Burn like a fire, blaze like fire in Cairo

Quoheleth Matthew Yglesias:

Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and a brilliant and original thinker and advocate for the intelligent deployment of American power in order to build a more just and humane world.

There's nothing worse than people of obvious intelligence and felicity using cheap euphemism because they are embarrassed (and rightly!) by their own committments. Matthew Yglesias is lauding Samantha Power for her advocacy of killing people in other countries at our discretion in order to affect social and political changes. They believe that they possess the capacity to judge societies sufficiently or insufficiently equitable, free, "just", "humane", modern, etc. They believe that they can grasp local complexity easily enough in the more backwards regions of the world to effectively adjudicate others' civil conflicts. They believe that as Americans, they have a right to kill people to accomplish these ends. They know that such ends have rarely, if ever, been accomplished, but they're pretty sure that's just because Samatha Power and Matthew Yglesias, or people like Matt Yglesias and Sam Power, haven't been the ones in charge. It's only a question of getting their kind of people.

I am going to suggest to you all, madman that I am, that there is exactly no moral distinction between killing people to take their oil and killing them to bring them the wonders of anglo-saxon common law, the jury system, and franchise democracy.

History Isn't a Judge, but Time Is an Executioner

Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has been holding hearings on the administration’s negotiations with Iraq over the legal status of American troops in Iraq beyond Mr. Bush’s presidency. He said that the administration had rebuffed demands to bring any agreement to Congress for approval, and had largely succeeded.

“They’re excellent at manipulating the arguments so that if Congress should assert itself, members expose themselves to charges of being soft, not tough enough on terrorism,” he said. “My view is history is going to judge us all.”

-The Times

Somewhere even as we speak someone is being tortured for Bill Delahunt, but hey, at least no one will accuse him of being soft on terrorism. I recall Susan Sontag giving an interview to Kurt Anderson, one of the many etherizing occupants of NPR studios, just after her book Regarding the Pain of Others came out, and there was a moment when her voice nearly raised and you could almost hear her rising out of her seat: "These are human beings who do this," she said, speaking of certain unspeakable horrors that arrive inevitably with war. "We have to stop being surprised!"

In other words, the work of historians is largely obfuscatory. Nazi Germany, how could it happen? Reams and reams and reams and libraries and films and monuments and museums, but as you can see above, the question, more accurately put, would be: Nazi Germany, how could it not have happened. Martin Niemöller, requiescat in pace.

Foodie Friday, Numero Whatever

The rediscovery in America of real Italian cuisine, led by guys like Batali and Bastiniach, has been a great pleasure. The diversity of Italian regional cooking, and the way the new Italian chefs have emphasized their cooking as a kind of attitude and mindset rather than a foolish fidelity to non-native ingredients is a pleasure. During the long interregnum between the early 20th-century wave of Italian immigration and the renaissance of American Italian cooking, we got a lot of red sauce, and one of the saddest losses of that time was the loss of bolognese to "meat sauce," a tepid condiment of bland tomato sauce, dried seasoning, and crappy beef.

There are, of course, as many bolognese as there are Bolognese. This is my take. I use bucatini, a popular Roman pasta that is like a very thin drinking straw

Bucatini bolognese

1lb ground beef (higher fat – 85/15)
1lb ground pork
1/4lb thick-cut pancetta
1lb peeled, diced tomatoes; good canned diced tomatoes are best out of season
1 medium onion, very finely diced
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 medium dried chile
2 cloves
Freshly-ground nutmeg
Whole milk yogurt
Extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt
Black pepper

Chop the ground meat with a large knife – it helps it to break up into smaller bits as you brown it. Dice the pancetta as finely as you can.

In a large, thick-bottomed sauté pan, saute the pancetta lightly in a very little bit of olive oil until most of the fat has rendered into the pan. Remove the meat with a slotted spoon and reserve. Add the ground beef and lightly brown it in the mixture of oil and pancetta fat. Remove with a slotted spoon and reserve. Add the ground pork and lightly brown it in the mixture of oil, pancetta fat, and beef fat. Remove with a slotted spoon and reserve. (The process mixes the flavors, but it actually reduces the fatiness of an admittedly very fatty dish.)

In a large pot, heat oil and garlic, and then when the oil is hot, add the diced onion. Cook briefly over high heat, then salt and reduce the heat to medium. Cook until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the browned meat, the tomatoes, and the chile. Salt generously. Add a pinch of ground nutmeg and two whole cloves. Simmer covered for 1 hr. After an hour, cook your noodles. Add three generous tablespoons of good whole milk yogurt (replaces the traditional cream), stir together, and simmer for another 10-20 minutes while you boil water and cook your noodles. Salt and pepper to taste.

Drain the noodles when still a minute or two undercooked. Return them, wet, to their pot and toss over medium-high heat with some sauce so that it binds to the noodle. Cook together until just al dente. Serve with just a little additional sauce on top.

Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly

At Whatever It Is, I'm Against It, a totally rad blog that I have just added to the rolls, a fine comment on the dauphin's latest eructions, the occasion of which was the 5th anniversary of the Ministry for the Defense of the Volk und Reich. I am struck, as was WIIIAI, by this rough in the rough:

Our enemies understand that America’s economy relies on uninterrupted use of the Internet--and that a devastating attack in cyberspace would be a massive blow to our economy and way of life.

Pace William Gibson, but what? I'd like to bomb the fuck out of Oz, but problem is, it's only a metaphor

My lord, the crown which I have borne so long has given enough of vanity in my time. I beseech you not to augment it . . . when I am so near my death.

My good buddy la_rana assures us that it isn't a dictatorship, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Most Americans will seriously assure you that it cannot be so, though, since after all we have elections. But only in the opinion pages of The New York Times and are elections considered intrinsically good. Elections are a means of deciding succession in government. There's a reasonable case to be made that they can produce fairer results, by which I mean a broader sense among the governed population that their rulers guard their subjects' interests, if not necessarily better results, by which I mean rulers effectively guarding their subjects' interests. Let's say "free and fair" elections, then, obeying the cant of our times, and reminding ourselves that fairness alone isn't an overriding virtue.

There is not, however, a defensible case to be made that elections are categorically different than any other method of selecting leadership, be it hereditary succession or decisions by some People's Central Committee or the drawing of lots. There is no transcendent, eternal order that dictates what is or isn't a meritous means of deciding who gets to be the next big man. These are all human contrivances, part of no natural order, based on no particular imperatives. Would the state of our government really decline if we were to select our representatives by lottery? Over the course of a couple centuries? I wonder.

The fact that our dictator is chosen by a mediated plebiscite rather than, say, elected by the Roman Senate, is really quite irrelevant to the powers that he possesses. What is the purpose of orderly succession? Why do states and governments strive for it? Because orderly succession is one of the fundamnetals of continuity of government. Change that you can believe in!

Anals of Our Discourses

Walking toward the office today, I passed two fellows of the Homo meatheadicus variety. Their 30%-off no-wrinkle poplin-cotton pocketless point-collared Banana Republic Oxfords stretched tight across the feminine curvature of their overworked pectorals, and the roundness of their faces belied the well-into-their-thirties that their poorly-concealed spare tires gave away. The one dude said to the other dude, "Yeah, I'd be jacked off too." He meant it, clearly, as an indicator of anger, but really, does that work? I don't know about you, but I feel the expression should be used exactly oppositely from that. "I just landed a big raise! I'm totally jacked off!"

I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.

Well, Matt, when you realize that Abe Foxman is not a Jew, but a foreign agent, then it all makes a lot more sense. Abe Foxman knows that John Hagee isn't going to manipulate Russia and a trans-Islamic coalition to invade and destroy Israel, but he does know that John Hagee is going to do yeoman's work keeping the slack-jawed and hair-lipped portions of the Republican party, but which we mean everyone who lives between the headwaters of the Ohio and the Sierras, reliably pro-Israel, whatever that means.

The View from the Panopticon

Brazil was more prescient that 1984. It more accurately observed the decrepitude of Dystopia. The weakness of Orwell's work was in his villains, his inner party members who really knew what they were doing. If you haven't seen Gilliam's film, or haven't seen it in a while, pick it up, watch it, and then read this article. Tuttle, Buttle, etc.

I fear a surveillance society not because I think that the government will actually catch me in my subversion, but because I fear that it will think that it's caught me in my subversion. The pressure to "produce results" leads to the issuance of too many traffic tickets. Imagine what it will do when someone has to justify spending a bajillion dollars on some kind of algorithmic AI that's supposed to psychohistorically predict when a new 9/11 will change everything all over again forever. The more I order from Amazon, the kookier its recommendations for me. Entrail-reading isn't science, no matter how much one wishes it were so.

The Powderkeg of the Gift that Keeps on Giving Its Ulterior Motives

Admittedly my history of the Great War is a little shaky, but I seem to recall that secret treaties were some kind of problem or something.

The Fortunate Mistress

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

-Borges, "On Exactitude in Science"

Although I think Matt Y. is wrong about the neat split between popular and literary fiction, and although early audiences were perfectly capable of digesting fiction without the affectation of reportorial, first-person familiarity popular in early novels, he's definitely right to mock the pretense of "truth" in so-called memoirs vs. the idea of mere verisimilitude in supposed fiction. Since there has been another recent spate of memoirists revealed to be serial fabricators, this time cashing in on the Holocaust porn industry rather than the Drug-redemption porn industry and the Quirky-family porn industry of the recent past, let me, as I have famously put it, just say this about that.

Firstly, anyone who is interested in the ethics of truth and fiction could save themselves a lot of headache by simply reading the collected works of J.M. Coetzee, who has already though about it longer, harder, better, and in far, far more detail with far, far greater rigor than you, I, or anyone else ever will . . . ever. Otherwise, the truth is that it was not early audiences that suffered from an inability to distill truth from fiction and vice-versa, but contemporary audiences which have the trouble. I will tell you straight up, yo, that 18th-century readers were not under the broad impression that Moll Flanders was a "real" person any more than 19th-century readers thought that Becky Sharp was a real person or middle-20th-century readers thought that the Joads were an actual family. 14th-century readers, admittedly few and far between, were not under the impression that Dante actually descended into hell. The traditions of parable and allegory and symbol are older than recorded history. We flatter our modernity by thinking that the palmy Greeks thought that The Odyssey was true in the same way that a David McCullough tome is true, but this conviction is highly doubtful. It is a rare culture that confuses its truths with its entertainments, and usually a doomed one at that.

Which brings us by commodius vicus to these good ol' United States of America in this Year of the Bored 2008. What we currently face is a culture--and I use the term loosely, like a well-worn gogo boy's behind--in which the reportorial pretensions of our entertainment industry, which includes everything from James Frey to Lou Dobbs, have perverted our entire moral imagination, so that by and large we believe that all moral instruction must proceed from that which we rather hilariously deem non-fiction. This attidude has been many decades in the making, and it has infected religion, literature, politics, art, ad inf. Biblical literalism of a sort that would've shocked the Nicenes is a fine example. "To Catch a Predator" is another. CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC are in their entirety. In attempting to discern a clean, Cartesian break between fiction and non-fiction, we have committed as grave--and as ridiculous--an error as the persistent foolishness that holds some separation between body and soul, physical and personal self. All writing is in fact fiction. There are no true books or false books. There are only good books and bad books.

In the Booth

We all thought we were very smart, but it happened very slowly, and we didn't notice until it was so far underway that there was nothing to do but to participate. Or maybe none of us was very smart and it happened more quickly and thoroughly than anything like it ought to happen. Whichever way, it seemed at first like the full flowering of democracy. We had friends who complained about the length, duration, and expense of campaigns, but after a long interval of apparent apathy, wasn't it commendable--shouldn't we have been congratulating ourselves?--that this process had once again captured the popular imagination? People were excited again. People felt that they were beginning to crack through the barriers and barbed wire (metaphorical, of course!) set up by the gatekeepers to power.

We didn't notice how attenuated it had all become. The preliminary contests began at earlier and earlier dates, and we cavilled about it a little, feeling that it violated some ineffable rule of common sense, but we were made complacent by the daily tick of results and polls. It seemed that every day some state was selecting someone. Then, while we were distracted by who was up and who was down, a few of us began to feel that the contests themselves were multiplying. How many states were there? Didn't that one vote already? We were distracted. It was difficult to be sure. Sometimes a prior contest was tinged or tainted by an obscure violation of an abstruse rule and had to be done over. Sometimes the results of a later contest overturned the decision of a preceding one.

Someone was always in the lead, or someone was always coming from behind, or someone was dropping out, or someone was throwing his hat into the ring. The results of one election determined who would carry momentum into the next election, and we expected that we would go to the polls and confirm the frontrunner, except when we surprised ourselves and someone surged out of the field. Then we confirmed the strength of the comeback, or we confirmed that the comeback was ephemeral. We weren't quite certain when it happened, but somehow we forgot when was the last time anyone won. All the old calendars were recalibrated to the pace and preponderance of campaigns, and the schedules of campaigns were calibrated to other campaigns, and somehow, somewhere along the way we forgot what year it was or what season, what the election was for or why anyone was running. At some point, we thought it had become mandatory to participate in the process. We couldn't be sure, but we felt it was probably safer to show up. Somehow the rate of participation always increased, and somehow the importance of each vote was greater than the last. When was the last time anyone went to work, or ate other than a boxed lunch? We are all pretty sure that someone is still in charge, but we aren't quite sure of what.

Viking Science

The refusal to brook the mere possibility that humans affect the climate based on some medievalist notion that man does not control nature has at its root a totally false assumption. Consider the goofy anecdote that illustrates the sorry point:

When Christopher Monckton, who served as a special adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, ponders the current political push to curb greenhouse gases linked to climate change, he thinks of King Canute.

According to Monckton, Canute -- the Viking who ruled England along with much of Scandinavia nearly a thousand years ago -- took his courtiers to the ocean's edge one day, set down his throne and ordered the tide not to come in. The tide, of course, came in, and the king got his feet wet.

The lesson? The king taught his advisers "humility," Monckton said, by showing them that even he, a king, could not control nature. In the same way, he argued, modern-day politicians should not fool themselves into thinking that humanity is having a big impact on climate.

Now interestingly enough, man can control the tides to a degree unimaginable to dear old Canute.

As for climate change, all sorts of organisms, from algae to rainforest hardwoods to farting cows, have throughout the history of the world most decidely affected the climate. The oxygen-emitting plants are the most pertinent example. The idea that billions of industrialized mammals not only don't alter the climate, but that they can't is pure fatuity. Perhaps an argument is to be made that climate change as currently observed is not catastrophic. Perhaps it's even beneficial on the net. Who knows? Let's just not engage the error of its impossibility.

The High Heels of Doom

La Condi, the belle de jour of the Bush administration, is, Chelsea forgive me my trespass, walking the Arab Street. The current topic is the "peace process." The term is a lie. The emphasis lies solely with the outcome, although the outcome--a "peace agreement"--is ill-defined. You can be sure that any party to negotiations whose opening gambit involves the assignation of blame rather than a statement of position does not intend to bargain in good faith. The transparent attempts by one party to shave off the more recalcitrant factions in another are also indicators of bad-faith. "We don't negotiate with bullies" is the first rhetorical refuge of a bully. Bullies tend to lose ground in negotiations, even despite some paper victories.

La Condi is in a tight spot. Cannon to the right of her, cannon to the left of her:

But highlighting the predicament in which the Bush administration has now found itself in as it tries to broker a Middle East peace deal, Ms. Rice has steadfastly refused to use the phrase “cease-fire,” even though several of America’s Arab allies, and even some Israelis, have said that what is needed is a negotiated end to hostilities between Hamas and Israel.

“I’m saying that we want the violence to stop,” Ms. Rice told reporters on her flight Monday as she headed to Egypt. “Call it what you will.”

Ms. Rice wants to avoid the word “cease-fire” because administration officials believe that a negotiated cease-fire between Israel and Hamas—which the United States and Israel view as a terrorist organization—would legitimize Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinian people.

The fear, administration officials said, is that a negotiated cease-fire would likely undermine Mr. Abbas and make it look like Hamas is the entity with which Israel and the West should be negotiating, and not Mr. Abbas.

Fancy footwork, America! First you have the Swiftian madness of refusing to negotiate a cease-fire with the belligerent party. If your next-door neighbor's tree falls on your garage, you don't sue the guy across the street. Whether justified or not, provoked or not is irrelevant--Hamas is the faction firing rockets into Israel; Israel takes care to say it is responding to Hamas and has no designs on the rest of the poor bastards in Gaza. The PA hasn't got a dog in the fight, but it does want to regain the political supremacy that popular elections denied it, and since it cannot achieve that by electoral means or force of arms (i.e. through "Palestinian security forces"), it has manipulated the United States and Isreal--fortunately, the easiest nations to manipulate in the world--into waging a proxy war on Hamas.

This has of course backfired tremendously and messily. If the US and Israel wanted to delegitimze Hamas, they'd start negotiating with them immediately. Continued confrontation is what cements the group's political legitimacy. When you strip away the revolutionary cant, the central tenet of the Hamas faction is that Israel is not now, nor will ever willingly become, a good-faith bargainer; that it seeks the subjugation of the Palestinian people; and that therefore the only right course of action is violent resistence. Israel and its American ally play their role perfectly: they reject Hamas utterly; they reject its popular legtimacy; and they respond to violence and provocation with extraordinarily disproportionate measures, which serve only to shore up Hamas' position among a battered civilian population.

Israel and especially the US, contrariwise, appear genuinely to believe that their own approbation confers legitimacy, a notion so plainly contradicted by fact that it can only be a sincere article of faith. No cynical ploy would rest on so glaringly false a foundation. A good con is always 95% truth. La Condi et al. are actually invested in their game-plan--so invested that they haven't even noticed that they arrived at the wrong ballpark.

The Cuckoo's Nest

An op-ed page can only exist so long as the reader can trust the paper's judgment in assignments.

-Ezra K.

I swear to god that trying to keep up with liberal faith in Instutitions is going to end up sending me to one.

You know how to vanquish, Hannibal, but you do not know how to profit from victory.

In a thousand years or so, the great rivalry between the United States and Russia is going to be one of those fantastic stories of rivalry between powerful peoples, like the Greeks and the Persians, or Rome and Carthage, or England and France. It will play out as black farce, two totally self-unaware colossi, each acting unintentionally as the other's mirror. A lot of elephants have been dragged over a lot of Alps in the last century or so. I mean to say that it's been both a bleak and a foolish time.

Every once in a while, though, someone comes along and sees through it exactly. I think Kubrick did when he made Strangelove. Ironically, the man who's currently piercing the veil publicly and with regularity is everyone's favorite ex-KGB, black-belt autocrat, Vladimir Putin.

This would probably be the time to include a lot of caveats about how praise notwithstanding, he's still a pretty lousy bastard. So, noted. But he just keeps telling the truth, operating I suppose under the old nostrum that the best hiding place is in plain sight. He predictably sends Anne Applebaum, one of those experts whose understanding seems always to have our Others acting exactly as we'd suspect them to act, and for all the same reasons we'd expect of them, into condemnatory epilepsy, her brain wracked by great storms of offended lightning.

Averring on why it is that Russia bothers to hold elections, AA writes:

The need for legitimacy also helps explain the string of vitriolic, aggressive attacks on Western democracies that presaged yesterday's election. In the past couple of years, Putin has openly compared America to Nazi Germany, set up an institution designed to monitor America's supposedly dubious democracy and frequently accused both Americans and Western Europeans, especially the British, of hypocrisy and human rights violations. This rhetoric serves several purposes, but above all it is designed to inoculate the Russian public against the example of more open societies. The message is simple: Russia is not merely a democracy, it is a better democracy than Western democracies.

This is really wrong only by degree, but what a degree! She's read it barely but exactly wrong. The message isn't that Russia is a better democracy than the ones in the West, but that it's the same. He mocks our pretensions by setting up half-assed parodies of our institutions. He mocks our rhetoric by repeating it back to us as hysterical hyperbole, but unlike our own autocrats, who actually believe their own bullshit, who holler and wave their arms and Make Demands, Putin delivers his punch lines in flat tones with his lipless mouth drawn into the world's greatest extant smirk and his deep eyes glowing black. He delights in breaking down the fourth wall.

He knows that Russia, the resurgent power, isn't going to outlive him. It is a sclerotic, aging, ailing, dying empire ripe for further contraction. Because he's the most formidable man in the world, he has managed to staunch the bleeding, tame his rivals for power, the infamous oligarchs, and inject a little martial pride into his dour nation. Vladimir Putin is Russia, and that's why they fucking love him so much. Everybody knows that whatever comes after is going to be worse. America, of course, is on a similarly declining path, albeit a little further up the hill yet. Our allegorical image is going to be two dead geezers facing each other across a table, locked in a staring contest, beards and decrepit fingernails hanging toward the floor.

The Great and Cosmic Mysteries of Causal Reasoning; Or, How Prepositions are the Basis of All Understanding

Let's try a little experiment, shall we? The Times writes:

On Sunday, Palestinian militants in Gaza fired rockets into Israel, including some longer-range ones that hit Ashkelon and the desert town of Netivot, despite the harsh Israeli military action and the presence of the large Israeli ground force in northern Gaza.

Now, abracadabra, presto-change-o, huffity-stuffity:

On Sunday, Palestinian militants in Gaza fired rockets into Israel, including some longer-range ones that hit Ashkelon and the desert town of Netivot, because of the harsh Israeli military action and the presence of the large Israeli ground force in northern Gaza.

Like. So. Totally.

What. The. Fuck?

In honor of the WaPo's new editorial standards, I have composed the following essay for their Sunday Outlook section:

I Am Like So Totally Gay

So I am like so totally gay. Are you wearing that? Everyone is all like, Barack Obama, and I am just so not into it. I guess he's for gay marriage or something, or maybe he's not. Chris thinks he probably has the hugest dick ever, but I'm just like, if that were true, why would he want to be president.

Some people don't like gay people and say that we shouldn't be, you know, teachers and stuff because we'll corrupt children. They're probably right. I mean, not like children children, cause that's pretty sick, but I would probably fuck a high school senior if he was hot enough. I mean, obviously some gay teachers fuck high school seniors, or they wouldn't make so many porns about it. Same for gay doctors and stuff. I mean, if you had some really hot guy and he was your patient or whatever and he was really hung, would you really say that you wouldn't go down on him? That's all I'm saying.

I have this oen friend, Joey, and he's always trying to tell me that Leonardo and some greek dudes and a bunch of other famous people were big fags too and that means that gay people should be able to do whatever we want, which I guess is true if you're like Platocrates or whoever, but I think most of us would probably rather see if any of our friends were secretly posting on xtube. Just sort of like because that naturally interests us more.

Anyway whatever. I have to get ready to go out. Billy wants to get coke or something but I'm just going to get hammered because you can still fuck when you're drunk but there's like no cure for coke dick. So like, text me if you need anything. Laters!