Sabbatical

Out of town until the first week of May. Expect nothing but the ghostly presence of my contempt hovering around the absence of posts like a damp mist in a bare wood.

Dien Bien Phooey

Let me tell you, if there is one thing that really inspires confidence in the methods and motives of Western powers, it's France sending military advisors.

Project Monarch

It seems the most powerful invective that liberals can come up with is hypocrite. Now accusing a human being of hypocrisy is like accusing him of homo sapiens, which is why you can't get any real traction out of this sort of thing. Public morality differs from private conduct? Stop the presses. Sarah Palin talks up abstinence despite a prego daughter? Hypocrite! Meanwhile, America yawns. We got babies havin babies up in this here! This is life? Whadarewegonnado? Blog. Et cetera.

Anyway, there's a lot of Hypocrite! being tossed in the general direction of Obama these days. Like, he's being a hypocrite for not standing with or speaking out or expectorating up support for this revolution when he supports that revolution; he bombs Libya on behalf of The Rebels™, but he intervenes in Bahrain on behalf of a monarchy via the mercenary House O' Saud, but he won't do shit in Côte d'Ivoire, but he was for the Egyptian revolution before he was against it before he was for it, but but but. If you view the American Government as a sort of decent-but-flawed institution, an organization of great utility if guided for good by the right hands and minds, though capable of great evil if run by a person with a Tex-Mex Christian affect, a collective expression of popular will and republican principles that, while flawed, represent a sort of fundamentally decent and enlightened civilization, then all this hem and haw, back and forth, all this hypocrisy will drive you nuts. WHY CAN'T WE JUST STAND WITH THE PEOPLES? All the peoples, all the times.

Now if, on zee ohtruh man, you see the American Government as an immense dynamo of vast satanic energies; if you see American presidents and congresscreatures as effectively mind-file computers, hollow marionettes who sit in bobble-headed fallowness until the lesser driver-demons parachute into their meat-brains and turn on their public address systems, then, you know, you are less bothered by this sort of thing. I mean, seriously, to even begin understanding America, you must dispell entirely your remaining illusions about lost ways and betrayed principles and all that horseshit; preeminence is not exceptionalism; the US is just another empire, neither the first nor the last of its kind. It is not immoral but amoral; or, to use the religious image, it is a hell definied not by a lot of hot-wax S&M party-and-play but by being totally cut off from the light of god. To apply standards of consistency and hypocrisy to such a creature is absurdity at its uttermost. When someone starts coughing up statements like Torture Isn't an American Value or America Stands for Freedom or We Should Be Better than This, I feel my stomach start to burble. All of these things that America shouldn't or oughtn't or wasn't or cannot or does not or will not or whatnot: yo, that is what America is.

Arab Spring(loaded)

Just, you know, a cascade of indigenous protests, self-generated and un-suspect, curiously fluent in English, oddly ready to give interviews to public radio personalities, but totally grassroots, unrelated to foreign intervention, just a lotta peoples yearning to be free.