on the recent snowe

LI received a letter about the great Frosty dump from our correspondent, T., in NYC:

"The snow? Well, it was lovely; Sunday morning in particular - just lovely and quiet under a grey sky; everything moving slowly and fluidly; all the sliding rather than the usual striding. Tonight the streets and sidewalks are clear, but there is a nice ambient light through the window: streetlights reflceted in snow. But for me the charming aspects of the atmosphere are lost once the snow falls from the trees - already gone. Tonight is more about the 'hangover' of the snowstorm: crunching salt under foot and street corners deluged with slush and hardpacked billets of once snow now ice (perhaps the Eskimos have a word for that last awkward construct).

What is that loveliness that transpires in this city during a strike, a blackout, a snowstorm or the blowing-up of buildings? Well, probaly no such loveliness to a garbage strike, but I've never experienced one, so..... Perhaps it is a sudden realization of the scale of this place - perhaps some assurance that IT can be stopped, if only momentarialy; a reassurance that one is not merely grist for the wheel. Perhaps also it is a warm feeling of home, this is where I live. I remember clearly conversations with other transplants like myself in the months after 9/11/01 - those who wanted to "get out", it was all too much. Many of them did leave. Me? My want to stay was stronger: this is my place.

There is a strange formula that is thrown about in the news and in conversation: that it costs the city about $1 mil per inch of snow: so neat, so tidy. There are things to like about Mayor Billionaire, but when he assures the citizenry that Dept of Sanitation workers are pulling 12 hour shifts trying to clear the streets of snow, I think: do I really want to walk the streets when a guy is in the later part of a 12 hour shift, behind the wheel of a three ton truck with a four foot tall plow affixed to the front? No, I look both ways when crossing the street.

You know, I'm a Wisco kid so most of all of that is ado of nothing."

i fought the war, I fought the war but the war won

First, go here. If you have a slow computer, go elsewhere, and wait fifteen minutes while the Quicktime downloads. this little song and the three minute video with the cheap effects says everything I’ve been trying to say on this blog for a year. Better.

2. This, from the NYT business section:
Iraq War’s Virtues May Be Debatable. The Profits Aren’t.

In his recent State of the Union address, President Bush called for the nation to back the war in Iraq and to "stand behind the American military in this vital mission."

No matter how one feels about this particular conflict, war always has winners and losers — on both sides. There's the human toll, of course, which Mr. Bush acknowledged. Whether democracy and freedom will, over all, be winners, only history will divulge.

But some indisputable winners are clear now: military contractors. Suppose an investor were endowed with that golden instinct for spotting bargains and bought 100 shares of each of the top six military contractors at their lows of the last six years — lows reached by four of them in March 2000, before the election, before Sept. 11 and before any hint of war. That basket of shares would have cost $12,731.50. On Friday, it would have been worth three and a half times that: $44,417.
In the table the NYT lists the top military companies:

Boeing, 2.6 billion dollars profit, up 37.4% from 2004
Lockheed Martin, 1.8 billion dollars profit, up 44.2 % from 2004
General Dynamics, 1.5 billion, +19.1%
Northrup Grummen, 1.2 billion, +29.2 %
etc.

3. There is a mysterious type of music. It is hard to make, although it seems easy to make. It requires a lot of noise. It sends me into nihilistic rapture. Listening to this music, I both want to commit suicide and want to commit suicide again – which, in an odd way, makes the music life affirming. After all, you have to be alive to enjoy your own suicide.

4. Given my exhaustion with the world at the moment – do I live in some richer version of Idi Amin’s Uganda? Do I live in the Monster hospital? As the world is made visibly worse to feed the insatiable greed of upper class gangbangers, and as we tilt towards the environmental terra incognita of a planet without ice (enjoy these storms, Northeasterners), is there any justification for any of it? The laughable freedom. The on the road and through the ozone layer lifestyle. And the brute fact that a thing, a state, is spending as much money on war every year as was generated by the entire world in 1890. I think this song gets that across. We live both in hell and paradise at the same time. But as hell’s upper echelons direct things, year after year, paradise is disappearing before our eyes. If only… if only I were a genetic engineer, and were able to develop a bacteria that I could slip to the stockholders of the largest military companies. This bacteria wouldn’t hurt them. It would just make everything they smoked, drank and ate taste like human blood. My own little chanson de Maldoror.

5. I used to be in a band. In Santa Fe, in the early nineties. My roommate Melanie and I found a sultry sexpot, S., with a raspy, little girl voice. Mel taught her lover to pound the drums – we all loved pounding the drums. Mel was the only real musician, and had been in several punk bands. Me, I wrote the lyrics and did the styling of the songs with Mel, who played guitar. Our band played in clubs in Albuquerque and Santa Fe until Mel wanted to go to a bigger scene: Chicago. Myself, I didn’t want to commit myself that much. I wanted to go to NYC.

So Mel, if you ever come across this silly blog, check Metric out, man! This is just what we envisioned – as dark as classic NIN (which I wanted back then -- not realizing Trent Reznor was going to become a therapy groupy) with just a hint of that underlying Breeders’ sweetness. Sorry it didn't happen.

Our man Jafari.

Well, with the news that the Shiites are going to re-nominate Ibrahim Jafari as prime minister, the major American media have scored a perfect zero in interpreting the Iraqi elections: first, by telling us that Allawi and Chalabi were major contenders for the office (before the election), then by touting Abdul Mahdi, Sciri’s candidate and incidentally (oh, this flooded love into the hearts of the WAPO and NYT editorialists) a strong advocate of privatizing Iraq’s oil industry.

LI is better at interpreting the American media than outcomes in Iraq, but even we saw that the buildup to the elections, as seen through the prism of American journalism-speak, was so full of false premises that it was laughable. One of the things we laughed about then was a poll commissioned from Oxford Research by the BBC and ABC. That poll showed Allawi as one of the most popular politicians in Iraq. At the time, we remarked that the poll seemed so skewed that it had to have heavily sampled the rather small middle and upper class, and simply ignored the too dangerous to poll Iraqi working class. In the event, that proved correct. But though a poll that predicted, for instance, that Kerry would win with 60 percent of the vote in 2004 would become a laughingstock, the BBC poll will undoubtedly be used over and over again in the states. And there will be no questioning of the policy of writing more about Chalabi than about any other Iraqi politician, despite the fact that he has a constituency of about 0.1 percent in Iraq, largely made up of journalists and stringers for the Times. As for Jafari, the man who will represent the reason that the next two thousand Americans will die, the next 10,000 will be crippled, and the next 20 thousand or so Iraqis will be killed (collateral casualties, that. But sometimes, I do like to remember those freedom loving Iraqis we are doing so much to help), I’d predict a number of rehashing articles that tell little about the man, and then some fastening on some American friendly face. I would imagine that a mere five percent or less of the American population knows about the guy. Many would be surprised that his party not only helped invent suicide bombing in the Middle East, but were involved in setting off explosions in the American embassy in Kuwait and were supportive, and may be involved with, the destruction of the Beirut embassy in 1983. It would immediately occur to Americans, if they knew this, that the governing class in this country is fucked up. So they will never know this.

The media, after all, has a responsibility to keep Americans from knowing that the governing class is fucked up. Isn’t that the motto of the American Society of Journalists or something?

surely thou art the great God...

LI has been reading James Mill’s History of India. James Mill is known to most of us as the Gradgrind who brought up his boy, John Stuart, on a migrainous diet of Greek and Bentham. But of course Mill was a high clerk in the headquarters of the East India Company. His History is famous for its systematic contempt for its subject – to Mill, the whole problem with India was to root out any veneration for its civilization expressed during the 18th century Then one could set about the task of Anglicizing the natives, while rationalizing their laws. Mill’s History is one of the classic moments in the history of the imperial effect.

It’s an audacious book. Mill’s preface is full throated confession that the author had neither seen India nor is conversant with any of its languages. But, he argues – prefiguring the argument that runs through the whole book – it isn’t as if anything important would be gained by assimilating the native’s knowledge of the place, considering the worth of that knowledge and the relatively mean cultural level of even the most glorious native. Everything worth knowing about India can be gained from European books about the place, and in better order too.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Mill’s account of the Hindu religion. It’s rather funny, since he so disapproves. But it has some nice, 18th century features. For instance, Mill accounts for monotheism in terms of the dialectic of flattery. Because the rude mechanical figures that the gods are as he is, he at first showers them with adulation and flattery, just as he’d like to be flattered. But flattery repeated falls short. Other, more violent excitements and endearments have to be added to the mix to move the gods. Eventually, one settles on a god and begins to prune the tree of other deities, as those deities take something away from the splendor of the deity to which you’ve dedicated yourself. Eventually you simply demote the deities wholesale, and presto-chango you have one god and a whole roomful of metaphysics. This is not quite the psychology one would expect from a utilitarian.

Interesting. But this is what I want to excerpt. It is a fable that I like, even though I am reminded of Dr. Seuss’ story of the goldfish, too:

“At the close of the last calpa, there was a general destruction, occasioned by the sleep of Brahma; his creatures in different worlds being drowned in a vast ocean. The strong demon Hagyagriva came near him and stole the Vedas, which had flowed from his lips. When the preserver of the universe discovered this deed, he took the shape of a minute fish, called sap'hari. A holy king named Satyavrata then reigned. One day, as he was making a libation in the river Critamala, the little fish said to him, How canst thou leave me in this river water, when I am too weak to resist the monsters of the stream who fill me with dread? Satyavrata placed it under his protection in a small vase full of water; but in a single night its bulk was so increased, that it could not be contained in the jar, and thus again addressed the prince: I am not pleased with living in this little vase; make me a large mansion where I may dwell in comfort. The king successively placed it in a cistern, in a pool, and in a lake, for each of which it speedily grew too large, and supplicated for a more spacious place of abode; after which he threw it into the sea, when the fish again addressed him: Here the horned sharks and other monsters of great strength will devour me; thou shouldest not, O valiant man, leave me in this ocean. Thus repeatedly deluded by the fish, who had addressed him with gentle words, the king said, Who art thou that beguilest me in that assumed shape. Never before have I seen or heard of so prodigious an inhabitant of the waters, who like thee has filled up, in a single day, a lake 100 leagues in circumference. Surely thou art the great God whose dwelling was on the waves.”

That little fish reminds me of the transformations of my own obsessions. They, too, first appear as little threatened things. And I coddle them. I fish them out of dangerous places and put them in protective places. And they grow. It isn’t their fault they grow – it is what obsession is supposed to do. And I put them in larger containers: I put them in a crush, I put them in a notebook, I put them in the plan for a novel, I put them in a social life, I put them in a move to a new city, I protect them and protect them. And then I look and see and lo: my obsessions have filled up twenty years or more. My so called life.

zombies in love

Iraq, I rack 'em up and I roll,
I'm back and I'm a hi-tech GI Joe.
I pray for peace, prepare for war
and I never will forget ~
there's no price too high for freedom
so be careful where you tread. – Clint Black.

LI is sickly fascinated by the sixth Bush budget. Six years in a row of what some muckety muck’s might call pathological lyin’ by our Rebel in Chief ©, not bein’ as well trained as he is in the big picture. Although there is no price too high for freedom, we have not been putting that exactly square in the budget for the past three years. Our bold Rebel in Chief ©. learned, in the secret years of his training as one of America’s great guerilla warrior (after the big one himself, Sylvester Stallone) to clothe boldness with discretion – hence the song of the supplemental that has tripped shyly through congress, year after year.

Our Rebel in Chief ©. has grown so enamored of fictitious numbers that he could market his budget as a his own personal memoir. Part of the wonder of the thing are his zombie groupies. It is sorta like a cult in which the leader’s failures become tests for the follower’s faith. The more the Rebel in Chief © fucks the pooch, the more you acquire credit in heaven by believing in him. It’s even an incentive to fuck the pooch – I’m pretty sure that the big man sometimes just fails in certain ways to see just how his zombies will figure out how to kiss his ass. Idi Amin used to do the same thing. The ritual of the approach is very important. There’s a wonderful article in the NYT yesterday where the journalists run right into Bush’s lies and lies about Katrina, and the embarrassment of the reporters is visceral – you can feel them suddenly euphemizing up a storm. Because if you say here’s a lie, the zombie will eat you. It is scary out there in the cable show dark, where jowly men in suits, like human gastric ulcers, maunder on threateningly about politics.

So how much more will the war’s supporters go for? How wide the failure, and how often will they tell themselves like battered woman going back to bozo, we just ain’t getting’ the good news yet! And, after all, don’t you want to be a hi-tech GI Joe in the biggest budget flop ever made? It’s like Waterworld on crack. Sure you do, honey. Burn down the studio. Order more sets. 400 billion dollars for F/X, and here’s the good one: we could probably just cut that by 200 billion if we just gave every terrorist 10 million bucks, free and clear. But that would show lack of vision! Those terrorist extras create the ambiance! No expense should be spared!

The reason why is freedom. The reason why is the wind of freedom. Man just gots to be free. It is in his nature. Actually, it is in his left testicle, according to medical science. All that good news is just pent up and waitin’ to flood out. Iraq is gonna look so good any day now that we will all want to move there – and that just might be a good idea, since this fuckin’ country is approachin’ bankruptcy fast! Plus the dozen or so hurricanes that are sure to drown this or that ho hum metropolis this summer, interrupting our Rebel in Chief©’s vacation – what kind of country is that, anyway?

Since the Congressional Budget Office now puts the cost at 500 billion, and they are not including medical costs for wounded vets or other disguised costs which Stiglitz claims raises the cost another four to six hundred billion – well, we are finally realizing Clint Black’s romantic dream. And to think, we coulda paid for that Social Security shortfall and national health care with the money we are spendin’ and have a little left over for carfare.

I guess that the idea is: fuck that. Our country is about freedom and the ownership society, not about fuckin’ dental care for the kiddies, man. So let’s rack up another 600 billion chips and all sing, like zombies in love:

“If everyone would go for peace/
there’d be no need for war/
but we can’t ignore the devil/
he’ll keep coming back for more!”

I’m psyched!

let it all come down

Some days, you read the papers and you think, surely this dirty regime is about to fall.

Item: Vice President Cheney directed his assistant, Scooter Libby, to leak what seems to be classified information.

Item: The CIA officer who coordinated intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the Bush vanity project says that the administration cherry picked the intelligence to make its case.

Item: Bush’s news conference comment that he not only did not know Abramoff, but thought for a long time that he was a brand name of cleaner, like Easy-off, is contradicted by Abramoff’s own memory of good times with George.

Item: old news, but again, the Crawford ranch White House was quite aware that NOLA was drowning as it was drowning. Panicked, Bush went to the West Coast and played a little back stage guitar.

Item: even Republicans agree that this year’s White House Budget has as much chance of being realized as the Aristocrats has of being named the 700 Club Movie of the Year.

But the machine keeps grinding madly on. It becomes more and more obvious that we are trapped in one of the minor moments in history – hemmed in, on one side, by Danish cartoons, and on the other side, by a claymation POTUS, preparing for our obvious problems – global warming, a warming trend in the gulf and the Atlantic that is going to lead to more severe storms, a transportation technology centered around a nineteenth century invention, a serious reckoning with a post-manufacturing economy – by closing our eyes.

Perhaps hibernation is the only good political answer to this moronic inferno. But aesthetically, this is the trifecta. The gold rush. The Klondike of irony. This is the era of yahoos, and there’s no excuse for a writer not to watch it with extreme interest, pad in hand. Watch the yahoos shit on each other. Watch the zombies mouth the slogans. Watch the press make itself into a bodyguard of lies for systematic injustice, and then blandly preen itself on its objectivity. Watch the big pieces drift.

I love the smell of stupidity in the morning.

the machine that eats your brain

As the Muhammed-as-Snuffy-Smith controversy continues, it is interesting to watch the politics become a veritable machine to produce idiocy. I suspect that there is some mystical law that governs these things. But, one wonders, what is this law? Is it something in the nature of opposition itself, some diabolical dialectical germ that is slipped into that moment in the discourse which ends up producing those magnificent retards, the left and the right, the point and the counterpoint, the defenders of civil liberties (with exceptions) and the defenders of the oppressed (no matter what they do)?

If this is so, it would subvert my idea of progress, the good society, the goals of art, the use and purpose of philosophy, the true, the beautiful and the just. It would make my life a mockery and the minimum life style I’ve chosen the door prize of the lowest order of sap. It would make my words no more rational than the foaming of a poisoned rat.

… Well, at least it would be all about me. There’s always a bright side for your true American narcissist.

In this case, on the one side, we have the every brilliant Teheran government paper, with its Auschwitz cartoon contest; on the other side, we have the calls in Britain to jail the demonstrator who dressed up as a suicide bomber. And then there are the guys in Afghanistan who have died for the sake of… uh, what? rushing an army base that represented in their minds a cartoon published by unbelievers in an unbelievers kingdom by the sea.

Myself, I went, via Le Colonel Chabert, today, to Democracy Now and discovered, to my dismay, that the idiocy may be terminal. The conversation between As’ad Abikhalil is and Irshad Manji is enough to make you pull out your hair. Abikhalil should be representing my line: he is a non-believer who nevertheless wants to defend a degree of outrage among the Moslems who are outraged. So far, so good. But he immediately goes into a riff of free association that has little to do with anything. Israel, of course, pops up. And he can’t get over the fact that Manji has appeared on Fox news. This seems to be a mortal sin. Manji, on the other hand, is full of the kind of gotcha tactics that make me turn off the radio.

Yet both could have helped each other a little bit. This is the thing about discourse, and opposition. It is not a zero sum game. The beauty of opposition is to keep it on the highest possible level, not to take advantage of the referee looking away to foul your opponent. Manji makes a good point, and ruins it by making it into a description of Abikhalil’s position, when it isn’t a description of his position at all:

“And speaking of dissent, you know, I find it interesting that your other guest suggests or actually emphasizes that there is a targeting of Islam, but that no other religion, you know, can be mocked. How then does he explain the routinely and viciously anti-Semitic programming that comes out of the Arab world. And I would remind him that we Muslims never protest that kind of atrocity. So, how do we have integrity demanding to the rest of the world that they completely respect our religion, when we ourselves have trouble respecting other faiths?”
And while it is true that you don’t find a lot of Christian fundies protesting about the oppression of Buddhists in Tibet, you do find Christians and non-Christians in Western countries protesting. And it is also true that a repulsive anti-semitism has been emitted as a salve by Arabic countries for the “cause of Palestine.”

Unfortunately, Abikhalil decides, (instead of saying, that doesn’t represent my point, but I think I can connect what you are saying to my suspicion that Islam was selected for mockery for reasons that aren’t being admitted) to attack Manjil for various crimes of political correctness, plus not being an Arab speaker. Nobody asks if there are any Danish speakers in the room. And -- let me guess -- they didn't serve Danishes in the Green Room. Maybe they can rename them Holy Cream Cheese Pastries.

As'ad Abikhalil: “Well, Amy, that’s very easy to respond to. First of all, I am aware of the pontification of the other guest on FOX News, among other outlets that relish the opportunity to have somebody like her –“

I haven’t watched a political show on tv for around fifteen, twenty years, but I imagine this is just how they all operate. I don't get it -- why does anybody watch them?

Then my man Abikhalil gets involved in this discussion:

“AMY GOODMAN: As’ad AbuKhalil, would you say this is an overreaction, what is happening?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: I mean, first of all, Amy, it’s not up to me to decide. I have my own sensibilities, and for me, I mean, as a secular atheist, you know, I would love to have people who mock and ridicule all religions together, but it is the inconsistency that’s striking, as well as hypocrisy…”

Well, LI has no problem deciding. If ever there was an over-reaction, we are seeing it. If ever there was a predictable over-reaction, we are seeing it. I've considered how I want to die -- whether I want the total package, the pain, the cancer, the death agony going on for days, or the in-and-out package, heart attack, death. But one thing I definitely know: I do not want to die over an insulting cartoon.

I’d quote more of this illuminating discussion (partly because it is, apart from being stupid, genuinely funny), but since I am sick this week (with a cough that starts up and goes in my throat like the howls of somebody's chained and abandoned dog, God damn it) I figure I’ll write about this in another post.