cheese it, the cops!

way too much tammy, i know. possibly i'm a bit too drenched in hip hop as i teach my course and need a break. so let me try a different defense of 'stand by your man,' obviously one of the iconic songs of the twentieth century for a variety of reasons. but if you're opposed to standing by your man, you're opposed to monogamy. that's your perogative, of course - you bobby brown bitch. i'm kind of into the idea myself. heterosexuality is a rich, complicated landscape, with all kinds of gender roles and stuff. it might have had some connection to the subordination of women, of course. but you know i don't think we can really help ourselves: we were born this way; this is who we are, not what we chose; it's an identity, not a lifestyle. perhaps heterosexual marriage failed as an idea; it just wasn't practicable. but it had a certain compelling yin/yang quality. and of course even heterosexuals should be able to marry whomever they please. tammy explored every mood and moment of heterosexual romantic love - complementarity - from infatuation to conflagration. but it took hillary clinton to really live this particular song fully.

take me to your world

and here is a performance of surpassing excellence:

virtuosa bravura coloratura etc performance of the ways to love a man one thing to see is that something can be kitschy or campy and still be great art, or an authentic expression of emotion; no one has ever shown that more directly than tammy. to me a song like that is both funny and moving. well also of course sexy in a double-entendre way. one thing that kills me about tammy is the impassive stage persona - she barely moves or changes expression - in connection and contrast to the explosive emotionality of the singing. from the same album in the same vein but not up on youtube?: "enough of a woman." the, um climax here is right at 1:45.

what the human species has been evolving toward is idiotic self-congratulation. indeed, probably the species has been evolving toward extinction in a narcissus mode: so impressed will we eventually be by ourselves that we will forget to move at all. the notion that particular political positions are the outcome of evolution is idiotic. but what's really confused is the idea that "liberalism" is "iconoclastic." dude are you kidding? these people believe in herds: liberalism is mammalian but pre-great ape.

and let me just refresh your tiny iconoclastic mind. let's say that al gore really was the culmination of the human genome. of course maybe the human genome is a boondoggle, a terrible dead end, like the stegosaurus genome. indeed, looking at it squarely: almost all species that have ever existed have evolved toward extinction. but wherever we're evolving to, if the liberal was more highly-evolved than the conservative, would that have any tendency to show that any of the positions were true? i want to hear your arguments, or at least your entertaining formulations, not your mere assertion of personal superiority to me, as edifying as that is for us both.

anyway, i'm vaguely hoping the piece is satirical. either way it's pretty funny!

i'd rather be used as a club to beat mahatma gandhi to death than read no apology: the case for american greatness, the newly released "book" "by" "mitt romney."

there's a pretty interesting piece in time mag for march 1 about a german family that was granted asylum in the u.s. because they wanted to homeschool their kids, which is illegal in germany. if you don't send your kids to school there, they'll take them away, or send you to jail.

it's not that i can't rehearse the arguments in favor of universal compulsory education. it's just that it is - obviously - an expression of tyranny and its concomitant slavery. it's a quintesssential example of "progressive" politics (although in this case it originates in prussian militarism, as well it should): we have a beautiful vision of human liberation; we are all marching together into a shimmering future! that's why we have these guns and clubs. we know what's best, because we are the smartest best people. and so to protect you from yourselves we must constitute a power sufficient to engineer you however we see fit: an ever-growing state explicitly devoted to destroying every vestige of your autonomy.

now that would be a horrible idea even if these folks did actually know what the future should be or had some privileged access to the truth. unfortunately, they don't know shit. basically, none of us do. and the fact that american education - probably german too - is ever-more regularized, uniform, rigid, unimaginative, punitive, empty, mechanical, etc. is hardly a coincidence. this is where obama agrees with bush, where al gore agrees with dick cheney, and where stalin agrees with mussolini.

has there ever been a less interesting person than tom brokaw? the whole schtick is mechanically mumbling the common wisdom. i guess that must be the essence of who we are, or else he wouldn't be on your television 24 hours a day. if there were such a thing as collective consciousness, the consciousness of tom brokaw would be the consciousness of us all. but you have to picture the insane obsessive maniac or something underneath: one hopes desperately that there is a funky internal life, that there are secrets, some strangeness.

when someone walks up to the pentagon and starts shooting, it's worth recalling the unimaginable quantity of death that has emerged from that building: the napalmed villages, for example. many of the great technologies for expunging human lives have been invented and developed and deployed from that building: killing is its fundamental task, which it has performed with extreme focus, creativity, and systematicity. in the words of the weather girls: it's raining death; hallelujah it's raining death, in the form of white phosporous incendiaries or thermobaric weapons or predator drones. there is still a reasonable chance that the decision to destroy the entire world will come from the pentagon. certainly the capacity sits there all day every day. shooting at the pentagon is the opposite of assassinating martin luther king, say. shooting people is what the pentagon does: what it is. it's like when your fizzie factory fizzles: the opposite of irony: commentary through redundancy.

krugman this morning, crowing as usual about his moral superiority to you:

Bill Clinton famously told a suffering constituent, “I feel your pain.” But the thing is, he did and does — while many other politicians clearly don’t. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the parties feel the pain of different people.

i don't think anyone actually feels your pain until you hurt them, which i suggest would be a reasonable procedure.

it might surprise you, or it might not, to know that my favorite singer of all times in any genre is tammy wynette, so i'm glad to learn about an excellent bio. she sounds like a handful, which one could already detect. if you're a hip hop artist, the beat is mechanized, perfectly consistent. if you're a blues or a bluegrass artist, the tempo increases as you go. if you're a real country artist, it slows down. what you want to check out is the second item in the reel below: "too far gone." it's as extreme as country singing ever got: tammy delays so long hitting the note that you begin to wonder if the song can ever end. the agony is exquisite.



i think what i really enjoy is the way she tears open my chest with her bare hands and devours my heart in a blood frenzy.

if there's one thing that all americans can agree on, it's that dissenting views should never be presented in schools. it's extremely important not to confuse kids by representing more than a single view. unanimity, especially coercively enforced unanimity, is the only sure sign of truth. how can we expect you to passively accept the shit we're saying if we don't all the say the same thing at the same time in the same way? that, surely, is the very essence of 'science.'

say for example these kids are filling in bubbles with #2 pencils or on a touch screen: the purpose of all education. well a&c or aorc are not among the options. that's why every hunch, theory, bit of common wisdom, or momentary fad has to presented absolutely univocally as the essence of pure truth.

my only fundamental insight is that it is purposeless to say what everyone else is already saying. so for example i could talk about reducing your carbon footprint or recycling. but why would i?  all middle-school teachers have been chanting it like a mantra for a decade. every politician. every university president. every high-school aged girl, every television network, every carton of milk and ford advertisement. etc. it's what people say when they need to say something nobody could possibly disagree with. but if nobody can disagree with it, it's not an assertion. why don't you just look at my mouth or my blog and fill in the blanks? then you'll feel better. seriously, pretend i just said it. you know the words. even if i was completely committed to it body and soul there could not be any point in expressing it besides a commitment to infinite redundancy. shut up for a year and see if it comes back to life or something.

seems like the tea party movement could use some intellectual heft. my shelf of philosophy books consists of absolutely nothing but animal lashing out, so i'd like to offer my services as shadow minister of ideology.

the way the whole jim-bunning-is-shutting-down-the-federal-government thing is being played is going to bite you in the ass. the idea is that the dems can't believe their windfall: biden, reid etc all taking this big opportunity. supposedly the same thing killed the gop when they shut down the gov under gingrich etc. i don't think that these folks actually understand.

remember obama pledging pay-as-you-go, deficit reduction, fiscal responsibility etc.? the only exceptions to these principles that the administration is allowing is every piece of legislation they propose. but all bunning is doing is trying to enforce obama's supposed convictions. and if you don't think there's an anti-state-gigantism mood and a concern about trillions in deficits and debts, you haven't been watching. of course, anyone who actually was concerned about debt devouring our economy would be engaged in wacky conspiracy theories; racism; they'd be mere animals lashing out. and yet what they're saying would be true.

i feel that the people who are killing themselves here are the dems, and if it continues on like this, they'll lose both houses of congress.

the honorable joseph r. biden, vice president plenipotentiary of the united states and president of the senate llc, ph.d. (honorary), gesticulating randomly before the ruins of his party, policies, dreams