncover. Call it the Purloined Letter theory of the news; or if you don't cotton to references literary, the Jon Benet Ramsey theory.

It's not just a mistake; it's a collective delusion, one not limited to self-righteous TV talking heads or bored midwestern housewives, but a kind of language-game that almost all of us participate in, one that is democratic but perhaps also primal -- an attempt to interpret the motivations of a rival, whether internal or external, our childhood attempts to make sense of our complex family dramas, the animal ability to anticipate the next move of predator or prey.

It's a delusion with a germ of truth, not about its object but ourselves, and it takes immense discipline to dissolve. Obama's naming his mother is a razor slashing a silk balloon. There is too much else to talk about, too much hanging in the balance. An arrow shooting into the future.

New Yorker Goodies

Not much to add to them, but I really liked both this sympathetic/critical/honest profile of Alec Baldwin and this rundown of McCain and Obama's attempts at outreach to faith communities in the new issue of "the magazine."

Neither story tells you much that you haven't already heard before, but both are able to give their subjects a contextual sweep that makes you say, hmm, I think I understand that much better now.

(In addition to my new "Elections" tag, which helps split up my filled-to-bursting "The Polis," I'm going to add one for TV and Movies, called "Screens.")

Those Extra Ten Hours

The inimitable Sarah Vowell reflects on her gratitude for Ted Kennedy and Pell Grants:

I paid my way through Montana State University with student loans, a minimum-wage job making sandwiches at a joint called the Pickle Barrel, and — here come the waterworks — Pell Grants. Thanks to Pell Grants, I had to work only 30 hours a week up to my elbows in ham instead of 40.

Ten extra hours a week might sound negligible, but do you know what a determined, junior-Hillary type of hick with a full course load and onion-scented hands can do with the gift of 10 whole hours per week? Not flunk geology, that’s what. Take German every day at 8 a.m. — for fun! Wander into the office of the school paper on a whim and find a calling. I’m convinced that those 10 extra hours a week are the reason I graduated magna cum laude, which I think is Latin for “worst girlfriend in town.”

There are so many marvelously turned-out lines in this little essay, from the sublime---

My education made my life. In a sometimes ugly world, my schooling opened a trap door to a bottomless pit of beauty — to Walt Whitman and Louis Armstrong and Frank Lloyd Wright, to the old movies and old masters that have been my constant companions in my unalienable pursuit of happiness.

to the crackling---

I have spent the last eight years so disgusted with the incompetent yahoos of the executive branch that I had forgotten that I believe in one of the core principles of the Democratic Party — that government can be a useful, meaningful and worthwhile force for good in this republic instead of just an embarrassing, torturing, Book of Revelation starter kit.

and:

Compare [the Democrats] to the incoherent Republican primary field, a set of candidates expressly invented to make the average Republican voter nervous: the businessman was too Mormon-y; the evangelical might worship Jesus more than money; Senator McCain has campaign reform cooties; Ron Paul was Ron Paul.

that you might as well read the whole thing.