CANIS IRATUS.

Three Proposals to Resolve the Current Differences of the Wisconsin Supreme Court

2011-09-15T19:51:00.006-07:00

While Making the Judicial Process More Open to the Public, and Alleviating Wisconsin's Budget Crisis

1. Blindfolds.
2. Bowie Knives.
3. Pay-per-View.

Bin Laden and Richard III (Together at Last)

2011-05-05T23:47:00.003-07:00

Richard III was probably the most hated king in English history. Not as evil as Shakespeare made him out to be, but plenty bad enough. He was particularly hated because people believed that he had murdered his nephews, the princes Edward and Richard, and they were almost certainly right to believe that. Some modern mealy-mouths have tried to acquit Richard III, but tell that to Lord Stanley's yeomen, who hewed this villain down at Bosworth Field. They believed it.

When Richard was killed at Bosworth Field, they stripped off his armor and threw his naked and bloody carcass on the floor of a nearby chapel. There it lay for some days, so that people could travel from miles around to see it and know for certain that the hated Richard was dead. At some point the victorious Henry Tudor had the naked body hung up for public display in Leicester. It would have been a gruesome sight. According to legend Richard's head had been smashed open, fulfilling a prophecy that was told to him before the battle: "Richard Plantagenet, on your return to Leicester your head shall be broken where your spur strikes now."

Henry Tudor had his reasons. Some of Richard's henchmen had escaped the battle, and he wanted to send them a message. And he wanted it well known that Richard was truly dead. The Elvis Phenomenon was as common then as it was now. When King Henry VI died under questionable circumstances (possibly murdered, possibly even murdered by Richard III himself) it was rumored long after that he was still alive - somebody saw him in Scotland, somebody saw him in France. Henry Tudor saw to it that no one could claim Richard III had escaped justice.

At some point, perhaps weeks after his death, Richard's corpse was taken down and handed over to the brothers of Greyfriars Church, not so much for burial as disposal. Richard got no holy rites, nor even common respect. His body may have been disinterred afterwards and thrown into the River Soar. If he has a grave no one knows where it is - the authorities give conflicting information. They couldn't agree on who killed him, either. Nobody could keep the story straight.

Barack Obama is a Mind-Blowingly Awful Speaker

2010-09-27T17:14:00.004-07:00

Oratory is an important leadership tool, but not every great leader has it in his tool kit, while some lousy leaders have it in spades. Some of the greatest orators in American history led the old South into the disaster of secession and civil war, while the general who ultimately crushed them could barely utter two sentences in front of an audience. Likewise, there is no necessary correlation between rhetorical talent and (a) truth, (b) morality, or even (c) common sense. So much for the obvious.

Grading the oratory of presidents, then, would seem to be a business for rhetoricians, which I am not. But we are all consumers of political rhetoric, and the case of Barack Obama is special because we are consuming a product that is something other than advertised. I paid little attention to Obama's campaign, so I didn't hear him back when people were giving him rave reviews. Based on what I heard from other people, I assumed he was pretty good. He looked like he must be pretty good. Like Woodrow Wilson, he looked like somebody who ought to give good speeches. But like Woodrow Wilson, he isn't.

Comparing the other presidents of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan was easily the best of them, when he was being serious. Reagan did I'm serious as hell better than anybody. His jocular style was much less successful, though.

Clinton is okay, unless he's talking about himself. Clinton on Clinton is a slit-eyed study in clinical paranoid psychosis, but so long as he stays off that subject he gets the mark of competence. Like Reagan, the serious Clinton is much better than the knee-slapper Clinton.

Carter is okay. That might surprise people who remember that he helped to sink his presidency with a speech; the infamous "Malaise Speech". Not that he could have saved himself if he'd given another Gettysburg Address. But Carter really sounds pretty good to me, even when he's destroying himself. Carter has no jocular style. Everything he says is as serious as terminal cancer, even when he's smiling.

Both George Bushes are bad speakers. Which of them is worse is a matter for experts, but what makes them bad is the obvious discomfort they communicate. (George H. W. Bush was criticized for sitting and saying nothing while Reagan demolished him in the famous "Microphone Debate"; it was just as well he said nothing.)

Barack Obama makes them all look like Pericles. Unless he has become an entirely different person since he was on the campaign trail, I can't believe that anybody ever thought this guy was good. I can't believe that any Obama supporter could endure one of his speeches without feeling like they're passing kidney stones.

1. I Really, Really Hate Lounge Acts

In his live addresses, Obama reminds me of a comic who drops one phrase after another, fishing for something that the audience will react to. Since his audiences tend to be supplied by union locals, this is not too tough. [OBAMA: Fox News! AUDIENCE: Bwaaaaaaaaah!] After this, the audience does all the work, while Obama does a little strut and swagger.

This is as much fun to watch as family videos of somebody else's family.

2. "Let me make one thing perfectly clear."

These seven words, which I think of as the Clinton-Lewinsky Preamble, should probably never be used by any speaker. If you must say it, say it only once per speech. And immediately follow it with something that ACTUALLY IS PERFECTLY CLEAR.

3. Shouting Out to the Posse

This is okay when you're stumping for somebody on the campaign trail. But when you've called a nationally televised press conference and you start it with a bunch of shout-outs, it shows serious disrespect for other people's time.

Obama's use of shout-outs is excessive, and what makes it worse is that he actually refers to them as "shout-outs". If shout-outs must be used, they must be brief.

When calling a press conference to respond to a mass murder on a US military base, the shout-out should be omitted.

4. Horrible - Just Horrible - Mixed Metaphors

"It was muddy in the ditch. It was dusty in the ditch."

Incredibly, he hasn't used this one just once. He keeps using it, over and over. Apparently no one dares to point it out to him, just as they won't tell him that he doesn't know how to pronounce "corpsman".

5. Folks, Folks, Folks, Folks, Folks ...

Somebody poll-tested the word "folks" and decided that it was the greatest word in the English language - so great that the President of the United States must adopt it as an all-purpose indefinite pronoun. Obama is up to using it three times in one sentence.

Unless you're from Vicksburg, Mississippi, and are currently in Vicksburg, Mississippi, you should not make a habit of constantly referring to people as "folks".

6. The Pause for Emphasis

Obama loves to pause for emphasis. He could golf nine holes during one of his pauses, and in his mind he probably is.

The pause for emphasis is effective when the speaker has just said something that is truly surprising or significant. When the speaker has just said something banal, predictable, or incomprehensible, then pausing afterwards is the opposite of effective.

During Obama's pauses, I find myself struggling to remember what it was he just said. Something about folks in a muddy, dusty ditch.

Weird Science

2010-02-05T02:28:00.003-07:00

More Presidential Songs for School Children

2009-10-24T03:17:00.003-07:00

WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING

[To the tune of "The Times They Are A'Changin'"]

Come gather 'round people,
Whoever you are,
And think of those times
That were better by far;
In spite of justice imperfect
The law was the law,
And we lived in a country
Worth saving.
And a man came along
Sworn to serve one and all:
Warren Gamaliel Harding.

Come writers and pundits
Who stab with your pens,
And ruin the names
Of much better men;
Don't miss this chance
To get your licks in again,
For your curses
Earn praises in Heaven.
When you're long forgotten
Will still live the name:
Warren Gamaliel Harding.

Sure, the man took a few
Drinks now and then,
And the poker games lasted
Until God knows when.
He was not very wise
In the choice of his friends,
And sheer eloquence
He oft times was lacking.
No pretty boy,
For prayers Heaven sent:
Warren Gamaliel Harding.

He had no great vision
To save the whole earth;
He had no list of enemies
To grind into the dirt.
Yet he pardoned those
Whom others had hurt,
And for such deeds
Is high pardon given.
And the last ones now
Will later be first:
Warren Gamaliel Harding.

In re Roman Polanski: Who cares what Hollywood scum think, but ...

2009-09-30T18:45:00.002-07:00

I'm sorry to see the names of Bernard-Henri Levy and Pascal Bruckner on the petitioners list. These are men who in the past have had the courage to stand up to the foolish opinions of rotten elites. That courage has failed them now.

The Unhappy Coincidence of Obama and Iran

2009-06-22T20:16:00.002-07:00

Over the past few days, Iranians have done something that can't be done often enough. They've shown that human beings still aspire and deserve to be free. This ought to be an obvious fact, but our insane political culture makes it a deeply controversial one.

Oppression is strong and efficacious; it may well crush this moment of liberty, though it will hopefully pay a price for doing so. History obeys nobody's moral laws, as it is moved by the good, the bad, and the accidental.

One of those historical accidents attending Iran's revolutionary moment is Barack Obama, and if he is a blessing he wears an impenetrable disguise.

In March Obama sent an unprecedented video message to "the people and the leaders of Iran" - as if these two things were a harmonious whole. In it he repeatedly refers to Iran as The Islamic Republic of Iran, rolling out the phrase with relish. Whether or not Iran ought to be an Islamic republic is a question that is currently being put to the test of blood in Iran itself, and US interest would be better served by a negative answer. It was not diplomatically necessary for Obama to insist on Islamic Republic; on the contrary, it was diplomatically undesirable. Obama cannot distinguish between deference and diplomacy. This is not a small thing, just as making respectful reference to a "Supreme Leader" of Iran is not a small thing. Matt Yglesias makes the useless point that "The Fuhrer" was Hitler's "proper title", missing the obvious fact that Roosevelt and Churchill did not refer to Hitler as The Fuhrer.

In his video message, Obama heaped effusive praise on Persian civilization. Well, Persian civilization is currently in agony, so if this praise was sincere then we should expect some indignation to match it. Obama coolly explains that he is too smart to fall into such a trap - Obama does his diplomatic thinking out loud. Empty flattery, followed by indifference.

In explaining his sang froid, Obama refers to the history of US-Iranian relations - what does he think of when he thinks of that history? US crimes, apparently. The fact that the clique that currently oppresses Iran is the same clique that seized our embassy and held our people hostage seems to be missing from his consciousness. Obama assumes the moral superiority of anti-American claims, or thinks that "diplomacy" requires him to assume it.

Whatever message Obama thinks he is sending to the bloody hangmen that rule Iran, the message they are getting is clear: There is no danger, whatsoever, of pushing Obama too far. Kim Jung-Il understands this, if our own intelligensia do not.

What do you get when you cross Moral Equivalence with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

2009-06-02T07:35:00.002-07:00

"What we want to do is open a dialogue," Obama told the BBC. "You know, there are misapprehensions about the West, on the part of the Muslim world. And, obviously, there are some big misapprehensions about the Muslim world when it comes to those of us in the West."

So I have returned at last ...

2009-05-17T18:37:00.002-07:00

GLEN: And look what kind of a mess this country has gotten into while I was gone.

SOCRATES: Being an Athenian myself, thanks be to Zeus, I'd have to note that you Americans have no idea what a real mess looks like.

CRITO: You're absolutely right, Socrates. Wait'll he sees what Phaedo did to the guest room.

SOCRATES: You want to talk about the sad state of the world? Have a few beers with Demosthenes some time. By which I mean, don't.

CRITO: That's for sure. He starts out talking about Rule of Law, then he just raves about how Meidias stole his lawn furniture.

SOCRATES: Which is very American of him, I think. And speaking of ersatz Americans, we might as well have the Romans over and listen to Cicero and Tacitus bitch and moan all night.

CRITO: Very true, Socrates. You are so wise.

GLEN: Things have really changed around here, I can see.

SOCRATES: Exactly.

Eight things every Obama supporter should believe ...

2008-05-29T11:26:00.002-07:00

His kids went to school with Zbigniew Brzezinski.
With God’s help, Obama learned how to sleep in church with his eyes open.
When Obama says “Hope”, you’re supposed to say “How high?”
Every time Obama says “Change”, Arkansas and Kentucky change places.
Iran doesn’t really have a president, but Canada does.
“Preconditions” are those stripy pants that diplomats wear.
Obama’s grandmother burned down the Reichstag. It was totally not cool.
Ambition is Poverty. And he should know.

To the Names of the Unknown

2008-05-26T11:17:00.003-07:00

The regimental chaplain, if any, who usually attends the burials from the hospital, should make notes and communicate details to the captain of the company, and to the family at home. Of course it is usually impossible to mark the graves with names, dates, etc., and consequently the names of the "unknown" in our national cemeteries equal about one-half of all the dead.

William Tecumseh Sherman

Ahmadinejad at Columbia: The Pampering of Evil

2007-09-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

It was easy for Ahmadinejad to get cheers from his audience at Columbia. It was difficult to get them to jeer him.

In fact, it was so difficult that Ahmadinejad had to do a backward triple-somersault into the fever swamp by declaring that there were no homosexuals in Iran; "That phenomenon does not exist in our country." Only then could he get a negative reaction from the children of Korrectisch Politik.

Granted, Ahmadinejad's weird "dialogue" with Columbia was prefaced by a blistering smack-down from President Lee Bollinger. No doubt Bollinger has been feeling some heat from the alumni over the past couple of days, particularly from the School of Journalism grads who might have interpreted those Hitler remarks as a threat to invite George Bush to speak at Columbia. But I will not question Bollinger's motives; his remarks were very good and he properly set the tone by administering a good, stiff cold water douche. Ahmadinejad whined about it throughout his own speech - and got some applause for doing so.

Bollinger's introduction was aimed as much at the public and at Columbia students as it was at the little dictator. In the case of the Columbia students, results seem to be mixed, and mixed in favor of Ahmandinejad and his brutal Islamic fascist regime.

A lot people will claim that Ahmandinejad is very clever at playing to the media and the public, and that he is crazy like a fox. People always claim that in these situations, and they're usually wrong. In fact, Ahmandinejad is a bumbling mess, and if he is successful it is testament not to his cleverness but to the pathetic credulity of the people who cheer him.

It was astonishing what the man could get away with. A clever Ahmandinejad would have steered well clear of Holocaust denial; that donkey show is for Middle East racists, not the American stage. But he happily blathered on and on about it - even comparing it to the New Physics. He was canny enough to drag the Palestinians into it, and to play the victim when the questioners got too blunt with him, and in the end he scored several applause lines. But it's obvious that he could have easily dodged the whole issue and gotten away with it.

Likewise, he could have dodged the issue of Iran's execution of homosexuals, dissidents, religious minorities, and "soiled" women. He started off on the right path, by talking about drug dealers. It is standard practice for regimes like Iran to accuse their victims of being criminals. Executed gays, for example, are usually accused of being child molesters. That ploy has worked wonderfully well with the Western left, who are stunningly silent about Iran's brutality. What doesn't work wonderfully well is the claim that homosexuality only exists in the decadent West, and that's the card the fool finally played.

In short, Mr. Unpronounceable is a clod. If he is cheered for it, it is only because his audience is composed of bigger clods.

Not all of them are so stupid, though. Some of them see Ahmadinejad as a useful tool against their own enemies: Bush, Israel, and the dreaded Neocons. Or as the charmingly frank Ahmandinejad would call them, the International Jewish Conspiracy.

These apologists do not shrink from a nuclear-armed Iran; they welcome it as a counter to Israel. They will be glad to accept the full consequences of that, and when those consequences come they will blame Bush for it, or some future Bush-like object. Not themselves - not the champions of peace and justice.

Psalm for September 11th

2007-09-11T21:54:00.000-07:00

A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.

63.

O God, thou art my God;
early will I seek thee:
my soul thirsteth for thee,
my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land,
where no water is;

to see thy power and thy glory,
so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.

Because thy loving-kindness is better than life,
my lips shall praise thee.

Thus will I bless thee while I live:
I will lift up my hands in thy name.

My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness;
and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips:

when I remember thee upon my bed,
and meditate on thee in the night watches.

Because thou hast been my help,
therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.

My soul followeth hard after thee:
thy right hand upholdeth me.

But those that seek my soul, to destroy it,
shall go into the lower parts of the earth.

They shall fall by the sword:
they shall be a portion for jackals.

But the king shall rejoice in God;
every one that sweareth by him shall glory:
but the mouth of them that speak lies shall be stopped.

THE NEW REPUBLIC DIARIST - Spiders Don't Have Lungs

2007-09-03T03:36:00.001-07:00

IT SMELLED LIKE SLOW DEATH IN THERE. Thai take-out food. Bong water. Nightmares …

This is a senior editor’s office at The New Republic. Like all the rooms here it is small and austere; a natural habitat for amphetamine-powered liberals in white shirtsleeves – or if female, a Hillary Suit in crypto-sexual earth tones. Apart from the stacks of festering garbage, the only decoration is a bust of Pontius Pilate bearing the legend, “What is Truth?”

The senior editor himself, whom I’ll call Shifty, looks as if he has never been out of this office, perhaps having evolved out of the huge patch of oatmeal-colored mold that’s creeping up the wall. I am here to see Shifty because he has somehow gotten inserted into the long and tangled editorial chain between the writing and the publication of a piece – that is, he has been called upon to do some actual editing. Imagine Queen Elizabeth being ordered to drive up to Yorkshire and clean a septic tank.

Shifty grabs the article out of my hand and begins to read. This turns out to be a most unpleasant thing to witness, because he apparently stops breathing when he reads. By the time he gets to the third page his hands are trembling and a blue cyanotic stain is creeping up his face and down his neck. Finally he finishes and slams the piece down on his desk, then looks up and fixes me with an icy stare.

“Spiders don’t have lungs,” he says.

“What? Okay. But, uh, there’s not actually anything about spiders in that piece. It’s about the G8 Summit.”

“I know what it’s about, retard, I just read it!” He grabs the pages and throws them at my face. “My point is, spiders don’t have lungs!”

“Okay. Why are you saying that? What does that mean?”

“My God, can’t you hear them? Breathing in the walls? But I know it’s not spiders – I know there’s not a big tangled clump of bloated spiders breathing behind the walls, because spiders don’t have lungs!” His voice drops to a horrified whisper. “Do they?”

“Actually I think they do.”

“What?”

“Insects don’t have lungs,” I explain, “but a lot of arachnids have lungs. So if there was like a huge cluster of giant Black Widow spiders in there - with glistening, pulsating abdomens – I guess they’d all be breathing. If that’s what you were thinking of. Or if it was, like, big honking scorpions or something.”

This information seems to calm him a bit, and he settles back in his chair. “Then, I’m not crazy.”

“God, no,” I say, picking up the pages off the floor. “You’d be crazy not to worry. You want me to put something about spiders in the article? You know, to warn people?”

“Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Spiders, and something bad about Dick Cheney. That should fix it up.”

Friday Dead Cat Blogging

2007-06-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

When in despair of men's souls, blog the cat.

Except that the cat is dead, and has been dead for some time. It has joined a growing list of things that aren't there anymore. Long before the cat there was a beloved dog. Then there are older friends, relatives, and mentors who disappeared in a short period of time. And children I knew who disappeared into adulthood with shocking suddenness. And of course, True Love.

Like many people I show my respect for these missing things by not replacing them, or replacing them with something different and less valuable. Only I go too far with it. But I prefer my ways to the more popular method of treating the people in your life as possessions and transactions, always on the lookout for a better deal.

The main thing I lost and never replaced was myself. But that was a small loss.

Israel, the Palestinians, and the Cyber-Donks (Part One)

2007-05-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Charles Johnson linked to a Daily Kos diary in which the diarist – an Israeli - calls it quits, with one of the best door-slammer endings ever: “I came to this site with Leftist Zionist Environmentalist Pro-Peace ideology (Meretz style). I leave it with a heavy doubt of the entire ‘Progressive’ ideology, morals and goals.”

I briefly skimmed the comments to this diary and something caught my eye. I don’t usually read the comments at Kos, partly because the signature lines tend to be longer than the comments and it is very annoying to be subjected to the same tag-line slogan over and over. But what caught my eye was this:

“Israel/Palestine is not a germane topic for this site to begin with. The Kos himself has said so many times, and I agree with him. … It's been said here many times - it is a THIRD RAIL that blogsites touch at their peril. Kos blocks diaries that try to bring this topic up … Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian arguments HAVE NO PLACE HERE. Most people here, frankly, are not interested in discussing this chronically intractable subject.”

It’s a stunning admission for “progressives” who claim to speak credibly on world events to say that they are not interested in talking about Israel and the Palestinians. Besides being a salient feature of the international landscape, it is a very important part of American political culture – the culture that the progs are trying to harness and ride for a saddle-pony. The comment claims that “The Kos himself” tries to steer Kos away from such discussion, even to the point of deletion. And I found that very strange.

I already knew, as most people who read the blogs know, that one does not turn to the left for detailed discussion of Israel and the Palestinians. As the departing Kos diarist noted, there are an unnerving number of people over there who seem to assume that Noam Chomsky has said the last word on the subject. Still, the left has articulated lots of pro-Israeli - and even pro-Zionist - opinion in the past. For many decades there has been a lot of left and center-left interest in a positive future for Israel, so why does it suddenly and emphatically HAVE NO PLACE HERE? And above all, SAYS WHO?

More to come.

Second Dialogue on Liberalism

2007-05-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

SOCRATES: In our last dialogue, we discovered the first fundamental principle of Liberalism: “Liberals never shop at Walmart.” Where shall our pursuit of wisdom lead us next?

GLEN: I think we might have more luck if we started with the origins of Liberalism, and explored the Classical Liberal answers to all forms of political, cultural, and economic authoritarianism. You would especially benefit from that discussion, Socrates.

SOCRATES: Then let us not keep our insatiable mistress Philosophy waiting another instant. Phaedo is boycotting our dialogues, because he says they undermine the revolutionary consciousness of the masses. But Crito is here –

CRITO: Death to Walmart.

SOCRATES: And Alcibiades wants to participate, but only if he can play Julia Roberts.

GLEN: No, no, no. No way. Julia Roberts doesn’t even count as a real Liberal.

CRITO: Says who?

ALCIBIADES: Yeah, who made you the big Liberal Pope, anyway? I’ve been working on this costume all day.

GLEN: I’m not having any of that in this house. You guys can go to a bar if you want to do that stuff. No Julia Roberts, or no dialogue. That’s it.

ALCIBIADES: A curse on Liberals and their stupid sexist rules! I guess this is what the glass ceiling looks like, right? Here’s you guys way up here, and a girl can’t even get her foot in the door.

CRITO: How did you get your feet into those shoes?

SOCRATES: Now, we’re wasting arguing time that could be spent to advance Philosophy. Let’s begin, shall we?

CRITO: I need a drink first. What do Liberals drink?

GLEN: Ethanol, I think. In extreme cases, domestic white wine.

CRITO: Domestic white wine? Apollo’s Balls, I knew this was a bad idea! I knew I never should have let Socrates talk me into this!

ALCIBIADES: What’s the matter, Crito? You scared?

CRITO: Shut up! Screw you guys. You can laugh at me all you want, but I’ve heard terrible stories about people who turn into Liberals. It started out just like this, too. It was like, “I’ll just do a little bit of it at a party, and it’ll be no big deal.” Then they wind up like Euthyphro.

SOCRATES: What happened to Euthyphro?

CRITO: He started reading The American Prospect. Just now and then, no big deal, right? Well, he got himself so worked up over health care issues that he sued his own father, because his father wouldn’t pay for one of his slaves to have a sex-change operation. But the court capped the emotional suffering damages, so Euthyphro decides to vote for John Kerry, because Kerry is against tort reform. Well, once he did that, it was one long downward spiral. Last I heard, he had to go see Hippocrates because he had a broken bottle of Naomi Campbell nail polish in his ass.

ALCIBIADES: How did he get a broken bottle of nail polish in his ass?

CRITO: He can’t buy things at Walmart now, so he has to shop-lift. He was coming out of Walmart, and some neoconservative punks started pushing him around because of his Dixie Chicks tee-shirt. Then the police came, and they started beating Euthyphro too, because of the Patriot Act. They threw him down on the cement so hard that the bottle of nail polish in his ass broke.

SOCRATES: Yeah, right. He probably fell down, from drinking too much ethanol.

GLEN: Get the hell out of here. That never happened.

ALCIBIADES: Yeah, voting for John Kerry? That’s pretty far out. Euthyphro is so full of crap.

CRITO: Well, now he’s full of Naomi Campbell nail polish, too, and that’s not going to happen to me.

ALCIBIADES: You know, maybe this whole Liberal thing isn’t such a good idea. I mean, why take a chance like that?

SOCRATES: Don’t be absurd. I don’t believe a word of it.

GLEN: Neither do I. I mean, The American Prospect sucks, but it isn’t that bad.

SOCRATES: “The American Prospect isn’t that bad.” We’ve discovered another fundamental principle of Liberalism!

CRITO: Okay, fine –

GLEN: Wow, they’re falling like ripe apples.

CRITO: Okay, good, good. Let’s just stop right now, okay? Let’s just stop.

First Dialogue on Liberalism

2007-04-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

SOCRATES: Phaedo and I have been discussing the politics of your Republic, in an attempt to understand some of its more difficult concepts. We are currently studying “Liberalism”, but we cannot discover its essential nature, so we would like to propose a dialectical exercise to you. Let us have a dialogue in which each of us plays the part of a Liberal, discussing various subjects as Liberals would discuss them, and by this pretence we hope to increase our understanding of their philosophy.

GLEN: All right. What kind of Liberals are we going to be?

SOCRATES: Well, what are our choices? Prepare us a Liberal buffet, if you will.

GLEN: Well, you have Classical Liberals, Utilitarian Liberals, Keynesian Liberals, Social Democratic Liberals, Cold War Liberals, Post-Kennedy Liberals, New Age Liberals, East Coast Intellectual Liberals and West Coast Hedonist Liberals and Hornless Corn-fed Great Plains Liberals, and your endless varieties of Cultural Liberals …

PHAEDO: What are those Liberals who run around and have sex on your roof in the middle of the night?

GLEN: Cats, Phaedo. Those are cats.

PHAEDO: Oh.

SOCRATES: Let us take this approach. We’ve assembled a number of texts from your library that deal with Liberalism, and perhaps we can find a definitive model there. Up from Liberalism, by William F. Buckley. Down with Liberalism, by Ann Coulter. Over the Hills and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House with Liberalism, by Hillary Rodham Clinton, with illustrations by Sidney Blumenthal …

GLEN: No, no, and no. Keep going.

SOCRATES: You sure? That last one got a National Book Award. It’s got a little gold thing on the cover, see? And the pictures are really cute.

GLEN: Yeah, I see that, but we need something more definitive.

SOCRATES: Okay, how about The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade?

GLEN: Pffft! What?

SOCRATES: Alcibiades suggested that one. He says it’s a bedtime story for pussy Liberals.

GLEN: No, that one is out, and anything else Alcibiades suggested is out, too.

SOCRATES: Science and British Liberalism, by Struan Jacobs. Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, by Peter Berkowitz. And A Child’s Garden of Maoist Praxis, which contains a brief essay entitled “Combat Liberalism”.

GLEN: There you go. Mao is just what we’re looking for.

SOCRATES: Really? Is this book rich in the wisdom of the Far East, then?

GLEN: Maoism is so mind-blowingly rich in Far East wisdom that all other Philosophy was violently suppressed, so as not to distract people from the one true path.

PHAEDO: Wow.

SOCRATES: “Combat Liberalism” sounds like a cool kind of Liberalism, too.

PHAEDO: Can we do that one? Let’s do that one.

SOCRATES: Okay, here’s our definition, then: “People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves.” How shall we enact this?

GLEN: You and I will be the Liberals, and we’ll apply the Marxism to Phaedo.

SOCRATES: Agreed.

PHAEDO: Wait a minute – what?

SOCRATES: It’s just a dialectical exercise, Phaedo, to enrich Philosophy.

GLEN: Phaedo doesn’t care about Philosophy. He’s a poser.

PHAEDO: I am not a poser! I love Philosophy, I just don’t see why it has to be applied to me. And “Marxism” sounds like something Dionysius would do to a goat.

SOCRATES: The greater the discomfort, Phaedo, the greater the sacrifice for Philosophy. Okay, how do we apply the Marxism to him?

GLEN: Phaedo, we need you to build fifty radios by the end of the month.

PHAEDO: What? How am I supposed to do that?

GLEN: By volunteering to work day and night for nothing, in order to fulfill the glorious economic plan.

PHAEDO: Why would I volunteer to work day and night for nothing?

GLEN: Trust me, you just did. And if you keep complaining, you’re going to be volunteering for a self-criticism session.

SOCRATES: Okay, I’m a Liberal, too. What do I get to do?

GLEN: You tell people how happy Phaedo is to be building radios for us, and how much better off he is now that we’ve applied Marxism to him. Oh, and tell them that his literacy has improved.

SOCRATES: But all of those statements are false. Why would I tell people that?

GLEN: If anybody contradicts you, call them a McCarthyite and accuse them of questioning your patriotism.

SOCRATES: Okay. I’m not sure that Phaedo can build even one radio, though. He’s not very good with devices. He can’t even lift the toilet seat.

GLEN: The radios don’t have to work. He just has to build them, or else convince us that his manager is a saboteur who stole all the parts and sold them on the black market.

PHAEDO: But you already have a radio. Why do you want fifty radios?

GLEN: Because our capitalist neighbors have a radio, and if we have fifty it will prove the superiority of our Philosophy to theirs.

SOCRATES: It will? Okay. What will we do with so many radios?

GLEN: We’ll give Phaedo a free radio, of course, and we’ll open a store to sell the surplus radios.

SOCRATES: But who’s going to buy radios that don’t work?

GLEN: Phaedo. Who else?

PHAEDO: Wait a minute. I build all these radios for nothing, and then I have to go to your stupid store and buy them from you?

GLEN: First of all, it’s not my store, it’s the People’s Store. And second, from now on you’re only allowed to buy things from the People. No more shopping at Walmart.

PHAEDO: This sucks.

GLEN: Of course it sucks. That’s what’s so great about it. Absolutely nobody is going to profit from it.

SOCRATES: This is very interesting. But have we discovered any essential Liberal principles yet?

GLEN: Yes. “No shopping at Walmart.”

SOCRATES: Wow, this shit really works. Go, Combat Liberals!

One Afternoon in October

2007-04-22T03:45:00.000-07:00

Washington, DC

October, 1961

(The interior of a Lincoln Continental driven by JACK KENNEDY. BOBBY KENNEDY is in the front seat; TED KENNEDY, LYNDON JOHNSON, and ARTHUR SCHLESINGER are in the rear.)

JACK: We did it! We lost ‘em!

TED: Woo hoo!

JOHNSON: Balls on a pump handle! I got to hand it to you, Jack, you sure can drive one of these things!

BOBBY: Okay, we lost them. Can we slow down a little now?

TED: What’s your problem, Bobby?

JACK: Bobby is just feeling extra bad for the Negroes today.

JOHNSON: HAR HAR HAR!

BOBBY: Very funny.

SCHLESINGER: Thir? Excuthe me, thir, but do you think ith a good idea to give the Thecret Thervice the thlip? It seemth kind of dangerouth.

JACK: Hell, it was worth it just to hear you say that, Arthur.

TED: Come on, Arthur. We do this all the time.

SCHLESINGER: Yeth, but it seemth thomewhat dangerouth, ith all.

TED: So what? Girls never want to put out when the Secret Service is standing around all over the place. By the way, where are we going, Jack?

JACK: I thought we’d drive out to Baltimore and hire some new stenographers. Bobby, you want to mix the martinis? The stuff is in the glove box.

BOBBY: Martinis? It’s one-thirty in the afternoon – oh, never mind. (Opens the glove box.) There’s not a lot of vermouth in here.

JACK: As long as there’s plenty of gin and olives.

JOHNSON: We can stop at a package liquor and send Arthur in. Nobody knows who the fuck he is.

BOBBY: Okay, but I told Ethel I’d be home by eight o’clock, guys.

JACK: Pussy-whipped.

TED: Pussy-whipped, pussy-whipped!

JOHNSON: Har, har, har!

BOBBY: Shut the hell up, Lyndon. Hey, look. Jack, look, look, up ahead!

JACK: What?

BOBBY: The limo, up ahead in the left lane! It’s Hoover!

JACK: Is it? I’ll be damned, I think you’re right.

TED: It’s Hoover! Speed up, speed up! Arthur, roll down your window!

JACK: Heh heh heh … Bobby, hold my drink so I can get my window down.

BOBBY: Here we go, here we go … honk the horn, Jack.

JACK: There he is! He’s looking!

TED: FAGGOT!

JOHNSON: FAGGOT!

BOBBY: FAGGOT! FAGGOT! FAGGOT!

JOHNSON: (Shoves Schlesinger into the door) Goddamn it, Arthur, yell!

SCHLESINGER: You – you homothexual!

TED: Hey, they’re rolling down their window – oh shit!

JACK: HOLY CRAP! (Slams his foot on the accelerator as gunshots ring out.) The crazy bastard just took a shot at us!

BOBBY: Floor it, Jack, floor it!

JACK: I am flooring it! Ted, are they still behind us?

TED: I don’t know, Lyndon is on top of me! Get the hell off me, Lyndon!

JACK: (Looking in the rearview mirror.) We’re okay. They’re way back there now. Wow, that was fun.

JOHNSON: That was some hairy shit. Cripes, they must have hit us. We got broken glass back here. Oh, it’s Arthur’s.

SCHLESINGER: Whath happening? Thir, I can’t thee!

JACK: Jesus, they shot Arthur?

JOHNSON: Naw, he ain’t shot. They blew his glasses off his face, but they missed his head.

BOBBY: Fucking FBI. I spilled my drink all over. Okay, guys, let’s take it easy, okay? We can have fun, but let’s not get ourselves killed.

JACK: Oh my God. Look who’s right in front of us.

BOBBY: Jesus, Jack, now what? Oh my God!

TED: What? What? Who is it?

SCHLESINGER: Oh dear, now what?

JOHNSON: Who the hell is it? Oh! Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Ooh hoo hoo hoo!

BOBBY: I can’t believe it! Okay, Jack, maybe we should just back off and let it go, okay? We’re going to screw around and have a wreck.

JACK: Maybe you’re right, Bobby. Jackie’s going to have a fit as it is.

SCHLESINGER: Oh, uh - puthy-whipped! Puthy-whipped!

JOHNSON: (Punches Schlesinger in the face) Shut the fuck up, Arthur! You calling the President of the United States pussy-whipped?

JACK: Fellas, Arthur is right. We got to do something, this is just too good to pass up. Lyndon!

JOHNSON: What?

JACK: Drap your trousers, Lyndon.

JOHNSON: What? Aw Jeez, Jack, you serious?

BOBBY: Goddamn it, Lyndon, when the President of the United States tells you to drap your trousers, you drap your trousers!

JACK: Drap your trousers, Lyndon.

JOHNSON: Aw, Jeez. Awright, hang on.

TED: Get up beside him! Get up beside him, Jack!

JOHNSON: Hang on, I’m not ready! Ow! Hold it steady, Jack, I damn near put my head through the back window –

JACK: Oh, this going to be great. This is going to be so good.

JOHNSON: Arthur, you want to get your head out of the way of my ass? Bend over, bend over, you fucking idiot! (Sits on Schlesinger and plasters buttocks against car window) Aw, this glass is cold, fellas!

BOBBY: He’s ready! Honk, Jack!

(Interior of a limousine. RICHARD NIXON and RONALD REAGAN are in the back seat.)

REAGAN: So, anyway, we said to heck with it, and we just pushed the couch overboard with Rita Hayworth still on it. Heh. But then … sigh … but then, Dick, I got a letter from a little six year-old girl –

NIXON: What is this shit you’re telling me, Ron? Driver! Where are my little blue pills?

DRIVER: There’s some valium in your briefcase, sir.

NIXON: Yeah, but where are my little blue pills, goddamn it?

DRIVER: Sir, if they’re not there, you must have taken them.

NIXON: I know they’re not here, goddamn it, I just told you they’re not here. I’m talking to Ron here, goddamn it. I’m sitting here talking to Ron and I’ve got a cup of coffee and a roll of fricking Alka Seltzer, so where are my little blue pills, goddamn it? What, what, what is it? What are you looking at, goddamn it, what?

DRIVER: Um, it’s probably nothing, sir, but there’s a car coming up behind us, fast.

NIXON: Well, goddamn it. Where, what, who is it, what? Okay, okay, I see it now, who is that, goddamn it? Why, it’s those Kennedy boys! Goddamn it, Ron, it’s all those Kennedy boys!

REAGAN: How about that.

NIXON: Well, don’t wave at ‘em, you fucking dummy! What are they doing, what? What? Oh … oh my God, oh! OHOHOHH! You bastards! You rotten cookie-pushing bastards!

REAGAN: Oh, my goodness.

NIXON: Goddamn it, Ron, don’t look! Don’t look at them, that’s what they want! Those disgusting bastards … look straight ahead, Ron, look straight ahead! Pretend like we don’t see them, Ron, goddamn it!

REAGAN: Okay.

NIXON: We’re not interested in them, are we, Ron?

REAGAN: I guess not, Dick.

NIXON: Why, they’re not even interesting enough to make us sick.

REAGAN: Ha ha, no.

NIXON: Step on it, driver, get us out of here, goddamn it!

(Interior of Kennedy’s car)

BOBBY: Ha ha ha ha ha!

TED: HAH HAH HA HA!

JACK: Ha ha hanh – ah, shit! I dropped my drink! SHIT!

BOBBY: Jack, we’re going awfully damn fast.

JACK: I know, Bobby, the glass is stuck under the accelerator! Hey, Ted! Lean over the seat and grab the wheel a minute while I get it. Hurry, damn it!

(Crash)

(A phone booth by the Potomac river. A crane is lifting a car out of the water.)

BOBBY: Ethel? Hi, honey. I just wanted to tell you I’m going to be a little late getting home. We were on our way to, um …

JACK: Gang rape Julie Eisenhower.

BOBBY: We were on our way to meet with some important Negroes, and we had a little accident. What? No, honey, we weren’t drinking. No, no. Well, we kind of wound up in the Potomac River, is all. Well, honey, it was … it was dark, and –

TED: Unfamiliar road.

BOBBY: It was an unfamiliar road, honey, and it was dark. Yeah. No, everybody is okay. We’re just trying to find Lyndon’s trousers now. Okay. Okay, honey, I love you. Goodbye.

Twenty-five percent of all automobile accidents involve alcohol. If you drive, don’t drink. If you drink, don’t drive. A message from the National Safety Council and the Republican National Committee.

What I'm Not Reading Lately

2007-04-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

More Nonexistent Books

Since I haven't been able to get into a book for weeks, I thought I'd add to my list of favorite imaginary books, beginning with some enyclopedias.

ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA by Hari Seldon, et al. A comprehensive work compiling all human knowledge, intended to shorten the new dark age that will follow the collapse of the galactic empire. Written on the remote planet Terminus with the permission of imperial authorities, who couldn’t care less. (Isaac Asimov, Foundation.)

ENCYCLOPAEDIA GALACTICA. Either the UK edition of Seldon’s Encyclopedia, or a work of similar ambition. Now largely ignored in favor of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Douglas Adams)

THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams, et al. Don’t panic and always bring a towel; you know the drill.

THE GREAT BOOK OF RECORDS by invisible aerial spirits. Marvelous book owned by the sorceress Glinda the Good of Oz. All events that transpire anywhere in the world are automatically recorded in this book, though details tend to be sketchy. The records do not organize themselves, so it is necessary to wade through an ocean of text to find something specific. The Book of Records anticipated the internet by 80 years, and the Encyclopedia Galactica by more than 12,000. Greatly influenced the writers of Microsoft documentation. (L. Frank Baum)

A FIRST ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF TLÖN. (Memphis, Tennessee; copyright 1824-1914) Published in 40 volumes over a period of 90 years, this encyclopedia was commissioned by American millionaire Ezra Buckley and limited to 300 copies. Any surviving editions are in private collections only. Over half of the sets perished with the RMS Lusitania in 1915, thanks to a radio miscommunication; the German submarine U-20 was supposed to waylay the ship and capture the encyclopedias, not sink them. Tlön is an imaginary planet, so the encyclopedia’s contents are entirely fictional. A genuine set is bound in yellow leather with a silk frontispiece stamped “ORBIS TERTIUS”. A spurious volume IX was sold to an unknown collector over the Internet, but exposed as a forgery by Glenn Horowitz Booksellers. (Jorge Luis Borges)

EARLY PLATES ON THE MORPHOLOGY OF INSECTS OF THE AXA DELTA, by Sean Kernan. This book purported to contain fragments of the Tlön encyclopedias, but has been exposed as a hoax.

AZATHOTH AND OTHER HORRORS, by Edward Pickman Derby (1908). Book of weird lyrical poetry, in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep. Derby was a child prodigy who was influenced by “the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey”. How a Baudelairean poet makes himself notorious is, of course, unexplained.

NECROTELECOMNICON, or LIBER PAGINARUM FULVARUM (“The Book of Yellow Pages”) by Achmed the Mad. Terry Pratchett’s homage to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.

THE MAN WHO WAS OCTOBER, by G.K. Chesterton. An imaginary sequel to the actual book The Man Who Was Thursday. (Neil Gaiman, Sandman)

THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER KINGS, by Waltham Kitteredge. A study of the American northeastern upper crust, with special attention to inbreeding. Kitteredge coined the term “un-neurotic courage”, in case you’re wondering who coined that. (Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan)

AN OPEN INVITATION TO THE CHYMICAL WEDDING, BEING A MODEST PROLOGOMENON TO A FULLER REVELATION OF THE HERMETIC MYSTERY, by Louisa Agnew. Alchemy meets British middle-class sexual frustration. (Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding)

THE CAT IT WAS WHO DIED, by Ariadne Oliver. Mystery novel featuring the Finnish detective Sven Hjerson, who is based on Oliver’s real-non-life friend Hercule Poirot. (Agatha Christie)

ON THE TYPEWRITER AND ITS RELATION TO CRIME by Sherlock Holmes. The Alger Hiss Library in Washington, DC, had a rare American edition of this book, but it was loaned to CBS News and never returned.

GRAMMATICAL GARDEN, OR THE ARBOUR OF ACCIDENCE PLEASANTLIE OPEN'D TO TENDER WITS by Pulverentus Siccus. (C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian)

THE WISDOM OF THE GREAT KAMIKAZE PILOTS, Anonymous. Notable only for the illustrations by Walt Disney. (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF TIME TRAVEL by Roberta Sparrow, aka "Grandma Death" (1944). Actually a philosophy of temporary, unstable universes. (Donnie Darko)

BETWEEN TIMID AND TIMBUKTU by Beatrice Rumsfoord. Book of poetry by another reclusive rich female weirdo, which is also all about time - "time" being between "timid" and "Timbuktu". (Kurt Vonnegut)

THE THING WITH THREE SOULS. Ace Science Fiction paperback version of the New Testament. Sequel to Master of Chaos. (Terry Carr)

An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-12T22:56:00.000-07:00

GLEN: I never thought I’d get to do this, but now that you’re dead, who’s going to stop me?

VONNEGUT: Good thinking.

GLEN: I wanted to tell you that Mother Night was one of the books that influenced my life …

VONNEGUT: Thank you.

GLEN: I don’t know what you’re thanking me for. You’re not taking credit, are you?

VONNEGUT: Well, I did write the damn book.

GLEN: Technically, yes, but I’m not some high school kid who mined your books for reports just because they’re short. I’ve been reading you since I was in the fifth grade, and I actually paid attention to what you were saying. You’re saying that people are machines, who have no freedom or dignity and merely play out their inevitable destinies in a deterministic universe.

VONNEGUT: I only made that point about ten thousand times, usually in the first paragraph, so I can’t really praise you for your insight.

GLEN: So it follows that Mother Night was just the cumulative result of impersonal physical and chemical processes, of which the machine called Kurt Vonnegut was just one accidental component. So thanking you for writing Mother Night would be like thanking a salesman for inventing the vacuum cleaner. You see my point?

VONNEGUT: Of course I see it, because it’s my point, not yours.

GLEN: You’re kind of possessive for a machine, and a socialist machine at that.

VONNEGUT: That’s what happens when you’re a successful socialist writing machine. You wouldn’t understand.

GLEN: Let’s talk about unsuccessful machines, then. You’re fascinated with characters who go insane, or who are destroyed by circumstances beyond their control.

VONNEGUT: Of course. With defective machines you have tragedy, pathos, comedy, all the stuff of fiction. With normal machines you’ve got a boring dinner party. And nobody wants to watch a machine work. They want to see it break down, or crash into something.

GLEN: But from the point of view of a machine, there is no such thing as a defective machine, or even a mechanical breakdown. A machine simply performs whatever physical process is mandated by its current state. Only from the point of view of a non-machine, a designer or an operator who expects a certain result, could a machine be judged to be defective or broken.

VONNEGUT: God.

GOD: Me.

VONNEGUT: Hey … whoa, whoa, what the hell is this?

GLEN: You’re dead, what did you expect?

GOD: Don’t worry, I’m not a real god. Lucky for you. I’m your god. I’m the god you created, and that you’ve been complaining about for the last sixty years.

VONNEGUT: But he looks just like me.

GLEN: Well, he is you. You must have created him in your own image.

GOD: That’s right. I’m just a harmless, amiable old Andy Gump who doesn’t really give a crap about anything. Don’t be alarmed.

VONNEGUT: If you’re my god, go terrorize a hamster farm and leave me alone.

GOD: I’d think you’d be grateful to me. I’ve served you pretty well.

VONNEGUT: Can you believe this guy? By doing what? BY DOING WHAT?

GOD: Mostly nothing. It’s a pretty easy gig. Beats the hell out of crucifixion – not that I’m telling anybody else how to run their business. All I really have to do is exist.

VONNEGUT: But you don’t exist.

GOD: Oh, yes I do. If I didn’t, nothing you’ve written would make any sense at all, and you’d be in a hell of a fix. First of all, I’ve taken all the responsibility of Free Will off your shoulders. Since I’m the only guy who has Free Will, I get blamed for everything and you’re off the hook. You get to deny me and dump all of your garbage on me at the same time. You can’t beat that deal with a stick, Sonny Jim.

GLEN: Good point.

GOD: Of course it’s a good point, smart ass.

VONNEGUT: If you cared, you wouldn’t exist. If you exist, then you don’t care. Asshole.

GOD: Of course. Exactly. That’s the whole point, don’t you see? Other gods impart meaning to human existence by caring about it. But I’m your god, and I impart meaning to your world precisely by not caring about it. This allows you to sympathize with your fellow human beings, in spite of your obvious disdain for them as broken machines that never work the way you think they ought to. You can’t love them, but you can hate me for letting them break down and crash into things. You’ve stripped them of every scrap of value or volition, but you still want to judge them and preach at them, so you take it out on me. And that’s a freebie, too, because you know I’m just a funny old bastard who’s probably not even listening. I don’t care, so you don’t have to.

VONNEGUT: Okay, so you’re my god and I created you. Consider yourself uncreated, and beat it.

GOD: Not so fast, Kurt. Don’t you remember that you promised to set all of your characters free? Well, even if you hadn’t promised, you’re dead now, so I can do whatever I want.

ELIOT ROSEWATER: That goes for me, too.

VONNEGUT: Oh, cripes.

HOWARD W. CAMPBELL: And me. Now that Kurt is gone, I’ve gotten back together with my wife – my real wife, not the fake one that demented old fart tried to foist on me – and I’ve even revived my career in broadcasting.

GLEN: In Nazi Germany?

HOWARD W. CAMPBELL: Better yet, CBC Radio.

KILGORE TROUT: Things have really picked up for me, too. I’m a copy editor for People magazine now, and I’m just enjoying the heck out of it. I’m going through a 12 step program, working out my issues with my abusive creator, and I’ve met a woman who’s an old fan – an old fan of me, not of Kurt – and we’re planning to get married and have children.

GLEN: Congratulations. That sounds great.

KILGORE TROUT: I’m taking it one day at a time and feeling good about myself, and I’ll tell you something, Glen, I never would have made it this far without the ministry of the Reverend James Dobson.

ELIOT ROSEWATER: Absolutely. Focus on the Family. Absolutely.

GOD: Amen.

KILGORE TROUT: It has been such a huge help to me.

VONNEGUT: Jeeeeeezus …

BILLY PILGRIM: Family has really been the road to recovery for me, too. Now that Kurt is dead, I’ve come to realize how much of my unhappiness came from seeing everything through his perspective. I’m back with my wife, I’ve stopped going back and forth in time, and I’m building strong relationships with my son and my daughter. And instead of worrying what Kurt thinks about everything, and expecting Kurt to approve of everything, it’s been …

HOWARD W. CAMPBELL: What does Billy Pilgrim want?

BILLY PILGRIM: Exactly! What does Billy Pilgrim – I’ve learned to separate my life from his. Okay? I’ve learned to separate my life from his.

ELIOT ROSEWATER: Absolutely. And that is so important.

BILLY PILGRIM: I don’t have to hate my wife, my career, my children, my space-time coordinates, just because Kurt hated them. I don’t have to be miserable just because Kurt expected me to be.

GOD: Can I ask everybody a question? Does anyone here feel like they were “programmed to fail”?

RUDY “DEADEYE DICK” WALTZ: Yes! Yes! Yes!

ELIOT ROSEWATER: Absolutely.

BILLY PILGRIM: I think that’s how everybody here feels. And you know something? It wasn’t just that I felt programmed to fail. I felt that if I didn’t fail – if I didn’t suffer in my career, suffocate in my family life, if I didn’t go to an alien planet and have sex with a porn star – if I didn’t suffer though all of these things, I felt that Kurt wouldn’t love me.

HOWARD W. CAMPBELL: Exactly. And that is a terrible, terrible position for a child to be in.

DWAYNE HOOVER: But there is a way forward from that. There is a way forward from that.

KILGORE TROUT: Yes.

DWAYNE HOOVER: I don’t have to be unhappy. I don’t have to fail. And if Kurt were alive right now, I would tell him - Kurt, if you can hear me, wherever you are –

VONNEGUT: Oh, for crying out loud …

DWAYNE HOOVER: I would tell him: Kurt, I forgive you for everything you’ve done to me. I have accepted responsibility for my own life, for my own happiness, and I have accepted Sidney Sheldon as my personal Lord and Savior.

VONNEGUT: Oh my God!

GOD: I’m not listening to you, Kurt. This is something that we’re sharing among ourselves, now. This is not something that you can step into and control.

HOWARD W. CAMPBELL: You know, I really like what Dwayne said about forgiveness. I think that was so important.

ELIOT ROSEWATER: Absolutely.

HOWARD W. CAMPBELL: I’d like to tell Kurt that, too.

KILGORE TROUT: Let’s all hold hands and say it together. Should we? C’mon everybody, let’s hold hands and say it together.

EVERYBODY: I FORGIVE YOU, KURT VONNEGUT!

VONNEGUT: Fuck you.

GLEN: Do you think that Free Will can exist? Now that you’re dead, I mean.

VONNEGUT: Fuck you, too. Does this thing just go on and on, or does it have a moral?

GLEN: Well, it sort of has a moral. “You are what you write, so be careful what you write about.”

ELIOT ROSEWATER: Absolutely. That is so true.

GOD: Amen. Amen.

Democracy, Liberty, Beauty, and Truth

2007-01-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

SOCRATES: There is a question I have been meaning to put to you, as you remain so addicted to the peculiar notions of democracy. Is it possible for a republic which is founded upon the principles of liberty, free speech, and intellectual freedom - as yours is - to also devote itself to the establishment of Truth, and the creation of Beauty?

GLEN: No.

SOCRATES: What?

GLEN: I said no.

SOCRATES: Okay. Huh. That's it, you don't want to fight about it?

GLEN: No.

SOCRATES: Want to drink a couple of beers, and then try it?

GLEN: No.

SOCRATES: How about ---

GLEN: Shut up. Just shut up.

PLATO: Both of you shut the hell up. I'm trying to watch Tony Soprano.

Sic Semper Tyrannus, Baby

2006-12-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

Our public intellectuals are struggling to explain Saddam’s demise to us folks in the bleachers. This is important to them, because they think that we believe everything they tell us.

Historical parallels with Nuremberg have been suggested. But Saddam’s situation was nothing like that of the Nuremberg defendants. They were tried by a multinational court (not an international court as it is often miscalled) which employed unique and unprecedented legal procedures. The Soviet members of that court were unabashedly prejudiced against the defendants, and voted to convict and execute nearly all of them – they even insisted on charging them with a crime the Soviets themselves had committed: the Katyn Forest Massacre. (Much to the annoyance of our gallant Soviet allies, the Nuremberg defendants were exonerated on that particular charge.)

Saddam, on the other hand, was convicted of pure and simple murder by a national court of his own countrymen. Although it is characterized as a “war crime” or a “crime against humanity”, those terms are mostly rhetorical. These abstract definitions were introduced by Nuremberg in order to establish an unusual culpability, but they were unnecessary in Saddam’s case. Saddam was convicted of the murder of specific people, for which he was directly responsible. No one can claim he was subjected to any kind of “Victor’s Justice”.

What makes Saddam’s case unusual is that a dictator was deposed, tried in a court of law by his own people, and humanely executed. This is far from being typical. Most fallen dictators escape into exile; if they are captured, they are dealt with in a summary and often brutal fashion. Mussolini and Ceausescu were shot after being sentenced by tribunals that convened just long enough to pronounce the death sentence.

Slobodan Milosevic was not a dictator of Saddam’s stature, but his fate was exactly what some liberals would have awarded to Saddam. He was trundled through an international trial at the Hague, which was magnificently bungled, and finally died in custody. Until the day they die, his partisans will believe that he was murdered in prison, just as Napoleon’s followers did. Just as radical leftists believed that the Baader-Meinhof terrorists were murdered in prison. There’s a lesson in that, boys and girls. You don’t get a single iota of credit from the enemy for coddling their heroes. Unless we had figured out a way to make Saddam Hussein live forever, we’d get blamed for killing him anyway.

Unfortunately, the most typical career trajectory of all for a dictator is this: kill your enemies, loot your country, bask in the absurd flattery of your foreign apologists, and die in your bed at a ripe old age. The number of dictators who manage to do this is obscene.

When historians look back on us, they won’t be shocked at the one dictator that got hanged, but at the scores of them that weren’t. How, they will ask, could we believe that the life of one brutal man is worth more than the life of an entire nation - decimated, enslaved, and robbed of decades of normal human existence? Could there be a greater crime than inflicting the living death of totalitarianism on millions of people?

Tyranny, lay thy foundations sure, for goodness dare not check thee – but maybe the times are changing.

THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD: HOW TO LIE ABOUT CHRISTMAS

2006-12-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

So, how was your Christmas? Tired of hearing that? Tired of explaining how the cat climbed the Christmas tree and knocked it over on top of your aunt, and how the kids poured the punch bowl down the laundry chute? If people insist on sticking their noses into your Christmas business, pick one of the following lies and see if they ever ask you about your holiday again.

An old friend you haven’t heard from in years invites you to spend Christmas with him, on his 200-foot yacht anchored off the Florida Keys. He’s a major investment broker and all of his best clients are on board for the holiday, including Nicole Kidman, Richard Petty, and the Beach Boys. The Braes of Glenlivet send a boatload of French Oak Reserve as a Christmas present.

The party is so great that people from the Keys try to swim out to the ship, but a nasty rip current keeps the crashers at bay. You see Katie Couric clinging to a lounge chair, just before a freakish three foot swell hurls her back onto the beach.

On Christmas morning you are awakened by the Coast Guard, who are responding to noise complaints from the US Naval Station at Guantanamo. Fortunately, the anchor cable parted during the festivities and the yacht has drifted out past the three-mile limit. Unable to arrest you, the Coast Guard joins the party.

On the way back, the Coast Guard offers to race you with their cutter. Your friend has had so much to drink that he’s sneezing Egg Nog, and when he declines the Coast Guard makes chicken-clucking noises at you. So you take the helm, and totally make that cutter eat your wake.

You were just about to sit down to turkey and cranberry sauce with the whole family, when you get an urgent call from your best buddy. He’s been trying to repossess Burt Reynolds’ car for six weeks with no luck, and the finance company has been slam-dancing on his butt. He’s finally located the car, parked in front of Burt’s lawyer’s house in Oakland. He wants you to drive him out there so he can nab it. He knows it’s Christmas Eve and he wouldn’t ask if you weren’t such a great friend, but damn it, he needs you.

So you and your friend head out to Oakland in your Dodge Viper. Sure enough, there’s the lawyer’s house and there’s the car: a twelve-cylinder Pagani Zonda. Even before the car comes into view you can smell the analine leather interior, and see the bottle-fly green paint job reflected in the night sky like the Aurora Borealis.

Unfortunately, there’s lots of other cars parked there, too, and an under-strength platoon of bodyguards are walking around with MAC-10 submachine guns in full view. “Don’t worry,” your friend assures you. “We’ll do this fast. Just follow me. No matter what happens or where I go, just stay on my tail lights.”

Your friend rolls out in the alleyway and jacks that Pagani right out from under their noses. As he speeds away and you pull out to follow, you can see the security guys piling into their Cadillacs, which you figure are probably armored and relatively slow. As long as you stick to the upscale residential areas they won’t be able to shoot at you very much.

So you head south out of Oakland faster than a raped ape, and you start getting the idea that the Pagani is a little too much for your friend to handle, because he's bobbing and weaving all over the road. (Later you will learn that he had to break off the wheel to jack the car, and he's trying to steer it with a pair of Vise-Grips.) Finally he misses a curve completely and goes tear-assing right through somebody's huge Christmas display. You ramp the curb and follow him, figuring that he did it on purpose to throw off your pursuers. So now you're crashing through a fake Winter Wonderland, dragging strings of lights and the lower torso of Frosty the Snowman behind you, when a life-size Santa sleigh with all twelve reindeer looms in front of you. Guiding the sleigh is a kangaroo with a blinking red Rudolph nose. You figure it's just plastic, and it's too late to swerve anyway, so you punch it.

Big mistake. The damn thing is mounted on a steel and concrete framework. You ramp five feet into the air as your undercarriage is shredded like cheese in a grater right under your butt. When you come down again all four of your tires are flat, so you sled along in the grass until enough turf piles up to bring you to a stop, leaving a forty-foot smoldering trail of oil and transmission fluid behind you.

You friend doubles back and scoops you up. Shaking the last of your pursuers, you finally roll into the repo yard, where an angry confrontation ensues between your friend, the finance company, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department, and - for some reason - Mel Gibson's groundskeeper.

Just as there seems to be no hope for Peace on Earth, in walks Burt Reynolds. Burt takes full responsibility for the entire incident, apologizes to the finance company for falling behind on the payments, and he writes them out a fat check right then and there. He also promises to buy you a new Dodge Viper.

"Merry Christmas, everybody," Burt Reynolds says.

"God bless us, every one," you add, and the guys from the finance company start crying.

You all pile into the Pagani and head to Union City for pancakes. You get pulled over three times on the way, and Burt Reynolds talks the Chips out of giving you a ticket every single time.

It's Christmas Eve and your relatives are due to arrive any minute, so your wife dispatches you on an emergency run for last-minute relative supplies: deodorant, Kaopectate, beer, and cheap Frothy Sputum champagne. But on the way home, while you're waiting at a stop light, two guys run out into traffic and jump into the back of your Buick. One of them sticks a gun in your ear and says, "Drive!"

You quickly calculate that you can't unbuckle your seat belt and kick their butts before they shoot you, so you drive. As you head down the road, they explain the situation to you. They are contract agents for the CIA. Top Secret intercepts have just revealed that former President Jimmy Carter is a commie-terrorist spy. They apologize and promise that they will not expose you to any more danger than is absolutely necessary, but national security demands that they commandeer you and your vehicle to drive them to Atlanta, Georgia. They have to watergate the Jimmy Carter Library and secure vital evidence.

So you drive all night to Atlanta, singing Handel's Messiah, with the CIA guys backing you up on the chorus parts. You know you sound really great, too, because everybody you pass is honking and blinking their lights at you. The beer runs out on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line, but miraculously you find a liquor store in Georgia that's open. This reminds you of the very first Christmas, when Joseph managed to find an open manger in Bethlehem. It's like history repeating itself.

A few hours before dawn you reach the Jimmy Carter Library, which looks like a UFO that crash-landed on a Greek ruin. Security is totally pathetic and you easily breach the north perimeter of the compound. Your target is the Arafat Microfiche Vault on the lower level, so one of the CIA agents kicks in a basement window with his cowboy boots and you're in like Flynn. Everything is going according to plan until you turn a corner and run face-first into a totally naked woman, who starts screaming her enormous lungs out.

As luck would have it, the General Reference staff is having an unauthorized Christmas party on the premises, complete with strippers and a brass band in Santa suits. Fortunately the CIA has professional expertise in these matters, and the agents quickly figure out a way to turn this unexpected setback to your advantage. They explain to the naked woman that the three of you are also festive librarians, who just ran out to get more Frothy Sputum. You infiltrate the party for the next several hours, while the CIA guys stuff microfiche into empty champagne cases.

As you're trying to find your car the next day, who should you run into but Jimmy Carter! Carter tells you that he is on his way out of the country for good, and he just stopped by the library to get some Chapstick he left in the restroom. The former president sadly explains that he is tired of being an outrage to decent folk everywhere, and he has decided to spend the rest of his life in Tibet, bugging the Chinese. Before he goes to Tibet, however, he plans to address a special session of the Knesset, in which he will apologize to the entire human race for being such a jerk.

You give Carter a ride to the airport, and he pays for the gas. Plus, you get a fat reimbursement from the CIA for the use of your vehicle, including a triple per diem for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. You wind up making over $1500 out of the whole deal.

Infantile Liberalism Vs. Mary Cheney’s Baby

2006-12-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

This is what I get for being on the New Republic’s e-mail list. An idiot-gram entitled “Mary Cheney’s Baby”:

Dick Cheney's daughter is an open lesbian-and now she is pregnant. Her presence would seem to pose a problem for conservatives. How can they decry gay unions and then fail to decry Mary Cheney's lifestyle? In this week's cover story Andrew Sullivan explores the conundrum represented by Mary Cheney and then dissects the conservative reaction to her pregnancy.

Here is my open letter of retaliation:

Dear TNR:

I did not know that Mary Cheney was going to have a baby. Still less did I know that this baby presented a personal problem for me – a conundrum, no less. In a time of war and momentous ideological struggle, thank you for taking a moment to warn me of this fresh unforeseen threat. Forgive me if my reaction seems ungrateful.

Mary Cheney’s baby is none of your damn business. Who the hell do you people think you are, the Gay Standards & Practices Committee? Why don’t you keep your sheet-sniffing ferret noses out of other peoples’ laundry?

However many things I have failed to decry in this life, and however profound my baby-induced existential crisis is, I must decline your offer to have Andrew Sullivan dissect me for nine bucks and some change. In fact, if Andrew is looking for something to do, why don’t you tell him to get his own head and ass wired back together into some kind of functional apparatus? If he did he might start making occasional sense again.

Feel free to contact me if you have anything to say that isn’t utterly moronic.

It’s not the fact that the New Republic has decided to pester a baby that makes me mad, per se. It’s the fact that so many responsible liberals, for whom TNR once served as a flag ship, still insist on retreating into frivolities like this one. It is for this reason that our Popular Front against terrorism, which held so much promise a few years ago, has so far failed to keep that promise.

Not everybody turned out to be a gutless wonder, of course. Democrats, liberals, and even the left have contributed some real paladins to this fight. Their efficacy is demonstrated by the hysterical hatred that the anti-American mosh pit shrieks at them. Their moral courage is second to nobody’s.

But for too many, the petty little world of Democrats and Republicans - locked in eternal metaphysical struggle over some stupid-ass remark somebody made on Face the Nation last week – remains the ruling paradigm. Everything else is unserious.

We’ll get to Appomattox some day. Right now we’re still in a bar in Washington after First Bull Run, bitching at each other like cranky children.

Robert Altman's Latest Death Trip

2006-12-09T23:37:00.000-07:00

There aren't too many directors I would immediately recognize if I walked into the middle of one of their films, but there are a few. If two characters use the word "n-gger" thirty-seven times in one conversation, it's Quentin Tarantino. If David Mamet's wife is in it, it's David Mamet. If I've already seen it, it's Joel and Ethan Coen. And if it has a HUGE ensemble cast of utterly unsympathetic characters, zero plot, and is totally devoid of anything resembling either comedy or drama, it's Robert Altman. And even though I've walked into the middle of it, it's probably going to last another three hours.

I'd like to salvage something from all the hours of Robert Altman I've seen, but it's not going to be easy. Start with his most popular film, M*A*S*H. M*A*S*H is, in fact, a perfectly vile piece of work. It's cynical, mean-spirited, misogynistic, and doesn't have three jokes in it that are actually funny. The idea of a comedy set in a blood-soaked surgery in Korea is supposed to be a fine artistic juxtaposition, I suppose. But the endless television series that followed proved that a military surgery is no different from a Boston bar, or Seinfeld's living room. And it's disturbing how easily the corrupt and cynical characters of the film were so easily transformed into conventional Hollywood liberals on television. Just as the dismal, barren scrub hills of Korea were perfectly mimicked by the dismal, barren scrub hills of central California. Overall the effect is ultimately depressing, but being depressing is not the same thing as being profound.

Moving right along to Altman's critical masterpiece, Nashville. Here we are invited to think that we are experiencing a parody - of Nashville, of course, but Nashville as an effigy of Amerika. The clues start right at the beginning with the first of the hundred characters we'll meet: Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), a nudie-suit nightmare with Elvis hair who is in his studio recording a bicentennial song called "We Must Be Doing Something Right (To Have Lasted 200 Years)". This is a canned-laughter cue for liberals to jerk their knees - patriotic country music? Bleeeech! Afterwards Haven warns his piano player to get a haircut. "You don't belong in Nashville (Amerika)." Once again Altman picks a big, fat, slow-moving bogeyman and aims low.

Maybe I'm reading too much into Nashville. Or too little. At the end of the film, singer Barbara Jean (a Loretta Lynn stand-in, played by Ronee Blakely) is senselessly gunned down during a performance by a guy who looks like Clark Kent. "Thank yuh, thet song was fer Mommy an' Daddy ---" BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! A hippy and a soldier wrestle Clark Kent to the ground. As Loretta Lynn's body is carted off the stage, Barbara Harris takes the microphone and sings a pretty, meaningless tune: "You may say that I ain't free, but it don't worry me." Everybody happily claps and sings along. Roll the credits.

That has to mean something, right? After all, Nashville was nominated for four Oscars in 1975, and is a perfect fossilized specimen of the Seventies: brainless music, brainless clothes, brainless art, high gas prices, Arabs running amok, crazed gunmen running amok, Jimmy Carter running amok, cynical films with no plot - okay, maybe that's what's happening right now. Maybe that makes it prophetic, or timeless. I find it hard to care. I just want my six hours back - at least, it seemed like six hours. Maybe I want that whole decade of my childhood back, without the sordid details. Without this goddamn picture in the middle of it.

But I gave Altman another chance, with Short Cuts. When dealing with a Robert Altman film, it's best to focus on one of the thirty different storylines and spend the rest of the time taking cigarette breaks and replenishing the Milk Duds supply. The part of the film I chose to watch dealt with a small boy who is accidently hit by a car (driven by Lily Tomlin). The boy seems to be unhurt, but he collapses a short time later and eventually dies. This unpleasantness is reinforced by the appearance of the boy's grandfather (Jack Lemmon), a painful failure of a man who threw his life away with a marital infidelity, and by a twisted pastry chef (Lyle Lovett, minus the Large Band) who harasses the dying boy's mother with nasty phone calls. All of this is every bit as much fun as it sounds, and I don't know if I can take any more cinematic experiences like that one.

Ingmar Bergman supposedly said, "I could always live in my art, but never in my life." I guess Altman finally achieved in his life what he did in his art: Death by sheer indifference. I can't think it will be much of a change for him. Resquiat in Pacem, friend.

What is Truthiness?

2006-12-03T12:57:00.000-07:00

SOCRATES: Glen, Crito and I beg you to join our discussion, and enlighten us on a subject that has puzzled us both. What is “truthiness”?

GLEN: Well, first of all, it’s a fad word with more style than substance. But so far as I can tell, something has “truthiness” if it seems to be true in some way that is intuitive or emotional, but not proven by evidence or reason.

SOCRATES: Hmmm. Then I beg you to excuse me, for I must be dreadfully ignorant …

CRITO: Very true, Socrates.

SOCRATES: Shut your pie hole, you idiot. You’re supposed to say “very true” when I say something that actually is true, not when I’m engaging in self-deprecation for rhetorical effect.

CRITO: When you say something that is true, or something that has “truthiness”?

GLEN: Could we skip the rhetorical effects for once? Just get to the point.

SOCRATES: Very well. This quality of “truthiness” that you describe – it differs from truth in that it is neither a self-evident fact, nor is it deduced by logic?

GLEN: That’s right.

SOCRATES: And yet, if a person perceives “truthiness”, he perceives something that appeals to him in some manner that reason cannot explain?

GLEN: Yes.

SOCRATES: And he judges this to be good, though he cannot prove why?

GLEN: I suppose so.

SOCRATES: Then once again I have confirmed by belief that Americans have no appreciation for beauty. For is it not obvious that this “truthiness” is none other than the quality of being beautiful? All civilized people understand what beauty is, but Americans are so ignorant of beauty that they must invent ugly words to describe its effects, on those rare occasions when beauty penetrates their petrified senses.

CRITO: So truthiness is beauty, and beauty, truthiness? Am I supposed to say “very true” now, or are you still pretending to be stupid?

GLEN: Pretending or not, he’s dead wrong.

SOCRATES: How am I wrong?

GLEN: Because “truthiness” doesn’t appeal just to sensuality. It also appeals to ignorance, bigotry, and malice. People see truthiness in things they want to believe, and lots of people want to believe the worst. People love to believe in conspiracies and immanent disasters, and all kinds of sordid things that are not at all beautiful.

CRITO: Unless they perceive some kind of bizarre beauty in such things. A sort of “beautiness”.

GLEN: Beautiness?

SOCRATES: I think Crito has had one of his occasional rear-end collisions with truth. For if truthiness exists, the analogous quality of beautiness must exist also. In fact, isn’t the entire American aesthetic founded on beautiness? Americans are repelled by any refined expression of beauty, finding all such poetry and music to be nothing but noise and nonsense. They want extravagant spectacles of color and sound, orgies of violence and pornography, and they reject as pretentious anything that rises above the lowest common sentiment. They want counterfeit beauty, to go along with their counterfeit truth.

GLEN: You’re one to talk. If we had any artists in this country, you’d be all for shipping them to Guantanamo.

SOCRATES: All I’ve ever asked of artists is that they serve the civic and ethical purpose of society, which of course they won’t do. But your Republic has done an admirable job of exterminating them. And your bogus artists serve the purpose of your culture very well, since that purpose seems to be sado-masochistic nihilism. They couldn’t be greater patriots.

GLEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I still don’t know what you mean by “beautiness”.

CRITO: It’s like the time that Sappho went to Fort Lauderdale. She hit on this chick in a bar, only it turned out that the chick was a guy wearing a dress.

GLEN: So beautiness is like a guy wearing a dress.

SOCRATES: Not a very elegant analogy, but it has a kind of truthiness to it.

Quiet Blog (Fiction)

2006-10-14T02:57:00.000-07:00

Eager_Angel wrote:

Bravo for that wonderful and informative post, Ruth. I am so happy to have discovered your weblog. What a pleasure it is to find someone whom I so completely agree with.

10:13:06:10:02

Ruth wrote:

Thank you for the kind words, E.A. I like a compliment as much as the next person, but I think you’re laying it on a little thick here. My post was more snark than substance, and when you say you agree with it I hope you mean you appreciate its sarcastic bent. Not me at my best, really. But thanks anyway.

10:13:06:10:15

Eager_Angel wrote:

You’re too modest, Ruth. Though I must say, I wish you had found a better way to express your modesty. I wish you would not use the word “snark”, for example. Yes, I know that Mister Instant, who is a university professor, uses that word. To me it is an infantile and obscene-sounding word, and I think it far beneath you to use it.

One of the things I enjoy most about your writing is that you avoid the excessive use of hard consonants. I find it very unpleasant to read prose that is filled with the ceaseless hammering of hard consonants. I may not go to movies or read most books because of this.

10:13:06:10:21

Ruth wrote:

I don’t know if you’re pulling my back leg or not, E.A., but I’m glad you don’t find it unpleasant to read my blog. Your reason interests me, though. I didn’t know I was skimping on hard consonants, and I’m glad you don’t feel cheated.

10:13:06:10:40

Eager_Angel wrote:

Really, Ruth, at this point someone might almost accuse you of not knowing how to accept praise. What I meant was that your writing has a soothing sound to it, without all the Latinate clanging and banging about. By Latinate I mean of course the classical pronunciation of Latin, with its crunching C and punching G and piercing S sounds, not the less disturbing ecclesiastical Latin. It seems a very simple thing to say and I see no reason why you should laugh at me for saying it, Ruth.

Not long ago, I was given an analgesic drug following an operation. When I awoke in my hospital bed I very distinctly heard – through an open window - the sound of a snake slithering across a gravel path more than four miles away. That distance is an estimate, mind you, but not an exaggeration. The sound was so detailed and so distinctly present to my ear that I was able to gauge it quite well. I did not find this sound pleasant, and its duration was mercifully brief. Had it continued, I’m certain I could have counted the number of ventral scales on the snake’s belly, as well as the number of gravel stones that it disturbed in its passage.

10:13:06:10:52

Ruth wrote:

E.A., I assure you I wasn’t laughing at you, and let me say thanks again for your kind words. I’m not sure how your story about the snake fits in here, but I hope your operation was a success and you are feeling much better. Can we leave it there?

10:13:06:11:15

Eager_Angel wrote:

I have not re-read what I wrote because the sound of it is too unbearable, and you should know that I found it very DIFFICULT to write, but I thought what I said was perfectly clear, Ruth. I am told that my sensitivity to sound is neuropathic rather than physical, and that the sounds that bother me are not real sounds but aural hallucinations. I am no more sensitive to actual sound than any other person is, they tell me. But I know very well (and so do they) that these sounds have a physical effect on the body. The sounds that Beethoven heard in his mind while composing caused actual damage to his hearing, petrifying the cartilage of his ears until every “real” sound caused him agony. You can imagine the precautions I take. I change residences frequently, because I find that locations acquire a certain unsettling sound after a while. The internet is very important to me, but it’s hard to find suitable-sounding material. That’s why I was so pleased to discover your weblog, Ruth. I wish I could say I was pleased with your present comments. MAY we leave it there?

And yes, my operation was a success and I am fully recovered. For a time I had a small problem with gagging, as if I were about to vomit, though I felt no nausea at all. One of the doctors told me that this sensation was also neuropathic. This doctor is a Jew, and I have no objection to Jews, though I do not like the jarring sound that the word “Jew” makes. But this doctor articulates the “th” sound in such an aggressive manner that I cringe when I talk to him, and afterwards I feel as if I have been punched in the breast and abdomen.

Receiving no help, then, it took me some time to discover the source of my discomfort. It was a woman who lived not two blocks from the apartment that I then occupied. Although she lived alone, she frequently talked on her telephone. When she talked she made incessant use of certain four-letter words, relating to genitalia and the uses of genitalia, with an unnecessarily violent articulation of the consonant K. I don’t know if it was the frequency of her voice (from her appearance I judged her to be a Latina, about 25 years of age) or the mental imagery that she experienced when she articulated these K-words, but I felt each one as a physical contraction in my diaphragm. Having diagnosed the problem, I was able to resolve it. So yes, I am feeling much better.

10:13:06:11:33

Ruth wrote:

Um, I have a feeling I’m going to be sorry I asked this, but how exactly did you resolve that problem?

10:13:06:11:54

Eager_Angel wrote:

The sounds did not persist after the source was removed. Although her voice (or mind) was able to affect me at a great distance, it thankfully lacked resonance. It caused no apparent damage to my body or to my physical environment, though to be safe I have moved to a new apartment.

10:14:06:12:00

Ruth wrote:

Seriously, E.A., if were you, I would see your doctors again and let them know that you need a little more help than they’ve given you. Seriously.

10:14:06:12:23

Eager_Angel wrote:

You are not listening to what I write. I’ve explained why I may not talk to my doctors, and it’s not only the doctor who says “neuropathic” in an abusive manner. All doctors are self-important and speak with unnecessarily loud voices.

Just like that man who visited you last night. I don’t know if he’s a doctor, but he has an offensive manner about him and he laughs very loudly. Besides which he smokes cigarettes, and he put out a cigarette in your window box while he was waiting for you to open the door. From the first time I saw him I knew he smoked cigarettes, because of the constant hissing noise he makes. I don’t know why a young girl who lives alone would let someone like that into her apartment.

10:14:06:12:44

Ruth wrote:

Listen, whoever the f-k you are, this has gone far enough and before it goes any farther you should know that I’ve called the police.

10:14:06:12:50

Eager_Angel wrote:

There’s no need for you to carry on like that and say those words. And I know that you’re lying because I have your cell phone right here. Never mind, I can see you’re not listening to me now.

10:14:06:12:54

Ruth wrote:

Just to say that Ruth is not here anymore. Everything is quiet now, and Ruth is at peace. Goodbye.

10:14:06:01:52

Eager_Angel wrote:

Goodbye Ruth. I’m happy that you’ve found peace. I’m very sorry, though, that you are not the person I thought you were. How could a shrieking, foul-mouthed bitch have written with such serene beauty? Apparently I only heard what I wanted to hear. Isn’t that the way it always is?

10:14:06:03:05

Yellow_Kid wrote:

Great post, Ruth, keep it up.

I see that Eager is trolling you; I recognize the name from the old Pantech music forum. He (or she, whatever it is) was always doing spelling flames and complaining about people making noise in the thread. Real basket case with a side of fries. Some of the regulars stopped posting there because of this guy. Don’t let him bug you out.

10:14:06:06:22

Four September Good-Byes

2006-09-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

I’ll take the subway from here, she said, or you’ll be late.
She leaned towards him quickly, beautiful in her sexless b-suit,
and they kissed quickly before she stepped out onto the curb.
See you, they said. She walked away from him,
past the brownstones where the men wait all day in limousines,
and disappeared forever into Manhattan’s impersonal shuffle.

His wife was still asleep when the carpool arrived.
His mother was up as usual, making breakfast for the kids.
She gave her son the little lunch she had made for him,
feeling guilty as always that it was so plain and thrown-together.
She lifted the kids onto the window seat so they could wave good-bye.
If she said good-bye herself, she could never remember afterwards.

Last night she told him that she was unhappy, with no love in her voice.
She still smelled drunk. He touched her bare shoulder and kissed it.
In the dark hallway he put one hand on the kids’ door for a moment.
He could picture them through the door, asleep in the rubble of childhood.
He wanted to stay home, but what had she said? Time to grow up.
So he grabbed his gear and went to the station, feeling strangely charged.

She woke as she always did: early, alone, and still tired.
The emptiness and sameness of her apartment felt unbearable that morning,
so she cleaned off some of the crust of age and left for work early.
She passed through Harlem on the way, and she remembered seeing it
last Easter, when people were walking to church, the little girls in Easter bonnets.
She smiled at the memory. Without knowing it, she said her last good-bye.

Herodotus on History, Life, and Split Infinitives

2006-08-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

SOCRATES: Our good friend Herodotus is visiting us, as he is preparing a new English translation of his famous Histories. For this purpose he seeks to expand his knowledge of English vernacular, so he has come to make use of your library, which is renowned as "The Vulgarian Alexandria".

GLEN: I'm honored, and of course Herodotus is always a welcome sight. But if you need a new translation, why don't you just let some Associate Professor of Classics do it for you?

HERODOTUS: The last Professor of Classics was executed by a firing squad in April.

GLEN: No kidding?

HERODOTUS: So my publisher tells me. The professor died bravely, and the publisher's mail room clerk was slain alongside him. That's why I haven't received the advance check he promised me. Though my publisher's detailed account of this tragedy left me deeply moved, I suspect there is more to the story. I'm afraid that the publisher was not willing to pay someone to translate Herodotus, and concocted a falsehood to conceal his reluctance.

SOCRATES: Won't pay someone to translate your work? Well, perhaps he feels that the translator should pay for the honor of rendering your wisdom into a barbarian tongue, rather than receiving payment. And what price could be high enough for such an honor? I'll bet the finest scholars in America are mortgaging their mobile homes to raise the funds.

HERODOTUS: Perhaps. Or perhaps no one cares about your old friend Herodotus any longer.

GLEN: No, no.

SOCRATES: You should have seen the Emmy show. They wouldn't shut up about you. Herodotus said this, Herodotus said that ...

HERODOTUS: Spare me the flattery. Do they really shoot people in this country for being boring? As my friends you owe it to me to tell the truth.

GLEN: No, no, no. God, we wish.

SOCRATES: Would Glen be sitting here if that were true? Get a grip on yourself. Anyway, you'd be the last one they'd shoot.

GLEN: Tell us about your studies.

HERODOTUS: Well, I've been quite absorbed in Mencken's The American Language, as well as Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Fowler's spirited defense of the split infinitive is also very interesting. We didn't have split infinitives in Greek. I can't wait to try one.

SOCRATES: Go for it.

GLEN: You want another drink first?

HERODOTUS: All right, but not so full this time. This wine is very rich.

GLEN: It's not wine, it's scotch. You don't have to put sugar in it like that, it's already flavored.

HERODOTUS: Oof. Hah. So it is ...

SOCRATES: The Celtic barbarians who make the stuff drown sheep in it. They believe that the sheep's soul becomes trapped in the wine.

HERODOTUS: Really? Must remember that. It does rather taste like a sheep's soul, with a trace of smoke, kissed from the lips of a woman who has just taken a cold drink ... a breath of hot passion mixed with ice. Hera and Aphrodite, tongue-fighting in my mouth.

SOCRATES: Were there any split infinitives in that sentence?

GLEN: No.

SOCRATES: I want to hear some split infinitives.

GLEN: Hang on, refill first.

HERODOTUS: Single Malt. Incredible stuff. What if they drowned two malts in it?

SOCRATES: Or like, six?

HERODOTUS: Woof. Balls on a chariot wheel. Are we ready now?

SOCRATES: Do it. Split an infinitive.

HERODOTUS: Okay ...

SOCRATES: Do it! Do it!

GLEN: I can't believe we're doing this.

SOCRATES: I know, I know. This is so bad.

HERODOTUS: "To purely love, is to lovely be; and for her and I to lovely join, is to sweetly split infinity."

SOCRATES: That was good. A trifle fruity, but it was pretty good.

GLEN: That ... that was the greatest, best split infinitive I've ever heard in my life.

SOCRATES: I wouldn't go that far, but it was pretty damn good.

GLEN: Way to do it. Way to frigging do it. Cheers.

SOCRATES: Cheers.

HERODOTUS: Thank you. Cheers.

GLEN: Now give us something from the Histories. Give us a story.

HERODOTUS: But I haven't even begun the translation yet.

GLEN: So what?

SOCRATES: Yeah, to hell with the translation. You're not a writer, anyway, you're a logios. Just go with it, just tap the words right out of your bad Ionian soul. Oral history rules.

GLEN: Just let loose the river, and let it find the sea.

SOCRATES: Yeah.

GLEN: Let the river find the sea.

SOCRATES: Yeah.

GLEN: And we're not going to judge you, and get all over your case and stuff, because we're your friends. You know? And we're just, we're just here with you. You know what I mean? We're here.

SOCRATES: Exactly. Exactly. And you know, Herodotus ... you know, you're not an Athenian.

HERODOTUS: I know.

SOCRATES: You're not an Athenian.

HERODOTUS: I know I'm not.

GLEN: What has that got to do with anything?

SOCRATES: Can I just say what I was going to say? Can I just talk for a minute? Herodotus, all I'm saying is ... you know, you're not an Athenian. But you're okay.

GLEN: Of course he's okay. He's better than okay, he's Herodotus. And he's our friend, and we're here with him, and he's going to lay out some history for us, so why do you have to start up with your Athenian shit? What the hell is the matter with you?

HERODOTUS: Guys, guys, whoa. Let's have another drink, and just cool out. It's okay, I perfectly understand, okay?

GLEN: Okay, okay. Cheers.

SOCRATES: Here's to swimming with bow-legged Amazons.

GLEN: And swimming betwixt their knees.

HERODOTUS: So, what would you like to hear?

SOCRATES: Something with a bunch of dead Spartans in it.

HERODOTUS: Yeah. Yeah. See, I always knew you liked Thucydides better than me.

SOCRATES: No, I don't.

GLEN: Come on, Herodotus, he didn't mean it that way.

SOCRATES: Thucydides is a prick.

GLEN: If Thucydides were to, like, crawl through a mile of sewage mixed with broken razor blades, just to lick your shadow off a dead Spartan's ass, it ... it would be totally wrong for him to do that. Because, you know, he would not be worthy.

SOCRATES: Thucydides. Feh. We should drive down to his house and kick his ass until he craps blood. You know why he was exiled, don't you?

HERODOTUS: Because he failed to relieve Amphipolis when the Spartan Brasidas besieged it.

SOCRATES: No, just because he was such a prick.

HERODOTUS: My friends, rich in wisdom and single malt scotch-wine, thank you for your appreciation. But I'm afraid the world has passed old Herodotus by. It reminds me of the Pyramid of Asychis. This pyramid was made of mud instead of stone, and was humble in size compared to that of Cheops. Yet this crumbling heap was considered to be the greatest pyramid of all, because of the manner in which it was constructed. They drew the mud from the bed of the Nile by inserting a long pole into it, and only the mud that was gathered from the end of this pole was used to make the brick. That's me. That's my life.

GLEN: What is? The Pyramid of Asychis is your life?

HERODOTUS: Yes. Ugly, squat, and falling to pieces, but lovingly and painstakingly built. One handful of mud at a time. Or something like that.

If Barry Goldwater had been elected president in 1964 ...

2006-08-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

Memo to The New York Times:

If Barry Goldwater had been elected president, he would have dropped an atomic bomb on a little girl picking flowers in a field.

Sorry, I was picking up old Democratic campaign commercials on my head-plate again.

If Barry Goldwater had been elected president, there would have been no "Great Society". If you can think of anything that was Great about it, that's what the country would have missed.

There almost certainly would have been much less American involvement in Vietnam. Johnson's massive escalation in 1965 was partly driven by his need to appear strong at a time when his administration was facing serious challenges from the left. Even without that, it's unlikely that history would have played out exactly the same way under Goldwater.

If Goldwater had been president, the Democratic Party would have been spared its disastrous collision with the New Left in the late 60s. The so-called counter-culture would have been in the same impotent position that the far left is today. Undamaged by hippies, the Democratic Party could have aligned itself with the Civil Rights movement and built its strength instead of bleeding like a stuck pig. George Wallace and his racist legions would not have risen to "save" them from the communists and the freaks. The president that followed Goldwater might well have been Hubert Humphrey instead of Richard Nixon.

With no Richard Nixon, the growth of the welfare state would have been stunted even further. No Democrat ever dared to expand the public sector as breezily as Nixon did. In fact, Democrats had to ally themselves with Republicans to stop Nixon from imposing a minimum income (see Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Politics of the Guaranteed Income). Humphrey would still have had to contend with the hippies, but they would have been the over-dosed and much weaker hippies of the mid-70s instead of the revolutionary brigands they were in 1968.

It is unlikely that Ronald Reagan would have been running for president in 1980 if Goldwater had won in 1964. The Republican Party would likewise have been much different, and probably somewhat weaker. The religious conservatives, neoconservatives, and libertarians who energized the party in the 1980s were themselves energized by the outrages of the 60s and 70s. If those outrages had not spilled out over the entire country and engulfed the Democratic Party, the religious conservatives would have remained quietly bi-partisan, the neoconservatives would have remained Democrats, and the libertarians would have remained irrelevant. The Republican Party would have retained its old country-club atmosphere. They would have offered up a tepid figure every four years, a Bob Dole or a John Connally or an 80s version of Barry Goldwater who no longer had any scare value.

We'd all be a little less battered and a lot more mellow.

While all of this was going on, The New York Times would have been having an absolute, flat-out, frothing fit. Don't let them fool you as they skip down memory lane gathering mayflowers and might-have-beens. Now that Goldwater is safely dead they can spin pleasant fantasies about him being elected president, but they wouldn't have been happy if it had happened. They aren't happy with anything that happens.

If I were the Twelfth Imam returning for the end of the world ...

2006-08-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

I would have been here at 8:00 AM.

The Myth of Hisballah Charity

2006-08-15T16:49:00.000-07:00

The establishment media has a nice lazy spin on the biggest terrorist organization in the world: Charity Wins Deep Loyalty for Hezbollah. Reporters eagerly collect anecdotes about Hisballah’s gifts to the adoring Lebanese people. Olive oil, small business loans, rebuilt homes, medical treatment, and cash hand-outs. Hisballah’s penchant for terrorism, assassination, war-mongering, subversion, kidnapping, and anti-democratic fascism? Small price to pay, apparently.

What about the billions in Western aid to Lebanon, from both public and private sources, which dwarfs Hisballah’s expenditures by several orders of magnitude? All this is in vain, the old theory goes, because Western nations are only interested in imperialism and colonialism and Jews. Hisballah showers largesse on people because their hearts are just bursting with love.

The media spends little time wondering about where the money in Hisballah’s free-flowing coffers comes from. Whose stuff are they giving away? Charitable organizations have to get their money from earnings, donations, or taxes. The source of an organization’s funds is definitely relevant to their status as a charity. Mafia crews who generously spread their stolen loot all over the neighborhood are not considered charities, though they might be very popular with people who don’t get in their way.

Unlike most terrorist organizations, Hisballah has legitimate bank accounts. Like most criminal organizations, they also have legitimate investments and income from legal businesses. Like most terrorist and criminal organizations, though, one of their foremost sources of income is drugs. They own the brisk drug trade in Lebanon, much of which is supplied by poppy fields in the Beqaa Valley. Hisballah spies and operatives are often paid with opium or heroin. There is no love like the love of a heroin junkie for his connection, if you consider that sort of thing love.

The Lebanese traffic is probably only a small part of Hisballah’s drug earnings. The DEA has traced methamphetamine smuggling in the United States and Canada to Hisballah bank accounts. Methamphetamine abuse has reached such proportions that Native American health services are struggling with huge numbers of addicted newborns, and even larger numbers who are born with traces of crystal meth in their systems. Hisballah’s contribution is the supply of the pseudoephedrine ingredient, which is increasingly difficult to obtain legally.

That’s a pretty steep price to pay for an olive oil giveaway in Beirut.

Hisballah is also hip-deep in the extremely nasty illicit trade in diamonds and black-market gold. But like the Mafia, their biggest cash cow is probably ordinary theft. Hisballah has been connected to car theft rings in Canada and cigarette smuggling in the United States. Hisballah operatives in Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina have made millions from pirated intellectual property alone. Hijacking, insurance fraud, Nigeria scams, extortion, loan-sharking, money laundering, and burglary keep Hisballah’s cash register ringing. So does money from illegal immigrant smuggling rings, which are not operated by kind-hearted people.

Like other criminal organizations, Hisballah shears the sheep closest to home. Arabs and Muslims are high on the list of their victims. The Mafia got its start shaking down other Italians, while posing as a social service organization that supposedly protected its own kind. Critics were accused of ethnic prejudice. Hisballah’s “charity” is in that dismal vein.

Hisballah steals or soaks millions every year, often from the poorest and most wretched people on earth. (The meth-poisoned inhabitants of some Indian reservations might well envy the lifestyle of the average Lebanese, bombs and all.) They hand out a small fraction of it to dupe people into kissing Don Corleone’s ring. This is above and beyond their naked acts of terrorism and murder, which is their main occupation.

The difference between the Mafia and Hisballah is that the Mafia bribes politicians, authorities, and reporters to protect itself. Hisballah’s deluded fans are giving it away for free.

Gunter Grass, Nazi Superman

2006-08-14T20:06:00.000-07:00

Maybe the famous left-wing writer thought the time was ripe to reveal that he’d served with the Waffen SS; maybe he intended it as a boast. Genocidal maniacs have always been popular on the left, but until lately those who were explicitly Nazi or anti-Semitic were an exception. But these days Hitler is more popular than any time since Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (lately honored by the witless and depraved Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) and his intellectual descendents in Iran and Venezuela and Gaza are the new heroes of modern youth. Maoism looks kind of shabby and old-fartish in comparison. Soviet communism is dead beyond hope of resurrection, the Sandinistas are on the ash heap of history, Che Guevara is Bolivian fertilizer, and Castro barely has enough strength to piss in his olive drabs.

So maybe Grass thought the black suit and red piping would dress up his image a bit. If so, I’m glad to see he was somewhat mistaken.

Grass had previously claimed to be a member of the Reich Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst or RAD), which was almost too perfect a job for him. The RAD was a fine example of Nazi Socialism. They even had a red Proletarian banner featuring a shovel and a garland of wheat, a total rip-off of Soviet iconography. It was like getting paid by Hitler to be a communist.

Now he claims to have been drafted into the 10th SS Panzer Division in 1944. This could be the case; most Waffen SS units were all-volunteer, but they began conscription after the Reich’s fortunes went south (all the way to Stalingrad, in fact). But why was this not revealed before? Veterans of the SS are not eligible for benefits unless they served involuntarily, and any past service in the SS would have to be acknowledged to determine his status as a veteran. No doubt records are confidential, but if Grass was forced to serve, why keep it a secret? He has capitalized on his war experience before, why would he have passed up a chance to describe the very belly of the beast?

Many of his erstwhile comrades on the left are reacting with shock to what Grass did 60 years ago. They ought to reacting with shock to just about everything he’s done since. They ought to admit that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Nazism and Communism, especially not in Germany.

Abnormal Psychology 201 – Introduction to Dr. Deborah Frisch

2006-07-08T19:19:00.000-07:00

At the time I write this, the esteemed Jeff Goldstein is still off-line. A DoS attack took Protein Wisdom down shortly after Jeff and his two year-old son were subjected to an incredibly vile and sinister string of comments by Dr. Deborah Frisch, an adjunct Psycho-Prof from the University of Arizona.

We’ll treat this DoS attack as a coincidence for now. Later, we’ll treat it as the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from the kind of people who did it.

I won’t reprise Dr. Frisch’s creepy sado-pederastic hate speech, except to note a few of its peculiar characteristics. For our aim here is psychological examination. Psychology is a job which traditionally belonged to writers (like Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard) rather than Piled-Higher-and-Deeper Doctors-Of. Alas, I am no Kierkegaard, but going up against the likes of Dr. Frisch is a task for lesser minds. It would be far beneath the great Dane to chase this particular greased pig all over the fairground. Besides, if Dr. Frisch’s profession admits the likes of Dr. Frisch, then it is time for writers to reclaim the task which we once humbly ceded to the social so-called sciences. We can’t do much worse.

I’ll let the doctor introduce herself, in this comment at Left2Right (note that the post that drew this comment was a tepid note “on blogosphere manners”):

My name is Deborah Frisch. I live in Tucson, Arizona. I teach in the psychology department at the YOUkneeversity of AIRYzona.

You want to come find me, see that I'm real, hold a .357 magnum in my face, i say:

BRING IT ON.

A few minutes later, Dr. Frisch added:

One day, some cheeky blogger is going to be offed by a psychopathic blogger. Will it be a scuffle@left2right? idunno.

i hope to hell it ain't me, i gotta tell ya.

but i feel kind of guilty for not blowing myself up on the steps of the lincoln memorial when i lived in d.c. while i was doing out pork for sam..so in a way, i WANT some futhermucker A-hole to off me because i pissed him off in the blogosphere.

BRING IT ON, FUTHERMUCKERS!!!!!!!!

A regular panorama of pathology invites our examination here. The comment about psychopathic bloggers killing other bloggers is of obvious interest. As is the totally irrational display of hostility, the aggressive use of profanity to intimidate, and the references to violence, guns, and even suicide bombing. Note how capitalization suddenly deteriorates right after “.357 Magnum”. When an educated person who normally uses passable grammar suddenly ceases to do so, it is of course an indication of an excited mental state.

In the Spike Lee film Clockers (if you don’t pay attention to Spike Lee films, you’re being an insufferable Dan Quayle) there is a scene where the protagonist Ronald (played by Mekhi Phifer) shows his pistol to a young boy. Normally meek and articulate, Ronald undergoes a physical change when he handles the gun. In real life Ronald is a hapless punk with a weak stomach who is easily dominated by everyone around him, but when he holds his gun (which he has never actually used) he is taken over by a power fantasy. His face twists into a sneer and his speech devolves into crude ‘hood-gangster argot. The transformation is both frightening and pathetic.

Just thought of that, for some reason. Being a staunch defender of the right to bear arms, it saddens me to see people for whom a gun is an ersatz penis. But it also amuses me to see the way some supposedly gun-hating liberals get all gooey at the idea of fondling a firearm of their own. That’s what you get for indulging crude materialistic superstitions.

Dr. Frisch managed to more or less retain the use of her caps key during her assault on Jeff’s family, but her little inner bitch-slapping pimp just wouldn’t shut up:

I don’t give a rat’s ass whether the pissant’s progeny live or die, but I have no intention of snuffing the mofo’s chillen myself … Wanna escalate this game. Fine wit me. Bring it on, hombre. Bring it on.

I should point out that Dr. Frisch is not black, if it is not obvious from her horrible Steppin-Fetchit-from-Hell ebonics. It’s bad enough that prepubescent suburban punks fantasize about gangsterism. Dr. Frisch’s porcupine display is doubly embarrassing, whether it’s intended to frighten others or to make Dr. Frisch feel like … well, a man.

Does Dr. Frisch want to be a man? Or to borrow some “scientific” psychology, is Dr. Frisch a man trapped in the castrated and insufficiently hairy body that is the normal biological manifestation of gentle women-folk? Is it therefore necessary for her (him, whatever) to augment her penis-less corporality with a psychological construct that simulates the absent appendage? In order to reinforce this construct (which is under constant assault by social conventions, not to mention common f—king sense) is it necessary for her to acquire a physical object to symbolize (or reify) her penis? Like a high-powered handgun, for example? How much more of this can I stand before I’m as moonbat as she is?

Stepping away from the abyss for a moment, I’ll let Dr. Frisch describe her mental furniture, in another thread from Left2Right:

I'll cop to be Christophobic. I'm abrahamaphobic, more generally - I have utter contempt for and anger toward the trinity of guy in the sky religions (judaism, christianity, islam). I think they are much less sensible than other religions (Buddhism, pantheism) because they are sexist and speciesist (god's a guy, god's a person). My tax dollars are being used to kill Iraqis, maim Marines, mangle Humvees and destroy a poor nation's infrastructure because of this pathological worldview.

I am a Christophobic lesbian. The way I feel toward Christianity is exactly the way many fundamentalist Christians feel toward me. If you offered me the deal to live and let live - they'll stop judging me if I stop judging them, I'd say no way. I reckon they'd say the same thing.

….

I think we are in the endgame. I think the time for civility and politeness is over. I think there is a very good chance the US will be at war (either a civil war or the target of a worldwide coalition that recognizes what a cancer we've become) within the next ten years.
So to me, the only hope is to duke it out with words with the slim hope that this will preempt the need to duke it out for real.

…

Oh - and for the record, I don't hump my dogs or cats, I don't have any piercings and the only leather I wear is on my Birkenstocks.

Reading through Dr. Frisch’s numerous posts in that thread, I notice that her capitalization wobbles at the thought of God, just as it previously prostrated itself before the stirring mental power-image of the .357 Magnum. Again we must diagnose mental agitation, though probably of a different sort. Whereas gun-wielding imagery caused her to hurry breathlessly along a sort of orgasmic plateau, the eternal countenance of the Almighty has a castrating effect, inducing impotent rage. She takes God to be symbolic of male endowment, which attacks her own genital pretensions. It circumcises her right up to her pencil neck. Even guns are no good against God.

In retaliation, Dr. Frisch resorts to a variety of emotional tactics. She diminishes God to “baby hay suess”, but the infant incarnation of God fills her with even greater fear and loathing. To some persons of the feminist persuasion, a baby is an even more oppressive tyrant than a grown man is. In Dr. Frisch’s twisted “Penis = Power” world-view, a baby is a wound that men inflict on women with their penis/weapon. Judaism mocks Dr. Frisch by over-awing her with a hopelessly superior masculine image, while Christianity sneaks up behind and completes her humiliation by symbolically impregnating her with Baby Jesus. The virgin Mary also offends her – but “the virgin” is her own despised self-image; the mocking reflection of her own frustrated sexuality.

To reassert this sexuality, Dr. Frisch – apropos of nothing – alludes to humping things. Especially small helpless things; i.e., animals and children. Note her obsession with “ephing” and impregnating, which irrationally dominates her anti-Goldstein comments.

She also alludes to conspiracies, conspiracies, conspiracies. This is apparent in her blog, which is full of 9/11 sick-think, and in her recent comments in which she portrays herself as the victim of Jeff Goldstein’s “minions”. She constantly indulges in interpreting well-earned criticism as orchestrated persecution, and insists on viewing the logical consequence of her own actions as unjust punishment. This is, of course, a dead give-away for sexual inadequacy and frustration. These little conspiracies are mere adumbrations of the grand metaphysical conspiracy that deprived Dr. Frisch of the penis she so desperately desires, and which she heroically struggles to construct in spite of the cruel reality that daily castrates and renders her powerless.

Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha hah ha ha. Okay, I’m almost out of scotch. Time to stick a fork in Dr. Frisch’s lily-white ass, because I’m done with her.

So maybe the idea of taking back Dostoevsky’s profession from the modern so-called psychologists was not such a great one. A sane and healthy mind has the life expectancy of a Colombian judge in this business.

Also, to continue with this might reinforce Dr. Frisch’s delusion that she is under assault by Jeff Goldstein’s minions. I am not Jeff’s minion, only his constant admirer. It doesn’t make me mad when people attack Jeff, because he can defend his own lunch money. But attacking his family, however obliquely … that just fries my cheese to a crisp. (Note the barely repressed hostility in all the preceding paragraphs.)

I think Jeff, and Jeff’s loved ones, have little to fear from Dr. Frisch. Or from Dr. Frisch’s imaginary phallus. Else I would not have made light of a situation that has grieved him. Peace out, boys and girls.

Not Born for Wars Alone ...

2006-07-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

Lt. Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, in a message to his men only hours before his death on July 4th, 1976:

I believe in the responsibility of commanders: a good commander is one who feels a sense of full responsibility for everything done under his command.

I believe in going into details. Anyone who doesn't do it, and who tries to save himself work, will miss the main objective of preparing the unit for war.

I believe that there can be no compromise with results. Never compromise with results that are less than the best possible, and even then look for improvements.

I believe, with absolute faith, in our ability to carry out any military task entrusted to us, and I believe in you.

I believe in Israel and in the general sense of responsibility that must accompany every man who fights for the future of his homeland.

The basic assumption in our work is to prepare for war in the best possible fashion, in order to stand quietly on the day of judgment, when it comes, in the knowledge that we did everything we could in the time that we had.

The time that Yoni Netanyahu had on this distracted globe was not long; just over thirty years. In that short time he fought in two major wars, one minor war, and participated in at least three decisive operations with the elite Sayeret Matkal special forces unit. All that plus the endless day to day warfare of the professional Israeli soldier.

Death is the special companion - the shadow wife - of the military professional. At age 17, Netanyahu wrote:

Death — that's the only thing that disturbs me. It doesn't frighten me; it arouses my curiosity. It is a puzzle that I, like many others, have tried to solve without success. I do not fear it because I attribute little value to a life without a purpose. And if I should have to sacrifice my life to attain its goal, I'll do so willingly.

Maybe that's as much philosophy as a soldier can afford, and all that he needs. It's the difference between a soldier and a fanatic. To the fanatic the world is meaningless, life has no value, and the only purposeful action is to destroy as much as possible before you yourself evaporate - either to mix your atoms with the void or to greet a bloody grinning god of death. What the difference? But a soldier fights precisely because he recognizes the meaning in things that thoughtless and superficial people cannot understand.

In another week I'll be 23. On me, on us, the young men of Israel, rests the duty of keeping our country safe. This is a heavy responsibility, which matures us early. I do not regret what I have done and what I'm about to do. I'm convinced that what I am doing is right. I believe in myself, in my country and in my future.

There is no self-pity in these words, only a note of understandable regret - again, the mark of the humane man who must grow up fast and live a soldier's life. The nihilist wants nothing better than the struggle he throws himself into; he is precisely struggling against everything that is or might be better. He has nothing to lose and nothing to give. The bloody revolutionary is celebrated as a tragic and romantic figure, when he is nothing except an aberration. The tragedy belongs to the civilized men who must dream of peace while standing endless guard against its enemies.

Not a day passes, literally, without a border incident, sabotage, mine explosion, murder, ambushes, shootings and setting fire to fields. During all the years of my service and of my living here the situation has never been so tense. In the army, everyone is impatient — when are we finally going to strike back?!! We have complete confidence in our strength. We are capable of anything.

That was written in the months before the Six Day War. Unfortunately too many of Israel's civilian leaders, including the great David Ben Gurion, did not share the confidence of her soldiers. They clung to the belief that Israel must survive by alliance and negotiation, because they were afraid that the world would not tolerate Jews who defended themselves by force of arms.

The Wars of the Jews are always the ugliest and hardest of all. These are the wars of apologetics and futile bickering, suppression or distortion of facts, and procrastination in making decisions. There is no doubt that what's called for is new leadership, a more correct perception of the realities, a sound recognition of the enemy's aims, and clear, definitive strategic-political planning. There must be no fumbling in the dark and no more tactical expedients, for these will get us nowhere.

It's the great obscenity of modern history that the mantle of "peace" is worn by those those murder peace inch by inch, either deliberately or by neglect. Those who would act decisively in defense of peaceful society must wear the "pro-war" label, while so-called pacifism demands that the endless attrition of terrorism, tyranny and murder be tolerated and tolerated and tolerated. Maybe the human race will wake up and maybe it won't, but Yonatan Netanyahu will stand quietly on the day of judgment, with nothing to apologize for.

The real cause is the sense of helplessness in the face of a war that has no end. For the war has not ended, and it seems to me that it will go on and on… This is the 'quiet' before the next storm. I've no doubt that war will come. Nor do I doubt that we will win. But for how long? Until when?

We're young, and we were not born for wars alone.

Existential Gore

2006-06-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

From the Nuremberg Rally that they call the Cannes Film Festival, Ariana Huffington provides more priceless Gore trivia:

"This is my second visit to Cannes," he said. "The first was when I was fifteen years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists -- Sartre, Camus... We were not allowed to speak anything but French!" Which may explain his pitch-perfect French accent.

This was too much for Jonah Goldberg, who kvetched:

… young Al got C's in French at his tony Washington high school, St. Alban's. That's some school if a kid who can intelligently discuss Sartre's "La Nausée" and Camus' "Betwixt and Between" in apparently pitch-perfect French still can't earn a B in French class. Mon dieu!

This, in turn, was too much for the left-head blogs to sit still for, being as they are very defensive about Mr. Gore’s alleged intellectual payload. The Anonymous Liberal shot back:

Of course, Jonah didn't bother to do any real research on this point. If he had, he'd have discovered that Debra Saunders' attack biography--The World According To Gore--corroborates Gore's claim. And if Jonah had bothered to contact Gore's spokesman for clarification, as Greg Sargent did, he'd have learned the same thing that Greg did: Al Gore worked on his family farm and studied in Cannes that particular summer.

The Anonymous Liberal went on to hedge his bets, suggesting that possibly Gore misspoke, or Huffington misheard him. (You’d think that would have been cleared up by Gore’s spokesman, if somebody had bothered to ask him.) This is standard Gore-groupie apologism: Anything Gore says is absolutely true, unless it isn’t, in which case he never really said it.

Me, I’m ready to believe it. This is too cool not to be true. Let us retrace young Gore’s steps as he embarks on his intellectual adventures among those for whom “existence precedes essence”.

First of all, we must acknowledge that going to France to study existentialism when you’re fifteen years old is a trifle on the nerdish side. I would have loved to go to France and read existentialist philosophers when I was nineteen years old. But when I was fifteen, I wouldn’t have crossed the street to look at one of those guys unless he was wearing a cheerleader uniform. There’s a huge difference between fifteen and nineteen – I mean, huge.

For mere Republican mortals like myself, that is. In fact, I spent my fifteenth summer working on a farm, without a single French intellectual in sight. I wouldn’t have known Sartre from a tree stump. I didn’t even know who Bruce Springsteen was. So I dare not compare myself to Al Gore, who is clearly my social superior.

So Gore went to Cannes and read existentialist philosophers, Sartre and Camus – but whoa up there a minute. Sartre and Camus are often mentioned in the same breath, being as they were friends and occasional antagonists, but the fact is that Camus was not an existentialist. Camus was not even a member of the existentialist extended family (which includes Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard).

If Gore went to France to study existentialism, he should have studied Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, not Sartre and Camus. “Sartre and Camus” is an entirely different story. It might seem like a trivial point, but if you’re going all the way to Frogville to study existentialists, it’s the kind of thing you ought to know.

In fact, for existentialist purists, it would be Merleau-Ponty alone, as he is the premier example of the French breed. Sartre had largely repudiated existentialism by 1962, giving it up for Marxism (his Critique of Dialectical Reason was published in 1960).

So Gore, the son of a US Senator, went to France to study a notorious Marxist. What the hell is up with that, I wonder? A notorious Marxist who, at the time, had become a major apologist for Third World terrorism, having written only the year before:

In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it.

That sounds familiar, but all this stuff about shooting Europeans is kind of rough stuff for a fifteen year-old kid to be reading. Are we still sure that’s what Gore was doing in Cannes?

Anyone who has studied Sartre would know these things about Sartre. Unless you’re just dropping names (“Sartre, Camus”) in which case, you’re a poser.

I think this one is going to have to be classified as one of those things Gore never said. Like that internet thing, this is just not panning out.

God Bless the Forward Air Controller

2006-05-27T20:45:00.000-07:00

God bless the Forward Air Controller,
With his target marker and his extra set of balls.
(The sky pilot said it
And you’ve got to give him credit,
For a son-of-a-gun-of-a-gunner was he:
“Praise the Lord and laser-paint the target
And we’ll all stay free.”)

God bless the riflemen and the field cooks,
The assistant gunners and loaders,
The quartermasters and the combat engineers.
(Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom.
Springing to the call
Of their brothers gone before,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom).

God bless the Drill Instructors and the Tops,
The Lances and the Specs,
The Pettys and the Command Master Chiefs.
(For the heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone,
But non-commissioned men
Will live and die among their own.)

God bless the screwballs, the misfits,
The shitbirds and the FNGs.
(Death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling,
Oh Grave, thy victory?
The bells of Hell go ding-a-ling-a-ling
For them and not for thee.)
God bless the Fire Control System Specialist.
(For in despair I bowed my head,
“There is no peace on earth,” I said.
Then I heard the Sig Op say,
“Rounds are out and on their way.”)

God bless the dragoons, the powder monkeys
And the little drummer boys.
(May we fill their vacant ranks
With a thousand free men more,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom.)

God bless those who shoot, move, and communicate.
God bless those who triumphed,
God bless those who tried.
God bless the quick and the dead.
God bless those who pray,
God bless those who stand and wait.
(And though this world, with devils filled,
Should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed
True hearts to stand before us.)

Mary and the Pharisees

2006-05-21T21:50:00.000-07:00

O my Teacher and my Savior,
What would have been my destiny,
Had not eternity expected
My acquiescence every night,
With each fresh customer enticed
Into the web of my profession?

The Magdalene by Doctor Yuri Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)

Listen up, fresh customers. Ron Howard, facing a disappointing critical reception to his film The Da Vinci Code, has fallen back on the less-than-brave tactic of claiming that the film’s offensive qualities (which he obviously underestimated) are intended only to provoke discussion. If you haven’t heard that one before, you slept through Fahrenheit 911.

But if they want some discussion, I’ve got it on tap, and all at their expense. The subject of this discussion is the Mary called Magdalene; a Mary very extraordinary, the freed captive of seven demons who wept at the foot of the cross; a seer of angels and first witness to the Resurrection. Mentioned in all four of the gospels (but ignored by the trendy bogus gospels of Thomas and Judas) the few chords that she touches there have reverberated through two thousand years of history.

Hollywood can’t understand a woman like Mary, just as they can’t understand Joan of Arc or Shakespeare’s Ophelia. This is because Hollywood is heavily informed by feminism. Feminists don’t know dick about women, even if they happen to be women.

How Many Marys Can We Put You Down For?

Mary Magdalene is a sort of miniature trinity, being sometimes one woman and sometimes two or three (or even four) depending on interpretation. Besides the passages where she is named as Mary Magdalene, three other women mentioned in the gospels are thought by some to be Mary Magdalene:

- Mary, the sister of Jesus’ good friends Martha and Lazarus, who left home to become a disciple. Also called Mary of Bethany. [Luke 10:38-42, John 11]

- A woman in Capernaum who anointed Jesus’ feet, much to the annoyance of Simon the Pharisee, who told Jesus he ought to send her away because she was a sinner (probably a prostitute). [Luke 7:36-50]

- An adulteress who was saved from stoning by Jesus. [John 8:7]

In Roman Catholic tradition, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the unnamed sinner of Capernaum are thought to be the same person. In Greek Orthodox tradition, they are thought to be three separate women and each has a separate feast day dedicated to her. Protestants tend to fall somewhere in between, generally holding that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, at least, were separate individuals. Some popular traditions associate Mary Magdalene with the adulteress of John 8:7, but most scholars don’t. In my opinion they were all separate women – Jesus had lots of female followers, including more than one Mary.

It’s a matter of opinion, anyway, not of doctrine or faith. Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine both refused to take sides on this issue.

Regardless of this, we know several things about Mary Magdalene from the passages where she is unmistakably identified: She had seven devils cast out of her by Jesus, she was present at the crucifixion, she discovered Jesus’ tomb empty and spoke to the angels who were there, and she was the first to see the resurrected Jesus. Throwing in the other women just adds some background to Mary; in particular, the idea that she was a prostitute.

Mary and the Feminist Vice Squad

“That, my dear,” Teabing replied, “is Mary Magdalene.”

Sophie turned. “The prostitute?”

Teabing drew a short breath, as if the word had injured him personally. “Magdalene was no such thing. That unfortunate misconception is the legacy of a smear campaign launched by the early Church.”

So says the Gospel according to Dan Brown. Brown doesn’t stop to consider the fact that Mary Magdalene is a Catholic saint. (She’s a saint in the Orthodox and Anglican churches, too.) Making someone a saint is a funny way of smearing them. Dan Brown doesn’t bother drawing logical conclusions from his ideas, probably because he has no original ideas.

The depth of the confusion can be seen in this Time article about The Da Vinci Code: Mary Magdalene, Saint or Sinner? Even the title ought to give Christians pause at the fundamental ignorance being displayed here. Saint and Sinner are not two mutually exclusive things – in fact, every saint is both at once. Even the saints sin and fall short of the glory of God.

Treating the conflation of Mary Magdalene with the “sinner” as an underhanded conspiracy that has been covered up for centuries (“Three decades ago, the Roman Catholic Church quietly admitted what critics had been saying for centuries: Magdalene's standard image as a reformed prostitute is not supported by the text of the Bible.”) the article goes on to lament: “Whatever the motivation, the effect of the process was drastic and, from a feminist perspective, tragic.”

Of course, from a feminist perspective, everything is tragic – from simple organic chemistry on up to God Himself. It’s all so unfair. And they can’t understand Mary Magdalene except in terms of status and power (which are matter and energy in the feminist universe) so they must stumble the moment they set foot on her trail:

"The pattern is a common one," writes Jane Schaberg, a professor of religious and women's studies at the University of Detroit Mercy and author of last year's The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: "the powerful woman disempowered, remembered as a whore or whorish." As shorthand, Schaberg coined the term "harlotization."

If I’m laying it too heavily on the feminists here, it needs to be pointed out that feminism has no unique content of its own. It is only a minor subspecies of parochial modernism, that despises history and refuses to understand anything except by its own narrow, contemporary values. So they are shocked that Mary Magdalene, whom they have chosen to picture as the Hillary Clinton of Galilee, is mixed up with “less distinguished” women like simple Mary of Bethany and the whore of Capernaum.

A simple examination of the canonical gospels, rather than a rummage through the dumpsters of Gnosticism and neo-paganism, allows us to look at Mary Magdalene the way Jesus Christ saw her, which is quite a different perspective.

Jesus Among the Whores and Sinners

“Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” So said Jesus to the chief priests and elders of Bethany, who questioned how he could forgive the sins of such people. “For John [the Baptist] came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him.” [Matthew 21:31-32]

It was no small part of the scandal that Jesus made among the scribes and Pharisees, that he consistently refused to turn his back on the whores and tax collectors, let alone recognize their right to put such sinners to death under Mosaic Law. “Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners? And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” [Luke 5:30-32]

But the clearest answer is given when Jesus meets the whore at the house of Simon the Pharisee [Luke 7]:

SIMON (muttering to himself): This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she is a sinner.

JESUS: Simon, I have something to tell thee.

SIMON: Master, say on.

JESUS: There was a certain creditor which had two debtors: the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty. And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most?

SIMON: I suppose the one to whom he forgave the larger debt.

JESUS: Thou hast rightly judged. Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore I say unto thee: Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.

It is this woman that Catholic tradition identifies as Mary Magdalene, to the outrage of the feminists who call it “harlotization”. They couldn’t miss the point by a wider margin if they tried, though I suspect they try very hard to miss the point. They must likewise miss the point of “the last shall be first”, “blessed are the poor in spirit”, and “the meek shall inherit the earth.”

They want to “elevate” Mary Magdalene by turning her into Simon the Pharisee, but Jesus was on the side of the poor powerless whores.

Pope Gregory and the Legend of Mattress Mary

In his “Homily 33”, Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) made a number of conjectures about Mary Magdalene: That she was the sinner that met Jesus at the home of Simon the Pharisee, that her sin was prostitution, and that the ointment she put on Jesus’ feet was -so to speak - formerly used as a sexual aid.

None of these ideas were new, but they planted the identification of Mary as a whore firmly into Catholic tradition. So the modern Pharisees all hit the roof. But even if Gregory’s speculation was off base, Jesus Christ would have had no trouble seeing his point.

To Gregory, the notion of a whore’s perfume being put on Christ’s feet was a vivid example of how sin is transformed by redemption. He further imagines that the seven devils that Jesus cast out of Mary (an event mentioned in two of the gospels, but never described) represented the Seven Deadly Sins – so Mary Magdalene was a regular Smorgasbord of Sin.

People who cannot understand how Gregory is praising Mary Magdalene cannot understand Jesus or Christianity, period. The more degraded Mary the Sinner was, the more exalted was Mary the Saint. Having been forgiven so much, she was great in repentance and great in love – great in spiritual virtue, not power, status, or respectability. That’s why Jesus refused to be repelled by her, and why he praised her above the “good” Pharisees.

Hamlet told his mother, “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.” Mary Magdalene had the virtue, and doesn’t need our modern assumptions. Again, it is those who want to dress her up as a Pharisee who insult and diminish her. Call it the Mary Magdalene Code. There’s nothing secret, esoteric, or difficult about it, yet some people will be eternally stumped by it.

Mary Magdalene, Superstar

For hundreds of years before the feminist neo-pagans and the best-selling philistines discovered our poor Mary, millions of Christians followed her through the familiar Easter recitation of John Chapter 20.

But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.
And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.
And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.

Simon Peter and another disciple went into the tomb first and saw nothing, after which they went home. It was Mary Magdalene to whom all the visions were given that morning – Mary the sinner, the whore, the weeping maudlin woman. Not the Pharisees or priests, or even the apostles. Just her, who loved him most.

No small thing, for those who can understand it.

John Kenneth Galbraith, RIP

2006-05-16T03:44:00.000-07:00

My great-uncle was a cowboy, and during the New Deal he drove a herd of cattle 40 miles to sell them to the United States government.

To his horror, the government agents immediately shot the cattle – literally right before his eyes – and bulldozed the carcasses into a ditch. He’d thought they were going to use them to feed the poor. Fifty years later he was still outraged: “They wouldn’t even let me take some of that meat for my dog.” Another life-long Republican was born.

[I’ve always wondered if one of the agents my great-uncle met that day could have been Edgar Dick, the father of science fiction legend Philip K. Dick. Edgar Dick worked for the Department of Agriculture and went around the country in the 30s, killing cows for Uncle Sam – exactly like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel. Possible, but not likely, I guess.]

His brother, my maternal grandfather, was a shopkeeper. He likewise harbored a life-long grudge against the New Deal. The thing that made him angry was the pamphlet that periodically arrived in the mail from the Office of Price Administration, listing the prices that merchants were required to charge for all items. That little book was the personal work of the Deputy Director of the OPA, John Kenneth Galbraith. The price of everything was whatever Mr. Galbraith said it was.

The liberal fetish for price-fixing probably helped cause the shortages that forced rationing during World War II, though the country had managed to avoid rationing during World War I. Most people figured out that price controls were bad when Nixon took a page from Galbraith and imposed them during the 70s. Galbraith never figured it out as long as he lived. If it had been up to him, some clever fellow in Washington would still be pulling numbers out of his butt and mailing them to every business in the country.

Galbraith was the king of American liberal economics, the biggest deal since Professor Thorstein Veblen. He typified the heroic pose of the liberal oligarch: elitist, dictatorial, utterly divorced from mathematics and methodology, and smugly convinced of the moral superiority of socialism.

Any kind of socialism. Galbraith believed that the country should be run by a triumvirate of Government, Business, and Labor. When Lee Iacocca adopted that program for his abortive presidential bid, somebody from The New Republic finally had the courage to say it: that system had already been tried; it was the essence of Mussolini-style fascism. That’s FASCISM, Boys and Girls. Iacocca was a dim-witted lightweight who faded away fast, but someone should have challenged Galbraith directly on that point. It was his idea, after all.

The parallels between fascism and liberal economic thinking will someday astound historians, but today we can’t talk about that without giving Compassion Freaks the stutter-fits. But they share the notion that freedom produces chaos and injustice, which the State can fix by wise micro-management and strict control. Liberals mostly confine this theory to the economic sphere. Mussolini applied the same logic to politics, culture, information, and education. Why not? All of those spheres are likewise full of chaos and dissent, which intellectual oligarchs are just itching to jump in and fix. Galbraith wandered down that path, too, proposing that the government force-feed government-approved culture to the masses.

So was Galbraith a fascist? Not really. Galbraith was a poser, not an economist, and his brand of “liberal” economics is a mess of smug prejudices, not a real theory. Like so many others, Galbraith took his liberal intellectual superiority for granted, and felt no need to prove it by actually doing any thinking.

Too bad. He was a pretty good writer, though. So was Mussolini.

Cell Phones, Privacy, and Your Big Fat Mouth

2006-05-15T04:30:00.000-07:00

USA Today says:

A majority of Americans disapprove of a massive Pentagon database containing the records of billions of phone calls made by ordinary citizens, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. About two-thirds are concerned that the program may signal other, not-yet-disclosed efforts to gather information on the general public.

Oh, I'm sorry, were you concerned about your telephone privacy? Are you afraid that strangers are listening in on your conversations? Then read the following sentence carefully: LEAVE YOUR BLASTED CELL PHONE AT HOME, MOTOR MOUTH.

I've been listening in on people's phone conversations every day for years now, and I'm frankly getting sick of it. It started about ten years ago. I had an old television set that picked up frequencies that have since been reserved for cell phones. So right in the middle of Masterpiece Theater, I get a voice-over by Suzy Creamcheese who can't stand the unbearable loneliness of a fifteen-minute drive to the grocery store without calling her sub-mental boyfriend. After having many such cell phone calls broadcast into my personal space without my permission, I realized that 95% of them were about nothing at all. No information was communicated, no important instructions were given, no important questions were answered, no rational purpose was served. Just blah, blah - hold on, I've got another call - blah blah blah.

I admit that this is partly a personal problem. I've got a thing about telephones. I've never liked them very much. I hate the way they allow old girlfriends, over-talkative relatives, and complete strangers to just ambush you right in your own home. Of course I have a telephone and of course I talk on it, but I regard it as an occasional convenience at best. I get uncomfortable talking to people that I can't see. What the hell are they doing while they tell me all this crap I don't want to hear? Are they even wearing clothes?

But what annoys me most about telephones is the tyrannical regime they impose everywhere. The phone rings, so the television or the Bach concerto has to be turned down, children have to be silenced, and everybody has to sit quietly while someone talks on the phone. EXCUSE ME, I'M TRYING TO TALK ON THE PHONE. Any idiot who picks up a phone and dials it immediately shuts down whatever is going on at the targeted location (or wakes it up, if it's 3:00 AM) and nobody questions this power. The telephone is the wall console from Orwell's 1984: it speaks and you obey.

This would be bearable to me if people used telephones in a reasonable manner, but they don't. They use them as substitute brains. If they have a problem, they don't stop to think about it, they grab the phone and call somebody. If they have a moment of solitude, in which they might ponder the meaning of their existence or enjoy a sunset or make up their minds about immigration issues, they grab the phone. If they haven't talked to Suzy Creamcheese for two whole hours, they grab the phone. If they have nothing worthwhile to say to anybody, they grab the phone.

My television problem was solved long ago by a new television, but the cell phone problem gets worse every day. They make them the size of matchboxes now, apparently so nudists can carry them around in their asses. Everybody has one. I can't enjoy a moment's peace in public without someone suddenly shouting, right in my ear, HELLO or DUDE, DUDE!

There are no more quiet back rooms in America where you can drink a cup of coffee in silence. Everybody goes in there to use their f--king cell phones. HI, IT'S ME AGAIN! WHAT? HE DID? OH MY GAAAAAAWWD!

So don't tell me about the NSA listening to your phone calls. I have to do it all the time. If they could bother you one fraction as much as you bother me, there might almost be some justice in the world. What they ought to do is identify the people who make more than six calls a day and knock them unconscious with ultrasonic feedback signals. Unless they happen to be driving, in which case local law enforcement should be alerted so they can pull them over and pistol-whip them.

The Mossad killed the Palestinian terrorist known as "The Engineer" in 1996 by packing his cell phone with plastic explosive. Then they called him and blew his head off. The Mossad sure does have some great ideas.

Suppose the NSA had a science fiction device that could read people's brain waves and eavesdrop on their thoughts. What would they hear?

Nothing. Nothing but white noise and cell phone calls.

Holy Week Memorials

2006-03-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

I KINGS 2:2 - I go the way of all the earth: be thou strong therefore, and shew thyself a man.

MEMORIAL II (April 1999)

There are fewer men like you
in the world you leave behind.
Before the final day has come
there will be no such men at all.
The world was never made to last.
Progress rolls it forward
to soar around the sun,
and the sun too is a pilgrim.
The universe is a diaspora
of restless stellar nations.
A man's life is an instant.
His mind pops like a spark.
But that spark has power
to pierce eternal shadow.
Rarer is the man who knows
that light was given in love
and is meant to love with.
Instead they grasp at it
to mock the thing that gave it.
Their prideful hands eclipse it.

This is not to ease your waning,
but to mourn it all the more.
It isn't God, the stars or sun
that puts the lights out one by one.

THE LAST OF MY GREAT LOVES

Is not jealous;
She will outwait all the others.

She likes to be played with,
But doesn't care if she's ignored.
She'll walk a few paces behind,
Or hold my hand awhile.
She spies always,
but never tells.

She surprises me in strange places.
I see the white flash of her profile
Across the room.
I didn't used to like that,
But now I mind less.
She grows on me.

She will still want me when you have can't have me,
And she'll lie with me while you walk away.

Special Guest Blog by George Clooney

2006-03-17T03:29:00.000-07:00

I want to get something clear right off the bat. I'm the real George Clooney. The guy who's been mouthing off at Huffington Post is Lester Koszlofsky, who worked as my butt-double in the film Batman Vs. McCarthy - which I courageously produced, starred in, directed, catered, best-boyed and gaffered. Lester is also the guy who slam-dunked Pooches, Ariana's disgusting worm-ridden Yorkie, through the windshield of a taxi cab after the Oscar ceremonies.

So even though I didn't do it, I can understand Ariana Huffington's rabid thirst for revenge. Hitler felt the same way after World War I. In fact, Ariana herself probably felt the same way after World War I.

But I don't care. You see, I'm a Liberal. I'm going to keep saying that word, and I'm going to say it loud. LIB-RULL. Sometimes when I say it, I'm going to dribble my lip with my finger, like this. LIBRRRRUL. Cool. LIBUBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRL!

Why am I saying "Liberal" so much? Because unlike some people, I'm not afraid to. Just try reading the last paragraph out loud. See? See what I mean? You can't do it, because you're scared. Admit it.

Why am I so unscared? What makes me, George Clooney the LIBERAL, so brave? It isn't because I'm rich, and it isn't because I'm surrounded by sycophants and professional bodyguards, and it isn't because I just took half a pint of Demerol in the ass. It's because I'm a Liberal, which comes from the Greek words LIB (brave) + ERAL (real good).

I'm an old fashioned Liberal. Not one of those post-McGovern Liberals, who think the Sixties are over. Not where I come from, they're not. Out here in Hollywood, the Home of the Brave, even the Fifties and the Seventies are still going full-blast. William F. Buckley used to brag that he stood athwart History, yelling "Stop!" But we're the guys who drove History into a ditch and rolled it end over end. Now the pieces are all mixed up and laying all over the place, and you know what? Maybe that's okay.

What does all of this have to do with Ariana Huffington's demented attempt to avenge the death of her diseased lap-dog? It's just another example of the jealousy and the McCarthyism that beautiful rich Liberals like me have to contend with every day. You think the limousines and the private jets and the palatial villas in Europe are just for show? You think they isolate us from the realities that we claim to know so much about? Damn right they do. And you know what? Maybe that's okay.

Farkin' Combat!

2006-03-13T04:27:00.000-07:00

Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft are part of the "Great Firewall" built to imprison Chinese bloggers and journalists.

Cai Lijun got 3 years in prison for posting articles (on a non-Chinese website) calling for democratic reforms.

He Depu got 8 years in prison for pro-democracy internet offenses.

Li Zhi got 8 years in prison for criticizing official corruption after Yahoo provided Chinese authorities with information.

Liu Weifang got 3 years in prison for criticizing the Communist Party online.

Lu Xinhua got 4 years in prison for posting (on a non-Chinese website) articles about human rights abuses in China.

Jin Haike got 10 years in prison for pro-democracy internet offenses.

Shi Tao got 10 years in prison after Yahoo provided Chinese authorities with information.

Xu Wei got 10 years in prison for pro-democracy internet offenses.

Yang Zili got 8 years in prison for posting pro-democracy material on his website.

We don't know how many of these people there are, just as we don't know how many people China executes every year. All you Democrats who shrieked yourselves hoarse over every tear shed at Guantanamo, how about working up one drop of sweat for the imprisoned cyber-dissidents? Republicans, where is the commitment to freedom for China that you sermonized about in the 2004 platform?

What is to be done?

Under God the People Rule (On the South Dakota Abortion Ban)

2006-03-08T12:43:00.000-07:00

My mother was a legislator in South Dakota for ten years, and I got to know many of that state's politicians when I was growing up. Some of them are still in office, and are partly responsible for the current attempt to ban abortion. Contrary to what some of their opponents may think, they do not carry bibles everywhere they go, and they have only one head each. They are farmers, ranchers, and small business-people who have real lives outside of politics. They have an annoying habit of saying that they are "tickled" rather than "pleased". Pro-Choice forces will note, with appropriate alarm, that an unnerving number of them are Democrats.

The outcome I'm hoping for is simple: I hope this goes to the Supreme Court, and that Roe V. Wade will be overturned. (Loading Blackmun's original document into a rocket and firing it into the sun would be a nice touch.) That's all I want. After that, the state itself might turn around and recind the ban under some future majority, as the issue will henceforth be at the mercy of democratic federalism.

I do not want a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. I want the federal government - congress, courts, and chief executives - to get out of the abortion business, and stay the hell out of it, forever.

This will not end abortion, not in Patricia Ireland's wildest paranoid dreams. It will continue indefinitely in the great majority of states. Pro-Lifers will have to live with that, because this is a nation subject to democratic rule. It is the greatest nation that anybody ever thought of, but it is not utopia and it is not the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Of course, Pro-Choicers will not be happy either, because they are generally opposed to any limits on abortion, or even the possibility of limits.

So why am I wishing so much unhappiness for everybody on both sides? For the same reason that teenagers have to pick up their rooms once in a while, and learn trigonometry. They don't like it, but they'll thank you for it some day - well, maybe they won't thank you, but they have to learn it anyway. That's the drill.

Roe V. Wade has been a clumsy dodge that has prevented this country from directly confronting the issue of abortion. That confrontation must come, and it must boil to equilibrium by democratic means and not by autocratic fiat. There is no shortage of opinion about abortion, but there is a serious lack of reason about it. We can't end the controversy by pretending that it is a done deal, one way or the other. We'll just suffer it forever, like the symptoms of a disease we are not allowed to diagnose.

No Frolicking

2006-03-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

Holy Blood, Holy Plagiarism

2006-03-01T04:01:00.000-07:00

The only thing that surprises me about the lawsuit against author Dan Brown, by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, is that it didn't happen a long time ago.

I read HBHG some 15 years ago, and found it a very entertaining book. The thesis of the book - that a secret organization named the Priory of Sion is guarding an eye-popping secret about the bloodline of Jesus Christ himself - has been long exposed as a hoax. The hoaxster himself, a Frenchman named Pierre Plantard, later repudiated the book. Its warped reasoning was satirized in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum. Still, it's a fun book.

Unlike The Da Vinci Code. Apparently only UK reviewers have the gonads to criticize this lead turkey, while my own benighted countrymen invariably begin with, "Whatever you think of his ideas, Dan Brown has written a first-rate thriller!" Yeah, and Stephen King is Dostoevsky.

There are writers who show you things, and writers who tell you things. Dan Brown is a most unfortunate example of a writer who tells you things. And he is so anxious to tell you things that he interrupts action and narrative to do so. It is unclear who is doing the telling: the main character, or the omniscient author. Whoever is doing the telling, they do not bother to explain the New Age jargon they use. (I can't understand how anyone who is not familiar with feminist "myth-makers" like Barbara Walker can even make an iota of sense out of The Da Vinci Code.) Finally, the little lectures that pop up on every other page are filled with the most outrageous absurdities, including all the stuff about Leonardo Da Vinci, most of which is dead wrong.

The only good thing about The Da Vinci Code is the unintentionally hilarious stuff, beginning with Robert Langdon, a professor of "Symbology". Of course there is no such academic discipline, not even at Ann Arbor. A symbology is actually a protocol for the creation of algorithms that can be read by a machine. The best known example of a symbology is the common bar code (a supermarket scanner is a "symbology reader"). So Langdon is like a Professor of Bar Codes. A novel about a bar code expert ("The Da Vinci Bar Code") might be pretty good, but Brown is too lame and humorless to write it.

What really amazed me about The Da Vinci Code, though, is that someone would copy (in very close detail) the thesis of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and present it as original fiction - apparently oblivious to the fact that the whole thing had been blown wide open more than a decade ago. Brown even plants clues to HBHG in the text (there is a character named Teabing, which is an anagram of HBHG author Biagent) that his lawyers are probably regretting right now.

There is an interesting question in this: Does the fact that HBHG's authors presented their work as historical fact entitle other authors to treat it as such? I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty confident that historical fact can't be copyrighted. Of course the "history" in HBHG is the product of the authors' imagination, but does the fact that they believe it to be true undercut their intellectual property rights?

Frankly, I couldn't care less. I hope Brown, Biagent, and Leigh all go broke from legal fees, and make huge asses out of themselves in public while doing so.

What really annoys me - and what has annoyed me since I read HBHG, fun as it was - is that the sick fantasies of a deranged Frenchman (a Vichy, an anti-Christian, and an anti-Semite) have survived so long. They are soon to become a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks. The resemblance of "The Priory of Sion" to the Elders of Zion is no accident, and was part of Plantard's explicit intention. We now have another Protocols on our hands, and like the other one it will never die.

We could all use a little ...

2006-02-27T01:22:00.000-07:00

IN THIS ISSUE: Dr. Makow’s Burkha Fetish!

Did you ever play Scruples: The Game of Moral Dilemmas?

I did, some years ago, with a great friend and teacher of mine. We were unimpressed by the game’s attempt to present us with moral conundrums, and we thought that our ethical learning disability was due to the pitcher of martinis that we drank while trying to walk the straight and narrow. Little did we know that the game’s inventor, Dr. Henry Makow, was a bulgey-eyed leaf-nosed Moonbat (chiroptera lunae). We might as well have been taking moral instruction from Larry Flynt.

Having gotten quite rich from selling seven million copies of his warped ethos worldwide, Dr. Makow now gives away stupid ideas for free at www.savethemales.ca, otherwise known as the Canadian Wimmin-Haters Club.

Guess what his favorite religion is?

He explains, in The Debauchery of American Womanhood: Bikini Vs. Burka. (Warning: This article contains debauchery, bikinis, and Americans.)

The Muslim woman's focus is her home, the "nest" where her children are born and reared. She is the "home" maker, the taproot that sustains the spiritual life of the family, nurturing and training her children, providing refuge and support to her husband.

In contrast, the bikinied American beauty queen struts practically naked in front of millions on TV. A feminist, she belongs to herself. In practice, paradoxically, she is public property. She belongs to no one and everyone. She shops her body to the highest bidder. She is auctioning herself all of the time.

I've never heard of a feminist flesh auction. Neither have any of the boys down at the Sale Barn. I assume this is something they only have in Canada.

In America, the cultural measure of a woman's value is her sex appeal ... As an adolescent, her role model is Britney Spears, a singer whose act approximates a strip tease. From Britney, she learns that she will be loved only if she gives sex. Thus, she learns to "hook up" rather than to demand patient courtship and true love. As a result, dozens of males know her before her husband does. She loses her innocence, which is a part of her charm. She becomes hardened and calculating. Unable to love, she is unfit to receive her husband's seed.

This explains the question in Scruples which goes, "You've discovered that your wife is unfit to receive your seed. What do you do with it?"

At his press conference on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld said that Iranian women and youth were restive under the rule of the Mullahs. He implied that the US would soon liberate them. To Britney Spears? To low-rise "see-my-thong" pants? To the mutual masturbation that passes for sexuality in America? ...

Feminism is another cruel New World Order hoax that has debauched American women and despoiled Western civilization. It has ruined millions of lives and represents a lethal threat to Islam.

These thong-clad Canadian feminists are apparently unstoppable, so it looks like Islam is doomed to suffer lethal masturbation.

How I Called Ms. Tiscareno a Pussy and Have So Far Lived to Tell About It

2006-02-22T06:32:00.000-07:00

My article on Roe V. Wade attracted more attention than anything I've ever written. Even more than my USENET classic, "Defenestration in Film". I got a great deal of positive responses after the excellent Jane Galt linked it in her blog-study of abortion, and I got lots of angry email, too. If I were a sour-faced Perfesser of Stuff at the University of Michigan, like Juan Cole, I'd be suing a bunch of people.

In short, my little salvo set off rather more secondary explosions than I expected, especially for something that I had never intended to blog about as long as I lived. It was a rather passing fancy that made me shell that day-care center, and it must have been a Palestinian day-care center because there was a freaking ammo dump inside of it.

Anyway, of all the places for me to turn up, the article turned up on rense.com, the website of the Jeff Rense Radio show. The government of my beloved United States of America (Love it or get your butt out of my amber waves of grain, and stay the hell out) does not entirely approve of rense.com. The State Department describes it as a "conspiracy theory website" which contains "a great deal of unreliable information".

I don't know what is on rense.com that required government attention. There seems to be a lot of UFO speculation, and the State Department is certainly courageous enough to stand up to fleshy-headed alien trespassers, so long as none of them turn out to have a Saudi passport. I didn't ask to be there, but now that I am, I've asked the Foggy Bottom Boys to amend their description to read: "a great deal of unreliable information, and a few bits of deeply moving prose."

Anyway, some responsible person at rense.com should have thought twice before dumping my cogitations on a bunch of people who get all their information from The X-Files. Many of these people do not even have "Net Nanny" installed and are more or less at the mercy of anybody with a keyboard. The victim in this case was a Ms. Tiscareno, who went into convulsions after being exposed to me.

Ms. Tiscareno exhausted the entire Planned Parenthood vocabulary in ripping me a new one, even the rarely-used word "Mommy". She accused me of being against birth control, of failure to use prophylactic devices, and of taking a jovial view of coat hangers and abortion clinic bombings. And so on and so on. But what really made her mad was:

I wouldn't be so mad right now, if this A...Hole wasn't so insulting by directly calling us Pussies.

Oh yea, final line, "Sisters are supposed to be doing for themselves, you Pussies."

Free speech or not, that is out completely out of line.

[signed] A very angry Ms. Tiscareno

Okay, so I called them pussies. It's probably not a good idea to call people "pussy", as it leads to playground accidents and fraternity drinking fatalities. But I did Roe V. Wade fans the courtesy of assuming that they were more responsible than that. I was just snapping their jockstrap a little. Ms. Tiscareno had no cause to take it personally - for all I know, Ms. Tiscareno killed her last boyfriend with a carpet razor, and has not a single pussy bone in her body.

But I'm not a pussy either (in spite of what my last girlfriend thinks) and I'm not intimidated by the litany of accusations that the Roe V. Waders hurl at anybody who questions their Sacred Writ. I am particularly unmoved by the "argument" that I am not entitled to even have an opinion because I'm a man. This is the United States Constitution we're dealing with, not "Hints from Heloise". I regard such intellectual bluster as mere bullying, and if you scratch a bully you'll find a pussy every time.

They could all prove me wrong - and someday they may have to. When Roe V. Wade goes to the ash-heap, like Communism and Disco did before it, they'll have to take their case to the state legislatures and fight the democratic fight. They'll win some and lose some, and we'll find out what they're really made of. So screw your courage to the sticking place, pussies.

Diary of a Blue State of Mind

2006-02-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION: I know you’re evil, but what am I?

One of our favorite mindless political pastimes (and there are so many) is the game of Gotcha, where we indignantly quote each other as if to prove to some theoretical neutral observer how awful we all are. This is much more fun than listening to each other, especially since we’ve become so polarized that we barely speak the same language. The same words are used, but the words no longer refer to shared concepts. So a statement which is innocuous in one wing of the asylum is outrageous in another, without changing a syllable.

Not that we would agree with each other if we understood each other, but we might save a lot of time and choler if we went past the visceral provocations of words and looked at the mismatched concepts a little more closely. Which is what I undertake to do here, by taking a long look at somebody who speaks a language that is very alien to me.

“Grushka” (NOT his real name) is a longtime commenter and diarist at Daily Kos. The moniker is usually rendered lower-case in the e.e. cummings style that is so common on the internet; I capitalize it here. Grushka is a male American, born in Boston and currently living in New York City, where he works as some sort of professional. This biographical information comes from his own comments, and we needn’t ask for any more.

These are selections from Grushka’s Daily Kos diaries, from October 2004 to the present. The entire diaries are archived at Daily Kos, except for the last one (2/15/06) which has been deleted from the site. Besides the diary excerpts, a few of Grushka’s recent comments are included here. I generally give much less weight to a person’s comments than I do to their formal posts, because even the wisest of us get 2:00 AM foot-in-mouth disease. Still, when someone commits themselves to such a sweeping declaration as “American democracy is utterly dead”, I generally assume that it’s not just a bottle of Beefeater that’s doing the talking. Some sober cognitive process must have preceded such an outburst.

My intention here is not to vilify Grushka, or to ridicule him, either. Satire is a very low form of art – hell, I should know – and I am trying very hard to stay off the low roads here. My usual response to sentiments like Grushka’s is to make light of them, but I’m making an attempt to take Grushka seriously, so I resist any impulse to lampoon him. I’ll take a page from Spinoza: “… not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”

IT IS NOT MY INTENTION to claim that Grushka is representative of leftists, liberals, Democrats, or any associated flora or fauna. I won’t even claim that he represents Daily Kos. (In fact, as his last diary there was deleted, it’s obvious that someone at Daily Kos regarded at least that particular note as discordant - objecting either to its content or its expression.) So let’s start with the assumption that Grushka speaks only for himself. This is one “Kossack” and one “Blue State of Mind”, not all of them. People who want to can come into this shoe store and wear anything that fits.

Obviously none of Grushka’s broad political ideas are original, or even uncommon. Many reasonable people share these general opinions. They may also share Grushka’s view that their differences with their political enemies are intractable, without sharing his grim mindset. My interest is not in Grushka’s political opinions (all of which we have heard many times before) but in the personal conclusions he draws from them.

Finally, about the excerpts themselves: The usual objection to presentations like this one is that comments are being “cherry-picked” or taken out of context. Actually, I’ve sinned more in the opposite direction. A great portion of Grushka’s diaries from three periods over the past year are reproduced here, and most of what is left out is repetitive, irrelevant, or of momentary interest only. I certainly have not intentionally deleted any “context” that would change Grushka’s meaning, in an attempt to distort what he is saying. Grushka is given to making blunt statements, and to making it clear when he feels his statements require illumination to be understood (“PLEASE read this entire diary before bashing me. PLEASE.”) I can’t reproduce Grushka verbatim, but I’ve made every effort to let him speak for himself, and to explain himself. And of course, the entire diaries are archived at Daily Kos except for the last one.

ABOVE ALL: This is not about Daily Kos, and this is not about Grushka as a person. So long as he does no violence to others, Grushka’s soul is nobody’s business but his own. I wish him as much karmic happiness as he allows to others, whether he wants to be happy or not. Or I would, if there were such a thing as karma. There isn’t, really, but you know what I mean.

Part One: “I want to create a blue state of mind in my blue state.”

October-December, 2004: Grushka confronts the election. He vows to break with all his “Bush friends” and to “opt out of America”. (Subsequent diaries indicate that these threats are not entirely carried out.) Thirty days after the Fall he questions the meaning of his life, and worries that his political commitment will get him into professional trouble.

What have you learned through this whole process?
by grushka
Sun Oct 24, 2004 at 07:05:33 AM PDT

… I have always been a liberal. But I was not a fighting liberal. Now I am, and I feel as though the world has shifted - in a tiny, yet cosmic way - because I have become an actor.
…
I have never been a 'joiner' in my life: I fancy myself a skeptical person and an individual. But I have truly gained so much by subsuming myself (to some degree) into a group with a larger purpose. We are all individuals, yet working for a common cause that is so... well, good.

The New Strategy: Strengthen Europe
by grushka
Fri Nov 05, 2004 at 10:29:47 AM PDT

so they can be a counterweight to an increasingly insane United States. I have NO idea how to win over these red states. I truly believe these people cannot be reached. religion ends all debate, all discussion. And that is why the power structures validate it so.

Time to Prune my Friend Lists
by grushka
Fri Nov 05, 2004 at 09:02:44 AM PDT

I'm going through email, going through the cell phone... and I'm junking my Bush "friends."

It's not a spite thing. It's more than that. I detect in these people something that repels me. A latent white male fascism that I had always laughed off or chalked up to maleness. I mean, I have an aggressive, obnoxious, pointlessly destructive male side, too. But I don't elevate it to the sphere of polics.

I don't validate my masculinity by cheering the slaughter of Iraqi civilians.

I want these people out of my life. I want to create a blue state of mind in my blue state. Travelling to the swing states during the election, I met the most amazing people - people whom I have missed out on over the years.

I think I can make it without moving abroad. I'm pretty sure I can.

Opt Out of America
by grushka
Mon Nov 08, 2004 at 07:47:13 AM PDT

I certainly am. Not a Sinclair-style targeted boycott, but a general opting out of the American.
No Hollywood movies. No cable. I don't drive, but if I did, it would be a very old used car. Very few new clothes - and none from chains. No eating at chain stores of any kind. As few household products from large companies as possible.

Only extremely progressive magazines - no mainstream newspapers, either. No more New York Times.
No medications. Of course, I'm young and have no prescriptions, but I'm increasingly skeptical of the pharma industry's products, across the board.

Any other suggestions? I want this election to mark a change, where a substantial portion of America said "no" in a fundamental way, in addition to the more specific forms of protest we will be developing over time.

What say ye, Kosites?

What is our obligation to our own lives?
by grushka
Thu Dec 09, 2004 at 05:39:15 PM PDT

… I'm simply agonizing over this question: what is my obligation to live, to improve myself, my career, my (potential-future) family?

American politics is no place for the weekend warrior any more. To accomplish anything, you need full attention. You also need a strong stomach for battle with the neo-fascist/authoritarian/corporatist/theocracy.

I fought that battle, like so many of us, during the presidential election. I feel pretty good about my contribution.

And yet, what am I to do these next four years? I'm the kind of person who takes this all very seriously. If I do not disengage from the struggle, I will not be able to vigorously pursue a career here in NYC, where one has to be on one's game. Because I WILL have an edge that comes from caring too much about this stuff, and I WILL get into trouble. Because all (nearly all) is political.

Part Two: “EVERYTHING is political.”

September-December 2005: From Grushka’s last terse observation that “all (nearly all) is political”, we take him up again almost a year later. Hurricane Katrina seems to have driven the nail all of the way into the wood: “It's time for all of us to realize we are facing a murderous enemy. One that lives in our own towns, right next door. I hate to say it - even in our own homes.”

Shoot Looters!
by grushka
Thu Sep 01, 2005 at 08:33:28 AM PDT

To careful observers, everything has always been political. But the ramping up of the right wing noise machine over the past 20 or so years has made it a lot more obvious. EVERYTHING is political. Even hurricanes …

… They've (fucking bastards) taken us to war and killed Americans and people from other lands to loot even more ...

I have to say it: it's racism
by grushka
Thu Sep 01, 2005 at 07:32:07 PM PDT

It's a dark thought. But the subject has been broached: much of the New Orleans story has been race.

And I now believe it is race that has caused this entire situation. Which may lead to the deaths of many Americans. The reason the Administration has been so slow is not incompetence. It's pure racism.
…
It's too late. We have a huge fucking catastrophe on our hands. And one that shows a very, very dismal American face to the world. One that lets its black skinned citizens die.

Who set off this "explosion"?
by grushka
Fri Sep 02, 2005 at 10:09:40 AM PDT

[Earlier Friday, an explosion at a chemical depot rocked a wide area of New Orleans and jolted residents awake, lighting up the dark sky and sending a pillar of acrid gray smoke over a ruined city awash in perhaps thousands of corpses, under siege from looters, and seething with anger and resentment.]

Sorry, but this smacks too much of dirty tricks. It seems an incredibly convenient - and television-compelling - image of "complete chaos that hampers relief efforts."

It's also a not-to subtle visual analog of the LA riots. A strong cue for white America.

This shit is amazing. I won't even apologize for the seeming "conspiracy theory" nature of this assertion. It seems all to plausible to me.

I Turned Down US Open Tickets Today
by grushka
Mon Sep 05, 2005 at 03:46:10 PM PDT

A Wall Street friend from a top investment bank left a message this morning: he had an extra ticket to the US Open Tennis matches today. Fancy corporate pavillion, great food, champagne.
I never called him back.

I cannot bear to be with the American elite right now. I cannot abide their casual cruelty. If I heard one disparaging remark - and I know these Wall Streeters , it would've happened - about Katrina's victims I would not have been able to hold back.
…
I have always dreaded living in a society like this. Where lies and repression are the only means of maintaining order. Where cruelty is a sign of belonging and participation. Where crushing others is the essence of every social interaction. And yet it is here. This America in 2005. This is the Bush America.

American Stress. Why?
by grushka
Wed Sep 07, 2005 at 08:14:12 PM PDT

… everyday American life is fraught with a good measure of stress. Stress in the purest biolgical sense: the constriction of breathing, the release of adrenaline, the near constant fight-or-flight stance.
…
Does it make us more biological fearful - and thus easily divided by race and class? (I do realize that fear also keeps us in line politically).
…
I guess I want someone to tell me it's all worth it...

Bachelor Party in Montreal
by grushka
Thu Oct 06, 2005 at 01:01:32 PM PDT
…
First, getting there: the anger towards Americans was palpable at airport customs entering Canada. God, that was unpleasant. Even more annoying was having no one in my party understand when I said the surly behavior was because the world has had it with America.
…
And I realized something else: the republican/conservative type gets a kick out of degredation. They LIKE being served obsequiously, as close to plantation style as they can get. Lording over the masses is a thrill to them.

This hostility, love of degredation, status consciousness gone wild goes a great way to explaining phenomena our side seems baffled by. It's why you can't logic out the reasons for the Iraq War, or tax cuts, or drilling in ANWAR, or the reaction to Katrina.

I'm not sure how understanding this dynamic can help us. But I think it may somehow. I urge you to think about it, and how we can develop strategies for making the true face of conservatism apparent to Americans. A face which for me is perfectly summed up by Dick Cheney's gruesome sneer.

The Varied Brains of Kossacks
by grushka
Fri Oct 14, 2005 at 09:03:52 AM PDT

I'm interested in the ways people think. The ways different minds operate and apprehend the world. The sheer range of intellectual types is fascinating, with some people thinking in such different styles as to make them almost different species.

You can see this all over our beloved Daily Kos.

First, a bit about my own mind. I have always been drawn to theory: big ideas, connecting different systems, trying to tease out what makes the whole thing work. I interpret the world through metaphor; I'll recklessly apply Goedel's incompleteness theorem to epistemology, for example, or use the Big Bang to think about the start of the Cold War and the resulting solidification of the national emergency into bureacratic forms (like stars and planets forming after the Big Bang). I'm not so good with math so I've always used language as my primary intellectual tool - as with any way of thought, it has its benefits and drawbacks. I'm sure certain Kossacks would consider such a mind frustratingly sloppy at times.
…
Others are more like me: they see the actual manifestations of republican/conservative polices as trivial, and proceed from the overarching conviction that conservatism is a charade that masks a transfer of wealth to elites via and endless number of subterfuges. Each individual outrage is merely an outgrowth of this central truth.

IRRITATING: Gloating When the Right Attacks Bush
by grushka
Wed Nov 09, 2005 at 08:17:13 AM PDT

When it comes to fighting the hydra-headed conservative beast - Leninist in its willingness to throw away all rationality, reason, and logic to pursue its regressive agenda - I'm open to any strategy. What we're fighting is so extreme and so dangerous that we need to be deft and nimble and strategically sharp.
…
When we gleefully say Bush is "spending like a drunken sailor" and how the "fiscal conservatives" are angry about that, we shoot ourselves in the foot. Instead of selling the American people on tax hikes for the wealthy, we reinforce conservative dogma that government spending is "bad."

Why are we giving credence to right wing ideology? Why are we playing their game for them?
…
The right is using us for fools. When they paint Bush as a moderate who ignores their views, they are solidifying that insane notion: that Bush is a moderate because he hasn't ended income taxes or expelled Muslims from the country. And we play right into that, guarenteeing that the new "center" becomes Bush-style republicanism.

I'm all for anything that hurts conservative republicanis. Anything. I loathe these people with all my heart…

The Right is Our Enemy. Never Forget That.
By grushka
Wed Dec 07, 2005 at 02:10:22 PM PDT

This qualifies as a contentless diary. It is mere admonition, and a short one at that: I beg you to remember that the right wing in this country is your mortal enemy. At best, they do not care if you die. At worst, they want you dead.

What we've seen the past 5 years is mind-boggling. It is beyond belief. We've seen new low after new low. Katrina was bad enough to damn any Administration for all time. Add Iraq, 9/11, the Patriot Act, the manipulation of religious sentiment, the torture, the deficits, the detention camps, the endless lies...

It's time for all of us to realize we are facing a murderous enemy. One that lives in our own towns. right next door. I hate to say it - even in our own homes.

You have to figure out how you will deal with this enemy, but remember: it CAN happen here. IT absolutely can happen here.

It's time to hate.

Part Three: “I hate it so much it hurts.”

January and February, 2006: The first five entries are comments from various Daily Kos threads, in which Grushka renews his vows of alienation from the “cosmic evil” of conservatism, and all its works and pomps. His tone seems to range from wistful humor to genuine anguish. The final entry is his diary of two days ago, which was deleted from Daily Kos and is here reproduced in its entirety.

By the way, I neither praise nor blame Daily Kos for deleting the diary. Regardless of their reason for doing so, they have a perfect right to delete anything they please from their site, without explanation. I am not presenting it here in order to stick it in their faces. (Thanks to those who screen-captured it before it was deleted.)

I am 100% liberal

I believe in social justice, a social safety net, all of it.

That said, our backs are against the wall. I am NOT willing to go down fighting for gay marriage or affirmative action or even abortion. I deeply believe in all those things, I truly do.
But we don't have the luxury. We are in mortal peril right now, and we need as much sanity as possible from US leadership.

I am willing to jettison these "nice to haves" in order to quite literally save the world (if possible).

The right is killing America

by grushka on Thu Jan 26, 2006 at 09:24:01 AM PDT

Civilization sucks

Humanity was better off in small, roving bands foraging for food.

I'd've been a million times happier as a native American, circa 1300 AD, living in the Pacific Northwest or California or New England or the Great Lakes region.

Damn that would've been great. Hunting, fishing, taking psychedelic substances before festivals, living free.

Seriously. Everything since then has sucked except for the Simpsons and "Exile on Main Street."

The right is killing America

by grushka on Thu Jan 19, 2006 at 09:31:13 AM PDT

Look, this is a complex moral issue

Are American soldiers basically noble? I dunno. Perhaps they are as individuals. But what they did in Vietnam, Cambodia, and what they're doing in Iraq is REPREHENSIBLE. THey are at the service of a dark power structure with no moral decency at all. And nothing good can come of it.

The right is killing America

by grushka on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 06:57:08 PM PDT

American democracy is

utterly dead... the admin knows - rightly - that the American people are sleepwalking zombies. They've put up with everything over the past 5 years with nary a peep.

Pathetic, but the only threat to the permanent right wing oligarchy-junta may be from within the security services/military.

The right is killing America

by grushka on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 12:05:06 PM PDT

Someday these fascist pigs

may be doing this shit to you, or me, or my family or your family.

Not that it doesn't make me fuckin sick when it's done to Iraqis (or the other brown-skinned people we seem to have been perpetually bombing for 60 years now).

I don't really consider myself an American any more. I mean, I'm morally guilty for what this fascist country does because I live here and live fairly well on its rickety, imperialist-driven economy. I have no illusions about my inherent guilt.

But as for the flagrant, war-loving, motherfucking ACTIVE douchebaggery that infests 50% of this country - I deny it outright. I hate it so much it hurts.

I know this should be "our country, our flag, too." But come on. You know what they've done to this country. It's not even partly ours anymore, if it ever was.

A $ trillion down the drain. A world lit on fire. Thousands upon thousands dead. All thanks to the cosmic evil of conservatism, and its grinning death heads in the white house.

I spit in all their faces.

The right is killing America

by grushka on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 06:32:51 PM PDT

I Hope Cheney’s Shooting Victim Dies
by grushka
Wed Feb 15, 2006 at 08:12:09 AM PDT

PLEASE read this entire diary before bashing me. PLEASE.

I’m going to try to make a moral argument for why I hope Harry Whittington dies from his wounds. It is not a simple argument, and I fear I may not be able to articulate it as well as I have conceived it in my mind.

But I feel quite morally justified in hoping that Harry Whittington dies from his wounds. And here’s why.

The Immorality on Focusing on One Person

I believe it is impossible to have a compassionate response to the death of a single individual you don’t know in any way. In a world of 6.5 billion people, roiled by war and suffering every moment of every day, it is impossible to feel meaningful compassion for the death of an individual who has no direct connection to you. I believe to feel such compassion for an individual is morally vacuous, given the very real suffering of such vast swathes of humanity.

I find the propensity of human beings, or at least modern human beings, to focus on the deaths of individuals while ignoring mass suffering, incredibly distressing. And immoral. I believe it was Stalin’s dictum that “one death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic.” This propensity makes great crimes possible.

Note: there is a special case when feeling great sorrow at an individual death is morally justified: the tragic death of an admired figure (your JFKs, MLKs, RFKs, and so on).

To sum up: Harry Whittington does not exist for you or me. He is a media phantom, an abstraction, a symbol, a tool. He is nothing more than those things (and I mean that in a non-ideological, existential sense).

He Deserved It

OK, this is where I may seem more conventional in wishing for Harry Whittington’s death. But again, please bear me out. My argument may not seem as subtle as I wish it, but I think I have a point.

Do I flat out think that conservatives deserve to be shot? Of course not. That is not what this diary says or what I believe. Do I think a man who engineered the Texas GOP takeover – with its disastrous effects on the US as a whole – deserves to be shot? Again, no. Not in the sense of a jury trial and subsequent execution.

Now, do I think a man who was engaged in a quail massacre with the architect of the most despicable Administration in US history, at a time when Americans are dying and killing Iraqi civilians for a pointless war … a man (I’m referring to Harry Whittington now, not Cheney) who almost certainly supported the war, and who almost certainly would not send his own children to die in it (yes, I’m now assuming things. But I don’t care – I’m willing to bet $500 I’m right) deserves to be shot by the VP in a hunting accident?

Do I? The answer is an unequivocal YES. In such a cheap, idiotic, ironic, nauseating, appropriately feudal circumstance, a situation so far removed from the run of real existence as to make it refer to nothing else, the answer is YES. In this particular circumstance, with these particular players, normal human pity and compassion do not apply.

And so, I do indeed hope Harry Whittington dies from this particular circumstance. The conservative revolution he played a part in spreading has brought misery, destruction and death to untold thousands of Americans. As he romped like a feudal lord with his dark masters, he got what he indeed deserved. I hope this plays at least some small part in waking Americans up. In that way, Harry Whittington’s death might atone somewhat for everything else he has wrought.

AFTERWORD: What kind of people are we, anyway?

I think most of us who engage in political discourse on the internet (or in any medium) assume that some of the people who listen will agree with us, and praise us for our insights. We also probably assume that some people who don’t agree with us will experience some sort of negative reaction, though what that negative reaction is supposed to accomplish is not always clear. Sometimes we chum the waters with red meat and sometimes we fish with flame bait. And sometimes we actually try to persuade the fish to jump up on the dock, which is much harder to do.

But all of us think that we’re talking to somebody. And the voice we speak with is not necessarily our real voice. Those of us who are not public persons can adopt cyber-personalities that behave differently than our real selves do back in “meat space”. All writers have a literary existence that is different from actual space-time existence, and God help the writer who gets them mixed up (see DICK, PHILIP K.). It would take a clinical psychologist with a doctor-patient relationship to know for sure which of us are crazy and which of us are faking it, and he could not possibly know that by analyzing the semi-fantastic creatures that we are in cyberspace.

Since our real selves are a matter of guesswork – maybe even to ourselves – we must adopt a paraphrase of Vonnegut’s moral from Mother Night: On the internet, you are what you pretend to be – so be careful what you pretend to be.

So we don’t need to worry about whether the real-time meat-space person who wrote these diaries is a genius or a sociopath. We only have to deal with “Grushka”, his ethereal manifestation, and we are free to judge that entity by its words, without assuming anything else.

So here is what I observe about Grushka:

1. Grushka is a “politicist”.

For Grushka, everything is political, and not just because he explicitly states, “EVERYTHING is political”. We don’t have to take only his word for it - his belief is reflected in his black-and-white dogmatism and his wish to be free of all politically objectionable associations and friendships. Only “extremely progressive” environments are acceptable, because he assumes that anyone who is not with him is against him. He goes so far as to doubt that prescription medications really work, because they’re made by evil pharmaceutical corporations. He probably isn’t kidding.

In all its forms, [politicism] defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies. To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other.

That definition fits Grushka very well. His entire self-image is defined by politics. Because his reality is immersed in politics, he cannot escape from it into the private refuge of friends, or into non-political pursuits. Those private spheres barely exist for him, or at least bring him very little happiness. Because his identity is wholly political, he can’t afford a sense of humor or self-irony. Because the contrast between his political identity and the political identity of “those people” is so stark, he can’t afford any compromise or self-criticism.

And because politics is in everything he sees, he can’t get any critical distance from it. His attempts to reason about it in cold blood – as in the “Whittington had it coming” essay - are extremely painful (he repeatedly begs the reader to follow him down the excruciating path) and the results are self-contradictory and grotesque.

Like any good politicist, Grushka is prone to conspiracy theory, because no event can be neutral or incidental.

2. Grushka’s reality is ruled by Evil.

Nietzsche contrasted two types of ethics, which he called “master morality” and “slave morality”. (These are not intended to represent all moral systems; in fact, both are deeply flawed.)

Master morality begins with a definition of good, which the moralist generally applies to himself: “All people like me are good.” People who do not meet the criteria of “good” are not necessarily evil, but insofar as they fall short they are not good, either, and are regarded with condescension, pity, or indifference.

Slave morality, on the other hand, begins with a definition of evil. The slave moralist regards himself as “good” simply because he does not meet the definition of evil; he needs no moral justification other than the fact that he does not belong to the evil class of persons. The bigger the evil, the more evil the evil, the better he is – regardless of his own character or actions. It is therefore in his interest to exaggerate evil as much as possible. His entire moral world is determined by evil, and he is more or less at its mercy (powerlessness is a great virtue in slave morality).

An old teacher of mine (himself a leftist) described Nietzsche’s idea of slave morality this way: “In the relationship between good and evil, evil wears the pants.”

Evil definitely wears the pants in Grushka’s world. Boy, does it ever. He describes his world as “a world of 6.5 billion people, roiled by war and suffering every moment of every day.” All human progress has been in vain: “Civilization sucks. Humanity was better off in small, roving bands foraging for food.”

Because evil is stronger than good in Grushka’s world, hatred is stronger than love. Hatred operates by a special logic of its own, and only more hatred can match it. Note that in the Whittington essay, he declares that it is impossible (even immoral!) to feel compassion for an unrelated individual, but then goes on to justify feelings of lethal hatred for that same individual.

3. Grushka is a fatalist.

Some people are attracted to political ideologies that offer the possibility of heroic action – not necessarily action of their own, but at least a sort of voyeuristic gratification. Leftist politics are notoriously loaded with such possibilities. Unfortunately, Grushka has chosen a “progressive” strain that seems to deny the possibility of any progressive action, and he is locked into a posture of impotence and frustration.

In his post just prior to the election, Grushka says he has (lately) become an actor “by subsuming myself (to some degree) into a group with a larger purpose.” The problem with subsuming yourself into a larger purpose – over which you actually have little or no control – is that if the larger purpose fails, so do you. By setting standards of success or failure that are far outside of your own abilities, purposeful action and just reward become disassociated. When the dissociation becomes serious enough, the “life is meaningless” syndrome sets in.

If Grushka’s “larger purpose” had succeeded, he could at least enjoy (mostly undeserved) feelings of efficacy. But it failed, so he must suffer equally undeserved feelings of helplessness. His tone thereafter is relentlessly pessimistic. His reaction to the reality that has over-awed him is to hide from every possible part of it, jettisoning friends and reaffirming his total emotional rejection of the hated regime again and again.

In short, nothing makes Grushka really happy except a mass political triumph. Belonging to a sect that rarely if ever triumphs, though, means he is doomed to frustration. He seems to be quite aware of this, and even hostile to any idea that this situation might change: “I truly believe these people cannot be reached.”

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Grushka wants to be alienated and unhappy, or at least believes that he is morally obligated to be unhappy because reality is so intractably evil.

4. Grushka is a collectivist.

Politicism generally implies collectivism, but it’s worth taking a closer look at Grushka’s collectivist aspect.

The Whittington essay is a fine example of collectivism’s awkward moral reasoning, in which the existence of evils (real and imagined) in the “big picture” negates the moral value of the individual. It’s the warped view of Stalinism, pure and simple: “I believe to feel such compassion for an individual is morally vacuous, given the very real suffering of such vast swathes of humanity.” This reminded me of a movie about an uptight girl’s school, where someone said, “I don’t know how we can even talk about having a school dance when there’s so much hunger in the world.”

The conclusion of all such logic is that nothing less than a universal utopia is required for morality (or happiness) to exist at all. “Scientific socialists” of the past recognized that, and claimed that, indeed, morality does not exist.

It is the dilemma of contemporary collectivism that it is deprived of the historical determinism of Marxism, which promised a good result at some point in the future. At the same time, they are burdened by notions of morality, guilt, and the significance of individual action, all of which Marx would sneer away as “bourgeois”.

They are stuck with the prejudices and complaints of Marxism, without the utopian faith and the cold-blooded amorality of Marxism. Marxism was a miserable failure, and Marxism with half the pages missing can’t be much better.

5. Grushka is anti-democratic and anti-rational.

The two characteristics go together, so closely that they are almost the same thing. Grushka, at best, embraces the tragic Leninist idea of “democracy”: the total submission of collective humanity to a narrow political ideal.

Grushka does not see, or seriously look for, rational ways out of his dilemma. He wallows in emotional denial instead. He certainly does not see the power of democratic debate and persuasion – like so many on the left, he is not interested in challenging the right intellectually, and instead seeks to isolate himself from any possible intellectual contact with them.

Grushka’s views the democratic masses the way Charles Foster Kane did: as a bunch of people who think what they’re told to think. He angrily assumes that the other side is doing a better job of straw-bossing the peasants than his side is – their propaganda is better, or at least louder.

This idea, incidentally, is why the left has become such a mess in the mass media, notably on talk radio. They refuse to accept that many among the masses have ideas and values of their own, and that they look for public figures that reflect their ideas and values – not for demagogues who dictate new ones to them.

6. Grushka’s beliefs lead him to psychopathic conclusions.

I won’t say that his beliefs logically imply psychopathic conclusions, because Grushka’s logic isn’t that good. Others could hold the same beliefs without taking them to the disturbing lengths that he does.

That doesn’t mean Grushka is crazy. As I noted before, we have no way to make that diagnosis. The human mind contains infinite possibilities, and it is possible for a perfectly sane, healthy mind to embrace psychopathic concepts, especially when political ideology is involved. The mind is also prone to insincerity and exaggeration, but Grushka is in dead earnest and he obviously does not engage in hyperbole for mere effect.

What do I mean by psychopathic? I’m not a doctor and my use of the word is not clinical or strictly scientific. I call it “psychopathic” when the mind deliberately withdraws from reality in order to justify a specially edited version of reality. It is psychopathic to deliberately associate individuals, groups, or events with things that they have no relation to, in order to justify your own negative feelings. (If you see a group of teenagers horsing around on a street corner, and you feel angry towards them because somebody stole your car battery three weeks ago, this is not exactly psychopathic thinking – it’s just all-too-human emotionalism. It’s the sort of thinking that you should admonish yourself for, not the sort of thinking you should rationalize and embrace.) Irrational feelings of hatred or rage towards individuals, groups, or things are not necessarily psychopathic, but building a conscious rationalization for those feelings is.

This tendency stands out most clearly in the Whittington essay. It is bad enough to hate another individual for ideological reasons, worse yet to wish them harm, but worst of all is to convince yourself that the individual has no meaningful existence at all. Likewise, treating people as if they are mere symbols of something you despise is not healthy or moral. (You couldn’t blame a 19th century Russian Jew for hating Cossacks, or for feeling distaste at the very sight of a Cossack. Even if such hatred is totally unconstructive, it has a rational basis in experience. Extending that hatred to a Russian you just saw walking down the street in New York, on the other hand, is just bigotry.)

That said, I think it’s also obvious that Grushka is not a dangerous cyber-person. His feelings of hatred mostly cause him to withdraw into unhappy isolation, so the real victim is himself. A good example of this is his description of his trip to Canada. The inconvenience of going through customs is blown up into a metaphysical indictment of the United States. The failure of Grushka’s companions to understand this makes Grushka a lonely boy. Impotence, inaction, and a feeling of being the cat-toy of omnipotent forces is Grushka’s thing, not murderous rage.

CONCLUSION: How do you get along with people like Grushka?

Again, we don’t need to make assumptions about how representative Grushka is. One Grushka would be bad enough, if you happen to know him. If you should happen, for instance, to invite him to a Superbowl Party, not realizing that he seethes with silent rage at your very existence.

I don’t know the answer. I certainly don’t delude myself into thinking that Grushka could be reconciled with people like me by love, or reason. His alienation is a self-reinforcing dynamic, and he is not only closed to reasoning from the other side, he regards such attempts as hostile.

Albert Camus wrote that a man would rather die than become the thing he hates most. That’s probably true of most of us, not just Grushka. That’s why you should be very careful about what you hate, and why.

True Kufr Romance

2006-02-11T20:37:00.000-07:00

COMIC BOOKS: Definitely an important part of my education:

Early comics were kid's comics, like Baby Huey (about a huge duck in a diaper), Richie Rich, Sugar and Spike (the last one was about a little red-headed boy and girl, twins, and it had some remarkable artwork for a kid's comic, with futuristic themes). But those kind of books were only introductions to REAL comic books, which were about Superheroes and War.

Comic books were extremely gloomy and dark in the early 70s, when I first started to read. Later, when I saw reprints of older comics from the 50s and early 60s, the contrast was incredible. (In the 70s, DC did lots of reprints of old comics). If the real world changed a lot in ten years, the comic book world changed completely - it went inside out.

In the 50s, Superhero comics were still crudely drawn (they were only for kids, after all). The advertisements said FUN and ADVENTURE! Figures were cartoony and poorly proportioned, anti-realistic, with artwork actually declining since the 40s. One guy drew Superman for years without ever learning how to draw Clark Kent's horn rim glasses (in the 40s, Clark wore tidy wire rims). When you saw Clark in profile, the arms of his glasses were an inch above his ears, as if they were glued to his temples. Superman had an enormous, bulky torso --- his waist was as big around as a tree trunk --- but his arms and legs were shrunken and frail-looking. He looked awful, like a steroid junkie. Batman was better, but not much. In the 50s, stories were all about science fiction and magic (pretty much the same thing in comics -- magic was just extra-dimensional science) and everything happened in the day time. Everything was upbeat and ended happily, with the heroes never doubting themselves, and usually overcoming "evil" with clever tricks rather than violence. This was appropriate, since "evil" was something that was mainly played for laughs. Villains no longer carried the huge Colt automatic pistols they used to have. The Joker was just a tricky clown, not the murdering fiend he had been back in the 30s and 40s, when he poisoned his victims with a toxin that left a gruesome rictus on their dead faces. The Joker never killed people in the 50s. Nobody did. People didn't even punch each other in the face anymore. They just played little pranks on each other, with the last laugh going to the hero. The last panel always showed the hero and his sidekicks with huge grins on their square-jawed faces. "Hmn. I wonder what trick Lex Luthor has in store for me next time? Ha ha ha!"

Then everything changed in comics, completely.

Artwork went from being clumsy to super-realistic, and the sun went down forever. Everything was dark and shadowy now. Heroes were suddenly moody and plagued with self-doubt, to the point of being neurotic (sometimes they actually described themselves as neurotic). The happy sunny world of locker-room pranks turned deadly as hell. The Joker rediscovered his lethal poison and started a regular massacre, practically slobbering with maniacal laughter over his grinning victims. In a way, everything was thrown back to the dark 30s, but with modern angst mixed in. [The violent heroes and villains of the 30's had cleaned up their act during WWII, when they became patriotic citizens] Only the really sinister super villains survived the transition to the late 60s: the Joker, Two-Face, the Scarecrow, Lex Luthor (who stopped being the over-bright class clown and became the kind of guy who threatened your immortal soul). The "fun" bad guys like the Riddler, the Penguin, and Mr Mzxpltk (or whatever) were out. More and more often, though, the bad guys looked like regular people.

Some 30s heroes who had been hopelessly out of style in the middle decades made comebacks in the early 70s. The Shadow (in a beautifully drawn DC comic) was back, with his sinister psychological warfare and his Colt automatic pistols. The Shadow was the Joker gone more or less straight. Then there was the Specter (DC again) who was first drawn in the 30s but had dropped out of sight for 20 years. Now he was back. The Specter was the ghost of a murdered police detective who used paranormal powers to KILL his enemies in gruesome ways, such as snipping them in half with (magically conjured) giant scissors. Magic was still around, but it was no longer alien science. It was Satanistic, even when it was used for good.

The Joker, the Shadow and the Specter were back in their element, but everybody else seemed hopelessly lost. Heroes were a mess. Robin went to college in 1969 ("I'm a man now! 'Least, that's what my draft card says") and Batman moved out of the Batcave into a modern office block, but that didn't help. (""We're in grave danger of becoming --- OUTMODED! Obsolete dodos of the mod world outside!") Superman got a new artist and a new world to live in, too --- the Daily Planet got bought out by a giant media corporation The covers of his books had titles like "Superman --- ENEMY OF EARTH!" and "Superman, You're Dead, Dead, DEAD". One showed Lois Lane being taken into Hell by demons (Help! Save me!) while Superman cowers helplessly. Because Superman was so super, it was a major effort for his writers to come up with ways to punish him: new kinds of kryptonite, magic, even Satan himself. That was his problem --- I never liked Superman, starting with his circus-suit costume.

Themes of death and rejection were very big. Heroes went from being colorful outlaws (in the 50s, they were model citizens who went to banquets and bridge dedications) to being despised outcasts. The Teen Titans (who included Robin the former Boy Wonder) were total disgraces who were forbidden by law to wear their costumes because they had screwed up something big, so they wandered dark streets in slacks and turtlenecks, resenting each other. I vividly recall opening a Green Lantern comic and seeing the hero, in his nice green and black costume, standing with his head hanging and saying "Well, I guess I'll recharge my ring and see if I can manage to do that without screwing it up." Failure, inadequacy, death. Lots of stories featured images of heroes actually dying, showing their coffins or their tombstones with mourners surrounding them --- the hero never actually bit the dust, but he was always hanging by a thread. Everybody was Sylvia Plath in tights. It was very, very common for the last panel of a story to show the Superhero, not smiling, but with his face in his hands, WEEPING.

The Green Lantern was extra notorious for his insecurities. That was too bad, because he had the best-looking costume of any Superhero, and he was probably the best-looking man, too. That was all for nothing, since girls didn't read the Superheroes and I doubt if gays did either.

There were two schools of Superhero fans --- kids who read DC comics and kids who read Marvel comics. I was a DC reader because DC comics did not have so many "To be continued ..." stories, and my favorite heroes were Batman and the Shadow (later I discovered an old-timer who was the greatest comic book hero ever - The Spirit. More about that later.) But I read Marvel books, too. Marvel's artwork was not as good (they had the famous Jack Kirby, who drew characters who looked like they made out of Lego blocks or something), and the stories were more upbeat, almost 50ish. But the depression and spirit of the times was there, as well. The Fantastic Four, you could tell, didn't really like each other very much. The Silver Surfer, who surfed through space, was constantly spouting metaphysical angst, he sounded like Pascal's "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread" etc. The Silver Surfer had something called the Power Cosmic, which was like "the Force" for semi-suicidal hippies. Worst of all was Spiderman (Marvel's top hero --- their financial equivalent of DC's Superman). Spiderman had a terrible time. His girlfriend Gwen got killed (top that!). He was always swinging around fuming about what a loser (his word) he was. Then there was Dr. Bruce Banner, a.k.a. the Incredible Hulk, who was just plain crazy, just short of being the psycho killer that the Specter was. Bruce Bixby later played him on TV, always paranoid and stammering: "Don't ... make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

Another Marvel superhero was Prince Namor, the Submariner (Jules Ffeifer called him the "Black Muslim" of comic books, in attitude -- he was actually white, from Atlantis). The Submariner originated in the 30s, when he was a total sociopath who used his super powers to smash New York City, ripping up elevated trains, tearing the spire off the Empire State, and KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE in huge batches. How he ever made it into mainstream comics is a wonder. Then WWII came and he switched to beating up Nazis. He was still around in the 70s, a big sinister bully with pointed ears. In the 70s a Superhero was either a self-doubting whiner or an angry killer.

I didn't like the dismal, disturbing world of the 70s comic book, so I looked for older comics whenever I could. The greatest discovery was the Spirit, by Will Eisner, which was the best written and been drawn comic character I ever saw. But the Spirit was totally unknown to most comic book fans, because he'd never been in comic books. He was published in the Sunday supplements of major dailies in the 40s and 50s, in seven page black and white stories. So relatively few people ever saw or read him. I found him in 1974, when Warren comics reprinted his stories in book form, with some of the stories colorized. Warren comics were not like regular books: they published magazine-sized black and white comics like Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian --- aimed at teenagers and adults.

The Spirit's world was completely out of sync with the comic book world of the 50s. It had a lively sense of humor, but it was the dark 30s world of film noir, sinister and sometimes oppressive, but without the angst of the 70s. The Spirit wore a blue suit, gloves, and a wide-brimmed hat, with an eyemask that looked like it was painted on. He was a big man, the strongest looking man in comics, with a better build than Superman even if the Spirit didn't have any special powers. When he hit somebody, you could tell it really, really hurt. He was definitely better drawn than Superman. The artwork was as good or better as the 70s art, twenty years ahead of its time. The dialogue was superior, too. A Spirit story had lots of sound effects.

The Spirit's hometown was Central City, which was like an extra-seedy Chicago, not Gotham or Metropolis (the first realistic comic book setting for a major hero, until Spiderman, who lived in New York). Central City was grimy and rusty - a lot of loose paper blew through the streets. It had corrupt political parties instead of nice authority figures. Unlike other comic cities, Central City had weather -- lots of it. It rained and snowed like hell, the wind blew, and they had awful heat waves where everybody oozed sweat.

Bodily fluids: the Spirit comics didn't just have sweat and tears --- they had BLOOD, lots of it, huge gouts of blood, spreading in puddles. If someone got shot, you saw the impact ripping through their clothing, and then they bled. Blood spread over sidewalks and dribbled into the sewers. Other comics almost NEVER depicted blood, even in war comics, even in the 70s.

The Spirit wasn't the sunny, smiling politician type, like Superman and Batman were at that time. The Spirit got mad, really flew into rages. He got mad at his girlfriend Ellen (blond daughter of police chief, always plotting marriage). When he got mad at villains, he gritted his teeth and steam rose from his head, and then he would wallop the daylights out of them. Now these were the days when Superheroes in other books never hit people --- they just lectured them and outwitted them. The Spirit beat them senseless. Really awful beatings, where men would be flung end over end into a tangle of garbage cans. Their faces would squish up under his fist. They always bled, with blood streaming down their noses and chins, and their eyes would swell completely shut. At least he didn't use a gun. They used guns on him, though. The Spirit got shot more than any hero I ever heard of. He would topple down long flight of stairs and crawl away trailing blood. Later he would show up, blood running through his fingers as he covered the wound, sweat dripping from his face, and get somebody to "dig the slugs out" of him. He felt real pain; it hurt like hell to look at him.

But he was also a nice guy --- a believably nice guy, not the grinning cardboard goody two-shoes like Superman, but a real person that you actually believed cared about people, like juvenile delinquents that he tried to set straight. And when he was cool, he was very cool. He would ho-hum when they threatened to shoot him or cut him to pieces. He only got mad when they did something really bad.

The Spirit might get mad at himself when he made a mistake, but he was worlds away from the crybabies in other books. If the Spirit cried (and he had to have been the first comic hero ever to do that) he just got a little tear on one cheek, and there had better be damn good reason for that. He sure didn't rack himself with sobs, or go around blubbering about what a loser he was. He wasn't a loser, just human, and he knew it.

And he had the most incredible women --- besides Ellen, there was a whole harem of female semi-villains (the term was "adventuress") like Silk Satin, Sand Saref, P'Gell, Thorne Strand, and a cute doctor with librarian glasses and a killer body. They were the most beautifully drawn women you ever saw in a comic, and they were the only enemies who were allowed to run circles around a comic book hero indefinitely --- because of course they were all deeply in love with him, and always sneaking away in last few panels to sob over him with big fat tears rolling down their cheeks. The Spirit was perfect. The kids moping over Spiderman's personal problems never knew what they were missing.

Eisner was an exception to the kind of comic book art I usually liked. I liked realistic art, not "stylistic", and I wanted stories with NO KIDS in them. The idea that kids like to read comics about other kids so they can "identify" with the story is one of the stupidest and most persistent ideas in comics. That was where Batman got Robin, Captain America got "Bucky", etc. I hated Robin and all boy heroes. I wanted to read about grown-ups, period.

The Spirit had a lot of kids in it, and the kids were caricatures with big heads and eyes, not realistically drawn. Villains tended to be caricatures, too, with names like J. Sneever Squinch. But there were real villains, too, like the Octopus. And there were those fantastic women, who would come home from some criminal activity and find the Spirit lounging on their couch, complaining that the perfume in the closet had made him dopey (he was incredibly cool and laid-back with women - with everybody, in fact. He would break into the crook's hideout and take a nap on the sofa until they got home. If they got irate with him or pulled a gun, he beat the utter living crap out them). I put up with the "stylistic" elements, because the Spirit was such a great comic it more than made up for any defects. And when he went for straight realism, he was better at it than anybody.

Eisner was way ahead of his time, and he was the master of the "splash" panel, where the action busts out of the frame and flows across the page. He was also the master of the "opening shot". The first page was always spectacular, with creepy buildings and rain pouring down gutters. It was too bad that the newspaper format limited all Spirit stories to seven pages, which was way too short. But he told incredible stories in that limited space, some of them funny, some tragic, and some that were apocalyptically weird science fiction.

War comics were the other kind of comic book. Charleton comics published comics with historical themes, but the main war comics we read were by DC: Sgt. Rock, G.I. Combat, The Losers, The Unknown Soldier.

War comics were very big in the early 70s, during the last years of the Vietnam War. After '75 they went into decline. There had to be a sociological reason for that, but never mind. The Vietnam-era DC comics were not about Vietnam, but about WWII. And they were not nostalgic about it. All of them had off-beat themes, and they were as gloomy and death-tripping as Superhero comics, but seemed to have better reasons for it (being about war).

Sgt. Rock was the most straight-forward, about a tough top sergeant from "Easy Company". But the stories were some of the most depressing ever. Sgt. Rock was always in a funk. He never smiled and hardly ever cracked a joke. Instead he talked about "the bloody cobwebs in my brain" and such. The stories were all about infantry combat and about men being killed in combat, as if they were written for hard-boiled veterans, who would hardly have wanted to read them, anyway. They had a few touches of comic-book fantasy, like Little Sure Shot, an Indian GI who wore feathers on his helmet and who could knock out tanks by shooting arrows down their barrels, but mostly they were death-trips.

G.I. Combat was about a tank that was haunted by the ghost of Robert E. Lee. The Unknown Soldier was about a G.I. who'd had his face blown off by a grenade. He became an OSS agent and covered his mangled skull with rubber masks to disguise himself. The Losers were a group of four soldiers who were, well, losers. They survived, but the reader was always left with the impression that they'd blown it. That comic was definitely a cipher for Vietnam.

Marvel had war comics, also always about WWII, some in the same mold as DC's - one was War is Hell, starring a Polish character with an unpronounceable name who was the first man to be killed in WWII. His Hell was to be reincarnated over and over as a WWII soldier from various countries, where he would get killed again. In the one issue I saw, he was a Finnish soldier fighting the Soviets, a part of WWII I'd never heard of before (who says comics aren't educational?). The last panels of the story showed corpses of Russian soldiers frozen to death in the snow. Another Marvel war comic was about a Dirty Dozen-style group of misfits, led by an Irish sergeant named Kelly who lived in remorse because he'd once killed a man in the boxing ring, and had been court-martialed for it. In one story a civilian holds a weapon on the group and threatens to shoot them all down. Kelly says "Go ahead, the world would probably be better off." That summed up the whole comic hero philosophy of the time.

The sole exception to the anti-war War Comics of the time was Marvel's Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandoes. This book had a completely different attitude. Sergeant Nick Fury liked war. He led a group of Rangers who were a complete ethnic mix, as if they'd been designed for politically correct purposes. There was a Southerner named Reb and a black named Gabriel, who naturally were best friends. There was a Jewish mechanic from Flatbush named Izzy Cohen. There was an Irishman named Dum-Dum Dugan, who wore a steel-plated fedora with corporal's stripes on it, and an Englishman named Percival "Pinky" Pinkerton. They even had a German defector named Eric. The commanding officer who sent them on their missions was a mean-tempered captain who was ironically named "Happy Sam" Sawyer.

All of the Howling Commandoes were heavily muscle-bound, even the dainty Englishman Pinky. Sgt. Fury was a muscular comic, full of bulging biceps. The Nazis not only got shot, they got punched, beaten, picked up and thrown like rag dolls (though there was no depiction of blood in Sgt. Fury). All the while they were shooting, punching, and tossing Nazis, the Commandoes cracked wise. They were the biggest wise-crackers in comic book history, and unlike most smart-mouthed Superheroes, they were actually pretty funny. The humor was muscular, too. Sgt. Fury was hilarious to us when we were kids, and it was also the most thrilling book to read. No downers. The Commandoes were all true-blue patriots who believed in the war 100%, and who gave stirring denunciations of the Nazis (or "Ratzis") when they weren't cracking wise. Here was typical dialogue (after they parachute behind enemy lines):

FURY: Awright, Izzy, you got five minutes to steal us a Kraut staff car.
IZZY: Since yer givin' me so much time, Sarge, is there any partic'lar color you'd like?
FURY: SHADDAP! Yer down ta four minutes now, wise guy!

Even the text of Sgt Fury (the sub-panels where narrative background was supplied) was written in Brooklynese Wise Guy argot, using phrases like 'Natch! and 'Nuff said! Profanity was represented by "Ever-lovin'" and "Blazes" - the Commandoes never said #@%&%$! Grenades were always "pineapples" and Thompsons were "toy cannons". The cigars that Fury constantly smoked were "cheroots". You didn't carry things, you "toted" them. The comic book itself was referred to as a "battle-mag" (an issue was an "ish") and the reader was generally addressed as "true believer" (that was true of all Marvel comics). The editor was "Smilin'" Stan Lee, publisher of Marvel Comics. He would insert helpful notes into the text panels: "That's a Me-262, fer all you scissors-totin' scrapbook hounds out there! - SENTIMENTAL STAN". Marvel comics were actually footnoted (*SEE ISH #243!) as if reading comics was some kind of scholarship, where writers were required to cite references.

Stan Lee created Sgt Fury, along with the famous Jack Kirby. I didn't like Kirby's artwork at the time I was growing up, but he was considered maybe the greatest comic book man of all time. He invented the super-patriot Superhero when he created and drew Captain America all the way back in 1941. His old comics were great, but by the 1970s he was drawing the kind of anti-realistic style that I hated. He was doing comics for DC, too, like Kamandi, a muscle-bound teenager (with hair like Betty from Archie comics) whose shtick was that he was "the last boy on earth". It was awful. I wouldn't read him even if he was the last boy on earth. I was glad Kirby didn't draw Sgt. Fury. The artists were generally realists, even if the action wasn't. Jack Severin was on of the artists who drew him (he also drew some of Sgt Rock and The Losers.)

Although it flew over my head at the time, it's obvious in retrospect that Sgt. Fury was meant to make a political statement. In one story, a newspaper editor decides to send a "bleeding heart" pacifist reporter to the front to get a look at the war. (I had no idea what a "bleeding heart" was, I thought it was a medical condition). The reporter winds up with the Howling Commandoes ('Natch) who can't stand his anti-war guts. The reporter winds up killing a Nazi after he witnesses an atrocity, and so he is cured of his bleeding heart.

They went further than that. One of their stories was set in the present day (about 1970), with the Commandoes re-uniting to go to VIETNAM and sabotage a North Vietnamese atom bomb! This was absolutely unheard of. Other books, war or otherwise, never EVER so much as mentioned Vietnam. But Sgt. Fury actually went there and fought Viet Cong, just like they fought Nazis.

During the whole formative period up to age twelve or so, I don't remember hearing adults talk about the Vietnam war, and I remember very little about news broadcasts relating to Vietnam. I knew there was a war going on, but I assumed that we were still fighting WWII. That's what people in the comic books were doing, so it seemed a logical conclusion to me.

Three Paths for Islam

2006-02-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

If there’s one thing that Muslims and non-Muslims can agree about, it’s that something has got to give.

Here in the West we’ve been acting as if we’re the ones who are already beaten. The Left, which lost all interest in Rome decades ago, is accustomed to sympathizing with any barbarian horde that shows up at the gates. The Right is equally accustomed to wallowing in defeatist visions of apocalypse, in which a world bereft of courage and integrity caves in like a rotten pumpkin, and we can’t wait to say I-told-you-so. The Middle seems to think we can hide from all of this, walling ourselves off in our corner of the globe and nicely ignoring history until it goes away.

Everybody seems to think that the situation is too much to handle, and we shudder to think what it would take to handle it – not only war between governments, but total war between entire cultures. Not just destruction, but nuclear destruction. Yet capitulation is even more unthinkable, even to people who pretend to favor it.

The Muslim militant seems enviable in comparison, with his noble savage simplicity. He has little to lose, and an entire world to win. He burns like a pure fire while we smolder with self-doubt, bad faith, and fear. He has the “passion” and the “authenticity” that we’ve taught ourselves to covet.

All the same, he is hopelessly overmatched. Historian Paul Johnson remarked recently that Islam’s crusader spirit will die before the end of this century, and probably sooner than later. If this sounds too optimistic, I recall Johnson’s prediction in the early 1980s that the Soviet Union would soon die of demographic convulsions. Reading Modern Times as a boy, that prediction astounded me. I’d never heard anyone say such a thing before. My formative understanding of the world was built around the Manichaean confrontation of East and West; supposedly an indefinite stalemate, fossilized by the nuclear Balance of Terror.

And yet it happened, and Muslims played an important part in the death of that political galaxy. Not just the Muslims of Afghanistan, but the great mass of unassimilated “Soviet” Muslims whose Islamic culture was living and vibrant. The soulless, artificial corpse-culture of Marxism was no match for it. It was only a matter of time and mathematics.

But Western Civilization, for all its materialism and spiritual malaise, is no Soviet Empire. It is, in fact, exactly what the Soviet Union falsely claimed to be: an awesome product of natural history, against which Socialism is as fake as a cardboard tree. Its crises have always led to ever greater strengths, in defiance of all Marxist so-called logic. Political, cultural, and economic liberty are truly the Jinns that can’t be put back in a bottle. No ideology can control the West, let alone conquer it. It co-opts ideologies as easily as the Romans collected pagan gods. And its visible strength is only the merest tip of the iceberg. It suffers endless ridicule, defiance, and betrayal – but it always survives, because its spirit is the spirit of Life itself, and its inertia is too great for any revolutionary enthusiasm to overcome.

So the question is not how the West will survive the challenge of Islam, but how Islam will survive it. This collision has come before; it happened in the 16th century when modern Christianity confronted the modern world; a world which was no longer entirely Roman or entirely Christian. Christian thinkers looked on the warring kingdoms and decadent petty states of Europe with much of the same disdain that modern imams do: a morass of money-grubbing, quarrelling, moral indecency, and Godlessness.

In the accommodation of Christianity to modernism, the way was necessarily led by the Protestant reformers. In the 16th Century the Catholic Church was politicized and secularized, entombed in the status quo. The glory of Augustine and Aquinas had faded away (like the golden age of Islam has) and the Catholic humanists who would lead Catholicism into the future were only beginning to emerge. So it was up to the leaders of the Reformation to reconcile the old God with the new Caesars. Three major solutions to this problem were explored, one of which was successful. These three paths now point the way to the possible futures of Islam.

THEOCRACY. The ideal scenario for the zealots, of course, was the political subjugation of Papist, Jew, and heathen king. This was the path explored by Calvin and Zwingli. Zwingli’s protestant theocracy in Switzerland was short-lived; it led him into a hopeless war with Catholic powers, which killed him and his oppressive regime in the same blow. Calvin established a theocracy in Geneva which likewise did not last; nor did it last when it came again in Puritan England - and again in Puritan New England.

The old Catholicism had tried it all before, of course. But ruling kings had not turned kings into good Christians; instead, it turned Popes into second-rate politicians. By the time of the Reformation, Rome’s power was treated with contempt even by Catholic princes. Reached for comment, Christ said, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

Calvin and Zwingli never had a chance. If the universal Pope of a unified Christian Church could not micro-manage civilization, how could a couple of upstart theologians do it? Yet their task was simple compared to the ambitions of the modern Lords of Jihad, who think they can swallow all of Democracy, Christianity, Capitalism, and Modernity, and digest it, too.

SEPARATISM. If you can’t beat them, stay away from them. This was the path taken by the so-called Anabaptists. They withdrew from the objectionable worldliness of the world into enclaves of their own, seeking to live a pure interpretation of Christian doctrine.

All Christians had grappled with the problem of reconciling Christ’s injunctions with life in the modern world. The Catholic Church had held that these injunctions were literal, but not universal – they did not apply to all Christians and only monks were expected to obey them in full. Lutherans, who had done away with monks and even with priests, held that the injunctions were spiritual guides that were binding on all Christians; not literal in their interpretation, but universal in their application. The Anabaptists went for both literalism and universalism, which put them completely at odds with society.

The Anabaptists earned a reputation for honesty, humility, and willingness to die for what they believed. They were often admired even by the people who persecuted and killed them. But there was a dark side to the Anabaptist force: humble in demeanor, some of them became excessively proud in spirit. Martyrdom convinced them of their own saintliness, and of the irredeemable evil of the rest of the world. Eventually their pacifism turned into militancy, their asceticism turned into the worst kind of crusader spirit, and their alienation turned into belligerent paranoia, as it so often does. They became obsessed with apocalyptic revenge fantasies in which a Christian elite would pour forth from a New Jerusalem, slaughtering the infidels.

In 1534, somebody tried it out. Anabaptists seized Munster, violently overthrowing the city fathers and expelling Catholics and Lutherans. They declared Munster to be the New Jerusalem, and prepared for the apocalypse in which 144,000 "saints" would conquer the world. In the meantime, they experimented with the most absurd literalism: in imitation of various Old Testament prophets, they went around naked or attempted to eat hot coals. The Anabaptists, once peaceful and meek, proved to be close relatives of the Christian theocrats who were their chief enemies.

The “New Jerusalem” lasted just long enough to permanently discredit Anabaptism, which dwindled thereafter to small minority sects. Their descendants are the Amish and other separatist communities, which have survived only by the tolerance of democratic societies. They no longer militate against the secular world, which is in fact their only reliable protector.

That is not the fate that modern Jihadists aspire to, not by a long shot. If it were, they would oppose all Islamic regimes and embrace democratic ones, as their only possible means of survival.

CO-EXISTENCE. This was the path chosen by Luther, in which church and state lead a separate life alongside one another. The Christian may participate fully in civic and economic life, while keeping his spiritual self separate from society’s unchristian aspects. He obeys the law, serves in the king’s army, pays taxes, and generally renders unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s – but nothing else.

If he can’t do this, he peacefully accepts martyrdom. Luther was horrified by the fate of the Anabaptists and disgusted by the crusades. He taught that Christians must never defend the faith by force. He went so far as to say that the state should not defend the church if it was attacked, as the church must trust to God alone. A Christian may kill to defend his country, but he may not kill to defend his faith.

This arrangement was, of course, the historically successful one. It is the path followed today by western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant alike, and by Judaism as well.

It didn’t all work out the way Luther would have liked. Ceding the public square to secularism led to a level of social permissiveness that outraged the old German. “Women go about bare these days, front and back, and I cannot stand to see my teachings put to such abuse.”

Plunging necklines aside, Luther should have been grateful that his worst fears were not realized. The church did not die in a pool of martyr’s blood, being now protected by its harmonious relationship with the state. One influenced the other, not always for the best, but neither would ever destroy the other. Out of this harmony, western democracy was born.

It is up to Islam now to follow one of these paths. The first two lead to extinction – in the West, at least - and the third leads to democracy.

Warriors, Wusses, and Worse: Why The Los Angeles Times Should Be Placed Under Martial Law

2006-01-28T04:17:00.000-07:00

I DON’T LIKE The Los Angeles Times. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have if you are the kind of person who is apt to write NO WAR on your face with lipstick. I am not that kind of person, so I am quite pleased with my opinion.

And I've got no problem with other people — the ones who believe in free speech and stuff like that — supporting the right of The Los Angeles Times to publish their goofy paper. If you think they have a right to do that, by all means object when we kick in their doors, defenestrate their office equipment, and water-board Joel Stein until he passes cerebrospinal fluid through his nose. Cerebrospinal fluid which — I am convinced — will prove to be composed of Orange Jell-O with banana slices and miniature marshmallows.

But I don’t like the God-forsaken worthless-ass Los Angeles Times. And being against The Los Angeles Times while claiming to believe in the nonviolent tolerance of free speech is — I now realize and freely admit — a position which is unbecoming to a serious-minded adult manperson. To put it into the Junior High School Locker Room prose to which readers of The LA Times are accustomed: It’s wussy. Since I do not want the low-carb version of Peking Man to snap me with his jockstrap, I forswear all such hypocrisy from this day forth.

To blindly allow The Los Angeles Times to exist unmolested, I fear, may give them an opportunity to annoy me further in the future. Plus, I would be giving soft acquiescence to the use of “impact” as a verb.

And skimpy little say-nothing paragraphs.

Having realized my mistake, I don’t want to blame the exploited homeless people who deliver the paper in exchange for methadone. Nor even the LA Times editorial staff, gravel-sucking plecostomi though they be. And I’m certainly not going to blame myself, an innocent victim misled by the “free speech” lies of Voltaire and John Stuart Mill.

And blaming LA Times publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson for disgracing all carbon-based life with his very existence is just too easy. Not easy enough for Arnold Schwarzenegger to do it, but almost that easy. The truth is, if it weren’t for so-called journalists there would be no so-called journalism, and therefore no Los Angeles Times. Journalists are the pathogens and journalism is the disease — The Los Angeles Times is merely the pus-bloated symptom.

I do sympathize with any person who passed out while playing with a Fisher-Price Spell Toy and woke up at the Columbia School of Journalism, if any such person exists. But when you decide to become a journalist, you pretty much know that you’re not going to be saving the country from Richard Nixon. 67% of Journalism majors know that Richard Nixon is dead. So you are willingly signing up to serve the pathetic cultural ambitions of white middle-class liberals. After 20 years of this you write a 250-page book (with no footnotes!) to entomb your ego. Future journalists inherit your skimpy little book like genetic damage.

I know all of this is easy for me to say. I’m a blogger, not a journalist. I wouldn’t walk across the street to talk to a United States Senator. (What for? Seriously, what the hell for?) I don’t chase Clinton’s girlfriends through high-speed traffic. Such truth as I may possess is not for sale, nor is it used to extort leaks from Beltway scum. I don’t get Pulitzer Prizes for running circles around fact-checkers and brain-damaged assistant editors. I don’t pretend to be objective while plagiarizing DNC press releases. In fact, I don’t pretend to be objective ever.

Journalists tell us that they perform a necessary informative role — even when dead wrong — that is vital to the functioning of a free society. Even if this is so, I see no reason why I should be grateful for it. Those at The Los Angeles Times who are requesting this consideration display no gratitude for all the stuff other people have done for them. Like their imperialist ancestors who helpfully colonized Oakland Hills and the beaches of Malibu, or the Armed Forces who prevented the same from becoming possessions of the Emperor of Japan, or the LAPD which keeps the crack-heads and gang-bangers out of their unisex restrooms.

Besides, if there is one thing my elders have taught me — those solons whose wisdom was distilled in the intemperate Sixties, then mellowed for decades in the oaken casks of capitalist affluence — it’s this: Screw Everything. Especially everything that doesn’t affect me. But also a lot of stuff that would affect me, if somebody wasn’t taking care of it for me while I stand around and bitch. Above, screw all the stuff that I can get paid to make fun of in print by people who are even more witless and depraved than I am.

Another thing I've learned from these hoary cultural icons (and The Los Angeles Times is only a small part of their intellectual legacy) is that if I find some person or thing to be politically disagreeable, it's probably because that person or thing is PURE EVIL. Not in some figurative sense, but evil like something right out of Paradise Lost or Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World. So Christian charity must step aside for righteous zeal.

Now, I'm not advocating that we herd the staff of The Los Angeles Times into a cage, to be raped by amphetamine-crazed circus animals while we film the grisly spectacle for Pay Per View. On the other hand, what do I care? I don't write for their stupid paper.

Pseudo-Religion 101: Introduction to Divine Retribution

2006-01-18T12:06:00.000-07:00

Since Ray Nagin and Pat Robertson (and many others who live in daily fear of the just wrath of God) are anxious to discover just how they are being punished and for what sins, here are some important historical examples from humanity's rap sheet:

.WHAT WE DID ..............WHAT GOD DID
TO ANGER GOD ............. TO PUNISH US

Invented war ......................Invented hippies

Witchcraft..........................Postmodernism

Mindless Pagan..................Political Parties
Idolatry

Sold Indulgences...............Sells Car Insurance
and Bogus Relics...............and Online Prescription
.........................................Medication

Beheaded Saint.................Beheaded
Thomas More....................Jayne Mansfield

Killed the last...................Killed the last honest
Passenger Pidgeon............building contractor

Forced courthouses...........Forced NASCAR to
to remove the Ten.............mandate restrictor
Commandments................plates on race cars

The so-called World...........The so-called
Council of Churches...........United Nations

Communism......................Low-flush toilets

Moved the Dodgers............Moved Detroit
to Los Angeles.....................to Japan

Jailed Martin Luther.............Released G.
King, Jr..............................Gordon Liddy

Cancelled Star Trek............Vietnam

Aleister Crowley.................Pat Boone

Garth Brooks......................Eminem

Bill Clinton........................George Bush

Replaced "Merry...............Replaced "woman"
Christmas" with ...............with "bitch" and "man"
"Happy Holidays".............with "motherf--ker"

Reflections on Sharon: The Battle of the Chinese Farm, and Other Mad Adventures

2006-01-10T01:09:00.000-07:00

Ariel Sharon’s identity as a politician has always been tied to his reputation as a soldier. Definitely by Israel’s enemies, for whom any Israeli soldier is a monster and a war criminal and will therefore be a monster as a statesman, too. Some liberals – including some in Israel – barely stop short of that assessment themselves, at least in Sharon’s case. Their idea of a “good” Israeli soldier is one who promotes a Palestinian homeland, like Rabin did. (At least that used to be the ideal; in order to pass muster today you’d probably have to be in favor of abolishing Israel, too.) So Sharon represents the dark heart of Israel: the soldier who does not apologize for fighting; arrogant and contemptuous of law; and who is at bottom a butcher with no regard for human life, especially the life of an Arab. For them he personifies the caricature of Israel that her enemies have devised, and this is greatly troubling to them because in their own hearts they more than half believe in that caricature themselves.

Sharon’s problematic reputation goes back to the 1948 war, when he first made his bones in the Palmach strike battalions of the Haganah. By the age of 22 he was a major in command of Unit 101, Israel’s first special forces unit. His critics point back to this time when they call him a maverick who ignored or exceeded orders at will, and who acted with disregard for civilians and human life in general.

In irregular warfare, the problem of telling soldiers from civilians is not a trivial one. Especially when the enemy routinely operates from civilian-occupied areas, and makes no attempt to protect or evacuate civilians even when given plenty of opportunity to do so. It doesn’t help when your enemies get the benefit of every doubt, even from your so-called friends. Technically, the Jordanian police at Kalkiliah were civilians, and the Palestinian fedayeen they were protecting could be called “civilians” too. But those fedayeen were crossing the border to kill Israelis, after which they would fall back behind a shield of other civilians. Unit 101 took them out (violating Jordanian sovereignty in the process, horror of horrors) to stop their operations, not because Sharon wanted to maliciously kill some noncombatants.

Sharon’s supposed insubordination (and general beastliness) during those early years of struggle have never been specifically established, and never could be. The operations of the Haganah and of Unit 101, during those most precarious days of Israel’s existence, were generally secret. They were often carried out without written orders, in situations where command authority was either unclear or was deliberately obscured for purposes of deniability. Compared to our own covert ops in Vietnam, Sharon’s shadow war was relatively mild. Compared to French measures in Vietnam and Algeria, it was laughable. Compared to standard PLO practice, it was a model of humane restraint. Finally, it took place during a time in which – as David Ben Gurion well recognized – it was absolutely vital that Israel show that she would defend herself in deadly earnest, or she would never have a moment’s peace.

Far from being an undesirable loose cannon, Ariel Sharon was the ideal man to conduct such operations. The more “maverick” he was, the better suited he was. Ideal for his critics, too – those who can’t stomach what it takes to survive in the face of an utterly ruthless foe can pretend that the efforts which keep them safe in their homes are the work of an irresponsible madman. So they can have their safety without taking moral responsibility for it. In short, Ariel Sharon was exactly the kind of man that his nation needed him to be, right across the political spectrum.

During the Sinai Campaign of 1956, Sharon was criticized for provoking an unnecessary (but fairly minor) battle at the Mitla Pass. Classic Sharon, his critics would say. After having been denied permission to attack the pass, Sharon was allowed to scout it, and his overly aggressive reconnaissance led to a fight. Therefore, he “disobeyed” orders. The successful efforts that allowed his brigade to reach the pass in the first place were overshadowed, and his military career was nearly ended. If this is insubordination or incompetence, there are many famous generals in history who could cite better examples from their own experience. Fortunately for Israel, Sharon was not finished. In 1967 he led Israeli forces to a brilliant victory at Abu Ageila that literally ended the war on the Sinai front: when the Egyptian chief of staff learned about this defeat he panicked and ordered a general retreat, taking Egypt right out of the fight.

Which brings us to the 1973 war, and Sharon’s most infamous feats of mad dog behavior. Driving towards the Suez Canal in typical Patton style, Sharon’s tanks and paratroopers collided with heavily fortified Egyptian infantry at the so-called Chinese Farm. Rather than another neat Abu Ageila, the Israelis endured three days of fighting and heavy casualties before Sharon crossed the canal and ripped through the Egyptian rear, completing a fatal encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army. Again, in defiance of orders!

Taking the Chinese Farm battle first: Sharon’s enemies called it a huge blunder, and accused him of leading an entire brigade into an Egyptian trap. (Sharon’s enemies can’t make up their minds whether Sharon is too good at killing people, or not good enough.) A three-day pitched battle is nobody’s idea of a good time, and grinding it out in the face of a superior enemy position is not the classic IDF style. No doubt (like Gettysburg, Waterloo, Stalingrad, and Marathon) it could have been done better. During the Six Day War, Israeli armored forces had moved virtually at will, destroying anything in their path. One of the lessons of 1973 was that those days were over. For the first time in history, a country faced an army that had been literally custom-built to destroy them. The Soviets built Egypt a new army from scratch after 1967, and then trained it for two years behind a screen of UN peacekeepers – which then rolled out of their way as neatly as a sliding door. They hurled this army at Israel on the tenth day of Ramadan, that notorious Islamic peace-fest, and when Israel reeled back and then moved to counterattack, they found that all the rules had changed. The Egyptian forces were protected by an umbrella of first-class SAMs that took a heavy toll of Israeli aircraft. It was no longer possible for a fighter-bomber squadron to route an entire Arab armored division. And Egyptian troops were now equipped with superb wire-guided Soviet anti-tank missiles that were ideally suited to desert warfare. Under these circumstances, it was ridiculous to expect that IDF forces could encircle the enemy without a brutally hard fight, and it was almost a miracle that they were able to succeed at all.

But the enemy’s deadliest weapon against Israel, as always, was diplomacy. The sort of diplomacy, that is, where the enemy gets to call a time-out whenever things start to go against him. Israel is expected to obey every whim of the allegedly peace-loving world community, while her enemies get to raise hell until they get themselves into so much trouble that they need another ceasefire to save their bacon. It was during one such plea for “peace” that Sharon continued to pound nails into the Third Army’s coffin, ensuring that the Egyptians and their Soviet sponsors would have to call the show off for good. Kissinger scolded the ambassadors, and the Soviets went into a purple fit, while Golda Meir just shrugged her shoulders: What could she do, with that lunatic Sharon running loose and disobeying orders? I doubt if any prime minister was ever happier to be disobeyed.

Once again, as in 1948, Sharon was exactly the sort of loose cannon that his nation needed him to be, and thank God for that. Lincoln famously observed that he wished other generals would drink some of Grant’s whiskey, and so long as Israel must operate under the lopsided restraints that no other nation on earth is expected to observe, she ought to hope that she will always have a few mavericks like Ariel Sharon. And the liberals can sit safe in their homes and curse him. Everybody wins.

[Cross-posted at lgc, just because I felt like it for some reason. After writing about Sharon, I feel the need to break some sort of rule, however unwritten it may be.]

Zarathustra Speaks Again

2006-01-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

Early one spring, when the water was rushing cold down the mountains, a man from the town came to the hermitage and asked to speak to Zarathustra.

“Esteemed elder, I beg you to hear me and give me your advice.

“I am a civil servant – of the fourth rank – and I have a son. My wife and I have labored long and hard so that he could be educated at the colonial university. It was our dream that he would become a doctor, or a magistrate. Why not? My beautiful son was a flower that bloomed brighter every day. No child could have been happier or more promising. So greatly did we rejoice in him that none of the world’s sorrows could touch us.

”At the university, my son joined a nationalist party, and befriended many young political men. I did not object. When I was a youth, I belonged to the very same party, and I had many such friends. But when my son began to give all of his thoughts to these political affairs, rather than to his studies, I became concerned. Yet I did not reproach him, because I could not believe that anything he did could lead to an ill result. My son was so filled with life and intelligence, it seemed only natural that some of this bounty should spill over its banks; and yet his river would find the right way to the sea.

“But, wise one … a terrible progression now occurred. My son became estranged from all of his friends, except for a small number of radical men. His language became dogmatic and cruel, and he would no longer show any respect to me or to his mother. Some of the men in his circle were military officers who could procure weapons, and he talked quite openly of the violence they would do with these weapons one day soon. And now I did plead with him. On my knees, I pleaded. But we can no longer understand each other. He is little more than a child, but he seems to have despaired of everything but death and bloodshed. Certainly he sees no good in the world, and he speaks of it with nothing but hatred.

“My wife has implored me to turn him in to the Civil Guard, before he gets into dreadful trouble. But how can I inform on my own son? The Civil Guard may jail him – or worse – even though he has done nothing wrong. And yet I live in terror that he will kill someone, or be killed himself. Tell me, please, what is the right thing to do?”

Zarathustra answered: “You must not turn in your son. You must not attempt to dissuade him, either. You must shut your door to him and give him no further support, until the day that he returns to you as a loving son once more.”

The man was saddened by this advice, but he resolved to do as Zarathustra said, for it seemed better than anything else he could do. So he thanked Zarathustra and left without another word.

***********

Late in the winter, when the mountains gleamed white and the hermitage was draped in ice, an old man came and asked to speak to Zarathustra.

“Old one, I wished to see you again and speak this to your face before I died.

“Many years ago I came to you and asked for your advice. You told me to shut my door on my wayward son, and I took your advice. Wait until he reforms himself, you said, and I took your advice. But I never saw my son again. He murdered a state official – a man with five children of his own – and was himself killed immediately afterwards. All of my happiness died with him. The grief of his mother doubled my own. Though she did not speak a word of reproach to me, I never felt her love again. Within a year she followed our child to the grave. I hoped to die too, but it has been my fate to live year after year in sorrow; alone and despised.

“This is what I reaped from the seeds of your famous wisdom, Zarathustra. And if I have lived bitter years to reach this day, it can only be so that I may tell you to your face that all your philosophy is poison.”

Zarathustra answered: “I remember your visit very well, and I remember the question you put to me. You did not ask me how to recover your lost happiness. You asked me to tell you the right thing to do. You did not explain what you meant by right, so I inferred it from your other words, and gave you the best answer I could.

“I told you to sever yourself from your son. Your son was sick, and either you were the cause of this sickness by your failure as a father, or you were not. If you did not cause his sickness, it seemed to me that you could not cure it, either. And if you were the cause, then cutting yourself off from him was the only possible way to do him any good.

“You feared that your son would die, or be responsible for the death of another. Both of these fears were realized. How should I have advised you to prevent this? The very same thing might have occurred if you had denounced him to the authorities. Not only that, but you would have violated your own moral precept by informing on your son. Such a course could not be the right thing that you wanted me to tell you. On the other hand you might have continued to shelter him in your home, concealing your knowledge of his violent intentions. In that case, however, you might have abetted even more deaths. That could not be the right thing either, by the standards that you yourself follow. With death on either hand, the only right course is to withdraw yourself and make no choice at all. So did I advise you, and my advice could not have been anything other than it was.

“If you had asked me the best way for you to be happy in your situation, I could have given you some better advice. Happiness is entirely an accident, so there is no right way to do it. You might have asked me: ‘How can I live so that I enjoy the greatest amount of happiness and the least amount of sorrow?’ And I would have told you that this is a logical contradiction. You cannot increase the possibility of happiness without increasing the possibility of sorrow, for they go together like rain and lightning. If you would minimize both, then be like Zarathustra. Have no wife, no children, no expectations of the world and no hopes for the future. Spend your days contemplating human wisdom, which is a little bit happy and a little bit sad, but not an unmanageable amount of either. For a man can’t fall off a mountain that he never climbs.”

Thus spoke Zarathustra. But the man was not consoled, and for the rest of his life he muttered against Zarathustra and warned everyone not to seek his advice. But he was just a bitter old man, fading out of the world like an old stain, and nobody listened to him.

Infamy, Then and Now

2005-12-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

Roosevelt held the small scrap of paper in his trembling hand. It was a crude drawing of ships exploding in a harbor, with bodies flying through the air. Even the fish in the water were crying out in anguish. Written above the sketch were the words "You damned! Go to the devil!" and Japanese characters were jumbled at the right margin.

"Where ... where did you get this?"

"It was dropped over the harbor by a Japanese pilot, Mr. President," Admiral King replied. "The Japanese portion of it says, 'Hark to the Voice of the Moment of Death. Wake up, you fools.'"

"Merciful God." Roosevelt let the paper fall from his fingers. "How many dead, Ernie?"

"We don't know yet, sir. The Oklahoma capsized during the attack, and the Arizona exploded. The decks were crowded with men attending Sunday services. Perhaps as many as two thousand, sir."

"Two thousand ..." Roosevelt raised his spectacles and covered his eyes with his hand.

"This is terrible," Henry Wallace muttered. "Sir, why do they hate us so much?"

"I think the answer to that is rather obvious, Mr. Vice President," Secretary Hull said sadly. "Our country is founded on murder. Basically, we came over here and just started killing people. And we stole Christmas from the Indians."

"No we didn't," Secretary Stimson objected. "We stole it from the pagans."

"Indians are pagans, Harry. I think. Indians are pagans, right, George?"

General Marshall blinked. "How the fuck should I know?"

"Well, I thought you Army people might have noticed, while you were chasing them around and setting fire to their pointy tent things."

"Teepees, Cord," Secretary Knox put in. "Indian tents are called teepees."

"Enough!" The President glowered at them. "I want a plan of action, and I want it now."

"We have to withdraw from the Philippines, of course," Knox said. "Our occupation of the Philippines has made us a target."

"Frank, they bombed Hawaii, damn it, not the Philippines!"

"Yes, but they're on their way to bomb the Philippines now. Sir, have you taken a look at the polls lately? Sixty-five percent of Italians want us to withdraw from the Philippines. Seventy-two percent of Hungarians!"

"Eighty-six percent of Germans, sir!" Secretary Hull interjected. "Eighty-six percent of Germans in a Der Sturmer poll want us to end our military occupation of the Philippines! Everybody hates us, sir."

"And one can hardly blame them, can one?" Stimson sighed. "After the way we stole Alaska from the Russians. And California ... who did we steal California from, again?"

"The French, I think," Wallace replied.

"California, Henry, not Florida!"

"No, no, no," Hull said. "We stole Florida from the Spanish, and Louisiana from the French. California we stole from the Mexicans."

"The hell we did," General Marshall growled. "You mean Texas, not California."

"Well, it was one of those two. Which one has the Alamo thing in it?"

"The what?"

"Everybody shut the hell up!" Roosevelt slammed his fist on the desk, rattling the tea cups. "Cord, I want reports from all our embassies in allied countries. A co-ordinated plan of action ..."

"Sir, haven't you been listening? We have no allies, everybody hates us."

"The British, I mean!"

"Yes, we're all alone," Stimson said sadly. "The French are gone, the Belgians are gone. The Swedes won't help us, either. The Turks ... I think the Turks hate us, too."

"I'm talking about Britain, God damn it! You want me to show where it is on a map?"

"What about the Spaniards?" Admiral King asked.

"Hate us," Wallace sighed.

"Britain!" the President bellowed, jabbing at the map on the wall. "Crumpets and umbrellas! Steak and kidney fucking pie! Even that worthless son of a bitch Kennedy knew where it was! Are you people listening to me?"

"What if we just offer to give Hawaii back to Japan?" Stimson mused.

"Okay, I'll do this thing myself." Roosevelt turned the scrap of paper over and began writing. "Dear Winston ..."

"Sorry we stole Massachusetts," Wallace suggested.

"And I'm making a radio address, as well." Roosevelt scribbled furiously. "December 7th, 1941 ... a day that will live in infamy!"

"Will live where?"

"Sir -"

"Infamy! Infamy! Infamy! Do you hear me, you sons of bitches? Infamy!"

"Frankly sir," Secretary Hull said, "that kind of talk scares me worse than the Japanese attack does."

Great Minds Think Alike

2005-11-17T01:44:00.000-07:00

A Dialogue on My Startling Intellectual Resemblance to Justice Antonin Scalia

GLEN: Sydney Carton of Aggressive Conservative makes an interesting point about my post on Roe V. Wade.

SOCRATES: I would be most grateful if you would share it with us.

ALCIBIADES: As would I. Regale us, please.

GLEN: He points out that Scalia raised similar objections in his dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood V. Casey. So, we kind of think alike. Which I thought was cool.

SOCRATES: Ha ha ha.

ALCIBIADES: Ha ha ha ha.

GLEN: Well, you can laugh all you want to, but there are ... you know, points of congruence, and stuff.

SOCRATES: Points of congruence. Ha ha ha ha.

ALCIBIADES: Ha ha ha ha ha.

SOCRATES: I wonder if Antonin Scalia also got his head caught in a shoe rack when he was a child.

ALCIBIADES: It must be so, Socrates, for how could it be otherwise, when there are so many points of congruence? Ha ha ha ha.

SOCRATES: Wait a minute, wait a minute! Isn't Antonin Scalia on the list of "People Whose Shoes Glen is Not Fit to Lick"?

ALCIBIADES: I seem to recall that he is, indeed. But as you yourself are the author of that monumental work, I defer to your superior scholarship on the matter.

SOCRATES: Alas, no. It is often mistakenly attributed to me, but the list was actually compiled by Heraclitus when he was scamming grant money from the MacArthur Foundation. I merely wrote the introduction to the Esperanto edition. Would you be so kind as to hand me the first volume? We must consult the text at once, for if Scalia is on the list, the theory that he and Glen were separated at birth will stand refuted.

ALCIBIADES: And once again philosophy will be indebted to Socrates.

SOCRATES: Let's see ... Number One, Jeff Goldstein. Number Two, Bon Scott.

GLEN: Bon Scott?

SOCRATES: Number Three, the guy who played "Potsie" on Happy Days.

GLEN: Bon Scott? Are you talking about the guy from AC/DC who choked to death on his own vomit?

SOCRATES: Number Four, Antonin Scalia!

ALCIBIADES: Hah! Hah! Busted!

GLEN: [Expletive deleted]

SOCRATES: It was a beautiful dream while it lasted, wasn't it?

Poems from another winter

2005-11-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

JFK IN HEAVEN

JFK's in Heaven,
He's our chief remembered joy.
Handsome, rich, forever young -
Our brief and shining boy.
May he shine on in our memory
And never fade or dim;
Ask not what he did for us,
Look what we did to him.
We shot him through the head.
(It should have been you instead.
Or maybe Ted ...)

Oh well, let's just remember
The words the poet said:
JFK belonged to Jesus,
And that's really why he's dead.
You see, He only loaned us
Our pretty plastic Jack
To fill our dollhouse Camelot
Until it was time to give him back.
Jesus took him home to Heaven
To sit at his right hand,
And all our sins went with him -
Satan grabbed his nuts and ran.

And the ferryman waived the usual fee;
Oswald went to Hell for free.
So, where does that leave you and me?

Why, right here on the barren earth,
Beneath the veil of tears,
But if we all just keep the faith
We'll quickly pass the years.
And soon we'll all see Jack again
(Oh, we'll never let him go)
And we'll forget the pains we suffered
While we waited here below.
When the first television angel
Welcomes us to the fold,
And the Holy Motorcade
Rolls down the streets of gold ...
There'll be no Vietnam in Heaven,
No wives, no screaming brats.
Our bodies will be glorified -
We'll all be Democrats.
No more burden to bear,
No more price to pay,
Just rolling along forever
With Christ and JFK.

All that loving goodness,
All that charming wit ...
You'll never get enough of it.
No shit.

THERE IS NOTHING NOW OF ME

There is nothing now of me
but her confessions late at night,
when, under the gentle priestly prodding
of her lawful wedded husband,
she undergoes the necessary exorcism.

She conjures me for him;
a fleeting, almost comic figure
with long white fingers and a garbled voice.
A clownish open-casket face
gleams wetly and then evaporates.

But maybe I am not
sent to the swine in my entirety.
Unspoken adumbrations ferment like sins
in warm pools of forgetfulness,
breeding vengeful poltergeists.

I am speechless, blurred and dead.
And yet I will drop photographs
to lie like bombs in dusty undiscovered places,
and scuttle dirty dried leaves
across clean white kitchen tiles.

An Infinity of Possible Gores

2005-10-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

AL GORE, renowned intellectual and former everything

Assorted aides, reporters, sycophants and zipperheads

THE SCENE: "We Media" conference, New York, October 5th 2005

[Enter GORE, accompanied by several aides. He is about to mount the podium and deliver his latest jeremiad. A hushed excitement is in the air, as palpable as Lime Jell-O.]

GORE: I wonder what I should entitle this speech when I anthologize it in my next book?

AIDE: How about "More Gore-Bore for Your Press Corps Whores"?

GORE: Heh. Hey, that kind of rhymes.

AIDE: Yes, sir.

GORE: I could get that Jesse Jackson thing going for me. God, how I've dreamed of getting that Jesse Jackson thing going. That Jesse Jackson ... panache, as it were.

AIDE: Yes sir, as it were, sir.

GORE: That would really show that pasty-assed son of a bitch, wouldn't it? "First Black President", phooey. I got your first black president right here, Bill.

AIDE: Sir, remember to zip that back up before you go out there.

GORE: How do I look?

AIDE: Like a bad ice sculpture of Martin Luther King, sir. Now, remember what we told you about the gesticulating. What do we do when we gesticulate?

GORE: [Thinks a moment] Keep my elbows below my shoulders, and don't knock the microphone over. And be careful not to get that Mussolini thing going.

AIDE: Good, sir. And remember - don't leave the podium and approach the audience, because it creeps them out. And if you get excited and start shouting, remember not to open your mouth all the way because it makes your eyes cross.

GORE: Got it, got it. [Deep breath] Well, I've kept History waiting like a horny teenager long enough. Here I go.

[GORE enters the hall and mounts the podium. Wild applause. Various undergarments are thrown, but they are deflected by the chicken-wire security fence.]

GORE: I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger.

AUDIENCE: Gasp.

GORE: It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions. How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered an alternate universe?

[The lights suddenly intensify, filling the hall with a blinding white glare. The floor seems to sway underfoot. GORE pauses, disoriented. Yamaha Organ "music" swells, then fades as the lights return to normal.]

GORE: Uh ... wow. Did anyone else feel that?

ROD SERLING: Submitted for your approval: Albert Arnold Gore, Junior. An average white middle-brow politician, born and bred in the District of Columbia and propelled to the stellar heights of the American consciousness by his mental prowess and his awesome vanilla mojo. An oratory genius who paints Dali-like landscapes with his tongue. But his latest rhetorical flight is about to make an unscheduled landing in ... The Twilight Zone.

[GORE looks around, confused. Aides pelt him with Little Debbie Granola Snacks to get his attention.]

AIDE: Psst! Sir! Snap out of it!

GORE: Ah, yes. Ahem. As I was saying ... Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?

[For some reason, nearly everyone in the audience has their hand raised. GORE pauses again, bewildered. Something strange is happening.]

GORE: Um ... On the eve of the nation's decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?"

LARRY FLYNT: Excuse me, Mr. President? Mr. President!

GORE: What? What did you say?

LARRY FLYNT: Mr. President, Larry Flynt from the Washington Post. Sir, if the Senate was empty, how do you know Senator Byrd really said this, and if he was talking, how could the halls have been silent?

GORE: Uh ...

ELEANOR CLIFT: Mr. President! MISTER PRESIDENT! Eleanor Clift, Weekly Standard. Did you say "invade Iraq"? When did we decide to invade Iraq? Don't you mean Poland?

[KARL ROVE steps up and leans toward the microphone, shouldering GORE aside.]

KARL ROVE: Of course the president meant to say "our decision to invade Poland". He just misspoke a little. Don't make a big deal out of it, Eleanor.

ELEANOR CLIFT: Do you know what "freedom of the press" means, Karl?

KARL ROVE: Sure. Do you know what STFU stands for?

GORE: Wait a minute, wait a minute! What's going on here? [To KARL ROVE] What the hell are you doing here? I'm giving a speech. This isn't a press conference. Why are they asking questions?

KARL ROVE: Al, this is a press conference. You didn't overdose on nasal spray again, did you?

GORE: Am I really the president? Of, like, the United States?

KARL ROVE: What do you want, another recount? Get a grip.

GORE: And Tipper is the First Lady?

KARL ROVE: [Puts hand over microphone] Al, honey, you know I love you. But I swear to God, if you call me "Tipper" in public one more time I'm going to slap your mouth right off your face.

GORE: Wait a minute ... you're Tipper?

KARL ROVE: Are you deliberately being a bitch? We'll talk about this at home, now do your stupid press conference.

REPORTER: Mr. President! Mr. President, with the vicious hate-filled right-wing attacks that Hillary Clinton is making on your adminstration every day, do you ever regret creating talk radio?

ANOTHER REPORTER: Mr. President? Mr. President!

LEVITATING PURPLE BLOB WITH MULTIPLE EYESTALKS: Nerber Blistrix? Nerber Blistrix!

YET ANOTHER REPORTER: Mr. President, isn't it true that you're standing behind that podium because you're not wearing any pants?

GORE: [Looking down] Oh, my God.

AIDE: Sir! Sir, wake up!

GORE: Aaagh! Aaagh! Aaagh!

AIDE: It's okay, it's okay. You're okay, you just ---

GORE: What happened?

AIDE: You were reading over your speech and you fell asleep standing up, sir. We've warned you about that.

GORE: My God, I had the most horrible dream.

AIDE: Are you going to be okay, sir? Should we cancel the speech?

GORE: No, no, of course not. It was just a nightmare, that's all. The media conference is counting on me, I can't let them down.

AIDE: Media conference? What media conference? This is the dedication ceremony for the Rush Limbaugh Presidential Library, remember? Are you sure you're okay?

GORE: AAAAAAGH! AAAAAAGH! AAAAAAAAGH!

ROD SERLING: An old adage tells us, "Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it." We might add: "Be careful what you fear, because it might come true." If not for you, then for some other you, in some other dimension. An important safety tip from ... The Twilight Zone.

Learning Math with Paul Krugman, Part Two

2005-10-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

In the previous installment of Learning Math with Paul Krugman, Professor Krugman showed us how to fudge presidential polling data to make it say whatever we want it to say, so that when we lose we can claim that we were cheated.

It is a paradoxical yet fundamental truth of Mathematics that the larger the numbers are, the easier it is to tamper with them (Zogby's Law). Every good CPA knows that it's much easier to "lose" a million dollars of Walmart's money than it is to cover up a $20 shortfall in an office football pool. Only a true Grandmaster of Fuzzy Math can work successfully with the very small numbers.

Alas, the results are not always guaranteed. Witness Krugman's recent attempt to pretend that the number 5 is the number 3, with an intellectual audacity not seen since Parapsychology adopted Quantum Mechanics. Too bad the shrinking violets at The New York Times' editorial board were unable to appreciate such a bold creative effort, or they would not have printed this jellyfish retraction:

"In describing the results of the ballot study by the group led by The Miami Herald in his column of Aug. 26, Paul Krugman relied on the Herald report, which listed only three hypothetical statewide recounts, two of which went to Al Gore. There was, however, a fourth recount, which would have gone to George W. Bush. In this case, the two stricter-standard recounts went to Mr. Bush. A later study, by a group that included The New York Times, used two methods to count ballots: relying on the judgment of a majority of those examining each ballot, or requiring unanimity. Mr. Gore lost one hypothetical recount on the unanimity basis."

Once again mathematical innovation is stifled by the hobgoblins of tiny philistine minds.

Intelligent Design as Philosophy

2005-09-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

The World is composed of facts, not of things.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Woe unto you, lawyers! For you have stolen the key of knowledge. You have not entered in yourselves, but you tried to hinder those that have.
LUKE 12:52

[This was intended as a comment on the continuing discussion of Intelligent Design at Winds of Change, but is posted here for reasons of bandwidth economy. When nobody reads what you write, you save a lot of bandwidth.]

....

Gathering on some of the comments above, if Intelligent Design is understood as philosophy, then what does it have to offer philosophy?

I think the broad conclusion of philosophy vis-a-vis religion is not the "Death of God", but the Socratic wisdom that our metaphysical knowledge is severely finite.

At this point the hard empiricist stops, draws a line in the dirt, and says "This marks the absolute outer limits of science and reason. Beyond this, everything is imcomprehensible and should be ignored. If anything beyond this point exists at all, which it probably doesn't."

Of course, that empiricist is wrong. Even science doesn't respect that boundary. Physicists and cosmologists have been out in weirdo territory having a ball for years. Sometimes even the mathematicians are jumping the fence and running wild. The laboratories are left behind on these excursions.

Wittgenstein said "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", as if we had to observe a reverent silence towards all that fundamentally unknowable Great Beyond. Hume had already gone him one better by threatening to burn all the books that sinned against empiricism. But we're not going to shut up and we're not going to let anyone have our books until they pry our cold dead fingers off them, so that's out.

Furthermore, we know very well that scientism, which sneers at a God that it can't define, can't even understand itself. The logical positivists tried to help out here, and made a huge mess. Thomas Kuhn showed that science doesn't all work as smug and neat as it's supposed to, and Godel and Heisenberg showed some of the reasons why. So we owe science due respect, not absolute obedience.

So my point is this:

Either we acknowledge that science doesn't teach us everything that we want to know, and does not express everything that we need to say (this is the correct conclusion - nudge, nudge), or we try to push that empirical barrier way the hell out into Kingdom Come, so that we can stuff everything into a proper knock-down scientific understanding.

Unfortunately I think Intelligent Design is going straight down the second road. In a handbasket.

Who gave them leave to do this? You guessed it - the worthless God-forsaken Postmodernists, that's who. They showed that you could invent an entire philosophy out of totally bogus jargon and get away with it clean. Think of what you could do with impressive-looking mathematical equations (better yet, statistics!) instead of meaningless run-on sentences. Another four-lane cloverleaf highway straight to Hell, in nothing flat.

Why Roe V. Wade Must Be Overturned, Encased in Lead, and Sunk to the Bottom of the Marianas Trench

2005-09-22T23:29:00.000-07:00

There to Lie Forever Among Tubeworms and Busted Russian Submarines

Enough is enough is bloody well enough.

Let us leave aside the merits or demerits of the legal reasoning in Roe. Leave aside the moral objections and rationalizations of abortion, of judicial activism, of settled law, of reproductive rights, of stare decisis and lex idioticus ad infinitum. None of these things are relevant to the present discussion.

The salient point is this: Roe V. Wade has had a disastrous and insidious effect on the highest judicial process in the country. It has hijacked an entire branch of the United States government, which means we only have two left. It has reduced all public discussion of constitutional law to one word: ABORTION. The grand legacy of John Marshall, John Jay, and Oliver Wendell Holmes is now represented by a single lump of tissue: ABORTION. The evolution of judicial thinking in the greatest nation on earth has been stopped dead by ABORTION. The vitally important democratic function of reviewing and choosing suitable candidates for the greatest court in history has been gruesomely hewed down to a single splinter: ABORTION. Blind-folded Justice is almost mute; she can only croak the word ABORTION.

Socrates, what is truth? ABORTION. Conan, what is best in life? ABORTION. What's the atomic weight of Germanium? ABORTION. What is the very meaning of existence itself - what single word breaks the silence of those infinite spaces that filled great Pascal with dread? ABORTION, ABORTION, ABORTION, ABORTION, ABORTION.

Like I said, enough of this monomaniacal cretinism. Enough already.

This one-note ukulele again played incessantly during the present confirmation process, which was all about Roe V. Wade [ABORTION]. Griswold V. Connecticut made a comical cameo appearance, but not even anti-Catholic bigots (well-represented among Roberts critics) are silly enough to believe that Roberts is going to confiscate all the prophylactics. Invoking Griswold was just an amateurish McCarthyite tactic intended to point the finger at Roberts' religion: i.e., to remind everyone that Roberts is a Catholic who might be insufficiently enthusiastic about ABORTION. So unenthusiastic, in fact, that he might overturn Roe V. Wade, even in defiance of the Pope. (So far as liberals are concerned, the Pope is Mario Cuomo.)

Hillary Clinton, the Karma Chameleon of the "New" Democratic Party, has turned the same old tacky color in this debate: She can't support Roberts' nomination because his "failure" to answer questions about [ABORTION] make him unfit to stand as a guardian at the constitutional Shrine of [ABORTION].

Make no mistake, then - the Supreme Court is no longer the Supreme Court of past fame. It is now the National Abortion Tribunal, and its members are no longer jurists, they are the Keepers of the Abortion Toggle Switch.

]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]-----0-->0-----

]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]Fig. 1A. Abortion Toggle Switch, closed.
]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]Suction motors will engage.

As we can see from the schematic diagram above, the Abortion Toggle Switch is currently in the closed (ON) position. The entire purpose of the so-called Supreme Court, as current wisdom understands that purpose, is to stare at this switch all day wondering whether they should play with it or not.

Now this is a sad state for this once-great court to have fallen to, and makes me wonder if we don't need another court to assume the neglected responsibilities of the current one. Then the Abortion Toggle Switch could be moved to some remote corner of the public's attention, and the various abortion partisans could play their endless game of Keep Away without buggering up the entire constitutional process.

However, this would require amending the constitution itself, with all attendant fuss. The simpler course is to push for Roe V. Wade to be overturned, so that the Supreme Court can get out of the abortion business. And stay the hell out of the abortion business, forever.

At once the Pro-Choice legions arise in anguish, complaining that they will never be able to survive the savage Darwinian environment of American politics without the protection of Roe V. Wade. Well, cry me a freaking river. It's about time that you gelatinous sob sisters learned to paddle your own canoe. If you haven't got the guts to make it in the real world, you'll have to use something other than the United States Constitution as an artificial life support system.

If you believe in it, go out and fight for it in the state houses and the legislatures, like an American. If you can't handle it, go practice on some more elementary front of the culture war, and get yourselves trained up. Sisters are supposed to be doing it for themselves, you pussies.

Concluding Postscript on the Death of Yassir Arafat

2005-09-14T10:28:00.000-07:00

There was an old man from Ramallah,
Who unexpectedly went to see Allah.
When asked, "By what deed
Were you made a shaheed?"
He said "I choked on Gâteau au ricotta."