A Minor Corrective

I am not one to quibble with Roy Edroso's critical eye, and this post is well worth the read, but I do think Roy misses something both significant and simple:

The intractable bigotries of the American Right are offensive to all thinking people, even to those who were traumatized into joining it in 2001. Yet no major candidate in either party will stand up for gay marriage. I think they realize that if they did take up the cause, they would be greeted, not by just the small clutch of angry misfits whose heads swim with homo-hatred, but by them and a much larger group they've convinced to come along in solidarity.

What Roy ignores is the plain fact that no major candidate in either party thinks that fags should marry. Most are perfectly happy to host homos in their homes, to delight in their conversation, to sap off of their tastes, and to approve of their love, but they believe in the holy reservation of gold bands by God for straights, and in their hearts they continue to feel fag relationships as somewhat lesser forms of their own tawdry, largely failed efforts at lifetime pair-bonding.

Foodie Friday

Mushroom comsommé with porcini, whole coriander seed, and saffron

Consommés are traditionally made from a meat base and contain a high concentration of gelatin. Consequently, they have to be served very hot or else they begin to solidify, forming a sort of aspic. This recipe, in which the methods for making a meat-based consommé are adapted to a mushroom base, contains no gelatin, and should be served at room (or patio) temperature to bring out the surprisingly sweet and delicate flavor of the clarified broth.

2 or so pounds of crimini mushrooms
1/2 cup dried porcini mushrooms
several fresh porcini mushrooms
several shallots
several fresh carrots
4 very fresh eggs
1 whole clove
4 all-spice berries
whole-strand saffron
sea salt
black pepper
white pepper
basil
good water

The dish begins with a very simple mirepoix of diced shallots and carrot. Using shallot instead of onion gives a special pungency to the final product. The flavor of celery, the third ingredient in a traditional mirepoix, is too bright for this soup, so I leave it out. Saute the mirepoix over a medium heat until the shallots soften and the notable sweet scent of cooking carrots begins to fill the room. (This, by the way, is my best advice to any cook. Fuck your kitchen timer. Learn what things smell like at different stages and in different methods of cooking.) You can use extra virgin olive oil, but I prefer clarified butter, which has a rounder, less assertive flavor. Do not use unclarified butter under any circumstances. Also, don't salt the mirepoix. If you add mushrooms to an already salty pan, the salt causes them to extrude their liquid too quickly, become mushy, and lose their flavors.

Now add your mushrooms. Crimini mushrooms are ideal--more delicately flavored than grown portobelli, but more assertive, meaty, and woody than dull white mushrooms. Cook them in the pot with the mirepoix until they have begun to brown. You'll begin to notice that the smell of cooking mushrooms becoming dominant. Once the mushrooms have reached this point, you can salt them. In this as with most dishes, a good medium or fine sea salt is ideal, and I prefer to salt slowly and mildly at each stage of cooking rather than adding some determined amount at the beginning or end of a recipe.

While you perform the preceding steps, heat water in a large pot to just under boiling. Now that your mushrooms are brown, add the water to the pot until the contents are completely submerged. Add your dried porcini to the water. Add one whole clove, four roughly crushed all-spice berries, and several generous twists of black pepper from a grinder set on a coarse grind. Bring the contents of the pot to a boil, then immediately reduce to a simmer. Depending on your quantities and the quality and freshness of your mushrooms, you should simmer from two to three hours, partly covered. (That's a lot less than a meat-based consommé.) Periodically taste a chunk of fresh mushroom from the broth. If it still tastes recognizeably of mushroom, it's not ready. When the mushrooms have given up almost all of their flavor, the broth is ready.

Strain the broth through a colander or seive to remove as much solid material as possible. Return the strained broth to the stovetop, but retain a cup or two of broth which should be quickly chilled in the fridge or freezer. Add a healthy pinch of saffron to the simmering broth and let it steep for at least 10 minutes. Separate four eggs, retaining the shells. You will not need the yolks for this recipe. Crush the egg shells and add them to the broth on the stove. Whisk the egg whites into the chilled cup of broth, and whisk that into the rest of the broth. Add the juice of one quarter of a lemon. Slowly increase the teperature on the stove. The protein from the egg whites and shells and the acid from the lemon juice will draw the rest of the impurities out of the broth and form what cookbooks call a "raft" and what honest cooks call a disgusting layer of horrific scum on top of the broth. You will want to let this bubble and boil for a few minutes, then reduce the temperature to stop the boiling and skim off the scum.

Now for the final straining. You will line a colander with either several layers of already-damp cheese cloth or several layers of damp paper towels. Remember, you must use several layers--single layers of cloth or paper towel will immediately saturate and cease to allow the passage of liquid, while too many layers will also strain ineffctively. You have to find a happy medium, usually four or five layers of cloth and three or four paper towels. The strained broth will be an extraordinary color: translucent, reddish, earthen. Allow it to cool slightly and taste it. It will have a deep, complex flavor despite the relative few ingredients, with a slight sweetness accented by the all-spice and clove, which also help bring out the savory character of the mushrooms. You can prepare this broth a day in advance.

For your final preparation, julienne a fresh carrot and set aside. If you have basil plants, pick the tiny, baby leaves for garnish--otherwise, cut several large leaves into a chiffonnade. Set aside. Slice your fresh porcini very thinly lengthwise (from top toward stem). You could also use any fine seasonal mushroom. Morels make a dramatic presentation. Heat extra virgin olive oil in a saute pan. Saute the mushrooms quickly, adding a tablespoon of whole coriander seeds almost as soon as they hit the oil. When just darkened and cooked through, transfer the mushrooms and coriander to a paper-towel-covered plate.

To present the dish, place a little pile of the julienned carrot in the bottom of a shallow bowl. Spoon several ladle-fuls of broth over these. Lay several slices of sauted mushroom with coriander seeds on top of that. Give it one or two twists of fine-ground white pepper. Top it with your basil garnish. Serve.

Captain America, I Command You to . . . WANK!

Victor Davis Tecumseh Garibaldi Germanicus MacArthur Pershing Bathsheba Hanson displayes the supply-side of the one-handed reader. Is it hard to type lefty, Vic?

Coup de foudre

Kathryn Jean Lopez says, "He's a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch."

The argument is actually quite ingenious. In it, Lopez avers that if George W. Bush, who has betrayed every conservative principle that she's able to identify, which consist dually and exclusively of disliking Ted Kennedy and hating Mexicans, gets an opportunity to shoehorn one more kook into the Supreme Court, then he can retire to Texas content in Lopez's enduring hosannas. Tellingly, the article is awash in the language of courtship and marriage--once fallen for, now a marriage to be saved. One imagines the president signing some vast amnesty providing automatic citizenship, free health care, food stamps, and a blinged-out mansion for every hispanophone in the world, with Lopez whimpering beside him on the floor, and the president saying between clenched teeth "Why do you make me do this to you? You know I love you baby. This hurts me more than it hurts you."

Ahab

Eugene Robinson phones one in on Paris Hilton. "Why do I know all of this?" he asks the wind and the clouds, the spirit and the waters after many paragraphs of sub-Us celebritography. "Why do I even have an opinion?" Needless to say, our intrepid cultural critic has dredged the depths of his own conscience to find a series of answers that have something to do with "an intriguingly mysterious exhibitionist." He notes that all this gaudy self-display is searingly superficial, with no hint of "inner life." As cultural insight goes, this ranks with the theses, long-expounded by American television comedy, that men and women are different, that black people do it this way and white people do it that way, that old people sometimes forget things, and that inside every couple's child is a world-weary Shecky Green.

Anyway:

We watch her because we're curious about what might be behind the mask. Even in her mug shot, the hair and makeup were impeccable -- and, as always, she wore an enigmatic little half-smile that suggests she knows something the rest of us don't.

Yeah, or Dude? Maybe you just wanna fuck 'er? That "enigmatic smile" and what she knows? What she knows is that it's nahgahnah happen. Every time some famous swizzle with tits and a sex video makes the big time, the stroking moves to the chin and we're all treated to these embarrassing eructions of self-unawareness, when everyone knows that the attraction, the fascination, the enigma, whatever, are all codes for, "Man, my dick would look HUGE going into that."

And the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

I'll See Your Prussia and Raise You an Austro-Hungary

Wisdom from Pat Lang and pablum from General Lute (an appropriate name for a man whose position toward the legislature and the public is basically Orphean). But both have fallen under the spell of "must." It's a strange word when you think about it, conveying both affirmative duty and necessity, implying a kind of inevitability, suggesting that if what must happen doesn't in fact happen, then the failure was a lack of will or a lack of effort, but not a lack of means. With that in mind, I say that Lang uses the word correctly but naïvely, while Lute appropriates the word to suggest that the impossible will inexorably occur.

Lang says:

The US is now a Middle Eastern regional power and must accept its responsibilities as such.

Looking back, we can see how the "transfer of sovereignty," pooh-poohed by many of us as trashy symbolism, was equally a calculated maneuver to abrogate our responsibilities as an occupying power. It was precisely to avoid "responsibilities" as a "Middle Eastern regional power." It allowed the United States to do what it does everywhere in the world, which is bellow above everyone else in the room while pretending that we have no territorial obligations, that the entity called Iraq acts of its own accord, and that our task is not to deal with other regional powers as neighbors, but to continue the habit of treating them as a very distant foreign region that is nevertheless in "the vital national security interests of the United States." The responsibilities of which Lang writes can't be undertaken meaningfully without acknowledging that the United States remains, however tenuously, the occupying power in territorial Iraq.

Meanwhile, Lute and the rest of the Washington gang who keep saying we "must succeed" in Iraq are, as always, confusing desire and means. As noted elsewhere and otherwise, the Iraq war has failed by even its own most elastic measures of success. The war is lost, and regrettably, there's an aspect of the Great War to the aftermath. What's left behind is not a clear new order, but a wasteland, politically decimated, civically enervated, regionally unstable, socially unanchored. (Also, the United States, you know, gets to leave more or less physically unscathed.) There are only losers now.

Donkle See, Donkle Do

Here and here you can read to your pinko hearts' delight how the Clinton administration engineered the failure of the UN weapons inspection process in Iraq in the 90s in order to justify not lifting the sanctions that, hey, they weren't going to lift anyway. Thanks, Ralph.

1 and 1 Million Are Both a Number

Justin, the American Crackpot, writes of supercilious Donkle junketeer Eric Alterman:

On consecutive days Alterman wrote that it would do upper middle class people good to be arrested at least once so they can better appreciate the underclass’s relationship with the police. There is something extremely wormy about this that I can’t properly put into words.

Let IOZ lend a hand through the magic of rephrasery:

It would do upper middle class Los Angelenos good to be pulled over at lease once so they can better appreciate Rodney King's relationship with the police.

Herein the worminess becomes clear. Beneath the thin layer of superficial similarity, we're talking about two categorically different experiences--"Liceses and registration" versus "Get on the ground, nigger!"

M.C. Escher and the Logical Mobius Strip

The editorialites at the WaPo are irked that Vladimir Putin, who has nothing to fear from the ballyhooed West and so enjoys occasional bouts of saying whatever the fuck he wants, said whatever the fuck he wanted:

In the past few days, the anti-Western rhetoric of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which had been rising in pitch for several months, has reached Soviet levels of shrillness. He accused the United States of "imperialism" and "diktat" and threatened to target Europe with new Russian weapons. In an interview with foreign journalists, he cynically mocked Western democracy, saying that U.S. "torture, homelessness, [and] Guantanamo" and Europe's "harsh treatment of demonstrators" have left him as the only "absolute and pure democrat" in the world.

Soviet levels! Serious indeed.

It occurs to me that if the United States quit torturing people and locking them away in the Guantanamo oubliette, if Western Europe quit corralling demonstrators like recalcitrant cattle, if the United States quite invading shit, if Western Europe quit blustering about the titanic unacceptability of "a nuclear Iran," then Putin's fusillades would seem considerably less trenchant. As for targetting Europe with "new Russian weapons," I think we all know that Russia is no more likely to nuke Paris than the proposed American missile defense system is to work. This is action-reaction in a realm of pure Platonic forms. We have no capacity to shoot down ICBMs, and Russia has no intention of starting a nuclear war.

On the other hand, at least three Republican candidates affirmed last night that they would use nuclear weapons against Iran to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons to us against the United States. These lines may or may not have been uttered to please the totally insane studio audience, a microcosm of a totally insane American electorate, which howled with equal approval when Ron Paul said we must get out of Iraq now and forswear future preemptions and when every other candidate said we must kill everyone and everything. And there you have it: "Soviet levels of shrillness" from our very own field of Republican presidential candidates.

Au marché !

I do believe that my main man Ron Paul just endorsed the Henley Model:

But what American access to oil reasonably requires is nothing more nor less than a functioning oil market.

Holy petroly, Batman.

Ezekiel

"And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel: and they shall do in Edom according to mine anger and according to my fury; and they shall know my vengeance!" saith Victor Davis Cincinnatus Judas Maccabe Octavian Rasputin Charlemagne Hanson. Actually, he says that our bullshit is insufficiently convincing, that the "globalized media is an American epiphenomenon, but the narrative of the war is still the IED, not the purple finger." An American epiwhat? Careful with that axe, Eugene.

I am sensing a certain failure of imagination in the five or six people who still insist that Iraq, bumps n' scrapes n' all, is still doing basically okay. The vestigial digit of Ali al-Sistani's most excellent elections was blown off, I'm afraid. It no longer moves us. It never really did.

"The United States can usually win even postmodern wars abroad if it can play to its strengths." So begins an essay, and so shall we end. What is a postmodern war, and when has the United States ever won one? And if not once won, then from whence cometh that overloud "usually?" And if not usually, but never, then what are you saying Victor? What is the lesson to be learned?

Today in Casual Racism

Is it my imagination, or is Martin Peretz casually accusing Jesse Jackson of profiting from trade in war diamonds just, ya know, for shits and giggles?

Frankly--I have not a scintilla of evidence for this but I do have my instincts and my grasp of his corruptibility--I suspect that Jackson was let in on the diamond trade or some other smarmy commerce.

I mean, frankly--I have not a scintilla of evidence for this but I do have my instincts and my grasp of his corruptibility--I suspect that Martin Peretz bakes blood into his matzot.

I don't like Jesse Jackson, nor the American habit of cozying up to friendly monsters in Africa or anywhere else, and we all know that Martin Peretz was never a fan of those people, whoever those people happened to be in the era, but this is a strikingly gratuitous insinuation.

You're Wearing WHAT?

So Ross Douthat says that Jonah Goldberg said that George W. Bush is a crunchy condom. And I'm like, Ewwww! Oh no he dih'ihnn!

Ah, no. I see. He says that Jonah Goldberg says that George W. Bush is acting like a this guy, who hates fags, but now with 30% more dietary fiber!

Andrew Sullivan is also mentioned, but look, as a cocksucker myself, I feel justified in saying that a cocksucker who chooses as his Orwellian epigraph, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," is a dreadfully humorless cocksucker. Quick! Someone make a funny about small dicks!

The ostensible topic at hand for all these gentlemen is the Spirit of Conservativism, which like the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future is full of wise lessons, and which equally like them all does not exist except in fictions written for children. Conservativism without a landed aristocracy is just prejudice in the guise of sentimental nostalgia.

There's a note of self-pity in all these harangues, each an exercise in retroactive self-justification: I wuz had, I wuz! George W. Bush is now as he always was, a third-rate legacy from a second-rate New England political dynasty, who floundered through a bought education and a series of bought businesses without ever acquiring any convictions other than a rich fratboy's habitual disdain. In him, Jonah Goldberg, an even lower legacy, saw himself, and the rest of the conservative crypto-pseudo-intellectuals saw an empty vessel into which they poured their various fantasies and their unearned pride. In the early days, he was to be their Louis Phillipe, protecting privilege and letting everyone else scramble. Then 9/11 scared the hell out of them, and they saw in their July monarch an adequate mannequin for the dress of a generalissimo.

Meanwhile, people with real power rather than column inches and bandwidth, went about the business of expanding the empire, but now the shock and bloodlust of the weakling class enabled them to do so more openly. Bear in mind that the newly shrill conservative critics of George W. Bush object only to the perceived failures of his programs (and the perceived absence of his pogroms), and if everything he touched were moderately less inclined to turn to loose, steaming shit, they'd still be cheering the slaughter.

All this gut-chewing over the various and sundry betrayals of conservativism ultimately end at that. They resent him for being unpopular. And there you have it. Fratboy values giveth, and fratboy values taketh away.

In Which We Hail One Small and Partial Victory for Liberty

Oh, fuck yeah!

Mr Verloc

So the JFK bombers turn out to possess neither the means to blow up a pressurized fuel line nor the basic chemistry to understand that combustion requires oxygen and explosive combustion requires a whole fuckin lot of oxygen. Naturally, Andrew McCarthy and the gang at The National Review are entirely hysterical, and I will never forgive Arthur Silber for beating me to the Mommy Dearest metaphor.

1984 is an attractive literary guide to our present national epoch, but I increasingly believe that the real novel to guide us is Conrad's The Secret Agent. Our American jihadists are equally inept; our agents provacateurs equally ludicrous; and the great powers scheming behind it all are in equal parts evil and bumbling.

"What we want is to administer a tonic to the Conference in Milan, [Mr Vladimir] said, airily. "Its deliberations upon international action for the suppression of political crime don't seem to get anywhere. England lags. This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty. It's intolerable to think that all your friends have got only to come over to--"

"In that way I have them all under my eye," Mr Verloc interrupted, huskily.

"It would be much more to the point to have them all under lock and key. England must be brought into line. The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their preservation. I suppose you agree that the middle classes are stupid?"

Mr Verloc agreed hoarsely. "They are."

"They have no imagination. They are blinded by an idiotic vanity. What they want just now is a jolly good scare. This is the psychological moment to set your friends to work. I have had you called here to develop to you my idea."

And Mr Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent Mr Verloc with inward consternation. He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organization where in the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge. Once Mr Verloc had opened his mouth for a protest, but the raising of a shapely, large white hand arrested him. Very soon he became too appalled to even try to protest. He listened in a stillness of dread which resembled the immobility of profound attention.

"A series of outrages," Mr Vladimir continued, calmly, "executed here in this country; not only planned here--that would not do--they would not mind. Your friends could set half the Continent on fire without influencing the public opinion here in favour of a universal repressive legislation. They will not look outside their backyard here."

Mr Verloc cleared his throat, but his heart failed him, and he said nothing.

"These outrages need not be especially sanguinary," Mr Vladimir went on, as if delivering a scientific lecture, "but they must sufficiently startling--effective. Let them be directed against buildings, for instance. What is the fetish of the hour that all the bourgeoisie recognize--eh, Mr Verloc?"

No

In the last Democratic presidential primary debate, the Donkle fixation on America's lost "leadership," its lost "moral authority," its lost "ability to lead by example"--in other words, its lost capacity to influence other people with subtler forms of coercion than outright invasion--was on gaudy display. It's telling evidence of crippling self-regard that we're so eager to locate the gravest consequences of the Iraq War in our own national capacity and national pysche. To be sure, there have been many lamentable consequences of the various incarations of the War on Terror™ right here in the United States: further creep of the national security-surveillance state; further militarization of the police; further constriction of the bounds of acceptable discourse; further sacralization of patriotic sentiment; further expansion of "something-must-be-done" public sentiment in regards to all sorts of problems and irritants, large and small, all manifesting as calls for more government doing more . . . whatever. But the principle human costs of our declared war on all who oppose us and any who quibble even slightly with our aims have been borne by those living outside of America, and the fact that in every mainstream regretting of Iraq, 3,000 dead Americans are mentioned before "countless dead Iraqis" speaks to a particular kind of narcissism. (So to does the phrase, "countless dead Iraqis." They aren't countless. We choose not to count them. Their toll is voluntarily unknown by its takers.)

Now another familiar article, in which a monumentally fucked-up torturer extravagently regrets doing all that torturing, and the familiar tones of advocate journalism--the sort that usually follows single mothers in the projects, or new immigrants, or the recently laid-off--tinkle around every sentence. We're meant to feel pity for Tony Lagouranis, an American torturer recently returned from Iraq. He's practically an archetype: the young man, sent to Iraq by the dangerous ideologues of the Bush administration, empowered to do whatever it takes, instructed in the arts of coercion, filled with propoganda turning otherwise detestable practices into moral imperatives for the protection of the United States. The proper response to this man isn't pity but contempt. The article wonders aloud how it is that a man who used fear so brutally, who showed such strength and determination in his messy, difficult work in Iraq, could prove to be so weak, so afraid, so brittle upon his return to civilian life. The plain implication is that his work made him so; it's the old story about the mirrored effects of torture on the tortured and torturer alike. It's the comforting fable about good men, forced to do bad things, who are later crippled by guilt because at heart they are good. That should be a familiar fable. It is, after all, the myth we tell ourselves about the United States itself.

Of course, Tony Lagouranis did not become weak, brittle, and afraid by torturing. It was the fact of his weakness, his fear, his venality, and his subservience that made him an ideal torturer in the first place. It was his moral vacuity. It was, in short, his cowardice. Lagouranis' epiphany, which doesn't come until he has actually begun considering Nazi techniques as instructive, is fine, but far too late. Can you praise a man for acquiescing right up to the line of the Third Reich? A good man, a brave man, a decent man, would have said, "No." He would have said it from the outset. I don't mean to heap approbation on this one man, nor to deny that he's suffering. Clearly he is. But if he suffers from nightmares for the rest of his life, then that is an appropriate punishment for what he did. Nor do I subscribe to the idea that the dauphin and his court are absolved by the fact of their followers criminal cowardice. This is the lesson that Tony Lagouranis should have learned from his Nazis: that for evil men to lead us into darkness, there must be weak men to follow them.