Goddam.
Jeanne d’Arc has a killer, must-read piece on Trent Lott and Lady Day and how it is you mean the words that come out of your mouth. —The only thing I’d add (presumptuous cretin that I am) is how maybe we should take a close look at Lott’s heir presumptive and maybe start singing “Oklahoma Goddam,” too.
Are you feeling lucky, ducky?
Read the lips of an administration that promised to “take down the tollgate on the road to the middle class”:
Lindsey compared the Social Security tax to a deposit in a neighborhood bank’s Christmas Club. In such clubs, periodic deposits are returned in a lump sum during the holiday season, and Lindsey said no one would consider such deposits a tax.
Rush Limbaugh is after your paycheck. So is the Wall Street Journal. And now the Mayberry Machiavellis are “working up more sophisticated distribution tables that are expected to make the poor appear to be paying less in taxes and the rich to be paying more.” —What is it about the tenor of the times that makes naked class warfare seem a sane, sensible, politically driven approach?
You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot,
Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our last!
I’d’ve maybe voted for “The Carol of the Bells,” which is deliciously sinister if done properly (ignore the pasted-on English lyrics and instead keep Poe in mind: “The tintinnabulation of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells—”), or maybe I’d’ve gone with “The St. Stephen’s Day Murders,” but Barry, damn his eyes, went and wrote a surprisingly touching pæan to Irving Berlin’s spectacular perennial, “White Christmas.” So now I’m all discombobulated and don’t know what to vote for. (Rumors that George Winston’s December slips onto my turntable at this time of year for repeated playings when no one else is around are scurrilous at best.)
Rude, crude, and dangerous to know.
This one’s for former Buffalonian Kevin “Blarg” Moore: the Buffalo Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2002. Too much sports and a peculiarly vitriolic hatred of John Ritter, but hey, it’s 50 people; you’re going to find some quibbles. The entry on Ari Fleischer alone is (scatalogically) worth the price of admission. Which is free. But you get my point.
The game of us and them.
And, finally, as we know, Democrats have had plenty of harsh words about Trent Lott’s remarks at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party. But Bill Clinton got in a more light-hearted dig.
Our Jonathan Karl reports that the former president offered this line at a benefit last night at the Robert Kennedy Memorial—quote. Mr. Clinton, he said: “When Robert Kennedy ran for president, we supported him. We’re proud of it. And if he had lived and been elected, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” —Judy Woodruff, Inside Politics.
Well, anyway. It’s hoot-worthy line. Thanks, Atrios.
Let X = the number of Music Products purchased at full price between 1995 and 2000—
It’s not that I don’t think class-action lawsuits are a good idea—flawed though they are, they’re frequently the only way a wronged class of individuals can take on the armies of lawyers that cool their heels in the halls of large corporations. (While we’re all up in arms over judicial nominations and Total Information Awareness and the ghosts of the Ford Administration come to exact their due, we should also keep an eye out for what the RNC has planned by way of “curbing civil liability”—a somewhat more honest term than “tort reform,” methinks. [“You should not have a local judge in a county issuing a ruling that affects hundreds of millions of dollars in business across the country,” says the chief lobbyist for our US Chamber of Commerce. —Why on earth not?])
No, this rubs me the wrong way because these guys are getting away with year after year after year of price-gouging (going back much further than the stipulated date of 1995) by paying out no more than $20 to each and every qualified member of the class—and all without admitting any wrong-doing whatsoever. (As for not engaging in this practice in the future—why are you laughing? What’s so funny?)
“Continued litigation would only consume millions of dollars of company resources at a time when (Universal’s) executive energy and business focus are better spent providing consumers with compelling music,” said multinational corporation Universal regarding the settlement. Yeah, whatever. Fill out a claim form if you like, but if you get your check, I’d suggest blowing your $20, or your $10, or your $5 on a symbolic gesture. Get some music from Janis Ian, maybe. Or go see some local kids, as yet unsigned. Or hell—buy a book.
—via MetaFilter.
An apology—
—to all my co-workers, since once more I’m listening to “Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, Like Antennas to Heaven...” off the album of the same name by Godspeed You Black Emperor!
“(...more awkward pirouettes in the general direction of hope + joy...)” —Yeah. Sometimes. Pretty much, yeah.
Because you might need a giggle as much as I do.
From this priceless article, found thanks to Atrios:
The biggest sign, though, that LeBoutillier and Co. have no interest in the “real truth” is the description of the proposed “exit room,” which will purportedly depict an “exact recreation of the White House as the Clintons’ left it—trashed, damaged and defiled. ... We will recreate this to show—in the most vivid manner possible—just how much damage the Clintons did to ‘the people’s house.’” (Italics theirs.)
—It is worth noting that the improper apostrophe after “Clintons” is also sic, sic, sic. It is also (perhaps?) worth noting the inevitable Lott connection.
Now none of youse has any excuse.
For a good long time now, those of us who are blessed with God’s own computer and are in “the know” have blithely typed our simple text into the marvelous Tex Edit and then scrubbed it briskly with Dean Allen’s invaluable AppleScripts for web writing. It’s how you get decent punctuation and alternate characters and some small modicum of typographic competence on the web (plus easy linkin’) without having to remember the dam’ Unicode for an em-dash (——in case you were wondering) or whether you closed that strong tag three words back (oops).
But the unwashed heathens—or those of us who have to close our sleek little iBooks and trudge our way to day jobs in a stodgy, Gated world—were left bereft, forced to rely on our own meager (meagre?) devices.
Until now. —Mr. Allen has concocted a simple web-based Perl thingie that takes text you drop in and Unicodes it and wraps it with a decent assortment of happy tags. Post sparkling text with proper punctuation (and diacriticals!) to the web from anywhere at all.
So if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to get up, put on some pants, go to work, and pretend to do this-that-or-the-other while tinkering with this happy little toy on an infernal, fenestral device.
So much for space cowboys.
It’s official: Fox isn’t ordering any more episodes of Firefly.
update— What The Man has to say on the subject. Fingers crossed and wood veneer knocked.
Why shouldn’t we talk to ourselves.
These days it’s not so much, “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention,” it’s, “If you aren’t outraged, you’re on another planet entirely.” —Got to thinking after whipping off that quick’n’dirty screed against landmines yesterday—what about, you know, the nukes? The depleted uranium shells? The fact that getting all huffy about use of landmines is in a weird sort of way conceding that there will, at some point, be an invasion? (Which point I am stubbornly unwilling to concede as yet—darkest before the dawn and all that—but I am a fool.) Speaking out against landmines—which, unlike nukes, will almost certainly be used (iff); which, unlike depleted uranium, poses a much more direct long-term threat; which will pose a threat to American servicefolks during the course of the war and Iraqi people for decades thereafter—still, it seems almost misguided. A reed in the storm. Whistling the wrong way entirely as you march past a graveyard in the dark.
Or from there to the Trent Lott imbroglio: it is nice watching him squirm, yes, and it’s bleakly funny watching everyone pile on now that it’s “safe” to do so, but it doesn’t change the fact that anyone who’d been paying attention had known this about Lott for years and years and it didn’t matter one whit.That, as Slacktivist puts it, “the GOP is not segregationist because Trent Lott is its majority leader. Trent Lott rose to become majority leader because the party is segregationist.” And removing him from nominal power while satisfying will do nothing in the long run to the much larger problem of which Lott is merely a symptom. Come 2004, there’ll still be fliers passed out in Maryland and Louisiana and Mississippi and elsewhere letting black voters know that if the weather sucks on that November Tuesday, why, heck, they’ve got a week left to turn in their ballots, unless, of course, they were late in paying a bill in the past year, and Sean Hannity and E.D. Hill will still be reminding their wannabe dittoheads that the Democrats were segregationists too, back in the day, and what about that Georgia state flag?
A couple of weeks ago over at Body and Soul—one of the few blogs which should be on everyone’s morning must-read list—Jeanne d’Arc posted the back and forth of an intriguing email conversation she’d had about liberal communication that wasn’t backs-to-the-wall knives-out-and-rats’-teeth defensive (all too rare, these days), and while you should read it through if you haven’t already, but I want to muse on something d’Arc said, parenthetically, in this letter, right here: “I mean, fundamentally, it’s the quintessential feminist demand: Let us tell and interpret our own stories.” And yes—yes, it is.
Yes, but.
Thing is, telling our stories isn’t the problem. (Or interpreting them; interpretation is another way of telling a story.) You get up on your soap box (wherever it might be) and you open your mouth and you speak.
The trick is getting people to listen. To pay attention.
Because other people have bigger soap boxes and louder voices and insist on telling your stories for you and getting them all wrong, and even then the people you’re all talking to have their own ways of reading this story or that story and interpreting it for themselves, and, well. And it’s frustrating because the truth is out there and attention must be paid and so you stand tall and tell your story—and yet. They’re all yammering about John Kerry’s fucking haircut, instead.
All of which reminded me of a book I still haven’t read. (Yes, Sara. It’s on the list.) But it’s a basic concept I’m familiar with from having read pop-science books on chaos theory and the like, so I’ll pontificate out here on a limb for a moment: I think one of the things blogs do, or try to do, is seek out and cultivate tipping points. About this, that, or the other. In an attempt to build momentum and talk it up enough until (sort of like a laser, bouncing back and forth inside its ruby echo chamber until it’s powerful enough to punch out) attention is paid. It’s not the cleanest of metaphors (though it’s better than meme, I think), and the way it progresses from echo chamber to echo chamber is weird and hard to track: Trent Lott’s remarks last week were the tipping point leading to a bubbling of outrage among the cognoscenti over the views we’re known he’s had all this time, the views we’ve known his voters and his party have more or less tacitly supported, but it was a simmering fed by the one newspaper to break the news within a couple of days of its occurence. And yet it was Al Gore’s remarks on Monday that seemed to signal the tipping point for the broader mediasphere, triggering the long-delayed comments of commentators and politicians—does Gore read Atrios? —Of course, without the pressure brought to bear by the simmering blogs of the cognoscenti, it’s questionable whether Gore’s remarks could ever have tipped it. (If you feel that Lott’s half-assed apology was the tipping point, it’s questionable whether he would have felt the need to say anything had the cognoscenti not already been set to simmering. Who tipped what first?) —And now, of course, a week later, other people in my office are pissed off about something blogtopia was on top of a week ago. But how, and why, and who’s responsible? —Those, I don’t think, are even the right questions. Tipping points.Smart mobs. Flocking behavior. The divine madness of crowds. Talking to ourselves. Preaching to the choir. Fisking in the echo chamber, yo.
(And we still haven’t solved the problem.We’ve just noticed that when you say the same things over and over again in concert other people are more likely to pick up on it, which, hell, the right wing learned a long time ago. We still can’t guarantee that anyone will listen. That “our” story, my story, your story will be heard. That attention will be paid.)
(And the whole time, the heart beats more quickly. The teeth clench more tightly. “Blood pressure,” says the Spouse. But attention must be paid.)
For your consideration, then, another tipping point, or not: from Helen Thomas to the watch to Body and Soul to me to you:
Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness Program will snoop into bank records and credit card records and track purchase histories and travel patterns but it won’t violate the holy sanctity of the records of gun buyers.
It’s just there’s so fucking much. And more of it, every day—
Let’s open with a joke.
Because it’s all going downhill from there.
Cast your mind back to the 1999 Darwin Awards, when this runner-up got tagged as “Fatal Footsie”:
Decades of armed strife has littered Cambodia with unexploded munitions and ordnance. Authorities warn citizens not to tamper with the devices.
Three friends recently spent an evening sharing drinks and exchanging insults at a local cafe in the southeastern province of Svay Rieng. Their companionable arguing continued for hours, until one man pulled out a 25-year-old unexploded anti-tank mine found in his backyard.
He tossed it under the table, and the three men began playing Russian roulette, each tossing down a drink and then stamping on the mine. The other villagers fled in terror…
Now: scoot forward in time to 1 January 2001, when the world had not yet become A Different Place, and the various signatories to the Ottawa Covention banning the use of landmines had their second meeting, in Geneva, to discuss how things had been going thus far. There was some discussion of the fact that the US hadn’t signed as yet:
In practical terms, campaigners admit that an American signature would make little change to their current use of mines. With the exception of the North Korean border, the U.S. has not manufactured or used banned mines for the last three years. However, few people doubt the symbolic significance of a positive gesture. “It would make a very important difference if America signed. There is some international stigma in being one of the pariah states that hasn’t signed up,” says Rachel Harford, Joint Coordinator of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.
And though we may not have had the best reasons for not signing, we still had good reasons for not using landmines (outside of the North Korean border). After all, a GAO study of the 1991 Gulf War determined that the use of landmines by allied forces impeded us and didn’t necessarily impede the Iraqis. Moreover:
...even with clear-cut rationales for using landmines commanders were fearful of fratricide and decreased battlefield mobility caused by landmines and their usage. These concerns were based on “the obsolescence of conventional U.S. mines and safety issues with both conventional and scatterable landmines…and concern that reporting, recording and, when appropriate, marking the hazard areas created by the placement of self-destruct landmines or dudfields were not always accomplished when needed.”
And yet.
And yet, and yet, and yet.
The Pentagon is preparing to use anti-personnel land mines in a war with Iraq, despite U.S. policy that calls for the military to stop using the mines everywhere in the world except Korea by 2003.
Outrage. Anger. Fury. Channel it all into emails and faxes and letters to your Congresscritter now, people. Then CC it to Senator Patrick Leahy. Give him the mound of mail and the bursting letterbags he needs to go to the White House and the Pentagon and say with all our voices, “No. Way. In. Hell.”
—Of course, I realize I’m merely assuming you’re outraged at this news. It’s presumptive of me, I know. But hey—bygones.
Satire comes on little cat feet—
The rumors of Satire’s death are greatly exaggerated—
Satire is where you find it—
David Chess (via Plurp) wants to know if this site is a parody or not. (I think Steve’s readers are right: the quotes in the older news pages get a little more obvious—
“Parents should monitor their children’s activities, not librarians,” stated ALA spokeswoman Lilith Strug, “Librarians are much too busy to be bothered with worrying over the occasional incident of a child viewing bestiality. We have books to sort and overdue fines to track down, you know! If you don’t like pornography, just look away.”
Eminently sensible, no? —Also, the Irreducible Complexity Mousepad is less than wholly subtle, in my opinion—but the Ruby Matrimonial Thong is altogether too, um, revealing.
The people beg to differ.
Well, this one does, anyway.
“This proposition has been presented to the Supreme Court on a number of occasions and repeatedly rejected by the court, we hold that the continued opportunity to exonerate oneself throughout the natural course of one’s life is not a right so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental,” the appellate judges wrote.
—From the New York Times, via the incomparable TalkLeft (here, and also here).
We do, indeed, have a fundamental right to challenge our own deaths, as ordered by a system that has been demonstrated time and again to be fundamentally flawed if not actively corrupt. The idea that this right is not “so rooted” in my traditions or conscience, or yours, that it at some point runs out because it is too expensive or too tiresome or too embarrassing to allow it to be pursued, that proof of guilt is a procedural point satisfied by properly filled out paperwork, and not our best, most strenuous, most exacting efforts to find out fundamentally what happened, and how, and why—that, in a word, is insulting. Somebody really ought to step up to the plate and do something, take a stand in favor of life over process, justice over expediency, getting it right over getting it done…
There he goes again for the very first time.
First, read Barry’s righteous repudiation of Lott’s 96-hour-late apology for how we the people misinterpreted what it was he’d had to say (careful of the bile still dripping from that hideously neutral word, “discarded”); if every Democrat and moderate Republican had done the same thing to this wilted, diseased, insulting attempt at a high-hand, I’d feel marginally better about the current political discourse. (If every journalist on the White House beat peppered Ari Fleischer with repeated questions about his boss’s support of an unreconstructed segregationist until he tossed them all out and briefed an empty room from then on; if every journalist on Capitol Hill kept asking every Republican Senator what they felt of their elected leader’s views until they cracked and said something altogether unscripted—well, it’d still be only marginally better, but it’d be a nice, comfortable margin.)
Second—and oh, I know, you already know, you Drudge-skimmer, you Marshall-mashee, you habitué of the Times. But allow me a simple pleasure, won’t you?
After a fiery speech by Mr. Thurmond at a campaign rally in Mississippi for Ronald Reagan in November 1980, Mr. Lott, then a congressman, told a crowd in Jackson, “You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”
—Yes, this is hardly news for those who’ve been watching Lott and his associates for years. But the fact that outrage is sparking in some highly visible watchfires, that it’s starting to catch in wood we’d never thought would burn, that this man will be made to feel even if only a little still uncomfortable (or more; or more) for having profited so egregiously by winking and nudging at his own hate and fear—that’s news. Or at least some tasty schadenfreude.
Kid detectives. Also, how magic works. (Really.)
Jenn wasn’t feeling well, so I went to Johnzo and Victoria’s by myself. And since for a variety of reasons I wasn’t feeling like engaging in another round of sartorial combat with Mr. Snead (among them: I’d been painting a bathroom and trying to figure out how to build a wall all day; I didn’t feel like a tie; and anyway, I’d just worn my green three-piece to an office party the night before), I decided to dress down: jeans, white shirt, yellow sweater, black Chuck Taylors. Encyclopedia Brown, I decided, looking at myself in the mirror. Twenty years later, that is, and mumblety-mumble pounds heavier, and while I’d like to imagine ol’ Leroy’d grow up to look devilish in the right light with a dapper Van Dyke, the indications are not favorable. —Also, I don’t wear glasses.
Anyway, because I was thinking of myself as Encyclopedia Brown, twenty years later, the pear brandy sipped from a coffee cup seemed that much the sweeter, somehow. The Veggie Booty that much the spicier. It was with an edgy, naughty glee that I larded my sociopolitical rants with unexpectedly crude sexualized metaphor. (Though I rather imagine ol’ Leroy’d ascribe to more of a get-by-on-your-own-merits winner-take-all I-got-mine-screw-you zero-sum libertarianism, rather than [say] tendencies toward Bakuninist anarcho-syndicalism, but one can muse. Regardless, he’d be more willing than I was to cut George Will some slack. Because of the whole baseball thing.) And there was something deliciously wicked about nipping out to score some cloves, even if they were filtertips, and even if it did take me three matches to get one of the damn things lit. —I palmed the matches all the way back to the party, where I threw them tidily away in a dumpster. My two Chuck Taylors, it seems, were still goody.
But what the whole Encyclopedia Brown thing ended up putting me in mind of was Josie.
Josie Has a Secret is maybe my favorite thing over at Kristen Brennan’s shrine to go-go late ’90s hyperactive possibilities. It’s squarely in the tradition of the kid detective, with the puzzle in each chapter whose secrets are revealed at the ever-important back of the book. But unlike Encyclopedia Brown and Sally Kimball, the Dragnet of the kid detective set, Josie and Darla kick it up a little on the amoral, wicked side—more like the Great Brain, say (and those with a better memory for Fitzgerald’s books than me are hereby invited to open up the Wikipedia entry). —Josie and Darla are, after all, not detectives, but magicians (Penn & Teller, that is, and not Harry & Hermione). That’s what makes the book special.
For one thing—toying with magic whether staged or otherwise (?) takes us one big step closer to the thing detective fiction is “really” about. For another, staging the puzzles in each chapter around classic magic tricks that are revealed in the back of the book encourages critical thinking in a more (I think) successful way than pummelling kids through trivia (Encyclopedia Brown knows there’s no Q on the telephone dial, and that the Confederates would never have called it the First Battle of Bull Run until after the Second)—you’re learning the bare bones of pranks you can pull on your friends, after all.
But most importantly: Josie manages to pull off its debunkeries with grace and charm, never stooping to the acidly dismissive sarcasm that Randi and his ilk are all-too prone to fall prey to. It’s a heartening display of intelligence and generosity of spirit in a field that sees all too little of either. (Where the fuck are the sequels, already?)
—Plus, illustrations by Kris Dresen. How can you lose?
So now I’m rifling through old memories of long-since-lost books. Emil and the Detectives, of course, though I’m really thinking of the book I always called Emil and the Detectives but which wasn’t—it was German or Dutch or (just maybe) French, and I was reading an English translation (you read weird books when you’re a kid in Iran), and this book’s shtick was that each puzzle chapter had a full-page illustration teeming with Purloined Waldo-esque detail that hid the solution in plain sight. (Anyone?) —There were also some books about bear spies; I want to say they had something to do with Bearsylvania, but Google just brings up teddy bear hobbyist sites (when I go looking for 25-year-old kids’ books, yes yes). Also: did Gahan Wilson illustrate some books about Loonies who lived on the Moon? With a Space Navy? Or was it someone else who just drew like Wilson? Or am I having another flashback? And there’s a couple of books on the tip of the tongue about a kid inventor—more a step sideways from kid detective than a step closer in, I think—but he invented all sorts of wacky stuff, like a flying bicycle, or at least something he could use to make a bicycle fly. I’m remembering this haunting nighttime flight home over moonlit countryside on a bicycle, and a midnight picnic of sandwiches in a field in the middle of nowhere… Also, I think he tried to make his own soda pop once and instead derived a frictionless lubricant. (Anyone?)
(What? Magic? How it works? Oh. Right. Forget Crowley; read chapter three of Josie. Right there in one place is everything you’d ever need to know about magic—“magickal” or otherwise.)
Good luck with your Fourierism.
God help me, but in spite (or perhaps because) of it all, I adore Metropolitan.
