20 January 1988
Final scheduled Transmission, this Series: 4/27/88 (effective: 5/1/88): Winthrop rowed across the Charles, walked up Pinckney Street and into the State House while the door was unguarded, the Pigs having all taken each other to Happy Hour; Schrödinger, however, has made only partial delivery and may have run afoul of the Hanseatic Factor (last transmission was from Bremen, Lübeck remains silent)—IF Schrödinger has fallen within the aegis of the Lutine Bell, THEN Implement The New Economic Policy (1921); John W. stopped off at Epworth and Samuel advised him to obtain Letters of Marque from Whitehall; Mistah Kurtz is riding anchor off Port Royal while Melanchthon has rented a room within sight of 490 L’Enfant Plaza East, SW, 20219; John Brown has departed Haddington and checked in at Harper’s Ferry; Owsley will shortly begin networking with Alberich, after which the Embarcadero will again be laden with Sutter’s Surprise. The local opera-bouffe will, Deo volente, mercifully terminate on 5/14/88, immediately thereafter punitive operations against the Narragansett will commence. Current print-outs indicate the Iroquois will NOT come to their aid; however, initial field reports from Agitprop indicate that resistance will be fierce and it may be necessary for the advance column to fall back on New Bedford—the following sections should stand ready to receive casualties: WNW, CEC, RWG, PRMcS, KCW. If conventional ordnance does not suffice, Matthias Flacius (Illyricus) will hand-deliver FERMI’S FEAR, after which the heresiarch Roger Williams and his Pelagian cesspool at what is ludicrously known as “Providence” will be deprived of their heathen allies. Once the Black Flag has been raised over “Providence,” the liquidation of The Six Nations will proceed seriatim. The Hudson Valley will then lie open and undefended, fallow ground for the Agenda of 5/72. “Et ad haec quis tam idoneus?” ORA PRO NOBIS, ORA PRO ME.
Some unsolicited advice.
Ang? Buddy? When you set out to make a controversial movie about a couple of gay cowboys, and you cast a couple of matinee bishonen like Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as the two romantic leads, well, you raise certain expectations in certain quarters. And then when you announce maybe you’re going to back off from any actual sex scenes, preferring a more metaphorical approach, because “two men herding sheep [i]s far more sexual than two men having sex on screen,” well, you pretty much fuck those expectations over, let me tell you. —People are going to think you’re a wimp, and a sissy, and a big ol’ fraidy-cat. You really want to take that hit after the Hulk?
Let ’em make with the man-love, Ang. Won’t hurt you a bit, and trust me: the ladies will love you for it.
Don’t you mean mittelterrestrial?
So apparently Fahrenheit 9/11 is stuck with the R rating, which, as any fule know, will only make it that much more appealing to the kids we’re supposedly thinking of—hot damn! Must be gory. Faces of Death gory! —Maybe Move America Forward can gin up an astroturf campaign to independently card kids at 9/11 showings. Yeah. That’s the ticket.
Actually, though, it isn’t so much the carnage that made the MPAA bar the door to the lucrative under-seventeen market. Apparently, at one point some soldiers are shown listening to the Bloodhound Gang, and they sing along—
The roof!
The roof!
The roof is on fire!
We don’t need no water
Let the motherfucker burn!
Goodbye, PG-13.
What’s distressing though, is this: the distributors tap Mario Cuomo to pinch-hit their appeal. The MPAA declined to listen to the big gun, but here’s (part of) his argument—
Altogether the hard language and graphic pictures consume about 3 minutes in a film lasting 120 minutes.
The raters agree that there was nothing else in the film that required any cautionary notice to parents: no nudity, sexual conduct, inappropriate theme, or illicit drug use. I think it’s fair to say that given the common uninstructed interpretation by the public of the “R” rating, many of the viewers of the film would be surprised to see so few of the undesirable characteristics they expected to find in an “R” rated film.
Why then should the film not be rated a “PG 13” as was “The Lord of the Rings,” a film that is saturated with slaughter, butchery and corpses—human and extraterrestrial?
Extraterrestrial?
Signs and wonders.
Hitting a paragraph like this in the introduction is either something very good or very, very bad:
To forestall uneasiness on the part of the reader when confronted with statements which are too shocking, primarily that we continue to live in a world in which magic still has a part to play and a place of honor, we have let the texts speak for themselves. We have, in the reader’s behalf, assumed the burden of understanding them in letter and in spirit. After all, the conclusions we have drawn seem to us adequate recompense for the painstaking study pursued for twelve years without interruption, study involving philology only as a means, not as an end in itself. The fact that unremitting concentration on the meaning of documents has here supplanted mere reporting of their contents suffices to explain the individuality of this work, an individuality for which we do not believe we must apologize.
Ioan Couliano wrote that in Chicago in May of 1986. In May of 1991, somebody climbed onto a toilet in the stall next to his and, reaching over the wall and down with a .25 caliber Beretta, put a bullet in the back of his head. —So he must have been onto something, right? Right?
?? whats iicf?
Matthew Baldwin strikes again:
This morning the authorities entered the home on Babson and found it deserted, the floors slick with mud and seaweed. On the computer was the LiveJournal of Zackary Marsh, with a notice reading “Update Successful.”
Revolver (four, revisited).
Er stößt seinen Speer in Siegfrieds Rücken: Gunther fällt ihm—zu spät—in den Arm.
Let’s try a précis in English, shall we?
Siegfried rejoins the hunters, who include Gunther and Hagen. While resting, he tells them about the adventures of his youth. Hagen gives him a drink that restores his memory, and he tells them of discovering the sleeping Brünnhilde and awakening her with a kiss. Suddenly, two ravens fly out of a bush, and as Siegfried watches them, Hagen stabs him in the back with his spear. The others look on in horror, and Hagen calmly walks away into the wood. Siegfried dies, lingering on his memories of Brünnhilde. His body is carried away in a solemn funeral procession.
There it is, boys and girls: the ur-Dolchstoß. Le coup de poignard dans le dos.
Accept no imitations.
He had become painfully aware of the enemy’s overwhelming firepower, of his superiority in the air, of the countless tanks against which one could oppose nothing of equal force. Everyone recognized that Germany, economically exhausted and lacking important raw materials, helplessly faced the enormous harnessing of the world’s resources. But all this had nothing to do with the feeling of superiority as person, soldier, and fighter. The fact that this feeling of superiority was retained after the war’s conclusion is of utmost significance for the German future. It preserves a feeling in society that the battlefield was not left as loser, despite the lost war and the mighty collapse. The consciousness of being superior in fighting ability is the best means for maintaining the military spirit. It also helps cultivate the will to fight for the fatherland’s freedom when destiny calls.
—Friedrich Altrichter,
Die seelischen Kräfte des Deutschen Heeres im Frieden und im Weltkriege
The naïve faith that the German soldier felt himself to be and, in actuality, was a better fighter than the Frenchman, Englishman, American, or Russian reflected the officer’s own narcissism. The fallacious belief that by preserving the German soldier’s sense of superiority one gained a decisive military advantage was possibly tied to two unconscious transactions that typified the right-wing visionaries: the urge to fantasize a war of revenge that would erase the reality of Versailles (and defeat); and the underlying conviction that his and the nation’s strivings were invincible because they were congruent with God’s Plan.
—Peter S. Fisher, Fantasy and Politics:
Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic
I was playing the wisecracking hero in the microscopically budgeted sci-fi thriller: Han Solo in a Clint Eastwood serape, who (interstellar archeologist and plucky sidekick in tow) stumbles over the USS Sulaco and with intuition, sarcasm, and a deeply engrained distrust of ossified authority and The Book manages to save a couple of Marines and the archeologist and his own hide from the pseudoscientific zombie menace We Were Not Meant To Know. (Mostly, what I remember is the Corridor: a couple of sheets of drywall on jerry-rigged 2×4 frames, with sliding doors on either end yanked open and shut by whoever wasn’t running the camera or the lights or staggering about as zombied Marines. “Just like they did ’em on Star Trek,” said the director, justifiably proud of those damn doors, which had eaten half his budget. —Scene after scene after scene was shot in that Corridor.) —I supplied most of the costume myself: the paratrooper boots and the East German army surplus pants I’d scored from Banana Republic, back when Banana Republic was a J. Peterman for high school kids with attitude; the serape, from the year and a half we spent in Venezuela; the khaki shirt I bought for the occasion that I still wear from time to time. But the director insisted on a gunbelt his grandfather had scored: dark brown leather with a heavy metal buckle stamped with the phrase Gott mit uns.
“Can you believe that shit?” he said, grinning. “World War I, that is. They really thought God was on their side.”
But if God is with you, and nonetheless you lose—well, what?
Obviously, you were betrayed. Robbed. The November criminals worked to sap the will of the fighting man, signing him up for Spartacist soldiers’ and sailors’ unions, filling his head with doubts, suing for peace and signing the treaty of Versailles when it was clear victory was just around the corner, if we’d just held out, if we’d just trusted in Gott, who was mit uns. And we would have, too. But we were stabbed in the back. —Just like Siegfried.
Siegfried? Why him? —He’s the offspring of an incestuous, adulterous union, after all, and it’s no excuse to point out that only such a son who knows no fear can slay the dread dragon Fafnir. He’s a murderous thug who spends most of the Götterdämmerung stumbling about as a drug-addled amnesiac, raping his girlfriend while wearing another man’s face, stealing her ring, pledging her troth to him, blundering off into the bush to go a-hunting with the son of his mortal enemy. —He is an idiot, like Nietzsche’s goddess of victory; without dizziness or fear he sets himself down on the crest of the moment, having forgotten everything from the past, and standing then on a single point he is happy as no one else is happy. He can Get Things Done, that Siegfried. Until Hagen urges him to sing of his past deeds. Until Hagen slips him the antidote to the drug he’d already slipped him, the one that destroyed his memories in the first place. That’s when the two ravens fly up out of the bushes. That’s when Siegfried turns to stare after their flight, distracted, and that’s when Hagen can stab him in the back.
With a spear, we should note. Not a dagger.
I’m just saying.
Wotan has two ravens. Had. —Caw, says the first one. Mer. Mr-no. Murnan. Mourn; remorse. Memory. Mimir. Why.
Caw, says the other one. Cwo. Cwi. Wei; wei; wei wu wei wise. Caw. How.
Hugin is the name of the one; thought. Munin the other: memory. Cwo, cwi; Mr-no. How and why.
The “Liberalist” comprises the Pacifist, the Marxist, and the Jew. He thinks rationally and is only capable of calculating. The volkish man, in contrast, lies rooted in the irrational. He opposes “ratio with religion, the individual with the collectivity.”
Reason is defamed as “whore” of the Enlightenment, as perpetrator of “empty ideals.” An appeal is made to instinct and feeling. Only when thought becomes saturated with feeling does it become acceptable and organic.
—Friedrich Franz von Unruh, “Nationalistische Jugend”
Wenn ich Kultur höre…entsichere ich meinen Browning!
—Hanns Johst, “Schlageter”
Customers interested in Flight may also be interested in:
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Great Rates. Great Flight Times. Save when you book at Expedia.com.
Not to knock Amazon overly, but y’all might want to take a look at that algorithm. —All of which is by way of saying: you can pre-order your copy of Flight now. And you should. Oh, my, yes. You should.
Point; counterpoint.
So we just got back from a birthday dinner and a viewing of Shrek 2 which, better than the first, so, good humor and bonhomie all around, even if Bill’s snarking off about how it went over his head, and I’m doing the usual before-bed sweep of email and referral logs and that sort of thing, and it seems Bill Scher, who’s been slaking parched throats over at the Liberal Oasis for a good long while now, said something nice about me on the Majority Report, putting me in the rather heady (if lower-cased) company of uggabugga (diagrammatist extraordinaire) and skippy (the bush kangaroo). And so now I’m looking around at the last post a couple of days ago about a comics spat and at the litter of revolver bits lying about still to be put together and wondering about the whole poltical–non-political–apolitical blogging thing, and worrying whether the personal is political enough, but then I remember I meant to tease Jim Henley (with good humor, and bonhomie) for asserting that dance or the novel can be defined in some necessary and sufficient manner that poetry cannot, and of course attempting to define a political blog or a non-political blog or an apolitical blog is just as much a mug’s game as defining poetry, or the novel, or dance, or comics. It is what it is: Damon Knight’s definition works for everything, see. Not just science fiction.
So I’ll point you to an entry by Elkins, instead, since she’s much better at this sort of thing than I am, and it’s off to bed with me. (Though I do wonder: which definition of the novel did Jim have in mind? My own favorite, whose provenance escapes me: “A piece of writing, of a certain length, that has something wrong with it.”)
A cavalcade of comics coverage!
I don’t think in any language. I think in images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. They don’t move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.
—Vladimir Nabokov
And Me, too! I’m thinking, except there’s only really one Russian phrase that I can pick out of my foamy brainwaves these days, and that’s “Ya sliushayu jazz.” —But you’ve probably already got this. So you’ve seen the quote. Ah, well.
So we had the first-ever Stumptown Comics Fest last weekend, and all in all it went quite well. The Old Church proved a startlingly apt environment for comics geeks of every stripe, for which Messr. Deutsch (Hereville!) is owed many thanks. And if you were there, and you bought a ticket from a bearded guy in a vest who kept stamping people on the palms of their hands rather than the backs or the wrists, well, that was me; hi. Sorry about that. Hope you had fun. But if you weren’t, well, I’d like you to take a look at this, for instance—
—which would be a photo of Bill Mudron (Pan” alt=”” />), Kevin Moore (In Contempt!), and Bethanne Barnes (Future Ruler of the World!), all vamping in front of guest of honor Christopher Baldwin (Bruno! Little Dee!). Also, I’d ask you to take a gander at this—
—which would be Ty and Ian Smith (Emily and the Intergalactic Lemonade Stand!) working out some sibling rivalry or other. Heck, I’ll even ask you to peer thoughtfully at this—
—if only because the pipe organ is pretty much a visual definition of boss. (You’ll have to click through for a glimpse of the stars up Bethanne’s nose, though. —It’s a long story.)
Once you’ve done that, I’m going to ask you to read this.
TO THE EDITOR: This is for “Mr. Hip” Erik Henriksen. Nice of you to feature something comics-oriented, but you forgot something very obvious—the true comics community is made up of geeks [Destination Fun, Stumptown Comics Fest, June 3]. Now I know “geek” is extremely hip right now, but I don’t mean indie rock/hipster geek. I mean the real geeks, the intelligent outcasts that played Magic in junior high while you made fun of them and hiply listened to grunge and Snoop Dogg.
Now pretty much anything in this city with an ounce of underground coolness has been taken over by scenester fucks, exploiting it until it’s sucked dry and turned to shit. But the twice yearly Portland Comic Con you mentioned in your article is not for the too-cool-for-school crowd—it’s for the real people. Not a fucking fashion show where scenesters can strut down their runway and “oooh” and “aaah” over each other’s generic black/brown wardrobes, sip wine, and snub each other (which I’m sure the Stumptown indie comic extravaganza will be).
Just become the fucking yuppies you’re destined to be and go to First Thursday like the rest of them. Stay out of the comic scene before you contaminate it more than you already have.
—Heather Lockamy
Now—and I’m being totally honest, here—it’s hard to blame Heather. It is. Really. —See, “Mr. Hip” did a very enthusiastic job of talking up the Stumptown Fest, but he did so in that inimitable Portland Mercury fashion of trash-talking everybody else on the field in question: in this case, the venerable Portland Comic Book Show, for years pretty much the largest comics event in the Pacific Northwest. Henriksen’s piece doesn’t seem to be archived online, so I’ll take me some liberty, here—
Twice a year, there’s a really horrible comic convention in the Memorial Coliseum basement, where dusty boxes of old superhero comics are hoisted out of geeks’ basements for other geeks to oooh and aaah over. It’s the type of place where you expect to see the Comic Book Shop Guy from The Simpsons waddling about, and unless your idea of a good time is debating the continuity errata of Stargate SG-1, it’s best to stay away.
Ten points from Gryffindor, Mr. Henriksen. This is a lazy opening, tagging such vastly overused tropes as the Comic Book Shop Guy and continuity neuroses for a cheap, crowd-pleasing us-them shot. —I’m not knocking the praise he goes on to slather over the nascent Stumptown Fest; heck no. And he was slathering that praise under a deadline, and I’ve been there all too many times myself not to recognize the siren song of said cheap shot and the easy, welcoming rhythm of a well-worn cliché. You just don’t have time to fact-check every puff-piece in the weekly what’s-doing section and deathless up the prose it deserves. (Of course, our major news media works under similar circumstance, which led us pretty much into a spectacularly stupid war in Iraq. Surely we can learn from their example?)
Said venerable Portland Comic Book Show is, indeed, in the basement of the Memorial Coliseum, and its overall ambience is one of dust and flea market. But that’s where you go for old skool superhero books and original Pogo newspaper strips and sugary J-pop soundtracks and abstruse action figures. And yes, there’s usually a buxom B-movie scream queen signing autographs next to the guy who played Second Jawa from the Left. Movies and video games steal attitude and approach from comics, to say nothing of talent; so comics in turn leans on movies and video games to draw a crowd, and if you’re going to turn up your nose at that, you might as well give up utterly on the mighty San Diego Comic-Con. —But there’s also reps from three of the most notable publishers in the industry, and writers and cartoonists from the superhero mines and the new mainstream; for years, this show has been a steady and reliable anchor in the Pacific Northwest comics scene. The Stumptown Comics Fest isn’t supposed to replace it, gentrifying comics out of the reach of ordinary, everyday geeks—it’s there to augment it. (Seriously. The Comic Book Show could only offer up ten tables for small press cartoonists. The Stumptown crew was convinced they could sell twenty. And the Old Church was just sitting there, on the corner…)
But all this nuance can’t fit in a quarter-page puff piece, and so Heather’s knee jerks rather understandably, and she misses out on a fun time and ends up calling the lot of us “scenester fucks” and “fucking yuppies,” and we’re standing around with paper stars up our noses going “Wha?” and wondering when the Buffy animated series will start already.
So really, in the end, it’s worth one of those tired, long-suffering laughs. The real people, lost in the epistemological mix, talking past each other once again. Us? Them?
Anyway, Heather: I’m sorry I didn’t play Magic in junior high. I was too old when it first got started. But I did play it, and I understand somebody who threw down with you back in the day had a book for sale at the Fest. So please, feel free to show up next year, because there will be a next year, and it’ll be as geeky as this one was. And if you don’t end up liking it? Well, I guarantee you the Comic Book Show will still be there. This town is more than big enough, and then some.
Now, I’m going to steal one last photo from Erika’s report (so I didn’t take any myself. So sue me):
Yes, that’s Jenn (Dicebox!), but the gentleman she’s speaking with is Dapper David Chelsea (David Chelsea in Love! Perspective!), who recently played host to a smattering of Portland’s finest underground inkslingers in a 24-hour comics fest. The results are now online for all to see. Go! Free comics!
Finally, a moment of silence: Dirk Deppey admitted the obvious last week. ¡Journalista!, one of the leading lights of the comics blogosphere, just ain’t coming back now that he’s editing the Comics Journal. Well, damn, says I. I hadn’t been holding my breath, but I’d still been holding out hope, a pale slender thread of it, anyway, and, well, sure, the comics blogosphere is bigger and bawdier and just plain noisier than it was when he got started, and if a lot of that’s due to him, well, it’s showing no signs of letting up since he had to go away. But still: something’s been lost. An important focal point, a dollop of healthy snark, a one-stop shop for industry gossip and pointed pontificatin’. Hats off, sir. —But he does enthusiastically recommend Kevin Melrose’s Thought Balloons, and heck. That’s good enough for me.
So there’s your cavalcade already. I’ve got to get back to reading about the Weimar Zukunfstroman which, let me tell you, is depressing as fuck. (A hasty postscript to Mr. Henriksen: no hard feelings, ’kay? The publicity really was much appreciated, and I have no doubt that Gryffindor will make up those points easily, and more besides.)
What color are the dolphins in her world?
Here’s what Peggy Noonan wants from Bill Clinton’s forthcoming autobiography:
Sometimes candor is an act of patriotism. The patriotic act we need from him in his book is utter frankness and honesty about how it came to be that terrorism was ignored by our leaders throughout the 1990s, that pivotal time.
I’d crack a joke, but why bother? —Anyway, TMFTML totally aced Nicholas Confessore’s question, so, um, why bother?
Revolver (five).
(In which I take it personal. —The personal is political, after all.)
Int. office, late afternoon, and there’s J. Jonah Jameson, editor-in-chief of the Daily Bugle and Peter Parker’s nemesis, his Commissioner Gordon, you know, in the movie they got that guy who plays the psychiatrist on Law & Order and the white supremacist on Oz to play him, only this is a Frank Miller Daredevil book, so he’s stern and avuncular in all the right ways, and he’s drawn by David Mazzuchelli, so he’s a subversively old skool figure striped with these impossibly rich, impossibly noir, utterly impossible shadows from venetian blinds. He’s got his sleeves rolled up, by gum, and a pre-Bloomberg cigar is smoking like a chimney, and he’s delivering a stern and avuncular beat-down to ace reporter Ben Urich, cowed into submission by the Kingpin’s goons. “Listen, Urich,” and you can hear the growl coming up off of the cheap glossy paper, “there are thing you just don’t let happen in this racket. Number one is you never get scared away from a story. Not while you’ve got the most powerful weapon in the world on your side.” And then he picks up I swear to God a rolled-up newspaper—this is back when Miller knew how to swing a cliché—he picks up this newspaper and he shakes it at Urich. “This is five million readers’ worth of power. It can depose mayors. It can destroy presidents.”
—Oh, but that’s just dinosaur talk! This is the wired age. Everything’s changed. It’s many-to-many and participatory journalism and Nick Denton gossip. It isn’t five million readers; it’s fourteen hundred inbound links on Technorati. It’s ranking as a Mortal Human on the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem. It’s a taste of the power that took out Howell Raines, man.
And it isn’t a rolled-up newspaper he’s shaking at me, either. It’s a photo he’s sliding across the desk, into the light of a halogen desk lamp, the only light in the room. I can’t see his face. He isn’t smoking, but the place smells like old cigarettes and burnt coffee. “Well?” he says.
The photo is a Time magazine cover from 2003, when they chose the American soldier as their person of the year. Somebody’s photoshopped in a Nazi armband, some notches on a riflebutt. “The American myrmidon,” says the headline.
“What about it?”
“It’s a simple request,” he says. “Just say it clearly and unequivocally.” There’s a click, and from somewhere comes this eerie, tinny mock-up of my voice, like a forgotten voicemail message. “This graphic disturbs and disgusts me and it is not representative of what I believe.”
I don’t say anything. It’s been a while, but I’m wishing I had a cigarette.
He clears his throat, leans forward, his chair squeaking. One hand slipping into the light to tap the photo. “Come on,” he says. “Will you denounce this image as vile hatemongering? As something that doesn’t represent your point of view?”
And still I don’t say anything.
“All you have to do,” he says, “is say, ‘That’s disgusting. I don’t believe that.’” It’s my voice again. I bite my lip. He leans back in his chair. “And I’ll believe you,” he says. “I really will.”
The threat is so implicit, so thoroughly beaten into our lizard-brains by years of bad television upon decades of B movies, that he doesn’t even realize he’s making it.
“...it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long...”
FastNBulbous is one of the house trolls over at Political Animal, and they have a loyalty oath for all us card-carrying liberals—
A poll for you Political Animal Readers:
The following appeared in a theatre review written by Michael Feingold in the Village Voice:
Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.
This opinion is presumably not shared by Foreman; you can gauge the breadth of his imaginative compassion from his willingness to extend it even toward George W. Bush, idiot scion of a genetically criminal family that should have been sterilized three generations ago.
How many of you agree with the author that Republicans should be exterminated and that the Bush family should be sterilized? If you don’t agree, should the author be made to apologize and/or resign and/or be fired, a la Trent Lott? Also, would the publication of this review be prosecutable as a hate crime in Canada?
Posted by: FastNBulbous on June 9, 2004 at 8:04 PM | PERMALINK
Oh, heck—we wouldn’t need to exterminate them all. How was it Quentin Tarantino said that Ezekial 25:17 went?
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
If we executed enough evil tyrants in order to physically intimidate Republicans by making them realize that they could be killed, too, well, heck. The weak would fall into line. The Democratic party could take its rightful place as the corporatist opposition party, and we could all take a deep breath, smile, and get down to the real work of leaving this world better than we found it.
Sure would make things a heck of a lot easier.
But! Alas. We are all of us here on the sinistral side crippled with the terrible moral burden of trying, trying real hard, to be the shepherd. We are most of us trying so hard we won’t even claim to be better than those we fight: we know that anyone can slip, and that claim no matter how right it might feel in our gut leads to the dehumanization of those who set themselves against us. All we can do is remember that there are no ends, only means, and one of the means we must eschew is their eliminationist rhetoric, no matter how satisfyingly cathartic it might be to stop a moment and say to yourself, what if—
But no. We’re trying, real hard. To the ever-increasing us! —I’ll always drink to that.
But not with just anyone. There’s limits; there’s always limits. A little later in the dicussion, FastNBulbous, responding left and right to those who’ve forgotten Rule No. 1, lays this on us—
I repeat, has any other public figure, or someone as “cultured” as a theatre critic, called for the genocide of millions of Americans based on their political views?
Coulter’s call for the execution of one individual who fought on the side of those who were responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans against our troops is not analagous, imho.
Of course, this asshat of a reviewer is entitled to make statements that bely his status as an assclown.
I just find it interesting that when someone calls for the extermination of millions of Americans, the response of most people here is to point out relatively mild statements by Republicans rather than condemn the genocidal wishes.
I was hoping that more people would try to convince me that they don’t agree with this jerk.
Posted by: FastNBulbous on June 9, 2004 at 9:15 PM | PERMALINK
Why should we point out relatively mild statements? Why should we be concerned with hyperbolic calls for genocide from Village Voice theatre critics when smiling Republican ignorance and hate killed so many thousands and laughed about it until they were forced by blood and sweat and oceans of tears to pay the least respect a fellow human being is due?
So I’m only human. I’m not going to rush to buy Bulbous a drink unless there’s some small sign of contrition; some vague gesture toward an apology. But I am only human: I’m not going to spit in their face, either. (Read this, I might say, and think, real hard, about what it is you’re doing, and why.) —Or kill them, for God’s sake. “Execute” them. (Ha! As if I could.)
James Howard’s Romeo and Juliet,
or, Revolver (an intermission).
John Holbo cites Nietzsche and makes my head ring, once more proving how inadvisable it is to do this sort of work without a license, or at least a basic grounding in the classics:
The stronger the roots which the inner nature of a person has, the more he will appropriate or forcibly take from the past. And if we imagine the most powerful and immense nature, then we would recognize there that for it there would be no frontier at all beyond which the historical sense would be able to work as an injurious overseer. Everything in the past, in its own and in the most alien, this nature would draw upon, take it into itself, and, as it were, transform into blood. What such a nature does not subjugate it knows how to forget. It is there no more. The horizon is closed completely, and nothing can recall that there still are men, passions, instruction, and purposes beyond it. This is a general principle: each living being can become healthy, strong, and fertile only within a horizon. If he is incapable of drawing a horizon around himself and too egotistical to enclose his own view within an alien one, then he wastes away there, pale or weary, to an early death. Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come—all that depends, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically. This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential.
And, well, yeah, though there’s a demon on my shoulder muttering sardonically, what, you have to repeat history sometimes, to give your life some direction? (What comes after farce? —And if Rumsfeld were to look it over and then note that gosh, there’s a distressing lack of meaningful metrics, well, I might allow as how he is not without his point on this one.) —And so I’m stuck halfway, trying to figure out how to say something not altogether unmeaningful in the matter of World Building v. Allegory, though that’s not it—Tlön v. Quantum Mechanics, perhaps, or Schrödinger v. That Darn Cat—and comes now the Urbane Sophisticate and the Rude Mechanical tumbling ass-over-teakettle down an astroturfed hill, about to crash into Samuel Delany, who’s waiting in the wings for his spearcarrier’s cue as Siegfried bellows his last. And while I’m trying to figure out whether the next move up my sleeve is necessary, or needlessly petty, Nietzsche through Holbo whacks me upside the head with the Martian’s lesson: knowledge is power is a crock. The more you know, the less you can do, and that’s the hidden snare in the Wiccan Rede. (But isn’t that the point? Strength is for the weak! That way, you never have to do anything.) —But this has dissolved into a mush of inside jokes and personal shorthand; airy gestures in the general direction of what I think I’m trying to say, rather than hard work with muscular prose, digging in to figure it out. So I’m off to the drawing board again. In the interests of slaphappiness and the general spirit of what-the-fuck, I’ll leave you with this:
Romeo and Juliet, Wrote by Mr. Shakespear : Romeo, was Acted by Mr. Harris ; Mercutio, by Mr. Betterton ; Count Paris, by Mr. Price, The Fryar, by Mr. Richards ; Sampson, by Mr. Sandford; Gregory, by Mr. Underhill ; Juliet, by Mrs. Saunderson ; Count Paris’s Wife, by Mrs. Holden.
Note, There being a Fight and Scuffle in this Play, between the House of Capulet, and House of Paris ; Mrs. Holden Acting his Wife, enter’d in a Hurry, Crying, O my Dear Count! She Inadvertently left out, O, in the pronunciation of the Word Count! giving it a Vehement Accent, put the House into such a Laughter, that London Bridge at low Water was silence to it.
This Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, was made some time after into a Tragi-comedy, by Mr. James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive; so that when the Tragedy was Reviv’d again, ’twas played Alternately, Tragical one Day, and Tragicomical another; for several Days together.
Oh, one more goddamn thing:
To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a “presidential directive or other writing” that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”
—from that WSJ story on that torture memo
They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that’s what Bill Clinton says—and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that “if the president does it, it can’t be illegal.”
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb.
—from Hunter S. Thompson’s Nixon obituary
The theme of short and pithy posts shows no signs of abating:
I was quite amused by this joke.
For your consideration:
Little Dee, the new daily strip from Chris Baldwin.
Something I didn’t necessarily need to know:
When a hand-crafted, all-natural vanilla marshmallow is dunked in a glass of Rosemont Estate’s 2002 shiraz, the aftertaste—once you’re past the initial burst of something foully rot-sweet, like a failed grappa—is an astonishing simulacrum of IHOP’s blueberry syrup.
