DC Law Student Disorientation—Today!

D.C. law students: The D.C. chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild is holding a disorientation today, from 2-6 p.m., at UDC law school. Here's a PDF with the details, and I'm told there's going to be a good ol' fashioned keg party following the event. I'm going to try to make some or all of it. Hope to see you there!

Posted 09:28 AM | TrackBack | 3L ai action alerts

Reality Testing Yubbledew: Election '04 to Katrina

Recent polls show that a majority of Americans are not satisfied with the Bush administration's response to hurricane Katrina. Some are saying that the response was so bad it's caused some sort of crisis of confidence in the ability of our government to do the right thing and protect American values and interests in times of great stress.

Of course, I'm thrilled that my fellow Americans are finally waking up to the fact that this administration is not only incompetent but nearly pathologically focused on its own agenda and interests at the expense of what's best for the American people and the rest of the world. Thank goodness people are finally waking up!

But, um, how is it that an administration can start a war based on lies, send thousands of American soldiers to their deaths, be responsible for killing thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens, and increase hostility against the U.S. all around the world because of all this aggression—how is it that this administration could do all this and still win the 2004 election!? And why now, after the tragic lack of response to hurricane Katrina, are Americans finally saying “enough!”?

I think I understand this apparent mystery, but I'm not sure. First, a little psychoanalysis for you:

When people of normal intelligence behave in a way that rejects what they experience as real, it requires some explanation. Psychoanalytic theory assumes that inadequacy in reality-testing fulfills a psychological function, usually the preservation of an attitude basic to the individual's makeup. If inadequate reality-testing threatens to undermine such [a] functionally significant attitude, it is avoided.

Charles R. Lawrence III, The Id, the Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning With Unconscious Racism, 39 Stan. L. Rev. 317, 332 (Jan. 1987).

This is basically what I said after the 2004 presidential election—the horror of what the Bush administration had done in its first term was so great it created a sort of paralysis on the part of those who could sort of see what was going on. If there's a silver lining in the federal government's completely inept response to hurricane Katrina, it's that a majority of Americans finally became—at least for a few days—so shocked, so appalled, so horrified that the defensive mechanism that had previously forced them to deny how awful this administration is turned around and urged them to demand some accountability.

Bush's approval rating is now at an all-time low. How long will it be before our overly-developed psychological coping mechanisms overcome our critical faculties once more? Bush has now promised to spend “unprecedented amounts” of federal money to help rebuild the region affected by the hurricane. Can he buy his way out of this? And do we really want that, knowing that this administration has demonstrated that its number one spending priority seems to be to transfer as much federal money as possible into the hands of private corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel? In addition, it has already said that workers hired in the rebuilding effort will have to work for substandard wages. From where I sit, Bush's speech last night can do nothing to change the fact that this administration doesn't care about the average American; it cares about the corporate American, the only “person” it will ever love.

Be that as it may, the question remains: Why did Katrina wake a majority of Americans up when the Iraq war didn't? Does it have anything to do w/coping and repression? Was the horror of the lack of response to Katrina somehow greater than the horror of waging a war of aggression based on lies? If so, what would that say about our country? Or is it simply that the horror of the lack of response to Katrina was so immediate and obvious and unambiguous, whereas people were able to construct some sort of plausible rationale for accepting Bush's war?

Posted 09:10 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | election 2004 general politics

Kurt Vonnegut is my hero.

For the past week or so life around the imbroglio has been almost completely tv-free because, for various reasons, we temporarily had no cable. The cable has now been fixed, which allowed me to watch a recent episode of The Daily Show which featured an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. One Good Move has the interview available here, and it's totally worth your five minutes to watch. As others have noted, Vonnegut is still very much on his game, dishing out the dark irony better than just about anyone else does. A couple of choice quotes:

I think our planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us and should!

And:

I've wanted give Iraq a lesson in democracy, because we have some experience with it. After 100 years you have to let your slaves go. After 150 years you have to let your women vote. And at the beginning there's quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing, which is what's going on now.

Posted 06:59 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | general politics tv land