Cochliomyia hominivorax delendum est.
How’s that for eliminationist rhetoric?
I feel vaguely guilty, making such a deal of accepting John C. Wright into my life. After all, what’s he done since then? A turgid apologia (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi) that in no way indicated he’d thought at all as promised on what the Elders of Sodom had wrote, and an all-but-unreadable screed against empiricism (I think): Neo cannot say why he chooses to fight, and thus homosex is wrong, quod erat dammit. Overall a disappointing performance I must say.
—And then John H. Richardson has to cast a chilly pall over the whole enterprise anyway by going and talking to Mike Austin, an eighth-grade teacher in Oklahoma who until recently was saving the world one essay at a time over at the Return of Scipio.
Yeah, that Return of Scipio. Took me a minute too.
And Richardson has a lovely conversation or two with Austin, who seems a much nicer person than the Scipio Resurgent, much I’m sure as John C. Wright is much nicer than 
johncwright; he seems a hale enough fellow, I suppose, who could essay a hearty laugh—but that’s just how it works. Most of us are better than our manifestos.
But still and all:
As we drive back to my hotel through the clean wide streets of Oklahoma City, I take a chance on some gentle teasing: “Everything’s so well-groomed, you got no garbage, no graffiti—I do not see the collapse of American civilization here.”
His answer comes out cold as a can from a Coke machine: “If you were to look at the streets of Nazi Germany in 1936, they would appear a lot like this. Probably cleaner.”
I’ve heard this exact argument before, from the Glenn Beck follower types, but I can’t believe they really mean to compare their fellow Americans to the most cold-blooded killers in human history. It must be rhetoric. They can’t be that alienated from the society that has given them, beyond any civilization in history, lives of such extraordinary privilege and comfort. My voice rises with my exasperation. “You could say that about any town anywhere!”
His answer comes back steady and patient, like he’s explaining history to one of his eighth graders. “The government in Washington, DC has encroached so much on states’ rights, it seems like we don’t have a federal system any more, rather an imperial one. And when the states lose their rights guaranteed in the Constitution, then what you have is tyranny.”
Obama is a fascist, he continues. Setting the limits of investment-bank incomes and claiming the right to seize General Motors are just two examples. Where in the Constitution does it grant him those powers? Are we a nation of laws, or is this a lawless regime that sends out its goons like Mussolini?
(And there it is, the voice of the blog: What has always stood against lawless men? Force. That is the only idiom understood by such men. To answer lawless men with force is to speak their language.)
[…]
“There are things worse than violence, John,” Austin tells me. “Slavery is worse than violence. The most peaceful place in the world is the cemetery.”
It is really a quite serious matter that the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back…
There’s a new outfit in town—
—whose name’s suggested perhaps by all the glittering potentates who came to do homage to the aforementioned Elders of Sodom on receipt of their open letter to Wright. The basic mission statement for members reads as follows:
As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.
This first of September, the Kalends of Sextilis, they’re asking for a show of hands. They suggest a link to fiction which is in any way on mission, and while there’s this or that I could point to, there’s also this or that game I don’t want to give away, and so instead I’ll highlight an old series of posts:
It’s how I started swatting at screwflies, anyway.
John C. Wright will of course forever be known for or at least in light of his hatred of homosex, but for all that he can’t bring himself to wish for the destruction of its practitioners, adherents, and supporters; at worst, we all get to sit in closets again, as Morality ever-so-passively just somehow returns. —Mike Austin, the (former) Scipio Resurgent, is at once more cosmopolitan and strict (then, Scipio was famously Græcophilic), but even he can’t bring himself to take the action he seems to think is vital; can’t help but laugh with the mainstream media man who’s come to talk to him; can only lash out at abstract ideas that have never set foot in Oklahoma or anywhere else. —They may have gone around the bend, but there’s enough shame yet to prevent them from actually advocating the clear, precise, destructive, eliminationist praxis needed to bring about the world they think they want.
And where there’s shame, there’s hope?
Room enough, anyway, for words: and enough of them, from stories told, from lives lived, from experiences actually had, will always outweigh an argument merely propounded.
We’ve always been better than our manifestos.
Sure thing.
Who’s keeping the office pool on Christianist Ministers Likely to be Found in the Next Six Months with a Baggie of Meth and a Rentboy these days? I want to put a benjamin down on Steven Anderson.
Go, look, see.
Yes, the beginning of this chapter’s been a slow burn (in more ways than one), but if you haven’t read this week’s Dicebox page because you’re doing the web equivalent of waiting for the trade, well, you’re putting off till later what you could be appreciating right the heck now.
Just walk it off down Highway 61.
I was thinking as I wrote the below of comfort zones and how far my daily round tests mine, and I don’t think it’s to my credit that the writer on my feeds most likely to make me roll my eyes is Radley Balko. —For all that I fiercely agree with the work he’s done and the fight he fights, there’s still that fundamental assumption clash, and when he starts to talk about say health care I find I’m biting my tongue.
The point that’s missed in the Bob Dylan story, as a less inflammatory for-instance. —Dylan goes for a walk before a concert in Long Branch, New Jersey; somebody sees an old man in a jacket wandering around in the rain, looking at houses, and calls the police; the young whippersnappers don’t realize they’re dealing with, y’know, Bob Dylan, and take this old man who has no ID back to where he says he came from, where he’s vouched for, and exeunt. —I saw it as a charming little anecdote about how celebrity somehow still doesn’t always guarantee special treatment, with a grace note re: the ineffable charms of Long Branch’s run-down, once-glorious Shore-side neighborhoods; Balko, well—
I don’t know. I find it pretty depressing. There was a time when we condescendingly used the term “your papers, please” to distinguish ourselves from Eastern Block countries and other authoritarian states. Post-Hibbel, America has become a place where a harmless, 68-year-old man out on a stroll can be stopped, interrogated, detained, and forced to produce proof of identification to state authorities, despite having committed no crime.
I guess I just don’t see the punchline.
Joe Strummer in the comments makes the obvious point:
How is it that it’s suddenly the “end of America” when a 68 year old white guy gets stopped by cops and asked where he is? Hasn’t this been a feature of the African-American experience since… whenever? Welcome to the party, folks.
And I don’t know about you, but I’m instead thinking of “The Pedestrian.”
“Your name?” said the police car in a metallic whisper. He couldn’t see the men in it for the bright light in his eyes.
“Leonard Mead,” he said.
“Speak up!”
“Leonard Mead!”
“Business or profession?”
“I guess you’d call me a writer.”
“No profession,” said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.
“You might say that,” said Mr Mead.
He hadn’t written in years. Magazines and books didn’t sell anymore. Everything went on in the tomb-like houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multi-colored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.
“No profession,” said the phonograph voice, hissing. “What are you doing out?”
“Walking,” said Leonard Mead.
“Walking!”
“Just walking,” he said simply, but his face felt cold.
“Walking, just walking, walking?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Walking where? For what?”
“Walking for air. Walking to see.”
Balko dates our fall from grace to the Supreme Court’s decision in Hibbel, from 2004. Bradbury wrote “The Pedestrian” in 1951, after getting stopped by the police while walking with a friend down Wilshire Boulevard—
Bradbury answered “Well, we’re putting one foot in front of the other.” The policeman didn’t appreciate Ray’s humor and he became suspicious of Bradbury and his friend for walking in an area where there were no pedestrians. After some arguing the policeman told them to go home and to not walk any more. Bradbury said “Yes, sir, I’ll never walk again.”
The Dylan story, and the Bradbury story, are measures of how we still aren’t living up to an ideal, not how far we’ve fallen from some idyllic past. To pretend otherwise is to mistake one’s rhetoric for the real—the same error in kind if not degree as fighting off a homosexual lobby comprised mostly of happily married heterosexual couples. It may well fit the narrative of one’s current fierce fight—Hibbel is a nasty little watermark in the constant erosion of the Fourth Amendment—but it seems as if you’re seriously arguing that there was ever an America where the cops wouldn’t stop a 68-year-old man out on a stroll, or any of the rest of us who looked to someone like we didn’t belong. And that makes you seem (charmingly, frustratingly, dangerously) out of touch.
One way of course to avoid or at least curtail these assumptions, these privileges, these rhetorical irrealities, is to read outside one’s comfort zone, and I’m in no way trying to imply Balko doesn’t. Nothing’s a guarantee some asshole on the internet won’t find some nit to pick. I’m just trying to bring it back home, you know? Here is this boat in which we all find ourselves. —Anyway, with the addition of johncwright as noted below, I think it’s safe to say Balko’s no longer anywhere near the person I read most likely to make me roll my eyes, a distinction anyway of dubious merit for all concerned.
John C. Wright is recoiling in craven fear and trembling, and I don’t feel so good myself.
Actually, I don’t know that he’s necessarily recoiling in craven fear and trembling. But: he has taken down his storied post, “More Diversity and More Perversity in the Future!” in which he excoriated the SyFy [sic] channel for “recoil[ing] in fear and trembling when lectured by homosex activists,” after said post received 800+ lecturing, hectoring comments; and besides, I can never pass up an obscure joke.
I’ve been going by his LiveJournal every night now, ever since I caught a link to that rant (via the Mump), and I figured out this was that guy who wrote those books I’ve never quite gotten around to picking up—and now I can’t tell whether I’m glad I dodged a bullet, or whether I wish I hadn’t.
Tonight, after nuking the aforementioned storied post, he (in the course of defending his apology) posted the following:
First let us clarify who the enemy is. It is not the homosexuals. The enemy is the homosexual lobby (who for the most part are happily married heterosexuals) that are devoted to a Leftwing antinomian agenda, and willing and eager to use pressure tactics to enforce the doctrinal conformity so near and dear to the heart of the Left.
Which is me giving you the full context of the paragraph, and not the experience of reading it; the experience of reading it was rather more like—
The enemy is the homosexual lobby (who for the most part are happily married heterosexuals) that bleep! does not compute
When I found my jaw and resettled it on my face I found myself nodding along—well, yes, in a world in which the homosexual lobby is for the most part comprised of happily married heterosexuals, well, sure, perhaps there might very well be something sinister about their devotion to an antinomian agenda. —That our world, the world in which both I and John C. Wright unarguably exist, does not in any way resemble this world does not in any way invalidate the logic; merely the premise.
Sorry. Jaw’s still a little loose. —There.
I tried to post a comment. I was going to quote the bit about the homosexual lobby (who for the most part are happily married heterosexuals) and I was going to ask whether I might ask how he came by this particular fact. But he’s locked down comments to his LiveJournal; only those he’s added as friends are allowed to comment at all. The rest of us are banned.
Can’t say I blame him. The shitstorm was mighty. Battening the hatches is only rational.
MacAllister and I have not exactly been arguing or even discussing but more like honing points off each other. I’m going to quote hers first because it’s my blog and I get the last word, and I’ll grab hers from this tor.com thread:
I think we cannot conflate the art and the artist.
Actually, what I think is more vehement than the above statement.
In 1953, Isaac Asimov called SF “that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings” and I find that description compelling precisely because so much of the impact of science upon human beings has precisely to do with issues that, once upon a time, were dictated to us by shamans, holy men, or chicken entrails.
I think it’s damaging to conflate the art with the artist. The writer is not the book. When we’re talking about the literature of ideas, especially, I think it’s damaging to us as thinkers, readers, and writers to artificially and arbitrarily shield ourselves from ideas we disagree with, find unpleasant, or even repugnant.
And there is nothing in that I do not agree with, but—and I’m going to grab mine from a whiles back when the Islets of Bloggerhans were talking about Orson Scott Card again because, you know, not inappropriate:
Science fiction is largely a fiction of setting: the bulk of the iceberg that’s unseen, underwater, is the act of world-building, and in that act, politics is paramount. (One is building a polis, after all.) —Therefore, it’s all-too-appropriate to keep in mind an author’s politics when considering their science fiction: an author who, say, considers homosexuality to be an aberration, is un- (or perhaps less) likely to build a world that would appeal to a reader who does not. There’s an assumption clash: one of his fundamental, foundational bedrocks is abhorrent to me, and vice-versa.
One can respond: well, yes, but there’s nothing about aberrant homosexuality in Ender’s Game, so how can it clash? Heck, there’s nothing in that book about homosexuality at all! And I will resist the urge to say oh, you think so? and I will even resist the urge to say precisely! —Instead, I’ll allow as how there’s frequently large gaps in the jerry-rigged polis left as exercises for the reader: one can hardly describe every kitchen sink, after all; one must make assumptions, and count on the reader doing likewise (which among other reasons is why fan fiction [and slash fiction] is so popular in science fiction). But that’s precisely why when those assumptions suddenly clash, it’s unsettling, even violently dissonant.
Which is why it’s not an argument and hardly a discussion. I’m talking about why I’m no longer terribly interested in reading Card’s work, nor Wright’s; she’s talking about why such work must remain available to be read. —A book doesn’t always have to be an axe for the frozen sea within, for God’s sake, but one should never lose the ability or God forbid the inclination to read for the hacking. But when the only challenge a book’s likely to pose is the challenge not to throw it across the room—
Why’d this come up in the first place? —Most of the 800+ comments to that storied post were along the lines of “I’ll never read your books again, thanks for warning me off, you’ll never get dime one of my money.” (“Every time you bloviate offensively on the internet, a reader swears off your work for life,” says Catherynne Valente, in one of the many open letters to Wright that have sprung up of late.)
Now, there’s a difference between “I do not wish to read you, or support you with my money,” and “You should never be published ever again!” though I can appreciate how it might be a difficult distinction to make on the receiving end. Especially when it’s more overtly couched as a boycott: “I’m never buying a Tor book again so long as they keep publishing writers like you.” (I’m sure John Mackey can sympathize.) But there’s also a difference between “You should never be published again!” and “I’ve fucking had it with living in world where you and yours make the rules!” —And I think what it is is my Emma Goldman baseline’s not wanting to be part of a revolution that depends on shutting people up.
Even if one of the ways I try to keep my little corner of the world safe from them and theirs is to, you know, not bother to read works by this author or that.
Barry and I were emailing about Wright and Card and suchlike. “Ah!” I said at one point. “Sitting in judgment of other people with my morning coffee on a chilly day off from work with a baby in my lap. —Have I mentioned how glad I am she’ll grow up in a world where these moral monsters are marginalized? Have I mentioned how terrified I am I’m wrong?”
That initial, storied post is an ugly thing, a ham-handed attempt at excoriating the SyFy [sic] channel from an infantilely Manichean lex naturalis, full of the sneering braggadocio of a playground bully preening for his sycophants (says me, with a sneer). —His basic argument (expounded in a later comment to that post) was a syllogism in Camestres:
Odd as it sounds, I was fully loyal to the sexual revolution as an idea. Then someone tried to convince me that two lesbians licking each other in the crotch was the same in all ways, just as sacred, just as romantic, just as normal, just as beautiful as Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Iseult, Micky and Minnie, Adam and Eve, Jove and Juno, Father Sky and Mother Earth, me and my wife.
(Or Ruth and Naomi? says me, preening.) —And yes, the premises fall apart in your hand when you gingerly try to pick them up, but yes, it’s a just-so story, and thus irremediable to them what believes. What’s striking is the ugliness of the language, the revulsion, the almost-desperate hodgepodge of totemic icons thrown up in defense, all in an argument that insists on the rigor of its logic, on the intractable ad hominemity of the other side. It seems to have struck Wright, too:
I think my posts were accurate but were not measured.
Let me give you a hypothetical:
Imagine standing in the waiting room of a hospital, and overhearing a doctor joking with a nurse about some patient about to die, and the doc uses gross slang to describe the patient’s bowels dissolving and so on—and you realize that patient is your loved one.
Now, the doctor said nothing untrue, and he was engaged in what actually he thought a private conversation (even if it was in a public spot). But you would be shocked, and he should be careful of your feelings.
And—well, yes, the analogy’s strained and rather terribly objectionable, but the basic sentiment, the apology itself, that’s sound enough, surely? Commendable, even, in an internet where no one ever walks anything back ever? (Though it’s with a poor and a threadbare, sketchy grace: “I had damn well better offer these people, enemies or not, the olive branch, and quickly. They will not accept it, if I am any judge of character: indeed, they will take it as a sign of weakness and redouble their efforts. But that is not my concern and not the orders I was given.”)
Except—the “you” above is a very particular, rather singular you, with a very particular and singular loved one who’s about to (figuratively) die:
There was one commenter whose feelings I actually hurt. His mother is a homosexual, and he was rightfully offended at the language I used to describe homosexuality. Him I apologized to privately, but I would also like to do it publicly. It is hard to tell, just from reading words, when people are being sincere, and when they are not, but I thought this one guy was sincere, and that most of the rest of you were engaged in rhetoric.
To him, wherever he is, I am sorry. I regret my words, and I regret my thoughtlessness. Please forgive me.
—And the queerly thrilling horror that’s been creeping over me the past few days comes sharply into focus, with all this talk of a monolithic Left and their antinomian agendas and a homosexual lobby filled with heterosexual couples and a straight Sappho and the evil space monkeys: he literally does not realize that every single person who snapped at him in the 800+ comments left on that storied post, every single one, was reacting out of anger that had come through grief, was just as rightfully offended by the language he’d used, was no matter how rude in response just as deserving of apologies both public and private, that each of them was or loved or knew someone whose life had been bent or broken or wrecked or deflected by the appallingly arbitrary rules he was defending, his dreadfully unnatural lex naturalis—
Yeah, but I wasn’t going to do, well, that.
This was about—what, exactly? Grace, yes, and the koan; trying to get past the two-minute hate—I did say it was anger that came from the grief, and did allow as how the responses were rude (and got my own licks in: “Shorter Wright: My sexual peccadilloes are moral imperatives; your sexual peccadilloes are suspect; their sexual peccadilloes are disgusting”—hardly one of my finer moments)—but trying to make a point of how maybe one should listen to an objectionable author just as one might listen to their works, when really you’re more than ready to sit in judgment on a chilly August night over a splash of bourbon, is just as chary as offering up an olive branch you’re ready to snatch back at the first rebuff. —And there’s more than a little disaster tourism in all this, too, which I realize mucks up the clarity of that up there, but none of our motives are ever pure.
And maybe if I did get a chance to ask him directly how he came by the striking notion that the homosexual lobby are for the most part happily married heterosexuals, he’d just tell me that by “homosexual lobby” he meant, of course, the monolithic Left, and as homosexuals comprise a minority of the Left much as they do the population at large well QED, but maybe he wouldn’t; I don’t know. There’s a herky-jerky searching quality in all the self-serving bluster that, well. Doesn’t so much fill me with hope. But it’s certainly captured my attention the past few days.
Or maybe it’s just I have a weakness for pompous brio. —Whichever; anyway, tonight I added John C. Wright as a friend over to the LiveJournal.
(Oh, I added Catherynne Valente, too. After all, her baseline work for the bare minimum hit of the stuff she’s jonesing for, for which she’d forgive an artist just about any asshattery, is Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale—and what are the odds? So’s mine!)
Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!
I realize Kathryn Jean Lopez is beyond shame; I realize there is no hope for the National Review, and perhaps there never was. Still. This needs to be spread as far and wide as possible:
If only as an object lesson in how not to play this little game.
Bring it on.
“America’s psychopathic healthcare system is sacrificing tens of thousands of lives, mainly working class and African American, for the sake of profit. Health advisors and boards of trustees routinely kill people, knowingly, to defend the bottom-line. Right now, those who are scaremongering about the NHS are lobbying vehemently to ensure that nothing about this vile state of affairs ever changes. They aren’t stupid enough not to understand the consequences of what they are doing, but the current rate of death and misery is part of creating an optimal investment climate. This is social sadism. This is a humanitarian catastrophe. To remedy this intolerable state of affairs, I propose a lobby or solidarity group to ‘Save America’ (or ‘Save America From Itself,’ or ‘Stop Them Before They Kill Again’—you get the picture). There should be rock concerts in Hyde Park to raise money for the millions of Americans who have no healthcare. Bob Geldof and Bono—and here’s the excellent thing—would be totally uninvolved in any of this. Funds should be available for those who have been told by their insurance companies that their life is less important than shareholder value, to pay for an airline ticket to any country where they can get treated properly. And all support should be given to those heroic freedom fighters taking on the inhuman monsters who have been getting away with killing their people for far too long. I bet negative PR like that would get some reforms going pretty fucking quickly.” —lenin
Really a quite serious matter.
And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
The funny thing about Sarah Palin’s “death panel” bullshit isn’t that it’s completely pulled out of the collective ass of the Republican party, no. The kneeslappingly hilarious punchline is of course that these “death panels” already exist:
Ensuring that everyone has access to care has become a full-time cause for Ms. Demko. She and her family have been without insurance since her daughter was born four years ago with what doctors say is Down syndrome. Her husband is a self-employed contractor so the family had relied on her job as a substance abuse counselor for their health insurance.
But Demko said she couldn’t keep working full time with an infant with special needs. When she quit, she didn’t realize that would result in her family’s being unable to get health insurance.
Ohio does not require insurance companies to cover children with disabilities considered to be preexisting conditions.
The fact that “Obama’s bureaucrats” are working overtime to pass legislation that would (ideally) prevent private health insurance coverage from being denied for precisely that is precisely why the right wing has desperately kicked out the bottom of the barrel and started clawing its way down through the earth’s crust.
The UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”
One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.
The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
—Investor’s Business Daily, “How House Bill Runs Over Grandma” [via]
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (but intends to retire from this post in 2009), a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and the distinguished research chair at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
“I realize,” said John Holbo, “it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back…”
Because you aren’t funny!
I don’t know; it’s a good point, it’s a very very good point, but the column’s terribly earnest, and anyway the Joker’s beef has to be sympathetic or else the discourse doesn’t work, you know? Do you really want to give them that card? —And besides, what we’re talking about here are useful idiots who’ve been ginned up to protest the fact that their health insurance companies will be forced to abide by the terms of their policies. The same useful idiots who earlier this year marched against their own taxes being cut. We aren’t talking Heath Ledger. We aren’t talking Jack Nicholson. We aren’t talking Cesar Romero and we’re certainly not talking Marshall Rogers. We’re talking Gathering of the Juggalos.
Still: turnabout, fair play, and my his eyes look creepy when you brush away the fake remorse:
Damn! They’ve sussed it out.
I see from Orcinus that O’Reilly and Goldberg found themselves a couple of brain cells, rubbed ’em together, and dimly glimpsed what debblish mischief we’ve been up to all this time with the ridiculing of the flat birthers:
Goldberg
I have a theory. And the theory is this: That the Chicago Mafia inside the White House want to keep this crazy controversy going. Because the longer it goes, the better the chance that they will conflate the crazy right-wing fringe with regular conservatives and regular Republicans.
O’Reilly
That’s not a bad theory.
Oh, but boys. It’s so much larger than that. See, as Frank Rich demonstrates (for those who will read), it’s not just the “regular” conservatives and “regular” Republicans we want to tie to this madness:
The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name. Last summer, Cokie Roberts of ABC News even faulted him for taking a vacation in his home state of Hawaii, which she described as a “foreign, exotic place,” in contrast to her proposed choice of Myrtle Beach, SC, in the real America of Dixie.
Or wait—is Cokie actually a “regular” conservative? It’s so easy to lose sight of them, these days.
Politics as she is spoke.
It’s a truism that conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. —If so, Sarah Palin just sealed the deal to become the first truly successful conservative politician since the sainted Reagan.
Upton’s rede.
It’s a popular thing to say, usually these days in the context of why it is global-warming denialists are so insistent on denying reality—
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
—which is one of the reasons why Ygelsias has become so dependent (rhetorically) on murdering Bangladesh. But:
If my pension fund is buying [crap mortgages] from Goldman, and my pension fund loses lots of value, that’s not Goldman’s fault. No one is forcing anyone to buy anything. The only thing Goldman is guilty of is making profits.
That’s from Matt Taibbi, quoting email written in response to his magisterial article on Goldman Sachs and why we’re currently where we are, in what should have been the resurgent golden age, the return to the nines. —“I’m not even going to go there,” says Taibbi of his interlocutor; “the psychology of a human being who would take the time to actually write in a complaint like that is so bizarre that it would take more time than I have today to even begin discussing it.”
Which is not to say I have an answer myself. Oh, there’s something in it of Dickinson’s corollary to Upton’s rede:
Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich, than face the reality of being poor.
From 1776; skip to about 4 minutes, 20 seconds in.
But is that enough? In the desire to deny one’s own poverty, is it really so difficult to understand that one’s own salary, the very possibility one might one day be comfortable if not rich, is being stolen by the very system one thinks one is protecting? —Somebody’s got to be rich, and it might as well not be me?
I have no idea. Just go read Taibbi.
If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain—an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere—high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth—pure profit for rich individuals.
Half-learning all the moves.
Seriously, io9, how the hell do you write even a puff-piece on The Last Airbender movie without even a gesture toward its calamitous casting calls? I mean, over a third of my traffic these days is from people googling up this article right here…
The 140 is no excuse.
There’s apparently some concern out there about the tabloidization of TPM, about which, well, Marshall & co. have always had an impish gleam in their collective eye, and anyway, how much further do they have to fall before they’re even as bad as the Washington Post?
No, I come to criticize TPM for something altogether other: popularizing the use of “spox” as some sort of ghastly Varietysprech for “spokesperson”:
ABC’s Jake Tapper just twittered in a report that Gov. Sanford has now made contact with his office.
Gov Sanford called office + was “taken aback” when learning of interest his trip has garnered, his spox sez. Will return to office tomorrow.
I don’t care how much trim you have to lose to fit the hed. This must stop. Immediately.
The consonants and vowels; the consequence of sounds.
And here I am, (belatedly) recommending you go read Barry’s transactional analysis of free (as in speech).
Crap.
Saw this taped to the back window of a Suzuki on the way into work, not so much a bumper sticker as a placard—
A government big enough to supply you with everything you need, is a government big enough to take away everything you have…
—Thomas Jefferson
And I hope your nose wrinkled as immediately at that as mine did: I hope the horrid clanging dissonance between the words spoken and the speaker putated, in language, in political and historical consciousness, in punctuation, struck you as hard and as fast as it did me. “Bullshit,” I snarled, with perhaps more vituperation than was absolutely necessary, but commuting makes me cranky, and anyway he was driving like a dick.
But, I thought to myself mere moments after the outburst, is it really? —Bullshit implies some awareness on the bullshitter’s part of the truthy nature of one’s utterances. If one were in the course of a heated discussion on the un-American nature of single-payer health care to suddenly bust out with “Oh, yeah, well I think it was Jefferson once said that a government big enough to yadda yadda” then I think we could all agree that one was bullshitting us with a cliché draped in a disastrously silly argument from authority and move on from there. But to print it out and tape it to the back window of your car for all to see one’s apparent ignorance of the language, the historical and poltical consciousness, the punctuation of the very Founding Fathers to whose imprimatur one so desperately clings? To so apparently believe the thing so clearly wrong? —We need a different word, I think.
Horseshit?
But the relationship between the two is close, perhaps too close: most horseshit begins as bullshit, for instance, much as the example above—the words are the same; it’s the purveyors’ attitudes toward them that make the only difference. And what of those who deploy bullshit to defend a core notion of horseshit: does the reliance on what one ostensibly knows to be truthy call into question the degree of one’s actual ignorance of the truthiness of that which one’s defending? And think of the nightmarish, irresolvable arguments over Liberal Fascism: bullshit or horseshit?
Also, the bull and the horse don’t work so well in the metaphoric relationship. —Maybe it’s all bullshit, and it’s more that there’s those who shovel it, and those who don’t seem to notice they’re walking around covered in it?
(Gerald Ford, August 12, 1974: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” Jefferson said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild [sic], and government to gain ground.” —Lost lashings of nuance aside, theories as to why Ford got transmogrified into Jefferson as the authority from which to argue tingle deliciously, don’t they?)
Was, is, and ever shall be.
Photo credit should read MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images.
