Who Is IOZ?

In Spite Of

2009-07-13T15:48:00.003-04:00

Pittsburgh has been much in the news lately, from the Financial Times to Forbes to James Wolcott's appreciative love note, and let me just say that our success seems like powerful evidence that libertarians and minarchist types are proven totally wrong by our current success, as we have enjoyed, for the past three decades, nothing but the most astonishing competent, proactive, forward-looking, thrifty, and effective government. Under no circumstances should Pittsburgh's redevelopment be interpreted as the concerted effort of private citizens, foundations, and businesses to circumvent hopelessly flawed, facile, and half-witted county and municipal governments whose high officials are uniformly bent on frustrating and thwarting decent local endeavors in favor of pie-in-the-sky schemes. Were it not for the offices of the mayor and county executive, the departments of public works, building inspection, and safety . . . were it not for city and county council, for all the wise leadership, we would not be where we are today.

Supreme Questions, an Audenesque

2009-07-13T15:42:00.000-04:00

If you were an animal, Sonia,
what animal would you be?
A bear, a racoon,
a humpback whale,
a flea?
A tidewater heron or a garden snail?
A spoon-
bill, otter, sea worm, or anemone?
A fat and flower-sagging bumble-bee?
A kitten or a spider or a me?

A Snapshot, upon Return

2009-07-13T09:19:00.003-04:00

The past week brought the departure of Livia Sarah Palin Augusta from the Juneau Palatine, drawn heavenward, I am told, still alive in mortal flesh, on a flaming dogsled towed by a high-waled sleigh hitched to a Ford F-350 borne aloft by ten thousand giant peacocks and eight tiny reindeer and two hard-boiled eggs. It also brought stories of the departure of American troops from Iraq, which they have accomplished with their usual alacrity by not actually leaving, or, as Matthew Yglesias might put it, "perform[ing] their job with skill, and leaving Iraqi leaders with a handshake." Two events, in other words, that technically happened, and yet did not happen. Marshall McLuhan, eat Jean Baudrillard's heart out.

With all of these flocked non-departures--America from Iraq, Sarah Palin from the national scene--I am struck after my week-long hermitage mostly by the thoroughgoing asininity of events. America seems engaged, at the moment, in a vast and metaphysical contemplation of the unreal, object without aspect, effect without action, sense without input, and so forth and so on. I was afraid, I'll now admit, that the Obama era, even if prone to crisis (and what era isn't?), would bring a certain mellowing of the American Zeitgeist, a quieter and more circumspect American hegemon, a domestic political life composed of a million Clintonian "initiatives" packaged as reform. This has turned out not at all to be the case, as these early months of the new regime have seen a rededication to the rule and destruction of Abroad along with the greatest transfer of wealth ever, from private citizens to failed enterprises. Evidently we are now engaged in some sort of massive something-or-other in the arid south of Afghanistan, "the heart of the Taliban opium trade" as an NPR commenter had it (me, I thought it was only the point of origin, the heart being these United States); Obama is on the radio, reminding us that the bag of beans he gave us is not a bag of magic beans, that it will require two solid years of thickly spread bullshit as fertilizer before it sprouts; and today, Sonia Sotomayor, the heart-devouring, Amazon-priestess, Quetzalcoatlienne dominatrix of pre-hipster ethnic Brooklyn about to ascend the capital, where, like Molly Bloom, the Senate will speak a many-voiced monologue with no full stops until at last it says yes I will Yes

News of the Feared

2009-07-12T22:40:00.005-04:00

So today The Internet told me:

No further comment. See younz soon.

Gone Fishin'

2009-07-02T15:37:00.002-04:00

Leave a comment if Barack Obama's navel blossoms with a lotus flower and brings the Kali Yuga to a close, or whatever. Back on the twelfth, younz.

Dayenu

2009-07-02T11:20:00.003-04:00

He did not, to my recollection, participate too fervently in the endless ratcheting of the more, better Democrats movement, preferring to cultivate an image as a wonkish, though admittedly partisan, observer and commentator, but Matt Yglesias made the headline, so Matt Yglesias gets the infamy:

Why 60 Won't Mean Much

Hallelujah!

You may recall how the Donk protested its innocence back in the bygone days of Total Republican Dominance. Don't blame us!, the Donkle cried. Not even the traitorous quisling Jeffords in those heady, pre-9/11 times helped much with his defection to the Donk bosom. Then slowly, slowly, like the first mutant fish hauling its bony, wheezing body out of the slime and onto the sand, the Donk slipped back into power. But when it won Congress, it wasn't enough, and when it won even more Congress and the Presidency, it wasn't enough, and when at last it achieves sentience and launches Judgment Day on its unsuspecting, soft, human creators . . . still, it will not be enough.

In this regard, Democratic voters are really no different than the Rapture-ready Republican rubes they are ever-willing to mock as credulous fools, worshiping likewise at a church whose eschaton is ever-imminent but never-arriving.

Stay Out of Tegucigalpa, Lebowski

2009-07-01T11:42:00.004-04:00

There is a certain charm to the response, which moves feelingly, but could've used a continuity editor. In the first paragraph, it accuses us (the, uh, Who Is IOZ? community) of campus liberalism, which is understandable, given our fondness for tapestries on the dorm room walls. Of course, this is as far from a den of revolution, self-proclaimed or otherwise, as you can get, seeing as we counsel that the revolution is useless, defeat inevitable. The condition of man is to be ruled. Annoyance is the ultimate resistance. And cetera. I personally am not ready to fight for Latin America. I simply counsel that the United States, a corporation in which I am just a poor, extremely minor shareholder, not fight for Latin America either, indeed, that we leave Latin America alone.

In the second paragraph, Mr. Loomis declares that this aggression will not stand, man, and proclaims that the principle of preventing rightist rollback of leftist political gains to be "more important than this particular situation in Honduras," a curious complaint from a man who just a half-sentence before was parenthetically castigating his critics for their ignorance of "actual conditions in Latin America." Well, is it the particular or the universal that hold the day, the principle or the actual? I suspect the question remains unresolved in Mr. Loomis' brain. I suspect the question hasn't occurred to him. Meanwhile, the more pressing question, which motivated my first little foray, goes thunderously unanswered: I am still not sure what it means to say the coup cannot stand. Send in the Marines? Place your suggestions in the box.

In the third paragraph, Loomis ventures that I and others react poorly to criticisms of Castro and Chavez. Allowing that such reactionaries exist, so what? Whatever else you might say about those two, they are leftist, Latin-American-ish presidents . . . though presumably not the sort whose ousters Loomis would personally prohibit from standing. Or are they? In any case, it doesn't seem germane.

After this we return to Loomis' fanciful "world," whatever or whomever that may be, and his insistence that it not "allow the coup to succeed," again without pausing to take a breath and suggest just what this world is supposed to do about it. He then notes that President Zelaya is not "a real progressive leader," although Loomis, gosh, sure wishes that were the case, but in the meantime, what're'ya gonna do, vote Republican? He concludes with a clarion call. What happens in Honduras has no effect on the rest of the world, unless it happens, in which case, it will affect the rest of the world. Now that's clarity you can change your belief in.

Wooly-headed sentiments like these usually herald a dire case of the neoconservatives, for eventually the revolution can only ever be served by sending in the Marines. Meanwhile, the non-revolutionaries here at Who Is IOZ? advise only that the US stay the fuck away from Latin America, letting them fight their own wars and revolutions, rather than forever seeking to mold other peoples to our passing political whims.

Last, Best

2009-07-01T09:48:00.003-04:00

Today in 2009 we’re in a lot of ways back to where we were four years ago—able for American forces to start leaving on a high note, confident that they performed their job with skill, and leaving Iraqi leaders with a handshake.

-Matthew Yglesias

Or you could say that in 2009 a tactically exhausted and strategically impotent American army is beginning a pullback, leaving behind a million or two (it is a mark, a stain, a dishonor, a horror that we frankly have no idea) extra dead and displaced Iraqis under the rule of a gangster president who looks ever more like his predecessor, whose ouster we sought at the cost of those hundreds of thousands of lives. You could say that the "high note" on which we depart, having made the world safe for British Petroleum, consists of a level of daily terror and violence, both on behalf of the extant state and on behalf of the various insurgencies, hold-outs, rebels, extremists, and others, that would fracture and destroy any internally peaceful western society. The "job" performed so admirably by American forces was the unprovoked invasion and occupation of a foreign nation, and the fact that the American military has subsequently managed to mop much of the blood from the gutters does not obviate or abnegate these facts. Meanwhile the assurances from the leaders of the various Iraqi factions that it is all now a matter of political accommodation and hard bargaining between them reeks of misinformation. Here, for example, Qubad Talabani, the son of Iraq's new warlord-dictator, tells a series of self-serving and transparent fairy-tale lies to NPR's Scott Simon, who simply cannot imagine that that lovely Oxbridge voice could tell an untruth.

Here, then, you have a generational crime, an act of naked aggression rationalized post hoc as a regrettable and unnecessary event that nonetheless worked out . . . what? A little better than expected. This judgment seems to me to be wholly inaccurate, desperate, and immature. It marks not the glimmer of success but the abjectness of our failure that we comfort ourselves in knowing that the conquered province we leave behind is merely straining, rather than splitting, at the seams.

The Worst

2009-06-30T15:05:00.003-04:00

If uh had'n glamahhd dem widdinn an inch ah dey sanntee, den blah blah blah vampire stuff blah blah.

-Vampire Bill, True Blood

Regrettably, I must part ways with Dear Leader, with whom I share many cultural affinities, and declare True Blood, even more so than its predecessor/rough draft/plaster mold, Six Feet Under, to be dispositive on the question: is Alan Ball worse than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined, times one million, to the infinity power?

It is Ball's life's work to take a simple dramatic setup, tie it face down to a dirty, semen-crusted mattress, and continually rape its tender ass with a monstrous array of spiked, flanged, barbed symbolic dildos until the poor thing is so traumatized, so utterly dehumanized, beaten, and destroyed that it confuses the pain for pleasure and the criminal abuse for a kind of love, at last offering itself up to the Satanic Ball with a frightful willingness, allowing itself to be sacrificed in a ritual sexual murder to the horrible demonic gods to whom Ball long ago devoted the last black ounce of his sanguinary, bestial soul. Around his artistic charnel house, he has erected a Busby Berkly set of high-kicking, homosexual glamour-gays whose pastiche of a parody of camp distracts the audience from the screams within.

True Blood begins with a beach-book setup. There are vampires, and a very special, sexy young lady who can hear people's thoughts, except for the thoughts of her soon-to-be-beloved vampire, Bill. There is a lot of heavy-handed paralleling of the vampire quest to "come out of the coffin" and gay liberation, which like every other point of plot and character in the show is dispensed with for thousands of episodes at a time before resurfacing without explanation as the central driving force of a new plot line, which will moan its way to a fizzling orgasm like a sixteen-year-old getting a hand job before going home to do its homework, or whatever. I should take pains to say that I have no problem with vampires in pop culture, and if Anna Paquin and her heaving bosoms wish to badly impersonate the phonetic transcriptions of Remy LeBeau's cajun accent from the X-Men comix of my adolescence for a television show that continually forgets that, oh yeah, she is totally, like, also a psychic, then that, by god, is her right as a Canadian-born New Zealander living and working in these United States. If we as a country and I as a man are able to accord millions of dollars in box office revenue to the spectacle of Wesley Snipes and Kris fucking Kristofferson duking it out with Stephen Dorff and Udo holyshit Kier while house music from the worst fucking rave in the history of the reunified Germany hoots on like a bad car alarm in the background, then we can hardly bemoan the desecration of Nosferatu at the hands of Alan Ball.

In other words, it is not for reverence of the source material that we should hate this show, but for its total indifference to its own ridiculousness. From time to time, the show is aware of its own absurdity and seems about to make something of it, but then it forgets, just as it forgets that Sookie is a psychic until it . . . remembers. Sort of. The show now features no less than ten million vampires--they outnumber the actual townspeople of Bon Temps Looooooseeeeeeaaaaannna a billion to three, but also a man who can turn into a dog, a minotaur, and, I am not fucking kidding, Circe. Yes, that Circe. Also there is a sort of Fred Phelps Church of the NoMoreVampires, drug dealing, drug addiction . . . and a treasury of accents stolen from Robin Williams, locked in a cage, fed cocaine for twelve hours, and poked with a stick through the bars. HBO's vaunted production values are nowhere to be seen. An algal lagoon looks like a dirty Koi pond, and the poor film crew has been forced to light the sets with a table lamp and a pen-sized maglite.

But all of this . . . all of it would be forgivable were it not for the singular, cardinal failure at the center of this show, the great, monstrous dynamo of FAIL that powers its every creak and strain, heave and howl, and that is its utter insistence that given any situation in which even a hint of a choice exists, the character must behave in the most bone-headed, incorrect, foolish, transparently ex machina manner possible. Every single development of plot and character is arrived at by forcing a character to behave erroneously. The open-minded become suddenly suspicious; the suspicious become suddenly accepting; characters who know each other's most intimate secrets speak in obfuscatory riddles rather than giving each other plain information, even when the lives of their friends are obviously at stake! Of course, if everyone behaved rationally all the time there would be no show, no conflict, but since no one ever behaves rationally ever, there is simply an unending skein of narrative pratfalls, a string of Wile E. Coyote moments, an insane and incoherent series of set-piece scenes between which the Molechian Alan Ball and his writer-minions insert nonsensical dialogue that does nothing to further our understanding of characters because at long last, this show does not have any characters. It is the most titanically incompetent and god-awful television show ever created, and three million people watch it every week. I'll be tuning in. Will you?

You Mean, Coitus? Part One Zillion

2009-06-30T12:55:00.003-04:00

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Tuesday that he saw his Argentine mistress more times than previously disclosed, including what was to be a farewell meeting in New York chaperoned by a spiritual adviser soon after his wife found out about the affair.

A "trusted spiritual adviser." Like . . . an Irish monk?

Extraordinary Statement of the Day

2009-06-30T12:03:00.003-04:00

I usually oppose US intervention in Latin America. Certainly it has not gone too well in the past, to say the least. But this is a clear case of the Honduran elite class attacking democracy itself. It is not 1983 anymore and this kind of behavior is not acceptable. While Zelaya isn't such a great president, he was democratically elected and is clearly supported by a large percentage of the population. Plus, if the international community allows this coup to stand, the precedent is set that right-wing politicians and militaries can overthrow the new generation of left-leaning governments in Latin America without reprisal. Not allowing this precedent to take place is much more important than Honduras itself.

-Erik Loomis

I am not certain who this "international community" is supposed to be, nor what new "US intervention" Loomis' imagines will not "allow this coup to stand." But it is the last sentence of the above excerpt that most mystifies me. What on earth can it possibly mean? "Much more important than Honduras itself"?

Enhancements

2009-06-30T09:44:00.002-04:00

BOB GARFIELD: The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights says that waterboarding is torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross have called what the U.S. did “torture.” Waterboarding is unambiguously in violation of the International Convention on Torture, which has been ratified by 140-some countries.

It seems to me that the only people who think it’s a debate are the Bush Administration, who are the culprits. So how does that constituent a debate?

ALICIA SHEPARD: Well, there are two sides to the issue. And I'm not sure, why is it so important to call something torture? You know, when you describe the technique, I think that sounds like torture to me. Isn't it the job of the news media to put the facts out there, to give as much detailed information and to put it in context?

BOB GARFIELD: I put it to you that embracing a euphemism for torture validates a political position. You’re trying to be apolitical but, in fact, to embrace terms like “harsh interrogation tactics” instead of calling a thing by its name, in effect, gives credence to the Bush Administration’s argument, does it not?

ALICIA SHEPARD: Yes, I think it does. I think using terms like “harsh interrogation tactics” or “enhanced interrogation techniques” does validate the Bush Administration. So that’s why I said why not just describe it. I think when you detail something and explain specifically what it is, then the public can decide.

Via Greenwald, I discovered this hilarious and embarrassing foray into damage-control, an ironic sort of circumlocutory question-begging non-response to the proposition that NPR embraces official euphemisms for various acts of official barbarism. The nonpartisan newsmedia has tied a more-and-more Gordian knot in trying to conceptualize itself as a totally neutral non-quantity, neither animal nor vegetable nor mineral, shapelessness motionless in void, forever in never, amen, ad infinitum. I am particularly fond of NPR Ombudsperson Alicia Shepard's notion that "when you detail something and explain specifically what it is, then the public can decide."

There is, of course, a long-established and perfectly usable means of discussing as-yet unproven accusations of wrongdoing, which is to append the crime with the adjective, alleged. Even if one were to accept that NPR's most fervent aim is to avoid prejudicing the, ahem, public, lest Joe Sixpack hastily reach a conclusion without all due deliberation, it would seem that the proper way to describe American torture in this manner, which would avoid both euphemism and the appearance of prejudgment. Oh well. What's fun about Gordian knots is not the tying, but the hacking to pieces later on.

Dick Flick

2009-06-29T13:16:00.001-04:00

Every Monday, I go to The New Yorker hoping to find Anthony Lane, only to find David Denby. And I weep.

The Cremaster Cycle

2009-06-26T15:00:00.004-04:00

The New York Times has a nice chuckle at the expense of the Birchers, and, hell, the Birchers are pretty chuckleworthy at times. And yet, if you take "The Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Rothschilds," not as the literal rulers of mankind but as a sort of metonymy for the institutions of global State Capital, then frankly it doesn't sound so very crazy at all.

Perstroika

2009-06-26T10:03:00.004-04:00

This Krauthammer 40,000 column is so utterly and extraordinarily insane that it achieves a sort of majesty. Like the highest attainments of lyric poetry, it totally resists paraphrasis, and I urge you to read it all. Bref: Mir Hussein Moussavi could be Yeltsin . . . must be Yeltsin, once cast in the endless psychodrama that is the American version of world history as a bewildered Russian drunk with an occasional mean streak, now cast by Krauthammer as if he were the figure around which Russian popular protest coalesced to bring down the Soviet Union. Which, needless to say, is not what happened. Yeltsin did manage to beat back Communist recidivists, but then got himself mired in a two-year bitch-fugue with the Russian parliament, eventually calling in the tanks to shell the legislature into submission. Then he sold off the entire Russian economy to six former KGB agents and four members of the old politburo, drank himself silly, resigned, and effectively went into hiding. Vladimir Putin, the tiger-killing god-emperor of the steppe took over, and now notably occupies one of the prime spots in Krauthammer's personal gallery of villains.

The Krauthammerian takeaway: the most desirable outcome for Iran would be a momentary pseudodemocratic caesura followed by the rise to power of a truly brilliant and capable strongman who will with acumen, aplomb, and efficiency consolidate Iran's position as the preeminent regional power and a decidedly recalcitrant, revanchist player on the world stage. (To be fair: this seems to me as good an outcome as any, but by the prevailing Washington Post logic would represent absolute defeat and failure.) Seriously:

Unless Mousavi rises to it, or another rises in his place, Iran's democratic uprising will end not as Russia 1991, but as China 1989.

Now, twenty years later, Russia is "defying" . . . someone or other in Georgia, wagging its dick at the Ukraine, flipping off the EU, and in general causing nothing but trouble for the satellites and allies of the American hegemon. China, meanwhile, is bankrolling the West, producing cheap goods, and keeping US symphonies afloat by booking them to play goodwill tours in East Asia. If Iran's "Green Revolution" represents their own Tienanmen, then we might consider ourselves lucky . . . as might the Iranians, who in a mere generation could be the powerhouse economy of the near Orient.

Killer

2009-06-26T07:51:00.000-04:00

This is all I have to say about that.

Do as I Say

2009-06-25T09:34:00.003-04:00

It's perfectly, delightfully absurd to have Little Lord Obama, the Deuxième Dauphin, sniping at Iran's government for its democratic failings given the half-assed plebiscitory dictatorships America has thus far installed to the right of them and to the left of them. Such blithe hypocrisy is America's favorite dance step, and I am neither surprised nor the type to lament the inevitable damage to our . . . our what? Our legitimacy? Our standing? Our brand? Ever thus to deadbeats. And yet somehow one feels like . . . parents who, having discovered the teenager's pot stash, both punishes the poor boy and keeps the pot for themselves.

Call me Ishmael

2009-06-25T09:21:00.004-04:00

Now I know that Iran isn't part of "the Arab World" any more than India, Indonesia, or for that matter the United States are part of the Arab World. And Mona Eltahawy knows that Iran isn't part of the Arab World any more than Moldova, Azerbijan, Georgia, Tibet, Laos, Nicaragua, or French Guyana are part of the Arab World. But most of the readers of the Washington Post don't know this, which makes one wonder what agenda is served when Eltahawy so assiduously elides the distinction in the pages of the WaPo opinion section.

A Young, Trophy Governor . . . Owes Money All Over Town . . .

2009-06-25T08:27:00.001-04:00

He kidnapped himself.

I Would Ask For Y'Alls!

2009-06-24T14:29:00.002-04:00

Right now, even as I type, Mark Sanford is apologizing to Jesus for not telling him that he was gonna head down to Buenos Aires for . . . for what now? I know that whenever I go out, I leave . . . wait, he is fucking his Argentinian pen pal!

All Together Now

2009-06-24T12:20:00.003-04:00

As various western factions debate whether Iran is or is not a democracy, or is or is not in the process of becoming one, or mired forever as some sort of mishmashed autocratic theocracy or theocratic autocracy or theo-oligarchic dictatorship or military oligocracy or or or . . . it does us well to bear in mind that not one of these various régimes, Hitlers, enemies-of-order, terrorists, failed states, nemeses, adversaries, competitors, ad inf. exhibits anywhere near the hegemonizing, evangelical zeal of the club of Western democracies when it comes to their political institutions and variously scorned or vaunted ways of life. I'm not referring specifically to the American version of militarized neocolonialism in which foreign nations are forcibly conquered and occupied, their leaders deposed, their governments disassembled, and the whole thing reconstituted at gunpoint in some or other image of American Federalism, although that's certainly part of it. I'm referring instead to the broad philosophical and ideological commitment to "spreading democracy," from niggling hopes that the Chinese industrial economy will convert that nation to the doctrine of universal suffrage and 30-second campaign spots to the more romantic ideation of Iranian street protests as an early application for NATO membership and congressional seats in Brussels.

You might call it Democratic internationalism, and although it's gaudier by far, it bears a striking resemblance to its old nemesis, Soviet Communism. It stands in stark contrast, incidentally, to whatever on earth you'd call the Chinese system--whatever else you might say about the Chinese, they don't seem to have any designs on the American constitution. Our various scardeycats prattle fearfully about Islamofascism and its expansionist impulses, but while one can certainly find radical voices calling for the unification of the Ummah, even the wildest dreams of some new caliphate stop short of Cordoba, let alone Vienna, despite the fever dreams of The Internet's more entertaining madmen. Occasionally you will hear some American rightwinger or British nationalist averring that the Muslims are overrunning London, Paris, Marseilles, but even this doomsday is more a worry about displacement than conquest, a vaguely held fear that white folk are being outbred. There is no sense or evidence that Osama bin Laden wishes for America to convert and embrace the religion of the Prophet. The Taliban have no designs on Topeka. Yet you cannot say the US Congress has no plans for Karachi.

They're Gonna Kill that Poor Woman

2009-06-24T10:56:00.002-04:00

As America goes mad with grief and pity over the supposedly intolerable death of an Iranian woman in the chaos of the ongoing political protests, it is worth noting that our flying death robots are killing scores of people--guilty, innocent, dangerous, friendly, who knows? who cares!--all the time. Recalling this is, I believe, a necessary antidote to the temptation to view the Iranian uprising with a false optimism that sees our countries drawing nearer together, if only the revolution succeeds. Leaving aside the dubious victory claims of the Iranian opposition, the turth is that Iran, even as a pseudo-military theocratic autocracy, has never been an aggressor nation like the United States and its Western Allies, has indeed fought only one major conflict, the Iran-Iraq war, which was begun when Iraq invaded without warning, hoping to take advantage of the disarray of the Islamic Revolution, backed by, among others, these United States.

Gee, Twenty?

2009-06-24T07:15:00.002-04:00

I wonder, will Barack Obama be outraged by "threats and beatings" when they come to Pittsburgh in September?

We Are the World

2009-06-23T09:16:00.002-04:00

And, of course, the long and rich history of British imperial intervention in Persia does provide some support for the notion.

-Sir Marmalade Jellyknees Aloysius Ginnifer Hitchens, Escutcheon of the Upitstay, on Iran

This sentence leers like a drunk in the middle of an article on Iran's "primitive" paranoia, and one wonders why it was included at all. Caveats don't sit well in polemics, and anyway, like the saying goes, just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Yes, Iran has concocted a veritable treasury of foreign devils, ever meddling in their internal affairs. So too has the United States and its satellite Airstrip . . . with far less reason or historical justification. You can blame the Anglo-Saxons for the Shah, but you can hardly blame the Mullahs for Margaret Thatcher.

In the meantime, Christopher says:

There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons.

Our affairs indeed.

Let A Thousand Nicola Teslas Bloom

2009-06-23T07:42:00.003-04:00

"Morgan Jones, host of 'flamethrower' parties, pleads guilty."

Interesting to note that Mr. Jones lawyer was at pains to assure the court that Mr. Jones harbored no "anti-government sentiment." Why the absence or presence of such sentiment should be dispositive one way or other . . . Of course, I don't believe that our reptilian overlords can be brought down by revolutionary vigilantism, so I keep my flamethrowers, uh, to myself. In this new age of right-wing "terrorism" we must bear ever in mind the old Clintonian aphorism: you cannot claim to love your country while hating its government. Personally, I'm no great fan of either, although Pennsylvania is lovely at solstice time.