"Hey, Sarah Palin, hows that hatey, killy, reloady, crosshairsy thing working out for ya?" -- Frank Conniff
“Now, it's true that the [Wikileaks] cables were legally available to well over 1.5 million Americans, who had adequate security clearance. But trivial? Don't believe it. The cables show the daily business of a mighty empire acting in manners diametrically opposite to public pretensions.... The WikiLeaks documents show that the picture of the international business of the United States offered by the major U.S. media to the public is an infantile misrepresentation of reality.”
-- Alexander Cockburn
"I remember when I was dying in Silver Surfer...The director was like, 'It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.' He was like 'Don't do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.'" -- Jessica Alba in Elle
“Stupidity defeats you in some way. Especially when time is at a premium. And sometimes these questions are themselves mischievous.”
-- Arundhati Roy
“George W. Bush said Friday he will not visit Denver this weekend as planned because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was invited to attend one of the same events as the former president.... [Bush spokesman David Sherzer] said Bush doesn't want to be part of a forum that invited someone who has ‘willfully and repeatedly done great harm to the interests of the United States.’"
-- Sheila V. Kumar, Associated Press
“... Sam disliked the attitude of moral superiority above all else... One merely had to tip open the Britannica to discover that between the years 1912 and 1945 the Germans had destroyed a hundred million lives out of a basic assumption of moral superiority. And this was only the most notorious example that could be extrapolated in every direction in human history, including our own extermination of over a hundred Native American cultures, up through Vietnam, and perhaps Nicaragua in the future... Part of the ethos, the soul history, of American capitalism was to destroy absolutely everything that wasn’t immediately useful.”
-- Jim Harrison, “Sunset Limited”, in The Woman Lit by Fireflies
-- "Because the mongoose isn't fighting snakes for food, or for territory, or for survival -- it's fighting snakes because fuck snakes.
-- Danny Vittore, "Six Animals That Just Don't Give a F@*k"
"All the Stones the Builders Rejected" 
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
Showing posts with label American culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American culture. Show all posts
From Cairo to Istanbul
THURSDAY UPDATE: John and Jeffery are in Istanbul now, taking advantage of the local beer, and the layers of a city going back to Byzantium:
So we have fled the country temporarily. We are currently refugees in Istanbul (not Constantinople) which offers all of the typical trappings of a refugee environment: stunning views, great food, a local beer, Ottoman history everywhere. The usual.
For the time being we are safe and sound. Depending on how the situation in Cairo progresses this week, we will either return to Egypt next week or set up camp in an undisclosed location until further notice (not the United States). The American University in Cairo plans to reopen next week and begin a new session the week after.
More at John's blog here.
***
I tried reaching John Martin's blog from Egypt, and sure enough, it's blocked, but if you type/paste 72.14.204.99 in your browser's address window, it will take you to a Google page that can circumvents the Egyptian block, and from there you can reach John's blog-- You Can't Make Mistakes If You Don't Know What You're Doing-- though comments are disabled. Anyway, forwarded from the suburbs of Cairo, dated January 26:
Situation update for those concerned about our safety
.... There were widespread protest demonstrations in Cairo yesterday and in about 10 other cities as well. They have continued tonight, but on a smaller scale. There was a good deal of violence at one point late in the evening yesterday when the police finally decided to clear out the occupied areas. Tear-gas, water cannons and rubber bullets were all used. There were no live rounds fired. There have been several deaths and in Cairo about 250 people were injured and are now hospitalized. This could well be the beginning of something huge here, not unlike what happened in Tunisia. There are reports of rumors coming in that the son of the President (and his perceived successor) has left the country and is presently in London. It is rumored that the First Lady has also left. These reports have been vehemently denied by the American Embassy and should probably be considered unlikely to have actually occurred.
It will be interesting to watch how the situation progresses, but it will be unlikely to cause any problems for us. This seems so far to be a primarily secular popular revolt instead of one lead by the Muslim Brotherhood or other politico-religious groups. It is unclear where exactly the organization is coming from though. The protesters are regular, working-class people seeking governmental reform and measures to relieve the grinding poverty that Egypt is experiencing.
Social media sites and some news sites are being blocked variously throughout the country. Twitter confirmed earlier that they were in fact blocked yesterday. People are using external proxies in order to circumvent the internet blockades and communicate with each other. This will likely lead to stronger measures undertaken to control the flow of information both to news outlets and to those involved in the demonstrations. There are rumors that mobile phone service is being cut off for known activists. There were reports last evening that mobile services were cut off in Tahrir Square in central Cairo.
We are quite safe at present in Maadi (a southern suburb/district of Cairo). The part of the city we live in is far from the action, and the likelihood of anything happening in this particular suburb/district is low considering that it is inhabited primarily by wealthier folks and expatriates. Regardless, we’re keeping our eyes and ears open and making only leaving the house when absolutely necessary. Some of our more foolhardy friends are headed downtown regularly to scope out what is happening. They are brave, but perhaps a little foolish. It is understandable though. This is an exciting time here.
I am paying pretty close attention to what is happening and I will keep all of you informed in the case that the situation changes, possibly necessitating our evacuation. In that extremely unlikely scenario, our plan is to catch whatever flight is available to somewhere in Europe and then regroup and figure out what to do next. We will be extremely grateful to our friends in the EU if they will be willing to take in refugees at such a time as it becomes a necessity....
So we have fled the country temporarily. We are currently refugees in Istanbul (not Constantinople) which offers all of the typical trappings of a refugee environment: stunning views, great food, a local beer, Ottoman history everywhere. The usual.
For the time being we are safe and sound. Depending on how the situation in Cairo progresses this week, we will either return to Egypt next week or set up camp in an undisclosed location until further notice (not the United States). The American University in Cairo plans to reopen next week and begin a new session the week after.
More at John's blog here.
***
I tried reaching John Martin's blog from Egypt, and sure enough, it's blocked, but if you type/paste 72.14.204.99 in your browser's address window, it will take you to a Google page that can circumvents the Egyptian block, and from there you can reach John's blog-- You Can't Make Mistakes If You Don't Know What You're Doing-- though comments are disabled. Anyway, forwarded from the suburbs of Cairo, dated January 26:
Situation update for those concerned about our safety
.... There were widespread protest demonstrations in Cairo yesterday and in about 10 other cities as well. They have continued tonight, but on a smaller scale. There was a good deal of violence at one point late in the evening yesterday when the police finally decided to clear out the occupied areas. Tear-gas, water cannons and rubber bullets were all used. There were no live rounds fired. There have been several deaths and in Cairo about 250 people were injured and are now hospitalized. This could well be the beginning of something huge here, not unlike what happened in Tunisia. There are reports of rumors coming in that the son of the President (and his perceived successor) has left the country and is presently in London. It is rumored that the First Lady has also left. These reports have been vehemently denied by the American Embassy and should probably be considered unlikely to have actually occurred.
It will be interesting to watch how the situation progresses, but it will be unlikely to cause any problems for us. This seems so far to be a primarily secular popular revolt instead of one lead by the Muslim Brotherhood or other politico-religious groups. It is unclear where exactly the organization is coming from though. The protesters are regular, working-class people seeking governmental reform and measures to relieve the grinding poverty that Egypt is experiencing.
Social media sites and some news sites are being blocked variously throughout the country. Twitter confirmed earlier that they were in fact blocked yesterday. People are using external proxies in order to circumvent the internet blockades and communicate with each other. This will likely lead to stronger measures undertaken to control the flow of information both to news outlets and to those involved in the demonstrations. There are rumors that mobile phone service is being cut off for known activists. There were reports last evening that mobile services were cut off in Tahrir Square in central Cairo.
We are quite safe at present in Maadi (a southern suburb/district of Cairo). The part of the city we live in is far from the action, and the likelihood of anything happening in this particular suburb/district is low considering that it is inhabited primarily by wealthier folks and expatriates. Regardless, we’re keeping our eyes and ears open and making only leaving the house when absolutely necessary. Some of our more foolhardy friends are headed downtown regularly to scope out what is happening. They are brave, but perhaps a little foolish. It is understandable though. This is an exciting time here.
I am paying pretty close attention to what is happening and I will keep all of you informed in the case that the situation changes, possibly necessitating our evacuation. In that extremely unlikely scenario, our plan is to catch whatever flight is available to somewhere in Europe and then regroup and figure out what to do next. We will be extremely grateful to our friends in the EU if they will be willing to take in refugees at such a time as it becomes a necessity....
Commonplace Book of Quotations for July
“... It was the fixation of businessmen that the WPA did nothing but lean on shovels. I had an uncle who was particularly irritated at shovel-leaning. When he pooh-poohed my contention that shovel-leaning was necesary, I bet him five dollars, which I didn’t have, that he couldn’t shovel sand for fifteen timed minutes without stopping. He said a man should give a good day’s work and grabbed a shovel. At the end of three minutes his face was red, at six he was staggering and before eight minutes were up his wife stopped him to save him from apoplexy. And he never mentioned shovel-leaning again.“ (John Steinbeck, “Primer on the ‘30s", anthologized in America and Americans )
“Colleges must counter the experience of conventional high school education in the United States, where learning is little more than a standardized test-driven chore with utilitarian benefits. In college, students should discover that most of the important writings and discoveries they will study were not generated for their benefit, but rather came into being in order to illuminate and improve life.”
(Leon Botstein)
“Revolutions are always impolite because the upper classes have never taught manners to the people.” (Leon Trotsky)
“... The supposed rise of the “mama grizzlies” of the right, has obscured where things really are with women in politics. One in six members of Congress is female; out of a total of 535 seats, Republican women hold only 21, or 4 percent. It’s hardly an onslaught.” ( Julia Baird)
“The motor of accumulation has been sputtering for nearly four decades, and its coughs can be heard again now that the roar of combusting paper wealth is dying down. This doesn’t mean capitalism or even growth is at an end. Economists of all kinds have pinned their hopes on the transformation of laboring and saving Chinese into hardy consumers. In any case, the US consumer—a ravening appetite in a paper house—appears to be finished as the world’s buyer of last resort. It would add a nice dialectical twist to the future history of our period if it could be said that, around the time the post-Maoist Chinese took up shopping, the post-bubble Americans turned to studying Marx.” (n+1, uncredited)
“Professional historians were in danger of killing off history, he [Hugh Trevor-Roper] wrote, just as philosophers were killing off philosophy, through a misplaced zeal for ‘unimportant truth’. He therefore committed himself to promoting history as a public discourse aimed at helping ordinary readers to understand the world in which they live... By bringing history “down to earth”, Gibbon and the other Enlightenment historians had contributed more to the discombobulation of know-nothing theologians than any number of philosophers would ever be able to do... if skeptical secularism is to get a new lease of life, perhaps it needs a little more history and a little less philosophy, more explanation and less indignation.” ( Jonathan Rée)
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” (Unknown comment on Wonkette)
Whereas in the late 17th and early 18th century, an orange rock guy wearing a beard and a pirate costume is de rigueur for the Caribbean. Why? ‘Cause comic books, that’s why.
" 'Everything I'm doing now in terms of talking about climate, talking about immigration, talking about Gitmo is completely opposite of where the Tea Party movement's at,' [Lindsey] Graham said. . . . On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was 'very, very contentious,' he recalled. During a later meeting, in Charleston, Graham said he challenged them: ' 'What do you want to do? You take back your country -- and do what with it?'. . . . Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.'”
(The New York Times Magazine)
“Most media outlets have someone parked in Ballroom 20 and someone parked in Hall H, writing about the big developments in both rooms, and that makes it seem like the only stuff going on at the Con is the big set of announcements from the major studios and networks. There's a whole other world of weird, hyper-personal geekery that flows around the edges of the stuff that gets written about... So much of Comic-Con is about making you forget what you really love to replace it with a temporary high that clinging to the things that truly mean something to you becomes that much more important.”
(Todd VanDerWurff)
"The opposite of war isn't peace, its creation."
(A character in Rent)
“Colleges must counter the experience of conventional high school education in the United States, where learning is little more than a standardized test-driven chore with utilitarian benefits. In college, students should discover that most of the important writings and discoveries they will study were not generated for their benefit, but rather came into being in order to illuminate and improve life.”
(Leon Botstein)
“Revolutions are always impolite because the upper classes have never taught manners to the people.” (Leon Trotsky)
“... The supposed rise of the “mama grizzlies” of the right, has obscured where things really are with women in politics. One in six members of Congress is female; out of a total of 535 seats, Republican women hold only 21, or 4 percent. It’s hardly an onslaught.” ( Julia Baird)
“The motor of accumulation has been sputtering for nearly four decades, and its coughs can be heard again now that the roar of combusting paper wealth is dying down. This doesn’t mean capitalism or even growth is at an end. Economists of all kinds have pinned their hopes on the transformation of laboring and saving Chinese into hardy consumers. In any case, the US consumer—a ravening appetite in a paper house—appears to be finished as the world’s buyer of last resort. It would add a nice dialectical twist to the future history of our period if it could be said that, around the time the post-Maoist Chinese took up shopping, the post-bubble Americans turned to studying Marx.” (n+1, uncredited)
“Professional historians were in danger of killing off history, he [Hugh Trevor-Roper] wrote, just as philosophers were killing off philosophy, through a misplaced zeal for ‘unimportant truth’. He therefore committed himself to promoting history as a public discourse aimed at helping ordinary readers to understand the world in which they live... By bringing history “down to earth”, Gibbon and the other Enlightenment historians had contributed more to the discombobulation of know-nothing theologians than any number of philosophers would ever be able to do... if skeptical secularism is to get a new lease of life, perhaps it needs a little more history and a little less philosophy, more explanation and less indignation.” ( Jonathan Rée)
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” (Unknown comment on Wonkette)
Whereas in the late 17th and early 18th century, an orange rock guy wearing a beard and a pirate costume is de rigueur for the Caribbean. Why? ‘Cause comic books, that’s why.
" 'Everything I'm doing now in terms of talking about climate, talking about immigration, talking about Gitmo is completely opposite of where the Tea Party movement's at,' [Lindsey] Graham said. . . . On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was 'very, very contentious,' he recalled. During a later meeting, in Charleston, Graham said he challenged them: ' 'What do you want to do? You take back your country -- and do what with it?'. . . . Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.'”
(The New York Times Magazine)
“Most media outlets have someone parked in Ballroom 20 and someone parked in Hall H, writing about the big developments in both rooms, and that makes it seem like the only stuff going on at the Con is the big set of announcements from the major studios and networks. There's a whole other world of weird, hyper-personal geekery that flows around the edges of the stuff that gets written about... So much of Comic-Con is about making you forget what you really love to replace it with a temporary high that clinging to the things that truly mean something to you becomes that much more important.”
(Todd VanDerWurff)
"The opposite of war isn't peace, its creation."
(A character in Rent)
Orthodoxy, OCD and the F@#ing Wire, Baby
“As the Bacchae knew, we always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like.”
-- Adam Gopnik, “What Did Jesus Do?” in The New Yorker
***
“The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.”
-- Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin Shelley
***
“Each day brings fresh proof to my feeling that orthodoxy of any kind is simply another word for "learning disability." It's in the nature of orthodoxy that one is discouraged to process new information objectively: the world MUST be as previously learned. Hence new data, rejected, leaves the poor person, be it a driver, a doctor, or a politician, severely handicapped. “
(Steve Brodner)
***
“Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic remarked that ‘you mustn’t enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it.’ However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that ‘you can’t fool all the people all the time’, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.”
-- Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
***
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar.
-- Jorge Luis Borges
***
***
As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over — God love them — any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.
.... The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before — Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people — but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor.... If, in the words of the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish people have a natural right “to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state,” then the inescapable codicil of this natural inheritance is that the Jewish people, “like all other nations,” are every bit as capable of barbarism and stupidity.”
-- Michael Chabon on the Israeli blockade of Palestine
***
“... Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.”
-- Matt Ridley
***
“Professor James Leckman of Yale University did tests on the cerebrospinal fluid of OCD sufferers and found gobs and gobs of Oxytocin, the chemical responsible for love, jealousy and parental attachment. As it turns out, OCD-sufferers produce as much of this stuff as new parents and raver kids on ecstasy. This led Leckman to think there may be a very big connection between parenthood and OCD, believing that once upon a time in our evolution, obsessive attention to detailed cleaning and hygiene rituals marked the difference between infants that survived childhood diseases and ones who didn't. Compulsive rituals don't seem so weird when they involve constantly circling the camp site to make sure there are no wolves coming to eat the children.... Apparently succeeding in the human species isn't a matter of being crazy or not crazy, but having just the right amount of craziness.”
-- Robert Evans and Philip Moon, Cracked.com
-- Adam Gopnik, “What Did Jesus Do?” in The New Yorker
***
“The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.”
-- Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin Shelley
***
“Each day brings fresh proof to my feeling that orthodoxy of any kind is simply another word for "learning disability." It's in the nature of orthodoxy that one is discouraged to process new information objectively: the world MUST be as previously learned. Hence new data, rejected, leaves the poor person, be it a driver, a doctor, or a politician, severely handicapped. “
(Steve Brodner)
***
“Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic remarked that ‘you mustn’t enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it.’ However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that ‘you can’t fool all the people all the time’, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.”
-- Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
***
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar.
-- Jorge Luis Borges
***
***
As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over — God love them — any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.
.... The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before — Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people — but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor.... If, in the words of the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish people have a natural right “to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state,” then the inescapable codicil of this natural inheritance is that the Jewish people, “like all other nations,” are every bit as capable of barbarism and stupidity.”
-- Michael Chabon on the Israeli blockade of Palestine
***
“... Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.”
-- Matt Ridley
***
“Professor James Leckman of Yale University did tests on the cerebrospinal fluid of OCD sufferers and found gobs and gobs of Oxytocin, the chemical responsible for love, jealousy and parental attachment. As it turns out, OCD-sufferers produce as much of this stuff as new parents and raver kids on ecstasy. This led Leckman to think there may be a very big connection between parenthood and OCD, believing that once upon a time in our evolution, obsessive attention to detailed cleaning and hygiene rituals marked the difference between infants that survived childhood diseases and ones who didn't. Compulsive rituals don't seem so weird when they involve constantly circling the camp site to make sure there are no wolves coming to eat the children.... Apparently succeeding in the human species isn't a matter of being crazy or not crazy, but having just the right amount of craziness.”
-- Robert Evans and Philip Moon, Cracked.com
Othello, the Boulevard, Teabaggers and Lattes on the Rim of the Volcano
Othello isn't only about jealousy, any more than Hamlet is about revenge. Othello's great sin is his assumption that because you are Good, all others must necessarily be trustworthy as well.
If I were sent back with a warning to the Belle Epoque in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, how many of the boulavardiers could perceive the deadly earnestness with which the children of that time were training to become mass murderers? Would any of them have been able to strangle the infant Hitler in his cradle? Albert Speer said that it was hard to recognize the Devil when he's standing by your shoulder.
From what I’ve seen in Cultural Amnesia and Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals the people in the cafes thought of militarists as clowns, no real threat, certainly not builders of death factories— and if the militarists did succeed in finding a war, well, they mostly hurt themselves and young fellows stupid enough to follow them. War, however terrible, was fought between armies in a field outside of town-- sophisticates didn't realize what industrialization could do to weaponry and the practice of total war.
The Dreyfuss affair was the argument of that time. It was injustice and anti-Semitism that sent Colonel Dreyfuss off to Devil’s Island on a trumped up charge, but no one thought of The Affair as a blueprint.
So there I am on the boulevard with my coffee, laughing at someting Tristan Bernard just said, sighing at a stray tendril of hair on the neck of a passing girl who might have modeled for Mucha—- but how could I tell them what I know? That the 20th century will be a bloodbath, that industrialization will turn the front line into an abbatoir, with my friends from the cafes and salons-- Tristan Bernard's own grandson Francois-- at the bottom of the pile in Matthausen? How many of them would believe me?
They would smile and nod and exclaim mais certainment! if I’d predicted that a militarist would blow himself up with some diabolical device, that a head of state would be caught in a sex scandal, or a minister sent to prison for embezzlement. They would recognize our own all-too-human sins, folly, arrogance, lust and greed. But would anyone on the boulevard believe a prediction of the ash pit, the soap factories, the pillows stuffed with human hair? A medievalist might recognize the precedent for Ilsa Koch, but like trusting Othello, most would not be able to countenance the sick rantings of the so-called man from the future. When the most dreadful thing you can imagine in others is limited your own capacity for evil, you never see what's coming until it’s too late.
This is not to paint a sentimental picture of bohemians caught napping by the wicked military-industrialists— it was a failed water-color painter, Hitler, an amateur mythologist (Himmler) an advertising genius (Goebbels), and a country full of worshipful rubes who dreamed the iron dream. Never underestimate the resentment and malevolence of a failed artist-- from Beck to Norman Podhoretz, O'Reilly, Midge Decter and the Kristols, angry failures have found a home on the right because the hipsters made fun of them and wouldn’t invite them to the cool parties. This may be oversimplify the motivations of Limbaugh and Goerring, but not by much.
The bad guys can fall into the same trap as Othello. Krupp sponsored the Nazis because they could not imagine a wickedness greater than their own capacity for greed and political control. German militarists and industrialists thought they would use the Nazis to get rid of the labor unions and the liberals, and in the end the Nazis used them. American conservatives thought they could use the emotion of the Teabaggers and the the Know-Nothings to disguise their plutocracy as populism. The Bohemian Grove made Ronald Reagan, patron of idiots, who didn’t know, didn’t care and didn’t think it mattered how many were ground in the wheels beneath his chariot. Now of course, the tail is wagging the dog, with Limbaugh and Palin the soul of the party.
Othello is a supreme success in his own field, but battle savvy doesn't transfer to the parade-ground. He knows only two kinds of women-- his sainted mother and voracious camp-followers, and if Desdemona isn't a saint, then she must be a whore. In the world of men, he thinks his combat instinct has taught him all he needs to know about reading men; if he's fought alongside me, then he must be a pal. It is naivete and self-assurance that destroys him, long before the first whisper from Iago.
One morning in an inner city classroom, three sharp explosions went off outside and I turned to see that all the kids near the window had hit the floor without any comment. In most classrooms, anything out of the ordinary from first snowflakes to fornicating dogs will draw a mob to the glass. "Missa Fountain," Wayne scolded, "you might want to get away from the window." I was the sophisticate, but in the words of a forgotten punk-rock magazine, "Goerring said 'When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun'. When someone mentions guns, a liberal reaches for his culture." Shades of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.
Now we are in a political cycle with candidates mined from the Jerry Springer show, deviance defined downward. It is permissible among people like Sharon Angle and Rick Barber to make physical threats against their opponents, to talk of secession, to shout down reason. Palin smiles more broadly the crazier the talk gets. They see themselves as perpetual victims, giving them psychological permission to use "any means necessary" against their oppressors.
I wonder about my own complacency. Having a wonderful time, sipping my latte on the rim of the volcano, but keeping one eye on the exit and hoping my friends and I have enough sense to jump to Canada before it blows. When do the clowns cross the line from buffoon to monster?
Smile or Die
Through a friend of my friend Shannon McRae, this wonderful animation of Barabara Ehrenreich's explication of the Happy People...
I suppose my first encounter with the Happy People would have been in the 1970s. There had been experiments like the attempt to levitate the Pentagon, or my friend Tom's Whole Earth theories about mucus, but these thought experiments harmed no one and made great theater; most of us still understood the difference between reality and make believe.
By 1976, the year Tom Wolfe published "The Me Decade", there was real money changing hands for the power of positive thinking. I knew some Erhard Seminar Training graduates intimately, and learned that my skepticism was not just a buzzkill, but a hindrance to any progress. I nodded and demurred while a honest-to-stereotype yuppie complained that his mother's cancer was "her own damn fault". She had given herself cancer-- not by cigarettes or swimming in chemicals, but by bad, cancer-causing thoughts.
I dodged repeated invitations to attend an est seminar, and instead went looking for Chicago theater while my girlfriend spent her money becoming more "real"-- ironic phrase, now that I think of it. I'm not bitter about never getting real with Werner Erhard; instead I attended a performance by the Japanese Grand Kabuki its own self.
Here Ehrenreich points out that the "think and grow rich" con doesn't just take foolish people's money anymore; it now contributes to our collective delusion. Hell, it's one of the building blocks.
Lena Horne
I'm guessing most tributes to Lena Horne will include the 1943 version of "Stormy Weather", but it's interesting to compare that young girl's intuitive understanding with a bluesier version sung later in life. Not a false caesura in either version, by the way, which ought to teach pop idols the difference between genuine emotion and sentiment, but probably won't.
The other two songs, "Moon River" and "It's Not Easy Being Green", I posted for myself. I'd like to know what went through her head while rehearsing "Green". With that voice and those impossible cheekbones, this woman could have run the table as Hollywood's Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Dark Lady, Sally Hemings or the Queen of Sheba-- but in that benighted time, she couldn't even hang on to the part of Julie in Showboat. The studio cast Ava Gardner in the "controversial" role of a "high yellow gal" passing for white in order to marry the man she loved.
So Lena finally said to hell with Hollywood, went home to New York and became a chanteuse instead. Ironically this was a winning decision: Hollywood discards its leading ladies quickly, whereas jazz and blues singing, like painting, rewards longevity and depth.
Commonplace Book, April: Sensitive Redheads, Richard Pryor, What Wonder Woman Represents and Too Much Twee in Literature
“He had seen society in its three great phases—Obedience, Struggle and Revolt... and he hesitated in his choice. Obedience was dull, Revolt impossible, Struggle hazardous.”
(Balzac, Pere Goriot)
“He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.”
(William Drummond, some old Scotsman)
“Something nice this way comes. It begins with the awful—whether it’s as enormous as the Holocaust or the World Trade Center or as intimate as family dysfunction or the death of a loved one—and then finds comfort. None of this Anna on the tracks, Emma in the dumps, or depressing Father Zosima’s corpse smells stuff; that’s sooo 19th century. ...
Instead, let’s just book passage on a gentle, healing voyage. Sound trite? It is, but it’s apparently the literature of our time as exemplified by Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, along with everything McSweeney’s, the magazine founded by Eggers.”
(Melvin Jules Bukiet , ”Wonder Bread” in The American Scholar)
“In American popular culture, the private detective is a unique heroic figure: champion of last resort for the vulnerable client, a knight-errant for hire, bringing rough or poetic justice to cases unserved by more official powers that be. [Robert Parker] wrote dialogue that at once informed, amused and gave a sense of character; and he conjured characters a reader wanted to spend more time with—especially Spenser, a fixed point in a footloose world, take him or leave him. A pragmatist whose ethics were situational. A tough and decent type who did what needed to be done in the service of a moral cause, affirming the worth of the individual regardless of race, sexual orientation, social status, age or occupation. He made timeless points that need to be remade every generation, in a society ever able to find ways to betray the public and private trust.”
(Obituary by Tom Nolan in the Wall Street Journal)
“As Juke [on a 1974 Lily Tomlin special], Richard Pryor gave one of his relatively few great performances in a project that he had not written or directed. He made use of the poignancy that marks all of his great comedic and dramatic performances, and of the vulnerability—the pathos cradling his sharp wit—that had seduced people into loving him in the first place.... The concert films are excellent examples of what the Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey once described as Pryor’s ability to “scare us into laughing at his demons—our demons—exorcising them through mass hyperventilation.”... Taken together, the concert films show the full panorama of Pryor’s moods: brilliant, boring, insecure, demanding, misogynist, racist, playful, and utterly empathetic.... Pryor embodied the voice of injured humanity. A satirist of his own experience, he revealed what could be considered family secrets—secrets about his past, and about blacks in general, and about his relationship to the black and white worlds he did and did not belong to.”
(Hilton Als profile of Richard Pryor in The New Yorker
“So Wonder Woman counts among one of the very few superhero genre characters that are legitimately a gift to young women. She is not a character to be marketed to young men. Marston assured the company the boys would read as well, but she's custom designed for young women. For god's sake, she's a princess who talks to animals. Her entire supporting cast, with the exception of one blockheaded love interest, was women. She is a character made with little girls in mind.
The bondage urban legend always struck me as a mean-spirited attempt to rob us of that. To strip her of all innocent and generous beginnings in favor of something uber-sexualized. To say that we weren't worth our own superhero princess, she had to be secretly aimed at young men. That she was really meant for boys. It's a way to steal Wonder Woman, and claim she wasn't ever stolen.
To be honest, that's why I've always felt they had trouble with her. She is a female-oriented character that they keep marketing to a widely male audience.” (Ragnell on her blog Written World”
“I think that's a big part of it — she COULD tear someone's head off, she COULD destroy a country if she chose. But she would consider that a failure as a warrior for peace. The death of an enemy is not victory to her. I love that stuff. I think it's a far better blueprint for the future than most of the action hero stuff out there right now.
But there are a million reasons. I love that she's the DC universe's premiere badass. I love that she was giving messages of the power of womanhood in the 40's, you know, decades before Buffy or Xena or Lara Croft. And there's a part of me that loves the pegasi and the princess-ness of it all, and all the trappings of Paradise Island. She's just brilliantly conceived. And I like her with a dry sense of humor, while we're at it. The sisterhood aspect of the Amazons is tremendously compelling to me. Who wouldn't love to have that many sisters who loved you AND carried bladed weapons?”
(Gail Simone, current writer on Wonder Wonan, in an interview at After Ellen)
“If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who deal likewise with their fellow men.”
(Saint Francis)
“The largest single survey to date of serial killers found: 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as children; 46 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adolescents; 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adults.”
(Human Society of the United States)
“When John Paul II appointed Cardinal Ratzinger head of the department that watches over theological orthodoxy (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF), it was in full confidence that he would curb the proliferating dissidents, not least the liberation theologians of South America who argued that sin could often mean not wrongdoing by individual moral agents, but the injustice of social and political structures leading to poverty and oppression. He soon earned himself the sobriquet "the Pope's Rottweiler". Theologians guilty of unorthodoxy were summoned to his inquisitorial office: some were deprived of their teaching licences, and others were excommunicated.
... Benedict... continues to think of the abuse as a spiritual lapse, rather than a psychological, social and criminal problem. Priestly pedophile abuse, in his view, is a failure of priesthood, a failure of holiness, asceticism and piety. ... The cause of the crisis, he said, had been secularism, and the temptations secularism has posed to the holiness of priests. The innocent majority of priests in Ireland... are infuriated by Benedict's implied exculpation of the Vatican and the papacy.”
(John Cornwell in The New Statesman)
“Scientists suspect that small inherited predispositions are either enhanced or suppressed by experience, and computer models show that tiny discrepancies at the start can become enormous over time, through feedback loopings of positive reinforcement. Evidence is also emerging that certain physical setpoints affect temperament globally. Notable among such setpoints is the relative rate at which one’s nervous system processes sensory information.
“There are low information processors who don’t attend much to their environment and bulldoze through life,” said David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York at Binghamton. “Then there are the sensitive ones who are always taking things in, which can be good because information is valuable, but it can also be overwhelming.”
Studies of highly sensitive people show their delicacy is “domain general,” Dr. Wilson said. Not only are they “exceptionally moved by symphonies” and find graphic depictions of violence “too hard to bear,” but they are also sensitive to drugs like caffeine, and their skin is easily irritated by the wrong soap, sunscreen and fabric. Highly sensitive pigs squeal a lot; highly sensitive people feel a lot. Sure, it’s painful at times. But just switch on some Bach and I’ll squeal my thanks for thin skin.”
(Natalie Angierin The New York Times)
“Most TV comics trade in brand-name jokes or jokes that play off physical stereotypes. They don’t question their culture so much as pander to its insatiable hunger for distraction. But [Bill] Hicks’ mischievous flights of fantasy bring the audience back to reality with a thump. Hicks is a kind of ventriloquist of his contradictory nature, letting voices and sound effects act out both his angst and his appetites.... He started writing and performing his jokes as an alienated thirteen-year-old in Houston in 1975, and, by his own count, for the last five years he has been performing about two hundred and sixty-five days a year, sometimes doing as many as three two-hour gigs a night. Few contemporary comics or actors have such an opportunity to get their education in public.”
(Profile of the late Bill Hicks by John Lahr in The New Yorker)
(Balzac, Pere Goriot)
“He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.”
(William Drummond, some old Scotsman)
“Something nice this way comes. It begins with the awful—whether it’s as enormous as the Holocaust or the World Trade Center or as intimate as family dysfunction or the death of a loved one—and then finds comfort. None of this Anna on the tracks, Emma in the dumps, or depressing Father Zosima’s corpse smells stuff; that’s sooo 19th century. ...
Instead, let’s just book passage on a gentle, healing voyage. Sound trite? It is, but it’s apparently the literature of our time as exemplified by Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, along with everything McSweeney’s, the magazine founded by Eggers.”
(Melvin Jules Bukiet , ”Wonder Bread” in The American Scholar)
“In American popular culture, the private detective is a unique heroic figure: champion of last resort for the vulnerable client, a knight-errant for hire, bringing rough or poetic justice to cases unserved by more official powers that be. [Robert Parker] wrote dialogue that at once informed, amused and gave a sense of character; and he conjured characters a reader wanted to spend more time with—especially Spenser, a fixed point in a footloose world, take him or leave him. A pragmatist whose ethics were situational. A tough and decent type who did what needed to be done in the service of a moral cause, affirming the worth of the individual regardless of race, sexual orientation, social status, age or occupation. He made timeless points that need to be remade every generation, in a society ever able to find ways to betray the public and private trust.”
(Obituary by Tom Nolan in the Wall Street Journal)
“As Juke [on a 1974 Lily Tomlin special], Richard Pryor gave one of his relatively few great performances in a project that he had not written or directed. He made use of the poignancy that marks all of his great comedic and dramatic performances, and of the vulnerability—the pathos cradling his sharp wit—that had seduced people into loving him in the first place.... The concert films are excellent examples of what the Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey once described as Pryor’s ability to “scare us into laughing at his demons—our demons—exorcising them through mass hyperventilation.”... Taken together, the concert films show the full panorama of Pryor’s moods: brilliant, boring, insecure, demanding, misogynist, racist, playful, and utterly empathetic.... Pryor embodied the voice of injured humanity. A satirist of his own experience, he revealed what could be considered family secrets—secrets about his past, and about blacks in general, and about his relationship to the black and white worlds he did and did not belong to.”
(Hilton Als profile of Richard Pryor in The New Yorker
“So Wonder Woman counts among one of the very few superhero genre characters that are legitimately a gift to young women. She is not a character to be marketed to young men. Marston assured the company the boys would read as well, but she's custom designed for young women. For god's sake, she's a princess who talks to animals. Her entire supporting cast, with the exception of one blockheaded love interest, was women. She is a character made with little girls in mind.
The bondage urban legend always struck me as a mean-spirited attempt to rob us of that. To strip her of all innocent and generous beginnings in favor of something uber-sexualized. To say that we weren't worth our own superhero princess, she had to be secretly aimed at young men. That she was really meant for boys. It's a way to steal Wonder Woman, and claim she wasn't ever stolen.
To be honest, that's why I've always felt they had trouble with her. She is a female-oriented character that they keep marketing to a widely male audience.” (Ragnell on her blog Written World”
“I think that's a big part of it — she COULD tear someone's head off, she COULD destroy a country if she chose. But she would consider that a failure as a warrior for peace. The death of an enemy is not victory to her. I love that stuff. I think it's a far better blueprint for the future than most of the action hero stuff out there right now.
But there are a million reasons. I love that she's the DC universe's premiere badass. I love that she was giving messages of the power of womanhood in the 40's, you know, decades before Buffy or Xena or Lara Croft. And there's a part of me that loves the pegasi and the princess-ness of it all, and all the trappings of Paradise Island. She's just brilliantly conceived. And I like her with a dry sense of humor, while we're at it. The sisterhood aspect of the Amazons is tremendously compelling to me. Who wouldn't love to have that many sisters who loved you AND carried bladed weapons?”
(Gail Simone, current writer on Wonder Wonan, in an interview at After Ellen)
“If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who deal likewise with their fellow men.”
(Saint Francis)
“The largest single survey to date of serial killers found: 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as children; 46 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adolescents; 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adults.”
(Human Society of the United States)
“When John Paul II appointed Cardinal Ratzinger head of the department that watches over theological orthodoxy (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF), it was in full confidence that he would curb the proliferating dissidents, not least the liberation theologians of South America who argued that sin could often mean not wrongdoing by individual moral agents, but the injustice of social and political structures leading to poverty and oppression. He soon earned himself the sobriquet "the Pope's Rottweiler". Theologians guilty of unorthodoxy were summoned to his inquisitorial office: some were deprived of their teaching licences, and others were excommunicated.
... Benedict... continues to think of the abuse as a spiritual lapse, rather than a psychological, social and criminal problem. Priestly pedophile abuse, in his view, is a failure of priesthood, a failure of holiness, asceticism and piety. ... The cause of the crisis, he said, had been secularism, and the temptations secularism has posed to the holiness of priests. The innocent majority of priests in Ireland... are infuriated by Benedict's implied exculpation of the Vatican and the papacy.”
(John Cornwell in The New Statesman)
“Scientists suspect that small inherited predispositions are either enhanced or suppressed by experience, and computer models show that tiny discrepancies at the start can become enormous over time, through feedback loopings of positive reinforcement. Evidence is also emerging that certain physical setpoints affect temperament globally. Notable among such setpoints is the relative rate at which one’s nervous system processes sensory information.
“There are low information processors who don’t attend much to their environment and bulldoze through life,” said David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York at Binghamton. “Then there are the sensitive ones who are always taking things in, which can be good because information is valuable, but it can also be overwhelming.”
Studies of highly sensitive people show their delicacy is “domain general,” Dr. Wilson said. Not only are they “exceptionally moved by symphonies” and find graphic depictions of violence “too hard to bear,” but they are also sensitive to drugs like caffeine, and their skin is easily irritated by the wrong soap, sunscreen and fabric. Highly sensitive pigs squeal a lot; highly sensitive people feel a lot. Sure, it’s painful at times. But just switch on some Bach and I’ll squeal my thanks for thin skin.”
(Natalie Angierin The New York Times)
“Most TV comics trade in brand-name jokes or jokes that play off physical stereotypes. They don’t question their culture so much as pander to its insatiable hunger for distraction. But [Bill] Hicks’ mischievous flights of fantasy bring the audience back to reality with a thump. Hicks is a kind of ventriloquist of his contradictory nature, letting voices and sound effects act out both his angst and his appetites.... He started writing and performing his jokes as an alienated thirteen-year-old in Houston in 1975, and, by his own count, for the last five years he has been performing about two hundred and sixty-five days a year, sometimes doing as many as three two-hour gigs a night. Few contemporary comics or actors have such an opportunity to get their education in public.”
(Profile of the late Bill Hicks by John Lahr in The New Yorker)
Hold 'Em in the Caul, Field
I still think there's something creepy about Holden Caulfield. What's this business of catching children before they "fall" into adulthood-- when the world needs more adults, not fewer? Or Seymour Glass, waking his wife Muriel from her shallow slumber in a particularly ugly way?
I can imagine Holden (if he stays out of jail) ending as a basement-dwelling iconoclast, proud to be smarter, more "authentic" than the rest of us suffering monkeys, part of the cast of High Fidelity or the local comics shop. Given his social class, Holden might end as Jerry Rubin did, praising Charles Manson and then graduating to embrace Reagan and Wall Street, albeit with a Saturday Night Live ironic twist to his mouth. Is it unkind of me to wonder if Rubin was sneering when he was hit by a car?
Am I the only one annoyed by Salinger's twee characters being made of, well, Glass? I know Seymour had a tough war (Salinger himself was part of D-Day), but does that excuse spattering even the silliest of women with a mess of brains? Better to volunteer for pharmaceutical experiments if you want to throw yourself away. Why not rush into a fire, or find a leper colony like Graham Greene's Burnt-Out Case?
The Canadian Phillip Marchand has some thoughts on the American man-child. Salinger himself managed the equivalent of a James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, never sullying his reputation with lesser work (as someone said of Elvis' death, "good career move")-- but not dying, enjoying his royalties in private, apparently a pleasant enough life with friends and family.
I would have liked Holden better if, having rejected the phoniness of straight society, he picked up a shovel and scooped shit at an animal shelter, or sorted clothes for the homeless, or even (cough) tried to teach in the public schools. Holden creeped me out when I first read Catcher in middle school-- I preferred Irving Stone's Michelangelo and VanGogh, or T.H. White's King Arthur: sensitive, maybe doomed, but not likely to surrender.
I still prefer genre writing to the finger-sniffing stories of "New Yorker" fiction. The wounded detectives, from Spenser to Travis McGee to T. Jefferson Parker, expose the truth like Holden but then try to do something about it. Even the silliest super hero, as Michael Chabon makes explicit in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and implies in Wonder Boys, is at least pretending to be a grown up, picking up their imaginary cosmic shovel or rescuing a kitten from a tree to make the world a better place. Salinger reminds me of those people who don't like kittens because they turn into cats.
I can imagine Holden (if he stays out of jail) ending as a basement-dwelling iconoclast, proud to be smarter, more "authentic" than the rest of us suffering monkeys, part of the cast of High Fidelity or the local comics shop. Given his social class, Holden might end as Jerry Rubin did, praising Charles Manson and then graduating to embrace Reagan and Wall Street, albeit with a Saturday Night Live ironic twist to his mouth. Is it unkind of me to wonder if Rubin was sneering when he was hit by a car?
Am I the only one annoyed by Salinger's twee characters being made of, well, Glass? I know Seymour had a tough war (Salinger himself was part of D-Day), but does that excuse spattering even the silliest of women with a mess of brains? Better to volunteer for pharmaceutical experiments if you want to throw yourself away. Why not rush into a fire, or find a leper colony like Graham Greene's Burnt-Out Case?
The Canadian Phillip Marchand has some thoughts on the American man-child. Salinger himself managed the equivalent of a James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, never sullying his reputation with lesser work (as someone said of Elvis' death, "good career move")-- but not dying, enjoying his royalties in private, apparently a pleasant enough life with friends and family.
I would have liked Holden better if, having rejected the phoniness of straight society, he picked up a shovel and scooped shit at an animal shelter, or sorted clothes for the homeless, or even (cough) tried to teach in the public schools. Holden creeped me out when I first read Catcher in middle school-- I preferred Irving Stone's Michelangelo and VanGogh, or T.H. White's King Arthur: sensitive, maybe doomed, but not likely to surrender.
I still prefer genre writing to the finger-sniffing stories of "New Yorker" fiction. The wounded detectives, from Spenser to Travis McGee to T. Jefferson Parker, expose the truth like Holden but then try to do something about it. Even the silliest super hero, as Michael Chabon makes explicit in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and implies in Wonder Boys, is at least pretending to be a grown up, picking up their imaginary cosmic shovel or rescuing a kitten from a tree to make the world a better place. Salinger reminds me of those people who don't like kittens because they turn into cats.
The Violent Death Index
Awake at three in the morning. Plane crash in Buffalo on TV; 49 souls gone. But who knows how many-- the people who loved them-- who might be still asleep and don't yet know that their lives just stopped, too? I wonder about all the violent deaths in this country, more murders in one month in our larger cities than Japan has in a year, and does all that sorrow left behind add up in some way, accumulate like an invisible pollutant in the atmosphere? What kind of creatures feed off of that sorrow? What kind of thing thrives in an environment like that?
Steampunk Building
Art Deco has the Chrysler Building, but who knew that Steampunk (think of Jules Verne and a future designed with wood, brass and iron instead of plastic) has a building of its own?
These are pictures by Alan M. Pavlik of the Bradbury Building , built in Los Angeles in 1893, a history of the building at Wikipedia, and the building's history as a set for films by Charlie Jane Anders at io9.
Thumbs Up, Michigan! And Whadda YOO Lookin' At?
Upstate New York exists to make Michigan feel better about its status as the Texas of the North. Sure, we wolverines gave America its mad bombers, Nixon's pardon, the Amway-Blackwater dynasty, breeding enclaves for Calvinists the Netherlands didn't want, and city planning worthy of a post apocalyptic zombie film, but at least we don't shop at Forever Leather in Utica.
Who Watches the Watchmen?
I said what about my eyes?
"Keep them on the road."
I said what about my passion?
"Keep it burning."
I said what about my heart?
"Tell me what you hold inside it."
I said pain and sorrow.
He said, "Stay with it."
(Rumi)
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen, the Citizen Kane of comic books, appears to have been turned into a beautiful film (though I'm a little vague as to whether the director, Zack Snyder, is the "visionary genius" mentioned in the trailer and not an "honest craftsman", since every shot is a computer enhanced re-creation of Gibbon's drawings and Moore's words.)
How do you explain to the uninitiated that Moore's Watchmen is sad and funny and horrific and haunting, that it is not for anyone under the age of 18, that it is one of those books that leave you forever changed, disturbed, unsettled? For my desert island library, I would prefer Moore's Promethea, but there's no denying that Watchmen is a masterpiece. It breaks your heart, but it's not an easily quoted book, because so much of the emotional impact of a given scene or dialogue depends on context, its connection with the rest.
I'm excited by the musical choices too-- Smashing Pumpkins' “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning” as good a theme for Rorschach as any, along with songs referenced in the original: "All Along the Watchtower", "Unforgettable", and I assume "Desolation Row".
Like everyone else who loves the book, and honors what Moore was trying to tell us, is worried that the film will simply illustrate the action sequences or spend its time tracking the doomsday plotline, too much Nixon and not enough Kitty Genovese.
In the original, the Watchmen's alternative history is only an interesting backdrop for the characters in the foreground. The heart of the story is in Rorschach's interview in prison and Jon and Laurie's conversation on Mars. That's a danger with almost any effects film, that the skills of the SFX crew can outrun the ability of the director and screenwriter to create a human being, and you wind up with monstrosities like Independence Day. If they keep Moore's script and let Rorschach be Rorschach, Watchmen could be the first superhero film to win and deserve an Oscar for Best Picture, with Jackie Earle Haley winning Best Actor as Rorschach.
"Keep them on the road."
I said what about my passion?
"Keep it burning."
I said what about my heart?
"Tell me what you hold inside it."
I said pain and sorrow.
He said, "Stay with it."
(Rumi)
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen, the Citizen Kane of comic books, appears to have been turned into a beautiful film (though I'm a little vague as to whether the director, Zack Snyder, is the "visionary genius" mentioned in the trailer and not an "honest craftsman", since every shot is a computer enhanced re-creation of Gibbon's drawings and Moore's words.)
How do you explain to the uninitiated that Moore's Watchmen is sad and funny and horrific and haunting, that it is not for anyone under the age of 18, that it is one of those books that leave you forever changed, disturbed, unsettled? For my desert island library, I would prefer Moore's Promethea, but there's no denying that Watchmen is a masterpiece. It breaks your heart, but it's not an easily quoted book, because so much of the emotional impact of a given scene or dialogue depends on context, its connection with the rest.
I'm excited by the musical choices too-- Smashing Pumpkins' “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning” as good a theme for Rorschach as any, along with songs referenced in the original: "All Along the Watchtower", "Unforgettable", and I assume "Desolation Row".
Like everyone else who loves the book, and honors what Moore was trying to tell us, is worried that the film will simply illustrate the action sequences or spend its time tracking the doomsday plotline, too much Nixon and not enough Kitty Genovese.
In the original, the Watchmen's alternative history is only an interesting backdrop for the characters in the foreground. The heart of the story is in Rorschach's interview in prison and Jon and Laurie's conversation on Mars. That's a danger with almost any effects film, that the skills of the SFX crew can outrun the ability of the director and screenwriter to create a human being, and you wind up with monstrosities like Independence Day. If they keep Moore's script and let Rorschach be Rorschach, Watchmen could be the first superhero film to win and deserve an Oscar for Best Picture, with Jackie Earle Haley winning Best Actor as Rorschach.
Books: James Crumley, 1939-2008
Word comes that James Crumley has died of congestive heart failure. At least one of his novels, The Last Good Kiss earned him a seat at the table with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and another, Dancing Bear, is for me one of the best American novels of the last fifty years.
A lot of us have the first line of The Last Good Kiss memorized, like the opening of Moby Dick or Pride and Prejudice: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” – But it’s Dancing Bear that haunts me as a picture of lonely America in the closing years of the last century. It is also very funny and sometimes poetic and very violent and very sad.
The critics’ darling, Cormac McCarthy, covers some of the same violent ground, but doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already suspect about debased human nature; despite the poetry, there isn’t anything in No Country for Old Men or Blood Meridian you couldn’t learn elsewhere, and the Oprah bestseller The Road was a rehash of every genre post apocalypse novel from Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague” to Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, and you’ll have a much better time reading Y. McCarthy and James Elroy have become splatterporn for the literati, assigned by professors as exemplary instruction for the naïve. "America was never innocent,” Ellroy scowls in American Tabloid We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets."
Violence is as American as apple pie, but you need a great soul for it to become tragedy, and that’s what Crumley’s books provide with narrators like C. W. in Kiss and Milo in Dancing Bear. Without a soulful witness, as in the heartless landscapes of McCarthy, Ellroy, and your average slasher film, suffering has no meaning, the dead are left unburied and unmourned as Antigone’s brothers. Crumley looks back more often than Lot's wife, and is all about the regret.
The “dancing bear” of the title might refer to the Indian myth invented for the opening chapter, telling how the bears taught native tribes to gather sweetness from the bee, or it might be a section of forest near the Dancing Bear River stolen from the natives by Milo’s grandfather, and endangered by corporate polluters (“pollution” being our era’s euphemism for poisoning someone else’s earth and water), or it might be the hide of a grizzly killed by poachers, or it might be Milo himself, kept hopping like a circus bear trained to “dance” by making him walk on a hot metal plate.
The later adventures of Milo and C.W., in Bordersnakes and The Mexican Tree Duck sometimes teeter on self-parody— the New York Times in a snide review, called the setting “a Montana demimonde undreamed of in the philosophies of Dale Evans”-- but then, The Thin Man and The Little Sister aren’t as good as Red Harvest or The Long Goodbye. For a while there, in The Last Good Kiss, The Wrong Case and the war novel One to Count Cadence, James Crumley crafted very good books, and in Dancing Bear he made a great one.
My neighbor the detective, who knew Crumley out West and told me about his death, has Crumley stories to tell, but my favorite is from the Chicago Sun-Times. Crumley showed up late for a reading once and apologized, explaining, "I lost my watch."
"Any idea where?" he was asked.
"Yeah," Crumley said. "I threw it out a car window in El Paso in 1978."
The Rabbit's Prayer: But First They Have to Catch You
It used to be respectable to learn from Nature, although that has fallen out of vogue-- deer stupidly refuse to adapt to motor vehicles, and fur, fish and fowl alike have shown themselves pathetically unable to fit in with a system dominated by asphalt, Dick Cheney and Monsanto. Adopt the wisdom of the animals? The Native Americans' embrace of casinos filled with clouds of blue tobacco smoke only shows that they've finally wised up and joined the party. If the polar bear didn't want to become extinct, he would would have planned for the future like the rest of us. And if military planners succeed in their quest for the robot soldier (127 billion being spent on something called the Future Combat Project), it'll be our turn to learn what it's like to be a raccoon in the headlight.
And yet, and yet... the book of Nature, when it's not paved over but read with care, contains undiscovered cures for cancer (oops, that plant just went extinct, sorry) and biological marvels of technology beyond human ken. If humans could make an elevator cable with the strength of a spider web, we would ride elevators into space instead of explosive rockets. The unassuming kangaroo can put a fertlized embryo into stasis for years at a time before it is born, effectively suspended animation. Jim Harrison learned a principle of Zen from watching his cat: "When a cat doesn't know what to do, it sits down."
The motto beneath this picture is the rabbit's prayer from Richard Adams Watership Down. Like most gifts granted to mythic heroes, it contains both a boon and a curse. The rabbit hero El-ahrairah was the last to receive a blessing from God in Adams' lapine mythology, and with a sauce familiar to owners of house rabbits, the trickster told God he could just bless his rear end, and so in a dangerous world where everyone else has the weapons and the money and the lawyers and the bulldozers, the rabbit-- "prince with a thousand enemies"-- was given the means of escape.
This is a world of killer apes, unspeakably cruel to the small things of this world. The voice of a woman named Zawadi Mongane is on the BBC testifying about unspeakable atrocities. Her children were killed; she was forced to hang her own baby. She lives in absolute poverty now because of the stigma attached to rape victims in the Congo. She stays alive because one daughter had been overlooked and still needed her. This is a world that makes good people live like weeds in the cracks of a sidewalk.
I think of Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms", a clear definition the difference between the Western democracies and fascism. "Freedom from Fear" was one of the planks. Norman Rockwell made a picture: two small children lie asleep while their parents hold a newspaper filled with war news. No one is going to be raped or murdered or left behind. It was our credo, once, for about five minutes back in the Forties. It was a Tuesday. It ought to be our credo now, recited like the Pledge of Allegiance, but now we are an empire, and we only "rescue" people and "give the gift of democracy" if they're sitting on an oil reserve. The worst thing about a world of monsters and lawyers is that they force the rest of humanity to become lawyers and monsters just like them. The Cherokee, as I recall, tried adopting suits and ties and farms and churches and newpapers, they even tried the Supreme Court, and it didn't do them a damn bit of good against a man like Andrew Jackson.
Never mind the Hollywood Indian talking about Brother Bear and Sister Mountain Lion and busy Brother Beaver. There's not much they can do against a court order or an AK-47. What should I learn from watching my little rabbit brothers and sisters? When Sophie our house rabbit went into the dark, she went kicking, angry and grunting at her illness when it wouldn't let her stand up straight, but still kissing and nuzzling my hands to the last. She never was sad a moment in her life. All the races in her cosseted life had been for fun, mock assaults on our startled cats, ear shaking laughter when she outwitted an imaginary foe. Now she was running from death, and she saw no reason to drop her insousciance because she was going to lose this one. Pluck.
The robot soldiers are coming, papered with writs drafted by lawyers like Douglas Feith, and no one you know is going to own one. If the storm clouds break over your house, God grant you strong legs and daring.
(Rabbit print by Zanfandel, available at DeviantArt, which if you've never been there before, is the widest ranging online gallery for amateurs and professionals alike.)
Petroleum Pity Party
Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips are going to receive $18 billion dollars' worth of tax breaks over the next ten years, in spite of $123 billion dollars in profit and poor people spending 10 percent of their income on gas because American corporations have sabotaged every attempt to create European style mass transit in this country.
In 1886 the Supreme Court unwittingly created a pantheon of living gods on Earth by granting corporations the same rights given to individuals. In a dispute between Santa Clara County and the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Court defined corporations as "persons", that according to the 14th Amendment (intended to protect freed slaves), "no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law", and that California could not tax corporations differently than individuals.
A corporation can effectively become an immortal being of immense power by replacing worn out personnel and acolytes, and if need be, by moving across the street and changing its name, as gods themselves are wont to do. Modern life has thus become a competition between unconnected individuals and the thousands who have allied themselves with some corporate master. This puts a free man in the unenviable position of a journeyman carpenter trying to compete with the team building a pyramid.
To join a corporation, to consider its mission statement your holy writ, requires the corporate believer to hold fast to certain professions of faith. The Senior Vice President of Exxon Mobil, Stephen Simon, tells us that the oil companies deserve the tax break because "imposing punitive taxes on American companies will discourage the investments needed to safeguard our energy security." Shell's Hofmeister has the gall to blame the Interior Department. "The U.S. government restricts supply to American consumers," and Peter Robertson, vice chairman of Chevron, chimes in that the Congress should "open up the 95 percent of the outer continental shelf that's off limits" to drilling. Poor babies; Exxon only made $40 billion dollars last year, and only 9 percent of that was profit margin.
Remember when we used to smile at Grandfather Heinlein's science fiction prophecy that nation states would be replaced by corporations?
In 1886 the Supreme Court unwittingly created a pantheon of living gods on Earth by granting corporations the same rights given to individuals. In a dispute between Santa Clara County and the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Court defined corporations as "persons", that according to the 14th Amendment (intended to protect freed slaves), "no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law", and that California could not tax corporations differently than individuals.
A corporation can effectively become an immortal being of immense power by replacing worn out personnel and acolytes, and if need be, by moving across the street and changing its name, as gods themselves are wont to do. Modern life has thus become a competition between unconnected individuals and the thousands who have allied themselves with some corporate master. This puts a free man in the unenviable position of a journeyman carpenter trying to compete with the team building a pyramid.
To join a corporation, to consider its mission statement your holy writ, requires the corporate believer to hold fast to certain professions of faith. The Senior Vice President of Exxon Mobil, Stephen Simon, tells us that the oil companies deserve the tax break because "imposing punitive taxes on American companies will discourage the investments needed to safeguard our energy security." Shell's Hofmeister has the gall to blame the Interior Department. "The U.S. government restricts supply to American consumers," and Peter Robertson, vice chairman of Chevron, chimes in that the Congress should "open up the 95 percent of the outer continental shelf that's off limits" to drilling. Poor babies; Exxon only made $40 billion dollars last year, and only 9 percent of that was profit margin.Remember when we used to smile at Grandfather Heinlein's science fiction prophecy that nation states would be replaced by corporations?
Readings: "In the Hyborean Age, We Call That Thursday"
“[Witches] sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report.”
(Malleus Malleficarum, 1547)
***
“We don’t think of ourselves as a culture in the West. We think that we somehow exist outside of time and culture. We’re the real world moving inexorably forward: Get with it or lose the train. When the truth is, we’re the anomaly. ... We think that this that this economic system or our exists out of culture, out of time, and is the inexorable wave of history when, by definition, it is simply the product of a certain set of human beings, our lineage.”
(Wade Davis)
***
***
'China will tighten its controls over foreign singers and other performers after Icelandic singer Bjork shouted "Tibet! Tibet!" at a Shanghai concert last weekend... Bjork chanted the name of the Chinese-ruled Himalayan region after performing her song "Declare Independence," which she has used in the past to promote independence movements in other places such as Kosovo.
The performance "not only broke Chinese laws and regulations and hurt the feelings of Chinese people, but also went against the professional code of an artist," the ministry said in a statement quoted by the official Xinhua news agency.'
(Reuters)
***
“The awful truth, of course, is that we’re all living in a huge conspiracy, and things are so ridiculous that we barely even think about it anymore. We entered into the Iraq war under false pretenses. Our government routinely spies on its citizens both inside and outside its borders, and runs secret courts with special rules. We torture and kill civilians in other countries because we can.
“I was surprised when I met some of Seattle’s Truth groups [Believers in alternative 9-11 conspiracies] because I was confronted by smart, sincere people with lots of information about the sad state of civil liberties and corporate control in the United States, people eager to inform other people about what’s happening to our rights and using money out of their own pockets to do it. People fighting, in other words, the single biggest sin in America: laziness. ... They could do a lot better by dropping the arguments about the melting point of steel and whether or not planes actually did hit buildings. What they already have in their hands is priceless: In just a couple of years they’ve created, from nothing, a truly democratic, highly visible grassroots framework for a new kind of peace and civil rights organization that could use that concept of “civil informationing” to bring about change.
(Paul Constant in The Stranger)
“The more I read about Socrates, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.”
(Lord Macaulay)
“It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party's nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.
“By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party's nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.
(Gary Hart)
***
“I'm not really a horror reader. I don't really love roller coasters and things that make me queasy, and I particularly dislike gore. ... But—you knew there was a "but" coming—I've always had a weakness for ghost stories. I'm not sure why; something about the attenuated cry of the long dead, something about the loss, and the possibility of justice, or at least the emergence of truth, strikes a chord in me. There's something ineluctably human about ghosts.”
(Michelle West)
***
“In Buckley’s world, gifts of intellect and power were to be used as bludgeons against the less gifted and powerless. For all his cunning charm, Buckley’s was a cynical view of the human condition, its practicality based on the commonest greed and fear. Alas, few truly rigorous minds ever had the chance to take on Buckley in public, though he was ultimately oblivious to argument. Still I wonder if he ever regretted that his intellectual defense of selfishness became the mindless thuggery of the current conservative movement?”
(blog comment by Ric Williams)
***
“Germany, Japan, and the USSR were modern industrial nation-states that posed direct, tangible, and sustainable military threats to the survival of the United States. The Islamofascist enemy is a specious conjuring of the neoconservatives that does not exist. The Islamist threat personified and led by Osama bin Laden is a direct, tangible, and enduring national-security threat to the United States, but it does not now amount to a world war, and it will not unless the neoconservatives continue to hold sway. We are fighting a war with the Islamists that is ours to lose, and at the moment we are successfully losing it because President Bush and 17 of the 19 individuals in the current crop of presidential candidates buy Podhoretz's lethal lie that the Islamists are "the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization" and are, "like the Nazis and the Communists before them … dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherish and for which Americans stand." Actually, America's war with the bin Laden-led Islamists is fueled by the impact of U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies in the Islamic world, not, as Podhoretz claims, by "our virtues as a free and prosperous country." To the extent that America combines reduced interventionism with military action against genuine threats, we will defeat the Islamists. The increased interventionism of Podhoretz and his coterie will lead to endless war abroad and eventually between Muslim Americans and their countrymen at home – and America's defeat.”
(Michael Scheurer)
***
“So fuck the Street, Ben Bernanke; just this once, just for, like, a quarter or something. You don't have to play rough; I'm not asking you to nationalize any industries or institute land reform or anything, just give them a little scare. They chose this path, you know. They chose to worship Ayn Rand and wear those Paul Smith shirts and pay zero money down on their Hamptons summer homes and obnoxiously, whenever confronted by someone like myself at a bar, claim that the Market Solves Everything. Let the market solve this one for them.”
( posted by “Moe” on Jezebel.com)
***
Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?
Yes. It. Can. The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.
Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.
The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”
But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
(Roger Cohen, “Beyond America’s Original Sin”)
***
“...Conan has sex with a ghost, chops up a couple dozen mummies, and then stabs a wizard who is riding a giant red eagle and summoning Lovecraftian horrors. Back in the Hyborean age, that was pretty much just called “Thursday.””
(Chris’ Invincible Super Blog)
(Malleus Malleficarum, 1547)
***
“We don’t think of ourselves as a culture in the West. We think that we somehow exist outside of time and culture. We’re the real world moving inexorably forward: Get with it or lose the train. When the truth is, we’re the anomaly. ... We think that this that this economic system or our exists out of culture, out of time, and is the inexorable wave of history when, by definition, it is simply the product of a certain set of human beings, our lineage.”
(Wade Davis)
***
***
'China will tighten its controls over foreign singers and other performers after Icelandic singer Bjork shouted "Tibet! Tibet!" at a Shanghai concert last weekend... Bjork chanted the name of the Chinese-ruled Himalayan region after performing her song "Declare Independence," which she has used in the past to promote independence movements in other places such as Kosovo.
The performance "not only broke Chinese laws and regulations and hurt the feelings of Chinese people, but also went against the professional code of an artist," the ministry said in a statement quoted by the official Xinhua news agency.'
(Reuters)
***
“The awful truth, of course, is that we’re all living in a huge conspiracy, and things are so ridiculous that we barely even think about it anymore. We entered into the Iraq war under false pretenses. Our government routinely spies on its citizens both inside and outside its borders, and runs secret courts with special rules. We torture and kill civilians in other countries because we can.
“I was surprised when I met some of Seattle’s Truth groups [Believers in alternative 9-11 conspiracies] because I was confronted by smart, sincere people with lots of information about the sad state of civil liberties and corporate control in the United States, people eager to inform other people about what’s happening to our rights and using money out of their own pockets to do it. People fighting, in other words, the single biggest sin in America: laziness. ... They could do a lot better by dropping the arguments about the melting point of steel and whether or not planes actually did hit buildings. What they already have in their hands is priceless: In just a couple of years they’ve created, from nothing, a truly democratic, highly visible grassroots framework for a new kind of peace and civil rights organization that could use that concept of “civil informationing” to bring about change.
(Paul Constant in The Stranger)
“The more I read about Socrates, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.”
(Lord Macaulay)
“It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party's nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.
“By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party's nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.
(Gary Hart)
***
“I'm not really a horror reader. I don't really love roller coasters and things that make me queasy, and I particularly dislike gore. ... But—you knew there was a "but" coming—I've always had a weakness for ghost stories. I'm not sure why; something about the attenuated cry of the long dead, something about the loss, and the possibility of justice, or at least the emergence of truth, strikes a chord in me. There's something ineluctably human about ghosts.”
(Michelle West)
***
“In Buckley’s world, gifts of intellect and power were to be used as bludgeons against the less gifted and powerless. For all his cunning charm, Buckley’s was a cynical view of the human condition, its practicality based on the commonest greed and fear. Alas, few truly rigorous minds ever had the chance to take on Buckley in public, though he was ultimately oblivious to argument. Still I wonder if he ever regretted that his intellectual defense of selfishness became the mindless thuggery of the current conservative movement?”
(blog comment by Ric Williams)
***
“Germany, Japan, and the USSR were modern industrial nation-states that posed direct, tangible, and sustainable military threats to the survival of the United States. The Islamofascist enemy is a specious conjuring of the neoconservatives that does not exist. The Islamist threat personified and led by Osama bin Laden is a direct, tangible, and enduring national-security threat to the United States, but it does not now amount to a world war, and it will not unless the neoconservatives continue to hold sway. We are fighting a war with the Islamists that is ours to lose, and at the moment we are successfully losing it because President Bush and 17 of the 19 individuals in the current crop of presidential candidates buy Podhoretz's lethal lie that the Islamists are "the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization" and are, "like the Nazis and the Communists before them … dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherish and for which Americans stand." Actually, America's war with the bin Laden-led Islamists is fueled by the impact of U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies in the Islamic world, not, as Podhoretz claims, by "our virtues as a free and prosperous country." To the extent that America combines reduced interventionism with military action against genuine threats, we will defeat the Islamists. The increased interventionism of Podhoretz and his coterie will lead to endless war abroad and eventually between Muslim Americans and their countrymen at home – and America's defeat.”
(Michael Scheurer)
***
“So fuck the Street, Ben Bernanke; just this once, just for, like, a quarter or something. You don't have to play rough; I'm not asking you to nationalize any industries or institute land reform or anything, just give them a little scare. They chose this path, you know. They chose to worship Ayn Rand and wear those Paul Smith shirts and pay zero money down on their Hamptons summer homes and obnoxiously, whenever confronted by someone like myself at a bar, claim that the Market Solves Everything. Let the market solve this one for them.”
( posted by “Moe” on Jezebel.com)
***
Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?
Yes. It. Can. The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.
Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.
The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”
But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
(Roger Cohen, “Beyond America’s Original Sin”)
***
“...Conan has sex with a ghost, chops up a couple dozen mummies, and then stabs a wizard who is riding a giant red eagle and summoning Lovecraftian horrors. Back in the Hyborean age, that was pretty much just called “Thursday.””
(Chris’ Invincible Super Blog)
Commonplace Book: Quotations
“The more extraordinary the story the more ordinary the drunk.”
(old AA saying)
***
“One of my favorite concepts in anthropology is that of the polite fiction. It's something nobody believes, but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. My favorite example was of a Pygmy couple. Pygmy divorce involves quite literally breaking up the home: the couple tears apart their house (it's easy - the houses are made of leaves) and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. It escalated until the wife threatened to leave, and the husband yelled something along the lines of ‘Fine!’ and there was nothing the wife could do but start tearing down the house. She began tearing the roof off, clearly miserable. The husband looked wretched too, but at this point neither could back down without losing face and by now the whole village was watching.
Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of ‘You're right, honey! The roof is dirty! It'll look much better once we get those leaves washed!’ The two of them started carrying leaves down to the river, soon with the help of the whole village, and then washed and rebuilt the whole roof. When the anthropologist later discreetly asked how often one washes the roof, everyone looked at him like he was a complete doofus.”
(Ali Davis, True Porn Clerk Stories)
***
“This is an important sophisticated argument. It doesn't help to point at the amputees and say how terrible it is."
(British Tory Peter Viggers, speaking against a ban on land mines)
***
“In contrast to Winston Churchill — another son with a famous father, who managed to free himself psychologically and politically from the shadow of his parent, learning from his elder’s mistakes without being governed by the need to rebel programmatically — the younger Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Weisberg, “played out his family drama in a way that had devastating consequences for his family, his country and the world.”
-- NYT review of The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg
***
Will Elder, The Shadow, Mad Magazine, 1950s
***
“The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear.”
(Michael Chabon)
***
“The Clintons... and yes, I think it's fair to refer to the plural... have ridden their centrist, sellout, fundie-crooked-accomodationist pony right into the ground. They've controlled the Democratic agenda and enabled the most egregious GOP crap. They are emblematic of a Congress that's done little to repudiate George Bush. ... The Clintons are admitted hawks, they're prudes, and they're absolutely quaint on issues like continuing the embargo on Cuba. Someone needs to surgically remove the Cold War out of their ass. They take advantage of liberals hoping that they are more "cool" in their private lives than they are in their public ones. Who cares? I don't want to "have a beer" with them; I'd rather they show their social justice colors in their public policy.”
(Susie Bright)
***
Miss Sylvia, daughter of Tim and Staci
(old AA saying)
***
“One of my favorite concepts in anthropology is that of the polite fiction. It's something nobody believes, but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. My favorite example was of a Pygmy couple. Pygmy divorce involves quite literally breaking up the home: the couple tears apart their house (it's easy - the houses are made of leaves) and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. It escalated until the wife threatened to leave, and the husband yelled something along the lines of ‘Fine!’ and there was nothing the wife could do but start tearing down the house. She began tearing the roof off, clearly miserable. The husband looked wretched too, but at this point neither could back down without losing face and by now the whole village was watching.
Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of ‘You're right, honey! The roof is dirty! It'll look much better once we get those leaves washed!’ The two of them started carrying leaves down to the river, soon with the help of the whole village, and then washed and rebuilt the whole roof. When the anthropologist later discreetly asked how often one washes the roof, everyone looked at him like he was a complete doofus.”
(Ali Davis, True Porn Clerk Stories)
***
“This is an important sophisticated argument. It doesn't help to point at the amputees and say how terrible it is."
(British Tory Peter Viggers, speaking against a ban on land mines)
***
“In contrast to Winston Churchill — another son with a famous father, who managed to free himself psychologically and politically from the shadow of his parent, learning from his elder’s mistakes without being governed by the need to rebel programmatically — the younger Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Weisberg, “played out his family drama in a way that had devastating consequences for his family, his country and the world.”
-- NYT review of The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg
***
Will Elder, The Shadow, Mad Magazine, 1950s
***
“The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear.”
(Michael Chabon)
***
“The Clintons... and yes, I think it's fair to refer to the plural... have ridden their centrist, sellout, fundie-crooked-accomodationist pony right into the ground. They've controlled the Democratic agenda and enabled the most egregious GOP crap. They are emblematic of a Congress that's done little to repudiate George Bush. ... The Clintons are admitted hawks, they're prudes, and they're absolutely quaint on issues like continuing the embargo on Cuba. Someone needs to surgically remove the Cold War out of their ass. They take advantage of liberals hoping that they are more "cool" in their private lives than they are in their public ones. Who cares? I don't want to "have a beer" with them; I'd rather they show their social justice colors in their public policy.”
(Susie Bright)
***
Miss Sylvia, daughter of Tim and Staci
Mark Twain's Rules for Funeral Etiquette
Do not criticize the person in whose honor the entertainment is given.
Make no remarks about his equipment. If the handles are plated, it is best to seem to not observe it.
If the odor of the flowers is too oppressive for your comfort, remember that they were not brought there for you, and that the person for whom they were brought suffers no inconvenience from their presence.
Listen, with as intense an expression of attention as you can command, to the official statement of the character and history of the person in whose honor the entertainment is given; and if these statistics should seem to fail to tally with the facts, in places, do not nudge your neighbor, or press your foot upon his toes, or manifest, by any other sign, your awareness that taffy is being distributed.
If the official hopes expressed concerning the person in whose honor the entertainment is given are known by you to be oversized, let it pass -- do not interrupt.
At the moving passages, be moved -- but only according to the degree of your intimacy with the parties giving the entertainment, or with the party in whose honor the entertainment is given. Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief. Where the occasion is military, the emotions should be graded according to military rank, the highest officer present taking precedence in emotional violence, and the rest modifying their feelings according to their position in the service.
Do not bring your dog.
Dick Gregory Can Still Kick Ass
Dick Gregory as dead-on funny as anybody's been all year. Why is this man not a network commentator when we are asked to listen with a straight face to the wrong once, wrong twice, wrong again and again blatherings of Kristol, Will, and the rest?
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