In my last two blogs (blog one, blog two) about health care, I’ve suggested that the line between government responsibility and free market can be defined by parsing out the difference between rights and commodities. If the government can do something better than the private sector, like build an interstate highway system, or run a national miliarty, etc., it should do those things. Government exists for this purpose: to enable us to accomplish things together that we never could on our own. But there is an upper limit to what the government can accomplish insofar as it acts as the guarantor of our inalienable rights. The public option risks failing to realize this.

Let’s start with the obvious. The government cannot mandate that each and every American citizen be healthy. It could, however, offer tax credits to those healthy enough not to increase the drain on the health care system. It cannot offer diamond encrusted care plans to 300 million people. And yet, it can offer basic coverage that reflects our right to life.

The public option is not evil because it threatens private insurance companies. It is simply the wrong solution to the right problem. What America needs is a tiered health care system where the bottom tier is 100% government subsidized. Basic coverage is available to anyone who wants to go to the doctor. This reduces the burden on both the public and private sector. No longer do private insurance companies have to factor in check ups, basic prescriptions, simple procedures, etc., into their premiums. And the government can focus its full attention on streamlining that first tier.

This provides basic care to everyone in a way that avoids the emergency room loophole that tax payers already subsidize. We can put our tax dollars to good use for the betterment of the citizens of this country.

If you’re interested in the principles behind this idea, feel free to check out my post on emergent socialism.

On his blog Tony Monkovic compares the official statements from PETA and the Humane Society. Vick seems to have become the whipping boy of PETA. Vick’s crime aside, I’m uncomfortable with the double standard that the media has applied to this story. From the beginning to the (no) end (in sight) of this story, Vick has become a symbol for cruelty. PETA has gone so far as to say that they “will not take anything off the table when it comes to any team or league that may sign Michael Vick.”

What he did was cruel. No question. Vick subjected harmless animals to pain; he put them to death for the sake of sport. But I’m tired of the double standard. Every year folks head out into the woods armed with rifles, bowie knives, and bows and arrows to hunt down innocent animals for sport. Tell me that bow hunting is something other than subjecting animals to pain and death for the sake of sport. Tell me that the ritual slaughter of often docile and helpless animals that takes place every year in America for the sake of sport is something drastically different from dog fighting.

I understand that what Vick funded and particpated in was a different degree of cruelty. And don’t forget, he suffered two years in prison for it. But what I’m interested in is the arbitrary cultural dichotomy between hunting for sport (legalized killing) and dog fighting (illegal killing).

As much as we want to make it black and white (no pun intended), it’s simply not that simple.

I hate that innocent animals suffered at his hand. I also hate that innocent animals suffer for the sake of legalized sport. But neither of these questions interest me in Vick’s case. They just represent the larger cultural milieu that has to be named before we can talk about the interesting stuff.

For instance, after the media has created such a $%@& storm for Vick, it’s fascinating to read Adam Ostrow’s take on using media to reinvigorate Vick’s career.

And perhaps the biggest question that remains (aside from the obvious: will Goodell reinstate Vick?) is: can Vick still play? He never was a great passer. Never had great vision. He was always just the most freakish athelete on a field full of freakish athletes. After two years of life in the slow lane, can he still fly? I hope to see this question answered on the field. So Goodell, PETA, NFL teams, get it right. Get over yourselves and let the guy play.

Without spoiling the plot for those of you purests out there, let me say that Omega broaches a heady subject. What makes up the “you” of you? Assuming for a moment that we had the technological ability to store a matrix of information as complex as the human brain. If that information was uploaded from your brain and put into another one, would there still be a you? Would the upload itself be you? Or, would you be you if the upload was downloaded into another brain?

The first question we are tempted to ask in response to these questions is this. At what point does a change in structure preclude the structure’s usability? Is your favorite hammer still your favorite hammer if you swap it’s splintery wooden handle for a plastic one? Is it still your favorite hammer if you replace the head? At what point does a thing become another thing? This question is interesting, but it is the wrong question.

The right question is a bit stranger. And it’s answer stranger still. We know too well from the history of medicine that changing the brain means changing the person. Lobotomies, strokes, head injuries, they all may leave in tact memories and information, but may also significantly alter the identity of a person. On the one hand this could lead us to believe that the brain is just a storage facility, and that damage to the storage means damage to the persona who accesses the storage. But another possibility exists. The possibility that the youness of you is not just uploadable information, but architecture as well.

When I say architecture, I don’t mean just the network of neurons, but the whole event of you. The architecture of experience is less a question of attributes: can you play a Beethoven sonata on a toy piano? And more a question of resonant space. It’s more like asking: can you sing in a vacuum?

We take for granted the substance of air because it’s invisible to us. But it is this invisible substance that functions, quite literally, as resonant space. We cannot speak or sing without it. Neither has meaning, or possibly even existence without a space in which to discover their expression.

Is it the same with the youness of you? What is the data without a space in which to resonate? I’m resisting the urge to bring up Lacan and Heidegger and Husserl and Void. I’ll save that for future posts. Suffice it to say, when it comes to human beings and the architecture of our experience, there may be no such thing as a picture without it’s frame. The you that you know as you, may very well be inherent to your personal architecture.

“These guys [Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens] are going to have a hard time getting into the hall,” said Tim Kurkjian on ESPN News tonight. Manny now finds himself in that esteemed group of guys who got caught. A day ago it might have been a compliment to have your name lumped in with Manny, but no longer. He’s received the mark of shame. But does he deserve it? Do any of these “enhanced” atheletes deserve that?

At this point I’d like to briefly review some of the sentimental arguments.

1. If stars use, kids will start to use. (The let’s-protect-our-children argument)

2. Users have an unfair advantage. (The cheating argument)

3. Users don’t have a respect for the game. (A variation of the cheater argument)

4. Users hurt their bodies for the sake of performance. (The it’s-sad-they’re-so-stupid-as-to-end-up-with-man-b0obs-and-shrunk-junk-just-to-work-out-more argument)

Now that we’ve reviewed, let’s ignore those arguments and for goodness sake please, let’s stop acting like performance enhancing drugs are a problem. People don’t watch sports to see ho-hum, every day, quotidien unfeats of strength, agility, and speed. We don’t tune in to Sports Center to catch up on all the amazing stuff that almost happened. We participate in the religion of sports because we l0ve super-human feats. We love watching the impossible. Look no further than the NBA theme: “Where Amazing Happens.”

The entire life of an athelete is devoted to performance enhancing. Whether its watching tape, shooting free-throws, icing joints, receiving cortozone injections during halftime so that they can play through the pain, the entire sports industry is one big performance enhancing endeavor. So let’s stop pretending that we care whether or not Manny is taking hCG to regain testosterone after a steroid cycle. Let’s stop getting our dander up over Barry’s cream, or Clemens’ beer can, or Jose’s juice.

There is no reason that locker rooms all around America shouldn’t doping up their players to get 150% out of them. That’s what we pay to see. We show up to watch amazing. We wait in line to see records broken, visitors go home broken-hearted, and freakish atheletes with inhuman abilities perform in our presence.

So please, stop telling me that we should suspend players who dope. Stop crying about cleaning up the game. Shut up about integrity. And please, most of all, give up on the the sentimental arguments. Steroids don’t give you the ability to hit a 95 mph fastball 400 ft. They don’t make you fast enough to run a 4.2 40. They don’t make you catch a ball, help you understand the game, or give you the mental capacity to handle the pressure of stardom.

They do help you recover faster, increase your endurance, and give you a pretty good shot of prolonging your career. That way the fans only get to see more amazing feats from their favorite player. Of course there’s risk invovled. But that comes with the territory. Ask the vast majority of offensive linemen who can barely walk by the age of forty, or the basket ball players whose ankles and back are so shot that they live in pain the rest of their life. Athelete’s take a pounding for their paycheck.

Sports is one of the most physically destructive constructs of our society, but that doesn’t bother us. We don’t care if boxers die at 50 from aneurysms. We don’t care that football players die of kidney failure from the copious ammounts of anti-inflammatories that have been pumped through their bodies. But for some reason we do seem to care about steroids. For some reason we have decided that there is just something wrong with this kind of performance enhancement. It’s just unfair.

In reality, what is truly unfair is our judgment of performance enhancing drugs. These atheletes are giving us exactly what we’ve been asking for: bigger, better, faster, more. And when we find out how hard they’ve worked to deliver what we’ve asked for? We call them cheaters. We threaten to keep them out of the hall of fame. We want them thrown out of the game. It’s shameful. We’re disgracing the game with our hypocrisy.

The player’s associations and the coaches and the owners need to put their heads together and finally get this straight. Legalize PEDs. The system will balance itself out. These guys want to play as long as possible to make as much as possible and to be loved for as long as possible. Only a few are stupid enough to actually damage their bodies with dangerous performance enhancers. The vast majority are simply delivering the highest quality product that they possibly can for as long as they can. Come on folks! This is America. Aren’t we supposed to applaud that?

So, I believe it’s time to answer this barrage of performance enhancing drug news with a performance enhancing shrug. Shut up and play ball.

Since the invention of the radio, the television, the computer, the cell phone, information is more accessible than it has been at any time in human history. Television news shows broadcast 24 hour a day. Blogs are updated by the hour. Blackberry’s route breaking news by the minute. RSS feeds disseminate new information at the speed of light. And human beings? We still move at the same speed we always have.

Relative to our technophile culture with its Baudrillardian suicide looming on the fringes of our collective unconscious, human being seems to be moving slower and slower. There are days when we lament the effective deceleration. But for Badiou our slowness isn’t slow enough. Referencing our cultural velocity he says, “this speed exposes us to the danger of a very great incoherency.” In Infinite Thought he argues for a philsophy that insures lugubrious action, a slow appropriation of the impossible number of truths being created. Philosophy becomes for Badiou a truth analyzer rather than a creator of truth.

I wonder if we have entered a similar phase of art in human culture, a phase where the once prescient artist is blinded to an impossible future and turns attention instead to the present, to the past. Which begs the question, is the new art retrospective rather than prophetic?

Cezanne relativized points of view decades before Einstein produced his theories of relativity. Picasso fractured the portrait well before we became aware of the cracks in the foundations of our self image. Rilke spoke ecstatically of the act without its symbol decades before talk of the murder of signs, or the hyperreal, or deconstruction, or the death of meta-narrative.

This is only a guess, but I’ll hazard it anyway. As the technological dissemination of our constructed reality approaches full realization, we are estranged not only from our being (our ontos), but we are removed from any meaningful context of the present. The artist then is constrained to work retrospectively. They cannot look forward, because their senses, their unique sensitivity to the warp and woof of our iteration, are blinded by the infinite having been presented as reality.

Two modern poets come to mind as I close this blog. I’ll leave you with their thoughts.

Bob Dylan: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there…”

And I think Thom Yorke may have said it best on In Rainbows: “Has the light gone out for you / cause the light’s gone out for me / this is the twenty-first century / this is the twenty-first century…”

“Change” has been one of the premier issues of this election. Both Obama and McCain promised that they would lead our country in changing the failures of the past eight years. Obama is up. And we are all waiting to see how he will lead in bringing about this change. But before we run-off into the future, let’s take a brief look at ourselves, starting with our fear of the world “socialism.”

Many of Obama’s detractors accused him of being socialist. This caused quite a stir, and it bears noting that our very conception of who we are lies at the heart of the brouhaha over socialism. [BTW, as Rekonstruct stated in his post on socialism, Obama is not a socialist.] Take George Will’s appearance on the Colbert Report in June, 2008. When Colbert asked him what the difference was between conservatives and liberals he replied, “Conservatives say, ‘We will protect you from idealism; we will protect you from the liberal faith that you can make something straight from the crooked timber of humanity.’”

So according to Will, liberalism, and by extension socialism, is too idealistic. It thinks too highly of humanity. Socialism requires a certain amount of trust in the system (and the people running the system) that it will actually achieve equality of outcome. Will also points out that liberalism requires that we give up more of our freedom. Under a more socialist government, those Wasilla Hillbillies might not be able to shop at Neiman Marcus. They might have to give that money to big brother, and trust that he ensures that even Joe the Plumber has cloth enough to cover his crack.

So what do we think of ourselves? Do we trust us enough to “spread the wealth?” When we consider the issues of trust in humanity and personal freedom, we are confronted with the specter of the Neocons. For the past eight years, they have taken away quite a few of our freedoms (see patriot act), and they have not guaranteed equality of outcome (see Hurricane Katrina). For the past eight years, we have had the worst of both worlds: a government that thinks we are all crap and who, nevertheless, keeps increasing the size of the government, not to help us, but to help itself (cf Halliburton). That is, of course the point of this discussion, we want to change all of that.

So which side of the seesaw do we push on now? What is this “change” we keep yelling about? True conservatism? True socialism? Do we say that people are crooked? Straight? Mixed? Do we have bigger government? Smaller?

These are great questions and I think they need serious consideration. However, I do know one thing: we let the last eight years happen. We stood back and let the Neocons take away our freedoms, take us to war, and take up the weapon of torture. We let the crooked side of humanity win. So before we run off into the next eight years, yelling “,turn right!,” or, “take a left!,” we have to take a long look at the fact that we were complicit with and victimized by the Neo-conservatives. What does that really say about us? Can we really change?

First off, the notion that America is not a socialist country is a quaint denial of our political and economic history. America taxes its citizens to provide services and fund its programs. The government subsidizes business and individuals. Wake up folks, we socialize all sorts of things. Stop pretending we don’t. It’s no longer a question of whether or not America should tax its citizens in order to subsidize; it has become a question of what should be subsidized and how.

Second off, the size of our population and our land mass necessitates socialization. When my interest intersects your interest–whether we agree or disagree–we are faced with the specter of socialism. This leaves us with two questions. If we agree: do we pool our resources and accomplish something that neither one of us could have accomplished alone? If we disagree: how do we determine whose rights prevail? This has been the state of human politics from the dawn of ‘human.’

This brings me to my duh moment. For lack of a better name I call it “Emergent Socialism.” It goes a little something like this. There are programs/people/businesses/types of infrastructure that inherently lend themselves to the ’social.’ Here’s the rub. Up till now in American history, socialism has, in the main, been a dirty word. And so, the implementation of the ’social’ has been approached in an ineffective, inefficient, back-room, grubby-handed, ad hoc sort of way. It has lacked a coherent, guiding principle.

Enter free market. If the market had a semblance of freedom, citizens wouldn’t put up with the subsidization of private industry for the sake of profit. And yet, because we haven’t had a guiding principle, this is exactly what has happened. To paraphrase Andrew Young, “Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.” It’s an embarrassment.

As we recover from eight years of de-regulation (aka socialism for the rich), I have hope that we can head in a new direction. Not pure socialism, I don’t think that works in a country our size. Neither can we put up with this non-sense de-regulation. So, if you’re listening Barack, let me suggest a new guiding principle: Emergent Socialism.

Let the principle of the ’social’ guide what we decide to declare worthy of our subsidization. Let’s not be afraid to socialize what inherently lends itself to socialization, and let’s not be afraid to pull the plug on things that are not inherently social.

This leads to questions about tax appropriation, state and federal responsibilities; it leads to questions about the intersection of our interests, questions that hopefully we can begin to answer in a coherent and meaningful fashion.

In closing I’d like to leave you with the question that emerges above all the others: what can we accomplish together that we couldn’t alone?

Our group of loyal Obama supporters clicked over to Fox News to see how they were ‘covering’ the ‘news.’ Brit Hume looked like a lost child; when your reporting exists in the hyperreal, there’s nothing to do when the real comes crashing back in. We watched for a few minutes while the camera aimlessly followed a nameless blond anchor woman around the set. It wasn’t worth our time.

That’s when it started to sink in. Barack Obama is president elect of the United States of America. The words started to carry new connotations. President is no longer a word to be ashamed of. The United States of America no longer has to be a farce. I feel a little strange wearing my Planet Hollywood t-shirt today. Normally I love the irony of it. But this morning I want something more substantial than irony for breakfast. I want to wear more than irony on my sleeve.

In a way I find myself struggling just like Brit Hume–what do I do now that the real has crushed the facade? As Barack said in his acceptance speech last night (I paraphrase): “This election is not the change we seek, it is only the opportunity to make the change.”

For those of us here at Happy Mortal, let me say it: “Let the rebuild begin.” Or, in snappy talk: “Yes we can.”

Yes we can…do what? Well, that’s what we’re here to talk about. I never would have believed that so many of us would be in this together. In the hyperreal of American politics, we would have had our one night stand and gone on our merry way. Today, we wake up together with hope for the future, and a long day of work ahead of us. Somehow this changes everything, or at least it gives us the opportunity to change.

What do dragons and the frozen credit market have in common? A lot. Maybe. Just tag along with the analogy for the moment, I think it ends up revealing interesting qualities of capitalism and the standing reserve.

The deal is this. Dragons don’t like to spend money. What do dragons like? Pillaging, burning villages; eating toasty, roasted knights in shining armor; amassing large piles of gold, jewels, crowns, your basic treasure collection. Now, Reaganomics suggests that this treasure is like clouds. Once the dragon’s horde is big enough, coins start to form like moisture and rain down on the poor, disenfranchised villagers.

Here’s the rub. The purpose of a dragon’s treasure (aka standing reserve) is most certainly not market liquidity. The dragon has no interest in spending the mass of capital. This is the unconscious neuroticism of Western Capitalism: capital is not a means to an end, it is an end in itself. Capitalism (big “C” Capitalism, note I am not talking about the simple fact that human beings work and consume) is a posture of transformation. The often unspoken point of it all is to transform resource to capital. It is worth noting that this posture is preceded by a way of seeing: the world as resource.

That’s the analogy–the gaints of capitalism are like dragons. It is not their nature to liquidate their resources. In fact, because Capital is an end in itself, these giants have no resources, only standing reserve. Standing reserve is not for spending, it is for having. There is no economic purpose to the standing reserve. It is a neurotic posture that stems from our antagonistic relationship toward the world. In short, it is a misappropriated fear of death.