The other 157,999.
The first casualty, of course, is truth. —Here’s what some of the others looked like. (For those all het up to kill the Iraqis in order to save them, to murder civilians in order to improve their quality of life, to overthrow a dictator by destroying and displacing his citizens: where have you been the past 12 years?)
Federal judgeships aren’t consolation prizes for a few years of decent behavior.
Which comes from Donna Ladd’s take-no-prisoners jeremiad against the very idea of nominating Charles W. Pickering, Sr., to the Fifth Circuit Court. “Apologists are actually giving a would-be circuit judge an ovation for once prosecuting the low-life scum of the KKK,” she wrote, holding up to the light one of Pickering’s strongest claims to having reconstructed himself. —This was written, mind you, back before Lott stuck his foot in his mouth and got demoted from Senate Majority Leader to chair the Senate Rules Committee; back before Frist, Lott’s replacement as Majority Leader, vowed to turn the Lott imbroglio into “a catalyst for unity and a catalyst for positive change.”
Well, Bush has just handed him a doozy of a test for those catalysts. —It’s time to dust off the Case Against Pickering, again:
Judge Pickering’s opinions on the bench also raise questions about his commitment to fairness and to the federal courts’ historic role as dispenser of equal justice. Many of his civil rights opinions betray an indifference, and even outright hostility, toward those seeking to remedy perceived injustice. Judge Pickering displays a tendency to inject his personal opinions and biases about the state of the law, the losing plaintiffs, or judges in other cases, raising serious questions about whether he is ruling based on personal views or on the dictates of the law. He has also acted in other ways that call into question his commitment to fairness, including refusing to appoint another judge to decide whether he should be recused when a party alleged that he had a personal bias and threatening or imposing sanctions in cases in which sanctions did not appear to be warranted. He has been reversed by the 5th Circuit Court over decisions in which he not only failed to follow controlling legal precedent, but failed even to mention it.
Set aside for the moment the question of his commitment to civil rights, if you like; refuse to contemplate his past actions, papers written in law school, his support for the Mississippi Sovereignty Committee. Forget that the Fifth Circuit has the highest minority population by percentage of any circuit in the country, yet only one black judge and two Hispanic judges. (We are, after all, a color-blind society, with no need for such corrective action.) Forget the whole Trent Lott deal; he was an isolated case, and anyway, John Ashcroft is still Attorney General. Forget all of this and ask yourself the big question, you know, the one on merit:
Is this man even competent to ride the Fifth Circuit?
The Free Congress Foundation says yes, on the basis of three of over a thousand decisions—and writes off Pickering’s paper used to strengthen enforcement of Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation laws as “an academic treatise on a legal question” and support and even use of the Mississippi Sovereignty Committee as a vote between sealing or burning the Committee’s records.
Federal judgeships aren’t consolation prizes for a few years of decent behavior.
The questions to ask yourself, now; is the appalling hubris of renominating Pickering to better grease the skids for the renomination of Priscilla “Enron” Owens? Are both nominations designed to draw attention away from the unabashed looting that’s the centerpiece of the Bush plan for “economic recovery”? Is the whole mess nothing more than a contrived bundle of awfulness to distract us from North Korea? Why hasn’t Tom Ridge declared a mauve alert yet? And how much more cynical do we have to get to keep up?
Behind the scenes.
So blogrolling.com is fine (and dandy), I got the blog roll up and running with a minimum of fuss, tested the handy (also dandy) one-click bookmarklet, and the flow of whuffie continues unabated. That’s it. Carry on. Me, I’m heading back to work.
Have you seen this ancient geegaw?
Okay, so it isn’t in the 1482 Annunciation by Hans Memling, as previously announced. But it is cool, and it is worth a look: the medieval Itty-Bitty Book Light. —If you should happen to see it before March, drop Janice Safran a line, would you?
It’s all starting to come together.
Barry’s got a good summation of pithy, meaty posts from other people about the hows and the whys of the Bush “stimulus” package; Atrios types up a revealing table from the New York Times of who will save how much—but it’s Ted Barlow who points out what will, perhaps, prove the most chilling of unintended consequences. At least, I’m hoping it’s unintended. It’s easy enough to believe this White House is utterly unaware of the snarling, snapping wolves at the doors of about 50 statehouses and countless counties and cities and other municipalities. Right? —The alternative is that Wile E. Coyote’s in charge. Which, come to think of it, would be an improvement.
Synonyms: accessory, accomplice, affiliate, ally, auxiliary, branch, buddy, chum, clubber, co-operator, cohort, collaborator, compatriot, comrade, confederate, consort, fellow, mate, offshoot, pal, partner, peer, playmate, sidekick.
When he sat down with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in a Chicago hotel suite on July 18, former Missouri Senator John Danforth assumed he was the only one in the room being considered for Vice President. After the intense three-hour meeting ended, Danforth came away thinking he might be offered the job. It never occurred to him that Cheney, the man in charge of Bush’s selection process, was also his competition. “Cheney flew [me] up to Chicago,” Danforth recalled last week. “I took that to mean Cheney had declined it.”
—from “How Bush Decided: His choice of Cheney says a lot about how the Governor sees himself and what he learned from Texas and from his father,” 1 August 2000, cnn.com.
It is assumed you’re reading Talking Points Memo on a daily basis; certainly, he’s a must-read on North Korea, as he has been on South Dakota, as he has been on Trent Lott, as… You get the point. But I wanted to take a moment to make extra special sure you all read “Vice Grip,” his latest for The Washington Monthly. —Paradigm shift begins at home, after all.
Denying whuffie.
So I haven’t read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom yet but I have read this squib on Boing Boing about how the Guardian dubbed whuffie as one of the 25 technologies and notions that hold the most promise over the coming year:
It’s the great conundrum of the web. Why do so many people do so much for free? What do people get out of it? Whuffie—that’s what. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow for his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Whuffie embodies respect, karma, mad-props; call it what you will, the web runs on it.
See, I use Sitemeter to check the stats on this blog-thing. (Arguably too much.) It’s down this morning; I can’t see how many people have visited, or where they’re coming from.
I’m also using blogrolling.com to build a blogroll. I went to do some work on it this morning, and it’s gone from the internet; there’s something up (at least temporarily) with the URL. Since the rolls are hosted at blogrolling.com, blogrolls all over the net (like the one at Rittenhouse Review) are gone, kaput, nada. —So people who might otherwise have browsed through to new sites can’t. At least, temporarily.
Obviously, there’s plenty of ways to host this stuff yourself and not be dependent on other people’s bandwidth or server issues. But for those of us without the requisite skillset, well, they’re darned useful.
But they’re also a glaring weak spot in any economy of whuffie.
—Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just cranky. More coffee, then off to work. Whee.
États Rouges, 2050.
She was not a particularly bad bishop. She was, in fact, quite typical of Episcopal bishops of the first quarter of the 21st century: agnostic, compulsively political and radical and given to placing a small idol of Isis on the alter when she said the Communion service. By 2037, when she was tried for heresy, convicted and burned, she had outlived her era. By that time only a handful of Episcopalians still recognized female clergy, and it would have been easy enough to let the old fool rant our her final years in obscurity. But we are a people who do our duty.
I well remember the crowd that gathered for the execution, solemn but not sad, relieved that at last, after so many years of humiliation, the majority had taken back the culture. Civilization had recovered its nerve. The flames that soared about the lawn before the Maine statehouse that August afternoon were, as the bishopess herself might have said, liberating.
According to Fichte a “real völkische community” would egalise itself once the nationalist consciousness started growing. All members of this community would be entitled to a fair and sober existence, if they would keep themselves far away from “foreign influences” and “decadent luxury.” Just like Fichte, the Khmers believed the “völkische” body to be a biological organism that could only remain healthy when completely isolated from “foreign countries.”
“Daddy says the ethnic cleansing is an obsession to the Angkar. The Angkar hates everyone who is not a real Khmer. The Angkar wants to clean the democratic Kampuchea from all other races. They are seen as the source of all problems, all corruption and all injustice. Only when they are gone, the real Khmer culture wil florish again,” Ung writes in her book. She must keep at distance from “ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese and other minorities that are racially depraved.”
—Eric Krebbers, quoting in English the Dutch translation of Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father.
Via Atrios, Archpundit, and Joe Conason. “The first Civil War was, on the whole, a gentlemanly affair,” writes Bill “Brother Number One” Lind; “the second one wasn’t.” —Well. The first time is a tragedy, the second a farce; and those who do not learn from history are doomed to end up on its slag heap.
Too much woman (for a hen-pecked man).
“What’s the difference between you and Peter Tork?” asks Phil.
“Me?” says me.
“As an example. What’s the difference between you and Peter Tork?”
“I don’t know. What’s the difference?”
“You didn’t date Nico.”
I love it when Phil comes to visit.
We picked him up this morning for a late breakfast and a few hours of general bumming around. The plan, as laid out yesterday, had been to maybe do some record shopping.
“No,” he says, at breakfast. “Scratch that. I blew my budget yesterday. Unless…”
When Phil trails off like that, it’s an invitation to prod him for more. This is always worthwhile. “Yes, Phil?”
“Well, I’m trying to fill in some of the gaps in rock history between, oh, Char Vinnedge and, oh, Chrissy Hynde…”
Jenn and I grin at each other. “Who?” says Jenn. —She’s asking about Char Vinnedge, of course. I mean, if you don’t know from Chrissy Hynde, well, read this and go buy some albums and listen to them and then come back. Not to be snooty or anything. But.
Anyway: Char Vinnedge: as Phil tells it, back in 1964 the Beatles came to America. Vinnedge went to see them in concert and (like most screaming young girl fans) left with the burning desire to form her own band just like them. So she dragooned her sister and a couple of friends into playing the songs she wrote and they called themselves the Luv’d Ones and if they never quote broke out of the Michigan circuit back in the day, we can in this 21st century buy a run of their stuff off Sundazed Records and with the benefit of hindsight note how ahead of their time they were and how Vinnedge was a guitar god of the first water and if we go a bit overboard sometimes, assuring folks they weren’t the puppets of record company executives, they weren’t a marketing gimmick at all, why, that all-girl band really did play their instruments, well, it’s understandable. (We’re frequently reminded the Monkees could play their instruments, after all.) —But the Luv’d Ones are unusual. They were ahead of their time. They blazed a trail, back there in the mid ’60s, for all that it’s gone largely unnoticed.
Rock history, then, from Char Vinnedge to Chrissy Hynde.
“Well,” says Phil, “for one thing, there’s the Joy of Cooking.” And can we stop for a moment and reflect on how fucking cool it is to name an American roots-folk-rock band the Joy of Cooking? “They were formed in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when I think both of them were in their 30s. So they were doing rock songs about housewives being abandoned by their husbands and having nothing to do all day but drink, you know? But they weren’t an all-woman band. They had some guys who would come and play their instruments and keep their mouths shut. And anyway, they aren’t the ones I’m looking for. Not today…”
“Oh?” I say.
“Fanny,” says Phil. “Fanny and Birtha.”
“Fanny,” says Jenn.
“And Birtha,” says Phil. “I’ve got one album by Fanny, but it sucks. Still. It’s an all-woman heavy rock band from like 1971. And Birtha I think put out two albums, and everyone says they’re better than Fanny, but I’ve never seen either one anywhere. So I’m safe. I’m not going to find them. I mean, I blew my music budget yesterday…”
So we pay for breakfast and Jenn heads back to the house to work on the latest page of Dicebox and Phil and I stroll down Hawthorne to Excalibur, where he picks up a 1973 copy of The History of Underground Comics (out of print). “I blew my music budget,” he says. “Not my buying-neat-stuff-on-a-whim budget.” And on our stroll back to the car, we happened to pass Crossroads Music, and since Phil had already blown his music budget and anyway he was not going to find what he was looking for, he was safe, right?
Score: Birtha, by Birtha; Charity Ball and Rock and Roll Survivors, by Fanny; and a copy of Sandinista on vinyl, which isn’t one of the gaps Phil was trying to fill, but is pretty thin on the ground at this moment in history, so.
And so I got to hear Birtha, and I got to hear Fanny, and I think I agree: Birtha’s the better band. The opening track on the album—“Free Spirit”—gets this chugging beat underway that cries out for some Quentin Tarantinoid to dredge it up for a perfectly obscure moment of transcendent pop-culture swagger on film. And if Shele couldn’t quite do the Janis she was trying for (I think it was Shele), well, she hit close enough to not have any regrets, I think. —But I’m perverse: I think I like Fanny better. Of the two albums we heard, I’d be more likely to play Charity Ball than Birtha. More range—no, not quite; more ambition in what they were reaching for, even if they weren’t as successful in pulling it off. It was a more fun album, in some respects. But I want both albums in the house—it was like—okay. There’s the Replacements song, “Alex Chilton,” right, which is one of the best songs ever. And it’s about Alex Chilton, who was the prodigy kid behind Big Star, whom a lot of people who know from music talk about but you don’t hear all that much. So I finally go out and get the CD that has Big Star’s first two albums together, and I play it, and it was—but I need to digress again. Back in high school there was a cool radio station in Chicago whose call letters escape me. Michael Palin, looking for a quick hit of cash, did a couple of rather funny television commercials for them. In one of them, he was inexplicably holding a pizza while informing the viewer that this particular radio station did not play its music over and over and over again from some pre-programmed hit list. Variety, that was the key. A wide spectrum of songs. He looks down at the pizza, and sighs. Holds it up. “And to think,” he says, “This was once ‘Stairway to Heaven’.”
Maybe you had to be there. But: the point: Big Star is pretty squarely in the genre called Classic Rock; it’s what you’d hear on the radio in the upper 90s to the low 100s, I guess, and don’t those stations usually have a morning Zoo? “Aqualung” and Foreigner? You know? Big Star would in style and approach and general sound fit seamlessly into that format. —Except that it isn’t pizza.
And neither is Birtha. And neither is Fanny.
And now I want to hear some Luv’d Ones, too.
“They weren’t the first, though,” says Phil. As if one could ever point to anyone and say, that person, there, that’s the first. As if the category we’re talking about—women rock instrumentalists? Rock bands fronted by women who wanted to front their own rock band?—were anything more than a vague sketch. Fanny and Birtha weren’t the only points (we could maybe hunt around for whatever Bitch put down on tape somewhere) and of course Char Vinnedge wasn’t the first (if you wanted to get silly about it, you could point to maybe Bessie Smith).
But Phil wants to talk about somebody else. “Nope. There was somebody earlier…”
“Who, Phil?”
He grins. “Kathy Marshall, the Queen of the Surf Guitar. She was 13 years old. She played a lot with Eddie and the Showmen and blew Dick Dale off the stage. And guess how many recordings she has.”
I shrug. Phil holds up his thumb and his forefinger and makes a circle with them.
“There’s a couple of acetates somewhere of two songs written for her that nobody’s pressed,” he says. “That, and maybe six pages of photos of this 13-year-old girl in a cute little dress with a Fender Stratocaster in the Encyclopedia of Surf Guitar. She apparently lives in Orange County these days. Had a couple of kids. She’s what, 52?”
And then we talked about whether one can categorically state that Death is a character in every Coen Brothers movie (I can’t find it in The Big Lebowski and I’m not entirely certain about The Man Who Wasn’t There) and what you’d maybe put on a mix tape that begins with “Mink Car” and ends with “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”
“Hey,” says Phil. “What’s the difference between you and Peter Tork?”
I love it when he comes to visit.
Rule No. 1.
Not to be a kill-joy, but rule no. 1 in any online community is this: Do not feed the trolls.
They crawl out of the woodwork, these trolls, to say things intended only to stir up trouble. They want you to get angry. They want you to fly off the handle. They love it when you go off in a high dudgeon at great length and with furious vituperation. They don’t care what you say, how clearly you hold the moral high ground, how you raze their pathetic arguments to the foundations and salt the very earth they stand on. They just know if they say something outrageous, they’ll get attention, and when the current furor dies down, they’ll just say something outrageous again. Moreso, maybe. Try to top themselves. (You remember your T.A. for Tots? It’s a classic case of confusing Warm Fuzzies and Cold Pricklies. If the PC Police didn’t exist, they’d have to invent them—wait a minute—)
So: in case you hadn’t figured it out: Ben Shapiro is a stone-cold troll. —For fuck’s sake, Jerry Falwell apologized for saying this shit. (Whether he really meant it in his heart is between him and his God and immaterial to the matter at hand.)
It’s become hip in certain circles to refer to “the Virgin Ben” when dealing with Shapiro—mostly because of how he spun this lifestyle squib. —This is a classic case of feeding the troll. It’s not so much red meat as the Goblin Queen’s appropriately righteous indignation, but running gags like “the Virgin Ben” will feed his persecution complex and give him enough of a crusader’s high to keep him going for weeks on end. (Why, if he’s lucky enough, maybe he’ll break out of the blogosphere and get his own Working For Change profile.)
Of course: online, if you don’t feed the trolls, they eventually go away. Not entirely—we will always have trolls with us—but it’s possible to maintain a civil discourse over and around them, through them and past them; if you can’t resist, if you give in to temptation and the troll gets what the troll wants, well. You can always ban IP numbers.
Out here in the real world, if you don’t feed the trolls, the Heritage Foundation will still give them columns.
Life is unfair. Dammit.
Do the good work. Do the substantive work. Speak truth to power and all that jazz; turn over what rocks you can and tell everyone what you find there. Take responsibility for your news and hold accountable the official voices who are supposed to bring it to you. When the chattering classes swallow unquestioned the latest bile from entertainers like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, demand better. (Because trolls who get others to agree with them are the most dangerous trolls of all.) But Ben Shapiro? The Virgin Ben? Come on.
I mean, it’s like kicking a puppy. You know?
Going to the Show.
Dwight Meredith has announced the winners of the 2002 Koufax Awards; hearty congrats to old friend Barry for the richly deserved Best Design Southpaw. Read through the whole list and follow every link: the winners deserve it, every one, and the nominees all gave them good hard runs for the money.
But now that a game’s been pitched intra-league, as it were, to extend the metaphor (conceit?), it’s time to head up to the Show. Maybe the 2003 Bloggies could signal the eruption of the left-wing grassroots mediasphere.
Hey. A kid can dream.
Further reason for Derbyshire & Co. to despair.
You won’t find Henriette Cecile Beigh and Andrea Yoshiko Uehara on the new “Celebrations” page of The Oregonian, but someday you might find them in the history books. That’s because Rita and Andi are transgender trailblazers. Born 55 years ago as Henry Charles Beigh and Andrew Iwao Uehara, they are, perhaps, the only same-sex couple to become legally married in the state of Oregon, a feat accomplished during the brief time that Andrew had become Andi and Henry had not yet become Rita. They even have the certificate to prove it.
Of course, there’s also the dentist who has very good reasons for the state not to cut funding for dental care for the 400,000 poorest adult Oregonians, and the community activist (and black single mother!) who says, “That’s all great and wonderful, but the point I’m trying to make is, you work at a social-service program, but the only people of color are the janitors. You work with all black people, but yet you don’t have any people of color in your personal life. How serious are you about your fight to change things?” —So those National Review bigots pundits could take their pick, really.
A taste of things to come,
or, A cheap shot.
Nassau County, I think, provides a so-ghastly-it’s-funny microcosm of what happens when incompetent, crony capitalist Republicans leave fiscal prudence to tax-and-spend Democrats.
An American institution that deserves to be honored.
Thanks to Kevin, I’ve now got a quote that pretty much sums up my reaction to Charles Rangel’s (D-NY) proposition to bring back the draft:
Assume that all governments lie. Do not accept the idea that the violence of war can be justified by claiming to prevent a larger violence. Understand that all war is a war against children, and therefore can not be justified, whatever the reason.
—Howard Zinn, historian
In other words, I’m much closer to TalkLeft than Daily Kos. —Or, as Utah Phillips puts it (rather, as Utah tells us Tom Scribner put it):
Well they’d roust him out; he would hobble down the hall, pick up the receiver of the phone, swear at whoever was on the other end for being exhumed from his room, and I’d finally say, “Tom, Tom!”—this was on my nickel—“Tom, slow down a minute! It’s Utah, I got a question for ya.”
He spoke that workers’ shorthand, that sort of slices the fat off of any kind of argument. One time I said over the phone, “Tom, I’m in a debate over here at the Unitarian Church on bringing back the military draft; they’re going to try to bring back the military draft so I’m debating it. Now, you tell me what you think.”
Well, there was a long pause. Then the voice come back at me over the wires. “Nnuh. When I started in the forest, most of my workmates was Scandahoovians: Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Swedes. Most of ’em left the old country fleeing conscription to fight another dumb European war. Yeah, the wealth of the West was built on the backs of draft dodgers. It’s an American institution—deserves to be honored.”
And yet, the dog still hunts—
Had a weird experience over a year ago or so, watching television: one of those commercials came on. You know. A cross-section of America in natural light, looking with simple, quiet pride directly into the camera’s slow-mo pan, a subdued but stirring “America the Beautiful” jangling sweetly under an earnest voice-over. Thing of it was, I was arrested, sat up, jaw dropped, my shrivelled little heart growing three sizes all at once. Because what the voice-over was saying was this:
I believe there’s a reason we are born with free will.
And I have a strong will to decide what’s best for my body, my mind, and my life.
I believe in myself.
In my intelligence, my integrity, my judgement.
And I accept full responsibility for the decisions I make.
I believe in my right to choose—without interrogations, without indignities, without violence.
I believe that’s one of the founding principles of our country.
And I believe that right is being threatened.
The greatest of human freedoms is choice.
And I believe no one has the right to take that freedom away.
And I thought to myself, damn. Propaganda works. —Of course, the choir always likes to be preached to, but still. It felt good, you know?
I had another of those moments, just now. We’re lounging around, doing a note-taking, idea-sketching, Thai-take-out-snarfing, muscat-drinking, Pym’s-nibbling day, with videos, the Spouse and I. There’s a La Femme Nikita marathon on Oxygen!, and while neither of us ever got into the show, it’s a fine enough thing to have on in the background between flicks. Anyway. Commercial break, and here’s a simple little commercial from Familyplanet, telling us there’s a difference between hope and despair, and that there’s hope yet for a future where people around the world can have the tools and the knowledge they need in their own hands to plan for the families they want, to enable them to negotiate one of the contingencies of life, and not be at its mercy.
And I had another one of those weird, unsettling, moments where I agreed wholeheartedly with what a commercial was telling me.
I mean: if it really were as bad as some say, don’t you think the choir would be preached to just a little more often? —Or maybe we’re just playing it cagey. Trying not to tip our hand. Is that it?
My God, the hair.
Barry, of course, weighed in with his two cents about the Haberdashery, and the evanescent, delicately necessary threadworks of artistic communities; now Jenn’s written up her own account of what it was like and how it all came together, Back in the Day.
With pictures.
What’s frightening is most of that hair is still around today. Be warned.
Bonus: Amy’s put in an appearance, in the comments to my original post; get thee a blog too, woman. And: if you lean on Sara, she might just post those Clarion ’91 photos. —This nostalgia kick could get to be a trend.
