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September 01, 2004
 You know, I've spent alot of time and effort deliberately avoiding the city. And what happens? I end up being forced to come here due to circumstances entirely beyond my control.
So far, I've seen nothing. A bomb-sniffing dog. A checkpoint. BIG EASY-TO-READ SIGNS in the Hoboken train station, accompanied by squads of brightly-vested NJ Transit employees.
Downtown, it's quiet.
Too quiet.
Any minute now, I expect to be swept up in some leftist mayhem. They'll bubble up the elevator shafts like the Blob, overwhelm me at my cubicle, and bury me in a pile of poorly-lettered signs and giant puppets. Then I'll be zip-cuffed and thrown into L'il Gitmo with the rest of the rabble, my cries of "Dammit, I'm an NRA member!" lost among the shouts of the busted and forlorn.
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UPDATE: Yes, I did indeed get some evil-lovely crispy-fat General Tso's from Miscellaneous Chinese Place #76.
No, you can't have any of that, either.
September 02, 2004
John Cole takes Richard Cohen to task for sloppy writing and for letting his big ugly bias hang out in front of the children.
This, in turn, is related to Reverend Sensing's take on Bush's supposed comment that [ready the Media Glee Machine!] We Can't Win The War On Terror. Gasp!
The good Reverend, of course, has got the actual quote, as opposed to the soundbite that Big Media Inc. tossed back and forth among themselves like a bloody scrap of mouse among a passel of housecats, and he writes:
Obviously, not sound-snipping the answer reveals that what Bush said was in fact thoughtful, probing and well considered. He just blew the first sentence in a political sense. This is a war of a highly unconventional nature. Only two weeks after 9/11's attacks I wrote,
This war will not have a clear ending in either time or space. There will be no surrender ceremony of abject capitulation by the enemy. Victory, whatever that word will actually indicate, will be neither final nor obvious. To the question, "How will we know we've won?" the answer is, "We won't."
To buttress my point, and the president's let's change the question:
Q: Do you really think we can win the fight against crime in the next four years?
Would you not think it either arrogant or stupid for a president to answer, "Absolutely, and by the end of my second term there will be no more crime"?
The Administration could have avoided giving the media and its other opponents such ammunition if they had properly named our enemy and declared war on Islamofascism, or some less syllabic equivalent, instead of on Islamofascism's tactics.
The whole domestic "War on [insert social ill here]" concept is ridiculous to begin with, and now they've used that nomenclature to package an actual war, which is downright foolish. It's lowered this conflict to the level of the ineffective War on Drugs, matched it with the abstract War on Crime, and declared it as winnable as the eternal War on Poverty.
This terminology is a reflection of one of two things: the actual dim-wittedness of the American people, or the Government's assumption of the dim-wittedness of the American people. I favor the latter but am of late increasingly reluctant to completely dismiss the former.
September 03, 2004
Some Stale Pottery About France
Oh, greatest and most powerful of worthy Big Ideal Things,
we beseech thee
Supplicant on Gallic knees
we ask that
(if it's not too much trouble)
You tell us why, oh Why,
did our flatulent attempts
at appeasement
not save us from the touch
of the Allah-fearing darkish people
who comprise 8 percent of our population?
Perhaps it is because
we did not offer them government-subsidized cheese?
Holy Crap! Bubba had a heart attack!
See, I knew those pork rinds were a bad idea. But he was all "Depends on what you mean by arterial plaque" and whatnot.
Hope he doesn't die. He's one of those loathsome-but-likable really smart people that I seem to collect and store in closets and under the bed in big plastic boxes and such.
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UPDATE: Holy Crap! Bubba was Hospitalized With Chest Pains; Will Face Bypass Surgery!
See, I knew those "Buckets O' Batter-Dipped Cheese-Filled Onion Rings" were a bad idea, but he was all "I'm building a bridge to the 21st century, where everything is fried" and whatnot.
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MORE UPDATE:
Holy Crap! I've had a heart attack!
See, I knew that bowl of pancakes was a bad idea. But I was all "You may be a bungee-jumping, kitesurfing, mountain-climbing extreme-sports mama, but I'm gonna have these pancakes in a bowl" and whatnot.
September 04, 2004
I am deeply skeptical of anyone who earnestly claims to be an opponent of all stupidity based upon the strengths of their own vast intellect. Particularly when such claims are linked to comic book plot devices. Nothing against comics--I've got friends in the industry. I'm just saying.
I mean, I'm a genius and all, but I Google on the shoulders of giants and, quite frequently, am stupid myself. It's part of my charm.
I can honestly think of nothing more foolish than slathering on the hubris because of the efficient arrangement of three pounds of neural tissue. It's like being proud of a big penis: no matter what the accidents of birth gave you, if all you do is spend your time pounding away like a braying donkey you're not much of an improvement over the microphallic mutant in the next exhibit.
Even more amusing is that people who are actually intelligent, insofar as they use their bit of gray matter to exercise the quintessential human talent of logos or reason as best they can, don't even bother entering into debate with such prideful folks, because their constant chatter has made it evident that it would be a waste of time to do so.
This is what emerges when rhetoric is thoroughly confused with reason: a crop of well-spoken dolts.
Ah well. This is actually Occult Saturday!, and because I'm lazy today I'll toss another bit of Barrett's The Magus at you, concerning Intelligences and Spirits, which is entirely unrelated to everything else you've just read.
NOW, consequently, we must discourse of intelligences, spirits, and angels. An intelligence is an intelligible substance, free from all gross and putrifying mass of a body, immortal, insensible, assisting all, having influence over all; and the nature of all intelligences, spirits, and angels is the same. But I call angels here, not those whom we usually call devils, but spirits so called from the propriety of the words, as it were, knowing, understanding, and wise. But of these, according to the tradition of magicians, there are three kinds; the first of which we call super-celestial, and minds altogether separated from a body, and, as it were, intellectual spheres worshipping only one God, as it were, their most firm and stable unity or centre. Wherefore they even call them Gods, by reason of a certain participation in the Divinity, for they are always full of God. These are only about God, and rule not the bodies of the world, neither are they fitted for the government of inferior things, but infuse the light received from God into the inferior orders, and distribute every one's duty to all of them.
And there you have it. Now, I'm off to the X-Box, where I can make people's heads explode with my mind.
September 06, 2004
It's Labor Day. So I labored by watching acrobats and corsetted bosoms while eating turkey legs and sausage on-a-stick and drinking yards of ale.
Oi! It's the New York Renaissance Faire!
This concludes the entirety of my posting efforts for today.
September 07, 2004
Well. Once again life knocks at the door and presents me with a faceful of mud and a boot to the head.
Faced with imminent loss of jobbage, I of course turn to an acrobat for advice on life. This acrobat, actually: Dextre Tripp. Acrobats, knife-throwers, contortionists, jugglers and the like remind me that there are in fact quite a number of ways to eke out a living, and while I'm not going to take up juggling fire while sitting on a chair balanced on a slack rope, I know that the generally happy demeanor of these folks is due to their finding of...The Thing.
You know: That Thing You Do. Whatever Floats Your Boat. Makes Your Balls Roll, Blows Up Your Skirt, Tempers Your Sausage, and so on.
It's always the same. Whenever I come across someone who's generally happy in life, they invariably have The Thing. They make a living at it, and it changes everything. They all say the same thing: find it. Find The Thing.
Well, I haven't found The Thing, and I'm right pissed about it.
Shortly, I'll have a jobless stretch to do some earnest searching. I've got a fairly good idea about what The Thing might be. We'll see.
September 08, 2004
Andrew Sullivan dribbles this bit of sarcasm about Michael Novak's florid praise of President Bush:
No, that wasn't a recent quote from an obscure North Korean sports stadium.
That's right! At the National Review you can find the equivalent of totalitarian North Korean toadies in fear of their lives praising the insane Kim Jong-il, who controls his people with starvation and routinely threatens to nuke us.
Because, you know, Jong-il is just like George Bush!
This is why I don't much care for identity politics. It turns you into a person with a peculiarly distorted ideation, like a balloon with a soft spot that's gotten all bulged out and oddly-shaped. It removes the Clever Filter, which non-fixated people use to discern whether their cleverness is actual cleverness, or merely a window into their thoughts. Andrew resents the fact that gays are being used by the Bush administration in a cynical bid to bring out those four million evangelicals who didn't show up at the polls in 2000 and gave Karl Rove those anxious hair follicles. As well he should.
But that doesn't mean that a hyperbolic comparison between Bush and a delusional, murderous dictator should pass without comment, particularly when it's made by someone who has previously been enamored with the president.
I don't believe that supporting a discrimintaory constitutional amendment for reasons of political expediency is a testament to good character or a commendable moral stance. Especially if you do so while knowing full well that it doesn't have a sexually reassigned lesbian biker's chance in Appalachia of passing. However--and I say this despite my own predilections--neither do I believe that the issue in question surpasses the importance of the threat of Islamofascist terror and the effective prosecution of a war against its practitioners and supporters. Not even close.
I believe that the long-term trend in this country is towards the elimination of all officially-sanctioned discrimination. It won't happen during a second Bush administration, but it will happen eventually. The fact that the elimination of discrimination towards gays isn't happening fast enough for Andrew is, quite honestly, too damn bad.
Andrew lays down his defense by writing that readers are "invited to send in suck-uppery of either Kerry or Bush in this ra-ra campaign," and I'm assuming that means he's somewhat disinclined to locate some Kerry suck-uppery himself.
The needs of Andrew's personal identity have obscured his judgment about the immediate needs of the polity as a whole. Kerry is not the man to fight the war that needs to be fought, and Bush's political bigotry doesn't change that.
September 09, 2004
September 10, 2004
Let me get this straight.
John Kerry wants to run the country, and says that he's the man who is best able to prosecute the war against the Islamofascists.
And yet, he has surrounded himself with people who are so astoundingly incompetent that either a) they don't know that a Vietnam-era typewriter and a modern computer produce printed output that differs so obviously in typeface and spacing that any expert could identify it as a forgery almost immediately, or b) they don't have enough sense to have the Highly Incriminating Documents That Are Just What We Need thoroughly examined by said experts, just on the off chance that Karl "Evil Genius" Rove supplied them to Democratic operatives using his vast network of sneaky dark elves. Or maybe Rove supplied the douments to the media knowing that--being so Objective and all--they'd snap them up like an emaciated shark lunching on half a cow carcass.
The Democratic Party is supposed to be full to bursting with Intelligent People who understand the subtleties of the world and are just dripping with finesse and nuance.
And yet, this incident bears the marks of a total loss of control. Either the campaign attempted a dirty trick and spectacularly bungled it, or they were completely unaware of what 60 Minutes had, or they were aware of it and didn't bother to make sure that the story wouldn't end up making them look like they fools that they increasingly seem to be.
Whether the Kerry campaign had anything to do with the documents or not, their near-total incompetence in handling the exigencies of a mere presidential campaign does not lead me to believe that Kerry is capable of making the kind of decisions that need to be made in this time of war.
Looks to me like "it" has been "brought on."
I wonder if that phrase is one of those things that makes the Senator's toes curl when he thinks about it? I've got loads of memories like that... so many that they make me twitch and squeak like a Tourette's-laden lunatic.
Good thing I'm not running for President, huh? I'd be a disaster.
And, once again, we're talking about crap instead issues--but apparently Kerry doesn't even have the wherewithal to change the subject.
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UPDATE or, rather, SOME MORE TRIVIAL CRAP:
A man obsessed with old typewriters says:
For those who want my opinion... the documents appear to be done in Word, and then copied repeatedly to make them "fuzzy". They use features that were not available on office typewriters the 1970s, specifically the combination of proportional spacing with superscript font. The IBM Executive has proportional spacing, but used fixed type bars. The Selectric has changeable type elements, but fixed spacing (some models could be selected at 10 or 12 pitch, but that's all). The Selectric Composer was not an office typewriter, but apparently did use proportional spacing. These were very expensive machines, used by printing offices, not administrative offices.
Meanwhile, 140,000 US troops continue to bake in the desert sun. Where is the most effective place to put them next? Do you know? I don't, and neither candidate is telling.
But by GOD we all know a bit more about typewriter technology, don't we? And that's always a good thing.
I said always!
September 14, 2004
What?
Oh.
No, no free ice cream today. Or yesterday. Come back later.
There will be pickles, maybe. And some warm root beer.
*hic*
September 15, 2004
 The more attention I pay to the trivialities of the election, the stupider I get. The blogosphere is in a narcissistic phase right now, playing gotcha! with Big Media Inc.: How long will they ignore the Swift Vets' ad? Almost two weeks! How long before CBS begins to crack? Six days!? Wow! Look Ma, no centralization!
The biggest story on the on the Web, it seems, is the Web. And how clever we all are. I get sucked in too easily, and I play the game a bit, because it's seductively easy to repeat other people's conclusions, and it requires little mental effort on my part. Meanwhile, our enemies gather, and plan, and disperse.
On Saturday night, driving home from dinner with Pea and her visiting Pop, I spotted a light against the cloud ceiling, off in the darkness to my left. At first, I thought it was a car dealership--End Of Summer Sale-A-Thon! A billion dollars cash back (if you qualify)! Free ham!
It wasn't. It was 600,000 watts' worth of memorial: the twin shafts of "Tribute in Light" from Ground Zero, visible over forty miles away as they soared up into the overcast darkness.
So we drove through town and out the other side, to find a place away from the lights, with a clear view of the horizon. Earlier that day, there had been apple-picking at a local orchard, and its long driveway offered the perfect vantage point. At the crest of the hill we stopped the car and turned its lights off.
We're far enough in the country that the Milky Way is actually visible, a subtle glowing band across the dome of the sky, surrounded by a healthy coating of stars. Pop, a suburban denizen, was impressed with that. Even Pea, who was in SoHo on 9/11, spent more time looking up at the sky than out at the distant column of illumination.
I took some time away from them, looking towards Manhattan in the dark. That morning, I woke up at around 11:30, and thought, "Three years ago at this hour, I was walking towards the Queensboro Bridge, waiting for another plane to fall from the sky."
And that was all. There were apples to pick, and some local wine to drink, and present-day things to do.
But that night, watching the photonic ghosts of the towers from so far away that the twin columns of light merged into a single, hazy spear, I felt an odd mixture of sadness and disgust. Sadness, as I remembered the day, the things that I had seen, heard, and smelled. Disgust, as I realized that although those events were still dominating my figurative and literal horizons, our national political discourse is mired in stupid, petty squabbles devoid of substantive meaning.
Close to 3,000 Americans were murdered on our own soil. There was a strike on our nation's capital.
That day should have been the day that changed everything.
Instead, I fear that it is showing some of what constitutes the character of far too large a segment of the modern American polity, a character shaped first by the sacrifices of my grandparents' generation and then by the leisure of their indulgent children, who encouraged the theoretical sores of postmodern nihilism to fester, suppurate, and spread.
Now, the polity is so divided that what was bluntly obvious to my grandparents--the need for defense in the face of aggression--has become lost in a fools' chorus of loud, meandering rhetoric disguised as universal moral sensibility.
The Republic is under attack. It's not under attack by gays, or Republicans. It's not being targeted by Michael Moore, or Karl Rove. The provenance of forged memos and the validity of tarnished, 30-year old medals is not a threat to our citizenry.
We are engaged in a struggle with death-loving enemies that, should the opportunity arise, will not threaten the use of a nuclear weapon. They will simply use it.
Three years from the day I choked on the dust of a skyscraper as I fled downtown Manhattan on a bicycle, I am almost inclined to say that, should such an event occur, we will deserve it. We have so lost our way that we cannot agree to rise up in sweeping defense, or even in mere vengeance. The arrogance of the established media and the inane pandering of our political class are not things inflicted upon us. They are, by and large, our own creation.
Like the endless parade of reality-TV shows that wouldn't get made if people didn't watch them, our information mongers and our leaders wouldn't behave the way they do if their behavior wasn't continually rewarded with success and with power.
Will any of those who exploit our divisions assume responsibility for the blood of Americans who may die as a result of the petty, time-wasting bickering they encourage?
I doubt it.
Responsibility, these days, is quaint.
September 16, 2004
So... am I, you know, discouraged? Much?
The gnarly horns of my dillemma are these (and lo, they are gnarly indeed, like unto a very nasty Doc Johnson product):
- Whatever he was doing thirty years ago, Senator Kerry's 20-year record in the Senate provides a clear portrait of a man who just wishes that people were a bit more like him, with all his deep thoughts and complexities. I used to wish that too, until I realised that I was being arrogant and pretentious, and was too self-involved to realize that I was having my best conversations with myself in a vast echo chamber well-populated with no one else.
- No, that last bit doesn't make much sense. It's sort of a "mood sentence." Work with me here. The gist: nuance is a thing for State Dinners where one can polish one's excellent French, not for wars where your enemy just wants to turn you and everyone you care about into radioactive ash, or twitching, foaming, pox covered corpses, praise Allah, as soon as possible please.
- George Bush is surrounded by a political machine named "Karl" which knows how to win. Win, win, win! Elections, that is. The calculus is that getting out the evangelical vote and its hangers-on will secure the election, and anything that successfully resolves that equation Must Be Done.
- That means that Dubya's sensible initiation of the Iraq campaign--inasmuch as a determined effort to kill a whole lotta people can be called sensible, but monkeys will be monkeys--is tempered by all this divisive domestic nonsense that his machine has enacted in order to retain power.
Can. We. Please! Have some candidates who know how to lead us as a people, instead of one who's just good at the game and another who sucks at it?
Apparently not.
And that is why I'm just hacked off about the whole thing. Either I swing with the Naderites and say that we've all been sold into eternal slavery to our corporate masters--in which case we don't really have a say and it's not our fault anymore--or I'm forced to conclude that the citizenry just doesn't give much of a rat's ass as long as there's enough food, entertainment, and prophylactics.
I'm still banking on a voter turnout of well under 40%, in this, The Most Important Election Ever.
Now: I'm going to saddle up my Street Machine, newly outfitted with the ice blue Down Low Glow and two Cygolite Night Explorers. I will be a recumbent pedal-powered UFO in the country dark.
September 17, 2004
 In a truly despairing bit a couple of days ago, fueled by an absence of the proper medication and an excess of Pinot Grigio, I wrote:
The arrogance of the established media and the inane pandering of our political class are not things inflicted upon us. They are, by and large, our own creation.
Today, via Jeff Goldstein, I find a bit by Stanley Kurtz ["From Biased to Partisan"]. In it, he writes:
True, nowadays all the network newscasts are liberal. But CBS has had that reputation longer than the rest. Gradually, with the exit of moderates and conservatives to other networks and the alternative media, CBS's audience is probably now composed largely of liberal Democrats. In the middle of the most divisive presidential election in years, we have to assume that the CBS audience itself is far more interested in helping John Kerry than in getting to the bottom of the forgery issue. So as the country increasingly divides into two media camps, the "mainstream media" is becoming more openly partisan. And it's the audience that's driving this — not only, or even primarily, the journalists, liberal though journalists may be.
Which is half my point; the other is that media excesses at the other end of the political spectrum are (duh) driven by the other half of the audience.
Still another half of my point (which makes for a full 150% of pointy goodness--you get your damn money's worth here) is that characterizations of bias originating from anywhere in the political spectrum often treat the media as though it sprang into existence ex nihilo, and just whimsically creates the truckloads full of crap that are routinely dumped onto the unsuspecting heads of the American public who, after all, Just Want The Truth.
Both sides point to media's bias in favor of the Other Guy, and even co-opt terminology to describe "their" media--witness Kurtz's characterization of Fox News as "alternative," which would no doubt send a significant portion of IndyMedia's readership into paroxysms of Bush voodoo doll-stabbing. Overly clever linguists claim that the so-called "liberal media" is really just a propaganda front for the true elites, which are (natch) the corporations and the conservatives, and at the same time, conservatives foam about the media's shoddy portrayal of their causes.
The underlying assumption, in all of these seemingly contradictory cases, is that the media ought to portray the truth objectively because that's what people really want.
But people, by and large, don't spend their days focusing on getting the truth. People want to be happy and comfortable. They want to be confirmed in their beliefs and don't want to feel uncertain or stupid. If they're routinely exposed to something that makes them feel unhappy and uncomfortable and stupid, they'll go elsewhere if they can and, America being the Land of Twenty-Seven Orange Juice Varieties, there are plenty of places for them to go.
Every excess, every bucket of partisan bile, every distorted half-truth, and every fraudulent and biased story serves a need of the media consumer.
When Americans want something, they get it.
It's not "the media's" fault.
It's ours.
September 18, 2004
The evil corrupter of youth is going to take him from Step One, which is a mere high school diploma stuffed with a gym sock, to Step Two, which is a college degree stuffed with absolutely nothing at all. Smoke that and it'll really get you out there!
--Frank Zappa
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UPDATE:
The cowbell is a symbol of unbridled passion, ladies and gentlemen.
--also Frank Zappa,
at a slightly later point in time
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FURTHER UPDATE:
As is the trombone, but Frank didn't say that, to the best of my knowledge.
September 20, 2004
Allrighty then, the people, they have spoken, and they cry aloud:
Shut up! We are just not innarested in your continuous breaking of political wind, and, furthermore, we think you may be in need of psychiatric assistance. However, we will avoid reporting you to the Bureau of Reality Control if you make fast with the funny innaresting stories and the strange vignettes.
So noted.
Mind you, I don't disagree with that assessment. But I certainly think that someone should nip round to my house and provide me with jugs of wine on a regular basis, and maybe a monthly stipend, and some back bacon.
That would certainly help matters.
September 21, 2004
 Where's my goddamn jug of wine? And my bacon?
I'm waiting.
No matter. Last night was the opening night of allergy season, an affliction that's like Vietnam. If you don't have them--I mean really have them--then you just don't know, man. You just don't know.
I have allergies. I've had allergies for my entire life. And when George Bush got allergies, he took Benadryl.
When I am President, I will never take Benadryl. I think America needs a President who knows what it means to have his eyeballs turn red and pop out of his face, and not a President who just pops a pill to avoid allergies.
Because I have faithfully had allergies, I know what it means to serve my country. I know how to end allergies, but I'm not going to compromise my position by telling you about that plan now, without the power, and put our young men and women who are expelling their mucous at risk.
Did I mention that I have allergies?
My wife, she's too rich to have allergies. She has our manservant Pokko have them for her.
I'm a man of the people.
When I am President, every American will have a congested sneezing servant named Pokko.
And so forth.
*yawn*
Time for some more Pinot.
It's not in a jug. It will do.
Bastards.
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UPDATE:
It's Italian Pinot. Get a grip.
September 22, 2004
Why?
Because this is America, and I don't have to if I don't want to.
That's why.
September 23, 2004
"I've got a plan! And it's as hot... as my pants!"
September 24, 2004
Every so often, I have an insight that's so momentously profound, so earth-shatteringly brilliant, that I must hide me to my computer and stoke up its coal-fired Celeron. But, alas! By the time my hamster-powered Van de Graaffs have sparked up enough juice to fire the electron gun at my eyeballs, my scintillating idea has gotten impatient and flitted off to find someone else who's already at their machine, just waiting for some errant thought to infect their cerebrum.
So you, gentle reader, get this crap instead, which is why I am universally adored, though rarely quoted.
[Excuse me a moment--must respond to an offer of Free Daffodil Bulbs]
Damn. That took all evening. Now I've got to go to bed.
Gardeners. Can't live with them, can't throw them thro' the wood chipper and send a crimson curtain of their remains cascading into the rose bushes along the back fence.
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UPDATE:
Apparently, you can.
Those are going to look just gorgeous next spring.
September 27, 2004
So... hand tremors and a sort of full-arm twitch thing are only bad if they happen in front of other people, right?
 I've had the most uncontrollable urge to do this in other blogs' comments sections all evening, but I know that it's just so rude, so I'll do it here instead.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!!! BLAAAAAAAAAAARRRG! WWWWWAAAAAHHH! WAAAAAAAAAAAHHH! NYEAAAAARRRGH!!! UGH! AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
There.
That's much better.
September 30, 2004
Suffering from severe malaise. Servants have left due to repeated beatings, so no one available to take up posting slack.
Almost out of Pinot. Soon, will be forced to open domestic Chardonnay... and it's October. Do you understand?
God help me.
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UPDATE
Yes, he said that. Really! Read the transcript. Immediately after proclaiming that he had "no intention of wilting," Kerry claimed that he had "never wilted in [his] life," and that he had "never wavered in [his] life."
People are all over the "never wavered."
Me, I'm all all about the wilting.
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