VauxhallVelcraux

Bend It For Beckham

2008-03-20T14:26:00.004-04:00

Whilst catering last night, I noticed that almost everyone in the VIP section where I was serving hors d'oeuvres was big, hulking and rude. Usually that means it's some financial firm celebrating evil's defeat of good, but '08 is not a banner year for them and in any case, these guys weren't potbellied as much as neck-less. Then I noticed David Beckham.

Officially, it was a dinner for the US Soccer Foundation, and there were pre-recorded video greetings from Presidents G. H. W. Bush and Clinton. Beckham spoke and actually gave a Lifetime Achievement Award to Pele, which was pretty cool, actually. Pele can barely speak English and is in fact still alive.

David Beckham was wearing a midnight blue suit with black shoes and a red tie. I couldn't get close enough to inspect his duds further because he was taking pictures with everyone, but the tailoring was pretty rad. He's much thinner than I thought, and not as tall (maybe 6'0"). And his voice is so boyish. His hair was shaved all around with a slight difference (maybe one guard) in length around the top; kind of stupid but he still looked good. Much better than the cornrows from 2002. The only bad thing is that you could just barely make out the odious winged cross tattoo on his lower neck. Reading his wikipedia profile, it turns out that he has a plethora of shitty, cliched, "meaningful" tattoos all over his 0% body fat body. What I did not see was his wife, the Spice Girl who can't sing and who looks like a UFO, which is good, because I want to bend it for Beckham quite badly so I might have upended a soup tureen on her.

As I was eating on the back stairwell during my break, he and his handlers walked by as the celebs usually do when they're leaving and don't want to attract notice. I'm probably paid to be discreet, but I almost started caring about sports. It wasn't quite like the time when Bill Clinton made the rounds, shaking all the waiters' and chefs' hands, but every server who's into dudes (about 95% of the women and 40% of the men) experienced some titillation when Beckham brushed our knees on his way out the door.

Incidentally, what is up with this photo, which is the first one that pops up when you google-image him?

His musculature looks painted on and reminds me of this:

Diarrhea, Diarrhea Every Morning...Plus "The Nine" by Jeffrey Toobin

2008-01-14T10:26:00.000-05:00

As of Cleanse Day 11, I am almost certainly underslept but I don't feel it. The laxative tea makes me get up with what feels like a sine curve of nausea pulsing through my abdomen, so around 5-7 am I am roused each morning to go to the bathroom. Since I live next door to a foundry, as well as down the block and across the street from two separate concrete plants, the clamorous din of industry keeps me wide awake until just before it's time to get up, which is when I usually fall back asleep. I woke up at 5:30 this morning and have been up ever since. It's 4:00, the time of day when I am usually so tired that I just make tea and read blogs until it's time to go home, but I have lots of energy. No caffeine or alcohol in thirteen days! And it will be another five at least before I breach my Mormon lifestyle.

Also, my sense of smell has improved tremendously. This is something of a mixed blessing, because while it's novel to get a whiff of someone's reheated lunch and be able to identify its composition by olfactorily detecting the various ingredients, it sucks to be confronted with someone's chicken tikka masala and then go back to my desk sucking yet more lemonade out of my Nalgene bottle. It's not so much that I'm starving as that I'm tired of the monotony.

For, you see, this cleanse is a totalitarian dictator bent on making me a skinny unperson if I commit the thoughtcrime of fantasizing about mopping up burger fat with a curly-cut french fry. I can't really socialize, and climbing stairs is strangely difficult. But I've been crossing things off my to-do lists like never before.

Considering that Elliott and I spent the entire weekend together--waking, sleeping, all--I don't even have cabin fever or stress of any kind. My sex drive has been decimated, for sure, but I had an enormously productive weekend watching films, taking Dudley to the park, seizing my jackets from an inept tailor, going to the MoMA, etc. I even read Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine from cover to cover, and have since started Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great.

Toobin's book is pretty excellent. He examines the evolution of the Supreme Court from about 1990 through the present, with his central thesis being how the mere weight of precedent, the involuntary international renown of the various justices and their travels, and the excesses of the Bush Administration have generated an irresistible force of cosmopolitanization, and, with it, a leftward drift. Sandra Day O'Connor in particular is depicted from having morphed from a Goldwater Republican to something like an Olympia Snowe. Toobin can rely too heavily on the conclusions of a single telling anecdote to brand an entire justice's temperament and judicial philosophy (in particular, Anthony Kennedy's "vanity"), but the glimpses behind the most powerful and mysterious branch of the federal government are fascinating--and occasionally, titillating. Souter writes with a fountain pen! The Ginsburgs and the Scalias celebrate New Year's together.

Toobin makes much of the relative isolation in which each justice labors; their clerks mingle and interact, but aside from regular meetings, the actual jurists allegedly work in monastic seclusion. And indeed, they are capable of bickering by proxy, through their opinions. On the other hand, he writes of the extracurricular connections among them: Rehnquist and O'Connor had barbecues together, O'Connor and Breyer were close, Ginsburg mothers Souter, Thomas is well-liked by everyone, etc. He also reveals his CNN/Beltway/Establishment position by peppering the text with the occasional revealing distaste for bloggers or hoi polloi. But it's an outstanding look at the Court and the political figures whose careers are affected by its composition.

That said, back to the cleanse. Day 11 is easier than Day 10, where I was constantly aware of what I'm not eating. I've lost just under ten pounds, which means that if I lose another five in the remaining five days, I will probably gain them back and stick with my weight as of today: 158 pounds. Now my goal is to weigh 150 by my birthday in March.

I haven't eaten solid food (except tiny slivers of lemon rind) in 260 hours. I will not eat for 121 more.

Cleanse: Day VII

2008-01-10T16:02:00.000-05:00

It's like a hunger strike for Darfur, only it's really so I can fit into all my pants.

When people casually ask me what I'm doing for lunch or see me come into the kitchen while they're heating up fragrant Indian food, they apologize profusely as if I were a mosque and they just entered me with shoes on, eating a pork rib hero.

I can tolerate the sight of food! To prove it, I will attend our weekly brown bag tomorrow, where there will be free kettle chips, Les Petits Ecoliers and cheese and crackers.

It's amazing how a single day of sub-par weight loss (in today's case, straight up zero) dampens your mood. I lost 2.8 lbs in the two prior days, which made me think I'd mastered the rhythm (eight glasses of lemonade, with some pulp and rind in there, seemed ideal) but apparently the body does what it wants. Fuck you too, body.

I'm exhausted every night because a) I'm not eating and b) the laxative tea makes me wake up at 5:00-7:30 in the morning, and by the time I've sat in the bathroom with the light on for a few minutes, I'm wide awake and it's not entirely pointful to try to get another half hour of sleep, over the din of the concrete factory's magic.

If anyone who doesn't know what they're talking about wants to vocalize their suspicions that the cleanse is either a hoax or deleterious for you, please shut the fuck up. Don't bother me; I'm on a cleanse.

Cleanse: Day 5

2008-01-08T17:11:00.000-05:00

I've lost 4.2 pounds.

Day 2 was pretty bad, because I couldn't warm up.

Day 3 was better and day four was the best, but today I've been starving and exhausted all day. None of the supposed superpowers (such as an enhanced sense of smell to the point where you can tell if someone next to you has a cold because you can detect the mucus in their head) have kicked in yet, nor do I have a coated tongue or weird body odor.

I forgot my cayenne at home, so I'm cold again (it warms your body and keeps your metabolism from slowing down). It's 65 degrees outside in January, and I can't really appreciate it. I went to the tailors and passed by a Popeye's and a McDonald's on Delancey--neither of which I would ever eat at--and practically stopped short when I saw posters for chicken wings and 2 McMuffins for $3, as if they were naked mannequins, either of the Kim Cattrall variety or the kind you might have seen in Gimbel's or Wannamaker's in 1948. Supposedly when you get cravings, it's for the things your liver is finally free to detoxify in the absence of new shit entering your body through your pie-hole, but I can't remember the last burger I ate. The last bad thing that entered me was ten pieces of bacon at a New Year's brunch, which might explain the craving for Mickey-D's.

The downside to this cleanse is that you can't really hang out with people unless it's at a movie, because everything else involves eating and drinking. Although Elliott and I cleaned the house pretty thoroughly on Sunday, as a nice balance to what was going on inside of us. We always abide strictly by zen principles.

It has been 118 hours since I chewed. I don't imagine eating solid food (and even then, soup) until the evening of Saturday the 19th, so 264 hours to go.

With ten days to go, I should lose about 12 more pounds if the trend holds steady. That would be a shade under the 10% of my body weight that I hoped for.

Barack Obama, New Jersey, Bill Kristol and a Lemonade Cleanse: New Year's Revolutions

2007-12-31T12:53:00.000-05:00

My gut feeling is that 2008 is going to be a great year for everybody. 2007 was, heretofore, the absolute zenith, but I gained a lot of weight. As a 167.8-lb. walrus, my vast gut now possesses the predictive powers of ten tweens' fingers on an Ouija planchette. So my prediction is that Dakota is totally a retard, and 2008 is going to be a great year for everybody.

If the Iowa caucuses sustain their ridiculous, inegalitarian and anticlimactic role as kingmaker (fully ten months before the actual election), President Obama will be there at some point next year signing single-payer health care into law. I don't care that he has sort of flirted with a universal health care system that incorporates existing HMOs and Big Pharma or that his insipid and anti-intellectual bromides that constitute his message of hope and change make use of right-wing talking points to distance himself from actual progressive grassroots. What I care about is that one of the whitest, most rural states just picked an urban African American senator as the recipient of its delegates and disproportionate media largesse--over Hillary. That's a sign of progress: that a wealthy, educated biracial man can shunt a borderline-elderly, wealthy, educated woman of privilege into third place.

Universal health care will of course mean that thousands of creative young people dependent on their menial day jobs for the health insurance they provide will soon be able to ditch them and go freelance without fear that a staph infection or a broken arm can decimate their financial futures. It would be naive to say that will translate into some golden age of artistic production. But it will certainly reshape the job market in favor of people who can barely tolerate working in an office.

As far as Mike Huckabee goes, I'm delighted to see Mitt Romney's attempt at purchasing victory thwarted and look forward to the ensuing civil war within the Republican party as the evangelicals who now expect to course to victory try to wrest control from the corporate-types who always regarded them as useful idiots. Take that, Mitt, with your stupid fucking rich-boy name and your gross Paulie Walnuts temples and your asinine and grossly unhistorical contention that freedom requires religion.

Huckabee is not the only conservative on the rise. Bill Kristol, who might be the shittiest of all television gasbag pundits (read Glenn Greenwald for a list of malevolent and foolish statements) has now been hired as an Op-Ed columnist by the New York Times. So now we can enjoy our terminally liberal media with a nice injection of fear-mongering and imperialism from a man who thought the Iraqi occupation would take a few weeks. He also looks like Rutger Hauer.

I don't think you can tell the difference. Bill Kristol is a neocon replicant hitchhiker, but without a bird of prey.

Subject change. When did New Jersey become one of the most progressive states in the country? California may be trying to address climate change by suing the EPA over its ridiculous refusal to permit higher auto emissions standards in the nation's largest car market--to which New Jersey and even New York State and our colossal disappointment governor have signed on--but New Jersey has made the gay equal, abolished the death penalty (first state to do so since its 1976 reinstitution), and now might allot its electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. Plus the Democrats now have a good chance at picking up one or two seats there--maybe three. Honestly, it's becoming a model state. UPDATE: New Jersey has now formally apologizedfor slavery.

***

While I want to count among my New Year's Revolutions the desire to double Guantanamo, triple the murder rate (to halve the rent!) and quadruple my carbon footprint, the conclusion is: Sadly, No.

I would like to publish my novel (through a literary agent), learn enough graphics skills to make a living off of it someday, blog more frequently, be a better dog owner by taking Dudley to McCarren Park more, bike to work whenever possible, watch 200 films and read 50 books, eat at a great restaurant at least once a month, take yoga classes, wax my excess body hair and continue my pursuit of reaching all fifty states by age thirty (only two years and two months to get to the remaining eighteen).

In order to achieve the energy level necessary to accomplish these things, I’m going on the lemonade cleanse with Elliott. For two weeks. This entails laxative tea at night, followed by a gruesome saltwater flush each morning (two tbsp. uniodized sea salt in a quart of water, which cannot be absorbed by the blood or the kidneys, so instead of pissing it out you shit it out). Then, six to twelve times a day, you mix half a lemon with a tablespoon of Grade B organic maple syrup, a dash of cayenne pepper and 10oz warm water.

Today was day one. It’s 4:00 and I’ve had four glasses of lemonade and untold quantities of water. The salt water gave me incredible diarrhea, somewhat akin to Angel Falls during the rainy season. It reverberated throughout the ACLU like an audio beacon of terrorist-coddling. Yesterday I ate only fruit and the day before that fruit and salad, and I won’t be eating any actual food until January 19, because you need to drink orange juice only for a day as a sort of cool-down, followed by vegetable soup and probiotics.

So as of the afternoon of day one, I’m pretty hungry and can’t really concentrate on anything. On Fridays at work we have “brown bag,” where everyone eats together in the library and NYCLU pays for some cookies, crackers, brie and pretzels. Even though it was unbearable to be around people eating fragrant things like Indian food on top of the delicious junk, I used it as an occasion to self-righteously boast about my new crusade to shed my 2007 muffin top to what I assumed would be sympathetic co-workers, in order to generate possible social pressure to hold me accountable. A couple of people agreed in principle and one person has actually done it (for four days) but there were some stares. Well, fuck you too, I’m going to be svelter than thou! I'm going to be a big old head with a stick for a body! Zero weight for '08!

Francis Ford Crappola

2007-12-06T15:45:00.001-05:00

Elliott and I saw the newest Coppola film, Youth Without Youth at the Paris Theatre this week, and before getting into I'm going to lavish considerable time and attention to the accoutrements of the theater-going experience. First, it's a sincere pleasure to sit in a theater with only one screen, even if you have to go to 58th Street to do it. (Seriously, it was dark and snowing up there and they have an FAO Schwartz; that's how far north it is). Some budding soft-drink company called Tava was giving their shit away for free. Rich or poor: everyone loves free. I hadn't eaten dinner and reconciled myself to getting reamed up the ass for popcorn that makes your lips burn, but downstairs in the concession they were handing out free bags of popcorn plus gourmet cupcakes. When something has dulce de leche all over it, I'm going to take two, even if the item in question is a vagina dentata. But gourmet cupcakes will do.

Even though I can't fit into my pants anymore, I totally had popcorn, soda and three halves of three cupcakes for dinner.

Now the part about the movie. Coppola came out, age sixty-eight, to plug his latest film with a disarming level of earnestness. It's the first since The Rainmaker, which came out in 1997. While disputing his introducer's claim that his production company, Zoetrope, was "on hiatus," he ticked off a list of things his daughter Sofia was doing as proof that his own creativity hadn't sputtered out completely. Kudos, nepotist.

After plugging his wine label, he wryly referred to his desire to be a "young, independent filmmaker" before popping a Cialis with the Weinstein brothers. Then it was time for the worst film I've seen in the theaters so far in 2007. In short, it's the story of a scholar (Tim Roth) who at the age of eighty is struck by lightning and heals into his forty-year old self, with time to complete his magnum opus on the origins of language. His accrues supernatural powers and falls in love with a woman who's the exact double of his first love, and they travel the world together as she falls victim to various trances and altered states, speaking in tongues and brushing ever closer to the primeval language of man.

As an screenplay adapted from Mircea Eliade's story of the same name (a Jorge Luis Borges copycat), it was essentially dead in the water from the get-go. Imagine trying to remain faithful to the story about the king who commands his cartographers to draw increasingly detailed maps of his domain until they eventually create one that's exactly its size. To that, add a horrifically bland performance by Tim Roth with assistance from a bevy of high-pitched Eastern European doctors and academics who are seemingly motivated by pure beneficence.

This is not a whimsical film. Its flirtation with magical realism adheres strictly to its conventions as a plot device, without any interesting explorations of the themes that would, you might think, leap to mind immediately once you'd heard a one-line synopsis. The way in which Roth's "girlfriend" ages while he remains eternally youthful isn't boring because it's a common cliche; it's boring because it's like Dorian Gray with the decadence drained away. It doesn't even make sense. You never really see any hint of what Roth is working on, nor does the film clue you into why it matters. He's merely focused. There is an undeveloped allegorical theme of Romania through the middle third of the twentieth century, and the unrealized promises of all its abortive governments, but no amount of newspaper front page montages can sustain such scattershot connections.

While many of the individual shots are beautifully composed (including the titles), the film is painful. It's essentially one large, ponderous, slow-moving fiasco. It's like a demigod orchestrated the collision of two galaxies over the course of an eon and expected us to be enthralled as stars missed each other by light-years and only a few stray asteroids banged together. Coppola wants to be a young filmmaker, but the ability to conjure up a budget that must have lurched into the tens of millions doesn't come from small-scale viticulture. He's an old man who tapped decades worth of favors to disgorge this shitty meditation on recuperated youth, and like Roth's hidden monograph, it's irrelevant.

Crispin Glover and "It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine."

2007-11-27T17:10:00.000-05:00

I went with Elliott to see Crispin Glover at IFC last night and it was terrif. He looked good (although I don't like his hair, it's too 90s; also, if he turns to the side he looks completely different in profile) but I was really impressed with his ability to give an hourlong performance without water, then screen the second film of the IT Trilogyand then field questions before sitting down to sign books and posters, lavishing several minutes on each person. It was at least four or five hours of work and he didn't look the least bit fagged out.

The performance consisted of him reading excerpts from several of his strange little books, which had nothing in the way of linearity or a through-line but for the vague thematic resemblances: quasi-scientific nineteenth century scientific discourse, animal dissections and paranoia. You know, same old, same old. There is a certain way of approximating insanity that Glover writes towards which is really excellent. He observes the logorrhea that accompanied the imperial mania for classifying everything and uses it as a jumping-off point for brushing against terror and insanity. There have been different ways of understanding the insane--none of them very good--and medical science from the late 1800s juts out like an escarpment. Glover doesn't "go crazy onstage" so much as make use of text. He performs most of the same words that appeared on the accompanying slide show of pages from the books, so the words were right there in front of the audience. The text (as text) contains typographically set words like you'd find in any book, but drawn-in words that slip between dialogue, excess narration and marginalia superimposed over the "story." Also, it was really fucking rad to watch his control. The occasional discrepancy between the words on the slide and the words Glover uttered indicates that at times he's ad-libbing because he hasn't got the entire thing memorized verbatim, but that might be a sort of deliberate Spaulding Gray-like tic. You read along and Glover intones things in a far better way than you read them. I guess, simply put, that's what makes good acting good, but the sudden discontinuities in pitch or emotional tenor were really rad.

The film itself was also fantastic. It's a somewhat comic horror movie about a man (Stephen C. Stewart) with cerebral palsy and a hair fetish who winds up strangling a series of attractive women, except for one disabled woman who refuses his romantic overtures out of prejudice. Stewart's words are essentially incomprehensible all of the time. His first victim is played by Margit Karstensen, who, in addition to looking slightly MTFish, is incredible at playing a generous but put-upon divorcee with a slightly crazy ex-husband.

The interiors are all brightly colored and harshly lit, with sparse furnishings and open walls that suggest a stage production, the omniscience of the viewer and a total lack of privacy for lives that exist entirely within a single room. In contrast, the nursing home/institution from which Stewart emerges for his spate of murderous dates is populated by goggly gargoyles and grotesques. It's amazing, and will never be released on DVD because Crispin Glover has yet to and in fact may never recoup the production costs and earns what he can by touring in perpetuity.

There's something about Glover that seems vaguely autistic. He reminds me of my landlord, a 70-year old sculptor named Tom Clancy, from the brief period I lived in Clinton Hill. He who was incredibly intrusive and regarded our house as his personal art project (which, to an extent, it was). He would calmly sort of try to regulate our daily lives without realizing how shockingly inappropriate and irritating it was, but you could say increasingly rude and pointed things to him without the least emotional reaction passing across his beatific face. He was either truly imperturbable or else considered us to be such lowly peons that no matter what mud we threw at him, it wouldn't matter. Crispin Glover gives me that vibe. He's Buddha-like, but I bet when negotiating something pertaining to his artistic vision, he's inflexible and stubborn and oddly effective. Being born into privilege probably helps, but it's not an aristocratic air as much as a singularly focused confidence. Then he signed books for at least half an hour, chatting with everyone. One might not expect such a degree of earnestness from him, but there it is. I wanted him to write "Dear Pete, You're my density...I mean, my destiny," but chickened out. He had that weird falling-out with Robert Zemeckis over the sequel.

Shlag is Automatic!

2007-10-26T15:49:00.000-04:00

I took my parents and my boyfriend to Peter Luger for my parents' thirtieth wedding anniversary, and it was one of the greatest meals I've ever had in my life. I was fully prepared going in that it would be astronomically expensive and the service would be gruff and Teutonic, but on both counts I was pleasantly surprised--even if my father can rack up a sixty dollar bar tab in about an hour. If you order Porterhouse for Three for four people, it's about $130 and you walk out with a third of the meat uneaten. I had one drink, because I was offering to drive my parents back to Long Island (which they declined, but I'm still glad I didn't get drunk, since it would have been an extra forty bucks and I might not remember the event as perfectly).

Essentially, we didn't deviate from the script. For appetizers, we had the tomato-and-onion and a side of bacon. I've never in my life eaten tomato in pieces, with nothing on it. I'm a finicky priss. This time, I was slicing it up like a filet. With the house sauce on it it was incredibly meaty and rich. Same for the Vidalia onion. However, it was the bacon that really blew me away. It was the thickest, fattiest, most perfectly salted and crispy slice of bacon I've ever had. It looked like a hot dog autopsy. As good as the meat was--and I'm a bit chagrined to admit it--it was the bacon that was truly a mind fuck.

But the meat--they give you two enormous medium-cooked t-bone cuts with the pieces of meat half cut off into a sort of niblet, with the plate elevated at one end so that all the bloodied butter pools together. I ate until my breathing became labored with the pressure of meat on my lungs, and even then, as the waiter was about to bag our remnants begged someone to eat the final piece he extricated from the anonymous chunks left over. His plea was so earnest that I couldn't say no, and he was right. And the spinach and German potatoes were fantastic. The portions were tiny compared to the porterhouse; it seems they restrict the mandate for gluttony to meat.

As far as service goes, I was expecting something along the lines of the Muppet Movie when the dude with a hairnet throws plates of frog-legs as Telly Savalas and his myth. Instead, it was courteous with the ideal amount of pleasant chit-chat, i.e. "Is this your first time here, or are you regulars?" It was somewhat collective, with a panoply of middle-aged Germans working together around the dining room. They can carry twice the number of plates that I can. When they bring you your meat, they serve it in a hybrid-French service manner. Everything was prompt and no-nonsense. My father kept marveling at the decor, which is basically a zero. The tables are ancient oak, without any finish or tablecloths; there are rows of dusty steins lining the ledges and the bar, which lacks a footrest of any kind (believe me, it's quite distracting) might have been assembled in 1887. The lighting is overpowering and entirely overhead.

But after 120 years, it's done gone and branded itself. Marketing their own sauce might have been the watershed moment, but at least you can't buy a t-shirt. The self-commemoration is muted, limited basically to an insider's appreciation. If there were anything the least bit flamboyant, the entire operation would fall into the kitsch column. In spite of a casual dress code, it manages to avoid a kind of old-school tackiness by maintaining its singularly fantastic food (or at least, that's my guess, having only been there this one time). It's only replicated itself once, although who knows if they'll dismantle the building to make way for more Williamsburg condos and re-assemble it in Vegas.

Frank Bruni of the Times wrote a bullshit review a month ago. He does touch on the lighting issue, and I agree that the shrimp cocktail was lackluster, but most of his complaints are frivolous. Wah! The waiter threw gold coins at me! He sighed impatiently when my idiot friend inquired about the goddamn fish! I don't want to leave Manhattan to eat dinner!

Whatever, dude. My only real complaint is that there wasn't a wide range of choices of wine by the glass. (And they're not cheap--if they do that lunch burger deal for like ten bucks they can track down a suitable red wine to pair with their beef). For dessert, we ordered cheesecake and chocolate mousse cake. (They were out of German-American Bund-t cake). As the server left, I called after him about shlag. "Oh, yes. Shlag is automatic!" he said, walking away. I thought that was hilarious. The standardization of the meals really betrayed the underlying efficiency. Shlag is ubiquitous! Shlag is omniscient! And it was really good.

Bottom line: it's probably the best steak in the universe. No matter what the NY Times may shrewishly bitch, with its signature anti-style, Peter Luger is probably the best novelty restaurant there is.

Sometimes the New York Times is So Conservative I Have to Shit in My Pants

2007-10-12T13:12:00.000-04:00

Here is an article in its entirety.

Liberal Base Proves Trying to Democrats

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: October 12, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 — Of the three most recognizable Barneys in America, one is a singing purple dinosaur, another is a prehistoric cartoon character and the third is a gay congressman from Massachusetts.

Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat, is as closely tied to the issue of gay rights as Barney Rubble is to Fred Flintstone. But recently, Mr. Frank has been under siege by gay rights groups.

They are angry because Mr. Frank has removed specific language about “gender identity” from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would protect gay men and lesbians in the workplace and that gay rights advocates say would now leave transsexuals and transgender individuals vulnerable.

There is almost no chance that President Bush would ever sign the bill. But the bitter tug of war between gay groups and one of their best friends on Capitol Hill is the latest example of how Democrats in Congress, since regaining majority control this year, have been torn between making compromises needed to pass legislation and satisfying the unrelenting demands of the party’s liberal base.

Mr. Frank, in an hourlong news conference on Thursday, defended himself and said he would press ahead with the bill knowing that by not including the transgender language he could attract enough votes to get it approved. But he also expressed frustration that the Democrats were hampering themselves.

“There is a tendency in American politics for the people who feel most passionately about an issue, particularly ones that focus on a single issue, to be unrealistic in what a democratic political system can deliver,” Mr. Frank said, “and that can be self-defeating.”

“This is a moment of truth for responsible liberals in the Democratic Party,” he added.

The tension between Democratic lawmakers and their base has been most visible on the Iraq war, where the insistence by some of the most outspoken antiwar groups on setting hard deadlines for the withdrawal of American troops has often handcuffed Senate Democrats trying to reach a bipartisan deal on legislation to change the war strategy.

To the delight of Republicans, it has also played a role in a host of other issues, including a fight over increased fuel economy standards in the energy bill, and demands for more spending on environmental programs in the farm bill.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi disappointed Democrats seeking major changes to the federal farm subsidy program — changes that Ms. Pelosi had supported in the past. Instead she adopted a more moderate approach that made some changes but left most of the subsidies intact and that she called “a good first step.”

On the energy bill, the Democrats struggled to navigate the demands of two powerful factions in their base: organized labor groups tied to the auto industry and environmental groups. Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, thwarted Ms. Pelosi’s efforts to increase fuel efficiency standards.

The liberal group MoveOn.org started a campaign that included radio advertising branding Mr. Dingell, who is 81, “Dingellsaurus” for opposing the energy standards that the group said would combat global warming.

Representative Adam H. Putnam of Florida, chairman of the House Republican Conference, said Democrats were struggling with tensions between the party’s liberal wing, which provided money and support for the 2006 elections, and the views of many freshmen Democrats who won office in moderate or conservative districts.

“The freshmen who actually won seats in districts that had voted for Bush, in conservative-moderate districts, having nothing in common with Code Pink or MoveOn,” Mr. Putnam said, referring to the antiwar groups.

“The base turns on them in every single case,” he added. “So at some point they have to stop falling into the trap of constantly playing to the base and try to solve problems.”

Democrats point to a series of legislative achievements this year, including an increase in the minimum wage, new lobbying and ethics rules, and an overhaul of student-aid programs, and a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi, Brendan Daly, said she was providing responsible leadership.

“One of the things she says is that an activist — that’s their role to be persistent and unsatisfied and try to push the envelope,” Mr. Daly said. “But when you are in a position of leading, in Congress, you have to be realistic at some point.”

Sometimes, though, the in-fighting can seem unreal, as with the recent fury directed by gay groups at Mr. Frank.

“Barney Frank is not gay enough?” asked Representative Thaddeus McCotter, Republican of Michigan, one of the most conservative members of the House .

Even Mr. Frank acknowledged the weirdness. “The likelihood that somebody is going to run against me in my district on the grounds that I have been insufficiently pro-gay is not very high on my list of concerns,” he said.

He has put gender identity protections in a separate bill that is not expected to be acted upon this year.

But many gay rights groups said they were truly angry and bewildered, especially because the compromise involves a bill unlikely to be signed by Mr. Bush. A coalition of some 280 groups sent Mr. Frank a letter urging him to include gender identity in the bill to be voted on soon. “What we are talking about is stripping out a part of our community for a symbolic vote, which in our opinion does not advance the struggle for civil rights for our people,” said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

“If the goal here is for the new majority to demonstrate that it is responding to a core constituency,” Mr. Foreman said, “passing a non-inclusive bill is not going to accomplish that.”

Some Republicans in the House have said they wished Mr. Frank had included the language on transgender and transsexual people because it would have made it easier for them to vote against the bill.

Mr. Frank, at his news conference, said that including gender identity would kill the bill while approving a compromise measure would be a momentous step. “It is an important sign to the rest of the country that we are making progress,” he said.

“On the other hand,” he continued, “an announcement that this new Democratic Congress led by a woman who has been as committed to full rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in every aspect of her career, that she had to kill a gay rights bill and couldn’t do anything at all would, I think, be the most negative message we could send.”

First, Barney Frank's bill. While admitting, right at the outset, that "there is almost no chance that President Bush would ever sign the bill," David Herszenhorn goes on for paragraph after paragraph torpedoing the alleged stupidity of the Democrats' 'liberal base.' Even though the bill itself, irrespective of the language or provisions it contains, is so wacky and far to the left--imagine, protection for gay people enshrined in the law of the land--that our arch-conservative president would, without a doubt, veto it, the writer goes out of his way to browbeat the stupid, angry activists who don't understand how Congress works. Imagine, the very audacity of pushing for unpopular civil rights legislation! Those stupid hippies, this isn't the United States of Dolores Park! Trannies are way, way too fucked up to be included in 'realistic' legislation. They're like, boys who wish they were girls! This is Congress we're talking about. They only deal with serious things.

I actually agree, tentatively, with the substance of Frank's objections. It seems hypocritical, if not dangerous, to live and work in New York, under city and state employment protections, and hold Mississippi homos hostage to a provision that would certainly damn the legislation. And you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But if Bush is going to veto the bill anyway, no matter what, it seems incumbent to pursue inclusive language. To do otherwise is tantamount to saying "America might be ready for lesbians in the workplace, but FTMs? No way." You don't compromise on purely symbolic votes. That's why symbols mean things. They're supposed to be bold and unambiguous.

However, it's the tone and form of this Times article that I find so horrendous. It originates from a loathsome, insider perspective that considers all citizen activism to be a gnat-like distraction from the business of the adults who live and work among all the pretty white pillars. It reminds me of the scene from "The Pelican Brief" where outside the court are protesters holding signs saying "Overturn Roe v. Wade" and "Ban the Bomb!" as if people who believed those things would be standing side-by-side ranting at The Government. The attitude that vocal critics who aren't columnists or lawmakers are all just one big amalgamated mass of irrational blowhards is totally baseless and condescending, more so because irrational blowhards are basically the only kind of people on TV and in government.

But wait, there's more. Who is this article really attacking? Homophobic Republican congressmen? No! The Democratic party's "unrelenting demands" of the party's liberal base are to blame. Who cares if Nancy Pelosi is a catastrophic disappointment and Harry Reid's goal of appearing strong to voters will remain rather elusive with his strategy of capitulating to Bush on every minor detail? Fuck those hippies, especially when they're gay hippies! Those chaotic, well-organized, mellow, touchy, type-A free spirits must be kept as far as possible from power.

Even more stupefyingly, the article quotes a Michigan Republican's thinly veiled sarcasm: "Barney Frank isn't gay enough?" This is incredibly revealing. It's the single most frustrating tactic in existence. Rather than call McCotter out on his bullshit, they're using his words to make the point that gay people should be satisfied they got one of their own in the door and whenever there's a disagreement, the responsible and serious adult is always right and the salivating hordes are always wrong. It doesn't matter if Barney Frank is kowtowing to a reality that doesn't actually exist, except in the talking points of That McCotter and his comrades. How gay do you gays want it? Too gay, Congress has concluded. Transgender people are, like, gayer than gay. Not going to happen. Some Republicans in the House have said they wished Mr. Frank had included the language on transgender and transsexual people because it would have made it easier for them to vote against the bill. You can almost taste the contempt. Activists are so stupid that they're playing right into the GOP's hands...by doing something the GOP never would.

The best course, naturally, is to govern to the right of George Bush. It's a surefire way to convince Americans that Democrats are serious and to repeat the stunning electoral coups they had 2002 and 2004. You know, after last year's stunning rout for the grassroots. Not that political reporters seem to care much about the governance of the nation. They just want to maintain their Versailles and will do anything to keep the hoi polloi out of it. Far more important than the passage of legislation is the need for the media-government alliance to crush the activists. The New York Times, a supposed paragon of liberalism, will even join rhetorical forces with a conservative Republican if necessary to make this point. It's the paramount concern of all parties.

The second most important thing is to parrot the innermost desires of GOP re-election strategists as gospel truth. The far left [sic] wants to cram its agenda down America's throat, every Democrat who won in 2006 is actually a conservative from Lubbock, the electoral map will be infrared in 2008, blah blah blah. That way, no matter how far to the right conservatives lurch, liberals have to leap towards them or else get hammered for being obstreporous and 'far left.' Compromise has to be the operative word in everything they do, since the purpose of National Review is to make Republicans principled and audacious (to put it kindly), the apparent reason for the Times's little quasi-editorials is to demand that the Democrats be quivering jellyfish, even on symbolic votes pertaining to social justice. Way to go, liberal media.

Hillary's Inevitability

2007-10-07T23:24:00.001-04:00

The strangest reality of US political discourse is the inescapability of fake news stories. This week's bullshit about Barack Obama not wearing an American flag lapel should never have existed in the first place, but the deft manner in which he torpedoed it as an issue (except on conservative blogs, where, predictably, the episode served to disqualify him as a Person To Be Taken Seriously, since Jonah Goldberg was on the fence till just now) weirdly prolonged its shelf life. Obama may now be credited for defusing an atomic bomb on his blazer by left-leaning Serious People, maybe even People you know.

John Edwards isn't so lucky, as the $400 haircut will apparently remain wedded to his character like "potatoe" is to Dan Quayle or a ham sandwich with Mama Cass. That story is here to stay. To be fair, it was ridiculous to spend his contributors' money on something like that, although the angle of attack is of course the gender-betrayal of caring about one's appearance. Even though Bill O'Reilly wears makeup on television everyday, it's women alone who are supposed to enjoy being vain and seduced by frivolities, because it's women who are stupid that way, not men who want to be the next leader. Do you know a troop? Ask a troop what he thinks. Breck Girl. Haircut: bad. Breck.

What's weirder is how Hillary Clinton somehow manages to avoid all of these things. She doesn't even get caught in the meta-scandal where a non-scandal can still become topic for discussion when the candidate's handling of the non-scandal transcends the terms of the non-scandal itself until someone especially clever affixes the suffix "-gate" to the most salient plot point. She isn't so new to us that her character requires salvaging or redemption. She's like Marmite. Love her or hate her. There was a brief ruckus when she exposed some cleavage, but that was less about her than about the New York Times succumbing to Maureen Dowd's Coulter-lite attitude about all women. Hillary can't choose her gender and it wasn't even about her, per se.

There is also the "question" of whether America is "ready" for a woman president (or a black man; apparently we can't yet handle the thought of a black woman). What readiness means is beyond me. Forty percent of the populace will blink in incapacitated stupor for four years--the dumbest forty percent, but the one whose wants and prejudices inform our entire political discourse--because they, and therefore America, aren't fully prepared for the reality of gender equality. The facts of course belie this--more people will vote for a woman or a black man than a 72-year old, a Mormon or a twice-divorced man.

(Incidentally, I see the pragmatic concern with respect to the first, and the possible moral objection to the third, but the second one is just complete prejudice. What is it about Mormons that makes them so objectionable compared with Christians? The practice of polygamy, renounced officially in 1896? It's certainly not their belief in the bearded cloud with the booming voice who sends you to hell when you masturbate. Will no one ask Mormon Harry Reid about this?)

So, is the almost complete absence of petty non-scandals surrounding Hillary, the supposedly "most polarizing" Democrat of all, something worth noting? It might be too early. (The whole fucking thing is too early, really). But as of October 2007 she, the one you'd most expect, has not yet had to weather a single "gotcha!" moment. I wonder about the connections between being anointed the Establishment candidate by Democratic operatives and being a media darling. The recent candidacy most similar to hers is that of George W. Bush in 2000. She's related to a former president, for starters. (How weird that, if she should serve two terms, we will have had a Bush or a Clinton in one of the two highest offices for a thirty-six year period). While McCain put up a good fight, those "in the know" presumed Bush's easy ascendancy towards being the ultimate nominee, and that's what happened. Again, the slippery and nebulous ties between corporate media's owners, their interests and the possible overlap with that of GOP strategists is too vast and conspiratorial and enticingly easy, but certainly not nonexistent, even if only by coincidence. Hillary, though, isn't an easygoing newcomer rich kid who's charming the pants off of the Washington press corps.

Instead, she's a seasoned player and expert in calculation whose entire candidacy seems predicated on never making a single mistake and navigating a tacitly hostile media environment by playing it supremely safely while her rivals self-immolate on one or another media fabrication which no Karen Hughes could fix. There's no question that, if elected, she'll govern considerably to the left of where she's currently campaigning. Even if her atrocious pollster/adviser/strategist Mark Penn has a history of union-bashing and her general coterie is comprised of the worst of 1990s New Democrat focus-group insiders who despise the netroots and dread the possibility of the dirty hippies who've been right about everything since 9.12.01 gaining a firmer beachhead in politics by championing the election of more and better progressive Democrats.

So the inevitability narrative can only grow in power. It's a genius strategy for deflecting the mines before the media (which I confess I'm characterizing as a unitary and nefarious monster, a one-headed Cerberus, so to speak) pounces. If in eight months she's where she is now, there's no question Hillary Clinton will have been coasting to election all along!

San Francisco

2007-10-06T23:45:00.000-04:00

Even if the number of visibly crazy people and otherwise ugly people is off the charts, I'm going to move there. The default San Franciscan is a fat, fortyish woman with no eyebrows and fire engine red hair who's shopping for a hat in a thrift store in the Upper Haight right now. In spite of that, I'm going to move there. When I told my cousin's partner's drunken aunt that the snobbish attitude of lifelong New Yorkers towards the rest of the planet constitutes its own form of unbearable parochialness, she threw up her hands and yelled that finally, someone agreed with her, and damn, I should meet her daughter (who lives on the UWS).

Anyway, pictures from Folsom:

I think I remember the front looking weirdly the same

Way better than a parabola (cf. above)

Where else can you dance in a cage suspended by a crane right next to a church?

Vauxhall/Vox Populi

2007-09-11T17:06:00.000-04:00

On one of my Bataan pleasure marches through London I went to Vauxhall, which used to have a famous garden (which comes up in Vanity Fair,among other places and, humorously enough, is now a total den of faggotude. It also has a bus station whose sheer outrageousness and lack of utility distinguishes the British tradition of public art from the somewhat more pedestrian aesthetic of US public transportation.

Amazing.

About a block away is the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, which has a really fun gay night called Ducky and which may be torn down because it sits on a valuable parcel of real estate. I found it funny that pubs with names like that, with stuffy or utterly unoriginal connotations, would not draw the same patronage in the US unless people were patronizing them (ahem) "ironically." Here's a good example:

There's also a place called the George and Dragon, in Shoreditch, that was one of the coolest gay bars to be found. But the name: in NY, it would suggest a sort of multiple-television Irish/sports bar that you might find on 33rd and 8th. You'd never go there. In London, it's all like that. (There was a Royal Oak, but that's different).

Anyway, near Vauxhall is Oval, which has an arena where they probably play football. Not only is it near one of those disused natural gas tanks like we used to have in Queens till about 1997 when they were both torn down, it's also covered in vines. This is what I wish would happen with the Woodhull Medical Center, which is as forbidding as it is oddly beautiful, but would totally benefit from massive horticulture draped from its flat roof. It would look like The Future, as envisaged in 1976.

Here, in Oval, at the age of thirty, you can renew in the glorious ritual of Carousel.

While I promised myself I'd avoid Westminster in general, it's hard because it's so central. I walked by St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, which I remember being a very beautiful church, to find that it was completely closed off because of construction. Rather than bury it behind just a scaffolding (the erection of which, around a building you like, is really depressing because you know they'll never come down for years), they put up a cheerful red barrier with churchy people smiling apologetically for the bother.

In a way, this probably embodies the number one difference between British and American societies, both in practice and as materializations of their national self-mythologies. The American insistence on individual rights over the collective, on private over public, on decentralization over uniformity has resulted in different license plates, different alcohol laws, a sort of optimistic garishness to the landscape, and an impoverishment of municipal services up to and including bridge collapses. Britain, by contrast, is slightly over-administered. By that I mean there's a certain top-down homogeneity that's at once reassuring but also a bit stifling. When walking down a platform in the Tube you might encounter a bench with a sign--an official sign, not a handmade or improvisational one--warning you that an armrest is missing. In the US, public transportation is so underfunded that a bench might stay that way forever, or at least until the agency responsible snagged some corporate tie-in to refurbish a station. If there was any kind of 'idiot-proof' signage, it would only be because someone was covering his or her ass against some hypothetical litigious dick. In Britain it almost seems as if bureaucrats actually concern themselves with the possibility of someone sitting there.

It's kind of that way nationwide. A sort of rational, non-demagogic vox populi seems built into civil servants' decisions. (Civil service itself is selective and highly sought, not the territory of shrewish harridans from the underclass who work in windowless, low-ceilinged offices). Since coming back, I've started reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It depicts the excruciating violence that led to the policing of the US-Mexican border, which consolidated state power over the borderlands that McCarthy exaggerates as huge, desolate wastes unfit for human habitation. It's integral to American self-hagiography that this is a vast, still-somewhat-untamed country. The West is manly and the Northeast effete, so the popular imagination settles on the former as a sort of touchstone for our supposed national character. (Or so some might have it). Ignoring for a second all the ridiculous contradictions that vision contains, it's still true that the West is the fastest-growing area of the country--and we anomalous for being an industrialized country that grows at all.

Britain has a sort of snug, tidy stasis; after empire, the energies required to categorize and administer the surface of the globe were turned inwards without abating. This is often considered symptomatic of a malaise affecting the entirely of Western Europe, where the trade-off in achieving a gentle socialist welfare state seems to be any kind of dynamism. It makes you wonder what shocks America's self-regard will sustain when we experience, say, a twenty percent reduction in our standard of living once our untenable empire collapses. I'm not suggesting that British culture is pessimistic or cynical (although that's arguably the case). But the achievement of more enlightened social policies, all radiating from the top and reflected in warm, rosy walls national landmarks undergoing renovation requires a kind of tranquility before the bureaucracy can orient itself that way. Collapsing Interstate bridges augur poorly for post-imperial America.

Brutalisme! (And then we take it higher)

2007-09-07T19:50:00.000-04:00

I really meant to write more about London while I was actually there, but I forgot entirely about the need for voltage adapters and sort of preferred to go out every night and then get up early in the morning and walk around. So now I'm back in New York attempting to make good on my promise (largely to myself) to show off my new camera and its capabilities. What are some of the interesting things I did that coincide with the photos currently uploaded to my iPhoto?

I ate Marmite. (If you say it like a "cockney" would, it sounds like you 'hate' Marmite!" A more relevant tidbit about cockneys is that they don't actually exist).
I didn't go to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard or to the London Eye or to the Tower or Piccadilly Circus or Speaker's Corner.
But I did get to see a lot of brutalism!

It's not quite Queensboro Plaza, but there's nothing quite like the abortious carbuncles of top-down midcentury urban planning designed to replace Luftwaffe bombing craters on the cheap.

"Why won't the pedestrians behave like they do in the rendering?!" the social engineer was overheard to exclaim.

Sometimes, though, an expressway cutting through the urban fabric actually provides a nice counterpoint to a defunct canal.

I didn't just stick to the gentrified precincts of northwest London. I went to Brixton in search of Electric Avenue, but I couldn't find it. Here's some proof that I made it all the way to the end of the Victoria line:

I couldn't find Electric Avenue because I refused to walk around with an A-to-Z guide and it wasn't depicted on the "continuing your journey from Brixton" map in the Tube exit. (Side note: Transport for London must employ dozens of graphic designers, because every station--plus every single bus station--has a different, and very helpful street map centered on where you actually are. Not like coming out of a NYC subway station at, say, Grand Street and seeing an awkward parallelogram from TriBeCa to the Upper East Side etched on a waterlogged papyrus). Anyway, Brixton was pretty diverse. It's funny, being liberal-minded, how your inclination to call black people "African Americans" doesn't apply in the UK. There, they're known as Africo-BritaniccanLilongweAntananarivoshanan'anphuphu. Many more of them are Francophonic than one finds in Brooklyn, and the segregation isn't nearly as extreme, but maybe that's only because it's socially acceptable for white people to live in council estates. There are also far more Muslims, which is somewhat interesting because if any US city contained both a high proportion of Mohammedans and a large absolute number, I think Bill O'Really?s minions would have a freakout. Maybe they're only just getting by without a major race riot or State-imposed halaal roundup, but I think London deserves greater recognition for having sustained a terrorist attack without subsequently persecuting the Muslims who live there.

When Do I Get to Meet Prunella Scales?

2007-08-22T20:05:00.001-04:00

Nature is committing a crime against nature when you have to wear a sweater and a jacket in August unless it's a high altitude in the southern hemisphere. All the same, it's goddamn delightful to be in London. Now that Tony Blair and his jetpack have given way to a new gouvernment, a couple of backbenchers welcoumed me at Heathrouw with a lei made of doner kebabs, but I was so jet lagged I waved them off, which was stupid because all other foodstuffs in this country are slathered in my bete-noire, mayonnaise. It's the British National Substance.

Anyway, I met up with my friend Rachel, whose family lives in Queen's Park, in West London. Together we tore through the West End, which is where NYU's housing and academic building were when I was here in 2001. I wanted to get the nostalgia done with first. We walked by where I stayed six years ago and I didn't recognize the building. The first thing I noticed is that way more Londoners dress like me than do New Yorkers. There's this thing called "New Rave" where obnoxious bright colors are totes mainstream (kind of like the Scissor Sisters, who aren't just for L train homosexuals after all). Even the cops get behind it.

Even though Paramus, NJ is pretty good, being home to "Leather!" and other such emporia of middle-class catastrophes, I found a store in Queen's Park that's got a mirrored dresser with some flowered patterns cut into the glass in a frosted fashion. The store's called "Ooh!"

I've almost been run over a few times. I'm kind of an aggressive pedestrian, Elliott has plucked me out of harm's way on at least three or four occasions and it's just my instinct to look left first when crossing a two-way street. So I'll most likely be dead within days, mowed down by a Lilliputian car that gets 20 deciliters to the furlong. A cab almost hit me and I noticed Dawn French was in the back seat with Ruby Wax. I ran into a pub while walking back to Rachel's because it had started raining, and wound up peeing in a trough next to Terry Gilliam. V. S. Naipaul elbowed me in the jaw while boarding the tube at Marble Arch and I saw Margaret Thatcher humming as she filled a shopping trolley with inorganic, cage-entombed eggs at Tesco. I'm really disappointed that no one has bothered to introduce me to Prunella Scales. I'm like, "Hello? American! Bring her to me."

You run into ambient celebs a lot because London is kind of like NYC, LA and smushed altogether. Sometimes they come to you. Bob Geldof came to the door soliciting a few quid for coalminers who have been striking since 1984. I said, "You looked better with your eyebrows shaved and throwing a TV at that groupie. Here's 50p." That's about the equivalent of a dollar. The exchange rate was $2.05/pound last week but today it's $1.98 because the chavs who had been able to swing a second home in Scottsdale are starting to get foreclosed upon as we enter "the last throes, if you will" of transnational capitalism.

Tomorrow I'm going to walk to some canal for an obligatory hour before saying fuck it and blowing a paycheck on jeans and shoes exactly as I swore I wouldn't do. I should have taken more pictures, but it's been raining so much that all I can offer is an aerial shot of Jones Beach.

Bill Richardson's "Self-Immolation"

2007-08-15T16:37:00.000-04:00

The more I read about the LOGO pseudebate, it seems the consensus is that Gov. Bill Richardson is dead in the water with the "visible vote." His comment that homosexuality is a choice, followed by a rambling "I'm not a scientist" disavowal of the softball question he was handed, is supposed to reveal the dinosaur behind the candidate's progressive facade.

Here's the exchange, taken from Pam of Pam's House Blend, who is of the opinion that Richardson certainly "self-immolated on live TV:"

MS. ETHERIDGE: Thank you.

Do you think homosexuality is a choice, or is it biological?

GOV. RICHARDSON: It's a choice. It's --

MS. ETHERIDGE: I don't know if you understand the question. (Soft laughter.) Do you think I -- a homosexual is born that way, or do you think that around seventh grade we go, "Ooh, I want to be gay"?

GOV. RICHARDSON: Well, I -- I'm not a scientist. It's -- you know, I don't see this as an issue of science or definition. I see gays and lesbians as people as a matter of human decency. I see it as a matter of love and companionship and people loving each other. You know I don't like to categorize people. I don't like to, like, answer definitions like that that, you know, perhaps are grounded in science or something else that I don't understand.

You could be charitable and say Richardson lamely attempted to articulate a sort of rejection of the very question, when posed by conservatives, of the etiology of homosexuality. In other words, if asked the same question by Fox News, a more polished Richardson might have said, "I don't see how it matters. Gay people are citizens who deserve equality and fair treatment under law. I'll leave matters of homosexuality's causality to scientists." Instead, the blogosphere decided to take the angry sophomore approach, complete with shrieking talons and gasp collectively at what a paleocon the governor really is--someone completely unfit to have been our UN ambassador, etc.

Admittedly, when confronted with the question "If the New Mexico legislature sent you a bill allowing gay marriage, would you sign it?" his position that gay marriage isn't a "realistic option" crumbled. But there is another dynamic at work here. It is apparently the position of the pre-eminent gay-oriented media outlet that homosexuality is an innate, genetic characteristic (with the only other alternative being "it's a choice"). In their desire to win mainstream acceptance, they have floated a demonstrably false idea with its own built-in risks.

First, if gayness is genetic, that would mean identical twins, who share the same genes, would both have to be gay, which isn't the case. Then there's the oft-stated theory that sexuality is a continuum, not a binary, even if most people group themselves into one or the other (and mostly the one). Moreover, since persons attracted to their own gender most often do not reproduce, a fairly stable rate of fags in the general population would be difficult to sustain--especially these days, when fewer gays and lesbians marry people of the opposite gender out of desperation or a desire to be normal. Unless you're willing to believe that there's an undiscovered sexuality gene that goes gay frequently enough to create unrelated gays and lesbians all over the world, making it an anomaly among anomalies, I just don't buy the genetic model of explanation.

But LOGO does! HRC does! They do it because of the statistical overlap between people who believe homosexuality is "not a choice" with acceptance of gay people. Fair enough. But it's appalling to me to see the self-appointed vanguard of politically sentient gay America recoiling in horror when someone implies that gayness is anything but an inborn trait. They think they're fighting conservatism, with its insistence that gayness is a(n) (im)moral decision, that kids can be converted, etc. So the mainstream homos deny it. But all that does is reinforce the underlying premise that it is undesirable to produce more gay persons. The gay establishment's hysterical overreaction implicitly reveals their agreement with the hateful wingers on this point, and their desperate desire to pre-empt the recruitment criticism lays bare the mild self-hatred and illiberalism at the core of their orthodoxy.

Accepting that the "cause" of gayness is a complicated psychic dynamic requires lengthy explanations that are anathema to sound-byte culture, so it's almost forgivable. But this lockstep shriek that Bill Richardson is a clumsy homophobe for not believing something that isn't actually true is a different story.

Logo's Democratic Non-Debate

2007-08-10T14:24:00.001-04:00

The homochannel isn't established enough to host a proper debate. Owned by MTV, the network essentially created a different category, a fairly undemanding forum, to lure Democratic candidates (and, though none, not even the "socially liberal" Giuliani, rsvp'd with a yes, Republicans too). If debates are like marriage, this event was a civil union; one is supposed to marvel at the political clout wielded by the LGBT community in its ability to rise to the second-class occasion by having a one-on-three chat that glancingly engages the different candidates' positions. (It's okay that the results did not mirror perfectly the current hierarchy, but it is somewhat strange when preening for acceptance produces Dennis Kucinich as the winner.)

It was therefore foreordained that this forum would be about marriage, marriage, marriage. The narrative last evening shaped is essentially that "since everyone opposes 'don't ask, don't tell,' their position on same-sex marriage is the only item that differentiates one candidate from another, with respect to the LGBT community and its interests." Well, with an audience stacked with well-dressed, mainstream people, some of them veterans (plus a few C-listers like Neil Patrick Harris), that's basically what one would expect.

John Edwards, anguishing at a literal hair's breadth from openly supporting gay marriage, finagled in vain to connect his uphill-fight campaign theme of eradicating poverty to the equal signs splashed across the stage. Obama and Clinton, bookending the six attendees, won the most applause for their honesty, but still fell short of marching in lockstep with our community's apparently monolithic demand to enshrine our incomes in the bosom of the State. That Hillary Clinton attracts such enormous support from gay men is strange. Perhaps it's a groundswell desire for someone, anyone, who looks like a front-runner to acquire runaway momentum and sweep away the nonsense after the colossal failure to eject Bush in '04. But the woman displays almost no leadership qualities on this or, frankly, any issue. She'll eventually oar her way over to the right side, but for now, a group still mired in quasi-outsider status really shouldn't flock to the ultimate insider candidate in such droves. It's just unseemly, considering the alternatives. I don't think 1970s activists would be gaga for Scoop Jackson.

But there weren't gay activists here. The event was moderated by a Washington Post correspondent, a media executive, and a Mom-rock musician. Kind of top-down when, again, the purpose of the event is to highlight what the supposedly liberal candidates will do to ameliorate the legal situation of a widely reviled segment of the country. It would not have killed the gravity of the forum to invite someone who works in AIDS advocacy or research, or with any number of the largely invisible LGBT populations (the elderly, the homeless, the gender non-conforming, or people of color). Welcoming the wealthy doesn't make you a vanguard.

That said, in the end I came away with the sense that any one of this people, in the Oval Office, would be a vast improvement over any Republican. A Hillary-Obama ticket (which, honestly, seems likelier than any other combination I can think of) would not only sweep to victory. Bill Richardson, the best candidate on paper, suffered a near-total collapse when after deploying the infuriatingly condescending and cowardly term "realistic" to describe his preference for civil unions over marriage, he was asked what he would do if the New Mexico legislature produced a marriage bill for him to sign. Busted, bitch! He also looked busted, being a fat man in a wrinkly suit who speaks in a monotone voice while palavering on an on about what's realistic, when in fact what he really means is, "my aides didn't prep me well," because he apparently thinks transgender people frequently want to marry one another and that homosexuality is a choice--although to be fair the heteronormative crowd offered only genes or birth as an alternate etiology. He's also "not a scientist," which is not what a former Secretary of Energy ought to be crowing. You fucked it up, sir.

One positive thing, which I almost don't believe, is this statistic: over 90% of gay people vote. In 2004, 9 million out of 122 million votes cast were "gay" votes. That makes fags and dykes 7% of the electorate, or twice their proportion of the general population. Even weirder is that slightly more gay men than lesbians vote. I thought all lesbians voted. I mean, I just did.

The Simpsons Movie

2007-07-30T16:14:00.001-04:00

A. O. Scott had it pretty much dead-on in the Times: it's as good--and little better--than a very good episode. Not quite a "Treehouse of Horror" or a "22 Short Films About Springfield" (which Scott mislabels as "32," thinking of Glenn Gould) or the one where Homer eats the five-alarm chili and needs to find his spirit guide, a coyote voiced by Johnny Cash who says one of the best lines in the whole series, "I'm just your memory, Homer. I can't provide you any new information." Let alone my three personal non-Sideshow Bob favorites, the one where Bleeding Gums Murphy dies, the one with the Stonecutters and the casino episode with Marge's gambling problem.

There was nothing like that. Other than seeing Bart's dick, there was nothing especially memorable about the film, certainly not on a catchphrase or character development level. I also share Scott's complete disappointment that Patty and Selma weren't in it at all. The animation was pretty rad, with the helicopters depositing the dome and the interior of the NSA standing out as particularly textured.

I'm not arguing that the film was an exercise in pure cashing-in, but rather pack it with visual rewards to lifelong fans with good observation skills or who've watched dinnertime reruns for more than a decade, the movie was slanted suspiciously heavily towards themes and characters from the earliest days, from the height of Bart merch and before the show really hit its mid-to-late '90s peak. Thank Christ there weren't a million guest voices, at least.

The skateboarding scene, Flanders as a do-gooder neighbor rather than an uber-Christian, the inclusion in crowd scenes of season one figures as stripper Princess Jasmine or Barney's Bowl-a-Rama, Maggie's prominence (and, if you stuck around through the credits, her 'first word,' which was already 'dada' in the episode that shows her birth) -- it all adds up to creative control being turned over to marketing types who don't actually watch the show but whose memories reach back to the marketing bonanza of 1991. In essence, it's as if people who wanted to reproduce the 'success' of the Simpsons when it was a runaway phenomenon guided the entire process, and the writers and animators who hammered out an insane quantity of satire before the Simpsons devolved into a vehicle for celebs to play themselves. Other than almost-too-easy references to "the four states that border Springfield," the film should have taken the show's total disrespect for continuity further, rather than cramming in hallmarks of the 'glory days' (from the perspective of a network executive keen on profit). No "Simpsons" fan wants to admit it, but the show isn't actually a ratings gold mine. It was the 56th most watched show in 2005-2006, tied with the ignominious "America's Funniest Home Videos." So we have this weird result where the movie catered unnecessarily to the most philistine taste, to the people who grind out shit like this or stuff "Ay Caramba!" into Katie Couric's mouth when the Bart float bobs down 5th Avenue in the Macy's Parade.

So, it was funny. Hillary as VP under Scratchy is funny. Albert Brooks is always funny. The drunks running into church when the God-people run into the bar was very, very funny. But it should have been made eight or ten years ago, because waiting this long forced it into a time warp where it feels like it was made sixteen years ago. And why they never look into who lives next door, on the side that isn't the Flanders', is beyond me.

The War on Terrour as a Diet

2007-07-19T11:04:00.000-04:00

Glenn Greenwald notes, the limit of neoconservative reflection the conduct of the war is sloganeering. Jonah Goldberg of National Review called for the US to be more "ruthless" in prosecuting the war(s). When asked to clarify, he said he didn't mean a "dogged, merciless belligerence," but a "single-minded determination to win." There we have it: the blueprints for victory. Blogger Glenn Reynolds, when asked what our strategy in Iraq ought to be, replied, "Win."

Greenwald focuses his post mostly on the noxious and inaccurate comments the extreme right makes about war opponents: how they're seditious traitors, how criticizing the war architects is unacceptable, how liberals should be executed to set an example, etc. With the caveat that anecdotal quotations shouldn't be used to indict an entire political movement, the unanimity of mind among prominent war supports does indicate a sort of hive mentality. Greenwald lampoons the substance-free macho posturing perfectly:

By "single-minded determination to win," does that mean we bomb more indiscriminately, forget about ethical restraints, break the law, re-instate the draft, raise taxes to pay for a larger military? Who knows. He won't say. They never do, because their real goal is to sound tough and avoid admitting error ("the Iraq War isn't a failure; not at all. We just need to stiffen our spines, take the kid gloves off, and commit ourselves to a single-minded determination to win").

Thus the war is basically framed as if it were a diet, where sheer will and determination can see you through to the goal of slipping into a new Iraq to be the prettiest neocon at the party. Considering the Manichaean nature of our political discourse--specifically, the unquestioning assumption that "us" are "good" and anything we do, no matter how horrible, is perfectly justifiable because "them" are "evil"--this is especially pernicious. It applies the verbiage of individual moral struggles to the macro level of the nation. Citizens are asked to sacrifice nothing, but must identify completely the conduct of the war with the ordinary difficulties of everyday life. The message is that this war on terror is effectively permanent, we will live in a low-grade state of emergency that is subject to periodic flareups for the rest of our lives, but at the same time, victory would be just around the corner if you people would just shut up for six months, stop "emboldening our enemies" with your shrewish bitching and hold out for the glorious outcome we're on the precipice of unveiling.

Even worse, this sets up the post-Iraq plan of attack for the right. When we withdraw from Iraq, no matter how obvious and overdue it is, they will shriek about how we've castrated ourselves in front of a region whose culture only understands domination and the use of brute force. To withdraw is never evaluated against prudence or rationality (to say nothing of the ridiculous cost, $400 billion so far) but only a metric of humiliation where it is once again Us or Them feeling the iron boot. That we would do it to ourselves stupefies conservatives, because it's a one-dimensional, implicitly gendered dynamic to them. The liberal desire to humiliate America requires a purge because criticism of the Bush Administration's diktats confuses ordinary citizens, saps their reservoir of mute cheer and, by revealing the plumage of effeminacy to the manly Muslims, imperils the entire war.

Actual strategy need not enter this calculus; the entire predicate of the Surge is "troops + more troops = victory tomorrow." That's the sum of Pentagon planning. If tomorrow never happens to become today, it's only because our will must have flagged (due to the liberals) in our faith-based endeavor. When the President is convinced he talks to God and God to him, it makes those liberals even more treacherous; they operate outside of God's divine plan, eroding the national character of a country blessed by the Almighty. It's God's will; it should be your will; you should will yourself to refrain from speaking out against your president because the success of the war depends on having the stomach to endure Guantanamo just a little longer, because we're so close to a victory in which there aren't any more terrorists.

As for "emboldening our enemies," that meme really ought to sputter out by now. I don't see how people bent on total destruction of a country can be any more emboldened by this point, nor do I think "embolden" is even a word, except ironically, the way "decider" and "misunderestimate" now are. But to Joe Lieberman, every Democratic attempt to rein in the lawless extravagance of our imperial fiasco adds more fuel to a fire that can grow hotter and hotter, forever. Did you know that Muslims are capable of infinite emboldening, if given the opportunity? One of these days, Harry Reid is going to sponsor a bill that will push the Islamic universe towards a quantum singularity where they all blow themselves up and take space-time with them.

In the meantime, we need to stick to the diet. This country has a real obesity problem.

Faggot Panic

2007-07-16T17:05:00.000-04:00

What the fuck is this, 2004? Elizabeth Marquardt of the Family Values Institute (red alert) has written a screed decrying the emergence of triple-parent family unit, an outgrowth she traces directly to the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage and gay adoption.

This is how she starts in: Sometimes when the earth shudders it doesn’t make a sound. That Old Testament-esque allusion to the very firmament of the universe trembling beneath our misguided experiments with the divinely-mandated natural order is a pretty tired trope. The hideous immoral deviant that is a lesbian mom is enough to make the whole world buckle apart.

Her big beef is with a Pennsylvania court's finding that a child may have three legal parents: two lesbian mothers and the biological father, all equally obligated to support their offspring. Unsurprisingly, Marquardt's language refuses recognition that both women could be mothers--she coins the ungainly co-parents--but oddly, nowhere is the word father to be found. There is a sperm donor who is a friend of the couple, but that's it. Here's a conservative who's willing to delegitimize this family more expansively than just casting aspersions at the unity of two women.

So apparently this ruling constitutes yet another in the escalating series of mortal wounds liberals and the LGBT community care to inflict upon Civilization itself (in the name of procreating, natch). In other Western nations, there have been legal moves to institutionalize family structures with more than one parent, and this is Badforthechildren. Marquardt "pre-empts" the possible refutation of her paranoia by arguing against a simplistic "three is better than two, right?" line of thinking, comparing the polyparent situation to a divorce.

When you only tepidly endorse gay marriage to begin with, it's frustrating to have to defend it, but comparisons of building a family with dissolving a family are just too facile. It just doesn't make sense unless one is convinced from the start that there is some metaphysical dimension where rules come from and man+woman=the way it's always been, in which case there's no arguing with you because you have God on your side and that's all there is to it.

She writes: We found that even these children must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home. They have to grow up too soon. When a court assigns a child several parents, some of whom never intend to share a home, they consign that child, at best, to a “good” divorce situation. Is it the court intervention into the sacrosanct nuclear family, the State-sanctioned social engineering that she finds so repellent? Because responsible parenting can't possibly be at odds with exposing children to "different values, beliefs and ways of living." Unless you want them home-schooled, away from the evolutionists. Obviously that sort of talk boils down to "gay parents will manufacture gay children, which we certainly don't need more of." But this is hardly a case where a normal heterosexual couple's ideals for childrearing have been infiltrated by the homosexual agenda--everyone involved is a consensual party, going to court to seek governmental legitimacy for their complex and previously unaddressed legal situation. They're not suing each other. There is no acrimony. It's not a divorce. Kids won't be shuttled between different houses by jealous parents or held hostage to their petty disputes. The only example of "different values" is Marquardt's idea of what morality is versus the lesbian lifestyle.

And even if there is a divorce involved, divorce exists. Gay people exist. With gay marriage will come gay divorce, which conservatives will cite as further proof that gay people are evil, when it's actually proof that gay people are fallible. Having three people claim parental status is, in a sense, a logical continuation in the relaxation of anachronistic bigotry that passes for the government's approach to marriage. Straight divorce can and ought to lead to the same outcome if the circumstances merit. The nuclear family has been saddled with responsibilities far beyond what it's capable of. It doesn't necessarily take a village, but reality can't be governed by a sentimental reference point to some fleeting and largely mythical postwar gender paradigm wedded (if you will) to biblical morality. At least Marquardt doesn't wonder about a man marrying a goat.

She concludes by tying the well-being of children to a dual-headed household, with no empirical evidence. Just one study about divorce being bad. (Of course, she doesn't speak a word against divorce, let alone its high occurrence in red America). This is the most frustrating thing about conservatism: you can say whatever you want and make assumptions all over the place because God's got your back. You can be as authoritarian as you want, and any attempt to adapt to cultural changes becomes nefarious "social engineering" and can be plotted on an axis of our eventual ruin. Just like when vitro fertilization begat a race of amoral cyborgs who can't love, legally recognizing three parents when there are in fact three (or four when there are four) is tampering with the Divine Plan. The earth is quaking because gay people may have found a way to make more of themselves. We grant the people to want to have children parental rights at our peril.

Impeachment

2007-07-13T16:16:00.000-04:00

As this overly long but still accurate article points out, Bush's unpopularity (defined as the percentage of poll respondents who state they disapprove of his conduct) has exceeded that of every president since polling began, except for Nixon's during his last days, and even then, only by a point. Margins of error and the prevailing winds of any given day produce different figures, but Bush is generally at 26% positive, 66% negative. Conservatives might blame the immigration bill and Bush's (somewhat surprising) refusal to demonize a vast swath of the American population, but rational people know better.

Glenn Greenwald and the contributors for DailyKos frequently muse about the identity of the "dead-enders" who cling tenaciously to their president inerrant. Apparently a quarter of the sentient public constitutes a basis of rump support that will stand by the glorious leader forever--as long as all the scandals and failures plow forward in the same predictable, unidirectional way. As long as the cliff we drive off of is Mt. Surge and not Mt. National Health Insurance, the GOP base will never renounce their support for the resolute war leader, whose complete lack of interiority is for them his paramount virtue. That means that one-quarter of the US population will not only tolerate but actively cheer a record of lawlessness and radical abuses of power. (This is the segment Rudy Giuliani is courting, hoping his authoritarian fear-mongering will get another quarter of the electorate to forget it's not 2002).

For a dozen reasons, a goodly proportion of the media continues to take the Bush Administration's statements at face value. That Tony Snow glided so effortlessly into his new role as White House spokesman from his old one as...auxiliary White House spokesman for Faux News doesn't even get much of a mention anymore. But the New York Times which created the position of public editor partly in response to its gullible and cozy reporting of pre-war Iraq intelligence now has in reporter Michael Gordon a Lieberman-esque zealot crusading for war with Iran by uncritically regurgitating military machinations about that country's stealth involvement in the insurgency. Joe Klein of Time and several Washington Post columnists also do their best to cheer on the neocon wet dream, functioning more or less as a collective Maureen Dowd to the self-style conservatives' Ann Coulter. Rather than make extraordinary, inflammatory statements as Coulter does about Democrats, they subtly, even cattily, reinforce Republican talking points about the war, its architects and its inevitable end by continually framing opponents as quavering surrenderistas who lack the steely courage of manly men like Fred Thompson or the guileless Scooter Libby, whose ardent love of country rightly ought to have trumped any verdict pronouncing guilt for whatever felonies.

This miasma of dynamics has produced a climate where talk of impeachment has bubbled up towards a critical mass, wherein it is no longer the province of the fringe (Lyndon LaRouche; Dennis Kucinich, maybe) and may now be the pet cause of the vanguard.

It's not just the progressive blogosphere anymore. Television gasbags can fudge the numbers, but supporters of impeachment now number almost forty percent of the general population, with greater strength among the young. We're apparently caught in a parallel dimension to 1998, when in spite of weak public support, a Republican congress impeached a president for 'crimes' that are tragicomically pathetic compared to the systemic collapse of government as an institution charged with executing policies for the sake of the national good.

The media, for their part, operate more like the fawning coterie of Versailles than a check on governmental abuses and lies. It is only the relentless criticism from progressive bloggers that has forced the clubby Washington correspondents' pool to re-evaluate its place vis-a-vis the people who are supposed to be their amiable adversaries, with noted discomfort among many national reporters at the prospect of attending the ribbon-cutting at the new White House press room--a purely ceremonial event, dedicated to the ritual of news management, at which Bush did not even take any questions. Still--they supported a commutation/pardon for Libby, lied and said most Americans did too, and it doesn't take a genius to guess that they will fight impeachment tooth and nail, because loyalty is the king of virtues in Washington and one does not let one's own fall.

In any case, there are multiple objections to impeachment, many of them good. The best one is that there are only 50 Democrats in the Senate, and you need 66 to remove someone from office. So barring his death, Bush will remain as president until January 20, 2009 (meaning a mind-boggling 18 more months of this shit). The prospect of President Cheney is less than appealing, and the feasibility of some kind of double impeachment strains credulity. Purging the entire cabinet in some kind of mass sweep would be delicious, but even more dubious. Entering a pattern where opposition parties impeach the sitting president would siphon off a lot of energy from 'real' matters, like health care. And not to be a cynic, but the damage is done: Iraq is a conflagration that may actually become a full-on genocide, the Supreme Court might as well have Roger B. Taney sitting on it, and the timid Democrats cannot be counted on to do anything but submit toothless, Third Way-style adjustments to the war's conduct for the inevitable veto.

However, the crystallizing irony is that impeachment exists for a reason, and if not now, when? The most frustrating thing about power-worshiping media practices is the naive and giddy belief in the endless elasticity of the Republic. The people in charge and their ideological cohorts are incompetent and morally bankrupt, they are draining the government to finance their imperialistic boondoggle, their psychotic musings on "how we should have done more to kill 18-35-year old Sunni men" or how war with Iran is the answer are truly terrifying, and--most of all--they don't give a shit about the rule of law. They politicize every government agency, they lie and dissemble when questioned, concealing their tracks, pardoning their foot soldiers and evaporating public trust in government. This is how empires fall from within.

One can envision an easy future where a nuclear attack on a US city triggers a chain of events that makes the current perpetual state of emergency analogous to the relation between Clinton's crime(s) to Bush's. The Constitution is literally suspended, the full brunt of our military might is turned on the enemies within and the media-industrial complex's corporate paymasters self-censor any possible critiques. These cliches are sophomoric for a reason; it is entirely possible. Impeachment must always be viewed not as payback against Bush-as-inarticulate-tyrant or Bush-as-enabler, but as the final, almost desperate, gesture against the total corrosion of a system designed more than two centuries ago as the superior check on the ability of the powerful to rewrite the rules and then break them anyway.

We can demand an immediate withdrawal of soldiers from Iraq, or that Harriet Miers comply with a subpoena or that Bush stop the practice of signing statements. None of the above will happen, and the template is now secured: future presidents can invoke terrorism as a justification to do whatever they want, get the media to acquiesce with almost no effort, and use their years in office to appoint with impunity a judiciary composed of like-minded people who will vet and validate their decisions. Thus will the 'American experiment' (as it were) dissolve into a new normality. The next half-century depends on Justices Stevens and Ginsburg surviving for another year and a half, and for our political class to align itself with the rational three-quarters of the population who oppose the war, if not the growing plurality who can no longer tolerate this.

Rich Food in a Time of Decline: Some Thoughts on the Sopranos Finale

2007-06-11T16:10:00.001-04:00

The ending was the only outcome David Chase et al. could have opted for, seeing as the structural arc of the series seemed foreordained to end with Tony's death-or-capture. My initial irritation with the "Oh yeah? Live with this forever" attitude you can easily read into the finale was bullshit, though, because in deflecting an "ending," the narrative actually reinforced itself.

The Sopranos was always television show about decline. The very idea of the Mob, bound by an antiquated honor code befitting Sicilian immigrants or the Old World, surviving into suburban New Jersey in the twenty-first century was an incongruity built into the pitching of the pilot. Tony's succession as head of the family seemed a sort of genealogical endgame, because he knew A.J. would never take up the business and had to stretch out to Carmela's side of the family--to her cousin Christopher whom he re-christened as his own nephew--for any hope of continuation. Decadence crept in; A.J. was weak and dissipated, fainting at the prospect of military school and ringing up thousand dollar checks at Meatpacking clubs. Christopher's own struggle against heroin and drinking practically did him in, and when Adriana was revealed to be working with the FBI and Sil had to shoot her, it increased the pressure on Christopher to enshrine himself as heir apparent by quickly marrying another woman, so as to produce his own offspring.

It didn't happen. Christopher, too, was killed in the end. After Vito died, triggering the final war, there was Bobby. Carlo flipped and Sil was injured. Paulie, never trusted with too much, succumbed to paranoia about his own death and superstition over a cat thought to be obsessed with Christopher's framed picture. He was already too old and could never be the nucleus around which a new family might form (he was the only unmarried member, after all). The crew shrank faster than it could grow, and the ones who remained were aging. It was Patsy, a sixty-ish soldier, whose son was to eventually solidify the Soprano future by getting engaged to Meadow, a union founded on a sense of urgency as much as Meadow's willed blindness to the sources of her father's wealth.

And it's wealth that's the locus of the anxieties of capitalism and gender. To avoid complete collapse, capitalism must generate replicate its dynamics on ever larger (and maybe increasingly vulgar) scales. Historians of empire and proto-neocons like Daniel Bell frequently conclude that affluence undermines the virtues required for it to exist: thrift, diligence, the ability to forego immediate pleasures. This is understood to be the underlying reason for aristocratic torpor, perversion and sexual sterility. Tony Soprano, anti-hero, demanded loyalty and allegiance and espoused conservative political views but lived more like a dauphin, with a sprawling series of marital infidelities and an appetite for fattening Italian food.

This celebration of a sort of life-sustaining moribundity remained at the heart of the show. A generation after the wealthy fled Newark for places like West Caldwell, returning (if at all) only to commute--in the case of Sopranos, to a butcher shop with offices in the back. They enmeshed themselves in federal urban redevelopment plans, through dummy union jobs and corrupt subcontractors: parasites on an already-blighted city. The entirety of North Jersey, a juxtaposition of Superfund sites and built-out subdivisions is of course much more nuanced than the Leno-esque national punching bag it's often made out to be. It is, among other things, swollen with fertility for organized crime's decadent anachronism, for religiose murderers and homophobes who kiss each other on the cheek. Such anachronisms had to give way sooner or later, execution-style or in a drawn-out trial, but in the case of Tony Soprano all we'll know is that his empire was indeed untenable.

Will No One Kick Thomas L. Friedman in the Cock?

2007-04-18T16:46:00.000-04:00

It's bad enough for this multi-millionaire who married into a mall-development heiress's family to parade around as if he were some Everyman, but sentences such as this (in today's Times, behind their firewall):

It annoys me no end to read about how China is now more popular in Asia than America — China, which censors Google and has supported a Sudanese regime engaged in mass murder in Darfur.

are incredible. To put it in context, it is a parenthetical statement about what an Obama presidency could do to repair the image of the U.S. abroad. Friedman, partaking of the rhetorical strategy that defines him as King of All Self-Styled Moderate Wise Men, contrasts the world's righteous anger with our current leadership over Iraq, Kyoto and the like with another, illegitimate anger, such as blaming "us" for "their" problems. (He doesn't list these problems, nor does he mention who exactly "they" are--the wretched of the earth, bureaucrats in dictatorial regimes, educated Western Europeans, or whoever).

This is the guy who's supposed to represent the erudite, liberal wing of political thought. Someone theoretically in line with the Times' um, stereotyped readership of New York intellectuals (and I don't just mean "Jewish"). This is also the deliriously pro-globalization simplifier who refuses any candid acknowledgment that for free trade to work successfully, it must be backed up by extraordinary military power. Such as the kind that frequently makes the world hate "us" (e.e., Latin America, Southeast Asia or the Middle East). This is also the guy who can utter with little introspection such a breathlessly hubristic and frankly bitchy aside about China being "more popular" than us even though they censor the internet (we've never done anything like that, being civilized). Nor have we in our squeaky clean adherence to human rights violations done anything but condemn the Sudan in the harshest terms. Also, Guantanamo doesn't exist and we haven't killed 900,000 Iraqi civilians since 2003. But most importantly--our record on the Sudan is unimpeachable.

I mean, what a fuckhead. But this is the kind of commentary we should expect from people who criticized the dirty hippies for not rallying around the war when it started and whose half-hearted remorse for having been myopic, irrational and generally stupider than said dirty hippies betrays the complete lack of humane intellect at the core of their philosophies. So of course the Friedmans get to keep their jobs no matter how wrong they were on the signature issue of our era, and by doing so reinforce the imprimatur which the New York Times bestows upon liberalism itself, all so everyone who reads him and agrees can, despite the illogic and lack of compassion there, consider themselves good, progressive people.

Now Is Not the Time for Gun Control. It's the Time to Ban Late-Term Abortion!

2007-04-18T10:35:00.000-04:00

What a fucked-up convergence of insanity. Students who wear t-shirts that say "Bong Hits for Jesus" can get suspended because as all reasonable people can infer, the right of free speech does not protect juvenile comedy that refers to the use of harmless controlled substances. But the Second Amendment must remain absolutely inviolate, even after the worst mass murder by a single gunman in U.S. history. And the Second Amendment must be defended from across the political spectrum, by no less a personage than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has urged for cooler heads to prevail on this utterly black-and-white issue. Thanks, you goddamn Mormon.

Guns are for assholes. They can be found clipped to the belts of people who think it's fun to intimidate and inflict death.

To argue otherwise is absurd. Go on Daily Kos, and you will see, among all the comments posted by self-proclaimed progressives, a real streak of pro-gun machismo. It is as if the trifecta of losing Democratic cultural issues (gays, guns and God) they have chosen a Clintonian strategy of triangulation by supporting all three, as long as the last one is watered-down into a huggy, nonsectarian contentlessness. It maintains equilibrium, and makes the Democratic party more palatable to Western state libertarians and the interior Northeast. Very principled. I hope more people get shot so we can pick up NY-24 and ID-01 in November 2008.

And of course, in keeping with the conservative "culture of life" (which apparently means anything childishly authoritarian, up to and including mass death) it's now been deemed crucial for the government to step in and contravene the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Let's not worry about signing statements or unauthorized surveillance of US citizens. The completely disproportionate attention paid to this one rare procedure by the cultural right is so fucking stupid. But now that they've gotten the one piece of red meat on abortion they're going to squeeze out of this hypercon Court, I hope they enjoy it. Because if the 5-4 majority goes any further in dismantling the right to privacy, it might just bury the Republican Party forever. They lose on the issues anyway, and it's only their financial advantage that keeps them in power. Now they don't even have that anymore. Honestly, I think this is the crest of their excesses in this domain.

The Sorrows of Young Werther

2007-03-26T16:27:00.000-04:00

I don't know why I bothered, since I hate Romanticism (with a big R or a little r), but at least it was very short.

What I principally can't stand, above and beyond the extreme self-absorption that seems to constitute the contemplative imaginings of self-style Romantics, is the extremely tight vocabulary one finds in their work. This is largely the case with the English poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron--who comprise virtually the entire mini-canon of the period and are almost always listed exactly in that order), but Goethe, at least in the translation I read, could be included. They employ a tiny battery of words, and always use them in superlatives. Lightning is always terrifying. A hideous peasant will invariably overheat some 'tremulous excitations of the soul.' Someone is generally imprison'd in a bower, or espying a glen. It reminds me of the playlist to a classic rock radio station. How many times can you turn on Q104.3 and think, "All right! 'Layla'!"? Yet Romantic literature presumes that everyone who came before them never fully appreciated just how beautiful a sunset is, even though they allow themselves recourse only to a small group of adjectives.

Moreover, while the emotions that the sublime inspires in these poets might have been almost new then, in hindsight they enjoy a surprisingly narrow emotional range. Werther, in self-imposed exile, falls in love with a woman who is engaged to one of his friends. His delirious emotional highs and despondent abysses are only complemented by noting how easily he can shift from one extreme to another. I don't think the literary merit of a text dissolves in diagnosing its author with bipolar disorder, but neither do I think it bespeaks some sort of genius. Mozart's The Magic Flute, for example, was written almost contemporaneously, and contains a love plot with very little in the way of reasons-why, but it's a much more beautiful story. Such truncated foreplay, as it were, is more of a convention of the time than a hallmark of love's purity or true essence.

As for purity--in that we have a real locus of pseudo-Christian body hatred. Werther exclaims that his love for Charlotte and his intentions are of the purest, as if that's supposed to win her over. I assume he means his desire is sexless, and therefore holy? This is why I can never get behind even the most watered-down religious ethic, because even a gentle pantheism that appears inimical to the crude, crusading violence of Christianity carries these strong metaphysical holdovers of body hatred masquerading as profundity, as an eternal truth. Werther/Goethe speak as if the epistolary text chronicles some raw emotional revelation. In reality, it's a series of cliches that aspire to a sort of middlebrow "poetricity." It's proto-emo.

Susan Sontag's essay "Piety Without Content" discusses the trend (which was in full force in the ecumenical mid-20th century and has subsided amid evangelical fervor and the proliferation of religions that don't fall within Western monotheism) toward making "religiousness" some kind of personal or artistic virtue. "For a believer the concept of 'religion'...makes no sense as a category," she writes, because people don't ascribe to "religion" when they accept the specific tenets of a particular faith. Catholics don't abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent because it's "religious," they do it because it's part of Catholicism. "To be religious is always to be in some sense an adherent (even as a heretic) to a specific symbolism and a specific historical community the believer may adopt. It is to be involved in specific beliefs and practices, not just to give assent to the philosophical assertions that a being whom we may call God exists, that life has meaning, etc. Religion is not equivalent to the theistic proposition."

She further criticizes the idea that all "serious" ideas contain some sort of religious valence, or that all major thinkers (including atheists like Marx and Freud) can be subsumed under the smug heading of "religious teachers" because the content of their writings overlaps with what religious traditions speak to. I think Goethe's book exemplifies an identical tendency with respect to poetry and what it does. There is a strong tendency to emphasize content at the expense of form. In a religious context, it's the insistence that everything important is somehow, some way religious. With poetry (or, better, Poetry), it's the idea that the only way to express these important or eternal verities is through a lofty style that's full of shibboleths so that everyone who hears or reads it knows perfectly well that the speaker has switched to the proper mode befitting the awesomeness of the ideas. The advent of free verse produced some of the best poetry in English (Stevens, Pound, Moore, Bishop) and then sort of declined into an excessive democratization and reduction of standards that, while maybe even necessary, totally sacrificed form and allowed the teenagers of divorced parents to whine their way closer to the canon. If there's any avant-garde left, it's going to be found in revolutions of form.

For the Romantics, at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the ability not to live a life of abject suffering, to maybe travel a little or spend most of your days in reflective contemplation was starting to trickle down to the haute bourgeoisie. That led to new art. But Adorno is right when he says that art is temporary. Frescoes fade, plays are lost, statuary corrodes, buildings burn down. And the relevance of a given piece or text for one time period will become muted--until, if it enters the pantheon, it's simply a commodity, something reprinted in textbooks and stored in the Louvre that you know all about way before you actually travel to see it.

People fall back upon Poetry for the same reason. They're terrified of the impermanence that is their fate and want some undemanding, unambitious absolutes to navigate by, and the enduring popularity of Romanticism is largely because it's a repository of post-Christian dictates about Life. There's always this impulse to install a certain swath of Art as an eternal set of texts or pieces that establish some absolute truths, and that seems to be to be a knee-jerk reaction based on fear. It probably terrifies many people to imagine a future where nobody reads Shakespeare, but I don't know if that would be so bad. It wouldn't be necessarily a dumbed-down dystopia. Even today, the most that non-scholars care about "the Bard" (eww!) is virtually lip service. I haven't seen one of his plays performed since college. Theater itself seems to be trapped in perpetual crisis mode. Nothing has unlimited staying power. Romanticism isn't just "unfashionable," or something you could breezily dismiss, but it's just not as interesting as more recent genres/styles. There's a sense of being dazzled that I don't even care to recapture. One could argue that we've been poisoned by our own acute self-consciousness, but that's just what characterizes this era and there's nothing we can do about it unless we're born as, say, Forrest Gump.

Goethe completely sacrifices form for dubiously Eternal content about 'the soul,' which, since it doesn't exist at all, can hardly be called words to live by. If I were a Stalinist, I would say "Burn this bourgeois crap." Instead, just don't read it.

NYPD Has Come Totally Unhinged

2007-03-25T14:49:00.000-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html?pagewanted=1&hp

It's not the least bit surprising that they were spying on activists, but the sheer breadth of the program is pretty astounding. Where does the NYPD get the resources to encamp detectives in Europe and the Middle East, or send them around the country? (Charmingly, the list of places where anti-Republican groups probably congregated and where those detectives went to infiltrate their meetings probably mirrors an indie rock national tour).

We are seeing the expansion of a new category of non-crime crime, wherein the State diverts resources to creating dossiers on an ever-wider spectrum of groups or individuals deemed inimical to a very broad conception of "government." I guess, in a sense, that's just not news. Isn't it funny, though, the way some of the activists are quoted as saying they knew they were being infiltrated: "Young men aged 25-32 asking 'first name, last name.'" While the article ends with hearty self-congratulations by the cops, you have to wonder if the program was worth it at all, or if, as I suspect, the cops basically blew their own cover everywhere. Imagine a few college-age artists being dogged by an earnest, clean-cut guy with shiny shoes and a real entitlement problem who has no idea about any of the music they listen to, let alone, um, art. Cops are so lame! And they don't even know it.

At a Critical Mass ride, I once heard an officer yelling down at a girl, "Who is the leader of this organization?!" It's all-too-common to roll your eyes at some stoner who gets excited at the thought that the government has a file on him, but the NYPD has also gone way overboard in the jouissance they get out of their own paranoia. They really want there to be some kind of pyramidal organization to any and all kinds of public, demonstrative speech. They want all behaviors they deem anti-social to emanate from a hive mind. It almost seems like they develop an instinct, that the very form of protest--irrespective of content or political valence--triggers a certain reaction.

What would happen if Critical Mass occurred at the same time as a rowdy anti-abortion protest? Would the NYPD regard it as some kind of two-pronged strategy? Would they make sure to separate the "criminals" from each event and interrogate them against one another's statements, trying to "fool" them into a Prisoner's Dilemma situation? I always wonder if the cops have a tough time keeping an eye on what's going on in Chinatown, because of a dearth of Chinese officers. I honestly can't believe they sent people to the Middle East. Who in the Academy is qualified to train people in the arts of international espionage? It's ridiculous enough that they're so clueless as to waste all that time looking for assassins at Parsons and then pat themselves on the back for having thwarted any would-be Lee Harvey Oswalds.

I think September 11 inculcated in the NYPD a perverse identity crisis where they now view themselves as the single greatest power keeping civilization safe from terrorists, terrorists who have already struck at New York twice. A report chronicling their adventures in the fabulous Orient--there are some serious delusions of grandeur going on there.

But that's what happens when you give assholes unlimited power.

Ann Coulter

2007-03-07T17:58:00.000-05:00

I admit it: I like her. I enjoy reading her books, because they're hilarious artifacts of the ways stupid people are prodded to think, and unlike Bill O'Reilly's, they're not all about her. You can argue that I'm contributing to a degenerate spectacle by buying them, but I don't think individual consumer choices can save or destroy the world, and although I do refrain from Wal-Mart, Nike, fast food and other liberal hobgoblins, I think it's important to avoid a certain self-righteousness by an ironic purchase here and there. Plus it would behoove the left to study the right rather than ignore them, hoping their salient retardation will make them go away.

That said, it's no surprise that Ann Coulter finds herself in, as she put it, "the 17th career-ending situation of my life." Referring to John Edwards as a 'faggot' at a conservative feeding frenzy, she has proven that in the future, political outrage will have fifteen minutes of fame. I don't care at all that she used a word that I also use to refer to myself every day. You don't stamp out the negative connotation from a term by censoring it, or policing it as a forbidden object. That only makes it tantalizing, and bestows upon any jokes involving it an electrifying thrill.

But there are still a number of frustrating aspects to this episode. First, there is a resilient idea that the liberal blogosphere is a playground of juvenile insults and bad language, so nothing conservatives do or say can be taken as 'out of line' if the comments page on any given lefty blog has the word 'fuck' on it. Therefore a crazy person like Ann Coulter, who is absolutely a fixture of the right and who will never be uninvited from Fox News or any other media outlet no matter what she does, gets equated with anonymous citizens who possess no real sway, but who can somehow taint an entire hemisphere of political discourse with an ineradicable moral stain.

Second, didn't that whole Tim Hardaway thing just happen? I mean, weren't we here just days ago? (I like the Onion's apology: "Sorry, faggots.") And that guy from 'Grey's Anatomy'? For the rest of my faggoty life, am I supposed to endure an increasing acceptance of faggots punctuated by the occasional consequence-free outburst from a pro athlete/actor/pro right-winger? What a fucking bore. Ann Coulter was aiming for a sound-byte, but it's the media at large that got one. These bits of micro-outrage, these fagsploitative blurbs that bubble up from time to time--what's the point? Eventually there will be another episode in an unbroken chain of homophobic incidents. Sooner or later, Mel Gibson will say something. Or maybe Mitt Romney. Until people's careers actually suffer from being hateful and stupid--the way they are (justifiably) castigated for being racist or anti-Semitic--I can't bring myself to care about anymore of these utterly ephemeral news-crawl flareups.

Finally, John Edwards is not gay. Also, Hillary Clinton is also not a lesbian. Prominent Democrats are not gender-benders and don't come anywhere near representing the needs and interests of people who are. Left Behind posits gender normativity as the primary axis by which your soul is saved or damned. Dykes go to hell while wives go to heaven. Heroic men get saved while the insecure sign on with the Antichrist. It doesn't even have to be in the conservative media; Maureen Dowd, who never wrote a column about an issue in her life, will eventually meow her way into slandering every Democrat running for president on the basis of how they deviate from their supposed gender norms.

The cult of contrived masculinity, wherein a rich-bitch daddy's boy from Connecticut who skips out of a cushy alternative to Vietnam and makes monosyllabic pronouncements on battleships--we all know what that's about. It's frustratingly easy to conclude that conservatives are stupid, simply outrageously stupid. But they're so fucking good at it, it makes me nauseous. Case in point: Michael Savage, talk radio host, said he's not "homophobic" per se because lesbian moms don't fill him with fear, they fill him with contempt. Great. Now academia needs to embark on a project of renaming the concept because an idiot found an almost lawyerly loophole around self-incrimination. But before that happens, Ann Coulter will almost certainly taken a swipe at Hillary Clinton for being too mannish, yet of course not manly enough to lead.

How Is This Shit Even Possible?

2007-02-17T15:34:00.000-05:00

http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifWhile it's a good indication that Democrats have not lost their timidity and Republicans have not lost their temerity that we're even still in Iraq, and the altnernative to Bush's policy is a series of toothless and diluted resolutions, no one seems to notice that Republicans still control the Senate.

After threatening a procedural shutdown if Democrats filibustered another judicial nominee (which I guess is a less august method of opposition than simply not vetting them at all, as the GOP-controlled Senate did with our previous president's choices), the Republicans have used that same filibuster they claimed to revile...and now they're exercising what amounts to a passive version. They torpedoed the minimum wage bill, and forestalled indefinitely any debate on the homeopathic-strength anti-war resolution.

Has the media gone completely insane? No one, to my knowledge, has so much as noted in passing the breathtaking hypocrisy at work, or the incredible stranglehold that the GOP has placed around Harry Reid. Apparently zealous leader-worship is mandatory for the executive when that executive is a Republican and forbidden in all other cases.

The Times' front-page article takes it as an article of faith that, until the expiration of eternity, Democrats will need sixty votes to do anything. And Jim Bunning of Kentucky couches his intransigence in the name of comity. If they'd only pushed a little harder to get what they wanted as the minority, the Democrats might be governing today.

Tom Friedman needs a good cock-punching

2007-02-14T11:25:00.000-05:00

Because he's just a shitty writer. For being stupid, he should be beheaded by terrorists, along with the rest of the milkily apologetic pro-war pundits who still have their sinecures.
Here's the column, purloined from behind the Times Select firewall in a petty act of civil disobedience (because it's outrageously expensive).

Foreign policy experts are still trying to parse Vladimir Putin’s weekend blast against America, which he described as a brutish country that “has overstepped its national borders, in every area.” But rather than asking what exactly motivated Mr. Putin to lash out at the U.S. in this way, the question we should be asking is: why do remarks like these play so well in Russia today?

I’ve just returned from Moscow and I can tell you what analysts there told me, what even Russian liberals reminded me of: NATO expansion. We need to stop kidding ourselves. After the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, the Bush I and Clinton administrations decided to build a new security alliance — an expanded NATO — and told Russia it could not be a member.

And let’s not forget that the Russia we told to stay out in the cold was the Russia of Boris Yeltsin and his liberal reformist colleagues. They warned us at the time that this would undercut them. But the Clinton folks told us: “Don’t worry, Russia is weak; Yeltsin will swallow hard and accept NATO expansion. There will be no cost.”

So, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were invited to join NATO in 1997, and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia followed in 2002. Lately, there has been talk of Ukraine and Georgia also joining.

I believe that one reason Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer and cold warrior, was able to come to power after Mr. Yeltsin was partly due to the negative vibes of NATO expansion. We told Russia: Swallow your pride, it’s a new world. We get to have spheres of influence and you don’t — and ours will go right up to your front door.

But now that high oil and gas prices have made Russia powerful again — the gasman of Europe — Mr. Putin is shoving Russia’s resurgent pride right back in our face. In effect, he is saying to America: “Oh, you talkin’ to me? You thought you could tell me that the cold war was over and that NATO expansion was not directed at Russia — but we couldn’t be members anyway. Did you really think we were going to believe that? Well, now I’m talkin’ to you. Get out of my face.”

Mr. Putin was only slightly more diplomatic in his Munich remarks, where he said: “The process of NATO expansion has nothing to do with modernization of the alliance. We have the right to ask, ‘Against whom is this expansion directed?’ ” We all know the answer: it’s directed against Russia. O.K., fine, we were ready to enrage Russia to expand NATO, but what have we gotten out of it? The Czech Navy?

For those of us who opposed NATO expansion, the point was simple: there is no major geopolitical issue, especially one like Iran, that we can resolve without Russia’s help. So why not behave in a way that maximizes Russia’s willingness to work with us and strengthens its democrats, rather than expanding NATO to countries that can’t help us and are not threatened anymore by Russia, and whose democracies are better secured by joining the European Union?

I got an earful on this from Russians. “NATO expansion was not necessary,” Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the last liberal Duma members who is ready to openly criticize the Putin government, said to me: “In the current world, Russia is not a military danger for any neighbor. It was the wrong concept. You need another architecture.”

Aleksei Pushkov, who has a foreign policy news show on Russian TV, said: “NATO expansion was a message to Russia that you are on your own. Russians were unhappy. We said: ‘The cold war is over, so what is this? They are moving a military alliance toward Russia’s border.’

“At the time of NATO expansion, I was running around the world saying one thing: ‘Don’t do it, or, if you do, stop with the Baltic states because you are losing Russia,’ ” Mr. Pushkov added. “And the answer I got was fantastic: ‘What can Russia do? What measures can you take?’ I said, ‘We can’t take any measures. You are losing an ally. Because there is a deep tectonic shift in the Russian psyche that says, ‘These guys are about exploiting Russia’s weakness. They don’t want it as an ally, but as a junior partner that will be like a little dog doing whatever they say.’ ”

I’m not here to defend an iron-fisted autocrat like Mr. Putin. But history is prologue. The fact is, we helped to create a mood in Russia hospitable to a conservative cold warrior like Mr. Putin by forcing NATO on a liberal democrat like Mr. Yeltsin. It was a bad decision and one that keeps on giving. Just when we need to be getting Russia’s help, we’re getting its revenge.

First of all, Putin's "lashing out" at the US constitutes an accurate statement about American power and they ways we use it. Perhaps it was impolitic for a head of state, but Friedman's own columns routinely castigate our national laziness re oil, green energy, Iraq, etc. "Remarks like that play well in Russia today" because anti-Americanism is as morally justifiable as it is popular with semi-literate electorates (if a country like Russia could be said to elect its leader).

So, according to Friedman, NATO is making things worse with Russia...but he furnishes no concrete examples of what precisely Russia will do to us. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's not stoking truly base anxieties of a nuclear showdown with our old enemies. If it's natural gas they'll withhold from the West, so much the better to amend our grotesque energy policies. Does Friedman support a smaller NATO, an irrelevant NATO? I don't think American unilateralism is a viable alternative at this juncture, and while it might be "antagonistic" to Russia to have Estonia allied with the US and nearly all of Europe, it would require major logistical changes to incorporate into NATO the world's largest country by landmass--without even accounting for its corporatist, authoritarian leanings and unsavory arms deals.

Putin knows he can acquire more power by puffing up a phantom pissing contest with the West, and then conceal his power-grabs by claiming NATO expansion as a grave threat to Russia. Sticking it to Putin--who is an anti-democratic dictator, spawned in the KGB--might just be the Bush Administration's sole foreign policy success. Friedman's idea that Russia would be cooperative and multilaterally-inclined but for NATO expansion is naive. Additionally, Friedman's characteristic oversimplification squeezes the dynamic of post-Soviet Russia's political transition into a single linear axis where admitting the Czech Republic (and its Navy; that was funny) into NATO bred a chain reaction leading to the restoration of a crypto-Stalinist dictatorship.

As far as Friedman's writing goes, this column is a jumble of mixed metaphors (plus at least one split infinitive). "A tectonic shift within the Russian psyche that says, 'These guys are exploiting Russia's weakness...'" Okay, we've got seismology combined with pop psychology, the sum of which is then anthropomorphized as a speaker. Earlier, he decodes for the layperson Putin's baffling utterances as "Oh, you talkin’ to me? You thought you could tell me that the cold war was over and that NATO expansion was not directed at Russia — but we couldn’t be members anyway. Did you really think we were going to believe that? Well, now I’m talkin’ to you. Get out of my face." Putin, when his words are anglicized, shifts from mafioso to Queen Bee/Mean Girl. Thanks, Tom L.

"Extremist"

2007-02-13T13:46:00.000-05:00

Along with the "far-left"/"far-right" appellations you read all over the place, on blogs, in editorials, in books written by pundits, I think the word "extremist" should be retired from intellectual discourse. It's too easily hijacked by headlines for purposes of delegitimizing opponents' viewpoints without actually attending to the arguments they make.

In my fantasy world, where my novel gets published to great acclaim and I make the rounds on television news, creating little controversies everywhere, I'm sure I would be branded as an 'extremist,' 'Commie,' 'far-left' tool of the 'radical homosexual agenda' before I opened my mouth, and who would want that to happen (to themselves--in fantasy world)?

Glenn Greenwald, who is by far the best blogger I've ever read, does it in his inaugural post for Salon. It's not so much that I want to stick up for Glenn Reynolds, the extremist in question, who is a fascist and doesn't really deserve attention as a serious thinker. However, damning all conservatives or Bush-supporters as extremists clouds the big picture. (Although, honestly, you have got to be seriously devoid of introspection to be cheering the government on at this point).

Dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers aren't simply these parochial blowhards to whom the mainstream media grant disproportionate airtime as part of a backbreaking attempt at appearing fair. They're not all carbon copies of Fred Phelps. They command legions of readers, or followers, as the case may be. When conservatives condemn liberals as extremists, it's part of a successful enterprise in which the mainstream creeps ever rightward, with liberals and leftists cut out of what passes for a 'national conversation' while apparently no one can be too far to the right to forfeit credibility as a public figure (cf. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan). At the risk of oversimplifying the already one-dimensional axis on which political affiliations are graphed, you can't be further to the right of those men without being a Klansman or skinhead. On the left, there's a vast gulf that could be filled with all sorts of people, but--just to name a few--Ralph Nader's too "unreasonable," black leaders are too "militant," and for whatever reason, the only academics that ever get on television are moderate-to-conservative and gender-conforming.

As of yet, reality simply can't accommodate this strategy when liberals employ it, because there's a giant swath of this country who identify as evangelical Christians, and those people are already acutely attuned to feeling "shut out" by "cultural elites." The right can ignore the left, but for the left to ignore the right or label its spokespersons as extremists reinforces the prevalent ethos whereby left-wing intellectuals know nothing about ordinary people's lives and don't give a shit about them, either. So not only is tarring someone with the "extremist" label needlessly corrosive to reasonable discussion, it might just be adding fuel to the fire of the right's dizzyingly adroit campaign to screw liberals and leftists, no matter what they say or do, or even if they say anything at all.

Really Shitty, Homophobic Journalism

2007-02-12T15:12:00.000-05:00

Read it, bitch.

First of all, let's talk photo. It's a shot of a young, not unattractive 20-something walking to his therapist's--at night, across a parking lot, after the rain. He's wearing a leather jacket. If not for the bright lights, which suggest a film or music video set (or sexual surveillance), one might think this young closet case is out cruising.

That's just funny. More to the point, this article is yet another example of the so-called liberal media bending over backwards to cater to their staunchest critics--people whom reporters are no doubt tired of hearing bitch and complain--by "triangulating" between the accepted scientific consensus and an ideologically driven, archconservative fiction. This is perfectly analogous to taking seriously a Chevron-funded think tank that exploits tiny lacunae in our current understanding of global warming, or the Discovery Institute's protestations that since biology can't replicate the genesis of living matter in a test tube, God must have made humans ex nihilo in 6000 BC.

The New York Times is literally taking at face value (and not ethnographically) claims that gay people can (and by implication, ought) attempt to alter their sexual orientation if they have some moral objection to it. Rather than investigate the absolutely insane origins of those objections--or, more importantly, the profound psychic damage they can produce in tormented young homos who have the misfortune of being raised as Mormons, Shiites, Hasids or Catholics--this article employs the time-honored tactic of not engaging the bullshit straight on but leaving it to the news consumer to read between the lines. I.e., they're lazy. And naive to think that news coverage of this ilk will placate their vituperative right-wing critics, who want to silence dissent and will regard the Times as the enemy forever, no matter how slanted and inaccurate their reporting becomes.

Are we really supposed to believe Ted Haggard is "completely heterosexual"? In all likelihood, he's completely homosexual. It would blow up the entire evangelical edifice to concede that a man with a direct line to God is an incorrigble faggot. So they'll make him disappear and call it a stunning rout for reparative therapy over the forces of licentiousness.

Similarly, what's especially pernicious is the reporting on the odd ways in which this Corey person is groping towards the truth about himself. He's afraid that his inadequate feelings as a man might be behind his gayness, and he's probably right. Boys who are sensitive or bad at sports or who like writing poetry or making clothes or decorating are generally shunted out of a rigid gender binary where 'true' manliness is as limiting as it is stringently enforced. And not everyone's good at repressing things. Childrearing in devoutly religious families tolerates nonconformity less than a lot of other situations. But the Times, dominated as it is by neoliberals and their fascination with neuroscience and genes as the causations of all things, might not entertain explanations that verge on the psychoanalytic (let alone Marxian). So yet again, in their pursuit of avoiding all things left-wing in favor of the holy and eminently "sensible" middle, they forego reality.

Why not engage in some actual investigation that proves, once and for all, that these reparative therapy scams are just that? How about some goddamn fucking journalism? Instead, this article comes off as a paean to the diversity of American religions: wow, what a rich tapestry of faiths we have...which all have some kind of evil, antigay program operating in the basement. But for every ostensible success story, there are many other stories of people who have concluded they were deluding themselves, including some who used to be among the movement’s most visible leaders. How about, "This expensive cruelty actually never works"? I don't expect an editorial anytime soon that says, "Religion is stupid. They're after your money. Any purported benefits can be derived elsewhere, and 'faith' is just a cover for stupidity or insanity. Unclench your moral sphincter and try to enjoy the time you've got with the people who love you. Love, the liberal media." But why do they always have to ferret out a highly dubious middle ground, fraught with their own political investments, and palm it off as a seasoned objectivity?

Police Paranoia in Two Cities

2007-02-01T11:38:00.000-05:00

Bush came to NYC yesterday, visiting the Stock Exchange where he made an uncharacteristically candid speech about the realities of income inequality before leaving via the heliport that's essentially downstairs from my office. (I always wonder what he thinks about New York. If asked, he'd probably offer some just-folks opinion about the sinful ways of the big city and the notorious assholes who live in it, but he got more money from the Upper East Side than any other ZIP code, and if I were such a kingly president, I'd be sort of impressed with this corner of my domain).

Anyway, his brief stopover naturally precipitated legions of law enforcement doing all sorts of odd things that in the aggregate theoretically lead up to greater security for our leader, and, maybe, the rest of us. A few streets were closed, some to vehicular traffic, others altogether. (For example, you couldn't walk down Wall Street towards the Exchange, unless you were exiting the subway. That'll fool those towelheads.) South Street and the tip of the FDR Drive were blocked off except for the presidential convoy, because a podunk place like Manhattan doesn't need its major ring road artery on a weekday. The plazas on either side of my building were sealed, and everyone was trapped in our forty-story tower for ninety minutes--during lunch. And of course there were snipers on the roof, helicopters all over, NYPD divers in the river (that's got to SUCK), sirens everywhere, barricades left and right, and men with Uzis (at least, that's what I think they were) patrolling the streets. I wonder how long it'll be until chemical masks and riot gear are standard operating procedure.

These steroidal theatrics are intended primarily to terrify. Whether it be the NYPD, the Secret Service, the Armed Forces, the FBI, or a combination of them all, the sum is a phenomenon designed to maximize the visibility of the American government's grip on the situation. Many a cheery warmonger of our decade says or said things like, "Until Sept. 11, Americans didn't have to worry about things like terrorism." Taking that at face value (because tearing stupidity apart is a bore by now), one thing you might add is that "Americans never had to worry about seeing or feeling the full brunt of our military capabilities." Obviously, yesterday's mass inconvenience because the NYPD doesn't want to revisit Dallas 1963 only blocks from the WTC site doesn't nearly approach what the Iraqis (or, for that matter, the citizens of 60 other countries at least) have experienced, but I think the taboo has been violated.

Similarly, in Boston, a marketing tactic for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" led the BPD to freak out over some Lite Brites that had been deployed in nine other cities without a fuss. The mayor and state attorney general clamored for blood, but not only were no laws broken, this hysteria has not--as one might hope--led to any reappraisal of just how easy it is to trigger a wasteful overreaction like calling out the bomb squad and shutting down a section of the Charles River. Nor was it limited to the BPD. Fox News (duh) questioned whether or not it was a "terrorist dry run." I mean, please.

There is at least a component of these anti-terror operas which seeks to deter homegrown would-be terrorists or anti-American foreigners germinating in our midst. I really don't know what to think about that, because there's no merit to a city appearing lazy or inept in its response. Again, however, it's inevitable that there will be a ratcheting up of a new normality, in which ordinary citizens can expect both their civil liberties and plain old time and energy to be checked at the door out of deference to security concerns.

As we passively permit law enforcement to ever-swallow greater concentric circles of cities, paralyzing everything within their self-assigned geographical purview with the ugly plumage of counterterrorism, the more we can naturally expect paranoia to take hold in all quarters, eroding some of the simpler pleasures of urban living and producing our own expensive and predictable false alarms that then demand blood to justify the fantastical expense.

The Seventh Continent (this post is full of spoilers)

2007-01-29T16:52:00.000-05:00

This is Michael Haneke's first film (Haneke being the Austrian director who later made Cache, The Piano Teacher and Time of the Wolf), and it's among the more fucked-up I've seen in awhile. It's based on the true story of a Viennese middle class family who, alienated by modern life, quit their jobs, tell everyone they're moving to Australia, destroy all their possessions and kill their daughter and then themselves.

It came out in 1989, so the technologies of consumer electronics and chemical factories and, to a lesser extent, the hair all appear worthy of destruction, but nonetheless, the extremely measured pacing gives way to a glorious orgy of systematically flushing all their cash, ripping shirt seams, bashing dressers, shattering mirrors and upending lamps. The centerpiece of the home is a large fish tank that basically contains an entire ecosystem, and although his wife shouts "Nein!" the husband tears into it with a sledge hammer, flooding the living room and sending dozens of fish to flop around on wet shards of glass, over a thick layer of household jetsam.

Their eight-year old daughter begins to cry, for the fish, for herself, and against the game that suddenly turned nasty and manic. Haneke's brilliance lies in the ability to reveal the family's zealous nihilism shot through with doubt and fear, because the viewer can't help but enjoy the parade of destructive images--until the fish tank and the daughter's reaction make you experience shame and disgust. As the fish begin to die, the three eat their last meal (which is basically champagne plus all the food they had left in the house) and retreat to a ruined bedroom to watch television. The mother gives her daughter poisoned milk before ingesting some kind of poison herself, drinking from a glass that once stored her toothbrush. The glass, a symbol of bourgeois virtue, of morning/evening routine, and of the bland little obligations that bookend the day, is one of the few things left intact in the home and the same item the husband uses to take his own life, similarly by poisoning, as well. His and hers suicides.

At some point, maybe after flushing tens of thousands of Deutsche marks, they passed the point of no return and simply tried to enjoy themselves until the inevitable happened and the concentric circles of demolition fell at last to their own bodies, by which time they would be so ex-static or numb with exhaustion that the exercise might almost be painless. The daughter's tears over the fish completely derail that climaxing emotional movement, but the mother knows that they can't undo the damage and so has to kill her daughter, anyway. Having murdered her only child, she must murder herself, and in fact dies horribly. The father, alone in a dark house with only the glow of the staticky television, writes their names and times of death on a wall as soon as he swallows the poison. If he had spared the fish their concussive deaths, had not advanced his strategic annihilations too prematurely, they might have at least died together, ending the brutal separation they'd each perceived and which drove them to their insane act. By shattering the glass, he condemned every animal in the house to die alone and--in the case of himself and his wife--consumed with fears and regrets as impossible to bottle back up as water gushing from the busted fish tank.

Perpetual Electioneering

2007-01-26T17:10:00.000-05:00

It's kind of disturbing that the 2008 began virtually as the Congress elected in 2006 sat. Even the hardiest political junkies cannot maintain a this level of enthusiasm for another twenty-one months. Either we're going to enter a sort of "Phony War" phase where ten or more Republicans and eight or more Democrats are "running" for president in that everything they say and do will be judged in light of that fact as they amass the half-billion dollars each eventual nominee will likely raise--but no one will be campaigning per se; it will be like Nazi Germany versus France and Britain through early 1940.

It would be nice to think that the media wants to inform the populace, but really, they exist to sell soap and laser hair removal, so permanent campaigns will frictionlessly establish themselves in the collective consciousness, akin to the crawl at the bottom of CNN or the time-temperature-stock-market-indices-and-station-logo zone at the bottom right. Nobody appears to acknowledge what a monumental distraction elections are from the actual business of governance. It's a good thing Nancy Pelosi achieved her 100 Hours of Legislation in fewer than fifty--now we can stare at Hillary and Obama.

We've become like Texas. Only instead of a system where the legislature meets for a short period every other year, after which everyone returns to his or her real job, that formerly fallow season is now filled with bickering and pander. Like ads on the side of the bus. How was that canvas ever permitted to be ad-free for so long? It was just sitting there. Same for 2007. I mean, come on, Bush really sucks. Better to prepare for 2009 when he's out of office than to use the remaining two years to demand oversight, accountability and responsible legislation, right?

Add to this the fact that big states, annoyed at the clout that Iowa and New Hampshire jealously guard, have threatened to front-load their primaries earlier and earlier. Two tiny states in the Frostbelt haven't always caucused in mid-winter. That happened over a period of time, and we can reasonably expect primaries a full year before the general in not very long. Moreover, when people wonder why we haven't had a black president yet, they should probably look at the ethnic composition of Iowa and New Hampshire. They are 93% and 97% white, respectively. If we don't have at least a de facto national primary day (which, if I truly got my druthers, would be held after Labor Day...although I'm betting on Valentine's Day at the latest), we should probably just let the entire field of candidates get vetted by a gated subdivision in Orange County, California. It would preserve the whites-only kingmaker status of the current calendar, but the climate would be gentler on the kids MoveOn buses in.

The Glass is Three-Quarters Empty

2007-01-25T14:49:00.000-05:00

I forgot that January 20 has passed, meaning there's less than two years till the inauguration of the new president. So we're in the last throes, if you will, of the Bushies. I'm of two minds as to whether or not the next White House occupant will roll back all the ruinous policies and procedures of the current administration, or if after eight years of grotesque aberrations a new, skewed normality will have set in. Probably somewhere between the two. Some odious features of this president's way of doing things that will likely endure are press conferences full of unchallenged lies, interference into embarrassing bureaucratic reports, and the release of critical information on Friday evenings. When the White House lifts its portcullis to divulge bad news they can't get away from, it's usually after the correspondents' pool has left for the weekend.

So we've only got a couple of years left until (hopefully) we get a Democrat in there, sitting on top of a Congress that is tilted ever more to the left (with 21 Republicans and only 9 Democrats in the Senate up for re-election in 2008, I can't envision a Senate that isn't at least 53-45-2, even accounting for the fact that Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and probably Tim Johnson (D-SD) will lose, but that's a tangent).

Even still, the war will hemorrhage our resources and attention. It's clear that the entire affair is gradually being palmed off onto the team (and highly likely presidential ticket) of McCain-Lieberman, the sainted maverick and his loyal bipartisan cover. If they should win in 2008, we'll literally be at war forever. If they lose and Democrats advocate withdrawal from Iraq, the narrative which the right will push with all its might will be that we could have won, but for those weak liberals who pulled out just as victory as only 6-9 months away. And when someone nukes Chicago in 2013, it will be because spineless Democrats betrayed our resolve, not because the U.S. continues to act like a complete asshole. I eagerly await a new generation of gutless warmongers rattling sabers at Teheran, as long as other people's sons and daughters patrol its slums and attempt to differentiate Shiite from Sunni.

Isn't it weird that, for all their self-congratulation and selective trumpeting of facts, no one in the military or federal government even discusses Afghanistan? Korea is called the Forgotten War, but no one seems to remember that we are actually losing two wars right now. Is the American psyche so fragile that our predilections for self-hagiography can't tolerate the fact that we're both hyperpower and double loser? There's no room in the national meta-narrative for losses of this magnitude. It's taboo. If you bring it up, you must be an America-hater on the scale of Jean Baudrillard. Joe Lieberman might still be trotting out the absolutely contemptible falsehood that the people we're fighting in Iraq are the ones who attacked us in 2001 (unless he just means 'Muslims'), but not even Dick Cheney has the gall to crow about how the obviously resurgent Taliban are at the end of their rope.

The point of all this is that while it might feel good to know the clock's ticking on the Bush Administration--especially now that it lost its compliant Congress--I'm skeptical on just how much of a restoration of good governance and truthfulness we can really expect to see. Led by our fawning media, we're doing a fine job of allowing the unacceptable to morph into white noise and unpleasant wars to go utterly unreported.

The Silence

2007-01-24T19:05:00.000-05:00

I continue to have new favorite Bergman films all the time. The first half of this one is forty-five minutes of the best filmmaking you'll ever see. It's the simple story of two sisters, Ester and Ana, and Ana's young son Johan traveling through an unnamed European country on the cusp of (civil?) war. One of them gets sick, and they're held up in a hotel for a few days.

Since the controversy of such things has long worn off, I tend to look right past implied lesbian incest, but it's there.

That said, the titular silence is the sort of miasmic alienation one expects from midcentury European modernism. Ana more or less abandons her son in the hotel, goes to the movies and sees a couple having sex before bringing a grizzled waiter back to her room. Ester, who appears to be dying of TB, lies around in self-disgust, half-drunk and feverish. She's the erudite aesthete of the two, but there really isn't a spirit/flesh dichotomy to their characters inasmuch as they are both victims of, well, phallogocentrism in different ways.

In my second-favorite scene, Ana leaves the movie theater and is caught in a tide of men on the sidewalk. She's dizzy and with a war approaching there's a weird combination of tension and an absence of tension on the street. It's sort of an inverted foreplay; war operates as a torturous tease, an inability to find release or ejaculate. And phallic symbols abound: writing implements, a tube of lipstick, a tank's gun swiveling aimlessly in a city square--that last one, especially, embodies the exquisite unpleasure of being locked permanently at the moment just before release.

There are only a few other characters, a concierge/bellman/room service waiter who seems to be running the near-empty hotel by himself and a troupe of performing little people. The hotelier is tall and elderly, with protruding teeth and thick black glasses. Like the performers, he's grotesque in the literal sense. But he's profoundly kind, comforting Ester in her delirious discomfort (my favorite scene) and offering Johan half a bar of chocolate.

As the adult characters seldom speak, his uncomprehending but nearly nonstop chatter highlights the silence at the center of discourse. This is a film about the inability of any two people in a godless universe to communicate, how trying to get through is futile. Any sensitivity to or suffering from the subsequent alienation of this reality can drive people into misguided and increasingly desperate attempts to connect in ever-more spectacular or sensational ways. Fucking a stranger is as moral or amoral as withdrawing to the solitude of your bed.

Minimum Wage Bill Filibustered

2007-01-24T16:23:00.000-05:00

In the category of "giant episodes of scandalous hypocrisy that aren't worth your attention because how Nancy Pelosi is inept and Communist and that's what we should focus on," the Senate voted 54-43 in favor of raising the minimum wage to the titanic, everything's-better-now rate of $7.25 an hour.

Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to placate the conservative demands that the haute bourgeoisie get something, too. They filibustered it. Remember when it used to be that House Republicans were crazy and their Senate counterparts were a tad more mature? Also, remember last year when the Democrats threatened to filibuster Bush's most egregious court nominees, the extreme conservatives who in some cases were "not qualified" according to the American Bar Association? And the "nuclear option" proposed by Bill Frist, to do away with filibustering altogether? And the extraordinary display of "bipartisanship" exercised by the Gang of Fourteen, who essentially adopted the Republicans' desires and repackaged them as "working together for you, the people"?

If you earn the minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, and put in a 40-hour week every single week of the year, you will earn--gross--$10,712, in the land of opportunity. Rather than ameliorate that humiliating factoid about our country, Senate Republicans used the same tactic they threatened to abolish when confronted over their ambition to remake our judicial landscape under the stewardship of archconservatives who aren't even good at their job. And they did it three weeks into their tenure as the minority. And nobody's pointing this out.

Bush unhinged

2007-01-12T16:41:00.000-05:00

According to Condi, it's not 'escalation,' it's an 'augmentation.' Just because 68% of the country doesn't think it's a good idea, the decider will keep on deciding, after much deliberation and lengthy consultation with the cooler heads in our government, no doubt.

The writers of Left Behind love to mock diplomacy as the province for effeminate, Francophile boys to prance around behind elaborate protocols and never actually do anything, but I wonder just how much hollering we'll hear over Condi's latest boilerplate from, you know, National Review or something.

(An interesting tidbit: Jonah Goldberg, one of the biggest neocon assholes, is three weeks away from losing his $1000 bet, waged in Febr. 2005 against liberal blogger Juan Cole--who is smart and fluent in Arabic--that in two years, Iraq wouldn't be caught in civil war and both Iraqis and Americans would reach a broad conensus that the US war had been worth it).

It's altogether too tempting to imagine the inside of the president's head. Psychoanalysis comes easy. But seriously--what is going on over there? Against the white noise of 'we're listening to your conversations, 'we open your mail,' 'Jose Padilla...did...something,' and all the thousand other high crimes known and unknown, almost no one's backing his baby anymore--not even a majority in Utah. It doesn't take a genius to know that George H. W. Bush has agonized for years over what point does his intervention become goddamn necessary (but big deal, he's rich and practically dead). Obviously, the newly canonized Gerald Ford (ah, for the days when your president was really, really nice) was holding his tongue till it was a posthumous tongue. Nonetheless, there is still a constellation of true believers--a bipartisan coalition if one counts the Connecticut for Lieberman party.

Is this really supposed to be John McCain's war? Is the man who bussed himself all around the country crowing about integrity going to crucify himself in 2008 by taking on this burden--just to gain access to Bush's vaunted fund-raising club? That's an incredible gamble. That fabled maverick, so utterly desperate to be president, will eat shit straight from the hand of the man who told South Carolina in 2000 that he had a black baby, swinging the primary to Bush. The storied POW, the even-keeled skeptic, straight-talking Arizonan--he's toeing the party line to the point of pure absurdity.

Does anyone think 'winning' is possible? Does the Iraqi civil war have a dynamic where victory is achievable for any side? Iraq is like the Lebanon in 1975: 15 more years of war to go, followed by a painful and turgid peace plus de facto Syrian domination. If Iraq doesn't partition itself, which it should (at least for the fucking Kurds' benefit), it will merely hobble into the next paradigm change of power relations in the Middle East: oillessness. Whenever that is, 2050 or beyond. We've fucked Iraq over fourth-dimensionally.

The scariest thing is the new momentum of the federal government under Bush's charge. With Vice President Cuckoo-Bananas still, against all reason, not having bowed out for (ahem) health concerns even though he's ten times the ineptocrat that Donald Rumsfeld ever was, it's hard to believe we have two years and a week left of this shit. Bush et al. simply do whatever they want; that's the essence of the signing statements and the sweeping assumption of powers: "I can do whatever I want." In the end, Bush is the ultimate rich kid, never having had to be responsible for a single thing. He's a brat. No one has ever told him no, and now he's refigured the parameters of the world's most powerful office precisely so that no one can ever tell him no until January 20, 2009.

And now, in total and complete contravention of prudence and public opinion (in rare alignment) the traitor-baiters are actually condemning more overworked soldiers to die for their catastrophic error. They actually are. People are heading back to Iraq, some of them, for the third time. That's two fewer tours of duty than Dick Cheney's draft deferments. I suspect most of those people aren't heading back willingly, although you can't neglect the myrmidon factor. We're sending more people to die, for no good reason. Making sure that the ones who died already "didn't die in vain" qualifies as a shitty reason.

This is probably what animated so much anti-Nixon vitriol, around 1968-70, before Watergate; people had the sense that, for the first time since 1933, the government broadly did not give a shit and was actually behaving in even more ways contrary to
the country's best interests (to put it mildly). In 2007, still stinging after losing both chambers of Congress, Bush has decided it's a good idea to augment the war by sending more people to Iraq in order to hasten victory, and many of the Republican signers-on to this idea want to deploy more soldiers to make it possible to withdraw them.

The real answer is immediate withdrawal. There is nothing more than can be done for Iraq, because "Iraq" contains too many people bent on killing each other, not enough of which can be blamed on ancient blood feuds among sects to exculpates our blundering naivete for having gone there in the first place. We need to start leaving tomorrow, at the fastest possible speed, slowing only enough so that those physically boarding planes are protected by those who have not yet been lucky enough to leave for home.

Children of Men

2007-01-12T15:08:00.000-05:00

For no reason at all, I imagined this film to resemble Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf: subtle, disturbing, irresolved and quietly intense. It was instead more of a big-budget action movie whose art director consulted the dystopian literary canon for wisps of indie credibility. That probably sounds very disparaging, but this film was closer to that hot mess, V for Vendettathan I'd hoped.

All the same, a lot of the detail was striking. Beginning with the premise, two decades of infertility coinciding with and contributing to nuclear war, the permanent suspension of civil liberties (oh no), etc, is novel. I liked the lack of an explanation, although that did not imply a lack of exposition: characters swap sob-stories about when they first realized the world was going to hell, and the yellowed headlines papering a terrorist cell's hideout, while a nice visual, were too melancholic and backward-looking to be altogether believable. In other words, this movie succumbed to the near-universal affliction among dystopias, which is for characters rehash conversations and events that would have become, by the time of the movie according to the narrative's own chronology, ancient history. (New Yorkers just don't talk about Sept. 11 all the time). But that's just Hollywood's heavy hand, broadening the appeal.

Back to the good things. The symbol of the crown, so anachronistic and fainly embarrassing to many Brits, gets a steely update and serves as the focal point for the UK's self-hagiographic survival skills. Surveillance cameras along back-country roads are hot shit (as it were). The Ark of the Arts--I don't know; kind of ridiculous (although the truly inexplicable inclusion of an injured, possibly psychologically scarred boy playing a video game with wires under his fingernails is awesome). My favorite image was the sight (through a car window!) of a marching band and exotic animals on some sort of royal parade ground--it's crypto-imperialist, grotesque and somehow fascist, but without the obviousness of, say, "Big Brother is Watching You." Rampant toxic waste doesn't really make sense, but it was gross--as were fields of dead animals and people, burning--the spiritual pollution of the beloved English countryside.

Mass deportations of illegal immigrants don't really hold up, either (Europe's low birth rates already force it to permit hundreds of thousands of foreign workers each year), but that's missing the point. The point--emphasized by radio deejay chatter, character backstories and lots of other details--is that the industrialized west may have already hit a point where a precipitating crisis (be it total infertility or anything else) will necessarily trigger a cascading series of actions and reactions leading only to a brutal and aesthetically hideous police state that dominates the media by fear and executes patently absurd policies. What stupider way to combat depopulation than by launching into xenophobic overdrive?

Along with V for Vendetta and 28 Days Later, there's a common theme of British anxiety in the age of terrorism or even just globalization. Always an island of relative stability, never been invaded in almost a thousand years, usually on the winning side of wars, a ghost of its former imperial self, a relatively tiny place that nonetheless gave birth to the world's lingua franca--still there's a streak of paranoia, over infection by disease (see Mary Shelley's The Last Man, or the laws quarantining all pets for six months before entry, to keep the UK free of rabies) or being entrapped by a futuristic fascism enforced by the isolation of being borderless and off to one side of Europe. A totalitarian government that can seal everyone in and manipulate the media to portray the rest of the world as having fallen into chaos is a fear peculiarly strong in Britain, judging by three recent post-apocalyptic films.

****

Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"

2007-01-01T23:45:00.000-05:00

Aside from White Teeth, this might be my favorite novel of the twenty-first century. (Now that we're seven years into it, that's no longer such a frivolous comment). I've never read any McCarthy before, and I've always thought of him as a writer for old men who read Hemingway while he was still alive and fantasized about fishing with him in Cuba. (Take that value-neutrally).

The Road is by far the best post-apocalyptic narrative I've ever read. And it leaks onto the page itself: the typography omits quotations marks, apostrophes and, in a lot of places, commas--all without appearing cutesy or self-consciously 'experimental.' The central motif of the book is ash. It's never explained how the world ended, but there was some sort of war which led to fires sweeping through the entire continent, killing many of the survivors and causing a downward spiral in which people were unable to feed themselves and resorted to cannibalism, which produced such a climate of terror that whoever was left retreated into isolation to survive, making any efforts at collective survival impossible. The fires and subsequent extinction of species reached critical mass, causing nearly all plant life and the oceans to die and making the earth rainy and cold all the time. And everything is covered in ash and dust. A father and son, who are almost certainly not actually related, travel south out of desperation and the need to remain active. They're starving.

There really isn't much of a plot, per se. They don't talk much, either. What makes this novel so incredible is the way in which they combat both the terrible pointlessness and total fear, reduced to eating rotted fruit and sleeping under tarps in the freezing rain. Often the father decides against a fire, in the event that marauders kill and devour him and his adopted son in the night. At one point, they come upon a house and find, in the basement, dozens of people locked in the dark awaiting the hour when their captors will eat them. That's just about the worst image I can think of.

While it's one of the more exceptionally jarring, the entire book is a tense study of narrative anti-inertia. McCarthy never lets up, but his touch is light, adroit. He's an exceptionally good writer who never succumbs to melodrama, and the ending, while ambiguously happy, doesn't stray. In our comfort we can imagine visceral horrors about what it would be like to remain alive after everyone else died, with the birds and the grass gone, too. That tradition is long and good, if shot through with a lameass streak of spirituality. But McCarthy's book basically owns up to the fact that there's no such thing as God--an oddly uncommon gesture--while eliminating the one other repository of hope: good dreams when your waking life is a catalog of despair. The father tells the son that although bad dreams are brutally unfair, it's important to keep having them because if they stop that means you've begun to give up. That's as ingenious as it is awful to hear. I cried.

Gerald Ford

2006-12-27T15:09:00.000-05:00

Having been born in the earliest days of the Reagan Administration, I always had to remind myself that Gerald Ford was, indeed, still alive. What a quaint curiosity his 2 1/2 year tenure was. While Jimmy Carter has always been, pretty unfairly, something of a national joke (not to mention a rare puzzle, a pro-abortion evangelical Democrat from Georgia who did not pursue the same path as Zell Miller), one wonders what Gerald Ford thought about that: "Shit, I lost to THAT guy?"

Sandwiched between Republicans Nixon (who until around 2002 was arguably the worst president we've ever had) and Reagan (who clobbered what remained of the postwar liberal consensus), with Carter in there, Ford's presidency doesn't seem to have swung much in the glare of hindsight, whereas Carter's now a peacebroker and homebuilder and even Nixon now appears to be the last real liberal. To label Ford a mere placeholder invites anti-intellectualism and unearned forgiveness. Not only did he okay Indonesia's butchery in East Timor (where up to 200,000 people--a third of the entire country--died in a Kissingerian burst of 'stability'), but he pardoned Nixon, too. (Let's also not forget that two of the very worst public servants in recent memory--Cheney and Rumsfeld--spawned in the Ford Administration).

I know the prevailing wisdom about the pardon episode basically aligns with Ford's sentiment that "our long national nightmare is over," but I fail to see how a man unelected to either the presidency or the vice presidency who exculpates his former boss of grievous wrongdoings for 'the sake of the country' isn't very much to blame for the cynicism and apathy that have never left the body politic in the subsequent 35 years. No, there wasn't a conspiracy or a backroom deal, but the appearance of dirty maneuverings is all it takes. No one seems to remember that once upon a time you could believe your government wasn't just lying to you, all the time, in every way. Ford's lost re-election bid, and its direct traceability to the pardon, have exonerated him in the eyes of history as a decent man who prudently did the right thing even at the cost of his own political future. No--Ford was both wrong and stupid. People demand vengeance in the guise of justice when a mentally retarded citizen commits a crime, but when an imperial and pathologically secretive president breaks laws all over the place, it's best to avoid future embarrassing headlines and put the matter behind us without a criminal investigation? Nixon should have been prosecuted. Period.

As far as the man's inherent decency, well, don't expect the respectful tones of an obituary to plumb the psychoanalytic workings of good old-fashioned Midwestern conservatism and its blue-eyed work ethic. But at least the Times acknowledged the troubling contradiction between a man who would give a poor child the shirt off his back and then dash back into the Oval Office to veto a school lunch program (or whatever they said). What are we really to divine from this? That Ford was a singular example of cognitive dissonance? Or incuriousity? Or that his compassion was deep and genuine but simply myopic?

Isn't this one of the systemic problems with conservatism as a philosophy? That in spite of all the protestations from illiberals of all stripes that they actually care about the poor, the marginal or the oppressed, "caring" requires actual follow-through and more than patchwork, remedial forms of addressing poverty and disenfranchisement. Specifically, it requires marshaling the forces of a government that is, for better or for worse, inextricably tied into a vast matrix of socioeconomic forces that, if left unchecked, demonstrably ravage the lives of those who don't already possess the different forms of capital required to get ahead. It's anecdotally pleasing to remember Gerald Ford as a real swell guy who would strip himself bare in the event that shirtless moppets swarmed the South Lawn, but it's not simply Ford-the-individual acting in isolation when we stop to ponder why conservatives reflexively stop short of using government as a force for good, instead preferring to bankrupt it and staff it with cronies and then point to the resulting disaster as proof of government's inherent inefficiency and utopian pointlessness.

Gerald Ford was probably very nice. But like everyone in government who isn't doing whatever possible to equalize the results of a capitalist polity, he shouldn't get a pass. And he had 29 years to use his influence as a venerable and post-political statesman for any number of causes he might have adopted. Carter builds homes. Clinton's coordinating efforts to combat HIV and AIDS. Ford golfed.

Poetry, but not really

2006-12-18T17:49:00.000-05:00

Over a week ago, the New York Times ran a mash note to a poetry critic at Harvard named Ann Vendler. It absolutely crystallizes the pernicious anti-intellectualism that is endemic over there, particularly in one three word phrase. When heaping praise on this venerable woman of letters and her authoritative judgments on what is or is not fine verse, the piece said, "Eschewing fashionable theory, Vendler is a school of one, an impassioned aesthete who pay minute attention to the structures and words that are a poem's genetic code" before going on to quote (who else?) Harold Bloom.

Eschewing fashionable theory. What a brazenly dismissive gesture towards far smarter people than the author of this love letter. It's endlessly irksome how the Times wishes to inculcate in its readership a desire for knowledge up to and including the level of literacy that the Times' editorial manual holds itself to, and no further. As the final arbiters on what's meritorious and what's simply intellectual masturbation, they will assign themselves the task of fawning over 'aesthetes' who see past the bullshit (read: things that are hard to read and which challenge intuitive or unexamined thinking) to get to the timeless, the eternal qualities of poetry--rather than succumb to the sirensong of, say, Roland Barthes, whose work is a mere plaything for the unserious and wishy-washy. And it can all be done without even reading this "fashionable theory," which may contain playful typography, French terms or sentences that require re-reading. I wonder if people who eschew fashionable theory might also eschew "eschew."

It's not that everyone has to tear down the canon at all times. You just can't set yourself up in opposition to academia with a single condescending throwaway phrase summing it up. But the liberal media doesn't care about its credibility among lefties. They just want to please the people who don't want Toni Morrison listed among the greats.

Christians are stupid, this time about Christmas cards

2006-12-11T22:03:00.000-05:00

At my new job at the New York Civil Liberties Union, we receive Christmas cards in the mail from earnest believers in the rump heartland (possibly those in the 31% of the electorate who have totally cut and run from reality). Because we're pro-separation of church and state and therefore godless heathens--shit, I wish it were so, but one of my co-workers goes to Bible study--we need to be reminded of the inherently religious nature of December.

So we get letters. Some of these people don't even have the courage to sign their names or include a return address. They must be afraid of our vast powers of surveillance and the waterboarding we've threatened our enemies with. One woman, Connie Bixler of Branson West, MO, did identify herself and wrote an elaborate Hallmark treatise about how He sent His only Son to live a life like ours and what a miracle that is. Unfortunately the card in which these pithy maxims arrived had snowmen and frolicking children on it, just the sort of inoffensively nonsectarian imagery a well-meaning but ultimately damned blue-stater might mail out to friends and loved ones.

I wish I had the card here, because my real point is the tortuous syntax one apparently must wade into when one is speaking about profundities with a Christian inflection. It's appalling. No, it's sad. Because the American educational system shits out these ill-read people whose awareness of rhetoric, cadence and poetry is so polluted by the thundering contentlessness of their pastor that they really think they're emulating the way God...actually...talks.

What a miracle--that God would send his son, who is also himself, to live and die. Really, that's a big wow. And we are complicit in his death! (Much less than our complicity in, say, exporting computer monitors to Nigeria where the mercury leaks out and pollutes all the groundwater). What a miracle is the Lord! Our God is an awesome God! Things that are not only patently not true but which should be self-evident to those who have believed them for decades and who ought to be totally past them by now and into a more intermediate stage--these are perpetually held up and glorified as amazing fonts of continual revelatory power, when really they're just sentences that appear verbatim in a lot of hymns and sermons. Christians think that God's strangely elaborate form of self-immolation a) proves his love for us, b) is sufficiently interesting to exhilerate them for all time and c) commands trump status as an all-purpose rebuttal against reason, logic, Islam, empiricism and, frankly, imagination itself.

This has dual components, in written language and the spoken word. Listen to any televangelist and you hear these reliably tidal intonations. Nietzsche broke with Wagner because he felt Wagner's music was pure ornament, an elaborate hoax to disguise the lack of substance in these marathon operas. That's what it reminds me of. Preachers have to cloak the naked reality that they're recycling poorly-executed literature which, in order to inculcate in its gullible adherents the unquestioning and childlike faith which Jesus himself encouraged, must remain unalterably fixed in 18th century crypto-English. Christian discourse never gets around to saying anything because if you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and you question the need for priests or any learned group of spiritual intermediaries, Scripture must be totally accessible to all as well as totally closed and in no need of supplementary chatter. Since not even the primmest of scolds wants to be lectured on moral rectitude ALL the time, and we know the Christian Coalition considers helping the poor to be outside its purview, all we're left with is the circular contentlessness, with enough signifiers sprinkled in to keep up appearances. Only the signifiers aren't actually shibboleths in the sense of 'code words strung together to let believers know that a fellow believer is talking to them, so they should listen.' It's more that the pastors adopt a highly artificial tone of voice that, irrespective of the life lessons or admissions of having sex with dudes while on crystal, constructs the expectations of the faithful at the same time as it satisfies them.

Back to the Christmas cards. It's the same deal. These people aren't writing to evangelize, in the sense of genuinely hoping to strike a chord within the ACLU's wretched little heart, so that we recant and join the warmongers. They just want to perform a little exercise in striking back at one of the more visible and concrete manifestations of the vague, all-encompassing anti-Christian culture they perceive to be axing their way of life out from under them. Yeah, it's passive-aggressive. Given that most people only care what the neighbors think and imagine God to be the ultimate neighbor, one endowed with unlimited spying-from-behind-the-drapes, they're not only accruing a small spiritual chit, they're adopting the posture of the asshole neighbors who are always out there judging them. It's more fun to get to look down on someone for once, and if that someone happens to be a fleet of left-wing New York attorneys, so much the better.

So the vocabulary they help themselves to is this garbled nonsense. It's way too easy just to think that there's a lumpen mass of illiterate morons out there, and some of them have more time on their hands than you or me. But I bet a lot of them are in the upper middle class, college-educated people who read. They just feel obliged to express their irritation with "Happy Holidays" by underlining the holier terms pre-printed in the cards, and affixing a highly specific variety of claptrap that makes perfect sense to them because it replicates how speaking about God-related matters "ought to be." It's the necessary conduit of evangelical discourse, religiose without being the least bit pedagogical. And it's weirdly opaque. If there's one single thing to hate about the South, it's the attitude of "I'm going to offer you some sweet tea because you're a guest in my home and I believe in being a gracious host, but I'm going to give you every indication through tone of voice, body language and eye contact that I hate you and I'm quite confident you're going to hell." Except instead of offering us Mock Apple Pie with Cool Whip (p.s. the secret ingredient is apples), we get Christmas cards.

John Updike's "Terrorist" and a Terrorist Op-Ed in the Times

2006-11-28T19:28:00.000-05:00

The op-ed in question is this.

It's a prime example of how irritating space constraints are--and that ends my charitable analysis, because otherwise it's one of the most pernicious things I've read in some time. It's frustrating to me the way the Times pompously interpellates its readership as sensible moderates who are above the political fray, detached from these weirdo hippie bloggers and the fat Christians who live somewhere vaguely west of Morristown. I have no idea who Richard Shweder is, but he's doing a fine job proving everything conservatives about the "liberal media" already think while dissociating himself from facts.

First, people who write things need to realize that by virtue of publication, their words are part of the media; one time contributors aren't ghostly visitations upon the op-ed page just because they don't have a regular, twice-a-week column. It would also be helpful for their naivete to dry up and recognize that no matter how much they strive to present themselves as prudent, cautious skeptics and as adults, there will always be archconservative flameouts because the O'Reillyites who think Christmas is under siege by a secular cabal will continue to regard both freedom of speech and the left's right to exercise it as an indulgent nicety we can and ought to dispense with once the risks to our security become too great--and indeed, according to the Little Green Footballs school of thought, they already did five years ago. So self-described moderates can try their hardest to win converts to the mainstream cause by pillaging the sophomores they see all around them, all those bearded Critical Mass riders supporting Howard Dean's 50-state strategy and protesting the war(s), but it's not actually working.

People who care about politics are either liberal or conservative. People who don't really care, who don't really pay attention, and who make up their minds who to vote for the day before an election are not exactly a constituency. The right writes for right-wingers, and they pillory moderates as the hardcore left, a group that is basically adrift and authorless. CNN doesn't want to be the liberal alternative to Fox; they want to be the Empathy Network (witness the rise of Keith Olbermann on the plucky little MSNBC). The New York Times doesn't want to be a liberal standard-bearer. They want to retain credibility, advertising dollars and the cachet of being the Newspaper of Record (which they actually disavow, explicitly, having forfeited telling us about Peruvian cabinet reshufflings and the monetary policy of Bhutan decades ago). They want to position themselves as moderates because they hope, as the Paul Begalas and James Carvilles continue against all logic to be paid to say, they can sweep the amorphous mass of ill-informed adults who define themselves against hysterical anti-abortion Minute Men on the one hand and some angry Daily Kos diarist on the other.

That said, the actual op-ed was an atrocity because it basically treats the scientific method as just another ideology, equal to Pentecostalism or utopianism. While in a Derridean sense that's largely true, I don't think it's fair to lump them together because at the very least, empirical analysis reveals arduous and well-developed modes of self-correction, something which religious certitude doesn't want to imitate.

Then there's the resilient canard that the 20th century's biggest evils weren't the products of religion at all. I guess that means Nazism and Communism, aka the 10th grade Catholic's tactics for rebutting Nietzsche. Since it's just weak and condescending to say "that bullshit argument doesn't deserve an answer," let's say that fascism's alliances with religion are well-documented, that Communism-as-practiced was grotesquely compromised from its inception, that it was ushered in by megalomaniacs in societies that were far too poor and unstable to withstand the subsequent opposition of the capitalist West, that the left long ago moved away from top-down solutions that pay attention only to class as an axis of oppression, and that the pyramidal structure of 20th century totalitarianism (Nazism in particular) involved psychological sublimations of the Godhead (or somesuch) in a way that exalted the leaders as alternative gods. I just don't see a comparison between, say, a Maoist revolutionary and a subscriber to the New Yorker who doesn't pray.

The very idea that "the West" can be regarded as monolithic and secular is dangerously oversimplistic. The United States might not be a Christian nation in its governing principles, but the historical applications of its policies (up to and including this afternoon) definitely are. And even then, there isn't even unanimity among atheists. There are lots of atheists with terrible politics--Sam Harris, for one. (He manages to support Guantanamo Bay, that fucker). To say, loftily, as Shweder does, that atheists and the religiose live in mutual miscomprehension is smug and irritating. The entire trope of dividing the entire world along one simple axis, installing oneself in the very center, and measuring the stupidity of everyone else by how far they deviate from that center (which just happens to be where one holds court in one's infinite wisdom), is singularly anti-intellectual and dishonest. It's also the basis for Thomas L. Friedman's entire career.

This brings me to Updike. I'm just going to give away the ending, so know that now. Frankly, I can't decide if his latest book is a cop-out or if its cautious optimism might be right after all. In short, it's the story of an 18-year old biracial Muslim convert, Ahmad, raised by a single mom in a city that's obviously Paterson, NJ. His shaikh gets him a job with a furniture company run by people who are funding a terrorist plot, and his guidance counselor (a vaguely self-hating Jew [sorry, I really, really hate that phrase] who's sister-in-law is an undersecretary for homeland security, and who took an 11th hour interest in his well being) attempts to persuade him to go to college and not blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. In the end, Ahmad doesn't do it.

Essentially, the underlying theme is the rootless waste of modern American life. There's adultery too, like in every Updike book, but Ahmad (who has unconvincingly precise diction and intuition for a messed-up teenager) is excruciatingly sensitive to how ugly, meaningless and unhealthful Christians make the world. But as a zealous adherent to the Abrahamic tradition, he scorns the body's urges and detests infidels. There isn't an apocalyptic tension the way there is in Left Behind, as Ahmad's act of terrorism isn't aiming to set in motion a chain of events leading to a nuclear holocaust or anything; he just wants to strike at the enemy. But Updike goes on an on describing postindustrial urban North Jersey, and he makes guidance counselor Jack Levy a spent shell who tosses out one lengthy, depressing diatribe after another about what a waste life is.

There is a scene, the day before Ahmad's supposed deed, where he takes the time to pick up a beetle that has landed on its back, only to see it take two tiny steps and then die anyway. Ahmad's encounter with insignificance, his spiritual equivalence with a dying bug, is painful and sad. So how can it be that literally everyone who isn't a hollow moron, everyone sensitive or intelligent, comes to the exact same conclusion--that the United States embodies a terrible, ugly void and wants to reproduce it everywhere--yet diverges so dramatically over what to do about it, i.e. kill lots of people on behalf of a God, or recognize that no god exists and do your best to reformulate everything around that cruel, central axiom?

This is why I think the Times's op-ed is essentially terrorist in nature. It's a poorly thought-out fig leaf designed to give them moral cover from some fellow citizens, fascists awaiting a more serious national crisis, who wish them to be shut down, jailed or hanged. The Times is, de facto, the periodical of choice for a large number of secular cosmopolitans, a small and educated caste--some of whom make a shitload of money, to be sure--who are neither persecuted nor taken seriously, and among whom (although not exclusively) there is a subset of people who have abandoned metaphysics entirely.

In Terrorist, the government infiltrates the homegrown Islamists' inner circle and their informant is beheaded. This information is the only thing that nudges Ahmad to reconsider. It's coincidence alone that prevents his suicide-homicide bombing. The holy moderates of punditry are doing their part to keep things together for now, but their reach isn't global and the false moral equivalance they foist on the left and the right can't last forever. More and more people grow disenchanted with globalization, consumerism, and the values of the self-purifying market all the time, but most of those people are kept from thinking critically about it, and are driven into the irrational, nationalist myths of their respective cultures.

Matewan and M

2006-11-16T17:34:00.000-05:00

So the John Sayles movie from 1987 and the Fritz Lang movie from 1926(?) sort of remind me of one another. They have nothing to do with one another, although the actual plots are roughly contemporaneous: a coal miners' strike in 1920s West Virginia and a child-murderer (played by Peter Lorre) in Weimar Berlin.

The former involves the incorporation of a foreign body (Joe Kenehan, a labor organizer and ex-Wobbly played by Chris Cooper) into a tight, suspicious, mountain village reeling from the deaths of several miners and the coal company's punitive response to the strike. The latter relates to modernity's (or, better yet, the Modern(ist) state) attempting to capture the criminal and dispense with him according to the rule of law before the mob finds him first and tears him to pieces.

In Matewan, a local shop owner named Lively is revealed to be an agent provocateur in the employ of the coal company. Interestingly, his store had accepted company scrip as payment for goods at the rate of 2 to a dollar. So while appearing to be an admired paternal figure, a success in spite of the company's harsh actions, he was not only gouging the impoverished miner families but actively working behind the scenes to keep them down. Lively seeks to discredit Kenehan by convincing a dimwitted girl who's in love with him that Kenehan had made fun of her to all the other strikers, but winds up having to leave town when his subterfuge comes to light, carrying only his glasses as he fords a river that's deeper than he is tall.

He, the heart of the community, is rejected and Kenehan is grudgingly welcomed, and proceeds to admit, forcibly, African Americans and Italians into the union. Appreciative of the benefits of solidarity, and preferring not to be scabs, those two outsider groups's assimilation is awkward and incomplete, but nonetheless the cobbled-together coalition holds long enough for the union to endure, and at the end, one of the greatest shootouts ever kills off the corrupt and powerful strikebreakers. Here, an ambiguously utopian though straightforward premise--that there is power in a union, and workers' material lives will improve immeasurably if they can form one--propels a tiny, backwoods community to recognize its own heterogeneousness as a precondition for its continued survival. The polity must incorporate the Other to last.

In M, by contrast, two groups with the same ends in mind pursue a wanted felon for the purposes of plucking him out, expunging him like a contaminant. The "M" itself, attached to the murderer's coat, resembles the "A" in the Scarlet Letter in that Lorre's character is convicted of sin in the court of public opinion well before his actual trial; one group treats him as a murderer, the other as a suspect.

Shot after shot of desk drawers, files, charts, urban planning maps (all in that immaculate and ornamental Germanic typeface I associate with Oktoberfest) drive home the point that Germany just before the rise of Nazism self-consciously considered itself a young state with something to prove. M is in essence a film about the consolidation of the State's monopoly on violence. It's anti-fascist in its mistrust of the mob, in cheering on the orderliness and well-oiled sense of procedure that good cops and a good bureaucracy bring to bear on the pursuit of justice and retribution. The decadence affixed in hindsight to the Weimar Era may be celebrated (as in Isherwood's "Berlin Stories") or despised (as by conservative harrumphs that Nazism was only possible because of the fragile Republic's tolerance and effeminacy), but Lang might have wanted to do for Germany what the young Kurosawa wanted to do for Japan in Stray Dog: boast a little about its maturity. Barely half a century old (as a unified nation) and carrying all the blame for WWI, Germany-as-State had to prove it was as capable as Britain, France and Italy, and the equal of Germany-as-a-people as a standard bearer for high culture.

Ted Kennedy Wins Re-Election! And other amazing facts about the election!

2006-11-15T17:42:00.000-05:00

1. a 51-49 Democratic Senate is insanely cool and far beyond what anyone thought possible. For some delicious proof that conservative pundits have their heads up their asses, check out the National Review's haughty predictions. Seriously. They're delicious.

2. There remains but one New England Republican congressman, Chris Shays of Connecticut--and he probably won only because Joe Lieberman drove so many Connecticut Republicans to the polls in the wealthiest district in the region. There are 22 Democrats representing New England. To see what a truly historical occurrence that is, look at the electoral map of 1936.

3. For the time being, the momentum appears to be pushing the Southern Strategy to its logical conclusion: the Republican Party as a regional party, limited to the South (minus Northern Virginia, South Florida, the NC Research Triangle, SW Texas, Arkansas and a few urban pockets), a few rich suburban districts, racist evangelical-heavy spots in the Midwest, and Southern California.

4. Time to flush them out of Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan. New York State can still stand to shake itself free of one or two more, even though the Republicans hold the smallest percentage of seats here since the New Deal.

5. However, the last time the Democrats won big--1992--the GOP destroyed them two years later, and 2004's talk of a Republican 'perpetual majority' seemed dispiritingly convincing at the time, but look where we are now.

6. Yet in 1933, there were only 25 Republicans in the Senate and 103 in the House, so why not aim high?

7. It's funny when well-paid smart people on tv cover their asses by inferring from the victory of Heath Shuler in rural North Carolina that the entire class of freshman/-woman Democrats are conservatives (some forty people) when only days ago they were being tarred as leftists. But oh no, Jon Tester opposes gun control!

8. Nancy Pelosi's grim visage might have motivated some flagging GOP stalwarts to go out and vote, but no one seems to have stopped to think about what super-secret ultra-lefty agenda she's supposedly be thinking about. Getting troops out of Iraq, halving student loan interest rates, ending earmarks, investigating the Bush Admnistration's googolplex of errata, making health care affordable, responding to climate change, reducing the alternative minimum tax for the middle class, not being corrupt as shit...not much room for the mandatory priest-goat weddings or the abolition of Christianity, really.

9. If nothing else, 2006 is significant because libertarians (whatever that means) left the Republicans for the Democrats in significant numbers. Arizona and Colorado will be blue states by 2012. Most people prefer government to stick up for them against terrorists and predatory corporations, but they prefer that their government treat them as adults when it comes to making personal decisions. I seriously can't believe Arizona voted down the anti-gay marriage amendment. This is the same state with the Minutemen and the Israel-style fence against Mexico. Then again, it was Barry Goldwater who said "You don't need to be straight to shoot straight" (not that I advocate for gay people wanting to be xenocidal myrmidons).

So here, a bold prediction: if the Democrats don't stick together or Lieberman defects and the Senate is lost (good probability of that), and the GOP tastes blood in the water, the Republican 2008 primaries will propel a reliably Bush-like (though comparatively isolationist) conservative to the fore, because I don't think they're going to bet on Giuliani or McCain. (McCain already lost and the GOP hates losers; at some point it's going to come out that Rudy lived with a homo couple after his wife divorced him and kept Gracie Mansion).

So if they repudiate Iraq but essentially stick to what's going on now, and they lose again, we're going to see some serious shit. I think that by 2012--the election-after-next--the evangelical crowd will no longer be driving the party, and, as they did from 1925 till the early 1970s, they will essentially forego politics as a tainted dominion not worth getting tangled up in, especially since the Rapture will be really, really imminent by then.

But yea--the Democrats!

Ghastly

2006-11-07T10:35:00.000-05:00

This is such bullshit.

First of all, this crosses a major line with me when so-called progressives, who define themselves against the insular and complacent powers-that-be, cozy up to market logic as a way of trumpeting the Democratic party's credentials. What a fantastic conservative talking point that's become unquestioned wisdom: "the market." Referring to the dynamics by which multinational corporations do what they do as if it were akin to a few fishwives hawking halibut in some quaint village in the Maritimes. "The market." DailyKos has revealed its founder's openly Republican origins by critiquing the DLC-style 'New Democrats' (Clinton, Lieberman, Harold Ford, etc) yet suckling at the same font of bullshit that granted those self-styled adults their legitimacy circa 1992 when, like Blair's New Labor, they abandoned their principles after losing 3 presidential elections.

I can't believe anyone would buy the idea that presidents control the economy. People don't want a centrally planned economy but hold their leaders accountable when a 'free' 'market' resists top-down management by the federal government. Clinton did not give birth to the internet age, and if his policies made it happen a certain way, we have all seen what happened to that bubble even before Bush took office. Yes, balanced budgets are probably a smarter choice--but that was hardly liberal/Democratic dogma in the days of Truman, Johnson or Carter. A lot of the industrial landscape has changed since 1945, and since there is certainly no inherent or historically constant 'Democratic' way of shepherding economic growth, it's total bullshit to use this metric as a means of demonstrating one side's superiority. Plus, if Humphrey had won in '68, or McGovern in '72, the oil crisis of 1973 would almost certainly have happened anyway, and then who would be laughing?

Finally, I wish someone with a bigger mouthpiece than I've got would just own up to the fact that conservatives almost certainly create more aggregate wealth, and liberals, more sensitive to the grotesque inequalities conservative ideas breed, vacillate between fitful crusades for social justice and their default stance of silencing the left wing that favors a fair redistribution of resources and pleasures, even if it means alienating the corporations that underpin the system which no one else questions as long as times are good.

Who Gives a Shit What I Think, But...

2006-11-05T23:23:00.000-05:00

...remember having to hear stupid people on tv point to a county-by-county map of the US, awash in a sea of red jurisdictions with fewer residents--to say nothing of actual voters--than a small commuter college?

Remember how the 51-48 Bush re-election was a mandate (i.e. the smallest margin of victory for a second term since pre-stroke Woodrow Wilson in 1916) that would cement the Republican Party's power as the future of America? Or whatever bullshit hauteur Tom DeLay uttered that I dimly remember and can now but quasi-paraphrase.

Well. Fuck. Those. People.

Here's my prediction: a 50-50 Senate and a House safely ensconced in Democratic hands at 234-201, a 31-seat shift. (I don't really care about governors that much; if there's one spot you have to have a Republican, you want him or her there, where they don't vote with others to determine national policy. Thus speaketh my closet federalism).

I think the Democratic Senate candidates will win in Rhode Island, Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and barely squeak out in Missouri, while hanging on in New Jersey (easily) and Maryland (way tighter). Tennessee is a loss and Arizona was never in play, but after Colorado it remains the Western state with the greatest potential for purplization. (As a sidenote, should Jim Talent defeat Michael J. Fox in Missouri, that would basically mean that Tennessee has fucked us twice in six years: Harold Ford, right-wing Democrat and he of the so-called "perfect campaign" is hardly someone I'm going to weep for, but who deserves to win, and if Al Gore could have just won his home state in 2000, we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are now, although that's like pondering what happened before the Big Bang).

(-)(-)(-)

In the House, Democrats will pick up:

2 of the 3 in Connecticut (Farrell over Shays and Courtney over Simmons, but not Murphy over Johnson, thanks to Joe Lieberman)

3 in New York (Massa over Kuhl, Gillibrand over Sweeney and Arcuri over Meier in the open seat vacated by Sherwood Boehlert, but not the ghastly Peter King, who called the AARP a radical organization and whose name sounds too much like mine; not Vito Fossella, the only Republican to represent a part of NYC--Staten Island [duh, of course] and grossout-townie Brooklyn; and not Tom Reynolds, enabler and go-between in the whole Foley matter. It would be delightful if Hall beat Kelly, but I'm skept)

3 in Indiana (Hill over Sodrel, Donnelly over Chocola, and Ellsworth over Hostettler...take that, throbbing red heart of America)

3 in Ohio (Wulsin over Schmidt, Space over Padgett and Kilroy over Pryce)

3 in Pennsylvania (Sestak over Weldon, Murphy over Gerlach, and Carney over Sherwood)

2 in Florida (Mahoney over not-Foley aka Negron, and Jennings over Buchanan for the seat held by Katharine Harris, archfuck who's destined for defeat in her Senate race. It's possible for Klein to prevail over Shaw, but I'm skeptical)

2 in Colorado (Perlmutter over Beauprez, and Paccione over Musgrave; the only race I'm obscenely optimistic about is Marilyn Musgrave, who is so insanely homophobic that I hope her dog dies, her couch collapses and her sons, should she have any, get raped by Ted Haggard)

1 in Iowa (Braley over Whalen)

1 in Illinois (Duckworth over Roskam...this might be too optimistic. WTF, Illinois?)

1 in New Mexico (Madrid over Wilson)

1 in Texas (Lampson over Sekula-Gibbs)

1 in California (there's no God, but please God let it be x over McNerney over Richard Pombo, the most staunch anti-environmentalist in the universe)

1 in North Carolina (Shuler over Taylor)

1 in Virginia (Kellam over Drake)

1 in New Hampshire (Hodes over Bass)

1 in Minnesota (Wetterling over Bachman, but Gil Gutknecht will hang on)

1 in Wisconsin (Kagen over Gard)

1 in Idaho (Grant over Otter)

1 in Kansas (Boyda over Ryun)

1 in Arizona (Giffords over Graf)

1 in Kentucky (I don't know which, but losing all 3 would be tough)

1 in Wyoming (Trauer over Cubin)

Regrettably, we will likely shed a seat in Georgia (which against all mathematical possibility somehow seems to be growing more Republican) and not pick up seriously good chances in Washington (two), Virginia, Texas, Illinois (two), Colorado, California (two), Illinois (two), Nebraska and New York (for the last, as stated above). As I look back, this is optimistic by 3 seats (Musgrave in particular...but what a cunt!). Although, in the best case scenario, New York and New England will have a mere 4 of their 51 combined seats in the House held by Republicans. That's particularly amazing if you look at the election of 1936.

A lot of these winners will lose in 2008. That's for certain (I'm thinking Trauner, Grant and most of all, Lampson). However, there are a couple more things to note: first, Howard Dean will be vindicated as a total genius for pursuing the 50-state strategy when the conventional wisdom is that Democrats aren't, weren't and could never be competitive in a vast number of districts, some of which they are going to win. The Democratic establishment hates Dean--fine. They hate the bloggers--fine. Their fear of students/hippies/moms/critical thought borders on the pathologically self-destructive--fine. But they at least had to recognize the shrewdness of fielding so many people-funded candidates, if only to spread the GOP's resources thin. Many a Republican rep grew soft and complacent, many beleaguered Democrats in vermillion districts grew into their disenchantment, and in less than two years the alignment is about to undergo a seismic shift--thanks to Dean. The end result is that in ten years, 'conservative' should be as generally embarrassing as 'liberal' is now, and Nebraska will have a functioning Democratic party on the ground. The ultimate electoral point is to isolate the GOP within the South...and Southern California. Second, Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey are the states to pummel in 2008, at the local level. Among them, they have 26 Republican-held seats (11, 9 and 6, respectively), and are bluer than they appear. Rumors about New Jersey's succumbing to the Red Death are greatly exaggerated, as much as they were after the GOP convention in '04.

And finally, something needs to be said about poor Ned Lamont, who will lose and retire from being a known commodity. I really like Ned. I made the girl who sits next to met at work vote for him in the primary. To say that Joe Lieberman is an asshole is seriously boring, but as for my provocative prediction of the cycle, I think he'll have the decency not to defect in the 50-50 Senate (although I think a couple Republicans will quietly switch sides in the House, and a lot of retirements will suddenly pop up in '08--I'm thinking of you, Mike Castle of Delaware), when the Republican party circles its wagons to lay the ground for making 2006 a monstrous aberration, they will demand that Donald Rumsfeld be fired and they will install Joe Lieberman. CT Gov. Jodi Rell will appoint a GOP to fill Lieberman's term, and the Senate will be 51-49 for the GOP, or 51-48-1 as long as Bernie Sanders is alive.

Borat

2006-11-04T19:04:00.000-05:00

I'd like to write something along the lines of "Everything that happened till this point is stupid" with respect to 'Borat.' Because not only is it the funniest movie I've ever seen, it comes closer to satisfying my demand that given the resilience of marketing strategies and cultural conservatism, the only thing worth doing is to make fun of the bad guys in the most contentless possible way. That way you can't just be picked up and absorbed into the litany of so-called liberals whom half the population will simply not pay attention to at all. No one will include Sasha Baron Cohen in the roster of Michael Moore, the Dixie Chicks, Harry Belafonte, the ACLU, etc. 'Borat' is new in that it absolutely skewers 'the US and A' without giving off the impression that he's some quasi-sophisticated filmmaker who plugs at it until he finally stumbles on the fattest, most racist old lady who's excited to be caught on camera prattling about how it's God's will that George W. Bush be in office, etc etc.

Cohen basically hates America. He shows only its worst aspects: assholes on the subway, racist store owners, Pentecostals speaking in tongues, politicians proclaiming the US as a Christian nation, terrifyingly homophobic and anti-Muslim rodeo people, the orgy of martial interpellations that is sports. The fact that his character hails from a country that only 30 Americans can name the capital of makes him virtually create it from scratch, with all the attendant Communist-era imagery, spectacular anti-Semitism, vulgarity, and a hilarious accent. Kazakstan, member of the coalition of the willing, fairly recent addition to the 'free' 'west,' proves a superb foil to the bloated hyperpower that is us.

Borat's over-the-top anti-Semitism is supremely fucking funny, and it provides him cover not only since Cohen's Jewish (duh) but because it's such an offensive thing to have in your movie, so unlike what a moralist would do, that no one can just label him a liberal. And you know what happens when you get called that. Bill O'Reilly puts you on his enemies list and then you find yourself preaching to the choir and hanging out with Cindy Sheehan. Making Borat technically repellant but still endearing is just ingenious, and it's all in the service of muddying up the agenda. Cohen isn't trying to de-elect Bush or urge us to believe that patriotism somehow has nothing to do with the military-industrial complex. This is the best political humor ever created. He doesn't make you afraid that legions of earnest hippie sophomores are going to elbow Chomsky aside and deify him as their hero. Nor will National Review write recuperative paeans in his honor as they love to do for Sprinsteen. This is a good-natured Fuck You, America. It's perfect pitch.

And scenes such as the extended destructive naked hotel wrestling with the fatass producer--I mean, how can you not flinch? It might be the funniest thing that ever happened. Usually these things are tainted with at least a little homophobia or racism, but it just isn't. This just isn't a guilty pleasure, as you might be able to argue Dave Chappelle kind of is. He's not really pointing out homophobia as much as exploiting the discomfort everyone feels when they see a hairy guy mimicking butt sex with a fatter, hairier guy as they shatter mirrors and upend furniture. The scene looks totally spontaneous. Almost nothing in the whole movie comes off as staged.

Maybe Cohen really did shoot hundreds of hours of film, searching for the most comically wretched people to fool. But apparently Ali G just scored every time, with Ralph Nader, with Andy Rooney, with Pat Buchanan. I prefer to think his genius, as Borat, comes from perpetual, film-worthy character development with every single encounter.

*****

Scanners

2006-11-01T22:38:00.000-05:00

Awesome movie. Cronenberg's obsession with flesh, with creating new orifices and exposing the interior of the body, isn't sexual as it is in Existenz, which surprised me given the possibilities of the physicality of telepathy. Seeing the head of what looks like Representative Henry Waxman of California explode is fucking nasty. Seeing Michael Ironside (who is basically a older, rougher, better Hugo Weaving) duel with...the other guy at the end was seriously horrific and tense. The art direction was great: shots of the company headquarters, a combination of the midcentury corporate office tower and the contemporary bioresearch campus, in winter dawn with a few exposed trees and othing else around, is vaguely unsettling. Corporatized science carries such a heavy unease quotient, and the image of bodily fluids contaminating an antiseptic room comes off as inevitable and appropriate. The gas station explosion scene was a little cheesy, and you have to suspend your disbelief over any discussion/illustration of computers pre-1995 (with the exception of Blade Runner), but otherwise this was about as good as horror gets. Even if the audio didn't always align with the video and the Netflix sleeve gave an important detail away.

****2/3

Chinese cars

2006-10-18T11:55:00.000-04:00

This is funny. A Chinese car manufacturer called Geely ("JEE-lee") is cranking out pieces of shit. Hmmm--what Bennifer vehicle (no pun intended) from 2003 does that name sound like?
Maybe this will give GM, Ford and the city of Detroit, whose evolutionary futures are near-extinction, a few more years to limp along.

Conservatives Are Stupid Re Everything, Specifically Overpopulation

2006-10-17T19:10:00.000-04:00

The NYT's replacement for the venerable William Safire was John Tierney, an idiotic, glorified metro-desk hack. On the occasion of the 300 millionth American (which was this morning, supposedly) he had this to say:

'Overpopulation' is history's oldest environmental crisis, and it's the most instructive for making sense of today's debates about energy and climate change. It's a case study of intellectual arrogance, and of the perils of putting too much faith in a 'scientific consensus' of experts infatuated with their own forecasts...China is facing a new problem: a severe shortage of young workers to support an aging population. The one-child rule has turned out to be both an assault on personal liberty and a public policy mistake. The parents made short-term sacrifices that left them worse off in the long run--the same risk we run with poplicies designed to curb global warming decades from now...The chief plagues and disasters afflicting future generations will be different from the ones forecast by Al Gore or any other popular prophet. The best insurance policy is to build free, prosperous societies of smart, adaptable people.

Whoa. You are stupid. The most annoying thing about conservative swipes at the science-based version of their scary liberal establishment is how they cherrypick the most dated, top-down midcentury bureaucratic methods, as if the left hasn't evolved way beyond that. (Let's not even expose the cognitive dissonance involved in the media and general public's hostility towards "people power" or "activists" or "protesters" or whatever bottom-up attempts at social reform; for the purposes of scaring you with unpleasant scientific facts, every liberal wears a white lab coat and stands next to ENIAC, but when they burn flags they grow their hair long.)

So naturally anyone who mentions that 6.3 billion people is about five times what the earth can support and 300 million Americans unfaily consume an ever-greater share of a finite world's resources is an inflexible Maoist.

Tierney basically says that barbaric 'medical' solutions to overpopulation (such as forced sterilizations, which were in vogue about the same time as lobotomies and a general denial that women could have orgasms) are what anti-growth critics currently propose. And since those ideas suck, growth is best. The "free and prosperous societies of smart, adaptable people" (contentless boilerplate alert) don't exactly emerge where women are condemned to have four children each. The correlation between wealth and low birth rates is pretty much and iron law of reality by now. Check it out. All the richest countries are down by the bottom--as are the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, and let's not mention what economic system those countries painfully transitioned to fairly recently. Even within the US, slow-growth regions like the Northeast enjoy the higest standards of living, and most of the fastest-growing places are full of crime, divorce and other 'social pathologies' that conservatives cite as evidence of our decadence and decline. Tumult and dynamism are simply not conducive to happy people, and although they might generate more aggregate wealth, we have a pretty good idea what direction the money's flowing to under the stewardship of the party allied with right-to-lifers and the Club for Growth.

I especially love (as in hate) Tierney's self-incriminating attack on China for its one-child policy, which may have been draconian, but it was implemented in 1979, and China's economic growth (which he would certainly approve of) basically started around then, too. (It's self-incriminating because he favors privatizing social security, but now he wants to criticize inequality-by-age in a country that lacks its equivalent). China simply would not be China if there were 2.4 billion Chinese. If they are anything close to a technologically advanced country, it is owing at least in part to campaigns against having more than one child. And the worst problem China faces isn't a shortage of young workers; it's a giant migration of 400 million peasants to urban areas and attendant pollution/unemployment/civil unrest as the frighteningly abridged transition to a free-market occurs without much popular participation in the decisions. In other words, top-down and pro-growth policies.

The fact remains that the United States is the developed nation with the highest rate of growth. Economists generally praise this, as endless growth is always necessary to prevent a capitalist polity from crisis. Christians like growth because it proves our 'natural' virility, and how we are uniquely blessed by God to the exclusion of everybody else even though there's no mention of the Western Hemisphere in the Bible. (In our race against the equally rapidly reproducing Muslims, it's literally a deathmatch, according to Left Behind). It can also be cited as another stat proving how we're a third-world nation in disguise. Whatevs. Our rate of growth owes itself almost entirely to immigration. New York State literally exports young people by the tens of thousands every year, because the city and suburbs are unaffordable and upstate lacks jobs, and the state's population continues to grow only because of New York City's resilience as a gateway for immigrants. Without them, we would enjoy negative growth. (Not that I advocate restricting immigration, necessarily).

Presumably in my lifetime there will be 450 million Americans, most of them living in Nevada. I'm skeptical of the possiblity of maintaining our standard of living at that level, but I'm on the fence as to whether our current standard of living is sustainable even today--and it's certainly a thumb in the eye of about 4 billion seriously impoverished people. There need to be way fewer humans, very soon. One way or another, there probably will be.

The Transcript

2006-10-05T14:49:00.000-04:00

Ewww.

This is the last bit of dialogue, from the page:
well i better go finish my hw…i just found out from a friend that i have to finish reading and notating a book for AP english

After desultorily mocking his computer-illiterate mother as a way of changing the subject from a stale sexual thread, he signed off with that excuse, which was either made up entirely or else came about as he decided to switch priorities, because chatting it up with your congressman about his hard-on is a total bore.

Seriously. This completely blows away the 'save the innocent children' idea. This is a teenager with a short attention span whose tone in the IM conversation is one of indifference. I'm sure that section of the public that considers oral sex to be freakishly deviant will be horrified, but while still kind of gross, this reveals Foley to be pathetic: baiting an uninterested jock into measuring his penis only to have the reply be "I've already told you that."

And that's the climax of the narrative. Foley doesn't say whether or not he's masturbating; he just mentions, again and again, that he's hard, and the page doesn't seem to be uncomfortable--or unfamiliar with cybersex. If anything, he's rolling his eyes at Foley's repetitiveness, disappointed at how tame this hour-long chat really was. Of course, the dynamics of this situation are ripe with the potential for exploitation, and maybe this teenager is utterly confused, but he's sexually active, he's over the age of consent and he's not not flirting. This is simply not the same thing as coercing an eight-year old into having sex with you.

Mostly because they didn't have sex, they didn't have cybersex, this is as salacious as the fucking thing has gotten in almost a week, we're indoctrinated to be completely horrified over it even though it made the 'child' in question yawn and sign off, and it's so goddamn infuriating how everyone isn't focusing on the continuing pattern of abuse of power!

Foley and the 'Good Conservatives'

2006-10-03T09:44:00.000-04:00

So the Republicans now distancing themselves from Mark Foley are now being claimed as 'principled conservatives.' I guess that's what being an opportunistic homophobe gets you labeled as in the media. Again, this is not just the repetition of the mainstream's unswerving allegiance to its paleocon overlords; you can find this shit on DailyKos.

Bay Buchanan--Pat Buchanan's sister and campaign manager--is cited for condemning Foley's behavior. At what point did she become a model for laudable conduct? The Buchanans are racist assholes who represent the position furthest to the right in the American political spectrum, just before you fall off the cliff into paranoid conspiracy theorists who would never get air time on CNN or even Fox. Bay's own words on yesterday's Situation Room demonstrate her lack of credibility as a standard-bearer for principle:

This is a known homosexual who is writing e-mails to the home of a 16-year-old boy, asking for pictures. That's all you need to know. ... We need an investigation. Bring in the FBI. Stop this guy. Make certain that, if indeed he was the predator he could be, he was stopped that day. They failed that. You cannot spin this. And I don't know that I would call it a cover-up"

'This is a known homosexual.' Meaning, 'Wake up, tolerant America, and realize these mincy faggots are after your children.' And she doesn't even believe in the cover-up(!), which is actually the only cause for scandal. The House leadership prefers anything which could contribute to its everlasting deathgrip on power over doing the right thing, and they most certainly swept this under the rug, for years. How could it be anything but a textbook cover-up? But Bay Buchanan sees it as a function of liberal-homosexual infiltration of the highest ranks of the GOP.

Incidentally, this is what amazes me the most about social conservatives. They are the most fickle constituency, that I don't know how anyone could stand to deal with them. If one is truly of the opinion that the homosexual agenda, flag-burning and prayer are the most pressing issues of the day, and that their state in our culture reveals a singularly dangerous threat to our souls, why would you ever bolt the GOP? How could you be anything but satisfied? The far-right seems to regard anything short of Getting Everything We Want to be high treason. James Dobson has hinted that he might not urge his sheep to vote in '06. Is that really supposed to earn him respect as a power broker? His commitment to the party boils down to periodic threats over whether or not to blackmail them into re-orienting the entire business of Congress to handle his pet (non-)issues. Yes, the Democrats are basically as disciplined as the Muppets, but at least the dreaded bloggers (who are roughly analogous to social conservatives or evangelicals) are committed to working within their chosen party, and don't petulantly bitch and moan every time they don't get exactly what they want. Hopefully at some point critical mass will be reached and evangelical beliefs will lose some credibility with the general population at the same time that the corporate-minded GOP bosses grow weary of the impossibility of placating them.

Anyway, the point is that again, this is not a scandal about gay sex. Nor is it even about a 'child predator.' The kid(s) in question are teenagers, old enough to be pages in Congress, for Christ's sake. They're old enough to know about sex and to enjoy it, too--and in any case, sex was not had. This scandal is about abuse of power (a boss intimidating his subordinates through sexual harassment), hypocrisy (a homophobic Republican closet-case sitting on a committee charged with designing punitive legislation against largely-fictitious sexual predators) and corruption (the secretive party leadership closing ranks around one of its own rather than doing the right thing). It's a cover-up.

And finally, when NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey resigned after appointing his boyfriend to an antiterrorism post for which he was totally unqualified, that too was about abuse of power rather than the salacious nature of sodomy. I thought the way that that played out was responsible and enlightened. So let's have the left behave now as the right did then. We can start by no longer quoting Bay Buchanan as a model of righteousness.

Mark Foley, Catalyst for Irresponsibility

2006-10-02T13:46:00.000-04:00

After Tom DeLay, Bob Ney and Randy Cunningham, we have another one. In a sense, this is good; anything that extricates Congress from the grip of evangelical warmongers is a good thing (and Foley will remain on the ballot, so maybe the district is suddenly competitive).

However, there's a lot of bad things about this story, in its particulars, in its coverage, and the way that Democrats will almost certainly milk it. Specifically, this really shouldn't be about the sex. Because there wasn't any. Foley is a hypocrite, an embarrassment, a creep and an asshole, but we don't know for sure if he has actually fucked any teenage boys. So while in terms of getting the average dingbat voter to pay attention to the monstrous, secretive Ineptocracy that passes for the American federal government, the more sensational, the better, moral panics emanating from the left do nothing good.

It's already starting. On DailyKos, there are numerous references to how this damages "families." Great, another GOP talking point unconsciously repeated by the supposed scourge of GOP talking points. What the fuck do families have to do with it? A couple of rich-bitch Republican teenagers get gross emails from their boss and suddenly the nucleus of civilization is imperiled. Now the Democrats can rush in and triangulate themselves into the forefront of 'protecting families from child molesters,' which along with being 'hard on terror' (or pro-blank check for Bush, or pro-electrocuted genitals in our colonial prison outpost that we stole from Cuba, or whatever they want to be called), we may now smile with self-satisfaction that we've outgunned the GOP...to their right.

First, 'child molesters' are generally bogeymen devised by conservatives and propagated by a compliant media eager to peddle salacious untruths, all to truncate social services and heap responsibilities on the nuclear family that it was never meant to handle. That way we don't get creeping socialism in the form of subsidized child care, and maybe a few women will tire of the glass ceiling AND a double career and get back home where they belong.

Second, 'the family' already gets pretty much everything. Especially when you mean middle-class white families (as opposed to dysfunctional families, from the working class to the frightening specter of single black mothers). American society is utterly oriented around catering to the family, be it television scheduling or the geography of the country itself or tourist-friendly enterprise zones where red-light districts and culture used to be. So quit whining on behalf of the haves.

This has also produced some fantastically ridiculous journalism. Such as this from the NY Times's blog "The Caucus":
While congressmen caught in a sex scandal is nothing new, the way the story broke shows the power of Web technology to influence politics. Few people may have even been aware that instant messages can be saved and copied, but they have turned out to be a powerful weapon. Before the Internet, a story like Foley’s might have kicked around for months, with conflicting accounts, and possibly never surfaced. Once the existence of the e-mails became known, Foley was swept away within hours.

Gosh, wow! Computers exist! The news cycle has been condensed! Meta-chatter is all we do!

Really, this scandal should highlight the corruption that has come with radical expansions of power in a one-party state, which the Republicans have cultivated with lightning speed. The Speaker of the House knew that this was going on, as did nine other Republican congressmen, but they elected to keep it from Foley's Democratic committee co-members and from everyone else, because Ronald Reagan's eleventh commandment about never criticizing thy fellow Republican is paramount, even if it requires yet another cover-up in an election year when you're already smarting from scandals and this time it might lead to the cover-uppee committing rape. Who do you trust, values voters?

And even then, I just don't see why intergenerational sex is the world's biggest catastrophe. Granted it's not the norm and I don't specifically endorse it either, but really, what's the big? The fact that it's same-sex attraction certainly fuels some of the outrage, and I'd like to think that liberals might at least recognize that and not fuel it further. What's really outrageous about Foley's conduct is the abuse of power, the coercion and the terror-about-my-future-in-this-business it must have inspired in the teenage page. And this connects perfectly with the overall Republican attitude vis-a-vis everything: cloak governance in inordinate secrecy, push the panic button on terrorism and sex offenders and prayer in school, undermine the rule of law and the separation of church and state, rewrite the tax code to redistribute all resources upward, intimidate the media, and then do whatever the fuck pleases you because you've made it, baby.

If Foley broke any laws in 'transmitting harmful material to a minor' under Florida law, can someone with more patience than myself please consult the books to see if that moral transgression was a violation of a law written by a paranoid, antisex Christian Florida Republican? Because if so, this requires a bit more perspective. This scandal is occurring as thousands of children are starving or being massacred in the Sudan, as the US government continues a superlatively self-defeating war in Iraq that has killed who-knows how many people, and the like. Protecting the children is way too warped if it starts here.

Furthermore, the extraordinary lengths lawmakers go to to 'protect' children (but certainly not from poverty or bombs) probably contributes to an overall culture that will never get over its prurient fascination with the spectacle of the sexualized child. The more discourse there is on this subject, the more citizens get roped into this tantalizing cycles as they play out and the more dark, lascivious desires become energized. JonBenet Ramsey captures the public's attention because she was seriously hot, fifty million men kind of wanted to fuck her, and the repulsion/attraction her image inspired created a cottage industry. Mark Foley's pet pages--with whom he might have been simply exchanging naughty emails and getting off on them--threatens nothing of that scale, except a regurgiation of the same right-wing hysteria, only this time from a left eager to maximize its electoral gains by exploiting the alarmism inculcated in us by the right itself. Hurray for the terrorism circus that is the media.

I do believe that's the worst thing I've ever heard. How marvelous

2006-09-28T17:13:00.000-04:00

Or so says Christopher Guest after torturing Cary Elwes in "The Princess Bride."

Maybe my perspective has become a little skewed, but has the United States now become (tragi)comically evil? I mean, the vote to ban torture officially while giving this president the power to define it really is the narrative climax of sane Americans' national embarrassment and disgust. Short of nuking Pyongyang on Election Day Eve, there's nothing worse that the government can do. The party of small government, the organization whose reason for being is to rein in the power of the State, has now authorized the State with the power to inflict physical and psychological pain as it sees fit.

So the NIE report, the comprehensive conclusions of every government agency devoted at least in part to terrorism, means nothing. Why even have a Department of Homeland Security at all, if we're so hellbent on undermining our own existence with wars and torture, and only a tiny segment of Congress even gives a shit? With an almost Piscean will to self-undoing, Christians can only comprehend responding to a punch with a punch, even if it breaks your fist (in fact, the boondogular missile defense system that once upon a time seemed like the worst way to undermine the international system relies on 'hitting a bullet with a bullet').

Iraq is a cause celebre. Afghanistan in the 80s was, too, and where's the Soviet Union now? Realists expected it to last well into this century, it collapsed because the jihadists there bled it dry and set internal events in motion, and Ronald Reagan and the US somehow got all the credit. The people in power now rewrite every narrative of world events to culminate in the greater glory of the United States. I'd like to see the Christians who are so cocksure of the US's centrality in an eschatological master-plot answer for the eventual annihilation of an American city.

The next terrorist attack is inevitable, and when it comes, the right will clamor and shriek for us to 'bravely' accept sharply curtailed freedoms in the name of freedom. Surveillance and torture: expect their gradual expansion and abuse. Expect them to be used, conveniently, against despised populations (minors who want abortions, the HIV+, the mentally ill, anyone browner than a Sicilian) just as law enforcement has begun requesting warrants permitted in antiterrorist cases to be used against drug dealers and organized crime.

Which legal scholars were consulted in the drafting of this torture bill? Was it just GOP party hacks? Because I think it might be. I think we'd be hard pressed to find someone within mainstream jurisprudence, post-Japanese WWII internments, post-McCarthyite black lists, post-Palmer Raids, post-Sacco and Vanzetti, post-COINTELPRO. 'You're a fascist!' is such an easy bomb to lob. But seriously, you stupid fuckers, torture is the worst idea conceivable. Unfortunately, it's part of what we've always done.

Extraordinary

2006-09-25T23:54:00.000-04:00

Because Bill Clinton was at best a mediocre president (cowardly, illiberal, indecisive, dishonest, scandal-prone, always needlessly playing defense against the Republicans, heading up a scattered foreign policy, etc.), the nostalgia felt for his tenure generally distills into admiration for him as a 'master politician.' I've always wondered what the hell that meant, since how savvy are you really if both houses of Congress flip to the enemy on your watch and then you lie about blowjobs and get caught lying?

Now I remember. This interview (part one, part two) is truly fantastic. Its quality is iffy, it's in two pieces, and it's pretty long (15 min altogether) but everyone, everyone, everyone should watch it. I haven't read anything link-worthy that gets to the root of exactly why I think it's not only good TV but an important episode in the history of journalism, which is that an ex-president--a figure generally revered, even quasi-deified in the case of B-actor Ronald Reagan--is smacked around by yellow journalism as if he were Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore or Tariq Aziz or whatever flake/upstart/enemy of the state. Moreover, Clinton not only reduced the smirky and insufferable Chris Wallace to an intellectual fetal position, he called into question the very mission statement of Fox News. I just don't think Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush would get that kind of treatment from anyone, anywhere, over anything, and if either did, they probably would not excoriate the interviewer or periodical in question as practitioners of shitty journalism, propaganda and misinfotainment. It. Was. Amazing.

Not only that, but Clinton only began to set the record straight. This is an excellently-researched backup of what Clinton said, quoting one conservative senator after another to reveal their convenient amnesia and rank hypocrisy.

Fuck yeah.

War in Iran? Pretty tacky, darling

2006-09-24T10:15:00.000-04:00

People have begun referring to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the president of Iran, as a dictator. Which is funny, because he was elected, the same way his more moderate predecessor was. Adding to that the list of non-elected leaders whom this country supports (Pervez Musharraf, for one) as vital allies in the "war" on "terrorism" (in the course of which we have of course contributed absolutely no terrorizing acts ourselves), the term 'dictator' is elastic to the point of meaninglessness.

But it still possesses a charge, and the Neocon Imagineers are gradually positioning Iran as the 'real thing,' or maybe the 'country we should have attacked in the first place but the Nazi-Russia like evilness of Saddam was just so glaring we were distracted. Saddam, Saddam, Saddam. But, really this time, Iran!'

I don't believe Karl Rove will use airstrikes as some kind of October surprise. It's too theatrical and obvious; he gets more covert and relies on auxiliaries the closer an election gets. But the timeline of the political calendar and that of the neoconservative failure caucus that's wondering What Is To Be Done? parallel one another very eerily. They're like sorority sisters who've begun ovulating in synch.

And in a political system where in spite of our leaders fucking almost everything up, torture and how best to employ it are still somehow up for debate among serious minds--even as our catastrophe in Iraq has conclusively begun generating more future terrorists than if we had not pre-emptively invaded--a third war just can't be ruled out. Even if al-Qaeda's strategy all along was to see us bankrupt ourselves in frivolous wars as our innate paranoia, weakness and decadence impels us to, we're not going to refuse that tantalizing possibility of fighting and losing in three adjacent countries.

How could we possibly fight and win in Iran, unless we just withdraw from Iraq and/or Afghanistan? (I think we should withdraw from Iraq, but that's largely because we shouldn't be fighting non-essential wars at all, especially with an exhausted military that conservatives don't care to finance properly). Bush's WWII analogy is dangerously dis/ingenuous, because as the British showed last month in foiling another airline attack, fighting terrorism ought to involve police and surveillance--although not spying without warrants, and not by yoking intelligence-gathering to pre-decided future wars. It shouldn't take a chattering hippie to realize that war is not the answer.

Especially now, when hopefully people will recognize that there really has been a fundamental shift in war. Wars between countries are increasingly rare; civil wars and insurgencies--i.e. the harder kind, the ones which drag on forever because tanks and missiles don't crush political resistance--are common, and with belligerents like us at the helm, will possibly grow to be more so. Given the dynamics of Islamist terrorism and the ambiguously Christian West, future wars will simply breed the need for more wars. That's fine if you're Raytheon or Kellogg, Brown and Root, or a Republican congressional representative from a conservative district, but bad for the rest of us.

Especially because in the case of Iran, what exactly is Iran doing that's so terrible? Developing nuclear weapons is not an act of aggression. We have them (and we used them!) and so do eight other nations, including the one actually ruled by a dictator and constantly teetering on the precipice of Saudi-Arabification, Pakistan. Not only that, but the US is fighting a war just to the east and the west of Iran. If al-Qaeda or the USSR or Imperial Japan were pummeling Canada and Mexico, do you think the US would just abide it?

Oh, but they burn flags and hate Israel! Hating Israel is an ingenious political trick promulgated by semi-legitimate Arab governments which are rich in oil and corruption and poor in jobs, literacy and civil rights. They can foist the blame for the problems they create on a tiny apartheid-state (which, in all fairness, hands Arab propagandists no small amount of fodder, with its ghastly war crimes, unconscionable treatment of Palestinians, and supremely ignoble and immoral destruction of Lebanon). Israel is the eternally convenient distraction used by its incompetent, impoverished neighbors whose rulers are largely secular and cloak themselves in legitimacy by allowing fiery clerics to rant on and on about the Zionist Satan. You never hear about how there-is-no-God-but-death-to-Israel in Indonesia, India, Bosnia, Morocco or other nations with large Muslim populations. It only happens where it's politically useful. And face it: Israel isn't going anywhere.

Iran will not launch nuclear weapons on Israel because they would kill a shitload of Palestinians and also annihilate a number of holy sites and shrines, possibly including the Dome of the Rock. Not only that, but Iran is a democratic state attempting to soften the inevitable change from its 1979 revolutionary fervor to a wealthy, influential power. It has pretensions and aspirations to be a regional hegemon, not a global pariah. If anything will further empower Iran, it's not 'appeasement,' but 'staying the course,' which has allowed Shiite militias to run harum-scarum, willy-nilly and pell-mell through Sadr City and much of Baghdad. Heck of a job, United States.

Oh, those wacky Africans, so unlike us

2006-09-23T13:17:00.000-04:00

From yesterday's NYT:

On the final day of campaigning [in the Gambia], President Yahya Jammeh vowed to rule for the next 40 years. Mr. Jammeh, who seized power in 1994 as a 29-year-old army lieutenant and went on to win elections in 1996 and 2001, told supporters that he ruled through God and that “no coup d’état or elections can remove me.’’ He faces two challengers but warned at the rally in Serekunda, east of the capital, Banju, “I will develop the areas that vote for me, but if you don’t vote for me, don’t expect anything.”

"I've heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for president." -- George W. Bush, to evangelical preacher James Robison.
"We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this." -- Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, 2003.
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its votes to [Bush in 2004]." -- J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio secretary of State, head of Bush re-election campaign in Ohio, and current candidate for governor.

I'm assuming that places likely to sustain a major terrorist attack are New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles. Given that, here are some interesting numbers revealing the similarity between our government and that of a risible African dictator who rules 1.5 million people.

New York City's allotment of federal anti-terrorism funds in 2006: $124 milion, down from $207 million in 2005.
Washington, D.C.'s allotment: $4.3 million, down from $9.2 million in 2005.
The capital region (incl. Maryland and Virginia suburbs): $46.5 million, down from $77 million.

New York City voted 73.82-22.76, Kerry over Bush
Washington DC voted 89.18 -9.34, Kerry over Bush
Prince George's County, MD voted 81.8 -17.2, Kerry over Bush
Fairfax County, VA voted 53.3 - 45.9, Kerry over Bush

Wyoming receives $27.80 in antiterrorism funds per person. It voted for Bush, 69-29.
Alaska receives $24.83. It voted for Bush, 61-36.
North Dakota receives $23.82. It voted for Bush, 63-35.
New York receives $15.54. It voted for Kerry, 58-40.
Illinois receives $8.13. It voted for Kerry, 55-45.
California receives $8.05. It voted for Kerry, 54-44.

I like Dick Cheney

2006-09-20T15:32:00.000-04:00

I like that he's an unvarnished psycho asshole who doesn't pretend to hide behind Jesus. Weirdly, this has made him something of a "true believer," in that he genuinely appears to believe the strange things he says, about Iraqi WMDs or connections to al-Qaeda, things which have been debunked so many times in so many places that even linking to them seems superfluous. He's so sinister, diabolical and un-reassuring, yet he beat the shit out of John Edwards in the vice presidential debate. He's anti-avuncular, wrong all the time, and has a track record littered with disaster, but apparently people feel safer knowing guys like him are running things.

But even if he's the one foaming at the mouth for a giant war with Iran, he seems like enough of a libertarian to be at least a little uncomfortable with domestic spying and authoritarianism-at-home as a response to threats abroad. (After all, he did say he was in favor of gay marriage because "freedom means freedom for everyone"; yes, I think gay marriage is a frivolous waste of resources better spent addressing real inequalities, but it's nice that an uber-conservative gets it).

Taking the Bush Administration at face value, rather than estimating the extent to which Cheney is the puppeteer dangling the rapidly-aging Bush, I think it's useful to distinguish Cheney's evil tendencies from the overall horrors of our government. He's a fearmonger, but not a fascist. Yes, he obtained five draft deferments and has crusaded shamelessly for war after war, but his defense of the US isn't hysterical or knee-jerk. Yes, it doesn't take a genius to realize his secret energy-policy meetings devised ways to enrich Big Coal and Big Oil (and could have been poached from the plot of Naked Gun 2 1/2), but I don't think he's played in any Rovian reindeer games to destroy the credibility of the electoral process.

However, he's smart and consistent. When he was secretary of defense under the previous Bush, he knew that nuclear nonproliferation was going to be a big problem after the USSR disintegrated, and fortunately people responded and we don't have 15 more nuclear powers than we already do. To look at him in the most charitable light, he's much more of a realist than a neocon--motivated far more by a fear of international institutions ravaged by rogue actors than by a complacent trumpeting of America's inherent virtue and grandeur as a way of doing away with that pesky UN.

It's also interesting that he doesn't want to be president. I can't think of a time in US history when a sitting vice president, under a two-term president, opted not to run. The 2008 election will be unique in that no incumbents will be seeking a nomination, let alone cruising through a primary season as an anointed front-runner. If the GOP gets trounced this November, losing one or both chambers of Congress, is it possible that Cheney will retire? Will his four heart attacks finally wear him down (officially speaking)? If Bush is reduced to an unpopular lame duck--far from a given--would he appoint one of the '08 contenders to prime them for a presidential run? I don't think Karl Rove has the guts to install Condi (not because she's a black woman, but because she's single) but it would be a stroke of genius if he did, and it would piss Hillary Clinton off like nothing else.

If we have to go to war with Iran, but it doesn't happen till after Cheney's resignation and return to war profiteeering in the private sector, and they're fishing around for someone to steward the CNN-friendly pyrotechnics of battle to inflate Bush's poll numbers, Bush might want to consider pardoning Daniel Biechele, the manager of Great White, who isn't up for parole till September 2007. In terms of competence alone, he is clearly in the Cheney mold.

Let Me Shit on a Lot of People's Good Intentions For a Second

2006-09-19T15:01:00.000-04:00

I've seen this on three t-shirts in Manhattan this week, so it must be cool now.

Actually, it's a grade-A grossout. It's the kind of bullshit ecumenism that means nothing other than to highlight the supposedly enlightened viewpoint of the wearer, who transcends the petty, myopic conflicts among religions while understanding that nothing about those religions needs to be changed, other than what causes conflict--which is, apparently, extraneous ideas that fundamentalists adopt as a perversion of spirituality and which have nothing to do with the actual tenets of the three monotheistic faiths at all.

Unfortunately, this is absolutely required in American political discourse, where the faith of a given individual must be respected at all costs. Hey, my adherence to things-that-were-good-enough-for-my-parents/my-heritage-of-which-I-am-immensely-proud-even-though-it-represents-no-actual-accomplishment-on-my-part/ideas-the-neighbors-will-gossip-about-if-I-don't-profess-them/crudely-anachronistic-and-anti-empirical-nonsense-derived-from-a-poorly-written-though-often-re-edited-book demands nothing less. I've taken a real gamble here by proclaiming my faith in a God who will make me burn forever if I don't!

This is where "spiritual, but not religious" comes into play as the ultimate metaphysical dodge. "Coexist" could be the new mantra for people who dislike war because it's dangerous to "children and other living things."

A possible way to assassinate Pat Robertson would be to wear this shirt and listen to the song "Imagine," because in several of his books he goes on and on about what a coded anthem of quasi-Marxist one-worlder utopianism it is. (Only Robertson equates that with devil-worship, the Anglophile liberal intelligentsia of the '50s, the ability to use a credit card in war-torn nations, and the conspiracy by a crypto-Jewish cabal of financiers who will orchestrate another Great Depression in 1996).

Of course, for this slogan to get anywhere, it would require that the 2/3 of the populace who require a bit more clarity and a bit less muddled do-goodery to drop dead or at least stop voting entirely. Because given the choice between evangelical narratives of the Clash of Civilizations and a Bono-esque plea for a Klatch of Civilizations, most people will choose the former. Glaring cognitive dissonance usually wins over watered-down cognitive dissonance, and people who are terrified of more than the iota of commodified free-thinking they've already committed themselves to don't usually get anywhere.

2006-09-14T14:18:00.000-04:00

This is bullshit. I especially love

Mr. Smith, who was married when he entered the Marine Corps in 2001, hopes to dispel a stereotype of the “promiscuous, night-going, street-dancing” gay man by telling his story and sharing the reaction that disclosure of his orientation elicited. That reaction was largely favorable.

It's great that freedom is on the march within our own armed forces. It's great to know that we have an anti-sex gay Republican gender police at the forefront of that struggle. It's great that self-hating faggots are attempting to assimilate on the backs of their more effeminate...brethren. You know, like the "night-goers." And it's really great that someday in the future the war machine might welcome cocksuckers with open arms. I really look forward to the day when Hadithas and Abu Ghraibs happen under morally callous, racist leadership that's just riddled with fags. Manly fags who never cry after massacring children. And what you really don't want is street-dancing after the bloodbath, believe me.

Conservatives Will Kill Us All (Part I in a series extending indefinitely)

2006-09-13T11:09:00.000-04:00

Tucker Carlson mentioned to his "leftist lesbian friend" (his Situation cohost Rachel Maddow?) that she's the kind of person who would be shot first when al-Qaeda takes over. That's not a direct quotation, since I can't find it anywhere on the Infobahn, but I want to unpack it.

First, I'm going on the assumption that even if he said that in a playful, "Oh, you!" kind of way, it echoes popular sentiment about leftists, lesbians and leftist lesbians. Which is to say, they're unattractive, pushy, hypersensitive, shrill, immoral, drunk on academic terminology, and generally opposed to everything good about the America that will save everyone from terrorists while keeping its own roster of war crimes within tolerable limits.

However, I think a person sort of has a moral responsibility to be someone al-Qaeda would hate. Otherwise, you're...kind of like an Islamist terrorist. It seems cowardly to me to hope that a Qaeda assassin would pause to draw a Venn diagram and evaluate your convictions, cross-checking for mutually-held prejudices and superstitions, freeing you so he could spray bullets at the Jews and porn fans.

I want a prominent conservative Christian to answer this question: does the fact that there exist leftist lesbians in this country make it more likely that terrorists will attack us? That would really put them in a bind. Answering yes would reveal their paranoia and fascism as well as the almost beautiful symmetries between Talibans foreign and domestic. Answering no (the right answer) means you can't really yoke together the War on Terror and the various cultural purification crusades that are always seeping into everything. Which is of course what many conservatives really want; you could substitute 'Mexicans' or 'biracial Vegan Bahai' for 'leftist lesbians' and still piss off Osama bin Laden and Pat Buchanan just as much, even though they would claim to hate each other most of all. Although we already know what Jerry Falwell thinks, someone should pose a version of that question to Rod Parsley or Pat Robertson. Does the existence of your pet enemies make it more likely that terrorists will attack the US?

Naturally I don't believe in a logical magic bullet that would make Pat Robertson's head explode or his followers go away. I'm just saying.

The other thing that's stupid about Tucker Carlson's comment is the naivete about how war works and what al-Qaeda wants. Rhetorical flourishes though they might just be, you occasionally hear things about the enemy marching through our cities or taking over the government, as if this were one of those Twilight Zones where all the neighbors become Commie-robots who vote in the zombie-aliens.

At the risk of going on and on about the obvious, terrorists aren't armies. They don't march. Or sack. They are not modeled after the Visigoths or a military state like North Korea. And the mobile, suburbanized geography of the US itself makes the notion of a besieged city quaint. We are a gigantic country, unoccupiable by an enemy uninterested in occupation. Terrorists don't have a real interest in 'being here' other than as parasites preparing attacks. They don't want to be attorneys general who rewrite the penal code to conform with Shariah. They don't have Post-Its full of helpful hints about improving our Weberian rational bureaucracy. They want to kill a lot of us and re-establish a caliphate so they can relive the glory days, but even that's not the true goal. I don't even think the true goal includes destroying Israel, since it's such a useful recruiting tool (and anyway, try erasing Israel without blowing up the Dome of the Rock. I dare you.)

Their wet dream is the decline and fall of the United States, which will allow them to fill the vacuum and reorganize world affairs to halt the traffic in forbidden things. Having destroyed the USSR, which collapsed barely 2 years after withdrawing from their 10-year disaster in Afghanistan, they've got their sights on the remaining superpower, the one that exports L'eggs and pictures of titties. Five years after the Tradge, they're doing a smashing job getting us to bleed ourselves dry losing one war and forgetting about the stalemated other one while fitfully undermining the rights and freedoms that nominally differentiate 'us' from 'them.'

Actual terrorist attacks are like nudges towards implosion. We're totally playing right into their hands, and the doctrinaire incompetence of the Republican Party means the next Septmber 11-style episode might just be critical mass, the moment when Bill O'Reilly and his hive mind viewership don't stop screaming until the Bill of Rights is treated like a peacetime nicety impeding our survival. That's what terrorists mean when they call our empire decadent. The mismanaged, unfinanced wars and iffy commitment to our founding principles reveal more about our soft underbelly than the presence of leftist lesbians, i.e. the people Christian conservatives revile as evidence of our national decadence, ever will. The God-people are going to get us all killed, which of course is the only way to truly cleanse a Christian nation of its secular taint, but that's another topic.

Islamists want to inspire enough terror that we collapse basically by ourselves. I don't think they're very interested in navel-gazing red state/blue state debates, but at the risk of saying something completely outrageous, maybe there is a greater likelihood of getting attacked under a Democratic president, if he or she is sane and not susceptible to Cheney-like bouts of panicky desperation (e.g. the "one-percent doctrine"). A Democratic president who shows the world that we aren't going to succumb to hysterics, nuke Tehran without provocation or suspend trials-by-jury might inspire terrorists to try again and see what happens, since the Republicans were such facile dupes who required little to no masterminding.

Anyway, terrorists won't be marching anywhere anytime soon, and if they did, I don't think anyone among them would make a distinction between leftist lesbians and the upstanding, conservative Tucker Carlsons of the world who pride themselves on valuing a few things that Islamists also happen to believe and who might just get a prurient thrill thinking about lesbians from time to time. Top or bottom, we're all of us equally fucked.

That shit is totally macaca

2006-09-12T20:24:00.000-04:00

OK, so I'm not convinced that 'macaca' had much traction as a racist epithet before the whole episode. Granted, George Allen is totes conservative, he met with a slightly whitewashed Klan-like group, he has Confederate memorabilia in his office, and Democrats need his seat to retake the Senate, but I don't buy it. Not that I'm clamoring hard on his behalf. After apologizing halfheartedly, he and his coterie of advisers came up with an "Ethnic Rally" as a way of drumming up support among browner Virginians. WTF?

However, not only are we supposed to believe that in mis-speaking, he was uttering some secret shibboleth that his Appalachian audience was to take as signifying Allen was 'one of them' or 'seeing eye to eye with real Virginians' (a totally presumptuous claim), but that it backfired spectacularly because a word I have never heard of before in my life is actually a terribly loaded put-down for people from the Indian subcontinent, where monkeys of the genus macaca masturbate in the trees. The target audience would have to be stereotypically 'backwoods' enough for a political candidate to enhance his standing through racist speech but also sophisticated enough to pick up on the reference to a despised minority (and we all know which minority group racist rural Virginia hates most; my bet is that it isn't the South Asians clustered in and around Fairfax County, so why would Allen go that route?). I don't think the word is common parlance among racists or anyone else.

But really, the final nail in the coffin is that this episode is referred to as 'the macaca incident,' or as the NY Times blog 'The Caucus' put it, the 'macaca kerfuffle.' When Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) referred to 'white niggers' on national television, that wasn't referred to as 'the white nigger hoopla' or 'that wigga bidness.' Casually repeating racial pejoratives is kind of discouraged in the mainstream media, and not without cause. But not this time: 'macaca' is just too obscure to have real invective behind it. As racial insults go, it's belongs in the curio cabinet.

George Allen probably harbors genuine racist thoughts. But he's also an idiot who misspoke while trying to be off-the-cuff, and now he's being pummeled for a bad reason. I have a better reason: George Allen thinks we should still be presiding over Iraq's meltdown in the name of our national security. There, Democrats. Run against that, please.

Something hilarious

2006-09-11T17:43:00.000-04:00

Did you know there's a congressman from Idaho named Butch Otter? I swear. Here's his site. Something that is entirely fictitious is that there is also a senator from Idaho named Gaylord Pederast.

The Freedom Tower

2006-09-11T17:14:00.000-04:00

OK, so does anybody think the current plans are banal? When I look at the current proposal, the four buildings in descending order, I see Chicago-Boston-Pittsburgh-Scottsdale.

If the corniness of descending order itself--which reminds me of a family photo at a Sears in Cape Girardeau, Missouri--weren't bad enough, 1776 feet is an absolute grossout. When a Democrat comes into office in January 2073, substituting Korans for Bibles and switching us to the metric system, the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence will be replaced with the ignominious height of 541 meters, which recalls the spread of plague to Egypt and the momentous occasion when the Uighurs came under the rule of the Hephthalites.

Wow.

The Freedom Tower. The design looks 100% devoted to commerce. There is absolutely nothing monumental about it except for the height and location, which together all but guarantee a dearth of corporate tenants, dooming it to be as much of a dead mall as the predecessor abortions-of-architecture were. It's a good thing Manhattan doesn't have a second, more important business district or anything, otherwise millions of square feet of bullseye office space in an unplanned neighborhood inconveniently sited to suburban commuters might be a bit of an anachronism.

The Freedom Tower. George Pataki tried to get the cornerstone laid during the GOP National Convention. I'm sure Larry Silverstein has freedom foremost in his mind. We're Americans and we love Freedom.* Why won't the Sunnis take our freedom? Oh yeah, they live in the sensuous Orient, where the perfumed dates might be poisonous, kohl-eyed assassins do the dance of the seven veils, and nothing is what it seems.

Mr. President, Iraq is sovereign.
Let freedom reign.
Mr. President, since you manage to fuck every single thing up, terrorists blew up the Freedom Tower using plastic sporks and lip gloss.
Let Freedom rain.

First Amendment subject to repeal upon tower's construction. Freedom not valid in the following: AL, AK, AR, AZ, CO, FL, GA, ID, IN, IA, KA, KY, LA, MO, MT, NB, NV, NM, ND, OH, OK, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WV, WY, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Washington, D.C. must remain without congressional representation while Freedom is in power. Puerto Rico will be a colony in perpetuity. Brown or brown-ish peoples not to enjoy freedom while cauliflower needs harvesting.

World War Three

2006-09-11T16:56:00.000-04:00

World War Three has begun. At least, that’s what Newt Gingrich wants us to believe. He told Meet the Press that the Republicans can remaster all the world’s conflicts into electoral success if they make the case that Iraq’s civil war, Iran’s assertiveness, North Korea’s ominous provocations and Israel’s aggressive approach to Hezbollah and Lebanon are in reality a single eschatological narrative that only the mighty GOP can vanquish.

Presumably this call-to-arms, the honest recognition that the Third World War is here, will encourage all Americans abandon their anti-incumbent predilections and welcome a new round of civil liberties belt-tightening. “Staying the Course,” has failed so wretchedly that Bush and Rove now need to rebrand the national strategy, out of which a phoenix of Republican landslides will flutter toward the heavens. “We need to have the militancy that says 'We're not going to lose a city,’” Gingrich told the Seattle Times. One year after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has been all but written out of the storyline.

When nature accomplishes what terrorists must never be permitted to do, it simply fans the fire of those who view the world through a prophetic lens, wherein the United States’ catastrophic policy towards nearly every global hot spot (not to mention natural disasters) simply validates the evangelical belief that the end is surely nigh. This time. Gingrich believes that Republicans suffer from “incumbentitis,” and have sacrificed their muscular resolve for unlimited pork. This sacrifice of core principles has permitted the incoherent opposition to jump ahead in the polls heading into November. That much is true.

In actuality, Gingrich’s demand to redouble the war effort under the most chilling rhetorical banner reveals just how far the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Robertson, and how Republican reliance on evangelical values-voters as useful idiots has metastasized into their domination of the party’s strategies. The grownups have lost complete control. The insistence that we are fighting World War Three grants a single-minded moral clarity to the grotesque ethical compromises (Guantanamo, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, domestic wiretapping) that have sullied the early War on Terrorism.

Few remember World War One (or the eerie parallel between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and Israel’s pretext for pounding Lebanon), but World War Two was a good fight through and through—internment camps be damned--according to the national meta-narrative. If all signs point to this as the struggle out of which the Antichrist could emerge, quibbles of waterboarding will disappear as the trifling distraction they should have been all along. The idea of the United States as a Christian nation performing God’s work airbrushes our peccadilloes in favor of a commanding sound byte that all normal people should be able to agree on. That is the central point of Gingrich’s remarks, with their evangelical inflection: we will no longer tolerate these nuisances.

Dissent, now that all conflicts have been amalgamated into one total war against America, reveals the dissenter to be a troop-hating traitor who probably prefers to muddy up our focus with talk of gay marriages and national health insurance, things which God would never condone. For those who hold the New York Times guilty of abetting Al-Qaeda for publishing photos of Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home after the Secret Service okayed them, Gingrich’s marketing ploy might appear long overdue. Seeing the left itself as the domestic counterpart to Islamist terrorism means no tactic is too desperate in preventing Democrats from retaking the House. Anything that connects our current debacle to the glorious wars of the past and the biblical tribulations of the near future literally must succeed, if conservatives are prepared to heed Gingrich’s warmongering and put the soul of the Republic on the line as never before. Gingrich, tired of writing Amazon.com reviews all day, might be angling for media attention in preparation for an ’08 comeback. Sensationalism in the guise of sage advice from yesterday’s king is a time-tested method. But before excoriating those who deny the “reality” of a Third World War, Gingrich might want to take a page from War Games--one of the many, many pop artifacts dealing with the unimaginable horror of WWIII, and note that the only winning move is not to play.

September 11

2006-09-11T16:36:00.000-04:00

Hello! It's a bright and cloudless day, just as September 11ths ought to be, and now that we have these pesky moments of silence out of the way, it's time to launch another bullhorn in the wilderness: VauxhallVelcraux.blogspot.com. The place to be.

I stopped blogging two years ago today when it became apparent to me that John Kerry was going to lose. I would link to my old blog as a testament to my know-it-all-ness, but my politics have lurched leftward since those pessimistic days and I've become less of a jejunebug, so I don't want to draw attention to that particular infobahn exit ramp.

Anyway, feel free to check back periodically as I fritter away the hours, on company time, in interminable intellectual analysis. If iVillage becomes too much to bear, there's always VauxhallVelcraux.blogspot.com, a bland smokescreen for the den of nepotistic cronyism within.