The Broad View

Cry "havoc," and let slip the war of dogs

Oh great. Now The Dog Whisperer is giving political advice. People Magazine quotes Cesar Millan, who famously instructs dog owners to be "calm and assertive" — and leaders of their pack. Well, we saw the leader at today's press conference, with a pretty impressive pack behind him. (As a friend of mine from Chicago used to say, "Not too shabby." His dog of choice, by the way, was the basset hound.) 

That calm assertive energy is something Millan sees "coming out of Barack during his speeches" and advises him to maintain it – not just with dogs but with world leaders as well. [Emphasis mine.]

Yeah, as if Obama were going to get snarky with Sarkozy, or brassy with Brown. I do believe that Obama will keep his masterful cool with Putin or a poodle; he doesn't need Mr. Millan to give him lessons. 

And speaking of poodles, were it not for its utterly undeserved "frou frou" connotation, the standard poodle would be the ideal dog for the Obama Family. Its almost uncanny ability to process information and to communicate effectively mirror the great skills of the President-elect and his First Lady-elect. Its beguiling good manners recall the dear and dignified charm of  the First Daughters-elect. It is playful, loving, a great watchdog (perhaps not especially important when you've got the Secret Service on the job), and, oh, I dunno, just adorable. And it's also the best damned dog for people with allergies.

Do I have a bias? Yes, indeed. I've had the daily pleasure of living with standard poodles for a couple of decades now — first Max, a boy dog — and for the last ten years the ineffable Bizou, our girl pictured here, who is a non-stop source of joy for our entire household.

Nothing frou-frou there, nor Blairian. But I don't know, frankly, if the American people are ready for a breed that has a certain whiff of aristocracy — although I have reason to hope, as of November 4, that we're done with the reverse snobbery of Nixon's "Orthogonians" and their misbegotten progeny.

In this regard perhaps it is helpful to note that, according to Toronto's Globe & Mail, "a summertime poll from the American Kennel Club surveyed 42,000 voters. The people spoke, and they want a purebred poodle." (Of course the AKC may be a self-selecting, um, élite.)

As an Animal Planet junkie, I'm a sucker for winsome rescue dogs with heartrending back stories, and if the Obamas can find one that's hypo-allergenic, then maybe that's the route they should take.

But I think that once you have a poodle you can never go back. Which is to say, as breeds go, it's the right dog for  progressives! 

Uh-oh!

Well, the only poll that matters has been taken, the only vote that counts has been cast.

The Alien has endorsed McCain. Obama should just concede the election right now and save us all time and money.

WASHINGTON, DC - In a shocking reversal, the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain.

With major implications for the U.S. presidential election, political kingmaker the Alien has changed his endorsement amid furor. Both political camps are buzzing about the implications, as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years.

Ongoing investigation points to Cindy McCain as being the cause for this historic shift in allegiances.

Yes, it's true. The Alien has been mesmerized by Cindy McCain's eerily transparent eyeballs and was last seen cavorting with Mrs. McCain in a hot-tub.

Also abuzz are the Village Elders who have been rendered incoherent by the revelations. While they are properly scandalized by Cindy's dalliance with the Alien -- Sally Quinn has vowed to strike the hussy from her guest list -- they are simultaneously overjoyed that Favorite Son and former Maverick John McCain will be their next club president. The Washington Post reports that David Broder, Dean of the Undead, will postpone his embalming to attend the Inaugural Balls.

Weekly World News editors remain cautious in their predictions:

What impact this news will have on the election has yet to be determined. Swing state voters, who will decide this election, have the highest rate of alien abductions and UFO sightings and are known to vote in accordance with supernatural forces.

Cosmopolitan: Part I (My Town)

Cosmopolitan —
—Synonyms: sophisticated, urbane, worldly
—Antonyms: provincial, parochial

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I've been thinking for a while about what it means to be "cosmopolitan" -- an adjective that to me is suffused with the glow of enlightenment and generosity of spirit -- and I should know; I'd use it to describe myself. So how did it become -- in some circles -- pejorative, implying something dangerous and subversive?

Rather than waiting till I've wrestled all my notions to the ground, I thought I'd work my way through the social etymology with a couple of riffs. Here's the first.

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One of the elements that make Santa Barbara a wondrous place is its cosmopolitan cultural life. Even after living here for 17 years, I remain amazed by the rich and diverse worlds of theatre, music, fine arts and literary life that the community supports and by the extraordinary professionals in those worlds who call this place home. When I consider the particular set of coincidences that led me to move here, I always say, with much obvious gratitude, "How did I get so lucky?"

A case in point: The other night Pat and I nipped downtown for dinner with a local journalist friend and then to see a superb production of the riveting Take Me Out at Ensemble Theatre Company -- the theatre of which Pat used to be the managing director and I a member of the board.

We had the pleasure of running into Bob Lesser, a terrific actor who just happens to be married to Ann Louise Bardach -- the author of Cuba Confidential and one of the true experts we have in the public arena on the intricate relationships that underlie our policies toward that beleaguered neighbor. Bob told me about Annie's October 15 piece in Slate, which discusses John McCain's own "ties to terrorists" -- a perspective that perhaps only Bardach could have illuminated for us.

Polishing the cosmopolitan shine on our city is the remarkable campus of UCSB, with its Nobel laureates, major research institutes -- and the public Arts & Lectures program which brings to town a stunningly eclectic list of performers, writers and thinkers.

Then there's UCSB's Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life. The Capps Center promotes the great ideals of a beloved teacher and public intellectual, Walter H. Capps, who died of a heart attack in 1997, not long after we elected him to Congress. (His wife, Lois, equally loved, has held that Congressional seat ever since.) Walter, as you will see if you follow the links, was the very antithesis of "provincial" or "parochial" -- words the dictionary offers as direct opposites of "cosmopolitan." He set a standard for thought and discourse that moved from gown to town and beyond. He was another of Santa Barbara's treasures, as is the Center that carries his name and his legacy.

Tomorrow night Jonathan Alter will be delivering a talk under the Capps Center's aegis, and you know we'll be there -- along with many hundreds of our town's cosmopolitan citizens.

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1960...

As I listened to McCain and Obama duke it out last night over what to do about Georgia, I had a queasy sense of déja vu. Is it already 48 years ago that one of the rallying cries in the second debate between Nixon and Kennedy was "Quemoy and Matsu"? I was still a kid at the time, but somehow I remember thinking that Quemoy and Matsu must have been terribly important if the Vice President and this new guy got so excited over it.

The issue of the PRC's perennial mischief in the Strait of Taiwan, where the ROC-claimed islands of Matsu and the Quemoy group are located, lives on today but is hardly the Rubicon of Asia-Pacific geopolitics. In the 1960 presidential debate, Nixon pressed Kennedy to commit to using nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy and Matsu against the PRC. Get that? Nuclear war over a couple of islands that most Americans probably couldn't locate on a map.

Russell Baker, the incomparable Times columnist, recalled the demagoguery over Quemoy and Matsu in discussing its similarities to the issue of Nicaragua in 1985:

There hasn't been so much posturing and braying about so little since 1960. That was the year John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon managed to spend a big part of an entire Presidential campaign flailing at each other about Quemoy and Matsu.

Everybody remembers Quemoy and Matsu, I hope, because there isn't enough space in this column - or in this entire newspaper, for that matter - to explain why the future of humanity hung on the outcome of the Quemoy-and-Matsu situation. You had to be there.

And if you were there, of course, you probably can't believe - now that you think about it - that grown Presidential candidates really thought Quemoy and Matsu were important.

Baker could have written that this morning. He knew the same minefield was laid around both Quemoy/Matsu and Nicaragua: No one wanted to be accused of being "soft on communism."

Flash forward to 2008. Now no presidential candidate dare be accused of being "soft on Putin." Same thing.

Obama's response last night to McCain's goading over Georgia was much like Kennedy's over Quemoy and Matsu: measured and realistic. McCain was channeling Nixon. Nixon had accused Kennedy of "wooly thinking" of the kind that led to the Korean War and predicted that any flexibility on our part would open the door to the invasion of the ROC.

We know what happened. Kennedy won the election and the issue of Quemoy and Matsu died down outside the glare of presidential election politics.

Does anyone believe that 48 years from today our grandchildren will remember Russia's smackdown of Georgia? Is brinksmanship with Putin -- as opposed to hard but realistic bargaining -- the better course? Do we still believe in the domino theory?

Hey, anybody remember the Missile Gap? Not one of JFK's better moments in the '60 campaign. Demagoguery can be a two-way street.

[Photo: Al Rodgers, DKos]

They've got a lot of what it takes to get along

Dow up nearly 200 points, posturing a-plenty in Washington and agreement on a bailout reportedly nearing finalization. Looks like there's some celebrating on Wall St.

Oops, wrong century.

Unnatural Male Enhancement

While researching links for the previous post, I stumbled across this AP item which must be immediately broadcast far and wide:

Toad aphrodisiac kills man, NY issues warning

NEW YORK - Health officials are warning New Yorkers to stay away from an illegal aphrodisiac made from toad venom after the product apparently killed a man.

The city's poison control center issued the warning Friday after receiving a hospital report that a 35-year-old man who ingested the hard, brown substance died earlier this month.

The product is sold under names including Piedra, Love Stone, Jamaican Stone, Black Stone and Chinese Rock at sex shops and neighborhood stores. It is banned by the Food and Drug Administration. [...]

Health officials said the hardened resin, made with venom from toads of the Bufo genus, contains chemicals that can disrupt heart rhythms.

The aphrodisiac was supposed to have been applied to the skin, not eaten, but authorities said even that use can be harmful.

Will someone please explain why men are so obsessed with their penises that they will do anything, ingest anything to get a woody. Gullible men will kill any animal, preferably exotic and endangered, to obtain bizarre body parts that might somehow magically impart the dead animal's puissance to their flaccid members. It's just pathetic. No wonder every day brings an avalanche of spam touting penis enlargers and bogus aphrodisiacs. No surprise that we're inundated with ads and commercials pushing Big Pharma's favorite cash cows, Cialis and Viagra. (What is it with those idiotic Cialis commercials ending with the happy couple outside somewhere in a pair of bathtubs? Is that some kind of symbolism I'm missing?) And who could forget to mention Smilin' Bob and his Enzyte habit? Natural male enhancement, indeed. Ha!

Of course, women who inject themselves with Botulinum toxin can hardly wag their fingers at a little toad venom.

What it means to be an Amurrican

(1) Obama's lapel is seen without its flag pin, (2) Google honors Sputnik — and all (patriotic!) hell breaks loose! See (1) and (2).

Mandeans, lip service and buck-passing

Update below.

One of the most distasteful aspects of our occupation of Iraq has turned out to be our insufferable smugness regarding the Iraqi capacity to appreciate our priceless gifts of Democracy and Self-Government. It is beyond ironic to witness the American power elite chiding Iraqis as if they are incorrigible children and warning that we'll take our soldiers and go home if they don't shape up to our satisfaction. As if.

They all do it: Bush, the dreadful Rice, Congressional bloviators, self-righteous presidential candidates, pompous pundits. They're all looking to blow a smokescreen over their own hideous lapses in judgement from the get-go in Iraq. It's "Blame the Iraqis for the Mess They're In." So consistently has this idea been promoted that it may well become the hook we'll latch on to if we finally do decide to bug out.

In the meantime, I say it's pretty cheesy to be blaming hapless Iraqis for the whirlwind we unleashed. It's also unconscionable to be giving endless lip service to protecting Iraqis when we know those who've been working for us are toast if we don't allow them into the U.S. when we leave.

The same goes for a group of Iraqis that I'd have thought the right would be clamoring to save: the Mandeans, "who are the only surviving Gnostics from antiquity." Oh, wait. Heretics. They'd probably rather let Muslims in over Gnostics.

Nathaniel Deutsch, professor of religion at Swarthmore, writes in today's NYTimes that the number of Mandeans in Iraq has shrunk from approximately 60,000 when we invaded to fewer than 5,000 today.

Unlike Christian and Muslim refugees, the Mandeans do not belong to a larger religious community that can provide them with protection and aid. Fundamentally alone in the world, the Mandeans are even more vulnerable and fewer than the Yazidis, another Iraqi minority that has suffered tremendously, since the latter have their own villages in the generally safer north, while the Mandeans are scattered in pockets around the south. They are the only minority group in Iraq without a safe enclave.

When Mandeans do seek refuge in the Kurdish-dominated north, they report that they are typically viewed as southern, Arabic-speaking interlopers, or, if their Mandean identity is discovered, persecuted as religious infidels. In Syria and Jordan, Mandeans feel unable to practice their religion openly and, after years of severe deprivation, some have begun to convert simply in order to receive aid from Muslim and Christian relief agencies.

Their 2,000-year-old culture is unique in the world and completely vulnerable to the surrounding chaos. It will probably not survive unless they can emigrate en masse to the U.S. Given our track record so far in that regard, we can probably start playing taps for the Mandeans. Read the piece and weep.

Update: While on the subject of what I believe is our obligation to accept Iraqi refugees who request asylum, the Sunday NYTimes has a report on the "life of lies" that Iraqis who work for us are forced to lead.

For the tens of thousands of Iraqis who work for the United States in Iraq, daily life is an elaborate balancing act of small, memorized untruths. Desperate for work of any kind when jobs are extremely hard to come by in Iraq, they do what they must, even though affiliation with the Americans makes them targets. [...]

“Our life, it makes you laugh, but it’s a tragedy,” said Felah, a bowlegged Shiite man with a tired look, who has lost six close relatives, including a brother, to Sunni militants, and whose wife and children have been forbidden to see him by a bitterly sectarian father-in-law. “We feel that we are not telling the truth, but what can we do?”

Every well-fed, comfortable chicken hawk who insists we've got to stay in Iraq with one breath and screams about Muslim terrorists coming over here in the next breath, should be forced to live Hamed's life:

The real trouble began last fall. An envelope with two bullets was left outside his front gate. He said it contained a note: “Spy,” it read. “You will be killed.” A few days before, someone from his neighborhood had seen him leaving work at the base, a friend told him. He and his family left his home immediately.

He rented an apartment for his wife and children, and then traveled to Lebanon. There, he applied for refugee status, encouraged by an announcement by American officials that immigration quotas for Iraqis would be raised, but ran out of money after waiting months for his application to be processed. Unable to work in Lebanon legally, and faced with a choice of bringing his wife and children into poverty there, or living apart in Iraq, he decided to return to Iraq, forfeiting his application.

Now he lives on the third floor of a cheap motel in a poor neighborhood in Baghdad, away from his wife and children. He sleeps on a thin foam mattress and padlocks his door at night.

“My economic situation controls me,” he said. “I have nothing now.”

Such are the joys of Democracy and Self-Government that we've brought to the benighted Iraqis. This nation will be paying for our criminally negligent blunders for a long time -- at least as long as the long-suffering Iraqis.

Awash with guns

Monday's mass shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech will undoubtedly lead, as so many tragedies do, to a search for answers, for those measures that will ensure that something like the massacre in Blacksburg never happens again. And that search will almost inevitably lead, as it has in the past, to a discussion of gun control.

So reads the lede in "Why Democrats dumped gun control," currently in Salon.

It's all too drearily familiar by now. Horrific gun massacre occurs and dominates the headlines for a week. During that time, numerous liberal, urban Democrats decry the easy availability of handguns and assault weapons while platoons of conservative Republicans and Democrats repeat the tired formulations about liberty, the Second Amendment and how "it's not guns that kill people, it's people who blah, blah, blah...." Much tossing of anecdotes and statistics by both sides ensues.

It wasn't so long ago when a congresswoman near me got elected riding on the emotions of such events: Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband and son were victims in the Long Island Rail Road Massacre. Her loss changed her life and her politics and turned a reflexively Republican district into a Democratic one.

But times have changed since Bush took office and gun control will stay in the background as long as Democrats find renewed strength in western states or look to extend their victories in purple districts where hunting and gun ownership are the norm. Gun control is not a winning plank in the Democrats' platform these days, especially since there are a whole bunch of Democrats who own guns. As the piece in Salon points out:

Today, a substantial portion of the party's new standard-bearers are pro-gun, or at least anti-gun control. Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who now heads the Democratic National Committee and is the favorite of the new party power base emerging from the Internet, has long been an opponent of gun control. So has Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., the man whose squeaker victory in November gave Democrats control of the Senate and who was selected to give the party's response to President Bush's State of the Union address this year. Last month, one of Webb's aides was arrested on his way in to a Senate building with one of Webb's guns in his possession. Webb responded with a spirited defense of his right and need to bear arms. Even Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the new Senate majority leader, is pro-gun.

After that, check out Meteor Blades posting at DKos:

Like most Kossacks, I have strong opinions on the subject of gun control. 

Specifically, I firmly believe that self-defense is an inherent right (included as number one in the Declaration of Independence - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). I own guns - both antique and modern - and I believe that getting a permit to carry one concealed should not be difficult. I do not believe that such permits lead to higher rates of gun crime. Indeed, during the past 15 years, 23 states have passed  concealed-carry laws, joining the 16 that already had them. In the same period, gun murders have plummeted by 31% in the United States.

Meteor Blades is one of the most passionately liberal and genuinely humane people around. At the end of his post he includes a poll on gun ownership in the DKos community. As of this writing, fully 50% have never owned a gun and never will. Another 23% have never owned a gun although they have considered owning one.

Frankly, I fall somewhere in the middle of all this. I don't think the Second Amendment says that no restrictions or control can ever be placed on gun ownership. On the other hand, as long as there is a patchwork of state laws it is practically futile to try to tighten up restrictions much past where they are now. The country is awash in firearms and those who wish to get them will find a way sooner or later, somewhere or other.

There may be more success in some of the more novel approaches to control, i.e., bans on certain types of ammunition and restrictions on ammunition purchases. It will all be fought tooth and nail by the NRA and their bought-and-paid-for legislators.

No, I think we've got to go back to first causes. We've got to disenthrall ourselves. As a nation, we've got to get over our love affair with guns. Bit by bit, we must nibble away at the normative status of gun ownership. It's just too socially acceptable to own a gun, especially when you describe yourself as a "collector" or a hunter. In my world, unless you're a subsistance hunter, a soldier or a police officer, gun ownership is for fetishists or criminals, or maybe people living in remote cabins.

Will gun murders go down with restriction? Perhaps not, but certainly accidental gun deaths will go down. And despite Blades' statistic citation, I wonder if the decrease in gun murders has more to do with the general prosperity of the Clinton years than the deterrent value of concealed guns among the general populace.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, gun advocates are trying to make the case that had more students been packing guns, the shooter would have been stopped almost immediately.

Can we just ask what planet these people are living on? They've been watching too many episodes of "The Unit" if they actually believe that a campus of young college students will act like anything other than a stampeding herd when confronted with such unnerving and unthinkable events. I can't imagine a better way to boost the death toll than to have untold numbers of panicked students pulling out guns and blazing away.

Can we really just consider guns with a cold, sober eye? Guns are instruments for killing at long range. It is far easier to stand across a room or across a field and pull a trigger than it is to actually come to grips with someone who will fight back.

It will be the work of generations to wean ourselves from the false security of guns, from the romance of guns, from the frisson of imagined power with guns. But it's really time we, as a nation, grew up. Most of us aren't living on the frontier anymore. We won't starve if we don't kill the rabbit or the buck. If we're invaded by a foreign army, or extra-terrestrials, or there's a coup by the black helicopter crowd, we're not going to hold it all off with our little home arsenals.

Until we figure this out, we should hardly be lecturing the world about our superior culture and lifestyle.

Are you a bonobo or a chimp?

Bonobos live in a relatively peaceful matriarchy; when conflicts do arise, instead of fighting they often use sexual activity to resolve them, defusing the aggression with friendly phsical contact. Like hippies, they make love, not war. Chimp society, however, is a male-dominated hierarchy based on power. Unlike the gentle bonobos, who seldom kill, chimps will hunt for meat and even kill members of rival groups.

—Temple Grandin reviewing Frans de Waal's "Our Inner Ape"