Well, I may have called Jill Kelly et al. “a bunch of self-inflated, over-leveraged, Floridian yoga-and-pedicure arrivistes,” but at least they never killed nobody. If she and her husband and their little circle of Gulf Coast socialite lites were running a series of nested social scams, as they patently were, appending themselves to the native déclassé aristocracy of West Florida, namely, The Military, like a collection of slightly natty minor nobles pissing in the stairwells at Versailles while waiting for a chance encounter with a Bourbon, then at least they were harmless. They weren’t off in Afghanistan, sending folks to their doom. The fact that everyone in Washington seemed—and seem—to find them so offensive for having brought low several once-great men suggests that there may yet have been some redeeming social value in their grift. Oh, I am sure they’re self-entitled assholes, but at least they’re not generals . . . or senators. And remember, Petraeus himself was just a useful Press Release, an avatar of some sort of martial success to be dumped on each open-mouthed Tina Brown each time the grim facts of our “Decade at War” threatened to boil over into something like public disaffection. A stooge of a bunch of stooges brought down by the machinations of some more stooges—is anything more American than that? The Kellys can’t understand why they’d face opprobrium for what they know anyone else in their circumstances would’ve done. They wanted notoriety, not to be notorious! Sister, don’t we all.
War and Politics
The Potential Inheritance of the Earth by the Honey Badger
Poetry, War and PoliticsAs if the morning sun could give a shit.
Each subsequential generation feels
uniquely favored by Apollo’s wheels;
outside of any science, we permit
our poetry to make it animate;
a sky-borne notary, official seal,
approves America, or the New Deal,
or Obama’s elevation over Mitt.
But when we’re gone, its hydrogen will still
continue fusing, irrespective of
the politics of our successor race,
whatever species next decides to fill
its nearest star with qualities like love,
intentionality, goodwill, and grace.
The Right to Bear Arms
Culture, War and PoliticsWhat I find particularly offensive, though, is listening to some dude with “evolving” views on fags like me wave Stonewall at America in the middle of the series of glorious non sequiturs that constituted his address in order to affirm that the rising tide of American moral imagination lifts all boats, even the fucking gay ones. Fuck that shit, Mr. Prez. America is a nation of tantrum-throwing moral infants that’s been dragged bawling out of the crib of its own moral and ethical object impermanence, and even now it’s kicking and screaming on the floor of the department store, yelling that some black guy got into a California law school ahead of a deserving white.
Oh good, the President has reluctantly and at length come around to the idea that the gays oughta be married, and his own evolution on the matter is cast as a microcosm of the mythopoeic inevitability of the expanding rights and franchise of America. Aw, we just needed to get to know you gays, uh, guys I mean. And then we figured out that you’re okay! For which, I think, we are supposed to be grateful. No, actually, not just grateful. Actually, edified. Like, our cameo in the inaugural feature is supposed to be valedictory, after all those years waiting tables, we finally got the callback. Put on your dance belt Mary Jane, and stretch those quads.
Caesarian Sectionals
Culture, Media, War and PoliticsFor all the po-faced, high-church sentimentality and stentorian sententiousness of the quadrennial American coronation day, there’s something almost charmingly—and disarmingly—tacky about our great national junket jubilee, a certain plastic tablecloth, fire-hall wedding, warming-tray ziti trashiness that makes the fact that we are ultimately celebrating the ratification of one more dude’s right to once more screw the poor and bomb the fuck out the rest of the world slightly more tolerable. “I wasn’t sure if I’d like it without the turntable stage,” I overheard one woman say to her husband as they left Les Mis the other night, “but that music!” Yes, that music. If inauguration has a cultural counterpart, an art that expresses its gaudy artifice, it’s the Broadway musical; it’s the Broadway mega-musical, which, like our own imperial habits and attitudes, usually premiered in London before metastasizing here in the God Bless the United States of America. The music isn’t very good, and the singers are atrocious; the whole thing is big, brassy, and somewhat incomprehensible. But, you know, you dreamed a dream and all that. You left humming, and you bought a tee-shirt on the way out.
Among the many tonal contradictions of all this gala pomposity is the relentless self-reassurances we seem to require that what’s special, what’s unique is how regular our elections are, how our uninterrupted history of electing lawyers, rich guys, and Indian killers every four years, come war or come war, is business as usual. Well, if that were the case, what’s with the flyovers and drum-and-fife bands and floats and the presence of Beyoncé? In fact, we seem slightly shocked as a nation each time we manage to pull this off, a shock that we then sublimate into a grotesquely puritanical Washington bacchanal, which suggests to me at least an underlying ambivalence about the whole system. The President-elect then gets up and praises the national bylaws: “Fourscore and a bunch of other years ago, our forefathers brought forth this corporation based on a pre-cash valuation of ten million to be issued as follows: 3,000,000 Series A preferred shares to . . . Please see non-dilution language in Appendix A . . . Board of Directors to be composed of . . .” And so on.
Then they all drink crap wine, eat an underdone steak and overboiled lobster, and tomorrow the French will still be bombing Mali, the drones still attacking Pakistan, the Rockaways still a mess, the prisons still full, the Mexican civil war still raging, and the Congress still angling for jobs as Canadian Tar Sands lobbyists or whatever. It is futile to get worked up about these things. Your friends are all posting Proud to Be messages in their Facebook feeds, but you are bigger than that. Your soul is bigger. You walk into the kitchen. You put the music on loud and you get the nice fish out of the refrigerator. You give the dog some crackers, and you kiss your boyfriend, and you open a nice IPA, because you feel like a beer tonight. Martin Luther King, Jr. isn’t rolling in his grave, guys. He’s dead. And the dead have one up on us, for they are constitutionally incapable of giving a fuck. You kiss your boyfriend again on the lips, and you pay all those assholes exactly the attention they deserve, which is none at all.
The Days When We Had Rest, O Soul, for They Were Long
Culture, Justice, Media, War and PoliticsWhile I’ve always thought that there was something particularly crass about our habits of erecting edifices of grief to strangers whom we perceive as similar to us even as we note and let pass without comment the deaths of so many more distant, more different people in our country’s wars and misadventures, and while I likewise find our habit of reacting with dismay to items like the prosecution-unto-death of Aaron Swartz even as we’re dimly aware that poorer, less connected, less important people are hounded to their lives’ ends by the dirty machinery of our penal system, which is powered by punishment wholly out of scale to any wrong, punishment which is itself quite often the only wrong ever committed, the sheer, tawdry, grotesquely ill-proportioned persecution of the young man for acts whose criminal taxonomy is something out of a Lewis Carroll poem is the sort of spectacle that really does make you wonder how long, actually, a society intent on destroying its genius in order to preserve the inbred rights of its rentier class to extract filthy lucre from the margins of genuine intellect can endure.
Wolfenstein
Culture, Media, War and Politics
“But Mom,” I said. “It’s killing Nazis!” Which didn’t win her over, exactly, but I did get to keep the game, and I managed to waste some moderate portion of my youth Playing Violent Video Games without ever killing anybody.
We live in society that will devote many fatuous hours discussing and deliberating the ill effects of video games and movies and rap songs and what have you. They are contributing to a “culture of violence” or some such. Meanwhile, the president actually has a kill list, and we accept the following as so banal that they escape the necessity of daily reporting:
You gonna blame Quentin Tarantino and Halo for that?
Assholes Are Like Opinions, Everyone’s Got One, and Everyone’s Is Just His Opinion
Culture, War and PoliticsFollowing a call by a French minister to censor certain so-called hateful speech, a Guardian writer wrote what I’d call a predictably contrarian piece praising limited forms of censorship, and Glenn Greenwald wrote a predictably outraged piece arguing that
Nothing has been more destructive or dangerous throughout history – nothing – than the power of the state to suppress and criminalize opinions it dislikes.
Let’s say I’m not entirely convinced by this formulation, or by its corollary slippery slope: that the first infringement on free expression is the first step toward the camps. I mean, if we reject the notion that government-sanctioned gay marriage leads inexorably to interspecies romance or traditional Mormonism or whatever, then we’re also obliged to reject the notion that outlawing fag-baiting and Holocaust denial will march us straight into 1984.
Now I’m not in favor of government censorship, and The Higher Power According to Your Understanding of Him only knows that letting a bunch of self-satisfied énarques troll through hashtags, fishing for hatefulness and incivility and historical revisionism is a distressing—if also comic—proposition. But I do subscribe to this formulation:
First of all, I still lean to free speech absolutism. My position right now is to simply not give a shit about defending jerks.
That is to say, I think the left confuses the imperative to defend the least among us with the need to zealously defend the biggest fucking dickshits among us. The ACLU is great and all, but we completely over-valorize getting the Nazis a permit to march in Skokie. There’s a terrific irony underlying this notion that on the other side of prohibiting the swastika is inviting the yellow star. I do think the Nazis should be able to march past the synagogue and the Klan through downtown Birmingham, but we’ve too carefully cultivated the reflex to leap out of our seats when it seems that such ability might be curtailed.
Or, taking the French example, the conditions of extreme poverty and repression that obtain in the banlieues are much greater “threats”—are much more “destructive and dangerous”—than a bill to ban #SiMonFilsEtGay. That’s not to say that we need to fixate on one to the total exclusion of the other, but if we’re more concerned with assholes tweeting rank opinions (many of them not even the real, truly held opinions of their shock-seeking pseudonymous authors) than we are with the lack of a commuter line to Clichy-sous-Bois, then our allegiance is really to a hollow formalism rather than to the rights of human beings to live free, happy, comfortable, unmolested, and uncircumscribed lives.
In fairness, I believe that Glenn Greenwald would echo a lot of these sentiments, and it’s never fair to presume that a writer’s chosen emphasis implies the exclusion of other concerns. Still, there’s tendency to swashbuckle into these absolutist arguments about free speech every time some C-list bureaucrat or columnist suggests cutting off this or that asshole’s microphone, which is rarely matched in intensity or duration when the police go storming in to nettoyer la cité au Kärcher. (Plenty of free-speech advocates are also prisoner’s rights advocates; are also drug law opponents; but as a matter of column inches, well . . .)
We saw a similar phenomenon when one of the Democratic Party hacks at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money made some shall-we-say intemperate comments about Wayne LaPierre in the moments immediately following the school shootings in Connecticut. Of course, a gang of right-wingers put on their shit-eatingest Schadenfreude grins and accused him of “eliminationist rhetoric”—a coinage popular on liberal blogs—for calling for Uncle Wayne’s “head on a spike.” Meanwhile, the blogger went on to call for the state to declare LaPierre a terrorist and toss his ass in jail. His university employer publicly regretted his comments, and a gang of luminous slightly-to-the-lefties circled the wagons and demanded that his freedom—his Academic Freedom, ye gods—be respected, with the implicit understanding that telling a guy to quit acting like a dick is the equivalent of Threatening His Job and Livelihood.
But people in much shittier and more precarious jobs all over America and all over the world actually get canned every day for mouthing off or using Facebook wrong or failing to ask the customer if they found everything they were looking for today, and that is the sort of injustice that demands our attention, not the plight of some entitled shitbag who felt that recent bloody events made for an opportune moment to advocate for criminalizing gun advocacy—that is to say, for supporting activities that, if lamentable, are legal in our society.
Insofar as there is a public debate about free speech, it’s largely confined to a neverending argument about the rights of privileged dickheads to be dickheads, and usually to each other. But most of humanity isn’t limited in the expressive sphere by censorship or hate speech laws or MPAA or whatever. It’s limited by poverty, imprisonment, the tyranny of intellectual property, the limitless powers of the boss, the cartel ownership of the means of communication. The terms of service are a bigger constraint on free expression than the Minister of Women’s Rights. The unequal distribution of wealth has more profound implications for speech than any statute.
First-Person Shooter
Media, War and PoliticsWe live in an entertainment culture soaked in graphic, often sadistic, violence. Older folks find themselves stunned by what a desensitized youth finds routine, often amusing. It’s not just movies. Young men sit for hours pulling video-game triggers, mowing down human beings en masse without pain or consequence.
Burn After Spending
War and PoliticsChristmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
-Our Man in Havana
Another reason I enjoy Graham Greene is that his bleak humor is so often prescient, proving the necessary point that comedy isn’t just the highest form of analysis, but the only form. He really could have written this story himself: two posh American dilettantes playing at playing at war, while the Generalissimo supposed to be in charge is bonking his amanuensis.
Actually, with all the awards dinners and jocular wine-soaked, clothed-and-skirted confabs, the thing smells just as much of Gilbert and Sullivan, but in Greeneland people actually die, and die horribly as a pesky side effect of human vanity and stupidity, and that’s the sad tale here. Two genuine American crackpots, experts on empires that have ceased to exist, got scam salaries from a non-profit DC racket and literally sent hundreds of Americans and god knows how many Afghans and Pakistanis to be killed, crippled, and maimed while the real officers were off porking a bunch of self-inflated, over-leveraged, Floridian yoga-and-pedicure arrivistes. At least Wormold did it for his daughter.
Perfectly, this article arrives simultaneously with its own publisher getting on the box to tell us that Chuck Hagel is insufficiently committed to setting giant piles of money on fire to serve as the Secretary of Defense. Really!
Mr. Hagel took a very different position when asked about Mr. Panetta’s comment during a September 2011 interview with the Financial Times. “The Defense Department, I think in many ways, has been bloated,” he responded. “So I think the Pentagon needs to be pared down.”
That’s being offered as a criticism. To even suggest such a thing is to be rendered unfit.
Well, the Washington Post is also a scam, the rump entertainment product of a test-prep rentier on the equally bloated American university industry, and there’s a great and ironic similarity between two scheming profs running a con dispensing advice to the generals and a scheming tabloid running a con by doing the same to the rest of the ruling class.
I suppose everyone will have to be shocked by this latest revelation about the petty venality of our modern-day Scipios, even though it’s the most unsurprising thing in the world. Talk about vanity. Our wars are nothing but, in both the modern and the ecclesiastical sense. The real long con here is on you, America. Your main man Obama is chucking your shitty retirement plan in the meat grinder while a couple of humanities Ph.D.s direct a quadrillion bones or clams of carnage halfway around the world. Your job sucks, you haven’t got any public transportation, your city is on the verge of bankruptcy, and your unpaid parking tickets have been reported to the credit ratings agency, making it impossible to refinance your crap mortgage. Don’t worry, though. Some dude who once expressed some mild skepticism about the non-personnel administrative expenses of the most lavishly, obscenely capitalized entity in the entire world may yet, despite the objections of The Potomac People’s Daily, get confirmed in some big-shot political job that you don’t really care about anyway.
Jacob Bacharach 