I'm Afraid of Americans

I think that it is worth noting that liberals spent eight years bemoaning the incipient fascism of the Bush-Cheney era, but now that their bright and shining star is in charge, it is absolutely verboten, totally beyond the pale if you'll pardon the expression, to call OUR President--commander-in-chief, Adeodatus, The Obama--a fascist. Show some respect, why dontcha? Likewise this recent imbroglio in which Obama decides to beam himself directly into America's classrooms to urge The Children to just say no, or stay in school, or whatever . . . I mean, honestly, I find it entirely harmless, more chuckle-worthy than anything, the sort of babykissing politicking that makes American Democracy the laughing stock the beacon of the Free World. Nonetheless, if Georgie-Peorgie had preempted Sponge-Bob to urge Our Children to clear the brush of their minds, such as it was, one can imagine the cries of Big Brother!

In any case, the fact that we are even having such an argument is only one more indication of the swollen absurdity that is the modern imperial presidency, pontifex maximus, head cheerleader, life coach, guidance counselor, priest-confessor, confidant, inamorato, ad infinitum. The question is not so much whether or not it is fascistic per se for the head of state and chief executive of our nominal republic to address Our Children, The Future, but rather whether or not it is more simply ridiculous. If our most fervent desire is for our children to Stay In School, a more effective remedy than an annual pep talk might be to make schools less wholly miserable, enervating, spirit-crushing, thought-destroying, mind-rotting, child-processing, conformity factories . . . but then, that might chip into the standardized testing scam, and as goes Kaplan, Inc., so goes the Washington Post, a local publication in Washington D.C. modeled on Gotham and similar scene-style glossies.

Biodiesel

Oops.

There is something odd about this story. The Taliban purportedly hijacked a couple of fuel trucks, which they got stuck in a riverbed outside of a village. Then NATO called in an air strike, blew them up, and killed scores of civilians. Of course it was civilians from the local community siphoning gas. Ain't no Sunocos in Kunduz, right? Meanwhile, what? Did we think the Taliban hijackers were just hanging out, waiting for AAA?

Shit We Like: Poetry

Jesus Christ, IOZ, why don't you write about something you like already? Fine. I like Marilyn Hacker. A poet who has turned the conventions of formal verse ("the New Formalism"--ugh, bah, yuck) into templates for lyrical and prosodic invention that few poets have managed either within or outside of traditional forms, her particular subject has been loss. The final sonnet of the "Coda" of her 1986 volume, Love, Death, and the Changing of Seasons is as perfect a poem as any ever committed to paper:

Did you love well what very soon you left?
Come home and take me in your arms and take
away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
Never so full, I never was bereft
so utterly. The winter evenings drift
dark to the window. Not one word will make
you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake
from your night toward me. The only gift
I got to keep or give is what I've cried,
floodgates let down to mourning for the dead
chances, for the end of being young,
for everyone I loved who really died.
I drank our one year out in brine instead
of honey from the seasons of your tongue.

It opens with the classic metrical inversion, much-loved by Shakespeare, substituting a trochee for an iamb in the first foot, which tips you into the pentameter line. The line plays ambiguously on the phrase love well. Well is a procedural sort of adverb. "Did you do well on the test?" It implies skill or competence. We speak of love in terms of quantity. We ask, "How much do you love me?" Not, "How well?" And it stands in odd contrast to the phrase that follows: what very soon you left.

In the second line, the tone of longing inquiry turns to the imperative. Come home, it demands with a hard spondee, but the meter quickly confounds the command, as the iamb in the second foot is followed by a trochee/iamb combination (me in your arms) and then the pleading repetition of take, a tone reinforced by a metrically odd line in which the list of common ailments seems to contain only stressed syllables, giving it a quality of insistence. The contents of the list, meanwhile, are quotidian and rather pathetic, and indeed, the demand that the lover return from the line before has quickly turned away from the opening's broad question, did you love well, to the less romantic, if truer-to-life, concerns of a woman recently split from her love: who will tend me when I'm sick?

Then the poem turns again, becoming very nearly melodramatic: Never so full, I never was bereft / so utterly. Already, we see the form of the poem itself approximating the progression through the end of a relationship, by turns practical and theatrical.

What follows is a meditation on the power of the poem--keep in mind, this is the final sonnet in a book of many dozens all devoted to this same love affair. It admits, through several metrically virtuosic lines, that nothing said will undo the end of their affair, make the ex-lover "wake . . . from your night toward me." She admits to the material futility of the whole thing; memories are worthless; all she gets to keep are her tears, and here she is slyly mocking herself as well, not only by getting a dig at her own weepiness with the old floodgates metaphor, but by subtly mocking the very affair she is lamenting. In this case, when she writes of dead / chances, for the end of being young, you've learned from the preceding poems that this was a relationship between a middle-aged woman and another nearly half her age, and as if that weren't enough, she reminds herself too of the friends and family she has really lost--for everyone I loved who really died. Paraphrasis doesn't do it justice. It's really a magnificent passage; in less than a dozen lines it plumbs both the tragedy and absurdity of romantic loss, invokes both sorrow and self-pity. Then it closes with that extraordinary summation: I drank our one year out in brine instead / of honey from the seasons of your tongue. Bitterness, defeat, affirmation, and a minor fuck you! in two lines. Not bad for a mere sonneteer.

Sad Men

I must once again take issue with the critical judgment of critics I ordinarily admire. In this instance, Will Wilkinson and Micha Gertner disagree! Fortunately, they are both wrong.

Because it is somewhat stylishly done,occasionally well-designed, and produced with overall aplomb, it is easy to ignore that Mad Men is a period-piece soap opera. Its better production values represent higher budgets and the benefits of a hebdomanal, rather than daily, schedule. It is cursed by the same ridiculous plots, unlikely characters, and preposterous acting as any of Grandma's "stories." Its interrogation of gender relations in the sixties bears the same relationship to real dissection as putting firecrackers in frogs bore to high-school biology. Splat! Similar half-assed evocations of a male-dominated, highly-gendered world abound. Mad Men apes Desperate Housewives, but because it dresses in better drag, it seems less the bimbo, more the talented Female Impersonator. Its central "stolen identity" conceit in the character of Don Draper is a sub-amnesia-episode contrivance, straight out of Edge of Night (thanks again, Grandma IOZ!).

Although I have surely mocked and derided him for some sin of liberalism in the past, I must say that Mr. Mannion gets it exactly right when he calls this coat-hanger abortion of a television program "one of the most relentlessly and deliberately humorless shows in the history of television drama."

To Rule Mankind and Make the World Obey

Credit where it is due: this is a fine column by Glenn Greenwald on the permanent-war state. The Stiftung ponders the dénouement.

I will certainly not be the first to resurrect decadent as the word qui fait date, but as Washington's grape-eaters accept into their ongoing orgy the various moron offspring of the patrician class and aver, as Glenn notes, that wars not won are still better entertainment than wars not fought, it is hard to see a more timely adjective.

Home Sweet Home N At

I heartily commend to all younz guys this important guide . . . part of an ongoing series.

It's All the Same in the Allende

Well, I will give it this much, it is a novel legal mind indeed that disdains the tools of our justice system not because they are often fallible and sometimes punish the innocent, but rather because they might punish the guilty.

Let's go in for a little additional irony. The argument usually achieves a more majestic form of stupidity when it devolves into worries that each succeeding government will march into the capital and immediately throw its predecessors in the dock, junta after junta, like one of 'em South American banana republics, djoo noh?

Because, after all, the United States of America would never have anything to do with anything like that.

Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything unseemly.

The Sacred Band of Thebes, ladies and gents. They'll be here all week. Uh, rimshot.

The Funniest Richard Cohen in the Portion of America Currently Occupied by Richard Cohen

America's next top model, Richard Cohen, cannot decide about torture. He expounds upon his own moral imagination, which wouldn't be up to the task of determining the rightness of making adolescent soccer teams shake hands after a game, and condemns anyone who's passed more than four or five fruitless seconds considering the moral nature of torture as "ideological," a word that, like so many others, means something different within the headquarters of the Washington Post than it does without. Whatevs. I am willing to believe that in certain Washingtonian corridors, there are powerful people who might read and be swayed by your perseverating Krauthammers, your pedantic George Wills, your earnest El Kruggos, your high-heeled, low-minded Dowds, but I do not believe anyone cares about Cohen. Recall he is the guy who wrote a whole dream-sequence ballet scene for the MGM musical that is his life about how he didn't interview the President. So, you know, natch.

If you can't say unequivocally that torture is wrong, then you can't say that anything is wrong. Moral relativism alarm, woo-ah-woo-ah! I eagerly await Richard Cohen's next thinkulation: "Contract Murder, But Does It Work?" In any case, Cohen is guilty of crimes against Herman Melville, and I will personally not pay any money at all to the first person who kidnaps Richard Cohen, ties him to the back of a sperm whale, and sends the fucker down. Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Glenn Greenwald Refuses to Disavow Pseudonymous Blogger IOZ's Statements that Joe Klein Is a Scat-Loving Donkey-Show Promoter

Yeah, okay, Glenn, but I am more interested in what you don't say. Specifically, you nowhere indicate that it would be wrong to murder Joe Klein, dress him in lacy pantyhose, shove a balloon full of heroin up his hairy ass, drape his neck with an Anthrocon event pass, and dump his body in the Tidal Pool. I've read your post fully three times through, and thoroughly, and you simply do not mention that Joe Klein is not a truck-stop trough-dwelling pisspig cockslave bottomboy whose mother was a carp and whose father wore house dresses. So, boo to you, and stuff. Obviously you belong to the lunatic fringe, since you are so eager to smear your opponents with this hateful rhetoric.

The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus

Tomorrow, Glenn Beck, who is a sheep (exclamation point exclamation point) is going to take off his gloves (exclamation point!) and tell you where to be, America, to save America. But America is a place; it is where it is by being what it is! Beck! You are the Jean Baudrillard of the Ludwig Wittgensteins of the barnyard. Some pig! Two legs good, four legs baaaaaaaa-d.

I don't want my brother coming out of that toilet with just his dick in his hands, alright?

Will Wilkinson writes about guns at political events as an introduction to an interesting, brief take on the overcommitment of public resources to protecting that evasive game bird, the American politician. A thoroughly hilarious comment thread ensues, in which a number of offended liberals (I assume) effectively accuse Will of playing Cassius in the future assassination of The Obama. Oh, into what dangers would you lead me, Willkinson, that you would have me seek into myself for that which is not in me?

The liberal argument against the private right to bear arms is made in bad faith. If they wish to more thoroughly curtail the legal possession of firearms, they should seek to amend the Constitution, clarifying the limits of that right. As it is, they are stuck arguing that the Second Amendment does not mean what it means, or, in another popular argument, saying that since modern militaries render armed resistance to state power futile, well, fuck it, Dude, let's go bowling. Other commenters point out that if we learn anything from the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, it is that, duh, insurgency works, and gangs armed with rifles and RPGs can wear down great powers.

I tend to believe that the world could use more assassinations of presidents and potentates. If we are cursed forever to be ruled by such men, let them at least pay for their power by looking over their shoulder from time to time.

UPDATE: I would also like to note, for the record, that in the original Rome--and here is an argument for the thesis that the original is always better than the sequels--most of the best assassinations were carried out by the Secret Service.

The Children, Who Are the Future, Amen

Her son is smoking skunk, she learns, a strain of cannabis whose THC content is much more potent than garden-­variety pot — except that it has become garden variety. I had never heard of skunk either, but a quick search online led me to a souk of seeds for the home farmer, advertising up to a toxic 22 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content in some strains. My shopping cart remained empty as I browsed in disbelief. Even as stronger varieties are being bred and marketed, medical research is linking cannabis use to behavioral and cognitive changes reminiscent of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression and anxiety disorder. And yet we find ourselves arguing about whether pot is addictive or a gateway drug or should be legalized. We are collectively losing our minds.

-Dominique Browning in her Sunday Times review of The Lost Child

Damn, bro, that's some skunky shit.

-Me, various points, mid-nineties through present

Since the Times has published not one, but two reviews of Julie Myerson's The Lost Child: A Mother's Story, it is worth noting that this "skunk" weed legend has long since been thoroughly discredited. In other words, Dear Dominique: no, it's only you.

Rumors of increases in the "potency" of marijuana have long informed the scaremongering that serves the interests of prohibition, and it intentionally prays on the general scientific illiteracy of Anglo-American societies, which have long been uniquely concerned with that devil weed. No one nowadays suggests that whiskey be outlawed because it is 800% more potent by volume than mere Budweiser. People wrongly assume that potency is a synonym with toxicity. Interestingly, alcohol is toxic, and increases in potency do correlate to increases in toxicity. Meanwhile, THC, the "active ingredient" in marijuana, produces no toxicity reaction in humans, and even if it were true (it's not) that it is monstrously more potent today than in the salad days of hippie yore, it would not necessarily follow that it posed any greater danger to consumers. Indeed, the greatest health dangers in smoking weed are the high levels of inhaled tar and carbon monoxide.

In any case, the actual son who is the fictionalized subject of Myerson's memoir denounced his mother for the book, called her nuts, and said that he just likes smoking pot. Assuming that he is as goofy and self-serving in memorializing those recently passed days as his mother, we can comfortably take his assertions with several handfuls of salt. Memoirs make liars of everyone involved. The behaviors described, particularly the violence, if true, toward his mother, suggest that if he had--if he has--a drug problem, it isn't weed.

This is actually a common problem for the families of addicts. My family was convinced that my brother was a cocaine addict because we knew that he did coke. Meanwhile he concealed his true addiction to opiates quite thoroughly--only in retrospect does it become obvious how plainly his real behavior indicated the latter and not the former. Myerson's defense of her publication--"the importance of publicizing the nightmare of teenage drug use outweighs prohibitions against writing about their child," in the reviewer's paraphrase--is betrayed in its venality by that one word, publicizing. Better that she be honest with her son, reminding him that to know a writer is to risk appearing in a book one day, that you cannot patent your own life to protect it from thieving fictionalists. "I did it for the children" is the lousiest excuse on earth; it is the most plainly bullshit, and the surest to be a lie.