Politics is always about relationships. These relationships are kind of like the ones we have in our daily lives.

Monarchy mirrors a patriarchal family. Totalitarianism mirrors a dysfunctional, alcoholic, and abusive patriarchal family.

American democracy, on the other hand, is not like a family relationship. Our democracy is dating. More than that, our democracy is the third date.

The early days of dating always have a healthy dose of self-delusion in them. You think your favorite politicians love you for your mind; that's why they finally called you back and asked you out again. But all they really want is your body in the voting booth; they'll tell you anything to get you into bed with them.

Go on, tell me how smart and interesting your new boyfriend is. Tell me how successful he is and how good his prospects are. Sure, make excuses for him and tell me how he meant to call you earlier, how he meant to send you flowers, how he meant to take you someplace fancy only he forgot his wallet. Come on, tell me how he never lies to you and tell me what he really meant to say.

And then, the next morning, call me up and tell me how he doesn't usually come so quickly, how he didn't really mean to call out those other names, how he didn't really forget your name.

Yeah, that's right. Tell me he loves you.

. . .

We should have kept it every Thursday Thursday Thursday in the afternoon For a couple of beers and a game of pool - Morphine

Tug Boat Potemkin's proprietor (he'll hate being called that if he ever sees it...), Gummo Trotsky ponders dim sum and how paying the bill promotes an active propensity for collective action. Dim sum, you see, is a communist plot . . .

Paul Robinson, very briefly, discusses honor and its role in Jacksonian foreign policy. Saddam is mentioned as having insulted the US, the word "credibility" is identified as a synonym for honor, and the Greeks are cited in the conclusion for having known that pride goeth before a fall.

Brief and provocative.

Summer is nearly over. This morning I saw that the Brazilian clothing shop has a sign new in the window:

"Biquinis, 15% desc."

Fall is just around the corner.

" Patriotism is not only respect and love for tradition; it is also the relentless selection and discarding of elements in this tradition. " - Jozef Lipski

Unpacking, I found a piece of paper containing this double-edged quote from a man with a particularly unfortunate career¹. While every patriot will make appeals to tradition, they always do so selectively; I no less than you.

There are, however, two extremes of the spectrum, people who may claim the mantle of patriot and who may clothe themselves in the flag but who most certainly and demonstrably are neither patriots nor clothed. Both represent an abuse of history and an inability to pursue the future.

First, there are those with no love and no respect for tradition at all. They are willing to read out whole sections of our founding documents, choose to forget swathes of our history, and deny what they themselves owe to the past. History, for them, is a scale upon which we balance good and evil, and every example of a good turn is opposed by the weight of three or four bad.

Second, there are those who refuse to acknowledge new traditions. They select a point in history (and an interpretation of that moment) and claim that all changes since then are not in keeping with patriotism. For them, the past moment is the truth, the present is a lie, and the future is an apocalypse where the armies of light and dark will clash.

While the first is considered to be more characteristic of the "left" and the second has become associated with the "right", I submit that neither side has any monopoly on these forms of foolishness. Listen to the mangy crows croak about the New Deal and its overthrow of American values or the drab parrots who tell of how much better it all was in the sixties.

Better yet, be a patriot, look forward to the future, and figure out how to pass on our best traditions to our children. Make a few new ones while you're at it.

(For more, if somewhat disingenuous, De Spectaculis on tradition.)

. . .

¹ Jozef Lipski (1894-1958) was the Polish Ambassador to Germany 1933-1939, before moving first to England and then to the US.

He is infamous for having negotiated the Germany-Poland Non-Aggression Declaration of 1934, a document that the Nazis used to parse Poland out of existence through a deliberate difference in understanding what was meant by "internal concerns".

Unpacking, in my case, leads to re-reading. I've found old notebooks with profound if juvenile ramblings, scraps of scratch paper with disembodied quotes or book titles, comic books I don't remember buying with storylines I don't remember reading, and book after book I've loved.

Near to the end of Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards!, the Patrician offers an opinion about good people and bad. The only thing the good people are good at, he says, is overthrowing the bad ones. But the bad always take over the reins of power because they can do something the good cannot: the bad guys can plan. I realized that within this concept of human nature, the Bush Administration fits the definition of the good guys!

The last time a President fired his entire cabinet was in July 1979, contributing to a steep decline in his popularity. I doubt we'll ever witness such a complete bloodletting again. So, don't get your hopes up.

Pedantry does a useful background check on "courriel" (which, for what it's worth, is a way cooler word than "e-mail") and notes a common usage since 1993 - as well as a tempest in a teapot.

Dancing like a goat, leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop, never glancing down into the abysses that glowered below, it was inevitable that I stumble across Nietzscheblog, a very new annex to a course not yet taught by philosopher John Holbo. Being the hoary, hyperborean, and hyperbolic Nietzschean that I am, I am seduced.

I eagerly await his continuation of "Genealogy versus Analysis"!

Went into Target this weekend and saw that they had begun to build their "back-to-school" displays. Given that it was the last day of my own week off, the signs really spoke to me . . . ouch.

In the spirit of the moment, Steven Johnson offers an excellent metaphor - and piece of advice - that teachers at all levels ought to drum into their students heads from the first crisp fall day through the muggy days of June.

" We're wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source. It's closer to a collectively authored op-ed page—filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion—than an encyclopedia. "

He blames bloggers. Ha!

. . .

UPDATE: Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber wanders off from the Slate article and wonders why poli-sci doesn't have an online clearing house for papers and works in progress. The links and comments continue to mine this vein in several interesting directions.

Dave Neiwert's series on "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism" from Orcinus has finally been collected, edited, and PDFed. Click the link on the left bar, drop Dave five bucks, and check it out. But don't read it after dark.

In one sentence, Mr Neiwert wants "to give the reader a clear understanding of fascism not merely as an historical force but a living one".

Essential.

Just this past weekend, in the course of a discussion about what constitutes art and how you could tell¹, a physicist insisted to me that Jorge Luis Borges had "many interesting things to say about infinity which would be relevant to anyone's life". What precisely were the circumstances under which these things about infinity would be relevant to, say, my life would have been my next question - had the discussion not been derailed by the arrival of the lobsters and our prompt falling to.

Now I find that Daniel Davies, known also as "D-squared", has joined Crooked Timber and that he has inaugurated his participation in that playground with his own discussion of Borges and an interesting thing about infinity² that he (Davies) finds relevant, certainly to his own life.

That a physicist and a financial analyst (of some strange ilk) would both be interested in various permutations of infinity is, I find to my own pleasant amusement, not so very strange.

. . .

¹ One interlocutor held that art must - absolutely must - contain some message. This statement met with some confusion as the rest of us tried to boil this down into a meaningful statement. A new, and woefully imprecise, term surfaced and we were subjected to the consideration that art must begin with an "objective intent". Whether this "object" was in fact of material origin or resided solely in the intentions of the artist was never fully resolved given the inherent slipperiness of the phrase. I tried unsuccessfully to move us toward firmer ground by questioning the assumption that art demands an artist. Needless to say, no one else wanted to walk into that swamp.

² I understand Voltaire said something along the lines of, "the only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity".

Oh, the things that we miss when we take a few days off from the mediasphere! I tell you, I have wondered for months whatever became of American Diplomacy - and now I know.

Buried amid the endless offers to hook me up with great deals, free stuff, great and/or free sex, and the chance to help former African dictators for a bit of remuneration, occasionally I get curiosities.

. . .
[slightly edited for prettiness]

Greetings,

We need a vendor who can offer immediate supply. I'm offering $5,000 US dollars just for referring a vender which is actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment. Contact details of vendor required, including name and phone #. If they turn out to be reliable in supplying the below equipment I'll immediately pay you $5,000. We prefer to work with vendor in the Boston/New York area.

1. The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a series wrist watch with z80 or better memory adapter. If in stock the AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor, two I80200 warp stabilizers, 256GB of SRAM, and two Analog Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be great if reliable models are available.
2. The special 23200 or Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built in temporal displacement. Needed with complete jumper/auxiliary system.
3. A reliable crystal Ionizor with unlimited memory backup.
4. I will also pay for schematics, layouts, and designs directly from the manufacturer which can be used to build this equipment from readily available parts.

If your vendor turns out to be reliable, I owe you $5,000.

Email his details to me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com (please do not reply directly back to this email as it will only be bounced back to you).

. . .

I'm afraid my correspondent, under item #1, is mistaking the Mind Warper (Gen.4 series) wrist watch with the AMD Four Dimensional Warp Generator (4DWG), two very different pieces of equipment, which to the best of my knowledge, do not come in an "all-in-1" configuration. However, you can get the 4DWG in a bundle with the Acme 5x24 Time Transducing Capacitor (23200 hasn't licensed their model for integration in this century, which is why I'd go with the Acme). I'd definitely recommend the bundle, or else the 4DWG is only good for stopping relative time or walking through walls, both of which get old fast. And I far prefer the voice activated 4DWG to the GUI interface despite the cost and time of training it: it has a much quicker activation, which is useful when a witch-hunting mob or a hungry sabertooth is after you.

I'm not sure you can get the Acme without the temporal displacement anymore - not that you'd want to. Nothing like starting a trip in an empty field only to find that it was an old growth forest five hundred (or five million) years ago. Or a volcano. I'm glad to see that my correspondent is also interested in the complete jumper/auxiliary system. Inertial shifts in your frame of reference can be very disorienting, if not dangerous.

The Mind Warper (Gen.4) is certainly a useful piece of equipment for the temporal traveller who wants to blend in, but you shouldn't expect to find it packaged with the other pieces of equipment on the list. It is very delicate and quite sensitive to sudden shocks. In fact, you should make sure you keep it at least forty centimeters away from your Time Transducing Capacitor while jumping from one time to another or else you might wind up forgetting who you are. Not a pleasant prospect.

Now I'm afraid my friend has been sold a bill of goods on item #3. The crystal Ionizor with unlimited memory backup is a myth. Sooner or later, you're going to run out of memory. Just look for an Ionizor with enough memory for four jaunts - and preset your return! - and you'll be fine for most needs. Only historians and archeologists really need any more than that.

I don't know why everybody always wants to pay to get ahold of the schematics. I mean, you can get instructions on building your own off of the internet for free. I understand that the safeguards in the commercial models are calibrated to a higher standard than most hobbyists can achieve, but the schematics really don't help if you don't have access to specialized manufacturing tools.

Of course, I sent along the contact information for a couple of good tour guides. They have solid, tested equipment, good insurance plans, and won't let this tourist step on any butterflies.

UPDATE: The zeitgeist seems to be turning toward "Time Travel" this week. There's a new Terminator movie in the multiplexes and Wired has an article this month.

The move has cut into my time for all other endeavors, thus my trickle of output has slowed even further. On top of that, I missed the opportunity to comment on my favorite holiday!

I love July 4^th. I love it because I love the words (and I'm not alone).

I always take the time to read the Declaration out loud, declaiming every rolling phrase and candid reason, turning them over in my mind as I shape them with my tongue. A wonderful thing sprang forth from Congress nearly full-grown that day in 1776, a concept about people and their choices and hearing their voices. But liberty was not yet fully-grown then and she is not yet fully-grown now. And so, on the 4th, I also remember and take to heart the great words of Abraham Lincoln:

" It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. "

Kip over at Long story; short pier says almost everything that needs to be said today about marriage.

But Senator Frist and his narrow ilk are too late. The barn door is opening and it is nearly wide enough to let all the wild and pretty horses loose.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is considering whether or not the Constitution of our humble Commonwealth offers its protections, its rights, and its responsibilities to all citizens (I wrote about this in March). I suspect - and I hope - that they will rule that our laws apply equally to every single blessed one of us. And then its the end of the world as we know it - and I feel fine . . .

Thousands of couples who had been unable to legally consecrate their unions will flock to Massachusetts for a simple ceremony and a wild party. These tens of thousands will return to their scattered and far-flung homes and once there they will demand their rights. Liberty will not be denied. The cat will be out of the bag, the toothpaste out of the tube, and Humpty-Dumpty will be lying smashed at the base of the wall.

Ten years from now, only a foolish and howling few will even remember the dark days at the turn of the century when families were denied and love was a crime.