America outsources even its mediocrity

When I was in Rome, and felt nation-sick, I inaugurated America Day (to be held each June 28 hence) by going to the store and buying Pringles, Snickers, Coke, and a Budweiser. It was glorious, and I felt proud. And I'm glad I did it then, because Anheuser-Busch, that shining emblem of Americana, is being sold to the Belgians. I'm sad. Maybe even outraged. Next year I'll have to use Miller, or something. Is nothing sacred? Will the French buy back the Statue of Liberty? Will Ford move to Mexico? Will Arnold Schwarzenegger get to be President? These are sad times, my fellow Americans.
I'm not really opposed to these kinds of sales. Free markets often to work out in everybody's favor. But Budweiser really is an American icon, and whether or not you approve of the drinking culture of our great nation, you really have to be sad to see it go. Obviously they'll still serve it. Obviously it will still taste gloriously bland. But it won't be the same.

Two politicians walk into a bar

Apparently there's a stir about next week's New Yorker cover. It depicts Barack and Michelle Obama standing in the Oval Office in full terrorist regalia under a portrait of Osama bin Laden as a flag burns in the fireplace. Both the Obama and the McCain campaign have called it "tasteless and offensive," but I for one think it's time that everybody suck it up for satire.

I'm working backwards here, because my first instict is to defend everything the New Yorker does, and then figure out why it's okay. The cartoonist, Barry Blitt, defends his work by claiming that, "It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is." Sure, but he needn't be so diplomatic. One of my favorite things about this "new kind of politics" was that there weren't supposed to be any pulled punches. I want to see a cartoon of McCain cutting brush in a cowboy hat with Laura Bush (he's Bush III). I want to see Obama stubbing a cigarette out on the face of a helpless white man as he sips a fine red wine (he's an elitist who hates white people).

Come on, media, help us think more about the men who will run our country! Don't just give me soundbites, give me biting commentary. Don't give me scandals, scandalize me. Political discourse has the reputation of turning off millions of Americans who feel like it's such a dirty game that they can't get involved. But Americans love dirty games, let them participate! People know more Bush jokes than they know Bush policies. It's time to use that to everybody's advantage.
Q: How many Democrats does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Only three, but they need healthcare and a living wage.
Q: How many Republicans does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Let the market decide!
Those are just off the top of my head, but I feel confident that the more jokes we hear(constructive jokes, mind you, not Dennis Miller shit), the more invested we'll be. And so I applaud the New Yorker for spearheading what will hopefully be a trend of amusing understanding.

The Yale Corporation is a collective douchebag.

About two weeks ago, from the YDN:

In February, when he first endorsed plans for expansion, Levin suggested the new colleges would allow for the Yale College enrollment to increase by about 650 to 700 students, or 12 or 13 percent of the existing student body. But Levin said the Corporation has decided to make the colleges slightly larger, allowing for an increase of about 800 students, or roughly 15 percent of the existing student body.

There goes the first promise they made: eliminating annex housing. Now they're just planning to "significantly reduce" it, which entirely defeats the purpose.
Mostly I'm pissed off about this because aside from going forward with an expansion we don't need that had very little student support, they're going back on their word about all the things that got them any support in the first place. Next they'll be saying that the enormous student center they promised with plenty of places for groups to meet will become office space, and that they won't be hiring that many new faculty after all.
Why do we need to expand anyway? The answer most commonly given is that Yale feels bad about rejecting so many qualified applicants. Aside from the fact that I don't give a shit, that's a pretty shallow answer. Admitting another 200 kids a year won't take us back to 1980 admissions levels, it will take us back to 2004 admissions levels. Maybe. And why do we care? Yale has prided itself for centuries for having an intimate student body with a compact campus that has the feel of a liberal arts college but the resources of a university. Now they're expanding our numbers, sprawling our campus, and straining our resources. Those motherfuckers. Somebody please try to justify this move to me. Please.

Salvation subject to availability

By popular demand, I'll start with the "near-conversion" story. It may not be quite as juicy as some of you were hoping, but it was still an experience. About three and a half weeks into my five week stay in Rome, two friends and I decided to check out St. Peter's basilica in the afternoon. We had been reading Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, and I had been particularly struck by this passage:

When we reached the door, and stood fairly within the church, it was impossible to comprehend that it was a very large building. I had to cipher a comprehension of it. I had to ransack my memory for some more similes. St. Peter's is bulky. Its height and size would represent two of the Washington capitol set one on top of the other--if the capitol were wider; or two blocks or two blocks and a half of ordinary buildings set one on top of the other. St. Peter's was that large, but it could and would not look so. The trouble was that every thing in it and about it was on such a scale of uniform vastness that there were no contrasts to judge by--none but the people, and I had not noticed them. They were insects. The statues of children holding vases of holy water were immense, according to the tables of figures, but so was every thing else around them. The mosaic pictures in the dome were huge, and were made of thousands and thousands of cubes of glass as large as the end of my little finger, but those pictures looked smooth, and gaudy of color, and in good proportion to the dome. Evidently they would not answer to measure by. Away down toward the far end of the church (I thought it was really clear at the far end, but discovered afterward that it was in the centre, under the dome,) stood the thing they call the baldacchino--a great bronze pyramidal frame-work like that which upholds a mosquito bar. It only looked like a considerably magnified bedstead--nothing more. Yet I knew it was a good deal more than half as high as Niagara Falls. It was overshadowed by a dome so mighty that its own height was snubbed. The four great square piers or pillars that stand equidistant from each other in the church, and support the roof, I could not work up to their real dimensions by any method of comparison. I knew that the faces of each were about the width of a very large dwelling-house front, (fifty or sixty feet,) and that they were twice as high as an ordinary three-story dwelling, but still they looked small. I tried all the different ways I could think of to compel myself to understand how large St. Peter's was, but with small success. The mosaic portrait of an Apostle who was writing with a pen six feet long seemed only an ordinary Apostle.

But the people attracted my attention after a while. To stand in the door of St. Peter's and look at men down toward its further extremity, two blocks away, has a diminishing effect on them; surrounded by the prodigious pictures and statues, and lost in the vast spaces, they look very much smaller than they would if they stood two blocks away in the open air. I "averaged" a man as he passed me and watched him as he drifted far down by the baldacchino and beyond--watched him dwindle to an insignificant school-boy, and then, in the midst of the silent throng of human pigmies gliding about him, I lost him. The church had lately been decorated, on the occasion of a great ceremony in honor of St. Peter, and men were engaged, now, in removing the flowers and gilt paper from the walls and pillars. As no ladders could reach the great heights, the men swung themselves down from balustrades and the capitals of pilasters by ropes, to do this work. The upper gallery which encircles the inner sweep of the dome is two hundred and forty feet above the floor of the church--very few steeples in America could reach up to it. Visitors always go up there to look down into the church because one gets the best idea of some of the heights and distances from that point. While we stood on the floor one of the workmen swung loose from that gallery at the end of a long rope. I had not supposed, before, that a man could look so much like a spider. He was insignificant in size, and his rope seemed only a thread. Seeing that he took up so little space, I could believe the story, then, that ten thousand troops went to St. Peter's, once, to hear mass, and their commanding officer came afterward, and not finding them, supposed they had not yet arrived. But they were in the church, nevertheless--they were in one of the
transepts. Nearly fifty thousand persons assembled in St. Peter's to hear the publishing of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It is estimated that the floor of the church affords standing room for--for a large number of people; I have forgotten the exact figures. But it is no matter--it is near enough.

Twain does not exaggerate. The place is immense, and, simultaneously, perfectly proportioned. It is easy to imagine that St. Peter's is God's house, and that God's house is decorated with hundreds of square feet of beautifully detailed mosaics, colossal statues of saints, and one of the most epic domes ever built. Epic, that is the right word to describe it. To walk through it was an odyssey, to turn a corner was to discover another church's worth of treasures, to look up is dizzying but hypnotizing. I spent four hours in this church. No particular ceremony was going on, no procession or mass. But it was not for a moment boring or tiring. After two hours or so of wandering through the arcades and apse and nave, we walked through the papal crypt, past the bodies of the politicians who really shaped the middle ages and the renaissance, past full-grown men crying like babies at the tomb of John-Paul II, and finally past the tomb of St. Peter himself. Here, I paused, and gave a short bow, a gesture I had purposely avoided at the altars of all other churches. Here was the rock, the foundation of Christianity and the Western world, the Godfather of civilization. A bow was appropriate.Next, we went up to the cupola, at the top of the dome of St. Peter's. The climb was grueling, but the view was monumental. The basilica, I believe by regulation, is the tallest building in Rome, by a very significant margin. The Pantheon which, when up close, looks like a giant structure, is barely visible among the streets and other monuments. Imagine marveling at the height of Harkness tower and then turning around to see the Empire State building. I believe the feeling is analogous. In any case, I was stunned by the whole ordeal. Tombs, views, and my goodness, the baldachino. What a structure that thing is. As I was walking out the church, and looked back at the gigantic nave with the gigantic altar and the rays of light coming through the gigantic windows, yes, I felt an impulse to belong. I've always said that if I were to join any religion, it would be Caltholicism or Congregationalism. Congregationalism for the apolstalic lovey-ness, and Catholicism for the grandeur. Several of us decided that we wanted to go to mass on Sunday: a 10:30 mass, in Latin, with full homily. It would have been... epic. Unfortunately, you have to get tickets in advance for a mass at St. Peter's, and we didn't come soon enough. Thus, I remained mass-less, and all possibilities of conversion were crushed beneath church bureaucracy. Ain't that always the way?

Just you wait...

Hey, folks. Sorry I've been gone so long. I'll explain in a bit, but the good news (if you like me) is that I'll be back in a mere matter of days!
Coming up, on Alcibiades at Yale:
-The difference between Rome (where I am now) and America
-New developments in the 2008 election
-Maybe a bit on Roman Triumphs (what I'm studying)
-My near-conversion to Catholicism thwarted only by bureaucracy
-And I'll beat up on that William Deresiewicz article that everybody's sending around.

See you soon!

Your chains will set you free

Helen and David were talking last night about constraints, and how oppression can be good. The basic thesis, as I interpreted it (disclaimer: I was not the most compos of mentis), was that we need some benevolent oppression to tell us who we are and where we fit in society. Femininity, for example, is mildly oppressive, but it gives women a role and allows them to more expediently explore the meaning of their lives.
Okay. That seems to work. But if we need constraints to help us understand identity, what kind of identity do we have? Is there anything to us, naturally, or do we merely reflect the cultural circumstances from which we come? Sure, my social context tells me who I am, but am I actually discovering who I am or am I learning who I'm supposed to be?
I'm fine with reading history and looking at art and considering the origins of our culture. But if our culture is really worth continuing (and I think it probably is), why is coercion necessary, never mind good?

I'm pretty into choice. This is because I love freedom. But even more than general freedom I love it when people make their own identities. This doesn't mean iconoclasticism for iconoclasticism's sake. People who shout "down with the man!" annoy me as much as they do anyone else. I've chosen a fairly traditional persona in my society, for now. But I'm not sold at all that it's oppression itself that's important, rather than just wanting to protect things that we happen to like.

Burke gets abused (as usual).

Matthew Yglesias linked to an article in the Atlantic about how John McCain is a Burkean conservative. Personally, I think it's trying too hard.
Perhaps, just perhaps, he isn't a neocon. But it isn't metered change he's doing, it's pandering. The reason he's for the tax cuts now is because it will get him votes. Same reason why he voted against the anti-torture bill. It isn't that he philosophically opposes changes and restrictive reforms, he's just more spineless than we give him credit for.
Yes, the James Dobsons and Rudy Giulianis of the American right aren't real conservatives. Yes, what the Republican party needs to get it back on some kind of philosophical path is more Burke. But John McCain just isn't the guy. He's a maverick, remember? He stands up for what he believes in, even if it isn't the norm! Granted, John McCain is as much a maverick as Mike Gravel is a libertarian, but conservatives (authentic or otherwise) can't have it both ways.
The way I see it, the Republican party has three directions they can go:
1. Neoconservatism. Like Reagan with a sadistic edge. Low taxes for the rich, strong military presence in every country between Egypt and India, and a centralized government doing whatever the hell it wants with its people, resulting in generations of debt, broken alliances, and wholly useless moral "highground."
2. Federalism. Starve Washington, let the libertarians run free in the streets, and kick back as the poor of America rise up and bring the long-awaited Proletarian revolution.
3. Real conservatism. Elitism. The kind of thing Burke wanted- social conservatism, economic protectionism, and a heavy dose of aesthetic power plays. This direction is actually impossible.

These options all have some stuff in common, and McCain has to an extent flirted with all of them without commiting to one. Intriguingly, this is one of the things that makes him so appealing to moderates. They don't know what kind of a conservative he is, so they can't be sure of all the terrible things he'd most likely do. He might invade a country, but he might not be a neocon. He might gut welfare and education and social security, but he might not be a small government libertarian. He might purely maintain the status quo and waste everyone's time talking a big game about America versus the ideological forces of evil. Is he John? Is he President McCain? Or is he J.S. McCain III? Hopefully, time will never tell.

In any case, he's no Edmund Burke, and he's still a bad candidate.