I’ve been thinking about how to move YrDoingAGreatJob away from the whole blog as just re-posted smorgasbord of cool stuff you think your (invariably tiny) group of readers will dig; but dadgummit, along comes this monumentally astute knowledge bomb from Matt Bai over at the New York Times Magazine.

In light of yesterday’s “shocking” defeat of Democrat Martha Coakey by Republican Scott Brown for Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat, Bai discusses the increasingly antiquated notion of partisan political alignment. Now, if that term sounds unfamiliar, you’re probably young and it might as well remain unfamiliar. But basically, it’s the idea that because one year ago voters ushered in the Liberal Jesus Barack Obama and technical Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, the nation’s voters would stop watching crappy cable news and listening to even crappier talk radio and go back to work and forget about guns and butter and trust the Democratic Party they just elected and keep voting them back into power each time because, well, Washington and politics and especially, reform, move at about the pace of a garden slug.

Of course, all that is about as relevant now as a rotary phone. Here’s Matt (worth quoting at length):

On a deeper level, the fading dream of realignment reflects our attitudes about permanence in a society that judges its digital TVs by their “refresh rates” — that is, the number of times per second that the pixels on the screen rearrange themselves to create a more eye-popping picture than the one that just existed. In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night…

It isn’t only majority parties that will have to recalibrate their ideas of longevity in this new environment. It’s the individual politicians, too. Only in Washington, where changing social attitudes from the rest of the country generally arrive with all the speed of a Pilgrim vessel, is protracted incumbency still considered some kind of ace-in-the-hole selling point. Americans who rotate through a series of jobs or even careers every decade are far less likely to want to pull the lever for the same graying senator — or the same graying party — for the duration of their natural lives, which means the politician-as-local-institution is probably headed for the history books. It doesn’t seem likely that Scott Brown, the newest Massachusetts senator, or any of the energetic and unwrinkled senators who have recently arrived in Washington will ever be memorialized the way Ted Kennedy was, or have the chance to treat the Senate as a kind of surrogate nursing home, in the manner of a Strom Thurmond or a Robert Byrd.

(via The Chronicle Review)

and:

Not only did [Hannah] Arendt have an affair with [Heidegger] when she was an 18-year-old student about half his age, before Hitler took over, but despite his public exaltation of the Fuhrer, despite his firing Jews once he became rector of Freiburg University. We now know that she later resumed some kind of warm relationship with the brownshirt philosopher (yes, it turns out he often wore one to his lectures). Arendt helped usher Heidegger back into the intellectual version of polite society, indeed assisted in preventing his ostracism as a Hitlerite, at least by those who considered his notoriously opaque use of philosophical language to offer something of value beneath it—apart from further opacity….

(via Slate)

From the New York Times:

Amid a global frenzy fed by multibillion-dollar hedge funds, wealthy speculators and governments [are] all rushing to stock up on the precious yellow metal, the price of gold briefly surpassed $1,100 an ounce on Friday, a record high…. In the United States, ads promising high prices for gold are regular fodder for late-night television spots, while buyers are setting up tables at shopping malls or hosting gold-buying gatherings at private homes—like recession-era Tupperware parties…. “Everyone and their grandmother has a sign out saying, ‘We buy gold,’ ” said Ron Lieberman, the owner of Palisade Jewelers in Englewood, N.J. He estimates that 10 times as many people come into his store to sell gold now as when the metal was selling for $300 an ounce at the beginning of the decade…. “In Europe, people want physical gold to store themselves, with no documents,” said Bernhard Schnellmann, director for precious-metal services at Argor-Heraeus. Often, the company doesn’t know the ultimate destination of the bars it makes, only the identity of the bank in Zurich or London that is handling the order.

Which of course brings to mind another much-related century-trotting fad: Pirates!

“In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.” ~ John Dos Passos

(via Strangemaps)

What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention? Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam…. Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how the British, Russians, or others have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing now with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.

(from Commonweal, via Harper’s Magazine)

The future will inevitably—and unfortunately—make many an addendum upon this post, but I wanted to round up a few related items for those of you who may have skimped a little on yr newspaper reading lately.

I want to talk about South Carolina—the state in which I spent my formative years, and one that I have a very high regard for and miss very much. Too frequently overshadowed by its less reactionary and more carpetbaggin’ northern neighbor, South Carolina holds a distinct place in my heart for its heart & belly-warming cuisine, uniquely serene natural landscapes, and genuine qualities of its inhabitants. I understand it is a particularly Southern—and with regard to race, particularly problematic—tendency to be paternalistic, but along with some of the sharpest minds, South Carolina boasts some of the most base. I’d actually be remiss if I didn’t confess that I didn’t cherish them all. In other words, they may be idiots, but they’re our idiots.

Now, I grew up in Charleston, often regarded as a sort of New Orleans of the southeastern seaboard—romantic, cosmopolitan, home to dandies and quaintrelles of loose morals, and, with regard to its neighbors, racially relatively easy-going—admittedly, a city not terribly representative of the state in which it resides. (Many folks “upstate” speak of the port as one they simply tolerate, and hope their sons and daughters don’t desire to go to college there.) Still, Charleston is undoubtedly Southern, where one can partake of all that implies (food, architecture, weather), while remaining a city that breathes a more worldly air which provides it with a concrete otherness from the rest of the state and its people.

And it is this dichotomy between Charleston and the rest of South Carolina which, more or less, brings us to the brunt of this lil’ essay: namely, the agonizing fact that the vast majority of South Carolinians, as sweet as they often are, continue to persist in electing the most willfully ignorant, two-faced, coarse, racist, and corrupt Politicians-With-a-Capital-P to their state and national governments. And if that weren’t bad enough, the Daily Show is there to remind us that we bang horses.

The facts speak for themselves, and the stories are all too true. So, as a Charlestonian, I increasingly ask myself Why? Or rather, how? And the answer, more often then not—and not terribly secret—boils down to ignorance. It is a trait that is unfortunately self-perpetuating in a state consistently ranked near the bottom of national public education rankings, and near the top in unemployment. Southern politicians (nearly always Republican) self-servingly harness the uncertainty that such ignorance and poverty breeds, and channel it directly into fear—of bogeymen. Big government. Illegal immigration. Socialism. Fugitive slaves. And no matter what the actual political/economic priorities of the Republican party are (chiefly, promoting the interests of the wealthy), they are able to manipulate poor, naive Southerners into voting them into office. Every single time.

Will this change? Unfortunately, I doubt it. The recent electoral inroads made by Barack Obama in Virginia and North Carolina have more to do with the migration of liberal-leaning Northerners to Southern cities, not a paradigm shift in the thinking of Republican Southerners. And as a previous post attempted to explain, the Internet will only facilitate the entrenchment of those beliefs, rather that expose them to a world without bogeymen.

But still I’ll go on loving South Carolina and Southerners in general. I could love the region and despise its people (an opinion I’ve heard bandied around quite a bit outside the South), but as far as I’m concerned, you can’t separate one from the other. They are part of each other’s landscape—Columbia’s mouthwatering barbeque as no distinct from the unreformed yokel who makes it. Sometimes this dichotomy is funny; other times, only laughingly sad. There is an obvious existential tension to this quality of Southerness, but like the day-to-day tensions of city living, it is an anxiety which ultimately makes you understand and appreciate all the more where you grew up.

Life is about finding the right balance, no? Efficiency versus beauty. Freedom versus security. Vice versus virtue. Most Americans shoot straight for the middle, which aside from some boring artistic preferences and questionable policy positions, seems to work fairly well. We are a generally private people (an inheritance from the English), sometimes stupidly rational (thank our German forbearers), and forever proud and usually suspect of authority (all rise: Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sequoyah, etc.)

As of late, however, you may have noticed a few of your fellow citizens in danger of falling, nay, regressing into more reactionary, and decidedly far (…)-wing sectors of thought. Back in the nineteenth century, they used to call this phenomenon “know-nothingism,” and while it proved to be a successful political tactic, the trick was short-lived, and is today generally shorthand for being willfully ignorant—a short leap from just being a crazy old coot.

This has manifested itself most recently, and most virulently, in the town hall meetings cum shouting matches called up by your local senator (or President) explaining how a public option of health care might help you and your family receive quality medical care. Those more historically inclined might have confused the fiasco for a thirteenth-century waltz of Guelphs and Ghibellines (minus any tangential literary bequests).

Another inferno that has been a-ragin’ is that between the defenders of the agri-biz food industry and the many-monikered green/sustainable/organic/local movement (a subtlety hydra-headed group of interests, but more or less speaking to the same thing, and everyone knows who they are) that ironically finds most of its adherents in the places furthest from the farm and food chain.

More below the radar, but particularly interesting, is the small, but fervent group of parents who choose not to vaccinate their children for fear of unintended, and so far unfounded, side-effects like life-long allergies and autism. That the other side of this argument is nearly a half century of successful (some would say miracle-working) public health policy is no matter.

Is the private and old-fashioned rational mind fast becoming a thing of the past? Or has the Internet and social media allowed for like-minded individuals to cohere, trade ideas, and organize movements much more successfully than ever before? The latter more than the former, surely; but it’s the particular virulence of social media that is actually making the decline of the rational mind a certainty, rather than just upstaging it as a new value in American politics.

Naturally, I have heard that women should remain scarce on Men’s Day, but my suspicions lead me to believe otherwise. The ladies in Germany like to booze it as much as the men, and more often than not, I’ve heard, are as liable to wind up sans shirt. There is, of course, an official Ladies’ Day or Mother’s Day or whatever, but I don’t think it gets the same sort of play around town. Who knows, though? From what I can gather so far, Germans love to drink beer everyday, at all times of the day, all the time. And being a logical people, if there’s a Ladies’ Day, the idea goes to create a Man’s Day; or vice versa. So here’s to it:

Prost zu Männertag!

Marci Washington is a painter from here in the Bay Area (Oakland/SF), and I recently wrote a piece for the nice folks at Shotgun Review about her solo show “Dark Mirror.”  (read)