Satire and questions

Great satire has not only a primary target but a secondary one. The primary one being the obvious object of satirical invective. The secondary, though, being the obvious beneficiary of satirical invective. Id est, in A Modest Proposal, swift satirizes folks concerned with hunger and over-population by showing how callous they can be with the barely absurd proposition of killing off children (It is barely absurd because it is a simple, logical extrapolation instead of a non sequitor). This is funny, but it also doesn't let the other people off the hook because it is so logically compelling that a good reason why we shouldn't eat old people must be produced. Hence, the primary and secondary targets.


Another example is in a recent issue of the Onion about Alabama winning the national championship. Here is the headline: Unpopular BCS Crowns Alabama National Champions, Endorses Rick Santorum, Spits On World War II Veteran, Pushes Elderly Woman Down Flight Of Stairs, Wishes Osama Bin Laden Were Still Alive. 


The article follows through, showing that not only is the BCS absurd, but people who complain about the BCS are absurd. In fact, the true satirical target are those people who think the premise to the article matters. This gets to my main paint: great satire addresses how we ask questions more than it addresses how we answer them. In, A Modest Proposal, the way we talk about overpopulation is the ultimate subject of ridicule; not specific answers.  Cheap satire, then, exists where someone accepts the premise but merely disagrees with another. That's why satire around abortion never really works but it does around presidential debates.

Dr. King and Figures

Martin Luther King, Jr., was not born Martin Luther King, Jr. but Martin King. As a young boy, his father, Martin King, travelled to Germany and saw Wittenberg and the lands of the reformer, Martin Luther. He was so enraptured by the idea of Luther that he took that name for himself and for his son. It was what Luther represented (defiance, faithfulness, action) that caused Senior to change his name.

Dr. King always represented. Rosa Parks was chosen to not go to the back of the bus because of what she represented, too. Basically, that was always a part of who King was. He was never important as a man; always as a metaphor.

The key here, though, is that that is not a bad thing. Metaphors are not hollow, nor are symbols. It is the nominalism of daily life which tells us to distrust metaphor, to distrust symbol, to distrust representation.

The nominalism of daily life rejects explicit symbols but does not reject symbol. We have figurehead's everywhere and don't look past them: presidents, managers, parents. It rejects talking about Dr. King as the symbol of the Civil Rights Movement (and thus talking about racism today, other figures of the movement, his own peccadilloes, etc.) instead of the fact that he is the symbol and that's okay. He can be a symbol and a man. He can be a symbol and a sinner. He can be a symbol and a preacher. And this, dear friends, is the cruelest aspect of the nominalism of daily life: whenever a symbol is allowed, it isn't allowed to be anything else. Binary thought pulled through.

You see, even talking about complexity usually works in a binary system because complexity is often enough spoken of entirely in generic forms. Things are complex or simple. Not complex and simple. Not 400,000 words and simple.

So Dr. King is a symbol and a human and a churchman and a sinner and a marcher and many other things. Dr. King represents the Civil Rights Movement and you can see him that way without missing out on all the other nuanced aspects of his life or the lives of Bob Moses, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, Fanny Lou Hamer, etc..

The act of tokenizing Dr. King is a moral failing on an individuals part. It doesn't come from symbol but from laziness.

On Ron Paul

To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on a placard, or could not move the party machine, men such as this become something more than political operators, they become symbols. Substantive charges against them, no matter the reasons, are dismissed. The movement they represent means more. But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug-war, who oppose the Patriot Act deserve better than Ron Paul.  

It is not enough to simply proffer Paul as a protest candidate.One must fully imagine the import of a Paul presidency. How, precisely, would Paul end the drug war? What, exactly, would he do about the Middle East? How, specifically,would the world look for women under a Ron Paul presidency?  

And then the dispatches must be honestly grappled with: It must be argued that a man who could not manage a newsletter should be promoted to managing a nuclear arsenal. Failing that, it must be asserted that a man who once claimed that black people were knowingly injecting white people with HIV, who fund-raised by predicting a race-war, who handsomely profited from it all, should lead the free world. If that line falls too, we are forced to confess that Ron Paul regularly summoned up the specters of racism for his own politically gain, and thus stands convicted of moral cowardice... 

...I do not mean to be unsympathetic here. It is regrettable to find ourselves in this untenable space, where all our politicians cower and we are bereft of suitable standard-bearers. I would like nothing more than to join my friends in support of Paul and exhilarate in a morality unweighted by the ugly facts of governance and democracy. But the drug war is not magic. It is legislation passed by actual politicians, themselves elected by actual by Americans. Unbinding that war demands the same.  

The fervency for Ron Paul is rooted in the longing for a reedemer, for one who will rise up and cut through the dishonest pablum of horse-races and sloganeering and speak directly to Americans. It is a species of saviorism which hopes to deliver a prophet onto the people, who will be better than the people themselves.  

But every man is a prophet, until he faces a Congress.

TNC from last week

Old Post on Iowa Politics and Comment on Today's Caucus

This is from last year on the Farm Bill. It is still a propos for today.

Old people vote. Farmers vote.  This is why social security and medicare are golden cows that can't be touched. This is why the Farm Bill is a golden cow that can't be touched.

I was thinking this morning about how I should start writing letters about the Farm Bill, and I may do that, I don't know. The most problematic aspect of it has nothing to do with America's health or economy but the export subsidies given to cotton, rice, and other farmers to send crops to developing countries. Like Wendell Berry says about a lot of ag-related policy, we had a solution and created two problems. By sending cotton to Africa, for instance, we not only deflate the possible local production of cotton (problem), but also we claim it as aid (problem). Instead of aiding Africans, we are aiding Arkansans who may need help and support but that need not come on the backs of Africans or Haitians or where ever we send our cotton.

The Farm Bill is problematic in so many ways, but farmers vote: especially in Iowa.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

The politics of Iowa are "different". Huckabee won four years ago. The politics of Iowa are different because, as far as Republicans go, they don't matter. People spend all day talking about how they don't matter, but politicians and news-makers refuse to believe their own words. Huntsman believes Iowa doesn't matter but so did Rudy Giuliani. 


The past decade, Iowa has mattered tremendously to Democrats and indifferently to Republicans.

Maybe this tells us more about the difference between Republicans in Iowa than Republicans nation-wide than anything else. Maybe it doesn't tell us anything at all.

Anonymous and Tenth Innings

Two things:

* Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare (this regards the wretched looking Roland Emmerich film). The only counter-argument is entirely based on classism and educational determinism. Everyone who goes to Harvard isn't brilliant. Everyone who doesn't graduate high school isn't stupid. Argument destroyed.

* Game 6. I think Ron Washington is try to take away overmanager of the year from La Russa. Basically, managers this postseason have had a WAR of like -25. If none of the teams actually had managers (and remember, Washington did say that he hasn't met with his position players since June), these games might have been decided on the field instead of in the heads of crazy people pulling (or not playing) awesome pitchers.

The Faith of Steve Jobs

Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church’s pastor. “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?”  

The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.”  

 Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?  

“Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.”  

Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshipping such a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism. Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. “The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery"

From the Walter Isaacson Biography.


The funny thing about pluralist religious philosophies is how self-centered they are. It is about you finding yourself, finding your own way into "the house". You are the center of the universe. If it is intuitive to you, it is right.


The 14 year old Jobs outsmarted the Lutheran pastor not because of a Lutheran lacuna he had uncovered (like the perfect size for the iPad), but adolescent petulance.


Perhaps that is the untold story of Apple: it is a company that has succeeded because it never challenges the impulses of adolescence. It complexifies life by simplifying the unnecessary. 


Isn't that every teenage romance?

Good is not an Economic Category

Ten years ago, when Time magazine felt obligated to include a theologian on their list of bests, somehow they found Stanley Hauerwas. He responded, in part, by saying best isn't a theological category (the whole escapade I find comical because Stanley and Duke and Duke grads like to joke about it but they also like to reference it (see above). It is pure false humility. If it is truly irrelevent than it never need be mentioned again. But it is relevant. It is relevant to show the ignorance of Time magazine and people like them...I am getting off my point).

Okay, so this morning I was reading Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation a little bit and thinking about his presentation of the testability of the market and then the obvious sprung up: good is not an economic category. Better is an economic category. Survival is an economic category. Good isn't. This is the absurdity of Colbert saying that Global Warming exists because Al Gore's movie made a profit.

Capitalism isn't bad because it doesn't have a good. The problem is when it is used to find the good. Like so many intro-economics books that begin with the morality of capitalism, how it has helped the world.

The market is like the scientific method: it is a tool not an answer. When it is used as an answer, the question itself must be challenged.