Let a Thousand Mussolinis Bloom

You can skip David Brooks entire column, with its habitual Cleaverisms and pining for some Atlantean age of Anglo-Protestant ascendence and Jim Crow responsibility and social cohesion, because when heated and boiled, the icky sediment that remains is just three words in the penultimate sentence: crisis of authority. And that is where the steaming bullshit meets the sawdust. The crisis of authority is the failure of authority, not the failure of our authorities, to be solved by reconstituting the same authorities in different arrays and formats, but the failure of Authority in . . . well, David, in a philosophical sense. Good god, I feel like erstwhile dominatrix and Marlboro spokesmodel Ayn Rand for saying so, but authority is anti-life. Authority is coercion, whether it is the city council or the sense of the Senate. The reason that people hate and distrust it is that it fails to enrich their lives. It circumscribes choice in the name of all kinds of security, but life feels no less precarious because of it. It's opaque and incomprehensible. Its institutions are of a deliberately inhuman scale. There is no social compact. For all the still-mouthed platitudes about participatory politics, people understand that they have no choice in the matter. We don't get to negotiate this contract. There's no mutuality. Crafting some new gaggle of distributed, "decentralized" dictators is not a solution to a category error.

Missing Something

"The sleazy deals, the Louisiana Purchase, Cornhusker kickback. the PhRMA deal," McCain said. "The sleaze that Chicago-style sausage-making going on in the formation of this bill."

-Some Old Guy

The, uh. The what? The Louisiana Purchase?

Personally, I am opposed to the health care bill because of Seward's Folly.

Scritch an Itch

I continue not to be able to get worked up about the continual problem of sexual predation in the Catholic Church. Chis Hitchens is predictably coniptic about the whole thing, so you can turn to him if that's what you're into. The culture of rape is horrible, its preponderance sickening, and yet at the same time, is anyone surprised? Here is an organization dedicated to keeping its entire institutional hierarchy in a state of perpetual stunted sexual boyhood, a repressed gang of physiological adults pretending to be half-man eunuchs in the service of the most insane heavenly Cage-aux-Folles routine this side of the Ganges. So naturally, these guys are going to play doctor. While it is certainly true that penetrative rape is a part of the problem, what is more striking to me is just how much of the "abuse," as we agree to euphemize it, takes the form of childhood and early pubescent sexual exploration-manquée, how much furtive touching and weird oral copulation is going on. The sad conclusion is that many of these priests are in fact not predators per se, as our age of lurid, kiddie-porn panic would have it, but that they are sadly stunted and deranged. Indeed, lifelong celibacy is the single most perverse human sexual practice, the single greatest deviation from any norm of human sexuality that we might reasonably identify. It is weirder than S&M, weirder than coprophilia, weirder than sexual self-mutilation, weirder than yiffing. So in that sense, we might view the priestly penchant for childrape as a sort of desperate, depressing, terrible reversion toward the mean.

The Known Unknowns

BAGHDAD — The followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a radical cleric who led the Shiite insurgency against the American occupation, have emerged as Iraq’s equivalent of Lazarus in elections last week, defying ritual predictions of their demise and now threatening to realign the nation’s balance of power.

Their apparent success in the March 7 vote for Parliament — perhaps second only to the followers of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as the largest Shiite bloc — underscores a striking trend in Iraqi politics: a collapse in support for many former exiles who collaborated with the United States after the 2003 invasion.

-The Times

Me oh my. It's almost as if "former exiles who collaborated with the United States after the 2003 invasion" fed America's gang of Alden Pyles a lot of bull about the disarray and imminent demise of the Sadrist movement. Astonishingly, it makes, you know, sense. The Americans were going to be inclined to trust Anglophone exiles anyway; Oxbridge and Harvard English suggest a man is one of ours. The exiles, meanwhile, gained greater American trust by providing America with "intelligence" that America of course had no way to independently verify since apparently the four people who speak Iraqi Arabic in the whole of the United States are queerer than Johnny Weir doing a drag-skate as Lady Gaga impersonating Liberace to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," ergo Asked, Told. So, to further their own political fortunes, America's totally altruistic, un-self-motivated, objective exile partners told tall tales that America was only too happy to believe. Oh, it's a hard slog with the Sadrists, but I'm sure they're in their last throes and all.

Then Le Surge, and like any good guerrilla-cum-rebel movement, the Sadrist militias largely went to ground. They've been quiet for a couple of years, which in America is an eternity, but anywhere else is . . . just a couple of years. Since they weren't fighting, they got even more organized, and when no one was looking, they threw up a slate of popular candidates and then got their thousands and thousands of motivated, dedicated followers to vote. Oops. You're not dealing with morons, here.

Yeah, well, like, what's the takeaway? It is that America still has no idea what the fuck is going on in Iraq. After nearly a decade, our little satrapie is as opaque to us as ever. Our allies aren't really our allies and our enemies aren't necessarily our enemies. We have no reliable sources of local information, no meaningful read on domestic alliances and allegiances, no capacity to verify the truth or fiction of information regardless of the source, no sense of popular sentiment, if, indeed, there is any popular sentiment to speak of. (Think of what this means in the infinitely more insanely incoherent Afghanistan.) What we have is this:

“They cannot be dismissed,” a Western official said on the condition of anonymity, under the usual diplomatic protocol.

On condition of . . . ? What? The "standard diplomatic protocol" is to grant anonymity for a banal observation so universal as to be nearly atopical?

"Looks like rain," a Western official said on condition of anonymity, under the standard diplomatic protocol. "Can't beat the weather."

Fuck you, New York Times, and fuck you, too, America, you goldbricker.

Who Could Object

One fairly recent development has been the inevitable attacks by the right on any person who attempts to, in some small way, contribute to the public discourse to advocate for liberal causes.

It's Michelle Malkin's world. We just live in it.

-Eschaton

Oh gimme a break, Duncan. Your party played the most transparent bluff in the game, using a child-prop to forestall any response or criticism with all the crass carelessness of Sarah Palin swinging her retarded kid around like a lady's handbag at a campaign rally. "Let's put a human face on it," they said, and indeed, they chose an adorably pudgy black boy, I'm sure totally at random, with no thought about what the French call Lay Vizuells, just, you know, they were walking down the street, just a couplah party consultants, just out to grab a sandwich and a Coke, just minding their own business, when a little boy made out of kittens and sunshine wandered up to them and said, "Oh, please, Misters, Oh, my mother died because of The Health Care Debate! And I'm jus' a lil' boy who can't find a nationally televised political rally on my own! Oh, can you help me!"

So Professional Insane Racebaiter Michelle Malkin was hauled out of the interment camp in which she happily resides when not in use and used by the GOP to call the Donk on its bullshit. And this is basically rule #1 of politics in America. If you are going to kiss babies on the campaign trail, then someone is going to accuse you of raping babies on the campaign bus.

Cross[dressing]disciplinary Studies

Human beings, the philosophers tell us, are social animals.

-Brooks

Philosophers?