Hellfire Nation by James Morone

This is the most fun I've had with a history book in ages. Mr. Morone traces the oscillation between religion as a democratizing tendency and religion as a method of social control for the elites.

The Democrats anti-populist rhetoric about the people in pickup trucks in red states is actually part of a long standing elite/enlightenment critique of the more untempered varieties of evangelical religious expression.

Republicans have so effectively captured populist rhetoric to accomplish elitist goals in large part because they speak the language of religion and Democrats don't. Morone makes the point that as far back as the Puritans, religion was about who belonged and who didn't. A counter current (evident in the Great Awakenings) was religion as a leveling and democratizing force. The Republicans have put together a winning formula of talking like they are from the democratizing version of Christianity and also playing on fears of the "other" whether it be Willie Horton, Mexican immigrants or gay people.

In my angrier moments I think that the solution might be for Democrats to take back the moral high ground--to point out that the Republicans are hypocrites who win elections by encouraging Americans to hate their fellow citizens. They've turned good Christian people into warmongers and hateful people. I'm pretty sure that if there is a hell, a special level has been reserved for GW and his cronies. But that may be a trap...Somehow when I think thoughts like that I really feel that I'm living George W. Bush's America.

Harry Potter & the War on Terrorism

The new Harry Potter book attempts to capture a wizarding world under seige. Vague fears, random acts of violence, and the search for understanding of the evil that is Voldemort create a world that is uncomfortably close to our current reality.

The only nit I have to pick is that the world seems disconnected with the world of book 5. We've gone from pre World War II appeasement of an evil Hitler figure to post World War II terrorist cells. The shift is too radical to be believable.

In real life, people have a hard time holding more than a few ideas in their head. Once a group of people has an idea of what "enemy" and "evil" means, they can't wheel around and radically change it in a year or so.

Another thought: evil in a state is much scarier than terrorist evil. Most terrorists who have any kind of long term success are connected to states or quasi-states and most terrorists have strong nationalistic tendencies. This is something that has been completely ignored in our current war on terror because GW does not want to name names.

What People are Wearing

I went shopping today....at a mall. I guess like most people, I tend to focus on what I'm wearing instead of what other people are wearing. Crowds at a mall are just so much background to my mental world.

But today I couldn't find anything to buy and everything I tried on didn't fit. I also realized that stores have wildly varying sizes and a lot of it depends on your income level. At the Gap I'm a medium. At Banana Republic I'm a Large. At WalMart, I'm probably a small.

I also realized that most people at the mall were walking around in clothes that were way too tight. I also stumbled into a shoe sale and Nordstrom and realized that most women wear uncomfortable shoes--all day--every day. I bought a pair of shoes that was super comfortable and saw a 70 year old woman wearing the same shoes as I walked out of the store.

A recent book I read by Thomas Frank pointed out that fashion and capitalism are made for each other. The art of being cool requires constant investment in things that become obsolete very quickly. It's a sucker's game played in lycra and four inch heels.

Things I saw at 24 Hour Fitness: Part II

* a woman with a tube of lysol handiwipes (with bleach). She wiped down an entire treadmill, created a horrible smell and then exercised for all of one minute before moving on to the bike which she did the same thing to. I'm a big fan of bleach, but my god.....

Dukes v. Walmart

I don't know if these folks are going to update their blog, but I'm planning to follow this case pretty closely.

http://employmentblawg.blogspot.com

The fun part is that the hearings will be in San Francisco. The other fun part is that it is the largest class action in history and the reason that it was able to be certified is that Walmart runs its operations in such a way that everything (including it culture of discrimination) is standardized.

Is blogging bullshit?

I was reading a review of a book about bullshit in the new Harper's and apparently the author of the bullshit book believes that blogging is in part responsible for the rise b.s. in modern society.

I do think that blogging gives you some mental habits--run on sentences (and thoughts), ignorance of research, authority without knowledge-- that aren't entirely healthy. I'm sure blogging will (like e-mail) do some dreadful things to grammar over time.

But blogging is just a tool. And by genuinely diffusing the opportunity to say something among many people, (including those who are not professional GW Bush ass kissers--aka the press corps) blogging has potential to be a really democratic art form.

Actually, I think that Journalists (like lawyers) need to realize that they are playing a new game. Since most reasonably intelligent people can now look things up for themselves, journalists need to learn how to dig deeper and add something to the discussion beyond a nifty intro paragraph or a pretty face on the television. If you have a full time job as a journalist, you have a chance to develop breadth and perspective.

Since journalists are now less respected than lawyers, it may be a tough sell.

War Trash by Ha Jin

I'm into this book, but the narrator is weirdly not very compelling. He misses his girlfriend. He feels torn about following the communists. I can never quite predict what he's going to do next. I guess that's why I keep reading it--I'm trying to find out if he's going to hang together as a character or not...

The Spiral Staircase--Nice, Very Nice

I never expected to like Karen Armstrong. I think it was for entirely stupid and snobbish reasons. She doesn't have a degree in it, but she writes books on the history of religion for a popular audience. Her autobiography "The Spiral Staircase" is compelling, sweet, and consistently interesting. She resolutely refuses to sensationalize or glamourize any of it--being a nun, a school teacher, a TV personality, a woman traveling in the middle east. There's something nice about the English can pull that understated thing off. . . . .

Freaknomics--Fun but Overwrought

I liked this book. The questions it asked were interesting and the answers were much more believable than the general run of answers provided by economists--in part because the economist author portrays himself as an iconoclast and I'm all for smashing the economic idols.

On the other hand, why do economists feel the need to tell you 10 times a second how brilliant they are? It makes me want to say--no you're not. (I had the same problem with the Harvard President--If he hadn't claimed that he was so wonderful, I could have had more sympathy with his stupidity)

If nobody has ever looked into the economics of cheating before or whether Roe v. Wade caused the drop in crime rates, I have to say that says more about the profession of economics than the brilliance of the author. I think it will probably take a non-economist to truly challenge the empty pretentiousness of most of what passes for economic analysis these days.

If Consciousness is a burden, some people are traveling light...

What is the correct attitude towards the not so bright? The conventional wisdom is that we should feel sorry for them, pity them, and promptly forget them. When large numbers of them turn out to vote for a stupid and evil administration, we briefly became more concerned. It is a problem for the rest of us that large portions of the American population are unable to connect the dots between things like SUVs and global warming or rising debt and the essential slavery of the American worker.

I think jealousy is the appropriate response towards people who live this way. They are happy at the expense of others and cannot even be held morally responsible because they are too dumb.

I had proposed this theory like 10 years ago and a friend of mine brought up the counter argument that people who are not very bright have a lot of experiences that they can't explain-- Things happen and they don't know why and that must be a scary and frustrating way to live. However, in my extensive observations of not-so-bright people, I've discovered that they are generally untroubled by things that they can't explain. They find the simplest possible explanation and move on. They also feel very little need to reconcile contradictory explanations. So, they can simultaneously believe irreconcilable things. (i.e. George W. Bush didn't tell the truth about Iraq/ GW is an ethical person unlike that lying Bill Clinton)

Among the many things that we don't discuss meaningfully in this country, I think some attention needs to be paid to the problem of the not-so-bright among us. As a democracy, we will not be able to survive too many of them. I think many of the not-so-bright could be turned into reasonably-bright people if they are caught early enough and educated. Today's packs of feral teenagers are tommorow's feral suburban parents. Scary thought.