Do You Take This Man?

This shit slays me. Look, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama personally oppose same-sex marriage. Both of them are wealthy cosmopolitans. They're both perfectly comfortable with gay people. They'd probably prefer it if the gays got married, as it would further validate the universality of the received social order. Everyone knows that their opposition is politically advantageous. Obama has explicitly and repeatedly said that he thinks same-sex couples should have exactly the same legal rights as married couples . . . but that's not marriage somehow. Verbal sophistry. McCain just stays mum on the issue, but we all know that multimillionaire social élites are simply not motivated by those sorts of petty cultural grievances. Guys like McCain will tell fag jokes to the moon, but are totally untroubled sociopolitically by the "threat" that fag marriage poses to their own, uh, holy matrimony.

Now. Patrick Healy of The New York Times knows this. His editors know it. The family that controls his paper knows it. All of them understand that these guys are talking out of both sides of their mouths in order to seem non-discriminatory while still appealing to the perceived cultural prejudices of some archetypal Middle American. So what you have here--surprise!--is a major American newspaper engaging a fiction that it knows to be a fiction as if it were a serious social dispute. A more reasonable article would be titled, "If Elected . . . McCain and Obama Will Do Nothing at All about Gay Marriage." The body of the article would report that neither of them is animated by opposition to the idea, that both are pretty comfortable with the Gay, and that they will endeavor to appease the remaining homophobes of rural America and the Midwest by intermittently nodding toward their cultural anxiety without ever actually doing anything about it.

Machaivels

The Most Important Election Ever in Our Lifetimes Ever now draws to a close, and some account of its passing is probably in order. We should probably recall that neither of the current candidates seemed especially likely back when there were still 7,000 aspirants in the primaries. McCain won because Romney and Huckabee cancelled each other out, leaving the Senator from Senescence to gather the war-focused remnants of the Bush II coalition and the 3 remaining Episcopalians in America. Giuliani's 11 supporters likewise glommed onto the McCain train after their shiny-pated madman bombed out early, perceiving in him the same over-compensatory anger that drew them to Rudy in the first place. Obama took the more traditional track of motivating "the base," in this case, lying relentlessly and transparently, if soaringly, to soi-disant anti-war Democrats and eking out a primary victory over the truly awful Hillary Clinton by running a moderately more effective campaign to turn out primary voters in the urban centers of large states.

McCain's party received him peremptorily at first; Obama was, uh, greeted as a liberator. Obama swiftly made himself into the Establishment candidate, and McCain swiftly descended into madness and dissipation, improving his standing markedly among Republican die-hards. Obama's vision of "hope and change" is to "restore America's standing in the world," i.e., to travel back in time to the late-90s Bill-Clinton boom-time-bombs-away society. McCain, I don't know, has an extraordinary collection of scars to which he refers anytime he feels the need to prove something. His support consists of the butt-end of Kulturkampf vets, Christian moralists, Muslim-haters, and racists. That must be ennobling. Although he's a monster, I almost hate to see him go out like this. You are supposed to sell your soul, not your dignity. Triumphant liberals meanwhile can barely restrain their gloating, and what's most interesting about the Democrats and their partisans is how the corruptions of power have infected them even prior to officially acquiring it.

Plato Is a Man. All Men Are Mortal. Ergo, All Men Are Plato

Differing Perspectives [Jay Nordlinger]

Senator Obama said this about John McCain: “By the end of the week, he’ll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” That’s interesting. Obama evidently thinks of communists as people who share. I think of them as people who kill.

So by this definition, Charles Ruthenberg was not a communist, but Timothy McVeigh was. Communism has proven to be a pretty murderous political ideology lo this century past, but murderousness per se has got nothing to do with what identifies a political system as communist. Italian Fascism was murderous. National Socialism was murderous. The Government Junta of Chile was murderous. None of these were communist. In fact, all of them were specifically--and murderously--opposed to communism.

Plainly, Barack Obama does not think that communists are people who share. He's saying quite the opposite. He's saying that dudes like Jay Nordlinger think that communists are people who share. He's making fun of guys who see in his proposals to make the income tax incrementally more progressive a plan to collectivize the American economy. Meanwhile, their boy has been collectivizing and nationalizing the economy for the last year at breakneck pace. Is he a communist? (IOZ dit : oui.) So say what you will about Obama. I'm not a fan myself, obviously. But the guy makes fun of Republican partisans who see Reds beneath every stone, behind every bush, and sure as the sunrise, one pops up to prove his point for him.

More Defeatism in Poetry

The Reckoning

by Theodore Roethke

All profits disappear: the gain
Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
And now grim digits of old pain
Return to litter up our home.

We hunt the cause of ruin, add,
Subtract, and put ourselves in pawn;
For all our scratching on the pad,
We cannot trace the error down.

What we are seeking is a fare
One way, a chance to be secure:
The lack that keeps us what we are,
The penny that usurps the poor.

I'm My Own Grampaw

Oh hellz yeah. Today was the wrong day to quit smoking weed. Good thing I didn't.

Destroy All Monsters

The other day my crazy dittohead great-aunt explained to me that America was primed for a race war whether Barack Hussein Obama won or lost. I asked her which side she thought he'd pick, and she looked at me like I was crazy. I told her that depending on league in-season trade rules, I'd probably unload him to the blacks in exchange for Tiger and Lenny Kravitz. This completely befuddled her. A race war. D.L. Hughley and Jon Steward fighting to the death in the streets.

I Love You You're Perfect Now Change

Last night this sort of . . . eccentric but very beautiful boy whom I sleep with from time to time told me the most charming post-coital bedtime story in which all the major figures of the ongoing presidential campaign stood in for fairy-tale characters in a sort of Into-the-Woods style mash-up, or something. I wasn't really paying attention. I bring it up only because the hilarious and ongoing implosion of the McCain/Palin partnership has something of a fairy-tale quality to it, although clearly more along the Grimm Bros. to del Toro continuum than the happy-happy Americo-Disney types.

They do seem to exist in a world in which logic and continuity as we understand them don't universally apply. Barack Obama has run a campaign modeled on Reagan and Bill Clinton: projecting empathy; emitting optimism; evincing assurance. John McCain has gathered an army of mythical creatures and tried to storm the castle from . . . within the castle. Watching a billion-year-old creature who has inhabited the Senate since the solar system was a mere accretion disc twinkling in Yaweh's eye, along with his sometimes partner, the northern sorceress, go galloping in circles, believing themselves to be engaged in a flanking maneuver, is not pretty, but it is very funny. If I were Italo Calvino, I'd make a novel of it. What do you think they say to each other, when perchance they meet?

Gerund Article Noun

Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is in growing the pie.

-John McCain, all the fucking time

Seriously like double-you tee eff? This asshole can't even come up with a convincing analogy. "Growing the pie"? The phrase is a lexico-conceptual black hole. I can feel the tug toward the event horizon of non-meaning even as I type. I mean, why not "aching the boat" or "slamming the air" or "focusing the box"?

And yet this random jumble of syllables has become the central rhetorical trope of his campaign. Orwell, when he wrote "Politics and the English Language," talked about the manipulation of language lacking content, but didn't anticipate campaigns conducted in Klingon.

Shish Boom Bah

I mean, let us be temperate. The "break-up of the Soviet Union," the most recent collapse of a major world empire, oft-cited for its rapidity, consisted of the devolution of some recently acquired (in historic terms) border regions, a decade or two of political upheaval, and the reconstitution of the core Russian state under a modified (not that modified) system of government. On the other end of the spectrum of imperial decline, you've got Rome, whose decline and demise occurred over a longer period of time than the period of European peoples inhabiting North America--including the Norse, if you want to be generous about the Eastern Empire. There are examples of the swift destruction of great empires--the Mongols; Alexander's Hellenic empire--but these were empires built on orgies of conquest, with no permanent political apparatus or governing structure to hold them together after the passing of the conqueror. The decline and fall of enduring empires isn't a poof-it's-gone scenario. As much fun as it is to cackle at the poor fortunes of an overextended America and doomsay its future as a political entity--and hell, maybe my dreams will come true and within my lifetime I can claim to be a proud resident of the Confederated City-States of the Middle Atlantic--but, you know the poetry about how the world ends, how the world ends, how the world ends.

Anyway, you've got guys like Robert Kagan cupping his balls ever tighter to his pelvis and bitching that some people don't think America is number one anymore, a minor misreading. Some people don't think America is going to remain number one for long. But again, let us be temperate. There are two concurrent strands here: the relative decline of American predominance and the relative rise of other loci of power, wealth, and political influence. The dogged insistence that the United States must, just must, remain the single, sole, unique, and unitary arbiter of global fortunes is fine locker-room talk among the dwindling, injured squad of rah-rah white-guy Patriot-Americans, but wishin' don't make it so. That sort of talk is extremely self-reflective anyway; imagine what a sad, small life it must be to structure your sense of self around an image of yourself as a carrier of national greatness. I know dudes who do that with the Steelers, and it's not pretty.

Oil resources will both complicate and catalyze the shifts in global fortunes, although ironically the current clusterfuck international economy may actually provide some respite from the fuel crunch, as slowing industries and diminishing personal fortunes substantially reduce demand. Nevertheless, in the foreseeable future, the lessened availability of easily portable energy seems destined to force nations to moderate their ambitions, and that in itself will likely mediate the ups and downs of national fortunes.

Laïcité

Oh brother. That's some funny shit.

In the Tank

Oh good Lord. I forgot about the Slate feature where they ask their gang of relentlessly contrarian spouters who they're a-gonna vote for and Surprise! everyone is all like, Obama, because, of course, their contrarianism is a posture--pose lacking content. I am occasionally told by angry Donk Syndrome sufferers that I myself am a contrarian, but that is a gross misreading: I am a drug-addicted misanthrope, sealed in a hermetic microcosmos of my own making, imperturbable and utterly feh. I actually believe some of my whack-o, outside-the-mainstream opinions, and I do not go dashing back to the fold once every four years in an electoral Pascal's Wager. But Slate? As Crispin Sartwell might say, these are people without intellectual integrity. They don't make statements skirting the hyperbolic edge of their own actual beliefs in order to challenge others to think differently. To be merely a provocateur is to be hollower than an actual ideologue.

The Birth Pangs of the Growing Pains of Something or Other

I will not take the incidences of recent American attacks on Syrian and Pakistani territory to prattle fruitlessly about sovereignty. That ship sailed long ago. Condemning America for failing to respect the territorial sanctity of other states is like accusing the rain of being wet.

Still, one notes the preponderance of militant groups hostile to America and its interests, and though the issue has faded from the fore as the world economy huffs through the final, schizoid moments of its decades-long meth binge, it's worth noting that transnational insurgent groups continue to proliferate. Individually, none of these is the "existential threat" so popular among post-Soviet know-nothings. Nor, for the most part, are they actually fixated on the United States. One of our great, egomaniacal national myths is that the central motivation of Islamic radicals is Death to America. More accurately, their principle motivations are things like: Death to the corrupt, apostate, America-backed government in Islamabad. The September 11, 2001 attacks were an aberration. Insurgent and rebel groups from North Africa through the Middle East, subcontinent, and Pacific archipelagos engage American troops and assets where proximity dictates.

Paradoxically, while some fighters are rootless, semi-religious mercenaries, bopping across borders to get to where the action is, the goals of the various movements and insurgencies tend to be on the local-to-national scale. The Taliban aren't interested in Kansas. Rebels in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas don't care about moral degeneracy in Las Vegas. These people are not seeking to establish some vast caliphate and gobble up the world. The United States, in the principle symptom of our special brand of flailing imperialism, has gotten itself embroiled in a gaggle of civil wars. Most of the nations in question have been modern nation-states for somewhere between fifty and one hundred years. We might recall what happened in America when it was around that age.

A Tit for This is a Tat for That

Okay, so now Joe the Underemployed Pseudoplumber is John McCain's foreign policy adviser or some shit. McCain is the most FAIL candidate since Alf Landon.

The Great Con

DIANA CHISTENSEN: Christ, you brought half the West-Coast office of the William Morris Agency with you. I'm Diana Christensen, racist lackey of the imperial ruling class.

LAUREEN HOBBS: And I'm Laureen Hobbs, badass commie nigger.

-from Network

I was thinking about this relationship from Chayefsky's '76 magnum opus, between the profit-mad network Valkyrie Diana and the profit-mad Communist Laureen, and how Laureen must have been partly modeled on Angela Davis, and how Angela Davis was Who Is IOZ?-endorsed dead communist Gus Hall for President, and how we are all connected in the great parallelogram of life.

When I was living in France as a student, I used to chat with an old gentlemen at a café I'd frequent near the ancienne Douane. He'd been a member of Action Française, a gang of Orléaniste monarchist restorationists who eventually spawned Jean-Marie le Pen and that whole gang of French far-righters. In other words, the dude had been a fascist, but he was serious about monarchism, and he liked to point out that democratic elections were no more or less likely to produce good, capable government than hereditary rule; as many bad presidents as bad Bourbons, I believe, was how he put it. What, anyway, was the difference between the two in the 5th Republic? What power did the monarchy claim that couldn't be arrogated to the President at his whim? If that's overreach, it's minor. Personally, I take the point.

HOBBS: Don't fuck with my distribution costs! I'm getting 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! (indicates the GREAT KHAN)--And I'm giving this turkey ten thou a segment and another five for this fruitcake--(meaning MARY ANN GIFFORD) And, Helen, don't start no shit with me about a piece again! I'm paying Metro twenty percent of all foreign and Canadian distribution, and that's after recoupment! The Communist Party's not going to see a nickel out of this goddam show until we go into syndication!

Gus Hall for President

What the fuck is a communist, anyway? In the waning days of the election season, the McCain campaign's internal chronometer seems to have reset itself to 1976. I suppose there are the Chinese, but really, nearly 20 years after the wall came down, do Americans even remember communism? In the absence of high-stepping military parades and batteries of Russian missiles on parade through the grim streets of Moscow, is the charge even meaningful? I keep seeing these McCain commercials that ominously intone: Barack Obama wants to spread the wealth. Obama's already spent a quintillion bajillion gamillion dollars advertising in PA. Why would McCain give him another free spot? Maybe he ought to accuse Obama of planning to ship all the intellectuals off to collective farms to grow corn for all that subsidized ethanol he supposedly opposes.

This while the sitting Republican President looks more like Brezhnev than Reagan, attending the Olympics and international talks while industry tanks at home. We just nationalized our banking system, and the government may yet effectively transform GM into VAZ. But Obama's gonna tinker with the income tax rate--Red! Whatever. One eagerly awaits George W. Bush's final, post-stroke press conference on the White House lawn, chest waited [uh] weighted down with meaningless medals, eyes hazy, speech unsteady, hands trembling. If McCain really wanted to win, he'd start calling Obama a capitalist stooge and himself propose to usher in the dictatorship of Joes the Plumbers.

Open Auditions

Last night my buddy and I came up with the idea that we were going to form a hip-hop collective called Ill Manual Crunk. Our first album will be called Hipagorical Hoperative.

They're gonna kill that poor woman.

I'm not kidding about this. This is the most important election since FDR in 1932, 76 years ago. Another election of this importance won't happen for another full lifetime.

Per a recent comments-section discussion about lousy sequels, I've been re-reading the original Frank Herbert Dune sequels, which really do get hilariously terrible by the time you get to Heretics of Dune. I mean, between the heavy-breathing one-handed reader dirty-novel sections and the insane supercrazy Ayn-Rand-style disdain for the teeming, genetically inferior masses of humanity and the looooooong segments of religiophilosophic dialogue in which interstellar mystics jockey for advantage by spouting off incoherently, for pages on end--well, as implied: hilarity ensues. Anyway, there's one point where, swear-ta-jesus, Herbert describes something called a, wait for it, hypnobong. Seriously? Yeah.

Anyway, my point is, clearly that's what they're smokin' over at the Group News Blog, cuz that is some whacky shit.

The Poll Shows Pot in the Lead

So I'm all like, yeah, Barack Obama is going to devour the world, whereas John McCain would just grind his teeth and blink rapidly and shout angry non sequiturs to his "friends," and the usual progressive lurkers lurch to their feet and proclaim that while, sure, Barack Obama is going to launch wars and kill people, he's definitely maybe not going to launch as many wars or kill as many people, so really, you know, ought to be considered a boon to the world's downtrodden. The Donk is plainly excited by the prospect that their golden boy is going to steer the ship straight and true. Right on. I'm often asked--no; I'm often accused of holding all "political activity" to be quixotic and futile. A plain misreading. I think everyone should join their neighborhood association or support their local farms or help their neighbors throw rent parties or equip their houses with solar panels and geothermal wells and cut themselves off the grid. But participating in national politics? Bah. You have to believe that there is something worth improving. The unexamined notion at the heart of the progressive commitment to national electoral politics is the idea that America is good at heart, that it's something to be saved, fixed, bettered for future generations. Me, I think it's a dark and twisted monster with a heart of cadavers, shit, and coal. Working to forestall its eventual demise would be crazy.