eye of the storm

so here's the kind of scandal that breaks ten years later, but of which we're already seeing the leading edge. it's going to turn out that "anti-american cleric muqtada al-sadr" is being indirectly, but in bits connivingly, funded by the united states. remember when cheney's office was kind of circulating the notion that we should simply side with the shiites, cause the sunnis are such a carbomb painsintheass? well, we more or less have, and pulled back verbally or operationally only when it became obvious that this was a formula for the entire breakdown of everything (or anything that was left). you're going to find that we have (through our iraqi government) armed the death squads etc. and i think that we scouted this as a strategy in counter-insurgency, that maliki probably thought he was being winked at as he funnelled resources in that direction, avoided any legal or military action against militias etc.

you know what's a little surprising about the wmd thing? (this kind of coming up in my head w/regard to the tenet book.) that these folks didn't just go ahead and plant weapons everywhere, along with documentation etc. admittedly, there is a good chance that the fabrications would have been exposed, leading to an even worse complete pr meltdown. on the other hand, we'd still be trying to sort out what was what. i actually expected day by day in those first weeks for them to stumble over their own vats of chemicals etc. one thing i'm sure of: such a strategy must have been considered and rejected, which actually sort of speaks to the limits of evil and clownishness even among evil clowns.

well i watched the debate. no disasters, no amazing breakthroughs. my man mike gravel came off a bit nutty, but what do you want from my man? but at least he's got a real and consistent position on iraq (as he did on vietnam): not one more american should die; it's unconscionable. immediate withdrawal. and why doesn't anyone seem to like this legislating by plebescite direct-democracy thing? radical, right, and practical. i thought edwards missed a good chance to make fun of his own hair, but i was myself making fun of bill richardson's "hair." obviously, they're all obsessed by iraq, because they brought every question back to it. hillary was...hillary, she backed and forthed on every question, even health care and gun control. i think you see someone with great command of information and a rhetoric studiously absorbed from people like her husband. but you see such a thoroughly politicized personality that it's empty all the way to the bottom. obama is, as everyone says, likable and impressive, much more natural behind a podium than any of the rest. dodd was better than solid, biden too, but i don't think anyone's worrying about them getting nominated, and indeed at the end biden actually appeared to endorse clinton (if the republicans are wishing for hillary, he said, they're going to be sorry). kucinich is actually very very good on a wide variety of issues. when he started rattling off treaties we ought to sign on to or observe, he rocked. i think it's possible that he could get some "traction" if there are further radicalizing disasters: revelations of war crimes by the bush admin, or even terrorist attacks.

so i was watching tucker on msnbc from the site of the dem pres debate in sc. and he was asking his little panel: do you think barack or others could get traction on hillary by calling her on her iraq vote? the consensus was 'no,' because at this point they're pretty much agreed on how to proceed. but what i'd say is: look what that vote (and, you know, edwards's and kerry's etc) shows about *them.* one reason a lot of these people voted the way they did was because of the polling, because they feared a fatal political blow from a 'no' vote. but that's to play politics with tens of thousands of people's lives. if that was behind the vote, then these people are, putting it mildly, disgusting moral slime. or do you really think hillary was impressed by the ridiculous arguments, or taken in by the inyourface deceptions? what i would say if i were barack (or anyone else who did not vote for the thing): *if* someone took a decision like that for political reasons, what does that say about the quality of their leadership or of their character? that way you're not just hurling horrible insults, but talking...hypothetically.

hey cool! i'm always psyched by another chance to insult turkishness. ps: genocide! genocide!

you know i'm still trying to figure out something to say about global warming. but surely we might start getting a little worried about the teenage-girl-with-pms hysteria of even the "responsible" media:

Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous — and more intractable — than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war.

ok. the threat of the arms race was more or less the annihilation of the planet. whose model shows that outcome? we're in the phase of escalating the apocalyptic claptrap into a nonstop screech, running around in circles screaming: the rapture religion of the educated left. we need to get the next phase, and you're going to find in a few years that we've calmed down a bit, had our midol.

p.s. this summer you're going to see, in cities all over the country, americans gazing up at a gigantic flickering image of al gore and chanting slogans in unison.

what i think is an interesting question about events like vatech: to what extent do we, should we, can we (or: do i should i can i) feel connected? well, i do feel more connected than to a bunch of bodies in baghdad. why? sheer physical proximity? class or national solidarity? is it because i'm soaked in coverage? i do feel like there's a slight element of simulation in the "we are all vatech" moments all over the country, a bit of emotional forcedness, a bit of ethical theatricality that is about establishing our own goodness, to ourselves among others. but surely we ought to respond, ought to feel something? should it be something deep, and if it isn't are we defective? a friend of my wife's spoke very movingly about the whole thing, choking up a little, and she asked him whether he had a connection to the people. his response? "my daughter almost went there." that's pretty thin: but yet we are eager to make some kind of emotional claim. should we shut down the campus, the state, the nation, the world? i'm not purporting to answer these questions but to raise them raises a series of fundamental ethical questions about the extent of empathy, the principles of connection, our claim on one another and the processes by which these claims and connections are mediated.

unaccountably, i haven't heard anybody blaming vatech on hip hop. you might start by searching lyrics for "glock." i'm thinking about the connections of hip hop to global warming, alberto gonzales, and darfur. i have it on good authority that just before he started torturing people, dick cheney was soaked in wu-tang clan. late middle-aged assholes are so...impressionable.

Time for Tiffany's favorite cultural event! It's Eurovision!!

Update: By accident, I set this thing to autoplay. I can't involuntarily inflict Finnish Heavy Metal on those of discrete, sympathetic taste who visit Eye of the Storm. The fact that Crispin hasn't tracked me down to kill me for that indicates that he either hasn't checked since I posted it or isn't sure where I am. However, if you are into Finnish Heavy Metal, that 's for you.

Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes here; long time fan, occasional guest blogger. Didn't plan on this one, but if you want to get a clue as to how good Crispin's musical choices are, consider this as prime alternative.l

Anyone who's watched it finds it a sick sort of American idol experience only in sequins and general weirdness. You know, past winners include Celine Dion, Banannarama, Abba, and the Lord of the Dance -- which I saw, and thought very surreal, since it actually had some musical merit and the dancers could in fact dance... However, after these guys, assuming things leap back from the edge as in Rich Little from Steven Colbert, the winner this year will probably be some pigtailed Swiss girl. In a drindle. Singing to Sheep... What's really funny, is that these guys are now Finnish National Heroes. Well, Rock and Roll never forgives. Or forgets...

so, as i often do, i'm teaching thoreau's civil disobedience in my political philosophy class. i asked how many read the thing in high school and got a respectable show of hands. but the idea of teaching this essay in a large public high school is absurd. how would you behave in high school if you followed only the dicates of your own conscience? how would any administration treat any kid who did? and indeed, now grading through my quizzes, i can see (again) that a lot of students simply cannot read it; they cannot believe he's actually arguing that we ought flatly to disobey unjust laws, withold taxes in time of war, etc.

i really think the impulse to roll all the bushy scandals into one big bale of indictment, as frank rich does today, is unfortunate. like i say, i'm enjoying watching the clowns go down. but the only connection of l'affaire wolfowitz to iraq is that wolfowitz was an architect of the iraq policy. do you think dems are less likely to get into a "i got my girlfriend a job"-type scandals than republicans? or kerik love-nest/friend-in-the-mafia type stuff? connecting gonzales on us attorneys to iraq relies likewise on the flimsiest analogies, etc. what you don't want to do is become such a partisan hack yourself that you're just obviously willing to throw in anything and call it all iraq. at that point you've got no claim to objectivity or credibility.

hey the washpost has quite an excellent piece on vatech by lionel shriver today. i personally am sceptical of her (i have it good authority that lionel is female) claim that you could prevent such events by reducing the coverage, though it's hard to deal with the strange combination of "we are in mourning" solemnity with extreme sensationalism that you get on the cable networks. but anyway, shriver writes pointed, angry prose. and her points that we're now going to see a set of oppressions that are incompatible with education, and that the first thing we always do is try to blame someone are the right things to say.

just want to belatedly discuss the gonzales hearing, which i listened to. the guy is about as bright and formidable as a little clod of dirt: he got absolutely stomped. i do find it a bit ironic that, though being a torture enthusiast doesn't disqualify you for the ag job, firing some us attorneys might. at any rate, these rove folks can barely even pretend to pretend that they might be concerned about anything in the legal world besides their own political advantage; they can't even pretend to pretend that the justice department has any independence from the white house political operation.

my favorite moment in the whole thing was provided by orrin hatch. now even if you were alberto gonzales's actual bitch, you'd have to see that substantial issues are at stake and that it would be important to try to substantively figure out what happened. but hatch was asking questions like this: "mr. gonzales, what are some of the basic functions of the justice department?" it was as though hatch not only wanted everyone to understand that he is the merest idiot, he wants to grandstand about it. i seem to remember similar passages of outright cretinism in the clarence thomas confirmation hearing etc. and of course if he's thinking about what he's doing at all, he's expressing contempt for the issue and the hearing itself, which is strange in a situation in which even people like sessions, cornyn, and coburn obviously have some pretty serious misgivings.

hey i just posted on eugene plawiuk's  carnival of anarchy about anarchism and violence, their theme for the  period.

let me hit you with some  atheism in the face of vatech (and let me remind you: something like four times as many people were killed by a bomb in baghdad today (only they don't count, or they count, say, 100,000/1). really, the monotheisms (=judaism+christianity+islam), according to whom god is all-powerful and perfectly good, are incompatible with this event. it's not that, once you write a book developing an amazing rationalization, it might not turn out that they are strictly logically inconsistent, but that you've just got a dishonest, and i want to say, more or less obviously false vision of the universe as you embark on this project. you don't look at the world and say: how might a world like this have come about? you look at some dogma that was enforced upon your person, and ask: how can i make this compatible with a breathtakingly anomalous situation? when your faith ceases to be directed at the world, you are subject to any delusion. blame it on sin or free will, but then you're going to have to make every single poor fucking asshole ridden with bullets deserve what she got.

the religious response is not an honest response: it is self-delusion. but it is poignant: surely none of us can squarely face this world - its horror. we must evade or escape by some means, and the religious means is no worse than the alcohol means, the emotional deadness means, the cho means of i'm just going to kill everyone; i commit myself to destroying this world. actually, the religious means is better than that, anyway.

hey yo. i've finished my rendition of the tao te ching and webpublished it together with passages from kuo hsiang's great commentary on the chuang tzu.

one thing about us. when something like vatech happens, we mourn for three seconds. then we try to figure out who to blame, and go to 24-hour coverage of that question. obviously, after the first shooting these cops and officials had a chaotic situation and a plausible theory. they didn't move that slowly, and i don't think we can know whether their decisions were reasonable; probably, they were, more or less. it's funny about powerful people like college presidents or presidents of the united states: one of their basic functions is to be scapegoats, even in unaccountable insane disasters. you'd have to say the gov response to katrina was pathetic and idiotic. but on the other hand people started blaming bush before the rain stopped: for the state of the levees, for global warming that caused the hurricane etc. this may be why anarchism is actually impossible: because then we won't have the sacrificial victim by which we make sense of our senseless world. we want an agent we can identify and spit-roast, even if we have to generate an extremely strained story to do it, even if we have to hold them to standards that we ourselves could not possibly meet. a related sort of example: without hitler to fantastically absorb the responsibility of millions of germans for the holocaust, they'd never have been able to look themselves in the mirror after 1945. it's as though one person or a little cabal executed millions.

so p.j. rodriguez actually mentions my book act like you know in relation to imus, and strangely even my mom wants to know "what i think." and i just watched meet the press do an hour on it etc. so i'm going to have a fairly serious go.
now, first of all, as anyone with any acquaintance with my stuff knows, my default position is to defend anyone caught in the pc maelstrom as follows. if y'all had your way, our public discourse would amount to a speech by hillary clinton or john kerry: an absolutely empty set of cliches that no one could possibly disagree with, or indeed think about at all. one danger lurks in a public discourse of screeching racism or misogyny or something. another lurks in not having a public discourse at all, just a solemn unanimity about a thousand bromides. one feature of this is that public and private discourse detach themselves utterly from one another, so you have no idea what anyone thinks, if indeed anyone does. (my defense is self-defense: if you listened to what i might say in  the course of a given lecture on political philosophy, it would freeze your blood.)
i feel a little differently about this case because it was directed against actual human beings, as opposed to mere public figures. if i threaten death and destruction to alberto gonzales and insult his mother - who obviously failed completely - or something, tough shit. but why would i want to insult matee ajavon (= the amazing rutgers guard)? so anyway, i think that we'd better listen in this case to what the people insulted say about how it made them feel. in this regard, imus has conducted himself pretty well in the apology phase, even if he was trying to save his ass. and i feel like he really should have apologized, because without any real discursive function he was just hurling nasty insults at young persons.
"nappy-headed ho" is certainly parasitic on african-american slang; it's just not something a white person says without that influence. it referred in large part to the darkness of the rutgers black girls, as opposed to the light skin in particular of the tennessee star candace parker. skin tone is the kind of thing that a lot of people - white or black - might notice, but which you're not supposed to say. (i watched the women's tournament, and can't say i thought about skin tone much; however it wouldn't be shocking if we found that a lot of the rutgers players originated in the ghettoes of nyc or, as with ajavon, newark, nj. i think this is one reason i got caught up in the rutgers team and was rooting them on; it's one of the reasons they seemed like underdogs. others: rutgers has never won anything. tennessee wins everything. they started out 2-4 or whatever it was. ajavon overcame a serious injury and is just a transcendently fine player. vivian stringer is a great coach without a national championship etc) there's still a de facto racism internal to blackness by skin tone, both in black and white cultures. [tell you what: the first black president is going to be...pale.] at any rate, the use of black slang, no doubt informed by hip hop, was an element in the comedy, though it's not any sort of excusing condition, as imus himself has said. still, we're in rich, interesting territory, which we might discuss rather than merely sticking our fingers in our ears.
at any rate, let's go on to the hip hop connection. i personally am amazingly tired of "gangstas" and their pimpin. um, if your ideal of gender relations is prostitution, you deserve, at a minimum, eternal damnation. it's at this point just insanely repetitive. on the other hand, you're a dork if you go to music to have your political positions confirmed, and the play with offense and transgression is central to pop music and in particular, black pop. check out ma rainey or blind willie mctell, circa 1920s. you've got to dig on the hyperbole and humor, as well as finding out something disturbing about individuals or cultures. actually, you do learn something about the state of the culture by listening; if they were delivering clintonesque yackety smackety, you'd have no idea what anyone ever thought about anything. i have absolutely no reservation about issuing the lastest ludacris album in its rankest form, even though i personally would rather listen to sage frances or something. and i let my children negotiate all this in any way they see fit.
i just want to say to all you pursed-lip offendeds: you are preparing your own doom. if you enforce a code of cliche, then violating that code becomes funny in itself: you create the humor you hate. and the fact that people will still say what they're not supposed to is, overall, important, good, and unkillable.

matee ajavon and candace parker. candace parker has extremely "good hair."

ok. straight up. the washington post op-ed page is both inexplicable and despicable. every day it features some press release from the office of some politician or official. but to let alberto gonzales's staff just repeat the lines from his testimony, press conferences etc is truly idiotic. it has nothing to do with opinion journalism; it's the opposite of opinion journalism; just the mind-numbing pr of the powerful. it's not even writing, much less good or interesting writing. this is completely self-evident, and it is beyond my understanding how the post persists in such practices.

you know, the wolfowitz scandal is just a sordid little tale of personal corruption of the sort you find anywhere there's money, power, and sex. you could strain to connect it to neo-conservatism via "arrogance" or something i guess, but c'mon. but i'd be lying if i said i didn't gloat watching him go down, with gonzales and, what the hell, rove, whose email accident is just so beautifully nixonian. i'd like to see each of the architects of this disastrous and profoundly evil administration publicly humiliated, one by one, on whatever grounds are available. i'm gonna enjoy this, all the way through.  i once again saw a "freedom isn't free" american flag sticker as i drove home from work today and i was thinking: yeah you can't kidnap people and stick them in black site torture facilities without coercive taxation.