cheese it, the cops!

rep deb

ok. they managed to be pretty civil to each other, despite trump's  and kasich's initial outbursts, by focusing on the panelists. cnbc came off extraordinarily badly. i'm not sure how well carson will wear, despite his beatific thang. he's woolly at best. fiorina is always sharp, but i don't think she's going to go that far; her record doesn't sustain her presence. bush might not make it to iowa. rand did fine; he might be able to live off the land for a little while like his dad; we'll see how this filibuster thing goes.

10:18 trump's closer was great on how he and carson got the debate cut down to 2 hours, thank god. i'll tell you who lost this debate: john hargrove, who was peevish, defensive, and miserable.

9:55 bush is a non-entity.

9:54 it is sort of ridiculous how little airtime paul's getting. he did ok on medicare though.

9:47 republicans agree with democrats that we should take immigrants based on their skills and ability to contribute and education etc. all this means is that we only want the most privileged people. it is a consensus and will be ever-more systematic policy. how about this: one criterion is the degree of suffering or deprivation that you've experienced or that we've imposed (in our internment camps, e.g., or in disastrous wars we set in motion).

9:33 republican populism, where they start talking anti-wall-street, income inequality, and ceo pay, could be viable. i'm not sure that huckabee or santorum can quite carry it through this election.

9:27 the questions are really gratuitously hostile and nitpicking. you said this about him, etc. trump has taken to just saying 'no i didn't.' cnbc better watch it; they'll be killed on fox and talk radio for the next two weeks.

9:18 carson: "the pc culture is destroying this nation." well...irritating it, certainly. or me, at least. perhaps not our very worst prob, though, even on my account.

9:12 kasich has some pretty intense facial tics, clumsy mannerisms, rheumy eyes, etc.

9:09 carly has some 'squishy totalitarianism" on board: big government consolidates power in every dimension, especially economic.

9:06 on an earlier exchange; rubio kind of crushed jeb on the idea that rubio missing votes is a probem "someone told you that you should say that; you're only saying that because we're running for the same office." only too true.

9:03 carson unresponsive on drug profiteering. i don't know that he has any real policy moves.

8:59 mets 0 royals 0; wizards 65 magic 69; spurs 49 thunder 45.

8:53 gonna be honest, though, rubio is the only one i can really picture as president. well, perhaps christie. that's not a matter of whom i like. but eg paul just doesn't eyeball like a commander in chief, sadly.

8:49 paul: "right and left are spending us into oblivion." i'm going to go for 'light and reft' from now on.

8:46 cruz is pretty chubby. pretty nice killing the cnbc panel though; kinda of a virtuoso performance. they have been quite trying to embarrass the candidates and set them against each other. the panel is trying to make news. they're envious of megyn kelly. 

8:41 there just are too many people on the stage: rand and huckabee have not even participated.

8:31 trump's attacks, this time on kasich, just lurch into straightforward verbal abuse. kasich was bellowing, though. he has definitely been appointed attack dog on trump and carson, but i don't think he's a nominee.

8:27 hargrove to trump: "is this a comic book presidential campaign?" seems rather gratuitous. trump slaps back just fine of course.

8:25 but some of these people are better than they need to be: fiorina and christie, for example. oops rand's going to start a filibuster tomorrow on the debt.

8:20 awful lot of good sports on though. how many times will i listen to the idea that our greatest days are ahead?

6:19 but these four are extremely unprepossessing; santorum is the only one among them who makes a plausible presidential candidate. graham's war-mongering takes on the aspect of obsession; it's what he says in response to every question. what do i have to do to be rid of bobby jindal? oh wait: switch the channel.

yeah i'll be blogging the debate(s) tonight. may glance at the first one but will def take on the 8pm round.

A Sad, Shortsighted Species

I've been very sick the last couple of weeks. One course of pretty nasty antibiotics and I started to feel better and then wham! Back to the local Stop&Doc where I got the first prescription and the office, which serves a couple of hundred people daily. They couldn't find a substitute to cover while the normal guy took some vacation. We commiserated back and forth, since I needed help; and they -- four people -- were waiting for the word to close shop and 3/4s of a day's pay.

While this was a personal problem, it got me thinking. I've had 2-4 cases of strep throat and associated problems every year since before Crispin was born. Had the tonsils out when I was 20 and the idea that no more sore throats was a total lie. However, there was a lot less misery. Still, when it gets full blown, I'm pretty useless. More so than normal, according to some. 

On the other hand, I've never had smallpox, tetanus, swine flu, diphtheria, thyroid, tetanus, rabies, rubella, shingles, malaria, plague, anthrax or any of the other stuff I've been vaccinated for. Made me wonder why this is so...

So, channeling Phil Ochs, I wrote about it.   

 

warholiana

i was in pittsburgh over the weekend and went to the warhol museum. i might state my view of warhol as follows: really it's impossible to do the history of art of the last half century without him; he's foundational. now, on the other hand, i would say that i have experienced the images as sometimes amusing, but not interesting as images; just kind of a trick to very quickly change photos into paintings. it's very repetitive and the swathes of color thrown over the image never struck me aesthetically. (also of course the style of his images is utterly ubiquitous; has been for decades. i don't need to ever actually see one again.)

at any rate, i've heard several people say that they were converted finally to warhol by the museum, which is pretty darn cool, in an old dept store etc. and to a limited extent, that would be true of my experience. i would say, for example, that like a lot of people i was favorably impressed with the pre-pop materials, and they have paintings and drawings going back to the 40s, a fair amount of his fine commercial design, book jackets, and so on. he's very fresh and amusing and he can really draw.

now the weakest floor, by far, is dominated by the celebrity portraits of the 1970s. these are mechanically self-imitative; they lose all the sharpness and freshness and conceptual interest of the early pop images. i'd say that in this period, warhol was continuously fawning on celebrity (for example, that was the tone of interview magazine). the man's values are revealed in all their glittering emptiness, his mediocrity as a draughtsman etc is obvious. just speculating now, but the word 'cocaine' comes unbidden to my brain. it's like the most banal disco music, but you can't really dance to it.

 but i will also say this: moving back from the 70s/80s to the 60s makes you realize how sharp those early marilyns and elvises and jackies and maos were. it shows how well he was doing the style of warhol in the 60s, and actually i was more impressed with both the visual and conceptual quality of the earlier work  than i would have thought i'd be. 

[further notes: the 80s collaborations with basquiat are incoherent. the room of floating silver clouds is wonderful. my favorite work is probably the three-d packaging things: the brillo boxes etc. arthur danto wrote about them obsessively for decades, and i could see how one might (he also held that they killed art forever.)]

me on andy warhol and the persistence of postmodernism

 

dem deb

kind of fritzed out, i suppose. i agree with many: hillary did well. that thing about her enemies was good. i'm not sure how well bernie plays in the long run; he's pretty abrasive, kind of hectoring. but like a lot of people, i emerged from the debate slavishly devoted to lincoln chafee. it's like a cult out here.

9:40 bernie is improving; it'd be good if he could smile or something. this thing where climate change is our worst national security crisis is still horseshit, though.

9:27 actually, ww3 blooming in the middle east is going to end up swamping all other issues over the next few years. ps hillary, how in the world are we going to impose a no-fly zone on the russian airforce?

9:24 clinton makes a distinction between the putin regime and the medvedev presidency, which i guess is what she dealt with? she didn't underestimate putin, because he wasn't even in power, is her argument. it's pathetic.

9:20 common sense. common sense. they're like parrots. i think bernie may yell too much without sufficient dynamics. he needs to bring it down to conversational.

9:16 clinton is definitely scoring on bernie on guns. pretty direct. 

9:13 webb is kind of bizarre on affirmative action, supporting it but only for african-americans? then he's all like 'poor white folks! my people!'

9:10 o'malley is just not going to be able to sell baltimore as a success story, for heaven's sake. it's insane.

8:57 but sanders is ok. it's true you can sort of picture clinton as potus.

8:54 i think o'malley is going nowhere.

8:43 never ever be the recording artist singing the national anthem before the democratic debate, right, cheryl crow? good heavens.

8:37 kevin spacey is famous stuff that sucks.

8:33 i wish it was wolf blitzer rather than anderson cooper, who's kind of vague and blank.

yes! i'll blog the debate. if i was watching anyone, it might be webb. but he doesn't seem to want to be president; i'm not sure why he's 'running.'

war blooming like a flower

it looks more or less like russia will fully engage in the ground war in syria, with troops, etc. no doubt they can quickly transform the balance on the ground.

i've been listening to lindsey graham on cnn. his view is that russians are assembling a regional force - assad's alawites, iran, hezbollah - and launching a ground war to prop up assad. in short, "russians and shiites". then he gives this: the russians are sort of doing what i thought we should do: form a regional force (in this case saudi arabia, jordan, kurds, turkey). he said the russians will destroy everything we've tried to do, rip up various cia programs. (that appears to be accurate).

so this raises the specter of shiite/sunni regional war (already well underway) now driven by one non-local, christiany superpower on each side, or images of world war 3 blossoming out of the middle east. 

our policy has been insane, actually. we have fueled the sunni/shiite religious war by forcing a shiite/iranian regime on iraq, and we are de facto allied with the shiites of iran. and then we're trying to assemble a sunni force to take out isis, even as sunni regimes implicitly support and covertly fund isis. saudi arabia is running a savage bombing campaign in yemen with our materiel against iranian-backed rebels, etc. whatever obama says, we've essentially let assad proceed, hoping he'll take out isis; we've been 'coordinating' with assad, and with iran. and saudi arabia. and we have soaked the whole region in weaponry thoroughly and for a long time.

we even, i think, implicitly approved a russian intervention, until it started to become evident what shape it would take. we're arming and funding both or all sides, just as though we hope for maximum chaos and are intent on taking practical measures to achieve it.

i think this situation is something we fundamentally created or at a minimum made possible and set off, with policies of mind-boggling idiocy starting with the iraq invasion. the only hopeful thing i can think of is that we are too, um, chickenshit actually to commit ground troops, or actually to confront russia (on ukraine/crimea, all we did was yap, e.g.).

on the other hand we are very likely to have a republican president, and if it's anyone but paul, that pres is liable to be belligerent and intent on restoring american pride, superduperpower status, and so on. e.g. kasich in the last debate squarely portrayed a worldwide struggle between islam and 'jewish and christian values.' we're still not all that good at distinguishing between muslims. well, they might not be too swift at distinguishing among non-muslims.

you really could get a pretty direct spread into europe and europe is already engulfed by refugees and russian expansion. it is embroiled, and could easily become much more embroiled.

then there's israel. it wouldn't be shocking if they more or less approved of the conflict, or are taking measures to keep it going (we're doing the same, but our motives are not sensible; theirs would be watching their enemies destroy each other). i don't think we have a clear picture of what they're doing in syria. but i do know this: if there's a republican pres (again, other than rand paul), s/he will do whatever israel tells himmer to do. this is another way you might get a explosive expansion of an already explosive situation. why are republicans the servants of israel? wackily enough, because of a protestant christian interpretation of the apocalypse. plenty of islamists are throwing down the apocalypse too, oh and probably some jews are too. this may appear demented, and yet expecting armageddon seems a little less fantastic every day. a key factor in putin's regime is the revival of the russian orthodox church.  quite the complex little religious situation.

then again, perhaps israel is lending substantial support to assad and the russian incursion. astonishingly, their interests align somewhat with iran's. then again, maybe they are also helping sisi and the saudi royal family against their islamists. the israelis would be trying to keep the armed conflict or isis from washing up right on their border. it's close. what happens if it gets closer?

and the situation is even more complex than that, because you have intra-religious conflicts, christian on christian (usa v russia), and intra-sunni civil wars in afghanistan, egypt, and libya.

republicans love to say that iran is the world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism, but it's really sunnis who are reaching into the west with a constant dripdrip of terrorism. this is a way various countries including the usa, can get sucked in, or how the front comes to calgary and marseilles and adelaide and xinjiang and both birminghams. we've already pretended that we've been in a 'war on terror' for 14 years, and a spectacular attack (perhaps a couple of assassinations) would be one way we get sucked in fully to a real war.

so, if there's a world religious war, how does that comport with everyone's idea of what the shape of history looks like? remember last week, when it was obvious that we were all engaged together in a progress toward secularization, freedom, and so on? univocal, progressive, or teleological conceptions of history are simplistic, self-congratulatory, and false.

new country girls

here's my favorite song on the country charts in a while.

 

 

and let me recommend hailey whitters' album black sheep.

 

 

 

you only get one moment like 'girl in a country song,' but the maddie and tae album is pretty darn good.