Always a bridesmaid ...

In a previous post I mentioned some minor misgivings about Barack Obama -- something about him being a politician not immune to a touch of calculation, and not not quite the saint some would have him believe him to be.  This led me to support another candidate, who, sadly, did not win.  I'm speaking of course of Eugene V. Debs, a man who would not have shrunk away from accusations of socialism.

There were of course a number of practical and legal obstacles to Debs winning this year's presidential election.  As a permanently disenfranchised convicted felon, it's unclear whether he would qualify for the ballot in all the states.  That, and being dead, though I've been unable to find anything in the constitution specifically listing vitality as a requirement for the office, a loophole exploited for several years by Ronald Reagan.

Still, it's worth considering the merits of Debs' character, policies, and qualifications.  Debs was a brilliant union organizer and labor leader, driven by a deep hatred of suffering and injustice -- the sort of person we might call a community organizer these days.   This brought him into the world of (Socialist) party politics.  Radicalized by the brutality of government and robber-baron response to strikes, Debs turned to socialism, and ran unsuccessfully for president four times.  Debs' socialism wasn't about mere wealth re-distribution.  Nor was it the party and state sponsored terror that the totalitarian movements that usurped the name convinced Americans socialism means.

Debs' credo was one of sacrifice and humility in the service of improving the lives of poor people and opposing war.  He saw capitalism, not as the engine of universal prosperity and political democratic freedom (as it is so often seen today), but as a source of suffering, stratification, and militarism, the true enemies of freedom and democracy.  His pacifism led to his greatest sacrifice.  As World War I ground on, and Woodrow Wilson brought  America closer to the fields of Flanders, Debs agitated against the draft and was arrested for espionage.  Though convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, he remained  unbroken.  At his sentencing hearing, Debs uttered what became the rallying cry for his final presidential campaign from behind bars:

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Next time someone tells you Barack Obama is a socialist, throw that back at 'em and ask 'em when Barack ever said anything like that.  As much as the right might want to tar Obama with the brush of radicalism and class warfare, it's worth remembering what the real thing looks like.  So far as I know, Obama has never claimed that his rightful place is in prison alongside the other outcasts from American prosperity.

It's been clear since he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention that Obama thinks his rightful place is at the apex of the U.S. political system.  It's also clear from the way he has campaigned, and most recently from the people he seems to be selecting to that we shouldn't expect a commune to break out any time soon in Washington.  But it's also worth remembering that Obama did promise change.  Much of this came in the form of Yoda-like platitudes ("change we must").  But he also said some specific things about what he would do (and how he would do them) that he should be held to.

One of the areas where he promised change fairly specifically was environmental policy, and today he made good.  He announced that he would put in place a "cap and trade" system this year to begin addressing pollutants causing climate change.  Put that one in the plus column.

He also said that he would work to re-professionalize foreign service and diplomacy, and move us away from a fear-based national security policy.  Not such good news on this one.  The two big items were his behind-the-scenes support for keeping Joe Lieberman on as head of the senate homeland security committee and his offering the secretary of state slot to Hillary Clinton.  Neither of these moves is about the merits, because on the merits neither is a good candidate.  This is pure naked politics.  Lieberman means one more vote for the Democrats (assuming he's back on the reservation for good), and nothing more.  Putting Hillary in the cabinet takes a potential voice of criticism out of the senate (with no risk of losing a safe Democratic seat), and more importantly, out of the running in 2012. 

Obama is entitled to be political about certain things. Though a bit disappointed, I'm not yet heartbroken about these moves.  Still, that makes him only one for three on big decisions this week, and I'd like to see him do better.  Now what would Eugene do?

Bluefood Endorses ...

You practically can’t open up an editorial page or blog without coming across some pundit scratching his head over John McCain “suddenly” going negative.  Some wonder how John McCain had this horrible campaign thrust on him against his better nature and maverick spirit. Others express sorrow at seeing the man they once admired transformed into yet another victory-at-all-costs Republican willing to transfer from the Straight Talk Express to the Turd Blossom Special, as long as it stops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue along the way.  Some, such as William Kristol, cry for the campaign to let McCain be McCain.  Others, like  a Time magazine doofus named Ana Marie Cox (who is well dissected here) wonder “wha happen?” to the guy they thought was so honorable and cool, and wait for him to be a maverick again.  This article hits all the typical notes.

I am amazed that anyone who has spent even a moment studying the presidency and/or observing politicians could have such thoughts.  It seems obvious to me that anybody running for the office of president is on some level a defective human being.  To say to the world "I deserve more than anyone else to hold the most powerful political office in the world" requires an astounding degree of narcissism.  Campaigning requires a comparable degree of mono-mania.  I find this confirmed (at least in hindsight) by the performance of the people who actually reached the office.  I can think of no examples of presidents since the U.S. became a major power who didn't exhibit some disturbing personality traits and who didn't commit at least some frightening abuses of their power (except perhaps those who died in office before they got to do anything).

Given this, I think it behooves journalists to work from the assumption that any serious candidate is in fact dishonest and dangerous, and that any image he presents of himself is to be questioned.  Ultimately, it's a matter of the scale of the deceit and danger, not its presence or absence.  On that continuum, as a human being, McCain is not Bush or Nixon, but he sure as hell ain't Jimmy Carter either (who was probably the closest we've ever come to having a president actually be what he professes to be).

 

In this light, it has been obvious from the get-go that the mainstream media has completely failed to report on John McCain as it should have.  I mean come on, the man has actually called himself a maverick for years, without winking.  In and of itself that should be a clue that he's trying to mask his conformity.  Real mavericks don't call attention to their differences. They just keep doing whatever they do, and to hell with everyone else's opinions.  Gandhi was a maverick.  Oskar Schindler was a maverick. Ted Kazcynski was a maverick.  William S. Burroughs was a maverick.  John McCain is about as much of a maverick as the Fonz.

Throughout McCain's career, there have been well established (but under-reported) instances of the gaps between what he says about his character and values and his actual behavior, in both his personal and public lives.  His treatment of his first wife.  His behavior in the Keating five scandal.  His notorious ill-treatment of people in his inner circle and foul temper.  His less than complete grasp of most of the facts and issues he confronts.  His campaign finance practices.  His earmarks and log-rolls.  He's not the worst hypocrite ever.  He actually has on occasion gone with his conscience in spite of his self or party interest.  However, this has been nothing like the matter of course that so many are convinced it is. 

Maybe at least in this small way he is better than the most craven of his peers. But, realistically, he does not stand apart from them.  He is one of them, in spirit and action. 

Actually, I take that back.  He is in at least one dimension worse than any of his peers that I can think of.  He is the only current member of congress to have  spent years in captivity as a prisoner of war under horrible conditions and frequent torture.  He knows better than any of his peers how terrible it is for those in Camp X-Ray, or the ratholes of extraordinary rendition.  He also knows the galvanizing effect torture, (and endurance), have on soldiers who believe in their cause.  Yet when presented with an opportunity to take a stand against the Bush/Cheney torture regime, he did so only briefly. He then turned about face to legislate a policy that specifically allowed heinous torture of POW's and others in the Bush/Cheney Gulag, in an obvious quid pro quo for support of his presidential bid.     

So if all serious presidential aspirants are to be treated as sociopaths, what are we to make of Barack Obama?  The worst anyone seems to be able to dredge up against him is that he maintained personal ties to an impolitic preacher and an erstwhile Weatherman.  He seems to be the apotheosis of decency and sophistication.  Annointed "the one" by the Matrix generation, he is seen as a morally pure, prophetic liberator from the yoke of Republican tyranny.  Yet here he is, on the threshold of the presidency, so there must be something, or else the defective human being theory of political success must be abandoned.

Hmm.  What could it be?  Among friends, I have joked that I have profound reservations over Obama's honesty because of his confessions in his first memoir that he was a dope fiend in his college days.  I have my doubts.  He was class of '83 at Columbia.  I was class of '84.  I lived in Sigma Nu for a semester.  I played in bands.  Barry who?  I never saw the guy once.  Not at the pot store on Amsterdam Ave, not in the back room at Cannon's, not at tequila night at the West End.  Not drinking the Quaalude and grain alcohol punch at the parties in Furnald Hall.  If he can lie about being a degenerate, what else is he lying about?

But seriously, a recent event makes it clear that the DHBTPS is safe for another election cycle.  On October 20, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama.  Wow, you say. The leading African American Republican switches sides for our guy.  That's terrific.  Cynically, yes, it probably is terrific, if endorsements mean anything.  And how did Obama respond?  He called him "a great soldier, a great statesman, and a great American."  He then went on to say:  "I have been honored to have the benefit of his wisdom and counsel from time to time over the last few years, but today, I am beyond honored and deeply humbled to have the support of General Colin Powell."  Wow, you say, what a gracious acceptance, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.  Again, cynically, nice touch, Barry.

But wait a second, what's Obama's position on the war in Iraq?  Right, he was against it in 2003,  and has been ever since.  He says it's one of the worst mistakes in the history of U.S. foreign policy and has had  dreadful consequences at home and abroad.  And what does he think of his colleagues who support the war?  He says the biggest thing wrong with John McCain is his judgement about the war.  It completely overshadows whatever positives there are in the rest of his resume.  And remind me again, who was it who actually made the public case for the war in Iraq, turned American opinion in favor of it, and crafted the "coalition of the willing" by telling a bunch of lies and half truths to the United Nations?  Right, Colin Powell.  And when did Colin Powell express regret for having done this and come out in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq ASAP?  Uh, not yet.  In fact, as near as I can tell from his recent utterances, he still supports the war and thinks the surge was terrific.

Yet Obama welcomes the support and advice of this man whom I doubt he really respects.  I can only guess why, but I think it is because he has made a calculation that the American public is blind to what Powell really is (a consummate Pentagon bureaucrat, with a mixed command record, and a disastrous civilian one), and is still drawn to his personal magnetism and prominence.  If Obama really had the courage of his convictions, he would reject the endorsement and tell the American public what fools they have been for allowing themselves to be duped again and again by this fraud.  The reality, though, is that he wants to be elected more than he wants to be right.  In accepting Powell's endorsement and saying nothing about Powell's role in getting us to where we are now in Iraq, he allows Powell once again to abuse his status as a touchstone for black pride and white guilt.  In effect, he absolves and endorses Powell in a cynical bid for the votes that he thinks this might bring him.

This is not the worst thing a politician could do, but is undoubtedly something a politician would do.  I often joke that no man alive deserves to be president, therefore I'm voting for a dead guy, Eugene V. Debs.  I thought I might have to shelve that line this year, but it looks like old Eugene is  on the ballot again.  Now if I can only figure out how to do a write-in ...

I've seen the future and it is ...

As readers of my novel in (slow) progress may have gathered, I am a bureaucrat. My current role in the leviathan of municipal government has me dealing with a great many consultants who have been hired to decipher and improve the bureaucracy. For those not familiar with the sweet science of consulting, it consists of paying a bunch of guys who used to work for you upwards of $250 an hour each to ask people who work for you now what they do, writing down their answers in a report that's more nicely copied and bound than what your own graphics department can produce, and doing a bunch of Powerpoint presentations that state the obvious in obscure ways.

OK, not the consultants I manage (ahem), because I know how to extract real value out of these guys. But pretty much any consultant project parachuted from enough levels above where the work gets done to scare people into cooperating does tend to play out this way. The best part, of course, is the Powerpoint. There's a recent trend poo-pooing Powerpoint as everything George Orwell told us to watch out for (google "powerpoint crashed the space shuttle" or "powerpoint makes you stupid" to see what I mean). I think this is mostly wrong, or rather confusing correlation with cause. The ascendency of Powerpoint doesn't so much make people stupid as it reflects the inexorable ascendency of stupidity.

For those not familiar with this product, Powerpoint is a Microsoft software package that empowers one stupid person to convince a group of other stupid people that he knows what he's doing. Per Bill Gates' plan to take over the universe by bewitching worldwide upper management with shiny objects and paralyzing the able-minded by not telling them how to turn off Mr. Paperclip, if there's a smart person in the room when a Powerpoint presentation is on display, he's so busy rolling his eyes and having his ironic comments go over everyone else's heads that he fails to notice that he has been assigned all the "action items" and "touch points" for the follow-up session until the end of the meeting.

It all kind of reminds me of "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley's novel about a totalitarian future in which introspection is treated as a crime, cosmetically perfect people at the top of the food chain carry out simulated fornication endlessly without consequences, and people speak almost exclusively in what sounds a lot like leetspeak. BNW is usually described as "dystopian", because it presents a vision of a future stripped of all nuance, complexity and irony. But unlike "1984," which depicts a totalitarian world in which suffering is redefined as pleasure, BNW shows shows most people enjoying themselves, which leaves some room for some people to view it more as a how-to manual than a cautionary tale.

Powerpoint is evidence of this. But it is also a reflection of something much deeper in the human psyche. Bear with me now, because I'm about to lay out a theory of everything for the perfection of the human experience. It's all about shape and it's all about the future. For instance, in BNW, a book about the future, human beauty is idealized with the adjective "pneumatic", i.e., inflated, plumped up, no longer angular, but ... what's the word I'm looking for? Round.

Another example (and the one that inspired this vitally important cross-cultural, highly scientific examination of human nature during a long layover) is Charles DeGaulle airport outside Paris. CDG was planned in the early 1960s, at the apogee of futurist idealism. It is round.








Extravagantly so. Terminals, passageways, flight information screens, water towers, taxi-ways -- it's one futuristic curving swoop after another. The plan of the whole place is round. Other examples abound. From the eastern bloc, we have the embodiment of communism's triumphant future, Sputnik.

In contrast, we have many examples of non-round visions of the future ending in failure or obsolescence, most notably the wedge-shaped angularity of rusted, underpowered 1970s automobiles

and post-war public housing projects.

So what does all this have to do with bureaucracy and management consulting? Everything. Bureaucrats toil in misery in square, dimly lit cubicles. They drown in reports full of lists, tables, and bar chars, all square, defined, and limited. The quintessential artifact of the bureaucratic craft is the organization chart -- people in boxes tethered to the hierarchy, defined by their function, not their essence or aspirations. But bureaucrats dream, and when they do, they dream of the future. A future where things go smoothly, processes flow unimpeded by insecurity, ineptitude, or turpitude. A future that is ... Well I'll let you guess.

To illustrate, let me first tell you the true, inner secret of Powerpoint presentations: They are all the same. They come in many colors, jargons, and templates, but they all follow the same story arc. They foretell two futures. One is the path you are on today, and where it will lead you without the guidance of the presenter. It is full of loss, disharmony, and suffering. The other offers the possibility of redemption, renewal, and remuneration and can only be reached through the wisdom of the elders and their knowledge of best practices. Something like this:

Now a cynic might say that this what you get in a society ruled by marketers schooled in conformism. But no, I say it is something else. It is a yearning, for a voluptuous, pneumatic, curved ideal, rejecting the piercing angularity of the past, embedded deeply in all of us. Without knowing it, when we speak of revitalization and change in the corporation, we express ourselves in the visual language of visions of the future. Heck, it might even be genetic, a sort of transformational grammar of the visual. Somebody get me Chomsky, stat! Anyway, I have seen the future, perfected, and it is round.

R.I.P. Peter S. Albin 12/20/1934-2/20/2008

My father Peter Steigman Albin died on Wednesday February 20, 2008 after a long illness.  Below is the text of my Eulogy to him.

.........

Before I move on to what I have to say about Dad, I’d like to acknowledge a few people who made an enormous difference in the quality of his life in the years since his stroke.

First, his friend and colleague Duncan Foley, who continued to see light in Dad when so many of us could only see darkness.  Duncan has also asked me to read a few words he wrote: Pete Albin had a big effect on my life both as my collaborator in scientific work and as a human being. I will leave the scientific issues for another time. What Pete lived through remains astonishing to me. His experience in the small way I was able to understand it, was uniquely cruel and powerful. I cannot miss his suffering, but I will miss him. As the Quakers say, let us hold Pete in the light.

 

To Gerard Trebot, who provided camaraderie under extraordinary circumstances and showed us all how to see not only what Dad needed from us, but what he could still give us.

To Doctor James Robilotti for his wisdom, compassion and friendship.

To Doctor Gary Inwald who saw hope where others saw futility.

To Doctor Chris Fabian, for his calm counsel

And most of all to my mother, Pat Albin.  Those closest to our family know the heroic sacrifices she made.  I can only marvel at her strength and kindness.

To all of you, I offer you my deepest thanks and express my admiration for the examples you have set as human beings.  Many others helped, but without you, Dad would have died many years ago and would have had many fewer moments worth living.

….

It’s tempting to talk about Dad from a particular perspective – colleague, family member, friend, teacher, but choosing any one of those seems not merely insufficient to me, but wide of the mark.  As is true of anyone, Dad was of course more than the sum of his parts, but I think one of the things that set him apart from the rest of us with multiple interests is that in essence, there weren’t any parts, only the whole.  Whether he we was delving into the most abstract of mathematical constructs, raising children, telling a joke, becoming a master go player, carrying on an ordinary conversation, or just staring out the window, he brought to bear the same combination of attention, rigor, eclecticism, humor, and Rabelaisian gusto.

Staring out the window is a particularly illustrative example, because it’s something he did a lot, and it was for him an exceptionally fruitful activity.  For many years, he would look out the picture windows of our 22^nd floor living room and watch the landscape below him be transformed by construction.  This culminated in the site excavation and then construction of the NYU gymnasium in the late 70s.  As he watched the work unfold, he became more and more fascinated, eventually bluffing his way onto the jobsite and getting to know both the labor and management sides of the operation.  This led to a series of papers on the differences between the way engineers and workers approach problems of optimization and queuing.

His conclusion was that the traditional management-science approach of traveling salesmen and linear programs didn’t capture the richness of what was going on and wasn’t any more effective than letting the front-end loader operator decide by himself how many trucks were needed on-site.  He laid this out with his characteristically idiosyncratic symbology.  All while sitting around in his speedo-style underwear, drinking pots of coffee, puffing away on pipes of varying contents, while listening to WBAI on the radio and bullshitting with his teenaged son.  There was no incongruity to this multi-tasking across the spectrum from sublime to ridiculous, though.  No contradiction in any of his dimensions, habits, virtues, or vices.  It was all simply Pete.

I think this captures the essence of how he approached his more theoretical and intellectually challenging work, too:  First, he liked real-world examples.  Second, he thought that cognitive and information sciences that try to model how people actually think have a better shot at representing the way people solve problems and interact than the “incomplete” formalisms of traditional models of rationality.  Third, standard economics terminology never quite worked for him; he always needed his own.  Fourth, he couldn’t just sit in an office and crank things out.  He needed coffee and conversation to develop an idea.  He needed distraction, hustle, and bustle, before he could settle into his night-owl productivity.

The other thing, which is very hard to recognize if you didn’t really know him in more than one context, is that there is an earthiness and whimsy in the way he presented his ideas.  His writing is full of neologisms, circumlocutions, and odd constructs.  In someone else, this might just be jargon, but in him it was a form of wordplay and a source of amusement.  Dad punned and kenned on paper and in person with abandon, regardless of context.  I often sat with him as he worked, and watched a smile play across his face, or even heard him chuckle as he scrawled away in felt tip.  Looking at these sentences after the fact, I can’t say that I get the jokes, but I know they’re in there.  The verbiage in his later work is drier, but the whimsy comes out in the illustrations.  The meaning of the images generated by his simulations was almost secondary to him.  He got a big kick out of the idea that his equations could produce such pretty pictures, and he often just showed people screen shots without trying to explain what they meant.

My thoughts about Dad as an intellectual often center around a conversation we had about the word “discipline,” in the sense of an academic discipline.  This word represented everything he found most frustrating about academia.  Working within a discipline meant restricting yourself, punishing your own mind when it strayed outside the boundaries set by the arbiters of the field.  Deep down he was very ambivalent about the label “economist.”   He was proud of the field’s intellectual rigor and admired many of its practitioners.  He wanted to be known as someone who worked in the same tradition as, Keynes, Arrow, Galbraith.  However, he kept being told (in reviews, grant applications, and job interviews) that he wasn’t working within the discipline.  Maybe it was good mathematics, or linguistics, or computer science, but it wasn’t economics.  He didn’t really understand why academics put themselves in bins like this.  And though he craved the validation of his peers, he grew weary of the chase.  Because of these frustrations, it never bothered him that his children didn’t follow in his footsteps.

I think I’ve said enough about the serious side of Dad, though, and I’d like to return to what I started to say about gusto.  Here are some of the things Dad loved to do: 

Swing a tennis racquet
Swing an axe
Eat haute French cuisine
Make Chinatown waiters bring him the dishes written on the walls in Chinese
Eat in greasy spoons, and declare that there is no such thing as enough bacon
Give talks on highly technical subjects
Consult with captains of industry and finance
Tell shaggy dog stories
Play absolutely any game
Listen to Bach, Wagner, and Beethoven
Sing “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”
Go to foreign movies
Go to plays
Go to the opera
Hang in out pool halls
Listen to Phil Rizzuto call a Yankee game
Read the great books
Read mathematics and physics texts
Read Linguistics journals
Read Gargantua and Pantagruel
Live like Gargantua
Organize anti-war protests
Read the Nation
Listen to WBAI
Listen to right-wing talk radio
Hang out in cafes
Hang out in museums and art galleries
Explore the wonders of cities
Sleep out under the stars in the country.

 Come to think of it, he really liked to do almost anything, go almost anywhere, and talk to almost anyone because all knowledge was good, and to him, accessible.  Any activity offered new skills to be mastered, new people to meet, and new places to explore.  Growing up with someone so filled with wonder and fascination at the world around him, who was also equipped with such astounding powers of understanding and communication was an extraordinary privilege.  It was also an extraordinary to privilege to feel my esteem being reciprocated, a feeling I’m sure many of you share.

 I’m not going to say that he was a saint, or that there was never friction between us, or that he wasn’t at times enormously frustrating to deal with.  But I knew from very early in life that he had rare gifts as a parent and human being.  As I grew into adulthood I recognized more in the way of feet of clay, but I never really lost the sense that he was sui generis, and above all, fun.  He remained the person I most enjoyed spending time with, up until the moment in August of 1991, when so much of that was taken away, not just from him, but from all of us.

 It has been very hard to find perspective on Dad’s long and brutal illness.  It is hard to imagine a crueler fate than to be a polymath and athlete who retains only enough of his mind and body to know what he has lost and be unable to do anything about it.  The last 16 years have been a punctuated equilibrium of decline, with each crisis bringing lower baselines of health and function and erasing more of what Dad once was.  In this context I have struggled to maintain my best memories of him, but this is a struggle that has to be taken on.  I believe in a sort of life after death.  By this, I don’t mean that I believe in god, or the spirit world, or any metaphysical sense of “soul.”  Trust me, it is impossible to imagine that the grandchildren of Joe Albin or the children of Pete Albin would.

 What I mean is that the influences of the people in our lives are not simply winds or waves that knock us one way or another as they pass.  As much as a child carries the DNA of his parents, we all carry the words and deeds of those who shape us physically, emotionally, and intellectually.  These can be a burden, or they can be a blessing.  Dad’s influence was overwhelmingly the latter for me. I have a mind that he in large measure taught me how to use.  I have a love of the intellectual, the physical, the aesthetic and the comical.  Most of all I have memories of his shaggy grin as he picked me up from school, joined me on climbs in the four corners, or walked up to me after a gig and said “now I know how Keith Richards’ mother feels!”  I would like now to leave you all with a simple request.  Keep the best of Dad alive inside you, the whole thing.

Oh No!Not Another Mac vs. PC Blog Entry!

Given how I'm old and all, I've been using computers for a long time, strictly PC's, going back to the days of MS-DOS.  I can't say that I've ever been religious about it, but PC's have been the logical choice.  I used to do a lot of development (mostly in MS Access, which is highly platform dependent), and to the extent that I sometimes brought work home from the office, strict compatibility, without having to think about it was a virtue.  I used other people's Mac's occasionally, but failed to see what all the fuss about (and really didn't like one-button mice).

Recently, my wife has significantly ramped up her level of computer usage, and for the first time, we really needed a second machine.  My own requirements have changed.  I really don't do any development anymore, and am most interested in doing more writing and more music production.  Time constraints aside, I had largely given up on music on the computer.  Multi-track audio on a PC that has to run a lot of other software and be shared by multiple users really is a pain in the ass, and I have completely lost whatever capacity I once had to fight with the assininity that is the way Windows configures stuff.  I also wanted a laptop rather than another desktop machine.

Putting all these thoughts together, it became clear to me that it was time for a Mac, a specifically, a MacBook.  Even though at first blush

Part of me really resists this because I absolutely despise cult marketing, Apple's in particular, and don't want to reward it with my business.  Mac's also appear to be (significantly) more expensive at first blush.  But after doing a bit of due dilligence, it became clear  to me that a PC laptop comparably configured to a MacBook is really not much cheaper.  It used to be impossible to figure out what "comparably configured" really meant, but now that Macs use Intel CPUs (and only the high-end ones), um, apples to apples comparisons are much more straight forward.

The other real kicker is software. Mac comes bundled with a multi-media suite called iLife that achieves a level of integration and interoperability that's comparable to what MS Office achieves with "productivity" software.  iLife includes something called GarageBand, which for me turned out to be the coup de grace.  GarageBand is what's called a "digital audio workstation" -- basically, a recording studio in a (virtual) box.  In its first few releases, it was basically a toy, dumbed down version of a DAW, but the latest release is a whole 'nother story.  It has all the functionality I will ever need, is free, and requires no configuration because it comes pre-installed and guaranteed to work.  There is nothing comparable out of the box in PC land.  OK Mr. Jobs, you can have my credit card number now, but please, no more of those stupid PC drone in a suit vs. Mac hipster in jeans commercials ...  

The other big seller with GarageBand is that it includes it's own collection of synthesizer sounds, and "loops" that are tightly integrate with the rest of its functionality, as opposed to DAWs that treat these things more as ancillary "plug-ins" that require more in the way of getting the pieces to talk to each other.  In practical terms, this means that for someone like me who is neither a competent keyboardist nor drummer, I can build tracks that have fairly convincing fake drums and keyboards much more easily than I could in the DAW packages I had used previously.  At some point I may actually detail some of this, but for now, evidence of my first efforts with GaragBand is below.  Several other generations of audio production technology are represented here.  

Guns or butter?

Pardon the political intrusion, but every once in while one of my more deeply buried multiple personalities, which cares about these things, manages to seize the conn ...

Prior to the election of 2000, one of the bits of conventional wisdom was that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Gore and Bush. One of the bits of conventional wisdom that came to replace this (as the Bush regime plunged us into war abroad, alienated us from our allies, ravaged freedom at home, and put a hurting on the polar icecaps) was that there was in fact a huge difference between the two. As someone who voted for Ralph Nader, I've done penance for this for many years. I'm willing to concede that there was indeed a larger denomination of difference, and I think the world is a worse place for having been subjected to going on eight years of shrubbery. Still, as a new silly season bears down upon us, I'm once again left to ponder how much difference there really is between one side and another.

For instance, Giuliani has anointed himself the heir to Bush's militarism, authoritarianism, contempt for dissent, and rejection of the sovereignty of other nations. He seems to like fetuses a whole lot more than he used to, and is looking forward to owning beach front property in Dutchess County.  In contrast, we have the populism of Edwards, whose positions can best be summarized by writing down a list of Bush's policies and inserting the word "not" before every verb. Then there's Huckabee, the absurd holy roller, and Hillary the soulless technocrat. It's easy to find dipole pairs of elephants and donkeys, (or elephants and elephants or donkeys and donkeys) and compare and contrast until the cows come home.

Ultimately, though, this is a fool's errand because the terms of debate are so constricted. On the environment, the battle lines are drawn over which pseudo-alternative energy technologies will be subsidized. On issues of "security", the question is which restrictions of the Patriot Act will be retained. On health care, it's a matter of nibbling at the edges of the absurdity of a system built on the inherent conflict of interest between for-profit insurance paid for by employers and sick people.

But perhaps greatest lost opportunity is the war because no candidate or other significant figure in the mainstream has taken the matter beyond the questions of "what were Bush's reasons for going to war?" and "how long should we stay in Iraq?"  None of them asks "why militarism at all?"  In this domain, I really think they're all minor variants on the same theme.   

Suppose any of the three big lies of the war (WMD, Saddam hearts Al Qaeda, democracy flowering in the desert) had a shred of legitimacy, and the cases for any were not manufactured entirely out of whole cloth.  Would any of the candidates of either party (except maybe Kucinich, who doesn't really count) oppose the war, even as currently prosecuted?  Frankly I doubt it.   I think some of them were and/or are troubled by Bush's deception and with the way he actually did things on the ground.  But to say that you're against the war now because it turns out Bush was bullshitting (or to say that you were against it at the outset because of concerns about the particulars) is really to say that you accept that there is a case for invasion other than pure self defense and that aggression is an appropriate tool in our international relations kit.

A true opponent of the war would say that even if everything Bush had said Iraq in 2003 had been true, he would have voted against invasion, and taken personal risks to make his opposition known. Of the big three Dems, only Obama can get away with saying he opposed it from the beginning, but if you read his published positions more closely, you can see that he's hedging his bets.  He says he was against the war because he didn't think it would work as conceived by Bush, and because it drew resources away from the more important conflict in Afghanistan.  Those are certainly valid positions, but they strike me as entirely inside the Beltway. 

Looking at how he proposes to end the war, I see more of the same.  He says he'll immediately begin withdrawing "combat" troops and not build "permanent" U.S. military bases (good), but it's clear that he intends to maintain a sizable American military presence.  More importantly, there's nothing in his budget positions about reducing the level of military spending in Iraq or anywhere else. Edwards and Clinton have very similar positions (though it took both of them quite a bit longer to arrive at theirs). 

Each of the big three (and even in some ways a couple of the Republicans) also makes populist noises about making the country a better place by tinkering with the welfare state.   They even all offer "plans" to fund these changes.  In reality, though, all they really do is spout a bunch of platitudes about taking back the Bush tax cuts and cutting pork barrel spending.    None of them really talks about the kind of fundamental restructuring of national taxation and spending policy that would be needed to make us a bit more like Canada or (heaven forfend) France.

 

So let me just say up front that in some ways I would like this country to be a bit more like France.  I say this out of pure selfishness.  I have elderly, infirm parents, a young child, I'm not rich, and my prospects for financial reversal (absent winning lotto) are dim.  I would like my parents' modest estate to live as long as they do, and maybe even a bit more.  I would like my son to be able to go to a good College and enter a career without debt.  I would like to be reasonably sure that if I keep working more or less as I do now, I can stay more or less in the middle class.  I would like the air we breathe and the pace of the lives we lead to be a bit gentler.  None of these is even close to a certainty within the means at my disposal, and I am well above the median household income.    If I lived in France, it would be.  One option would be to move to France, but there are reasons not to, not the least of which is that I actually like this country.

There are five things that I think could bring these meager dreams a bit closer to reality, and I don't think any of them should require us to stop pronouncing the last letters of words:

• High-quality, free education from infant daycare all the way through university
• "Single payer" comprehensive, universal health insurance, not linked to employment
  
• True medical coverage for the elderly (without all the gaps in medicare, and including coverage nursing homes),
  
• A national plan for improving mass transit and reducing car usage
• An energy policy centered around reductions in consumption rather than exploitation of new resources. 

In other words, your basic left- liberal agenda.  None of this is actually all that radical in light of the things that large numbers of Americans actually say they want.  Some might require us to rethink ideas about freedom of economic choice.  Some might challenge commonly held ideas about moral hazard and entrepreneurship.  All of them would require vast changes in spending at all levels of government.

Okay, so now go ahead and call me a tax and spend liberal.  The thing is, though, I don't think that tax increases are the answer to any of this.  Another bit of conventional wisdom is that France (and Germany, and Sweden, and Holland ...) can all afford generous welfare states because they have much higher tax rates than we do.  Trouble is, this isn't true.  Various studies show that if you factor in the total tax bite (including taxes on real estate, sales, state and local income etc.), America falls somewhere in the middle.  Tax havens like Switzerland pay a lot less than we do, but on average, it turns out that Americans' total tax rate is about the same as Germans' and Frenchmen's.

The big difference is that the typical middle-class German or Frenchman actually receives some direct services that have a real bearing on quality of life from the national government.  In contrast, non-retired middle-class Americans basically get nothing from the feds.  So what do we get that Europeans don't?  We get a military.  A really big one.  Big enough to fight major wars on multiple fronts without resorting to conscription.

We have been trained to believe that this is something that we need and can afford.  The truth neither is the case.  As our rising national debt makes clear, we definitely can't afford it.  The rhetoric about the irresponsible Bush tax cuts are a bit of red herring.  Sure, they've made a difference (especially in out-year projections), but the real hit to the Federal budget has been Iraq.  Pretty much nobody but Bush disputes this.

But what about the need part?  We need a strong defense don't we?  Okay, we do, but not this strong for two reasons.  First, the level of "preparedness" is wildly disproportionate to the threat.  The cold war is over.  The greatest threat to our survival is no longer military.  It is economic (i.e., China, and soon India).  We need enough military to make anybody think twice about fucking with us or our most important or favored allies.  We'd have that if we spent a quarter of what we spend now.

 Second, and perhaps more importantly,  having a huge military tempts us to use it.  Our national mythology is that we fight on the right side and enter wars to rescue the downtrodden from tyranny.  Truth is, we've done that relatively few times, and during the eras when we've had growing standing armies we've tended to use them to overthrow governments and install dictatorships. Sweden used to do this to, 300 years ago, when they had an empire.  Now they have Ikea, and life is good.

To tie this all together, what I would like to see in the campaigns is a real discussion of how our government should set priorities.  Do we want to fill the hole in the medicare donut, leave no child's be ... uh leave no child behind, improve our transportation infrastructure, put our country back at the top of the basic research charts, land on Mars ...?  Well we can't do all (or most) of those things and be orders of magnitude more militarily large than the rest of the world combined.  I would like to see every presidential hopeful present a pie chart of how he would allocate the current federal budget among major priorities.  Use the current CBO revenue estimates.  No fudging about new revenues from better tax compliance or cutting bridges to nowhere in Alaska.  Given a pie the same size as the real thing, how would you cut it.  This would force them to confront what they want out of a military, and how much they're willing to pay for it.

Okay, I know.  Nader isn't running this year.