The Astral Significance of Ralph Nader

There are more serious pathologies in Donkledom than Thanksralphery, but none so consistently hilarious. The conviction that a few thousand fringe characters, rather than the hundreds of thousands of registered Democrats who voted for the Republican candidate, were the wooden stake through the mechanical heart of the electronic Saint Albert Gore is only one of many sharp edges in the cracked ontology of the Democratic faith, and through their many refractions comes light as through a kaliedescope after a good mouthful of mushrooms*. On the other hand, my sympathy for Nader is almost entirely formed of my antipathy for the Donk and all she stands for. Were it not for my underlying pleasure at the ruined chances of Mr. Iraq Liberation Act and his running mate, the Huckleberry Hound, I'd be more hostile, because, at last, the radicalism of your basic Naderite barely dips below the soil; these are people, by and large, who believe in democracy, the sort of campus revisionists who used to insist that just because virtually every instance of the adoption of Marxism-socialism-communism as a practical ideology resulted in vicious, tyrannical dictatorship, well, that didn't mean that wouldn't work if someone would just do it right. The third-party impulse in American politics, of which Nader is the most prominent but not the sole example, is an example of a venal ideological commitment to a system premised on the ridicule, corruption, and destruction of internal dissent. Even to cast oneself as a "protest" candidate and asking supporters to cast a "protest" vote is to reify political obedience as a concrete expression of political will, when in reality all you've done is waste gas and most of your morning in order to play your part in legitimating a farce.

Case in point: I had to pop over to the optometrist today to get a pair of glasses repaired, and on the way a pair of college dudes in bad sandals stopped me and asked if I'd sign a petition to get Nader on the PA ballot. Despite all those nasty things I said just above, I refer you back to my opening, and say simply that yes, I am dyspeptic enough to sign off on such a thing, if only in order to give myself a chance to cackle at other's misfortunes later on. I told the kids that not only would I sign, I would sign many times in many hands, using the names of living friends and relatives, all verifiable, none of whom would balk in the least at this minor act of political vandalism. They met the offer with such looks of horror that even I was momentarily taken aback, thinking maybe I'd murdered a cat, but no, no, that wasn't the case. "That would be . . . fraud," the long-haired one whispered, then hissed, glancing around as if expecting to be overheard. "Fraud!?" said I. You're trying to slide your way into a contest so rigged and fraudulent as to beggar belief in the first place, and beyond that, it's a contest whose design is inherently hostile to you, which sets up extraordinary impediments to your participation at every opportunity, undermining you at every chance with almost sadistic glee. And you're worried about a little ballot-stuffing in a petition whose sole purpose is to get you into the locker room, where at best they'll ridicule your little pecker and stuff you into a locker before heading out onto the fields? Seriously? Fah real?


*Do not write complex, compound sentences on mushrooms. Or go to work on mushrooms.

Foodie Friday, by Request

If you're not growing your own greens, you're dumb. Throw some seeds on dirt, water that shit, and there are your greens. That's all. What's wrong with you, you lazy fuck?

Whole trout wrapped in arugala and baked in parchment paper

A simple preparation that adds just a hint of peppery herbal flavor to the clean taste of the fish, this is one of my favorite summer meals. I serve it with a simple lemon-and-cardomon-flavored orzo and a green salad. A basic cous-cous with pine nuts, cucumber, and sorrel (or mint) is another good bet. You'll want whole, boned trout, fins trimmed and head on. Each trout yields two small filets. If you're a skinny faggot like me, one filet is good for a serving. If you're fat (i.e., anything larger than a skinny faggot like me), you'll probably want a whole fish. Most good fish counters or markets will bone the whole fish for you; some grocers and markets sell them as "prepared trout."

trout
fresh arugala
fine sea salt
white pepper
lemon
extra virgin olive oil
parchment paper

Preheat the oven to 350. Rinse the trout outside and in, then pat dry with paper towels. Lightly season the interior of the fish with salt and pepper. Blanche the arugala for 15-20 seconds (no more! it's very delicate) in boiling water, then immediately transfer to an ice bath. Wrap the fish head to tail in the slightly softened greens, so that almost no flesh is visible. Place the fish on a piece of parchment paper three times as wide and one-and-a-half times as long as the fish body and drizzle with olive oil. Lengthwise, bring the two edges of the paper together, fold over a qarter inch, then another, then roll down tightly to the fish. Then fold in the two open ends in a rough triangle (as if wrapping a gift), then roll them tightly to the fish. Place on a baking sheet and bake in the oven for about 10-12 minutes. Remove. Let cool slightly. Unwrap, remove arugala, separate the filets, and serve warm with a small wedge of lemon.

Dr. Pangloss vs. Godzilla

Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption. Thus an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable. The alternative is letting Tehran have its bomb. In either case, a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust would be in the cards.

Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland. Some Iranians may believe that this is a worthwhile gamble if the prospect is Israel’s demise. But most Iranians probably don’t.

-Benny Morris in the Times

STRANGELOVE: Yes, but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
DESADESKI: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.

-Dr. Strangelove

Color me skeptical, but for the sake of assumption, let's take as given that there's some validity to this bluster. This is military policy as conceived by the sort of people who we've all run into in our working lives: "You can't fire me! I quit!" In other words, dangerously unstable and totally unselfreflective marginal personalities who will probably one day return with a gun. In other words, plain dangerous. The most voracious consumer of Israel-Will-Be-Destroyed fodder is Israel's own political class, and why wouldn't it be so? Were they not able to make the case that they sit perpetually on the knife-edge of destruction, their hold on power would substantially weaken, and some pussified socialist kibbutzers might just take over and fag up a proudly martial nation. Reading between the lines of Morris' article, which isn't hard to do since it's written entirely in capital letters, each 1,000 feet tall and outlined in neon, one comes away assured of the point that we vicious anti-Semites have been trying to make lo these many years: that Iran does not and cannot threaten Isreal, that the Israelis are the one with the air force and arsenal of nukes, and that while Iranian rhetorical bellicosity can be Wagnerian in its heights of chest-clutching, diaphram bursting intensity, when push comes to shove on the playground, we all know whose ass ends up in the mud.

I'm beginning to hope that one of these days the wombats achieve sentience and crush all humans to death with their chitinous posteriors. It would serve us right.

Out of this Furnace

By embracing market economics while preserving the party’s monopoly on power and restricting political freedom, Mr. Pan writes, China’s Communist leaders have concocted an “authoritarian capitalism” that “could be as exploitative as anything Marx — or Mao — ever envisioned.” Free markets and private enterprise, he says, “generated wealth and prosperity, but unrestrained by democratic institutions, they also produced grim work conditions”: without trade unions, a free press, independent courts or elections, workers have little leverage with their employers and no way to remove corrupt officials, who often collude with business interests.

-La Kakutani reviewing Out of Mao's Shadow

Wow. Yeah. Those wily Chinese sure have come up with a unique system of state capital. Unprecedented.

Mere Anarchy Is Loosed Upon the World

This shit is good:

And perhaps most tellingly, despite their disagreements, Greenwald and vanden Heuvel both supported Obama's practice of going out of his way to attack black poor people, most recently in his scurrilous Father's Day speech and again before the NAACP. (And, by the way, he grew up without a father and is running for president, no?) To Greenwald, this is the "Obama we want to see more of," the one who takes positions that are "unorthodox" and "not politically safe." Since when has it been unorthodox or unsafe politically to malign black poor people in public? Who the fuck has been doing anything else for at least twenty years? Public sacrifice of black poor people has been pro forma Democratic presidential strategy since Clinton ran on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it" and made a burnt offering of Rickey Ray Rector, and victim-blaming based on just-so stories about supposed "behavioral pathology" has been the only frame for public discussion of poverty for at least as long. To vanden Heuvel, Obama's contretemps with Jesse Jackson, who, ironically, has his own history of making such attacks, around this issue reflects a "generational division" among black people, with Obama representing a younger generation that values "personal responsibility." She also, for good measure, asserted that Obama has been "nailed unfairly" for his cozying up to the evangelicals and promising to give them more federal social service money. In explaining that he comes out of a "community organizing" tradition based in churches in Chicago, she didn't quite say that the coloreds love their churches. But she didn't really have to say it out loud, did she?

This is what passes for a left now in this country. It is a left that can insist, apparently, that Obama's FISA vote, going out of his way (after all, he could simply have followed the model of Eisenhower on the Brown decision and said that the Court has ruled; therefore it's the law, and his job as president would be to enforce the law) to align himself--twice, or three times--with the Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito wing of the Supreme Court, his declaring that social problems, unlike foreign policy adventurism, are "too big for government" and pledging to turn over more of HHS and HUD's budgets to the Holy Rollers are both tactically necessary and consistent with his convictions. So, if those are his convictions, or for that matter what he feels he must do opportunistically to get elected, why the fuck should we vote for him?

Answer: You shouldn't! Anyway, read the whole thing.

I suspect that Professor Reed and I have radically different notions of what ideally would spring from the aftermath of an implosion of the current American imperium. Me, I favor a vast guignol of gas-thievery, petty cruelty, dusty leather costumes, and aviator goggles, all enacted on a sprawling desert. And zombies. Several of our regular commenters appear to doubt that my political convictions could possibly extend beyond the reestablisment (sic - as if it ever obtained) of something called the "rule of law." In this conception, the enaction of arbitrary statutes by governing bodies is preferable to extra-statutory arbitrary action by those same bodies. This having worked out so well. In fact I hope in my lifetime to see the United States dissolve into microregions and city-states surrounded by tilled fields. I am thinking of calling this philosophy anarcho-feudalism, or some such. Manor life without the lords and ladies. We'll have just enough electricity for lights and the internet. We'll farm with draft animals. We'll travel by foot and by bicycle, and folks'll have to learn how to bake their own damn bread.

Walpurgisnacht

At A Tiny Revolution, Jonathan Schwarz reminds us of some stellar sycophancy:

KOPPEL: You looked sensational [on TV]. Tanned and well rested... How was your vacation?

KISSINGER: Very pleasant. We missed you. We expect you to show up.

KOPPEL: Normally I don't let you go without me... How is your schedule for the next couple of weeks because we wanted to have you and Nancy over some evening?... In fact, I am not sure we would have anybody else over. Just a quiet evening.

Now it turns out this dinner party actually occured, at the Kissinger's, and I was able to acquire a transcript ("you don't want to know about them, but there are ways, dude") of that dinner party:

NANCY MAGINNES KISSINGER: Jesus . . .
HENRY KISSINGER: . . . Shhhhh . . .
NANCY: . . . H. Christ . . .
HENRY: For God's sake, Nancy, it's two o'clock in the . . .
NANCY: Oh, Henry!
HENRY: Well, I'm sorry, but . . .
NANCY: What a cluck! What a cluck you are.
HENRY: It's late, you know? Late.
NANCY: (Looks around the room. Imitates Bette Davis) What a dump. Hey, what's that from? "What a dump!"
HENRY: How would I know what . . .
NANCY: Aw come on! What's it from? You know . . .
HENRY: . . . Nancy . . .
NANCY: WHAT'S IT FROM, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE?
HENRY: (Wearily) What's what from?
NANCY: I just told you; I just did it. "What a dump!" Hunh? What's that from?
HENRY: I haven't the faintest idea what . . .
NANCY: Dumbbell! It's from some goddamn Bette Davis picture . . . some Warner Brothers epic . . .

Then Ted and Grace Anne show up for some fun and games, they all take off their human skins and have a reptilian blood orgy, and the sun comes up over the Potomac. Exeunt.

Heathers

An old standard among enemies of the current American administration is the Dirge for the Decline of American Credibility. Credibility is a pretty vacant term. What it really means is that in international opinion polls, America proves less popular than it once was. International polling is notoriously unreliable, especially in the impoverished and so-called developing world, so I take such figures with a rather large grain of coarse Trepani sea salt. Those foreigners reachable by pollsters are relatively more educated and affluent, and more inclined to view Americans favorably, since it wasn't their coca crop that America destroyed, nor their nun that America tossed out of an airplane, or what have you. The decline in American popularity among the international bourgeoisie under the Bush administration mimics the path of disillusionment among American progressives, who only now under the callous, indifferent, and totally indiscrete leadership of the Crawford dauphin and his Subterranean regent have come to realize what poor motherfuckers all over this globe have known all the fuck along: that America is one mean and violent sonofabitch.

The self-deception inherent in this view of the Bush administration as having totally transformed our national character is a subject often noted and sure to be returned-to here, but for the moment the question that more interests me is what, precisely, this pitiable gang, so longing for the halcyon days of Most Popular Transcontinental Empire in School, want from their vaunted, bruited credibility. What end does it serve to be thought highly of in the, ahem, international community? What does one buy with moral capital? What does one borrow with ethical collateral?

This is the nub, the unexamined premise at the base of the extravagant regret. What one buys with credibility is the right to act without restraint. Here is your essential liberal imperialism. The underlying desire is the ability to stage their humanitarian interventions without the moral and practical scrutiny now attending (uh, sort of) our imperial adventuring. They wish to return to the days when one could fête Wesley Clark, and they hope to do something, who the fuck knows precisely what, in Darfur, without having to explain why precisely they're invading, whose side exactly they're on, what they're going to do there, how long they plan to stay. The idea that this credibility is in the Washingtonian vein of lighting the world through good example is pure steaming merde. Credibility is the right to prosecute the policies necessary to the maintenance of post-Bretton-Woods American full-spectrum global dominance without a lot of whiny foreigners callin' you on your shit. It is a sap to the conscience. It reassures you that your nation is on the side of the angels. That it is exceptional. Unique among countries and empires. Selected. Elect. Good. Under such circumstances, our current gang of progressives and anti-war activists [sic] can go back to laughing at the hippie bitches protesting around the School of the Americas, and reassure themselves that our ordnance is the most humanitarian in the world.

In Which I Am Once Again Forced to Defend Barack Obama, Alas

Cher M. Derbyshire,

Vous prétendez que personne (ou presque) ne peux apprendre une deuxième langue car vous en a trouver trop difficile. En fait, ce n’est pas nous, c’est vous ; je vous assure. La plupart du monde en a au moins une compétence rudimentaire. Aux Pays-Bas, on est souvent trilingue. En beaucoup des pays de l’Afrique, on parle une langue tribale et une langue « postcoloniale ». Moi, j’ose dire que vous êtes simplement con, mon ami.

Amitiés,
IOZ

Dowry

Ever entertaining in her outrage, renowned agitatrice and bee-keeper Twisty Faster pens a peroration on the underlying dumbness and horror of phallo-feminism, which is the conviction by certain men of the liberal-arts-educated set that, having once attended a Take Back the Night event as an undergraduate, they stand as valuable allies in the struggle for vaginal equality. Whatevs, dudes. In my younger and more formative years, when I conceived of myself as a radical queer--a self-image that bad sex, good sex, drugs, ennui, war, boredom, the officiating in Superbowl XL, the decline of the dollar, the new translation of Anna Karenina, etc. have conspired to obliterate--it used to piss me off to no end to listen to some straight dude or dudette talk about their status as an Ally, usually because their 40-year-old mom got divorced and became a carpet-muncher, or their older brother was a bukakae bottom, or whatever.

Anyway, I chuckled mordantly when I read Twisty's post because over at The American Prospect, a sort of rendering plant where received opinion is extracted from recent graduates of the US News and World Report Top 25, one Ezra Klein gives the ol' Title IX try to the issue of Women's Representation in Government. How bogus. Women will not find equity by appending themselves to the imperial, patriarchal state. The idea is self-evidently preposterous, like suggesting that women could achieve sexual equality if they raped as many men as men women. It's also egregiously paternalistic. Point:

When it comes to convincing women to run for office, it turns out that among the most powerful things we can do is simply ... ask.

The same is true for convincing them to give head, I'm told, but that's hardly a brief for political equity. If only we menfolk would hold the door for the ladies, why, they'd go into the restaurant.

The idea that power derives from proportional representation in elected bodies is one of the more charmingly primitive articles of faith in our late-democratic era, the sort of thing that future generations will look back on with the mixture of horror and bemusement that we currently reserve for the Divine Right of Kings or the deification of dead emperors. It has no more basis in reality. It's just an example of: our system produces the best results because it's our system.

The Basis of a Beautiful Friendship

LAUREEN HOBBS: Don't fuck with my distribution costs! I'm making a lousy two-fifteen per segment and I'm already deficiting twenty-five grand a week with Metro! I'm paying William Morris ten percent off the top, and I'm giving this turkey ten thou per segment, and another five to this fruitcake! And Helen, don't start no shit about a piece again! I'm paying Metro twenty-thousand for all foreign and Canadian distribution, and that's after recoupment! The Communist Party's not gonna see a nickel of this goddamn show until we go into syndication!

HELEN MIGGS: C'mon Laureen. The party's in for seventy-five hundred a week of the production expenses.

HOBBS: I'm not giving this pseudoinsurrectionary sedentarian a piece of my show! I'm not giving him script approval, and I sure as shit ain't gotten him into my distribution charges!

MARY ANN GIFFORD: [screaming] You fucking fascist! Did you see the film we made of the San Marino jail breakout, demonstrating the rising up of the seminal prisoner class infrastructure?

HOBBS: You can blow the seminal prisoner class infrastructure out your ass! I'm not knockin' down my goddamn distribution charges!

GREAT AHMED KHAN: [fires off his gun through the ceiling] Man, give her the FUCKING overhead clause. Let's get back to page twenty-two, number 5, small 'a'. Subsidiary rights.

-Network

My feelings about The New Yorker here duly noted, I feel obligated to defend the rag against its current crop of self-interested (self-obsessed?) detractors. As satire, which has admittedly, increasingly become an excuse for mere tastelessness, goes, the Obama cover is pretty thin. No Modest Proposal, that. Yet in decrying it, liberals have embraced precisely the sort of hoary, bowdlerized determinism that leads conservative Kulturkampfers to presume, for instance, that one brief glimpse of a naked titty will lead little Suzy Chastitybelt on the straight road from the Silver Ring Thing to some gonzo-porn harem. Since we here at Who Is IOZ? never shy from sweeping, insupportable generalizations when we have the opportunity to make them, let me just say this about that. It's so plain as to be self-evident that no one inclined to believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist and his wife a badass commie nigger is passing his Tuesday evening engrossed in the rainy-day prose of The New Yorker, and no one inclined to the prose stylings of Ian McEwan or the sensation-numb pomposity of David Denby or the New-Deal harumphery of Rick Hertzberg is going to tip in favor of Terror-Nigger belief because he misconstrues the intent of the cover. The liberal argument contre the cover has nothing to do with causal reality and everything to do with a vaguely defined sense that this image "reinforces" some sort of "meme" floating around in the aethersphere, that it's mere existence pollutes the discourse, whatever that might be. (The hilarious result: an image that would never have found its way beyond the toilet tank tops of a minor slice of the bourgeoisie now finds itself on the cover of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, et al.)

The McCain gang, meanwhile, gets to denounce the image with extravagant, hyperbolic, operatic horror-delight, casting a blanket over the equally plain fact that they're the motherfuckers behind the rumor. It's like what Lenin said... you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh . . . In other words, she kidnapped herself, man. And there, if we might speak more realistically about discourse-pollution, is a perfect win-win scenario for their faction, for the get to endlessly remind people that some folks think Barack Obama is a Terror-Nigger by decrying the fact that some people think such unthinkable thoughts. Did we mention that Barack Obama isn't a Terror-Nigger? Well, let us mention it again.

Allons enfants de la patrie

Dress it up however you like, Burke hated the French revolution because it broke some shit. He wasn't conservative, he was a priss. The American revolution was elite, Classical in its aesthetics, respectful of property, protective of Institutions (including that "peculiar" institution, of course). That a board of self-interested aristocrats should like to sever their connection with a corrupt and inefficient empire bothered him not at all. He admired them. In France, par contre, a lot of dirty peasants rose up to wreck the place, showing no deference and chewing with their mouths open. Philosophy had nothing to do with it. It was a matter of taste.

Happy Bastille Day

Fannie, Freddie, and Me

The free market. How the fuck about it, huh?