Is Scott Walker's "fixation" on Reagan "creepy"?

The Capital Times writer Paul Fanlund says so, as he identifies "3 Themes" in Scott Walker's just-published book "Unintimidated." The other 2 themes are "He throws even his allies under the bus" and "His egocentricity is just bizarre." This is the Cap Times, appealing its readership of Madison liberals who've been hating Walker for the last 3 years and have been hating Reagan even longer.

On the Reagan "fixation," there's Walker's annual Reagan birthday party (which is also the anniversary of his wedding to his wife Tonette). Here's how Walker describes the party in 2011, which was just before the big Wisconsin protests began.

[On] Saturday, February 12, Tonette and I hosted a dinner at the Executive Residence to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birthday. (I had been in Dallas to see the Packers win the Super Bowl on the sixth, his actual birthday, so we postponed the celebration by a week.) 

Meade and I were reading the book out loud together last night, and at that parenthetical, I said: "Oh, yeah, the protests blotted out all the great afterglow feeling we were having over winning the Super Bowl." That was sad!

Tonette and I host a dinner each year on Reagan’s birthday. We serve his favorite foods— macaroni and cheese casserole, and red, white, and blue Jelly Belly jelly beans— and have musicians perform patriotic songs and Irish music. 

Aw, come on. That's creepy?! That's incredibly sweet. Who gives a party and serves mac-and-cheese and jelly beans? It's beyond unpretentious, and it's just charming and nice. Why shouldn't Republicans celebrate Ronald Reagan, their modern-day icon? And I give Walker credit for putting the celebration on February 6th (or 12th) instead of March 30th (in the style of the Democrats, with their icon JFK (see Rule #8, here)).

It is a wonderful evening, and serves as a reminder for me each year to be hopeful and optimistic just like Ronald Reagan. It happens to be a dual celebration because President Reagan’s birthday is also our wedding anniversary. Tonette jokes that I never forget our wedding anniversary because it is Reagan’s birthday.

Well, isn't that a really low-key and generous way to make your anniversary something that's fun for other people you know? But for Fanlund, that's part of a creepiness profile.

Hey, Fanlund, ever consider whether you're creepy? Maybe Walker seems creepy to you because deep down you know the way you look at him is creepy.

"Optimism: trend alert?"

NY Daily News caption from its Fashion Week coverage under a photograph of a Kate Spade bag that — I am not kidding — looks like this:



That may represent a trend, but it is not optimism. It's painful sarcasm and hopelessness about a lost past that wasn't even any good anyway.

That bag, with the burlap fabric and "homemade" childish embroidery, references the early 1960s. (I remember those idiotically cheerful bags ladies carried on the boardwalk.) Perhaps the Kate Spade operation is alluding to the 50-year retrospective on the ultimate crushing of hope that is descending upon us this fall, the Kennedy assassination.

If you're medicated, you might look at that bag and see optimism. Do you complete the sentence to make lemonade? Those words don't appear on the bag (not on that side anyway). Face it: This burlap monstrosity is intended to make you feel bad. Life sucks. Suck a lemon.

"Coach is a good proxy for mid-to-upper-income and so-called aspirational spenders world-wide."

"Coach is 'a style that conveys a sense of treating oneself,' said Paul Swinand, retail analyst at Morningstar Inc. MORN -0.49% 'There are a lot of people that find it very compelling.'"

The link goes to a WSJ article that requires a subscription. I can give you a link that will work in case you want to do some aspirational spending. Or maybe you'd just like to talk about the concept of aspirational spending.

Is aspirational spending something we should be happy to see — a signifier of optimism — or something we should decry? Here's an article from 2010 declaring the "aspirational consumer" dead:

"Aspirational marketing is a technique in which the goal is to sell items to people who can’t afford it." Ouch.

"Marketers have long known that we have an aspirational society, and they've gone heavily after those consumers," observed Claire Ratushny, a brand-positioning consultant based in Eastford, Conn.

"Now, 'aspirational’ is a dirty word."

Should we buy a slightly expensive handbag as a way to say it's 2013 and we're feeling fine? The audacity of hope, baby! "Hope" is the thing with feathers... and handbags.

***

Do aspirationalistas leave the tag on?

"Why the Conspiracy Theorists Will Have a Tough Time With Boston."

"The attacks in Boston lack a number of the factors they need to concoct a really compelling conspiracy theory...."

Writes David Weigel, but is Weigel a man with the kind of imaginative, suspicious mind that is drawn into teasing out the limitations in an official story or is he the sort of complacent optimist who hopes there will be no more trouble? I don't know, but his list of 4 boldfaced "factors" doesn't particularly impress me. Show some respect for the conspiracy thinkers out there. And they are out there.

A man preferred the wife he had before she started taking anti-depressants.

The old sarcasm and sense of the absurd aligned with his, and now it's gone, superseded by optimism.

"Why Aren’t More Americans Fired Up About Inequality?"

Think Progress tells us it's something called "system justification":

[P]eople are “motivated to defend, bolster, and rationalize the social systems that affect them — to see the status quo as good, fair, legitimate, and desirable,” because it serves their own internal needs and desires as humans. It helps them “manage uncertainty and threat and smooth out social relationships,” and “enables people to cope with and feel better about the societal status quo and their place in it” ....

[T]here’s a powerful need in our own lives to reduce difficult feelings and anxieties when confronting the limitations of our social and economic order. 

It's true that people seek meaning in whatever exists. Everything happens for a reason. God has a plan. It's for the best. We want to like what we must deal with. It's a life skill. People who lack it are depressed. But we should also develop our critical thinking. That doesn't mean that if only we could think critically we'd get fired up about wealth inequality. Just because we're motivated to believe that the status quo is good doesn't mean the status quo isn't good. The fact that something currently exists is some evidence that it works better than untried, untested alternatives.

[C]hronically high system-justifiers, such as political conservatives, are happier (as measured in terms of subjective well-being) than are chronically low system-justifiers, such as liberals, leftists, and others who are more troubled by the degree of social and economic inequality in our society. 

Given that the left position is inherently depressive, it's interesting that showbiz folk have succeeded in making it feel good to be left-wing.

Cass Sunstein reviews "Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism."

That's a book by Sarah Conly, published by Cambridge University Press. 206 pages, $95. $95! Fortunately, we cannot be coerced to buy that. I will exercise my autonomy and refrain from buying it. I'll just read Sunstein, for free, here.

[A] significant strand in American culture appears to endorse the central argument of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty....

the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.

Sunstein refers to social science research that shows people actually aren't very good at making decisions for themselves. We have "present bias" (and don't pay enough attention to the future), we're bad at assessing probability, and we're "unrealistically optimistic."

Until now, we have lacked a serious philosophical discussion of whether and how recent behavioral findings undermine Mill’s harm principle and thus open the way toward paternalism. Sarah Conly’s illuminating book Against Autonomy provides such a discussion....

To Mill’s claim that individuals are uniquely well situated to know what is best for them, Conly objects that Mill failed to make a critical distinction between means and ends. True, people may know what their ends are, but sometimes they go wrong when they choose how to get them....

If the benefits justify the costs, she is willing to eliminate freedom of choice, not to prevent people from obtaining their own goals but to ensure that they do so....

A natural objection is that autonomy is an end in itself and not merely a means. On this view, people should be entitled to choose as they like, even if they end up choosing poorly. In a free society, people must be allowed to make their own mistakes, and to the extent possible learn from them, rather than facing correction and punishment from bureaucratic meddlers. Conly responds that when government makes (some) decisions for us, we gain not only in personal welfare but also in autonomy, if only because our time is freed up to deal with what most concerns us....

 As for Sunstein himself, he prefers a softer form of government manipulation, described in the article and in his book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."