Some Art Stuff

Doghouse Riley, a funny-as-hell guy who's sure to end up on the Who Is IOZ blogroll just as soon as I, you know, put him there, finds notable innumerate-illiterate-American Gregg Easterbrook twittering that his plasma screen is really awesome but, geez, does Broadway suck. Easterbrook:

Now think what has happened in technical and artistic trends in the 50 years since 1957. Scientific endeavors have made fantastic strides in quality, complexity and significance. Consumer product quality has increased dramatically--new cars are packed with features unknown in 1957 yet are far safer and more reliable, and the cell phone in your pocket and the computer you're reading this on, to say nothing of the Internet it's transmitted over, would have been viewed as supernatural by the engineers who built Explorer I. At the same time, the quality of art has plummeted. There hasn't been a musical of artistic merit to open on Broadway in many moons--right now, it's all vapid dreck. (In fact, I think the show "Vapid Dreck," based on a remake of a remake, opens at the Brooks Atkinson soon.) And although good books are still written, what truly great novel has been produced in the past decade or two?

Read Riley for a charmingly cantankerous response. Here's ours.

There's perhaps more and better art today than at any time since the last opening of a century. Sarah Sze produces astonishing, complex, ethereal, meticulous constructs:

Kara Walker combines narrative, vicious satire, and historical revisionism with startlingly beautiful adaptations of the silhouette form, and she is probably now the most important and insightful documentarian of Black history in America:

Rivane Neuenschwander, a South American artist, crosses genres to produce lovely, humorous, alien art that combines pop and expressionist sensibilities.

I'm not personally a fan of Matthew Barney, but the Cremaster Cycle is nevertheless one of the most monumental endeavors of human creativity since Wagner completed the Ring Cycle:

Broadway musicals have always been categorically awful with rare moments of greatness. West Side Story was great because Berstein made it great. Quick, name another musical from 1957 without Googling. No? Yes. But by any measure today's theater is producing good and important work. To take just one example: despite niggling reviews by intellectually insecure critics, Tom Stoppard's massive Coast of Utopia, the most ambitious theatrical cycle in at least fifty years, was a monumental success, both artistically and popularly.

Have the last 10 years been poor ones for literature? Hardly. Delillo published Underworld in 1997. Chabon published Kavalier and Clay in 2000. Coetzee published Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and Slow Man. Shirley Hazzard published The Great Fire. Marilyn Robinson produced Gilead.

Whatever you think of these particular artists--and I, certainly, am no fan of them all, or of all their works, the last few decades have been an extraordinarily fecund time for the arts. Note also that with the exception of one visual artist, I've only listed artists in the US and Britain (or, in Coetzee's case, Australia by way of South Africa). Let's not forgot that the rest of the world has artists too, if often fewer bombs and smaller televisions.

Frot with Irony

That they miss the irony of their tolerance being intolerant almost by definition to speech of the kind they don’t approve (and it is “speech” in the most literal and superficial form that they are attacking here, not a worldview or an instance of encoded hate, many of them having determined that the intent is irrelevant (linguistically incorrect), or that they are entitled to dictate what that intent was (poor interpretation)) is therefore quite understandable: irony requires the rubbing together of meanings, and judging by the reaction here, signifiers can only take on one particular signified at any time, or at least, the meaning of the sign must be determined by the signified that those who presume to take ownership over original intent have agreed to adopt.

-Jeff "Protein Wisdom" Goldstein on his longtime companion's use of the word "faggot"

Dear Jeff,

The rubbing together of meanings!

Love,
IOZ

War. What Is It Good For?

Scratch a conservative and you will find an onanist every time. Here is David Brooks in a high dudgeon over the supposed collapse of conservativism due to what he calls America's "creedal" nature. By creedal he means ideological but implies--probably unintentionally--a nearer truth: that since the founding of their nation Americans have been unique among peoples of the world in their willingness and ability to swallow snake oil, stretch their meaty arms, and proclaim themselves (all evidence to the contrary) well and fully cured. Anyway, Brooks:

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

Well that's not quite it, is it? Burke was perfectly content with the American revolution, yet heaped opprobium on the French revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France, a shoddy and inaccurate tract if there ever was one. Why? Because the American revolution preserved the privilege of land-ownership, and the French revolution did not. Bada-bing, bada-boom.

Conservativism from the Roman Senate to the Brits to Brooks has at its heart this economic prerogative, which it occasionally dresses in the modest attire of Tradition. These Arcadian pretensions are totally phony. Conservatives do not dream of Eden, but of manor homes and a rentier economy.

Protecting the privilege of ownership isn't a crazy philosophy, and it's certainly true--to give Burke due credit for betting on a winning horse--that in the final analysis, the American revolution was prefereble in many ways to the French. (Though were they so different, after all? The French got Napoleon and we got Manifest Destiny. The French got the Terror, and we got the slave trade. In the end, we all got Vietnam.) Washington, Jefferson, and even that bastard monarchist Hamilton were patrician by inclination, and the American constitution, prior to the post-Bill-of-Rights amendments, is certainly a conservative political document. Certainly much-lauded "stability" is served by vesting the power of governance in the landowning classes.

Brooks says:

The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan.

"Existing arrangements." That, friends, is a euphemism. The tempermental conservative doesn't prize "epistemological modesty," whatever on earth that's supposed to be. He prizes his acreage. Plenty of so-called tempermental conservatives were perfectly happy to see the British gobble up the world for their empire. More acres! There is no more "rapid reform," than conquest, nor any more radical revision of "existing arrangements."

This, of course, is why so many tempermental conservatives went balls-out for the Iraq invasion. Not because they are revolutionaries. Because there was money to be made.

Yoink

Are you as disappointed as I am that this craigslist help wanted ad, entitled Get Involved in This Exploding Market...Identity Theft, doesn't include any information on stealing someone's identity?

Personally I don't care whose identity I steal, but I've always thought I'd make a fantastic Jennifer.

The Triumphant Return of* Pittsburgh Blogging

Pittsburgh, as you may or may not know, has the youngest mayor of any major American city. Luke Ravenstahl, at the young, hoary, horny age of 27, runs things around here. Actually, there remains some debate about the likelihood that things around here are running him. To which I say: Who honestly cares? Ravenstahl attained to his position through an odd quirk of our local government. Mayoral succession passes first to the City Council President. Ravenstahl had been a young city councilman who was elected council president by his fellow council members as a factional compromise. Other than directly succeeding the mayor, council presidency is basically ceremonial. Whodathunk that Mayor Bob O'Connor would have, like, a totally rare, totally untreatable brain cancer? Anyway, that is the ballad of Luke.

Since his ascencion and corronation, he's made a number of prominent ethical gaffes, most of which involve a sort of Pimp-My-Life affection for sports figures and fancy transportation by private jet. Laughable, I think, but not exactly condemnable. The latest hijinks, however, achieve the Who Is IOZ? seal of approval.

Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl found nothing wrong yesterday with his use of a police vehicle paid for with Homeland Security Department grant funds that he used for business and personal trips.

And by "business and personal trips," you mean?

Mr. Ravenstahl confirmed Tuesday that he used the vehicle, assigned to the police Intelligence Squad, for everything from business travel to Harrisburg to a trip to an Aug. 18 Toby Keith concert at the Post-Gazette Pavilion.

I even forgive him the Toby Keith!

At a breakfast speech before the Executive Women's Council at the Duquesne Club, Downtown, Mr. Ravenstahl responded defiantly to questions about his judgment.

"I understand I'm being held to a higher standard but at the same time I'm going to continue to be who I am, because that's the only way I know to be," he said. "Have I learned? Absolutely. Will I carefully consider decisions that I make? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, I'm still going to continue to be who I'm going to be, and go to concerts like I always have, and go to have a drink with my wife in bars. That's what 27-year-olds do and I shouldn't be any different."

Yeah, you tell 'em.

I'm not interested in The Petit Prince's baller lifestyle, of course, but rather in the perfect poetry of defrauding Homeland Security through creative barhopping. Talk about an honorary Defeatist! We might all pause and ask what precisely a federally-funded GMC Yukon is doing for the Pittsburgh Police department and how it's going to help if Haji McVeigh and Others Unknown detonate a dirty anthrax-formed penetrating mass destruction weapons program in the middle of Heinz field? We might ask, but why bother? Nuthin', that's the obvious answer. The mayor and his wife could be smoking crack in the Hill District watching 13-year-olds fornicate with household pets in the back seat, and it wouldn't change a thing.

Homeland Security is a federal boondoggle, a waste of time, space, and national vigor. If my 27-year-old mayor wants to put rims on the motherfucker and roll all over town, more power too him. If the federal government gave me a ride, you can be sure that no ride would go unridden, blunt untoked, neighborhood uncruised, and no hooker would be left behind.

No One Man Can Kill a Million

Hey, remember General Petraeus? After months of orgiastic anticipation complete with its own ginned-up controversy, he certaily popped and poofed out of the picture quickly. Mere days after his testimony all that remained was an echoing howl of indignation at MoveOn.org, and now as the days stretch into weeks he's vanished completely. Polls purportedly show that American's opinions haven't budged one way or other due to his testimony. We have "turned against the war." In 2005 our views tipped from ambivalent to negative, and they've not tipped back. The American people, though slow to change, are ultimately wise, and Washington cannot fail to take note forever.

Hoo. Had you going, didn't I? When I hear the phrase The American people, I draw the shades, lock the doors, unchain the dog, and go for the gun cabinet.

The consensus in the country is that America got bamboozled into war. The consensus is that politicians cynically exploited legitimate anxieties, pumped them up to hysteria, and took advantage of the malleability of a fearful population. The consensus is that Americans are by and large opposed to the imperial policies of the American government, or at least would be if they undertood them. The consensus is that if politicians hewed to the national will and mood, they'd more seriously contemplate swift withdrawal from occupied Iraq.

The idea is that Americans got led by the nose into a disaster that they wouldn't have chosen for themselves, and that extrication from such disaster requires a change in political leadership brought about through exercise of the franchise. In other words, Democracy. America, good fucking luck.

So many of the political arguments of the last several years boil down to the question of who is leading whom, of whether politicians and their dark urges are expressions of the national id or independent actors trying desperately--and often successfully--to manipulate the public. The question of the supposed ideological affinities of the media is an extension of the argument. The questions of "fixed intelligence" are extensions of the argument. It should go without saying that culture, even political culture, doesn't work that way. The media reflects national taste, which is in turn amplified by the media. Politicians serve ideologies that are rooted in national urges, but the national character is also determined by the independent decisions of national leadership. These aren't paradoxes. They are self-reflexive, self-supporting, self-amplifying, mutually necessary pieces of the self-driving and self-perpetuating synthetic whole that is the United States of America. There is no chicken. There is no egg. The question of what precedes what is a fallacy.

What polls about the war reveal is not opposition but indeterminacy. The war has gone badly from the perspective of its myriad stated purposes, but as an act of national catharsis, it hasn't been without merits. It has briefly exorcised some bloody desires, and therefore served its brutalizing purpose. The question of how many Americans now believe that we "should not have gone over in the first place" is entirely irrelevant. At the moment when that question was relevant, America answered as it did, and off we went. The only point at which national opposition to a war actually matters is prior to the war. You'll note that those conditions almost never obtain. Wars are almost always popular at their outset. Once they begin, they too are self-perpetuating. Fire burns as long as there's fuel. Remember, we continued to fight in Vietnam even after the Congress cut off the dollar spigot. For nearly two years! That's warfare's tenaciuos hold on its own life, if nothing else.

This, I think, is one of the most fundamental arguments for anarchy. The truth is that in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, political necessities and practical considerations actually put a damper on the bloody public mood. I have no doubt that America in its panic would have blessed the use of nuclear weapons. Even as opinions on the war supposedly sour, there's remarkable tolerance for the horrors of torture. The souring mood is in any event a statistical illusion. What polls reveal is less opposition to the war--certainly not opposition to the bases of imperial warfare--than it is simple confusion. On all those questions pertaining to "what do we do now," Americans are perfectly divided, both by population and in their own minds. There are remarkable contradictions in polling results, all of which reduce to the desire to end the war but not to end it, for in ending it lies Consequence. You'll note that that's precisely the position of the majority of politicians in Washington.

The solution is dissolution.

In the year 1886, there was a Divine Prophet born in the State of North Carolina

MIAMI, Oct. 2 — Seven indigent Miamians accused of plotting to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago in the name of Islamic jihad went on trial here on Tuesday. Their lawyers said the defendants were not agents of Al Qaeda but pitiable bumblers framed by the government.

-The Times

Seven, count 'em, indigent (indigent!) Miamians. Now there are three words to strike fear in the heart of Americans. The men were also, evidently, martial arts enthusiasts, who were also "'training for hand-to-hand combat'" at the Liberty City building with swords, knives and nunchucks," according to the government informant who entrapped them. I too knew some martial arts enthusiasts, mostly in high school, all of whom were training for hand to hand combat. Only one detail seems amiss. Ah, wait, no. No. All in order:

[D]esperate urban residents who smoked a lot of marijuana .

Fuck. Fucking. Yeah. America.

These men were devotees of the Moorish Science Temple, a religion that could only exist in America.

So what you have here, it turns out, are a bunch of loser, scifi-fantasy, stoner dweebs dressed to kill for ComiCon, and they're being prosecuted for trying to blow up the Sears Tower. Dudes and dudettes, I will tell it to you straight. When IOZ was a loser, scifi-fantasy, stoner dweeb with a sunken chest and an eduring belief that martial artistry would come through the power of wishes, daydreams, and Kung Fu reruns, IOZ had a plan to blow up the whole world. Obviously I can't discuss the operation details, but suffice it to say it involved a space ship and a substantial harem of oddly androgynous young ladies who bore an uncanny physical resemblence to Brent, my gym-class lockermate.

All I Want for Christmas

One of these.

Thanks for the tip, A.

Hey Faggot!

I’m not worried about getting rammed up the ass by a Muslim, you jackass. I’m flummoxed by Gleen’s running interference for homosexual-murdering regimes and then turning around and lecturing us on our insensitivity to a particular brand of cultural difference that seems to inculcate that practice.

Of course, none of this should surprise anyone, because whatever that cultural difference may consist in, it cannot possibly be as dangerous as Neo-cons.

In fact, Gleen pretty much embodies Lacanian disembodiment[.]

-Dan Collins of the website Smart Spermatazoa, explaining that his pornocultural fascination with fags is not, in fact, a fascination with fags

Dear Dan Collins,

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Gros bisous,
IOZ

America, I'm Through

About a month ago I popped into the bar to grab a drink after a long evening of working on the house. There I bumped into an on-again, off-again buddy of mine who was at that moment soaked through with drink and lamenting the impending hammerblow of a breakup that everyone who knew him and the young lady involved saw coming from a year away. "Why doesn't she like me?" he moaned. I'm a fan of the hard but obvious truths out of which avoidance we make so much trouble for ourselves.

"Because," I told him, "You couldn't go ten seconds without needing some increasingly, ridiculously ardent affirmation of her love for you. Dude. It was totally annoying. No one likes that shit."

"Wow," he said, "Really? I did that?"

"Like a puppy with the gift of speech," I told him.

"Jesus," he murmured into his drink. "I didn't realize." He paused, stared into the middle distance, sighed. Then he turned to me and said, "Well, at least we're friends. You like me, right? We're buddies, right?"

By request now I wade into a similarly shallow pool. Anne Applebaum, the one woman on earth who wishes that NATO looked a little more like the Warsaw Pact, that the democratic intransigence of our putative allies was a little more Hungary, 1957, asks with the welling eyes of a fucked-and-chucked coed, Why don't they like us? Rather than asking decently--which is to say at a bar, sorrows drowning in a sea of whiskey and cheap domestic bottles--she asks extravagantly in the pages of the Washington Post:

"Why do they hate us?" Much ink has been spilled over the past six years in attempts to answer that question. By contrast, not enough attention has been paid to what is, in some ways, a more perplexing conundrum: Why don't they like us as much as they used to?

"They" in this latter question are our very, very closest allies. By this I don't mean France, or even Canada, democracies that are part of the Western alliance but that have never particularly warmed to the idea of American leadership, whether political or cultural. The French have always been huffy about NATO, and downright nasty about Hollywood; the Canadians have actually formed their national identity around being "not-Americans." No, the more interesting question is why support for American leadership has declined among our traditional friends: Britain, Poland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands.

I suppose that sixty years is a long time for so young a nation as ours, but I'm not sure that Germany, against whom we've fought two vast global conflicts, nor Italy, against whom we fought one, nor Italy and Poland combined, which before the war were to the industrial wage-slave trade what Africa once was to the Plantation economy, nor even the little Netherlands, for whom we've never had anything resembling either friendship or enmity, but rather charmed indifference mixed with touristic affection, can be called "traditional friends." Even Britain, she of the Special Relationship, has been a stolid supporter for a shorter duration than we like to imagine. Read Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower for a fine background in British-American enmity right up to the era of the First World War.

Our traditional friends, therefore, are really the states that Applebaum judges to have been the most compliant in the post-war period--not an unreasonable measure, surely, but not the measure she's talking about. Meanwhile France, the closest thing America actually has to a traditional friend, gets it for being "huffy about NATO, and downright nasty about Hollywood." France was "huffy" about NATO because Britain and the US refused the French government a coequal role in the alliance, and because--here the past is prologue--Britain and the United States declined to join a French coalition of the willing in Algeria. Yes. Britain and the United States saw France engaging in a futile colonialist effort against a native insurgency and thought it wiser to remain aloof. Plus ça change. As for Hollywood--can a nation which still reveres le cowboy really hate American movies? I lived in France, and had no trouble seeing the latest Hollywood fare anytime I wanted. It's true that French critics and French festivals hate and shun big studio vehicles. It's true that American critics and American festivals also shun big studio vehicles. Constructing global alliances over the respective popularity of Michael Bay is, in any event, pretty fucking silly.

And what's Canada done to deserve such scorn? Let's note that Canadians haven't "actually formed their national identity around being 'not-Americans.'" They formed their identity as a post-Commonwealth, multilingual social democracy. Being "not American"--which is to say generally friendlier and less violent--is mere affirmation of an extant beingness. I'm not certain what it means to "warm to American leadership," but the Amero-Canadian border, the longest undefended land border in the world--probably in the history of the world--has got to be warmth of some kind to something.

Here, at last, is what our friends, traditional and otherwise, might tell America at the bar. America, you're big, mean, paranoid, self-pitying, violent, unpredictable, fickle, self-satisfied, demanding, clingy, pouty, mercurial, vengeful, arbitrary, and dumb. You are in other words every boyfriend whose strong arms and handsome chin grew less attractive as the first date wore on into a relationship and the true outlines of your character overgrew the nice lines of your chest. You've got a nice ass, America, but you're a bad sport and you've got a shitty sense of humor.

Blow Ye Hurricanoes

Clarence Thomas has written a book in which he explains how his pappy supported him with a mixture of tough love, regular love, and religion. Is there any person in public life about which the same can't be said. If you are not yet famous, you can become so by publishing a book about how your junkie mother took your anal virginity with a strap-on in front of her meth dealer boyfriend and his trucker buddies when you were a mere lad of ten. And it willturn out you're a woman, or some shit. But if you're already famous, then the recipe is always the same. Tough love, regular love, and old-timey religion. Also, Anita Hill is a slut who masturbates with a plaster Jesus. Anyway.

Clarence Thomas is such a national apotheosis. Fantastically powerful and monomanicacally self-pitying, he is that uniquely American character who flatters himself as a self-made man and laments his own Job-like persecution at the hands of a series of indefatigable and largely imaginary enemies. If the man had daughters, he'd be well on his way to demanding accounts of the magnitude of their love.

Sweet Charity

Ezra Klein and Megan McArdle are hardly on the same page when it comes to taxes, tax policy, or anything else that has to do with money, so it's a pleasure to see them both inhabiting the same framework of total ignorance. A pox on both your houses! Awesome! Here's McArdle:

I agree that the self-congratulatory round of charity events in New York City is rather spectacularly useless and self-serving. No one who buys expensive tickets to a charity gala should be preening themselves on their fine charitable instincts.

What happens in a charity dinner or auction is that people get something they value, for which they pay somewhat more on the grounds that "it's for charity". But they deduct, not the price premium they were willing to pay for a charitable event, but the entire value of the purchase.

Now that would be true if it were true. In fact most gala tickets and charitable donations to fancy museums and the like are not 100% tax deductible. If McArdle or Klein had ever gotten an invitation or purchased a black-tie gala ticket for anything at all, they'd have realized this, for The Joe Schmoe Center for the Performing Arts would've sent them a tax deduction information form letting them know that the $10,000 they just paid for that 8-top table is, say, $8,000 deductible. Why?

Because nonprofits are required by law to assess a fair market value for any benefits, services, gift bags, entertainment, etc. that they provide their galagoers. If you paid $500 to the Joe Schmoe Center for the Creative Arts for a seat at the gala season opener, then $100 of that goes to the ticket value and $50 is dinner and complimentary drinks and $10 is free valet. Which means that you don't deduct $500. You deduct $440. There's certainly fudging around the edges, but the gist is that you only get to deduct what's going directly to the nonprofit's coffers as development revenue.

Leave that aside. Draw closer. I will tell you a secret. Galas do not make money. When you read that The Anywhereseville Museum Benefit raised $100,000, you're reading a lie. That money is above the direct costs of the event, but it's eaten up by all sorts of indirect costs, from staff time to internal rebilling of rental costs, on down the line. Why, then, hold a benefit?

The answer is that the benefit is a reward to people who are already giving you money. A $500/plate gala rewards people who are already giving you $1,000/year; $10,000/year; hundreds of thousands a year for the folks at the corporate and foundation tables. The gala is a nice thing to do for the people who support you, and yet they're still willing to pony up and arm and a leg for the privilege of eating some dry banquet food and sipping subpar wine during the boring speeches. Now it may bug Klein that these "billionaire hedge fund managers" are giving to the Metropolitan Opera and not a soup kitchen, but the idea that the government should disincentivize giving to the arts in order to cajole the rich into supporting the poor through charity is an awfully impoverished perspective.

The Disappearing Homosexual Chronicles

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page is no fan of fags, women, and ethnic minorities unless, of course, some goofy foreign potentate begins harrassing them, at which point the Journal rises up in righteous indignation not only at the persecution thereof, but of the mean-spirited and hypocritical refusal on the part of this or that liberal icon to sufficiently denounce said horrors.

As you are probably aware, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad claimed that there are no gays in Iran. Well, doesn't the Southern Baptist Convention make strinkingly similar claims about its own ranks? Ahmedinejad also claims to be something more or less like a head of state, which is as true of him as it is of Queen Elizabeth. True, in other words, but not true.

Here is the Journal:

So when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the startling claim at Columbia University last week that "we do not have homosexuals in Iran like you do in your country," it offered what could have been a learning opportunity to those who think Iran is just another misunderstood regime with an equally misunderstood president.

Is the Iranian régime misunderstood? Not by me. Personally, I don't plan to vacation there anytime soon, but neither do I intend to carpet bomb the place. Into my worldview I admit the possibility of a territory between those extremes. I could say the same about Chad or Estonia. Such are the wages of reason. It is true that Iran has as a figurehead a demagogic weirdo, but no nation escapes such fates entirely. Does Iran repress its gays? Oui, bien sûr. But an invasion seems unlikely to rectify that particular problem. Iraq, one notes, looks nothing like the West Village, nor yet Chelsea, although across sects and social divides, its men do engage a charming affinity for the Tom-of-Finland look.

The Journal heaves up some British liberal who noted that Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia, is preening, vainglorious, and altogether second-rate; that he chose to harp on free speech and to establish his jingo bona fides in the same speech, excoriating a man in a forum that dictated an unequal response. Had Ahmedinejad gone to the mic and called Bollinger a prancing ninny who thinks haranguing a captive audience is an example of moral cojones, he'd have been roundly called hysterical by everyone up to and including the Wall Street Journal. In truth, the Columbia forum proved regrettable for everyone involved. It was impossible to be in or near the lecture hall without being sullied by the floating detritus of someone else's asbestos ego.

If I were the sort of person who respected our institutions of higher education, the whole episode might trouble me. Fortunately there was only ever one kind of higher that went with my education. The rest I recognized as an expensive fraud, a long vacation. Everything about Bollinger's intro and Ahmedinejad's speech was a fraud. It was a simulated encounter--two callow propagandists obliging each other's need for a foil, and every word written about it, including all of these, further the tawdry spectacle.

Hessians

Blackwater USA now finds itself under a healthy heap of opprobium, but is this reasonable? Liberals who feel compelled by nationalism and daddy-complex fetishism to Support the Troops™ are pleased to have an opportunity to draw attention to the bloody toll of the war without having to confront the plain fact that "contractors" play an exceedingly minor roll in the carnage. "Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005," says the Times. Well, how many of the Marines engaged in? Is Blackwater USA piloting the jets that daily bomb civilian infrastructure? It's true that there are many soldiers of fortune in Iraq, and that they're largely unfettered and unaccountable, but here's the interesting addendum: the same is true for the Army! Cool.

There is an effort underway to further deligitamize the American occupation of Iraq without deligitamizing the principle instrument of the policy. Private contractors provide the opportunity to wax and blather about the gross inhumanity of our partial conquest without sullying the Boys, who are, to a man, "performing brilliantly." Whatever that means. That's not to suggest that every soldier is a war criminal. Neither is every mercenary. But to call one criminal and not the other because patriotism crassly demands a distinction is hypocrisy of the worst kind.

Speaking of Cannabis sativa . . .

USA Today reports on weed growin' in Kentucky and concurrent eradication efforts. The efforts, needless to say, aren't working out so well. In the past 25 years, according to the article, marijuana production in America has increased ten times to 22 million pounds. These numbers make me so hard. 25 years ago, the population was about 230 million; today, it's about 300 million. If 25 years ago we produced a mere 2.2 million pounds of the stuff, that means, prestodigito, we have increased per capita pot production in the United States from a meager seventh of an ounce per person to a far more respectable one and one sixth ounces in this glorious year of our greening lord, 2007. And they say all the good jobs are leaving the country.

At the end of the article, state trooper Lt. Ed Shemely, head of the "eradication unit," laments:

You're never going to stop people from growing marijuana, but the idea is to make it so dad-gummed hard to grow they go to Tennessee or somewhere else.

Now that is some fancy police talk right there, so to help you understand the Napoleonic depths of this Hammurabian legal mumbojumbo, this Augustan application of the intricacies of English common law, this geographical, geological, astrolabial, Numeorian, antediluvian, post-Lapsarian, phrenological, ecological, horticultural, phenobarbytic invention in the key of Cop, I have created this helpful visual aid:

I Was Able to Interpret this Feeling Correctly, Mandrake. Loss of Essence.

Somewhat noted around Netrootsia is Tom Friendman's mea sorta culpa, "9/11 Is Over." Me, I'd have called it, "9/11 Is So Over," but the Who Is IOZ? style guide is looser of tongue and wrist than the Times. Of interest to our soi-disant antiwar liberals is this passage:

9/11 has made us stupid.

To this observation, the ever-forgiving Jim Henley avers that it "has also made us cowardly and mean," before writing far kinder things about Friendman than the modern Hecataeus deserves. To Friedman cruelly and Henley kindly, I challenge: Whaddaya mean made us, boys?

Tom Friedman, you may recall, was stupid long before AD 2001. Prior to his incarnation as a sage of orientalist conventional wrongness, he was a roving rube for corporate marketing executives, armed with a subscription to BusinessWeek, an Economist from the airport newsstand, and a mobular cellulile telleephone. Yee-haw. He surrounded shopworn PR slogans with I'm-Okay-You're-Okay middle-management motivational-poster mush, and proposed that the world after the Cold War was going to be about the triumph of gadgets over something called Tradition, a category about whose borders Friedman is obligingly hazy. That was a clue for anyone willing to read closely. The world isn't about anything. Friedman culminated this phase by penning a book called The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which awfulness all of my minor powers of language are inadequate to describe. Wikipedia introduces it thusly:

The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a 1999 book by Thomas L. Friedman that posits that the world is currently undergoing two struggles: the drive for prosperity and development, symbolized by the Lexus, and the desire to retain identity and traditions, symbolized by the olive tree. He claims he came to this realization while eating a sushi box lunch on a Japanese bullet train after visiting a Toyota factory, and reading an article about conflict in the Middle East.

Here's a sentence that makes the verb posit seem too strong. Like most of Friedman's man-on-the-street moments, this event is clearly a fabrication, or to be fair, a clumsy conflation of many moments into a single moment so epiphanic that I'd call it Joycean, were it not so fucking retarded. The bento box is meant to represent Tradition, but bento boxes today are made of plastic, and the sushi of raw fish and rice that he would have been eating is a product of modern refrigeration bearing little resemblance to the traditional "sushi" of fermented rice. The bullet train represent "prosperity and development," but the Shinkansen opened in the booming sixties and had been proposed, in different forms, well before the Second World War. By the time Friedman hopped on, Japan was somnambulating through a decade of economic stagnation and its youth were dying their hair, making amateur internet porn with their girlfriends, and getting together for good old-fashioned suicide pacts--would that be Tradition? Olive trees are also meant to be Tradition, but who in the Middle East but olive growers gives a damn about olives? Olives aren't paying stipends to Saudi men; Iran isn't threatening to blow up olive tankers in the Straits of Hormuz if the US invades; and the US isn't threatening to invade over the groves.

Think. If Friedman had actually written a book about "the drive for prosperity and development . . . and the desire to retain identity and traditions," would 9/11 really have surprised and shocked him to such a towering degree as we witnessed? Would it have really unkeeled his world and sent it rolling through currents unknown? Would he have subsumed his jazz-finger happy-age globotopia talk for a little late-racialist jingoism about killin' some motherfuckers Over There? One does not go to bed Joan Baez and wake up Joe Strummer no matter how bad the acid or hard the heroin. Those sorts of transformations take time when one has actual convictions, no matter how looney-tunes those convictions might be. Friedman snapped immediately to attention and began crying for the dogs of war, along with a lot of other liberals who now join the mea kinda culpa with somber elegies to the now-departed jingo within. The claim, of course, is that they've all learned from the catastrophe in Iraq, but very few demonstrate a commitment to any sort of intellectual framework that will prevent the tragedy from finding outlet in farce. The pride that swells in such liberals when they look to Iran and say, "Aha, won't get fooled again!" sickens because it is so clear that they've absorbed no lessons other than "Troops dead: bad." While they continue to quibble about "planning for the postwar environment" and fret that a more strident commintment to anti-imperialism would render it difficult to bombard someone--Jesus, anyone! Fuck!--in Darfur, thus opening the sub-Sahara to the flower of peace and brotherhood, the current conflicts escalate. In their spare time, they judiciously parse the platitudes of Democratic candidates who will continue the same imperial policies as their Republican predecessor, albeit with a greater investment in circumspection.

Here is Friedman closing his recent Times piece:

We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy. Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July--ich is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced.

We are about the fourth of July. Oh, God, dude. Awesome. I'm about puppies, killer robots, spaceships, and bubblegum, and it has yet to get me that big promotion and raise. I too enjoy inhabiting the realm of pure ideas, but only on opioids with a healthy foundation of cannabis sativa. The longing for a "common purpose," much-expressed these days, is supposed to sound like JFK, but it calls to mind old Uncle Adolph rallying the people to a mythic Teutonic past full of Parsifalian derrying-do and spiritual purity. Those who paid attention at Bayreuth realized of course that although the music is sometimes lovely, the story is mad: dude spends seventeen straight hours wandering atonally in order to find the magic shit he needs to help some guy who got his balls cut off.

What I am saying, friends, is brief: When beneath the bullshit and under the orchestration you find men worried about potency, find shelter, for the bombs aren't far behind.

The Devil You Know

You've probably read that "a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate" if Candidate-for-Life Benito Giuliani takes the Republican nomination. It's a hollow threat--not because they wouldn't do it, but because Benito Giuliani is the Candidate-for-Life. That said . . .

Here's Democratic madwoman in the attic, Digby, crying for the nth time that the infotainment segment of the American economy (that is, the American economy) refuses to call these people radicals, whereas it mocks MoveOn etc. etc. ad inf. as a bunch of short-deck lunatics. In an update, she reveals the dark underbelly of the dim animal that is the Donkey:

My point is that a significant conservative constituency is actually threatening to run a third party candidate if they don't get their way and yet all we ever hear about is how the Democrats are being led down the path to perdition by the Move-On hippies who are pushing them to respond to the large majority of Americans who want the US to begin withdrawing from Iraq.

If you're at all like me, then you read this and wondered how any person with a pulse could conclude with the evidence at hand that the "Move-On hippies," along with that most popular stage dummy, the American People, "want the US to begin withdrawing from Iraq." They are, after all, busy trying to elect Democrats. And you know the saying about walking and chewing gum.

This is the standard operation for Digby and her Democrats: to bitch and moan that effective politics are presented in the media as effective politics. Meanwhile, her own coalition of timorous shut-ins toes the standard line: "More and better Democrats." I am not the only one to notice that the more precedes the better. The Democratic party has clearlyt noticed, for one.

If Digby, DailyKos, and the rest of Donkle Netrootsia were as serious as they endlessly claim to be about ending the war in Iraq, about truly yanking the center of American politics a few centimeters to the left, about getting the Democratic party as an institution to represent their milquetoast democratic socialist agenda, then they'd do precisely what that "coalition of influential Christian conservatives" is doing: threaten to bolt the party; threaten to support a third party; threaten to stay home. If they were serious about it, they would indicate in certain terms to the party-in-Congress that their majority is contingent on their effectuation of a particular agenda. But dear lord, then Cokie Roberts might call them radicals, or worse, leftists! Someone call for the smelling salts.

Digby, DailyKos, and the rest of the Netrootsia isn't serious about ending the war in Iraq. That much is patently clear. Against efficacy they weigh respectability, whose measure is a Congressional majority and respectful copy by Tim Russert's staff writers. Ennobling, isn't it? Respectability wins every time, because respectability brings institutional authority. "Dirty hippies" is the grossest of self-flattery. The real dirty hippies are the black-masked anarchists, the sign-waving ANSWER kids who the imagined leftwing of the Democratic party roundly condemn for daring to bring up the School of the Americas or IMF shock-therapy economics at an antiwar rally. The real dirty hippies don't care what Katie Couric calls them.

None of this is new. From the earliest usenet boards to the moderated diaries of DailyKos (a progression that prooves, incidentally, the fraudulence of Progress), self-identified Democrats and liberal activists have hurled themselves against the edificial liberal media myth with ardor if not alacrity, heaping opprobium on a series of enemies, "memes," and purported misrepresentations. It's a crusade by way of displacement, for their anger at their imperial representatives can never boil over--anything more than a simmer and the Donkle might lose a seat in Congress. That would be one less Democrat, I note, to cede warmaking authority to the President, which would be one less unsuccessful, abortive primary challenge to keep the kids busy over at Kos.

Digby and the Democrats are as authoritarian as their not-so-counter counterparts of the Right. They're gaga over positions and titles. What a tawdry spectacle it was when the Democratic-majroity Congress came to session and they began crowing "That's Madame Speaker to you," about the woman who, many months later, has done precisely nothing to end the occupation of Iraq. Indeed, since the Democrats took over Congress, The United States has escalated the Iraq conflict and has laid groundwork both in the Persian Gulf region and in the American Legislature for aggression against Iran. But what is the cost of another million dead Iraqis compared to control of two branches of the Federal Government?

Now more than ever it should be clear that these people are equal enemies of peace.