spend to make

Gone to ground. Gonna spend some o dat TRUST FUND. Back Monday. Doubleyoy!

Just Like He Did So Long Ago in Jericho

So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.

And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

Joshua 6:20-21

Who was it who said that the whole of human history is naught but the migration of tribes? Well, we do live in a world where the lowest available human designation is "stateless person." Although there are certainly cryptoracial motivations for the various anti-immigration efforts in the United States (and Britain, and Europe, &c.), laws like the recent Arizonan foolishness are not Laws for the Protection of American Blood and American Honor or American Citizenship Laws, which in a sense makes them even more absurdly indefensible. Absent a good, racially pseudoscientific, rationalizing foundation, birthright citizenship and closed borders start to seem like the joke they are. We are left to argue that "illegals" commit more crimes, which of course they don't, except insofar as we have criminalized the natural migration of populations in pursuit of resources . . . uh, what we would now call "economic opportunity."

Anyway, this is all just to demonstrate once more that citizenship is a form of serfdom; we are all confined to the manor of our birth except by the varying graces of our various milords.

Springtime for Goldberg

What a maroon!

Police States

You know, I am glad that libgressives have declared that Arizona's dumb and thoroughly impracticable new Papieren-bitte system means that Arizona is a police state, whereas the Democratic President continuing to arrogate to His Person the right to arrest, indefinitely imprison, assassinate, and otherwise dispose of any human being on the face of the earth, including all American citizens, is, um, a misguided extension of Bush-era policies. And this is not to say that I think the Arizona law is anything other than mean-spirited and vicious (although also, I think it's doomed, which mitigates against any outrage I might be able to work up). I am a believer in open borders. Citizenship is slavery, and all that. That said, a reactionary racial profiling law in an economically wounded Sunbelt pensioners village hardly approaches an extant, supralegal, federal regime in which a single office is vested with the dictatorial power to dispose of all human life as it sees fit.

This I Believe

I'm honestly not certain whether I find the egregious offense-baiting of Western artists and writers who wish to be perceived as somehow tough, unbowed by, uh "totalitarianism," or the preposterous willingness of Muslims around the world to respond in kind by taking the ridiculous bait to be more annoying, so instead I am going to make fun of Ross Douthat, whose author photo at the Times makes him look like he just killed seven hookers and then ate a cheesburger, for his evident belief that South Park is actually as opposed to superficially iconoclastic. South Park can be kinda funny if you're stoned. So are classified ads, trees, clouds, breathing, tee-shirts, dogs, squirrels, ice cream, houses, bicycles, sounds, fingers, etc. But the idea that it evinces anything other than the most conventional American mores is authentic American intellectual flatulence. Examine the Stone/Parker oeuvre and you will discover that politicians are dishonest, local police are inept, real racism is bad but "political correctness" has gone too far, governments and schools are too involved in our lives but at the same time its important to work together . . . ad fucking nauseum. South Park happily embraces the same set of inconsistent political and cultural nostrums that you'll hear bandied over any neighborhood bar or diner counter, a sort of mild and mostly incoherent libertarianism combined with a vaguely atavistic sense that Things Used to Be Different combined with an off-color joke or two. Its foul mouth and scatology are a mere patina under which lurks an almost wholly normative cultural sensibility. It may be the least challenging thing on television. American Idol is more radical.

Winning the Lottery Made Me Realize that Things Are Pretty Damn Good

You know, as the Son of a Hospital Administrator™, a louche layabout, and a privileged worker in the cultural class, in which going to fora with titles like "Greening the New Urban Enclave" is considered labor, ye gawds, I try, in offering up analyses of our political and actual economies, to remain cognizant of my privilege, to self-implicate as a member of the Western managerial class, albeit a marginal one, and to recognize that my experience of urban affluence, multicultural tolerance, and a fancy-pants liberal arts degree is not universal. So when I see some cossetted, flabby, petit-bourgeois child-of-intellectuals glancing up from his MacBook Pro and four-dollar over-sugared coffee to pronounce, on the fucking blog that he gets paid to write, that

people are step-by-step liberating themselves not from market capitalism as a means of obtaining consumer goods but from wage slavery in the worker-capitalism [sic] relationship

well, it makes me want to reach for my, uh . . . my, um . . . expensive laptop and . . . blog about it.

Most Americans are plainly more employer-dependent than ever. Health insurance, anyone? They work longer hours despite stagnant real wages and recieve a paltry fourteen days of annual vacation which they do not use anyway because even approved absence is taken for absenteeism. And that's just among the professional classes. Let's not forget the millions and millions of persistently under-employed, hourly wage-earners in America who recieve no ancillary benefits (no health care, no term life, no retirement, no nothin'), no paid vacation, and no paid sick days. And yet these people, no less than slobs like me, who cannot forgo the office to write the novel because without my prescription coverage the little bottle of topical cream to treat the tiny patch of psoriasis on my left shin goes from costing $30 per tube to several hundred, cannot do anything but keep working their miserable service jobs with no time off and no affordable leisure even if they did have a few flex days to spare because they are wage slaves in the labor-capital relationship.