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oaxaca links:
this map shows the proximity of oaxaca and chiapas, center of the zapatista movement.
zapatista expression of support
"protesters regrouping in troubled oaxaca": it's "teachers and anarchists."
pictures from ctv
amazing pictures
light in dark corners
sappho manifesto
indymedia
culture kitchen
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the events in oaxaca are extremely interesting. don't be too impressed with the basic media approach, which assumes that "order" must be restored, even while acknowledging the incredible corruption and violence of the government there.
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or think of it this way: while a large decentralized group of people can produce a sort of intelligence, as in open-source etc, a large group of people organized hierarchically, characterized by elaborate structures of subordination is, literally, an inanimate object. it is incapable of making decisions and it is incapable of telling the truth: it is incapable of making decisions precisely because it is incapable of telling the truth: it floats into a world of delusion and ceases to act intentionally in this world at all; it does not respond to stimuli. if you poke it in the foot, the message might reach the brain in some distorted form after a period of decades. you might as well ask the actual concrete out of which the pentagon is contructed for a strategy as address such questions to a military hierarchy the size of the us's.
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any ragtag bunch of bandits can bring a superpower to its knees. they're immediately responsive to conditions, cohesive, committed, lightly equipped, led with definiteness, basically indetectible in a civilian population. they're creative, improvisational, of necessity. we will never win a war like this: like the soviets in afghanistan, us in vietnam. say you built a giant robot, capable of burning whole nations, but incapable of detecting the little assholes with tripwires gathering around its feet... the american state is too large to accomplish anything definite or true in any arena of life. we suffer from elphantiasis. our only hope is actual decomposition.
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these people really are idiots. do they not understand that the government of iraq and shia militias are fundamentally identical? what impresses you after awhile is the unbelievable sluggishness of thinking; they're always two years behind the events. meanwhile, their actual policy intitiatives consist of phraseology: replacing "stay the course" with, i don't know, "beat me." they'll still be nurturing a young democracy after they've lost control of the whole country (and they're already close), and as iraq is de facto partitioned between a shia theocracy, a ba'athist sunni triangle, and an independent kurdistan. in the middle of a years-old civil war, they will be closely examining the theory of counter-insurgency, hoping to respond to events from 2004. too gutless to win, and too gutless to admit defeat, they will linger for decades, muttering catch-phrases and thus imposing death. we suffer (a) from gigantism: there's no lever in the world capable of moving this beached, reeking whale of a bureaucracy: that's the idiot inertness of the superpower. and (b) from politics: where we're trafficking in symbols and lies rather than in war and peace.
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i notice that npr and other media outlets are absolutely obsessed with body counts of americans in iraq: they announce the count many times each evening, actually rating october in a hierarchy of months. it's as though they're giving you a constantly updated world series score. it's hard, after awhile, not to pick up on the spirit and root folr maximum death: i hope this is the best month ever.
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ah. remember when the admin requested that news outlets not air footage of osama? their grounds were that "he might be signaling his evil minions." same id true of the gop ad: if he taps his rifle, he's saying blow up fedex field. btw, i'm making book on which nfl stadiums will get dirty-bombed this weekend. contact me for odds, and leave your credit card #.
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watcha listenin to profcrispy?
much to wanda's chagrin, i seem to back to country, after having burned out almost entirely for years due to the "farm report." anyway, i've been revisiting my favorite bluegrass intensively: dude, there it is on the shelf. right now i've got on the immortal hot rize: featuring tim o'brien, of course, but also the bluesiest bluegrass guitar player ever, the late charles sawtelle. the live album below cooks, cooks, cooks: and so beautiful on gospel harmonies. from the same era, the johnson mountain boys: "blue diamond" is surely one of the best dozen bluegrass albums ever cut, and dudley connell's singing is paradigmatic. when i was a kid around dc, i saw the original seldom scene many times: my dad was a friend of the bass player's (tom grey's) dad. john duffey's high harmonies will always be my model and measure. they were all "newgrass" and shit: it's a tribute to their success that they now sound as trad as flatt and scruggs (almost). i downloaded "live at the cellar door" off itunes: those were gigs i saw, more or less, though it was always the red fox inn in bethesda. and that album was worn out at my house: my brothers adam and bob had it in continual rotation for years. ss nails, just nails "hail to the redskins." anyway obviously then you've got to throw on some country gentlemen. ok then you're in reactionary chic, and it's time for reno and smiley: i'd rather listen to them than flatt and scruggs, though no one is going to beat the stanley brothers. still don reno is my favorite banjo picker. then i'm climbing back to the present with the gorgeous IIIrd Tyme Out. check out something like "snow angel": a perfect jewel of american song. i'm still holding out for a name change to the "blank mountain boys": "iiird tyme out" is as perverse as any norwegian death metal band name.
i'm gonna maybe do a series of brief guides to this and that: see if you order off my links i get a slight amazon gift certificate, and my amazon expenses always exceed my budget.
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so i just want to remind you of the basic argument, now so profusely illustrated as to be obviously irrefutable. there were two major justifications for invading iraq: eliminating wmds and lending a helping hand to the oppressed. north korea shows exactly how, say, dick cheney or john bolton respond to a country with actual nuclear weapons: dude: let's assemble a coalition and enter into multilateral negotiations. if they had thought iraq had the weapons, they'd still be all blah blah blah yackety smackety today. darfur shows exactly how they respond to actual genocide, what they do when true monsters of oppression are in the middle of slaughtering their people: yapyapyap. both these situations, among others, were in full flower at the moment they started shocking and awing those poor suckers in iraq. they're cowards and hypocrites. that's not merely my opinion: it's theirs. they shove that shit in your face every day all day. they could not be clearer about it.
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300 million seems a bit excessive. fortunately the bush admin seems intent on helping us commit suicide. actually, one actual american would be refreshing: it's all european mercantilism and socialism over here.
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watcha readin profcrispy?
pierre-joseph proudhon: what is property? (1840)
as everyone knows by now, property is theft. that's a good sample of pjp's penchant for paradox: he's a wildly creative and bold prose stylist, as well as the first person to refer to himself as an "anarchist" (on the grounds that anarchy is order). but the philosophy is an awful mess: proudhon thought he was placing "the social question" on an indubitable scientific footing, which was the characteristic claim of his era in political philosophy. rarely has it been further from the truth: he's not even coherent, much less scientific. is he a christian or an atheist? an anarchist or an absolutist? even he doesn't know or, really, seem to care.
murray rothbard: conceived in liberty (4 volumes)
a history of colonial america. i'm midway through the first volume. it's an amazing performance: elegantly and definitely written, bristling with hard facts, with an angle (libertarianism). "arrant self-righteousness and a flagrant double standard of morality are often characteristic of the side with the superior weapons in any dispute," rothbard observes, apropos of virginia's slaughter and treachery with regard to native populations.
yirmiyahu yovel, spinoza and other heretics (2 volumes)
a very interesting contextuualizing of spinoza as a marrano jew, from a background of forced conversion and exile among iberian jews. many marranos practiced judaism (as they understood it) secretly and became very skilled at covert expressions of their belief. (an analogy: check out covert rasta themes in early jamaican ska: as in prince buster's "king of kings": "lion says, i am king, and i reign." meanwhile rasta compounds were being raided etc). yovel connects this very plausibly to spinoza's remarkable and remarkably vexing prose style, which reveals a radical philosophy, but also disguises it. however, i'd say he overplays this particular hand: every expression by every marrano and spinoza's every comma are analyzed as having this structure.
banksy: wall and piece
this stencil/graf guy from the uk is as good and interesting a visual artist as there is working today. his work is wild, subversive, and also well-crafted: "all artists are prepared to suffer for their work. but why are so few prepared to learn to darw?" he's a hero of my daughter emma: at least she's not into picasso and all that billion-dollar genius shit. i'm teaching a graf course in the spring as i mutate into a prof of art and art history: this will be a centerpiece. here are three pieces banksy did on the israeli wall between themselves and and the palestinians.
"the greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. it's people who follow orders who drop bombs and massacre villages. as a precaution to ever committing major acts of evil it is our solemn duty never to do what we're told. this is the only way we can be sure."
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leave aside for a moment the question of whether governments can legitimately tell you how to practice your religion, in cases where doing so harms no one. ask yourself this, with regard to uk veiling debate: what do you say to a government that declares itself to have the right to tell you how you should dress? forget all this crap about assimilation and multiculturalism, and note that what you're doing is declaring tyrranical power and directing it at one particular religious group. pretty soon it'll be forced conversion time, or we might say, it is already forced conversion time, to "secularism." it's like "tolerating" homosexuality, but banning any same-sex public displays of affection. if you think that forced assimilation is the way to integrate your culture, or that this will increase feelings of goodwill and englishness in the muslim community, you're in for further rude awakenings.
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i don't know why everyone seems so disturbed by the foley thing. to me, the fact that the republican party is the party of hot butt sex with children speaks well for all republicans everywhere, and for the diversity and tolerance of our great nation. and it yields new and better interpretations of such euphemisms as "faith-based initiative," "protecting the homeland," "operation iraqi freedom," "dick cheney," etc.
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just in case you were wondering whether vlad putin is a genocidal murderer.
The shooting occurred on Putin's birthday and closely followed the birthday of his anointed leader in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. Angry journalists here could not let the coincidence pass.
"Apparently, this was a present for the two leaders," Yakovenko said.
"Why do I so dislike Putin?" Politkovskaya had asked in her book, "Putin's Russia." "I dislike him for . . . his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies . . . for the massacre of the innocents which went on throughout his first term as president."
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how low can you go? it's funny to think about the pope "abolishing" limbo: it seems that he and others may actually be confused about who is god. either unbaptized babies go to limbo - and play hilarious party games - or not. i'm not sure the pope gets to establish or abolish realms of being, though of course anyone can write and re-write fiction.
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judaism gets reborn as a genuinely hip religion. the idea that someone would try to do this is sad. first off, if it was reborn as genuinely hip, it wouldn't be judaism. second, it, um, isn't being reborn as genuinely hip. consider, before you go down this pathetic road to simulated grooviness, the history of christian rock, or hip christianity in general. this is going to be even more deeply embarassing. also, i'd suggest to the hip jew: do not write while actually unconscious. "this is not your father's judaism." first of all, you're writing advertising copy for judaism in a book review in the washington post. second, you're plagiarizing it.
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"Santorum's real problem is Santorum," said Clay Richards, a Quinnipiac University pollster.
hey, wait! he insulted rick santorum, the father of our state. isn't that illegal? at least he stopped short of insulting santorumness itself.
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i'm glad to hear that prosecutions of turkish authors for insulting kemal ataturk continue apace. true, kemal ataturk was a dumbfuck, a mongoloid, a clinically brain-dead, feculent sump of absolute stupidity. still, describing him as dressing in a chador, whether the description is true or false, insults turkishness itself. insulting such a race of intellectual pygmies and crossdressers is surely redundant, and there's no sense piling on. let us now praise kemal ataturk: he was probably the best drag queen i've ever seen: his diana ross was fucking uncanny. his mad affair with warren g. harding remains an inspiration to turks and republicans the world over. i think of ataturk as the founder of the modern gay liberation movement, and it is well known that he personally introduced amyl nitrate and crank
to the gay community, a signal service to humanity itself.
i'd love to hear your thoughts on what other persons or abstract concepts it should be a crime to insult. personally, i think it should be a crime to insult kurdishness, wisconsinness, cornishgamehenness, and the ramones.
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the torah as a parenting guide:
After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.
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"this i believe" is occasionally interesting, as long as it's not colin powell, who believes "in the promise of america." no one could have served all his life at the highest levels of government and believe in the promise of america; one might even get skeptical after awhile about the threat of america. it's hard not to see that most of what most people believe is a collage of cliches. this was just sad: half women's mag "this i do for me" self-esteem horseshit, half "jesus is my dr. phil." it has a fearsome aspect, though: there are hints that she writes things down and publishes them. my very selfhood is at stake every time my kids ask me for something to eat. really? then isolate yourself in a cabin in the yukon for a few decades or something; you'll never have an identity while there's anyone else around; you'll be their body servant or their spectacle; either way their glance will be more powerful than your self.
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i had a reading on the columbine spate of school shootings: authoritarian atmospheres, forced association, etc would get the occasional violent response. obviously, you can't read the thing in colorado or toaday in the next county over in the same way. it is extraordinarily disturbing that these are anti-girl sex/hate crimes, and the only reason to put them in the same category as columbine is the scene of the crime. obviously it is a heart-shattering irony that it's automatic weapons in an amish 1-room school. i don't think it's possible to quite say anything, the only possible reaction is a frozen despair.
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