What Went Wrong

Barbara Lerner of NRO has a pretty sound damning of the post-war occupation, and, in so doing, makes me wonder if the old spoils system of federal government didn't have it's good parts.


For starters, Lerner points out that Rumsfeld had both a larger role intended for Iraqis during the war and a much simpler interim government afterwards: both involving the INC and Ahmed Chalabi. Neither happened because State and CIA balked. Instead, the handover was put off for a year, and involves a largely faceless Iraqi Governing Council. Constitution aside, I don't think that the Iraqis believe that they're governing themselves, and that may not be helping.


And now we're going to the UN. That can't make things better.


I keep hoping that the adminstration has another surprise in their pocket, that they've got a new campaign in mind or a new front to open up in the WoT. I'm starting to wonder if they've become too reactive, too soft. I'm not the only one that thinks so. Is further bureaucritization really what we want to see happen? Can we afford to allow Iraq to become the next Kosovo?


George, Kerry's behind you in the polls. There's no reason to start imitating him.




Good God, that's three war posts in a row. I'm just chickenhawking it all over the place...

On "The List"

I agree with John McCain. I see nothing inappropriate about reading the names of the war dead. I see nothing that is going to suddenly undo support for the President and spike support for Kerry. We've been seeing the numbers coming in for a year: 1 killed one day, 5 killed the next day, 3 more the day after that. Of course they have names, and I can't think of a single reason why we shouldn't know them.


Naturally, it's possible that ABC will use the list to snipe at the president. But if they're in any way serious about honoring the sacrifices, I think the public will feel a greater connection to those that have died, and instead of saying, "These dead are too many," the response may well be "They shall not have died in vain!"

Whose Country is this, Anyway?

No, Sully, you aren't the only one who started to worry when he heard the Marines were handing Fallujah over to a previously unheard-of Iraqi army. This wasn't precisely what we were promised, was it? Furthermore, who is this Fallujah Protective Army? Who do they answer to? What guaruntee do we have that they'll actually do their job?


The only reason I didn't blog on this subject yesterday is because I was waiting for better information to come down the pike. Now I know that this plan is one they've been considering for some time, and that the FPA officers will answer to our own commanders for at least the time being. The last question remains in the air, but consider this: we're expecting Iraqis to govern themselves at some point. Within a few months, as a matter of fact. Might as well give them a chance to do that. It's not like Fallujah's going anywhere.


The thing to keep in mind is that we're not looking to add Iraq to the Union. All we wanted is for Hussein to be gone, and that Arabs get a chance to try something like the rule of law. We haven't got time to kill or pacify every Islamofascist in the country. There's still, after all, Iran and Syria to deal with.

Link, Link, Link, Sardonic!

It's been a while since I've added a new blog to the linksheet, so here it is. Sardonic Views has a good name and good content, and is one of those who posts more regularly than I, so he's in. Today he joins in on the Kerry dogpile, and hints at a meme that I hope gains traction: Kerry = the Democratic Dole.


Update: I forgot, I just added AfricaPundit last Friday. So it hasn't been a while. For some reason it felt like a while. And I stand by that statement.

Racist by Default

Here's a stupid story that speaks to an underlying reality; the ease with which the innocuous is called "racist." Elton John doesn't care for the national audience's picks on American Idol? We must be racist, and never mind Ruben Studdard. The American government doesn't move fast enough to fix Haiti? It's because the American government is the province of racist white men, and never mind the presence of Colin Powell, Condi Rice, or various Hispanics in the American government (they all look alike, right?). Somebody has the temerity to criticize people for slavish devotion to banal pop stars? They could possibly have a point worth making. Nope, he must be racist.


How did we get this way? More to the point, how long is this going to go on?

WMDs: Found?

They ain't sexy, but they have teeth. I wonder that the President isn't harping on this. Either he's wary of touching on the subject or he's waiting for a complete report, and then lay it out for the people, news-conference-style.


Incidentally, I can tell you why Kerry doesn't seem to be hacking it. It isn't his personality, it isn't his past. It's the fact that the poor sap has nothing to say. This past month would have been the perftect time to lay into Bush, not only criticize the current war plan but come up with a radical departure from it, one which would convince a majority that he knows what he is doing on terror and Bush doesn't. He failed to do that, because he has no plan, except he'll stay longer in Iraq, and he'll talk nicer to the UN. That doesn't excite anyone.

It Goes Like This...

...Black writer writes column about how black people should "be more thoughtful about whom they choose to rally around, ought to be less automatic in leaping to the defense." He refers to the O.J. Simpson syndrome, whereby a black celebrity is defended to the utmost by the black community when accused of a crime, innocent or guilty. Nothing happens.


...White writer writes column about how black people should "grow beyond the automatic reaction of defending someone because he or she shares the same skin color and is in a dilemma." He refers to O.J. Simpson syndrome, whereby a black celebrity is defended to the utmost by the black community when accused of a crime, innocent or guilty. He is fired from the student newspaper at Oregon State University.


So far, so typical of lefty thought policing at colleges. Instapundit added it to his "Crushing of Dissent" watch, which is where I got the link. But let us, for a moment, delve deeper:

Williams "does not know the experiences African-Americans have gone through. He will never know that," said Lauren Smith, president of the university's Black Student Union.

Let us examine the assumptions inherent in this statement: 1) Only those that "know the experience" of African-Americans may presume to write an opinion of them which is in any way critical. 2) This is true even if that opinion should make a point which is in itself uncontroversial (i.e. blindly supporting someone because of his skin color is stupid and wrong). 3) White people "will never know" the experience of African-Americans.


Inasmuch as the first assumption is in line with the old adage that one should refrain from judgement without walking the mile, I take the point. But just what are these "experiences" that Williams cannot know? Poverty? Surely she knows that there are far more poor whites than poor blacks, even if she never acknoledges such in her rhetoric. She does not know that Williams did not grow up poor. Fatherlessness? She does not know whether Williams knows his father or not.


Perhaps I am merely unjustly stereotyping. After all, as I have just demostrated, poverty and fatherlessness are not solely African-American experiences. I should assume instead that Smith is referring to the experience of dealing with racism, with being unjustly discriminated against because of race. Therefore, she should probably take note of Williams reaction:

"I guess this case has shown me that just because I'm a different skin color, the merits of what I wrote have been marginalized and ostracized to the point that I'm labeled everything in the book like racist, Nazi," Williams said.

It sounds to me like all that's missing is someone burning a cross in front of Williams dorm. Congratulations, OSU! Mission Accomplished. Dr. King would be so proud.

The New Bulletin Boards

Take a look at this conversation, and the threads of thought and counter-attack that appear on it. It's hard to tell how any of this is an improvement on the conspiracty-theory Web of yore or the institutionally biased (right or left) mainstream press. But then someone somes up with a gem like this:

One can, of course, pick the news outlet that tells one what one wants to hear, in the way one wants to hear it. And, if one is reasonably intellectually honest, one has to go to a lot of different places to try to gather enough information to synthesize an opinion. Not to get too philosophical or anything, but none of us really knows The Truth about what is going on in Iraq (or, for that matter, in our back yard). I'd be willing to bet that, with the exception of Scipio, few, if any, of us who comment on this board have been there recently. So, we're all getting snippets of information that are filtered and reconstructed to tell a story that reflects what the reporter, editor, or government briefer believes, or wants us to believe. And we, in turn, present the information in ways that confirm our innate biases. Hell of a way to inform a conversation.

Amen, brother, Amen.

The Dark Continent...Blogged!

It's kind of sad how, 400 years after Africa and Europe first made real cultural contact, Africa is as much as a mystery as ever. Say the word "Africa" and images of famine, war, pestilence, and he who sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed after him are sure to follow. I remember learning the states of Africa in 7th grade geography. To this day I know that there's a difference between Niger and Nigeria, and where these respective countries are located. But who's in charge there, what the economies are, whether there's political chaos or not, these things I know as well as the topography of Jupiter. Still less do I know what the people are thinking and doing.




This should help with that.

The Finest United Nations that Money Can Buy

The bribery and corruption of the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq prior to the war is gaining notice in the news. Instapundit's been blogging it for some time. It makes me wonder, and what to pose the following questions to those that oppose the war, for various reasons:


1) Does the fact that UN official were taking money from Saddam's regime cast doubts about the honesty of their opposition to the war?


2) Does the fact that UN officials were knowingly starving the Iraqi people for money cast doubts about their ability to govern the transition of Iraqi sovreignity better than we can?


3) Does any of the above change your opinions about a war's status as "just" being solely conferred by UN approval?


4) If the answer to any of the above is "no," can you explain why?

The Misty Gomer Fisk

A bit of interesting meta-commentary in NRO's Corner, on a method of text argument known as "fisking." A fisking is supposed to be a point-by-point refutation of someone's written work. Some of the Corner gang has taken the view that the term and method is over-used, and that people substitute the method for sound reading of their opponent and genuine refutation. They may have a point.


Fisking is closely related to MiSTing, which comes to us from Mystery Science Theater 3000, the only show that I have copies of on tape. On certain Star Wars-related boards such as The Jedi Council, the same process is known as "Gomering," after the screen name of one of its practitioners. I have used the method myself, under all names, and I think there's another thread that holds them together.


MST3K worked because they picked the ultimate dregs of the film world as their targets, movies like Manos: The Hand of Fate. The show was haughtily, hilariously superior to it's subject matter, a cascade of irony and quips, but not much in the way of what anyone would call serious film criticism. On the boards I frequent, the "Gomer bomb" is reserved for someone who persists in not getting it, a spammer or a troll who issues diatribes that deserve attention only for the purpose of underlining their poor writing, poor reasoning, and ill wit. This is done as much for the amusement of onlookers as for the edification of the recipient (which is usually considered a quixotic hope, at best). Likewise, "fisking" got it's name from Robert Fisk, an apparently bad journalist who invited such scorched-earth criticism. The method seems to suggest that you are peeing on someone from a great height.


The problem is that such a tone isn't always warranted or helpful. Sullivan isn't always a bad practictioner of this; he's usually restrained (althought he should know better than to call others "wobbly"). But I think we should all follow the rule of deserts and save the cut n'pasting for those that truly merit it.

My Dear Scutpale

How in Hell are we supposed to continue our eternal effort (and it is eternal, whatever the Enemy might say) at muddling the minds of humans if the Propaganda Department keeps giving the game away? I refer to this monstruosity. Did no one grasp that this was the kind of argument that should never have been thrown out to the human Internet, for all to see? Precisely who is minding the shop there?


Oh, of course I know it's an old argument, from one of the humans most famous thinkers, that cynic Plato (just how he managed to escape our clutches is a mystery even I am not privy to), part of a dialogue that has been used by atheists to cool the ardor of Christians since time immemorial. But that is precisely the point. The Euthyphro has to be used, with an unspoken bias and an exercise of glibness. It is perfect for a soul-dead adjunct professor of philosophy to use on an human youth who stopped learning anything useful about the Enemy when he or she was twelve years old (there are, of course, so many such humans nowadays). There the ephemerality of verbal speech, the sense of deference to authority, and the silent pressures we exert can have greatly desired effects.


But the written word is different. It remains, and therefore it's weaknesses can be discovered. It does not take a clever human to see that the "Euthyprho dilemna" is a false dichotomy. It's a classic heads-I-win-tails-you-lose trick. It purports to prove that either a) morality is seperate from the Enemy, and therefore superior to Him, or b) morality is decreed, by the enemy, and therefore arbitrary. The former is of course an absurdity, and the latter we have taught the humans to believe, without ever saying it baldly of course, as somehow "not good enough."


Surely, Scutpale, you know that the real deception lies in how we have taught the humans to think about what the Enemy calls morality. Specifically, we have taught them that Morality is a nature and being unto itself, not a descriptor of acts that either are or are not in line with a being's Enemy-designed nature. A lion stalking and hunting down and antelope is being true to its nature, following the commands that the Enemy has given it: feed and make more of yourself. Humans, alone among His material creatures, have the power to choose to go against their nature, to be immoral. Morality is therefore irrelevant outside of Creation; and since all Creation (Our Father Below, sadly, included) stems from the enemy, all morality must as well.


The fear of the arbitrary is a weapon we use well, since it stems from the Enemy-inspired love of the eternal. Because of our centuries of darkening, the humans cannot put the arbitrary and the eternal on the same plane. We cannot allow them to say to themselves "Given that the Universe itself is an arbitrary being, which did not have to exist, why am I surprised that Morality would be, too?" Such thoughts lead inevitably to dangerous wonderings about the Necessary Being, which that miscreant Aquinas put on the track to theism centuries ago. We must always supress them.


And honestly, Scutpale, did you not see that allowing the arguments for atheism to appear next to the arguments for the existence of the Enemy ought never be put in the same room together? Of course none of the latter prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the enemy exists; the humans cannot see Him. That isn't the point. Do you not see that the atheist ones are based not on reality but on attitude? Of course it's difficult for their silly, time-bound reason to understand Him. How could it not be? These problems we have used well, but not a one of them demonstrate as a logical consequence that He does not exist, merely that He is poorly understood. The other side shows from the arbitrary nature of existence itself that He does exist. Put the two together and what do you have?


I sometimes wonder if your department takes a bit too much joy in it's work, the crafting of argument. Remember my predecessors dictum: He can argue, too, and our purpose is not to enliven their minds.




Yours in austere sublimity,



Toadpipe

Gah

Somebody linked to me last week and then took their link away. My status page over at TLLB clearly shows it. Who are you, mysterious linker? And what did I do to make you de-link me?

Ooops

I missed my first anniversary. The Notion was a year old last Friday. Hooray for me.

The Passion -- Missing the Point

I deserve to be scourged for presuming to write about the Passion at this point, so many weeks after everybody else. I'm sure that most folk are sick to death of the issue. But there are some ideas about the movie that I feel obligated to address, and as it took me a while to actually see it, and a few more to digest it, you're putting up with me now. Such is life.


I live in St. Mary's County, MD, in what used to be Tobacco country and what is most distinctly Bush country. It's also Church country. I won't say that the churches have an absolute majority over the bars, but I will say that they give the bars a run for their money. They're mostly mainstream Protestant churches: Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptist, with a noticeable minority of Catholic churches, and the occasional Church of God/Pentecostal types. In other words, a fairly good cross section of American denominational habits. And it is invariably the Protestants who are advertising showings and tickets to "Passion of the Christ" in big shiny banners outside their rectories. Outside the Catholic churches, nary a one.


At first glance, this might be something that a Catholic would be ashamed of, much the same way we occasionally feel buttonholed when discussing Scripture with a Prod. It would seem as though they're "getting" the movie more than we are. Can they have more passion for the Passion?


Before I proceed on this subject, let me relate my experience with the film. I saw it with my dad a few weeks into Lent. That it was a dark, savage two hours, I will not doubt. I cringed at many moments, felt horror far more than I felt joy. That it was a film in any way anti-Semetic, I dispute. Only the modern age could see Pilate as a sympathetic character, rather than the gutless provincial bureaucrat I saw. The only piece of outright racism in the film was when one of the Roman guards escorting/whipping Jesus on the road to Golgotha said to Simon the Cyrenian, who carries the cross for a way: "Get going...Jew." Given the circumstances and the characters, it is hardly logical that Gibson intended such sentiment to be emulated. That everyone who should have spoken up for this man failed to do so, the movie makes abundantly clear. I really don't know what Charles Krauthammer, whose views I normally pay great credence to, is talking about here. He admits that most of the main characters in the story of the Passion, outside of Gibson's film, are Jews. But to depict that in a film is apparently an act of "irreligious agression." When I watched it, there was as much screen time given to Mary, John, and Mary Magdelene, all Jews, as to Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. Krauthammer ignores this, much as thousands of medieval Christians and Nazis must have. He also ignores the fact that the Satan character walks among the Roman guards as they scourge Jesus. All he can see are Jews: not humans, not Sons of Adam, not carriers of the moral virus known as Original Sin, just members of a particular ethnic group. I can't help but see this as an excessive focus on the racial makeup of a story, an impulse that is no less to blame for anti-Semitic violence than are the Gospels.


All of this makes Andrew Sullivan's me-too from March 5th less than convincing. Sorry, Andrew, if you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that the Jewish children that "turn into demons" disappear as soon as Satan has Judas out by the tree with the rope. This meant that they were illusions, which is what the Devil trafficks in. You can be frightened by Gibson's Traditionalism, reasonably call him a schismatic and heretic if such is your desire. But I didn't see anti-semitism in his film, and from what I've seen and heard since the film came out, the only ones who did were the ones writing the lead on the way to the ballpark.


But the bloodiness still needs to be confronted. Sullivan called the film "pornographic," in the sense that it reduces all matters of importance to the flesh. Christ's physical suffering is so graphic as to crowd out the enormity of the spiritual irony of the Incarnation of God destroyed by those he came to love. I take his point, and William F. Buckley's, such as they are. A more ethereal, more intellectual film could easily have been made, and indeed, might have been better. But they have missed the point and purpose of Gibson's film.


When my father and I walked out of the theater, we understandably had little to say. I felt emotionally exhausted. It had been too much; beating after falling after beating after nailing. But with some fresh air, I found perspective. As the truck pulled out of the parking lot, I said "That's pretty much what I thought it would have been like." Dad agreed. And that's why Catholics haven't been showing screenings of "the Passion" at their churches, because most Catholic churches already have it there.


Gibson's film is basically the Stations of the Cross set to film, with an extra prelude (at Gethsemane) and postlude (the 30 seconds of Resurrection). I've done Stations service on Holy Thursday as an altar boy, so I knew the account. I was able to predict what came next as it happened ("okay, that chick must be Veronica"). The only unique aspect was confronting the raw physical reality of those falls, those nails, that cross. It showed me Christ as a living reality, muscle and bone and blood. It was oddly, the stripping away of that life that made me see his pained humanity, and the horror of destroying a human, the lowliest of humans, let alone the Son of God.


This is, as near as I can fathom, the only justification for visiting such savagery upon our eyes: to show it for savagery, to show that violence really is pain, and that our Caiaphan fury and/or Pilatean complacency are the forces that permit violence and pain to grow to the point where it could devour the most holy among us. Sullivan is therefore half-right: Gibson has made a spiritual film for a pornographic age, an age that views physical truth as the only truth worth understanding. All who see it have a chance to see the fruits of ignoring truth, of giving reign to our pride or our indifference. It may be that the film is too much, that the brutality overshadows this message. If so, we should resolve ourselves to do better, and make films that better balance the spirit with the flesh. It would be a much better use of our cultural energy than most of what Hollywood offers.


And the market may just demand such.

My Dear Wobgrist,

Please accept this small note of congratulations at your latest coup with your human. The Lowerarchy has been seeking for some time to undue the pernicious influence of this man, Andrew Sullivan. How monotonously he rings out clearly against moral surrender to theocrats and thugs! Too tedious to recount, really. But you have really made him string himself up. I applaud you.


So tell me, Wobgrist, how did you get him to endorse a gas tax? How did you get a man to endorse making more expensive a substance that his fellow countryment depend on, but he does not? How did you get him to argue that the solution to solving a fiscal crisis caused by greedy overspending is to increase the amount taken from those who produce?


Never mind. I know exactly how you did it, and much does it please my emptiness. You have nicely played on his urbanity, from which two delights follow: 1) blindness to the rapaciousness of Caeser, at least so far as go the efforts of Caeser that he approves of (I mean, to believe that such would be a "wartime gas tax," which would disappear when the war did! Really, Wobgrist, you tickle me!), 2) disdain for non-urbanites. He'd deny this, of course, but one can see it clearly in this little passage:

Others say it penalizes those in remote and rural areas. So what? Very few taxes are perfect, and our electoral system — with its over-representation of big agricultural states in the Senate — already pampers the rural. I'd gladly exchange a gas-tax hike for abolition of agricultural subsidies. Any takers in Iowa?)

In other words, the bloody farmers can just pay up. How dare the people who grow our food and have nothing to do with the mismanagement of publis resources (as if this fool is unaware the most "subsidies" go to big players, not small farmers. A perfect blindness for you to exploit) expect an exemption from the cost of "repairing" it. Meanwhile, the professional writer and opinion-holder, belonging to the class that has argued for and defended every silly, expensive institution the American humans have established over the last 100 years, pays nothing. And of course he takes refuge in the arrogance of the "lone voice" when most folk disagree with him!


All this, Wobgrist, from a man who claims to advocate federalism (the humans' term for subsidiarity, and one far less clear, which is why we support it)! I and the Lowearchy are always pleased when we weaken the humans love of their humbler brethren and expand their passion for grand institutions, for trusting in Caeser's providence. For one thing, it is entirely contrary to what the enemy commands of them, and for another, divinizing Caeser is always in our interests. It weakens fortitude, and strenghtens pride, and the food created is of a most succulent kind.


We must, of course, expand on this. Have you considered suggesting to your human other things that he does not use that should be taxed? How about diapers? They're made from petrochemicals you know. After all, don't the filthy breeders owe it to those that make no children?




Your proud sponsor,



Toadpipe

Adapting

It's funny, I'm in New Yawk, the literary capitol of the nation, stuffed past the choking point with artists, poets, visionaries, and musicians, and all I can think to do is blog little brain-blurts inspired by Hollywood. I just watched Adaptation. It seemed clever the first time, maybe too clever to really carry its message: that simplicity is stronger than it looks. But on this viewing, I see that the structure of the film itself is an example of that argument. Which movie holds together better: the convoluted, self-referential first part, or the classic Hollywood climax? The booming wall of a theater screen has certain elements that work. You can play other games on it as well, but the old razzle-dazzle never fails.


It is naturally impossible for me to watch a film about a writer and not think about my own status as one. With the exception of this blog and my days as a newspaper editor in college, I am unpublished but hopeful. I've seen a few rejection letters and will likely see more. I have wrestled in the night, like Kauffman does, trying to will the idea to the paper. I know I can put a noun against a verb, and I know that persistence is rewarded. Everything else is fuzzier.


So is it my job to give my fellow solace, or truth? Is truth solace in another form, the solace of tommorrow? And which truths am I supposed to focus on? There are thousands, and that isn't the sophistry of a Pilatus. Look at the news. Some say the war in Iraq is going well, some say it is going badly. A given reporter can find an Iraqi who will say that the Americans are the eaters of Satan's shit, and another who will thank America a thousand times and proudly announce that he has named his son George Bush Hassan Ali or some such. Which one of them has their finger on "the truth"? And where do all these truthes ["e" added deliberately] fit in to the big Truth? And don't fudge and tell me there isn't one, just because you're scared of what a Truth might require of you.


I begin to wonder if art really has anything to do with Truth at all. I read in a thick, matte-cover music mag that likely only prints in NY about how there really is no underground, that when the barnacles of gloss are scraped of a band like the Strokes, all you find is five regular dudes who like playing music. True as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. The same was true of any band or any artist, be it the Holy Beatles or the Unholy Velvet Underground. All the great ones put their shoes on like the rest of us, breathe fear and confidence in the same air as the rest of us. When they do what they are best at doing, good things happen.


If that's so, then what do we need them for? Why should ink on paper, oil on canvas, light filtered through film and glass, a gesture on a raised platform, or thin metal plucked in syncronicity be so important to us? Why should we raise up as Better Humans those that can do these things well? All they're doing is what they've worked on doing, and they're never going to be able to relay a different truth to us than that. So why bother?


We bother because we need to be reminded that reality is real, that simplicity is strength, that dedication is the path. We need it every generation, and every day. There are so many truths coming at us at double-speed every eighteen months that we need to hear that a steady rudder will see us through. Art says so, by its patterns if not by its explicit text. When Andy Warhol painted a Campbell's soup can, he was saying that art is commerce, and he was saying that reality is real, simplicity is strength, and dedication is the path. So was Lou Reed when he pushed guitar feedback through the wall on the Velvet's second album. So was Charlie Kauffman when he wrote the screenplay to Adaptation.


And so am I, one of these days. But for the moment, I'm going to do some push-ups and crunches, shave, and then go walk the rainy NY streets to meet my girl. Life is good.

Fear and Loathe This

Sometimes I wonder if all a writer ever really manages to construct with all his poesy is the vague remembrance, the feeling of authenticity. For example, tonight I'm sitting in a warm appartment in NYC waiting for my girl to get out of rehearsal, with a White Russian in my gut and Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro's performances in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas sitting in my DVD player, already watched and waiting to be taken out and filed next to Barry Lyndon and The Seven Samurai. It's a rainy, blustery kind of New York evening that mocks man's faith in his protective invention, the umbrella. I have a stew pot of beef n' vegetable on the stove needing to be cleaned out, the first Joy Division album on the stereo; it's 9:56, and I'm wearing pajamas. Hit it.




All of which is a mood, not a reality. Somewhere in this same city there's a gaggle of acting students perfecting their craft. Somewhere in this same city someone is throwing up into a toilet, vowing that this will be the last time. Somewhere someone is meeting the love of their life. Somewhere someone is finishing a book that they've always meant to read. Somewhere some kids are being put to bed, secure in the knowledge that breakfast will be served hot and fresh tommorrow, and that school will pretty much the same as it was today. Somewhere someone is having a grand, memorable time listening to the downest, baddest music that can be found today, and somewhere else someone is writing the downest, baddest music that will be found tommorrow.


And sure, the opposite of all those things is happening, too. But who's gonna tell me which one of them is "real," and which is "false," and make me believe it?

Interesting...

So apparently Blogger's comepletely changed the interface. Hopefully this one won't upchuck quite as often as the other one did.


So apparently I became a Lowly Insect without my blog rating really changing all that much.


So apparently Iraq is in flames. Except that it isn't. Maybe everybody should just shut the fuck up until it's over.


So apparently a week went by in which I managed to blog once. Gah. Can't keep doing that.




If I have time, I might try to post my Passion review. The music reviews are going to have to wait for a more opportune time, like next week. Bear with me

My Dear Yakbuzz,

How very pleased I am to have read this morning's report, and discovered the actions of your client, Mr. Ashcroft. Quite frankly, we've heard very little success from your efforts, but I was able to convince the Lowerarchy that you were an experienced tempter and should be trusted with the assignment. It delights my hunger to no end to hear that he has begun cracking down on pornography.


You may think your achievement is minimal. It is not. You have poked and prodded this ascetic's faithfulness to the Enemy's laws to point where he now thinks that his law enforcement office ought to be concerned with, of all things, regulating lust. Now laws against lust are, on the face of it, very bad for our efforts. They provide limits to lustful behavior of humans, behavior which has been one of our greatest triumphs of this past century. But you have found the perfect chink in the armor. To make it the task of the federal government of the American humans to police the private morals of 260 million citizens is precisely what the Enemy would call "disordered." It is contrary to the niggling, pathetically dull concept of subsidiarity, of which the American humans positively reek, or used to.


We in the Lowerarchy of course know that the highest authority ought to do everything within it's power to do. Such was the very principle that led Our Father Below to take on the Enemy in the first place. Tyranny is the only true government, everything else wears a simpering mask. Anything which makes this case explicit is to be encouraged. Otherwise, the Americans might remember that their system depends on them regulating their own behavior, and that leads to thoughts which are Anaethema to we demons.


Moreover, it will give the proponents of lust a chance to stand before society and once more suggest that everything they do is "normal" and "natural" and "what people want." What fun we have had with those terms, what utter articles of faith they have become among the ignorant! It makes me wiggle with glee at the thought of seeing Flumbottom pull the strings of that delicious morsel, Larry Flynt, and make him dance his shameless little barbarian dance. Oh, the blabbering of fools who really think that their lives and bodies are their own! I drool with anticipation.


I must, however, force myself to be sanguine. You still have not managed to really undo this man's faith, to weaken his resolve or make it bloom into real Spiritual Pride. This is a start, but nowhere near enough. Perhaps you could induce him to blame a certain group of people for the lustfulness of Americans? Blacks? Hispanics? Catholics? See which ones trigger the least positive response and get back to me.



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Classic Alternative

Ten years ago I was a senior in high school, getting all thrilled and excited about doing Taming of the Shrew for a high school Shakespeare festival in D.C. I had a crush on a girl in the show, but didn't do a blessed thing about it, because I was quite exceptionally gutless about those things (also, I dressed like Screech, but with less flair). I was looking forward to getting the hell out of Waldorf, MD and out into the big bad world.

In short, I didn't give a fuck about Kurt Cobain, alive or dead. When the news came that he'd blown his head off with a shotgun, I wasn't even surprised. Somehow, I had known it would be thus, that the live-fast-die-young-sex-drugs-and-rock n' roll script would claim him. It wasn't like the secret wasn't out that he was a druggie (I swear, they should outlaw heroin. Oh, wait...). I might have given thirty seconds notice to the fact that he was a suicide instead of an overdose, but that was it. When the little grungies gathered at his house for a candlelight vigil, I rolled my eyes. When the papers started blaring that "the voice of a generation is died" I sneered and told anyone who made eye contact that KC didn't speak for me.

It was when they called him Our John Lennon that I started on the path to understanding.

Truth was, I'd always been kind of a closet Nirvana fan. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was a truly magnificent moment in pop culture, pulling fury out of a mockery of a cheap exploitation of the very generational revolt of which Nirvana was thereafter declared the first wave. Remember the "Teen Spirit" deodorant commercial? Remember how insulting, how irretrievably stupid it was? Where on earth did anyone get the idea that my "generation" needed it's own anti-perspirant? Was this some kind of prank? Did anyone actually buy or use that stuff? Why?

So yeah, when Nirvana made a video making fun of them, I loved it. I loved it even more when the whole brand -- with their crappy, faux-cool commercial -- dissappeared soon after. And, in my most secret heart of hearts, I loved the song: blistering riff, mumbled vocals, perfect climax, the works. After growing up on the limp-wristed new wave pope and the nauseating hair metal in the 80's, I liked that bands were coming back to the basics.

But I never threw down money for Nevermind. I wanted to, but I didn't dare. Part of this was economic: I was a military brat whose parents were spending every dime they could lay hands on sending me to private school. I couldn't just bug my folks for spending money so I could buy music like all the yuppie kids. The other part of this was a need to not do what everyone else was doing. Since middle school I'd developed a determination to always avoid the crowd, not do what they were doing, not dress how they were dressing (hence the Screech look), and especially not think they way they were thinking. Grunge seemed to have inherited all the political poses (and even at 12 I knew them to be poses) of hippiedom; I had just discovered that Rush Limbaugh was an amusing counterpoint to Northern California's nattering leftiness. So I said "Nirvana sucks" and stuck with it.

But when the piles of hair started saying that Cobain was the Gen-X John Lennon, something in me shook loose. "Dammit," I said, or something along those lines, "Kurt Cobain is not John Lennon! John Lennon was John Lennon, Kurt Cobain is Kurt Cobain! Nirvana is not the Beatles, they're Nirvana! Let them be what they are!" So the path began.


Six years ago, I was just out of college, and had made the decision to stop being a phillistine and start getting into music. I signed up for one of those BMG twelve-for-a-penny dealies and as part of my free shipment, I got Nevermind. "What the hell," I told my roommate with a grin, "It's kinda required, isn't it? Like Frampton Comes Alive was twenty years ago. I'm just bowing to the trends" (remember how admitting how lame you were was so cool in those days?). So I got it, and I listened, and I liked, and I threw it on for mixed-tape fodder, and I hardly cared. The same shipment had Ramones Mania, because I'd gotten into my head that I desperately needed to have "I Wanna Be Sedated." The Ramones got me into the Velvet Underground, and the Velvet Underground got me into all the rest of Punk, and before I had known what had happened, Nirvana had clicked nicely into place on my musical appreciation spectrum. I got the Unplugged album and shivered at the last song (still do). I won't say that they're my favorite band, but I do appreciate their power and their heart. Both of which were evident in their lead singer, who managed the superhuman feat of having charismatic appeal without being all that charismatic.

Which brings us to the media nostalgia/grief machine and the fun they're having this week. Spin prepared a loving print-shrine for their fallen underground martyr that provided the inspiration for this blog entry. The radio stations have shifted to "Gen-X Weekend" formats and playing "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies" as though nothing was amiss. We got a new Nirvana single two years ago, and someone decided to publish the his private journals not too long afterward. No, I haven't read them, and no I'm not going to, and it's not because I'd feel dirty about it, like this guy did. It's because I've decided that I have no interest in anything Cobain had to say.


I've trodden the path to understanding that Cobain was a man of great talent, and Nirvana a great band. Their noise was pure, and from the gut, and had about it from the earliest days more than a hint of sadness. It stands the test of time. For Cobain the artist, I have nothing but respect and admiration.

For Cobain the man, I have nothing but contempt. I have nothing but contempt for a man who was intelligent and creative but made no effort to understand the wide world around him, who spent so much time huddled in the corner with his precious pain that he could never ever find a chance to get beyond it. I have nothing but contempt for a man who consciously made himself a rock star (and he did, popular legend to the contrary) and then whined like a kindergartener when he discovered that people were becoming his fans without his permission. I have nothing but contempt for a man who claimed to love his baby daughter and then left her, so irrevocably, and to the care of a woman he had to know would not make a good single mother (she's twelve now, and I don't think I'd be her for anything). Mostly, I have nothing but contempt for a man who took the coward's way out, who gave up on hope after promising it to so many. Shame on him.

And that was indeed the final irony of Courtney Love's words at the aforementioned candlelight vigil, words to the effect that if Kurt really hated being a rock star, he could have stopped. No, Courtney, he couldn't, and he knew it. What else was he going to do? Starved on an intellectual diet that demanded an ascetic withdrawal from anything that smacked of normality, Cobain couldn't have just dropped it and sat in a house and had a beer and painted something. Like the Cathars of the 13th Century, grunge/punk demanded spiritual purity of its perfecti leaders while the laity were off having the time of their lives. Kurt didn't have the philosophical readiness to deal with his disappointment, to find the thing that made him valuable and cling to it. He was so busy unleashing his demons that he neglected to hunt for angels. He never grasped that the reason you walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death is not for its own sake but to reach redemption on the other side.

More fool him. And more fool us, for not learning from him.

Hiatus

I have to go for a few days. I'm moving this weekend and the phone is not yet turned on in my new digs. It may be a while before anything comes of it. Have a good 'un, and I'll see you on the other side.

I Must Confess the Truth

Guess what, everybody?




I've been plowing through textbooks and scholarly journals on educational assessment, and my fevered brain was granted a vision by Jupiter Optimus Maximus, who is whatever He/She/It wishes to be, and whose true name is unknown and unknowable. I was knocked from my desk and struck dumb, which made 3rd Period rather difficult to communicate with, but we managed, devising a simple yet beautiful language from grunts and gestures. But regardless, I have seen the light.


I'm voting for Lyndon LaRouche. He's an "economist, philosopher, world leader and scientific thinker". His web site says so, and I know they aren't lying.