Things Biology Just Can't Explain

It seems to me that any moral code based on materialism is missing an 'ought'. It could possibly explain why animals, including humans, behave a certain way. It could possibly explain why behaving a certain way better equips the species for survival.

What materialism can't explain, at least to my philosophically and biologically untrained mind, is why any such behavior is good, or bad, from a moral perspective. All it can do is to show the norm, and that individual creature A behaves different from that norm; it can't explain whether the behavior is right or wrong.

Materialism might postulate that an aberrant behavior hurts the species' chances of survival (though such an argument might more easily be made in hindsight). But it can't tell us why extinction is bad.

It can't even tell us why death is bad, since when one thing dies, many other living things get to nourish themselves on the carcass. As the outlaw Josie Wales said, worms gotta eat too, same as people. Modern biology, as materialism's water carrier in the natural sciences, should be pleased either way with the outcome.

Humans detachedly observe in other species behaviors that they would condemn as immoral in other humans. When lions kill each other in territorial disputes, the behavior isn't called evil, it's just what lions do. When chimps eat a female from another clan, it may seem repulsive, but again, they're just doing what chimps do -- I've yet to hear a biologist refer to this behavior as "evil". In fact, letting her live might raise the biologist's eyebrow, were that actually the aberrant behavior.

So it seems to me that, if we're discussing any morality derived from biology, we need simply to understand:

1. When humans act in certain ways, they're just doing what humans do.

2. Since they're just doing what humans do, there's no right or wrong, it just is.

3. If a behavior renders us extinct, that's okay, worms and buzzards have to eat too.

4. Nonetheless, there are behaviors that we like and don't like.

What this leaves us with is preferences -- morality minus authority.  E.g., if gay men like being with other men, that's natural. But that's a two-edged sword: if straight men don't like gay men's behavior, that's natural too.  It all boils down to what we like and what we don't like.

But to get others to take our likes and dislikes seriously, we have to dress them up in more dignified clothing. Thus, if I'm trying to convince someone to like what I like, I'm going introduce a new concept: morality. I don't like what you're doing: that's immoral. Do as I say do: that's moral.  Calling it 'morality' helps me get what I like.  Why are appeals to morality so persuasive?  Beats me.  But they are, and I can use them to my advantage, perhaps.

If morality is biological, I'm afraid this is the world we live in: morality is but an illusion, alive so long as humans are here to uphold it, dead and gone when the last human is.

Paul said that faith is belief in things unseen.  When atheists speak in moral terms, they are either exhibiting the last vestiges of faith, or exploiting them.

Van Cliburn, R.I.P.

Van Cliburn, the great piano virtuoso, is dead at 78.

I was a music major back in the early Seventies and was privileged to attend a performance given by Van Cliburn at my college. He was then in his late thirties.

As a music major on an instrument other than piano, the threat of failing my piano jury and not getting my degree loomed over me throughout my stay at Penn State. So I took piano lessons from one of the grad assistants -- one of the less distinguished ones, unfortunately, but that made us even, as I was certainly one of her less distinguished students. I do remember that she bad-mouthed Van Cliburn via "piannissimo praise", the preferred defamatory gambit of music students. Nobody could speak ill of Cliburn's talent, but the word on the studio floor was that he was "selling out" -- booking too many concerts, which kept him from putting in the preparation necessary to churn out great performances.

Well, sorry, but who can blame him? As Jerry Reed sang, when you're hot, you're hot, and Cliburn was hotter than Elvis. But my piano teacher, amidst the cattiness, let loose an interesting comment: allegedly, Cliburn would often be so "unprepared" as to memorize piano scores he had never actually played on the airplane en route to his gig. The nerve.

The remark had exactly the opposite effect on me that was intended. I could not grasp the level of genius it would take to be able to memorize a piano score that one had never played, or the level of showmanship it would take to perform it. My respect for Cliburn went up, not down.

And yes, even several rows back, one could see what enormous hands Cliburn had -- he was said to have been able hit an octave and a fifth with one hand. You don't have to have huge hands to be a great pianist (e.g., Alicia de Larrocha), but it has to help. The Air Force band to which I belonged once accompanied Leon Bates (back when he and I were both young) performing Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"; Mr. Bates is a smiling, handsome fellow who looked like he would have been as much in his element running a football through a tough defensive line as tickling the ivories in black tie. His style made marvelous use of his mesomorphic build: large, muscular, commanding.  Yes, big hands have to be helpful at some level.

Van Cliburn not only beat the pants off the Soviet pianists when he won the Tchaikovsky Competition, he earned their love and respect.  At the height of the Cold War, that was no mean accomplishment.  Cliburn made the world a better place, and the world is worse off for his passing.

Ulysses S. Obama

I've decided finally that Obama is a much better politician than most people give him credit for.

His style reminds me a lot of General Ulysses S. Grant.

His opponent, General Robert E. Lee, thought his job was to defend Richmond.  General Grant was not trying to take Richmond; he was trying to destroy Lee.

Ronald Reagan famously said something to the effect, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.  That's pretty high-minded and shows Reagan had a lot of class.  Unfortunately, politics doesn't always reward the class act.  There has, until Obama, always been an implicit understanding that your adversaries in the political process belong there just as much as you do, and at the end of the day some sort of compromise must be worked out -- hopefully, to your advantage.  Ronald Reagan was something of a Robert E. Lee.  He had actual policy goals and worked with anyone, Democrats or Republicans, to accomplish them.

Contrast that with Obama, who wouldn't breathe air if it meant acknowledging the GOP was right about something, anything.

This quote from Gov. Haley of South Carolina is instructive:

"I could not be more frustrated than I am right now,” Haley told reporters after the meeting. She said that when she asked Obama if he would consider a last-minute plan to shave about 2 percent from the annual federal budget without increasing taxes, the answer was “no.”“My kids could go and find $83 billion out of a $4 trillion budget,” Haley said. “This is not rocket science.”

Haley believes she's still operating under the Reagan paradigm.  She's upset because she thinks the president's job is to do what's best for the country and doesn't understand his intransigence.

She's trying to defend Richmond.

Obama is not trying to take Richmond; he's trying to destroy the GOP.

I think he's doing a fine job of it.

Merry Christmas 2012!

Merry Christmas 2012!

It has been unseasonably warm even for sunny Virginia Beach, highs in the seventies, and Christmas  is just a couple of weeks away.  If this is global warming, so far it’s actually rather pleasant -- I recommend warming for everybody’s globes.  And what a year 2012 has been.  Republican voters gave Newt the boot, while American voters decided that once you go Barack you never go back, and then told the GOP to keep its Mitts off the White House.   “Jersey Shore” found itself starved for attention, while North Korea just starved.   The President talked to the GM chairman and Clint Eastwood talked to a chair.   Hurricane Sandy made many beaches on the Atlantic coast considerably less so -- Hurricane Un-Sandy.  The Egyptians attacked our embassy, the Libyans walked like Egyptians, and the plural of Syria is serious.  It’s a crazy world, and getting crazier by the day -- in other words, situation normal.  Time now to sit back.  Relax.  Have a martini.  And when the world situation hands you lemons, remember that martinis go better with a lemon twist.  Don’t let the lemons twist you.

Yes, the year was too much.  Too much of what?  For starters, too much of Lee.  According to Newton, force equals mass times acceleration -- and because the acceleration of gravity is a constant, we can only conclude that the force was with me.  I was carrying more mass than a month of Catholic Sundays.  How fat was I?  I rented myself out part-time as a beach umbrella.  When my beeper went off, people thought I was backing up.  I walked into the Gap once -- and filled it.  Well.  Finally, when they took my ID photo by satellite, I decided I’d had enough of this.   I had the motivation – now, I just needed the right strategy.  Debbie has had continued success using the Weight Watchers’ portion-control strategy -- she took off sixty pounds and has kept it off for three years.  But portion control just doesn’t seem to work for me.  The doctor explained that the older we get, the less well we can handle carbs.  So I tried an experiment:  why not just see what happens when I cut out sugary and starchy foods, but otherwise eat whatever I want?  That was about nine months ago, and today I’m carrying about forty pounds less.  It’s an answer to prayer (thank you, Lord!) and still a work in progress.  The downside is I’ve had to spend some money on clothes, but that’s decidedly more pleasant when the salesman can walk past you without becoming your satellite.  One thing Debbie and I have learned is that, just like it’s always after five somewhere, Jos. A. Bank is always having a sale!  Their slogan:  “List price is for suckers.”

As usual, I went to the Eastern Trombone Workshop in March, and last June I took a trombone lesson with Dave Fedderly, the tuba player in the Baltimore Symphony.  Fedderly was a student of the late Arnold Jacob, legendary tubist with the Chicago Symphony.  He explained to me that I don’t know the first thing about something I’ve been doing, literally, my entire life: breathing.  You mean, being a blowhard doesn’t help one’s musicianship?  Well, what does he know?  Seriously, Jacob was the world’s leading authority in the physical mechanics of breathing and how it relates to wind musicianship.  Fedderly reminisced about when, as a grad student, he had played alongside Jacob with the Chicago Symphony.  Jacob was then in his sixties, suffering from emphysema and missing a lung -- Fedderly said, in awed reverence, “I still couldn’t keep up with him!”  And I can’t keep up with Fedderly.  Let’s keep it simple:  blow in the small end, take cover at the big end.  Sounds like good advice for dealing with all sorts of wind.  Speaking of which, I played again this past summer with the Tidewater Winds, and will perform a Christmas concert with them tomorrow.  My personal goal is always to evoke an expression of shocked disbelief from the conductor.  Since leaving the Air Force Band program almost thirty years ago, I’ve had to achieve musical success by defining it downward.

We’re still living in the same house, but you don’t have to move to change neighborhoods.  A family moved nearby that owns a veritable flotilla of vehicles – more ATVs, pickup trucks, boats and motorbikes than we can count.  For years, Debbie and I had been missing out on the aesthetic joy of listening to the subtle yet delicate ostinato phrases of thrumming V8s and diesels and revved-up ATVs speeding up and down the street.  Well, no more.  Turn off the Khachaturian, let’s hear the Cummins… Mmmm, sublime, and could you get me another glass of cabernet, Debbie?  As a bonus, the neighbor works at a landscaping firm and uses the street as the overflow for his industrial equipment.  So the view out of our picture window is more resplendent in flatbeds than in flowers, more backhoes than blooms.  The housing market being what it is, we’ve decided not to move, but to wait out this petroleum-powered siege in hopes that our neighbor’s business will succeed wildly, at which time maybe they’ll set sail with their rolling armada and move to a much nicer neighborhood.  In the meantime, we try to look at the bright side.  He’s friendly and owns cats.

Speaking of which, we acquired our kitty, Gabby, back in 2004, just before moving to our current house.  At first, she was emaciated -- her previous owner had simply thrown her out into the wild to survive on her own.  Somehow she lasted two weeks in the woods, without her claws, and with nothing to eat.  That experience made her what she was, the only cat I’ve ever known who hugged her food dish while she ate.  There was no cat in all Creation with a greater vocabulary -- we did name her Gabby, after all.  When you stroked her fur, you were likely to hear some combination of:  “Meow”; “Rah-Ah”; “Aahhh”; “Ack”; “Urf”; “Argh”; and my favorite, “Whooh!”  All the other cats we’ve owned were Debbie’s kitties, especially Nutmeg (our first) -- they worshiped Debbie like she was a made of a sweet elixir comprising catnip and mouse fur.  But Gabby loved me.  She would be waiting patiently at the door when I came home from work, and then bounce back and forth like… well, like a dog.  Last June she started moving very slowly and eventually stopped eating.  The vet told us she was suffering badly from a bad spine.  We tried putting her on pain-killers and steroids, and she did respond for a short time -- but she was fourteen years old, and it soon became clear that this couldn’t continue.  She took her last trip to the vet.   Both Debbie and I see “ghost sightings” of her now and then -- a flutter of the curtain, usually, or a fleeting shadow.  The hardest part is coming home from work, half-expecting a furry and vociferous greeting when I open the door.  In Cat Heaven, we hope she’s happy and has a food dish that actually hugs her back.  We miss her.

Debbie is still teaching elementary-level strings here in Virginia Beach.  The hearing issues she acquired when undergoing chemotherapy (more than ten years ago now) have gotten steadily worse –- tinnitus (ringing in the ears) and hyperacusis (certain sounds are much louder that they should be) plague her constantly, exacerbated by loud and (in the case of elementary strings class) shrill noises.  Fortunately, she had made for her a new set of earplugs, which help a lot -- we’re hoping they will get her through until retirement.  (I’ll bet my former band directors wish they’d thought of that.)  Debbie is still the music director at our church.  Her greatest gift is her ability to teach three-part choral pieces to a congregation that is largely without formal music training.  I’m still her favorite draftee, and of course I’d follow her anywhere, and do, even into Talbot’s, sort of the female version of Jos. A Bank (though against my better judgment).  Anyway, my job is to sing tenor or bass, as the occasion calls -- that's what I get for being a baritone – but I could even sing soprano if necessary, as long as Debbie is there to perform the necessary encouragement and timely wedgie.

When I was a kid, the local amusement park had a “penny arcade”, with arcade machines that were ancient even then, which would show you a “movie” if you inserted a penny and turned a handle on the side.  It was really just a series of photos that flapped in your direction, the speed depending on how fast you turned the handle, which gave the impression of motion -- that’s all movies are, after all, a series of photos presented in a sequence and at a speed that simulates motion.  These days, it seems like penny arcade machines are a metaphor for life -- the years just flip past and present a quick image, only we’re not the ones controlling the speed.  One of these days, the movie will be over, and we will be in the presence of the Cinematographer.  At this time of year, celebrated as His birthday, we like to reflect on the picture that we have shown the world this year, and give thanks to the One who gave our lives a screenplay that promises a happy ending.  Thanks be to the Lord, and please accept our best wishes for a wonderful holiday season and a blessed new year to come.

Fat Like Me

Fatboy.  Fatso.  Lardie.  Fat Albert.  Fat-Ass.  The Crisco Kid.  That last one's actually pretty funny.

I grew up being called these names and others like them on a daily basis.  It used to be confined pretty much to the schoolyard, or at least the schoolyard mentality -- in my experience, even some of the teachers were glad to join in.  But the joy of ridiculing fat people was too sublime to be forever contained, and so has become institutionalized in the popular culture.  A chosen few from among the myriad examples:

• In the third Indiana Jones movie, the opening sequence shows young Master Jones as some sort of boy scout having an adventure with his troop, which included the obligatory obese fellow scout as comic relief.  Ha ha, poke fun at the fat kid, it's a lot easier than actually writing something, you know, funny.
• In the 1980s movie, "Back to School", Rodney Dangerfield plays Thornton Mellon, a multi-millionaire clothing tycoon -- he owns a chain of "tall and fat" stores, which opens up a plethora of opportunities for fatty jokes.  E.g.,:  "Are you fat!?  When you go jogging, do you leave potholes?  When you go to the zoo, do the elephants throw you peanuts?  When a waiter hands you a menu, do you say, 'Okay'?"  Actually, these jokes are funny, and somehow they're not as hurtful when good-naturedly hurled by Rodney himself, who was no lightweight.  But what other group of people could you get away with insulting like that?
• In one scene in a made-for-TV movie chronicling the life of George Washington, no less a personage than George himself gratuitously ridicules one of his officers for being fat.  (Had it happened that way in real life, one might deduce that being fat takes away any points earned for volunteering to run around in the cold winter wilderness fighting Redcoats to the death.)  
• The narratives of innumerable commercials revolve around the pretty, trim and savvy wife mugging and smirking while throwing verbal barbs at her hapless husband, who is required by Madison Avenue to be fat and stupid (perhaps to encourage us to believe they are one and the same) and who just stands there mute as the deserving personification of the Stupid Consumer, in awe of his superior mate.

In short, all that trendy and high-minded talk about abolishing bigotry is baloney, a mask for finding more socially acceptable targets for it.  People do cherish their little hatreds, and obesity is high on the approved list.  Anti-fat bigotry is so much fun we can no longer confine it to the private sector; now we have the government weighing in, so to speak, that obesity is a "crisis".  My guess is, with ObamaCare, we will soon be the ones weighing in.  Remember, it's nobody's business who, or what, we have sex with, but if we eat too many Ho-hos, the national glare will be focused directly on you-know-who.  Let the witch hunts begin.  What did he eat and when did he eat it?  Maybe eventually Uncle Sam will steal fitness ideas from the Soviet Union and send overweight people to fat camps deep in the bowels of whatever part of the country most resembles Siberia.  (Duluth, maybe?)  It's for our own good after all, just like when one of Stalin's men took a pick ax and explained communism to a slow-learning Trotsky.

Come to think of it, big government often does solve obesity problems in a population.  Like Ethiopia did with Eritrea.  Like the Soviet Union did with the Ukraine.  Like North Korea is doing now with its own citizens.  You can't overeat if you don't have any food.  The obesity epidemic and public health will be the pretext for even bigger government, notwithstanding the number of people that big government has killed.

But I digress.  The consensus, even among people who don't believe in an objective morality, is that obesity is a moral failing.  The popular culture dives into that presumption like torch-wielding Puritans on a tethered witch.  I have heard obesity alluded to  as a sin from the pulpit -- the fruits of gluttony -- and as a threat to national security by a military leadership getting in step with the government's ever-changing cadences.   Joe McCarthy: out.  Your employer's Wellness program: in.  The idea that obesity might be a different kind of failure, perhaps genetic, recedes from view even as homosexuality, once thought to be a lifestyle choice, emerges with claims to genetic legitimacy.  We celebrate the glorious diversity of different lifestyles -- but only so long as it does not require super-sizing your fries or looking bad in Spandex.  Besides, being gay is cool and gays dress better.

But what if obesity is not a moral failing at all?  What if it's simply a problem of ignorance?  What if a lack of knowledge is at the root of this so-called epidemic?  Worse, what if obesity is actually being caused by misinformation emanating from the same authority figures in government and the nutrition field who are now chiding us for our girth while telling us things that are just not so?

In my next post, I will relate my personal struggles with obesity and detail some of my successes and failures in fighting this lifelong battle.   Meanwhile, let's just acknowledge the tremendous incentives to get thin -- gaining societal approval, looking and feeling better, perhaps living longer -- and observe one thing: people quit trying when they sense they cannot succeed.  Dismissing this as a simple lack of willpower is facile but arrogant, for the simple reason that you cannot directly feel what the fat person feels -- neither his hunger, nor his shame, nor the heartbreak of failure.  Set aside prejudices for just a short while, and consider the possibility that the deck may have been physiologically and/or psychologically stacked against many fat people.  And if you're a fatty like me, take hope in that there may be a solution that is far easier than you dreamed possible.

The Electoral Dance

Things are not always what they seem.

I've been watching elections since about 1968, and here is what I generally see:  relative to the final results in November, the polls throughout the summer and into early fall show Democrats ahead of where they end up, and Republicans behind where they end up.  Then, sometime around about two weeks before election day, there is some sort of an "adjustment", and behold!  By election day the polls are much closer to the final results.

Classic example of this was the 1980 election.  Carter had been running five points ahead of Reagan all summer long, clear up until their debate.  After the debate, the polls had Reagan pulling up to more or less even, and the morning of the election, the headline on the San Francisco Chronicle's front page (I was stationed in California in 1980) proclaimed, "Too Close To Call!"  Well, nobody told the Reagan voters.  Reagan won by a significant margin, about 51% of the vote in a three-way race (Carter got about 41%, and renegade Republican John Anderson garnered most of what was left over).

Even the elections that Republicans have lost usually turn out to have been much closer than the pollsters had prognosticated.  In '96, there were many polls showing Clinton with huge double-digit leads.  But the "adjustments" appeared at the last minute, followed by a relatively miserable showing for Mr. Clinton -- in neither of his two elections did he even break the 50% mark, but he did beat Dole by nine or ten points.

Even in off-year Congressional elections, the strength of the GOP on election day often appears to catch the media flatfooted.  The Republican takeover in '94 hit them like a runaway train; I don't know whether they were surprised, but they certainly acted surprised.  First time since the Eisenhower administration that both houses of Congress went Republican, and nobody had predicted it.

More recently, in 2010, the media acted like it was "shocking" when some people predicted a Republican congressional landslide.  But election day came, and there it was.

There's a pattern here.  So the next question is, are the polls reliable and the electorate just routinely shifts toward the Republicans as election day nears?  Or are the polls stacked to favor Democrats for as long as they can, until they must either adjust or lose credibility?

The latter seems more likely.

Now, is it some vast conspiracy to demoralize the Republican base to try to lower voter turnout?  Why would professional pollsters risk their reputations to do this?

Pollsters are trying to make money, like the rest of us, and their behavior just might be a simple, rational market response aimed at pleasing their customers.  Most news-media outlets are run by liberals, and liberals want to hear good news about Democrats.  So if you're running a polling company and a major network hires you to produce a poll, and you know the people you're dealing with prefer Democrats, you have a very clear incentive to give them what they want.  That is, until it comes into conflict with another stronger, countervailing incentive -- namely, keeping your reputation as a polling outfit intact.

Either way, it's easy to get a poll to say what you want it to say.  Here's a link to an illuminating article by PJMedia's Charles Martin, explaining how pollsters can achieve whatever results they're looking for and make it look credible:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-truth-about-polling-yes-romney-is-probably-tied-or-winning/?singlepage=true

Most pollsters this year have been (until recently) polling registered voters as opposed to likely voters (which tends to skew towards Democrats); and for the most part they have been oversampling Democrats.  In one Quinnipiac poll, for example, it was claimed Obama had an eight-point lead in Ohio -- but in their sampling, Quinnipiac gave Democrats a nine-point edge.  Ohio is a swing state; does it seem likely that nine percent more Democrats will turn out than Republicans?  You do the math -- in fact, you'd better do the math, as Quinnipiac doesn't seem very interested in doing it for you.

I'm beginning to suspect that the news media understands all this.  Why?  For the simple reason that, all along, Obama has been campaigning -- he's been behaving -- like he's behind.  The Obama campaign has been nasty, surly, and issue-free, focusing its attentions on assassinating Romney's character and trotting out red herrings about how rich he is.  That's not how someone who believes he's ahead in the race runs a campaign.  It shows a lack of confidence.

This tells me Obama's internal polling numbers have been closer to the real mark all along than the polls that get trotted for general consumption.  Obama behaves like he's behind because he is behind, and knows it.

And I don't believe all this has gone unnoticed by veteran reporters.

The polls now have "adjusted" -- of course, the election is next week -- and are giving Romney anywhere from a dead even to five-point edge, but many are still saying Obama still has the advantage in the Electoral College tally.

I think that, where they're saying Romney is now, is where he was all along -- but he is now strengthening his lead.

Right now, I'm expecting a solid Romney win, perhaps even a landslide.  Let's see if I'm right.

But here's another prediction:  if the election is within one state's electoral votes, and that state's election is within two or three points, the Democrats will airdrop a thousand lawyers into that state and try to steal the election.

Wait and see.

Saints, Players, and Useful Idiots

Some of the best writing to be found on the Internet is at the Belmont Club, a blog hosted by PJMedia.com, by one "Wretchard" -- a pseudonym for Richard Fernandez, a Harvard-educated Filipino.  I know very little about him other than he is a source of profound wisdom.  There is a link to his writing on this URL, and I highly recommend reading his stuff if you want to understand anything about what's going on in the world.

Mr. Fernandez will happily mix it up with commenters, and some of his best insights are in the comments section of his blog. Here's one such gem that touches on some of what I want to talk about today...

"The population on the Left can be divided into three categories — the “useful fools”, the revolutionary saints and the players. Of the useful fools we will say no more. Then there are the “saints” for whom Marxism is a religion and whose reward is to blind them to its actual purposes. It’s there to give them the transcendental experience that mysticism once gave the contemplatives. That’s what they’re in it for. They give the revolution whatever dignity it has; they do all the dangerous and necessary things and few of them survive it. Those who do are killed off by the third category, the players.

"All Communist societies are built on the bones of its saints. That’s all they’re good for really: to dream and to die.  But the players are those who actually know what it is all about. Which is that it is about power and money. Always was, always has been and always will be. That’s why they survive and while all the saints won’t. Because they know the Big Secret, they know what really matters. As for ideology, the players know that “Marxism” is just a disinformational narrative for the useful fools. They believe in Communism in the same way a crooked preacher believes in God. That is to say, not at all."

I agree 100% with Wretchard here, but would expand his generality to include all political parties.  If the distinctions seem less descriptive of the Republicans, it is only because they are less moved by raw politics and more moved by its trappings.  (If given a choice between being Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli, the Democrats would pick Disraeli every time, but the GOP would inerringly choose being the Queen.  Democrats would much rather hold power than seem to hold it; Republicans would rather hold the position than the actual power.)

What we have here in the U.S. is a two-party system -- two liberal, free-spending, drunk-with-power political parties. But one of them has to pretend to be something else on election day because they drew the short straw and have to scrounge votes from among those who don't like liberals, free spenders, or power-drunk politicians.

But the news media provides some cover for them, so they don't have to be all *that* conservative. Just enough to lie convincingly every other October.

As Wretchard sketched out for us, every political party consists of:

• Saints.
• Useful idiots.
• Players.

The Saints are the ones who stand conspicuously and bravely for the Cause, or are portrayed as such by the Players.  Sometimes they are the ones who die for it, either metaphorically or bodily. They are an inspiration to their party. The Nazis had Horst Wessel. The Democrats -- hell, they practically manufacture Saints: Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the Kennedy Brothers; Hubert Humphrey; Martin Luther King; and scores of others, even Sandra Fluke, who has managed to make sex boring. The Republicans have only Reagan. No political party can function without a few highly celebrated Saints.

The Useful Idiots, also called True Believers, are the dutiful troops who man the booths, lick the stamps, make the calls, invest their faith. They believe the Myth. No political party can function without the active participation of an army of Useful Idiots.

The Players are the organization people, the backroom deal-makers, the power brokers. They are reptiles, scaly and repulsive.  No warm blood.  No beliefs to speak of. No ideals to live up to. And they are pretty much indistinguishable from their counterparts in the opposition. Karl Rove is hated by Democrats and James Carville by Republicans, but they could easily switch sides.  And if they were to do so, so would the hatreds.

By some strange quirk of human nature, the Players always wind up in charge of the party. This is in accordance with Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which holds that every organization contains people who work for the cause and people who work for the organization, and without exception it is the latter who always wind up in charge.

In a suicidal spiral ever since Reagan, the Republican Party has all but purged its Saints. That's why they have to keep invoking the memory of Reagan. It's a party of Players vs. Player-wannabes. It's gotten so cynical that many of their Useful Idiots have wised up and joined the Tea Party.  There's a moment in Shostakovich's orchestral tone-poem "Stepan Razin" where the Czar's goons are trying to rouse the rabble to cheer the impending execution of Razin, a Cossack rebel for whom the rabble should really be sympathizing if they had their thinking caps on straight.  It's a musical moment full full of empty, hollow, forced huzzahs.


 
That's what the Republican Party sounds like when they invoke the spirit of Reagan.  Nobody is buying it, and Ronnie, if his spirit is loitering nearby,  is taking one of his famous naps.

And that's why Romney is struggling just a bit. He's somewhat hard to read, though. Seems too pure to be a Player, too non-ideological to be a Saint, and too smart to be a Useful Idiot.

Once I was a Useful Idiot. As John Lennon said, it took me so long to find out. But I found out.