Immigration and the Mark of the Beast (4 May 2010)

Ever since I was a kid and got Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast, the weird numerology of the Book of Revelation has always weirded me out. It didn't make much sense to me then that mainstream religion could accommodate grim eschatological ruminations; little did I know that was one of religion's primary purposes. I remember trying to read Revelation, thinking it would be like cool, doomy sci-fi, and ending up disappointed that despite its many quotable images, it was basically incomprehensible and unreadable. I wouldn't encounter something that inscrutable until I tried reading Spengler. Later I tried reading one of the Left Behind books in the same spirit and had to abandon that project right away. The idea of other people reading that stuff and taking it seriously was very upsetting. The U.S. functions on working compromises, yet not too far below the surface is an apocalyptic spirituality that communes with and yearns for the end-times, a mentality that cannot possibly brook the notion of compromise and enjoys a kind of ecstatic obstinacy that celebrates the failure of civic, secular society.

So, that's probably I found this Dave Emory-ish 3qD essay by Richard Eskow about biometric ID cards and alarm bells they may sound for evangelical Christians fascinating. Did you know that every bar code bears the number of the beast? Do you know about the "tribulation period"? Are you ready to "renounce your faith" and "receive your identification"?

The essay picks up on a Bible passage, Revelation 13:17: "And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." In other words, without an ID card, you can't participate in the economy -- an idea often touted in immigration-reform debates by moderates. Eskow thus contends that immigration reform may push evangelicals to even higher levels of end-times paranoia. The fear of being marked and counted by a repressive state is not unreasonable, as much of 20th century history shows, and it must have been a pretty salient threat for early Christians under the Romans as well. Secular society has come to address that fear with a robust concept of privacy (that captains of digital industry keep telling us are anachronistic). The video clips Eskow includes of evangelicals exposing the truth about bar codes are really, really creepy -- especially the second part of the second one, which is like a freaked-out, Christianized snuff film. Ditto for the clip titled "Balloons and Beheadings."

In language and content, this law almost seems designed to trigger apocalyptic fears. And just when it seems the symbolism can't get any worse, it gets worse. Way worse. What’s the name of the proposed “national biometric ID system”? ”Believe.” That’s an acronym for “Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.” But it might just as well be a neon sign indicating that we’ve just instituted the false One World Church, the Whore of Babylon and consorter with kings described in the prophecies and feared in church communities across rural America.

As Eskow suggests, this sort of sentiment is why Bush failed to pass immigration reform -- some on the right are nativists and racists dead-set against the "pollution" of America, others are evangelicals convinced that immigration reform is a stalking horse for one-world government and the whore of Babylon.

The financial crisis and generational warfare (2 Dec 2008)

Many someone should ask financial analyst James Quinn what he really thinks of Baby Boomers:

Of course, not all Baby Boomers are shallow, greedy, and corrupt. Mostly Boomers with power and wealth fall into this category. There were 76 million Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1963. They now make up 28% of the U.S. population. Their impact on America is undeniable. The defining events of their generation have been the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Kent State, Woodstock, the 1st man on the moon, and now the collapse of our Ponzi scheme financial system. They rebelled against their parents, protested the Vietnam War, and settled down in 2,300 square foot cookie cutter McMansions with perfectly manicured lawns, in mall infested suburbia. They have raised overscheduled spoiled children, moved up the corporate ladder by pushing paper rather than making things, lived above their means in order to keep up with their neighbors, bought whatever they wanted using debt, and never worried about the future. Over optimism, unrealistic assumptions, selfishness and conspicuous consumption have been their defining characteristics.

It's hard to disagree with any of the analysis, though the tone is occasionally scarily combative. I wonder whether as the recession worsens or drags on, if such sentiment will spread from the disgruntled-analyst sector to the younger generations at large, whether it will shape policy toward the social safety net for the elderly: Will we say, the Boomers blew their chance and lived beyond their means; if they don't get the Social Security benefits they expected, then tough shit. It's natural to want to hold irresponsible borrowers responsible for our overleveraged economy, especially since, as Rebecca Wilder points out here, household debt has yet to drop: "lax lending standards on credit cards allowed consumers to become overly indebted to credit card creditors. Interestingly enough, revolving consumer credit was still 43% of overall credit on November 12, 2008. When will it fall?"

But in many ways, the forces that have driven us into debt are systemic, institutional -- the interlocking forces of assets replacing savings for many families, of status hinging on consumption levels, of the service economy supplanting heavier industry, of more aggressive omnipresent marketing, etc. But I wonder whether there is cyclical generational component to attitudes toward consumerism. As part of the generational warfare, the practices of frugality have been co-opted by hipsterism as a kind of ironic, oppositional stance to the boomer generation. In the 1960s, boomers allegedly rejected their parents' prudent austerity for hedonism, reconceived as the essence of freedom. Perhaps those of us born in the 1960s and 1970s will now war against that hedonism (which turned into financial imprudence) out of necessity, but we will feel all righteous about it as if it were our generation-defining choice.

"The 'Nothing But Flowers' fallacy" (23 Oct 2008)

Megan McArdle links to this post at The American Scene by Matt Frost about what Frost calls the Nothing But Flowers fallacy: "the tendency to count on economic disruption to bring about salutary social change." ("Nothing But Flowers," if you don't know it, is structured a little like Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" in reverse: Instead of paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, David Byrne sings about modern society falling apart and parking lots devolving into paradise as we get back to the natural way of things.) He finds Joel Kotkin committing this fallacy in a Washington Post article (reposted here) in which Kotkin celebrates the possiblities for a "new localism" in the breakdown of the financial system and the coming recession. He is not afraid to cheer for the possibility that the complacent, isolating consumerism we all know and love may be involuntarily displaced at last by hardship. And presumably he assumes that the fact we will no longer having to bowl alone will compensate for no longer being able to afford to go bowling.

Preaching the silver lining of austerity is the inevitable result of mistaking nostalgia for possible progress; or rather it is the result of failing to recognize the complications that troubled the past golden ages. (McArdle quoted Frost's best comment: "according to Kotkin, our anomic communities will also be knit back together by high energy and food prices. A good pandemic flu, presumably, is all we need to complete the rebirth of American localities.") Obviously you don't have to read Studs Terkel's Hard Times to know that the Great Depression was no one's idea of a good fun. And suddenly changes in our standard of living is probably going to introduce more anxiety and friction into everyday life as opposed to open a space for us to be more involved with the community. For better or worse, when given the opportunity to detach from the community, our parents seized it. It's not clear why we would feel any better about being forced to reverse that choice. As Frost succinctly puts it,

If we arrange our families and our living spaces poorly when affluence gives us choices, we are unlikely to suddenly flourish when those decisions are forced upon us. Hard times won’t compel Americans into becoming their better selves, and if we are heading into some bleak days, it’s best that we all understand that in advance.

As consumers began cutting back on spending, I wondered if they might not embrace the Aldi alternative -- stripped-down shopping that makes the activity a humdrum chore again rather than an entertainment experience. But it's as likely that luxury shopping will be remystified and reglamorized by its sudden impracticality and remoteness from ordinary people's lives-- after the democratization of luxury was threatening to totally extinguish the mystique of Tiffanys, et. al. Prosperity is not the problem with consumerist societies; prosperity doesn't necessarily lead to consumerism, because consumerism, at least how I'm thinking of it, is not automatically synonymous with a lot of consumption. The problem with consumerism is the infrastructure of persuasion shaping our values and curtailing our freedom by narrowing the scope of experience and channeling us into certain kinds of consumption. Consumerism is an ideology, a destructive one that leads to environmental abuse, intensified stress, political inertia and, yes, isolated individuals who are perpetually unsatisfied. But these problems won't be cured by our all being denied the potential to consume.