Honestly, That's The First Time I've Ever Heard Of Someone Unintentionally Insulting Rod McKuen.

David Brooks, "This Old House". December 9

He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

--Ecclesiastes, Or, The Preacher

Well thank God for David Brooks, then.

--Jimbo Riley

AND Dear Lord, he's back at that exurbs thing like a dog returning to its sick. This is either the result of Late Onset Complete and Utter Failure Syndrome (taken, in some quarters, for Premature Obama Derangement, but I'm sticking with my diagnosis), or Desperate Thrashing In Search Of Continued Employment. Whichever the case, either get the man a good editor or into treatment, or both; surely, unlike MoDo, there's someone on the Times staff who still believes his schtick.

The 1980s and 1990s made up the era of the great dispersal. Forty-three million people moved every year, and basically they moved outward — from inner-ring suburbs to far-flung exurbs on the metro fringe. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh declined by 8 percent in those years, but the developed land area of the Pittsburgh area sprawled outward by 43 percent.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act, and soon Americans from coast-to-coast had steam coming out of the tops of their heads.

I know, I know, we've been over this before. Real sociology is bad enough, though it must be given credit for more-or-less avoiding the fascist impulses of its closest cousin. Pop sociology is tennis with the net down, eyeless linesmen, and no balls.

People in cities moved outward! It seems less like a polished gem of cultural observation and more like an imperative of simple geometry. I suppose they could have gone Up, or Down, or Stayed In One Place; each of which would then have Told Us Something Significant about Up or Down or Stasis. It's like Thurber's vain struggles with the microscope in Biology 101: Mr. Brooks, you do realize you've just drawn a picture of your own eyeball?

And again, we're fine with these pastoral frolics of his; we simply object to the venue. But then we actually live in that America which Brooks occasionally pretends to visit. And we can pretty much tell you that Exurb-Bound America in the 80s and 90s was tryin' to get far enough away from the Nigras that only a few of them would show up at its children's school in the next fifteen years, and those would have 4.2 speed in the 40 or good penetration off the dribble. The End.

Did anyone ever call Brooks on this? I don't mean on the internets, I mean during his decade and counting on PBS and NPR. The man has built an entire career based on studiously avoiding the obvious...

If you asked people in that age of go-go suburbia what they wanted in their new housing developments, they often said they wanted a golf course. But the culture has changed. If you ask people today what they want, they’re more likely to say coffee shops, hiking trails and community centers.

...while substituting this passive-aggressive, updated-for-the-Go-Go-Eighties And Not Since version of Hippies vs. Straights for an easily amused audience. Not to mention one which did not want to be reminded why it really fled the suburbs for the supersuburbs.

People overshot the mark. They moved to the exurbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds. So in the past years there has been a new trend. Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape.

There are restaurant and entertainment zones, mixed-use streetscape malls, suburban theater districts, farmers’ markets and concert halls. In addition, downtown areas in places like Charlotte and Dallas are reviving as many people move back into the city in search of human contact. Joel Kotkin, the author of “The New Geography,” calls this clustering phenomenon the New Localism.

And James "Doghouse" Riley, who hasn't got anything to sell that wasn't available at this summer's yard sale, calls it "White upper-middle class trendoids doing something different with their money than white upper-middle-class trendoids did fifteen years ago, and some guy in the newspaper discovering it eight years later. Which is, like, really, really unprecedented."

This is, admittedly, anecdotal, but then it's at least an anecdote, not something I extrapolated from a magazine while I was waiting for them to call my reservation. As someone who lived in a series of downtown neighborhoods that ranged from "trendoid transitional" to "sketchy", I've seen a remarkable, perhaps remarkably crazy, resurgence of the northside of my benighted village in the ten years I've been a suburbanite. The area north of the old, old monied residential areas of downtown, which were largely gentrified in the late-70s through the 80s, saw a housing explosion which had a lot more to do with Old Speculation than New Localism. To a guy approximately my height and weight who used to walk through areas of somewhere between ramshackle and condemned fine old houses, the difference between the latest go-round and the earlier was that this time in the place of individual rehabbers you got tax-break contractors coming in and turning whole neighborhoods into Victorianesque McMansions. I don't know anybody who lives there, which is to say it's a young couples' game, but I suspect that if the housing bubble burst anywhere in this city of neighborhoods, it's there, and that people who imagined they were going to sell for big profit and move across the county line when those children they planned to have someday were old enough to go to school are now considering the cost of a vasectomy. White flight is right where it landed. It isn't going away, and it sure isn't crawling back to the city shamefaced, shit-faced, or otherwise faced. It is, it goes without saying, demanding that a light rail system be built for it, to relieve the congestion and shorten the commute it caused and accepted in the first place, as small price to pay for getting away from the coloreds.

Barack Obama has said that he would start an infrastructure project that will dwarf Dwight Eisenhower’s highway program. If, indeed, we are going to have a once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment, it would be great if the program would build on today’s emerging patterns. It would be great if Obama’s spending, instead of just dissolving into the maw of construction, would actually encourage the clustering and leave a legacy that would be visible and beloved 50 years from now....

the Obama stimulus plan could help localities create suburban town squares. Many communities are trying to build focal points. The stimulus plan could build charter schools, pre-K centers, national service centers and other such programs around new civic hubs....

But alas, there’s no evidence so far that the Obama infrastructure plan is attached to any larger social vision. In fact, there is a real danger that the plan will retard innovation and entrench the past.

Okay, in response, let me just say, "Fuck you." If we need advice about where the next fifty years are headed, maybe we should look elsewhere, rather than to the guy who last prediction lasted twenty, and that by his own scorecard.

If the Middle Class now finds itself in a leaky lifeboat with a serious list on a moonless North Atlantic night while suffering the first signs of hypothermia, maybe it could begin by thinking about the underclass it willingly threw overboard for the sake of a little extra leg-room, back when the sun was shining and the wind was fair. You Broke It, You Bought It, and don't act like you didn't see the sign. I'm sorry for the Middle Class. I are one. And I've been screaming about Reaganism for thirty years, but still, fair's fair. We're enduring the moral repugnance of bailing out Wall Street thieves and pirates, not simply because there are Wall Street thieves and pirates, nor the corporate shill politicians who enable them, but because the Middle Class consciously, and repeatedly, voted in their favor. To say now that massive federal works program designed--at least partly--to repair the damage--in whatever portion--ought to concentrate on building bridges so SUV-commanding exurbanwhites can get to daycare more efficiently is the sliming on the cake. Charter schools? Fuck you. Repair the damage you've done over the past forty years by turning urban schools into political footballs and surrogates for segregation. No more top-down entitlements, no more tax subsidies for Lifestyle Shopping Experiences while schools go begging and honest people go broke. Either the economy continues to spin down the toilet, in which case the Middle Class will soon become the Underclass, and full recipients of the back of the hand they offered when times were good; or the economy will stabilize, and it will be time for the people who enabled this to start paying an overdue bill.

For a country which feels so strongly about religious conviction that it routinely lies to pollsters asking how often it goes to church, you might think the day would dawn when it decided to actually wash away, rather than wish away, its stain. That's no doubt too much to hope, but I don't see why a loathsome toad and former Bush page boy like David Brooks should still be offering us his vision of the future, and still sitting at the New York Times instead of on some trendy 21st century version of the dunking stool. At taxpayer expense, fine. 

Olio

• Isn't there a war zone we can ship Tom Brokaw off to now? I caught the second half-hour of his Meet the Press swan song interview with the President-elect, who, incidentally, he called "Mr. President" at one point, though the transcript has him saying "Mr. President-elect" all the way down. I realize that with Brokaw "elect" sounds something like "wec" or "we-oh" spoken as quickly as possible and with the tongue soldered to the lower front teeth at the rootline, but I distinctly...

• Wait, am I the only one who's disturbed by the whole "what to call the President-elect" business? The professional teleprompter readers on my teevee sure don't seem to be, to the extent that they seem wholly indifferent to the concept, or maybe they're just not mentally up to it. I'll provisionally trust this guy, because he's got perfect protocol hair (scroll down). He says it's "President-elect" and "Mr."

Now the problem I have with this--you knew there'd be one, right?--is that Senator Obama has not yet been elected anything; we-all elected Electors. And sure, minor quibble, but I'm not the one who stands on formality. Protocol does. Protocol is all minor fucking quibbling. I'm fine with "Mr. President-elect", but missing any opportunity to remind the American people that they are not free to elect the highest officer in the land seems a shame.

What I do have a problem with is the news-hairdos who skip the honorific and go right to the "Mr.", and, especially, the use of bare-nekkid "Obama" (I'm looking at you, CNN, but probably because you're the only one I've caught so far). The last-name business ought to be reserved for when we're officially tired of the guy, and should be left out of reporting altogether. This is especially galling since the blatant informality/cryptic insult/faux-democratic leveling is, without fail, coming from the mouth of the sort of person who'd take loud umbrage if you refused to let her cut in front of you in line at the bank, on the grounds that she's on television and you aren't.

• Where was I? Oh, Brokaw. As I say, I tuned in at the bottom of the hour, so I missed him suggesting Jack Fucking Welch as Auto Czar, apparently because, since it was his Last Day, he feared there might be a viewer or two still uncertain as to whether he (Brokaw) had a shred of decency. Someone who'd missed the last fifteen years of his pandering literary career, say.

Look at the transcript, if you must. It's not that Brokaw could have phoned it in; that's hardly newsworthy. It's that he could have phoned it in last February and had The Help spruce it up a little with some topicality. Twenty minutes at the top talking about the economy and bailouts, which never rises above headline depth, and which began with "How are you different from FDR?" Dear God, just once, just once to have a Mr. President-elect who'd say, "Gee, I dunno, Tom. You're the professional teller of Fairy Tales."

• Oh, if only we could harness the awesome power of the American Left and use it for good! Here, for example, the Internets' Answer to SMERSH cruelly pummel Mr. President-elect Obama over his cabinet choices, imperiling the delicate sprout of our national recovery and new-found good will. At least Politico has the sense to call them Liberals; the other day one of the blogs I roll had Jane Hamsher singing "L'Internationale" because she'd rather see Joe Lieberman's scrotum on the wall than his ass back in his seat.

Okay, so we learned last January that hoards of self-styled progressives seemed metaphysically certain they'd learned the lessons of 1972, while displaying a textbook case of fugue amnesia when it came to the Clinton years and the election of 2000. Symptoms appear to include repeated fevered attempts to emulate monolithic Republicanism. No criticism! You'll ruin it for everybody! Barack Obama must continue to pretend he's a Centrist, or else his fragile landslide victory might still come apart! Never mind that no Leftist worthy of the name could have ever mistaken Mister Senator President-elect for a liberal. But there's a guy who writes for a trades-union site who said mean things! Y'know, it ain't my party, but, Th' fuck did you imagine it to be? You took on the support of Mr. Obama as both leader of the nation and head of his party, and you're already freaking out before the Solstice? Good God, the Republicans pretty much have this sort of thing down to a science; when Marc Raciot proved unacceptable to the religious nuts as Attorney General, he was replaced by John Ashcroft before you could say Exposed Female Breast.

Look, there is one genuine piece of advice I can offer in this life, my only special area of expertise, and I don't say it very often, so listen up: The Buzz never lasts. Worrying about it makes it less enjoyable, trying to prolong it makes it go away that much faster. The Democratic Congress didn't fall to Bush-level approval numbers between '06 and '08 because it was too liberal, but because it didn't perform as expected. It bodes ill for people who prefer one side rather than the other pick their pockets. It isn't I who's criticizing Tim Geithner or Larry Summers, because I never had any illusions it'd be any different. It ought to be you who is, maybe; at the very least recognize that you signed on to manage Democrats, not Pentacostals.

• There's your problem right there. Mr. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gets high marks in the Environmental Activist press for going to Poland to mouth platitudes about Green Laws. Yes, the same Mr. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who owns eighteen Hummers, but doesn't even drive the one he converted to hydrogen anymore out of his newfound respect for the environment. Well, that, plus the fact that the CHP drives him everywhere, plus the fact that there aren't any Hydrogen Refilling Stations, unless you're traveling an endless loop from Sacremento to Long Beach. And yes, it's the same Governor of California who six weeks ago put the kibosh on, among other things, a pollution tax on carriers entering California ports and a law banning toxic chemicals in food packaging. But hoo-ray! He said something!

• h/t Digby:

"Having lived with this very right wing Republican group that runs the House most of the time, the notion of trying to deal with them as if we could be post-partisan gives me post-partisan depression."

--Rep. Barney Frank

"Choo-Choo". As In "Railroad".

Look, it's not my usual practice to defend guys who've
appended "von" to their names just to impress society dames.

--James B.S. Riley

Enid Nevy, "Sunny von Bulow, Focus of Society Drama, Dies". December 7

Guest expert: Dr. Michael Baden, Bulow defense expert and author of Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner (Random House, 1989).

LET'S us start with what can, and should, be agreed upon: Martha Sharp "Choo-Choo" "Sunny" Crawford-von Auersperg-"von" Bulow was found deeply unconscious on the morning of December 21, 1980; she was taken into hospital, but her coma was never reversed. Mrs. Bulow's children from her first marriage hired a private investigation team, which discovered the mysterious black bag Mrs. Bulow's maid had claimed to have seen several times, containing an exotic form of valium, amobarbitol, and a syringe with insulin residue. A Rhode Island grand jury indicted Claus Bulow for attempted murder. He was tried and convicted. The conviction was overturned, the state retried him, and he was found not-guilty.

So now let's have a brief word about fact vs. belief. Some people believe Claus Bulow tried to murder his wife. The presumption of innocence belongs before the Bar; we are not required to be agnostic inside our own skulls. But most of us feel that the Newspaper of Record ought to, at the very least, consider the matter in light of the ultimate finding of fact, instead of acting as though the first trial revealed theological certainties which were then negated by the bête noir of all those Charles Bronson actioners, the criminal released on a niggling technicality.  And we feel this, it should go without saying, despite the almost daily evidence that it does nothing of the sort:

The appeal was guided by Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, and the conviction was overturned on the grounds that certain information had not been made available to the defense and that there had been no search warrant when pills were sent for testing.

Mr. von Bülow was acquitted in 1985 after a second trial in Providence, R.I., where his chief defense counsel was Thomas P. Puccio.

That's it; we are then treated to several column inches detailing the "facts" of the case as presented by Maria Schrallhammer, Mrs. Bulow's long-time maid and a woman who admitted in the second trial that she'd lied at the first. We have the suspiciously European-seeming contents of the peripatetic black bag, but no mention of the fact that its provenance is entirely mysterious, nor that it was available to the suspiciously European-sounding von Auerspergs for several months before it was located. Nor that the maid had originally neglected to mention she'd seen the insulin.

That bag is the dog that didn't bark.

(By the way, we'll also note here--and, again, anyone checking this blog for legal advice ought to see a mental health professional as quickly as possible--that should you find yourself convicted of a crime you did not commit, and faced with the decision whether to appeal on grounds of "niggling little legal technicalities" or the findings of Paul Drake Jr, P.I., which conclusively prove your alibi, take the former. That's what appeals are won on.)

Okay, here's Dr. Baden's take: Mrs. Bulow had actually been admitted to hospital while comatose three times between December 1979 and one year later. The first episode was diagnosed as bronchial pneumonia; afterwards her doctor discovered hypoglycemia. The second, in early December 1980, was caused by acute aspirin toxicity. She'd swallowed at least 60 tablets due to a "sinus headache". Baden says this was an obvious suicide attempt, and one which almost worked. The Times report says exogenic insulin was found, or suspected; Baden says no.

On December 21 Claus found his wife unconscious on the bathroom floor. The window was open to the 5ºF. weather, and she was seriously hypothermic. Based on certain facts about the discovery, including an open medicine chest, the EMTs suspected barbiturate overdose. But somehow, at the hospital, her low blood sugar became the basis of her treatment; they may not have known she was naturally hypoglycemic. They didn't treat for overdose which Baden says should have been SOP. They put her on a glucose IV. Then someone managed to futz up the blood samples in the lab, which included a lab tech tossing out one of two samples. The first two results were contradictory. The third, weeks later, showed a high insulin level, but not--according to Baden--an unreasonably high one given that she'd been pumped full of glucose. But the reading would eventually be used to charge Bulow with attempted murder.

But the dog didn't bark. The attending physicians had misdiagnosed her, then discounted the alcohol and barbituates levels when they were returned (she had "only" 0.01 BAL, but that was several hours after she'd ingested anything; Baden puts her at 0.12 when she lost consciousness). The insulin vial is "remembered", and the dirty syringe is "discovered", after her insulin levels became the focus of her treatment. But that's not what sent her into her final coma.

The Baden book came to me by recommendation, and it's a great read. I've never read the Dershowitz book; I'm not that interested in the case as such, so I don't know how much of Baden's medical testimony, if any, it includes. But the fact is that not only was Bulow eventually found not guilty, there are explanations out there which not only suggest reasonable doubt, but which suggest the final verdict was the right one. It's also possible, in the mathematical sense, that the Times sorry tabloid recitation is actually the correct one. But that don't make it right.

Looking For The Right Gift For That Grade Schooler On Your List?

Yes, anodized O.D. It complements any school color scheme.  One-hand operation with the Carson flipper means you won't have to interrupt that tetherball match.  And if your school lunches are anything like mine were, you're bound to appreciate the combo edge when cornbread muffins are on the menu again.

Friday Bush Farewell Tour Blogging

I'VE been going through my Bush archives.  Okay, so that makes me sound more organized than I'll ever be able to pretend to be; it's a political dump file that dates back to Whitewater. or, roughly, whenever it was I got enough storage to actually keep stuff (ask your parents), with a mind toward giving the man a proper send-off, as opposed to the Bush Farewell Tour hosted by the likes of Charlie Gibson. By the way, the thing I find fascinating about that--not fascinating enough to watch, mind you, beyond what clips Jon Stewart decides to use--is that mass market "news" has been excusing itself for nigh-on thirty years now for its tabloid-worthy coverage by claiming the dictates of the Free Market. So, okay, who th' fuck wants to hear from George W. Bush any more? I can't imagine that yet includes even that portion of the audience which believes the presence of Laura Bush adds something (other than her creepy, Mother's Little Helper vibe; we're about to suggest that a certain event in late 2000 C.E., pictured above, should have caused America to pack up its 0.9 shootin' irons per capita and surround the Supreme Court, demanding Al Gore win Florida. But the simple fact is that no man's immediate family, let alone extended Crime family, ever argued more convincingly that he had no business being President of his local Jaycees, let alone a developed country, and we should have realized it long before Election Day).

Anyway, it's been interesting to note that practically everything I have dating to Campaign 2000 comes from Salon, or from some USENET (ask your parents) poster who laboriously stole someone's copyright for the greater good. Weren't no blogs in my day, sonny! It's also interesting to note that there was considerably--considerably--more criticism of George W. Bush, the man, the campaign, and the record, than I recalled. This may in part be because of what I was choosing to save, but there is a real sense that through 1999 and into the primaries Bush was being held reasonably accountable for his positions and his record, and not just his unfamiliarity with the most-common language used in America. There's actual anger in some Republican circles at South Carolina; there's Molly Ivans ridiculing Bush's campaign expense/ vote count ratio in Michigan; there are claims, from Republicans, that Democratic crossover votes are buoying Bush, and assurances that after his sliming of the Media Darling in SC the Press will be all over him. And then there's nothing. Nothing except Bushisms, the apparent suggestion that George W. Bush was lagging behind in the critical Grammatically Correct Americans demographic.

Then Al Gore invented the Internet.

It's difficult, maybe impossible, to accurately describe the campaign of 2000, let alone its culmination, without employing the word "theft". And, pace Kevin Drum and his readers, Bob Somerby is not a crazy old coot who's gone 'round the bend because of it; he's dead right. Once you've caught your leg in a bear trap, moving on may still be a concern, but there are others. The great majority of the people who committed fraud in the nation's Press in 2000 are still at their jobs, still disseminating, trivializing, juvenilizing, forcing everything to fit into their comfortable upper-class scripts. They don't apologize for helping put Bush in office; hell, they awarded themselves Gold Stars for the coverage. Campbell (Mrs. Dan Senor) Brown boogied the night away at Bush 2000 headquarters; once 2008 was clearly a Democratic year she went from baking cupcakes to throwing them.  She's suddenly a Feminist, the sort of Feminist who slags the President-Elect because he won't play the Hillary Clinton Is A Drama Queen game with her. You have to be an embarrassment on the order of Judith Miller to even receive a demotion. In fact, you have to be Judith Miller; there are enough other embarrassments at the Times alone to fill two new Tina Brown vanity websites.

Okay, so how Bush got there, and what he did once he was there, are two different things, but it can be a little difficult for the seasoned dyspeptic to sort them out, or care. And I'm sure I mentioned this before, but in the horrible month between the Election and the Selection, George W. Bush, the Man Who Would Be Exponentially The Worst President Ever, not only ducked the Press--appearing, I believe, exactly twice--but who, when he did turn up, showed evidence that his own skin was trying to reject his body. And while we may not be the most politically savvy, or informed, nation on earth, we are, hands down, that nation which, alone among countries whose primary language has an alphabet, believes quite literally in angels, demons, visitations from Beyond the Grave, extraterrestrials, card readers, palm readers, tea-leaves readers, entrails readers, table tappers, phrenologists, planetary omens, appearances of the Holy Family on baked goods, backwards messages on records, and half-off coupons. How th' fuck we missed that boil is forever beyond me.

Back Home Again

CARMEL, Indiana--home of Crooked Stick GC, where in 1991 Long John Daly leapt upon national stage, though "leapt" here is figurative--sits in the half-light of a late fall morning just eight miles from here, and even at this hour one can almost hear someone scheming to deprive someone else of a considerable chunk of his savings. It's what they do up there when it's too cold to golf.

Carmel--it's pronounced CAR-muhl, which used to be the way you could spot outsiders, but that's been the standard waggish pronunciation, like tar-zhay for Target™, for so long I catch myself doing it sometimes--is the Queen of Hamilton County, which keeps repeating that it's the Fastest Growing County in Indiana as though that meant Still Plenty o' Good Arable Bottom Land Left and not McMansions and strip malls everywhere there isn't already a golf course. They don't add And The Wealthiest nearly as often, unless they're sure you're one of their kind or are interested in leasing some prime retail space. But they're entitled to that one, too.

As I recall it, Indiana was the first state in the nation to complete its portion of the Interstate Highway system, including 465, the ring around what was then mostly suburban or still rural Marion county, which the city of Indianapolis would annex in short order. This facilitated White Flight right out of the county, and the sleepy little village of Carmel, and the nearby, even sleepier, whistle stops of Fishers and Westfield, were among the major beneficiaries, doubly so since Indianapolis' Old Money has always resided on the Northside.

It's a solid Republican area--in fact "solid" seems to weak a word there--and has been, probably, since Lincoln won the War, as John Prine once put it. This circumstance was not noticeably altered by the influx of thousands of middle-to-upper class white people.

You can add to the mix Central Indiana's own Chinatown; the sharpers who ran the Water Company from the 1920s picked Hamilton County as the spot for their new reservoir(s) (at one point the plan--Caution: Army Corps of Engineers At Work!--was to flood a full third of the county). In the end Congress refused to fund the plan, and the Water Company had to content itself with the profits from land around the reservoir they rather astutely turned into a housing development before the county could take it over for a nature preserve. Fishers and Westfield were a little slower getting into the game, but now it's a race to annex the most land before it's all gone, the better to collect water and sewage charges for the rest of perpetuity.

It's been a grand enough spectator sport for the occasional viewer with a sardonic outlook and no tax liabilities at stake, wondering when the whole damn thing would blow up and who'd catch the shrapnel. Long-time readers of this blog with nothing important on their minds might even remember our coverage of the tail end of the Connor Prairie Boondoggle, in which an outdoor laboratory-type living history museum wholly owned by Earlham College, a Quaker institution in Richmond, IN, was wrested from it with the help of Indiana's Republican Attorney General Steve Carter, who stepped in when a lot of Fishers muckety-mucks thought its full commercial potential wasn't being realized. Carter had absolutely no standing to get involved, but he did have an eye towards higher office and a nose for where the campaign contributions required to get there might be located, which is at least 9/10 of the law. As a result, Earlham parted with the museum, which is now in the hands of the sort of people who spend every moment, up to two hours daily, raising funds by selling the wealthy tax-deductible dinners, and--coincidentally, we're sure--a small section of land has been set aside for a much-needed condominium development. At the end of this season the Racist Star glowingly reported that fundraising efforts had set a new record, which is about as surprising as finding that porn sites had proven popular with frat boys. Our personal involvement is limited to the fact that the move to expel the insufficiently commercial Friends was spearheaded by Berkley Duck III, Esq., whom we wouldn't have had the courage to invent.

[Full disclosure:  we used to live near the county line, and a scant three decades ago I used to blissfully bicycle my way across rolling flat-ass fields and past the sleepy train-stop hamlet of 800 people.  Now you take your life in your hands driving through the place in anything smaller than a Lincoln Navigator.]

But if we imagined that the inevitable distant explosion we hoped to live long enough to hear someday would be caused by insufficient infrastructure, shoddy home construction, empty retail space, or, at the outside, water riots, we've had to content ourselves mostly with the six-to-eight legal battles over incontinent annexation that've been going on for a decade now. That is, we did, until late last week.

Because now word has arrived that Car-MEHL has a bit of spending difficulty, unrelated to the general economic malaise.  It's  more in the vein of Predictable Result of Guaranteed One-Party Republican Rule for Generations. A little over a year ago the soon-to-be-facing-the-necessity-of-buying-airtime-for-eight-solid-months-of-campaign-ads Daniels administration agreed to pay the city $90 mil to take over four miles of Keystone Avenue (Highway 431). Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard announced that this was sufficient funding to allow the city to build six more of its beloved traffic roundabouts, which are sort of a public transportation version of domed stadiums, except with speeding morons coming at you from three directions at once. Evidently what Carmel loves about traffic roundabouts is that they are so utterly unfamiliar to anyone who doesn't (or wouldn't be allowed to) live there that a large percentage of outsiders is likely to die horrible flaming late-model-domestic-vehicle deaths, or stay the hell away after a loved one has. It's a sort of PC replacement for their long-standing tradition of arresting anyone caught driving while Black. The damn things are bad enough when you're traveling Carmel's own surface streets; now they're putting them in on a major north-south thoroughfare which used to belong to the state, which, of course, had previously stymied anything that looked like change, progress, or just vaguely European.

Or that is they were, until Brainard (who'd been reelected--there's a shocker--a year ago while promising not a cent of Carmelite money was needed) turned up asking for $58 million worth of those cents, as the project was 1/3 completed and the money 1/2 gone. And it turned out that, oh--seat belts fastened?--he sorta might have known about this all along, and that $112 million had been the low-ball figure he'd actually been given.

Brainard, to his credit--his credit as a Republican politician, I mean--insists that he never tried to low-ball the plan to his constituents, but was merely misinformed. And overly optimistic that $112 mil could be made to look like $90 mil if one simply wished hard enough, and whistled while crossing any graveyards. And he says he withheld the shortfall until now because he wanted to make sure all the numbers were in before he said anything. The city council, for its part, begins feigning shock, shock! at this wholly unexpected turn of events it had been helping to keep quiet since February.

This comes on the heels of the public collapse six weeks ago of the private-funding cover story for the $80 million asterisk Carmel Performing Arts Center. $70 mil of that public money is already spent; the $40-60 million expected to pay for the limestone façade and skylight, and other classy upgrades, which was supposed to come from private fundraising, is so far roughly $38-$58 million short of its goal. The Redevelopment Commission has ponied up a needed $45,000,000.

Now, again, the only thing that's surprising, to me, is that this was learned not thirty years after the fact, when a dead call-girl's diary was opened or a papier-mâché bridge collapsed, but here and now, about a seated government. And the most entertaining feature, thanks to the Racist Star's new practice of putting reader comments right at the end of stories, instead of making you click a link for them, and thereby having time to steel yourself, has been the die-hard Republican excuse mongering, which has included "this shouldn't be news in an Indianapolis paper!" (the old Love It Or Leave It ploy with a special reverse twist), and the suggestion--which comes, mind you, from someone standing in the wreckage of Reagan-Friedmanomics and, possibly, with a view from his office window of the fifth publicly-finanaced sports palace we've built in the last thirty years, or maybe just the spot where we've torn down one or are tearing down another--that Brainard had somehow "turned into a Democrat."  

Caucasians

Steven Kurutz, "White Russians Arise, This Time at a Bowling Alley". December 2

IT'S a jackpot, of sorts, as a little side trip unexpectedly takes us to the corner of Food Fadism Boulevard and Boy, The World Sure Was Stupid Before I Came Along Avenue, and all thanks to the Coens. Martin Doudoroff of cocktaildb.com, who describes himself as "a cocktail enthusiast and technology consultant":

Lebowski adherents may have vaulted the White Russian to icon status, but serious cocktail enthusiasts still deride it for being simplistic and overly sweet — a confection designed to appeal to unserious drinkers.

“It’s hard to think of a more boring drink, except, perhaps, when it’s spraying from the Dude’s mouth...."

Believed to date to the 1950s or early 1960s, the White Russian has no great origin story; its culinary precursor is the Alexander. Having been popular in the disco ’70s, the cocktail is, in the words of Mr. Doudoroff, “a relic of an era that was the absolute nadir of the American bar.”

Okay, first: we find it imperative that the modern American old enough to drive, smart enough to read, and emotionally stable and hormonally-balanced enough not to try to turn everything he learns into a pick-up line, refrain as much as possible from throwing the word "nadir" around indiscriminately. Perhaps this is in part because in the 20th century we used to describe the Reagan administration that way.

Second: this is not my milieu by any means, and I freely grant Tequila Sunrise, Harvey Wallbanger (both pre-Disco), and Piña Colada (definitely Disco, though in fairness you needed something to cut the bitterness of all that blow, I suppose), the iconic White Russian and alcohol-poisoning-in-a-glass Jelly Bean or Long Island Ice Tea. But nadir? From a guy who allows himself to be described as "an historian" in print? (I'm sorry, "a" historian. Does the Times even have a style book anymore?) Forget the Tiki monstrosities of moribund Fifties and Sixties Ring-a-ding-Dingdom; how about the intervening Eighties, with their penchant for junior-high smuttiness (Give me a Blowjob! Gimme a Screaming Orgasm! Har, har, har.) humping mechanically in a ménage à trois with boring sweetness and instant Rohypnolesque intoxication (both the above mix Kahlua and Bailey's; the Blowjob adds whipped cream, while an Orgasm requires vodka). How about the following decade of Jello shots, body shots, drinks mixed right in your mouth, and Frozen Margaritas? Who you callin' nadir? For that matter, adding vodka to Red Bull, or every conceivable cordial to vodka and calling the result an Xtini does not exactly strike me as having transformed the Naughts into the height of cafe society, let alone Paris between the Wars.

Only the rarest of palates achieves expertise before middle age! We suppose this to be doubly difficult at minimum if one confines oneself to a field such as Mixology or The Western, where classical standards are non-existent and the odds of actually learning something useful before the subject renders you unconscious are long. You, sir, have mastered the art of knowing what's popular in your own time. Congratulations. If you have not yet received your Cultural Gold Star for having found the Austin Powers series delightfully anachronistic, I promise to look into it, if you promise to leave.

Now, then. Full disclosure: my drink is coffee, where I approach Voltaire in daily consumption. My alcoholic consumption tends to good wine, good bourbon, or first-rate Scotch, taken as God intended. On occasions when reduced speed is desirable it's bourbon, brandy, or apple brandy with gingerale. I can handle, on occasion, a Bloody Mary early or an X.O. Armagnac late. Coffee drinks in cold weather, vodka and lemonade in hot, splash of grape juice if you've got it. The latter is my Poor Wife's regular drink, but she's a public school teacher and can be excused anything.

And I've got no objection to the occasional Bailey's rocks or, yes, White Russian taken as a dessert. What I do object to is the sort of unqualified snobbery (and basic fraudulence) which sneers at anything "sweet" and puts sugar in its tea. The palate changes around age 25 from the infant's desire for sweetness (sweet things, in the wild, are not poisonous) toward the complex and the bitter and the longer-lasting. This does not simultaneously make you a genius, and sneering at "sweet" amounts to an unpleasant combination of the reformed alcoholic's agressive teetotalling and the second grader's abuse of the kindergartner.

Anyway, let's go to the tape, specifically, the CocktailDB.com list of Top 25 Drink Choices:

1. the Vesper Martini, which owes more to the connoisseurship of action movies than gourmandise.

2. French 75. A fine old name, and 2 teaspoons of fine sugar.

3. Alabama Slammer. Aside from the refined imagery of the name, Southern Comfort, Amaretto, and sloe gin. Not exactly for diabetics.

4. Brandy Flip. Cream. Egg. Sugar. Clarified butter optional.

5. Smith and Kerns. A boring White Russian, minus vodka, topped with soda.

6. Cuba Libre. Rum and coke, plus lime. Not at all boring.

7. Apple Martini. Look, first, it's vodka and schnapps, which is what Nabokov might have called a parody of a cocktail. If you like 'em, fine, but the simple fact that "cocktail purists" did not scream loud, long, and sufficiently until this whole "X Martini" thing was eliminated is an indelible black mark.

8. Whiskey sour, which adds some sour to its sugar, and which the CocktailDB would have you make with straight lemon juice instead of learning to make a proper sour mix. Pikers.

9. Manhattan. Finally a real cocktail.

10. Alaska cocktail. Gin, orange bitters, and Yellow Chartreuse, which is the sweeter version of Green Chartreuse.

Et. seq. People talk dry; people drink sweet, and no one ever went broke sneaking some sugar into his Chardonnay (eh, Mr. Kendall? How's that, Mr. Jackson?). I certainly don't accuse Mr. Doudoroff of actually drinking these things, but a dash of perspective never ruined any recipe I'm familiar with.

Malled

I'm laughin' now, but it ain't funny.

--Tom Turnipseed, first victim of Lee Atwater

OKAY, so, I'm not a shopper.  You might've guessed. I'm not quite so opposed to shopping as my socialist/anarcho-syndacalist/Luddite/contempto-elitist alter-ego might lead you to believe, or as he might wish; truth is it's really just the inertia.

Like any sensible person with a trip around the block to his credit, I'm aware that a) Capitalism is out to get me, personally, and b) this is nothing personal, at least not for the Capitalists themselves. For example, between this chair and the nearest Off-Ramp Mall there used to be two "sporting goods" stores, not counting a nearby Target, or the Wal*Mart I'll never enter, where a selection of doppelgängers and congruencies of such goods can be found. Now, thanks to mindless avarice, there are two counting a newly more-nearby Target and that Wal*Mart, and once I get to the Mall I find a retailer of sweatshop-manufactured apparel masquerading as a Sporting Lifestyle Specialist, the aptly-named Dick's, which I would forgive its faults on the grounds that it drove the once-even-worse local geniuses of Galyan's out of business, except that 1) Galyan's CEO Joel Silverman then wound up tapped to run Indiana's BMV, which he did as abysmally as he'd run Galyan's, and 2) somehow this didn't cost Mitch Daniels his reelection. So no gratitude from me. As far as I can tell, the main thing that came out of all that is that BMV employees wound up with a dress code that requires them to go to work looking like Joel Silverman does on his way to the links. Excepting, of course, that Silverman had a couple free closets worth of that get-up he'd amassed via regional sales-rep supplicants.  Not that it isn't a great look, though, golf shirts and khakis.  It makes you look as though you almost are dressed to break a sweat or do something useful, except you have no intention of ever doing either.  Like a golfer. 

And I had to go there yesterday--there was no real alternative--and I figured while I was there I might as well check out a particular store that might carry something I was thinking of as an Ift-gay for the Or-pay Ife-way, if you take my meaning. Dick's has its own entrances to the Mall, so I can't even tell you what year I last stepped anywhere else in the place. Probably the year I bought the Lava Lamp.

I made it through the intervening Food Court by pulling my sweatshirt up and breathing through it, shallowly, though I might as well not have bothered, since I came out into the Endless Plain of the Kiosk. They were stacked up, almost literally, from one end of the place to the other, or at least as far as I could see; I wasn't curious enough to go further. And they contained, without exception, the biggest collection of crap merchandise, useless geegaws, and celebrations of unwarranted vanity I have ever seen in my life, and I've been to several carnivals and once sat in the same room for ten minutes while my mother watched the Home Shopping Network.

And--I hesitate to mention it, really--the entire place seemed geared for "consumers" too young to drive or be gainfully employed except as Disney stars or child prostitutes. Which is precisely the taste the merchandise reflected.

Yes, yes, I'm old. Got it. But I couldn't help thinking back to my own mid-Boomer youth, where it required a great deal of effort--this is the era now popularly imagined to have been controlled by dirty hippies, mind you, though admittedly it's also the Midwest--it took a great deal of effort, I say, to avoid having someone dress you like Joel Silverman. There was nothing in the entire place anyone over the age and IQ of 22 could possibly have wanted; even if the shit somehow had managed to have taste, you wouldn't want it. Chains, jewel-encrusted cellphone skins, jewel-encrusted license-plate holders, jewel-encrusted cell phone plans; it was a freakin' phantasmagoria of Awful even allowing for the quote taste endquote of the target audience. I mean, fine, I know things are tough all over, but don't responsible adults buy clothes anymore? The most tasteful stuff I saw was at Dick's, the jackets, parkas, workout clothes, hats, gloves, booties, and thermal underwear in woodland camo, or else with THE NORTH FACE scrawled across them by some corporate-shill tagger with severe visual-field impairment. 

I did press on to my destination, fourteen Kiosks of Krap down the road, which trip took me past not one, not two, but three barkers with neck tattoos and no apparent awareness of soap. Maybe if they jewel-encrusted it.

Anyway, somewhere between Tattoos #2 (Carnival Geek settled in for the winter) and #3 (Recently Paroled Sniffer of Playground Swing Seats), and on my way to a bonus headache from whatever "fragrance" the mall was assaulting shoppers with via the HVAC ducts, it occurred to me, like a moment of seemingly impossible clarity in the middle of a twenty-car pile up: one needs to navigate through the modern age as though everyone one meets has had six or seven drinks, beginning when he or she woke up, probably within the hour. It explains everything.

Okay, Maybe It's Just Me, But It's Hard To Understand How We're Supposed To Stay In Afghanistan Longer Than The Afghans

Noah Feldman, "Fighting the Last War?" November 30

OR, How to sound like a moderate and a Bush administration functionary at the same time.

If Experience is the name people give to their mistakes (and wasn't Oscar, like, the Simpsons of the 19th century?), I'm left to wonder what name to give to the fact that I'm still taking nourishment and breathing without assistance despite the fact that the very people who got us into twin military disasters in this very decade are now the ones called upon to explain to us a) how Iraq is no longer a failure, and b) the quickest way to duplicate that not-failure in Afghanistan (which generally involves explaining that we can't, without explaining that the major snag is less the applicability of military strategy and more the difficulties involved in Simply Declaring Victory twice in a row).

Because I've seen it all before, but it used to involve a Decent Interval, like the one between the failure of excuse mongering in Vietnam and the election of Ronald Reagan, or the end of racist opposition to civil rights and, well, the election of Ronald Reagan. Not that any of that stuff had gone away, exactly, in the interim, but it had suffered electoral defeat and fallen into disrepute, before being rebranded; Iraq and Afghanistan--partly through the simple expedient of Just Keeping Them Going Forever--have suffered, by comparison, mostly a couple years of the David Brooks Don't-Make-Eye-Contact-Maybe-They'll-Go-Away technique before he and like-minded fellows were able to pop back up and start asserting the very same premise that got us there (both theres) in the first place, with the same apodictic fervor of the tent-show evangelist as before.

Enter Feldman, once the 32-year-old assistant law professor (with a Ph.D in Islamic studies) tapped by the Coalition Provisional Authority (see "Holy" "Roman" "Empire") to write the Iraq constitution, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Feldman gives us his bona fides; simply calling for another surge would be unserious, would ignore existential differences in the two situations, and, besides, might wind up as yet another flaming shit bag American Adventurism would have to hire someone to clean off its brogues after boldly stepping in:

Yet despite the surface similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, the differences run deep, as Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has acknowledged. The very words policymakers use when discussing Iraq — “nation,” “tribe,” “radical,” “Islamist,” even “Al Qaeda” — mean different things in the Afghan context. In the complex world of counterinsurgency, getting these subtleties of anthropology and sociology right determines success or failure.

To begin with, now, the regular Reader knows we're nothing if not joyously trans-partisan around here, so let us hop up and down in delighted agreement here: yes, indeedy, "Al Qaeda" (is that the Times' Magazine style book at work?) means something different in Afghanistan--it means "al-Qaeda (et. al.)", whereas in Iraq it meant "Scary Extra-Bold Headlines".

We're also happy to acknowledge the importance of anthropology (though we continue to maintain that sociology ought generally to stick to helping major international corporations choose the most popular colors for toothpastes and condom packaging) to counterinsurgency, though somewhere short of "deterministic". But then for some reason there's a nagging little voice asking "Why?" If The Surge was so successful, or productive of non-failure-type results, and if it comes right out of the (Petraeus-penned) Army counterinsurgency manual, why fuss over details?

The sheiks knew their authority would be enhanced if they could deliver patronage from the U.S. and the Iraqi government — after all, that is how they secured their power from the era of British colonial rule right up through the reign of Saddam. You could almost say the Iraqi tribal structure was built for the very purpose to which the U.S. counterinsurgency eventually put it.

By contrast, Afghanistan’s tribes — a term that covers everything from large confederations to cousin-networks and extended families — are not natural vehicles for creating loyalty to a central government. To the contrary, for many years the tribal confederations have functioned as proxies for foreign powers. As a result, the tribes are past masters at playing international interests against one another. Even if we can revive the traditional tribal structures, the result might be more chaotic than the situation now; a tribal strategy is as likely to increase internal conflict as to effect reconciliation.

I'm sorry, but "everything from large confederations to cousin-networks and extended families" does not describe Iraqi social structure?

Though this is nothing compared to the fact-esque truthiness of that historicity lesson. Iraq's tribal leaders are innate deal-makers, having dealt with the British for thirty years! (not to mention, or oddly not mention, for some reason, four-hundred years under the Ottoman Turks), and then Saddam; Afghans have an entirely different mindset, since they were only subjected to British influence from 1838-1919 (admittedly fighting three wars in that time), not to mention the Mongols, Mogols, Persians, Indians, Russians, and the Seljuk Turks, not to mention political dominance by the rough-majority Pashtun. So just how is it that foreign domination in Afghanistan (and eighty years of independence) creates a sort of natural-born insurgency, while foreign domination (and fifty-years of military strongmen following an installed monarchy) in Iraq creates natural-born poker players?

There are two ways to change the incentives of the many Pashtuns who until now have supported the Taliban based on the reasonable belief that they may someday return to power. One is to wage war more effectively, protecting villages from Taliban reprisals and persuading everyone that we will never allow the Taliban or other extremists to resume control. This would give Pashtuns a collective reason to seek accommodation with the U.S.-backed government.

But military advantage may prove elusive. The other way to change the calculus is to offer Pashtun leaders, Taliban or otherwise, something meaningful in exchange for promising to give up sheltering Al Qaeda and to allow basic freedoms, especially for women and girls. There may not be many Taliban leaders who are willing to renounce their ideology. But it is not too soon to start asking what, if anything, Pashtun leaders would be prepared to accept in such a deal, and if the members of the coalition could live with it in exchange for the chance to phase out the military occupation.

Let's put it another way: nothing is impossible to the man who doesn't have to do it himself, especially if he's paid to theorize about it, and hopeless acts of sacrifice by others are preferable to admitting that one was, in fact, standing directly behind the Pooch in question at the moment of that passive-voice coitus.

In three years, President Obama will have to evaluate the situation as his re-election campaign begins. If the Taliban in Afghanistan fight the coalition to a standstill while their Pakistani counterparts improve their position, he will face considerable pressure to bring American troops home. But in that scenario, withdrawal would invite a Taliban victory on both sides of the border, and the Taliban will have even less incentive to compromise than they do currently. The time for change is now, lest Afghanistan become the quagmire that Iraq was once said to be.

Said to be? Nay, Professor, was, and continues to be, ameliorated only by an apparently reduction in violence, a certain reduction in our reporting of violence, and absolutely no suggestion that there's a functioning central government which will maintain power or operate democratically once we're gone. It may be that no one hands out grant money for extended meditations on the odds on unscrambling an egg, but let us say, flat out: a massive fucking failure engendered by American military hubris, dating to a foolish, let alone erroneous, belief that we somehow stood outside the bounds of History, with a mandate to impose Pax Britannica II. There is no, absolutely no evidence the world is hungering for another one, and plenty of evidence (in fact, all available) that we can't do it anyway. That is not to say that the advance of democracy, real democracy, isn't desirable; perhaps in some of our lifetimes the day will dawn when, for example, Iraqi and Afghan women will once again be granted the freedoms they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein and the Soviet-dominated PDPA, respectively. If you catch my drift.

Really? You Have Mush For Thanksgiving?

Roger Cohen, "A Command of the Law". November 26

WHAT kind of Indian would say a fool thing like that?

It’s Thanksgiving. I’m thankful for many things right now, despite the stock market, and first among them is the fact that the next U.S. commander in chief is a constitutional law expert and former law professor.

Who didn't just vote to renew the trampling of constitutional rights via FISA, but did a Jim Rockford 180º to get there in time.

Look, we have already suggested that Barack Obama--should he find himself the beneficiary of an actual honeymoon period, and not just the current exasperated longing of an electorate for George W. Bush to vanish, from the Presidency, from history, and/or the planet--is entitled to one which doesn't invoke national commentary written as though the author found the entire honeymoon concept either new or foreign or rare.

So then are we also justified, maybe required, to suggest the opposite: that while the public may certainly indulge in the standard hopeful celebration of a new President accorded even so obvious a dud as George W. Bush, perhaps especially at a time when nothing has gone right for two election cycles now, the Public is an Ass; the punditasters ought to try to keep the tweenie squealing under control, unless they want to be mistaken for Jonas Brothers fans or Keith Olbermann.

It would be one thing if these platitudes could be mouthed in a glass without embarrassment. They can't. This was, as we said earlier, the first election in memory where the people who did vote would be the ones who couldn't bitch. Even the most zomboid of Obama fans cannot insist their man was elected, or plans to govern, as anything other than a career politician. He was, in fact, celebrated for that. This is of itself neither good, bad, fish nor fowl--nor required, as twenty-year-old political geniuses kept informing us during the campaign--it's a description of how we arrived where we are. Obama reversed himself on FISA, then excused the reversal on the grounds it was the best deal possible. At that point he'd been campaigning for President for eighteen months as the guy who was going to put an end to the white-socks-and-sandals unfashionableness of partisan politics. He did not pledge to do so while remaining a First, Fourth, or Fifth Amendment absolutist, not as I recall, but he did vow to "finish the fight with al-Qaeda" and express a preference for hot pursuit over the constraints of international law. Supposing we are still maintaining troops in Iraq come 2009, or still practicing "extraordinary rendition" people will have a right to be angry, but no right to feign shock.

Before I get to why, allow me to add two other reasons for thankfulness. The first is that Barack Obama is a man of sufficient self-confidence to entrust the critical job of secretary of state to his former rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has the strength and focus to produce results.

The second is that he’s a man of sufficient good sense to retain the remarkable Robert Gates as defense secretary.

Well, maybe so...I don't think, given the circumstances, that Gates was a bad choice, and given insider information he might even be a wise one, but neither of us has insider information, though one of us might imagine he does. If it's wise this sort of blather has nothing to do with it; the idea that Gates is retained, or not, as a signal about Obama's intentions in Iraq is prime Inside Baseball idiocy. It's a gurgled cry from anti-war leftists who imagined they were backing an anti-war leftist. Iraq is not your worry with Obama; whether there's enough recognition of our serious, generation-long military deficit is. And I don't mean whether or not he'll live up to that campaign pledge to rebuild the military (remember that one?), but whether we are going to see, at long last, a decision made to bring Cold War militarism to heel while there's still some pressure left in the brake lines, or whether it's going to have to proceed like Reaganomics has, until we're steered off a cliff, screaming all the way down about how we got there. America: You Only Have To Hit Us Over The Head With A Brick Twice Per Issue! It's amusing, in a sick sort of way, to see this from Jim Bianco:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion


• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion


• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion


• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion


• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)


• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion


• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion


• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

TOTAL bailout commitment so far: $4.6165 trillion

but the thing that's left out there is what a colossal pile of shit we've bought since 1946 in the effort to retain our post-war military/economic hegemony. Not to mention how that PR campaign eventually began feeding on itself, and we wound up spending just to maintain the spending, and had to talk ourselves into the hegemony part. We spent more on NASA since 1958 than we spent on the first round of bailouts, yes, but NASA's a trillion-dollar lab coat we put on the militarization of space, apparently to fool the rubes who, it turns out, were with the program from the moment they heard something was gonna blow up anyway. We've spent roughly $23.3 trillion in daylight on "Defense" (figures, taken from the Center for Defense Information, here) since the Second World War ended. That's using budget requests or projections for the last five years (through fiscal 2009), which doesn't change the total much, but it also exempts the Iraq and Afghanistan wars which,  you may recall, we're funding as a sort of side bet. Certainly not all of that $23 trillion, plus whatever's been spent off the books, plus NASA and whatever other extra-military spending's been going on qualifies as boondoggle, but we'd be remiss not to remind you that in there, somewhere, you, your parents, or your grandparents bought $1 billion (in 1950s dollars) worth of Atomic-Powered Aircraft development (after intelligence information suggested the Ruskies had already developed one); sixty-eight AWACS flying radar stations (at $200 million per in 1970s dollars), the realization of a post-WWII dream thirty years late, which had, by the time the first one was delivered, gone through three different justifications just to keep up with changing military and technical environments and which, today, serves basically as a sort of YouTube for the Air Force; the equally belated B-2, proudly fighting the Cold War since 1997 at a cost of $2.1 billion per in 1997 dollars, and whose vaunted stealthiness remains a rumor; God Knows How Much tossed down the Star Wars hole, dutifully dug with $1500 Pentagon-procured shovels for an octogenarian President with terminal brain bubbles; and the tenth carrier of the Nimitz class, the soon-to-be-deployed USS George H. W. Bush, (Motto: "Freedom at Work!"), which, at an estimated $4.5 billion, will thankfully be obsoleted six years later by the new Gerald R. Ford class carrier, at $8 billion per, not counting the $5 billion in development, and fittingly named for the only President of the United States ever to kill a man with an errant golf shot. By the time the third Ford class carrier is completed it is hoped that sophisticated navigational upgrades will keep many of our two-dozen carriers from colliding with each other despite there barely being enough room left on the world's oceans to swing a catfish. (Global warming should also help.)

Carriers, as you might know, represent another WWII solution in search of a problem, though this has largely been solved by our regular desire to push around tenth-rate nations with no navy, or air force, and frequently no coastline.

And these are just examples, folks, and conspicuously leave out the most egregious high-ticket embezzlements (say, the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile Program, which, for $6 billion 1960s dollars, protected one US ICBM site for four months from a theoretical Soviet attack which was theoretically impossible. Safeguard was itself a re-tread of the Sentinel program, which was designed to protect US cities. That one was never deployed at all, if that tells you anything you didn't suspect already).

And, okay, easy to pick on things, even when they are major programs, but leave us also remember that all this money, and plenty more, has managed to fail to achieve political objectives in four intervening wars, "spent" the Soviet Union into a bankruptcy it was already headed for, and found itself a much-needed new justification shortly thereafter, on September 11, 2001, thirty-nine minutes before NORAD managed to get two fighters to the most populous city in the country, assuming you're using the 9/11 Commission's timetable.

So you'll forgive me if I'm less that fascinated by whether Robert Gates is the right man at Defense or not, or whether his retention signals something or other about the Obama administration's real Iraq timetable, as my ratiocination in that area remains focused on how long we're going to imagine we can keep spending our way to a military hegemony notable for its big-ticket expenditures and near-total inability to actually defeat tenth-rate powers armed with sharpened spikes and the F-14 Tomcats we sold 'em back when the Shah was in power. For cryin' out loud, the incoming President faces not just the Sargasso Sea of flotsam left by the Bush administration; it also faces the prospect of trying to turn things around while professing a bipartisanship designed to elicit cooperation from the two parties which have so thoroughly fucked things up to this point. And he, or else some successor, will face the obligation at some point to scrap the whole thing and rebuild one based on reality. Better to try to do that when it's a choice than wait until it becomes a necessity.

So, too, you'll forgive me for imagining that New York Times Op-Ed columnists could find something more important to consider than whether Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will be able to work together (!), or to express belated admiration for the (projected) dismantlement of a Gitmo their own paper's tub-thumping helped fill in the first place.

There's Your Problem Right There

Times illustration by Matt Hollister

Fred Kaplan, "Beware Rumsfeld's Snow Job". November 25

Sir Donald Rumsfeld, "One Surge Does Not Fit All". November 23

FIRST thing: that's not a knot. It may have been inspired by a knot, specifically the sheet (or flag) bend, which is used to join two ropes together at the ends to form a longer rope (and which has the advantage, almost singular among bends, that it works when the ropes are of different diameters), but the free end (the part being held the way someone with terminal Victorian manners'd pick up a bird carcass) should have passed over itself (the "standing part") then under the other rope at the terminus there. Nor does this illustrate the untying of a sheet bend, which would be decidedly unphotogenic and require an extra hand, at least if you want to proceed apace. It illustrates, at most, the untangling of a fairly unremarkable tangle, that is, something short of Our Middle-East Clusterfucks. My suspicion is that Mr. Hollister (the artist) reduced a photograph of a sheet bend to B&W and added the hash marks, getting screwed up just at the end. If it's any consolation, that occurs a lot in knot tying as well.

As it happens I've spent the last week tying knots--not constantly, just every day--to keep my skills up, such as they are. Every so often I try to find where Larry has dragged the practice paracord (two pieces, left bound with a sheet bend) and I tie the five or so I know a few dozen times a day for several days, including by touch rather than sight. Because here is what little I know about knots: it's best to learn one or two useful examples of the types you need than to learn twenty different knots and wind up tying something that inadvertently combines two or more; that the two things you ask of a knot are that it hold under stress and untie easily; and that if you are ever likely to need to tie or untie one--I mean seriously do so--the odds are it will be on a pitch-black night in pouring rain at 34º F and you gloveless. So I know the Portuguese bowline, half-hitch, clove hitch, sheet bend, heaving line knot, and running hitch, and I can tie a highwayman's hitch, which is the only one I permit myself for fun (used, supposedly, to tie up horses when a quick getaway is anticipated; no amount of strain on the standing part will untie it, but those two prissy fingers in the illustration, applied to the free end, will collapse it in an instant. It's a lot of fun at certain types of parties. I have never actually tried it with a real horse, though, so proceed at your own risk). If my life ever depends on a pulley I'm SOL.

Okay, let's be charitable for once: that illustration does capture the incompetent execution of the Iraq War, even if it was unintentional. It's just got nothing whatsoever to do with our extraction predicament.

Kaplan takes the Op-Ed to task:

The first eyebrow-raiser comes in the second paragraph, in which he writes, almost in passing, "As one who is occasionally—and incorrectly—portrayed as an opponent of the surge in Iraq. …"
Let's stop right there.
From beginning to end—from the preparations for the invasion in the summer and fall of 2002 until his (forced) resignation was announced in November 2006—Rumsfeld consistently opposed all proposals to send more troops to Iraq.

Okay, but look: at the peak of The Surge we had fewer troops in Iraq than we began the war with, and next to no Willing Coalition forces. This is part of the The Surge Is Working canard, and it plays off the equally vacuous idea that we went into Iraq with 200,000 troops because of something called the Rumsfeld Doctrine. We didn't invade Iraq with 200,000 troops because that was the "right" number, or because Rumsfeld thought so. We went in with 200,000 troops because that was all we could muster and still conduct the war on the Bush administration timetable. This isn't even open to debate; within a year we were scrambling to find 20,000 troops to replace scheduled rotations, and we've been grinding away ever since, reducing our Strategic Reserve for the first time since WWII, massively restructuring troop alignments overseas, reducing R&R, and, finally, extending the tours of troops already in the field. It's certainly more complicated that just moving chits around a Risk board, but it never was a question of Rumsfeld overruling General Shinseki's plan to use 400,000 troops. We didn't have 400,000 troops then, which should be obvious considering we couldn't find them in the interim, and we don't have them now. We do have a changing set of circumstances (in a war! who'd'a thunk it?) which has allowed us to conduct a more effective counter-insurgency (after being forced by circumstances to acknowledge the Sadrists and bankroll the Sunni) which, combined with the mass-market media's relative disinterest in the present levels of violence has been portrayed as a "success" instead of the more accurate "new definition of failure".

That is to say, he understood (as many of the Army's senior officers did not) that the new GPS-guided "smart bombs"—which could destroy enemy tanks and troop formations from the air with extreme accuracy—meant that massive artillery units, with their heavy weapons and long logistical lines, were no longer necessary. However, he did not understand (as those officers did) that when it comes to postwar "stability operations," the key ingredient is boots on the ground—and lots of them.

For one, GPS-guided bombs are even more remarkably effective when one simply swallows the PR about them instead of bothering to look. But, still, this is bullshit in defense of bullshit. Facing a mostly tenth-rate force, one depleted by two major wars in fifteen years, completely lacking air cover and without anything that might have charitably been called "Command and Control" in the 20th century, we still managed to run into serious local trouble by outrunning our "outdated" supply lines, and, had the Syrians and, especially, the Iranians taken it into their heads to disprove the Rumsfeld Doctrine at that point we'd be talking about more than 4200 American casualties today. Laying this off on antiquated military thinking is bunkum. The plan the Bush administration forced on the military, in part by cashiering Brass until it cooperated, was unnecessarily risky and oriented toward political PR victories and the continued bankrupting of the country through incontinent militarization so beloved of the Right. Mission Half-Accomplished, and I don't need to tell you which half.

Let us state plainly, and again, that this bunch did not throw away American blood and American treasure into a wrong-headed military theory; they threw them away on a calculated act. It's the difference between a tort and a major felony. 400,000 troops required an international coalition. That meant waiting a year to even begin planning, before Germany, France, and Russia were convinced diplomatic pressure had not worked, which, of course as we now know, it already had. In a twelvemonth it would have been obvious, at least to anyone willing to look, that Saddam Hussein was no threat, imminent or otherwise. The alternatives to a large-scale coalition were a) a restructuring of our existing forces, namely our overseas commitments, which would have effectively eliminated most of them, and taken at least a year to arrange redeployment, re-equipping, and re-training, or b) conscription, which would have taken at least eighteen months to begin to make a difference, after the inevitable lawsuits over the exemption of women and gay men, and led to massive resistance and a sudden purple-fingered democracy movement in our own country, in which a public suddenly faced with a pre-pay arrangement on Iraq saw things in a sudden new light, like Saul of Tarsus, let us say. And let's repeat, here: the Bush administration didn't have the guts to put its proposals up to public scrutiny. It thumped that goddam tub for a year without ever making a move to increase or reorganize troop levels enough to cover our commitment to South Korea, for fuck's sake, at the same time it was naming Kim Jong Il World's Sexiest Hitler.

It's hardly surprising that Rumsfeld's autobiography promises to be as self-serving and full of glaring omissions as Krusty the Clown's. We're not going to imprison him; history's never going to absolve him. But leave us not lessen just what Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld set out to do for the sake of what Slate's military geniuses imagine is left of their reputations.

All Right, Jamesy. Let Me Up, I'm Fuckin' Serious This Time.

Andy Newman, "Irony is Dead. Again. Yeah, Right." November 23

NEVER again:

Its ill health was noted by, among others, no less an ironist than Joan Didion, the nation’s poet laureate of disillusion. The week after the election, in a talk at the New York Public Library, Ms. Didion lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an “irony-free zone,” a vast Kool-Aid tank where “naïveté, translated into ‘hope,’ was now in” and where “innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.”

Look, here's the thing: I'm from the Midwest. It simply did not occur to me to seek out Joan Didion's take on the election. Or Tina Brown's. Or George Plimpton's. In fact it didn't even occur to me to wonder if the election had brought Plimpton back to life for one last bon mot and Grey Goose martini, or to bother figuring out who's a part of the New York literati scene this century. That's how long ago my Poor Wife's subscription to Vanity Fair ran out, and how small a shit I give about it.

I mean, is someone actively preventing Joan Didion from being ironic in public these days? Does she mostly hang out with 18-to-20-year-old Obama fans? She got to write about the election in VF and lecture about it at the New York Public Library. What fucking more resuscitation does poor ol' Irony need? Maybe the woman should blog.

Oh, wait, here comes Conservative Humorist P.J. O'Rourke to give Dame Irony the Kiss of Life. Really, really side-splittingly funny Life:

But are ironic sensibilities like Ms. Didion’s — the detachment of mind, the appreciation of the folly of taking things at face value — really disappearing?

Not according to the conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke, who reported from his New Hampshire office on Wednesday that he was finishing a piece for The Weekly Standard with the working title, “Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About the Failed Obama Presidency Just Because He Isn’t President Yet?”

Zing! Y'know, I believe at this point we might safely conclude that Irony is doing fine, but some of her hangers-on got some bad salmon paté. 

Look, when you reach middle-age, let alone roar past it, it's fine to pile on the comic infirmities, but it's unseemly to pretend you've forgotten the last thirty years, at least so long as you still want to make public pronouncements. There were/are irritating, humorless twits who supported Obama, just as there were Irritating Twits for Ron Paul, Irritating Twits for Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and Vexatious Fops for Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, probably. Those of us of an historical bent might cast our eyes all the way back to 2000 C.E., when the contentious selection of George W. Bush, and the launch of the most ideologically-cracked administration in the history of the Republic (an ungracious Inaugural, the transparently ginned-up Clinton Scandals Redux, Dick Cheney's secret meetings with the real US government) resulted in a blistering 17% negative rating for Mr. Bush. Maybe there's such a thing as a honeymoon. Maybe Irony just needs to practice her aim a little. Or stop behaving like a whining seven-year-old with a full bladder staring at the candy shelves in the supermarket check-out line. The Droning Obama Gloriously Non-Sectarian Cloistered Monk Chorus was last fucking winter; since then he's dropped in the polls, fallen behind John McCain, started sounding like a Democrat, and won in a landslide. As we emerge from the Worst Presidency in History By A Factor of Two At Least (there's a fertile Irony field for you, Mr. O'Rourke) it's hardly surprising that a sizable chunk of the public is permitting itself some small degree of hope despite the bleak news on every possible front involving Presidential decisions of the past eight years (got a shovel, P.J.?).  

(Same with this phony Oh my God the Change Candidate is appointing former Clintonites routine. For fuck's sake, who do you expect him to appoint--Joe the Fucking Unlicensed Plumber? He's a Centrist Democrat and he's appointing Centrist Democrats. Too bad if he didn't unilaterally disarm. And same for the "Look, no phony quotas" routine. The reason Barack Obama can appoint people without a seeming, or obvious, regard for complexion, gender, or facial hair is that we have given minorities a leg up now for a generation. This is not an excuse to stop trying to rectify 400 years of intentional harm.)

Go ahead and hate Obama, if you wish, but quit fucking hating him by proxy; that was what the election was for. Mindless idiocy, wholly-unsupportable optimism, and ill-informed personal choices are going to be with us always. That is, in fact, the bulk of the recipe for the last thirty years of Republican dominance. Treat them the same, or avoid politics, but, as they say in baseball, act like you fucking been there before, huh?