Preach the Gospel always and, if necessary, use words

Now Washington D.C. has long been held to be quite literally Satanic by the conspiracy set, its streets a neat tracery of devilish runes, and while I give some credence to the belief, I hold Washington to be something even worse, which is in terrible taste; I can think of no uglier city; it makes St. Louis look like Paris; it makes Houston look like Angkor Wat.  And the MLK memorial is another perfect addition to the perfectly awful landscape, an immense, hammy, vaguely angry demigod emerging from a styrofoam Star Trek set piece, scowling in cartoonish dismay, looking, to my eyes, as if he is slightly hungry.  I am apparently late to the story, but it appears that the creators got the quotations wrong!  But no one can figure out how to transform the inaccurate paraphrase into a statement of actual principles without blowing the whole thing up.  Which describes how all right-thinking folk feel about Washington and thus, in an ironical sorta way, make me hope they leave the thing exactly as it is, a goofy reminder that the misattribution of bogus notions is the crowning intellectual endeavor in these United States.

Logan's Done

I'm buoyed by the case for Scottish independence and hope that it gives the Basques and the Catalans and the Slow Foods movement and the Walloons and the Texans and the Inuit and the obscure tribes of the Amazon ideas.  Liberal futurism is always so blandly totalitarian--whether utopian or dystopian, the whole Earth is forever resolving itself into world governments or other vast transnational, deracinated, cultureless, monolingual blocs, as if history is but a pale reflection of entropy and in the inevitable flight from primitive tribalism our animal passions cool to match the background radiation and we all end up in white corridors wearing space jumpsuits and eating our food in pill form.  But why should the future be thus?  Liberalism likes to blow kisses in the direction of diversity, but seems to fundamentally despise actual difference, and when they blow their stacks because some obviously racist conservative type denounces them as the real racists, I sorta hafta laugh, because it thrusts awfully near an uncomfortable truth, which is not, lord knows, that Asians are the smartest and blacks have an extra calf muscle due to natural selection on the slave ships or whatever, but rather that culture actually exists and has meaning; that it cannot simply be dissolved by New Deal social democracy or a more unified European fiscal policy or even hundreds of years of subjugation by some larger national entity.  Riddle me this, maze uh-meez: why shouldn't the Basques be free?

Like Lenin Said

Well I am glad to find that Rob Payne, whose post has links to the original news story, had the same reaction I did to the scandal of a Marine sniper team "desecrating" the bodies of the dudes they'd just killed.    But you know, c'est normal.  Like, it is scandalous for Pvt. England to pile a bunch of naked Iraqis the one atop the other, but it is not scandalous for America to fucking occupy Iraq in the first place.  Actually, the most hilarious thing is in the NBC report that Rob links to . . . Brian Williams assures the audience that the "offensive parts" of the photo of the Marines pissing on the bodies of the dudes they've just killed have been blurred out.  He means PENIS!  There are not enough lulz on the whole internet; every kittycat who ever lived could not LOL enough.  You've got Marines pissing on corpses, but AMERICA, no penises!

Gaze in the Military, part 97

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm I wonder who's been killing Iranian scientists.  Well thank God that homophobe Ron Paul has peaked at 23% in New Hampshire.

We're Down on Our Knees

Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour? -The Guardian

I see it as an advance for equality. After all, the state has been criminalizing normal adult behavior for millennia.

Or Does It Explode?

I really dig the idea that a presidential campaign is all about authenticity.  Do we really know who Willard Romney is?  His être-au-monde and être-en-soi?  Is he a self-created avatar of his own beingness, the observer, the fire, the shadow, and the cave?  Now obviously what is meant by authenticity here is something more like truth-in-advertising.  Does it taste great?  Is it less filling?  Do the curtains match the drapes?  And in this regard, let me suggest to you that Romney, despite all this shit about his inconsistency and incoherence, his too-slick demeanor and penchant for reversing himself, is far and away the grande dame of Executive Realness; he is exactly what he seems--all id and superego and a Cheshire grin where his I used to be.  The other candidates suffer from remnants of actual personalities, and will likely lose because of it.  Interestingly, Obama has always struck me with an almost identical impression, a human personality reduced entirely to its formal, gestural elements, Commedia dell'arte where the soul's 'sposed to be.  I can't wait for the general election season.

Steel Errs

Credit where due - Tebow, perhaps for the first time, but convincingly nevertheless, looked like a bona fide quarterback, and my Steelers made a lot of errors.  Maybe the kid's got a future after all.  Here is my pledge to yinz: if he beats Brady, which I sincerely doubt he will, but if he does, he'll make a fan out of me.