Two euphorics: Mr. T and Stephanie's Id

I am feeling grim about the mouth lately. A sickness I caught in Georgia has left behind a persistent, puzzling headache and cough - and then of course there is the day to day living in Blackwater’s USA, Bush’s America, which is a puling, putrid kind of thing to do.

So I’ve been looking around for things to cheer me up. Here are two of them.

the first is my friend T., his wife Kiyoko, and his baby Takeo-chan here:


The second is this band, Stephanie’s ID. Just some kids in Asheville, NC making music – great garage music - instead of trying to make celebrity industry vampire music, eventually to be glued to some monster and useless product to make the joyless little suicide of a life enjoyed by the viewing audience that much more cluttered. This band is pure, and I love the voice of this woman, Stephanie Morgan.

Danto on Rorty

In the introduction to his Truth and Progress, Richard Rorty signals his appreciation of Donald Davidson’s work on truth:

“The greatest of my many intellectual debts to Donald Davidson is my realization that nobody should even try to specify the nature of the truth. … Whether or not one agrees with Davidson that it is important to be able to give a definition of “true in L” for a given natural language (by means of a Tarski-type “truth theory” for that language), one can profit from his arguments that there is no possibility of giving a definition of “true” that works in all such languages.”

Yet, a page later, Rorty is breaking his vow of agnosticism in order to make the claim that “truth is not the goal of inquiry” for all the intellectual ‘progress’ we may have made:

“How do we know that the greater predictive power and greater control of the environment (including a greater ability to cure diseases, build bombs, explore space, etc.) gets us closer to the truth, conceived of as an accurate representation of how things are in themselves, apart from human needs and interests?”

It is between the renunciation of an absolute specification of truth and the attack on a specification of truth that Rorty, for people like me, runs aground. I admit that I am not very thrilled about reified notions of truth, and rather buy Tarski’s structural notion, which depends on a schema of language use rules, out of which arise a criteria of success encoded in the semantic function of truth. This does not look like the mirror of nature; instead, the truth becomes a device for the organization of conventions. Tarski published his paper in the forties, which was the seed time of organizations and cybernetics. Just as the U.S. government was reclassifying its citizens as Human Products, the targets for experiments with radioactive materials, the idea of truth as having some higher and more piercing meaning was being shrunk to its semantic function referencing variable places related through sentiential connectives. In other words, that some things are always true and some things are passingly true no longer has a first order significance for truth. Rather, truth is absorbed into a given construct language with no more fuss and bother than the successor function or the equivalence function. As Tarski writes of objections to his theory:

“As a typical example let me quote in substance such an objection.23 In formulating the definition we use necessarily sentential connectives, i.e., expressions like "if . . ., then," "or," etc. They occur in the definiens; and one of them, namely, the phrase "if, and only if" is usually employed to combine the definiendum with the definiens. However, it is well known that the meaning of sentential connectives is explained in logic with the help of the words "true" and "false"; for instance, we say that an equivalence, i.e., a sentence of the form "p if, and only if, q," is true if either both of its members, i.e., the sentences represented by 'p' and 'q,' are true or both are false. Hence the definition of truth involves a vicious circle.

If this objection were valid, no formally correct definition of truth would be possible; for we are unable to formulate any compound sentence without using sentential connectives, or other logical terms defined with their help. Fortunately, the situation is not so bad.

It is undoubtedly the case that a strictly deductive development of logic is often preceded by certain statements explaining the conditions under which sentences of the form "if p, then q," etc., are considered true or false. (Such explanations are often given schematically, by means of the so-called truth-tables.) However, these statements are outside of the system of logic, and should not be regarded as definitions of the terms involved. They are not formulated in the language of the system, but constitute rather special consequences of the definition of truth given in the meta-language. Moreover, these statements do not influence the deductive development of logic in any way. For in such a development we do not discuss the question whether a given sentence is true, we are only interested in the problem whether it is provable.

On the other hand, the moment we find ourselves within the deductive system of logic -- or of any discipline based upon logic, e.g., of semantics -- we either treat sentential connectives as undefined terms, or else we define them by means of other sentential connectives, but never by means of semantic terms like "true" or "false." For instance, if we agree to regard the expressions "not" and "if . . ., then" (and possibly also "if, and only if") as undefined terms, we can define the term "or" by stating that a sentence of the form "p or q" is equivalent to the corresponding sentence of the form "if not p, then q." The definition can be formulated, e.g., in the following way:

(p or q) if, and only if, (if not p, then q).
This definition obviously contains no semantic terms.”

LI was thinking of these things reading Danto’s review of Rorty’s last published work, here. Davidson himself said that Rorty’s problem was that, although he acknowledges that there is a difference between truth and justification, he continually conflates the two. Thus, the oddity of saying about any research program that its goal is the truth. Only research programs in philosophy take truth as their goal – most research programs take proof as their goal. This, I think, is the ‘irritating’ thing about Rorty – Danto’s review is less about Rorty’s essays – in fact, I am not sure Danto read them – than an elaboration of the fact that Danto found Rorty irritating.

As a rule, Rorty used the word true the way everyone else does, but if you were to ask him for his theory of truth, he would say something outrageous. He did so because he believed we all know when and how to use the word true, but no one has—or needs—a theory of truth to be able to do so: “Everybody knows that the difference between true and false beliefs is as important as that between nourishing and poisonous foods,” he writes in “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” one of thirteen essays from the last ten years collected in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, the fourth volume of his Philosophical Papers published by Cambridge. So philosophers who seek a theory of truth are wasting their time. When he quotes a philosopher who says something he agrees with, that doesn’t mean that he believes everything—or anything else—the cited philosopher says. This implies that he doesn’t really need the philosopher anyway. But it helps bring together the two sides of Rorty’s character—that of the likable, even lovable philosopher, with the exemplary values and virtues he indisputably possessed, and that of the saboteur of philosophical sobriety, a role he adopted for himself after the immense success of his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979. He demonstrates that not one of his admirable attributes is grounded in a piece of philosophy, since philosophy in no way explains any of them. The writing is a kind of performance, the purpose of which is to dramatize philosophy’s impotence. He liked to say that he never tried to rebut positions he opposed—he merely sneered at them.”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick has called the fifties and sixties the era of the cybernetic fold – the era of the structure and the variable. I think that is very accurate. Some came out of it command and control freaks - like Robert McNamara. People like Rorty lived near the heart of the cybernetic fold and came out of it marked for life. They were the cybernetic dissidents, but their dissent was strongly marked by the inescapable truths of cybernetic city – truths that have now become our environment, from the pixel characters in our movies to the humble orgies of cheesecake and ipod sanctioned by the credit card industry, the anti-union that has yearly raised our anti-wages for a village usurer’s price. The virtual invades the actual only after the actual discovers, like some burning and irremovable ulcer, its constitutional structuralism. Only then is it completely vulnerable. Slothrop's erections exactly predict the sites the V-2 will hit because Slothrop's dick - and indeed Slothrop - have been put together again, in a Primal Scene II laboratory, exactly as they were, except that - they are recombinants. And so our recombinant orgies are absolutely anti-Sadean in that they do not aim at the cold mastery of desire, but subserve a commuter-office slavery, a routine so hideous that no Josephine has arisen from us human product mousepeople to sing it.

Oliver Twist asks for more modalization, please

I have always liked the idea of the linguistic middle man – the guy who can go stalking deep into the technical jargon of some specialty and come back out and explain it in a ordinary language. Now, this isn’t really a knock against technical jargon – every groupuscule has one, from beggars to ex presidents. But the faith of the great middle men (o those incorrigible whigs!), the Edmund Wilson types, is that the technical jargon is merely a preliminary stage in intellectual discovery. Some of that jargon should slip under the bars and become vulgate. Some must remain behind. And, of course, the vulgar shouldn’t be so shit ignorant that they use a little unfamiliarity as an excuse to keep their heads firmly stuck up their asses.

All of which is to say that I am worried that, in my previous posts, I haven’t quite explained what I mean by modalization.

Now that is bad. It is bad because I need the term to explain the history of a social phenomena – the creation and diffusion of a way of speaking of emotions, feelings, and attitude that organizes these things according to whether they are positive or negative. That history is riven – the motives of the participants in it are distinct, and their objects are distinct, even as the model they created eventually melted together those distinctions and erased the differences.

Those various motives and objects can be organized by looking at them modally. And, as I said in my modal post, by modally I am not speaking just of the logician’s idea of modal. I am thinking, instead, of the semiotician’s use of the term, which is slightly different. So, to make this clearer, let me quote a nineteenth century philosopher, John Stuart Mill’s friend, William Hamilton. In Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, he writes:

“Pure propositions are those in which the predicate is categorically affirmed or denied of the subject, simply, without any qualification; Modal, those in which the predicate is categorically affirmed or denied of the subject, under some mode or qualifying determination. For example, - Alexander conquered Darius, is a pure, - Alexander conquered Darius honourably, is a modal proposition.”

Hamilton adds that he finds this distinction bogus: “Nothing can be more futile than this distinction. The mode in such a proposition is nothing more than a part of the predicate.”

He then takes up the more strict use of modal by logicians:

‘But logicians, after Aristotle, have principally considered as modal propositions those that are modified by the four attributions of Necessity, Impossibility, Contingence and Possibility.”

However, Hamilton still isn’t buying it: “But, in regard to these, the case is precisely the same; the mode is merely a part of the predicate, and if so, nothing can be more unwarranted than on this accidental, on this extra-logical, circumstance to establish a great division of logical propositions.”

In the 20th century, Quine agreed with Hamilton, Carnap disagreed, and in general philosophers decided this question on the basis, I think, of boredom: since analytic philosophy discovered everything it was going to discover by 1950, they took on modal logic because they had nothing else to do… Oh oh, I’m being unfair. I’m only joking! I’m only making with the funny business!

Still, disregarding Hamilton’s dismissal of modals, his account of them is what is behind modalization in semiotics – a merging of the rhetorical account of modals and the logical account. The higher level, in semiotics, is logical, with the next level having to do with cognitive and affective attitudes.

There, does that make sense? Are we out of the thickets? Can I say modalization without feeling like I’m resorting to some abracadabra? Yes, I think yes, yes she said yes…

the thrill of superstition

Alexis de Tocqueville landed in America in May, 1831 and spent nine months there; out of that experience he wrote Democracy in America and became famous.

Charles Poyen never quite became famous, and is now utterly forgotten. He came to America by a convoluted journey worthy of a Greek hero – his itinerary was littered with omens, pronounced by somnambulists. He consulted a somnambulist, Madame Villetard, in Paris, looking for a cure for a chronic pain he suffered from. Her remarkable knowledge of his disease- which, we are assured in his memoir, The Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, was not altogether beyond Poyen’s own comprehension, since he was a medical student – led him to ask her about his proposed journey to Guadaloup, where part of his family resided, apparently as plantation owners. Madame Villetard gave her approval, so off our hero went, to convalesce and further explore the mysteries of somnambulism. He did so, using some ‘colored servants’ as subjects, and proving to his own satisfaction that the mesmeric trance touched on something universal: …the human soul was gifted with the same primitive and essential faculties among every nation and under whatever skin, black red or white, it may be concealed.”

Admirable sentiments. However, the somnambulists of Guadaloup predicted that his illness would not resolve itself any time soon, so he set off for New England, where he had relatives. He went to Maine. He went to Lowell. He taught French. And, admiring his new country, he resolved to plunge into its difficulties, writing a book that ‘was calculated to avoid all social commotions and give equal satisfaction to the parties interested.’ This was in the 1830s, and it was to be expected that a plantation owning Frenchman would attack abolitionism – but, of course, not in the meantime defending slavery. Then Poyen turned his hand to translating and lecturing on animal magnetism. Of course, he felt the heat of prejudice – after all, the theory had been exploded by the ‘great Franklin’ fifty years before, alluding to the committee, including Franklin, Bailly, Lavoisier, Thouvet and other notables that investigated Mesmer, under the direction of the royal government in 1784, which concluded that Mesmeric effects were the result of pure suggestion. It was patriotic to disbelieve in animal magnetism. But the enlightenment America of Franklin’s time had disappeared. Paine, coming back to America in 1803, had already written bitter articles about the narrow and bigoted class that had supplanted the enlightened colonial elite. Poyen didn’t find the class particularly bigoted, except, of course, among the establishment medical men.

Poyen was just the kind of enterprising individual that America in the age of the Great Awakening tended to embrace. He had a story of sickness. He had a story of a cure. And the cure was not simply a cure, but a metaphysics, a cosmology, the beginning of a new world. From our diseases we make our discoveries.

Poyen confesses that he himself could not ‘magnetize’, but he quickly found a countryman of his, a Monsieur Bugard, a French teacher, who could. Thus began a practice that was also an exhibit.

It wasn’t that Poyen was the first Mesmerist in America, but he was the first well known Mesmerist missionary. And he had an effect in America that was, in some ways, larger than Tocqueville’s. He attracted a number of New England mechanicals who put down their tools and took up magnetic cures. Among them was a Mr. Phineus Quimby – the very name is like a Jules Verne character! – who heard Poyen lecture in Belfast, Maine, where Quimby worked as a clockmaker. Poyen saw that Quimby was a natural, and Quimby believed him, so like many a disciple, Quimby gave up his former life and embarked on a new one as a healer. Among those Quimby operated upon was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

Between Poyen’s stay in America and Quimby’s own practice, certain parts of the mesmeric doctrine melted away – or rather merged with other intellectual currents in New England. It is no accident that Poyen was attracted to the slavery debate – abolitionism and other social causes – woman’s suffrage, temperance, etc. - and spiritualism were joined at the hip in pre-bellum America. As was the intellectual culture that, for Edgar Allan Poe, was the only ‘aristocracy’ in America.

Poe, in the 1840s, took up mesmerism as a convenient device for producing uncanny effects. It worked – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a fan letter to Poe, mentioned that ‘Valdemar’ had produced a sensation in England. Indeed, it produced a sensation in mesmeric circles in general. The story begins with a pitch perfect reproduction of the tone of the animal magnetism pamphleteer, with its mixture of personal experience and scientific ‘fact’:

“My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine month ago, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:—no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extend, or for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the process. There were other points to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity—the last in especial, from the immensely important character of its consequences.”

Of course, the experiment in magnetic influence is held upon M. Ernest Valdemar – who is, of course, originally a Frenchman now resident in Manhattan. Poe has a lot of his usual fun setting up his joke: Valdemar, skinny and dying, is prevailed upon to allow himself to be subject to the mesmeric influence during his ‘dissolution’. Startlingly, after his death, Valdemar still communicates with the mesmerist:

“… here were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation—as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.
I have spoken both of "sound" and of "voice." I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct, syllabification. M. Valdemar spoke—obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. Now he said:
"Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead."
The story was published as a true account, originally, in England, although Poe didn’t intend it as a hoax. Poe’s own obsession/compulsion was with erotic resurrection. Always a great griever, Poe found a woman who reminded him of his dead wife – one Sarah Helen Whitman. She knew of him from common friends, one of whom had written to her about his ‘uncanny’ ways – ‘the strangest stories are told, and what is more believed, about his mesmeric experiences.’ He had talked to her a total of one time when, in 1848, he received a Valentine from her. That prompted one of his spookiest love letters, an outpouring that even ‘Helen’, as he decided to call her, must have found daunting. This includes this passage:
“Immediately after reading the Valentine, I wished to contrive some mode of acknowledging – without wounding youy b6y seeming directly to ackowledge – my sense – oh, my keen – my exulting – my ecstatic sense of the honour you had conferred on me. To accomplish as I wished it, precisely what I wished, seemed impossible, however; and I was on the point of abandoning the idea, when my eyes fell upon a volume of my own poems; and then the lines I had written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first purely idea love of my soul – to the Helen Stannard of whom I told you – flashed upon my recollection. I turned to them. They expressed all – all that I would have said to you – so fully – so accurately and so exclusively, that a thrill of intense superstition ran at once through my frame.”

Poe to Hitchcock - it is the same thrill of superstition that runs through Vertigo – oh, the male desire for the resurrected femme fatale!

And so this note of gloom and ecstacy became their intimate medium, if their letters are any evidence. As he writes in another letter to her:

“I am calm and tranquil, and but for a strange shadow of coming evil which haunts me I should be happy. That I am not supremely happy, even when I feel your dear love at my heart, terrifies me. What can this mean?”

Huh. Pursuing the modalizations that converged in PAM means pursuing the convergence of trans Atlantic cultures, which take us to strange places.

Here’s to the naked years, Takeo-chan!

If Douglas Sirk had worked in the Soviet Union, he would have made Slave of Love, the 1976 movie by Nikita Mikhalkov I saw last night. The movie depicts a film crew trying to make a melodrama starring the silent film star Olga Voznesenskaya in the South of Russia, on territory still held by the Whites. The camera man, Victor Pototsky, a handsome, Lermontovian dandy type with a car, obviously has a thing for the actress, who is publicly involved with her co-star on other films, a man named Maksakov. Maksakov is held up in Red Moscow, but expected to arrive momentarily – although he never does. During the course of the film we learn that the supposedly devil may care Pototsky is actually filming White atrocities.

Well. There is a small scene in the film in which Olga and Victor go walking through a park. The two are wearing Great Gatsy-ish clothing, and the light is falling at the right angle for sundrenched love love love, and they have gotten to that point in the age old ritual when Victor is about to explain himself – his wound in 1914, his war - when suddenly the sunlight dims, and a storm comes up. The storm is preceded by a blast of wind. In that blast, Victor tells Olga, “you want to live in the comfortable world you’ve been used to, but its no more. It’s been caught by the throat, in a deadly grip. … A new world is being born, and you are dying of an abominable boredom and ruin.” But Olga is distracted by the wind, which takes one of her veils and blows it away, and doesn’t hear him. As the wind calms down, we see Victor grimace – he knows he has said too much, and he knows he’s said it badly, stupidly, melodramatically - and then the camera pulls away to show Victor walking away, while Olga yells after him that he (dear enigmatic Victor) is only jealous of Maksakov, but shouldn’t be.

Speaking of ruin in a great wind to nobody seems to be an appropriate allegory for the last decade for those of us with ears to hear. If Olga had listened, of course, the events that unfold in the movie would have been different. And yet, perhaps not. For ourselves, for us American living in that national resort, the U.S.A., the wind blows elsewhere in the world at the moment, even if it has been unleashed by us. Meanwhile, what golden American days! What an amazing paradise of stuff and stuffing, and how cheap the most expensive things are! We can live as no human beings have ever dared to live, and we can unconsciously expend as much energy in a year as a whole peasant community would have expended in a year in 1800 – or 1900. The crazy geeks that are screaming as though they are in a great blast must simply seem delusional, and let’s admit it, they have a lousy record, always predicting ruin, and always things get better and better. Every ruin is a fixer up opportunity at zero percent down! But the geeks aren’t totally bats. There is something tedious, something artificial, something deadly about all of this embalming golden light, soothing us into thinking that we have only to perpetuate this sensation of drifting, that we only have to make sure that nothing disturbs it, that we have only to make sure not to look at what it is built on, in order for it to continue forever. Everything from the past cries out against this tendency.

This might seem like a downer speech to give to greet a little nouveau-né, but it is quite the contrary. Our far flung correspondent, Mr. T.'s ever golden wife, K., had a baby yesterday: Takeo-chan. What we are struggling to say, here, is that Takeo-chan, born in a peculiarly poisonous decade, will grow up in a better time, surely, one that will see the inevitable overthrow of the white magic and the zombie death drive that undergirds our massively sedated lives, one that will strip away the marbled fat and the toxins, apocalyptic jam on the highways, mental prison industries and universal yapping, throw it all away and be a little more naked. Or quite a bit more. Here’s to the naked years, Takeo-chan! And forgive those of us, Olgas all, who haven’t quite comprehended what our lives are all about.

a rough passage

One of the great contributions of Greimas’ semiotics to the world at large, or – more to the point - to the petty world maintained here by LI, is the notion of modalization, which is, briefly, that there are instances in discourse in which modals overdetermine descriptive utterances. Now, those of you who have taken a foreign language know what modal verbs are. They are verbs of ability, obligation, necessity, belief, and knowing, which usually take as their objects other verbs. Thus, ‘he goes’ can be turned into ‘he can go’, ‘he needs to go’, ‘he wants to go’, ‘he may go’, or even ‘he knows that he can go’, ‘he believes he needs to go,’ and so on. In logic, modals are about degrees of possibility, which highlights the linguistic modals around ‘can’ in our example – but in Greimas’ scheme, possibility leads us to the objective and subjective theories of possibility, which in turn leads us to knowing, believing, desiring, feeling – the propositional attitudes.

Now, LI is making this foray into the Antarctica of the arid for a reason. It is by using the notion of modalization that one is able to, as it were, crack the code of the polar affect model. A code that is rooted in the geneology of the ascription of positive or negative to feelings. As we noted in a previous post, the three sources that seem to be of interest in the development of this Sprachestil go back to the utilitarians, the energetics models of the 19th century physicists, and the language of animal magnetism. What is interesting, with relation to the latter, is that animal magnetism stands at the beginning of the great American idea of ‘positive thinking’. Positive and negative thinking arises out of the mixture of religious, therapeutic and social discourse in 19th century America, particularly in the North. It was made popular by that peculiar semi-religious precursor of New Age thinking called New Thought – the first self-conscious self help movement in the U.S. That movement was imprinted with the vocabularies of Christian science and a faint echo of transcendentalism, and was characterized by that thing that pops up in America again and again – the peculiar elasticity and availability of fact in the face of thought. Positive thought implicitly references the mentalist idea that the world is thought, and so thought can do things in the world – change the world. Now, there are many roots for this notion, but one of them is definitely animal magnetism. I am going to write a post about the voyage of Dr. Charles Poyen to these here states in 1839 – a little transatlantic epic that would have fascinated Charles Olson. But my larger point – for my essay – is that the polar model as it is used in everyday life now is dialectically divided between two modalizations, one inflecting ‘thought’, the other ‘feeling’, which are borne along by antithetical presuppositions.

The Boxer resolution on the enormous size of President Bush's penis

LI had a full report from one of our far flung correspondents about today’s exciting session of Congress. Surely it is a day that will go down in history! In the past, some have criticized the Democrats for not doing enough to help support our troops. The Washington Post, clinging to the moderate consensus, has accused Senator Reid of high treason and asked, rhetorically, whether it is not high time to remove his testicles. They also pointed to the unbelievable Democratic Party interference with the project of destroying the Earth’s atmosphere by 2020, an initiative being organized in the Vice President’s office by the Committee on Atmospheric Reform and Counter-Terrorism. Well, there are those who have bewailed the apparent deafness of the Democrats to what the wiser heads in Washington are saying, but I think today, the Democrats lashed back loud and clear. Senator Boxer and Senator Levin, two of the most respected moderates, offered a Senate resolution, the so called “Our President has the Biggest Dick” resolution, that sends a patriotic message to the troops as they succeed once again in Iraq.

Myself, I think the “Bush’s Big Cock” resolution is a strategic win win for the Dems. It marks a repudiation of the ultra-left wing of the Democratic party, which is rife with slanderous accusations of Bush's penile inadequacy (I agree so 150 percently with Richard Cohen's latest column, Why Doesn't Hilary admit Bush has the Biggest Dick, which chimes in from the Truman Democrat p.o.v.) and it shows the Dems standing tall with the administration as we face a truly supernatural threat from Iran, which is threatening to send a spaceship into the sun, loaded with dynamite, and blow the whole thing up – even before our monetize the atmosphere project takes off! This is wrong ethically, and it is wrong from the free enterprise standpoint.

The Boxer and Levin resolution reads: Whatever the nature of our disagreements in this great, great, great, great, great, great nation of ours, all Americans are proud of the tremendous size and vigor of President Bush’s cock. With a girth far exceeding that circumscribed by your average Iranian milkmaid's cupped hand, and a reported 17” height when fully aroused, Persident Bush’s cockadoodledo puts to shame the reputed teeny five incher hoisted by President Ahmenedickad. Incredibly, the monstrous Iranian President has threatened to use his dick like a rubber truncheon, smacking each Israeli into the ground with it like a fence post until he or she can’t move their feet. Surely, all options should be on the table to prevent this horrible penile crime against humanity from being affected, including first strikes against the augmentation plants that are working day and night to give the Iranian leadership much bigger, baseball bat like dicks. That we, as a country, need to beef up our beef is the only logical defensive measure – augmentation now, augmentation forever, we proudly say, Democrats and Republicans alike. Be it resolved that:
- no loyal American shall now or in the future make disparaging comments about the girth, the height, the eruptive force, the hardness, and the durability of our president’s wonderworking woody woodpecker;
- that all previous presidents be recognized for their ‘God bless America,’ their 3rd legs, their willie wonkers, their Moby and we do mean Moby Dicks, so help us God (except for expresident Carter);
- that the image of President Bush, brandishing his thwacker, be inscribed on the dime, or the quarter, or some other suitable coinage, with the engraver’s skill especially to be focused on the crest and crown of the thing in all its marvelous and intricate detail;
- and, finally, that any advertisement by Moveon Org or any other radical organization making fun of any President’s dick-o-licious be a capital offense, unless said members of the group can show that repressed memories or Satanic Cult induction made them do it.
LI is in total agreement with Fred Hiatt, who will point out in an editorial on Sunday how the reported monstrous growth of Iranian dicks give us all the more reason to nuke the place, but we dissent from his also foreseeable accusation that with the Democrats, it is always too little, too late. True, nobody has worshipped the Presidential Dick like Fred Hiatt. Still, I think loyal Democrats, serious Democrats, the Democratic leadership has rallied around the President’s dick more than Hiatt is giving them credit for. But looking forward, this great great great great great great great resolution will inoculate the Democratic leadership from the charge that they aren’t serious about Presidential dick, while at the same time the ultra-left wing, after a small outcry, will no doubt go back to their own collecting for a monument to Senator Webb’s war hero sized dick, which, it is proposed, should go next to the Lincoln Memorial.

From all of us here at LI, let’s hear it: hip hip hooray for Bush’s dick! Long may it fuck us over.