D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

First a caveat: I've mocked the Donkey for his so-called strategy of running against our agèd SecDef on the grounds that every disaster of American foreign policy for the last six years blew from his senescent brain like fluff from an autumnal dandelion.

That said, someone needs to take away grandpa's car keys. He can't focus. His memory flees. The young in one another arms. The salmon-spreaded falls. The early-bird fish filet-crowded seas. The lords and ladies of Byzantium are chatting about their new sets of All-Clad or something, and in comes Pap Rummy, stinking of cheap gin, linseed oil, and damp wool, waving around his finally-published letter to the editor. "Afghanistan! Opium! Infrastructure!" The grown children murmur among themselves--he's really lost it this time. This time, the home, and no arguing this time, Missy, unless you're volunteering to clean the bedpan yourself.

The Secretary avers:

Building a new nation is never a straight, steady climb upward. Today can sometimes look worse than yesterday -- or even two months ago. What matters is the overall trajectory: Where do things stand today when compared to what they were five years ago?

Which is awfully fucking poetic. (Admittedly, I always expect Rumsfeld to end a speech by placing both hands on his heart and doing a sort of art-leider tenor: Du mußt dein Leben ändern.) For most of Afghanistan, it seems, where "it" stands is more or less where it stood not five but ten years ago: a fractious, factional country split between tribal warlords and an expanding Taliban influence with a municipal central government struggling, and failing, to assert itself anywhere at all.

To Donald Rumsfeld, en tout cas, who tells us that one more cruel government has been swept up and deposited in "the dustbin of history," I offer this wisdom, courtesy of Bill F.:

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past.

I Hate This Fucking Country

[CHRIS] MATTHEWS: So you believe a gay member of Congress can serve with the same kind of sexual restraint expected of a heterosexual member?

Don Sherwood. Henry Hyde. Ted Kennedy. Newt Gingrich. Bob Woodward. Bob Dole. And that's just in the last 10 years.

I've stipulated before and will again that I am basically opposed to gay marriage, that I have my doubts about lifelong monogamy, and that I consider it naive in the extreme to posit male homosexuality as heterosexuality-but-with-men. Same-sex sexuality is different. It's a foolish sort of moralism--unintentional, but moralism nonetheless--to suppose otherwise. I've stipulated before and will again that I daily question the impulse to turn sexual predilection into characterological essential. I caper on about my faggotry, and surely my sensibilities, aesthetic and otherwise, have the gay in them, but I consider myself many ways otherwise before I consider myself a gay man.

But what a drag it is, day in and out, to find the identification about which you yourself are conflicted dragged out to set the curve on the primitive moral rubric of American public discourse, to find once again, years after you thought the issue had been put to be, the same unlearned public babblers questing after the fine sexual distinctions which do or do not permit a person to serve reasonably on the school board, in the Congress, as a gas station attendant. Thank god Mark Foley didn't infect some kid with HIV; we'd be in camps by now.

I want to say that I don't mean this as alarmism. If I end up behind barbed wire, it's far more likely to be for what I write here than for what I do with my cock. But there's a weariness that comes in making the same arguments again and again, responding to the same tired lines about the same projected moral decline. It's tiring. It's childish. That we live with a legislature full of men who condone the torture of innocent human beings and their secret, inexorable, unappealable imprisonment and must suffer through hearing the question asked: Can fags serve properly . . . that, I fear, is a bridge too far, or a chasm too deep, however you want to look at it.

A Fair Point to Make

Some commenters (okay, one commenter, but one of my favs) have suggested that I've gotten a bit unhinged, which is, like, totally true, but such is the current state of America. Still, I feel I should mollify everyone by reeling back on the doomsaying ever-so-slightly, with the observation that although the United States is a vast continental power bent on world conquest of one sort or other, we are also, perhaps fortunately, totally fucking broke. Not broke in the post-Versailles super-inflation sense, but broke in the other-people-holding-our-banknotes-sense. And I think it is fair to say that the Mandarins, the real Mandarins in this case, are chuckling to themselves as we take their credit and screw ourselves out of a reputation and a position of global dominance. I don't for a moment think that our bankrollers will allow us to launch a nuclear war, though.

That may not be sunshine, giggles, and a basket of kittens, but hey, you asked. I answered.

Reichsmordwoche

Apparently a list of gay congression staffers is now circulating. By whom? From where? I wonder, is it possible that we are not observing a scandal, but a purge?

Godwin's Law: Overruled!

Arthur S. is all like, "Is there anything in the world I or anyone else could write that would cause the vaunted "progressive netroots" to undertake one of their email-telephone campaigns about the coming attack on Iran? Anything at all?" (He knows the answer: "It would appear not.")

This is all in the context of the rather unsurprising story that ephebophiles stalk the halls and foyers of power like a new Sparta, minus, of course, the martial discipline. I've not seen such a density of play-acted shock since Claude Rains walked in on Bill and Monica, and I find it all the more depressing when I consider that it's entirely possible these episodes may catapult (or, let's be fair with our metaphors, drag) the Democrats back into power, whenceforth they shall do . . . what, precisely? Prediction makes asses of all, but I'd bet the bank that when the future's croupier upturns his cards, neither "schedule immediate floor vote to repeal detainee act" nor "pass sense of Senate in opposition to aggressive war against Iran" will appear.

Arthur says:

[By attacking Iran] the United States would forever brand itself as one of most destructive, contemptible, damnable nations in history, engaging in murderous, aggressive war whenever the whim strikes it.

And that is the essential datum that liberals and Democrats simply will not face: that to invade Iran would be to engage in an international crime of an order that the world last saw in 1939. Fuck you, Godwin. The Congrefs of the United States of America, the Greatest Nation in the Country, pace Agnew, has empowered its apashiac child-emperor to wage unilateral war, has stamped its imprimateur on vicious acts of torture, has eliminated the right to contest charges and imprisonment not only for foreigners but for its own citizens, and now proposes to wage not a first, not a second, but a third aggressive war in a span of five years.

No matter how many smiley faces you doodle in the margins, the spider in the center of the flag is still a Swastika.

Shooting Gallery

Although not a sportsman, killer, or paranoid myself (well, perhaps . . .), I consider myself a second amendment man. At least so long as we live in this tyrannous, kleptomaniacal, natty oligarchy of ours, I find it awfully hard to sympathize with the crowd that thinks the government, of all entitites, ought to control my access to mah nine. Fainter hearts might, and the uniform fetishizers of left and right surely will, quail at this impolitic thought: when Joe O'SWAT-Team comes not-a-knockin', claiming my flush toilet or off-kilter screen door or purchase of cold medicine as evidence and probable cause of my Noriegatude, I feel that as an American citizen as much as any vice president I have an inalienable right to shoot the motherfucker in his face.

The broader gun-rights claim, for which I've always had sympathy, is that only an armed people can resist tyranny when it truly arrives. It used to be that my more liberal friends would sigh when I said this and give me a familiar song and dance: "Do you really believe that a bunch of guys with guns and grenades can resist the military of the United States?" Thanks to Iraq (and who ever thought I'd write such a phrase), I wouldn't hesitate to answer without pause if asked again: "Yes, I buh-leeve!" Of course, your average American, denuded of any identity worth defending other than that of a passive consumer, a person whose only contributive economic activity is the opposite of production, will take just about anything so long as they don't cut off his cable. But a man can dream . . .

All that aside, however, this has got to be some of the craziest bullshit I've ever read, and I do include everything else that Eugene Volokh has ever written in that estimation just to show how serious I am. Is this really the sort of public policy for which Volokh is going to advocate: allowing our nation's educators to go out in a blaze of glory on those off-chancey days when a well-armed lunatic strides through the schoolhouse doors? Why not simply fill the halls with trip-wired plastique and instruct the children to watch their step? In my own high school days, I had plenty of teachers about one multiple-choice failure away from going full-on Rambo themselves, so let's not kid ourselves that conceal-and-carry is the way to go with the put-upon crowd of educators in our post-educated times. I suppose Volokh would say that he's not arguing that we explicitly arm teachers as a matter of policy, but rather that we let them choose to bring a sidearm to school, though I wonder what then would be his excuse for denying the same right to a trained-and-licensed sixteen-year-old. I have no other point here, except to ask that the universe save us from the dim and well-intentioned.

The Plot against America

I don't have to tell younz that I rarely read the likes of Hugh Hewitt, much as I enjoy speaking aloud his Seussically prosodic name, but I popped past today following another link to another post of his and found this uproar by Dean Barnett over Democrats using this Foley business to uniformly tar Republicans, particulary the use of this tactic by some Minnesota office-seeker named Patty Wetterling, of whom I admit I've never heard. Anyhoo, the first comment is one of my new favorites:

She obviously knows better
The only reason that Wetterling has any name-recognition in Minnesota, is that her child (a son) was kidnapped several years ago and never found. Since then, she's headed national organizations for missing and exploited children. IT'S ALL SHE KNOWS, and she can't even get THAT right. She knows absolutely nothing about foreign affairs, and proves it everyday. But, the one thing that she purports to be an expert on, she can't get right either. I don't think I've ever seen a more clueless and pathetic candidate in my life. In her defense, I don't think this ad was her idea. Nothing else in her campaign is her idea, because she doesn't have any.

Hey, it worked for Lindbergh!

Slaughterhouse Five

By contrast, it's not unusual in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe, to hear that the war on terrorism is phony, a jumped-up invention of the Bush administration and the U.S. press, a pretend reason for the invasion of Iraq, a laughably stupid way of conning voters—and a pathetic excuse for limiting artistic freedom. One 2004 poll found that more than half of the French, nearly half of the Germans, and a third of the British think the United States has overreacted to the terrorist threat.

Or, to put it differently: Neither the events of Sept. 11 nor any of the bombings that followed seem to have convinced Europeans that anything important has changed in the world. I only wish they were right.

That's Anne Applebaum, arguing in Slate . . . well, it all has to do with Idomeneo, a weak Mozart opera that got cancelled but shouldn't have got cancelled, and with the Pope, the head of a nominally sovereign state, who we're told was once German (the whole Hitler youth thing, that is), and who recently interrupted a speech on why secularism is inimical to reason, unlike a church of idol-worshippers which believes in the transubstantiation of matter, virgin births, ressurection, and the bodily assumption of living beings into some kind of extradimensional heaven, with a sort of "And oh by the way, fuck you, Muslims! Fuck the lot of ya!" for the scows in the nosebleed section. Just to keep things interesting. Anyway, Anne feels that all this somehow indicates that Europeans feel nothing has changed in the world, though they do seem to believe that Americans have transformed themselves into bogeyman-pursuing pants-wetters who'd kill tens of thousands of unrelated Iraqis in an unprovoked invasion in order to assuage some amorphous, ethereal anxiety about Saudis destroying American skyscrapers via the opium fields of Afghanistan. Like Catholicism, the War on Terror is revealed in its magesterial, Ionescan absurdity only when you say as literally as possible what precisely it is.

Others have pointed out that Europeans have experienced terorrism, domestic and foreign, for many decades, if not centuries, and they have already had their debates about the proper response to it, and that having settled the debate and accepted certain risks and established certain principles of prevention and response, they quite straightforwardly don't see why an attack on America, while tragic, should fundamentally alter not only their external policies vis-à-vis the rest of the world, but also the makeup and collective psychology of their own state. Why, in other words, should they go the American path of employing the fattest, dim-wittedest among them as operators of metal detectors and key buckets at every public venue from museum to shopping mall?

Others have pointed it out, so I won't elaborate more on that point.

Instead, draw your eyes up-article, where Applebaum, a woman who must have once in her girlhood run into the phrase "surely she can't be that stupid" and taken to challenging it as Rosa Parks once challenged "get up," writes:

In truth, the fact that Germany still hasn't experienced a Madrid- or London-style bombing is thanks to good luck, not good planning: As recently as last July, German police discovered two unexploded—because they were badly designed—suitcase bombs on a train. That Germany contains the kinds of radicals who could and would carry out such a threat is beyond doubt: Mohamed Atta, leader of the Sept. 11 bombers, studied in Hamburg. That Germans don't want to think about this is beyond dispute, too: More than 80 percent told pollsters that they don't feel personally threatened by terrorism at all.

Germany has never what? Germany descended as perhaps no other nation has ever descended into collective madness. Germany turned itself into a war machine that conquered all of Europe, that killed twenty million Russians, that nearly eradicated European Jewry. For those errors, those crimes, Germany was destroyed. For those crimes, Germany was bombed to dust. Its cities and factories were razed by arial bombardment. Good god, Applebaum: Dresden! Dresden!

Now I realize that in these United States, anything older than five seconds has already passed forever out of living memory and into the darklands and dreamscapes of forgetting, but in places we call "other countries" people remember history, and the Germans, perhaps, if only perhaps, recall that they once made a terrible war and paid terribly for it. They aren't a people without flaw, and their repentence may not yet be completed, but to accuse them of being ignorant of bombs is like telling the Japanese that they just don't get it when it comes to the dangers of nuclear weapons. It is preposterous. It is absurd.

Terrorism is the shoals on which too many American intellects lie now as wrecks. I object to my nation being afraid and craven. I object to it being vindictive and immature. I object to it being violent and precipitous. But each and all of these I can live with. I don't know if I can take the stupid much longer though. It creeps and crawls. You can practically smell it. You can taste it like a whiff of diesel in the air.

Blogroll

Both By Neddie Jingo! and Black Sky Theory have very generously linked to my writing here, and I'll try to return the favor in the blogroll, swelling their respective ranks of readers by a good half-dozen or so. I've been reading the former for quite some time and should've linked long ago. The latter I've just discovered, and I'm delighted because this "Black Sky Theory" business (see the author's bio) comports well with my personal sense of The Order of Things.

I've sadly deleted Fafblog, which seems to have gone fallow, and I've updated Rigorous Intuition, your one-stop shop for all items conspiratorial.

Cheers.

Tales for the Back Nine

Via Jim Henley and the always indispensible Anti-War, which I read but shamefully neglect to link, this from Cato:

Today’s Washington Post suggests that the reaction of some “antiwar liberals” to a recent leak from the National Intelligence Estimate may have been unjustified.

[...]

The U.S. was not safer in 1942–1945 than it had been in early 1941. We entered World War II because winning it would make America safer. In trying to win it, we suffered over a million casualties.

Part of the argument for toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime was that a beachhead for freedom and democracy in a Muslim Middle Eastern nation would, in the long term, weaken militant Islamism and promote peace. It was never suggested that the process of trying to create that beachhead would itself make anyone safer--no more than it was suggested that Americans would be safer during our participation in WW II.

Hence, it is fatuous to argue that a current rise in terrorist recruitment proves that toppling Saddam was a bad idea. Efforts to create a free and democratic Iraq are ongoing--the war is still in progress.

In the Second World War, when someone talked about establishing a beachhead he meant, you know, establishing a beachhead. The soldiers at Omaha Beach weren't actually involved in a vast, ongoing metaphor, Steven Spielberg's best efforst aside. All the Anrew J. Coulsons of the world, who treat warfare as a branch of philately, something to be harumphed over in well-appointed studies in the dusty lambent light of yon Venetian-blinded windows, simply cannot conceive that whether "War on Terror" or "beachhead for freedom and democracy," you will never triumph in combat by establishing an enduring figure of speech. So put down the port and cigars, ye men of empire, defenders of the faith, and gather round, for IOZ shall tell a tale.

Whatever gobble and yabber you have heard from Colonel Fairway Wood in the locker room at the country club, it's a frightfully contemporary (by which we mean, of course, grotesquely stupid) idea that the societal impetus to war is to establish a future state of safety. Allies, I give you the Treaty of Versailles. America, I give you Uncle Joe Stalin, nuclear annihilation, Korea, Vietnam, Poppy Bush, Gulf War One. Wars fought to establish "safety" begin as "breathing room," peak at Lebensraum, and end in a bunker with cyanide pills to the dog and a bullet to the brain. Recall that the First World War was proposed, at one point, as the war to end all wars, and that, laddies, has become what you'd call a cruel and bloody joke. Victory over this or that proximate enemy begets some new enemy some day nigh.

You vicious jokers, you bloodthirsty cowards, you excusers of torture, you degraded mo'fuckin' bitches, you keep burning shit down and expecting peace to spring like a flower from the still-cooling slope of a volcano. To you I commend a line of Greene:

Her name was Phuong, which means "Phoenix." But nothing is fabulous anymore, and nothing rises from the ashes.

Peace.

Just a link.

While I work on other things, this is the funniest post ever.

I once engaged in a similar prank, and with the very same hoity-toity rag d'intellos! The following classified ad has been running for at least the last three years:

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE/PERSONAL ASSISTANT—Highly intelligent, resourceful individuals with exceptional communication skills sought to undertake research projects and administrative tasks for one of Wall Street’s most successful entrepreneurs. We welcome applications from writers, musicians, artists, or others who may be pursuing other professional goals in the balance of their time. $90K–$110K to start (depending on qualifications).

So I was bored one day and dashed off a quick response:

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing in regard to the position of Research Assistant/Personal Assistant as listed in the classifieds section of The New York Review of Books. I would tell you that I am highly intelligent, resourceful, and an excellent communicator, but I suspect you already know the regard in which I hold myself, since I am, after all, responding to an ad in The New York Review of Books.

You say that artists, writers, and musicians are encouraged to apply, and I suppose I could tell you that I'm dabbling at writing a novel like every other person who reads that crappy rag. I just don't see how any of that is relevant. I should just be straight with you, so to speak: I am a young homo and I figure I can toss off (so to speak) whatever bullshit "research" you've got for me in the first hour or two of the morning and spend "the balance of [my time]" looking for Latin tops on craigslist. If I was too busy for all that, I figure that at 110 grand a year, I'd have plenty of pocket cash for some outcall massage. Also from craigslist.

Sincerely
-----

Never heard back. Huh.

Buddies Helpin' Each Other Out

I know that it's as American as applie pie and racism to deny sexual agency to anyone under the age of eighteen, to engage in the persistent fantasy that although physiological maturity come several years earlier, there is a necessary . . . refraction period between the first adult erection and the first permissable sexual act. That said, let me say that with the caveats about hypocrisy, power, and coverups all firmly in place, it is absolutely preposterous to pretend that the content of this IM conversation represents anything other than precisely the mutual efforts at hookin' up for a little "mutual JO, maybe oral with the right guy" that IOZ, M. le Congressional Page, Mark Foley, and every other gay man with a yellow running-man icon on his desktop has engaged in at some point or other from the moment the first effective ejaculation was coaxed by his own hand from his very own newly matured seminal vescicles to the present goddamn day. By which I am saying that we may criticize this Congressman Foley for acting in his life as a preening moralist intent on using the deep American pedophile-neurosis as a justification for expanding the power of the government to investigate private correspondence and conversation, but let's not call the guy a pedophile. Allowing that the seven-and-a-half inches alluded to in the linked IM chat reeks somewhat of the internet's curious addition of an inch to every penis (and curious subtraction of ten pounds from every waistline), it hardly construes the anonymous young page as a Humbert-imaged temptress to point out that he, clearly, is involved in that conversation too, and that it isn't the awkward suggestiveness of an adult and the embarrassed inability of a youngster to extricate himself. Alt-tabbing away the IM window when Mom comes into the room is certainly a tactic that I recall from the good-bad old days.

I do not, for the record, think it a good idea for Congressman to screw adolescent pages, nor, needless to say, do I think it a good idea for our modern moral crusaders to arrive in Jerusalem only to take up the hashish and comport themselves as Saracens, but I think we should be clear that Mark Foley was, in this most-published incident anyway, less a predator than a sad closet case desperately seeking a nice big one.

Unsolicited Advice for Marty Peretz

Noted Arab-hater Martin Peretz, who, if America is the cops of the world and the Arabs the niggers, aspires to be our civilizational Bull Connor, laments (by which I mean, barely suppresses his ejaculatory glee at) the, I swear to you, dear readers, I am not making this up "deep and bloody cleft in Islam." Needless to say, it's really about the Jews, with some mockery of the pre-sundown dietary and sexual proscriptions of Islam thrown in for good measure, as if Judaism hasn't got it's own totally looney dietary and sexual proscriptions. Anyway . . .

Dear Martin Peretz,

The last time it was acceptable to use the phrase "deep and bloody cleft," you could still get fisted by a total stranger at a bathhouse in the Castro and be back to the office before the end of your lunch break. Seriously, dude, sick.

Sincerely,
IOZ

America, America, You Bastard, I'm Through

As a policy matter, [Bob Woodward's new] book undermines Bush's attempts to strengthen the national will for the long and drawn-out fight ahead.

Had Neitschze known what ludicrous nonsense would be made of his well-worn "will," I suspect that Zarathustra would never have spake, saving John Dickerson, the author of the above-quoted pan-American übermenschian jibber-jabber, the embarrassment of identifying the metaphorical strengthening of a non-existent category of abstract collective sentiment as a matter of political policy. Nations don't have wills, and if you're going to suppose that they do, you might at least dress them up in bowlderized Parsifalian blood-race mythologizing, rather than the again-bowlderized version of that, the American version in other words, in which national will is really just the willingness of a large enough swath of the population to keep buying Chinese goods on credit so that our East-Asian bankrollers don't yank their subsidization of our economy and our trillion-dollar war machine. I'm certainly not the first to point out that when America was attacked, the first impulse of our political class was to tell us that we'd done nothing wrong (never, ever) and that we ought to all go shopping, the only collective activity left to a society that's rejected every other vestige of the ballyhooed Western civilization and culture for which it proposes itself the savior. I'm a libertarian by inclination and hardly inimical to the continuance of commercial enterprise as integral to the continuance of civic life, but let's not pretend that we're all a bunch of Iraqi women braving death in the marketplace simply because it must be done. Expending thirty dollars worth of gas to and from the exurban outlet mall is many things, but civic duty it is not.

In any case, if you want serious discussion of the shabby Sovietism under which we live, Arthur, as usual, is better than the rest of us combined. (He has also very kindly linked to Who Is IOZ?, and not for the first time.) Here, because it is Sunday and a beautiful day, and because the spirit endures, and because there's no remedy for death or doom but laughter, which is at least a palliative, I prefer to say this: This is the lousiest goddamn dictatorship in the whole lousy history of dictatorships. We find that every institution of our government has laid down before the not-threatening figure of a self-invented yokel, who expended more energy reinventing himself downward from the extraordinarily serendipitous circumstances of his birth than the strivingest among us spends pulling himself upward by the bootstraps. In pursuit of a non-war against a non-entity, the supposedly elected governors of our society acquiesced to the demands of this truckload of pseudo-Straussian lunatics with Colonel Cattle-Rancher riding shotgun, threw up their hands, laid down their tools of legislation and judgement, and said, "Eh, fuck it. The world's so dangerous and complicated. We're done. You have a go."

Now here we are with a supreme leader who's as likely to toss a guy in the gulag for making bad chili at the cook-off as for being a terrorist, a fellow who can't even manage the basic presidential task of mouthing a series of ecclesiastical non sequiturs in the midst of habitually jingoistic exhortations to national destiny without getting tangled up in every word of more than a single syllable, without pausing to display the self-congratulatory smile of a toddler who's got the round peg in the round hole for the very first time each time he speaks without stuttering some line that his speechwriting sycophants assured him ahead-of-time would bring applause. He's worse than a simpleton. They ought to teach him basic sign language and give him a fucking kitten, then write a children's book about it to give to some future president for studious consideration on the eve of the next grave attack on American soil.

If I'm going to suffer through the detention-and-disappearing state for the next year, the next ten, or the next fifty, then by fucking god, I want banners, rallies, party congresses, black uniforms, ominous dear-leader portraits scowling from every wall. Maybe that's the genius of our nouveaux authoritarians: central casting. How can you create yourself as a revolutionary against these people? If Leni Reifenstahl returned to make George Bush's Triumph of the Will, it'd come out of the cutting room as State Fair. In their preternatural boobery, they make radicalism seem like overreaction. We should be storming the White House in mass demonstrations, but what would we do when we found our native strongman reading Archie comics on the shitter?

At last it turns out that Franklin was right in his pessimism. Two-and-a-half centuries of democracy brings us to this. Our national mascot isn't Uncle Sam, but a redneck who's maxed out his credit cards buying guns and ammo for a neverending cycle of hunting seasons. Don't much like readin'. That guy looks a little faggy to me, if ya know what ah mean. Keep of the lawn. Beware of dog.