Surfacing

Thankfully, Blogger has a post-searching feature, but that hasn't always been the case with the blogs I've had in the past, so I can't track down the post I made some months ago where I could've sworn I singled out Mike Huckabee as a potential darkhorse candidate in the Republican primaries. If I could find it, I might make myself look rather prophetic, as Huckabee's star is currently soaring after a surprise performance in the Aug. 12 Iowa straw poll.

In "The New Man from Hope" at Street Prophets, uwdonke (take a closer look at that name) has a look at the new hope of the Christian Right. uwdonke quotes Stephen Strang (another name that ought to ring a bell), a Christian publishing mogul who might be the first person on the Huckabee bandwagon.

Wads of cash is exactly what Strang is angling to secure for Huckabee. [Strang] may not have the household name that Dobson does, but through a network of televangelists and mega-church pastors whose teachings are continuously available through churches, conferences, television, radio, and Strang's own magazines and publishing imprints, his views may well trickle down to at least as many people as follow Dobson. What's more, while most of Dobson's followers are white, charismatics are diverse; indeed, the cover story of the issue of Charisma containing Strang's Huckabee endorsement was "The Changing Face of American Christianity: Immigrant Faith."

Huckabee is pretty much a straight-arrow conservative clone of Sam Brownback, with one exception being that Huckabee doesn't seem to tremble at the oncoming Brown Menace. But, in contrast to Brownback, Huckabee has a jovial, easygoing manner, the kind of candidate who passes the "guy-you'd-have-a-beer-with" test the press so eagerly brandished to deliver us George W. Bush.

The other big names have yet to pour in behind Huckabee--he's not yet demonstrated the key atribute they need; the ability to win--but the small fish are starting to flop in, none more interesting and twisted than the case of Dr. Wiley S. Drake, a Southern Baptist preacher in California who used official church letterhead to endorse Huckabee's candidacy. When Americans United for Church and State protested to the IRS, Drake reacted bizarrely with threats of divine retribution.

Instead of responding to Americans United’s concern of illegal activity, Drake issued yesterday afternoon a plea to his supporters to join in “imprecatory prayers” (curses) every morning for Americans United and its staff.

“In light of the recent attack from the ememies (sic) of God I ask the children of God to go into action with Imprecatory Prayer,” Drake said, in an Aug. 14 press statement issued from the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park. “Especially against Americans United for Seperation (sic) of Church and State.”

In a section of his press release called “How To Pray,” Drake includes a long list of biblical citations that call on God to smite enemies. For example, the alleged enemies of God “shall be judged,” “condemned,” and “his days be few….” Additionally, supporters should pray that the enemy’s “children be fatherless, and his wife a widow,” and “his children be continually vagabonds, and beg; let them seek bread also out of their desolate places.”

Wiley Drake....FILLED with the love o' Jesus!

Shock therapy

So I happened to check in with the local paper today, which I never read (bad, bad non-participatory me!) and apparently there is going to be some turnover of the syndicated columnists they run. "Hm," I wondered aloud, "what new wingnuts will we be reading in place of the old wingnuts?"

Gone from our Opinion Page will be columns by Cokie and Steve Roberts, Kat Lopez, Nat Hentoff, Among Friends’ Tad Bartimus and the Village Idiot’s Jim Mullen. Replacing them are Amy Goodman, Marianne Means and Charley Reese.

Ohhhh...feeling..a little light-headed...need to sit down...is that *the* Amy Goodman? It is, in fact. Apparently King Features will be running a new syndicated column by the longtime champion of independent media. So she was likely part of a package deal, and perhaps not a direct choice of the awkwardly-abbreviated WTH, whose opinion page is mostly an echo chamber of redundant paleo-cons, "libertarians," and theocrats who love America and Jesus but won't give money to either.

I had an odd thought a few days ago of whether the paper had ever published a socialist writer. It dates to the 19th century, so the chances seem likely there was at least some agitating during the populist era. Still, I wouldn't have imagined I'd have a definitive answer this quickly.

Magneto

This blog is about to jump the shark, in which I will consign myself to the unserious, simple-minded, college-freshman masses of the leftoverse. What does that mean? It means I'm about to quote Noam Chomsky.

Not only are citizens excluded from political power, they are also kept in a state of ignorance as to the true state of public opinion.

Perhaps out of boredom I've suddenly developed a keen interest in the Political Compass, the popular internet tool that purports to test a collection of your political opinions, then plots you on a two-dimensional graph alongside various historical figures. According to the site's FAQ, the test is, by design, quite trickier than it first appears.

Some propositions are extreme, and some are more moderate. That's how we can show you whether you lean towards extremism or moderation on the Compass.

Some of the propositions are intentionally vague. Their purpose is to trigger buzzwords in the mind of the user, measuring feelings and prejudices rather than detailed opinions on policy.

At some point, I'd like to go through the test question by question, if for no other reason than to prove to myself I'm not crazy. I've taken the test a couple of times, each time going more slowly than the last, but I consistently flop out between -5 and -6 on both axes (the economic axis being the more fungible of the two for me).

But I'm not going to do that now. Instead, I wanted to take a look at the site's attempted pegging of the 2008 US presidential primary candidates.

Please keep in mind that The Political Compass is a universal tool, reflecting the full spectrum of political thought, and applicable to all democracies. US politics are generally fought within a more confined space. While in mainstream America, Clinton, for example, may be seen as left leaning, in the overall political landscape, she is a moderate conservative. Someone like Kucinich, while seen by his severest opponents as an extreme left winger, would qualify as a typical social democrat in a European context.

Here is the graph:

Obviously, I assume there's a decent amount of guesswork involved here, but this seems basically fair, to my modestly observant eye. Certainly, in the era of neoliberal orthodoxy, no one is going to be taken seriously by either party who posts a negative number on the x-axis. It is a bit more surprising that no one save Kucinich/Gravel score negative on the y-axis. (I'd like to do a more thorough analysis to see how one can get there, since it's the axis I'm far more familiar with.) Not even super-"libertarian" Ron Paul can get there, but perhaps he doesn't hate America enough *wicked grin*.

A great cause of chatter among media watchdogs is why the mainstream press spends so much time focusing on horse-race politics and quarterly fundraising reports in lieu of serious, nuanced policy considerations, and why, for example, it's considered a matter of conventional wisdom that Kucinich is too extreme to get enough popular support to win (which turns nicely into a self-fulfilling feedback loop). The answer is, at least in part, that the public is tilted much further to the lower left than the mainstream press, the Beltway establishment and Wall Street would care to admit, and it's quite important for their self-interest to make sure very few ordinary voting stiffs realize this.

Unfortunately, Political Compass doesn't compile demographic data (and it would be very skewed if they did, I suspect) but I'm quite confident in this proposition. It's rare for me to meet anyone while browsing fairly diverse places with both feet in the upper-right quadrant. I know someone with scores around the (0,0) mark (I've forgotten what to call that, too long since geometry) who presumably sees himself as a mainstream Democrat, if not a moderate, who is, in fact. left of everyone save the nutters who can't possibly get elected. The Kucinich campaign has been touting this poll which, even considering a possibly substantial selection bias, has Dennis the Menace winning in a landslide in a blind test of political opinion.

In our democracy, however, those people don't have enough money to elect their candidate, and, capital being correlated with intellect (I mean, it is, isn't it?), they just can't be trusted to make rash decisions. Napoleon is always right.

The summer of my discontent

I'm hopefully going to be writing a couple of posts about Joe Bageant's new book "Deer Hunting With Jesus," which, as far as I can tell, is a work of staggering genius that has to be read to be believed, an impassioned defense of working-class rural white folks against both the religio-capitalist charlatans who have exploited them like cattle and the urban liberal intellectuals who have dismissed them as unreachable and undesirable gutter refuse.

Bageant, who left the fold of his fundamentalist, blue-collar Virginia town to become one of those dreaded left-wingers, returns to the church where his brother is a fiery preacher who casts demons out of troubled youths.

One September day when I was in the third grade, I got off the school bus and walked up the red-dust powdered lane to my house only to find no one there. The smudgy white front door of the old frame house stood open. My footsteps on the unpainted gray front porch creaked in the fall stillness. With increasing panic, I went through every room and then ran around the outside of the house sobbing; in the grip of the most horrific loneliness and terror. I believed with all my heart that the Rapture had come, and all my family had been taken up to heaven, leaving me alone on Earth to face God's terrible wrath. As it turned out, they were at a neighbor's house not three hundred yards down the road and returned in a few minutes. But it took me hours to calm down. I dreamed about it for years afterward.

Since then I have spoken to others raised in fundamentalist families who had the same experience of coming home and thinking everyone had been "raptured up." The Rapture is very real to those people in whom its glorious and grisly promises have been instilled and cultivated from birth. Even those who escape fundamentalism insist its marks are permanent. WE may no longer believe in being raptured up, but the grim fundamentalist architecture of the soul stands in the background of our days. An apocalyptic starkness remains somewhere inside us; one that tinges all our feelings and thoughts of higher matters. Especially about death, oh beautiful and terrible death, for naked eternity is more real to us than to those born into secular humanism.

I'm a keen observer of many facets of fundamentalist Christianity, but the fascination with eschatology has always held a special place in my heart. The certainty of some Christians that the earth is passing through its final days culminating in global immolation has been with me for as long as I can recall.

This came to a nadir for me ten years ago this summer, when, for whatever reason, I became silently, obsessively neurotic over the notion that Armageddon was imminent, and that I had only two and a half years to live. As Bageant attests, if you have never known anything but fundamentalism, this becomes a very real and frightening thing. For nearly two months, I was desperate to stuff myself with any available distraction, because any time left alone to think ultimately lead to the grim despairing that the world was progressing along an inexorable countdown to destruction. All life was waste.

Worse still, I couldn't find an agreeable way to feel about this. The whole of the earth's population was going to be suddenly killed off, in what was billed by the radio preachers as the Greatest Event in History, and it all seemed so unsatisfactory and arbitrary to me. But not believing was just not an option, after all, the oily apologists had convinced me this was The Truth, and I would have to learn to accept it. And every time one of the much-"prophesied" signs of the End appeared on the news, the nausea started anew.

Of course, this could be chalked up to simple boredom and letting my mind wander. But it was, I think, the first revelation of the depravity that I was unflinchingly believed all around me, though I wasn't at the time ready to face it head on. Whichever of the multisyllabic factions of Last Days prophets one ascribes to, the basic idea behind it is really quite monstrous. I am sure it is believed by many sincere and well-meaning people who have never come to grips with its monstrosity because they assume it to be the Will of God and thus indisputable (a microcosm of their support for American foreign policy in that way, perhaps).

I don't know that it's had that kind of lasting impact on me the way it has for Bageant and others, though it was certainly part of the tunnel that led me out of fundamentalism. And, from time to time, it still occurs to me, particularly when reading slacktivist's series on "Left Behind," how I would react if the end-timers were right all along. Perhaps I can conceive of that possibility better than some because I know the feeling of being resigned to it.

You think I'm crazy?

Well, I'm not paranoid! Here are some gems from the letters section of today's King Kaufman Sports Daily:

Mostly, though, I imagine that baseball will continue to decline as fewer & fewer boys have the time, space, or inclination to play the game.

Generally, in order for something to continue declining, it has to begin declining.

And is anyone really surprised that the man breaking the most famous record in sports (though I'd argue that Ruth's 714 was the real iconic record, the one boomers like me grew up with. Until this recent hoo haw, I wasn't sure what Aaron's exact number was, 750 something) should elicit a lot of negative reaction? He's not some faceless pitcher juicing, he's a superstar who by most accounts just couldn't bear the adulation McGuire/Sosa got during their HR fest. It seems fitting to me that Bonds starting to juice was ultimately an act of supreme petulant ego.

Well, at least he admits it.

Kids today wouldn't get it. The asterisk is there for those of us who do remember when as a society we almost uniformly ridiculed those who cheated by using steroids, associating such cheating with totalitarian regimes who used athletics to "prove" the superiority of their system.

I'm keeping the asterisk next to Bonds's name, to always remember that Hank Aaron was the one who scored the most home runs during the time that America was a Democracy.

*faceplant* Remind me someday to ridicule those people who claim the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" was somehow a microcosm of democratic victory over Communism.

King Kaufmam is one of the most insightful sports commentators around, but even his modified rapture about Barry Bonds breaking the home run record is too much. Bonds' use of steroids attacks one of the most best features about baseball--the integrity and universality of records.

yeeeeeaaarrrghhh....

For all the sanctimonious nonsense going on in that thread, I did think this was a valid point:

This is really a human issue. And a workers' rights issue, in a sense. What if Kaufman worked for a publisher where there was a culture of people working 20 hours per day to produce bigger, better stories, and the management knew some people coped with this demand by using drugs but turned a blind eye? Would his stance on that situation be any less abstract and ambivalent?

511 amd the Memory Hole

Barry Bonds became baseball's all-time home run leader Tuesday night, surpassing Hank Aaron with his 756th career home run off the Washington Nationals' Mike Bascik, whose father twice pitched to Aaron after he had hit the final home run of his career.

The doing may be done, but the long odyssey of the national sports press and assorted others to pour doubt onto the record chase--which began three years ago when it became apparent Bonds was going to reach the all-time mark--is likely just reaching full swing. Bonds, as everyone knows, has long been under suspicion of using performance-enhancing drugs, and his connection to the steroid lab BALCO and disgraced trainer Greg Anderson are still under investigation which, we are told repeatedly, is a horrific calamity threatening to rip the very fabric of baseball.

I'm not buying it. These kinds of scandals come along at regular intervals, dutifully accompanied by a chorus of apocalyptic doomsayers predicting the imminent demise of baseball into obscurity. After the 1994 players strike which canceled the World Series for the only time in the past 105 years, we were regularly presented in the press with uncountable number of people who swore up and down they would never attend another baseball game. Apparently, and, if so, not coincidentally, these people have all died off. Major league baseball has set a new attendance record each of the past four years, and two Saturdays ago set a single-day record on a weekend that also included a record crowd for the Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

So I can say, with some confidence, that baseball has survived the trumped-up "steroid scandal" swimmingly. Steroids are a problem because they are a health hazard, and I am not in favor of unrestricted use as some are. But I also suspect the total effect of steroid use on statistical output in the past 15 years has been less than generally believed, particularly since pitchers have been dosing just as much, if not more, than their hitting counterparts, as we have discovered since baseball's new testing system began in 2005. (Indeed, Clay Hensley, the San Diego pitcher who allowed Bonds' record-tying home run, served a 15-game suspension in 2005 for a "steroid precursor.")

That's a minor inconvenience for the modern sports media, who need to find a way to discredit the modern athlete at any cost. I have little doubt that, even if steroids were not in play, there would be some other narrative put forth to render the new record-holder's mark untidy. Smaller ballparks, juiced balls, pitching talent diluted by expansion, etc.; all excuses which were being used in some quarters during the late '90s before the Godsend of steroids was fully realized. If Alex Rodriguez succeeds in surpassing Bonds' mark, he will likely do so as a full-time designated hitter, which will give the aged sportswriters all the ammunition they need to cast doubt on that accomplishment. Write that down. Come back to me in eight years.

All those points I mentioned in the previous graph are true, at least to some extent. There's no dispute we are living in an era of increased offense. What's absolutely scandalous is that there is nothing at all unnatural about this. Baseball, despite the bloviating of the more pompous purists, ebbs and flows from periods of pitching dominance to periods of hitting dominance. We are actually not living in the most favorable run-scoring environment of all time; that occurred from roughly 1925 to 1940, when Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a season and Hack Wilson drove in 190 runs. Those periods favoring pitchers, however, are usually held up as being somehow more aesthetically pure and innocent. That might have something to do with the last such period coming between 1960 and 1990.

Cy Young racked up 511 wins in an era when pitchers soft-tossed their way to 40 complete games in a season and had little restriction on the ways they could doctor the baseball. Young's record will never be approached before the invention of bionic pitching arms, yet tellingly no one in the sports press has suggested scrubbing pre-1920 pitching marks because of the legal spitter and "dead" balls which were rarely replaced during the game. On the occasion of Tom Glavine's 300th career win on Sunday, we were subjected to the chorus of gloom fretting that modern pitching were too brittle and flimsy to ever reach that modest milestone again.

This is the kind of tyranny we are up against. They are unsatisfied with casting aspersions on records of our generation which were aided by our current environment, they are also unwilling to recognize the occasions in the great and glorious past might have been similarly affected. They are asking us to believe the balderdash that modern players are somehow more morally weak for resorting to steroids, when the only distinguishing factor them and the players of past generation was the absence of that temptation. Anyone who believes otherwise is a doddering fool easily taken.

The modern sports scribe is like a worker gerbil slaving away in the Ministry of Truth, carefully cropping and editing history to flatter themselves and their generation. It is an unfortunate cycle that is passed down from father to son like the game of baseball itself. Luckily, it is also a perpetually losing battle, as current events are reinforcing.

My kingdom, my kingdom for a Bernie

We haven't really checked in Bernie Sanders since last November, but I caught this video of Sanders knocking around White House budget office nominee Jim Nussle knocking around the internets.

Sanders is currently filibustering Nussle's nomination, although Congress has since split for summer recess.

By the way, because I haven't yet mentioned it, note the item on the sidebar which you can read shared items I've tagged from Google Reader. Internet corporate synergy; dehumanizing, but periodically useful.

*Jolt*

Remember when I came back? Yeah, I actually did, but going out of the habit of blogging makes it hard to get back into the right mindset. I haven't disappeared, though. I think July is just a bad month for me, as the longtime reader(s) know.

In the meantime, enjoy this.