Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.
Back toward the end of the ’90s, a throwaway bit in Wired imagined advertising as a virus, mutating and adapting to fill every conceivable niche in the ecosphere of attention-mongering. —A meme, yes yes, but at least a rather specific and concretized example of one, with better metrics.
The bit ended by proposing a king-hell ad-beast slouching through a climax forest of synergistic marketing opportunities: let’s say (it said) that Nike starts buying 30-second TV spots and airing nothing. Not an image, not a sound, not an icon, not a blipvert at the end to brand the logo on your consciousness: just 30 seconds of empty blank nothing. We’d all know, of course, because everyone would be talking about Nike and their crazy empty ad scheme, and constant repetition would drive the point home until every blank wall, every cloudless sky, every television tuned to a dead channel would whisper Nike to our lizard-brains.
Magnificent (for some values of magnificent)—and yet we all know that pound for pound it’s the little things that best succeed in filling niches: the microbes, the bacteria, the virii and prions, like what I saw crawling through the ESPN chyron as I was buying a burrito for lunch: the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. How can one begin to measure the return on an investment like that?
In which Jamie Lee Curtis says just about everything that needs to be said to Jonah Goldberg on the occasion of the publication of his very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.
Further context here, here, here, here, and oh sweet Christ here as well.
Harsh, yes, but also unfair.
It only just now occurred to me: Alan Moore’s (and Kevin O’Neill’s, yes yes) Black Dossier is really his Number of the Beast.
Don’t shake out your dandruff and tell me it’s snowing, either.
Nordstrom used to have a piano player in each store, genteelly wassailing holiday shoppers, but this year the players have been rendered redundant: “The Seattle-based chain said the company is carrying out its hyper-attentive approach to customers, who it said compliment canned music more often than live musicians,” reports the Oregonian. —Somehow, I have a hard time believing they’re really doing this just to keep their customers complimentary. Golly. I guess Mr. Easterbrook was right.
Counterinsurgency.
Matt Yglesias in his typically deadpan cheek-tongued fashion has suggested a Sistah Souljah moment for those Democratic candidates in the market:
…I thought I might suggest Project Pat’s “Tell Tell Tell (Stop Snitchin’)” as a good candidate.
He cites fellow Atlantician Jeremy Kahn for support:
Police and prosecutors have been contending with reluctant witnesses for decades. But according to law-enforcement experts, the problem is getting dramatically worse, and is reflected in falling arrest and conviction rates for violent crimes…
The reasons for witnesses’ reluctance appear to be changing and becoming more complex, with the police confronting a new cultural phenomenon: the spread of the gangland code of silence, or omerta, from organized crime to the population at large. Those who cooperate with the police are labeled “snitches” or “rats”—terms once applied only to jailhouse informants or criminals who turned state’s evidence, but now used for “civilian” witnesses as well. This is particularly true in the inner cities, where gangsta culture has been romanticized through rap music and other forms of entertainment, and where the motto “Stop snitching,” expounded in hip-hop lyrics and emblazoned on caps and T-shirts, has become a creed.
But it seems silly to leap so quickly yet again for gangsta shibboleths when a much more probable proximate cause is at hand: cops, after all, are tasing people during routine traffic stops and for not removing their hats in city council meetings; they’re pepper-spraying infants; tackling, tasing, and pepper-spraying blind grandmothers; they’re enforcing draconian laws against the very act of sitting on public sidewalks. —Hearts and minds, people, hearts and minds; why on earth would anyone help a force so obviously arrayed against them?
Just imagine the press a Democratic candidate could garner by Sistah-Souljahing the police, to shame them into protecting and serving all of us…
Don’t hate on a—oh, who are we kidding.
In linking to this post by Carrie Brownstein, Matthew Perpetua—Mr. Fluxblog his own dam’ self—all but proves he’s never seen a Decemberists show.
All right, you’ve covered your ass now.
“The FBI is warning that al Qaeda may be preparing to offer adjustable-rate mortgages based on the bubble-inflated value of the homes of borrowers unable to repay them, leading to upwards of $1.3 trillion in potentially non-recoupable losses, according to an intelligence report distributed to law enforcement authorities across the country this morning. The alert said al Qaeda ‘hoped to disrupt the U.S. economy and has been planning the attack for the past five years’.” —Gawker
Treason.
[Mukasey is] wrong on torture—dead wrong.
—Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), shortly before voting to confirm Mukasey as our 81st Attorney General
You know, if somebody’s wrong—dead wrong—on torture, then politesse demands maybe you think a good long minute before going ahead and pissing all over them when they’re on fire. What you don’t do is vote them in as Attorney goddamn General.
Maybe it’s just me.
No man
No madness
(Though their sad power may prevail)
Can possess
Conquer
My country’s heart—
They rise to fail.
She is eternal
Long before nations’ lines were drawn
When no flags flew
When no armies stood
My land was born
And you ask me
Why I love her
Through wars, death and despair
She is the constant
We who don’t care
And you wonder
Will I leave her—
But how?
I cross over borders
But I’m still there now
How can I leave her?
Where would I start?
Let man’s petty nations tear themselves apart.
My land’s only borders lie around my heart.
Oh, all right, one more,
but really, this has to be the last, okay? F’reals. Because the thing to take away from Glenn Greenwald’s bizarre exchange with Colonel Steven Boylan is the terrifying glimpse it gives us of the world to come: a politicized, evangelical military, glowering in the corner of our right-wing echo chamber, and thus our polity. (A sitting senator threatened her husband’s life when he was president; you really think it won’t be a thousand times worse when they have more on their side and even less to lose?) —That’s what should set you shivering, see, but all I can do when I read Greenwald’s followup (as a thousand points of McVeigh try to park rhetorical Ryders full of fertilizer on his post) is giggle at his peerless snap:
…right-wing blogger Howard Kurtz…
God, we’re so frickin’ witty, sipping tea here on the lip of the Abyss! (And what the fuck else should we do, huh?)
Drive-by kulturklatsch.
I’m needed elsewhere; I’m trying to Get Things Done. (Never mind the sooty faces tugging at the Forge!) —This is mostly me using the Outboard Brain. And so: this (which found via this) seems somehow to me to be saying something, what, obverse? to this, which is (indirectly) about this. (I’d add something about the stagnation of the direct market in comics as everyone waits for trades that never come because the floppies don’t sell, but I’m not sure where to put it.) So: no thought, just bookmarks. (On a seemingly unrelated note: should I kill the joke about the three lions entirely? I mean, head, hand, and heart, but who the fuck’s gonna follow that?)
Politics as she is spoke.
Yes, it is interesting to learn that the Feds began wiretapping us in February of 2001 (though I coulda sworn we found that out like, last year already or something). But: you want to stop the warrantless wiretapping now? Don’t bother pointing out it was no fucking use at all in stopping 9/11. They don’t care, and anyway the rhetoric’s metastasized. —Point out instead it was no fucking use at all in stopping the Republicans from losing Congress.
A humble request.
I was going to rant about how nobody’s letting In Our Bedroom After the War breathe in the shadow of Set Yourself on Fire, but I have work to do, and really, you all probably knew this already, so instead I’ll just ask this: please, please, please stop saying “postmodern” when all you mean is “metatextual.” It’s so 1984.
I know you are but what am I.
As you know, Bob, they only accuse us of that which they themselves are doing, or mightily wish they could do—so maybe we might want to get a tad more concerned than usual with recent trends in rhetoric from the dextral reaches of the Islets of Bloggerhans.
The explanation you deserve.
Yeah, see, apparently? There was this football scandal or something was it last weekend or the weekend before where some guy from one team videotaped some guy from some other team and got caught and I’m not real clear on what the whole videotaping thing is about, maybe copyright violation or something, except I’m not sure how that’s cheating, I haven’t really been paying attention, but I haven’t paid much attention to football since the Superbowl Shuffle, to tell the truth, but anyway, football isn’t so much germane to the explanation you deserve.
Football comes into it because I read the Poor Man and he goes on about football and today he linked to a Gregg Easterbrook column about the whole cheating videotape thing and I know, Gregg Easterbrook, gah, but hear me out, okay? In the middle of this column on the whole cheating videotape thing which apparently is as important as that MoveOn ad in the scheme of things entire (though I am being unfair, perhaps, as Gregg Easterbrook is a sports columnist, and what are else is a sports columnist to write about but sports? Perhaps how the numinous might impact superstring theory? Ha ha), but anyway, in the middle of this column, Gregg Easterbrook said the following:
And if you’re tempted to say, “Gregg, at worst this is just cheating in some dumb football games,” here’s why the affair matters: If a big American institution such as the NFL is not being honest with the public about a subject as minor, in the scheme of things, as the Super Bowl, how can we expect American government and business to be honest with the public about what really matters?
And ever since I read that, I’ve been screaming and screaming and screaming and I cannot stop and that’s why I’m trying to pound my head through your wall I’m sorry but there it is aaaaaaaaaaaaa—
And holding; and holding.
Then again—
I always was too hopeful for my own dam’ good. (Shorter 2007: so I was wrong about the year. —I wonder if it’s the one that’s aimed at my old house?)
Blessed is the peacemaker.
One takes one’s humor where one can: the cosmic hilarity that ensues, for instance, when one reflects that Sen. Larry Craig (R) may end up doing more for world peace than all the rest of us combined.
