Logan’s end-run.
Let’s see: this post from Big Media Matt leads to this post from Tomorrow’s Pundit Today Ezra Klein commenting on five minutes in which SEIU’s Andy Stern told CAP’s CampusProgress.org the following—
We’re thinking of creating a new organization called My Life that would be mainly focused on 18 to 34 year olds. It would be web-based, and what it would allow people to do is purchase on a national level health care that you can move from job to job. You’d also be able to do things like tweak your resume on file permanently in your personal account. You could access debit cards potentially and start doing some of the new financial transactions like putting money on your cell phone. It would have opportunities for people to network with other people who are doing similar jobs or somewhat of a Craigslist-type function. It would be in some ways what AARP is for seniors: a place that advocates on their behalf. But clearly it’s a different form of organization; whether you call that a union, or an internet community, or an association, I’m not sure. But it has that kind of potential.
—which reminded me of a post from Old Skool Nick Confessore from back in the dark post-election depression of 2004:
Imagine an endeavor under which the official Democratic Party sponsored a non-profit health-insurance corporation, one which offered some form of health insurance to anyone who joined the party—say, with a $50 “membership fee.” Since I’m not a health care wonk, I don’t know how you’d structure such a business, or what all the pitfalls might be, or even if such a thing is possible or desirable. But I can think of some theoretical advantages. The Democrats could put into practice, right away, their ideas for the kind of health insurance they think we all ought to have. They could build their grassroots and deliver tangible benefits to members. Imagine a good HMO, run not for profit and in the public interest, along the lines the Democrats keep telling us all existing HMOs and health care providers should be run.
Which, yes yes yes. More, please. And of course you’d call that a “union.” Allow me to quote Utah Philips quoting some other guy—
Thus proving everlastingly what a union is: a way to get things done together that you can’t get done alone.
And to play for a moment the game of US and THEM: THEY are already out there, in their megachurches, patching the holes THEY’ve made in the social safety net: “First, you find a church.”
MBC is a mega-church with a parking garage that could serve a medium-sized airport, but many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar array of services—childcare, after-school programs, ESL lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of destitution: “First, you find a church.” A trailer-park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church. The closest analogy to America’s bureaucratized evangelical movement is Hamas, which draws in poverty-stricken Palestinians through its own miniature welfare state.
US could really use some more boots on this particular ground. Because let’s be honest, here: the point isn’t (just) to do good works. It’s to bind people to your party, your argument, your worldview; to provide, as Matt put it above, “the capacity to take people who aren’t ‘political’ sorts and make them see that politics is interested in them even if they aren’t interested in politics.” —That comparison with Hamas isn’t only a knee-slapper at the expense of the faith-based.
But let’s be further honest: one of the benefits of getting help from—and moreso of supporting the help given by—something like a megachurch is the ugly, comforting knowledge that the wrong people won’t be getting any. THEY must go elsewhere, and if they haven’t any elsewhere to go, it’s their own damn fault. —Partisan; exclusionary; tribal; the meanest of means tests, and Avedon Carol rings an important alarum re: My Life—
And this would mean, what? That you lose your healthcare once you hit a certain age, and then it jumps in costs because you’ll be in the other part of the demographic?
Now, Stern does say My Life would be “mainly focused on 18 to 34 year olds,” not limited to. And I think it’s a function of who would be likely to buy into the whole internet-mediated social networking 2.0 thing, as well as looking to reach out to people whose worklives no longer allow for unions as we’ve known them, and not a function of selecting only the young and liberal and secular and hip and healthy. —But the ugliness under the game of US and THEM is something to keep in mind: the whole point of the safety net, after all, is that it’s there for all of us, any of us, no matter what, should we need it. No binding other than citizenship required.
Also, “My Life”? Ack. Could it possibly be called something else—or is it actively intended to disincline folks like me, on the far side of the demographic line?
(I suppose it’s better than Welfr.)
Oh, hell yes.
You’ve reached Logan Echolls, and here’s today’s inspirational message:
A journey of a thousand miles begins with an historic midterm landslide.
Hedless conspiracy.
Noted in passing, over at the irreplaceable Slacktivist:
(One, possibly minor, but real, contributing factor to the trend of failing referendums and, thus, cuts in school budgets: “Tax hike” uses four fewer characters than “school funds.” This is why, my headline-writing friends on the copy desk tell me, you are more likely to read a headline that says, “District to vote on tax hike” than one that reads “District to vote on school funds.”)
Torture, working.
Since the Moscow trials of the ’thirties, in which so many of the Old Bolsheviks confessed to almost every possible crime—an actual majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee that had made the October Revolution were capitalist agents if the evidence given at the trials was to be believed—we have all grown considerably more sceptical about evidence extracted under torture. There is a remarkable similarity between, for example, a young German girl of the sixteenth century confessing that, naked, she had attended the Sabbath and there indulged in every variety of perversion and some of the confessions produced at the Moscow trials. One remembers that one of the Moscow accused confessed, in a fervour of self-recrimination, to having met and plotted with Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen although, in reality, the hotel had been burnt down some years before; this is very like the fervent repentance displayed by some accused witches for impossible supernatural crimes to which they had confessed.
—Fancis King, Sexuality, Magic, & Perversion
It still stops me, gobsmacked, on the street, when the thought crosses my mind: I live in a country that seriously argues whether torture is justifiable.
How thin and threadbare civilization is.
Remember this: they tell us our constitution is not a “suicide pact,” that give me liberty or give me death be damned, some things are more important. —Such as keeping them in power. That, it seems, is worth dying for.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Doing the only right thing is sick, twisted; not referred to as a joke; not (at all) funny.
A note on framing, to our esteemed colleagues on the dextral side:
While I question the wisdom of rolling out a new product in August, still, I gotta tell you, I’m wholly in agreement with your impending shift from “MSM media” to “527 media.” After all, anyone outside your little clique who stumbles over such a reference and goes googling for whatever the hell it is you could possibly mean will trip over far and away the most famous 527 of all: the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. —And that, my friends, is a connection we can all support.
Shorter How to Talk to a Conservative:
What color is the sky?
“I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live,” says our president, who didn’t know the difference between Shi’ite and Sunni, who is “puzzled” that thousands of Iraqis would take to the streets to demonstrate against America.
Miserable failure.
I mean, seriously. How long was the fuze on this particular punchline? Three years? You have any idea how long that is in internet time?
Are too Redemption’s tears and not in vain—for nothing idly weeps.
It’s not just that Lindsay’s a self-hating Jew for wanting to read Günther Grass. She’s also a pædophile!
When opportunity knocks your house down.
Ah, you’ve probably seen Aasif Mandvi on the Daily Show already. Go, see it again.
No shit, Sherlock.
You know, we start seeing headlines like this, it’s time to rethink some of our fundamental assumptions.
Crow is a dish best served cold.
So I’m noting this comment from an old friend for future gustation.
This machine bugs liberals.
Say, Fred, I heard Lyndon is forming a new Federal agency.
Yeah? What’s that?
It’s going to be called the Poverty Relief Agency.
Oh, that’s nothing new, Bobby Baker’s headed that department for years.
Zing?
Down in Havana, 90 miles from our shore
Lies an army of Commies and Fidel Castro
We were going to remove them, the plans were all made
We’d help with the airplanes on invasion day
But you know the Liberals and the CIA
They agreed with Adlai, take the airplanes away
So the brave freedom fighters were destined to fall
’Cause we didn’t answer when we heard their call
—the Goldwaters, “Down in Havana”
Rick Perlstein’s always worth reading; the Design Observer’s running an essay of his that the New Republic couldn’t be bothered to put online, so go, read “What is Conservative Culture?”
Conservative culture was shaped in another era, one in which conservatives felt marginal and beleaguered. It enunciated a heady sense of defiance. In a world in which patriotic Americans were hemmed in on every side by an all-encroaching liberal hegemony, raw sex in the classrooms, and totalitarian enemies of the United States beating down our very borders, finally conservatives could get together and (as track twelve of the Goldwaters’ Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals avowed) “Row Our Own Boat.”
But now conservatism has grown into a vast and diverse chunk of the electorate. Its culture has become so dominant that one can live entirely within it. Shortly after the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, a Washington activist could, if he so chose, attend nothing but conservative parties, panels, and barbecues; a recent Pew Research Center study suggested that partisan divisions are increasing at the community level. And yet, far inside these enclaves, conservatives still rely on the cultural tropes of that earlier period: At one living room “Party for the President” in 2004, a woman told me, “We’re losing our rights as Christians. ... and being persecuted again.” The culture of conservatives still insists that it is being hemmed in on every side. In Tom DeLay’s valedictory address, as classic an expression of high conservative culture as ever was uttered, he attributed to liberalism “a voracious appetite for growth. In any place or any time on any issue, what does liberalism ever seek, Mr. Speaker? More. ... If conservatives don’t stand up to liberalism, no one will.”
How to explain these strange continuities? And what does it say about the politics of our own time? Kirk offers no answers, because what holds the movement together isn’t its intellectual history but its cultural one. Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals is this mystery’s Rosetta Stone.
Bugging liberals, you see, being bugged by liberals, is not incidental to conservative culture, but rather is constitutive of it—more so than any identifiable positive content. Seeing Republicans appropriate liberal-sounding rhetoric on immigrants and education and getting credit for it—even while their policies corrode public education and also stoke an anti-immigrant backlash—bugs the hell out of the liberals. Which is, for Karl Rove no doubt, part of the calculation. Rove knows that the pleasure of watching liberals’ heads explode is the best way to keep his team rowing in the same direction.
Two things struck me, reading this: first, of course, appropriation isn’t only done to fuck with our the other side’s heads. When you start to believe your own bullshit, that you really are beset on all sides by an implacable foe, when you’re out there fighting dragons every day, you start to ask yourself what it is they’ve got that you don’t; you start to wonder if maybe you shouldn’t become a little draconic yourself. You say things like, “They have Joan Baez, who do we have?”
It was Dr. Fred C. Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade (CACC) who acted as [Janet] Greene’s “Col. Parker” and molded her into his very own Anti-Baez. As reported in The Los Angeles Times, on October 13, 1964, Schwarz unveiled his new musical weapon against Communism at a press conference at the Biltmore Hotel in LA. With Greene at his side, Schwarz stated to the assembled press that he had “taken a leaf out of the Communist book” by adding a conservative folk singer to his organization. “We have decided to take advantage of this technique for our own purposes.” He then added, “You’d be amazed at how much doctrine can be taught in one song.”
The second thing was how old the conservative schtick is. They were hating on the Clenis back in 1964.
Say I saw a new a great new play on Broadway last night, it’s called The Doll House.
Is that the Rodgers-Hammerstein show?
No, it’s a Profumo-Baker production.
Must have been quite a comedy!
Might call it a farce!
Rimshot, motherfuckers. Rimshot.
