Tequila Sunrise

This is wonderful, and I can't thank the reader who sent it to me enough.

The disastrous 9/11 memorial quotation was, evidently, never intended to be more than a high-sounding, stand-alone phrase, never intended to lead visitors to any more profound thoughts or emotions.

But whereas Caroline Alexander regrets the truly hilarious inappropriateness of the quote--although, perhaps, considered, it is not so inappropriate as she seems to believe--I would argue that its very superficiality, it's quick-reference Bartlett's character, is entirely in keeping with America's dumb need to memorialize everything and its post-Vietnam Memorial need to do so via increasingly deranged flights of architectural fancy, piling homage atop symbolism atop allegory atop the latest in computer aided drafting--I mean, the goddamn thing looks like a Vegas waterpark; they oughta get rid of the memorial inscription altogether and replace it with the happy-hour specials.

Call Me Fish Meal

Nobel Paul Krugman, emeritus recipient of the Absolut n Tonic Oslo Prize for Comparative Mixology, has called the recent Republican budget plans voodoo economics, whereas David Brooks is standing at the mineshaft door with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead. As I was saying, ahem. I would like to do away with the term voodoo economics, firstly. It has the reek of the black-frocked missionary sniffing down his nose at the primitives' animism without ever wondering if his own wine-and-a-cracker deity might not be just as phony as the numinous spirits of the riverbeds and pine forests. But despite Kruggo's high histrionics--cruel! mean-spirited! heartless!--I give him moderate credit for restraint. Brooks, on the other hand, is ready to sail off to Troy. "This is great. It’s democracy — how change begins." I've heard this same tone of grunt from the far side of a glory hole. What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm.

L'ombre des armées

Hm. Whose expectations are being managed?

Panzer Labyrinth

Listening to the bright lights of America's nominal right and putative left argue about the budget and the deficit and long-term fiscal whosahwhatsit has everything in common with that strand of Latin-American fiction that the dour taxonomists of academic-anglophonic lit'ruh-chur like to call magical realism--a term, by the way, that Borges himself would've been thrilled to invent, combining, as it does, the redundant and the oxymoronic, at least when applied to fiction. But I digress. The "budget debate" is like a fantastical story in which an imaginery academy of unreal scientists argue over the classification and disposition of made-up animals. Professor Bunkus holds that the Violet Squoo is a species of Unicorn, whereas Doctor Freno-Loji, bosoms heaving, declares it a Mermaid. Outside of the Dream University, by the way, the real junta is throwing nuns out of airplanes, lending the whole story a undertone of grave horror.

Marxism Mondays

The disparity in media coverage between what right wingers get anywhere anytime and what lefties have received over the past decade is so huge that when I reach for reasons I tend to get more paranoid about news organizations than I usually am. It's hard not to see it as a deliberate decision from the top. Ignore the protesting hippies.

-Atrios

Among the high-hit-count "progressives", Duncan Black is by far the most heterodox, even if the fair portion of his output seems to consist of one-line links, bad taste in music, and open threads, but this sort of thing explains why he can nevertheless be counted on, come electiontime, to hector everyone to suck in their guts and vote Donk, lord help ye, lest the evil Republicans take a greater percentage of charge.

The constant fondling of this particular media bias fetish is unimportant exact as an object lesson in the existence of left and right political categories as nothing more than neat arbitrary distinctions--shirts and skins playing a rough-and-tumble game of pickup basketball in the same prison yard under the same watchful eyes of the same guards. There are no lefties and right wingers; there is no "liberal" or "conservative" media bias. The premises are flawed; the categories are erroneous.

The media bias is in favor of Ownership. It is in favor of Power. It's in favor of Capital. This is why citizen-subject level observers from "both" left and right can view mass infotainment media as inimical to their interests at the same time. It is inimical to their interests at the same time. It serves the interests of the owning class. That it reflects preferences the left-to-right political spectrum at all is really just a matter of coincidence: whomever, left or right, coverage favors, it favors because that favor serves power.

Buddies Helping Each Other Out

Samantha Power. Anne-Marie Slaughter. There seems to be a certain Dickensian naming principle at work. Power is noted here. Slaughter is in the New York Review, praising Obama for having and eating his Libyan cake. Our values and interests, friends. Think of them not in mutual exclusion, but as the two halves of a binary explosive--individually inert, but together, well, to use the going term of art: KaBOOM!

Alongside these specific strategic interests, as Obama characterized them, was a more fundamental betrayal of “who we are,” a denial of our values that would cost us our integrity as a nation and as a global leader. That is a reason grounded in both our values and our interests. When the gap between what we say and think about ourselves and what we actually do becomes too great, it can cause a crisis of both national identity and international legitimacy. Obama knows this better than most Presidents; it is why he came to power vowing to reject torture and close Guantanamo (though that has proven difficult to accomplish in practice). During his inaugural address, remember the sense of a weight lifting from our collective shoulders and the roar of applause after the line: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Slaughter's basic form is apologia, and so it's unsurprising that it takes the form of a vaguely Aquinian cycle--America begets Identity; Identity creates Values; Values require Integrity; Integrity implies Interest; Interest relies upon Action; Action needs Actor; Actor is Obama; Obama defines America. The whole thing is an exercise in shame-faced question-begging. "Who we are" is so essential that no action (except perhaps inaction (unless, of course, "difficult to accomplish in practice")) can but reaffirm the values of that collective personality, which is definitionally good.

You may find this sort of argument terrifically sloppy and wonder how anyone with half a brain is ever convinced, but since the key feature of apologetics is that the apologist argues for something she believes to be self-evident, sloppiness is to be expected. The threat of hellfire makes converts more readily than the drone of logical fallacy, and to understand how these people relate to each other, the key is to think of them less as a debating society or a fan club than as a grotesque bukkakae circle jerk, in whose stick center resides Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or whatever poor drugged underfed twink has been snatched from the highway underpass to be bathed in the values and interests of America on any given week.

Annals of Lying Loyalties

Efforts are still under way to restart peace talks but if, as expected, negotiations do not resume, come September the Palestinian Authority seems set to go ahead with plans to ask the General Assembly to accept it as a member. Diplomats involved in the issue say most countries — more than 100 — are expected to vote yes, meaning it will pass. (There are no vetoes in the General Assembly so the United States cannot save Israel as it often has in the Security Council.)

-The Times

What a . . . what a . . . what an interesting verb in that parenthetical.