Category: Politics - Page 5 - UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

There is no John Galt

Who is John Galt? The rhetorical question, posed frequently throughout the early sections of Ayn Rand’s epic tome Atlas Shrugged, continues to crop up here and there to this day, usually as a bumper sticker on the back of a BMW: the economic libertarian’s counterpart to the Deadhead dancing bears. It’s a codeword, the inverse of 420. If you know the answer to the question, you’re in the club of laissez-faire capitalists and would-be prime movers.

If you’ve never read Ayn Rand — and if you’re older than 20, you probably shouldn’t bother — you may still wonder just who John Galt is. Quick summary: he’s the bold visionary savior of capitalism, the person who would let the old world die so he and his disciples can shape a new one in the image of the dollar sign. If that still doesn’t answer the question for you, well, take some solace in the fact that the question probably isn’t really worth answering in the first place.

I’ve been thinking about John Galt more lately than I have in about 18 years, since the second and last time I read Atlas Shrugged cover-to-cover. I’ll admit, it can be a page turner for most of its (excessive) length, at least until the portion near then end where John Galt himself takes over the world’s airwaves and launches into a dry, rambling 80-page soliloquy laying bare Ayn Rand’s philosophy. But people don’t read Ayn Rand because her writing is so great. It’s not. They read Ayn Rand because her ideas are radical and liberating to ambitious minds that feel trapped in a society of conformist mediocrity.

In other words, her ideas are just what 15-year-old, Rush-and-D&D-obsessed nerds need to feel better about themselves in a world that rejects them for being different. At least, that’s what I thought her ideas were until I got really obsessed with them in college, moving beyond her novels to her collected non-fiction essays, along with those written by her “egoist” acolytes, including Alan Greenspan.

Yes, that Alan Greenspan.

I was pretty surprised to learn that the (at the time) Fed chairman was an Ayn Rand devotee, and it convinced me (at the time) that some day soon we’d see Ayn Rand’s philosophy rise up and vanquish the mediocrity of our soul-sucking society.

But then I grew up. I realized that her writing fell firmly in the realm of fantasy. And it wasn’t just that the “second-handers” of society that she described did not correspond in any recognizable way to anyone in the real world. It was that the leaders in her world — not just the godlike John Galt but the creators, the captains of industry, like Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden — didn’t have any real-world counterparts either. People, in most cases, do not rise to power and wealth purely through their noble industriousness and hard work, just as people do not struggle with poverty because they’re lazy. The world Ayn Rand creates has a tantalizingly simple internal logic. Unfortunately, her world is a miserably inadequate model of the complex, messy external reality she believed her “objectivism” so clearly observed.

Still, all of this would be an academic exercise for me to ponder in my parents’ basement were it not for the likes of Alan Greenspan, and so many who have come after him: Ron and Rand (Rand!) Paul, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, the Tea Party and anyone whose ability to follow a thought through to logical conclusion is so broken that they somehow manage to espouse both Ayn Rand’s (aggressively atheist) philosophy and fundamentalist Christianity simultaneously. Check your premises, etc. etc.

What frightens me is that in the two decades or so since I outgrew Ayn Rand myself, and especially since the 2010 midterm elections, we’ve come to a point where we have people who embrace Ayn Rand’s philosophy, however contradictory their overall views may be, in positions of government power in the United States. People who apparently know (and, for that matter, care) so little about the way our government actually functions, yet who believe so fully — so faithfully — in the economic principles described in books like The Fountainhead and, especially, Atlas Shrugged, that they would run the metaphorical ship aground on these shaky premises, believing that allowing the United States to default on its debts, allowing the economy to crumble, would actually be a good thing, and would give them the opportunity to remake our government, our economy, our society, in a way more in line with Ayn Rand’s ideas.

But Ayn Rand wasn’t even a good science fiction writer, much less a good economist, and far less an astute, objective observer of the fragile complexities of human character and American society. If we allow our economy to collapse, if we make it collapse because we think we can start over from scratch with a (non-existent) team of all-star CEOs drawing up the blueprints, we will quickly learn the answer to the question. There is no John Galt.

Update (November 16, 2011): John Galt is getting some more attention lately, as apparently Lululemon loves him.

State GOP chair Tony Sutton’s faulty logic

“Something doesn’t smell right when you take control of the state house; you take control of the state senate; you win in the 8th Congressional District, and yet, somehow we don’t win the governor’s race.”

—Minnesota Republican Party chairman Tony Sutton*

I was planning to avoid much commentary on this year’s election, but I’m even more of a math/logic nerd than I am a liberal/progressive, and while I can (almost) shut my mouth about the Tea Party movement, I can’t let this glaringly erroneous logic go uncorrected.

First, Sutton makes two unfounded assumptions:

1. Supporters of Republican state house and senate candidates couldn’t possibly — possibly! — also vote for Mark Dayton.

2. Those same supporters of Republican state house and senate candidates couldn’t possibly — possibly!!!! — vote for Independence Party candidate Tom Horner for governor rather than Tom Emmer.

Let’s just talk math. Let’s go with that unfounded assumption that anyone who voted for a Republican for the state house would also necessarily vote for Tom Emmer, and anyone who voted for a Democrat for the state house would likewise necessarily vote for Mark Dayton. We’ll ignore the state senate and third-party candidates for now.

Let’s assume three house districts, each with 10,000 voters. And let’s assume the vote breakdown went something like this:

District	GOP House	DFL House	Tom Emmer	Mark Dayton
District 1	5,500 (55%)	4,500 (45%)	5,500 (55%)	4,500 (45%)
District 2	5,100 (51%)	4,900 (49%)	5,100 (51%)	4,900 (49%)
District 3	1,500 (15%)	8,500 (85%)	1,500 (15%)	8,500 (85%)
Statewide Total			12,100 (40.3%)	17,900 (59.7%)

In this scenario, the GOP house candidates narrowly won districts 1 and 2, while the DFL house candidate overwhelmingly won district 3. Still, the GOP outnumbers the DFL in this fictional 3-seat house by 2 to 1. And yet, the citizens in these three districts, all voting straight party tickets, handed Mark Dayton a decisive 59.7% majority victory in the statewide governor’s race.

This is fictional, simplified, and exaggerated, but it proves my point. And yes, I do believe that there’s some accuracy to this kind of breakdown. There are a few “deep red” districts in the state and a few very “deep blue” ones (mostly in the metro area), but most are fairly close to the middle.

In the actual vote, for instance, let’s compare two counties with roughly equal populations: St. Louis (home of Duluth) and Olmsted (home of Rochester). In St. Louis County, Mark Dayton received 61.8% of the vote; Tom Emmer, 28.6%. In Olmsted County, Tom Emmer received 45.9% of the vote; Mark Dayton 37.9%. So Mark Dayton “won” St. Louis County and Tom Emmer “won” Olmsted County. But saying either candidate “won” a particular county is irrelevant; this is a statewide office, and statewide totals are all that matters.

All it takes is a few districts with a very high proportion of Democrats to Republicans, and a lack of correspondingly skewed districts to compensate, and it’s quite easy, even imagining all voters voting a straight party ticket, to arrive at a scenario where the Republicans score a decisive takeover of the state legislature while still electing a Democratic governor (a statewide office).

March 21, 2010 was a good day

There were two huge news events yesterday, both of which made me more hopeful about the future of our nation, for drastically different reasons.

First, health care reform. I’ve been a big supporter of this since the beginning. The promise of reform of our woefully dysfunctional health insurance system was a key issue of President Obama’s campaign, and I am impressed that he stuck to it against considerable odds. Charting a course both idealistic and pragmatic, he achieved something other presidents have tried, unsuccessfully, for decades.

Is it a flawed and perhaps inadequate reform? Yes. But it’s a start. We’ve known we were on the wrong road, a dead-end road, for decades. We’re not back on the right road yet, but at least we’ve finally turned around and are heading in the right direction.

I’ll save the particulars for another discussion, and I’ll refrain from my usual complaints about the likes of Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin et al. I believe this is a profoundly good thing for America, and I believe in the coming months it will get better. By election day, the true value of what has been achieved will have started to become apparent. We’ll still be plugging our ears over the screeches from the far right, but in the end it won’t matter, because the Democrats in Congress, despite themselves, managed to get something, something really big, done. For more on what this reform bill means, there are some excellent articles at the New York Times.

The other big news, less essential to most Americans’ day-to-day lives, but great for Minnesota Twins fans, and really for anyone who appreciates the role baseball plays in America’s cultural life, is that the Twins signed Joe Mauer to an 8-year contract. And not just any 8-year contract, but a New York Yankees-sized 8-year contract. The amount of money involved may seem obscene to many, and I’m sure there will be complaints that if the team can afford that kind of salary for one player, they could have afforded to chip in more of the cost of Target Field. (I’d have to admit, there’s some credence to that argument, considering that this 8-year contract for Joe Mauer — $184 million — is more than the Twins’ share of stadium construction costs — $167.4 million.)

But that doesn’t matter. The fact is, Joe Mauer is unequivocally a superstar of Major League Baseball. And this is the scale of MLB superstar salaries. If Mauer had gone to free agency at the end of this season, he would have been signed by the Yankees, or the Red Sox, or another “large market” team on the East or West Coast, and if anything, he would have been paid more. I’m proud of the Twins for sticking it out, keeping the hometown boy at home, and giving him the kind of salary his stature in the league warrants.

Considering that less than a decade ago the Twins were being considered for contraction, the fact that they have become a perennial contender, and are now beginning a new era in a first-class ballpark with an MVP catcher, this contract is a decisive statement that mid-market teams do count, and that Major League Baseball really does happen outside of the Bronx. For more thoughts on the Mauer contract, check out this article from ESPN.com.

Looking ahead at the future of LRT in Minneapolis

Honestly, I have to admit that I’ve been fairly apathetic about the process of determining a route for the proposed southwest light rail line in Minneapolis. I love the Hiawatha Line: it’s the biggest reason why we moved to the house we live in. At the time I was working downtown, and our house is within walking distance of two stations. I commuted on the light rail every day for 3 1/2 years. I also take a keen interest in the extension of the Hiawatha line to the new Twins stadium, and I’m mildly interested in the next light rail project: the Central Corridor, because it connects to the U of M campus and downtown St. Paul, other places I am interested in traveling to.

But Eden Prairie? Not so much. All of the talk I have heard about the southwest line has been focused on Eden Prairie. Who cares? It’s the same reason I haven’t been clamoring for a ride on the new Northstar commuter line. I don’t need to go to Big Lake. I wouldn’t even know where the hell Big Lake was if not for the Northstar line teaching me that it’s obviously somewhere in between Minneapolis and St. Cloud (which, no offense to Michele Bachmann’s constituents, I also don’t need to go to).

Of course, I forget that in getting to Eden Prairie, the southwest line might just go through other interesting parts of the city along the way, such as Uptown. Or, maybe not. (Read on… I’ll get to it.)

Tonight has been a strange night of web browsing for me. I started off with a Daring Fireball post about Gary Hustwit’s (of Helvetica fame) new documentary Objectified. Then kottke.org led me to start thinking about geography, which is usually what carries me off on flights of link-clicking fancy. Even better, Kottke also linked to a fascinating post on oobject with before-and-after photos of cities, some good, like reconstruction of bombed-out European cities post-WWII, and others, well… pretty much the opposite. (Perhaps the eeriest thing about the exhibit was the similarity between Kabul and Detroit.)

After pondering urban decay, I was uplifted a bit by a series of photoblog entries by Alex Block, a Minneapolis native now living in DC, capturing his experiences on a return visit to our city this past summer. He had valid, if slightly stinging, criticisms of our Skyway system, but he also gave the LRT some attention. Most compelling for me, however, was his coverage of the proposed southwest LRT line, including the potent map below:

Block’s source for that map provides excellent background on the situation, and why federal cost-effectiveness guidelines may dictate that the comparatively worthless green line will probably get built, instead of the more expensive — but also immeasurably more useful — blue line. It’s not just population density; a pair of related maps show that poverty levels and current public transit use also heavily favor the Uptown route over the Kenilworth route.

Don’t get me wrong… the green line runs through some very nice parts of town, and I suppose in many ways it does make sense, at least from the perspective of construction costs, to follow existing rail right-of-way as much as possible. But “some very nice parts of town” don’t really need mass transit in the way that, oh, you know, densely-populated parts of town do, especially densely-populated parts of town with much higher poverty and transit ridership levels.

On the other hand, I suspect many people were initially critical of the route of the Hiawatha Line. I think I was myself, but of course back then I wasn’t familiar enough with this part of town to care very much. (And by now it should be obvious that I only care about what I care about.) It seemed that the primary selling point for the Hiawatha Line was that it directly connected the two heaviest-traffic parts of the metro area: downtown Minneapolis and the airport/Mall of America cluster in Bloomington. That in so doing, it could also be built relatively cheaply along available right-of-way next to Hiawatha Avenue — land originally intended for a freeway (source) that was never built — was a nice bonus for getting the plan through the funding process, despite the fact that that also meant that between the VA Hospital and Lake Street it would mostly run through a mildly-blighted stretch of abandoned grain elevators and former department store warehouses converted into self-storage units.

That mildly-blighted area is notably less blighted (the boarding up of Hiawatha Joe notwithstanding) today than it was a few years ago, thanks almost entirely to the presence of the LRT line running through it.

Perhaps there’s a lesson in this for the southwest line as well. Perhaps I should not be so quick to dismiss the potential for a light rail line to transform the ugliness around I-394 between the Dunwoody Institute and Penn Avenue. On the other hand, it’s not just the light rail that breathed new life into the area around Hiawatha Avenue. Hiawatha Avenue itself had to be there, and there’s nothing like it in the area of the proposed Kenilworth version of the southwest line. Nor does the majority of that part of the city need the kind of boost the light rail has given the Longfellow neighborhood. Phillips, Lyn-Lake, and Uptown, however, do need the benefits high-capacity rail transit would offer. They’re among the most densely-populated parts of the city, with some of the worst street traffic. Uptown is also one of the biggest destinations in the city, besides downtown itself, and for a southwest line to achieve the kind of success the Hiawatha Line has in its five years of operation, it’s going to need more riders than just Eden Prairie’s weekday commuters.

And so, much like my meandering links across the Internet earlier this evening, and my meandering reasoning here, it seems to me that there’s little question that if we think about the long term objectives of the line… the reason for building the damn thing in the first place, it makes sense to build it where it will actually be used, not just where it’s cheapest to do so.

Addendum: Lest you think I’ve gotten too swept up in my grand visions of freeway systems planned in the 1950s and ’60s, finished or not, and forgotten that they splintered and destroyed (disproportionately African-American) communities; or in this century’s counterparts in light rail projects and related work that lead to things like rerouting highways through sacred Native American land… I haven’t.

On separating artists’ work from their beliefs

My musical tastes have taken a couple of painful blows in the past 24 hours. First, an old friend and fellow musician tipped me off to an ongoing controversy over French prog rock/jazz drummer Christian Vander (founder of Magma) and his possibly pro-Nazi beliefs. Ouch.

Then, my growing interest in exploring the catalog of early ’70s soft rock duo Seals and Crofts, best known for the hits “Summer Breeze,” “Diamond Girl” and “We May Never Pass this Way (Again)” (gotta love those parenthetical song titles — they just don’t do that anymore), was waylaid by learning about the controversy over their anti-abortion song and album Unborn Child, released in 1974, right after the Roe v. Wade decision. The song led abortion rights activists to protest against the band, and probably accelerated their demise.

Christian Vander

The stuff about Christian Vander and Nazism is truly disturbing, although it should be noted that there’s no concrete evidence that he really does (or ever did) espouse these beliefs. Taking an honest look at Magma’s work, though, it’s not a huge leap to that conclusion. There’s plenty of Wagnerian influence in their work; Vander’s concocted language, Kobaian, sounds heavily Germanic, especially when shouted with a Hitler-like cadence (as did happen on some of their early recordings); and the band’s overall concept — a select group of humans flee an apocalyptic Earth and settle a new homeworld — is like a sci-fi version of the Third Reich. Another friend and Magma fan even pointed out that there’s a swastika in the cover art from the band’s first album, something I had never noticed before.

Of course, even with all of that, there’s no concrete evidence that Christian Vander is a Nazi. But since all of the band’s lyrics are sung in his own made-up tongue, and he’s never published an official Kobaian-to-French (or any other real language) dictionary, the best knowledge we have of what he’s actually singing about is the result of questionable fan translations.

Seals and Crofts

As for Seals and Crofts, one song written from the perspective of a fetus is a far cry from an entire body of work that may (debatably) promote a white supremacist agenda. But as a pro-choice liberal, knowing this song is part of the Seals and Crofts canon alters my perspective on the rest of the band’s work. Abortion is a complicated issue, however, in ways that Nazism isn’t: as far as I’m concerned, there’s absolutely no way to justify Hitler’s beliefs. I find Nazism so abhorrent I can hardly even talk about it.

But it’s possible to support abortion rights even though you think, ideally, no one should ever have an abortion. I would like to live in a world where abortion didn’t have to exist, but no one who hasn’t been in the position of having to make that difficult decision should feel like they have the right to take the option away from someone else. I don’t wish to belabor the abortion discussion in this post, however, as it is not the point. (And I think far too many important issues already get derailed by the abortion argument; case in point, the recently passed House bill for health care reform.)

The Big Question(s)

In both of these cases, the question for me becomes: Can I still enjoy the work of these artists, knowing that I disagree with their beliefs? I think there’s an important corollary to this question, and that is: Are the artists actively trying to promote their controversial beliefs with their art?

In the case of Seals and Crofts, on the second question, I would have to say yes they are, quite explicitly. To have released the song “Unborn Child,” with lyrics like “Oh unborn child, if you only knew just what your momma was plannin’ to do / You’re still a-clingin’ to the tree of life, but soon you’ll be cut off before you get ripe,” mere months after Roe v. Wade was a clear response to what was going on, and an unequivocal statement of beliefs on the issue. But, like I said, abortion is complicated. I think it’s possible to appreciate the difficulty of the decision, the moral ambiguity of the act, and still, ultimately, believe in a woman’s right to undertake it, if her circumstances lead her to do so.

As to the first question, I’m not sure this one song by Seals and Crofts can take away from the merits of the rest of their work, especially when you consider this song in the context of the band members’ Baha’i faith. I’ve tried to do some research (since I’m ignorant on the matter) on what Baha’i says about abortion (you can google it for yourself), and have come to the conclusion that, just as I’ve been saying, it’s complicated. There are certain readings that say it is “absolutely forbidden,” but also a broader interpretation that says it’s up to the individual conscience. This leads back to my general belief on the matter, which is that the decision should be left to the conscience of the person who is making it. If you feel abortion is an absolute wrong, don’t have one. But it’s a legal right, and its morality is a subject of debate. Don’t impose your beliefs on others who may also have carefully weighed the matter and conscientiously arrived at a different conclusion.

The song states the band’s (or actually, lyricist Lana Bogan’s) beliefs on the matter. And if you really read the lyrics, the message, repeated again and again, is “Stop, turn around, go back think it over.” Think it over. Not “don’t do it.” This is not a message I necessarily disagree with. The song, on the whole, feels a bit like the simplistic, emotional body blow delivered by the “I could wiggle my toes at 18 weeks!” pro-life billboards. A bit disingenuous and distasteful, focusing on one narrow aspect of the debate. For that reason, I think I may never be able to appreciate this particular song. But it’s not going to turn me off from the band otherwise.

Thinking about these two questions in relation to Magma leads to much different conclusions. First, it needs to be repeated that there’s no concrete evidence, at least none that I’ve seen so far, to suggest that Christian Vander is in fact pro-Nazi. I deeply wish to believe that he is not, because although there’s much tension and fury in Magma’s music, there’s also a tremendous life-affirming energy, and I would hate to think that is tainted with repugnant anti-Semitic beliefs. But, assuming for the moment that the story is all true, where does that leave me with his music? First, it’s important to consider whether he’s actively promoting these views within his art. That question is almost impossible to answer, given the fact that I have no idea what he’s actually singing about. This has nagged at my conscience since I first heard the band, but I dismissed it for two reasons: 1) I rarely pay much attention to lyrics anyway, focusing mostly on the instrumental parts and harmonic structures in the music I enjoy, and 2) since I couldn’t understand any of the words, I could appreciate the vocals as abstract sounds. I always assumed that this was Vander’s main intention with the invented language: since the vocal performances are somewhat operatic in nature anyway, with extended repetition of lines, removing any recognizable meaning from the words allows the listener to focus solely on the sounds of the voices. Of course, it’s just as easy to interpret this decision as his way of getting people to listen to his deranged rants without realizing the horror of what he’s talking about.

I sincerely hope that it’s not the latter. But knowing that it might be, and that this is a fundamental part of not just one song, but the band’s entire body of work, is extremely off-putting. Fortunately I haven’t been listening to Magma much lately anyway, but until I can learn more about the truth of these allegations, I will find it difficult to give them any attention at all.

In general, then, the conclusion I arrive at is that I can separate an artist’s work from their beliefs, if they do. But as with everything, it’s complicated. One isolated work that promotes a viewpoint I disagree with is one thing; an entire body of work devoted to actively promoting an abhorrent philosophy is fundamentally unacceptable. But that’s a pretty extreme scenario, one that’s unlikely to exist except in rare cases of extremely idiosyncratic artists… like Christian Vander. It’s tough to face the prospect of abandoning long-held enthusiasm for the work of such a gifted musician, especially when I’m not sure there’s any foundation to the accusations leveled against him. But it’s something to consider.

Disidentification

I was discussing this situation with SLP, and she mentioned a concept that came up yesterday in a class she’s teaching: disidentification. Disidentification arises mainly in queer theory, in the context of discussions of gender role identification. I hope I’m not committing an egregious offense in appropriating the term, but I think it has broader implications as well, in the form of “deeply engaging with ideas/theories and using them, but not identifying with them.”

This concept shows up a lot in art (especially music): talented artists can write from a perspective that is not necessarily their own. I am thinking in particular about “The Rake’s Song” from the recent Decemberists album The Hazards of Love. Colin Meloy is embodying a despicable character, one who has murdered all of his own children just to be rid of them, yet no serious listener assumes that Meloy himself is filicidal. From this perspective, it’s possible — though a bit of a stretch — to assume that Christian Vander is writing lyrics from Hitler’s perspective in order to reflect critically upon that perspective, or that Seals and Crofts are pro-choice but exploring the worldview of someone who is not.

As a listener, it is possible, of course, to hear “The Rake’s Song” and not feel the urge to act upon its message, nor even to be particularly appalled by it. After all, it’s tongue-in-cheek; the rake is an outlandish cartoon of a character in an already outlandish rock opera. It’s also possible to engage critically with the genuine views expressed in Seals and Crofts’ song without agreeing with them. And, presumably, it’s possible too to engage with whatever Christian Vander is singing about, even if you don’t like it. The questions then raised are: 1) do you want to engage with them, and 2) if not, why not?

I’m inclined to say “no” regarding engagement with possible pro-Nazi messages in Magma’s music. As to why I feel that way, is it because I find these views distasteful, even if I wouldn’t have known about them through the music alone? Or is it because I’m self-conscious that someone else might think I don’t just l like the music, but I actually agree with what he’s saying? Well, it’s probably a lot more likely that an outside observer would just think I was a nut for liking something so obviously weird, but I’m used to that.

Probably what it really comes down to for me is that, most of the time, I’m just not interested in engaging with these difficult topics. I have not devoted myself to a life of activism. I prefer to spend my time focusing on the positive things I enjoy. That doesn’t make the bad things go away, and it doesn’t make me care any less. I’m just not that good at that kind of engagement, and it just leaves me frustrated and upset that the things I dislike exist in the first place. Perhaps that’s a weakness to be overcome, but in the current context, I think all it means is that, for a while at least, I’ll be listening to more “Summer Breeze” and less “Kreühn Köhrmahn Iss de Hündïn.”