Though I Am Native Here

Culture, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

The patriarchy’s not how many drunk
and virgin girl’s fratbro Don Juan has “kissed.”
An –ism’s not the plural of an –ist.
Of all our costly fallacies, we’ve sunk
the most bad debt into this junk,
a penny-stock conclusion. What we’ve missed?
Five fingers unconfigured aren’t a fist.
A white boy? Surely troubled. Black? A punk,
a hood-rat twisted by his absent dad
and too-loud mom. But no bad man decided
these pathologies, which render each
black victim criminal, white killer mad—
a thing repeated is a thing believed
even by disbelievers, in the observance, and the breach.

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Friar

Culture, Economy, Media, Religion, Science, The Life of the Mind

 

I’ve always had a soft spot for Catholicism, as I do for all things Roman. I love its unrepentant, if cheerfully unacknowledged, paganism; I like that it manages to be both particular and ecumenical, with a vast canonical universe, unlike so much dour Protestantism, which has only the Bible and manages to treat all of the Book’s magnificent poetry like an instruction diagram for the assembly of a confusing piece of Scandinavian furniture. I like its camp and its kitsch. And like a lot of folks these days, I like this Pope. Seems like a decent fellow, although the obsequious puffery of his transcendent moral authority by non-Catholic liberal types every time he says anything to broadly accords with their political preferences strikes me as supremely odd—not that there’s anything wrong with proposing a useful political alliance, but rather because it so frequently and quickly shades into an argument from authority.

Here admitted: I don’t like the phrase “climate change,” not because I dispute the general underlying truth and reality to which it refers, but because the phrase itself is so distressingly market-tested, so anodyne, so wooly and amoral and abstract. It hardly inspires a rush to the barricades, and it reeks of the sort of ineffectual political non-postures that gave us, for example, the huge loser designation “pro-choice”—a place, ironically, where the Pope’s biological credentials seem suddenly less burnishable to a lot of the same people pleased with his stance on ecology. And, apropos this very item, the Pope’s insistence that population growth and population control are ecologically insignificant compared to the “consumerism” of wealthy nations is faintly incredible. Though he rightly criticizes the blind faith in technological fixes, the crackpot conviction that we can invent our way out of the problem via electric cars or whatever, a future as mere facsimile of the present, only, uh, “sustainable,” one hardly needs to be a vulgar Malthusian to understand that the ongoing addition of billions and billions more humans—and the attendant need to get them water and food and shelter and clothing—is a large problem in our larger complex of problems. In other words, there is a deep contradiction at the heart of Francis’s correct criticism of the notion of salvation via technological innovation: he too, in his way, is praying for an electric car. What is lacking is an act of really radical imagination, which would suggest that a harmonious and truly sustainable human society would be not simply different, but unrecognizable—unrecognizable in its conduct, yes, but also and more importantly in its scale.

None of this is really meant to single Francis out for criticism. I really do like the guy, admire much of what he says, and as regards his Franciscan ideas about a human ecology, I sympathize and at least partially agree. Compared to the national leadership of our larger and more influential countries, and certainly compared to the greenwashing corporate sector, the Pope’s statements are worthy of much of the praise that they’ve garnered. But, to use a business metaphor I’m otherwise fond of mocking, the idea that they’ve disrupted anything is incorrect. It’s just regular competition in an existing space.

A Public Assembly Facilities Manager Considers Jurassic World

Culture, Economy, Media, The Life of the Mind

1. Early on, we see a hotel room. Subsequently, however, as the crisis unfolds, we see multiple incidents of thousands of guests held in the hot sun on an outdoor concourse, even as the park director, dinosaur expert, and others scream about getting inside. Additionally, the dinosaur expert lives in an airstream trailer. Conclusion: Jurassic World has only one hotel room, substantially too few for an island resort that is at least a full day’s journey from the mainland.

2. Despite several employees possessing two-way radios, management primarily communicates with park staff via cell phone, an inherently less stable and reliable platform. Additionally, when radios are used, the signal often breaks up, suggesting a) insufficient repeater range/capacity, and b) poor battery charging discipline.

3. Front-line staff are untrained in emergency preparedness, and are not helpful in either evacuation or shelter-in-place scenarios.

4. Self-piloted, two-person vehicles are described as being able to withstand the terminal ballistic force of a .50 caliber round. This seems to be an incorrect safety standard in an environment in which the principle physical danger to vehicle occupants will be not be high-velocity impact, but rather sustained, high-pressure stress and/or repeated striking. Additionally, it is inadvisable to permit un-trained/non-licensed guests/vehicles to self-operate non-tracked, fully autonomous vehicles. Finally, the same technology that locks grocery cart wheels upon transition over a magnetic strip at the edge of a parking lot might be advisable where conditions otherwise amenable to driving such vehicles beyond their designated zone of operation exist.

5. Executive direction and daily operational control should be separated. While marketing/finance and operational duties may overlap, some separation of responsibilities is advisable, especially in a high-physical-liability environment. Suggest creating two senior positions, reporting to a General Manager.

6. In fact, reporting relationships are generally unclear, leading to significant and persistent confusion among front-line employees and management staff.

7. While it is never wise to carelessly damage or destroy capital assets, the stated cost of park attractions is substantially less than the potential tort exposure in the event of an attraction-guest consumption event. In fact, the stated cost of the park’s most troublesome attraction is only $26 million.

8. Broadly speaking, despite claims that the park has employed “the best structural engineers,” capital building assets are woefully inadequate and easily damaged by the regular and routine operations of the attractions. This suggests either a) these systems are, despite claims to the contrary, under-engineered, or b) despite good engineering, construction does not follow industry best practices. Given that our observations indicate the park ownership acts as its own general contractor/construction service, the latter seems more likely.

9. Technology is a complement to, but never a replacement of, good physical/visual inspection of safety and security components. Everything, everything has a limited useful life!

10. Although it appears to operate in a foreign jurisdiction, there appears to be substantial exposure to significant workers comp risk.

11. The public address systems, where they do exist, are not very loud.

12. I did not observe a responsible waste diversion program with clearly marked receptacles.

For Users Identified in the Chat Below

Justice, Media, Poetry, War and Politics

“Why is the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet?”

–Ken White

First we’ll mulch the judges; then we’ll bake
the ground-up prosecutors into pies;
we’ll pluck-out every congresscreature’s eyes;
for every cop, a guillotine and stake.
We mean it, pigs. Make no fucking mistake:
if not tomorrow or next week—surprise!—
some day we’ll figure how to anonymize
and route actual murder so as to make
hyperbolic rhetoric into
a magic incantation, thus commission
via mere intention, criminal
and violent retribution of the sort we spew
quite fecklessly, an Internet tradition:
untruth made true, if quite subliminal.

The Tool of Athens

Culture, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

“Nothing matters if we aren’t safe.”

-Marco Rubio

Nothing matters if we aren’t safe; our lives
are emptied by the scent of risk; our passions,
proximate to chance, all strictly rationed;
it cannot be enough merely to thrive,
to love our families, like our work, survive;
it’s insufficient that our God has fashioned
us to perish. Ours will be the Athens
of the modern world, a reborn state derived
from the demos, although I find democracies,
even within strict limits are a bit
too chancy. Nothing ventured? Nothing lost.
Elect me! I will be your Pericles,
though rarely modest and without the wit,
without the chance of gain, but without cost.

An Accident

Uncategorized

That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.

-Elon Musk

You can’t invent it; you can only co-
incide with its arriving, further be
confounded by its arrival’s constancy:
it can’t retreat, nor rush ahead, nor slow
itself; the subdivided moments go
careening, literally history;
the past is actual; the future’s only
concept and tense: it’s all verb and no
noun. A paradox of will is that
the will confuses being for becoming;
well, we presume that we can shape the next
from now’s conditions, the laboratory rat
assuming the food caused the maze, the numbing
shock. The food’s removed. The rat’s perplexed.

Like Uber, but for Stock Scams

Economy, Media

A breathless Times piece reported that a recent round of fundraising by Uber points toward a $50 billion valuation, which is worth a giggle or two, and is probably not accurate.

This gleeful silliness isn’t really the Times’ fault. The paper is just reporting what someone told it. Our supposedly adversarial and skeptical press has always and in actuality been generously credulous. Lawyers presume everyone is lying to them, their clients most of all. Reporters, on the other hand, “trust their sources.” Anyway, the Times proceeds to double down on its friendly presumption that sources say is a holy writ worth adopting verbatim, and describes Uber thusly:

So far, the company has raised more than $4 billion as it moves into new markets globally, disrupting established taxi and other transportation industries by letting people request rides through their smartphones.

I thought this was a gas—yuck yuck—as well, and I said as much, which led to the following exchange with my buddy Jim Henley:

Well, I thought I might briefly elaborate.

Every new product or venture these days is proposed to be a “disruption”—that is to say, a sort of definitive break, a paradigm shift, to use a largely discarded neologism that described more or less the same thing. Frankly, I’m unconvinced that any result of the human genius has qualified since the advent of agriculture, but even by the laxer standards of our sorry business press, the idea that Uber has disrupted anything is wrong.

Uber is a car service. From the perspective of someone like me, who lives in a city with a historically lousy—nearly non-existent—taxi industry, Uber is very nice. (Let us, like proper MBAs, leave aside the ethical questions.) From the perspective of a former taxi near-monopoly with lousy—nearly non-existent—customer service obligations, Uber is not very nice. But it is, at the end of the day, objectively described, still just a taxi service, albeit a service with a good scheduling/hailing feature, generally good (for the customer) pricing, and real ease of payment.

It is competition for existing firms, but it isn’t a new paradigm. It hasn’t changed the fundamental nature of getting a cab. You hail a ride. It picks you up. You pay for it. It isn’t teleportation. It isn’t the steam engine. A neat analogue is something like Japanese cars outcompeting Detroit in the 70s/80s.

Viewed this way, Uber is an interesting investment opportunity, but it ain’t worth tens of billions of bucks yet. A taxi company with (let’s be optimistic) good pricing and good customer service features and (let’s be realistic) looming increases in personnel and regulatory compliance and fleet management costs is never going to be anything other than a pretty low margin business. Well that’s fine—it can still be very profitable if it’s well managed! What it can’t do is pump future stock prices insanely high by managing the expectations of the rubes who’ll buy into an IPO, etc., in order to let the early investors cash out with a fat fortune. “Sir, have you got fifty seconds for me to tell you about this amazing investment opportunity? Get in on the ground floor!” There’s another term for disruption. It’s called a boiler room.

Acknowledgments

Culture, Media, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Things that Actually Happen

“He is not in a relationship with Anne Snyder.”

If not for her, then I could not have written
a book about man’s moral sentiments
with such precision or such elegance;
It was all her. I was merely smitten
with the fine turn of her prose; once bitten
by the sharp turn of her thoughts, evident
on my mind like a sting on skin, and delicate
and irresistible as a little kitten,
I—I’m not ashamed to say—became
a nobler man, a better author, bigger
than my critics, certainly humbler in my own life.
Can a muse be another half of the same
person? She is the sole source of the vigor
of my prose. I also thank my wife.

Middlebrow March

Culture, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

Fairly regularly, the online commentariat will erupt with frustration at the truism that you can’t get fired from the Op-Ed page for being wrong. If anything, a record of incompetence burnishes a career. Someone takes to Twitter and thunders that Newspaper Columnist is the only profession with real lifetime tenure. Well, that and Justice of the Supreme Court, another venerated institution that proves the truer truism: people rise to the level of their incompetence. There is, of course, an odd, often unvoiced conviction underlying these complaints: that in the Wild-Western private sector, people get bunged out for being incompetent all the time. This is part of a broad myth about corporate efficacy that anyone who’s ever actually met the C-suite occupants and corporate board placeholders of many a major corporation—or, frankly, just worked in any office anywhere—knows to be completely untrue. The smartest people in business do frequently get fired, yes, but it’s when the latest round of right-sizing cans the smart toilers on the lower end of the pay scale. The cream rises, yes. What that really means is that fat floats. David Brooks doesn’t get an endowed chair at Sulzberger University in spite of his mediocrity. All of the institutional incentives are designed to reward it. It is the curricula of his vita.

Brooks has lately invented himself as a kind of genteel moralist, and you can imagine him cast by George Eliot as a gently satiric country priest whose bit of Greek impresses the parish but makes him an object of fun at the manor. To be fair, few of us are really willing to pursue our moral sentiments to their most rigorous ends, and the elision of coherence and consistency in our criticisms of other people’s politics and philosophies is its own kind of error. Nevertheless, there is something not just comical, but slightly sinister, in a man who corrals his timid approval of “cop cams” with a dozen caveats about the value, and virtue, of privacy. Eleven months ago, he made “vast data sweeps” a pillar of privacy! Now he’s worried that some patrolman’s Go-Pro video of a domestic will wind up on YouTube.

“Cop-cams strike a blow for truth, but they strike a blow against relationships.” I won’t be the first to observe that Brooks’s turn to moralism coincided with a divorce. Maybe it’s unkind to psychoanalyze, but, after all, the man is very publicly lying on the couch several times a week. I think you find, in Brooks’s soft authoritarianism, his Matryoshka society of nested obligations, one overriding conviction, which is that too much truth kills a relationship, and wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we all just drank our cocktails at five and pretended nothing was wrong? His “zone [of] half-formed thoughts and delicate emotions can grow and evolve” sounds an awful lot like the moment the brain requires to tell the wife that yes, of course she looks lovely in that dress or, oh, dear, I’m going to be working late tonight, so don’t wait up. And in fact, I agree with him in broad principle; we are all due some space to be furtive little shits, only not when that secrecy possesses, and uses, a gun.

Religious Me-dom

Culture, Economy, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

“Religious freedom” laws are, broadly speaking, efforts to circumvent the broad drift of a society toward varieties of sexual and reproductive autonomy and freedom that social conservatives dislike. Recognizing that they are increasingly in a moral minority, they seek to provide an opt-out mechanism through which they can decline to participate in whatever unspeakably licentious —generally speaking, same-sex attractions of all types—activity they perceive in the culture writ large. Leaving aside, if we must, the pejorative penumbra of the word “discrimination”, discrimination is precisely what these laws are designed to permit. As something of a cultural relativist, I’m not entirely unsympathetic with these desires, even if I find them personally reprehensible, immoral, and based on religious hocus-pocus whose historicity and divinity I find questionable at best. The truth is that I am not sure how a society as large as ours can be properly morally regulated; perhaps it can’t. Even as a gay man who has very greatly benefited from a great flowering of (God, how I hate this word) tolerance, I am not convinced of the Progressive case, which is really a mirror of the most conservative cultural argument, which presumes a singular and universal morality at the Kingdom end of a teleology of human, well, progress. At the possible expense of my own self-benefit, I have my doubts about a moral monoculture.

I mention this, because you now have hugely influential corporate governors like Apple’s Tim Cook taking to the pages of major newspapers to denounce Indiana’s rather stupid new religious freedom law on the rather tendentious ground that “Men and women have fought and died fighting to protect our country’s founding principles of freedom and equality,” which is a fairly silly reading of our invasion of the Phillipines or the theft of California or the war in Vietnam, but I suppose we did help the Ruskies lick Hitler, and that’s a pretty decent trump card. The idea that the martial history of America is testimony for the value of inclusivity is patently bogus, but cheers to Cook for saying forthrightly that “Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination.”

But isn’t this sort of interstate, interest-specific legal arbitrage precisely the sort of thing that, expanded to the international forum, has permitted companies like Apple to become almost immeasurably profitable and valuable and men like Tim Cook to become ungodly rich? Isn’t it precisely the differing legal standards of the largely Asian nations where Apple manufactures most of its gadgets that permits it to violate, directly or through its contractors, all sorts of standards of labor decency and occupational safety—practices that we would consider not only illegal if they were to be deployed here in the US, but deeply immoral and unjust? Isn’t this effectively a vast, global, legal opt-out. And what if we expand our inquiry to include the people who labor even farther downstream extracting the raw materials necessary for the production of products like Apple’s, who work in even sorrier conditions hardly a step removed, if removed at all, from slavery?

So you see, people like Tim Cook are selective in their moral universalism; morality, it turns out, is universal only insofar as extends to the particular desires of a Western bourgeoisie; deny a gay couple a wedding bouquet that they could get at the florist down the street anyway, and that is a cause for outrage and concern; extract minerals using indentured Congolese servants, well, look, we’ve got marginal cost to consider! The moral argument, it turns out, curdles when exposed to the profit motive, and the universality of justice actually does end at certain borders, one way or another.