cheese it, the cops!

how it feels to be colorless me

addressing you on behalf of my race, i.e. white male heterosexuals, i just want to apologize for the way we fucked everything up: my people! my people!

oh do shut up.

honestly, the idea that obama is on the road or meeting with groups for photo ops, pushing exactly his budget from last year in exactly the same terms is just sad. it's not us he needs to persuade right now, and his strategies in persuading us again are harmful to the negotiations. really it's as though he doesn't have a single creative bone in his body, or on his staff. there is never anything but this tax adjustment on the wealthy. he needs actually to be negotiating, and tamping down rather than drumming up the rhetoric. it's just so the same old shit. i do hope they go over the cliff in a total display of dysfunction. also i think that is the only reasonable possibility of deficit control. i've heard surprising people taking this approach: howard dean, for instance. otherwise i'm telling you it's all tax cuts vs entitlements to the effect of infinite debt.

palestinians at the un

nothing is more disingenuous and fallacious than the statement of susan rice at the un, concerning this rudimentary proto-recognition of the palestinian territories, that the us opposes it because the two-state solution 'can only emerge from direct negotiations with the israeli government.' um, ok, so why is this incompatible with that? it's completely irrelevant. if we support palestinian statehood, we should be happy to endorse this little symbol of its possibility. this only constitutes a 'barrier to negotions' (the israeli formulation) in the sense that it could conceivably give the palestinians some little bit of leverage. of course, the israelis will only negotiate on a completely asssymmetrical basis. even then there's no chance they will agree to statehood.

the truth is that we oppose palestinian statehood until the israelis endorse it, which is, i predict, never. the israeli negotiating position is ridiculous; they certainly do not have any interest in palestinian statehood, but they're constantly pretending to endorse the two-state solution. you can't talk to people when they're just yapyaping like this. they'll say anything. their actual strategy is to represent their policy as being the opposite of what their policy is in fact. let's say they have mixed succes in concealing their actual policies, but there's no sense talking to them because what they say is always the opposite of what they do. how it could possibly be in our interest to echo this line of jive is a question i leave to the professionals. i said the same last year when the thing came up before.

more conspiracy theories

well i will say the way the obama administration publicly portayed the benghazi killings is at best a royal screw up. the very idea that they supposedly have no idea who developed the sort of false information purveyed by rice, carney, and others is bizarre. but there was no way some false cover-up story was going to hold up; no one could have seriously entertained that idea. nor, really, do i see why they should have; you pay tribute to the heroic dead and vow to do better on security in the future. so i think there's just some element we don't know about yet. at any rate, initially the acting director of the cia said the 'talking points' were redacted or falsified by the fbi. then they settled on the dni, etc. it's him; 'it's not my fault' would be a good replacement for 'e pluribus unum.'.

now here's a juicy possibility. note the rift between the fbi and the cia exposed in the petraeus scandal, where fbi agents are literally scrounging around in the director of the cia's emails as his fantasy world comes unglued and he prepares his resignation or tries to figure out how he can hang on after all. while that is happening, petraeus is distractedly watching susan rice on meet the press, like a soundtrack. i'm telling you we have no idea of the factions in this security state, and people could even be hanging other people's people out to dry, or sabotaging the other faction, or setting off suicide blackmail bombs, threatening to end careers. no doubt the factions were formed around different adultery/fine liquor/cialis/blackmail networks, etc. anyway, you can see how everyone might have been a bit bewildered right about then.

mmmmm, squishy

seems like someone out there started to figure out squishy totalitarianism, starting from a marxist angle.

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren’t straightforwardly opposing forces.

In this groundbreaking work, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin demonstrate the intimate relationship between modern capitalism and the American state, including its role as an “informal empire” promoting free trade and capital movements.

see, marxists could also have figured this out from the other end. were markets and states separate in the old soviet bloc, for example?

 

remember what you said about hip hop?

i just want to remark that, in my opinion, well-groomed white people in suits reading sheets is not music. maybe it's aerobics or something.

anti-spielberg

ok then, let's talk about steven spielberg. i want to say, it really is amazing all the things you're not supposed to say, and all the people who are more or less above criticism. but anyway, here's my idea: steven spielberg may be this and that, but he is not an artist. i'd say the very budget of these films precludes them being particularly expressive or embodying anything like a personal vision: the films are elephantine, inert, manipulative rather than meaningful, and really quite banal, though of course impressive as spectacles. they lurch between sentimentality and didacticism: spielberg is always teaching you another lesson, and all the acting and emotion and stuff is like a crocheted cozy on a bludgeon. the lessons are very much at the level of sesame street: they're just cliches: precisely because of the gigantic commercial emphasis and investment, the messages must be uncontroversial, and boy are they. nothing strange or subversive or original or idiosyncratic has ever appeared in any steven spielberg movie. and have you ever tried to watch indiana jones and the crystal skull? he's just the chap to do a hagiography of lincoln: there could be no more redundant or predictable gesture by an american filmmaker. 

spielberg will be remembered as the second-rate riefenstahl of squishy totalitarianism, the vanilla pseudo-auteur of the era of copyright protection. the stuff emits the scent of bureaucracy, or centralized planning of the arts. when it becomes impossible to spend that much money on a movie, movies will be better. with the deranged level of promotion, in which all media outlets conspire, it's almost like you're required to watch it and like it: it's socially compulsory, baby. i wouldn't necessarily trust the sincerity of any particular person's ecstatic response in a situation like that, especially critics. and i'll tell you this, the pentagon-style media organization - in publishing and recording and visual arts as well as film - has been an aesthetic wasteland, divided between big sortof highbrow art things and shimmering meaningless corporate pop. it's been the era of the blockbuster: way too much unanimous concentration on and promotion of way too few big bloated items: way too few novels; way too few songs; way too few paintings. you have to manufacture a critical consensus and give the bookers and stuff just to fend off facing your own conventionality and mediocrity. we must have the dullest and safest arbiters of taste since the romans. there's a difference between taste and authority, david remnick, and you are failing in your duty to be interesting. every sign that the culture is multiplying or disintegrating - and of course there are many -  is good for the arts. insofar as we have universal cultural touchstones they will be way too huge and puerile. gigantic art should be resisted.

tammy, reaching into your chest and clutching your heart in orgasmic blood-lust

reviving the tribute to tammy i put down in 'songs about kissing' (below). (that tammy wynette is fucking incredible: my candidate for the greatest pop singer of the twentieth century. her timing is so extreme and devastatingly expressive, playing so far behind and then on the band as though waiting for and then trying to seize the cure or just describing the shape of yearning. that timing is of the essence of country music, and it corresponds to the similarly extreme, the unmatched, dynamics. she's always threatening to unleash a new level of intensity. i don't think the recording equipment of the era could really capture or even survive what she's doing there. it's thermobaric. i will be your vietnam.)

you have to be very early on tammy's recordings. i hate to sound condescending especially to my favorite singer but few artists have more badly misunderstood the source of their own power; she made so many pseudo-sophisticated horseshit songs, starting early, so random downloads is a very bad approach. never, however, has suffering been so intensely expressed in popular music (i'll give you billie, though), but then also transcendence of suffering, or transcendence through immanence. really tammy is being crucified. i would call the cross 'heterosexuality,' or being female in a heterosexual couple circa 1967, and i have no idea why she doesn't play the cultural role played by judy garland; dude it's super-intense, super-tragic, in sequins, and the music is better. it's the campiest thing ever and yet within that tammy is completely emotionally exposed, absolutely vulnerable and devastated. she embodies a perfect submission, but she gropes for modes and moments of resistance or understanding. (if you want to hear systematic resistance, though, you'll have to listen to loretta.) anyway here's a twenty-cut list. i'm just going to say this: these are the best country recordings.

(1) The Ways to Love a Man

(2) Enough of a Woman

(3) Yearning (To Kiss You)

(4) I'm Not Mine to Give

(5) I Wound Easy (But I Heal Fast)

(6) Two Story House (George and Tammy)

(7) Too Far Gone

(8) D-I-V-O-R-C-E

(9) Apartment #9

(10) You Can Steal Me [Album Verson]

(11) Golden Ring (George and Tammy)

(12) I Don't Wanna Play House

(13) Stand by Your Man

(14) Don't Touch Me 

(15) I'll Share My World With You

(16) Almost Persuaded

(17) He'll Never Take the Place of You

(18) I Know

(19) My Daddy Doll

(20) These Two

(21) Where Could You Go (But to Her)

(22) Lighter Shade of Blue

(23) The Ceremony (George and Tammy)

 

 

there are still journalists

the best use of cnn is something like this gaza situation; they're reporting from gaza city, jerusalem, cairo, etc; you watch bombs exploding live behind the anchors. they have crazy-brave war correspondents who have done every conflict and who speak fluent arabic: ben wedeman and arwa damon, for example; these are people who did day-by-day through iraq, watched libya explode, have infiltrated into syria. really people like that are still my heroes. wedeman did an amazing piece about a funeral for a family killed in gaza yesterday. i have to say wolf blitzer is the best anchor in a case like this, despite whatever ethnic/professional background he may have: scrupulously fair, very sharp and pointed interviewing people from either side. anderson cooper likewise. sneer at their ratings slump if you want; they are indispensable. 

repudiate emerson for me

so there's a certain strand of the contemporary left - building of course on a basic element in the tradition - which associates the enemy with 'individualism.' there's a certain triumphalism of that right now. individualism is regarded as something anachronistic and tea-partyish, and people associate it specifically with white men and our racism and sexism, etc. you might even hear someone like ta-nehisi coates pointing out once more that jefferson and madison were slaveholders and that racism and sexism are at the heart of the american political tradition and specifically of its emphasis on individual rights, which is also often associated with capitalism. now, however, before you dispose of american individualism and cook us all into a big human borscht, i want you to read this essay, and as you do so i want you to repudiate it sentence by sentence. i want you to let your own position express itself by a negation of each of emerson's assertions.

tickle me

man, i hope you're not just suddenly noticing how creepy the muppets are. 

ella pops

amongst the vicissitudes of love and its weird or spectral simulacra, its multiplicitous ectoplasmic semblances, watcha listenin to, crispy? oh i'll tell you what, early ella fitzgerald. go download the war years. ella's mature or even very late artistry was devastating; i would definitely steer everybody away from the songbooks, though, and i say that emphatically. the orchestrations there are way too big; specifically, they are way too  big to swing. ella without swing is ridiculous; she was the best swing vocalist by some distance. the idea that she's recording in front of a big string section reading sheet music is sad. anyway, though, she had something early on that she didn't later: a gossamer girlish upper end. man she was poppin and boppin before there was any such thing. on a lovelorn song she is a match for billie as an interpreter; often early on she is notably economical. but only she just never was actually sad like billie so like this little glow of joy always comes through that translucent surface. oh then of course there is the best scatting ever by a ways, etc. alright she was 27 when she hit this, though this shows a bit of the darker potential.

lincoln cranks er up

judging by the trailers, etc, daniel day-lewis has answered the question of what lincoln was doing at ford's theater: indulging his unnatural appetite for scenery. you may come out of the movie with a surprising understanding of and sympathy for john wilkes booth, which no doubt was speilberg's noble yet relentlessly didactic humanity-expanding purpose. as booth so often remarked, everybody who ever met that dude wanted to shoot him. i am an asshole of unfathomable power! so astonishing is day-lewis's performance that he literally becomes lincoln, who literally becomes daniel day-lewis, who literally becomes lincoln and so on; at each stage everything that is not sheer mannerism is progressively filtered out until voila pure essence of lincoln.

songs about kissing

(that tammy wynette is fucking incredible: my candidate for the greatest pop singer of the twentieth century. her timing is so extreme and devastatingly expressive, playing so far behind and then on the band as though waiting for and then trying to seize the cure or just describing the shape of yearning. that timing is of the essence of country music, and it corresponds to the similarly extreme, the unmatched, dynamics. she's always threatening to unleash a new level of intensity. i don't think the recording equipment of the era could really capture or even survive what she's doing there. it's thermobaric. i will be your vietnam.)

Of the sanctity of poverty chosen and the ironic subtext

In which Crusader AXE (St Mary's School, 1965; Bishop Ludden High School 1969; College of the Holy Cross, 1973) ponders the problems inherent in recommending the cannonization of a socialist anarchist, abortion survivior, social activist, feminist and economic radical for Sainthood by the American Catholic Hierarchy, and smiles... 

david and narcissus

the thing to take away from petraeus scandal - not that people are really capable of drawing conclusons like this, or they would have done it from infinite data around 2000 bc - is a vague recollection of what power actually is, and what sort of person actually wants it, and what people do with it when they get it. this is just a kind of hilarious thing: beyond hubris and tragedy into a realm of sheer narcissism, grotesque self-deception, and farce. so really, i want you to picture this situation; petraeus chooses broadwell as his biographer either because he's sleeping with her or because he wants to. then they spend months together working together on a hagiography of petraeus and screwing (if you believe this crap about how it only started later, you're a worse sucker than david's wife; it might be some sort of attempt to save the book, which ought to be vaporized except as a cautionary tale). let's say the wholly uncritical worship - whether it was sincere or not (and in this sort of hierarchy, sincerity and voluntariness are always pre-compromised) - had an erotic effect; petraeus finally realized how his sexuality was actually configured or what it was actually for: an orgy of the most mortifying self-love, gaucherie on a world-bestriding scale. petraeus is his own fetish. then broadwell's on her book tour with their stirring tribute to his extreme...excellence, giving him a blowjob on every news program and radio show, and then again at the hotel room that night. in brief, a pure ethic of public service.

normally i might have a certain sympathy with the 'human foibles'/hey that could happen to anyone/throw the first stone kind of approach. let's say you want to think that through before you apply it here. the person of petraeus exposed in the scandal is a conspicuously outstanding - a truly distinguished - nightmare.

i like privacy as much as the next guy, but i am not going to peg my argument for it on the example of an invasion of the privacy of the director of the cia, though like so many others i would die to protect it. i would love to hear him explicitly crying foul on that, though. i admit that the concept that someone is rummaging around in the email of the director of the cia is very surprising, unprecedented as far as i am recalling at all. indeed, it is potentially explosive; it seems to expose rival commanding factions in the security state, like you'd get in pakistan or iran: hard to say who's in charge of what, really. you start to wonder who controls the nukes. i wouldn't think we know the half of it between the fbi and the cia; it could well have to do with, like, rival adulterous sexual factions: rival procuresses and viagra suppliers, for example, rival studs and lovelies and distinguished old men peppered throughout the military, the secret service, defense contractors, lobbying firms, etc. well honestly what do you expect in that sort of authoritarian hierarchy? heroes?

Faded love and National Security?

 

In which Crusader AXE muses about the CIA, Roman Triumphs, the Afghan conflict, hubris, schadenfreude, adultery, marriage, hypocrisy and teen age crushes by middle aged men viewed at least tangentally through classic honky tonk music because, that's what I do...

the cliff

people are still suggesting that obama can trump house republicans because he, unlike them, is willing to go over the fiscal cliff. dude have you not been watching this barack obama? he will not be doing that (though i think it represents a relatively rational approach to budgeting), nor can a person such as that plausibly wave that thing around. the last thing he is going to do is remove the bush-era tax cuts on the middle f-ing class. (i intend to offer a plea for the insertion of 'f-ing' between the two words of the phrase 'middle class' as a matter of correct usage.) he is not going to do that even symbolically or like for a moment. i guess he might have to pretend at some point in the process, but surely no one is going to take that seriously. this actually is why right-end house republicans do still have leverage. boehner is going to have to again try to deal with this within the caucus, because if it comes down to that straight-up vote on the sort of thing obama is saying again - oy 'we can do this right now!' you can't right now me again a year later - you could watch it fall apart into pure party lines again. 

more debrief

as the republicans tear themselves apart for ten minutes, i do want to say that i think basically what went wrong for romney was romney. they would have done better with a principled conservative (within limits); they would also have done better with an explicit moderate. it was possible to lose sight of this after that first debate performance, but no one - absolutely no one - was enthusiastic for romney qua romney. i also think that the republican party  has demographic challenges, as now every person who has ever appeared in a newspaper or on television has pointed out as though they were making it up themselves on  the spot, but i also i think the republicans got their ass kicked by the best ground operation in the history of american politics. while we're ragging on rove, i believe he must basically be credited for the axelrod model: go precinct by precinct, voter by voter through ohio. but the obamoids do it even better and add more dimensions. this is the other side of that messianic 2008 thing; while we were all doing that, that organization was pulling the last voter out of last old-folk's home in alexandria, va. quietly they mobilized the black vote in a way that made, for example, pa impossible for romney. the first thing an actual operative will tell you as an actual strategy is that in 2014 or 2016 they better get every actual voter they already have out; that starts out with having decent candidates. putting it mildly, karl rove is going to be better in that role than in fabricating diabolical yet unbelievably cretinous attack ads. truly it's only because you think you know better that you don't actually know that the people who make those ads are rank defectives. you figure they must actually be super-smart manipulators. no no take them at their word: they are the people that made that ad: regard it as the deepest most sincere revelation of their inner moral selves and measure of their intelligence. you have no real evidence otherwise, and when you start gathering the evidence, you will see that what i say is true.

in any way ever

i think there is plenty of room to compromise between the dems and reps. both of them can agree that there should be no serious efforts to restrain the deficit in any way ever. to infinity and beyond!

run your revolution like it's sesame street

so the syrian opposition generates a new leadership. headline here? no women. as your village is shelled and your mom explodes, i'd be appointing a commission on pay equity. as far as i'm concerned, they can sit there and die until they get to 17% lesbians. how many latinos in the leadership of the syrian revolution? surely these people can be made to understand the importance of tokenism to the war effort.

by the way, i would definitely support legislation to remove your children from your custody if you permit them to watch ss. here i make a serious assertion: sesame street  is the worst children's show ever, and quite a plausible candidate for the very worst television show of any sort. sesame street completely misconstrues the nature of childhood, not to speak of the nature of television. not every minute has to be another minute of fake play to teach; and we can do more for our kids than try to manufacture them as democrats. childhood is intrinsically, not just instrumentally, valuable, and if the point is that you'll never know how i or the corporation for public broadcasting actually formed your consciousness because you'll be under the delusion that you're having fun and acting autonomously; oh, think again and feel more fully your love of small persons. it's like you're forcing these poor little saps to listen to sting. or it's like the new punch and judy show, brought to you by erich honecker. i'm not sure you really want to entirely break down the distincton between entertainment and manipulation, but at least it doesn't work very well: the thing is as entertaining as a migraine. it's helping you model extreme insincerity, though, which will be extremely important to your children's future success. fortunately the ideas and values and characters are so blank that even though your three-your-old might be chanting along to the numbers again, it's going to be nothing compared to his discovery of something actual, like sponge bob say. really key to parenting: ask yourself, how can i manipulate my children to do and believe and say what someone told me they're supposed to, while all the time cleverly pretending to play with them? this is key to preparing your great love/little sucker for the college admissions process. supposedly sesame street was a substitute for pre-school for ghetto kids, growing up in housing projects built on the same aesthetic model. if you think ghetto kids got anything out of that or that it had a big inner-city audience, you are mistaken. it had a multi-cultural cast but the most painful whitebread aesthetic. its actual function was pre-kaplan sat prep course for suburbanites.

that's a rant, in case you're wondering, ma! meanwhile, where is bashar al-assad with his helicopter gunships when you need him? for episode 18 billion or whatever they're up to this week i want the whole cast down there in his state-of-the-art torture/education facility, forced to count from 11 to 20 and not recycle. the opposition to assad on sesame street will be evanescent. but it will be diverse.

reconciliation commission

john boehner is on television right now sounding extremely conciliatory. everybody's op-ed page is about how we can come together. i will take this moment, and i can actually suggest practical steps. start out with being critical of partisan bullshit coming from your own side!

love, triumphant

it is so good that gay marriage passed by ballot initiative in maine and maryland. the anti forces always say that no voters have ever approved it. see i totally read that as a libertarian thing, though i am not simply identifying as a libertarian. but same thing with the pot legalization. completely. absolutely. maybe when i keep saying there is nothing over on that side of the spectrum but more state power i need to qualify that. now y'all think more thoroughly about the welfare state in relation to asymmetries of power. k?

the way i think about marriage - and i say this as someone who has had some really harrowing experiences - is that it's an act of expression, you know? it's your personal public festival of love where you say whatever you can say that expressses the deepest commitment and love you can, in front of people who will be happy with you and also sort of try to hold you to it. right you don't need the state or the church for that, but that could be important too to someone. so i am for it for anyone in any form or by any authority they prefer. but i think again it needs to lose its normative or expected status and be some people's option. the gay marriage thing doesn't challenge the normative status of marriage. ok. one victory at a time; the other is something we're working on bit by bit.

wrap-up

so now y'all can go from a simulation of the ecstasy of election night 2008 to a simulation of the disappointment you felt for the whole first term. perhaps another redeemer will someday emerge to clarify the extremely muddled idea that is america. i don't think there are any plausible kennedys left, though. or they're all in rehab right now, harboring and hoarding their charisma.

like you, of course, i am kind of bummed out by our terrible setback in the war on women. we are getting. our. asses. kicked. but i am not at all admitting defeat. we will wrest from you once again control of your bodies! if we lose, though - as ultimately seems inevitable - i plan to go all tranny.

so looking at google election results: 1,087,503 votes for gary johnson; 368,324 for jill stein. about 115,000,000 for goldman sachs: those are indeed the people whose votes really counted. i remember pre-internet trying to figure out how many votes the libertarian candidate got; no one would report it at all. you'd have to wait until the next election for them to telll you they got 800k last time or whatever it was. 

 

 

flippant election coverage

12:07 one thing you should resist the temptation to do now is write the obituary of the republican party. that happens to the losing party after every single election. right there are these demographic challenges (though i'm less impressed by them than some). but i am telling you that there is an ever-renewed wellspring of real conservative sentiment in this country, and not only among white men. this thing where they've supposedly for decades been unable to work out their outreach to latinos, black folks, or even young single women is pathetic. i could write the scripts in my sleep. so could michael steele, for that matter. where is your total operation in the black church? do you really think even rick santorum doesn't work with latino catholicism? i am telling you that these are in many ways fundamentally conservative constituencies; they have only to inflect the image and make real connections. right you are going to have to tone it down on certain symbolic issues; just grab others. why don't you really blow through a completely sincere self-reflective speech on anti-racism? just hit hard on a certain vision of equality = equal opportunity etc. exploit the resentment of some portions of these populations for the very bureaucracis and forms of control that supposedly ameliorate their condition. work in self-reliance, quoting...marcus garvey.

12:00 co and washington have legalized pot. we started screaming for that in 1970. i remember getting gassed in all senses at the smoke-ins. folks, if you think a legal market in two or three states can be contained to those states you are stoned, but not stoned enough. the market in cannabis will be even more flooded than it is with the medical stuff everywhere; prices will come down. anyway, hard to believe!

11:58 gotta say i'm kind of relieved. that mitt romney is repulsive. plus everyone i ever actually hung out with is happy.

10:08 mackaskill wins: i guess maybe god isn't in favor of rape after all.

10:07 hey crusader, off the top of my blog tonight.

10:04 it would have been worth romney's adjustments to the supreme cort etc to see bruce springsteen sobbing. really all his records are like that. he charges admission.

9:52 call nh for obama. it's going to be ok, dems.

9:40 have to say i'm glad that bob casey beat tom smith in pa senate race, though that was obvious. smioth is a mine-owner whose ads featured coal miners paying sterling tribute to his signature on their paychecks.

9:30 the call for sherrod brown and the solid margin in ohio is one of the things that looks good for obama right now. i just think it falls into place even if he loses virginia and florida. michigan, pa, wi: all falling into place.

9:23 the blogging's gonna be weak; just chillin. glen points out that we all used to watch the total popular vote accumulate on the bottom of the screen on every network. we've been flipping through them all all night and no popular vote total of any kind anywhere. this is emblematic, we feel. it's not a national election in so many senses.

8:37 i fondly remember an election night i spent in jamaica. there was gunfire and yelling from all around. it seemed so direct, so human compared to 10 billion bucks in ads.

8:32 fox is definitely the toupee network plus i'd scrub the cake makeup off the blondes. 

5:50 once again, my old refutation of the claim that voting for a third party is wasting your vote (or one of many dimensions of the argument).

5:00 seriously my actual prediction for a romney admininstration: we'll be muddling through the mess. also for a second obama administration. it's going to suck pretty bad sometimes; other times not as much. such is our condition, nor is it entirely unsatisfactory.

4:15 martin bashir  on msnbc just described a romney victory as 'the real apocalypse.' it's literally hysterical! look you can say romney's a nebbish, a non-entity, a chameleon, etc., but this right-wing extremist threat to the american way of life just isn't plausible. plus it's very not plausible to do both of these things in back-to-back seven-minute segments. but like i say: any club in a purposeless fight, especially if you have a punch like bashir's. goldman-sachs or soldman-gachs? don't let these people work you up into a tizzy.

what group proved decisive

what demographic group will prove decisive? latinos? wal-mart moms? say the election finishes 52-48. i propose that every single demographic group constituting ten percent or more of the population is equally decisive. this would include left-handers or people living within sight of a big hill, for example. perhaps, on reflection, we will conclude that the latino vote was decisive. if romney had just gotten to where bush was, say broken off another 15%, he'd have won. so maybe the green-eyed people are evenly split. well, that was decisive for obama, because if romney had gotten them all, he would have won. every segment of the population, no matter who they are and how they voted is decisive in exactly the same sense as the latino vote. so maybe we oughtta get a little milder on the politics of groups. once you pull out wal-mart moms, they are decisive. women as a whole are decisive; men too; really hermaphrodites are entirely decisive in a close election. rural voters are decisive, also young and middle-aged and old voters. short voters, etc., no matter how they do vote. turnout is decisive; so are the people who'd have turned out no matter what.

feeling very pale

back from votin out here in latimore twp. voting is always pretty easy in rural america, though there was a bit of a line. it was 100% greying and white, which is a little disconcerting because there is a large latino population out here. we're still voting on paper. there was a woman standing there saying in a notably despairing voice, 'anyone interested in the democrats?' people actually kind of smiled at each other at that. one guy behind me in hunting gear was doing his wrap rap: they're selling the country! it's never been so bad! it's insane! if romney doesn't get elected... people i felt were looking at me funny with my earrings and gary johnson button; i was as diverse as we got, except for the cutest little pair of grandbabies! they did photo-i.d. me; the state of the law on that in pa seems extremely obscure; and there were contradictory notices on the walls inside the polling place. the democratic lady's whiteboard said that you did not have to produce photo i.d. i didn't mind producing i.d, which i think is an important step in keeping minorities from oppressing people such as myself by irresponsible use of the franchise. or by responsible use of the franchise. that's the problem with the country today. pimpin ain't easy. i voted the straight nihilst party line: the only party brave enough to face up and, hence, give up. it's over; nobody listens to techno!














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providing the margin

fox is doing a piece on how every vote counts. don't think your vote doesn't matter! because one time one vote decided an election! i think it was a california congressional race in 1948. remember hayes/tilden? well that was almost like that; really it almost could have been like that. or remember that kevin costner movie? now this seems to imply a principle: that the extent to which your vote matters is equal to the probability that the margin of victory for the candidate for whom you vote is exactly 1. of course even there it would be silly to say that your vote provided the margin, since x millions could say the same; your vote even in this scenario provides xmillionth of the margin. but obviously you'll need a better argument because you've just exactly confirmed my point.

what's the big idea?

the very spirit of america! remember, america is an idea. that tree that just fell on your car? that was a tiny bit of that idea crushing another tiny bit. from sea-idea to shining sea-idea. oops no blather consists of ideas, as does yapyap and hooha, but america consists of stuff. your ass is an idea, roger, but america is a thing. ok ok america consists of ideas. mine, though, roger; not yours.

Like Dublin on his tower, watching his world collapse...or not

In which Crusader AXE responds to Crispins' couer de crie aboout factions, confounds Louis MacNeice with theology and Ana Marie Cox with a homeless guy in Dublin, and addresses what the hell it's all about Alfie anyway, revealing that Crispin Sartwell is really Mitt Romney's illegitimate teenage lovechild due to Mormon baptism of some shit....