Where Were the Tea-Baggers During Bush?

Wendy Kaminer at The Atlantic asks a good question: "What Constitutes A Police State?" Lots of the people protesting against Obama are making the bizarre and absurd claims that he is trying to impose some kind of a police state. This would be laughable if there weren't so many of these people, and they weren't so serious. The fact that many of them are carrying guns is also a little worrisome.

But where were these people during the Bush administration?

Driving civil libertarians crazy is probably not a goal of this month's town hall protesters, but it may be one of their signal achievements. Having openly applauded, tacitly supported, or simply ignored the Bush/Cheney national security state and the unprecedented expansion of unaccountable executive power, the right wing now defends freedom against the spectre (and it is only a spectre) of universal health care?

Of course, the real threat from Obama is that he might affect their God-given right to all the health care they can get, and their right to buy and keep all the guns that they want.

How do the town hall protests define repression? Apparently it comprises any government regulation perceived as a threat to any constitutional right or federally mandated benefit that the protesters enjoy.

All of this is fairly obvious to me, but it's nice to see it all put together in one piece.

Let's Talk About Beer

Frank Rich writes today about the Beer Summit, President Obama, Sgt. Crowley, Prof. Gates, and Vice President Biden having some beers together at the White House. I agree with Rich, as I usually do. His main point is that powerful white people can't deal with the fact that this country is becoming increasingly diverse. Right.

But reading it, I realized I had read a great deal of commentary about the "Beer Summit," including some obnoxious defenses of Crowley from some right-wingers on various blog boards. What I hadn't done was read an account of the event itself. So I found the NY Times's live-blogging record of the event. The best quote of the day was from Gates:

“We hit it off right from the very beginning,” Professor Gates said. Laughing, he added, “When he’s not arresting you, Sergeant Crowley is a really likable guy.”

Gates also looked to the future:

“I said we both had been cast as characters in other peoples’ narratives that we couldn’t control,” Professor Gates said. “If we take control of our own stories, we can take control of narrative.”

I feel an odd sense of relief reading that, because it's one of the only times in my life that an idea vaguely reminiscent of postmodern literary theory may actually prove to be useful. Gates puts it well, but he doesn't really sound like much of an elitist, Harvard professor when he says it. It's very helpful that he's right.

What would that narrative look like? It's not that hard to figure out, and Gates again explained it well:

“Through an accident of fate this guy and I are linked together,” he said, “and the question is how can he help end racial profiling and how can I help members of my community be sensitive to the concerns of the police? If we can do that, then James Crowley and I will have taken control of our lives and our peculiar experience together and move it out of a Tom Wolfe novel and into a positive impact.”

This began as a dispute, two men diametrically opposed, even violently opposed. We have heard a great deal of noise and angst and inflammatory rhetoric and denunciations of the other side (by both sides). All of that obscures a larger truth: both sides really do ultimately want the same thing. Cops, at their best, want to keep society safe. African-Americans, at their best, want to be safe.

The noise also obscures the fact that the two most powerful men involved in this drama - Gates and Obama - are African-American. This ended peacefully, almost comically. Those facts - that the powerful, elite men are black, and that it ended well - are indications of something good: there has been a great deal of progress on this front. The fact that it was a controversy at all is a positive sign, because it means that people are worried. The white cop really, really does not want to be seen as a racist. That's a good thing. The black man who was arrested was released quickly. That's a good thing. The present is painful because the past is painful. But the present is less painful than the past, and the future will be better because of the present.

But we are already in the future. The arrest took place on July 16, which is now last month. The narrative has already changed.

Naturally, there has been all kinds of discussion about what kind of beer each of them had, and the symbolism of those choices. Ta-Nehisi Coates linked to James Fallows, who linked to another post on The Atlantic Wire, which linked to an article in Slate that examined the history of beer in presidential politics.

None of which had anything to do with racial profiling.

I'm not sure if Obama intended this, but inviting Gates and Crowley to the White House had the great effect of shifting the conversation. Is it just me, or are many people looking for an excuse to talk about beer rather than racial profiling or elitist Harvard professors? Not everybody. Frank Herbert, to his eternal credit, does not let go of these topics. Talking about the beer rather is one way to talk around the history of racial profiling, rather than addressing it directly. But it's also a way to talk about what they Gates and Crowley have in common. At the very least, they both had a beer with the President and Vice President of the United States.

I'm not a big beer drinker, but I have learned a huge amount about it from my best friend from high school, who brews an incredible range of beers at a brewpub in Michigan. One thing I have learned is that there is a huge amount of - oh yeah, I'm going to use this word - diversity in beers, even more so today, with the proliferation of brew pubs and microbrews. Which diversity is appreciated by many, many Americans. Don't think I need to push that line of analysis much farther.

One fact that has been totally overlooked in this brouhaha is that there was a very significant development in this area - much, much more important than what happened in Boston - out here in LA recently. The LAPD had been operating under a consent decree, imposed by a Federal judge, which required the department to reform a number of its practices. The decree was recently lifted, because the judge decided that the LAPD had, in fact, changed for the better. It's not entirely gone; there is still some supervision, particularly on the issue of racial profiling. The ACLU is not completely convinced. But this is clear and concrete evidence that, in the country's second-largest city, the future has begun to arrive. Even without beer.

Does poetry matter

The Atlantic recently opened up its archives, so readers can find anything that has been published (there is a fee, but I would consider paying if I found the right article). That's a rich trove, since it has been in existence since the mid-19th century. Andrew Sullivan dug up this gem by Dana Gioia. It's a superb treatise on the problem of why poetry seems to have left the public consciousness. It's the fault of the academy, according to Goia, and I wholeheartedly agree. There are now so many "poets in residence," that there is a glut of material. The problem is not just that glut, but the effect that it has on the poets themselves - they write for each other, they write ABOUT each other, and poetry becomes an ever-more self-contained subculture. I love this description of poetry:

Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.

What I find both tragic and funny about this essay is that I read quite a few paragraphs into it before I realized it was not contemporary. It was published in 1991, but still resonates perfectly. He proposes a few remedies, which I imagine had no impact whatsoever. This is because Goia misunderstands the purpose of the academy these days. The purpose of universities and colleges is allegedly to advance the cause of knowledge, and that is, for the most part, true of the people who work within them. But there is another purpose, and that is to give jobs to people who are brilliant, or at least smart, but otherwise wouldn't have solid employment options. There is, of course, a cost to paying these people to perform largely meaningless services, but it's cheaper than seeing them on the streets. If they are not necessarily productive, at least they do no harm. Our culture suffers for it in the form of too much bad poetry. Personally, I see no alternative.

This post would not be complete without Marianne Moore's famous poem, "Poetry:"

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.