It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
THIS SUNDAY, the Seattle Times ran a long and lovely story about the Grand Illusion Theater, where I curated a strange-matinees series in 1987 and where, under the name The Movie House, the Seattle alterna-film exhibition scene began back in 1970. Under various owners over the years (it’s currently part of the nonprofit Northwest Film Forum), the 78-seat GI has epitomized the best of the Seattle filmgoing scene: Friendly curiosity, wild eclecticism, and a healthy indifference to celebrity BS.
The same day the times ran its Grand Illusion piece, Scarecrow Video held a public wake at its Roosevelt Way digs for the store’s founder George Latsois. (He’d died earlier in the month, from the brain cancer that had forced him to sell the store four years ago.)
Latsois essentially took the aforementioned Seattle film-consumption aesthetic and built a video-rental superstore around it. He’d started with a handful of Euro-horror titles he’d consigned to the old Backtrack Records and Video store north of U Village (a sponsor of my matinees at the Grand Illusion). From there he opened his own 500-title store on Latona Ave. NE, which by 1993 had grown to take over a former stereo store on Roosevelt.
He built it from there according to that mid-’90s local business mantra, “Get Big Fast.” It had 18,000 titles when it moved to Roosevelt and over 60,000 now. But like many other local ’90s entrepreneurs, Latsois spent more money on expansion than he was bringing in. He became ill before he could sort it out, but the new ex-Microsoftie owners have honorably continued the store’s operations and its wide-ranging buying policies (want DVDs of Korean films dubbed into Chinese? They got ’em!).
Scarecrow Video, and the Grand Illusion four blocks away on University Way, are hallmarks of the city’s intelligence and unpretentious sophistication. These qualities were quite ludicly expressed in the current Seattle Weekly cover story. In a lengthy essay originally commissioned for The Guardian (that Brit paper that’s become the newspaper of record for un-embedded war coverage), local UK expatriate
Jonathan Raban depicts a city where just about everybody (except the cops and the sleaze-talk radio hosts) is adamantly antiwar, from the coffeehouses to the opera house. Around here we don’t have to escalate Bush-bashing protests into disruptive confrontations, because we’d rather try to send a more positive message out to the world.
Compare Raban’s depiction of the local antiwar movement with that of the current Stranger, which trots out that ages-old self-defeatist whine that Seattle’s (fill-in-the-blank) isn’t an exact copy of a (fill-in-the-blank) in San Francisco and therefore automatically sucks.
I say Seattle people only accomplish anything when they don’t settle for imitating shticks from down south, but instead dare to create their own stuff. We don’t have to break things or shut the city down to get out point across. We can forge our own path toward a less-stupid, less-violent world. We can show, by daily examples large and small, individual and massive, that, as they said in the WTO marches, another world is possible.
DAVID BRODER breaks from the Washington Post‘s recent deluge of Dubya-worship to dare to question a new Federal budget that sacrifices almost everything from education to children’s health, all for the sake of the gazillionaires’ sacred tax cuts….
WHILE SUSAN FALUDI ponders whether we’re seeing the death of certain American mythologies, such as those of morality and justice.
FRANK RICH isn’t the first one to notice how the Chicago movie reflects today’s cynical media manipulations. But I haven’t yet read of anybody who’s noticed the political relevance that almost redeems Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones. A republic slowly devolves into an empire while fighting both large-scale battles and sneak terror attacks–and while its supposed leaders are actually conspiring with the attackers, to generate an atmosphere of instability and to promote the “emergency” suspension of democracy. Lucasfilm is now filming the next sequel, in which (as we all already know) the forces of empire win and the defenders of freedom scatter into far-flung exiles. Let’s hope we can improvise a happier ending to our real-life clone wars.
WE DON’T KNOW WHO MADE IT, but here’s a hilariously intoxicating Gulf War 2 Drinking Game:
drink when: bush is called a crusader x2 if its by saddam saddam is called evil x2 if its by bush iraq troops surrender to the media x2 if to a unmanned vehicle or inanimate object a member of the media gets shot at a toast to the shooter if its ashleigh banfield (msnbc), geraldo riviera (fox) or arron brown (cnn) the united states terrorist threat level changes the united states government tries to link iraq to 9-11 someone implies tony blair is bush’s bitch someone implies scott ritter is Saddam’s bitch anybody ‘warns’ anybody the word “escalation” is used the media compares the war to blackhawk down x2 if its because a blackhawk really goes down a puppet government is installed in iraq x2 if its by the puppet government installed in the US
drink when:
NEWSWEEK’S EXCELLENT COVER STORY by Fareed Zakaria, “The Arrogant Empire,” is chock-full-O-lucid-observations. Among them:
“A war with Iraq, even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesn’t solve the America problem. What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country–the United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us….”The Bush administration’s swagger has generated international opposition and active measures to thwart its will. Though countries like France and Russia cannot become great-power competitors simply because they want to–they need economic and military strength–they can use what influence they have to disrupt American policy, as they are doing over Iraq. In fact, the less responsibility we give them, the more freedom smaller powers have to make American goals difficult to achieve…. “America’s special role in the world–its ability to buck history–is based not simply on its great strength, but on a global faith that this power is legitimate. If America squanders that, the loss will outweigh any gains in domestic security. And this next American century could prove to be lonely, brutish and short.”
“A war with Iraq, even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesn’t solve the America problem. What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country–the United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us….”The Bush administration’s swagger has generated international opposition and active measures to thwart its will. Though countries like France and Russia cannot become great-power competitors simply because they want to–they need economic and military strength–they can use what influence they have to disrupt American policy, as they are doing over Iraq. In fact, the less responsibility we give them, the more freedom smaller powers have to make American goals difficult to achieve….
“America’s special role in the world–its ability to buck history–is based not simply on its great strength, but on a global faith that this power is legitimate. If America squanders that, the loss will outweigh any gains in domestic security. And this next American century could prove to be lonely, brutish and short.”
…toward the most grandiosely stupid single action taken by a first-world nation in my lifetime. I feel like getting smashed, so I’ll probably send myself instead to a no-booze recreation joint (perhaps the go-kart place in Georgetown or the Family Fun Center in Tukwila).
Or I might peruse some of my favorite antiwar websites, such as Boondocks Net (not officially connected to the Boondocks comic strip). It’s got many intriguing essays and features about past wars (particularly the Phillipine-American War), early political cartoons, and peace and justice movements past and present. My favorite pieces on the site include one about Mark Twain’s scathing satirical story The War Prayer and William Dean Howells’s more somber 1905 home-front tale Editha.
There’ll natch be another antiwar rally today, at the Federal Building at 5. Details are at NotInOurNameSeattle.net.
Other antiwar sites with vital stuff on them include:
In punditry you might not have seen on the bigger news sites, the former “most trusted man in America” Walter Cronkite sez a war would not only permanently endanger international relations but could put the U.S. economy into chaos.
And our ol’ fave Molly Ivins asks, “Have you ever seen such amazing arrogance wedded to such awesome incompetence?”
Those nude protests you might have read about can be viewed at Baring Witness, which also provides instructions on staging your own big PEACE bodyscape. Individual ladies n’ gents had been sending self-portraits with body-paint messages to an Australian site called Nude for Peace, but that site has apparently been blacklisted by its server provider.
WIRED MAGAZINE put out its tenth-anniversary issue last month. Its contents will appear on its website once the issue disappears from the stands.
The issue contains a big section in which the mag, now run by the Conde Nast empire, relived its heritage as the most rah-rah, corporate-hip, cheerleader of the ’90s tech boom in all its manifestations. Particularly noticable are all the excerpts from pieces in which the magazine’s original regime emphatically insisted that “the old rules” of just about everything no longer applied. (With one exception: It once insisted the only way Microsoft could become a company it could approve of was to move to Silicon Valley, because “the Evergreen State is still the sticks.”)
In the world of the old Wired, everything was either Wired (hip) or Tired (square).
What was invariably deemed “Wired:” Giant corporations built up from nothing. Hyper-luxury lifestyles. CEO celebrity cults. Stratospheric stock prices for companies that had never earned a dime. Stock markets that would rise, rise, and keep rising into infinity. Unabashed greed and individual ambition. Power tripping. The relentless thumpa-thumpa of generic techno music. Sex redefined as individual pleasure (hence the “dildonics” fantasies for futuristic elaborate masturbation machines).
What was invariably deemed “Tired:” Thrift. Quiet dignity. Long-term relationships, other than with financial advisors. Labor unions. Health-care reform. Poor people. Caring about poor people. People in rural areas who didn’t move there from a city. Cities in North America that weren’t San Francisco. The “old media.” France. Environmental laws. Minimum-wage laws. Governments in general, except when subsidizing businesses. Literary genres other than science fiction. Movies without special effects.
True to past form, the magazine follows this nudge at its old arrogance with a big bit of new arrogance, in the form of a long cover story extolling hydrogen power, for cars and just about everything else. It’s a nice idea (a clean-burning fuel-O-the-future that emits only water vapor).
But you have to use some other generation system to make hydrogen. Windmills and solar panels could be used for that; but the corporate energy czars would rather promote “more fully developed” technologies—petroleum, coal, and especially nuclear power. The Wired piece goes on to suggest environmentalists should start loving nukes, as long as they’re being used to make hydrogen, and insists there are no safety or waste-disposal problems with today’s nuke-plant designs.
But then an article in the back of the same issue, about the eternally pesky issues regarding permanent radioactive-waste disposal, reminds us we’ve heard those no-problem promises before.
NEWSWEEK VET ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE recently gave a long speech to the Foreign Press Association on the messier-every-day mess the right wing sleaze machine has gotten us into, entitled “Clash of Civilizations or New World Disorder?” Some highlights:
“All I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty is that the world today is a lot safer than it will be in 10 years from now, as the forces of nationalism, fundamentalism, globalism, and increasingly transnationalism sort themselves out. The new nexus that I can see at my work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)—where I direct a program about transnational threats—is an emerging link between fanaticism, religion, and science….”Somebody, somewhere today is planning a post-capital world. I see some of the Phd dissertations being written all the way from Singapore to Spain following the scandals we had recently and still have on Wall Street. If present trends continue with democratic governance dominated by political leaders whose main concern is how to get themselves re-elected, then I’m afraid that democracy and the public good may be deemed incompatible, as indeed they were in Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s. “I don’t think it takes rocket science to figure out how much damage was done to the United States – the citadel of capitalism – by the age of gluttony on Wall Street. These crypto-capitalists saboteurs, as I call them in a column are the fodder that feeds transnational progressivism, which is a new ideology rooted in the NGOs…. “Last fall, Hewlett Packard received a patent for a new computer of breakthrough technology that will enable them to manufacture a computer smaller than a spec of dust. There is already a cell telephone so small that it can be planted in a tooth. So the technology revolution is bound to be an integral part of whatever emerges, as invisible molecular structures embedded in conventional chips will be worn, ingested, or implanted. Imagine entire chemical labs the size of a computer chip. Technology is neutral, but one can easily imagine that the forces of evil will harness it to their objectives…. “[Washington] has become a bilingual city where truth is the second language… “Are the networks in favor of war for ideological reasons or because ratings go up? I would tend to agree with the latter. They want a war. I am convinced of that.”
“All I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty is that the
world today is a lot safer than it will be in 10 years from now, as the
forces of nationalism, fundamentalism, globalism, and increasingly
transnationalism sort themselves out. The new nexus that I can see at my work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)—where I direct a program about transnational threats—is an emerging link between fanaticism, religion, and science….”Somebody, somewhere today is planning a post-capital world. I see some of the Phd dissertations being written all the way from Singapore to Spain following the scandals we had recently and still have on Wall Street. If present trends continue with democratic governance dominated by political leaders whose main concern is how to get themselves re-elected, then I’m afraid that democracy and the public good may be deemed incompatible, as indeed they were in Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
“I don’t think it takes rocket science to figure out how much damage was done to the United States – the citadel of capitalism – by the age of gluttony on Wall Street. These crypto-capitalists saboteurs, as I call them in a column are the fodder that feeds transnational progressivism, which is a new ideology rooted in the NGOs….
“Last fall, Hewlett Packard received a patent for a new computer of
breakthrough technology that will enable them to manufacture a computer
smaller than a spec of dust. There is already a cell telephone so small that
it can be planted in a tooth. So the technology revolution is bound to be an
integral part of whatever emerges, as invisible molecular structures
embedded in conventional chips will be worn, ingested, or implanted. Imagine entire chemical labs the size of a computer chip. Technology is neutral, but one can easily imagine that the forces of evil will harness it to their objectives….
“[Washington] has become a bilingual city where truth is the second language…
“Are the networks in favor of war for ideological reasons or because ratings go up? I would tend to agree with the latter. They want a war. I am convinced of that.”
TAMARA BAKER notes how Bush’s top advisor on “legal reform” admitted to having lied under oath. She should have put this at the top of her essay, but instead buried it in the middle of an article about the corporate news media burying important facts in the middle of articles.
…at the (beautiful) main Tacoma Public Library was a smash. Some 60 Citizens of Destiny listened to me, KIRO-AM’s Dave Ross, and two Tacoma News Tribune writers debate whether or not we’re all amusing ourselves into oblivion. I, as I told you here I would, said we’re not.
If anything, I said, the current would-be social controllers aren’t trying to get us to ignore serious issues by force-feeding us light entertainment. They’re trying to get us obsessed with certain serious issues at a non-rational level of fear and obedience.
As I’d expected, there were several cranky old hippies who pined for the pre-TV golden age they were absolutely convinced had existed just before they were born, and who didn’t believe me when I told them the old newsreels had war theme songs long before CNN. I also tried to reassure some of the library loyalists in the crowd that books weren’t going away anytime soon (even if library budgets are currently big on DVDs and, in Seattle’s case, on building projects rather than on book buying); whether the stuff inside tomorrow’s books will be worth reading is a different question.
One woman in the audience noted that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (the topic of an everybody-in-town-reads-one-book promotion to which this panel was a tie-in event) ended with a scene of people reciting from their favorite banned books, which they’d cared to memorize. In a variation on the old “desert island disc” question, she asked the panel what books we’d prefer to memorize. I mumbled something about The Gambler and Fanny Hill, saying they represented skills and pursuits that some people in a post-apocalyptic situation might not consider vital to survival but I would. I’m sure tomorrow I’ll think of a few tomes far more appropriate to the hypothetical situation. If you’ve any desert-island books, feel free to email the titles and reasons why you’d choose them.
I’ve been recruited into speaking this Thursday at the Tacoma Public Library’s main branch (1102 Tacoma Avenue South; 7 pm).
They’re running one of those “everybody in town reads the same book” promos, based this time on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The panel I’ll be at will discuss Bradbury’s premise of a future dystopia where audiovisual media are drugs and books are outlawed.
This nightmare image has been very popular among highbrow technophobes, particuarly by Neil Postman. In his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman essentially argued that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of TV-addicted idiots; that new info technologies were always inherently reactionary and anti-thought; and that The Word was good for you and The Image was bad for you.
I’ve written about Postman in the past: I disagreed with his premises then and still do.
The Simpsons and The Sopranos are, I argue, more intelligent than the books of Danielle Steel and John Grisham. Secondary and tertiary cable channels provide more highbrow arts and culture than PBS ever did. The Internet has helped to democratize the written word (and helped get the current peace movement jump-started).
And kids’ attention spans seem to be getting longer these days. I’ve written before how every Harry Potter book is at least 100 pages longer than the previous one; and about those PC adventure games where you have to methodically explore and experiment for weeks or months before discovering the solution.
Postman, and most of his leftist pop-culture-haters, apparently believe there had been a pre-TV golden age when everybody was a Serious Reader, every newspaper was a junior New York Times, and every magazine was a junior Atlantic Monthly.
Not so. Escapism has always been with us. We are a species that craves stories, pleasure, beauty, and diversion. Bradbury himself is an entertainer. (In the early ’50s he sold stories to EC Comics, whose Tales from the Crypt and other titles were denounced in the U.S. Congress as corrupters of innocent youth.)
And no, The Word isn’t in decline. We’re more dependent upon words than ever. Rather than dying, the book biz seems to be weathering the current fiscal storm better than the TV networks, and a lot better than the movie theater chains and the cable TV operators.
And those words aren’t always progressive or enlightening. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Jewish hoax that’s become recently popular among Islamic fundamentalists, is a book. The Bell Curve, a pile of pseudo-scientific gibberish intended as an excuse for anti-black racism, is a book.
Entertainment can give a context for ideas and propose a way of seeing the world. Few people knew this more fully than Francois Truffaut, who directed the movie version of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut was a lifelong student and admirer of great films. He wrote elequently about how the perfect scene, or even the perfect single image, could immediately express whole ranges of thoughts and feelings.
The question should really be what contexts and worldviews emanate from the entertainments we’re being given. That’s what I hope to ask in Tacoma this Thursday. Hope you can attend.
AN EDITORIAL in the NYC suburban paper Newsday offers some serious, detailed, far more viable options to an Iraq war—if the right-wingers have any actual goals other than going to war under whatever excuse is at hand.
…”Seattle totally sucks, man” whining came today in the unexpected spot of the Seattle Times Sunday magazine section.
Writer William Dietrich compared Seattle’s downtown to that of Portland and Vancouver BC. He gave our town last-place marks in everything from public transit to residential development. He blamed Seattle’s perceived failings on a lack of a strong, paternalistic planning bureaucracy capable of deciding what’s best for everybody and acting freely on its decisions.
Reality check time.
Yeah, we’re over a decade late with starting a big multi-county transit scheme; but the Times doesn’t particularly love the one we’ve now got (Sound Transit) and opposed the grassroots alternative to it (the Monorail initiatives).
We’ve had bureaucrats with big designs for how we were supposed to all want to live. They gave us the “urban village” and Seattle Commons schemes, which many citizens denounced as giveaways to private developers. (Oh yeah: Dietrich’s story highly approves of government givewaways to private developers. He praises Vancouver’s heritage of politicians who’ve been exclusively devoted to such giveaways.) So now we’ve got unofficially planned zoning schemes to promote luxury condos on every block that isn’t reserved for single-family homes (i.e., any block where the non-affluent might currently live).
What Vancouver really has, besides the land giveaways and the SkyTrain: A downtown constrained to a two-square-mile isthmus, surrounded by a city equally water-confined, discouraging highways and sprawl. It also has a Canadian political system in which the “highway lobby” has traditionally had less clout.
What Portland really has, besides the light rail: A flatter central downtown with smaller blocks and no alleys, encouraging more foot traffic and tying the “hip” areas (Burnside and the Pearl District) closer to downtown than our Capitol Hill and Queen Anne are to our central business district. This lack of topological barriers between the business district and residential districts is the chief reason why Portland has a downtown high school and supermarket and we don’t. (Of course, it didn’t help that Seattle closed Queen Anne High in the ’70s.)
Seattle’s transportation and sprawl problems haven’t been solved, and probably can’t be solved, by professional bureaucrats acting by fiat. It’s the bureaucrats we’ve got who’ve made such a mess of Sound Transit, led the fight against the Monorail, and helped promote sprawl. (Remember that failed state transportation referendum last November, that would’ve given trickles of cash to transit and gushes of cash to more suburban highways?)
Dietrich, and the Times, want a Seattle with more potentials for insider dealmaking and fewer democratic checks and balances. I want better. So, I’m certain, do most area residents. And that doesn’t suck at all.
UPDATE: The oh-so-long-awaited new-look print MISC will finally, knock on Formica, be out starting this Tuesday at select sales outlets around town. Subscribers should get it by the end of the week.
SOME MAGAZINES are so desperate to fill their pages with sex-related texts, they end up hyping alleged “trends,” sometimes contradictory, sometimes in the same issue.
Case in point: New York mag, which in a recent issue declares NYC young-marrieds to be a stress-defeated “Generation Sexless,” yet also proclaims a new upsurge in casual sex thanks to online dating services giving women more anonymity and power within such situations.
OK OK, less married sex and more unmarried sex aren’t contradictory. Except another story in the mag claims more NY-ers now want to marry and are having less casual sex.
Meanwhile, USA Today claims to have discovered a vast trend of listless middle-aged husbands, incapable of satisfying wives who came of age in the sex-lib ’70s and who still want it as often as possible.
Confused? Hey, it’s an innately confusing topic to begin with. Live w/it.
Or maybe it’s not so confusing, if you try to wrap it all into a meta-trend.
Say, a grossly overgeneralized meta-trend of Women Who Want It All, or at least as much of It as can fit around other weekly tasks; facing dudes who can’t be the Sole Breadwinner anymore (and are often not winning any bread right now), who don’t know what role to play opposite assertive women, and some of whom (particularly in art-and-media cities) might feel intimidated by some of the “cute” and “funny” wholesale male bashing in contemporary pop-cult.
This ties in, tangentally, with this site’s “Peepees for Peace” campaign, advocating the deployment of passionate male energy in the quest toward a better world for all. This call for a metaphoric rebalancing in the public sphere can easily equate with a need for more literal rebalancing in the private sphere.
I’m not advocating male superiority but male equality. As John Cusak’s platonic ladyfriend says in Say Anything, “There are millions of guys. Be a man.”
This country needs men.
Not the prepubescent schoolyard bullies of the political right.
Not the self-emasculated gender-guilt trippers of the political left.
Not the bumbling dads and incompetent husbands of the sitcoms.
Not the Pavlovian dorks of Maxim and The Best Damn Sports Show Period.
We need men who are equally eager to learn how to rebuild a dying economy and to learn how to lick clit. Who can create both new opportunities and new fantasy-role games.
We need more of the positive masculine qualities of bravery, responsibility, zeal, intelligence, and perserverence; at home and in the outside world. (The fact that juxtaposing the words “positive” and “masculine” is so rare in alt-culture, even a seeming oxymoron, is but another symptom of our problem.)
We need men who are confident enough to work and live alongside strong women, neither as master nor as slave. Men who can give women the kind of attentive, soul-meshing love neither vibrators nor blue pills can give by themselves.
Such men are made, not born. How to make them? I wish I knew.
Bellevue Square is trying to evict FAO Schwarz. But the troubled toyseller isn’t backing down, and is making legal challenges.
It probably won’t end there. Where might it end?
I can see it now. The GI Joes and the Toy Story Bucket O’ Soldiers surround the store, vowing to repel any invasion. Some of the Cabbage Patch Kids start learning triage. Plamobil people start planting small explosives around the 14-foot bear sculpture, ready to turn it into an instant barricade. Some of the Barbies offer themselves as human shields in front of the soldiers. Other Barbies rebel against the whole scene, and go off into a prayer circle somewhere near the educational toys. Bert and Ernie are reprogramming the foot-powered giant keyboard into an early warning alarm. Pokémon villains Team Rocket are attaching incidiary devices to the radio-control model cars, ready to roll right up to the mall manager’s desk upon the receipt of the go-ahead signal (Tickle Me Elmo’s giggle). An expeditionary force of Sailor Moon dolls secretly maps out a counter-attack plan. They will lead a vanguard of Dragon Ball Z and Power Rangers characters in taking more mall territory. They will pelt the mall cops (and any stray shoppers) with Monopoly houses and Jelly Bellys, but only as a diversionary tactic. While mall management is looking the other way, Jay Jay the Jet Plane will fly off toward the Muzak control room, to deploy the toys’ ultimate weapon. The unbearable strains of the “Welcome to Our World of Toys” song will play continuously, at full blast, until an unconditional surrender is attained.
NEWS ITEM #2: Mainstream news media, both national and local, have suddenly discovered young anarchists, some 26 years after the first circle-A teens and three years after WTO. Whether the papers are trying to brand all antiwar protestors as extremists, or whether they really want to shed light on the philosophy of no-government, the issue’s a little more pertinent now than it was pre-George Dubious.
At the time of the WTO protests, many of us perceived a “withering away of the state” underway, giving way to effective rule by a stateless corporate elite. Some WTO opponents vocally wished for a resurgence of governmental paternalism, countering the often inhumane moves of Big Money.
But nowadays, governments and their bosses have reasserted their presence, in unkind ways. The White House occupant has embarked on a macro strategy of sleaze and graft, of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, of imposing or trying to impose a vast spectrum of police-state brutalities. I’m starting to wonder if, should the GOP goon squad win in 2004, whether there will even be a presidential election in 2008.
So: It’s again quite relevant to ask whether the type of megastate that can do this much harm on such a grand scale deserves to exist. The biggest argument in defense of Big Government these days might be that it’s the only thing that could stop terrorism and protect North American residents from hostilities by other governments.
Nine-eleven’s perpetrators were non-governmental but still quite authoritarian. They weren’t after “regime change” here, but did encourage hardline elements within the Muslim world to try and form harsh governments in their own homelands. Our government’s might has so far failed to catch or punish this non-governmental force, and is now instead being massively redeployed against another perceived enemy which had little or nothing to do with the 2001 terror attacks, but which, by being a government with real estate and a real army, is more convenient to deploy forces against.
Back home, the argument against big government could easily be made by invoking Iraq and North Korea as the horrific result of governmental leaders who’ve grasped the kind of extreme strong-arm power our own government now wishes to impose upon us. Even the right wing’s rugged-individualist factions (such as the black-helicopter conspiratists and the “Remember Waco” bunch) are starting to grumble at Bush’s creeping Big Brotherisms. And with most Democrats still shunning their party’s past insistence that governmental power can do good things for people, it’s easier than ever to imagine no (or at least a lot less) government as the only viable alternative to bad government.
But what would replace big government? Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson has fantasied about a future where business takes over everything government used to do, even the police and the roads. Modern anarchists themselves usually invoke collectivist neo-agrarian Utopias where everybody would (supposedly willingly) all be neopagan vegan bicyclists wearing all-hemp wardrobes (a prospect just as monoculturally scary as anything the Evangelicals can propose).
I, as longtime readers can surmise, have other wishes. I happen to like DVD players, rock bands, and cheese-flavored snacks, and want to preserve the technological infrastructure that makes them all possible. But less facetiously, I believe humanity’s too diverse and unpredictable for any preplanned Utopian scheme to ever work. We need a society that’s flexible enough and diffuse enough to allow countless ethnic/religious/gender/subcultural/etc. sub-nations to all pursue their own definitions of happiness. Government can help or hinder this, as can business.
I don’t have the answers, at least not yet. But I’m researching them, for a possible book-length essay/manifesto. Any suggestions on your part would be most welcome.
