Rhinocrisy

So, following the downgrade and the resulting stock-market plunge, it’s worthwhile to shine a little light on S&P, to eradicate my own ignorance, anyway. If you wish to peer over my shoulder, I’m noting down my observations here. The company is a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill (yes, the guys who made your Geometry textbook), led by one Deven Sharma, a Bihari of relatively modest background (he has a degree in business management from OSU). Mr. Sharma last year penned an editorial in the WSJ complaining that they may be held to account (that is, face liability) for their rating standards, and calling for the repeal of ratings requirements on the debt held by certain investors. That is, the correct response to the colossal failure of ratings agencies to correctly identify CDOs, etc., as radioactive bombs, should be to remove ratings requirements from debt - that is, debt could simply be unrated, and a rating is merely a suggestive imprimatur bearing no significant or determining weight.

It’s quite clear why S&P’s president feels this way; he wants to punt. In the boom time he was happy to rubber-stamp junk and collect his commissions on it; now that the obvious deficiency of his agency (viz., their complete lack of any accountability for their ratings) has come to light, and some people in Congress are proposing an accountability mechanism, suddenly, S&P ratings should only be considered “just one of many tools”.

He also says:

[O]ur criteria for rating a security [following post-recession corrections] as AAA (our highest designation) include consideration of what could happen to a security if the country faces an economic scenario on par with the Great Depression.

Bear in mind that this was written well over a year ago. Now, it’s arguable that S&P was spot-on for rating all of that crappy debt AAA, since as it turned out, it was backed by the U.S. government. The government took the hit on behalf of all of that shitty debt, and now that its debt situation looks precarious, S&P wants to downgrade THEIR rating. This is high irony - if they had just done their fucking job correctly in the first place, instead of being greedy banksters, there would have been no need for a downgrade of U.S. government debt. S&P screws the pooch twice - first by not doing the job a ratings agency should (actually rating debt correctly), and then pillories the government (and the entire world) for cleaning up after their mess. Die in a fire, S&P.

None of which is to say, of course, that we don’t deserve a downgrade. We’re like a Bantustan right now, except without the political cohesion.

Lots of exciting stuff going on in the world these days, momentous, world-shaking events. And we all know what that means: now’s the time for dictators to swiftly crush their rebellious populace, while everyone is distracted by tsunami footage.

So, keep an eye on US ally Bahrain, where evil king Hamad has just imported troops from surrounding dictatorships (UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) to shoot and kill the angry plebes. Sounds reasonable, right? Fortunately our government is right on top of things: they are carefully evacuating all non-essential personnel from the US military base in Bahrain, and Secretary of State Hillary “Why Isn’t This Evil Shrike Dead Already O Lord”^* Clinton took the vital step of urging “all sides” to remain calm - gun-wielding foreign soldiers AND unarmed civilian protesters. In fact, it seems like all of our government officials, all the way up to the big Cheese himself, are “deeply concerned”.

Some of you might be wondering: “Wait, what was that about a US military base in Bahrain?” Well, what about it? That doesn’t really affect our deep, deep concern. After all, why would that be relevant?

“The welfare of our personnel and their families is of the utmost importance. This Authorized Departure is being ordered to allow family members who have concerns about their safety to depart without incurring an undue burden. We remain committed to our long-standing partnership with Bahrain.”

^* I am told the story of how she acquired this nickname at Wellesley is hilarious and instructive.

So, Obama is in India, as the NY Times points out, to “lift longstanding restrictions on exports of closely held technologies”. It shouldn’t take a huge effort to read through the unfortunate lede-burying going on. Couple that with the recent well-publicized sale of arms to Saudi Arabia^* and draw the straight line.

The “high tech” industry is one of the few remaining robust American manufacturing sectors, and one of the only ones with a product that retails in the hundreds of millions of dollars. For a country starving to death thanks to oil imports (which constitute somewhere around 50% of the US trade imbalance) and non-existent manufacturing, a quick-fix tour peddling arms to unstable, nuclear-armed, war-prone regions of the world is clearly too good an opportunity to pass up.

The Times also points out that this is Obama doing his necessary kowtowing to prove to American business (i.e., the war industry) that, humbled by his defeat, he is fully prepared to be their lackey:

Still, one of Mr. Obama’s main audiences in many ways seemed to be America’s chief executives, many of whom spent the recent campaign accusing the White House of being antibusiness and pouring money into the coffers of Republican candidates and groups that aimed to defeat the Democrats.

…“It’s unprecedented,” [Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric] said in an interview, praising Mr. Obama for talking up trade, a politically risky move for a Democrat. “I don’t remember President Bush ever having a mission like this. I think it’s quite rare and I hope the first of many.”

Luckily the vicious skull-fucking and skin-melting will be reserved for our children's generation, along with the catastrophic drought and infrastructure collapse. God rest ye merry, gentlemen. You're doing the Lord's work.

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^* Thanks to Saheli for pointing out the excellent “War is Business”.

I dropped a friend of mine off at Esalen in Big Sur last weekend; when I stepped out of the car I was greeted by the sound of African drums pounding out a tribalesque rhythm. At once my lip began to curl, and my skin crawled like a seething carpet of bees. Hippies.

I only caught a glimpse of one, maybe in his sixties, paunchy, shifting and repositioning his limbs in some kind of ritualistic imitation of dance. Fortunately I did not have to speak to any one of them, and was thus spared the effort of controlling my tongue, preventing it from twisting and spilling forth a litany of contempt.

I’m not precisely sure what my problem is, or why I should feel such an acute dislike for hippies. I can certainly name two qualities which I associate with them, and which might speed my distaste: cultural appropriation and inauthenticity.

An anecdote I have repeated to illustrate this point: a coffee shop I used to sit in for long hours was also frequented by a young gentleman of the hip persuasion. He had all the essential trappings of his kind: unkempt facial hair, dreadlocks, rough, organic cotton clothing. I overheard him conversing with a young woman, chatting her up, as smooth as a polished buckeye. He roved over a number of eco-tastic and spiritual subjects, finally landing on his devotion to Amma, Amritanandamayi Devi, speaking seriously of her environmentalist ethics. “You know, Amma says you should plant at least one tree every year,” he propounded.

“Do you do it?” his subject returned.

He hid his confusion behind a laugh. “No, I don’t do it,” he admitted. Which was not at all unexpected. He fairly stank of his inauthenticity, which is why he tried so hard to cover it up with the correct physical forms.

I’m convinced that at bottom what motivates most hippies to don the hemp pajamas is white post-colonial guilt. It’s hard to be a white kid in the modern day and age, constantly reminded that your privilege is built on centuries of oppression of people of color. The institutions of your culture have been dissected and identified as racist and patriarchal, run through with all sorts of demonic tendencies and compromised by their ceaseless perpetuation of horrific levels of violence. And on top of all that, you’re not cool, either. What’s a poor white kid to do?

Rather than live with the guilt, I think many try to give up their privilege by running as far from their roots as they are able. They study Third World and First Nations cultures, replace their own discredited institutions with bits and pieces taken from other world-views. They affect appearances of poverty and marginalization.

Why does this irk me so much? First, because I don’t think any of them manage to eradicate their privilege to the extent that they believe they do. Second, even if they did achieve this difficult goal, I’m not sure that their success would be laudable. I’d much rather someone retain their privilege and employ their position to setting the world to right, rather than focus on the more self-indulgent project of removing the source of their guilt.

This is a poor position to take, since I’m certainly not in a position to pass judgment on anyone else, and, furthermore, most of these people are my fellow travelers, and, at the very least, possess the basic desire for promoting social justice. Alas, bigotry grows from stereotyping. Encounter enough of a type and you may reify it enough to form attachments and dislikes.

Thank god we don’t live in an evil torture state! Remember, it’s okay for us to hold people indefinitely without rights if it’s not on American soil. We can do that without being an evil torture state. Hooray!

Some of you may have missed the fact that we started the Tribunal farce process in Guantanamo Bay, to finally give those terrorist scum the cursory dog-and-pony show they deserve. There was a lot of fanfare a few weeks back when Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed to planning every single terrorist attack of the past ten years. They even released his testimony. Note how the names of the judges and all the court officers have been redacted from the record, just like in a real fair, impartial public trial!

Anyway, my point. A few months back I was throwing up in my mouth because someone made me remember that Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s kids were at one point in American custody, fate now unknown. Well, since then, we’ve heard a little bit more on the subject, in this rather disturbing letter from the father of one Majid Khan, formerly a legal resident of the United States, one-time guest at a CIA “black site”, and now cooling his heels at Guantanamo Bay. Majid’s father, who had no idea whether his son was alive or dead for the past few years, is submitting testimony to the Tribunal, not being allowed to attend himself. Just like in a real public trial! Ha ha!

[left eye twitches unsteadily]

Included therein is this nice little bit about those kids:

Also according to Mohammed [Majid's brother, not KSM - ed], he and Majid were detained in the same place where two of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s young children, ages about 6 and 8, were held. The Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area upstairs, and were denied food and water by other guards. They were also mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.

Good to know they’re in such warm and tender hands.

Please disseminate this letter widely, so everyone can know what a wonderful, freedom-loving government we have.

I’ve spent the morning getting mad about Al Gore.

It seems that soon after Al received his Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research released a report about his profligate consumption:

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

Now, this is an absurd amount of power. Reportedly Al Gore’s house is 10,000 square feet (data not shown), which is maybe twice or three times the size of my house, depending on how you reckon things. I live in a northern clime, so presumably our consumption in this eight-person household should be much greater than in Tennessee. So I’m not clear what, exactly, Gore might be doing to burn so much power, and that makes me suspect there’s a little more to this story. But, be that as it may…

This story was widely reported with great glee across the blogospore, with many pointing out that since Mr. Gore was such an unmitigated tool, he was in no position to tell them what to do.

[Pause for dramatic sigh.]

This blog is called “Rhinocrisy”, for reasons of fancy more than anything else. But it behooves us to reflect for a moment on our sister-word, hypocrisy. The moment will be brief, and we will use it to say only this: hypocrisy is not important.

We’ve had precious little reflection on hypocrisy, here. I have always firmly believed that one bears responsibility for one’s own behavior. I attribute this to my Hindu upbringing, which inculcated in me the idea of “dharma”, which Spike Lee translated quite well: do the right thing. That’s all. So it doesn’t matter whether someone else says one thing and does another, or whether you yourself can’t reconcile your speech and actions. The balance of your sins is determined simply by whether you did the right thing, plain and simple. Whether or not Al Gore is a sinner has no bearing on your own sin, or on your right to sin. The Dude said it clearly two thousand years ago:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)

So, when we speak of “rhinocrisy”, we mean to say: failure to do the right thing.

I read Chris Hitchen’s 9/11 editorial in the WSJ last night. I realize Hitchens jumped the shark quite a while back, and one really should give very short shrift to everything on the Journal’s editorial page, but I’m continually astounded that people can openly espouse doctrines that should, at least ostensibly, be anathema these days. Here’s his conclusion:

The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. “We”–and our allies–simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, “turn,” isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future.

This is what happens when you stay up late nights watching “Commando” and “Rambo, First Blood: Part Two” on FX.

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

This might be the perfect reference next time some idiot asks, “Why do they hate us?”

(Via)