Back to Basics

President Clinton was, as we all know, the nation’s first black president. Now Newsweek has declared Obama to be America’s first gay president which means the first gay president will probably have to settle for being called the first alien president and, after that, the first alien president will be out of luck.

Unwilling to allow any of his future successors to corner the market on identity, the Washington Post has dubbed Obama; “The First Female President”, which is ironic given how his victory actually prevented the election of the country’s first female president. But the only way for Obama to win the war on women may be by going transgender.

Last year New York Magazine put Obama in a Kippa and stuck him on the cover as the “First Jewish President.” Before that he had already been dubbed the “First Asian-American President”, cementing his appeal as all things to all people. And why not, when we live in a wonderful time when anyone can be anything they want.

Elizabeth Warren, with her strong northern European features, and an ancestor who participated in the “Trail of Tears”, can be recognized as a “Woman of Color,” and, when challenged on her claim, the media rolls out a dozen pieces suggesting that Cherokee ancestry is some sort of vague unstructured concept that can’t be quantified with rigid standards such as actually having a Cherokee ancestor.

Over in Florida, that infamous white menace, George Zimmerman is standing trial and if the trial doesn’t go Holder’s way, the attorney general will charge him with a hate crime. In a saner world, there would be more chances of Holder going to jail for the mass murder of Latinos as part of a plot to subvert the Bill of Rights; than there would be of a Latino man being lynched as a white racist.

But we don’t live in a sane world, we live in a post-racial world, where everything is racial and nothing is racial. Where race is meaningful and meaningless, everywhere and nowhere, where everyone who wants to be someone has a victim identity in their wallet and an essay on the plight of their people.

The age of Obama is truly a post-racial one, not in the sense that race doesn’t matter, it actually matters more than ever, but that it no longer exists as a concrete identity. Race, gender and sexual orientation are just variables that you adopt if you like, but once you’ve adopted them, then you insist that they are an inescapable part of you and that you are one of the oppressed.

Forget being famous for fifteen minutes, that’s trite in the age of YouTube and Reality TV where anyone can be famous if they really want to. We live in a country where anyone can be black, gay or Cherokee and have a full time career resisting white oppression, a career that pays surprisingly well, despite living in a nation in the thrall of the Caucasian heteronormative patriarchy.

As a nation we are always making history. Not the old-fashioned kind of history of annexing frontiers, winning wars or going to the moon. Instead we make history by shoving some member of a minority group up to a new office.

 “I’d better keep this sh*t away from the Department of Energy or we’ll all go bankrupt”
*****

Energy Secretary Steven Chu used the movie The Avengers, which I saw last weekend, to segue into another pitch to keep dumping taxpayer dollars down the “clean energy” money incinerator.

By way of Erika Johnsen at Hot Air, here’s Chu writing on his Facebook page:

I can rarely find the time to make it to the movies, but my staff is buzzing about The Avengers, which focuses on a new, limitless clean energy source called “The Tesseract.” In the film, there is evidently an intergalactic struggle to claim this new resource – one we can only win by relying on heroes like Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Black Widow, and the Incredible Hulk. Naturally, the group includes a couple scientists!

While the “Tesseract” may be fictional, the real-life global competition over clean energy is growing increasingly intense, as countries around the world sense a huge economic opportunity AND the opportunity for cleaner air, water, and a healthier planet. This is now a $260 billion global market, a sum that would impress even Tony Stark. According to the International Energy Agency, last year — for the first time — more money was invested worldwide in clean, renewable power plants than in fossil fuel power plants.

Given how big the opportunity is, and how fast it is growing, it is no surprise that 80 countries have adopted policies or incentives to capture a share of the clean energy market. The good news is that we have an advantage every bit as powerful as the Incredible Hulk: Americans’ talent for entrepreneurship and innovation is unrivalled [sic] by any other country in the world. We have world-leading scientific facilities that would make Bruce Banner green with envy, and the investments we’re making today in groundbreaking new technologies can help American businesses stay ahead of the curve.

Ultimately, however, the clean energy prize is still up for grabs and countries like China are competing aggressively. It’s not enough for us to simply invent the technologies of the future, we need to actually build and deploy them here as well. As President Obama noted recently, one step Congress should take immediately is to renew the expiring tax credits for clean energy – a step that will create jobs and help American companies compete. When it comes to clean energy, our motto should be: “Invented in America, Made in America, Sold Around the World.”

When I saw The Avengers, I just knew when they got to the part about the the “Tesseract” — the limitless clean energy source — that it would make greenies with plenty of access to other people’s money harder than Chris Matthews stuck in an elevator with Obama.

Here’s the catch though, and it’s sort of fits metaphorically:

The villain in the movie is Loki — an Asgardian god who is also the archenemy (and adoptive brother) of Thor.

Loki seeks the Tesseract because it will open a portal in space through which the aliens from Chitauri will travel to earth in order to enslave mankind. Loki believes that freedom is an illusion and that it is the destiny of humans to be subservient to those who are their intellectual superiors (“Freedom is a disease and servitude is the cure”).

The commencement address has become part of the campaign trail. How better to showcase your candidate as a man with a vision for tomorrow than to feature him passing along some of his wisdom to the people of tomorrow, those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed graduates going off with an average twenty grand in debt into a marketplace with few job prospects.

Not everyone can get Obama to deliver their commencement address. It helps if your college is female and affiliated with the Ivy League, where downtrodden Barnard students can be counseled to “fight for your seat at the head of the table” by an unqualified man who began and ended his career by pushing out better qualified female candidates from Alice Palmer to Hillary Clinton. Barnard women are free to fight for a seat at the head of the table, so long as it’s not his seat or a seat that he wants.

These days the man whose administration pays women less than men, which has been repeatedly accused of sexist treatment of its female staff and whose chief speechwriter was photographed groping a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton, has taken to the campaign trail to warn about a “War on Women”. And where better to sell the war on women than on campuses which are becoming more female than male.

There’s something blatantly patriarchal about a powerful man arriving on a female campus promising to protect its graduates from that other man, but liberalism has long been immune from its own contradictions. Only Obama can protect women from Romney, when he isn’t protecting them from being President or saddling them with massive amounts of debt.

The 57 percent tilt of female to male enrollment on campus has also meant a disproportionate share of student loan debt being amassed by women. The students profiled in the recent New York Times article on student debt are almost all female and if anyone has been fighting a war on women, it would be the entire system of academic loan sharks who trade mostly useless degrees for five and six figure debt.

The sheepskin was once a doorway to a privileged world of achievement, but diplomas aren’t made of real sheepskin anymore, and the college degree has become as ubiquitous as tacky commencement speeches. Just about anyone who pays a limited amount of attention in school and is willing to take on a pile of debt can get a college degree from somewhere. It won’t be worth much, but it will cost a lot.

Universalizing college has not universalized education; it has not made us a better educated country, only a dumber one. Universal education has led to dumbed-down education and meaningless degrees. The only way we could keep moving more and more students up the ladder was by making the ladder as short as possible. Promotion, populist education and educators who barely knew more than the students have taken care of the rest.

A college degree was once a mark of distinction, now it’s a checkmark even for jobs that don’t have any innate reason for requiring it, and fortunes have been spent by government and students just to “stay in place” with the jobs of yesterdays high school graduates going to tomorrow’s college grads.

DISUNION SQUARED

I passed through Union Square on Wednesday. The park on the square happens to be the fallback point of Occupy Wall Street, but the OWS crowd was a little hard to spot. Oh there were a few vendors in the business of selling “radical” T-Shirts and pins, proceeds to either benefit the occupation or him, but the rest of the occupation was hard to find.

The breakdancers working for tips weren’t with OWS, but what about the clown with pink hair? The men playing chess for money obviously weren’t, that was too capitalist an activity. The NYU students sitting around and drinking soda? The guy playing jazz on a sax? The Halal mafia vendor sending smoke and a burnt smell from his cart? The dogwalkers? The artists drawing cartoons of tourists? The vendors at the farmer’s market unloading ostrich meat and gourmet goat cheese?

The signs reading GENERAL STRIKE MAY 1and STOP EVERYTHING are still pasted to walls, but the first has come and gone and there was more of a showing in Moscow than in New York City. Some of the signs urged everyone not to come in to work or school or even do housework, but defying the housework strike I vacuumed my rug on the first. For now a giant inflatable rat hasn’t shown up outside my window.

Finally I encountered a grossly obese man in union gear with a white hard hat and a sign around his neck ranting about billionaire war criminals or something equally stupid. I was going to snap a photo, but then I realized that would justify him standing there. OWS is a media driven phenomenon. Ignore it and it goes away.

I passed him by as he argued feverishly with a man in a business suit about something or other. Near the curb the breakdancers were hitting their rhythm and Mexican illegal aliens were selling t-shirts with a picture of armed Indians and text reading, “Homeland Security” and something about repelling terrorists for hundreds of years. It’s not the type of shirt you ever see a Mexican or actual Indian wearing, but some of the more radical white college kids probably love it.

After September 11, the leftists occupied Union Square for a month or two. I saw them on that very day writing up peace signs and cautioning against vengeance. Most people paid them no attention. The weeks wore on and they scrawled peace signs on the statue of George Washington marking evacuation day and did the usual Occupy Wall Street antics, long before there was an OWS or anyone was paying to them. Eventually they got evicted and the statue cleaned up.

Living in New York City you learn to deal with pests of all kinds, but the thing about pests is that they eventually go away. Sic Transit OWS. Take the A Train, hook up with Metro North and go home.

OCCUPY CAMERAS

… but in the meantime OWS is making friends and influencing people by attacking photographers who take their picture.

Takeaway quote

“The protesters’ argument is righteous, but is also silly,” José Martín, a 30-year-old activist and Marxist who has been involved in militant actions for over a decade and attended the Wildcat march, says.

Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog’s tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO’s and the oppressed Muslim of the week.

At a time when international desks are being cut to the bone, this is the one bone that the newshounds won’t give up. Wars can be covered from thousands of miles away, genocide can go to the back page, but, when a rock flies in the West Bank, there had better be a correspondent with a fake continental accent and a khaki shirt to cover it.

Writing about Israel isn’t hard. Anyone who has consumed a steady diet of media over the years already knows all the bullet points. The trick is arranging them artistically, like so many wilted flowers, in the story of this week’s outrage.

Israel is hot, even in the winter, with the suggestion of violence brimming under the surface. It should be described as a “troubled land.” Throw in occasional ironic biblical references and end every article or broadcast by emphasizing that peace is still far away.

It has two types of people; the Israelis who live in posh houses stocked with all the latest appliances and the Arabs who live in crumbling shacks that are always in danger of being bulldozed. The Israelis are fanatical, the Arabs are passionate. The Israelis are hate-filled, while the Arabs are embittered. The Israelis have everything while the Arabs have nothing.

Avoid mentioning all the mansions that you pass on the way to interviewing some Palestinian Authority or Hamas bigwig. When visiting a terrorist prisoner in an Israeli jail, be sure to call him a militant, somewhere in the fifth paragraph, but do not mention the sheer amount of food in the prison, especially if he is on a hunger strike. If you happen to notice that the prisoners live better than most Israelis, that is something you will not refer to. Instead describe them as passionate and embittered. Never ask them how many children they killed or how much they make a month. Ask them what they think the prospects for peace are. Nod knowingly when they say that it’s up to Israel.

Weigh every story one way. Depersonalize Israelis, personalize Muslims. One is a statistic, the other a precious snowflake. A Muslim terrorist attack is always in retaliation for something, but an Israeli attack is rarely a retaliation for anything. When Israeli planes bomb a terrorist hideout, suggest that this latest action only feeds the “Cycle of Violence” and quote some official who urges Israel to return to peace negotiations– whether or not there actually are any negotiations to return to.

Center everything around peace negotiations. If Israel has any domestic politics that don’t involve checkpoints and air strikes, do your best to avoid learning about them. Frame all Israeli politics by asking whether a politician is finally willing to make the compromises that you think are necessary for peace. Always sigh regretfully and find them wanting. Assume that all Israelis think the same way. Every vote is a referendum on the peace process.

In the days and weeks after September 11 hardly a day would go by without another homemade design for the World Trade Center showing up in my inbox. Some were crude, some were obscene, some were impossible to construct and some were genuinely visionary. Even those most familiar with the crusted workings of New York state and city government, not to mention the bi-state beast of the Port Authority, could hardly have imagined that eleven years later one far smaller tower would still be under construction.

One World Trade Center, formerly the Freedom Tower before that name was deemed too showy and patriotic, is a faintly shiny presence on the skyline, glass slowly sliding over stories of naked steel, overshadowed by Frank Gehry’s strikingly surreal Beekman Tower with its rippling lines. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you would hardly notice it was there.

Now One World Trade Center will lose a radome enclosure due to budget cuts, which means very little except that the building’s ridiculous 400 foot spire risks being classified as an antenna and OWTC will no longer be recognized as the tallest building in the country. The death of the radome is one of the many redesigns to the building that have made it the forgettable structure that it is today. And the difference in those 400 feet is the difference between a 1,368 foot skyscraper and a 1,776 foot skyscraper.

Having lost the Freedom Tower designation, losing the symbolic 1,776  height seems almost an afterthought. The 1,776 number was an artifact of Daniel Libeskind, the original architect, and his vision for the site. That vision was mostly discarded, along with its “sky gardens” and windmills. The “1,776″ height is about all that remains of the German-Jewish architect’s proposal. And regardless of whether we count the antenna as a spire or not, it will not be the tallest building in the world. Those can be found in the places that funded the terrorists, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, which have used slave labor to build glass and steel pyramids to the glory of their own pharaohs.

The Empire State Building, the Grande Dame of New York skyscrapers, has a roof height of around a 100 feet or 30 meters lower. The difference between a skyscraper built during the Great Depression and one built during the 21st Century Depression is around 100 feet and about a century of aesthetics. Where the spire of the Empire State Building is an organic extension of it, the one atop OWTC is awkwardly placed, it’s just there making time and filling up the space.

In its defense, One World Trade Center is graceful enough compared to the Sears Tower or the Dubai Burj, which pile blocks and needles together in a cluster of alien geometry. It will be better looking than the New York Times Building and the Bank of America Tower, which both have that made- by-IKEA look. It will also be completely unremarkable and that is a feature, not a bug.

Its blandness of name and design convey that it is an apolitical structure. Its only ambition is to embody a post-American bigness made possible by a large antenna. Its unexceptional nature is an antidote to the American exceptionalism sparked after the September 11 massacre.

Good news for those of you who enjoy taking your shoes off in airports. Al-Qaeda’s chief bombmaker, a cheerful fellow named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who sent his younger brother off on a suicide bombing mission with a bomb up his rectum, has been working on turning everything into a bomb. Cameras, printer cartridges and even pets.

The good news is that al-Asiri isn’t very good at it. His bomb did a good job of killing his brother, but not much else. The original underwear bomb worn by the Christmas bomber didn’t work out. The bad news is that with enough cannon fodder and enough attempts, sooner or later al-Asri or another college dropout will get it right. But even if he doesn’t, the force multiplier of the threat alone will do the job.

All it took was one shoe bomber to get us to take off our shoes. A failed plan to blow up airliners with liquid explosives led to the liquid ban. In the age of underwear bombs we have naked scanners. What is going to happen when the next plot involves explosives embedded in a laptop or surgically implanted in a pet?

A bomb anywhere is a bomb everywhere. When the bombs are everywhere, then so are the security measures taken against them until life is one big bomb and one giant security measure.

We may sooner or later hunt down al-Asiri and blow him away, but taking out a twenty-something graduate of a Saudi university after a long manhunt at a cost of countless millions of dollars will not be some grand achievement. There are plenty of Saudi, Kuwaiti and Pakistani chemistry students who can step into his place.

We are not fighting a war against toothpaste, shoes or underwear. Nor against bombs. Bombs after all don’t make themselves or detonate themselves. That’s what people are for and until we come to grips with the people making and detonating the bombs, then we will live in a world of bombs, where every item, no matter how innocuous, is treated as a potential explosive device, and every person in line as a potential explosive weapon.

The formula for fighting a War on Terror without defining a vector for that terror has led to a state of terror, in which everyone is either terrified or terrorized. The official word is that anyone and everyone can be a terrorist, and even though they all seem to be Muslim, the official position is that this is a complete coincidence, a misunderstanding of the religion of peace or a result of our foreign policy.

To believe any of these things is to also believe that history is bunk. Al-Asiri’s last name indicates that he comes from the Asir province, the heartland of fanaticism in Saudi Arabia. Asir means “difficult” in Arabic. Six of the 9/11 hijackers came from Asir and Bin Laden praised its tribes as “forming the lion’s share”. Asir had been a source of violence and Islamic fanaticism long before American foreign policy mattered to anyone one outside the hemisphere. The Asiri Wahhabis had fought the Ottoman Empire in Asir going back to the early 1800′s and then they fought the House of Saud. With global access, Asiris are able to extend their wars deep into our territory.

The People’s Cube has illustrated my Forwardism article with some great photoshops. This is one of them. You can find the rest at their site.

PROFILES IN COURAGE

So after four years, Obama finally got around to openly stating a position that everyone knew he always held, but that he sorta denied he held until the fundraising needs were bad enough to bring it to the table. And it’s a position devoid of specific commitments too.

If that’s not courage, I don’t know what is.

Four years from now maybe he’ll finally admit that he intended to badly damage American business and have the Muslim Brotherhood take over the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the media is chewing over what Romney did in high school, described under the trendy label of “Bullying”. Isn’t it wonderful how we can’t nail down what Obama was doing far more recently than that, but our dedicated media corps is busy investing what Romney was doing as in high school.

Any day now we can expect a hard hitting piece on Romney’s war on women in first grade. The current news lineup includes a congratulatory piece on Obama’s fundraising, an attack on Romney via his High School years and another attack on Romney from Obama over the auto bailout.

We may not quite be living under communism, but we are certainly living under its media apparatus.

OBAMA WHITEWASHES GENOCIDE IN SUDAN

This is a point that flew most people’s radar when commenting on Obama’s big Holocaust speech.

While Obama mentioned ‘atrocities’ twelve times in his speech, he only mentioned ‘genocide’ three times and one of those times he was quoting from the mission statement of the Holocaust Museum. The list of examples from his own policies contained only one example of genocide, the mass murder program carried out by the Sudanese government.

Tellingly Obama described this actual genocide as a ‘conflict’ rather than an atrocity and urged both sides to negotiate, a sharp contrast with his next three examples, in Cote D’Ivorie, in Libya and in Uganda, where he clearly placed the blame on three leaders and described military and pseudo-military actions that he had taken to end the violence.

President Omar al-Bashir, whom he urged in his speech to have the “courage” to negotiate and make peace, is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is no comparison between the actions of Gaddafi or Gbago and those of Bashir. Yet Obama ignored actual genocide, and defiled the Holocaust Memorial Museum by using it as a stage for whitewashing one of the world’s worst ruling mass murderers.

That’s an excerpt from my article on The Genocide that Obama Refuses to Prevent. The piece focuses primarily on Iran’s genocidal intentions toward the Jewish people, but I thought this point was worthy of further attention. It’s outrageous and downright criminal.

AAAAAGH REPUBLICAN JEWS

Asking a New York Times reporter to investigate the phenomenon of Republican Jews is like asking a moralist to go to Studio 54. There’s always this baffled tone of faint disapproval and mostly confusion.

While the overall Jewish vote skews statistically liberal, the Jewish community is a complex place, and there are communities within it that skews well to the right. Russian Jews are one of them.

The circle of men whirls around the fire, hand in hand, hand catching hand, drawing in newcomers into the ring that races around and around in the growing darkness. A melody thumps through the speakers teetering unevenly with the bass, the sound is both old and new, a mix of the past and the present, like the participants in the dance, the traditional garments mixing with jeans and t-shirts until it is all a blur.

It is Lag BaOmer, an obscure holiday to most, even to those who come to the fires. The remnants of the Jewish Revolt against the might of the Roman Empire are remembered as days of deprivation in memory of the thousands of students dying in the war, until the thirty-third day of the Biblical Omer, part of the way between Passover and Shavuot, the day when Jerusalem was liberated.

Deprived of music for weeks, it rolls back in waves through speakers, from horns blown by children and a makeshift drum echoing an ancient celebration when men danced around fires and shot arrows into the air. The fires and bows have remained a part of Lag BaOmer, even when hardly anyone remembers the true reason for them.

The new Yom Yerushalayim, the day of the liberation of the city, is coming up soon,  but the old Yom Yerushalaim, came thousands of years ago and ten days before it on the calendar. Time is a wheel, and, like a circle, everything comes around again. Hands pulling on hands, years pulling on years, on and on like the orbits of planets and stars. The Divine Hand of G-d pulls us along, and we pull each other in the dance of life.

The circle speeds up, men racing faster and faster, the children left behind, as the flames sputter and night falls. The rebellion, although bravely fought, failed, and Jerusalem fell again, and then Betar. The joy of the celebration turned to ashes, but, even in the shadow of the empire, their spirit endured. The stories were changed a little, the rebellion encoded into a story of Rabbi Akiva, the pivotal scholarly figure in the war, and of his students who perished because they had not been able to get along with one another. The failure of unity had been the underlying reason for the Roman conquest and the Jewish defeats. It is the ancient lesson still unlearned that the circle of the dance teaches us.

Lag BaOmer is not the first Jewish story of physically and spiritual heroism to be encoded for fear of the enemy. There is much that we know, without knowing what it truly means, messages from the past, that exist only as echoes reminding us of our purpose. Few of those in the circle passing around the flame know what they are truly commemorating and yet the act is its own commemoration. Thousands of years later the echo of a fierce joy, the pride of a people emerging out of a momentary darkness in a burst of wild energy, is still here. Though the details are forgotten, the joy endures, the song is sung and the fire still burns.

In the darkness, there is nothing but the fire and the dark shapes racing around it, leaping with the guttering flames.

The modern West has some of the most inefficient governments in human history which are obsessed with making things more efficient. Along with the inefficiently efficient machine, we also have two crises. One real one and one imaginary. The crisis of government growth and the crisis of global warming. Governments insist that we must adopt austerity to cope with the imaginary crisis of global warming, while reform advocates demand that governments adopt austerity to cope with the tremendous piles of debt and unsustainable spending.

It’s a basic power struggle over whether the government will starve the people or the people will starve the government. Like most political power struggles it begins with a crisis and a program for resolving it by transferring power. Depending on which crisis and which program wins the day, there will either be a massive transfer of power from the government to the people or an equally massive transfer from the people to the government.

Determining the locus of the crisis will also determine which way the power will shift. Are we the irresponsible ones for not biking to work or are they the irresponsible ones for running up a fifteen trillion dollar deficit? Are we the irresponsible ones for not skipping desert or are they the irresponsible ones for demanding totalitarian power over us? Are we destroying the planet or are they destroying the country?

The fundamental split between the Right and the Left in America and Europe now rests on austerity. The Right wants government austerity while the Left wants austerity for everyone else. Austerity is a form of efficiency, accommodating output levels to input levels for government, a heresy on the Left which believes in unlimited government growth and spending at everyone else’s expense. That means austerity for the rest of us in the form of more taxes, higher costs and assorted restrictions that make it cheaper for government to manage our lives.

The tug of war is over whether governments will impose austerity on us or whether we will impose it on them. Whether we will force governments to run more efficiently or whether they will force us onto a treadmill to cut health-care costs, whether they will drive us into cities to make delivering services to us easier and whether they will continue raising the price of gasoline to force us into their light-rail system.

Liberals have embraced locally-grown food, but not locally-managed government. They eat eggs from four miles away but insist on central governments in Brussels and D.C. invested with unlimited power. Their drive for energy efficiency is equally centralized and equally inefficient, depending on massive subsidies to develop the next-generation technologies that never seem to materialize, never seem ready for prime time and whose energy savings don’t reward the cost of developing and implementing them.

Regulating everyone’s energy efficiency, from the producers to the consumers, imposes a universal austerity on the people, but not on the regulators. In a regulator state, the only truly vital work is carried out by the regulators, who already embody efficiency by making everyone else efficient.

Governments impose energy efficiency by raising the cost of energy.