Gone Fishin'

Leave a comment if Barack Obama's navel blossoms with a lotus flower and brings the Kali Yuga to a close, or whatever. Back on the twelfth, younz.

Dayenu

He did not, to my recollection, participate too fervently in the endless ratcheting of the more, better Democrats movement, preferring to cultivate an image as a wonkish, though admittedly partisan, observer and commentator, but Matt Yglesias made the headline, so Matt Yglesias gets the infamy:

Why 60 Won't Mean Much

Hallelujah!

You may recall how the Donk protested its innocence back in the bygone days of Total Republican Dominance. Don't blame us!, the Donkle cried. Not even the traitorous quisling Jeffords in those heady, pre-9/11 times helped much with his defection to the Donk bosom. Then slowly, slowly, like the first mutant fish hauling its bony, wheezing body out of the slime and onto the sand, the Donk slipped back into power. But when it won Congress, it wasn't enough, and when it won even more Congress and the Presidency, it wasn't enough, and when at last it achieves sentience and launches Judgment Day on its unsuspecting, soft, human creators . . . still, it will not be enough.

In this regard, Democratic voters are really no different than the Rapture-ready Republican rubes they are ever-willing to mock as credulous fools, worshiping likewise at a church whose eschaton is ever-imminent but never-arriving.

Stay Out of Tegucigalpa, Lebowski

There is a certain charm to the response, which moves feelingly, but could've used a continuity editor. In the first paragraph, it accuses us (the, uh, Who Is IOZ? community) of campus liberalism, which is understandable, given our fondness for tapestries on the dorm room walls. Of course, this is as far from a den of revolution, self-proclaimed or otherwise, as you can get, seeing as we counsel that the revolution is useless, defeat inevitable. The condition of man is to be ruled. Annoyance is the ultimate resistance. And cetera. I personally am not ready to fight for Latin America. I simply counsel that the United States, a corporation in which I am just a poor, extremely minor shareholder, not fight for Latin America either, indeed, that we leave Latin America alone.

In the second paragraph, Mr. Loomis declares that this aggression will not stand, man, and proclaims that the principle of preventing rightist rollback of leftist political gains to be "more important than this particular situation in Honduras," a curious complaint from a man who just a half-sentence before was parenthetically castigating his critics for their ignorance of "actual conditions in Latin America." Well, is it the particular or the universal that hold the day, the principle or the actual? I suspect the question remains unresolved in Mr. Loomis' brain. I suspect the question hasn't occurred to him. Meanwhile, the more pressing question, which motivated my first little foray, goes thunderously unanswered: I am still not sure what it means to say the coup cannot stand. Send in the Marines? Place your suggestions in the box.

In the third paragraph, Loomis ventures that I and others react poorly to criticisms of Castro and Chavez. Allowing that such reactionaries exist, so what? Whatever else you might say about those two, they are leftist, Latin-American-ish presidents . . . though presumably not the sort whose ousters Loomis would personally prohibit from standing. Or are they? In any case, it doesn't seem germane.

After this we return to Loomis' fanciful "world," whatever or whomever that may be, and his insistence that it not "allow the coup to succeed," again without pausing to take a breath and suggest just what this world is supposed to do about it. He then notes that President Zelaya is not "a real progressive leader," although Loomis, gosh, sure wishes that were the case, but in the meantime, what're'ya gonna do, vote Republican? He concludes with a clarion call. What happens in Honduras has no effect on the rest of the world, unless it happens, in which case, it will affect the rest of the world. Now that's clarity you can change your belief in.

Wooly-headed sentiments like these usually herald a dire case of the neoconservatives, for eventually the revolution can only ever be served by sending in the Marines. Meanwhile, the non-revolutionaries here at Who Is IOZ? advise only that the US stay the fuck away from Latin America, letting them fight their own wars and revolutions, rather than forever seeking to mold other peoples to our passing political whims.

Last, Best

Today in 2009 we’re in a lot of ways back to where we were four years ago—able for American forces to start leaving on a high note, confident that they performed their job with skill, and leaving Iraqi leaders with a handshake.

-Matthew Yglesias

Or you could say that in 2009 a tactically exhausted and strategically impotent American army is beginning a pullback, leaving behind a million or two (it is a mark, a stain, a dishonor, a horror that we frankly have no idea) extra dead and displaced Iraqis under the rule of a gangster president who looks ever more like his predecessor, whose ouster we sought at the cost of those hundreds of thousands of lives. You could say that the "high note" on which we depart, having made the world safe for British Petroleum, consists of a level of daily terror and violence, both on behalf of the extant state and on behalf of the various insurgencies, hold-outs, rebels, extremists, and others, that would fracture and destroy any internally peaceful western society. The "job" performed so admirably by American forces was the unprovoked invasion and occupation of a foreign nation, and the fact that the American military has subsequently managed to mop much of the blood from the gutters does not obviate or abnegate these facts. Meanwhile the assurances from the leaders of the various Iraqi factions that it is all now a matter of political accommodation and hard bargaining between them reeks of misinformation. Here, for example, Qubad Talabani, the son of Iraq's new warlord-dictator, tells a series of self-serving and transparent fairy-tale lies to NPR's Scott Simon, who simply cannot imagine that that lovely Oxbridge voice could tell an untruth.

Here, then, you have a generational crime, an act of naked aggression rationalized post hoc as a regrettable and unnecessary event that nonetheless worked out . . . what? A little better than expected. This judgment seems to me to be wholly inaccurate, desperate, and immature. It marks not the glimmer of success but the abjectness of our failure that we comfort ourselves in knowing that the conquered province we leave behind is merely straining, rather than splitting, at the seams.