Ladies and gentlemen, a straw man

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse, Uncategorized 4 Comments

I should warn you right away that today’s post is probably a variation on what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American politics. I mean the style, not the essay. Yesterday, the White House withdrew its threat to veto S. 1867, the defense authorization bill that provides for (A) annual Pentagon funding and policy directives and (B) the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens suspected of aiding terrorists. See, it does two things. But don’t worry—the White House has concluded that:

the language [in Sec. 1031 of the bill] does not challenge or constrain the president’s ability to collect intelligence, incapacitate dangerous terrorists, and protect the American people, and the president’s senior advisors will not recommend a veto.

Press Secretary Carney’s remarks were interrupted when a bunch of crows got scared and flew away.

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NYC police clear Zuccotti Park

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 4 Comments

Occupy Wall Street protestors return to Zucotti Park on Tuesday afternoon. Photo from the Guardian, where they are not afraid to put other journalists front and center.

“I’m calling you to update you on what we did,” Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson told the chair of the Lower Manhattan Community Board. “We came in the middle of the night.” Thus ended the occupation of Wall Street, after police executed Mayor Bloomberg’s order to clear Zuccotti Park of tents and protestors around 1am Tuesday morning. After a series of temporary injunctions and contradictory judicial rulings, protestors are no longer camping at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. They trickled back into the park during the day, but no one is allowed to lie down. As winter sets in, more than one person is probably relieved not to have to do the sleeping on the cold ground part of civil disobedience. Yet the clearing of the park feels undeniably like the end of something, and it raises plenty of questions. “Is it over?” is not the only one.

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Force the White House to talk to you with petitions

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 6 Comments

You fuckers are lucky there aren't 5,000 of me.

Here is something amazing that the federal government is doing right now: if you put together a petition with 5,000 signatures, the White House will respond to whatever that petition asks. It’s like praying, if god actually existed and/or cared what people thought about him. At a time when a lot of people think the United States has strayed from Constitutional principles, this program is an unprecedented realization of the First Amendment. The people have the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances—something that almost never works when you do it via an actual petition, which is to contemporary politics what asking for a snack machine in the cafeteria is to student council. Nobody with a letter after his name has given a rat’s ass about petitions since the Sherman Act, until now. The good news is that this new program is very well-timed, since the internet has made the logistics of petitioning easier than ever. The bad news is that the two petitions answered thus far have 1) asked the President to legalize marijuana and 2) demanded that the federal government acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrial life.

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How a democracy starts to suck

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 4 Comments

Supporters of Mississippi's Proposition 26, including women past childbearing age, a couple of kids, and several dozen dudes.

Let’s say that you believe abortion should be illegal, in part because you have carefully considered the civic and cultural ramifications and in part because that’s what they said at your church, where you go with the kids you already have and the spouse who is the only person you will have sex with ever again. I’m messing with you—you’re not going to have sex with your spouse again. Anywhom, you are strongly committed to your anti-abortion position—which you call pro-life, although you are also for the death penalty—but you just can’t get enough people to vote for it. The Supreme Court said that abortion is legal, and even though they’re clearly the most bullshit branch of government, we still have to do what they say. The best alternative is therefore a constitutional amendment, but every time you get the words “abortions will be illegal” onto a ballot, a bunch of people vote against it. They’re mostly college kids and secularists and sluts who live in cities—clearly the most bullshit portion of American society—but, again, their votes somehow count as much as yours. You can’t make abortions illegal because the majority of Americans don’t want that. You must therefore figure out how to make them operatively illegal by passing laws that people don’t notice or care about, so that everyone else in America will abide by what you know is obviously right. For example, you can make a law that says any fertilized egg is, in fact, a person.

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What does a protest do?

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 5 Comments

Demonstrators at last week's Occupy Wall Street protests object to the Euro, the Reddit logo, semiological uncertainty and running out of cardboard.

The protestors who camped out on the streets of New York’s financial district as part of Occupy Wall Street did not disrupt much. Mostly, they blended in with the other people camping on the streets of New York as part of the ongoing Don’t Have a Place to Live demonstration, which also is probably related to Wall Street. That’s what OWS is upset about, kind of. The ostensibly leaderless group convened in order to show that they will “no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.” They did it by going down to Zuccotti Park and tolerating it in person, shortly before they decamped to tolerate it from a distance in Union Square and also before they got rounded up in plastic netting and pepper sprayed.

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