Howard Beale Street

Elitist in Chief

2008-07-30T17:33:00.007-04:00

Oh snap! Turn out the lights. This one's over, folks. Looks like an intrepid journalist just spotted a pair of $520 Ferragamo shoes on the feet of Presidential candidate Barack O...whatchootalkinaboutwillis?

They were worn by Don Juan McMaverick? WHOA! Whoa, whoa, whoa! What the...? I don't- Starting to feel woozy... Hold on now! No. Stop it. Stop! Wait just one straightalking minute! John McCain in sole-coddling Euro loafers? Does. Not. Compute. John McCain is a war hee-ro (because while trying to drop Napalm on civilians he got shot down and held captive by a bunch of gooks who did a bunch of nasty things that were once considered torture until a guy who once accused McStraighty of having an illegitimate black daughter started doing them, at which point The Straightness decided they were okay). John McCain is a man of the people, damn it! We know this because he has a ranch! Just like all the rest of us who own ranches! (Except he doesn't own a ranch.) Ah, fuck it! We all own new-age retreats in gated subdivisions in towns populated by aging hippie fascists.

Keep talking liberal media. We all know Barack Obama is the elititst in this campaign, because he was the coddled son of a Navy Admiral. D'oh! Because he cheated on his first wife then dumped her for a barely legal sugar mamita. Double d'oh! I mean because he went to an Ivy League school on a scholarship! Wait, there's nothing wrong with that. I hope my kid gets a scholarship to an Ivy, otherwise it's community college. No, wait, wait, I've got it. Barack Obama is an elitist because he's a Democrat. Ah...

Goodbye Abe, Goodbye Teddy

2008-07-30T15:57:00.007-04:00

Can we finally stop calling the Republicans a political party? Not that this kind of thing should shock anyone anymore. Wait a minute. It should shock people. People, wake up! Wake up, wake up, wake up! You vote for Republicans and this is what you get. But Obama is uppity, so...

Can we start a meme? Let's do that. Let's start one of them thar memes. It goes like this:

There is no more Republican Party. All that is left is a criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party.

Let's face it, if Honest Abe or that rabid fan of the National Parks system Roosevelt were alive today they would be Democrats. Liberal Democrats! You can bet their former Party would no longer have them, and the reason, in case I forgot to mention it, is that it is entirely populated by crooks!

Now, memorize the phrase criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party and use it as often and with as much gleeful malice as Republicans use the phrase Democrat Party. This is your mission. This is your time.

L'Esprit de l'Escalier

2008-07-26T04:32:00.008-04:00

In a series of mystical visions I encounter the 'gadflies and hornets' of our political culture ~

DAVID BRODER

I'm riding a bike around Washington and spot 'The Dean' going into Politics and Prose, no doubt with the intent of covertly dusting off his own neglected output. I call out as I pass, reminding him that he said of the Clintons, 'They came in here and they trashed the place, and it isn't their place.' And because 'You bastarding douchebag of a cunty old hack' doesn't quite capture it, I instead shout, 'You fatuous fascist. You fast fading flatulent gasbag. You fatuous flatulent fraud. Shut up, Broder. Broder, do you hear me? SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!!!' The Dean is startled by this unprovoked attack from a cyclist clad only in pajamas and spits up his Metamucil, like a baby who has been burped too hard.

Mission accomplished, I roll on, at ease but not at rest, never at rest. I know this was but one skirmish in a larger war. And so I gird myself for my next encounter with the banality of evil, available wherever the news is sold.

Panty Waste-ism

2008-07-26T02:37:00.010-04:00

Up on Kos right now is a diary titled God D*amn South Carolina. A heartfelt and compelling story about a miscarriage of justice. A young gay man was murdered by someone who got off with a 5 year sentence, suspended to 3. His killer will be eligible for parole in 10 months. 10 months for murder. Sorry, murder of a fag in South Carolina. So the author of the diary chose what in my estimation is a most appropriate title, if a little low key. Good gracious, he even bowdlerized "Damn" to "D*mn". I may not know what Dasteriskamn means, but I grew up in the South and as far as I'm concerned there are a baker's million of reasons to damn every former member of the Confederacy to hell for all eternity plus life, even ignoring this latest outrage. Et alors, motherfuckers, the diarist was more than justified in expressing himself the way he did. But this being Kos...

The aggrieved diarist was soon forced to update:

UPDATE: As I wrote in the comments, the title is aimed at a state government which would object with outrage to a gay tourism ad, but react with silence to this gross miscarriage of justice. I am not condemning the entire state, but rather, the government which allowed this to happen.

Which begs the question, Why the flip flop and fuck are Kossacks leaving comments in defense of South Carolina's honor? Is it because they imagine other Kossacks are so pig ignorant we might actually take the title literally and believe him to be damning - Jeremiah Wright-style - every member of the polity? Every last gun-toting, bible-thumping, flag-waving, wife-beating, cow-tipping, mouth-breathing, mullet-wearing, immigrant-bashing, fag-slaughtering one of them? Pishaw! We're far more sophisticated than that. Do the commenters really think we'd condemn an entire state by abusing the crudest of stereotypes? Double pishaw! We know better than that, my friends.

My question is, given that we know better, who are the servile little shits, the boot-quakers, ass-lickers and panty wastes who get so dern skeered about a Kos diarist besmirching the honor of a state whose greatest honor is firing the first shot in the Civil War? So skeered that they rush to warn the diarist he might be offending a few of the Palmetto State's more glaringly vacant minds? Who are these commenters and where and for how long have they been held captive by the Right's FARC of the mind? Because they display the classic signs of Democrat Stockholm Syndrome, defined in DSM-V as the need to see, sympathize with and sub-consciously support the Christian Falangist side of the argument, despite their own position being as reasonable and non-threatening as a rainbow-colored rabbit fucking a unicorn. I understand that the Overton Window has been moved so far to the right these last twenty years of Republican rule that once centrist or even center-right positions are now likely to be seen as quasi-Marxist by the corporate commentariat and the Entertainment Industrial Complex. But there is a reason Lenin thought it more important to kill Social Democrats than Monarchists. The former were the only force capable of undermining the revolution from within.

So I call bullshit on the captives of phony bipartisanship and Mutually Assured Disrespect. I call out the panty wastes and cowards. If they think the citizens of South Carolina are somehow better than the government they elected, let them install their sorry butts in Charleston - or better yet Spartanburg - and find out.

If we hope to move the Overton window back to the left (formerly the center) and our national conversation back to a potentially post-nationalist, post-chauvinist sweet spot of sanity, the last thing we need to be doing is hand-wringing over a diary title on Kos because it might upset the citizens of a state whose government considers a man's (homo)sexuality a mitigating circumstance in the trial of his murderer.

And honey, don't even get me started on the lynching that went on way back in the...oh snap! The twentieth century.

Tao Te Todd

2006-07-13T01:24:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking lately of writing a small book of wisdom. You know the kind: a wafer-thin assemblage of mind farts designed to "impart some of the lessons I've accrued here..." (The quote, Grasshopper, is from Rushmore. When you can watch this film without leaving a trace on the DVD player, then you will be ready to leave the Temple.)

Where was I? Ah, yes. I want to do my part, however humble, to improve humanity by advising it, as best I can in my capacity as a mortal with an average I(and E)Q, on how to make the earth a better place for all of us. A modest ambition, really. Not unlike Lao Tsu, who wrote the Tao Te Ching on his way out of China sometime around the 5th Century B.C.E.

You see, the Empire in which he lived (plus ca change!) was also full of shit, and he, like me (like you, dear reader?), could not take it anymore. So he moved to Canada. I mean Mongolia. Well, it may not have been called that then. I didn't major in Pre-Modern East Asian History. The point is he couldn't take it anymore, and since starting a progressive blog was not an option at that time, he up and left. However...one of the border guards was tipped off. Did he arrest Lao Tsu and put his skinny ass in Abu Ghraibuson? No. He knew Lao Tsu was a wise man, so he simply asked him if, on the way out, he wouldn't mind annotating a few pearls of you know what, something for the beleaguered guard to hang onto amid all the madness. And Lao Tsu, sweet fellow that he was, composed 81 brief chapters for that guardian of Empire. Next to the Sermon on the Mount, it may be the greatest explosion of humane common and uncommon sense in history. What's it all about? For the uninitiated, the Tao is a bit like Confucius minus the authoritarianism.

Anyhoos. I want to write something equally valuable, equally concise. Because let's face it, we live in times when so-called wise men, so-called statesmen are capable of bloviating for days without saying anything at all, at least not anything worth a damn. Maybe it's a liability issue - perhaps speaking the truth can get you sued, not for malpractice, but for practice. I don't know. I do know the Turks say, "Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages," and nobody needs that. Still, the truth is begging for our help. For my help. And I want to help. I want to help myself. I want to help you.

That's as far as I've gotten. The desire to help. I sit down to write, but it isn't easy knowing where to start. The baseness of contemporary politics and how we remedy that? No. Maybe greed, and how if we can overcome our avarice, we can finally create a world economic system that allows us to be good to one another and still keep our digital cable and (hydrogen powered) SUVs. No. It's got to be about religion, right? About how the left doesn't hate Jesus (although, let's face it, if this poor, oppressed, Mediterranean Jewish peasant, this hardworking carpenter and part-time rabbi, had any idea that based on a few of his speeches we'd get hillbillies shaking poisonous snakes at each other up in the hollers of West Virginny, he'd probably have kept his mouth shut and gone home) no, what we hate is the idea that because you believe in Jesus - and a peculiar version of him at that - you somehow have the right to tell the other 75% of the country how to live. Hmm...

You see how hard this is? Especially because I've been pretty busy lately what with helping plan my upcoming wedding and I haven't been getting a whole lot of sleep. I mean, let me spell it out for you folks, I'M TIRED. And that's when it hit me. EUREKA! HOOVER! DYSON! We're all so tired, maybe that is affecting the state of the world. When I really asked myself, "What would I do right now if I could do anything to get the world off on the right foot for the next thousand years?" I realized that hiring a Samurai to take out Ann Coulter wouldn't cut it, because she's just a hateful blowhard, and hateful winds blow, and hateful winds die, without any help from me. So here's what I came up with. Feel free to comment. I look forward to hearing your thoughts (just remember, I was tired when I began this post, and I'm even tireder now):

1. I would force the entire population of the world to participate in a general strike that would last one week. For a week, nobody could do a lick of work. Not the CEOs of the Fortune 500, not the janitor at your daughter's school, not the President, not Kos, not the good guys, and not the evil doers. Everybody, you're on vacation! During that same week, I would disable every electrical appliance known to man, and all the power plants generating power for them. That means for one week no lights but the sun moon and stars, no TV, no Playstation, no internets, no mobile phones, nothing. For this week, you get up with the sunrise, and go to bed with the sunset. Yep, folks, for one week you reset your clock to the old Circadian rhythms of life. In short, for one whole week, you get enough sleep. (GOD, THAT SOUNDS SO GOOD RIGHT NOW!)

That's it. After a week of the whole world finally getting enough sleep, our eyelids no longer twitching, our bodies no longer fatigued, our minds refreshed, sharp, attentive, we sit down and decide about

2.

An Honest Question

2006-07-13T00:57:00.000-04:00

This has been bugging me. I have a gay friend, a very old friend in fact, from high school. And he met this guy at a dance club our sophomore year in college, and by some miracle they are still together 18 years later. Among all of us in that clique of 18 year old Reagan-haters, poetry scrawlers, new wave music tasters, play makers, and academic decatheletes, they have had the longest lasting and most successful union, but they can't get married because they live in Houston. So what if they started a successful business, purchased two homes, continue to pay taxes out the yin yang like any successful couple? Because a group of angry, frightened old men (aka the Republican Congress) decided there is nothing more dangerous than homos in love, their union goes unrecognized by the state, and all that they hold in common remains in jeopardy. Gay marriage, say the angry, frightened (possibly closeted) old men, is a threat to the other kind of marriage - the kind Brittany Spears enjoyed for 48 hours one weekend when what happened in Vegas most certainly did not stay in Vegas; the kind Newt Gingrich had, so wholesome, secure and chock full of family values that he went to see his wife who was DYING OF CANCER and asked her to sign their divorce papers from her hospital bed, like the marriage of representative Henry Hyde (R - Hypocrisy) kept in fighting trim by his mistress of 17 years.

But it's OK because those folks all played it straight. Fucked up, but straight. And now here I am getting married in two weeks, and it isn't fair. It just isn't.

But my question, now I've digressed, is how the hell can these Republicans be so afraid of gay people when they've spent the last six years greedily and gleefully sucking George Bush's cock?

Don't Tread on Me, Kos

2006-06-09T09:08:00.001-04:00

Pardon the belligerent sounding title. I was referring to an old flag of the American Revolution and how it might serve as one possible banner for a renewed Democratic party.

While I enjoyed Kos' recent diary "The Libertarian Dem," his suggestion sounds like yet another semantic ploy, a way of distinguishing ourselves not from the Republicans but from other Dems by claiming to be, in the words of that old chestnut, "A Different Kind of Democrat." Haven't we been down this road before? DLC, Third Way, Blue Dog Dem, Progressive vs. Liberal? All this does is buy into the premise of our opponents, namely that there is something inherently wrong with the Democratic Party as presently constituted. It buys into the Establishment Dem idea that all we need to do to win is come up with better advertising, when what we really need are candidates unafraid to stand up for traditional Democratic values. Polls and a recent diary demonstrate that when people know where we stand, we win. Tester exemplifies this. It is not our ideology or party name that needs changing. It's our candidates. We don’t need a new Party; we need new Democrats. Proud Democrats who stand and fight can win. New labels do nothing but contribute to the idea that we are running away from who we are. If "Democrat" was good enough for Harry Truman, it's good enough for me. This might seem like nitpicking, but if we are afraid of our own name (and its proud tradition), why would anyone vote Democrat?

As for the Libertarians, can we please avoid any association with their ilk? These are people who read too much Ayn Rand as undergrads and never fully recovered. Their philosophy is slightly less coherent than Scientology. If we hope to pluck the low-hanging SOBS (which I define as moderates and conservatives who are Sick Of Bush's Shit), why not attack Republicans "from the right" by adopting the glorious motto of our own American Revolution: Don't Tread on Me.

Americans can't seem to get enough of the Founding Fathers and the Revolution they started. One of the flags of that Revolution may hold the key to a Democratic resurgence. Called a Gadsden flag, it shows a coiled rattlesnake on a yellow field with the famous motto: Don't Tread on Me. I think this is a better response to Bush's bullshit than ill-advised name games. NSA hacking your computer and listening in on your calls: DON'T TREAD ON ME. Santorum between your sheets? DON'T TREAD ON ME. Tom De Lay paying bedside visits to your dying wife: DON'T TREAD ON ME. Christianists telling you your Jesus ain't their Jesus, and their Jesus is the right one: DON'T TREAD ON ME. Isn't it simpler to say to the disaffected: Republicans may once have defended your liberties against an encroaching state, but no more. Today it is the Democratic Party which defends the traditional, "conservative" values of our Founding Fathers (who are no doubt rolling over in their graves at the mockery this administration has made of their intentions).

Remember the realignment that occurred when Southern Dems became Republicans, because that's where the racism had gone and race-baiting was their favorite sport? Imagine the realignment that will occur when people realize Republicans have abandoned the values of our Founding Fathers. It doesn't require us to change our name, only clarify that we stand for what they stood for. It's the same idea Kos is pushing, but it's simpler and strikes me as a better tactic than buying into the sham notion that there is something inherently wrong with the Democratic Party, which must now reinvent itself as a hybrid beast with the head of Brian Schweitzer and the body of the Cato Institute.

The Earth is Nothing

2006-05-05T08:26:00.000-04:00

Damn we are insignificant next to the sun.

It got me thinking about the end of life as we know it. Again. I feel like young Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, who stops doing his homework because "the universe is expanding." If the universe is expanding, that means it will break apart someday and that'll be the end of everything. "What's the point?" he asks. We're supposed to laugh at his lack of perspective - this cold fate lies billions of years in the future - but I was young Alvy's age the first time I saw the film, and I remember thinking, "Holy crap, he's right! What's the point?"

Of course with the benefit of age I now realize it's much worse than I thought. The sun will burn out long before the universe breaks apart. What then? The end of the earth means the end of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Whitman, Thoreau, Bach, The Beatles, Kurosawa, Godard, my porn collection. Forget my little films. It all seems so futile. Like donating money to Democrats.

I recently traveled to Niger where I spent some time trying to buy yellowcake KIDDING! among the Touaregs. What, a herd of German SUVs? No, silly American, the original nomadic population of the Sahel. Nomads. The very concept strikes us as quaint. But looking at that picture of the sun, I realized that if we survive its extinction (big if, given the way things are going) it will be as space-faring nomads strung out through the heavens, confined to soup can city-states, each with its own sovereignty, style, politics and culture, and artificial gravity (we love being grounded). This will not be a happy time. I just don't see the nomadic lifestyle doing it for us. Do you?

The life of a Touareg nomad is extremely difficult, despite having more than a thousand years of practice. We who have been raised in the West, among abundant supplies of water, food and shelter, have developed a murderous attachment to comfort, and though we may cop to the guilty pleasures of Star Trek Voyager, TV is one thing, reality another. What worries me is that we only have a billion years or so before that is brought home to us once and for all.

My Privates

2006-05-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

Interesting New York Times article on the deal a private US real-estate investor had to make to buy into the public-housing market in Germany.

Why aren't our mayors demanding these kinds of concessions when similar deals are made here? Privitization will continue apace unless the Bolivian model suddenly takes off in el Norte (a fantasy outcome that would warm the cockles of my Communitarian heart) but will it be done right? Much like globalization, the question isn't if but how.

Re: real estate, the real question stateside is new development, an issue very much on my mind as Bruce Ratner prepares to turn a large swath of downtown Brooklyn, blocks from my apartment, into a mini-Vegas Strip. The project has elicited a lot of controversy: is Vegas worse than the hole in the earth currently occupied by an MTA trunk line? Can we learn more from a subway routing station than we can from Las Vegas? Community activists are demanding more affordable housing units to be included in the project.

In Germany they demanded similar protections and got them. Why not here?

Incompetent President Blames Press, Democrats for His Failures

2006-03-09T05:30:00.000-05:00

Washington, March 9 2006. George Bush continued his lifelong vacation from personal responsibility today when he called a surprise press conference to blame a surprised press and quivering Congressional Democrats for the catastrophe in Iraq.

With that country teetering on the edge of civil war – a situation that could easily have been avoided if the President and the civilian leadership of the Pentagon had 1) actually planned for the post-invasion phase of the war, and 2) sent enough troops to quell looting and properly stabilize post-Saddam Iraq, as General Shinseki recommended to the Senate Armed Services Committee well in advance of the invasion – the President today lashed out at his critics as bearing the primary responsibility for his failures there.

“I don’t care if the Republican Party controls the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. I don’t care if I’ve got Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs wrapped around my finger. I don’t care if Shinseki warned me this thing would take 400,000 men. Fuck it! Those are facts, and facts don’t mean shit! Nietzsche said that. I’m paraphrasing. I don’t care about a complacent Supreme Court, and I don’t care if the press rolled over like a dead dog in the run-up to this thing. They’re criticizing me now, and that’s why we’re going to lose this war. Sure, any sane person would look at the situation and say the buck stops here. Well, I’ve got one word for Harry Truman: SCREW YOU! America isn’t governed by sane people anymore. Sure, a nation of true patriots, driven mad by my unending incompetence, would have risen up and driven a pitchfork through me by now. Lucky for me the loud, rude, rebellious gang who founded this country have been replaced by snivelling, servile sycophants. What? Surprised I know what sycophant means? I got better grades at Yale than John Kerry did, don’t forget. Sure, in the past a man with his hands on every lever of control might be held responsible for his actions, but that demands a burning passion for justice and an iron grip on reality. Those days are long gone. We no longer inhabit a reality-based world. The future is faith-based, baby! My faith tells me that we were just about to turn the corner in Iraq when the press started carping about how I do things. If only I’d listened to the evil doers in the Congress and France, if only I’d planned more better, if only I’d adapted quckerly, if only I could admit my mistakes. What mistakes? I’ve got one thing to say to the press: Boo fucking hoo. If it weren’t for you I could’ve won this thing. Despite your spinelessness, powerlessness, and general ass-kissing irrelevance, I hold you 100% responsible for all the questions I never asked, for all the plans I never made, for whatever actions I failed to order, and for every problem that has arisen or will arise in the future. It may appear that as President I have something to say about the final outcome in Iraq. Don’t make me laugh! This war is going to end in the biggest clusterfuck since Little Big Horn, and for that I hold the press entirely responsible. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the Vice President wants to show me how you shoot a man in the face and manage to turn yourself into the victim. I have a feeling that’ll come in real handy in the midterms.”

The President then gave the gathered journalists the finger, wiped his ass with the Constitution, and left the room.

Congressional Democrats, when asked for their reaction to the President’s statement, wet their pants and immediately called a press conference of their own to blame radicals in their party and a handful of progressive bloggers for their expected upset defeat in the 2006 midterm elections.

Krazy Kats

2006-02-10T11:19:00.000-05:00

If you want the best roundup on the Danish cartoons, a topic that seems more important in the grand scheme of things than local - by which I mean national - politics (you know, things like destroying the Republican party and impeaching the President - important to be sure, but nowhere near as important as drawing a line in the sand against those who would outlaw laughter, especially mocking laughter) then you've got to read Sully.

Keep scrolling. It's all good.

Funny Business

2006-02-08T10:31:00.000-05:00

Two great articles about the Danish cartoons and the violence that erupted in their wake (a wake that rolled along quietly for months until someone gave it a little help).

In the right corner, Claudia Rossett. I happen to agree with most of this, despite the fact that I'm a bleeding heart liberal and a pacifist (until someone really pisses me off).

If there was ever a moment when the left could agree with the right (who am I kidding? I mean show up the right) it is in rejecting the fundamentalist attitude that places the delicate sensibilities of some above the free speech rights of all. It's an attitude not unknown among our American fundamentalists, which may explain why Bush's State Department and its dependents abroad are making statements like this. Nothing like playing both sides in the War on Terror!

In the left corner, Digby. His apologia for Muslim fury and his indictment of Western indignation at that fury is food for thought. Nevertheless, the violence the cartoons have engendered is beyond the pale and gives creedence, sadly, to the idea that we are involved in a "clash of civilizations." If we are, better to get it out in the open.

Finally, I wonder if it has occurred to any of the outraged Muslims currently boycotting Danish products, setting fire to Scandinavian embassies, or issuing death threats to cartoonists and their publishers, that a prohibition on ridiculing the powerful – even the holy – is one of the reasons most of them live under tyrants? I know I enjoy being able to belittle our little tyrant, Shrubya, without fear of being beheaded. Spied on, yes. Beheaded, no.

Top Ten of the Last Ten

2006-02-01T15:47:00.000-05:00

I hate "to do" lists. But I love "to love" lists. (Did you just throw up in your mouth a little? Good. I was joking.) But I do love, love, love the movies. I have since my dad let me stay up past my bedtime in the third grade so we could watch Woody Allen's Sleeper. My top ten list always changes. Here is the latest version.

(I also love to hear what other people who love movies love. Feel free to leave your Top Ten in the comments section - or simply suggest additions to mine - and I'll discuss them here.)

THE CELEBRATION (for film students, there is Before The Celebration - BTC - and After The Celebration - ATC)

GUMMO (There were 60 people in my film school class; 2 of us liked it, everyone else hated it with a white hot hate, but Gus Van Sant is on our side. His review convinced me to see it. It ended: "I wish I had made this movie." What a perfect criterion for judging a film!)

NAKED (How a movie about a smart-arse can so brilliantly propagate an atmosphere of millenial doom is beyond me. I love this movie. I'm terrified by it. I wish I had made it. And maybe I will!)

BOTTLE ROCKET (Sometimes you watch a movie and you think it's one thing, and then at the last second the director does something, say he pulls a shot into slo-mo, and it forces you to instantaneously re-evaluate the film's tone and meaning, and it becomes a whole lot deeper than you thought. This is one of those.)

RUSHMORE (I want to sell a t-shirt that reads: "No, it was the handjob." Although picking out one favorite line from this film full of great lines is nearly impossible.)

THE KINGDOM (OK, this was a Danish TV series, but I watched all four one hour episodes in one sitting, then rewound the tape and watched it again, so shut up)

LOST IN TRANSLATION (I wanted to hate this movie, as I wanted to hate her previous film The Virgin Suicides. All I need is for the daughter of film royalty, who happens to be rich, pretty and popular, to also be a brilliant director, but she is and whenever I can't decide which DVD to pull down from my shelf, I watch this and am never disappointed. It's as close to perfect as a film can get.)

FIREWORKS (Takeshi Kitano's best film, though his recent Zatoichi is a close second. Incredible use of editing and visual suggestion. Kitano is also the star, and his performance is one of the finest ever captured on film.)

RATCATCHER (This film is stunningly shot, beautifully written, and the performances are so real it makes you wonder where Scottish casting agents find their actors, and where Hollywood casting agents don't.)

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (If Godard were Mexican and liked sex as much as sexual politics, he might have made this movie.)

THE LIMEY (Soderbergh proves that narrative film still has a few tricks left up its sleeve)

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD (By a Guy from Winnipeg, a city whose fierce climate breeds genius apparently.)

GHOST IN THE SHELL (If you've never watched anime, start here. The ideas in this film, copied - sort of - in The Matrix and other futuristic flicks, still keep me up. One of the most prescient films ever made.)

CLOSE-UP (By Abbas Kiarostami; the movie is older than ten years, but was released here only recently; a neo-realist post-modern meta-docu-ficiton about film and the culture of fame. In Iran.)

I know that's more than ten, but this is my blog, not yours, and I didn't major in math. If you want mathematical precision, you can read something else.

His Name is Shi Tao

2006-02-01T15:00:00.000-05:00

More on the Chinese journalist sentenced to ten years in prison with a little help from your friends at Yahoo. Amnesty International is on the case.

The greatest hope for increased openness and democracy in China comes from the internet. It can provide tools not just to members of the Politburo, or the business class, but to ordinary citizens. And though the internets threaten the very survival of this (or any) authoritarian regime, it would be suicide to bar the door. The market dictates that the internet be admitted. And that means free speech and open debate must be admitted along with it.

At least that was the idea.

Who expected American tech companies, most run by right (make that left) thinking Liberals from sunny Sunnyvale and other West Coast Edens, would in fact bolster the longevity of tyrants by voluntarily de-democratizing their revolutionary applications?

Oh well. As Sergio Leone might say, Per Qualche Dollaro in Piu. I have asked those of you who Yahoo to stop. I ask again. You have other choices (so far). And even if other companies have signed the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry, none have assisted the Chinese secret police in prosecuting a journalist. Only Yahoo can claim that dubious distinction.

It's up to you to make them pay.

howardbealestreet.blogspot.com

The Tao of Yahoo

2006-01-26T09:38:00.000-05:00

A while back I posted an entry entitled "Die, Yahoo!" (excitability in the defense of liberty is no vice) about that internet provider's kowtowing to the Chinese government, which it has helped quash the free exchange of ideas ever since signing the Orwellian "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry." The pledge works like this: the Chinese government asks you to block certain search terms - the really radical ones, like "democracy" - and you kiss their Communist ass and do it. Yahoo is the most egregious offender, but Microsoft and now Google have joined them in the hall of shame.

Well, Congress has taken note.

Chris Smith is a Republican, but before you run in horror, I'd like to tell you about him. He is an important supporter of the maternal health work that NGOs (like the one my fiancée works for) are doing in Africa. He's one of those nutty Christians whose faith actually compels them to seek out and assist the poor wherever they are found. (I think Jesus said something about it. That guy couldn't shut up about the poor!) Without his advocacy, obstetric fistula would not be getting the attention and financial resources it deserves from the US Government. Now he is taking on the sniveling greedheads of Silicon Valley. These corporate cowards had the power to stand up to China (yes, it would have cost them, after all, "Freedom isn't free") but instead they caved.

Please write Congressman Smith - and your own - and urge them to take your internet provider to task. A billion people are counting on you.

howardbealestreet.blogspot.com

Funny Games

2005-12-28T13:19:00.001-05:00

Are what Austrian director Michael Haneke likes to play. He's a sick fuck. I like that in a filmmaker. That said, Haneke's work is far from gratuitous. Funny Games is no Saw. His latest, Caché is his most infuriating so far. I like that too. I like being thwarted by a film. I like not knowing what's going on. I like not getting what I want. Maybe I'm a masochist. It helps to be a masochist if you intend to watch Haneke's films.

Yes, Haneke is a sick fuck, but there's method to his sickness. He appears to have a very low opinion of the human race, and he would like to punish it. Why does that make my heart sing? I guess I'm a sick fuck too. All I can say is, after watching one of his films, I want to scream I feel you, dog! I guess that makes me as much a misanthrope as Haneke. I consider Humans are an accursed lot a step up, as a moral position, from Those humans over there are an accursed lot, but we are blessed. The latter view, and not the love of money, is the root of all evil. Haneke chucks in the distinction, sketching nasty portraits of the class - the European bourgeois - most likely to cling to it, and sets about kicking their teeth in. It's fun to watch, but only if you like seeing people who richly deserve and are long overdue for a thrashing receive one. I do.

K. and I went to see Caché last night. Afterward we couldn't stop talking about it. It's never easy getting a handle on allegory (usually because the writer isn't sure what he's trying to say) which is why I tend to avoid it, but as we were hunting for the film's hidden meaning, the "real meaning," which we naturally assumed was political (I blame Hollywood for its infantilizing tendencies, yet I desperately seek refuge in the literal!) I remember saying, "It's so fucked up. He accuses this poor guy whose life he ruined of attacking him. Then he fucks his life up some more and all the while acts like he's the aggrieved party. That is so-" We both sort of looked at each other. "Oh... That's what it's about."

Yeah. THAT.

Everything is Connected

2005-12-28T09:35:00.000-05:00

Some very interesting questions raised in this New York Times article on Quantum Physics. The key paragraphs:

...Many of those who care to think about these issues (and many prefer not to), concluded that Einstein's presumption of locality - the idea that physically separated objects are really separate - is wrong.

Dr. Albert said, "The experiments show locality is false, end of story." But for others, it is the notion of realism, that things exist independent of being perceived, that must be scuttled. In fact, physicists don't even seem to agree on the definitions of things like "locality" and "realism."

"I would say we have to be careful saying what's real," Dr. Mermin said. "Properties cannot be said to be there until they are revealed by an actual experiment."

Now this is fascinating, a recapitulation among physicists of the whole argument between Berkeley and Hume about whether reality exists outside the act of our perceiving it.

Are scientists suggesting the physical universe sits in reserve, waiting for the moment when we observe it to come into existence? In other words, the question isn't: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The question is: Is there a forest at all? Isn't that the meaning of "Properties cannot be said to be there until they are revealed by an actual experiment."

This would answer many of the questions I never received a satisfactory answer to as a child (and later, as a college student) like: What lies beyond the Big Bang? Because if the universe is expanding, there is a limit to the expansion. What lies beyond that limit? Nothing? Are the far reaches of the universe being created as the Big Bang expands into them? Wouldn't that mean that the universe exists and doesn't exist at the same time? How can that be?

It doesn't matter, these experiments suggest, because what doesn't yet exist won't exist until we look for it. Then it will. (Is that what Jesus meant when he said "Seek and you shall find." Was Jesus more than a rabbi? Was he one of the first quantum physicists?)

There's a potential explanation for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle here as well, although I can't completely grasp it, other than to picture time and space as a single sheet of matter in which we all form constituent, as opposed to discrete, parts. Make sense?

Well, it's like the tagline from the Syriana poster: Everything is connected. Literally.

Munich

2005-12-24T10:57:00.000-05:00

K. and I went to see Munich at BAM last night. The house was packed, and we were forced to sit off center left. When I go to the movies, do I enjoy being forced into a seat that mirrors my politics? I do not. Enchanted at a very young age by Ptolemy, whose flawed cosmology placed the earth, and therefore man, at the center of the universe, seduced by the perfect symmetry of Palladio, whose buildings are best appreciated from their central axis, I've got to see a movie from the middle of the middle of theatre. Like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, I've got to see the movie from beginning to end, including credits. Finally, like God, I require silence. The cinema is after all a cathedral projecting our dreams and nightmares. Last night the parishioners' observance was far from golden. The guy behind me verbally close-captioned the movie for his historically challenged companion: "That's Golda Meir." Asshole.

I explained to K. some of the right wing bloggorrhea preceding the movie's release. As we were leaving K., who is Jewish, said, "I don't get it. The movie made everyone look bad." Exactly. People hate that. You want to remain a member in good standing of Team America, you've got to hate all the right people. Politics becomes more like high school with each passing day.

Here is what some people hate: making a Mossad agent look like a cold-blooded killer, even when he's killing in cold blood; making a Palestinian terrorist look (almost) human, even though he is. To the Manichean, good and evil are always pure. When the bad guys make war, it is bloody, cruel and intolerable. When we make war, it's a bake sale. Our warriors - on the right side of God and History - bake cookies and cupcakes. If they have to blow off a few heads now and again, well that's just the icing on the cake.

A quote I will never forget came in response to scattered criticism in the world press of the brutality of the US-led assault on Fallujah. A young Marine (who reminded me a lot of my brother after he returned from the first Gulf War) spoke with canny cynicism and a hint of regret about the things they were called on to do (like Bartelby, they would prefer not to, but that is up to the politicians, whom they universally despise):

What do they think we do? Marines don't shoot rainbows out of our asses. We fucking kill people.

He went on to say that if people had so many qualms, maybe next time they shouldn't rush [into war] so much.

But what I appreciated most was Munich's unflinching portrayal of the cost of violence on the men who perpetrate it, regardless of what side they are on, regardless of how justified the cause. One thing utterly lost on most politicians and pundits, entirely on the media and those members of the public without a relative serving on the front lines, is any sense that American men and women who return from Iraq alive and physically intact are still casualties of war. The psychic cost of killing another human being is one we prefer not to tally.

What is more human than seeing yourself in the the man facing you? It takes a lot of training to get a soldier to set aside his humanity and see another person - even his enemy - as worthy of death. This training, perfected by the military and by intellgence agencies, does irreparable harm, and the men and women who do the killing are well aware of it. One of the saddest scenes in Munich is when Avner finally returns home to Israel and asks his mother if she wants to hear what he did for his country. She says no, and we understand it is as much to spare herself as him. How many times will this scene be played out in the wake of Iraq? Soldiers will return home to loved ones eager to "spare" them any recounting of the horrors they have seen, and those warriors will understand that they are to shut up. We who have been spared do not wish to be infected by the inhumanity of those who have not.

One last thing: all the wingnuttery, the pre-release attempt at a takedown of the movie, has been carried out by people who haven't seen it. (It opened only yesterday.) How are they any different from the mullahs who condemned The Satanic Verses without having read the book? How do you condemn a work of art in advance? Are they that afraid of what the movie might say, what it might make people feel? The critics pay this work greater respect than it perhaps deserves. As Artaud said, The theatre never saved a man from starving so let's not get our panties in a wad (I'm paraphrasing). Still, Munich's critics are right about this: a work of art in its complexity (and yes, ambiguity) offers a picture of the world that mere ideology is powerless to control. It might make us think anything, that revenge is futile, that the cycle of violence must be broken, even though our enemies started it (and they did...didn't they?). So the attempt is made to kill it in its crib. For past successes of this type, see: Moses.

One of my favorite proverbs, from the Middle East as it happens, states: Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages. You'd think Munich's critics would be too busy chasing al-Qaeda out of ninety-nine villages to go after Steven Spielberg, but then again, look what they did when they had Osama trapped in the mountains at Tora Bora. They went after Saddam. At last, their strategy begins to make sense.

Merry Friggin' War on Xmas

2005-12-12T22:58:00.000-05:00

Maybe I'm being obtuse, but what's with all the gnashing of teeth over Christmas? I don't care if there is or isn't a war on Christmas, because Christmas is a holiday created by Department Stores to get a bunch of sentimental saps to confound the meaning of the birth of the proto-communist Prince of Peace with an annual consumer orgy, the better to get them to go out and spend their hard-earned money on highly unspiritual, I might even say material possessions, all this in supposed celebration of a guy who thought the best thing you could do with money was give it away to the poor.

And even if you don't buy that, none of it matters anyway, because there's one fact all the nattering nabobs of givitivity forget: Jesus was a JEW! Jesus never owned a fucking Christmas tree! Jesus never celebrated Christmas, and he doesn't care if you do. Hell, Jesus never even celebrated Hannukah. (It hadn't been invented yet.) So will all the eager practioners of Christian self-victimization who are currently too busy wailing about their favorite Jew being taken out of Christmas to get into the proper holiday spirit, will you please shut your pie holes and have yourselves a Merry Little Xmas?

Good and Evil

2005-12-08T20:09:00.000-05:00

In discussing the Iraq situation with a friend recently, I commented that America, in my opinion, was on the brink of moral collapse. (Why be reasonable when one can be dramatic.)

I felt afterward that I owed my friend an explanation of the insidious, unstated philosophy - or more simply put, the attitude - that I personally believe lies behind our current foreign policy, an attitude slowly taking hold of the American mind and endangering us all.

I was immediately reminded of Nietzsche, that acid-tongued lover of aphorism, who famously warned: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

"How could George Bush answer Nietzsche?" I wondered. With all that has happened, all that has been disproved (WMD, an al-Qaeda connection) and proved (torture, the use of white phosphorus as an anti-personnel - aka chemical - weapon), how could our Commander in Chief justify this war? But he's George Bush, so you just know he'd try. Then it came to me:

When we torture and kill we do it for the right reasons. We are good. When they torture and kill they do it for the wrong reasons. They are evil.

I suppose a morally bankrupt individual - a chancre of a man, a malignant tumor in human form - could argue that there is a tissue thin difference between the two and that the former is preferable, but then you'd have to be...well, you'd have to be the President of the United States, or the Vice President of the United States, or the Attorney General of the United States, or the Secretary of Defense. That's what we have come to. That is our position, the final justification for this immoral misadventure measured in human lives. When we kill we do it for the right reasons. We are good. It has about as much chance of succeeding as a moral distinction as the Germans did of reaching Paris during the Battle of the Bulge. (That's a double entendre, for you non-war buffs.)

So my merry thoughts were raging when I came upon Harold Pinter's recent lecture accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature (a prize richly deserved, I might add, with all the authority of a dusty BA in Drama backing me up) and he wiped the floor with my one liner. The theme he descants upon is the same - that of moral distinctions that aren't, particularly ones that happen to favor the US - but he is far more eloquent and far more angry than I - as you might expect from a man who is dying.

Conventional wisdom states that those on the brink of extinction find, at long last, their way to the truth and the courage to speak it without fear of consequences. And there are always consequences. As the Turkish proverb says, Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages. No doubt a certain gun-loving law professor from Tennessee and a certain paranoid, fawning babydaddy from the upper Midwest are even now preparing to attack this ailing genius, but since they have yet to volunteer for the war on which our very existence hinges, according to them, they've not been issued rifles and can only fire digital blanks at their enemies.

Here is what Pinter had to say. Read it and weep.

Off Target

2005-10-19T16:47:00.000-04:00

First I got this message from Planned Parenthood via my ever-vigilant fiancée:

Dear Friend:

Imagine walking into a pharmacy with a prescription and being told by the pharmacist, "I won't fill it. It's my right not to fill it." It's outrageous to think this is possible, but this is exactly what happened to a 26-year-old woman who presented a prescription for emergency contraception at a Target in Fenton, MO, on September 30. Join Planned Parenthood in demanding that every woman's pills be filled -- now!

http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/fillmypillsnow_target2?rk=DpzhfI91HmQWW

This kind of thing burns me up. You think we're fighting over a woman's right to choose? No. We've taken such a great leap backward during the Bush years that we're fighting over birth control. So I clicked, then typed, then clicked, and sent my outraged form letter off to Target. Because I'm an activitst of the usual type - you know, a little lazy, but I do care. I DO! I clicked! I typed! I clicked! And I'll do it again if I have to. Oh, and I forwarded the email to most of my mailing list with this message:

A forward from Katie...
I know you're all really busy, but this is really easy (a few clicks) and really important. It isn't about abortion. It's about birth control! But that's the fight. So let's fight it. Ever shopped at a Target? Love their ads? Me too. Now let'em have it.
-t

Maybe that's why I took this outrage to heart - I do shop at Target. They recently opened a store here in Brooklyn. I've given them my money on several occasions. Hell, I grew up on Target. Back in Houston, Target was our main man, for all the times we didn't have enough money to shop at Sears. BASTARDS!

So today Target got back to me:

Dear Target Guest,

Target places a high priority on our role as a community pharmacy and our obligation to meet the needs of the patients we serve. We expect all our team members, including our pharmacists, to provide respectful service to our guests, particularly when it comes to their health care needs.
Like many other retailers, Target has a policy that ensures a guest’s prescription for emergency contraception is filled, whether at Target or at a different pharmacy, in a timely and respectful manner. This policy meets the health care needs of our guests while respecting the diversity of our team members.

Your thoughts help us learn more about what our guests expect, so I’ll be sure to share your feedback with our pharmacy executives.

Thanks for taking the time to share your questions, thoughts and comments. I hope we’ll see you again soon at Target.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Hanson
Target Executive Offices

A form letter? Are you freakin' kidding me, Jennifer? Sure, I sent a form letter, but I'm a civilian. I've got a job to slack off at every day, for Christ's sake! But responding to inquiries and objections from customers is Jennifer's one and only job. And on reading her letter more carefully, I decided she wasn't doing it very well. There are so many things wrong with her response, so many implicit statements about Target policy which are absolutely outrageous that I was forced to shift in pro-activist mode and write a real-live, bonafide, hand-crafted letter expressing my seething outrage at her half-baked bullshit. It goes something like this:

Dear Jennifer,

Thank you for your timely response. It was not good enough by a longshot. I wrote to you in regard to a specific incident at your Fenton, Missouri store.

I would like to know how the issue was resolved. A young woman in need was turned away by someone who decided that providing a legal prescription was not in her job description. Given your response, I must assume Target agrees with her action. You stated:

Target has a policy that ensures a guest’s prescription for emergency contraception is filled, whether at Target or at a different pharmacy, in a timely and respectful manner. This policy meets the health care needs of our guests while respecting the diversity of our team members.

If someone has to go to a different pharmacy, then the service is not timely, is it? As for "diversity" you're simply using that as cover to avoid confronting a handful of religious extremists in your ranks. You call it respect. I call it cowardice.

Frankly, I fail to understand the logic of an employee who opposes abortion AND contraception. I thought we were done fighting over the pill. Not at Target, I guess. As you know, if a woman cannot obtain contraception, she is more likely to have an abortion later. Withholding birth control, emergency or otherwise, increases the rate of abortion. Until I hear otherwise, I will assume that Target supports an increase in the number of abortions in this country. Make no mistake, unlike your employee in Fenton, most people in this country are intelligent enough to support contraception whether they oppose abortion or not. Since your policy directly contributes to an increase in the number of abortions in this country, it will please neither right nor left.

A woman in need of emergency contraception is in a difficult situation, often desperate and emotionally fragile. If refused service, she will naturally assume that refusal represents official company policy. She is unlikely to challenge the employee and demand that someone else fill the prescription. She will go home, agonize, maybe go to another pharmacy, maybe not. She is likely to become pregnant, and then, because of your shortsighted policy, have to face the horrifying prospect of obtaining an abortion at a later date. Shame on you!

Further, as your policy makes clear, an entire store could refuse to fill a prescription. Why else promise to have it filled "at a different pharmacy"? Am I to believe that if an entire store opposes birth control, its employees will nevertheless provide the information necessary to get a prescription filled elsewhere? Where in Fenton did your customer have her prescription filled? If the Target in Fenton refused to deliver birth control, am I to believe a local mom-and-pop operation stepped up in your place? Do you know? I assume you keep a record of these referals?
You just opened a new Target a few blocks from my home in Brooklyn, at the Atlantic Center on Flatbush Avenue. I will not be shopping there again. Nor will my hundred contacts, nor their hundred contacts in Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Washington, Michigan, Florida. A form letter will not get our business back. If you continue kowtowing to religious extremists and refuse service to the vast majority of Americans, you will never get it back.

Thank you for your time.

-Todd Smith

Contractual Obligations and Metooism

2005-10-07T09:51:00.000-04:00

A recent CBS News' poll shows the President's approval ratings on, well, everything at all-time lows. There has been much celebrating over at Daily Kos, and in the left-wing blogosphere generally. I'm not sure why. There is an assumption that the scandal-plagued Republican party is near collapse and that all Democrats have to do to retake the House and Senate in 2006 is pick up the pieces. Forgive me, but that sounds suspiciously like the Democratic strategy of 2000 and 2004. Call it the stealth strategy: You can't see us, but we're here, and we're not as bad as those guys. Really! We all know how well that worked. Keeping your head down in a shooting war may save you getting your head blown off, but it isn't likely to produce the kind of victory (in the form of an earth-shaking electoral re-alignment) that the country is ripe for. That would require the Democrats to buy a clue and come up with a program informed by a governing philosophy, in short their own version of the Contract With America. The Gingrich Revolution could not have happened without the Contract, which offered voters not the sense that the Republicans stood for something, but the proof in black and white.

I'm no Bob Shrum, but I have a few ideas for a Democratic version of the Contract. We have the right to be bold, even visionary. We can over-reach. The public will forgive us. The key is to fearlessly describe the America we all dream of living in. Each item in the Contract should be a direct repudiation of Crony Republicanism.

1) Ban Senators, House members, and political appointees from engaging in legalized bribery - i.e. lobbying - for the length of any Congress or Administration in which they serve. That could mean a 7 year ban from K Street in the case of White House staffers who leave a two-term administration in its first year.

2) Institute public financing of campaigns, and ramp up the McCain-Feingold limits. Choke the influence of corporate cash. Donations to candidates are not a form of free speech - as Mitch McConnell once claimed - they are bribes. I keep hearing candidates say things along the lines of, Enron only donated $10,000 to my campaign. You think I can be bought so cheap? Which I don't consider an entirely rhetorical question. It sounds more like a warning to potential donors that influence costs a lot more than 10 grand. The idea that certain amounts do not affect a poltician is utter bullshit. My brother loans me 40 bucks, I kiss his ass until it's paid back. That's human nature.

3) Push for a Constitutional amendment to eliminate the electoral college and institute direct election of the President. Had this democratic reform been in place in 2000, we wouldn't be discussing this Bushit.

4) Raise the Minimum wage by the exact same percentage that Congressional pay has been raised each of the last ten years. Begin paying male Senators and Congressmen the minimum wage. (Female Senators and Congresswomen can stay at their current pay grade.)

5) Require the conversion of every automobile sold in America to hybrid technology by 2010, rather than the generation GWB has given automakers to come up with hydrogen fuel cell technology. Hybrid technology exists now, and we should begin curtailing our use of Saudi Arabian, Venezuelan, Iranian and Russian oil now.

6) Etc. etc.

I can't think of a better time for a Democratic Contract With America than right now. In a few days we may see Karl Rove being frog-marched out of the White House. If God exists, we may even see the Vice President taken into custody (let me dream). If at that time the Democrats aren't ready to say enough is enough and present the electorate with a real alternative, our best chance will be lost. As others have noted, people want something to vote for, not just against. In the absence of a well-defined alternative to the Republican party, Americans will seek out incorruptible Republicans, those hardy few who will return the party to its true Conservative roots. Some Republicans understand this and they are already stepping up to the plate. Yesterday the McCain bill passed the Senate 90-9. Here we have a Republican standing against torture and the worst offenses of the Cheney Administration (Lindsay Graham and Chuck Hagel also come to mind) while even the bravest Democrats seem content to whisper Me too!

Me too! doesn't win elections. Never has, never will.

Die, Yahoo!

2005-10-03T23:03:00.000-04:00

You know how everything is so fucked up these days it's hard to know where to begin? How it's hard to distinguish one level of fuckedupness...really fucked up, for example, like when Google kowtows to a Chinese government desperate to apply democracy retardant to Market Maoism by agreeing to censor certain incendiary terms - among them, democracy and freedom - from its Sino Search Engine, from a whole other level of fuckedupness...mind blowingly, earth threateningly, Communist cocksuckingly fucked up, like when Yahoo assisted the Chinese Ministry of Information, aka the Secret Police in their recent effort to track down a journalist who forwarded an internal government memo (warning Chinese reporters against covering the upcoming anniversary of Tiananmen Square) to his colleagues in the West. As if fingering this freedom fighter wasn't enough, Yahoo then provided information that helped guarantee a conviction. His sentence for Yahooing: ten years in a Chinese prison camp.

It may be hard in times like these to make such fine distinctions, hard to point to a single instance of injustice and say, "Other things are fucked, but this so perfectly epitomizes the true fuckedupness of the world we live in that this must be our singular and unyielding point of attack," but we have no choice. We must prioritize, and having prioritized, we must be willing to point fingers and scream, J'ACCUSE!

So let's dig our conscience and our passion for justice out of the black hole we tossed them in years ago and commit to taking on these corporate Eichmans. Because this isn't about China persecuting a democrat. It's about an American company enabling that persecution. Or as Yahoo put it: "just abiding by local laws." (Sounds a lot like "just following orders" doesn't it?) If we don't put a stop to this, the future of freedom is threatened, and not just in China.

Now I don't Yahoo. I hate their name, their ads, their site and their search engine. But some of you do. Well... STOP! Cancel any and all services you have with the company, urge all your contacts to do the same, and let Yahoo know exactly why you are taking this action. Something along the lines of -

Dear Yahoo,

I don't do business with sniveling cowards who suck Communist cock. I don't do business with companies that enable dictatorships to crush democracy.

I once hoped the internet would break the back of totalitarian regimes everywhere by giving people unrestricted access to the marketplace of ideas. Little did I suspect Yahoo would come along and collaborate with the Chinese government in the same way the Vichy government once collaborated with the Nazis, turning over democrats to Chinese authorities just as Vichy once turned over Resistance fighters to the Gestapo. Little did I suspect that you would voluntarily sign the Orwellian "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry." Little did I suspect that you would go along to get along, in the name of profits.

If you had the name of that lone hero who stood down an entire column of tanks after Tiananmen Square, would you hand it over to the Chinese authorities if it was the difference between obtaining or not obtaining a lucrative contract?

I will be passing this information along to everyone I know, urging them to boycott your company and all its services, here and around the world. I sincerely hope that our protest, however modest it may now seem, chokes the life out of you, before you choke the life out of Chinese democracy.

Sincerely,

a nameless democrat

Color Blind

2005-09-26T14:54:00.000-04:00

We live in an age of ignorance or bad faith. I can't decide which. George Bush and his disciples say they dream of a color blind society. I accept that, if you drop the word color.

New Orleans showed us the face of poverty. It is a face we are ordinarily blind to. At long last a society that seems to know no shame was shamed, not by the suffering of a third world country but by our own. The proper way to describe such places in America is third world county. Afterward, polls were taken. (Polls must always be taken!) Something like 60% of white Americans said race had nothing to do with the slow response to Katrina. Something like 80% of black Americans said, The hell you say! Can two groups holding such diametrically opposed views possibly be citizens of the same country? In a sense, no. My own view is that if there had been 100,000 white folks stranded in New Orleans, the government would have built the world's largest hurricane-proof gated community in the same time it took them to get bottled water and buses to the Superdome and Convention Center. At the same time, the real crime of Katrina's victims wasn't being black but being poor.

Is our mutual misundertanding a result of ignorance or bad faith? Maybe both. We are ignorant because the poor eke out an existence far below our country's high-flying cultural radar. We are in bad faith because we don't really want to know about it. Understanding would mean coming to terms with the grinding poverty that is a fact of life for too many Americans and accepting the unpleasant truth that economic policies that benefit us hurt them.

I have a simple fix. Repeal the Bush tax cuts in their entirety and replace them with a kind of Earned Income Tax Credit Plus for the working poor. Most poor Americans work. I hate that, and I hate the phrase coined to describe them. The category "working poor" should not exist in a country as rich as ours, but it does and we have to eliminate it, because a family of four earning $14,000 a year isn't living in poverty. It's living in hell. The credit would work like this: every family that works but earns less than the poverty level will receive a credit from the IRS equal to the difference between their salary and the median salary, which was $30,000 the last time I checked. For example, a family of four that earned $14,000 would receive a $16,000 check from the federal government - about a fifth of the average cut millionaires received under the Bush plan - instantly rendering them middle-class. Call it the Poverty Penalty, or if you prefer, the Jesus Credit (see "The last shall be first"). The difference is that this tax penalty is imposed on the society that would leave its working families indigent, rather than on the workers themselves. A bold reversal of historical trends! It may mean fewer yachts for billionaires, but that is a price we can pay! The beauty part is, this tax credit will encourage the unemployed to take any job no matter how low the pay (hell, it encourages workers to invade the service industries, housekeeping, Wal-Mart, etc.) and it will sunset the second the last American worker is lifted out of poverty, either via the credit itself, or more likely through American companies choosing to pre-empt the Penalty by paying their workers a living wage.

One last suggestion. Every year we get a little closer to Brazil, as the distance between rich and poor grows, and as those who govern from on high - at a safe remove from the floodwaters - have less and less in common with the governed, who are in them up to their neck. If we want policy that does the most good for the most people, our public servants should live as most citizens do. In short, we must eliminate that distance that separates those who govern from the governed. The easiest way to do so is to peg the salary of Senators and House members to the minimum wage. When our leaders have to live on the same pay as the majority of our citizens, a miracle may occur. A new Golden Age of enlightened policy will sweep like floodwaters through the corridors of power, and this flood, unlike the one caused by Katrina, can only benefit the citizens of New Orleans (and other third world counties) as they struggle to keep their heads above water.

Bring the Sword, Bring the Pain

2005-09-24T19:01:00.000-04:00

Two interesting articles about religion - or more precisely, religious figures - appeared recently in two well-known secular humanist rags:

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s essay, "Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr", in the September 18 New York Times Book Review and Malcolm Gladwell's article "The Cellular Church" in the September 12, 2005 issue of The New Yorker (not available online) about Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback church and author of the bestselling The Purpose-Driven Life.

The articles are by men who, to paraphrase Niebuhr, take religion seriously if not literally. They are respectful and thought-provoking, and I urge you to read them.

One quote from Gladwell's article sticks in my mind. In The Purpose-Driven Life Warren claims that when Jesus was on the cross, his arms stretched to the breaking point by iron spikes driven through his hands, what he was really saying to us was, "I love you this much."

Excuse me while I puke. Noted theologian Sam Kinnison came much closer to the truth when he suggested that what Jesus was really saying was, "AHHHH! AHHHH! AHHHH!"

Warren's sentimentalized view of Christ's suffering borders on the blasphemous. He takes the most powerful symbol of the Christian faith and reduces its meaning to a hug. I don't expect somebody who got his preacher degree via a correspondence course to have the same theological heft as St. Augustine, but Warren's Lord of the Hug metaphor is so offensive and so fucking dumb it beggars the imagination.

But enough about Rick Warren. Let's talk about Jesus. I've been thinking a lot about something he said in Matthew 10:34.

Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father;
and a daughter against her mother;
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one's foes will be members of one's own household.
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Jesus obviously never got Warren's memo about "low barriers to entry." I guess they started churches a little differently back in the day. One of the things that confounds and fascinates me about Jesus is that he did everything bassackwards from the point of view of building a popular movement. Take one example: divorce. Jesus tosses the law aside (though he earlier promised not to discard one iota) and says, Screw precedent. Divorce is history. Except for adultery, of course. No man wants a ho for a wife. (I'm paraphrasing.) Jesus makes this pronouncement to the citizens and later directly to the leaders of the ultimate patriarchy. Bobby Brown had his prerogative. One belonging to the men of Jesus' time was to discard a wife pretty much at will. Jesus says NO. Not exactly the best way to make friends and influence Newt Gingrich, as it were.

It also happens to be a strong argument for the importance of women in Jesus' ministry. Combined with Matthew 10:35 (he counts daughters as well as sons among his followers) you can make a solid argument for Jesus as the first feminst. His teaching certainly seems at odds with that of later Church fathers and may even explain the delight so many have taken in the "theology" of Dan Brown's bestselling religious potboiler.

When I read Matthew 10:34 I hear Jesus saying, "My teaching is hard. It's not for everyone. Well, it is for everyone, but everyone won't necessarily like it. Before me there was one way of living. After me, another. Follow me and your own relatives may turn against you, because people will fight tooth and nail not to change their lives." Hence the narrow gate. Today people prefer the supersized gate. Fortunately Jesus didn't conduct a door-to-door focus group before getting started. And while he managed to accumulate just 12 followers at the time of his death (one of whom betrayed him and another who basically said, "Jesus who?") look at the growth in the Jesus industry since! It shows that a durable movement does not, in fact, require low barriers to entry. Movements with the most committed followers tend to the opposite of the Warren model. The popularity of Saddleback does not point to a new Great Awakening. On the contrary, the contemporary churchgoer's preference for Warren's wide gate does not indicate a rebirth of faith but its slow decline.

I want to end on the sword. (No, I'm not suicidal. I mean the one Jesus spoke about.) Schlesinger quotes Niebuhr: "Americans are never safe 'against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire.'" For me, this is tied to the sword of Christ. I believe the sword is an image Christ used to warn his followers: Accepting me means cleaving yourself in two: there was you before the Word, and there is you after. I am a sword striking at the heart, striking deep inside.

But too many Christians give the verse a different interpretation. In a typically literal - militaristic - reading of scripture, they think the sword can be taken up to smite our enemies. It's the "Team Jesus Sword" sanctifying what we most fervently desire. We are people of the sword; you aren't. We are on Jesus' side; you aren't. What we do is right; what you do is wrong. We will be saved; you will be destroyed.

But can that possibly be the meaning of the man who said, "If anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn the other also." In other words: Whoever lifts a hand to defend himself has already committed murder in his heart. This is a difficult teaching to accept in a time of great insecurity. But hasn't the world always been as insecure as it is today? Hasn't the gate always been as narrow?

Intelligent Design

2005-09-19T12:36:00.000-04:00

I know there are more important issues at the moment, but I had a dream about a watch last night. I think it was my subconscious getting mired in the debate over intelligent design.

Intelligent design represents the kind of science once propounded by the Catholic Church (see Galileo). It's science for those afraid of science, afraid that certain facts might force yet another tactical retreat, like the one we all had to make when weather satellites revealed that raindrops were not, in fact, the tears of God.

My scientific training consists of three undergraduate astronomy courses, an anthropology course, and a genetics course. From these I learned there was a good possibility of life existing on other planets and their not contacting us was likely a sign of high intelligence, that our genes have 99% in common with apes but that 1% is the difference between "OOH, OOH, OOH!" and Shakespeare, and that it's highly unlikely my male ancestors had extremely large penises. Apart from that and what I read, I'm a layman. Big time. But as another layman, the late, great Bill Hicks used to say, I've got one word for those who accept the biblical account of creation: DINOSAURS! If all the earth's creatures were created at the same time in their present form, then why doesn't the Bible mention the dinosaurs?

To dinosaurs, I would add another word: carbon dating. OK, that's two words. Polls show nearly half of Americans believe the world was created sometime in the last 6-10,000 years. Most of us have rocks in our yard older than that (especially if you live in the Southwest) and carbon dating proves it. What do the anti-evolutionists believe? That all those finely tuned scientific instruments are part of a wily, reality-based plot? Or that God is using fossils AND rocks to fuck with us? Do they hear the voice of God saying, Who are you gonna believe: Me or your own eyes? Here's a hint: the eyes don't have it. Or else.

Deep down I think Intelligent Design is a movement of faithless, frightened Christians. If you need evolution to be a lie for God to be true, then your God is weak, and your faith is a house of cards. The existence of God will not be proved by denying verifiable facts, no matter how inconvenient. Just ask the Catholic Church. They got burned (or did the burning) to keep dogma's flag flying high above the facts, and it worked, for a few centuries. But in the end faith proved less immune to facts than the Church had hoped, and their influence in Europe collapsed. Before you mention Poland, see Ireland. The church as an intellectual and political force in Europe is dead. People still go to church, yes, but it doesn't influence policy. It barely influences policy here, and no one goes to church more than Americans. Case in point: if Jesus wielded any real political influence you might expect American tax policy to favor the poor, but he doesn't, and it doesn't. I digress. Centuries ago, the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant, but you can't recant the laws of physics. The Catholic Church has come to terms with that and today accepts the theory of evolution as proven fact. When will evangelicals come around? I'm not holding my breath.

Christians and Conservatives (not always the same thing) have railed against moral relativism for years, yet now they race to prove Nietzsche, its avatar, correct. "There are no facts, only interpretations," the German horse-lover famously asserted. "Precisely!" the theocrats respond. Were they not the ones who insisted, You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts! That was then, I guess. This is now. Now you can have your own facts. And if there's a mountain of evidence against you? Don't offer an alternate set of facts. Force people to turn away from the facts we've got, on pain of being called a God hater. The world has turned upside down. Belief is proof. Faith is fact. The poets and post-structuralists must be rolling their graves. What have we wrought?

Yet, this is not your parent's relativism. The relativism of the right is brave and new. It turns out people can't believe anything they want. Not if their belief, their faith, is in the power of human reason, empirical evidence, the scientific method, the effulgent reality of the phenomenal world and the necessity of answering questions on its terms, which would mean accepting that rocks are old, creatures evolve, and George Bush is the WORST PRESIDENT EVER. OK, that last one I just threw in for fun. Such a faith does not exclude God (it didn't for Einstein) but don't tell any of that to the Intelligent Design crowd.

America may be brimming with her own modern-day Galileos, sleepwalking through their days, muttering to themselves, "Yet it turns," cowed not by the Church, but by market forces and a cowardly desire not to rock a boat in which one group seems to control all the ideological ballast.

Good for Business?

2005-09-13T10:54:00.000-04:00

Just listening to the Roberts hearings on Fox, and heard what's her name, the dark-haired one with the hawkish face, blurb an upcoming segment as follows: "Would John Roberts on the Supreme Court be good for business?"

Now I know that the networks have to fill the day with audiovisual spooge, and I know that the business of America is business (insofar as it lines the pockets of sundry Bush family friends and retainers) but isn't this the crux of the problem we're facing as a nation?

I don't care if it's Fox News, CNBC, Republican fat cats or inner-city Democrats with an entrepreneurial streak, the question to ask about Roberts isn't whether he'll be good for business, but whether he'll be good for America. Those won't always be the same thing, and we need leaders who understand the difference. There's no question Roberts is extremely intelligent. Watching the hearings for five minutes makes that clear. But world history is full of geniuses who were DEAD WRONG.

Maybe it's a desire for simplicity bordering on the simplistic, but shouldn't the test for our leaders as for our policies be this: What will do the most good for the most people? How hard is that to understand? How hard can it be to implement? For example: does it do more good for more people to repeal the Estate Tax, or to reduce payroll taxes for the middle class? Try it with an issue close to your heart. The answers you come up with may surprise you. Wait, scratch that. They won't surprise you. They'll only suprise your fearless leaders.

Sounding the Alarm

2005-09-02T11:38:00.000-04:00

New York is an alarm that works in reverse. You know something is very wrong when the city gets quiet. Today on the subway, although the car I was riding in was chock full of people, it was eerily quiet. No one was talking, or shouting or laughing. No one was threatening to kick somebody's teeth in for looking at them the wrong way. You know, those everyday sounds that let a New Yorker know all is right with the world. Today there was near silence.

Across from me a woman was reading The New York Times. On its cover was a picture of the dead body of a woman floating face down in the floodwaters. You don't see that kind of cover very often. In fact, American papers have shown a shameful discretion in the face of the tragic death and destruction in Iraq. We rarely hear, and never see, the worst of it, but Iraq is far away. Most of the suffering afflicts Iraqis, not Americans. New Orleans is different. It's not them; it's us. Something terrible has happened to us, and maybe because one great city recognizes another, the people of New York had the same hush fall over them as in the days after 9/11.

The scariest day of my life wasn't 9/11 but two days later. I was on 23rd Street between Park and Broadway headed for the N train. It's a busy block. There are usually thousands of people about, taxis, buses. The noise level rises to a low roar. New Yorkers are oblivious to it, though tourists tend to find it unsettling. I come from one of the quietest towns in the world, but even I eventually acclimated and now, unless someone is screaming bloody murder, the decibel level doesn't bother me. That day was different. It was the first that many New Yorkers went back to work, and something about it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Something was wrong. About halfway down the block it hit me - nobody was talking. Nobody was saying a word. It wasn't quiet; it was SILENT. Even the taxis and buses were hushed. That was when the magnitude of what had happened really hit me. Something so terrible it literally shut New York up.

That's what it sounded like today.

Not the Sharpest Tool in the Shed

2005-08-25T01:12:00.000-04:00

Two days ago I had just about all I could stand from David Brooks, the Grey Lady's token "smart" conservative. Today got me from "just about all" to "You tool!"

The apologetics Brooks practises in his editorial on the Iraqi constitution is so patently dishonest, and in such bad faith, that I had to write him a letter expressing my feelings. I was a little peeved when I wrote it. Please pardon my French. I'm sure you, dear reader, can make the same points in kinder, gentler language, and I encourage you to try.

Remember, tilting at idiots is a noble, if hopeless, calling. Good luck!

Brooks,

Just read your latest, "Divided They Stand" and was impressed by your effort to take the lemon that is the Iraqi constitution and turn it into lemonade. What can I say? You are a complete and utter tool. I thought of going with idiot, or asshole, both of which aptly describe you, as does fatuous, arrogant, Pollyannaish and blind, but in the end I decided that tool captured you best:

1) Tool (n.) American slang; Originally a reference to the male member and now synonymous with suckup, sycophant, gasbag, git, and dickhead.

2) Tool (n.) implement, something made use of. In the sense popularized by the 101st Fighting Keyboardists: useful idiot.

You, Brooks, are a tool. But what I want to know is why?

Did they beat you up one too many times in high school? How else does one come to suffer such a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome? How did you go so wrong, Brooks? How did you become the buttboy for the fratboy who would have most eagerly and brutally mocked you as a child? Watching you sell your soul to justify this bumbling brat, whose fuckups are measured in human lives, makes me want to puke.

By a stunning coincidence, your editorial is running on the same day as news of the latest Sadr-sponsored uprising. His militia killed Casey Sheehan. Do you feel it yet, Brooks? Do you feel what a tool you are? No, I didn't think so. That's the other unmistakable quality of a tool: he doesn't realize he's a tool.

You quoted Ruel Gerecht. Do you also share his feelings about the loss of women's rights in the new Iraqi constitution? He recently said, "I'm not too worried about that." Has it occurred to you that Mr. Gerecht would have uttered the very same words prior to the war if asked about the prospect of American casualties? No doubt there are a good many things Mr. Gerecht never worries about. That doesn't mean the people whose lives are actually affected don't worry (See Safia Taleb al-Souhail) nor does it mean the people whose lives are actually affected don't die (see Casey Sheehan).

David, you're almost funny when writing about the rich and self-satisfied. Like they say, Write what you know. But you don't know shit about Iraq. No piece of paper is going to paper over this Mesopotamian clusterfuck. Why don't you wake up, smell the burqa, and write something honest for a change?

-Todd Smith

God is in the Semantics

2005-08-24T11:54:00.000-04:00

Here is a recent bit of bullshittery from an AP reporter describing Cindy Sheehan:

Sheehan lost a son in Iraq and has emerged as a harsh critic of the war.

Sheehan began a vigil outside Bush’s ranch, a demonstration that has been joined by more and more other anti-war protesters.

Why does the reporter call her a harsh critic? The harshest thing I ever witnessed at a vigil was some mild irritation caused by dripping candlewax.

Cindy Sheehan is a critic of the war, period. You might reasonably describe her as eloquent, or better yet effective, but harsh? Cindy is harshing Bush's mellow, no doubt, but that's hardly the same thing.

Look at her! Calling this woman harsh is like calling Cheney lovable. The reporter intends to discredit Sheehan by painting her criticism as strident, irrational, and mean. That's not news, it's an editorial.

Concern over a single adjective may seem excessive, a matter of semantics, a minor detail, but God, we are told, is in the details, and none of us should tolerate the kind of lazy reporting that conflates partisan talking points with the facts.

Please take a moment to contact the Associated Press and urge them to urge their reporters to cut the crap and stick to the facts.

War, Meet Fog

2005-08-17T16:50:00.000-04:00

I finally saw Errol Morris' documentary The Fog of War last night, and I was blown away. I resisted seeing this film for two years, not because I wasn't in the mood for a good anti-war film, but because I feared another attempt to combat Bush's Folly by tying it to Vietnam. That was then, this is now, I thought. Wrong. Spend some time with former Secretary of Defense McNamara, and you'll see why.

Whatever you think you know about Robert McNamara, you have never seen or heard him like this. He doesn't draw parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. He talks about Vietnam and the parallels come flying at you like a sortie of B-52 bombers over Hanoi. The parallels are not to the causes of the Iraq war, which one can plausibly, if incorrectly, argue bear no relation to Vietnam. No, the truly shocking parallels are between our current President and LBJ, between Rumsfeld and McNamara, between the misguided strategic thinking going on at the highest levels then and now, and, most tragically, between the errors of judgment and failures of moral imagination that led to unnecessary loss of life. It is a sobering film.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the best and brightest inside the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department all became enamored of a film called Battle of Algiers, its subject the French war in Algeria. They hoped to learn something about the nature of the Arab enemy and the methods (including torture) employed by the French in their doomed effort to wipe out a relatively small group of "terrorists." The film offers many lessons. Sadly, it was the most important of these lessons that our leaders ignored: the French lost. It is too late to draw further lessons from Pontecorvo's masterpiece. Not so with The Fog of War. I doubt Bush has seen it, and while far from stupid, I suspect he would fail to grasp its implications.

Still, I am prepared to send him my copy, if even one person can promise me it won't get lost in the fog.

Johnny Rotten Cash

2005-08-17T12:48:00.000-04:00

I have a theory I'd like to share and get a little feedback on. It's something that smacked me upside the head during a coast to coast road trip I took a while back. I happened to pass through Nashville, where I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the Grand Ole Opry and numerous other points of interest for the nascent fan of hillbilly music. And while I was there it struck me that country is the new punk.

The controversy over and ensuing popularity of Toby Keith's pro-war song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" was still being trumpeted as an important skirmish in the culture wars v.9/11 (though it was his heaping helping of cornpone "Beer for my Horses," that was burning up the country charts that summer). The ony conclusion a liberal could draw was that Toby Keith was an ignernt redneck whose love for his country and hatred of its enemies was blind. And he was damn proud of it. You don't like it? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! The man had clearly flunked his cultural sensitivity training course at the community college.

Yet as much I disagreed with his lyrics, I couldn't help thinking, I LOVE THIS GUY! Don't get me wrong. Toby Keith is an execrable musician, but his attitude is pure punk. It's an attitude I saw throughout the country pantheon, from gods like Johnny Cash and George Jones right on down to unpolishable turds like Toby Keith.

This was odd because, growing up in Texas, I actively rejected country and everything it stood for. I did so because I was a Texan, and in Texas you were either a shit-kicker or you were not. If you think I'm being insulting, then you don't know that the most popular country music station in Houston was KIKK (pronounced "kick") FM. The only thing standing between KIKK and KKK, as far as I could see, was I. Country music meant the Future Farmers of America, Ropers, Randy Travis, Travis Tritt, jingoism, racism and Charlie Daniels, that bearded, big-bellied, fiddle playing devil from the back of beyond. So I threw out Hank Williams and Patsy Cline with the bathwater.

It wasn't until I moved to New York and could listen to the music without the cultural saddle bags attached that I began to hear what I'd been missing. I quickly became a fan of those country musicians that all hipsters are encouraged to love: Hank and Patsy of course (who I always liked anyway, a hell of a lot more than Thomas Dolby or Bananarama) but also Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Johnny Cash. After my trip to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, I discovered Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley and dozens of others. And thanks to long days spent behind the wheel listening to the radio, even my resistance to artists like George Strait, someone I remembered well from my anti-shit-kickin' days, began to fade. I fell in love with his hit "Tell Me Something Bad About Tulsa," despite the fact that it includes the line, 'Tell me how those old oil wells smell in the wind.' Now that's just bad, but he sang the line with such conviction, such authentic, forthright, unironic, unabashed sincerity, I fell in love with it anyway, warts and all.

Maybe that's the secret. Country music ain't always pretty, musically or politically, but the musicians and the fans don't give a fuck (or as Michael Stipe put it in a non-country song: "They're real; they mean it."). Not giving a fuck, having the spine to sing what you believe whether or not it's popular (or even right) is pure punk. Toby Keith is a punk rocker. Steve Earle is a punk rocker. The Sex Pistols were punk rock, and Johnny Cash was punk. Hell, the fact that he's dead is punk. By contrast, today's self-styled punks - Green Day and Avril Lavigne, to name two - are like the meeting of a black eye-liner pencil and a marketing campaign on an operating table. Punk is dead, long live Country.

Now for some of y'all, the new punk is scary (shouldn't it be?) 'cos some of its I-don't-give-a-fuckness seems like ignorance, pure Red State guff. But most isn't. It's what we in Texas politely call "a little differnce of opinion," and as flaming liberals, aren't we supposed to tolerate those little differences of opinion better than anyone?

As I sit here, the country deep in my bones, I know those differences are indeed little. I know that they pale beside the majesty of the music itself, and that there's a reason even Toby Keith remembered to put a little Blue in his furious punk anthem.

Casey's Ghost

2005-08-15T14:19:00.000-04:00

The blogosphere is now All Cindy All the Time, and my initial reaction to the overkill is: ABOUT FUCKING TIME! It is fitting we discuss this war through the prism of a single grieving mom. I was wondering when we'd get around to weighing Bush's Folly against the individual lives it has destroyed. I was wondering when we would focus on the retail cost, when fine words like "hero" and "noble sacrifice" would burn off like morning mist to reveal the human faces underneath. I am grateful that this conversation has begun. Cindy deserves our thanks for forcing it on a reluctant press and an even more reluctant President. Her proximity is clearly cramping the President's style. This woman is shamelessly tainting the joy he takes at playing ranch: the brush clearing, the pickup truck driving, the fund raising, the brush clearing. Yet try as I might, I find it hard to grieve for his lost vacation.

Ah, the vacation... It may appear to be a separate issue, but I believe it is intimately related to the tragedy of Cindy Sheehan's loss and the broader tragedy of our impending failure in Iraq. To paraphrase James Carville: It's the vacation, stupid. Bush's refusal to meet with Cindy Sheehan is unseemly, but no more so than his refusal to attend the funerals of our servicemen and women killed in Iraq, lest in attending one he find himself compelled to attend them all. Attending death, in the sense of acknowledging its true meaning and full weight, is what Bush fears most. To do so would force him to consider the dead in the same way the families do, not as symbols useful for propping up his deranged vision, but as a long and painful series of facts. Human facts. We all know how the President feels about facts. He's been on vacation from them since the beginning. This trip to Crawford is only the most recent physical enactment of an ongoing mental event. Facts don't fit this President's worldview. They must be ignored, kept at a safe distance. And they have been. George Bush is a shallow man, and like most shallow men, he knows better than to set foot in the deep end. So he avoids a confrontation with Cindy Sheehan at all costs, because behind her he sees the ghost of her dead son. George Bush isn't avoiding Cindy. He's avoiding Casey. He is avoiding them all. George Bush sees dead people.

Whether or not anyone else sees Casey's ghost, we all sense a failure of moral imagination in the President's refusal to meet with her, and this sense is magnified because, in theory, he has nothing better to do right now, nothing but time on his hands. Why can't he walk, jog or mountain bike down the driveway and talk to this poor woman? So what if he talked to her before? She's changed her mind about the war and about him. That makes her what? Like a lot of other Americans? She gave her son. She gave the President a piece of her heart. She's earned the right to give him a piece of her mind.

Lost in Place

2005-08-11T03:55:00.000-04:00

I peeled open my copy of The Onion today and like its organic cousin it made me cry and cry. The top story: Bush Vows to Eliminate U.S. Dependence on Oil by 4920. Now why is that funny? Because it's true.

I sometimes think George Bush is a closet Taoist, so patient is he. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, that is if Dickie and Turdblossom say it's OK for me to take that step. If not, nevermind. I don't want to get on the wrong side of Karl Rove, know what I'm saying? Whatever bold new initiative W may propose, you can be sure the deadline will coincide with the college graduation of your great great grandniece.

I've been stewing about it since he came out in favor of the hydrogen fuel cell engine, which is a little like coming out in favor of penicillin during a polio epidemic. NO SHIT, SHERLOCK! The question isn't if we should replace the internal combustion engine, but when. If you went back in time and told Karl Benz, who developed the first practical automobile powered by the internal combustion engine - in 1885 - that we'd still be using the same technology over a century later, he'd scheisse his lederhosen. What apocalypse, he would ask, interrupted the march of progress and science? What epic disaster stopped the industrial revolution in its tracks? What gang of idiots left future generations dependent on a technology that was intended only as a single step on the journey toward better, cleaner modes of transport? The oil companies? Ach, I should have known.

With the leadership we currently enjoy, Herr Benz will be rolling in his grave for another generation at least. Let us harken to George Bush's clarion call to action:

With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.

A child born today? Is he giving the best minds in America EIGHTEEN YEARS to build a new car engine? Jaysus Christ, George. It ain't rocket science! This is rocket science:

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it - we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others,too.

Read the whole thing. You'll weep recalling we once had Presidents of this caliber. Kennedy gave that speech at Rice University, in my hometown of Houston (yup, Texas, folks) at a time when NASA was planting glorified oil drums atop ICBMs and sending America's craziest and bravest into low earth orbit. Walking on the moon must have seemed as improbable at that time as the prospect of a family picnic on Mars seems today. As improbable as the Rice Owls beating the Texas Longhorns, in case you didn't get the joke. (My guess is Lyndon wrote that line.) But did Kennedy say, "Look y'all, it's hard work. We'll get around to it when your children's children are collecting their privatized Social Security checks." No. He declared the time is now. And Americans rose to the challenge, as we always do. Where do we find a similar vision today? Certainly not in the White House. John F. Kennedy made a promise to the future, one kept not in the the eight years allotted, but in seven. George Bush demands over twice that time to come up with a modified lawnmower. See the differnce?

I sometimes imagine a race of murderously judgmental aliens roaming the galaxy trying whole worlds. They finally reach earth and must decide whether our planet deserves to be spared. Our court-appointed defense attorney, young, idealistic, has reams of evidence in our favor: Homer, Dante, the poetry of Rilke, the music of Bach and the Beatles, Van Gogh, Matisse, Brancusi, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, the cinema of Bresson, Kurosawa... "They invented Music, Art, Love, God! Please, just listen to this Bill Monroe album! Could we have invented Bluegrass? No! Not in a million years. They must be spared!" the young idealist pleads.
Then the prosecutor steps to the bar, clears his throat. "They still use the internal combustion engine."
"Say what? When did they invent it?" the judge would like to know.
"1876, by their calendar."
"What year is it now?"
"2005."
"Case closed," says the judge, as he reaches for the big RED BUTTON...

How To Stay Young

2005-08-10T16:10:00.000-04:00

A friend recently blogged about a lovely album she's been listening to. I lent it my ears. I liked.

Can anyone doubt music is the greatest of the arts? If I could sing I would never have gone to film school. Hearing a new sound, a great line, makes me feel eighteen again, and after a certain age (hint: 30) that is a very nice feeling. So:

1. Keep discovering new music. It continually awakens feelings you didn't know, or may have forgotten, you had.

2. Keep reading poetry. It reminds you that few valuable insights have anything to do with money.

3. Keep making love. It's great for your skin, and your soul.

4. Keep changing your mind. It means you learned something new and acted on it. If you're beyond learning and taking action, you might as well be dead. Or a pundit.

5. Keep trying to change the world. If you think it's too late, see 4.

6. Keep moving. Literally. A little kinetic activity now and again goes a long way - dancing, riding in the Tour de France, getting up to change the channel. It all helps.

7. Stop celebrating your birthday. If you can't remember how old you are, you never have to worry about acting your age. Acting your age past 30 is a death sentence.

8. Travel. Even if it's just down the road, new sights keep the mind and heart alive.

9. Be kind. It shocks people, which is funny when you think about it. It also feels good.

10. Laugh.

11. Keep adding to this list.

Bringing It All Back Home

2005-08-01T10:49:00.000-04:00

Shrub is growing up. He's given up the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) for the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE). For someone who is no fan of evolution, our President is evolving. (Soon Molly Ivins may have to call him Lil' Bush.) Yes, the President finally acknowledged that success in our struggle against the evildoers will be defined primarily by how many hearts and minds we win, not the body count. This is no small advance, like the moment when early hominids first began to walk upright. From perpendicularity, our promotion to Homo Sapiens was assured. Far more assured than the outcome of the GSAVE, but we should not underestimate the importance of this change in official language. Now we can win, because we have replaced an old slogan with a newer one! And the new slogan makes for a peppier acronym! You get the feeling the White House secretly convened the SuperFriends and issued them new Team GSAVE uniforms:

GEORGE
These ones really work, guys.

THE WONDER TWINS
Form of...an idiot. Shape of...abject failure.

Up until now, we are being told, the hearts and minds message was lacking. Unfocused. Or simply, like Phase IV of the Iraq War, marked "TBD." Messaging was the real problem! But now we're on it. We're gonna say the right things.

I'm no different from George Peppard's cigar-chomping "Hannibal" Smith of A-Team fame: I love it when a plan comes together. So I was excited to hear the President put his most trusted counselor in charge of the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy - no, not Karl Rove, you can already smell the burnt on him, he's toast- Karen Hughes, mother of John! If she's smart, she'll hire Weiden + Kennedy, the ad agency that turned Nike into such a successful worldwide brand with just a swoosh and a slogan. I'm sure they can do the same for Brand America, once George agrees to shut his pie-hole and outsource all his speeches to Tony Blair.

Deep down, though, I don't reckon Karen Hughes, for all her Texas charm (well, I see it - she reminds me of my elementary school teachers), will make a damn bit of difference, because George isn't going to outsource his speeches. More importantly, he isn't going to outsource his thinking. If you want to know what chance this man has of bringing the world together, just look at how well he's done at home. Look at all the uniting going on right here. No divider, he. (Must resist irony, must say it straight.) Here it is straight: a President whose theory of leadership is to divide and conquer doesn't stand a snowball's chance in Texas of winning this thing we're in, no matter what he chooses to call it. (GOTME?)

The Religious Atheist and Other Conundrums

2005-07-30T14:31:00.000-04:00

I hate to take y'all to church. I know how much I hated going as a kid, but I just finished reading Jon Krakauer's new book, Under the Banner of Heaven, and it is amazing. Anyone interested in religion in America should read it immediately. It's about Mormons. I know something about Mormons. I grew up with Mormons. There were quite a few of them in Katy, Texas. My first heart-rending crush was on a Mormon girl in freshman Algebra who used to flirt with me shamelessly but refused to date me for reasons having to do with the exclusivity of that faith. As a Catholic, I was not one of the elect, and so there was no hope - short of conversion - for me to enter her pure fold. Someone eventually did enter her pure folds, however. The last time I saw her was in a Wal-Mart parking lot, in a Wal-Mart uniform. I was home from college for Christmas. She quickly recounted the sordid tale of how she'd gotten knocked up at nineteen, been excommunicated, had the baby, and was now working as a cashier to make ends meet. I felt waves of jealousy and relief wash over me. You never can tell about people, no matter what they claim to believe.

Now for today's sermon...

America has passed through several Great Awakenings in the course of her history. Individuals usually have one or two of their own. Mine came in the seventh grade, when my science teacher explained the theory of the Big Bang (that's right you flat earthers, you deniers of carbon dating, stop fighting evolution, it's cosmology you should really be afraid of). I was making my First Communion at the time and full of big questions like: "But who created God?" The answers I received in my CCE classes were unsatisfactory. The Big Bang, on the other hand, blew my mind wide open. It grabbed hold of me and shook me awake. It explained so much randomness and evil. It also left a gaping hole where God had been. If I didn't need God to create the world, then what did I need him for? I tried to hold on to Him, deciding that maybe God was responsible for other things. Maybe He wasn't the architect of the universe, maybe he was the janitor. I tried to find a place for Him in my evolving conception of life, but He became smaller and smaller. Even if he only created Man, well, Man is a mess. How can a perfect Being create Man in his image, and Man be such an unmitigated disaster? The priests tell us it's because God gave Man free will. But if He knew we'd only use our free will to take a ten thousand year shit all over His creation, why would he give it to us in the first place? God is omniscient, after all. He's known from the beginning how it was all going to go down.

Besides, if it is so important that we freely choose good, why are there jails? We don't allow criminals to go on using their free will after they prove unworthy of it. Why would God allow us this criminal freedom? Ah, to test us! But I despise this vision of God. The SAT God. Just testing you, folks! Bullshit. Who can accept a God who sits in heaven fucking with his creation, you know, just for the fun of it. It can't be very satisfying for the Lord of the Universe. When I look around I see a handful of people, at best, worthy to enter heaven: Socrates, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Henry Miller, Mother Theresa (yes, I read Hitchens' book, but come on!). I'm sure your short list would be different, and that's fine, but it would be short. Many are called, few are chosen. I can just hear Jesus now: "Dad, what can I say? You were right and I was wrong. I kept giving you shit about the Flood, kept begging for one more chance to redeem those nasty fuckers. I really believed it would work, but it's been two thousand years since I let them nail me to that stinking cross, and look at them. Have they learned anything? Fuck 'em. They don't deserve to live. I say Kill 'em all, let You sort 'em out!" Well, that's what I'd be saying if I was Jesus. I hope it's not blasphemous to admit I sometimes put myself in Jesus' place. Isn't that what we're supposed to do? From The Imitation of Christ to WWJD? Christians have been urged to get into Jesus' head, his heart, his life. So even now I try, and on those rare occasions when I succeed, I see one pissed-off dude.

These are the thoughts of a religious atheist. I gave up my faith, but it refused to give up on me. I keep thinking about God. Trying to understand what He was trying to do, what He hoped for this world, and how I can work to fulfill His wishes. So what if He doesn't exist. He is still the image of perfection. I'd rather aspire to His will than to fame or fortune. (Sure, I could go on Fear Factor and eat stewed maggots with the best of them, but it would leave me feeling so empty.) It took me many years to admit I didn't believe in God anymore. I thought if I admitted I didn't believe in Him, He would strike me down. (There's a good Catholic for you!) Yet I never became strident in my newfound Godless Communism. I never ridiculed faith, nor those lucky enough to have it, as I always saw my own loss of faith as a tragedy, not as some joyful release from cant. Think about it. Take one look at this fucked up world and tell me it makes you happier to think there is no one to tally our deeds, to reward the just and punish the wicked. Without faith, however irrational, I sometimes think the world would annihilate itself in a matter of weeks. Belief is the hand staying our appetite for destruction. We know the impulse to rape, pillage and destroy, but something holds us back (at least from going all the way down that path). That something is fear of God. His existence is irrelevant. We all doubt it, but all secretly suspect. He's up there! He sees me! I better put that cookie back in the jar! Everyone secretly fears they'll be held to account for their actions. It makes you grateful for fear.

In some ways I'm more involved with the Lord today than when I believed in Him. I am attracted to God, even more to His Son. I hover on the edge of faith. Growing up in Houston I used to watch preachers and healers on late night TV: Jimmy Swaggart, Benny Hinn. They were good, no doubt about it. They had something. I often listened to their low rent cousins on the radio. It was gripping. God just grips you, even when you don't believe in Him. I will never pass up a chance to listen to someone's testimony. In college, street preachers and latter-day prophets often stopped by campus to proclaim the Good News. I made it a point never to miss one. I never minded their presence in my secular world. Sometimes I was so moved I would cry. Then I'd go back to my dorm, drink liquor, take drugs, fuck my girlfriend without a condom and know that if there was a hell, I was surely going to it. Oh well.

I take the faithful seriously. I take the extremely faithful extremely seriously. I myself still love Jesus, even though I don't believe He was the Son of God (there is no God, so how can He be?). The hypocrisy of those who do believe in Him - who talk the talk but can't seem to walk the walk - infuriates me more than it does God (if He existed). Sometimes I want to SCREAM: What part of "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven" don't you understand? What part of "Blessed are the peacemakers" don't you understand? Their Sanitized, Reaganized, Ayn Randified, Fully Incorporated, Limited Liability G.I. Joe Jesus makes me want to puke. My sole consolation is that, should they turn out to be right - if there is a God watching over us and His justice awaits - then none of their deeds has escaped his omniscient eye. No need to start a homegrown Baader-Meinhof gang. Henry Kissinger is already toast! So is George Bush. I just wish I could see his face when he finally faces St. Peter and is asked about the Iraq War.

SAINT PETER
What about all the innocent civilians who were killed because you started this war? The women, the children, the men who were tortured to death though innocent?

GEORGE
Um...but I was saving even more from a monster! Saddam Hussein! He killed hundreds of thousands during his reign. He was a devil!

SAINT PETER
Didn't your father supply him with the weapons he used to murder those innocents? Didn't your own Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, once go to Baghdad and shake his hand, after he gassed the Kurds?

GEORGE
He'd only gassed Iranians at that point. D'oh!

SAINT PETER
Besides, we're not talking about what Saddam Hussein did. We're talking about what you did.

GEORGE
But I meant well.

SAINT PETER
Yes, I know. You'll find your intentions over there, on that road...

(Saint Peter indicates the ROAD TO HELL.)

SAINT PETER
Now get going!

GEORGE
NO!

SAINT PETER
Say hello to Saddam for me!

Of course, I doubt Christians of this stripe really and truly believe in God. If they did they would already know He is watching and weighing every deed and they wouldn't be behaving the way they do.

There's a great Lenny Bruce line about the city I now call home: "In New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish." Maybe I find that joke so funny because I was raised in the first faith he mentions and decided to marry a nice girl from the latter, so in my case it has become literally true. Maybe it's because I've always felt the two faiths have so much in common (above all their staggering preoccupation with guilt). I know Lenny wasn't making a statement about theological affinities. He was suggesting the overwhelming influence of Jewish culture on this amazing city. But the Church I was raised in also has its domain of overwhelming influence. It's called the world.

You can guess from the way I turned out, I never really got along with the Church. When it wasn't boring it seemed downright crazy. I've begun reading in Apologetics, that misguided attempt of religion to explain itself rationally. Catholic apologetics begins with the Church's belief that the Eucharist is the actual body of Christ, and that the wine is his actual blood. Aside from the humorlessness of this literal interpretation of Christ's words in John 6:51 - I mean, if Jesus really wanted the disciples to eat his flesh and drink his blood, they could have done it right then and there, with Peter taking the left forearm and Judas the right foot - there is the more disturbing fact that every time a Catholic takes communion he is cannibalizing the Son of God. For Christ's sake! And don't get me started on Original Sin - if God knows all from all eternity, then he knew Eve would not be able to resist the temptation to eat the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge. For that matter he knew the serpent would tempt her. So why did he create the serpent and why did he plunk that fucking tree down RIGHT THERE! It don't make sense. The story just doesn't hold holy water.

Yeah, well, there are a lot of problems with the concept of God. Too many. That's why I gave Him up for Lent. But He refuses to give me up. So here I am. Here's my version of the joke: "In the Church, even if you're an atheist, you're Catholic." What more can I say? I am, and I am.

Bastards of Oil

2005-07-25T13:00:00.000-04:00

If I see that BP ad one more time I'm gonna SCREAM! You know the one. The one that asks the burning question: "Which would you rather have - your car, or a cleaner environment?" BECAUSE THOSE ARE YOUR ONLY FUCKING CHOICES, AMERICA! GOT IT?

Back in philosophy class, we used to call this a false disjunct. Which would you rather have - higher taxes, or your freedom (the freedom that comes from keeping every bloody penny you earn, accumulating a mountain of untaxed wealth, using it to build a McMansion surrounded by razor wire, a minefield, and a twenty foot high electric fence, paying a high school dropout - or more likely, an unemployed veteran of the Iraq war - minimum wage to guard the perimeter while you cower inside, cradling your flat screen HDTV and hoping against hope that when the time comes he'll muster the courage, on your behalf, to open fire on the ravening hordes of homeless children fucked over by a bankrupt government...WAIT! There is no government, because there are no more taxes to pay for all those frivolous things governments do, like educate those children for "free," or protect us from Osama Bin Laden)...well, which do you want? BECAUSE THOSE ARE YOUR ONLY FUCKING CHOICES, AMERICA! GOT IT?

Just kidding. That was a false disjunct, or in the vulgate, bullshit. Real Americans see through bullshit pretty easily. Which is why BP casts fake real Americans in their ads. Instead of seeing through bullshit, fake real Americans say things like: "Give up my car? That's like asking me to give up chocolate!" (The fake real American in the offending BP spot looks like the kind of woman for whom giving up a Whitman's Sampler now and again would indeed constitute a hellish sacrifice.) But let's leave her eating disorder out of it for a minute and parse what's really going on here.

What's really going on is very simple. BP is lying. BP is lying because it's a big fat greedy bastard of an oil company with a lousy environmental record - one of the worst - and it wants to distract us from that black and viscous fact by showing that fake real Americans think cleaning up the environment is so dang crazy it's like taking chocolate from a fat lady. How else view policy changes that would result in Americans using less BP product? (Then again, eating lots of chocolate won't result in THE END OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT. Unless you're this guy.)

It's the same bait and switch Trent Lott pulled the last time Congress was thinking of hiking fuel economy standards. You may remember him standing on the floor of the Senate next to a very large photograph of a very small car that he famously derided as a "purple people eater." It was a masterful bit of fearmongering: You raise gas mileage, you die!

Except that it isn't true. Death is not the only alternative to a more fuel efficient car. Just as walking is not the only alternative to a cleaner environment. Of course, if BP can convince you otherwise, you are likely to be far more indulgent of its environmental incontinence. Look, America, we have no choice. We've got to pump more and more oil, and you've got to consume it, and when you pump oil, well, spill happens.

Please contact BP and tell them to cut the bullshit. But be polite. Don't call it bullshit. Call it a false disjunct.

Ready, Fire, Aim!

2005-07-15T15:00:00.000-04:00

The Democrats are at it again. They wasted no time forming a circular firing squad after recent remarks by DNC Chairman Howard Dean portraying Republicans as fat cats who never had to do an honest day's work in their lives. Democrats promptly pissed their pants. Before the stain could dry a gaggle of self-appointed party leaders threw themselves in front of the cameras, so eager were they to perform the traditional hand-wringing ceremony. The good doctor's remarks were tut-tutted and distance was taken from the radical notion that there is anything shady about the party of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Tom DeLay. Smooth move, guys.

It seemed clear to me the Chairman had his tart little tongue planted firmly in his populist cheek, but the joke went right over the heads of our party Olympians. Which isn't surprising - most of them long ago evicted their sense of humor to make room for preening self-importance. This was exemplified by the performance of Joe Biden. Damn Joe, what kind of Democratic party is it if we can't even hate rich people anymore? The whole thing makes me want to scream. WHAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHEEEEYAAAAH! Damn. That felt good. (I finally understand where you were coming from, Howard.)

It's telling that the current leadership will instantly marshal all the passion and eloquence at its command to decry one of their own, but not to defend the party's honor. What sane woman wants to date a man who refuses to defend himself when attacked by some asshole in a bar? What sane man wants to date a woman who constantly bitches about her friends? Yet this is how we behave. Is it any wonder we keep striking out with voters? They see how we treat our own and they are disgusted. Instead of taking on the asshole in the bar, we think we can get the girl by becoming Asshole Lite. Or we think we can improve our individual fortunes at the expense of our friends. My mom knew better. She used to tell me and my brother, "If you can't think of anything nice to say about someone, don't say anything at all." It's homespun wisdom the Democratic party would do well to follow. As I don't expect it to do so, let me couch my advice in terms more likely to touch the power hungry heart.

Dear Senator Biden et al.,

You are not helping. You are not helping yourself, and you
are not helping your party.

NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Respectfully,

Todd Smith

A final note on ideology. "Centrist" Democrats claim that Howard Dean can never lead the party back to power because he is too extreme. He is accused of waging "class warfare," by which the chickenshit - er, centrist - wing means he should stop reminding everyone that a worker who puts in 40 hours a week ought to damn well make enough to live on. (Radical stuff!) I would remind these centrists of another "extremist" who continued to stand up for what he believed in after initially leading his party to massive electoral defeat. His name was Barry Goldwater.

Today we have a name for the Goldwater progeny: President, Senate Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House.

Danger Will Robinson

2005-07-11T01:54:00.000-04:00

So much stupid shit happens in the course of any given day that it's impossible to keep track of it all, and in the interest of maintaining my sanity I don't try. Consequently it's hard to pinpoint which particular instance of stupid shit incited me to start this blog. No, wait - it was a top ten list.

The list I'm talking about was compiled by the nattering nabobs of negativity over at Human Events magazine, where a committee of unreconstructed reactionaries recently selected the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. There were some real surprises:

4) The Kinsey Report. Kinsey's research merely confirmed what we all already suspected: our parents are (or at least were) freaks. His crime, according to the brain trust at Human Events, was "to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy." Is that what talking honestly about sex does? I personally think MTV does a much better job of normalizing promiscuity and deviancy, though I admit to lingering doubts about their scientific credentials.

7) The Feminine Mystique. Headline: Betty Friedan Nearly Upsets Karl Marx as Das Kapital Ekes Out 6th Place on Stupidest List Ever! Human Events apparently holds Friedan single-handedly responsible for tricking impressionable females into believing they might find more satisfaction in the workplace than the kitchen. Plus, she banged a communist. Why all the outrage? Communists are hot! (I base this entirely on Garbo's performance in Ninotchka.) More shocking is that Friedan opens a six-pack of whup-ass on Nietzsche, whose Beyond Good and Evil is relegated to 9th place. How can anyone take seriously a group that thinks women are scarier than Germans!

I don't know much about Human Events beyond their low opinion of human events these past 200 years (typical conservatives!) but I am generally of the opinion people should do whatever the hell they want, be it watching NASCAR, machine-gunning ripe fruit, engaging in consensual "sayex" with their cousins, or making lists - Don't Tread on Me You Can Do Whatever The Fuck You Want, that's my motto - but there is something rotten about the Human Events list...something that reeks of...what is that stink? Oh yeah! National Socialism. The Nazis too compiled lists of harmful books. Then they burned them. Remember what Heine said about book burning: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." He was right, of course. Compiling lists of dangerous books is a prelude to eliminating them. Given that a book is nothing more than a collection of ideas, and ideas call the human mind home, such a list is a prelude to eliminating human beings, lest they precipitate more untoward human events. I'm not saying some of these books (Mein Kampf, for example) haven't proved harmful. No, wait, that's exactly what I'm saying: BOOKS DON'T KILL PEOPLE; PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE. If you want their bad ideas to die like a dog in the street, send them into the street, where they can be exposed to that glorious disinfectant, sunshine.

I do go on. Forgive me. This is my first entry and I was rushed. (As Goethe said, "If I had more time, I would write a shorter letter.") In the past my response to such instances of stupid shit has been to try and ignore it, fail, and then stew about it, becoming a little more aggrieved at the state of the world while doing exactly nothing about it. No more. This time my indignation actually produced a tangible result: a letter. I've never written a letter to the editor before, but the idiotarians at Human Events awakened the slumbering beast within. I started this blog to tell you about it, to encourage you to awake and scream. No more free passes for stupid shit! Fighting back is good for your mental health. Besides, it can be fun. I've reprinted my letter below in the hope that it will encourage you to compose one of your own and send it to the editors at Human Events. Be sure to copy me if you do. I'll try to post a few of the cheekier efforts right here.

To: editors@humaneventsonline.com
Subject: 'Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries'

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for providing me with a good laugh and the reassurance that, as Dick Cheney might say, your movement is in its death throes.

Harry Crocker? Fred Smith? Prof. Brad Birzer of Hillsdale College? (Isn't that where Humbert Humbert taught English to fawning bobbysoxers in Lolita?) Your panel of has-beens and intellectual bottom feeders isn't qualified to judge a Gong Show episode, much less discuss political theory or the history of Western Philosophy. We both know most of them have never read the books on this list. (Do you expect me to believe Phyllis Schlafly is actually literate?) And seeing the promoter of the Swift Boat Liars given a forum in which to decry one of the great minds the Western philosophical tradition - I mean Nietzsche, not Ralph Nader - is enough to make a stone cry.

Good luck to you on your next list, in which Ann Coulter will select the 'Ten Most Harmful Dialogues of Plato' and demand of Socrates' ghost, "Why do you hate Athens?"

-Todd Smith

Boy Howdy!

2005-07-08T00:15:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends, Bitter Enemies, Undecideds,

Welcome to Howard Beale Street, my blog and alter-ego. Does that make it my blego? (And there will be puns.)

I here assert no authority beyond my own personal experience. I don't pretend to know any more about the way of the world than its current leaders. I understand the blogosphere needs a new addition like New York needs a new avant-guard theatre troupe. I feel your pain. Now you're going to feel mine.

You can look forward to intermittent postings about life, love, politics, religion, philosophy, country music (and the other kind), cinema, theatre and dance. If I left anything out, don't worry. I'll get to it eventually.

They say in cyberspace no one can hear you scream. Thank God. Like our friend the atom, these rants and raves will consist of mostly empty space. I never promised you a rose garden. Or ideas. Or insight. I just know that I can't keep my mouth shut any longer.

And so, Al Gore, thank you for inventing the internets. I'll sleep better at night once I get this off my chest.