ACT-UP, 25 years later...

I just read Frank Bruni's thoughts on How to Survive a Plague, a new documentary about ACT-UP and the early years of the AIDS crisis in the gay community. That period coincided with the years when I was coming out; I remember participating in ACT-UP protests in D.C. during the March on Washington in 1993 and in NYC during Stonewall 25.

Can't wait to see the film!

(Video link)

James Fallows on the Obama presidency

James Fallows takes a balanced look at the successes and failures of the Obama presidency, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the man himself. It's long but well worth a read, especially for anyone who feels like Obama hasn't lived up to their expectations. A couple of excerpts about the presidency in general:

The end of a president’s first term is an important time to ask these questions, and not just because of the obvious bearing on his fitness for reelection. Hard as it is to have any dispassionate discussion of a president’s performance during an election year, it will be even harder once the election is over. If a year from now Obama is settling in for a second term, a halo effect will extend back to everything he did during his first four years. His programs will be more effective in reality, since he will get that many more years to cement them in with follow-up measures, supportive appointments to federal agencies and the courts, and possible vetoes of any attempts at repeal. And, through the lens of history, they will seem more effective, since whatever he did in his first term will appear to have been part of an overall plan that was ratified through reelection.

And:

We judge presidents by the specific expectations they ask to be measured against: inspiration (Kennedy, Reagan, Obama), competence and experience (Eisenhower, the first George Bush), strategic cunning (Johnson, Nixon), integrity and personal probity (Carter), inclusiveness and empathy (Clinton), unshakable resolve (the second Bush). But eventually each is judged against his predecessors, a process that properly starts with a reminder that all begin their terms ill-equipped, in ways that hindsight tends to obscure.

The sobering realities of the modern White House are: All presidents are unsuited to office, and therefore all presidents fail in certain crucial aspects of the job. All betray their supporters and provoke bitter criticism from their own side at some point in their term. And all are mis-assessed while in office, for reasons that typically depend more on luck and historical accident than on factors within their control. These realities do not excuse Obama’s failings, but they do put his evolution in perspective.

Presidents fail because not to fail would require, in the age of modern communications and global responsibilities, a range of native talents and learned skills no real person has ever possessed.

And then this really interesting insight into the inexorable growth of the U.S. national security apparatus:

It is no wonder that the “national-security state” in all its aspects has continued to grow throughout the decades since the beginning of World War II. Defense budgets, intelligence and surveillance networks, private military contractors, irregular forms of war: these and other executive-branch tools of international power work like a ratchet. Some presidents rapidly increase them in times of emergency, as George W. Bush did after the 9/11 attacks. No president scales them back. Thus the imbalance continues to grow between international efforts, where a president has an ever greater array of tools and weapons, and the frustrating domestic arena. Despite having run on his opposition to the Iraq War and overseen the formal U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, Barack Obama has, if anything, expanded the range of executive military power, from his unilateral (and mainly successful) decision to intervene in Libya to his expansion of drone attacks

For the Obama-specific analysis, you're going to have to read it here at The Atlantic.

Thirty years ago...

Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the first report in the medical literature of the disease that was to become known as AIDS. From the CDC's MMWR Weekly:

In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection. Case reports of these patients follow.

I was fifteen at the time, still struggling in a small Midwestern town with my conflicted sexuality. It would be four more years before Rock Hudson died of AIDS and brought the disease home to me personally, leading me to slam shut a door I was just on the verge of opening. I remember riding around in my car one warm summer night, taping myself on my cassette recorder: Why did this have to happen now? Just when I was thinking that I could finally express who I am? Will I have to hide forever?

Thirty years. In those three decades I've come out. Demonstrated with ACT-UP and Queer Nation. Had countless friends test positive and several diagnosed with AIDS (though miraculously, only a couple have died). I've walked to raise money. Danced to raise money. Rode to raise money. I've studied the disease in classes. Been tested for it dozens of times. I've seen infection with HIV transition from being a death sentence to something much more manageable... and watched attitudes shift as well. Throughout these years the virus and the disease have been constants in my life as a gay man. Something to be afraid of. Something to fight. Something to assimilate as a fact of life. But it's never over, and each year brings a change in how this disease affects my community and how it affects me.

THE TENTH ANNUAL AIDS/LIFECYCLE begins tomorrow: a couple thousand riders and many hundreds of volunteers making the 545 mile journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I rode that route in 2007, and last year I volunteered for the medical team. I so wish I were going to be there this year!

To all my friends who will be: "Know that you are heroes for countless people. Ride safe and don't forget to use the hand sanitizer. :-) But most of all, when the going gets tough, remember that I love you. I'm so very proud of all that you're doing."

(Click to see a larger image)

And as a reminder of the long road from where this all began to the future we still hope for, here's the "I just wanna be there" scene from 1989's Longtime Companion.

(Video link)

I just wanna be there.

Violence and political change

I finished all 483 pages of Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order today. What a great book! I highly recommend it if you're interested in human history and political, social, and economic development.

Given the scope of the book and the many millenia it spans, I don't feel up to the task of summarizing it right now. So I'll just share this quote on the role of violence in political change that I found interesting:

The ability of societies to innovate institutionally thus depends on whether they can neutralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform....

The stability of dysfunctional equilibria suggests one reason why violence has played such an important role in institutional innovation and reform. Violence is classically seen as the problem that politics seeks to solve, but sometimes violence is the only way to displace entrenched stakeholders who are blocking institutional change. The fear of violent death is a stronger emotion that the desire for material gain and is capable of motivating more far-reaching changes in behavior. We already noted ... that economic motives like the desire to put in place a large irrigation system were highly implausible causes of pristine state formation. Incessant tribal warfare or fear of conquest by better-organized groups is, by contrast, a very understandable reason why free and proud tribesmen might agree to live in a centralized state.

Fukuyama cites the disagreement over slavery in the U.S. as a conflict that "could not be solved under the Constitution and necessitated a war that claimed more than six hundred thousand American lives." And as a consequence, the power of the federal government expanded significantly.

He also makes the claim that accountability in political systems is not sufficient to support good governance, arguing that the emergence of modern liberal democracies requires "a relative balance of power between a cohesive state and an equally well-organized society that can defend its interests." While the rarity of that condition explains why the English parliamentary case is unique rather than typical, the increasingly free flow of ideas since the Industrial Revolution has allowed other nations to more readily borrow and adapt such institutions to their own needs. Still, the success of externally imposed nation building is limited by the degree to which a society can be mobilized on its own behalf...

On good government

I'm about halfway through Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order, one of the best books I've read in several years. Starting in prehistoric times, Fukuyama traces the development of political systems in cultures around the world including China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. One thing I'm really loving is how he integrates various disciplines such as evolutionary biology, economics, and comparative political science. The book has already led me to reconsider my notions about the historical role of religion and has dashed my hopes that the current Republican fixation on reducing taxes at any cost is a temporary aberration.

A quote on good government:

The rule of law and political accountability are desirable in their own right. Sometimes, they can get in the way of good, effective government, as when an Indian state is unable to make a decision on a major infrastructure project due to litigation and public protests, or when the U.S. Congress cannot bring itself to deal with pressing problems like entitlements due to the influence of lobbyists and interest groups.

But at other times rule of law and accountability are necessary to preserve good government. Under the right conditions, a strong authoritarian system can produce extremely effective government. Political systems need to be able to endure changing external conditions and changing leaders. The checks on state authority provided by rule of law and accountability serve to reduce the variance in governmental performance: they constrain the best governments, but they also prevent bad ones from spiraling out of control.

From what I've read so far, it's clear to me that we're in a period of "political decay." I think we could use a good psychohistorian right now...

Quotes for the day

"What happened Sunday sent a message: When we say we will never forget, we mean what we say."

"The fact of the matter is you will not see bin Laden walking on this Earth again."

-- President Obama

Making sense of it all

I thought Nicholas Kristof's thoughts on the aftermath of Osama bin Laden's death were fairly insightful.

And this post "Killing a Monster" about the reaction of several New York City Buddhists helped to clarify my own thinking about where I stand. I liked the notion that monsters don't exist independently of the world around them, and it was good to reflect on the idea that all of our actions have consequences. But this quote from Ganden Thurman of Tibet House spoke to the fact that we live in a real world... a world with constraints that we can't always overcome:

Buddhism is about improving the way we make choices. Sometimes one’s choices are limited.

What to say

Hearing the news tonight, I found myself wanting to honk my horn, to yell, to make noise. And, ultimately, to be around other people. Unlike 9/11, when I wanted nothing other than to be alone, Osama bin Laden's death was an occasion to be spent in the company of others... in public.

So I made my way to a bar, a friendly place where I knew I'd know people. To revel in the demise of a man who has embodied evil for the last ten years.

To those who don't understand the celebratory mood that has broken out around America tonight, know that it has to do with more than bin Laden's death. It's about release, a hope and desire, if even for a moment, that we might escape the tragedy, pain, and unexpected difficulties of the first decade of the 21st century. Tonight we want to believe that this has all been a false start; that life might have been different had not bin Laden sent those planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

We want to believe that it didn't have to be like this.

And so, for now, for tonight, I honked my horn, and I screamed in my car. And I'm glad that our Muslim president Barack Hussein Obama took out Osama bin Laden.

Quote for this sesquicentennial of the War of the Rebellion

Future years will never know the seething hell, the black infernal background of the countless minor scenes and interiors … of the Secession War, and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.

-- Walt Whitman on the Civil War, which began 150 years ago today

Re-living the Bush disaster

I just watched Inside Job, the documentary about the global financial collapse we're just emerging from. And while there's plenty of blame to go around--the last several presidents and their economic teams (and that includes the Obama team), Phil Gramm and others in Congress, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan--I found myself totally remembering what it was like to live through the George W. Bush presidency...

There's not much comfort in being able to boast that you've lived through the worst presidency ever.

Oligarchy, sigh.

(Video link)

Oscars: Best Picture nominees

This year I've managed to see all of the movies that the Academy has nominated for Best Picture. I won't venture a prediction, but here are my thoughts on all ten of them, in the order I saw them (as best as I can remember).

The Kids Are All Right *****

This was the only one of the bunch to which I gave five stars (with a couple of exceptions, I rated all of the movies on my Netflix account within 24 hours of seeing the movie, and I used those ratings in this post). Still, it's not my top pick...

While watching it, the Julianne Morore-Mark Ruffalo story line made me angry, angry enough to want to get up and walk out. But even in the moment I sensed that that emotional involvement was a good thing.

I thought Annette Benning was perfect in her role, as good as she's ever been, and I'd be happy to see her win Best Actress.

Overall, I loved it.

Inception **

I walked out wondering, "Why do they think they have to try so hard?" I wasn't impressed, and it seemed like yet another movie that attempts to achieve something by going way over the top. Style over substance. Yes, very intricate. But I just didn't care about the Leonardo DiCaprio character or his relationship with his wife, so who cares? Yawn.

The Social Network ***

I wasn't a fan of Mark Zuckerberg when I walked in, and I cared even less for him when I walked out. But the movie was great; I loved the pace, the relentless progress forward. Web-time, indeed. And I agreed with an article I read about the movie when it came out (sorry, can't find the link): the movie serves as a generational litmus test. To some people, the Zuckerberg character in the movie is a clod and a jerk, entirely annoying. To younger folk, he has more of a "heroic" quality because of his accomplishments. Unfortunately, this apparently makes me "old" despite working in Silicon Valley all those years...

With regard to the real Facebook, which like Apple has become less and less appealing with time, my attitude shifted a bit after listening to a CNN interview with Google marketing exec Wael Ghonim who volunteered that "this [Egyptian] revolution started on Facebook."

Black Swan ****

I haven't been much of a Natalie Portman fan (Padmé Amidala, ugh), but she was totally convincing in Black Swan. Like most of my favorites on this list, this was a difficult movie to watch (crazy how self-mutilation as minor as ripping off a tiny patch of skin can twist me up in contortions in my theater seat). The movie had a lot of cohesive layers; overall, it just worked for me. Creepy, unflinching, and ultimately... completely, poetically satisfying. It breathed new life into Swan Lake the way Rent did for La Bohème.

This was the first of the movies I saw and said afterwards, "This gets my vote."

Toy Story 3 ***

I cried. And yes, it speaks to the challenges of aging. But as someone who is aging, it didn't move me all that much. I sort of had a, "Well, yes, it's more Toy Story" reaction.

The King's Speech ****

I cried. Awesome performances from Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, and Helena Bonham Carter. Really moving. But I wouldn't name it Best Picture, though it's the odds-on favorite.

Winter's Bone ***

As a native of a small midwestern town, there was a wee bit too much familiarity in this one. It left me glad that I hadn't lived through anything quite as desperate as the story portrayed in the movie. Well done. But again, just didn't feel like a Best Picture to me.

True Grit ****

After seeing this, I changed my Best Picture vote from Black Swan. Hailee Steinfeld was brilliant and left me wanting more... as in, "Please don't flame out like so many actors who start young!"

Everything that happened after the rattlesnake bite was "heavy"... not emotionally so but a demontration of gravity. In other words, it left me with the sense that there was just no other course that Mattie Ross' life could have taken (I didn't know the story from the book or earlier movie.)

And yes, I cried.

127 Hours ****

I changed my vote for a second time after seeing James Franco's awesome performance in that chasm. I knew the story well from listening to a long interview with the real life Aron Ralston, and I'm an EMT who was trained to deal with the gory... both of which probably made it more difficult to sit still in my chair than it otherwise might have been. Talk about feeling dread and anxiety.

This gets my vote for Best Picture because it's a movie that takes you somewhere where you've never been... and will probably never go. I couldn't help but imagine myself in his situation...

The Fighter ****

I can't resist Mark Wahlberg in anything, which goes without saying. :-) But his whole Ward family in the movie... Jesuchristo, scary! Christian Bale was utterly spot on... his winning the Best Supporting Actor is my only non-negotiable in the acting categories, lol.

No tears but I couldn't help but cheer at the end.

ALL IN ALL, it was a great year of movies. I'd recommend all of the above except Inception. Enjoy. :-)

For Sally

I haven't been blogging much these past few months. A couple of weeks ago a friend at work said something about it to me and shared that her friend Sally had also asked about it. I said that I thought it had something to do with my giving up on people (the masses in general, not anyone who reads this, of course :-). When she shared that with Sally, Sally sent back the message that I should write about that.

I actually have a folder full of links to articles and stories that I've thought I'd like to write about. And while it would be nice to say that the reason I'm not writing is that I'm too busy, the reality is that I just haven't had much of an inclination to do so. There's some truth in that offhand remark I made when asked why I wasn't blogging. That feeling of resignation is also behind my loss of interest in politics. It's really all so disgusting, the tenor of things... the utter inanity of political debate in our country these days. We're faced with difficult, complex challenges and what do we hear about? Whether this candidate is a witch, which party is ahead in fundraising, and... I'm drawing a blank. Jesuchristo, I can't even remember what was said in the days running up to the election less than a month ago. It was all so pointless and yet so many people in America just seemed to accept and echo it as if it was what really mattered.

In August I read Nixonland, Rick Perlstein's 900 page book about Nixon's political career, the era he lived in, and the environment he left us with. Somehow the book both reassured me and depressed me at the same time. On the one hand, knowing that politics in America today wasn't that different from what it was back then made me feel better. It meant that I wasn't living in the "worst of times" or in the "last days." If it's been like this for awhile, then maybe it can't be that bad? Maybe we'll still muddle through as we always have?

But at the same time I found myself blanketed with something like despair. Because if this really is how it is--if those in power really have no interest in improving our lot and instead it's all just about the fight for dominance and power and money--then, well, that's pretty bleak. There is this froth on top of Washington which is what you first see: the conversation is about climate change or healthcare or whatever. But underneath is something bitter, and like the proverbial iceberg, most of what's actually there is hidden. I send in my contribution for $25 while untold millions are flowing in from corporations. The money arrived in suitcases in Nixon's day... now the Supreme Court has put its stamp of approval on the whole endeavour. Give any amount and do so anonymously. How can that be healthy for democracy?

Democracy, heavy sigh. I'm tired of hearing about how people have the right to carry a gun into a bar. I'm tired of hearing that the Founding Fathers were somehow so akin to Robert (the Rules of Order guy) that they'd be in favor of tying the hands of government with respect to adapting to the times. I'm sickened by state politicians suing over healthcare reform while their constituents go without coverage. I don't want to tune into Sarah Palin's Alaska or hear that there must be a secret plot because Bristol is still on Dancing with the Stars. I look from screen to screen at the gym and marvel at an industry that gives us endless episodes of overweight people eating fried food at different restaurants and stupid people pretending to act naturally while they're on camera 24x7. The debate over deficit reduction? Good luck! Both sides are hostages to their "beliefs," and the public has no hunger for spending cuts. And I'm simply worn out when I think about the environmental changes today's kids will see because we were too slow to wake up and act. A scientific consensus about global warming? Who cares. We know more than ever about the changes that are likely to come and we're burning more coal than ever, even exporting it to China now. Money triumphs principles, apparently always.

Okay, I guess that's enough of that rant.

I had a dream the other night. I saw a group of gay men off in the distance. There was this strange sense that I ought to go join them. But I didn't; I realized that, like with my writing, I really didn't have much of an inclination to go there, to "be in the group," to belong. Wherever I'm going, right now I'm turned inward. I don't know how to solve the world's problems; I'm focused on my own. There are still those people who I reach out to and want to be there for, but overall I feel chastened. Disappointed in myself and for the mistakes I've made over the past couple of decades. Pessimistic about the ability of people anywhere to make a difference.

And yet, the other night, I finally watched Gandhi. I was in high school when it came out and not very sociopolitically aware. It held zero interest for me at the time (I was rooting for Tootsie on Oscar night). But there in his story, at least, seems to be some evidence that even in the midst of millions of people, individuals can make a difference. Though as I write this, I think it likely that the biggest impact I saw depicted in the movie was not the British Empire leaving India but the reaction of the Hindi man being told by Gandhi that he could find his way out of hell by adopting a Muslim orphan to make amends for the one he'd murdered.

To change something you have to be able to touch it, in one way or another. I'll think about that for awhile.

Where America and the Muslim world meet

I just read Ross Douthat's thoughtful column about two different conceptions of what it means to be an American. It struck a chord, particularly as I'm halfway through (and thoroughly engrossed in) Richard Perlstein's Nixonland, a nearly 900 page tome that traces the widening fissure between these two Americas during the Nixon years.

Douthat uses this lens to look at the current controversy over the proposed mosque that would be located near the World Trade Center site:

The first America tends to make the finer-sounding speeches, and the second America often strikes cruder, more xenophobic notes. The first America welcomed the poor, the tired, the huddled masses; the second America demanded that they change their names and drop their native languages, and often threw up hurdles to stop them coming altogether. The first America celebrated religious liberty; the second America persecuted Mormons and discriminated against Catholics.

But both understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer, and both have been necessary to the American experiment’s success. During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.

The same was true in religion. The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream. Nativist concerns about Catholicism’s illiberal tendencies inspired American Catholics to prod their church toward a recognition of the virtues of democracy, making it possible for generations of immigrants to feel unambiguously Catholic and American.

I agreed over the weekend with President Obama's comments about the mosque and its planners' right to build it. The president, however, is also pursuing a course with respect to a mostly Muslim part of the world which I don't support: a secret, shadow offensive against America's enemies--as he defines them--that relies on drones and cruise missiles rather than American boots on the ground. This approach can't be a long term path to U.S. security: it can only recruit the next generation of those willing to attack us.

Yet such wars come with many risks: the potential for botched operations that fuel anti-American rage; a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections; a weakening of the Congressional oversight system put in place to prevent abuses by America’s secret operatives; and a reliance on authoritarian foreign leaders and surrogates with sometimes murky loyalties....

The administration’s demands have accelerated a transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency, which some critics worry could lower the threshold for future quasi-military operations. In Pakistan’s mountains, the agency had broadened its drone campaign beyond selective strikes against Qaeda leaders and now regularly obliterates suspected enemy compounds and logistics convoys, just as the military would grind down an enemy force.

For its part, the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A. Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

And, as American counterterrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military, private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States has outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.

And the more I read about the insanity of the Vietnam war in Nixonland, the more I see parallels in Afghanistan: billions of dollars spent on an objective made nearly impossible by the fact that it's an American, and not Afghani, one.

ONE OF THE MOST INTELLIGENT DISCUSSIONS I've heard recently about America's security in this post-911 world is this Talk of the Nation interview with former CIA official and historian Graham Fuller. From his book A World Without Islam, which argues that our relationship with the Middle East wouldn't be significantly different in the absence of Islam:

Washington — perhaps as many global powers have done in the past — uses what I might call the "immaculate conception" theory of crises abroad. That is, we believe we are essentially out there, just minding our own business, trying to help make the world right, only to be endlessly faced with a series of spontaneous, nasty challenges from abroad to which we must react. There is not the slightest consideration that perhaps US policies themselves may have at least contributed to a series of unfolding events. This presents a huge paradox: how can America on the one hand pride itself on being the world’s sole global superpower, with over seven hundred military bases abroad and the Pentagon’s huge global footprint, and yet, on the other hand, be oblivious to and unacknowledging of the magnitude of its own role — for better or for worse — as the dominant force charting the course of world events? This Alice-in-Wonderland delusion affects not just policy makers, but even the glut of think tanks that abound in Washington. In what may otherwise often be intelligent analysis of a foreign situation, the focus of each study is invariably the other country, the other culture, the negative intentions of other players; the impact of US actions and perceptions are quite absent from the equation. It is hard to point to serious analysis from mainstream publications or think tanks that address the role of the United States itself in helping create current problems or crises, through policies of omission or commission. We’re not even talking about blame here; we’re addressing the logical and self-evident fact that the actions of the world’s sole global superpower have huge consequences in the unfolding of international politics. They require examination.

There is a further irony here: How can a nation like the US, which expresses such powerful outpourings of patriotism and ubiquitous unfurling of the flag on all occasions, seem quite obtuse to the existence of nationalism and patriotism in other countries? Washington never fared very well in the Cold War in understanding the motives and emotions of the nonaligned world; it dismissed or even suppressed inconvenient local nationalist aspirations, thereby ending up pushing a large grouping of countries toward greater sympathy with the Soviet Union. This was a kind of strategic blindness that viewed other nations’ interests and preferences as something that needed to be hemmed in, or isolated. We have been obtuse toward nationalism and identity issues in the Middle East and have lumped it all into the basket of "Islam."

And this:

History did not begin with 9/11. Our dealings with the Middle East go back a long way. The attack on 9/11 was a violent, extremist, and outrageous act, but it was also almost a culmination of a preceding chain of events over many years. If we choose to see history beginning at 9/11 — whereby we suddenly become the sole justifiably aggrieved party, now authorized to bring vigilante justice to the world — then we will continue to do what we have been doing all along, with disastrous consequences evident to all.

Those words--history did not begin with 9/11--stuck in my head even before I began reading Nixonland. I'm a child of the 60s. My parents were hippies. I think I have a decent grasp of history. But over the last few days I've started to flesh out in my mind events that were remarkably hazy for all of their proximity to my childhood. The Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and the '68 Democratic convention, for example, aren't just signposts anymore. And I have a clearer picture now of why issues like gun rights carry so much significance for conservatives.

I've long been familiar with the events of the 60s, yet I think I operated in a common illusion, one that most people experience. It's similar to the one that Fuller describes when he speaks of his "immaculate conception" theory of how governments see the world.

Deep down we all sort of imagine that history began with us.

Ezra Klein on our slow recovery from the Great Recession

From today's Washington Post, a not terribly upbeat look at historical trends in economic recoveries:

This White House has "vilified industries," complains the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. America is burdened with "an anti-business president," moans the Weekly Standard.

Would that all presidents were this anti-business: According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, corporate profits hit $1.37 trillion in the first quarter -- an all-time high. Businesses are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash reserves. Business spending jumped 20 percent last quarter and is up by 13 percent against 2009. And the Obama administration has cut taxes for small businesses and big ones alike. Maybe the president could be anti-me for a while. I could use the money.

The reality is that America's supposedly anti-business president has led an extremely pro-business recovery. The corporate community has recovered first, and best. The populist tone that conservative magazines and business groups decry is partly in reaction to this: As corporate America's position is getting better and better, the recovery is looking shakier and shakier. Unemployment is high. Housing looks perilously close to a double dip. Job growth is weak. Businesses aren't hiring. The 71,000 jobs the private sector added in July aren't sufficient to keep up with population growth, much less cut into the ranks of the unemployed.

That is the catch-22 of the recovery: Businesses will start hiring when the economy recovers. And the economy will start to recover when businesses start hiring.

And this:

Not all recessions are created equal. Recessions caused by financial crises take a lot longer to dig out of than their more common cousins. One is like the flu. The other, a car crash. When the flu goes away, you're good. When a collision spins to a stop, that's when the long, slow process of healing begins.

In "This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly," Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff study every financial crisis of the past 800 years. It's an exhaustive study, and its conclusions are depressing for a country that believes itself exceptional even in its suffering: We're not special.

If you consider unemployment, housing prices, government debt and the stock market, Rogoff says, "the U.S. is just driving down the tracks of a typical post-WWII deep financial crisis." In some areas, we're even a bit ahead of the game: Economic output usually falls by 9 percent. We held the drop to 4 percent.

Even the unevenness of our recovery is predictable. "Housing and employment come back much slower than equity and gross domestic product," Reinhart says. GDP usually falls for two years and then recovers. Equity can move even faster, which helps explain corporate America's rapid revival. But employment tends to fall for five years. And housing? That's usually a six-year slide.

A geopolitical video history of the atomic bomb, 1945-1998

It starts slow, but the pace picks up...

(Video link)

More from The New Yorker.

Oligarchy: a five part series

Michael Ventura is one of my favorite columnists. He's erratic and unpredictable. Sometimes I think his insights are brilliant. Other times I'm not really that interested in what he has to say.

He writes Letters at 3am for the Austin Chronicle, and I've just caught up on what has been on his mind this year; in particular, a five part series on what he describes as America's descent into oligarchy.

There are likely paragraphs you'll disgree with, or which will make you cringe, or even elicit whatever knee jerk reaction fits your own personality. I experienced all of that.

But there are also some truths in there, especially in the second column of the series in which Ventura argues that we're all responsible for what America has become:

The growth of the American Oligarchy has been building for decades, and we've been its enablers.

When I was a boy in Brooklyn we shopped at Jack's Delicatessen. Jack was someone we knew and liked. When we ran short of money, Jack let us buy groceries "on the tab." He knew us. He trusted us to pay that tab. Most of us were good for it. Jack lived where we lived. He was our neighbor. Money spent at Jack's stayed in the neighborhood, and Jack and his kind had a stake in keeping our streets as decent as possible.

Then a shiny big supermarket came to the neighborhood with a bigger variety of products that cost less. Not much less. A nickel, a quarter. We didn't know who owned the supermarket, and we didn't ask. They didn't run tabs like Jack did, but it was all so shiny, and it was a little cheaper. We abandoned Jack, who'd been our friend. To save nickels and quarters, we abandoned him. Oh, we still went to Jack's, but not as often. Small businesses have slim profit margins. If customers come in "not as often," there goes the profit margin. There goes Jack. Now our money leaves the neighborhood. There goes the neighborhood. We "saved" our way out of the possibility of community.

By the 1990s, Wal-Mart was doing that to whole towns. Barnes & Noble and Borders did that to independent bookstores. Whole Foods did that to small health-food stores. Chains like McDonald's and Starbucks did that to Joe's Diner and Sally's Breakfast Nook. (Starbucks didn't even have to sell cheaply; it merely had to be convenient.) Detroit automakers invented "warranties" to have your car serviced at their outlets; indy garages went broke. Agribusiness did it to family farms. And each time we buy an item online when it's available at a local store, we're doing it all over again.

With every local business we abandoned, with every dime or dollar we saved, we bought into a system that had no need of community. No need of us, except purely as consumers. Once that system was established, we had nowhere else to go. We still need what we need, but when we buy it our money is siphoned to a capital-"E" Elsewhere that, over time, became capital-"O" Oligarchy. With globalization, the biggest firms not only no longer needed our communities, they no longer needed our country.

So while it would be easier to a) not read any of this, b) dismiss it out of hand, or c) attempt to rip it to shreds, you might then wonder, isn't that how we got into this situation? If you're not happy about how things are, would it be worth your time to consider another point of view?

I'm reminded of the great sociology course I took in Las Vegas with Jane Heenan in 2008. Every one of us walked into that classroom with the belief that we saw our world pretty clearly. I'm pretty damned sure we all left at the end of the term with a new perspective on what might really be going on. But to get from here to there, we had to be willing to give up some of our certainty about the assumptions we'd been living with.

The point is not to read this and simply agree with it. The point it to think and ask questions. As Ventura notes in the first of these columns, quoting Thomas Pynchon from Gravity's Rainbow, "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

Here are links to the whole series:

1. 'Oligarchy' is a big, bad word that defines the country we still call a republic
2. The American Oligarchy has been growing for decades, and we've been its enablers
3. The isolation of the Professional Tier is the single most destructive element in American society today
4. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is the fundamental question of government
5. Society is created by a mass of individual choices

Data on this recession

The Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank has published data, including interactive graphs, which illustrate just how bad this Great Recession has been.

Sigh. :-/

Quote for the day

P.M. Carpenter on the nature of political change in America:

If genuine conservative genius there ever was, it came in the Founders' Burkean inspiration that true and lasting progress must pass the tests of peaceful struggle and tireless debate. Achieving a national consensus is hard, but it's necessary to progress' durability; vast and overanxious progress in a consensual void only insures its unraveling.

Quote for this historic day

Listening to Republican Congressmen tonight, as well as conservative callers to C-SPAN, I was dumbstruck by the number of people claiming that Congress was somehow overriding the will of the people and ramming something down America's collective throat. Do they really believe that our government only does things that have more than 50% support in opinion polls? And if they believe that, how can they explain that the Iraq War continued long after the war lost support? It boggles the mind.

On that note, I thought this observation from Andrew Samwick was right on target:

I don't think anyone will hold up the bill that will pass as exemplary, but it does reflect elements of health care reform that Democrats campaigned on and won on in 2008. So I have a hard time seeing this as doing violence to the will of the people as it is typically expressed in our electoral system. Elections matter. This is how they matter.

Another conservative take on today's consequences from David Frum; he thinks passage of healthcare reform is a disaster for the Republican Party. And Ross Douthat, also on the right, is somewhat relieved that America will finally get the opportunity to see who is right about this bill: its supporters or its opponents. He is skeptical, but also hopeful.

And looking back on this historic day, it's important to note that Teddy Roosevelt campaigned for president on a platform which included national health insurance back in 1912. Almost 100 years later, we've finally achieved that goal. The New York Times has a timeline here.

A leisurely slide down San Francisco's Market Street... in 1905

(Video link)

The music is "La Femme D'Argent" by Air.

Thanks, Jack!