untethered

Get me something that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage, I work for Dick Jones!

2012-02-08T10:07:00.043Z

Contra kitschmeister Clint Eastwood, the dystopian Detroit of Paul Verhoeven's Robocop, a failed city where street gangs rule the night and private contractors compete with the police, is coming to pass:

"We got to have a little Old West up here in Detroit. That’s what it’s gonna take,” Detroit resident Julia Brown told The Daily.

The last time Brown, 73, called the Detroit police, they didn’t show up until the next day. So she applied for a permit to carry a handgun and says she’s prepared to use it against the young thugs who have taken over her neighborhood, burglarizing entire blocks, opening fire at will and terrorizing the elderly with impunity.

“I don’t intend to be one of their victims,” said Brown, who has lived in Detroit since the late 1950s. “I’m planning on taking one out.”
(...)
The city’s wealthier enclaves have hired private security firms. Intimidating men in armored trucks patrol streets lined with gracious old homes in a scene more likely seen in Mexico City than the United States.

That kind of paid protection can run residents anywhere from $10 to $200 per month, and companies say business is good.

“We’re booming,” said Dale Brown, the owner of Threat Management Group, which along with Recon Security patrols neighborhoods like Palmer Woods in black Hummers.

“We’re paramilitary, but we’re positive. I’m not a vigilante. I’m an agent of change.

Somebody dial 911?

Public Enemy knew what time it was in 1990:

Sock it to the Man, Flav. How are black people with irony?

I can sure appreciate the irony of Detroit's last remaining law-abiding black citizens advocating for the right to bear arms--that "racist" legal relic, according Chicago's preening police chief and Candidate "clinging to guns" Obama. They level this charge oblivious to its converse: the law-abiding citizens of, say, rural Pennsylvania, are compelled to surrender a right they've held responsibly because of the failure of a feral few favored, by progressives, for their race. But the left will not concede even this; they'd have you believe the right never existed in the first place, than acknowledge they are in the business of destroying it.

Progressive logic insists none of us can have guns because Obama's homies can't resist shooting each other (and others) with them. But it's worse than that: they would deny us this means of self-defense against these same street thugs--on whose behalf progressives advocate generally, to the degradation of other customs, laws and conditions. Progressives want you to die. That's not fair, of course; it's just that some random innocent few of us must die, for justice to prevail. They don't want you to die; your death is incidental.

"There was a theme park called Beat-Down..."

2012-01-16T21:33:00.011Z

Well, thank goodness MLK's tearful little dears can now go to Fun Town. But do they have to bring their parents?
Oh racism. Why. Oh why.

Buyer's Remorse

2012-01-14T02:43:00.019Z

Excuse my rudery, but stuff the jubilee!
--Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine

Have they considered just putting a baton in his hand? They could replace the rolled-up paper, which makes him look like he's about to swat one of us for pissing on the rug.
Your more discerning lefty has to be uncomfortable with the Monster on the Mall. Can you blame him? It's too obvious, too much artistic and political overreach, with MLK emerging from Mother Earth like a primal deity--nothing to come before or after. Are they kidding? But tweaking the silly "drum major" quote--you've got to love it. It's like they've bought this big ugly car they have to keep forever and they're fiddling with the nameplate--because that's all they can do. Serves them right. We deserved better, though.

If Hell Has a Soundtrack

2012-01-03T01:04:00.018Z

I'd have thought it impossible to improve upon the lyrics to Imagine. Some things are just too awful to salvage. But Cee Lo Green has done it.
*

Outkast (Feat. Cee Lo), Liberation

(God, to be able to lose that mopey f---ing solo rap at 5 minutes in--what a great song this would be!)

The Icy Flame, Mad Monk Mix

2011-12-15T20:20:00.103Z

Live on, thou damned!
--Baudelaire, The Double Room

Life is the lash
Driving us on
Toward the flame
Without haste
Without pause
Calm, cruel, fixed
Indifferent to us
Its raw material that serves some purpose
We cannot know
Into the chilling fire, slave-soldiers!
Into Nature's maw!
This command the only counsel
Of a universe without conscience
And desperate Man takes his own
He imagines worlds beyond
Over and above this grave
Clear of its stench and toil
He peoples them with his beloved
Who wait there serene and knowing
Holding the Secret in trust
He blasphemes Nature's Holy Writ
As He works to will these things
He works in defiant futility
Despite Her daily proofs
Of disease and calamity
The endlessly varied forms
Her harvest of death takes, like
Myriad mutant troops enforcing Her terror
And She claims with equal indifference
Her rebels and Her slaves
But behind Her cold disdain
Concealed by Her advantage in time
Her actions reveal some jealousy
Of Man's last means of resistance
His undying imagination
And frail She may be after all
Behind that horrible beautiful face
So we may as well call Her bluff
Though we know Her game is rigged, and
Sing defiant you fading voices!
We last, we last and
We have no fear, for
In that crucible of ice and dust
In that fire that will not warm
There, final and eternal
Only there
We are
At long last my tiring friend
No longer alone.

We Come in PC

2011-12-14T18:45:00.019Z

My name is ghetwI', and I'm a Mormon.

2011-12-06T19:34:00.003Z

Brian Jonestown Massacre, Anemone

Rum, Sodomy, and the Rag

2011-11-23T22:53:00.005Z

Fun facts encountered while looking up aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), presently anchored alongside Syria:

Reports began surfacing immediately after delivery in May of 2009 of issues with the ships toilet system. As of November, 2011, the entire system has gone down at least twice, rendering all 423 commodes in the ship's 130 heads inoperable, with many more incidents that have rendered either half of the ship, or sections of the ship, without operating sanitary facilities. In one ship-wide incident, a repair crew spent 35 non-stop hours attempting to return the system to working order. The system is said to suffer breakdowns when inappropriate materials such as feminine hygiene products are flushed down the toliets.

Lone Doof

2011-11-21T23:09:00.003Z

The quality of "lone wolf" terrorists remains underwhelming:

Two law enforcement officials said Monday that the NYPD’s Intelligence Division had sought to get the FBI involved at least twice as the investigation unfolded. Both times, the FBI concluded that Pimentel lacked the mental capacity to act on his own, they said.

Ask not for whom the strife bodes...

2011-11-20T18:15:00.021Z

The New York Times knows multiculturalism when it sees it (abroad):

Sectarian Strife in Diverse City Bodes Ill for All of Syria

With all these models of truly multicultural (as opposed to whatever is meant by the phrase here in the States) societies around us, you'd think our elite might question its policy of planned ethnic diversification. Because while ethnic cleansing has a long, bloody history, ethnic diversification has none at all. That is other than history's many examples of imperial powers importing one population to displace another--we are the first to inflict this upon ourselves--which has always been just a means of ethnic cleansing. What part greed and what part stupidity propel our elite's actions remains a mystery to me.

2011-11-19T16:22:00.002Z

There is no crueler phrase than "life goes on..."

T-Shirt Slogan

2011-11-18T17:54:00.011Z

Works for any number of disciplines.

Glib Talib

2011-11-10T17:49:00.011Z

The Taliban are now deploying snark:

NATO figures show that enemy attacks declined by 8 percent during the first nine months of this year compared to the year before. The United Nations, on the other hand, reported in September that insurgent attacks had increased by 39 percent in the first eight months of this year.

Referring to the gradual drawdown of military forces that has begun in Afghanistan, the Taliban statement read, “If [Nato Secretary General] Rasmussen and all his allies leave Afghanistan completely then the attacks on them will reach zero and he can propagate the notion even more and say that the number of Taliban attacks have fallen further.”

Needs work, but looks like some aspects of Westernization are taking hold.

Contextualized for Your Protection

2011-11-04T01:14:00.010Z

I love this. Tintin is being sold with a familiar, reassuring paper band:

A spokesman said: “This is why we took the unusual step of placing a protective band around the book with a warning about the content and also included an introduction inside the book by the original translators explaining the historical context.
(...)
The warning reads: “In his portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Hergé reflects the colonial attitudes of the time…

“He depicted the African people according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period – an interpretation that some of today’s readers may find offensive.”

A Waterstones spokesman confirmed that the book had been switched to the graphic novels section of its stores four years ago, and that since then its position had not changed.

2011-11-01T17:46:00.010Z

In the social realm what is conventionally meant by “progress”, now, is the direction of societal drift, whatever it may be. The aggregate of all those liberated, loosed souls, whose beneficent effect is presumed. Social Progressives concern themselves with identifying the general direction of this drift, so that they may then name it, and approve of it as, Progress.

From the Untethered Newswire

2011-10-31T17:46:00.059Z

October 31, 2021, Stamford CT (UNS)

In an incident experts are calling unprecedented, a veteran daytime talk-show host died today when his soul fled his body.
"At approximately 12:59 this afternoon Maury Povich died of multiple complications resulting from the catastrophic, sudden detachment of his soul from his physical body,” a spokesperson at Stamford General Hospital read from a prepared statement hours later.

Povich, 76, collapsed during the taping of his television program Maury, which has been running in one form or another since 1991. In the recording of his final, incomplete show, disseminated on the Internet within minutes of his death, Povich appears to become disoriented, massaging his chest before taking a seat on the edge of the stage and waving off a concerned assistant. Then he loosens his tie and, smiling pensively, says, "you know I've done about a thousand of these paternity tests by now..."
At that point (warning: disturbing content at 10:58) his voice becomes unintelligible as he appears to physically implode. To the horror of his crew and the confusion of audience members, Povich collapsed in a gelatinous heap, unrecognizable as human, within seconds.

The studio audience reacted violently, as some bolted for the exits, some laughed at what they, perhaps, took to be a stunt, and others jockeyed to photograph or prod Povich's remains. At one point a man, who had just learned he is the father of three children, can be seen trying to cut away a piece of the former host for a souvenir. Stamford police took several hours to contain the chaos, making several arrests.

Loquatious DeVonne, 36, a participant on the program, was nearby when it happened.
"His voice got all weird and blubbery, like he was underwater or something. Then he just went all like a big rubber baby, you know, that was all hollow inside. I was like damn!"

Dr. Hal Ashborne of the Institute for Scientific Theology, after examining the tape, said the incident is vindication for the religious belief in the existence of a soul as the "core element of the human person." Dr. Ashborne played and analyzed the recording for reporters.
"Right here, just as he begins to collapse in on himself, we can clearly discern the implosion beginning in the chest, proving a longtime, nearly universal human intuition wrongly discredited by science--that of a soul extant as a physical reality within the human breast. And then here, precisely at 10:59:06, you can actually see Mr. Povich's soul leaving his body."

Ms. DeVonne and others could not confirm the soul's departure from their eyewitness accounts.
"All I know is it got real smelly up in there right when he fall down and he kind of made this loud fart sound." She said.

In an historic news conference scheduled for tomorrow, several of the world's top scientists and theologians reportedly will join to assert the death has demonstrated conclusively the existence of the soul as a "physical and ontological reality."
"I know. I couldn't believe it either." Richard Dawkins, celebrity atheist, said, shaking his head. "But what other explanation is there?"

The debate over the nature of the soul has only just begun, however, according to Dr. Samuel Mitchell, head of Connecticut University's theology department.
"The question remains as to the disposition of that soul. The soul is known to depart the body following death, not to precipitate or cause death. What became of it? Was it destroyed? And if it was, then has the existence of the soul really been proven? The soul is supposed to be immortal and immutable. Or is it subject, with enough time and effort, to degradation the same way a biological entity is? The question remains: can a man lose his soul?"

Dr. Mitchell reassured those concerned about meeting a similar fate. Povich was an extraordinary case, he said.
"One thing is clear. After years of intense, unremitting assault upon the seat of his own humanity with utter disregard for its well-being, Povich has unintentionally proved the existence of the soul, providing us here with the first recorded image of it. But it required concerted effort over a lifetime. It's unlikely there are very many people capable of scaring their soul from their own body, even if they tried."

Mitchell suggested the death of Jerry Springer, another veteran daytime talk-show host, may have to be reexamined in light of today's event. According to a police inquiry, Springer was killed in 2017 when a stage-light fell on him during a staple of his show, his "final thoughts" on the day's program. Yet several in the studio audience insisted they saw a lightning-like electric current passing from somewhere overhead and through Mr. Springer, who was reduced to ash in seconds. Controversy has surrounded that incident and was exacerbated when the recording of the program turned up missing. Mitchell isn't prepared to link the two deaths, but insists the degree and nature of Springer's injuries have not been adequately explained and should be reevaluated.
"This was no lighting accident."

Birth Fangs of Democracy

2011-10-20T17:49:00.037Z

Too bad for Hillary Clinton, so proud to stand on "the soil of a free Tripoli", so humbly furtive in arriving there, as our declining prestige (born largely of just the sort of intervention she was celebrating) warrants yet another secret Mideast visit from the Secretary of State (shuttle diplomacy has given way to touch and go diplomacy). Consequently, she just-missed the world's newest democracy taking its first tentative baby steps. They're so cute at that age!
And I'm sure they're just getting started. Maybe Ms. Clinton can drop in on her way home (in secret, of course), to have her picture taken with the corpse, trophy-hunt style. Hurry Hil, that thing's got to be ripening quickly.

The hush was almost deafening

2011-10-16T23:08:00.100Z

From the Apotheosis:

The statue, representing a "Stone of Hope," sits forward from a "Mountain of Despair."

In reality it's made to appear as if MLK has split the mountain in two and is morphing out of the granite like some great, sullen chthonic deity. After complete societal collapse the site will be suitable for virgin sacrifices and the like.

Visitors pass through the mountain on their way to King's statue and an expanse along the basin rimmed with an inscription wall covered with stone carvings of some of his most famous quotes. The four-acre area will also feature the iconic cherry blossom trees that draw thousands of tourists to the Mall each spring.
"The very first time that I came to the site, I was almost overwhelmed," Martin Luther King III said. "I really was impressed by this artist. He was able to capture the essence of my dad."

What does he know?

Sculptor Ed Dwight, who has made seven statues of King, objects to the memorial's depiction of the icon -- and to the artist chosen to create it.

"This idea of having this 30-foot-tall sculpture of this man, and this confrontational look, he would not appreciate that, because that was not him," Dwight argues.

Dwight is a black American artist, which might have seemed to make him an ideal candidate for the job, but he doesn't have access to a Chinese quarry and the indentured laborers who come with it.

You try steal happy family lucky civil rights! And cigarette lighter! Good for you we no white racist! Stop looking at girl! Up against wall!

[Chinese artist Lei Yixin], for his part, said America did not have sole claim on King.
"Martin Luther King is not only a hero of America, he's also a hero of the world," he said.

They could not find a capable black sculptor. They would not have a white one. Or they simply didn't want to pay a decent wage. So the Chinese, who disdain democracy and embrace ethnic nationalism, who despise blacks and view America's experience with multiculturalism and diversity as "chaos" largely because of the civil rights movement, who have contributed nothing to the advancement of individual or minority rights--they have the same, or greater claim to the civil democratic tradition than an American of European descent, whose forefathers have been dying for centuries to advance the cause.

A Communist Chinese national creating an image of an African American to harry European Americans about legal and political rights. And none dare note the ironic affront. This is the inverted empire of American multiculturalism, where hypocritical foreigners use the perverted language of civil rights to impose upon us an oppressive mediocrity.

He's all yours, Mr. Lei. But just between you and me, he ain't really all that. Then again, I suspect you knew that already.

Joseph is so money...

2011-10-16T16:51:00.011Z

Jon Favreau on Robert Downey's resurrection: "Not since Joseph in the Bible went from prison to prophecy has someone elevated themselves from so low."

Minimum Wage the Hard Way

2011-10-15T00:40:00.014Z

Cashier Fights off Attackers.* But what's that annoying white woman on about?

*Translated from the Drudgespeak: "Cashier Savagely Attacks Customers at MCDONALD'S..."

Gulls on Parade

2011-10-13T00:08:00.316Z

Is it me or is the Left adopting a National Socialist aesthetic? Here's the president's iEnemies site (note the link may re-direct to Obama's main campaign site):

Report lese majesty here. Or else.

Bringing to mind the SPLC's longtime paranoid theme for its Hatewatch. An interrogating eye emerging from pixellated obscurity immobilizes the viewer with its aggressive gaze:

Jeepers, creepers, it's the virtual panopticon! "Here's looking at you. And you. And you..."

And this poster from a minor Occupier faction apparently isn't parody:

The Starbucks Putsch.

Then of course there's Martin Luther King as the Mall's forbidding doorman:

"Free at last? Nah, man. There's a cover."

Its heroic gigantism calls to mind Hitler and Speer's ambitions for Berlin. As sculpture, its scale makes modest the far superior works of National Socialism's Arno Breker (Richard Spencer on the subject here). At least Breker's heroes gaze romantically off into the distance or benevolently upon the people.

The Left's triumphalist/paranoid style is incapable of benevolence, only condemnation or condescension. After all these years it's still a mirroring response to fascism, substituting contrition in place of achievement as the noblest of individual or national ideals (that will show those mouldering Nazis!).

So MLK must glower forever downward in sullen, lizard-lidded reproach upon generations of American schoolchildren touring their capital; no matter how many more disappointments come from the promise of civil rights, whatever degradations remain for us, a maudlin tyranny of the mediocre etched crudely in stone.

This exceptionalism is distinguished from the fascist brand by the accusatory, inward focus of its aggression. I don't see how this recommends it. America must now phrase its boasts in the fawning language of minority rights; the most craven imperial adventure or corporate mission adopts it to advantage. Having made a fetish of contrition our sins become magnified, numerous--and jealously guarded by those for whom they have proven lucrative. This is imperialism for the postmodern Left. This is its nationalism. Why and where else would the cultural elite assent to such confident, earnest kitsch?

This is why we elected Barack Obama, our Cipher-in-Chief. After the crimes, humiliations and, finally, the economic collapse of the Bush administration we lost confidence and faith; we turned with unrecognized nostalgia to what we've been conditioned to see as our greatest achievement and finest hour--the black civil rights movement. This is what America does right! This was what we did in our uncorrupted past. Pastoralism for Progressives. That impulse is spent. Multiculturalism, unchallenged by anyone in power and vulnerable only to reason, empiricism and history, has nowhere now to go but reaction when confronted by change or critique.

When Barack Obama slighted American exceptionalism (a perfectly defensible thing) he wasn't being honest. He does not reject American exceptionalism as such; he merely improvises on it. Obama has reminded us time and again what is exceptional about America: him. Only America, remember, could produce the wonder that is he.

Obama is an improvisation on our theme of national greatness, made incarnate. How dare they. The president reveres American exceptionalism.

The MLK monument is a fair representation of the now cynical civil rights narrative after decades of black failure--perpetual condemnation from an obscenely aggrandized figure.

If a tyrant pays himself tribute on such a scale, its purpose is clear. Those beyond his reach denounce his ambition and mock his vanity. Just who does this man think he is? We call him mad.

Likewise, just who does the Left think MLK is? Whose madness is this? What is their ambition?

Are we beyond its reach? Because in this curious case, American citizens have little more freedom than that tyrant's subjects to meaningful dissent.

Black Americans remain atop the hierarchy of grievance by virtue of their now proud helplessness and dysfunction. By achieving political success by virtue of failure everywhere else, black America has created a disastrously effective demagogic model, giving impetus to an ever-increasing host of ethnic and other factions mimicking the chauvinism and hostility of the black political identity. For this they pay their tribute in return, defending the narrative; but like resentful mafiosi kicking back upstairs to a decrepit godfather, they jockey among themselves, bide their time.

Had black America risen, as was expected, to the extraordinary, continuing measures adopted on its behalf at the advent of the civil rights movement, achieving a true equality, the movement might have passed into history a success. But this hasn't happened, so we've adapted by declaring the old expectations quaint and the original ideal--equality before the law--racist, burning the boats that brought us here.

Like the fascists before them, with whom they remain obsessed, our generation's revolutionaries co-opted their nation's racial mythology with disregard equally for religion, custom or decency. Revolution quickly became rule, and here in its most deliberate artistic expression it makes of MLK a static, reactionary bulwark against dissent, built to last a thousand years. The movement, like its monument, is derivative. Worse than a crime, a cliche.

What damn poor timing for MLK's apotheosis though, with the economy going to hell and youthful black lynch mobs cleansing the streets. In the present those insensate eyes, that petulant scowl, the schoolteacher's accusatory stance are an unearned and dishonest condemnation issuing from mediocrity and failure. Fitting for our inverted empire and its hectoring project of division and displacement directed upon its own. The MLK monument is an opportunity, a teachable moment as they say, to reflect on the wisdom and justice of that project.

The Roost is on the Left

2011-10-06T18:54:00.064Z

Making themselves to home.

The latest alienated, homicidal incompetent to personalize the sort of racial pandering the president is presently cranking to eleven for the 2012 campaign was shot and killed by police today. And we're off:

"He used to do so much for the community. Something must have happened to make him flip out like this", said Pastor Oscar Dace of Bible Way Christian Center. "Everybody just can't believe that this has happened".

Recall Omar Thornton's (no doubt to his mind heroic) final testament:"this is a racist place". What child-like confidence he had in its power to absolve him of cold-blooded murder (racism is the universal moral solvent, present in all human agency); that confidence was quickly validated by the unconscionable coverage that followed.

The comparison to Thornton isn't apt, though. Omar was an apolitical dullard. Shareef Allman has been identified by his friends and neighbors as a "pillar of the community" and, with the grim-comic oblivousness only black Americans can manage, a "kind-hearted mediator of conflict" who hosted a public access show and even got to interview Jesse Jackson on camera. This was a black man politically active in his community, an intellectual and emotional imbiber of the Narrative,* exacting retribution for, as he sees it, discrimination. How much more explicit does racial-political violence have to get for the topic to be broached by the High and Serious of the media?

*At this point I don't know the level and nature of Allman's activism. Sure would like to get a look at those public-access shows (the crazy sh-t you find yourself saying!).

update: I just got my wish. This was not a politically sophisticated fellow. A standard issue idiot. Met a hundred of them. God help us.

A Belated Introduction to Your President

2011-10-04T22:24:00.105Z

New and improved, 10/4
Updates below

The hits just keep coming for the Wonder Brother.

I discount the president's more explicit race-baiting; he's never more full of shit than when he's adopting that phony gospel intonation for such as the naive souls at Trinity United. Sinister as it is, the president's fervor is depressingly dull. He remains the void he set out to be--only we no longer project onto His Blankness the illusion of--whatever it was the liberals were on about--but now its disillusion. The former magnified his image, the latter reduces it. And still we ask--who is this man? His life has been about contriving an identity--now he has none.

The world's been turned upside down: now for advantage one assumes a black rather than white identity. But it's still true that you can pass but you cannot hide. Your life is a loop, you come from a mother and return to one. That's the inexorable pull that draws us to authentic origins--religion, ethnicity, family--as we age. To where will you return, Mr. President? Will there be anything there?

There is nothing exceptional behind that visage, other than a yearning ego, a sort of psychological greed. Obama never expected to do what his acolytes took for granted: to reconcile black and white America. He wasn't here to change anything, but to keep the movement on track, tightening the cordon around the white boys. That's what we get for being so good to him in Hawaii--perhaps we should have bullied him like the Indonesians. He took to the White House the plan and model he'd had for Chicago: the implementation and solidification of a permanent non-white regime, maintaining power by distributing your wealth throughout a network of identity-advocacy groups in league with corrupt business interests. What an asshole.

The president and his attorney general are small men (preceded by small men) who cannot see far. Whatever imagination they have is spent on their private psychodramas. But Holder and Obama's aggressively racial-political Justice Department letting those buffoons off for their voter-intimidation stunt* looks more enticingly actionable than ever. Darrell Issa just lost control of his bowels.

*update: that is in light of these new allegations of one "Malik Shabazz"* signed in as a visitor to the White House. Imagine what a Nixon meets Elvis moment that might have been. I'll pay good money to any reporter who'll ask: "Mr. President, did Mr. Shabazz wear the fascist get-up for his tour?"

*correction: not new at all, and previously explained by the White House as "another" Malik Shabazz, along with another Bill Ayers, when releasing the logs as a transparency gesture (presumably a separate visit--I mean, if you brought too many of the more ferocious elements of Obama's base together at the same time it'd resemble the bad-guy casting call in Blazing Saddles, complete with scowling reconquistos declaring their contempt for the rule of law).

That voodoo you do. BHO exhorts the multicultural minions of Project Vote: "To stamp out runaway decency in the West..."

I wonder if anyone has seen the actual signatures, which might be subjected to verification--because if even the absurd appellation M. Shabazz can belong to anyone now (I mean how far can you take this: "Oh, that's another Bernie Madoff"?), then the gesture's transparency only reveals it to be hollow.

"Log book? We don't sign no steenking log book!"

Vying Slave

2011-10-04T20:11:00.008Z

Missing puppy. Answers to Sarah. See dog-tag to identify owner.

The Wages of Glib

2011-10-03T21:01:00.028Z

The Amanda Knox trial has been decried as a "witch hunt", largely because of its show-boating, race-baiting prosecutor and his blatant nifongery.*

At least he had a genuinely reprehensible crime to prosecute. Another less lurid witch hunt may have lost its prey as well today, as David Starkey was cleared by British regulators of charges of racism, incurred when "hundreds" of exquisitely conditioned BBC viewers reacted with despair--despite the fact that Starkey was clearly speaking for himself and his fellow news-chat co-panelists reacted with the proper intellectual hysterics--to an impolite but undeniable assertion: that London's rioting white chavs have adopted black culture as their own.

In its headline the Telegraph did the right thing by placing the child-like charge in its proper context--between a pair of mocking quotation marks--and Mr. Starkey stands by his remarks. Progress, then.

*I suggest "nifong" be adopted as a verb for such cases as these.

I Can't Seem to Forget You...

2011-09-28T01:00:00.014Z

As for the president's Freudian slip, I'm reminded of a Sega Genesis commercial from 1994. Quarterback Joe Montana is taking a Rorschach test; as the psychiatrists (out to learn everything possible about football) flip through the images, Joe peers intently at each and repeats: "Reggie White...Reggie White...Reggie White...".

Rule #1 in politics: know who's Reggie White.

How Many Electoral Votes Do They Have?

2011-09-27T23:26:00.005Z

Who says the president has a Jewish problem?

Original Sin

2011-09-26T23:12:00.022Z

I was nothing
Before I came to be
I was contentment
I was obscurity

Then I entered the world
And the grave world entered me
The world in terror I cursed
The world in return cursed me
with this bond: Eternity

2011-09-17T01:38:00.003Z

Little Dragon, Seconds
video by taheenu

Remember When?

2011-09-16T18:13:00.007Z

Slate's Jacob Weisberg, (b)oracle, August 2008:

Many have discoursed on what an Obama victory could mean for America. We would finally be able to see our legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in the rearview mirror. Our kids would grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives. The rest of the world would embrace a less fearful and more open post-post-9/11 America. But does it not follow that an Obama defeat would signify the opposite? If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world's judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.

Spot on as always, J-Wee. Can't wait to see what you've got for 2012.

more:
Isn't it amazing how much this

The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.

sounds like a condemnation of the failing Obama Movement and the liberal hysterics which produced it, made, I don't know, yesterday morning? It really is prescient.

2011-09-15T18:52:00.000Z

Orbital, Times Fly (Slow)

Paranoid-in-Chief

2011-09-14T16:15:00.029Z

Via Drudge, it appears the White House is calling on some of its strengths from 2008--the power of the Internet, the gullibility of Youth, the paranoia of progressives--to compile a massive enemies list, with a fervor and reach in which Richard Nixon would find evidence of mental instability.

They've set up a "watchdog" website employing a vaguely sinister stark-alarm aesthetic (think SPLC's "Hatewatch") where you can report ~~suspicious activity~~ unfair criticism of the President's policies, politics or person. They have a list of refutations of common smears--first up: "...the President is a friend of Israel..."* (Ben-yo's finger-wagging notwithstanding).
USA. Mad from the top down.

*Somebody tell Manhattan's Jews not to worry: America is the nation Obama is intent on destroying through the displacement of its majority ethnicity, not Israel. Sillies!

Holiday

2011-09-05T22:37:00.007Z

The New Pornographers, The Bleeding Heart Show

2011-08-29T20:18:00.061Z

Teeth long past repairing
picket a gape, perpetually despairing,
beneath a thousand-yard stare
(as if requisite, bad hair);

Bulbous nose--Satan's choice!
blame it for the toad-fart voice
(Yes it must be Lucifer;
for what divine engineer
puts a head this heavy on a neck this austere?);

With pock-marked skin
and gap-toothed grin
(granted, a not-bad chin):
one mediocre specimen!

His malformed charm,
his fellowship too,
draw only the alarm
such desperate figures are due;

(silence insulates he from you)

And through that silence he says:
alive, still, no less than you...

Self-Portrait, August 2o11

Melobama

2011-08-28T03:02:00.021Z

Mother Nature's about to learn the cost of interrupting the president's golf game:

Obama takes charge at hurricane command center.

That's the actual headline. The Administration is determined to use this (pardon pun) overblown crisis to implicitly juxtapose Obama's action stance against Bush's lame Katrina performance. Maryland's Democratic governor assured Meet the Press: "This is a much better FEMA than the olden days". Irene makes a better crisis too--or the Eastern Seaboard has only President Obama's leadership to thank for averting complete societal breakdown.

But the accompanying photo suggests the president is bawling-out government employees for the slow pace of sandbag production, or something:

"I'm not going to be the one telling Michelle you guys couldn't get Tyler Perry!"

Bulk Mailer

2011-08-17T17:11:00.020Z

A message from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

"Racists are everywhere...People denying the existence of racism may be racist themselves."

Infernal Refugee Rag

2011-08-16T22:24:00.060Z

I've got a little time left and nothing to lose. You have too much of both. Everything you do is contingent on your future; I have none. You must take care; I will take advantage. You pay your tithe in hypocrisy. You're invested. I'm busted. But I won't go away. I'm that crank with the uncertain means of income. I'm your village atheist. I won't humor your gods, and I'm ten feet tall. I am familiar and unsettling, something you've heard of but have never seen. I'm always there, in the back, glowering, moving through the dim edge of the mass. My features are never clear to you, always in shadow...

You have bought in, like everyone else, to get by; you have incurred an unexpected debt. I am here to collect. No more payment in the counterfeit that is your condescension--I'll break your legs. We had a trust, you and I. You declared it invalid, and me contemptible; I am the perpetual loser. But what happens when the game is up? I am of the psychic barrens left behind by your rapacious bacchanal. Those wastes are always with me. You don't know shit. I want to bring them to you. You pass me on the street, looking away in distaste; I grab you by the collar, pin you up against the wall; listen here you bastards...

The old neighborhood rises up around us; I am momentarily overcome; you try to break free but I have the strength of the manic and I hold you by the neck at arms length, your legs squirming in air, with one hand while wiping my averted eyes with the other...

You owe me an explanation. I am your incorrigible white trash, your embarrassing relations, your loud neighbors overhead going at it, fighting, fucking, going mad. Trust your instinct; don't come up to complain. I will be gone soon enough. Then you'll miss me. You haven't met my understudy. Just wait...

Yes, wait here a while. I'm just getting started.

Hate's Not Here, Man

2011-08-10T14:23:00.114Z

updated below

Our Vigilant Elite: "Nothing to see here..."

From the AP:

WEST ALLIS, Wis.—West Allis police are releasing new details about some arrests on the opening night of the Wisconsin State Fair, but say none of those incidents possessed elements that would prompt their prosecution as hate crimes.

WTMJ-AM reports ( http://bit.ly/roRWMr) the Police Department issued a statement Tuesday with new information about a handful of the more than two dozen arrests made last week.

Witnesses reported the opening night attacks seemed to be racially motivated with young African Americans beating up white fair goers, but police say as of now there isn't enough evidence to support those claims.

Time for the Justice Department to bring its resources to bear?
And where are the intrepid reporters, holding local authorities to account, investigating the race-terror networks that organize the pogroms? Where are the features you might expect to see--telling the stories of the various decent folk descended upon by racist savagery?
Racism, violence, official deceit, heinous villains and sympathetic victims, scary visuals, all part of a nationwide, perhaps global,* trend; this should be where careers are made in journalism and federal law enforcement. Why the dereliction? Where is everybody?

It's elitist vanity, rather than decency, that finds the story so repugnant. People are being proven disastrously wrong. Thus their confusion. It's like the fog of war--not that we're saying there's a war or anything! It isn't as if hate criminals declare their motives for all to hear. Like everyone walked around with cameras recording it all!
Evidence is tough. Reality is hard.

SPLC finds a thicket. "This is a very complicated case Maude, a lotta ins, lotta outs...what-have-yous...lotta strands, man."

This summer's inconveniences should at least prompt the debate: apply hate crime laws in earnest or repeal them.

I had assumed its proponents were cynically aware of hate legislation's dubious necessity. They were just another species of demagogue, cultivating fear and loathing as leverage to power. Liberals become extreme law-and-order conservatives here (no longer liberal, but "progressive"). As in the case of rape, invoking another tenet of the faith, it's Damn the Constitution. White racism is for the progressive left what communism once was for the right (and liberalism, to tell the truth), the great enemy against which it defines itself. There is no Islamic terrorism waiting, so this Cold War must self-perpetuate. We will always be at war with Racist Eastasia.

But my faith in their cynicism is shaken. It seems they truly are that foolish: they thought the real race problem was the white redneck remnant. They really do see racists around every corner, and white racism in every instance of black failure. They are as blind to black bigotry as they appear--after all these years of purporting to make a study and concern of bigotry as such. That jig is up.

That proponents of hate crimes legislation weren't deterred by the potential for blowback--the chance the laws might affect more black and brown criminals--is striking. They are either that stupid, or that confident in their ability to force their hypocrisy upon the whole nation through the selective application of these laws. So far this is what they've done. Of course they didn't anticipate the summer of thugs.

Hate crime legislation, ironically, did. At some point it becomes appropriate and necessary--when the violence is no longer bearable. Once racially motivated crimes become a distinct problem. The left demanded these laws on the basis that they already were. They've been arguing dishonestly for years that hate crimes are a serious and growing threat--always in potential outbreak--suddenly they're right, the dumb bastards!

We say never ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity. Our progressive establishment, like their uncontrolled street-vanguard, seems to feed one with the other. With blithe confidence they created--for their despised white majority--a draconian remedy for black hatred with--well looky here!--hate crime laws. Whatsay we take these babies out for a spin?

Let's assemble that prison population of hate criminals the left has been clamoring for. Let its demographic composition mock their obstinate faith. If we were a serious country we would use or lose these laws, which our black children--for whom they were drafted, with tears and concern--mock with furious glee. I suspect we'll choose door number three. Maintain the lie.

*Oh shit, do we owe the world another apology? Mr. President?

update:
from the West Allis police department:
"As you will see from the press releases, the West Allis Police Department has NOT stated that it will not seek the [Wisconsin] penalty enhancer* for hate crime."
Pardon me, officer.

2011-08-09T05:06:00.005Z

Burial, Forgive
video by shiqaqa

2011-08-05T23:58:00.048Z

updated below

When life

Nina Tayloe asks Brown Berry (left), 75, for forgiveness Sunday during a prayer meeting at Clayborn Temple. More than two dozen people gathered outside the church in support of the upcoming dedication of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington.

and farce

Michael Scott wants to do something about racism.

converge.

That does it. I'm going to the MLK statue dedication. I've got to see this. There's no way the ground will be able to hold the hypocrisy. Something's gotta give anyhow. Carpool, anyone? A little Fear and Loathing in DC? Who will be my 300-lb. Samoan? I assure you I'm no Johnny Depp (here at Untethered, where things are right-side up, Johnny Depp is a wispy little mediocrity).

I'm serious. I just feel drawn, as if to a vortex created by the colliding air-masses of white anxiety and black resentment, to the unveiling of that monstrous likeness of Ozymandias and its sneer of cold command.* It's as if we're erecting these monuments to the ascendant multicultural empire, just as the host body that is the productive economy (which it has been inhabiting and attempting to replicate in rainbow-hues a la Invasion of the Bodysnatchers ) is dying. Soon it may have to crawl out into the open to starve in all its ugliness. I expect its defense to grow shriller and more violent the more desperate things get.

Good luck confusing diversity with excellence in the coming penury. Good luck disguising the failure of black America and the cost of placating its malice. The racial triumphalism which replaced the true language of civil rights has become so hollow and undeserved it cannot be disguised any longer. And the moment couldn't be worse for the dedication; to hear the usual platitudes, those melodramatic tones floating the same old bullshit narrative--now? Invoke away, but the fists and feet of our ferocious black children mock your nonsense, Mr. President

*I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

2011-08-04T20:52:00.002Z

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace*

2011-08-02T23:49:00.022Z

The answer to the still smoldering problem of black flash-mobs (now pirate raids for plunder as much as anything else) has always been with us, sadly:

The Police Department on Monday also announced the launch of SafeCam, an online program that allows residents and businesses to register their security cameras with the city, to help police apprehend suspects quickly.

Networks of surveillance cameras supporting quick-reaction police tactics, and re-purposed social media surveillance:

...Ottawa Police’s criminal intelligence section...keeps an eye on anarchist websites and the like — which sometimes will write about intentions to disrupt major events in the city, like diplomatic or Royal visits, and G8/G20 meetings.

“It’s very challenging to pin-point smaller events,” Sweet said. “It’s all new, but we’re in the middle of a project — a strategic response to social media.”

This will save us from North America's black children, and the need to admit how terrified we are of them. We in cities where the Youths' numbers aren't at critical mass (alas!) may not be in physical peril, but we all have to swim in the same civil-legal waters--a little muddier now with the latest innovatory trend in black malevolence. And we are grateful for our degraded privacy and the diverted resources. Everyone a little less free, a little more safe. Those little bastards really don't get enough credit for their malicious achievements.

*Title lifted from the Adam Curtis documentary.

Fairy Queens v Feral Negroes

2011-07-09T06:08:00.032Z

For certain people it's open season on certain other people. But some people you just don't fuck with. Beating a breeder to a pulp is unfortunate, but gay slurs are evil!
A hierarchy is established.
The divisionals were a blowout. Moving into the higher bracket, where it's Pouncers versus Flouncers,* take my money off the blacks and put it on the gays. Just as the Chicago authorities have done.

*These political allies have absolutely nothing in common. The slogan of the insurgency against multicultural imperialism: "exploit the contradiction!"

This ain't the Summer of Love

2011-07-08T08:28:00.034Z

"Really? Is this really happening?"
--Flash-mob victim

This ain't the Garden of Eden,
There ain't no angels above,
And things ain't what they're supposed to be,
And this ain't the Summer of Love
--BÖC

The post-racial dream has become a nightmare. The use of social media to take over public space by surprise (the definition of “flash mob”, alas) for the purpose of recreational racist terror is this summer's trend.

Affected municipalities across the country brace themselves ahead of heat waves and large public events; holiday weekends loom like potential squalls on the horizon. Recession-lean budgets strain to add police ("...we have deployed additional officers..."): more police aren't always enough ("...shootings happened despite a high police presence..."). Businesses lose money and fear for the safety of employees. Some are harassed for closing their doors to the chaos.

Suburbanites surrender the city and stay home; events are cancelled, scaled back, starved. Organizing ad hoc via social networking for the purpose of amusement, black adolescents terrorize parts of the country like al Qaeda only wishes it could.

It all seems so long ago now. Once, liberal Americans anticipated with perverse ecstasy a violent racist reaction to an Obama presidency. This is not what they had in mind.

In the burlesque of Obama's first presidential campaign, the occasional white rube documented fretting over emboldened black racists was a recurring act, eliciting satisfied shivers in the Good, and proving all the more the need for absolution by Obama. Fear of “uppity blacks”—how quaint! What a reassuringly familiar theme! How comforting, to see the good narrative, the one we've been steeped in since childhood, playing out as scripted, in one's very own lifetime, with the promised marquee villains hitting their marks and the handsome black hero in charge. Less loftily, one could stick it to a despised Other (other white people—topsy-turvy world!) and claim the moral high ground in doing it. Everything was so easy then—virtue especially.

The production was on schedule until the wrong crowd showed up for the mob scene. Who cast these extras? Without script or direction, public officials are improvising--and the dialogue just gets worse (the beatings were "barbaric", said Milwaukee's police chief, but crime, like love, is “colorblind”).
But the dominant culture has taken too big a stake in Barack Obama's role as racial healer to let the public focus-group this ending. The problem is today’s reality plays out like the earnest speculative fiction of 2008's presumed-phobics:

In the president’s adopted home of Chicago, political and cultural center of black America, networking teens—emanating from the same streets as young Barack Obama, community organizer—randomly form in bands, terrorizing non-blacks and forcing the closure of parts of the city before melting away like guerrillas—excelling a national trend in just this sort of racist mob violence. Small-town Pennsylvania remains dormant.

To deny his city was under siege, new Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, of all people, was forced into embarrassing public obstinacy: fears of “heat stroke” in the 88 degree weather, and nothing else, prompted the city to close beaches along the lake into which black adolescents happened to be throwing bicyclists for amusement. He was roundly mocked.

The new mayor accepted the necessity of this humiliation. Like one of the victims he won't acknowledge, Rahm checked his dignity, took his beating and endured the taunts. Add the self-respect of one of the most influential people in the world to the casualty list. No mean feat for the feral children of Chicago's south side.

The trust Emanuel and his brand-new police superintendent (I presume) hope to establish with Chicagoans will have to wait. Superintendent McCarthy blithely invoked trust, while repeating the lie once more with feeling for the heckling crowd. The irony was lost in all the irony. But trust was established: the mayor has demonstrated, to whoever it is runs his city, that he knows how to keep his mouth shut.

With fellow feeling the major papers will ignore this latest example of a public official misleading citizens about a criminal threat to avoid offending the same criminals--or black and liberal sensitivities. Faced with a nation-wide outbreak of racist violence our political and journalistic classes collude in Soviet levels of disinformation. This debasement of our discourse is yet another consequence of the violence—precisely, of the need to deny the nature of the violence.

Thankfully, the Great Recession is a massive plausibility-generator. The general angst of the present. Catastrophic unemployment. Cutbacks in summer programs. I don’t discount these things. Responsible public servants will recourse to them so they can do what they can while preserving the lie--and themselves. Invoking the general downward trend in crime is already a common, if fallacious, means of distraction.

But obscurity has its consolations. We get to ask. Does the recession explain the trend? Not on paper. Black Americans poll disproportionately optimistic about the future. President Obama inspires their pride and confidence still. Black Americans are feeling much better than other Americans about their prospects, because we have a black president. This contradicts the hoary stock reply that black racism and violence always stem ultimately from righteous grievance.

Neither does the video support the recession ruse: the flash-mobbers (so confident in their indemnity they document their crimes on camera for later boasting) are amused, giddy, joyful even. What is expressed (often verbally) is not resentment of white privilege but disdain for white weakness. This is an expression of power, not powerlessness.

The world is turned upside-down. The grandchildren of the civil rights movement now riot and plunder out of a sense of entitlement.

The respectable media, perhaps comforted by the fact the criminals are relatively few (barely seen from the commanding heights), have cordoned off the story (with "context" and "perspective" their Orwellian bywords) to keep the creepy white racists out. The thing will play out, to whatever end, with no indelicate commentary from them. In that silence is the tacit agreement: the physical damage of the mobs is nothing as compared to the psychic damage the truth will bring.

Where is the president? Where is that promised leadership on race? It's difficult to imagine a white president addressing the problem squarely, as an issue of black responsibility; Barack Obama could. No single man has had--or will likely have again--this level of moral authority among blacks and this much political power. But the president will remain silent.

The fact is that rather than being uniquely qualified to address the issue, Obama is uniquely hampered. This same story that made him the most powerful man on earth romanticizes and politicizes black racism. Our rapidly degrading reality stands out in relief against this inviolate, rigid narrative. There is much embarrassment, and I hope a little shame, in the silence of our race-rioters' apologists.

The narrative holds that we've failed black Americans. But reality demonstrates black America is failing the rest of us.

2011-07-08T05:20:00.018Z

Regrettably, I hereby revive this blog.

Sign Off

2011-02-14T07:22:00.005Z

This site will not be updated.

Roll Credits

2011-01-27T21:34:00.015Z

Beck, Lost Cause

Baths, Pop Song

Richard D. James, Quino-Phec

Outreach, Concluded

2011-01-20T04:36:00.017Z

Final tally. Dennis as existential stranger.

"Yes. Sexual predators infiltrated the social networking component of the site... "
--"Ryan", The Office

...the Darndest Things!

2011-01-19T17:50:00.010Z

Monday one of the feral teens involved in the economic-recreational beating death of Seattle's "Tuba Man" was arrested for something called "unlawful bus conduct." This is his second arrest after serving a nominal sentence for the killing, committed when he was just fifteen. His first (known) fatality remains a source of considerable pride for the youngster (see below), now 18 and just whiling away the brief period between that and the blessed release that will be his own death or long-term incarceration.
Somewhat reassuringly, the high correlation of violent crime to gross stupidity is here in evidence, suggesting that indecent interval will be very brief indeed. Unsurprisingly, his sophistication regarding the criminal justice system hasn't yet matched his precocity for criminal violence, and his conspicuous lack of shame regarding the killing (or appreciation for the mercy shown him) suggests that on his block he's something of a celebrity:

"While he was being searched by Deputy Hill and Deputy Nix, (the teen) bragged to them about being one of the juveniles who killed the Tuba Man," according to an incident report. "He bragged how his lawyer, John Henry Brown (sic), got him off with only three months for stomping Tuba Man to death and how he would get him off for these charges too," a deputy wrote in an incident report.
However, John Henry Browne was not the teen's attorney on the Tuba Man case, in which he received a sentence of 30 to 72 weeks and served all 72. His attorneys were public defenders Daewoo Kim and Hal Palmer, according to the King County Prosecutor's Office.

An Uncanny Recognition

2011-01-15T23:45:00.001Z

From The Onion:

NEW YORK—According to media analysts, the nation's TV commentators and political pundits have proved uncannily accurate when describing the deeply disturbed inner thoughts of accused Arizona gunman Jared Loughner. "It's strange, but when it comes to getting inside the mind of this human being who seems to possess no empathy, sense of morality, or hold on reality, and who is motivated only by personal animus and self-glorification, the nation's major political pundits have been amazingly adept," said Horizon Media analyst Bob Cullen, who has studied extensive tape of commentators on all major TV news programs and found their remarks on "what the killer is thinking" to be consistently thorough and detailed across the board. "It's almost as though they have some way of knowing, firsthand, exactly what this demented and highly dangerous individual with the eyes of millions upon him is going through." Researchers at Horizon Media also reported that a number of prominent TV pundits appeared to be mimicking the exact same chilling gleam in Loughner's eye for what they could only speculate was "dramatic effect."

Bitterness and Bravado

2010-12-27T15:36:00.045Z

It has finally caught up to me; I'm softening as I age. "Holiday depression". The relentless assault of cheer, phony and authentic, the bullshit controversies over Nativity scenes and greetings, the sight of a decrepit faith being mauled by Lilliputians, strutting and preening in their phony valor. The fucking loneliness; looking about for the "friends" who so quickly forgot us once ensconced in domestic bliss (may you asphyxiate in it) or withdrawn into their own caverns. The shrill boredom of the hyper-kinetic electronic sarcophagus that is the modern home! Yes, it's that time again, reader--because no one else is at hand!--for me to say:

Get out, get out, get the fuck out already! Stop picking at this corpse--it feels pain still. Horrid creatures! Avert your dull, expectant gaze; you don't rate to put eyeballs on me. To hell with you all, slack-jawed, dishrag, hair-ball civilians! Get out of my light. Don't disturb this stagnant air. Don't come slumming around here like some tourist. You reek of where you've been. Dive back into the Internet morass of plain, glib, literal-minded ephemera from whence you came.

There's nothing for you here. We don't craft reasonable arguments here; we don't weigh sides and ponder, on this hand, but then on the other, but yet again... My God, people! I'm going to napalm the whole massive, tangled circle-jerk that is the blogosphere; dig in, bitches. Oh you precocious, oh you ponderous denizens of the Internet! I'll lay you to waste as one.
No reader, you are not safe here. This isn't for you. What you want is to have your biases confirmed, your neuroses assuaged, your angst soothed. You want a pat on the head. You want flattering light to soften the edges. You require one remove, minimum, from reality. You need dark; you can't get it up in the light.
You laugh at this buffoonery but you know--you can't do this. Don't even try. I got skills. Echoes only second the boast--echoes diminishing off into the ether above--like music against your timid, confused din. I stand alone against the lot of you, and like my chances.

...

I don't know about you, but I feel better. Let's cleanse the palate:

MBM, Circles
"It's all you'll ever need..."

The Obsolete Things

2010-12-10T01:08:00.008Z

the bond of blood exacts in price,
its own kind drawn from other types,
man too must take his pay in kind,
and pray relief from the divine.

Or so it was, not long ago,
but now men's bellies all are full,
blood and bonds are history,
entombed with Guilt and Mystery.

no blood no burden,
thus no Divine,
pray forgiveness, in such a time?
our hands are clean our minds are pure,
but can we be so very sure?
for
he that suffers away unseen,
bears that burden, for you, and me

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

2010-12-02T19:01:00.066Z

Rest assured. Terrorist threats will not deter the United States from its military occupation of Muslim lands, and we will never allow profiling of Muslims in our airports.

Some among us take considerable pride in each assertion and find no conflict between them. Public opinion is less enthusiastic, but the two cover most of the regnant status quo demanded by elite consensus.

The good news is the caliber of high-profile arrestees suggest a still shallow pool of talent from which to recruit "home-grown"—or transplanted—terrorists. The class of more capable terrorists we reasonably expected after 9-11 hasn't shown up, even now, two occupations and three wars later. Qaeda shot their wad that day, but the blow still resonates through our actions and collective psyche.
The hapless prospects the feds have helped along their way to high-profile arrests impress far more for their malice than imagination. This late in the game and we're pursuing sting operations that draw lone foot-soldiers into crude conspiracies. Arguably a manageable problem that would be improved by withdrawing from our Middle East entanglements, the ostensible purpose of which is defense against this domestic threat.

This is predicated on a charitable reception of the FBI's account. In truth, when we are introduced to Mohamed Osman Mohamud and his sexually ambiguous war-face, we should first ask if we needed to make his odious acquaintance at all. We can assume the prospect of a long, probably fruitless surveillance pales next to the "plot thwarted" for law enforcement, and it's always just a whisker's breadth to justification when you've got such as the sneer of Osman. Officials pimping the "very real" threat of a "spectacular" attack sounded a bit like a band imploring their audience to dance on the strength of a few notes. But Fox will pick it up from here, I imagine.

If Osman is not the face of domestic terrorism we are compelled to make him the face of constitutional rights. Thanks a lot, government. And what a perfectly predictable, unreasoning face to intrude on the TSA/profiling meta-scandal, calling attention to our future reliance on diverse new Americans remaining indifferent to diverse new imperial adventures.

Sensing just such tensions, one local rag went beyond the “end of the world hits women and minorities hardest” gag:

That might explain why no Portland group is quite as shaken by the arrest and arraignment of Mohamed Mohamud than the city's Somali community, several thousand strong.

"As a Somali, it's, 'Oh, my God, one more thing we'll be remembered for,'" said Muna Abshir Mohamud, who works for the city of Portland's Office of Human Relations. "It's one of those images that's hard to unstick."

Since the eastern African country collapsed in civil war in 1991, the most memorable images out of Somali have featured pirates and burning helicopters.

In the first two years of that civil war, an estimated 300,000 Somalis died of starvation, but most Americans remember only that the ensuing United Nations humanitarian mission ended with the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in the chaotic streets of Mogadishu.

"To this day, if you say, 'Somalia,' it's" -- Muna Mohamud snaps her fingers -- " 'Black Hawk Down.'"

More recently, Somali pirates have dominated the news in the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, attacking cargo ships, hijacking supertankers and British yachts, and stealing off with millions in ransom.

Both Musse Olol and Muna Mohamud attended a Somali peace and unity rally outside Portland's City Hall on Sunday, and both spoke movingly about what they abandoned in Africa and discovered in America.

Olol, who left Somalia in 1981, remembers a country caught in the grip of the Cold War, so ruled by weapons that he was schooled -- literally -- in the use of an AK-47 assault rifle.
[...]
For the next -- and younger -- generation of Somalis, however, there is more restlessness, fewer jobs and harder feelings.

"All teenagers rebel," Muna Mohamud said. "For kids who aren't occupied, there are all kinds of activities out there. Sometimes it's running with the wrong crowd. Sometimes it's ending up at the wrong mosque."

"I don't think Portland is equipped to help the youth," Olol said. "The sense of family breaking down. It's like when you join a gang. They go after the kids who don't have the good support.

["Portland-area Somalis shaken by brush with disaster at Pioneer Courthouse Square" The Oregonian, 11/29/10]

Civil war, pirates, burning helicopters, Olol's arms training; Portland's not "equipped" to counter their effects? Imagine that! Outrageous! In all seriousness, how "shaken" can they be? But now that we've demonstrated our concern by asking, can we gently ask how well equipped are the Somalis for America? Alas, no. The tiger that attacked his trainer didn't go "crazy", as goes one of many Chris Rock jokes he's going to want to take back some day, that tiger went tiger.

Somehow obscured by all this is the real threat to American lives in Afghanistan, Iraq and who knows where else. Six more were sacrificed to the impossible mission of training Afghans how to defend Afghanistan against other, more determined Afghans. We've absently blown right past the cautionary Vietnam analogy, which at this point is an insult to the ARVN and a compliment to the Viet Cong. There are more fundamental differences too; the above-mentioned assassination might have been a scandal of historic import in that previous folly. Monday it was an inconsequential wisp in the electronic torrent. Tomorrow's street executions will be so much internet snuff at this rate.

Among the present casualties should be the customary belief in a fundamental link between colonialism and racism. Its promise remains the guiding light of the elect and the Burden is endured by fewer than ever, but if you look past the re-branding and the garish new Benneton-ad frontispiece, you'll see it's brought to us by the dissolute ideological heirs of the same old make. They glory in its death under the old name, while championing it under the new. In twinning the triumphalist narrative of the civil rights movement with American exceptionalism, the sins of the past are justification for the sins of the present. They're hard to distinguish side by side; the only difference I see is the current dishonesty.

No; today Oregon teens die abroad to protect us from the "Oregon Teen". God forbid you should suggest keeping the teens in their respective national homes. Might we send the ideologues packing at least?

Friday

2010-11-18T22:31:00.048Z

Primal Scream, Loaded

LCD Soundsystem, Home; NSFW (not safe for wussies)

A little intoxication never hurt no one.

Excuse me while I bust a freestyle:

angry mothers and martinets,
drunken brawlers and malcontents,
city dwellers and suburbanites,
phony players and proselytes,
get down, get down tonight...

confound tommorrow with yesterday,
toxic bliss lures woe away,
baptize yourself in neon light,
parry existential fright,
and get down, get down tonight...

our souls are held in solution,
with moonlight's gentle resolution,
rippled with eternal rhyme,
distilling space with metered time,
when we get down, get down tonight...

our cares return with break of day,
we cannot choose another way,
our destiny's the close of night,
we won't escape this mortal blight,
so come get down, get down tonight...

stick that in your Grammy ash-tray, Lil Wayne

Equality, now

2010-11-17T02:06:00.096Z

The Republican Party's continuing survival now depends as much on the Democratic Party's inherent contradictions as anything else. The latter has become less a labor party than a coalition of identity groups united in resentment toward a myth of majority privilege that grows more fabulous and farcical by the day, and--being identity groups--viewing one another with precariously contained hostility.

For their part the Democrats' most audacious achievement has been in keeping alive a quaint image of Republicans as natural demagogues, despite the fact that ethnic, sexual and class resentment long ago became the greater part of their own populist appeal. They manage this through their successful use of the fallacy of disparate impact (disparity in representation is de facto discrimination, thus any opposition to its remedy is bigotry of one form or another) and their appeal--ironically for the party of "tolerance" and egalitarianism--to minority racial bigotry and elite chauvinism.

When Republicans transgress their commitment to unilateral disarmament in this cold war of the races, cynically (for they do not mean it) condescending to address, in meek code, the concerns of white Americans as a group, they at least have ready at hand the spectacle of a vast, stifling complex of legal discrimination that daily confiscates their rights, opportunities and wealth, distributing them to virtually every one who is, by legal decree and social sanction, not them.

Contrast this with the Democrats' mirror-opposite demagogy asserting that these extraordinary efforts are not enough, due to the stubborn bigotry of this "privileged" class. Combining this with the current quasi-religious faith in a family of human races blandly undifferentiated by talents or tendencies (or even biology), liberals deliberately perpetuate a Great Slander--to wit, the failure of this generations-old edifice of legal and economic discrimination to equalize results, unprecedented in history or size, can only be attributed to the stubborn malice of the majority. The implication is that these perpetually failing, ever-greater efforts to cure minority under-representation are like a descending plumb sounding the still unknown depths of white racism. Hence, the relative mediocrity of "protected classes" in education and the professions continually produces political advantage. Weakness is strength. You have to admire the sinister, if incidental, brilliance of it. How comfortable some of our more sentient liberal demagogues must feel when considering the durability of disparity.

In this light, I find it incredible that liberals are shocked, shocked at the "whiteness" (somehow this phrase is inoffensive) of the Tea Party movement. This movement is precisely what they've been creating by decades of triangulation, through legal discrimination, demagogy and cultural derision. The Tea Party and reaction to it is the end game of those efforts and would have been expected had our more vociferous liberal demagogues not fallen for their own rhetoric and come to believe their own caricatures. Denying the humanity of a given class--how very illiberal.
Now, cornered and isolated from their countrymen by the formidable barriers of confiscatory patronage and cultural condemnation, assessing with greater clarity than the elite the reality of Barack Obama's ascent--the final marriage of corporate power with the diversity state--they are fighting back. But the liberals, po-faced in their naivete, apparently took seriously the notion that they had no right to self-defense, that mere exposure would chasten them into final, fearful submission or drive them into violent extremism (thus the tendency to see just that, despite the relative mildness of the movement). They are appalled to find them unrepentant, law-abiding and combative; how dare they? It's almost as if they're surprised to discover their bogeyman exists at all.

Liberals are appalled at the vigor of their victim's death throes, by its refusal to expire quietly. In the crude logic of "white privilege" these people cannot be victims--neither of the state nor of the racial violence this libel-as-virtue sanctions. The "racist" aspect of the amorphous and inconsistent Tea Party movement is its only coherent feature and its greatest justification and, despite convention, is nothing for which its members should apologize. Any group, however identified, has the right to defend itself against confiscation, slander and violence; the conventional double-standard that would deny them this right only makes their fight more necessary. The "Tea Partiers" are the unwitting last defenders of civil rights and racial equality.

But what the Democrats have attempted to fashion into a singular disdain for the very idea of a white majority is in reality many competing strands, intertwined and choking one another like ivy striving toward the sun of political dominance.
Homosexuals must fear and feel superior to straights at the same time they are encouraged to mimic the same heterosexual conventions the broader sexual revolution has eroded (yet we're told heterosexuals have already destroyed marriage, so what's the problem with gays caricaturing it?); women who don't view every personal and professional disappointment as evidence of a grand patriarchal conspiracy are ungrateful traitors to feminism; Hispanics cannot be allowed to assimilate, lest they lose what in this milieu is a distinct advantage, their historical grievance and envy of "Anglos"; Asians are encouraged to ignore their disproportionate scholastic success and wealth (which would presumably be greater if not for white malice--how this squares with liberals' insistence on their belief in absolute racial equivalence goes, like its many related contradictions, unchallenged) so that they too may partake of the spoils; naturally, aspirational whites must distinguish themselves from recalcitrant whites, or conspicuously decry their race as fervently as they encourage racial pride in non-whites; blacks, our most defiantly bigoted and narrow-minded Americans in part because of their proud primacy atop this hierarchy of grievance, need no encouragement to despise and distrust the rest.

Needless to say, all are relieved of taking responsibility for their own lot, much less for the whole of the nation. Unity my ass, Mr. President. The more dependent, the more criminal, the more wretched a given population is, the greater the guilt and presumed malice of the majority--a majority which in reality bears no resemblance to the monolithic entity presumed when we speak of a "white majority". Meanwhile, global migratory patterns have been mocking the myth of Racist White America on an epic scale for over a century; one's improvement in prospects by coming to America is directly proportionate to their place in the hierarchy of grievance. No one is more fortunate to be an American than a black American. But now that "civil rights" is an Orwellian phrase, outsized ethnic pride, patronage and legal discrimination are promoted as progress in the cause of legal equality and racial tolerance. Language and logic themselves have been thrown on the funeral pyre of the liberal Western tradition. Call it a cost of diversity if you will; I call it the cost of cowardice.

The nominal party of progress and cosmopolitanism myopically promotes insularity, parochialism and ethnocentrism wherever it sees advantage therein. Where they expect to find "unity" in this morass is any one's guess; of course, their notion of unity is necessarily perverted by the demands of their creed. What they call unity is the marshaling of disparate forces for the destruction of political enemies, for swamping critical inquiry beneath the weight of aggregated prejudice. Diversity already precludes open discussion of topics such as race and ethnicity; no one wants to be told they're "inferior" (other than conspicuously self-flagellating whites). We must unite to destroy the last vestiges of a foul, former order, our betters tell us. Unity, as envisioned by Barack Obama's mandarins of mediocrity, is an assault on the liberal republic, which is by definition a polity divided to check human constants such as ethnicity, interest, faction and ambition.

The success of the Democratic party rests increasingly on the reality (and implied threat) of violence; street crime is a form of individual rebellion against an oppressive society and rioting a natural periodic occurrence, if you believe the lies that are routinely passed off unchallenged, from the president on down. That they've managed to convince many of us that right-wingers are complicit in violence with every dissent from this narrative, despite the outright encouragement of murder and mayhem they engage in as a matter of course, is testament more to our cowardice as a people than to their narrative skills.

The Republicans, revealing themselves to be as bereft of courage as they are lacking in imagination, counter that the Democrats are the true "racists", rather than challenge the destructive and divisive lie that is "racism". We too, and more than you, could be their slogan. The mentality behind this is nothing new, and was aptly and comically portrayed in the Cohen brothers' film O Brother Where Art Thou, where a more capable brain-trust around Mississippi governor Menelaus "Pappy" O'Neil debates how to respond to their opponents' successful use of a novelty:

First Advisor:
Well, it's a well-run campaign. Midget and broom and whatnot.
Second Advisor:
Devil his due. Hell of an awganisation.
Junior (Pappy's idiot son):
- Say, I got an idea.
First Advisor:
- What's that, Junior?
Junior:
-We can hire us a little fella even smaller than Stokes's.
Pappy (slaps Junior with his hat):
-Y'ignorant slope-shouldered sack a guts! Why we'd look like a buncha satchel-ass Johnnie Come-Latelies braggin' on our own midget! Don't matter how stumpy! And that's the g**damn problem right there - people think this Stokes got fresh ideas, he's oh coorant and we the past.

The Republicans of reality are less sophisticated intellectually than this fictional hayseed. Needless to say, their strategy is no winner. But they would rather be wrong and losing slower, than right and losing faster, as they see it. They are invested in a corrupt system, as junior partners. Those of us who don't know better think there's still some advantage in being right, and trust even now in the ability of our countrymen, whose resentment has been so carefully cultivated these many years, to be finally lured to reason by the truth, plainly spoken and honestly offered (let's pause here, as you and I look at each other a moment before breaking out in bitter laughter).

The Republicans are the party of corporate and military power; the Democrats are the party of misery, mediocrity and malice. The two grow closer every day, as institutions have learned the costs of imposed mediocrity in the name of equality can be passed on to consumers and citizens, and in any case are far less expensive than the price of principled resistance. So the Republicans were in no position to recognize, much less coherently critique, the fatuity of Barack Obama's "trans-formative" election. Their response was to go find a high-profile token of their own, the lamentable Michael Steele, television personality. Needless to say he has been a disaster limited only by the amount of influence he's been denied. Correcting the mistake that is Michael has been complicated by the Republicans' success in the mid-terms. The fight is on and it's t-minus twenty-four hours (at least that's what I would choose in the office pool) before Steele starts crying racism. The Republicans, drawing from a diversity well far shallower than the Democrats, get the tokens they deserve.

2010-11-15T22:23:00.004Z

Bach, Cello Suite No. 6, Prelude (BWV 1012), Mischa Maisky

Derision Qwest

2010-11-12T21:50:00.028Z

I gave in last night and called the cable company to have my Internet service resumed. After setting up an appointment with Comcast for next Tuesday I stewed over the delay (an indignity magnifying the indignity of my surrender) and decided to see what Verizon had to offer.
I discovered that one calls Qwest (here at least) to inquire about Verizon services. The first call was answered by a woman whose accent was something I'll identify as West Coast-African American surly, reading from a script, with an enthusiasm level registering in a negative value (suddenly those phony-cheery service folk are sounding a lot better).

Each simple question was received with difficulty and answered with impatience. Eventually she got around to asking, in a flat tone barely registering as inquisitive, for the "physical street" where service was needed. Already chastened by implication to take her literally, I gave her the street name where I live. Of course this caused much confusion, and I gingerly offered my full address. She protested that she had already asked me that (apparently she was prompted, and failed, to ask for a "physical street address", as opposed I presume to a metaphysical street address; most likely Qwest doesn't trust its front-line troops to be capable of distinguishing street from email addresses).
We labored on, she and I, miserable each in our own way, with the sound of at least two other customer service reps in the background nearly drowning us out until finally I decided it was best just to hang up and try again, hoping for a better match.

The next customer service representative was reached the next day--today--because three successive calls were immediately disconnected before I reached a recording saying the office had closed for the day. My next co-foil was--no joke--a girl who identified herself as (my best guess) Taniqua.
T sounded like she was twelve, tonally and grammatically, and rushed through her set-questions in little desperate flurries. I went ahead and asked my own questions anyway, despite the fact that each seemed to knock her off a laboriously gained progress; she read off her responses from a script with redoubled obtuseness the purpose of which seemed to be that the exchange should not lapse into spontaneous human interaction and thus out of her already tenuous control. Still I could only manage sympathy for Taniqua where her predecessor inspired contempt. I've been incompetent at things myself after all (I am a contender for world's worst at many of the things at which I've tried my hand), and there are few greater humiliations, though I doubt she felt anything greater than annoyance and confusion. Empathizing with her plight I said I'd give it some thought and hung up.

And yet, I could not leave it alone. A third call captured a somewhat more sentient being. I was relieved to find what sounded like a young white male--either he would be more competent or his incompetence would serve to reassure me that I wasn't that dreaded of all things, a racist. Well, Colton was much better, but he too faltered a bit at each turn to his stubborn computer (as he helpfully narrated), and I, weary not just of mind but now of my very soul as I considered these were my youthful countrymen and certainly not the worst of them, I gently, grimly, set down the receiver. Defeat. If only I had a bit more patience.

It's a beautiful day outside. Barack Obama's army of the inept hasn't broken down the gates yet, and their awful din and the stench of the liberal Western tradition they've burned behind them like bridges back to reason can still be ignored, if you retreat far enough inward. Today I thrive still. I am outside and the trees are not yet bare. The women have left their heavy coats at home; the wake of a beautiful woman is unalloyed joy. America is a blessed place of ease and wonder. For the moment.

A little horse would be my paradise

2010-08-20T02:24:00.016Z

Bruno S. 1932 - 2010

Werner Herzog found the mentally unstable Bruno Schleinstein, who was known briefly to the world as Bruno S., in a 1970 documentary called Bruno der Shwarze (Bruno the Black). At the time Bruno was a street musician, playing traditional ballads; he played piano, glockenspiel, accordion and hand bells. He spoke in declarative bursts of idiosyncratic phrasings, often referring to himself in the third person, a curious--or not so curious--affect considering the subject was often his history of suffering and despair at his state of estrangement from society. The authentic voice of the psychically wounded, which artists can only approximate, never become. Herzog cast him in two films, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek, where he played the lead characters in his own enigmatic persona, his level of awareness and engagement with the process never quite certain.

Born in 1932, Bruno may have been beaten partly deaf by his prostitute mother before being abandoned at a very young age. He ended up in an orphanage run by the Nazis, where mentally retarded children and other Reichsausschusskinder (literally "Reich Committee Children"--wards of the state) were subjected to medical experimentation. As an adult Bruno worked days as a forklift driver and nights he made music. His primary neurosis was paranoia.

Bruno's difficulty hearing may have led to a mistaken diagnosis of retardation early on (fetal alcohol syndrome must be suspected here as well); he may have lost some mental faculties as a result of beatings either at the hands of his mother or the authorities; or he may have merely been damaged psychologically by the trauma of his early life, as Herzog believes.

His strange speech produced a spontaneous poetry of woe and anguish. He was paranoid and self-pitying--and for every good reason. He walked among us as a mangled specter from a barbarous yesterday, channeling the brutality of his history in through the sputtering device that was his damaged psyche. A living reproach from a past and a capacity for evil that are both too near.

Herzog wrote Stroszek specifically to place this strange character he’d found in a grim satire of nineteen-Seventies America. Herzog uses mostly non-professional actors throughout the film as the often grotesque characters Bruno-as-Stroszek encounters in Germany and America. He escapes a murderous pimp in Berlin to the indifference of a bleak plain in rural Wisconsin. The location and locals cast in Stroszek Herzog found while lurking about the hometown of Ed Gein (something about exhuming the grave of the killer’s mother). Herzog’s view of America is much like Bruno’s view of the world, morose and bemused, but compelling for its alien, distorted-lens focus and difficult to resist. A sort of retard strength.

Bruno believed he had been exploited and abandoned by Herzog, and many agree. There’s no doubt it was exploitation, but Bruno may have nonetheless benefited in the end from his fleeting celebrity. He resented Herzog for abandoning him along with the fair weather of celebrity he brought, but for Bruno happiness, as we understand it, was not a possibility.

It is fitting that Bruno should encompass also the shifty question of what constitutes exploitation. A reality television celebrity chooses to be exploited, often to extremes; society hasn't yet an answer for these--people whose individual actions become our collective embarrassments. Bruno S. was an early “reality” figure who chose his exploitation with an awareness that may or may not be less than that shown by the average current type we've come to know. But unlike them he lost no dignity, neither his nor ours, in the process. His ability to master the world was limited, but his capacity to feel was keen; in this sense he is the opposite of the modern reality figure—who games the world, sometimes skillfully, in blithe and childlike emotional indifference.

Bruno lived on the same installment plan of contingency and compromise with an ultimately indifferent world, as we all do, but on far harsher terms. Maybe that's what transfixed us, for a time; he was like us, visible and walking about, but farther down the abyss of human cruelty. Maybe that's why he was so easily forgotten.
He unsettled and mesmerized us because what we saw, in his unguarded and expressive face, was human cruelty expressing itself as the suffering of the living host that bears it along, like a germ planted long ago and thriving still.
At some terrifying level, within us all, the suffering and cruelty are indistinguishable. How else to understand this human constant that is evil? It is in the nuances of personality that we see these awful things, make these unwanted realizations. Personality was invented in the movie theater, where the living visage, in its endless expressions, is the subject.
Bruno's face was a hopeless plea, a perpetual surrender, and a haunting reproach. May he rest, at long last.

What is (a) hate (crime)? I

2010-08-15T22:14:00.033Z

psy•cho•sis, n
loss of contact with reality: a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia or mania that is marked by delusions, hallucinations, incoherence, and distorted perceptions of reality.
Microsoft Encarta

Is it too soon, for decency, or too late, because things move fast nowadays, to speculate on the potential for an Omar Thornton fan page? Due to the solemn credulity with which the media addressed the accusations—of a killer against his still dying victims—no mass murderer has so quickly gained so high a platform for so petty a charge. When the crimination is “white racism” no decent interval is allowed. Neither, skepticism. Omar’s hearing was immediately and dutifully granted in response to his crimes, with the usual suspect “experts” weighing in—only this time on workplace discrimination, not, as we've come to expect, workplace violence.

This estimation of "racism", broadly defined, as the equivalent of violence (with the noose as a talisman and the "n-word" as incantation, both imbued with supernatural powers) is how the cultural commissariat sanctions black-on-white violence as an unfortunate but understandable means of redress.

The press response occurred at the nexus of willed ignorance and forced imagination. The sort of horrors before which this cloistered class feigns to shudder on behalf of Thornton and his ilk they can only imagine. And imagine they do, with energy and diligence. I had previously reckoned a sane man’s homicidal “breaking point” was well beyond an overheard slur, an item of graffiti, and a company’s objection to being systematically robbed by its own. Merely mentioning these charges here, even if true in their slender entirety, is to give them indecent attention. Forgive me, but this is a very dirty business.

And we still don’t know the depths to which our media will go to prove its ideological gullibility—no echoes of restraint have yet answered the pings of credulity that were the first news reports. Exhaustion, rather than shame, quelled the herd’s hysteria. We can say the farcical delusion goes at least as deep as this Christian Science Monitor headline:

Is racism at heart of Connecticut shooting? Answer still unclear.

How quaint of you, if you thought the answer all-too-clear in the case of a shooter singling out the middle-aged white men who built and sustained the company that employed and endured him (as they tend to do wherever we find productive endeavor—an unacknowledged fact explaining most of the deliberately cultivated resentment, eagerly taken up by Omar, for this, the last remaining class against which discrimination is codified into law and derision is compelled by culture). No, this "racism" doesn't interest the media. Even in the act of murder a black man isn't granted the capacity for hate that a white innocent bears like a human stain, shed not even in death. America's "original sin" is, after all, confined to white Americans in perpetuity, whoever they are and whatever they do. Sickening still, but no longer surprising.

The grotesque irony of pursuing a homicidal bigot’s complaints of racial harassment is only noticed by the irrelevant (my hand’s raised). Still, the CSM story above actually lagged the pack to the skeptical rear by featuring an authority discounting, rather than humoring or giving undue credence to, Omar’s charges. For the media the event worked like a brain-teaser, where habitual thinking leads one to miss plain meaning. You know:

one of the coins is a nickel; the doctor is the boy’s mother; the hateful murderer is the bigot.

No “but of course” moment is forthcoming. Here the press is like the ideal subject for a hypnotist’s lounge act: easily brought under, highly suggestible, shameless in its stupor, oblivious in retrospect.

This defamation of the dead isn‘t without its black comedy: the murderer was wearied, we’re told (by a callow girlfriend as oblivious to shame as the reporters encouraging her, reveling in the attention and enthusiastically adopting, as it were, the role usually reserved for a tearful mother), by the racism that just so happened to find him at every job. The chronically incompetent and stupid typically blame luck or a spiteful world for their misfortunes, and in Omar’s mind racism followed him like a personal storm cloud, manifested, I presume, in charges of tardiness, ineptitude, theft. Perhaps it is me who’s being naïve. After all, what a boundless reservoir of racism white America is!

The media’s appetite would not be sated before we were assured of the gentle nature of this man and his love for family, lovers, and handguns. One newspaper featured a photo spread of the widow (of the killer, not one of the killed), complete with an image of the tattoo consecrating her upper thigh to their love.

In this AP story some demanded (further) justice be delivered upon the dead:

Some experts said Friday that, although nothing justifies Thornton's killing spree, the allegations of workplace racism should be investigated so they can either be dealt with or laid to rest.
"You have to investigate it," said employment lawyer Kelly Scott, adding that racial harassment in the workplace is often a crime.
"Any chance you have to make your workplace a better place, a safer place, you have to take it," Scott said. "If there are people who have these attitude problems or problem dealing with other races, they should lose their jobs." [seems the company attempted just this, in firing Omar]
Sharon Toomer, founder of the website blackandbrownnews.com, called it "an accountability issue."
"If he didn't (report harassment), that's great. He's just a nut case," [but if he did...] she said. "If he did go and nobody did anything, then the company's hands are not clean." [killin' is too good for 'em]
Messages seeking comment about a potential investigation into Thornton's racism claims were left Friday for the Hartford State's Attorney's Office, the FBI's New Haven office, the chairman of the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, and for the president of the Connecticut NAACP.

Once the guilt of the dead is confirmed by the standard of federal “civil rights law”—wherein the burden of proof is on the accused (here they can be said to be doubly disadvantaged, compelled by law to prove the negative in a voice rendered silent by their accuser; damn this teacher is strict!)—remedies will be considered. Perhaps a class action suit and subsequent settlement, an injunction mandating some sort of diversity program, a donation to an activist organization (and administration ally) of the Justice Department’s selection, the hiring of some member of the elect. Ms. Sherrod is available.
It has been a teachable moment.

It's our secret! Never teach the Wu Tang!

2010-07-02T15:10:00.057Z

An Untethered News Services (UNS) exclusive:

The following video was reportedly smuggled out of a meeting of the highly secretive group known as "Journolist." According to the former member who provided it to UNS on condition of anonymity, it shows a "far too common" ritual used for purposes of initiation and punishment. Untethered cannot vouch for its authenticity, but note the individual administering punishment here does bear a striking resemblance to the group's founder. Warning: the following contains images some will find disturbing.

Our source also provided the lyrics to the group's secret anthem:

Who controls your Google hits?
Who air-brushes Gaga's tits?
We do! We do!
Who knows when you get the clap?
Who thinks you're a bunch of saps?
We do! We do!
Who's behind all those theme bars?
Who makes Jonah Hill a star?
We do! We do!
Who made Black Eyed Peas a hit?
Who deems Olbermann a wit?
We do! We do!

Despite revealing the secretive workings of the group, the former member remains committed to the idea behind it.
"Initially it was supposed to be a safe place," he said, clutching a balled-up tissue dampened by tears, "where we could share our fears and frustrations, in a non-judgmental, text-positive environment of acceptance and understanding. A place for a few hundred of our most vulnerable individuals whose only other options for such expression are in the widely circulated and influential publications they write for. A harrassment-free zone where they could share ideas and speak freely when referring to certain classes, sheltered from the chilling effect of public scrutiny."

He lamented the group's reputed demise:

"Now how will we fashion the template by which to frame the issues of the day for the average American, without being hounded into silence by populist demagogues? In a democracy such as ours, the public square is no place for forming a workable consensus. These aren't bad people; these are the best people. These are the people who relentlessly expose the hidden racism inherent in American society. These are the people who shine a light on the coded bigotry of the Tea Party movement's rhetoric. These are the people who hold public figures accountable for the intolerance they privately express. Who else is going to hold the politicians' feet to the fire when they commit a gaffe? How will they perform these vital functions if they have to answer for every opinion or remark? The beneficial, free-wheeling discourse the Founders envisioned must be protected from public scrutiny, lest it spin out of control or is taken over by the irresponsible."

He took a moment to collect himself before continuing.

"But things started to go wrong right away. Cliques formed, discussions were dominated by some, or bogged down by others who took perverse pleasure in questioning basic assumptions. I didn't sign on for that. People were being let in who shouldn't have been there. One of them was even mis-identified as our Chosen One, with disastrous consequences."
But the severity of discipline in the group was what finally drove him out:
"The paddling just got out of hand. Some of those guys took entirely too much pleasure in it--giving or receiving. I just wasn't into it, and it was getting crazy. It got so you couldn't pick a dime off the floor in there without catching a whack."
Read more of our exclusive interview in this Sunday's magazine.

Your Presence is Not Required

2010-06-30T05:24:00.042Z

This is going to end badly.
Here I am slouching through middle-age; sexually I am hors de combat, as if by some secret but final decree. I lament it but the sentence is just--and just as well (I wouldn't join any club that'd have me for a member, and I wouldn't conjoin with anyone who'd have my member); I haven't earned any better.
It's time for a hobby, perhaps. But what the hell is a hobby? A man does a thing, or he doesn't. Me, I don't do anything.

I cannot help but see the futility in all forms of action. There is nothing I feel is better done than not done; all is a wash. The moment I take up a thing is the moment I lose interest in it. I am losing my ability to distinguish worth; everything is blending together in an unindividuated mass. Society is a great burlesque; garish, farcical, and in bad taste. Beneath "reality" some equilibrium sustains itself as sure as water finding its level, and humanity is but fodder; we are the inactive ingredient. Now don't start on me. One doesn't choose to believe such things; such things choose him. I'm not a cheerless man, and I don't envy your engagement with humanity.

I find organizations inherently sinister. I despise collective action. Concern sickens me. All men are foreigners to me, speaking nonsense. I am nauseated by the pace of time--I have temporal motion sickness. The less of it that remains the more mysterious it is. Its passage, the grinding, erosive consistency of it, is beyond my capabilities of understanding. Thus my default position--petrified immobility.

It's a congenital condition; you should see the rest of the family. Our indolence is sinful. How the hell this desultory line propagated is a mystery. We are a living refutation of evolution--and God. No logic or divinity could produce this. My family's existence is a profanation. My existence, in a world of heroism and suffering, is an obscenity. Yet we endure. Yet here I am. Still standing and pointlessly defiant. And there you are.

Nonetheless I keep an eye on the horizon for something I don't expect and wouldn't recognize; I am open to the prospect of meaning. Still, it cannot change a thing, because whatever comes:
This is going to end badly.

In Memoriam

2010-06-24T23:12:00.001Z

Originally posted on June 25, 2009

The Multitude Killed the Video Star

But I am invented too for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?
–"Arthur Frayne", Zardoz

We played the grooves off of that record. My girlfriend had Michael Jackson's Off The Wall on vinyl. For a post-adolescent white trash burnout, steeped in rock and leavened in punk and new wave, listening to something so mainstream felt downright subversive. But it would have taken a deliberate act of cultural bigotry to dismiss that album. Not that I pretend to be free of such bias; selective cultural inhibition is always operative in each of us, not only in determining what we won't allow, but what which we force upon, ourselves. Witness installation art, postmodern architecture, public sculpture. It is not by accident that the more public the work the more deliberately it offends reason and beauty; if you live in a major city, there's probably more than one monument to aspirational credulity within walking distance.

Later Jackson would transcend the simple genius of his early career with the Thriller album. The unmatched commercial success of Thriller was due mostly to its associated videos. Jackson's innovation of employing experienced filmmakers using production values previously unseen in that still raw art form would pay off in orders of magnitude. But something was lost. The Thriller video struck me, as everyone around me, with its technical wizardry. But privately I couldn't help noticing how glittering and trite it all was. While achieving something new by aspiring to music-as-cinema, it was still overrated as music and not very good as cinema. Michael Jackson, for me, was over and done with. But I was glad, with a pretentious snobbery I've yet to escape, that I was maintaining a healthy critical distance from what I saw as soulless commercialism. I was still deluded in thinking that music should remain immediate and a little raw, not co-opted. I still harbor that hopeless delusion, contrary to all experience. It was always just show business, emphasis on business. The trick is to discard the pointless bias against business, as such. Easier said than done.

Michael Jackson was not the first superstar, but he may be the first to publicly renounce personhood itself in favor of renown. Michael Jackson didn't lose his individuality, he discarded it as a hindrance to celebrity. What was always unnerving about him was the absence behind the mystique. He did not start out as a "personality", real or fabricated; there was never anything there to begin with beyond the remarkable talent. Through the years I've become convinced that the absence of personality, and eventually the grotesquerie that was offered in its place, amplified that talent. We never got to know him, even as we watched him grow up. It wasn't just that he was private--lots of celebrities are "private"--it's that he deliberately crafted a persona without personhood. He cobbled together a few cliches he found romantic--the eternal child as a result of being robbed of childhood, the lonely genius, the besieged eccentric--all bathetic in their self-pitying grandiosity. Michael Jackson made himself into a comic caricature of egomania.

He refused even to accept the limits of nature, treating his physical body as if it were as malleable as his public persona. Had he been less delusional, and perhaps more ably befriended by those around him, he might have been made to see that neither of these things were very much within his control. Michael Jackson, in his repeated disfigurement under the knife, took on the vanity of the nation. In this, his most ridiculed aspect, that which is considered most "abnormal" about him, he is in fact most like us. He was, if anything, a pioneer in the realm of plastic surgery. When he started out on his gruesome way, the practice was far less common than it is now. Michael took on our vanity the way Christ takes on our sins.

After his ascension into the heavens of transformative celebrity his career itself became a work of art as imagined by the People and expressed through commerce--something both more and less than art, somehow. His public persona and the transcription of his private life in the press and on television, his representation across the modes of media, morphing along the way like his physical appearance, increasingly as grotesque caricature, became our ongoing work of performance art, with an individual as our canvas and clay. Even now, after his death, the performance continues. We are not done with Michael Jackson. He "lives" on, as he wished.

Michael's desperate megalomania and personal emptiness made him the ideal instrument of the multitude. There are many more to come. This is one more consequence of our newly global village. Contrary to our intuition, despite the boasts of those who celebrate the new placeless and personless order they are so eager to acquiesce to, the individual is losing if not lost. Individuality is less possible, more illusory than ever. Those who manage to escape the ground of obscurity for the heavens of celebrity will light this new reality as they burn out--like stars. No longer does the artist conceive for the People, but he is conceived by the People. Poor Michael Jackson, both brilliant and simple, cunning but callow, never had a chance. Whoever he was.

New Chemical Brotherhood

2010-06-24T20:49:00.010Z

Chemical Brothers, K+D+B

Kind of chokes you up, doesn't it? Ah, youth! We're no match for it! These guys are pretty impressive too:

Alternative America Phrasebook

2010-06-22T06:12:00.006Z

"Your guide to the idiom of mass delusion."

Pragmatism, n. blogspeak
The murder of principle by expedience.
See also compromise; bipartisanship.

Consensus, n. hackspeak
An agreed upon delusion.

Cadence Song

2010-06-17T21:05:00.022Z

Me? I hope to go out singing, defiantly. Like DeNiro's redneck Nemesis in Cape Fear, warbling in tongues as the rising tide consumes him. I want to play myself over this way, a segue between shows, until the dirty water fills my lungs. It's not bravery, it's denial; and denial gets a bad rap. Denial is essential. Here's to denial! Without it life would not be possible.

I had a moment of clarity--terror, that is--recently, regarding the reality of death. You may know what I'm talking about. These moments when the veil lifts, for no apparent reason. You stumble into the misty vale; you are suddenly lost. The unwelcome result of too much time alone. Solitude is dangerous. Solitude is a faint whiff of death. Solitude is death's annex. I didn't choose solitude, it chose me.

I think about death all the time, but from a cowardly psychological remove; indeed, the thinking and talking about death are just skirting about the reality, as if to appease it, or perhaps find some soft point of entry. We turn a thing over in our mind endlessly, compulsively, as if to discover it anew; we think our gaze has transforming powers. How can a thing be seen, named, obsessed over, so familiar, so present and still taunt us with its opacity and mystery?

Death is an impermeable thing because oblivion, or non-existence, is necessarily beyond comprehension. The mind cannot step outside itself in the end. You can't imagine, much less know, it; we make do with the possibility of a thing called oblivion; an alternative to the fire of redemption, before which we alternately cower or warm ourselves. But then, perhaps non-existence simply isn't possible. If energy never really dissipates, but merely transfers, morphing endlessly in an ultimately meaningless burlesque, why then should we cease to exist? Vapor, too, is a state of existence. Immortality is no less plausible than mortality. But the question cannot be answered. Each will learn--or not--for himself, alone, and only upon passing. Curious? You first.

This is why religion is a necessary constant of human behavior. Death is why the organized atheists can only piss into the wind endlessly. Theirs is a sterile zeal. Death is the darkened face of nature's mocking mystery; death will forever be the abyss, the reason why the Known will always be but a sheen over the far greater Unknown.
Buck up, friend! Come along with me! We'll sing together the tune we know by heart. We'll sing like the hopeless do, like the doomed and the damned will, when there's nothing left but the breath in their lungs. We'll shed our heartaches along the way. Think not of death but life. Death will abandon discretion to reveal himself soon enough. He's already here with us.

Basketball is Basketball, Equality is Excellence, War is Peace

2010-06-17T20:57:00.001Z

Boldly now comes the WNBA's television campaign for its new season, to accompany the NBA playoffs. Interspersing footage from both leagues the spot creates the illusion the men and women are playing together. For example, a WNBA player makes a pass; we cut to an NBA player hauling it in on his way to the basket. Several such iterations and the tag-line:
Basketball is Basketball
It is agreed. Basketball is basketball.

As a self-contained system of rules, the game is its own standard and ideal; its quality is its only valid measure. The players' identities are incidental--they are only represented by their competitive success. Why would you concern yourself with who plays, as long as they play well? I offer this as the best interpretation of the WNBA's slogan.

But how is this not precisely the WNBA's problem? It is basketball we go to see, not basketball played by X. The WNBA has the unfortunate circumstance of competing with its far superior parent league in delivering to market basketball. The women are way out of their league. Yet here they are, at once drawing our attention to and contradicting the purely sentimental nature of their appeal. Basketball is basketball, sister.

Any league not open to all is a novelty act. Akin to a six-foot-or-under league, of which we would make no pretense of parity with the NBA. Why, then, does the WNBA exist? If there is some demand for off-season professional basketball, why not another open league (which in turn might not be too competitive for the better female players)?

But "basketball is basketball" can have another meaning besides that which I've assumed thus far. So just to be thorough. It can also mean:
discernment in basketball is unwarranted because quality is trivial or uniform.
If you've seen one game you've seen them all. Call it the "parts is parts" fallacy. This exhausts reasonable interpretations of the slogan at two, and they are mutually exclusive.

Thus we have a phrase that is literal nonsense yet holds in potential two contradictory meanings; it is and isn't. What a perfect foil for the encouraged chaos of cut-and-paste. Here it blends together the superior with the inferior deliberately to conflate them, to the benefit of the inferior over the superior. As the advertisement's visual creates the illusion of one game by splicing together two, likewise the text splices together one meaning from two. The WNBA offers, as needed, two fluid options to guide us to the Nirvana of egalitarian bliss: ignore inferiority or disregard excellence.

Not that anyone is paying attention, much less defending the integrity of the language, but the slogan, mild doublespeak that it is, is the inclusion argument boiled down to its essence; all the energy they concentrate in their concise palindrome backfires and only serves to reveal that equality degrades excellence ("equality" as defaced by the modifier "social"; alternatively "inclusion," or "anti-discrimination"). In any given instance, more of one ensures less of the other. Yet we are conditioned to believe the effect is non-existent, trivial or even opposite. Why?

Our elite is divided between those invested in and those cowed by the advance of a federally administered regime of equality. Thus too-evident instances of of equality degrading excellence and impoverishing the common good are collective embarrassments, not only as individual failures of policy, but as evidence of the constant--equality degrades excellence. The more "equality" the equalitarian gets the greater its cost, the plainer its effects, the more he must hide. He is not alone, however; the need to conceal this corrosive process has as many allies as excellence has enemies, always ready to take up pitchfork and put torch to the affronts to vanity and pride that are Truth, Beauty, God. Only here the rabble is roused on behalf of power and the status quo. We have drifted into a historical novelty: we have an elite that demands disdain for tradition, custom, history. What then do they consider their mandate? A certain definition of excellence, ironically.

Meanwhile, the NBA is a singular story of merit by excellence overcoming social and sentimental bias, justly celebrated as a civil rights accomplishment yet, less noted, demolishing the queer premise upon which civil rights law and culture is based. That premise: American culture degrades and represses minorities and all groups are equally blessed with the host of human talents.

A group representing some seven percent of the US population (before accounting for age), setting out with every social and many legal conventions against it and armed only with exceptional ability, took one generation to to dominate professional basketball--transforming the game in the process. Today black American men still represent eighty percent of the NBA, even as they've made it so successful it draws talent from around the world. This attests equally to the unprecedented fairness of the league and nation on one hand and the racial diversity of human talent on the other.

Not only has white America rejected sentiment in favor of the superiority of the black game, the stunning display of racial disparity on display is itself largely responsible for the success of the league--white fascination with black physical talent as a superior and therefore good thing. A recognizably Western impulse. Western (and if the following carried negative connotations we would be allowed "white") creativity propels the story through various media, its ingenuity delivers it in high definition to your home, its industry daily manages the logistics of filling arenas with the reverential. African athleticism made transcendent by American imagination and industry. Is there anything comparable in history? A little respect, please.

It is not forthcoming. The celebration of this story grows progressively shriller, as if in inverse proportion to the improving material condition of its beneficiaries. The narrative focuses almost entirely on the storming of the barriers--not of their creative dismantling. Taken as part of the larger civil rights narrative it is presumed the barriers remain, their latency here contingent on our militant stance against them, active most everywhere else. But the true lesson lies in the relative ease with which longstanding social prohibition gave way permanently to excellence.

But the broader cultural emanations from this frank display of what still seems like a mystical talent to white America transcend basketball, combining with black excellence in popular music to level an entire complex of traditional barriers to blacks; once habitually taken as inferior, now considered superior in many aspects; envied, emulated, exploited into cultural preeminence.
The milieu demands however the writer frame the cracker here, yet again: the nation is uniquely neurotic regarding race, what with all this fascination with it! This sort of thing often from sportswriters, as if to absolve themselves of that they so conspicuously ridicule or abhor, shocked, shocked. But the story is not told. Racist exploitation has made Black America a cultural colossus.

Indeed, it is not an imagined human uniformity but racial diversity, and its complementary nature, that acts as a catalyst to excellence in an exploitative process that nonetheless empowers the exploited. This could only happen in an overarching culture with the energy, creativity and fairness--the excellence--of America. Ironically, when we are compelled to pledge "diversity is strength" the meaning is opposite (roughly: diversity is our strength because we're all the same and no culture is superior--a patent absurdity!) and the intention is to scandalize this reality in the popular mind, contradicting as it does elite convention--rather, convention prescribed for us by the elite.

Equality is a conceit only societies made wealthy through discrimination can afford (or a disease only wealthy societies contract). We have so long been wealthy and thus conditioned to humor this sentiment that it has become an unexamined article of faith. That conditioning is evidenced by the oblivious confidence of the accusation (women!) implicit in the WNBA slogan: that we aren't giving the women a fair shot! They truly know not what they say.

None of this of course means the WNBA hasn't the right to exist, or that its athletes aren't worthy, or that it might not carve out an economic niche and justify the NBA's subsidy; it just means we would do well not to allow them the affront that is this slogan. If people will create and nourish the WNBA God bless them. But that does not entitle them to abuse the language or logic. You can have your ladies' league and I wish you well; but you cannot then have your "basketball is basketball" pretense. No ma'am.

As demonstrated by the NBA's example, excellence and equality are at odds. In the case of the NBA's wardship of the WNBA, excellence humors equality, because it can afford to. American history in aphorism! Long may she wave!

Pessimistic as we imagine we've become about the nation's economic prospects, we nonetheless dutifully assume an endless summer of rising tax revenue to fund the ever-increasing cost of our condescension. We presume the creativity and industry of the resented will outrace the demands of resentment in perpetuity. This resentment is far more nurtured than confronted by our creative class, as jealously as if it were their own. Which it is, of course; as an artistic form, the civil rights genre now is where class bigotry goes to masquerade as enlightenment.

If it seems the narrative has become indulgent, pornographic even, that's because it has. Self-interested but still less rational than emotional. We now have an elite that not only doesn't care what is good for the common, it doesn't know what is good for itself. Our modern inversion: an excitable, bigoted and irrational elite in need of the calming influence of a wise and engaged population. Ah, to have one!

Where might our defensive wisdom begin? By critical examination of just such Orwellian tropes as the WNBA slogan. The fact that it is merely an advertisement, or "just basketball", shouldn't pardon it. This is where merit should make its stand, out here on the front line of the assault on excellence, where language and logic are the collateral damage. Exposure, examination, ridicule; these are the weapons of the insurgency.

The WNBA's egalitarian experiment is a tap stuck into the broad trunk of the NBA--the very bounty of human inequality--diverting a trickle for the purpose of sentimental inclusion. Embarrassed by this fact, the WNBA distracts from its inferiority through artful subterfuge and chides us for our bias even as it claims privilege. Is there a better model of the Token State?

Can it suggest something of the costs of that state and its definition of equality, out here in the world where the individual's spoils are humbler and the collective consequences graver? After all, the law is the law, engineering is engineering, firefighting is firefighting, medicine is medicine. That disparity in quality the WNBA wants you to ignore isn't an anomaly, but a small, exposed section of something vast and deliberately misunderstood.

Of course, what the WNBA is really about is making women more like men. Which prompts a whole new why?

Alternative America Phrasebook

2010-06-15T19:45:00.021Z

"Your guide to the idiom of mass delusion"

Thoughtfulness, n., blogspeak:
1. Cowardice or careerism taken or presented as reflection, meditation, or contemplation.
2. Deference to convention or power; self-censorship to avoid offense or the degradation of one's professional prospects.
3. Intellectual conformance driven by a fear of social ostracism.

Thoughtful, a.
Milquetoast; mealy-mouthed; compliant; harmless; irrelevant; boring; lemming-like; chicken-shit; etc.

see also Seriousness/Serious

re-runs

2010-05-13T02:14:00.005Z

An inborn dread, a sort of latent panic familiar to my line, preceded me. This inherent conviction that things must go wrong will not be loosed by any device of socialization, rebellion, or medication. Ironically, this same fixedness in the breast of its unfortunate host makes it perfectly portable, and impervious to geography--maybe this is why my people have propelled themselves across all parts of the globe, as if in flight from this dread; maybe this is why now we seem determined to self-dissipate as a race. We can run but we can't hide.

Even this curious adaptation works as if it has its own ambition and designs, treating us as the means to our own end. A long line of dull, placid farmers crossed the Atlantic to become dull, placid American farmers, settling in square-head country in the perennially freezing dead-center of the continent, where we felt at home. At some point we were displaced from land to city, and, characteristically unaware, set upon a modest decline from modest heights. We are being deselected.
The pioneers came west drawn by horses on wooden wheels over wild country. Years later it was rubber on asphalt, a trail of noxious fumes, and little fortitude required. A group bound by no comparable shared act of passage, by nothing in particular. I am of this family.
The last leg of our white trash odyssey was the motor journey into the American West, merging along the way with the Okies and the wetbacks, with the disillusioned alongside the delusional, the failed and the ambitious, those on the lamb and them on the make, all holding in common a crisis of options; to California.

That lump in your throat is childhood passing

2010-05-12T20:28:00.011Z

Summer. Nineteen eighty-something. We were parting the traffic on the 605 southbound for Huntington Beach; I was wearing nothing but shorts and sandals, one hand holding on to the motorcycle seat, the other cradling a six-pack of beer, football-style. We leaned headlong into the wind like a pair of ski-jumpers, as P. effortlessly weaved the stodgy Honda CB350 through the cars, rendering them still as haystacks. I peered into them as we passed, looking for girls. My head rocked with spontaneous energy, to some silent beat, the effect of the youth spending itself within me. The exquisite expiration of childhood. We shouted back and forth in the gale we carried along with us, laughing through mouths windswept into lunatic grins; we cheerfully harried the odd fellow who was momentarily abreast and sharing our direction. We turned with the road into a direct and endless path toward a sun that will never set...

The Dandy Warhols, Grunge Betty

Pot to Kettle! Come in, Kettle!

2010-05-11T22:58:00.003Z

David Brooks glimpses the matrix darkly through Elena Kagan:

She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.

2010-03-07T12:32:00.000Z

Re-posted with Oscar night open thread in comments below!

Good news and bad. Our associates from the Storyboard blog have brought over three cases of Os and other much needed supplies. But no sooner is one gap closed than another opens up; Dolores, our longtime and beloved comment moderator, will be leaving Untethered today. We can no longer afford her services. Other staff members will be filling in, when possible, to pluck the pearls of thoughtful commentary (should they appear) out of the slow ooze of spam.
A heartfelt thanks to Dolores, on behalf of us all. We shall miss your homemade muffins every Friday. What cheer you brought to your often unpleasant task of sifting through the insipid and insolent commentary that the blog attracts! The pointless and the profane, you called it in your inimitable humor. We will hold the gate as best we can, and until we at last succumb your satirically stentorian "none shall pass" will resound in these halls.
Godspeed, Dolly!

I Love You! I Really, Really Love You!

2010-02-28T10:40:00.021Z

The New York Times' Caucus Blog didn't note if Van Jones teared up when addressing Glenn Beck directly in a speech to the NAACP, but I insist on believing he did. It renders the image so much creepier, and that much more entertaining, when he does a Sally Field channels Jim Jones by way of Bob Marley [update: with a--how could I have missed it?--shout-out to Avatar ("I see you"*)]:

“I see you, and I love you, brother,” Mr. Jones said. “I love you and you cannot do anything about it. I love you and you cannot do anything about it. Let’s be one country. Let’s be one country. Let’s get the job done.”

I'm going to love you forever, or until the weight of my love caves your skull in. Jones was in Los Angeles accepting an award, apparently for some artful obfuscation conflating "green jobs" (not to be confused with "little green men"--much more often sighted, if slightly harder to verify) and civil rights, thus diverting some portion of the public purse to a grateful political network. The actual wording of the award citation may have differed somewhat.

Anger on the Left over Jones losing his scalp was more aroused by who would wear it, the hated Beck, than by the loss of Jones, whom Beck raised for his purpose from a deserved obscurity (for the man, not his former office, which deserves much more skeptical clarity). It's understandable; Beck and his ilk are not sated by these political kills but only made hungrier. So a Van What's-His-Name is beside the point--it's the principle, so to speak, of the thing.

But Rahm Emmanuel, being no fool (witness the lack of public declarations of personal love for political enemies), must have viewed Jones as a relatively cheap loss, and one better taken earlier rather than later. A guy like that has the potential to become a real embarrassment down the road, and if you've already satisfied one campaign-debt with the absurdity of Van Jones, Green Jobs Czar, indeed, if you can essentially retire that debt early, well... Van Jones was the political equivalent of the decoy flares aircraft jettison to fake-out heat-seeking missiles. Or he would be, if such systems held the potential to explode unexpectedly in flight. Good riddance.

I, however, join those lefties who still lament the loss, if not for the same reasons. Van Jones would have made great theater. You're right, this isn't fair at all--he is making great theater. Here's hoping he gets the roles and attention commensurate with his talent. His most recent performance proves his commitment to his art and devotion to celebrity. Acting takes the courage to risk your dignity; or so actors and their acolytes insist, endlessly, often in undignified fashion. So, in my best imitation of James Lipton's purring drawl I say: Bravo, Van Jones! Encore!

*alternate title, for the Freudian-themed Horror Film version: Vangina, The All-Seeing Eye.

2010-02-27T23:47:00.004Z

I'm afraid m0re financial tr0uble t0 rep0rt here. We've c0mpletely exhausted 0ur supply 0f a certain v0wel, and haven't the means as yet to resupply; we'll be making d0, as y0u see here. And still, m0re semi-c0l0ns than we kn0w what to d0 with! Perhaps we can arrange s0me s0rt of barter with s0me0ne 0ut there? We als0 have Qs c0ming 0ut 0ur ears!

2010-02-23T07:59:00.036Z

--Oh, the earth is the best! That's why I'm a vegetarian.
--Well, that's a start.
--Uh, well, I was thinking of going vegan.
--I'm a level 5 vegan -- I won't eat anything that casts a shadow.
The Simpsons

If this year's newly broadened selection of Oscar nominees for Best Picture, doubled from five to ten, isn't quite as silly as the Dodo's demand that "all must have prizes", it is enlivened by the same spirit. All must have honorable mention, and any boost in video rental revenue that might accrue from it, in the hard commercial reality that is our side of the looking glass.

Perhaps the diluted field of nominees will subsequently dilute the indignation of arbiter elegantiarum and also-ran alike when the Academy, say, acquiesces to the brute force of box office by honoring the technological brilliance and treacly storytelling of Avatar, or, observing some other shadowy political consideration, declares the shopworn caricature of masculinity at war that is Kathryn Bigelow's capable but unexceptional The Hurt Locker worthiest of worthies. There are more important foci for one's outrage after all.

Speaking only for myself and having just endured Avatar with a novel combination of awe and abhorrence, I must give Mr. Cameron his due, earned by the sheer scale of his ambition and the fruits of his technical innovations. Uncle. If today's self-styled cognoscenti condition their praise (or praise mostly out of fear Cameron--or an avatar thereof--will turn up at their door in some sort of amphibious/aircraft/diving-bell plaything), tomorrow's will resurrect him in some future Next New Wave movement. Right now it's just "too soon", like joking about a recent human calamity.

Still, I protest hoarsely through this constricted windpipe: while I understand the epic expenditures of these films necessitate a simplified story that travels well from language to language, need they be so cloyingly cliched? To resort so reliably to hoary politico-sociological themes? I'm just asking. The vast back-catalogue of Western art that is our great public domain brims with basic, broad story-lines that have long ago proven their cross-cultural appeal. Pick a template and leave the demagogy to the politicians, I shout up at the colossus (only echoes answer).

Cameron's recourse to the theme of colonial capitalism despoiling a land and the wise pastoral folk intimately connected to it for his science fiction epic takes fashionable liberal misanthropy to its logical conclusion. You hate the rich? The West? White people? The male sex? Corporations? All of the above? Sluggard! We hate humans. Game, set, match.

But where does one go from here? The charitable view has Cameron merely throwing red meat (or, more appropriately, something fair-trade and/or free-range) to the censorious set to pacify them as he indulges his, and our, appetite for spectacle. It's a shopworn conceit already after all (I'm sure I recall "I don't like humans" surfacing as an epithet for this passé pose years ago among the hipsters). But what to do when, once led by the Sherpas of sanctimony to the summit of conspicuous contrition, we find the land already settled? Come back down, I implore; way too much development on Mt. Misanthrope.

But this is no answer for the ambitious. As a general in the regnant cultural empire, he must conquer new territory always, thematically as well as technologically. It matters little to the martial hero what standard he bears, as long as it bears him. So, if the noble ideal of racial equality, bogged down in the stubborn swamps of human nature, had to turn on itself and declare first that one race (guess which) should become the cathartic repository of the resentment of the rest, then finally that race as such is an illusion (created by the aforementioned "race" and its "science", thereby brilliantly adapting the shoddy narrative while keeping its villain ever in the foreground) then it necessarily follows that the species itself eventually has to fall from grace.

This we already know as the extreme boundary of environmentalism. Just as the noble ideal of equality of the races of man before God withered in the absence of God and became the perversion, and inversion, it now is, the eminently practical ideal of maintaining the environment for humanity's preservation has gone the same route. Some now proclaim humanity is the disease threatening the environment's preservation. First the White man as scourge of the globe, now the species as a whole is the great cosmic pestilence. Next up: "species" do not exist.

Forgiveness is a necessary component of the movie-going experience for all but the best directors in this cinematic Age of Indulgence. All things being equal, artistic freedom is a good thing. But when are all things ever equal? Many of today's directors would benefit from a little more harness (I know we would). Taking in a little Tarantino? Don your lead apron of lenience against the careless doctor's irradiation of idiocy. Bring a jumbo-sized tub of forbearance, salt it as necessary with resolve, and enjoy the pretty flashing pictures. Just don't confuse them with reality, or imbue them with morality.

Possession

2009-12-13T08:01:00.070Z

I confess I've never been overtaken entirely by passion. I've never given myself over unconditionally and without reservation to anything; neither joy nor grief, hate nor love. Likewise for any given idea; but this is just another way of saying the same thing, for the passions are ideas too. The purest ideas, confounding transposition into mere language and only hinted at by even the most sublime art. One has to live such ideas. The poets tell us the lover, as opposed to the merely amorous, is a zealot prepared to accept death itself on behalf of the idea of love.

But for me always there is an inaccessible self-consciousness, a clinical awareness that becomes alien. There is a foreigner within narrating the varying circumstances of my existence: so this is Dennis stricken with grief; so this is Dennis afflicted by love; etc. It has taken in every tragedy or conquest, every humiliation and all the pride, unaffected. This awareness constitutes, impossible I know, a distinct entity. Another Dennis.

I've always had my suspicions about this separate consciousness that is not conscience. It's not the opposite of the conscience, but the absence of it, that part between mindless instinct and moral self-awareness. It--he--observes me as if from without. He waits for the thing, whatever it is, to end; he makes no distinctions of geography--the peak of Everest or the easy chair, it's no difference. He takes everything in with a wonder-less curiosity, and never with surprise, even as he takes note of the novelty of a given occurrence, how familiar it is, or not, how it might change the dynamic of my existence, but not really, because, he knows, it's all just protocol and convention in the end, until it all ends--and this I expect he will witness with the same idle, abstract gaze. He is impossibly inhuman.

But there he is, always, looking down on the confusion of my psyche as if through impenetrable glass. I can only dimly sense his formless presence behind the reflection I cast on the pane separating us--of me, unsentimental and unforgiving in its clarity. He sees all and records nothing; he doesn't care. He humors no vanity. He has the goods on me; he doesn't care. He taunts me with his lack of reproach for anything, great or small. He will not be run off; he can't be gotten to. His indifference is eternal, mocking, superior.

I've felt passion, of course, even "deeply", whatever that means to you. But if a man hasn't at least once been "consumed" or "blinded" by passion, whether it be love or hate (and what's the difference, in the end, between these inversions of each other?), he cannot say he knows them. It then follows that he cannot recognize them in others; he can only behave as if he understands. He knows what a thing is supposed to look like and responds accordingly, in the interests of order, but mostly out of habit. Eastern mystics of one sort or another--and I can't tell them apart--might say he is unrealized as a human being.

But a human can only be human, in part and in whole, no more or less in the depths of "inhumanity", and always. The depraved man appalls us not only for his deeds but for his irrefutable demonstration of humanity's potential for evil; it must then follow that he demonstrates for each of us our own capacity for evil, because we cannot escape the bond that is our shared humanity. With each transgression the evil expand the Devil's realm, as surely as the the great establish the uppermost boundaries of human achievement. Every iteration of a man is an argument on behalf of and proving itself; lives committed to malice, lives sacrificed selflessly or stupidly, "madmen", lives "wasted" to sloth or obsession; all are competing models of man. No man can escape the assertion that is his life; he lives as he would have everyone live. Each life is the proposition: "this is Man."

There is some sort of accommodation between the reasoning frontal lobe and the reptilian brain stem, a Faustian bargain, a grotesque, conjoined symbiosis, right here in my head. Here appetite meets abstraction. A devil's workshop fashioning rationales for base impulse. It's a bureaucracy employed in legalizing anything, as needed. But it is not immoral--that would be too human, a transgression of morality and thus a recognition of it, leaving the prospect for contrition and redemption; it is amoral. It's out of this world, man.

A Christian might call him the Devil. Popular convention calls him "detachment", a sort of psychological debilitation, an unfortunate byproduct of modern society, or of Society; a decayed capacity to feel resulting from the ease and equivocal nature of the age; a problem of too little struggle--and too much time. One convention even, ironically, blames Convention. Vanity imagines him as a superior posture. Psychology gives him one name after another, as if to coax him out by finally landing on the magic invocation; after long and total failure, this science of the mind resorts finally, crassly, to myriad refinements and specialized forms of the original, temporary solace from the alien self: the intoxication and suppression of the senses.

These answers may suffice for a time, even a lifetime, but in the end they all fall short, because they allow for some accommodation or destruction of the demon. Even the Devil cowers before God, just as we mortals do. I am witness: my demon is a constant in presence, measure, and autonomy, immutable and ageless, there from the flash of conception to a death he will likely witness with the same impenetrable indifference. But in the end he cannot be separate, even if he confounds my will to the end; he is central, he is in fact the last reducible part of me, to be resolved by fire or oblivion, as the case may be. He will not distinguish between these two, therefore I cannot. I speak only for myself, understand.

Barry Bugs Out

2009-12-06T04:39:00.026Z

Tom Englehardt nails the true nature of President Obama's address to cadets at West Point:

Certainly, the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory military path chosen in Afghanistan, but represented a kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.

Rush Limbaugh's wistful musing about a military coup is more oblivious than devious: after a perfunctory, brief struggle, the coup is victorious (Of course, if the president had been arrested at West Point and replaced with a military junta, I'm not entirely sure Limbaugh wouldn't find a way to justify it. Are you?). Under political duress, the president has accepted the role of conditional, if not yet nominal, Commander-in-Chief, surrendering an authority he doesn't want and wouldn't know what to do with anyway. Now he bites his nails and waits, like the rest of us.

But it's not the president's prerogative to divest himself of command over the armed forces to avoid its political consequences--elite convention notwithstanding. The extraordinary executive power over war itself remains, insulated from legislative or judicial interference, nominally vested in an elected president, wielded by a cabal. This is dereliction of duty of the highest order. The Commander in Chief has abandoned his post to cower in the rear while his mutinous subordinates take command.

But okay, this is all retrograde and simplistic, I know. Just the sort of thing to set elite eyes rolling, like taking the Constitution and sovereignty too seriously. Let's crassly accept the "political reality" and acknowledge the asymmetry between the White House and the the military establishment :

The Pentagon dictates policy directly to the Republican Party, Fox News, conservative radio and Internet, while fighting to a draw in the contested middle that is the the unallied media.
Obama, on the other hand, leads a party divided on the war and has a more conditional alliance with a media complex--MSNBC, NPR, etc.--that is both less powerful and less subservient than their adversaries. It's no great boast, but the liberal media and Democratic Party have, on this issue, shown superior independence and character. The difference casts in relief the decadence of the Republican Party and its staunchest media organs.

Meanwhile, in the Boy Wonder's White House Joseph Biden, garrulous and glib, self-imagined Caesar to Iraq's Gaul, is what passes for a pragmatist and sage. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (her position the product of a previous political capitulation), known for taking flight in hectoring recrimination before the galling indignity that is the unscripted media encounter, is sent abroad to placate a resentful world. The charmless representing the clueless. God help us.

2009-12-03T08:09:00.003Z

I think I am allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern history, that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to do; and, pardon me, but there's not much chance that you're the exception, any more than I was. If you were born in a country in a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you're not a better person. Because if you have the arrogance to think you are, that's just where the danger begins.

--The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell

D'uhccuse...!

2009-11-23T08:23:00.064Z

He's just saying there's nothing wrong with that.

Well, they look like a white crowd to me. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it is pretty monochromatic up here. No surprise in terms of the ethnic nature of the people showing up. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a fact. I think there's a tribal aspect to this thing, in other words, whites versus other people. I think [Sarah Palin]'s very smart about this.
--Chris Matthews, television journalist

Chris Matthews' self-awareness is notoriously suspect. His analyses of the national psyche, to the extent they are coherent, typically reveal more about him than to him, and often. His random digressions branch off one after another, shedding the pungent, overripe fruit of his personal Tree of Knowledge. Around him his fellows navigate with care, watching where they step, casting nervous glances upward at the slightest sound.

Perhaps they feel some embarrassment at one of their own speaking too freely in front of the help; what's revealed is not just one man's coarse intellect, but the prejudices and delusions of an entire class. Chris Matthews can't maintain the ruse because he doesn't know it's a ruse. Still, he perpetuates it. Chris Matthews has managed to dupe himself, if no one else. Chris Matthews lacks situational awareness.

Not long ago, his undisciplined emotionalism would have been discouraged as a feminine preference for impulse over reserve; it would have been deemed unmanly. In that light Matthews' notorious masculinity fetish is neither homoerotic nor misogynist, but an honest fascination with a foreign point of view. His sexual boorishness is a failed interpretation of masculinity, lapsing into caricature. His visceral reaction to Hillary Clinton, catty.

But no one deliberately sets out to make himself a fool--unless he does it on television. Of these there are two kinds, the actor who plays the fool for our amusement and the fool who is lured before the camera, for our amusement. The most common form of the latter is the reality show participant.
Reality television democratized, ergo de-mythologized, celebrity. Distinctions are blurred in the ensuing chaos. In the post-revolutionary order professionals have ceded some local narrative control to the audience. Indeed, the spontaneous narrative that Reality television, and now "viral" Internet material, attempts is not a foreign product introduced to the people, but is generated from within them, performed by them and consumed by them. The author is the hive. Production is superfluous.

The viewer has grown used to (if not the reality, the conceit of) providing his own narrative. He is increasingly adept and accustomed to this. This is one tough crowd.
Thus the industry of television is confronted with a transfer of expertise to the audience, a sort of purchasing power; "media personalities" have less control over their media personalities. Television journalists used to be the gatekeepers of the information flow, now they are deluged along with everyone else in the flood. They have lost their monopoly on reality.

Its individuals must adapt to the new evolutionary environment; "redefine" themselves, in euphemism. The desperate scramble produces new, grotesque hybrids; shape shifters alternating between, and sometimes straddling, traditional and Reality television. No one yet understands what is happening. Reality TV aspires to surveillance of the individual by the mass; multiple raw feeds strategically located. It's a medium-specific tyranny of the majority. Professionals, once mystical creatures, have lost their former privilege. Everyone is fair game.

Matthews, like Tyra Banks or any other regular on The Soup, is a media personality less sophisticated than his audience and less aware of the nature of his performance. Chris Matthews is reality television.

The audience is no longer helpless and docile. It rebels against kitsch and manipulation. Anything introduced into the veg-o-matic of popular culture is now broken down, sampled and pilfered, recombined. The artist loses control over his work once it's released into this wild. Television's non-fictional performers are subject to this as well. The audience crafts additional or alternative narratives; unearths unintended subtexts; improvises parody of inferior work. These are defensive strategies. If we're not to be rid of them we are obliged by a sense of decency to ridicule a Tyra Banks or a Chris Matthews. One must marvel. One must not take some people seriously.

But he must consider them seriously, as symptoms of the human condition. After all, the joke is ultimately on us.
Reality television is the gallows humor of a culture self-slated for execution. The greater part of its appeal is not, as first glance suggests, the sugar-rush ridicule of one's inferiors; it's the bitter acknowledgement they are, after all, our fellows, countrymen, kin even. They are us.

You complain: Reality television shows a perversely select group. Yes; but it does not necessarily follow they're a meaner lot than the whole. After all, some are too wretched even to make it past first cut at For the Love of Ray J. How great is their number?

We may yet know. Commerce ensures new contrivances for luring their basest natures into the electronic square are even now being worked up by some of our sharpest young minds. Decent kids every one, no doubt.

Reality television has only begun charting the depths of human greed. By "greed" I mean also greed for love, status, attention. Like it or not, reality television is a valuable artifact of the present. But the ever-shifting lineup of "reality's" global community theater all manage to delude themselves in the end into thinking they are stars.

Reality TV is a living document of our decadent end. It was, after all, the poet-cum-charlatan-cum-"satanist" Aleister Crowley who declared

Every man and woman is a star

and began his "Book of the Law" with

Do what thou wilt will be the whole of the law
(commerce, I presume, necessitated a book-length addendum to this perfectly concise, all-encompassing statement of principle).

Reality television has never been more succinctly defined. You're the star; do what you will. Here it is prefigured before television. It just as neatly sums up current popular convention. "Reality", a long time latent, has been released into the atmosphere we all share. Its intrusive nature interrogates high and low. Its endless iterations are unforeseeable. The confused persona we know as "Chris Matthews" is one measure of its progress.

The More Things Change...

2009-11-15T00:24:00.017Z

From a former jar-head friend now working in Afghanistan as a contractor:

About the only thing you really need to stockpile is patience because it's a military/government project, where the sad but common saying is "f--k up, move up". You'd be astounded at the incompetence and how deep and swift it can flow through here sometimes. You remember.

I want to make an anti-Ken Burns documentary someday, for our decade's Iraq/AfPak project: over stills of soldiers in the field, accompanied by a soundtrack of melodramatic strings, a voice-over (is James Earl Jones still doing voice work?) reads letters and emails home; but instead of co-opting the chivalrous eloquence of the nineteenth century to romanticise the massacre from the comfort of our temporal remove, we get the contemporary voice and the gruesome comedy. Plain, unsentimental, profane, resigned. And a thousand times truer.

Oh, wait. It's been done:

cowardice

2009-11-11T07:44:00.025Z

This is a little embarrassing.

I thought I might write my way out of here. Setting messages in virtual bottles adrift in the electronic ether. Someone would find one, send out a search party. I would finally join society, whatever that meant. I had an idea of what it was, gleaned from a lifetime of secondhand accounts warped by the demented lens of electronic media. These posts are my various attempts to mimic that, to conjure in reality what I see in representation, as, increasingly, is the whole of my behavior. I'm a one man cargo cult.

Years ago, before my self-delusion was finally spent, before I finally accepted as chosen this isolation incrementally achieved through countless retreats from various relationships to the "outside world", that is to say humanity, I thought of my existence as taking place in a darkened room. There is a door somewhere, but I can't see it. I can only grope about in the dark, walking the wall with my hands. I could not know if I was endlessly retracing the same circuitous route in a tomb, or moving down an endless hall. But as long as I had faith in the existence of the door I was alright. It would lead me out; I would have friends, lovers, enemies. I would be normal, finally. This has been the unachievable goal I've set for myself. I would be part of a greater whole, drawing strength from it, rather than a whole unto myself, consuming my own psychic innards until my hollow, gelatinous shell caves in upon itself in a rubbery heap.

But delusion fades over time. Now I know: there is no door. The darkness is mine, projected outward. I cherish the room as all I know, because it is. I don't want to leave, therefore I cannot leave. I'm going to die in here. But I do miss the idea of the door. We are all precisely where we have chosen to be.
Save yourselves.

The Sacred and the Vulgar

2009-11-11T05:34:00.006Z

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

--Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Lone Wolf Tickets

2009-11-07T05:19:00.013Z

A question. Has anyone yet attempted to leverage yesterday's tragedy at Fort Hood into a defense of the Patriot Act's "lone wolf" provision? Maybe the question is not if, but when. I'm thinking of starting a pool.
Of course it may not be necessary. Yesterday* the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to extend three provisions: roving wiretaps; section 215, or the "libraries provision" diminishing privacy rights; and the "lone wolf" provision, which should probably be renamed the "pack of wolves" provision, for its potential (arguably inevitable) future misuse against political "radicals", as defined by whatever pack is in power.

[*correction: the House Judiciary Committee voted on Nov. 5 to allow the LW provison to expire; the Senate Judiciary voted last month to extend all three]

update: Speaking of grassroots terrorism, if the Seattle police are right, a man now in critical condition who was shot and arrested earlier today for the assassination-style killing of a Seattle police officer was waging a terrorist campaign of his own (with at least one accomplice) against the city's police department. According to police, Christopher Monfort, an Obama-lookalike with a similar biracial background, is also a suspect in an arson case involving the torching of several police vehicles at a motor pool. The arsonist left a note promising to kill police officers. Monfort is a University of Washington graduate and sometime activist:

Monfort received a bachelor's degree from the UW in March 2008, according to the university's degree-validation Web site. His major was in Law, Societies and Justice.

Last year, Monfort belonged to the McNair Scholars Program, part of the university's office of Minority Affairs and Diversity. The program aims to steep undergraduate students in sophisticated research, preparing them for graduate work.

Monfort provided this title for his project with the McNair program: "The Power of Citizenship Your Government Doesn't Want You to Know About: How to Change the Inequity of the Criminal Justice System Immediately, Through Active Citizen Nullification of Laws, As a Juror."

In an abstract of his project, Monfort said he planned to "illuminate and further" the scholarship of Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University. Butler is a proponent of jury nullification, a controversial principle whereby jurors feel free to disregard a judge's instructions and acquit a defendant no matter the strength of the evidence.

Butler has argued that such nullification may be particularly appropriate in cases where black defendants are charged with nonviolent crimes.

"It is the moral responsibility of black jurors to emancipate some guilty black outlaws," Butler wrote in a 1995 Yale Law Journal article, adding: "My goal is the subversion of American criminal justice, at least as it now exists."

update II: Seattle police now claim to have found bomb-making materials and more evidence linking Monfort to the arson and the murder, and have declared him a "domestic terrorist."

update III: After initially speculating that Monfort acted with one or two accomplices, they are now saying he acted alone

2009-10-26T06:26:00.006Z

Blockhead, Insomniac Olympics

Sparks, I Wish I Looked a Little Better (1983)

Narrative Blowback

2009-09-08T08:22:00.022Z

Has the media's recoiling fascination with the Angry White Mobs of health care reform's roadshow crippled that effort and stalled the Obama administration?

Marshaling evidence to that effect, liberal codger E.J.Dionne, for one, draws the only relevant conclusion: there is no such thing as a "liberal media bias." In giving the "tea-baggers" all that sneering attention,the media overstated their numbers and fury; and as we all know consequence equals intent and consequences are always intended. Employing their conspiratorial mob tactics (political organization and assembly, raised voices, unfashionable clothing) they snookered the media into acting as their own oblivious man behind the curtain, projecting the illusion of a powerful force. It's a new twist on an old story: idealistic and naive city folk brave the American interior in search of a dream, get taken by slick operating small-towners. It was a Simpson's episode. Of course, eventually everything will be a Simpsons episode.

But the pitchfork extras were too well cast. Like anthropologists happening upon a long-isolated tribe, the press marvelled at these folk, no longer mere legend. For all their habitual rhapsodizing about the historic demographic shift America has taken from shameful homogeneity to the uncertain (but nonetheless mandated Great and Necessary) multiracial beyond, the media was nonetheless shocked to find a retired middle-class as white as the workforce it once was. The past exists only as reproach, and those consigned to it carry its shame like the mark of Cain.

They have no character arc, or future. First this was prophesied, then it was decided. The unease produced in them by the media's endless celebrations of their long-overdue and deserved demise (the post-racial age of Obama) is treated as spontaneous bigotry welling up from inexhaustible depths. The racist nature of their demand for their "nation back" is presumed and condemned in one breath, and made no more understandable by Obama's open claim to the nation on behalf of a new, better people, defined by only by what they are not--white. Those clamoring for their "nation back" are literally guilty of talking back.

Of the accusatory adjectives used to describe the crowds, old and white, the first remains a furtive and facile appeal to an ancient prejudice, but the second has become a pejorative in its own right, encouraging a new sort of bigotry--one not so much sanctioned as it is required. All else being equal, "White" is now a moral failing into which one is inescapably born. How we arrived at this perversion of both Christian and Enlightenment values (in the name, alternatively, of both) remains shrouded not in mystery but coercion. One is not allowed to ask.

Media bias, liberal or not, is nothing more than the aggregate of the influential class' prejudices, fantasies, and phobias. It is not action but drift. Its predictable nature creates the illusion of direction and control. But once set in motion, round and round it goes, where the narrative stops, nobody knows.

Oblivironia

2009-09-05T00:51:00.001Z

That's my suggested word for oblivious to irony.

An example. Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, in Israel as part of a 56-member Congressional contingent summoned by AIPAC, repeating a theme developed there to criticize US foreign policy:

"I’m very troubled by that, because I don’t think we in America would want another country telling us how to implement and execute our laws."

Maybe I need to combine oblivion with gall. Yeah, needs work. From Philip Giraldi's Sept. 3 column.

2009-09-01T23:17:00.002Z

Summer ends over a weekend here, usually right about now. The grey cloak shrinks the sky, the fall chill shrinks the skin, my spirit lets out a pathetic whimper, but, as if by design, I'm returned the energy I'd thought, as every year, lost for good to one last August. Doors will reopen this Sunday, muse willing.

Dennis Does Democracy

2009-08-13T06:22:00.009Z

I went to my congressman's (Rick Larsen, Democrat) "health care forum" yesterday, having been compelled by one of the Moveon-type liberal activist organizations that send me emails (I think it was "BarackObama.com").

I arrived at the stadium (of the Seattle Mariners' triple-A baseball team, the Everett Aquasox) two hours early as the email suggested; there was a crowd gathered at the gates. The anti-reform faction had set up a table. A woman with a microphone was reading from a sheet of talking points, her insufficient amplification system being shouted down by the chanting of the pro-reform faction. Whenever someone took the microphone they were drowned out by chants of "Yes We Can" or "Liar, Liar."

The lefties were outnumbered by about 2 to 1, but appeared to be more the product of a unified organizational effort, with pre-printed signs and many in matching t-shirts (the conservatives all had hand-written impromptu signs). The local Democratic Party affiliate had set up their own booth with petitions and campaign-style paraphernalia. People jostled to block their opponents' signs with their own, but mostly kept their hands to themselves.

Eventually a group of young men showed up with Obama-as-Hitler posters. One of them positioned himself behind the conservatives' table as a woman was speaking, holding his sign aloft. He was hustled off by one of the larger conservative men. I later learned this was a contingent of LaRouche supporters. They were all young, with at least one woman in their group, and unexceptional enough in appearance.

At one point an overweight fellow with an effeminate manner showed up with a bullhorn, demanding: "Repeal the Bush tax cuts! Repeal the Bush tax cuts!" He was surrounded by detractors who argued with him for a while; he explained that he was there because the anti-reform protesters were "not welcome" at a "rally for health-care reform." Whether he was mistaken about the nature of the "town hall meeting" or was referring to the preliminary gathering at the gates I'm not sure. While his bullhorn gave him amplification superiority over the conservatives' paltry sound system, he gave it a rest after a few minutes.

After about an hour the conservatives shut down and the crowd calmed. People mingled about showing deference to friends and foes alike; debates broke out here and there; a polite Northwestern version of the contentious battles that are going on across the nation.

When they opened the gates people were passing out question forms but once we got inside Rep. Larsen, after speaking briefly, took random questions directly from the crowd. These were mostly challenges to reform, often lacking coherence or taking the form of statements; this went for both sides. Not all challenges were from the right; one citizen asked if Larsen opposed single payer reform because he had taken "half a million dollars from the insurance companies" (Larsen denied this charge). Larsen denied that illegal immigrants would be eligible and the "death boards" charge. Occasionally there were shouts from the audience, boos or applause; one man stormed over to place himself directly in front of me (if you want to find the crank, he's always right in front of me; it was annoying, but I delighted in pointing myself out to my daughter later on the evening news) and berate the congressman at volume. He shortly relented, sulking off in an exaggerated fashion, muttering that he would "be quiet, for now." This was the single such incident of "shouting down."
If what I saw was a typical example of what's happening at these meetings across the country, then the media is overreacting. But then, as I've pointed out above, this is the polite Puget Sound.

Slog Days

2009-07-30T00:54:00.004Z

I'm out on the back porch because the house just won't cool down. Tanned and tawny haired from the sun, looking like an aging surf bum and moving like the just plain aged in the oppressive heat, I swear I'll never complain about the Northwest's lack of sunshine again.
I have my legs crossed--habitually in what I've been taught is acceptable male fashion, ankle on knee and calf not angled too far above the horizontal. Our cat positions himself to look up at me, framed comically by the triangle formed by my propped-up leg. He blinks hello; it goes unacknowledged and he blinks again, more slowly and deliberately. I'm convinced this familiar practice is conscious signalling of affection on his part, born of the circumstance that cats only sleep in the presence of those they trust. He closes his eyes as an expression of this trust. I blink back and he is contented. He stretches languidly before moving on to a shaded spot, where he nearly pants like a dog in the heat. It seems suspiciously overdone, as if he's playing it up, not necessarily for me but for himself. Such as I am doing here. No work will be done today.

...but we can't get our picture...

2009-07-28T14:22:00.011Z

My latest TAC contribution is online.
Also offered gratis: Wilson Burman on Bernanke, Chase Madar on Samantha Power, Stuart Reid on the Pope and James Antle on Joe Scarborough.
"Ben Bernanke, Samantha Power, and the Pope walk into a bar..."
Subscribe here.

The Business End of Empathy

2009-07-14T04:45:00.048Z

McClatchy is reporting that liberal advocacy groups are going after the lead plaintiff in the Ricci case, who is expected to be called to testify at this week's confirmation hearings for supreme court nominee Sonya Sotomayor:

On Friday, citing in an e-mail "Frank Ricci's troubled and litigious work history," the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters' attention to Ricci's past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.
Specifically, the advocates have zeroed in on an earlier 1995 lawsuit Ricci filed claiming the city of New Haven discriminated against him because he's dyslexic. The advocates cite other Hartford Courant stories from the same era recounting how Ricci was fired by a fire department in Middletown, Conn., allegedly, Ricci said at the time, because of safety concerns he raised. The Middletown-area fire department was subsequently fined for safety violations, but the Connecticut Department of Labor dismissed Ricci's retaliation complaint.

Sotomayor's confirmation is an all but forgone conclusion. The point now is to obscure or discredit, after having failed to bury, Ricci, something Sotomayor attempted as an appellate court judge. Despite the White House's later attempt to portray Sotomayor's vote there as admirable judicial restraint, the true nature of that decision--dodging a constitutional question in fear of its consequences--was exposed at the time in Jose Cabranes' dissenting opinion (PDF). A judicial advocate of a certain interpretation of law welcomes the opportunity to make that interpretation--if it can be made without looking foolish or inept, thus later precluding such as a supreme court nomination. Luckily for Justice Ginsburg, she has no such worries (or shame).

Aside from the fact that Frank Ricci's history has no bearing on the legal question presented by Ricci v DeStefano, and liberal critiques of the ruling have depended on ignoring or mischaracterizing the actions of New Haven's mayor (in collusion with--or under threat by--an openly bigoted, convicted felon community organizer), PAW, in its desperation to obscure the corrupt machine politics arising from, and the legally unsustainable basis of, "disparate impact" as a model for anti-discrimination law (indeed, the fundamental conflict between "disparate impact" and "disparate treatment" which this case exposes), wants you to deplore Frank Ricci (and the lawsuit that bears his name) for (1) having the temerity to file a discrimination lawsuit, and (2) having once been fired.

The irony of a "liberal" effort to discredit someone for filing a discrimination lawsuit and losing his job, possibly for "whistleblowing", is further proof that fiction cannot compete with reality. "Bleeding Heart Liberals", we hardly knew ye. Whether PAW is oblivious to, or merely takes for granted, the legal reality that who is entitled to legal protection from discrimination is a matter of some discrimination, I cannot decide. But it's either sublime confidence or sheer nerve, provoking the public's habitual skepticism toward discrimination litigation in what is ultimately an attempt to preserve its current foundation. That very skepticism is what PAW and others typically identify as racism, reaction, ignorance, etc.

The open disdain of some for certain classes of people, including those who dare challenge quota hiring, is the flip side of a certain philosophy that, in this debate, falls under the shorthand term, empathy. If the word is not merely superfluous twaddle (and we have to assume it is used for some purpose), and has meaning, it must assign relative values of moral worth, holding other values constant, to classes of persons; these values must then bear upon the application of law. Minority trumps majority, female trumps male, poor trumps rich, etc. Of course this is nothing more than current "liberal" convention plainly expressed, which is precisely why some seize on the president's coded invocation to expose that convention. "Empathy" here is a euphemism for "favor."

The oblique and muted liberal critiques of Ricci have featured just this sort of reasoning, by people too steeped in their conditioning to recognize it; is it not empathy for the "white firemen" after all, to find in their favor? Categorically, no. They earned the decision by virtue of being right. Why, some have asked, are the Republicans calling Frank Ricci to testify? Is it not because he is sympathetic? Yes--but the confirmation process is a political process. The valid political counter-argument to Ricci's testimony would be to call Mayor DeStefano, for instance, to testify; this would also be a means of putting our "empathy" to work for us in deciding who deserves it more. It would further be an expression of confidence in the logic and justice of this faction's position.

Both sides on the Ricci divide were citing a political factor when describing the plaintiffs as "sympathetic." The best defense of "empathy" thus lapses into absurdity: it doesn't mean anything specifically, just that we should be good. When your best defense is irrelevance, it's time to concede.

A faction laying claim to "empathy" or any other virtue (think "patriotism", for instance), would make a talisman out of a word. It's not the enlightenment arising from meaning but the obscurity of emotion they invoke. Otherwise empathy is meaningless, as its defenders here have ably demonstrated.
The law is there to to limit power and just the sort of demagogy that invariably invokes such words as empathy. In the Ricci case the law served just that purpose. Watching the knives come out for Mr. Ricci, we see the ruthlessness upon which an unyielding claim to virtue is dependent. What is the law before virtue itself, after all? Empathy, like the classic liberal ideal, has been distorted by the political reality of modern America into its opposite.

Quantitative Sleazing

2009-07-10T03:51:00.004Z

From Bloomberg, Johnathan Weil reports a US prosecutor says a stolen Goldman Sachs computer program capable of manipulating global markets may fall into the wrong hands (wrong being other than the world's most powerful investment bank). About the first of this month Goldman notified authorities that former employee Sergey Aleynikov, not content with post-its and paper clips, ripped off the program in his last week working for the company. He was arrested getting off a plane in Newark on July 3. Arguing against bond, the government's prosecutor asserted:

It wasn’t just Goldman that faced imminent harm if Aleynikov were to be released, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti told a federal magistrate judge at his July 4 bail hearing in New York. The 34-year-old prosecutor also dropped this bombshell: “The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.”

Publicly Goldman is not going on record, but trying to play down worries:

Goldman isn’t commenting publicly about any of this, though it seems the bank’s bosses want us to believe there’s no need to worry. On July 6, Dow Jones Newswires quoted a “person familiar with the matter” saying this: “The theft has had no impact on our clients and no impact on our business.” Note that this person was so familiar with Goldman that he or she spoke of Goldman’s clients as “our clients” and Goldman’s business as “our business.”

Weil notes:

All this leaves us to wonder: Did Goldman really tell the government its high-speed, high-volume, algorithmic-trading program can be used to manipulate markets in unfair ways, as Facciponti said? And shouldn’t Goldman’s bosses be worried this revelation may cause lots of people to start hypothesizing aloud about whether Goldman itself might misuse this program?

According to his attorney, Aleynikov admits to downloading the software, but denies intending to use it in any "proprietary way." Aleynikov had left Goldman to work for fellow Russian emigre Mikhail Malyshev's start-up company, Teza Tech. Malyshev has been sued by former boss Citadel, alleging he's in violation of a non-compete clause. Malyshev specialized in--what else?--high-frequency trading, and according to the story linked above:

Malyshev, a Russian emigre with a doctorate in astrophysics from Princeton, left Citadel's quantitative trading unit in February after the funds he helped run returned about 40 percent last year. Their performance stood out at a time when most hedge funds lost money and Citadel's flagship portfolios tumbled 50 percent.

The quants shall inherit the economy.

2009-06-26T05:23:00.020Z

Beck, Hell Yes

Autechre, Second Bad Vibe
Looks like one of the performers from the Beck video.

Lemon Jelly, Space Walk
Voice sample: radio transmission of astronaut Alan Bean describing the sunrise during a space walk, Skylab 3 mission, July 1973

Zero Gs and I feel fine

Note how sampling works as metaphor.

2009-06-17T03:30:00.028Z

Closed for reinvention. Back soon.

update III:
Girlfriend:
"You come home, you order out food...and then you play those stupid Tito Puente albums until 2 in the morning!"
Guy:
"Tito Puente is gonna be dead, and you'll say: 'Oh, I've been listening to him for years. He's fabulous.' "
--Stripes

update II: be sure to check out the beehive to the right of the screen at 0:08. Like a Nascar Nefertiti!

udpate I:
Did somebody say "twang"?

The Osborne Brothers, Ruby, Are You Mad?

I can only think of two forms of original American folk music, the blues and bluegrass. The blues are subterranean rhythms that strip away all pretense and adornment to allow the unimpeded expression of desire and sorrow. Bluegrass is similarly engaged, yet impelled in the other direction, toward the sky. Where the blues and funk envelop you in the soil of earthen, down-tempo bass chords, bluegrass carries you into the heavens on manic high notes. Blues is earth; bluegrass is sky.
The nearness of nature and its inexorable pull are the common feature. Both evoke the primary and unequivocal realities of desire, family, toil and loss. The unavoidable immediacy of these things in the hungry and desperate experience of the rural poor of the early twentieth century is what gives these forms their inimitable beauty. We are drawn to these as authentic expressions of joy and sorrow no longer possible. The American pastoral.
I was trapped in traffic with nothing but an AM radio to distract me, in LA, when I abandoned the droning obscenity of the OJ trial to land on a non-profit station's bluegrass hour. What the hell. Random finds are the best finds. That's when I first heard this song. This piercing, high lonesome lament was like the lunatic ravings of a mental patient. I had "discovered" something that had been there the whole time. Who knew?

Now; leave me alone, I have work to do.

Condescension and Credulity

2009-06-04T08:34:00.015Z

No matter with what skill the great manage to seem other than they are, they cannot conceal their malignity.
--Jean de la Bruyere, Characters

That implicit credulity is the mark of a feeble mind will not be disputed.
--Sir William Hamilton

After a brief, nominal flirtation with the ideal of objectivity the political press is poised to revert to its roots in factional advocacy, with the larger outlets financed and influenced by corporate, private or foundational sponsors. That is, what of it will be left behind by the receding waters of the economic and cultural deluge. This goes carelessly unlamented by many amid the celebration of a "new media" (see New Economy, 2000). I see no reason to celebrate an order wherein any news organization with significant resources is ultimately funded by one powerful faction or another.

Yes, we've never had a truly unbiased, independent press. The ideal is likely impossible. But impossibility is the last reason to abandon a worthy ideal. Impossible ideals are the only ones worth striving for. It's all in the striving. The old class and regional biases, as exemplified by the world's most provincial newspaper of selective record, The New York Times (granted, its province constitutes its own city-state, giving its prejudices an imperial reach) aren't going away after all, and the fall of one order doesn't necessarily give way to something better. Human nature already ensures that the natural tendency of institutions is toward degradation.

The mayhem of the blogosphere is welcome for, among other things, its popular revolt against Crimethink as mostly determined by the "old media" in its role as a sort of priestly caste. Their monopoly may be gone, but the new advocacy model of journalism only increases their accusatory fervor, as opposing outlets trade accusations, depending on who's calling out who, of bigotry, anti-Americanism, xenophobia etc. But the stirrings of insurgency should not be mistaken for success (or its inevitability), and the potential for a reaction leaving our discourse more constricted than before remains. The mechanisms of control and panic still being put in place under the ruse of a "war on terror" lend themselves well to the purpose. To say nothing of the fact that once created power travels easily from descending to ascending faction, like a parasite abandoning a dying host for a healthy one. Power is agency; it tends to spill over the confines of its original justification to find new purposes, and is never surrendered by those who have it on mere principle.

An unfortunate consequence of Barack Obama's unique and slightly perverse appeal, and the rout of a decadent Republican Party, is the conversion of too many from opponents to proponents of power. This includes what remains of the "mainstream media", whose bias is not toward liberalism or conservatism as much as it is toward cowardice--accepting uncritically on one hand the appeal to consequences upon which current liberal social science and ensuing policy is based, and on the other its (counter-intuitively) natural complement, the nationalism of the Right. The term "political correctness" should be expanded to include American exceptionalism, at the least. What passes for liberalism today is just chauvinism differently expressed. Neither Left nor Right is uniquely corrupted by power. Power itself is the problem. That the exercise of power is an unfortunate necessity of governance makes it not less but more true.

The advantage, for instance, in a real, exaggerated, or surmised "right wing terrorist threat" is too tempting, with the potential for discrediting or radicalizing (prodding the fiction into reality) the opposition. Combine this with the impetus for legislation against "hateful" speech increasing along with a Democratic majority and the multi-ethnic populace which it must keep in a state of festering resentment and alarm (just as the Right must do with its base) and the previously mentioned journalists advocating on behalf of a very particular and hostile worldview. More than ever we need those with the resources to do sustained investigative reporting to at least feel chastened by a standard of objectivity. The aforementioned New York Times might seem to deserve its fate (every fate that isn't the result of natural catastrophe, and even sometimes that, is "deserved," after all) but the breadth and scope of its daily issue is a wonder, and its loss would be a tragedy.

The new media has also produced the ominous phenomenon of the top-down activist organization, reverse-engineering the model of the grass roots organization to put it directly in the service of the powerful and flooding the arteries of the new telecommunications with creepy, viral efficiency. I'm convinced that if the emails I receive from MoveOn.org came in audio format they would be expressed with a thick Russian accent over a straining analog recording of martial music. No, that would give them too much of a human quality. The "Age of Obama" threatens to become the slogan of our new multicultural tyranny, imposed in part by the political/ideological equivalent of the non-governmental organization.

Alas, what remains of the moneyed press increasingly exists not across an antagonistic divide from from the powerful, but is fragmented by the same factional rifts and insulated by the same elite prejudices. Big Media is an adjunct of the ruling class. This, combined with the inevitable connoisseur's appreciation of the art and play of politics that develops over time, renders it congenitally incapable of distinguishing political maneuver from statesmanship. Which brings me, finally, to the subject.

It's become difficult to tell where the President's political skills leave off and Big Media's credulity begins. The mistaking of platitude for profundity and condescension for compromise has become downright pathological in the age of the Wonder Brother. Never has so little awed so many so much.

This incapacity increases as our democracy matures, a consequence of age accelerated by the Obama effect, the increasing viability of the Fox News/MSNBC model of advocacy journalism, and the much deserved disrepute into which the Republican Party has fallen. If independence is our measure of health, the fourth estate, having endured a fitful adolescence and the disillusionment of middle age, is entering its dotage. As is the case with the aged, it's intellect is no longer supple and its biases are irrevocably set; it's less and less able to control its utterances for the sake of decorum; it grows fonder of sentimental kitsch. The press' gushing over this or that vaporous issuance from President Obama is the equivalent of the kitten and puppies calendars decorating an old folks' home. Correct that; the various artistic representations of Obama by acolytes, uncritically admired recently in that same Times, are precisely equivalent.

So when President Obama directly addressed abortion in his speech at Notre Dame, what we witnessed wasn't the brave magnanimity over which so many gushed--the president made certain there would be no change in his decidedly uncompromising support for taxpayer-funded abortion on demand in every municipality in the country. Offering meaningless, self-congratulatory expressions of compromise unattached to substance in such a way is an act that would typically be described disapprovingly as nerve, not "courage", as in "it takes nerve." But you do have to hand it to him.

As is the case with the new president, still, it wasn't the act but the reception that is remarkable. In this case the complete surrender of a former bastion of opposition to the cruel, calculating expedience of the president's abortion position, abandoning (to use the president's favored language) the powerless and voiceless to the powerful and loud. Ralph Ellison's concept of the inherent oppression of "invisibility", something the president is sure to have appreciated in the romantic abstract, has never been so applicable. This would be a defining feature of the unborn child (though the president's insistence on abortion goes beyond unborn and unwanted to inconvenient, as he will not sacrifice the good graces of Planned Parenthood to compromise on behalf of children who survive extraction), along with helplessness and powerlessness. The president's definition of abortion as a "choice" is an unremarkable commonplace in our low, dishonest age after all.

No; contrary to the adulatory response from the president's vast amen corner, what we witnessed wasn't a marvel of rhetoric or magnanimity, not a bold offer of common ground, but a condescending expression of power. Condescension is a form of disdain. The president brandished his position on abortion, a position the church once insisted was unconscionable, and planted it like a flag in the heart of what was once one of its grandest institutions. To the cheers of its children. This was not lost on him, even if it was lost on the press.
Some things aren't open to compromise--rather, this used to be true. "Common ground", here offered by the unmoving and unmoved, is the field of surrender. Compromise is the murder of principle by expedience, and "unity", another favorite of the president, is a prerequisite of tyranny. Meanwhile, what remains of the mainstream press has become so intoxicated by the expression of power that it cannot recognize it as such.

Voices, Violence and Vocations

2009-06-02T23:54:00.011Z

Impelled by religious zeal, a man commits an act of terrorist murder, targeting an individual he deems responsible for the slaughter of innocents. The charge follows: through the use of extreme language activist organizations, news outlets--the very opinions and beliefs they espouse--provoked the violence. By implication (or direct inference) these beliefs are discredited not by logic, fact or argument, but by an act of violence. Not content with the widely held view that the violent act should not be allowed to advance its ends, those with opposing ends determine it should advance theirs. Opportunism attaches to outrage. The shock of an act of violence magnified by social effect and media ubiquity becomes transformative after all, defining the limits of speech and, as necessarily follows, thought and action.

This process played out yesterday regarding the murder of an abortion doctor, as the sustained smirk occasionally punctuated by conspicuous displays of sanctimony that is MSNBC's typical news block gave way to sustained sanctimony occasionally punctuated by conspicuous displays of smirking. Whether or not this outrage is authentic is beside the point; when the personal outrage of the primped and powdered set of the nightly newscast became operative our society and its discourse became a measure more juvenile (it is not the authenticity of individual emotion that determines whether or not it is unseemly, it is the venue). It was the first indication I've had yet that Rachel Maddow (who's been otherwise exemplary in, for instance, holding the Obama administration accountable for its promises) was capable of anything other than her standard expression of vapid, self-satisfied ridicule (is this some Alinsky-ite strategy?). I'm not being facetious when I say it was touching; nonetheless, it was entirely inappropriate. It would be progress of a sort, however, if she retained a trace of that solemnity for her on-air persona in the future.

The act described in the first sentence above has happened not once but twice in the past two days. Will FoxNews, for one, follow reports of today's lone Islamic terrorist with a similar display of accusatory outrage? I think I haven't the stomach for any more cultivated outrage (Fox's daily, default level of bombast already beats even yesterday's orgy of righteous anger from MSNBC). I'm certain many have already pointed out the similarities between the two murders. I'm less confident many will draw the right conclusion--that speech must be defended above all, and violence can't be allowed to determine our laws or morals. Whether or not the murderers were right about the injustice they perceived is irrelevant. How one reacts to these crimes seems determined above all by point of view; but when murder or violence is the case, there can be only one point of view.

But this much too must be acknowledged: enough violence will determine the measure of our liberty whether we like it or not. Popular will, and panic, will ensure that. The decade has taught us nothing less. We've only had a taste of the repressive measures the consenting governed will be willing to impose upon itself. Violence works, and sometimes in very small, highly focused applications. Not to achieve the ends of its actors, for these questions will still be determined by the competition of popular and factional wills and that cruelest factor of all, expedience; no, violence works to degrade our freedom generally. It works to limit our very thoughts. Enough of it, enough of the terror it inspires, enough of the attendant opportunistic outrage of the politically engaged, and the limits will come, in gradually increasing severity. They're already at the border.

2009-05-25T19:10:00.029Z

Koko Taylor (1928-2009), Wang Dang Doodle

Jimmy Dale Gilmore Trio, The Mobile Line

"It's a league game, Smokey."

The Avalanches, Frontier Psychiatrist
"That boy needs therapy!"

Mint Royale, Show Me

Townes Van Zandt, Waiting Around to Die, from the film Heartworn Highways

Shill.He.Is

2009-05-15T16:44:00.012Z

The single most distressing result of Barack Obama's election is not the looting of your grandchildren's economic prospects to pay for the new administration's Great Lurch Forward into insolvency. It isn't the accompanying loss of liberty. Nor is it the mass decampment of "anti-war" leftists now silent or openly supporting the escalation of the war in Afghanistan (so that's what they mean by "MoveOn"). No; it's the ascendance of shameless kitschmeister Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas, whose "Yes We Can" video on behalf of the Obama campaign took the cliched political cant that is rap's tertiary stock-in-trade (after gangsterism and narcissism) to surreal and sinister levels, putting it directly in the service of power. The natural process of his passing down through the Dante-esque circles of celebreality television into ultimate obscurity is now delayed by at least four years.

Witnessing Bob Dylan's participation in Pepsi's cloying, Super Bowl-launched ad campaign ("every generation refreshes the world") alongside Will was like finding a beloved elderly family member working as a carnival geek. To a remixed "Forever Young" a sixties-era Dylan passes the baton (in the form of a pair of wayfarer sunglasses) off to Will. If this was a true representation of the state of popular music, the g-forces induced by such a sudden drop in iconic quality would cause the culture to pass out. Don't panic--it isn't. The raw material of humanity hasn't been left out overnight to spoil, and there are as many talented young people as ever, in and out of hip hop. Just don't tell Mr. Dylan. Like his early eighties "conversion" to evangelical Christianity, the less said of this embarrassing interlude the better. Let's give the president a pass too. Let him think that Puff Daddy and The Black Eyed Peas are relevant, that Wanda Sykes is funny (if that woman has ever said anything funny, it was surely an accident). There are too many meaningful delusions of which he will have to be disabused, by argument and circumstance, over the next four years, to worry about the trivial.

Now I learn from the blog Where Hip Hop and Libertarianism Meet (only to find they have nothing in common, I'm sure--no worries, Big Man Fascism, your muse still only has eyes for you) that Will.I.Am will be caddying the carpet bag for Terry McAuliffe (who Will identifies as his "closest political mentor") as he stumps for the governorship of Virginia. It's going to be a long four years.

2009-05-15T05:41:00.003Z

In my last post I said some harsh things about the American film industry. Then, this appears: Film Studio Mulls "Coyote Ugly" sequel. Coincidence? I think not.

The Sick of It

2009-05-12T16:45:00.018Z

I was pleased to read in the issue before last of The American Conservative (my copy takes so long to trek across the continent that I get it just as the next one is issued) Stuart Reid's mention of what is possibly the best television program ever made, Armando Ianucci's devastating satire of British politics The Thick of It (of which I would be woefully unaware if not for my Anglophilic friend Kevin Grace). If you're a fan of good satire seek it out, and keep an eye out for the film version, In the Loop, which levels the same keen satirical eye on the concerted effort of U.S. and British politicos to effect the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Somebody once said that American films are essentially children's fare in disguise. That may be a bit harsh, but can't be rejected out of hand, even by this lover of American cinema. Revenge fantasies, happy endings, clumsy sexual titillation, cliched humor, overt manipulation, overweening soundtracks cuing cheaply conjured emotion, all wrapped in the gaudy veneer of technical sophistication and run through the multiplex mill at a desperate pace. This represents the bulk of what we're offered.
I'm not complaining--the ninety percent that is dreck sustains an industry that occasionally produces what is our time's high art. No one is forcing us into the theatre, though the overbearing promotional (and cross-promotional) campaigns that treat each aspiring blockbuster as cultural seismic events to be missed at the peril of one's social connectivity are about as close to coercion as one can get without a knock on the door.

If only it were possible to shield oneself from the studios' ad campaigns. I'm convinced that far fewer people would be of the opinion that, say, the first three or four Batman films, were worth a fraction of the ticket price if they had experienced them without the considerable pressure of cultural consensus (manufactured though it may be). I still remember hearing an impressionable sort tell a friend that he'd purchased Batman on VHS (ninety-nine dollars retail) years ago when this was still a novelty (not to disregard the beneficial effects of the early-adopter's ambitious insecurities financing the development of welcome innovations such as home video). "Yeah, I own it," he bragged. Oh youth!

This cultural herding works in retrospect and reverse as well, when popular appeal over time comes to influence critical opinion. Sometimes this is deserved--I would cite the first Dirty Harry film, having outlasted charges of fascist leanings (too bad Clint Eastwood seems intent on burying it under the annual offerings of trite liberal cliche that are his current oeuvre--all while, apparently, collecting a pass from the cultural commissariat for making not one but two ape/man buddy films).
Sometimes not. Few old enough seem to remember that Apocalypse Now received middling reviews on its release (the production of the film, way over schedule and budget, incommunicado deep in the jungle, was a sort of building legend as it went on--a brilliant if unintentional parody of the film and its source work, Heart of Darkness, that remains far more compelling than its final product), and then only because Francis Ford Coppola was still riding in the wake of The Godfather. I'm not saying that Apocalypse Now isn't a classic--I'm saying it isn't any good. Unforgivable humorlessness. Pretentious dialogue. Martin Sheen conveying all the expressiveness of a sheet of drywall. "The horror" indeed. But that's an argument for another time.

It's a shame that we can't experience films without preparation every time. One should step into the theatre with zero expectations; a film should descend upon us like some mysterious, alien and authorless transmission from the ether. Some of my most satisfying film experiences have happened in this fashion, having come across something with no prior knowledge. The element of surprise doesn't hurt but enhances a film's chances of gaining purchase in our psyche. Alas, this is rarely possible.

But the "children's films" charge comes to mind when I compare The Thick of It to what is its nearest American counterpart, The West Wing. Earnest and attractive folk exchanging inauthentic witty banter as they labor for justice, narrating aloud their agonizing over moral implications every step of the way, lest we miss the point. Personal ambition barely in evidence. I just experienced a chill of disgust merely thinking about it. Most American television, in particular social and political commentary, is a sort of cultural masturbation. People watch such as The West Wing to convince themselves of their intelligence and superior morality, of the great expansiveness of their empathy.
Ironically, this is achieved in part by distinction of the initiated viewer from a great wretched Other--Republicans, often, in the vast melodrama (those familiar with Stuff White People Like will recognize the conceit of the "whiterpeople", superior in taste and ethos, which is dependent on an implied bogey I would call "other white people", or OWP, upon whom the whiterfolk are forever offloading their considerable and conspicuous contrition). It's been said before because it's true--most of our television and cinema is there to make us feel better about ourselves. Kitsch, in other words.

Not so with The Thick of It. Shot in what might be the most effective use of the verite style yet, the show conveys the absurdity and chaos of democratic governance in our time. In fact, governance is little in evidence as cabinet ministers and MPs spend their days ducking, dodging and fobbing off on one another scandals that seem to erupt daily, and that are more often acts of political gamesmanship than substantial concerns. The rare encounter between common folk and elite are treated as awkward collisions between alien creatures--cutting no false slack for either. The mark of true satire is the lack of unequivocal heroes and villains. The Thick of It is about nothing less than the impossibility of true democratic governance, and the continuing erosion of our approximation thereof, admirably placing the blame where it belongs--on human nature itself. The point is not to confirm our prejudices and massage our vanity but to dispel them. To wipe the obscuring fog from the mirror. Real satire, in other words.

Deconstructing Eric, or, Little by Little

2009-02-23T08:09:00.150Z

Abraham Lincoln once said that "If you're a racist, I will attack you with the North," and these are the principles I carry with me in the workplace.
--Michael Scott

Our Attorney General is right. We are a nation of cowards, fearing an honest discussion of race. But, unless he's breaking utterly with rigorously observed convention, he's dead wrong about what that discussion would look like. A newly open conversation about race and public policy is the last thing an Eric Holder wants.

In fact, Mr. Holder's intent was to preempt just this possibility, which he reasonably fears as an unintended consequence of Barack Obama's remarkable success. That success shatters the very assumption upon which it is most dependent--that America is inherently and uniquely racist, forever incomplete thereby. Holder finds himself tasked with performing the traditional February rite of reinforcing this assumption--as the first black attorney general serving the first black president. That's one hell of a contradiction. It's going to take a nation of millions to obscure it. Thus Attorney General Michael Scott's suggestion that every day be a nation-wide Diversity Day:

...if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.

When I saw the scare-quote screen crawl (I shall start calling them scare-crawls) on a television across a room, "Atty General Holder Says US 'Nation of Cowards'," I assumed Mr. Holder had renounced the fear-mongering on behalf of "security" that has overtaken the Nation since 9/11. Something about the courage required by liberty and the cowardice required by tyranny. Perhaps he even had the nerve to suggest the terrorist threat has been exaggerated by those seeking power and wealth. I imagined myself defending him to you. This is, after all, only what he should be saying. But Holder wasn't there to calm a panicked nation; he was there to panic a calm one:

If we allow this attitude to persist in the face of the most significant demographic changes that this nation has ever confronted -- and remember, there will be no majority race in America in about 50 years -- the coming diversity that could be such a powerful, positive force will, instead, become a reason for stagnation and polarization. We cannot allow this to happen and one way to prevent such an unwelcome outcome is to engage one another more routinely -- and to do so now.

But this is nothing new. The remarkable thing about Wednesday's speech was that the Attorney General broadened the mandate of the U.S. Department of Justice:

But we must do more, and we in this room bear a special responsibility. Through its work and through its example this Department of Justice, as long as I am here, must -- and will -- lead the nation to the "new birth of freedom" so long ago promised by our greatest president. This is our duty and our solemn obligation.

Mr. Holder did not reveal any plans for how he will "lead the nation to [Lincoln's] 'new birth of freedom' "; probably because he has none. Of course he may think we're not ready for them. As if this immodest language isn't disturbing enough, Holder combines it with an attempt not to merely prompt debate but to direct it:

I fear however, that we are taking steps that, rather than advancing us as a nation are actually dividing us even further. We still speak too much of "them" and not "us." There can, for instance, be very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action. This debate can, and should, be nuanced, principled and spirited. But the conversation that we now engage in as a nation on this and other racial subjects is too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own narrow self interest

This is a false accommodation. That there "can be" a "very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action"; is given, and not by the Attorney General. The implication is that current debate is heading for "illegitimate" territory, deliberately reinforcing white anxiety and black resentment that holds opposition to affirmative action as racist until proven otherwise.

To limit the debate is to control it. Holder, arguing like a good (or just fair) lawyer, needs to place the status quo he defends between two arbitrary "extreme" boundaries. Thus certain opinions are "simplistic" (of course he could be talking about the stubbornly crude logic of disparate impact and quotas--his call to frankness and depth included neither) or "extreme", serving "narrow self-interest."

It is a monologue Holder desires, alternating between narrow, meaningless poles toward a safely predetermined end, mouthed by a multitude distracted by false choices. The product of a collective, conditioned mind. But this much is obvious. What is more interesting is the unintentional but more revealing subtext, inaccessible to the author, incapacitated as he is by status, position and, appropriately enough, chauvinism. Holder's speech revealed the potential conflicts facing a civil rights movement-turned-industry by Barack Obama's stunning, rapid rise.
Those who most fear the reality of a "transformation" to a "post-racial" America are those who've most benefited from the decidedly racial nature of recent American politics--again, embarrassingly demonstrated with Obama's success. The end game of affirmative action and discrimination-through-litigation is revealed as long overdue. The intent of the "conversation" about race, now more than ever, is to de-legitimize that challenge by declaring it unfit for conversation.

If we should start taking seriously the "post-racial" nature of Obama's rise, we might start asking that it mean something beyond assigning a professional and political premium to certain individuals based on Obama's myth of "race and inheritance." But the obvious advantage that race played for the inauthentic son of slavery and segregation contradicts the myth. The notion of a white American jackboot forever on the neck of our culturally most powerful--black Americans--was questionable before Obama's remarkable campaign and the ecstatic reception of his inauguration. Now it is farcical.

But it isn't only that Barack Obama renders the white/black reparations dynamic absurd. The nascent Diversity State finds itself too soon and too totally triumphant. The bogey of white oppression threatens to become no longer plausible, and those groups assigned varying stature within the hierarchy of grievance are already eyeing one another uneasily.

The order now threatened by diversity is not pre- but post-civil rights. That minority became synonymous with oppressed, and "underrepresented" synonymous with denied, once only enhanced the power of the dominant minority, which extracted concessions from a still comfortable majority (that could still afford them and held an expectation of final conciliation). Smaller minority groups were content to follow the leader and accept a subordinate position. But what happens to that dynamic in a "post-racial" ("post-white") America where the majority of individuals have a birthright claim against the white plurality and no sense of obligation toward a black population that is culturally dominant, politically favored and stubbornly lagging in professional and scholastic achievement?
It was therefore Holder's purpose to preclude any challenges to black America's position atop the hierarchy of grievance. Black equality is more than simple equality. Holder is here to defend the primacy of his faction as the vanguard of a revolution now triumphant:

In addition, the other major social movements of the latter half of the 20th century -- feminism, the nation's treatment of other minority groups, even the antiwar effort -- were all tied in some way to the spirit that was set free by the quest for African American equality. Those other movements may have occurred in the absence of the civil rights struggle, but the fight for black equality came first and helped to shape the way in which other groups of people came to think of themselves and to raise their desire for equal treatment. Further, many of the tactics that were used by these other groups were developed in the civil rights movement.

By more false accommodation he allows that feminism, anti-war protests and other minority rights movements "may" have happened without the black civil rights movement--insinuating that they probably would have not. When Holder goes on to assert that black history is too little studied, and that "African American history is American history", he declares that black history is more than American history, and greater than any other group's American history.

The line is that we must continually revisit the sins of the past to understand our present. But in reality the better things get in the present, the more the self-interested must recourse to the dismal past, and the more the present has to be compared to an ideal of race relations that has never existed and may not be possible. There is no historical precedent for America, and nothing like her at present.

The regions from where America's "disadvantaged minorities" originate cannot compare in wealth, opportunity or liberty. Resentment of this humiliating reality feeds into that encouraged by the dishonest class of political opportunists represented by Holder. The language of civil rights has become an affront, no longer condemnatory of practice but of a people and a nation: the long history of Western civil liberties is only begun with the American civil rights movement and invalidated by the interlude of American slavery. "Simplistic", indeed.

We are in the late decadent phase of the civil rights movement. Declaring victory and demobilizing is not an option--this would involve the voluntary surrender of power, something that does not happen. Power is only surrendered under coercion or dissipated over time. The latter threat panics Holder and friends. Pretext must be found to justify power. Enemies, if they don't appear, must be found. First, they are said to be hiding among us. Then, the enemy hides latent within each of us. Our eternal vigilance against "hateful" thought is a population regulating itself on behalf of power.

Holder's acknowledgement of the problematic nature of diversity reveals an internal contradiction. By unmindful incrementalism we went from the noble ideals of equality and tolerance to their near-opposite: diversity as a goal in itself. Even now one cannot suggest publicly that a policy of ethnic diversifying is no more legitimate than one of ethnic cleansing, and no more fair. And while ethnic cleansing has a long, sordid history, ethnic diversifying has none at all.

A multiracial democratic republic worthy of the name will defend equality before the law against those who equate it with equality of results. It's too late in the game to deny that fairness in hiring and education produces racial inequality--inequality that, as we've seen, does not necessarily benefit the majority. Ethnic diversity and democracy are thus at odds. This was once a given; now it is heresy. But it is heresy only because we think it's awful that it should be so. Thus far we have chosen not to reconcile a diverse population to democracy, but to reconcile democracy to a diverse population. This may be inevitable. But, as the truth is always worth knowing and no subterfuge lasts forever, we would do well to call the Attorney General's bluff.