Noam Chomsky v. William F. Buckley in 1969

Here is a great video of Noam Chomsky on William F. Buckley's television program "The Firing Line" in 1969. Enjoy!

Over the Wall

Al-Jazeera on the situation in the prison known as the Gaza strip. 

When Budgets Are Tight, Cut Science

It has become a common occurrence in the U.S. to cut essential spending, as long as it is discretionary, when times get tough. The cuts always come before any tax increases, and the rational for such moves comes from a skewed interpretation of market capitalism. The cuts often come to programs that have clear economic impact, provide good jobs, and usually benefit society in the short and long term. That is why the recent cuts to nationally funded scientific research in the latest budget should come as no surprise. 

The venerable Fermi Lab in Chicago saw its budget cut by $22 million, requiring the elimination of hundereds of jobs. This cut was instead of what many expected would be a modest increase in funds going to this important laboratory. Along with the cuts to Fermi Lab, the U.S. was also forced to withdraw its participation in an international effort to construct a fusion reactor (ITER is the name of the project, Latin for "The Way") in France after Congress slashed all but $10.7 million of what was slated to be a $160 million allocation. While the other participating countries in the ITER project half expected the U.S. to founder on their obligations - they have learned to expect the inanity of our Congress - it is nonetheless a major setback. 

The fact that this project was cut is a prime example of the mentality of our government. Here is a cooperative international effort to build the first large scale test fusion reactor, to develop a technology that is the major hope for the generation of energy in the future, and the U.S decides to all but drop out. The project will go ahead, albeit at a much slower pace, but it just goes to show that our Congress is not only impervious to the wishes of the country, it is also incredibly myopic.

Don't Sign A Deal With The Devil

After years of occupying Iraq under a UN mandate that is now set to expire, the U.S. is looking to sign a new agreement with Iraq that will allow the U.S. to keep the rights it had under the old mandate far into the future. There are two big things very wrong with the new compact that the Bush administration is trying to get the Iraqi government to sign on to. One is that most Iraqi's don't support the U.S. staying in Iraq for more than a year (that was in September). The second problem is that the Bush administration is going ahead with negotiations with Iraq that are basically treaty negotiations, and yet it seems that they plan to forgo ratification by the senate, a move that would bring us a step closer towards an imperial presidency, which Bush has been trying to build all along. 

In articles discussing this new deleterious development in the Iraq war, the fact that the U.S. is going ahead with a plan for continuing military presence while 71% (see World Public Opinion article)  of Iraqi's are opposed to it is all but ignored. Instead, most articles focus on whether Bush can muster support in Iraq's divided legislature. The fact that Iraqi's are against the continued deployment of U.S. foreign fighters in their country is the most damning indictment of our continued presence there. 

Aside from the awkward fact that the new treaty the U.S. is trying to push through has no democratic legitimacy, there is also the other problem that hits closer to home: Does the president have the right to sign what he euphemistically calls an agreement without the 3/4 ratification of the U.S. Senate? That is what Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.) wants to find out in his scheduled subcommittee hearing. The problem as he and anyone else who has been witnessing the ballooning power of the executive branch can see, is that allowing Bush to negotiate and sign such a treaty with Iraq will undercut yet another function of the Senate. Now we can expect the Bush administration to do all in its power to do just that, but I hope that we also see the Democratic majority stand up and fight back. It's the least they can do and it just might turn into an opportunity to end this war. 

On Things Getting Worse Before They Get Better

I watched the very good documentary "Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man" last night, and among all the very interesting history of Mr. Nader and the regulatory movement he largely inspired, there was a bit that one of the talking heads in the film said that really stood out for me. If I remember correctly, the particular talking head was a columnist from The Nation magazine who said something to the effect of  "Ralph Nader is like a Leninist, he thinks things have to get worse before they get better". The comment was meant to be derisive, but I thought that it actually brought up a good point. Do things need to get worse before they get better? 

I think the best way to approach this questions would be with a quick little jaunt through recent history to examine whether politics - we are interested in politics here if you haven't noticed - actually works like that. Lets rewind to the end of the Carter administration. Now I am not an expert on how Carter's refreshingly new liberalism eventually tanked, but from what I have gathered it was from a mixture of economic hardship and bad policing by the Carter camp. Conversely, on the Reagan side, there was extraordinary political savviness, and a desire, by Reagan's backers, to hit the liberals hard and keep them in a servile place for years to come. This backlash, as the Nader film also points out, was due mostly to the drumming that corporate power took during the sixties and seventies. 

To digress for just a sec, I think I can make clear how drastically corporate powers changed their tactics by a short anecdote. A few months ago I met the former CEO of a large American conglomerate, that among other things, was a major weapons manufacturer. This man was the CEO of this company - I can't remember the name - in the sixties and seventies, when, as he made clear, things were very different in Washington. Things were so different, that when I asked him about lobbying back in those days, he had a hard time remembering his companies lobbyist - lobbyist; singular. Yes, back in those days this major weapons manufacturer had 1 lobbyist. Things have changed. 

To come back to the main issue of this write-up, did things get worse before they got Reagan? Most definitely they did. The seventies was a time of immense economic turmoil, but it would be ridiculous to blame it on the relative economic equality and hefty social safety net that were still intact from FDR and Johnson's Great Society. The issue, from my understanding, was energy - think oil crisis - monetary policy, and shifting fortunes of American manufacturing that resulted at the convergence of the two problems. So Carter was walloped, and Reagan, the man who knew how to blow smoke up America's ass just so, was in. This is when things began to get worse. 

It is good to remember that Reagan was unloved by large swaths of the country. His approval rating was average - around Bill Clinton's. It has been recently, after the Republican's set about creating a cult of Reagan, that people's perception of his presidency has rebounded. During the dark Reagan years things were quite bad, not only for the poor, who suffered the most under his regime, but also the middle classes. The two legacies that Reaganites claim as his was the dismantling of the Soviet Union and Economic recovery. Any serious scholar will tell you that Reagan really had nothing to do with the fall of the Soviet Union, and Reagan's economic policy, more than boosting productivity in the U.S. markets, caused or correlated with a huge market bubble - i.e. illusionary wealth. See Paul Krugman's article "Debunking the Reagan Myth" for more on this. So things got bad, and they got worse, economically, with Bush Sr. When Clinton finally came to power, with 43% of the vote mind you, he won on the implicit slogan "It's the economy stupid". Things get worse, they promise to make them better. 

But by the 90's the Democrats had turned into Republican-lites, and the liberals had nowhere to go. We reluctantly voted for Democrats, because they were the only option. The Republicans continued their assault on all things that the old Democrats used to stand for, and things went on like this until 2000, when many people were unenthusiastic about the two mediocre candidates and Gore lost because he ran a shitty campaign on shitty issues. 

Fast forward to today. Now we are faced with a presidential contest that is quite possibly going to be fought during an economic recession, while people are grappling with a grossly ineffective healthcare system, while we are pitched in a horrible war, while corporate profits are high and economic inequality is high as well, and while the specter of global warming - world wide catastrophe - is front and center, figuring into policy choices for energy security and environmental regulation. To me, most of these problems are the result of our weak democracy, where Republicans and Democrats are on the same page on everything from Welfare Reform to NAFTA, and people have no other choice but to grudgingly support one of the two candidates. 

Out of this milieu of problems we are blessed with a presidential contest that addresses the issues. But wait, is that the presidential race we are witnessing? I surely don't think so. Even at this early stage in the primaries we are still faced with few choices. The Democratic field, aside from Kucinich, parrots each other on every issue. They talk change, but give the electorate very little on what that change will be. Their foreign policy is basically Republican, they talk about a slight trimming of the economic mess through more regulation but don't address the problem of a fundamentally imbalanced economic situation, and their plans on domestic policy are not bold or forward thinking. This is the presidential field after 8 years of one of the worst presidents in U.S. history? Things got real bad, but I'm not seeing that illicit the response that would be expected. Now the question is, why not? I have my theories, which I don't think I will get into here being that I've been writing this for an hour straight now. Maybe things need to get even worse to get society to demand real change in the institutions that are today holding us down. All I know is that I hope Ralph Nader runs again. 

Knocked Up: More Evidence of Foolishness and Debasement in American Society

We are fooling ourselves. This is what I have come away thinking after many recent Hollywood movies I have seen. I have been aided in formulating and figuring out exactly what I feel has gone frighteningly wrong in American cinema by the Arts reviews of the World Socialist Website. Unlike most reviewers in America, the WSWS.org team does an amazing job of critiquing films from a social perspective, not simply asking whether the film was entertaining or not, but trying to find any semblance of substance. When a film is overwhelmingly lauded by critics and people across the country flock to see it, finding it to represent the ethos of our times, it is particularly important to investigate exactly what was found to be so edifying. The film "Knocked Up" garnered such appreciation a while back, with critics and audiences alike appreciating its honest portrayal of contemporary America. The problem was that "Knocked Up" was far from honest - dangerously dishonest I would say. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the film taken together with the lack of substance gives clear evidence that America as a whole is unwilling to face reality. While that may sound harsh at first, I think that if you have seen the movie with a critical eye, and then read the piece I have included below by WSWS's David Walsh, you will understand where I am coming from. 

Link to the original article, "Knocked Up and a certain generation's 'family values'"

Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, about an unlikely young couple who decide to go through with having a baby, is not a good film, or even consistently an amusing one. The storm of praise it has received is one more indication of how little most critics and far too many audience members demand of contemporary films.

The unemployed, disheveled Ben (Seth Rogen) meets Alison (Katherine Heigl), who is celebrating a promotion, at a club, and the pair drunkenly spend the night together. The next morning, he is so unappealingly and ostentatiously boorish that she has no interest in seeing him again. Some weeks later, however, when Alison believes herself to be pregnant, she contacts Ben, and the remainder of the film concerns itself with whether they will find their way to a relationship and a life together.

He, on his side, has a house full of roommates who do little besides smoke dope and plan a mildly pornographic Internet site. The scenes set in this household alternate between the genuinely comic and, more often, the distastefully crude. Alison lives with her demonically driven sister Debbie (Leslie Mann), brother-in-law Pete (Paul Rudd) and her two nieces. This couple’s quarreling and discontent, unconvincingly done for the most part, is presumably meant to remind the unwary that emotional “commitment” and marriage are not necessarily one and the same thing.

Everything about Debbie and Pete’s lives—employment, income, children, house, looks—is conventional, yet they are fairly miserable. Ben and Alison, on the other hand, are entirely ill suited, their relations are unplanned, accidental, he at least has no job and hers is threatened by the pregnancy, and yet...

Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), 39, is currently enjoying great success, with many projects, as writer, producer or director, on his hands. He has obvious talent and energy, and a certain flair, but his concerns are too narrow. He speaks for a suburban, middle class generation that grew up in the Reagan years and beyond. The past quarter-century in the US, with its emphasis on wealth and individualism, has refashioned the elemental liberalism of this milieu.

Whereas the concerns remain, at least in the minds of the individuals involved, essentially “humanistic,” their content has changed dramatically over the concerns of an earlier period. Recent history has convinced such people, either already well-to-do or in the process of becoming so, that protest against the general conditions of life is futile or counter-productive, or simply too demanding. Everything in their work is reduced to the small change of personal relations, “life choices” and “individual responsibility.”

Imperceptibly to themselves, perhaps, they have adapted their way of thinking to—or have even been molded by—the rightward lurch in official American opinion. It is not for nothing that Stephen Rodrick in the New York Times Sunday magazine, in a feature story on the filmmaker, could write, “Both of the films Apatow has directed offer up the kind of conservative morals the Family Research Council [a right-wing Christian outfit] might embrace—if the humor weren’t so filthy.” The protagonists, Rodrick notes, resist various temptations and are steered “toward doing the right thing.” There is something essentially conformist, despite the self-conscious lewdness and frenetic goings-on, about Apatow’s work.

The worst aspect of all this is that filmmakers like Apatow and others, no doubt sensitive to certain aspects of life and capable of insight, are blocked from bringing into their work more complex and interesting phenomena. The results are terribly limited. They think they are advanced, with their lack of shyness about various bodily functions, but a film like Knocked Up hardly speaks to contemporary American life in an important or enlightening way. Possessing the arid “timelessness” of works that bring to bear secondary questions (worries about “relationships,” feelings of inadequacy, fears of rejection) that have troubled the given artist since adolescence, it could have been filmed a decade ago or more.

Hardly anything of the tension, the volatility, the nervous in-flux quality of American life in 2006 or 2007 enters into the film. At a juncture when it’s difficult in everyday life to avoid complaints about (or curses aimed at) the Iraq war, George Bush, gas prices, multimillion-dollar salaries for corporate executives, falling house prices or other sources of public anger or anxiety; conspiracy theories, plausible or otherwise; rage of an increasingly social or anti-social character; and varying, often infuriating, manifestations of the generally dysfunctional character of American society, none of this appears or is hinted at in Apatow’s work. It is consciously oriented in another direction, a kind of comic, chaotic self-help book, a more knowing, grosser version of the afternoon television talk (advice) show. (“Take responsibility for your life,” “Behave your way to success,” “ You choose your behavior; you chose the consequences,” “The only person you control is you,” etc.)

A good many elements of Knocked Up do not hold up well under close scrutiny. Little or no chemistry exists between Ben and Alison throughout. There are couples that are unlikely, and there are couples that are simply not couples at all. Critics assert that Seth Rogen is “funny,” “sweet” and “charming.” Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but I found him singularly unappealing—and his cohorts, amusing and eccentric rather than merely unpleasant, perhaps one tenth of their screen time, even less so.

Works like this are unconsciously, and opportunistically, constructed. What is Apatow’s attitude toward the crude housemates? On the one hand, their persistent nastiness and one-upmanship toward one another and everyone who comes into their orbit are milked as a source of fashionably misanthropic comedy. The turn for the worse in American life over the past decades, the diminished and diminishing expectations for considerable layers of the population, has helped generate sour, sullen, spiteful humor (along with an audience for it) that specializes in picking on others, particularly those who are weaker. There’s something unhealthy about this trend.

(Bullying can also be the result of other processes, including the sort of militaristic and jingoistic atmosphere deliberately being whipped up in the US. The housemates’ passing references to Spielberg’s Munich, where the “Jews kicked ass,” besides being an obvious misreading of the film, has disturbing overtones.)

On the other hand, Apatow wants to have it both ways and extols the virtues of “family values.” The scene in which Debbie, with Ben and Alison in tow, tracks down Pete, suspecting him of having an affair, and discovers instead that he has secretly been involved in a fantasy baseball league, rings utterly false. Apatow, who the Times’s Rodrick makes out to be fanatical about marital fidelity, apparently couldn’t permit one of his lead characters to be guilty of straying. Such moral templates are inimical to serious art and the best forms of comedy.

Apatow stacks the deck, in any event. He creates a situation in which there are only two possibilities for Ben—carrying on with his vaguely bohemian, hedonistic, idle lifestyle or “growing up” and becoming a respectable, money-making petty bourgeois. The possibility of maturing and accepting certain personal responsibilities as well as doing something substantial and challenging, not necessarily financially well-rewarded, with one’s life is excluded.

A word should be said as well in this regard about Apatow’s attitude toward abortion. While he describes himself as solidly “pro-choice” in interviews, the film clearly steers clear of challenging the right-wing attack on abortion. The word is never even uttered. Alison apparently dismisses the possibility out of hand. How likely is that? Since she is a seemingly perfect candidate for such a procedure—she’s reached a critical moment in her career, she hardly knows or likes the father of the child, she has no apparent desire to start a family, she has the financial means to pay for an abortion—it’s dramatically peculiar that she offers no serious explanation for her decision. If there are other issues, moral or quasi-religious ones, then the filmmaker should have her say so.

The relationship between Pete and Debbie is poorly or schematically drawn. Rudd, a gifted performer, tries his best to give some depth to his character, but the various elements don’t add up. Pete is often cold, withdrawn, sarcastic, and it’s never clear why—especially as it doesn’t appear to tax him, at other moments, to be generous and warm. Mann, also gifted, strains to be difficult and demanding, but one generally has the sense that these are two intelligent and reasonable people laboring mightily to represent marital strife.

The artificiality of the approach is connected to the other issues mentioned above, the inward turning and lack of interest in broader currents of American life. According to the film’s logic, economic strains and stresses have no consequences for emotional life. Pete and Debbie are well-off, and almost nothing is made of job or other kinds of pressures in their lives. Alison has concerns about her career, but they disappear for most of the film, except for a few jokes about her expanding waistline, and play no substantial role in how events unfold. Penniless, more or less, Ben feels no apparent urgency about his condition, until Alison breaks up with him. Even then, it’s less a matter of economics than of “taking responsibility.”

There are comic moments and some freshness in certain scenes, likeable bits, even satiric touches (Alison’s bosses at the dreadful television network where she works are nicely done), but overall, this is a weak effort.