cheese it, the cops!

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. 

 

 

dichotomies that suck

now that radical sunni islamism has a state, there is the potential for rival totalitarianisms to short-circuit all other political possibilities in a spiral of centralization. everyone is comfortable thinking about the world as a dichotomy, as in the fascist-communist squareoff of the 1930s, and in a way you're forced to take one intolerable side or the other. that's how people with seemingly decent values got sucked into being stalinists.

so, here we have people who are into decapitation and burning people alive or opening fire at a restaurant as against people who are attempting to put the whole world under surveillance, assassinate you with a drone strike, and arrange systematically the world economy into a hierarchy with themselves at the top. 

the relief for me is that i'm not in charge on either side. i can afford to flip everyone the bird until the roundups actually begin.

state formation

one account of what's going on with isis puts the blame on 'stateless' or 'ungoverned' areas (another traditional formulation is 'failed state'). that's where the danger is suposed to lie, where terror blooms. but, first, surely the problems of syria and iraq are basically fomented by oppressive/corrupt governements. and second, is provides a pretty good model of how states arise (obviously, it calls itself a state) a more realistic version than the just-so stories of a hobbes or locke. people don't band together for mutual protection; they band together for rapine and sack (or religious fanaticism, or both). then as they roll in, you face a choice: die/lose evertything, or declare your loyalty to the sackers. pretty easy choice. your loyalty will expressed as tribute/protectio/taxes. then you are under the gang's protection, and they will start to consolidate a base by providing social services as well as physical protection from themselves and others. that's how the crips behaved in la, e.g., or hamas in gaza, and i speculate that it is the origin of the political state.

Parable of the Dog Parks

Given the middle-eastern attitude toward dogs, am I working to be offensive here, or is it just gratutitous? I'm leaning toward appropriately, gratuitiously offensive...the whole area looks like a neglected dog park in some bankrupt city in Southern California anyway, so what the hell. In the immortal words to live by sung by that great American poet and channeler of all things Crispin Sartwell, Todd Snider, "Just because you think you're runnin' the place, that don't mean you're in charge..."

 

 

6:55 if you are anti-attack, you have a good advocate in the hearings in rand paul. quite a sharp and entirely rational series of skeptical questions. kerry came back ok, though.

incredible credibility

the worst argument for a syria strike is the one everybody's making: look, if the president draws a red line and there are no consequences, he looks feckless, etc; american credibility is at stake around the world. that's just macho super-power bullshit. if it's a terrible idea to do it, or it is liable to have disastrous results, or there's no clear reason to do it, and you do it anyway because of some shit you talked last year, you are really not making policy - much less war - on a reasonable basis. 

ok, ok, pretty slick

true, the syrian regime has engaged in monstrous acts of mass murder. but they do have some skills! seems like they brought down the nytimes site for a bit, and now they messed with a u.s. marine recruiting site. they posted this:

“Obama is a traitor who wants to put your lives in danger to rescue al-Qaeda insurgents,” according to the posting on the website, marines.com. “Marines, please take a look at what your comrades think about Obama’s alliance with al-Qaeda against Syria.”

now you have to admit that's pretty clever, putting right-wing obamaphobes in alliance with assad. throw in far-left anti-americans, and you have got an amazing coalition. somehow i feel it won't hang together, though.