(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times / August 31, 2009)The Station fire continues to spread through the Angeles National Forest. Winds have picked up, but no Santa Anas yet.
More photos of the fire can be found here on the LA Times.
Anglachel
If we're so "smart", how come we keep getting our asses handed to us? Why can't we get our agendas enacted even when we hold legislative majorities? Somerby then goes into a long and detailed criticism of Krugman's latest article, picking up on themes he has been discussing with regards to Rick Perlstein last week. He's using these two thinkers in great part because these are two of the most perceptive analysts of Movement Conservatism around, people who have clearly demonstrated (Krugman with Conscience of a Liberal and Perlstein with Before the Storm and Nixonland) they get what that movement is and how it came to power.Our guy was the most effective ever! And health care reform was his lifetime passion! Only we liberals would fail to see the oddness of these conjoined statements, in a month when we’re getting our clocks cleaned again in the matter of health care reform! This isn’t a criticism of Senator Kennedy, of course, This is a criticism of us.
But then, that’s the shape of modern politics. The other side gets the big wins. Our side gets the pleasing stories, in which we’re allowed to define ourselves as being both moral and smart. That’s one of the ways the world’s ruling classes buy off numb-nuts like us.
I read this and had to agree. Mockery of the have-littles has been a standard operating procedure of the Stevensonian mode of liberalism since, well, Stevenson.* What benefit can come to liberalism by being constantly on an intellectual and cultural offensive against working class Americans? Somewhere between nothing and less than zero. Somerby continues by describing the corporate embrace of conservative political measures to defeat the liberal gains of the New Deal. Their success, as both Krugman and Perlstein have documented, lay in the ability of the Movement Conservatives to leverage the arrogance and elitism endemic in the rising technocratic elite - the revolutionary saints. Somerby winds up and delivers a kock-out punch:According to Krugman, the right-wing fringe—Rick Perlstein’s “crazy” people, he is careful to say—have taken over the GOP. But does that story, told that way, really make much sense? Does it really make sense on the merits? Does it make any sense as a matter of politics?
Just think about what Krugman says there:
In Perlstein’s piece (click here), he explained who his “crazy” people were—the people around whom he chose to build his name-calling piece. ... Does it make sense to be told that people like these have somehow “taken over one of our two major parties?” Actually, no, it pretty much doesn’t—but that’s where Krugman starts!
Grassley and all those other players are vastly more culpable than the “crazies.” But in the past forty years, liberals have always loved to kick down at little people—at the people who simply aren’t smart enough to win the Bates Medal, the Nobel Prize. In our view, Krugman’s story—as told there—is quite weak-minded. But ever since the days of Nixon, “liberals” have loved to tell that story, thus harming progressive interests.
Sound familiar? It is the alpha and omega of the Obama 2008 campaign, sneering at the socio-economic inferiors who they didn't need anymore to win the elections. Or, to quote Chris Bowers:COOLICAN (5/15/08): Though it had been tried before, Perlstein writes, Nixon was the first to successfully exploit a devastating new narrative: the Democratic Party as enemy of the working man.
Perlstein says Nixon understood the anger and frustration of working-class people, the humiliation of being looked down upon by elitist, liberal betters. Why did Nixon understand this “deeply sedimented cultural narrative,” as Perlstein calls it? Because he’d faced it all his life.
In California, Ronald Reagan was also “successfully exploiting” that “devastating new narrative.” (For examples, read Perlstein’s Nixonland.) Endlessly, we thought of that devastating narrative in the past five days as we watched a string of spectacularly un-savvy liberals describe certain aspects of the past forty-seven years. (More on that next week.)
We “liberals!”We love to call the other side dumb! But has anyone ever been dumber than we are? Tomorrow, we’ll start a series about the crucial questions Perlstein was asked in the wake of his piece in the Post. Why are Democrats so bad at “messaging?” So bad at “pushing back?” Why is that Democrats and liberals keep getting defeated by “blatant and ridiculous falsehoods?”
Put it a slightly different way: If we had the most effective legislator, why can’t we get the cause of his lifetime passed? Part of the answer: We’re too busy assuring ourselves that those who defeat us are dumb.
Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives: There should be a major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier decades. Given the demographics of the blogosphere, in all likelihood, this is a socioeconomic and cultural demographic into which you fit. Culturally, the Democratic Party will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class instead of rich donors and the white working class.Yup. Hope you creative types don't need health insurance.
I had to post this image. It is on the home page of the LA Times right now, but will get changed out. Taken by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times.
There wasn't a caption on the photo, but this is probably the Station fire bearing down on Acton. Two Los Angeles County firefighters were killed in a truck accident earlier today. The fire is climbing up Mount Wilson where most of the TV broadcast towers for the greater LA area are located, as well as an observatory.
Update - Here is an image of the fire on Mout Wilson. You can see the transmission towers: 
(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times / August 30, 2009)
Anglachel
Fun, sun and wildfires.This is the view from Marina del Rey on the coast looking back at the Station Fire. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times / August 29, 2009) This photo is from the LA Times' web site photo gallery.
LA Times has the best general coverage since they are right in the middle of it and have a lot of practice covering this kind of disaster.
For those who like to track such things, here is a map of the fires, their anticipated paths, and the evacuation zones. The fires are burning in the foothills along the northern edge of the San Fernando Valley, almost due north of LA itself. It is a heavily populated area that backs onto wilderness areas. The terrain is a series of sharp, steep canyons that run for miles back into the hills and are packed with brush that hasn't burned in decades. This picture should give you an idea of the terrain and vegetation:
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / August 30, 2009)
Firefighters defend a home on Canalda Drive in La Cañada Flintridge.
The canyons act like funnels, bringing the fires straight down into the developed areas sitting at the mouths of the canyons.
The temperatures have been in triple digits with humidity almost zero. There's a little cooling today and tomorrow, but then temperatures are due to go back up again. The only saving grace at the moment is that we don't have Santa Ana wind conditions, which whips up the fires and makes them spread faster and more widely.
So far, San Diego county has not had any major fires break out, though there was a 1,000 acre blaze on Camp Pendleton at the north edge of the county. The company I work for provides IT infrastructure for the city and county (communications, portable data centers, mobile computing, command and control operations, etc.) when disasters hit, so we're all on alert until the rains come in November. We're keeping fingers crossed we don't have anything like the fires in 2007. A nice, quiet, low fire year would be just dandy, thankyouverymuch.
Anglachel
In January, Obama suggested reseeding the National Mall—and that was turned into a toxic suggestion, one which had to be stripped from the stimulus package. In the same way, living will consultation—sorry, “death panels”—will now be stripped from health bills. And yet, we liberals still dream of the zipless debate—of the claim so clear and pure that it can’t be routed in some bizarre fashion. As we dream these dreamers’ dreams, we show that we still don’t understand the shape of our current predicament.The zipless debate, like Jong's zipless fuck, is a fantasy of cleanliness, of over-awing the opposition through sheer brain power, of not having to cut deals or appeal to the material (physical, carnal) interests of the ordinary person. It is the fantasy of the boys in grad school to reshape the world into their own image just by being really, really smart. The problem is that they also live inside their fantasy world, imagining the world to be like a really cool, newly opened Whole Foods where people will of course shop and select only the most healthy, morally upright, selections, full of fiber and antioxidents.* We can have our political triumph by braining really hard and not have to exchange vital essenses with the hoi polloi.
To our ear, Simon and Henneberger were each describing a political system they can’t quite explain. One side gets to yell crazy things—and the other side is required to make intensely detailed presentations! And yet, the side which yells the crazy things is the side which constantly wins! It’s almost like a dream from Kafka—a dream our side can’t quite explain. Then too, we thought of a passage from Wittgenstein: “We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.”Why are we trying to talk concepts when we are dealing with political survival? It's not that our side is so ethical or pure of motive. You only have to look at how quickly deals were cut to reward the merry banksters doing the Hanky Panky with the nation's wealth. We'll do high-minded, clean, behind closed doors, sophisticated financial fuck-them-over operations, no problemo!
Our side tends to have a very hard time explaining that peculiar system—when we try to explain it at all. And yet, one thing is painfully clear: “It looks like the same thing is happening all over again,”as Henneberger said about the current drive for health reform. Indeed, we recently reread James Fallow’s famous and important Atlantic piece, “A Triumph of Misinformation,” about the way the Clinton health plan went down to defeat in 1994 (just click here).For all its fame, his famous piece could have been written today, about the latest such triumph we liberals have helped engineer.
Astroturf and charity. I am less convinced by the first part of the argument because I know plenty of membership organizations where people pay money but end up being quite passive and disinterested. The real difference is that union membership is public - it is known who is a card carrying member of the organization. This contributes to solidarity, yes, but it also makes you a target. You really do need to hang together or risk it happening separately. Additionally, there are unions where the leadership and the membership disagree on the direction of the union, and where the leadership is not very responsive to the express wishes of the membership. All in all, I mostly agree, but don't find it as definitive as Lind does.Looking back, we can see that the history of American liberalism since the Depression falls into two periods: the New Deal up until the 1970s, when industrial labor provided the muscle of the reform coalition, and the neoliberal period, when unions have been eclipsed in the alliance by the black civil rights movement and other social movements: consumerism, environmentalism, feminism and gay rights. Necessary and important as they are, there are two problems with these liberal social movements as the base of a progressive party.
First, unlike unions, they are not membership organizations funded by dues from their members. They are mostly AstroTurf movements that depend on their funding and strategic direction on a handful of progressive foundations, and their leaders are appointed by donors and board members, not elected by followers. The work they do is valuable, but they cannot be substitutes for genuinely popular organizations.
Second, the members of most of these nonprofit movements are drawn disproportionately from the white college-educated professional class; their self-assignment to one or another single-issue movement does not disguise the fact that they tend to belong to the same social elite. Like the progressivism of the 1900s, but unlike the labor movement and agrarian populism, the progressivism of the 2000s is a movement of haves motivated by pity for the have-littles and have-nots, rather than a movement of have-littles and have-nots motivated by self interest. And because they are, or believe themselves to be, motivated by philanthropy, the progressive haves are less interested in the economic struggles of the have-littles of the broad working class than in rescuing a far smaller number of have-nots from dire poverty. And even those elite progressives who are concerned about the working class are motivated by noblesse oblige: "We're from Washington, and we're here to help!"
Is the future of American liberalism a politics of charity rather than a politics of solidarity? ...[O]rganized labor, after a brief, unforeseen period of influence from the 1930s to the 1960s, is crushed a second time by neoliberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, leaving an America in which the only significant conflicts are those within the economic elite. In such a political order, the only left that counts will be the left based on money rather than votes or members. Progressivism becomes a movement of the privileged and charitable who are interested in doing good to other Americans rather than with other Americans.Bingo. I would add that this is not necessarily a mark of failure, at least from the perspective of the haves. To be the one who is doing to rather than the one done to means you have power, privilege and protection - and you can keep the others out. Having to act in concert with others not of your tribe opens up the possibility of losing membership in your own group and the privilege that goes with it. Fear of loss and the resentment that clings to the knowledge that others enjoy what you no longer have are the two most powerful tools of the Right. Lind points out:
If the game of politics is a game that effectively is limited to the rich and the professional class, then the rest will find tribunes – usually affluent and well-educated themselves – who will propose to turn over the gaming tables and open the doors to the casino. Would the absurd distortions of the current healthcare-reform backlash resonate so strongly if the white working-class felt more invested in the modern version of liberalism?My guess is no. But, then again, the modern version of liberalism is not exactly offering up shares of stock, especially after the performance of Dean, Brazile & Co. when it came to throwing every possible Democratic constituency under the bus. The track marks are still pretty deep on my back, and I am thoroughly a member of that social class. Imagine how someone who wouldn't ever stand inside the magic circle (no way to buy your way back in, no way to "pass" as a member of the tribe) would regard the high-handed derision.
But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.It's even bigger than that. Reagan turned an equivocal election into a "mandate" by moving decisively to declare absolute victory and demanding that politics be conducted on his terms. Reagan was not merely a "great communicator" (i.e., knew how to deliver his lines well and look good on camera); he was a determined and consummate politician, understanding how to use power to gain more, and with an agenda the length of his arm. He generated results by recognizing and aggressively capitalizing on political opportunities.
But on the two great questions of this election, how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America's leadership in the world, [McCain] still embraces the extreme philosophy which has defined his party for more than 25 years, a philosophy we never had a real chance to see in action until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and Congress. Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades were implemented.This is the kind of argument you have to make to change the way people think. It isn't "failures in the past" but Republican failures. It is being willing to be hated by a fanatical rump group in order to be taken seriously by the majority.
Vital Lessons from the Health Reform WarsThe terms of the debate have not and will not change until we have someone who can use a political opportunity to make change happen. Change isn't a campaign; it is a mode of political life. It happens because you want to change for a reason, and you fight tooth and nail to achieve your goal.
- The big banker bailout has been far more damaging than the White House can imagine. ...
- The anti-Bush moment has passed, and with it a huge political opportunity. ...
- Rumors of the GOP's death have been greatly exaggerated. ...
- Obama's campaign machine is not fungible. ...
- The old media machine is alive and well. ...
- The national debate is still conducted on the right's terms. ...
- We are a soundbite democracy and the right has better soundbites.
It's the shop where wealthy American liberals buy their groceries.
But the American supermarket chain Whole Foods Market has found itself at the centre of a storm of controversy after its chief executive, John Mackey, wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal presenting a free market alternative to President Obama's proposed healthcare reforms.
Mr Mackey began his article with a quote from Margaret Thatcher and went on to add that Americans do not have an intrinsic right to healthcare - an idea strongly at odds with the views of a large proportion of Whole Foods' customer base.
The company, which has 270 stores in North America and the UK, sells organic vegetables, biodegradable washing powder and sustainable seafood to a well-heeled clientele and champions its liberal credentials.
I hate to break the news to you, kids, but its "liberal credentials" are as deep as its advertisements in the newspaper. It is a brand intended to appeal to liberal upper middle class snobbery and elitism, and to rake in all of your excess income.
There are several Whole Foods in the greater San Diego area, including one about three miles from where I live. I admit I was caught up in the glamor of it when it first opened up, but quickly grew disenchanted by the incredible price premium and, frankly, the crappy quality. The deli food tastes like the "organic" shit served up in college cafeterias everywhere (bland, under-seasoned, fibrous, incorrectly cooked, allowed to sit around for too long) but at about six times the price. The bulk foods are twice the cost of comparable products at the nearest area competitor, Henry's Market (which is locally owned, serves up local produce, and has great prices, just in case you're wondering), and the product selection is limited to high priced goods. Their bakery items are, in a word, inedible.
In short, it's a grand marketing scheme which has worked on people more concerned about appearing to do the right thing than actually doing it. A few people are smart enough to identify the ploy, but not quite willing to admit they were snookered:
Outside the store [in Washington DC], customers Emily Goulding and Ileana Abreu said the controversy had made them think twice about shopping there.
"It is hypocritical and disingenuous and it really cheapens the brand," said Ms Goulding.
"Whole Foods is expensive but people shop here because they identify with the social conscience of the company - now it turns out that ethos was just a marketing exercise," added Ms Abreu.
Um, so have you stopped shopping there? If the CEO "apologizes," will you happily go back to handing over your money for the illusion of an ethos? Are you taking your well-heeled asses to local produce stands, mom-and-pop owned corner markets, and some of the run-down independent grocers in the area who keep the money in the community? No? Why not? Because they don't sell perfectly shaped, organically grown, blemish-free red bell peppers imported from Holland for $4 each? Just the kind of dinged-up weird looking ones from Mexico at two for $1? Because they don't have nice looking stores with artfully arranged end caps and bright, colorful posters? Because they are a bit grimy around the edges and have people using food stamps at the checkout line? Becuse poor people with bad eating habits shop there and you don't like having to mix with the non-beautiful people?
Uh-huh. Riiiiight, you're there for the healthy, organic, natural food. Which is packaged at the same factories and comes from the same industrial farms and ranches as the other stuff, but has that pretty "365" label on it.
No, you're there to shop in an upscale grocery store where dirty poor people aren't able to join you, but marketed in such a way that you can pretend you're doing this for socially responsible reasons. I had to laugh at these two people interviewed for the article:
Massachusetts-based playwright Mark Rosenthal's "Boycott Whole Foods" Facebook page has so far attracted 24,738 fans, including supporters in the UK and Canada.
Rosenthal said, "I read the article and it stunned me, the hubris of this man who has made his millions selling his products to progressives in America based on an image of caring for the community."
Teacher Carol Kramer had driven from Virginia to take part in the protest. She said, "There are a lot of people out there who really invested in the Whole Foods brand, emotionally and financially. We are feeling really betrayed."
Why are you all so shocked?
This is exactly how The Precious was marketed to Whole Foods Nation, a facsimile of liberal values tied up in a "clean" package. The "progressives" are a social class, not a political movement, and they are all about image. It is a class still held captive by a fantasy of the JFK White House, wanting to see it as moon landings and cultural events and chic fashion, and not as Bay of Pigs and Vietnam and invasive policing by the FBI and CIA. Its a class that waxes rhapsodic over Woodstock, but is silent over tear-gas in the streets of Berkley.
I look at this situation and see a perfect microcosm of all the delusions about the nature of power and all the unacknowledged class prejudices held by Whole Foods Nation.
Anglachel