Together to Beersheba

So I am obliged to admit that I still go to High Holy Day services every year, principally because it pleases my mother, although I'm also grudgingly obliged to admit that I like the high holy day liturgies, or at least, I have a sentimental attachment, and I like the songs. Anyway, the parsha for the second day (read in the morning services at most Reform temples) is the 22nd chapter of Genesis, which is the story for God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. During the Rabbi's interminable sermon on the subject (there is quite possibly nothing less interesting that Midrashic commentary on what happens to Isaac between his escaping the blade and then reappearing a few chapters and a couple of decades later in order to get married cast in vague and inoffensive terms as a tale of self-actualization; yoy), I drifted, but I was recalled to consciousness briefly and found, to my surprise and delight, that the Rabbi was actually quoting my favorite Wilfred Owen poem, "The Parable of the Old Men and the Young":

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Owen's occasional weakness is his anachronism; even in the 'teens, some of his thees and thous were starting to sound a little silly, although let's be fair, that huckster Yeats, the Robert Frost of Ireland, generally accounted a far greater poet that Owen, produced plenty of hackneyed, stilted tripe (along with some legitimate masterworks, fine, ok, fine) filled with similar diction. But Owen's subtle prosody and masterful experimentation with off-rhyme and partial consonance are important and innovative in their own right, and I believe that he was more than just an inventive wordsmith who by dint of subject matter produced memorable works, but one of the great poets of the first half of the twentieth century, and one of the greatest chroniclers of war in English. The "Parable" showcases his formal invention--it is in effect a sonnet in blank verse with a singly rhymed couplet, although it almost fools you into thinking its rhymed throughout--and is remarkable and subtle in the way it both does and does not turn the Biblical account of Avram's almost-sacrifice on its head.

And Without the Use of My Legs

Well, via an intrepid commenter, I see that MattY has written his most penetrating insight yet:

All these countries are actually full of stupid policies--in Sweden a privately owned store can’t sell Tylenol and the United States invaded Iraq to eliminate a nonexistent nuclear weapons program--but we succeed nonetheless.

Yeah, you know, my one neighbor didn't get the proper building permits from the city before enclosing his back porch, and my other neighbor is a serial ritual sex murderer. Haha. Foibles.

Sold Out

A foreign government subsidizes its own domestic industries and enacts trade policies that help them to prosper. Their prosperity comes partly at the expense of competing American industries. The leaders of America's industrial labor unions demand that their government enact favorable subsidies and tariffs somehow stop the foreign government from supporting its own industries.

Ladies and gents, the American labor movement, now with 33% more packaging in every box for just 100% of the price!

My Wife Is Not the Issue Here

Look, book-burning is wrong, and I do not doubt that the scenes of a bunch of fat white Floridians cavorting around a Koran Kampfire will be receycled in the Muslim world, but honestly, Fred Kaplan et al., how many times will it bear repeating: the reason Muslims think that America is at war with Islam is because we keep bombing, invading, and occupying their countries! The reason "our troops" are in danger in Afghanistan is not that Rush Limbaugh hates mosques or that some Podunk preacher hates Islam's holy book, but because "our troops" are foreign occupiers.

Key Vindicators

This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced.

Let me say that again because I think it fails to sink in – literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced. Not misallocated. Not spent on programs you don’t approve of or distributed in tax cuts you don’t like. Trillions of dollars in value are not produced at all. Gone from the world entirely. Never to be had, by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pure unadulterated loss.

-Karl Smith of Modeled Behaviors

When people say that the job, purpose, goal, intent, etc. of something is to do something entirely different and often at near total odds with what it actually does, because someone once proclaimed these unsubstantiated and never-happening outcomes to be the job, purpose, goal, intent, etc., it calls into question their analytic framework. When someone says that the drug war is a failure because instead of stopping drug use, it destabilizes narco-producing regions of the world, brutalizes the underclass, perpetuates inequality, and foments the expansion of the police-prison state, then that person has mistaken a slogan for a product. When someone muses that our "strategy" in Iraq or Afghanistan is a failure because it is not producing "a durable, non-violent resolution to . . . political conflicts", then that person is a fool. And when someone says that late, post-industrial capitalism fails to "bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value," then I wonder in what idealized world of pure form and meaning has this man been living, because obviously, if you consider the current American economy and the global system in which it is embedded, the production of "value" is incidental to the continued concentration of material wealth and political influence. That is the point. It isn't a failure of the system. It is the system. You can look at America and say:

We have very low capacity utilization (75%) and very high unemployment (10%).

That is, we have factories sitting idle for lack of workers – low capacity utilization. At the same time we have workers sitting idle for lack of factories – high unemployment.

There are machines waiting to be worked and people waiting to work them but they are not getting together. The labor market is failing to clear.

And you can be very worried and confused by this. It might strike you as unsustainable. Politically destabilizing. Socially disloacting. Deeply inequitable. Harmful to the long-term project of republican governance.

Which, I'd say, is precisely the point. Cui bono, motherfuckers? Last time I checked, there were still some fuckers getting rich. Meanwhile, the American citizen is increasingly a cash-poor, at-will worker whose docility is enforced by his total dependence on the whims and good will of his employer. Capitalism! Ain't it grand?

Vibrato

For Mister Smiff, who hates vibrato, I found this neat performance of Brahms' "Geistliches Wiegenlied" by mostly-early-music singer, Karen Clark. The two Lieder for voice and viola are really lullabies, and this one comes off very nicely, I think, without some goldfish-mouthed Brünnhilde warbling like a megaphonic city pigeon.

C'est pas ma faute!

Via our friend Ethan at 6th or 7th, I see that MattY has gurgitated an authentically, um, an authentically interesting notion:

But whether or not Iraq achieves a durable, non-violent resolution to its political conflicts seems to me to have nothing whatsoever with the presence of American soldiers and it never did.

Well, now, alors, ahem, plainly the "presence of soldiers" is inimical to a so-called non-violent resolution, but you know, it obviously struck Ethan, and it strikes me as well, that Iraq's Sunni Baathist faction had found a resolution to Iraq's "political conflicts" even if you couldn't exactly call Saddam Hussein a devotee of the ideals of Satygraha. But anyway, yes, it is true that the non-violent resolution to Iraq's political conflicts cannot be effectuated by the violent foreign military whose invasion and occupation were the original and proximate cause of the eruption of catastrophic political violence.

I do think that MattY has happened in his bumbling way upon a new slogan for the United States of America:

Don't blame us just because it's our fault.

I would be much obliged if someone could translate it into the Latin.

LOLiban, Par 2

Subsequent to this post, it was brought to my attention that our friend Glenn Greenwald has also piped up to defend American Taliban:

Obviously, some of this book is deliberately polemical. Moulitsas is well-aware that the mainstream American Right is not remotely as extreme as the Taliban even in some areas where they share common premises. Even the most hardened American social conservatives (at least the ones with any influence) don't advocate the stoning of adulterers or throwing acid on the faces of girls who attend school. The difference between executing gays and wanting to deny them legal equality is obviously one of kind, not merely degree. In those areas where one finds such fundamental differences, the point of the book is clearly a rhetorical strategy, not a literal equation. The American Right has benefited politically by constantly suggesting a liberal sympathy, if not an outright alliance, with Islamic Terrorists, and Moulitsas' argument seeks to subvert that tactic by linking conservative fanatics with their Islamic counterparts based on common views and impulses. It's perfectly reasonable to debate whether that tactic is effective or constructive -- I'm ambivalent about those questions -- but it's simply silly to impose on the book a literalism it plainly does not intend and then righteously rail against it on that basis (Digby has more on that issue here and here).

And you know, there's wrong and there's wrong. As I said, this is exactly the same defense offered by the promoters of Jonah Goldbugger's potluck political history of "Liberal" "Fascism", which was likewise a political history with the trappings of a polemic, or a polemic with the trappings of a political history, depending on the day of the week and the political affiliation of the reviewer. Just as, if you are willing to ignore the vast preponderence of evidence, history, and behavior, you can make the case that the leftward side of American politics embraces schemes of social engineering and such that are vaguely reminiscent of mid-century European totalitarianism, you can likewise, by ignoring everything inconvenient, paint a picture in which the superficial religiosity and social atavism of the currently ascendent portion of the American "conservative" faction stand on common ground with Islamic traditionalists, in both cases strengthening your argument by loudly and repeatedly stipulating that yes, yes, you understand they're not the same.

But American conservativism is no more like the Taliban than Nancy Pelosi is like the Fuhrer. I wouldn't expect a hack like Digby to get it, but Greenwald is hip to the empire and understands that the two parties are two halves of a cooperative endeavor, that their stylistic differences are actual but wholly superficial, and that they share the interests of American hegemony--that the Democrats and Republicans in power are equally committed to an aggressive foreign policy, the garissoning of the world, and to a program of surveillance and statism at home, a policy of militarizing the police and subjugating individual autonomy to the false prerogatives of security. Greenwald knows this, and even writes about it sometimes; he understands that Barack Obama is no less an imperialist than George Bush. Greenwald has used his column to remind his broad readership that under Barack Obama, the hope and change candidate, the war in Afghanistan has escalated; the covert wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and East Africa have escalated. So, Digby is a hack. But Greenwald, what is your excuse?

And what is interesting here is that the Taliban, who before we invaded Afghanistan were a regrettably backwards and brutally theocratic regime who would eventually have been ousted by some other coalition of forces in Afghanistan--some collection of Northern tribes or whatever--has been transformed into a legitimate organization of national resistance to a foreign occupying power. You gonna pin that label on the GOP?

The Real Reality, Part Seventy-Seven

His girlfriend gafe up her toe! She sought we'd be getting million dollars! Iss not fair!

I love this story. I love every single word of it.

Beyond the predictable Democratic carping about perverting the "process," a word which signifies a system wherein the Democratic candidates win, what strikes me is just how seriously this Mr. May is taking his publicity stunt. He is prepping these people for television! He's taking time out to train them in the rudiments of public speaking. In fact, he comes across as having some genuine affection for them, unlike the faceless Donk operatives who all but dismiss the homeless as inhuman. In fact, I suspect that what began very much as a "dirty trick" become something modestly more precisely because it caused Steve May to come into contact with homeless people and learn, as you will, that they are, in fact, people.

Republican party politics obviously don't benefit the homeless. They occasionally benefit rich people. For everyone else, it's more or less a wash. Since precisely the same can be said for Democratic party politics, I believe that the, um, the takeaway from this article is that by recruiting a handful of homeless fellas to run for political office in Arizona, the GOP has become the more effective party of the poor.