A plague on this House, at any rate.
Via Atrios—
Recognizing the public need for fasting and prayer in order to secure the blessings and protection of Providence for the people of the United States and our Armed Forces during the conflict in Iraq and under the threat of terrorism at home.
WHEREAS the United States is currently engaged in a war on terrorism in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001;
WHEREAS the Armed Forces of the United States are currently engaged in a campaign to disarm the regime of Saddam Hussein and liberate the people of Iraq;
WHEREAS, on June 1, 1774, the Virginia House of Burgesses called for a day of fasting and prayer as an expression of solidarity with the people of Boston who were under siege by the enemy;
WHEREAS, on March 16, 1776, the Continental Congress, recognizing that the “Liberties of America are imminently endangered” and the need “to acknowledge the overruling Providence of God,” called for a day of “Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer”;
WHEREAS, on June 28, 1787, during the debate of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin, convinced of God’s intimate involvement in human affairs, implored the Congress to seek the assistance of Heaven in all its dealings;
WHEREAS, on March 30, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, at the bequest of the Senate, and himself recognizing the need of the Nation to humble itself before God in repentance for its national sins, proclaimed a day of fasting, prayer and humiliation;
WHEREAS all of the various faiths of the people of the United States have recognized, in our religious traditions, the need for fasting and humble supplication before Providence;
WHEREAS humility, fasting, and prayer in times of danger have long been rooted in our essential national convictions and have been a means of producing unity and solidarity among all the diverse people of this Nation as well as procuring the enduring grace and benevolence of God;
WHEREAS, through prayer, fasting, and self-reflection, we may better recognize our own faults and shortcomings and submit to the wisdom and love of God in order that we may have guidance and strength in those daily actions and decisions we must take; and
WHEREAS dangers and threats to our Nation persist and, in this time of peril, it is appropriate that the people of the United States, leaders and citizens alike, seek guidance, strength, and resolve through prayer and fasting: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the President should issue a proclamation—
- designating a day for humility, prayer, and fasting for all people of the United States; and
- calling on all people of the United States—
- A) to observe the day as a time of prayer and fasting;
- B) to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities; and
- C) to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our Nation.
—House Resolution 153, referred to the Committee on Government Reform by Todd Akin (R-MO).
Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: “Can’t you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism… every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you’re supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It’s not that hard a concept to grasp.
“Why would you think I’d want anything else? Humans don’t need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other—you’ve been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!” God said. “The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?
“I’m talking to all of you, here!” continued God, His voice rising to a shout. “Do you hear Me? I don’t want you to kill anybody. I’m against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don’t kill each other anymore—ever! I’m fucking serious!”
Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God’s shoulders began to shake, and He wept.
—“God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule,” The Onion, 26 September 2001.
I want my country back!
I don’t want to listen to fundamentalist preachers anymore!
—Howard Dean, 15 March 2003.
SB 742.
Bump and update, as they say. Oregon State Sen. John Minnis (R-Fairview) had proposed SB 742, which would nebulously define terrorism and impose a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years without parole for said nebulous terrorists. It looks doomed to failure, but doomed like Jason or Freddie Kreuger or the Terminator: it’ll be back.
Minnis said he will rewrite portions of the bill in an attempt to address concerns about the broad language and role Oregon police agencies would have in federal terror investigations. No additional hearings have been scheduled on the bill.
“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of hysteria associated with some of the original language” of the bill, he said. “I will bring something back and see if it works.”
Forget the definition of terrorism that’s been the bill’s contentious flashpoint—
SECTION 1. A person commits the crime of terrorism if the person knowingly plans, participates in or carries out any act that is intended, by at least one of its participants, to disrupt:
(a) The free and orderly assembly of the inhabitants of the State of Oregon;
(b) Commerce or the transportation systems of the State of Oregon; or
(c) The educational or governmental institutions of the State of Oregon or its inhabitants.
Keep your eye on what Minnis does to get the real meat of the bill passed. Again, from the Statesman-Journal:
Representatives of racial and ethnic minorities said they are troubled by two other aspects of the bill.
One would require local police to cooperate with any state or federal agency investigating terrorism.
Critics said it would call into question a 1987 state law that bars local police from aiding enforcement of federal immigration laws. The functions of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service have been split within the new Department of Homeland Security.
“It is a known fact that if immigrant victims of crimes feel that the INS will be involved or called, then crimes will go unreported and immigrants will not feel safe giving information to police to help them investigate crimes,” said Ramon Ramirez, president of the farmworkers’ union PCUN, based in Woodburn.
Minnis said he proposed the change so there would be no repeat of what happened in 2001, when Portland and several other police agencies declined to assist the FBI with interviews of Middle Eastern men.
The other would allow police to keep records of terrorism investigations — although records of a joint task force on terrorism could end up in federal hands outside state law.
George Hara, a retired Portland physician, said that could lead to political surveillance and what happened to him and thousands of others during World War II.
Keep in mind that what Minnis doesn’t want to repeat was one of the very first stumbling blocks cast before Attorney General Ashcroft’s Big Brother blitzkrieg. Remember what political surveillance looks like, why it is anathema to a free society, and why Oregon passed laws against it in the first place.
Forget putting protestors in jail for 25 years; that’s dead in the water. This is the stuff to watch out for. Keep an eye on Sen. John Minnis and his HUACkian aspirations.
I swear, it’s enough to make you think of moving to New Mexico...
Dream is dead.
(Here at Long story; short pier we continue our exhumation of the corpse of one Anodyne magazine [1996 – 1999, requiescat in pace]. Why? Damned if I know. An attempt to distract myself, perhaps. —Tonight, spurred mostly by an email from a friend idly wondering in what order, exactly, one ought to read it, we present my review of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman written on the event of its completion, back in November 1996. It’s impossible to overstate the impact Sandman has had on comics, but even as I type that sentence I realize I have no idea how it’s regarded in the here and now. History moves fast, these days; even faster in a world at once as fickle and monomaniacal as comics. People still know it, yes; people still read it; editors and publishers still fling together er-you-dite UK writers and this or that upstart cartoonist and a mishmosh of julienned Bullfinch’s and double-handfuls of Golden Age continuity in the hopes of bottling that much lightning again. But—but. Comics is also still enthralled [though there’s hope for the first time in years] to the longjohn [pervert-suit] superhero set, to a bewildering degree. Insular tropes that make no sense to readers not steeped in their mysteries derail the highest of concepts, while the stupid exigencies of 22-pages-a-month like [gummy] clockworks that dictate industrial cartooning pretty much put the kibosh on consistency in art and storytelling over any long haul. —All this, you see, is what makes good comics so miraculous to the embittered fan. [Imagine, say, what might have happened to the vital American prose short story, if it had squandered its rich variety of genre and marketplace by focusing tightly on, oh, closely observed, naturalistically quotidian epiphanics, produced to the increasingly bewildering dicta of insular journals and dwindling grants programs.]
(—That bit of savage irony riffed shamelessly off of Michael Chabon’s semi-coherent, ill-reasoned, and doubtless mistaken but nonetheless delightful introduction to McSweeney’s No. 10, a mixed bag—which was, one imagines, rather the point.
(I’d thought of a weblog for myself as a way of getting back into comics criticism [among other things]. This was back when I was thinking of calling it something else, like Blue Elephant Gun. Like a lot of other things, that’s been sidetracked. [I’m still tickled to see this blog-thing listed under “political sites” or the equivalent on this or that blogroll.] So maybe this is also a way to get back into the harness a little; toss the pill in the backyard with the old man or something. There’s a lot going on in webcomics, you know, and a lot to be said about it—a lot of people are linking today to Patrick Farley’s “Our Leader Speaks,” and more power to ’em, but fewer are clicking into the site itself to read [say] the richly strange and [now] bleakly haunting road-not-taken, “The Spiders” to note the amazing metatextual games he’s playing with Salon mockups and message board debates; fewer still would get any Colin Upton references I’d make regarding it.
(I should maybe get out of my own way, except to note that I was mad not to list A Game of You as among the best of the “books” of Sandman, and that some little credit for “surviv[ing] the debilitating collaborative process” is due to Karen Berger, without whom, I do not doubt. And one last note: for more old Anodyne comics fun, I can’t let pass an opportunity to recommend Barry’s Pre-Structuralist Funnies. Go, see what he was like back in the day.)
Neil Gaiman is not God. We’d best get that out of the way up front.
Not that this claim has (yet) been made in print, but some have come awfully damn close—like Mikal Gilmore, who writes, “To read The Sandman is to read something more than an imaginative new comic; it is to read a powerful new literature, fresh with the resonance of timeless myths.” (One imagines he had not yet read the wooden “Orpheus” issue.)
Or Frank McConnell, who claims that “Gaiman has invented, out of whole cloth, a mythology not just of comics but of storytelling itself.” (Really. This patchwork of pastiche and Shakespearean reference and obscure etymologies was invented out of whole cloth? I don’t think we were reading the same thing.)
So when one encounters something so bald-faced as Peter Straub’s assertion that, “If this isn’t literature, nothing is,” the temptation to do a little debunking becomes overwhelming.
But that would be the easy way out. Gaiman isn’t responsible for what people say about him or his work, merely the work itself: The Sandman, the comic he’s been writing for eight years, which just came to an end with its 75th and final issue. I gathered together the disparate volumes which collect the entirety (Preludes & Nocturnes, The Doll’s House, Dream Country, Season of Mists, Fables & Reflections, A Game of You, Brief Lives, Worlds’ End, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake) and sat down to read them all in one fell swoop. I went in intending to poke some holes in this grandly gloomy balloon I turned the last page feeling immensely satisfied, sated, full—the sort of feeling you get after finishing a good, meaty novel, and feel so rarely when reading comics.
One could state impishly that the moral of the story is, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Sandman is about Dream, the anthropomorphic incarnation of dreams and stories, one of the seven Endless—Destiny, Death, Dream, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Destruction—who are patterns, ideas, echoes of things older than gods. They have their realms and their responsibilities, and they touch the lives of every living thing.
Which doesn’t make them nice people. Dream, for instance, is a cold, unfeeling bastard, who takes his responsibilities far more seriously than the lives and feelings of the people around him—or seems to: “What does it mean to you?” asks Delirium once, when Dream mutters one too many times about his responsibilities. “The things we do make echoes,” she tells him. “Our existence deforms the universe. That’s a responsibility.” But Dream is so callous that he once condemned a pickpocket to spend the rest of his life dreaming of the gallows-tree. Nada, a queen in prehistoric Africa, once spurned his affections; he damned her to ten thousand years in Hell, and three black women die during the course of the comic, in falling buildings and in fires, echoing the destruction of her city and her damnation. Dream never notices.
Or rather, Dream was. The story begins with his imprisonment for almost seventy years by a Crowleyesque mage; when he escapes and begins to reclaim his realm, it slowly becomes apparent that something changed, somewhere. When he gets his hands on Dee, the rather silly villain of the first few issues, who has perverted one of Dream’s own tools and driven the world mad for a night, Dream merely returns him to the asylum and tucks him into bed. Not quite the epicly petty revenge one might have expected.
Dream spends much of the rest of the comic coming to terms with who he is, and not liking what he sees; two important stories revolve around his attempts to set right something he had thoughtlessly done in the past. “You’ve changed,” he is told more than once by friends and acquaintances. “I doubt it,” is his response. He is one of the Endless, after all, who are merely ideas, patterns, echoes; echoes can’t change, can they? This seeming paradox—that he does not like what he is, but feels he cannot change—ultimately drives Dream to destroy himself, to obliterate his own existence, his “puh-point of view,” so that another Dream, a different Dream, can take his place. A better Dream.
“I don’t know if it’s good,” Gaiman is fond of saying about Sandman, “but I do know that it’s long.” Which is precisely why it’s good. The length, the space, the luxury of two thousand pages of comics give Gaiman room to explore, play, to set up echoes of his own: Lucifer, who retires from Hell and becomes a night-club piano player; Haroun al-Raschid, who gives up his magical city of Baghdad to Dream to keep it safe from history; Shakespeare, who lays down his pen for the last time upon writing The Tempest (a play, of course, about a magician who sets aside his magic forever) to try to live life instead of merely writing about it. He has the space to do something like Worlds’ End, a collection of travelers’ tales of happy endings, narrow escapes, destinies averted; a tantalizing glimpse of roads not taken before turning down The Kindly Ones, the final act of Dream’s tragedy. He has room for not one, but three elegiac epilogues, three last shimmering echoes of the story to savor before closing the book for good.
Sure, the beginning is weak. There is an air of self-indulgence about much of the comic. The art, in places, sucks (Dick Giordano inking Colleen Doran with what looks like a scratchy ball-point pen, or Robbie Busch’s colors, at once muddy and garish). But there are beautiful moments, in both writing and art—Charles Vess’s issues, or John J. Muth’s, or the gorgeous Erté-esque designs and colors of Marc Hempel and Daniel Vozzo; “Sunday Mourning” or “The Golden Boy,” Brief Lives or The Kindly Ones as wholes. I understand the adulatory impulse which drove those reviewers to such giddy excesses: comics require more labor, and of more intensity, than just about any other medium. The fact that something as long and as structured and as cohesive as Sandman survived the debilitating collaborative process of today’s industrial comics is startling enough; the fact that it is good seems miraculous. But to refer to this story as “among the most extraordinary of all time in any medium” (Gene Wolfe, but he was writing an introduction, and so we will forgive him) is silly—and more than a tad defensive.
Gaiman isn’t God. He just wrote a good comic book.
Which is enough.
More than a thousand words.
My mother, Tina Manley, writes to let me know her photos of the people of Iraq will be exhibited in Tokyo in April. Here’s her statement that will accompany them:
The Middle East has always fascinated me. I lived in Iran in the 1970s and traveled throughout the area. The people and the countryside are among the most beautiful in the world. The Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and then the Gulf War seemed to put that part of the world off-limits for years. In 1991 the Gulf War had been over for 6 months and the UN Sanctions had been in place for over a year. Travel to Iraq by US citizens was forbidden by United States State Department to all but pre-approved groups of journalists.
The Iraqi Businessmen’s Association of Washington, DC, hoping to bring publicity to the plight of the Iraqi people, commissioned a group of seven photographers to go to Baghdad and photograph what effect the UN Sanctions were having on the people of Iraq. The group made it as far as Amman, Jordan, where we were to pick up our visas for Iraq. The Iraqi embassy knew nothing about our arrangements and refused to give us visas. We stayed in Amman for two weeks, repeatedly appealing for the visas which were finally granted to only two of us. The rest of the group returned to the US and the other photographer and I rented a taxi and traveled through the desert to Baghdad.
Once we arrived, we were required to stay in Al Rashid Hotel. Whenever we left the hotel, we had to have a government minder with us. We were allowed to photograph anything we requested as long as we gave our minder a list before we left the hotel. We were not allowed to change our minds or photograph anything spontaneously. I was mainly interested in the children and requested permission to photograph children at work, in school, in hospitals. My government minder also wanted to show me all of the bombed buildings, bridges, and homes.
The people were very willing to be photographed and asked me to tell the people of America that they needed help. The hospitals had no food, no medicines, and no electricity. The water treatment plant had been bombed and many children were sick with dysentery. Every bed in every hospital I visited was full. I saw children who were dying of leukemia because the chemicals used to treat leukemia could also be used for chemical warfare and were not allowed in by sanctions. I photographed children with kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency disease never before seen in Iraq. I saw badly burned children and children who had appendectomies with no anesthesia. Some medicines were being kept from the hospitals even though they were allowed in by the sanctions. At times I was crying so hard I could not focus the camera. The temperature in the hospitals was over 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Mothers had to stay in the wards with their children to bring them food and care for them.
Whenever I asked anyone what they thought about Saddam Hussein, they would pretend that I had not even asked the question and would not look at me. Even the government minder seemed very nervous and motioned for me not to mention Saddam Hussein’s name.
I visited a Koran school in a mosque and I photographed boys working in the streets to support their families. The photographs have been used by many organizations to inform people about the conditions in Iraq.
I don’t have any answers to the situation in Iraq, but I hope when you look at the photographs you will feel like you know the people of Iraq and know that we are all more alike than we are different.
The show abides.
INT. STUDEBAKER. DAY.
KERMIT
Why are you jumping up and down?
GONZO
I’m hoping mad!
KERMIT
Guy’s got a sense of humour.
FOZZIE
Hey, why don’t you join us?
GONZO
Where are you going?
FOZZIE
We’re going to follow our dream!
GONZO
Really? I have a dream too… but you’ll think it’s stupid.
ALL
No, no! Tell us!
GONZO
Well, I wanna go to Bombay, India and become a movie star.
FOZZIE
You don’t go to Bombay to become a movie star! You go where we’re going, Hollywood!
GONZO
Sure, if you wanna do it the easy way.
The next time it’s getting to be a bit, well. Remember the International Channel. Especially at 9 o’clock on a Sunday night when Showbiz India is on. Not just for the impossibly cheerful and preposterously joyous clips of song-and-dance numbers from mass-produced Bollywood musicals (where Michael Jackson’s old choreographers must be lauded like those old Beijing Opera fighting masters on the sets of Hollywood action movies), though that’s what lifts the heart and crooks the grin in the first place. —It’s also because you get to hear a long rambling interview with Gurinder Chadha, who was born in Kenya and grew up in England, and whose new film, Bend it Like Beckham, is sparking girls’ soccer leagues like wildfires across India. You get to hear her talk about casting her aunt in a background role and having relatives call from Australia to crow about seeing Auntie on the telly in a movie and you remember once again how big and wide and unexpected the world is and yet people somehow manage to crisscross it with something approaching grace (Jane puts down in New York a newspaper picked up in Australia; she can replace it with another copy from the kiosk on the corner)—and somehow it manages not to unravel in total chaos except.
Except.
—But at least these days it’s easy enough; we can all be superstars of Bollywood. (Each in one’s own unique idiom, of course.) Lots of bhangra and Najma and Vijaya Anand to be played at work this week. Talvin Singh, too. —Especially the stuff he did with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, except we’re getting rather far afield from Bollywood. But why not? Bring along some Muslimgauze, too, and Sif Safaa—except. Except.
The dark time was roasted by hailstones and flames.
The bright time was wiped out by a shadow.
There’s nothing I can do; there’s nothing I can do. Checking the news every five minutes does no one any good. Ripping off Robyn Hitchcock lyrics does no one any good. Giggling madly at slips of the lip in a global gamble with 10-million-people-at-risk-of-starvation chips does no one any good. Listening to the news choppers circle downtown and wondering acidly if the Burnside Free State will rise again tonight does no one any good. Grandly proclaiming that having lost what mattered to very real people we have won what matters to dreams and ideals is doing no one any good. —At least, it’s not doing me any good. Juliet, quoting a 4,000-year-old lament for the fall of Sumer and Urim? I don’t know if it did her any good. I don’t know if it’s doing me any good, though in a way I am—what? Grateful?
Such a little word.
There’s too much history in the air. Twelve years, three presidential terms ago, give or take a couple of months, we were all huddled around a TV in an unheated room in a big old Boston house, watching the bombs drop.There’s a mad sketch we all did, passing a big black sketchbook back and forth, watching that one guy, the human CNN guy, shocked and awed and scared out of his mind, reporting from downtown Baghdad. He went away after a day or so and was summarily replaced by a smug, blowdried little toad with an utterly improbable name. We laughed at him, because it was either that or scream at the phlegmatic silver-haired stentorians insisting, you know, that they just don’t value human life the way we do. And another turn about the widening gyre and here we are again. Deja vu, jamais vu. I know this place, though I have never been here before. I do not know this place, though I have been here many times. (This time? This time, will we finally fall from the lip of one interpenetrating, whirling cone to the apex of the other?)
Hunger filled the city like water, it would not cease.
This hunger contorted people’s faces, twisted their muscles.
Its people were as if drowning in a pond,
they gasped for breath.
Its king breathed heavily in his palace, all alone.
Its people dropped their weapons,
their weapons hit the ground.
They struck their necks with their hands and cried.
They sought counsel with each other,
they searched for clarification:
“Alas, what can we say about it?
What more can we add to it?
How long until we are finished off by this catastrophe?”
I’m going to unplug this thing and kick it in the corner for a bit. Metaphorically, understand. I’ll just be over yonder a ways. Talk amongst yourselves.
The grownups are (still) in the house.
Further gackery, this time from the antic muse: a quick sneak peek inside some of what’s passed for diplomacy in the Bush foreign policy, courtesy the Daily Telegraph. Want to know why Colin Powell didn’t pull a James Baker and travel the world convincing the Coalition of the Willing to actually pony up? “Powell was so busy protecting his position in Washington that he did not travel,” says Unnamed Source, a senior British official. (I wonder if there’s any relation to everyone’s favorite Bush administration spokesperson?) But the money quote, as Ana Marie points out, is the one which maybe gets to the heart of all our French troubles:
A few days later, Mr Bush delivered his key address to the UN General Assembly.
Another senior British official said: “There was tremendous in-fighting in Washington. The drafts of the speech went back and forth. I think there were 28 versions before the final text was agreed.
“For us the key phrase was Bush’s commitment to seeking a new UN resolution to disarm Iraq. We were only sure we had it 24 hours before the speech.
“For some reason this was left out of the text on the teleprompter as Bush was reading it, and he had to improvise.
“He managed to ad-lib a sentence saying ‘we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions’. But instead of saying ‘resolution’ he said ‘resolutions’ in the plural. That’s how we got stuck with the French idea of two resolutions.”
Almost crazy enough to be true, isn’t it.
All I have to say is, once this is over, the Iraqi people better be the freest fucking people on the face of the earth. They better be freer than me. They better be so fucking free they can fly.
Men were executed, women bled
Beads and fish changed hands and
Children stayed up late
Uh huh—
Colored drums they stretched the night
There’s a taxidermist looking for a fight
But now he’s gone
Ah yeah, only the stones remain.
Girls were decked with flowers and violated while
Boys spat juice from out of their fresh young bulbs.
Soldiers crossed their hearts and died and
Pretty girls turned cold inside
But now they’re gone.
Only the stones remain
Oh they’re gone, yeah
Only the stones remain.
And the stones have forgotten them
The stones have forgotten them
They break your body and drain the life out of it.
It sinks into the soil while the soul flies up into the air above.
And when there’s no more tears to cry, there’s
Nothing left to do but laugh.
Stained glass elaborations collapse and candyfloss evaporates, honey.
Only the stones remain, here they go
Ah yeah, only the stones remain.
Now they’re gone
Ah yeah, only the stones remain.
Girls were decked with flowers and ovulated while
Colored drums expressed the night.
There’s a taxidermist grinnin’ with delight.
—Robyn Hitchcock. Title from Get Your War On.
Cry havoc and let slip the jackals of war.
I haven’t been watching the mid-40s on our television, where the Vast Left-wing Media Conspiracy hangs out. Atrios has:
Literally every broadcast “journalist” should be ashamed of him/herself. I never talked much about shock and awe here because I assumed it was probably a scare tactic—something we could do, but not something we would necessarily do. But the whores on TV are pissed. They were promised their shock and awe and they aren’t getting it. Literally every report wonders when it is going to happen.
Pathetic.
Which reminds me of something posted to National Philistine back in January:
I find myself here, today, in an impossible situation.
I must speak to you—the press—with you and through you, using your kind of sentences and leaps of reason, letting you sell me like a precious but marginal commodity, so I can say what everyone already knows but a few vaguely important people in this city are unwilling to admit: that no one wants a war; that an attack against Iraq is no attack against terrorism; that an attack will in fact make the United States less safe; that the Iraqi people do not want a war to liberate them because they will not live through the liberation; that as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, “if we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.” I must convey all of this to you, sell it to you, all the while knowing that I find you despicable.
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
On the other hand, Raed abides; Christopher Allbritton isn’t on the ground yet; Kevin Sites still hasn’t updated. (One hopes it’s just more technical hell.) —Meanwhile, here in Portland, cops pulled guns on the drum circles of the Burnside Free State. Protestors turned highways into parking lots last night. And me, this morning, I just finished my coffee. It’s raining. Now I’m going to get on a bus and go downtown and spend the first day of spring helping one company sue another one.
The rules of engagement.
It is a joyous thing, is war . . . . You love your comrade so in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood is fighting well, tears come to your eyes. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and of pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and accomplish the command of our creator. And then you prepare to go and die or live with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that, there arises such a delectation, that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight it is.
—Jean de Bueil, Le Jouvencel (ca. 1465)
It’s an odd week to be reading Theodor Meron’s Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare. There’s a cognitive dissonance in reading the tusslings of 14th century philosophers with Saints Thomas Aquinas and Augustine and the very ideas that squirm beneath our op-ed pages, of a just injustice, a moral immorality, a gross crime committed, eyes opened and resolve firmed, for the greater good: a bellum justum; a just and proper war. There’s something so terribly odd in realizing Giovanni da Legnano back in the 1300s out-Orwelled the current powers that be, making a better case for the war in Iraq than Thomas Friedman ever could: war comes itself from divine law, he argues, with a “positive allowance” from God; because, he says, the “end of war…is the peace and tranquility of the world[, war] proceeded originally and positively from God.” —You read that, the bus stops, you close the book and you stand up and off you get, your brain kicked loose and floating numbly in your skull like a Sudafed high.
“The tinsel glint of chivalry.” That’s another good line, Meron quoting Maurice Keen, and I would have liked it a lot 20 years ago, or even 10; the slap at the cheapness of chivalry, the dishonesty of honorable brutality and the hypocrisy of tarting up slaughter with a surface sheen of civilized behavior, would have appealed greatly to me. I like it a lot now, too, but because it’s one of those perversely beautiful little paradoxes; I think of Christmas lights and cheap bits of foiled plastic. I mean, you don’t want to use too much, but judiciously apply it, then turn off the lights and squint just so: you get a heart-lifting thing of beauty. Chivalry—by which I don’t so much mean opening doors for ladies, no; I mean noblesse oblige, but more specifically the obligations imposed by differences in brute power and violence, not social standing (which, of course, is based implicitly on brute power and violence); obligations imposed not by anything inherent to power, no (power corrupts, after all)—but merely because we decided they should be. —Chivalry is hypocrisy, yes, but a necessary one, one that has tempered much brutality, horror, and bloodshed; as much as if not more than it has excused and endorsed, is my gut-level reaction. (Assuming one could ever even begin to measure such a thing.) Chivalry is a concept doomed to failure from the start by semantics and human nature, but nonetheless the attempt is made (was made? has been made?); and there is sometimes nothing so beautiful as clear-eyed stubborn folly.
“Force is the weapon of the weak,” maybe, is another way of putting it, but I’m reaching well past chivalry there. (“Power to the people! Teeth for shrimp! Plato was a fascist!” —Indeed, but also: “The People! United! Provide a bigger target!” Thereby demonstrating not only why I don’t do so well at rallies and marches, but also my penchant for sticking tangents in the spokes of whatever it is I’m wheeling at the moment.)
The Navy tried (not too terribly hard) when I was in high school to get me to come to Annapolis, and I must cop to having been tempted somewhat if not sorely. (Thereby proving in at least my own particular case that it’s not so much a particular extremism that attracts adolescents as it is extremity itself. Apocalypses and utopias [utopiæ?] [“Absolute Destiny Apocalypse!”] [another tangent; I’ll try to keep them quiet. Sorry].) I never would have gone—I even think I knew that, then—but there was something about—the power of it. A power tempered with restraint, or at least the illusions of restraint: the uniforms, the tradition, the discipline, the rules of engagement, the laws of war. Might in service of right. A power bigger than any one of us working for ideals great enough for all of us. And if it doesn’t take much to blow all that up into so much glittering tinsel, well—it’s still there. An impossible ideal, honored in breach more often than not, but a deep and abiding motivation in more than some of us would sometimes like to admit; never so clear-eyed as others would like to believe, but nonetheless tempering as much brutality in this world as it excuses and condones. If not more. —This flirtation with a great and aweful crossroads (not that I ever would have, not really, no, and the idea of me-then actually doing it fills me-now with a kind of rueful, wincing glee; a folly not at all clear-eyed or deliberate, that would have been) has stayed with me. I check in on the road not taken: I read enough of Clancy, say, to know he was enough of a partisan hack to make a lousy novelist but a useful non-fiction writer (with a shaker of salt to hand); I stumbled over David Poyer and snapped up his modern naval stuff like hotcakes; I was inordinately pleased when a friend, a naval alumnus, blurted, “Jesus Christ, you actually read the Bluejacket’s Manual? Without being forced?” —To list three touchstones pretty much at random.
(I’d sketched out that much at work, on breaks. A slow day. I got on the bus, rode home. “The bombs are falling,” someone said. I went shopping. Bought catfood. Wine. Feta cheese. “The bombs are falling,” someone said. “We’re doing this, aren’t we?” I went home. Made dinner. Here I am. The bombs are falling.)
I don’t know much, then, and none of it directly. But I know enough to know that though a “fair and lucky war” is impossible (has been impossible, since 1991; is always impossible, but, but), I still hope for a war as short and as deathless as possible. I know enough to know that I support our troops, for what that’s worth; I know enough not to be surprised when I hear from a friend of a friend that some of those troops have taken to referring to their commander-in-chief as “the Antichrist.” I know enough to know that this war is that most immoral and most unjust of wars—
Unnecessary.
I know enough to know the struggle for peace isn’t over. It has just begun. Just barely begun. Embarking on a war, someone said somewhere at some point, is like entering a dark room; there’s no way of knowing what will come. So curse the darkness—repudiate it, spit in its face, drag your heels against the hands that pull you into it, curse it—but light a candle, too. (You can do both.) Light a candle. Speak out. Forgive us all our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, but write the fall of every bomb on your heart, and never forget: Never again. Swear it.
Go, gentlemen, each man unto his charge.
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls.
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience; swords, our law.
March on, join bravely! Let us to ’t, pell mell—
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.
Never again, goddammit.
Moral dilemma.
It’s been a popular conundrum for the pro-torture crowd: there’s a bomb, somewhere. And you’ve got this guy strapped to a chair. Never mind how he got there, chatter suggests he’s the man with the plan, it’s a fucking red alert, there’s a ticking goddamn clock and if you make him talk, make him tell you the what and the where and the how then you, my friend, can stop the countdown. Save thousands, maybe millions of lives. Pop quiz, hotshot: What do you do?
Burn this.
(Originally written in July 1997 for Anodyne magazine. Obviously the measures referred to are out of date—though election year perennials. Also, I can’t guarantee there haven’t been any changes to the local laws. And: a word to the wise: if you burn the flag before Palestinian children in an occupied settlement, Joe Grossberg will proclaim “Good fucking riddance” when you’re later run over and crushed to death by a bulldozer. Caveat incinerator.
(As for why—well, fuck. It fits my mood tonight. So.)
So you want to burn the flag.
Better jump on the bandwagon soon, folks. The House of Representatives just passed a measure that would outlaw “flag desecration” by amending the Constitution so that it is specifically exempted from protection under the First Amendment. The vote was 310 to 114, well over the two-thirds majority required for any amendments. From there it goes to the Senate; if they pass it with a two-thirds majority (and there’s a good chance they will), it will travel about the state legislatures. And if 38 of our 50 states approve it, it becomes our 28th Amendment.
What will happen to life as we know it? More than you might think. Past measures would have applied to any recognizable incarnation of Old Glory, and would have enforced the strict Boy Scout code of flag etiquette: don’t fly it in the rain, don’t fly it at night (without the proper spotlighting), don’t ever let it touch the ground, fold it in proper triangle shape when you put it away, and, oh yeah, don’t burn it. Or throw it away. Burial is the only acceptable method of disposal.
These rules would also have applied to T-shirts, neckties, comic strips (check out a memorable Doonesbury from the Bush years) or any other printed material with a flag on it—even postage stamps. Proponents claim that they’ve learned from past mistakes, and that the current measure isn’t nearly so sweeping. Even so, we can expect Young Americans for Freedom to be busted for hanging flags from dorm room ceilings; everybody who buys those little flags from Freddy’s must bury them after the parade, or face stiff penalties; and our neighbor, Phil, who hung a flag from his front porch for the Fourth three years ago and has left it up rain or shine ever since will be getting a visit from the flag police.
That’s if the laws are fairly enforced. Which they would be. Right?
So. While it’s still legal to torch the Stars ’n’ Stripes, here’s what you should do: first, if you’re burning it outside, you fall under the clean air regulations which Portland must follow, so you’ll have to apply to the Fire Department for a “permit for ceremonial fires,” usually granted for luaus and bonfires. There’s no fee. (Indoors is not a problem—as long as you burn it in a proper fireplace or woodstove.) And, of course, you’ll be wanting a flag. A 3’ × 5’ American flag will set you back about $30, but it’ll be made of nylon or polyester, and flame retardant. It’ll burn (with enough lighter fluid), but it won’t be very pretty, or safe—“You’ll end up with a liquid, plastic mess, kinda like napalm,” warns a friend who has had some experience in this area. Use a barbecue grill or some other flame-proof device to contain it. Remember, campers: Anodyne says, “Safety first!”
“Why would someone want to burn the flag? That’s so stupid!” cried one of the flag shop attendants we spoke with while researching this matter. The last serious spate of flag burning was so long ago—during the Gulf War—that nobody remembers it. But no one is seriously concerned about flag burning, here; this is really about financial improprieties, and ethics violations, and Congress wanting a little Mom and apple pie under its belt, and not giving a flying fuck what it does to the Constitution in the process. Who knows—if this “exemption” passes, we can perhaps expect more: another exemption to the First Amendment, granting freedom of religion to everyone but Satanists, or an exemption to the Fourth Amendment, so that everyone but convicted drug dealers is secure from unreasonable search and seizure. You’ve got to admire the brute force logic at work: the Constitution says we can’t, but hey presto, a little white-out and tape, and now it says we can!
Yeesh. Happy Independence Day, y’all.
Ac-cent-tchu-ate the contradictions.
Via the irrepressible Portland Mercury, we learn that State Senator John Minnis (R-Fairview) has offerred up a bill that would, in part, define terrorism:
The bill defines a terrorist broadly, as anyone who “knowingly plans, participates in or carries out any act intended to disrupt the free and orderly assembly” of Oregonians. In other words, anyone participating in an event—be it a protest or otherwise—that impedes traffic, business, or public assembly on any state property, including schools or universities. The minimum penalty for such an infraction? Twenty-five years without the possibility of parole.
So everyone who went to the march this past Saturday was a terrorist. Almost all of the events planned for the day war “begins” are acts of terror. Those monthly Critical Mass bike rides? Terrorism.
Never mind that V.I. Lenin would clasp Minnis to his waxy bosom for so alacritously taking up his end of the bargain to heighten the contradictions. No matter that Andreas Baader would pucker up his withered dead lips to kiss Minnis for playing his part so thoroughly to the hilt. (Issa giggle, ennit? Imagining those guys holding up a VP of Sales in traffic on the Burnside Bridge in a Lincoln Navigator?) —Don’t get in a semantic tizzy about conflating permitted protests and civil disobediance with hijacking passenger jets to slaughter 3,000 people. The terrorists won long ago; penny-ante shit like Senate Bill 742 is just counting coup. Instead, read the fine print: what’s also terrorism is planning, participating in, or carrying out any act that disrupts:
(c) The educational or governmental institutions of the State of Oregon or its inhabitants.
Senator Minnis. John. Think about it for a minute. Look at the chaos the Republicans have caused by refusing to fund the state budget properly. Look at the mess you’ve made of public education and higher education. (And that’s without crawling into the ever-more-likely conspiracy theory to demolish our public schools in favor of religious education.) John. Senator Minnis. Think about it for a minute:
Your own law condemns you as a terrorist.
You might want to take this one back to the drawing board.
The Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee has some important updates and actions to take regarding this shameful travesty of a bill.
Gobsmacked. William Shatnered.
I was, what, five years old? 1972, 1973, thirty years ago—we were living in the little house in Richmond and packing everything up willy-nill, my mother, my father, my sister and I; we were moving to Iran. Arak, Iran: it’s a town 60 or 70 miles (as I recall) west southwest of Tehran, in mountainous terrain. (I remember it as small—except I also remember the apartment complexes going up everywhere, and the packs of feral dogs—but anyway, regardless, the place has heated up since). In Richmond, I knew it only as a two-syllable sound, a spoken word: Arak. So when the news was on and the newscaster (Huntley? Brinkley? Cronkite?) said something about tensions rising in Arak, and anti-American sentiment, I got worried. Mom? Dad? Are you sure we ought to be moving somewhere where they’re going to hate us?
That’s not Arak, I was told. It’s not a town at all. It’s the country next door, which is called Iraq. Like Iran, but different.
Iraq. Arak.
My folks live in Rock Hill, South Carolina nowadays. There’s a set of camel bells hanging from the rafter in the sun room: a long chain of bells each nested like a clapper inside the next larger on up to the monster at the top; you’d drape this string of bells around the neck of the camel just before the hump to jangle and clank your way through the desert. There’s gorgeous miniatures here and there painted in latter-day knockoffs of the Safavid style, all gem-like colors and Herge-ish lignes claires carefully painted with brushes of only a single hair: Khayyamish lovers and-thouing under a tree; polo players galloping madly through an Esfahan park. There’s a bit of engraved rock—actually, I think it’s a plaster casting of some engraved rock—fallen from a plinth in Persepolis. There’s a block of wood with a handle carved into it; the flat face is carved with intricate floral arabesques (“Don’t you know that angels do not enter a house wherein there are pictures; and whoever makes a picture will be punished on the Day of Resurrection and will be asked to give life to what he has created?”). Pick it up by the handle, and dip it face down in a wide shallow vat of dye glimmering darkly like plum jelly, then press it—quick, slam!—on the blank brown cloth stretched taut on the rack before you. Lift it, dip it, eyeball carefully and slam it down precisely next to the first. And again, and again, building the border (precisely, but quickly, firmly, decisively) as you go. Then take up the next stamp, broader, swap out the shallow vat of plum-colored dye for the shallow vat of dye that glimmers like mint jelly: dip it, eyeball it, slam! A set of abstract leaves in green, interlocking just so with the magenta floralesque border you’ve just laid. And again, and again, carefully but quickly, keep going, there’s ten more cloths to get out the door by lunch…
My mother being a professional photographer, there’s also photos. —And memories: riding a motorcycle for the first time (not the only, but almost; I was sitting in front of the guy who owned it—five years old, remember. Or maybe six), leaping over a (little) bonfire in a vacant lot on New Year’s Eve, hiking up the mountains outside Arak and spelling our names in the snow at the top with big flat rocks. (As it turned out, we couldn’t read them from the ground; we couldn’t even see them.) —We lived in a subdivision for American engineers working on the aluminum plant (perhaps the Ravan Zobe Arak facility?), and my sister and I attended an English-language school in a small, dilapidated wing off the local school. (At least, I remember it as being small and dilapidated. Not enough desks. A small playground that takes two different shapes in my memory-map; two different playgrounds? I can’t remember. I remember seeing the non-American wing once, through an open door: darkness, and a lot of cheerful kids yelling something at us I couldn’t understand. They didn’t have enough desks, either.) The curriculum it seems to me was supplemented with British schoolkids’ texts; that, plus a steady extracurricular diet of British boys’ adventure stories (I remember Biggles, mostly, but not well) and Tintin left me with a lingering, deeply rooted Anglophilia untrammelled by repeated contemporaneous doses of Arkady Leokum. (Yes, Tintin’s Belgian. The comics were British, in translation. The point is in fifth grade I was kicked out of a regional spelling bee on the first round because I spelled “parlor” as “parlour” and I still haven’t gotten over it, okay?) —There are still little jokes and scraps of Farsi phrase that pepper the family slang: “Zood your bosh,” for “Hustle your ass”, and we still get a laugh out of “making a barfman,” and my sister and I can still giggle at the thought of the Farsi numeral 5 (it looks like a teardrop with a butt, heh heh). I remember being told never to walk home through the half-built apartment complexes because of the packs of feral dogs. My best friend’s name was Reza. (I’d run into him again in Venezuela, briefly, but that’s another story.) —I remember the smell of bodega-like shops and stalls, which—do you still buy cassette tapes? (I don’t. So I don’t know if it’s still true.) Do you remember back in the ‘80s, when they first started to make clear cassette tapes in clear cases? Do you remember the smell of one of those tapes, brand new, just unwrapped, about to be put into the boom box? It’s a very distinctive smell: an odd combination of spice and detergent, like some kind of electric incense, faintly sharp, but too round to ever make you sneeze. I never found out why, or how, but that smell is the thirty-year-old smell of tiny shops in Arak.
And the other stuff, too, the unheimlich stuff: the appalling din of Coppersmith’s Alley in Esfahan—artisans working dawn to dusk in shops not much wider than a data entry carrell (careful with that hammer), beating out copper and brass into gorgeously intricate platework; the samovars—peering into the courtyard of the hotel at Esfahan to find a shady garden, a fountain, a nook tiled with baby blue arabesques and laid with gold and purple pillows, three or four dark men lounging comfortably, a brass samovar squatting behind them, tea at the ready, and then at a spring festival at a village outside of Arak, the equinox, when you throw open your house to let the winds scour it and head out into the country for a picnic, and there we were in the yellow green grass, lunching on rugs, a big fat samovar filling dozens of tiny glass cups in brass cup holders; the women who wore chadors, the long, draping black robes that covered almost everything but their faces. Underneath, they wore American blue jeans and blouses you could find at Woolworth’s, made in Taiwan. I remember the little grey train in the little grey amusement park on the shore of the Caspian Sea; I remember the astonishing colors of spices in the bazaar, an open sack of ground cumin, paprika, tumeric, hillocks of pure, clayey colors not found in my 120 Crayolas; my father younger than I am now, standing in a corner stall, haggling with a bemused smile over the replica flintlock pistols he still has somewhere in his cluttered office, the curved wooden stocks inlaid with off-white diamonds of camel bone. —I ate pizza and tacos at Ray’s Famous American in Tehran. I watched my first videotape sometime in 1973: one of the other American families, missing a dose of pop culture, had brought one of the big old clunky machines with them, and had someone regularly ship them tapes of American television; this was pure magic. (My folks had secretly put an audio tape recorder next to the television a few weeks before we left the States and made sound-only tapes of Batman to tide me and my sister over.) (And none of that is unheimlich, no; it’s all rather decidedly home-like, but encountered far from home, out of context: a TV star at the Plaid Pantry, turning a corner in Poughkeepsie and running into your childhood friend from Paducah.) —The class picnic: a dozen or so Yankee expat first- and second-graders heading up into the hills with the twenty-something American couple who ran the classes; struggling under the weight of a watermelon, rolling it in the dust under a loose chicken-wire fence stretched over a dry gully. A gravelly stream by a low gnarled tree. A man coming up out of nowhere (did he come to the picnic site? or did we go for a walk afterwards, up on the mountain?), out of the dust, in strange clothing (and surely I’m just imagining the memory of a big curved knife at his hip), browns and brassy golds, who stood still there (by the river? the side of a narrow mountain trail?), unspeaking, who did not respond to what either teacher said, in English, in hesitant two-word bursts of Farsi, who clearly would not let us pass; who clearly said without speaking a word that We Did Not Belong.
All of that, then: Arak. Not Iraq. —I’ve never been to Iraq. (My mother has; she has one of those stories that’s great to tell if not to have lived through about a CNN crew covering her bill when the Al Rashid Hotel stopped taking American Express.) I really can’t expect anyone else to give a good God damn about somebody else’s 30-some-odd-year-old memories of a town hundreds of miles and a sectarian split and an 80-year-old border away. Arak. Not Iraq. Who cares?
Still: I’ve got to start somewhere, myself. And maybe that’s the most primal, most basic, the most gut-level reason: for me, there’s a there there. You know?
Have your fun whilst you’re alive.
You won’t get nothing when you die.
Have a good time all the time
Because you won’t get nothing when you die…
(To be more or less continued.)
What if they gave a peace and everybody came?
“We are not at war,” he kept saying. We, the world community, are waging peace. It is difficult, hard work. It is constant and we must not let up. It is working and it is an historic milestone of immense proportions. It has never happened before—never in human history—and it is happening now—every day every hour—waging peace through a global conversation. He pointed out that the conversation questioning the validity of going to war has gone on for hours, days, weeks, months and now more than a year, and it may go on and on.
Thanks, Jeanne. Thanks, JoKer. Thank you, Dr. Robert Muller. My God, did I need that.
(At the very least, folks: light a candle this Sunday.)
Sometimes, though, you just can’t resist that pellet.
Keeping in mind that skewing an online poll is mockery for ever taking the damn things quasi-seriously in the first place, Atrios is right: Wolf Blitzer deserves as much grief as you can possibly give him for phrasing a weasel-assed question like today’s. Go. Vote early and often.
Something there is that does not love a wall.
—In me, anyway. I just had someone write to me and tell me they’d understand if—because it’s clear we disagree on this point, rather vehemently—I wanted to remove them from my blogroll.
Which sort of thing is one of the reasons why I wanted to swear off these holier-than-thou crapfests in the first place.
After the initial shitstorm over at Electrolite, things calmed down a tad; it’s still heavy weather, but the sort of thing it’s bracing to go for a brisk walk in, if you like that sort of thing. (Which I do.) In the course of which, Teresa Nielsen Hayden took a quick point (“David Brin is fond of quoting a study that suggests that people in a self-righteous mood are literally enjoying a high . . . an endorphin kick”) made by Stefan Jones and ran with it a bit:
Stefan, I’ve been assuming for years, just based on my own observations, that self-righteous indignation is a high. The shorthand term Patrick and I use for it is “cheap glow”. A lot of people obviously find it attractive. I figure it’s one of the reasons they listen to Limbaugh. I also figure it’s why some political websites—mostly right-wing, some left—have taken to having an “instant outrage” feature for the rats who can’t wait to press the lever and get their pellet. I’ve also noticed that the outrage-generating texts have been making less and less sense, as both parties to the transaction move toward the complicit admission that one participant just wants his shot of anger, and is willing to cede his judgement to the other in return for it.
And it’s that image of the rats that helps me square away some stuff that’s been bugging me about blogging lately—my own stuff as well as the stuff I read. It’s why, while I can’t get through the day without checking on Atrios (say), I tend for the most part to avoid his comments crew. (Which is not to speak ill of many fine people who’ve posted many fine things there.) It’s why when I leap up in a righteous dudgeon and jerk the lever myself for a pellet, I feel all hollow and crapulent afterwards. (Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself.) —It’s why, even though I check in with the Horse from time to time, I just can’t bring myself to ’roll her or him or it or them.
But we’re back to the blogroll thing again.
The only reason a link is over there is because it’s stuff and people I like to read, on a regular basis. It’s my portable bookmark list. The key there is “like”: a frothy, ambiguous, flighty word. You’ll notice, say, a distinct dearth of bloggers which could be considered right-wing—not to name the usual names, but. (This is a distinct lacking in a political blogger; then, the funny thing is, I’ve never considered myself a political blogger, per se.) (Well. It seemed funny at the time.) You’ll also notice a distinct dearth of blogs on web standards and design and usability (Dean Allen’s occasional out-of-the-blue smashcuts notwithstanding), in spite of my passing if inept interest in the field. —On the other hand, I’m probably going to start adding more of the gonzo critical sites I’m finding by following links off Bellona Times and Waggish; they make me feel stupid, in a good way. And I really ought to add more stuff about comics, since, you know, that’s one of my ostensible fields of expertise…
My point (and I do have one) being: the only reason I have a blogroll is to remind me to check in on stuff I like to read from people I like to hang out with. It isn’t a references list or a who’s who of my secret clubhouse. If I started kicking off people I disagreed with, Barry’d be the first to go; he stubbornly refuses to accede to my superior critical understanding of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Compared with that, harsh words over choking on this ill-advised thrown-away vote or that appallingly mis-directed outburst are as nothing; a trifle. (Piffle.) —I laugh because I care. Yes, there’s a big gaping wound here in the Progressive Left-of-Center Pragmatic Utopian Mills; I don’t think it’s waterlined “us,” but it needs to be talked about, and that’s hard when each side is still spitting angry rat-pellets at the other. So what I mostly intended (ha ha) with this morning’s post was to irresponsibly abdicate a field I hadn’t been listing in much lately, anyway, since I try to keep my dogs in other fights, and I really want to go on revising my tentative translation of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, honest I do; instead, I tried to get an underhanded dig in. (Cue Silvio’s Godfather impersonation: “Just when I thought I was out—they pull me back in!”)
To make a long story only slight longer: I’d never allow politics to get in the way of someone whose stuff I like to read and out with whom I like to hang. (Politics might keep me from hanging out with someone in the first place, but that’s different.) (Subtly so, but.) —So. No one’s being dropped from the blogroll, not today, and that’s enough with the metatalk. In the meanwhile: David Chess stopped by and said something delightful in his usual lucid way; and honest, Sara, I’m almost done assembling those links on Utena; and if Paul Krugman is shrill, I don’t ever want to be sane. —Thank you, and goodnight.
