Desiring Machine

All this discussion about votes for and against wars got me thinking a little. I just would like to point out a long time hero of mine. Oregon senator Wayne Morse. He lived and died before my time but I remember many years ago my grandfather telling me about Wayne Morse and the fact that he was one of two sentors to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964. That singular act of courage has stood out to me ever since my grandfather revealed it to me many years ago. It was one of those little factoids that deep down made me proud to be from Oregon. I was born in Portland, raised in La Grande, in north eastern Oregon.

In hind sight Senator Morse’s action seems courageous and correct. However, at the time things were just as complicated as they are today and Morse’s courage to vote his conscience is even more remarkeable when we recognize this fact. However, the lesson here is not one of political expediency. Morse’s actions had dramatic detrimental effects on his political career. In 1968 he lost his Senate seat to the infamous Bob Packwood who in my lifetime would be ousted from the senate in a political sex scandal when some of his secretaries came forward with charges of sexual harrasment. Morse never recovered his senate position and died before the general election in his race against Packwood in 1974.

Sometimes a vote is about poltical expediency but sometimes a vote is about being on the right side of history. And I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history and have to explain to future generations why I failed to act in such an obviously righteous way. But there’s the rub. We look back in time and everything is crystal clear. Looking forward righteousness is never self-evident. And that is THE moral and political question that we face in our time, in every time really. It is obvious to almost everyone that Slavery was wrong, that Hitler was wrong, that Stalin was wrong, and so on. But the challenge we face is always going forward, never back. It is often said that the victors rewrite history, but it is we who make history everyday. And at every turn in the road we have to ask ourselves, what kind of history am I making today? If that is not enough to keep one up at night I don’t know what is.

None the less I do think it is clear that we need more angry, obstinant cranks like Morse in the Senate not less.

Goldy over at horsesass makes some valid points in his blog post Progressives Need To Get Real. And I certainly understand the sentiment and frustration that motivates his point of view. We really do not know if the nation can stand a few more years of Bush and a Republican controlled congress. However I think he misses the larger issue, the more significant issue here.

Let me preface by saying this: I am a life long Democrat. I have voted the party line pretty much my entire life with the exception of Nader in 2000. And I love Maria Cantwell, I really do. I like her more than Patty Murray in a lot of ways. She has a lot of good ideas on energy policy, and if for no other reason she deserves my vote. The looming energy consumption crisis that faces this country is a significant, if not the largest, crisis this country and the world face. In some sense I think it is smart, forward thinking efforts of the likes of Cantwell and many others in this state that the Northwest finds itself with a “glut of green power” this year.

But I must also say no party, and I mean NO PARTY deserves the unquestioning assent of its people. Goldy suggests that the primary objective is seizing power:

“But No, we have to engage in our usual bullshit in-fighting over who is or is not ideologically pure enough? all the time losing sight of what should be our overriding objective: seizing power.”

I would suggest that this kind of thinking borders on unamerican. That “ends justify the means” kind of thinking worked well for the Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany but it is not baked into our DNA as Americans. Our political culture is certainly a fractured and painfully contentious one, but so what. That is the way it has to be. Our diversity while seemingly a weakness, is our greatest strength. And Goldy your willingness to let morons like MOMUS and JCH run unchecked in your comment forums is one of your blog’s greatest strengths. The willingness to embrace the free exchange of ideas is what makes us great. It is what makes us better than Republicans and moreover you win wars with ideas not by tactics alone. Go see V for Vendetta for great dramatisation of this principle.

Now to address a few points about Cantwell and her votes. According to Goldy there is

“all this wailing and gnashing over her failure to stop a war she couldn’t stop or her refusal to join a filibuster that could not win.”

It is a logical fallacy to argue for realpolitik and at the same time imply that certain votes don’t really count because the odds are just stacked against us too high. It is precisely in these moments that votes do count. If her vote for the war was that insignificant, then why not make the vote anyway? Well, because it was significant. It was 1 out of a hundred votes. And that is more power than any single citizen or protest march holds. Her colleagues in the Senate understand that the vote was significant and she understands the vote was significant. She probably did it for a number of reasons, a political calculation, an quid pro quo agreement with other members in the senate, maybe because she truly believed Bush and the WMD story. Who knows? The point is actions do matter. And they deserve to be accounted for. Is Cantwell’s vote for the war worth suffering a term with McGavick as senator? Probably not. Is the debate worth having? Absolutely. There are many, many, many poltically jaded and cynical people in our society. Many who have been looked over and forgotten by society and the political process. With voter turnout still hovering near 50% in this state we could do a lot worse than get people excited over a senate race. And to get people excited you have to speak to them and win their trust with real ideas, not simply harangue them into voting for voting’s sake in a camapign to seize power at all costs.

It was pointed out that I should have my links open up pages in new browser windows. This would enhance the user experience of IE users who currently don’t have the benefits of tab browsing. One solution add the target=”_blank” to all my links. A seemingly simple solution. But after a little investigation I found out that the target attribute is invalid in XHTML 1.1 strict. A deal breaker, and something I did not know about the target attribute. Besides, I am not inclined to having to type out the target=_blank” everytime I want to post an entry with links. There has got to be a better way.

Well after a little searching I found a convenient WordPress plugin called Zap_NewWindow that makes your links that point to outside domains automatically open in a new window. I like it. A nice elegant solution that remains Web Standards compliant. Plus I don’t have to think about it when I post entries and links. Satisfies the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid).

As a side note the open link in new window is not something I have really thought about for a long time. Because I use Safari or Firefox everyday, both browsers that support tabs, I unconsciously and instinctually right click on all links to “Open Link In New Tab”. Now if we could just get websites to stop using braindead Javascript to force links to go through hoops and thus break my ability to right click and open in new tabs.

Let’s move away from this kind of junk:

Javascript Based Links
I’m talking to you New York Times.

I was interested to find out that there are OS X Dashboard widgets out there for posting to blogs. Should make my life easier. This post was created with WordPress Dash.

The Senate passed a 2.8 trillion budget. The Democrats held back except for Mary L. Landrieu who understandably broke ranks to bring home some much needed Levee repair bucks for New Orleans. 10 billion to be precise. In the process the Senate broke their self imposed spending limits. This is all Republicans folks. I have said it before, Bush turned me into a fiscal conservative.

Here is some break down to put it in perspective. The current US population is 295,734,134. Let’s do some elementary math.

2,800,000,000,000 ÷ 295,734,134 = 9468 dollars for every man woman and child in the country this year. That is a lot. Where is this money going? Oh yeah there is this pesky WMD-hunt-cum-War-on-Terror-cum-elaborate-Civil-War-reenactment-with-suicide-bombers that we having going on in Iraq.

I am glad that the Democrats exercised discipline and voted against this thing. Let the Republicans draw a tighter noose around their own necks. I smell landslide in the fall.

You can argue till the cows come home on tax cuts and balanced budgets, deficits. But the Republicans decided to spend $10,000 of your money (or more likely your children’s money) this year. Let it not be said that Republicans are the party of fiscal restraint. They belly up to the trough with the best of them. It all boils down to budgetary priorities. And I would rather keep people off the streets, well educated, and healthy rather than bomb, shoot and maim brown skinned scape goats in the desert sands far away who just happen to be standing on a bunch of crude oil that we don’t want to get into the hands of the Chinese.

A recent medical study finds that hot pepper kills prostate cancer cells. This is news to celebrate. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I consume large quantities of Tabasco sauce. I always carry a little bottle with me to restaurants. I buy it by the gallon jug. Seriously I do! For a long time I have felt that there is net positive benefit to eating this stuff, even if I couldn’t prove it. I have attributed Tabasco sauce to my overall health and generally robust immune system. Of course I should probably be quiet and not get too confident in my imperviousness to prostrate cancer. I would not want to befall an ironic fate like Jim Fixx, the active runner who collapsed of a heart attack in the mid 80’s after years of heralding the health benefits of running.

The other night I went and watched the Eugene Jarecki film Why We Fight. A compelling documentary that starts with Eisenhower’s famous farewell address warning against the military industrial complex and traces the complex and fascinating history of this dynamic relationship between military, industry, and government. I am as liberal as they come and while I like a Michael Moore Bush bash as much as the next lefty, I really appreciated the gravitas and solemnity of this movie. Just the grave warning by Eisenhower himself, arguably the 20th century’s best Republican president, would have made this movie. The extent of Eisenhower’s contribution in my mind began and ended with the interstate system. And having travelled on many of its roads I have a profound respect for the interstate system he helped foster. A true marvel of the modern world. However, this movie for me gave Eisenhower much more depth. The gravity with which Eisenhower warns us against the armaments industry and its “potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power”. Eisenhower, with his intimate relationship to the military, was well aware of the machinations of the war industry and that makes his warning all the more serious. What I really got most out of this film was how difficult and intractable this problem is, and that Eisenhower probably understood this better than any president since him.

I will not pretend there are simple solutions to this problem. I am opposed to war in general and have major misgivings about the war in Iraq in particular. But I fully recognize that military serves useful functions. Under Eisenhower, it helped build out the interstate system, in the 60’s and 70’s it helped lay the foundations and research and development that ultimately gave us the internet. The effect of both these on our society and the world in general are difficult to overstate. However, the central thesis of this film and Eisenhower’s concern is a simple one: the total and sum influence produces a genuine risk of wielding “unwarranted influence” on our society and the world. The direct outgrowth of this influence is its power to create and perpetuate war and its ability to sap resources from the rest of society. I think the movie gracefully demonstrates how pervasive this is. There is not a single source of power and control. Although a lot of responsibility is thrown at the feet of our congress. The whole phenomenon is very dynamic in its organization and not necessarily hierarchical but diverse and divergent. With policy, the force of decisions come from far and wide. I recognize how intractable this problem is. I have great sympathy for those who find themselves in need and look to the military for career and socioeconomic advancement. I have family members who work and have worked in companies that are part of the larger war industry. I myself derive my living from a computer company, Sun Microsystems, that in no small part finds its products in military and government applications. I know people who work at Boeing. Eisenhower in his speech in 1961 puts it very succinctly:

The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

One of the more poignant moments in the film is when one of the workers in an American bomb factory expresses remorse and reservations over the fact that her hand has probably touched one of the bombs she sees explode over Iraqi villages on TV. And even more stunning is the contrast of this sentiment with the seemingly glib, smug and nearly celebratory exuberance of the fighter pilots who were the first to drop bombs in the opening salvos of the war in Iraq.

For me the mood of the movie is one of a melancholy and an overwhelming sense of how intractable the war industry seems to be. And judging from the paltry handful of people in the theater the subject matter of this film is not something many others are eager to experience either. The film doesn’t seem to offer many solutions and raises many questions. I know I don’t have any easy answers but I think films like these are instructive. And if anything it is important that we embrace the gravity of these questions. The film shows me that Eisenhower, more than most, felt the gravity and understood “why we fight”.

I am a fan of Bob Dylan and I think what I find most satisfying in his music is the ecstatic tenor in many of his songs. The somber and emotional mood of Shelter From the Storm is undeniable and has long been a staple of many Dylan fans, myself included. But I have recently become more aware of what I would like to call an “ecstatic” vein in Dylan’s music. I find this stuff positively infectious. Some examples I can think of are

• Paths of Victory

• I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)

• When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky (the version from the Bootleg Series Vol. 1)

• You Changed My Life

• When My Ships Come In

• If Not For You

At his best, Dylan is yearning, and earnest in his love songs. In many of his songs there is a crescendo build up to the excitement. Just listen to the build up in Dylan’s voice about 3/4 of the way through When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky it just bursts into a full blown enthusiastic earnest. This is completely independent of the lyrical content. Sometimes even in contradiction to the lyrical content. Take Desolation Row, far and away one of my favorite songs, especially the unplugged version. On the surface a seemingly somber song about desolation and absurd living, but in my mind Dylan carries it off with an air of ecstatic aloofness, with a detachment that is more cutting and incisive than the lyrics themselves. And for all those in despair about the current state of our nation just go back and listen to Paths of Victory or When The Ship Comes In. With these songs I just sit back and think I am glad to be alive.

I am too young to have experienced Dylan when he first came of age. I can only imagine how my parents experienced Dylan when they were my age or younger. My dad positively worships Dylan. For him it is a spiritual feeling. I came of age in the era of angst ridden grunge and Kurt Cobain. And there is much to acknowledge and celebrate in Cobain. He spoke for my time and screamed it out in a way that I still find compelling. But when I listen to the early Dylan I am reminded of a music and spirit that really is the soul of the progressive moment. A heralding of the political and cultural day of reckoning, an enthusiasm for the present and embracing of the struggle. The driving force through all this is an ecstatic emotional response that fully recognizes that we must remain present in the moment and live purposefully.