American stupidity -- let me count the ways

GOP lawmakers, meanwhile, appear to be lining up closely with the president on foreign policy. It has not helped the neoconservative case, perhaps, that the occupation of Iraq has not gone as smoothly as some had predicted. – Charles Babbington, Washington Post, Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush's Foreign Policy

“The American energy secretary, Samuel W. Bodman, who met with Iraq’s oil and electricity ministers in Baghdad, had a rosy view of progress here since his last visit in 2003.

“The situation seems far more stable than when I was here two or three years ago,” he said in an interview in the fortified Green Zone. “The security seems better, people are more relaxed. There is an optimism, at least among the people I talked to.””
...
“United Nations officials said Tuesday that the number of violent deaths had climbed steadily since at least last summer. During the first six months of this year, the civilian death toll jumped more than 77 percent, from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June, the organization said.”
- Quotations from the same article, “About 20 Sunnis Are Kidnapped in Baghdad”-

How does one face the enormity of an intelligence that has the scope of a housefly’s stuffed into a colossus the size of a continent? Hows does one grasp something that is as awesome, as hideous, as farcical as American stupidity –the right and real stuff, the strategy behind the atom bomb and the Hummer, the third, impossible division of the American brain - neither left nor right, but an as yet undiscovered dimension, somewhere between Miracle Whip and the world’s biggest human turd?

Here’s what Robert Calasso said about Karl Kraus:

"Kraus’ fundamental experience was acoustic, and it was constantly repeated. Like Hildegarde von Bingen, Angela da Foligno, and many anonymous schizophrenics, he heard voices, but the voices were all the more alarming since they had bodies, circulated in the streets of Vienna, seated themselves in cafes and even put on affable smiles. The inflections beat on him like waves; their deadly horde provided the most faithful company for his “threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse, where he is alone with his enemy, of the nocturnal room where he is alone with his demon, of the lecture hall where he is alone with his work.”

LI has his own threefold solitude. The enemy is met not in the coffeehouse but on a cheap dialup internet connection, blinking ads; the demon is poverty and a sarcasm that has long gone to the dark side and become pathological, a real heart condition, - a speeding up of the heartbeat, a spread of heat across the chest, the signs and symptoms of demonic possession; as for the work – well, where is the work? An impossibly cheap blog, cluttered with typos, clogged with yesterday’s annulled news, various and sundry highly forgettable reviews, failed projects that have left behind snowdrifts of paper and (wait for it, Prufrock) a graphic novel, of all things.

I’ve chosen to personalize the affront given to intelligence by American stupidity, which is rather like trying to personalize entering the Empire State Building, or entering your local shopping mall. It is doomed to failure – for if it succeeded even once, it would transform that stupidity into something else. The housefly thinks, cogito, ergo Musca domestica sum. But no, the default settings for stupidity are such that the bland language, or language substitute, used by our Energy secretary, and the formulas of WAPO’s ace reporter, Charles Babbington, are all the same thing – they have no external referent, but go on in a dark vacuum forever. They would hardly be real at all – but here we must concede that experiment has shown them to be real. The experiment of, for instance, the three thousand dead in Iraq. And it is LI who is unreal, LI with the ardent wish that tonight and every night, the throngs of those dead crowd about President Bush’s bed and freeze the blood of that pissant lowlife, who has found the dead level of his own incompetence in a clueless and ever more syncophantic court society. Freeze it tonight, and tomorrow night, and tomorrow night. Freeze it eternally.