Failure Is Not Not an Option

I am going to poach Prof. Crisy's habitual hunting ground and scatter some buckshot in the direction of the New York Time's own Mama Rose, Frank Rich. The column is a cavalcade of Donk hackjobbing, but fortunately for us, its full fatuousness is revealed in a single sentence:

Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama’s signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts.

Oh, do we?

Manufacturing a false crisis while strongly implying the necessity of lesser evilism in a single sentence is a turn of propaganda worthy of Goebbels, and yes, Mary, I did just compare Frank Fucking Rich to Goebbels. If, in fact, Obama's presidency is a skein of false starts and dissapointments, broken promises, bad faith, failure, retreat, and defeat, than why is its early end an "alarming prospect." Oh, oh, wait, I think I know. Because the Republicans are so much worse, right? They are, um, well, to coin a phrase, "The Party of No." Right? A cackling gang of incoherent nativist xenophobes in paradoxical thrall to foreign military adventurism with a strong undercurrent of anti-Constitutional authoritarianism. Unlike the current Donk gang, who only appear as such because they happen to be aping and enforcing and expanding all of those hated anti-Democratic, unconstitutional, illegal, unfair, unjust, ad inf. policies, not that they actually believe in it. It's just, if you want to unmake an omelette, first you have to make more omelettes

The "President's" health-care bill, his "signature issue," is a piece of shit. The fact that the Republicans misidentify it as Communism doesn't make it by some magical property of implied alchemical transference any less of a piece of shit. And if it fails, if The President fails, then that is because they are totes, legit failures reaching their fabulously FAIL apotheosis, or nadir, or, you know, whatever.

Insider Trading

I've written plenty of press releases in my professional life, and I fucking know one when I see one. Or, in this case, a couple.

Show us your portfolio, Friedman!

Gee! Hawd.

Evidently hyperautistic tourettes spokesmodel and all-around shit-munching gutter-trough pisspig "Wolf" "Blitzer" is now on the breaking story news case that the Department of Justice is a hotbed of jihad. Allahu Akbar, muthafuckas! Jesus Christ, America, really?

Anyway, it was on CNN, which gets about as many daily hits as this blog, so, you know, it seems unlikely to thoroughly penetrate zee dizcourze, comme on dit.

However. By the same goddamn, token, can we all please, pretty please, lay off the countervailing wailing that these are ruuuuhlll American patriots, these lawyers, dedicated to principles, model Romans, each of them, head to toes, soup to nuts. Responding to redbaiting and its offspring with a load of patriotic nonsense is equally tawdry.

Skeedlewompin

In honor of His health care bill

If it must be up or down, then I
declare myself oblique, bent, curved,
reticulated, backwards, side-to-side,
a waverer, a driving drunk who swerved
although the road was straight, a compass-based
ellipse, a tangent, hyperbolic line,
un-Euclidian as time and space,
trigonometric as the function, sine,
a ripple propagated where a stone
disturbed a stream, a probability
that won’t obligingly collapse, a lone
and undimension’d singularity,
mass of a mountain, scale of a flea, a blip,
a turn, a pirouette, a slide, a slip.

Les Immortels

The farflung correspondent who forwarded this to our attention cannily observed: neologisms that fail to acquire a widely accepted and broadly understood meaning after six fucking decades are probably not, like, conceptually the strongest, uh, concepts. I concur. Genocide has more or less come to mean, "killing a lot of people." Likewise, holocaust has come to mean killing Jews, gay has come to mean Hamaseckshul, and in Britain they call an elevator The Boot, a truck The Lift, and the trunk of a car is referred to as the People's Princess. Meaning is plastic, and the real joke here is that legislators and their attendant polisci academician groupies think that they can dictate and defer usage and signification. I mean, whaddayathinky'are, Congress, French?!

Taxi to the Dark Side

Boy, it sure is a good thing that Tom Friedman was able to talk to this gajillionaire Chief Executive of a monopolistic technology conglomerate concerned citizen about preferential, industry-specific tax policies education and economic policies that will not substantially reduce start-up and capital allocations will make America competetive again although they would significantly reduce annual operating expenditure through learning and technology and stuff thereby contributing to net yearly revenue so that America doesn't fall behind its competitors and thus positively impacting bottom-line profitability and remains competetive in the global market while maintaining robust share-value growth by artificially inflating reported margins for years to come which, at very least, will make Paul Otelli even more rich, bitch for the Children, Who Are the Future.

Be Good

As I have lately been making occasional mention of My Boyfriend Johnny Weir©, I feel I ought to say what it is that I find admirable about him as a spokescreature for The Queers. Firstly, as a humbuggering reactionary, I enjoy anyone who so resolutely confounds the categorizers. Johnny Weir makes no secret of being a big queer, but he keeps refusing to say that he's gay--a distinction, I think, with an important difference. I do not suppose anyone thinks Johnny is secretly banging some girlfriend while riding our current popular obsession with queeny popstar types. He has--almost--admitted as much; he likes dick. Well, that's cool. But in both public persona and topical statements, he proposes himself not as a representative or role model of homosexuals as much as a representative of all the poor kids, girls and boys, butch and femme, who do not comport to the received norms of gender. And that, I think, is altogether more brazen, braver, and more important.

I've observed before that much of the animus directed toward people of minority sexualities is motivated less by discomfort with sexuality per se than it is grounded in fear and hatred for those who are perceived as transgressing on the prescribed borders of male and female. I do not deny that same-sex sex, especially the dude-on-dude variety, still elicits prejudicial ICKs! from our society, but let's be frank. Ever since that first sleepless night in childhood when, having ventured into the hall on the way to a glass of water, we overheard the quiet creek of Mom-and-Dad's conjugal bed, we have been adepts and experts at pretending that we do not hear each other doin' it. I am sure that the nice straight couple next door pretends that no sex occurs in our household just as surely as we pretend that none occurs in theirs. I do do a lot of yoga. That explains the grunts, right?

Like any gay teenager, I experienced a fair share of derision and mockery, and yet it was always relatively benign. In part, this was because I was a child of great privilege. My family was very important in our small community. My father was a major public figure. My mother was on all the important committees and boards. My teachers and school administrators looked out for me because of who my parents were. But in even greater part, I never really traduced the norms of adolescent boydom. If hardly an ass-slapping heterosexual jock type (which in retrospect seems the queerest of queer, don't it?), I was reasonably athletic, understood how engines worked, got by just fine in wood shop, knew how to fish, followed the Pens and the Steelers, drank plenty of lousy beer, enjoyed loud action and science fiction movies, and was far, far less fastidious about personal appearance than I have become in my faggy older age--and even that, at last, has only to do with the fact that, vocationally, I am a sell-out, a careerist, a climber.

In comparison, one boy named Brent, likewise an honors and AP student, contrariwise a clumsy whippet of a twink with a taste for argyle sweaters, was teased mercilessly, constantly called a fag, forever harangued in gym, and generally made totally miserable because, at the root of it, he was girlish. He was also straight--is straight. Liked girls. Had not the slightest interest in dick. I should know, because I assumed, just as crassly as the bullies, the he must be gay, and tried fruitlessly to get him in bed.

Which brings us back to Johnny. Here is a queer public figure who is not endlessly agitating for the right to ape heterosexist contractual unions, who proposes not that it is fine for men to sleep with men, but that it is fine for men to act like women, or for women to act like men, or--since we love to follow things through to their logical conclusions here at Who Is IOZ?--that there is really no such thing as acting like a woman or acting like a man, except insofar as it's all just acting. I find it wholly admirable and entirely refreshing, after the last decade of dull-dull-dull marriage lawsuits and the current ongoing fervor to ensure that the gays can kill for their country.

Explaining American Exceptionalism with an Extended (You'll Pardon the Expression) Metaphor about My Penis

I want to tell you about my dick.

I was neither an early nor a late bloomer. My pubescence was in the fat middle of the bell curve, but with the exception of those hairy monsters whose voices changed in the fourth grade, all puberty-tortured boys imagine themselves to be the last to get hair down there. So, though I was surrounded by other gawky, broken-voiced, wispy-pubed young adolescents, I was convinced that I was the last to sprout. America's strange nudity taboos only make these feelings worse. I suppose we did shower in junior-high gym class, but most of us shuffled there and back shame-facedly, clutching towels, afraid that wandering eyes made us gay. (Postscript: wandering eyes made me gay.)

This was also the period of my own budding sexuality. It happened to coincide with the early days of IRC and AOL chatrooms and the like. (Yes, grrrrrrl, I am soooo younger that you. With the skin to prove it.) And we all know how big everyone's dick is on the internet. And we all know how big everyone's dick is in high school. Huge!

And all of this is to say that for years as a teenager I was convinced that I had a small dick. I mean, even before I'd ever really messed around with another dude, I had pretty much resolved that I would have to be a bottom, insofar as I sort of understood what a bottom was. It wasn't like anyone would ever want me to fuck him, since I had such a teeny tiny dick.

Then I started having sex with dudes. And as my usable sample size grew so that the anecdotal became effectively statistical, I was able to conclude that I did not in fact have a small dick. Indeed, it appeared that I was at very least on the upper side of average. It appeared that, though I was not going to be shortlisted for any pornographic top billing in the near future, I at least had no reason to be embarrassed about the damned thing.

Simultaneously, it began to dawn on me that all the boys who bragged about their own tremendous size were in fact petrified by the same fear that had once frozen me.

Fags do talk and compare cocks, and certainly the internet is still curiously overpopulated by the over-eight-inchers, and yet it's also my experience that gay men are a lot less worked up about their potential inadequacies than the straights, who, because they have comparatively so little intercourse, you'll pardon the expression, with their own kind, are less able to contextualize their own endowments, consider them realistically, fairly judge their virtues and shortcomings. So too, America, whose habits of bluster and braggadocio, whether by Presidents or National Review "journalists," are histrionic overcompensation for what is, at the end of the line, nothing more or less than a petrifying fear of coming up short in some measure of comparison.

Well Sir, I'd Say General Ripper Already Invalidated That Policy

Back in the day, of course, our various Merkin Muffleys could declare that it was "the avowed policy of the United States never to strike first with nuclear weapons," which was always a bit of self-congratulatory moral posturing, since the United States was the only country ever to have struck with nuclear weapons regardless of the preceding ordinal qualifier. But still.

But let us not forget, 9/11 changed everyting.



And thus do we find ourselves, one Soviet threat down but a billion Muslims to go, "rethinking nuclear policy."

Boy, I sure wish we had one of them Doomsday devices.