The rules of engagement.
It is a joyous thing, is war . . . . You love your comrade so in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood is fighting well, tears come to your eyes. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and of pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and accomplish the command of our creator. And then you prepare to go and die or live with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that, there arises such a delectation, that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight it is.
—Jean de Bueil, Le Jouvencel (ca. 1465)
It’s an odd week to be reading Theodor Meron’s Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare. There’s a cognitive dissonance in reading the tusslings of 14th century philosophers with Saints Thomas Aquinas and Augustine and the very ideas that squirm beneath our op-ed pages, of a just injustice, a moral immorality, a gross crime committed, eyes opened and resolve firmed, for the greater good: a bellum justum; a just and proper war. There’s something so terribly odd in realizing Giovanni da Legnano back in the 1300s out-Orwelled the current powers that be, making a better case for the war in Iraq than Thomas Friedman ever could: war comes itself from divine law, he argues, with a “positive allowance” from God; because, he says, the “end of war…is the peace and tranquility of the world[, war] proceeded originally and positively from God.” —You read that, the bus stops, you close the book and you stand up and off you get, your brain kicked loose and floating numbly in your skull like a Sudafed high.
“The tinsel glint of chivalry.” That’s another good line, Meron quoting Maurice Keen, and I would have liked it a lot 20 years ago, or even 10; the slap at the cheapness of chivalry, the dishonesty of honorable brutality and the hypocrisy of tarting up slaughter with a surface sheen of civilized behavior, would have appealed greatly to me. I like it a lot now, too, but because it’s one of those perversely beautiful little paradoxes; I think of Christmas lights and cheap bits of foiled plastic. I mean, you don’t want to use too much, but judiciously apply it, then turn off the lights and squint just so: you get a heart-lifting thing of beauty. Chivalry—by which I don’t so much mean opening doors for ladies, no; I mean noblesse oblige, but more specifically the obligations imposed by differences in brute power and violence, not social standing (which, of course, is based implicitly on brute power and violence); obligations imposed not by anything inherent to power, no (power corrupts, after all)—but merely because we decided they should be. —Chivalry is hypocrisy, yes, but a necessary one, one that has tempered much brutality, horror, and bloodshed; as much as if not more than it has excused and endorsed, is my gut-level reaction. (Assuming one could ever even begin to measure such a thing.) Chivalry is a concept doomed to failure from the start by semantics and human nature, but nonetheless the attempt is made (was made? has been made?); and there is sometimes nothing so beautiful as clear-eyed stubborn folly.
“Force is the weapon of the weak,” maybe, is another way of putting it, but I’m reaching well past chivalry there. (“Power to the people! Teeth for shrimp! Plato was a fascist!” —Indeed, but also: “The People! United! Provide a bigger target!” Thereby demonstrating not only why I don’t do so well at rallies and marches, but also my penchant for sticking tangents in the spokes of whatever it is I’m wheeling at the moment.)
The Navy tried (not too terribly hard) when I was in high school to get me to come to Annapolis, and I must cop to having been tempted somewhat if not sorely. (Thereby proving in at least my own particular case that it’s not so much a particular extremism that attracts adolescents as it is extremity itself. Apocalypses and utopias [utopiæ?] [“Absolute Destiny Apocalypse!”] [another tangent; I’ll try to keep them quiet. Sorry].) I never would have gone—I even think I knew that, then—but there was something about—the power of it. A power tempered with restraint, or at least the illusions of restraint: the uniforms, the tradition, the discipline, the rules of engagement, the laws of war. Might in service of right. A power bigger than any one of us working for ideals great enough for all of us. And if it doesn’t take much to blow all that up into so much glittering tinsel, well—it’s still there. An impossible ideal, honored in breach more often than not, but a deep and abiding motivation in more than some of us would sometimes like to admit; never so clear-eyed as others would like to believe, but nonetheless tempering as much brutality in this world as it excuses and condones. If not more. —This flirtation with a great and aweful crossroads (not that I ever would have, not really, no, and the idea of me-then actually doing it fills me-now with a kind of rueful, wincing glee; a folly not at all clear-eyed or deliberate, that would have been) has stayed with me. I check in on the road not taken: I read enough of Clancy, say, to know he was enough of a partisan hack to make a lousy novelist but a useful non-fiction writer (with a shaker of salt to hand); I stumbled over David Poyer and snapped up his modern naval stuff like hotcakes; I was inordinately pleased when a friend, a naval alumnus, blurted, “Jesus Christ, you actually read the Bluejacket’s Manual? Without being forced?” —To list three touchstones pretty much at random.
(I’d sketched out that much at work, on breaks. A slow day. I got on the bus, rode home. “The bombs are falling,” someone said. I went shopping. Bought catfood. Wine. Feta cheese. “The bombs are falling,” someone said. “We’re doing this, aren’t we?” I went home. Made dinner. Here I am. The bombs are falling.)
I don’t know much, then, and none of it directly. But I know enough to know that though a “fair and lucky war” is impossible (has been impossible, since 1991; is always impossible, but, but), I still hope for a war as short and as deathless as possible. I know enough to know that I support our troops, for what that’s worth; I know enough not to be surprised when I hear from a friend of a friend that some of those troops have taken to referring to their commander-in-chief as “the Antichrist.” I know enough to know that this war is that most immoral and most unjust of wars—
Unnecessary.
I know enough to know the struggle for peace isn’t over. It has just begun. Just barely begun. Embarking on a war, someone said somewhere at some point, is like entering a dark room; there’s no way of knowing what will come. So curse the darkness—repudiate it, spit in its face, drag your heels against the hands that pull you into it, curse it—but light a candle, too. (You can do both.) Light a candle. Speak out. Forgive us all our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, but write the fall of every bomb on your heart, and never forget: Never again. Swear it.
Go, gentlemen, each man unto his charge.
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls.
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience; swords, our law.
March on, join bravely! Let us to ’t, pell mell—
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.
Never again, goddammit.
Moral dilemma.
It’s been a popular conundrum for the pro-torture crowd: there’s a bomb, somewhere. And you’ve got this guy strapped to a chair. Never mind how he got there, chatter suggests he’s the man with the plan, it’s a fucking red alert, there’s a ticking goddamn clock and if you make him talk, make him tell you the what and the where and the how then you, my friend, can stop the countdown. Save thousands, maybe millions of lives. Pop quiz, hotshot: What do you do?
Burn this.
(Originally written in July 1997 for Anodyne magazine. Obviously the measures referred to are out of date—though election year perennials. Also, I can’t guarantee there haven’t been any changes to the local laws. And: a word to the wise: if you burn the flag before Palestinian children in an occupied settlement, Joe Grossberg will proclaim “Good fucking riddance” when you’re later run over and crushed to death by a bulldozer. Caveat incinerator.
(As for why—well, fuck. It fits my mood tonight. So.)
So you want to burn the flag.
Better jump on the bandwagon soon, folks. The House of Representatives just passed a measure that would outlaw “flag desecration” by amending the Constitution so that it is specifically exempted from protection under the First Amendment. The vote was 310 to 114, well over the two-thirds majority required for any amendments. From there it goes to the Senate; if they pass it with a two-thirds majority (and there’s a good chance they will), it will travel about the state legislatures. And if 38 of our 50 states approve it, it becomes our 28th Amendment.
What will happen to life as we know it? More than you might think. Past measures would have applied to any recognizable incarnation of Old Glory, and would have enforced the strict Boy Scout code of flag etiquette: don’t fly it in the rain, don’t fly it at night (without the proper spotlighting), don’t ever let it touch the ground, fold it in proper triangle shape when you put it away, and, oh yeah, don’t burn it. Or throw it away. Burial is the only acceptable method of disposal.
These rules would also have applied to T-shirts, neckties, comic strips (check out a memorable Doonesbury from the Bush years) or any other printed material with a flag on it—even postage stamps. Proponents claim that they’ve learned from past mistakes, and that the current measure isn’t nearly so sweeping. Even so, we can expect Young Americans for Freedom to be busted for hanging flags from dorm room ceilings; everybody who buys those little flags from Freddy’s must bury them after the parade, or face stiff penalties; and our neighbor, Phil, who hung a flag from his front porch for the Fourth three years ago and has left it up rain or shine ever since will be getting a visit from the flag police.
That’s if the laws are fairly enforced. Which they would be. Right?
So. While it’s still legal to torch the Stars ’n’ Stripes, here’s what you should do: first, if you’re burning it outside, you fall under the clean air regulations which Portland must follow, so you’ll have to apply to the Fire Department for a “permit for ceremonial fires,” usually granted for luaus and bonfires. There’s no fee. (Indoors is not a problem—as long as you burn it in a proper fireplace or woodstove.) And, of course, you’ll be wanting a flag. A 3’ x 5’ American flag will set you back about $30, but it’ll be made of nylon or polyester, and flame retardant. It’ll burn (with enough lighter fluid), but it won’t be very pretty, or safe—“You’ll end up with a liquid, plastic mess, kinda like napalm,” warns a friend who has had some experience in this area. Use a barbecue grill or some other flame-proof device to contain it. Remember, campers: Anodyne says, “Safety first!”
“Why would someone want to burn the flag? That’s so stupid!” cried one of the flag shop attendants we spoke with while researching this matter. The last serious spate of flag burning was so long ago—during the Gulf War—that nobody remembers it. But no one is seriously concerned about flag burning, here; this is really about financial improprieties, and ethics violations, and Congress wanting a little Mom and apple pie under its belt, and not giving a flying fuck what it does to the Constitution in the process. Who knows—if this “exemption” passes, we can perhaps expect more: another exemption to the First Amendment, granting freedom of religion to everyone but Satanists, or an exemption to the Fourth Amendment, so that everyone but convicted drug dealers is secure from unreasonable search and seizure. You’ve got to admire the brute force logic at work: the Constitution says we can’t, but hey presto, a little white-out and tape, and now it says we can!
Yeesh. Happy Independence Day, y’all.
Ac-cent-tchu-ate the contradictions.
Via the irrepressible Portland Mercury, we learn that State Senator John Minnis (R-Fairview) has offerred up a bill that would, in part, define terrorism:
The bill defines a terrorist broadly, as anyone who “knowingly plans, participates in or carries out any act intended to disrupt the free and orderly assembly” of Oregonians. In other words, anyone participating in an event—be it a protest or otherwise—that impedes traffic, business, or public assembly on any state property, including schools or universities. The minimum penalty for such an infraction? Twenty-five years without the possibility of parole.
So everyone who went to the march this past Saturday was a terrorist. Almost all of the events planned for the day war “begins” are acts of terror. Those monthly Critical Mass bike rides? Terrorism.
Never mind that V.I. Lenin would clasp Minnis to his waxy bosom for so alacritously taking up his end of the bargain to heighten the contradictions. No matter that Andreas Baader would pucker up his withered dead lips to kiss Minnis for playing his part so thoroughly to the hilt. (Issa giggle, ennit? Imagining those guys holding up a VP of Sales in traffic on the Burnside Bridge in a Lincoln Navigator?) —Don’t get in a semantic tizzy about conflating permitted protests and civil disobediance with hijacking passenger jets to slaughter 3,000 people. The terrorists won long ago; penny-ante shit like Senate Bill 742 is just counting coup. Instead, read the fine print: what’s also terrorism is planning, participating in, or carrying out any act that disrupts:
(c) The educational or governmental institutions of the State of Oregon or its inhabitants.
Senator Minnis. John. Think about it for a minute. Look at the chaos the Republicans have caused by refusing to fund the state budget properly. Look at the mess you’ve made of public education and higher education. (And that’s without crawling into the ever-more-likely conspiracy theory to demolish our public schools in favor of religious education.) John. Senator Minnis. Think about it for a minute:
Your own law condemns you as a terrorist.
You might want to take this one back to the drawing board.
The Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee has some important updates and actions to take regarding this shameful travesty of a bill.
Gobsmacked. William Shatnered.
I was, what, five years old? 1972, 1973, thirty years ago—we were living in the little house in Richmond and packing everything up willy-nill, my mother, my father, my sister and I; we were moving to Iran. Arak, Iran: it’s a town 60 or 70 miles (as I recall) west southwest of Tehran, in mountainous terrain. (I remember it as small—except I also remember the apartment complexes going up everywhere, and the packs of feral dogs—but anyway, regardless, the place has heated up since). In Richmond, I knew it only as a two-syllable sound, a spoken word: Arak. So when the news was on and the newscaster (Huntley? Brinkley? Cronkite?) said something about tensions rising in Arak, and anti-American sentiment, I got worried. Mom? Dad? Are you sure we ought to be moving somewhere where they’re going to hate us?
That’s not Arak, I was told. It’s not a town at all. It’s the country next door, which is called Iraq. Like Iran, but different.
Iraq. Arak.
My folks live in Rock Hill, South Carolina nowadays. There’s a set of camel bells hanging from the rafter in the sun room: a long chain of bells each nested like a clapper inside the next larger on up to the monster at the top; you’d drape this string of bells around the neck of the camel just before the hump to jangle and clank your way through the desert. There’s gorgeous miniatures here and there painted in latter-day knockoffs of the Safavid style, all gem-like colors and Herge-ish lignes claires carefully painted with brushes of only a single hair: Khayyamish lovers and-thouing under a tree; polo players galloping madly through an Esfahan park. There’s a bit of engraved rock—actually, I think it’s a plaster casting of some engraved rock—fallen from a plinth in Persepolis. There’s a block of wood with a handle carved into it; the flat face is carved with intricate floral arabesques (“Don’t you know that angels do not enter a house wherein there are pictures; and whoever makes a picture will be punished on the Day of Resurrection and will be asked to give life to what he has created?”). Pick it up by the handle, and dip it face down in a wide shallow vat of dye glimmering darkly like plum jelly, then press it—quick, slam!—on the blank brown cloth stretched taut on the rack before you. Lift it, dip it, eyeball carefully and slam it down precisely next to the first. And again, and again, building the border (precisely, but quickly, firmly, decisively) as you go. Then take up the next stamp, broader, swap out the shallow vat of plum-colored dye for the shallow vat of dye that glimmers like mint jelly: dip it, eyeball it, slam! A set of abstract leaves in green, interlocking just so with the magenta floralesque border you’ve just laid. And again, and again, carefully but quickly, keep going, there’s ten more cloths to get out the door by lunch…
My mother being a professional photographer, there’s also photos. —And memories: riding a motorcycle for the first time (not the only, but almost; I was sitting in front of the guy who owned it—five years old, remember. Or maybe six), leaping over a (little) bonfire in a vacant lot on New Year’s Eve, hiking up the mountains outside Arak and spelling our names in the snow at the top with big flat rocks. (As it turned out, we couldn’t read them from the ground; we couldn’t even see them.) —We lived in a subdivision for American engineers working on the aluminum plant (perhaps the Ravan Zobe Arak facility?), and my sister and I attended an English-language school in a small, dilapidated wing off the local school. (At least, I remember it as being small and dilapidated. Not enough desks. A small playground that takes two different shapes in my memory-map; two different playgrounds? I can’t remember. I remember seeing the non-American wing once, through an open door: darkness, and a lot of cheerful kids yelling something at us I couldn’t understand. They didn’t have enough desks, either.) The curriculum it seems to me was supplemented with British schoolkids’ texts; that, plus a steady extracurricular diet of British boys’ adventure stories (I remember Biggles, mostly, but not well) and Tintin left me with a lingering, deeply rooted Anglophilia untrammelled by repeated contemporaneous doses of Arkady Leokum. (Yes, Tintin’s Belgian. The comics were British, in translation. The point is in fifth grade I was kicked out of a regional spelling bee on the first round because I spelled “parlor” as “parlour” and I still haven’t gotten over it, okay?) —There are still little jokes and scraps of Farsi phrase that pepper the family slang: “Zood your bosh,” for “Hustle your ass”, and we still get a laugh out of “making a barfman,” and my sister and I can still giggle at the thought of the Farsi numeral 5 (it looks like a teardrop with a butt, heh heh). I remember being told never to walk home through the half-built apartment complexes because of the packs of feral dogs. My best friend’s name was Reza. (I’d run into him again in Venezuela, briefly, but that’s another story.) —I remember the smell of bodega-like shops and stalls, which—do you still buy cassette tapes? (I don’t. So I don’t know if it’s still true.) Do you remember back in the ‘80s, when they first started to make clear cassette tapes in clear cases? Do you remember the smell of one of those tapes, brand new, just unwrapped, about to be put into the boom box? It’s a very distinctive smell: an odd combination of spice and detergent, like some kind of electric incense, faintly sharp, but too round to ever make you sneeze. I never found out why, or how, but that smell is the thirty-year-old smell of tiny shops in Arak.
And the other stuff, too, the unheimlich stuff: the appalling din of Coppersmith’s Alley in Esfahan—artisans working dawn to dusk in shops not much wider than a data entry carrell (careful with that hammer), beating out copper and brass into gorgeously intricate platework; the samovars—peering into the courtyard of the hotel at Esfahan to find a shady garden, a fountain, a nook tiled with baby blue arabesques and laid with gold and purple pillows, three or four dark men lounging comfortably, a brass samovar squatting behind them, tea at the ready, and then at a spring festival at a village outside of Arak, the equinox, when you throw open your house to let the winds scour it and head out into the country for a picnic, and there we were in the yellow green grass, lunching on rugs, a big fat samovar filling dozens of tiny glass cups in brass cup holders; the women who wore chadors, the long, draping black robes that covered almost everything but their faces. Underneath, they wore American blue jeans and blouses you could find at Woolworth’s, made in Taiwan. I remember the little grey train in the little grey amusement park on the shore of the Caspian Sea; I remember the astonishing colors of spices in the bazaar, an open sack of ground cumin, paprika, tumeric, hillocks of pure, clayey colors not found in my 120 Crayolas; my father younger than I am now, standing in a corner stall, haggling with a bemused smile over the replica flintlock pistols he still has somewhere in his cluttered office, the curved wooden stocks inlaid with off-white diamonds of camel bone. —I ate pizza and tacos at Ray’s Famous American in Tehran. I watched my first videotape sometime in 1973: one of the other American families, missing a dose of pop culture, had brought one of the big old clunky machines with them, and had someone regularly ship them tapes of American television; this was pure magic. (My folks had secretly put an audio tape recorder next to the television a few weeks before we left the States and made sound-only tapes of Batman to tide me and my sister over.) (And none of that is unheimlich, no; it’s all rather decidedly home-like, but encountered far from home, out of context: a TV star at the Plaid Pantry, turning a corner in Poughkeepsie and running into your childhood friend from Paducah.) —The class picnic: a dozen or so Yankee expat first- and second-graders heading up into the hills with the twenty-something American couple who ran the classes; struggling under the weight of a watermelon, rolling it in the dust under a loose chicken-wire fence stretched over a dry gully. A gravelly stream by a low gnarled tree. A man coming up out of nowhere (did he come to the picnic site? or did we go for a walk afterwards, up on the mountain?), out of the dust, in strange clothing (and surely I’m just imagining the memory of a big curved knife at his hip), browns and brassy golds, who stood still there (by the river? the side of a narrow mountain trail?), unspeaking, who did not respond to what either teacher said, in English, in hesitant two-word bursts of Farsi, who clearly would not let us pass; who clearly said without speaking a word that We Did Not Belong.
All of that, then: Arak. Not Iraq. —I’ve never been to Iraq. (My mother has; she has one of those stories that’s great to tell if not to have lived through about a CNN crew covering her bill when the Al Rashid Hotel stopped taking American Express.) I really can’t expect anyone else to give a good God damn about somebody else’s 30-some-odd-year-old memories of a town hundreds of miles and a sectarian split and an 80-year-old border away. Arak. Not Iraq. Who cares?
Still: I’ve got to start somewhere, myself. And maybe that’s the most primal, most basic, the most gut-level reason: for me, there’s a there there. You know?
Have your fun whilst you’re alive.
You won’t get nothing when you die.
Have a good time all the time
Because you won’t get nothing when you die…
(To be more or less continued.)
What if they gave a peace and everybody came?
“We are not at war,” he kept saying. We, the world community, are waging peace. It is difficult, hard work. It is constant and we must not let up. It is working and it is an historic milestone of immense proportions. It has never happened before—never in human history—and it is happening now—every day every hour—waging peace through a global conversation. He pointed out that the conversation questioning the validity of going to war has gone on for hours, days, weeks, months and now more than a year, and it may go on and on.
Thanks, Jeanne. Thanks, JoKer. Thank you, Dr. Robert Muller. My God, did I need that.
(At the very least, folks: light a candle this Sunday.)
Sometimes, though, you just can’t resist that pellet.
Keeping in mind that skewing an online poll is mockery for ever taking the damn things quasi-seriously in the first place, Atrios is right: Wolf Blitzer deserves as much grief as you can possibly give him for phrasing a weasel-assed question like today’s. Go. Vote early and often.
Something there is that does not love a wall.
—In me, anyway. I just had someone write to me and tell me they’d understand if—because it’s clear we disagree on this point, rather vehemently—I wanted to remove them from my blogroll.
Which sort of thing is one of the reasons why I wanted to swear off these holier-than-thou crapfests in the first place.
After the initial shitstorm over at Electrolite, things calmed down a tad; it’s still heavy weather, but the sort of thing it’s bracing to go for a brisk walk in, if you like that sort of thing. (Which I do.) In the course of which, Teresa Nielsen Hayden took a quick point (“David Brin is fond of quoting a study that suggests that people in a self-righteous mood are literally enjoying a high . . . an endorphin kick”) made by Stefan Jones and ran with it a bit:
Stefan, I’ve been assuming for years, just based on my own observations, that self-righteous indignation is a high. The shorthand term Patrick and I use for it is “cheap glow”. A lot of people obviously find it attractive. I figure it’s one of the reasons they listen to Limbaugh. I also figure it’s why some political websites—mostly right-wing, some left—have taken to having an “instant outrage” feature for the rats who can’t wait to press the lever and get their pellet. I’ve also noticed that the outrage-generating texts have been making less and less sense, as both parties to the transaction move toward the complicit admission that one participant just wants his shot of anger, and is willing to cede his judgement to the other in return for it.
And it’s that image of the rats that helps me square away some stuff that’s been bugging me about blogging lately—my own stuff as well as the stuff I read. It’s why, while I can’t get through the day without checking on Atrios (say), I tend for the most part to avoid his comments crew. (Which is not to speak ill of many fine people who’ve posted many fine things there.) It’s why when I leap up in a righteous dudgeon and jerk the lever myself for a pellet, I feel all hollow and crapulent afterwards. (Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself.) —It’s why, even though I check in with the Horse from time to time, I just can’t bring myself to ’roll her or him or it or them.
But we’re back to the blogroll thing again.
The only reason a link is over there is because it’s stuff and people I like to read, on a regular basis. It’s my portable bookmark list. The key there is “like”: a frothy, ambiguous, flighty word. You’ll notice, say, a distinct dearth of bloggers which could be considered right-wing—not to name the usual names, but. (This is a distinct lacking in a political blogger; then, the funny thing is, I’ve never considered myself a political blogger, per se.) (Well. It seemed funny at the time.) You’ll also notice a distinct dearth of blogs on web standards and design and usability (Dean Allen’s occasional out-of-the-blue smashcuts notwithstanding), in spite of my passing if inept interest in the field. —On the other hand, I’m probably going to start adding more of the gonzo critical sites I’m finding by following links off Bellona Times and Waggish; they make me feel stupid, in a good way. And I really ought to add more stuff about comics, since, you know, that’s one of my ostensible fields of expertise…
My point (and I do have one) being: the only reason I have a blogroll is to remind me to check in on stuff I like to read from people I like to hang out with. It isn’t a references list or a who’s who of my secret clubhouse. If I started kicking off people I disagreed with, Barry’d be the first to go; he stubbornly refuses to accede to my superior critical understanding of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Compared with that, harsh words over choking on this ill-advised thrown-away vote or that appallingly mis-directed outburst are as nothing; a trifle. (Piffle.) —I laugh because I care. Yes, there’s a big gaping wound here in the Progressive Left-of-Center Pragmatic Utopian Mills; I don’t think it’s waterlined “us,” but it needs to be talked about, and that’s hard when each side is still spitting angry rat-pellets at the other. So what I mostly intended (ha ha) with this morning’s post was to irresponsibly abdicate a field I hadn’t been listing in much lately, anyway, since I try to keep my dogs in other fights, and I really want to go on revising my tentative translation of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, honest I do; instead, I tried to get an underhanded dig in. (Cue Silvio’s Godfather impersonation: “Just when I thought I was out—they pull me back in!”)
To make a long story only slight longer: I’d never allow politics to get in the way of someone whose stuff I like to read and out with whom I like to hang. (Politics might keep me from hanging out with someone in the first place, but that’s different.) (Subtly so, but.) —So. No one’s being dropped from the blogroll, not today, and that’s enough with the metatalk. In the meanwhile: David Chess stopped by and said something delightful in his usual lucid way; and honest, Sara, I’m almost done assembling those links on Utena; and if Paul Krugman is shrill, I don’t ever want to be sane. —Thank you, and goodnight.
What are you protesting?
Whaddaya got?
Meant to note this one earlier: Kevin points us to a fun little piece by Geoffrey Nunberg on the semantic drift of the word “protest”—since you now hear “pro-war protest” referred to every now and again:
But it sounds a little weird to talk about a protest in support of a war that’s about to be initiated by the Administration in power. Maybe that’s just semantic sloppiness, as if “protesting” nowadays were just a question of getting together to yell slogans—why should the other side have all the fun? Or maybe it’s a strategic blurring of historical memory. It’s hard to keep this stuff straight in an age when the oldies stations are apt to play Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” back-to-back with Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which was a number one hit a few months later.
Worth a chuckle.
Anyone here from Minnesota? How about Arkansas?
The bill to allow drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one vote shy of passing in the Senate. It looks like Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) is in the “no” camp on this vote (“Not now, but not never”)—though sending him a love-note probably wouldn’t hurt. (Remind him of his environmentally friendly campaigning in 2002.)
The Cheneyites are putting the pressure on Norm Coleman, freshman Republican from Minnesota, and the Arkansan Democratic delegation of Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln. So if you’re one of these fine Congressfolks’ constituents, be so kind as to drop them a line. Their names are email links—swiped from Barry, who also has the phone numbers, if you’re feeling all personal-like.
Fun fact, though: there’s some arcana going on in how to frame the Senate budget item covering the drilling which will either allow a fillibuster, or not. But don’t for God’s sake trust that; we need all three (or four) fence-sitters on board. So send your email, buck ’em up, and shut it down.
River of shit.
Once more, I’m being asked to choke on my vote in the 2000 elections. —Meanwhile, the registered Democrats who voted directly for Bush get a free ride. (Presumably, their choice was in some fashion more moral? more honest? than mine.)
You know what? I just don’t care anymore. I don’t give a good God damn. I’ve had all the fights I can stomach and all the arguments I can stand and I know why I did it and given it to do all over again I’d do what I did, and let me tell you what you already know: the Democrats in power have not acquitted themselves terribly well in the past two years. There’s plenty of Congressfolk with Ds after their names who I myself hope have a hard time swallowing around some of their votes. But you need to piss all over me and mine to make yourself feel better, get it out of your system? Fine. Go right ahead.
Feel better?
Now. Can we each in our own way go do what needs to be done about our current situation? Or is that too much to ask?
And you thought “freedom kissing” was a joke.
One of Daze Reader’s readers sent in this photo of a Nevada brothel menu.
Habeas pueruli.
Oh, we know how to make Khalid Sheikh Mohammed talk, boasted an unnamed American law enforcement official. We have access to his kids.
Kids? said the CIA. Sure, we’ve got the kids. Flew ’em to an undisclosed location in the States. No, not Cheney’s. We’re treating ’em with kid gloves. Legal guardian? Rights? What?
No, wait a minute, said the US. We don’t have the kids. We never had the kids. What are you, high?
Confused? Frustrated? Infuriated? Aw, heck. Don’t be. There’s a simple explanation: we (by which I mean thee and me) don’t even know for sure where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is. We (by which I mean them what represents us) have yet to habeas the corpus, so what’s a couple of kids compared to Public Enemy No. 22? I mean, 2?
Road to Surfdom (via TalkLeft) gives us a taste of how it’s playing in Paducah (as it were).
All of which makes this—more likely? Less likely? Utterly unfounded? Crazy—like a fox? Good? Bad? Indifferent?
“We have no information to substantiate that claim.” —Fills you with confidence, don’t it?
The only thing I can state with any certainty myself is that I’m highly skeptical of the claim that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s arrest—whenever and wherever it occurred—is itself an advertisement of the efficacy of the USA PATRIOT Act. But I’m a cantankerous and partisan sonofabitch on the subject, so you should maybe take that with a grain of salt, too.
Bush! Klaatu barada nikto—
It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet. But if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We will be waiting for your answer.
Which, to be fair, risks being misread, or rather read as a mirror image of my own reading; after all, in some imaginations, it’s Bush standing at the head of the flying saucer’s ramp, having been shot in the back by paranoid, squabbling (former) allies, delivering his cinder speech to Saddam Hussein—whose present course they fancy threatens to extend his violence. (The persistent lack of any option to join us and live in peace in Bush’s various ultimata rather militates against this reading—but the risk, nonetheless, is there.) Still! The first thing I thought when I read this—
Berkeley – After more than a million years of computation by more than 4 million computers worldwide, the SETI@home screensaver that crunches data in search of intelligent signals from space has produced a list of candidate radio sources that deserve a second look.
Three members of the SETI@home team will head to Puerto Rico this month to point the Arecibo radio telescope at up to 150 spots identified as the source of possible signals from intelligent civilizations.
—the first thing I could think to do was run outside and find a really tall hill and start yelling as loud as I could: “Help! Help! You frickin’ Galactic-Federation-formin’ Ashtar-Command-runnin’ Fermi’s-Paradox-duckin’ motherfuckers, get your butts down here and do something!”
All di tings wey dem talk about di rights, wey human beings suppose to get, na im de for this small book.
[...] Article 7
Everi one na im be, di same for law, no mata wetin di person be or di kind person e be. Di law of our kontri must to make sure say notin happen to am. Di law must to make sure say dem treat everibodi di same, so tay all dis tings we de talk about human right, nobodi go against am, or gada people to go against am.
—via Open Brackets: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Nigerian Pidgin English.
Pardessus anglais.
Sneaky bastards. I’d forgotten another French item whose ill-considered boycott the “grownups” have been engineering: French letters.
Pardon my French.
It was kind of pathetically funny when Neal Rowland did it. But actually slapping the moniker “freedom fries” on the US House of Representatives cafeteria menus is—well, it’s upholding a long-standing tradition of moronic House grandstanding, but it’s still pathetic. Disappointing, even. —But no longer funny.
Don’t take the weasel’s way out: don’t try to argue that they’re really Belgian fries, and the only reason we call them “french fries” is because of the technique of frenching, or slicing in long, thin strips (more properly referred to as “julienne”), thereby proving the protest is not only moronic, but misguided; Snopes makes it pretty clear that we call it frenching because that’s what you do to make French fried potatoes, and not vicey-versey. —Just go out, have some lunch, and order french fries, loud and clear, by golly.
Speaking of lunch—
