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.