Choices? Tough

I can't avoid Hilary Clinton. There she is, in every bookstore, leering unsettlingly out at me from the special displays where Thomas Piketty's book used to sit. As much as I don't want to think about it - and good god, I'm not going to read the fucking thing - I have some thoughts on her book.


Specifically, the title.


Hard Choices. Oh my.


It has already long-since occurred to many of us who notice such things that the rhetoric of hard choices, tough decisions, or some variation on words or theme, serves only the purpose of lowering expectations, and, generally, of signalling a rightwards orientation. It was a favourite rhetorical trick of Tony Blair's, and it has now become a standard of David Cameron's. The point of the hard choice is to signal to the public that, while there are many things the speaker wishes to do - really, honestly, earnestly - in a better world, that unfortunately, things being what they are, with the need to engage with the grim realities of the world, so on and such forth, those priorities will simply have to change. It's not what we wanted. It was a hard choice.


Observers may well notice that so many of these things which are described as hard choices actually bear a strong resemblance to the long-held convictions and ambitions of the speaker or writer. Cuts in the UK are routinely described as difficult decisions; the Opposition are constantly invited to demonstrate that they are ready and willing to make those hard choices, ie. to throw their ostensible constituency under the bus in the name of the market. All our parties - as they are in the US - are broadly aligned around the same program, with only distinctions in tone and emphasis to be made. We can make the point - and many do - that there aren't very many choices, and they never seem especially hard. The point is the signalling. Politicians are on your side! They wish they could help! But, you know, the world, bad things, terrible threats.


This is useful because it suppresses debate and reinforces the idea that we live in a post-ideological age. There are no arguments to be had, no competing ideologies, no politics; only hard choices. You can believe what you like, but the world works in this one way, and you have to compromise, to accept that reality, to get power (this is compromise not in the sense of reaching an agreement with another side, so much as the sense that a wall with a hole in it is "compromised"). Once you've got that power, you can't use it, except in narrowly prescribed lines. The hard choice is the rallying call of a technocratic political elite that is almost farcically insular and homogenous; it ensures that the few radicals who do somehow get into the system are shunted to the sidelines as unrepresentative mavericks; dangerous intrusions of the dread ideology into a politics-free politics.


Anyway. What's interesting to me, then, is that Hilary Clinton is leading the charge for hard choices by slapping it on the front of her book. Obviously this is a reaction to Barack Obama. The Audacity of Hope turned out to be a millstone around his neck as he turned out to offer neither hope nor audacity; "hope and change" turned out to be the most empty of slogans as Obama turned out to be an aimless, pointless mediocrity rather than an inspirational figure of charisma and unity. The Democrats have governed on a platform of doing the bare-minimum to maintain party discipline and loyalty among their voting base, not by offering much of concrete worth to their constituents so much as stoking up the threat of the Republicans. Meanwhile the real ideological battle is not being fought; as witness endless "liberal" Facebook memes trumpeting Obama's competence in terms dictated by the enemies of most Democrat voters: in terms of managing the structural deficit, bailing out industry, and killing military targets. Clinton's book, then, surely signals nothing more than a realignment of Democrat party messaging with their intentions.


Obama offered the world and delivered next-to-nothing; Clinton is also offering next-to-nothing, but she at least is making sure you know it from the off.

Picket Piketty

Thomas Piketty hasn't read Das Kapital, because it was too hard for him, apparently. I've not read Piketty either, so here's what I think about his book.


It's a 700-page fart by exactly the kind of asshole who won't accept people's real, lived experience or the evidence of his own eyes as valid unless there's a page of charts and tables next to a dust-dry digression by some prick with a PhD. The condition of the poor isn't real unless we can display it in a chart! You may not be able to feed yourself, but is that really data? And what are your policy prescriptions? Where did you go to school? And so on.


What do all these meticulously-collected and displayed data amount to? Why, some truly staggering insights. Did you know that wealth accumulates and concentrates, and that the ensuing inequality produces deleterious political and social outcomes? How could we have known! Why did nobody say anything!? And - make sure you're sitting down for this - what can be done to alleviate this situation? Well, you can, uh, tax the rich a bit more, I guess, or something. But not too much! We don't want to go too far, here! Wouldn't want to be a radical!


It takes - and this is worth repeating - 700 fucking pages to get to this.


Everyone but everyone is talking about it, of course, because there's apparently nothing like a 700 page book by a French academic stating the blatantly fucking obvious to finally concentrate the self-appointed Vox Populi's minds on certain realities of our Piss Hell Garbage Nightmare world for five minutes. Piketty's only useful function is to allow the bullshit-left media to continue to position itself as the Voice of Respectable Leftism without actually saying or doing anything that might actually make the world a less grinding, less miserable place. In the current formulation of our cult of expertise, it's only people like Piketty who are allowed to say, in essence, that shit is fucked, that capitalism is bullshit, and failing in its own terms, and the world is actually horrible for a lot of people, because Piketty can be trusted not to go overboard. He can be trusted to coat this bitter pill in respectable language, and of course to supply lots of charts. A normal, actual person who tried to say some of these things would be laughed out of the newsroom - I mean, come on, what are you, some kinda fuckin' anarchist!? Meanwhile, because Piketty's analysis and proposals come pre-neutered, they can be safely ignored. The news cycle rolls on.


And that's the punchline: Piketty doesn't matter. Piketty is going to be ignored. He's saying nothing we didn't already know (but now with charts!) while proposing next-to-nothing as a response, and it's still going to achieve the square root of jack shit except to launch a million shitty blogposts. This is one of them. Do you see?


Summary: Too Long, Didn't Read.

Call Off Duty

John Manshooter was pissed. He was needed for Warfare. Advanced Warfare. He knew this because the Commander in Chief had phoned him this morning.

"John," the Commander in Chief had said, "I've got some bad news. Retirement is over. There's Warfare. Advanced Warfare. We need you."


"Okay," John Manshooter said, wearily. He was tired of this endless Warfare. He put down the grenade launcher he'd been oiling. "What's the job, Chief."


"It's going to be tough this time, John." The Commander in Chief sounded worried. "This Warfare is Advanced. It's Advanced Warfare. The Foreigns have got their hands on killer robots, maybe. Or a genetically engineered dinosaur plague or something. It's not real clear."


John Manshooter swore. "Shit," he said, and then "fuck." Those ethnics had to be stopped. Stopped with bullets. Bullets from a gun.


John Manshooter was the best shooter of bullets from a gun in the business.


"It gets worse," said the Commander. "It's the Foreigns. They're led by... by Bad Americans."


John Manshooter swore again. This time he said "pisswizard." The Bad Americans were the most fearsome foes in the world. Almost as intelligent, driven and competent as real, Freedom-and-Justice loving Americans. They even looked like real people, and some of them had familiar voices and faces. But they were twisted by their love of Foreigns, and their incomprehensible hatred of America, which made them Bad. Foreigns were no trouble. Foreigns could be slaughtered in minutes, and nobody cared. But with Bad Americans leading them... well, that was a different story. That was Advanced.


"Alright, Chief," said John, stubbing out his cigar on his masculine, stubble-covered jaw. "I'm in. In for Advanced Warfare."


"Good," said the Chief, ringing off.


John Manshooter stared out the window. He'd show the Foreigns and the Bad Americans what for. He'd show them with bullets, bullets in their faces. It was the only language they understood, except for the languages they spoke.