Who Is IOZ?

Phi Beta Sucka

2009-11-24T13:11:00.004-05:00

Among the soi-disant sensibles of foreign policy jawboneration, you often find imponderables like Anne Applebaum's, in which she laments-without-lamenting that other major economic powers in the world refuse to act--that is the operative word, by the way, and it will appear again--like America's little fraternity brothers. Her worries are couched in the transparently false and wholly implausible claim that "America no longer wants to be the sole superpower. The American president no longer wants to be the leader of a sole superpower. Nobody else wants America to be the sole superpower, and, in fact, America cannot even afford to be the sole superpower." Well, perhaps we cannot even afford it, but even that's debatable given the willingness of others to bankroll our misendeavors. Failure to invade is the general diagnosis, and that's understandable. The only empires to earn the 20th-century designation, superpower, were the US and the USSR, and both were fond of blowing shit up and dictating to lesser powers just precisely what it was that they could do with their independence.

But that was then and this is now and water is water and east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. We find Applebaum, in response to the EU naming a couple of apparently compentent but unknown (relatively) technocratic types to major posts, avering:

Europe might have a new phone number, but when Obama calls, the person on the other end of the line will still be unable to act. "Europe" will not be a unified entity capable of coordinating a unified policy in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East, or anywhere else anytime soon. Europe cannot, in short, become America's full partner in foreign policy.

There's that pesky word again. But act how, precisely? In what capacity? This is even leaving aside any question of why a sane person or self-interested national entity would ever be anyone's full partner. Exit, Washington's ghost. "Europe" is a partially politically integrated economic union that has yet to quite work out a Supremancy Clause, but even when it does, that is no guarantee that will choose to join us in barelling around the china shop.

Speaking of China, it equally befuddles Anne:

Europe, when counted as a single entity, is still the world's largest economy. China, whatever else it might be, is still the world's fastest-growing economy. Sooner or later, the simple need to defend their economic interests might persuade one or both to start taking the outside world more seriously.

If you're not killing them, deposing their governments, or occupying their countries, you're not taking them seriously. In defense of its economic interests, China has made economic partnerships. This is evidently working out in China's favor. (Incidentally, it also seems to be working out in Africa's favor, far more so than the more pious, less remunerative lectures from the so-called West.) Applebaum finds that "China appears uninterested in joining an international campaign against terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or anything else." Yeah, and it won't sign our petition to expand casual Fridays to the Thursday prior when the Friday is a Federal holiday that the office has off either! It won't invest in this promising swampland with me! It said that this thin and poorly-documented prospectus promising 20% annual returns looked too good to be true! It seemed like it hesitated when I asked if this dress makes my ass look fat!

Si j'ose dire

2009-11-23T14:59:00.003-05:00

You know. I do not grant Christ Hitchens' premise that the US Army doesn't deliberately kill civilians. The "deliberately" is pure casuistry. It's a semantic backdoor through which a hugely spurious assumption squeezes its fat, ugly ass: namely, that if an act (i.e. aerial bombardment) with a known end (i.e. the death of civilian bystanders) is undertaken for a purpose (i.e. killing the #3 man in Terror!) that is distinct but not separable from that end, then the morally dubious outcome (civilian death) is defensible because we did not mean for it to happen even though we knew it was going to happen. But you know what, I am a generous man. Let us grant the premise, for argumentation. The US Military does not "deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact[.]"

Well, even thus granted, it remains an immense non sequitur! Radical Muslims are more incensed by America killing Muslims than by other Radical Muslims killing Muslims. Stop. The. Fucking. Presses. What is the argument here? That a religious radical should be more upset by suicide bombings? And then . . . what, precisely? What the fuck are we still doing in Afghanistan, Christopher?

It seems to me that Terror War hawks are desperate to pin Islamoradicalism or what have you on Nidal Hasan in order to prove a point about the necessity of their war, when it seems to me that no matter how you slice it (and for the record, I believe that Hasan's crimes were "religiously motivated", insofar as the phrase has any meaning), you circle back to the same question. What the fuck are we still doing in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Fuck it: grant that Islam is itself a deranged form of religious psychopathy. How the fuck do you defeat a terrorism with a billion adherents? What on earth are any of these people talking about?

Major Hasan is an object lesson not in the failures of some fictitious multicultural boondoggle, but in the fallacious premises underlying the whole notion of a War on Terrorism. It demonstrates the elaborately retarded fraud at the heart of it. It shows not that we court problems by tolerating Islam, but simply that it is not possible to prevent those bent on committing violent acts from committing them 100% of the time. It demonstrates that you cannot eliminate the application of violent tactics at home or abroad through the application of military force in other countries. It shows the fallacy of absolute security. Men exist and guns are real. In the absence of time machines or mass extinction events, these genies are out of their fucking lamps. I mean, I am all for turning the Hasan rampage into a mock parable about the inscrutable nature of evil in the world, but for once can we get a grip? If the acts of the army in Afghanistan can be permitted no bearing on the acts of Major Hasan in Texas, then is not the inverse true? And if so, then what? What?

Vay-Cay

2009-11-23T12:13:00.003-05:00

Light posting this week due to the celebration of the successful genocide of the aboriginal population of North America. Every time an American says "this is what it would be like if the Nazis had won the war," a Native American chuckles mordantly. Preparations this year include:

Mustard and peppercorn rolled rare leg of lamb with roasted root vegetables
Potato gratin with Gruyère and Brenta, dusted with nutmeg
Warm potato salad with toasted cumin seeds
Farro with braised leeks and citrus-coriander dressing
Raw, sweetened cranberry and tangerine chutney with cayenne
Two savory fritatti, one with pancetta, one with sweet red pepper
Celery salad with shallot-cardomom vinaigrette
Green lentils simmered with prosciutto butt, with shaved Parmigiano Reggiano
Fresh, small rustic cross loaves
Cheeses, meats, and olives n shit
Sweets via potluck

But I will still try top pop in here from time to time.

A Delirious Man

2009-11-23T09:18:00.004-05:00

I too will confess to you that your right hand will save you. Behold now the Behemoth that I have made with you; he eats grass like cattle. Behold now his strength is in his loins and his power is in the navel of his belly. His tail hardens like a cedar; the sinews of his testicles are knit together. His limbs are as strong as copper, his bones as a load of iron. His is the first of God's ways; [only] his Maker can draw His sword [against him]. For the mountains bear food for him, and all the beasts of the field play there. Does he lie under the shadows, in the covert of the reeds and the swamp? Do the shadows cover him as his shadow? Do the willows of the brook surround him? Behold, he plunders the river, and [he] does not harden; he trusts that he will draw the Jordan into his mouth. With His eyes He will take him; with snares He will puncture his nostrils. Can you pull the leviathan with a harpoon, or press down his tongue with a rope? Can you insert a fishhook into his nose, or pierce his jaw with a barb? Will he offer much supplication to you, or will he speak soft words to you? Will he make a covenant with you? Will you take him as a lifelong slave? Will you play with him like a bird or tie him to your maidens? Will charmers dig pits for him? Will they divide him among the merchants? Will you fulfill [your desire] to make a tent of his skin or a shade of fishes of his head? Put your hand over him; remember the battle, do not stop.

-Iyov, 40: 14-32

The Book of Job may have borne more exegesis and commentary than any other in Tanakh, so it's worth nothing what a fantastical shaggy-dog story it really is. It's tempting to read it as a tale of temptation, although it plays in odd inverse: rather than offering Job the world to renounce God; The Adversary, (that's Satan, sort of, to you goyim) is allowed to strip the worldly goods and comforts away from Job in order that he make his renunciation. Then follows a series of debates in which Jobs friends stop by to offer him earnest but almost wholly useless thoughts and advice on the nature and ultimate resolution of his inscrutable predicament. Then God appears as a whirlwind, doses Job an a heavy sheet of sunshine acid, and describes in amazing technicolor detail what it is like to be the creator of the universe, complete with a couple of extraordinary, beautiful, and deeply weird science-fiction space monsters, the Behemoth and Leviathan. Job is rewarded for his fidelity with increased riches, a new family by his largely off-stage wife, and long life.

Now the Coen Brothers have gone and made a kind of pastiche of the Job tale in A Serious Man. When was the last time I so enjoyed such a miserable movie? Likewise a shaggy story, in which a not-quite-prosperous Jewish everyman is afflicted for apparently no reason by a series of inscrutable misfortunes, some of them minor, some of them operatic in their intensity, the film seems to have befuddled even many approving critics, in part, I believe, because they just don't get the capricious and insane Jewish God. The Coens have always enjoyed afflicting their characters in a manner positively redolent of old Hashem, and here, since it is actually (evidently) The Name himself fucking with everyone, they allow themselves wide latitude. The God of the Old Testament, as Christians might put it, is not the dotty old man of popular imagination, nor the loving Jesus, nor even the militant hall monitor of the nouveau Protestant imagination, but an ancient and primitive tribal deity, not even the radical monotheist of later minting, but a being just half-removed from the crowded pantheon of the primordial Near East, a God who doesn't just get angry at the Israelites for the Golden Calf, for instance, but has Moses send the faithful Levites to kill 3,000 of them pour décourager les autres.

Larry Gopnick, the beset professor and Job-manqué, is played with the requisite lack of verve by Michael Stuhlbarb, and Richard Kind plays closeted, overweight, cyst-draining Uncle Arthur, whose "Mentaculus," a madman's kabbalistic diary that turns out to by an Uncertainty-defying gambling prophecy, is one of the great jokes of the movie--plays Arthur with real pathos. There is a moment, though it may only be a dream, when Arthur cries out that God has given Larry (who is at this point well into his own misfortunes and living in a motel) everything and given him, Arthur, "shit," that actually rends the heart. George Wyner plays Rabbi Nachtner, "The Second Rabbi," who tells the best tale, a long and seemingly pointless parable of "The Goy's Teeth," a story so hilariously without a point or direction that it could take its place in Writings. A pot-smoking son, a hair-washing daughter, and Fred Melamed as Sy Abelman, the not-quite cuckolding suitor of Larry's wife, intoning musically, "This is no Manischewitz. This is a wine . . . a Bordeaux, Larry. Open it. Let it breathe" . . .

See it.

The Ratchet Effect: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lieberman

2009-11-19T15:26:00.004-05:00

Lieberman. You have to admire his tenacity. He cut himself an admirable deal. Senate leadership lets him run a committee and do whatever he wants, and in exchange, he willingly functions as a convenient scapegoat and target for ineffectual Progressive wrath, as they are constitutionally incapable of understanding that he is not an impediment to the Donk's grand plans, but a primary component. Indeed, if "Republicans apply the torque that turns the thing rightward [and] . . . Democrats are the pawl," then the likes of Lieberman (see also, Ben Nelson, the Blue Dogs, et al) are the teeth on the gear, which is to say, the sharp protrusions against which the Democratic pawl clicks to prevent backsliding. The wheel turns right; the Donk slips in; Lieberman cries "Across this line . . . you do not . . ."; and the Progressive internet goes bonkers and ignores the rest of the machine. Whether health care or the terror war. Doesn't matter. The effect is the same.

Now I am sure that good liberals everywhere will crow about Lieberman's hilariously useless hearings in which various and sundry cable news commentators haul up to Capitol Hill to weight in . . . weightily on Homegrown Terrorism or whatever. But of course everyone's interests are served. The interest of propagating the crackpot nomenclature of Islamofascism and suchlike is advanced. The interest of making the Donk and The Obama appear like reasonable proceduralists is advanced. The interest of giving the Elephant a forum in which to inveigh against the depredations of Political Correctness ("Hello, 1990s? This is Politics calling.") is advanced. Thus ever does the axle turn.

Hope Yet

2009-11-19T11:52:00.001-05:00

As I understand it, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have outlawed mammography and made abortion mandatory.

God Shed His Grace On Thee

2009-11-19T11:20:00.000-05:00

Welcome to your country.

The Donkey and the Hippopotamus

2009-11-19T10:23:00.003-05:00

I think I am going to side with Republicans on this one. Mais pourquoi ? Because let us hew to the law of least hypocrisy. If we are going to conduct a show trial, let's conduct a show trial. Regrettably, the Obama administration seems firmly dedicated to the rule that if it can be half-assed, it must be half-assed.

Leave aside the fact that these decisions are pure whim and fancy, based on no discernible principle. Leave aside the Attorney General's boilerplate prosecutorial insistence that a conviction with the maximum sentence is not only desirably, but inevitable. Leave aside all the back and forth about who will or will not have the opportunity to grandsand at trial, whatever form that trial takes. Concentrate instead on the Obama régime's ludicrous insistence that it carry through with a legal process whose outcome has no relevance except insofar as it could provide a superficial rationale for killing the defendant. That's what's at stake; it's all that's at stake. For all its insane bluster and hubris, our government is not comfortable simply putting the guy against a wall and shooting him. So. We go to trial. If convicted and sentenced to anything less than death, he will be imprisoned forever. If acquitted and not sentenced, he will be imprisoned forever. But if sentenced to death, well, see you at the party!

The Bush people appear almost admirable by comparison. Their military tribunals got bogged in a morass of internal power struggles and legal quibbling, but no one in that administration pretended that tribunals were anything other than what they were: an administrative sentencing process for the presumed guilty. Now that is a travesty, but at least it's a honest travesty, and certainly not without historic precedent in this and other countries. Indeed, one might even call it the civilized norm in the broad sweep of history. Meanwhile, in the present, we must endure the endless invocation of justice from those who would traduce the most basic, fundamental principles of legal due process even as they extol them.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations.

2009-11-18T12:38:00.002-05:00

This morning on the little hourly NPR newsbreak on the classical station, there was a brief piece on Obama-in-China, which after the usual boilerplate signed off by noting that China had rejected proposals for a "Group of Two" because China does not "enter into alliances." So here we are. Obama is deciding how many more troops to send to a colonial outback, while communist China hews to word and spirit of Washington's farewell address. I just can't stop smiling.

Twenty-Twelve-Step

2009-11-17T09:24:00.003-05:00

Well. 2012 is basically the sumnation of everything, a neat package in which Roland Emmerich reenacts Genesis 6-9 in the most hilariously overwrought of all possible ways. What does it say about our society that we can seamlessly create Himalaya-devouring tsunamis with digital magic but putting realistic cracks in the plaster is still beyond Hollywood's set dressers? The end is near, that's what. Anyway, uh, spoilers.

I expected a movie with no plot, but as the reviews have noted, the film suffers from a surfeit of plots. Every character has a back-story-and-a-half, and though it plys the usual American eschatology in which the end of the world plays as the orchestra under the operatic tale of familial reconciliation, there is something gleefully refreshing about the fact that it actually spends a great deal of time with the blended Cusack clan nowhere to be seen.

In the end, the Chinese, at the direction of the rest of the world, have built some big boats. "Arks!" As Oliver Platt says, "Leave it to the Chinese." Only they could build on such a scale. The boats are designed to withstand the force of the world-ending flood, and yet the gear mechanisms that close their doors can be jammed up by a 2" penumatic hose. "We can't engage the engines until we get a hard seal on the door!" cries the captain as they float on collision course toward the North Face of Everest. Did Cusack jam it up in the first place? Will he swim to the rescue? Reader, he will.

With three seconds left before the end, the Noble Black Scientist realizes that the billionaires whose bought admission to the boats he was only moments ago decrying as desperately unfair are going to be left behind to die, and he makes an impassioned plea to save them. Oliver Platt, a chief-of-staff type who's now in charge-ish, reminds him for the ten zillionth time that preserving a nucleus of human subjects is more important than the interest of fairness. This is a reasonable point, and that makes Platt the closest thing to evil, but Emmerich is in a forgiving mood, and no one in the movie is truly bad.

In the end, it turns out that Africa has survived the flood. Africa! Earlier in the film we see a few of the the two-of-every-animal (really!) brought aboard--giraffes, gorillas, rhinos. So, I guess that was a waste of helicopters, eh? I imagine the Africans, upon discovering that they, seemingly alone, have survived the cataclysm, can only respond with a hearty "Fuck yeah!" Until, of course, the boats full of white people show up. "Oh, hell no! Fooled us once, shame on you, but you . . . won't get fooled again!" Or, as my buddy put it on the walk back to the car, "Hello white people. Those are some nice boats. Would you like to see our bullets?"

The Truman Show

2009-11-16T10:55:00.001-05:00

You know, a more effective way to encourage the ends sought by E.J. Dionne would be to legalize patronage.

No. Woo peed on my rug.

2009-11-16T09:33:00.003-05:00

The Krugster really hates those damn Red Chinese.

So picture this: month after month of headlines juxtaposing soaring U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses with the suffering of unemployed American workers. If I were the Chinese government, I’d be really worried about that prospect.

Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they’ve taken to lecturing the United States, telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits — that is, to make our unemployment problem even worse.

Oh, the suffering of America's unemployed. The humanity!

Turnabout is fair play, and after years as a middling economic power enduring lectures from first-world free-traders, let me advance the following: China owes us a lecture or two in return. (And spare us, please, the irony of couching complaints about Chinese pedantry in a schoolmarmish column predicated on the notion that no one on the Central Committee ever took intro to macro.) The Chinese have a manufacturing economy, and the US remains giant net importer of goods. Also, there is the rest of the world: perfectly happy to buy Chinese.

And of course, the Chinese worry that they may shave a point off of growth, down to 7%, perhaps. We should only be so lucky. One quarter with stats like China's at its worst would get The Obama declared dictator-for-life by Mitch McConnell.

Gosford Jumps the Shark

2009-11-13T13:56:00.003-05:00

I mean, I guess so. "Conservatism argues that people with a healthy culture can form a happy society even with a poor structure of laws." That seems awfully idiosyncratic, doesn't it? Also, define "healthy culture." And "happy society." I think that conservativism argues that traditional (for which read: historical) socioeconomic hierarchies, patterns of property ownership, and distributions of labor preserve social order, that order creates harmony, and that the interests of order and harmony outweigh the interests of equity. I think conservativism is incoherent because it is a rump heir to the political defense of the privilege of a landed class that no longer exists. In other words, it appeals to an extinct social order that was largely maintained by limiting the private ownership of property, a system of wide-spread tenancy and dependency, even as so-called conservatives attempt to trasmogrify into a contemporary "free market" ideology in which everyone is a home-owning entrepreneur. The "traditional values" it espouses are at almost complete odds with its economic program, which is why you get such hilarious shit as broadsides against Hollywood decadence and popular music, or even more hilarious economic populism in which heartland morons, the elderly, and the infirm are persuaded to believe that transnational corporatism is the very definition of individual economic liberty. What strikes me most about conservativism is how thoroughly its adherents are convinced that they represent the best hopes of an enduring order when, really, they're already long out of date.

How to Hold an Election

2009-11-13T12:04:00.000-05:00

Carefully, your hands beneath, your arms
outstretched, your spine erect, your eyes cast down,
your mind dead set against its subtle charms,
your lips pursed in a narrow, angry frown,
your tongue prepared to form a bitter speech
denouncing what it was that you embraced
until true reason demonstrated each
belief you’d held deserved to be effaced,
forgone, forsworn, forgotten, then replaced
with what we sought through blowing up to teach,
firm-handed installation of the current taste
in civic social order, free of waste
like native culture, undisputed boon
if openly and freely held. And soon.

Loud Obbs

2009-11-12T13:06:00.003-05:00

Lou Dobbs, the comically overweight cartoon basset hound who saw his career resurrected when his character was recast in the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup, has died at age two hundred and seventy pounds. Interviewed at his residence, Cartoon Network president Jonathan Klein said, "Lou Dobbs was a human being. I don't think anyone would say otherwise."

Dobbs, best known for pronouncing it fry-joals, became a controversial figure due to claims about Mexicans. Barnum "Doc" Stanleyprznykowskinski, a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Dobbs devotee, summed up many fans' sentiments: "Ya knuh, I worked dahn the mill up till sentty-sicks, but they closed it dahn an at. So, ya knuh, den I gawda job up da hospuhtul. Nah um awna fixt income an at. Nah, dair ain all too many Mexuhcans in da burgh, but, ya knuh, yinz gawda look out fer yinz own, ya knuh?"

Dobbs will be laid in state at a Hoss' Family Restaurant outside of Washington, D.C. His will stipulates that his ashes be blessed by two priests, a rabbi, and the youngest living descendent of Walter Duranty before being scattered over the Rio Grande.

The Peace Race

2009-11-12T11:02:00.004-05:00

Lee-loo. Multipass.

-The Fifth Element

I like that The Obama's "four options" for Afghanistan are all the same option. I like the fact that he has bravely rejected any of the final four options in favor of finding a "compromise," a "hybrid." A fifth option? Barack Obama is calling audibles, yo. He's runnin' the wildcat offense! He's in the empty set. It's a reverse double onside punt fake kick passing lateral play.

These "classified cables" are a pretty hilarious shell game, too, aren't they? Uh, cables? What, uh, what year is this? "Hullo, Op'ratr? I need you to place a call to KLondike 1-2345! On the double! And Op,ratr, make sure you get off the line!"

I like that this man was the putative peace candidate.

It's Nature's Way of Deceiving You

2009-11-11T12:42:00.007-05:00

Technoutopian Greenocrats of the Thomas Friedman variety have this astonishing idea that if you just create a different model of growth, then you can hybridize consumption and conservation. Well, okay, sure. And my adorable little dog loves to eat her own poop.

So. Let us consult the ghost of elementary-school science class. In any system with finite resources, there are limits on growth, even where the resources are replaceable. Herbivores that overgraze will see their populations decline from unsustainable peaks even though the grass grows back. Predators that overhunt will see their populations decline despite the fact that the herd persists and has more calves. These are simple examples but illustrative of the regulatory mechanisms of natural equilibrium. Sometimes growth exceeds resources and there's dieback. Sometimes you get a few good rainy seasons and a glut of good grassland and the population rebounds quickly. Etc. and so forth.

But no system in which there are finite resources supports indefinite growth. The problem with this sort of Aspen-Institute vision of a world of Priuses and Whole-Foods-brand back-yard rainwater cisterns is that it works on the government model of increase: it calls projected future declines in growth cuts. Oh, if only we can slow the increase of . . . With increase, of course, remaining the operative word.

Now I think it may yet be possible for Brazil to find a way to economic prosperity without slashing and burning the rainforests for soy fields. But here is where 3rd-grade science fails. There's more than one vector here, and if Brazil uses less of this, it will use more of that . . . meanwhile, the fucking population continues to explode. To once again harp on a familiar theme, the problem we have is not that there are seven billion people consuming too much, but that there are seven billion people, and counting. I haven't got any proposed solution, but I'll tell you this: solar panels are not. Gonna. Fucking. Do it.

Armistice

2009-11-11T10:14:00.003-05:00

I'll tell you what. I may think the President is a bastard for whatever he's about to do in Afghanistan, but you certainly have to commend the guy for ending the war in and occupation of Iraq.

Sahaslisberger

2009-11-10T10:53:00.002-05:00

Now that was a fine damn game of pigskin. Best kind of hangover.

We tell say ^to ourselves stories stuff in order to because to live of morality

2009-11-10T09:50:00.008-05:00

Now this is a truly bizarre column by David Brooks. It begins by plagiarizing Didion. Indeed, his sub-White-Album White Album crib has the truest mark of plagiarism: it corrupts the original prose because it misses the point. I mean, Brooks is not actually a bad writer. He has a facility with language. He's no Montaigne, lord knows, but he's no Ross Douchehat either. And as a competent if unexciting writer, he could surely have cribbed Didion's famous opening paragraph without a dead giveaway, could have deftly appropriated her insights as his own. But, like many workmanlike yet inferior writers, he gets caught by the desire to write prose commensurable to that which he is trying not to copy, and in doing so clumsily appropriates an idiom even as he lazily seeks to invert its meaning. Brooks:

We’re all born late. We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re thrust into social conditions that we detest. Often, we react in ways we regret even while we’re doing them.

But unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves.

The stories we select help us, in turn, to interpret the world. They guide us to pay attention to certain things and ignore other things. They lead us to see certain things as sacred and other things as disgusting. They are the frameworks that shape our desires and goals. So while story selection may seem vague and intellectual, it’s actually very powerful. The most important power we have is the power to help select the lens through which we see reality.

Yeah, yeah, David Brooks. History is a nightmare from which you are trying to awake. Or, you know, something.

Now it's worth reflecting on what Didion wrote and David copied:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

On a merely stylistic level, you can see the effects of the bowdlerization. Brooks can't manage the rhythms, and he quickly runs out of words. "Things . . . other things." Oh, David.

Anyway, Brooks is looking for a "morally or politically serious nation." He wants to replace one totalizing narrative with another. The "conversation" he finds lacking is lacking in his estimation because it has not yet reached his preordained conclusion. The story of mental unbalance is too pat, says Brooks, too easy. We need to substitite . . . oh, how about a categorical? How about, "evil"? Which is neither pat nor easy, of course. Which is serious.

On Didion's side, she is writing about precisely the sort of radical alienation, ennui, and anomie that could, for instance, drive a man to shoot up an army base. Isn't that inconvenient! Meanwhile, someone at the Times should probably ask Davey to rewrite his term paper. By himself this time.

The Feeling of Power

2009-11-09T12:52:00.005-05:00

Now I am going to disagree with Prof Crispy when he writes:

so people do a lot of wrong things. "the west" does a lot of wrong things. it will lob a missile from a predator drone into your wedding, which looks like terrorism. and the evil of such things needs to be described and exposed bit by bit. but the logic is, for all that, utterly different: comprehensible even if wrong etc. both acts might be evil, even equally evil, but they are evil in fundamentally different ways. one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter is just wrong. no one is a freedom fighter in virtue of killing whoever happens to be present, victimizing people without any connection to a cause or comprehensible strategy for pushing it forward.

How does "[lobbing] a missile from a predator drone at a wedding party" serve "a cause or comprehensible strategy for pushing it forward"? I think the plain answer is: it doesn't, really. Or, it does, but not in the way that Crispin's text implies. And I think that no matter how far back you draw, how deftly and capably you examine the stated and unstated intentions of the "state actor" that was the ultimate cause of that predator drone firing that missile at that wedding party, no matter how capably you slice and dice the arguments from humanitarianism or the arguments from self-defense or the argument from economic self-interest (i.e., oil, pipelines, etc.), you end with actual actions, pardon the redundancy, that are "well beyond stupid," incomprehensible on any terms, even their own.

Now there are clearly differences between committing violence by proxy on behalf of the United States of America and committing violence by blowing oneself in the name of Allah and the Prophet and what have you, but I simply do not accept that these events are so fundamentally distinct as to constitute wholly separate teleological categories, which is where I think the Prof's argument inevitably ends up. The US and its allies are pursuing a hopeless mish-mosh of unarticulated and ineffible and wholly fantastic goals: regional hegemony, economic dominance, control of resources, humanitarian assistance, The Womyn!, some semblance of religious pluralism, democratization, universal franchise, freedom, whiskey, sexy. Well, okay. And the American state and its allies have constituted an armed hierearchy that gives orders down a long chain of command, at the end of which a bullet or bomb finds a body. Kaboom! The terrorist who blows himself up in a marketplace is the poor, sorry end of a similar, albeit much shorter, abstraction of violence from its source. So the terrorist does it for Mohammed and the soldier does it for Uncle Sam. So what? In the end, both sow sufficient violence, confusion, terror, and uncertainty that no opposing group can exercise meaningfully universal control.

Consider. What are we doing in Afghanistan? After all the dross has been peeled away, the most comprehensible, consistent, and coherent explanation remains: we are there to deny the Taliban and their allies control. Now it would be wonderful if Hamid Karzai discovered his inner Jeffersonian (well, Hamiltonian, but are we gonna split hairs?), but in the meantime, this is it. Rubber on the road. Deny the Taliban the country. Into the cracks and fissures around this goal flow such minor boons as the pipelines and the Womyn and the occasional stab at democracy. And what are our enemies but a mirror image, enacting violence and sowing chaos and dissension to deny America and its allies control. Into the cracks and fissures around this goal flow such minor boons as . . . It is mere attrition. To whom will the cost become too high first? The differences are all in the economies of scale. To America, it seems more sensible to use robots and missiles. To the Taliban, the terrorist, whomever, it seems more sensible to use people. There are more of them. They are eminently replacable--they can be manufactured with a minimum of infrastructure, you know? There is an old, classic Asimov story about a future society in which the long use of computers has denied man the knowledge of mathematics, until a hobbyist reverse engineers arithematic from the workings of the antique calculators that he builds for fun. The leaders of this society are overjoyed. They have been engaged in a long and costly interstellar war. But computers for missiles are so expensive, whereas a human pilot . . .

Extinction Suite

2009-11-09T10:10:00.005-05:00

The predictable players have come out to lament the insufficiently gaudy remembrance we give to the events of 1989. A relatively measured example:

There will be speeches and celebrations to mark this anniversary, but not as many as the day deserves. (Barack Obama couldn’t even fit a visit to Berlin into his schedule.) By rights, the Ninth of November should be a holiday across the Western world, celebrated with the kind of pomp and spectacle reserved for our own Independence Day.

Does this not strike you as odd? "Our failure to celebrate the downfall of Soviet Communism in the style of Soviet Communists reveals the shallowness of our devotion?" Uh, what?

The other complaint, of course, is that we have likewise failed to reify the monstrousness of Communist crimes, that we must work harder to fetishize the depredations of Lenin and Stalin as we have those of Hitler, so that . . . something. There seems to be a conviction that the ironical wearing of Che tee-shirts or hammer-and-sickle patches suggests some susceptibility in our youths, The Children, Who Are the Future, to the communist menace. Well, to that I say:

Future Bolsheviks.

Perhaps instead of tawdry self-congratulation, we might reflect on implacable nature historical processes. All is vanity. That sort of thing. The end of history. Ha! Are we still talking about that? Even Fukuyama quit worrying about it when someone told him about the Singularity. In the future, we'll all either be robots or dead. My money is on the latter.

The Bill Will Be Killed

2009-11-06T15:49:00.002-05:00

Here stated: Dana Milbank is a pompstrosity. Thus stipulated, this is snappy.

All of these truths I am about to reveal to you . . .

2009-11-06T11:31:00.003-05:00

What's even more hilarious about the mind-state, if I may modestly exaggerate, that La_Rana discovers at The Corner is that the circumlocutions are rationalized as necessity in our so-called politically correct culture. Like, if we say these racist things directly, then we will be accused of racism. But of course the authors at The Corner deny that the racist things they would otherwise say are racist. Which would make the potential accusations false. It's sort of the Conservative Bokononism: all of these racist things I am about to say to you are not racist. Anyway. In order to circumvent and head off accusations of racism, these dudes couch everything in this hilariously perambulatory language, which others read, translate, and then . . . use as a grounds to tell them that they're a bunch of racists. The Corner types then circle back, say, "Well, we never actually said [insert racist thing]," so your accusations are specious, and anywaya, even if we did say [insert racist thing], it would not be racism.

Traumedy

2009-11-06T09:34:00.005-05:00

Apparently there was violence on a military base. Well, my world is turned upside down. Maybe the major just confused the medical center with a wedding party.