Saint Bush in the Executive Suh-weeeeet.

A leader’s first job is to project authority, and George Bush certainly does that. In a 90-minute interview with a few columnists in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Bush swallowed up the room, crouching forward to energetically make a point or spreading his arms wide to illustrate the scope of his ideas — always projecting confidence and intensity.

Spoken like a true columnist, for whom the world of working, let alone leading, remains charmingly distant, like manner life, feudalism, reality . . .

I grazed a hard copy of the Times at La Prima Espresso (quite possibly the finest espresso bar in the United States) this morning, and Tom Tomorrow was good enough to provide the really good parts for we non-Times-Select-selected consumers of the only thing still made in America: the news. Anyway.

"A leader's first job is to project authority." This from a man who's never worked a job, whose principle experience with business America is the self-infatuated rhetoric of post-actualized executive confabs in which figurehead CEOs mouth PR-drone-written speeches full of blowsy bits of managerial nonsense, from which Brooks, middlebrow America's very own PR manager, will extract geopolitical lessons with an alacrity second only to Tom Friedman, using these in turn to craft one more inverse-Positivist panegyric to things-as-they-are-and-shall-ever-be, Revolution in Permanence, Sharper Image, ad inf. Things do work differently in politics, I know, but out here in working America, a leader who takes as his main duty the projection of authority is a leader referred to almost universally as "that jackass," as in the following dialogic example:

WORKER 1:Hey, I heard you got called into [President/CEO McSuch-and-Such]'s office. How'd that go? (rolls eyes sarcastically)
WORKER 2: Oh yeah. That jackass spent like fifteen minutes telling me about his trip to fucking Sonoma, then took a call from his wife, and then that jackass made me go over these [reports/settlements/proposals/P&Ls] like four times, after which that jackass still didn't get it.
WORKER 1: God, that guy is such a jackass.
WORKER 2: I had to prep him for the last fucking board meeting, and even then, all that jackass could get up and say was some bullshit about "identifying new initiatives" and "redefining our core principles in order to manage transitions and identify new markets."
WORKER 1: Yeah. What a fucking jackass.
WORKER 2: Plus, whenever he talks, he gets into this crouch, like he's going to jump on you, and whenever he thinks he's talking about some big idea, he waves his arms around as if the idea is as big as his armspan.
WORKER 1: A jackass. World fucking class. I told you that when you came on here. Didn't I tell you?

Brooks goes on to observe that Bush "possesses an unusual concept of time." Unless Bush is an aborigine on a vision trip into the fucking Dream World, I don't want to hear that he has an unusual concept of time. Now, I criticize Americans for their shortsightedness and failure to think in the long term, but such a critique is predicated on the idea that it is the failure to think out the consequences of contemporary practices that consitutes a lack of vision. But people who claim to be lost in long-term, grand-sweep, broad-stroke, supra-historical thought are people who seek to conceal their extraordinary capacity for fucking everything up behind a wall of pseudo-prophetic bullshit, who wish for you to believe that today's failed negotiations, tomorrow's unsigned leases, next week's IRS lien--these things are all but petty obstacles to the crowning, if forever unfulfilled, glory of their strategc vision.

And lo:

“Ideological struggles take time,” he said, explaining the turmoil in Iraq and elsewhere. He said the events of weeks or months were just a nanosecond compared with the long course of this conflict. He was passionate on the need for patience and steadfastness. He talked about “inviolate” principles written upon his heart: “People want you to change. It’s tactics that shift, but the strategic vision has not, and will not, shift.”

He really is the CEO president, isn't he?

But let us return momentarily to an earlier paragraph:

“I got into politics initially because I wanted to help change a culture,” he says, referring to his campaign against the instant gratifications of the 1960’s counterculture. And he sees his efforts today as a series of long, gradual cultural transformations. Like many executives, he believes that the higher you go, the further into the future you should see[.]

It occurs to me that if his father had never been saddled with the lack of "that vision thing" . . . well, there it is. Here's the thing, though:

When George W. Bush got into politics, it was because even his family and friends, some of the richest, most powerful people in the world, could no longer continue to foot the bill for this boozy, possibly born-again screw-up without even the wits to get a good CFO who'd actually run shit for him. It was no longer in the folks' interest to keep a healthy, irrelevant sinecure open for the dumb son of this American dynasty, who believed, like David Brooks, that the job of a leader is to lead, and that one who leads is a leader, and other such tautological merde of the upper-management caste in this country. To speak as if Bush, the alcoholic, coke-addled, half-wit of his four-decade formative years entered politics, of all places, in order to "change the culture," a program that in Brooks' paraphrastic telling has an almost Lutherian reformative scope--"his campaign against the instant gratifications of the 1960’s counterculture"? fer re-al?--is to engage in the most preposterously transparent myth-building since . . . ever. He was the sixties counterculture, albeit without the balls to piss off Bar and Poppy by comingling with negroes or protesting the war in which he did not fight. The hard-partying man who came to god is a trope long past its sell-by date. It barely worked for fucking Augustine, and, though I'm sure Brooks would flatter and belabor that comparison, it sure has hell isn't going to work for George W. Bush.

BUSH: Well Stretch, my answer to that question is: Give me chastity and continence . . . e-heh-heh-heh . . . but not yet. Eh-heh-heh-heh.

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

If there is one black man in America who proves beyond all doubt the catastrophic moral and intellectual consequences of go-along, get-along incrementalism, it's Goddamn Colin Powell, who rose to prominence in the military and then politics by sucking so many of the hairy white assholes in our hairy white garrison-imperium that it's a wonder he can taste anything other than the nutty, bitter flavor of a post-mess-hall high colonic. Here is a man who made himself into an instrument of a post-Nixon Republican party that--let's be clear--hates itself some damn nigra but can no longer say so aloud, or at least not in such precise and accurate terms, not beause white, voting America necessarily feels any differently, but because white voting America, ever perplexed that black people can call each other nigger but whites are forbidden from doing the same, feel in their charming, middlebrow manner that propriety dictates race and racial animus simply not be spoken of at all. He allowed himself to become a prop for the collection of slack-jawed racist revanchists in ascendence in Washington in order to show white America that the question they could not ask about race had been answered. That, in and of itself, is poor form for a supposed moral paragon, even a moral paragon who got himself tits-deep in a little cover-up of a tiny ol' thing called the massacre of My Lai. To top it off, he lent his so-called credibility not only to any old collection of neotheoconservatarian reactionaries, but to the lyingest bunch who ever got the moron son of an American dynasty to give speeches to the stockholders and otherwise jerk off to internet porn in a nicely appointed, safely untrafficked corner office. He did so not only so that this collection of goons and millenarian spiritualists could achieve electoral victory by convincing "the middle," wherever that resides these days, that they too felt that black folk are just fine so long as they pass the paper-bag and white-person-accent tests, but also--and much worse--to cast a shadow of respectability over the monkeyed-up relay race to the war in Iraq, whose every bullshit premise he regurgitated with a calculated pose of independent analysis, convincing not a small number of people that the thickest crap he was laying on was the cream cheese on the bagel. He did so in no small part by playing to the basic racial prejudices of the American people, among which is the commonly held conception that if a black man rises rather than falling into jail, he must be a real smart motherfucker, ergo moral besides, since the only black figure most Americans know anything about, excluding rappers, murderers, and the Venn diagram intersection of those two sets, is Dr. King, a man denuded of all moral complexity on his elevation to Mosaic folk-herodom.

Powell, the man who brought you the war, now brings you this startling revelation, a day late and a dollar short:

The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.

To which there's only one reply: you've got to be fucking shitting me. The world is beginning to doubt? The world is done doubting. The world done decided. We all know that Americans aren't a terribly introspective bunch. Every atrocity in our history, from all the dead Indians to the 3/5 Clause to the Vietnam War finds itself in a file marked "Good Intentions . . . Gone Awry," with a cute doodle of a fat guy in a polo shirt shrugging his innocent shoulders and a text bubble: "Aw, shucks. I didn't mean it." What the rest of the world sees, meanwhile, is a vast, rapacious empire of bovine mediocrities, sustained only by the delusional capacity of a fat, broke-ass population to keep spending money it doesn't have on shit it doesn't make. We're huge. Our asses are huge. Our houses are huge. Our cars are huge. Hugeness is the principle adjectival value assigned to "the non-negotiable American Way of Life." To power our hugeness, we suck up a quarter of the world's energy resources, which still aren't enough to air-condition LA through a hot summer. In order to sustain our civilizational fat-ass-itude, we keep stomping around the Middle East, believing that if only we could find some leaders capable of convincing their people that millennia-old tribal, ethnic, and religious attachments are but the ugly caterpillar from which the beautiful butterfly of a double-mortgaged, interest-only, credit-and-debt economy might spring, then by god, we'd all have oil and money forever and ever amen. But because no such leaders exist, and because so many Hadjis would rather be clansmen in a village than miserable, debt-ridden, suburbanites with fat, asthmatic, diabetic children, we choose to invade their countries, depose their leaders, arrest and torture their menfolk, then muse to ourselves about "cultural differences" preventing democracy from taking root. In other words, the world sees us for what we are: the Flounder of the world, but with guns.

What I mean to say is that the world hasn't begun to doubt the moral grounding of our fight against terror; they think we're too fat, stupid, violent, and self-possessed to even comprehend the moral issues at stake. This is why, when you speak to educated foreigners, they speak of the United States less with anger than with sad resignation. Our national tantrums aren't the result of malevolence, but of stupidity, of a childlike mentality that is circumsribed by the immediate circumstances of its existence, that conceives of no impediments to the fulfillment of its desires and the catering to its whims because it can't truly conceive of any agency exterior to its own. They don't believe us to be immoral so much as entirely amoral: devoid of the basic empathic capacity necessary to civilized conduct in a complicated world. Our war against terror is hysteria. It's psychotic. It takes a singular act of political violence and imagines that from such seed has grown an entire forest that must be razed to the ground and burnt. We won't use tools to do it. We'll do it with will and resolve. Will and resolve are fantastic, because you don't have to lift one porky finger or move one bed-sore-ridden ass cheek to believe that you've resolved to believe that you've resolved to believe . . .

Iran and Goal

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.

~Frank Zappa, 1977~

Today's papers report unsurprisingly that all the same old bullshit about Iran is all the same old bullshit about Iran. Well, who are you gonna believe, some uppity wog with a fancy prize from a bunch of Svenskish commies, or "[t]he report's author, Fredrick Fleitz, is a onetime CIA officer and special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration's former point man on Iran at the State Department"?

A lot of people speculate, and I'm guilty of it myself as much as anyone else, that after waking to the realization that the Iraq war is a collossal lie, debacle, and misadventure, the great dull mass of people populating the desert of the American Intellect, which is pretty much all of America from the Ohio Valley to the Sierra Madre and everything south of the Mason-Dixon line, most especially that drained swamp cum cemetery that we have the temerity to call a capital, will wake slowly the the snake-oil sale past perpetrated and rebuff the not-so-slick talkers of the administration when they come knocking with a shiny new war. This seems to me to rest on an awfully shaky assumption, probably a fallacious one: that antiwar sentiment, such as it exists in America today, has as much to do with the phoney pretexts for commencing and continuing this conflict as it does with "the steady drip of casualties" or "Iraq's inchoate civil war" or whatever other stock wire-service phrase you feel fits best.

But if half the nation still believes that Saddam had so-called weapons of mass destruction and personally authorized Mohammed Atta to fly the lead plane on 9/11, then it seems an awful stretch to conclude that Americans are turning against the war because it was and is a lie. They're turning against it, rather, because it is a failure. As much as the dauphin and his aides mouth words like victory, the stench of losing hangs heavy over the Iraq project, and that's not something easily effaced, no matter how many times the ranch-hand-in-chief goes on the teevee to tell us "we can be confident in victory because of the skill and resolve of America's Armed Forces" before segueing into some vaguely Biblical gibberish that is to the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr. what To The Extreme was to Straight Outta Compton.

It's an error, though, to conclude that this renders future aggressions unpalatable to the people. The only impediment is their association of war in general with war in Iraq in particular. That's a regular army corps of engineers levee bracing for a hurricane of Iranian hobgoblinization. Democrats will probably never get it into their heads that Americans don't give a good goddamn about this or that report, about the accuracy of such and such a claim, or even about the much-lamented overstretched military. They care about kicking ass. I suspect it won't be hard to sell them on some abstruse conception of the Iraqi insurgency as cheating . . . victory via a bad call. That sort of thing. Iran is just another Sunday. Let's see what the boys can do.

All The Wrong Lessons Right, All the Right Lessons Wrong

[Marc] Sageman argues in his book, "Understanding Terror Networks," that we are facing something closer to a cult network than an organized global adversary. Like many cults through history, the Muslim terrorists thrive by channeling and perverting the idealism of young people. As a forensic psychiatrist, he analyzed data on about 400 jihadists. He found that they weren't poor, desperate sociopaths but restless young men who found identity by joining the terrorist underground. Ninety percent came from intact families; 63 percent had gone to college; 75 percent were professionals or semi-professionals; 73 percent were married.

This is David Ignatius, a man who, having read one thousand too many Tom Friedman columns, recently reduced the entire America-made Amero-Iranian imbroglio to a batty metaphor about Tehran's civilian driving population, who, like every good Pittsburgher, stomp on the gas to make a left-hand turn out of an intersection at a light change. From this, he extrapolates a game of civilizational chicken. From such evidence, we might also conclude ourselves to be locked in a death struggle with the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Moroccans, the Vietnamese, except that we are not, ergo . . . What? It is impossible for a rational human being to know what occupies the mind of a columnist, and thus are we reduced to the more quotidian, albeit more painful, task of reading their tortured sentences.

I haven't read the propitiously named Sageman's work. I have only Ignatius' reporting of it. But if it's true that most terrorists [(sic)?] are raised in intact families, acquire higher education, engage in successful professional lives, marry, and by extension found families of their own, then isn't the most logical conclusion that terrorists are not driven by "young anger," as the article's headline puts it, but by specific social, political, moral, and economic grievances? Isn't the most logical conclusion that such men are rational actors making informed decisions to participate in acts of political violence with mortal consequences not only for their enemies, but also for themselves? Isn't the most logical conclusion that educated, affluent (relatively, perhaps, but nonetheless) men with stable social and kinship networks feel so aggrieved by particular choices made by their governments and ours, and that they find themselves so impotent to resist these choices or to alter the attendant policies through any standard political or nonviolent means that they choose--calmly, rationally, informedly--to participate in warfare against those governments whose oppression they feel most acutely? Don't these conclusions suggest that the surest path to ameliorating the preponderance of terrorism in this world is through the deliberate reevaluation of those policies that create grievance among such young, educated, politically informed men in the first place?

Why, no! Because they are in a cult. Unlike every other cult in the world, it prays not on the weakest and most vulnerable members of a society, but on its most able, its most economically mobile, its most educated, its most affluent.

To be fair, Ignatius heads in the direction of acknowledging the rational bases of terroristic acts:

Unless new grievances spawn new recruits, it will gradually ebb over time.

And:

The only sure way to ignite revolutionary zealotry in the younger generation [of Iranians] would be for America to go to war with Iran -- something I dearly hope we can avoid.

Then he veers back into another traffic metaphor, this time about a nation of seat-belt-wearers as a nation unlikely to be a mortal enemy of the United States. Unlike such non-seat-belting mortal enemies as France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Vietnam . . .

Ignatius concludes hopefully:

This is a week when we remember, with horror, that there are dangerous killers in the Muslim world. But unless we make big mistakes, we should not find ourselves condemned to a permanent war, much less a clash of civilizations.

It is as if the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan never happened. As if Israel never bombed Lebanon. As if the West Bank and Gaza did not exist. As if the military junta in Pakistan were not operating with a free pass from the United States. As if the apostate House of Saud didn't rule the Arabian peninsula. As if. As if. As if.

If you can't even name the mistakes in your past, how the hell are you supposed to avoid them in your present and future?

America as the Eastern Bloc

Gary Boettcher, a pilot and president of the Coalition for Airline Pilots Association, a trade group that closely tracks security issues, said he constantly sees people drinking from illicit bottles of water or putting on lip gloss when he walks through the passenger cabin. Most of the time, he said, it doesn't bother him.

"They are just doing their routines like they always did," Boettcher said. "An old woman drinking a bottle of water doesn't concern me. . . . The whole screening process is a facade to make the public feel safe, to show that the government is doing something."

I find this story both heartening and terribly depressing. I find it heartening because I think that such acts of petty defiance indicate a small, if growing awareness of a government-perpetrated scam. I find it depressing because it's mostly in grim, repressive regimes that such acts of petty defiance can seem heartening.

Anyway, here is another picture of an open trash can in the middle of an open airline terminal full of indiscriminately-deposited terroristic-type water bottles and lip glosses:

Annals of 9/11 Conversations.

"So, I guess you're not supposed to say 'Happy 9/11'."
"No."
"Well, how do Jews do it on all those sad holidays."
"We don't have sad holidays. We have somber holidays."
"Well, how do you do it on those?"
"I need another beer."
"Me too. But seriously. Like, what do you say on Yom Kippur?"
"In Hebrew you say G'mar HaTimah ToVah, which has something to do with the whole name in the Book of Life thing. But in America you mostly just say 'Good yontif.'"
"What's a yontif."
"I think it's a contraction of Yom Tov. Good day."
"So you're really saying good good day."
"Yeah. It sort of gets on my nerves. Like people who say ATM machine."
"I hate that too. I want to try that IPA."
"Yeah, it's good. Anyway, I don't think you can say 'Good 9/11' either."
"Haha. No. Probably not."
"But you can't argue that it's more or less a holiday."
"Sure I can. It's not a holiday if they deliver the mail."
"You're consigning whole religions to holiday irrelevance."
"Secularism is grand."
"It totally is a holiday, though. Patriot Day. They passed a law."
"They should have called it Everything Changed on 9/11 Day."
"You don't think that's a little unweildy."
"Remembering Those Who Died at the Pentagon, in the Twin Towers, and on Flight 93 Day."
"GWOT Day."
"No. I think Patriot Day works. It's got late-Soviet chic."
"There's a late-Soviet chic?"
"Soviet is totally chic right now. Eastern bloc. Since we're the new Soviets and all."
"We are?"
"You don't think."
"Well, I guess having a Patriot Day is a step in that direction."
"And surveillance. Don't forget the domestic surveillance."
"Poorly produced propaganda."
"An alkie Supreme Leader."
"People's Deputies."
"Haha. Really, really shitty domestic auto makers."
"Ooo. That's good. How about: the popularity of vodka."
"Yeah, that's good too."
"So. Yeah. Happy 9/11."
"Happy 9/11 man. You want to get stoned after this?"
"Probably. In honor of the fallen heroes."
"Which ones."
"I don't know, man. Whichever."