Terrorists

"A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?" -- While Raj from What's Happening looks on.

The Commonplace Book, Last Week of May

A couple of personal favorites to start:

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” –Lincoln

and

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to steal bread, and to beg in the streets." -- Anatole France

***

“There was a time when a vital center coalition existed in the Senate, where there was room on both sides for trading votes across party lines. The Republicans destroyed that coalition and Liebermann, inexplicably, doesn't seem to get that. Even worse, when the shit comes down, he inevitably sides with them. Many Democrats took a long time to learn the harsh lessons of GOP political hardball and had to lose to a bunch of thuggish right-wingers before they began to recognise what they were up against. Lieberman still refuses to accept the fact that his high minded centrism is a weapon in the hands of the radical Republicans.”
-- from “Centrist Know-Nothings” at Digby's Hullabaloo

***
“There is a certain reverence for the sociopath as a major cultural type in American society, along with the frontiersman, the puritan and the outlaw.”
Robert Stone

***

From a list of “50 Favorite Marvel comic book characters” by Wheeler on LiveJournal:
“Nick Fury
Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Superspy. Eyepatch. Cigar. Gun. Giant citadel held aloft by helicopter rotors. Flying cars. Robot clones. Holograms. Hot Italian contessa girlfriend. The definition of cool. These days, Nick Fury doesn't smoke cigars, because Marvel editor Joe Quesada lost family to lung cancer. I lost family when Godzilla took down a SHIELD Helicarrier over San Diego, but that doesn't seem to bother those insensitive shits at Marvel.”
“Swarm, Fritz von Meyer
Created by Bill Mantlo and John Byrne.
Swarm has appeared in comics only a scant handful of times, yet he has massive cult appeal. To understand why, there's just one thing you need to know about Swarm: He's a Nazi made of radioactive bees. Shakespeare only wishes he'd come up with stuff this good.”

***


“On the other hand, it's possible for a talented wanna-be who's written a good book to stress out at the prospect of actually submitting the thing, and suffer a debilitating attack of multiply recursive self-consciousness, which eats up every scrap of processing capacity and so impairs their judgment. That is: A good book can have a bad cover letter.”
-–Teresa Neilsen Hayden

***

TO: The Citizens of the United States of America

RE: Revocation of Your Independence

In the light of your failure to elect a proper President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. (Except Utah, which she does not fancy much.) Your new prime minister (The Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a minister for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire will be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

***
“But Constantine takes the liberties of adaptation too far. In the comics, John Constantine is a snarky blond working class Brit whose iconography includes chain smoking and wearing a dingy yellow trenchcoat. He is not a mopey black-haired American with a big gun and tattoos. Calling the guy in this movie John Constantine is an insult. If you made a movie of From Hell, which is largely about Jack the Ripper, and decided to change Jack the Ripper into an American stalking the streets of '20 Chicago with a tommy gun, no matter how good the movie was people would be rightly upset. So I'm pissed. As rumour has it [apparently confirmed as true—OEE ed.] Alan Moore has instructed (DC Comics) to not credit him as the creator of the character. And putting his money where his mouth is, he has instructed that the royalties that he was splitting with his co-creators goes exclusively to the artists (Rick Veitch and Stephen Bissette) .... Often we hear about an artist upset that his creation has been butchered but this is the first I can recall where the creator asked that both name and money be rejected.”
-- Jonathan Korman in his blog -- Miniver Cheevy

***
“No-one who sees a system as "natural and inevitable" can really examine it; this is why minority groups create the best comedians, generally.” --Michael O’Hare

***
“David Broder is such a wanker. And, as pointed out at Tiny Revolution:
MR. RUSSERT: David Broder, is it possible for official Washington--the president, Democratic leaders, Republican leaders--to arrive at common ground, a consensus position on Iraq?
MR. DAVID BRODER: It's possible, Tim, but they won't get there by arguing about who did what three years ago. And this whole debate about whether there was just a mistake or misrepresentation or so on is, I think, from the public point of view largely irrelevant. The public's moved past that.

“And, as pointed out at Tiny Revolution: Just days after he said this, a New York Times poll found that 80% of Americans felt it was "very" (56%) or "somewhat" (24%) important for Congress to investigate Bush's use of intelligence on Iraq.

“In Broder's world: Figuring out how we got into this catastrophic war, not so important. Not only that, he assumes because it isn't important to him it must not be important to anyone. This is called the Pulling It Our Of Your Ass school of punditry, something the Dean has apparently mastered in his old age.” -- Atrios

***
"In essence, the basic question of philosophy (as of psychoanalysis) is the same as that of the detective novel: who is guilty? " -- Umberto Eco
-- Art by John Kricfalusi, that Magnificent Bastard

BUSH THE DECIDER, BULLY, BLAMER AND DENIER

See the funny man stop smiling about halfway through Stephen Colbert's routine.

Let us not forget that this is the man who thought it was funny to mock a woman he was about to execute. This is the man who responded to Cindy Sheehan, "I'’m not meeting again with that goddamned bitch! She can go to hell as far as I'’m concerned!" This is the man who reacted to the "Bullshit Detectors" worn by elderly Veterans of Foreign Wars by saying, "tell those VFW assholes that I'’ll never speak to them again if they can'’t keep their members under control!" This is the person who thought it was funny to mock his own search for WMDs at the 2004 correspondents' dinner, but that's okay: the death toll was lower then.

Bully, blame and denial, bully, blame and denial, the tired litany of what we used to call "a dry drunk", who loses the alcohol but none of the attitude.

Leave a Thank You note for Stephen Colbert HERE.

Some Insight on the presidential temper tantrums HERE.

Complete transcript of Colbert's routine HERE.

And a calm assessment by Doug Elfman HERE.

6,500,000 People Can Be Wrong

A stupefying concept, buried in an AP story about Geena Davis' ABC show "Commander-In-Chief":
"'if elected to another season uh, term,' Davis joked, 'whatever I can do to make change happen quicker in the fake world, I promise to do.' Poll results don't look promising. The show ranked No. 64 in the Nielsen Media Research rankings last week, with 6.5 million viewers."

6,500,000 people watch a show, but that's NOT ENOUGH to keep it on the air??? I've never seen the show and am indifferent to its fate, but what kind of a culture can we expect from an industry that, on a daily basis, has to please more than SIX MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND AND ONE HUMAN BEINGS AT THE SAME TIME??? I cannot conceive of anything I do or would WANT to do that would entertain that many people, short of broadcasting baby animals.

Kill All the People You Want, but Cover Your Breasts, for God's Sake!

And You Ask What Has Driven Me Mad Dept.

From an unsigned editorial today in

The New York Times

".... A game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has a lot to tell us, most of it unpalatable, about how American culture looks through certain eyes. But so does the reaction to this modification and the scenes it exposes. As always in America, sex and nudity create the scandals, not systemic violence..."

Way back in the Stone Age, Lenny Bruce complained about the response to Hitchcock's "Psycho", and a culture wherein violence was okay but nudity was verboten. I first grasped this when the moneymaker "Jaws" was rated PG and the much more humane "Harry and Tonto" was given an R rating for language and incidental nudity. More anecdotes on the phenomenon

HERE

I suspect a cultural historian could find the same hypocrisy going back at least as far as the Stanford White murder, when America cared less about Harry Thaw kiling a man than about the seduction of Evelyn Nesbitt.

Some of this weird kink in the American psyche is invented, whipped up by the entertainment media, looking for a sex scandal to enliven its stories. Sometimes the lip smacking is inconsequential, like the discovery that Janet Jackson is a mammal. Sometimes it harms the republic itself, as with the time wasted on the Lewinsky affair.

It should be noted that my own storytelling sometimes includes graphic sex and graphic violence, the former reserved for the heroes and the latter usually practised by villains. Cruelty to animals and innocent people upsets and enrages me as a monstrous aberration, but sexual activity as just another part of life's rich pageant. Sex and violence in the media are on a continum, like good cooking and bad cooking.

WHAT DRIVES ME MAD is the willful naievety of the American parent. "Grand Theft Auto" and "GTA: San Andreas" have been played in basements for donkey's years, and now the Righteous Outrage of Suburban Motherhood has only just awakened, because someone discovered that sex was involved-- not the imaginary killing of thousands-- and how many Iraquis HAVE been killed so far, in a war none of them volunteered for--? Does anyone else see a pattern?

From a posting by "CJs Girl" at

Gaming Tips

message board:
"Many things affects your sex appeal [within the GTA game]. The clothes you wear, the hairstyle you have, the car you last drove, how many and which types of tatoos you have. For the hairstyle, I'd pick the most expensive. Cornrows are good sex appeal hair cuts. The blonde CornRow is really good for sex appeal. Afro's are good too and the High Afro is too. When you get to the big city where the casino's are you can get Elvis styled hair, which is excellent for sex appeal. The car can be the best cars you can find. Each type of car lowers or brings up your sex appeal. Back tatoos give the most sex appeal. Don't have too many tatoos, because that can bring down your sex appeal, because you will be "full of ink". I guess the women don't like too many tatoos. I think 3 should be the limit if that. For the clothes: low top shoes give you more respect, which can help with sex appeal a little. I think when you wear the hat or cap backwards it brings more sex appeal. I think sideways does well too. I think when you buy clothes from the more popular clothing stores, it brings up your sex appeal. ZIP clothing stores work well and I think Binco works just as good. Didier Sachs works best from what I have heard, but I haven't gotten that store open yet. Make sure to have plenty of style. I buy all of the clothes available at each store I open to when I get to a dressing room at a Safe House I can have a variety of clothes to choose from. Your local Grove Street Gang Members help you out with your outfits. They'll tell you what they like and what they don't." ***

*** Readers are strongly advised not to ask sociopathic killers for fashion hints while engaged in reality.

One of these fantasies is destroying America in the mind of YOUR innocent baby right now.