Revoltin' Development Dept. - I thought popunders were bad. In the last couple of weeks, Big Media sites have come up with something worse, though I'm not sure what they're called. These ads are persistent layers that are part of the webpage you want to read, and cover the content for a period of time. Some are animated, some are not. All of them are based on the principle of preventing you from doing what you want to do on the web for a period of time. (An awful lot of them lack a "close this ad" option.) Which is to say, they are less like print ads and more like radio/TV commercials.
Memo to advertisers: The first principle of sales is that people buy a product because it makes them feel good to do so. You are not making me feel good with this trick.
Obviously, web advertising is getting increasingly desperate. With popunders, the delusion was that if they can just force you to interact with the damned thing they have surely scored a victory for their clients. With - let's just call them commercials, because that's what these wait-until-it's-over persistent ads are - the idea seems to be that your endurance will wear down. Perhaps as obviously, all this is a symptom of the terminal problems with the ad-based web model. Ginger Stampley has been writing a lot lately about what she calls the end of the web free lunch.
I would argue that the web was never "free." The defining feature of the web, though, going clear back to the days of pure gift culture, is that producers have to pay for content. Consumers won't. (As always, except for pornography. And the truth is, if you're paying for pornography on the net you're just not looking hard enough.) Right now, there are two intersecting problems: the developers of broadband infrastructure can't make money at their initial prices, so costs of accessing or offering bandwidth-intensive content are increasing rather than decreasing; and a particular "producer pays" model, profiting for content provision by selling advertising, just ain't working.
You can lump most web content into gift culture, self-advertisement, outright vending or commercial media. Gift culture and self-advertisement blur into each other, as Ginger points out: Virginia Postrel and Joanne Jacobs want you to buy their books, so they undertake the cost of providing browsers with fresh, regular access to their thoughts. (This has always been true. I damn near made a particular gift culture project of my own pay off a couple of years ago, and only wish my timing had been better.) Self-advertisement and vending blur into each other too. Both amazon.com and the official Buddy and Julie Miller site want to sell you things, and both types of sites often offer goodies.
It's commercial media that takes it in the shorts from both broadband costs and the failure of the advertising model. This has its satisfactions. The class of fuzzy, bigeyed things does not include AOL Time Warner. But while Big Media has a lot to answer for - its goal has long been to make the web as much like television as possible - even it has managed to provide great social good. Having the contents of uncounted domestic and foreign newspapers and magazines a click away has been a great boon. As Virginia Postrel insisted, it has been the indispensible foundation of the blogging world. In warblogger Ken Layne's words, it means "we can factcheck your ass."
The gift culture web and the self-advertisement web and the direct-vending web are going to survive in relatively familiar form. How the commercial media web as we've come to know it is going to make it I have no idea. But I doubt that more annoying advertising techniques are the answer.
What's So Funny - Apparently, the British Association for the Advancement of Science has held a poll to determine, once and for all, the world's funniest joke. It's not bad. The LA Times has a more detailed report that includes several of the runner's-up. It also includes the top vote-getters by nationality. (Canada's is especially lame.) Since the media really does suck, neither the LA Times nor MSN tell readers even such basic information as what percentage of the vote the top joke got. The official site has that info (47%), and the "worst joke" winner too. (You've seen it before.) Other than that, it has little more detail than the LA Times story. All that is on the site is the press release that essentially is the LA Times story.
The British Association characterizes the poll as a "science experiment," but if that's true, how did they get the wrong winner. The following is the funniest joke ever:
A: Ask me "What is the secret of humor?"B: Okay, what is th -
A: Timing!
A Modest Proposal - Should we make war on Saudi Arabia, as Ken Layne urges, or pull our troops out of what the French Ambassador to London might call "their shitty big country," as neo-isolationists have urged for years now? This morning it hit me. The President could present the case for war to the US Congress! In their capacity as the People's representatives they could decide whether the offenses rise to the level of casus belli! We could do the same sort of thing with the question of war on Iraq! In fact, why not, as a check on untrammelled executive power, say that from this day forward the power to declare war will reside exclusively with the legislative branch?
It just seems like the responsibility for deciding to attack other countries is an awful lot for one guy, somehow.
21st Century Netiquette - An exchange anent the previous exchange.
Jim: Who quotes whom on whose blog?
Ginger: You quote me, 'cos you're the warblogger. I have more to write about gun control and Argentina (2 separate posts, though) before Sunday morning, I hope.
Saudi Dearies - Years ago, I read a Pete Hammill piece in the Village Voice about a mob hit, in which he noted that all the locals had "dearies," as in, "My dearie is that his lieutenants decided it was time for the old man to go." In response to this site's most recent musings about the precise relationship among official Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda and the September massacres, Ginger Stampley writes
A hypothesis that has occurred to me about "official Saudi sanction" for
al-Qaeda is that one or more of the Saudi princes is supporting bin Laden
in the hopes that he'll get the throne when bin Laden deposes the current
Saudi regime.Bin Laden would almost certainly be playing this ambitious prince for a
fool, but it would make sense of some of the insensible elements, wouldn't it?
Ginger makes an excellent point. Mrs. Offering, who grew up in the Aramco complex at Dharahn, would tell you that to speak of "the Saudi government" at all is to exaggerate.
I still think bin Laden makes an awfully convenient sworn enemy, seeing as how the one thing he doesn't seem to do is attack Saudi royal interests. bin Laden could be "the loyal opposition" and thesaudigovernment not have been in on 9/11 ahead of time. One's intelligence assets do wacky things sometimes. But if they're your intelligence assets, you may want to save their butts. Shame about all the dead Jew-Crusaders, but dammit, he's still the loyal opposition! Where would we find another half so suitable?
Sample Question - Once, Unqualified Offerings passed an evening in a whorehouse. Bachelor party, get the groom drunk, negotiate and yada yada yada. This was just about 20 years ago. The establishment was officially a photography studio in outer suburban Maryland. For all I know, they actually did family portraits during the day. It's essential to the story that, hard as it may be to believe, I wasn't inhaled. This was not out of moral scruples. Partly it was an image thing: as a social late bloomer I probably found "paying for it" more shameful than more sexually successful men that age. Also, having paid my share for the groom I was out of money. So what you had was a handful of awkaward young men, most of whom had met (I kid you not) through a college science fiction club, hanging around what looked like a lower-middle class living room with a handful of scantily-clad young women in front of a late-night TV movie. Occasionally, one of the women would half-heartedly solicit business by urging us, generically, "Let's go!" or "Let's party!" but not to the point of looking away from the TV while doing so.
I did fall into desultory conversation with one worker in a leopard-print sheath, and the topic turned, briefly, to the groom. "He'll be back," she said, with more amusement than malice. "That's just how men are." What I was thinking right then, taking in my surroundings, was "What's your database, lady?"
Why do I bring this up? I suspect self-parody. But the "What's your database" question just occurred to me while viewing the results of the latest Arab News poll on the question "Do you think the Osama video was doctored or faked?" Results when I voted (I voted No) were 2-1 in favor of the tape's authenticity.
So who votes in the Arab News polls? Back in early November, the site polled its readers on who they thought was behind the anthrax attacks. Only a quarter of all respondents chose "right-wing Israelies." That seemed like a gratifyingly small number given what we've read about Arab opinion, and 33% pro-fake on the tape seems gratifyingly small too. Are Americans and other non-Arab respondents skewing the results because it's an english language, internationally-available site? Probably. Too bad, too.
Almost But Not Quite - As many warbloggers have pointed out today, major news organizations have done their own translations of the bin Laden dinner party video and found things the US government left out of its official transcript. They come tantalizingly close to moving early paranoid theorizing on this very website into the eerily prescient category, but not quite:
Bin Laden's visitor, Khalid al Harbi, a Saudi dissident, claims that he was smuggled into Afghanistan by a member of Saudi Arabia's religious police.
says abcnews.com. This is still not quite smoking gun-level evidence that bin Laden is a Saudi operative rather than the Saudi rebel he claims to be, alas. Maybe the religious policeman is a traitor to the crown, or maybe the religious policeman was operating under official sanction or maybe the religious policeman was operating under official sanction while imagining that he was a traitor to the crown. The "Wilderness of Mirrors" is like that.
The newly translated tape segments are enough, in combination with other evidence, for blogger Ken Layne already:
Folks, Saudi Arabia attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. It doesn't matter whether the command came from that bloated hog King Fahd or the fanatic religious leadership he can't control. What is obvious to everyone except the Bush Administration is that our ally, Saudi Arabia, harbored, supported and created the terrorists who launched a war against the United States 100 days ago.Forget Iran and Iraq and Somalia for now. It is time to attack and occupy Saudi Arabia, put its leaders and "clerics" on trial in military tribunals, and destroy the bin Laden terrorist network where it lives: Saudi Arabia.
This is an expansion of the war that Unqualified Offerings could almost get behind. The Saudi ruling family is at the very least an accessory after the fact. If better evidence turns up that they were more than that, yeah, bomb them back to the, uh, sand age. The Saudis have been walking right up to what we might call "The Taliban Line." We never found evidence that the native-Afghan clerics themselves were in on the planning and execution of the September massacres, but they compounded their original sin of giving our attackers a base of operations by attempting to shield them from retribution. You could make a case that the Saudi government's stonewalling on freezing al Qaeda assets and providing information on the Saudi-national hijackers since 9/11 puts them in "against us" rather than "with us" territory. At the very least, we have grounds to declare ourselves disappointed, close our bases in a huff and turn off the arms spigot.
But then, we should have done those things years ago. Why haven't we? There seem to be interlocking reasons, none of which make sense on their own. Supposedly, we're protecting Saudi Arabia from Iraq. There's nothing about the Saudi government that merits protecting, and that has been true for years. They were worth keeping around during the cold war. Since then? Phooey. They are tyrants, their laws are viciously misogynist and they require that the US continually demean itself to "protect" them - no crucifixes on Christian soldiers, no female soldiers driving, no cooperation in investigating the Khobar Towers bombing. You know the litany. Forget "we need the oil." They need our money. The chief complaint of our enemy, Iraq, is that we won't let it sell oil! Saddam Hussein hates our guts and he'd sell us oil if we let him. I realize that we just had eight years of the Clinton administration, and there may well have been no one around who understood the law of supply and demand, but one would like to think the "free market" Republican administrations bookending Bubba had a clue about it.
The Bush family seems to really like the Saud family. So there's sentiment. Otherwise, it's hard not to conclude that the government values Saudi bases not as a means to defend Saudi Arabia, but as a platform for projecting power into Iraq.
If that's how the Saudis see it, then one of the biggest difficulties with the Saudi Arabia Attacked the US hypothesis goes away. With all the circumstantial evidence tying bin Laden into the Saudi power structure, the question remains: Why? That is, what would the House of Saud hope to gain by launching a covert attack on the United States? They hate us? I'm sure they do. But why this particular mode of acting on that hate? Why not just say Get your stinking Jew-Crusader troops out of our kingdom, please? (Prince Bandar can help with the wording.) Among the possible answers, one must include It's just too straightforward for the Saudi Royal Family. But the other biggie would be that they didn't think we would go, that the forward anti-Iraq platform was so important to us that we would fight to keep it.
I'm just not sure yet. I still don't quite see that 9/11 can be seen as the sensible expression of even a hostile official Saudi policy. It's worth noting that if the US government will lie to keep up the peace with an Arab government they like (Saudi Arabia), they'll lie to push us toward war with an Arab government they don't like (Iraq). The other thing worth noting about the two countries is that, if the Saudi government does want to drive American bases out of their country, they must believe that they have an understanding with Saddam Hussein that will hold.
Babushka Nation - There's an article in the small but growing genre of FBI visitation accounts on the SFGate.com site, to which I found a link from the firebreathing paleocon lewrockwell.com. A man named Barry Reingold had been making it his business to criticize the president, the war and "the ruling class" to the folks at his health club. There's something incredibly Bay Area about that. When the FBI came calling they specifically asked him about his membership in the health club.
"And then they said someone in the gym had reported that I had been talking about terrorism and Sept. 11, oil profits, capitalism and Afghanistan," Reingold said. "And I said, 'Oh, really.'"
The FBI helpfully informed Mr. Reingold that "you have the right to freedom of speech," though you'd think that's the sort of information that voicemail would suffice for, and Mr. Reingold informed the FBI that he knew that, was not interested in the fact that they had to write a report and that he was done with the conversation. He shut his door and the FBI went away.
The purpose of repeating the story is not to cry that Night Has Fallen (it hasn't) or to suggest that Reingold must be something of a jerk to pester the folks at his health club like that. (He probably is, but I like the way he handled the FBI.) The purpose of repeating the story is to suggest a little bit about How Night Does Fall when it gets around to falling and just what the scope of the darkness can be. The problem here is less the FBI than the patrons at the health club. Not just the US but the world is full of busybodies, sneaks and jerks, one of which you have to be to call in the feds on some random crank whose views you don't cotton to. Actual tyrannies depend on just such people - the block warden in Sandinista Nicaragua, the babushka on each floor of the Soviet hotel, the jealous business competitor in Phoenix-era South Vietnam, the nation of informers that was East Germany.
Many years ago I recall an article (almost certainly in the Washington Post) on reconstruction attempts in Uganda after the fall of Idi Amin. The task was the more enormous for the complicity of so much of Uganda's population in Amin's repression. Don't like your neighbor? Your ex-boyfriend? Your employer? In a land of real midnight knocks on the door you have an easy way to get rid of them. It happened a lot in Uganda, despite, indeed because of, everyone knowing the certain fate of the people they accused.
In Reingold's case, the FBI seem to havemore commitment to his rights than at least one person at his health club did. In a relatively free society at peace, these sorts of people have to satisfy themselves driving 55 in the left lane of the Interstate or reporting their neighbors to the county for not having their pet licenses current. As society gets less free and/or less peaceful, they get more bothersome. At some point they become an actual menace. It's another reason to keep wars and security measures both as short and as focused as possible.
Speaking of Alan Bock - Much of his column this week would bug the crap out of your more zealous warbloggers. For instance, "Therefore, I operate on the assumption that the main purpose of the current conflict (I still dislike calling it a war despite the de facto truth so long as Congress doesn't have the gumption to do the constitutional thing and declare war) is to expand and perpetuate the power of the permanent government, the ruling class, the people who think ordinary human beings are an unruly lot that need a whole lot of supervision and imposed discipline – and they're just the folks to handle the job." But anent your more zealous warbloggers, this passage is of interest:
Bush administration officials are said to have been annoyed at criticism from the Standard and New Republic crowds that they weren't being aggressive or decisive enough in the early stages of the Afghan conflict, waging only a sissy bombing war. Serendipitously enough, harsh editorials and articles from both magazines hit print the day Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance and the Taliban (apparently) began to come apart.
Over the last couple of weeks, various me-zines have had great sport exhuming defeatist predictions from left wing doves. But the defeatist predictions of neocon hawks have been allowed to rest quietly, e.g. the famous twin columns o' doom that Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol published in the Washington Post on October 30th. (Krauthammer's column began, "The war is not going well." Couldn't find a link to Kristol's, alas, but I distinctly recall that he used the 'q' word.)
So do I believe that crap about how the war's purpose is "to expand...the power of the ruling class?" Answer: Ask me in two years; or say: by their fruits ye shall know them. Unqualified Offerings has been clear that the war that we have been fighting, against the men and organizations that attacked the United States and the government that provided their platform, is justified and prudent. I'm all for tour stops in the other shitholes where al Qaeda hangs out, so long as the focus remains on destroying our actual attackers. There is a cadre of neoconservatives and neoliberals who want to recklessly expand the enemies list, fight wars for allegedly prophylactic reasons, and make it the country's open-ended mission to remake other countries to our liking. Some of them even frankly acknowledge that this is imperialism, they just argue that imperialism is a good thing. And too many of them plainly consider war a tonic for what (they think) ails the culture. Out with "decadence" and in with "national greatness."
If we destroy our attackers and come home, Bock is wrong, or anyway, those about whom Bock is right did not prevail. (I don't doubt that Bock is right about some of them.) If we refuse to admit to victory, if we keep hopping from country to country, if the language of the indictments against our successive targets grows ever more vague, if every political season brings some new domestic security measure without which the country can't survive, then Bock is right.
What a Wonderful World This Would Be - Meant to recommend Alan Bock's column of last week, in which he muses on the prospects for "nation-building" in Afghanistan and, by extension, elsewhere. His modest proposal: the federal model, a la Switzerland today and the US in earlier times. However, he writes:
The main reason such a scenario is unlikely, however – unless the Afghans figure it out for themselves and kick the international observers out – is that the kind of people likely to be involved in peacekeeping or nation-building efforts on a professional basis find the idea of decentralism and localism not just somewhat backward and old-fashioned – a model we have moved beyond – but almost literally incomprehensible. Those who have moved into positions of authority in nation-states and international organizations are almost all relentless centralizers who believe that the key to civilized life is the kind of large-scale bureaucratic institutions they happen to inhabit.I think it is safe to say, for example, that the average Eurocrat doesn't see himself as I see him – as part of a parasitic growth on a society that developed enough prosperity through centuries of relatively decentralized political rule enhanced by relatively free trade that it could tolerate some parasites without dying. They don't see large central bureaucracies as a luxury good always threatening to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Instead, they see the institutions they control as the real drivers and engines of prosperity and civilized behavior. Almost every institution of higher education in putatively civilized countries reinforces this misconception.
Rational Altruism Watch - The indispensible Instapundit.com recently inaugurated a campaign to help blogger.com pay its bandwidth bills. Many bloggers keep their sites as third-level domains of Blogger's blogspot.com. blogspot will host a site for free, with a banner ad on the top of your page, or for $12/year with no ad. $12/year is damned cheap for hosting - all you do is click a little link in the banner that reads "Get rid of this ad" and it's off to Paypal. Instapundit reader Ken Booth suggested
It might be worth mentioning to your readers that it's not necessary to be a Blogger user to help. Simply clicking on "get rid of this ad" on a Blog*spot site will bring anyone to the payment form.
Even if you host elsewhere than blogspot, as I do and those Houston bloggers do, if you take advantage of the convenience of Blogger you have an interest in Blogger's financial viability. I just played Secret Santa to a blogspot blog that was kind enough to cite an Offering of last week. (Even though the fellow is a...liberal.) If you find yourself reading a blogspot blog that you like, and you see a banner ad, hey, pay the twelve bucks. It's Christmas.
Killer Bs - A couple of excellent posts on Ginger Stampley's site about broadband, bandwidth bills, blogging and bankruptcy. The second one is here. Scroll down to get the other. She makes two essential points, the first for her fellow bloggers:
But I am ready for the day blog charity goes away, whether it's over bandwidth and server costs or something else. Are you?
The second is more in the line of a bid for eerie prescience:
This is at least part of what killed the Enron-Blockbuster broadband deal, and one of the reasons why Enron's broadband division tanked so hard. Broadband is still in its rollout phase, and it will take some time until the cost of the rollout is amortized, either directly or indirectly through barnkruptcies.
A few weeks ago, Ginger was musing on the possibility that broadband will be like the railroads, and that the companies that actually build the infrastructure will not outlast the effort. It will be successors to the original firms and investors that actually make money on the deal. That saddens my Inner Telecom Employee because it means I end up having to look for work. But my inner political economist is not unduly bothered. Even if all the original investments crap out, they will have resulted in a robust communication network, which is a great social good.
But Try Telling That to an Angry Mob - Fun fact: an MSN auto search on the string "Robert Fisk angry mob" brings up "about 467" entries. (It's the header that says "about" - what, it doesn't know?) A search just on "angry mob" as a phrasal unit finds "about 12,458." However, "happy mob" comes up only 83 times, and "pensive mob" not at all. Obvious conclusion? Federal subsidies for pensive mob formation!
There's Good and Bad in Everyone Department - Cartoonist/Writer Ted Rall has become the official mascot of the Idiot Pinkos Lodge lately, and not without reason! But I've read two of his pieces of on-the-scene recording from Afghanistan, and they are good, vivid accounts journalism. And as this piece shows, he's smarter than Robert Fisk, or at least more careful.
What's In a Name? Ms. Postrel noted that the domain is highclearing.com and the name of the blog is "Unqualified Offerings." She asked why the domain wasn't unqualifiedofferings.com or the name of the blog, "High Clearing," so things would match up, and furthermore, what is a High Clearing anyway. Answers:
If you start saying "high clearing" as an anglo saxon sometime before the turn of the first millenium and keep saying it long enough, it ends up sounding like "Henley" ("heah leah," is more or less the romanized spelling, as I recall it.) Until very recent times, any name once meant something intelligible somewhere. If they tell you "It's a place name," as often happens with the name "Henley," all they're doing is begging a follow-up question, which is, How did the place get that name? (The best site I ever found on the web for such inquiries was Arrow Publishing's "What's in a Name?" site. It's gone, and my attempt to bring it up as a Google cache page failed. Sorry.) A couple of years ago I decided to register a domain for the sake of a permanent e-mail address. "henley.com" was taken. Cool options like tlon.org were taken. "highclearing.com" was not. "supplanter@highclearing.com" is just jim@henley.com after a trip to the reference section.
I had no blog or even the thought of one, nor even a personal homepage. The domain has housed only hobby sites (for various roleplaying games) in subfolders until October. When the blog bug bit, thanks especially to the example of instapundit.com, whose reward for the inspiration has been a steady stream of snarky items here, I finally had a use for the root domain. "High Clearing" sounded a bit, well, lofty for a blog name, not to mention obscure. And people might think I had "Catskill Eagle complex" or something. I chose Unqualified Offerings for the value of the pun on "unqualified." Unlike my betters - Postrel, Kaus, Sullivan, Reynolds - I didn't go to the bother of actually building a solid body of work before beginning to mouth off on the internet.
At some point when the Offering family is flush I may buy a more appropriate domain name and point it here. That way all preexisting links continue to work. For now, here we are.
Burtonville - Virginia Postrel got lots of good mail about Virginia Lee Burton's books and posted it here. Very much worth your time.
Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here? It was the irony that drew me in. Roaming the Montgomery County Fairgrounds that August (it must have been 1994), I spotted the odd conjunction and laughed out loud - side by side, the booths for the US Postal Service and the Libertarian Party. I felt sort of libertarian before that moment, though I had been an enthusiastic "New Democrat" only two years before. I'd been reading the New Republic for ten years and even sold them a single, entirely inconsequential article. (Which they edited the shit out of; talk about your house style!) I was big on Mickey Kaus's workfare ideas. Now, I had started reading Reason at some point. (For that matter, I read The New Criterion. Until they ran Bruce Bawer out it was a must-read.) And the truth was, the bloom was off my New Democratic rose. The Clinton administration's cabinet and sub-cabinet (yes, I followed that stuff) had too many paleoliberals in it for a TNR type to feel altogether comfortable. It seemed like there just weren't enough neoliberals to fill the ranks of a Democratic administration. There was Waco and, even less conscionably, the administration's apologetics for Waco. (To their credit, those statists at TNR denounced the government's conduct at Mount Carmel early and often.) The health plan was a spectacularly misguided congeries of perverse incentives, another S&L crisis waiting to happen. As for my flirtation with Kausism, life happened. I spent some years managing a bookstore in the District of Columbia and realized that DC constituted a laboratory experiment in the value of makework municipal jobs - the DC civil service has traditionally been less a means of administering government programs than a government program in itself.
In after years, I would jokingly refer to myself as a "Clinton libertarian." In August 1994, I had either not completed my "conversion" or not realized that I had when I struck up a conversation with the fellows in the booth. They were, of course, geeky white men anxious enough around other people to make many other people uncomfortable. Not unlike myself when you come right down to it. They of course had me take "The World's Shortest Political Quiz," which I would in after years learn to call a push poll. But that encounter marked the dividing line between my life as a proto-libertarian and a libertarian proper. I cast my first LP votes in 1996 and have done so since whenever I had the chance. During my years as an at-home dad, I even took a turn in the booth each summer, pushing the Quiz on other people (the dicey question was always the one about farm subsidies - this was an agricultural fair, after all), offering stickers to the kids, trying to have a rational discussion with the occasional Randite pulling duty on my shift. ("Reality exists, and we haven't got a clue.")
Being a libertarian in Montgomery County, Maryland is like being a rabbi in Iraq. Montgomery County's idea of a Republican is Connie Morella, who loves federal spending fine, and federal spending on federal employees better yet. And while Republicans are not Democrats, they are by no means, most of them, libertarians.
Virginia Postrel wrote, anent the LP's thirtieth anniversary press release, "As a small-l libertarian who occasionally votes Libertarian, I'd rather the party just go away. As satisfying as it may be to cast a protest vote, they're bad for the cause." It's hard to gainsay her. The recent two-time Presidential nominee has mired the Party in scandal. The scandal distracts from his real accomplishment, which is to drive the LP's presidential vote total down into Howard Phillips territory. The Party continues to distribute pamphlets that time has falsified: "America's New Party" (not anymore guys); "America's Largest Third Party" (um, you mean, third-largest third party); "The Libertarian Party is the only party founded on principle" (nonsense - the Democrats have a principle: "You need us to save you from your own worst instincts"; the Greens have a principle: "Die, human scum!"; just because a party doesn't want to say their principle aloud doesn't mean they don't have one, and having a principle is not in itself praiseworthy, though they have trouble agreeing in Marin County). As Postrel points out, its desperate preemptive embrace of any celebrity who even flirts with the l-word is embarrassing, even Clintonian. Our local party had its own problems. The County party put all its energy into state ballot-access petitions. We had national pamphlets whose level of discourse made Jack Chick seem like CS Lewis in comparison. We had nothing specific to Montgomery County. Other than ballot access petitions, we had nothing specific to Maryland either.
I remember, the winter Governor Parris Glendenning - motto: "Why do you think we call it the Free State of Maryland?" - announced his brilliant plan to give millionaire Art Modell free use of a big expensive stadium that the Governor, the Stadium Authority, and those nice construction magnates with all the campaign contribution money would build in Baltimore. Montgomery County hated the idea - it was money that could be spent on "the children" was what they said aloud, and it was more Montgomery County tax money flowing to Baltimore was what they kept to themselves. We ought to make noise against this stadium deal, I suggested to a local candidate while pulling a primary pollwatch shift. That would be a waste of time, he responded: Everybody in Montgomery County is against the stadium, even the Democrats.
Well then! We wouldn't want to be on the popular side of an issue and risk picking up supporters! Or taking the opportunity to make what the Democrats couldn't, a principled case against such boondoggles. (Once you accept that government has a limitless portfolio to make people happy, as contemporary liberals do, everything else is just haggling over details.) The Libertarian Party sucks on the national level and sucks on the local level too. Heck, I suck too. It's not like I threw myself into forging the local LP into the sword of freedom or anything. I did some shifts at the booth, read my magazines, and voted. Heck, I never even formally joined the Party. (Wasn't going to sign "the Pledge.") Ten years ago, Alan Ehrenhalt argued that liberals have an innate advantage over conservatives in the political sphere because, since liberals really believe in government, government tends to draw the most talented liberals. Since conservatives don't believe in government, the most talented conservatives tend to go into business. Ehrenhalt claimed that the talent gap explained why Americans, on balance, elected politicians more liberal than themselves. You only have to watch the House Republican leadership attempt to parry the Democratic spin of the day to realize Ehrenhalt was absolutely right. What is true for conservatives is vastly more true for libertarians.
And yet. I can't quite join Postrel in wishing the LP would just go away, if "go away" means, leave so libertarians can work with and within the two major parties. A belief in the rightness and necessity of the expansive State is all that unites the disparate factions of the Democratic Party; it's what unites Al Sharpton and Martin Peretz. The Republican Party is crueler: Republicans mouth "small government" arguments against programs they don't like, as if arguing from principle, then turn around and argue for government action to secure their own ends, whether "moral renewal" or "national greatness." It's hard to argue that Ehrenhalt's ambition principle doesn't apply even within the Republican Party itself, which bodes ill for any libertarian "revolution from within." Postrel herself argued convincingly in 1996 that there was no good reason for a libertarian to prefer Dole over Clinton. She convinced me, anyway.
On the other hand, if Postrel means that libertarians should set up shop in the market of ideas outside any formal party structure, I'm more inclined to agree with her. I vote LP because I don't want to waste my vote on parties that are guaranteed not to move the country in the direction I'd like to go - those would be the Republican and Democratic Parties - but I increasingly sympathize with the bumper sticker that says, "Don't vote. You'll only encourage them." More importantly, voting is something the citizen does at most once a year. The rest of the year has to be proportionately more important to one's life, even to one's political life, than election day. Let a hundred flowers blog!
Stasism and Dynamism, a Parable - My mother developed postoperative diabetes some years ago, which meant the doctors wanted to know a lot about family medical history, which meant mom quizzing my grandmother, who was alive then, at great length. One afternoon my grandmother's frustration got the better of her. We were in the car, discussing all of this, and she said, "Jim, how would I know what people in our family had what? Back then people didn't take all these tests for things. They just died."
She didn't say it like it was a good thing.
The Blog Ate My Homework - Yesterday was, unless I misremember, the first day Unqualified Offerings has gone without an update since its inception. Blogger was down from midafternoon on, which was a drag, since, among other things, I promised Virginia Postrel days ago that I would investigate the matter of Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House, among other things. Actually, some of the ideas kicking around Unqualified Offering HQ amount to a Virginia Postrel Tribute Blog - albeit a "libertarian-style" tribute involving a certain amount of disagreement. I owe the woman for being the first person who doesn't actually know me personally to link to this site. Oh, and there's the matter of the huge intellectual debt too, but never mind.
Having bought and reread The Little House for the first time in about 15 years, I've hit a snag: the book is just not as good as Mike Mulligan. The problem is protagonism, or the lack thereof. Unlike Mike, the Little House striveth not. It just sits there. I mean hey, it's a house, right? Burton endows it with consciousness and a certain limited intellect, but not with legs or wheels. Things don't even exactly happen to the Little House for much of the book so much as things happen around it. In the beginning, its builder utters an oath. ("This little house shall never be sold for gold or silver and she will live to see our great-great-grandchildren's great-great-grandchildren living in her.") In the end, his great-great-granddaughter chances upon the house and effects the famous rescue.
At the very least, The Little House feels more static than Mike Mulligan, and it feels less slyly dynamist too. Was it the War or just three more years of life that led her to produce a more purely nostalgic book than Mike. It's tempting for a dynamist-symp like me to conclude that the book is less dynamic because it is less dynamist. But that would be unwarranted. The stasist John Henry legend has protagonism and tragic greatness in spades.
The art is great, Bonnard as a precocious nine-year-old. (A thumbnail bio of Burton says she always drew her books before she wrote them.) And flipping through the book tonight I see hints of elements complicating the apparently unalloyed pastoralism. I should probably reset my mind, accept that Little House is eclogue rather than epic, and come back to it another time. I should probably read it to Offering Boy a few dozen times first also.
Worth noting since the whole dynamist.com investigation into Burtoniana began with a feminist complaint about gender roles in Mike Mulligan: The passive, four-walled title character of The Little House is a she. But then, her rescuer, the builder's great-granddaughter, is a she too.