Entries from January 2008 ↓

Last.fm, a “social music” site, has started streaming full tracks, from thousands of artists, for free. I’m listening to Springsteen’s new album right now. So happy.

Incidentally … is it me, or is “social” the new “i”? For a while there, back in the mid-late 90s, every other mildly internet-related product had a little “e” tacked onto the beginning of its name. Then Apple ushered in the era of the “i”, setting off a mini-apocalypse of i-products and — even worse — endless i-puns. That seems to have petered out, thank god, but now the success of MySpace and FaceBook has given us a stultifying cavalcade of “social something” sites. Hey guys! Bandwagon much?

One thing that the Bush Administration does very well is lie. We’ve long known, in a sort of mushy intuitive way, that pretty much every single thing they told us on the runup to the war in Iraq was false, but now we have documentary evidence that quantifies the breadth of the deception. A study by the Center for Public Integrity found that Bush and his minions lied to us 935 separate times while they were priming the country for war. Here’s a depressing chart:

You know what all the war apologists are going to say: we went with the information we had at the time; we’re not liars, we’re imbeciles; if loving your country is wrong then I don’t want to be right; and — most of all — all that stuff is in the past, we need to deal with the present. But this is more than an exercise in after-the-fact carping, and it’s more than simple gotcha journalism — it’s a remarkably detailed chronicle of how to go about deceiving an entire populace through the simple expedient of falsehoods constantly repeated and then propagated by a credulous media. A character from Le Carre’s Absolute Friends says it this way:

Every war is worse than the last one, Mr Mundy. But this war is the worst I ever saw if we’re talking about lies, which I am … Makes no difference the Cold War’s over. Makes no difference we’re globalized, multinational or what the hell. Soon as the tom-toms sound and the politicians roll out their lies, it’s bows and arrows and the flag and round-the-clock television for all loyal citizens. It’s three cheers for the big bangs and who gives a fuck about casualties as long as they’re the other guy’s?

What we have here is the Bushies’ playbook, opened for all of us to see, and we ignore it at our peril. These people are the masters, and we need to study their tricks — so that when their next incarnation rolls into town, we’ll be ready for them.

If this blighted decade in American political history has taught us nothing else, it’s taught us this: we are governed by a pack of cretinous monomaniacs.

This was brought forcefully home to me when I read about the stimulus package that Bush proposed last week, to save us from the recession he’s spent the last six years more or less guaranteeing we’re going to have. It’s an $140 billion package designed to put $800 in the pockets of consumers, in the hopes that they will immediately turn around and spend it, thus perpetuating the pathetic charlatan’s sleight-of-hand that the American economy has become: an economy kept afloat by rabid consumer spending and a punctured housing bubble whose ludicrous, speed-fueled mania served to obscure the rot at its core.

Framing the package as a tax rebate allows Bush to argue that the people who don’t make enough money to pay taxes shouldn’t get a piece of the pie, and that businesses should, thus doing his duty by the supply-side gods that Saint Reagan voodoo’d into existence, so many years ago.

So this proposal may be pretty stupid, but it’s not in the least bit surprising. Because the people who make these decisions have two basic solutions to every problem they encounter: go to war, or cut taxes. There’s nothing to attack here, really, so the only other option is to cut taxes. There you go. Simple. ¹

I find it mind-boggling and sad that the huge, complex, fantastically expensive machinery of government should be employed in the service of these facile, binary decisions. Because when the question comes down to one of a very few options, you really don’t need that many people crunching the numbers. There’s a fairly basic algorithm at work here.

To wit — does it:

• Speak a funny language? or
• Not worship at the altar of capitalism? or
• Not do what we tell it to do? or
• Have something we want?

If yes, and it doesn’t supply us with oil, then attack.

Otherwise, cut taxes.

That’s it. I mean, yes, there’s a lot of rhetoric and propaganda that goes along with this stuff, crazy twisted ratiocinations, specious arguments, etc. But that’s basically it. A sampling:

1. Our economy is tanking! [Cut Taxes]
2. Iran might possibly get nuclear weapons, someday, maybe! [Attack!]
3. The government has too much money! [Cut Taxes]
4. The government has too little money! [Cut Taxes]
5. The government has exactly the right amount of money! [Cut Taxes]
6. Whoops, my bad, Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons after all! [Attack!]
7. We’re at war! [Cut Taxes]

It’s not just the Republicans, and it’s not just the politicians. The media, in their zeal to reduce everything to a series of buzzwords, lays waste to vast swathes of ambiguity. Evangelicals. Soccer Moms. NASCAR dads. Black people and white people and latinos. And so on. We’re all stripped of our humanity, pigeonholed, laminated, and laid bare on the tables of the punditocracy to dissect like the content-free abstractions that we’ve become.

Here’s hoping that whoever moves into the White House a year from now is enlightened enough to understand that the country’s problems are not a playground for their pet ideologies, and that policy grows up from a process of reasoned thought, not down from a small grab-bag of vetted, preordained solutions.

Holy crap. Weird Tales accepted another one of my stories. If there was an emoticon for “capering around room and hooting like a madman”, I’d definitely be using it right now. But there isn’t. I am struck, once again, by the stunted expressive power of emoticons.

The last time I got published was in high school, in the literary magazine. It was called Ladyfair, a sort of heavily-veiled stream-of-consciousness paean to a girl I was infatuated with at the time. I remember that pretty well, but I can’t remember the girl’s name anymore, or what she looked like. My memory routinely betrays me like that — on any given day, I can barely remember what my high school was called, or what color socks I’m wearing, or how many hands I have. But I still remember that story. So my poor leaky brain is capable of holding onto stuff, if it finds it important enough.

The first Weird Tales story, Creature, comes out in March, in the 85th anniversary issue. I think I’m going to remember that, too.

My work computer decided to freeze up and eat itself last night, and this morning it wouldn’t boot. I pawed ineffectually at it for a while, then broke down and called IT. I haven’t had to do that in a while, so it took me some time to track down their contact info. It turned out to be an 800 number. This was immediately troubling, but I dialed anyway, and sure enough … it was a call center.

We’d outsourced our own tech support.

I sighed, and resigned myself to the inevitable. Five hours and two calls later, my computer still isn’t working. But at least my ticket has moved down the chain to someone I actually share a goddam building with.

I was bitching about this to my brother, who wondered when corporations would start outsourcing their bathrooms facilities. It really isn’t all that far-fetched.