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.