Seven letters on politics (11/12/04)

Antiquarian pursuits (11/19/04)

____________

(9/17/04:)

Undoubtedly you’re onto something in re the verbal/conceptual permutation of “weapons of mass destruction”; it suggests that the administration’s policy is founded on a sort of systematic malapropism, even dyslexia. This would explain much.

My stomach hasn’t been equal to the task of following the CBS fiasco blow by blow; though I am, naturally, familiar with the principal conjectures. The Rove theory does actually sound plausible to me, meaning that despite my best efforts to plaster myself with ideological Coppertone I’ve probably been out in the political sun too long. — In a [very] weak moment I watched a couple of minutes of Matthews on Hardball the other night, during which he pooh-poohed the whole thing as a tempest in a teapot and [as usual] rudely interrupted his “guests” to remind them that all reasonable people, i.e. himself, had long since concluded that what Bush did thirty years ago is irrelevant today. The fact that the originals of the documents in question either were or were not plucked from the dumpster [and if not perhaps transcribed?] when Bush’s operatives visited Guard headquarters in 1997 to purge the record preparatory to his run for president, i.e. that the coverup is quite recent and obviously relevant to the present behavior of Dubya, seems to have sailed over the heads both of Matthews himself and all the contributing commentators, pro and con. [I.e., not simply did he weasel out of the draft while pretending the opposite, he’s still trying to weasel out of admitting that’s what he did. This says that he lies to the public and to himself; and doesn’t that explain everything.] If I were really paying attention, I would be in despair. — I did also manage to notice, in the space of another minute or two, that Senator Graham [not Florida, the South Carolina guy] though very critical of the administration’s Iraqi policy nonetheless performed perfectly the signature rhetorical gambit the administration’s apologists have employed to insinuate the relevance of the war in Iraq to the “war on terror”, i.e., mentioning 9/11 in one sentence and Saddam in the next without explicitly stating any logical connection. Thus without actually lying they succeed in intimating Saddam was responsible; and sure enough, the poll numbers on this misapprehension are still over forty percent. — What did they do? take everybody in the Republican party to Camp David for the weekend and drill them on the bait and switch until they all got it right?

Sky Captain did not disappoint; it came off as something like anime, with a bit of live action and the actors inserted. It owes something to Lucas, but mainly represents a fresh [and I think better] reading of Lucas’s sources. Beautifully executed. By all means check it out. — Point of trivia: right at the outset one of the victims of the mad scientist trying to take over the world passes a message to Gwyneth Paltrow in a copy of Newton’s Principia; at the very end, in the closing credits, acknowledgment in dutifully made to the publisher for permission to show the cover of their edition of Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy [so complete now is copyright paranoia in Hollywood] — but, typically, “Principles” is misspelled; so much for relying on the spellchecker.

I too favor a remake of Duck Soup, but not as fiction but reality: let’s give up on the United States as a bad marriage, and split the county into red and blue moieties. These would be called, naturally, Sylvania and Freedonia respectively, and it is a very amusing exercise to fill out the details: I fancy the Marseillaise as the Freedonian national anthem, for example. After he gets out of the hospital and gets a pulse back in his pants, I think Clinton is just the man for the Groucho role: with or without the greasepaint moustache, there’s no doubt he has the leer. And of course there’s no doubt we’d all go straight to war; in truth we’re at war already, it’s just that we’d be admitting that this is the case. — If we sign onto the program as early endorsers now, we may have a chance later to toss those all-important first tomatoes at Margaret Dumont. Give it some thought.

Later.

.............

(10/10/04:)

Odds and ends:

I’m glad to see IBM finally put the Japanese back in second place where they belong. But why did it take so long?

Mattick has an interesting article in the current issue of the Scientific American on his ideas about genes that code for RNA and their role in developmental biology.

A note on VH-1: it can’t be an accident that though I frequently flip past the channel during the appropriate programming hours, I always seem to see the same video over and over again. Do they even change it once a month?

You may have noted that the Times magazine Sunday before last was unusually good. I particularly liked the piece on Wong Kar Wai, the Godard of Hong Kong; probably the greatest director in the world that no one’s ever heard of.

I hadn’t looked forward particularly to Dylan’s autobiography, but the critical notice in the Times won me over with a single quote: Dylan on the burden of his own past: “It was like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat.” — Obviously he hasn’t lost his way with words. I’ll have to check this out.

Having long since concluded that what is actually said and done in the presidential campaign is almost wholly inconsequential, that all that matters is how everything is spun, and that I cannot abide the principal spinmeisters, I’ve done my best to ignore the debates and their fallout; though I did note that Der Spiegel thought Kerry killed Dubya, and said the Wall Street Journal was so embarrassed by Bush’s ineptitude that they didn’t even try to spin the result on the editorial page afterward. — Unfortunately [though personally I’d be perfectly happy to annex Berlin and get rid of Oklahoma] the Germans don’t get to vote. — Was Bush really wearing a wire? this ought to be grounds for impeachment. [As if.]

Of course, surfing for images the other night I stumbled across a right-wing blog and discovered that Kerry plans to transfer control of the American military to the French. — Well, better them than the Texans.

Rumor has it Robert Rodriguez had hired the famous fantasy artist Frank Frazetta [creator of all the old Burroughs paperback covers, and, I might add, all my computer desktop wallpapers] as production designer on A Princess of Mars before his dispute with the Director’s Guild led to his removal from the project. This was an interesting idea. — Apparently Kerry Conran has succeeded Rodriguez. This may be an even more interesting idea.

In re The Motorcycle Diaries [which is, as you may have gathered, remarkable]: a little Peruvian kid guiding young Che Guevara and his travelling companion around an ancient city tells them the natives distinguish the architectural achievements of their own ancestors from those of the Spanish as the products, respectively, of the Incas and the Inca-pables; I guess there are translatable puns. — I’m still trying to figure out why Che is suddenly hot again; is it just that, unlike the other gods of the New Left, he really was a great man?

I still haven’t seen Shaun of the Dead, but it amused me to see that the rave reviews inserted pro forma into the newspaper advertisements came not from the usual obscure critics [“Unparalleled brilliance!” exclaims L. Garbonzo of the Boulder Litterboxliner] but from Stephen King, Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi, and George Romero himself. An interesting precedent.

Still hasn’t arrived: I [heart] Huckabee’s. — David Russell has won my loyalty in perpetuity with Spanking the Monkey and Three Kings, even if he is crazy. — Naomi Watts trivia: her father was tour manager for Pink Floyd.

Never one to fail to follow a trend many moons after everyone else has picked up on it, I downloaded a copy of Mozilla Firefox the other night and discovered to my astonishment that it actually works: Netscape Navigator 1.0 at long last. — Of course, nothing seems to run Java applets properly any more, except perhaps Internet Explorer; what a revolting development this is.

Jon Stewart let the news footage of Allen’s crew toasting one another with champagne to celebrate their winning the X Prize run for a moment without comment, and then, to my immense amusement, started hoarsely screaming “The nerds have won the pennant! The nerds have won the pennant!” Well: I guess they have. — In the early Sixties it took the wizards of the Skunk Works only a couple of years starting from scratch to design and build the SR-71 Blackbird; is this kind of thing still possible, or is the heroic age of aeronautical engineering over? The romantic in me would like to think that it is not. We’ll see.

On a whim I dug my copy of Ratner’s Star out of storage and read it again. DeLillo certainly had his moments. — “I draw a blank.” — “What kind of ignorance am I dealing with here?” — “How many kinds are there?” — “As many as the mind of man can catalogue. Don’t they teach ignorance in school anymore?” — Well, now that you mention it —

Later.

...........

(10/17/04:)

Well, the way the Bush insider scornfully dismisses the objections of the elitist coastal crowd as irrelevant since “reality-based” seals the argument for me; but obviously not for everyone else — simply because, for them, it isn’t an argument at all, and never was. Clearly the liberal delusions about the electoral process representing a rational choice by the enfranchised masses based on a judicious evaluation of positions and facts mean nothing in this modern age of asymmetric ideological warfare. What a fucking nightmare. Not only have we seen the end of the Age of Revolution in our time [1789 — 1989, requiescat in pace], but also, apparently, the end of the Enlightenment. — Isn’t this just about the time that the battletested noses of the Jewish people start to twitch, and they renew their passports and put their money into gold? — Let me know which way you’re all going. I’m going with you, and I promise to convert.

Don Imus on the silence of Fox News on the O’Reilly scandal: “‘We report, you decide’ — [derisive laughter] — Eat me!”

Later.

;;;;;;;;

(10/21/04:)

Though I left off my childhood loathing of the Yankees roughly around the time they acquired Reggie Jackson, I’ll have to admit I took heart from their meltdown, which I chose to read as an augury of the chances of a certain Massachusetts senator whose fortunes we’ve been following of late.

As it happened I watched the game while reading Wittgenstein’s Poker, which finally I found in a usedbookstore. This was, as per all reports [e.g., yours], very entertaining, though it’s difficult not to distill from it the moral that a violent argument over whether or not there was any real point to all the other violent arguments the two of them had made a career of is pretty much what you’d expect from a couple of guys who, the authors’ diligent research confirms, essentially never got laid. — It doesn’t seem to me that there’s much Rashomon-like ambiguity in the story. The only one who flatly denied that anything like the incident took place was Geach, who was [a] a witless dick and [b] like the rest of Wittgenstein’s disciples, autobrainwashed on the subject of the Master. I imagine Wittgenstein did brandish the poker, though Popper probably didn’t get off his snappy comeback until after he’d left. That would have been a bit too cute; after all he wasn’t Jon Stewart.

The favorable portent of the success of the Bosox notwithstanding, I covered my ass while shopping and, true to my word, picked up the first of the three volumes of the Penguin edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. [“It was at Rome,” said Gibbon, “on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.” For some reason I was a few days off.] — A classic specimen of English prose, a monument to the Age of Reason; and, of course, where we’re going, an invaluable guide.

Later.

.........

(11/3/04:)

[Cocktail enquires why he’s still in the country:]

In truth, I am somewhat at a loss to explain my mental state; have I ever been this dismayed by the result of an election? if not, why not? After all, I survived the reign of Nixon and the ascension of Reagan, which seemed, at the time, to be nearly as bad as this. Maybe it’s just the unhealthy zeal with which I’ve scanned the periodicals in the post-9/11 era, which means that I have an alarmingly detailed picture of what the administration intends to accomplish with a second term: packing the courts with right-wing zealots [the guy who wrote the brief defending the use of torture and claiming the irrelevance of the Geneva conventions has already been promoted to the federal bench; I shudder to think who they have lined up to succeed Rehnquist], socalled “tort reform” which will, as a practical matter, ensure that nobody without money will have any legal recourse against anybody with money ever again, a fundamental realignment of the tax codes in favor of people who have money already at the expense of people who still have to make it, a new-and-improved version of the Orwellian Patriot Act which will, among other things, make it possible for the government to revoke somebody’s citizenship and deport him without providing any explanation, prodding the FCC once again to allow media consolidation on an unprecedented scale, inevitably favoring the interests of the likes of Rupert Murdoch and ensuring that no political opinion to the left of Tom Delay will ever be heard on the airwaves again, and the systematic dismantling not simply of the New Deal of the second Roosevelt, but the environmental and antitrust legislation of the first — and, in fact, after minor obstacles like the separation of Church and State have been removed, the undoing of the principal accomplishments of the Enlightenment and the European Age of Reason. At this point there’s nothing to stand between the Rove cabal and the accomplishment of their ultimate purpose, which seems to be something like putting all the wealth of the nation in the hands of a few thousand people and trusting the church to keep the rest in their place — i.e., turning America into Saudi Arabia. The fact that they’re so fucking inept in the conduct of the “war on terror” only makes it all more likely: it is appalling how easy our trusted “allies” the Pakistanis have made it for loonies, e.g. their own intelligence services and their friends in Al Qaeda, to pass out nuclear weapons, and really it only seems like a matter of time before some Islamic nutcase drawing on a Saudi bank account drives a van into the middle of Manhattan and sets one off; which will mean martial law in perpetuity and the permanent end of civil liberties in this country. Meanwhile even though the whistle was blown on Poindexter and “Total Information Awareness” the intelligence services are busily compiling the databases that will provide them with the list of persons to be detained in event of national emergency; and it would, of course, be disgraceful not to find one’s name upon it. — Of course none of this matters to the electorate, of whom I think at this point more than half don’t know that the Earth goes round the Sun, let alone why their paychecks are shrinking or who bombed the World Trade Center.

Generally I think of Australia. Somebody suggested Iceland. Europe isn’t a bad idea still; they have universal health insurance and privacy rights. Canada is an obvious first stop. For that matter there may be as many as a million expatriate Americans living in Baja now; of course that means property values are going up. — On the other hand maybe the most sensible thing is just to move to California and start agitating for the state to secede from the union. — But rest assured I’m thinking about it.

Great comeback by the Bosox though. If only some of it had rubbed off on Kerry.

Later.

...........

(11/5/04:)

[Replying to a series of points:]

I want to say “No thanks, I’m trying to quit,” but I guess I have to respond. My first, and most fundamental resolve, is to quit reading the paper and watching anything on the television except movies [I dug out my old tape with Linklater’s Slacker and Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Hunters on it this evening; what a great double feature]; the principle is that of minimizing stress, because there’s no use worrying about what you can’t affect. If I had a lot of money I might think differently, but then again even George Soros didn’t have enough. So maybe the best idea after all is just to emulate the example of the ostrich [the patron saint of the administration’s policy on climate change] and stick my head back into the sand; where conceivably I may yet find enough quiet to think about things I can actually solve, like the inverse problem for the lambda calculus. It’s not like I haven’t made an adequate number of dire predictions of the imminent decline of the empire. If nobody else gets it, fuck it, I give up.

Unresolved questions: did anyone verify the results given by the Diebold voting machines by comparing them against exit polls? I heard some independent groups were going to do this, but [see above] I’m loathe to investigate. — Did Sinclair really broadcast the antiKerry documentary all over Ohio on the eve of the election? just one more argument in Rove’s mind, I’m sure, for pushing media consolidation through the FCC in the second term.

In re the rest:

[a] Ordinarily I’d agree that eventually the joy ride ends and they run the country off a cliff and an enraged electorate rises from its stupor to throw the bums out. But the war already blew up in their faces and they’re getting away with it. One would think that the strategy of covering up when you get caught out in a lie by telling a bigger lie can’t succeed forever [Lincoln, you can fool some of the people all of the time, etc.; compare also the Gambler’s Ruin], but it hasn’t happened yet. Anyway they don’t have to fool you, or me, or Maureen Dowd, or Krugman, or the editors of the New Yorker, or anybody with a scientific education, or anybody who can actually remember anything that happened more than fifteen minutes ago [which excludes all television journalists save Jon Stewart]; and they certainly haven’t. All they have to do is fool a majority of the people in a majority of the electoral college, which seems to be pretty easy for them. [I can’t take seriously the chorus of pundits who are busily explaining that the problem is that the Democrats are out of touch with the majority; the problem is that the majority are now out of touch with reality.] — When the economy blows up, which in the laissez-faire state of nature they’re hellbent to restore happens every twenty years like clockwork, maybe then the electorate turns on them. But in the brave new world of global interdependence what does that mean? If manufacturing leaves and capital leaves and foreign-born talent starts going somewhere else [cf. the abdication of Steve Chen reported this week in the Times], does the country recover? And isn’t that just what the religious right really wants, anyway? [If a return to the nineteenth century requires a return to a nineteenth century standard of living, well then, so be it.]

Probably if the Democrats still controlled Congress Bush would be long gone: the really amazing thing about the record of the administration, particularly after what happened to Clinton, is how many lengthy and embarrassing investigations have not taken place: Halliburton, the Cheney energy consultations, the prewar intelligence fiasco, Abu Ghraib, the misconduct of the war, Delay’s manipulation of the Texas redistricting, Ashcroft’s excesses, etc. Even the 9/11 panel let them off easily because it was constrained to be “nonpartisan” — a word which, thanks to the disadvantages imposed by intellectual honesty, means something to the Democrats and absolutely nothing to the Republicans. Unfortunately at this point I can’t envision the circumstances under which the blue team could regain the majority; but if they did, for instance, win in 2006, I’d be a fervent advocate of impeachment proceedings.

[b] When they put us in the camp, it won’t just be for a month; just ask those people who are still trying to find out what happened to their relatives in Chile and Argentina. Patriot Two will allow the government to revoke your citizenship and deport or detain you without explanation; Poindexter got canned, but there’s still an army of happy little trolls hard at work datamining to put together the master list of the Usual Suspects to be rounded up in event of national emergency, and as I’ve said previously, it would be a disgrace not to be on it. — The delicate psychological question is, are they really looking forward to that next catastrophe, the nuke in Manhattan, say, that will allow them to get away with this? As usual I wonder what Nietzsche would say. I think the answer is: consciously, no; unconsciously, yes. [Was there not a suspect relish in the way that Cheney pronounced the warning “We’re going to get hit again?”]

[c] The Democrats can’t broaden their base unless they relearn the art of lying with a straight face on the principle that the end justifies the means. This is not made easier when, e.g., even the intelligentsia all go along with the Republican accusation that Kerry is dithering whenever he makes some calculated statement on this basis; never mind that he, unlike the opposition, is trying to keep the pernicious tendency on a short leash. Bush of course meanwhile can say whatever he likes, because the presumption is he doesn’t have to be consistent. — More proof that the right wing braintrust have cracked the code of the political media, and can manipulate them at will. — The pundits are all still sadly shaking their heads over the loss of credibility at CBS after the National Guard memo turned out to be a [qualified] forgery; meanwhile Fox trumpeted the unsubstantiated claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth 24/7 without the slightest pretense of objectivity. If you don’t believe in facts, I guess, you’re under no obligation to check them.

Of course how you lie about the main point at issue, i.e., taxes, is beyond me. Rhetoric must promise something for nothing. In principle this means lower taxes and more government services; in practice [i.e., what “lower taxes” means once you’ve broken the code] what suffices is a positive net balance of payments in your own congressional district — the amount of money flowing in from the government has to exceed the amount flowing out. If you examine the data the blue country loses heavily in this regard [California most of all] and the red country wins. [This means the blue and red countries are respectively the red and black countries, I guess.] — Gingrich’s district before he retired received more money per capita than any other; it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Delay’s now held this distinction. This proves that if you’re completely irresponsible you can not only campaign for but legislate lower taxes and still insist on enough pork to keep your district in the black.

[d] The recession will have to take the Chinese down with it. Otherwise they’ll take up the slack. — Anyway the Saudis have been carefully calibrating their production for decades now to ensure that prices stay high enough to keep them in gold-plated bathroom fixtures and low enough that alternatives aren’t seriously explored. — Their economy, at least, is fairly easily managed.

[e] If this goes on another year or two, recruitment will tank and the Army’s morale will suffer irreversible damage. — Meanwhile the Al Qaeda recruiters are consciously promoting the Iraqi jihad as the war that will topple the American empire, just as Afghanistan toppled the Soviets. Indeed something like this could actually happen. — It’s amazing the extent to which the argument is still about Vietnam. The Bush/Cheney axis still devoutly believe that was a noble episode in the crusade against Communism, lost only because of a stab in the back. [The Pentagon of course knows better.] The somewhat deeper observation that pseudosuccess in Vietnam would only have encouraged a series of colonial wars which would have bankrupted us just as Afghanistan bankrupted the Soviets somehow lies beyond their grasp; though fortunately it was clear enough to Bill Casey. Note that every time they’ve regained power since the Seventies they’ve started plotting a new version of Vietnam to prove that they were right; it’s now conveniently forgotten that the principal concern of the Reagan braintrust was trying to find some excuse to go to war in Central America — “this time we do it right” — and then, hopefully, invade Cuba and get even for the debacle of the Bay of Pigs. Fortunately they got no farther than Grenada and Panama. — Has anyone ever pointed out to these morons that the colony in Cuba was an enormous financial burden on the Soviets, and that if they’d been suckered into picking up a few more such dependents they would have gone broke that much faster?

[Note on the Iraqi insurrection: this, too, as it turns out, is being funded by the Saudis. It’s certainly interesting that an irresponsible left-wing propagandist like Michael Moore keeps coming up with the right answers. Isn’t it.]

[f] Feyerabend under pressure from the administration at Berkeley at last gave in and gave examinations in his class in the philosophy of science; one question was “How did Thomas Aquinas explain the coldness of the devil’s penis?” When Arafat finally gets his dick out of the posterior of Palestine, someone can write a treatise about it. In Latin, of course.

[g] No sex except for procreation is the traditional position of the Catholic church, and thus, of course, the only consistent one, if you buy any of these arguments at all. We really ought to try to make clear which party is for, and which against, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Why do I now constantly have the feeling that somebody is trying to screen Pleasantville by running the film backwards?

Religion really is employed as the opiate of the masses, and the powerbrokers always regard themselves as being exempt from the rules. Thus the behavior of the Saudi princes off the reservation, O’Reilly, etc. — Was it widely remarked that when Gingrich had an extramarital affair he insisted on oral gratification rather than intercourse so that he, just like Clinton later, could maintain deniability?

As for the correlation of the liberal vote with population centers, this is natural. Greater population density entails more interaction with other people, which necessitates mutual tolerance, and a greater need for public infrastructure and government services. Urban dwellers understand automatically that they have to pay more for the benefits they derive from city life; they also understand that the higher incomes they can earn in consequence more than make up for it. — This is also a fundamental reason for the difference in perspective between Europe and America, and the reason why mass transit is more efficient and cost-effective in Europe, etc. — Also professional talent is attracted to population centers, and the intellectual vote is still overwhelmingly liberal. As a scientist discussing the antiscientific bias of the administration pointed out in the pages of the New York Review of Books the other day, the only political debate among his peers [biotech millionaires and all] had to do with whether a vote for Nader was completely wasted. — Everyone understands this, of course, but somehow it has become fashionable to claim that the traditional right-wing antipathy for intellectuals is justified because this better represents the spirit of the people. This is ridiculous. The country is rich because of its intellectuals, not in spite of them; and they aren’t in Kansas. Above and beyond my earlier remarks about the correlation of American Nobel laureates with the 2000 election map, I noted a couple of months ago, for instance, that of the two hundred or so Guggenheim fellows listed in a congratulatory full-page ad in the Times, ten or fifteen were foreigners, perhaps ten [if you didn’t count the four from Boulder and the five from Austin, residents of blue counties] came from the red states, and about a hundred and eighty came from the urban centers of the blue states. This is not an accident.

The real problem with taxes, which urban dwellers seem somehow to understand but no one else will try to, is that they aren’t linear as a function of the population; there’s an additional term of some kind, perhaps quadratic [well; probably a series of higher-order corrections], that represents the correction for higher population density. It’s obvious when you think about it that the more people there are, particularly the more people there are in a finite amount of space, and the more things that they do, the more complicated life and human interaction become and the more complicated are the requirements of even minimal regulation. But of course politicians don’t think about it.

Morons may dominate the electorate, but one cannot envy Bush’s superior ability to connect with them. That way lies madness. There has to be a better way.

Suggestion for the Democrats: pull out an old copy of the Contract with America and, with all the cynicism with which it was originally proposed, endorse it. — Two useful sources of embarrassment: the balanced budget; term limits. The point of the latter, of course, was to remove the advantages of incumbency, which then favored the Democrats; turn about is fair play.

Another suggestion: if the evangelicals really do acquire a majority, it’s all over. Maybe the most appalling realization of the last couple of months is that I’ve started to identify with the situation of the Iraqi Kurds, who face absorption into an Islamic state when the Shiite majority assumes power. An argument for federalism there and, interestingly enough, here: why not embrace the principle of decentralization? repeal the national income tax, and restore the autonomy of the states. Then we can all move to California or New York, and ignore Washington.

[Variant: start a movement to annex Canada into the United States. Right away we add ten more blue states.]

Unresolved question: who really has the majority? if you add up the Democratic votes for Congressional candidates and the Republican votes. — Note the Gerrymandering Theorem: the maximum proportion of a Congressional delegation you can obtain by redistricting with x percent of the voters is 2x percent of the delegation [proof obvious.][The interesting question is actually the topological one, whether you can accomplish this while maintaining the requirement that districts be connected regions.] How relevant is this to the present situation? I don’t know about Texas, but this seems a useful way of looking at, e.g., Pennsylvania.

It’s maddening how much this catastrophe has been aided by blind luck: the bad luck of 9/11 that elevated Bush from an automatic lame duck to “a war president”, the plane crash that killed Wellstone at a critical juncture and handed the Senate back to the Republicans, the extended hurricane season that kept Kerry out of Florida while Bush was handing out disaster-relief checks, etc. Of course every catastrophe is aided by luck.

The great irony is that in this age when every ambitious young lad can aspire to the stature of Doctor No, and a mad scientist really can destroy the world, it isn’t a physicist or a biologist that does it, but Karl Rove. Ah, the horror.

Not familiar with Joy Division; apparently my loss. Really fond of Alban Berg, weird but true [check out his operas]; Schoenberg is too formal. Intrigued by Sirius, but not yet a subscriber. Also by the notices for the Dylan memoir, but I haven’t read it. The Prisoner [assuming you mean the Kafkaesque Sixties spy drama] I still remember as the best serial I ever saw on television. I spent the weekend before the election reading Gibbon sporadically and watching a Marx Brothers marathon which included everything but A Night in Casablanca [no loss, as I recall]; I even have Copacabana on an old tape, as it turns out. As a result I keep drawing parallels between Bush and the Emperor Constantine, and I can’t get “Lydia the Tatooed Lady” out of my head. No wonder my vote doesn’t count.

Well, like all New Year’s resolutions, this renunciation of politics probably won’t last. But I’m going to try, damn it. You have to give me that.

Later.

.......

(11/12/04:)

[In reply to more political remarks:]

Ah, the agony. I tried to ignore the body of this for a couple of days, but the temptation is irresistible. — Another relapse. — Well, it isn’t that bad. I’ve kicked harder drugs than politics. I’ll quit again tomorrow. Honest.

In re Bush’s recovering-sinner pose: this really disturbs me. The problem with it is illustrated by an old bumper sticker another one of my sisters [more than one went through this phase, alas] used to have on her car: Christians aren’t perfect; just saved. I was forcibly reminded of this reading the description in the Times magazine of Karen Hughes’ reaction to a reporter’s cross-examination on some incident or other, some political occasion on which Bush used unChristian language off-mike: though the reporter and Hughes had both been present and heard what Bush had said, and though the reporter wasn’t making a particular issue of it, she kept insisting that Bush had not sworn at anybody, because he didn’t swear. Somehow in this connection it emerged that people like the reporter simply didn’t [in Hughes’ estimation] understand the fundamental point that it didn’t matter, really, what people like Hughes and Bush actually did, because the only important thing was that they were saved and they would be forgiven. — So therefore, I guess, Bush could swear at somebody and it didn’t really happen [so Hughes could lie about it], because the Lord would forgive him [her] his [her] minor lapses. — Or major lapses. — Or anything, actually. — The difficulty here is a sort of equivalent, in the ethical domain, of the reductio ad absurdum of teleological explanation: whatever happens, happens because God wills it. This eliminates entirely the intellectual obligation of attempting an explanation for anything. Similarly, if whatever you do is okay because you’re one of God’s elect and even if you make a mistake the Lord will forgive you, this eliminates personal responsibility and you can do anything you like. — So one of the really good ideas of Christianity, the idea that if you sincerely repent your sins you can be forgiven, is perverted into an eternally-renewable get-out-of-jail-free card. — Note that this does not work in the context of, say, Catholicism, which stresses the use of reason; Aquinas, e.g., believed before everything else that God could only will that which was rational. But in the context of irrationalist fundamentalism it works just fine: what God wills is entirely arbitrary, and whether you can keep track of His whims from one moment to the next is irrelevant [because impossible]; all that matters is a willingness to follow orders. All that tiresome analysis of right and wrong and cause and effect and action and responsibility is eliminated, and you’re left with the comforting realization that whatever you do is all right, because you do it, and you havve been saved. How wonderfully convenient.

[Curiously enough I’ve observed a similar incapacity to recognize personal responsibility in Boulder Buddhists, but I don’t know or care what theological arguments they think they’re relying on or whether they’re peculiar to the products of the Naropa Institute.]

In re issues: obviously they’re overrated. The intelligentsia and the press [when they’re taking themselves seriously] pretend to make a great deal of them, as if the attention span of the electorate were really equal to a rigorous debate, but in the age of celebrity journalism and the fifteen-second sound bite and the running joke on VH-1 that even what happened last week might as well be ancient history, who are we trying to kid.

Odd you should mention Davy Crockett. It dates me almost exactly to confess that he was one of the first and greatest of my heroes. This may be why I never wanted to be a cowboy, though I did at one point want to be the Deerslayer. — On the other hand, mostly I wanted to be Flash Gordon.

As for religion in politics, invariably what is said about this is pernicious bullshit. I don’t recall what I thought of the Berrigans [except that they didn’t fit the traditional authoritarian Catholic template very well, which probably seemed like a positive development], but it didn’t begin with them and at this rate it will only end in catastrophe. Politics is about power; nobody expresses an opinion in public unless he wants to influence, and usually control, what other people think and do. The American mullahs differ in their aims not in the slightest from the Iranian mullahs; they just haven’t been as successful. Yet. — The danger is that people are always looking for a reason to cut one anothers’ throats. In general they can’t find an adequate excuse in differences of opinion about, e.g., the role of the Fed in setting interest rates, but religious issues are another matter entirely; after all, God is telling you to do it. — The lack of historical perspective here is frightening. In Europe right up until the year 1700 it was considered completely normal for people to slaughter one another over the issue [cf. Swift on which end of the egg] of whether or not the body and blood of Christ were physically present in the sacrament of the Eucharist; as a matter of course people were drawn and quartered and their heads put up on pikes, and burned at the stake for heresy [we just passed, nota bene, the four hundredth anniversary of Bruno’s incineration for maintaining the plurality of worlds.] After that, and particularly after the spectacle of the jihadlike English Civil War, which provoked the interest of some intellectual heavyweights, e.g. Locke, in political philosophy, reasonable people came to the conclusion that enough of this was long since enough, and made it the first principle of the Enlightenment that theology and politics had to be separated; roughly for the same reason that it isn’t a good idea to mix nitric acid and glycerine. The separation of Church and State is a corollary of this realization, and that’s why it’s codified in the Constitution. — Well, all that is over now, and God help us. — In particular I have no idea how we’re supposed to be imparting an understanding of these principles to the Islamists, who are uncivilized in exact proportion to their failure to understand them, when the American mullahs are hellbent to turn the clock back to the Dark Ages.

In re the red/blue = rural/urban divide, this is a long and interesting historical essay. I know of one lengthy study of the antecedents of film noir that traces the roots of the myth of The Wicked City back to the beginning of the nineteenth century; and I’m sure you could continue to Bunyan, or Maimonides, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, if you were sufficiently persistent. So far as I’m concerned the fundamental conflict is between all the things I value, i.e., reason, freedom, creative expression, mutual toleration, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and distributed parallelism, and the forces of irrational repression, fear, paranoia, and the Orwellian enforcement of the von Neumann bottleneck; not even Dionysian opposed to Apollonian, but Eros versus Thanatos. — The city is human possibility, and the advocates of repression fear that. Everything else is detail.

Current political realignments notwithstanding, I still think the demonization of “the liberal” is meant to connote not simply “urban sophisticate/degenerate” but also “Jew” [the quintessential alien], and intimates jihad. I don’t put a lot of stock in those Sunday Times put-it-in-perspective pieces that try to trace the roots of current events through what is apparently supposed to be a hermetically-isolated American history back through de Tocqueville to the Puritans, but the Red scares which followed both the World Wars, for instance, followed this pattern; and the specific episodes with which I’m familiar in depth, e.g. the Oppenheimer case and the Hollywood witch hunts, had very obvious antisemitic subtexts.

As for the electronic voting machines, at this point I’d be willing to give up this pretense of democracy and just let the damned machines choose. Of course then there’d be an argument about who gets to program them. But better that than this refusal to recognize that the electorate is being programmed, and who is doing it.

And the Marx Brothers reissue is being followed by a W.C. Fields boxed set. — I interpolated The Bank Dick and Never Give A Sucker An Even Break into my election marathon, and I must say my admiration for Fields has not lessened. — Give me an unrepentant drunk any time.

Later.

____________

Beau Brummels (9/23/04)