Entries from February 2005 ↓

I’m happily making my way through Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail in ‘72, when suddenly I come across this passage, and my jaw drops open, and a sharp needle of recognition lances through my frontal lobe. Hunter S Thompson is talking to an acquaintance about Edward Muskie’s candidacy for the Democratic ticket:

“Ed’s a good man,” he said. “I respect him.” Then he jabbed the padded seat arm between us two or three time with a forefinger. “But the main reason I’m working for him,” he said, “is that he’s the only guy we have who can beat Nixon.” He stabbed the arm again. “That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard even to guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get another four years.”

I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something depressing about it. How many more these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

I said exactly the same thing, using almost exactly the same words, after the wheels came off the Dean campaign and Kerry emerged from the scrum of the Democratic primary, victorious and bruised and grey and already doomed. And, more to the point, I thought exactly the same thing: am I ever going to get to vote for someone I genuinely admire?

I remember coming back home from voting in ‘92. I was young(ish), elated, hopeful, glad to be a part of the whole participatory democracy thing, and genuinely excited about the prospect of having a man like Bill Clinton as my president. But, this time around, my vote was driven more by apprehension, fear, and — yes — loathing; it was a staving-off. And a lot it good it did me, or the country. How sad.

Another interview featuring Colin Powell pinning the blame for our discredited WMD-fueled entry into Iraq — and his own entirely false testimony on the matter before the UN Security Council — on faulty intelligence.

The problem was stockpiles. None have been found. I don’t think any will be found. There may not have been any at the time. It was the best judgment of the intelligence community, not something I made up. Clinton had been told the same thing.

We hear this same shit over and over again. Clinton believed the same thing! So did Blair! We’re all idiots!

But here’s the difference: Bill Clinton didn’t take us to war over his misapprehensions.

From: The Office of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
To: The President of the United States
Subject: The Supreme Court

Dear Mr President:

I must bring your attention to an issue that poses a grave threat to the national security of this country. Our government has, in its midst, a rogue agency bent on preventing the executive branch from performing its primary tasks of killing all terrorists and transforming the world into a paradise of God-fearing Christian heterosexual Republicans. This agency is called the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court consists of a panel of very old people who make the final decision on important legal matters. Despite the questionable efficacy of such “judiciary” influences of our nation’s well-being, the Justice Department would have no serious concerns about their mandate, were it not for the fact that the court is filled with treasonous haters of America.

Witness the near-disastrous affair that preceded your first coronation, in which four of these ancient personages refused to sweep aside the spurious question of voting irregularities and install you into your proper place.

Witness further their decision in the Guantanamo matter, wherein they attempted to force us to treat terrorists like members of our own species by offering them such luxuries as trials, civil rights, and food. This is very troubling. We can, of course, continue to evade their ludicrous edicts by feeding the terrorists through the military tribunal system (see Appendix E: Project Kangaroo), but, nevertheless, this outrage augurs worse to come.

It is time for you to take decisive action, Mr President. You cannot let this bald and ridiculous assault on your executive privilege go unchallenged. The attached document lays out a forty-point plan for eliminating the scourge of this court, whose deleterious effects on the safety of this country cannot be overstated.

This is, of course, a delicate matter. Many in this country are still absurdly attached to what they call “the rule of law,” so we cannot simply abolish the court. Instead, we must slowly work it out of people’s system, as one nudges a thorn to the surface of the skin before extracting it.

First, we must change its name, to bring it nominally into its correct sphere of influence. I suggest a two-year plan in which we effect a slow, gradual transformation. First, we will call start calling it The Really Super Court; eventually, it will become The Very Very Important Court; third, The Quite Relevant And Not At All Quaint and Obsolete Court; fourth, The Little Court That Could Court; and, finally, The Collection of Sour Old People Court.

Once we have nudged The Collection of Sour Old People Court into its rightful place, we will then switch the government away from its longstanding reliance on “checks and balances”, to a more realistic and patriotic system of “suggestions and constructive criticisms”. In this system, the other branches of the government will assume the role of advisers, who will offer ignorable commentary on any fiats you decide to enact.

This will give you unprecedented power to do the things you’ve always wanted to do for the good of the country, such as:

• Pass a law changing the pronunciation of “nuclear” from the quaint and staid old “nook-lee-er,” to the more modern and relevant “nook-u-lar.” This will bring the official version of the word in line with your abilities.

• Pass a law forbidding citizens from voting for politicians whose political parties start with the letter “D”, which is a subversive and terrorist-loving letter.

• Pass a law that immediately impeaches senators whose Body/Mass Index exceeds 50. This will take out several good Republicans, but we will gladly sacrifice ten of ours for one Ted Kennedy.

• Pass a law changing the dictionary definition of the word “torture” to something less sweeping and justice-retarding. Suggestion: Torture — The act of feeding non-terrorists their own intestines while they are still alive. This will, of course, be accompanied by a change to the definition of the word “terrorist”: Terrorist — People who the government says are terrorists.

• Pass a law that allows you to sell the state of California to Puerto Rico for a reasonable price. This will allow you to enjoy all of the economic benefits that the state affords our nation, without having to endure their consistently treasonous voting habits. Alternatively, you could just make it an extension of the District of Columbia.

And there are many more, of course. See Appendix A: Making the Pie Higher for a complete list. I suggest you put this plan into place immediately, as the next election is less than four years away.

Sincerely,

Alberto Gonzales, AG

Update: Four hours after I finish writing this, I stroll into my local Barnes & Noble and discover, featured prominently in the new nonfiction section, a book called Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America. With a foreward by Rush Limbaugh.

You just can’t parody these people.

This afternoon, my dog decided to step up his longrunning campaign to bankrupt us. So far, he’s been relying on various intermediaries to do so: huge veterinary bills, hospital visits, kennel stays, massive property damage, etc. He’s ingested deadly poisonous snakes, chewed through priceless Renaissance paintings, hurled himself through ancient plate-glass windows. He’s a nuclear beagle bomb.

At first, my wife and I assumed that our much-larger human brains, paired with two sets of opposable thumbs and a fairly significant size advantage, would eventually win us the day. We no longer harbor such illusions. Out only hope is constant vigilance and steely determination: we spend our days bracing ourselves for his next gambit, and praying that we are lucky enough to survive it.

Today’s discovery throws that strategy into doubt. I walked into the bedroom and found him surrounded by the torn and crumpled remnants of about twenty dollars in fives and ones. He was just getting ready to commence the beagular destruction process (which he’s been perfecting for some years now on drier sheets, toilet paper rolls, newspapers, and various Very Important and Irreplaceable Things) when I arrived. He looked around at me, dropped his head, gave me a baleful, faux-contrite look, then retreated sheepishly under the bed.

So now we know: he’s decided to cut out the middleman, and go straight for the cash. It’s brilliant, really, in its utter simplicity. I fully expect to come home one day to find him galavanting through a snowstorm of newly shredded green and white confetti, the atomized remains of our life’s savings, which he will somehow contrive to have delivered to the house. He’s that good.

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” – Hunter S Thompson

Rest in peace, Mr Thompson, if peace is what you’re after. Somehow, I doubt it is.

The Onion AV club has an interview with Mitchel Hurwitz, the creator of Arrested Development, hands down the funniest non-animated show on TV. Lots of interesting stuff here, but I found this particularly cool:

I also had this idea — I’ll give you all the details, because I assume there are students reading this, and if you’re not a student, you can skip this part, because it’s incredibly boring. Someone told me once about this paradigm that exists: matriarch, patriarch, craftsman, and clown. It’s this quartet that resonates through history and popular culture, and you can find it as a diagram in everything from The Beatles to Leave It To Beaver to Seinfeld. In The Beatles, you can kind of see it the clearest. You know, Paul is the matriarch, John is the patriarch, the craftsman is George and the clown is Ringo.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I really like the idea that there’s some formula out there, some simple primordial recipe for narrative goodness that always shows up when you break successful stories down to their elements. I like these kinds of atomic commonalities because they make me feel like we’re all part of some big pan-human organism, but also because they make the prospect of writing stories a little less daunting. It’s not just you and a blank piece of paper and an infinity of possibilities. You have someplace to start.

So, yes: I’ve come to believe that it’s important to have some very basic ground rules in fiction. They’re no more a check on your creativity than meter is an impediment to good poetry, or the net an impediment to good tennis. It’s just part of the game. It maybe even defines the game. Structure doesn’t create inspiration, but it does give it bones.

I’ve never read HP Lovecraft, largely because what little I’ve seen of his prose has been a little too purply for my tastes. But my interest has just been kindled by an article that looks into the controversy over whether he was a genius or a hack. It’s interesting reading, and occasionally funny as hell.

Take, for example, the fact that while Lovecraft is usually described as a forefather of modern horror fiction, his stories are, to put it bluntly, not very scary. Wilson complained, with perfect justification, that Lovecraft ladled on the frightful adjectives and adverbs when describing — or even just hinting at — the nightmarish realizations that typically confront his protagonist at a tale’s climax. In “The Lurking Fear,” the narrator, recounting his sensations as he is about to discover something awful, explains, “I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.”

Lovecraft’s narrators routinely rave about the “hideous,” “monstrous” and “blasphemous” nature of their revelations. Wilson went on, again quite reasonably, to observe, “Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words — especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus.”

Good stuff. But, say what you will, he’s got a huge following seventy years after his death, books still in print, a role-playing game based on his work. You can mock his popularity, but you can’t deny that he did something right.

On my summer vacation I went to a planet called Earth. It is a little planet that is mostly blue except where it is brown or white. The blue parts are soft and you can fall into them to a place where the air is heavy and wet and you move very slowly and you can fly. The brown parts are hard. The white parts are soft and hard and also cold.

The first thing I met after I fell onto the brown part was a creature who pointed a long metal cylinder at me and made a small metal thing come out of it very fast. It bounced off of my chest and fell down on the ground. I think he was playing a game of projectile tag with me just like we play at recess and that made me happy. I picked up the little metal tagball and put it in my mouth and spat it at him. But he was too soft to play right because the tagball went through his head and came out the other side and he fell down and stopped playing.

So I walked on the brown part until it turned green. And then I walked on the green part until it turned grey and big rectangles came out of it and went into the sky and squat metal and glass things went by very fast. There were other creatures like the first one but different colors and shapes. They looked at me and pointed and made noises but stayed away until one of them who was blue came and made loud noises with a hole in his head that opened and closed a lot. It was funny. He pointed a little cylinder at me and made noises. But I didn’t want to play with him so I turned the air around his arm into an adamantine block. He fell down and the block around his arm clunked on the ground and the hole in his head opened up real big and he make a high piercing noise that hurt to listen to.

I stepped over him and went toward a shiny monolith that went up very high and reflected everything around it. It was tall and beautiful. I wanted to bring it home but it was too big. So I called my Daddy.

By the time my Daddy got there in his ship there were lots of people around me and they were playing tag with me and there was a mountain of little metal tagballs at my feet. A flying machine was overhead dropping loud things that went bang and tore up the ground and exploded some of the creatures. There were big green machines with treads rolling over the low metal glass things and they were coming toward me and shooting big tagballs. They hurt a little when they hit me but I didn’t say anything because I’m sure they didn’t mean it. They were just playing.

Anyway Daddy got there and said what is it son and I pointed at the monolith and said I want it and he said it’s awful big and I said still. So he smiled and said ok and grew until he was as big as the monolith. He stepped on some of the creatures who were still playing tag with us and brushed some of their flying machines away. Then he picked up the building and put little particle boosters on it and programmed them for home. It shot away through the sky and into space.

Then we got into his ship and went home. But before we did Daddy turned all the air on Earth into glass so that everything would be the same when I came back which I’m going to do next year. And that’s what I did on my summer vacation.

Juan Cole, on the current state of reality in America:

Although George Orwell/ Eric Blair wrote 1984 as an anarcho-syndicalist socialist critique of Stalinism, it is becoming increasingly clear that it was also prophetic about the direction of Late Capitalist societies characterized by corporate media consolidation. In such a society, Cheney can substitute himself for Sistani and speak for Sistani, erasing the real Sistani just as the Republican pundits have erased the real Iraq. “Ignorance is knowledge.”

Orwell’s name gets thrown around a lot, but, I think Cole’s right about this. If you want to acquire something like authoritarian control over a free society, but lack the legislative tools to do so, then you have to control the information. Citizens of countries like ours, blessed with a couple of centuries of relative freedom and representative democracy, will inevitably get complacent and lazy. When it comes to matters of national interest, of affairs beyond our narrow private spheres, we find a couple of people/institutions to trust, and believe what they’re telling us.

Some people choose to believe what their leaders tell them, without reservations. This explains the trust a large segment of our population accords George Bush and Dick Cheney, who have been lying to us about many things, for many years. Their adherents would have to venture outside of those comfortable trust zones to believe anything else. No easy matter.

Some people choose to believe the media — which is to say, they believe what other people choose to believe about what our leaders are saying. Journalism is supposed to be a dispassionate laying-out of facts, but even facts have an agenda when they’re filtered though the cheesecloth of partisan bias. And, of course, facts can be twisted until they’re unrecognizable. So when Bill O’Reilly claims that Barbara Boxer assailed Condi Rice’s respect for the “troops” — when, in fact, Boxer said “truth” — and when he continues to make that claim for a couple of days, despite the existence of several transcripts saying otherwise — then those people who’ve chosen to pin their credulity to O’Reilly’s insano-fascist ravings are going to believe something that is not, from the perspective of the reality-based community, true.

But the real danger comes in when both the government and their media vassals lie to you. Then you’ve entered Plato’s cave: tied to a stake, unable to look around, staring at shadows of reality playing out on the wall before you. Unaware that they’re shadows. Screwed.

But we’re not screwed, of course. Because we’re not tied to anything. All we really have to do is notice that the fantastical images parading themselves across the walls aren’t even remotely credible, then turn around to find out what’s really going on back there.

Harder than it sounds. Complacency’s shackles are nearly as strong as the police state’s, and it requires a lot of effort to break free of them. I speak for myself as well. The only forays I make out of the liberal blogosphere are when I’m following links to the latest Republican outrage. I can’t even stand to watch our President speak anymore. I’ve chosen my shadows, the ones I believe to be the closest representations of the realities raging behind me, and I don’t see myself turning away from them.

Should I? Can I?

When Isaac Newton was a boy, he acquired a notebook and spent inordinate amounts of time copying things into it: extracts from a book on secrets and magic, Aristotelian theory, instructions on drawing, recipes for making colored ink. He didn’t embellish any of his transcriptions with commentary, analysis, insight. It was a pure experiential dump.

In later years, Newton would go on to develop mathematical and scientific principles so radically different from accepted thought, so breathtakingly revolutionary, that they would seem, at first glance, to come from a different sort of reality, one separate from the normal chain of human progress.

And yet he claimed that, if he’d seen further than others, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants; that he sometimes felt like a boy collecting pebbles on a beach, oblivious of the ocean of truth in front of him. And, as a child, he copied down, by rote, for hours on end, things that other people had written. I find that strangely comforting.