The Race Today

Huckabee to win Iowa; Romney to collapse; Clinton's attack machine to rev up; Obama-Edwards deal to be "leaked" by two very happy campaigns.

"My first foray into free speech"

Noted without comment

"In throwing her support behind presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with an unprompted, heartfelt speech at a New Hampshire rally last month, Carole Simpson, the longtime ABC news anchor-turned-Emerson College journalism instructor, flung herself into the partisan fires . . .

"Simpson, 65, said she immediately regretted her actions and offered her resignation the next day, which university officials refused to accept. Now Simpson is considering an offer from the Clinton campaign to stump for the candidate, namely before black audiences in the South. She and other university officials have agreed she will not teach political journalism courses if she campaigns for Clinton.

" 'I know I made a mistake. It was definitely the wrong venue for my first foray into free speech,' Simpson said. 'But I'd really like to see her win.' "

(I'm a liar, I will comment: First, sorry for the ad, I'm too inept to figure out how to remove it. And I don't have anything against this ex-anchor, in fact I'm grateful for the inadvertent admission about the realities of corporate news-making.)

Hot stuff, eh?

The bottom pic is the only surviving portrait of my main man, Louis-Michel Aury. He was an insurgent pirate fighting the Spanish and Americans in the early 19th c. Caribbean. Although he helped found the first republic to offer the franchise to all men, regardless of skin color, his memory lives mostly in second-rate ghost stories circulating around NE Florida. Amelia Island, the site of the Republica de las Floridas, is now a white-supremacist golf holiday resort.

L. O. L.


The top painting is a self-portrait done by William Augustus Bowles, who married two Creek chicks and started a revolutionary United Nation of Creeks and Cherokees; the portrait hangs in the National Gallery. He was imprisoned in the Phillipines, escaped to West Africa, made his way to London and then back to Florida, and was finally killed while in jail in Havana. My man...

Long time no see.

So I've been far from a faithful blogger, these past few months. I'm not really sure of my audience here; I know SD and perhaps NI might be reading, but almost certainly no family and, tragically, no Chuck Todd, Ambers, or Winona Ryder (no link needed).

Who cares, though? It sure is a pretty picture...

This Poor Woman

Epitomizes the insanity we've brought upon ourselves as a result of 9/11. This lady's brand of craziness - hard-working, helpful to institutions which do good work for the world, non-threatening and yet entirely, repellently nutso - is mirrored in the nonsense of the NY Times devoting time and energy to debunking her story. Bush lied, and thousands and thousands have died; this stupid lonely chick tells some stories, and the Times rakes her over coals.


(dyspeptic mood derives from Boston, a city which proves, once and for all, the trouble one gets into when white people are allowed to run things).

God Bless Carlo Valdonoci

War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws.

Why I Like Hip Hop

check this out.


Will's Speed Racer tee is one of the first outbreaks of hipster witnessed anywhere in the western world. I remember wondering and loving that shirt, when i was twelve and all the world seemed like it might well be Golden Gate Park. Now I'm 27, and most of the world seems like Markham, when I was young - hot, buggy, and perhaps not all that worth the while.


But this song - and the history which precedes it - signifies everything grand. Fuck trouble, forget heartache - it's warm, and the earth loves you.

Hank and Barry, For Reals




Henry Wallace and Pete Seeger, rockin' it

So, everyone's crowing about Barry's hitherto unheard-of level of fundraising. Some left bloggers (mydd, in particular) have spied out the fact that Obama's money machine is not, like Dean's, entirely reliant on internet donations. Neither, however, is it based on high-dollar corporate giving, as with Hills (and every Republican candidate).

Rather, BAM's money is coming from live events, from those 15,000-20,000 person rallies he's held in Oakland, Atlanta, and other places. This use of the rally atmosphere (music, sun, folks and their kids, face-painting etc.) reminds me of another left-wing presidential candidate. In 1948, Henry Wallace, FDR's VP and a leading light of the anti-Cold War, progressive wing of the Democratic Party, was thrown off the ticket to make way for a good ole Missourian machine man, Harry Truman. Wallace, upset with the 1 million deaths of the two atomic bombs, with pervasive segregation, exploitation, and anti-black violence in the South, and with the growing resurgence of reactionary forces in general (see Taft-Hartley, etc.), decided to run an independent campaign for the presidency.

This is the famous "Dewey defeats Truman" election, and the forecasts were so close for a reason. Truman faced breakaways on the right and left, with Strom Thurmond pledging to fuck over the blacks (except, one imagines, for the ones he was sleeping with), and Hank Wallace inspiring the still-vibrant American left, and few observers expected him to capture the presidency.

Of course, in the end, he did, and hating Henry Wallace became a highly profitable pastime for those on the "reasonable" left, the people like Arthur Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr, who we are now taught to revere. And yet, the left's potential was never truly tested... until now.

In short - BAM is cool, Hank was cooler, and may we all pray that motherfucker wins the nomination.

Good Advice, Long Delayed

I was advised a while back that personal news, rather than random trifles of political interpretation and off-color material, was the key to a blog item of any general inter-est. I'm awfully prone to emoting in a confessional mode, having been reared a papist and taking a perverse pride yet in its wondrous inversion of the dubious art of psychotherapy, wherein one's story of sin redeems itself in the telling. So here's some personal news:

I'm still terribly nasty to myself. I've inoculated myself against any remnant idea of fair play and perspective, and so grow irritable and entertain violent thoughts. The angel on my right shoulder says, "you've been offered so much, with white skin and quick tongue and taxpayer support, if you don't make something of it you'll be hapless, worthless, and entirely beyond the pale. The devil on the left laughs at the notion, knowing that you haven't had anything from your parents and betters that others didn't get (except for the occasion not two months ago which saved your life, and dares not speak its name); that success is suspect, given the country and the prospect of 20 years of Weimar America, where people I know now will be blamed for knifing the government in the back; and that the "gap between rich and poor" (how anodyne a metaphor, the "gap"; sure it should be minded, but there's no comforting chasm between the 70 hours a week by force and the 60 hours a week by choice crowds. Manhattan mixes them together, and leaves those without to wonder and uneasily avoid the conclusion even Aerosmith knew to draw) means I will always seethe in stupid, nonsensical, unhelpful, confused anger.

When the joy of becoming a historian, and speaking however helplessly to the enormous condescension of posterity thus far happily bestowed on my subjects, will return, is more than I know. I think my best friend is sick to death of me, and can't see how to persist and abide when I don't know any other strategy. I owe my brother money, and still indulge myself in vices the vast majority of people my age foreswear.

But self-loathing is so 2003, and can't bear any more of a burden than it already does. Thank god for good role models.

When I meet Barry, it will look something like this.

By Popular Demand

What More Can I Say?

I (heart) Andrew Sullivan

For writing paragraphs like this one:

Two further impressions. At a couple of points in his speech, he used the phrase: "This is not who we are." I was struck by the power of those words. He was reasserting that America is much more than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and Katrina and fear and obstinacy and isolation. And so he makes an argument for change in the language of restoration. The temperamental conservatives in America hear a form of patriotism; and the ideological liberals hear a note of radicalism. It's a powerful, unifying theme. He'd be smart to deepen and broaden it.


(Disclaimer: My Dad has long been a fan of Sullivan's; his sweet blend of mild social liberalism, Catholic tradition, intellectual integrity, anachronistic Toryism, and gay wit always appealed to him. Naturally, I took the opposite stance, and saw little in his writing I couldn't get from any other Beltway Clintonite Third Wayer. Then the war came, and as with so much else it served as a crucible to separate out the elements of pundit thought. And Sullivan came off well, especially in comparison to, oh, ninety per cent of the rest of the Gang of 500. Now, our mutual devotion to Barack Obama, in particular in terms of what his rhetoric and persona can do for the left, has sealed the deal. Andrew Sullivan, you just moved up a notch in my book.)

Moqtada? I hardly touchedah!


I've been a lonely soul in my take on Shiite badman Moqtada al-Sadr. Bear with me, and keep the magical mysteries of Hegelian logic in mind as you do so:

al-Sadr is the most popular public persona, bar none, among poor and working-class Iraqis. He's leant his very loud voice to the Sunni ex-Batthist insugency, such as during the Marine siege of Falluja; his militia keeps order and some basic level of resource equality flowing in its neighborhoods.

Despite this, the administration and its useful idiots have repeatedly declared him the most dangerous man in Iraq; Cheney has gone throughout the Middle East, teaming up with Prince Bandar to cement a pro-Sunni (who are after all, the vast majority of practicing Muslims) alliance that has even led to covert support of splinter groups like Fatah al-Islam, who are currently dying (along with some probably nameless women and children and men) at the hands of the Lebanese Army in the refugee camp battles. Bush has been quite public in his disdain for al-Sadr's political movement. The ham-handed neoliberalism of Paul Bremer and the CPA made a pro-worker economic policy impossible to contemplate, and so, as ever, the poor are reaching out to the madrassas and the Islamic charities, who will at least take care of them.


My secret suspicion: folks in the government know the very best thing for the state's interests in Iraq would be the elevation of a compliant strongman. Knowing how far away we are from the days when intelligent adults believed Chalabi would be PM, DoD and CIA people are working to facilitate the emergence of a nationalist, Shiite-but-dovish-on-the-Sunnis, public figure with broad credibility and a parliamentary and bureaucratic following adequate enough to stablilize the absolutely chaotic half-functioning of Iraqi organs of state. al-Sadr, recently back from some supposed exile in Iran, is now on the scene, poised to take advantage of the failure of the escalation, and also the early heat of the 2008 presidential campaign (as we know Bush would like nothing better than to wait it out and heap the Messopotamia on to Barry's ample-but-sexy lap).



Also, this article is refined nonsense. al-Sadr got his popularity, not from 'vehement anti'American speeches' but because his father was a saint who fed the poor and was murdered by the Baathists. As well, the tone towards M has changed, and there's less of the aggravating 'he's just a filthy nutcase' type of analysis.

OhhhhhhhBAMA


"We need somebody in there who wants to get out of Iraq as soon as possible," said Mangione, a conservative Republican who once voted for Ross Perot, then went with Bush and is now thinking about supporting Obama."


I read quotations like this all the time; it's the kind of evidence that, paradoxically, makes significant elements of the netroots left uncomfortable, as if signs of non-traditional support from the right = inicipient willingness to egregiously sell out (a la Joe Lieberman). But Barry doesn't need any Obamamentum; he's almost single-handedly repackaging the brand image of the progressive left in America, and the political consequences will be tremendous.

(the link, which i just lost, is from an article in the Baltimore Sun on a Peter Hart focus group; as a further sign of poor Hillary's troubles, take the journalist's willingness to describe her "single-minded pursuit of power"!!!)

Don't Hate, Congratulate


Well, it's been a while. Major changes have occurred; I'm now a proud employee of the Sanitation Department of New York City (New York's... Dirtiest? Toughest? Wickedest?), making a bundle a week to divine the origins of our city's nonsensically privatized carting industry. My closest friend left for the west, to minister to her family. The weather's turning nice.


So which of these developments, you ask, bring me back to blogging?

None of the above. Rather, it's the emergence of good ole b-boy Allan Houston, formerly of the NY Knicks, now ballin' for Barry. I used to love watching him play with Latrell Sprewell, my favorite Knick of all time; now that he's rich n retired, he's hosting house parties for Barry O.

Good times, good times.

Liberation Theology

For years I've been fascinated by liberation theology. The ole pater familias was a priest, before his babies, and his peculiar brand of Marxism with a human face is still, to me, the least bad way to face down the awful brutality of capitalism and empire. Marx's most inspired insight was his articulation of the ideal/hope/truth that we create ourselves through our labors, of love and for money and in fear and desperation. Left Catholics know that the world we live in is inextricably shaped by this anthropological conviction, and know further that the scandal of a hard-working human being paid less than is necessary to raise a family and hope and shape and love in a modicum of comfort is as much a turn away from God as is one's opinion on abortion, or the cut of the piety on one's sleeve.

And yet these two traditions, Marxism and the theology of liberation, have together shaped me (and countless others) more than any other cultural or intellectual current. The insistence on a rhetoric of dignity undergirds the success of Hugo Chavez and Nestor Kirchner and Lula too; my church's recognition of the preferential option for the poor, and of the sick sin of several billionaires living amidst the countless wretched, is the chief reason it will continue to thrive in the face of our deliciously godless market-driven cultural secularization.

What the Fuck?

In re France.

From the NYT:

"During an argument about nuclear power, for example, Ms. Royal played schoolteacher, asking Mr. Sarkozy, “Do you know how much of electricity consumption in France comes from nuclear power?”

When Mr. Sarkozy said it was 50 percent, Ms. Royal corrected him, saying it was 17 percent. To that, Mr. Sarkozy replied, “No, Madame, that is not correct.”

She lectured him “Go do your homework.”

He argued back, “I may not be very informed about the issue, but I’m consistent.”

Indeed, both were wrong: the answer is close to 80 percent."

(in re Nelson: hah-hah)

Hey Jerks

So, one hopes this will become the standard format, thus saving my three readers from the unmitigated eyestrain of the mutating (thanks, thesaurus.com!) form of this site.

"Best of the Best" was one of the first films I saw (thanks, Michael Hernandez!) in sixth grade, when a fortuitous bus stop connection led my brother and I into the world of action/adventure, i.e., the categorical obligations of being a white man. For the ignorant among us, Best of the Best features an American karate team battling Koreans for the title, and honor, of being the best action heroes in the world; they face some obstacles along the way but are able to Triumph via their indomitable Will, etc .

The film begins with shots of an auto factory, incongruously set in Portland, Oregon, and of Eric Roberts (i.e. the white man) high-fiving his white and black co-workers. Eventually, like any good WWII movie, he joins a karate crew consisting of a hippie, a redneck, a wop from Detroit, and an undefinedly east Asian fella from Fresno.

I haven't finished it yet, but I'm fairly they will go on to victory against the Big Dog Koreans; as everyone knows (i.e. those who have seen 14 minutes of the free netflix version of the film), Koreans train "mentally, as well as physically"; their victory is all but assured until the plucky grit of the Asian and the White Man come together to defeat their nefarious scheming.

Point being - this made me realize that more or less every movie made in the United States after 1975 and before the mid-80s was to do with Vietnam, and the sick scar of defeat in a foreign land. Like "The Murder of Vincent Chin," but moronically, "Best of the Best" shows that the fear and trembling brought on by neoliberalism, the defeat of the unions, and global labor market re-organization ensured that some kind of post-defeat aesthetic redemption* was both necessary and proper.

America, a tolerant land of Italians, rednecks, and others, comes together to defeat a monolithic (save for the eyepatched villain) 'Korean' (i.e. other, i.e. Asian, i.e. gook, i.e. chinaman, i.e. slope, i.e. sick shit) team composed of faceless assholes bent on ruining our good time. Everyone was losing their jobs, and everyone (who was male and had no other priorities [thanks, Dick Cheney!]) had sick visions of the sins of occupation from Vietnam, and everyone was hoping for some redemption. Voila, Best of Best...

Further point being... what are we to expect from this sick shit we've brought to Iraq? Ninja-Muslims (Now, With Bombs!) sacking the streets of major American cities? Levantine Lotharios fingering the skirts of lecherous white chicks? Middle Eastern terrorists poking around in the hearts and minds of Middle Western innocents?


I don't know.


*for upper-middle class white folks, the example was 'letting' little Maya Lin design the Vietnam Memorial; oh, aren't we modern people, with our tolerance of foreign architects and our willingness to laud those who suffered and were brought low and lost their minds and limbs for the sake of our Cold War caprices, whose intellectual weight and moral seriousness were demonstrated by the use of the dominoe (motherfucker!) as the chief illustrative metaphor.

new favorite film of all time


this early Kubrick heist flick called The Killing. clever criminals, bent cops, italian jokes, subtext of racial justice, scenes in a chess club, duplicitous harridans with questionable drinking habits... what does this film not possess that I may not take away (wisdom from)?

really, why else leave one's off-code bed-stuy shithole at 5 pm when the weather's beautiful when one can stay in and get elevated with Kubrick noir?

Win With Webb

I can't even remember where the original version of that slogan comes from (I'm with Sara Fisher; I too always thought "googling was something you did to yourself"). But it's sure as hell true. Webb's comments on the veto of the Iraq timetable bill were right on the mark:

"We won this war four years ago. The question is when we end the occupation."

I remember countless rooftop conversations with an old friend in the summer months before the '04 election, where I argued that the Dems best strategy (and Dean's only general election strategy) was to argue that the war was indeed won when Bush announced his Accomplished Mission; then, and now, the question was occupation, and how to end it with as few Iraqis dying as possible in the process.

But as anyone who remembers four years ago knows, there was a ferocious ideological attack on the very notion that 200,000 American military personnel under arms in a foreign nation constituted an 'occupation.' Besides the overt "liberation, not occupation" nonsense was the subtler, and more effective, series of thoughts like "Hussein was a tyrant, whatever else you say, Iraqis are better off now than they were then, really only the remnants of Baath party are fighting anyway." All these sentiments were illogical, as well as beside the point; but they served to pin down public debate (such as it was) on issues that obscured the glaring elephant occupying the room.

People like Juan Cole were wonderful, hammering away at this point; but the indignity of being forced to articulate the obvious only led him (and mecs like me) to sound shrill, like gleeful Cassandras.

Now, though, that the dikes have burst, and neither the public nor the ruling class has any patience with the administration, it's for the center-left to redeem themselves for refusing to call our presence in Iraq an occupation when the words would have counted. (Insert snotty lecture on George Orwell and 'Politics and English Language,' etc.) I remember how shocked I was, (!) seeing the International Action Center and International Socialist Organization (who along with the roving anarchist community basically provided the bulk of organizers in advance and during the massive protests in 2002/3) signs begging an end to the Occupation. It's an ugly word, and its absence from Democratic party talking points during the initial disasters of 2003-4 is now making it difficult, for many officials/candidates, to clearly articulate the most important reason why the nation should disentangle ourselves from Iraq.

Paradoxical Progress

Well, unfortunately, I have no idea how to capture screen shots from web sites (egads...). Otherwise, I'd show this: the front page of the west coast's leading daily showing a gigantic city block overflowing with people marching in support of immigrant communities, matched with a headline proclaiming..."Immigration Rights March Attracts Far Fewer in L.A."

Ok, ok, so last year more than a half a million people thronged the city, leaving the Black Bloc boys (and police and security service types) with visions of revolution dancing in their collective head. Still, this is the most mismatched front page I've ever seen. What a crabbed, caviling point to make, really; it's the kind of uncharitable reaction that would make one blanch if you heard it said at a party or over dinner. Unless, of course, one's institutional role is to pooh-pooh the poor immigrants, with their little marches and flags and things.


And yet, on the other hand, check this. Maybe I just haven't noticed, but this is the first article I've seen to characterize what happened in LA in 1991 as an uprising, not a riot. It's long been a point of pride on the left to say LA Rebellion or Uprising, rather than Riots; I'm happy to see some MSM types follow that lead.

I might be writing this only because I saw an a little piece in the Washington Post, about John Hope Franklin (like Morgan Freeman times 1,000,000) leading survivors of the Tulsa "Race Riot" to Congress to ask for some recognition for their suffering, and recompense for their losses. (In 1921, hundreds of white men, deputized by OK sheriffs, tore through black neighborhoods in Tulsa, killed 300 men, women, and children, and burnt down a 42-block area). As one mother told her daughter, "Your country is shooting at you."

American Politics Today; or, Catching World History on the Turn

My view on the landscape:

Both McCain and Clinton bet the wrong horse; years ago, both thought the only way to be President was to be hawkish on Iraq, and now both are paying the price for their strategic misjudgment. Losing a war is the most significant sin an American president can commit, and the real world consequences of W's folly, for the GOP, the idea of unilateral intervention, the Bush family name, and our national nonsense of being "the world's only superpower" have only begun to be measured.

For this reason, neither John nor Hillary will win their respective nominations. So, barring some awful accident, the campaign will come down to Barack and Rudy. Both are non-traditional candidates, one a drag king, the other a coke fiend; both are free of the taint of responsibility for this godforsaken war; both are media-friendly, and fit the emerging mainstream media narrative of a nation searching for new options. Stakes is high; Rudy is a tinpot dictator waiting for his chance to reign, with no constitutional scruples to speak of and enough oily charm to make the bicoastal elite ready to defend him in the face of intemperate left-wing aggression.

Barry, on the other hand... BO has the sort of biography that makes progressives swoon. He was a community organizer, for christ's sake; what's more, he worked with the Industrial Areas Foundation, linking Catholic parishes with AfAm churches to enable social change. Every person on the left, as they get to know this, will take this fact as a secret handshake, as a moment of dog-whistle politics of the sort that kept W in tune with the evangelicals even as he campaigned as a moderate decent sort of Republican.



Given the Senate situation (21 GOP seats up for election, 12 Dem seats, 11 of which are totally safe), it's likely that the Dems will increase their margins in Congress in 2008. Whether they win the Presidency is another matter entirely.

If enough of the country has gotten over the fear of a black man in executive office, then the USA has a serendipitous opportunity to undo the awful realities of the first years of the 21st century. If Rudy wins.... qui sait? c'est sur que maintenant ce serait le moment d'huir le pays.



Also: HotlineTV is like Apocalypse Now, only it totally doesn't matter and who cares about decadence anyway?

"Full Blown Bourgeois Decadence, That's What I Call It."

I lied. This is the best episode ever.

"Soviet power + electrification" etc.

"Yes, sir. Rogueishly."

pip-pip, love, etc.
ba

err


So, "gin, juice, and justice." i like snoop dogg, buttthe point was to convey the happy hippy carnivalesque possibilities that attend the vast sadness of being of the Left. Wonkette when it was Ana Marie Cox was an inspiration, as were the Radical Cheerleaders (though I was scared to death of them when I was 19, and now they're city commissioners...), the percussive dances of the NYU strike picket line, and the walls at NC.

Now for the first time in my life the left is rising. No one knows how to deal with it; the Washington Post still editorializes (or has David Broder opine) that the Dems will overreach, when the public is far more radical than the party in their (our) thirst for hasty withdrawal from the morass over in that other country.

Check this quote:

"All more than held their own in the debate." This is from a paper that is not all that conservative when it comes to domestic politics, but is still at the forefront when it comes to trashing the prospects, strategic savvy, and/or popular appeal of the Democratic party. Now, now that Bush has lost a war, and the corporations have won everything they could have possibly asked for and are too lazy to just outright enserf us, now that it's clear to even the most myopic observers that the Dems are set to take control of everything in '08, now is when we get judiciously even-handed reporting of the strengths of what is by all accounts a very strong field of candidates.

Yeah for democracy, and also nazi-dupe english short story manufacturers.

"Oh, I Understand. I Understand Perfectly. You've Funked It."
- Lady Florence Creigh to Bertram Wooster


Well. Nearly twenty days with no postings. Hardly a good sign for my blogging future.

In sum.

Got an ideal part-time job, for which I read books in exchange for payments of cash. Lost said job in exchange for two lazy mornings with fake German girlfriend, one of which, truth be told, was marred by rain. Applied for dream job, making twice as much, laboring in dusty vineyard of the NYHS to make a 19th c. pamphlet collection available to scholars and the interested public.

This is out of control. I'm a social democratic guy; I think investment capital should be socialized in democratically controlled funds; I think prisons should be abolished and armies disbanded, that Palestinians should get a state and Cheney the chair. And yet, this dupe's tales of a twit and his butler resonate so powerfully for me. The episode linked to features not only Irish jokes, but motorcycle mick humor. For those who follow this blog (you know who you are, Winona), you'll understand the providential synchronicity that this reveals.

Saw the advisor today. He was Hegelian in a way that should draw the teary admiration of every ex- and current Marxist. Determinate negations are still determinative; enslaved people made cotton for the largest industrial plant in the world, while their masters calculated currency fluctuations and arbitraged their risk through mutual funds, yet we'll still think of American slavery as a barbaric anachronism whose sins sits at the hands of the dead slave masters whose work wrought the system of slavery.


Women I still love:

Winona Ryder

Maura Tierney

Maura O'Brien

Hannah Arendt/Mary McCarthy (only together; this one's for you Leigh Claire)

Nancy Cunard

SH, JH, JP

A Grown Man Named 'Mitt'?

The Mitt Romney hunting storyline, a collection of stories way, way, way too inane to link to, should be a heartening sign for Democrats. When was the last time a Republican candidate was subjected to this kind of substantively irrelevant, irritatingly prolonged manufactured controversy? Poor Al caught shit for earth tones and Naomi Wolf; Howard raised his voice in a crowded hall and was rewarded with eight days of screeching repetition; JFK II (farce, not tragedy) had, well, his entire campaign. One assumes this means that the Gang of 500 doesn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

On an entirely unrelated note, some divine soul has put seasons and seasons' worth of the old BBC Jeeves & Wooster up on youtube. Bless your heart, angel, whosoever you might be.

And if you're too hip to like P.G. Wodehouse, just because he made, like, propagandistic radio broadcasts for the Nazis, well, you know, go to hell.

formatting is for suckers...

So, in the best news yet disclosed this week (soon to come: Barry's outta sight Q1 fundraising numbers - why would Axelrodland hold back unless they had boffo figures?) - Cormac McCarthy, portraitist of the bleak violence attending the American conquest of the continent; the ardently reclusive, avant-garde-but-for-the-horses icon of contemporary letters in the United States; the hero of many a citystruck boy eager to reconnect with the wacked-out drunk-ass spirit of William Faulkner, is making his first-ever television appearance.

On Oprah.

Now, only half the fun in this came from the whiskey shot I poured as soon as I heard the news of the man's appearance. Another half comes from the snippy words of the second-rate academics who have, thus far, cultivated his public reputation.

"Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and a former editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal Online.

Dianne Luce, president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, said, "Oh, my goodness. Those poor women don't know what they're getting into." McCarthy's novels, she added, are "very bleak."


Really, the only good criticism I've ever read of McCarthy comes in the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Blood Meridian, where the obvious comparisons to Melville and Faulkner are made, as well as the overwhelmingly, hauntingly, irritatingly biblical cast of his prose. Above and beyond that, however, is the fact that McCarthy is a small-d a democrat as you will find. As with everything, I have no idea how to express this adequately; but to fixate on the violence without looking to the kind of democracy such bloodshed would produce is to miss the central point.

needless personal note, in re: SH:

Noted - an ex-girlfriend, to whom in reaction I hopped over the emotional cliff, had her cats taken by an ex-bf on his way to California. Quite rightly, as a good progressive hippie drug-aficionado should, she called the police, and had him indicted. When he returned to NC, he had the joys of going to court to answer charges of kitten abduction, second-degree.


Goodness gracious, as Barry says. How does one account for that? I knew everyone was going nuts, but I more or less thought she already was, and so would be spared the more foolish aspects of the general decline. Not so much, not so much.

Another One?

The best thing about old Wonkette was her ability to make drunk jokes without any personal vulnerabilities or accidental revelations of world-historical self-absorption. Not so me. So want to hear some good music, that, like, isn't indy nerd self-congratulatory drivel? Music that's good, and shows how hip-hop along with Faulkner and blues is the only contribution of value America's likely to make?

Lyrics Born
Emanon
Pigeon John

(alternative post title: why moving to brooklyn and not wherever i could afford in california was a big fat fruitful mistake)

"OH, that's right, his name was Billy... Yo, this cat was all right, I saw him down at a Kiwi dj's night at this red hiphop bar, yo he was into politics for real. Yeah, for real."

Let Me Reminisce Over You...

(PM Dawn)

Howard Dean, c. June, 2004.

Hannah Arendt, for everything.

Noam Chomsky, for writing me back.

Rawkus Records, before your demise defined the word 'inexplicable."

To Andrew the Torontan of Polmo Polvo, for buttering up ole billy.

BKen, for what I might have known.

BO08, for this chance now.

Mario, for ducking before your idiot son fucked it all up.

Joe Hill, for resembling what a man might be.
("my will is simple to decide/as i have nothing to divide")

Dorothy Parker, for being the last one to see Sacco before they killed him, and for being buried in the garden of the NAACP before they could call you a wigger for wanting that.

For Billy, for crying at the thought of poor old Dorothy Parker, and poor old America.

Don't Get Me Wrong

I still think white people, generally speaking, make awful music. But this one dude had the idea to let a bunch of indy rock nerds ape their chamber music betters, and had the better idea to do it in the middle of a Korean church in midtown, and had the even better idea of soaking the whole thing in gratuitous red wine. Check it.

That's Buzzy!

Having remembered that I, in fact, keep a blog (if not the particulars of how to do anything with it), I decided its time to inaugurate a new feature to happywarrior. In loving memory of when I used to believe that shit, I'm starting a series of knock-offs of Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom watch. I have no idea how to copy and paste little arrows, but that's why they invented words anyway.


(little green up arrow) Ben Smith. I know, I know; egg on the face, unforgivable journalistic sin, etc. But, really, everyone loves the guy, and made haste to publicly cut him some superfluous slack. Plus, he was nice to Chris Owens.


(little green up arrow) HotlineTV. This political 'journalism' 'show' is to my affections as Catholicism was to Evelyn Waugh; you could stay away all you like, but with a twitch upon the thread you'll find yourself right back up in that shit. Watching yesterday's show this morning, I heard John Mercurio make mention of some 'William,' who doesn't appreciate his imperious interruptions. Not so, good sir! I'm down with good ole frat boys and their clever mispronunciations of co-host names; it's almost as hip as W's monikers. But that madcap ice skating rankings craziness? Classic.


(way down red arrow) ridonkulous - will you all shut the fuck up? 'ginormous'? what are we, (searching for appropriate opprobrium; drowning in whiskey-soaked fury).

Oh the things you'll see...

I can hardly believe this has yet to come up, but let's talk a little bit about HotlineTV. Like Hillary, by talk I mean you listen as I type, but pay that no never mind; this is assuredly the finest political web-tv cultural criticism you'll read online this afternoon.

I first came to HotlineTV in the halcyon days of late summer 2006. There were two young men, I recall, who were the stars; one gangly drunk by the Mercurio, and one apple-cheeked Orlandinian, went by the name of Chuck I believe. And Katy bar the door, what a show! Cheap graphics, sure; laughably well-intentioned Nat'l Assoc. of Mining Corporation propaganda to start out, of course; idiot sports-metaphor concluding segment, you know it baby. But above and beyond all this, the heart of the show was the camaraderie, the esprit de corps, the pure drunken intimacy of John Mercurio and Chuck Todd.

I'm pretty sure I party better than those losers in DC. Maybe not Sam Smith (fuck you DCist, I met you all at Black Cat and you wouldn't stop asking me where I went to college), he wilds out like a big 'un, but better than most of those narcotics-shy, martini-tippling, ambitious sons-o-bitches. But seeing Mercurio sniff and blink and make inappropriate jokes, my confidence was shaken. Todd is clearly a lightweight (haha, political director of NBC News), but this italian fella is onamove.

Absent real proof, I can only point to the delirious quality of this post to aver for the quality of this show. Also, for some bizarre reason every editor at Hotline is super-hot. You know who I'm talking about: who could forget Shira Toeplitz's sexy stammer, or Maura O'Brien's vampy poses. Amy Walter and Marc Anbinder can speak on camera like professionals, fer sure; but I have seen the future of my political media consumption, and it is the good-lookin' leftwing political journalists at HotlineTV.

Thank you, National Journal. If only you knew...

So, not doing so well on the whole 'posting' thing. In re: the remedy.... Item!

Here' s an Oak-town (don't stop) pic of a Bam* rally, happening in early March, the year before the election. As my increasingly main man Ben Smith says: Whoa.


* Bam, the NY Daily News' glorious new nickname for Barry, is now the nomenclature of choice for all right thinking left-wing types. Let it be duly noted.

Big White Corn Farmers for Barack

If you haven't yet, check out William Finnegan's profile of Barry, from a 2004 New Yorker. Lovely detail, just a hint of the idolatry to follow, and some juicy bicoastal-elitist characterizations of Ill. rednecks in Cairo. Your Obama-related quote of the day....

Time-Life Classics of Human Dignity





This woman, the one whose jacket is buttoned but not zippered, with the chapped face which would be that of a drunk were it not so bitterly cold in, the one who's like as old as my grandmother? This woman here made me feel like a million bucks about the human race this morning. God bless all old women, amen. And cheeky chess players and communists, too.

No time for blogging, no time at all, as the lovely neighbor is set to open her show, I (heart) Bed-Stuy, at the waist-high landlord's gallery next door. Her name being Naomi Campbell, there's little doubt as to the vast increase in attendance this show will boast in comparison to previous efforts, inevitably people solely by the artist's immediate pals, Raphael the dwarfish rentier, and us the neighbors.

In any case, could hardly pass this up. CPAC, the conservative organizational force whose hoary past reaches all the way back to the Reagan years (so I believe), chose Indiana Rep. Mike Pence as their keynote speaker for their 3/2 Ronald Reagan banquet. Pence is one of the few, bold House Republicans to have opposed Bush's march to war; another, John Hostettler, was defeated in November after running, as always, a low-funded, high-grassroots (heh) effort. With this kind of hgh-profile signalling, the conservative organizational elite - as opposed to bought-and-paid-for White House/RNC operatives - is demonstrating how fed up they are with a war that will wreak havoc on their hopes for a durable governing conservative majority.

More later on high hopes for the long-awaited schism between the economic conservatives ie plutocrats and social conservatives ie jesus freaks.

Barack quotation of the day:

Bacack, the Man in Black ("leave off that whiskey/and let that cocaine be" - even with all that book money you can't afford it)

Not-yet Mario and No-longer-the-same-old Newt have teamed up to, you know, um, elevate the motherfucking political discourse.


I usually try not to go the ultra-snarky Atrios road in my limited blogging, aiming instead to rise to the serene discursive heights of TPM or the American Prospect. But this shit is ridiculous.

No media trope is more shop-worn than the old chestnut of bipartisan cooperation to save country's from flaming extremists. Maybe it started with Gramm-Rudman, maybe when Truman went to Vandenburg and Taft to tell them what was what in re: the commies, but the sanctification of 'bipartisanship' has become clearly central to any media narrative of DC politics. No matter the self-importance of the participants, the structural significance of their policy reforms, the political value of their proposals; any initiative put forward with the janus face of bipartisanship stands a decent chance of getting some valuable MSM ink.

Yet with this Gingrich-Cuomo business, the shark has clearly been jumped (poor shark; i wonder if they got his credit cards too...). Shit, I love Mario Cuomo, and I mean love him. He was the patron saint of my liberal anti-Clinton family, his '84 convention speech one of the first things I ever searched for on youtube. But his kid is a goddamn pain in the ass. Andrew has mucked up his various efforts at electoral office in New York, despite the pull of a near-sainted three-term ex-Governor father. He's like Mark Green; he's probably pretty decent if you ever had to talk to him, but on camera, in public, and in print he comes off as an obnoxious knucklehead who you'd steer clear of quicker than the Mormon at the office party.

And as for Newt... while his faux-presidential campaign continues, and his speaking fees rise marginally, I can only imagine he'll come out with this shit on the regular. Who knows what we'll have the pleasure of seeing over the coming months... Gingrich-Coelho on campaign finance reform; Newt-Zell on the dangers Allah poses to American national security (answer: targeted assasination of all foreign deities); Newt-Joe Liebs on getting the guns out of video games, and into Iraq.... Who knows where the fun will end?

Well.

I may even blog some summary of the last few months of my life, a bit of a script treatment featuring sex, drugs, and pigeon john, but most probably not.

What I will do is begin featuring an Obama quotation of the day. This one's from an absolutely crack-addled feature by Hilary Hylton on Barry's rally in Austin last Friday. It's a gem, and not only because it tracks so nicely with my morning this Tuesday.


"It seemed more rock concert than political rally as 20,000 Texans gathered Friday afternoon in that same downtown Austin park for what Obama's campaign dubbed a "Kick-Ass Rally." The crowd was predominately young, the music by Cyril Neville and Tribe 13 first class funky, and the misty rain was infused with the occasional aroma of marijuana. Only the sea of signs with "Obama '08" gave the slightest hint that this was a political event. A favorite Obama theme is the government failures following Hurricane Katrina, so it was appropriate that Neville, a New Orleans evacuee who has settled in Austin, performed at the rally. But what was unconventional was Neville was the warm-up act. There were no local or state politicians to whip up the crowd. In fact, the only identifiable Texas politician spotted at the event was Constable Bruce Elfant, a popular local Democrat with longtime ties to student Democratic organizations."


Dean's Bryant Park event in the summer of '04, at which plus que 10,000 folks attended, including me, felt the same, with a mildly corporatish grafitti artist up on stage (later faux-prosecuted by the charlatans and miscreants at the NYPD), some flasks of whatever it is upper-middle class white people drink, and enough potential political energy to swamp any opposition within the Party. Obama's the same kind of thing, though his background as an organizer at least strongly suggests that he'll know better than Dean and Trippi did, and nurture the thing before they announce its inevitability.


"Barack Obama, one Hot Mama"


"Half-black, half-white, all right"

Black enough? "The little taste he got from his father was all he needed."


Goodness gracious, I love the man.