Samir Chopra's Blog, page 54

The Oregon Militiamen Need Several Magazines Of Caps In Their Asses

Hang on just a second, America. You thought you were done with the Native Americans? Done driving them off their lands, killing them off, infecting them with smallpox-ridden blankets, massacring them, breaking treaties, taking over ancient hunting and ceremonial grounds, mocking them with derogatory and offensive stereotypes? Not so fast. Much work remains to be done, and the brave Oregon militiamen who are gallantly battling the Bureau of Land Management and have taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge have much to teach you.

First off, roads need to be built, using bulldozers, right through archaeological sites that are of great historical, emotional, and symbolic value to a Native American nation–in this case, the Burns Paiute Tribe. Such infrastructural support is necessary to transport the truckloads of lubricant and dildo that have been shipped from all over the country, with great affection, to the militiamen–all the better for them to put the final touches on their frontier fantasies, wherein, you know, men are men, and get really friendly on long, lonely, cold nights. The road building–which will scrape several inches of the topmost layer of earth off the ground–will also ensure that damage will be done to land protected  by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. (“More than 300 recorded prehistoric sites are scattered across the refuge, including burial grounds, ancient villages and petroglyphs.“) Remember, archaeological sites are the kinds of places where you see folks handling just about anything with kid gloves–like in those musty documentaries which show people on their hands and knees brushing dust off relics oh-so-carefully.

Second, six-thousand year old artifacts need to be rifled through by as many grubby paws as possible, all the while accompanied by faux expressions of concern and a desire to take care of them in cooperation with the Burns Paiute Tribe. (“Some of the artifacts — including spears, stone tools, woven baskets and beads — date back 9,800 years.“)

Tell you what, Oregon militiamen. Go home. Go home and take care of your business(es). And your families. This sideshow provided some cheap amusement at first, and allowed for the expression of some outrage at the double-standards so clearly on display in the kid-gloves treatment you received at the hands of the federal law enforcement authorities. In exposing those double-standards so clearly, you might even have performed a public service. So, like, thanks. Thanks too, for highlighting the injustice of mandatory sentencing minimums. You’ve made yourself into heroes for a certain demographic; you’ve ensured yourself invitations to the NRA’s Defenders of Liberty Luncheon and the Federalist Society‘s Breakfasts with Antonin Scalia. Who knows, some of you might even be invited on to guest blog at the Volokh Conspiracy.

But now, the show is over. Your addition to the never-ending abuse of Native Americans is not welcome and it is not funny. Your ersatz expressions of concern for their property, which you have already desecrated, and which you feel free to run your hands through, mark you as very particular bunch of dipshits. Pack up the guns, pick up any half-used tubes of lube, remove all dildos from bodily orifices, and fuck off right on back to where you came from.

The Subway Car’s Daily Dose Of Culture

My train ride into Manhattan today reminded me that yesterday’s lament about the possible lack of adequate ‘cultural consumption’ in my life in this city was sorely missing one aspect of my urban experience: the culture that this city’s residents  experience and ‘live’ by the mere fact of being in this city.

This morning, I dropped my daughter off at her daycare (one run by a very hard-working and well-organized Haitian lady) and then caught the uptown Q.  To describe that train’s usual complement of passengers as a veritable United Nations is a running cliché in Brooklyn; this morning was no exception. (The Q starts at Coney Island and terminates in Queens.) I could hear at least four different languages–Russian, Spanish, Bengali, English–around me as I sought a position in my crowded car. Having secured one, I opened up my book and began reading.

Distractions came easily. Standing next to me, and leaning against the subway pole in a manner that might soon require a reminder in subway etiquette from a subway rider more cranky than me, a young, fashionably dressed Orthodox woman read the Torah, swaying her body as her lips moved. Across from her, a thirty-something hipster, inadequately dressed for the cold, his lips, nose, and ears a bright scarlet, began loudly muttering to himself. A young couple, one standing, the other seated, held hands, and gazed soulfully into each others eyes, perhaps preparing themselves for the moment when the intended destination for one of them would induce a tearful and kiss-inducing separation. And so on. (For some reason, morning rush-hour trains do not feature, quite as often, the musical performers, break dancers, and various panhandlers who are a near-constant accompaniment in the evening hours.)

Such descriptions of the ethnic, cultural, and psychological diversity found in a New York City subway car have the status of cliché now: Oh look, so many different ‘types’ of folks and behaviors! How interesting! How fascinating! For all of that, the resultant edification remains the same as it ever was.

The substantive point here, of course, is that such experiences constitute a very distinct and pleasurable kind of cultural phenomena; they are not second-rate or low in comparison to attendances at classical music concerts, museums, ballets, operas and the like. They enable an education; they refine our senses; they introduce us to distinct ways of living (I have observed many, many, diverse techniques of wooing, childcare, passive and overt aggressiveness, reading, listening to music, and the like on subway cars). They bring us into contact, sometimes a little too closely of course, with those we share our urban spaces with. Yesterday, like a good New Yorker, I complained: about the lack of time and money and attention and energy. This morning, I was reminded of other riches in my possession.

Note: As a reminder of some of the mixed blessings of a subway ride, as my train pulled into the 34th Street Station in midtown Manhattan, a malodorous aroma indicating an overly rich breakfast or an upset stomach, or both, wafted around the car. The car emptied in a hurry.

Peter Gay On Bourgeois Insecurities (And Mine)

In Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, (WW Norton, New York, 1998) Peter Gay writes:

Only the most determined could gather up the leisure and the energy after a hard week’s toil, or for that matter the money, to haunt museums, or follow compositions in the concert hall with a score, let alone travel to improve their hazy acquaintance with what they had long prized from a distance. Their perpetual fear of social descent haunted them. Those who saved their meager assets for culture, then, were making a distinct choice of how they wanted to live, favoring beauty over beer, self-improvement over self-indulgence….To appreciate the finest in art and music is a trial for human nature; it calls for the hard work of breaking the cake of custom for the sake of discriminating pleasures running counter to the pressure for simplicity and mere relaxation in rare leisure hours.

Matters have changed little since the nineteenth century. I live in New York City, which is bursting to the seams with art, music of all stripes, opera, ballet, museums, theaters, live performances, film festivals, libraries, world-class universities–among many other sites of cultural production. And yet, thanks to my duties as a parent and a professor and the cost of living on some of the world’s most expensive real estate, I find myself, at most times, unable and unwilling to sample the pleasures of this gigantic smorgasbord of cultural offerings. Of course, I flirt with philistinism in not particularly caring for ballet, opera, or long days in museums, but you catch my drift.

Instead, on most occasions, I have to console myself that reading a book on the subway, reading an essay or two from the New York Review of Books at night in bed, or watching the products of this New Golden Age of Television i.e., an episode of a television series, is all the immersion in culture that I’m going to get. When the stars align, I watch a movie–or two!–on the weekends. At home.

The fear of “social descent” or worse, ‘intellectual’ or ‘cultural’ descent stalks me too: Surely, I should do more to pursue my cultural edification and be capable of the hard yards required to edge myself up the totem pole of “discriminating pleasure”? (Just to prove, you know, that I’m not an impostor?) That old clash between the willing spirit and the enervated flesh gets in the way: the choice of watching avant-garde cinema or a Netflix original series late at night, after my wife and I have put our daughter to bed, is rather easily settled in favor of the former; the cost of theater tickets quickly stay the hand reaching for a wallet when thoughts of daycare expenses cross my mind.

Ironically, as a graduate student, I worked harder to ‘consume’ culture. I often  disdained ‘narrative cinema’; I worked harder to find discounts in this rapacious city; I more often preferred “self-improvement over self-indulgence.” Perhaps I was more uncomfortable in my skin then; perhaps, now, more familiar with myself, I’m content to be pushed in directions that do not call for such heroic effort.

Road-Tripping With Rush Limbaugh And Glenn Beck

Yesterday, I drove up to Albany to meet an old friend. After spending the night, I returned this afternoon to Brooklyn. While driving, I sought entertainment through radio. The usual fare of FM was hard to snare: reception was often spotty–for whatever reason, the selections were uninspiring–a little too much emphasis on the Eagles methinks, and as usual, there were way too many commercials. After entertaining myself for a little while with the Hudson Valley’s WPDH, as I got closer to Albany, I found WGY on FM 103.1, ” a radio station licensed to Schenectady, New York and owned by iHeartMedia, Inc., broadcasting a news and conservative talk radio format.” On it, I heard Rush Limbaugh yesterday afternoon, and Glenn Beck this morning. It was, as might be expected, an edifying experience.

Here are some of my takeaways:

Rush Limbaugh is most accurately analogized to an angry, blustering, bully, who imagines himself the leader of an insurrection; his broadcasting booth is the balcony of his palace. Glenn Beck imagines himself a deeply religious libertarian scholar of the constitution, one deeply steeped in the history of this nation, this “republic” (which might be his favorite word of all time), who also happens to be leading a folk movement to take back political power.
Donald Trump is scared of no one but Rush Limbaugh. With great glee, Limbaugh played an “audio bite” of Trump responding to a reporter’s question about Limbaugh having described him as not being “a true conservative.” Trump’s response went roughly as follows: “I’ve heard that, and I just want to say that I respect Rush; he’s been great to me, and I have a lot of respect for him. I love him and I think he’s been great to me.” That’s all. Limbaugh played this clip at least four times, chortling on each occasion.
Glenn Beck speaks with many, many, pauses for dramatic effect, all the better to let the portentousness of his pronouncements about “the republic,” the Constitution, “this nation’s founding fathers,” “self-evident truths,” and liberty sink in. This is a man who clearly thinks he is saying Very Important Things.
Both Limbaugh and Beck agree, roughly, that this nation “is hanging by a thread,” that there is “a state of cultural decay,” that “we are headed for a dictatorship.” They also agree that the disdain of the Republican Party for the Trump candidacy is proof positive that the Trump is doing something right, that he, as Beck put it, might be “the one we’ve been waiting for.” (They both also breathe heavily into their microphones.)
Limbaugh is definitely the more paranoid of the two: the Bernie Sanders candidacy is a conspiracy, stage managed by the Democrats to show that Hillary Clinton is a tough candidate, capable of riding out a tough primary challenge, and of dispelling any notions that she is merely placing the crown on her head. (Rush also thinks Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith are bigots and racists for suggesting a boycott of this year’s Oscars.)

I did not just listen to a couple of radio shows; I traveled to distant lands. Sorry to sound like an anthropologist, but my sense of having encountered a distinct cultural formation was very acute.

 

The FBI, Online Brokerages, And The Hiring Of ‘Potheads’

This almost-two-years-old story about the FBI’s claim that it could not find hackers–AKA ‘cybersecurity experts’–to hire because they smoke marijuana (and thus would fail their pre-employment drug tests) reminds me of a story from the days of the Internet gold rush, as demand for programmers, system administrators, and the like meant the instant hiring and satisfaction of salary requests with little regard for the background of the applicant other than their technical credentials.

The background to this story, as described in a previous post, is as follows:

As the summer of 1997 ended, I found myself, within the confines of New York City, a nomad. A break-up with my girlfriend meant I had to find new accommodations, and it had resulted in my moving thrice in three months. Finally I settled on the Lower East Side, renting a room in an apartment still under construction. I was broke; the moving had cost me; I had lost apartment deposits and spent too much money eating out, drinking beer, whiling away my time in bars playing pool. My meager summer employment hadn’t kept pace with my reckless expenditures and I found myself skimping, saving, borrowing money from friends, just to get by and pay rent. Even more problematically, my doctoral oral examinations awaited; I had an ambitious reading list–in philosophy of language, logic, and science–to get through.

As the fall semester began, I found myself caught, willy-nilly, in a form of monastic discipline. I had wasted enough time over the summer; I had to buckle down now. I had two section of Introductory Philosophy to teach, a long list of journal articles to get through, and very little money to spend. So I did what all abstainers do: I enforced a routine. I tried to wake up at the same time everyday, avoided my old haunts, and kept my nose to the wheel.

Well, it worked. I passed my oral exams (I was told I had earned ‘a distinction.’) But I was still broke. I needed work, and would have to take a semester–the coming spring of 1998–off from graduate school. So, I typed up a CV, detailed my previous experience as a C programmer and a UNIX system administrator, and faxed it to a dozen or so head-hunters in New York City. By the end of the day, I had received several call-backs. The next morning, I spoke to one of the agencies, and was directed to an interview with an online brokerage for the position of a UNIX system administrator (to take care of their battery of SUN servers that powered their website.) I interviewed, made my salary demands known, and waited for a call. It soon came, informing me I was hired. But I had to take a drug test first.

I had smoked pot several times over the past summer, but from September onward, I had abstained. You see, folks who smoke marijuana can make reasoned decisions about whether they think indulgence in it may interfere with personal and professional projects of importance. I wanted to concentrate on my teaching and exam preparation; simple abstinence seemed like a good way to facilitate that process.  And now, it seemed my abstinence would also help me pass the drug test my employer wanted me to undertake.

There was one problem though: the drug test was not the usual ‘piss-in-a-bottle’ test; instead it tested hair samples. I found this out on the day I went for the test. Surprised at not being handed a bottle, I dutifully raised my arms for clippings to be taken from my armpits. This did not bode well, for I had learned that traces of marijuana can be found in hair samples for months longer than in urine samples.  A day later, I received a phone call from the Human Resources Department. The conversation went as follows:

Administrative Lady: Mr. Chopra, we want to let you know that you tested positive for marijuana in your drug test.

Me: Oh, really?

Administrative Lady: We would like you to know that at XXX, we have a drug-free workplace.

Me: Uh-huh

Administrative Lady: Can you please come in as soon as possible to fill out your remaining forms?

Me: Sure.

And that was it. I had failed the drug test, but I was still hired. I was a UNIX system administrator; I ‘knew’ Solaris; I was in a possession of a ‘rare’ skill. What were they going to do? Go find another system administrator, back into the madness of trying to find someone qualified, in competition with other brokerages and Wall Street employers? Fat chance. I was in.

Six months later, I quit. I had saved enough money to float my graduate school boat for a while. And I continued to abstain from pot till the day I defended my doctoral thesis, on January 6, 2000. Then, I celebrated.

Boccaccio And Double Entendres In A Patriarchal Society

In his review of a new translation of Giovanni Boccaccio‘s The Decameron (by Wayne A. Rebhorn, Norton, 2015), Stephen Greenblatt writes:

Many of these stories are scandalously obscene, but the scandal has nothing to do with filthy words….circumlocutory words, or periphrases…have nothing to do with prudery. They are part of Boccaccio’s inexhaustible bag of metaphorical tricks, and they work because, except for the crudest and most tongue-tied of us, everyone resorts to such tricks constantly, if rarely with such inventiveness. As Boccaccio writes “The Author’s Conclusion,” “Men and women generally…go around all day long saying ‘hole’ and ‘rod’ and ‘mortar’ and ‘pestle’ and ‘sausage’ and ‘mortadella’ and lots of other things like that.” The point is not that such words should rightfully be innocent of double entendres but rather that we gleefully carry our sexual energy over into everyday language, and we love it. It is part of what it means to be healthy and alive.

As the unsurprising popularity and ubiquity of the ‘That’s what she said’ and ‘said the actress to the bishop’ formulations shows, our language is littered with ample opportunities for such ‘interventions.’ Quasi-hecklers and budding comedians especially delight in these: the innocent speaker launches forth, utters the fateful phrase–say, perhaps, “I kept pushing hard” or “there was no point in stopping” or “it had quickly hardened”–and the would-be Michael Scott, sensing an opportunity, steps in with his interjection. Titters and snickers follow. Easy pickings indeed. (I cannot tell a lie; I have indulged myself on occasion in precisely such a fashion.)

But we don’t all “love it” and we don’t all find the reminders of this “sexual energy” in our “everyday language” to be part of the meaning of “what it means to be healthy and alive.” There are times when the constant, knowing, deployment of double entendres or ‘That’s what she said’ interjections can, in certain social and conversational contexts, become occasions for discomfort, for displacement, for silencing, and thus even contribute to a form of harassment. As women have often complained in workplace settings, the deployment of double entendres in conversations by their male colleagues–with nods and winks at other accomplices–has often contributed to an uncomfortable work environment. (Sometimes their gentlemen colleagues–in the bad old days–would bring their “sexual energy” to the workplace by watching porn at their work desks, or by putting up pinups of scantily clad women on their desks.)

In a society riven by unequal gender relations and dynamics, by patriarchy and sexism, our carrying over of our “sexual energy” into our “everyday language” includes carrying over a great deal of that  same inequality and imbalance. The woman whose uttering of “it wasn’t as long as it could have been” is interrupted by a “that’s what she said” in the workplace is, in all likelihood, surrounded by men who make more than her, whose work is taken more seriously, who are listened to more carefully and respectfully.

Our “everyday language” does not just contribute to our politics, it also reflects it.

William James And The Pre-Raphaelites’ Influence

This morning, for no particular reason, or perhaps because I’ve been reading Becoming William James, Howard Feinstein’s excellent psycho-biography of William James, I posted the following on Facebook:

William James was a better, more interesting, writer than Henry James.

These are, as my friend Margaret Toth pointed out, “fighting words.” But of course, as I noted in response, “That’s why I put them in a status. To get one started.” An entertaining and edifying one so far.

One of the defenses I mounted of William James–in response to Bryce Huebner saying that “Henry may have been the better philosopher”–was that I considered that William’s better writing made him a better philosopher too. (Just because I find the distinction between form and content a spurious one.) I then went on to say that William “certainly comes across as the wiser, the one with better insights into the human condition.”

Now, one aspect of a philosopher’s wisdom may be found in their work; another may be found in what they themselves found to be influential and important in their intellectual and psychological development.

A good example of this is the influence that the Pre-Raphaelites had on James. Their “aesthetic embodied tendencies that would emerge in William’s later work as a pyschologist and philosopher.” They:

[E]mphasized a psychological element in subjects that had hitherto received symbolic, allegorical treatment. Observation of the people around them was as important as learning the painter’s craft….[their] use of color and emphasis on realistic detail gave their painting a characteristic hard edge, creating a visual world of shapes with impermeable boundaries, like so many pieces of stained glass.”

Later, William James in his psychological work  “would prefer minute, phenomenological descriptions of minds in action.” In his philosophical pluralism, “he explored the relationship of personal worlds, he, too, emphasized the hardness of edge that divides human experience as decisively as lead separates the fragments of stained glass.”

But perhaps most impressively for me, James took the most inspiration from John Ruskin‘s views on artistic creation, on “the relationship between effort and talent.” For Ruskin had written:

It is no man’s business whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, but quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work will always be the things that God meant him to do, and will be his best. No agonies nor heart-rendings will enable him to do any better. If he be a great man, they will be great things; if a small man, small things; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, if restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable. [John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1851, pp. 12]

There is a simple and acute wisdom here, one that might be discerned quite clearly even as we disregard the predestinatory  note, and Ruskin’s belief–expressed elsewhere–about the great men being able to do great things “without effort.” For the injunction here is clear, one we find expressed in modern homilies too: do your work as best as you can; put the hours in; be steady and steadfast in your efforts; care not for rewards or recognition; do not torment yourself with anguish about whether your work was meant to recognized or valorized. The doing of it–and the staying with it, and enjoying the time spent on it–is ample reward.

Note: All quotes other than the ones from Ruskin are taken from Becoming William James, pp. 108-110.

 

Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Franchise Slumbers

I saw my first Star Wars in December 1981; my brother had bought us a brace of tickets as a welcome-home treat. (I had been away at boarding-school.) I enjoyed every minute of it, from the opening gunfight, right down to the destruction of the Death Star. I  looked forward to the sequels with some eagerness.

The sequels, sadly, were a bit of a bore. By the time the Return of the Jedi had rolled around, I was burned out on the franchise. But I wasn’t immune to its marketing prowess. When Star Wars was resurrected in the fin de siècle, I dutifully returned to the theaters, only to be scared off by the colossal incompetence on display in The Phantom Menace. I let myself be suckered again to watch the Attack of the Clones, but after that experience–where I’m not sure I made it through the entire movie–I was determined to not be fooled again, and did not watch Revenge of the Sith, a decision I do not regret in the slightest.

Clearly my resolve has weakened over the years, and so, this past week,  I found myself in a movie-hall watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I should have displayed greater resolve and stayed away.

It’s all here for the faithful: lightsabers, droids, Hans Solo, Chewie, stormtroopers, Death Stars–bigger and badder, an exotic menagerie of creatures, and so on. A great deal else is recycled: there is a bar scene, there is an attack on a Death Star, which always seems to have one fatally vulnerable point, a tall baddie dressed in black who breathes heavily and who has gone over to the Dark Side a long time ago, there is father-son conflict, a droid who has a personality of sorts, and contains a capsule with vital intelligence, thus becoming the most valuable object around, there are fights on pathways overhanging deep chasms, there is an air raid by tiny fighters on a Big Death Star, there is a Yoda-like figure–there is, as you can tell, very little imagination and creativity displayed by the ‘story writing’ team. There is also the usual inconsistent scaling and physics: objects which appear gigantic suddenly shrink, lightsabers sometimes burn, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they cut through objects, sometimes they don’t. The Force Awakens does showcase has a few lines which aspire to wittiness, and which appeared to inspire a few titters from the faithful around me, (especially when they were uttered by that rogue, Hans Solo.) But otherwise, there’s slim pickings here.

It’s all much of a muchness, really, serving to demonstrate once again, that no matter how much money you throw at the silver screen, and how fancy you get with the gimmickry, nothing quite makes a conventional feature film like a good story.  One thing The Force Awakens gets right, as do many other members of the franchise, are some beautiful set pieces of spacecraft: sometimes ruins in the desert, their cavernous interiors the setting for exploration or high-speed chases, sometimes on static display, sometimes in close-up, sometimes from afar. This astonishing visual art is perhaps the franchise’s greatest contribution to cinema. One can only hope that some enterprising hacker will collate these into a highlights reel and make it available online (before the Disney Legal Warriors come after him.)

The force isn’t with this one, but then it hasn’t been with the franchise for a while.

Why It’s Okay To Mourn, To Cry For, The Passing Of Strangers

Many silly things are written when celebrities die. One is that you cannot speak ill of the dead. Another is that you cannot mourn for those whom you did not know personally. A variant of this is that visible expressions of grief for those you did not have personal acquaintance with are ersatz, inauthentic, a kind of posturing.

The folks who make the former claim are simply clueless about the nature of the public life. The latter are clueless about how emotion works, about the nature and importance of symbolism and its role in our memories, and thus our constructed self.

Consider for instance that I tear up on the following occasions:

Watching this musically mashed-up tribute to Carl Sagan;
Watching a Saturn V rocket lift-off (or reading about the death of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee while testing Apollo 1);
Watching fighter jets at an airshow, or indeed, even listening to the roar of a fighter jet’s afterburners as they are lit.

I did not know Carl Sagan personally. I did not know any of the astronauts on the Gemini and Apollo programs. I did not know Grissom, White, or Chaffee personally. I do not know any of the pilots who perform at airshows or whom I have seen taking off on many occasions. Indeed, one might ask, why tear up when watching or listening to any of these things? Man up! Be authentic! Stick to the known and the personal.

Sorry, no can do. Carl Sagan was an important influence on my education and philosophical and intellectual orientation as a child; to watch that little mash-up of Cosmos is to remember my childhood, one spent with my parents, watching Cosmos on Sundays at home. And my father was a pilot who flew fighter jets; I watched the Apollo 11 documentary with him as a child. My parents are no more. Need I say more about why I tear up when I undergo the audio-visual experiences listed above? Planes, rockets, astronauts, men with crew-cuts, memories of the moonrise. How could I not?

The emotions we feel are wrapped up in the deepest recesses of our selves; they reflect memories accumulated over a lifetime, traces of experiences, formative and supposedly insignificant alike. This is why, of course, when we listen to music, we can conjure up, seemingly effortlessly, a mood, an atmosphere, a remembrance, a time long gone. Music is perhaps the Proustian Madeleine par excellence. We listen to music when we read, write, walk, run, make love, work out, play, talk to our friends–the list goes on. We grow up with music; it becomes associated with our lives and its distinct stages. We listen to some songs again and again; they become almost definitive of a particular self of ours.

So when a musician dies, one whose music we have listened to on countless occasions, it is natural to feel bereft; we have lost part of ourselves.

To ask that we confine our expressions of sympathy and sorrow to only those we know personally is indeed, not just ignorant, but also morally dangerous; it bids us narrow our circle of concern. No thanks; I’d rather feel more, not less.

Chelsea Clinton On The Iraq War: A Worthy Inheritor Of The Clinton Mantle

Chelsea Clinton has been groomed for a long time to take over the Clinton Empire. Her education, which has essentially consisted of a long, slow, drive through the salubrious gardens of the Ivy League and Oxbridge, thus providing adequate insulation against the hard edges of social and political reality, form an important component of this preparation. (Her marriage to a hedge-funder, and early entry to the top-dollar speaking circuit, hasn’t hurt.) Her qualifications as Heir Apparent were never better on display than in the following exchange:

“Has your mother shown any remorse for the fact that her vote cost Iraqis a million of their lives?” a student asked Chelsea Clinton on Monday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ms. Clinton replied: “She cast a vote based on the best available evidence. Perhaps you had clairvoyance then, and that’s extraordinary.”

Some American folksinger once wrote that “you don’t need to be a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.” Well, I have news for Chelsea Clinton: you didn’t need to be a clairvoyant to see which way an American invasion of a Muslim country in the Middle East, one which had nothing to do with 9/11, would go. You merely had to have the reading skills of a senior undergraduate student, all the better to read a National Intelligence Estimate with, you know the briefings that are given to US Senators to enable them to make, uh, educated and informed decisions with.

As Doug Henwood notes in My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets The Presidency:

Hillary cast her vote for the Iraq War without having read the full National intelligence Estimate, which was far more skeptical about Iraq’s weaponry than the bowdlerized version that was made public. This was very strange behavior for someone as disciplined as Hillary, famous for working late and taking a stack of briefing books home. Senator Bob Graham, one of the few who actually did take the trouble to read the NIE, voted against the war in part because of what it contained. We can never know why she chose not to read the document, but it’s hard not to conclude that she wanted to vote for war more than she wanted to know the truth.

Why would Hillary have wanted to vote for the war, which always looked like being, and eventually became, a moral, political, and economic catastrophe, a crime that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans? Well, at the least, it would have been a politically popular vote, an easy capitulation to expediency, a way to join, and chime in with the warmongering chorus that animated  American politics then. It was a cheap and easy way to proclaim your patriotism, to affirm your desire to exact retributive revenge, to ‘go with the flow.’ It was the kind of thing that a political opportunist would delight in.

It was, in short, a classic, signature, Clinton move. Chelsea Clinton has learned well, and she’s letting us know she’s got the chops. We’re not done with this dynasty yet.