Ax(e)minster and other inconsequentialities.
The post office downtown has closed. And even though it isn’t the same thing (at all) as the ugly concrete barricades blocking the former parking circle in front of the Edith Green – Wendell Wyatt Federal Building, a makeshift solution to a problem we will always have with us (until we decide otherwise), they’re still signs of the same dam’ thing: that my own personal slice of civic life, the convenience? the dignity? the pride, perhaps, the civic pride of being able to walk a couple of blocks from my office and buy some dam’ postage stamps from what was once the oldest post office in continual operation west of the Mississippi (yes, convenience, too. But a convenience altogether different than being able to buy said stamps at the local supermarket), that my civic life is less important than five parking spaces for 9th Circuit judges; that the desire to be seen doing something quick and dirty and starvation cheap and ultimately utterly ineffectual against a form of terrorism (rental trucks and fertilizer bombs; plastique, if you’ve got militia connections with disgruntled servicefolks, perhaps) that, outside of Ann Coulter columns, is so 1995, that this pissant little gesture (a stroke of a pen, and a dozen concrete barricades, ugly protowalls shaped like long caltrops, like these are the things you cut slices from to make the riprap tumbled at the bottom of commercial jetties, are dumped haphazardly a set distance from the foundation of the building, no cars or trucks closer than this, please) is more important than any pride one might take in appearances, in what tries to pass these days for an agora. At least Napoleon III had the gumption to rebuild the entire frickin’ city, you know?
Slapdash. —This is what I think of, walking down the sidewalk between the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Portland Branch) and more of those dam’ barricades.
I’m reading a collection of short stories by Gary Lutz and I like them well enough. He has a flair for sentences that loop unexpectedly, nouns verbified and adjectivals adverbed not for mere ugly convenience (à la businessprech) but for a much more immediate and nebulous effect, and when it works (“I’d awelessly faked my way through a Midwestern graduate school with a dissertation two hundred and eighty-seven clawing, suffixy pages long, all of it embezzled from leaky monographs”) it works quite well indeed, and when it doesn’t (“Every night we let sleep reinflict upon us its formulary and useless terrors. Come morning, it was usually argued that we were out of place, and a map was once again pencilly roughed out”) it doesn’t so much, and though “Street Map of the Continent,” say, leaves a chill wind blowing down your spine, overall it’s mostly grey little anti-epiphanics, straitlaced recountings of the unreasonable reasons behind obsessive peregrinations that end up going nowhere much; things done not because they are done but because the words that make up the telling of them conjure interesting, evanescent new flavors in your mouth. He’s a po-faced absurdist in the same basic school (I’d say; you might say different) as Kelly Link and Ray Vukcevich, but Lutz’s insistence on naturalism (thus far) anchors him, greys him, sends him spinning away from oddball presque vu into obsessive, nattering retreat, but that’s just me tagging him for not doing what he isn’t doing, not for not doing what he’s doing well, which he does do. Still. Link’s witches and Vukcevich’s spacesuits end up paradoxically making their stories more open, more universal, more—more. Real(ish) people reacting appropriately (if one could ever designate what is apropos in such circumstances) to impossible stimuli, rather than people not so real(ish) because they react inappropriately (if at all) to quotidian stimuli—phones that don’t ring, dead-end jobs, that annoying neighbor in the apartment just above you. (Schizophrenia and neurosis, isn’t it?)
But I’m being hard on Lutz, whom as I said I like. Quite. Has an evident love for words and a way with sentences, a sort of brusque chivalry, at once antique and outlandish. —Even if his much-vaunted clarity isn’t, much.
Jenn’s put up some of the first entries in her Explications, some of the world-building elements behind the scenes of Dicebox which (ahem) I’ve had a hand in. One of which I’d mostly forgotten between the writing of it and now: the review of the soap opera to which Griffen is addicted, Forever Between the Light and the Dark. —And aside from the particular point I want to make about Axeminster is the sheer delight I had in coming up with the details: if you want to know what my ur-entertainment is, it’s pretty much this: an anime-bright never-ending steampunk spicepunk glitterpunk Bollywood musical soap opera. Baby, I am so there.
But. Axeminster, Adelaide. The “Axeminster” comes from MacGuyver, of all places, which neither the Spouse nor I had ever watched before. —You have to understand how we get work done, sometimes, especially in the winter: bundled up on the couch, her at the one end, me at the other, under the same afghan (and, if especially cold, a comforter, perhaps), a cat on this lap or that (the other, not so sociable, watching us dreamily from the ottoman), our respective laptops (hers snow, mine tangerine) on tray tables before us (or maybe she’s got the sketchbook, the pencils, the kneaded erasers, and is constantly asking me to hold my hand thus, to laugh so, to turn my head and smile and hold it, just for a moment, there, thanks). The television’s on more often than not, more as hearth than actual focus of attention: flashing color and flickering noise to distract the bits of the brain that would otherwise get in the way of the words you’re writing or the lines you’re drawing with a lot of hemming and hawing and second-guessing. And one of those nights the channel surfing had stopped for one reason or another on TV Land, there at the top of our expanded basic cable dial, where we found an episode of MacGuyver. Maybe it was the opening with the nuclear plant somewhere in the Middle East being MacGuyvered that hooked us, I dunno. But it turned out to be an appallingly amateurish show with those weird, washed-out ’80s TV colors and a terribly hackneyed plot. The fun came from D’Mitch Davis’s portrayal of laconic hitman Axminster, out to get Our Hero—or rather, from the way he was portrayed: a black man nattily dressed in safari-ish gear standing in the back of a jeep bossing a posse of white men in full-on camo-and-safety-orange hunting togs who’d relay the most obvious exposition to him in hastily deferential tones: “He’s just been shot, Axminster!” “Nobody’s here, Axminster!” “It’s coming from over there, Axminster!”—And all of those painfully obvious voiceovers slapped onto location shots filmed MOS and shoehorned into the narrative. The giggles got positively Pavlovian.
Since I was noodling the Forever Between review while half-watching it, the producer became Adelaide Axeminster. —All of which I’d promptly forgotten, utterly, until Jenn asked me to give the piece one more once-over last night before uploading them.
So.
For some reason, there’s a connection in the back of my brain, nebulous and inexplicable but unquestionably there: on the one hand, the difference noted above between Link and Lutz, between schizophrenia and neurosis (as it perhaps were); on the other, the fact that I react to “Full of Grace” almost entirely because of the way it was used at the very end of Buffy’s second-season finale (which was on FX not too long ago; I was cooking dinner, the Spouse taking a post-work bath, and we’ve seen this ep a dozen times, easily, but the commercial break ends at 10 till the hour and here comes the fourth act, Buffy striding down that dawnlit street with a bare sword in her hand, Xander crashing out of the woods with a rock and a lie, and the pasta water’s boiling but it doesn’t matter; the sword fight is thrilling but clumsy—Boreanaz’ stunt double has a completely different hairline, and it’s as-ever painfully obvious when it’s Gellar and when it’s Sophia Crawford—and it doesn’t matter; the dialogue hasn’t aged well in spots and the acting especially at the end with the Scooby Gang standing around hands in their pockets and bandages on their heads is, again, clumsy, and it just doesn’t matter; the Spouse is out of her bath book in hand in her red robe in the TV room dripping and it doesn’t matter, because out of all this somehow the alchemy still works its magic a dozen times over now; it’s still ten of the most shattering minutes ever on a TV show, my God; Whedon teases us with the Worst Possible Ending and then shockingly ups the ante; Buffy kisses Angel one last time and then plunges the sword into him and the look on Gellar’s face as the music crashes to the ground and out of the wreckage crawls Sarah McLachlan’s voice, the winter here is cold, and bitter…), and yet I react to Poe’s “Amazed” for almost entirely inexplicable personal reasons (which won’t stop me from giving it that old college try: it’s the maze, of course, amazing, ha, but it’s the moment when—the song has climbed up out of its nice-enough but still quotidian verse-chorus-verse into an endlessly lifting bridge that’s churning with this undeniable washing waltz of a rhythm—and then the bass and the drums drop out leaving only her voice and the melody carried by I-don’t-know-what, strings, synthesizers, it doesn’t matter, there’s a guitar in there pretending to be a sitar, I think, but so what, the words carried along willy-nill in that waltz: And here by the ocean the sky’s full of leaves, and what they can tell you depends on what you believe… and that’s it; I’m standing on a beach somewhere, the air is cold and full of water and salt and the sound of the waves, endlessly—), and yet—and yet, these two songs, two very different reasons, but the feeling itself is the same, the same: that swooping swelling presque vu that demands attention, that you stop and hold yourself motionless and let it happen to you until it’s past, it’s over, you’re done. And then.
I’m sorry. What was I saying?
No means no.
Separation means separation.
Uniter means not dividing.
This means war.
I don’t want to listen to fundamentalist preachers anymore.
A half-satisfied cat being better than none.
Moved mostly to post a couple of searches on which Google (and thus by extension this whole mighty interweb-thingie) failed me today. First, the Multnomah County Library has in storage a book with the tantalizing title: History of remarkable conspiracies connected with European history, during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, by Lawson, John Parker, d. 1852. But it’s in, as noted, storage, and anyway the library is closed on Mondays (thanks ever so much, Mr. Sizemore), so I couldn’t go on my lunch break to figure out whether or not I can pry it out of their hands for a week or so. But! Google would help! And instantly, to boot! Surely a book about so tantalizing a topic will have been read by someone somewhere, and thus naturally enough nattered on about on some obscure webpage. —I’ll at least have a better idea as to whether or not Mr. Lawson’s tome is worth the prying. But even the simplest variation of the title turns up bupkes, and John Parker Lawson, d. 1852 or not, fares little better.
Hmpf.
Second: enjoying immensely The Sword and the Centuries, by Alfred Hutton, FSA—he quotes primary sources extensively, is proving a wealth of delicious trivia about points of honor and fighting with long sharp sticks, and has that wonderful tang to his voice, that admixture of florid vocabulary and dry understatement that makes me weak in the knees. I mean, he uses words like supersticerie—
Well. Google turns up nothing, and the editors of the OED apparently hadn’t read Sword by 1971. —The meaning is clear enough from context:
A certain Gounellieu, a great favourite of the King, had incurred his hatred, and that justly, because this Gounellieu had killed, as it was said, with supersticery and foul advantage, a young brother of his…
...we have seen how various acts of “supersticerie” arose—how a wicked-minded man, feeling sure that his adversary was honest, would appear on the field with a good strong coat of mail concealed under his shirt…
Breaking the word and scrying its entrails helps, too (of course): super and sistere, to stand above, cf. intersices and superstition. Supersticerie does have a supernatural component, given the number of charms duellists would tuck about their person for a chance at that scant edge (and the vociferousness with which they then had to proclaim before God and King or Duke or Marshal they had done no such thing); and so one who depends upon such supersticery (as opposed, say, to mail coats hidden under shirts, or paying one’s buddies to waylay one’s opponent on the way to the duelling ground—also incidents of supersticery) is, of course, a bit superstitious. I like the quality of its movement in logic-space: appealing to extra-legal recourse is, in a sense, standing above the fray. And I like its linkage with another obsolete variant on super-sistere, which the OED had tumbled to in 1971: superstitie, the power of survival. —“The people are the many waters, he turn’d their froth and fome into pearls, and wearied all weathers with an unimpaired Superstitie.”
So there’s my contribution to the interweb-thingie, this week; give it a few days, and the next time someone goes hunting via Google for “supersticerie,” they’ll get something of an answer. One out of two ain’t bad.
But I’m still curious as hell about Lawson’s 150-year-old conspiracy theories. Anyone? Anyone?
Your First Amendment in action.
Via the Daze Reader, a neat little essay from Lawrence Walters answering that question that’s been nagging the back of your brain lately, I’m sure: why on Earth are all those porn flicks made in Reseda and Studio City, anyway?
Another bitter laugh.
You take them where you can find them: there’s something about the sight of Canadian cartoonist Colin Upton, glowering like some constipated Buddha, ruminating on the sheer stupidity of the zipless cakewalk, that makes me stifle a giggle. —Via Scott McCloud, Upton’s Gulf War Diary in comics; well worth blogrolling or bookmarking.
Remember, kids, dissent is wrong.
You get used to that bitter tang and there are some delicious moments, these days. Who’d’ve thought that Marvel Comics would ever possess a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to history and the big moral questions of the day—good, evil, the place of dissent and the responsibility of all citizens of a democratickish government to know and understand the consequences of the actions it undertakes on their behalf—than, oh, the National Review? —Well, me, for one. But I’m a weirdo.
Mission creep.
I need a new word. If it’s war that’s hell, what on earth can we call this that will do it justice?
UMM QASR, Iraq – The US military came up with a solution yesterday for the penniless people of this port town begging for water: Sell it.
Despite general mayhem at distribution points—including knife fights—the Army has struck a hasty agreement with local Iraqis to expedite distribution of water to the roughly 40,000 living here.
Under the deal, the military will provide water free to locals with access to tanker trucks, who then will be allowed to sell the water for a “reasonable” fee.
“We’re permitting them to charge a small fee for water,” said Army Col. David Bassert.
“This provides them with an incentive to hustle and to work,” said Bassert, an assistant commander with the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade.
He said he could not suggest what constitutes a reasonable fee and did not know what the truckers were charging. He said the tradition here of haggling at markets would help the system work.
“People know when they’re being gouged—we’ll deal with it,” Bassert said.
Especially when the largest potential employer is hanging signs like this:
Tucked in the classifieds of national Indian dailies on Wednesday was an advertisement that could further alienate the Muslim community from the United States.
The advertisement calls for applications from “non-Muslims only” for sundry jobs at the US base in northern Kuwait.
The US base “urgently requires” lift operators, store keepers, clerks, typists, security guards and drivers. The advertisement insists that the applicants, besides being non-Muslims, should speak English and be below 35.
Luckily, retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner is listening to the British and not the Americans.
Garner sought to gloss over what had become an increasingly angry US-British dispute on the direction and goals of the relief effort. The Americans wanted to jump-start a free-market economy by letting Iraqi contractors sell water at a modest profit to encourage private business in general.
But British officers were exasperated at what they viewed as a heavy-handed and unrealistic American attempt to impose supply-side economic theory on what is essentially a barter economy in the aftermath of dictatorship and war.
“We’re going to build on what the British have done,” Garner said, putting an end to the initial US approach that was enthusiastically outlined Monday by Army Col. David Bassert of the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade.
But I still need that new word. Greedracious? Backstabistick? A thick brown taste in the back of your throat, an acrid tang of decay, like you’re rotting from the inside? Jesus Mary Mother of God, what in the hell are you jumped-up morons thinking?
(Via Nathan Newman, with an assist from Steve Colbert.)
Remissal.
I would be remiss, that is, if I didn’t mention the Girlamatic launch in somewhat more detail. It’s the latest in the Modern Tales family of subscription-driven webcomics sites: a low, low monthly fee gets you a passel of strips updating weekly in a variety of new fresh flavors. —Girlamatic caused some little controversy when it was first announced; comics shouldn’t build its own ghettos, women don’t need special help, we should judge comics on their merits and not the gender of the cartoonists; that sort of thing. (Oddly enough, a great many of the skeptics, while feeling that congregating comics by the gender [or race, or ethnicity, or religion, or culture, perhaps] of the cartoonist or the [largely] intended audience was a mistake, did not feel that congregating comics by genre—science fiction, gag, autobiographical, pervert suit, etc.—was itself a similar error.) Well, now that Girlamatic has launched (and is no longer vaporware, mere fodder for messageboard speculation), it can be judged on its own merits.
I don’t think it comes off too terribly badly. The gravitas of Donna Barr, say (almost ridiculously self-indulgent, poorly scanned in spots, and in German to boot, but it is Donna Barr, so); the kickass one-two punch of Shaenon “Narbonic” Garrity and Vera “Cartooning Goddess” Brosgol (yes, that Vera Brosgol); Kris Dresen’s gorgeously drawn “Encounter Her”; I’ve read the first fit of The Stiff by Jason Thompson, and it’s going to creep the holy fuck out of you; I like what I’ve seen of Layla Lawlor’s Raven’s Children, so I’m curious to poke around in Kismet: Hunter’s Moon; Harley Sparx is apparently out to do some sort of shonen ai piss-take on Dante, so you know I’m in the front row with popcorn; Andre Richards brings the old skool minicomics vibe; Dylan Meconis (yes, that Dylan Meconis) is bringing Bite Me to the party; and while I can say nothing at all either pithy or penetrating about Lisa Jonte at the moment, she’s in heady company, is she not?
Which leaves us with two of the current roster as yet uncommented. First being Spike, and another of those whereinnahell-did-she-come-from moments. The woman has a gorgeous design sense (a curious shortcoming in comics as a whole) and draws like some unholy combination of Charles Burns and Chris Ware; check out her own website, for instance these beautiful little character studies, and then check back for more Lucas and Odessa. —The second as yet uncommented, of course, is the Spouse: and allow me to set aside any pretence of setting aside any pretence to objectivity, because I do think it’s clear enough without spousal bias that Jenn’s a sharp writer with an ear for witty dialogue, an excellent cartoonist in the illustratorly school, inspiringly cheeky in her symbol-games and pattern-making, with a yen for futures that are lived in and not just dreamed up. Add to which her gorgeous color sense and a world-building skill with perspective (a behind-the-scenes hint: David Chelsea’s Perspective! will teach you everything you need to know), and—well, Dicebox alone is worth a buck ninety-five a month. —Much less everything else, and more on the way.
But! Enough with the hype. We now return you to your regularly scheduled bitching and moaning.
Has been constitutive of.
At the end of the day, this is maybe the worst crime I’m willing to charge junior professor and middleweight bloviator Nicholas De Genova with: a tendencious mangling of the written word out of unexamined habit that results in such no-duh sentences as:
In my brief presentation, I outlined a long history of US invasions, wars of conquest, military occupations, and colonization in order to establish that imperialism and white supremacy have been constitutive of US nation-state formation and US nationalism.
The remarks in question (“I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus”) led the New York Post to idly speculate on how cool it would be for the National Guard to take up once again the practice of opening fire on peacefully protesting fellow citizens. De Genova has since expounded on his “million Mogadishus” soundbite in the Columbia Daily Spectator (link gacked from Electrolite’s comments, though the Invisible Adjunct has more to say on the subject), and it’s pretty much what I thought; these sorts of clarion calls for clear moral lines—with little thought as to the very real effects on those (of racially subordinated and working class backgrounds, as he takes pains to point out) who must necessarily toe those clear moral lines; who are rarely, if ever, anyone remotely like the clarion caller him- or herself—this sort of stirring speechifying has always been and will ever be constitutive of rabble-rousing and moral thuggery on every side of any conceivable political divide. It’s as shocking to find in academia—red state or blue state—as gamblers in Casablanca. —Yes, sheltered narcissist De Genova is far too quick to urge others (from racially subordinated and working-class backgrounds, to boot) to step up to his plate, but when it comes to the difference between urging and actually being in a position to enforce a glitteringly beautiful, inhuman moral clarity, I reserve my ire and my disdain first and foremost for the enforcers, button-men and condottieri—and there’s a long line of zipless cakewalk neocons ahead of De Genova, let me tell you.
(And such powerful weapons my ire and disdain are, too. Each hair on my head stands upright, like spines, and each one is tipped with a fire-spark. One eye squeezes tighter than the eye of a needle; the other opens as wide as a goblet. My mouth opens and stretches to my ears, my lips peel back until all my teeth show and you can see straight down my gullet. All around my head the hero-halo spins and flashes like a falling star. —Just ask the Spouse.)
Anyway, best quote on the whole sordid mess comes from Scott Lynch, in those ever-lively comments at Electrolite:
The thing that hits me hardest in the gut about this stupid De Genova/Kent State “thought experiment” is that there are folks out there who seem to think (or are willing to suggest in “jest”) that Kent State was only a tragedy for the left. It’s a bit like suggesting that Pearl Harbor was a tragedy solely for Hawaiians.
Now: Geraldo Rivera. Shameless flack or traitorous hack?
Operation Zipless Cakewalk.
TBogg points us to this interview with Tony Kushner, which (among many other things it’s good to hear being said) has added “his zipless little war” to my lexicon. —Also, he’s working on a musical.
Bandwagons of April fish.
I’d like to think of something to add to the Cheney-bashing that’s merrily (if obscenely) celebrating our Creator-endowed right to pursue happiness by indulging our Madison-crafted right to invite those calling shrilly for the piking forthwith of the heads of fifth columnists to take their alien and sedition acts, fold ’em till they’re all sharp corners, and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine. (I excuse the portmanteau nature of that sentence, collapsing as it is under the weight of a number of issues in the popular consciousness this side of the continental divide, by noting that the title of this post does refer to bandwagons.) —But I flip through my Cheney files and stumble over this choice piece by Joshua Micah Marshall and I’m reminded, once again, that Dick Cheney, who selected himself as Bush’s ideal veep, is a sheltered idiot, an incompetent executive, a scowling shill whose only skill is working the old boy network, and a prime candidate for architect of a great many of our current woes; and suddenly, oddly, I’m no longer in the mood.
And anyway, the Spouse is being held as a material witness.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
Alienated and seditious.
Even moderate liberal Kevin Drum agrees: in fact, he’s said it himself: “Bush has gone a step beyond the Imperial Presidency and is now conducting something like a Papal Presidency: he does nothing in public except make speeches ex cathedra and then wait for his friends in the press to fawn over his commanding presence.” —And maybe I’ll just let the “even the liberal” joke (good-natured, I’ll have you note) stand as my comment on the radical/extremist/moderate/centrist debate, as others have said what I’d want to say much better than I’d ever get around to saying it myself.
But! I was talking about papal presidencies, which, if you Google it, brings up all manner of creepy conspiracy-think of the them-Papists-and-their-Jews variety, which I may well trawl for nuggets of this and that the next time I’m feeling up to playing with creepy conspiracy-think. (Not so fun, these days.) —Teresa Nielsen Hayden calls to our attention another manifestation of the presidex maximus:
Thousands of marines have been given a pamphlet called “A Christian’s Duty,” a mini prayer book which includes a tear-out section to be mailed to the White House pledging [that] the soldier who sends it in has been praying for Bush.
“I have committed to pray for you, your family, your staff and our troops during this time of uncertainty and tumult. May God’s peace be your guide,” says the pledge, according to a journalist embedded with coalition forces.
Kevin Moore points us to another, more secular:
Republican-led legislatures in five states believe they have found a way to ease the budget crunch: eliminate the 2004 presidential primaries.
President Bush is unlikely to face serious opposition in the Republican run-up to the election, so any budget-driven change to the primary would affect the growing field of Democratic candidates.
I feel like the government just took a shit on my chest again, to paraphrase Jon Stewart. Perhaps now’s a good time to bring up what Becca overheard at work?
It’s not that I don’t trust God. I just don’t trust Bush. I don’t think he’s talking to God, or letting God talk through him. And I find that very, very disturbing.
And aside from this, I got nothin’. So maybe we’ll close with a joke: see, there was a brief cessation in the rain this weekend, so we all up and down our street came out and mowed grass and weeded and did gardening things and got caught up, since when it’s raining no one’s ever out working in the yard. Our neighbor on the south side is the street’s designated crank: mumblety-mumble years old, fighting feuds with half the street whose origins no one can at this point remember (barking dogs, a car bumper an inch too close to a driveway, garbage cans clattering at 2 in the morning and now he crosses the street when he sees you coming, that sort of thing); he also knits stocking caps for homeless Navajos and has what is perhaps the Western Seaboard’s largest collection of jazz recorded on 78s and wax cylinders in private hands. Plus the Victrola and the Edison to play them on. Loudly. Very loudly. At nine in the morning. On a Saturday. Which is okay, really, because the rain’s stopped and you’ve got to get up and go mow the grass anyway…
“You Republicans?” he asks us, this particular Saturday, after advising our neighbors to the north as to the possible provenance of a couple of interloping lillies on their streetside strip. (He is also a gardener of some note, this crank.) —And you’d have to look at us, me, and our neighbors to the north, to see why, exactly, we all burst into laughter at that. “Well,” he says, chuckling, “I am. Anyway. I got a joke for you.
“See, the president, George Bush, he was having a dream. And in this dream he wanders along”—the writer in me is tempted for no especial reason to set it in Disney’s animatronic Hall of Presidents, but our cranky neighbor did not, and so I won’t—“and he meets George Washington. And Washington says, well, hello, Mister President. Now, I don’t want to poke or pry, but I’ve got to tell you: things are looking a little rough for America right now.
“And Bush, he nods, he says, well, President Washington, it maybe isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. Could I maybe trouble you for some advice? As to how to be a good president?
“And Washington says, well, the thing that worked for me is honesty. Tell the truth, Mister President. Always tell the truth.
And Bush nods at that, and walks on. And he comes across Thomas Jefferson. And Jefferson, he says, you know, Mister President, I’ve been keeping an eye on things, and I’ve got to tell you: it looks a bit precarious at the moment, what with that and that.
“And Bush, maybe he quibbles at precarious and maybe he doesn’t, you know, but he does say, President Jefferson, sir, I was wondering: do you have any advice you might offer me? As to how to be a good president? Even a great one?
“Jefferson, he looks thoughtful for a moment, and then he says, well, the American people, Mister President. Take care of them first and foremost, keep their concerns always in your mind. You can do no wrong if you act for them.
“Bush nods at that, and he walks on. And this being a dream, of course, he runs into a third president. President Lincoln, this time. And Lincoln nods sagely and he says to Bush, Mister President, you have yourself a tough row to hoe.
“And Bush, he nods and he says, well sir, I’ve met President Washington already, and I’ve met President Jefferson. And they seemed to agree that maybe things aren’t as rosy as they could be. And I firmly believe that, as the president, it is my duty, my responsibility, to lead America to that rosy future. So. I’ll ask you, sir, what I asked them: what advice might you give me, one president to another, as to how I could be a good president of these United States of America?
“And Lincoln, he strokes his beard a moment. And then he says, well, Mister President, you could start by taking in a play.”
Thank you! I’m here all week.
(Our cranky neighbor, he then says, “I’m a Republican, yes. And I wouldn’t vote for George W. Bush if he was the last dam’ Republican on the planet.”)
Yes. Cats.
Oh, I know. And if you know me personally, you’ve probably already seen these pictures. But it’s Friday, which (according to the mighty CalPundit) is Cat Blogging Day, and so: Our cats.
The dot-com war.
Tracking a meme from my own rather limited point of view: Jon Meltzer was the first I saw to say it, this morning, over in the comments to this post at Making Light. —Five minutes of browsing later, and here’s Sullywatch making a more detailed case. (Although—thinking about it—George Soros wrote an op-ed a week or so ago about the Bush Hubris Bubble…) —The dot-com war. —This one has legs, I think.
Sweating the small stuff.
It’s hardly surprising that nothing’s going according to plan (or is it?) when we can’t even get the uniforms right.
Military leaders insist that the shortage of desert BDUs will not affect the safety of American soldiers. They point out that Iraq’s terrain is not entirely Sahara-like, and that green camouflage may actually work better near the banks of the Euphrates River, where vegetation and mud are present.
Oh. Never mind, then.
Keeping it simple.
There’s a stark beauty to this:
To: president@whitehouse.gov (President George W. Bush)
From: k@metameat.net (Paul Kerschen)
Subject: The cost of the Iraq war
Dear Mr. President:
Yesterday the media reported that you have made a supplemental budget request to Congress of $74.7 billion to pay for the current war in Iraq. Your budget for fiscal year 2003 assumes total federal receipts of $2,048.1 billion. My personal income tax accounts for .000000040% of that figure. Applying this percentage to the amount of funding you have requested from Congress, I find that I personally have been asked to pay $29.94 for the Iraq war.
The Mercy Corps, a charitable organization with which you may be familiar, has established an Iraq Emergency Fund to help alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe that the war has already caused, and which will only worsen in coming weeks. Lack of food, clean water, power, and medical supplies will place millions of people at risk of hunger and disease, and a refugee crisis of massive proportions is assured. I have made a charitable donation to this fund in the amount of $199.62. As I am in the fifteen-percent tax bracket, this will reduce my federal tax liability for the next year by the precise amount which you have charged me for your war.
I oppose this invasion in the strongest possible terms. Neither my belief that America must be protected from unconventional threats, nor my immense respect for the American men and women who are currently risking their lives on your orders, alter my conviction that you and your advisers have conceived this war recklessly, in bad faith, with insufficient thought given to possible consequences, insufficient support given to diplomatic alternatives, and appallingly little regard for the sanctity of human life. You will not wage it in my name, and you will not wage it with my financial support.
Sincerely yours,
Paul Kerschen
I needed to run the numbers on our taxes anyway. (Thanks, Juliet.)
Anecdotal.
John points us to this anecdotal LiveJournal post:
Remember Ali, the Iraqi student I wrote about a few weeks before leaving for Italy when telling about going to the antiwar rally?
He’s gone. Disappeared.
His parents’ phone number is disconnected.
His mother cannot be reached at work.
His father disappeared first… and now, one of our babies is gone!
His counselor said to me this afternoon: “Either the parents have been called in by the government for questioning, or else they’ve all fled.”
Further anecdotes, to give you an idea of what it’s like to flee:
Like millions of immigrants, the Ahmeds had lived and worked in the United States illegally—but undisturbed—for years. That changed this year, when Pakistan became the latest country whose citizens are required to register with immigration officials in the United States, or face detention or deportation.
Immigrants who entered the country illegally, or whose visas expired, can be deported or detained when they register.
The registration, which includes people from 24 Middle Eastern countries plus North Korea, is causing an upheaval in Muslim immigrant communities across the nation as many decide to seek refuge in Canada.
It has turned border cities in New York, Michigan and Vermont into unlikely refugee camps for hundreds waiting to get into Canada before the March 21 registration deadline for Pakistanis. Aid workers estimate that 2,500 Pakistanis have left the United States for Canada, and another 1,000 are waiting to leave.
The numbers of people fleeing will grow, they predict, as more countries are added to the list and as Canada prepares to shut its doors this year to foreign refugees coming from the United States.
Anecdotes about what it’s like to stay:
“Everybody is stressed out. The FBI has assured us that they will do everything necessary to ensure our safety… but not everything raises to the level of a crime that you can report,” notes Basha, chairman of the American Muslim Council.
The ugliness has been sporadic so far: four women wearing the Muslim head-dress or hijab were verbally abused in a Venice, California restaurant in the past week, according to CAIR, an Islamic advocacy group that monitors hate crimes against the Muslim community.
In the Midwestern United States, a Muslim man and his son were refused service in a Michigan store, while in neighbouring Illinois, one mosque received a bomb threat, and worshippers at another were spooked when projectiles shattered a window during evening prayers.
Some anecdotes as to why they might be staying here in the first place:
“Which one of you would like to see Saddam removed?” An Iraqi immigrant asks this question in Arabic of fellow immigrants. All raised their hands.
“Saddam’s people shoot him and he lost his finger,” said the translator, pointing at the hand of one immigrant.
Man after man after man at a Shiite Muslim community center showed the scars of the Iraqi regime – physical and emotional.
“How many of you lost somebody because of Saddam?” the translator continued asking.
“Two brothers,” said one.
“Five brothers,” said another.
It’s obvious why so many here want Saddam toppled. But it’s how he’s being toppled that is causing some concern.
“Nobody would be happy to see his country being demolished and bombed. It’s a mixed feeling of doubt, fear and hope,” said Iman Husham Al-Husainy of the Karbalaa Islamic Center.
The federal government is declining to specify, however. So anecdotes on that score are rather, as they say, thin on the ground.
