I need the whip of the thunder, and the wind’s dark moan.
The Rev. Al Sharpton steps into the rain:
I am tired of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they’re preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade… We know you’re not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California—when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there you had nothing to say.
But all of a sudden, when Proposition 8 came out, you had so much to say, but since you stepped in the rain, we gonna step in the rain with you.
[…]
There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people’s bedrooms and claim that God sent you. It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being relegated into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying language?
I know I shouldn’t be surprised by the truth-eaters, but damn:
Like Lincoln’s plain manner of speaking, Joe [the Plumber]’s commentary is still unvarnished; it still “has the bark on” as the phrase was applied to Lincoln. And if anyone reading this immediately jumps to the conclusion that I am comparing Joe Wurzelbacher to Abraham Lincoln, you have a perfect example of the dynamic I am talking about.
What was Whittle thinking? —I suppose maybe if somebody called him on it, he could always point to this and this and say Obama says he doesn’t “compare” himself to Lincoln, but we know better, so QED?
Hyperbole,
or, Yup, it’s a silverfish.
Yeah, I know, you’re all, dude, Achewood is brilliant? I was never made aware of this fact until now! —But you know how they say every age gets the Achewood it deserves? This is that Achewood.
Insecurites.
It’s a sad state of affairs when, in today’s pluralistic, post-racial society, a rich white man still feels the need to play let’s you and him fight.
Newgle.
Lifehacker tells you how to replace the old Google G in your Firefox search box with the new Google G. —Good God, why?
It’s a chick thing; thank you so much!
Sometimes it’s nice to take a couple of disparate things from your daily media rounds and just sit ’em down next to each other. You know?
No wonder so many men are becoming gay, I mean really. You listen to women today. They’re afraid of ’em! It’s not that— A lot of guys become gay out of default. —There’s another epidemic that we’re not talking about: the lack of grandchildren epidemic. I’m gonna do a whole show on that, which is separate from the gay thing. But why so many white families don’t have grandchildren.
—Michael Savage, noted swimming partner
of Alan Ginsberg
—Jim Balent, noted writer and artist of Tarot,
Witch of the Black Rose
It took its toll on all of us.
Is it just me, or is the Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome of 2008 a little more… tired, than usual?
What Mads Gilbert said.
In case you’ve got less than half an ear on what THEY’re saying about the Gaza and you’re wondering Mads who?—
I am appalled by the terrorists attacks, but I am just as appalled by the suffering the USA has inflicted on others. It is in this context the deaths of 5,000 people must be viewed. If the US government has the legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, those who are oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with whatever weapons they can create. Dead civilians are the same, whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis.
Which is from the bad mad days of November 2001, which is when Solveig Torvik of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said this about what Dr. Gilbert said:
Yes, dead civilians are the same. But are the reasons they are dead always the same? I think not. That’s where critical distinctions must be made. When civilians die, it matters whether they die as intended or unintended targets. To me, it matters whether you die in the service of liberty or tyranny.
Hear, hear! More light less heat, we always say. But how does one ensure the world shall know one’s aim is ever toward liberty? Perhaps a leafletting campaign?
Nom-nom.
So taking some advice I undid an old feature-that-was-more-like-a-bug around here and flipped off the switch that restricted the atom and RSS feeds to excerpts only, which is why maybe I just spammed your LiveJournal friends page or your old skool reader, I dunno. Sorry. Anyway, you should now see the full body in the feed for every article, instead of just the excerpt.
Unless you’re using Firefox. Um. Which somehow can read that there’s an excerpt present and so chooses to show the excerpt in the feed even though as far as I can tell there shouldn’t even be an excerpt there for it to read. —Of course, if you’re reading it in Firefox through Bloglines or Google Reader or some such, then you’re okay; they seem to pass the full body through whether you’re reading it on Firefox or no. Unless you’re using them in Firefox to subscribe directly to the atom feed. In which case they don’t.
I don’t even have any idea what happens in say NetNewsWire or Feedly or Thunderbird.
Anyway. There’s options! Which is all I ever wanted. (I just wanted more control over them.) —I guess you should point your reader of choice at the Feedburner feed and if you’re still getting it the one way and you’d rather have the other and you just can’t make it work let me know and I’ll see if there’s something I can do on my end. Otherwise I’ll assume y’all’re good and we’ll go from there.
Unkinny.
I’ve written about that sense of ostranenie which is heimlich; how about the home-like stuff that leaves you feeling all outside yourself? —I do not watch football, not anymore, and even then it was only on in the background while I did other things because the grownups had control of the television. I haven’t been to Alabama in years; the time I’ve spent there is measurable at most in months. But I was born there, and the first dirt I ever walked on was dry and red and smelled like pine sap under the sun, so when Jim White sings “Alabama Chrome” and gets to the bridge—
The heat it is withering, humidity smothering.
Strip of silver tape, a sly lie covering
Dent in the side of a redneck ride.
Going deep for the Crimson Tide. —Yeah!
—I can’t help but pump my fist and sing along. Roll Tide.
(I don’t think you understand. My father went to Auburn. War Eagles! See? I can’t help but get it wrong! And yet I can’t help but get it—)
Gonna bump to the thump of the Selma slammer.
Wanna jump up and down like a wack jackhammer.
Sing a little “Sweet Home Alabama”—
Jimmy gimme wink like a big flimflammer.
Men are from Yang; Women are from Yang, too, just a different part.
The latest comics blogospheric blow-up about icky-icky-girlstuff-p’tang! leads The Beat to post something which leads us to remind you that yes, pink, because it is a warm, active, yang-y color, was until early in the 20th century considered the only appropriate color for boys; blue, cool, passive, wet and yinny, was until roughly the same time considered the only appropriate color for girls. (Nelly Bly’s nickname, growing up? Pink. Because she was such a tomboy.) —It’s beyond high time in all these culture wars for us footsoldiers to remember we have so much more in common with the grunts on the other side than our own dam’ generals, but that’s usually the way with US and THEM.
Boatswain!
I’ve been watching an inordinate amount of Prospero’s Books lately, because it is an ideal entertainment for an infant who’s sitting in your lap while you’re trying to get some work done in a window on the other monitor over there—glorious music, a charismatic man doing all sorts of silly voices, every second there’s something new and rich and strange and beautiful to look at.
—Also, I now remember why it was I’d thought of giving Perdix all those memory-dancers, but that’s neither here nor there. Nor would you be interested to learn that I want my office to look like this:
At least I’ve got the papers-and-books-everywhere æsthetic down.
—While we’re on the subject of movies playing repeatedly in a corner of the screen, remind me to tell you at some point (and I’m not even kidding here) why Speed Racer was maybe 2008’s best movie. Fuck The Dark Knight—those fucking Wachowskis filmed a sequence in the goddamn subjunctive!
Will no-one rid us of this truculent pundit?
I want to be good; I want to live up to the koan. But then I hear something so willfully, viciously stupid, so areal, something that does such violence to our already shredded discourse, something like this—
The New Deal—everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed.
—and I get all Lewis Black again.
The trouble with Holbo’s Complaint (“I realize it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back”) isn’t that it’s hard on US to read their stuff without a sunny heart. It isn’t even that THEM ain’t coming back from around the bend ever at all. —To each their own, you know? If that’s what floats their boat, who am I to judge?
It’s that they’re determined to drag all the rest of us around the bend with them.
The site, with its ever-present Wikimania for lists, lists many scholars who have given up on the site, many more who are discontented, and only two who are happy with the status quo. The vandalism problem has received a lot of publicity, but that one’s actually fairly minor, or at least relatively fixable. More aggravating is “edit creep,” the gradual deterioration of a polished article by well-meaning but careless edits, and, even worse, “cranks,” which are classified with typical Wiki-precision as “parasites, scofflaws or insane.” And a crank can single-handedly destroy an article’s usefulness.
The problem is that Wikipedia forces its contributors to come to a consensus, and building consensus with a crank is a fool’s errand. Many of the departing scholars note the incident that finally brought them to leave; mine was a truculent teenager who refused to acknowledge that minimalist music was considered classical, because, as he put it, “it sounds more like Britney Spears than like Merzbow.” Let that sink in a minute. A person who insists that Einstein on the Beach, or Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes, or Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue cannot be considered classical because it sounds like Britney Spears is not a person one can seek consensus with. Because of that and his flippant rudeness I refused to argue directly with him, and appealed to the Wiki editors. Yet because of the Wikipedia policy about consensus, I couldn’t get around him, either. And when I checked the “Expert retention” page, I realized that this was not an isolated bit of bad luck, but that this recurring problem bars the dissemination of knowledge throughout Wikipedia.
Kyle Gann gave up on Wikipedia because of it. But giving up the body politic is a bit more difficult. A lie gets halfway around the world by the time the truth gets its shoes on, and that was before a professional corps of altheaphagei took up their stations outside its door, forks aloft. What do we do to beat it back? Must we each of us Epimenidean soldiers take up steel-edged rulers and station ourselves at the palaces of the pundits and whack their knuckles as they wax stupidic—
Oh. Hey. Army of Davids. Self-correcting blogosphere. Wikitopia.
—We will never be done with the long slow slog of the koan: word for word, person by person, dismantling the stupidity, alleviating the ignorance. The wood to be chopped, and the water carried; the dishes washed and the laundry done.
Still. It’s hard, seeing intellectual violence like this, wolves outside the door the way they are, not to want to punch someone in the face. (Or at least spit in their coffee.)
Say boots without shoes.
A dictum from Wikipedia’s ongoing effort to isolate that formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article, noted without comment:
Neologisms are words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities. Protologisms are neologisms that have not yet caught on widely. (In fact, “protologism” is a neologism to be avoided.)
Otto’s rede.
John Judis is worried that Obama doesn’t realize just how bad things are. Me, I think he has some idea. (The signs are all about us.) —I think Obama’s fetishizing Otto Von Bismarck: “Politics is the art of the possible.” And, yes, I know:
Mark Schmitt has some typically wise things to say about momentum and naïvetie:
Bush’s mistake [in attempting to privatize Social Security after the 2004 election] was an unsurprising one. It is rooted in the naïve idea that presidents get a mandate from their election in the same way a gyroscope gets its spin. The bigger the victory, the bigger the mandate, and as time passes, the mandate diminishes. Bush didn’t have a big victory in 2004, but it was at least a solid, uncontested affirmation, and he decided that with a little extra spin and some abuse of power, he could get more out of it.
For all the romance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days, history suggests that presidents do not get a mandate as a mechanical function of their electoral margin, but in fact they build it over time. They earn it not by winning but by governing. They assemble coalitions and use them again and again, and build institutions and make them work. While many good policies and necessary emergency measures were passed in the first 100 days of the New Deal, the innovations that lasted—those that defined politics until Reagan—came later, after FDR had consolidated power, forced the Supreme Court to accept a new set of assumptions about government’s role in the economy, and won the 1934 mid-term election.
Yes but well you see, as Rick Perlstein points out—
Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation’s status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity — which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.
The Oval Office’s most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy’s martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points — our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests — to make change possible any other way.
Taking the long view, building on the nines, this is without a doubt important, and FDR did win big after those 100 days. But one of the ways he built institutions to allow him to govern lastingly was by nailing some damn thing to the wall and saying there, see? We’ve done that. What’s next?
I don’t know. My hopes were never that high. But I’m starting to worry that in his chilled and admirable pragmatism Obama’s fallen far far short of what we need, far further than I’d feared. “The art of the possible,” after all, isn’t the art of what is possible.
It’s the art of making things possible.
Descriptivate, don’t prescriptivate—
Damn skippy “conversate” is a word. It’s a beautiful word! Try it out in sentences instead of “converse.” Hear what it does to the rhythm. Snappy little backformation, that.
—What do you call it when you reverse-engineer a backformation? Because “opine” is the most godawful clunker of an admittedly useful word, and “opinionate” as a verb would sail so much more smoothly:
He opined that the New Deal was a cause, not a cure of the Great Depression.
He opinionated that the New Deal &c. &c.
See? Clarity and music. Makes what so many do just so much opinionation. —Which, well, icing on the lexeme.
