So the National Organization for Women thinks Elizabeth Vargas is a cause célèbre? Does she even rank as a garden variety célèbre? When someone says to me, "If it can happen to Elizabeth Vargas it can happen to anyone," I have to assume they're referring to hosting World News Tonight, not getting shoved out the door.
Okay, okay, NOW can look out for its own agenda. But aren't there millions of women out there with no health care, no disability insurance, who can be fired because the boss doesn't like how they say, "Good morning," who are just one religious crackpot with a pharmacy degree away from poverty? Wouldn't most of those women consider one week of Elizabeth Vargas' pay a godsend?
Don't get me wrong, just because Vargas is extremely overpaid because she learned to read and comb her hair doesn't abrogate her rights. But she isn't being dumped for getting pregnant; she's getting dumped because ABC can't do the Ken and Barbie News now since Ken caught some shrapnel in the conk. They waited a decent period. They can't bring on Ken's Best Friend Skippy, and they can't leave Barbie there alone. Barbie is a fluff merchant. Fortune's turned against her, just like Fortune cold-shouldered thousands of other girls and boys who weren't pretty enough to get there in the first place. The difference being that Vargas gets millions for not quite making it, and the 24-hour-a-day nanny service women with real problems will never know.
Besides, nobody's ever had a better opportunity to put something in John Stossel's coffee and failed.
Wednesday, May 31
Tuesday, May 30
Martinizing Old Glory
Roger Ailes wonders about the whoopers and whistlers at Arlington National Cemetery.
We get a double dose in Indianapolis, since the Race, which used to be held on Memorial Day and thus had the justification of honoring the departed on their day among 400,000 people who had chosen to go to a sporting event instead, is now held the day before. Like most sermonizing and other public pieties the ceremonies tend to turn the beaters on High and just let 'em run, out of fear that insufficient time will be spent on showing reverence, and the whole thing winds up like a Twinkie without the sponge cake. The moment of silence (with that many people) always impressed me. The moment of Blue Angel (now B1) flyover always impressed me as an excuse for Air Force brass to score some free ducats.
Maybe that's just me, but my guess is that I'm not the only person who can recite the Gettysburg Address (with variants) who's never even bothered to read Edward Everett's two-hour oratory.
But if the Speedway engages in understandable patriotic poshlost, it's left to local teevee news to burst the bonds of dignity and turn the whole thing into one long, breathless shill appropriate to a new mall opening, apparently a reaction to those days when we used to line up and spit on the graves of Vietnam veterans. Used to be they'd cover taps somewhere, and a 21-gun salute and the wreath laying at Arlington. Yesterday it was practically wall-to-wall, with multiple remotes and Civil War reenactments (the heat! the wool!) and microphones stuck in everybody's phiz, including the team of husband and wife war dead buffs who were dressed in identical American flag shirts.
Even so, one moment of truth snuck through, somehow, when a young woman (wife, sister, I didn't catch the ID) said, "I used to spend every Memorial Day picnicking in the state parks. Now I suppose I'll spend every one, for the rest of my life, at Crown Hill (Cemetery)."
We get a double dose in Indianapolis, since the Race, which used to be held on Memorial Day and thus had the justification of honoring the departed on their day among 400,000 people who had chosen to go to a sporting event instead, is now held the day before. Like most sermonizing and other public pieties the ceremonies tend to turn the beaters on High and just let 'em run, out of fear that insufficient time will be spent on showing reverence, and the whole thing winds up like a Twinkie without the sponge cake. The moment of silence (with that many people) always impressed me. The moment of Blue Angel (now B1) flyover always impressed me as an excuse for Air Force brass to score some free ducats.
Maybe that's just me, but my guess is that I'm not the only person who can recite the Gettysburg Address (with variants) who's never even bothered to read Edward Everett's two-hour oratory.
But if the Speedway engages in understandable patriotic poshlost, it's left to local teevee news to burst the bonds of dignity and turn the whole thing into one long, breathless shill appropriate to a new mall opening, apparently a reaction to those days when we used to line up and spit on the graves of Vietnam veterans. Used to be they'd cover taps somewhere, and a 21-gun salute and the wreath laying at Arlington. Yesterday it was practically wall-to-wall, with multiple remotes and Civil War reenactments (the heat! the wool!) and microphones stuck in everybody's phiz, including the team of husband and wife war dead buffs who were dressed in identical American flag shirts.
Even so, one moment of truth snuck through, somehow, when a young woman (wife, sister, I didn't catch the ID) said, "I used to spend every Memorial Day picnicking in the state parks. Now I suppose I'll spend every one, for the rest of my life, at Crown Hill (Cemetery)."
Monday, May 29
Holiday Garden Tour
Grüss an Aachen rose ("Jerry") responding quite well to this spring's root pruning.
Close up of Jerry.
My wife had to use the digital camera last week, so I cleared it out and found these tulips reaching for the sun from March. They predate our purchase of the house. There's never been more than three blooms before.
The fern family. Clockwise from the tassel fern at bottom center: Japanese painted fern, Lady fern, Southernwood fern, Japanese beech fern (all but invisible in front of yellow nametag), Lady in Red, another painted fern, and autumn fern just beginning to bloom. Leatherwood and Royal ferns just visible in back. The hosta in the lower left corner is Fire & Ice, one of my favorites.
I have to splurge on something just hitting the market every year. Here's this year's, a heuchera called "Peach flambé".
Japanese fleece flower, heuchera "Palace Purple", dead nettle, hosta "Blue arrow", a hosta I don't know the name of but call "Tie-dye" because it'll exhibit a half-dozen different tints once the weather gets hot, and a $5 garage sale pot my wife found.
Friday, May 26
The Top 50 Liberal Rock Songs of All Time
Please tell me nobody's gonna do this. And if they do, please tell me that "Imagine" isn't going to be #1. Somebody.
Thursday, May 25
Delirium, Revisited
Um. I'm not sure about this. My recent illness had, as the earlier three bouts have had, a certain hallucinatory quality, a clarity, not a fevered delirium, not a spinning turntable of Ray Miland Lost Weekend dementia with mocking laughter and skulls and snakes an' shit. Mescaline, not LSD, if that means anything to you, and if so you ought to be ashamed of yourself. It would kill your mother if she knew.
Sometime in that period I saw George W. Bush standing with the First Lady, he was saying something about immigration, I think, and she was just this incredible phony person standing sorta next to, sorta behind him. It may have been her body language, or my enhanced psychic receptivity, or maybe I made it up. But she seemed to be laboring at the Stepford bit, which seems to come so naturally to her. It was the first time I remember seeing her where I imagined there was something going on in her head. I listened to some Pere Ubu on the grounds that I wanted to do something with this free psychedelic experience, but David Thomas made me laugh and it hurt to laugh. I went to bed. That was Friday.
Then sometime over the weekend Alton Brown pronounced "Herculean" correctly. He might be the only teevee personality I've ever heard do so. I immediately forgave the schtickiness he's descended into in the past few years, but not Iron Chef America. That was Saturday. I went to bed.
The punchline isn't that when I woke up Sunday I was no longer hallucinating but "conservatives" were. They were--David Brooks removed all doubt--right where I'd left them. I was worried, briefly, about the Others, though. The local news, for one. You'll remember that Mitch "Apple Box" Daniels is about as popular as foot odor, and the poor dears are having a hell of a time figuring out who's ass they're supposed to kiss. There was a brief reprieve when the new fireworks law, aka "fuck it, just go ahead and blow shit up", went into effect, giving Channel 8 the opportunity to hand over a film crew and five minutes' air time to the barely literate "owner" of a major fireworks retail barn and site of a future test of local emergency preparedness.
It was the sort of thing that twenty years ago would have run as a "would you look at what sort of toothless cousin-marry-ers are running loose in [name Southern state]?" feature. The "operator" of this business--which, incidentally, neighbors have been trying to close down for years--kept squawking sentence fragments about "Freedom" and "America", and I kept waiting for someone to walk into the shot and give her a doggy treat.
I've lost track of how long this has gone on. In my youth Indiana, like the civilized world, restricted the sale of major explosives to people who had legitimate reasons to topple buildings. It was a rite of summer in certain quarters to drive to Tennessee (ten feet over the border sufficed) and come back with a trunkload of M-80s. I myself enjoyed the occasional Roman candle fight or the amateur theatrics involved in keeping a straight face while somebody's dad demanded to know how the aluminum siding got blackened. Then suddenly such playthings were openly available in Indiana, provided you signed a piece of paper agreeing not to set them off. Seriously.
There was no question about why the law suddenly changed. Fifteen-year-old boys are not, as a rule, politically connected or effective organizers, and emergency rooms, so far as I know, don't have lobbyists out trying to drum up more business. The only question was why the local media seemed oblivious to prima facie evidence of a state legislature with a For Sale sign out front. It's the same legislature which last year removed the restriction on setting the shit off--which, of course, had been roundly ignored--on the grounds that it was "hypocritical". But it wasn't hypocritical, of course. Hypocritical is where you deny the thing you're really doing. In exchange, fireworks retailers will now be collecting a surtax to fund fire safety and preparedness and, I hope, to fund several masses in the Fire Marshal's memory.
Y'know, it's not that I find watching shit blow up to be an obvious substitute for a satisfying adult sex life, though I do. It's not that this is willfully marketed as a question of "Freedom" when real freedoms are trampled with impunity, nor that as we face a national military manpower crisis Indiana is giving our most natural recruiting demographic a good reason to stay home. It's not even the thousands of injuries--mostly to children--these things cause every year. It's the frickin' tawdriness of the culture, the grubby everything's for sale reality behind the Culture of Life sermons and the Support Our President yard signs. It's Chinatown. Where they've been selling firecrackers for generations.
I'm still a bit tetched. I thought this was gonna veer off onto Richard Viguerie's WaPo Op-Ed, not because it or the spectacle of "conservative" rats deserting their own ship is particularly amusing at this point, but because last night Norah "Bot" O'Donnell did a piece on it on MSNBC, and either she couldn't be bothered learning how to pronounce "Viguerie" or the rest of us have been saying it wrong for twenty-five years. Why don't we have a better press corps? Because we deserved the one we do have.
Sometime in that period I saw George W. Bush standing with the First Lady, he was saying something about immigration, I think, and she was just this incredible phony person standing sorta next to, sorta behind him. It may have been her body language, or my enhanced psychic receptivity, or maybe I made it up. But she seemed to be laboring at the Stepford bit, which seems to come so naturally to her. It was the first time I remember seeing her where I imagined there was something going on in her head. I listened to some Pere Ubu on the grounds that I wanted to do something with this free psychedelic experience, but David Thomas made me laugh and it hurt to laugh. I went to bed. That was Friday.
Then sometime over the weekend Alton Brown pronounced "Herculean" correctly. He might be the only teevee personality I've ever heard do so. I immediately forgave the schtickiness he's descended into in the past few years, but not Iron Chef America. That was Saturday. I went to bed.
The punchline isn't that when I woke up Sunday I was no longer hallucinating but "conservatives" were. They were--David Brooks removed all doubt--right where I'd left them. I was worried, briefly, about the Others, though. The local news, for one. You'll remember that Mitch "Apple Box" Daniels is about as popular as foot odor, and the poor dears are having a hell of a time figuring out who's ass they're supposed to kiss. There was a brief reprieve when the new fireworks law, aka "fuck it, just go ahead and blow shit up", went into effect, giving Channel 8 the opportunity to hand over a film crew and five minutes' air time to the barely literate "owner" of a major fireworks retail barn and site of a future test of local emergency preparedness.
It was the sort of thing that twenty years ago would have run as a "would you look at what sort of toothless cousin-marry-ers are running loose in [name Southern state]?" feature. The "operator" of this business--which, incidentally, neighbors have been trying to close down for years--kept squawking sentence fragments about "Freedom" and "America", and I kept waiting for someone to walk into the shot and give her a doggy treat.
I've lost track of how long this has gone on. In my youth Indiana, like the civilized world, restricted the sale of major explosives to people who had legitimate reasons to topple buildings. It was a rite of summer in certain quarters to drive to Tennessee (ten feet over the border sufficed) and come back with a trunkload of M-80s. I myself enjoyed the occasional Roman candle fight or the amateur theatrics involved in keeping a straight face while somebody's dad demanded to know how the aluminum siding got blackened. Then suddenly such playthings were openly available in Indiana, provided you signed a piece of paper agreeing not to set them off. Seriously.
There was no question about why the law suddenly changed. Fifteen-year-old boys are not, as a rule, politically connected or effective organizers, and emergency rooms, so far as I know, don't have lobbyists out trying to drum up more business. The only question was why the local media seemed oblivious to prima facie evidence of a state legislature with a For Sale sign out front. It's the same legislature which last year removed the restriction on setting the shit off--which, of course, had been roundly ignored--on the grounds that it was "hypocritical". But it wasn't hypocritical, of course. Hypocritical is where you deny the thing you're really doing. In exchange, fireworks retailers will now be collecting a surtax to fund fire safety and preparedness and, I hope, to fund several masses in the Fire Marshal's memory.
Y'know, it's not that I find watching shit blow up to be an obvious substitute for a satisfying adult sex life, though I do. It's not that this is willfully marketed as a question of "Freedom" when real freedoms are trampled with impunity, nor that as we face a national military manpower crisis Indiana is giving our most natural recruiting demographic a good reason to stay home. It's not even the thousands of injuries--mostly to children--these things cause every year. It's the frickin' tawdriness of the culture, the grubby everything's for sale reality behind the Culture of Life sermons and the Support Our President yard signs. It's Chinatown. Where they've been selling firecrackers for generations.
I'm still a bit tetched. I thought this was gonna veer off onto Richard Viguerie's WaPo Op-Ed, not because it or the spectacle of "conservative" rats deserting their own ship is particularly amusing at this point, but because last night Norah "Bot" O'Donnell did a piece on it on MSNBC, and either she couldn't be bothered learning how to pronounce "Viguerie" or the rest of us have been saying it wrong for twenty-five years. Why don't we have a better press corps? Because we deserved the one we do have.
Tuesday, May 23
One Minute Rebuttal
David Brooks, "The Big Sleep", NYTimes, May 21
Brooks, you PRISSY LITTLE TOAD, if we wind up the the same space someday I'm gonna PUSH YOUR FACE IN so far you'll have to TAKE OFF YOUR SWEATER VEST JUST TO SNEEZE! And NOT just because you wrote another specious column, NOT because you can't seem to choose one key and SING THE ENTIRE FUCKING SONG IN IT, NO, not even because you pull out that ridiculous "left blogosphere" shit when I WILL PAY YOU $5 FOR ANY BLOG BEYOND KOS, ATRIOS, OR KEVIN DRUM YOU'VE EVER READ ON THE SUBJECT, HELL, ever read at all, for that matter, providing you'll pick up the money in person so I can KICK YOUR ASS SO HARD PEOPLE WILL THINK YOU'VE GOT A GOITER! Is my minute up already?
And for this reason, the hearings must be investigated, for their dullness derived from three catatonic streams. It was, to twist the metaphor of a recent book, a perfect calm.
The first element in this calm was the rapid fizzling of the N.S.A. scandal. We have been treated in the past year to a panoply of anticlimactic frenzies. For example, we have seen the periodic flaring and the inevitable noneruption of the Valerie Plame affair. Every few weeks, perhaps coinciding with the full moon, the left half of the blogosphere will arise from its habitual state of paranoid rage and soar into a collective paroxysm of anticipatory glee over the thought of Karl Rove's imminent indictment. Alas, the indictment never comes.
Brooks, you PRISSY LITTLE TOAD, if we wind up the the same space someday I'm gonna PUSH YOUR FACE IN so far you'll have to TAKE OFF YOUR SWEATER VEST JUST TO SNEEZE! And NOT just because you wrote another specious column, NOT because you can't seem to choose one key and SING THE ENTIRE FUCKING SONG IN IT, NO, not even because you pull out that ridiculous "left blogosphere" shit when I WILL PAY YOU $5 FOR ANY BLOG BEYOND KOS, ATRIOS, OR KEVIN DRUM YOU'VE EVER READ ON THE SUBJECT, HELL, ever read at all, for that matter, providing you'll pick up the money in person so I can KICK YOUR ASS SO HARD PEOPLE WILL THINK YOU'VE GOT A GOITER! Is my minute up already?
Monday, May 22
White People Amusing Themselves With Tax Money
Lose 10 lbs. This Weekend, Guaranteed: The Sweat and Spasm Diet. I think it's got potential. In the event I doubt I lost more than five; I weigh myself about once a decade just to see where the new baseline is. Thanks for all the good wishes in the meantime.
I felt well enough yesterday to spend 120 bucks at the nursery, actually enjoy a meal (dinner, romaine-and-red-leaf with chicken breast), and read the Sunday paper:
Just north of the extent to which our fair city could annex property in the 60s lies The County Named Appropriately for Alexander Hamilton. It is serving, at only a moderate cost, as an open-air laboratory of Republicanism, something which isn't publicized much; for all I know this puny blog may be the outside world's only source of its progress. Thirty years ago the county was a large pasture speckled with old farming communities, a solid Lincoln Republican land. Noblesville, the county seat, was notable for the two-story chicken that stood on the edge of town. Oh, and there's Geist Reservoir, Indianapolis' Chinatown. There's the remains of a village underneath the water. We don't know where all the other bodies are buried.
In the late 60s the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to flood half the county to increase the size of the reservoir. Personally, I'd like to see them bring that up again.
One of those little villages is Fishers. We lived there for awhile in the late 70s, just at the beginning of the housing boom. The population was just under 2,000. It's twenty-five times that now, nearly wall-to-wall strip malls and McMansion "communities". I used to ride my bike all over that place and the only dangers were the occasional farm dog and excessive bucolic cheeriness. Today you take your life in your hands just driving on those roads. Fishers is also the location of the municipal airport, which is how it found its way into the Sunday paper.
Thanks to Fishers' laissez-faire (French for "greedheads devouring each other") development "program", that airport now sits smack in the middle of "town", meaning on 450 acres of prime strip-mall fodder. Last December Hamilton County asked the Indianapolis Airport Authority, which owns the airport, for permission to move it, which was granted, supposedly provided everyone agree on a new location by June.
Behind closed doors (where else?) they settled on a 1000 acre site in an unincorporated part of the county. The Fishers board agreed. The Hamilton County Commissioners okayed it. The Noblesville City Council votes tomorrow night. Noblesville gets to vote on the grounds that it's the closest annexing (French for "tie down and consume like a roasted pig") authority. Meanwhile, theactual current owners of the land are up in arms and have hired an attorney to fight the takeover.
I thought you might enjoy the dueling quotes:
"This is all about Fishers sitting on beachfront property smack in the middle of their town where the airport is. If this airport is such a great thing, then why isn't Fishers moving the airport to another location in their town?"
--Noblesville Council President Terry Busby
"If this is such a big problem, then why doesn't Noblesville let us annex [the land]? "We'd be happy to put the airport in Fishers and wouldn't think twice about it."
--Fishers Council President Scott Faultless
Meanwhile, the veritable font of Hamilton County incontinent Republican civic boosterism and unchecked economic rapine, Carmel--somewhat quiet on the liebenstraum (German for "obtain the water rights to in exchange for other considerations") front since it got its ass kicked by a bunch of toothless hillibilies*--has decided to arm "stay at home moms and part-time community activists" with radar guns in an effort to combat speeding. Violators aren't ticketed; they receive a friendly letter from the Carmel PD.
No word yet on whether the volunteers are provided with grocery bags in the fight against Carmel's other long-term traffic problem.**
That's it for today. Remember, you can't run an open-air laboratory without the chance a few rats will escape.
* I kid. Home Place, a small unincorporated area now surrounded by Carmel. One of Carmel's actual legal arguments was, "But they get to drive on our streets!"
** For you younger readers, a reference to Driving While Black.
I felt well enough yesterday to spend 120 bucks at the nursery, actually enjoy a meal (dinner, romaine-and-red-leaf with chicken breast), and read the Sunday paper:
Just north of the extent to which our fair city could annex property in the 60s lies The County Named Appropriately for Alexander Hamilton. It is serving, at only a moderate cost, as an open-air laboratory of Republicanism, something which isn't publicized much; for all I know this puny blog may be the outside world's only source of its progress. Thirty years ago the county was a large pasture speckled with old farming communities, a solid Lincoln Republican land. Noblesville, the county seat, was notable for the two-story chicken that stood on the edge of town. Oh, and there's Geist Reservoir, Indianapolis' Chinatown. There's the remains of a village underneath the water. We don't know where all the other bodies are buried.
In the late 60s the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to flood half the county to increase the size of the reservoir. Personally, I'd like to see them bring that up again.
One of those little villages is Fishers. We lived there for awhile in the late 70s, just at the beginning of the housing boom. The population was just under 2,000. It's twenty-five times that now, nearly wall-to-wall strip malls and McMansion "communities". I used to ride my bike all over that place and the only dangers were the occasional farm dog and excessive bucolic cheeriness. Today you take your life in your hands just driving on those roads. Fishers is also the location of the municipal airport, which is how it found its way into the Sunday paper.
Thanks to Fishers' laissez-faire (French for "greedheads devouring each other") development "program", that airport now sits smack in the middle of "town", meaning on 450 acres of prime strip-mall fodder. Last December Hamilton County asked the Indianapolis Airport Authority, which owns the airport, for permission to move it, which was granted, supposedly provided everyone agree on a new location by June.
Behind closed doors (where else?) they settled on a 1000 acre site in an unincorporated part of the county. The Fishers board agreed. The Hamilton County Commissioners okayed it. The Noblesville City Council votes tomorrow night. Noblesville gets to vote on the grounds that it's the closest annexing (French for "tie down and consume like a roasted pig") authority. Meanwhile, the
I thought you might enjoy the dueling quotes:
"This is all about Fishers sitting on beachfront property smack in the middle of their town where the airport is. If this airport is such a great thing, then why isn't Fishers moving the airport to another location in their town?"
"If this is such a big problem, then why doesn't Noblesville let us annex [the land]? "We'd be happy to put the airport in Fishers and wouldn't think twice about it."
Meanwhile, the veritable font of Hamilton County incontinent Republican civic boosterism and unchecked economic rapine, Carmel--somewhat quiet on the liebenstraum (German for "obtain the water rights to in exchange for other considerations") front since it got its ass kicked by a bunch of toothless hillibilies*--has decided to arm "stay at home moms and part-time community activists" with radar guns in an effort to combat speeding. Violators aren't ticketed; they receive a friendly letter from the Carmel PD.
No word yet on whether the volunteers are provided with grocery bags in the fight against Carmel's other long-term traffic problem.**
That's it for today. Remember, you can't run an open-air laboratory without the chance a few rats will escape.
* I kid. Home Place, a small unincorporated area now surrounded by Carmel. One of Carmel's actual legal arguments was, "But they get to drive on our streets!"
** For you younger readers, a reference to Driving While Black.
Sunday, May 21
Friday, May 19
Later
Woke up ten minutes ago. Everything drenched in sweat. I'd been asleep for about an hour, the longest stretch since yesterday afternoon. I don't quite feel the mental clarity that usually accompanies a fever break, and the thermometer's battery is dead and I have no idea where my wife put the real one. But I got out of bed okay--peeling off the cover wasn't like plunging into a tub of ice water--and I'm sitting down awright. I can bend over, sorta; it no longer feels like someone's just kicked me in the right nut, more like someone did that yesterday. I'm hungry. I'll probably stick with the surgery diet for awhile, just in case; diverticulosis can mimic appendicitis.
Cool Papa Bell's birthday reminded me of William Wallace's poem "Anthem", which you can download here (.pdf file) along with a key to the nicknames, although "Ducky" should be Joe "Ducky" Medwick, not Robert "Ducky" Detweiler if you ask me, and a section on the Negro leagues is certainly in order. Read in out loud, unless it hurts when you laugh, too. I'm going back to bed. If I wake up later I'll let you know.
Cool Papa Bell's birthday reminded me of William Wallace's poem "Anthem", which you can download here (.pdf file) along with a key to the nicknames, although "Ducky" should be Joe "Ducky" Medwick, not Robert "Ducky" Detweiler if you ask me, and a section on the Negro leagues is certainly in order. Read in out loud, unless it hurts when you laugh, too. I'm going back to bed. If I wake up later I'll let you know.
Thursday, May 18
Slog
Okay, so I check in with this week's Nooners column, "Out of Touch: What the president's immigration speech and "The DaVinci Code" have in common," which--you're not going to believe this--never actually makes the case that either is Out of Touch. She does manage to use "detached elites" as a segue, but it's tacked on, unsatisfying, almost as if she'd merely slapped out her contractual 850 words by glancing at a couple of headlines, though of course we know better.
There's not much more to be said for the rest of the thing, either, except a) What the hell happened to religion over the past twenty years that its most vocal adherents can't handle a figurative accidental jostle on the bus without breaking into hysterics? b) would you please quit quoting that "85% to 90% of Americans identify themselves as Christian"? They don't. (It might have been 85% twenty years ago, but it's been dropping ever since and was below 80% a couple years back.) c) if you've got to make (up) those raw number arguments, kindly bear in mind that nearly that many Americans say they believe in ghosts or ESP, which should at least give you pause, plus a solid minority admit to believing in the predictive power of astrology, and many others attend Bi-Monthly Science Fiction Conventions in costumes they made themselves.
As for the Bush/Immigration part of the equation, it's turned out to be a celebrity marriage reality program between Bush and the Right, hasn't it? The aging drama queen and the no-longer-young stud who fills out a flightsuit but isn't too much in the imagination department? Can somebody explain this to me? Four years ago he was a Colossus, the Solitary Warrior, the man who'd single-handedly saved Civilization Herself from the dastardly Moor. Now he's a bum.
Of course no one puts it quite like that, but how are we to understand it? Nobody asked Noonan or Hinderocket back then to slather on the praise in a way that would make a Scientologist PR flack blush. But having done so, wouldn't you expect they'd stand by him now, instead of griping that he didn't update MacArthur's plan to salt the 38th Parallel with cobalt?
Oh, and one more thing, Peggy. If you're occupationally unable at this point to write about politics without telling us what "the people" want, move to Omaha and shut up for five years.
Speaking of Hiney, he's the second person I'd seen praise this from Wretchard at The Belmont Club:
I can't count the number of links I've chased because somebody said, "X is a really good writer," or "Here's a thought-provoking piece for both sides," and he or it turn out merely to reinforce the blurbist's own prejudices. It's not a right-wing-only phenomenon, but the above is--that popping pressure-value of political angst, the wisp of comradeliness, the assertion that Right and Left have been equally misguided--you can only find that sort of thing on the Right, and then only because they've spent four years blaming the Left and the Media for everything and now find themselves out of ammunition and cover.
So in the spirit of our shared sacrifice, with the now comforting world of the War on Terror receding into the background, let me just say this: What the fuck you talkin' about?
I'm obliged, too, to mention that as it goes with the rest of the world, so it goes with Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: please do not try to operate it without reading the manual first. Jaynes' discussion of what consciousness is is a delight. The stuff about myth suffers from Academic Out of his Element Syndrome. Jaynes' theory is not reversible, the "bicameral mind" is not something quaintly assigned to "primitive" peoples, and it's not a defense of "intuitive thinking," nor an excuse to toss around "unconscious mind" like it's a scientific term. I think you were probably reaching for Jung, but at times like these, like most times, it's best to keep your hands in your lap.
There's not much more to be said for the rest of the thing, either, except a) What the hell happened to religion over the past twenty years that its most vocal adherents can't handle a figurative accidental jostle on the bus without breaking into hysterics? b) would you please quit quoting that "85% to 90% of Americans identify themselves as Christian"? They don't. (It might have been 85% twenty years ago, but it's been dropping ever since and was below 80% a couple years back.) c) if you've got to make (up) those raw number arguments, kindly bear in mind that nearly that many Americans say they believe in ghosts or ESP, which should at least give you pause, plus a solid minority admit to believing in the predictive power of astrology, and many others attend Bi-Monthly Science Fiction Conventions in costumes they made themselves.
As for the Bush/Immigration part of the equation, it's turned out to be a celebrity marriage reality program between Bush and the Right, hasn't it? The aging drama queen and the no-longer-young stud who fills out a flightsuit but isn't too much in the imagination department? Can somebody explain this to me? Four years ago he was a Colossus, the Solitary Warrior, the man who'd single-handedly saved Civilization Herself from the dastardly Moor. Now he's a bum.
Of course no one puts it quite like that, but how are we to understand it? Nobody asked Noonan or Hinderocket back then to slather on the praise in a way that would make a Scientologist PR flack blush. But having done so, wouldn't you expect they'd stand by him now, instead of griping that he didn't update MacArthur's plan to salt the 38th Parallel with cobalt?
Oh, and one more thing, Peggy. If you're occupationally unable at this point to write about politics without telling us what "the people" want, move to Omaha and shut up for five years.
Speaking of Hiney, he's the second person I'd seen praise this from Wretchard at The Belmont Club:
However that may be, Jaynes' theory intriguingly suggests that hunches, guesses and intuition may hold some validity. They are the end result of a logical process inaccessible to the waking mind. My own hunch is that in the last two or three months there's been a change in the tone of the blogosphere. Nothing definite, simply a change in atmosphere in proportion to the degree of abstract tendencies of the blogger....
My own theory is that all the old divisions so sharply erected between September 11, 2001 and April, 2003 have been slowly eroded by the uncertainties of the world. The Left and the Right have seen their champions turn out to be all too human, and are confounded. Issues which are a wedge on both sides of the spectrum -- like immigration or Darfur -- have scattered interest groups around like balls after a billiard break. New issues like the resurgence of a hostile Russia, the spread of Marxism in Latin America -- even the malicious buffoonery of the Iranian President -- are crowding at the fringes of the now comforting world of the War on Terror. The old play is ending and yet the new one has not yet begun. And this bothers abstract intellectuals far more than it does the men in the field. A soldier can write with perfect conviction that "the world was a slightly better place every time I pulled the trigger" because he lives in a world of specificity, but the agonized thinker can find no such comfort in cold abstractions; abstractions now in need of repair under the weight of experience.
I can't count the number of links I've chased because somebody said, "X is a really good writer," or "Here's a thought-provoking piece for both sides," and he or it turn out merely to reinforce the blurbist's own prejudices. It's not a right-wing-only phenomenon, but the above is--that popping pressure-value of political angst, the wisp of comradeliness, the assertion that Right and Left have been equally misguided--you can only find that sort of thing on the Right, and then only because they've spent four years blaming the Left and the Media for everything and now find themselves out of ammunition and cover.
So in the spirit of our shared sacrifice, with the now comforting world of the War on Terror receding into the background, let me just say this: What the fuck you talkin' about?
I'm obliged, too, to mention that as it goes with the rest of the world, so it goes with Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: please do not try to operate it without reading the manual first. Jaynes' discussion of what consciousness is is a delight. The stuff about myth suffers from Academic Out of his Element Syndrome. Jaynes' theory is not reversible, the "bicameral mind" is not something quaintly assigned to "primitive" peoples, and it's not a defense of "intuitive thinking," nor an excuse to toss around "unconscious mind" like it's a scientific term. I think you were probably reaching for Jung, but at times like these, like most times, it's best to keep your hands in your lap.
Wednesday, May 17
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