Fascinoma

Mephisto in Mississippi

2012-01-21T11:08:00.005-05:00

A friend of mine writes thats he's joining the Republicans Voting for Obama Because They Can't Stand Any These Assholes, which I completely understand. After all, by any historical standard Obama is a moderate (and milquetoast) Republican, and the members of the Clown Show are now all really plainclothes agents of the KKK.

It truly is as if Ronnie Reagan went out to the Mississippi crossroads and made a deal with the devil, to wit: You can have absolute power, but you must champion ignorance and bigotry to get it. It's been the GOP playbook ever since.

Clearly Newt thinks that offer hasn't expired.

Three-Letter Entities

2011-12-16T09:24:00.002-05:00

When you look under the white sheet of Republican bigotry, there is really nothing -- not even a a ghost. Free markets, small government, strong defense, family values: these aren't ideas, they aren't even really meaningful slogans except as code for punching hippies and brown people and whoever else they don't like today. They' re really more like the words Japanese vendors put on t-shirts because they like the look of English. Meaning, in the normal sense, isn't important.

As an illustration, here's the way a market "free" of regulation really looks.

Number 5

2011-11-08T09:11:00.004-05:00

Think what you will about Herman Cain's nonsensical tax plan, proud ignorance of politics and geography, the fact that he didn't know China has had the bomb for 50 years, his willingness to play the Clarene Thomas Racial Victim Card while doing the bidding of racists, and of course the point that he was first a peddler of bad junk food, and then a skirt-chasing-though-married lobbyist, here from Woman Number 5, is the real kicker:

She was "suspicious of Cain's motives and declined to set up the date," the Examiner reporter wrote.

That prompted Cain to reply, "Then you and I can have dinner." Instead, some of Donella's co-workers suggested a group outing.

“I couldn’t swear that he had some untoward intentions, but we all thought his tone was suspect and we didn’t feel comfortable putting him in touch with that woman,” Donella, whom the Examiner identified as an independent who voted for President Barack Obama in the last election, was quoted as saying.

She said she didn't witness any "inappropriate sexual behavior" at the group dinner. But she claimed he asked the waiter for two $400 bottles of wine, and then stiffed the rest of the group when it came time to pay.

Women Are Laughing at You

2011-11-03T09:55:00.003-04:00

It's target rich environment what, with a whole traveling circus of mental midgets vying for the GOP nomination, or at least pretending to be candidates so as to sell books, pump up their speaking fees, and, above all, gratify their narcissism. But one would almost have to pay attention to come up with a good blog post about all that.

But I dunno, I've been commenting a bit lately on other blogs etc, so I guess I do sorta feel the itch still. On a positive note, I went o see St. Vicnent at the 9:30 Club the other night and that was very, very cool -- one of the few shows I've seen that turned out much better than I expected. Annie Clark is like the daughter of Rachel the Replicant. Maybe she plays the music Rachel's engineers put in her dreams.

On a bitterly amusing note, this post (Best All Round Blog Post I've Read in Awhile) from Whiskey Fire about the upsurge in right-wing macho bullshit since Cain's sexual harrassment story broke. What maroons! Personally, I kind of like the way Amurka's most executin' governor is dishing out a high-tech lynching to its most reprehensible suckbutt. Poetic injustice.

Season's Greeting

2011-10-03T13:29:00.003-04:00

I have been writing lots on other projects and so not letting myself blog for fear of confusing the Muse. But I have noted, as we precipitate into Fall in a handbasket, that for the last few days, here in the Imperial City, there has been a very odd tendency for it to start raining at precisely the moment the sun breaks through. Just now I noted the latest iteration of same from the more-windowed top floor of the Ministry . Just what it means I couldn't say, but back in my youth some of the most dixified gals would say it happens when "the devil is laughing."

Verily, I believe.

Faith-Based Initiative

2011-09-11T15:41:00.000-04:00

Trade Center

Minute by minute the emergency metastasized
into black-hole disaster, collapsing into, unto itself,
its algebraic increments detonating exponentially.
The reactionary tabloids saw Satan’s face frozen
for a moment in the smoke, missing the big picture,
the triumph of ideas over disproportionate force:
an infinitesimal investment in offense precisely
applied to yield infinite collateral dividends.
The dominoes still fall through the economy,
the fallout deforms the very genome of democracy.
A terrible myth has arisen from the stricken city,
a symbol which will outlive anything we recognize.

Miscellany

2011-09-01T10:41:00.004-04:00

An hypothesis: moral judgment ought always to be particular, about particular acts and actors. Bigotry is in essence moral generality -- group x is less good (brave, trustworthy, loyal, clean etc) than group y. But this brings us back to paradox. Can we say that bigots are less moral than others who do not so generalize? I suspect we can, but I wonder how we could test this empirically.

On the one hand I suspect that people who believe absurdities will commit atrocities, on the other I suspect that what people "believe" is to the exact degree it conflicts with their actions irrelevant. This what the man was supposedly trying get at, 'By your acts shall ye be judged.' It doesn't matter what a televangelist tycoon "believes." He's still separating poor fools from their meager money with bullshit.

It occurs to me that Obama is probably going to lose, for the reason he deserves to lose: because he did not go after the war-profiteering crime syndicate the GOP has become. He was elected to protect us from them, and he thinks he's supposed to "work with them."

The Lobbyist laments the screwing of the children in the divvying of public treasure. We are not eating our seed corn so much as distilling it into moonshine. Or ethanol perhaps.

Whole Lotta Shakin'

2011-08-24T11:05:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I was on the phone with the Lobbyist when the earthquake hit. Being an erstwhile Angelino, and otherwise experienced at such temblors, I knew what it was right away, if not necessarlly, what to do about it. The Lobbyist rang off quickly and evacuated her building. I watched my co-workers abandon ship and then looted the communal office supplies. After about 4 PM, the work-mood being broken, and my co-workers almost all departed, I headed out and boarded the subway, for two stops. My train had a malfunction of some sort which caused me and all my fellow passengers to be offloaded to a jammed platform, next to which the broken train sat, preventing any replacement. I decided to walk, since it was a beautiful afternoon and it was only a couple of miles.

The streets of downtown were gridlocked becaude many traffic signals were haywire. But every bar along Connecticut Avenue was jammed with happy evacuees, people who got outside and discovered it was beautiful and so decided to knock off early and/or wait out the bad traffic. My heart went out to the many poor-schmuck waitrons who arrived at the restaurants where they work expecting the sleepy 3-to-5 time when they could mix mixers, fold napkins, eat their own meals, and othewise gear up for actual business, only to be swamped by earthquake-related goldbricking.

Today I noticed that the Post had a big headline "Earthquake Jolts DC Area." Well, no shit Sherlock. This strikes me as the quintessence of modern journamalism; it's not really about news, per se, it's about confirming what everybody already "knows."

Mourning in America

2011-08-19T14:16:00.001-04:00

Offertory

Every day they’ve that much more
Of cops, courts, corporations, Korps;
They thank their God of pure Armed Force

With freedom’s bruised, insemened corpse.

Sunday Meditations

2011-08-14T14:02:00.004-04:00

At least in America, today's typical "Christian" believes fervently those aspects of dogma and scripture which are juvenile, cowardly, atavistic, self-excusing, and sentimental. On the other hand, with respect to the difficult lessons -- tolerance, brotherhood, self-abnegation, and honesty -- which Jesus supposedly imparted by precept, parable and example, the Christian finds Christ totally full of shit. Yet the careerist clergy does not point this out.

The atheist's beliefs are quite often logically and morally consistent, consistent with the empirical evidence of the world (save for the ethical leap of faith), and consistent with the atheist's behavior. The fundamentalist's beliefs are nonsensical, superstitious, and abrogate morality for the capricious preferences of the jealous and bigotted diety, and are blithely set aside for worldly gain or pleasure. Yet the atheist must respect the Bible-thumper's faith, and not vice versa. Jesus wept.

Expect GOP Retirements

2011-08-08T16:15:00.003-04:00

It appears master strategist Nancy Pelosi only poses as a total fucking idiot. She has virtually ensured many retirements from most Christian-Right wing of Congress by tricking Boehner into abolishing the Congressional Page Program. I expect that some of the former Congressmen will go into the Catholic priesthood where they can continue to mentor young boys.

Doing the Gipper Proud

2011-08-03T09:18:00.003-04:00

Joe Walsh, congressional Tea Party Darling comes, off even at a glance, as a smug, vicious twit, narcissist to his superficial core. And it is the opposite of surprising that he turns out to be such a sanctimonous hypocrite, telling the world about goverment expenditure, "I won't place one more dollar of debt on the back of my kids....," while stiffing them for child support to the tune of $117, 347.

This kind of hypocrisy it is not incidental to the right-winger, it is essential. Today's Republicanism is the creed of the self-blind projectionist. Sanctimonious hypocrisy is its life force.

Jimmy Carter II

2011-08-01T08:50:00.002-04:00

BO has all the political acumen of Jimmy Carter, with none of the commitment to principle.

It seems to me that he ought not be reelected, whatever the cost. If you do not exact a penalty for such behavior you are indeed condoning it.

Young Republicans

2011-07-27T09:56:00.001-04:00

I recently had dinner with an old friend who avowed that he is a Republican, and according to Sunday’s New York Times young people (especially the less-educated), are trending more Republican of late which leads me to wonder, are these people ignoring the real Republican platform or drawn to it? Might it help to elucidate the things common to virtually all Republican politicians:

Climate change denial.

Religious bigotry: the fervent wish to see “God” returned to the public classroom and Creationism given equal footing with evolution there.

Coded race-baiting bigotry, up to and including actively seeking to suppress minority voting with phony voter fraud scandals.

Voodoo economics: the something-for-nothing superstition that tax break pay for themselves, and that concentrating wealth in the hands the few “creates jobs.”

The fervent wish to dismantle environmental, workplace safety, food safey, and product safety regulations, and abolish the agencies that enforce them.

Orwellian warmongering -- a reflexive enthusiasm for whatever war a (Republican) President provides pretexts for, especially if it intersects with the racial and religious bigotry that forms the party’s life force.

An acceptance of warrantless wiretapping, torture, extrajudicial incarceration and execution, as the President’s prerogative in the eternal wars of his choosing.

Belief that pregnancy is a proper penalty for sex, and enthusiasm for governmental interference in the most private moral decisions of the citizenry.

The prioritizing of corporate rights over those of the citizen.

An eager willingness to pander to the most proudly ignorant, racist, xenophobic among us, and to exacerbate these tendencies among the citizenry.

My God Is Bigger Than

2011-07-14T13:15:00.004-04:00

As I was descending to the Underworld Expresss this morning I passed a soul rising on the blood-spattered (no idea what that was about) steps of my station and I noted his tie. It seemed to have some sort of Old School pattern on it and reflexively I scanned to see if it might possibly be a school of my acquaintance. But no, not the Ohio Boys Reformatory, not even a school -- the little gold and black repeating embelems, proved on close inspection, to be a pair of disembodied hands pressed togther in ostentatious prayer. The latent Satanist in me recoiled inwardly.

The other day, as I was running, I passed a couple of gals steaming up the Mass. Avenue sidewalk, past Joe Biden's place, in black chador. I was hot in just running shorts and shoes, these gals, though they weren't running, must've really been suffering in those getups. My heart did not go out to them however.

It strikes me that there is a whole lot of very public piety about these days, and more all the time. All at a time when warmongering, fuck-thy-neighbor materialism is fast becoming the semi-official creed of the land -- and the world that slavishly imitates it. I think it goes to show that this kind of ostentatious display, this sanctimonious exhibtionism, is precisely the opposite of what it purports and idiotically even considers itself to be. It is not merely Godless, but godless, soul-less. A backsliding, self-blind, moronic credulity is quickly replacing all that is noble and transcendent within humankind.

It Couldn't Happen Here

2011-07-12T14:28:00.003-04:00

It may be anything by safe to say, but it is nonetheless true, that Rupert Murdoch has done more damage to Western Democracy than the Communist Party, Al Qaeda and the Medellin Cartel combined. He's been pouring poison in our ears for years.

It would be really nice if the hacking scandal led to his demise and to that of his underlings. But soon enough the New York Times will be running a story about how he weathered this crisis like a real pro and came out smelling like a rose. Because that's how degraded our discourse has become -- in no small part due to Rupert Murdoch.

This Modern World

2011-07-07T09:00:00.004-04:00

The most salutary thing that could come of the Casey Anthony Case is would be Nancy Grace's committing seppuku but that ain't gonna happen. That would require some self-awareness, some sense of personal responsibility and the capacity for shame. Satan take the capacity for shame from people like Nancy in trade for the promise of fame -- or at least air time.

But the thing to really remember about the case is not the travesty of justice (we piss on justice in this country all day, every day), but its quintessence as values-porn. The case pushed all the right buttons as Amanda points out: a victim so innocent she's practically a snowflake baby; a defendant who's demonstrably slutty, has tattoos, and has Hispanic paramours. This case is just right to inflame the resentment and bigotry of rubes coast to coast.

Never mind that tots die every day in this country due to the stupidity and/or depravity of their waste-case parents. Little is done about this and no power in heaven or on earth can make the media take an interest if, say, the moron in the dock is fat and black. It's just not good TV. But get a pouty-hot redneckette in handcuffs before the cameras, and not only can she focus the lady of the house's maternal outrage, but Dad can think in the shower about how he would punish and punish the little slut.

The fundamental truth is that this was a Show Trial. It had nothing to do with getting justice for anyone. If we were at all interested in justice the entire Bush administration would be awaiting their dates with the firing squad. The Show Trial is about distracting us from facts like that. It's also about scapegoating, about making a human sacrifice to the "principle" of justice, rather than, say, trying to bring about justice in a rational, workaday, painstaking manner.

Casey Anthony did it, some form of "it", I dare say. But Dick Cheney had people tortured to death. Casey probably won't be bragging about it the way Dick does. So there are travesties and travesties.

R.I.P. U.S.A.

2011-07-04T12:08:00.002-04:00

I can't really see the slightest cause for optimism on the nation's nominal birthday. The ship of state lists ever more to the right aided by the vileness of our talking heads and the complicit cowardice of the Democrats.

Soon enough the thieving mad fools of the Reich Wing will precipitate real economic disruption, the kind that causes incalculable widespread suffering, which, in turn, inspires rage against the putative authors of the catastrophe. The Foxagandists will exploit this into a Tall Trees Moment wherein the aggrieved masses will turn on the very people who decried the from the start the folly and predations of the Kleptocracy. Perhaps the Capitol will burn so Rick Perry (or similar) can blame it on the liberals.

This said, here's cool subjective-P.OV. video of a firework's one mortal orgasm.

America's Feudal Future

2011-06-22T08:55:00.005-04:00

Obviously not feeling blogtastic lately, trying to write other things and so reluctant to fire literary synapses on this exercize. But what the hell.

I was reading something about how people are prejudiced against the candidacy of Mormons like Romney and Huntsman, almost to the degree they are against gays and atheists. And this was reported like it was a bad thing. Mormons believe some really whack shit, but if we're skeptical of the judgment for people who believe errant nonsense, why then, we're religious bigots apparently. But maybe they should poll how people feel about a Scientologist Candidate, a Holocaust Denier candidate. How about a Raping Babies Cures AIDS candidate? (Are all "beliefs" to be held equal?) What about a candidate who advocates emulating Christ's life of voluntary poverty, humility and pacifism -- a "Christian" as it were? For sure that asshole wouldn't stand a chance against the muscular, Navy Seal Jesus of American wet dreams.

It seems to me that many of the problems American "democracy" faces stem from our backsliding into moronic superstition. Democracy became possible when the Enlightenment debunked the God of kings, nullifying their Divine Right to steal from the people. But nowadays everybody in office must be a "believer." Woe unto the Congressional schmuck who didn't go out and sing "My God Is Bigger Than Your God" on the Capitol steps come 9/11. The problem is: people who will believe in Creationism and the Holy Trinity, will also believe in Master Racism, Trickledown Economics and Small Government.

Last night the lobbyist and I watched the rerun Nightline thing on Bernie Madoff, and I was struck by a particular admission from one of his fund-raisers, who himself grew quite rich in the scam. He said he wondered, as he was rolling in the "easy money," how this could possibly be. He had never worked hard for it, he explained at one point. Nor did he question it. Finally he and his wife concluded, "It's God's will," that they be rich. Just as George Bush concluded that it was God's will that be be President.

So here's my vison of the future: The Theocons will rule under Divine Right, in pomp and impunity, with support of the snake-handling, churchmouthing masses, because of course, only their capricious God can create a Good mysteriously and inexplicably higher than truth, merit, fairness, justice. These mere earthly, neighborly goods will be set aside, because it is God's unknowable will. Then will begin the witch hunts and crusades in earnest.

Free Market in Operation

2011-05-24T12:58:00.003-04:00

I was chatting with my brother last week about the Unicornians, the sort of Fountainhead- thumping zealot who thinks that free markets will save the world and that regulation is the root of all evil and he was saying the only true free markets are agrarian barter systems, especially in hand-to-mouth subsistence societies. But there's are other sorts of free market: the crack corner, and the boulevard of streetwalkers. Though there too, somebody is always trying hard to monopolize those outlaw businesses, which is to say, regulate it for his own profit.

It occurs to me: should one actually be speaking to one of these zealots one might point out -- a free market has no values, just prices. So, for instance, Mr. Glibertarian, Mrs. tea Party, how much is your daughter's virginity worth? Not surprisingly, from the righteous state of Utah, comes one answer.

Strange Is Truther Than Fiction!

2011-05-17T09:20:00.003-04:00

I read this weird thing about some Korean guy who crucified himself (to death!) recently and was instantly reminded of the great Alan Dugan poem Love Song: I and Thou.

Where there's a will there's a way apparently.

Let Them Eat Hate

2011-05-11T08:43:00.004-04:00

Last night I made the mistake of listening to Rachel Maddow and guest talk about all the fascistic things being jammed through the Florida legislature by the sleazebag governor, a health-care scammer who should be in jail, but no, in the Graveyard of the Republicans he's king! Scott wants to drug test all welfare recipients and all state employees, regardless of any probable cause. This probably won't fly with the federal courts, but that doesn't mean it won't become Florida law. There are also about a trillion anti-abortion measures about to be ratified and a reduction in unemployment benefits -- in a state with high unemployment. But here's my favorite: Florida Satate has apparently pimped its econ department out to the Kock brothers for $1.5 million. For that street-whore price they get to call the shots on what gets taught and who gets hired in that department; hence they get to ensure that all kinds of Ayn-Randian voodoo economics gets passed off as knowledge.

Florida, like Arizona, and Virginia, and some other places I could mention, is rapidly getting so fucked up that decent people should get together and boycott the tourism and industry of such places. (Apparently they already have in Arizona.) But won't that hurt the poor and workers? some might say. I say, what's the alternative, a sternly worded letter? When you hit these Reich-wing asholes in the wallet, they feel it. When they hear from their troglodytic constituents that their bullshit is costing them money, they hear it. Nothing else will do it, short of incarceration. These people are basically psychopathic. They like to enrage people. It's only when that rage gets translated into effective action and bites them in the ass that they think better of it.

Condition Beige in Situation Room

2011-05-06T09:33:00.004-04:00

We have definitely gone through the post-modern looking glass when the "news" consists partly of our "leaders" watching TV. Here that image gets the respect it deserves from Gawker.

I also like a gloss on the situation from Jesus' General: "Sec. Clinton realizes that Safeway closes at midnight. Bill couldn't have stared at ice cream until 4 AM."

Cheap Veneer of Civilization Peels Back

2011-05-02T08:48:00.004-04:00

I spent the evening writing about oht and kultcha and barely turned on the TV, so I didn't get to see Obama cut into Celebrity Apprentice (take that Donald!) to announce the killing of Osama. In fact I learned about it this morning from the Weather Channel of all places. I surfed around the news a bit just to see if I'd heard right and landed on David Ignatius of the WaPo spoutning some bvullshit about how the "enhanced interrogations" of six years ago had led to a nickname of a Osama's courier which ultimately led, he implied strongly, to last night's killing, thereby justifying his (David I's) endorsement of torture. This was MSNBC.

Something in me had to see what Fox had on, and sure enough, the was Rob Lowe (?) in Times Square watching the moronic throng chant "USA! USA!," as if VJ day had somehow come anew. Fox seems to be playing this on a continuous loop. I must say about the crowd, one doesn't usually see such glee unless there is a lynching or book burning.

Divide and Conquer

2011-05-01T10:24:00.006-04:00

Today, as I was walking to the Ministry to work on my upcoming talk, I had to traverse a stream of people trotting or briskly walking up Pennsylvania Avenue, all wearing t-shirts and/or race numbers labeled "Race for Hope." I don't really know which disease they're hoping to cure by the activity (one would hope it's something to do with reversing the deadly effects of our sedentary life-style), and I admit to having run many such a race in years gone by -- but always for reasons having nothing to do with the putative "cause." In fact I don't really think much of these things. It always seems to me like a Charity Ball -- lucky ducks get to feel better about doing what they like to do, and the fig-leaf for their self-indulgence, the charity, gets the crumbs left over. Maybe.

I assume these "races" actually raise some money for their causes and so guess they do some good. But they also do some harm, I suspect, in the same way that the state lottery does. In a small way, in the mind of the public, they divorce cause from effect, suggesting to people that (even getting them to walk the talk that suggests that) doing something wholly unrelated to a problem will magically somehow address and ameliorate that problem. And while it is true that there are some problems (mostly non-problems actually, like the drug-problem, the Domino Effect, or say the "Jewish Problem") which benefit more from benign neglect than from doing anything, it is not true that actual problems are solved by feel-good diversions. It takes work, risk, commitment, resources, or put simply, sacrifice -- a word we shrink from like vampires from the light.

But beyond the cognitive disconnect being promoted here, beyond the backsliding promotion of magical thinking, it also struck me, in my writer's radar for paranoid narrative, that perhaps there's another vaguely pernicious effect of all this sort of thing. I can almost envision some Evil Genius at the top of things laughing gleefully at such events, seeing how they distract the well-intentioned, divide their energies into many ineffectual causes, and deplete those energies (quite literally) without any risk of actual change to the status quo. It's a pageant of useless good intentions, as opposed to say, a union march or a lynch-mob of awakened righteousness. "Excellent," Monty Burns would say. "They don't even know what hope they're racing for."

For some reason this, and the Reich-Winger's insistence that government power be decentralized as much as possible, reminds me of the fifty or sixty different badges (besides the Star of David) the inmates of concentration camps were labeled with, and how this helped the very few guards to enslave and exterminate the millions.

Nobody Could Have Predicted

2011-04-20T08:52:00.005-04:00

Condoleeza Rice, the queen of smug, is in so many ways the overrated quintessence of that go-along-to-get-along Satanic banality which so typifies our benighted age: she lent her vestigial blackness as a fig-leaf to the Bushies' Jim Crow claim to the throne, and of course also as fig leaf to the ill-concealed fundamental misogyny of the GOP. As figurehead/fig-leaf she was perhaps the most useless National Security Advisor of all time, ignoring all sorts of explicit warnings, blaring klaxons and strobing idiot-lights to make the 9/11 plot the Most Successful Terror Attack Ever, and then somehow retaining her job. Then she was a key mouthpiece selling the wholly phony causus belli of the Iraq war, after which she signed off on the many war crimes the administration committed in torture chambers around the world.

In a truly just world Condescenda Rice would be in prison, on trial for her life, if not already divvied up for her organs. And in the real world of not too long ago she'd have been shunned by anybody self-respecting. But in the 21st Century, an age without shame or honor, she's still a Princess of the Classical Piano, soon to be trotted out for ratings by those heroes of the Left, Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, to guest star on 30 Rock.

Part of me wants to say, leave it at: "Fuck you Tina Fey. Fuck you Alec Baldwin. Any time I'm ever tempted to listen to anything you have to say, I'll remember this, and flip the channel."

But perhaps it might be more creative and more positive all round to write some barbed jokes for use on the Condi episode. Maybe Tracy Morgan could man up and zing her like he did Sarah Palin. On maybe his character would have some pointed questions about how she came to join a a Willy-Hortonizing, KKK-Lite political organization that takes its life force from bigotries of all sorts, but most especially American whites' hatred of blacks. On maybe Tina Fey could, in a pop cultural reference, wonder if Condi and Laura were secretly "sister wives"?

Put 'em in the comments or better yet, send them to NBC!

Before and After

2011-04-16T12:15:00.004-04:00

So, Barry Bonds has been convicted of obstruction of justice, and got a mistrial on three perjury charges. At least one commentator makes a pretty good case that the obstruction charge is kinda bogus, but it's pretty clear that Bonds wasn't really anxious to come clean, in any forum, on the matter of his steroid use. Personally, I don't care much if Bonds used steroids. As an adult he should be allowed to assume the risks of such things. I understand the league has an interest in policing this, and if I were a player I would resent having to take steroids to compete with those who do. It's wrong, given the league's ban, because it's cheating. But, what the hell: they're professionals -- they're in it for the money; there are powerful perverse incentives in that setup. Indeed the whole professional sports industry is rather perverse with its elevation of semiliterate lunks to demi-god status, its obscene rewards for negligible societal contribution. But I don't lose any sleep over it.

What does get me is that the entire Bush administration was and continues to be a spree of perjury and and obstruction, and nobody's on an eight-year witch-hunt to put any of them away for their countless lies, obfuscations and amnesiac episodes. Maybe if they were black.

We Are All Neville Chamberlain Now

2011-04-04T10:39:00.004-04:00

It's very simple actually: Republicans believe in the free market exactly as Nazi's believe in the Master Race. They think it's science, not superstition. And from this absurdity their atrocities will follow logically.

People who fail to understand this are morally negligent.

Newt Is a Four-Letter Word

2011-04-02T13:18:00.008-04:00

Newt Ginrgrich, is one of the lowest forms of life in the universe, and yet he is regarded with awe by the even lower forms of life, American journalists and Republicans. He thinks that just because he's well documented in all sorts of sworn testimony as a total sleazebag who (let us never forget) served his wife with divorce papers when she was in the hospital with cancer, doesn't think any of this should disqualify him as President. I must admit to being really stuck by his recent "hard working/county lover" defense of his sleazebaggery.

"There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate," said Gingrich, who has been married three times and has admitted having extramarital affairs. "And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn't trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them." Gingrich said he "felt compelled to seek God's forgiveness. Not God's understanding, but God's forgiveness."

So much bullshit in one line. The only thing Newt feels passionately about is the pleasures and perks of Newt. Newt hasn't the slightest idea what is good about America, and what is not good -- principally assholes like himself -- and he sure doesn't feel passionately about the salutary abstractions and marginal moral gains that recommend America. And I can't really see Newt working hard at anything. Maybe he endures long hours of having his ass kissed, but apart from that, where is the evidence he's ever worked hard at anything but Narcissism? But what really gets me is "things happened in my life that were not appropriate." He quickly goes on to say 'I wasn't trapped in situational ethics' except that he just explained that in his situation (which turned his virtues into liabilities) "things happened." He didn't do them, you see; they happened. He wants to rationalize, but he also wants credit for refusing to. A complete sociopath, just like all Bush's closest cronies, utterly incapable of moral self awareness.

Every thief, parasite, sadist and miser has as creed a puerile sophistry which makes his predations and self-inlulgences not only logical but laudable.

I gotta hand it to Newt, he even manages to slime God with his notion of forgiveness, no small achievement. I never have liked the idea that no matter what we do, it's cool with Jesus. That kind of God isn't really a force for good in the universe -- good thing He's only imaginary.

The Literature of Self-Disclosure

2011-03-29T09:31:00.005-04:00

It's kind of interesting -- well, appalling really -- to observe people's behavior on the Metro and speculate on how it encapsulates, epitomizes or otherwise discloses their overall style of living. For instance a significant portion of able-bodied Metro riders take the free ride up the escalator instead of humping their lazy asses up the stairs, as would be better for them, and contribute to system efficiency. Does this mean they are parasitic, free-riding, schlubs in all their dealings, or does it just mean they're a little oblivious or self-indulgent in this relatively small matter? Frankly, I suspect the former, but I'm not sure. And of course there will be times when we all need to take the free ride, and we should be allowed to.

Another aspect of Metropology is reading matter. At the entrances to most stations there will be, weekday mornings, some poorly-paid black people handing out free newspapers, the Express and the Examiner. The former is a "digested" and dumbed-down version of the center-right Washington Post and the latter is the far-right corporatist propaganda sheet of reactionary billionaire Phil Anschutz. (I once spent an afternoon in Phil's company, watching him watch a sporting contest involving one of his many franchises and I am happy to report that his drink of choice on that occasion was Coors Lite, over ice. I think that speaks volumes. ) About half the people on the Metro during morning rush hour will be reading one of these rags, and one must wonder, does their choice declare their political leanings and affiliations? Alas, I suspect it does. Of course a lot of people are also reading really really really creepy stuff, like the Bible (especially popular among Marine officers) and Ayn Rand, and you don't even want to know what these people are up to when not on the train.

There is a certain odious type one sees around town but not so much on the Metro, as the Metro smacks of liberality and socialism. It were better that Republicans motor around in big-block gas-guzzlers whenever possible. Still, some do ride the Metro. And you can be sure that the fat white guy in the red tie and the Burberry, doing his level best to take up all of the two seats -- so as not to have to share with a tree-hugger or a negro, and also just because he deserves it for his many John Galtian contributions to society -- will be reading the corporatist rag with great, self-satisfed concentration. Some people can even read smugly.

Butt Seriously Folks

2011-03-25T09:14:00.003-04:00

Today when I arrived at the Ministry I stepped into an elevator redolent of someone's very recent and vitriolic fart. How rude! It was still vaguely there about half an hour later, having, I supppose, infused the carpetimg. It got me thinking about recent news, which is to say the trend of the last 50 years or so, and it inspired this little lift from Auden: To Republicans hypocrisy is like the smell of their own farts; they secretly like it and they think nobody else notices.

One of Obama's great "strengths" is his prowess at ignoring such farts in the elevator, as if they came from Granny -- the poor dear. The GOP knows that he can be counted on to never point a finger at the authors.

A second, only tangentially related point here: the other day the headline of the year was published, "Crack Found in Man's Buttocks." Tres amusante. Less amusing was the story beneath it, the one which details the drug bust which produced the headline. My bullshit detector went off with a loud flatulent tone when I read it.

You can bet large amounts of money that what happened here was the man in the photo was pulled over for driving while black, then shaken down, and afterwards the probable cause -- the "leafy substance" on the floor of the car -- was dreamed up to make the search sound legal. Soon the officer who squeezeed that one out will be in court testilying, commiting a felony in the name of law enforcement. This happens every single business day in every single city in America. It's just one of the many benefits of America's eternal War on Drugs, one of the reasons our why our prison population is so disproportionately black, and one of the infinitely many fragrances of right-wing hypocrisy.

Pole Dancing for Jesus

2011-03-24T08:58:00.002-04:00

Crystal Dean, who was probably doomed to become a stripper when her parents gave her that porno-name, offers "Pole Dancing for Jesus" classes in Spring, Texas (of course it's Texas), where also of course the local Faux News affiliate is all over it. She says she was "raised around religion n' all" and as a result is "very Christian." She's quite sure that "she's good with God" who "doesn't judge" but if we wanna judge her, go ahead.

Personally I've got nothing against pole dancing. I don't very often go vote for it with a big wad of Washingtons, but I have done so in the past, in such Temples of Terpsichore as Crazy Girls, Jumbo's Clown Room, and Seventh Veil, but that was when I was in L.A. and required to take meetings under such taxing circumstances. Still, I suspect that Jesus would have no problem with pole dancing, so long as the performers were tolerant, peaceful and charitable. He might disapprove of those joints where the dancers are encouraged to feign interest in the customers so as to extract money, but I'm sure Crystal was never like that.

I can't say I much care for the brand of theology that says, 'God doesn't judge.' This is pretty much George W's brand of laissez-faire Christianity: 'Jesus forgives us so, fuck it, bring on the waterboards.'

Finally, I can't say that I actually believe the account, but I do like the anecdote: Crystal says that some folks have come around literally thumping her door with their Bibles for conflating Jesus and sexy nekkedness in this way. I would really like to see some video of that.

Big (Insert Size-Joke Here) Love

2011-03-21T09:17:00.004-04:00

So, last weekend I undertook a difficult and dangerous mission to the Nutmeg State. This is a dangerous place, apparently awash with the sort of Islamo-Socialists who elect governors who at least give lip service to raising revenues by taxing the rich. I frequented the art galleries of New Haven and the better restaurants of the area so as not to associate with such Enemies of Private Property. (They were blessedly undergrad free, since they're all decamped for Spring Break to places without drinking ages.)

I got back in time to watch, at the Lobbysist's Pleasure Palace, the finale of Big Love which I thought they pulled off about as well as it could be done. I thought the little nod toward reconciliation between Nickie and her sexpot daughter made no sense whatsoever, and I didn't much care for Margene's haircut in the final scene, but in general it was good TV. Brilliant that the plodding, Bushite neighbor should assert his flagging manhood in such crystalline Second Amendment style. I mean, if you can't shoot a man for preëmptively sodding your lawn, what kind of country is this?

I was a little disappoint that there wasn't some graphic depiction of lesbian epiphany among the sister-wives, since it seemed to me that's the way the narrative really wanted to go. But maybe that's my series and not theirs.

What He Said.

2011-03-14T09:05:00.002-04:00

I meant to piss on the passing of that old Clinton-hater David Broder, but it was difficult to come up with anything especially pithy (Know: pun intended.) about his particularly bland brand of evil's banality. Fortunately somebody was more inspired than I am on this subject: Driftglass. So I'll just let him do the talking. Here is a pithy sample:

David Broder -- this "Dean of the Washington press corps" -- totally missed out on covering the greatest story of his time; the utter collapse of the American news media and the mutation of the GOP from a political party into a dangerously fascistic cesspit of oligarchs, lunatics and rubes.It was a story which his background and years of hard work had almost uniquely prepared him to cover, and one that was literally staring him in the face for much of the last 20 years.

And he completely fucking blew it.

So megadittoes Driftglass, thanks for reminding us what a milquetoast shithead Broder was. By the way, I recommend clicking through to the Driftglass site, and checking out the new masthead, one of the most fabulous in the whole Blogosphere.

Euthanize NPR

2011-03-09T08:29:00.002-05:00

So the Republicans are going to try again to defund NPR, and use as ammunition the fact that an executive was videotaped calling the Tea Partiers racist. Meanhwile NPR suspends the executive, who's on the way out the door anyway, for telling the abundantly obvious truth. It just goes to show you, NPR should indeed be defunded, because they're craven chickenshits too ready to trim their sails to the breaking of GOP winds. Once upon a time, say about 1986, NPR news provided useful counterpoint to Reaganaut bullshit and corporate shilling. But those days are long gone. The slant at NPR is distinctly rightward these days. Sure they don't drop as many g's as the Bushies and so lazy complacent suburbanites still think of them as the voice of Liberalism, but I haven't heard on NPR a vigorous critique of anything corporate, military, right wing or even downright facist since at least 9/11. Somehow they always manage to provide a weak paraphrase of the sane position, and then turn the mike over to a well-prepared shill for the GOP interest who provides the last polished turd. And then the NPR folks go home to their Bethesda McMansions confident they've provided balanced journalism. Maybe shaking Fawn Williams' hand on the way out the door.

Well, a false friend is worse than a frank enemy. I can get classical music from Pandora. com and anything I want from sattelite radio. NPR, drop fucking dead.

Plaza Mayor

2011-03-05T14:41:00.004-05:00

I know my fans will want to know that I'm safely returned from another dangerous tax-paid mission abroad where I was menaced at every turn with rich food, strong drink, seductive exotics, and worst of all, treasures of Western Culture. I eluded the forces of evil by spending all my free time on the move -- trekking through the ancient, labyrinthine streets, in and out and around the vast major art galleries, cathedrals, palaces amd parks, never retracting my steps (unless totally lost), never dining in the same fabulous restaurant twice, or not twice in a row anyway. Thus did I shake any surveillance the forces of evil might have attempted, and so was able to accomplish my vital mission in the furtherance of Goodness and Freedom.

Above you can see somehard intelligence: two lads looking on as a foreign agent deploys a vast weaponized soap bubble, designed to dazzle and confuse our troops in the field. Either that or he's unrolling the world's largest superthin condom -- which would suggest that America is falling dangerously behind in male-enhancement technology.

Athletes of Evil

2011-02-19T11:25:00.002-05:00

I'm tempted to say that most people do the best they can by their own lights, but I think closer to the truth is that most people are no better than they have to be. At the very least, certainly many people are no better than they have to be. But the crucial question, the question with which I started this blog, is this: are some people evil? Corollary questions include things like when do they become evil? Are we evil in the moment or to the degree we ascribe evil to others?

The fine novelist Richard Price presents a well-researched practical viewpoint on the matter when in Lush Life he has a New York homicide cop reflect upon how most perpetrators are really just sad sacks, morons or fuck-ups bumbling through life in an incidentally lethal way, although even this hardened character allows for the rare existence of what he calls "athletes of evil," those, I suppose, who go the extra mile in brutalizing, bullying and betrayal because it delights them to cause anguish. I'm sure there is this impulse in all of us, perhaps waiting to express itself in the right dovetailing of opportunity and impunity. Most of us never get that opportunity, except in small ways, and even then we're sickened, in retrospect, when we see it lashing at out some especially helpless subordinate -- because we can.

Still, I read of people like Rupert Murdock and the Kock brothers, already richer than anyone should be, the new kings of our age, and I wonder why they feel the need to inflict more pain, to roll back the real moral gains of Western culture, by seeking again to concentrate all the power with the plutocrats. It just seems cartoonishly evil. I suppose this sort of evil arises (like the Inquisition and Nazism) when people become convinced of a higher good that necessitates tormenting the enemies of that good.

This is of course what it's all about in Wisconsin (a Koch brothers subsidiary), as this editorial makes clear. The "budget crisis" is what their Koch-Puppet governor has ginned up to break the unions, a Republican/Free-Marketeer/Know-Nothing wet dream since unions came into being, and what really makes Ronnie Raygun a saint to these people (See under PATCO.) Collective bargaining gives many people countervailing force against the plutocrats, and so naturally the royals want to disband the unions (not just public-employee unions, all unions), divide and conquer.

Anyway, In honor of recent events, and VD's recent passing I composed this little ditty:

Valentine for Washington

Gone the girls of Fourteenth Street
where once the Jills and johns would meet.
Sidewalks crammed back then with whores,
now host bistros, condos, bars.
The girls of then have left The Life,
in fact, or else they’ve gone to wife.
Not to say the trade has died,
but nowadays it has gone inside.
Now it’s on the internet,
where what you see is what get
(– plus a viral lagniappe,
if you fail to safety-wrap):
Latin Lover, Siamese Twins,
Chocolate Maxi, Nordic Sin,
naughty nanny/dirty diaper –
here it’s called the “David Vitter.”
Others who once walked the streets
gave it up; they can’t compete.
Now the black-robed ruling class
will cheaply sell its pimpled ass;
Antonin and Clarence T
give it up but not for free,
put Justice’s fine scale in hock
to the wealthy brothers Koch.
The Democrats say who has time
to prosecute such petty crimes?
Barrak O and Eric Holder
don’t see any need to bother.
They “look forward,” never back,
and those crimes happened in the past.
Surely none will steal or torture
any time in the near future.
The blow-up doll has just three holes
but modern pols will pimp their souls,
with oaths that are a waste of breath
like the hooker’s “Yes, love. Yes!”
They sell the future for loose change
called on K Street “making rain,”
don the kneepads for the rich

and play the role of prison bitch.

The Ruling Class

2011-02-16T08:28:00.004-05:00

I would bet the rent that Eric See-No-Evil Holder will do all he can to cover up the mess, but you would think that Clarence T's failure to disclose $ 600, 000 in income from right-wing influence peddlers, and his failure to recuse in the Citizens United case, after he'd been wined and dined by the Koch brothers (financiers of the suit) would merit some sort of investigation -- especially given that, in the Citizens United case, it's clear that Antonin Scalia was a benficiary of the Koch brothers largesse too. (Of course if Leura Canary didn't have to recuse, why should anybody?)

Today's legal climate is a Reactionary's wet dream: the courts are at long last packed with people who care little or nothing for the law or justice, and think that the good is what's good for Corporate America -- which is to say the emerging right-wing ruling class among whom they count themselves. The Democrats don't say much these days for fear of being kicked out of the club, becoming "little people" when the plutocrats finallty consolidate all the power.

Virtually everyone seems to forget that America was founded on a class struggle (more than even its authors knew), a war to overthrow any ruling class. Will nobody take up that banner again? Note that, Leura Canary is still a U.S. Attorney (why?) , and Obama isn't really doing much about getting judges appointed and approved. We will have justice when the last Democrat is strangled with the entrails of the last Republican.

Fang and Claw and Wings and Bourbon

2011-02-07T11:46:00.005-05:00

To work up an appetite for the Sacramental Foods of SuperSunday The Lobbyist and I walked through yesterday's springlike morning in Rock Creek Park and up through the zoo, where much to our delight there was a pageant of lions, a tumbling scrum of cubs all practicing earnestly to be savage beasts, stalking, pouncing, lying in wait for approaching victims, working through the countless wrasslin' moves that lions must learn in order to thrive in the pride -- the Granby Roll, the Half Nelson, the Leg-Shoot, the Mirror-Reversal Escape, the Jujitsu Flip, the Tail-Bite etc. The two lionesses patrolled the Martial Arts Academy with great dignity, offering correctives and constructve criticism where necessary, and the father sat on the hillock above it all keeping a sharp lookout (whenever not actually asleep) for hyenas, and generally looking as if it was his job to pose for statues -- and that's pretty much it. It was all fabulous. Anybody who doesn't love a show like that can kiss my ass. We also saw otters on parade (otterly ridiculous!) and the Cloud Leopard walking around in his tree and yowling about the dire existential state of the universe. Big teeth on that cat, as one could tell when he was really louding. Yowza.

Afterwards I went out to a StuporBowl party in Arlington that was fabulous. Many great iterations of the Sacred Food (chips, dips, wings, chili etc) abundant drink, children sledding outside, throwing snowballs, tormenting the small, timid, and weak, and generally behaving like the lion cubs. Also old friends and major MILFage. Some sort of sporting contest on the host's drive-in-sized screen as well. Is this a country or what!

I caught a cab back to the District in time for Big Love at The Lobbyist's Dome of Pleasure and Cable Channels. Very weird and fun also.

Borborygmos

2011-02-01T15:18:00.005-05:00

I used to wonder what Kierkegaard meant by a lot of things, like this: "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

Now, of course, I understand this as another of his koäns, in context of his distrust of publicity, of expression. But of course there is a very objective sense in which this is true too. Certainly the average American has no more need of freedom than (as they used to say) a fish does of a bicycle. He has nothing to express that isn't subservient and conventional and insofar as his appetites or business practices are criminalized, he feels entitled to ignore such prohibitions, because the law is so manifestly an ass. Give me libertinage, or give me death!

Rich, spoiled, soft, ignorant -- the American people are like stampeding sheep. If you panic all that stupid passivity in one direction, well, then your enemies have something to fear. As do your friends.

I see the Reactionaries are celebrating Reagan's "centennial." I am again aghast that the Gypper is so rosily remembered. He really was Evil in all its smug, Brylcreemed banality, happy to have power without a use for it, and without any principle limiting its exercise. Of course, most Americans will find this heretical. Ron, evil? Where are the bloody fangs?

God Blows a Smoke Ring

2011-01-26T08:56:00.005-05:00

I so wanted to watch the State of the Platitudes address last night, but on ESPN 2 there were big European girls playing good tennis in Australia and I just couldn't make my hand move the remote. I'm sure I can read the text if I ever want to give myself an infarction. I do understand from a quick surfing of the Sorosphere that he didn't use the word "unemployment" and also that Michelle Batshit (R-Ohio) covered herself with feces during the rebuttal. I sure hope somebody taped it!

I wish people still did political stand-up as in the days of Mort Sahl. Steven Colbert did it at the White House Press Dinner - once - and they almost sent him to Gitmo. Not funny, the High Broders of the Nation said. They were, of course, as always, wrong.

Free jokes here:

I voted for Obama. I felt he had more principles to abandon.

Who knew that by "Change" they meant he'd change into the schmuck he replaced?

Supernova remnant above is, naturally, from APOD.

The Curious Case of Spanker Johnson

2011-01-15T12:55:00.005-05:00

Several people told me I should look at the new book Humorists by Paul Johnson, since it has a chapter on a favorite artist of mine, Thomas Rowlandson. So I put it on my Christmas wish list and my sister got it for me. Had I known that the author was a Thatcherite twit I would probably still have read it, but I would done so through inter-library loan. It's actually sort of interesting and informative on some matters, but it is peculiarly deformed in places by the author's own neuroses, including his misogyny. His Reactionary paranoia, is quite evident in the several places where he rails against that Political Correctness which is "fatal to humor." Tories like him always get a little vexed when someone questions their right to piss on the traditional groundlings.

It generally flabbergasts me when people, even people who ought to know better, blithely accept Political Correctness as exclusively left-wing, over-corrective humorlessness, when in fact this kind of fun-police overcorrection functions much more powerfully to suppress critique of the status quo and the power elites. For instance, when people dislike Limbaugh's calling the President "Halfrican," to people like Johnson, they are being too Politically Correct. But when lefties like MoveOn.org, arguing quite correctly that he's about to again sell us the "light at the end of the tunnel," make a little pun on Petraeus' name ('General Betray Us'), the Senate, with Democratic support, passes a resolution condemning the pointed and apt satire. Now that's Political Correctness.

You learn on the first day of law school there's no such thing as justice in or out of court, but sometimes there's comeuppance. Paul Johnson's latest got a really fabulous flogging in the New York Times Book Review, wherein the author, Neil Genzlinger, did his readership another real service: he reminded us of a Salon article where Christopher Hitchens took the Tory douchebag apart, for being simultaneously a philandering fetishist and champion of "family values."

This was apparently before Hitch swooned over Bush in his flight-pajamas and decided that women aren't funny, so it's also sort of doubly instructive. It reminds us of two elusive truths: that assholes sometimes do good deeds, and that as we grow older we do not necessarily grow wiser.

The Irrefutable Is Always Tautological

2011-01-13T08:52:00.004-05:00

Here at the Ministry of Elegance I've been reading and pondering deeply on the aesthetic significance of humor. I had just about figured it all out, in the process discovering a simple, elegant theory that Grandly Unified Everything (metaphysics, religion, aesthetics, history, psychology, economics and Finnegans Wake) and then I happened upon this few seconds of video amazement.

One Grand Unifying Theory shot totally to hell.

Are All Equivalences False?

2011-01-11T09:52:00.005-05:00

No one could have predicted that despite the fact that a Democrat was targeted for assassination after years of unhinged but extremely profitable vitriol from the Reactionaries, that the lesson taken from the incident would be that both sides need to tone down their rhetoric. The comPost's Dana Milbank reminds us that several years ago people were saying very rude things about the Bush administration -- imagine! just because they were grifters, cowards and war criminals some very lowminded people disrespected the Bushies. And this is basically the equivalent of drawing crosshairs on your political opponents and raving about how their empathy menaces the American Way.

But seriously, it's really, really simple. One side thinks violence is totally righteous -- they're all for any kind of war, weapons system, capital punishment, police brutality, tasers, guns for everyone, torture wherever necessary, troops on the border and keeping the black and brown down generally, death to abortionists etc.; one side passionately espouses violent sport and every other kind of macho mayhem, and one side is a lot more skeptical about all that stuff. Moreover it's the violence-loving side that predominates today in the military, among the cops, the corporations, and the courts. So it seeems to me there is a lot more danger -- to basically everybody in the world -- from the American Right, and inherently a lot more menace in their heated rhetoric. The idea that there are, as always 'abuses on both sides,' is as usual, bullshit, a trivial fact in service to the large and heinous lie.

Mr. Fish "sample" is from Harper's.

Truth is subjectivity.

2011-01-07T08:47:00.004-05:00

"Subjectivity is truth, subjectivity is reality," Soren Kierkegaard concludes koänically in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. One could spend years trying to understand what he might have meant by this claim, so surprising in an age (1846, to be exact) increasingly and rightly enraptured with Science. (The Origin of Species would come just 13 years later.) Indeed, some of us have reflected on this notion for the decades since our undergraduate acquaintance with it.

Certainly, one aspect of Kierkegaard's view on the matter is that knowledge is predicated first of all in self-knowledge, from the Delphic γνῶθι σεαυτόν. He seems quite aware of how what we now call "audience consideration" inherently tends to warp our formulations of the truth. He uses, somewhat ironically, Lear's Cordelia an an exemplar of true love, "She loves, and keeps silent." Baudrillard says something similar, "If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity." So -- we must consider not only the apparent facts of any case and what they may lead us to believe, but also why we might wish to believe it, and especially why we might wish to state the case so.

But Kierkegaard was not embracing Berkelian Idealism or Eastern obsessively inward spirituality (though there are certianly parallels between his method and that of Zen). He believed there was an objective reality, right and wrong belief about the world and its history, and that one could grasp the truth about it. He just thought that insofar as that truth was easy or safe to apprehend it was trivial. It was true, but not the Truth.

But, as I have said before, he also believed that the strength of a conviction was inversely proportional to its publicity -- and this fact has its subjective and its objective aspects. The brilliant insight, or even the fervent narrative, can be a startling, powerful, and heretical revelation; but once it's broadly accepted, or ossified into dogma, it becomes trivial, just wallpaper. Thus Christianity was stunningly powerful when it was new, dubious and suppressed, just as was Mormonism. But as these things get mainstreamed they become less powerful. True, there are today a billion soi-dissante Christians in the world, but what a deal of palatial apparatus and non-stop propagandizing it takes to keep them going through their somnambulistic motions. And do any of them think Christianity requires the emulation of Christ or even the following of his precepts? As religions go it's a zombie, operationally undead -- and was even when Kierkeggard was railing against it.

In any case, what prompted this particular meditation was an intersting article in New Yorker The Truth Wears Out which bears Kierkegaard's maxim out quite nicely. From dubious premises, through slipshod methodology to questionable results and foregone conclusions, that's the way modern science (especially medicine and the social sciences) increasingly operates.

The lovely picture above comes to us courtesy APOD (click for better view), where science produces beauty.

I Can't Watch!

2011-01-04T09:11:00.006-05:00

I'm still off news. Soon I'll have a ninety day-chip! And I feel some real mental health effects, or at least some distance from my daily consumption of Truthiness. I've long noted that the morning newspaper is really just a textual hypnotic, an addictive distraction precisely like soap opera, or a sports team's season, missed acutely like a cigarette when it's not on the stoop in the morning, but habit aside, not needed at all.

The news people insist that they're superior to bloggers becuase they deal in "fact," but they really deal in stories, stories which, like any, must be constructed according to the aesthetics of fiction in order to sell.

Their stories must have conflict, antagonists, heavvies/heroes, bullies, underdogs, or perhaps just (especially?) well-matched teams, and of course scores. Score must be kept somehow in numbers: dollars, votes, fatalities, degrees fahrenheit, acres underwater or on fire, et cetera, et cetera. What they call facts are really what the practitioners of fiction sees as "authenticating detail" -- that which charms the reader into suspending disbelief.

I used to try to tell my students this back when I lectured in Contemporary Literature but they mostly stared at me like I was speaking Swahili. What, the news not real? Next Professor X will be telling us God is dead! If their faith in our Free Press were to be undermined, why... where would it end? That might mean... Free Markets don't regulate themselves!

Still, the fact remains, and seems clearer to me the less I drink from the firehose of "news" that spews 24/7, that most of it is precisely authentic as professional wrestling, and its practitioners deserve no more respect than the steroid-freaks and ringmasters of WWF.

Nixon, Reagan, Palin, Satan!

2010-12-17T09:07:00.004-05:00

Here at the Ministry of Elegance people are already laboring mightily to throw the annual Christmas party, a massive feed and booze-up, wherein hardly anybody lampshades or tells the boss off. We're all too elegant for that, and also there is a lot of well-armed security about.

I'm still not paying any attention to the news. Why, as Barbara (Father of our Country) Bush might put it, would I want to besmirch my beautiful mind with that stuff? I don't know if it's making me happier, but it's making me more focused on other stuff which might profit me better. Still, the Lobbyist tells me that the Senate, including many Democrats, voted down the Omnibus Bill (of which, in my news-bubble, word has not otherwise reached me), which means less money for the already impecunious and needy people she represents, and yet we're still shoveling money into the black hole of ForeverWar. The Lobbyist is truly sad, in fact I think she was near tears last night.

On the elevator last night, as I was late leaving the hushed and darkened Ministry I encountered two young women who work on the Top Floor. We joked on the way out about buying Costa Rican real estate against the day President Palin takes office. But it occurs to me, who will stop sexy Sarah from taking the helm? The same wise and decent Americans who elected Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Cheney (twice!)? The courageous and visionary Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and....?

Nixon, Reagan, Palin, Satan! Is that a cheer or a historical trend?

Call of the Wild

2010-12-09T09:35:00.004-05:00

I'm still not watching any news to speak of; in fact I'm paying as little attention as a Washingtonian can to politics -- though I'm peripherally exposed to the machinations of the Kleptocracy by the Lobbyist's daily lot.

It's been very good for my writing, I think. It's like sublimation or something. The psychic energy and scribbler's urge I don't expend on civic eternal vigilance come back to me in the form of intellectual and literary foment. We'll see what comes of this.

Still, I feel the urge to blog a bit. So, I will, on whatever subject. For instance, last night I was running through the frigid darkness and just turning the corner for the last third of a mile up my street, when, just at the top of my peripheral vision I saw something blurry and scurrying on a big tree beside the street. I was an obsessive naturalist as a child and last night I was a bit amazed at how quickly my internalized field guide came back to me. In the space of about a stride my brain-pan flashed "Flying squirrel." I stopped and turned back and circled the tree until I found the little critter splayed head-down against the trunk. As soon as I spotted him he turned and zipped up and around the trunk, in a sort of lightning-fast, hyperpprecise movement that reminds one of hummingbird flight. I eased around the tree some more and spotted the squirrel again, now peering down from the crotch of the tree's great bifurcation, little wombat-eyes shining eerily in the backscattered streetlight. I clapped my hands just to see it move again, and up the tree it zipped, and away, seeming about ten times as fast as a normal squirrel. I ran on, enchanted for a good while, and thinking back to the time when my late sister and I trapped a couple of flying squirrels in our wooden box-trap, on the edge of the Fort Belvoir woods, maybe fifteen miles from my current home. We peered at them for a day and then let them loose. Apparenty they're not that rare but they are nocturnal, and so rarely seen.

This morning, in at trap in my kitchen, there was a mouse, peering up at me with the same sort of black beady eyes. I was rather less enchanted to see him -- perhaps because he's been crapping on my kitchen counters. It's all context I guess.

Extremely Cool

2010-11-26T08:30:00.002-05:00

Here is a bit of space music and the aurora borealis over Norway. A little thing to be thankful for. That is all.

Meretocracy v. Meritocracy

2010-11-23T12:17:00.005-05:00

When visiting my relatives in the Nutmeg State I made the mistake of reading the Hartford Courant's editorial page, primarily for Colin McEnroe, who was, as usual, quite funny and as usual slagging Droopy Dog Lieberman. But just to remain fair and balanced the editors also let Tom Foley, recent loser in the local gubernatorial race, soil a few column inches in a piece entitled Ice Cream For Everyone! Or, How To Win An Election. And what a steaming pile he served up.

Foley is a preppy, a slick and shady operator, and a longtime bagman for the GOP, which explains why, despite being a criminal hothead, he was still made ambassador to Ireland by George W. But Foley really is a gem-quality specimen, and as such he served up some prose that deserves to be remembered for its quintessential GOP-ness, its illustration of the global delusion at the core of Republican thinking. Says Foley:

Politicians win elections by making promises..... This is very different from the business world, where people have a lot of information and personal contact before entering into a business transaction with someone. A reputation for truthfulness and follow-through on commitments is essential for success in business and, therefore, is carefully cultivated and protected.

But politics is different. Saying what people want to hear — even if it
doesn't really add up — and being purposely vague seem to work in politics.
These skills may even be some of the most important for political success. If a
businessman is caught lying to a lender, there will be no loan. If a businessman
makes absurd or vague promises to a customer, there will be no purchase
order.

However, a politician caught lying to voters can still win a lot of votes.

Leaving aside the falsity implied by the article's headline in this context -- that Foley lost because his opponent made more spurious promises than he did. What's more striking here is that Foley apparently believes, or wants us to believe he believes, that the business world is a meritocracy! Such a belief would be a self-serving delusion, paralleled perhaps only in days of old, by Massa's conviction that the childlike slaves are happy. It would require complete amnesia about, for instance, The Savings and Loan Disaster, Enron, the Archer Daniels price-fixing scandal, the Mortgaged Backed Securities Disaster, Bernie Madoff, and innumerable other examples of just how sleazy business-as-usual often is. Some will say these examples just point ot a few bad apples, but in point of fact, in the private sector, just as in all walks, bullshitting, corner-cutting, fact-fudging, book-cooking, expense-padding, resume-inflating, sand-baggging, back-stabbing and outright thievery, grand et petit, are rampant and more or less accepted. If a "reputation for truthfulness and follow-through on commitments" was, in fact "essential for success in business" all commerce would grind to a halt and virtually no MBA would be employed anywhere in the country , and perhaps nowhere the world.

Foley, an MBA himself, seems to have forgotten things like marketing and advertising -- things which in the usual practice deliberately mislead. Indeed, as Neil Postman observes, the message American children rightly take from the countless commercials they're subjected to (and in which modern "business" is predicated) is that "Adults tell lies for money."

The thing is (as I have said before), Republicans speak a special "pro-business" dialect: Advertese, or Spiel if you will. It's all pitch. Like musical notation, this dialect cannot convey truth; it is not built for assertion. Its measure is not truth or falsity, but effectiveness in conveying feeling, in persuasion, seduction, deception, the conjuring of mood or illusion. Speaking spiel as they do, I suspect that Republicans like Foley have come to think in it too, and thinking in a language with no truth-value, they have lost the ability to discern or even care whether their assertions have any correspondence with reality. They have come to believe their own bullshit. It would be sad if it weren't so dangerous and despicable.

We're Not Worthy

2010-11-15T10:26:00.004-05:00

Went to see Wild Target last night, needing an antidote to late imperial decline, existential nausea, intimations of mortality et cetera. As one might suppose of a caper-comedy with Emily Blunt and Bill Nighy, the movie didn't have a brain in its head, and so it served the purpose admirably. Absolutely fabulous in its way. It went on precisely as long as it should have, had just enough violence and tons of Emily behaving badly (as she also did so deliciously in Sunshine Cleaning) in slinky clothes and best of all, no growing, no learning. My kinda film entertainment.

The Lobbyist and I got to see a flash of the National Gallery rotunda where we recently dined in high style, and some art so it was all cool.

Pythagorean Silence

2010-11-12T09:24:00.005-05:00

Kierkegaard the Ironist fulminates against journalists in his journals: "What we need is a Pythagorean silence. There is a far greater need for total-abstaining societies which would not read newspapers than for ones which do not drink alcohol."

Of course Kierkegaard did not dream of Powerline and Fox News, but he certainly understood how the need for a "public" makes truth at best a tertiary consideration to journalists -- even as they congratulate themselves for their objectivity.

In any case, I have come to the conclusion that paying attention to the divergence of our national discourse from reality, or even rational abstraction, has had a pernicious effect on me, driving up my blood-pressure, making me irascible, causing me a very low form of despair, and distracting me from more salutary labors. So, I'm giving up the news -- not reading any more papers or blogs, not watching any news on TV, or not with any regularity anyway. We'll see how that goes and what it does for blogging.

What's Your Sign

2010-11-03T16:49:00.004-04:00

I thought it might be a public service to post a compendium of sign-compendia from the Fear/Sanity rally. There's a good bit of overlap among these but here are some. Here are some more from the same people, their 20 Funniest. Here's their most offensive, most of which aren't very offensive to thinking people. Here's a good Top 100. And here's somebody else's funniest.

The Numbers

2010-11-01T09:02:00.004-04:00

The Lobbyist and I attended Stewart/Colbert rally on Saturday and had a big time, especially at the afterparty. It was by far the biggest crowd I've ever seen on the Mall, and a very witty, decorative, polite, and hope-inspiring crowd it was. My favorite sign read: "I'm already regretting my decison to carry this sign all day."

I snarkily predicted at the time that the corporate media would minimize the numbers in any way they could; I figured they'd reduce the participants' numbers to about the Pentagon's kill numbers for Iraq. But in at least one case they went another way.

Well the Post went about 220k, CBS 225. Seems low to me, but whatever. It's three times as many as the Glenn Beck cross-burning, brought out -- and they were mostly stupid, fat, angry white guys, many on the government dole in one way or another, and yet mortally afraid the government will do something for brown people. Their response is then rather like the ape's tendency to growl at strangers who appear at the small water hole, and this is consistent with fascism's engagement of the reptile brain.

As someone pointed out, the IQ, the energy, the age and child-bearing potential of the crowd on Saturday should spell doom for the Reich. But, as I've often said (after Stalin) it's not who votes who counts, it's who counts the votes. And given that the GOP has devolved into stooges of the oligarchs, we can expect that their general trend for disenfranchisement, disillusionment and in general suppression of democratic action will continue. That's what their voter fraud thing is all about. You can tell what a Republican is up to these days by what he's on about -- if he's raving against perversion he's got a rent boys waiting in a suite. If he's warning about pickpockets he's got his hand on your wallet. If he's on about voter fraud, he's doing all he can to rig the election. Of course all this got a big boost from Citizens United, now the oligarchs can sell any lie they can afford, and you can bet the booboisie is buying. Expect them to inflame the masses whenever one of their flunkies loses an election. The citizen is lot less than 3/5 of an individual as a result.

Anyway, I'm flipping channels first thing this morning, looking for local weather, and I alight briefly on CNN's segment about the rally. It was predicably weak. There's no love lost between Jon Stewart and CNN, so that is perhaps to be expected. But the segement ended with the news-bimbo slavishly reciting, without further comment, Glenn Beck's ludicrous claim of 300,000 to 600,000 folks at his last rally. I was a bit surprised, but then I remembered, CNN were the folks who gave Beck his start on TV. So of course however many wefre there on Saturday, CNN would report that Beck brought out more. Expect a lot more of this sort of math in the future, only expect it about balloting.

The O'Donnell Blue Balls Affair

2010-10-29T13:54:00.003-04:00

Re: the exposé of the abortive hookup with Christine O'Donnell by a young Philadelphian. A great many people seem to be congratulating themselves for condemning the indiscretion of the piece and also for sympathising with O'Donnell. But that's a bullshit reaction. O'Donnell doesn't deserve the least bit of sympathy. She is not a private citizen anymore, she's running for high public office; moreover she hasn't ever really done anything professionally but run for public office -- it's her grift as it were. So, just on that account she loses a fair amount claim to privacy. But any claim that she may have had left should be forfeit to the fact that she promies if elected to do all she can to intrude the state into the most private matters of everybody in the country.

The writer of the piece in Gawker comes off as callow and extremely conventional, but let’s not forget that O'Donnell is a woman who won her spot on the ticket by implying her Republican opponent was gay. I’d say O’Donnell’s defenders would have more of a case if he’d actually had sex with her and then told the tale. But what happened here was way weirder and less moral than that, and a bit more reflective of O’Donnell’s whackjob toxicity.

Let’s review: O’Donnell shows up on an unnounced booty-call at the home of her aunt’s tenant (bit of a power play there), on the strength of a brief meeting months before; she drags the guy out and leads him in drunken merriment, then persuades him to help her ditch her wing so that she may go home with him discretely. When she gets him back to his home she announces there won’t be any sex because she’s a virgin. She’s done everything she can to lead him to expect sex, which she then denies. That’s her legal right of course, and for a gal of 16 or 18 or 22 it’s more common and maybe more understandable. But it’s a rally bizarre piece of work for a fortyish woman to pull on a 20-something man, and she’s very lucky the guy didn’t toss her out into the night, or worse, drunk as he also was. (Not that tossing her etc would have been right either.)
Anyway, the story is not som much about an odd drunken hookup per se; it’s about something a lot more pathologically manipulative, and… entitled. Sorry Amanda, O'Donnell's not just a confused girl out for fun, she's a powertripping, hypcritical, manipulative, prick-tease.

Maybe it could have been told more tastefully, but I think if you’re paying attention and not just clutching your pearls, it adds valuable inside information to the dossier on this Tea Party darling. These people are not simply misguided, they are malignantly twisted in their souls, down to the smallest aspect of their lives it often seems. It’s foolish and dangerous to pretend otherwise.

Don't Let the Door Hit You, Fawn

2010-10-21T15:35:00.003-04:00

Fawn Williams finally got the axe from NPR. Way overdue. As usual, of late, NPR screwed the pooch, in this case by making Fawn look like a martyr for free speech. In fact, he is and has long been a fascist hack for the Toxic News GOP Support Team, which should have gotten him fired a long time ago -- but didn't. Now Fox will trumpet the lie that Williams got fired for his relatively innocous sounding admission abpout how he gets all vaporous when Muslims are on the plane, when in fact it was undoubtedly the cumulative humiliation of having the sellout mofo dirty the brand on TV, plus the specific situation -- his remark came during an extended hand-job on Bill O'Reilly, a real test of the knee pads staged to assure the Great White Douchebag he's right to hate Muslims reflexively.

Esprit d'escalier

2010-10-15T08:50:00.004-04:00

So I'm a little jet-laggy still and waking up very early with my head sort of in mid-sentence with itself and anyway today, I woke up with a vivid memory of a dinner I was at last spring with the Lobbyist among some very nice liberal people, all of us (well maybe not me so much) hyper-educated, successful and distingushed. One of the other dinner guest was a constituitional law professor at a very good state university, who nonetheless (or perhaps therefore) was about as smug and puerile as it is possible to be without getting punched. He made a lot of sort of snide jokes which aimed to show what a sensible centrist adult he was, how he wasn't buying into the bullshit of the left or right etc. At one point he went out of his way to sneer at Keith Olberman and Rush Limbaugh in the same clause and I objected instantly, and fairly forcefully "False equivalence." People glanced at me and as if I'd ripped off a big fart, and then turned away and preteneded I'd said nothing. Howdy Doody went on pontificating for the rest of the dinner sumgly assured that he was delighting all in earshot, except perhaps myself, who (it was obvious from my reception) was beneath consideration. People like him, criminally self-blind in their professorial imbecility, are why academia is no place for most decent people.

Now, I fault our hosts generally, nice as they are, for their generally panglossian and centrist view of things, for the argumentam ad temperantiam which underlies their general outlook. And this morning it occurs to me me that the tendency to find equal fault on both sides in American politics is a form of intellectual negligence, even evil in its most banal form. Its aggregation across the American populace will be the undoing of the world.

In any case, I won't be doing that dinner again.

Back in the Heimatland

2010-10-14T16:19:00.005-04:00

I had another danger-filled mission for the Ministry of Elegance so, once I had vanquished evil (the Trafalgar Square Chapter), the Lobbyist and I were again galavanting at taxpayer expense, this time in the UK, where we studied up on accelerating the spread of socialism in Amerika, while also covetting many of the extravagant goodies on offer in Mayfair and drinking drinks and breaking bread with all manner of effete intellectuals. Heavenly. I wondered yet again why if even the English can have a crackerjack railroad system that gets one from Edinburgh to London in 4.5 hours in wified comfort with regular passages of a drinks cart, whyu can't The Greatest Nation Ever? Hell, even the Italians run a dandy train system; the all-powerful yanks, not so much....

I see the Tea Partiers haven't gotten any more attractive in the fortnight I went without them. Their ascendance is proof positive that here, just as much as in Germany, the scum will have a Hitler of their own.

While abroad we visited a calico cat who emigrated when John Ashcroft was pretending to be Attorney General. A very beautiful kitty.

The Prospect Before Us

2010-09-22T16:32:00.004-04:00

I recently discovered a very interesting blogger, David Seaton. His view of our situation and future is bracingly bleak and brilliantly articulated.

Nobody will be surprised that I agree with his assessment that fascism isn't really our future, it's basically happened already -- we're just too busy watching the lobotomy box to figure it out.

It is through Seaton that I came upon Robert Paxton's excellent definition of fascism. It should be tattooed on everybody who ever works at the White House:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."[

Roid Rage Among the Donut Mucnhers

2010-09-22T15:45:00.006-04:00

Down in BOrlando a cop took it upon himself to faceplant an 84-year-old man who was a bit irate that his car had been towed. The cop claims to have been very afraid of the geezer, and his twit boss picks up on this alibi. Too bad about the old dude's broken neck.

Yet another instance in an epidemic of wacky cop violence aganst citizens, which I propose has two causes: one, the worship of armed authority in today's copsucking Amerika, and two, what must surely be widespread use of steroids in the very beefy ranks of our constabulary. If we cared at all about police brutality, all cops would be randomly drug tested for said drugs, and immediately tested after any use of force, no matter what the alleged justification. The chances of this happening are nil. But it's a thought.

Always remember boys and girls: your average cop is just a gym teacher with a gun.

Wankers of the World Unite!

2010-09-20T15:22:00.005-04:00

So Ms. O'Donnell claims to dabbled in witchcraft for awhile, back in her college-slut days. I don't really believe her story, but still I wouldn't be surprised if she did dabble a bit. Anybody who can believe in Tea Party bullshit could also believe that Satan will trade her superpowers for her soul. But a more amusing take on the candidate is here. Don't miss the musical interlewd embedded at the bottom.

Moore and Moron

2010-09-16T08:56:00.004-04:00

So last night Michael Moore was on my teevee as I was fixing dinner, talking (God only knows why) to Wolf Douchebag Blitzer. Now, Michael Moore's heart is in the right place and he works hard and he's done some really good and funny things, but he gets a lot wrong too, which somewhat undercuts the force of the stuff he gets right -- unlike the rest of us who are infallible.

Anyway, last night Moore was raving to Wolf Blitzen about how the Democrats are wimps who lack the courage of their convictions -- and in this he is precisely right -- but he went on to say thats what he's "always admired" about Republicans is they believe in what they say, and get up early and bang away to engforce these beliefs no matter how wrong or stupid they are. Here Moore errs on several points. First off, all it's not clear that the professional Republican believes anything consistently. It seems much more likely that most are just bundles of sociopathic reflexes held together by a Caesarean sense of their own entitlement to everything in the world you can possibly imagine, and otherwise consistent only in their soiopthically contrarian impulse to manipulate people destructively, a subset of which is their unfailing, unreflective desire to piss liberals off.

Second, insofar as the Republican does believe something it is likely to be not merely wrong, in the sense of erroneous, or merely stupid, but it is quite likely to be actually evil - that is to say, it is a shibboleth of bigotry or a facile rationalization for past, present and intended wrongdoing. Nobody is to be admired for their belief in something for nothing ('Cutting taxes raises revenue... the ar will pay for itself etc') the core fallacy of the American Right. Nor should they be admired for the notion that war is good for economic ills, or for the idea that white Christians are the Master Race, with God-given dominion over all others and tough-love dispensation from all ethical reflection on the plight or treatment of brown people. It is wrong, criminally negligent at least, to believe most of the bullshit the Republicans swallow and regurgitate endlessly, and it is stupid to "admire" them for it.

Dance of the Flaming Assholes

2010-09-15T12:37:00.003-04:00

Apparently the Tea Partiers won big in the primaries yesterday, despite being truly moronic, nauseating and despicable people. There's Christine O'Donnell, a onetime television crusader against masturbation, now Delaware's Republican candidate for Senate. There's Carl Paladino who out-bigotted Rick Lazio for the GOP gubernatorial slot; this is is a guy who sends out Klan-mail and bestiality-porn over the internet, a landlord to the New York government in Albany, a guy getting rich on tax dollars who nonetheless thinks he's a paragon of free enterprise. And then of course, we already had Dr. Ron Paul and Joe Miller. Esq. both disgraces to their respective professions.

The Democrats are overjoyed with the latest nominees. They think it means they have a chance to hold onto the Senate. Personally I learned from W. not to root for the big loser to be nominated. The American people will probably love the guy, or girl. Plus, the lower the Reublicans sink, the lower is the bar the Democrats set for themselves. We must always remember, the if the Republicans are -100 on the moral quotient scale, the Democrats won't dare be any better that -99. The success of the Tea Party creeps is a very bad sign, a sign of mass psychosis. Millions of people won't repudiate this madness unless and until it clearly costs them everything they value. Think Nazis in the ruins of Berlin.

Prelude to a Book Burning

2010-09-08T12:44:00.004-04:00

I dragged the Lobbyist to see the Norman Rockwell exhibition at the Smithsonian over the holdiay weekend, not becuase I'm a big Rockwell fan, but because I was interested in a particular image which I'd seen in the promotions. Still, I must admit I was very interested by the show, though perhaps not in the way the painter or the curators intended. As an exercise in Highest Kitsch it would be hard to top, and it was full to bursting with the kind of Wonderbred white folks likely to make Glen Beck pop a woodie.

It's not that Rockwell didn't have talent, he clearly did. But why he chose to exercise it in such a subervient and Bowdlerized fashion is hard to say. Certainly there was money in it, and maybe middle class comfort was as much as his sensibility could aspire to. But he sure does celebrate American complacency like crazy. It's very white and healthy, nary a hint of sex, disease, death, or sin. He makes Mother Goose look like Stephen King. Everybody is lit up with virtue, good intention or, at worst, the kind of minor foible which can be fully captured by joshing. At most, men leer impotently at glamorous gals, who don't return the slightest visible interest.

It strikes me that Rockwell's castrated attitude to his art is nicely encapsulated by the picture above, a fisherman hauling a mermaid in a lobster pot. She seems to be bound at the wrists, but is not at all distressed by this -- au contraire. And the fishmernan himself is just hauling dead weight -- note the down-pointing handle on the marker float. There's infinite weird, wonderful narrative possibility in the capture of a mermaid, but Rockwell's picture closes all of it off completely (It's a sort of anti-storyboard) with a type of humanity that has nothing naughty below the waist.

It's not that art has to dwell on or foreground dark or forbidden things to be good, but the relentless exclusion of anything even pleasantly troubling invariably deforms expression. And this, many white Americans are quite sure, is the quintessense of American Art.

Honoring Her Offer

2010-08-31T12:59:00.006-04:00

The Lobbyist and I were far away from Washington when the Tea Baggers invaded and I think that was a very wise move -- protective of my mental health and perhaps even my liberty. Hard to imagine a more despicable bunch of people: 87,000 white whiners who don't know much about anything, except they sure know they're victims -- and that everybody except the most racist of twits is responsible for whatever highly abstract victimhood has been visited upon them during their long cossetted lives in the American white middle-class.

One of my co-workers, a very nice, mild-mannered lady, yesterday commented upon all this to the effect that 'both sides should tone down their rhetoric.' I respectfully disagreed. I was tempted to say something like, 'Yes, if only both the Jews and the fucking Brownshirts had been more moderate back then, how much unpleasantness might have been avoided.' But I didn't, and I attribute this diplomatic fact to my pleasant escape over the weekend.

Not to dwell on the Beckerwoods too long, but their whole project "Restoring Honor" to America is something they can only believe in because they're incapable of undertsanding it. (Is this a sine qua non of most faith?) Honor is predicated in truth. To be honorable, you must first and foremost tell the truth; also you need to act so as to make your promises accurate predictions of your behavior; and you need to act in a manner that will not require you to lie later. All of these needs further require that, as much as possible, you determine and are mindful of what is true. But the Tea Baggers, like Republicans in general, have absolutely no interest in the truth, except as a trivial prop for their phony poses of knowing. Witness Michelle Bachmann who inflates the rally size by a factor of twenty. Like all members of her "Capitalist" cult, she speaks Advertese. There is no term for honor or truth in Advertese, just as there is no word for weather in Hawaiian.

Glen Beck is as fit to restore honor as Tiger Woods is to restore chastity.

Peckerwood Über Alles.

2010-08-26T08:48:00.003-04:00

I'm sure it's best for my mental health that I'm getting out of town this weekend, what with Glen Peckerwood and his brownshirts taking over the Mall. Never mind the marchers, those who don't understand that all these people are scum are to be shunned, excluded from all civil intercourse until they show clear, consistent signs of raised consciousness. Alas, that kind of radical conversion will be quite beyond the usual Tea Partier, and even beyond the typical negligent who doesn't recognize them for the fascists they are. Most of these people will go to their graves, live the rest of their cosseted, ignorant lives firmly ensconced in their "designer victimhood," convinced that despite riches and security vastly beyond their deserving, they have been oppressed by the reverse-racist, left-wing government.

Here's the quintessential example, one Bruce Majors, royalist stooge who fancies himself a revolutionary, the guy who wrote the Tea Bagger's Guide to Avoiding Brown People and Foreigners in DC. Racist, woman-hating asshole, he's basically the movement mascot.

They're "restoring honor" to the Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of The Speech. Kind of like restoring cleanliness with fecal graffiti.

We're so fucked.

The Opposite of News

2010-08-20T08:52:00.004-04:00

So I read today in WaPo's Excrescence that 18% of American think Obama is a Muslim, and not just a putz. I would bet that this 18% is entirely within that portion of the population that has zero idea what a Muslim is. Moreover, at least 18% of Americans think professional wrestling is real, that aliens abduct people in order to play doctor with them in their flying saucers, and that Jonah was sawllowed by the whale. So fucking what? A lot of Americans are really, really, really stupid. This is the result of 60 years of television, accelerated by 15 years of Fox. But it's the opposite of news -- which is why column inches are being devoted to it. If real news gets carried real changes will have to be made.

Is it wrong to pray for the big asteroid, or just stupid?

Last Act Dilemmas

2010-08-17T07:57:00.004-04:00

It's my birthday today and I feel considerably older, having been mugged by the oral surgeon Saturday last, and being now on a cocktail of antibiotics and painkillers that prevents the coccasion's proper debauchery.

I confess I'm running out of capacity to even look upon the atrocity of American politics. The Foxagandists want to take us back to the Dark Ages, when superstition and subjugation ruled for the most ruthless and brutal few. And there doesn't really seem to be much hope of stopping them, short of a large asteroid, at least not until the next fascist scheme collapses under the weight of its own parasitism and paranoia. Certainly the milquetoasts of the Geithner administration aren't going to help matters.

Evil takes dominion over even the best, it seems. In the same way that the only rational course for the even the sanest Iranian leader is to acquire a nuclear weapon before the next Republican occupies the White House, the sanest course for even the best American may be to grab for as much loot as he can put away before now and when the democracy finally dissolves, and hope that is enough of a hedge in the coming kleptocracy to see one through to The End. In view of this, I sometimes feel the urgent need to pen a dark, brooding "action film," one that primes the audience, by close-up revelation of the villain's hideously despicable and perverted indulgences, for the big deafening, climactic explogasm when said villain gets his comeuppance in the last reel. The trouble is I'd want the baddies to be Republicans, and the sort of people who enjoy that sort of movie are at heart Republicans. Still, as such they are so self-blind they might not recognize themselves in the as the Hero dispatches them with a manly sneer.

Real America

2010-08-04T17:44:00.003-04:00

I rendezvoused with my siblings in my mother's home town, a rustbelt burg on the Great Lakes. It's a place of great natural beauty, at least when it's not iced in, but it's in the crapper economically. The old Carnegie Library is for sale, likewise the Free Methodist church downtown, and the newsstand where I bought Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels and several Kerouac books, along with other influential texts. One can buy a four-bedroom hosue there for under fifty thousand dollars. I saw a beautiful 150- year-old place on 25 acres with 1100 feet of creek frontage, asking $175, 000!

There must be hundreds, perhaps thousands of these towns. Union busting, NAFTA, free market capitalism in action. My fellow Americans, welcome to the Third World.

"I arted."

2010-07-29T16:17:00.004-04:00

This object becomes a very meta comment on the relationship, or perhaps distinktion, between between graffiti and art when considered with Audens' reflection that: "Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts."

What He Said

2010-07-26T09:05:00.002-04:00

I've been away from the Ministry for a bit of vacation, lounging with The Lobbyist in a cabin by a high mountain lake. Bears, eagles, chipmunks, coyotes, trout and mosquitoes, but no intertubes or cellphones and this was good. I did pick up on the Sherrod episode, apparently yet another shameful episode in bullshit, cowardice and incompetence by the Looking Forward Not Back Adminstration. Jayzus.

Kathleen Reaches Out to The Base

2010-07-14T09:00:00.004-04:00

Kathleen Parker, right-wing asshole and soon, in view of her Aryan appearance, to be an obersturmbannführer at Crap Not News, unwittingly admits to something almost universally true about self-styled conservatives -- they're not fully people per se, they're contrarians, adolescent againsters. This is to say, they don't really have principles, ideas, adult character or individuality of their own, they define themselves tribally and especially as enemies of of various persons, places and things. Their highest purpose in life is to vex their enemies, real or imagined. Someone seems to have reprogrammed Parker, who once said true things about Grifter Barbie, things like, "If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself." In today's column she walks back from that accurate assessment faster than a Brownshirt who has crossed Limbaugh, saying, at the top of her mashnote to Sarah Palin:

For what it's worth, I get a kick out of Sarah. May I call her Sarah?

She and I apparently share a certain genetic predisposition to annoy all the right people. These would be the folks who take themselves and their ideologies a tad too seriously. Thus when I was promoting my book, "Save the Males," I wore an aggressively feminine suit -- pink with a bow in back -- just to irritate hard-line feminists, who, without bothering to read the book, would hate it on sight.

I happen to hate bows, but it was worth it.

I'm totally sure all those humorless feminazis were completely steamed about the hated bows Kathy wore just to spite them, and this more or less negated the egregious studpidity of Parker's book. But more importantly: Kathleen, like all Republicans, can't see irony and is totally selfblind, therefore she can't know that the of all people in the universe, it is her own ilk who take their ideology a highly lethal tad too seriously, that is why they have our troops engaged in folie a deux with the more ignorantly murderous Moslems.

Palin remains a grifter, liar, bigot and bully, but according to Parker, not someone to be "feared or loathed." If not for the Sarah Palins of the world, what purpose do fear and loathing serve?

Guns or Butter

2010-07-09T09:25:00.004-04:00

So I was watching Olberman last night and they had Barney Frank on, and he was as usual making more sense than the average politician -- not that I expect that this matters much. He pointed out how America spends as much on our military as the rest of the world combined, how given its virtually unlimited and unaccountable budget the Pentagon has absolutely no incentive to economize (It a Basic Law of Ecconomy* that people with no reason to economize don't.), thus we get the $700 hammer et cetera, and also that independent of the wars we're losing so expensively in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're still throwing a lot of money at the last one we won, in the form of lots of troops in Japan and Europe, doing what exactly?

This makes me wonder: if we're so threatened on our borders, why don't we bring those 15,00o Marines back from Okinawa and have them march the deserts of the southwest. At least then their paychecks will go into the bras of American hookers.

The sad truth is this: all governments are schemes for "wealth redistribution," as Glen Peckerwood's Tea Partiers say. In the absence of this function the most piratical simply end up with everything of worth -- in which case a rapacious few live slightly better in armed camps precariously protected from the squalid masses -- and other pirates. (We can see this sort of devolution in places where "the market is free;" that is to say the narcocracies of northern Mexico. ) Progressive or socialistic governments redistritbute the wealth in welfare, cultural enterprise, and payola; fascist governments redistribute it in arms and payola. There's a lot of skimming either way, but the difference isn't moot. Investment in arms actually gives a very, very poor return on the government's investment, besides being morally deplorable. This is just an economic fact. A billion dollars put into a bomber is of benefit to a few thousand people who build and a few dozen who crew the bomber. A billion dollars put into a social program or a brick and mortar project of almost any other sort puts the same billion into the pockets of the recipients or builders, et cetera, and then we end up with something of potential long-term benefit to people of the community or even the nation. There is only a sweepstakes chance that the bomber, after it's done, will ever do anything for anyone -- though it might well explode an Afghan wedding or two. After all, we had a multi-trillion dollar Air Force on the job on Septemeber 11, 2001, and it didn't ameliorate the situation even slightly in any fucking way. So, we can contuinue to piss money into the rathole of bloody boondoggles and fetishized objects, or we can actually return some of the wealth of the people to the people. Which will Washignton opt for?

Other basic economic laws include:

Good; quick; cheap -- pick two.

Ex nihilo nihil fit, or: People who try to get something for nothing end up getting nothng for something.

Stupid Impacted into Diamond-Hard Fecal Mass

2010-07-08T08:40:00.004-04:00

Perhaps it is unfair to single out Wolf Blitzer for the accumulated sins of our mass media. On the other hand he's famous, rich, and a total fucking moron, as the link's snippet of him on Jeopardy illustrates perfectly. At the end Alex says, very awkwardly, "Wolf, things didn't work out as you'd hoped..." a Masterpiece of understatement.

The Ted Baxter of Crap Not News!

Quick Getaway

2010-07-04T14:10:00.003-04:00

The Lobbyist and I just got back from Clifton Forge, Virginia where we went to see a concert by one Scott Miller. I used to go there a lot when I was college student as I had friends there and we did the hippies-in-the-mountains thing. Very, very beautiful area but Clifton Forge is a depressed, rusting little railroad hub in the groin of a steep valley. Still lots of (freight, coal etc) railroading through there, but not much employment on today's automated systems. Still, they are desperately trying to gentrify and come back as tourist, outdoorsy destination, selling the local rivers and vast National Forests thereabout. There seems to be a cadre of come-heres who have bought up dirt-cheap housing and retail property for their own private Idahoes. There's one fairly spiff little bistro/bar run by refugees from Tidewater, an outdoor outfitter, lots of junk/antique places (very depressing most of the wares) and a thriving home-hospice supplies emporium. Best not dwell on their clientele.

Anyway, they're trying to fix up the old Masonic theater there (in 1905 the local Masons decided the hillbillies needed an opera house!) and Scott Miller was playing a benefit in view of his family roots in the area. The building is quite lovely in a Rose for Emily sorta way, and the concert was fabulous and funny, with wine and birthday cake (the place opened on July 4th) and all the area bourgeois in attendance.

Anyway, the Lobbyist and I also went hiking Friday and Saturday in the gorgeous Douthat State Park and even she, whose city-girl motto is "Ewwww -- nature," seemed to have a good time on said hikes. She didn't care much for the big blue Spotted Salamander I caught ("It's related to a snake.") and released, but she did like lunch in the lakeside park restaurant -- a time capsule of simple WPA-era rustic styling, staffed by gorgeous hillbilly girls in the last moments before their double-crossed genes, egregious diet and the Oxycontin kick in.

It was very nice to get out of DC for awhile.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

2010-06-28T09:08:00.006-04:00

I guess The McChrystal Flap has caused an extra moment or two of reflection on what the hell we're doing in Afghanistan all these years later. What hasn't been said much, and should be alluded to every time the subject comes up is this: there was at one time a good chance that our incursion there might have been quickly and productively resolved. We could chave been out of there long ago, having made a demonstration of the penalty to be paid for attacks on America, and having left millions grateful there, in a liberated and pacified nation. Instead, they largely hate us there, with good reason. The religious fanatics of the Taliban are about to come back into power there and go to work again with Osama and Al Qaeda, because we let them and him slip away. The authors of this collosal bungle, collosal string of bungles, were Bush and Cheney, who were already fucking up badly in Afghanistan, but not badly enough for their tastes -- for they soon took their eyes off the ball to begin a multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle in Iraq. And yet our pundits don't seem to think one mess has anything to do with the other.

Iraq? they wonder. What's Iraq?

Home of the Slave

2010-06-26T12:48:00.004-04:00

Okay, if they're not "conservatives," and you can't really shorthand their true hideousness in such historical terms that, no matter how apt or carefully considered, won't turn milquetoasts Americans off, how can we characterize American right-wingers?

How about this? They're authoritarians. They waste a lot of breath about how they want a small government, the government which governs (and provides) least, and yet they want a government that polices our private morality quite a bit, and a government that supports a vast and aggressive military/secret police system. They actually like (in fact, they grow sexually excited at the idea of) vast power concentrated in a few hands. They just don't want that power to be elected in the conventional sense. They much prefer the idea of power, even unaccountable power (Is the another kind?) in the hands of corporate executives.

It often seems to me that there is an underlying assumption, even among many Democrats, that the private sector, because people vote for its offerings with their pocketbooks, is somehow more of a meritocracy than the government or academia -- as if white collar workers were actually held accoutnable when their products suck, or people just fail to buy them. Indeed, somer MBAs suffer when their companies tank, but more often the hard working people who actually tried to make things work properly suffer first, or most, and the sociopathic credit hogs at the top cash in or move along to the next sinecure. I mean, who believes that Tony Hayward is going to fall on hard times now that he's poisoned the Gulf of Mexico.

In any case, any honest person who's ever worked for a big corporation will tell you, it's a bureaucracy like any other, rife with dead wood, corruption and inanity. Spasmodic efforts to hold people accountable there almost invariably weed out the nonconforming, not the nonperforming.

So, if the winger objects to being called an authoritrian ("I'm for small government!"), try corporate authoritarian. Only if CEOs have diplomatic immunity are markets really free.

On the Other Hand

2010-06-18T17:20:00.002-04:00

I've often reflected on what a crock of shit "conservative," the right-winger's favorite term for himself is. It's hard to imagine how one reconciles multi-trillion dollar experiments in regime-change and forcible democracy-building, blind faith in a vengeful, capricious, bigotted Bronze Age deity, and a similar blind faith in mankind's collective wisdom being expressed through unregulated markets et cetera, with "conservativism" in the rigidly tradition sense that consrvatives have traditionally insisted upon. But right-wingers are indeed conservative in the traditional negative sense -- they are real climbers on the bandwagon, Yankee fans, takers of the safe bet, and as such, suck-ups to power and money -- like Joe Barton and the other stooges of the GOP who find tragedy and "shakedown" in holding accountable a poor defenseless and, by definition infallible multinational Corporation.

But come to think of it, that's part of the right-wing mind set. After all, these are the people who are happy to bomb, rape, and rob any and all, but think that if you just suck up to Jesus enough you're ethically superior.

It really is a shame there's no Hell; it would be a great comfort to many.

Flaming Jesus Update

2010-06-16T09:09:00.005-04:00

It's all been so depressing what with the Gulf of Mexico turning into a toxic dump site and American political discourse degenerating even faster, the President turning out to be even more of an empty suit than the Lobbyist predicted, the weather here in DC turning prematurely Panamanian, and all the movies around town sucking hard. But I must admit that, like many, I was oddly cheered by the way Big Butter Jesus burned to the ground after what the underwriters call an "act of God" -- in the form of lightning strike. it was kind of like a Klan rally crossed with Burning Man right there beside I-75. The smiting of the graven image was made even sweeter by the way the Pornarama directly across the highway was completely unscathed!

On the up side, I did get to see Strasburg pitch his super debut for the Nads the other night, and did get to see Patty Griffin at 9:30 Club Saturday, and did see one of my all time favorite movies last night, Will Penny -- which was the best movie Chuck Heston ever did by far, and he knew it too. Bread and circuses -- not just for the couch potato!

Merde-Ass Touch

2010-06-02T14:19:00.003-04:00

It seems that to the degree we have gone along with Republican "ideas" for the last sixty years we have had: distastrous deficits, institutionalized racism, ecological catastrophe, massive loss of jobs and industry, alliance with some of the world's scummiest dictratorships, the conversion of the republic to a pseudo-theocratic, quasi-fascist military-industrial complex wherein extrajudicial detention, torture, warrantless wiretapping, and pre-emptive, undeclared, self-perpetuating forever-war are accepted practice, and, of course, wildly successful terrorist attacks. It may not be surprising that the average couch potato doesn't undertand this, but you would think that profesional Democrats would, at least.

The Republicans royally fuck up every single thing they touch, and virtually everything that's wrong with America today is due in part to the fact that they are never held accountable.

I call the picture above: The Spirit of the GOP. Drill baby, drill.

Auld Lang Syne

2010-05-31T10:50:00.004-04:00

It's not often that one sees cliché redeemed as perfectlly as the fabulous singer Susan McKeown does in this version of Auld Lang Syne, which she renders in the Scottish dialect (lyrics and translation here). She accomplishes this redemption by 'going deeper' (as the method directors and writing instructors tend to say) into the original elegiac conceit, making, with the sparest of accompaniment something haunting out of what has been otherwise been reduced to utter crap, on the order of Happy Birthday.

The transcendent in life, best we can do, is just such a reclaiming of memory and meaning from Entropy -- who would fence it all to Oblivion for pesos on the dollar.

Update: Perhaps apropos Memorial day, it occurred to me after the fact that a similar, even congruent reclamation from the deserved oblivion of cliché was Hendrix's Woodstock anthem.

WPA Style Gulf-Cleanup Army

2010-05-29T12:58:00.005-04:00

It's just an idea, but it's got real possibilities. Why not create a WPA-style army to clean up the Gulf of Mexico beaches and marshlands? There are millions of able-bodied folks crying for work, and here's a hell of a lot of work that will basically need to get done by hand, with shovels, bags, wheelbarrows et cetera. This is work that can't be outsourced to Inda. It'll be hot, hard, buggy, smelly work so even if we pay a real wage, (like, say $20 an hour) nobody will be said to be getting a handout. I envision a real corps, with barracks or trailer camp bases being thrown up quickly. Recruits, should be by quota drawn from all over (with some allowance for relief of those directly affected, fishermen etc) to maiximize support for the program.

If we can keep griftshops like Halliburton and Blackwater away from the trough, there might be many real benefits from such a program: cash in the pockets of people who need it most and who are most likely to return it quickly to the economy (putting more cash in pockets of people who need it badly); a restored sense, for those who serve and are served by the project, of what government for the people, by the people, can and ought to do; hands-on experience for additional tens or hundreds of thousands of people from all over, of what the real cost of drill-baby-drill has been and will be.

The one thing we must not do here is entrust this to the free-enterprise system, or the wisdom of the market. The sociopaths of private industry, and the regulators' capture by them, got us into this mess; they must not be allowed to profit from its remediation.

Canned Derbyshire

2010-05-27T09:31:00.004-04:00

When you untether words from their usual, traditional, agreed-upon (and to that degree fixed) meanings, you eliminate their capacity to express anything true. Words then become just noises, tribal identifiers or notes in a spiel. Starting, appropriately, with its most treasured shibboleth, the term"conservative," the Conservative movement shows itself determined to reduced English to Advertese. The evidence of this is endless but here's one more quintessential piece anyway: the hacktackular yet unbelievably smug John Derbyshire admits at NRO that he himself wrote a blurb for his own book, and attributed it to one of his betters. Derbyshire says that the putative author of the blurb declined to read his book but gave him permission to attribute a fake blurb to himself -- and now the fellow is safely dead so he can't very well contradict Derbyshire's version. The salient thing here is that Derbyshire, one of the putative "thinkers" of the Right doesn't feel the slightest compuntion about this. It's just commerce , the way these things are done. There's no dishonor, as far as he's concerned.

These Free Marketeers think we all speak advertese, a dialect which cannot be used to express truth. In it there is no truth or falsity of a statement; a statement is merely efficacious sales pitch, or it's not. That is the only question. This is certainly a way to do business, alas. But it doesn't admit the slighest possibility of honor. These people are blithely and completely without honor. Derbyshire, like virtually all of the ilk is a moral child, the development of his conscience arrested about age eight.

Girls Gone Wild, etc

2010-05-26T16:57:00.003-04:00

Somewhere I saw a headline to the effect of 'Sorority Girls Have Public Sex, Cause Thousands in Damage.' This reminded me of my undergraduate days, so I had to click on the story. Shocking. The Pi Phis of Ohio got some 'splainin' to do. Oh to be young again....

Here's an actual quote from the new GOP Website (Values Section) that is half bigot chat-room and half snarky send-up. Not sure which inflection this has:

PEDOPHILES ARE AN EVER GROWING TO OUR CHILDREN, SO I WAS THINKING THAT WE SHOULD CAPTURE ALL PEDOPHILES AND PUT THEM IN CAMPS WITH FREE-ROAMING BEARS. PEDO-BEARS IF YOU WILL. IT WOULD SEND A STRONG MESSAGE TO PEOPLE: DON'T BE A PEDOPHILE.

Pedo-bears, if you will. I would pay to see that movie!

Jackboot on the other Foot

2010-05-21T09:46:00.003-04:00

Again, via Mark Kleiman, this view of what Fascism looks like on the ground. There is a political context here, of course, and as always in Jerusalem, it's tortured. But all that aside, what's depicted here is cowards bullying the defenseless because they can -- this is the corruptive aspiration, the life force, the raison, d'etre of Fascism everywhere. Fascism isn't a political posture or philosophy; it's a fashion, a style, a group neurosis.

Why Rand Is a Racist

2010-05-21T09:16:00.004-04:00

I've got to admit that Rachel Maddow does some good work. But she doesn't really nail it very often, and it seems like it's sometimes because the tough questions don't occur to her or because she's afraid to ask them. I watched her chat with Rand Paul the other night and while I liked the way she kept after him, it seems to me that she didn't really get to the essence. As Mark Kleiman points out, she should have asked him, "Well, enough about public accomodations; do you think a private employer should be able to turn down qualified applicants because they're black? Should they be able to pay black people less for the same work?"

And beyond that, she should have asked, "Isn't your stance really just a racist dog-whistle, another in the long-standing Republican tradition of coded signals, signals to bigots that you'll work to keep power in white hands? Otherwise why tilt at a matter of settled law?"

Regardless of your own subjective attitude towards other ethnicities, if you exploit racism you're a racist -- period.

"Small Government" = Police State

2010-05-20T09:01:00.004-04:00

I watched a few minutes of Olberman's mash-up of GlennBeck speeches at "Liberty"... um... "University" in the appropriately named Lynchburg, Va., and at the New Reich Association convention (no guns allowed!) and while I could only stand so much of it, I really did enjoy the Hitler like histrionics, especially when he was raging about being called a Nazi. Fairly quivering with indignation, stalking the stage like the Furhrer overmedicated, he roars, "The right in this country is small government. Nazism is Nationalist Socialist Workers Union."

Well actually it's 'worker's party' (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) but don't expect Glenn to let the facts get in the way of a talking point, especially when it smears lefty institutions like unions.

But -- I digress. Elsewhere in the speech Glenn says the only things we can trust in today's society are "each other, the troops and the police." I'm not quite sure why we need so many police if we can trust each other (but perhaps he just means the white folks in the audience), nor am I so sure it's a good idea to trust the troops or the police, given the propensity of the former for shooting up innocent folks, and of the latter for tasing, beating, framing, bribe-taking and shooting up innocent folks. But anyway, that's it, in essence: the mantra of the small government Republicans and "Libertarians". When Beck and his ilk talk about small government they mean 'Cut everything that doesn't benefit me directly -- except armed forces , police forces, and prisons.' They don't really seem to grasp somehow that force is inimical to freedom. But they don't really understand or care about freedom anyway. Freedom to them is convenience, cheap gasoline, the remote control.

Those too stupid to understand the past will re-enact its atrocities.

News and Non-News

2010-05-18T12:36:00.003-04:00

What a wonderfully wacky world we live in: a smoking hot Lebanese immigrant becomes Miss USA and the wingnuts have infarctions. You would think they'd be happy to see a self described Muslim gal packaging herself up as sexist commodity. If becoming Miss USA isn't wholehearted embrace of the American Way (god help us), I dunno what is.

In other non-news: Mark Souder, a family-values Republican has gotten caught with his pecker in the cookie jar. The new wrinkle is the pro-abstinence video he made with his mistress -- who's kinda cute in a naughty-librarian way. So what does she see in the tubby Souder, a man with no detectible charisma? It must really be tough for a single gal in this town.

In still more non-news, a front running Democrat has shot himself in the foot by issuing some bullshit about his service in Vietnam -- when he never went there! Kinda like Hillary and her Bosnian snipers.

Why Aren't Conservatives Funny?

2010-05-16T10:56:00.006-04:00

I read in FDL that some really zany "conservatives" are starting a web thing called Richochet that promises to be like a "cocktail party" with about 40 different right-wing voices. Well, more like a circle-jerk I suppose than any cocktail party I would ever attend -- except perhaps in the spirit of field anthropology. The idea is that it will be fun and funny apparently, completely ignoring the fact that self-styled "conservatives" are virtually never funny. True, they can sometimes get a bully's laugh at the expense of the defenseless from their fellow sociopaths, but they are as incapable of wit as snakes are of opera.

I'm not quite sure why self-described "conservatives" are so unwitty, but perhaps it has to do with the fact that they can never transcend their own affectation of wisdom and uprightness. Armored within their own fundamental pretentions, they lack the nimbleness to skewer the pretentions of others. It may also have to do with the fact that wit involves a considerable, if ironic, reverence for the truth, and right-wingers universally prefer dogma, superstition, legend, prejudice and romance to the truth. For instance, one of the honchos at Richochet (you gotta love the NRA cachet of this) says this kinda thing:

"At a time when the country is being dragged to the left by Washington and mainstream media, this is another way to fight back," says Robinson.

Now, the idea that the country is being "dragged to the left" seems about as ass-backwards as the notion that the sun goes around the moon, but it's about as universally accepted as geocentrism once was. I suspect that it's mighty difficult to intuit le mot juste when your reality detector is so earnestly overridden. You must have a basic impulse to conform your understanding to the real events, properties and propensities of the world, before you can distort these to good satirical effect.

Finally, the death of wit among the brownshirts may have to do with the inherent levelling function of wit. A joke upward, had at the expense of powerful and/or sanctimonious pretense works, whereas a joke had at the expense of one less entitled seems gratuitous. It may be a matter of moral authority. Just as one's heroic claims about one's self are discordant though one's similar claims about another may be poetic, it may well be that people with all the power can't really kick downward with any aesthetic distinction -- especially when they're preoccupied with whining about what victims they are, as John Yoo, VD Hanson, Mark Steyn and some of the other fun-filled folks at Richochet seem to be.

It reminds me of the Tea Party Woodstocks we keep being promised. Woodstock is perhaps not the best metaphor for the reincarnated Klan. It ought to remind people, that whatever the failures and excesses of the "hippie movement" were, it consisted in a snowballing creativity (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Hendrix, Hunter Thompson, Michael Herr, R. Crumb, Saturday Night Live) that really did change the world briefly, and the arts enduringly.

The Tea Party, which is really just the logical extension of Republicanism since Nixon, epitomizes what happens to wit when divorced from art's anarchic life forces, from its moral, subversive purpose: it dwindles to a husk of it's obligatory and rightful self. We get, say Richard Pryor or Dave Chapelle, they get nigger jokes.

I Used To Be Disgusted

2010-05-06T09:00:00.003-04:00

I am slightly surprised by my continuing capacity to be appalled these days, but as Elvis Costello says, I try to be amused. Still the thing that gets me right now is how very seriously my credulous countrymen take the obvious buffoons of the Right. It stikes me, that besides being dishonest, self-deluded, and inauthentic, conservatives are above all pretentious. It's not so much that that they put on airs of aristocracy or scholarship, though many do that too, it's that they credit themselves with the traditional wisdom, moderation, morality of the Conservative, while whirling about in a tizzy of hypcritical judgment. Not that we need any fresh proofs of this, but we're getting them anyway recently, in two blatant assclowns of the Reich.

One is Elizabeth Hasselbeck, giving blondes everywhere a bad name, ragging on a fellow mannekin for her immodest dress on Dancing with the Stars, then crying about it when people called her an asshole. This of course is utterly trivial, real Lady Booby sort of stuff, but it actually captures the gravitas of Conservatism perfecly.

The other example is George Alan Rekers, quack and homophobe, recently filmed returning from a ten-day vaction with a fellw who literally advertises himself as a rent-boy.

God is a bad novelist, otherwise he'd make at least some of these moralizing pricks fundamentally decent, just misguided. Alas, in reality they are invariably monsters who, if there were any justice should be put down by horse doctors or dog catchers.

A good novelist, Henry Fielding, had this to say about their ilk:

The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation. But tho’ it arises from one spring only, when we consider the infinite streams into which this one branches, we shall presently cease to admire at the copious field it affords to an observer. Now affectation proceeds from one of these two causes; vanity, or hypocrisy: for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid censure by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues. and tho’ these two causes are often confounded, (for they require some distinguishing;) yet, as they proceed from very different motives, so they are as clearly distinct in their operations: for indeed, the affectation which arises from vanity is nearer to truth than the other; as it hath not that violent repugnancy of nature to struggle with, which that of the hypocrite hath

Τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια

2010-04-29T08:24:00.005-04:00

Everybody from Aeschylus to Samuel Johnson and Hiram Johnson seems to have said, "The first casualty of war is truth," but that doesn't make the observation any less apt. Indeed, what is war but a society's agreement to suspend mormal notions of morality towards violent achivement of a particular end? (This is not necessarily a bad thing if the end is, for instance, genuine self-preservation.) Of course this means, along with tossing normal prohibitions against homicide, vandalism etc, putting aside concerns with niceties like truth and honor. Perhaps the most strangely self-disclosing instance of this in history was Don Rumsfeld's Institute of Strategic Influence, which he announced back in 2o02. Somebody clumsily admitted that the Institute would be deceiving the public in service of the War on Abstraction, and Don Rumsfeld held a press conference whereat he retired the outfit's name, but reserved the right to lie to America whenever he saw fit:

And then there was the office of strategic influence. You may recall that. And "oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall." I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.

For some reason people kept affecting surprise when, even after this admission, it tuned out that Don and his buddies had lied at virtually every opportunity. Those people wouldn't tell you the correct time.

Well, their wars are still going on, with no sign of abatemenent in the near term, and the Right Wingers are trying to gin up a new war here at home against Obama and his Socialist Black Healthcare Death-Panel Helicopters, so perhaps we shouldn't surprised that truth is not being well served. All these years of war (starting perhaps with Hitler and proceedding right on through the Cold War) have inured us to constant lying it seems, but this last decade or so seems to have completely addicted the Right Wing to lying. The Republicans no longer seem to have the slightest concern with the truth of their claims, just their effectiveness as sales pitch. Of course, our journalists are now so cowardly, co-opted and corrupt that they don't report the plain truth (say, for instance, 'Mitch McConnel blatantly lied today when he said Wall Street regulation would ensure bailouts.), so why wouldn't Republicans, in full Rush Limbaugh mode, just run their mouths saying whatever, until something stuck -- never mind its falsity. There's no penalty for lying if you're a Republican. Perjury is a rite of passage for them.

Every day brings a new Reich Wing outrage against simple reality; it's too much to even note them all. Deception and self-deception is standard operating procedure now, our pundits don't even notice anymore. Only Stewart and Colbert take stances which allow them to encompass the delusional truth of political discourse.

In Prasie of Axolotl

2010-04-25T14:22:00.004-04:00

It's Earth Day Plus out there on the Mall and people are gathering and singing and saving the planet like crazy, mostly because it's a sort of balmly day in DC and not as rainy as predicted. I went for a run and snapped some pictures, but mostly it was just white folks in summerwear. I did like the cool bus pictured above, the "Peacemaker," because you meet the nicest people on a bus.

I once ran into a lovely former student, Laura, a couple of years after she graduated and she told me that right after she'd last seen me she was riding the bus from Colorado to Phoenix and out in the Arizona desert a motorist pulled up alongside the bus and started firing a pistol into it, hitting numerous passengers and the driver, who somehow managed to maintain control. Then the shooter raced away, but turned around and plowed head-on into the bus, ending his spree. It turned out he'd already killed three people (including his ex-wife) down in Phoenix that day, and set his apartment building on fire. He was the quiet type apparently. Laura doesn't ride the bus anymore. Or go to Arizona.

The Earth People reminded me (just by their numbers) of all the Teabaggers I've seen in recent months, all eight billion of them if you believe the Foxaganda. Virtually all Teabaggers reminded me of The Big Drift -- which is that tendency among Americans to gain one or two pounds and lose one IQ point each year after college, until finally you're fatter and stupider than the young you would have thought possible. Teabagger: QED.

Your Earth Day Assignment: go here, scroll down and listen to the Axolotl Song. Epic!

Esprit d'Escalier

2010-04-17T09:54:00.004-04:00

I must admit that sometimes I step onto the subway and feel "rogue hatred" (as Tom Wolfe put it) for all of humanity. I supopse it's the reptile-brain's reflexive reaction to competition for finite resources, the snarl of jackals at the shrinking water hole. But I also think there is a rational basis for some of it -- the completely rational disdain for the free-rider. Start with the people who manage the stations: often I come into my home-station at morning rush hour and two escalators are running up, and one down. As the ratio of entering (thus descending) passengers to exiting ones must be at least 50 to 1 at that time, this represents an utter dereliction by the person sitting in the glass booth next to the escalators. That person ought to get off the lazy ass and reverse the direction of one escalator, and he or she ought to get written up for failing to do so. But that would the introducing accountability and responsibility (and more efficiency and rationality) to the system, and we can't have that. Actually expecting employees to notice things and take an interest? Socialism!

Of course if we wanted to really improve the system by raising the consciousness of the riders, we would also encourage the able-bodied to walk up and down the escalators instead of riding, lumpen on the right side, as if the device were a vehicle and not a thoroughfare. This would empty and fill the stations much faster -- which is what the escalators are there to do. But that would probably be too much like Sweden or something, actually encouraging the couch-potatoes to get exercise and promote efficiency! UnAmerican!

This morning I saw a couple of young, smug, affluent (and exceedingly stupid by their chit-chat) white folks blithely pounding down mocha smoothies and chowing on bagel sandwiches on while riding downtown -- in blatant violation of the commonsensical laws against food on the subway. I felt like saying something like "The law doesn't apply to you...why?" But I didn't. In retropsect a better idea came to me: next time, I think I'll simply snap their picture with my constant companion the PowerShot, and we'll just see what happens from there.

Wankers of the World, Unite!

2010-04-12T11:13:00.004-04:00

I was off to Kitschtopia over the weekend and distracted by art, food and company from the grievous state of the world. It was very nice.

Now I am back at work, but was amused this morning by Matt Taibi's slagging of David "Banality of Evil" Brooks, whom he catches reflecting upon how the rich now work harder than the poor. Oh really.

Work, real work, in the Shaker – work is prayer – sense consists of doing something valuable (beneficial, pleasurable) for somebody else. Getting your ass kissed and your ego stroked for going through some executive motions, no matter how remunerative it is for you, is not really work. It’s a position, a sinecure, a title – in the feudal sense. Working backwards from Freud’s brilliant insight that “sanity is the ability to love and work,” it is no wonder then that so many of the rich and of our pampered elites, are morally or even generally deranged. They are denied the corrective benefits of visceral contact with humankind’s shared realities, and also the moral refreshment of sacrifice. It’s quite simply “Spoiled Brat Syndrome” and the great myth is that it is only acquired in childhood. It can manifest at any age, given a prolonged period where the insufferable “sufferer” is subjected to rewards vastly disproportionate to risks and/or contributions. George Bush is the quintessential example of this of course, as I have often written. The most telling thing ever about him was his answer to ‘What sacrifices will you ask of Americans in this war?’ W quite literally didn’t understand the concept “sacrifice” as naturally, one who has never worked might not.

Wikilealks Footage Reconsidered

2010-04-07T17:26:00.005-04:00

In fairness, I can say with a lot of confidence that, were I a grunt at the front, where people were often, actively trying to kill me, my attitude would pretty soon morph into: Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. This is one of the reasons I've never volunteered for any of our overseas adventures, and also one of the reasons why I've been opposed to virutally all of them. You put people in that position, you're gonna get that kind of behavior. But the Ozzie and Harriets of America seem to believe that all our boys go over there and maintain a Tom-Hanks-style stoic chill. We're just here to help y'all be free -- goddamnit! Americans can't understand why we're not greeted as liberators -- because they never see tapes like the Wikileaks release, that show us in essence: utterly clueless, misunderstanding all we see, yet deadly, raining death from above on all and sundry because it's too dangerous or troublesome to actually figure out who the enemy is, if anyone. Once they're dead, of course, we can most definitely be sure they are enemy, usually without fear of contradiction.

In fairness too, I'll bet the boys who do the killing close up, and take the real chances, aren't so cavalier about it as these helicopter guys, who probably have it relatively cush, and are way out of range in most instances. (I would bet large dollars that the combat-mortality rate among gunship crews is nearly nil.) So basically, these laughing boys are just hot-rodding thrill killers at this point, drunk with their power to kill with impunity, and really getting off.

As we brace ourselebvs for a number of open-carry militia rallies here in the DC area, it occurs to me -- how do these right wingers feel about choppers just opening up on everyone in the vicinity of anyone bearing arms, or anyone coming to the rescue of anyone who was unlucky enough to even be near someone bearing arms when the blasting began? I guess only American have Second Amendment rights.

Ode to an Apache

They are not our brave aviators
nor our young soldiers, too soon
old from too many tours
gravely saving and taking life.
They’re idiot kids playing
video games in the safety
of their levitated La-Z-Boys,
reveling in the lethal evils, clean,
laughably abstract at this distance,
which our technology makes possible.

Propaganda with Gattling Gun

2010-04-06T08:57:00.004-04:00

WikiLeaks has somehow posted helicopter gun-camera video, complete with radio chatter, from an incident in Baghdad in which a number of people loitering in the street were blown away on suspicion that they were carrying weapons. In at least two of the cases, as the video shows, the weapons were mere cameras, Reuters news cameras as it turns out. A reporter and his driver were killed.

After the initial burst of 30mm cannonfire a van pulls up to the scene, and people emerge from it to attend to the surviving wounded. No weapons or other evidence of hostility appears but the helicopter's gunner opens fire anyway, killing the would-be rescuers and incidentally, wounding two children who happen to be in the van.

Appalling as the carnage is, even more awful is the abundant frat-boy chatter and laughter that attends the slaughter. It's really not the Hollywood picture of brave aviators, facing down danger, taking life in full awful congnizance of the gravity of their actions. No, these guys are completely safe, high above the action, not particularly concerned with whether or not they're killing innocents, and highly amused, in the aftermath by the carnage they have wrought. It's just a video game to them. When it's all over, and it's made clear to the choppers that they've shot a little girl, they just shrug it off, one of them says, "Well, it's their fault for bringing their children into a battle." Only there is no battle. He might just as well have said, "It's their fault for bringing their children into the city where they live."

Now, I know that war doesn't really make a man out of you. In fact, it more often brutalizes -- turns you into something much worse than you were, and might have been. And I also know that not every soldier is the sort of sociopath these boys seem to be. But the chatter on the tape reminds me of the "gorilla in the mist" jokes the Rodney King cops made on the radio after their police riot. Ther mere fact that they feel free to speak this way suggests a pervasive attitude.

And we wonder why the wars aren't going so well, why we aren't -- once again -- winning the hearts and minds.

Of course Wolf Blitzer and Crap Not News took the "Shit happens" route with this story. Nothing to see here folks.

Fox News -- Planet Killer

2010-04-05T13:03:00.005-04:00

Last night, by way of wishing Happy Easter, I was ranting to my scientist brother about the brownshirts and how I’m afraid that the jig is basically up; the shitheads aren’t coming back to reason anytime soon. Unless and until, like their German forebears, they find themselves living in the ruins off whatever their daughters and wives can pull in whoring for the troops of the conquerors, there is no brute fact sufficient, so nothing will ever punch through their sanctimonious delusions and let them see their grandiose cause for the cheap hustle (the exploitation of their resentment, neurosis, ignorance, and immaturity) it always is.

One of the key reasons why this isn’t going to happen, and why the republic isn’t going to heal itself with free speech is, of course, Fox News. Now Fox itself isn’t that big a player, it doesn’t make that much difference hour by hour or day to day. But think of it like The Asteroid Tugboat people hypothesized a few years back. If you need to alter the trajectory of a thing in space over time, say, an asteroid on a distant-future date to collide with earth, you can get there ahead of time and attach an ion-drive thruster to it. The ion drive can't really develop much torque, can’t accelerate things quickly or out of heavy gravity, but it can exert long-term, steady pressure enough to actually and significantly change the trajectory of even big things, perhaps enough to save the planet!

On the other hand, or perhaps conversely, as long as we have Fox News pushing the discourse ever-so-slightly but constantly and inexorably to the Corporatist Right, things cannot get really or lastingly better. The fascists really can push the one superpower and thus whole planet into ruin. Eventually, on this trajectory, America will be a police-state kleptocracy where government monies are spent only on armed force, prosecution, imprisonment, and protection of the ruling class's ever-growing private property. Economic chaos, civil unrest and environmental degradation will only accelerate this process.

Dark days ahead, my friends.

Of Time and Tubs

2010-04-02T09:05:00.005-04:00

Last night I dragooned a few innocent, junior Ministry staffers into a mad errand. We headed downtown descended into a subterranean dispenser of strong spirits for several mind-fogging beverages and then we went to see Hot Tub Time Machine. Let me just say about it -- there are some things you can't unsee. Like Rob Cordry's unwaxed ass, and that's just for starters.

It's very, very cleverly written, referencing or drawing on every time-travel/alternate-reality text from It's a Wonderful Life to Terminator and The Butterfly Effect, with a slap here and there at Stephen Hawking, Red Dawn, and everthing bad about the 1980's, including the clothes, the hair, the music, Ron Reagan (seen bullshitting about Iran-Contra) long lines of cocaine, long lines of tequila shots, hopped-up little skanks in leg-warmers, bags of magic mushrooms, breakup-poetry and... where was I?

I especially loved the way the film depicts today as the logical, and not very wonderful extension of those times, the way it's completely unapologetic about its grossness, insensitivity and extremity, the way it exploits its young actresses for gratuitous nudity, and its refusal to get moralistic, hopeful or messagy about things. It hews pretty close to Seinfeld's one rule of comedy: No growing, no learning.

Hot Tub Time Machine prominently features an "illegal" Russian version of Red Bull called ChernoBull, and a million other little touches like that. A furry wild-card tinkering with the NFL's time-space continuum. An alllusion to the painting of Francois Clouet. And John Cusack. And Chevy Chase stealing scenes, and hot startlets. What's not to like?

"Deeply wrong on every level," said one lovely operative at the Ministry of Elegance afterwards. She meant that in a good way.

Code Pink 1; Karl Rove 0

2010-03-31T09:26:00.005-04:00

So Karl Rove goes to Beverly Hills to spew lies and sign books for a bunch of brownshirt altercockers but the Code Pink Gals showed up to shout him down. They tried to make a citizen's arrest for his war crimes but he was having no part of it; he blusters about the "totalitarianism of the left" and squirts out a few more lies and then departs without signing autographs for the kneepadded fascists. The editors of the film report linked to above are very, very careful to give Karl his say, without (as usual) any critique or fact-checking whatsoever, including the assertion that "The Downing Street Memos are a complete fabrication...." and also that the Leftist Totalitarians "believe in free speech only for themselves," as if the Code Pink gals aren't performing their duty of counterspeech, and also as if Karl hasn't been free for decades to pour his poison into the ears of the nation, to promote the most preposterous and destructive falsehoods on the most prestigious talking-head shows, to spill the secrets of the state with impunity -- yet somehow his free speech is being suppressed.

Well fuck Karl Rove and fuck any of them (left or right) who have the megaphone of television with which to blast the nation: when they're out in public it's the public's turn to respond and say anything they like, short of threats, over and over, even if it impedes the comfortable intimacy of the well-paid celebrity with The People.

Bonus Link: Teabonics -- the dubious grasp of spelling, English, logic, and reality amomg the sign-wielding TeaBaggers (click the slideshow at upper-right).

Goniffs

2010-03-26T08:34:00.006-04:00

In the great Miller's Crossing, Joel and Ethan Coen have the hero observe this about the Jewish siblings around whom the plot turns, "She's a grifter, just like her brother. They probably had grifter parents and grifter grandparents and someday they'll each spawn little grifter kids."

Myrna Birnbaum, spoken of here, sounds a little like Sarah Palin, only she finally is shown to be a tart with a heart, too much heart to finally pull the trigger on her detractor.

I wonder, still, if there are odd family traditions of what we goyim call "grifting" in Jewish communities, a legacies of shady operation passed down from father to son and daughter. In any case, I know this: the word often associated with the Cantor clan in the Richmond, Virginia, Jewish community where Eric Cantor gew up is gonif -- which apparently is something between an outright thief and a shady operator. The word doesn't seem misapplied to Eric when you consider all the cash the banksters funnel to him through his wife the bagman/lobbyist.

This morning I awoke to hear local News Channel 8 telling Washingtonians that both Republicans and Democrats were getting threats of violence over the passage of health care reform. A moronic blonde bimbette catapulted this propaganda for Cantor. According to the station's website, yesterday Cantor came out with this:

"A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I've received threatening e-mails." Cantor said. He refused to release details, however, saying it would only encourage more threats, and refused to take questions.

According to the website, the Richmond PD, not a notoriously liberal outift (believe me), say this however:

Later Thursday, however, Richmond police said in a news release that the bullet had been fired into the air around 1 a.m. Tuesday. It finished its arc back to earth at a sharp downward trajectory, breaking a window pane on the bottom floor of the two-story brick building where Cantor's campaign leases the top floor.

So a bullet fired at random and spending its last energy on a building where Cantor has very infrequently gone, somehow becomes an attack on his politics, proving to the bimbette, that, despite what her own station's wensite publishes, there is (as usual) equal wrong on both sides.

Now there is a story here, and that is that the Minority Whip got caught in a deliberate, obvious, and preposterous lie, which he was telling to make political hay, but that is not the story our on-air "journalists "want to tell.

Journalism is not even writing any more. They just mix up a cocktail of rumor, propaganda, superstition and statistics into a he-said/she-said controversy and call it news. No need to worry about the truth of the matter. That seems like kind of a grift to me.