That’s the way to do it!
The Buffalo Beast’s “50 Most Loathsome” of 2007 is out.
Hey! A new John Sayles film!
“Snooty art-house critics like me sometimes rough up Sayles’ films, which don’t tend to be cinematically or dramatically adventurous and sometimes feel like they’re offering a predictable blend of progressive politics and Dickensian morality tale. (Silver City was somewhat of a snooze, for example, despite Chris Cooper’s memorable turn as a dimwitted, George W. Bush-like cardboard candidate.) Honestly, it’s time to get over that. Sayles’ movies almost always offer terrific casts, ample compassion, tremendous local color and an appetite for exploring the complexities of American life.” —Andrew O’Hehir
—On the other hand: “It needs to be electrifying, and instead, it’s a John Sayles movie.”
This is what ecclesiacracy looks like.
In Anchorage early in October, the doors opened onto a soaring white canvas dome with room for a soccer field and a 400-meter track. Its prime-time hours are already rented well into 2011.
Nearby is a cold-storage facility leased to Sysco, a giant food-distribution corporation, and beside it is a warehouse serving a local contractor and another food service company.
The entrepreneur behind these businesses is the ChangePoint ministry, a 4,000-member nondenominational Christian congregation that helped develop and finance the sports dome. It has a partnership with Sysco’s landlord and owns the warehouse.
The church’s leaders say they hope to draw people to faith by publicly demonstrating their commitment to meeting their community’s economic needs.
“We want to turn people on to Jesus Christ through this process,” said Karl Clauson, who has led the church for more than eight years.
—Diana B. Henriques, Andrew W. Lehren, “Megachurches add local economy to the mission”
It would be churlish and irresponsible to link however tenuously this story of megachurches owning and operating shopping centers and housing developments and limousine services, dithering humorously over how best to render unto Cæsar (“We’re very intertwined—it gets tough day to day,” says Doug Rieder, church business administrator for First Assembly Ministries; “I have to constantly ask myself whether I am accurately allocating our costs”)—it would be irresponsible and churlish indeed to juxtapose this story with, oh, a quote or two ripped from this screed:
My own take is considerably more cynical. The Satanic doctrine promises that Christianity is easy. No changes needed in lifestyle or attitudes. Just call the toll-free number on the bottom of your screen, and have your credit card ready. Operators are standing by. No need to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or visit the sick or imprisoned, just slap a “Bush/Cheney ’04” sticker on your car. This is exactly Bonhoeffer‘s “cheap grace”:
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion, without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
[…]
All Fundies are Fundamentalists. Not all Fundamentalists are Fundies. And all Fundies that I’ve met are, by the definition in this essay, Satanists. They believe that God will Rapture them away from trouble, that charity is harmful, that God wants them to buttonhole people on the street, that the best prayers are loud, long, and public, that certain people are “unclean” and must be kept out of churches, that George W. Bush is inerrant and without sin.
For one thing, ChangePoint is avowedly nondenominational. And why on earth did the pseudonymous author have to go and drag politics into it?
Another contribution [First Assembly Church of God] makes to the city is a free daylong celebration it holds on Independence Day, complete with fireworks.
Mr. Hiatt said no one seemed to find it awkward for a church to conduct the community’s celebration marking the birth of a country committed to separation of church and state.
“It was a very positive event,” he said.
Mr. Rieder, the church business manager, paused when asked whether people of other faiths would have felt comfortable at the event.
“We try not to discriminate in doing community service,” he said. “There are Muslims and other non-Christians here, of course. And we do want to convert them, no doubt about it—that’s our mission. We don’t discriminate, but we do evangelize.”
The same quandary confronts Pastor Clauson in Anchorage. “There is nothing inherently alienating about what we’re doing economically,” he said. “An Orthodox Jewish youngster or a conservative Muslim child encountering our programs would find zero intimidation.”
Nor does he want his community to become divided along religious lines, he said. But at the same time, “we definitely want to use these efforts as an open door to the entity that we feel is the author and creator of abundant life—Jesus.”
He added, “It’s a tough balancing act.”
—Henriques and Lehren, op. cit.
And so into 2008.
You know, hoppin’ john makes for a pretty damn good risotto.
Years end in narcissmatics.
Blame this bout of self-indulgence on the recent run of comment-spam, which draped itself all over a run of 2007 posts in roughly chronological order. There I was, scraping barnacles off titles I hadn’t myself read in months, so why not? —January, then: let’s go with red, blue, and tippers, with an acknowledgement that red-state–blue-state games are an accident of history that’s been enshrined as conventional wisdom while no one was paying attention. (How else does wisdom become convention?) —And let’s throw in a bonus corollary, since February was so weak.
March was all about 300, of course, but also “Black Molly.” April? Mocking the truth-eaters. In May, I remembered to get in a critical apprehension (hearkening sidelong back to something I’d brought up much earlier), but I’d also like to remind you that Republicans only win by preventing as many people from voting as possible, and they lie lie lie to do it. —And June was, um, the sixth month of the year.
In July, our grand experiment turned 231, and I set out on a prospective series whose actual subject I’ve yet to mention. (I also digressed, briefly, on the subject of the magical honky.) August? August was better than February and June, but. At least I launched a meme. In September, my own grand experiment finally found something in common with Jack Benny; otherwise, all I managed was a bit of staircase-wit.
From there on out, well: October was a bit of a drive-by; in November, I mustered up a bit of snark; December, for some reasons beyond my control, became the month of Jonah. —Not my best year, 2007. I’d like to say I was busy elsewhere, but I wasn’t, so much. (Nor has a certain decision borne much fruit.) I should, perhaps, end on a resolution, but that’s for Tuesday; the year’s not done yet.
Still: 2008 can only be—ack! Jesus. Can’t believe I almost said that out loud.
Fascists are people;
Liberals are people;
∴ Liberals are fascists.
Yes, another blip about Jonah Goldberg’s very serious, thoughtful lump of horseshit that has never been smeared across the public discourse in such detail or with such care. —Over at Unfogged, Bob McManus thinks Jonah deserves serious consideration, and while my immediate impulse whenever anyone asks why we aren’t taking it seriously is to point to Bérubé (his lunch with Horowitz; more en pointe, his Goldberg variations), let’s, well, take McManus seriously:
“You think Jonah deserves serious consideration”
Yes I do. If I were a progressive blogger, I would look at the book and wonder what was being taken off the table rather than what was being put on the table. I would meta and Strauss the damn thing. He had a purpose. He is getting paid.
And yes, Jonah has a purpose; Jonah did, indeed, depressingly enough, get paid for his fumbling assault on language and critical thought. But his purpose is simple enough to discern: he’s out to degrade any attempt at defining and situating fascism. What’s he’s trying to take off the table are Umberto Eco’s 14 ways of looking at a blackshirt, replacing them with nothing more than a bulge-eyed spittle-flecked bellow of “Fascist!” in a crowded theater. And if you’ve followed the links above, you already know why he’s trying to do this: Bérubé, that prancing jackanapes, told you plainly enough:
So if Jonah Goldberg’s project is to show that liberalism is the new fascism, it probably makes sense to ask whether there’s any old-time fascism running around somewhere while the doughty Mr. Goldberg mans the perimeter.
Over at Sans Everything, Jeet Heer does what little spadework’s necessary to demonstrate that Jonah’s own National Review has been steeping in precisely that old-time fascism for years. —Thus does Jonah’s 496-page argument collapse: no longer a brutally clever attempt at shifting the Overton window, it stands revealed as nothing more than a desperate bleat of “I know you are, but what am I!”
It stands revealed, yes, to those that read; but only those who already know will read. —How do you reach someone who believes what Jonah’s said? Or at least professes to believe?
I’m stuck in the koan. —On the one hand, of course this assiduous furore of taking-unseriously isn’t an attempt at argument per se. Posting clips from A Fish Called Wanda won’t convince anyone who isn’t already in your corner of anything; nor will baldly proclaiming that the new fascist stormtrooper is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. They’re tokens and dogwhistles in a playground slapfest, and the best you can say for us over them is we’re less likely to pretend otherwise. “Taking Jonah seriously” doesn’t work on the playground; all we can hope for is damage control. —To the extent they aren’t spontaneous upwellings of disgust, or hails and hearty laughter shared with weary fellow travelers, or attempts to spit in Jonah’s coffee, our salvos and volleys strive inch by inch to effect our own Overton shift: to achieve some critical mass and attach some small measure of shame to the name of Jonah Goldberg, so this media outlet or that think-tank venue might think twice before inviting his participation, and his opportunities to play his tokens and sound his dogwhistles might thereby be lessened. If only a little.
On the other, we win to the extent we can by increasing the us and decreasing the them. It’s hard to do that when you’ve grabbed them by the lapels and you’re smacking them in the face with their own dam’ book and you’re bellowing “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”
An alternative to that protest vote for Ron Paul.
“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America,” says Indian rights activist Russell Means, “and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us.” (Or, wait, maybe not so much.)
IOKIYAR to infinity and beyond!
In 2005, the 109th Congress was dominated by Republicans, who complained like crazy about Democratic threats to filibuster judicial appointments. How dare they abuse this time-honored senatorial privilege to disrupt the people’s business? cried the Republicans, who threatened to nuke the privilege outright to prevent its sullying. In that year, the term “filibuster” appeared in 358 stories in the New York Times and 407 stories in the Washington Post. —In 2007, the 110th Congress sees a Democratic majority, and a Republican minority who have disrupted the people’s business with filibuster threats on everything from popular energy legislation to budget measures a whopping 62 times—on a pace to more than double every previous record for using and abusing this time-honored senatorial privilege. In this year, the Times has published 83 stories mentioning “filibuster”; the Post, 187. (So far. There’s just over a week left to 2007. Maybe they’ll catch up?)
Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.
Back toward the end of the ’90s, a throwaway bit in Wired imagined advertising as a virus, mutating and adapting to fill every conceivable niche in the ecosphere of attention-mongering. —A meme, yes yes, but at least a rather specific and concretized example of one, with better metrics.
The bit ended by proposing a king-hell ad-beast slouching through a climax forest of synergistic marketing opportunities: let’s say (it said) that Nike starts buying 30-second TV spots and airing nothing. Not an image, not a sound, not an icon, not a blipvert at the end to brand the logo on your consciousness: just 30 seconds of empty blank nothing. We’d all know, of course, because everyone would be talking about Nike and their crazy empty ad scheme, and constant repetition would drive the point home until every blank wall, every cloudless sky, every television tuned to a dead channel would whisper Nike to our lizard-brains.
Magnificent (for some values of magnificent)—and yet we all know that pound for pound it’s the little things that best succeed in filling niches: the microbes, the bacteria, the virii and prions, like what I saw crawling through the ESPN chyron as I was buying a burrito for lunch: the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. How can one begin to measure the return on an investment like that?
In which Jamie Lee Curtis says just about everything that needs to be said to Jonah Goldberg on the occasion of the publication of his very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.
Further context here, here, here, here, and oh sweet Christ here as well.
Harsh, yes, but also unfair.
It only just now occurred to me: Alan Moore’s (and Kevin O’Neill’s, yes yes) Black Dossier is really his Number of the Beast.
Don’t shake out your dandruff and tell me it’s snowing, either.
Nordstrom used to have a piano player in each store, genteelly wassailing holiday shoppers, but this year the players have been rendered redundant: “The Seattle-based chain said the company is carrying out its hyper-attentive approach to customers, who it said compliment canned music more often than live musicians,” reports the Oregonian. —Somehow, I have a hard time believing they’re really doing this just to keep their customers complimentary. Golly. I guess Mr. Easterbrook was right.
Counterinsurgency.
Matt Yglesias in his typically deadpan cheek-tongued fashion has suggested a Sistah Souljah moment for those Democratic candidates in the market:
…I thought I might suggest Project Pat’s “Tell Tell Tell (Stop Snitchin’)” as a good candidate.
He cites fellow Atlantician Jeremy Kahn for support:
Police and prosecutors have been contending with reluctant witnesses for decades. But according to law-enforcement experts, the problem is getting dramatically worse, and is reflected in falling arrest and conviction rates for violent crimes…
The reasons for witnesses’ reluctance appear to be changing and becoming more complex, with the police confronting a new cultural phenomenon: the spread of the gangland code of silence, or omerta, from organized crime to the population at large. Those who cooperate with the police are labeled “snitches” or “rats”—terms once applied only to jailhouse informants or criminals who turned state’s evidence, but now used for “civilian” witnesses as well. This is particularly true in the inner cities, where gangsta culture has been romanticized through rap music and other forms of entertainment, and where the motto “Stop snitching,” expounded in hip-hop lyrics and emblazoned on caps and T-shirts, has become a creed.
But it seems silly to leap so quickly yet again for gangsta shibboleths when a much more probable proximate cause is at hand: cops, after all, are tasing people during routine traffic stops and for not removing their hats in city council meetings; they’re pepper-spraying infants; tackling, tasing, and pepper-spraying blind grandmothers; they’re enforcing draconian laws against the very act of sitting on public sidewalks. —Hearts and minds, people, hearts and minds; why on earth would anyone help a force so obviously arrayed against them?
Just imagine the press a Democratic candidate could garner by Sistah-Souljahing the police, to shame them into protecting and serving all of us…
Don’t hate on a—oh, who are we kidding.
In linking to this post by Carrie Brownstein, Matthew Perpetua—Mr. Fluxblog his own dam’ self—all but proves he’s never seen a Decemberists show.
All right, you’ve covered your ass now.
“The FBI is warning that al Qaeda may be preparing to offer adjustable-rate mortgages based on the bubble-inflated value of the homes of borrowers unable to repay them, leading to upwards of $1.3 trillion in potentially non-recoupable losses, according to an intelligence report distributed to law enforcement authorities across the country this morning. The alert said al Qaeda ‘hoped to disrupt the U.S. economy and has been planning the attack for the past five years’.” —Gawker
Treason.
[Mukasey is] wrong on torture—dead wrong.
—Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), shortly before voting to confirm Mukasey as our 81st Attorney General
You know, if somebody’s wrong—dead wrong—on torture, then politesse demands maybe you think a good long minute before going ahead and pissing all over them when they’re on fire. What you don’t do is vote them in as Attorney goddamn General.
Maybe it’s just me.
No man
No madness
(Though their sad power may prevail)
Can possess
Conquer
My country’s heart—
They rise to fail.
She is eternal
Long before nations’ lines were drawn
When no flags flew
When no armies stood
My land was born
And you ask me
Why I love her
Through wars, death and despair
She is the constant
We who don’t care
And you wonder
Will I leave her—
But how?
I cross over borders
But I’m still there now
How can I leave her?
Where would I start?
Let man’s petty nations tear themselves apart.
My land’s only borders lie around my heart.
Oh, all right, one more,
but really, this has to be the last, okay? F’reals. Because the thing to take away from Glenn Greenwald’s bizarre exchange with Colonel Steven Boylan is the terrifying glimpse it gives us of the world to come: a politicized, evangelical military, glowering in the corner of our right-wing echo chamber, and thus our polity. (A sitting senator threatened her husband’s life when he was president; you really think it won’t be a thousand times worse when they have more on their side and even less to lose?) —That’s what should set you shivering, see, but all I can do when I read Greenwald’s followup (as a thousand points of McVeigh try to park rhetorical Ryders full of fertilizer on his post) is giggle at his peerless snap:
…right-wing blogger Howard Kurtz…
God, we’re so frickin’ witty, sipping tea here on the lip of the Abyss! (And what the fuck else should we do, huh?)
