Department of Dharma

Never, never have I so desperately wanted a window to break.

Bombs A-gay

So apparently Romney hired A Gay to spout insane shit about Iran, and some Family Research Majority Silent Council Organization of Concerned Women for American Enterprise were like WHOOOAAAAA, buddy; you can't have a gay man mouth bellicose slogans about distant foreign countries.  That would be immoral!  Now one of my nice liberal friends said of this episode that he just can't believe any gay could ever consider himself a Republican after this incident; she was incredulous.  Meanwhile, the moral questions about slaughtering thousands of Iranians for some reason or other remains un-addressed.

Gilds

Many people believe that in our system of state capital, the capital comes first.  Well, only if you mean The Capital.  Capitalism, and especially its finance division, is just rent-seeking; actually, the state owns everything--all that money is a lend-lease.  Now the financiers--just as much as the Occupy movement--imagine that corporations have captured government, which has got it precisely backwards.  And you see these poor rich people crawling over themselves to get the government to play nice, because the state owns them; they are the Great Guild of Boondoggles and Pyramid Schemes, operating under a charter than any prince may take away.

An Englishman Is about to Talk French

I happened to be cooking dinner last night when the President arrived on the radio to make what one might charitably call a speech; like everything Obama says these days, it had the dull, affectless quality of a fourth-place effort in a high-school forensics competition combined with the clackety, bullet-pointed style of a Risk Management seminar.  First slide: Get the Job Done.  It's hard to recall that this guy used to attempt to imitate--never successfully, but he tried--better orators; he allowed the occasional complex syntax to impinge upon the uncertain borders of his declarative kingdom.  Now, he speaks English the way I speak French when I'm sober: fluent within phrases, herky-jerky as soon as anything grows into a sentence.  The result is that weird habit of conversant but not really fluent speakers of a language to talk very fast while talking very slow.  Having spent several years now isolated from any actual humans, he's getting worse and worse at impersonating an actual human.

You know, I have always been essentially a materialist, philosophically speaking; I mean, I believed that consciousness was epiphenomenal and all that, that the mind was just a metaphoric abstraction of the physical brain; that being was fundamentally electrochemical and all that.  Then I met Glenn Beck; I will not go into the details here.  Suffice to say, he awakened in me the capacity to believe in, well, if not the supernatural per se, then at least the mildly transcendent, that which cannot be accounted for by our science.  Beck, offstage and out-of-studio, is not actually a person; he is a sort of sub-golem, animate but not actually alive, mobile but not motive, a sort of automaton in the sense that the Christian world used to imagine animals: a machine that merely gives the impression of being alive.  Then, before he starts broadcasting, the Reptiloids or Annunaki or Rupert Murdoch or whomever, they draw the appropriate sigils in the dirt and masturbate their great barbed penises and call up his demon or operating thetan or, uh, whatever, which incorporates or instantiates or something into his meatmind and turns him into a creature, possessed.

So Obama, it seems to me, occupies only the former state of being; his Cartesian mind-body is on the splits or something; perhaps he had a real soul once which was so repelled by the necessities of power that it packed a hobo bag and hopped the first train out of the vast, post-Soviet hulk of a terminal that is the physical embodiment of the President's current mind.  Or perhaps there never were any passengers and there was never a train.  All that concrete was built in the last years of an empire that had already, for all intents and purposes, collapsed; the tracks lead nowhere; the lights never turned on; beyond its walls there is no city, nothing but grass and low hills and unharvested wheat.

Emissions and Inspections

In response to the Oh, Brother gang touting its unverifiable gangland hit on Osama bin Laden--we shot him and we dumped him in the drink? what's not to believe?--as a sort of forged-in-the-crucible moment demonstrating the Prez's iron soul, Willard shrugged and said, well, shee-it, even Carter would've pulled that trigger.  And I am inclined to agree; Carter, after all, did pull it; his raid just didn't go so well, although, to be fair, he chose a set of targets that existed, observable to the outside world, and he couldn't fob the whole thing off by wrapping a sack of potatoes in a bloody sheet and tossing it overboard.

But to Romney's point, I say: it's a pretty good one.  The idea that US presidents agonize over this shit, wrack their midnight consciences or whatever, is false; there is no problem on earth that cannot be solved with a cap in someone's ass; to believe otherwise would be un-American.  The whole system of the imperial state tugs its symbolic figurehead in the direction of giving his benediction to acts of war.  No one selected for that office would do otherwise; a US president standing in the way of blowing something up for some or other reason would be the equivalent of a Pope redecorating the tacky-ass interior of St. Peter's--unthinkable, absurd.

What I appreciate about Romney's remark, even though this obviously isn't what he intended it to mean, is that it makes so plain the basically quotidian nature of murder-by-Presidential-decree; it says that ordering hasty acts of war is the equivalent of updating your Outlook calendar or checking your voicemail in the morning, a mundane and repetitive task that everyone performs, just a part of the job, one part Easter Egg roll and one part press conference.  Romney is standing in front of the great national Meineke and asking us to laugh at the incumbent mechanic for bragging about offering oil changes and tire rotations.  Well, what else would he be doing?

Va pensiero, sull'ali dorate

So the plan to prevent terrorists from using planes to attack one of Europe's most densely populated urban areas is to shoot down planes over one of Europe's most densely populated urban areas.  Actually, the plan is to employ snipers to shoot the pilots of planes over one of Europe's most densely populated urban areas,  precisely the sort of antic triaging of potentially disastrous consequences that only a dedicated security bureaucracy could dream up, a plan to get the patient onto the operating table faster by crashing the ambulance through the doors into the waiting room.

This is the logical conclusion of our ever-escalating investment in security theater; the opera ends and Nabucco, still wielding his sword, jumps into the audience and starts beheading dowagers.  When returning from Spain recently, as I was herded along with a thousand other weary, creaking travelers through Philadelphia's Minoan-era labyrinth of an international arrivals gate, it occurred to me that we now have to pass through security in order to get to security, and I imagined a Kafka pastiche, an infinite regression of security wherein some poor Herr waits indefinitely in series of security lines that lead only to the next layer of security.

The Olympics, or the airlines, or the G20, or whatever--all of the essential and inessential functions and events of our society have come to serve a singular purpose, which is to justify an elaborate system of gates and human backflow preventers.  The whole thing is strangely religious, really, all things on this earth, however small or large, important or irrelevant, testifying if viewed by the righteous and devout to the eternal and ubiquitous glory of a god . . . only in this case the god is not a cloud-borne old man or graceful Shiva tapping out the passage of universal time on his drum, but rather a malfunctioning scatter X-ray machine; in this universe, Pilgrims don't so much journey to Jerusalem or the Holy See as await a travel visa that will never be issued because none exist; there is a metal detector at the entrance to the symbolic maze on its cathedral floor.

Having seen from the safe distance of an involved non-participant the planning that went into shutting down Pittsburgh for the G20 a while back, I can report firsthand the positive joy the people charged with erecting security take in it.  I am not stretching the religious metaphor.  These are fundamentally ecstatics, transported by temporary barriers, enraptured by color-coded credentials.  Everyone likes to blame this on terrorism, or let's say instead on an "overreaction" to terrorism, but terrorism, like, I don't know, the Virgin Birth, is just a neat bit of retconning added to make a garbled backstory both more coherent and more poetic.  It would be a comfort if these people were merely evil; instead, they're all quite mad.