It's been a remarkably grim week, and so, courtesy of the entire staff of one here at Who Is IOZ?, I leave you this Friday night with a moment of unadulterated levity. In what may be my favorite craigslist man-for-man personal ever:
I am looking for straight, bi or gay guys who are willing to allow me to massage there feet, suck on there toes and lick there souls.
The Editors notes Jacob Weisberg, whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken, attempting another interventionist post-hoc salvage operation on the discreditable notion that the United States has the capacity, the duty, and the right to kill foreigners in order to alter the political makeup of their countries. He raises the bloody flag of Kosovo!, which liberals take as some sort of unmitigated success since it happened under El Clinton, although from my vantage I see a couple hundred thousand internal refugees, ethnic Serbs still unable to return home, continuing civic unrest, and hundreds of Serbian properties burned as recently as 2004. But I suppose it still beats Baghdad.
If I differ with the Editors, it's in this idea of a "limited victory" in Afghanistan because, even though that country too is spinning back down the gyre from its high point as a shithole to its once-and-future existence as a hellhole, there was a coherent casus belli and some limited set of military objectives were achieved. But what we really managed to do in Afghanistan was no more or less than rearrange the relative powers of local tribes and warlords and engage a brief and now-ending refraction period wherein it was more difficult for stateless terrorist groups to organize, plan, and train. Now, of course, those groups and others have simply claimed new redoubts in the border regions with Pakistan, fancifully labelled an American ally, and the presidential pejorative "Mayor of Kabul" is less and less accurate because it's become, if anything, an overestimation.
Intervention is fancy talk for killing. All the politics and morals heaped on it by the domestic talk squad are but veneers and excuses. It cannot, does not, and will not work. It's brutality, bloodshed, and imperial war. Live it. Love it. Learn it.
When I want to buy marijuana, I call my weed guy and meet him at a coffee shop. I treat him to an espresso, and we talk about classical albums we've recently enjoyed. He used to own a record store. Then we take a walk around the block.
When I want to buy cocaine, I send a text message to my coke guy asking him if he's out and about. If he is, I meet him at a bar we both like. If he's not, I meet him at his house. It's a nice little house in the near suburbs. We talk about jazz. He's a musician and just does this on the side.
Heroin's a little more troublesome, and I don't indulge in it myself, but all you have to do is cross Penn Avenue and drive into Homestead. It isn't The Wire. The guys who sell are basically regular guys, and polite, if somewhat amused by the cultural whiteness, such as it is, of their clientele.
So when Matthew Yglesias, who's good on foreign policy, writes--
I guess this is something liberals and libertarians are supposed to agree about, but I consistently find it bizarre that there are some people who seem to think it would be a good idea if you could just walk into your local convenience store and pick up some heroin or crack along with your Fritos and Diet Coke--I guess I find it bizarre that he's under the impression that it is currently somehow less convenient or more difficult for an intending buyer to purchase those products than if his proposed situation were the case. It's more expensive, but by no means harder to find. Plus, in a pinch, drug dealers make deliveries, which no 7-11 has done for me lately.
Dave Weigel, posting at Reason's Hit and Run, is today's hero of good humor in the face of venality for locating Rep. Virgil Goode's constituency in the Kingdom of Prester John. The post is a response to another Goode effusion in Re: the Subject of Mohammetan Im'grints. You may be assured that they are bad, and that Keith Ellision (D-Mecca), who it turns out is not an immigrant, is worse. It all has to do with Judeo-Christian Values. A quick polling of the staff here at Who Is IOZ reveals that no one can actually identify what a Judeo-Christian Value is.
I note, in any event, that among the so-called major monotheisms, Christianity and Islam share many more affinities and particulars of practice than either does with Judaism. They share their missonarism, which is largely alien to Jews, and they share the revelatory coming of a savior or prophet of singular religious and liturgical import, and they share a penchant for sectarianism and schismatism, and, of course, for geographic expansionism, anti-Semitism, priestly clericalism, monumentalist religious architecture, and a whole host of others, which might explain their historical antipathy--similarity, as any bunch of siblings can tell you, breeds more contempt than diversity of interests. When I hear a yokel like Goode yapping about Judeo-Christian values, I hear only that America is a Christian nation, but we won't go killin' them Jews like them Nazis did.
"In Washington this morning, bells at the National Cathedral will ring 38 times for the 38th President of the United States . . ." Americans, I'm told, used to pride themselves as a practical people, not much given to this sort of impious, imperial stagecraft. Reagan's funerary procession was more gaudily pagan, but so was his myth. He was, after all, The Man Who Defeated Communism. That communism had long since defeated itself, at least in the USSR, was inconsequential to the legend. The Jerry Ford hullabaloo is more irksome to me. False modesty in an elaborate state funeral is crass, but Les Médias do love themselves some jus' folks. They loved it in the dauphin when he first ran for office. They didn't love it so much in Ford back in the day, when modest patrician expectations still held for those in high office, but these days it's all about reg-uh-lur people, and Football Jerry fits that mold nicely. The music will be Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." More fittingly they'd have hired a bunch of former South Vietnamese prostitutes to sing Woody Guthrie songs in traditional dress. Cheney and Rumsfeld will speak, supposedly, and Kissinger will bite the head off a live pigeon. George and Laura will emerge from their respective hibernation chambers, the one filled with cocaine and the other with a bath of botulin and virgin bloood. Somewhere a secret service agent will cough. A bomb will go off in Iraq. A cloud will pass. A blond cable news anchor will wait until her mic is cut, and then she will yawn.
I was going to jump on the bandwagon and post a year-end/year-beginning bloggie award. Something like: The Making 2006 Suck Harder and Not in a Good Way than It Already Did Award. Instead I stayed up all night, drank half a bottle of 15-yr. The Balvenie, and still feel it today. So I’ve just updated my blogroll a bit.
Gone is Jim Kunstler, who lost his perch by failing to understand that the important thing about the character of Cassandra was not the crazy, but the correct. Gone too is the seablogger, who, if I were giving awards, would get the Victor Davis Thermopylae Xerxes Hitler Stalin King Leopold Hanson award for genocidal hackery.
Added are Yglesias, whom you know, and some of my favorite true-left anti-Donkle howlers, including the inimitable Stop Me Before I Vote Again, the ever-entertaining UFO Breakfast by my friend and yours, j. alva scruggs, and the doyenne of Donkle deconstruction, Marisacat.
Several others are forthcoming, and ye know who ye be, bitches.
Extraordinary. We consented to the murder of a foreign head of state. We acted as his jailers and puppeteered his kangaroo trial. We kept him until the moment of his extralegal execution. We turned him over to a lynch mob. They murdered him. Then they threw his body in a cheap casket and threw the cheap casket in the back of a pickup truck. Then we had to go retrieve the body so that they didn’t just toss it in a hole somewhere. You have to read it to believe it.
Better to have shot him when they found him. It isn’t so much the injustice that troubles me, because after all, he was not a man much deserving of just treatment (though that, of course, is no excuse), but the pretense of justice, maintained so insistently by our squad of domestic Jacobins. What did Robespierre say? “Pity is treason.”
He also said “No man can climb beyond the limitations of his own character.” Of whom does that remind you?
None of this is auspicious news.
After Saddam Hussein was lynched by mocking thugs who, to judge by their dress, intended to follow the execution by knocking over a convenience store, a grainy cell-phone video of the tacky, disgusting affair zapped up to the internet and began making--pardon the cliché--the obligatory rounds.
Others have already noted the masturbatory glee of our domestic necrophiliac squad, but noting their sado-sexual pleasure alone doesn't make explicit enough the aesthetic connection between Saddam's execution and Paris Hilton's bored hotel-room tryst, or between Saddam's execution and Colin Farrell's embarrassing hooker tryst ("Yeah, baby, you've got my breakfast, lunch, and dinner."), or between Saddam's execution and The-Dude-Who-Played-Screech-On-Saved-By-The-Bell's scatalogical tryst with a couple of bimbos. Just one more video of a guy getting fucked.
Fareed Zakaria, author of such children's classics as Illiberal Democracy, wrote:
The saga of Saddam's end--his capture, trial and execution--is a sad metaphor for America's occupation of Iraq. What might have gone right went so wrong.It is simply not true. America's occupation of Iraq could no more have gone right than a Vegas date with a coked-up hotel heiress or a motel encounter between a Hollywood star, a black hooker, and a video camera. It is not in the execution that things went awry; it's the thing itself that's wrong. There's the old expression about putting lipstick on a pig, and that certainly holds here. But more to the point, Saddam's snuff-film execution and the occupation that occasioned it show that some people--too many people; too many powerful people--are as careless and insensate about killing as the rich and tawdry are about fucking.
When last we left The Singer Sewing Machine, he was bruiting the merits of Tom Wolfe, whose elderly libidinal fascination with the under and inner regions of the late-adolescent female anatomy he can't quite conceal beneath a skein of grumpy, grubby moralizing.
Now we find him whirring once again, this time about who has been naughty and who has been nice regarding the cell-block lynching of America's once and not-now-future Iraqi king. "I dimly recall from my childhood people weeping for Stalin's natural death. No, what I recall was not in Moscow. It was in New York. Jake wore a black arm-band to school that day." I take it Jake is a typo for Susan Sontag, but I could be mistaken. Then:
Did Germans cry when Hitler committed suicide with Eva in his Berlin bunker?No, you goddamn monster. They cried because their whole damned country was rubble, ten-year-old boys and eighty-year-old men were defending Berlin, everything was on fire, and what Auden called "that huge imago made / a psychopathic god" was swiftly crumbling to reveal their nation as a collective murderer. Defeated peoples weep.
