Friday, April 13, 2007
HELP. alicublog seems not to be loading properly. Or, in some cases, at all. I haven't done anything to it except add last night's post. Other blogspot sites seem fine.
As you know, blogger is useless dogshit when it comes to assisting its constituents, so I turn to you. Any helpful hints?
11:34 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, April 12, 2007
AN OLD FART WITH HIS PALL MALLS. I heard a bunch of people today who said they read Kurt Vonnegut when they were young. So did I, tons of it. It's easy to form the impression from this experience that Vonnegut, who passed Wednesday, was a YA author: simple prose, outlandish premises, and what seemed to me then a clever fatalism that fit well with my other early and ill-digested experiences of literary despair. It's easy to forget that Vonnegut's best-known works were written from a mature perspective; he was a 47-year-old World War II veteran when he created Slaughterhouse-Five.
But I picked a copy of Jailbird out of the dollar bin a few years back, and was surprised and delighted to be reacquainted with his prose, which is indeed simple, but also sturdy enough to support all kinds of fantastic conceits -- Tralfamadorians, Ice-9 and so forth. It also supported a world view which was not, in retrospect, so much despairing as accepting, and at times wise.
Not that Vonnegut didn't recognize the absurd and unjust -- he just saw the humor in them. And his wasn't the common kind of black humor, either, with which most of us seek to neutralize our outrage when it becomes too much to bear. In fact, the absurdities and injustices that were his great subjects -- war, world annihilation, the plight of unrecognized innocents, and the decay of age -- called for something much larger than the gesundheits with which we normally brush away our little glimpses of these things. It required an epic imagination, which Gore Vidal noted in his post-mortem remarks: "He was imaginative; and our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much."
I see what he means: while James Jones, for instance, gut-punched his way through the feelings that the War left him with, Vonnegut wove fantasies from them -- fantasies of what might be behind the worst things in human experience that made them, well, part of the human experience. A Nazi in the afterlife, for example, from Happy Birthday, Wanda June:It was almost worth the trip--to find out that Jesus Christ in Heaven was just another guy, playing shuffleboard. I like his sense of humor, though--you know? He's got a blue-and-gold warm-up jacket he wears. You know what it says on the back? "Pontius Pilate Athletic Club." Most people don't get it. Most people think there really is a Pontius Pilate Athletic Club. He then figures that he should get a warmup jacket ("we got very good tailor shops up here") bearing the name of the man who killed him. This is utterly fantastic, but that a Nazi might react this way to Christian forgiveness is very easy to believe.
Much later, when age oppressed him, Vonnegut wrote books like Jailbird, in which an old man who, despite his best intentions, finds himself a convicted Watergate felon, muses on the grand caprices of fate as he watches a dog at play:I observe how profoundly serious Nature has made her about a rubber ice-cream cone -- brown rubber cone, pink rubber ice-cream. I have to wonder what equally ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I myself have made. Not that it matters at all. We are all here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years. He may have been brought to this understanding because of the outrageously grim twists in his own fortunes, but his epiphany comes from a dog with a rubber ice-cream cone. This is absurd but, I think, more dignified than most absurdism. It is an insight into the universal via the particular, which is the business of first-rate writers.
11:54 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, April 11, 2007
THE MILLION-MAN SCRUM. Sick as I am of the whole Imus business, I feel it necessary to address this:And, in a particularly sinister misinformation campaign, key leftists are now trying to portray Imus as a conservative! That's despite his endorsement of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race and past tirades against the Bush Administration from a decidedly leftist perspective. With, naturally, an InstaHeh.
Whatever else we can say about Imus, I don't thing we can say he's particularly partisan. I'm surprised so few people (well, Digby, but he's exceptional in so many ways) have recalled this 1996 Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner, at which the I-man said stuff like this in the presence of President Clinton and his wife:...the President was at Camden Yards doin' play by play in the radio with John Miller. Bobby Bonilla hit a double, we all heard the President in his obvious excitement holler "Go Baby!" I remember commenting at the time, I bet that's not the first time he's said that. [Turns to President] Remember the Astroturf in the pickup? Then, some gags about Whitewater. A bunch of conservatives got their equally-offensive lumps, though none of them was President and placed directly in his line of fire. Since his Billy Sol Hargis days, Imus' patch of media turf has ever been wild outrage, and whether you find him, as Digby does, a "spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview" or an amusing diversion is a matter of taste.
But now the guy is just another ball contended for in that million-man scrum that is our discourse. It had to come to this. In the blogosphere, people embroiled in scandal eventually become mere signifiers for one political team or another. 'Twas ever thus. It even happened in the big Trent Lott affair of '02, recalled fondly by blog triumphalists as a bi-partisan victory for sweet reason, but in fact just another bone of contention, as I remarked at the time:Trial balloons were floated, bearing the idea that liberals were insufficiently outraged by Lott's remarks, based partly on Tom Daschle's mild, collegial reaction, and, perhaps, on faith that the Right's zone-flooding strategy would, by sheer force of volume, render outside opinion irrelevant. "Either the Democratic Party is appallingly inept, by dropping the ball on this issue, or it's appallingly cynical...I guess 'inept' wins either way," mused InstaPundit. "Where's the New York Times?" cried Andrew Sullivan. "Howell Raines is so intent on finding Bull Connor in a tony golf club that when Bull Connor emerges as the soul of the Republican Senate Majority Leader, he doesn't notice it."
Word was also spread that Lott was never a friend to the Right at all: He was a weak and inefficient Senate majority leader who had effectively given the hated Clinton a pass in his impeachment trial. "He is only for the status quo," wrote Arthur Silber, "stunningly lackluster and uninspiring...tin ear and vacuous mind" In fact, after the GOP's victory in 2002, Capitol Hill Blue reported, "a Republican consultant I know threw up his hands in disgust" (pause to digest this counterintuitive image) "and said 'Christ, this means we'll have Trent Lott as the leader again.'" One wondered how Lott got the job in the first place--till Robert George told us (via another blind Republican quote), "Trent Lott survives because the ex-frat boy puts on a good kegger."
As always happens when conservatives are in high dudgeon, comparisons to Clinton were hauled out. Quoth National Review's Rod Dreher, "Ol' Trent is just following the example of his fellow Baby-Boomer Son of the South, William Jefferson Clinton." A parody at Transterrestrial Musings had Lott, in his BET appearance, announcing that, as "Bill Clinton was the first black president," he was "the first black Senate Majority Leader." Get it? Things haven't improved since then. In the pro-am pundit community, Imus will be torn at until the game gets old, and then someone other object will serve.
This is not meant as a defense of Don Imus, but as a reminder that the real discussion is about something entirely different.
11:04 PM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, April 10, 2007
HONKY, PLEASE! Libertas on the Don Imus case:“Nappy Headed.” I had no idea that was a slur. No idea whatsoever. Do you know how many times I’ve heard that term used affectionately or comedically between black people in movies or on television? Thankfully, I’ve never called anyone “nappy headed,” because I didn’t know what it meant. But how am I supposed to know it’s yet another “N” word when no one tells me? How am I supposed to know it’s offensive when black people use it all the time as a punch line? Also: "I’m used to the double standard that allows black people to call each other what they want." And: "Or, is it African American guy? Or Afro-American guy? Or People of Color?"
I feel bad for the guy. I grew up in a white working-class neighborhood where the preferred word for black people was "niggers," yet somehow I eventually figured out how to deal respectfully with people of different races. It helps to be more interested in people than in preserving, indeed cultivating, one's outrage over Political Correctness, rap music, etc.
I guess Culture Warriors don't find that trade-off worthwhile. Their loss, I'd say.
9:04 PM by roy edroso
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WELCOME WAGON. The moratorium on Elizabeth Edwards criticism has been cut short because she publicly disapproved of her neighbor, one Monty Johnson. Hear, for example, The Anchoress:Elizabeth Edwards seems to have embraced her inner Rosie. A few weeks ago, we had Rosie O’ Donnell lecturing us on how using a word like “terrorist” de-humanizes terrorists. O’ Donnell apparently has never figured out that when she says things like “Christian Fundamentalists are as dangerous as Muslim Fundamentalists” she’s “de-humanizing” a lot of people, too. And now, this Edwards woman - a true Rosarian, it seems - is characterizing someone as “rabid, rabid Republican” and suggesting that it’s perfectly fine and good to dislike people you’ve never met - to decide before you’ve ever tried to meet them that you would not be civil (I assume she means “civil” when she says “nice,”) to them. There has been a bit of coverage on Johnson, including this corker from the Carrboro News, which includes a photo of his domicile, which features a boarded-up window and is strung with barbed wire. As a paranoid, I approve of Johnson's approach -- if not the Bush/Cheney sticker -- but I can imagine why Mrs. Edwards is troubled by his proximity. In another interview, Johnson says, "[Edwards] claims to be for the poor people... He don’t care about us. I see him jogging. He doesn’t pull over and say, 'How are you doing?’" This is hardly surprising as, in addition to giving out several interviews denouncing Edwards, Johnson has also been seen stalking government agents on his property with a gun.
Again, as a paranoid I approve of Johnson's Cold Dead Hands approach to gummint interference; I may move to his neighborhood myself someday, as it seems tailor-made for folks with my attitude toward society and indeed socialization. But I can also see how Mrs. Edwards, who has a husband running for the Democratic Presidential nomination (and children as well), would be apprehensive about having a belligerent, armed rightwinger living across the way. The Anchoress may see this as unChristian, but I see it as common sense.
12:11 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, April 09, 2007
THAT JOKE ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE. The front page of Sunday's New York Post was devoted to this story:I DUMPED HILL FOR OBAMA '08
City Hotel Man Opens the Door to Dem Upset
April 8, 2007 -- Bryant Park Hotel doorman Gregory Smith campaigned door to door for Bill Clinton in 1992, he voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton in both her Senate elections - but last week he went online and gave $25 to Barack Obama for president.
He says he has dumped the Clintons for the upstart Democratic senator from Illinois, whom he calls "a needed breath of fresh ideas and openness."
The doorman told The Post that Hillary Clinton's flip-flop on the war and her earlier coyness about her presidential ambitions have turned him off her - probably forever... You can read the whole thing, but it all boils down to this: a doorman changed his choice of Presidential candidate. I know about Breslin and the gravedigger, but come on. The election is many months away. The conventions are many months away.
It has long been the conventional wisdom that we "gotta love the New York Post" for its ludicrous front-pagers -- "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and all that. I respect the tabloid writing style, and the Post editors who come up with fresh, snappy heds on a daily basis. But for me the Post's cuteness has long since worn off.
The turning point may have been this front page, in which the French and German Ambassadors to the U.N. were shown as weasels, to demonstrate the paper's contempt for those Ambassadors' lack of susceptibility to Colin Powell's U.N. slide show, which was alleged to prove that Iraq was hiding WMDs in smudgy boxes identified as mobile bioweapons labs. I suppose it might have been mildly amusing if you really believed that Colin Powell was telling the truth, and hated the French and the Germans enough to find Der Sturmer caricatures of them clever. But you have to admit that the joke hasn't aged well.
Chacun à son goût and all that, but to me this sort of thing falls into the same category as Don Imus' gag about the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team. I strongly disapprove of his suspension -- let a hundred stink-weeds bloom, so that we may not be spared knowledge of what we have become. And, in the name of the Republic, leave those who find this sort of thing funny free to laugh their fool heads off over it. It's just not my thing.
UPDATE. My editor has corrected me as to the specific object of Imus' slurs in this instance.
11:07 PM by roy edroso
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Sunday, April 08, 2007
SELLER'S REMORSE. Michael Ledeen notes the latest mayhem in Iran, blames unnamed liberals:But, just like women stoned to death in Iran, or the mass starvation of the people of Zimbabwe, these horrors are greeted with the silence that racists reserve for the less-than-humans who behave in an uncivilized way. Their unspoken attitude is, well, what can you expect of these untermenschen?
And anyway, it's all Bush's fault. The Ole Perfesser concurs:"UNTERMENSCHEN:" He's right. That's how they seem to think.
UPDATE: Reader Ted Clayton emails: "Perhaps you could specify who "they" refers to. "
As you can see from reading the linked item, it refers to those allegedly-progressive Westerners who refuse to hold non-Westerners to the same moral standards applied to, say, America and Britain. That should be obvious to, well, anyone who's paying attention.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Drew Kelley writes: 'I am shocked, shocked, to find prejudice among our "best and brightest'." The descent of the "progressives" into racist double-standards is an old story, but it's still one that bears pointing out now and then. I'm sick of this shit. First, conservatives called for the invasion of Iraq, with the welfare of the Iraqi people one of their flimsier pretexts. And since the whole DemocracyWhiskeySexy business went south, it's conservatives we most often hear talking about what a disappointment the Iraqis have been.
General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, for example, has said he wants an end to "'peace, love, and understanding' silliness" in Iraq, and cites as a better model for pacification "the Mau-Mau revolt, in which the British won a complete victory -- thanks to concentration camps, hanging courts and aggressive military operations." And, he has also said, "if Iraq's Arabs choose to backslide into the regional addiction to corrupt governance, it's a lick on them, not on us."
John Derbyshire has said that while he supported the invasion as a "psychic shock to the whole region" -- which "It would have done, if we’d just rubbled the place then left" -- he came to realize that "we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that."
Another rightwing erstwhile warfan, Crunchy Rod Dreher, now says that "I hate that a single drop of American blood was shed for these people."
John Podhoretz says "If the Sunnis and Shiites really go at it, it's hard to see what exactly we can do to get them to stop."
Even Rich Fucking Lowry, author of the notorious "We're Winning" National Review cover story, has said that "The problem with Bush’s freedom rhetoric is that it appears to not be true... All around the chaotic and violent Middle East, human hearts are yearning for many things, but freedom isn’t high on the list."
Yet Ledeen and the Perfesser persist in saying that those of us who predicted that their invasion would result in a shitstorm are the ones who look down on the Iraqi people.
I'd say they suffered from guilty consciences, if there were any indication that they had consciences of any sort.
UPDATE. Commenters point out that The Good Glenn got there first with more. How could I have forgotten the Perfesser's "more rubble, less trouble"? I guess that's why Greenwald is at Salon and I'm wearing a cardboard belt.
2:17 AM by roy edroso
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