Calm are the delights...

    ...Of talking the best fishing holes,
     and all the beautiful bass ponds
     with a kind-minded Swamp Yankee,
     large of body and soul.

    Calm, too, the holy fragrance drifting
    Of sweet pepperbush, under the moon;
    Of bats swooping bugs, and the clear cold cry
    Of that splendid living ghost: the loon.

    So Swamp Yankees and loons,
    I number ye my friends,
    Not as friends today are called;
    But as friends did oncely howl
    In the far-lost days of Auld.

Letter to Andrew Sullivan #2, or,

A Missive to Marquess of Queensbury Mugwumps.

Dear Sir or Madam:

        Having engaged in some heated facebook controversy on the subject
of my natal Boston and Chick-fil-A, I thought I'd respond briefly to your
well-intentioned, though thoroughly naive, and frankly Mugwumpish,
position.

        First, cities and towns are still democracies, and if a powerful
private actor, in this case a large corporation, wishes the privilege of
operating within these polities while expending significant resources (as
in, money to anti-gay groups, not speech alone, which you neglect to
mention) to corrode the  very social and political mores that undergird
these polities -- in Boston's case, respect for the equal personhood of,
inter alia, LGBTQs -- it is fully within that community's right to refuse
permission to the corporation to operate within its borders. The 'free
market' (i.e., the imaginary world of Manchester School economics and
Milton Friedman) does not have any prior claim to the sovereignty of these
democratic polities. There is no universal right of opening franchises, and
if you seek to give material aid to bigotry against Group Y, and then find
yourself denied permission to operate within a city that is an oasis for
Group Y, you have no grounds for surprise. Polities construct and maintain
so-called "free markets", and polities may govern them as they please.

    Indeed, the idea that a self-regulating market must be the ne plus
ultra, the final arbiter of economic questions, is a relatively new one,
having only taken hold -- and then irregularly and as the result of
enormous violence -- in the middle decades of the 19th century. Before
that, and indeed, during and after that, both governments and popular
crowds had no problem telling commercial concerns deemed destructive of the
social and political order to take a hike -- for instance, the Michigan
Railroad War of the 1850s, or the anti-turnpike riots in England a century
before that. It is the supreme (small 'l') liberal arrogance to 1) assume
that any individual's right to profit supersedes that of the community to
its lifeways; and 2) to equate the poor injured business-owner, denied the
chance for even more money, with any number of put-upon minorities -- in
this case, the minority whose oppression the poor businessman seeks to use
his profits to finance.  You and Greenwald are both small-l liberals of
varying stripes, and so you presume these things; but not everyone in this
country is a small-l liberal, so I don't think your presumptions hold.

    Finally, in terms of practical politics, it is no surprise that a
supporter of the House of Lords would feel the need to blindly adhere to
Marquess of Queensbury rules -- but politics in this country is now the
inverse of Clausewitz; it is war by other means, and for too long we have
seen the polite center-left hold to your oh-so-fastidious rules of
engagement, and get slaughtered, while the Right sharpens its swords and
prepares for battle -- enough! If this 'bullying' makes business-owners
more afraid to use their power to attack gays, that is fine with me. You
are obviously not from a big northern city: this is small-fry stuff in
terms of political intimidation. You may be an immigrant and an Irishman
(by descent only -- what true Irishman comes out for the House of fucking
Lords?!), but you don't understand whatsoever the Boston- or Chicago- Irish
experience that politics is personal, and it involves throwing some sharp
fucking elbows. You may think of this as bullying; in reality, it is
fighting, which a comfortable fellow such as yourself may not be accustomed
to having to do. Indeed, you didn't have to fight precisely because guys
with the courage to engage in overt confrontation came before you and paved
the way for you: it's no surprise that Larry Kramer finds your entitlement
in this regard insufferable.

  This idea that we can all reason together with some tea-and-cakes is so
much middle class bullshit, of which you and Greenwald are representative
-- the Right and Left poles, as it were. The working class has long known
that politics is a tough and dirty fight, and the other side is playing for
keeps.

  There is a reason Malcolm Tucker emerges, in the end, as the most
consistently likable character in "The Thick of It" -- because he knows all
this, and his goal, unlike the careerists around him, "is to keep the other
wankers out of government."

  Just as libertarians free-ride on the liberal (US sense) political order
they so deride, so do you and Greenwald free-ride on the brawlers like
Larry Kramer -- or Tom Menino -- who fight your fights for you.

Signs You Are Not Dealing With a Serious Person

1. They tell you in all earnestness that Hitler was a socialist;

2. They cite the Heartland Institute [sic] as a legitimate source of information;

3. They insist that the availability of military assault weapons to lunatics has no relation to the frequency of massacres in the United States;

4. They say global warming is bad, but it would be even worse to stop it; after all, we must think of the poor Africans, who shall never get a chance to chow down on Big Macs in their Hummers if those cruel Scientists have anything to say about it;

5. When you point out that the poor Africans will suffer massive droughts and desertification because of anthropogenic global warming, they simply deny that such warming will occur, as though the stipulations of Microeconomics 101 (Milton Friedman edition) about how the world is supposed to work over-rule the Laws of Physics;

6. They talk bravely about the wickedness of The State, while drawing a salary and benefits therefrom;

7. They believe that openly carrying pistols around ice-cream shops and university campuses is a sign of deep civilization;

8. They insist that when private actors defraud the Commonwealth, it is the Commonwealth's fault for trying to prevent the fraud in the first place, on the visionary theory that if only we'd let these "job creators" alone, they would stop trying to screw us.

9. They blame schoolteachers, cops, and firemen for the current economic crisis;

10. They wonder whether 9/11 was "an inside job".

  This was another installment in "Life in a Post-Empirical Age!", in which the methods of deconstructionist postmodernism get taken and applied by the political Right (who could have seen that coming?).

Days like this

     On days like this, the only decent thing is to let electoral politics drop. So there will be no cut and parry fighting today; no rhetorical bar fights with various elements of the Right. Today, after the massacre in Aurora, a decent respect for our countrymen and our Country -- for the shared values and common history which bind the several nations of this federal Union -- impels us to stop with surficial things, and to gaze beneath the waves, into the deep, into dark, fathomless waters.

     Why is it that our nation so regularly sees this kind of violence? Why does our neighbor to the North, republican in all but name, and with equal access to guns -- why is it that they see this so much less frequently than we do? This is not to say there is not violence in Canada; there is. But why this gory succession of mass murder in America? There was Columbine -- a kind of satanic Star of Bethlehem, Lucifer's light truly, bringing warning of worse things to come; and then 9/11, a veritable sounding of Gabriel's awful Trumpet, calling all of world-civilization's wicked, cruel, and nihilistic urges to the gory field. But even before Columbine and September 11th, before Baghdad and Fallujah, before London and Madrid, before this all, there were the other, smaller attacks -- at Jonestown, in Arkansas, in 1998, and at Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, where children shot dead other children. I remember in my own time, in February, 1996, a day with lovely snow beginning flurries beginning preparatory to a Nor'easter, getting our report cards before February Vacation and then getting let out early into the snow and the stacking cordwood because someone in the Eighth Grade had brought a gun to school, causing Charlie Chandler and I to exchange disbelieving and quizzical looks while we found out whether we'd managed a B in pre-algebra. What was the meaning of that, this overwhelming desire for murder among our young people?

      I don't claim to have any special insight on the question. And yet, when we think of it, of the enormity of these massacres that toll in grim succession across all corners of our land, we must come to the conclusion that there is something awry in the national soul; something not unrelated to the political assassinations and racial violence of the 1960s, perhaps not unrelated to the epochal fratricide that forged the modern nation one hundred years before that. Perhaps, even, going back to the Old Testament scale slaughter, and Total War, of the Great Swamp Fight in King Philip's War, and the Pequot Fort at Mystic three decades prior.

    Where there has been violence in the past, we may only expiate it; when violence is currently occurring throughout and beyond our society, and in our own name, we may put a stop to it, and obviate the need for any future atonement. I cannot say, but I wonder if these massacres would cease, if, first foregoing the external symptoms of our national illness, we as a People could effect a transformation of the National Soul.

  What I mean to say is, we ought to cease supporting a government that is the greatest purveyor of violence abroad in the world today.

 We ought to cease supporting police departments that make everyday life for our racial minorities something out of an authoritarian nightmare, just as we ought no longer support a prison system that has become a racial gulag.

   We ought to no longer tolerate the vigilantes in our midst who seek to attack immigrants seeking a better life, or to intimidate Muslims seeking to peacefully practice their Faith.

     We ought no longer tolerate those persons, corporations, and economic interests whose irresponsible and grasping acquisitiveness makes of everyday life a place of violence for the poor, the unemployed, and the sick.

     We ought no longer tolerate the many cruelties built into our institutions of education, from the endemic sexual violence of universities to the subtler, but still violent, competitiveness which makes of learning a mere footrace, and of knowledge a mere mockery.

    Finally, we ought to look within ourselves, into our own souls, and to identify what is violent there; to identify it, and to root it out, with Lovingkindness, with Justice, and with Peace.

     Only then, I think, shall we find peace in this country and in our own hearts.

Finally...

... the return of normal New England summer weather -- 72, cool, and half-foggy here on the Gulf of Maine. I pray for the good people of St. Louis, with all their hot sorrow in the middle of the continent.

     I pray also that the voters of this federal, continental empire, will remember this typically troglodytic behavior -- http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/republicans-block-climate-change-hearing.php -- next election day.

   A fun final point -- the benighted and/or wicked Congressman who says that they won't hold any hearings on this extreme weather is none other than Fred Upton (R-MI), uncle of noted Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover girl and twitter courtesan Kate Upton -- how's that GQ cover and photo-shoot for family values, Fred?! [see here:  http://i.huffpost.com/gen/651969/thumbs/o-KATE-UPTON-GQ-570.jpg?4 ] 


  In all seriousness, this is straight Ancien Regime stuff. Corporate hack legislator kicks the can down the road while his niece teases a Popsicle for the provocative titillation of all three Estates.... Meanwhile, thunder rumbles from the mountains, as we remember The Law, and the Prophets, and their truth: that, some day, justice must roll down like waters. Woe to the Uptons, and woe to Nineveh that makes such idols thereof!

Letter to Andrew Sullivan #1

 Today Andrew Sullivan links to Messrs.  Matthew Yglesias, Conor Friedersdorf and Daniel Drezner, et al., defending the greatness of outsourcing, complaining of the "ridiculous offensive[ness]" of Obama's campaign against Bain's vulture capitalism. Ah, lickspittles of capital, unite! You have nothing to lose but other people's jobs!
     Seriously, what is fucking offensive is that these people, who are by no measure possible working class, seek to defend the destruction of entire communities, entire swathes of the country, in the name of a false idol of economic efficiency; or, for the more bleeding heart among them, in order to better the lives of Chinese peasants (this is the actual sweatshop defending line of Yglesias). I thought we were Countrymen? Or are we only Countrymen when my family, friends, and neighbors go to fight the immoral and ill-considered wars these assholes cheer for?

     Jesus Fucking Christ.

     "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?"

A poem for getting back on Life's horse

ULYSSES

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
that loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known---cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honored of them all---
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end.
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, my own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the scepter and the isle---
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me---
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads---you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are---
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Good cosmopolitanism

A gay Persian-British guy singing a song written by the American descendants of enslaved Africans.... good cosmopolitanism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmmTsEu19YM&list=HL1342493909&feature=mh_lolz

For bad cosmopolitanism, just turn on MSNBC.

Todd Gutner, the Amazing Omitting Weatherman!

    WBZ 4's latest meteorologist (n.b. TV Meteorologist : Climate Scientist:: Marketing Firm : Economist), Todd Gutner [ http://boston.cbslocal.com/personality/todd-gutner-2/ ] is one of the more-enraging hacks on the Boston local news scene.  Gutner, with ever the perpetually cheery smile of the empty-headed News Prick, describes the increasingly baffling, bizarre, and horrible weather of the 21st century for us every day -- always with that shit-eating grin -- yet says nary a word about why all these weather events may be occurring. Never a word about why a winter in New England just passed with a total of 8" of snow; never a word about why a drought is occurring in southeastern Massachusetts in March; or the fact that in living memory -- and I know he remembers this, unless he's as empty-headed as he looks -- summer temperatures in the 90s were a once or twice a summer thing, not an every day of the week thing.

   J'accuse, Gutner! You're a climate change omitting hack, beholden to your corporate paymasters, deceiving the people for a six-pence! In coming days, we shall recall well who gladly palmed those thirty pieces of silver....

"What do you know of The Real South Shore?"

   Once upon a time, a long time ago, I had myself a lagan love, a fair darling girl descended from Charlemagne and many Earls and Dukes besides, and cheeks rosy as the spring, a neck white like apple blossoms, eyes like lilacs. And as all loves which are ill-starred grow, bloom, and die, so too did this one. And many months later, upon happening to see her, my old Amelia, she told me that she had gone out "on a few dates" (microbrewery tastings? Food carts with gourmet yams for only $17.50 in Davis Square? Ice-cream made from civet shit?) with a guy who was from the Town of N______, nearby, but who wasn't like me, was "a real South Shore guy."
   --- Meaning what, I asked.
   --- You know, more the preppy, SUV, soccer-playing type of guy.
   --- I see. I don't know that that's what constitutes the real South Shore, I said, in a rare bit of tact.

   What I ought to have said was:

      "What do you, a mere transplant, a veritable nomad of the American upper middle class, beholden to no place and loving no place deeply and knowing no place deeply -- what do you know of the true South Shore, the place that was created over centuries by eyes both Wampanoag and English, Irish and Brazilian? What do you know of the pines and the ponds, the marshes and the swamps, the way the ice washing ashore makes a strange sighing in darkest winter? Why, you don't know it, you don't know it at all! Not at all! Mark ye this: the Yuppie invasion, and colonisation of all things -- an invasion of which you are part -- has come to this shore, too; and this invasion, this human red tide, has washed up soccer-playing preppie SUV d-bags, and set them down in alien cul-de-sacs, and obscured what this land was, is, and will be. So when you speak of this infestation as more "the Real South Shore" than this eccentric Swamp Yankee scholar -- then, Madam, you show how profound is your ignorance of the lands you make a habit of colonising. Remember, every Raj has its 1857 -- and eventually, the colonised get their independence. Do you understand? Our independence!"

Liberty, Republicanism, and New England

Here I stand, by the shores of the Gulf of Maine, having attained a very limited Liberty, and a very delightful peace, a tranquil bay after long storms, after long voyages.

And though here, cultivating my own garden on the clement shore of the bay, I enjoy a great degree of liberty in my own life -- it is also true that in our larger lives, in the life of the world, liberty breathes air both dirty and unsafe; grows mangy under the fetters of those veritable Hungry Ghosts of Capital; grows cruel and despotic under the aegis of a culture that values cruelty and despotism, and says so….

Now, what do I mean by liberty? I mean first of all a republican liberty, based on a community of egalitarian freeholders, answerable to no other than one another through structures of direct democracy, particularly the Town Meeting, which has served these Towns well for near four hundred years now. I emphatically do not intend the kind of savage and lawless war of all against all that the mavens of modern Mammon tell us is the Best of All Possible Worlds. the vaunted “liberty” of moneyed oligarchs to ignore their neighbor dying in the street -- and to charge him a ha'pence for the privilege of dying on his gilded doorstep!

Indeed, I believe that liberty under un-republican forms, under forms either oligarchical or monarchical, or under conditions of mere rule by mob (which rarely occurs compared with the other kinds of tyranny; but does appear nonetheless),  is no liberty at all. Republicanism gives form and frame to the reality of liberty, the reality of a liberty to something rather than just liberty from something. This is the territory of what J.G.A. Pocock has called Atlantic Republicanism: of Machiavelli in The Discourses, and the Commonwealth Men of 17th century England; of Mr. Jefferson's “the Pursuit of Happiness” as well – the right to make some positive good in the world for yourself and your own, and your community of which you are part (and which is part of you). In short, the goal, as per Aristotle, is eudaemonia -- a sense of thorough-going human flourishing.

This is because I believe the merely metaphysical (and I mean this in the worst sense) understanding of individuals and communities of the libertarians – those Jacobins of propertied Reaction – is prima facie absurd. Indeed, such a notion of who we are, of what we are, is so foreign both to the New England experience, and the New England mind, on the small scale; and to the human experience writ large, that only a studied recalcitrance to the dictates of facts and experience, of common humanity and inherited wisdom, could impel one to accept such an insensate, selfish, and small-minded idea of liberty. Again, just as under the Jacobins, the spirit of 1789 became the Spirit of the Terror, so too does the spirit of 1689 become a spirit of propertied terror in the hands of the libertarians. Shorn of historical context, adrift from historical moorings, in them the principles which once marked the birth of British liberalism become warped – to monstrous and maleficent proportions. No man is an island, and any political philosophy which forgets this maxim is bound for cruelty and absurdity -- often both at once.

Thus, this blog is started in the spirit of one who defends the republicanism of his homeland, these wooded coves and stormy capes, mountains who rocky crowns touch the sky, this New England. As William Billings, the hog reeve of Boston and America’s first secular composer put it, during our Revolution: “Let tyrants shake their iron rod,/ And slav’ry clank its galling chains;/ We fear them not – We trust in God --/ New England’s God forever reigns!”

                  So, come, my friends! 'Tis not too late to preserve republicanism this side of the Atlantic!