Who dines on the diners?

We have previously discussed, in these lonely pages, how economics is the eugenics of our time, a neatly fraudulent epistemology that serves principally to permit all the inhuman varieties of psychopathy to flourish in the all-permissive cannibalistic abattoir of pseudoscience. Thus, Yglesias:

In support of his view, Ferguson marshalls two arguments. One is to quote a constituent from a town hall meeting who reportedly said that the falling price of iPads doesn’t offset the increased price of food because “I can’t eat an iPad.” Which is true. But you also can’t send email from a banana or watch streaming video on a bag of rice. When electronics, communication technology, and entertainment get cheaper then you have more money left over for bananas.

Well, there you have it. I sort of envision a world in which all children are in possession of a digital device that allows them to watch with keen, malnourished intensity as Sally Struthers pleads for their very own lives.

The Frog of War

While I see no particular reason to trust a couple of "senior Pakistani security officials" any more than I'd trust any other government officials, it's fer shiz true that America's story keeps a-changin. SHE KIDNAPPED HERSELF!

Tomorrow We Start Tearing Down the College

So, as Duncan Black quite reasonably says, the notion that a bunch of adolescent Vampire Diarists not knowing about the obscure Silver-Age comic-book villain Osama bin Laden is cause for fucking despair is just fucking crazy. I mean, lemme axe you thusly, mes folles: does Ezra fucking Klein "know" "who" "bin Laden" "is"? Not to get all post-structuralist all up over his pretty boyface, but insofar as his character is continually recreated by the historical (con)text in which he be encountered, yo, can he be said to be at all? But let's not be too hard on Ezra, who is, after all, just parotting Jamelle Bouie, who actually coughs up the following without the slightest hint of irony:

Still, it's sobering; not because it reveals anything profound about our educational system or the attacks on 9/11, but because it points to an absolute truth: for each generation, America is a very different place, and the America we lost on 9/11 -- the America that didn't profile citizens, torture people, or monitor their phone calls -- isn't even a distance memory for the children and teenagers of today's America.

Oh, um, what? HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF A LITTLE THING CALLED VIETNAM? Look, I love the progressive notion that America's soul was whiter than the shaved ass of a Bel Ami model until that dastardly do-bad, George Dubya and his team of nefarious lawyers turned it black, but honestly. America didn't profile its citizens before 9/11? Written by a black guy? Seriously? Wonders will never cease.

Your Own Lying Eyes Is An Other

One of the more interesting derangements of what I will call the Earnest Left is its weird capacity to recognize as pretext that which it nevertheless treats as root cause.

Carthago Delenda Jest

CIA SUPERIOR
What did we learn, Palmer?

CIA OFFICER
I don't know, sir.

CIA SUPERIOR
I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.

CIA OFFICER
Yes, sir.

CIA SUPERIOR
I'm fucked if I know what we did.

CIA OFFICER
Yes, sir, it's, uh, hard to say

CIA SUPERIOR
Jesus Fucking Christ.

-Burn After Reading

So the various images of Americans stomping on Osama photos and jiggling their American-flag-clad potbellies in general jubilation at the assassination of a semi-fictional character whose vague presence at the periphery of the memoir that is America's autobiography signified nothing so much as a thin bravado spread haphazardly like a mat of dry sticks over a deep pit of fear and self-loathing are about as tawdry and embarrassing as anything I have ever seen, although it does make me proud to be a Pennsylvanian. While New York and Washington, America's two most excruciatingly déclassés metropolises manifested their gross triumphalism for the cameras with all the dignity of a late-90s MTV spring-break special, NPR's flumoxxed reporters wandered Shanksville searching vainly for a country jingo to express operatic delight at the dispatch of this latest Hitler among the Hitlers of our times. Unfortunately all they discovered were some terse nods and tentative questions: does this mean we can come home now? Quick cut to Washington. The answer: no. This morning various spokescreatures again reassured themselves that Our Commitment to Afghanistan will be generational, and officialdom is united in declaring that while the world is better, safer, greener, brighter, etc. in its post-bin Laden epoch, these are merely, uh, um, subjective, poetical judgements, and by any qualitative analysis the world is neither better nor safer nor greener nor brighter nor et cetera; his death, in other words, meant everything and nothing, the sort of weirdly simultaneous actuality and non-being that appeals to Pentagon officials, defense contractors, and medieval scholastics and just about no one else.

Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer

I go away for a week and when I come home I discover that NORAD has shot down Santa Claus.