To Every Season

When I imagine George F. Will writing a column, I imagine it goes a little something like this. He rises from a coffin full of his native Illinoisan soil, gazes across the wide bedroom to his wife in her twin bed and sleeping cap, cinches his bowtie, drinks seven gin-and-tonics, and tells his PA to finish the column by the time he returns from his daily session of whipping Latina whores in the special dungeon Fred Hiatt maintains for him underneath the US Naval Observatory.

But if you want to see what a George F. Will column would be like if he got up, performed a linked series of sun salutations, drank an acai smoothie, kissed his power crystal, smoked a doob, and put on some Peter Paul and Mary, well, Merry Christmas.

Madness and Civilization

in·sti·tu·tion·al·ize
Pronunciation: \-shnə-ˌlīz, -shə-nə-ˌlīz\
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): in·sti·tu·tion·al·ized; in·sti·tu·tion·al·iz·ing
Date: 1865
1 : to make into an institution : give character of an institution to {institutionalized housing}; especially : to incorporate into a structured and often highly formalized system {institutionalized values}
2 : to put in the care of an institution {institutionalize alcoholics}

The next time some Foucauldian grad student starts trying to tell you how the West has institutionalized insanity, tell him that he's using the word in the wrong sense.

Forensics

I would like to revisit Sarah Palin for a moment. I want to concede that she is wrong about everything. But I also want to say, look, your schematic cultural objections to her winking style of pretended regular-guy-ism is no excuse for judging her to be a greater moron than Barack Obama, who is also wrong about everything. If there is one characteristic that this dude has demonstrated over and over again, it is that the world-view he has synthesized is fundamentally stupid and unsound. His Nobel speech proceeded more neatly from word to word than Sarah Palin's RNC convention barnburner, but as an expression of a thesis it was equally incoherent, and as a statement of principles it was a good deal more bloodthirsty.

KISS

This Times editorial blithely proceeds from bitching about onerous airport security theater and bureaucracies that are both inefficient and ineffectual to agititating for the quick confirmation of "the heads of the T.S.A. and the customs agency, both of which have been under interim management for a year [because there] is no excuse for more politicking or delay with the nation’s security." The food at this restaurant is so terrible. And the portions! So small!

They also get in their quick shot at Yemen, our nemesis du jour, the new, new, new Afghanistan, wherein we are now doing . . . well, something, and in the future we definitely need to . . . do . . . more . . . of it. Probably.

Now I cannot be the only one to note that the vast and historic catastrophe that was Northwest Flight 253 was neither vast nor historic nor indeed a catastrophe. It was in fact an unspectacular failure. What it objectively demonstrates is that it is very difficult to blow up an airplane, that even if a terrorist mastermind manages to sew C-4 into his cloak of invisibility and smuggle himself into the luggage hold, it is very difficult to blow up an airplane. And obviously most yahoos never get as far as getting the bomb, let alone getting onto the plane with it, and even when they do, it is very difficult to blow up an airplane. Unlike the movies, in which every ricocheting bullet finds its way directly into the nearest fuel tank which immediately and for no reason explodes, explosive chemical agents here in our matrix world-line are finicky and difficult; detonation is not assured; minor variances in temperature and pressure, in the ratios within the explosive mixture, in the application of heat or electrical current, all of these make a difference, and any of them can doom the experiment. Dear America, I know that you are watching Mythbusters. Pay. More. Attention.

It is very difficult to blow up an airplane, and that, more than any other reason, is why it is so motherfucking rare for airplanes to get blown up.

In attempting to construct a rational security process, one could begin with a set of factually accurate premises, actuarial probabilities, and some general principle of parsimony. Or, one could demand that we add x-ray specs along the snaking lines at airport security checkpoints, because why not?

The machines have been criticized by privacy advocates. We’ve had some qualms, too, especially with early versions that showed the outlines of a naked body too clearly. But security officials have managed to blur the images and adopted other procedures that should allay those concerns. What is needed is a rigorous and independent process of evaluation for whole body scanners and other equipment — the Transportation Security Administration has 10 at some stage of development — to figure out what provides the best security at the most rational cost.

The problem is not that the scanners traduce the prudish boundaries of the American moral self-bubble. I, for one, would be perfectly content to stroll naked through Pittsburgh International, especially in the winter, when I lack a poolside at which to make a show of my ass and abs. The problem is that there will always be a clever means of evading the scanners. Just as "lethal chemicals, plastic explosives and ceramic knives" evolved in part to evade the metal detectors, so too will new substances and materials be created to evade body scanners. Thus ever does the wheel of progress turn. When the Federal Government mans every checkpoint with a levitating ascended master whose great googly third eye pierces all the etherial layers of the transdimensional mutliverse, you can be sure that some clever bomber will find a loophole in the eighteenth dimension to scurry through. And it will still be very difficult to blow up an airplane.

Notice, meanwhile in mundane reality, that the editorial demand for "a rigorous and independent process of evaluation . . . to figure out what provides the best security at the most rational cost" is in fact firmly precomitted to the application of "whole body scanners and other equipment." In other words, the rigorous and independent process is not a process of inquiry at all, but rather a purchasing process seeking a low bidder. It's not an experiment, it's a fucking RFP!

Avatard

The plot is ludicrous.

-Maude Lebowski

In a year, when James Cameron's Avatar appears to be no more than an overlong bit of interstitial video-game narrative (perhaps literally so, as the game-console tie-ins roll out), the critics who hailed it as a technological breakthrough are going to look mighty foolish. To be fair, it is hard for me to imagine the New York Time's Manhole of Darkness goofing off with an afternoon of DragonAge, and so I'm willing to call this sort of oversight an error of ignorance. This is not to say that Avatar wasn't pretty, prettier even than I expected. Although his magical blue planet is as under-realized a fictional world as a magical dolphin dorm poster . . .



. . . it is fair to say that it's nonetheless superficially well executed, which isn't just faint praise. I mean, I can't draw a still picture of my last psylocibin experience, let alone animate the fucker.

That said, it was hardly revolutionary. Yes, it captured in higher resolution and with more convincing textures the looks of both organic and inorganic material, but that is a difference of mere degree, not of kind. Jurrasic Park was revolutionary. Avatar is merely refinement a couple of decades later. I am routinely impressed by the graphics today's games afford, but when was the last time you were really overawed by the realization of what a computer-contained world could be. The Miller brothers in the nineties? Anyway, I digress.

The story, as elsewhere noted, is basically blue Pocohontas having sex with the blue Dances with Wolves, and it does drag on. The ultimate outcome is never in doubt. Of course, it never would be. I am actually quite all right with the lousy noble natives defeat rapacious paleskin narrative; I am fine with the marine falling in love with the native girl and leading her people to victory. Yes, there are colonialist overtones; yes, the shit is all over the noble savage mytheme; (yes, it is preposterous to imagine that an insterstellar human civilization would commit ground troops when they could just dump a spacemissile from space); but these are hardly new stories. I mean, hello, The Aeneid anyone?

But as there are no stakes for the crippled marine who eventually goes native to enjoy a fully abled blue existence, there is never the slightest tension. Though glancing reference is made to an ecological catastrophe on earth, all the humans are motivated either by cartoon-capitalist money-hunger or by goofily gung-ho militarism, and so there's never a choice, an agonizing fork in the road where, even though we may guess which path the protagonist will take, we still feel the wrench of his decision. With a few more lines of throwaway dialogue, Cameron could easily have established a scenario in which the survival of human civilization itself depended upon the successful extraction of the miracle mineral from the alien world, thus rendering the nobility of the natives more heroic and the violent hubris of the humans more tragic.

Now. As completely inane and absurd as was 2012, it actually created a compelling antagonist (you can't call him a villain) in Oliver Platt, by giving him the firm conviction that sentimental morality had no place in seeking the survival of the species itself. This point was of course undercut by the plot's insistence on a highest-bidder mode of access to surviving the apocalpyse, which was in turn a narrative conceit to justify saving John Cusack (why, oh why, did they save John Cusack) and giving The Black Scientist a sentimentally moral speech about giving everyone a chance because Rawlsian fairness must hold even unto the ends, literally, of the motherfucking earth. But still, Platt's character was a thousand times more compelling than the corporate hacks and military contractor-manqués of Avatar. He was animated by a realistic--within the context of the story--belief that had merit. Imagine, Avatar fans, if the battle-scarred colonel were not merely a casual racist and blood-thirsy goon, but a brutal realist willing to contemplate terrible things, including xenocide, because he believes it necessary for the survival of his own people.

Well, that would have been another and better movie, but perhaps a less popular one, as it would have required that the audience consider, if only briefly, that it is possible to confronted with a circumstance in which clarity is elusive and there is no plain right and wrong, in which necessity dictates heinous acts and victory in a righteous cause may yet spell disaster for one's enemies, who were themsleves impelled to act evilly by forces beyond their individual control. Oh well. Flying fucking dinosaurs! Fuck. Yeah.

Future Hocks

My only hope is that the big Lebowski kills me before the Germans can cut my dick off.

If you think that the passing decade saw America at its full, retarded apotheosis, then I say you've got another thing coming. As much as the stench of rot emanates from the cracks in our civilization's crumbling sidewalks, we remain in truth the preeminent smasher-upper of things on this, the good Lord's blighted garden, and though it is now fashionable to imagine the Chinese dashing past us in the home stretch, it will be a long time indeed before they manage to extricate themselves from the lumbering pas-de-deux in which they lend us the money that we use buy their goods, thus returning said money to their national coffers in an infernal economic perpetual motion machine that, though a fraud like all perpetual motion machines, is a damned good and durable one.

At last count, we were admittedly, openly, actively engaged in offensive military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, with a fifth, Somalia, a not-so-distant memory, and our government's media interlocutors are hastily prepping the ground for the further expansion of our china shop routine to Muslim Africa. Worrywort liberal technocrats of the Krugmanite variety worry endlessly that we are a civilization on the decline because our most recognizeable national symbol has horribly metaporphosed from the eagle clutching the fasciae to the Sam's-Club fatass using her cart less as a receptacle for purchases, more as a makeshift walker as she wheezes in diabetic near-catatonia from frozen, fifteen-pound bags of denatured chicken parts to palattes of quadruple-ply toilet paper, but as the saying goes, this is a feature, not a bug. While good progressive types bray that the traitorous Obama econ team is feverishly working to reinflate the bubble, as if Larry Summers et alia were unaware of their own project, from my cheap seats it seems the perfectly reasonable thing to do, if indeed your ultimate goal is the maintenance of a vast, underliterate, overweight, edge-of-poverty, reactionary, religious, chauvinistic, bovine, compliant, wage-slave comsumer class down whose ever-hungry gullets you can shove ever more crap in order to fund the vast and indifferent engine of hegemony. Do you think America is going to get any less fat and stupid over the next ten years? Whyever so, when precisely that society has so well served the interests of expansionism? I was in a Wal-Mart last week and saw a man the size of seventeen of me zipping around in a Rascal. On the back-end of the seat was the old, familiar bumper sticker. "These Colors Don't Run!"

Harvest Moon

The invention of the camera and then, in the last century, the advent of audio and video recording gave rise to some of our classic tales of total surveillance, the dystopian vision of a society in which everyone's every act was observed and recorded. And as these technologies have improved and miniaturized, as our electronic brains have grown in capability and sophistication, it sometimes seems, when standing in front of an ATM's electronic eye or being photo'd by a traffic camera at a red light or, say, living in London, that to a degree the nightmare is no dream at all. By the same token, though, the very ubiquity of such surveillance, the sheer volume of information, has made the process of scooping up pebbles into the more difficult task of squeezing handfuls of sand. Every children's toy now records DV, and though it seemed inordinately creepy when premiered, a program like the unlamented Total Information Awareness project of our darling DARPA now seem less hubristically totalitarian than merely foolish. As the familiar illustrative example reminds us: to make a completely accurate map of a coastline, one must in fact recreate the whole coastline. To miniaturize is to lose resolution, information. To be totally aware of the information on the Internet is to be the Internet. And we all know what happens then.

As the volume of information in our non-possession has come to resemble an ocean ecology far more than a filing cabinet, full of rich zones and dead ones, bright shallows and abysmal depths, the clear reality is that there is no clear reality. We can cast nets, but nets are more hole than rope. When we go bonkers about this or that threat slipping through the cracks and demand to know why we didn't know more, know it sooner, know it better, and know it faster, we ignore the plain diagnosis: the problem isn't too little information, but too much. The problem isn't that we can't collect it. We can. We do. We have. The problem is that we can't make sense of it. It can no longer be organized, sorted, collated, cross-referenced, and made to cohere. There is a certain universal principle at work here, an inexorable fact of uncertainty. You just can't know everything. The desire for total awareness and the attendant desire for absolute control that are the twin pillars of our relentless, also futile, push for total security are, to reuse a metaphor, built on sand. It keeps slipping and shifting. Our "intelligence" points us in one direction, and suddenly we are forced to wheel in another. We have no perspective. A minor and utterly failed plot ignites a reaction as if to a catastrophe. Our attempted cure for the perceived ill of too little knowledge inadvertently feeds the actual syndrome of too much.

Christmas Break

I blew my wad mocking healthcare last week, and although mine is a godless, heathen family, the rump Catholicism on the paternal side impels us to celebrate a loud Christmas (my second favorite of our oddball holiday celebrations, a hair-width runner-up to our raucus Passover Seder). So posting has been light and will continue to be so through next week, when I shall attempt to review The Decade.

In the meantime, the main course for this year's Christmas dinner will be a tagine of spiced lamb with dried fruit and almonds. It will be preceded by a hot-and-sweet onion soup. Our sides will be a very simple lemon risotto, root vegetables roasted with olive oil, smoked salt, and peppercorns, and wilted greens with fennel seed.

For the soup, I boil the reserved carcass of a whole roast chicken with chopped carrots, onion, green onion, lemon grass, whole cinammon, and star anise for about two hours and then strain it through a fine, double sieve. I reserve a quart or two for making the risotto. I caremalize several large red and yellow onions with a bit of garlic and shallot, deglaze the pan with a bit of red wine, pour the mixture into the soup broth, bring it to a simmer together with one more dash of wine, and then serve in wide bowls over big hunks of stale bread that I've soaked in olive oil, garnished with a few splashes of bright red chili oil.

For the tagine, I buy beautiful, cheap, fatty lamb shoulder, chop it into 3/4" cubes, marinate the meat in a mixture of raw milk yogurt, toasted, ground cumin, coriander, turmeric, cayenne powder, mustard seed, olive oil, and coarse salt for an hour or so. Then I toss it together in the tagine with roughly chopped almonds, dried dates, dried apricots, dried figs, parsley, shallots, garlic cloves, and quartered meyer lemons. I close the tagine and place it in a cool oven, which I then warm to 250. The lamb cooks at 250 for 4-5 hours. Then I uncover it, raise the temperature to 400, and let it brown on top.

For the risotto, I bring the reserved broth to a low boil and add some additional lemon grass for perfume and flavor. I melt some finely diced onion, shallot, and carrot in clarified butter over medium heat, then raise the heat and add the rice to toast. I only use broth to deglaze the pot, and then cook the risotto slowly over a once-again medium heat, adding just enough broth to keep the rice submerged at all times, until it is thick and creamy, at which point I add a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice, a bit more salt to taste, and a few pats of sweet cream butter to thicken the dish and mount the flavor.

The root vegetables are simplest of all. Chop 3-4 each turnips and rutabagas and 2-3 celery roots into even cubes, toss them all together in a ceramic baking dish with good olive oil, smoked sea salt, and cracked black peppercorns, and put them in the oven with the tagine, giving them a good 1.5-2 hours at the low temperature, then letting them likewise crisp and brown up a bit in the hotter oven.

To wilt the greens, chop them roughly, gently heat some olive oil and crushed garlic cloves in a heavy saute pan, and slowly add the greens, making certain to salt them lightly before they begin to wilt, so that the salt is evenly distributed throughout. When all the greens have wilted, roughly chop some fennel seeds and toss them in over the heat. Serve with just the slightest dash of good red wine vinegar.

And to all a good fucking night.

Tuesday Travesties

I do not know what Chris Floyd is talking about. It all makes perfect sense.

The War on Christmas, Gameday Diagrams

You may be unaware, but I am something of an amateur military historian. I have taken the liberty of sketching out the decisive battle in the War on Christmas, showing how the vast numerical superiority of The Christians was overcome by poor battlefield selection and the inferior manueverability of their heavy troops compared to the combined cavalry and light, swift infantry of Secular Islamofascism and the Liberal Jews.

The Christians, believing their tremendous troop strength gave them an unbeatable edge, chose to array themselves on the narrow plain between the Santa Claus River and the Black Friday Forest. It was their theory that a more or less direct frontal assault on the forces of Secular Islamofascism would quickly smash the opposing lines. They were not concerned with the Liberal Jews, who were camped on the far side of the swift river and in any case on the wrong side of the treacherous marshes of Hanukkah.



However, dissension in The Christian's ranks ultimately split their forces. While forces under Protestant Command advanced in a direct line, the Catholic Generals wheeled to their left, hoping to take The Secular Islamofascists right flank.

The Liberal Jews quietly advanced to the bow in the Santa Claus river and risked a dangerous ford, still unnoticed by The Christians.



As Protestant forces assailed the Secular Islamofascist front lines, the right flank of Secular Islamofascism moved swiftly to outflank the Catholic armies on their left. At the same time, the Liberal Jews were already familiar with the deceptive landscape of the Hanukkah marshes and were able to cut a swift path, emerging to attack The Christians weak rearguard. Those Secular Islamofascist forces under direct attack, meanwhile, bravely held the line.



The Christian rearguard was rolled up, throwing their armies into disarray, as the quick flanking maneuver of the Secular Islamofascists had also driven back the Catholic left. Thus The Christians collided with themselves on the center of the field and in the confusion were thoroughly routed.



Only a small Christian force was able to flee back toward the forest.

Sloth

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

-Dorm Rap Douthat

There's really nothing wrong with a little pocket philosophy. It would be easy to complain that despite, or because of, his Harvard education, young master Douthat doesn't really understand what Hobbes meant by "state of nature," but that would be cheap and a bit dishonest. After all, Hobbes himself didn't know what he meant. Cribbed and bowdlerized philosophy is only very offensive if you hold the authentic item in high regard. I do not. Hobbes was a crank, and Leviathan was bunk. Casting back to its notions about the natural world is like appealing to Aristotelian mechanics in discussing rocket launches.

Anyway, what are these "human societies that hew closest to the natural order"? Life expectancy in modern Russia is twelve years and three and months, after which every single adult man dies from a mixture of bathtub vodka, automatic gunfire, and despair, but you would hardly call Russia neolithic. We consider the Afghans primitive, and yet your basic illiterate tribesman seems to have a far firmer grasp on such cornerstones of modernity as the internal combustion engine that your average chin-bearded Ivy Leaguer. Among actual neolithic peoples, both extant and within the archeological record, all that can be said is that there is and was wide variety--peaceable types and warlike, long-lived and sickly, idyllic and hardscrabble. Plus ça change, motherfuckers, as I am wont to say.

The flip side of this rusty coin is the myth of the noble savage, the crass primitivism that Douthat et al. associate with Hollywood and New Age America but that has in fact been with us since the gods of the stargate or whoever gave us civilization. And that's the rub, isn't it? They are the same fallacy. Cultural conservatives imagine some kind of attack on the "theistic" cosmogony, even as it is their own confused fairy tale that posits a pre-civilizational Eden as the natural and primordial state of man. Meanwhile, the merely narrative appeal of making every ancient tribe and alien civilization into nature-worshipers is simply this: despite what every dork with a World of Warcraft avatar and a pile of Frank Herbert books believes, creating a unified, coherent, Tolkienian, fictional universe is very, very hard. It may have taken James Cameron a half a billion dollars to make the blue titties of his forest babes jiggle just so, but it took old J.R.R. a whole lifetime to invent his elves. Mere primitivism is a problem in storytelling not so much because it fetishizes false notions of indigenousness, nor because it attacks the received moral order of the Christian universe, but because it is bad storytelling. And isn't that likewise the problem with the Times editorial page and all its compeers? Not that they're so fucking wrong, but that they're so goddamned lazy.

You Go to Snore with the Uvula You Have

Yggie Stop! He's not interested in the contents of a vast, costly, inequitable, inefficient, incomprehensible piece of legislation because it reaffirms the important principle that it is the business of the congress to craft vast, costly, inequitable, inefficient, and incomprehensible pieces of legislation. America's problem over the last decade-and-a-half, in his estimation, is that our legislature has acted in insufficient quantity and at inadequate scale. He's like the Ezra Pound of goofball punditry, driven mad by his own insane preconceptions, locked in the sideshow cage of the internet, screaming, "Make it big!"

Meanwhile, Yggie evidently has some kind of excellent reputation as a foreign policy yodeler. A point he often makes, and a point of agreement between him and me, is that considering various military adventures in the abstract--democracy, whiskey, sexy good; burkha, Islam, no-democracy bad; that sort of thing--as a matter of what Leftwhich Warrior Michael Bérubé in his High Late Early Medieval Postmodern Enlightenment mode semi-coined "deontological war", is plainly completely insane, and that here below the realm of pure form and action, there is the simpler, if imperfect, question of actual capability. Like: does America have the ability, capacity, resources, and patience to transform Afghanistan into a representative democracy? And if the answer is no, then . . .

So, and perhaps I am missing some of the ins and outs of this particular case, but before we start lauding The Congrefs of these United States for their ambition to build this particular tower of Babel, before even we wonder whether it will gain divine approbation or incur terrible retribution, perhaps we ought to ask a few questions of the structural engineers. In other words, the question is not whether or not Congress should "reform health care", but whether or not it can.

Hammer and Needle

Yummy. My first bowl of shit.

-Baltimore Mayor Carcetti, The Wire

For those of us who like Barack Obama on some level think single-payer health care would be best but impractical, then hoped for a system with a public option, but who are still enthusiastic about health reform that doesn’t include it, I think we’ve really reached a moment when it would be good to have Ted Kennedy around.

-Yglesias

Yggie really ought to go into politics fer rizzle, because he seems to have distinct coprophiliac tendencies. "Health reform." What is that? To this imponderable the Donk answer is: anything and everything. Quite literally. So long as it comes out of a Donk congress. Now Yglesias is the sort of blurgher who's fond of hectoring far lefties and libertarianische types for their habit of speaking in generalities and idealities, ignoring the ol' salt-mine of practical politics. So one wonders how he can persist in being so blithely unconcerned with the actual content of the bill before him. Is it a cake, or is it a turd? Well, it's on a plate, isn't it? Are we gonna split hairs?

Universal, tax-funded health coverage has been transmogrified through the usual Washingtonian alchemy into an insane mandate that uninsured individuals purchase, at great personal expense, extremely shitty insurance plans. There you have it. The federal government is going to force poor, underemployed people to spend thousands of dollars that they can ill afford to spend on consumer products offered by private corporations. I am sure that Yglesias et al. will have some very clever arguments about how this is ultimately good policy because it forces the irrational lower orders to invest in plans that will at least hedge against future catastrophe, you know, the sort of rational future-planning that poor morons don't usually make because fortuity failed to commend a Harvard education upon their beer-drinking souls. So it is worth reiterating: poor wage-earners cannot afford health insurance. That's why they don't buy it! Although it seems to us comfortable salarymen far more rational to pay a couple hundred bucks a month for minimal coverage just in case we get Ted Kennedy's brain cancer, it isn't an option for some people.

Point being, what you have here is a partisan hack endorsing a plan that does nearly the exact opposite of that which he claims to preferentially support, because his party, sort of, produced it. Instead of using public funds to provide direct subsidies of medical treatment, you have private wealth confiscated through the threat of legal sanction for the purpose of increasing the market penetration of private companies. You've replaced a program of individual welfare with a system of corporate welfare paid for by the very individuals whose economic status would make them the recipients of the individual welfare you claim to seek. Fuck the poor, so long as it reflects well on Barack Obama, his coattails, and our chances in 2010.

Meanwhile, all these kiddos flipped their buzzed heads when John Mackey wrote a one-off op-ed suggesting some half-assed private solutions to the lack of broad, national health coverage, even as they came to support not merely a privatized insurance provision, but a system of obligatory national consumption.

The Part about the Book

As a reflexive reactionary, I did not want to like Roberto Bolaño. It seemed too much like jumping onto a bandwagon. But The Savage Detectives was such dark fun, and By Night in Chile has to rank as one of the great monologues in prose fiction (not to mention that it accomplishes, if glancingly, an effect that it took Proust himself ten jillion pages to create), and before I knew it I was sold.

I mention this because I hope that my reluctance will lend some greater sense of sincerity to my critical judgment. Of all the novels I've read that were published within the last fifty years, 2666 is the finest and greatest of them. Every page is an astonishment.

And the Winner Is . . .

The Sickness unto Death

Just because we're bereaved, that doesn't make us saps!

So I guess village blurgher Ezra Klein called Joe Lieberman a senatorial version of Dan Burros and then some other dude at The New Republic suggested that Lieberman was a bad Jew because he couldn't do arithematic, or something. Blog! Well, the occasion sent me skimming through Mr. Klein's recent output, and it is striking how it tells the famous tale of stone soup in reverse . . . except somehow the moral remains the same. Basically, everyone starts out with a big pot of delicious hearty soup, and then all the residents of the village stop by and scoop out all the good stuff, and what's left is a half-full pot of rancid water and a hunk of rock. Delicious! Or, at least, better than nothing.

Well this is the partisan rearguard's answer to everything, isn't it. Better than nothing! They don't seem to be doing very well shoring up the flabby flank of Donk voters. Poor Matthew Yglesias is practically beside himself as he sees the motivated hope-n-change groundswell realizing that they might as well fuck it and go bowling for all the change they've seen. "Nobody ever accomplished anything in politics by not participating." Fuck you, buddy. I'll see your Mondale campaign and raise you a Gandhi. Consider youth absenteeism in the 2010 advertising cycle an act of civil fucking disobedience. The kids might not be right, but at least they're not idiots. Look, despite all the high moral hoo-haw that American civic philosophy has long stuffed into our politics like apples into a Christmas goose (or, you know, think of your own goddamn metaphor, you dirty fucks), non-transactional voting is just conscription. Why should anyone be obligated to fight for someone else's cause? Just for the record: I do vote in municipal elections, but when I vote for the guy who says he's going to address my pothole problems . . . I presume he is going to address my pothole problems, not make a big show of carting in a tracked excavator to tear up all the asphalt and then stick me with a bill for getting rid of the potholes.

A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory

The Post-Gazette reports on the devil weed. For a little pull-quote scaremongering, they go to the local color:

"I'm not surprised that the use has stopped declining," said Holly Martin, chief operating officer at Greenbriar Treatment Center, an adult rehabilitation center in Washington, Pa., with facilities throughout the Pittsburgh area.

"We're seeing more and more younger folks who are admitting to using" marijuana, she said. These younger adults usually range in age from 18 to 25, and many behave as though using marijuana is not that serious.

"People don't see it as a big deal," she said. "That's the thing that's the scariest."

Now I bear a bit of a personal grudge against the Greenbriar and its patent-medicine peddlers. My late brother spent some time in a Greenbriar residential facility before he died. He might as well have gone to a chiropractor for a broken spine. A hotbed of disgrace and recidivism, organizations like the Greenbriar are wormy parasites on the prison and insurance industries, catering to down-and-outs on early release, spouse-abusers on strict probation, and kids like my brother, whose family-funded insurance provides a nice incremental revenue stream. As a model of healing, these centers are quakery in its purest form, combining fast detox with bowdlerized twelve-step-ism, the former presuming that temporary abstinence is an act of willful change rather than mere time-biding, the latter turning the rigor of self-directed recovery into hortatory group-meeting feel-goodism.

While I personally find the sometimes strident book-thumping of the more vocal twelve-step proponents off-putting and think that Crispin's insights (which I've linked before) into both the strengths and the contradictions of AA ands its brethren are fairly spot on, I want to emphasize a separate praisworthy point about these programs, aside from Crispin's very true note about their admirably anarchist organization: they are not advocates. In part, this is a necessary function (lack of function?) of their innate anarchy. Without leaders and spokespeople, without a capital-O Organization, without a governing body or a system of overall consensus, the program can generate no positions. But I think it worth mentioning nonetheless that AA and NA and al-Anon and others are not prohibitionist. They assume the existence of drugs and alcohol. They do not presume that anyone who drinks is an alcoholic or that anyone who uses drugs is an addict; they do not lament the existence of drugs and alcohol anymore than overeaters anonymous laments the existence of food or gravity.

That isn't to say that twelve-steppers aren't a bit judgemental outside of the rooms. Believe me. I live with one. They are fond of idetifying alcoholics, and almost any character flaw or habit of bad behavior becomes "acting like an addict." But even in judgment I have never, to my recollection, heard a twelve-stepper announce that the problem is that our society doesn't take alcohol, marijuan, heroin, ad inf. seriously enough.

Treatment facilities, on the other hand, are business ventures, and prohibitionary public policy is good for business, not only because the courts and prisons funnel thousands of people into treatment every day, but also because addicts like my brother who are insincere in their desire for recovery use treatment facilities as means of escaping and preempting social, financial, and legal problems. I mean, my brother didn't go into the Greenbriar because he truly believed himself to be an addict and sincerely wanted to stop using opiates; he went in because he had been passing bad checks and wanted to prove to friends, family, and employers that he was willing to change, either to avoid legal action or to get our financial support should some store or bank decide to take him to court.

Thus do you find these scammers and snake-oil salesment forever decrying the perfidious influence of drugs, as if drugs were animate agents, capable of evil intent. And you will also note that even the softer-seeming confidence men of the treatment industry, those who loudly regret draconian sentencing rules, push for a system of "decriminalization" that ultimately maintains prohibition but replaces jail terms with court-adjudicated probationary treatment programs.

The Name of the Hose

Matt Taibbi's bruited exposé of Obama's you'll-pardon-the-expression backdoor dealings has set the usual twits a-twittering. Taibbi responds convincingly and then pulls the punch in a post script. More in a moment. I would first like to engage in a little cathartic ad hominem. Below you will find pics of Tim Fernholz and Matt Yglesias, the nuns whose critiques are linked above. I cannot for the life of me remember which is which.



This back-alley cub look seems to be the mode de rue of many you'll-pardon-the-expression up-and-coming Donk intellecshuls these days, and for a time I couldn't figure out why it was that a youth desperate to be taken seriously by his wise party-hack elders would so blatantly signal a barely-repressed desire to be taken into the barrel room of the local Eagle to be repeatedly fisted and peed on by a gang of bear leather daddies, but then I was like, Oooohhhh, that's why. Someone should explain to these boys that no good comes to a party bottom. A few years into it and you've got nothing left but a loose asshole, some nasty infections, a drug habit, and a face aged beyond its years.

I mean, honestly. Yglesias is a bit of a dweeb, certainly a careerist, and his idea of iconoclasm is penning a defense of Howard Dean, but even so I cringe to see him bend over in stirring defense of Obama against Mount Olymia Snowe's impenetrable hairline. It's plain undignified.

Well, anyway, Taibbi clocks plenty of body shots, but I've got to disagree when he ends with this:

The Prospect writer argues that “the problems Taibbi tries to describe aren’t some ridiculous cabal” but instead “come from group-think and structural influences.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but this was exactly the point of the article. The issue with the modern Democratic party is that its leaders all share a world view that’s extremely narrow. They genuinely believe in Rubinite ideas, have grown accustomed to an incestuous relationship with Wall Street, and they probably think that the right people were put in charge. Their failure to look beyond their own “group-think” for solutions to economic problems is exactly the issue.

Strictly speaking, it's true, and yet I note that you could likewise say that the issue with the National Socialist party was that its leaders all shared a world view that was extremely . . . narrow. And that is not to say that the Democrats are Nazis, Dude, far from it. It is merely to point out that the problem with our ruling junta isn't their unwillingness to "look beyond" their pernicious crocodilian cannibalistic blood-worship, but rather the fact that they are, in fact, flesh-eating, blood-drinking, reptilian man-crunchers. Suggesting that they have somehow failed to look beyond the received wisdom of their class presumes mere intellectual failure and thus undercredits their vicious intelligence. The problem is not that they are idiots, although idiots are certainly well-represented in the upper echelons of our lategreat empire, but that they're bastards.

Friday Flow Charts: Barack Obama, Explained

No posting tomorrow, so here is the early edition of our new favorite feature. Click to enlarge.

The Reason for the Season

Caesar Augustus

The President's Nobel acceptance speech was delivered in his usual language of moral overgeneralization and bad analogy, but if there was one line that revealed the thing in all its absurdist glory, it was this:

But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars.

And there you have it. A President goes to Oslo, claims the mantle of military dictator, and proceeds to harangue the whole world about the necessity of war in the name of peace. Our nation has no constitutional Commander (not that that's ever stopped anyone); those powers are explicitly delineated, referring to the Army and Navy and the "militias of the several states." Oh well. Like the boys in the union always say, precedent trumps the contract.

I Coulda Been a Big Star

You know, as a Child-of-Privilege, a Sitter-on-Boards, a Server-on-Committees, a certified Homosexual-American, and an occasional featured figure in the local scene-and-style pages, I know a thing or two about the modes and methods of benefit-dinner gatecrashing, and the stodgy insistence of the Washingtonian socialisti that Washington's social life is an outlier because it does not comport to the standards of Manhattan and Los Angeles reeks faintly of a classic inferiority disorder, as a dry floor-drain trap reeks faintly of sewer gas. In reality, Washington's self-vaunted code of conduct is the national norm; a self-same code animates every small town and midsized city in America. "Small-c conservative." Indeed. Welcome to Pittsburgh. It is not a matter of class, nor a particular decorum, but merely a matter of who's been around for long enough, which arrives thusly at the inevitable corrollary: who knows whom. But there is a secondary rule, and it is this: if you can convincingly act like you know everyone, you're golden. And as an aside, things are not so different in NY or LA.

But the naïve New York reporter, poor déclassé thing that he is, has duly transcribed the Capital anonymice as they insist that the Salahis have broken with Washington standards by "embracing fame." Oh, indeed?

The Salahis are also eliciting gasps in Washington by embracing fame with unambivalent gusto. That’s pure Los Angeles, a place where there is very little downside to showing up at a party, or on any blog or gossip page. In Hollywood, famous people gravitate toward each other simply because they hope that by huddling up, their odds of being photographed multiply. In Washington, notoriety can be hazardous to your career and there are dozens of wise men and aides de camp with reputations built, in part, on their near invisibility.

As pure a pile of bullshit as you'll find this side of the cattle ranch. Quick, Monsieur la journaliste, name a few of the top Los Angeles press agents. Name me a single Hollywood studio executive vice-president off the top of your head. Name a stylist! Name a top film editor? Name a unit production manager or a line producer. There are dozens of them with reputations built, in part, on near invisibility.

Read The Hollywood Reporter, or US Weekly, or page six; then tell me if they aren't full of the same on-background reportage that graces the front pages of the Post and the Times. The gasps heard in Washington when the Salahis are mentioned aren't gasps of shock, but of recognition.

The Inner Harbor

There is a libertarian tendency to read Mencken as an earlier, pithier, and less schematic Ayn Rand, although there is little evidence--indeed, there are mostly counterexamples--in his writing to indicate that he thought much more highly of the Fords and Edisons of the world than the Hardings and Bryanses. He was a powerful advocate for a certain literary taste (if you think highly of Huck Finn, you can thank Mencken), an entertaining fan of German music, and he introduced Nietzsche to America, for the benefit of bombastic undergraduates hereandeverafteramen, and yet insofar as he could be said to hold a particular political philosophy, it would be most accurate to call him a heckler. In his own estimation: "I am not a constructive critic."

But one of the joys of being a part of the posterity for which an author partly writes is that the poor scribbler gets no posthumous say in how his words get deployed in argument, and so Menken's remarkable, quotable arias on the corruption endemic to the practice of democratic and representative government have served every club, clique, and ideology that America has subsequently produced. Despite such . . . democratic usage, I think it's fair to say that the libertarians and marketeers have cornered a fair portion of the Mencken market, and as in the above-linked piece by Rothbardian Doug French, they have deployed Mencken principally in order to advance and propound the benefits of a post-Jeffersonian natural aristocracy, a class of entrepreneurial meritocrats against whose rock-of-ages-like productive rectitude the depredations of the politicla class crashes, sprays, and retreats. I like to think that Mencken would be amused.

It is true that the canny Baltimorean did lament the universial plebianism of America, perhaps most famously in "American Culture":

The capital defect in the culture of These States is the lack of a civilized aristocracy, secure in its position, animated by an intelligent curiosity, skeptical of all facile generalizations, superior to the sentimentality of the mob, and delighting in the battle of ideas for its own sake.

Regrettably for Doug French and the Mises institute, I do not think that Mencken was anticipating "Sir Richard Branson--knighted for "services to entrepreneurship"--[who] sticks to business and reportedly owns 360 companies."

Were it not so plainly a result of obvious yet resolutley unexamined intellectual prejudices, I would find it curious that our freemarketarian friends are so dutifully committed to the plainly preposterous notion that within enterprises outside the political realm, true merit and virtue are rewarded; the cream rises; talent is recognized; ability is a boon. On a small scale, this is funny because it presumes the existence of enterprise outside the political realm. On a grand scale, it's funny because its most ardent proponents have so obviously never spent much time in a business enterprise, where the perversities of who does and does not rise are, if anything, even more deranged than in the strictly political territory of electoral politics. While there are certainly some very smart, talented, incisive, conversant, articulate, and well-cultured businesscreatures in the world, most of our captains of industry are even more cretinous, subhuman, moronic, and depraved than the average US senator, and that's no low hurdle or short sprint. There is a reason that the cottage industry of office humor, which is nothing more than the endless retelling of the same joke about The Boss being An Idiot, has exploded into one of our culture's most uniformly popular forms of popular entertainment--behind only the psychosexual thrill of America's greatest single contribution to human civilization, the Law and Order franchise.

Zap

It is the avowed policy of this blog to approvingly link any criticism of off-brand sleeping aid and diuretic, N+1.

Counterexamples

I am pretty sure that Bob Herbert has written this column before, and he's certainly not the first to propose that our profligate war-making is somehow the product of the so-called all-volunteer military, that if only the yutes-of-privilege were likewise called to duty, we would hesitate to commit such blood and treasure. And of course, he is correct. Were it not for the draft and the fair share borne by the children of our élite, our conflict in Vietnam might have dragged on for nearly two decades, costing tens of thousands of of American lives, millions of southeast Asian lives, and billions upon billions of wasted dollars.

Steelers

It may not be one of the great mid-season collapses, but goddamn, Steelers. Even the best teams can suffer the occasional loss, but to lose a series of close games in the manner they have, well, regrettably admitted: a mark of an inferior squad.

A Third Force

So. Thomas Friedman. Holy shit. He finds a Cronkite-Kennedy interview:

Cronkite: “Do you think this government still has time to regain the support of the people?”

Kennedy: “I do. With changes in policy and perhaps with personnel I think it can. If it doesn’t make those changes, the chances of winning it would not be very good."

The interview took place on Sept. 2, 1963! One month to the day later, Diem would be dead following a disastrous America-backed coup. One month! Ho Chi Mihn would apocryphally chortle: "I can scarcely believe the Americans could be so stupid."

So is this the plan Friedman commends to The Obama?

Not yet a month later, Kennedy would also be dead. The war would persist for another 12 years. Another fifty-odd thousand Americans would die, along with untold millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the New York Times.

Friday Flow Charts

I'm not raping you. I'm just forcing you to have sex with me while you struggle and scream, "No!"

"I do not believe we have locked ourselves into leaving," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during a Senate committee hearing Wednesday. "But what we have done ... is to signal very clearly to all audiences that the United States is not interested in occupying Afghanistan."

-reported on NPR

I admit it: I relish the image of Hillary, the pantsuit vampire of our times, acting out this well-armed community-theater adaptation of Bartelby the Scrivener.

"Get the fuck out of Afghanistan, America!"

"We would prefer not to."

***

Now I do not wish to reopen the old back-and-forth with Michael Bérubé. In the first place he recently made some mildly complimentary comments about yours truly and I am truly, truly that capricious and self-involved. Rather more substantively, I am immensely enjoying the recently enjoined cockfight between him and Louis Proyect, for there is nothing so wonderful as an internecine lefty-fight--with any luck, all the world's unrepentent Marxists and liberal internationalists will eventually slash each other to death with the razors tied to their feet and we can fee their unrecognizeable, bloody remains to the one pig in Afghanistan as expiation for the sins of ineffectuality and hubris. (You can guess to which side each of those is assigned.)

And yet I do wonder what the author of The Left at War has got to say about Afghanistan now. To his credit, I do not believe that Béreubé ever used that most disgusting of all clichés and called Afghanistan "the good war." But he has certainly spoken of its necessity and derided those who always opposed it as being so in thrall to a Chomskyian vision of bloody American imperialism that they (we) simply retreated in a familiar black-and-white (he would say Manichean, but I can't condone that misuse of the word or slander of a perfectly, wonderfully weird cosmology) world where America is the rote evildoer, everyone else is ground under our heel, and not even a direct attack on our own country merited a military response.

To be sure--plenty of people were making something resembling that argument! Personally, I'm sympathetic to it, although I think it simplifies. I would say more accurately that regarding the justification proferred for 9/11 by its evident architects, America's pernicious actions and influence in the "Muslim world" were real, but ultimately pretextual, and that 9/11 was in turn actual, but nonetheless mere pretext for for invading Afghanistan. That is to say, there's a certain truth to the claims that these attacks and invasions were responses to provocations, but a very limited sort of truth: a small truth told in such a way as to make it a large lie.

So. Cast backwards. It is the 9/12 Lacuna of Good Feelings and everyone has set to crying, "Something must be done!" But had you asked a lousy anarchist, fatalist, and defeatist like me where I thought we'd be in 2010, I'd have told you straight up: Still In Afghanistan, for no particular reason, with a President of one or other party making speeches that sound like self-fulfilling prophecies. Why?

Not because America is malevolent, but because America is heedless.

This is ultimately my beef with liberal internationalism. I mean, I echo its critics from the left when they accuse its proponents of white-washing America's truly execrable history as an imperial and colonial power, but I think that critique, while accurate, misses the point. Though they would perhaps not go as far as I, or the "Chomskian Left" would like, I think you will find that folks like Bérubé accede to and accept the argument that America has often behaved very, very badly and deservedly won itself enemies. They'd simply say: we wish to redirect America's power for good. But America's power can't be redirected for good because it has no moral component. It isn't malevolent either. It can't be understood as a matter of good and evil, or right and wrong. It is a product of pressures and incentives, economies and assumptions, interia and habit, circumstance and accident. I do not actually think America invaded Afghanistan because it wished to do evil, nor (more charitably) because it confused right intention with right action. I think that its invasion was all-but-predetermined, set in advance by accumulated history, triggered by a particular event, yes--but if not triggered by that, then it would have been by something else. And while I think that we are obliged to bear witness to it as a matter of individual responsibility and morality, as a matter of personal right action, I also think that the arguments we've all been having about who does or does not support it are wholly immaterial, as likewise I believe the question of whether or not America should or should not intervene in this or that conflict, genocide, civil war, or what have you in such and such part of the world and for some or other purpose are immaterial; America either will or will not, but never because of what anybody thinks.

Today in Liberal Racism

We were both shocked as well by Obama, who typically doesn't shy away from nuance and details, continually speaking about Afghanistan as if it is a nation in the same manner as the US or UK: But Afghanistan is, of course, not the same. The reason nation-building hasn't worked there (and will continue to not work) is because there is not a national identity to hold together the disparate tribes that comprise its population. It was strange to see such a glaring omission of so basic a fact from Obama's address, although I suppose its inclusion would elicit precisely the sort of questions that Obama hopes to avoid.

-Melissa McEwan, chauvinist

Spoken by a gal who's never watched Braveheart, heard of the American Civil War, or acquainted herself with Northern Ireland. Evidently. "Afghanistan is not the same." Sister, huh?

Now, the reason that "nation-building hasn't worked" is that "nation-building" is a euphemism for foreign occupation, and there is resistence. Liberals in general seem to prefer goosey sociological explanations for why the brightness and light of representative democracy do not immediately take hold, and the plain facts of insurgency escape them. Armed Afghans do not want our army in their country, and they will keep trying to kill us until we leave. Go back to college and argue about melting pots and salad bowls, you geeks. Afghanistan is for real, and Superjesus Black Reagan just committed us for the long haul.

And what is revealed about the straw leftism of our dear Shakespearian sisters by this telling slip of the tongue? In every antiwar activista, a Satrap? If only the Afghans weren't so tribal, so primitive, we might sit down and reason together. Maybe Barack Obama could make a speech!

Drag Show

Oh me, oh my. What a dud! I at least expected a bit of unearned grandiloquence, a little bit of the old upward, onward, better, faster, bigger, hotter, harder, yeah! Instead we got a subliterate word soup that took thirty minutes to say what could have been said in thirty seconds. The poor liberals don't know what to do. March? Run a primary challenge? I imagine the entire electoral base of the Democratic Party pouting miserably into its soup, a spitting image of Claire Danes in the My-So-Called Life years: "God, Dad, you just make me want to die!"

Anyway, I think we can safely say that this outcome was as predictable as tides and sunsets. Plus ça change, motherfuckers.

Ipse dixit

Can the mechanical car turn against the man with the remote control? Can software revolt against its programmer? Clearly this is absurd.

-Dinesh D'Souza

Spoken by a man who has never operated a copier, I say. Or tried to replace the belt on his washing machine. Or personally tried to remedy the Google redirect malaware. Or confronted a stubbornly running toilet. Of course non-sentient systems can "revolt"! To think otherwise is . . . absurd!

D'Souza has penned a three-part series (uno, dos, tres) in which he proposes to prove that there is an afterlife because he guesses it to be so. Read it for yourself, lest you think I exaggerate. He is not kidding when he calls it "the presuppositional argument." Did I mention that he calls it the presuppositional argument? Brothers and sisters, he does. The argument from I-Guess-So--it has a certain tinny ring, like a tambourine left out in a downpour.

As it turns out, D'Souza is not so much proposing a new apologia for an afterlife as he is assuming the existence of an afterlife to make a not-novel argument about the origins of human morality. Along the way, he gets confused about Copernicus, mixes up special and general relativity, literalizes Dawkins argument in "The Selfish Gene," decontextualizes and misunderstands E.O. Wilson, gets Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments to mean almost the opposite of what it says, and manages to ignore the last fifty years of biological and behavioral resarch into "altruism" and "morality" in the animal kingdom, proclaiming that "morality [has] an undeniable anti-evolutionary thrust."

It's such a mess that I feel badly for him. His "novel argument" is a bare tissue of hastily recycled forensics-team clichés, all of which ultimately wash out as: natural selection as I understand it cannot explain why humanity has come up with so many injunctions to be nice to each other, ergo heaven. Dear Dinesh, existence is not a predicate. Jesus Christ, and I thought I smoked a lot of weed in college.

Democratic Gore

Today the outrage of many of my more . . . progressive friends and acquaintances has found its outlet at Facebook, that hotbed of direct-action politics. 35,000 troops?! This is not what we elected you for, Obama, reads one prototypical message. The various hypotheses outlining how it is that the popular will of the demos gets transmogrified via voting, the blessed act, into the ol' kratia are, maybe needless to say, a source of tender amusement to this author. The idea that the--how to put it?--intentionality behind the quadrennial exercise of the main-vein franchise matters even a whit is plumb crazy. Far better to spend hours masturbating over magical sigils. No, it will not work, but at least you get to come.

As is often the case, I find my thoughts lagging a few paces behind Mister Smith on the matter, and I will steal his point about the religious sensibility of political true believers to make one of my own. You know, properly understood, the act of prayer is not an act of will, but an act of submission. Well, so too the vote, which is secular democracy's answer to the prayer. I know the popular civics texts tell us that the bosses work for us, that our little Republic is what you call an employee-owned company, but plainly that's just not case. To vote is not to give an order but to offer acclamation. You're just agreeing, ahead of time and sight unseen, to whatever it is that the bastard says, or does not say, that he's going to do.

Barack and Me

Well-known savory beignet Michael Moore has written An Open Letter to President Obama in which he chipmunks around, threatening that millions of The Children, Who Are the Future, will flow south across the Rio Grande if Obama sends but one newly minted private to Afghanistan, the, cue music, Graveyard of Empires! I just adore the idea that by doing what he was transparently going to do all along, Obama is traducing his principles. You already ate your bowl of shit, Moore, when you pulled the lever on that blustry Tuesday. No one cares what you think. What are you gonna do, go Green? Where on earth does anyone get the idea that Obama's heart protests even as his lips say, Go.

Brave New Squirrel

Does David Brooks believe that America discovered counterinsurgency warfare? Does America believe that America discovered it?

Mannequin

I will modestly disagree with blogfriend Jonathan Schwarz when he writes, à propos The Obama AfPakWarSpeak:

The decision's been made. Now all we need is a reason!

That is to say, I think that this interpretation is right in spirit but wrong in fact.

It would seem to me that the decision-making process, such as it was, the set-piece meetings held in series over the last few months, have been mere prelude to a speech. We may recall that all of the "options" presented to Obama were the same option. It would therefore seem that what we have is not so much a decision in search of a publishable reason as a speech in search of an occasion. A small distinction, perhaps, but a difference nonetheless.

While I don't agree entirely with the popular conservative complaint that Obama "governs by speechmaking," it is true that the oratorical mode is his rhetorical preference. Where circumstances have presented the opportunity for him to engage his hortatory charms, he's leapt to it. Here, the daily dullness of occupation and counterinsurgency has simply failed to provide a punctuating event convenient for the delivery of a bit of revival wisdom, and so the producers of our great democracy have done what producers do: created an event. It is no more real than the latest fluctuations of Tom and Katie. Presidential addresses are so very like the movies in any case. They get released to the critics ahead of time; a few snobs pay attention to the reviews; everyone else goes, or doesn't; likes it, or doesn't. Someone at Slate writes a column. The Steelers drop another one. Christmas arrives. What were we saying?

Separate but Equal

To be clear, Bond has used this line several times, and when he says "equality," he isn't talking about the right to vote, the right to eat at a public restaurant, the right to attend an integrated school or the right to a fair trial. He is talking about the right to change the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples.

-Taylor Harris

Proposition: from Brown through Loving, the Civil Rights movement changed the definition of equality.

Je me récuse

Sure, Iran sees Evin as the mirror image of Guantánamo. But undoing that U.S. aberration was central to Obama’s message. Speaking out against the abuse of Iranian political prisoners must be equally so. Obama should continue to seek engagement — it’s the only way forward — while denouncing the outrages.

-Roger Cohen

Sure. Except. Guantanamo plainly isn't aberrant. Similar American-run prisons of even greater scale exist in Iraq and Afghanistan. These have been widely reported on. They've been deeply reported in Cohen's own New York Times. They're not "black sites",though, those, too, have been reported in the Times; they're publicly acknowledged. And, you know, one's an aberration, two's a coincidence, but three is a pattern.

Then of course there is the niggling fact that Obama has not undone anything.

Still yet: outrage. Now, it is nearly an article of faith among the US press and much of the political establishment as well that expressions of high dander and loud regret are an integral part of policy arsenal. If it's a day with a name ending in day, you can be sure that someone, somewhere, is aggressively deploring something.

I circle back to the advice that Papa IOZ gave me when I was first entering the working world. "Never," he said, "let them know that they're getting to you." I have carried this all-purpose koan with me ever since, and though I chose a perhaps less remunerative field than dear old dad, I feel that my modicum of professional attainment is more due to the tireless application of this injunction to patient imperturbability than to any particular skill set--in the parlance of our times. To yell, scream, pound the desk, and climb the walls is to admit preemptive defeat; it is to indicate almost without fail that you are bargaining from a position of weakness. Puffed feathers don't really make a bigger bird, ya dig? And as far as I've made it my business to remain impassive in the face of this sort of thing, I've made it pretty well in the Business. It works with one's compeers, and it works with one's bosses as well. A red-faced man is easily manipulated, let us say.

I don't like Barack Obama. He's as much a bloodthirsty reptile as any other top croc in the American empire. You do not attain to the purple by blowing sunshine out of your ass and picking flowers all day. The now-forgotten war in Iraq continues apace, and the evident scuttling of elections there predestines an ever-longer stay for our quote-unquote combat troops. Meanwhile the once-forgotten, now-remembered war in Afghanistan makes a key-change and goes up-tempo, as Obama prepares to go all Lyndon Baines on the place. On the domestic front, well, what can you say? These rich fucks, this whole fucking thing.

And yet. If there's one praiseworthy part of the man, it's his ability to go for a day or two without working himself into a towering rage and issuing Mosaic declarations of denunciatory hoo-ha from the Rose Garden for the benefit of the Washington press corps' tender moral sensibilities.

Phi Beta Sucka

Among the soi-disant sensibles of foreign policy jawboneration, you often find imponderables like Anne Applebaum's, in which she laments-without-lamenting that other major economic powers in the world refuse to act--that is the operative word, by the way, and it will appear again--like America's little fraternity brothers. Her worries are couched in the transparently false and wholly implausible claim that "America no longer wants to be the sole superpower. The American president no longer wants to be the leader of a sole superpower. Nobody else wants America to be the sole superpower, and, in fact, America cannot even afford to be the sole superpower." Well, perhaps we cannot even afford it, but even that's debatable given the willingness of others to bankroll our misendeavors. Failure to invade is the general diagnosis, and that's understandable. The only empires to earn the 20th-century designation, superpower, were the US and the USSR, and both were fond of blowing shit up and dictating to lesser powers just precisely what it was that they could do with their independence.

But that was then and this is now and water is water and east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. We find Applebaum, in response to the EU naming a couple of apparently compentent but unknown (relatively) technocratic types to major posts, avering:

Europe might have a new phone number, but when Obama calls, the person on the other end of the line will still be unable to act. "Europe" will not be a unified entity capable of coordinating a unified policy in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East, or anywhere else anytime soon. Europe cannot, in short, become America's full partner in foreign policy.

There's that pesky word again. But act how, precisely? In what capacity? This is even leaving aside any question of why a sane person or self-interested national entity would ever be anyone's full partner. Exit, Washington's ghost. "Europe" is a partially politically integrated economic union that has yet to quite work out a Supremancy Clause, but even when it does, that is no guarantee that will choose to join us in barelling around the china shop.

Speaking of China, it equally befuddles Anne:

Europe, when counted as a single entity, is still the world's largest economy. China, whatever else it might be, is still the world's fastest-growing economy. Sooner or later, the simple need to defend their economic interests might persuade one or both to start taking the outside world more seriously.

If you're not killing them, deposing their governments, or occupying their countries, you're not taking them seriously. In defense of its economic interests, China has made economic partnerships. This is evidently working out in China's favor. (Incidentally, it also seems to be working out in Africa's favor, far more so than the more pious, less remunerative lectures from the so-called West.) Applebaum finds that "China appears uninterested in joining an international campaign against terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or anything else." Yeah, and it won't sign our petition to expand casual Fridays to the Thursday prior when the Friday is a Federal holiday that the office has off either! It won't invest in this promising swampland with me! It said that this thin and poorly-documented prospectus promising 20% annual returns looked too good to be true! It seemed like it hesitated when I asked if this dress makes my ass look fat!

Si j'ose dire

You know. I do not grant Christ Hitchens' premise that the US Army doesn't deliberately kill civilians. The "deliberately" is pure casuistry. It's a semantic backdoor through which a hugely spurious assumption squeezes its fat, ugly ass: namely, that if an act (i.e. aerial bombardment) with a known end (i.e. the death of civilian bystanders) is undertaken for a purpose (i.e. killing the #3 man in Terror!) that is distinct but not separable from that end, then the morally dubious outcome (civilian death) is defensible because we did not mean for it to happen even though we knew it was going to happen. But you know what, I am a generous man. Let us grant the premise, for argumentation. The US Military does not "deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact[.]"

Well, even thus granted, it remains an immense non sequitur! Radical Muslims are more incensed by America killing Muslims than by other Radical Muslims killing Muslims. Stop. The. Fucking. Presses. What is the argument here? That a religious radical should be more upset by suicide bombings? And then . . . what, precisely? What the fuck are we still doing in Afghanistan, Christopher?

It seems to me that Terror War hawks are desperate to pin Islamoradicalism or what have you on Nidal Hasan in order to prove a point about the necessity of their war, when it seems to me that no matter how you slice it (and for the record, I believe that Hasan's crimes were "religiously motivated", insofar as the phrase has any meaning), you circle back to the same question. What the fuck are we still doing in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Fuck it: grant that Islam is itself a deranged form of religious psychopathy. How the fuck do you defeat a terrorism with a billion adherents? What on earth are any of these people talking about?

Major Hasan is an object lesson not in the failures of some fictitious multicultural boondoggle, but in the fallacious premises underlying the whole notion of a War on Terrorism. It demonstrates the elaborately retarded fraud at the heart of it. It shows not that we court problems by tolerating Islam, but simply that it is not possible to prevent those bent on committing violent acts from committing them 100% of the time. It demonstrates that you cannot eliminate the application of violent tactics at home or abroad through the application of military force in other countries. It shows the fallacy of absolute security. Men exist and guns are real. In the absence of time machines or mass extinction events, these genies are out of their fucking lamps. I mean, I am all for turning the Hasan rampage into a mock parable about the inscrutable nature of evil in the world, but for once can we get a grip? If the acts of the army in Afghanistan can be permitted no bearing on the acts of Major Hasan in Texas, then is not the inverse true? And if so, then what? What?

Vay-Cay

Light posting this week due to the celebration of the successful genocide of the aboriginal population of North America. Every time an American says "this is what it would be like if the Nazis had won the war," a Native American chuckles mordantly. Preparations this year include:

Mustard and peppercorn rolled rare leg of lamb with roasted root vegetables
Potato gratin with Gruyère and Brenta, dusted with nutmeg
Warm potato salad with toasted cumin seeds
Farro with braised leeks and citrus-coriander dressing
Raw, sweetened cranberry and tangerine chutney with cayenne
Two savory fritatti, one with pancetta, one with sweet red pepper
Celery salad with shallot-cardomom vinaigrette
Green lentils simmered with prosciutto butt, with shaved Parmigiano Reggiano
Fresh, small rustic cross loaves
Cheeses, meats, and olives n shit
Sweets via potluck

But I will still try top pop in here from time to time.

A Delirious Man

I too will confess to you that your right hand will save you. Behold now the Behemoth that I have made with you; he eats grass like cattle. Behold now his strength is in his loins and his power is in the navel of his belly. His tail hardens like a cedar; the sinews of his testicles are knit together. His limbs are as strong as copper, his bones as a load of iron. His is the first of God's ways; [only] his Maker can draw His sword [against him]. For the mountains bear food for him, and all the beasts of the field play there. Does he lie under the shadows, in the covert of the reeds and the swamp? Do the shadows cover him as his shadow? Do the willows of the brook surround him? Behold, he plunders the river, and [he] does not harden; he trusts that he will draw the Jordan into his mouth. With His eyes He will take him; with snares He will puncture his nostrils. Can you pull the leviathan with a harpoon, or press down his tongue with a rope? Can you insert a fishhook into his nose, or pierce his jaw with a barb? Will he offer much supplication to you, or will he speak soft words to you? Will he make a covenant with you? Will you take him as a lifelong slave? Will you play with him like a bird or tie him to your maidens? Will charmers dig pits for him? Will they divide him among the merchants? Will you fulfill [your desire] to make a tent of his skin or a shade of fishes of his head? Put your hand over him; remember the battle, do not stop.

-Iyov, 40: 14-32

The Book of Job may have borne more exegesis and commentary than any other in Tanakh, so it's worth nothing what a fantastical shaggy-dog story it really is. It's tempting to read it as a tale of temptation, although it plays in odd inverse: rather than offering Job the world to renounce God; The Adversary, (that's Satan, sort of, to you goyim) is allowed to strip the worldly goods and comforts away from Job in order that he make his renunciation. Then follows a series of debates in which Jobs friends stop by to offer him earnest but almost wholly useless thoughts and advice on the nature and ultimate resolution of his inscrutable predicament. Then God appears as a whirlwind, doses Job an a heavy sheet of sunshine acid, and describes in amazing technicolor detail what it is like to be the creator of the universe, complete with a couple of extraordinary, beautiful, and deeply weird science-fiction space monsters, the Behemoth and Leviathan. Job is rewarded for his fidelity with increased riches, a new family by his largely off-stage wife, and long life.

Now the Coen Brothers have gone and made a kind of pastiche of the Job tale in A Serious Man. When was the last time I so enjoyed such a miserable movie? Likewise a shaggy story, in which a not-quite-prosperous Jewish everyman is afflicted for apparently no reason by a series of inscrutable misfortunes, some of them minor, some of them operatic in their intensity, the film seems to have befuddled even many approving critics, in part, I believe, because they just don't get the capricious and insane Jewish God. The Coens have always enjoyed afflicting their characters in a manner positively redolent of old Hashem, and here, since it is actually (evidently) The Name himself fucking with everyone, they allow themselves wide latitude. The God of the Old Testament, as Christians might put it, is not the dotty old man of popular imagination, nor the loving Jesus, nor even the militant hall monitor of the nouveau Protestant imagination, but an ancient and primitive tribal deity, not even the radical monotheist of later minting, but a being just half-removed from the crowded pantheon of the primordial Near East, a God who doesn't just get angry at the Israelites for the Golden Calf, for instance, but has Moses send the faithful Levites to kill 3,000 of them pour décourager les autres.

Larry Gopnick, the beset professor and Job-manqué, is played with the requisite lack of verve by Michael Stuhlbarb, and Richard Kind plays closeted, overweight, cyst-draining Uncle Arthur, whose "Mentaculus," a madman's kabbalistic diary that turns out to by an Uncertainty-defying gambling prophecy, is one of the great jokes of the movie--plays Arthur with real pathos. There is a moment, though it may only be a dream, when Arthur cries out that God has given Larry (who is at this point well into his own misfortunes and living in a motel) everything and given him, Arthur, "shit," that actually rends the heart. George Wyner plays Rabbi Nachtner, "The Second Rabbi," who tells the best tale, a long and seemingly pointless parable of "The Goy's Teeth," a story so hilariously without a point or direction that it could take its place in Writings. A pot-smoking son, a hair-washing daughter, and Fred Melamed as Sy Abelman, the not-quite cuckolding suitor of Larry's wife, intoning musically, "This is no Manischewitz. This is a wine . . . a Bordeaux, Larry. Open it. Let it breathe" . . .

See it.

The Ratchet Effect: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lieberman

Lieberman. You have to admire his tenacity. He cut himself an admirable deal. Senate leadership lets him run a committee and do whatever he wants, and in exchange, he willingly functions as a convenient scapegoat and target for ineffectual Progressive wrath, as they are constitutionally incapable of understanding that he is not an impediment to the Donk's grand plans, but a primary component. Indeed, if "Republicans apply the torque that turns the thing rightward [and] . . . Democrats are the pawl," then the likes of Lieberman (see also, Ben Nelson, the Blue Dogs, et al) are the teeth on the gear, which is to say, the sharp protrusions against which the Democratic pawl clicks to prevent backsliding. The wheel turns right; the Donk slips in; Lieberman cries "Across this line . . . you do not . . ."; and the Progressive internet goes bonkers and ignores the rest of the machine. Whether health care or the terror war. Doesn't matter. The effect is the same.

Now I am sure that good liberals everywhere will crow about Lieberman's hilariously useless hearings in which various and sundry cable news commentators haul up to Capitol Hill to weight in . . . weightily on Homegrown Terrorism or whatever. But of course everyone's interests are served. The interest of propagating the crackpot nomenclature of Islamofascism and suchlike is advanced. The interest of making the Donk and The Obama appear like reasonable proceduralists is advanced. The interest of giving the Elephant a forum in which to inveigh against the depredations of Political Correctness ("Hello, 1990s? This is Politics calling.") is advanced. Thus ever does the axle turn.

Hope Yet

As I understand it, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have outlawed mammography and made abortion mandatory.

God Shed His Grace On Thee

Welcome to your country.

The Donkey and the Hippopotamus

I think I am going to side with Republicans on this one. Mais pourquoi ? Because let us hew to the law of least hypocrisy. If we are going to conduct a show trial, let's conduct a show trial. Regrettably, the Obama administration seems firmly dedicated to the rule that if it can be half-assed, it must be half-assed.

Leave aside the fact that these decisions are pure whim and fancy, based on no discernible principle. Leave aside the Attorney General's boilerplate prosecutorial insistence that a conviction with the maximum sentence is not only desirably, but inevitable. Leave aside all the back and forth about who will or will not have the opportunity to grandsand at trial, whatever form that trial takes. Concentrate instead on the Obama régime's ludicrous insistence that it carry through with a legal process whose outcome has no relevance except insofar as it could provide a superficial rationale for killing the defendant. That's what's at stake; it's all that's at stake. For all its insane bluster and hubris, our government is not comfortable simply putting the guy against a wall and shooting him. So. We go to trial. If convicted and sentenced to anything less than death, he will be imprisoned forever. If acquitted and not sentenced, he will be imprisoned forever. But if sentenced to death, well, see you at the party!

The Bush people appear almost admirable by comparison. Their military tribunals got bogged in a morass of internal power struggles and legal quibbling, but no one in that administration pretended that tribunals were anything other than what they were: an administrative sentencing process for the presumed guilty. Now that is a travesty, but at least it's a honest travesty, and certainly not without historic precedent in this and other countries. Indeed, one might even call it the civilized norm in the broad sweep of history. Meanwhile, in the present, we must endure the endless invocation of justice from those who would traduce the most basic, fundamental principles of legal due process even as they extol them.