cheese it, the cops!

OK, I Figured Out Gaslighting, but What the Hell is Cancel Culture?

i was glancing through the Times Literary Supplement when I saw a commentary that basically laid out Cancel Culture as bitched about by fans of Prince Harry and fans of the Traditional Experience. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were accused of being denizens of Cancel Culture, attempting to cancel the monarchy be saying it didn't matter anymore to them. That anyway seemed to be the way the Dons and Doyens we Yanks imagine wandering through the House of Lords. The Joe Strummer wannabe's found the bitching about the Sussexes be tossed in the maw of the great Kraken of Tory Cancel Culture...

My own thought is that Cancel Culture is a way for Right Wing twits to bitch about encroaching realities. Might be working against them -- when was the last time anyone mentioned Ayn Rand in normal conversation. Encroaching reality might be doing us a favor if it keeps forcing these folks into a smaller and smaller corner. 

However, through no real fault of the universe, I was presented with a couple of articles that addressed in different ways the actual role of Cancel Culture...one that has been around for a long time, since literacy and probably before that. 

The morning began with a tag from Downeaster Jeff Thompson, who is one of the more genuine and grounded of the former blogger occasionally stepping out but usually hanging out dropping logic and decency bombs in the role Facebook Malcontent Primo. Jeff was posting an article by Jacob Bacharach, a NGO manager probably because of the hours, a novelist and essayist of some merit, and most germane, a blogger that would get Swift to come down from heaven or up from hell to make an appearance. This was an appearance not of IOZ but of Jake, but it was absolutely great. 

The article appeared in The New Republic, to which I have now subscribed. What the hell, just something else I will probably not read all that much. The GEN X Cancel Culture Warriors Who Never Grew Up is well written and is worth reading just as an exercise in criticism. It also has some excellent points. I could fill a longer article than Crispin wants me to with just pieces of the work. This is one example that made me understand a bit...

There is also something regressive and a bit adolescent about this sort of thinking, as though all the cancel culture complainers long for are evenings at the debate club and late-night rap sessions full of grand philosophical gestures and free from the grotty pressures of real life. It may be why so many cancel culture critics are fixated on the college campuses they themselves have long since left. The concession and compromises of adulthood are rarely as fun or as heroic as the caffeinated debates of their youth, when they could say and do almost anything, parked in a beanbag chair in a red-brick dorm.These thinkers are unwilling or unable to grasp that debate alone cannot resolve many of the problems we face—climate, inequality, poverty, disease. They are not mere exercises. They are material and real, and they are immune to cleverness and outrageousness. They require solidarity and collective action as much as they require argument...

One of the other things that I read in passing usually is AEON which is a bit more intellectual and usually has an article about some philosophical issue, another about some aspect of social science or it's intersection with SCIENCE, which can be interesting as well as scary at times. Recently, Aeon began adding articles from PSYCHE which is oriented toward looking at just about anything from a psychological point of view -- scientific, social science, speculatory, historical or philosophical. 

This article dealt with the forbidden books and texts that are starting to come out the woodwork of academe.

Nailed it...Sideways!

I am not sure where Dave Barry's stuff normally appears, but the annual year end summary is always helpful in gaining perspective on the past year. It may not be a valid perspective, because he does still drink a lot of concoctions involving coconut oil, metamucil and Everclear, but it is a perspective. And, it is never wrong...in it's underlying themes. At times, I picture his son calling him on Christmas Day and asking if Dave could send him some of the shelf Levitra because like the old TV commercial that they used to watch during the Superbowl, he wants to make his passes go longer and straighter. He would start crying, and wonder why he thought leaving the Miami Herald for the Boise Gazette was a good idea...

It's a shame, really. Like most years, he should win the Pulitzer for best description of the Zeitgeist and myraid of rough beasts preparing to assault Jerusalem. He wrote:

"We’re trying to think of something nice to say about 2020.
Okay, here goes: Nobody got killed by the murder hornets. As far as we know.
That’s pretty much it.

"In the past, writing these annual reviews, we have said harsh things about previous years. We owe those years an apology. Compared to 2020, all previous years, even the Disco Era, were the golden age of human existence.

"This was a year of nonstop awfulness, a year when we kept saying it couldn’t possibly get worse, and it always did. This was a year in which our only moments of genuine, unadulterated happiness were when we were able to buy toilet paper."

So, Zeitgeist nailed. Read on those who can read. If you're Trump, have Eric and Don Jr draw pictures and have Ivanka write some one line explanations. "Remember March Daddeee? It sucked." Something like that.

The Sound of Silence Can Be Really a Lot Better Than the Make a Noise Approach

"We must go on as a nation, and as families. Of course you still love your uncle, even if he is bellowing about stolen elections at Christmas dinner, just as you love your sister-in-law even while she’s trying to ruin a wedding reception by holding forth on socialist saboteurs. But neither they nor the millions of other diehards deserve our engagement. The sooner we refuse to continue such conversations, the sooner we might return to being a serious nation. " -- Tom Nichols

Tom Nichols is a very interesting guy. He's a Professor at the Naval War College, writes books about things like why knowing what the hell you're doing is no longer considered important in this country, and writes for The Atlantic. He has made a point throughout his written career that he writes not in his role as a Professor at the Naval War College, but rather as a civilian-citizen who is exercising his freedom of speech. Not that what he writes is really so controversial; he just is shielding the institution and himself from people like the Trump administration.

 

He appears often on CNN, MSNBC and PBS. I caught him last night, and when this particular article was referenced in Veterans Today, I wanted to share it immediately the contrast between media makes me think it should be worth reading for everyone. . It's one of the best arguments I have seen lately for the idea of silence when talking is not a productive strategy. Or, as Marcus Aurelius puts it, "Having no opinion is always an option."

 

He acknowledges that it's probably going to be hard; we are a nation of talkers, and free expression is kind of in our DNA. Except, when there is no sense to the conversation. Should I find myself on a panel someplace discussing the election, you can expect me to be as opinionated as possible. I don't forsee that happening, by the way. But, why do I want to argue about Trump when I'm buying a cheeseburger or with my neighbor right after greeting him with "Merry Christmas?"

 

There's an old joke that's really apropos here. "Don't wrestle with a pig. It will annoy the pig, and you'll get dirty." I'm certain that many of them feel the same way about us, by the way. Silence can work for all of us here...

 

 

If the ultimate Existential Marxist thinks Existentialists are whining wimps and Marxists are delusional pussies...

The idea that there has to be an author of a joke is properly paranoiac: it means that there has to be an “Other of the Other,” of the anonymous symbolic order, as if the very unfathomable contingent generative power of language has to be personalized, located into an agent who controls it and secretly pulls the strings. This is why, from the theological perspective, God is the ultimate jokester. -- Slavoj Zizek, The role of jokes in becoming-man of the apes,  MIT Press, Cambridge, 2018.

Been on a bit of a hiatus from writing and reading anything other than noir mysteries and Cthulhu...writing and thinking about the what's going on in the world is just too depressing. Maybe Trump will decide to stop the fires in the Amazon by nuking Brazil. Maybe he'll decide to issue bounties on dead migrants trying to "sneak into" the country. Maybe the next time he leaves the White House he will declare himself King and Captain Underpants simultaneously, and drop his pants in front of the press, not remembering that he went commando that day...

Anyway, I was sitting in a restaurant waiting for the steaks to arrive and ignoring my wife while glancing at my smart phone -- which says a lot about me, her and the world in general, I guess, when I say my bi-weekly copy of the highlights from MIT Press. Glancing at the contents I thought, "I ought to read that, and I ought to read that, and...'5 Jokes from Slavoj Zizek?' Zizek wrote 5 jokes? And a book about them..." 

You see, I've been trying to read Zizek for years. I find him incredibly difficult to read...and yet, I continue to read his work. There are just aspects of it that make me want to get what the hell he's talking about and be able to explain it. I've listened to him speak, and it reminds me of the better profs I took philosophy from -- humor, subtlety, madness, commitment, a bit of gentleness and a lot of passion. Then, he gets involved with Kant for 200 pages about 2 pages about 15 or so words. This is why I find it hard to read him. Yet I keep reading.

 

Well, actually, that's academic philosophy in a nutshell. Crispin disagrees, (as he should, being a tenured professor of philosophy at a school that tried to fire him for complaining about being plagiarized by an academic professor of philosophy at another university in a non-academic philosopher way. He thought, as any rational or "Irrational Man" would think, that his response was not directed at here as a threat but as a cri de coeur about the absurdity of modern academic publishing and reputations and all the rest. If you listen to that song, by Miranda Lambert or by Fred Eaglesmith you don't hear anger -- you hear fear, frustration, and despair. Of course, the other professor felt that this was threatening and degrading and racist and sexist and probably a threat to her own sexuality. Or something. Complained to her chair, who complained to Crispin's Dean who...well, it went on from there. Crispin is still working and still sending out tweets and facebook posts and still muttering under his breath.) Actually, he probably agrees with me...

Face it. Zizek is a highly respected respected academic philosopher who gets away with this stuff because he's a highly respected academic philosopher in Europe, where people know not to take him literally, but seriously. Crispin operates in a world that is bureaucratic and bizarre and does it well for the most part. If Zizek came to spend a semester at Yuppie-Wannabes On the Brandywine with Crispin, they'd both end up in jail. I would definitely send them cake with blocks of C4 in them; and, they would probably eat the C4, being actual philosophers as well as academic philosophers, and having no idea what the hell it was anyway. 

Note: Top, Giacometti, Head on a bolt; bottom, Giacometti, Le Chat

 

What if Donald Trump is really the Joker but with as a result of inbreeding just has a lower IQ?

Just wondering about a few things. 

My latest piece of at Veterans News Today. We're kind of banned by Facebook these days, and I'm ok with that. It seems pretty clear that while we all must be insane to think that writing for an alternative media independent and intentionally unbridled will in any way accomplish or gain anything. Hell, we don't even get T-shirts.

“Logicians have but ill defined /As rational, the human kind; Reason, they say, belongs to man,/But let them prove it, if they can. Wise Aristotle and Smiglesius,/By ratiocinations specious, Have strove to prove with great precision,/With definition and division, Homo est ratione præditum;/But, for my soul, I cannot credit ’em. And must, in spite of them, maintain/That man and all his ways are vain;  And that this boasted lord of nature/ Is both a weak and erring creature. That instinct is a surer guide /Than reason-boasting mortals pride; And, that brute beasts are far before ’em…” Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1697

Enjoy, and Slainte!

The Age of the Imbecile...

O' beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie -- Don Henley, End of the Innocence, 1989 

"I’d bet you’ve thought, shaking your head and muttering, something like: “Jesus. We live in an age of impossibly catastrophic stupid.”You’re not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the financial crisis, something happened — an old story began to be rewritten, as the world found itself poorer once again. There was an explosion, somewhere deep in the human heart, and a tsunami rippled across the globe — one boiling and bubbling with every imaginable variety of stupid: human folly, gleeful ignorance, self-destructive greed, reckless spite, dim-witted cruelty parading itself as enlightenment.And so now a tsunami of imbecility is rolling like a slow-motion thermonuclear bomb across the globe. Lightning bolts of foolishness shiver down it. Smoke clouds of idiocy billow from it. Here are the five kinds of stupid wrecking the globe — because your first job, these days, as a human being, is to make sure you’re not being turned into an imbecile by this wave of stupid, too". -- Umair Haque, Eudamonia, 3/4/2019

One of the tons of weightless, mass-less but still existent things that cross my field of vision daily is Medium. I like it, because it gives me access to a wide variety of interesting stuff. Kind of a Daily Kos/ Huffington Post for people who have a bit broader perspective. And one of the things I enjoy and learn from is the work of Umair Haque, who seems to be occupying an intellectual space not all that different from Kierkegaard's or Schumpeter or I don't know...Hunter S. Thompson. 

I'd never heard of the guy, and started reading him because he was echoing things I thought, which is scary. Then I googled him...turns out the guy is a highly respected management guru with a meta-view. Which, when you think of it, is a rarity. Now, perhaps sort of a bit of humanist eschatology, which is an interesting concept in itself.

 

Folks  who are neck deep in the struggle to make the world a more humane and human place might gain from his perspective or might find it annoying. Good on you. But, I think that even people trying to save the world might occasionally need a slightly contrarian buzz. As for the rest of us, I think countering the age of the imbecile is a pretty laudable exercise. 

 

I don't know where I want to go with this, but I think it's something people who think about the things they think about can find a better place to put the lever. Invite comments, thoughts, and suggestions...

 

So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason. -- "On Banning Bokonon" Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

 

Apropos, perhaps? 

 

 

And deep in Miller's Cave...

Dark old cave, Miller's Cave...

Way down in the state of Georgia/ among the swamps and everglades / there's a big hole in Tiger Mountain/ God help the man who gets lost in Miller's Cave...

Sometimes I think that Wolf Country should relocate to Miller's Cave...

"Of course, our grotesquerie of a president decided that it was horrible that these disasters keep piling up, stoked by a combination of overheated rhetoric, totally unhinged and evil behavior, and perhaps the full moon were detracting from his many accomplishments like…crashing the stock market? Threatening the Federal Reserve, supposedly telling the Chairman not to raise rates or he would get even; then, ok-ing the largest bond action to get over the known monster deficit his beloved tax disaster — err, law — shot in the Federal coffers." 

https://www.veteransnewsreport.com/2018/11/02/dispatches-from-wolf-country-memento-mori/

All together now...Traitor! Poltroon!

New post over at Veterans News Report. We probably should be getting the petitions ready for Trump after his return from Helsinki. Will he withdraw from NATO? WTO? Insult Finland? Give Alaska back to Russia with apologies? Piss on the covers of his bed if they put him in Buckingham Palace? 

Look, Russia invaded our country by interfering the election and has been engaged in information and cyber warfare against us and our allies for at least a decade. Trump is doing everything possible to cover that up and let them have an expressway into the next election. It's treason in effect; it certainly violates the espionage act and a variety of other things. We need to start saying that out loud. 

Look, the things that made America a world wide power weren't an isolated economy and military power. It was when we stepped up in 1941 through 2012 and tried to lead the world through a leadership based on principles of liberal democracy as opposed to Realpolitik, selfish national interest, and greed. When we violated those principles, we ran into problems…and on a world stage, problems tend to play out over generations if not centuries. So, if you are crafting an overarching policy for governing a great world power, "don’t do stupid things!" would be a great first principle. This administration instead has an overarching policy of "Abe Lincoln was a Republican...I bet you didn't know that!"

So if you are wearing a MAGA hat, I suspect you’ve already stopped reading my stuff, where ever I link it or post it, so read some history of the US involvement in Iran, Cuba and Latin America, and Mexico instead. Read Mark Bowen’s “Blackhawk Down” and “Tet.” Read Ralph Peters’ series of US civil war novels. Get some perspective that doesn’t include ditto signs. Read some collections of George Wills’ writings, some Ralph Meacham, Sandberg’s Lincoln. Read the history of the US constitution. Get a bit more knowledge and maybe even some perspective. If nothing else, try to be an informed, loyal and situationally aware American.

Kissing the collective asses of Putin, Xe, and Kim probably is certainly not the way to make or keep America great.

"Do you think about the things you do think about?"

 

The title is from some dialogue in Inherit the Wind, the great 50s play and 60s film ostensibly about the Scopes trial but really about the freedom of thought and expression. Lots of lessons for us, and if you haven't seen the film or read the play, you are missing a treat. I believe that line was lifted verbatim from the trial record. Clarence Darrow, denied by the court of using expert witnesses to justify his client's teaching of evolution, put Williams Jennings Bryan on the stand as an expert on the bible and in a marvelous display of his skills, puts the Bryan and establishment position to shame. In this small bit of dialogue, the Bryan character says that "I do not think about the things I don't think about?" Crowd erupts! Yea, Christianity. Toss the lousy science teacher to the lions! 

In the film, Spencer Tracy played the Darrow character, and he looks up and asks " Do you think about the things you do think about?" 

This is intended as a way of kicking off a bit of a thought experiment. Both Crispin and I have thought for years that the real advantage to a blog is the possibility of learning. It can be a dynamic conversation, as people reflect on issues and experiences. Lots of it has degenerated since the glory years of the medium. Here's an attempt to start one again, here where I was forced by a prickly weirdo philosopher to start thinking critically and reflecting critically more than a decade ago. 

The attached article is my first part of a discussion of John Kelly, General, United States Marine Corps and the recent debacles he's been part of and often leading in the West Wing. I have some theories based on my knowledge and experience of people like Kelly. Irish-Catholic, old patriotic American men in positions of authority and transformation called to face the fact that, to steal a line from Casey Stengel by way of Jimmy Breslin, the answer to "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game." often is "No." 

 

There is nothing unique about what's happening in this mess. Far from it; my boots share some of the same shit Kelly now has on his and if you hang around long enough in leadership roles or advisory roles you'll have it too. The possibility in this case is that this case blows up that sort of People-Processes-Protocols-Procedures-Organizational Dynamics-Learning-Communications-Ethics nexus so we can see it. Not unlike what Plato did in The Republic, taking the question of individual ethics and blowing it up into political science. Looking for the ideal state and finding something like a steroidal Sparta says more about Plato than it does about the thought experiment. 

So, please take a second to read my piece from Veterans News Today and just think about the Kelly thing. What have we learned from this about how things that seem so simple go so wrong? What is the key underlying failure here and how does it relate to similar situations where this sort of mud has splattered on your boots --Crispy's famous last stand for the academic freedom to quote Miranda Lambert comes to mind -- and what should we learn from thinking about this? Put your thoughts into the comments here since Vets has gotten weird about comments pages. If you wish, drop me a note at [email protected] because I'd like to know what people think, not just about my failed stabs at brilliance but about thinking about thinking about what you're thinking about. 

New Wolf Country Post

New post. Gratuitous although relevant Doors music. Shakespeare. List of Russian Movies on Afghanistan. General Character assassination of Trump, although there's really not that much to assassinate. Call for Jesus to Smite Mike Pence. Normal Wednesday here in Wolf Country.

 

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/08/23/dispatches-from-wolf-country-idiots-sound-fury-go/

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

 

Let's invade Afghanistan again, it worked real good last time! Oh, that's right, we're still there!

New post. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Outsiders have trying that over and over and over with Afghanistan since Alexander the Great, and it didn't work all that well any of them.

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/05/19/not-a-particularly-bright-future/

To hold the center and help the idiot in charge not to screw it up!

 

Well, I suspect we might see a US civil war at some point in  the future, probably brought on in part by this morass of utter incompetent and deranged bullshit. Definitely, Madison and Hamilton never envisioned a Donald Trump except locked in Bedlam...

One thing I will say is that H.R. McMaster has one of the most thankless and impossible jobs in Washington. Thank God Stephen Miller is writing Trump's speech for the Islamic leaders. That should be interesting, he seems like a nice person to do that.  

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/05/18/dispatches-from-wolf-country-henry-viii-or-johnny-lackland/

That Monkey is tied, so let's skin him!

 

Seriously, this started out about a column in The Stone on this morning's Times Op Ed page about whether or not Bo Diddley was a Buddah...and it then morphed into Brian Williams stealing a  line from Leonard Cohen's First we'll take Manhattan and then TRUMP and then more stuff about blues music and improvisation and then Trump and then ...Olbermann? On Trump now being coherent in a false equivalency to a normal president because he's blowing shit up....

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by the birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line that's moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, I told you, I was one of those

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I don't like your fashion business mister
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin
I don't like what happened to my sister
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
Then we take Berlin, then we take Berlin

 

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

 

 

I don't write about the environment very often but when I do...

I don't write about the environment very often because when I do I usually get angry and then despair at how incredibly stupid we are. Seriously, it's time for the spiders, because we're useless drags on the universe. 

That said, when a bunch of people get in the room, watch a shit sandwich sign a piece of paper and then tell lies about how wonderful it's all going to be, and everybody in the room know that he's lying and ignorant and uninformed and that they're reinforcing this with their Mike Pence wide-eyed, Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love staring smiles, you either get angry about it or die. Even aesthetically, it's awful. Morally, ethically, policy-wise, governance wise, it's awful. Even when some of the victims are there, smiling...it's smug, stupid and alternately self-defeating. 

So, coal country and related debacles...

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Win A Man for all Seasons Dual Format (Blu-ray & DVD)

Trump tripping over Umberto Eco in The Guardian

I always found time to struggle through Umberto Eco's stuff, even though it was a hard day at the literary coal face. Most literary philosophers are like that, of course; Foucault's Pendulum really made my eyes ache, and as Wiki points out, Anthony Burgess said that it had so many arcane references and allusions that to get all the jokes, you needed an index. Or, a crib sheet. Cliff notes. A tutor...

But, it was always worth the work. Even if you weren't so sure as to what actually went on and how it happened, it was one helluva ride. So, it was nice to be reminded of that this morning when going through The Guardian I found this:

The great philosopher-novelist Umberto Eco once declared that we will always come up against “the hard core of Being” and the “lines of resistance” that tell us when we are talking rubbish, or acting nonsensically. There was a time when I wondered bleakly if Donald Trump may be exempt from this philosophical precept.

British political reporter and Guardian Journalist Matthew d'Ancona rattles more than a few chains in Trump's attic and cages in his basement. Muslim Exclusion Act is one part of Being's hard core; the AHCA versus ACA is another; and the whole NATO kerfuffle is another. At some point, the whole house of Cheese will just melt into the Dumpster Fire of his ID and his lackeys' ideological venom and self-dealing desires.

In business, I refer to it as having a great idea trip over a relevant fact. Stainless steel pipe is really spiffy, except when you're using it to handle salt water where it will eat through the metal and leak catastrophically faster than cancer through a colon. You can't get jet fuel out of peanut butter no matter how hard you try. You really can't roller skate in a buffalo herd. 

 

And, being President of a complex and multi-layered tripartite government is not the same as being the sole proprietor of a privately held firm. Nobody really has to listen to what you want in government; it's all fungible. You don't really have any privacy or the ability to just phone it in; when you do, something happens. When you get it wrong, people will notice. Smart people, with long memories, and not all that interested in trusting a con artist, poseur and hype-artist. People way smarter than you who remember insults and slights just as malevolently as you do, but wait for the proper time to get even. How much might  Lindsay Graham or  Ted Cruz enjoy casting the vote that impeaches his President and casts him out into darkness? 

D'Ancona finishes like this, no time for parades and an auto da fe' of Breitbart, Ivanka's lingerie line and The Art of the Deal. At least, not yet. But the time is coming...if you keep smashing into Being's hard core by tripping over facts including "You're not the boss of me and you're not so big" you may be forced to drag you orange ass back to that Florida swamp and hand out timeshares. 

To change the metaphor: the waves of Trump’s sociopathic belief that he can say and do what he likes with impunity are starting to hit the rocks of reality. There is nothing to celebrate yet, no cause to relax, no outcome assured. Let us just say that this may, conceivably, be the end of the beginning.

Amen, brother. Amen.

 

"You never know -- It might stop us"

 

Interesting article about Britain, English folk music and tradition, and in a way, about us. Stick in the Wheel is a relatively new English Folk Group, and started to wonder about the roots of English traditional music. Nicola Keary and Ian Keary are two members of the band and recorded a series of field recordings of traditional British music with a wide variety of the musicians currently practicing the art. They wrote the piece for the Guardian and it's well worth it. The resulting album, From Here, is being released today and is available as MP3 and CD from Amazon and others. 

The UK is at least as diverse a nation as we are, with many similar problems,  and we share a surprising number of anal-retentive characteristics. The Brits voted for BREXIT with less than half the electorate showing up and a lot of votes in favor of it just because they were pissed off at the seeming inability of government to cope and rather than blame it on themselves for electing the Tory wankers, they decided to blame the EU as the representative of all their woes.

The message of protest is often intrinsic or hidden. It has to be quietly subversive because our enemies are among us: our rulers and bosses

We, of course, had less than half the electorate show up and of that, less than half voted for Donald Trump. Our food, beer and dental work is superior; they have better schools for the most part and a functioning national health service, except they've shown in it and the other aspects of community life that if you want to have nice things as a nation, you need to spend the necessary money. Trump shares little with Margaret Thatcher except greed and basic deep-seated meanness. 

Why Nazi punching might be good for the soul

Why we should consider Nazi punching but only when they are doing Nazi things...like flashing White Power Gang Signs on Meet the Press with gratuitous Crispin Nazi Punching shout out, Pastor Niemoller axion, description of hate crimes as data points, kind of...and Camper Von Beethoven. Who doesn't love some Camper? 

 

 

Appointment in Pandemonium with Trump, LePen and Satan

From The Guardian Books Newsletter, January 26, 2017--Poem of the Week 

Slow Food

I would like to feed this child who is dying with slow food,
So that time might stand still for him, so that a grandfather
Clock might not fall apart in his arms. All of the laziness of air

In our warm temperate climate, all the anxious hands
Of young barristers at this morning’s Farmers’ Market,
All of this complete snobbery of the gut, might bear down

Upon one dying child. Here is my Euro, child. Here is
The olive oil and the stuffed artichoke. Here is the conscience
And the conscience money. They stole my land too,

They took my small cottage apart, stone by stone.
They surveyed all of us and we nearly died. I am sending, child,
Very fast Irish food from my evicted great grandmother.  --Thomas McCarthy, 2016

---

Reading this and seeing mental visions of pictures and faces and memorials, I also saw similarities to Alepo and Syria, and Israel and Palestine -- coffin ships, starving refugees seeking something probably inescapable, and a heritage of a horrid night and day...Pandemonium is the capital of Hell, and when the evil doers sit there and plot against heaven with fallen angels and demons, they'll be singing along with venture capitalists, factory farmers, religious bigots and imperialists throughout history. No one's heritage is clean...we should be better. 

So, not being a folk singer, I wrote this article.... We may be the cops of the world but we're really not very good at it. As with so much since the death of Truman, we may mean well but our efforts to make the world a better place end up in an orgy of negative masturbation, doing things that neither feel good nor accomplish anything meaningful. 

 

 

Merry Pre-Christmas What the Fuck!

 
I don’t know what to say here except there’s something for everyone, I supose. And that includes these hand-crafted Cthulhu sex toys by Necronomicox. How did these things come to be, you might ask? According to Necronomicox: “I saw a niche that needed to be filled, so to speak.”...Because in his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming masturbating, amirite? --- Dangerous Minds, 11-5-2016

As a sort of pseudo-journalist, I am temporarily homeless. Veterans Today and Veterans News Service are reorganizing, and I'm temporarily without a home for my Wolf Country Dispatchs. I hate to take up a lot of Crispin's space, so I'm looking for a temporary home...since I've always wondered if I might be somewhat unloved there because I'm not friendly to various wingnut batshit conspiracy theorists but...hell, it looks like the Batshit Conspiracy Theorists got it half right...

Anyway, one country's useful idiot is another's...President Elect. So, my thought is simple. I think everybody who has a vestigial fondness for the Constitution and American myth, should immediately send one of these sweaters to your favorite Republican weasel. The more Christian they claim to be and the less they indicate it by their beliefs, the better.

Is it the Batshit Old Bag on the committee that overseas the NLRB who hates unions and doesn't understand why workers want them? Great, she wears a large. Is it Paul Ryan, the Eddie Munster Look Alike Ayn Rand worshipper who has no clue about economics, economic theory, Catholic doctrine and teaching, or basic concepts of justice? He's a tall skinny weasel by comparison to the COSTCO bargain sized old broad so I'd say a large also. Is it Mitch McConnell, the useful Idiot who sold out American interests and autonomy to Russia so that Trump would be president? See if they have one with a turtle neck and get an extra large so the Turtle can just turtle his way into your heart.

And, if sweaters aren't your thing, there's always the Cthulhu dildo, which is appropriate for either gender in the GOP anti-American crusade. 

 

 

Is Mike Pence the one for whom grateful I should be?

New vets posts. Gratuitous Prince Tribute. Hamilton speech. Favorite Dylan. Alec Baldwin as Trump...Siri, how do I kill ISIS? Steroids. Putin. 

http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/11/21/gratitude-at-a-rolling-roil/

 

He begins to sense the walls closing in, his options limited, his power constrained. He wants to fly in his own jet and discovers that after January 20, that just isn’t going to happen. How can he be expected to fly in an airplane where his bathroom doesn’t have gold fixtures? He is no longer important; his office lends him what importance he has. It’s a different kettle of foie gras…

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhu_Ky85t24

Harkonnen as Trump conducts ill-fated tour of Trump Tower

If you're not familiar with Masha Gessen and you're interested in Russia and how autocracy works, you should be. She's a great writer and journalist. A Russian Jew and dual American citizen, she's lived much of her life in Russia, working as as journalist through the fall of the Soviet Union through Yeltsin and the rise of Putin and the Oligarachs. Her work appears in the Times, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Daily Beat, the Atlantic and any place intelligent people argue about exactly how the world is ending, fire or water. She's written about Putin based on both her journalistic reporting and one hell of scaring paternalistic intervention into her career; about Pussy Riot and the band's meaning; about the Boston Bombing and aftermath; and a recent book about a well-meaning Stalinist attempt to resettle Jews in Siberia. She's a talented, brave and uncompromising talent and spokesperson. 

In a recent article right after the election, Masha published a guide to surviving the Trump whatever the hell the next four years are going to be.  I'm writing about Trump and the inter-regnum with a calmer mind after reading her work here. She has basically five rules for surviving the Autocrat with mind, integrity and sanity still in tact. I've used my last two pieces to discuss the first two rules. They are: 

1.Believe the Autocrat.  A more elegant writer than I, she doesn't put it this way but -- No matter how completely the statement uttered as policy is illiterate, ill considered, at odds with the facts on the ground and the general laws of god, nature, physics, mathematics and aesthetics, doesn't mean the rabid wombat who has taken control  doesn't fully intend to do it. Think Mao deciding to make everybody build small blast furnaces in the courtyards of their buildings and thus triple the output of steel overnight...or Stalin, deciding to imprison or execute everybody in the senior ranks of the Army because he had a bad dream and figured he'd let the dialectic sort out the sheep from the goats. Or Trump saying he doesn't want to live in the White House...Fifth Avenue is going to never be the same. I'm not sure where Trump is going to rank on the lunatic-sociopath-psychopath-schizophrenic-bi-polar autocrat scale. I'm thinking of equating him with God in the theory that God is 80% malevolent but only 20% effective. 

Poetry, Myth, Southern Rock, Politics, Trump

 

One of the projects Crispin and I have been putting off until he's in the witness protection program here in California is our own musical-poetical-satirical-philosophical unified field theory. Fuck Einstein, our's will work. Here's my latest stab at it from over at Veterans News Now or where ever they're putting my stuff...

http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/09/28/more-mid-week-blues/

 

 

Birds are just cheap imitations of dinosaurs...can you get herpes by touching the Donald...

Congratulations Crispin. Truth, justice and the American way triumph...understand you can say whatever you want to now about whatever you want to say, so long as it is in classic Greek with stones in your mouth. Way to go...

I'm not sure if I'm channeling Louis Ferdinand Celine or Lewis Black in this latest post for Veterans News Service, but I'm providing it for your consideration. Warning, it contains inappropriate juxtaposition of Yeats and Donald Trump. 

As Guy Clark wrote in The South Coast of Texas, “Living on the edge of the waters of the world calls for the dignity of whooping cranes and the likes of Gilbert Roland.” Instead, we’re offered the mortgage broker who lost his license and runs Hispanics for Trump and his concerns about Taco Trucks, and pigeons. (I feel compelled to state almost unequivocally, that there is no truth to the assertion that the meat in Trump Towers Chicken Taco Salad is a mix of pigeon and sea gull, any more than the beef taco is rat.)

 

Just sitting around waiting to die at the wheel of my Citroen!

 
Reading the morning email from The Economist, I discovered to my amazement that the Israelis have a problem besides the personality transplant on back order for Bibi Netanyahou. (Should note that Typepad's suggested spelling for Bibi's last name was "Hootenanny.") Seems that they have a small reactor we gave them for experimentation purposes which is being decommissioned as it should be because it's outlived it's usefulness. Then, there's a bigger one out in the Negev desert that doesn't produce anything except plutonium and similar stuff...and it's a year younger than Barrack Obama. The recommended retirement age for one of these things is 40 years; this one is 53 years old. 

What the hell, what could go wrong? Well, it's worth pointing out that the reactor was made in France in the 50s...I for one wouldn't be all that excited about depending on the well-known French quality engineering system that existed 70 years or so ago. Wine, bread, cheese, sausage, cider--they have that down. But, nuclear reactors? 

Would you want to have your children's future depend on the equivalent of a '58 Citroen?

There's more discussion of it here... 

 

 

 

 

The Running Kind...Kind of

 

After reading an article in the New Yorker that seemed to confuse Merle Haggard with Jean Paul Belmondo and maybe Johnny Holiday, I gave up. Lucinda Williams recommended a piece and that made me think it might be really possible to still communicate authentically in English. So, while this is kind of a review of the writer's piece, it's really my tribute. Haggard was a lot of things but one thing no one ever accused him of to his face, anyway, was being some kind of auteur. So, in a probably misguided attempt at authenticity...Melancholy Honkytonk.

 

Being authentic and honest has it's dangers and downsides -- ask Crispin -- but if you work at it, you might be surprised a bit. Maybe even in a good way. --Mike

Of talking llamas and Caesar and Rick and Vivian

 

I've been reading Mary Beards, SPQR-AHistory of Rome and it is fantastic. Imagine that you are public intellectual and on TV a reporter asks a little girl "Who do you want to be when you grow up?" and the girl just beams and smiles and says, "Mary Beard." Not Duchess Kate? Somewhere, a unicorn may have died, but I think the English Women's Rugby Team will continue to put the Men's Team to shame. 

I was having a bit of writer's block and came upon a piece on Premier Guitar. Their Chief Content Officer, whatever the hell that is that's different from Managing Editor, Shawn Hammond had a great piece about shoulder devils and guardian angels and what to do when you are hearing a constant refrain of "You suck..."in your head. He recommends watching "The Young Ones" which might work for most people...especially if somehow you missed Rick and Vivian and Alexi and the Boys raising hell on BBC or PBS. 

Anyway, I went through a couple of re-writes -- I never re-write; Crispin gave me a C- on a post just to get me to proof-read and edit, and produced this - part review of Beard's really good book; part discussion of her most key point, at least for me -- Rome provides a context and a model for us, but don't look there for solutions. We're on our own here, and trying to do a double envelopment like Hannibal at Cannae won't help with DAESH. 

 

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.   

 

A Duck will kick your ass if you're not careful!

 

Been wondering what will happen to the nation and the world and your 401K and the Mets when Boehner is gone and the guy who wants to invade Syria takes the gavel as the Speaker of the House? Well, in general, everything is fucked. 

My friend Eric Garland and I semi-collaborated on this piece that points out how sad it is that the departure of Boehner in KMAGYOYO moment inspired by the Pope saying, "Pray for me. You're fucked." or whatever he said, inspires not joy in Mudville but absolute...nausea. 

Yes, the Republican Party is now the tree in Nausea. Sartre. Read it. You'll never read another philosophical novel again. However, you can still be happy if you've a mind too...