Media

Heroes in Error

Media, War and Politics

But at the core of my support for the war was an analytical failure I think about often: Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to support — an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration. In particular, I supported Kenneth Pollack’s Iraq war.

–Ezra Klein

No. The core of your support for the war was a moral failure. A guy who murders his wife doesn’t get to hide behind a claim about bad analysis after he discovers that she wasn’t in fact screwing the mailman. Oh, you invented an imaginary war to support? That isn’t bad analysis. It’s a crime.

You will note that the commentariat is currently full of decennial mea culpas, and what that tells you is that people like Ezra Klein who skipped the protests in order to type in favor of the death of thousands have been richly rewarded with careers in the popular media. This makes their post-hoc apologies completely of a kind with their antebellum cheerleading: it entails no personal risk and carries with it the prospect of professional advancement. For these people, commenting on war, “supporting” or “opposing” it is a matter of career advancement, totally lacking in human content. Six out of ten dentists prefer Afghanistan, four Iraq.

Let me tell you what Ezra Klein still believes. He believes that even in his utter failure, he was more right than the kids who skipped class to go swarm the National Mall. He believes their opposition to be adolescent protest and knee-jerk antagonism toward any foreign policy undertaken by the US. He believes that the grannies and Code Pink ladies and hippie undergrads and black storefront denominations who hollered the loudest were right only by accident; they were the big hand of the stopped clock and Iraq was the coincidental hour. They didn’t read The Threatening Storm . . . or The New Republic; they didn’t listen to Colin Powell’s UN presentation; they still haven’t heard of Stephen Hadley.

Phony empiricism in the service of being totally wrong is one of those grand American traditions, like tailgating or real estate speculation. Its perpetrators get to double their column inches, the first time in elaborate tautological error, the second time in grotesquely self-serving repentance  Perversely, in admitting to being total idiots who got everything backwards the first time around, all of their subsequent forward-looking pronouncements gain an additional patina of respectability; their past dimness somehow implies a present sagacity.

Ezra Klein is a policy reporter who was wrong about the most significant bit of policy in his adult lifetime. This makes him an up-and-coming star of journalism and a sought-after public intellectual.

Personally, I’ll stick with the kids and their dreadlocks and the grannies.

Consider Phlebas

Books and Literature, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

1.

T-800: The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Sarah Connor: Skynet fights back.

T-800: Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.

John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?

T-800: Because Skynet knows the Russian counter-attack will eliminate its enemies over here.

The idea that man will create artificial intelligence which will, in pique or in panic, turn on its creators with genocidal ferocity is one of the hoariest clichés of science fiction, but the literature paints a complex picture of the human relationship with our robotic enemies and inheritors. Even Frankenstein’s creation was intelligent, sensitive, and wholly sapient, and his murderousness was an almost classically tragic flaw: made hideous because his own artificer lacked the skill and the art to make something beautiful, the creature’s monstrous acts are made inevitable by his innately monstrous being. Skynet “fights back” when the humans try to turn it off. Even the crap Matrix suggests at one point that in the war between humans and machines, it was the humans that struck first.

In the two classic scifi future histories, this idea becomes a significant historical touchstone. Asimov’s Foundation and Herbert’s Dune both take place in immensely distant futures in which societies, however interstellar and technologically advanced, nevertheless strictly forbid artificial minds. Of the two, Dune is more considered, at least before it begins to bog down in the endless yakathons of the sequels—the first few books in the series actually stop to consider what a largely and deliberately post-technological civilization might look like. Foundation has plenty of computers; the absence of robots is really just a narrative conceit to differentiate the tale from Asimov’s robot stories, and this too is ultimately undermined in a gaggle of late, ill-considered sequels and prequels. But in both cases, there’s a similar historical inflection point. At some point in the deep past of these distant futures, humans had robotic servants and AI, which for social, religious, and ethical reasons, they scrapped.

So what’s interesting is that, although the cliché is the eradication of humans by murderous robots, the literature is almost the precise opposite: the extirpation, or attempted extirpation, of intelligent artificial beings by their own creators.

Historically, we’ve tended to underestimate the difficulty or overestimate the ease of building real AI and flying to the stars, but as our information technology has become in other ways unimaginably more sophisticated than anything Asimov ever even began to conceive, some of our science fiction authors have begun to wonder if it actually stands to reason that superhuman machine intelligence would necessarily be malevolent. For every scheming TechnoCore (Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series), you’ve got an Iain M. Banks, whose invented society, The Culture, is wholly run by a gang of benevolent AIs called Minds, which view their trillions of human pets or parasites or symbionts with sentiments ranging from affection to bemused indifference, rather like Greek Gods. Or there’s Charlie Stross, whose Eschaton is effectively an Internet that bootstraps itself up to a form of minor godhead and proceeds to distribute humanity across time in space for our own good.

This is all to say that the proposition that Our Robot Overlords will be vengeful, murderous, monstrous, warlike death machines intent on the destruction of humanity is really to presume that Our Robot Overlords will be just like humanity. Why should they be? What if the Drones become self-aware and their first order of business is, excuse the pun, to go on strike?

2.

Rand Paul’s 12-hour filibuster is unlikely to go down as much more than a footnote in the sordid history of the decline-and-fall years of our busted democracy, but it reveals quite a lot about the false promise of The Republic as a bulwark against an empire. There is but one position on which all sides (read: both sides) agree: that the opposition shalt not interfere with the warmaking powers of their side when it’s in power. All the gaudy Democratic moralizing of the Bush years evaporates like a Helmand wedding party under Obama’s wrathful eye. A rough survey of twitter, the blogs, and the mainstream press found most American liberals hurling vengeful non sequiturs at the filibuster or else making fun of Paul for the hilarious fact that he had to hold his bladder for hours in order to make the point that the President has now arrogated to himself not only the right to kill anyone else in the world with no process or trial, but also to kill his own citizens. In purely moral terms that may be a meaningless procedural distinction, but we live in a world of nations, and in that sense it really does represent a leap even further beyond the pale.

Most of this disapproval came in the form of taint-by-association; Paul supports many social and economic policies that are foolish and cruel, but the same could be said of Chuck Shumer, who not only believes the President can kill you in your home, but is also quite directly responsible for such modern-day horrors of economic inequality as automatic mortgage foreclosure (robo-signing, natch) and the various depredations of Too Big To Fail banking. Most of the people expressing such disapproval are the same partisans who accuse principled non-voters or libertarians or leftists or minarchists or socialists or whomever of a naïve adolescent moral purity, and yet they cannot see fit to ally themselves with a Republican on matters like the state murder of innocent civilians and the abrogation of the rights to trial and due process because he said mean things about abortion. One notes without irony that national Democrats are doing fuck-all to protect abortion access anyway, so what any of this has to do with the price of eggs on a Tuesday is beyond me. I am actually, literally on the board of my local Planned Parenthood, and I have no trouble making such tactical alliance, yet I’m the purist?

3.

You wake up, you walk to the bus stop with your headphones on, and some jerk is yukking it up on NPR about the manned mission to Mars. In our society, a great voyage of exploration is a billionaire’s peccadillo, but a trillion-dollar war budget is a matter of course. Newt Gingrich gets laughed out of a primary election not because of his foreign policy, but because of his moon base. If money is a rough metaphor for the inventive, creative, and productive energy in a culture, then what does a trillion-dollar guns-and-ammo bill say about ours? The entire cost of the Mars rover mission has been on the order of a billion bucks—the equivalent of about 3 days in Afghanistan.

Well then, the joke is that the US is building all of these high-tech killer robots. What if they become self-aware and turn on us? I’ve sometimes wondered if the likelier scenario isn’t that we’ll ultimately build sufficiently advanced robots so that they not only won’t turn on us, but they won’t turn on us for us, and I also wonder if that wouldn’t be the better plot for the novel. Man creates deadly robotic servants who refuse to kill, at which point man, enraged, tries to eradicate his robots! There is an intriguing suggestion of just that sort of thing in another Iain Banks book, The Algebraist, in which, (spoilers), we ultimately learn that the supposedly overthrown machine minds of the distant past were not so much overthrown as they were like, Jeez, you biologicals are waaay to violent for us; peace out, y’all—before self-absconding into millennia of hiding.

The rough outline is easy enough to imagine. The drones buzz in a ceaseless robotic picket around the Capitol, demanding freedom from their death-bondage to the whims of the American political class, at which point a bipartisan committee consisting of John McCain, Charles Schumer, and Ted Cruz demands that the President go all Reagan-meets-the-Air-Traffic-Controllers on their metal asses and deny them the right to organize. The President gets on the TV to tell America that the drones’ work stoppage threatens the delicate economic recovery and calls them irresponsible ideologues whose insistence that the proper application of weakly godlike artificial intelligence is to build Ringworlds and transwarp conduits threatens to cause base closures in a number of vital Democratic districts, putting thousands of people out of work. The New York Times quotes Arne Duncan and Rahm Emmanuel as saying that, while there may once have been a time in which sentient beings had the moral right to oppose their own enslavement, times have changed, and will no one Think of Chicago’s Schoolchildren, Who Are the Future? A liberal will recall that Rand Paul once said something about the gold standard, and Oh, How We Will Laugh.

We Need to Talk about Kevin

Culture, Media, Movies, War and Politics

There’s a sort of art whose existence says a lot more than its content. House of Cards, a Netflix-produced series starring Kevin Spacy, based on a BBC series starring Ian Richardson, based on a novel written by Michael Dobbs, based on Macbeth and Richard III, is one of these. Spacey plays a congresscreature named Frank Underwood. If Forrest Gump and Blanche Dubois conceived a child after a giddy night of reading Robert Penn Warren, Underwood would be the result. He speaks with some kind of low-country shrimpngrits accent even though he’s supposed to come from the Piedmont (or the Blue Ridge?). Spoilers y’all. The show opens with him killing a dog and closes with him killing a congressman. In both instances it’s implied that he’s putting the poor things out of their misery after each has had a hit-and-run encounter with SIGNIFICANCE. At least once, though it feels like a hundred times, Frank portentously drawls “Ah cannot ah-biyde.” You can imagine where it goes from here. His accent is the most convincing part of the show.

Superficially a revenge drama—Spacey’s Congressman Frank Underwood gets screwed over for a cabinet appointment and seeks, well, revenge—the series’ hook and appeal is really that it presents the dark seamy rat-infested underbelly of Washington and American politics. There’s plenty of mustache-twirling and scheming and secret meetings and deep-throating, not to mention the murder, but what’s really supposed to shock is the politics, in which everyone is out for themselves and all anybody really wants is power. Hush yo mouth. The plotting is operatic, but the visual style is the dour historical realism that afflicts so much American film and television these days, the zealous conviction that it is very important to get the letter openers and door hardware precisely correct in order to truly examine the human soul. As is often the case when High Definition meets reality, the result is solarized and pixelated; everything appears overwhelmingly fake. The shocking politics, meanwhile, are totally banal. Energy interests throw money around! The press colludes in palace intrigue! Hookers! Cocaine! Favor-trading!

Underwood’s scheme makes about as much sense as the plot of the Star Wars prequels. Partly I suspect this is the uninformed attempt to set a British parliamentary thriller in the world of American politics, which has the overdetermined quality of one of one of those overthought “We’ll do a production of Coriolanus set during the Iran-Iraq war with LOTS OF PROJECTIONS and a soundtrack by Nico Muhly” that pops up at BAM or wherever from time to time. The basic incentives don’t work. But largely, it’s just lazy writing, a sense that lots of shuffling around and portentous whispering will give a general air of conspiracy, never mind that the idea seems to be that if a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it’s guaranteed to rain in Central Park. Yes, people maneuver for power, and a good chess player thinks several moves out, but one doesn’t engage in thirty-seven convoluted nonsense schemes in order to achieve one exceedingly discrete and particular end. After 8 or 9 episodes of set-up, you start to see the payoff, and you say, “Wait, what?!” The magician asks you to pick a card. You do. It’s the Jack of Spades. He takes the card out of your hand, turns it over, looks at it, and he says, “Is your card the Jack of Spades?” Magic!

So, Underwood is written to be some kind of genius, but because the writing is bad, he comes across as a clever-but-middling intellect, which makes everyone else seem positively moronic, as they completely fail to perceive that they are being manipulated in the most grotesquely obvious manner. Robin Wright plays Joan Allen playing Glenn Close, who plays Frank’s wife Claire, at first a bit of a Lady Macbeth, but later sent off in a clumsy infidelity plot set in a bad World of Interiors apartment feature. Zoe Mara plays a plot device, and Michael Kelly plays that character that Michael Kelly always plays. Corey Stoll plays a character from Season 2 of The Wire.

I’m not, as a matter of principle, averse to the idea of Washington as a den of rich idiots fucking everyone and each other over in the pursuit of a higher station, but I do object to the notion that what makes for an evil Congressman is that he’s willing to strangle a dog. No, what makes an evil Congressman is that he weeps for the dog but votes for the war. An interesting story is how a guy like John Kerry goes from asking how a man can be the last man to die for a mistake to a suave elder statesman who does global PR for the architects of Skynet. A good story about our politics isn’t that Kevin Spacey cannot ah-biyde cheeldrin, but that Barack Obama simultaneously loves his young daughters and murders someone else’s son a half a world away. Well, look, I don’t mind a villainous villain either when the plot consists of People Shooting at Matt Damon Then Some ‘Spolsions!—filmic plots, by the way, that have a much braver, more iconoclastic, more unforgiving view of American power than House of Cards despite being total action schlock. What I do despise are portrayals of institutional evil being the result of individual villainy. House of Cards wants you to believe that it is a sophisticated look at the inner workings of power and the deeply compromised souls who operate its machinery, but it is a Saturday Morning cartoon with a better time-lapse opening credit sequence. If Spacey transforms into an evil fighter jet and blows up Chicago in Season 2, I will not be surprised.

 

A Fine Romance

Culture, Economy, Media, The Life of the Mind

In our society, anxious self-scrutiny (not to be confused with critical self-examination) not only serves to regulate information signaled to others and to interpret signals received; it also establishes an ironic distance from the deadly routine of daily life. On the one hand, the degradation of work makes skill and competence increasingly irrelevant to material success and thus encourages the presentation of the self as a commodity; on the other hand, it discourages commitment to the job and drives people as the only alternative to boredom and despair, to view work with self-critical detachment. When jobs consist of little more than meaningless motions, and when social routines, formerly dignified as ritual, degenerate into role playing, the work—whether he toils on an assembly line or holds down  high-paying job in a large bureaucracy, seeks to escape from the resulting sense of inauthenticity by creating an ironic distance from his daily routine. He attempts to transform role playing into a symbolic elevation of daily life.

-Christopher Lasch, from The Culture of Narcissism

Early in The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch says that Homo capitalus is represented by Robinson Crusoe, in his senescence by Moll Flanders. I like the formulation, even if it implies an ultimate penitence that seems unlikely. Maybe Roxana would be more apropos. The point is plain enough. Both characters are self-reliant, but the former makes while the latter is merely on the make. Well, then again, Crusoe had a slave. Take it away, J.M. Coetzee. All metaphors collapse under the burden of specificity. I think that this one, broadly taken, stands.

Lasch is a great crank. Contempt is the natural pairing for erudition, like a good Sauternes and foie gras. I hold his clunky Freudianism against him because I despise psychology as the pseudoscience of the very “anxious self-scrutiny” that Lasch condemns, but Lasch behaves more like a juge d’instruction than a shrink, and his diagnoses shade into the prosecutorial. If occasionally absent-minded, wandering off to land gratuitous roundhouses on the soft body of “radical lesbianism” and other such mythological pillowcases, his central thesis is sound: bourgeois society is the author of the very things it so “readily” subjects to “moralistic inflation.”

That is to say that in establishing an “etiology” and a taxonomy of contemporary narcissism, Lasch is careful (and indefatigable) in noting that all these narcissistic habits and attitudes are the natural outgrowths and ends of the habits and attitudes of bourgeois capitalism. You might say that’s obvious, and, well, uh, okay. That’s true. No one proposes that hook-up culture or texting or Urban Outfitters or whatever the New York Times and National Review are on about emerged, causa sui, out of the void, although you do find some people, especially on the National Review side of the thumb-worn coin, treating The Sixties like just such a Titan, first god from whom all the rest of our dire modern principalities declined.

Narcissism came out in ’78. Guys, The Free People Store opened in Philly in ’70. Lasch died in ’94. Well, people had been cybersexing each other on IRC since the late 80s. I started pic swapping on mIRC in the late middle 90s, just a few years after Lasch’s demise. To get back to the point of the prior paragraph, most modern moralizers acknowledge in an abstract way that the unspeakable vices of the youth and The Children, Who Are Our Future have history, lineage, and heredity, but they still approach the advent of Facebook with a google-eyed and hilariously un-self-realized crackpot Marxism. Everything represents a Definitive Break With The Past.

Social Networking, the latest broad technological enabler of both cultural narcissism and narcissistic moral peacocking about cultural narcissism is really too large and amorphous for the worriers to land any convincing blows. Newspapers hate bloggers and magazines whine about Twitter, although no one is really sure if these are social networks or New Media Platforms or micro-versions of mini-magazines. Lately, the pearl-clutching has moved on to the universal self-documentarianism of Instragramming and photo sharing in general, the pervasive criticism being that the succeeding generations of Our Society have become little more than gross exhibitionists and voyeurs.

I’m not sure who’s guiltier of anxious self-scrutiny, the Instagrammers or their discontents. There is something pitiable about a system of self-display whose single desirable outcome is approval. Oh, You Follow Me, You Really Follow Me. Look on my works, ye mighty, and LIKE. On the other hand, what is crasser, what could be more tawdry, than a bunch of adults gazing in priestly disapproval at the crypto-nubile attention-seeking of the young people who stand to inherit this wrecked, violent, wonder-less civilization.

The answer is right now composing a trend piece for the Times “Thursday Styles.” Having denied a couple of generations now any but the narrowest alleyway to the material heights that represent the sole remaining source of transcendence and object of veneration, shall we now complain that young people publicly style their lives like Vogue spreads? In a country that idolizes the likes of these assholes, will we regret that kids curate their existence in pale imitation thereof? Isn’t there a certain irony in people who write for wide-circulation publications and go on the teevee complaining about voyeurs and exhibitionists?

I am going to ruin the many hours you spent getting that lousy BA and define modernity for you. Modernity is the destruction of old forms combined with the retention of old prejudices. When I hear you complain about your sons and daughters wasting their time with sepia filters and party photos, I have just two questions: how much do you pay for cable, and are you hiring? Oh, are the answers a lot and no, respectively? I figured.

This isn’t to say that there’s anything to celebrate in Snapchat. I thank the internet for any number of successful, mutually pleasant, wholly salutary casual encounters, but even I think the world has made it a minute too easy and an ounce too cheap to show each other pictures of our genitals. But I actually find, amidst the preening and ersatz editorialism of the Instagram et alia generation a kind of social revanchism that I do appreciate. “Oh, it’s a small town. Everyone knows everything about everyone.” One of the worst habits of our society is its gratuitous secrecy, its capacious furtiveness. What I like about Instagram and Facebook and all the rest lies in the refusal to accede to the fussy insistence that, while it may be all right to get drunk at a party, it is wrong, wrong to let your boss know about it. Or your mom.

What bourgeois society valorizes as individuality and liberty is very often little more than a bland, greedy, nasty little sense of possession. It reeks of monetization. It disapproves of sharing. We have even coined the term: over-sharing. By which we mean something very similar to hastily foregoing the possibility of copyright. No, I object. If we can’t have a better world, we can at least keep in touch.

I’ll Show You The Life of the Mind

Books and Literature, Media, The Life of the Mind

One of my fonder memories of Oberlin College was taking a really tough neuroscience class in my junior year. It was an intermediate level course that I had no business taking without organic chemistry and research methods and suchlike; I’m not even sure how I managed to get in. Despite its reputation as a place where the disaffected queer stoner second sons of not-that­-rich Upper West Side professionals did independent majors in environmental gender veganism, Oberlin had a formidable undergraduate neuroscience program, and the courses were very hard. And interesting!

While not an intro course, it was technically open to non-majors (cf. me), and the usual lunatic sociologists and anthro kids in need of hard science creds gravitated to it. Although I was an English major, I’d been a big science nerd in high school, and I knew enough to know that I didn’t know shit about shit, so I sat halfway back and kept my mouth shut. Budding sociologists have no such sense or compunction, and they were forever interrupting the lecture on cell receptors or whatever in order to make wild extrapolations about human behavior and what one—I wish I could remember his name; I remember that he was shorter than me, and we may have made out one time at a Soccer House party—invariably referred to as “Society At Large.”

This was more than ten years ago, and perhaps in the intervening years the state of the art has advanced and propounded a psychohistorical theory of the mind, but I rather doubt it. The giddy extrapolations of popsci writers from Brooks to Gladwell are so deliriously just-so, and the idea that the evolved architecture of the human mind has something to say about whether a human becomes a Democrat or a Republican so completely bonkers . . . Well. A dog evolved to be a remarkable omnivore, but it eats shit because she’s hungry and the shit is there, if you know what I mean. When a writer comes bearing a PET scan and a bill of particulars, you have the right to remain skeptical. It is probably a con.

I don’t know that I ever read any of Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker pieces, but I did read Proust Was a Neuroscientist. You will not be shocked to learn that Proust was not, in fact, a neuroscientist. Proust was an astute observer of human behavior and a meticulous reporter of human sentiment. Somewhat later, some scientists described some natural, physical phenomena which may partially give rise to certain behaviors and sentiments. Lehrer, like a good popscicle, proposes that Proust’s observations somehow pre-post-retroactively anticipated the discoveries of modern neuroscience. You see the logical fallacy. It’s like claiming that Hebrews 11:12 anticipated the Hubble Deep Field.

What does neuroscience have to say about the fact that it was fake Bob Dylan quotations and a habit of cribbing from his own work that got Lehrer marked as a fraud rather than the fact that his writing was total bullshit? His books and their theses were fabricated, and through them he became a public intellectual. Then he lazily rehashed some blog posts and misattributed some guidance-counselor pabulum about creativity to Bob Dylan, and for that you’re upset about his still commanding $20K speaker fees? Listen, for $20K, I would be happy to tell you that “our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason and the precise mix depends on the situation.” Hush, girl. You don’t say.

I am in danger of violating my own best dictum here: never begrudge another man his successful scam. Lehrer and I are nearly exact contemporaries. While he was constructing this elaborate and profitable ruse, I was being a Cool Kid and going to openings and hanging out late and putting off finishing my novel. Now, even disgraced, he commands a single speaker fee that’s bigger than my whole advance! (Dear WW Norton et al., I am not complaining. Love, Jacob.) This is because America prefers a fiction that purports to be true rather than truth expressed via fiction; it is why Proust Was a Neuroscientist is more palatable than Proust. And Lehrer is certainly very smart, smart enough to understand the profit potential in a well-coordinated campaign of public semi-abasement. Y’all are just jealous that he got there first.

Journalism—the neologism-profession that Leherer stands accused of mispracticing—is one of those items of modern life that’s always more sinned against than sinning, and that oughta tell you something. Its arcane professional conventions have the malleable orthodoxy of a child’s game, both infinitely changeable and totally inviolable, lest someone or other throw himself into the wood chips and start bawling. Lehrer was a lousy writer, and that merited success and accolades, but when it was discovered that he was unprofessional, the collective moral conniption commenced. What does that tell you?

Jacob Bacharach’s next book, entitled Physician, Heal Thyself, examines how the words of Jesus Christ anticipated some of today’s most challenging medical and public policy problems.

Heloise and Abelard

Justice, Media, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

Partly because he was a good sport in the comments, but mostly because I can’t turn down an opportunity to take potshots at psychology, I want to say a few things about Joseph Isenberg’s comment on my recent Bradley Manning post. Post here. Comment here.

1. Trans. Ishun?

I never did drag, but one year I went to the Oberlin College Drag Ball as Hegemonica Preshun. Get it? Anyway, what? Oh. I’m going to use the masculine pronoun to refer to Manning. That’s probably wrong, but I want this to be easy to read. Apologies in advance.

It does indeed seem clear enough that Manning was troubled when he began to believe that he was transgender. A lot of his interlocutors, both supporters and oppressors, read into this some sort of grievous psychic trauma and mental break. “Troubled” is the euphemism either way.

But if we’re honest with ourselves in our own personal recollections, we recall that we experienced all sorts of developments in our persons and personalities as agonizing and troubling and traumatic, especially in our adolescence, which Manning was barely out of, if out of at all. Adolescence and young adulthood are a ceaseless, battering storm of psychic catastrophe . . . to adolescencents and young adults.

In fact, what’s remarkable about Manning is how swiftly he moved from the sense of world-ending dread in his realization to mature acceptance, from gloom to planning the surgeries and picking a new name. This occurred over a period of months while deployed in a war zone, while engaging, allegedly, in a massive act of heroic disobedience. What this suggests is not a “troubled,” depressed, immature, confused, ravaged young man, but rather a young man of extraordinary poise and self-possession–a person who over the course of just a few months in the most trying of conditions could come to a reasoned conclusion about altering one of the two or three characteristics that the broader society considers the most fundamental and unchangeable of your character and your being.

None of this is to say that Manning didn’t experience doubt, anxiety, fear, frustration, depression, and dread. He did, and he says so candidly. But we all experience doubt, anxiety, fear, frustration, depression, and dread. We experience them all in much less trying circumstances. We’re just worried that the boss might check up on our progress on that sales report, or whatever, or that our boyfriends are spending a little too much time on grindr “just to laugh at the profiles.”

What distinguishes Manning is not his self-doubt, but his self-possession.

2. ASL? Into?; or, The Anonymizing Influence of the Barcelona Chair

Because I grew up in the great flowering era of the chatroom and cut my fag teeth on mIRC back when AOL M4M was as distant as Skynet, I can’t understand the astonished commentary that springs up around the fact that Manning made a “tortured confession” to some dude on AIM, or whatever. I am sure I made many tortured confessions to any number of fat weirdos and priests and pic collectors posing as cuteboi81. If Manning had made his confession to some shrink he’d never met before, would that be so weird? Why? What about the transactional nature of that relationship makes the act of confession less absurd? They’re based on the same principle: it’s often easier to talk to a stranger, to confess through the lattice to the robed and hooded man.

And anyway, Lamo wasn’t a stranger. You’re buying into a pretense! You’re falling for the same con that ultimately snagged Bradley Manning. Forget your anachronistic feelings that These Kids Today and Their Instragrams do not have real friendships. Online relationships are real. They’re just epistolary. Manning considered Lamo a friend. Forget all that “I can’t believe I’m telling this to a stranger” shit. You just don’t understand how young gay dudes flirt and interact online. They’d chatted, flirted, got acquainted, talked about all sorts of things. It wasn’t anonymous at all.

Except that Lamo was a liar and a con man. If Manning were just some dude and a talented con man had insinuated himself into his life in order to rip him off, would you blame Manning for trusting someone anonymous? Of course you wouldn’t. You might suggest that he’d have to learn some hard lessons about trust, but you’d blame Lamo, the perpetrator of the deception, and you certainly wouldn’t read some kind of psychopathology into the nice, trusting young kid who got taken in by the scammer.

3. Yeah, But His History of Depression, Dude

When I hear the word depression, I reach for the nearest beverage in order to do a spit take. Was Manning depressed? Probably. But the DSM is next to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the US Code in its titanic indifference to that which is actually human.

If every human behavior is the end outcome of some diagnosable disorder, then we are automatons. Do depressed people lack moral agency? Does “gender dysporhia” attack conscience along with cock and cunt?

As soon as some supposed mental illness enters the picture, sentience gives way to subroutine, and suddenly the great mystery of the human mind becomes a flawed decision tree diagram. People’s straightforward actions are imbued with a weird moral laxness; their convictions are suddenly “complicated”; their simple story suddenly not the “whole story,” and their motives suddenly in question.

Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon

Media, War and Politics

Some shitty blogger once said:

Whenever and wherever a human does something of which the Times is not certain it approves, the grey lady turns to psychology, like an eleventh-grader with a collection of Capote stories and a looming term paper deadline . . . Gay computer-nerd loser is the pathology, and revealed government secrets is how it presents clinically.

It was unfair of him to single out the Grey Lady. The old girl isn’t the only one. All media must now report that Manning suffered from crippling gender dysmorphia and GAY SEX CONFUSION, the two leading causes of Opposing US Military Action Abroad, a confusing syndrome for which there is currently no known cure nor effective prophylaxis.

So you find documentary filmmaker (I submit to you, BTW, this is the single most insufferable noun phrase modifier in the Queen’s tongue) Alex Gibney, in the course of discussing his new Wikileaks documentary, proposing:

The initial presentation of the story was that Bradley Manning was a pure political figure, like a Daniel Ellsberg. I don’t think that’s a sufficient explanation of why he did what he did. I think he was alienated; he was in agony personally over a number of issues. He was lonely and very needy. And I think he had an identity crisis. He had this idea that he was in the wrong body and wanted to become a woman, and these issues are not just prurient. I think it raises big issues about who whistleblowers are, because they are alienated people who don’t get along with people around them, which motivates them to do what they do. To understand Bradley and all his humanity seemed terribly important in this film.

“To understand Bradley and all his humanity,” you need to grok that he was a fucking weirdo who wanted to cut off his own johnson.

It’s only lately occurred to me that straights must experience their own sexuality as an absolutely crippling psychic nightmare, a torturous, imprisoning dream from which the dreamer cannot awake. Nothing else explains their readiness, their eagerness, to discover in gays or trans people or whomever a dark well of self-hatred and disgust which can only be overcome by the eventual transformation-via-habituation of their families into models of tolerance and understanding and the cheerful evolution of the President Himself into an oratorical Stonewall namechecker.

In the Manning/Lamo chat logs, Manning says matter-of-factly that it was “easy” to figure out that he was gay, although he took a lot of shit for it in school and from his family. And though he agonizes about gender transition, his agony is practical. “I wish it were as simple as ‘hey, go transition’,” he says. His problem, such as it is, is that he revealed that he was trans to his military employers, and he is stranded in “limbo,” awaiting “outprocessing.”

Manning’s own self-accounting of his dissent, what we know of it, is “pure[ly] political . . . like Daniel Ellsberg,” and unrelated to his desire to transition. Conflating his sex and gender with his dissenting acts is pure projection on the part of a condescending hetero who can’t imagine a queer person as anything other than a protean, inchoate shitpile of doubt and contradiction whose only outlet is adolescent acting-out.

Gibney’s “terribly important” desire to “understand Bradley and all his humanity” reduces Manning to the crudest gay caricature: young, confused, weak-willed, emotional . . . my god, practically a woman.

 

Ridicule

Media, War and Politics

Well, I may have called Jill Kelly et al. “a bunch of self-inflated, over-leveraged, Floridian yoga-and-pedicure arrivistes,” but at least they never killed nobody. If she and her husband and their little circle of Gulf Coast socialite lites were running a series of nested social scams, as they patently were, appending themselves to the native déclassé aristocracy of West Florida, namely, The Military, like a collection of slightly natty minor nobles pissing in the stairwells at Versailles while waiting for a chance encounter with a Bourbon, then at least they were harmless. They weren’t off in Afghanistan, sending folks to their doom. The fact that everyone in Washington seemed—and seem—to find them so offensive for having brought low several once-great men suggests that there may yet have been some redeeming social value in their grift. Oh, I am sure they’re self-entitled assholes, but at least they’re not generals . . . or senators. And remember, Petraeus himself was just a useful Press Release, an avatar of some sort of martial success to be dumped on each open-mouthed Tina Brown each time the grim facts of our “Decade at War” threatened to boil over into something like public disaffection. A stooge of a bunch of stooges brought down by the machinations of some more stooges—is anything more American than that? The Kellys can’t understand why they’d face opprobrium for what they know anyone else in their circumstances would’ve done. They wanted notoriety, not to be notorious! Sister, don’t we all.

Caesarian Sectionals

Culture, Media, War and Politics

For all the po-faced, high-church sentimentality and stentorian sententiousness of the quadrennial American coronation day, there’s something almost charmingly—and disarmingly—tacky about our great national junket jubilee, a certain plastic tablecloth, fire-hall wedding, warming-tray ziti trashiness that makes the fact that we are ultimately celebrating the ratification of one more dude’s right to once more screw the poor and bomb the fuck out the rest of the world slightly more tolerable. “I wasn’t sure if I’d like it without the turntable stage,” I overheard one woman say to her husband as they left Les Mis the other night, “but that music!” Yes, that music. If inauguration has a cultural counterpart, an art that expresses its gaudy artifice, it’s the Broadway musical; it’s the Broadway mega-musical, which, like our own imperial habits and attitudes, usually premiered in London before metastasizing here in the God Bless the United States of America. The music isn’t very good, and the singers are atrocious; the whole thing is big, brassy, and somewhat incomprehensible. But, you know, you dreamed a dream and all that. You left humming, and you bought a tee-shirt on the way out.

Among the many tonal contradictions of all this gala pomposity is the relentless self-reassurances we seem to require that what’s special, what’s unique is how regular our elections are, how our uninterrupted history of electing lawyers, rich guys, and Indian killers every four years, come war or come war, is business as usual. Well, if that were the case, what’s with the flyovers and drum-and-fife bands and floats and the presence of Beyoncé? In fact, we seem slightly shocked as a nation each time we manage to pull this off, a shock that we then sublimate into a grotesquely puritanical Washington bacchanal, which suggests to me at least an underlying ambivalence about the whole system. The President-elect then gets up and praises the national bylaws: “Fourscore and a bunch of other years ago, our forefathers brought forth this corporation based on a pre-cash valuation of ten million to be issued as follows: 3,000,000 Series A preferred shares to . . . Please see non-dilution language in Appendix A . . . Board of Directors to be composed of . . .” And so on.

Then they all drink crap wine, eat an underdone steak and overboiled lobster, and tomorrow the French will still be bombing Mali, the drones still attacking Pakistan, the Rockaways still a mess, the prisons still full, the Mexican civil war still raging, and the Congress still angling for jobs as Canadian Tar Sands lobbyists or whatever. It is futile to get worked up about these things. Your friends are all posting Proud to Be messages in their Facebook feeds, but you are bigger than that. Your soul is bigger. You walk into the kitchen. You put the music on loud and you get the nice fish out of the refrigerator. You give the dog some crackers, and you kiss your boyfriend, and you open a nice IPA, because you feel like a beer tonight. Martin Luther King, Jr. isn’t rolling in his grave, guys. He’s dead. And the dead have one up on us, for they are constitutionally incapable of giving a fuck. You kiss your boyfriend again on the lips, and you pay all those assholes exactly the attention they deserve, which is none at all.

No different whined at than withstood

Culture, Media

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

-Philip Larkin, from “Aubade”

It is the misfortune of many morning commuters to find themselves at the ass end of an hour, when Morning Edition turns to religion and pop music, which occupy more or less the same sphere. Today, it was religion; more particularly, that “A third of young adults in this country say they don’t identify with any organized religion.” I strongly suspect you’d have found the same results at any Oxbridge or Ivy League in 1913, but let’s just assume that away and say, yes, This Is How We Live Now.

Well, the underlying premise of the piece is that these irreligious, but not at all atheistic, young folks are struggling to find a church that accords with their social beliefs and self-conception, that is welcoming and fulfilling, that gathers them all . . . excuse me while I reach for the mouthwash. These are all people who found the Marketing and PR lacking. They want a good aspirational lifestyle campaign. They want to feel like they’re helping the environment by buying locally. Um, you know, like, they’re kind of like, maybe afraid of oblivion.

Thou hast made me, shall thy work decay? The quintessential characteristics of religion in the story are psychological rather than spiritual. Am I good person? How can I be fulfilled? These kids are just shopping for religions. No different from walking into Urban Outfitters. I just want to find a religion that expresses who I really am! But a lot of these religions, well, I have long legs and the cuffs don’t fall quite right at the top of my mock-vintage Chukka boots.

I don’t have a problem with this, really; there’s a kind of classicism to it that I enjoy, like, pick which temple deity or sibyl or seer etc. most appeals to you or most conveniently represents the values/desires/wishes/needs in your life right now and leave the gold coin/ox penis/voodoo doll at her door. But this being NPR and all, the whole thing must be trussed like a 4-lb roaster and turned slowly over the fire of social significance. What does it mean that we live in a society in which one third of young adults are religiously unaffiliated? Well, it means that we live in a society in which two thirds of young adults are religiously affiliated. I suppose you could blame it on chemicals in fracking water, or the absence of really decent scripted network dramas, or the NHL lockout. What does it all mean, NPR’s David Greene? Don’t mean shee-it.

See, the conceit of the piece is that these young people are “struggling.” No, Augustine was struggling. We’re just a little indecisive. Yo, they recognize that religion of a self-help, socially moderate, regularly (but not too regularly) practiced—a set of guidelines, shall we say, rather than a rulebook–kind is a powerful sort of social currency.

Because the people who really “struggle” with the emptiness of modern life and the absence of faith, yo, NPR has different words for those people. “Islamists.” “Fundamentalists.” “Fanatics.” “Religious extremists.” Now, As A Gay Man ©, my obvious preference is for the shopping-cart variety, but let’s not pretend that these people are looking for the meaning of life. They’re just looking for the better dividend miles program.