Why Are They Allowed to Call Each Other Nigger, Part One Million

Oh, fuck it. In the spirit of the Holiday Shopping Season, I guess I'll say something about IQ. Everyone is talking about it these days, mostly because Bill Saletan over at Slate (no link--find it yerselfs) waded back in with the novel argument that niggaz iz stoopid and ayzhins iz good at the violin. Now I have mentioned IQ in the past, derisively as is my wont, and some wisenheimer always pops in to intone somewhere between mournfully and triumphantly: "Actually, IQ is a remarkably accurate . . . " blah blah blah, making the hardly debatable point that the Intelligence Quotient is a remarkably good measure of the Intelligence Quotient. And the ancient cubit was a remarkably good measure of the ancient cubit, but you don't see anyone building tunnels under the English Channel using the damned thing. Given the enthusiasms of its supporters, it's perfectly obvious that IQ is the current equivalent of phrenology, and if anyone among you doubts that Will Saletan and Andy Sullivan would break out the foreceps and start measuring skulls and noses if some crackpot racialist told them it was back in vogue, then frankly, I should probably give up.

Anyway, IQ. Mine, for instance, is higher than Saletan's or Sullivans. Oh, yes, I was a "gifted" child, and for many years I demonstrated my extrardinary capacity to imagine what this shape would look like if folded that way without actually folding anything! Square pegs, round holes, color-coded memory games. Yes, children, I am the Ubermensch, with Pure Will where my ribs once were and a wound that will not heal and a line-item veto on the laws of nature. And yet here I am, mere blogger and smart-ass, small-potatoes administrator in the backwaters of the American empire while all around me you boobs with your meager 120s and your poor spatial reasoning skills are wheeling and hustling yourselves to more money, more influence, more more than I have or likely shall ever have. That isn't sour grapes. I like my life. My only point here is that IQ ain't Smarts, Smarts ain't Genius, and Genius ain't Success.

Why, you are asking yourselves, are guys like Sally and Sully so godfuckingdamned interested in proving that niggers are a lot of watermelon-eating, crack-smoking, welfare-cheating, baby-having, oversexed, underbrained perennial losers? Why can't they be more like the jooz? Or the Indians? Well in the first place, it's because they're both a couple of vicious racists who, unlike some crotchety remnant Klansman in some holler in the Carolinas, haven't even got the strength of conviction for their own bigotry and have to hide behind some second-rate eugenicist to validate their distaste for the nigra. Also, it's a penis thing. You will notice that the major proponents of these theories of inferiority are white men, and that for some odd reason, they are not threatened by admitting that the Slants are smarter than they are. Well, the White Women aren't at stake in that imaginary equation, are they? But in larger part and in the political realm, these are people who seek to invalidate the social policies of 20th-century American liberalism without blaming themselves. "We tried," you see, "But the damned rappers just weren't good enough." You can see the same narrative shaping itself in, say, Hillary Clinton's ongoing accounts of the failure of the poor, stupid Iraqis to take advantage of the marvelous opportunity we've given them. The failure of liberal social policy is not in question, but to question the actual reasons for such failure would necessarily be to call into doubt certain presumptions about the efficacy and capacity of the state in matters into which it has forcibly extended its purview. That, of course, would be intolerable. Better to blame the blacks. It's not like they ever put down the sweet tea and forties and read Slate anyway.

Is. Was. Ever Shall Be.

Hi, my name is Paul Davies, and even though I've never done any original research myself, I have totally written stuff about the Anthropic Principle, which is totally not a half-assed attempt by scienticians in an age of renewed religiosity to pimp their own relevance by proposing a vast, cosmic tautology wherein things are the way they are because they were the way they were which means the must have been the way they must have been. Follow? Let me break it down for you. See, if things hadn't happened the way they happened, then things wouldn't be the way they are. They would be different! And that, like, proves that present outcomes dictate past conditions rather than the other way around. Or something like that. Frankly, I get confused when I try to explain it to a bunch of laymen like you rubes, but I assure you of one thing: It is not question-begging. It is very serious, scientifical analysis, or my name isn't Paul Davies.

Look. You might think I sound like a stoner drop-out who's read one too many Timothy Ferris pop-sci texts and spirituality gobbledygook in order to come up with some crackpot theory that quantum mechanics, the Catholic Church, and Aboriginal dreamtime all combine to necessitate a man-centered universe. But that's not the case. That's not it at all. All I'm saying is that physical laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. I'm mostly saying that because, frankly, I couldn't even make it through Godel, Escher, Bach, which was, to be honest, a little too deep for me, even though my graduate students keep telling me that all proofs rest on externalities and that to try to prove something otherwise is necessarily to engage in tautology, casuistry, circular argument, and bad faith. Yeah, well, who's the director and who's the fucking TA, smart guy? Here is my point: Faith. Stephen Jay Gould. The Laws of Physics. The Goldilocks Universe. Class dismissed.

His Dank Materials

After many, many, many people insisted I read it, I spent the few days prior to Thanksgiving reading Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy while the bread dough rose and so forth and so on. The idea behind these recommendations, so far as I could tell, was singularly that I am a vicious atheist who was noting even before Terrence McNally stole the idea that any savior who spent all his time palling around with twelve dudes and one hag was surely a big old homofuckingsexual. And I will admit that I found the first volume of this trilogy rather charming and inventive. I read it quickly, and I was eager to go on.

Wow. Not since Godfather Three has a series . . . I am at a loss, really, to express just how disappointingly turgid and ridiculous were the latter two volumes of the series. If you are an author, friends, and contemplating a trilogy, take my advice: Don't.

Outcome-Based Education

Someday Rudy Giuliani will look back on this moment and wonder why he didn’t run as himself.

-David Brooks

Well, that probably depends on whether or not Candidate-for-Life Benito Giuliani wins, an unlikely but not impossible scenario. In any event, what's curious is Brooks conviction that whatever Benito said back when he was the Duce of New York was necessarily his true, deep, interior conviction, an article of faith such as it were, whereas whatever crazy doxological swamp-gas he utters now that he's trying to tie up the young-earth vote. But of course, Giulinai could believe truly believe that the homosexual Jewish descendents of the extraterrestrial, shape-shifting reptilian progenitors of the human race still control our destiny through the machinations of the Rothschild banking family, and might have only said all that prior bullshit because you cannot attain to Gracie Mansion without tossing a few bones to the queers, spics, and niggers who actually command some clout in the five boroughs.

The search for Authenticity in politicians is inevitably a curious affair, but it's made all the more so by the conviction of the non-governing members of the governing class that holders of and aspirants to office must surely share their own milquetoast convictions. David Brooks assumptions about Giuliani, note, are that he shares in private the same fundamental principles as David Brooks. Why, after all, would he not. Indeed, if you jaunt through Brooks past, similar writings, you will find an uncanny conviction that whomever it is may be saying this or that to please so-and-so or such-and-such, but at heart, in private, they share the same principles as David Brooks: middle-of-the-road, upper-class, colonial-home-owning white pablum of the sort that you will hear at every lower-end country club in the United States of America.

Driving While Black

A lot of nice white liberals have recently discovered, courtesy of a few prevalent taserings, that, holy cow, the cops are pigs.

Now this is not to imply that I feel anything other than sympathy and outrage, but if I may, nigga, please:

Police in the country are now allowed to torture speeders by the side of the highway in order to get them to comply.

Yo, Digs, the five-oh been doin that shit forever. Far be it from me to rain on anyone's outrage parade, but the police have been torturing black folks for speeding--or not speeding--since he first black man drove the first car through the wrong neighborhood--or not the wrong neighborhood.

Anyway, this is what you might call the Niemollerian principle at work. First they came for the such-and-such, and then they came for me. I'm just saying.

And By The Way, Which One Is Pink?

Mencken said that the Americano is distinguished in all fields and endeavors by his capacity to believe that which is palpably untrue, and by the headlines you can sense that statement's palpable truth. What's happening in Iraq is not "progress" by any lights, dear god. It is right now worse than it has ever been, "reductions in violence" or whatever the going phrase is notwithstanding. Timorous American liberals are reenacting their prewar failures, casting themselves as an opposition but hiding behind the hedges. For fear of being shown wrong a year in the future, they will not state plain facts. Fortunately, we're all gonna die. So here it is, unvarnished. America has overseen the effective ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, and there you have it. Reductions in violence. Elsewhere and otherwise, we have thoroughly empowered the very people who will soon ramp up their efforts to reacquire the reins of state power. The Anbar awakening my ass. You might as well call it "a third force," pace Graham Greene. Do you want to know why they have effectively cooperated in attacking and undermining the operational efficacy of all those home-grown Iraqi terrorist groups who made the last year the deadliest ever? Because now that they are organizing, they don't need a lot of fuckin' amateurs fucking things up. This is not a difficult point to grasp if you simply stop viewing Iraqis as naive little children and understand that these people who now claim to have allied themselves with America are political sophisticates. The chaos served their interests for a time. If you want to worry, worry about the brutal efficacy with which they've clamped down on something that a hundred and fifty thousand American soldiers couldn't control. These are parties with a political agenda, and America has effectively abandoned the weak government that America itself set up to underwrite the aspirations of that government's principle domestic enemy. So, you know, everyone who's spent the last five years pointing out that the real difference between Iraq and Vietnam is that in Vietnam there was an organized, ideological enemy that sought political control of the Vietnames state whereas in Iraq there's just a bunch of camel jockey's blowing shit up because they're a lot of primitive, superstitious sand niggers with no politics and too much plastique can kindly sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. Of course, we never overtly allied ourselves with the Viet Cong, but whatever. Here's the point, dudes. At some point not very far off, you are going to see a substantial uptick in directed violence against the current Iraqi government and the American occupation forces who have convinced themselves and their media interlocutors that they're only in it for the money. We know which Lebowski you are, Lebowski. You're not dealing with morons here.

Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! She explained.

As you can surely imagine, I look forward to the upcoming election the way I look forward to anal sex after bad Chinese--something that is supposed to be uplifting, beautiful, and stimulating to the high pleasure centers of the brain reduced to something shitty and uncomfortable. I have not watched the so-called debates because, good, sweet Jesus, why? But mon ami James Wolcott to whom I owe a debt for recently bumping some traffic my way has asked a question, or posed a ponderable, and I feel that I can offer an answer. Sir James of Ocicat:

I don't understand why these televised debates can't be held in a more intimate studio setting so that the candidates don't feel compelled to SHOUT there ANSWERS back to Wolf Blitzer, who himself is BELLOWING as if trying to be heard above a raging inferno.

James is being coy in order to get his knocks in, a practice, by the way, of which we fully approve here at Who Is IOZ? He understands perfectly well that in the simulacra-simulacrum-simulacra of The Process, the whole Grand-Guignol studio audience schtick is there precisely to convince the producers that they are convincing the public that This Is Not A Production. This is a sort of bastard-retarded McLuhanism: If there is no medium, there is no message, at least not on the part of CNN, which exists beyond the veil of this world like some spectral supernaturalism of a trade-paper rip-off of Doc Tolkein. Their entire reality being a double-mediated, thrice-removed reprocessing of an already subjective reality, the poor bastards in the control room never consider the perfectly obvious point that in Real Life™ people do not gather under the kleigs to argue politics while a gang of pre-wrangled partisans hoots--or does not hoot, as the Format requires--them on. To them the presence of Other People indicates a degree of actuality in the same way that a laugh-track indicuates a degree of humor, and lord help you if you try to throw a neither/nor on that scenario at someone who works in infotainment, for they will look at you as if you just told them that Santa Claus is broadcasting a top 40 radio countdown through the fillings in your molars.

Anyway, the shouting. In the first place, shouting is Wolf Blitzer's only mode of address. I fear that crouching on the hotel floor while bombs went off overhead during the first Gulf War permanently damaged his inner ears. My grandmother is quite hard of hearing these days. Every room in her home contains a TV, every one of them is always on, and all of them are turned up so high that Helen Keller could understand every word by feeling the vibrations in the floorboards. I walked in just the other day and Blitzer's Phillip K. Dick scream-a-thon, the "Situation Room" was playing in the living room. There he was standing in front of 4,000 moniters each subdivided into 97 tiny image insets all talking simultaneously. And there he stood, bellowing.

Now if that were not bad enough, Blitzer speaks English as if it were his eighth language, and he has never mastered its interrogative form. I am somewhat sympathetic. Having never quite achieved native fluency in French, I often find myself constructing elaborate statements followed by a wilting n'est-ce pas when I'm trying to ask something in that language. Blitzer questions like an autistic Latvian on a three-day cocaine bender, shouting subjects and misconjugated predicates in rapid series until a whole edifice of somehow-related anecdotes and propositions sits teetering in the empire of the airwaves, then shuffles his ever-gaping yawn-hole into a preposterous frown and asks everyone to raise their hand if they agree. The reason that they shout back at him is the same reason I shout at my grandmother: I figure she won't hear me if I don't, and besides, I have no fucking idea what she's talking about in the first place. Names and events from decades before I was born in neighborhoods I have never entered elide themselves into a miasma of sensecent nostalgia. Do I remember Johnny Kanootz who used to come into the bar, who they called Johnny Go-Go because of his girlfriend, or maybe because of his car, back in '64, when the Pirates still played at Forbes Field? Good god, no. This, friends, is what it's like to be poor John Edwards confronted by that bearded madman. You are half-afraid that in the middle of a sentence he's going to forget your name, start screaming, "Why are you in my house?!" and try to stab you with a butter knife. It is, in other words, at once deeply sad and thoroughly terrifying.

Food for Thought

What are you makin' for Thanksgiving, IOZ? Well, first note that I hate Turkey. I have eaten the innards of sea creatures that even the Japanese look on warily, but there's something about turkey that makes me gag. Also, the Boyfriend's mother who isn't allowed into my kitchen hates that we don't eat Turkey, so there's sadistic glee involved in planning an elaborate menu without it.

This year, our first course is a puréed garnet yam and yellow potato soup flavored with Assam tea. Shallots and garlic are first sautéed in duck fat, and then finely cubed potatoes and yams are added along with a mixture of aromatic spices, one bag of tea leaves, and a clarified stock made by slow-simmering a prosciutto butt. The ingredients are cooked until the yams and potatoes are soft enough be smashed and fluffed with a fork, then they are puréed together and held warm in a pot on the stove.

After the soup, we'll cleanse our palattes with a salad made with peppery greens--arugula and watercress, probably--dressed with a mixture of goat's-milk yogurt, mint, citrus, and black pepper.

We'll eat tartes flambées, an Alsatian dish quite similar to a thin-crust pizza, topped with crème fraiche, gruyère cheese, caremalized onions, and pancetta.

Our main course will be a whole fish--snapper? sea bass?--cooked en papaillote, which is to say in parchment paper in a hot oven, seasoned according to the fish, but probably including small capers, sliced caper berries, toasted cumin, salt, and white pepper. It will be accompanied by several contorini: wilted spinach flavored with lemon and carraway; basmati rice steamed with coriander seed and cardomon; and a "sweet and sour" squash dish in which acorn squash is first steamed, then sauteed in olive oil, then glazed in a reduction of honey and red wine vinegar.

Dessert will be cheese--Dutch Beemster flavored with nettles, a Brie de Meaux, and a variety of Pyrenees with green peppercorns--green apples and red pears.

There will be three breads: a traditional french baguette, a rustic loaf made with semolina, and a large boule flavored with carraway.

Mission: Accomplished

There is much banter in the blogs this morning about a talk given by "military strategist" Stephen Biddle, originating in this note from attendee Marc Lynch. Laff line:

Without getting in to his arguments or my reservations, I just wanted to lay out Biddle's best case scenario as he presented it: if everything goes right and if the US continues to "hit the lottery" with the spread of local ceasefires and none of a dozen different spoilers happens, then a patchwork of local ceasefires between heavily armed, mistrustful communities could possibly hold if and only if the US keeps 80,000-100,000 troops in Iraq for the next twenty to thirty years. And that's the best case scenario of one of the current strategy's smartest supporters. Man.

Friends, readers, fellow fags, and breeders, gather 'round and tilt your ears. Herein, I shall endeavor to resolve your confusion on this point. Take every sentence you have read, written, or spoken about the Iraq War in the last five years, and replace the word "War" with the word "Occupation." Now marvel as the scales lift from your eyes. By way of example, let's turn the typical--

Stephen Biddle says the War in Iraq is going to last for twenty to thirty years.

--to the correct--

Stephen Biddle says that the United States will occupy Iraq for twenty to thirty years.

Was that so terribly hard?

Confusion on this point is common even among the majority of the ostensibly antiwar community, in particulawr among those who self-identify as Democrats. Though they're happy to bitch about "accepting Republican frames," and so forth and so on through the many permutations of that complaint, they largely accept a very elementarily false premise about this war: namely, that it is a war. But while it's true that Iraq is restive, that states of conflict exist throughout that territory, and that words like war and occupation are really terms of art, the conceptual weakness of this interpretive framework is quite clear. It accepts prior to analysis the given that the necessary end for the war is the substantial removal of American troops from Iraq. Whether that end is accompanied by some sort of political or strategic success--the flowering of democracy, the institution of a stabilizing military government, whatever--is really quite secondary to the main, common conclusion that when the war ends, in victory or defeat or some indefinable state in between, the boys will come home.

There is a particular irony here for those of us who have mocked and lambasted the President for his notorious Mission Accomplished speech on the deck of the aircraft carrier. The irony is this: viewed properly, that statement wasn't such a stretch. Since the goal of our invasion was occupation, the first brief period of warfare during which the United States engaged in the territorial conquest of the nation of Iraq was, in fact, concluded with the accomplishment of its goal. The flaw in reasoning since then has been to assume that the presence of "80,000 to 100,000" American soldiers in Iraq is somehow extraneous to our purpose there. Reader, the presence of those troops is our purpose there.

Real Print

The crazy bastards at Buffalo's The BEAST have decided to publish a little bit of IOZian wisdom. Evidently, they took a look at the miserable reputation of their juvenile, unserious ragazine and decided that having a deranged catamite drag them even further into the reactionary muck was a good decision. Thanks, fellas!

Open Wider. Good. A Little More. Yeah. That's It.

Bush's response to the crisis has been shaped to a great degree by a continuing White House calculation that Musharraf represents its best chance to put Pakistan on a path to democracy[.]

-Michael Abramowitz in the Post

Dear Michael Abramowitz,

COUP IN PAKISTAN: THE OVERVIEW; PAKISTAN ARMY SEIZES POWER HOURS AFTER PRIME MINISTER DISMISSES HIS MILITARY CHIEF

Bloodlessly,
IOZ