Chaucer at the Bit

This is an idea I sound in my new book, “The Change I Believe In.” The book is about the journey I and millions of Americans took, from the exhilaration engendered by Obama’s election and the first months of his presidency, through the disappointments and frustrations that have followed. It is, above all, about recognizing how transformational change comes about in a system rigged against it.

-Serena van der Woodsen

These people really need to get religion or something, because this is the worst journey imaginable. Well, look, the change I believe in comes from cultivating mindfulness, equanimity, and compassion. The whole lib shebang, the whole Obama schtick, the wholesale misappropriation of Gandhi's exhortation to be the change you want to see in the world--oy, outside of a philosophy of rigorous Hindu asceticism it is exactly the platitude it's become. And that is really the problem with these well-meaning progressives, I mean, the problem other than the problem of their eagerness to return a child-murdering capitalist stooge to the Throne of St. Lincoln for four more years . . . the problem is an entirely outward-looking vision of transformation; a management-guru spiritualism: five principles, six steps, and seven processes for a better tomorrow, today! It takes the pilgrimage, which is a ritual physical metaphor for a movement of the spirit and flips it and reverses it; it imagines that a lot of banal shuffling about in the phenomenal world is gonna get everyone's Kundalini nice 'n uncoiled. And so you end up at mere tautology: transformational change. Yeah, okay, we are going to transform the change in the system that is rigged against transformation in order to immanentize the system to transform itself to change us? Uh, how about we cultivons nos jardins and all that. Do you consider "navel-gazing" an insult? Maybe you oughtn't.

Hie Unto

Christopher Hitchens died of esophageal cancer; in an older, simpler time, we might've still blamed it on all the vile and poisonous nonsense he hacked up between great gulps of vile, poisonous sustenance.  He was never an especially good writer, which is why he crossed the Oxbridge to America, where accents are mistaken for intellect.  I read Why Orwell Matters, but I can't remember a single word of it; from the title, I suppose it makes the argument that Orwell matters.  I have it filed in my library alongside Harold Bloom's Shakespeare Was Important, Malcolm Gladwell's Noun: A Verb, and my dad's old Tom Clancy collection.  Apparently he was supposed to be some kind of iconoclast because he took some potshots at Mother Teresa, but the tipping of holy cows, like the tipping of actual cows, is better confined to a muddy adolescence.  He was supposed to be searing but was merely snide; his great intellectual trahison stank mostly of a mid-career MBA, a brief strategic necessity in order to pad the paycheck.  A person who uses a natty portmanteau like Islamofascism without a halfhipster of irony is not a writer.  As an atheist, I found him as embarrassing as my loudest aunt's impenetrable Pittsburghese, mortifying in polite company.  If the universe were just, he would wake from his passage on Kolob, basking in the angelic light of billions of perfect, white, immortal Mormon smiles.

I, of Newt.

I love Gingrich.  I love his new idea that the President or Congress oughta send the Texas Rangers after judges who issue rulings contrary to their decrees and make em splain themselves.  It just doesn't go far enough.  I think every institution of government should have its own paramilitary, and every minister should have the power to summon any other minister to splain his ministrations; every decision should be infinitely reviewable by every individual; Joe from Public Works should be able to subpoena John Roberts who will be tied up, metaphorically speaking, with John Boehner, who has to rush to testify before Ethyl in the WalMart greeting line.  His totalitarian vision, taken to its own logical end, is the very anarchy we so desire.

@ Risk

Robert Brame, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the lead author of the study, said he hoped the research would alert physicians to signs that their young patients were at risk.

“We know that arrest occurs in a context,” Dr. Brame said. “There are other things going on in people’s lives at the time they get arrested, and those things aren’t necessarily good.”

If doctors can intervene, he added, “It can have big implications for what happens to these kids after the arrest, whether they become embedded in the criminal justice system or whether they shrug it off and move on.”

-The Times

This is the tag on an article revealing that a third of all Americans are arrested by the age of 23, or, if you want to be optimistic about it, not quite a third of all Americans are arrested by the age of 23. The herrenperfessers and the perfesserdokters naturally see a growth industry of sorts here; why should the justice system get all the fun and profits while the psychopharmacologists are stuck merely shoveling speed down the gullets of disputatious pre-teens? What profiteth it the Bayer Corporation or whatever if a kid arrested for selling dime bags (can you still buy dime bags? ach, inflation) gets merely a fine and probation, rather than a lifetime of psychiatric medication? Why make the graffiti boys merely scrub off the evidence of their delinquency when you can also sell them Paroxetine?

Chilling and delightful, like a good snappy horror flick: the total, unquestioning acceptance of this as the natural state of modern life, as regular as pimples with puberty.