9:46 that was quite an excellent clutch performance.
9:43 "our rights come from nature and god, not from government": well when was the last time you heard a republican throw down 'nature'??? now, we'll be picking over his religious thing, or history of randian skepticism or scientism. romney even tried to short-circuit this in the intro, describing ryan with uncharacteristic specificity as 'a committed catholic.'
9:35 ryan is a relatively compelling figure; little charisma but he seems very reasonable and decent and he's not stupid. he has a lot of what romney lacks; he seems human and also committed to something. also the cow-lick and open collar are working in contrast to rom. however, every dem campaign consultant is salivating: that budget is a collage of specific targets, the basis of a thousand ads.
9:34 nothing is more absurd than the political autobiography; everyone narrating their own story as the american dream; each person's history coalesces into a few catch-phrases and absurdly canned anecdotes. it's the worst literary genre of all time. ryan's whole life is that his father died when paul was in high school. that's what he had to struggle over to...realize the american dream!
9:33 like dick cheney and wade michael page, paul ryan is white! i'm not sure i can really overcome that in my head.
9:32 fam is cute.
9:31 actually he adlibbed ok coming in and correcting himself.
9:28 mitt just introduced ryan as 'the next president of the united states.' well, anyone but mitt.
9:17 right now gov. bob mcdonnell is laying the worst egg in history: giving his own campaign speech for the senate; even telling his own biography as though he were accepting the vice presidential nomination. announcement scheduled for 9 and they're letting mcdonnell stomp on their own momentum. it's ridiculously incompetent
54 is a good age for a person in my line of jive to transform his hopes for sudden recognition of his transcendent genius to hopes for transcendent posthumous success. really when i was but a wee philosopher i thought i could be a transformative figure. insofar as i am in contact with reality, i'd have to be convinced by now that such a thing is not likely, possibly due to insufficient talent. princeton and stanford aren't calling; indeed, it's more like i'm lucky to have a job. i fantasize about a macarthur or something, but i didn't even get the grants i applied for for my sabbatical. i keep writing books and they get published, but putting it mildly they don't launch a discussion, much less whole new lines of actual inquiry, ecsatic worldwide acclaim etc.
now i might tell myself things like this: oh they just don't see how incredible i am because they're too...narrow-minded, conventional etc. however, one would have to notice that radical or unconventional figures often do extremely well. so then it oscillates to: well you must just suck, you pathetic fuckhead. it's hard to tell about yourself how smart you are, or how good you actually are at your job , isn't it? at least, it's hard for me.
so i tell myself that all i can really do is to try to keep plugging away, or doing the best work i can. i berate myself: are you doing this because you believe what you're saying and because you love what you are saying it about - are you doing it for it - or are you doing it to be loved and admired? i want to be intrinsically committed to the material, not the career: that's how i feel i could do meaningful work. but then: i am writing a 'system of philosophy.' it might be tending to become massive. and i have to ask myself: who would read something like that from you? ok if some famous dude at harvard or the sorbonne was doing something like that, someone might publish it and people might read it. but the world surely is not begging for that from crispin sartwell. i do think about audience/success enough to ask myself, stongly enough to make me take the day off, whether anyone will actually read this stuff i spend years typing. and then i find myself in a fantasy: oh you know in 2075 somebody will casually find my book in the stacks of an academic library and go: wow that's amazing! revolutionary! let's write some dissertations about this. i portray myself in my own head - in what i cannot but regard on reflection as really a pathetic attempt to bolster a repulsively saggy ego - as a van gogh, etc: someone laboring away in obscurity in his own time only to sell for $100 million a hundred years afterwards. i waver between crazed grandiosity and useless defeatedness.
just possibly these reflections are somewhat heightened by the news that my ex-wife - with whom, pathetically, i am still in love - is dating an academic who just got a 200k advance on his next book, and whose divorce decree states specifically that should he win the nobel, she gets a third. i am so far from worrying about your pathetic nobels! he sobbed.
one way that paul ryan 'balances the ticket' is that he is evidently a person of conviction. another is that he is a latina firecracker, the charo of the house of representatives. but to be honest, i'd as soon be ruled by the principles of pol pot as those of ayn rand. well, maybe that's not true, but at any rate rand's picture of what human beings are and how we should behave is disgusting. ryan is a relatively bold choice, despite all the people pushing romney in that direction. i expected portman or pawlenty, and that the basic strategy would be to try to bore people so entirely that they wouldn't be able to pay attention, and maybe, in their stupor, inadvertently vote republican.
it's funny but as the right accuses obama of being pol pot, the left accuses romney of being ayn rand. the choice of ryan of course lends some credence to the latter interpretation. but honestly, the policy implementations of these commie v dog-eat-dog positions are not dramatically distinct. obama's recent ad says that 'the choice [we] face could not be more important,' and if you listened to the big vision statements you'd get the vibe of extreme polarity: the whole direction of the future is at stake. but justice and fairness and liberty and opportunity come down to seven percent in the upper bracket. the distance between the soaring rhetoric and the extreme safety of the actual procedures is lurid. the polarization of the parties is amazing considering the actual distance between their actual proposals, which is small. so, in a way your vote is primarily symbolic or rhetorical: the question is what you believe most deeply; the expression of that in a policy is a slight nudge left or right.
the ways each party presents itself symbolically, and the ways each presents the other, are so absurdly disconnected from the realities in which they might embody or realize that symbolism that one has to take most american political discourse at this stage to be a form of sheer fiction or fantasy literature.
but however, the ryan move does increase the concrete differences. but though it kind of traps romney into passionately defending ryan's version of entitlement reform, i suspect that ryan would be pretty much sidelined in a romney admin, and that any adjustments will be pretty incremental.
ryan will by default be romney's spokesman on budget matters. but i wonder whether right now, as ryan looks at romney's actual economic plan - which calls, as far as i can see, for tax cuts and increased spending - he feels that it takes deficit reduction with sufficient seriousness.
mark mckinnon is an excellent political operator and commentator. this here is utter bullshit, though. that quote from george w: no human being talks like that in real life, thank god. ok go ahead and pretend that george w is a stateman, but you don't have to make him an animatronic lincoln who walks among us. whistling 'go tell it on the mountain'? dude whatever. possibly mckinnon has seen and written so many campaign advertisements that he has the scripts confused with actual human conversation.
Convention speeches are powerful tools to bend the curve of public opinion. George H. W. Bush’s 1988 convention speech is a great example. His son’s speech was also quite powerful. I remember driving with George W. from his hotel to the convention to deliver his speech. I was being quiet, trying to give him some space to get in the zone. Suddenly, I heard what I thought was the radio, and someone whistling the song, “Go Tell It On the Mountain.” Then I realized it was Governor Bush. Amazed, I asked, “Governor, you’re about to give the biggest speech of your life and you seem more relaxed than I’ve seen you in months.”
And he said, “I feel so confident about the speech revealing who I really am and what I believe in, that I will happily live with the verdict of the voters either way because they will know who I am, what I stand for and who they are voting for.”
the other day i was huffing a doobie out behind the shed with my buddy carl. carl was humming 'holiday in cambodia.' and i said, "Carl, I so love this great land, and such is my confidence in the American people that I know there is no challenge too great for us to overcome." despite the look of extreme weariness on his face, carl whipped out his ASP 21" Friction Loc DuraTec Airweight Baton - F21DA and beat me down like the bitch i am. i am today an ugly, brain-damaged person. but i am a person.
turns out that the sikh temple shooter was kind of a nazi punk rock star. for a little world, it's a world. the vid below is popping up with 2,500 hits: kind of surprising because i think wade michael page might actually be on stage?
i listened through a lot of fascist punk in the course of doing political aesthetics; here's a bit.
It is worth worrying about the use of fascist or Nazi symbolism in punk music and about explicitly white supremacist and anti-Semitic punk music of the kind issued by labels such as Die hard or Victory. When punks defined themselves as the opposite of hippies, they took on a right-wing politics by default, and many of the fundamental hardcore bands had moments that could be construed as right or white-wing. MacKaye talked about being a "white minority"; DC was Chocolate City. The song was later appropriated by European white supremacists. Black Flag did a song called "Guilty of Being White," in which they made fun of leftist guilt about racism. Seminal New York hardcore bands such as Agnostic Front and Cro-Mags flirted more enduringly with anti-pc themes, though they could not be termed fascist. The early LA hardcore band Fear featured hilarious and appalling racism and sexism - "the trouble today with women: the mouth don't stop" - and a back-to-back 'F' symbol that was a kind of fuck-you swastika, along with American/German eagles etc. Skinheads in Britain in the late seventies became associated with the anti-immigrant quasi-fascism of the National Front, ironic given the sub-culture's use of black Jamaican music as the source of its beat. At latest since the hardcore era (1980-84) there has been a world underground of racist or anti-immigrant punk music (already in 1983 the Dead Kennedys could sing "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"), distributed hand-to-hand, inbox to inbox in the old-fashioned DIY manner. Such bands have garnered predictable, occasional attention, and are sometimes prosecuted under anti-Nazi laws in Germany or Austria. Here is a lyric from the band Ethnic Cleansing, and though it is obviously repugnant, we also should begin to wonder about its possible parodic quality.
You know hardcore has gone to shit
When niggers and faggots are in the pit
Maximum Rock'n'Roll [a punk magazine] supports this crap
Were I to try to give a serious reading of such material, it would go like this. It is parodic in the sense that it is not produced without an intentionality and distance that gives it the whiff of irony; it is specifically constructed or tailored as a provocation or an anthology of offenses, of forbidden words. On the other hand, the views expressed are not without effects, and one would be rash to say that the person who wrote this is not a potentially violent homophobe. The racism and the anti-racism of punk are spectacular; they are a matter of hyperbolic signs that reflect ambiguous or multiple intentions.
Really the audience for that lyric is probably ultimately left-wing anarcho-punks, as the reference to the leftist punk periodical Maximum Rock n Roll shows. Punk enacts a schism from the get-go or fragments into a million bits in a happier or less deadly recapitulation of what happens within the defeated liberation front in a third-world country. First the right broke with the left over the swastika and the hammer and sickle, then each side started splintering, with leftist anarcho-punk especially notorious for schism. This half self-conscious tribalism comes from reading Lord of the Flies in middle school and leads to various audible and visual cues of belonging and exclusion.
Without excusing the fascism of some punks (or of anyone else), I point out that one feature of punk is that it always avails itself of the most extreme possible symbolism. Early on, in the Pistols and their comrades, the point was simply the transgression, not the content, and putting swastikas on the Queen's eyes was almost nothing but a provocation. Anarchism and fascism, whether we consider them as related (through Georges Sorel, let's say, or even Mussolini) or as at opposite ends of the spectrum, have a similar preternatural ability to freak decent people out: a potency as word or symbol virtually unmatched in our vernaculars; they almost cannot be heard, which is why to use them has the flavor of raving meaninglessly. The Dead Boys tossed around the word 'schweinhundt,' but probably really didn't care whether they were anarchists or fascists as long as they weren't Democrats or Republicans. As well, the fascists in particular, as we have seen in spades, had a vivid symbolic repertoire of iron crosses and swastikas and lightning symbols: adapted by right punk as instant infinitely reproducible (xeroxable, stencilable) signs of transgression that everyone could read in shock. The punks availed themselves of the symbolism before they thought through the politics. And when they did, they split into camps, right and left punks, anarchist and fascist punks. In Britain the right railed against immigrants; in the US they tossed around supposed Klan affiliations. A few of the musicians or hangers-on who casually adopted the swastika on their torn-up leather jacket (in fact an early version of the Clash was called "London SS") eventually set up shop in secret revolutionary enclaves, Falangist squats (Clash: "Spanish bombs, they killed Garcia Lorca"), and militia camps; one rightist group adopted the name "Rock Against Communism," as though this was 1930s Germany, but with electric guitars. Fascism and anarchism have in common a global attack on the established order, which both regard as diseased and inauthentic. Punk - the musical style - expresses this critique perfectly, even as it avails itself of musical signifiers that were long in construction, such as Jamaican elements or militaristic drums. These elements function in immediate political expression, argument as beat.
Nevertheless, one might argue that the aesthetics of punk are more suited to an anarchist than a fascist use, and indeed Nazi and racist punk is a fairly small sub-genre, and far more frequently the politics are libertarian/leftist, in my experience; the ratio might be 90/10 with local variations. First of all, punk design and punk music are often what we would merely call anarchic, using the term not primarily in a political but in an aesthetic sense. That is, the material presented is apparently disorganized, purposefully disordered, undisciplined, arbitrary, or not rule-bound. Punk proceeds by collage and by at least the signs of improvisation. It is notoriously undisciplined, even where it becomes a convention or a fashion. That punk is anti-authoritarian is compatible with it being fascist in a situation wherein the power that it is responding to is not itself fascist, but, say, social democratic. It is hard to imagine the sorts of skinhead punks attracted to the right merging into a Hitler youth or a disciplined corps of soldiers or workers. Certainly right-wing punk never produced a Führer. But it not at all hard to imagine punks living without a state; many have tried to do so even in the midst of state power. In the course of researching this chapter, I've been a bit stunned by the pervasiveness and seriousness of the anarchism in punk: it's everywhere from Vancouver to Sydney, from magazines to album covers to lyrics to interviews. As you examine the politics of all the seminal bands, from the Pistols and Clash to Black Flag and D.O.A., from Dead Kennedys to Minor Threat, from Bad Religion to Anti-Flag, it's hard not to see the thing as a whole as an anarchist movement, the first in the West since the early twentieth century.
i have to say that the olympics track and field competition is, among other things, an amazing celebration of black womanhood. lord that field for the 100 metres: what a magnificent group of african warrior princesses, with incredible fire in the eyes (as well as unbelievable acceleration, of course). also i'll pay tribute to the rather shocking virginity of 29-year-old lolo jones. let's just say that she's running against the tendency of the culture. that is sexy.
allyson felix:
tianna madison:
shelly-ann fraser-pryce (the world's fastest woman):
i'd say folks have a pretty low standard of 'counter-intuitive.' then again i would caution those contemplating a career in the counter-intuitive that if you take a few more giant steps after gladwell, you will often be greeted with incomprehension, or at least extremely modest book sales.
well charles lane has a point about gore vidal, who was sort of an evil crank. however, i'm pretty much willing to forgive anyone with that prose style for anything. lane quotes vidal on the death of vidal's nemesis (and presumably lane's hero) william f. buckley: “I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.” perhaps this is supposed to be an illustration of vidal's 'nihilism,' really it's just a typical perfectly-made insult; i'd be proud to have produced that sentence. one thing to consider about someone like vidal: ok he had a cultural presence. but the actual effect of his own opinions on anything real was miniscule. so go ahead and just do your beautiful ugly thing. i figure he and buckley are perched in a glass booth above hell quibbling for opposite reasons with satan's politics, which currently dominate our blasted nation.
buckley wrote well, though not invariably. he did not write as well as gore vidal.
i went and got a chick fil-a sandwich yesterday, not because i am opposed to gay marriage (indeed, my view is that gay marriage should be compulsory), but because the idea of mayors trying to get rid of businesses because they don't agree politically with their executives is frigging insane. 'they don't represent chicago values': just as though chicago were a collective consciousness and it happened to be rahm emmanuel's. funny how for a politician 'all of us together' means 'me.' that's the alternative to individualism, i guess.
wait didn't these obama-types just come out for gay marriage a half hour ago? now they won't do business with anyone who doesn't agree with their brand-new position, which is a fundamental part of their identities and those of all of us.
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