Bring it, you ill-tempered, foul-mouthed Father-Coughlin–wannabe who’s so fucking pathetic you have to get your creepy-ass deep-pocket think-tank buddies to bulk-buy your book up the bestseller lists.
A certain bigot (and those on the right who want to claim him as their own, a necessary corrective to the liberal American mediasphere, be my guest; every time he opens his mouth he makes rain for us) with a brand spankin’ new MSNBC TV contract (whose fingerprints are those on the knife in Donahue’s back?) is making some waves by calling for the arrest of the leaders of the anti-war movement once the Shock and Awe start raining down. (A link to his front page is provided as reference, should you need to verify this fact yourself. Be warned: ugly type and blinking graphics await.) —Savage (whose bearded mug glares at me on my commute every morning, since the local talk-radio outlet has a deal that splatters him and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Savage and local wannabe Lars Larson on the backs of busses, and there’s an irony in there, somewhere, a sick, stunted little thing that’s the best we can do, these days) also demonstrates an utter lack of familiarity with the middle school American History curriculum by linking favorably to the text of the 1918 US Sedition Act, repealed in 1921 and since repudiated as a grimy nadir, along with the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. We can giggle, if we like, at his historical ignorance (doubtless he would wail and moan about goddless, communist NEA teachers slandering American history—much as he will twenty years from now, the four years of Bush 43’s term long since rubbing elbows with Harding’s and Grant’s at the bottom of the presidential barrel, the odious USA PATRIOT Act having been repealed, joining the US Sedition Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts down there with the slimy fear-mongering stuff that honestly, we see it now, it’s a bad idea, we’ll never do it again, promise); certainly, giggling is better for the health than glowering worrisomely at the millions of nativist brownshirts who presumably hang from his every slaver-drenched word. But I say what the hell. Let him have his Sedition Act. Go back and read it. Forget the latter “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States” language; these are all gimmes, as no one on the anti-war side is mocking the First through Fourth Amendments like Ashcroft, or insulting drafted servicefolks like Rumsfeld. Nah. Check out the opening lines of the act Savage wants to champion:
Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States, or to promote the success of its enemies…
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known in the biz as a “money quote.” (Thanks, Sully. Oy.)
- Given that the Bush administration has made and conveyed false reports and false statements regarding Iraq at every turn;
- Given that “such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of the American people” is to directly interfere with the operation and success of the military and naval forces of the United States, sending them into a conflict without the international support we require;
- Given that by every sober, informed estimation of the situation, the coming conflict will destabilize the Middle East to an unprecedented degree, providing new waves of recruits and new sources of arms to Al Qaeda, thereby promoting the success of our ostensible enemies, and putting this country in the path of a danger for which we are criminally unprepared;
- Well.
—I think it’s quite clear that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, et al, would be the first to face charges of sedition under the renewal of this act, by golly.
Hey. It could happen. It could.
(Aw, forget the Father Coughlin ref. Father Coughlin’s too good for the likes of Savage.)
Tender is the mouth.
I now have a little plastic ziploc baggie with three teeth in them. One of them has an ugly little patch of corruption near what used to be its backside, on the inner gumline. Sneaky little bastard. The fourth, the fourth tooth cracked on extraction. Between the cavity and the old filling it pretty much lost its structural integrity. Had to be drilled or sawed or something; I’m not too clear on the details. Somehow in all the excitement I also managed to miss them pulling the upper right, missed it completely. (How does one not notice something like that?) I was lying there in the chair trying to figure out some polite way of getting their attention, um, excuse me, I think y’all forgot one, only I had a block clamping my jaws open and I couldn’t figure out how to make my tongue work and I didn’t want to go grabbing the sleeve of the guy who was sewing part of my gum shut. Bad form. And anyway all the nitrous (“Have you ever had to have nitrous before?” the nurse? hygienist? asked. “Well,” I said, “recreationally,” and we both laughed) leaking through the little nose mask made it terribly easy to suppose, you know, that maybe (weird as it seemed) I’d missed it, they’d already pulled it and I hadn’t noticed, and what do you know.
When I was kid I relished going to the doctor or the dentist. Well, not so much relished. But I remember, say, the pediatrician in—was it Charlotte? I was in second grade then, eight years old—or was it Kentucky? Three years later. Even if I can’t place it, I remember the basics: the doctor had the same freaky-deaky eyesight I do, a ridiculous range of focus, reading highway signs out on the horizon or books dangling from your nose; we used to piss off his nurses by standing all the way across his office from the eye chart and reading it there, all the way down to the bottom, grinning. —His nurses all wore glasses, you see.
My wisdom teeth started coming in early, when I was about 13 or so, and they were straight and even and well-behaved. Never had a cavity growing up. —And if it’s a child-like pride I take in my clean bills of health (“My,” the dentist says, peering at my teeth, “you must have grown up with a lot of fluoride in your water”), so be it; doctors and dentists are rather parental figures. Pleasing them touches something atavistic. Oh, would you look at you, growing up so big and strong. —Unlike aunts and other relatives, doctors and dentists are in a position to know.
t’s with something of a sense of betrayal that I’m looking down at this little baggie as I type. My chin is still someone else’s. I brush my beard from time to time with the idle thought, so, this is what it feels like to Jenn. Helps distract from the holes in the back of my mouth. They’re full of blood and gauze at the moment, but I can still feel where something isn’t, despite the numbness of my jawline; I can feel as I type the empty place where the pain’s going to come roaring in. (Jenn just called to check up on me. There’s something amusing about being able to type as effortlessly as ever, even though I’m rendered a mush-mouthed rube. Wah. If oo go to Ho Fooze, cou oo ge me some soup?)
I hate the taste of gauze.
My straight-shooting, well-behaved wisdom teeth were just too far back to clean properly. (It’s a poor craftsman blames his teeth, but hey.) The cavity in the lower left ten years ago, first blemish on my perfect record, was just a warning shot. The traitorous little bastards were harboring all manner of noxious critters hell-bent on destroying my gums and rendering my wonderfully solid fluoride-rinsed teeth homeless before my dotage. And the upper right (yeah, I’m looking at you, you little creep) was nursing a cavity of its own like a sunken scab, a weird gravelly scar etched across that smooth ivory face. —And if you’re having two out, you know, you might as well go ahead. Get it all over with. In for a penny and all.
Ah, well. At least my eyesight’s still freaky-deaky.
This is getting embarrassing.
Los Angeles got its act together and passed one.
Across the country, 113 cities and counties have passed resolutions urging President Bush to work for peace, to exhaust all diplomatic options, to keep military force firmly where it belongs—as the last possible resort. These aren’t by any means binding resolutions that have a hope in hell in and of themselves of affecting anything. But they’re yet another telling sign of the profound distrust growing daily in this country regarding the coming (but not inevitable; never inevitable) war. —If you scan that list, though, you’ll note a rather glaring exception: Portland, Oregon—the most livable city, a progressive’s dream, capital of the People’s Republic of Multnomah County—axed an anti-war resolution on a 2 – 2 vote.
Erik Sten voted for it. Pro-business law-and-order mayor Vera Katz voted for it. Dan Saltzman, though he’s on the record as opposing the idea, ducked the vote that day. Randy Leonard mumbled something about not having enough information, and voted “no.” —Randy. Baby. You got elected to know enough about stuff to make decisions. Okay? That’s what being on a city council is all about. But a tip? You really, truly don’t know enough about something, you abstain. You don’t vote against it. Okay?
And Jim Francesconi—
Francesconi said he saw no point to the resolution. Despite having written a letter as a private citizen to President Bush objecting to unilateral military action. He’s keeping mum about the why, but there’s a number of guesses. Most hinge on a memo sent to the city commissioners the day before the vote from Portland Business Alliance head Kim Kimbrough, which stated, “Time spent by the City Council during Council meetings debating, hearing, or acting upon the proposed resolution only helps to diminish the credibility of the Portland City Council.” Perhaps this is what Leonard didn’t know enough about; why Saltzman skipped the vote; why Francesconi voted no. —If so, well, as the Willamette Week put it, “A single letter from Kimbrough trumped the marchers and the thousands of cards, emails and phone calls City Hall received in support of a resolution against attacking Iraq.”
(“Diminish the credibility of the Portland City Council.” You know what else diminishes that credibility? Aside from ignoring the will of the voters? Having our city’s public education woes held up as an object lesson in the funny pages. What’s that? No connection? It’s not your fault Salem can’t get its act together? We should blame the Brainstorm readers who voted down Measure 28? One city resolution against unilateral military force won’t do a whit to help the kids? —Well, yes. And no. There is no direct benefit; no magic money will suddenly come pouring into any coffers because the city council stands up and says, hey, folks? We over here in Portland just want to go on record as saying this is, you know, a bad idea. But. There is a direct and profound connection between the educational crunch we’re facing all across the country and the 150-some-odd-thousand troops waiting for Turkey to vet our credit history. Doonesbury makes it. Body and Soul spells it out a little more clearly.)
This war is wrong. More and more Yanks are coming to realize this every day and are speaking out against it. One of the ways we have of speaking out is to ask our elected representatives to say something for the official record. City councils and county commissions do this all the time, every day, across the country. Thousands upon thousands of Portlanders stood up to ask our city council to say something for the official record against this war—and they declined.
That is what diminishes the council’s credibility most of all. —Trust me. I think we’re going to have a hard time forgetting this one.
Post no bills.
Okay, so I’m a little late on this one. Better than never. Just before the 15 February march—no, wait, rally—in New York City, the Baghdad Snapshot Crew posted thousands of copies of photos of Iraqi citizens throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. In the course of which, Emilie Clark and Lytle Shaw were arrested and held overnight on misdemeanor charges. Their trial date is set for 13 March.
I’m sure they’ll be pleased to learn that Microsoft got off with a $50 fine. —Of course, no one at Microsoft got arrested, insofar as I can tell. Or at IBM or Nike.
Nike—y’all want corporations to be treated as individuals when it comes to freedom of speech. You still sure about that?
On a clear day you can see forever
You can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Funny thing about waves: give ’em a little time, they come rolling in again.
Can we just cut the fucking ironic humor and ask a simple question?
Ashcroft adds yet another compelling argument to the ever-growing heap in favor of forcibly ejecting him from the office of Attorney General. (It’s a Get Your War On reference. In case you were wondering.)
Word to the breakaround, y’all.
Or something like that. —If there’s any blogger I’d ever want to be (aside from myself, that is), it’s the languagehat. The man’s polylingual like a fittstim, snarky like an illywhacker, he’s all-too comfortable brachiating happily through the madly glorious exfoliations of the liberal arts, and every time I think of him as the Rosetta stoner, I break out in a fit of Flight Lieutenant Biggles; if nothing else, he raises the bar for links to cool stuff you might otherwise never have heard of but now can’t imagine living without, you know? Which, for me (cue standard MeFi lament), is what the web is all about.
His write-up of the New York Times obituary of Robert K. Merton, for instance, which, in the course of firmly cementing another book into my teetering must-read-soonest stack, reminded me of the all-too-terribly cool word “anafractuous,” in the course of seeking a quickie etymology of which I stumbled over this lovingly detailed exegesis of John Bellairs’ “The True History of St. Fidgeta, Virgin and Martyr.”
In other words, today I had a good coffee break. —So. Thanks, ’hat. Look on this perhaps as sincere flattery, inspired if nonetheless inept; I just wanted to give a little something back. Yo.
No blood for duct tape.
From Boing Boing we get this squib from the Washington Post—
That most lamentable duct tape suggestion last week by a Homeland Security official—which drove countless panicked citizens out to buy the product—has been widely derided as useless and pretty crazy.
But maybe not so crazy. Turns out that nearly half—46 percent to be precise—of the duct tape sold in this country is manufactured by a company in Avon, Ohio. And the founder of that company, that would be Jack Kahl, gave how much to the Republican National Committee and other GOP committees in the 2000 election cycle? Would that be more than $100,000?
Sales are through the roof; Kahl’s son (and CEO) reports the duct tape plant’s running 24/7, even though duct tape is a lousy sealant. —And you thought this stuff was beyond the pale.
(Actually, it’s all a grand metaconspiracy to drive sales of tin foil. My father specializes in aluminum engineering; I’d say more, but
Cookie break.
I got mugged by a couple of giggling Girl Scouts coming out of the grocery store. I got away six bucks lighter with a couple of boxes of Samoas perched precariously on top of my bag of groceries.
So I thought I’d point out, you know, that the American Family Association believes that “Girl Scouts seem to revel in their belief that all religious concepts are equal”; the International Organization of Heterosexual Rights is upset because “20 years ago, Girl Scouts learned about how to sew and cook, today they learn how to successfully hold a feminist rally”; the National Review cries that “the Girl Scouts is arguably one of the most politically correct organizations in the country”; and the American Heritage Girls are organizing as an alternative based on Judeo-Christian values (non-denominational)—all of them staunchly following in the 50-year-old footsteps of the American Legion its own bad self.
Makes you want to go buy a truckload, doesn’t it.
t.A.T.u. en passant—
Elena posts some interesting insights from Russia into that phenomenon known as Tatu—who, I am given to understand, are 50 cents shy of the number one spot on TRL. (There’s a moral or something in that, or maybe it’s an ironic O. Henry twist, but I don’t give too much of a damn. I’m enjoying h too much for that.) —I’d just note that in the version I’ve seen of “Prostye dvizheniya,” it’s not at all clear Yulia’s, well, jilling off; she was assembling a time bomb to blow up her school (metaphorically, maybe; these music videos are irresponsibly slippery when it comes to the Truth) because Lena was making out with some guy in the middle of a slo-mo carousel. But that video was I’d thought for “30 Minut,” so what do I know? —I’d also note that mentioning t.A.T.u., Taty, or Tatu prominently on your website is a great way to score traffic from web searches.
Burlesque.
Browsing Blogdex, I stumbled over two lit-crittish burlesques of our current sitch, from either side of the howling divide: that side, and this one. —Unfair, perhaps, but it is rather nice to have one’s prejudices reinforced now and again, isn’t it? (Meanwhile, in the real world—)
Pictures, pretty pictures, and statistics.
I was temping in the mailroom of a [commodity] company’s world headquarters (or, if you like, the world headquarters of the [commodity] division of a much larger company; it all gets so complicated with all those interlocking boards of directors, you know?)—and from here on out, whenever someone speaks dreamily of the inherent superiority of private corporations over government institutions when it comes to being lean mean efficiency machines, I’ll think of the Shanghai junk mail. International inter-office mail went out twice a week via FedEx, see. You’d take whatever had accumulated in the Shanghai in-box, say, over the course of the week, and stuff it in a FedEx international overnight envelope, weigh it, print up the shipping invoice, and put it on the stack for the guy to pick up at 4:30. Now. Since the guy in Shanghai did almost everything by phone or fax or email, and anything physical that absolutely, positively had to be there overnight was, well, sent overnight (since none of the local stationery shops had watermarked stock certificate paper of the archaic dimensions favored by a Mexican law firm, we had to get that firm to send up a chunk of their blank stock via FedEx so that appropriate certificates could be printed at headquarters and then FedExed to a board meeting elsewhere so three people who wouldn’t otherwise be in the same place at the same time could sign them and then FedExed back to headquarters so that we could FedEx it back to the Mexican law firm—FedEx: it’s not just a transitive verb, it’s a racket), and didn’t languish in the interoffice in-box, well, what was left, twice a week, was junk mail. Seminar come-ons, offers on the latest businessprech books, stamp-your-logo-on-this-ash-tray-and-give-it-out-as-a-sales-incentive pitches, executive travel package deals, credit card offers, magazine subscription cards, and thinly veiled attempts to buff up a marketing database by urging you to renew your membership in this or that dodgy [commodity]-based professionals’ fraternity or who’s who directory, all of it gang-addressed to the names of every company executive on some three-year-old list (“Who’s X?” I’d ask, trying to sort the mail my first couple of days. —“X? X? Oh, right, he’s dead”)—and since they were all executives, logic (absent real information as to actual locations) dictates it all be sent to the home office. Including, you know, the stuff for the guy in Shanghai.
So twice a week—in addition to shopping for stationery in Mexico City—I was shovelling a snowdrift of 3×5 and 5×8 cardstock (matte and glossy), shrink-wrapped trial issues, and no. 10 windowed envelopes (“0.0% APR!—For the first 90 days, then…”) out of the Shanghai inbox, dumping them into a FedEx international overnight envelope, and blowing $35 so the guy in Shanghai could have his assistant open the envelope and dump all the contents straight into Shanghai’s paper recycling stream.
“Can we just skip it this time?” I asked, the first time I put together an international interoffice run.
“International shipments go out twice a week. Germany, Ireland, Shanghai, England. It’s all got to go.”
“Yeah, but the guy in Shanghai has nothing but junk mail.”
“So that’s what you send.”
So I sent it. What the hell. Wasn’t my money. Wasn’t the money of the person who was showing me the ropes. (The dodgy nature of anecdotal evidence aside, money to burn will be burnt. Whether it’s public or private. So.)
—But! That wasn’t what I wanted to point out. One of the seminar come-ons that I ended up keeping (everyone in the chain of command got one, including the guy who’d been dead three years) was for visual representations of data—you know, charts and graphs and such. At the top of the flyer was the arrestingly beautiful graph-map of Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign, by Charles Joseph Minard, acclaimed in the flyer (and elsewhere) as the best graph ever done by anyone, anywhere.
There seems to be something of a Minard meme running around lately; at least, ever since I tucked that flyer away (along with a copy of Scientology’s Advance! magazine, addressed to an executive who’d moved on to other things, and a charming renn faire catalog ditto), I’ve seen it crop up in unexpected places, like tacked to the wall of Scott McCloud’s studio. (Actually, thinking about it, that’s not that unexpected.) —The most recent place (also, thinking about it, not that unexpected) is over at Ray Girvan’s criminally underappreciated cornucopia of miscellany, the Apothecary’s Drawer; there’s a dearth of permalinks for individual entries, but scrolling down to find the one dated 14 February 2003 will take you past so many other cool, time-wastin’ links that I’m sure you won’t mind. When you get there, you’ll find links to re-visions of Minard, Florence Nightingale’s contribution to the history of statistics, and other historical milestones in the field of statistical graphing—including this stunning 1880 stereogram, perhaps the first stereogram ever done, breaking out the population of Sweden from 1750 – 1875 by age groups. It might not be the best, but it’s certainly one of the most beautiful. In an austere, geeky way.
What he said.
Don’t bother with my rather incoherent and ill-considered screed of this morning (“The dearth of outrage,” solely in the interest of allowing the folks at home without a program to play along). Instead, go read what Calpundit has to say on the subject, and ponder his questions from both sides of the divide.
And now for some necessary comic relief.
Me: It is possible that some people might have found the plot a little improbable. They might find it hard to believe that, in order to garner political support for his tax cuts, George W. Bush would secretly arrange a giant parade in Washington honoring the richest people in America, who would march front to back in order of their net worth. Or that a cadre of earnest, teetotaling college students would get wind of this and, encouraged by Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, rise up to stage a heroic counter-parade honoring basic American values like morality and hard work. Was this perhaps deft satire, a nifty Swiftian touch?
Burrows: No.
Me: Ah.
—from Gene Weingarten’s interview with Robert Burrows on his novel, The Great American Parade.
I should probably fall back on Aristotle at this point and note that the comic is properly the ridiculous, which is itself a species of the ugly—and one must admit that the ridiculous (especially as a species of the ugly) is not without its own (quiet) dignity. (“Dignity!” cries the Gene Kelly in the back of my brain. “Always dignity!”) —For all that The Great American Parade sounds truly, ridiculously wretched (if not so much the worst novel ever published in the English language), Burrows has earned a hallowed footnote in the history of holy follies.
Or, at the very least, he’s made me smile. Here’s one to him, then.
It’s not the idle hands that worry me.
Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with, but there was bad blood in him; someway he got into the magic bullets and that leads straight to Devil’s work, just like marihuana leads to heroin. (You think you can take them bullets or leave ’em, do you? Just save a few for your bad days—)
Well, now, we all have those bad days when you can’t shoot for shit.
The more of them magics you use, the more bad days you have without them, so it comes down finally to all your days being bad without the bullets. It’s magics or nothing. Time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself: Kid, you’re hooked, heavy as lead.
And that’s where old George found himself, out there at the crossroads, molding the Devil’s bullets. Now a man figures it’s his bullets, so it will hit what he wants to hit, but it don’t always work that way.
You see, some bullets is special for a single aim. A certain stag, or a certain person, and no matter where you are, that’s where the bullet will end up, and in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser’s wand and points where the bullet wants to go.
—profoundest apologies to Tom Waits and William Burroughs, of course.
The dearth of outrage.
Matthew Yglesias, reacting to the latest repudiation of earnestly made promises by the Bush administration, says, “Clearly it’s going to take some real pressure from the public to get the administration to stick to its original promises on this point. Pressure I wish liberals were more interested in organizing….”
Screw that.
The profoundly obvious inability of the Bush administration to do the right thing in Iraq is one of the keystones of liberal opposition to the war. This is so much a matter of record that I don’t feel too terribly bad about being pressed for time as I write this, and so only have a smattering of links gleaned from a quickie Google search: Hitch-wannabe Nick Cohen calling this coming betrayal back last summer; the Village Voice with a breakdown of all the spoils-to-be; Madeleine Albright warning us last fall, “It is wrong to suggest democracy and Islam are not compatible… We are not concerned enough about what creates this anti-American feeling. [Americans need to] let them know we support their aspiration for freedom.” —I suddenly feel like I’ve been told I give more of a shit about Augusta than the Taliban. Mattie. Baby. Maybe we’re a little distracted by all the Shock and Awe, and maybe our nuanced arguments about how this war is nothing more than an excuse to replace an old, worn-out strongman with a fresher, newer, more pliable model get lost in the sea of “Attack Iraq? NO!” placards, but trust me. We’re down with the pressure. We’re on message. We’re good to fucking go. We aren’t the problem, here.
What I want to know is, where’s the right?
The principled right, who told us all that this was about bringing democracy? Who tell us that we must strike a blow against Hussein for his oppression of his own people? His gassing of the Kurds? Who tell us that we on the left, marching against this war, are Stalinist stooges standing up for totalitarian regimes and betraying the liberty and self-determination of the Iraqi people? I’ve never taken these arguments seriously—no one with an appreciation of recent American history would—but they’ve always had the fig leaf of the Bush administration’s promises and stated intentions. This latest of many repudiations finally strips that fig leaf away, shreds it, lights it on fire, and stomps the ashes into the dust.
That’s the outrage I’m looking for. The noise that needs to be brought. Left and right standing up together: if this 12-year-old shadow war is finally going to slouch into Baghdad under cover of the greatest powers of darkness, we must make certain that what’s left standing in some small way begins to atone for the horror that’s been wrought. —We both want ballots. We always have. You said it would take bullets. We said there were other ways. But we both agreed on the ballots—and instead, we’re only getting bullets. Bullets on out, as far as the eye can see.
Well?
(I’d even take a touchingly naïve epiphany, like Julian Sanchez’s. —Hell, I’d even take ol’ Ronnie Reagan, at this point.)
National Condom Week—14 – 21 February.
Aw, you knew there had to be a catch. Via the ideologischer unzuverlässigkeit of Uppity Negro, read this:
In his recent State of the Union address, President Bush promised to provide funds for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs in Africa and the Caribbean. However, the president’s extremist allies are now demanding that not a dime be spent on condoms as a means of preventing AIDS. Their solution? Abstinence only.
So go on, y’all. Pony up and send a condom to Africa in President “Yeah, baby, I promise I’ll use condoms, I swear, only not this once, you know, because I’m out, yeah, I’m out, and we gotta get this done, right?” Bush’s name. (I don’t think they’re going to be able to fit all of that on the wrapper, but hey.)
