The war of us and them.
And you know, I really ought to be working on the next watchmaker bit. I started revamping that old thing because I’d thought I might have a little time to post this week, but had no idea what I’d say.
Funny how things work out.
Anyway, Josh Lukin writes to let me know that “The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism” ain’t necessarily all that, but “...Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red,” now there’s a fuckin’ essay, which reminds me that I still haven’t dug my copy of Times Square Red Times Square Blue to the top of my tottering pile, so I do, and I open it to “Red,” and here, let me write out the first two paragraphs that I saw while we still have some small shreds of Fair Use left:
The primary thesis underlying my several arguments here is that, given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.
My secondary thesis is, however, that the class war raging constantly and often silently in the comparatively stabilized societies of the developed world, though it is at times as hard to detect as Freud’s unconscious or the structure of discourse, perpetually works for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and of the institutions holding those practices stable, so that new institutions must always be conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again till they are destroyed.
That right there is a model of how things are and what happens to them as we go along. —Here’s another:
An evelm philosopher once wrote: “Almost all human attempts to deal with the concept of death fall into two categories. The first can be described by the injunction: ‘Live life moment by moment as intensely as possible, even to the moment of one’s dying.’ The second can be expressed by the exhortation: ‘Concentrate only on what is truly eternal—time, space, or whatever hypermedium they are inscribed in—and ignore all the illusory trivialities presented by the accident of the senses, unto birth and death itself.’ For women who adhere to either position,” this wise creature noted, “the other is considered the pit of error, the road to injustice, and the locus of sin.”
And one’s from an essay and the other’s from a science fiction novel and it’s not like it’s either the first or the second and there aren’t other ways of looking at things, I mean, for God’s sake, they aren’t even mutually exclusive, and I know you might quibble with this or that aspect of the one or the other, and that what I’m about to do is unfair and even brutally reductionist, but still: take the one, and the the other, and hold ’em up against our current situation, the great divide, the Blue and the Red.
Which does a better job of limning the struggle we’re actually in, and the actual sides that have lined up to join it?
That said, what tactics now suggest themselves? Seem more useful? Counterproductive? Downright destructive?
Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditone querentes?
So Joshua Micah Marshall links to the Daou Report, which was highlighting a Corner post by Ramesh Ponnuru, and now I have another Lewis Black earwig wreaking havoc with my equilibrium:
The risk is that liberals’ moral arguments are peculiarly prone to coming across as self-righteous and moralistic.
And yes, I know he means it in the “addicted to moralising” sense and not merely in the “pertaining to or characteristic of one who practices morality” sense, but hey: he left the door open. And it’s a lovely little piece of snark to walk away with, isn’t it? Our moral arguments are hampered by an actual morality that we insist on applying to ourselves—and thus, by extension, anyone who’d join our club.
Their moral arguments consist mostly of ganging up to tell some convenient Other on the margins over yonder that they’d damn well better knock it off.
—Snarky as it is, though, it’s the kernel that proves Ponnuru’s basic argument: playing the preaching game won’t work for us, and it’s not because Americans are Bad, but because People are Cussedly Cantankerous. Besides, it’s letting them pick the battlefield and define the terms, and Ponnuru’s post is an avis most rara: advice from the other side that’s worth the taking. He just showed us where and when their flank will ambush us. Don’t let’s take the bait.
That said, I can’t get Nick Confessore’s crazy idea out of my head. Maybe providing health insurance through the Democratic party is in itself not so great a plan, no. But the idea of using what power we have to do what we can to weld together a reality-based safety net, doing what it can to end-run those most useful bits of the government currently headed for Grover Norquist’s bathtub, providing an alternative to the faith-based megachurch charity network, and thereby reconnecting the party with the people, and reminding the people directly just why it is we come together to get things done in the first place—
Sure, it’s buying votes with bread—a practice connected to traditions as old as the idea of a republic itself. It’s also one hell of a lot more useful than half-heartedly taking up tut-tutting about Grand Theft Auto.
One thing after another.
I do write about comics occasionally. —Over at Mercury Studios, Steve Lieber interviews himself with a list of “What’s it like to be a guy in the comics industry?” questions proposed by Devin Grayson, who’s maybe a little—tired?—of distaff curiosity. Dylan Meconis, meanwhile, having chewed what she bit off, teams up with Hope Larson for a lovely little online mini. And y’all are reading the Graphic Novel Review, right? Jenn did this month’s cover, since she’s between chapters on Dicebox—her shoes being ably filled with a charming little aside called “Sprouts,” by Kris Dresen. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, go, read it now: the first pages will be free till tomorrow morning, when the next pages upload.
Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I write about comics. Sometimes I just link a bunch of stuff.
Panem et circenses.
Still want to cut the red states loose and go your own urbane way? Well, hell. You don’t just have Mike Thompson on your side: a big hand, ladies and gentlemen, for the rhetorical stylings of Jim McNeil!
The states Kerry won, due solely to votes in just one or two cities each, are California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. The cities that out-voted the rest of their state or adjacent areas are the District of Columbia, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Portland and Seattle.
Kerry won just eight states (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont) with balanced votes, and only two of these (Delaware and Hawaii) are outside of New England. These states gave him just 41 electoral votes.
The 11 cities listed above gave him 208 such votes, against wishes shown elsewhere statewide. Four more states could have had similar results due to city voting in Cleveland, Denver, St. Louis or the Miami to Palm Beach- area. Add D.C.’s three electoral votes and just 15 cities can award 278 electoral votes.
Thus, cities can pick our president, against the wishes expressed elsewhere nationwide.
Laugh if you like at his apparent misunderstanding of the whole point of democracy—that’s actually a standard tactic over in non-reality-based circles, where the vote is calculated by interest group, weighing the franchise of those you agree with more heavily, while discounting that of those you would consign to the Joy Division. Usually, though, this is reserved for the votes of those with funny skin: without the black vote, we’re told, over and over again, those Democrats would be sunk, yessiree. McNeil’s only innovation is to take the urban of “urban comedy” literally.
Now, I’m hardly the first person to have noticed it, but still: doesn’t one-state-two-state-red-state-blue-state make you think of the chariot races?
Factions were identified by their colors: either Blue or Green, Red or White. Domitian added gold and purple but they, like the emperor, were never popular and short-lived. Colors first are recorded in the 70s BC [sic]; during the Republic, when Pliny the Elder relates that, at the funeral of a charioteer for the Reds, a distraught supporter threw himself on the pyre in despair, a sacrifice that was dismissed by the Whites as no more than the act of someone overcome by the fumes of burning incense. According to Tertullian, these were the first two factions and, although the Blues and Greens are assumed to have appeared later in the first century AD [sic], it is likely that all four colors extend back to the Republic. Whatever their origin, by the end of the third century AD [sic], Blue and Green had come to dominate the other two factions, which seem to have aligned themselves as Red and Green, White and Blue.
A pairing of Green and White, at least, can be seen from lead “curse tablets” that invoke the most terrible fate for rival factions.
I adjure you, demon whoever you are, and I demand of you from this hour, from this day, from this moment, that you torture and kill the horses of the Greens and Whites and that you kill in a crash their drivers…
I conjure you up, holy beings and holy names, join in aiding this spell, and bind, enchant, thwart, strike, overturn, conspire against, destroy, kill, break Eucherius, the charioteer, and all his horses tomorrow in the circus at Rome. May he not leave the barriers well; may he not be quick in contest; may he not outstrip anyone; may he not make the turns well; may he not win any prizes…
Which, if nothing else, tells us the two-party system has always hated and feared potential third-party interlopers more than their soi-disant rivals. (Okay, weak. But it also answers the riddle of what color libertarian states are given on the Akashic electoral map.)
But! What do we do about this state of affairs? That’s the operative question, isn’t it? —Well, luckily for y’all, they used to show The Tomorrow People on Nickelodeon, and I watched a lot of it when I was a kid:
Though if you look deeper into the kaleidoscope and see past the loud colours that are the obvious horror, sci-fi and comic book references (John losing his “super powers” when imprisoned) this is quite an interesting science fiction story about an alien race who, like cuckoos, lay their eggs in different nests. The nests being different planets and the eggs taking the shape of the dominant life-forms on each planet, in this case taking the human form. The problem being that the energy the eggs need to hatch and fly free from earth can only be generated by human anger. The aliens have the power to create anger in humans by painting pictures of different planets that have temperamental weather conditions, which somehow affect the aggression levels of human beings who come into contact with them, and also by creating badges of different colours (blue and green) so the wearer of a green badge will become violent towards the wearer of a blue badge (but only when the weather is bad on, let’s say…Rexel 4!) The Tomorrow People’s job is to convince scary and very creepy Bowiealike alien Robert (who has been living in a junk shop with someone he calls Grandad, but actually appears to be a character that has fallen out of The Goon Show), that they can generate the energy needed by everyone on earth going to sleep at the same time and dreaming violent dreams whilst Stephen and John re-route the dream energy to the hatching aliens using giant stun guns! As John himself says “It’s an idea!”
So, hey. Let’s get cracking.
Looking for Mr. Finch.
Sometimes you wish they’d go for the pith, you know?
Of all the loathsome spectacles we’ve endured since November 2—the vampire-like gloating of CNN commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing his “mandate”—none are more repulsive than that of Democrats conceding the “moral values” edge to the party that brought us Abu Ghraib.
That really ought to be shouted from battlements, for fuck’s sake, but—and much as I love em-dashes, and the clauses you can tuck inside ’em—there’s no rhythm. No rough music. No beat to pump a fist to.
Still. It’s one fuck of a clarion call.
Fred Clark gets it, too; and if his last line is more stiletto-snark than trumpet blare, well, the stiletto’s the weapon of choice right now in the op-ed alleys of the world.
Some political observers have responded to the electoral map and the exit polls by suggesting that if Democrats want to succeed in the scarlet states they will need to: A) accept the gelded notion of “morality” as a category primarily concerned with the condemnation of sexual minorities; and B) join in and embrace this impious form of piety to win more votes.
This is bad advice. It is also—what’s the word I’m looking for?—immoral.
We don’t need their morals. We have a better grasp of the morals they claim than they do. We don’t need their mandate. You ask Americans wherever they live what they want, what they really want from the world, you get them down to brass tacks and away from buzzwords slippery with rhetorical snakeoil, you do that and we win on the issues every single fucking time. What we need is their mantle, the one they drape over themselves before stepping up to the pulpit, the mantle that we let them steal because in a moment of weakness we felt sorry for the people they claimed to be. It’s that air of authority, that choice box seat in the frame they build themselves; it’s the high ground on the battlefield of their choosing, not ours. —It’s an old, old story, this theft, and it hinges on a fundamental human weakness: the confusion of style for substance, medium for message, dazzle for insight, mantle for morals—the design flaw lurking in our fantastic abilities to recognize patterns and leap to conclusions. It doesn’t matter that the emperor has no clothes, so long as he he’s got the mantle. It doesn’t matter, the words coming out of his mouth; we’ll help them along, after the fact, to what we think they were supposed to mean, until they’re no longer recognizable as what was said. We expect them to be moral, because authoritative, older men are always moral authorities—and so they are, no matter what nonsense they spew. We expect them to equivocate, because thoughtful, nuanced folk always equivocate, and would you look at that? —That’s what the mantle does, and that’s why we’ve got to get it back.
How? I don’t know. (Dismantle the hierarchies implicit in your language! cries a wag in the back. Well, bucko: that’s a strategy. What we need, here and now, are tactics.) —The mantle’s a slippery thing, too slippery to grab: it’s an air, yes, an attitude, but it’s also an expectation. It’s a way of seeing, but more imporantly, of being seen. It’s granted as much as it’s assumed; it’s taken as read, as much as it’s spoken. It’s a story, is what it is: the story we expect to see, and the roles we expect the people we’re seeing to play in it. Change the story, and you change the world. We don’t need to take back the mantle before we can go on to win; we take back the mantle, and we’ve won.
—Which puts us in the realm of strategy again. Not tactics. And anyway, sure as dishes and laundry, there’ll be another to fight in the morning.
But are you starting to see the problem with letting the red states go hang, with cutting our shining cities adrift on our blue hills and leaving them to their hardscrabble ignorance? That’s taking on the roles they deign to give us in the story they want to tell, the one they’ve been telling ever since they snatched the mantle from us—and while pretending “they’re” the conscious authors of this story is as artificial as pretending there’s only one story, or heck, that there’s a monolithic “them” against a unified “us,” and you can even make the argument that there’s a dark power in taking up the roles they give us and twirling our mustachios to the hilt, jiu-jitsuing their story over its logical cliff, still: the mills of poetic justice grind even slower than the other exceeding kind, and anyway, there’s other ways.
What other ways?
(What was I saying about pith?)
Look, this whole thing got started because somebody was searching for arthurian parallels and washed up here and when I went poking to remind myself what Arthurian parallels had to do with what I’d thought I’d written, and I found myself in the middle of some stuff about a Joss Whedon television show that has been squatting, all unseen, at the heart of this one-state-two-state-red-state-blue-state bullshit because the story that’s being told, the story that we’re telling, the story that we’re letting them tell has no place for it. And this is pop culture, yes, this is art, such as it is, and all of that is chopping wood and carrying water when what we need, here and now, are tactical airstrikes (our best targets being the news, and how we get it, and how we pass it along: the stories we make all unknowing when we do, and how we go about changing them: that word, sir, “morals”: I do not think it means what you think it means), but this is a long, slow, tedious business, writing, and grace comes from unexpected quarters, and fortune favors the prepared, and this is what I’ve got, here and now. Make of it what you will. Wood’s still gotta get chopped; the water won’t carry itself, and as far afield as we might have wandered from Abu Ghraib and economic injustice, still: the pulpiest attack on this poisonous story we’ve somehow been tricked into telling, the most half-assed all-unknowing attempt at snatching the mantle from the emperor’s bare shoulders—it’s infinitely more useful than yet another round of fucking the South.
And Whedon’s a step or two up from pulp.
Whedon has cited in a number of interviews the effect his professor Richard Slotkin had on him at Wesleyan, and Slotkin’s book, Regeneration Through Violence. With Firefly, I think he was starting to play directly with those ideas in an edgily dicey manner. —Set 500 years in the future, the show’s political setting was a none-too-subtle recreation of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction: the Alliance of rich, industrialized central or core worlds had fought a war to quell the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged outer planets. The rebel “brown coats” had been put down, the frontier overwhelmed, the Union cemented, and now all our heroes can do is scrape by from job to job, keeping a low profile. It’s a standard western setting, troped up into the future, yes—but that doesn’t account for the chill that went down my spine when, in the (second) pilot, as our heroes engineer their last-minute getaway, Mal (the captain of the ship, a former rebel who still defiantly wears his brown coat), smiles and tosses a bon mot at the villains of the set-piece: “Oh,” he says, “we will rise again.”
Jesus, I thought. Does Whedon know what he’s playing with here?
After all, playing by the rules of the metaphor, Mal maps onto the Confederacy—the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged butternut-coats that lost. And he’s stubborn, proud, independent, self-reliant, a rugged, gun-totin’ he-man, whose moral gut regularly outvotes the niceties of his ethics, and who nicely fills out a tight pair of pants. He is, in many ways, the sort of ideal idolized by reactionaries and conservatives, and his beloved brown-coat rebellion was everything the neo-Confederates claim of the poor, put-upon, honorable South.
“Oh,” he says. “We will rise again.”
But! Mal was also rather explicitly something of an antihero. Whedon calls his politics “reactionary”—oh, heck, at the risk of derailing my sputtering argument, let me quote him at length:
Mal’s politics are very reactionary and “Big government is bad” and “Don’t interfere with my life.” And sometimes he’s wrong—because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.
And there’s the world Mal and his crew and fellow travelers play in, where the folksy talk is peppered with Cantonese slang. Women work as mechanics and fight in wars. The frontier isn’t romantic; it’s hardscrabble, nasty and brutal. The Alliance isn’t Evil, just banal, mostly—and what conflict and oppression we see is driven not by race or religion or (admittedly homogenized) ethnicity, but class and economics, pure and simple.
Whatever it is that’s going to rise again, it sure as hell doesn’t look like the neo-Confederate dreams of the South.
The last batch of westerns—Peckinpah, Leone, et al (and yes, I know morally ambiguous began with John Ford, at least; let’s keep this simple)—rather famously took the straight-shooting archetype of the morally upright western hero: the cowboy, the marshal—and turned his independence and integrity and self-reliance rather firmly inside-out. And that was a good and even necessary thing to do, and anyway it made some kick-ass movies. But in savaging the happy macho myths America had told itself back in the 1950s, in trying to cut away the swaggering pride and racism and cocksure aggrandizement that landed us in Vietnam, among other things, we went too far. Hokey as it might seem, there was a baby in that bathwater. And what I think Whedon was doing with his SF western was very deliberately walking up to the other side of the kulturkampf and taking their idea of a good man—the independence, the self-reliance, the folksy charm, the integrity (cited more in breach than practice by the Other Side, whose idea of self-reliance means I got mine, screw you—but I grow partisan, I digress)—he was taking that idea of a good person, a person capable of doing good things, and giving it back to us.
Of course, what you have to realize there, is the story he was trying to change is one we tell ourselves. (Which is why Mal’s an atheist, see. This is therapy, not outreach.) —Thing about changing stories is everything’s up for grabs until the new narrative settles in, and nobody’s gonna know exactly how everything falls out until it does—and that’s maybe another reason why it’s comfortable to paint ourselves with blue-state woad and charge their rhetorical guns, yet again. At least we know what to expect, right?
There’s other ways, though. Might behoove us to start looking for them.
Watchmaker, watchmaker, make me a watch.
Whenever I hear about something like, oh, how close we’re maybe getting to reconciling general relativity with quantum theory, I think of the termites.
The termites: there’s this guy on the TV, one of those professionally unflappable British narrator guys, crouching three feet underground in a cramped little dig somewhere in the middle of the East African desert, playing his headlamp over a nightmarishly inscrutable labyrinth of twisty little passages, all alike, maybe wide enough to cram a finger into. The labyrinth is mirrored in the ceiling inches over his stooped shoulders. He’s inside the base of a termite mound, this narrator guy, in an heroically excavated cross-section. Outside, above, it’s a weird flat sail, razor-thin at the top, seven to ten feet tall and it’s easily that long. Aligned north to south so it catches the full weight of the morning and evening sun, but hides in its own sort-of shadow from the brutal noonlight. Inside, those labyrinthine fissures snake through the sail, hollowing it out like worm-eaten driftwood, sinking down another yard or so below the narrator guy’s feet, down to where the mud starts, kept cool and damp by seepage from the water table.
And all of it done by termites: hordes and hordes of plump pale bugs as big as the first two joints of your index finger, that hoisted the sail, dug the labyrinth, and now swarm blindly about, sealing one passage here, opening another there. Why? says the narrator guy, three feet underground. Why this incredible effort, this marvel of insect engineering? His unflappable mien not at all compromised by the dirt streaking his cheeks. Air conditioning, says the narrator guy. The difference in temperatures between the cool air underground and the air in the sail, heated by the sun, sets up a constant flow throughout the nest. Regulated by those swarms of tiny HVAC techs, opening this shaft, closing the other, the ambient temperature throughout most of the nest never fluctuates outside of a narrow 2º Fahrenheit window. And a good thing, that, says the narrator guy. There’s a fungus the termites depend on for their digestion which can only flourish in that temperature range. Without the termites and their marvel of insect engineering, the fungus would wither up and blow away in the 120º afternoons. And without the fungus: no termites.
Hearing this made me all shivery inside. Here I am, a rakishly secular humanist with just enough science to get me into trouble, and this unflappable narrator guy is breezing past an incredible marvel of inhuman ingenuity with a dry, unflapped chuckle, heading off after the next incredible marvel—weaver birds, maybe, or octopi that open Mason jars with their tentacles. I can’t remember. I was left behind with a startling sign of intelligent design, one far more impressive than that dam’ bombardier beetle, and nothing but a dull piece of logic to pick it apart with. How on earth could trial and error, self-organization, and evolutionary pressures have produced such an intricate system of vents and a thermostat far more effective than the one in my office? How could it all have had enough time to work itself out to support this fungus, when without it, the fungus would die? When without the fungus, the termites would starve?
Could it all have been made, and not just happened?
Luckily, I have a friend who’s able to help me sharpen my logic and show me which end to hold it by. (Thanks, Charles.) —My mistake, there on the couch, gobsmacked by the unflappable narrator guy, was (rather foolishly) to assume the fungus’s dependence on that precisely narrow temperature window, and the termites utter dependence on the fungus, were constants throughout the history of their symbiosis; not so. The fungus was hardier in the past; the termites less finicky. The incredible success of their relationship was finely tuned over an incredibly long stretch of time—evolved, one might say, along with the termites’ instincts for building with spittle and homeostasis, and the fungus’s for, well, whatever it is fungi do all day—until it reached its current interdependent apex, littering the East African desert with monuments seven to ten feet high.
So it’s a little thing, and a bone-headed error, and I’m not at all suggesting it’s the same thing, no—well, maybe similar, perhaps, in kind if not degree, but still: I think about that shiver I felt, looking at the inscrutable labyrinth; I remember the ghostly whisper in the back of my brain, insisting despite all I know that it must have been made and couldn’t just have happened, and I think, I think I know what it is that makes people take up ideas like the anthropic principle. And maybe it’s because I share that feeling that I take such an immediate and visceral dislike to them. (Well. The ideas. I mean, it’s nothing personal.)
Nails.
Fuck the South? —I’m a ’Bama boy in something of a self-imposed exile, a Yankee throwback who still has strong opinions on grits, and I like a good rant as much as the next raconteur, but you know what? Fuck you. No, seriously: fuck you. There’s more than enough stars and bars to go around. Sure, that asshole wrote that thing where he cut off his nose to spite his face, but so what? Assholes like that have been writing masturbatory fantasies about strange fruit for years. There’s hardball, but there’s also letting them set the rules and pick the battlefield, and it doesn’t take a Sun Tzu to point out what a mug’s game that is.
Kos tells us Frank Rich nailed it—as yet another Canute spitting into the incoming CW tide about those pesky “values voters,” anyway. And Rich has his point, even if it’s thin and dispiriting. —But when I want some quality spleen-vent, I tap the source, and once more the pseudonymous skimble fails to disappoint:
As a Blue Stater, I am sick of being told how negative I am and that I hate Christians, or the American South, or heartland states, or gun owners, or people less educated than me, or families, or rural culture.
I don’t hate any of that.
I hate incompetence. I hate unchecked greed. I hate secrecy in public institutions. I hate discrimination. I hate the distortion of public discourse by giving common words coded meanings. I hate coercion. I hate disproportionality in prosecution and sentencing. I hate the theft of public property for private gain. I hate having my privacy violated, especially in medical and financial matters. I hate that members of this administration avoided military service but abuse veterans and send soldiers and reservists to their deaths—and still pretend to recognize Veterans Day.
All of these things reduce the choices available to our citizens. All of these things contradict compassion. All of these things reduce freedom. The bullshit versions of compassion and freedom exclude the real things from our lives.
That’s what I hate.
Added bonus.
While cruising some Goats-related sites on the internet for the bit prior, I stumbled across as neat a piece of writing advice as you could ask for, tossed off the cuff of an engaging interview. So, ladies and gentlemen, the Mountain Goat himself, John Darnielle:
The problem with most people that write that way is that they focus more on “is it true?” than “is it good writing?” Most things don’t resonate when they’re true; it’s how the audience hears it when it doesn’t have anything to do with them. So I’ve always been resistant towards that, from since I was a kid and wanted to become a writer. They’d say, write about what you know, and I’d say I’m a fucking kid! [laughs] I don’t know anything—I wanna write about monsters! But at the same time, I think my new songs are so much better than the old songs, and they’re more rooted in truth. I guess what I’m going at is, first learn to write, then try to write about yourself, once you’re able to distance yourself, to lose the notion that what was so spectacular to you isn’t necessarily so spectacular to everyone.
Whipsaw.
There’s a woman copping a smoke in the doorway of a building one stop up from where I get off. It’s right next to a Men’s Wearhouse. The windows are done up for Christmas already: one of those foxily silver male models looms in a window-filling poster, dapper in a dark suit, holding up a puppy with a big red bow around its neck. The next window over, he’s casual in a den somewhere, a nice bright sweater, a mug of something hot and spiced in one hand. He’s wearing the same airbrushed grin in both shots, and not a silver strand is out of place: a metrosexual CEO, his hands never dirty, his lucre never dreaming of filth. Someone just like him was hanging in those windows last year, and the year before that: the river is never the same, but it takes a while to wear a loop into an oxbow. As it were. I mean, it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet, but here’s the Christmas swag; the Payless down the street got its holly-swaddled signs up the Friday before Hallowe’en. I ought to be livid. It’s one of the harmless little things I let myself blow up over. (Not until Black Friday, people! Please.) But I’m not. I’m not. —And her? She’s standing there in her business drag, blowing smoke: taking a break from answering the phones, stepping and fetching, an early morning deathly dull sales conference with successorized PowerPoints, trying to sort 500 boxes of document production for the upcoming class-action suit. She might have been copping a smoke there yesterday, too, or last week, or the year before; maybe I just never registered her. Maybe I never looked up in time. Maybe her schedule changed; maybe she just started here. Maybe she was working in Tualatin last week. The river is never the same, but how different is it, really? A little ripple here, that’s gone before you know it? A different twig rolling down the current than the one that was there a minute ago? The scree shifted a little when you weren’t looking? What does any of that matter? Don’t these people realize Everything Changed last week? Don’t they see what happened? Doesn’t anyone?
The second of November, 2004: and nothing was ever the same again.
And sometimes what I’m listening to is Paul’s band, Arms; a lot of the time what I’m listening to specifically is “Build on the 9s.” And yes, I know, the song is built out of nine sections, and no take was ever more than nine bars long, and they chopped it all up and edited it back together, and they’re singing “Build on the 9s, build on the 9s,” because, you know, that’s what they were doing. But they recorded it in 1999, when the tail wind that carried us through that decade hadn’t yet begun to sputter, and even if a decade is a wholly artificial demarcation, a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas (important events, and important ideas), and just when did the ’90s begin, anyway? The World Wide Web? Clinton’s inauguration? “Right Here, Right Now”? That night the Wall came down? —Remember when all our wars were going to be for the right reasons? (They weren’t, but remember?) Remember when we were going to abolish stupid work and outsource ourselves in our pyjamas? (We never really could, but remember?) Remember when somebody would show up at your cubicle with an orange messenger bag full of DVDs and ice cream you’d just ordered online? When the hit TV show was “Northern Exposure”? When we were all going to move to Prague and become uncitizens of the Middle World? Remember when the clouds finally looked like they were lifting and the sunlight lit up the sky and the drums kicked in and then they blew that amazing horn break that sounded like it was going to last forever? Remember when we were going to save the world?
Those are the nines, right there: nine one, nine oh, nine three, nine five, all the way up to ninety-fuckin’-nine. (Eight nine, even, and the Wall, coming down. There’s a photo of me somewhere, with a ponytail, in the long dark coat I still wear to work when it’s cold, chipping away at that Wall with a hammer and chisel. When I was six or maybe five we went through Checkpoint Charlie and Mom was told she couldn’t photograph an old bombed-out church in East Berlin, so she turned around and caught its ruined reflection in the oranged glass cladding of the people’s office box across the street. —My God. Was it all really that long ago?) —Build on those nines, dammit: and the song lurches in its engagingly undrunken way from nine-bar to nine-bar, and all those names come thundering through the speakers, universal in their particularity. The increasing us and the decreasing them. The past didn’t go anywhere! The nines are still here, all about us. Build on them!
And I’m listening to that because it’s something I need to know, here and now. It’s easy to forget.
Remember Y2K? Remember why we were gonna party like it was 1999?
The twelfth of December, 2000: and nothing was ever the same again.
Later than eleven
Trying to make the earth into a heaven
So, yeah: saving is what misers do, and there’s something else I’m listening to, when I’m not listening to that. What I’m listening to is the Mountain Goats, and specifically what I’m listening to is “The Plague.”
There will be cotton clouds
Above the fields, as white as cream
There will be loud singing in the churches
As we all come out to take one for the team
And all our great schemes and plans
Will slip like fishes from our hands
And the rivers will all turn to blood
Frogs will fall from the sky
And the plague will cover
The country with its anger
La la la la
La la la
La la la
I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime.
So here I am, at the edge of everything, ready to take a leap into moonbattery. Deep breath. Flex your knees. Roll your head this side to that, loosen your neck, free up your shoulders by swinging your arms back and forth. Spit in your palms and rub them together. Even though you’re not about to grab anything, it’s something to do, a sign and signifier of focussed intent. Step up to the edge. Grip it with your toes. Crouch a little, find your balance, careful. Easy. Feel that clutching tingle in your glutes. Savor the air, suddenly sharp in your nose. Your heart’s beating faster. Let it. Swallow. Okay: coil your muscles, arms back, ready to fling yourself over and out, take one more deep breath, hold it a moment, let half of it out, and—
There.
—Of course, I had to climb back up out of moonbattery to pose for that leap, and now I’ve made it, I’m not actually falling tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle into the outer darkness, shrieking oddly umlauted vowels, coughing up words with too many consonants: I’m maybe a foot away, still on the ground, hunkered over a little, dust puffing up from my feet where I landed. There was no edge. This isn’t moonbattery. It’s just a step or two away from where you are now. Maybe a little darker, but otherwise the same. We were warned, goddammit: it doesn’t take the pattern-skrying of a Teresa Nielsen Hayden or the fever-stoking of a Greg Palast to make it clear. We were told, up front. That nameless Bush aide cheerfully copped to it, in the Ron Suskind article linked ’round the world:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Well, Bev Harris is studying what they did. You want a barricade? (Or a levee, to sandbag?) That’s as good a place as any to start setting one up.
The election was rigged. They stole it. Last time, they cold-cocked us when we both found ourselves in a suddenly dark room with nobody looking; this time, we went in with a flashlight, but they’d slipped us a mickey, and that’s why our lips are numb and our mouth tastes like cold pennies as we stand here, ready to make our little leap: the election was rigged. George W. Bush still isn’t president. (Except in all the ways that actually matter.)
And I’d like to say leaving is a crock, all due respect to my favorite popstar notwithstanding. I’ve said it, actually: leaving is a crock. There’s too much left to fight for and too much left to fight with for us to go gently into exile. But I’ve said it as much to buck myself up as anything else: I repeat it to myself, trying to spit that taste out of my mouth, to convince myself it’s true. Leaving is a crock, yes, but more to the point: leaving is hard. —But I’ve read “Jesus Plus Nothing.” They’ve told us up front what they want. They’ve cheerfully copped to it. We’ve been warned. And here I stand in Little Beirut, the capital of the People’s Republic of Multnomah County: somehow alienated, somewise cut off; alone, despairing, so very, very sorry.
Leaving is hard. But is it really harder than fighting?
What comes next? I don’t know. Whither the left? Ha! I barely can tell you what I’ll be doing tomorrow, beyond following Bruce Baugh’s sage advice the best I can, and keeping a weather-eye out for galiel’s canaries to start dropping. But can I just for a minute jump on the “moral values”-bashing bandwagon? We don’t need to start preaching, and we don’t need preachers (though we need everyone we can get). We know our morals and we know what we stand for and we know we’re right. What we need here on the left side, the side of progress, the side that gets things done, the somewhat more purple side that keeps picking those somewhat more magenta states out of the gutter and loaning them a sawbuck till payday that we know we’ll never see again, what we need is, and bear with me on this, we need a Daddy. We need father-figures to go on all the TV chat shows and sternly and implacably stick up for our values as we know them and lay down the law as we would write it with an ineffable air of authority that reaches right past the frontal lobes and plugs into the monkey-brain, there to patiently bit-by-bit unwire the awful “moral values” meme bombs with Truth and Justice and the American fucking Way, and I realize this is the voters-are-rubes argument, which is seemingly at odds with the voters-was-robbed argument, and I’ve plumped for the voters-is-mean argument, too, and probably will again, but elections are legion; they contain multitudes, and I know this is about to decohere into gassy rhetoric, babble and fury, but hear me out: what we need now is Atticus Finch, ladies and gentlemen.
So, hey, let me end with a quote from Barry Goldwater, that seems to have fallen off Will Shetterly’s site:
Now, those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny.
Using their own words against them! That’ll show ’em!
Premature, perhaps, but.
HYDRIOTAPHIA.
ENTIERRO DE LA URNA;
O, Un DISCURSO De las URNAS De SEPULCHRAL ENCONTRADO ÚLTIMAMENTE EN NORFOLK.
A mi amigo digno y honorado,
Thos. Le Gros, de Crostwick, Esq.
La gallina el pyre general estaba hacia fuera, y el valediction pasado encima, los hombres tomó durar adieu de su interred a amigos, esperando poco que la curiosidad de las edades futuras debe comentar sobre sus cenizas; y, no teniendo ninguna vieja experiencia de la duración de sus relicks, llevada a cabo ninguna opinión de tales despue’s-consideraciones.
¿Pero quién sabe el sino de sus huesos, o cómo él debe a menudo ser enterrada? ¿Quién hath el oráculo de sus cenizas, o whither él debe ser dispersada? Los relicks de muchos mentira como las ruinas de Pompey, en todas las partes de la tierra; y cuando llegan sus manos éstos pueden parecerse ahan vagado lejos, que, en un recorrido directo y meridiano, tenga solamente pocas millas de tierra sabida entre se y el poste.
Not quite right. I shall try again, in the morning.
Hope dies last.
I was going to kick up an old entry on the commemorative slang we all should be using to describe Republican Fuck Tha Vote initiatives, but who needs that shit? We’re in the last days, the die’s rattling in the cup, our toes are damp in the Rubicon, and be damned if it’s the same river it was last time. Joshua Micah Marshall has the only post you need to read from now until Tuesday. He’s quoting somebody working the polls in Florida:
My job is to get people to the polls and, more importantly, to keep them there. Because they’re crazily jammed. Crazily. No one expected this turnout. For me, it’s been a deeply humbling, deeply gratifying experience. At today’s early vote in the College Hill district of East Tampa—a heavily democratic, 90% African American community—we had 879 voters wait an average of five hours to cast their vote. People were there until four hours after they closed (as long as they’re in line by 5, they can vote).
Here’s what was so moving:
We hardly lost anyone. People stood outside for an hour, in the blazing sun, then inside for another four hours as the line snaked around the library, slowly inching forward. It made Disneyland look like speed-walking. Some waited 6 hours. To cast one vote. And EVERYBODY felt that it was crucial, that their vote was important, and that they were important.
And there were tons of first time voters. Tons.
Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll see you on the other side.
Winning friends; influencing people.
Y’know, Ted—can I call you Ted? Ted, I could, if I wanted, thank you, for finally giving me a glimpse of what it is y’all think you see when you take a look at Kerry; I could sneer at you, and tell you that your partisan ideal of God is a pathetically transparent crutch, devoid of mystery and grace, part and parcel of the exclusionary rhetoric that has so bitterly divided a country so sorely in need of uniting these past four years. I could point out that the soldiers whose vote you so assiduously champion are many of them paid so little they must feed their families with food stamps—which puts them squarely in the freeloaders’ camp, whose vote you so thoughtlessly disparage. I could slyly allude to the charming hubris in whingeing on about the unworkable inefficiencies of public works over the internet—one of many great public works that make this modern world of ours at all possible—but it’s an old and tired point, worn smooth with overuse. (Besides, you doubtless go out of your way to use private toll roads, and think the free market would do an even better job of keeping cholera at bay; also, I’d have to hear you rationalize an administration that’s presided over one of the largest public-sector growth spurts in history. I’d really rather not.) —I could be rude, and unload a mercilessly colorful stream of invective that attempts to plumb the willful depths of your ignorance; I could be shrill, and hold you up as an example of all that is wrong, as one of the tuneless tootling flutes that bedevil our sleep and hold us back from all that we could be; I could be deferential, since the ground I need to cover has already been well and truly mapped. I could be a mensch, and let you know, privately, that anyone who goes on about how dumb Democrats are had probably better know how to spell Republicans. (Hint: there’s only one “i.”)
But what I’m gonna do, Ted, is this: I’m gonna tell you to stop sending me unsolicited commercial email. This may be one of the most polarized elections ever, or at least in a while, but if there’s one thing that will bring us all together, Democrat and Republican, Green and Libertarian, and unite us in a common cause, it’s an undying hatred of spam.
Verb. sap. and all that, old boy.
November criminals.
The evidence is abundant that Kerry has no concept of unintended consequences. He has been protected from those all of his life. Nutured as he is in the ideas so dear to the Left, of victimology and irresponsibility, of class warfare and division, of “situation ethics”, nannystatism and “internationalism”, he is as ill prepared to deal with the results of his “policies” as he is to tell the truth… or even to know what truth is.
He’ll be sure to fuck it all up while remaining clueless, protesting his own innocence and blaming it all on Bush.
He simply must not be allowed to take office, no matter what the rigged results of the election may be. And we must not tolerate the kinds of post election shenanigans the dipocrats are planning.
It is our American tradition to tolerate the elction of those with whom we disagree. Gear up for the next election and try to reach some accomadation with the other side, for the good of the Nation. That has been or practice and our salvation. And we have been trying in naive good faith to accomodate the Left for most of a century, to our sorrow and peril. Most of the ills in our politics and in society generally can be ascribed to this alone.
This time, there will be nothing left of that Nation in which this was the way of peaceful and civil governance. If Kerry “wins”, it will be too late to save the Nation which showed the world the miracle of representative republican government. Our soveriegnty and our Constitution will be further demolished, our economy and military weakened, our enemies emboldened, our confidence and spirit disheartened and, most likey, we will suffer catastrophic physical attack on our own soil.
The combination of disasters ensured by a Kerry “victory” amounts to a national crisis that we simply cannot allow. In four more years, it will be far too late.
Posted by LC Jon , Imperial Hunter at October 28, 2004 11:32 PM
So yeah: one thing and another and it’s looking enough like our long national nightmare might actually be over on the third of November that I’m biting most of my down-to-the-wire nails over Measure 36.
But you know what happens when a nightmare’s over, don’t you?
You sit up, gasping, and then the alarm goes off, and you jump, and you hit the snooze button, and maybe you try to go back to sleep for another five minutes, but you can’t, so you finally get up and I hope you remember to turn off your alarm clock, or otherwise it’s going to go off while you’re in the shower and God that’s annoying, but however it ends up you make coffee in your bathrobe and if you’ve got some time you read the news, and then you go and you put on some pants and you put on a shirt and you get your jacket and your keys and your wallet and you go get on the bus and you ride downtown and you go to fucking work.
That’s what happens when a nightmare’s over.
Voting is terribly important. It’s absolutely vital. It’s also just about the least important thing we can do, politically. —Butterfly effect aside, swapping the smirched and tarnished R on the White House for a magical golden D is just the barest beginning.
Magician and Superman.
Favorite line from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, thus far:
“Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people,” said Wellington.
Doesn’t hurt, I suppose, that it’s Stephen Fry’s Wellington I’m seeing in my head.
I’m enjoying the book a great deal: it is, in its own gentle way, precisely the antidote I needed for Stone, even if it’s coming from an unexpected quarter. (I like wondering what Aubrey and Maturin are up to, in this alternate history.) —But (as with any upstairs Britfic, or Merchant & Ivory production) I’m spoiling the fun a little with those nagging issues of class: how delightfully easy it is to study magic, when one doesn’t have to worry about meals or a mortgage or a day job! (But that’s just envy talking. Don’t mind it.) I’m reminded of sprezzatura in evening clothes, and how keeping one’s head when all about you etc. is much easier when you have a certain amount of power, over the situation that’s lopping heads, or at least yourself; it’s therefore a sign of power, and that’s why coolth’s so cool—and maybe, just maybe, why I’m finding Mr Norrell the more sympathetic. (Thus far.)
Which leads me to Scott McCloud, ruminating on the difference between rage, and calm, and how they apply to power fantasies. And I suppose I could dig into the differences between power over and power with—but I’ve just straddled the Pond, by golly. And there’s work elsewhere to be done.
The company kept.
Kevin Drum is surprised by who turns up on Reason’s poll of prominent libertarians, and I suppose I am, too: any movement than can (avidly) count Wendy McElroy and Charles Murray as members is—oh, hell, one just doesn’t know what to say. —But at the same time, I’m not at all surprised: it’s the usual suspects who measure their liberties in tax cuts and care more about being right than trying to do right—and run the risk of fucking up. You all know these guys, if you’ll permit me a gross generalization: he’s in every comics shop and sci-fi club and weekly Dungeons & Dragons session—actually, let’s swap that out for Diplomacy, or maybe Starfleet Battles, or, yeah, Advanced Squad Leader. —There’s a certain social power that comes from digging into an argument and overwhelming the other side, and nothing fosters argument like making an abstruse, persnickety, anti-conventional choice, clasping it to your bosom, and defending it rigorously against all comers. (“The grapes are sour, as anyone with eyes can plainly see.”) Hence the impish delight that wafts from the screen when Reason asks its assembled panel for their favorite presidents: “Bush 41,” says Jonathan Rauch, almost daring you to ask why. “Grover Cleveland,” says Robert Higgs. Losers fall back on the classics: Washington, Lincoln; Jesse Walker scores over-the-top cool points: “Richard Henry Lee,” he says.
But that certain social power easily evaporates when you find you have to walk your rigorous defense back, and power’s a hard thing to give up, and maybe this is why so many libertarians on this list are voting for Bush again, in spite of. Tax cuts, they say, ignoring the explosive growth of a government that will never fit in that bathtub; Islamofascism, they say, and blithely order up another round of aerial strikes in urban areas full of people who mostly just want to get on with their lives—but really, it’s for much the same reason as the principled non-voters and the Elmer Fudd write-ins: I’d rather be right on my own damn terms, they say, than run the risk of ever being wrong. —The poetic justice of the reality-challenged candidate so many of them have backed into, who clasps his impetuous choices to his bosom and defends them against all comers, on his own damn terms, is chilly comfort. —It’s not that I think that Libertarians for Bush is a large-enough constituency to swing a state, much less the election; it’s just that it’s always hard to see a dream so shiny turn so foully rancid.
(I mean, the Greens at least have a basic faith in the enterprise, however touchingly naïve. —Us Greens? Oh, look: my own concern for coolth is getting in the way!)
The ice has gotten thin beneath my feet out here, so it’s time for me to walk it back. I had a much pettier point to make, before I got distracted; a bean-counting, politically correct point, persnickety in the extreme: reading my way down Reason’s poll, I was surprised to note there’s three times as many Kerry supporters listed as there are women.
One just doesn’t know what to say.
Isn’t it nice we’re all in on the joke.
It’s amazing how quickly a random cruise through the web can send a Lewis Black joke screwballing at you:
The ‘Dirrty’ singer—who is fronting a new MTV documentary promoting sexual abstinence to US teenagers—also says she tries to make love every day and claims she is open to all sexual experiences.
Much as hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, due diligence of a sort is the tribute prankster pundits pay to what passes for objective reality, these days. So I’ll note that it’s all a little more complex than the writer of the blurb above (oh, how they must have high-fived and bumped fists with everybody in the bullpen when that one went through) would have it seem: the documentary in question, “Sex, Votes & Higher Power,” is part of MTV’s Choose or Lose programming, which this year is committed to getting 20 million 20-somethings to vote—which, demographics being what they are, is all to the better end of the short stick we’re holding. And a brief perusal of more in-depth descriptions proves the show is more complex than “promoting abstinence to US teenagers”:
By traveling back to her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, to meet several young women and men who have been directly affected by the government’s policies on abortion, abstinence-only sex ed and dating violence, Christina finds out firsthand what’s going on in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The special will present several sides of the many issues affecting young people and present where both political parties stand on these issues.
And while I didn’t watch it (due to a lack of cable, and not having known of its existence), them what did report what sounds, indeed, like a studiously bent-over-backwards fair-and-balanced approach. —But! The atheists in the audience are already chomping at the “Higher Power” in the documentary’s title: pun or not, it’s a loaded gun of a phrase this year, especially when you drag it out for sex and youth and our misbegotten approach to the incendiary intersection of the two. And much as I might be amused by the image of Christina Aguilera, who says she tries to make love every day, impishly quizzing a couple of Silver Ring Thingers about just how far it is they can go and still abstain, I keep coming back to that MTV press release, which so lovingly cites the Heritage Foundation’s bullshit statistics about the “success” of abstinence-only education.
But again, I didn’t see it, and so I’m not going to get any further out on that limb than this. What’s important here is the Wile E. Coyote moment I had when I first read that line cited above: and what can you say when a pop star who’s working the post-t.A.T.u. mediasphere with coy gossip about shamelessly red-blooded quotidian fucks is cited in the very same article as leaping at the chance to promote abstinence to American teens? —Even adjusting for the Brit-tab snark factor, you have to admire the tesseract of pre-breakfast impossible things lurking at the heart of it all.
Maybe hypocrisy is the tithe virtue pays to vice. Yeah. That’s it.
