Forgiveness

I rolled over to Roy Edroso's place this morning, and came upon his notice of this comdedy gold mine at what I take to be a popular rightwing blog called The Gates of Vienna. The Gates are holding a slogan contest, you see, looking for some sort of World-War-I style Kill-the-Hun type of thing to rally the . . . well, not the troops, who appear to be rallied just about to the breaking point. To rally, I suppose, the warriors of words, those brave blogospherians just itching to compose a new Chanson de Roland for our Saracen-filled era. Between references to the Borg, the Lord of the Rings, and, dog help us, Babylon 5, there are a number of characterological insights into the dhimmitudinous depths of rightwing cubicle colonels everywhere. My favorite:

Remember Hagia Sofia!

(One of many things that I, personally, will never forgive.)

Personally will never forgive. I, personally, will never forgive the English Lord of Shrewsbury for his ignominious defeat at the hands of Jean Bureau, which likewise occurred in 1453, but should our Anglo allies determine that the French indeed pose the sort of grave danger to the West that just a few short months ago they were said to pose, well, I hereby stake claim:

Remember the Battle of Castillon!

Porn

You know, that really grinds my gears. Where in the bible does it say that a man can't fire off some knuckle-children in the privacy of his own neighbor's living room while his neighbor's at work because I don't have a DVD player? Well, I don't know where it says it because the Bible was way too long to read!

-Peter Griffin, The Family Guy-

If there could be one place protected from the cancerous infection of pornography and sexual misconducts, one would assume that the Christian church would be that sanctuary. But, recent research is revealing that no one is immunized against the vice-grip clutches of sexual addictive behaviors. The people who struggle with the repeated pursuit of sexual gratification include church members, deacons, staff, and yes, even clergy. And, to the surprise of many, a large number of women in the church have become victim to this widespread problem.

-Marketwire report-

Via Ex Cathedra, we learn . . .

Note the curious locution in that Marketwire report: "The people who struggle with the repeated pursuit of sexual gratification . . ." Most of the people I know who struggle with said pursuit, and repeatedly, are the sorts of guys and gals who, you know, aren't gonna win the Homecoming crown but sure do have nice personalities. And great smiles!

As for me, I am surprised by many things in life. I am not, however, surprised that "a large number of [Christian] women" are victims of "the repeated pursuit of sexual gratification." They sure ain't gettin' it at home, what with Husband spending all his time reading up on new car prices in the computer room closethedoorgetoutofheredon'tlookatmeohgodohgod!

Despite the Best Efforts of Everyone, this Pacifism Has Not Necessarily Developed to Our Advantage

And let me point out, Dude, that pacifism is not . . . Just look at our situation with that camel-fucker in Iraq.

-Walter Sobchak-

So. A rearmed Japan. Rockin'.

Granted, the Japanese LDP is staunchly pro-American. But consider that in East Asia, six years of Foreign Policy dauphinoise has seen resurgent nationalism, an ascendent China, a nuclear Pakistan an assasin's-breath from Islamonazifascicommunism, a nervous nuclear India just to the Southwest, a nuclear North Korea, and one of the world's great modern military powers on the verge of renouncing its pacifistic constitution in favor of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere larger role in the world. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, nationalism got more or less smashed along the way to the various purple-fingered plebiscites in Iraq, replaced by crude, murderous tribalism with a confectioner's sprinkling of transnational monotheistic whack-jobbery for good measure.

And, to reemphasize, everone's pretty much figgered out that some nukes is better than none nukes.

All this would surely come as a shock to the thin-chested think-tankers advocating a "muscular" US foreign policy were they either capable of shock or capable of paying attention. To phrase it as only an American could understand, they see the Law of Unintended Consequences as a theory, not a fact. Just as they speak of Iraq and its problems, when they can bring themselves to admit to its problems, as if the United States' military actions there were not the direct, proximate cause of such problems, there seems to be a general consensus among the so-called serious thinkers that the diarrheac explosions of Bad News about the globe have nothing directly to do with the drunken lumbering of the World's Awesomest National Destiny Country. That is to say that while the more ahem-mature of them may scorn the Vainglorious Vatican (né The Bush Administration) for its responses the the various and sundry crises about the globe, they cannot come to terms with the idea that the rest of the lunatics are misbehaving precisely because they've been sprung from their traditional restraints by the biggest, looniest inmate of all.

If there is any reason to advocate a relative isolationism, in which our principle engagement with the rest of the world consists of equal-partner trade and little else besides, this is it: that it leads by example. People tire of war more quickly than they tire of prosperity, except perhaps in the offices of Marty Peretz, who lately seems to believe that if only someone would give him the opportunity to give Sheik Nasrallah a roundhouse right in the kisser, everything would be just dandy on the international front. The question is not: Can the US work actively in the world more effectively and humanely than it has? Well, sure it can. The more pressing and important question is: Is that good enough? And, I'm afraid, the answer is clearly no. Universal rights of man, democracy, and all the rest of the good stuff do not obtain from wars, from shuttle diplomacy, from carrots, or from sticks. They obtain when a sufficient portion of the population possesses a minimum of wealth and literacy to demand un-arbitrary protections of property and person. They grow, in other words, out of a rational self interest grounded in the quotidian, mundane, unextraordinary work of buying and selling shit, making a living, improving the house. I know that's not the sort of Lebensraumian National Destiny that Davey Brooks and the water-cooler commandos go for, but there it is. At some point, the shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, tradesmen demand some basic protections of universal and un-whimsical law. Thus are Republics born.

Then a nice two-century run, and here we are, Finnegan's-Wake style, along the rivverun, waiting to tumble to our doom. Been nice knowing y'all.

You talkin' to me?

Via Talking Points Memo, I see that the conversion of the United States from Republic to Empire to Rickety Oligarchy to Senile Gerontocracy proceeds apace. With Rummy farting beets and lambasting a bunch of shell-shocked, postprandial veterans about Vichy America and Ted "The Bridge Goes to Somewhere, Just Nowhere Important" Stevens babbling about the tube-er-net (as if the whole thing had been constructed by The Shadow, or the architect of your local drive-through bank), you'd think that someone would flip the channel to a nice Golden Girls rerun so the old fellas could rub one out in peace and leave the rest of us to enjoy the tail end of the ride and the open bar on the H.M.S. Spengler. Instead, we get Senator Conrad "It Is My Real Hair" Burns noting that:

the United States is up against a faceless enemy of terrorists who "drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night."

I'll go out on a limb and claim that I've popped around the block in a fair few more taxis than this latest loudmouth Senatorial refugee from the dialysis lab, and never once have I found myself confronted by a driver without a face. More pointedly, I'll note that from the World Trade Centers to the Madrid and London bombings to the latest blasts out of Iraq, every major incident of terrorism in the last six-odd years has occured in daylight, which begs the question, doesn't it: Why is it so goddman hard for a perfectly caucasian gentleman to get an Uptown cab after three AM? I ask you.

At least the Soviets obliged us with good footage of their hokey here's-my-phallic-warhead parades up and down Red Square, high-kickin' like a lot of commie Rockettes. That put a real face to the Ruskie. Then all we got out of bin Laden et al. was a lot of B-reel of grown men climbing on jungle gyms and running through obstacle courses. Senator Burns tries mightily to concoct an image of pure terror, but alas in its facelessness it falls short of terror and clocks in just barely north of spooky and a little bit gross.

Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.

They have taken 3,000 American lives on one single morning, they've attacked country after country after country throughout the world with a very determined idoelogy, they're trying to overturn governments. They took control of Afghanistan, they're trying to take control of Iraq, they're trying to take control of Lebanon and they're doing it for a very specific reason --- they have territorial ambition, they want the resources, they want the nuclear weapons, they want to destroy the west.

-Dan Bartlett, Presidential Spokesman-


They rip us of our wealth and of our resources and of our oil. Our religion is under attack. They kill and murder our brothers. They compromise our honor and our dignity and dare we utter a single word of protest against the injustice, we are called terrorists. This is compounded injustice. And the United Nations insistence to convict the victims and support the aggressors constitutes a serious precedence which shows the extent of injustice that has been allowed to take root in this land.

-Osama bin Laden-


And what is the connection between us and them, how many bundled links do we find in this neural labyrinth? It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

-Don Delillo, Underworld

Rumsfeld Assails Critics

Salt Lake City – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld launched renewed criticism of the administration’s detractors yesterday in a speech to the American legion. Drawing on the “lessons of 1938,” he argued that many Democrats and anti-war activists “call it music, that crap they listen to, even though it's just noise.”

“Where did they put the remote control?” he asked of Congressional Democrats, whom he accused of “trying to put me in a goddamn home and have some fat colored nurse feed me applesauce all day long.”

Joseph Biden, a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy, took exception to the Secretary’s remarks. “No one is trying to put Don anywhere,” said Biden. He added, “We just think he might enjoy himself with more people . . . his own age. In a . . . community. Not a home.”

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said that such talk was “premature.” “The President has a lot of confidence in Don,” she said. “And on a personal note, as a trained classical pianist, I agree about the music.”

Reached for comment in his office, Mr. Rumsfeld defended his remarks. “I can still drive,” he said. “I’ve been driving since before you were born, you little shit. You’re not taking my keys. I can’t hear you. Turn down that racket in the background.”

Mere Regret

Life at War

The disasters numb within us
caught in the chest, rolling
in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough

weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart . . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though

its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
so I carry it about.’
The same war

continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it:

the knowledge that humankind,

delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,

whose music excels the music of birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifests designs
fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

still turns without surprise, with mere regret
to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines mercy,
lovingkindness; we have believed one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;

our nerve filaments twitch in its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

-Denise Levertov-

The Government Failed To Smash through Its Own Bureaucracy by Creating a New Bureaucracy, So Let's Create a New Bureaucracy to Smash through . . .

The Sept. 11 commission catalogued in detail how our intelligence establishment simply does not function. We made priority recommendations to rebuild the 15 bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies by creating a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, to tear down the walls preventing intelligence-sharing among agencies, and to rewrite personnel policy with the goal of bringing in new blood not just from the career bureaucracy but from the private sector as well. This approach was completely rejected by the Bush administration, which decided instead to leave this sprawling mess untouched and to create yet another bureaucracy of more than 1,000 people in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was the exact opposite of what we had recommended.

From "We're Not Winning This War" (Emphasis mine)

The above-excerpted article, by one John Lehman, who served on the 9/11 COmission, isn't very notable, except as an archetypal example of the new "thinking," in which our national failure to eradicate the sorta-kinda-civilizational danger of Islamohitlerism is chalked up to rhetorical error: that we have misidentified the problem as "terror" or "terrorism," which is an incombatable abstraction--"This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes." Were we to simply identify the concrete agent of our woes, our fuckin' problems would be over. The concrete enemy: Jihadism. Lehman admirably glosses this most abstract of concretes, this most concrete of abstractions:

We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith. This enemy is decentralized and geographically dispersed around the world. Its organizations range from a fully functioning state such as Iran to small groups of individuals in American cities.

Bref, we aren't at war with a lot of disconected, discontinuous, occasionally cooperative, often antagonistic groups of various sizes, organizational structures, impetuses, grievances, locations, tactics, and capabilities, who share only a variety of associations with the world's second-largest religion and a fury over American foreign policy, though not necessarily the same parts of that policy. Instread, we're at war with a lot of disconected, discontinuous, occasionally cooperative, often antagonistic groups of various sizes, organizational structures, impetuses, grievances, locations, tactics, and capabilities, who share only a variety of associations with the world's second-largest religion and a fury over American foreign policy, though not necessarily the same parts of that policy.

Not-so-bref. Perhaps a visual aid:

Since ideas don't occur in Governmentia so much as the infect, Lehman, like Posner and a bunch of other Official Kooks in the Court of the Dauphin, feels the proper remedy to our woes is a domestic spying agency without police powers. That such agency is forbidden by the Constitution is no impediment to these folks, for whom the Constitution is not only just the Constitution, but also just a piece of paper. The survival of some political entity called The United States of America, which is not, as we all surely know, in doubt, is of greater import than the survival of the political entitiy called The United States of America. Content is secondary to masthead.

The initial excerpt from the article follows the "James Bond, James Bond, my Kingdom for James Bond!" lines. Lehman's lament--that their mitigatory reforms to reduce the size of government agencies produced the opposite effect--are the tears of a man who, having served as Secretary of the Navy, a position dedicated only to the growth, never to the diminishment, of an institution, hasn't even a basic understanding of organizational behavior. When working on a contentious labor negotiation last summer, my colleagues worked mightily to trim the size of our bargaining agreement, to streamline relationships between management and labor, to simplify the chain of command, the make lines of authority and responsibility more transparent and more direct. We failed. The contract is longer than ever, the organizational chart more complicated. Late in the game, it was necessary to bring in a mediator, who met initially with both sides in private. When we explained these goals to him, he chuckled at us and said that never in his twenty-five years of mediation and arbitration had he seen such a thing accomplished "without tearing up the whole damn agreement and starting from scratch."

That, it goes without saying, is not the spirit possessing a man who wants a "strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, to tear down the walls preventing intelligence-sharing among agencies, and to rewrite personnel policy."

Lehman goes on to lament North Korean missile-rattling (do missiles rattle? if so, are they a threat?) and China's plans to build a 600-ship navy, all of which sounds like a plea to quit fucking around with all this forward thinking and rebuild a vast conventional military, to do something or other, whatever it is. Such competing imperatives play well in Freedonia, D.C. These are the same people, by and large, who constantly regret Americans' deep-held distrust of their own institutions. Well, of course they distrust their institutions! For more than half-a-century now, the policy of their government has been to pat them on their collective head with one hand and utter soothing noises out of one side of its mouth, while pushing the air-raid siren button and whistling warnings with the other. Concurrently, it has erected a vast structure of secrets, first in order to keep the nuclear cat in the bag, then, once it became clear that that wasn't going to work, simply for the sake of keeping secrets with the sort of self-dissimulating absurdity that makes the ever-present shades of Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault grin with posthumous vindication of their eternal rightness about just-about everything. Americans aren't a particularly bright or involved people. They don't distrust their rulers for complex reasons of sociology or ideology. They distrust their rulers because their rulers are untrustworthy.

I've drifted somewhat afield of the original argument, so I'll just tack on a conclusion and call it a post. It works at the WaPo, so it oughta work here. The only steps that we, as a nation, could take to significantly reduce the threat of terrorism, which is really relatively minor as threats go, involves taking actions abroad that I would characterize as sane and you, John Lehman, and all your sleepover buddies, would call "retreat."

Horse Feathers

There's a memorable line in the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers. Groucho, the president of a college, is informed that there is not enough money in the budget for the college and the football team.

"Tomorrow," he says, "We start tearing down the college."

Judge Richard “A Chicken in Every Pot, a Closed Circuit Camera in Every Home” Posner is a fan of the argument that The Constitution Is Not a Suicide Pact. Posner views the 18th-century document with the same amused disdain most of us reserve for leisure suits—antiquated, démodée, the product of a bygone, go-go era. (But wasn’t the very existence of the Constitution precipitated 13 years earlier by . . . a suicide pact? Lives, liberties, and sacred honor. All that jazz. John Hancock was willing to see his neck in a noose, in other words, that he might live a free man. The sucker.)

Glenn Greenwald hits most of the high points. I only wade in to point out, once again, that terrorism is not particularly terrifying. The interstate highway system is a greater threat to our national wellbeing than a bunch of monotheistic medievalists. Would Judge Posner advocate that the government ration all foodstuffs ingested by all Americans in order to prevent the statistically far graver threat to American health and welfare of Diabetes Mellitus? Does he advocate surveillance cameras in every home to prevent the epidemic danger of suicide?

Of course not. Any man who suggested such a thing would be laughed out of public life. Increasingly, the question to ask is not: Why are we ruled by these madmen?

It is: Why are we ruled by these cowards?

President Rabelais

Compare:

Gargantua, at the age of four hundred four score and forty- four years begat his son Pantagruel, from his wife, named Badebec, daughter of the King of the Amaurotes in Utopia, who died in child-birth: because he was marvelously huge and so heavy that he could not come to light without suffocating his mother.

And Contrast:

"There will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered," the president said. "Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses."

Responding to something else altogether, my buddy La Rana observes:

[Fred Kaplan] is flabbergasted, just flabbergasted, to learn that yes, the American people, god bless them, elected a goddamn child to lead them to their destiny.

When the looney-tunes figurehead President of Iran sounds saner than the looney-tunes figurehead President of the United States, then you have, as the saying goes, a problem.

I've spent as much time as the next pseudo-radical jawing about the American Empire this, the American Republic that. I certainly pay proper libertarian respects to the founding principles of these United States, even if such principles where honestly never much in force. But lately I've come to suspect that this whole "America" thing is not only a farce and a cosmic mistake, but a perverse conspiracy on the part of, ahem, Old Europe. Somewhere along the line, those bastards let slip boatloads of their nuttiest religionists, then filled in the swampland with a lot of pseudo-Anglican slavers and called it a day.

In Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, Family Guy paterfamilias Peter lands a gig as an Everyman commenter spouting nonsensical rants on the evening news (to replace their "Spotlight on the Middle East"). The spot is called "Grind My Gears." When eventually fired, he finishes his final segment thusly:

"And you know what else grinds my gears? You America! Fuck you!" [dragged off by security].

"Human Ingenuity's White Flag"

A lot of Democrats and self-described Liberals operate under the delusion that the euphemistic racism and misogyny (and mad-dog genocidalism! let's not forget . . .) of the Grand Old Party is a sophisticated program of obfuscatory language deployed to confuse the general electorate while signaling to their hardcore supporters that, yes, they will keep the negroes, wogs, and female-Americans in their proper, which is to say prone, place. Politics being the sphere of tenacious mediocrity, however, there's a simpler truth: Republicans use their euphemisms not because of sophistication, but because of crudity, hence their perennial popularity with the media and with The American People--also, truth be told, spheres (in the case of The American People, quite literally) of mediocrity. When you graduated from college and rented your first apartment on your own, perhaps your mother called you, worried that you were moving into a "bad neighborhood." It wasn't merely decorum preventing Mom from telling you to move somewhere with fewer black folk and less Section 8. The bad neighborhood was just a big, fat, unexamined premise in her brain. She didn't really mean that "Black people are dangerous criminals to a white faggot like you," even though that's precisely what she really meant. Paradox lies at the heart of such euphemism.

Here is Rich Lowry at The National Review writing about Hurricane Katria and its aftermath:

New Orleans, as it once existed--as a city of half-a-million people built below sea level in a flood-prone area in the path of hurricanes--was never a natural phenomenon. It was a triumph of human ingenuity, of the feats of engineering that gave it the levees and flood walls and pumps to keep it dry enough to support its charming, but politically, socially and economically dysfunctional, existence on the edge of the deluge.

Because Lowry writes for a magazine, there exists the temptation to presume a certain degree of rhetorical sophistication; therefore, there exists the temptation to presume that when he calls New Orleans "charming, but politically, socially and economically dysfunctional," he understands that what he's really saying is: "New Orleans is full of really neat musical niggers, but if they haven't got a trumpet in hand, they're probably just smoking the crack rock, murdering white people, and voting for Democrats, and that is why the levees failed."

Dear reader, resist the temptation! No man who leads off by noting that a city is not a natural phenomenon should benefit from presumptions of sophistication. (The under-sea-level stuff is doubly ridiculous as justification for this kind of Master-of-the-Obvious mooing; are we to presume that safely altitudinous Denver, say, exists sui generis--a gleaming high-plains miracle just waiting for inhabitants?) Lowry doesn't mean that "New Orleans is full of really neat musical niggers, but if they haven't got a trumpet in hand, they're probably just smoking the crack rock, murdering white people, and voting for Democrats, and that is why the levees failed," even though that's exactly what he means.

Lowry runs through the familiar litany: that after 9/11, George W. entered his "heroic phase," that Afghanistan proved how awesome America is, that firefighters and policemen are rad, and that Katrina "was ripping the political guts out of [the Bush] administration." Katrina, also, played out "against the backdrop of the Iraq war." Once again, it's tempting to believe that Lowry has constructed all this bromidic nonsense as part of a specific project to propagandize the just folks out in the heartland. Once again, it's wrong. His language lacks the subtle self-regard of the intentional euphemist. Like many regular reporters, as well as most partisan media figures, he really believes this crap is true, even though he leaves the specific meaning of any given phrase entirely unexamined. He really believes that Bush-with-Bullhorn was "heroic," for instance. He really thinks of the War in Iraq is some kind of "backdrop" against which other things "play out."

He quotes Emerson: "Events are in the saddle and ride mankind." He then observes:

Nothing is so damaging to a political leader. Bush’s presidency will remain diminished until he finds a way to vindicate human ingenuity’s power over events, and show that he again is in the saddle.

Is it possible to further misconstrue Emerson's little aphorism? It isn't a condition to be rectified. Surely there was dithering, incompetence, and dismal malfeasance following the destruction of New Orleans--and likewise over in Backgroundland. These, neither, are fixable. I doubt very much they can even be much ameliorated. The horse not only doesn't, but can't ride the rider.

Papieren.

Bitte.

I especially enjoy this bit:

In an era of chronic concern over terrorism and anxiety over immigration, the business of determining who is who [sic] has become increasingly urgent.

I try to stay out of the emmessemm-is-rotten game, if only because they furnish most of my punch lines, but the above sentence kills me. One of the few valuable things I learned writing academic papers on literary and cultural topics was to locate myself in the argument: to say, Hey! This isn't the disembodied voice of god. It's me. Here's a quick gloss of my position vis-à-vis the subject at hand. Here's a sentence noting my critical method. Shit like that. Here at Who is IOZ?, I usually get away calling myself an anarchofaggot, or what have you. (Not true! Comb the archives for hints about IOZ's socioeconomic status! His family life! His age! Wheeeee!)

So here's the WaPo, one of the two principle media interlocuters for the American government and economic establishment, nattering about "chronic concern over terrorism and axiety over immigration" without noting, even in passing, the role played by the media in fomenting such anxieties. And while I don't expect full-paragraph disclaimers on the complicity of tabloidized newsmedia in crafting a nation of corpulent pseudofascisti, I hardly think it too much to ask that the self-proclaimed neutral arbiters of our not-so-great national discourse at least give us some throwaway acknowledgement that what's bad for your feet is damn good for Dr. Scholl's.

The Fresh Prince of Sadr City

Hey guys! Better to be a nigger in Iraq than a nigger in East Philly!

Mamas, take note. If a couple of guys who are up to no good start making trouble in your neighborhood, it's no longer necessary to pack your baby off to his auntie and uncle in Bel Air.

Send him instead to his Uncle Sam. In Iraq. Where things, are just fucking peachy.