Terminator, Buffy, and the Elektra Complex

Tonight brings the second season of Terminator, which means dainty little Summer Glau beating people up, and in some sense we have Joss Whedon to thank for that, since her main resume item for being dainty but violent before this was his Serenity movie.

That teen-girl-butt-kicker archetype in turn echoes his character Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and she’s as good as any starting point for talking about tensions within “third wave” feminism (for many people, this entry just got a lot less fun fast). Long philosophical story short: feminism is an amorphous thing that may have some good points (despite my ten-point critique of it in a prior entry that generated so many negative comments), but I’m not sure that pretending that girls can routinely beat up boys is its strongest suit.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying Buffy is rooted in some sort of pent-up she-anger directed at males (nor am I suddenly demanding realism or whining about violence — though I think in the long run, feminism’s greatest and most libertarian contribution may be nudging the world ever-farther away from thinking that physical might makes right, and I suppose readers can let me know if that observation is enough to make me a feminist or, once again, merely a jerk, or both, or neither).

Rather, I’m saying that third wave feminism (90s stuff, basically) — unlike the (fairly-libertarian) first wave of feminists seeking equal legal rights or the (leftist) second wave seeking social egalitarianism by statist means if necessary — seems to get a lot of its appeal from the relativistic pretense that there are simply no generalizations one is allowed to make about differences between the two sexes, such as observing that one tends to be larger and stronger than the other.

(Generalizations, which can be very useful and may well be true even when they aren’t, do not commit me to patently-false universal claims such as all men being stronger than all women, which is the sort of straw man [straw person?] claim angry third-wavers tend to pretend they’re up against when they launch their smug, snippy little Response posts; far from the generalizations being universally true, as a few people would be happy to remind me, I once lost an arm wrestling match to a female — an unusually fit one around six feet tall [not Megan McArdle] — but that is, I hope we all agree, beside the point.)

The problem with pretending that women are just as likely to be macho as men is that what starts out as an implicit promise to “let the chips fall where they may” (the simplest phrasing of the attitude that I think all freedom-loving laissez-faire types ought to feel obliged to take toward these issues) tends inevitably to lead to the observation that the chips are, in fact, falling in certain predictable patterns, and when the feminists are disappointed by this, it’s suddenly time to let the second-wave methods (affirmative action laws, etc.) snap back into action, and we all realize we were living in a fantasy land of spirited no-holds-barred competition.

As with the naive formulations of conservatism described in my entry yesterday, what seemed like a set of universal principles begins to look instead like special pleading for a favored subset of the population with shifting, even hypocritical demands (and you were worried my Palin comments wouldn’t lead us back to Month of Sex entries! I live to segue!).

Or to put it more briefly: there is no better way to get your boyfriend to think of you as a second-class citizen than to insist that women love horror movies as much as men — and that he’s a sexist pig if he thinks otherwise — then demand that he comfort you as you cry in the theatre later (that’s purely a hypothetical-metaphorical example, you understand — not meant to suggest there are no female horror fans, as my predominantly nerdy acquaintances well know).

•••

One reason, I think, that men — like Joss Whedon — are so tempted to buy into third-wave feminism faster than men bought into first- or second-wave feminism is simply that living in a world of women who did genuinely kickbox their way through life and never cry would be totally hot. (One of the least-convincing recurring claims of feminism is that we men want women to be weak, fragile, and weeping — when in fact most of us spend a great deal of effort trying to get at least some women we know to stop being weak, fragile, and weeping, as these qualities are not fun but seem pretty hard-wired into a lot of women anyway, despite all the social pressures — especially from men — to be tougher.)

Take the beautiful 1990 hardcover graphic novel Elektra Lives Again by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, which I stumbled across in my old room at my parents’ house in Norwich last weekend (not far from that recently located Sooty the Bear puppet and his magic wand). Elektra, Daredevil’s killed-and-resurrected foe/girlfriend (played by Jennifer Garner in two — two! — fairly forgettable films), is a beautiful ninja assassin, and her story here is a reminder of why we all loved Frank Miller in the first place back circa the 1980s. Instead of the monotone dark shadows of works like his Sin City, this Elektra story is full of big spreads and bright colors like a strained-glass window (fittingly for the Catholic Daredevil).

Indeed, the colorful and topographical-feeling, sculptured-rooftops cityscapes in Elektra Lives Again feel more like the work of Will Eisner, who created the urban superhero The Spirit, than the upcoming Spirit movie probably will, since the movie, by Miller wearing his director hat, appears (from ads and posters) to adhere all too closely to Miller’s own Sin City style of shadows and silhouettes. If Miller wants to do that stuff, maybe he should just do another Sin City movie — or direct The Dark Knight Returns if Chris Nolan ever has a tragic falling out with Warner Brothers.

In any case, I applaud Elektra, Buffy, and Cameron/River for being able to take down whole armies of males in a fight, but — at the risk of sounding like I’m even more feminist than the feminists — machismo may be an unreasonable standard by which to judge women, one more demand that we all (condescendingly) refrain from commenting on reality so that the womenfolk can pretend whatever they like.

And, no, I am not suggesting that men can fly, in case that’s unclear.

Long-Term Risks for Conservatism

Some elite thinkers might think that I sully myself by writing with even the tiniest sympathy for figures like McCain, Palin, or Ted Nugent, as in yesterday’s post. And I admit it’s hard to know when to stay above the fray and when to risk looking like a partisan participant in it — and this problem is one that market-leaning conservatism in general has, for reasons stretching back at least to the Enlightenment but perhaps inherent in the human condition, at least so long as we engage in politics.

To put it another way: you sometimes have to envy the old internationalist communists, thinking (as children of the Enlightenment) that they had the one solution for all times and places. They were disastrously wrong, but precisely because of their universalism they were probably plagued by far fewer doubts — and fewer accusations of “hypocrisy” — than conservatives (I don’t know who that unnamed White House staffer was who supposedly spoke disparagingly of “the reality-based community,” but I don’t think anyone could honestly survey the history of the left and right and say that the left has historically been more deferential to local reality).

But despite the fact that deference to local conditions (including smalltown U.S. customs) is a form of tolerance, history and demographics may eventually make conservatism — still treated as if it’s a universalizing, homogenizing force in the rhetoric of figures ranging from neocons to antiglobalization activists — seem instead like special pleading by a specific ethnic/cultural minority (or rather, a historical majority in the U.S. that will inevitably one day become a minority here, as it is in the larger world).

Palin, for example, appeals to my parents (and to me, and to Megan McArdle’s mom to boot, and probably to a lot of other people’s moms) for reasons having more to do with abstractions like “pluck” than with ethnicity, yet she literally leaves P. Diddy worrying, “I don’t know if there’s any black people in Alaska” (though he has since decided he’d enjoy playing hockey with Palin, so her appeal may be broader than some expected).

And not all black people are P. Diddy, which is just as well — but the point is that old-fashioned cultural appeals (even if we optimistically assume they bring out good, freedom-loving, universally-applicable qualities in people) are rearguard actions in the long run.

•••

Of course, that doesn’t really bother (a) pessimistic paleoconservatives who assume it is their destiny to go down with the good ship Old Republic anyway or (b) neocon/Reaganites who (in my experience) tend to overestimate the power and pervasiveness of their rather narrow (not bigoted, just boring) conception of “normal.” That is, there are a lot of Republicans, some of them among my favorite people, who tend to assume (not literally but metaphorically/aesthetically) that the world is sort of like a large, placid suburb plus a few baffling trouble spots — and thus that cultural inertia will always be on their side (since, for example, “normal people who aren’t crazy” prefer PTA meetings to hacking their neighbors with machetes).

Long term, though, they’re going to need arguments and/or results so convincing that they’ll play in Peoria and in Punjab without hypocrisy or contradiction (go ahead and call me a globalist, but the whole world has to someday see itself as part of the “us” with no or virtually no “them”).

And I’m well aware that’s why some free-marketeers would say we have to bet on some form of liberalism or neoliberalism in the long run (and thus focus on steering liberalism in as free-market a direction as possible instead of fighting liberalism), because Punjab will never buy whole-hog into the package of philosophical ideas and cultural signals that sells in Texas.

And I’m well aware that that’s also precisely why some other capitalists (not to mention plenty of leftists) would say we have to give up on the wider world and embrace the local (let Punjab be Punjab and Peoria Peoria).

•••

But the homerun of course, from a libertarian perspective, is getting the right things universalized and the right things kept local. Some good ideas travel, some don’t. And it’s tricky knowing to what extent the U.S. can still be talked about as if it’s a locality (something that generates a stokable hometown pride) and to what extent it’s not only tactically inept but quite literally rude to do so. Palin seems ordinary to some and like a weirdo from a specific weird state to others, you might say.

To take a semi-personal example of a less economic nature, if I say “Merry Christmas” in a blog post (which I haven’t), it’s sort of a step toward openness, tolerance, and the mainstream on my part, since I’m an atheist and would generally prefer to avoid mentioning the holiday, if left to my own devices — but to some people, the well-intended greeting would make me seem even more parochial than usual, as if I’m just echoing my white, Christian ancestors and ignoring, say, my Jewish and Hindu readers (to take two of my other favorite ancient, mistaken worldviews as examples).

To put all this another way: I wish capitalism really were the irresistible, globe-straddling, nationless, rootless, unstoppable, abstract force that leftist jerks like Antonio Negri think it is, if only so that one could more easily maintain its smooth machinery without inevitably getting tripped up on the lumpier, messier chunks of local and traditional politics upon which the machinery rests (if corporate logos really had a mesmeric and loyalty-commanding power to rival the flag, as the Naomi Kleins of this world would have you believe, this whole capitalism-spreading project might all be much easier — not that real corporations and abstract market rules are synonymous, which is another part of the problem).

As it is, talk abstractly and you get accused of ignoring local reality (“Tell that to the people already on welfare! And to Andean Indians!” etc.). Talk in detailed terms of local reality and you risk sounding more partisan than you are, or like you’re deploying cultural Trojan Horses for nameless-faceless-heartless ends, which to some extent you are — but only because people resented your effort to talk abstractly (“No, see, I’m not saying there’s anything inherently good about the fur traders here per se, I just meant that when those first settlers came here…”).

I have no good solution, obviously — nor can I even resign myself to agnosticism, knowing that if I do so, some people will eagerly seize the opportunity to take it as a victory for any and every non-capitalist policy they like (e.g., you haven’t successfully persuaded everyone yet, therefore it’s time to stop trying and just accept the welfare state/majoritarian democracy/affirmative action/etc./etc.).

I just have to hope the whole general mess gets nudged in a slightly better direction once in a while. There will be no global revolution followed by utopia — and that’s not my fault.

Why Nugent Is Voting for McCain

One reason to think McCain may yet win is that he didn’t seem to me to be merely distancing himself from the GOP establishment with his “reform” speech Thursday — it’s also a great way to appeal to what we not long ago called the Perot voters (populists who probably also like Palin).  Remember the Perot voters?

McCain may send enough mixed signals to yoke together moderates, conservatives, paleoconservatives, some forgiving libertarians (with his veto and waste-cutting vows), Republicans who like the religious right, Republicans who don’t like the religious right (a tactically useful difference between him and Palin), and the fed-up populists who might in an alternate version of history have become repeat Reform Party voters (if the actual Reform Party weren’t so crazy it makes us libertarians look downright staid).  That’s not a bad center-right coalition — one perhaps smaller but more motivated to vote than Obama’s much vaguer mosaic of optimists and change-seekers, many of whom (especially the young) I predict will forget to show up in November but will still smile warmly when they see pictures of Obama.

And at the risk of sounding like I irrationally retain some shred of optimism after all that’s gone wrong in the past couple decades: the aforementioned McCain coalition might actually accomplish something useful, depending on how it defines “reform.”  If cleaning out the stables means cutting lots of pointless spending in Washington, McCain may redeem himself even in Matt Welch’s eyes.

If instead it means, for example, destroying the pharmaceutical industry (bad guys, as McCain calls them), well, we may all lose our eyes to macular degeneration or something.

Doubtless it will be a little of both, but there is just the tiniest hope — greater than any offered by Obama — that McCain (or Palin) might decide, say, that Social Security as we know it must end.  I’m not holding my breath — just saying they’re at least a roll of the dice, while Obama is almost certainly politics as usual, or worse.  (Note: Biden.)

•••

Ted Nugent said on Glenn Beck’s show (the day of Palin’s selection) that he considers Bob Barr a friend but thinks the pragmatic thing to do is vote for McCain with the intention thereafter to “keep on his ass.”  Not such a crazy position — but despite the ruminations above, I’m starting to think the simplest, easiest way to keep on the GOP’s ass is to just keep voting Libertarian (so quick!  so effortless!), as I will have in half the presidential elections I’ve voted in (if you count my write-in for Dave Barry in 1992) if I stick with Barr.

A libertarian swing-voters sidenote: Palin’s appeal to the West seems like a smart move if you believe Ryan Sager’s 2006 analysis about the Republicans needing those libertarian-leaning but recently Dem-voting mountainfolk to survive.  She “sure loves her some Jeebus,” as my friend Chris put it, but in more of a frontier way than a Southern way, which may end up being decisive.

The Unpersuaded

I can’t fault Republicans less ideological than myself for being fired up after Palin and McCain’s convention speeches. Neither, though, can I blame (all of) the “Obamacons” and Obama-sympathizing libertarians for wanting to further punish the Republicans for their misbehavior over the past eight or fourteen years. I have never been entirely satisfied with any of my own presidential votes, so I can hardly blame other people for solving the “least-bad” dilemma in other ways.

At the same time, I will observe that four particularly McCain-averse libertarians who sound like they might be McCain-averse enough to vote for Obama — Megan McArdle, Andrew Sullivan, Reason’s Matt Welch, and Jacob Levy — might have one motive in common that I’m not sure anyone’s pointed out: war guilt. All four of them ranged from gung-ho to at least moderately supportive of going into Iraq and — dare I say it — might be overcompensating a bit now with their Obama sympathies. But again, I recognize there are no perfect solutions, and for all I know, they’ll all end up staying home or casting Bob Barr protest votes, as I plan to (sitting here in what I assume to be a hopelessly blue state anyway), likable though I find Palin.

•••

In the case of Jacob Levy, too, he might agree with me that his familiarity with Obama and Obama advisor Cass Sunstein from the days when all three of them were at the University of Chicago may reduce his horror at the thought of an Obama presidency, rationally or not (Jacob and Sunstein are even fellow former Volokh Conspirators, and Sunstein, despite being a diabolical statist monster, was invited to participate in that Critical Review conference I went to this past Sunday — Sunstein is interested in libertarian ideas, though mainly, it seems to me, for purposes of subverting them and advancing statism).

I was surprised, though, to see Jacob saying on his blog that he’d probably vote for Obama even if Dick Gephardt were his running mate. It’s bad enough Obama picked libertarianism-bashing Biden, but if he has hidden virtues great enough to offset even a hypothetical arch-protectionist, union-goon running mate like Gephardt, I must really be overlooking something (Jacob, in his thoughtful and slightly dry way, explains that he mainly feels the Republicans still need to be punished for abusing executive power, which may be true, though I wish we didn’t have to be punished along with them, with one-party Democratic rule and all the taxes and regulations it is certain to bring).

•••

More useful to Republican strategists than the observations above might be the complaints from my friend Chris, another (non-blogging) GOP-averse libertarian. Chris dashed off (so forgive any typos — and he swears like Peggy Noonan!) a long, very effective e-mail explaining exactly why he, despite being a laissez-faire capitalist like me and the four writers invoked above, still gets too angry at the Republicans to support them, and I genuinely think that even the most venal and self-interested Republican strategists could learn something from Chris’s comments, so listen up (or just hire me as a political consultant so that someone can add common sense to the muddled verdicts of all those focus groups, primarily by reminding you that “us vs. them” tactics inevitably leave some people feeling you’ve put them in the “them” category when you might have put them in the “us” category). Says Chris:

I think it comes down to this: the republicans as presently self-defined, based on the main thrusts of their campaign rhetoric, hate me. It was pretty clear from all the speeches last night they hold the following sorts of beliefs:

–Being patriotic (and, ideally, excited about the idea of fighting for one’s country) is good and being critical of one’s country (assuming one’s country is America) is bad.
–Loving God and having unquestioning faith in Him is good while basically anything that goes against this, biological science in particular, is suspect or bad.
–Being intellectual in the sense of thinking that ideas are important (especially complex ideas) is bad, while thoughtlessly sticking to your inherited beliefs (or “going with your gut”) is good.
–Being gay or thinking, say, that gays should get the same rights from the gov’t (and here I mean basic rights like marriage, not special rights like discrimination protection, etc.), is bad.
–Small town living is somehow more authentic and good than living in a city;
–The West (of the US) is good, the East is bad.
–Things that appeal to the masses are good, things that appeal to the intellectual and economic elite are bad (Where have I heard this before? Oh yes, Mao Zedong)
–Education past high school makes one less authentic and good, the better the school one went to, the worse one is.
–Interesting in things foreign is inherently suspect.

Needless to say, I fall on the bad end of basically all these things. I think patriotism or basically any unconditional adherence to any group or organization is a bad thing and is evidence of stupidity and moral laxity. Though there are situations in which I would consider fighting for America the correct thing to do, those situations are extraordinarily rare and I don’t think that joining the army is inherently more moral than being a teacher, scientist, business person, hedge fund manager, etc. I don’t believe in God and do believe that science offers the most accurate and convincing ways to explain the world. I like ideas and think there’s great value in being intellectual, vague though that term is. I don’t think there is anything immoral or unnatural about being attracted to people of the same sex and though I don’t think the gov’t should have a role in marriage at all, if it does I think it should treat hetero and homosexual couples equally.

I’ve lived in both small towns and big cities and like aspects of both. In my experience people in small towns are just as promiscuous, dishonest, violent, etc. as people in big cities, but they also tend to be more narrow minded and unintelligent than the average city dweller (with, of course, many exceptions on both sides). I’m perfectly happy with the East Coast and don’t think that the West is in any way more authentically American, at least not in any good way. I am part of the elite and I think the things that appeal to my tastes are just fine, in fact in most cases objectively better than those things that appeal to the masses. I’ve been in school in some manner or another for almost my entire life and I plan to stay there. I have devoted a good part of my intellectual and professional life to studying foreign cultures.

Now I should have grounds for agreement with the GOP on economic matters and that is the one area in which I found myself in agreement with some of the rhetoric. However, most of the speeches last night defined the GOP in social, not economic terms. Sure, Romney Huckabee, and Palin brought up shrinking gov’t and keeping it out of our hair. Romney is the only one that has a shred of credibility there. Coming from Huckabee it’s laughable, and it increasingly looks like Palin grabbed every cent of gov’t money for Alaska (and her hometown before that) that she could. Yes, she rejected some ridiculous showy items, like the gov’s private jet, but there was no reduction in the earmarks that Alaska (and her small town before that) got from the federal gov’t (including the money for the “bridge to nowhere”).

So even if I thought the GOP would be better in economic terms, and I’m not convinced that it would given historical reality, I just can’t vote for people who are openly hostile to almost everything about me…[H]ere are some part of the speeches that particularly annoyed me or struck my as hypocritical (with my comments):

*Romney:*

“You know, for decades now, the Washington sun has been rising in the east. You see, Washington has been looking to the eastern elites.”
–1. So what?
2. It’s bullshit anyway. The only recent president who has been a member of the “eastern elites” was Bush I (and possibly Bush II, if you consider being born in Greenwich and going to Andover, Yale, and Harvard elite). Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton were not “eastern elites” in any meaningful way (unlike, say, Romney himself).

“Is a Supreme Court decision liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with constitutional rights? It’s liberal.”
–O.K., then I’m for a “liberal” Supreme Court, as I think the rule of law is an essential part of a civilized and prosperous nation.

“Opportunity rises when children are raised in homes and schools that are free from pornography, and promiscuity, and drugs, where there are homes that are blessed with family values and the presence of a mom and a dad.”
–Maybe not the best line for a presidential candidate who left his crippled wife for a rich woman 20 years younger. And there seems to be a bit of promiscuity (and drugs) in the Palin family as well. Oh, and are the democrats running on a pro-porn, promiscuity, and drugs platform? I must have missed that.

“You know, it’s time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother.”
–Cute line. What are those ideas, exactly? And who was it that has fought tooth and nail to increase the gov’t’s ability to listen in on phone calls, etc. without warrants? Yes, the dems are definitely in favor of big gov’t, but let’s not pretend that our freedoms have somehow increased during the last 8 years. That’s just fucking absurd.

“Our economy is under attack. China is acting like Adam Smith on steroids, buying oil from the world’s worst and selling nuclear technology. Russia and the oil states are siphoning more than $500 billion a year from us in what could become the greatest transfer of economic wealth in the history of the world.”
–Wait, so now the free market is bad? I’m confused. Would he rather China act like Marx on steroids? Does he expect other people and countries to GIVE us their oil? Yes, Russia and Saudi Arabia are hardly free-market paragons, but that’s not the force of his criticism here.

“Our economy has slowed down this year, and a lot of people are hurting. What happened? Mortgage money was handed out like candy, and speculators bought homes for free. And when this mortgage mania finally broke, it slammed the economy.”
–No shit. But what a strange example! All this happened under Greenspan’s watch. What does it have to do with liberals? This is the market at work (and I don’t think it’s bad that people are now facing the implications of their moronic decisions) and I fail to see how it can be blamed on the dems.

*Giuliani:*

“[Obama has] no leadership or major legislation to speak of. His rise is remarkable in its own right — it’s the kind of thing that could happen only in America. But he’s never run a city, never run a state, never run a business. He’s never had to lead people in crisis.”
–Gee, where have I heard this before? Oh yes, he used the same exact words during the primaries about McCain. Now he’s just added the last line, as if being in a POW camp prepared McCain to be president.

“Having been to that part of the world many times and having developed a clear worldview over many years, John knew where he stood. Within hours, he established a very strong, informed position that let the world know exactly how he’ll respond as president. At exactly the right time, John McCain said, ‘We’re all Georgians.’”
–What does this mean? How would McCain respond? Would he attack Russia? Send troops to Georgia? Disasters both.

(Continuing on Georgia) “Obama’s first instinct was to create a moral equivalency that ‘both sides’ should ’show restraint.’ The same moral equivalency that he has displayed in discussing the Palestinian Authority and the state of Israel.”
–1. I’m not sure how “both sides should show restraint” creates moral equivalency.
2. Both sides SHOULD show restraint! Is there another alternative that would be better?

“John McCain will follow the fanatics to their caves in Pakistan or to the gates of hell. What Obama wants to do is give them a place setting at the table.”
–1. I’ll believe that when I see it. Didn’t Bush say the same thing about Bin Ladin?
2. When has Obama advocated organized negotiations with Al Qaeda? Iran is hardly the same thing. And frankly, negotiating IS better than armed conflict in almost all situations.

*Palin*:

“A writer observed: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.” I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.”
–See my comment about small towns above.

“When I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and knew their families, too.”
–But when she was mayor she hired Ted Stevens’s former chief of staff as a lobbyist. He brought in over 25 million worth of earmarks for the town.

“As for my running mate, you can be certain that wherever he goes, and whoever is listening, John McCain is the same man. I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment.”
–1. McCain flip flops constantly. Taxes, climate change, torture, you name it. He attacked the religious right until he finally recognized he needed them to get elected. Then he sucked their dicks hard. Very hard. And given that Palin has been in political positions basically non-stop since she was 28, and is now running to be fucking VICE PRESIDENT, I think she can start to consider herself a member of the permanent political establishment.

“There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you … in places where winning means survival and defeat means death … and that man is John McCain.”
–1. So what? Thanks and all that (though, of course, we lost the Vietnam war and last I checked it didn’t lead to the collapse of the free world. Why, because capitalism, not invasion, is what changes countries for the better and makes enemies into trading partners), but I didn’t realize that the presidency was a reward for good service in the military 40 years ago.

“If our state wanted a bridge, we’d build it ourselves.”
–As noted, she was strongly in favor of the bridge until the political fallout hit. Then she still accepted the money for the state. Alaska suck more gov’t teat than just about any state, living off taxes from oil companies and federal money. The former has increased since she’s been in office and the latter has stayed the same.

Might it not be easier and wiser, Republican Party, to stick to deregulation and tax cuts and thus get this man’s vote? I’m sure he could tolerate a nice comment or two about Jesus if you did, as long as you put your money where your mouth is on the fiscal topics.

P.S. Meanwhile, back in the paleo world (or, in honor of recently-deceased narrator Don LaFontaine, perhaps I should say “In a world where ancient customs still rule…”), it’s interesting to find that some bloggers at American Conservative are calling Palin too neocon or at least insufficiently paleo even though Buchanan himself is excited about her. Those cranky, hard-to-please Buchananites have gotten more Buchananite than Buchanan himself, in other words. Tough crowd.

Paleos and Palin

There’s more to the Republican convention than the Republicans’ first-ever female v.p. nominee, but let’s talk about her some more anyway, along with some related topics (fine though McCain’s speech was):

•Katherine Taylor pointed out to me that a writer who, like me, was a recipient of a grant from the Phillips Foundation, helped spark the idea of a Palin v.p. nomination.

•Some have, perhaps hastily, described her as something of a paleoconservative — that is, a conservative who, in the early-twentieth-century rather than Cold War style, emphasizes local control instead of DC plans, diverse traditions instead of a monolithic Western World.  As it happens, a paleo-inclined writer (Tom Woods) was depicted as something of a scandal in the Washington Post this week, since he ghostwrote Ron Paul’s most recent book (as if they don’t all use ghostwriters).  What the Post failed to note is that I had already drawn attention, in one of my Retro-Journal entries, to a greater scandal — if memory serves, Tom was that guy I mentioned who in college was twice duped into bringing a flask of his urine to a random public building, thinking it was needed for a phony psych experiment.

(I was reminded of this at Dawn Eden’s fortieth birthday party last night by James Kalb, who hosted a tradition-themed discussion group fifteen years ago that sometimes included Woods and me — and Kalb himself is the author of what will be one of my December Book Selections, so stay tuned for that.)

•On another paleolibertarian note, I notice that Tuesday’s Ron Paul  “alternate” Repbulican convention brought such highlights as (1) a live appeal for support from Bob Barr (who has pointed out ways in which he’s more libertarian than Palin), (2) a speech by admirably independent Jesse Ventura that, alas, included remarks seemingly sympathetic to the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, and (3) the comment by attending paleo writer Bill Kauffman that “locating the antiwar wing of today’s Republican Party is like looking for the Juice Newton wing in the rock and roll hall of fame.”

•Speaking of rock, though, as I type this, I am very pleased to say, they’re playing Heart’s “Barracuda” at the close of the GOP convention in honor of Sarah “Barracuda” Palin.  It’s not quite the Sex Pistols, but I’ll take it.  All right, it’s better than the Sex Pistols, frankly.

•Megan McArdle — who was having an asthma attack during Palin’s speech (but later noted that her own mom, like mine, likes Palin, seemingly a good sign for the GOP) — reacted strongly to Romney’s speech, accusing him of using the word “liberal” in a random, meaningless fashion.  Andrew Sullivan seconded this odd claim — and noted approvingly that David Brooks (that right-wing socialist) even called the speech “borderline insane.”  Much as I hate to be at odds with two prominent libertarians and one prominent pseudo-conservative, I suggest reading the Romney speech, virtually every word of which I — and, I would have thought, most market-friendly-type conservatives — agree with.  Am I borderline insane or are his critics off-base?

•In this odd week, it seems as though libertarians, paleoconservatives, and neoconservatives are simultaneously very stirred up, largely because of Palin, but still dissatisfied — as well they should be.  A good time for Todd Kruse to launch a populist yet free-market conservative blog called RegularFolksUnited.

More in the next couple days on those other disgruntled folks, though — with at least a few mentions of sex, in keeping with this month’s theme, I promise.

She Likes Machine Guns, Capitalism...and Pot

That headline does not refer to tonight’s birthday girl, Dawn Eden (and note that this month’s Debate at Lolita Bar occurs Sunday, Sept. 28, NOT tonight as it normally would) but rather to tonight’s other conservative female star, Sarah Palin. (But if my birthday party co-organizers were able to follow my suggestion about putting the Republican Party convention on the video monitors at the club Plumm, I may be able to see both simultaneously.)

It’s interesting that Hurricane Gustav both interfered with the schedule of the St. Paul convention unveiling Palin and put a spotlight on a man (from my Brown days) considered for her role, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. Judging by the way the media, dazzled for about half a day, are now heavily beating the “doubts” drums on Palin, there must be a lot of people wishing Jindal had been the pick — v.p. speech from a storm-ravaged city, etc. Might have been good theatre.

But what little we know about Palin so far seems OK to me.

•As noted above, she’s a machine-gun-wielding, avowedly pro-free-market pot smoker (she admits she used it during the short time pot was legal in Alaska, as indeed it was without civilization coming to an end, as I’m sure she noticed). That hasn’t made her pro-legalization, but then, even the Libertarian Party candidate this year is reluctant to come right out and call for legalization (he, like Ron Paul, says leave it to the states, while Palin says focus on meth instead).

•My parents, not overly political folk, did indeed immediately like Palin and find her more down to earth and likable than any of the other candidates (an unexpected political lesson from my day in Norwich, CT last Friday prior to my Boston sojourn, which included that libertarian conference I mentioned Sunday). My Boston-dwelling, left-leaning acquaintance Nancy Tewksbury may be right to warn some of her fellow lefties in a mass-e-mail that they should not dismiss this element of Palin’s appeal, not to mention her appeal to some disgruntled Clinton supporters.

•If I were Lorne Michaels, I would be irked that Tina Fey is no longer on the Saturday Night Live cast, though others (who unlike me have actually seen the show in the past several years) assure me other cast members can handle it.

•She so far seems fairly normal despite the rapidly-circulating, almost panic-inducing rumors about her (1) being a Buchananite (she apparently just wore one of his buttons as she did for other visitors, later supporting Forbes, as did I at one point), (2) being in the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party (it seems rather that her part-Inuit husband may have been, which would be fine with me, of course — I’m generally pro-secession, whether that means respecting the secessionist desires of Georgia, Ossetia, or even Hawaii, whose recent push for Native American-style semi-autonomy may well be something Obama and his supporters consider respectable), and (3) being the mother of her grandchild (something about which the left would presumably not be morally outraged — though it turns out to be false).

•Richard Spencer of Taki mag is rightly happy about her, at least one blogger at Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, interestingly, is not (no pleasing some people), while Reason notes that pro-Ron Paul blogger Meli Oped (that’s his real name?) interviewed Palin about Paul a while back and was pleased that she said:

“He’s cool! He’s a good guy. He’s so independent. He’s independent of, like, the party machine? I’m, like, right on…so am I. The party machinery, on both sides of the party, you know…Americans are tired of the incessant partisanship that gets in the way of doing the right thing for this country.”

Sounds pretty cool.

•••

Meanwhile, another Paul supporter (who went on to argue in favor of Bob Barr at one of our Debates at Lolita Bar), Avery Knapp, was in St. Paul yesterday for Ron Paul’s “alternate” convention of dissident libertarian Republicans, and I hope he found time to meet up with my co-worker Jeff Stier (who’s attending both the Democratic and Republican conventions) and New York Post’s Kyle Smith, who are also in that town this week.

But for those of us merely experiencing politics via the media this week, here are some other interesting developments:

•Comic book writer-artist Erik Larsen, a co-founder of the comics group Image, never known for its subtlety (it gave us Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, for example), seems to be signaling his presidential pick on the cover of the latest issue of Savage Dragon — can you deduce his preference?

•My friend Laura Braunstein, like Sarah Palin a “hot librarian” type (but unlike Palin, actually a librarian), notes a swell Onion video on the Republican Party/minor party tension.

•And as Don Boudreaux noted in a mass-e-mail, a genuine anarcho-capitalist is blogging at New York Times this week: Pirate-loving Pete Leeson is a guest blogger at Freakonomics — and I’m pleased to see his book about pirates now has a much better title than its old working title of Anarrrchy. (Note: Neither he nor I am endorsing the thieving fundamentals of pirate behavior — nor the behavior of more familiar left-wing anarchists like the assholes pointlessly destroying random citizens’ property near the Republican National Convention this week.) Even better: Leeson’s first post mocks UFO and Bigfoot sightings, and skepticism is as close to my heart as anarcho-capitalism.

Coincidentally (since this is, after all, the Month of Sex on this blog), I have repeatedly been told that there is a very popular recent porn film about pirates. I’m not sure why pirates should be considered particularly sexy (as opposed to, say, hot librarians), but if that helps boost Leeson’s book sales, I think it will be good for the economy in the long run (I mean for systemic/analytical reasons, not because the book industry requires stimulation).

Dawn Eden Parties at Plumm 9/3/08

Our Debate at Lolita Bar does NOT take place tomorrow night as it normally would but rather on Sunday, Sept. 28 — but in the meantime, tomorrow does bring a PARTY!

Yes, I have somehow ended up cohosting a fortieth birthday party for my ex-girlfriend Dawn Eden, chastity-promoting Catholic author of Thrill of the Chaste.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008
7-10pm
The Plumm
246 W. 14th Street (8th Avenue)
Open bar during first hour

Hosted by J.R. Taylor, Doug Dechert, Noel Ashman, and Todd Seavey

RSVP to J.R. Taylor at: jrt[at]RightWingTrash.com or (201) 838-7255.

Sidenotes: I still don’t believe there’s a God, of course, and when I first met conservative, Christian J.R. (through whom I’d later get to know Dawn), back in the days when I, too, wrote for New York Press, he told me he sometimes edits porn, including the magazine High Society, to which I replied, “Oh, you mean the marijuana magazine?” and he responded, with slight but genuine offense, “I would never edit a drug magazine!” (I was of course thinking of High Times).

So J.R.’s a smut-peddler and I’m atheist, and we’re cohosting a party for a God-fearing chastity promoter.  Who’s worse in Dawn’s eyes, then, J.R. or me?  Furthermore, what would Jesus do (that is, drugs or sex — the former, I’m inclined to think, since despite J.R.’s aversion to drugs, Jesus said a lot more about coveting wives than about coveting pot, and he supposedly liked wine)?

In any case, it’ll be the event of the millennium and not a bad addition to the “Month of Sex.”

Book Selection of the Month: "The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex" by Pagan Kennedy

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month [of Sex] (September 2008): The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories by Pagan Kennedy

My friend Pagan Kennedy (the hip genius behind some ten books now) has a new book out today that’s an anthology of biographical essays about mostly-science-oriented maverick inventors and geniuses and the like — with the lengthy title essay being a biography of Alex Comfort, the guy who wrote (and lived) the revolutionary The Joy of Sex circa 1970, when such things were still taboo for most people despite hippies being everywhere (by contrast, I plan to make this a “Month of Sex” on this site, blogging about related topics for weeks — not necessarily always approvingly, though — and hosting a related Debate at Lolita Bar at 8pm on Sept. 28).

Pagan’s collection of unique, often strange individuals — from noble nerds trying to devise the cheapest imaginable ways to build machines out of scraps accessible by impoverished Third Worlders to a teenage girl weightlifter who can lift over 300 pounds above her head — are to me a more uplifting celebration of America, in all its bizarre, unpredictable richness, than either of this week’s other purported big events: Labor Day and the other big socialist happening, the Republican Party convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul (though I hope my friends there will have fun — especially if they make it to the Ron Paul “alternative convention” on Tuesday [I think I know a guy who was torn between going to that or Burning Man, where there were surely people who have read The Joy of Sex and who might like Pagan's book even more -- hell, everyone at Burning Man should buy a copy on the basis of her first name alone]).

As even canonical conservatives like Burke and Kirk used to say (before the whole political spectrum decided to start marching lock-step straight to hell while muttering about “unity”), diversity is a natural and important part of a healthy, functioning society — and not just diversity in the approved, quota-filling sense that university professors use the term. People are wonderfully varied and weird, in ways that you never would have thought of ahead of time, and not just in ways that fit the approved channels for “extreme” or “cool” behavior, either.

One delightful wacko profiled in this book is a performance artist I would probably find downright annoying if I met him, who goes around claiming to be the Emperor of America, but better a thousand more people like him than one real claimant to such a job. Alex Comfort, who gives the book its title, was something of a Dr. Frankenstein for the hippie era, viewing his every orgiastic escapade as part of a series of experiments necessary for enlarging the entire population’s ability to enjoy sex — and knowing all the while that he might lose his wife and his own happiness in the process. We learn from the successes and failures and ambiguous combinations made possible by a planet of billions of experimenters, even if a necessary part of the process is telling many of them they’re nuts.

And this book contains an actual photo of Pagan being strapped into a cap full of brain-stimulating electrodes by the cap’s scientist creator. You have to love that. And I suspect in the long run, the future gets created by people like this — and chronicled by attentive, curious investigators like Pagan Kennedy — instead of by politicians of any ideological stripe bellowing about “tomorrow.”

As for what tomorrow will bring on this blog: a unique character who adds to the quirky American tapestry in part by disapproving of some of those aforementioned sexual experiments, Dawn Eden.

A Critical Review of: Ignorance

If all has gone according to plan, yesterday, the day after my pre-written, automatically-posted blog entry about communism vs. punk, I dined with friends in the Boston area — not all at the same meal (merely for scheduling reasons) — who ranged from a Billy Bragg fan to an actual living, breathing Southern Republican politician, not to mention Pagan Kennedy, the author of tomorrow’s Book Selection of the Month on this site (which has the double honor of kicking off the ToddSeavey.com “Month of Sex”).  Pagan says she doesn’t know any Republicans (unless you count me, but back when I first registered that way in 1987, I was still counting on the Republicans to shrink government at home and battle communism abroad — times change, and I grow more radical with age in some ways, despite cliches to the contrary).

But today — assuming I’m not passed out in a ditch somewhere as this entry posts — I’m surrounded almost entirely by libertarian academics, at a conference hosted by the journal Critical Review (to coincide with the weekend of the slightly more prestigious but less politically useful American Political Science Association convention).

The sort-of amusing topic of the conference is “ignorance,” which sounds as if it means everyone will show up not having done the readings but actually means that we’ll be discussing the extremely important — but frankly embarrassing — question of whether the whole idea of democracy is rendered ridiculous by the inescapable (and absolutely ineradicable) fact that virtually no members of the general public have the slightest idea what’s going on.

Time and again, pollsters and survey-takers prod the public to answer “approve/disapprove” questions without bothering to ask whether the public has ever even heard of the issue under discussion — and the public obligingly flips a mental coin, to paraphrase Kent Brockman, using the wording of the question itself to guess at a plausible response, and even going on to vote for members of Congress and candidates for president in pretty much the same fashion.  In the late 80s, only about half the populace knew the name of the vice president.  In the 90s, over half the populace was unaware who Newt Gingrich (probably the second most important politician of the decade) was.  And so on.

Yet government-lovers want all of these people to control each others’ lives through constant voting affecting all areas of human endeavor, in one great war of all against all, mediated of course by that engine of coercion at the center of it all, the state, which naturally has to take its cut (about 40% of national income last time I checked).  If you proposed the system as a novelty in a world without government, you’d justifiably be called insane (“There’ll be these 535 or so people in Washington, we’ll give them 40% of everyone’s money and near-limitless power…”).

Yet here we are, grateful just to have escaped aristocracy and other arguably-worse systems — but terrified of full-fledged individual freedom, individual responsibility, and secure individual property rights…trying desperately to remember why we favor subsidies to ethanol…or if we do…or whether that’s what people from, y’know, that state where the Democrat guy comes from are in favor of…because of, y’know, the like economy or something.

Ah, poor, confused voter!  So much easier to stick to hot-button issues like sex — which you can grasp as easily as you grasp your own genitalia — and so, for the month of September, starting tomorrow, I shall.  Blog about sex, I mean.

Catwoman's End Draws Nigh

If you’re looking for something to do this weekend — with the Olympics over, Obama having ascended to Olympus, and me being away in New England for various purposes through Labor Day (despite blog entries still magically appearing) — consider going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit of superhero-themed clothing, which closes after this weekend. One comics industry professional, who shall remain nameless, called it “ten pounds of gay in a five-pound bag,” but it’s cool regardless.

I saw it, and I think my favorite line from any of the explanatory plaques, from a Catwoman display, was one about how Catwoman costumes underscore “the alpha-cat/omega-kitten duality,” which sounds like the coolest episode ever. (Professional manga-hawker Ali Kokmen notes that Michael Chabon may have written that line, as he did the official exhibit book.) Actually, “Omega-kitten” also sounds like it could be a phrase from the LOLCat Bible, though the LOLCats are much less literate than Chabon, obviously.

Speaking of heroes, villains, and younglings, every time I see an ad for that tough-guy sci-fi movie Babylon A.D. with Vin Diesel, I can’t help thinking about the fact that the decidedly less tough-sounding title of the novel it’s based on is Babylon Babies. And titles certainly make a difference for marketing purposes. Would fandom be eagerly anticipating, say, Watchmen Babies?

Communism for Punks

Cretins, many residing in places like Brooklyn or Berkeley, who see resistance to capitalism as the ultimate purpose of punk or other creative impulses — not to mention the ultimate purpose of politicians — would do well to stop for a moment today and remember the plight of Gorki Aguila.  He’s the punk rocker and anti-communist scheduled to stand trial in Cuba today for criticizing the state — and still he pulls no punches in his comments, as you can see in this clip.

Kind of makes a Billy Bragg “heroically” singing about communist revolution in England or an ignorant Rage Against the Machine fan wearing a t-shirt with mass-murderer Che Guevara on it seem like a fucking joke, doesn’t it?

I cannot begin to tell you how happy I would be if this ended up being the day Cuban communism began to fall apart (sandwiched between the U.S.’s two statist political conventions, no less).  Good luck, Mr. Aguila.

(And you can get a t-shirt of that anti-Che symbol, with the slogan “Communism Kills” at Bureaucrash.com.)

Obama-Biden vs. McCain-Uhhh...

I think it would’ve been gauche for McCain to announce his running mate today, when Obama’s doing his whole Sermon on the Mount/Zeus in Clash of the Titans thing.

Worse, though, on any day, would be McCain announcing that his running mate were Lieberman or Huckabee. I expressed my dread of the former on Sunday and my dread of the latter in the comment thread of this entry on Karol Sheinin’s blog.

Then I think about ways Romney could go wrong, and it’s like the primaries all over again but more depressing this time because there’s no more time for zigzagging and uncertainty.

Then I remember I’m voting for Barr and things get brighter for a moment — then dark again.

A Time to Come Together and Hate Government

Politicians love to accuse each other of being divisive demagogues — making such claims helps them be unifying demagogues. Obama is one of the most amazing cases I’ve yet seen of someone who manages to say, in effect, “Let us stop fighting and come together (behind me), so that partisan bickering can end (and a thoroughly left-wing agenda can triumph).” It’s a measure of how exhausted Americans are by the usual right-left fighting that they’re willing to suspend disbelief and let either side triumph as long as it claims this will end the fighting.

Nothing unifies like a common enemy, though, and the left would like that designated foe in the public’s mind to be the right, while the right would like that common foe to be the left. And so we continue.

I, of course, have The Real Answer, which is to wake up and recognize the entire class of politicians — and all government — as the common enemy, to be dispensed with once and for all, like monarchy and slave ownership. To achieve that beautiful dream (together!), we should focus on examples of government being so damn stupid — yet ideologically ambiguous — that no thinks upon hearing the examples “More treachery by the other ideological side in the right-left dialectical struggle!” but rather “Government has gone full retard once again!”

Here’s an example from New Zealand I think most decent Americans of all ideological stripes can agree to find revolting: telling people what they can and cannot name their children. I wonder if they’d let people name their kids Voltaire and Groucho, as I’ve repeatedly urged friends to do, to no avail?

2008 vs. “2012”

Watching this week’s Democratic convention tie itself into politically-correct knots trying to make the whole production “green” (not to mention all-union) has of course been hilarious — but it should never be forgotten that these uptight, rule-making, obsessive nitwits want desperately to govern us all in the same Kafkaesque fashion. The Democrats are not freedom-lovers. They are petty totalitarians. If you want to be green on your own hippie commune, I have no quarrel with you. Use fines and taxes and ultimately threats of jail time for non-compliance (it has happened) to make the rest of us green, and you’re a thug — likely one who isn’t having much impact on the Earth anyway.

A perfect example of how doomsday-environmentalism has become interchangeable with mystical apocalypse predictions is the fact that Roland Emmerich (himself hardly all that green, given his notoriously gaudy house full of stuffed zebra heads and the like), who directed the laughable (but Al Gore-praised) climate-change thriller The Day After Tomorrow — not to mention the goofy prehistoric adventure 10,000 B.C. — is next doing the mystical-apocalypse, Mayan-“prophecy”-inspired 2012, about the world ending in 2012, with even more disasters in it than in The Day After Tomorrow.

I guess you could say 10,000 + the day after tomorrow = 2012 = box office gold!

The Best Argument for Obama, in Two Sentences

(As a goodwill gesture on the first day of the Democrats’ convention in Denver.)

Pragmatically speaking, is Obama the only alternative to the U.S. fighting simultaneous, arguably unnecessary wars in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Iran?

I’d be willing to limp along with higher taxes and a weakened economy for a few years to avoid all that, I have to admit.

(Much as I might wish Bob Barr, who I plan to vote for, were higher in the polls so that we didn’t have to choose, once again, between peace and prosperity, to oversimplify things radically — and I realize it isn’t clear we’ll get either of those things no matter which major-party candidate wins.)