An Army of Davids

I've been reading the funny thread about liquid explosives and the like at Making Light. I have a question for the Glenn Reynolds, Sansabelt-posthumanist crowd:

Will not our transhuman techological singularity selves set off all the metal detectors?

Things That Are Mattter-of-Fact in Atlanta

Such as:

Well, I think [Wal-Mart] should [run] the "mom and pop" stores out of my neighborhood. But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs; very few black people own these stores.

That's good for a laugh or two. And here I thought I was a radical hard-ass for saying that I'll call anyone a nigger who'll call me a faggot.

Race makes it too easy. The problem, at its root, is tribe. I'm a hopeless cosmopolitan myself, and don't honestly give a damn whether white folk survive into the next century undiluted or not. The larger truth, however, is that you cannot erase thousands of years of human chauvinism with the power of sit-ins and direct action. That's as true in Hotlanta as it is in Beirut as it is in Baghdad as it is in Uttar Pradesh. Differences in degree, if not in kind. We're but naked, helpless creatures, and we clump together for protection. Is it great wonder that we clump via easily-appreciated similitudes? I am not, shall we say, sanguine about the post-racial, post-ethnic prospects for a unified global humanity.

That said, Andrew Young, for whom the Jewish, Korean, and Arab moms and pops were such implacable obstacles to equality and seasonal menus, has a plan:

I think we may have erred in not paying enough attention to the potentially positive role of business and the corporate multinational community in seeking solutions to the problems of the poor.

If you can tell me what the "corporate multinational community" is, bully to you. I for one think it pushes the definition of community a step or a marathon too far. I'd hate to see what happens when the arguments at that neighborhood association's meetings get heated.

Oh, wait.

Ennui

Apple pie. Baseball. The NFL preseason. Summer crowds in D.C. "Hastily called news conferences." Mid-August, and some things just scream: America!

In the various official responses to Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's decision that the dauphin is no Napoleon, one notes an unsurprising absence of substance. Every counterargument seems predicated on the shaky premise that efficacy conveys legitimacy. (The efficacy of these surveillance programs is itself a matter of insupportable assertion, given the double-secret probation atmosphere surrounding the issue.) Let's enumerate:

[The ruling] would weaken the country’s defenses if allowed to stand.

It "has been effective in protecting America."

"The whole point is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks before they can be carried out."

"The terrorist surveillance program is firmly grounded in law and regularly reviewed to make sure steps are taken to protect civil liberties."

"Our terrorist surveillance programs are critical to fighting the war on terror and saved the day by foiling the London terror plot (sic)."

"It is disappointing that a judge would take it upon herself to disarm America during a time of war."

Meanwhile, the dauphin himself increasingly sounds as if he's been scriped by Alfred Jarry.

"If Al Qaeda is calling into the United States, we want to know why they’re calling."

Maybe they just want to use up their roll-over minutes.

I guess this stuff still plays among the thumbsucker crowd, but it's pretty clear that no number of gel-bra bomb scares is going to recapture the allegience of John and Jane Heartland, who have a mighty but not inexhaustible appetite for bullshit. This is not, as well-meaning libearls are fond of assaying, because there lurks within each McAmerican a sort of ruminant wisdom which, though slow to wake, eventually combines with the wisdom of each neighbor to bring forth the inexorable rightness of "The American People." If The People are right, you can be pretty sure it's by accident. Their current fatigue with the garrison state of American politics has nothing whatsoever to do with some realization that the actions of the dauphin and his court contravene the fundamental beliefs on which this nation was founded. As Mencken said when recalling the effect of his translating the Declaration of Independence into "regular American," such ideas, if understood, mostly anger and alarm the regular American. The Bill of Rights, expressed in plain English, would still scandalize most of our countrymen.

Rather, the plain people are tired of alarms--tired like school kids shuffling out of the schoolhouse for the latest laconic fire drill. Americans are slowly coming to the conclusion that the threat to their particular persons is significantly smaller than they've been told. Concurrently, they see that their nation's bumbling about the world, mostly in places they've never heard of full of people with names they can't pronounce, is exacerbating every problem, or at least the transmittable images of every problem. It's a familiar feeling for every mid-level working man: the boss, whose job consists of no identifiable work and whose strategy-jabber at staff meetings makes no sense to anyone, stumbles around, clearly out of his depth, clearly exacerbating the problems, whatever they are, by doing whatever it is he does.

I have no confidence that Judge Taylor's decision will stand. Obsequiousness and venality are no less traits of our federal judiciary than our impotent Congress, and the higher one's bench, the more people one owes. But I do have a smidgen of hope that those American People, whomever they are, are at last beyond recapture by the fearmongers of the Imperium--not because The People are wise, but because The People are bored.

A Thousand Little van der Lubbes

When Kevin Drum starts questioning, you can be fairly sure the end is nigh. Although, just for the record, I told you so.

Since Who is IOZ? is neither a serious nor responsible blog, I'm going to be the one to say "Reichstag." Take your Godwin's law and shove it. It was perfectly self-evident at the outset--and it seems now undeniable--that this plot, like every other recent plot, is a fabrication of our own governments (American and British), and that the suspects rounded up are just another motley collection of losers without the connections or influence to make trouble over their phony arrests. At very worst they are, like the Brooklyn-Bridge Blowtorcher or the Miami-Chicago Ninja Bombers, a bunch of fantasist dupes whose masturbatory vigilante imaginations led them to one-too-many indiscretions at the bar, shooting the shit with some buddy who himself has the plan for "the perfect murder" or "the perfect bank robbery," especially once he's got some Jack in him.

I called it the Lady Clairol Bomb Plot of 2006. How prescient. It's turning out to be as phony as a platinum blond.

The Human Face of Government Intrusion

With the usual caveats about the uselessness of electoralism: very interesting.

I've been banging on Democrats a lot recently, but the above-linked article on Michael Shiavo reminded me just how much I despise the Republican Party. If ever such a dismal collection of sub-sentient reprobates ever otherwise existed in the history of America, it's news to me. At least the nigger-hating Southern Democrats of yore were honest about hating niggers. At least the Tories of the Revolution were honest about their loyalism. The Supreme Soviet was more honest about the aims of its government than the Republican Congress.

It's easy enough, writing in a blog or bitching to your buddies over beers, to dismiss Bill Frist as a Mengelian reinterpretation of Colonel Klink, ruling over the stoogeriferous United States Senate, a collection of swampy gasbaggery that out-absurds the combined opera of Gilbert and Sullivan and the Marx Brothers. His long-distance video diagnosis of Terri Shiavo alone was an inspired inversion of Groucho's great line as Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush: "Either she's dead, or my watch has stopped!" But consider the more sordid facts of the matter.

Here was a private citizen, a fairly ordinary guy involved in a tragic but not-uncommon dispute with his in-laws over the final medical decision in the life of his wife, who had languished for years and was beyond the hope of medicine. That her condition was even more dire and incurable than most in similar circumstances was only an added grotesquerie. I want to emphasize that the extraordinary attention lavished on this particular instance of end-of-life stewardship easily diverts us from the quotidian nature of such disputes. Every oncologist, palliative care specialist, gerontologist, home-care nurse and internist has witnessed a family split into opposing camps, one desirous of a swift, humane end, one clinging to irrational hope. Even in my own family, among which there was unanimous consensus that my grandfather should be removed from the hospital, offered only palliative care, and allowed to die at home without life support or extraordinary measures of any sort, suffered from division and argument during the final weeks of his life. When no such consensus exists, legal recourse isn't uncommon.

Michael Shiavo faced those common hardships, particularly an extremely uncooperative, argumentative, and uninformed set of relatives, for years. He met another woman. He had children. For his sake and theirs, he must have desired as swift an end as possible, but he fought on.

Then the entire apparatus of the ruling party of this country was turned against him. The president rushed back from his vacation to sign emergency legislation crafted by the Congress of the United States in order to contravene every court order in support of Mr. Schiavo. He was tarred repeatedly as some sort of wife-abandoning pervert seeking to kill her off in order to run off with some hussy. He was mocked in the right-wing press. The so-called mainstream press caricatured him endlessly. The heads that talk shed crocodile tears for "Terri." The greatest powers and loudest voices in the most powerful nation on earth aligned themselves against one man and his private decision and pitched a carnival at a funeral. They turned on the klieg lights and the tinny music, filled the park with moronic Christians, ever-eager to interject their medievalist, four-humors, ensoulement-at-conception lunacy into the public sphere, and did a danse macabre around the wicker-man body of Terri Shiavo, who was--let's not mince words--a gassy sac of flesh with a brain stem, no more a person than a jellyfish or slug.

I could give many reasons why I call myself a libertarian, why I distrust government in the absolute extreme. This, among them, is paramount: that it could happen to me. It could happen to you.

Franco-Republicans

Thank God we the Israelis at best managed to avoid a tactical defeat and surely committed a strategic blunder totally kicked ass all up and down the Levant, so I can get back to writing about more important things, like how Franco-American Senatorial Candidate Georges-Alain called a vaguely brownish worker for his opponent's campaign "macaca," evidently a mispronounced version of a pretty common French slur, which Georges-Alain pretty clearly learned from his French-Tunisian mother.

It reminds me of the time I got really pissed at this marketing intern who was hanging around the back of the conference room at an interdepartmental meeting and started screaming, "Look! Look at him! Ce pédale, il veux que tout le monde l'encule ! Il aime des grosses bites ! Il baise des hommes! Il s'habille comme une femme ! La vice anglaise, la vice anglaise ! Il va à l'enfer ! Il est mal !" Then I was just like, "Dude, what? Oh, no, I was just like talking about his haircut."

Advantage: Terror!

"We disrupted a terror plot, a plot where people were willing to kill innocent life to achieve political objectives," Bush said.

Maybe George Bush really has been reading Camus. Otherwise, how do you explain that "kill innocent life" bit. So abstract. So existential. Jesus, what's next? Fighting a war on terror?

Nah. That'd be crazy.

BLOG!

The President of Iran has a blog.

Whatever.

Call me when he's got a profile on ManHunt. Then we'll talk.

Aujourd'hui maman est morte

So the Dauphin supposedly read The Stranger. He probably didn't read it, but presidential readings, like the divinity of Christ or the justice of statutory rape laws, are not meant to be questioned in polite company. That the handlers of our layabout ruler wish us to believe he's knee-deep in a good tale of ennui and arab-killin' is . . . disturbing.

But it could've been worse. Tony Snow could be telling us that the boy-prince has been reading Gide. I'd hate to be some teenage Mexitexican ranch hand over at Kennebunkport South after President Merkel-Massage got his hands on L'immoraliste.

But for Shakespeare and maybe Cervantes on a good day, no man could invent this character, this George W. Bush. He is the great fiction of our time, the hybrid-spawn of Dogberry and Richard III.

A Point Made Well, With Pictures!

Here is a good post. Although I can proudly report that I was on the vanguard of the gimme-a-break movement in Re: the Matter of Exploding Frappuccino, it never occured to me that the high-tech response to explosive liquids would be to dump them all in a big fucking bin, together. Here, let me pour this nitro into this metal receptacle!

The Confiscatory Republic of America.

Annals of Liberalism, Part Whatever

Dear The Government,

Please make train travel just as miserable as flying.

Sincerely,

A. Liberal