Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.
The text message I get with a quote a day lists the source as anonymous; ThinkExist sources it to H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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Category: Reflections
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Googling to a better life
Using Google as a guide to a good life – by xkcd.
I recently came to a new understanding about blogging.
About a week ago, I spoke with a friend of mine – who I consider to a somewhat successful businesswoman – ((I only include the qualifier ‘somewhat’ because it is obvious that she has greater ambitions.)) who explained to me that she was not sure who she was going to vote for because her top concern was the economy and she was not convinced about either candidate’s competence on this matter.
This came up as, walking by her office, she told me, motioning to the newspaper in front of her, “Obama’s economic ideas are getting torn apart here.” She was reading the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal – so, of course, they were beginning to warm to the man they had despised for these many years, as he sought to “coddle terrorists” because he was now the lapdog of the economic far right and the imperialist far right.
Of course, I mean John McCain, who tragically has sought to dispel his identity as a maverick who would stand up to the far right by groveling to the twin pillars of the elite wing of the Republican party. (McCain has been unable, or unwilling, to effectively seek the backing of the less elite, social right wing of the Republican party.) McCain, unable to give a position governing vision of his own – aside from a League of Democracies which would allow the United States to begin a new cold war with the tyrannies of the world including the two most powerful upcoming great powers, Russia and China – has sought to win the support of the three pillars of the Reagan-Bush coalition by selling visions of the social, economic, and foreign policy apocalypse that would occur should Barack Obama win the presidency.
That’s what McCain is now about – what his career has come to – demonizing Barack Obama. And I don’t think this is just some unfortunate political step McCain feels he needs to take – like endorsing the Confederate flag while campaigning in South Carolina. After he did that, McCain apologized afterwards and said he was wrong and pandering. While McCain knows many of the shots he is taking now are cheap – his early and strident attacks on Obama demonstrate a kind of urgency. McCain truly seems to have convinced himself that he deserves to be president, and Barack Obama is arrogant for challenging him.
My friend could see this – and probably agreed with most of this. But what she cared about was economics.
I discussed some issues with her, acknowledging that economics was not my strong point. But what I encountered while speaking with her was an agreement about the type of problem that we faced – a genuine structural problem within our capitalist system that had been worsening for some time – but a lack of understanding about the next steps. I believed – and tried to portray – that McCain, as a doctrinairre Republican on economics since 2006, would attempt to benefit the richest, fewest individuals while enabling the worst excesses while Barack Obama would take moderate, pragmatic steps to correct some of the underlying issues.
After speaking with her, I wanted to write one complete piece that would effectively make this case.
And for days, I wrote little else as I struggled to put together these pieces.
And that is when I realized something about blogging. The strength of a blog is not in any individual piece, but in working through the ideas in real time, responding to each day’s news events in some small way, putting a spin, adding a bit of understanding. Even as I would do that, I would still attempt to write “the piece” that would make a difference, that would change minds.
Blogging is about writing dozens of pieces – which together form a kind of journal, allowing insights into thought processes that are not available in single articles which should be consistent and coherent. Instead, blogs at their best provide a messy view of the thought process that would go behind an article, behind an idea. As people respond and attack and support a blogger’s arguments, they evolve. And that it what makes blogs a strong medium – even if it also demonstrates why they can never replace more definitive works.
Which is why I’ll now be adding another area to ruminate on – the economy.
[digg-reddit-me]Feelings are running high among us Obama supporters who also are strongly opposed to telecom immunity and the current FISA bill.
As the New York Times noted this weekend, the largest and most quickly growing group in Barack Obama’s social network was “Senator Obama – Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right“. I had joined the group a few days before the article had come out because I, like many others, felt strongly about this issue. I still do. And I believe Barack Obama took the wrong position.
But what has astounded me in the past few days has been the overwrought emotionalism that – from my perspective – has caused many of Obama’s supporters to lose perspective on this issue. Here’s a sample of some of the sentiments that have been sent out to all of the members of the “Get FISA Right” group in the past few hours, since Obama voted in support of the bill:
“A dream died today!”
“Obama just lost my vote!!!”
“As we are about to throw out the 4th amendment shall we redefine the Bill of Rights as the first 9 amendments, or should we just leave a blank between 3 and 5 as the 13th floor is left out in high rise buildings.”
“I think we finally got to see the side of Obama we all deep down, thought was there. Another money grubbing lawyer going along with the pack; saying one thing doing another.”
“Please stop giving your hard earned money to this fraud!”
“Today, the Constitution will be shredded at the hands of Democrats and Barack Obama. I no longer believe that voting makes a difference. I am completely dispirited. Obama’s talk of change is a sham.”
“I find myself today looking for Ralph Nader’s campaign website.”
Perhaps more honest than these sentiments, one writer started with this caveat:
“At this very moment, this is how I FEEL. It does not mean it is how I will follow through, merely how I feel…”
He then unleashed a tirade. But at least he could see that he had lost some sense of perspective.
Glenn Greenwald, probably the foremost expert on this topic, one of the most influential opponents of this bill, who has been tirelessly pushing this issue through his blog and through guest appearances on radio shows was able to keep perspective when Obama first announced his turn-around on this issue:
There is no question, at least to me, that having Obama beat McCain is vitally important. But so, too, is the way that victory is achieved and what Obama advocates and espouses along the way.
The overheated rhetoric by these passionate supporters lends credence to the scoffing of the right-wingers who have insisted that Barack Obama’s support is weak because the young are naive and credulous and easily marginalized.
Truly – how many people supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel because of his position on telecom immunity? Far fewer than are now peevishly demanding refunds for their donations. This is an important issue – but it is far from the only issue.
Those of us who have been involved with politics before know that no matter how great the individual, you should never place your faith in a politician. A knowledge of history teaches us that every great person is still limited by their times. Abraham Lincoln – perhaps our greatest president – was vilified by the abolitionists of his day for being too pragmatic, for compromising too easily, for not sticking to his principles. In the end, Lincoln’s greatness came not from the fact that he stood on principle and defeated his adversaries – but that he skillfully managed our nation through a great crisis and took every opportunity he thought prudent to achieve the ends he sought. But it was the people and the battles that created the opportunities. Lincoln was only a great leader because during that long, hard war, we became a great people, willing to die for the fragile idea of freedom.
Barack Obama is not Abraham Lincoln, and we are not in a civil war. But we do face a very real crisis of identity and very real threats from at home and abroad. What we need to remember – as citizens – is that Obama is not and cannot be our savior. What Obama’s campaign has always been about is us. Unlike Hillary Clinton or John McCain or any other candidate, Obama’s campaign was about the movement that was supporting him. Which is why both Clinton’s and McCain’s campaigns have focused their attacks on Obama’s supporters as well as the candidate himself. For the past few weeks, McCain has been trying to put a wedge between Obama and his supporters – based on the theory that if he can paint Obama as “just another politician,” the youth vote that has been expected to throw the last few elections to the Democrats will forget to show up, again.
Obama is another politician. An uncommonly good one. An uncommonly thoughtful one. An unusually astute one. But like very person, and like every politician, he has made a mistake and voted for an awful bill.
I still support Obama. And so should you. Winning this election is not about Obama – but about the movement. If we do not become a great people, then neither Obama nor any other politician can become a great president.
Obama has spoken positively about how this movement should put pressure on him and every other politician to do the right thing – and with his campaign he has created and with his presidency he has promised to create more of the tools to do just that. No one will get every issue right – but the core reason to support Obama, as Lawrence Lessig has argued, is because he supports reforming the process to allow citizens to truly engage with power – by making the government more transparent and more accountable. He also happens to be on the right side of most of these issues – supporting increased transparency in Washington, restoring habeas corpus, ending our neo-empire in the Middle East, opposing wars of choice, net neutrality, and many other issues.
For those who have declared that the “dream” died today – stop dreaming about Barack Obama and start working to get our nation back on the right track. Electing Barack Obama is only the first step, as today’s events have proven.
I am disappointed in him. And I think criticism is warranted. But temper tantrums rarely do anyone any good.
This disappointment will not diminish one iota my determination to have Barack Obama elected the next President of the United States of America. This is our moment. Let’s not let momentary disappointment lead to a disengagement with politics.
[digg-reddit-me]Without endorsing the report or the think tank, here’s an appropriate quote from the Harry Bradley Foundation’s report on America’s National Identity [pdf] (h/t David Broder):
America is unique among nations in being founded not on a common ethnicity, but on a set
of ideas. A nation based on ethnicity perpetuates itself by the fact of birth. But a nation founded
on an idea starts anew with each generation and with each new group of immigrants. Knowing
what America stands for is not a genetic inheritance. It must be learned, both by the next generation and by those who come to this country. In this way, a nation founded on an idea is inherently fragile. And a nation that celebrates the many ways we are different from one another must remind itself constantly of what we all share
This understanding of the inherent fragility of America represents the essential insight of American conservatism – an understanding that George W. Bush has entirely rejected. I describe this as a conservative insight based on a more traditional view of conservatism that, in Buckley’s phrase, “stands athwart history shouting ‘Stop!’ ” A conservatism that in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Russel Kirk respects traditions and the status quo.
George W. Bush is not a conservative by any of these standards. He is instead, a right-winger, divorced from the divorced from the inherent moderate or even reactionary elements of the conservative tradition. He is not a liberal – as some conservatives now claim, trying to distance themselves from him. Bush is a radical right-winger whose main focus has been the establishment of an American empire abroad and an elected monarch at home.
What is most perplexing about Bush is that even as he has sought monarchical powers – the ability to imprison people without charge or judicial review indefinitely, the right to be free from the constraints of law, the authority to wage war without checks or balances, and the protection from accountability to the people or other branches of government – he has been relatively restrained in his use of them. This makes his presidency all the more insidious – as the greatest majority of Americans have not noticed the growing power of the presidency even as it threatens the very idea of America – and idea which is inherently fragile.
This report focuses on how we need to educate America children and citizens in order to enable America to survive. This is true. But what this report appears to miss is that the most dire, the most pressing threat to America today is the legal framework and the precedent set by the actions of the Bush administration.
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The Message from Hillary
Clinton’s campaign had leaked to the press word that she was going to suspend her campaign and endorse Obama early yesterday afternoon after Clinton received strong push-back in her meetings around Washington to the idea of staying in the race a bit longer. The Obama campaign first learned of this development from the press.
Early this morning, Hillary’s campaign made an official announcement via an email to her supporters at 1:53 am entitled, “I want you to know.” The full text:
Dear Joseph,
I wanted you to be one of the first to know: on Saturday, I will hold an event in Washington D.C. to thank everyone who has supported my campaign. Over the course of the last 16 months, I have been privileged and touched to witness the incredible dedication and sacrifice of so many people working for our campaign. Every minute you put into helping us win, every dollar you gave to keep up the fight meant more to me than I can ever possibly tell you.
On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.
I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party’s nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise.
When I decided to run for president, I knew exactly why I was getting into this race: to work hard every day for the millions of Americans who need a voice in the White House.
I made you — and everyone who supported me — a promise: to stand up for our shared values and to never back down. I’m going to keep that promise today, tomorrow, and for the rest of my life.
I will be speaking on Saturday about how together we can rally the party behind Senator Obama. The stakes are too high and the task before us too important to do otherwise.
I know as I continue my lifelong work for a stronger America and a better world, I will turn to you for the support, the strength, and the commitment that you have shown me in the past 16 months. And I will always keep faith with the issues and causes that are important to you.
In the past few days, you have shown that support once again with hundreds of thousands of messages to the campaign, and again, I am touched by your thoughtfulness and kindness.
I can never possibly express my gratitude, so let me say simply, thank you.
Sincerely,
Hillary Rodham Clinton
There’s still asking their supporters to Contribute which is interesting – understandable too, as her campaign is in quite a bit of debt.
- Watching Rubashov, page 108:
He found that those processes wrongly known as ‘monologues’ are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as ‘I’ instead of ‘you’, in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner remains silent, shuns observation and even refuses to be localized in space and time…
- Listening to Ivanov, page 157:
There are only two conceptions of human ethics, adn they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacronsanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community–which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first concept could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice it is impossible. Whoever is burdened with power and responsibility finds out on the first occasion that he has to choose; and he is fatally driven to the second alternative. Do you know, since the establishment of Christianity as a state religion, a single example of a state which really followed a Christian policy? You can’t point out one. In times of need–and politics are chronically in a time of need–rulers were alwats able to evoke ‘exceptional circumstances’, which demanded exceptional measures of defence. Since the existence of nations and classes, they live in a permanent state of mutual self-defence, which forcecs them to defer to another time the putting into practice of humanism…
- In the mind of Rubanov, page 255:
The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless suffering. But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous increase in the sum total of the first. So the question now ran: Was such an operation justified? Obviously it was, if one spoke in the abstract of ‘mankind’; but applied to ‘man’ in the singular, to the cipher 2-4, the real human being of bone and flesh and blood and skin, the principle led to absurdity. As a boy, he believed that working for the Party he would find an answer to all questions of this sort. The work had lasted forty years and right at the start he had forgotten the question for whose sake he had embarked on it. Now the forty years were over, and he returned to the boy’s original perplexity. That Party had taken all he had to give and never supplied him with the answer. And neither did the silent partner, whose magic name he had tapped on the wall of the empty cell. He was deaf to direct questions, however urgent and desperate they might be.
My favorite Quotations from Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.
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The utility of principles
“We don’t have much time, Kadife,” he said. He could hear that strange note of dread in his voice. “I know you’re bright enough and sensitive enough to get through all this with grace. I’m saying this to you as someone who’s spent years as a political exile. Listen to me: Life’s not about principles, it’s about happiness.”
“But if you don’t have any principles, and if you don’t have faith, you can’t be happy at all,” said Kadife.
“That’s true. But in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it’s stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals – only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.”
“Actually, it’s the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.”
Ka wanted to say, But the things they believe aren’t true! but he managed to hold his tongue.
From Snow by Orhan Pamuk on pages 312-313, in a conversation on whether or not Kadife should bare her head.
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Imagineering!
Never actually been to Disney World, but this observation by Seth Stevenson was fascinating:
The Imagineering Field Guide to Disney’s Animal Kingdom reveals that the imagineers deliberately left the parking lots out in front of this Disney-style zoo as bleak and barren as they could. A wasteland, with no strips of grass to interrupt the endless asphalt slab. They wanted to heighten the contrast we feel when entering into the lush, wooded Animal Kingdom park. The scheme “ensures that the immersion into nature … will be very impactful.”
My first thought upon reading this was: Screw you, imagineers! Parking lots suck enough as it is. You’re saying you made yours even more depressing than necessary, just so you could showcase some cutesy landscaping idea? Go imaginuck yourselves!
Once I’d gotten this indignation out of my system, my second thought was: Gosh, they sure do put a lot of thought into this stuff. Leafing through these behind-the-scenes books (I also have The Imagineering Field Guide to Epcot) brings to light, yet again, the insane attention to detail you find at every Disney property.
Excerpts from my Journals
[Dated July 16, 2003.]
If we find W.M.D. in Iraq, but lose Iraq, Mr. Bush will not only go down as a failed president, but one who made the world even more dangerous for Americans. If we find no W.M.D., but build a better Iraq – one that proves that a multiethnic, multireligious Arab state can rule itself in a decent way – Mr. Bush will survive his hyping of the W.M.D. issue, and the world will be a more hospitable and safer place for all Americans.