Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1123 Editor's Choice: 106
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(Almost) Thankful for Tancredo
[Read the article: A job well done by Tom Tancredo]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Without people like him nipping at the heels of otherwise pragmatic and self-preserving Republicans, Bush might have accomplished the one act of true statesmanship he hinted at during his 8 years of maladministration and misdemeanor — general amnesty and legal worker status for the millions of butt-busting illegals upon whom the American economy depends.
I can't bring myself to actually claim that the perpetuation of the perverse system we call (with no great accuracy) "immigration law enforcement" is an actual good thing, but that cloud does have a silver lining, which is that Bush's lack of gonads prevented him from accomplishing something that would have earned the GOP the close personal friendship of nearly every Hispanic in America for at least a generation to come.
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Underlying Weakness
[Read the article: We're prejudiced, now what?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Detection of a difference, no matter how innocent, is enough to result in ethnocentric strategies.
This is the key to the methodology, and its underlying weakness as a social model. Robert Burton is not entirely correct in saying that the model's agents had no preprogrammed knowledge of, or preference for, ethnocentrism — they had the one big one, that we all already know about, which is the idea of there being a difference worth noting to begin with.
Consider for a moment the range over which racial definitions have wandered in the course of history. Imagine if in the middle of the Axelrod-Hammond experiment all the red agents and all the blue agents agreed to set themselves to "purple" instead, and resume execution of the model's algorithm — a rough approximation of what has happened to the idea of "white" in America over the past century. Or, conversely, a separatist movement splits every fifth "green" off into a "blue," and the game plays on from there.
That is how race works, and that fluctuation of definition is the missing cultural factor that Burton seems to despair of finding.
So let's not get too excited about the neuroscience. I would be surprised to learn that the amygdala does what it does independent of cultural signification, or a lack thereof.
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Tool
[Read the article: Col. Boylan's implosion accelerates]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Steven Boylan's behavior is symptomatic of the cult of mediocrity under the Bush regime. When loyalty to a narrow, extreme ideology with no basis in reality becomes your overriding selection criterion for promotion, things like competence and character become secondary at best and may simply have to be disposed of entirely.
Hence Clarence Thomas, a poor jurist but probably literally the only black man in America with an advanced law degree who could be relied upon to endorse a right-wing agenda on the bench of the Supreme Court.
Hence the endless succession of complete tools, from Rice to Rumsfeld, who lack even a basic ability to do their jobs.
And hence Boylan, a prominent PR flack who can't write in complete sentences and whose diatribes show a total lack of any sense of proportion. It's not hard to imagine that he was the only guy Petreus could find who was willing to work for him.
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Article of Faith
[Read the article: Mukasey's nomination and the sudden opposition to "waterboarding"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's an article of faith among American legislators that the people whom they represent don't actually care about legislation that doesn't directly affect them. No matter how much sound and fury a given issue may generate, the conventional wisdom is that "the people" have the attention span of a mayfly, and come the next election all will be forgotten and the usual crowd will be re-elected.
All that does matter, in that calculus, are the long-term consequences to the legislators themselves. If you take stands on issues that are principled, but which alienate you from your colleagues, you won't have the tit-for-tat relationships that enable you to bring home the bacon — and that's what will cost you at the polls.
More severely, in the face of a ruthless opposing party, the Democrats in particular have become terrified of having to justify not having supporting excessive and extreme policies after the fact of some as-yet-to-occur terrorist attack. All the principled stands in the world will be forgotten, and "the people" will only remember the burning buildings on TV.
That is a very real attitude among even the most enlightened people in Congress. It's important to realize this because our legislators are good at one thing above all others, which is knowing what their constituents will, and won't, remember come election year. If they say that citizen outrage is as transient as a whore's affection, I say they must know what they're talking about, because it's their job to know and they still have their jobs.
So for six long years these people have been managing the Bush era more or less as usual, with no great ill effect. Only now near the end are they realizing that the rules are starting to change. Dodd's translation of principle into campaign cash has caught their attention, at the same time that the casualties of MoveOn's ongoing sniping campaign have started to add up. These things are happening through channels other than the traditional Beltway "issue-based" lobbying groups, and that has caught Congress off-guard. Now that their faith has been shaken, they're starting to figure out that this time is different. And they're coming around.
So let's not be too gloomy about eleventh-hour opposition to Mukasey by our representatives. When it's this late, that's the only kind there can be. And let's also show some humility and remember that it's our own long history of apathy that we're working against here, not just theirs.