Participatory culture.
Could someone with a direct line to Jane Yolen and Mark Teague pass this along to them? It’s just about the best review a book can garner.
Send more cops! Send more paramedics!
teaotter has a public service announcement for your consideration.
The first one’s always the hardest.
This horrible, soulless monster, meanwhile, has to decide whether she’s going to carve notches on her keyboard or paint cute little nooses on the lid of her laptop. This one gets to choose between a swastika or a stylized icon of a burning cross. —Trouble with eliminationist rhetoric is pretty soon it’s all you’ve got left, and the thing I’d like to ask those who insist on playing them to our us is this: you really want to go there? Because in the long run, we outnumber you. And history will not be kind.
There’s still a kibosh on the man-hand jokes, though.
Okay. Now you can mention her name, and her eyes will fill not with dead light, but clammy fear and greasy despair, and Jesus will toss confetti for his frolicking kittens. (All due props to the Rude Pundit.)
A critical failure on my pop-culture roll.
It wasn’t until this morning over breakfast that I realized why it is Kitty Pryde’s doing that fucked-up splashing thing with her fist on the last page of Astonishing #15.
Something I read that I liked.
There ought to be an anthem for grocery shopping, because carefully and clinically choosing the stuff you’ll be made out of is grade-A autonomy.
Althæaphage.
I got an email here. Uh, “Rush,” uh, “now that two of our own have been tortured and murdered by the terrorists in Iraq, will the Left say that they deserved it? I’m so sick of our cut-and-run liberals. Keep up your great work.” Bob C. from Roanoke, Virginia. “PS, I love the way you do the program on the Ditto Cam.” [Laughter.] I read… no, I added that! He didn’t, he didn’t put that in there. [Laughter.] You know, it—it’s—I—uh… I gotta tell ya, I—I—I perused the liberal, kook blogs today, and they are happy that these two soldiers got tortured. They’re saying, “Good riddance. Hope Rumsfeld and whoever sleep well tonight.” I kid you not, folks.
Do I even need to tell you that not a single liberal kook said anything of the kind?
It’s not that they lie. It’s not even that they lie so brazenly, so completely, so shamelessly. It’s that people believe them. It’s not that if only we were speaking out against their lies with more volume and vigor and vim. The indisputable fact of us, being where we are and doing as we do, is enough to give them the lie direct. But the people who believe them don’t pay any attention, and if they do happen across us, they don’t listen. They don’t have to.
Go, Google Abu Zubaydah. Read up on how important he was: a top Bin Laden deputy, al-Qaeda’s top military strategist, their chief recruiter, the mastermind behind 9/11. He’s thirty-five. Two years younger than me. We caught him in 2002. He’d been keeping a diary for ten years, written by three separate personalities. His primary responsibility within the foundation was to make plane reservations for the families of other operatives.
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied.
So we tortured him. We tortured him, and he told us all sorts of things about 9/11, and over a hundred people we’ve since indicted on the strength of his coerced word, and “plots of every variety—against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, ‘thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each… target’.”
And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
At least the president didn’t lose face.
As above, so below: the self-similarity of the wingnut function; string theory for echthroi. Too much has been swallowed ever to turn around and come back up; it’s basic human nature to prefer being wrong to ever admitting one might not have been right. (The sort of human nature one is supposed to outgrow, yes, but.)
“Ignorance is a condition. Stupidity is a strategy.” Cliché? Hell, it’s a shibboleth: Welcome to the Reality-based Community. —Ignorance we can deal with, with the talking and the listening and the reasoning and the debating and the citing. Stupidity requires a different approach. Pathological liars so epically insecure they’ve made up their own network called “Excellence in Broadcasting” and call themselves “America’s Anchorman”? That shit writes itself, but our real fight’s altogether elsewhere.
Other than that, Madame de Pompadour, how did you enjoy the reign?
There is a lot to like on the new Regina Spektor, but I want each and every one of you to know that whenever I have occasion to refer to “Samson“ (and I will; oh, yes, I will), ever and always henceforth I would have you understand I mean the “Samson“ one hears on Songs and never in a million years the “Samson“ one finds on Begin to Hope.
Porch, with occasional rainbow.
Scott McCloud was here on Sunday. Fun was had.
Signs and wonders.
The Exodus Inward has ended, it seems.
Apparently, I’m waiting for something.
Though I know not what. —Y’all see anything likely, let me know, okay?
How terribly civil.
Colleen Holmes, a stay-at-home mother in Portland, Ore., reported an exchange with a Verizon Wireless customer agent that illustrated not only the dismay some Americans feel about the newly disclosed domestic surveillance but also the fear of terrorism that, for many, more than justifies the program.
Holmes said she was so angry about reports that the government was collecting telephone calling records on millions of Americans that she called Verizon Wireless to explore canceling her service and switching to Qwest.
“It’s your constitutional right to voice your opinion,” she quoted the customer service agent as having told her. “If you want planes to fly into your building . . . “
Hey, Verizon? Go fuck yourself.
Monkeys and Wolves and termites, oh my!
The Known World is back from database hell. (For those interested in such things, of course.)
“...an awfully big adventure.”
Belle has been paying more attention to the Fighting Keebees than I have; she’s found they’ve gone straight from singing “Over There” to playing “Waltzing Matilda.” She quotes a chickenhawk auxiliary:
I think [Tapscott, Morrissey, and Bainbridge] may be suffering some variant of PTSD, worn down by defending difficult positions at the forefront of the battle against irredentist [sic] Democrats in Congress and their fifth-column [sic] in the media.
Which is, itself, enough to send Kieran Healy shrieking for a bottle of Sorkin.
You don’t want the truth because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that blog. You need me on that blog.
But it’s Bruce Baugh with the piercing insight that once and for all demolishes the meme: oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
Talking with Mom and Dad about their personal histories led me to this association: what the war party bloggers have done is recreate the experience of being a child in World War II. They write patriotic essays and make patriotic collages, and get pats on the head and congratulations from the authorities. They watch diligently for the mutant, I mean, for the subversive among us, and help maintain the proper atmosphere of combined courage and vigilance. They are not expected to manage the family books, nor invited into discussion of the nitty-gritty, and it seldom occurs to them that there’s even a possibility there—that’s for the grown-ups, and rightly so.
Salad days.
Yes, I know the Online Integrity signing statement is nothing more than a cudgel wielded by some particularly witless hypocrites, but nonetheless, I must take exception to Chris Bowers’ seemingly sensible initial reaction. “In 2006,” he says,
I have no plans to steal candy from children, or to take money from the collection plate at church. I do not plan to spit on people I pass on the sidewalk, nor do I plan to set fire to a school. I have no intention of committing insurance fraud, insider trading, bank robbery, sexual assault, murder, or genocide. I do not plan on doing any of these things, because I think they are ethically wrong. I also do not plan to sign a pledge indicating that I am not going to do any of these things.
Perhaps; perhaps. But: back in the late ’80s, tail-end of the Reagan years, orientation week or somesuch at Oberlin, and various student groups are proselytizing from card-table pulpits outside Wilder. And if I tell you no one would ever have been so tub-thumpingly stupid as to set up an affirmative action bake sale back then, well, maybe you’ll see where I’m going, but maybe not. —One of the organizations was of course Amnesty International, and one of the buttons they had for anyone to pick up and pin to their jacket (for this was the ’80s, after all) was a red one, I think, that said in big bold white block letters:
STOP TORTURE
And my friend’s rolling her eyes at this, my friend who’s written more than her share of letters to political prisoners. “Oh, that’s brave,” she says. “What, we’re celebrating basic human decency now? You really think someone’s ever going to come up and see that button and say to you, no, no, we need to torture more—”
(Ah, but Michelle Malkin was somewhere in that crowd. So you never know. —Even then, we never knew.)
