Christmas Break

I blew my wad mocking healthcare last week, and although mine is a godless, heathen family, the rump Catholicism on the paternal side impels us to celebrate a loud Christmas (my second favorite of our oddball holiday celebrations, a hair-width runner-up to our raucus Passover Seder). So posting has been light and will continue to be so through next week, when I shall attempt to review The Decade.

In the meantime, the main course for this year's Christmas dinner will be a tagine of spiced lamb with dried fruit and almonds. It will be preceded by a hot-and-sweet onion soup. Our sides will be a very simple lemon risotto, root vegetables roasted with olive oil, smoked salt, and peppercorns, and wilted greens with fennel seed.

For the soup, I boil the reserved carcass of a whole roast chicken with chopped carrots, onion, green onion, lemon grass, whole cinammon, and star anise for about two hours and then strain it through a fine, double sieve. I reserve a quart or two for making the risotto. I caremalize several large red and yellow onions with a bit of garlic and shallot, deglaze the pan with a bit of red wine, pour the mixture into the soup broth, bring it to a simmer together with one more dash of wine, and then serve in wide bowls over big hunks of stale bread that I've soaked in olive oil, garnished with a few splashes of bright red chili oil.

For the tagine, I buy beautiful, cheap, fatty lamb shoulder, chop it into 3/4" cubes, marinate the meat in a mixture of raw milk yogurt, toasted, ground cumin, coriander, turmeric, cayenne powder, mustard seed, olive oil, and coarse salt for an hour or so. Then I toss it together in the tagine with roughly chopped almonds, dried dates, dried apricots, dried figs, parsley, shallots, garlic cloves, and quartered meyer lemons. I close the tagine and place it in a cool oven, which I then warm to 250. The lamb cooks at 250 for 4-5 hours. Then I uncover it, raise the temperature to 400, and let it brown on top.

For the risotto, I bring the reserved broth to a low boil and add some additional lemon grass for perfume and flavor. I melt some finely diced onion, shallot, and carrot in clarified butter over medium heat, then raise the heat and add the rice to toast. I only use broth to deglaze the pot, and then cook the risotto slowly over a once-again medium heat, adding just enough broth to keep the rice submerged at all times, until it is thick and creamy, at which point I add a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice, a bit more salt to taste, and a few pats of sweet cream butter to thicken the dish and mount the flavor.

The root vegetables are simplest of all. Chop 3-4 each turnips and rutabagas and 2-3 celery roots into even cubes, toss them all together in a ceramic baking dish with good olive oil, smoked sea salt, and cracked black peppercorns, and put them in the oven with the tagine, giving them a good 1.5-2 hours at the low temperature, then letting them likewise crisp and brown up a bit in the hotter oven.

To wilt the greens, chop them roughly, gently heat some olive oil and crushed garlic cloves in a heavy saute pan, and slowly add the greens, making certain to salt them lightly before they begin to wilt, so that the salt is evenly distributed throughout. When all the greens have wilted, roughly chop some fennel seeds and toss them in over the heat. Serve with just the slightest dash of good red wine vinegar.

And to all a good fucking night.

Tuesday Travesties

I do not know what Chris Floyd is talking about. It all makes perfect sense.

The War on Christmas, Gameday Diagrams

You may be unaware, but I am something of an amateur military historian. I have taken the liberty of sketching out the decisive battle in the War on Christmas, showing how the vast numerical superiority of The Christians was overcome by poor battlefield selection and the inferior manueverability of their heavy troops compared to the combined cavalry and light, swift infantry of Secular Islamofascism and the Liberal Jews.

The Christians, believing their tremendous troop strength gave them an unbeatable edge, chose to array themselves on the narrow plain between the Santa Claus River and the Black Friday Forest. It was their theory that a more or less direct frontal assault on the forces of Secular Islamofascism would quickly smash the opposing lines. They were not concerned with the Liberal Jews, who were camped on the far side of the swift river and in any case on the wrong side of the treacherous marshes of Hanukkah.



However, dissension in The Christian's ranks ultimately split their forces. While forces under Protestant Command advanced in a direct line, the Catholic Generals wheeled to their left, hoping to take The Secular Islamofascists right flank.

The Liberal Jews quietly advanced to the bow in the Santa Claus river and risked a dangerous ford, still unnoticed by The Christians.



As Protestant forces assailed the Secular Islamofascist front lines, the right flank of Secular Islamofascism moved swiftly to outflank the Catholic armies on their left. At the same time, the Liberal Jews were already familiar with the deceptive landscape of the Hanukkah marshes and were able to cut a swift path, emerging to attack The Christians weak rearguard. Those Secular Islamofascist forces under direct attack, meanwhile, bravely held the line.



The Christian rearguard was rolled up, throwing their armies into disarray, as the quick flanking maneuver of the Secular Islamofascists had also driven back the Catholic left. Thus The Christians collided with themselves on the center of the field and in the confusion were thoroughly routed.



Only a small Christian force was able to flee back toward the forest.

Sloth

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

-Dorm Rap Douthat

There's really nothing wrong with a little pocket philosophy. It would be easy to complain that despite, or because of, his Harvard education, young master Douthat doesn't really understand what Hobbes meant by "state of nature," but that would be cheap and a bit dishonest. After all, Hobbes himself didn't know what he meant. Cribbed and bowdlerized philosophy is only very offensive if you hold the authentic item in high regard. I do not. Hobbes was a crank, and Leviathan was bunk. Casting back to its notions about the natural world is like appealing to Aristotelian mechanics in discussing rocket launches.

Anyway, what are these "human societies that hew closest to the natural order"? Life expectancy in modern Russia is twelve years and three and months, after which every single adult man dies from a mixture of bathtub vodka, automatic gunfire, and despair, but you would hardly call Russia neolithic. We consider the Afghans primitive, and yet your basic illiterate tribesman seems to have a far firmer grasp on such cornerstones of modernity as the internal combustion engine that your average chin-bearded Ivy Leaguer. Among actual neolithic peoples, both extant and within the archeological record, all that can be said is that there is and was wide variety--peaceable types and warlike, long-lived and sickly, idyllic and hardscrabble. Plus ça change, motherfuckers, as I am wont to say.

The flip side of this rusty coin is the myth of the noble savage, the crass primitivism that Douthat et al. associate with Hollywood and New Age America but that has in fact been with us since the gods of the stargate or whoever gave us civilization. And that's the rub, isn't it? They are the same fallacy. Cultural conservatives imagine some kind of attack on the "theistic" cosmogony, even as it is their own confused fairy tale that posits a pre-civilizational Eden as the natural and primordial state of man. Meanwhile, the merely narrative appeal of making every ancient tribe and alien civilization into nature-worshipers is simply this: despite what every dork with a World of Warcraft avatar and a pile of Frank Herbert books believes, creating a unified, coherent, Tolkienian, fictional universe is very, very hard. It may have taken James Cameron a half a billion dollars to make the blue titties of his forest babes jiggle just so, but it took old J.R.R. a whole lifetime to invent his elves. Mere primitivism is a problem in storytelling not so much because it fetishizes false notions of indigenousness, nor because it attacks the received moral order of the Christian universe, but because it is bad storytelling. And isn't that likewise the problem with the Times editorial page and all its compeers? Not that they're so fucking wrong, but that they're so goddamned lazy.

You Go to Snore with the Uvula You Have

Yggie Stop! He's not interested in the contents of a vast, costly, inequitable, inefficient, incomprehensible piece of legislation because it reaffirms the important principle that it is the business of the congress to craft vast, costly, inequitable, inefficient, and incomprehensible pieces of legislation. America's problem over the last decade-and-a-half, in his estimation, is that our legislature has acted in insufficient quantity and at inadequate scale. He's like the Ezra Pound of goofball punditry, driven mad by his own insane preconceptions, locked in the sideshow cage of the internet, screaming, "Make it big!"

Meanwhile, Yggie evidently has some kind of excellent reputation as a foreign policy yodeler. A point he often makes, and a point of agreement between him and me, is that considering various military adventures in the abstract--democracy, whiskey, sexy good; burkha, Islam, no-democracy bad; that sort of thing--as a matter of what Leftwhich Warrior Michael Bérubé in his High Late Early Medieval Postmodern Enlightenment mode semi-coined "deontological war", is plainly completely insane, and that here below the realm of pure form and action, there is the simpler, if imperfect, question of actual capability. Like: does America have the ability, capacity, resources, and patience to transform Afghanistan into a representative democracy? And if the answer is no, then . . .

So, and perhaps I am missing some of the ins and outs of this particular case, but before we start lauding The Congrefs of these United States for their ambition to build this particular tower of Babel, before even we wonder whether it will gain divine approbation or incur terrible retribution, perhaps we ought to ask a few questions of the structural engineers. In other words, the question is not whether or not Congress should "reform health care", but whether or not it can.