cheese it, the cops!

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Odd how things fall apart as the center folds in on itself and the falcon shits on your scrap of paper. The hell with Yeats. 

I remember these many decades later listening like a good little Catholic boy as my 8th Grade teacher and the school principal, Sister Mary Louis, read Dulce et Decorum to us in class. An Irish immigrant Franciscan nun, she had lost an uncle at the Somme, a cousin at the GPO, and a second cousin to the Black and Tans. Gave her an odd attitude toward it all...which I guess I caught. She also made me read Aristotle. This was an odd punishment at 13. 

 

So, I blame myself on the mixed influence of Kaiser Wilhelm, Winston Churchill, Michael Collins and Padraic Pearse. 

 

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/07/29/dispatches-from-wolf-country-dulce-et-decorum/

second part of a very lively and substantive discussion with dan kaufman about 'entanglements.'

 

 

micro-solutions

as you know, i've come up with a simple solution for cultural appropriation: just avoid the words or aesthetic products of minority and oppressed groups. (or it would be simple, if figuring who belongs to what groups were simple). now i propose to address the scourge of micro-aggressions. the hard part of dealing with micro-aggressions from the point of view of straight white guy is that they're unconscious; we don't even know we're doing it. that certainly is going to make it hard to stop. we can start stopping by becoming self-conscious and stilted in all conversations with gay people, black people, latino people, women and otherwise gendered people - in short almost everyone. but it's not enough. the obvious solution is simply not to address such people at all unless absolutely necessary, and then in a few clipped words. with other people who identify as straight white men, i will be my bold, free-wheeling self; i say what i think, and laugh heartily and make mistakes, etc. i will greet everyone else with completely emotionally neutral silence. if absolutely necessary, a few extremely polite words at most, with an extremely curtailed repertoire of gestures. this of course will prevent me from knowing them at all, or they me, or from participating in any sort of community that is not a community of white straight men. ah, but who cares, you know? i'm more comfortable with white guys anyway. i just want to stop oppressing people. 

me talking to dan kaufman on sophia & meaningoflife.tv.

 

 

violence, violins, silence

one thing about 'science': surprisingly, the word seems to turn off all critical reasoning faculties. but of course you have to like the conclusion; then any argument is a good enough argument, as in this tissue of strange fallacies by lisa feldman barrett in the new york times, arguing that speech can be violence and that she has a scientific basis for distinguishing speech that is from speech that isn't.  

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

the argument runs like this: what causes physical harm is violence. stress causes physical harm. words can cause stress. so words can be violence. as usual, the neurology does nothing at all, especially if you already knew that stress can cause physical harm. but it describes the harm: stress = violence shrinks telomeres. so i wonder what else shrinks telomeres; it's all violence.

seriously, boiling down the argument, it's this: doing anything that stresses someone out is assault.  think about that for just a minute, alright? 

zz

watcha listenin to, crispy? zz ward's new album the storm. she will sell millions, or at any rate she ought to.

 

(that fantastic negrito is fantastic.) alright, first off, i love the genre location: i'd call it roots pop. there are all sorts of trad elements, including soul, blues, early hip hop, perhaps just a touch of country here and there. this is how i think popular music should develop, venerating the tradition and using it, but also pushing it forward, so it sounds like now. i'd compare zz's approach to, say, robert cray in the '80s: oh that is definitely the soul blues, and that is definitely right now too, and it sounds great on the radio. there are all kinds of contemporary production touches on the album, and they are not at all in tension with the songs or the voice: the stuff sounds great.

zz is about the singingest motherfucker you ever heard, and to some extent she emulates adele's approach: big love and heartbreak songs, showstopping voice. i love the timbre, which can be rough or smooth, flying or growling. her first album when the casket drops, is also wonderful.

 

i'd say the new album is a bit more commercial, and also the lyrics are less interesting (here we've got 'you better do it like it's 25 to life'), which is part of the headed-to-platinum approach. i've got no objection to commercial, however, and i say she should just go right on and you should buy her albums. that makes sense, because she has yet to record a clunker.

 

 

me in splicetoday this week, searching for the free world. america's 'leadership' is based on two things: the size of our economy and the power of our military. let justin trudeau rule narnia with the iron fist of love.

meanwhile, back at the ranch, the trump admin is going down. it should be pretty quick from here i think. 

day by day my commentary's on twitter, @crispinsartwell.

Papa's got a brand new mixed bag...

 

What do Trump, Washington and Jefferson all have in common? All three trusted treasonous and greedy senior military officers.

At what temperature and humidity will an active human being working constantly actually cook? 105F and 100 humidity. 

Why'd the Russian chick cross 5th Avenue? Suborn treason and possibly get her parking validated after getting a Taco Bowl in Trump tower.

Like I said, a mixed bag in a new post.

Oh, and I actually like Haim. Guess I need to seek help -- seek out

.

 

 

Go to Sodom and Gomorroh, what do you care, aint nobody there'd want to marry your sister!

I was working on a different piece, wanting to segue from Trump into some recent books about how generally awful war and diplomacy are when you have no idea as to what you want tor an outcome. However, I began by wondering if I was the only writer on the staff who wondered when the woke daily "what the hell has that idiot done now?" Tapped a vein...

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/07/04/dispatches-from-wolf-country-round-and-round-stumble-on/#1

There is some related, kind of, Mothers of Invention. 

Here is some always related Allison Moorer-Shelby Lynn from a joint project...

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/15/532936594/songs-we-love-shelby-lynne-allison-moorer-not-dark-yet

 

self-subordinated and deeply confused

perhaps donny's greatest accomplishment is revealing by provocation the bizarre, contradictory, and above all subservient ways that his opponents think about politics. check this showcase of fallacies, contradictions, and fantasies by the emotionally shattered yet sneeringly superior lawrence o'donnell.

first of all, he repeatedly uses the word 'we' to refer to donald trump; that is, he over and over again identifies donald trump as the american people, and includes himself in donald trump himself. that donald trump diddles around about climate change means that we do: it means to lawrence o'donnell that lawrence o'donnell himself is a climate change denier. that donald doesn't hold certain truths to be evident means that we don't, that o'donnell himself does not. we have a collective consciousness, and his name is trump, and that is on the account of his opponents. in other words, lawrence o'donnell is a nationalist who holds that we are all one person together, and that person is the president of the united states. that position is obviously dangerous gobbledygook, and yet he is also congratulating himself throughout on his own superior intelligence. just track the reference of 'we' through the monologue to see the bizarre, subservient belief system that leaves him in this condition of enraged bewilderment.

i challenge you or o'donnell to run through that monologue and draw from it a plausible or non-disastrous account of what o'donnell thinks trump is, and what he thinks he himself is.

then there is the material on 'truth' and the concept of 'self-evidence.' no, you doink, that carbon emissions cause climate change is not self-evident in the sense that the declaration of independence says that human equality is, even if the evidence is overwhelming. no assertion of science or truth produced by it is self-evident in this sense, or else research would not be necessary. no, 'the truth of barack obama's birth certificate' is not self-evident. that donald trump denies p or expresses doubt about it, or that 38% of americans do, does not in any way affect the truth or falsity of p. truth is not what 'we' 'collectively' believe, and what 'we' 'collectively' believe is not what out leaders say; nothing should be more obvious, and you know it very well: you've disagreed with your political opponents about matters of fact throughout your life, and you don't believe it if you don't take it to be true. your sort of reality melts away as soon as anyone dissents. let's say that 'reality' and 'truth' are matters of consensus. then there has never been any such thing as reality or truth. i know you think you can produce one by 'education,' by which you mean relentless indoctrination. have fun trying, i guess?

so it's on to 'we are so much better educated than they are,' just sheer grotesque elitism, to which his own tissue of fallacies and incoherences give the lie. whomever educated lawrence o'donnell, they destroyed the basic reasoning abilities with which he was born.

really, what i want to say, however, is that the notion that the president of the united states is all of us, or indeed any of us but himself, is a fantastical and wildly dangerous superstition, completely impossible to give a rational account of, and a mere expression of enthusiastic self-subordination. it's incessant though. one of my favorite columnists, kathleen parker, gives a version of it. she is embarrassed by the behavior of her nation (for the first time?) imagine barack obama wrestling a fox logo! oh i don't know, so what? donald trump is no more part of me or i part of him than i am part of genghis khan or kim kardashian or that philedendron over in the corner, alright?

if this whole thing has the effect of showing each person that they are not a nation or are not the government of the united states, that can't hurt. these folks really do imagine themselves as little faces who all together constitute the leviathan; together we are the president etc. show some pride, show some sense, etc. you're embarrassed simply because you are enthusiastically subordinated and now are so confused.

[once more i am going to show you that you do not believe that social consensus has any relation to what is real or what is true. thought experiment: by extreme indoctrination or chemical intervention or psycho-surgery, the fossil fuel industry produces complete unanimity on the claim that the planet is not warming at all, but growing colder. does that keep the ice caps intact, on your view?]

people who have freaked on trump for ragging mika apparently haven't noticed that she, like many others in the msm, has been hurling brutal but unimaginative and profoundly repetitive personal insults at trump for many months. (that's my splce column this week.) they have become what they purport to repudiate, except they aren't terribly good at it. here's cnn's ana navarro: “Listen, you crazy, lunatic, 70-year-old man-baby, stop it. You are now the president of the United States, the commander-in-chief, and you need to stop acting like a mean girl, because we just won’t take it.” that's part of her call for a return to civility. i'd be firing back too. cnn gets body-slammed, then 'just keeps doing our job,' half of which is actually reporting, the other half just a string of personal attacks on the man's sanity and so on. also, as the navarro shows, or mika's obsession with hand size, the attacks are relentlessly feminizing, showing that their emitters do regard it as degrading to be female. i'm surprised they haven't started in on 'he's so gay,' or tried racial slurs.

in their attempts to grapple with trump, they have become trump, without the flair or competence in ridicule. but even ana navarro or mika brzezinski are responsible for the things they themselves say. the defense will be the tried and true and infantile 'he started it.' p.s. that wwe vid is pretty darn funny. come back with little hands again, i guess, if that's all you've got.