Author: jacobbacharach

Du mußt dein Leben ändern

Culture, Media, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

“Very strong, powerful men. Young.”

-Donald Trump

Strong, powerful: men. Young. They come
bright-eyed and desiring all we’ve built
on the Manhattan bedrock and Mississippi silt,
long after our dead, gorgeous youth had run
off the Indians, French, buffalo; won
the West; their beautiful hands grasped the hilt
of the ploughshare-sword. Less masculine men, guilt-
wracked, longing for that smooth flesh, dumb
to their inarticulate desire to be near
this youth would open up the castle to
these hordes of lovely angels; but I, a man
old enough to be beyond such queer,
unusual wants, know better; I only rue
my lost marble, now an expensive tan.

Mourning Joe

Culture, Media, Poetry, Uncategorized, War and Politics

Hey Iran, you have exactly 300 days left to push a US president around. Enjoy it while you can. After that, there will be hell to pay.

–Joe Scarborough

He’s never thought
of himself as anything but a vessel for
the true sensibilities of the rich and poor
alike; he’s not

one to worry
about the particulars; let the news-
papers fret like little priests; in the pews
the people—sorry,

the real people:
they value simple common sense above
the effetely weak-kneed truth of things; they love
strength, hate evil.

So what if we began
the war, transgressed a border, armed both sides
against each other? The principle that guides
him: a man

must be a lion:
he wakes and knows exactly what he wants
for breakfast. “Consuela, two croissants!”
She’s Uruguayan,

maybe, legal
though, he’s almost sure. His car and driver
take him straight to the station. A survivor,
like an eagle

who’s come back,
no thanks, whatever you’ve heard, to regulation,
from a brush with what the dweebs would call extinction:
attack, attack—

he learned it on the last
if unopposed, campaign: never concede
a point—that’s what it really means to lead:
no brake; all gas.

For the Rest, Trump

Conspiracy and the Occult, Economy, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Uncategorized, War and Politics

Though in the wild he is not a Muss-
olini, or not quite, he has a dear-
ly bought and bald-headed public fear
that the old order’s order has shaken loose,
the locomotive stalled, the red caboose
has rolled off backward, feckless, foreign, queer;
the goggling passengers try to smile, sneer:
the question of ticket class is too abstruse,
and yet they have been left behind; they are
getting drunk and telling the waiter that
they’re going to have him fired, but their hist-
rionics never leave the dining car.
The bosses don’t care anyway. Back at
the station they quibble over who’s a fascist.

Made Flesh

Culture, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, War and Politics

“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

-Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, M.D., P.C

We are all flesh: we live; we die. The seasons
slip through our notice. My God, it’s Christmas! We
have only just remembered to trash the tree
from last year. Of all the brief reasons
to be glad, despite the body’s daily treasons—
its aching mornings and sniffling nights—they flee,
my thoughts, first, to this: that we are free
of immortality, which makes heathens
of the divine principalities, for they
can neither aspire nor want nor hope nor change;
they can’t make their fortune or lose weight,
and nothing escapes their notice: a single day
is a century. Their lives are intolerably strange.
They do not really live. Instead, they hate.

Paris, ailleurs

Justice, Poetry, Religion, War and Politics

Abundant peace from heaven, and life, for all
of us; but if not this, O God, if You
are real then grant us less, and if not, do
it anyway: that we will not fall
for the same false lessons as before; we will call
our mothers and email our friends; we’ll renew
our marriage vows and sex lives. We try too
hard to be more than simply good and stall
in our moral progress every time we think
we must defeat evil with will instead
of opening our doors and being kind, letting
our neighbors know our names, having a drink
with our estranged brothers, giving the dead
our Kaddish; those who killed them our forgetting.

14 Things Successful People Do Before Breakfast

Economy, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind

Regrets the alarm; looks at his sleeping wife;
wonders if she dreams of him at all;
worries in the shower that his dick is small;
at breakfast nicks his thumb with a kitchen knife.
Pastes on a smile; says, “I love my life,”
as he pulls on his Oxfords in the entry hall,
though some days he thinks he’d rather burn it all
to the ground, make anarchy and civil strife,
smoke weed again, or call the pretty boy
he’d briefly loved in college. He will not.
Luck built five bedrooms and three cars.
Blessed by fortune, unburdened by weighty joy,
easy commute, two average little snots.
Skips dinner, makes excuse, and hits the bars.

I Myself Dabbled in Pacifism

Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

At the first Democratic primary debate of the already interminable 2016 Presidential contest, it took a little over half an hour to call in the airstrikes. Ironically, much of the first half hour was spent arguing over who would most effectively curtail the ready availability of firearms on the domestic market. Gun control is a strange and contradictory position for mainstream American liberals. President Obama has observed that America, almost uniquely among developed nations, permits almost anyone to own not just a gun, but lots of guns. The result, he claims, is our national epidemic of gun violence, especially the escalating incidence of “mass casualty” events.

But the United States also uniquely has an archipelago of 700 military bases around the world and is waging hot wars in dozens of countries, from major ongoing deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan to air strikes in Syria to drone warfare in Africa. If the US is an unusually gun-loving culture, it is also an unusually militaristic one. Without drawing lazy lines of causation, there’s clearly more at work than just a legal right to possess firearms. What makes a society paranoid and trigger-happy? There must be a reason why a market exists for so many guns.

The candidates, with the possible exception of Jim Webb (whom my astonished boyfriend described as “the worst uncle at your family picnic”), didn’t pitch themselves as pro-war, of course. A mainstay of liberal politicians in America is stake out a position as a staunch opponent of all the bad wars (even those you accidentally voted for yourself) and an enthusiastic supporter of all the good ones. Obama himself campaigned and won his first term in part by casting himself as anti-war; he’d opposed the invasion of Iraq. He won a Nobel Prize for the accomplishment of not being George W. Bush, and then proved to be an even more enthusiastic supporter of drone warfare than his predecessor. He spent the next eight years expanding a secretive campaign of botched assassinations. There are, it turns out, no anti-war American presidents.

The closest thing to an anti-war candidate in the current race is not the supposedly radical leftist, Bernie Sanders, but rather his fellow New Englander, Lincoln Chaffee, a former “liberal Republican” whose chances of winning the nomination are only slightly better than mine. Sanders, meanwhile, positions himself as less committed to foreign military intervention than Clinton—hardly probative, since her principal claim to wisdom and perspicacity on military matters is that the guy who beat her to the 2008 nomination in large part on the issue of her Iraq War vote elevated her out of defeat and made her Secretary of State.

Sanders was a conscientious objector in Vietnam. He was emphatic. “I am not a pacifist, Anderson.” He opposed Vietnam specifically. It would be churlish to mock him for objecting most strongly to the one war in which he stood the greatest chance of fighting. Unlike the Rumsfelds, Cheneys, and Bushes of the world, he did register his open objection; he didn’t mouth support for bloody foreign adventure while trading on his daddy’s connections to keep his own delicate flesh planted firmly on American soil. In effect, Sanders argues that his support for war has been judicious: precisely the quality we’re supposed to want in a commander-in-chief. He opposed Iraq, and looking at Syria, he fears a “quagmire,” though he went out of his way to support air strikes and the nonsensical idea of a no-fly zone.

On the other hand, in making the case for his military bona fides, he proudly noted his support for certain campaigns:

Obviously, I voted, when President Clinton said, “let’s stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo,” I voted for that. I voted to make sure that Osama bin Laden was held accountable in Afghanistan.

Perhaps we learn better lessons from our bad wars than the “good” ones. It would be more accurate to say that Afghanistan was held accountable for Osama bin Laden, who was discovered and killed more than a dozen years after the Afghan War began, and notably in another country. America is now 14 years into that conflict; the country is riven and unstable; the Taliban, against whom our initial invasion was ostensibly fought, are retaking territory, and have even become America’s tentative allies in some circumstances against ISIS and other foreign militants. It’s a strange resume-builder for a man opposed to quagmires.

Kosovo is a stranger lesson still. There’s little doubt that the NATO air war hastened the end of the Kosovo War, but it did not “stop ethnic cleansing.” On the contrary, it had the opposite effect. Although there were atrocities prior to the bombing campaign, not to mention hundreds of thousands of “internally displaced peoples,” the systematic expulsion of the Albanian population only started after the bombing campaign began. Then, at the conclusion of open conflict, hundreds of thousands of these refugees returned, while almost all of Kosovo’s Serbs fled. As Adam Roberts, hardly a Chomskyite, wrote in an assessment published shortly after the conclusion of the war:

The fact that the campaign failed in the intended manner to avert a humanitarian disaster in the short term, even though it did eventually stop it, makes it a questionable model of humanitarian intervention. The uncomfortable paradox involved—that a military campaign against ethnic cleansing culminated in a settlement in which the majority of Serbs resident in Kosovo departed—must reinforce the sense that humanitarian operations cannot suddenly transform a political landscape full of moral complexity.

Another paradox: a good war that Bernie Sanders supported ended in a scenario terribly similar to the bad war he opposed, the effective ethnic partition of a multi-ethnic state.

He now supports an air war in Syria. It suggests that, though he may differ in the particulars, in broad principle Sanders is a predictably mainstream Democrat with the mainstream’s fatal affection for air war as a neat and clean form of “humanitarian intervention.” What, precisely, the bombardment of Syria is meant to accomplish, tactically or strategically, and against whom, is not so much unanswered as unasked. The natural American reaction—to fill every void of good options with a bombing campaign—is more than bipartisan: it’s the fundamental default of American politics. Consider this: Bernie Sanders is more willing to distance himself from the civic religion of capitalism than he is from American intervention in foreign wars. Socialism, relentlessly demonized in US politics, isn’t a poison pill, but the notion that a military is only for self-defense is.

Rare Arms

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

Second Amendment jurisprudence is high on the list of the great national embarrassments foisted upon us by our embarrassing federal judiciary, who continually accept the ahistorical interpretations of people who actually claim that a Constitutional government enshrines the right to armed insurrection against itself. Not even the framers, who had actually and recently fought in a revolution, imagined it meant such a thing, but here we are. America’s quasi-religious fetish for its own Constitution is in any event a strange national obsession. The Constitution is a hash of archaic bylaws whose principal strength is that it’s so vague and badly worded that it can mean whatever we need it to mean at any given time. “A well regulated…”

Well, gun advocates have done nothing if not given us a pithy slogan expressing exactly how incoherent they are: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. This is like saying cars don’t drive on roads or hammers don’t pound in nails. That a tool requires an operator to do its work begs the question. Guns were made to kill things, people chiefly among them. They’re a very good tool for this purpose. It’s possible to nail wood together without a hammer, but much easier with one; it’s possible to commute 30 miles to work without an internal combustion vehicle, but not easy; it’s possible to kill a whole lot of people all at once without a gun, but crossbows and broadswords do lack individual efficiency. Guns are machines for killing, and they kill a lot of people.

Refocusing from the implement to the actor also lends itself to our current absurd scapegoating, in which “mental illness,” never specifically defined, becomes a legitimate target for legislative intervention; Congresscreatures publicly imagine they can legislate sanity, and yet they can’t conceive regulating the purchase and ownership of an industrial product. How a nation that requires a $25 co-pay for a blood pressure and reflex test that you have to wait five months to book intends to provide universal, ongoing, robust psychological care to its 300 million souls, many millions of whom don’t have sufficient insurance and are therefore on the hook for more like $150 if they ever want to visit a regular old doctor, is unclear. Meanwhile, much of the gun violence in the country—not the mass shootings of white people that make the news, but the daily killings of one here, two there in places like Chicago—isn’t a question of mental health, not as the gun debate defines it anyway.

But. There is a kind of moral credulousness on the part of the Nice Liberal critics of our national gun culture, and there’s something intolerably amoral about a politician like Barack Obama assuming a pose of high moral dudgeon to snipe at conservative gun rights advocates while he presides over, among other atrocities, the bombing of a neutral hospital—literally, a war crime. (And the bombing of the MSF hospital is just one war crime among many; we just happen to note it because its victims are Western, professional, media-savvy, and English-fluent.) This isn’t cheap whataboutism; if you ask how we can be such a violent society and exclude sixty years of uninterrupted global warfare from your analysis, then your crass factionalism is showing.

It’s true: blaming domestic gun deaths on America’s violent, aggressive imperialism is a little like blaming it on mental illness; it identifies an approximate rather than a proximate cause and spins its wheels wildly away from a practical mechanism for mitigating the problem here and now. I do, however, wish that those who advocate for stricter gun control in this country would evince a more convincing and universal pacifism, rather than crying out in passionate horror each time some nut shoots up an elementary school but merely regretting each time their president blows one up.

Shabbos Goy

Culture, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

“The court cannot condone the willful disobedience of its lawfully issued order,” Judge Bunning said. “If you give people the opportunity to choose which orders they follow, that’s what potentially causes problems.”

When I was younger, I was more strident in my atheism. If I lacked the misogyny and gross prejudice—against Islam in particular—that qualify a person for the “New Atheist” label, then I nevertheless held to their practice of swashbuckling into almost any conversation, dull sword drawn, ready to declare that Holy Books hopelessly self-contradict; all those eternal truths are changeable and historically contingent; the notion of any kind of supreme and omnipotent being refutes itself under the simplest tests of logic; and oh, by the way, the Inquisition etc. were very, very bad. All of these arguments are simultaneously true and facile; faith exempts itself from these little eructations of materialism, which doesn’t make it correct but does make it in a sense immune to correctness as a category. In the last decade, my atheism has both deepened and softened. I suspect that had I encountered the right rabbi at the right time in my early twenties, when my passionate anti-religion burned hottest, then I might have been salvaged by grace. Now I tend to view religion, and at least some of the religious, with sympathy, which puts my soul beyond their reach, although it does sometimes force me to remind people that I know there are no gods and just appreciate the poetry.

This long caveat is to say that I have some sympathy for Kim Davis, though not because she’s in the right in her imagined protest. The idea that an agent of the government can nullify the law and obviate the constitutional rights of citizens due to her own private beliefs is manifestly silly. In the immortal formulation of your Catholic hero and mine, Antonin Scalia, you are entitled to your beliefs but not to your government job. Yes, even government employees, even elected officials, can engage in civil disobedience, but you don’t get to ride the First Amendment freely into your pension, especially not by violating its first clause in the delusional belief that in so doing you’re defending its second. As plenty of folks have pointed out, it was well within her small power to deputize some other row officer to sign off on these Satanic permits; that she refused to do so out of a let-us-say theologically suspect belief in the transitive property of the rendered-unto-Caesar suggests a desire to force the issue to a head. The Supreme Court is ironically responsible for this mess: its sloppy Hobby Lobby decision has convinced every minor divine in America that mere belief in whatever puts diplomatic plates on his prejudices.

But the Supreme Court is responsible, and it seems to me that any reasonably dull person, which is to say most Americans, who occasionally tunes into cable news, could easily draw this same conclusion: that “deeply held faith” abrogates temporal law. Egged on in this incorrect belief by unscrupulous legal counsel, you can just imagine how a person like Kim Davis could come to see herself as a hero and a martyr. Unlike her counsel, I don’t actually imagine that Davis holds any particular animus toward gays in particular, but rather has just a vague, foreboding sense of the inevitable decline of the familiar order of things. I grew up in a dying Appalachian coal town in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and I knew plenty of women like Kim Davis. They went to the Church of Abundant Life and believed that Jews were going to hell, although one suggested to my mother that our family might be among the 144,000 to be bodily assumed into Heaven on the Rapture’s eve. They thought homosexuality was an abomination, but they were on perfectly good terms with the chubby homo who feathered and teased out their hair at Bangz. Democrats hadn’t done shit when the mines closed, so they drifted toward George Bush and learned to blame the unions and weren’t entirely wrong in either case. The Kim Davises of the world can’t do shit about the decline of Eastern Kentucky, but by God, this one of them can take a stand against things bein’ different. Correctness as a category does not apply.

Now, your regional sob story and hopelessly convoluted sexual ethics don’t entitle you to discriminate from your elected office, but I have the inescapable feeling that by holding her in contempt and tossing her in the clink, Judge Bunning did precisely the wrong thing. He was correct to observe that a pecuniary penalty would have had no impact; political allies of her lawyers would have made fines immaterial to her. And yes, courts do need a mechanism for enforcing compliance with their orders. But it strikes me that if Bunning could just wave his federal wand and allow others to issue the permits, then I see no reason why he couldn’t do the same without the cell. Despite her protestations to the contrary—that these certificates are somehow invalid without her signature—no one believes that the boys down at the Social Security Office are going to take her word over the order of a federal judge. I’ve seen some commentary on the convoluted authority to issue these permits in Kentucky, but state permitting statutes don’t trump the constitution, and their misapplication doesn’t invalidate gays’ right to marry.

If anything, to have simply swatted away her feckless protest and instructed someone else to marry the couples in question would have been a more fitting, biting, and deserved punishment. Let her whine impotently from behind the permits & licenses desk down at the county office while the janitor signs off under the authority of the US District Court. She will be neither hero nor martyr, and in a few months, she’ll wonder why she ever made such a fuss. Instead, I fear we’ve created another dumb saint in a country that seems to me to be drowning in dumb sanctimony. We must learn to love our enemies enough that the only punishment we desire in their defeat is their irrelevance. That would suffice.

Ronald Raven Signs a Piece of Legislation

Media, Poetry, Religion, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

Never more than a few wing’s beats
away; the poor pigeons warble that
they’ve lost the parking lot where they grew fat
to the loud and faster Corvidae who bleat
an almost-human language; the raven defeats
the mere flocked and fearful flights of cat-
harassed and bread-fed winged rats
of the city by being them but more: he eats
what they eat; lives where they live; but he
collects in his nests a bright collection, this
strange habit of display, half warning
and half fetish. De-natured doves, we,
really, are the pigeons; how we miss
the lost evening cliffs. But the raven is morning.