You Can't Win, You Can't Break Even, and You Can't Even Leave

I was just reading a very frustrating article at Clusterfuck Nation. (With my friend Rustin, I'd be more inclined to classify the culture as the product of a Hundred-Year Fever Dream rather than a prosaic old Clusterfuck, but chacun a son gout, non?)

In his essay "Lagging Recognition," he makes the very important case that one of the major consequenses of the economic downturn (following hard on the heels of 30 years of Reaganite anti-statism) is infrastructure decay and collapse. One of the major componenents of the infrastructure decay and collapse is, therefore, a decline in road quality, which, if left unchecked (and it is currently unsustainable, most likely) will result in the eventual decline of car culture.

This is not without sociopolitical consequenses. As Kunstler writes,

The political dimension of the collapse of motoring is the least discussed part of problem: as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves able to buy and run cars, they will feel increasingly aggrieved at the system set up to make motoring virtually mandatory for all the chores of everyday life, and their resentments will rise against the elite that can still manage to enjoy it. Because our car-dependency is so extreme, the reaction of the dis-entitled classes is liable to be extreme and probably delusional to an extreme, too.

One can already observe the reaction of the car-owning majority to the carless classes (a prime example would be the "Why didn't they just leave?" types whining about Katrina victims who were left without transportation out, as options for those without either car access or money were severely limited); a look at the suburban landscape as it has existed from the late 1940s onward should be an indicator, as should any number of extremely car-centric developments, such as strip malls, shopping malls, and big box complexes. It's woven into the culture in ways that most people don't even see. (How many "boy meets car" songs do you know?) As Kunstler says, "Happy Motoring is so entangled in our national identity that the loss of it is bound to cause a national identity crisis."

The decline, probably inevitable, of car culture is going to change all that. Kunstler writes, "It will be very painful for us to walk away from the car-centered life. Half the population faces the ugly obstacle of being hopelessly over-invested in a suburban house and all the life-ways associated with it."

Now for the frustrating part.

As you know if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, the most viable alternative to a car-centred lifestyle is one that revolves heavily around the use of rail-based transit. As I've documented at length, the original "suburban" development was the streetcar suburb, which permitted a car-free or low-car-usage lifestyle while maintaining many of the benefits of modern suburban life (detached houses, residential streets, relative quiet), plus some other benefits that modern suburbs don't often have (a sense of community, outward-looking houses that encourage street-level interactions, a diminished lack of attachment to the community at the family level). These communities were planned from the outset to be built on a human (not car) scale, so they're walkable (even in bad weather) and at one time provided access to rail-based public transit seamlessly as a part of the design of the neighbourhood. Modern suburbs will need to be retrofitted to include rail-based transit (and most of them are not even designed to be bus-friendly).

Likewise, most modern urban areas will need to undergo the same retrofitting, and absent a complete demolition and rebuilding (probably not politically feasible) will not function as well as communities designed with integral rail transit in mind.

The frustrating part of this is that we had all of this at one time; the time to have (as they're now saying again) "electrified the railroads" was before they ever converted the existing electric railroad network to diesel. The time to start building streetcar suburbs was in the late 1800s, and streetcar suburbs (and the streetcar lines that serviced them) should never have been taken out of operation in the period between 1920 and 1960. The time to stop getting swindled was while the swindle was going on, not 60 years after the fact.

Let me reiterate: We once had what we now need.

Further, I really do think (having looked at it for strictly unhealthy amounts of time) that all this was preventable, if there'd been the political and social will to do so. But our parents and grandparents got sold a bill of goods by a bunch of long-dead conmen and their heirs, and we and our children will have to take the brunt of it.

Good luck!

Dear Toronto Star

I might be more inclined to subscribe to your newspaper -- which I love, by the way -- if you would stop calling me to try to get me to subscribe.

I. Will. Not. Patronize. Businesses. That. Telemarket.

That includes you, so knock it off.

A Brief And Cranky Reminder

Teleology is bullshit.

Disabled people are not about you. Disabled people don't exist to "teach you" things. We're not your instructional objects, so shut the fuck up until you grow out of your absurd religious fetish.

Simply because having the experience of being around a disabled person has caused you to expand your mind doesn't mean that that person exists to expand your mind. To quote from the excellent essayist A.C. Grayling, "In case you need reminding, the point can be illustrated as follows: I would not be writing this on a laptop if computers had not been invented, but this does not prove that computers were invented so that I could write this." Framing the issue the other way is grossly offensive to every disabled person on the planet and mighty arrogant of you.

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Just to show that I'm not a completely nasty person all the time, here's a lovely Hadiqa Kiyani video for you to enjoy: Dholan Aawein Ha, Jhook Wasaven Ha.

Evil Biofuel Powered Reptile-Shaped Kitten-Eating Machines from Another Planet!

(Joke reference, because I'm too disgusted for anything but snark.)

Now the Associated Press is lying about biofuels, along with (possibly, unless this is grossly misreported) the US Congressional Budget Office, claiming simultaneously that "Food stamps and child nutrition programs are expected to cost up to $900 million more this year because of increased ethanol use," whereas further down in the same story, they say, "The CBO said other factors, such as skyrocketing energy costs, have had an even greater effect than ethanol on food prices."

So, uh, if these otherwise-unnamed "other factors, such as skyrocketing energy costs, have had an even greater effect than ethanol on food prices," why are those things not news? Why are we not hearing how energy costs and purple mitten futures or whatever and all those other factors with such a significant impact (although you can't be bothered to name them) are driving up the price of food? Why are we only hearing that the sky is falling because of corn-derived ethanol?

Look, folks, I'll make this perfectly clear: Writing a news story so that the most significant contributing causes of a phenomenon are buried and mostly not described two grafs below the lede so that a minor, relatively insignificant contributing cause can be highlighted in the headline, the slugline, and the lede, is dishonest. It's a lie. It's also bad journalism, and it needs to stop. I'm looking at you, Mary Clare Jalonick of the Associated Press, and all the other reporters who are doing this.

As I've said before, I'll be the first person to tell you that corn ethanol-derived biofuels suck diseased donkey ass, okay? They're really a bad execution of an otherwise good concept, especially since if we're doing biofuels, we should be doing them from waste materials, used french-fry grease, switchgrass and other low-till, no-maintenance, no-irrigation, low-energy-expenditure crops, and not something as disgustingly high-maintenance as corn.

Besides which, as I've mentioned before, no, corn ethanol is not starving the planet, or taking high-fructose corn syrup out of the mouths of impoverished babies to power hippie yuppiemobiles, so sit down and take a chill pill or several already.

Economic Terrorism

Unless I'm seriously misreading this article, didn't Wall Street basically just take the vast majority of US taxpayers hostage, then threaten to crash the economy into the World Trade Center ground unless they got their bonuses?

Since I'm too inarticulate to deal with this at length for the moment, and I'm really working on a post about Greg Gutfeld and his gang of gutless groupies, go read Melissa McEwan and Hilzoy.

Is It Okay to Say the "C-Word" Here?

I'm talking about the word "cult." That C-word. Let's talk about that for a moment, since the word seems to have fallen out of fashion in the current vernacular. The finger I've got on the pulse of pop says that most people associate the word "cult" with Hare Krishnas and various other hippie-dippie weirdnesses and probably figure that the fashion died out around the same time as disco fell off the charts.

Not so. As the very perceptive Southern Beale says:

Removing individuals from their support structure -- family and friends -- and replacing that support with a new one; separating the world into those who have privileged access to an exclusive truth and those who do not; placing a group’s doctrine over and above an individual’s experience; use of overly-simplified, cliche-ridden language and slogans; use of “sacred science” -- the idea that if something works for so many in the group it has the authority of “science”; and a cult of confession where one’s testimony is told so often it becomes a well-rehearsed script outlining how lost and sinful the individual was before finding salvation in the group: these are all classic hallmarks of a cult.

There are lots of cults operating these days; they've just mostly gone under the radar to a certain degree, in that modern cults don't usually sell flowers in airports or beg for converts on city streets. These days, they shut their followers up in remote locations, and/or operate as single autonomous units, communicating over the internet.

Southern Beale documents the ways in which the Quiverfull movement operates as a cult, bolstered by quotations from an article by a former movement leader. We can find similar experiences within movements like the FLDS, which famously locate their settlements far from mainstream society (so they can operate their multigenerational women- and child-abuse schemes undisturbed by uncoopted law enforcement), the Satmar Hasidim as they exist in places like Kiryas Joel, an all-Satmar intentional community in New York (where 2/3 of the town's population is below the poverty line and 40% on food assistance due to the Satmars'...interesting ideas on work), or the proposed Ave Maria, Florida, whose founder, a hard-line Catholic, said that he wished to ban abortions, pornography, and contraceptives inside city limits. We've seen this before, with everything from the Heaven's Gate suicides to the events at Waco.

Other cults still exerting a disproportionate influence on the popular culture include the everpresent Unification Church (Sun Myung Moon), which publishes the Washington Times, famously owns much Washington DC real estate, and sponsors various political events, including one at which a Democratic politician crowned Sun Myung Moon, and Scientology, which owns and controls a substantial portion of Clearwater, Florida. (I was there in the early '80s, before Scientology took it over. Too bad; it used to be a nice town.)

With incidents like the ones chronicled here, the UU Church shootings (where the shooter left a manifesto proclaiming his hatred of all things liberal), Glenn Beck's latest assertion that liberalism is driving people to commit mass shootings, and all the various other eliminationist, tribalist, and authoritarian rhetoric we've been hearing of late, the cultic mentality is in full swing, and looking like it's going to ratchet up even further. As Southern Beale says, "It's time we got comfortable with the words "cult" and "thought control" again. We live in a mass-media age, and the tools of exploitation have expanded beyond anyone's wildest dreams." We can't address this problem without effective ways of talking about it. Let's call a cult a cult and not cut off our vocabulary's nose to spite its face.

I See What You Do There

Let's talk about Ari Fleischer on Chris Matthews' show the other day. Lots of people have been commending (inasmuch as Chris Matthews deserves any kind of cookie) Matthews for taking Fleischer to task. You can watch the video here, courtesy of MSNBC, which seems to have, for once, picked out the salient point from the copious distractor material.

Most of the people in the blogosphere I've read so far are (still) focusing on the oft-debunked claim that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attacks of 11 September 2001. That's an old lie. They've been lying about that one since 2001. Not that I'm willing to just let it go or anything, but I think the focus on this particular revenant lie is distracting from the larger point.

Did nobody else but me notice how Fleischer said, "How dare you say 9/11 happened on our watch?"

That right there is possibly the biggest rewriting of history we've seen yet from the people who sincerely believe they can just create "their own reality," regardless of what the actual facts, documentation, and videotape say.

I can't quite tell what Fleischer was meaning in saying that. It seems to me that either he's been swallowing the Clinton-did-it Koolaid for so long that he really does somehow believe that 11 September 2001 (the 6 August PDB notwithstanding) happened on Clinton's watch, or he really is trying to unhappen Bush from that day's events.

Side note: He seems to be making the rounds on the talking-head shows, lying all the way, so I suspect this is a prong in a systematised campaign of disinformation. More later.

I can understand why most of the left blogosphere is still hung up on the Saddam Hussein-9/11 thing; the Bush people have been banging that drum so hard for eight years they've long since ruptured the head and broken the sticks, and for a while (search down for "Hussein") a majority of people believed it. Frankly, I can see why. If you're an ignorant racist scuttlefish who knows nothing about Islam or Middle Eastern politics, and who's been primed for years to hate Muslims (and to hate Saddam Hussein in particular, since I can remember talking about how the North American media was demonising him as the Hitler Nouveau du Jour back in the 1990s when I was in high school, ferchrissakes), it's pretty easy to believe that a Middle Eastern dictator might have something to do with Islamic terrorism.

On the other hand, the Bush people have spent the last eight years trying to convince everyone how preznitial Bush looked giving speeches on the rubble in NYC, how the response was appropriate and justified (and for the first little while until the idea of going after Osama bin Laden got boring or impractical, working), and how Bush's policies kept everyone safe because there'd been no terrorist attacks on US soil since then*, and how everything they did and were doing was justified because 9/11 shut up, and so on. And here's Bush's former press secretary insisting on national television that the former president wasn't the president on 11 September 2001, despite all evidence to the contrary, and My Pet Goat footage notwithstanding.

That is, frankly, an enormous, mind-blowing lie, to the point where everything Matthews said was utterly inadequate, and to the point where only a Joseph Welch-style rhetorical pile-driver would have been necessary and sufficient. That isn't just conveniently omitting some salient facts to attempt to shore up a lie of convenience by omission, that is blatantly 1984-style historical Memory (ass)Holism.

Frankly, I suspect they're going to continue to lie and lie and lie until they've tinfoiled the radar enough that sufficient numbers of people don't know what to believe anymore. They do this all the time, basically daring people, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Authoritarian followers can be duped into believing the authority figures over their own eyes, and I suspect that's Phase II of this operation. First confuse, then consolidate...their planned step three, of course, is a return to power, buoyed by a glib line of patter that convinces the confused rubes that there really is such a thing as (Received) Truth, and they are It.

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* Excepting the anthrax attacks and all those various copycat crimes (like Chad Castagena and friends) and the garden variety abortion clinic bombings and shootings and assorted Minute (pronounced "my newt") Man milita-nut-nitwit things perpetrated almost solely by white goodoleboys, of course...