Pre-Groundhog Day Media Notes: “Free-Market Socialism,” I.P., and Other Ambiguities

[UPDATE: The Friday, January 27, 8pm Vaclav Havel play reading mentioned below, Memorandum, is first come first served, tickets by donation, directed by Robert Anthony Peters, at 45th Street Theatre, 354 W. 45th.  Even if I don’t make it, you should.]

In one week, on Groundhog Day, I’ll resume roughly-daily blogging, albeit in a different vein, as you will see. 

One year ago this week, I blogged a near-final word on my C-SPAN2 appearance from late 2010, but it appears my ex-girlfriend from that broadcast is leaving the Big City and reassessing her life, so we’ve non-violently buried the hatchet, and I get a few of the old books from her vast and obscure library in the process.

To mark the occasion – and to compensate for me officially ending my Book Selections of the Month entries last month – some notes on recent books and articles of import:

•If it wasn’t David Brooks himself who titled his column “Free-Market Socialism” this week, bless the subversive copy editor who called a (mushy, Clintonian) philosophy what it is.  At the same time, kudos to Brooks for calling the economic component of his (evolving) thinking “libertarian.”  Nice to see him using the term in a positive way once in a while. 

In a way, though, he ends up being the secular-statist (to use progressive Newt Gingrich’s favorite formulation) version of a social conservative: Instead of markets for economics + religion for basic morals, Brooks wants markets for economics + state for basic morals.  It won’t work – morals are an even subtler thing than economics, and the state can’t be trusted to engineer either.  But we can all feel him feeling society’s pain, in a meta-Clintonian fashion. 

I’ll try to stop bashing him all the time.  But he and several prominent neoconservatives should retire now, along with the rest of the failed establishment, and everyone should vote for Ron Paul.  

(C’mon, conservatives – how much pain do liberal Romney and TR-like blowhard turned Catholic pseudo-moralist Gingrich have to cause you before you remember there’s a real anti-big-government candidate in the race?  There’s an escape route here, people, not just from phony candidates but from socialism itself, markety or otherwise.)

•In addition to seeing a documentary about Ayn Rand tonight – and tomorrow night dropping in on free-market Democrat Dan O’Connor’s bar event at Tammany Hall Tavern and seeing a Vaclav Havel play called Memorandum about socialist bureaucracy – I need to return a borrowed copy of Against Intellectual Property by N. Stephan Kinsella to its rightful owner. 

Much as I might wish, as a libertarian, that this book – or any other – settled the complicated issue of I.P. to my satisfaction, I think it remains a muddle.  True,

Ron Paul, MLK, Catwoman, and the Huntsman

At the halfway point of an otherwise non-blogging month, I pop back in briefly to note that Huntsman will be on TV any minute now speaking about his departure from the Republican race for president and his endorsement of Romney.

One irony is that he turned on Ron Paul toward the end, trying to get attention by blaming Paul for a racist ad that Paul plainly did not create (and which bore no resemblance to Paul’s actual, freedom-themed ads) – when in truth, Huntsman has enough libertarian tendencies to make Ron Paul a more logical second choice for Huntsman voters.  I hope the small handful of Huntsman voters, for what it’s worth, will figure that out for themselves. 

(And with five GOP candidates left – and Perry probably out soon – my main hope now is just that Gingrich and Romney continue to tear each other down until Paul becomes the plurality candidate around whom real conservatives rally.  I am grateful, therefore, for Newt’s stubbornness.  Even Paul says Romney looks hard to stop, though.  And let us not speak of Santorum.)

I hope Huntsman’s departure so soon after failing to get traction with his condemnation of the non-Paul race ad will be the last time we have to rehash any Paul racism charges.  Last I heard, it didn’t even sound as if Paul’s Alabama paleoconservative allies were the ones responsible for the old, offending newsletter passages but, ironically, as if they might have been the result of a “respectable” East Coast thinktanker/business writer clumsily trying to wax satirical in a half-offensive Gawker-like fashion – and as if at least one of the pieces clearly bore that writer’s byline rather than being written by Paul or ghostwritten and attributed to Paul. 

The more you look at it, the less there seems to be there.  And Paul’s actual output is so vast, there are countless more productive avenues of investigation – so let’s stick to them.  Ironically, though, when the notoriously-vast heap of unshelved books in my apartment collapsed the other day, the top layer of sediment unveiled was in fact a copy of the Ron Paul Freedom Report newsletter (October 2007, to be precise), which I had totally forgotten I ever had.  You will be shocked to learn the articles therein are about taxes and sound money, not the black man. 

We can’t bring MLK back to life today to ask his opinion of Ron Paul, but another important 1960s figure is still with us: Julie Newmar, one of three women to play Catwoman on the 1960s Batman series (another being Eartha Kitt, in a wonderful bit of raceblind casting, by the way), endorsed Ron Paul on Facebook.  Maybe a campaign ad is in order with her saying (with an astonishingly-still-sexy purr): “I played a famous thief – but there is one candidate who rrrrespects your property rights.”

(South Carolina Republican senator Jim DeMint's endorsement right about now would also be greatly appreciated, of course.)

In any case, with Paul’s focus plainly on individual liberty and tolerance, those worried about incipient fascism should probably be made more nervous by the “Sympathy for the Devil” cover by Slovenian band Laibach (who, I am pleased to hear, will also do the music for the Nazis-from-the-moon comedy film Iron Sky in April).

Speaking of fascists, the crucial thing being left out in the reporting about the unusually chaotic passenger and crew reaction in that tragic cruise-ship-sinking may be the fact that the scrambling evacuees were largely Italians.  Italy spawned the Roman Empire, Catholicism, the Mafia, fascism, various forms of machismo – and perhaps not coincidentally a culture in which spontaneous forms of order such as “waiting in line” often do not exist, shocked though I was the first time I heard about that problem from an Italian immigrant.  Maybe they are slightly less likely to abandon ship in civil fashion without a leader.

But I’ll be back in February to further raise the level of civility.  See you on Groundhog Dog.

I’ll Be Back on Groundhog Day, but Things Will Be Different

With Bachmann and likely Perry dropping out – and neither Santorum nor Huntsman having much national heft – plus Gingrich aimed squarely downward, it looks as though 2012 will be a bit like 2008 (that is, an almost-certain nominee and a vexing libertarian footnote), except Ron Paul will be taken a good deal more seriously this time and the probable nominee-by-default (McCain then, Romney with a probable McCain endorsement now) less seriously. 

In the end, if the GOP picks Romney over Paul, I’ll vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson, the #JifnotP vow I encourage others to take and spread (and if we merely end up replacing Obama with another decline-managing, statist force-lover named Romney, at least I’ll get to watch the decline being managed by the New England establishment that reminds me of my childhood – small consolation after glimpsing the possibility, in Ron Paul, of ending the big-government nightmare, but relaxing like a morphine-induced death, I suppose).

But I’m spending the first month of this agonizing process offline.

I’m sure you can get ahold of me if you really need to and I don’t check in in a timely fashion.  For example, TONIGHT from 6:30-8:30, you’ll find me at the Kiva event celebrating poverty-fighting microfinance, at Vig Bar, 12 Spring St.  

(That’s something I wouldn’t be doing if I believed the passage in wacky David Graeber’s Debt that argues that the last thing we should want for people in the developing world is for them to join us in the unending cycle of credit and finance, but more about that Occupy guru after my return.) 

As hinted today in my 1,500th tweet (and here, not far short of my 1,500th blog entry), I have some preparations to make for the next phase in the ongoing Todd Seavey project, which I hope will be even more exciting than the FIVE YEARS of ToddSeavey.com that some of you have now experienced.

And if I sound more radical lately – well, yes, and I think the next phase will be one marked by an even greater openness to new ideas.  A month offline may actually be a pleasant start in that direction, since the Net is hectic whereas scientists find that “empathy, as well as deep thought, depends...on neural processes that are ‘inherently slow’,” as noted in a Pico Iyer article pointed out by Alyssa Pelish (herself the friend who became one of my ACSH successors, if you’re tempted to check out their stuff while I’m away).

An honest assessment of humanity’s numerous bad ideas would likely reveal that we not only need to dispense with many of them once and for all but squelch the temptation to keep talking about them and fighting about them (further discussion of religion, of war, or of big government as a reformable thing, for instance, may be quite pointless, but people keep doing it – and that wastes valuable time our current economic and political system may not have anymore).

So we’ll aim higher when I get back, and I hope to be both less compromising and more diplomatic.  We’ll see how that goes. 

I think it was one of my old college humor-writer colleagues who observed that Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence” (the proper attitude of one who loves his circumstances) is a bit like Groundhog Day.  And so, even if it portends four more years of statism and idiocy, I shall return on GROUNDHOG DAY, and much like Nietzsche – I shall return as an incarnation of DIONYSUS!

People of Iowa: from Ron Paul voters to Will Wilkinson (plus Rudy, “thick” libertarianism, and more)

After seeing the very good (and conservative-friendly) Iron Lady last night, I wish Margaret Thatcher were a plausible write-in candidate for the Republicans this year (and I look forward to seeing the whole Iron Trilogy this year – Iron Sky about Nazis from the moon in April and of course Avengers).

Instead, many of us today hope we will see Ron Paul win the Iowa caucus, despite his flaws (all politicians have some, as you may’ve noticed).  At the very least, it would foster wider discussion of libertarianism and in the best-case scenario, of course, it might lead to government’s evil presence in our lives and in the economy starting to recede in one year, changing the course of human history. 

(I actually predict he will win Iowa, given the failure of the usual polls to gauge the far greater likelihood of Paul voters actually showing up in large numbers relative to other candidates’ fair-weather supporters.  All the number-crunching strategy by my geeky faction, which wants to transform both the home team and the game itself, actually reminds me a bit of the Aaron Sorkin-penned Moneyball, another fine film.)  

So naturally, on the eve of potential triumph, yesterday Will Wilkinson announced that he is not a libertarian after all, is in fact a liberal (not just a “liberal-tarian”), and would not want to be part of a movement that included Ron Paul (nor indeed any movement at all).  I bear Will no ill will but feel as though some sort of apology may be owed to the people who kept telling him a few years ago that he’s not really a libertarian.  I never even went that far – I’m all for letting people define these things somewhat broadly – but for some reason, I still feel sort of vindicated.

Coincidentally, I only just learned that Virginia Postrel doesn’t want to use the label anymore either (but at least she takes care to put a “classical” in front of her “liberal”).  The real question here, of course, is: OK, WHICH ONE OF THE REST OF YOU WANTS TO JUMP SHIP?  KERRY?  MEGAN?!  All the recent “voluntaryists,” maybe?!?  I’m simply a libertarian, by the way.  Feel free to use me as the definitional case from now on, especially if I’m the only one left.

Libertarians Who Need Their Space

No, but, hey, man – it’s cool.  It’s cool.  We OK.  We OK.  (And if we win, I hope the ensuing celebration rivals the New Year’s Eve party at which I photographed the knock-off “Snowballs” seen above – and my thanks, too, to Kevin Walsh for pointing out that other photo, which really is Ron Paul in a Houston Astros uniform.)

And I can understand mainstream libertarians – very much including me, despite all the scorn and skepticism young Ron Paul-wave libertarians heap on Beltway-style, thinktank-funding, white-paper-producing type libertarians – such as Ed Crane wanting to be on record distinguishing between (what I still see as) libertarianism proper and Paul’s brand of paleolibertarianism, with its extra (and occasionally weird) cultural baggage (none of which has much effect on policy prescriptions, still deducible from imagining strict property rights and laws forbidding only assault, theft, and fraud). 

But I think some outright enthusiasm from libertarians at this potentially-historic juncture is not only warranted but arguably morally necessary.  For one thing, we should not appear to be lazily echoing the “Paul can’t win” mantra when there are so many useless, big-government-loving, unphilosophical, mainstream types to perform that function already (like John Podhoretz, for instance).

To his credit, liberal Jonathan Chait at least finishes his article by going into far more amusing detail than most people about how unlikely he thinks a Paul victory is.

I’m sticking to the #JifnotP vow I’ve been encouraging people to take, though – publicly tell the GOP you’ll vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson in the general election unless the GOP nominates Ron Paul and proves it’s serious about shrinking government before big spending destroys civilization.  Really let the GOP know they won’t have our vote this time without our man leading them.  Otherwise, they’ll just think, “Well, Romney’s kind of a business guy – that should be good enough for those, what you call ’em, libertarian people.”

Speaking of electoral strategy: you know, it might never have occurred to Ron Paul to focus on this first caucus so much had it not been for Giuliani failing to do so back in ’08.  THANKS, RUDY!

(And Rudy was briefly under consideration again in this election cycle, too, along with so many rise-and-fall GOP candidates and potential candidates that you may not even be able to remember them all.  At least the Herman Cain – remember him? – left behind this wonderful artifact, noted by Gerard Perry.)

Paleos and Catholics

But suddenly, it’s not just Paul vs. mainstream choice Romney.  

Looking Forward to 2012, Looking Back at OWS

Arguably the biggest domestic political development of 2011 was Occupy Wall Street, and it’s interesting how it manages to throw my four favorite things (at least up to this point in life) back at me in mutated form:

•Comics/genre material: V for Vendetta masks have become almost as important in reality as in the comics that spawned them.

•Alternative rock: Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel and others have serenaded Zuccotti Park – and I have tickets to see one of his now-rare concerts on Jan. 21 in the slightly classier setting of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

•Anarchic politics: Of course, to the extent OWS wants anarchism, it’s decidedly of the left-anarchist variety, but I sort of have to admire the willingness to ask fundamental questions largely shied away from since about a century ago, when anarchists were also making trouble downtown.

(I’ll have more to say in the near future about OWS guru David Graeber’s bizarre and disturbing argument in the book Debt for abolishing not just government debt, student debt, or mortgage debt but indeed all mathematical keeping of accounts whatsoever.)

•Skepticism: From the hygiene problems to the odd little shrine at Zuccotti to the refusal to outline a legislative agenda, there were signs reality has not been OWS’s highest priority – but for all my cynicism, I would not want to rule out something new and useful coming out of all this.  Surely, the carnivalesque uncertainty (and potential) was part of the appeal.

In any case, I look forward to the new year and a whole new era – and, I think, even a completely altered list of favorite things – much as I enjoyed the last twenty years of my time in NYC (having arrived just a few months after college graduation) and in this mindset.  

The more mundane key to making it a truly happy new year by my standards, though, will be keeping that Romney-vs.-Gingrich fight going so long that they exhaust each other while Ron Paul – who I think has the potential to change the world in even more fundamental ways than those contemplated by OWS – quietly scoops up all those disaffected, quasi-libertarian, and Tea Partyish votes out there and becomes the plurality voice within the GOP. 

Whatever strange, eclectic, and occasionally reprehensible motivations the Paul movement might have, the common theme for nearly all his enthusiastic fans is creating a world of voluntary interactions instead of domination by force.  I look forward to being able to talk of such things in mainstream settings – instead of just number-crunching election returns and budget tweaks and the like. 

My New Year’s resolution is to renew contact with the world (live and in person instead of just online, as you’ll soon see), including with some people I’ve neglected amidst recent hectic transformations.  Soon, I promise, things will be taken up a notch.

Rock N’ Books

Kudos to singer Kelly Clarkson for endorsing Ron Paul (and please consider taking the #JifnotP vow to vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson UNLESS the GOP nominates Ron Paul). 

By contrast, a reader of my New York Post piece on the conservative band Madison Rising e-mails to note the longstanding tie between communism and folk music and says, “Bob Dylan realized it too at a certain point when he rejected the Emergency National Civil Liberties Council, when they tried to give him an award.”

My favorite Dylan political moment, of course, remains (the subtly-extended version of) “The Times They Are A-Changin’” being used for the amazing credits sequence of Watchmen.  (And I’m surely not the only person who was reminded of the lesbian kiss in that sequence when he saw this recent-yet-historic military moment in the news.) 

Some will criticize Ron Paul for suggesting he would have tried to keep us out of WWII – but then, he likely would have kept us out of all the other horrors depicted in that credits sequence, too.  He may prove to be a history-altering figure on a par with Dr. Manhattan, so encourage Iowans to start the process by voting for him this Tuesday.

I am not, however, endorsing this Mexican cult’s musical warning about implantable Satanic microchips.   Uh, even though I admit that idea is briefly mentioned in this far catchier pro-Ron Paul rock song by Aimee Allen.

Speaking of musical conservatives, the hip Mark Gauvreau Judge (who I think has finally given up on his middle name) is turning his attention to trying to start up a documentary about the crucial commie-turned-conservative Whittaker Chambers (not associated in any way with conservative punk Angie Chambers).  A film about the author of Witness sounds like a noble project to me, even if Chambers was one of those hysterics over at National Review like the ones I blogged about yesterday who condemned Ayn Rand.  You can help Mark Judge out and say you were a witness to history in the making.

Another nice piece of history (noted by J.P. Freire): this marvelous start to a twenty-year old book review, from a time (as I vividly recall from Brown) when a lot of academic books deserved to be reviewed in this fashion. 

But it may be best to avoid reading books anyway, at least if you’re a woman frightened of having men use them as a conversation starter.  So says trollish feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte, or at least she starts off a recent rant by saying (she-splaining?):

Few things provoke a man gripped by anxious masculinity like the idea of a woman reading, at least a woman reading anything beyond patriarchal assignments in man-pleasing. As any female bookworm can attest, almost no public behavior you can perform is more likely to get men to bother you and demand to know what you’re doing than simply reading a book. It makes sense. Few behaviors signal subjectivity more than reading...

Likewise, if you are a woman holding a Rubik’s Cube and a guy says, “Hey, what’s with the Rubik’s Cube?” he is trying to oppress you.  (To Hell with this whole paranoid, power-obsessed mode of thought: Let’s try liberty instead, people, starting on Tuesday.)

#JifnotP: Please vow to vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson UNLESS the GOP nominates Ron Paul

I tweeted this message today:

As a #libertarian, I hereby vow I will vote for #Libertarian #GaryJohnson unless the #GOP nominates #RonPaul. PLEASE RT WIDELY: #JifnotP

With Gary Johnson today announcing his departure from the Republican Party presidential race and his plan to campaign for the Libertarian Party nomination, I vowed on Twitter – with the hash tag #JifnotP – that I will vote for Gary Johnson in the general election unless the Republican Party is wise enough to nominate Ron Paul as their candidate.  (Several hundred thousand more like me could actually make conservative strategists rethink their general-election plans.)

I’ve voted Republican in about half of the presidential elections in my adult lifetime and Libertarian in the other half, so I’m not a fanatic who the GOP could never count on.  I am the swing voter they may need to retain in a close election.

And they won’t this year, not without Ron Paul. 

I didn’t want it to come to this. 

•I largely put up with Bush’s wars in hopes that urgently-needed entitlement reform would also be part of the deal.

•I thought Rick Perry sounded like a plausible consensus candidate before we all saw how tongue-tied and clueless he is.

•I urged my fellow libertarians – as well as various paleoconservatives – time and again not to pick divisive fights with the neoconservatives. 

•I have called myself a fusionist, written of Ron Paul on National Review’s website in measured terms, and longed for a happy Reaganesque free-market coalition that seeks compromise on the divisive foreign-policy and religious-rhetoric issues.

And I don’t view contemplating a Johnson vote now as any sort of sabotage or disloyalty.  On the contrary, implausible as it may sound to some, I still see Ron Paul as the ultimate fusionist figure: hardcore libertarian, socially conservative, populist enough for disaffected moderates, and beloved by many left-leaning defenders of the anti-drug-war, antiwar, pro-civil-liberties variety.

More important, the financial crisis has changed the

National Review Apologizes to Ayn Rand (Remains Haunted by Libertarianism)

When people ask me “Who is Gary Johnson?” – alas – they usually don’t mean it as an Ayn Rand homage.  They just want to know who he is.  Nonetheless, I’m excited that in a few minutes he’ll live-stream his announcement of his plan to abandon his Republican run for president to run on the Libertarian Party ticket.

If the Republicans aren’t smart enough to nominate Ron Paul, libertarians will be more pissed off than usual, and it appears we’ll have a better alternative than usual.

And remember, as C-SPAN is reminding us in a series all this week, even losing presidential candidates can do a great deal to reshape political dialogue (tonight at 10pm, it’s the Barry Goldwater story).

On Christmas, though, C-SPAN aired a November 4 panel at Yale of conservatives who’d worked with William F. Buckley, asking what he might have thought of the current state of conservatism – and the specter of libertarianism loomed large during that discussion, too, I was pleased to see.  (Not that NR isn’t eclectic: moderator Linda Bridges noted colleague John Roche objecting to being called a “Disraeli Tory” and insisting he was in fact a “Catholic syndicalist.”)

•Panelist Rich Lowry, disappointingly, took pains to say he didn’t mean to imply by any libertarian-friendly comments he made that Buckley would support Rand Paul.  

•William Kristol went farther, in his weasely way, and suggested that Buckley (who only died three years ago, keep in mind) might not have been as libertarian had he come of age today, since in Kristol’s opinion people were more complacent about big, progressive government in the mid-twentieth century but now, presumably, are fully aware of the problem and thus in no urgent need of such a philosophy.

•Bridges said she thinks Buckley’s awareness of the necessity for “ordered liberty” “inoculated” Buckley against any non-Burkean form of libertarianism.

•Neal Freeman admitted National Review had no clear definition of conservatism when the magazine was young and that they were “making it up” as they went along – but he added that he or someone else of a non-doctrinaire bent responded to the seemingly absurd first talk at NR by fusionist Frank Meyer (who wanted traditionalism and libertarianism explicitly united)

USSR then, U.S. today, Ron Paul next week, Rothbard forever (despite those newsletters)

Sunday was not only Christmas, it was the twentieth anniversary of the official end of the Soviet Union (not that things are perfect in Russia nowadays).  I wish Vaclav Havel had lived long enough to mark the anniversary, but then, he was a smoker, and smoking has claimed almost as many lives as Communism (really: they’re both around 100 million; aliens would say Communism and smoking were the main ways humans killed themselves in recent centuries).

We cut an empire in the process of breaking up a little bit of slack philosophically as it adjusts to its new context.  Russia has had its moments of nationalism and paranoia as it (most likely) settles into being a capitalist and democratic nation over the long haul.  And I hope historians – not to mention voters in Iowa next week if you know any – will forgive the Ron Paul movement for being an odd blend of arch-individualists with a passion for tolerance and peace...and a few weirdo racists and border-obsessives. 

I seek unalloyed truth in philosophy, but in electoral politics, I am happy to pick the least of nine evils – and if, for instance, you want sound money and a decrease in overseas military commitments, you may as a practical matter at this juncture in history have to hold your nose and get there through a dose of nationalism.  Hell, it’s not much weirder than putting up with Obama’s socialist youth or most of the Republicans’ religious views.  Steering the big, stupid ship of state is the main thing, as the Paul-bashing neocons should be the first to understand.

•••

But what about those newsletters?

Much as I admire economist Murray Rothbard, co-founder of the contemporary libertarian movement, he was downright postmodern (perhaps my anarcho-capitalist friend Evan Isaac would say troll-like, in current Net parlance) about gleefully (but temporarily) adopting any damn philosophical/rhetorical tack that seemed like it might piss off defenders of big government, especially since hardly anyone in the broader populace was paying attention anyway.  He was almost like Foucault or Robert Anton Wilson that way.

I look forward to the press conference at which someone, perhaps Rothbard/Ron Paul associate Lew Rockwell, tries to explain how philosophical principle logically led the same group of people to ally with the Black Panthers, sympathize with the Viet Cong, co-found free-market thinktanks, and flirt with racist militias over a period of twenty years or so (any port in a storm, basically).  And I’m not saying I won’t find that hypothetical speech persuasive, either.  I’m just saying I would enjoy that press conference.  (It could happen any day now.) 

Regardless of who (possibly Rockwell) penned the racist passages in the newsletters, it’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that they seem to have occurred mainly around the time the Cold War was ending and Rothbard was fumbling around trying to create a “paleolibertarian” alliance (that is, a union of libertarians and local-tradition-defending paleoconservatives along the lines of Pat Buchanan).  And then – perhaps more tellingly – such passages seem to have stopped by 1995, the year:

(A) Rothbard died (and I do not mean for a moment to give the impression I relish his passing – I even attended the New York memorial service for him and still recall wondering whether it was in bad taste for a friend of mine to wear a Starfleet insignia pin to the event),

(B) Oklahoma City put an end to many people’s brief fascination with the “militia” movement, and

(C) I noticed the Mises Institute’s Free Market newsletter, which started coming to me in the mail around then, sticking to econ and, to my great relief, being devoid of the racist taint of some of the earlier Mises Institute material (I hadn’t then seen the really rough stuff from the earlier Ron Paul survivalist newsletters but had noticed a somewhat fishy passage or two in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, which existed roughly in between the Paul newsletters and the current version of Free Market – and so was relieved to see that, whatever those unpleasant and stupid tangents had been, the group seemed to have worked it out of their system).

Is it possible that the reason Rockwell hasn’t fallen on

Ron Paul/Rand Paul/Rush fallback plan

I still have my fingers crossed for Jan. 3's Iowa caucus – but if we must wait a few years longer...I am told Rand Paul seems to be not only a de facto anarchist but, perhaps more important, a HUGE fan of the band Rush.

Sadly, Rush told him not to use their music during his Senate campaign last year.  Amusingly, a Rush tribute band quickly stepped up to offer their services instead, but I think they were turned down.

It would be neat to someday see Rand say, "I know many of you here at my presidential inaugural gala are also fond of my father [hold for applause] and that this means some of you, like him, feared a conspiracy to create a 'North American union,' but to show that I do not blame Canada for the difficulties that globalization can sometimes bring along with its myriad blessings, tonight I'd like to break with tradition by having a non-U.S. band play at this celebration.  Ladies and gentlemen, Rush.  And now please bow down before your new master, Aqua Buddha."

P.S. Or he could at least use the prog rock band that John Huntsman briefly dropped out of high school to play in.  (Really.)

Nerd films of 2012! Lars von Trier! The end of the world (twice)! Bane capital! George Lucas vs. Newt Gingrich in space!!

A round-up of thrilling movie news, including my picks for The Sixteen Must-See Nerd Films of Next Year.  But first:

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia: I was pleased that last night’s Radio Amateur semi-open mic event (organized by Jim Melloan) featured eight solid minutes of Lars von Trier-bashing, he being the sadistic Catholic convert and Hitler-sympathizer who expects audiences to keep watching women suffer genital mutilation and various forms of psychological abuse in his pretentious films (oh, and speaking of Catholic converts, albeit non-sadistic ones in this case, do note the correction from Dawn Eden I added to yesterday’s entry). 

During last night’s show, large comedian Angry Bob declared von Trier’s recent film Melancholia the worst film he’s seen all year – and further complained that his agent wasn’t comfortable with him bashing von Trier on Twitter, since you never know if you may have to work with von Trier someday, which for Angry Bob seems...improbable, much as it would lighten the tone of von Trier’s oeuvre.

ODD CELEBRITY SIDENOTE: I saw welfare-parodying rapper Mr. EBT on the street not far from the club after I left the Radio Amateur show, or at least someone yelling to a woman that he’s Mr. EBT and that she should check out his work on Wordstar.  She did not seem as impressed as I was, but I wish him luck. 

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol: Today, of course, you can see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in theatres (I want to see it despite my ongoing one-man war against crazy chicks) and you can see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol – which, according to a friend of a friend of mine who lived in Dubai recently, I was correct to peg as lavishing extra-special attention on the Dubai Tower sequences in its teaser trailer a few months ago, since it was indeed big national news – and a vast expenditure of time and money for all involved – when the film was shot there, with de facto local government assistance.  The results are awesome and dizzying, I must admit, especially in IMAX, though I do not plan to visit any place that forbids Israelis.  I will even forgive the film its eventual descent into levitating-magnet-suit silliness. 

Dark Knight Rises teaser sequence: Less forgivable is the muffled voice of Bane in the Batman vs. Bane teaser sequence attached to the start of Mission Impossible.  And as I feared, director Christopher Nolan (perhaps the real villain here) sounds like he’s in denial about the problem.  I vow to you here and now, I will not see Dark Knight Rises unless I am assured that “the Bane problem” has truly been fixed (but for now, I will optimistically include it on the to-see list below).  A friend of mine notes the studio may have $1 billion or so riding on fixing Bane before next summer, so you’d think they’d do something about it.

By the way, in the comics, Bruce Wayne eventually had sex with and impregnated two of the three villains who appear in this film (not Bane), namely Catwoman and Talia (the former’s child growing up to be Huntress and the latter’s growing up to be the fifth Robin).  Millionaire playboys can get away with that sort of thing.  (Technically, Catwoman’s pregnancy occurs in an alternate universe, but, y’know, details.)

ONE YEAR TO GO until the day when crazy mystics think the world will end: Dec. 21, 2012 is (long calendar story short) when some believe the world will end, and though I do not believe in any supernatural claims, purely from a marketing perspective, I have long been curious what lucky big-budget Hollywood production would come out on that day, opening up neat publicity-angle potential.  I was rooting for Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle, but that series appears stalled.  

I am pleased to report that it shall be:

Crazies, Survivalists, Converts, and Exiles (and Ron Paul)

That’s me above in front of the U.N. HQ here in New York City, wearing my Ron Paul button – and the other picture is me in the free facepaint they were deploying the night before at a “Bowie Ball” downtown, so you’ll understand why some blue smudges may still be visible in the U.N. pic.  It wasn’t because I painted my face blue like in Braveheart before walking down there to shout “Freedom!”

The fading of the Gingrich boomlet means Ron Paul now leads in Iowa.  I hope he’ll win there, win the nomination, and go on to become president.  The fact that he’d do so while having much of the Republican establishment against him would only sweeten the deal – and would be a sad final contribution by that establishment before big government came to an end, with their obstructionism likely viewed by history as a last-minute abandonment of principle.

I can understand people freaking out and saying the old coot’s too weird, but then, all the other GOP candidates are also weird in various ways – and the guy in the White House regularly attended Rev. Wright’s church, you’ll recall.  People rightly condemn kookiness, but they tend to condemn only the kinds to which they are unaccustomed. 

If a political candidate comes from a background of socialistic community organizing and Ivy League postcolonial thinking, or from Texas prayer meetings, it doesn’t surprise us enough to cause alarm.  If instead he comes, in essence, from the 1970s survivalist movement, people want to summon psychiatrists, though it’s not clear that the kinds of claims survivalists made were less true than those made by those other subcultures. 

The question should be who will produce the best results in office, and by any remotely sane limited-government-oriented standard, you have to at least strongly suspect it’s Ron Paul.  He might do well to treat his weird past philosophical (and rhetorical) baggage almost as a “gradual conversion” story.  If Wright didn’t bring down Obama – amazing, when you think about it – I don’t know that Paul need be brought down by past dabbling in conspiracy theories.

In fact, given how badly mainstream conservatives have screwed up over the past few decades, maybe it’s time to let people like the Randians and Birchers back in, precisely the two factions Buckley thought most in need of exiling from the right.  How much worse could they do than, say, Bush? 

(And recall my theory stated years ago that it took a combo of craziness to make the first American Revolution possible: religiosity, populism, individual liberty, anti-monarchical conspiracy theories, etc.  If the Straussians are allowed to steer churchgoers in order to augment their power, perhaps libertarians can steer conspiracy theorists for contrary ends.  Heck, I’d vote for a UFO obsessive if I were confident he’d cut spending – and indeed I’ve just been told that Goldwater intended to release UFO files if elected.)

But as a reminder that conspiracy theories are, generally speaking, a bad thing – and as my little nod to Hanukkah – here’s a link to the final graphic novel from the legendary Will Eisner, The Plot, tracing the sad history of one the nastiest conspiracy-theory hoaxes of all time, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 

I expect that Paul is focused on the very real conspiracy – or organized criminal gang, if you will – called government, not on imaginary conspiracies like the Elders.  And so, here’s hoping Gingrich and Romney destroy each other and vault Paul to the presidency by default (and that the hackers called Anonymous don’t end up invalidating the Iowa caucuses with their reportedly-planned mischief and having the ironic effect of keeping more-authoritarian candidates in power). 

That’s all I want for Christmas – after which, if Paul sets the tone for his party, I can look forward to the day when all conservatives care more about stopping creeping socialism than about (A) honoring Malcolm Muggeridge or (B) how many troops to keep in Kurdistan, not that those are unimportant topics.  In fact, it might be best for American freedom if some cadres of professional Christians/Mormons and Jews are too distracted by the holidays to pen more denunciations of Paul in conservative publications before January 3 arrives.

I know I feel as if it’s coming up too fast for me to properly prepare.  This could be the turning point in the story of human liberty I’ve been waiting for and not really expecting to see in my lifetime.  I feel like one of those characters in a Left Behind novel – or a survivalist manual, if you will – who suddenly realizes he’s done nothing to prepare for the End Times.  Except this may be a happy new beginning.  America could use one.

•••

I don’t think 2012 will be the end of the world, but (as I noted on Twitter, where my Sunday tweets, by the way, described the Occupy event I was attending) it will be the thirtieth anniversary of Peter Kreeft’s book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley, which was inspired by

“Occupy!” last night. Rock today. Occupy Onwards tomorrow.

•Well, I think the Occupiers were less freaked out by my Ron Paul button last night than the neocons were the night before.

And I gave some advertising advice to the Occupiers last night in Brooklyn (or at least n+1-affiliated people writing about the Occupiers).  They threw a party in a loft overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge to celebrate the release of the Verso Books volume of essays Occupy! and neglected to put up a big sign noting that they were selling copies at the event for a mere $5.  That’s a steal!  I got mine.  I hope they’ll be profitable at that price.

But should we even keep track of who owes what to whom?  (Hint: yes.)

A left-anarchist anthropologist who suspects not, David Graeber (ex-Yale prof and author of Debt, that book I retrieved from polyamorists and flight attendants the other night), will be on a panel tomorrow – along with Mike “Rortybomb” Konczal, my recent drinking buddy who (rightly, I suppose) chastised me for not knowing the names of real mediation firms and who appears, by the way, to have abandoned his brief reciprocal following of my Twitter feed [UPDATE: He’s back!  You can follow him too]. 

But no matter: tomorrow at noon, I’ll attend that panel of Occupy-affiliated leftist writers, 5:15-6:15 at the Theresa Lang Auditorium, 55 W. 13th, part of a day-long discussion called Occupy Onward (starting at noon) that I’ll mostly skip.

•I very briefly bumped into a notorious ex of mine, herself a product of Yale suspicious of the cash nexus’s triumph over traditional communal ties, as I was entering the subway last night to go mingle with the Occupiers.  Then, at the party, I bumped into a friend who was almost in that same essay anthology from last year that the ex and I were in but usually writes about art (and she is a tad more conflict-averse than most of my political acquaintances).  Then, returning to Manhattan and exiting the same initial subway station, I bumped into a woman who just days earlier at dinner had told me she believes meaningful coincidences occur more frequently than can be explained by random chance.

Despite NYC constantly reminding us it’s a small world, I’m not quite convinced coincidences happen more than they ought to (people are awash in info and unconsciously sift out the few nuggets that resonate – in countless areas, from religious symbols to science data), though I confess I remember believing that in childhood. 

Indeed, I remember seeing (hearing?) the first album I ever bought, Synchronicity, as musical confirmation of the concept (popularized by Jung).  Within a year, I would no longer believe in supernatural or paranormal claims of any kind – but I STILL BELIEVE IN ROCK N’ ROLL, and so, let us devote the rest of this entry (in what I vaguely recall was supposed to be a “Week of Rock”) to some great music links:

Atheists, Asperger’s Cases, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Other “Crazy” People

I.  Christopher Hitchens, fellow atheist, died last night around the time I was:

(A) talking to economist Bryan Caplan and others about whether a religious person – or indeed anyone at all – qualifies as mentally ill (likely encountering more than one Asperger’s case over the course of the evening, itself an ambiguous diagnosis from a moderate-Szaszian perspective – the evening began at an event about the collapse of the Euro and ended at a dinner full of libertarians, after all)

(B) hoping to find a place to crash this weekend in NYC for a visiting Catholic friend (especially if among her fellow Catholics – but let me know if you’re feeling hospitable regardless)

(C) preparing to host at my own place another friend who wasn’t religious the last time I saw him but, absent my guidance since that time, has now decided he’s a Christian (and is already posting his regrets online about Hitchens not seeing the light, etc.).

The above is not a multiple choice quiz, by the way.  I mean I was doing all these things – and in between was retrieving from a cabal of polyamorists and flight attendants a copy I had misplaced of the book Debt by money-abolishing left-anarchist David Graeber, which will help me prepare not only for a book club in which I’m supposed to participate but for the n+1 party tonight at Verso Books’ loft for the release of the book Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America.

II.  But to get back to the crazy crazy people for a moment:

I have known a couple flat-out schizophrenics, mourned a grandmother with Alzheimer’s, and in general think the brain is just as prone to severe dysfunction as, say, a kneecap – but I will admit that the term “crazy” can be applied over-broadly.  Caplan leans toward the Szaszian view that most insanity is merely socially-disapproved eccentricity that shows the “insane” person has highly unusual preferences (like deciding to wear a Ron Paul button to an econ event where I was seated with diplomats, a Council on Foreign Relations guy, and Commentary editors – all of them quite likable – to return to last night for a moment). 

Nearly a decade ago, Caplan noted his disagreement with the moderately anti-Szaszian essay I wrote for ACSH about whether insanity exists and whether smoking is truly an addiction (regardless of that question, it’s truly the leading preventable cause of death, so you’re at least an idiot, in the conventional sense, if you don’t quit, and I am quietly steeling myself to mourn you an average of a decade earlier than my non-smoking friends).

Ironically, though, I’ll be in trouble if I convince Caplan that he is himself crazy, since Jacob Levy apparently declared him very mentally similar to me years ago when they were at Princeton.  I had forgotten that...but Caplan sort of reminds me of Levy.  Blind leading the blind, maybe.

III.  But the people noted above are mostly males (not coincidentally, I’d say), and in a few days American moviegoers will be in love...with a crazy chick.

Lisbeth Salander, the main character of the thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is a reminder that people can seem crazy while being products of

Seavey on Madison Rising in NYPost (plus NR vs. Ron Paul)

•Welcome, Post readers (if any).  I must begin by saying I was selling Alex Bodnar short by calling him merely “bass player” in my article today in New York Post about the conservative rock band he’s in, Madison Rising.  He is a guitarist who also plays the bass – and I mean no insult to bass players by apologizing for that oversight.  (If you want a commemorative hard copy, it’s the issue with the headline “ELEVATOR DEATH TRAP” on the front page.)

•The members of Madison Rising reflect a fairly easy-going consensus form of conservatism, honoring troops without disliking Ron Paul, respecting core moral values without harping on religion.  This big-tent approach is something they could learn from over at National Review. 

I notice that NR, in their board editorial warning Republican voters away from Newt Gingrich in surprisingly harsh terms, also took a brief, tangential swipe at Ron Paul, saying he’s returned to “vile” 9/11 conspiracy theories and proven in the process that they are the very essence of his philosophy.

BULLSHIT, NR. 

Just for starters, Paul’s references to the 9/11 attackers likely being angry over U.S. military intervention in the Middle East is itself evidence he doesn’t think they were dispatched from DC, if that’s what you’re implying – and if that is what you’re implying without saying so, that’s almost as irresponsible as the conspiracy theorists themselves using weasel language like “whoever attacked on 9/11.” 

Look, I wish Paul were a bit more hawkish myself – you may remember me saying so even as I praised him in an article on the National Review website during his previous presidential campaign – but when you (and by you I likely mean Lowry in the case of this unsigned collective editorial) stoop to the level of saying that merely criticizing the “glee” (admittedly a poor word choice) of the Bush-hawks in having a rationale for open-ended war is the same thing as peddling 9/11 conspiracy theories – and I assume it’s the “glee” comment by Paul that elicited NR’s accusation of “vile”-conspiracy-theory-mongering – you’re getting very close to saying that anyone who wants war to be rare or limited is some kind of schizophrenic or UFO nut. 

Unsurprising, perhaps, given the vehemence with which Lowry (challenged by Tim Carney) defended NR’s cover-story denunciation of antiwar conservatives as “un-American” (not that the guy who wrote that story, David Frum, is in such good standing with the right himself these days – and I’ll waste no pity on him, as all of these people are starting to get on my nerves; perhaps some Bush administration hawk should write a frank memoir about welcoming the open-ended military intervention 9/11 offered and call it Things Related and Unrelated – Google it if necessary).

•Again, I wish Paul were a tad more hawkish myself, but with his possible victory in the Iowa caucus on January 3 the closest shot the world has ever had to rolling back big government – at the time when we most need to put our fiscal house in order – it is monomaniacal to insist on hawkishness-or-disqualification from Paul, who is essentially the only Republican candidate perfect on every other issue by NR’s own presumed standards (and unlike Romney et al you know he means it). 

I will ask now, as I asked four years ago on NR’s website,