Chicken

Everything sucks, and it's too lovely outside to care, so here is the best way to roast a chicken. It's best prepared to "Ah, guarda sorella" from Così fan tutte on repeat. Happy 4:20. Peace out.

Ingredients

One 3-4 lb. Chicken
1/2 medium yellow onion.
1 shallot
1 lemon
1 cinnamon stick
Saffron
Anise seed
Butter
Chicken stock
White whine
Sea salt
Black pepper

Drying the bird

Rinse the chicken in cold water, pat dry, and then place on a rack in the refrigerator. Rinse and dry the reserved gizzards, liver, and neck as well, and set them on a plate in the refrigerator. Don't cover anything. The point is to let it all dry. You should perform this step around lunch time, leaving at leat 4 to 6 hours for it to dry. Remove the bird and its insides about an hour prior to cooking to allow it to come up to room temperature.

Prepping the bird

Salt and lighly pepper the chicken's cavity, then stuff it with the gizzards, liver, neck, and a large bunch of flat-leaf parsely. Don't ever use anything other than good sea salt. On any meat, fish, or vegetable. Ever. I prefer a slightly coarse grind for cooking, and a coarser salt for finishing. Truss the chicken. Truss it for fucking real. Buy a poulry needle and twine, and learn to sew up the cavity and tie the legs and wings. It will make a difference. Now rub the skin generously with softened butter. I prefer Pulgra European-style butter, which is inexpensive and widely available at good grocery stores or European importers, but any good, unsalted butter will do. The best way to get an even coating is to soften the butter and then rub it between your hands until your hands are both coated with butter, then give the chicken a nice, sexy massage. Generously salt and pepper the skin.

Cooking the bird

While you prep the chicken, bring a small pot of chicken stock to a low boil on the stovetop. After you've prepped the bird, get a shallow baking pan and fill it with about a quarter inch of stock, half a diced yellow onion, a diced shallot, a lemon divided into eighths, a whole cinnamon stick, a large pinch of saffron, a small pinch of anise seeds, and a half cup of white wine, preferably a slightly off-sweet, fruity wine like a good Gwertzraminer or even a Gruner Veltliner. Place the bird, breast down, on a V-shaped roasting rack, and place the rack in the pan. The rack should be high enough that the chicken doesn't touch the liquid.

Place the pan in a cold oven, and heat it to 550 F. Watch it closely until the skin just begins to brown--it will turn almost a straw color. Flip the bird and roast it, breast side up, until the skin turns a deep, golden-brown. Reduce the oven temperature to 225 F. Flip the bird on one side and roast until the color begins to even on that side, then flip it onto its other side and repeat. Finally, raise the teperature again to 450 F. The skin, already brown, should just begin to bubble away from the bird. It is now crisp. Remove the bird from the oven and use a ramekin or small plate to angle the rack downward on a board or dish where it can rest for 5-10 minutes.

Strain the juices and broth left in the pan, and combine with a dash of white wine vinegar and a teaspoon of good mustard. Use it to dress a salad of chiffonaded escarole.

Divide the chicken into quarters with a cleaver. Serve the whole quarters with your salad and crusty bread.

Prohibition

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

-2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution-

The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

-Section 1, 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution-

E.J. Dionne doesn't particularly care for guns, which is fine, and thinks that the United States government should more actively prohibit their sale and use, which is working out really well against the scourge of drugs, so why not give it a try in some other sphere? Like many liberals, Dionne bangs his head resolutely against the wall of second-amendment absolutism and asks, Why?! As in: "Why can't we read the 2nd Amendment like a biblical parable rather than a literal injunction?" The answer, obviously: We can't, because it isn't.

Dionne has often complained in the last several years about the President's extraconstitutional actions, and has suggested a certain inviolability--theoretically, at least, morally, ethically--to constitutional boundaries, limits, prohibitions, enumerations of duties, etc. But in the matter of guns, he seems to suggest a degreee of malleability in that legal foundation; he evinces a Yoo-like willingness to say that something says something other than what it says. Well, there's nothing unusual about that. We are all literalists when it suits our purposes, and fabulists when it suits our purposes, and every shade between when they in turn suit the expediencies of the day. That said: if Dionne believes that lax gun laws and the easy availability of firearms are grave threats to our society, why doesn't he advocate for the repeal or alteration of the second amendement?

We know the answer. It's the same reason that our current crop of torture and secret-police fetishists won't openly attack the fourth amendment or the eighth: symbolic sacrosanctity prevents it; they aren't honest enough or brave enough or honorable enough to say that they believe these rules to be mistaken, or just relics of another time.

But the dumbest thing Dionne says has very little to do with guns per se:

In other spheres, we act reasonably when faced with new problems. When Richard Reid showed that nasty things could be done with shoes on airplanes, airport security started examining shoes. When liquids were seen as a potential danger, we regulated the quantity of liquids we could take on flights. We barred people from carrying weapons onto airliners long ago.

If we can act pragmatically in the skies, why can't we be equally practical here on the ground?

Never before have I heard someone make the argument that forcing travelers to shuffle through security in stocking feet and leave their hairspray and Evian behind represent positive increases in our security, nor yet that these sorts of regulations represent "reasonable" responses to pressing crises. There is a broad consensus in this country, including among many of the most fervent terrorphobics, that these are no better than cosmetic boondoggles, inconveniences designed to symbolize security while providing none, hysterical reactions to non-threats that allow the government and the airlines to wave the flag of something-done without actually doing anything. Removing liquids from airlines wasn't rational: we all saw the photo of the TSA employee empyting these "potential dangers" into a big metal garbage can in the middle of a crowded terminal. We know that in most airports, shoes are removed only because metal in them sets off the detectors, and that if you're wearing rubber-soled tennis shoes of the sort that the so-called shoebomber was himself wearing, you can pass through security without removing them or subjecting them to additional scrutiny.

In the end, I've got to concur with Jim: I knew I didn't like this guy.

Nothing Is Certain but Death

It's been a while since we've had a good game of Kick the Donkle in these-a-here parts, so my great thanks go out to Radley Balko, who points to your good friend and mine, Matt Stoller, who's written what may well be the first One-handed Reader on taxes that I've ever seen. Seriously:

I just paid my taxes, and I have to say, I always take pride when I do so.

Now since we all pay taxes--if we avoid 'em on income, we still get 'em on cigarettes and booze, or whatever--this is a little like taking pride in pooping. Not, in other words, something that an adult is supposed to do, though perhaps fit for a child. The basic idea is we'reallinthistogether, a Kumbaya paean to a naive One-Countryism in which your tax dollars are, as the saying goes, hard at work. This is the sort of thing that leaks out in the nocturnal emmissions of bowdlerized Keynsians, a bare-breasted WPA workathon in which the money flows from the coffers straight into the mighty dams and highways and byways of the US of A. There is a feint in the direction of shared responsibility for The Bad Shit--it is "our war"--but the general tone and tenor is identical to the sentiment more concisely illustrated by "Freedom Ain't Free" on the bumper sticker.

But the real underlying sentiment here is the old Bill Clintonism: You can't claim to love your country and hate its government. The idea is that the country is the government, that peoplehood is just a collection of political instutions and symbolic traditions, and that but for the Risen Lord Baby Jesus himself, there is naught holier in this world than The Two-Party System, and all of its spending priorities, by god. But while Grover Norquist and gang, who we're right to scorn, have a basically infantile notion of what it means to "shrink the government," and while the rest of the conservatives, Reagan to Bush and beyond, all want to increase the size of the state just as much as liberals, albeit with different emphases, there are in fact those of us who seriously advocate for a wide and strict curtailment of the ability of the state sector to do much of anything at all. This is something neither the State Left nor the State Right can understand: libertarians do not care about cutting taxes except as a pleasant side effect to the actual project of carefully circumscribing the powers of the state. When George Bush babbles that he wants to cut taxes because The People can spend their money better than the guvmint can, he's not making a libertarian argument, because he's got no intention of making the state smaller in any way. Despite the heaven-high cry of American liberals, trimming this or that entitlement program or research grant, nor yet eliminating forever Sacred Social Security, is not "drowning the government in the bathtub," as the Norquistian bugalloo goes. Unless, that is, you're operating under the mistaken conclusion that all those aircraft carriers and spy satellites and the like are somehow not of the government.

Anyway:

Our tax code is the DNA of our nation's moral compass.

That's a hell of a mixed metaphor, but maybe he's talking about an organic compass of some kind. In any case, is Stoller saying that the "DNA of our nation's moral compass" necessitates hypertrophic growth into a vast, ganglious, militarized imperium that has shat a thousand conflicts all over the globe and that gobbles up everything it can get its greedy paws on, heedless of who it hurts or what crimes, subterfuges, and acts of violence it takes to sate its insatiable rapacity? Shit, he may be right about all this after all.

Hail to Thee, Blythe Spirit! Or: Reefer Madness

I hadn't been smoking pot for a couple of months, because my guru tells me that the occasional fast or the temporary abstention is good for general practices of mindfulness, and I'm inclined to agree based on experience. But last night I ended by own personal Lent, figuring that I ought to get back on board before the holiday, lest I sputter and cough like an amateur, and I got totally fuckin blazed.

What did I do? I read some poetry. I roasted a chicken on a bed of radicchio for dinner. I drank a couple of glasses of white Bergerac. I ate some granola for desert. Then I ate some ice cream for more desert. Then I ate the rest of the ice cream. Then I walked up the street to the convenience store, bought some microwave popcorn, walked home, got even more ripped out of my brain, ate popcorn, drank tea, and watched some scifi movies.

Deep, deep into the mind of a criminal . . .

Looked in the Mirror, Saw a Stranger

There are only so many times you can hear the phrase "unimaginable violence." Unimaginable is one of those odd negations, like unprecedented, that almost always means precisely the opposite of what it means. What about the "violence" was not already imagined in a thousand movies and a million video games and the trillions of scheming neurons of the expanding state police apparatus? Maybe the context of the academy and the relative youth of those involved--as victims and perpetrator--in the shootings at Virginia Tech oblige a certain blindness in commentary on this matter. In the end, though, it isn't difficult to find plenty of imagined instances of a dude with a gun walking into a building and killing a few dozen people.

I don't mean to author a screed against fictive violence. People who believe that Sin City and violent video games can be read as the proximate causes for real-life carnage are just the sort of facile, fatuous scolds who denigrate art in all its forms in our culture by so insistently decrying it as another quotidian factor in the lives of The People or the lives of The Children, with a remedial-Freudian causal relationship to the eventual disposition of those lives. More directly, they put the cart before the horse, such as it is. It's not the celebratory bloodshed of cultural artifacts that makes a terrifyingly violent culture, but a terrifyingly violent culture that ferments a liturgical, devotional propagation of bloodshed in cultural artifacts. I've always been skeptical of too-simple notions about art as mimesis, but clearly a correlation exists.

What you have to consider when you listen to all these accounts of supposedly unimaginable violence, of tragedies no person could ever possibly prepare himself for, because, again, how could anyone imagine that such terror would be wrought by one person on others, for any reason, at any time, is that it is the express policy of our government to engage in precisely such terrors through its military and its police agents. There, really, is the willful blindness and the dark shame of this moment. That a nation which regularly engages in aerial bombardments of urban centers, that invades and occupies other countries without provocation, that garrisons its armies in almost every country in the world, that turns around and sells its own military equipment and martial skills to its own internal police forces, who likewise commit daily atrocities, not the least of which has been to put more or less an entire generation of black men in jail--that such a nation can, in the rare moments of national introspection sparked by unsanctioned atrocity, delude itself into understanding what occured as without precedent, without cause, without a tether to the very heart of life in the nation, speaks to the sort of people we are, and it doesn't speak highly.

Christopher Hitchens

"Fuck yeah! If I had a smokin' Muslim babe, I'd get her a sweet-ass job at State too."

Baghdad

Now imagine this happened every day.

Accidental Truth Edition

Some insurgents have moved into Baquba to escape the escalation in Baghdad. But the city has been attracting insurgents for years, particularly after American officials in Baghdad proclaimed it and surrounding Diyala Province relatively pacified over a year ago and drew down their troop presence.

-The New York Times-

To escape the what?

Hessians

In addition to the fact that tens of thousands of dumb American kids, full of our culture's general gender phobias and sexual viciousness and casual attitudes toward the extremes of violence, without a lick of Arabic or cross-cultural understanding among them, terrified by their strategic impotence and therefore prone to horrible situational bullying, under the high leadership of a pack of thugs, liars, moral reprobates, and advocates for the cruelest of tortures, there are also 20,000 mercenary murderers in Iraq right now, the kind of ex-army washouts who by rights should be working part-time and low-wage, simmering with resentments, getting into bar fights, and spending the occasional night in the town jail for roughing up their often-pregnant, loud-mouth girlfriends. Instead, the government and military leadership of this nation, who we are assured are working earnestly to find a "solution" to the problem of Iraq, have consented to load these bums up with guns and booze and pay them hundreds of dollars a day to swagger around a nation that doesn't fucking belong to us, immune to any law on earth, and to kill people, if they so choose. Let's all be perfectly clear about this: Just as the purpose of the military is not to build democracy or liberate peoples or serve the higher idols of humanitarianism, but to kill and destroy, it is the purpose of the "security contractor" to perform the sorts of extrajudicial thuggery and mob-style whacking that even the rapists at abu Ghraib had too much honor to commit. The linked Post article notes that it was Satrap L. Paul Bremer who first exempted these bastards from all the laws of heaven and earth, and the inclusion of that detail in this and similar articles always seems to me to indicate further just how pervasive is the notion that what is occuring in Iraq is the result of a series of tragically mistaken decisions. But the fact that ignorant men made the decisions does not make the decisions themselves acts of ignorance. Or, as they say on the innertubes: Not a bug, but a feature. The United States didn't create a legal vacuum around two tens of thousands of heavily-armed hit men by accident, and the issues of their accountability and their culpability do not "remain unresolved" because they're "thorny" or "difficult" or "complex." How many times must we repeat ourselves: the war in Iraq was an act of aggression by the United States, an unprovoked invasion with no more moral or legal legitimacy than any conquest undertaken by Germany or the Soviet Union or Napoleonic France. We are not the good guys.