Out in the Real World

Good afternoon. This is not going to be a long post, just a post, without even bothering to put any links in. A new bad habit, I guess, though I am not here to whine. Just to maintain the habit, as it were. There's still plenty of politics I could be posting about - I have not yet worked out a full bore How We Lost The Election and How We Can Win The Next Once post, though I've got one simmering. I have 2 years to work on that, so I'm not going to kill myself. I will note what I hope I do, now that the election is over - write more about other stuff - the arts, movies, music, comics, maybe books. Get back to the real world.

I will take this opportunity to note what I have seen recently, very briefly: Sideways - quite funny at times, interesting enough, even if it is about another 40ish white guy moping about self-inflicted wounds. Thought his guy is affecting - maybe in the ways he comes off as more real than most people on movie screens. Being played by Paul Giamatti is always an advantage, but it's more than that - it's details, like his apartment, his car, the fact that he doesn't have a cel phone. And the wine. Wine is what is best and worst about the man - his passion, but a passion he can't quite indulge in without lording it over people, and a passion which hides, not too subtly, some nasty stuff (the fact that he is a drunk.) So this may not be brilliant, but it is a fine movie, with many surprising virtues... And many big virtues - especially the performances, universally fine.

And Undertow - new film by David Gordon Green, starring Jamie Bell and Dermot Mulroney. Very nearly a remake of Night of the Hunter - here the villain is Josh Lucas as Mulroney's brother, just out of the pen - he shows up, tries to act ingratiating, Mulroney tries to do the right thing - but it doesn't take long for the two of them to be fighting over their father's "treasure" a collection of gold coins. This does not end well, and soon Bell takes to the road with a little brother. They pass through a really down and out south, a step or two ahead of Lucas' thug, passing out books as they go. It's a little bit too derivative, but quite gorgeous and moving anyway.

We Are Not the Country We should Be

I am not going to be a gracious loser. I find it very hard to believe how this election went - how can such a manifest failure as George Bush get that many votes? What possesses people? - and I feel great trepidation for the future. I could blog the future - it may not be as bad as all that. There seem to be three likely outcomes: 1) The GOP, red in tooth and maw, takes everything it can get and tears both country and itself apart - the latter will not be a comfort, because I care what happens to my country. 2) the GOP grows up. Without an election to win, they back off the posturing, address their failures, and try to fix things. If Rummy hits the pavement, or Colin Powell starts making decisions again, this might come about. I'm not holding my breath - but this would not be unprecedented. 3) More of the same! incompetence, posturing, lots of noise, but little concrete action, no risks, good or bad, but lots of talk about risks... everything aimed at holding power, which now gets shifted from Bush to Congress, and whoever will be Bush's successor. Pandering continues apace. Iraq either drags on without resolution, or they declare victory and come home, and leave things to work themselves out. This is all too likely. I don't know if this is better or worse than #1. #1 is more likely to energize the opposition, and more likely to crash and burn, choking on its own greed, as it gulps down one too many metaphors at once.... 3...

The feeling I get from all this is that in the end we (the majority of voters in the country) ended up voting for an imaginary candidate. "Decisive George Bush" - as fictional as Giblets - an image of toughness and resolve that no facts, no revelations of lies and shenanigans, no pictures of the President of the United States unable to act with the country under attack until someone tells him what to do, can ever shake. Could shake. They (not me) voted for this chimera - they voted for what they wanted him to be, pretending, wishing, that he was what they thought they needed.

The fact that John Kerry largely was that man - the war hero, the senator with the guts to take on the administration, organizations like the BCCI and such - made no impression. I don't know why. Mabe because the GOP stayed relentlessly on message. Maybe because the democrats, across the board, saw John Kerry for what he was - their opinions of him ranged from enthusiasm to Anybody But Bushism, but they were all interpretations of the actual John Kerry... Can a real man, good bad or indifferent, compete with an imaginary man? You would like to think so, but the evidence before us says no.

Bloody hell.

Anyway, now, let's just hope the democrats decide that this is the time to fight. That they get tough - call Bush on his crap, resist wherever they can - this is not the time to whimper, well the people have chosen... The people chose a lie. The people were wrong. It is our responsibility to wake the fucking people up and get them to stop doing things like this to themselves.

Election Day

Here we are. Our future as a nation in the balance. Yes, yes, a man's best friend is hyperbole - but there's enough truth to it that I'm not backing off. All the stories about republican vote suppression - their consistent devotion to keeping down the vote - they depend on it - makes me worry. So let's hope the dems get out in force and simply blow Bush away. It can happen. Stranger things have happened. And you want to believe that at least a majority of people know better than to vote for Bush. You have to hope.

On a more personal note - I voted in my current town for the first time. Some kind of club, a VFW or American Legion hall. Paul Krugman has a nice article - "The humbleness of the surroundings only emphasizes the majesty of the process: this is democracy, America's great gift to the world, in action." It's true. The talk about freedom and all in grand abstractions hides the fact that freedom and democracy consists in a bunch of old men and women leafing through sheafs of voter rolls, checking your name off, handing you a ballot... prosaic as hell. It gets you right here!

So off we go! And hope it's clean, and the voting itself is what continues to matter, and not the lawsuits and posturing when it is done. Keep this power in the hands of the voters - don't let it turn into spin, like damn near everything else.

I am Happy

The Red Sox won the world series. That does not happen very often. I am euphoric. I just spent an hour or so on the phone with one of my friends, my softball coach. In 1986, I watched most of game 6 alone - I rememebr standing in the living room, in the last inning, 2 outs, with a beer in my hand, waiting to open it, waiting, not wanting to jinx them by celebrating too soon - but ready... And they put people on. My buddy, the osftball buddy, showed up in the middle of the inning - he was already worked up, he'd been listening in the car. We watched - hits were hit, runs scored, and then the grounder went between Buckner's legs. My friend jumped up and down int he middle of the floor screaming "Fuck fuck fuck!" I crawled under a desk. We continued in that vein for some time, and then another pal showed up, a New Yorker, gloating. I hated him.

We had some fun with him last week. He got as taste of what it's like to be us. And tonight - I ended up watching the game alone (we'd been planning to watch the game together, but he had to work) - and I was thinking, in the ninth, this is exactly what happened in 1986. I watched it alone, just like this - so alike, but so completely different. The way it felt. In 86, with a couple outs, when the Mets got people on board, I was terrified - the Sox were so capable of losing. And I remember distinctly saying to myself (and anyone who might have wondered by), just let them hit a pop up; no grounders, no fly balls, a pop up, someone can catch that. Those who would defend Buckner - or rather, MacNamara (I don't blame Buckner - the man was in worse shape than Curt Schilling this year!) - should take note. Everyone saw that disaster coming. I saw it coming. I knew Buckner was not capable of fielding his opsition - in truth, of course, I didn't trrust any of the other infielders, or the outfielders either. But this year? With Cabrera and Reese and Mientkevitch (there's no chance that's spelled right, but hey) out there - with Damon and Kapler int he outfield - they could hit it almost anywhere and someone was going to catch it. Hit it where you want,, I thought, just keep it in the yard - this game is over.

It's a magnificent thing. Baseball is an integral part of my life, as much as religion is for some people. It is all that. What can I say? The Red Sox have won the world series. May they do it again, and again and again.

And they did it fast - I can get some sleep! eventually. They did what I hoped - they marched through the opposition like a bunch of batting practice pitchers - well, the Cards anyway. Or more to the point - stifled them, the way Pedro Martinez or whoever will mow down the Boston College squad in early spring training. They made everyone they faced look overmatched. Looking at it now - the gutsy team playing over their heads looks like the Yankees - keeping in a series they had no business being in... Just doing it all at the beginning of the series. Exciting stuff.

One last thing - for now. As has happened through the whole post-season - whenever someone has a bad stretch, they broke out of it at a key moment. Tonight (and yesterday, a little bit) it was Trot Nixon - a huge double - a couple other hits. Just like Bellhorn and Damon at the end of the Yankee series, or Lowe, or Manny after not getting any RBI in the Yankee series, all along - everyone on the team had a huge game or two in the last week. It's wonderful. Indeed it is.

Poking the Head in

I have not done much writing here lately. Blame the Red Sox. The last week or so has been a constant rush, desperation, exultation, anticipation, exhaustion... It continues apace.

Meanwhile, out in blogland, I have been finding James Wolcott's blog to be about the best read out there. He might make the mighty "blogroll" soon, if I ever go in and add some more links.

Baseball Blogging

So Ramiro Mendoza balked in a run, and I turned it off and then it was 0-3 and then....

and now?

Sweet Jesus, look at this. The Sox come back - with the guys who weren't doing it all series suddenly doing it - Bellhorn with another Home Run - and Johnny Damon! just unbelievable.

I got nothing to say but uh - yes! fucking yes! yes yes yes yes yes!

Now let's get the Rog.

Wait - I do have more to say. It's this - one of the things that makes this team so great is the fact that they love winning. They got a lot of crap last year for celebratiing the wild card, then celebrating the short series - the twits whined that they were getting too worked up over the intermediate steps - the real champs, they say, don't celebrate til the end. Well - this gang - celebrate everything. And that, I think, is part of what gives them an edge - they just go out and play and... keep playing.

This is mind blowing. Really is. Wonderful. Amazing. God almighty. Stunning. Stop!

Jon Stewart on Crossfire

I had heard about John Stewart's appearance on Crossfire last week, but seeing the video - my god! (Link Here) He's spectacular - he comes on, they want comedy - he gives them a lecture on their responsibility as a news show. And - despite Tucker Carlson's crying - he's funny anyway! But he gets the serious point made - that they are part of the theater of politics (and the unstated point that Stewart's show is a parody of the theater of politics), and that the theater of politics strips away the reality of politics, and undermines the political system. Stewart makes the point - sticks with it - doesn't slip into platitudes or abstractions - stays funny doing it, though not just funny... And it just hangs there, twisting in the breeze, because the other two make very little effort to discuss it. In fact, Carlson illustrates Stewart's points at almost every turn: whining because Stewart didn't play his assigned role - squirming because Stewart came on and did not just let things go the way they always go. He challenged them to a real discussion - they were not able to respond.

Could they have? I can think of things they could have said - like, "we have to walk a tightrope - we have to make it so politicians keep coming on the show - we try to get past their shields, but we can't do it directly. We have to play the games with them, to get them here, to try to get past the games." I don't know if that is a defense - but it's something. Realistic challenges require access - access requires at least some pandering to the theater. The trick is to get past the defenses, sometimes, just a bit. The problem there is that the show most likely to get at something legitimate behind the spin is the Daily Show. Comedy has always allowed criticism of those in power - Stewart uses it pretty well. Fake debate shows like Crossfire have never done that sort of thing - they allow posturing and scripted outrage. Pro wrestling....

And finally - the Crossfire guys, trying to defend themselves as "hard-hitting" - as not being part of the system - were utterly exposed by Stewart. He did to them exactly what he said they should do to politicians, and they were utterly unable to respond.

States and Terrorism

A very good post at Washington Monthly about the war on terror - about the differences between how conservatives and liberals see the war on terror. The former, Drum says, see it as being against states - rogue states; the latter against groups that mean to do us harm - oftren active in failed states. This arises from Bush's gaffe at the third debate, claiming never to have said he wasn't concerned about Osama Bin Laden. It is more specifically an analysis of his comments when he did utter that unforgettable (except by Bush) remark. What Bush said, at the time, was:

Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And again, I don't know where he is. I--I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.

This is a very clear statement of what Drum is talking about - Bush looked at even Bin Laden as dangerous because he was running a state. When he lost the state - Bush stopped caring. Drum makes the distinction that liberals indeed do tend to make:

But as dangerous as they [rogue states] are, they're still states, and they still have an interest in continuing to exist — which means they're unlikely to directly threaten the United States. What's more, since central governments dislike competing power centers, they have a fundamental interest in preventing terrorist groups from amassing too much influence within their borders.

Failed states, by contrast, don't, which is why terrorist groups seek them out. And since terrorist groups like al-Qaeda do directly threaten us, it's failed states and non-state terrorist groups themselves who pose a much greater danger to the security of the United States. John Kerry understands this. George Bush and his advisors don't.

This is right, I think. And it has been at the center of a lot of the disputes that have arisen over the last 3 years of foreign policy. The "law enforcement" model some leftists favor is based on the notion that terrorists (the ones we have to worry most about) do not operate through states. Opposition to the Iraq war obviously is built around this. I can speak for myself - when we were attacked, in the early days, when no one quite knew who had attacked us, and people wondered if it could be Saddam Hussein, I was convinced it was not. Because of this - Saddam had a country - he had a political entity that he could lose - that could be attacked and destroyed. To attack us would justify our attacking him and destroying him. He existed, in 2001, at our sufferance - and he had to know that anything that any direct move against us would result in getting him run out on a rail. And - again, speaking for myself - I am convinced that by attacking him we seriously weakened that very real deterrant on state villainy. Rogue states - (pre-conquest) Iraq, North Korea, whoever - had to know that if they messed around too much they could be taken out. But now - they have to think they can be taken out no matter what they do. So - clearly, this is not going to encourage better behavior. This encourages antinomian behavior!

Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye

Jacques Derrida has died. Legal scholar Jack Balkin writes a nice appreciation....

I read Derrida in grad school, back in the 80s. Most decidedly tough sledding, but fascinating. The first piece of his I read (or tried to read) was his "Living On/Borderlines" essay in the Deconstruction and Criticism book, collecting the "Yale Mafia" inside one set of covers. Derrida's contribution ran an essay on Blanchot on top of a long footnote consisting of an essay on - long footnotes? It's been awhile. The way it looked on the page, though, was instantly addictive, and I kept reading Derrida in hopes that I could understand some of it. Eventually I did, though I had to read a lot of Nietzsche and a fair amount of Hegel first.

But understanding aside - the way he wrote suggested things, ways of writing, mixed registers. You don't see that sort of thing in academic writing all that often. You see it, instead, in works of genius like The Third Policeman . It is pleasant to imagine Derrida as a kind of gallic, "serious" Flann O'Brien. It's only slightly far-fetched - O'Brien's japes are very serious; Derrida in turn seems, if not precisely comical, certainly delighted in the sheer oddness of his writing. The puns and wordplay and elaborate typographical trickery he occasionally indulged in cannot be completely rationalized as high seriousness.

At any rate, it was that - the sense of excitement in the act of writing and thinking that his work gave off - that drew me to him first, and kept me at it, long enough to get some clue what was going on. And then - frankly, it made sense. A lot of what he said simply makes sense. Not that I can possibly justify that conclusion at this hour of the night. But as far as I am concerned, Derrida made the world a better place.

Dick Jokes aplenty

So after swearing not to watch the first presidential debate, but getting sucked in, I decided, what the hey, let's watch the VP debate - made it about 20 minutes, and then it was off to watch the Twins and Yanks. Go Johan! I did flipback now and again... I guess I missed Edwards' big comeback - he had a bad start - letting Cheney lie with impunity, and seeming wobbly and anxious, while Dick repeated his talking points and his miscellany of lies with an air of intelligence and gravity. Something like that - like Cheney's performance - is what I feared from Bush last week - making nonsense sound good... Didn't happen. Happened tonight. Then they switched the domestic policy, economy and such and Edwards came crashing back. So I'm told. Santana was pitching around that vaunted Yankee lineup, holding them down... what can I say?

Meanwhile, I shouldn't post a link to this, but what the heck? Something about Dick Cheney compels me. "A elderly Romanian man mistook his penis for a chicken's neck, cut it off and his dog rushed up and ate it, the state Rompres news agency said Monday." He should have just choked the chicken....

Oh god.

First Baseball Post of many to come

Very good story by Glenn Stout of the origins of the Curse of the Bambino in anti-semitism and infighting among millionaires. I rather suspect that Frazee bears some blame for ruining the Red Sox - selling Ruth and Mays and others - even if they were trouble makers - was not wise... but still.

I also suggest that even if no one articulated the "curse" idea before 1986, a lot of people held some version of the idea. I am struggling to remember this now - it seems to me the decline of the Red Sox, and decades of failure that followed, were always associated with the sale of Ruth... But I don't know how explicit the "curse" idea was. Seems to me, pre-86, the terms of the divine punishment against us were usually Puritan - fate, the elect, sinners in the hands of an angry god. I remember the "curse of the bambino" as a cheap, new-agey revision of that.

It's time for the Sox to be favored for something - maybe the Patsies can win as underdogs, but the Red Sox have been underdogs all these years - kick some ass, boys! March triumphant through the buttery opposition and their triple A/oldies league pitching! Rack up those three run homers! 9-3 is a good start.

Someone Should have Studied...

It turns out I lied. I watched the debate. It was fascinating - I'm curious to see how this plays out in the media and on the blogs, and how other people saw it. Will we all see it from a strict partisan perspective? Or will we cross the aisles?

What I saw was this: Kerry addressed issues, consistently - talking about actual issues, addressing every question with a good deal of substance.. Speaking in complete sentences, stringing thoughts together, connecting them. Bush? My God - he was horrible. He slumped, he all but twitched. He kept acting like he wanted to go home, there were times it sounded like he was about to cry. His answers were horrible - over and over, he sounded like he was grasping at straws - the worst answer I think was after Kerry whacked him on North Korea (and whacked him hard.) Kerry brought that up - brought up Bush backing off alliances and treaties and so on - Bush couldn't come up with an answer. He stammered and hesitated and hedged and came up with something about an international criminal court. It was amzing.

Most of the debate, Bush kept looping back to the "mixed messages" line - which is all it is, a line. He would try to say something substantive - get lost - and jump back to Kerry's "inconsistency." It had the quality of someone hoping they could make it true by saying it often enough. An amazingly bad performance.

So - I don't know how prejudiced I am. I should note - if I were a Bush fan, I would hardly change my mind - but I think, if Kerry looked or sounded that bad tonight, I would be in a very bad mood. As it is - it will be interesting. I am not sure what to think of the spinners - I saw a bit of Mark Shields and David Brooks - Brooks said it was even; Shields said when Clinton and Reagan got reelected, they ran on optimism, morning in America - Bush can't do that. So - does Brooks saying it's even in fact mean, slam-dunk Kerry? (On the local channel, one guy said Kerry hit it out of the park - the other guy said on substance, it was a draw - the first guy laughed at him.) Interesting. But a late night. I bid you farewell.

UPDATE: I have come in and corrected some of the more egregious spelling errors - that post will show you what typing on a laptop at 11 PM will do... I have also been looking around the net - looks like I got it right. Links later. Spoke with a Bush supporter - even he seemed quite subdued.

Politics Goes so Good With Fear

Atrios (and many others) post links (now inactive) and text from AP's coverage of the debates. You will notice that I am posting this before the debates take place...

I'm neither as shocked or appalled as I should be. The debates are a charade. I have no intention to watch them - what point would there be? I have a pretty good idea where these guys are going to take us - what could change? Now - if I were on the fence, sure - but I'm not... I don't really expect anything inspiring or horrible to happen - in fact, I don't expect anything real to happen. The debates are a pretext to the discussion of the debates (which I refuse to call "spin"), which is mostly - on the blogs, on the cable channels and radio and whatever - a game among political junkies that is no more related to actual politics than arguing about your fantasy team is to the world series. Except that the world series is, itself, something of a real event - and political campaigns have been pretty well emptied of any content.

Once someone gets in office, of course, they can start to do some harm (or, potentially, good, though who expects that?) - but that's almost an accidental by-product. You might have thought that in this day and age - in the middle of a (stunningly ill-advised) war, etc., that things might have swerved toward seriousness, but I'm afraid not. JohnKerry, I suppose, sort of tries to feign seriousness, but even he seems more like he's playign a politician than he is one. I miss Howard Dean - who shot off his mouth and went after actual issues. But that's not what we have. Though I wish we geta bit more of that - get on the issues and stay there and get people to think about the issues, at least hear about the issues, every day.

Blame

This is a couple days old, but seems worth looking at. Here's Christopher Hitchens making specious arguments about liberals "rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan". He's up in arms about this:

"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month." Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Phoenix Business Journal, referring to a possible capture of Osama bin Laden before Election Day.

This is "Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable" he says - though he, unlike Mrs. Heinz Kerry (or me) would apply those terms to her, rather than George Bush. She is expressing, after all, the notion that Bush would cynically produce OBL at the last minute. Hitch finds that a dreadful slander:

The plain implication is that the Bush administration is stashing Bin Laden somewhere, or somehow keeping his arrest in reserve, for an "October surprise." This innuendo would appear, on the face of it, to go a little further than "impugning the patriotism" of the president. It argues, after all, for something like collusion on his part with a man who has murdered thousands of Americans as well as hundreds of Muslim civilians in other countries.
* * *
The unfortunately necessary corollary of this—that bad news for the American cause in wartime would be good for Kerry—is that good news would be bad for him. Thus, in Mrs. Kerry's brainless and witless offhand yet pregnant remark, we hear the sick thud of the other shoe dropping. How can the Democrats possibly have gotten themselves into a position where they even suspect that a victory for the Zarqawi or Bin Laden forces would in some way be welcome to them? Or that the capture or killing of Bin Laden would not be something to celebrate with a whole heart?

This is a fine example of missing the point. He was closer up above - this sentiment is a direct attack on the integrity of the president. It is not hoping for bad news - it is suspecting that if there is good news, it comes with a twist. It's achieved by abandoning substative policies in favor of a quick propaganda hit; it's done in the face of the real bad news that exists...

This, then, is the central statement: "But I also know the difference when I see it, and I have known some of the liberal world quite well and for a long time, and there are quite obviously people close to the leadership of today's Democratic Party who do not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq."

This is not a serious argument. It never is. It is blinkered. Kevin Drum illustrates the point well - reminding us that Bush's administration are the ones "dicking around":

After all, Hitchens has chosen to ally himself with the most unserious group of war leaders this country has ever seen. They treated the runup to war like a marketing blitz for a new soft drink; they have trivialized critical issues of national security because doing so made them into better partisan cudgels for congressional campaigns; they have ignored the advice of military professionals because it was electorally inconvenient; they have repeatedly misled the American public even though they surely know that this is disastrous for long term support of the war; and they have refused to seriously address the exploding guerrilla war in Iraq for months because they're afraid it might hurt their reelection chances.

The left does not root for the enemy - they do not excuse the enemy or hope the enemy wins. What the right calls "rooting for bad news" is more of a prediction. We say - because of Bush's policies, bad things are going to happen. It is true that, in the heat of the argument, sometimes predicting disaster will look like hoping for disaster - and especially when disaster comes, the urge to say "I told you so" can be hard to resist... But still" we do not want to lose. We want to see Al Qaeda undone and Iraq made safe and stable and peace restored - we just don't think those things are likely to happen with Bush and company in charge. "Hope is not a plan." Doing things that are clearly misguided and foolish and then hoping it will all work out all right is obviously worse than calling foolishness what it is, even if that means you have to emphasize the odds against us. Ultimately, what this amounts to (in the broad sense) is holding Bush and his administration responsible for the damage they have caused.

Does the Times use Times New Roman?

The Onion offers up about as complete a take down on Mr. Bush as you can ask:

Freshly unearthed public documents, ranging from newspapers to cabinet-meeting minutes, seem to indicate large gaps in George W. Bush's service as president, a spokesman for the watchdog group Citizens for an Informed Society announced Monday.
* * *
According to Rocklin, the most damning documents were generated at roughly one-day intervals during a period beginning in January 2001 and ending this week. The document's sources include, but are not limited to, the U.S. newspaper The New York Times, the London-based Economist magazine, and the well-known international business and finance record, The Wall Street Journal.

"Factual data presented in these publications indicates that Bush took little or no action on issues as widely varied as the stalled economy, increasing violence in post-war Iraq, and the lagging public education system," Rocklin said. "The newsprint documents also reveal huge disparities between the ways Bush claimed to have served Medicare patients, and what he actually did."

I am not sure what to add.

Go read Eric Alterman

Eric Alterman gets it right on the infamous Bible Banning republican campaign literature:

Dear Religious Americans. How are you? I am fine. Have you notices that the Republican Party thinks “You are all a bunch of morons.”
(Think I exaggerate? Liberals “banning” the Bible? Can anyone but a paranoid lunatic believe such a thing is possible?)

And down below, Charles Pierce launches a defense (of a sort) of Dan Rather. First by very logically pointing outL

Riddle me this: if I forge a letter from U.S. Grant in which are described the events at Appomattox, and I sell it to someone, and I get caught and  tried for fraud, and they prove that the document is fake, does that mean the Civil War never really ended?

Then trashing the degraded set that pass as TV journalists these days, and concluding with this:

So, as Dan Rather becomes everybody's dinner for a while, it's important to remember that he had some very big moments in a media culture that was not yet so corrupted that it would give voice to liver-spotted bagmen like Pat Buchanan and William Safire. It's important to remember that he had these moments in a media culture that was not yet fully tolerating the likes of George Will, Conrad Black's poolboy, his cabana full of purloined debate materials. It's important to remember that he did so in the days when the media culture at least tried to keep crazy people at bay, where the likes of Jonah Goldberg would be covering the sewer commission in Plattsburgh, if he were lucky, and Ann Coulter would be screaming at people on a subway platform.
  I'm a reporter. That's all I've ever wanted to be. So is Dan Rather, so I feel comfortable in saying that he screwed up in a very big way. But he doesn't deserve to have an aging hack like Dick Thornburgh as a professional proctologist, and he really doesn't deserve the cheap shots that are coming his way from people unfit to fasten his kaffiyeh.

It's all good. But Alterman - and his correspondents - usually are.

Art1 Art2 Art3 Art4

Long Story, Short Pier has another comics post up. Debating the definition again - or rather, the word to use to describe the thing he means when he says comics. "Sequential Art" or some such. Here the players are Eddie Campbell, speaking through an interview at Graphic Novel Review, the ubiquitous and inevitable Scott McCloud (so I'm taking this class, Harvard Extension, "Reading Across Media" - and first class, not far into the first lecture, what does the professor do but start drawing boxes on the blackboard, then lines between them, then little guys in them - all the while talking about the structure of narrative, ad the importance of the gap between panels. We will, in time, be reading Understanding Comics - though she noted, at the end of the class, that a good place to start in understanding narrative was - well - right there...), and Kip Manley himself. Whose take is this:

But we’re you and me both at once tenacious and fickle: once we’ve named a thing, we balk at the idea of changing that name—but that very truculence lets black-garbed stagehands work some magic by changing the thing just enough when we’re looking somewhere else. I’ve seen previous attempts to do what Eddie Campbell wants, from “comix” to “drawn books,” and while I’d never say never or not in a million years, nonetheless: my money’s on “comics.” Sad as it may seem, it’s much, much bigger than the longjohns—and it always would have been, if only we’d known how to look.

Now in the company of these giants who am I? But my money's with Kip. Cause to me it seems what is unique in that art form - the thing that makes it an art form itself (whatever you call it - format? medium? something) is - well - what Kip said, just above what I just quoted: that "all they have to work with is one picture after another". Everything else - the drawing (or photos or whatever), the words, the stories, the plots, the themes and ideas and characters and - getting back to Professor Kakoudaki - even the idea of transition itself - belongs to something else (all of them, maybe, something different, though often overlapping and etc.) What makes it comics (or whathaveyou) is the series of pictures - which exists as much in Rose is Rose as Maus. So - I'm for comics.

Some Ravings on Young Chickenhawks

Here, James Wolcott takes the piss out of a disgusting little shit taking smug pot shots at John Kerry's war service. This youngster - 22 years old - has his own radio show, so nodanger that he'll be headed off to Baghdad to help bring peace and democracy to the middle east. That would be "opportunism" - as he called Kerry's volunteering for service....

Ai-yi-yi. The main offense was saying that if Kerry had really been hurt, he'd be in "a real nice wheelchair" now. It's sad to bring in facts to batter a poor bastard like this Ben person, but I have an uncle who was wounded in WWII. Machine gunned in the legs, if I remember the story right. Who came home, rehabbed, and worked for a living for the next 50 years or so, worked - in the woods, in sawmills, on farms.

It goes without saying that this little dung heap Ben Ferguson isn't about to risk his sorry ass fighting this war he undoubtedly is so hepped up about. That isn't enough to stop him taking shots at a man who did fight in the war he was faced with, and fought with distinction. I am tempted to suspect that this Ferguson creature has never done a lick of work in his useless life either. And if he knew anyone who fought in a war - was wounded in a war - he would not say things like that.

Except - he probably would. The part I don't understand - often, these people do know people who fought, who suffered, who worked - and they still don't care. They still are able to pretend to honor their relatives or friends and yet piss on people like John Kerry or Max Cleland. It is that complete lack of empathy, or willingness to acknowledge what the other guy has done that is fucking us all over, really.

More Music, in Memorial

It has taken a couple days, but I am coming back to Johnny Ramone. I was heartbroken by the news of his death. That surprised me a bit - I was sad, but not heartbroken when Joey died, and he was a lot more likable. It’s probably the timing - I'd seen the movie, and was writing about the band, thinking about them - and then he died. It hurt - far more than most celebrity deaths (Marlon Brando, say) - almost as much as when my transcendent cultural heroes (Johnny Cash? Charles Schulz?) died.

It’s odd, feeling sentimental about Johnny Ramone. Joey made sense - but Johnny? He was an asshole - no one liked him. He comes off very badly in the film - a sour, mean, bitter man, with a cruel streak - the way he turns to his wife and puts her on the spot about whether there was any tension between him and Joey, and won’t let her get away with uttering a platitude or too. His wife - the woman he took away from Joey, causing that break. Classy. But at the same time, he comes off as someone who knew what he had in the band - who knew, maybe even better than the others, how fucking good they really were (he says in the film that only the Clash were close to them - the only way to dispute that is to note that the Clash aren’t in their league.) He knew what he had, and respected it (The Ramones) immensely, to the point of realizing it was worth more than his petty feuds.

So, yeah, he was an asshole, but he was also a genius. Everyone says he inspired a raft of guitar players - true. And he and his band (but in a lot of ways, that is him - the sound of the band, if not their material, is really Johnny’s guitar, fully formed from the very beginning, pure and unwavering from that point on) did inspire a raft of musicians, making simplicity possible, making it possible for anyone to be in a band. I myself - I fiercely regret that I did not hear them in time. If I had heard them, instead of Kiss, in 1976? Where would I be? Better than I turned out, right? They were cool, they were simple, they were honest, they were perfect.

That is the last word on them: they were a perfect rock band. Very possibly the perfect rock band. And Johnny Ramone was, probably, the perfect rock guitar player.

Now - perfection is not everything - perfect things are not necessarily the best thing. Perfection, purity, these things are limits - not weaknesses, really - but limits. You have to get past perfection at some point, to be the best - so all this sentimentality can’t blind me to the fact that if I were choosing, I’d still take Pere Ubu or the Velvets or the Beatles, possibly P-funk, maybe the Stones... it’s a short list - the bands I like more, or who were “better” than the Ramones - Beatles, Velvets, Pere Ubu, maybe (by some criteria) Beefheart, Can, P-Funk, maybe the Stones, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and the Byrds, maybe Fairport Convention/Richard Thompson, maybe even Bob Dylan - but that is about all. There are guitar players I like more, though that list isn’t much longer: Hendrix (though I don’t listen to him as much, and often feel almost intimidated by him), Thompson definitely, Clarence White and Michio Kurihara (the secrets), maybe Roger McGuinn - Jimmy Page, I’m afraid, Wes Montgomery and probably Charlie Christian, with Pete Cosey, Sonny Sharrock, Michael Karoli lingering around the edges. There could be others.

That’s not as long a list as I thought. I started, the morning he died, as it happened, making a list - my top 10 favorite guitar players of all time:

Richard Thompson
Jimi Hendrix
Jimmy Page
Johnny Ramone
Clarence White
Michio Kurihara
Roger McGuinn
Pete Cosey
Sonny Sharrock
Peter Townshend...

...say. There's Johnny, quite high up there. I was thinking about this stuff before he died - the movie had me thinking about him, and writing about him - which is obviously part of why this news was so devastating. They were on my mind...

So back to the Ramones - their place in the world of rock and roll, my reaction to them. About what they did - their sound, their importance...

The dirty secret is that I am ambivalent about them. I mean, the last 2-3 years, I have gone rather far in the other direction - listening to art bands, from Can and Soft Machine and Van Der Graf Generator to Derek Bailey and Keiji Haino to David Bowie and Radiohead. Yet - I have also gotten into punk a bit more, the edges of punk, bands I did not hear at all the first time around - the Buzzcocks (minimal airplay), Stiff Little Fingers (I had never heard them, knowingly, til I got the record - only 2 or 3 years ago.) Minimalism and avant garde and noise and - those things feed off one another, but they do it in a way that kind of pisses on the rhetoric of punk. I have never trusted its Puritanism (it is not accidental that it devolved into real Puritanism, pretty quickly, with straight edge hardcore and the like), its trashing of what came before. I loved AOR before I heard of punk, and continued to love it after I started liking punk, and still love both... so I don’t know.

Still - it is not really the Ramones I am ambivalent about. I am ambivalent about the propaganda that surrounds punk. You never hear anyone talk about the Ramones without talking about killing off the dinosaurs - and about simplicity and fun as if that were somehow antithetical to “seriousness” or virtuosity. That was not part of the first wave of punk. The Ramones' contemporaries were bands like Television - guitar noodling eggheads; Patti Smith - poetess; the midwest bands - Rocket From the Tombs, The Mirrors, the Electric Eels - coming out of the 60s bands, Stooges, Velvets, MC 5, the garage bands, the art bands (Captain Beefheart, Red Krayola, the Mothers, etc.) It was not monolithic - it was just devoted to freedom, aggression, to expression. The Ramones were part of it - it is a bitter pill to hear them being turned into another force of conformity.

I have to stop somewhere. I have the luxury here in blogland of developing whatever it is I'm saying over time. So I can come back. But I want to finish with this - something I wrote down back when Joey Ramone died. Punk changed everything - but it did more than kill off what was on the radio and replace it. (It didn't really do that - just exposed so much of what was on the radio as the shit it was.) It created plenty new - but it also changed what was already there. After punk - and when I say punk, I mean The Ramones - you could, if you were listening, hear the rock in the bloat of what came before. It didn't so much kill off all the Led Zeppelins and Black Sabbaths of the world as redeem them. Robert Plante once said that "God Saved the Queen" was a slowed down version of "Communication Breakdown" - which it is. But you needed punk to hear it again. It changed the way people listened to heavy metal - after punk, people could hear Bonham's drumming, Sabbath's drive and AC/DC's punch again. That is what punk did for me - I started listening to punk in earnest in the mid-80s - and it sent me as much for my old Zep and AC/DC records as for the punk-derived bands around at the time (The Replacements, Husker Du, Butthole Surfers, The Meat Puppets - my personal mid-80s favorites). I was not alone - as grunge would soon show us...

I am very grateful. Thank you Johnny (and Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy).

Standard Issue Republican Hate-Mongering

Here's another exampel of Republican dirty tricks. Washington Monthly reports that the Republicans are sending campaign letters to voters in West Virginia suggesting that the Democrats will ban the Bible if elected.

The literature shows a Bible with the word "BANNED" across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word "ALLOWED." The mailing tells West Virginians to "vote Republican to protect our families" and defeat the "liberal agenda."

Now, if I were an intelligent (though unscrupulous) republican, this is where I would say, "It's a metaphor, people! it's symbolic of the idea that by passing these laws, antithetical to the bible, the liberals are removing the bible from the public discourse!" I would then add, "sheesh" and go make fun of paranoid democrats with my conservative friends. (I would try to hide the smirk until that point.)

However, that answer is a cheat. Because, in fact, liberals (not all liberals everywhere, of course, but some liberals - not the ones running for president, probably not the ones running for any office in West Virginia) are in fact the ones advocating that gay marriages be allowed. So that part of the mailing is, in fact, literally true (if you discount the fact that the liberals doing this terrible thing are in far off Massachusetts and Northern California and places like that, and are not running for president.) So - if you combine two ideas - banning the bible and allowing gay marriages - and one refers to something that is literally true (in some parts of the country) - can you then claim that the other does not refer to something that is literally true? At which point - since no liberals anywhere are trying to ban the bible, in any literal, symbolic or other sense - doesn't this letter become a base lie and a dirty trick?

The last word then, to an ACT spokesman:

Jim Jordan, a spokesman for America Coming Together, described the mailing as "standard-issue Republican hate-mongering."