Category: Rants

Detroit Porn, like Urban Blight Porn in general, is pretty played out at this point. A follower on Facebook suggested that I watch this video, though, and because it was produced by Detroiters rather than outside voyeur-journalists I decided to give it a shot. If you have the opportunity, give it a watch.
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The first ten minutes are standard Michael Moore-style "Everyone is unemployed and the CEO gave himself a giant bonus" boilerplate that is so familiar to us now that it hardly registers. The next ten minutes about Detroit's local elected officials is…more interesting.

It is not a surprise that any city's elected officials – mayors, county boards, city councils, assessors, etc. – turn out to be incompetent boobs. Frankly it's more shocking when a local public servant isn't a knucklehead. What very few people appreciate, however, is how corrupt they are compared to, say, members of Congress and why the near-complete absence of interest in local elections ensures that we'll never get anyone better. Certainly I would never imply that corruption is absent at the higher levels of government; only that it is more common and significantly more brazen at the local level. Detroit is just one of many big cities whose elected officials could be used to prove that point.

The problem is that most Americans pay very little attention to politics. What attention they pay is generally devoted to the big national political issues of the day and Washington. As newspaper readership continues to plunge, radio programming is increasingly syndicated/nationalized, and local news is downplayed we are left few people outside of the over-55 local TV news watching and newspaper reading demographic paying any attention to local politics.
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Not coincidentally that's also essentially the only group voting in local-only elections, in which turnout is often under 10%.

Morons, scam artists, lunatic extremists, the guy who owns 8 bars in your medium sized city…this is the kind of person who ends up on a county board. And they will continue to because local politics are ignored unless and until someone makes the mistake of trying to raise property taxes by 0.

01% or pass a bond issue to do something evil and socialist like build a library or fire department.

Then the pitchforks and torches come out, of course.

One of the reasons conservatives are so sensitive to charges of being a movement composed mostly of virulently angry, reactionary, and sometimes violent white men is that they are a movement composed mostly of virulently angry, reactionary, and sometimes violent white men.
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The Republican Party expends an incredible amount of effort and resources on image doctoring; every time some elected official or party worker lets the mask slip away and the rest of us see them for what they really are, the spin doctors rush in to tell us, in a tone that suggests that they are actually trying to convince themselves, that Republicans are smart, forward thinking, and kind people.

Fortunately the internet allows every yahoo on Earth to spout off with no filter whatsoever. I like to call internet comment sections "Where Hope Goes to Die," but in reality they give us the important opportunity to see what those wonderful, honest, generous, hard-working Americans who make up the right side of the ideological spectrum are really like when there are no Communications Directors and PR hacks around to teach them how not to sound like cave monsters.

Yesterday, some random guy was found near the White House with a rifle (which was unlicensed and unregistered) when apprehended by the Secret Service. Fox News posted this item on its Facebook feed. I took a pair of screen captures of the first screen or two of comments on the post:

There it is. That's what they are: mean, reactionary, semi-literate, and violent. They haven't the most basic understanding of the laws and rights they claim to cherish, and most of the comments sum to "It would be awesome if someone murdered the president." The reason they are so sensitive to the charge that this is what they are like is that they know, even if they won't admit it, that this is in fact exactly what they are like.
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Oh – they are really not-racist too.
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Just ask them.

I am a realist about what I do for a living. At no point do I believe that students are going to remember in ten years 90% of what they learn in my classes. Instead, the goal is to get the 10% to stick somehow. They won't remember how the House leadership is structured but hopefully they'll remember that the fundamental problem in Congress is that what is best for each individual member does not add up to the best outcome for the nation as a whole. They won't remember the different types of elections that coexist in our system, but hopefully they'll remember that people vote when the costs are sufficiently low and it makes them feel good to do it.

When I talk about the courts (in the context of an Intro class, we have exactly one week to devote to a large number of subjects, so withhold your "Look how smart and great at your job I am" comments laden with minutiae) I know that there isn't much they will remember. One thing I try to emphasize, though, is that the Supreme Court is political. It is inherently political and nobody should expect that it, or any other institution made up of human beings, is a completely neutral and fair-minded arbiter. It is somewhat baffling to see these occasional "OMG guys did you realize the Supreme Court is basically driven by politics and ideology?" pieces in the media as though anyone out there paying the slightest bit of attention does not already realize this.

The Supreme Court is, was, and always will be political for two basic reasons.
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One is that the process in which the justices are chosen is political.
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Presidents select the person closest to themselves in ideology from a set of boundaries established by the ideological makeup of the Senate at that moment. Likewise, the Senate, especially if controlled by the opposite party, pushes as hard as it can to convince the president that its willingness to confirm the appointee has a limit. Barack Obama looks at the Senate and asks himself if it's worth it to try to nominate the most extremist liberal he can find when he could appoint someone who is still really liberal but will be confirmed with flying colors.
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Of course it isn't, and with a Republican Senate the person he would choose would have to be less liberal still. Political reality dictates the choices.

Second, the issues the Court is asked to resolve are political. Irrespective of one's preferences, when asked to resolve political questions the institution becomes unavoidably political. This has gotten much worse in recent years as the actual political process – the one with elected officials who do everything in their power to avoid going on record to vote on highly contentious issues – punts issues to the judiciary to decide. Gay marriage? Why cast a vote in Congress that could be a liability when you can just wait for a series of legal decisions to sort it out? The Supreme Court is tasked in a wink-and-nod way with resolving a lot of issues that are politically unfeasible for Congress or even State Legislatures to tackle. This suits most elected officials just fine, abdicating responsibility and then reaping the benefits of pissing and moaning about whatever the courts decide.

If anything, today's court is less explicitly made up of partisan hacks than it was for most of our history. Check out some of those Civil War and Reconstruction-era courts if you doubt that. We don't have to be thrilled with the political role the Supreme Court plays but we certainly shouldn't be surprised by it.

People around these parts have the strange tendency to think that the phrase "Will it play in Peoria?" is cute and charming. This is unusual, of course, inasmuch as it is an entertainment industry way of saying, "Will stupid people like this?" The city is far more famous for that and has been for a while; Ambrose Bierce wrote in his Devil's Dictionary:

DULLARD, n. A member of the reigning dynasty in letters and life. The Dullards came in with Adam, and being both numerous and sturdy have overrun the habitable world. The secret of their power is their insensibility to blows; tickle them with a bludgeon and they laugh with a platitude. The Dullards came originally from Boeotia, whence they were driven by stress of starvation, their dullness having blighted the crops. For some centuries they infested Philistia, and many of them are called Philistines to this day. In the turbulent times of the Crusades they withdrew thence and gradually overspread all Europe, occupying most of the high places in politics, art, literature, science and theology. Since a detachment of Dullards came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower and made a favorable report of the country, their increase by birth, immigration, and conversion has been rapid and steady. According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians. The intellectual centre of the race is somewhere about Peoria, Illinois, but the New England Dullard is the most shockingly moral.

People who see themselves as cultural, financial, or educational elites think very little of The Common Folk. Always have, always will. Hell, even people who are demonstrably dumb as a post think they are smarter than everyone else. If this shocks you, you are among the post-like. Powerful Hollywood people cannot believe the shit Average Americans will pay to watch and listen to. The guy who runs McDonald's probably refuses to eat the slop he's trying to sell to rubes. And yes, to the feigned shock of millions of Obama-addled conservatives this past week, our political leaders think we have the intellectual capacity of a potted plant coupled with the attention span of a goldfish.

If one thing has distinguished conservatives over the years it is their deep and profound respect for the wisdom of the masses and the average voter, right? Yeah I'm pretty sure that's correct. They talk about it all the time, I think.

Feigned outrage and equally feigned worship of Salt of the Earth, Hard Working Americans are so central to the Republican playbook at this point that it would be a shock if they weren't banging the drum as hard as they are right now over a years-old video featuring an academic who was anything but the "architect of Obamacare." While your uncles and the cast of Fox & Friends are busy acting shocked – shocked, I tell you – at the idea of a highly-paid consultant who thinks most people are morons (an assertion that is pretty easy to prove empirically), ask yourself how likely you would be to believe him if he said "American voters are very wise." Wouldn't seem terribly sincere, would it?

The upcoming Supreme Court decision on the healthcare reform law might be the most important since Citizens United, not only because striking down the law would impact the ability of many Americans to afford health insurance. It is more important as a barometer of just how far down the rabbit hole of partisan hackery the right-wing majority on the Court has traveled.

The latest "legal" challenge essentially based on a typo and a ridiculously overly-literal reading of one sentence in the bill that, if the logic of this argument is followed, implies that only insurance exchanges run by individual states and not by the Federal government can subsidize insurance. This is the kind of argument you make when you have lost an argument. You start measuring the margins and checking the font size to see if some irrelevant minutiae of the code of bureaucratic requirements has been violated. You pull out the dictionary and parse every word according to the most obtuse reading of its literal meaning.

You take individual phrases out of context and read them in a vacuum while entirely disregarding the meaning of the text in its entirety.

At least four people on the Supreme Court think this case is worth hearing, which is alarming given how sophomoric and pedantic this argument is. These are people who argue that aside from the text itself the most important consideration in interpreting the Constitution is the intent of its authors – and here they are poised to completely disregard the intent of the people who wrote and voted on a piece of legislation. Irony doesn't get more ironical than that.

If the law is struck down on this basis – and it might be – the five ancient right-wing hacks on the Court have initiated an entirely new era of jurisprudence wherein every law, rule, and regulation will be subject to legal challenges based on a pedant's most intentionally obtuse reading of the text. Where would be the limit? This is not an invocation of a Slippery Slope; it is a legitimate question. Could a law be invalidated for being printed on the wrong kind of paper? Could it be invalidated if something is misspelled? If a punctuation mark is used incorrectly? If a member of the leadership in the House or Senate misspeaks or pronounces a word incorrectly during the procedural stage of voting on the bill? If I get an audio recording of a voice vote and argue that some members were saying "eye" instead of "aye"?

Answering questions of this variety seems like an excellent use of the time of our nation's jurists.
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This type of argument used to get laughed out of court; hell, it used to get laughed out of a second-year law school seminar room. And now because OBAMA it is being entertained seriously by the most powerful court in the land. Cool.

We all know by now the old saw about what happens when someone introduces a statement with "I'm not a racist, but…
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" and over the last few years I have come to understand that a man self-identifying as "a nice guy" is equally ominous. It makes sense that it would portend something awful. How often is "nice" used in a way that isn't passive aggressive or pejorative?

Think about what you mean when you describe another person as nice. You mean they are boring, so boring that you can't think of an actual quality they possess. When you had a "nice time" at something, did you have lots of fun? And in what world would you want to lead by describing yourself to another person as nice? I'm not nice. I'm polite, but in common usage "nice" means saying a lot of flattering things to someone in the hopes that they will do what you want them to do.

The clearest warning sign is that the men who are always telling everyone what Nice Guys they are inevitably fall into one of a small number of categories. Some are young and awkward, too immature to really understand how romantic and sexual relationships work and of the belief that they are owed something by the women of the world for being friendly. Hopefully they grow out of it. Most are the ex-fratboy "Learn How to Pick Up Any Woman!" types who think that they are so much smarter than women, despite all evidence to the contrary, that women will fawn over them in response to 20 minutes of pleasantries and a cocktail. These people are so transparently awful that the phrase Nice Guy, as their chosen descriptor, is indelibly tainted by association.

There's nothing I get a bigger kick out of than the hundreds of posts seen weekly around the internet about men trying to pick up women on dating sites and apps (Tinder, OK Cupid, etc), introducing themselves as Nice Guys, and then immediately going psychotic when their advances do not receive a prompt and positive response. To wit, from Tinder's Finest Bachelors, we have one of the internet's most entrepreneurial and self promoting wizards of pickup artistry going from "I am such a nice guy! You should meet me!" to "You should be happy I am acknowledging your existence you whore" in like, ten minutes. This is curious, as it is not the kind of thing I would classify as Nice nor is it something a legitimately Nice Person would say.

When I lived in Madison, WI I grew wary of the downtown homeless population. Having lived in Chicago I was not shocked to see homelessness, nor am I prone to spiteful reactions toward them. But I learned that some of the homeless people, either due to mental instability or strategic planning, would flip the hell out if you said no when they asked for change. "Have any change?" "No, sorry, not today." "YOU MOTHERFUCKER I AM GONNA RIP YOUR FUCKING THROAT OUT IF I DON'T GET…
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" etc etc. This made me, unfortunately, apprehensive about interacting with them.

Usually I try to treat homeless people like People, looking them in the eye and exchanging words with them rather than trying to avoid them out of shame or whatever.

After a couple of them lost their shit on me, though, I became a little more actively evasive.

Being a woman on an internet dating site can't be too different. It's a minor miracle that they talk to any of us, ever.

It is common knowledge that the newspaper industry is going down the toilet, which is unfortunate for all of us because newspapers provide 90-something percent of the original reporting relied upon by other media.

Most of what we read online or see on TV isn't "reporting" per se but re-reporting from major newspapers. We want them to continue to do the hard work but we don't want to pay for it.

This will have more consequences that we realize since smaller papers are usually the first to go, either going under or being purchased by larger media companies and filled with homogeneous wire service content. That means there is essentially no one paying any attention to what local governments are up to, and boy oh boy do local governments get up to some stupid crap. The Chicago Tribune just uncovered a fun little game the Chicago Public Schools played with its bond issues. Due to the district's financial problems, "plain old municipal bonds weren't good enough anymore, and banks were standing by with attractive new options.
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So…the chief administrative officer at CPS and other officials pushed forward with an extraordinary gamble. From 2003 through 2007, the district issued $1 billion worth of auction-rate securities, nearly all of it paired with complex derivative contracts called interest-rate swaps, in a bid to lower borrowing costs." Shockingly that didn't work, and instead of lowering costs it ended up costing over $100 million dollars more than traditional bonds would have.

In a vacuum this example is not that big of a deal outside of Chicago.
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What should be keeping us awake at night is the prospect of thousands of Bright Ideas of this variety lurking out there and waiting to blow up in our faces. There is nothing more terrifying than going to a city council meeting or becoming familiar with your local government on some level. You may find some shining examples of public servants here and there; overall, however, the people who have decision-making power at the local level in this country are not terribly bright. And for the most part we have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

If they make decisions that affect us directly – putting up red light cameras, for example – we freak out. Not much of what they do is that visible, though.

Given the budget nightmares that city/county governments and school boards have confronted since 2008, we might reasonably shudder to think of how many shortsighted, risky, delusional, or otherwise harebrained schemes they signed off on in the last few years. With most of us (myself included) paying next to no attention to what is going on at the local level, it is highly likely that we'll be seeing plenty more of these little surprises. These are the governmental equivalent of taking payday loans – cash in hand today with the exorbitant costs punted into the future.

I can't wait to see all the disasters on which the clock is currently ticking without our knowledge.

Another election, another autopsy of the American electorate.

Here's what we know. Americans generally believe that the minimum wage should be increased, that the War on Drugs is stupid, that draconian prison policies should be scaled back (if for the wrong reasons), and they elected by sizable margins what may be the least likely human beings on the planet to enact policies along those lines.

On the surface it makes no sense, but this pattern is becoming familiar. Democrats do well or something approximating well during presidential elections when a larger share of peripheral voters – younger, poorer, generally disenfranchised, and more cynical voters who can be enticed into voting only with great effort – show up at the polls.

Then the midterms roll around and turnout is embarrassingly low, limited mostly to old white people. This certainly contributes to the schizophrenic nature of our elections in comparison to public opinion on major issues, which is generally pretty stable over time. Our preferences don't change dramatically yet the balance of power swings back and forth regularly. Why?

Differences in who turns out across elections are part of the answer.
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The other is that American voters have extremely limited choices. Third parties, leaving aside the occasional billionaire independent candidates as anomalies, have no realistic hope of winning elections beyond the local level. When people are highly dissatisfied (which they are) and feel that the country is a clustercuss (which it is), what option is there when the Democratic Party appears to be in control than to vote for Republicans?
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When the GOP has been in charge for a while, what else is there to do but vote for Democrats (see 2006, 2008)?

Unwilling to devote the kind of time and energy it would take to be well informed about the issues and demand decent candidates – not that we could compete with the influence of unlimited and unaccountable money – we have little choice but to mix and match different combinations of institutions of government and the jackwagons that are offered to us on the ballot. The only inherent advantage Republicans have is their superiority at playing the "They're comin' for your guns!" game. With the demographic tide firmly against them, that trick won't work forever.

In the meantime we all have to live with the consequences of constantly electing people who are hellbent on doing things large majorities of us find either reprehensible or merely stupid.

Over the past year or two I've used this forum for a terrible confession a few times: that following the minutiae of elections and domestic politics no longer holds much appeal for me.

In the past I've devoted considerable time and space to covering Senate races, for example, but this year it felt even more pointless than usual. What is at stake in this $4 billion election in which neither party has advanced any kind of agenda? The Republicans are running purely on fear and lies and the Democratic game plan is…there isn't one. Obama has completely given up and has disengaged from Congress.
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Who can blame him, and what reason is there not to follow his example and say "Alright, fuck it"?

There has always been an aspect of voyeurism to politics and elections.

Now it feels like the participatory aspect has gone out the window and we are now simply spectators in a battle (or "battle", if you recognize how slender the differences between some pairs of candidates are) fought between complicated legal fictions turning billions of dollars into terrible TV commercials on behalf of corporate interests. It feels like there is nothing at stake and everyone is just going through the motions. Turnout will be abysmal as usual and 2014-16 will rival 1998-2000 in terms of gridlock, pettiness, and absolute futility regardless of what happens on Tuesday.

A handful of gubernatorial races should, in theory, be interesting but we're all so used to punitive austerity and legislative ineptitude at this point that no one even bothers to pretend that our situation will improve depending on which candidate wins. The Republicans are promising to keep destroying everything and the Democrats are doing their usual "We'll do, uh, something different from that, or probably nothing. And isn't nothing better than something bad?" Hard to imagine why nobody cares about participating in this process with incentives like that.
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More pointless "showdowns," more pointless Repeal Obamacare votes, more pointless Benghazi investigations, and more nothing happening for months on end while we wait for the odd Supreme Court decision for the rare spectacle of something actually happening. That is what we have to look forward to whether there are 45 or 50 or 55 Republicans in the Senate or whether they add more to their historically awful House majority.

This is the new normal and it stretches endlessly before us. And another election in which most of the people who vote are over 55 offers nothing more interesting than the possibility that things will get even worse.

But I'm being a little ambitious. Getting even worse would mean that the election managed to change something. Let's be serious.

After a stretch of not terribly awesome news over the weekend and continuing into this week, I was talking with a friend about my favorite topic – feeling stuck in a place I don't particularly like. She noted, and I immediately agreed, that this is hardly a unique problem. If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone complain that they felt shackled to or stuck in a job they don't like, I would have a very strange way of earning money.
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I'd also have about twenty extra dollars per year. If anything I have less to gripe about than most job-haters given that I don't actually dislike my job but rather its location. Still, it's not pleasant. Just in case you imagined having no life whatsoever outside of work as being pleasant.

My standard line is to tell frustrated friends that all paid employment is pretty awful, because if it was fun and fulfilling they wouldn't have to pay people to do it. This is an exaggeration, but only just (notice how the unpaid intern economy focuses on professions like journalism and activism rather than mundane but economically productive jobs). I doubt this is comforting, but it is hard to get useful advice on this topic since we are all basically in the same boat. The vast majority of us would love to wake up tomorrow morning and never have to work again; more accurately, we would love never to have to work a given job because we needed it.

Everyone tells a version of the same story: I hate this job but I need it. I'm stuck, I'm trapped, it's out of my hands. The reason we all say this is that it is true. Unless you happen to be that rare individual with some high-demand skill, most of us are in an unhappy marriage with our jobs. We live paycheck to paycheck and struggle under some debt burden – educational, medical, consumer, or whatever – that keeps us going back to a job that makes us feel like shit day after day. Getting a different job sounds good in theory but with hundreds of applicants for every job in most fields these days we realize (and are repeatedly told) that we're lucky to have one.

We are not, in any meaningful sense of the word, free. Yes, anyone is free to quit and become a hobo. But for those of us who like living indoors and having exotic luxuries like electricity and running water, the feeling of being Stuck is overwhelming.
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We all realize that the job we have is the best job we can get and the other options reside several rungs down on the ladder. The more I think about this dilemma – and I'd estimate I devote about 25% of my waking time to it on any given day – the more I realize why Americans, particularly the ones under the most economic pressure, talk so much about Freedom and put so much stock in their 2nd Amendment rights and their, uh, unique conception of religious freedom. People cling to those more symbolic types of freedom because they understand, even without admitting it to themselves, that they don't have any real freedom. Saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays" or stocking your home with a ludicrous arsenal of weapons gives life a nice, shiny veneer that looks like freedom. Those things probably feel like great moral victories to a person who spends his days working at a job he hates and for which he is barely paid enough to afford his shitty house and shitty car in whatever eyesore of a town he calls home.

I guess guns and public nativity scenes and refusing to buy health insurance are symbolic things that allow people to convince themselves they are free, or at least to avoid thinking about how little freedom they really have. We are encouraged, and in many cases encourage ourselves, to think of Freedom as intangible because most Americans have none that is tangible. Like Bill Hicks used to say, "You think you're free?
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OK. Try doing anything without money, then you'll see how free you are."