Retro-Journal: End of an Era, Early 1989

This week, in 2007, I’ve just seen a Marxist acquaintance argue in a debate that the government knew in advance about 9/11 — and I’ve seen the New York Times print a notice about the fact that a letter they had run contained plagiarized material — by a plagiarist who is a student at Brown University and had also plagiarized material for his Brown Daily Herald column, from sources including Foreign Affairs. All this turns my mind to events of eighteen years past…

I was in a mood to take a meta-level view of things as the second half of sophomore year started in early 1989: Reagan was leaving office; the Cold War (though not quite yet the Communist bloc) had officially ended during his administration; and I had been reading things like Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach (about recursion, which reminded me of the Escher-like Doctor Who story “Castrovalva,” about a town that loops back upon itself), a tiny sample of Ayn Rand (not yet enough to be effective), and various comic books that in one way or another stepped back and asked in a metafictional way whether superheroic conventions made sense: Ambush Bug, Zot!, Marshal Law, and, not long before that, Watchmen. Somehow, though, the big questions, about which systems made sense and how to frame our views about the good things in life, instead of leaving me thinking like a self-doubting liberal or a deconstructionist, left me thinking a bit more like…a Viking, or perhaps an Egyptian pharaoh, in the following limited sense.

If minimizing human suffering or maximizing human happiness (not quite the same thing, but we’ll leave that aside) is the proper goal of moral and political rules, might not utility have a tendency to become self-defeating by spreading an ethos of risk-aversion and constant efforts to ameliorate suffering instead of daring to do great, even reckless things, sometimes causing harm but occasionally hitting new heights that would redound to the benefit of all humanity in the long run? That is to say — though I had no desire to see people raided like the victims of the Vikings or enslaved like the builders of the pyramids — might there be a danger that an ethos that decreed that every action must be suffering-minimizing would lead, as Nietzsche feared, to a cowardly society in which no noble soul felt comfortable saying, “The hell with all of you — I’m going to go pursue this heroic project whether the rest of you like it or not, indeed, even if it upsets the rest of you, simply because I think it’s great”?

In a world where everyone felt obliged to become, say, a social worker, would anyone become a Shakespeare, a daredevil, or a loner scientist? What social/moral formula could harness our ability to decrease suffering while still affording enough freedom to let each person pursue his own vision of happiness — or even misery-making greatness? These didn’t quite seem like questions appropriate for Brown, where even English classes often revolved around the question “What about the poor?” — while here I was, wondering “What about the great?”

Fortunately, I was in a class on existentialism that semester that heavily emphasized Nietzsche — taught by Rex Welshon, who’d been the T.A. in that Martha Nussbaum class the previous semester in which my comedy-writing comrade Andrew Clateman had leapt out the window. I enjoyed the class, even if I thought it a bit poseur-ish for Welshon to throw in references to the Sex Pistols’ nihilism, the beatniks, and Ayn Rand (calling her “an intellectual charlatan” for so blatantly ripping off Nietzsche — “anti-life” and all — and pretending to have no influences but Aristotle). Eighteen years later, though, who am I to criticize someone for throwing in references to the Sex Pistols and Ayn Rand?

(The class had the odd side effect of leading, without me having any conscious intent to be ironic and certainly no perceived hope back then of looking hip, to me standing, quite alone and no doubt nervous-looking, in the middle of the floor at a great little alternative-rock-friendly Providence concert space called the Living Room, the day after April Fool’s 1989, prior to a Fixx concert, rapidly reading the seemingly interminable and largely pointless existentialist classic Being and Nothingness by Sartre, worried that I wouldn’t finish it in time for class. Walking nearly-abandoned streets, past the silent Rhode Island state capitol and a couple ominous warehouses, to get to that venue at ungodly hours, often to hear bands few other people cared about, was good practice for being a New Yorker two years later. And yes, that’s the fifth Fixx video I’ve linked to on this blog, which shows great restraint on my part, I think.)

I should note that much as I admired his individualistic, system-smashing spirit, I was never tempted to embrace Nietzsche’s relativism — the universe exists and, as science shows, can be understood as an objective phenomenon, independent of and largely indifferent to human perceptions, as I suggested in one of my Brown Daily Herald columns that semester, entitled “I’m OK, You’re a Relativist.”

—–

My sophomore roommate Marc Steiner (who, despite technically sharing more of Brown’s politics than I did, was getting tired of the place and would decide to spend the next school year at Pomona as an escape) and I had entered the campus leftist magazine The RAKE’s contest to invent an explanation for what their traditionally capitalized title actually stood for. Marc and I won with “Radical Alliance for Knowledge and Empowerment,” though we’d suggested several far sillier ones, including “Radicals, Anarchists, Kibitzers, Etc.” — my main incentive for entering being the prize, lunch with the RAKE staff, which included cute Argentine left-winger Astrid Wessels. She didn’t show up, but I had lunch with four RAKE staffers who explained their vision for social democracy to me, and when I asked how anything as unpopular with the majority of voters as comic books or a highly experimental new machine would win approval if everything had to be voted on, they assured me that inventors could simply take their inventions before a national TV audience who might then vote funding for it up or down electronically. This lunch was the first time I started to view naive leftists with something akin to pity. I certainly didn’t see them as monsters.

Two rooms in my dorm provided a tidy little reminder that people can be radically opposed in some ways and kindred spirits in others: on my hall, just one door away, was the dorm room of Dave Whitney, a political moderate who would go on to become a general manager of the radio station WBRU, an architect, a libertarian, a Republican, an Episcopalian, a father of two, and a pillar of his community, fond of rock n’ roll but also of nice ties and dress shirts and not very happy about drug use on campus. In the room directly below him, by contrast, was Noel Rabinowitz, who would go on to become the communications technology organizer for the Communist Party USA. As could easily be seen from outside the dorm, each of them had, by sheer coincidence, put a big, red Soviet flag up on his wall, Dave’s exactly one floor above Noel’s, in pretty much the same spot on the analogous wall. But Dave’s was there because he went on an awesome vacation to Russia, while Noel’s was there because he was a Communist.

Tension between Dave and his roommate, Kenji, may have been a more relevant foretaste of conflicts to come within American popular culture, though: Dave loved alternative rock and was playing a long-sought vinyl classic in his room one day when, to his great alarm, Kenji slapped his hand down on the record and began moving it back and forth under the needle, producing rhythmic screeching. “What the hell are you doing?!” demanded Dave, to which a startled Kenji replied, “Oh! You mean…you don’t scratch?”

Never did I imagine then that within a few years, not only would the Soviet Union be history but so too would the walls between rap, metal, and punk.

On a related note, in a surprisingly prescient journal entry near the end of the semester, I noted that one reason the New Wave fading away was so disappointing was that I’d always believed, as the futurist aesthetics of New Wave videos encouraged, that the world of tomorrow would be ever more New Wave-like, but with New Wave fast becoming an obsolete, hackneyed “80s thing,” that now seemed unlikely. (For the next decade and a half, though — until the spread of electro-clash and cheap fluorescent hair dyes and cyborg-like personal electronic devices and goth-chick bartenders — I would never entirely let the flame of hope die within my heart, as friends can attest.)

—–

Earlier in the semester, I started getting the occasional phonecall — in a pattern that I am pleased to say lasts to this day — from Dan Greenberg (now an Arkansas state representative), who had founded Brown’s libertarian/conservative magazine, the Spectator. Dan was a bit disappointed to hear that at that time I still thought of myself as more the creative than the political type and wasn’t interested in trying to take over the Spectator — I was too busy trying to figure out how to do a good job as the new editor of the Film Bulletin, with some of its best writers, including former editor David Kamp, graduating.

Dan Greenberg had graduated the previous year but continued to follow campus politics a bit via a Brown Daily Herald subscription, something he fully admitted might show an unhealthy obsession, but things were slow in Bowling Green, OH, where he was editing the libertarian-friendly journal Social Philosophy & Policy. Dan liked my columns, but seemed alarmed that I hadn’t read some of the most prominent political philosophers (I was then still focused on the just-plain philosophers). He recommended writers like Robert Nozick and John Rawls (I at first thought he meant the jazz musician Lou Rawls) — but also various comic books, including old issues of The Spirit. And in that strange time before the Internet, an important communal bond was formed, across states, between two people who would never go on to live in the same city, despite their paths crossing frequently.

Dan said he’d considered giving the Spectator the title Voice of Reason when he founded it — the same name I’d subsequently given my Brown Daily Herald column — but his father, conservative columnist Paul Greenberg, convinced him it sounded too arrogant. Paul Greenberg would most famously coin [CORRECTION: popularize] the name “Slick Willie” for a prominent Arkansas politician, one not yet part of this narrative.

—–

It was encouraging to encounter other minds who’d reached what I was increasingly inclined to think of as not only conservative but specifically libertarian conclusions — especially minds who shared my (then far less popular) opinion that the left was a greater threat to freedom of thought and expression than the right.

The idea of campuses as “politically correct” was not in vogue quite yet, but the phenomenon was already quite real. I recall the idea that “every man is a potential rapist” being popular on campus at the time, and an angry anti-rape activist named Naomi Sachs confronted and denounced me for simply writing a column in which I noted that activists’ stats suggesting (a) that 1/3 of women had been raped and (b) that black women were three times as likely to have been raped as the general populace were a bit hard to believe, since that would imply that about 100% of black women had been raped. I told Sachs I wasn’t dismissing the issue of rape — nor even saying the stats had to be wrong — just pointing out the credulity-straining logic of some of the stats being carelessly thrown around, to which she replied “It has nothing to do with logic!” and stormed away.

(This was also a valuable early lesson in the abuse of statistics by activists — the oft-repeated one-in-three stat, which probably created a great deal of anxiety in young women across America and no doubt subtly altered some people’s social lives for the worse, was based on a self-selected survey in which “rape” was defined so broadly as to include having sex due to “emotional pressure.” Doesn’t almost all sex in some sense involve emotional pressure? Another lesson in the importance of putting the left’s numbers in context came from my reading around that time about the work of Dr. Bruce Ames, who’d been much-lauded early in his career for pointing out manmade carcinogens in food but seemed to be attracting less attention now that he was attempting to put those carcinogens in context — by pointing out that nature itself puts carcinogens literally thousands of times more powerful in food, even in the purest and most organic of broccoli, without humans suffering any ill effects, making the regulatory crusade against the weaker manmade carcinogens absurd. The left’s — and the press’s — perfect willingness to drop context on such issues, all the while masquerading as the defenders of science, would bother me for the next twelve years, until I finally got a job fighting back. The most important overlooked story back in 1989, though, was that nearly everything the left says about economics, even more so than culture or science, is based on strategic context-dropping — and shortly, the world and I would get a very loud wake-up call about that.)

I couldn’t help noticing continual examples of the left, out of over-sensitivity and cowardice, being on the wrong side in struggles over free speech and free thought — examples never much emphasized in the news, such as when a fatwa was issued against the brave British satirist Salman Rushdie and the thoroughly progressive Canadian government responded by considering banning his book as “hate propaganda” against Islam.

In retrospect, that was a small sample of much greater troubles to come, but my attention was on other troubles that, fortunately, seemed to be winding down: Nicaragua’s communist dictator, Daniel Ortega, had finally promised free elections, and the Soviets were pulling out of Afghanistan. The Soviet mindset was still going strong at Brown, though, where a slight increase in the number of business majors was declared by Dean Blumstein, according to an interview with her, to be “an unfortunate reflection of our society and its values.” (Would that I had been a business major — I might now have enough money to make withholding donations to Brown mean something.) Worse, a literature professor named Duncan Smith — campus director of Phi Beta Kappa — went so far as to publish an essay about what a great relief it was to exit West Berlin and enter East Berlin, since the communist-controlled part of the city was so mercifully free of advertising and the oppressive presence of commerce.

It’s hard to believe American academics/leftists thought that way such a short time ago — as some still do, of course — but within months it would become obvious (even if they have still never fully admitted it) that history was not on their side.

This Week's Bouts!

No time for analysis! Must fight!!

•••Tonight’s 9/11 did-government-know debate, with Sander Hicks vs. Karol Sheinin (I’m goin’ — heck, I’m hostin’)
•••Video of Rev. Jen vs. Katherine Taylor from one of our prior debates — complete with me asking a vocal 9/11 activist to leave [UPDATE 11/8/07: But last night went smoothly, so no complaints] — is not, alas, easily found online, though Nick Zedd was shooting some footage, so here’s that clip of Bill Maher bouncing hecklers instead
•••Right vs. left over the Constitution, as explained by Richard Epstein, Thursday at 6 at Union Club (I didn’t have an erotic dream involving him and Tiffany Amber-Thiessen like one unnamed friend of mine did, but nonetheless I’m goin’!)
•••Good kaiju vs. evil kaiju, this Friday at 8 at Warsaw on Driggs Ave. (I’m goin’!)
•••Ron Paul vs. one-day online fundraising records, broken on the Fifth of November (meaning he symbolically inherits the anarchist mantle of V from V for Vendetta, who wears a mask of Guy Fawkes, associated with that day — as did I when I led that anarcho-capitalist counter-protest, as can be seen particularly well in an additional article about it; that’s Ali Kokmen in the V mask with shades on it, and you can see me at least holding one)
•••Club for Growth vs. Ron Paul (their verdict — he’s too cool!)
•••Libertarians Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson vs. Hayek-insulting money-distributor, geek, and U.N. suck-up Jeffrey Sachs at the Gotham Club, Saturday at 3 (the time-wasting BBC once invited me to question Sachs by attending a speech he gave, without ever calling on me when the time came — nonetheless, I’m goin’!)
•••Joe Strummer vs. musical convention (as seen in a documentary about him and the Clash showing at IFC — for instance, at 7:15 Saturday; I’m goin’!)
•••The triangulator vs. the flip-flopper (my fear of what might lie ahead if Hillary faces Romney in the general election next year, if he continues to do better than Giuliani in early-primary states)!
•••The state vs. religion (pitting them against each other to create stalemate and some possibility of freedom is a tactic about 2,000 years old in the West, and one I suppose fusionists like me, exhausting as it is to steer the culture single-handedly, have hoped to use in wielding the religious right as the biggest available weapon against the traditionally Democrat-driven welfare state, but I admit, for those concerned, that the tactic is no longer working smoothly, though not exactly for the reasons you might think — not so much because we are in real danger of utterly marginal figures like the Christian Reconstructionists taking over the bland and faithless federal government but [a] because the social right has lost interest in budget-cutting [though even my liberal-libertarian friend Jacob Levy admits that the most gung-ho budget-cutters are often, like Sen. Tom Coburn, also the gung-ho theists, mostly to the public's benefit] and [b] because the Democrats are turning to faith now, too, without necessarily losing their interest in the welfare state — and my fellow Phillips Foundation Fellow, Democrat Mark Stricherz, has just written a book, Why the Democrats Are Blue, saying he’s all for a more faith-fueled donkey party)
•••Julie Jargon vs. Jennifer 8. Lee (on a more scientific note, I just wanted to note the delightful name of Wall Street Journal’s new health reporter and the Borg-like name, apparently considered good luck by the Chinese, of one New York Times reporter, apparently quite the party-thrower down there in DC — though my favorite pseudonyms remain Voltaire and Groucho, so I keep trying in vain to convince friends of mine who plan to have kids to use those names for them)
•••USSR vs. U.S. — an Israeli couple I know, now living in Geneva, once observed that both countries, ironically, had some of the same problems of trying to forge coherent policies with an impossibly large population with divergent tastes, which is probably true to some extent (but the U.S. is still here — while I’ll write a little about the final days of the USSR in this coming Friday’s latest Retro-Journal entry — be there! There! There!)
•••Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman (If we must have a comedian in office, and perhaps we don’t, couldn’t it be the far funnier Stephen Colbert? I’m pleased talk of him running as a Libertarian — just in South Carolina — seems to have gone nowhere, though, since I think the time for Howard Stern-for-governor publicity stunts has passed, it being Ron Paul-for-President time, which is far more serious)

The Pagan Kennedy (et al) Guide to CONQUERING ALL MEDIA (plus 9/11 debate reminder)

Tonight at 6:30, Pagan Kennedy reads at the Mid-Manhattan Library (40th and Fifth) from her book The First Man-Made Man (which was winner of the prestigious ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month for April 2007), about the first woman to become a man through surgery.

As I’ve alluded to before, Pagan has written nine books (ranging from pop culture analysis to novels to history), articles for numerous (especially Boston-based) publications, and in the early days, ’zines (which were sort of like blogs but made from dead trees because Pagan hates the Earth — I jest) — all of which should make those of us who have yet to finish writing one book question why we bother even getting up in the morning, but I will instead look upon her as an inspiration. Or as another, more business-oriented, writer friend of mine, Charis Warchal, once eloquently put it: “Bitch can write.” Indeed. Indeed. (Those troubled by the gender implications of that formulation should come join tonight’s discussion about sex changes and cultural norms.)

I know serious writers are supposed to be awed by quality, not sheer output — and Pagan’s got both — but now’s as good a time as any for me to confess that I’m somewhat envious of and awed by people who crank out a ton of stuff, and I don’t just mean a classy, highbrow book every two years or so, as in Pagan’s case, but even unabashed hacks who pour forth highly-redundant novels. Take Michael Moorcock, the British “New Wave” sci-fi novelist, who was a big influence on various things I like, from The Adventures of Luther Arkwright to Grant Morrison to Buckaroo Banzai — yet whose own stuff often reads like he whipped it off at the rate of twenty pages a day while on speed after reading some Conan stories and listening to Pink Floyd.

Yet instead of dismissing him, I find myself admiring the audacity of the tricks he comes up with for making even redundant stuff look like “I meant to do that.” In particular, he uses the device of a multiverse — multiple similar universes — to explain the great similarity of many of his protagonists (the Eternal Champion!), turning a potential weakness into a strength (he even dares to compare this hacky practice to Renaissance Italian Commedia dell’arte, with its recurring characters — the cheeky bastard!), and (fittingly) he inspires imitators in the process. The result is that he has dozens and dozens of novels, sometimes reprinted with character names altered to make them fit together better continuity-wise, often kept in print through the efforts of obscure, impoverished little publishing companies — but kept in print, one way or another, bless him (spreading a bit of left-anarchist philosophy in the process, too, which just makes it seem all the more like a subversive, underground plot, as befits the Fifth of November, especially coming from a Brit).

And from William Hazlitt (one of several awe-inspiring writers of old, ranging madly over numerous topics in their careers, about whom I wrote encyclopedia entries for a Facts on File project a few years ago) to Gersh Kuntzman to Christopher Hitchens, I have to admire the people who keep churning it out, often in widely varying forms and media (witness Gersh’s play about SUVs, complete with singing crash test dummy). You only live once, and the ultimate deadline looms ever closer.

Let me also add, without deviating from my mission to be a neutral debate host, that even when I am diametrically opposed to his political positions, I have to admire Sander Hicks for making them known via newspapers, TV broadcasts, plays, bootstrapped publishing companies, and even his punk (?) music performances — so come see him debate Karol Sheinin this Wednesday about 9/11 even if, say, you think one or both of them is an offense against reason. (I’ll be there to make everything OK, as I always do.)

None of this should be taken to mean that Pagan is a hack, by the way — far from it — but that, too, you can see for yourselves this week — tonight in fact, so come by the Mid-Manhattan Library (40th and Fifth) at 6:30.

P.S. Speaking of inspired hackwork, I notice that my Earthlink start page, due to a fortunate typo, contained a news item this morning with the following delightful headline:

Teary Goodbye for Space Station Astronautaaaa

The Scott Nybakken Guide to CONQUERING ALL MEDIA

I stopped reading comics about a year ago and have almost entirely resisted reading about them online for the past half-year (you know, ever since DC unveiled the fifty-two new universes and Darkseid, Monarch, and the Monitors started fighting for control of them — or so I hear on the street, not that I, y’know, care or anything) — and I shall continue to resist, at least until Grant Morrison’s miniseries-to-end-all-miniseries, Final Crisis, comes out in mid-2008 (and maybe even then).

However, when one of my best friends is interviewed by the site TelevisionWithoutPity about the increasing popularity of comics-derived stories in other media, such as the TV show Heroes, and what it all means not only for the comics industry and for Hollywood but for the trend toward multimedia in general — and thus for the very destiny of humanity — the least I can do is link to it.  And Scott’s not just smart, he’s funny, as many of the people reading this already know (but I, too, thought he was serious when, in the interview, he mentions the comic book adaptation of Ken Burns’ Civil War — it could happen, branding issues with Marvel notwithstanding).

Scott’s employers have also launched an online comics imprint called Zuda recently, and as Chuck Blake says, comics companies in general had better get with the program and start selling their wares (especially back issues) online if they hope to avoid simply getting their profits pirated away by the ever-increasing ease of bootleg-downloading of images and everything else.  As the folks at Reason.TV seem to understand, we’re not just entering a period when each TV show has a website or most movies have novelizations but when people (especially the young) will become more and more indifferent to which medium they’re getting their latest dose of a given story/artist/phenomenon from — and indeed will expect to be able to switch back and forth between them with unthinking ease.  Spider-Man isn’t just on paper, he’s on TV and in the theatre and on your phone and even in your fridge eating all your foods, or so the kids these days tell me.

Then again: I used to devour printed Zot! comics eagerly, but after a couple years, I still haven’t gotten around to reading the online version, even though I just posted the link right there.  I still have some habitual attachment to paper, apparently, but the rising generation won’t, you mark my words!  Mark my woooooooooorrrrrrrrds — !!

P.S. Scott’s also fleecing hippies by selling his original artwork from the production of a legendary video for the band Phish, “Esther,” so by all means place an order before all the other fans come down from their highs and snatch up the good stuff.

P.P.S. For only a few hundred million dollars, I’d be willing to produce a sci-fi rock opera based on the songs of the Fixx, tentatively called Built for the Future (hey, I wrote a few Justice League comic books — how much harder could it be, especially in this multimedia era?), and if that happens someday, I will also have a site that sells original artwork.  Until then, buy Scott’s stuff.

Retro-Journal: Ron Paul for President -- in 1988 (plus P.J. O'Rourke and more)

I saw presidential candidate Ron Paul on a talk show — and was very skeptical.

It was July of 1988, and Ron Paul, then running as the Libertarian Party candidate, appeared on The Morton Downey, Jr. Show, an almost self-parodic harbinger of shoutfest shows to come, complete with a microphone stand referred to as “The Loudmouth,” decorated with a big, bellowing mouth-symbol, for use by audience members with questions. Ron Paul’s desire to legalize drugs met with howls of objection from audience members and from the host, the gangsterish Downey. However, my friend Paul Taylor — who, like me, was home in Norwich, CT on vacation after our first year of college — surprised me by agreeing with the libertarian position, arguing that voluntary means for coping with problems like drug addiction existed (rehab centers and the like) and that legalization would eliminate the incentive to create black-market drug gangs, which are a far more pernicious influence on society than drug use itself.

Influenced by philosophy professor David Schmidtz, from whom he took a class at Yale, my friend was ahead of me in accepting libertarian reasoning, though as an atheist moderate-conservative of a skeptical bent, I was ripe for recruitment. It would take another year for me to be fully convinced, though. Before that (as noted in my prior Retro-Journal entry), I would vote (in November 1988) for George H.W. Bush, who would make neocon icon William Bennett his drug czar and wave a baggie of (fake) crack on TV to underscore the menace of drugs.

I wouldn’t be a Bush loyalist for very long, though. Precisely as horrified neoconservatives would predict, my reading of Machiavelli over the 1988 summer vacation had made me a bit more comfortable viewing government as a product of competing interests and selfish, quasi-economic calculations instead of some pseudo-divine, absolutist enforcer of That Which Is Good and regulator of That Which Is Bad (and, after all, if you really think the state should subsidize all good things and suppress all bad things, you’re essentially a totalitarian, no matter how benign). That same summer I had also read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land — primed by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to accept its depiction of bureaucracy and intolerance as absurd yet omnipresent phenomena — and saw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the first time.

—–

Back in 1988, Brown didn’t quite have a David Schmidtz to mold my suspicions about government into a philosophy (though it had a freshman named Bobby Jindal, who would take market-oriented ideas all the way to the governor’s office in Louisiana nineteen years later, by which time libertarian John Tomasi — who I was lucky enough to hear speak in New York City recently — would be one of Brown’s most popular professors, teaching freshmen a balanced intro-to-political-theories course).

As a sophomore, though, I was still more concerned with cultural than with economic issues anyway — and the religion-tinged harangues about the state of the culture that came to define the right in some people’s minds were not even noticed by me then (I was so comfortably anti-religion that I didn’t even take religion seriously as a political or cultural force — not intending to live in the boonies with hillbillies or inbred mental defectives, I assumed religion would not really be a factor in my world, so political leaders paying it occasional lip service was of no consequence). Rather, my view of the culture was inspired by things like the writing of Tom Wolfe — criticizing some of the same stupid aspects of the culture that annoyed me, such as the unmitigated narcissism of New Age spirituality and the dangerous impulse to treat radicalism as chic.

I agreed with Paul Taylor, though, that utilitarianism, the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people — and not some arbitrary metaphysical standard, nor a parochial cultural allegiance — was the proper, humane way to gauge the value of human actions and public policies. That fundamental view hasn’t changed since.

I not only wrestled with these issues in philosophy class (next school year I’d become a double major in English and philosophy, with a plan coalescing to write about political and philosophical issues in some capacity after graduation) and in the dorm room I shared with environmentally-inclined Washington-stater Marc Steiner (the room tragically sandwiched in a no-man’s-land between two fraternities due to our lousy housing lottery number) but also in a roughly biweekly Brown Daily Herald column called “Voice of Reason.” My first editor wore a USSR shirt as he gave me instructions on how to turn in my work, the Soviet Union then being, for just a little while longer, a going concern and one still widely believed to be the future (I recall one student even having a jacket emblazoned with map-silhouettes of the U.S. and USSR, labeled “SLAVERY” and “FREEDOM” in that order). The column would make me something of a campus celebrity over the next three years and train me to expect most public reaction to my work to be negative.

—–

That’s not to say there wasn’t any normal college fun, like my depressive but funny and philosophical friend Dan Shuster demonstrating the ease with which one could glide across the floor of the cafeteria on a chair by placing small sections of banana peel under its legs…or Brown-spawned radio station WBRU going to an all alternative rock format (the first professional station in the country to do so, during a glorious, fertile period after New Wave but before grunge, when somewhat subtler — and for the most part, at that time, more obscure — alt-rock bands like R.E.M. and Crowded House and the Smiths and the Hoodoo Gurus and Violent Femmes reigned)…or the movies I got into free by being part of Brown Film Society, essentially absorbing a decent education in the history of film as a mere side effect of wanting to write comedy for their publication, the Film Bulletin, which in the late 80s had on its tiny staff such future luminaries as David Kamp (now of Vanity Fair), Gersh Kuntzman (New York newspaper editor and columnist), Hayes “Beers” Jackson (now an actual, working sitcom writer in L.A.), Andrew Corsello (now of GQ), and Scott Nybakken (now of DC Comics).

Primed by Tom Wolfe and comedy-writing, I was delighted to hear a P.J. O’Rourke speech on campus that semester (he being both a National Lampoon veteran and rising political satirist), and I never would have known about him or the speech had it not been for the self-defeating posters put up around campus by angry leftists, featuring excerpts of his work and asking “Is This Funny?” — to which the only reasonable answer was, “Say, this guy is pretty funny.”

Comedy was an important tool of rebellion at a resolutely politically-correct college, and it took some serious artistic integrity to keep making breast jokes in the Bulletin when even many of the staff members worried about the partriarchal impact that doing so might have on society (I worried more about the fact that few people liked my short-lived Brown Daily Herald comic strip about philosophy, Craven and Bogus, which would be gently canceled by Herald comics editor Joan Hilty, now at DC Comics, the next semester — but Dave Burrowes, a guy who always dressed like the Grim Reaper and was nicknamed “Death” on campus, liked the one I did about him enough to tape it up on his door, so that’s something anyway).

Some of the most artful college pranks ever to touch my life took place at the start of that sophomore year, so I will commemorate them here.

—–

•A student named Bob had a phenomenal ability to remember names and would deliberately memorize the names of people he’d barely met in order to confuse them later by acting as if he knew them well. When they actually knew him too well to be taken aback by that, he’d resort to tricks like concealing himself and repeatedly calling someone’s name, knowing that he was good enough at throwing his voice that the target would never be able to locate him (I was introduced to that tactic when my friend Jonny Skye, the Oregonian relativist, stoically maintained eye contact with me and kept saying “Ignore it” with repressed anger when her name repeatedly echoed across one dorm courtyard from no easily-discernible direction).

But his coup de grace, which I was privileged to observe as I walked through the Van Wickle Gates onto Brown’s main green one day, was noticing two students — each walking down one of the pathways that met in a V at the Gates, neither of them recognizing him or each other — and, as he passed them at the intersection of the V, doing a split-second introduction of the two (“Doug — Mary; Mary — Doug,” or whatever the hell their names were) and leaving the two of them standing there, staring at each other, and fumbling in vain to remember or understand — while Bob, if that was his real name, quickly but casually strode on up the green. (If I ever find out the two went on to date, this officially becomes the greatest story ever told.)

•A far more ambitious comedic stunt was undertaken that same semester by the campus TV station, BTV, which sent a few of its staffers to take a tour of Princeton, videotaping it as if for tourist/prospective student purposes, pretending all the while not to know each other, while asking the tour guide such inane questions as “And do you know how tall Jonathan Edwards was?” One member of the tour, as if in sudden panic, shouted “I’m not smart enough! I’ll never get in here!” and raced away across the Princeton campus, never to return, while his comrades, continuing to chat with the tour guide, deadpanned spontaneous reactions about how that guy must be really insecure.

•Andrew Clateman (the Film Bulletin writer and fan of the Marx Brothers, Dada, and deconstructionism, noted in my previous Retro-Journal entry) found himself bored to distraction in a section of Prof. Martha Nussbaum’s Nietzsche class, led by a grim-sounding T.A. named Rex Welshon. Andrew stood up, demanded to know who in the class would dare follow him in rejecting the constraints of system and society — as Nietzsche would desire! — then leapt out of the classroom window (subsequently dropping the class). Andrew was later told that after a stunned pause, Welshon said, “He may be the only one here who really understands Nietzsche.”

This would not be the last time Nietzsche would influence my college days, and something of his bombastic, giddily combative tone would creep into my writing — as it had into Mencken’s, in turn influencing O’Rourke — despite Bulletineer Laura Braunstein’s gentle warning that my columns sometimes sounded arrogant. (Similar concerns would be expressed that semester by Rhoda Flaxman, instructor of the training class for writing tutors I was taking — and the same professor, ironically, whose class the previous year had introduced me to Jonathan Swift, greatly influencing my satirical tone as a columnist and thus the rest of my life.) In a related dilemma, but one with implications far deeper than mere choice of writing style, I would soon struggle with the question of how one reconciles a Nietzschean love of unfettered individual freedom with the hyper-rationalistic, calculating mindset necessary for being a good utilitarian. Stay tuned…

Scary: Doom v. V v. NYT v. Onion

Which is scariest:

(a) This Doctor Doom jack-o-lantern pointed out to me by Jacob Levy (which may be more alarming than that electricity-shooting costume I mentioned in a previous entry).

(b) The fact I’m headed to see the vampire movie (second in less than a week) 30 Days of Night (Kip’s Bay 7:15 show) dressed as V from V for Vendetta.

(c) The fact that the New York Times, which cannot be so in love with gay stories as to have lost all interest in being taken seriously as a fact-based newspaper, ran an op-ed today by a transgendered ghosthunter about how contacting her father’s ghost was awkward since she’d changed genders since his death.

(d) Or the new form of tyrannical government that the Onion imagines being accidentally created by (political) scientists at the Cato Institute, pointed out by Kerry Howley on Reason’s blog — and Kerry should know about tyrannical governments, having lived and worked in Burma for a while (and left New York City of all places to do so) — wait, can I call it “Burma”?  Luckily, I’m not in Burma, so I can call it anything I damn well please.  I shall call it Tyrannical Monk-Beating Socialistland — and that is far scarier than Halloween.

Ron Paul-and-Johnny Rotten Was Not a Nixon-and-Elvis Moment

I think Ron Paul did a fine job on Tuesday night’s Leno broadcast — calmly, jovially explaining his intention to end income taxes altogether and end military involvement not just in Iraq but around the world, with the audience cheering.  He humbly added that regardless of whether he has flaws, the philosophical message of liberty is sound, and he even plugged free-market “Austrian economics,” a term probably never before heard on the Tonight show.

But what made the broadcast magic — and Leno himself noted it was fitting — was the Sex Pistols singing “Anarchy in the UK” right after the Paul interview, with Johnny Rotten, after singing “I want to be in anarchy,” adding a characteristically menacing but implicitly supportive “Hello, Mr. Paul.”

And, as I’d hoped, the two of them shook hands just as the show ended.  Since they’d implicitly bonded during the song, the moment avoided being awkward in the fashion of that famous Elvis-meets-Nixon handshake photo, which The Weekly Standard rightly put on its cover a decade ago to accompany an article on the idea that rock and conservatism, all wishful thinking aside, do not naturally mix.

(I can’t help thinking that if fellow libertarian punk fan Michael Malice — who also happens to love The Golden Girls — was watching the show, he got the added thrill of hearing a cameo-making Betty White answer the question “Why are you here?” with “To hear the Sex Pistols, of course.”  And Betty didn’t flinch when they threw eggs at her in the subsequent sketch, either, which is pretty punk-rock.)

If only Tom Cruise had renounced belief in Thetans and the intergalactic overlord Xenu during his segment, resolving to exit public life permanently in order to study skepticism, it would have been a perfect night.

—–

I’ll consider it all perfect in retrospect, though, if Paul shoots up in the polls.  As he cautiously said of the spontaneous grassroots/Netroots movement swirling around him, if it keeps growing exponentially the way it has in recent months, “there’s a risk I could win.”

Paul’s old Austrian-economics-popularizing pals, Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, surprised some of their free-market cohorts by supporting Ross Perot in 1992, on the grounds that he was at least a spanner in the works of the two-party system.  How much more exciting, then, to have a candidate who is simultaneously spanner, libertarian, major-party-member, and well-timed beneficiary of a wave of popular conviction that government is incompetent and in need of humbling.

If Paul strikes some as low-key and low-energy in a field of bombasts and demagogues, I can only hope that America is about ready for an unassuming, mild-mannered president — sort of like the one I hoped we’d gotten with Bush, back in the pre-9/11 days, when he avoided speeches and press conferences and seemed content to host tee-ball on the White House lawn.  Calvin Coolidge, I thought!  Just the sort of do-nothing president we need.  But now it’s far too late in the day to do nothing, I fear, so we need a president who will instead strive mightily and with principled consistency to get government to do less, which is much harder than nothing.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "Did the Government Know in Advance About 9/11?"

VS.
YES: Sander Hicks, founder of Soft Skull Press, Vox Pop, and Drench Kiss Media and author of The Big Wedding: 9/11, the Whistle-Blowers, and the Cover-Up.

NO: Karol Sheinin, blogger at AlarmingNews.com (at one point guest blogger for Michelle Malkin) and founder of the counter-protest group Actual Truth About 9/11.

This contentious issue will be broached next week on Wednesday, November 7 (at 8pm) on the basement level of Lolita Bar (266 Broome St. at Allen St., one block south and three west of the Delancey St. subway stop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side) — with Michel Evanchik moderating and Todd Seavey hosting.

In just-barely-related news, constitutionalists and conspiracists alike may enjoy tonight’s (Oct. 30) Tonight show appearance by my favorite presidential candidate, Ron Paul, as noted in yesterday’s entry, not that some Truther support for Paul makes him a Truther-endorser (or militia man, or Bircher, etc.) — but he probably wouldn’t put such chicanery past the government, either. In the interests of hostal neutrality, I will say no more until after next week’s debate, though.

How did I come to know two people with such opposing takes on this issue? Well, Karol co-hosts the monthly Manhattan Project non-leftist media gatherings with me and Mark Cunningham, while Sander (who, despite his being a Marxist and onetime pursuer of the NY Green Party nomination for Senate, I met through libertarian novelist Katherine Taylor of all people) is technically responsible for me hosting all of these Debates at Lolita Bar, since it was his invitation to see him debate the pros and cons of globalization that led, in 2002, to me first encountering the Jinx Society, then the hosts of the debates. (As it happens, I recall that the cover of National Review on stands the week of 9/11/01 depicted a scary-looking antiglobalization protester with the slogan “Back to the Barricades!” though that antiglobalization protester with his black mask and his fist in the air looked like a well-mannered piker after the Trade Center came down.)

One constant since those early debating days: Michel Evanchik was the moderator then, as Sander faced off against globalist L.B. Deyo (a tenant in the building where Sander was a super), and Michel will be the moderator next week, lo these five years later — during which time L.B. has moved to Austin, TX (whence came the Raspberry Boys comedy troupe, including L.B.’s friend Jerm Pollet, who I saw host and joke their way through a screening of the Halloween-ish 1987 film The Lost Boys last week, with a young Kiefer Sutherland playing a teenage vampire instead of a tough agent and sometime reluctant torturer with exactly 24 hours to save America, over and over again); Sander has married, become a father, divorced, developed an interest in Gandhi instead of violent revolution, and founded a socialism-themed cafe (in Karol’s Brooklyn neighborhood); and Karol has gone from Nader voter (!) to a war-on-terror hawk.

But then, look at me: rooting for Bush then and for Paul now, though I haven’t changed all that much. Come help us sort it all out next week, on Nov. 7. (No chants, shouted interruptions, or rioting, please — your enthusiasm is appreciated, but we’re there to hear both debaters do their thing.)

Tom Cruise, Ron Paul, and Sex Pistols -- on Leno 10/30

Tomorrow, when the three guests listed above are supposed to be on the Tonight show (in that order, if all goes as scheduled), is a big night for Scientology, libertarianism, and punk rock — and somewhere out there, someone who’s into all three is even more excited than I am.

Despite the very minor alliance between the Scientologists and libertarian psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz in combating the practice of involuntary psychiatric treatment decades ago, though, I like only the second and third items in that list (and I wrote about my differences with Szasz five brief years ago) — but two is enough for tomorrow. I’m not demanding. Maybe some Pistols fans will watch and find in freedom-loving Paul a quite literal version of the conservatism for punks I think the culture needs — patriotic, free-market, and individualistic, but with a directness and immediacy more likely to motivate people and retain their emotional loyalty than long, abstract treatises.

Fittingly, I heard about the impending Paul/Pistols broadcast this past weekend while in DC for gatherings of people affiliated with the Phillips Foundation (among them Ron Paul-admiring Robert Novak and an editor from Ron-Paul-fan-banning conservative blog RedState) and people affiliated with Reason, now headquartered in a hip DC brownstone and running Reason.TV (Kurt Loder and Drew Carey were there, the latter accompanied by a bevy of Price Is Right models).

But I saw an even bigger celebrity in DC (thanks to an unexpected post-Reason party hosted by Reason veteran Julian Sanchez and relatively new Reason writer David Weigel), indeed the biggest celebrity of all: I refer to mighty GALACTUS! Yes, some industrious Halloweener constructed a costume based on the three-hundred-foot-tall, purple-armored eater of planets from Fantastic Four comic books, complete with giant, two-foot-thick boots and towering helmet-vanes that just barely enabled him to fit inside the high-ceilinged old house in question. Galactus was even taller than blogger Megan McArdle.

Also at the party were Fantastic Four villain Doctor Doom, with Van de Graaff-machine-generated electrical bolts leaping from his gauntleted hands, and Spider-Man villainess the Black Cat (accompanying a Doctor Who-garbed Sanchez, complete with sonic screwdriver), all to heavily 80s-leaning music (as for me, I see I have just received an unanticipated V for Vendetta mask in the mail from fellow anarcho-capitalist and V for Vendetta fan Bretigne Shaffer Calvert, granting me subversive powers that no mere Marvel could control).

But above all: Galactus. Indeed, He Who Hungers made my brief stop at the party more satisfying than seeing that sham of a (nigh-Galactusless) Fantastic Four sequel movie ever could have.

To get back to punk for a moment, though: anyone who thinks the urge to rock is not (for good or ill) something instinctual and primal should check out this (ostensibly untrained) dancing parrot pointed out to me by girlfriend Koli. This sort of energy can be harnessed for good or for awesome, but it cannot be destroyed or ignored, not while mohawked life endures, be it hairy or feathered. And you can take that to the bank, with or without fractional reserves.

Retro-Journal: Blooming of an American Mind

As I headed back to Brown in early 1988 to finish my freshman year, I took inspiration from a winter vacation that included reading Allan Bloom’s Leo Strauss-influenced book The Closing of the American Mind (recommended to me by my high school friend Paul Taylor’s conservative dad, one of the numerous suggestions he gave me, Paul, and our friends Chuck Blake and John Hersh from high school whenever we’d all gather in Norwich during college vacation). Bloom seemed to give a pretty decent diagnosis of what I’d experienced at Brown the previous semester, arguing as he did that higher education had become a hotbed of relativism, the idea that there are no truths and that everything is simply a matter of arbitrary perspective — which by some non-sequitur always implicitly means the Marxists or feminists win any argument (or in certain formulations, Marxists, feminists, and Freudians, though Freud’s prestige was declining).

I hadn’t yet chosen a major, but there were hints of where things were headed, as Bloom helped inspire me to purchase Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics as vacation reading — but also Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan and Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. My interest in timeless truths wasn’t going to eliminate my awareness of the absurd (quite the contrary), nor would it make me an enemy of modernity in general, since I shared Bloom’s enthusiasm for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideal: reason as the thing to strive for, not only in science (the sole place where some moderns would concede it resides, if anywhere) but in philosophy, economics, ethics, and art — not to mention, in the case of the Enlightenment-spawned American Revolution, politics. All of these things would have to be defended against the relativists, anti-rationalists, and egalitarians to whom crime and justice, ugliness and beauty, were interchangeable, fluid concepts.

—–

At the same time, I felt at home with people like a hammer-and-sickle-earring-wearing, half-black, punkish girl named Tonya Strong from my high school, whose lamentations about the inability of some of her classmates even to locate oceans on maps (let alone follow the details of the Iran-Contra hearings) reminded me of my own chronic concern, so common among nerds, that I was surrounded by psychopaths and cretins. Tonya (then a member of the high school band Anal Staircase) and some smart New Wave and punk girls in my high school were a valuable reminder that punk, like conservatism, is an elite, often judgmental creed, not a hooray-for-everyone love-fest like their arch-foes the hippies, and I liked that in the punks. Yet I even liked some of Brown’s neo-hippie relativists, such as a cute Oregonian relativist named (poetically) Jonny Skye. Though I ended up arguing frequently about philosophy with her (she was more consistent in her relativism than philosophers like Richad Rorty, insisting, for instance, that you could fly unaided if your beliefs about gravity led to that conclusion), I nonetheless wrote her a friendly letter (excerpted here), dated January 6, 1988, about my newfound sense of mission — and my (literal) dreams, which I was much more prone to remember in detail back when I was eighteen, and which around then took a combative turn that may have been influenced by my coalescing political views:

After pondering these things and sleeping, I dreamt recently that I was a child again… (In real life, I never had youthful energy and always hated riding bicycles, but it was a dream.) With Chuck and Paul, I ran through the woods and larger-than-life backyards, wielding toy guns. Pursued by a crazed killer resembling professional wrestler Jesse Ventura, we fled to a Toys ‘R’ Us where we gleefully but efficiently bought up all the plastic Uzis and M-16s to defend ourselves. A friend of mine named Tewksbury was there, at a big party, and demonstrated that he’d put on fifty pounds, grown sideburns, and joined a lousy rock band… The party continued and I fell in love with a girl who wanted to know if I was interested in photography of the solar system, as the dream ended…

I woke up happy, with a renewed conviction that I could do the world good by writing comic book stories about convincing good vs. evil conflicts.

—–

Precisely as horrified paleoconservatives would predict, my indirect influence by Leo Strauss (via Bloom) led me quite directly and immediately to a certain admiration for Secretary of Education William Bennett — who was emphasizing the need for high standards, Great Books, teaching about the Founding and American traditions, and the like — and thus contributed to my intention to cast my first-ever presidential vote later in the year for George H.W. Bush, who planned, if elected, to keep Bennett on in some capacity. (That capacity would turn out to be drug czar, though, making him head of a doomed policy I came to think should be abolished, along with the rest of the government — but that’s leaping ahead in the story.  Bennett reportedly went on one blind date with Janis Joplin in 1967 — around the time he was playing in a band called Plato and the Guardians — so I think he’d boost critics’ sympathy for him if once, just once, he broke down in tears while giving an anti-drug speech and said “I just don’t want anyone else to end up like Janis.”)

My own growing conviction that I should use writing to transmit values — perhaps in the mode of satirist Jonathan Swift, who I read that semester in an English class taught by Prof. Rhoda Flaxman — caused me to drift away from acting, which I’d done in high school (also writing the play we performed as high school seniors, a large-cast production called A Simple Machine about over-idealistic professors whose social reform movement descends into factionalism — not a plot based in the tiniest way on anticipation of what might lie ahead when I got to Brown, nor even the slightest awareness of what campus politics was like, but rather concocted by sheer coincidence from a vague desire to have an excuse for brainy characters to argue about big issues) and also done my first semester of college, playing Mr. DePinna in a production of You Can’t Take It with You, about an eccentric family who, among other things, refuse to pay income tax.

As a budding writer, I might not intend to act, but I imagined I might still take an interest in writing for TV or movies someday, and so I decided to take a film production class — but film production classes at Brown were subsumed under the university’s most overtly ideological (and strange) department, Modern Culture and Media: in effect, the semiotics and deconstructionism department. While semiotics is technically just the study of signs and symbolism, deconstructionism was an elaborate, verbose, obscurantist philosophy largely created by French and German writers with communist or fascist sympathies and unmitigated contempt for capitalism, individualism, tradition, and any pretense of objectivity or rationality.

—–

There was no way to take a film production class (praxis) without first taking a theory class as a prerequisite, and so, despite being newly enamored of the rational Enlightenment and timeless moral absolutes, I signed up for one of the most relativistic, anti-rationalist, anti-bourgeois, capitalism-bashing, patriarchy-lamenting classes the Ivy League had to offer, MCM 66, “Cinematic Coding and Narrative,” taught with dreary resignation by black-clad professor Mary Ann Doane, who would solemnly intone such claims as that, in the Hollywood Text, the Male is capable of action just as — and in part because — he is capable in nature of achieving ejaculation, while Woman, in film, serves only as “a receptacle.” She would then look vaguely disappointed if students responded with “Ewww” noises instead of nods of assent.

The teaching assistant overseeing the class section I was in was one Brian Goldberg, also consistently clad in black (and resentful of innocent freshman questions about this very common MCM color choice), who I was told had come from a fairly well-off DC-area family but had converted to Marxism and who told us that he was alarmed when visiting his parents to look back through his old Snoopy comics and see how “they were preparing me for my insertion into capital.” Since all narrative conventions were regarded as mind-controlling, bourgeois propaganda by the decons, we not only watched strange avant-garde films but were asked to type our papers without margins or paragraph breaks and to make sure they always filled exactly one side of a single sheet of paper, presumably to teach us some sort of lesson about the arbitrariness of academic conventions and, by extension, the arbitrariness of the entire corrupt capitalist system and Western civilization. One shy, well-meaning, and thoroughly left-wing student raised his hand to ask, sheepishly, if we should use conventional grammar and punctuation. Goldberg seemed annoyed by the question and said yes.

My friend Andrew Clateman — one of my fellow comedy writers at the Brown Film Society’s comedy publication, the Film Bulletin, which I joined that semester — was quite enthusiastic about decon, seeing in it an extension of the skeptical mayhem he loved in the Dadaists and the Marx Brothers. He was convinced that filmic conventions — and by extension, all perceptions of reality — were so much a product of social conditioning that, as he put it, an ancient Native American shown a film of a buffalo would not even perceive the buffalo.

Three years later, surprisingly, the Forbes Foundation would donate $2 million to the MCM department, which responded to skeptical questions about the seeming mismatch between ideologies by assuring everyone that giving millions to MCM was a perfectly logical extension of the Forbes family’s interest in media. By contrast, this blog entry — like next week’s Retro-Journal entry — is currently unfunded.

Conservatism and Punk

Two data points do not constitute a trend — my whole day job is built around that insight — but I’m still pleased to encounter two very different public figures, two days in a row, who may have grown more sympathetic to libertarianism.

The literary journal Opium celebrated the release of its fifth issue Tuesday, and musician Moby was there. He didn’t say anything about libertarianism himself, but departing Opium editor Elizabeth Koch said she’d been corresponding with him on the topic for many months and that he seemed to be growing more sympathetic (John Kerry fundraising concert and veganism and so forth notwithstanding). I should also acknowledge that he’s not a punk, mainly a techno guy, but since he mentioned helping to get that movie about Joy Division off the ground, once performed Joy Division songs live with New Order, lamented being booed by Mission of Burma fans when he surprised them by performing with that band on stage, and did a great cover of their song “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” I’m shoehorning him into my “conservatism for punks” trope/philosophy just for today.

He also — in his very cautious, tentative, unassuming way — expressed some skepticism about the official story about the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. I’m not sure if a willingness to listen to libertarian and conspiracist ideas makes him a natural Ron Paul voter (not that I’m saying Paul claims it was an inside job, but some people who do claim that like his anti-establishment tone, for good or ill), but it at least means Moby should attend our Nov. 7 Debate at Lolita Bar between Sander Hicks and Karol Sheinin on the question “Did the Government Know in Advance About 9/11?” (though I imagine that will focus more on the World Trade Center — hometown pride and all).

The other trending-libertarian note for the week is less surprising: I spoke briefly to National Review’s Jonah Goldberg at the International Policy Network awards event where he took third prize (for the year’s best market-oriented columns), and he said writing his upcoming book, Liberal Fascism, did make him a bit more libertarian. I’ve seen an advance copy of the book and will write about it more as my Book Selection of the Month for December, but for now I’ll just say that it’s probably going to surprise a lot of people with the breadth of its condemnation of statism across the modern political spectrum. It’s not going to be just an Ann Coulter-type left-as-punching-bag book (vegan-bashing subtitle and so forth notwithstanding).

What Would Giuliani Do?

Imagine you’re Giuliani and you get the GOP nomination — and that you don’t care much about philosophy, just winning the general election.

Do you pick Thompson as your running mate to keep the social right (which distrusts you) happy or McCain to win over more moderates (note that Thompson does not fare that well in head-to-head polls vs. Hillary, whereas McCain, like Giuliani, nearly ties her)?

I think I’d try to go with a bets-hedging, pre-announced “super-Cabinet” that included rivals, if they’d do it, such as, say: Thompson for V.P., McCain for Defense Secretary (or maybe HomeSec Sec — my brain has not gotten used to thinking of that strange post as real yet), Romney for Health and Human Services — and of course Ron Paul for Treasury, which is the most important (and principled) part.

(Not that I’m counting Paul out for prez just yet: indeed, you can attend another pro-Paul party this Friday (the 26th) from 8pm to 2am, a Grand Opening party for the NYC Ron Paul HQ at 515 West 29th St. [suggested donation is $10 or more] — and they’ll have live bands, a DJ, and cheap drinks [but I'll be visiting some Reason and Phillips Foundation folk in DC -- Reason.TV officially launches this weekend, you should know, and already contains a blog post about George Takei's government-induced conflict with The Simpsons over my favorite episode, so the site has my endorsement].)

Some on the right hate McCain for restricting political speech through campaign finance laws, but even while rightly deploring those laws, they would do well to remember the popular sentiment behind them: the idea that we should know who’s paying for our politicians.  There are ways to achieve that end without restricting speech, too, such as requiring officeholders to disclose all gifts and services given to them, which is what my Arkansas state-rep. friend Dan Greenberg is trying to do in that state.  Put simple restrictions on officeholders instead of onerous restrictions on private campaign donors — while still responding in a meaningful way to popular (and populist) annoyance at the money/politics nexus.

INSANITY UPDATE:

In Democratic news, it looks like I may need to change my rankings of who’s least-sane among the presidential candidates: Richardson only called for an expose of the UFO conspiracy, but now Kucinich appears to claim to have personally encountered one — if you believe Shirley MacLaine’s recollections, not always a safe move, since she claims to have been reincarnated from ancient Atlantis and to have received wisdom from aliens living among the Pleiades.

P.S. And speaking of personal transformations, the Japanese have ways of fighting crime without electing Giuliani, if you believe this article from the New York Times is as dead-serious as implied.

P.P.S. About ninety minutes ago, Fox Business Channel was interviewing the daughter of Shari Lewis — and Lambchop — about their flight from the Malibu-area fires.

Character and Christianity -- D'Souza vs. Hitchens

How different the approaches to religion are at the event I attended last week and the one I’m headed to tomorrow.

—–

Last week, an awards dinner hosted by Templeton Foundation-funded magazine In Character — which devotes the entirety of each issue to thoughtful essays on a single virtue, such as generosity or self-reliance — bestowed honors on writers who had addressed some virtue at length, including my fellow libertarian Wendy McElroy (who I had never met before), who wrote and spoke about a ham radio network used to bring messages “from Santa” to sick, immobilized kids at Christmas. I’m sure I’m not the only atheist in McElroy’s milieu, since a disproportionate number of libertarians (being rationalists and anti-authoritarians) are atheists — and the Templeton Foundation, by contrast, is very sympathetic to religion (even seeking to find areas of overlap between religion and science that I don’t think will ultimately turn up) — but placing things under the (to my mind) broader rubric of virtue made the usual nastiness over specific matters of doctrine fade away.

I don’t know McElroy’s religious views, if any — nor do I even know for sure the religious views of Dr. John Templeton (son of the organization’s founder) and his wife, both of them medical people to whom I spoke at the event about ACSH’s pro-science work — but I do know that no one present at the In Character event was likely to accuse someone on “the other side” of being callous and morally depraved. Obviously, regardless of differences in our descriptions of the cosmos, everyone present wanted the sick kids to be happy.

—–

By contrast, both Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens have said some pretty nasty things about atheists and religious believers, respectively — even though D’Souza has worked with enough libertarians that he, too, must know and like some atheists, while Hitchens has spoken admiringly of George W. Bush in the past and clearly understands that Bush is motivated partly by a sense of religious mission. It should be interesting to see, then, how negative their claims about “the enemy” get at the debate they’re doing tomorrow night (Monday, Oct. 22, 2007, doors opening at 7) under the auspices of King’s College, for free at the Ethical Culture Society at West 64th and Central Park West on the question “Is Christianity the Problem?”

When Hitchens is merely arguing that the supernatural claims of religion are unproven and thus very probably false, he has my full support, but I don’t pretend to be able to precisely gauge the far more complicated social impact of religion (though I think its dangers are often ignored in favor of its warm-fuzzy aspects). If a man tells me religion is the only thing keeping him from becoming an axe-murderer, I’m disinclined to deploy my best atheist arguments on him right then and there — but as hinted in my comments about the In Character event, I think the actual number of people for whom good feelings and virtue must be forged only through religion is small — I think Buddhists, ancient Romans, modern atheists, and indeed virtually everyone understands that a world of constant lies and physical assaults would be awful, and I think that if (if) self-proclaimed atheists behave badly in some ways in our society, it is more their rebel/outcast status in the current society than anything essential to their worldviews that leads to their alienation from some social norms.

D’Souza, by contrast, has argued that America should rein in its secular/permissive culture to avoid invoking further wrath from traditionalists abroad (that’s another complex social and strategic question that I won’t pretend I can readily answer — though I wouldn’t automatically bet against the power of rock n’ roll, consumerism, and sex to carry the day overseas against the hatemongering radical traditionalists) and, far more nastily to my mind, has argued that atheists are both arrogant and incapable of feeling deeply about or providing consolation after tragic events, such as the Virginia Tech massacre. That’s nonsense, as I’ve said before — but I’m not so much interested, for present purposes, in refuting the claim as in noting what it suggests about D’Souza’s mindset: the ever-popular and increasingly tiresome view that one’s enemies just aren’t fully human — go ahead and hate them, they don’t feel pain the same way we do.

—–

It’s fitting for multiple reasons that the issue of attributing mental states to one’s opponents will be on my mind at the debate tomorrow:

•I’ll attend with girlfriend Koli, who happens to be a Virginia Tech alum and has often said she never thought she’d be dating a (reluctantly) registered Republican.

•We’ll be joined by Daniel Radosh and his wife Gina Duclayan, and Daniel and I covered a prior D’Souza-Hitchens debate (on affirmative action, with Hitchens making the memorable argument that regulations calling for larger bathroom stalls might benefit gays), as opposing left and right columnists for New York Press (I’ll use next month’s Book Selection of the Month entry in part to talk about those days and some of the other things in the pre-blog Seavey bibliography). This time, Daniel and I are both essentially on the same “side,” I think, favoring the anti-religious British leftist turned quasi-neocon, but due to Hitchens’ zeal may find ourselves leaning toward D’Souza on some subsidiary issues, if D’Souza is smart enough to avoid vilifying atheists — as I fully expect he will not be. (Daniel, by the way, has a book coming out next year about weird Christian pop culture.)

•The Ethical Culture Society building where the debate will take place also happens to be, I expect the record will show in the end, the only place where Todd Seavey ever attended church on a regular basis (very briefly), to demonstrate to my then-girlfriend Dawn Eden a willingness to hear religion’s side of things. This, as she very politely concedes in Chapter 18 of her book Thrill of the Chaste, was a tactical error on her part — not because I wasn’t willing to listen but because she had assumed that any decent person with an open mind and a warm heart could not fail to embrace religion once he did listen. This is the recurring mistake religious people make, only slightly better than D’Souza’s dismissal of atheists’ capacity for emotion: rather than admitting that they have failed to make their case, they assume that some sort of hard-heartedness or willful blindness on the part of non-believers is the only possible explanation for continued atheism (after all, does it not say, I assume, in Book whatever, Verse such-and-such, that all people of good will who listen for the voice of the Lord shall hear, etc., etc., and so on?).

—–

Sometimes, even when the other side would really, really like to see things your way, you just haven’t made your case. Or as Oliver Cromwell, not himself the most tolerant fellow, wisely said: consider that you may be wrong. More important, for current purposes, consider that even if you’re right, you may still seem completely wrong to even the most generous of listeners. Rarely does someone see the truth and choose to believe something else — I’m not even sure if that’s technically possible, absent some sort of self-hypnosis or amnesia, though people can certainly be stubborn.

But whether you’re Cromwell, al Qaeda, Dinesh D’Souza, Karl Marx, or MoveOn.org, it sure helps fuel your own sense of righteousness if you can convince yourself the other side is deliberately ignoring the plain evidence you’ve placed before them and opting for wickedness. Then one need have no qualms about destroying them utterly — though that never quite works out well, and they have a tendency to start questioning your good will at that point.

Control -- a Movie About Joy Division's Ian Curtis

A depressive friend of mine in college (she should be cropping up in one of my Retro-Journal entries in about four weeks) once disturbed me by saying she didn’t think there was anything particularly unhappy-sounding about one of her then-favorite bands, Joy Division. I think most people would agree that Joy Division sounds exactly like a band whose lead singer, Ian Curtis, would go on to hang himself.

Indeed, when I first heard their comparatively upbeat-sounding song “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” I remember thinking that it sounded a lot like the depressive Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (I’ve always been too nerdy to be in danger of going goth — and I should note that every second of the old TV and radio versions of Hitchhiker’s is funnier than a minute of the recent movie). Since then, I’ve heard the contrast between some of the first Joy Division songs recorded, more bouncy and punk than the dirges they’re best known for, and it’s about as painful to then hear the more depressed-sounding later tracks as it is to realize that you overlooked comments that, in retrospect, were signs of a friend being suicidally depressed. Joy Division sounds heavy, in much the same way that the guitar in Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” does — and we know how Kurt Cobain ended up (that’s my favorite Nirvana song — but I’m not depressed).

On a brighter note, Control is a very good movie — and looks and feels very authentic, probably because it was directed by the man responsible for one of Joy Division’s only videos (like the film, starkly black and white and often still like a photograph) and was based on the autobiography of Curtis’s widow. She suggests that Curtis’s suicide was caused in large part by his being unable to figure out any resolution to being torn between two women — his wife and Belgian amateur rock reporter Annik Honore. He also appears to have been worried that he was a bad, often absent father to his young daughter; to have suffered increasingly severe seizures; and to have been plagued by money worries after leaving a job at a placement agency for clients that included the retarded and fellow seizure victims. Add to all that a Cobain-like ambivalence about fame and the fact that the poor man was only twenty-three when he killed himself, and it’s admirable he held up as well as he did.

It’s also admirable, in a way, that he felt so deeply conflicted about the love triangle — it seems almost quaint three decades later, when rock stars go through wives faster than they put out albums. A pity he didn’t find a better way to deal with it all, though. Much as some people love New Order (that poor dog!), the peppier and dancier band that rose from Joy Division’s ashes, I would love to know what later Joy Division albums would have sounded like — they were arguably the first “postpunk” band, even though they were contemporaries of the Sex Pistols and other early punk bands, taking punk sounds but adding a great deal of maturity to them that makes clear the songs aren’t relying solely on noise, energy, or the element of surprise to impress us.

Like U2 or the Smiths, they can be appreciated even by an oldster like me who rarely summons the energy to pogo anymore and wants to be able to hear all the lyrics (and speaking of the Smiths: on a less-glum glumrock note, Drudge linked this week to an article about the Smiths/Electronic/Modest Mouse guitar player Johnny Marr becoming a professor — maybe he’ll be inspired to write more songs about boys’ schools).

P.S. A more spirited alternative-rocker, Tibbie X, also attended Control last night and notes that her relatively new band, Kissy Kamikaze, will perform on Nov. 1 at Galapogos Art Space along with other bands containing roller derby girls. Nothing glum about that.

P.P.S. And lest it sound like this entry is all punk and no conservative, let me add that Brown alum and free-marketeer Bobbby Jindal has won the election today for governor of Louisiana by enough to avoid a run-off election — and like John Stossel, he can be trusted not to blame post-Katrina problems there on global warming.

My Retro-Journal Begins -- with "Black Monday" 1987

Flashback! Shocking Origin Saga Begins Here! Now It Can Be Told!

As I entered Brown in the fall of 1987, I didn’t expect to be the sort of person who takes an interest in politics (just literature). The only way in which America had seriously disappointed me up to that point was by going four — rather than the originally planned three — years without a new Star Wars movie (I would wait another twelve years, but perhaps that disappointment can be revisited in a future installment of these weekly Retro-Journal entries — forty total, each recounting half a year, from 1987-2007).

Twenty years later, I’m a cranky, somewhat pessimistic libertarian — who hopes fellow 90s Brown alum Bobby Jindal will win the Louisiana governorship in tomorrow’s election there, allowing him to restore Katrina-ravaged New Orleans free-market style (with the side benefit of reducing author Naomi Klein to tears, given her recent book denouncing post-disaster market-based reforms). But I wasn’t always like this…or was I?

Entering Brown, I had come from a stable, two-parent, one-child, middle-class, suburban/rural, literally red-white-and-blue home with Colonial decorations and a white picket fence in Norwich, CT — where emotions, in the time-honored New England fashion, rarely ran high, unless I was denouncing my parents for something like not being New Wave enough in their musical tastes (the small handful of vinyl albums I bought as a teenager — before becoming obsessed with audiotape, the oft-derided but then most-flexible format — began on a high note with the Police’s Synchronicity, and I’m not confident I’ve bought a better album since). In retrospect, of course, I realize my mild-mannered parents liked the Police and Prince — and the Stones and Motown and Elvis — and were (and are) right about most things.

Even at the time, I never disagreed with them so much as to question their — our — whole way of life. America, to the extent our chunk of it was representative (and I still don’t think it was that abnormal), seemed to work OK. Even though I was already an atheist and thought plenty of popular trends were stupid, I was fairly accepting of the whole U.S. package, from NASA to TV to the Cold War to classic rock to shopping malls (even if malls bored me personally, aside from bookstores). No major complaints, no carefully-formulated ideology (and no known party affiliation for my parents).

I picked Brown University, though I was accepted to all the Ivies (except Yale, where I did not apply because its world-class divinity school caused me to worry, wrongly, that the place would be crawling with Bible-thumpers). I interpreted the brochures about how Brown students should be “liberal” in their thinking to mean liberal in the classical sense (though I wasn’t yet familiar with the classical/modern liberal distinction): open-minded and individualistic, making it the sort of tolerant place that encouraged people to invent their own majors if they so chose.

Brown was certainly full of individualists and creative oddballs — and I’m grateful for that to this day — but it became clear upon my arrival in September that many of those quirky people interpreted “liberal” in a much more modern, even revolutionary, sense than I had.

The very first entry in my college journal noted some of the strange — and annoyingly, stridently political — things that struck me about the place (and the very first sentence mentioned one creative oddball, then a sophomore and dorm counselor to freshmen, who remains my friend to this day). Here’s the verbatim opening paragraph of the diary, revealed to the public for the first time:

One of my residential counselors is a cheery fan of love-guru Leo Buscaglia named Cherry, the other a muscular Rambo fan named Reid. The previous occupants of my room here at Brown University painted the walls in numerous horrible colors, covering them with the word “Anarchy,” some kind of fish-cow thing, and a bad-looking cyclops. I was rebuked by a Christian speaker here named J.P. Moreland for being “only a freshman” and claiming to know that the design argument for the existence of God fails. Fuck the Central American Solidarity Organization, all “collectives,” the Organization for Marxist Studies, and the Block Bork Coalition. One girl from the Block Bork Coalition, Laura Petricola, wrote an editorial in the Brown Daily Herald supporting Gus Hall, General Secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, for president. The Brown Film Society’s [comedic] Film Bulletin suggested revising sexist history texts by changing the word “men” to “men and skirts.”

That first week of the journal, while I was in this alternate universe, the outside world — which had just recently gone through the Iran-Contra hearings — was experiencing another important death-pang of the mostly-happy 1980s, the major stock market dip of October 19, 1987 — exactly twenty years ago as I type this. I didn’t really hear about it until the next day, as recorded in my journal entry for Oct. 20, 1987:

I was up far too early this morning, typing a physics report, half awake, when [roommate] Allen’s alarm clock/radio went off, saying “Bzzt fzzzrrrt worse overseas, with Australia’s stock market falling 25%…” I was so unsettled, I had to go buy a newspaper before completing the physics report. They’re already calling yesterday’s stock market crash “Black Monday.”

Not a bad time to embark on a four-year vacation from the real world, actually. The entry for Oct. 21, 1987 again mentions Allen, my born-again Christian roommate from Kentucky, as well as the three core members of my nerdy high school clique, who’d also gone on to prestigious schools (none of us aristocrats or legacies, just smart kids from a fairly blue-collar area who always did our homework):

Two guys from Allen’s group, the Campus Crusade for Christ, tried to convince me in the snack bar called the Gate that Christ rose from the dead and that I’m “biased” against the supernatural. Eat me.

I’ll bet Paul Taylor is finding John Hersh hard to live with at Yale after the big market correction, since John kept saying in high school that it would come eventually. I wonder how Chuck Blake enjoyed the earthquake out at CalTech.

The next day brought conspiracy theorists and race activists, plus evidence Brown was becoming annoying enough to turn me into a reactionary:

THURSDAY, OCT. 22, 1987: Central American Solidarity Organization showed a conspiracy videotape from the Christic Institute attempting to link Iran-Contra to everything from the Nazis to Nixon. On Wednesday, our entire freshman unit (about twenty-five people) had to meet with the organization RACE, which defined racism as the existence of a powerful white majority and started a list of “racist institutions” which they never completed, stopping after I suggested adding affirmative action to the list, but which probably would’ve included everything in the U.S. if they kept going. [Brown was then a place where the non-white freshmen were literally asked to show up on campus three days before white students, to be educated about racism at the "Third World Transition Program" meant to help them fend off the oppression by the later-arriving whites like me -- yet no one thought the left might be fueling rather than defusing racism.]

On Oct. 26, I noted the tension between Marxist theory and the classics: “Lots of semiotics bullshit in one English class. King Lear in the other.” Only in retrospect do I notice that that Shakespeare play is fitting, since I also noted that day that my paternal grandfather passed away in New Hampshire — where many Seaveys had lived since William Seavey oversaw construction projects there back in 1631, I now know. And speaking of patriarchs, the next day’s entry says…

Girls from the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center met with our freshman unit and asked the no-win question of whether feminists should be working harder to change men’s attitudes or women’s. I said women’s, since all but one of the men in my senior high school English class [when surveyed by our highly sensitive and then not-yet-famous English teacher, Wally Lamb] said they wanted a marriage of equals, while all the women said they wanted a “traditional” marriage with the man in charge. The Sarah Doyle girls didn’t have much of a response. Residential counselor Reid suggested the creation of a Fred Smith Men’s Center...

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 28, 1987: Unable to find a cable adaptor to get Brown-TV’s “adult uncensored cartoons,” I settle for watching the Republican presidential candidates debate on PBS…

Back then I knew nothing about libertarianism but apparently was already bothered by the usual right-left political categories, as suggested in this entry:

SUNDAY, NOV. 1, 1987: Thinking about the weird party-line consistency in politics. Where are the vegetarian Reaganites? Why do the strange New Age newspapers sold on Thayer Street have to be anti-nuke, anti-police, and anti-capitalism?

No time to solve that question back then, though — college was a fast-paced intellectual environment, as alluded to on Nov. 5:

Finished relativity and the history of the universe in physics today, read the rest of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and now must finish Villette.

Note: Yes’s Big Generator album has “A Song for Harmonic Convergence” on it, and the Maharishi [Mahesh] Yogi’s nationwide Ghandarvan peace-n-harmony music festival will be held partly in Brown’s Alumni Hall, thanks to Brown’s Transcendental Meditation Society. I fear this kind of mysticism could come to dominate our whole culture...

FRIDAY, NOV. 6, 1987: One other kid in philosophy agrees with me in seeing the soul as an unnecessary, unsupported hypothesis. Last night’s Late Night with David Letterman featured a list of “The Top Ten Dark Secrets from [Supreme Court nominee Douglas] Ginsburg’s Past,” including the clever “Beat a drifter to death with a tube sock full of wood screws”…

MONDAY, NOV. 9, 1987: The Organization for Marxist Studies is stupid. I went to one of their meetings, at which they argued that the U.S. mass media paints a negative picture of the USSR. Apparently lots of high schoolers think the USSR sided with the Axis in WWII, which the OMS blames on media, Reagan, corporations, and G.I. Joe cartoons, all of which “serve the ruling classes”…Laura Petricola (of Block Bork Coalition fame) says condescendingly, “Many U.S. history books even try to create the impression that the USSR was reluctant to fight fascism at the outset of the war, which is a blatant misreading of history.” Non-Aggression Pact, Laura. I left about 9 to watch (ironically) The Billionaire Boys’ Club, with Judd Nelson as a billionaire murderer…

Already, the tensions that would dominate our age were apparent in that first Gorbachev-era semester: capitalism and anti-capitalism, highbrow theory and pop culture, Letterman and Batman. But stranger developments lay ahead, as I will recount in my second Retro-Journal entry, one week from today (blogging in the normal fashion in the meantime, aiming for shorter and more frequent entries — and now with a glorious RSS feed, down in my front page’s right margin, to keep you updated, should you choose, on when I’m updated — thanks, webmaster!).