Brother Can You Spare a Regression Line?

My Fundamental friend draws my jaundiced eye to this report, cribbed from this Times story, to the effect that "81 percent of respondents said they believed 'things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,' up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002." And a little bit of calcium falls from the coral reef of my heart.

Not only is it a fitting sort of justice--proof positive that the great cosmic banks do indeed maintain some karmic balance sheets--for a nation whose habit of rollicking around the playground, kicking other kids toys and throwing mud in their hair, but it also reveals the plumb depths of our cultural depravity and intellectual incoherence, for what kind of perverse, thoughtless positivism leads a person to think that a country or a people has a "direction"? I think it's safe to conclude that in the public mind such direction consists of a shared sense of ever-expanding national prosperity, because from the moment our indoctrination education begins, that's what we're taught. "Progress is our product," as the saying used to go, and nothing so darkens the national mood as the thought that the relentless expansion of fortune might hiccup, let alone actually pause. Americans have no instinct to simply be, which accounts not only for our rampant unhappiness, but also for our inability to leave other people the fuck alone. I would like to believe that our present anxiety will lead to some reconsideration of the hocus-pocus empire we've constructed, will lead us back to some thoughts about community, but something tells me that comeuppance precedes wisdom, alas.

No, But I Can Sell You This Crack

Oh noes indeed. Via Jonathan Schwarz, who keeps his hip-waders closer at hand than I, I see that "five retired NATO generals"--caveat preemtor--have released a report entitled Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership. If five toothless crackheads scrawled directions on how ta get youself some hard with a stolen sharpie on the tiles of a dirty McDonald's bathroom, you would not look up from your piss and consider that, given their experience and expertise in the subject, there must be something to commend it. The question is not, "How can I get a decent rock in the Hill District at two in the morning?" Rather, it is "Why the fuck am I in the Hill District trying to buy a rock at two in the morning?" Id est, let us not get caught up bickering about whether or not these generalissimi present an actionable plan for grand statergery, but instead consign ourselves to the question of just why it is that such a thing is necessary. I know how hard it is to put down the pipe, but Together We Can.

The Bulgarian Heresy

An apocryphal story within my large and rather colorful family is that one younger cousin of mine, terrified of his priest, refused the honor of becoming an altar boy. My exasperated aunt pushed the issue, until he practically cried, "Don't you know what they do to boys like me?!" At a loss to meaningfully counter his fear, my aunt relented. Ironically, it was her irreligious husband who convinced the boy to go through with it (mostly, I suspect, for the benefit of his wife's state of mind). My uncle told his son: "If he touches your penis with his hand, touch his harder with your knee before you run away."

Anyway, I thought of this charming little fable when I read bigblogger Atrios impondering "why childhood behavior is being shoehorned into adult norms, and normal behavior issues are treated as criminal problems." The link directs you to one of those litanies of little boys and girls being labeled "sexual harrassers" for doing what little boys and little girls do.

Fortunately, I know the answer, and it goes a little something like this: We're totally fucked up about sex. Get it? We're also totally fucked up about children. Sex has become a matter of ideological badminton, proposed as having some sort of broadly applicable moral import, with the Christers making it a kind of covenental initiation thing and the wibbubwul pwogwessives making it an act of liberation and the fags and lezzies making it a matter of core human identity and everyone, everyone, everyone running around screaming that sex and children, like bleach and drano, should never, ever mix. Meanwhile, La Intercourse is not in fact an act of particular moral import, although it can certainly be enjoyed in regular doses. Consider pissing. Almost everyone does it, and everyone agrees that it is usually more appropriate in certain locations than in others, and if you're having trouble doing it, then you go to the doctor and the doc fixes you right up. Yet it is not loaded down with the tons of cultural baggage inherited from all these millennia under the yolk of our insane Angry Dad in the Sky.

In any case, I digress. The obvious solution to the problem Atrios identifies, of course, is for everyone to stop having children.

Human-beings

I have recieved a fax. At my office. It is the most remarkable conspiratorial document I've seen in quite some time, handwritten and totally unsolicited by your humble IOZ. Came out of the blue As soon as I have a spare moment to transcribe it, I'll post the whole thing. Teaser:

We do not want our Mothers, Out Wives, Our children, our grand-children to be insulted, to be lied to, each day of our lives, to have a "Mentally-Sick" Canadian man, by name: Hillary Rodham Clinton, with the help of all, known, Treasonous, Presidential candidates, and all Television News-staffs, through our nation, knowing Hillary Rodham Clinton, is a "Mentally-sick" Canadian Man out of Calgary, Alberta, Canada!!!! His picture each day on television, campaigning, is an insult, is a lie, to all Mothers, Our Wives, Our children, Our grand-children, to us as MEN, and as human-beings!!!!

Makes a believer out of me.

You Say the Bavarian Illuminati, I Say the Jew-Run Banks, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

So Michiko Kakutani is reviewing some new book about bin Laden, and aside from the fact that people who discuss "Oedipal rivalries" and "Freudian family dynamics" as if either were something other than, ya know, mythical are patent-pending morons, I'm most hung up on this:

Mr. Coll’s book also traces a host of bizarre connections among its dramatis personae, suggesting that there are often less than six degrees of separation when it comes to the new globalized world of international finance.

Yeah, unlike, say, uh, Hapsburg Europe. I mean, you don't have to believe that the world is overrun by a race of shape-shifting reptilian overlords from beyond Sirius to figure out that rich people, like, totally know each other. Marie Antoinette was Austrian? But she was in France! No effin way.

On the other hand, Kakutani seems amazed by the fact that Jimmy Baker did business with a bin Laden brother, as if that were somehow more nefarious than the fact that the United States armed the fucking mujahadeen!

Evidence of Abstinence

Twisty Faster, la belle sans balles, propriet(ress) of our new favorite blog, blames The Patriarchy for the Harvard Virgin. It having been just over 7,000 years since I last read a NY Times Magazine piece in an elder Age of the Earth, I was actually sort of, rather, you know, titillated at the prospect. Being a less advanced Patriarchy-blamer myself, I won't step on any expert toes, but, in the immortal words of me, Let Me Just Say This About That:

There was a time when not having sex consumed a very small part of Janie Fredell’s life, but that, of course, was back in Colorado Springs. It seemed to Fredell that almost no one had sex in Colorado Springs. Her hometown was extremely conservative, and as a good Catholic girl, she was annoyed by all the fundamentalist Christians who would get in her face and demand, as she put it to me recently, “You have to think all of these things that we think.” They seemed not to know that she thought many of those things already. At her public high school, everyone, “literally everyone,” wore chastity rings, Fredell recalled, but she thought the practice ridiculous. Why was it necessary, she wondered, to signify you’re not doing something that nobody is doing?

That opening sentence is infelicitous to say the least, for if not having sex consumed so little of her time, then, good God, she must've been fuckin nonstop! Hot. What our Timesian interlocutor actually means to say is that prior to their arrival in Sodom, none of the city dwellers ever thought to rape an angel. No, no. Nor that. What author Randall Patterson means to say is that when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible. Ah, yes. What he means to say is that when Janie Fredell was a mere womanling, fresher from the pouch, she wasn't givin' no nappy dugout to no one. Right? Right.

If indeed it seemed to Janie that no one was having sex in Co. Springs, however, I am here to set her straight, so to speak. For while the Springs may not be such a fallen, epicene epicenter of ski-bunny-bonkery as Boulder or, worse!, Ft. Collins, we can be reasonably certain that at very least, in some distant meth trailer off route 24, someone is getting boned. And if not, then rest assured that the flyboy wannabes at the Air Force Academy are themselves in large part what were once upon a time called pussyhounds. Good christ, if they can't do it legit-like, they just rape 'em! Yeeeeeeee-haw!

She was troubled by Christian fundamentalists, and of course they were troubled by her in return, for although she "thought many of those things already," those things presumably centered around an intellectual locus of venery, she was (and remains) nevertheless a subservient minion of the pagan potentate of the Whore of Babylon in Rome. And if that weren't bad enough, she got into Harvard and she still doesn't know what "literally" means.

The wide-eyed shock at a "culture that says sex is totally O.K.” is overplayed and unbelievable. The Holy and Apostolic Roman Catholic Church prohibits many things, but cable TV isn't one of them. Perhaps if she travelled to Harvard not merely across a continent but across the years, flashing into Cambridge from some Hawthornian past, she could lay claim to surprise, but since not, not. Disgust I would believe; disdain I could swallow; but surprise, uh-uh. NFW.

You can imagine the rest. The No-Sex people say that if you have sex you will get pregnant and then die poor and alone, bereft of God and salvation. The Go-Sex sociololological types bitch like good liberals that the No-Sex people are creating false consciousness with "bad data"--oh, Lord, save us from the bad data--and everyone is all up in arms about the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea, as if, seriously, anybody really carez what younz think about their penises and vaginas. People will follow their urges and convictions where they lead, which is usually, almost inevitably, to the outcome of an orgasm.

I am broadly more, what is the word, "sex-positive" (ick!) than Twisty Faster, which is a Function of Faggotry. We are a silly people, and despite our far smaller population, feel the need to seminally counterbalance all that you breeders waste on disgusting reproduction. We are essentially Albigensian, which is why Jacques de Molay, that old buggering Cathar, is my singular hero. Life is Evil; Stop Making More of It! Yet I too wonder how it is that a woman like our Janie comes to define her soi-disant feminism principally through her resistance to penetration, unintentionally positing that it is not equality of gender that she seeks, but of genitalia, and even then only until some Roman pederast sprinkles the water, says a few words, and sends her forth to a nervous, fumbling noces. Equality: For a Limited Time Only! Buy Now! Well, there you have the final frontier of consumerism. Non-political pseudoequity as a One-Day Sales Event.

Still, the saddest moment in the whole sorry article comes not from Janie, but her Boy Wonder counterpart, Leo Keliher, a would-be monastist and recovering onanist:

To the matter of masturbation, he said, “This was really tough for me . . . because when you have a habit that’s so deeply ingrained, it’s hard to stop.”

No, Leo, no! Self-love is what separates us from the lower orders, for at long last, as we discover that dolphins have names for each other and chimps use tools and bonobos have face-to-face sex, what remains in all the Kingdom of Animals to make us solely and uniquely human if not the fact that we, seemingly alone, jerk off?

UPDATE: Nevermind!









God I fucking LOVE the internet.

Je n'accuse pas

Someone reminded me that Jonah Goldberg is, in fact, a columnist for the LA Times, and so I meandered over to find out who was a fascist today. Well, it turns out that what's really got Jonah's goat, so to speak, is those damned Darwin fish--you know, the feet-sprouting icthys on the back of VW Golfs everywhere:

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there's the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

I am going to wade out on a limb here and suggest that it's hard to top the smugness of claiming sole authority of the eternal salvation of the otherwise-damned immortal soul. One of the curiousities of religionites of all sorts is their breathtaking failure to appreciate the extraordinary scope of their own claims.

En tout cas, Jonah finds it reprehensible that this admittedly peurile, bumper-borne provocation should be carried out in a land where one's neck is not literally on the line.

I think this is a false juxtaposition, but I would have a lot more respect for the folks who believe it if they aimed their brave contempt for religion at those who might behead them for it.

Seen and raised, card-shark!

Muslims: Your religion is as crazy as the rest of the chillun of Abraham. Its ontology is question-begging and its eschatology belongs to the lower orders of fantasy, the sort with warrior princesses battling velociraptors. The misogyny in your texts is disgusting. The notion that you can reconcile the tribal mores of a lot of desert nomads with the necessary cosmopolitanism of modern urbanism is pure lunacy. Your dietary proscriptions are silly. Your delineations between representational and non-representational art are arbitrary and untrue. Your creation myth is false. Your fashion is terrible. I live in Pittsburgh, and I know plenty of trees that would act as fine gibbets. Come an' get me!

Curtains Match the Drapes

Hey, we redecorated! Thanks to our buddy Ender from the wayback days. Future endeavors of his will be noted at mememcow, so keep your eyes on that if y'all will.

Comments appreciated, especially compliments.

Two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments

Napoleon gave the world its first truly modern legal code, and Hitler gave it the the crematoria, but to a Ukranian farmer is there really such a difference between one invading army and the next?

At some point one must admit that the lesser evil is nevertheless evil, and the idea that forestalling doom by approaching it with more hesitant steps is by some measure a kind of progress is one of the looniest I can imagine. Is it true that John McCain is "a real nutcase." Yes. But so too are his principle opponents, and the fact that the Candidate of Gender and the Candidate of Color seem intent on a marginally more circumspect policy of killing foreigers and a somewhat less intrusive version of the domestic surveillance state matters hardly at all. Indeed, I suspect it will be worse. It took the cataclysmic disregard for basic propriety--what I would call George W. Bush's radical honesty--to make our darling "progressives" realize that they live in a vicious, torturing empire, and should a suave talker like Obama or a dull bureaucrat like HRC take the Awful Office, these same progressives will be more than happy to go back to more noble pursuits, like scoffing at Chomsky and mocking the patchouli-wearing jerks protesting at the School of the Americas. The writing is already scrawled on the waiting wall.

Let the Donk "retake" America. That isn't especially my concern. I am happy to admit that America exists, but I'm afraid that my ontology curls up and plays dead when it encounters the more bearish notion, embraced in the old "bipartisan" fashion, that America therefore must exist. What began as a genocidal slave-republic, matured into a genocidal continental empire, and transcended itself into a global hegemon is not redeemed by the fact that we enfranchised the ladyfolk or reluctantly half-emancipated the Negro or, I don't know, bombed the fuck out of Serbia. Critiques predicated on "reform" are apologia for ongoing crimes. "We will tiptoe into your house to murder you" is hardly an improvement over coming in with murderous shouts and guns ablaze. Insofar as this ineffectual electronic pamphlet has an intellectual commitment, it is to the devolution of America, and to understanding that whether you're in the shallow end or the deep end, you're still swimming in the pool.