Frogs for Snakes

This morning I bumped into this article [will open a new tab/window] in the Washington Post reporting on political consultant Drew Westen’s attempts to help Democrats use language morely likely to appeal to voters’ emotions, and so more likely to persuade them to vote accordingly. Also this book review, from New Scientist, of Flipnosis: The art of split-second persuasion, revealingly titled “How to get others to do what we want”.

Yesterday I read “Crisis of Legitimacy” on Talking Points Memo, which ascribes citizen anger at the federal government to a sense, clearly exemplified by the Tea-Partiers but widespread, that we are wallets-and-votes only, existing only to enable the will of the pow that be, without a voice of our own–at least not one being listened to.

For several years I’ve been tracking and trying to articulate my feeling, arounsed as much in local politics as in national, that the common interest of the citizens is no longer a category of thought in politics, that politicians cannot conceive of a political arena not constituted by competing interests. So their “difficulties”, the scorn with which we view them, stem from their view of life as a content of competing purposes rather than a collaborative effort of common purpose, which is more like how the rest of us see the world.

As Ruskin said: “Beware the fury of a patient man.”

According to So Damn Much Money, a chronical of the rise of lobbying in D.C. and the parallel increase in the power of money, the politician’s motto is (or ought to be) “When it rains, dance.”  Meaning, whenever something good happens claim credit.

Our politicians are doing that now related to movement on the previously stalled bill to overhaul financial regulation.  Acording to a N.Y. Times article:

“Republicans said that they had forced Democrats back to the bargaining table to negotiate a bipartisan accord, while Democrats said that Republicans were hastily abandoning their opposition in fear of a public outcry.”

The parties’ posings are ex-post-facto rain dances, I suspect. What’s really happening is that lawmakers are feeling the public’s outrage at the looting of the economy by the investment houses and the cowardice keeping our government from doing anything about it. And about time.

From a Washington Post article on the financial regulation bill: “Democrats have been unwilling to alter the legislation without a guarantee that it would bring Republican votes.”

Republicans this session have engaged in “bipartisan” deliberations (which aren’t that at all but are rather negotiations over what interests will be privileged) thereby revising legislation which will pass with or without their support more to their liking, then they don’t vote for it.

There’s no such thing as one-way bipartisanship–it’s plain crazy to propose “You do what I want in the interests of bipartisanship”–so from a practical political standpoint Democrat lawmakers should just ignore their Republican counterparts as irrelevant and take the inevitable attacks on their lack of bipartisanship.

They’re going to get attacked for something no matter what they do, that’s the current M.O. of the Republican Party, and with congress’ approval ratings hovering a little south of 25% it’s hard to imagine how those attacks would do any additional damage.

According to a post on the tech blog Slashdot:

“Classical music is being used increasingly in Great Britain as a tool for social control and a deterrent to bad behavior. One school district subjects badly behaving children to hours of Mozart in special detention. Unsurprisingly, some of these youth now find classical music unbearable. Recorded classical music is blared through speakers at bus stops, outside stores, train stations and elsewhere to drive away loitering youth. Apparently it works. Detentions are down, graffiti is reduced, and naughty youth flee because they find classical music repugnant.”

I don’t need any convincing– the local Sprouts market has been playing loud ’60s rock and roll to get me to shop at Sunflower since they opened. Face it–Freddy and the Dreamers, bad then (IMO), haven’t aged all that well.

According to the BBC, the French Immigration Minister yesterday rejected a man’s citizenship application because he forced his French wife to wear a head-to-toe Islamic veil, citing naturalization law that requires anyone seeking citizenship to “demonstrate a desire for integration.”

France officially does not recognize race or ethnicity, holding that citizens are simply and completely French. The argument against the veil, presumably, is that requiring the veil deprives a woman of rights and so violates the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, on which the republic is founded.

Although their refusal to recognize ethnicity seems to have caused them some problems, notably in their official inability to treat a poorly assimilated group differently from a well assimilated one and so tend to their specific integration needs, the general attitude is laudable: We are French, not hyphenated-French.

We think, or we thought, that the U.S.A. had been better at integrating our immigrant population into mainstream culture than most of Europe, but recent acts of home-grown terrorists should cause us to reconsider how good we are at it.

And we should also wonder if the conflict between the values of a liberal, secular culture and fundamentalist, religious one aren’t just intractable.