Upon hearing once more the serial bangs and muffled thuds of our crack circular firing squad, the words of—I believe it was Kissinger?—are called to mind.
The stakes are so small precisely because the politics are so vicious.
—No, wait, that’s not quite it.
The stakes are so vicious precisely because the politics are so small.
Fudge. That’s not it, either. Bear with me. I’m sure I’ll get it in a minute.
Bumrush the MSM.
Sic, of course. —Digby says:
By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient’s family’s wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother’s wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.
Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.
Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo’s care thus far.
Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo’s because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.
And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.
Those who don’t read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is “stepping in to save Terry Schiavo” mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.
Do what you can about it. Copy this and paste it into the TO field of an email message:
360@cnn.com, 48hours@cbsnews.com, am@cnn.com, Colmes@foxnews.com, comments@foxnews.com, crossfire@cnn.com, dateline@nbc.com, daybreak@cnn.com, earlyshow@cbs.com, evening@cbsnews.com, Foxreport@foxnews.com, insidepolitics@cnn.com, inthemoney@cnn.com, live@cnn.com, livefrom@cnn.com, newsnight@cnn.com, nightline@abcnews.com, nightly@nbc.com, rrhodes@airamericaradio.com, today@nbc.com, wam@cnn.com, wolf@cnn.com, world@msnbc.com, wsj.ltrs@wsj.com, letters@nytimes.com, public@nytimes.com, netaudr@abc.com
Add what you can to the list. Show them the pieces of the story they aren’t telling the rest of the country. Ask them to do their jobs.
You are getting agitated again.
Some questions:
Why did you let Sun Hudson die? Why are you drastically cutting Medicaid even though it insures that more families must face the horrific consequences of George W. Bush’s Texas Futile Care Law? Why are you encouraging others to threaten the lives of Michael Schiavo and Judge George Greer? Why do you persist in this hideous farce, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the country wants you to sit down, shut up, and stop showboating on the back of someone else’s pain?
The only answer that makes any sense at all:
Because Terry Schiavo’s case lets us weaken states’ rights and spit on the constitution.
Babykillers.
Oh, do let’s ignore nuance on this one. —Go here, to Tom DeLay’s “Majority Leader” webpage—since folks who don’t live in the 22nd can’t email him from his own page without some chicanery.
Fill out the contact information as you like.
In the comments box, write this:
Why did you let Sun Hudson die?
Pass it on.
The baby wore a cute blue outfit with a teddy bear covering his bottom. The 17-pound, nearly 6-month-old boy wiggled with eyes open, his mother said, and smacked his lips. Then at 2 p.m. Tuesday, a medical staffer at Texas Children’s Hospital gently removed the breathing tube that had kept Sun Hudson alive since his birth Sept. 25. Cradled by his mother, he took a few breaths, and died . . . Sun’s death marks the first time a US judge has allowed a hospital to discontinue an infant’s life-sustaining care against a parent’s wishes, according to bioethical experts.
—“Baby dies after hospital removes breathing tube,”
Houston Chronicle, 16 March 2005
It is now one o’clock on the East Coast, the time preordained by a Florida state judge to allow for denial of food and water to Terri Schiavo. This act of barbarism can be, and must be, prevented. The Senate has before it the Protection of Incapacitated Persons Act of 2005. This bill is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, they have chosen to adjourn rather than pass it.
Those senators responsible for blocking the bill yesterday afternoon, Senators Boxer, Wyden, and Levin, have put Mrs. Schiavo’s life at risk to prove a point—an unprecedented profile in cowardice. The American people are not interested in squabbles between Republicans and Democrats, or between the House and Senate. They care, and we care, about saving Terri Schiavo’s life.
—“Terri Schiavo is Alive—This Fight Is Not Over;
House Continues to Work to Save Terri Schiavo,”
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Sugarland), 18 March 2005
ABC News obtained talking points circulated among Senate Republicans explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case. Among them, that it is an important moral issue and the “pro-life base will be excited,” and that it is a “great political issue—this is a tough issue for Democrats.”
—“Republicans Seek to Take Schiavo Battle to Supreme Court;
Husband Calls It a ‘Mockery’,” ABC News, 19 March 2005
o.H.M.y.
Y’all remember Tatu? Taty? t.A.T.y?
(Take your time. I’ll wait.)
Okay. I haven’t been following the news all that much, because, y’know, you load one fauxsapphic lolitapop eurochirp album onto your iPod, how many more do you need, and anyway, the pop-culture buzz only lasts so long. —Somewhere in intervening time, it seems, Yulia and Lena wised up to the exploitative nature of their predicament and cut out one of the middlemen by dropping their Svengali, Ivan Shapovalov. And promptly fell off the cult stud radar. There was apparently a reality show, framed around the recording of their new album? Which was supposed to drop on 14 March? Anybody?
Ah, but what about said ex-Svengali?
“I don’t care if she is Russian or not,” says Shapovalov. “This is a girl from the Internet. I can’t even determine the exact style of her music. She sings in Tadjik, Georgian and Pharsi languages. Her songs are about love, about life.”
Ladies and gentlemen: n.A.T.o.
“It’s my first concert, and anything can happen. But everything is going to be fine!” The CNN commentary fades slowly into a steady techno beat, soon joined by live drums and a heavy guitar riff opens up. As Nato lifts the microphone to her lips and starts to sing, the audience strains to hear her voice over the noise. But no matter how they crane their necks, they can see nothing of her face, hidden behind a black veil that shows only her eyes. The lyrics, too, are a bit of a mystery, as Nato doesn’t sing in Russian, but in Chechen and Georgian. One thing is clear: Nato’s outfitted to look like one of the infamous “Black Widows,” the female Chechen suicide bombers.
Confidential to Kriston Capps, to whom many thanks: Russian culture qua culture tends neither to be deaf nor immune; rather, it takes inordinate pride in the world’s deadest pan:
As a finale, Nato performs “Chor Javon,” a catchy song with clear hit potential that’s going to be released as her first single. As soon as she puts down the microphone, the guards jump on stage and fire paintballs into the crowd with their fake Kalashnikovs. Alexy, a 24 year-old concert-goer, gives the whole thing a tired smile. “I’d imagined this would be way more radical,” he says. “Machine guns, the whole silent guard routine—you’re really not going to shock anyone with that kind of thing these days.”
Alas!
Alas, a blog is back from database hell.
Old skool.
I may be getting paddled by the Happy Tutor elsewhere, but never let it be said I said he couldn’t turn a phrase on a dime and kick a white-hot nickel back in change:
You are not watching a play. My friend, you are on stage, as a member of the Chorus. The play is a tragedy, with comic or satiric interludes. What makes it tragic is that time and power are slipping away from the moderate. The tragedy is about how, through the failure of the Chorus to speak up, democracy in Athens was lost. The play ends with a Peter Karoff, or one of so many other such moderate, wise figure’s tragic recognition that it is too late for protest. They, the ones who come to their recognition too late, or express it too late, are not hauled off. Theirs is a worse fate, to live for the rest of their lives, in what had been a democracy, with the urbane shrug that was the tipping point, forced to repeat that shrug under conditons that become increasingly bleak, and to pass on to their heirs that legacy of self-subjugation.
Turbulent Velvet, meanwhile, wants to remind you of what Kenneth Burke said about satire and burlesque, and you need more than I want to paste here, so go. —As for me, all this on top of re-reading Wicked is proving a rich, rich diet:
“Animals in pens have lots of time to develop theories,” said the Cow. “I’ve heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labor. We weren’t beasts of burden, but we were good reliable laborers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we’d be socially redundant, too. Anyway, that’s one theory. My own feeling is that there is real evil abroad in the land. The Wizard sets the standard for it, and the society follows suit like a bunch of sheep. Forgive the slanderous reference,” she said, nodding to her companions in the pen. “It was a slip.”
Elphaba threw open the gate of the pen. “Come on, you’re free,” she said. “What you make of it is your own affair. If you turn it down, it’s on your own heads.”
“It’s on our own heads if we walk out, too. Do you think a Witch who would charm an axe to dismember a human being would pause over a couple of Sheep and an annoying old Cow?”
“But this might be your only chance!” Elphaba cried.
The Cow moved out, and the Sheep followed. “We’ll be back,” she said. “This is an exercise in your education, not ours. Mark my words, my rump’ll be served up rare on your finest Dixxi House porcelain dinner plates before the year is out.” She mooed a last remark—“I hope you choke”—and, tail swishing the flies, she meandered away.
Too rich, perhaps. I need to get back to the more comfortable ground of the Unheimlichsenke. I did have one more thing to say, at least.
Eisners, and a drunken eagle—
Maybe they don’t go all that well together. I’ve been juxtaposing too much, lately. Let’s set them to one side, and the other. First, the Eisner Awards, named for comics giant Will Eisner: the Oscars,™ see, are sort of the Eisners of the movie industry. Heidi MacDonald over at the Beat has some paradigm-shaking news—
Eisner Awards Accepting Webcomics Submissions
The judges for the 2005 Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards are accepting submissions for a possible Best Digital Comic category.
Criteria:
Any professionally produced long-form comics work posted online or distributed via other digital media is eligible. The majority of the work must have been published in 2004. Audio elements and animation can be part of the work but must be minimal. Web comics must have a unique domain name or be part of a larger comics community to be considered. The work must be online-exclusive for a significant period prior to being collected in print form.
Submission:
For webcomics: Send URL and any necessary access information to the Eisner Awards administrator, Jackie Estrada.
For CD or DVD comics: Send disc to Eisner Awards, 4657 Cajon Way, San Diego, CA 92115.
Deadline: March 25, 2005 (but sooner is much preferred)
Things are moving fast: the first webcomic to be nominated at all for any sort of Eisner was Nowhere Girl, back in 2003. At this rate, we’ll have only four or five years of the best webcomics being ghettoized in the Best Digital Comic category and locked out of all the others (since they’ve already got an award of their own, you know). —I kid! Heidi says that somewhere, Scott McCloud is smiling, and I have no doubt he is, so I went to see for myself, and tripped over a link to this good Columbia Journalism Review article on comics journalism, which
reminds us all (you didn’t forget, did you?) of Brought to Light:
Something of that æsthetic range is represented by the two main pieces in the 1989 book Brought to Light. In one half of the volume, Joyce Brabner and Thomas Yeates tell of the 1984 bombing at a press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua, which killed eight people and injured twenty-eight others. The presentation is straightforward, using plain language and realistic illustrations, and drawing on the accounts of witnesses and the evidence presented in the Christic Institute’s lawsuit alleging CIA involvement in the bombing.
Flip the book over, and you find a story with similar themes told in a very different manner. The celebrated comics innovators Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz present a fable-like retelling of CIA history, narrated by a lonely, alcoholic eagle wearing an ugly checkered sports coat. Sometimes painterly, sometimes cartoonish, in places using techniques of collage, the piece outlines a record of atrocities culminating in the Iran-contra affair. The tone wavers between the confessional and the bombastic, and the imagery employs heavy symbolism, with human chess pieces, sprinting swastikas, and swimming pools full of blood.
But the facts are there, and the nightmarish surrealism seems to fit the subject matter. Indeed, the reader is forced to question the propriety of the standard journalistic conceits—the calm recitation of facts, the carefully hedged allegations, the measured tone. A drunken eagle swimming in blood may actually come closer to the point.
And yeah, I’m saying to myself, yeah: it’s stuff I know, a beat I’ve heard before, hell, I’ve played it, but the CJR slicks it up nice. Comics are an incredibly personal medium—what you’re reading was hand-drawn, handwritten, just for you by the cartoonist (or at least, they look that way) (or at least, they can look that way, they mostly look that way, it’s an effort to look any other way), and that’s a powerful jolt right there of what it was the gonzo folks brought to the table, a jolt we sadly need again. And it’s not just surrealism and naturalism: comics are capable of extremes of pointed emotion and perplexing ambiguity, sometimes in the same dam’ drawing. —But circling in on the point: we know how to read a news article any which way we want to, now. They know how to write ’em any which way they want to, too. But the moves and techniques of comics are still new to a lot of people; we’re still figuring out how they work, ourselves. We haven’t taught ourselves to ignore them, read around them, we haven’t figured out how to innocculate ourselves against them, not yet, not anywhere near to the same degree. And that’s why Joe Sacco’s sad sack rendition of himself and that shrieking, sotted eagle are able to do what they did (do!) so well.
Well, that and talent. And technique, honed over years of backbreaking, unrewarded work. —But aside from that.
And I was going to say something about blogging taking a tip and epiphanies and such but I’m not because why bother. I’m just going to
remind myself that the Eisners are checking out the webcomics. Excuse me; I have some folks I need to pester about getting their stuff ready to submit.
Pretty good.
Roy posted a link to a searching analysis of the Cedar Revolution in pictures, by Michael Totten and his Swaggering Commenteers:
What you see is the difference b between pure hearts and evil ones. The smile on an evil face can never be as refreshing ad one one a good face. Evil betrays itself for all to see.
...coercive people are almost always mean, angry, repressive, and they think it’s all for the greater good…
Look at the faces in each group…A picture tells a thousand stories.
One group looks happy and free,
*******while the other,*********
with their faces covered, looks dark and violent, (why?)...
It almost looks like Men and Elves vs. Orcs from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, doesn’t it? Too bad that in many ways it is. Let’s hope the outcome is the same, albeit with a lot less bloodshed.
...I’ll go out on a limb and say the Syrian thugs look a heckuva lot like the anarchist punks who riot in the streets of San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, all the way down to the flag-burning and masks.
And I’ll allow as how we can get a wee bit pissed-off up here in Little Beirut when cops pepper-spray infants—a patch, perhaps, on the complex political dynamics currently being played out in Lebanon, but a wise if intemperate person once said something to the effect that unhappiness is relative, and depends solely on one’s circumstances. But that aside, there’s a wee bit of a problem with this pretty-good, ugly-evil analysis that’s au courant. Think a moment, I’m sure you’ll get it…
What a refreshing smile. So happy and free. Beatific, even. No anarchist punk, he.
A former Nazi who fled to South America and became the charismatic leader of a religious sect has been arrested in Argentina on charges of child abuse and torture.
Paul Schaefer, 83, was seized in the town of Tortuguitas, 18 miles west of Buenos Aires, along with six people described as his security team, Argentine police said.
He has been hiding for eight years, ever since a warrant for his arrest on paedophile charges was issued in Chile in August 1996.
Fish in a barrel, but what are you gonna do? And it’s not like Totten really believes that pretty is good, good pretty, and that’s all on earth ye need to know. Right? It’s just, y’know, he’s saying whatever pops into his pretty little head that he thinks might help his cause. One of the strengths of the blogosphere, that soapbox extemporizing. Along with the, the whaddayacallit. Self-correcting thingummy. That.
Oh, and conspiracy-mongering. That, too. An easy thing to fall into, you gaze for long enough into a pretty, pretty smile like Schaefer’s.
The long and the short of it.
While we’re at it, Joey Messina posted an interesting question at the end of an old, old entry:
just have one comment what does long story, short pier mean?
looked it up but cannot find anything
And I was going to say something, but then it occurred to me: before I open my big mouth, why not open-mike it? See if anyone out there on the other side of the screen has an answer that might be different than mine. Or theirs. Or yours.
So: what does “long story; short pier” mean? Anyone?
Those who forget are doomed.
Holy Christ. I’d forgotten. It’s been bugging me all this time and I’d clean forgotten until something, some quirk, some happenstance jolt sparking between here and here maybe lit up the memory and I squatted, in the muck, hauled it up, felt a chill…
You’ve seen this, I’m sure.
And we’ve read all the foofooraw and snarked it up about as far as it will go, but there was still, somewhere, deep inside, a chill. You felt it. Didn’t you? I did. And I don’t know where it came from for you, and like I said, I had no idea where it was coming from for me, until I remembered “In Pictopia.” —Buzz Bunny opening that black gash of a sneer and spitting “What’s up, doc?” like it was “This time, it’s personal,” that’s pretty much the moment when Nocturno taps Flexible Flynn on the shoulder and Flynn turns around and he’s, he’s different, and forget for a moment the fact that the changes in the funnybook industry that Moore and Simpson were allegorizing so terribly well in “Pictopia” are no longer a pressing concern; the long Dark Knight of the superhero soul has come and gone and commented ironically on itself and we’ve had nostalgia explosions since then, and joycore, we’ve eaten it all up and gotten used to the idea that the occasional paradigm twitch is part of the paradigm, now, and if Sue Dibny is dead, well, the Teen Titans are tearing up the cartoon ratings. It’s a wash. —Oh! You’re gonna jump when Buzz snarls, all trace of the transvestite trickster god ruthlessly rubbed from his face and voice. It’ll give your innards that twist of wrongness that only Echthroi and the finest committee-dump entertainment product can manage—it’s a pure shot of the visceral punch that Moore and Simpson so lovingly, heartsickly conjure up with the blank flat sneer on Flynn’s steroided face. But the snarl, the sneer, those are just the signs: what’s signified is what you see when you stumble out of Captain Billy’s on the desperate, despairing heels of Nocturno, through the black-and-white streets past windblown scraps of blank paper to the very edge of town where you cling to the chain-link fence. Out there, past all that, is nothing. It’s empty and flat. Far as the eye can see.
Is it getting bigger? Blanker? Coming closer?
Sure, laugh at the Loonatics. It’s gut-bucket funny how bad it is, how naked the opportunism, how shoddy the assembly, how quickly it will fold and be forgotten. But it was here, in the first place. This isn’t bad art; please. That we will always have with us. This is something else, and we may always have that with us, too. Now.
Mind the chill. Remember the run to the fence. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again.
Your spasm of activism.
By way of the Hellcat, here’s Patridiot Watch on the Democratic Party’s usurious credit card:
Just a week after handing the Republicans and credit card companies a big win by restricting people’s rights to enter into bankruptcy, the Democrats’ web site continues to offer a credit card with rates that rise to 29.99 percent.
Annual percentage rate (APR) for purchases: 0% for the first 3 monthly billing periods that your account is open (“Introductory Period”). After that, 9.99% to 23.99% [snip]
Default APR: Up to the Prime Rate** plus 24.74% or up to 29.99%, whichever is greater, and may vary (see explanation below***)
The Hellcat has an excellent rant on just how soul-destroying the bankruptcy bill is. Read that and then try to keep your temper in check as you go give the Party whatfor. Everybody inside the Beltway thinks nobody outside the Beltway is paying any attention at all to something so dry as bankruptcy deformation, so it’s safe for them to whore it up for some extra cash, but they’ve gone far too far with this one: if it passes the House (which it probably will) and Bush signs it (which he will, he will), then Capital One will be coming after your kneecaps as well as your wallet. Remind the Democrats that the outrage they’re hearing right now over a pissant-stupid offer is nothing compared to what they’re gonna be hearing in a couple of years; remind them that Senator Joe Biden (D-MBNA) will never be president, now; let them know that we are paying attention, and more of us every day.
And then: the Decembrist has the graduate-level coursework. Let him lay out what PAYGO is, and why it’s so important, and why once again those inside think us outside don’t care, and then pick up the phone and call your Senators and tell them that you do. Bonus round: you can score a point against Bolton, too, if you like. Again, Mark Schmitt explains.
Koan.
Kyogen Osho said, it is like a man up in a tree hanging from a branch by his mouth. His hands grasp no bough. His feet rest on no limb. Someone appears under the tree and asks him, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the west? If he does not answer, he fails to respond to the question. If he does answer he will lose his life. What would you do in such a situation?
It’s not that an oleaginously pompous third-rater has from a wrought-iron throne on a cedar deck proclaimed me and mine and half the country about him as traitors. That shit—that particular shit—that’s fuckin’ hilarious. What it is is that a couple of oriflammes of our perniciously liberal media have nevertheless in spite of or rather because have chosen this overcompensating twerp and his cohorts as the best our nascent medium had to offer, this past year.
Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don’t bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don’t qualify, you stupid shit.
With TIME, I suppose, they could be telling themselves it’s “Blogger of the Year,” you know, like “Person of the Year,” it’s not a mark of respect or who was the best or anything like that, just who had the most impact, like how we picked Hitler and Khomeini. Yeah. That’s the ticket. —But what the fuck is The Week’s excuse?
(Hey, did you read that nutty stuff over at Powerline today? And every day? Here’s my advice. When you find yourself reading something by Hindrocket, some rant about how irrational and traitorous the left is, or the MSM; just sort of pretend you are reading a Spider-Man comic, and Hindrocket is J. Jonah Jameson yelling at Betty Brant, or Robbie. Or Peter. About Spider-Man. Because why does he hate on Spidey so? Spidey is so obviously not a menace. He’s good. It’s too bad we all know who Atrios is now. Otherwise we could imagine: what if Atrios is really, like, Hindrocket’s secretary? I realize it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back. Still, you’ve got to find a way to read their stuff with a sunny heart.)
“Am I saying we can all just get along if we all just cut the nonsense and admit we are a nation of pragmatic liberals and Hartz was right?” says John Holbo. “No, but I pretty much agree with what Timothy Burke says in this post. Count me in as a liberal sack of garbage.” —Which confuses me: John’s style, after all—while sometimes perhaps a tad too comfortable for the afflicted—is nonetheless an arrow fit for the quiver the Happy Tutor seeks to fill. I would not call it faux naïveté, but there’s a wicked glee hiding under his sunny heart, one that takes no small delight in walking you through the follies of others. Far too generous and charitable to ever be called Fisking, but it’s precisely that charity and generosity that enable it to do what it does.
But that’s actually why the Happy Tutor wouldn’t tell Holbo to ankle it off the ramparts, and what’s actually puzzling me is why Holbo—whose reaction to David Horowitz’ “Frozen Limit of Silly” is to head out on the ice and land a very creditable hit—why he would align himself nominally with Burke’s earnest liberal tribunes; nominally against the Tutor’s wetworking hockey hitters. —Then again, I’m puzzled by the fact that I, too, agree with Burke: I also want to grab the Tutor’s essay by the lapels and yell, “What’s your great idea, motherfucker?” (“Creating a dialectical set of traps for the unwary reader,” yes, I know. But who’s the unwary reader, dammit? Who?) —Of course, Burke says “I write [as a liberal sack of garbage] because the only way to win a rigged game is to play fair and hope that the onlookers will eventually notice who cheats and who does not,” and I want to grab him by the lapels and yell, “Onlookers? For the love of God, man, what onlookers?” and the whole mess dissolves into another kabuki war of cod-liberal and cod-leftist, which I don’t think was ever anyone’s intent.
I think sometimes the reason we’re so good at circular firing squads is that the only readers we’ve got are ourselves, and you always end up playing to your audience. (Is it pomo cul-de-saccery to note that Gomer Pyle’s as much a rôle as Happy Tutor? Probably, but it’s no less true.) —Meanwhile, the oleaginous pontificies yell at nothing but the voices in their own heads, taking potshots at their puppetuses of the left that somehow still get scored against us. But how? By whom? Who’s onlooking? Who’s reading? —How do we knock the scales from someone else’s eyes?
Even if your eloquence flows like a river, it is of no avail. Though you can expound the whole of Buddhist literature, it is of no use. If you solve this problem, you will give life to the way that has been dead until this moment and destroy the way that has been alive up to now. Otherwise you must wait for Maitreya Buddha and ask him.
It’s just a war of Whig on Whig, says John. A family squabble. Not so fast, says Bob McManus, spitting out some numbers from the latest naked attempt to shift the tax burden off the rich onto the rest of us. Yes, yes, I know, says John. (“I realize it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back,” he says. “Am I saying we can all just get along if we all just cut the nonsense and admit we are a nation of pragmatic liberals and Hartz was right?”) But without a sense of historical perspective, of moral perspective, you can’t leap into battle with a sunny heart. —But how can you laugh at a secret note in your permanent record? asks Roz, and maybe she’s grinning as she asks, but it’s a grim little grin (and the Happy Tutor, after all, is looking over a cold chain of law already forged that could easily lead from Horowitz’ frozen limit of silly to a long, long stint in jail). And maybe we can all laugh grimly at the fact that Roz actually is dealing with Tory against Socialist, not Whig against Whig, ha ha! But why, asks Lance Mannion, why did Ring Lardner have to spend a year in jail for a wisecrack?
First, they win. Then we attack them. Then we laugh at them. Then we ignore them…
Kyogen is truly a fool
Spreading that ego-killing poison
That closes his pupils’ mouths
And lets their tears stream from their dead eyes.
And there I go myself. See? We can’t go forward if we’re always fighting the war of us and them—but we can’t fight at all if there is no them. And we are in a fight, by God. They’re curtailing basic personal liberties, they’re destroying opportunities, they’re wrecking the commonwealth, they’re deliberately making life worse for the rest of us and we’ve got to stop them, goddammit, before they drive us all to a crisis point and betray everything America stands for—
( And Adam Kotsko says, “There has to be some way to react to people wanting the wrong thing other than to just say, ‘Well, I guess we’d better give them what they want.’” And I say, Jesus Christ that’s a dangerous fucking statement. And I say, hell yes. There must. Bring it on.)
I don’t want to yell at the voices in my head. I don’t want to fill a barrel with puppetuses of the right and take potshots. What I want—what we all want, with our earnest tribunals and dialectical traps and sunny hearts—is to knock some scales from eyes. And it’s not that they have to agree with us—if we did not see things differently, we would not be different people, after all. And anyway sometimes it’s our own eyes we’re trying to clear. But on this one point here, or that one, there, if they could just see that they are wrong—
How do we knock the scales from someone else’s eyes?
The upper part [of the kanji for koan] means “to place” or “to be peaceful.” The lower part means wood or tree. The original meaning of this kanji is a desk. A desk is a place where we think, read, and write. This “an” also means a paper or document on the desk.
There is another kanji used in koan. In the case of this kanji, the left side part means “hand.” The literal meaning of this kanji is to press, or to push with a hand or a finger. For example, in Japanese, massage is “an-ma.” So this “an” is to press to give massage for healing. This kanji also means “to make investigation” to put things in order when things are out of order.
“And the student was enlightened.” —But you have to have a student first, see? It’s rare, it’s vanishingly rare for a koan to reach out and strike some random bystander or passerby, someone who isn’t already looking for enlightenment. Sen no Rikyu foils an assassination with a point of etiquette, and while enlightenment doesn’t really pierce a veil in this one, there’s still maybe a lesson we could learn. Gudo, the emperor’s teacher, enlightened a gambler and a drunkard by being decent to him, and speaking plainly, and there’s definitely a lesson there, too, though I wonder about what happened to the drunkard’s wife and mother-in-law and kids. —But still: for the most part it’s students and monks, monks and students, people already engaged in the dialectic, shall we say, who realize there are eyes, and scales to be knocked from them, who are actively seeking the best way to do just that.
—To get back for a moment to those numbers Bob McManus cited, and what they mean, for us, and them: I know why we end up with aggressively regressive tax policies like this, and the politicians who push them; I know what we have to do to stop it from ever happening again. I’ve known for a couple of years, now. All it takes is a piece of paper and a pen. You ready? Write this down:
- A majority of us think that only somewhere between 1 and 5 million Americans live in poverty in the US.
- The actual number of Americans living at or below the poverty level is 33 million.
- 47% of us think the poverty level is $35,000 a year for a family of four.
- The actual poverty level for a family of four is $18,104 a year.
And it doesn’t matter if you do it earnestly, or with a sunny heart in the face of obstinate opposition. It doesn’t matter if you lard your dialectical koans with honeypots for the unwary puppetuses of the left or the right. What matters is that you go out and you find one of that majority, one of that 47%, and you sit down with them, and any way you have to, you show them that they have crucially misapprehended the situation. You show them the facts of the matter. Use whatever frame you can find. Whatever works. And then up and on to the next.
That’s it. That’s all there is to it. And if their ignorance is less blind than willful? If they have different remedies in mind than maybe what I think is best, or you? That doesn’t so much matter. (There are always more scales to fall from eyes. Even yours; especially mine.) We can’t begin to hash out those differences until we’ve reached some basic agreement as to where we all are and what we’re all facing, but once we do—
I have every reason to believe that all our other battles can just as easily be won.
Pupil: Why did the Bodhidharma come from India to China?
Master: I have no idea. Why do people always ask me that?
Up is down; black is white; y’all is fucked.
Two grandpas and their granddaughters joined President Bush on Thursday in making his case that Social Security was on wobbly footing and private investment accounts would help provide a safety net for future retirees.
From the AP by way of Joshua Micah Marshall. —I’d say something about how easy it is for the emperor to hide his flop sweat when he isn’t wearing clothes in the first place, but what does it matter? Win or lose, we’ll all be paying it out to MBNA anyway.
Like a seed dropped by a seabird.
Despite what some might tell you, it’s not that often I get memewhomped by a tune, playing it over and over and over again until coworkers and Spouses alike threaten bodily harm.
But when I do get so memewhomped? —Thank God for iPod and earbuds, is all the people around me have to say.
And this one’s particularly, shall we say, embarrassing. Revealing? —Wicked, see, is one of my all-time evermost favoritest books: Gregory Maguire’s Elphaba is one of those characters who kicked her way inside and made herself at home, and I can only imagine the fantastic damage she’d’ve wrought had the book been around in 1986 or so. When I heard they were doing it up for Broadway, I shivered: on the one hand, there’s almost nothing that can knock head and heart for the same loop at the same time like a musical done right; but on the other—how many, really, are done right? —Lately?
So now I’ve heard the soundtrack for Broadway’s attempt at Wicked. And it’s, well.
Competently played?
Except for this one song. —Well, no, not “except”: “Defying Gravity” is a king-hell slice of Disney cheese, a competently played first-act closer that bulldozes its way through what ought to be the most delicately charged moment between Elphaba and Glinda, leaping past questionable rhymes and awkward scansion straight to those triumphantly lung-punching diva belts your bones will thrum to all through intermission, and the less said about the climax, the better. And it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter. I can see the auctorial intent blundering up to me like a sloppy puppy dog, like a kid behind the wheel for the very first time, and it doesn’t matter one bit: my buttons still get pushed. Just about all of them. Hard. “And if you care to find me,” Idina Menzel whoops over the accelerating horns and synths and drums, “look to the western skies!” and it’s all I can do not to hit replay over and over and over again like some endorphin-besotted rat.
Something about doomed characters and triumphal moments anyway, in spite of. Because of, even.
(Also: the way Idina’s voice catches when she says, “Glinda, come with me. Think of what we could do, together!” —Did I mention how they’re playing up the subtext hardcore? Apparently, that’s what the reviews all mean when they say something like “adding a dose of camp,” and the collapse, right there, the tectonic shift and dizzying inversion of that word in this context, that’s maybe the wickedest aspect of the whole dam’ enterprise: femslash drag-queen divas in mutually unrequited love. —When the price drops sufficiently, high school productions of this thing will do a magnificent job of breaking hearts.)
So I put on “Now / Later / Soon,” because it’s just about the opposite in every conceivable way, except how I stop in my tracks when the three waltzes interlock at the end to build some brand new thing that soars into unexpected heights; I put on “Flying North,” because it moves with the same sweet grace of doomed exhiliration. If I have to, I’ll crack open the J-pop. “Yakusoku Wa Iranai” on heavy rotation ought to do the trick.
—But just one more listen first, okay? I can always stop later.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day—
Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s right about that threat to poliblogging that might not even really be a threat: Nathan Newman has the best take:
The FEC is making noises to limit the speech of blogs in the name of campaign finance reform. Josh worries that this “would mean the end of what this site and so many others on the right and left do.”
Only if we follow the rules. I won’t. Free speech is worth fighting for and the best way to do it is to refuse to be silent. There are a lot of bloggers out there and that’s a lot of people to throw in jail if they all pledge to defy the rules.
I think most campaign finance rules restricting contributions are worthless and lead to idiotic proposals like this one. This is a good place for the insanity to stop. The more bloggers who pledge to defy the FEC, the less likely they are to move forward.
I’m down with that. If we take this sort of naked moonshit lying down, then the Medium Lobster will have won:
Certainly the excesses of the blogosphere will now be held in place, but how can there be true campaign reform when the spoken word goes unchecked? Every day, millions of Americans make unchecked and unregulated political contributions by making political endorsements on sophisticated verbal logs—or “verblogs,” if you will—comprised of billions of currently untracked sound waves transmitted through the atmosphere. Until these words are properly tracked, counted, and restricted by the FEC according to the arbitrary limits of McCain-Feingold, American democracy will forever remain a prisoner of Big Speech.
“My fellow Americans. I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Iran forever. We begin bombing in three months.”
Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia’s Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has “signed off” on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the US manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
—Mark Jensen , “Scott Ritter Says US Plans June Attack on Iran,
‘Cooked’ Jan. 30 Iraqi Election Results”
Off. Off. Off!
