Gung-ho
In all the foofooraw over Paul O’Neill’s statements about the Bush administration drawing a bead on Iraq from day one, and the counter-claims and counter-counter-claims, that he’s full of shit, and we were never planning regime change until 9/11 changed everything, and anyway we were just following in the footsteps of Clinton’s policy, which wanted regime change, I mean, God, who didn’t, I’d just like to dredge up this quote again, from a September 10, 2001 profile of Secretary of State Colin Powell:
When the Secretary jumped out front on Iraq, pushing to “toughen” crumbling UN sanctions against old nemesis Saddam Hussein by making them “smarter,” conservatives scoffed that meant weaker. But Powell persuaded the President—because, say aides and rivals alike, he’s very effective when he “marshalls his facts.” The Administration—and Powell—was embarrassed later, when Russia rebuffed the plan.
And as soon as Wolfowitz, a zealous advocate of “regime change” in Baghdad—backing dissidents to overthrow Saddam—settled into his office, he told European parliamentarians that Powell was not the last word on sanctions or Iraq policy. Enthusiasm is building inside the Administration to take down Saddam once and for all. Powell too would love to see Saddam unhorsed, says an official at State. “But you need a serious plan that’s doable. The question is how many lives and resources you have to risk.” Powell’s unwillingness to fight any less-than-total war is legendary, and the particulars of launching a covert insurgency among the feuding Iraqi opposition factions would give any general pause. The proposition is still “hypothetical,” he told Time. But plenty of others on the Bush team are gung-ho.
To review:
- Senior administration officials were planning to take Saddam down once and for all before 9/11.
- This was seen as a deliberate break with previous policy.
So what’s wrong with what it was O’Neill said?
From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out…. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, “Fine. Go find me a way to do this.”
It took all night to complete the rigging, securing the steel cable a quarter of a mile in the sky across the 130-foot gap separating the towers.
No, I’m still not back. But a random afternoon link-walk took me to the Gothamist, where I found this squib about the winner of the Caldecott Award: The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, written and drawn by Mordecai Gerstein. It’s the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the not-quite-completed towers of the World Trade Center. The book looks beautiful; the story here on PBS’s American Experience will put an indescribable chill down your spine, part wonder, part joy, part thrilling fear, part ineluctable grief. (One can’t help but turn the image upside-down.) —Be sure to click through to the sample illustrations from the book, where you’ll see “He Lay Down to Rest.”
Not really back just yet, but.
I spent an hour I don’t have clearing 400-some-odd pieces of comment spam off the pier. We run Jay Allen’s invaluable MT-Blacklist hereabouts, but this stuff all got past it. —I’m wondering if we have some smarter monkeys in the house.
The comment text was all scraped out of an article on how memory stacks work. The names were all first names, common enough to have been lifted off a popular baby name list. The email addresses and IP addresses were all different. And there were dozens of URLs linked, none of which had made it onto the MT-Blacklist master list yet. Some of them were misspellings or variant spellings of others. I didn’t bother trying to visit any, but I’m thinking most of the URLs were the equivalent of chaff, thrown up to waste time and effort so that maybe somebody would sigh and throw up their hands and just leave the 400-some-odd links up till tomorrow, maybe, giving Google enough time to register the link.
Jay’s currently travelling, and anyway I’m not too sure how to verify which of my entries aren’t on his master list yet to submit them officially. (I could figure it out, but there’s work yet to do, and sleep.) I haven’t seen anyone else hit with a chaff attack yet—at least, no one on my short list of usual suspects who’ve shared spam attacks with me in the past—but if you do suddenly find yourself with 400-some-odd new pieces of comment spam full of chaff, here’s my updated blacklist.
Oy.
Oh, while I’ve got your attention: the Fiery Furnaces and the Books.
Might as well make it official.
So the computer died, and then the transmission decided going in reverse was too much of a bother, and then there was the car crash (different car), and then the 103-degree fever, and then the flying to Newark with a head cold, and the resulting black eye from the sinus pressure, and the Christmas spent mostly unconscious, and the Rockettes I didn’t in the end get to see, and, well. It’s been a couple of weeks.
(When you die, and you end up in hell—as we all will, of course—and they get around to offering you your choice of torments, and one of them is taking off and landing for an eternity with a head cold pulling a nastily proxigean spring tide through every single one of your sinuses, take whatever the hell else they offer. It can’t be worse. Trust me.)
I’m trying to put everything back together again, or at least the bits I can find and scrape together and recollect, on Jenn’s old iBook. It’s a sweet little machine, and I’m finally getting to play in the wonderful world of OSX, but it’s still got Jenn’s old filing structure kicking around and a bunch of Jenn’s old files to boot and it doesn’t even have a name yet. And I’ve been meaning to revamp Long story; short pier as it is—the look, but also the structure, and maybe even the how and the why. And I’m trying not to think about the work that’s been lost on City of Roses—less than you might think, but still: there’s a lot to be done before I can get it back on track. And the rest of me, which is long past overdue a thorough dusting and reorganizing. And. And.
I don’t so much heave as lob a sigh at the thought of it all.
It’s going to be quiet around my various web enterprises for about a month or so, is the basic point, except for the sounds of pounding and splintering and hammering and drilling and sweeping and cursing when a thumb gets pounded instead of a nail, or a line of CSS fails to work as advertised. Surf your way through the linchinography to the right there in the meanwhile. I mean, all I can say for myself at the moment is that I finally got to see Eddie Izzard (canned, but), who is as brilliant as everyone (who is anyone) says, and I got to see enough of the American Queer as Folk to wonder why on earth they bothered, and it was cool meeting up with Paul and Scott even if we did end up missing Julia and HM, and New York City is still pretty much New York City. Not that I was all that worried, but I still shudder to remember when Unique New York got ripped out and replaced by a Nobody Beats the Wiz™ (long since gone), so my cockles were nicely if trivially warmed to see that the Sock Guy is still on St. Marks Place. (But when on earth did Forbidden Planet jump across the street and lose all its books? Management does not approve.) —Other than that? It’s snowing, and I’ve got a malingering cough and a cat in my lap, and my feet are cold, and there’s a lot of work to be done. So.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
I’m a moirologist, not a miracle worker.
It’s dead, Jim. —Still not funny, though. Pardon me, there’s something in my eye—
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walk into a bar—
As I’m still waiting to hear and all, here’s what’s doubtlessly the strangest and most particular Google request to come over the transom in a while:
read stories about people getting naked then still alive getting into a furnace without surviving
The irony I did not need.
So I’ve been bad about backups, yeah. I have an old tangerine iBook. I have a 250 meg Zip drive and some disks. I have 14 or 15 gigs of music and writing and graphics work and freelance stuff on it. It’s a relatively new 20 gig drive. I’m cocky and careless. You do the math.
But, cockiness and carlessness aside, it was eating at me. So. I found a lovely LaCie 40 gig external drive. Ordered it. Loaded the driver for OS 9.2. (My tangerine doesn’t quite have enough oomph to run OSX. Sigh.) Plugged in the drive. Watched the arrow go all wonky when I tried to move it about the screen to close windows. Pulled the USB plug to the drive. Restarted.
Whir-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!
Oh, fuck.
I think in a couple of days I’ll find it terribly funny, and we’ll have a jolly laugh at the irony and the folly of it all, ha ha, and the speed with which the potential loss of what in the grand scheme of things is really little more than prettily patterned 1s and 0s has reduced me to a blubbering supplicant desperately bargaining with whatever Powers might possibly be that if everything turns out to be okay or at least salvageable then I’ll mend my ways, I’ll back up religiously every night and say my prayers, I’ll floss, I’ll stop wasting so much time on the internet with egosurfing and troll-baiting and “research” and googling for unmentionables and—
And—
It will be funny. Someday. Right?
Right? Ha ha? Someday?
But. This moment here. Right now, as I’m typing on the Windows box at work and staring at the blank black screen of the tangerine iBook I’ve used as an outboard brain since 1999. That I write on. That I design on. That I read the news on. That I keep track of friends with. That holds all of my prettily patterened 1s and 0s.
Right now, not so much.
Vote early. Vote often.
Via Zoe Trope, we learn that the American Family Association is conducting a poll to determine America’s attitudes regarding same-sex marriage. They intend to present the results to Congress.
Unfortunately, they neglected to let a broad spectrum of Americans know about the survey. However will it be truly representative of our country in all its diverse majesty? So go, vote—then spread the word.
You know?
The only car in Venice.
Haven’t you always wanted to see a wooden Ferrari being driven through the canals of Venice by a guy who made his house with books he’d carved from wood? —Sure you have!
Now why didn’t I think of that before?
On this long night of unexpected work at the “day” job, on a weekend which was to have been devoted to catching up on totally buggered deadlines and procrastinated household chores, I at least have this simple idea to console me:
A gin martini softened with single-malt Laphroaig rather than the more typical vermouth. A couple of olives, and—
Well. Two of ’em set me up quite nicely on the dinner break.
Happy anniversary.
We all know that George W. Bush is unelectable. After all, he lost last time; he’ll lose again. In every conceivable metric, he has failed to clear the bar set by even the most inept of presidential predecessors: whether it’s the gutshot economy, the punch-drunk war, the hamfisted cronyism, the Nixonian authoritarianism, or the ludicrous foreign policy, as conducted by a bunch of froshling poli sci majors on a Diplomacy binge, he’s presided over the most appalling collection of creeps, crooks, dolts, and faith-based dipshits ever to tap a Teapot Dome. His administration has been a miserable failure; any slob in a smelly T-shirt could beat him in a walk on that special Tuesday in November. The man is unelectable.
But he is selectable.
So here’s a clip’n’save vocabulary list of tricks and tactics we all ought to keep a weather eye out for, beyond the obvious black-box ballot-stuffing threat of Diebold and company:
Rehnquist v. tr. To purge voter rolls of blocs designated as likely to vote Democratic, whether by excluding anyone with the same last name as someone who might be a felon, or directly intimidating minority voters at the polls. Usage: “Katherine Harris really rehnquisted Florida in 2000.”
Kennedy v. tr. To gerrymander voting districts to prevent adequate representation of minorities; from the act of using specious legal reasoning to defend this practice. Usage: “The Republicans are getting more brazen about how they kennedy voting districts.” Note: overshadowed by the more virulent synonym, delay.
O’Connor n. The hypocrisy of strenuously attempting to appear principled while openly aligning oneself with unethical, amoral factions, lending them respectability in return for the tactical advantages gained by trampling the very principles one claims to uphold. Usage: “There’s an entire class of ‘good’ Republicans in this country, lost in an advanced state of o’connor.”
Thomas v. tr. To “work the ref,” manipulating rules, regulations, policies, procedures, and public relations to prevent crucial information from reaching the public, thus ensuring the vote goes your way. Usage: “The punditocracy appears if anything to be even more complicit in thomasing political coverage in favor of the Republicans than they were in 2000.” Note: thomasing differs from diebolding in that no vote tampering occurs, per se.
Scalia n. Any Supreme Court decision which is a one-time only deal, setting no precedent, engaging in transparent sophistry that makes a mockery of the articles cited, and effecting a naked power grab that shatters our much-vaunted system of checks and balances. Usage: “Bush v. Gore? Total scalia, dude.”
Over it? Feh. Move on? Ha! Happy anniversary, y’all, and remember: he’s unelectable—but selectable. The gang that can’t shoot straight is governing like there’s no tomorrow— certainly not one that belongs to anyone but them. They will not go gently into that good night.
But they will go there, by God.
The life you save could be your own.
Look, I like a Weetzie Bat book as much as the next fellow, but I’m not about to start waxing rhapsodic over the City of Quartz. There’s a place for it in the collective unconscious, I suppose—gracelessly aging screen queens of whatever gender still need shady bungalows where Nancy Drews and Walter Neffs can tumble headlong into stories they won’t suss out till the final moments of a posthumous voiceover, and the world would be a poorer place without the Dude. But (what little I’ve seen of) the there that’s there all too often leaves me wretched, retching on all fours.
In a metaphorical sense, anyway.
There’s the heat and the sun and the fact that you’re driving for hours to get anywhere and the sheer number of movie billboards makes getting around the city feel like those obnoxious DVDs where you can’t fast-forward past the coming attractions. There’s the prefab megaburbs, fœtal Neal Stephenson atopias that spring forth fully paved from the knotted foreheads of urban planning committees, settling the Mandlebrot fronds of their culs-de-sac around big-box nuclei of Home Depots and Bed Bath & Beyonds, and if you think it’s tacky to blame Venice for the sins of Thousand Oaks, well, tough. There’s more than enough to go around. And sure there’s wonder there, and beauty—you can’t put that many people in one place without some deliriously amazing things being done and said and built—but it takes too much money and gas to enjoy them properly. I am a callow, petty, cruel man, and for these sins: heat; sun; annoyance; urban blight; profligacy; bad planning; and one of the worst cups of coffee I’ve ever had in my life, I could easily write the whole festering mess off without a backward glance—Bats and bungalows, screen queens, Dudes and all. Except—
We were in this minivan, Scott and Ivy and Winter and Sky and Jenn and me, and we were somewhere between Thousand Oaks and Culver City and having a hard time getting any closer to either of them, and it was hot, and the sun was flinging daggers off the chrome and glass all around us, and even though there’s something to be said about improvising Pythonesque skits with a couple of disarmingly precocious kids in the back seat of an elderly minivan on the 101, you’re still stuck in the back of an elderly minivan on the 101, and even disarmingly precocious kids can get squallingly cranky. (Hence the Pythonesque skits.) Are we there yet?
Eventually whatever was blocking the traffic popped free and it began sluggishly to move, down out of the dry, scrubby hills through cool green suburbs toward the apocalyptic orange haze at the bottom. Somewhere off thataway, that grey mass that wasn’t quite sky and yet wasn’t quite anything else? That has something to do with an ocean, apparently. And for all the skyscraping high-rises jutting up at alarmingly random intervals, none of them quite stick in the mind’s eye, you know? (Quick! Draw LA’s skyline!) —We didn’t go quite that far; we found instead a nondescript corner with only a couple of movie billboards looming over it and parked. (Climbing out, I discovered I had suffered a Sartorial Indignity; I do not want it to be said that I blame anyone, as any fool knows one shouldn’t wear white pants in an elderly minivan frequented by disarmingly precocious children. But: nonetheless: I had, and it was.) One door down from that corner was a nondescript storefront. Scott leaned on the nondescript buzzer. The door opened. And, ladies and gentlemen, as God is my witness: all of Los Angeles was redeemed.
We were in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
For one thing, it was cool and dim. But! I don’t know that I have ever spent any two hours more totally immersed in awe, stumbling about through such a lovely, druggy haze of presque vu. I— I—
Trailer parks! Rotting luck! Athanasius Kircher! Mice on toast! —Aw, fuck. Words fail me.
(There was a book. Words kinda failed him, too.)
Which makes this part of the post mildly moot: it has come to my attention that, like so many other enterprises which depend upon the kindness of strangers, the Museum of Jurassic Technology could use a little more help than usual, these days. Memberships start at $35 per year ($25 for seniors and students), and you get stuff and discounts and free admission and so on. And if you know about the Museum then you know, but if you don’t—my inability to articulate the hows and the whys and wherefores does none of us any good, now, does it.
Think of it this way: one day, you, too, will be in Los Angeles. And you, too, will be hot and sun-stricken and stuck in traffic. When you finally pull off the 101 into the City of Culver City, well—you’re gonna want a there to still be there. Know what I mean?
No one may ever have the same knowledge again.
Unelectable.
I’m gonna quote Atrios on this one:
...and another thing. Stop ceding the goddamn debate. Who here thinks Howard Dean can beat Bush? Why Ted, you ignorant slut, Fred Flintstone could take Bush with Barney Rubble as his campaign manager. Wesley Clark should stop saying that he needs to be the nominee because someone needs to be able to match Bush at foreign policy. What Clark should say is that Joey Tribiani could match Bush at foreign policy, though he, Clark, has the most experience. Stop acknowledging that Bush is strong on anything. He’s a big loser. He’s a miserable failure. He’s lost 3 million jobs. He got us into a screwed up war. Our soldiers are being killed by terrorists. The Middle East is a mess. Afghanistan is a mess. OBL is alive. Hussein is alive.
Say it with me, everybody: George W. Bush is unelectable.
Angels.
So yeah: I’ve got this thing about Ayn Rand and objectivism—I’ve got no use for her, and I’ve got no use for it. (There’s a subset of Trek fandom who like to insist that Surak’s Vulcan logic is best expressed as Randian objectivism; it would seem they utterly glossed over the moral of the third-best Trek movie ever made.) —And one of my most cherished prejudices is that libertarians are coddled, pampered, naïve fools, who believe what they believe only because they have no clue what nastiness awaits when their cherished ideals are fully implemented. “A farmer in Idaho who’s contemplating taking up sodomy,” was R. Fiore’s definition; “Repeal all laws except the ones that benefit me,” was mine.
Bedamned if Arthur Silber doesn’t manage to challenge all of that on all-too-regular a basis.
Bastard.
Anyway: read what he has to say about Angels in America, and take it to heart, and watch the damn thing, already. —I saw it on Broadway, too, and, oh, heck. Just see it. (Amp’s recording it; we’re all going to get together with some popcorn one of these days and shut away the rest of you for a while.)
And not that this has much to do with anything that’s gone before aside from the obvious, but make sure you pick up a copy of Wig in a Box. Hedwig, Rufus Wainwright, Robyn Hitchcock, the Breeders, the Polyphonic Spree, Sleater-Kinney (with Fred Scheider!), and Cyndi Lauper her own damn self, and the proceeds go to support the Harvey Milk School. How can you beat that?
What happened, you mooks.
Oh, there were circumstances. (There are always circumstances.) There was that holiday. (I made my usual goyishe challah and a black bean and chocolate chili.) I’ve been so distracted from other writing tasks that I can’t work up the gumption to procrastinate those by tossing off something here. (They ought to come first, which means this usually does, unless I’m over some other rainbow entirely.) I’m going through another one of those periods where my normally fecund outrage lies fallow; overwhelmed by the effort to keep my head above this river of shit, for some perspective, I’ve instead curled up in a little ball and sunk to the bottom, where at least it’s cool and dim and quiet—pleasant, really, as long as you don’t try to breathe. (It’s a heartsickness. I read the news and I sigh and shrug and turn away to burrow deep within the flannel sheets we just bought and I turn out the light.) We lost a cat we never really got to know all that well. (She reached out for something as the shot went home, the most she’d moved in hours, and then she stopped breathing. We got a paw print and a clip of fur in the mail from the clinic and I suddenly found it hard to speak. Chris ’shopped a silly composite image from these silly snaps that Jenn took, and now I have a mental image of Kitty Heaven that’s going to be hard to shake. But at least it makes me laugh.) And of course, there’s the day job—
I don’t talk much about the day job, do I?
I work in litigation support, basically, a field I never even knew existed until Aaron, the Demented Lawyer, snagged me a part-time job here. When the freelance writing and graphic design market started drying up, I stepped up to full time; now, I’m a Project Manager, with a corner office and everything. —Basically, when two companies hate each other very much, they come together in a lawsuit. And the lawyers for each side want to see all the pieces of paper the other side has in its filing cabinets and desk drawers and bankers’ boxes stashed away in the unused office space on the sixth floor, memos and financials and correspondence and telephone messages and test results and printouts of every half-baked Excel spreadsheet and ill-conceived Power Point presentation stuffed onto the harddrive of that laptop Bob hasn’t used since the ill-fated trip to Nova Scotia. And they argue back and forth about what’s pertinent and what’s privileged, but in the end all this paperwork is boxed up and dropped off at our offices, where we scan it all in, number every page in sequence, print (“blow back,” in the parlance) a fresh, numbered set, break that up into discrete documents, code the particulars of each document into a database, and then hand the whole shebang back, neatly boxed up and easily and quickly searchable in any of a number of ways. —We sort haystacks, in other words, so that needles—howsomever defined—might more easily be found. And on the one hand, this is cool: if a lawyer is getting ready to depose Bob about that trip to Nova Scotia, and she wants to see every memo he wrote before he went, she doesn’t have to send her paralegal scurrying down to the sixth floor office to search all those bankers’ boxes for any memo that he might have written before the date of the trip; instead, the harried paralegal can scurry over to the computer, run a simple database search, and print out all the corresponding documents. Time and money are saved! The invisible hand of commerce lubricates the exceeding fine if slowly grinding mills of justice! Huzzah!
On the other hand, you also have clients who get a mite peevish when you try to tell them it’s a wee bit difficult to print 60,000 pages in chronological order in 12 hours.
I think I’m figuring out why I don’t talk about the day job much. —Oh, there’s something new to learn with every project, and there’s scads of fun terminology (blowbacks, Bates numbers, redwelds, bankers’ boxes [which, thanks to my days in comics retail, I can assemble with alacrity], etc. etc.), and I get to see all sorts of juicy behind-the-scenes stuff, going through other companies’ dirty laundry every day, but since I sign a non-disclosure agreement with most of the projects I take on, well.
So: day job. We work for lawyers; there’s the concomitant stress level that that entails. —November was a month, in other words; still, peevish clients and appalling actions taken in my name and good food with friends I haven’t seen in years notwithstanding, I’m most rattled here on the other side by the death of a cat I knew, what, two months? Less?
Stupid death. It’s a really dumb way to run things, you know? —Oh, sure, “They will come back—come back again, as long as the red Earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Why should He squander souls?” If it floats your boat, I guess. But rake my yard, first. Then talk to me about squandering.
Reflexive decency.
Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a faggot there from Boston—not a blue-blood Brahmin, neither, most as upright as a straight man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the state. And what do you think? They said he was a lawyer in a big firm out that way, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could get married when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? Now, I’m sweet on Dolores, as you know, and I was just about to go and ask for her hand if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a state in that country where they’d let that faggot marry a man, or let some bulldagger swoop in on sweet Dolores, I drawed out. I says I’ll never get married ag’in. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never get married ag’in as long as I live.
With thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, for reminding me; apologies to Messr. Twain; and a great big dollop of neener dumped all over Jonah Goldberg and all his icky, phobic ilk.
The Devil, quoting Scripture.
Matthew, Chapter 7, that ol’ Sermon on the Mount:
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
Some of the trees in question: Allen Brill introduces the Right Christians to the latest batch of the Christian Right, who’ll doubtless be spearheading the upcoming Last Stand for Bigotry against gay marriage. David Neiwert does some digging into recent efforts by Richard Mellon Scaife & co. to do to America’s churches what they’ve done to America’s conservative movement. One of Neiwert’s links leads us back to Brill and thence to a connection between black box voting and a particularly nasty brand of Christianist. And y’all did remember to make a copy of this Harper’s article from a while back, didn’t you?
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
(Which, you know, is fine and dandy for Him. But what about the rest of us, huh? Stuck down here with these corrupt and evil-fruited trees.)
