Industrial Decline as a Red Herring

David Simon had another rant quoted in the Guardian.  It was mostly true -- the war on drugs as a war on black people -- but it reminded me of something that rings false in Simon and many others on the contemporary left- their bemoaning of America's industrial decline.

This is not just a left-wing phenomenon.  It is found across the political spectrum -- people generally agree that American manufacturing has declined (which is true, in employment terms) and that this is the cause of the problems of the American working class.

I would dispute the last part of this conventional wisdom.  To start with, there is no necessary connection between highly paid, lower-skilled jobs and the manufacturing sector.  Indeed, the manufacturing jobs that remain in this country mostly either require advanced technical degrees, or pay somewhere in the vicinity of $10 an hour.  Working in a factory does not magically transform the working class into the middle class, and shuttering factories does not magically transform them into the working poor.

No, the reason why factory jobs used to be so good was because of the strength of American labor, and because we were a society that had decided that working people should be able to live the American dream, even if they're not anesthesiologists.  The problem is not the sort of labor that Americans are doing, but our nation's devaluation of labor in general*.  The services industry is, unlike manufacturing, extremely resistant to offshoring (we need people to work in our stores, in America) -- the problem is that we have decided that it's fine that our legions of restaurant and retail employees make $8 an hour.  Wringing out hands about the decline of factories does nothing to help the million or so Americans working at Wal Marts across the nation.  The factories are not coming back (at least not in their previous, labor-intensive, form) but there is plenty we could do to help the American working class, by getting serious about the workers of the service industry.


*Perhaps our romanticization of blue-collar works only helps to devalue pink-collar work, as we act as though pink-collar jobs are intrinsically not valuable, unlike those begone heroes at the Ford plant.

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman - Initial Thoughts

For the past several weeks, I've been re-reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate.  The shortest review I could give is that you should read it, it's brilliant and beautiful and brings alive a world that most  people in the West can only imagine.  It is a masterpiece.

But if you want to hear something more, you can find my thoughts below.

'Revolution' as magical thinking

The revolutionary extremism of the Right has been on display lately.  First there was the news that 44% of Republicans believe that an armed revolution may soon be necessary to protect freedom.  Then the NRA's national conference and its new president showed the organization's commitment to de-legimitizing elected officials and chattering about the importance of the second amendment for maintaining  that last, violent option to defend liberty.

I know some conservatives (namely my brother) who talk like this.  They say it casually, flippantly.  They mention no plans and no lines in the sand.  Thus I  think the good news in all of this is that few people are really serious about wanting to take their guns and seize some federal buildings -- they are not actually turning the NRA into a massive revolutionary militia, they're not drawing up lists of targets or planning on disputing elections by force.  They talk about it like it'll be a simple matter of saying 'I revolt' and that it will not require them to start lining up and shooting Nancy Pelosi's staffers, or sending the executive boards of the Sierra Club and NAACP to some camp*.  They're just talking, and talking like idiots.

The Uniquely awful presidency of George W Bush

George W. Bush is back in the news with the opening of his presidential library (when did these become a thing, anyway?).  There have been some weak attempts to defend him, and more repetitions of what we already know -- that George W. Bush was a poor president that made bad decisions, a man so obsessed with being 'the decider' that he banished any of the doubt and self-reflection needed for serious decision making*.

I've been returning to something that the great, curmudgeonly historian David Foner said -- that George W. Bush was the worst president ever.  Now I didn't think that then and I don't think that now -- we've had more wicked presidents (Jackson) and presidents that have presided over (and helped create) greater national disasters (Hoover, Buchanan).

But there is a narrow sense in which I think Bush is 'the worst ever' -- never before has a president -created- so many problems without any need or excuse.  Never before has a president been given such a strong hand -- a budget surplus, international leadership both moral and political -- and squandered it so completely, leaving us with financial collapse, trillion-dollar deficits, a misbegotten and mismanaged war, and Abu Ghraib.  The other presidential failures -- Hoover and Buchanan come to mind -- were given great challenges and failed spectacularly.  George W. Bush was given one significant but manageable challenge - 9-11 - and failed badly, and then he conjured up more failures (deficits, Katrina's aftermath) from thin air and sheer incompetence.


I've studied a bit of American history, and I think this is unique.  Other presidents (Nixon, Jefferson) mixed unforced errors with brilliant accomplishments, while others (Adams) had brilliant accomplishments amidst general incompetence.  George W. Bush doesn't just belong aside Harding and Filmore amongst the mediocre presidents, he belongs at the bottom of them all, circling the drain with Buchanan and Hoover.

*This probably has a bit to do with his MBA education and his stints in the corporate world, honestly.

'Collectivism' and 'Statism' are useless words

As the last two posts from me indicate, I've been reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.  Nazi and Stalinist atrocities have taken up enough mental real estate of late that I dreamt last night that my old elementary school was an underground prison.

But these atrocities are in a sense all around us; their memory is omnipresent, from their rather central role in school curricula to the use of Nazi and Soviet history as the ultimate in taboo humor.  They inform our discourse, and similes involving them are ubiquitous.

Most of these similes are too stupid to take seriously.  Comparing Obama to Hitler is so self-evidently moronic that I half suspect that no one truly believes it, people just want to believe it.  But more insidiously, some people use deliberately vague terms as a way to invite comparison between the democratic welfare state and authoritarianism.  Such comparisons are as useless and unenlightening as they are offensive.

They are not obvious, however.  Because one can define one's terms to make such a comparison true, in a trivial way.  You can, for instance, define all those who do not believe in absolute individual liberty as 'statists' or 'collectivists.'  By this definition, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler are all 'statists.'  But in so doing you have done nothing -- you've just invented a word that means 'everyone that disagrees with me' and applied it appropriately.  Such a word is not a term of history, but merely a propaganda tool, a linguistic trick designed to paint all your opponents with a Stalinist brush.

You may protest, that this is a philosophical term, one that accurately describes people's values, to which I would reply, simply -- hogwash.  On the contrary, such a way of speaking shows a perversely abstract way of viewing human belief, human morality and human action, where the bad thing about Stalin was not that he murdered millions, but that he did not believe in individual property rights.  Interestingly, on this point the libertarian agrees with the 1930's Communist apologist, who saw Stalin as just another progressive fighting for equality.

By their fruits ye shall know them.  Any term that turns us away from the actual impact that ideas have on human beings is a perversity, an intellectual temptation to lose sight of our fellow man.  To guard against this we must view 20th century atrocities not as myths or abstractions, but as historical facts, the products of particular systems.  Not merely a watchword for everything we hate.

Bloodlands: Something of a Review

I've finished Timothy Snyder's well-crafted but monumentally depressing book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Stalin and Hitler 1933-1945.  As I said before, it is a must read for anyone interested in 20th century European history, WWII or 20th century authoritarianism and its attendant atrocities.


I was struck by a few things about it.  For one, Snyder has enough literary and moral sensibility to place horrific events in a human and moral context without losing sight of cause and effect.  In particular, his conclusion, which combines history, ethics and politics, would make the book worth reading even if the rest of the book was just tables of fatalities.  This conclusion is by turns moving, intellectually probing and at times it presents a quiet challenge to the cliches we are so often fed about these atrocities.

Some Thoughts About How I Dress

The seasons are changing and with it my outfits, which has gotten me thinking about my clothes again. Believe it or my wardrobe (my clothing, shoes, accessories, jewelry, and outwear) is something that I've given a lot of thought to, in ways that may not show, so this post is an attempt to clarify why I dress the way I do.

I was a late bloomer, and subsisted happily on unfitted tshirts and jeans until 10th grade, when I got involved in theater, got a boyfriend, and realized I wanted to dress more like my peers. The first time my mom took me to the mall and I cared about what I was buying instead of going "yeah, whatever" I was quickly overwhelmed by the number of options out there and how to choose and combine them when I hadn't developed a sense of style and didn't have any female friends I felt comfortable asking to help give me one, and to boot all of it was SO expensive - especially the accessories. For $100 (an enormous sum when I was 15) I was going to end up with just a few outfits, not a whole wardrobe. About an hour in I shut down, much to my mom's disappointment, and never really recovered.

Since then I've gone about building up my wardrobe on MY terms, not the mall's or what's in style. In building up a wardrobe I've considered several factors - 1. body type, 2. price, durability and comfort, and 3. personal style, which I will explain below.