Road To Hell

Liberals, as a group, have often attributed Geo. W. and the Neocon’s boneheaded decision to invade Iraq to their (or at least W’s) pure stupidity. In fact, of course, nothing of the sort is true. The decision to send troops was a perfectly rational move to establish an American presence – “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” – in the heart of the Arab and Moslem worlds. From Iraq, the US could project power in any direction, toward Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, depending on the need. From Baghdad and Basra, American land and air forces could range out over deserts and seas to threaten our enemies, protect our friends, and, oh, yes, secure American access to oil.

The problem? Well, you already know it. The invasion was predicated on the assumption that we were liberating a nation-state that which would remain coherent even if its resident despot were removed. In fact, of course, nothing of the sort was true. Iraq was cobbled together by Gertrude Bell and the British who thought it would be fun to see if you could make a country out of people who hated each other. Without a thoroughly totalitarian despot at the helm, a Frankenstein’s monster like that is going to fall. And, now, we’ve got the results of our war of liberation . . . chaos, civil strife, roadside bombs, and death by a thousand cuts.

So, in other words, the invasion wasn’t stupid.

It was, however, a gross criminal error.

And . . . in the real word . . . that’s whole hell of a lot worse.

Keep the Nay in Napalm

So, a few days before Christmas I was out getting a some last minute gifts. In the parking of the Mall I spotted a car parked near mine. It was a new one, rather expensive, and all nice and shiny.

It also had a bunch of bumper stickers. They read (from right to left) something along the lines of “Keep Christ in Christmas,” “Shock and Awe” (this with a small picture of a jet dropping bombs), “America, love it or Get Out,” and, last, a modified pro-George W. Bush sticker with a large “W” attached to an American flag and, below that, “whup ass.”

I hurried away.

I didn’t want to meet to the person who owned that car.

I might have been forced to admit that I didn’t know what part of the Bible it was that Christ (as in “Keep Christ in . . .”) said something along the lines of “Blessed be they who napalm women and children.”

I suspect it may be in the Sermon On The Artillery Platform, but I don’t really remember.

holiday greetings

Merry Christmas to all! And to all a good night.

Xbox Xbox Xbox X-freaking-Box

Okay, would everybody on the freaking planet who is NOT trying to buy a freaking high-priced Xbox this freaking holiday season to play psychotic video games involving larges amounts of simulated carnage on Christmas morning please raise their freaking hands?

One . . . two . . .

Okay. Thanks. Just checking.

horse's a...

The current attempts, in places like Kansas and the White House, to forbid the teaching of evolution and replace it with the dogma of Creationism is, alas, proof of the old adage.

To wit: you can lead a horse’s ass to water, but you can’t make it think.

JJ on Oz

J.J. Bittermuch from hell:

Don’t know if you’re following the news of street violence in Australia, Paris, and so on. Quite nasty, really. Young men, mostly Arab or North African, going on rampages and smashing up everything in their path.

Now, I know they’ve been “oppressed” and “denied” and “discriminated against” . . . and, at least in Australia, they didn’t start the violence (well, okay, maybe they did, or maybe they didn’t, but that’s not the point) . . . and I should be thoughtful and tolerant and kind . . .

And yet . . . and yet . . . why can’t I escape the image of immigrants going abroad in search of a better life ...

And then doing their level best to make everywhere else just as sh*tty as it was at home?

Unnatural

Amazing really. I mean, the way that the people who oppose genetically modified food because it is “unnatural” are the first ones in line for botox and liposuction.

Bittermuch (and De Sade) on Politics In the Bedroom

J.J. Bittermuch writes from hell:

I’m struck by how often Americans cannot seem to understand why anyone would hate us, nor fail to fall to their knees in gratitude when we tell them the live their lives and run their countries.

So, let me offer what, I hope, will be a clarifying anecdote.

Some time ago, now, I saw that a woman has written a relationship book that counsels women on how to deal with their men. The book has drawn endless fire from social critics because, the critics said, the book told women to submit to their husbands without a whimper.

I finally got around to looking at the text and discovered that, in fact, it said no such thing. Boiled down to elementals, what the author actually wrote was that if women cared to keep their husbands and boyfriends then they should not correct their every utterance, nor call them stupid and ineffectual in front of their friends or children, nor devalue their ideas or ambitions, nor otherwise treat them as annoying yet dimwitted anthropoids who haven’t quite learned how to count above ten without taking off their shoes to use their toes.

I love it.

What other culture on the planet would define basic civility toward your life-mate as the morbid symptom of pathological masochism?

Hummers and Necon Wisdom

I read in the paper the other day that the Pentagon is rushing to replace the Humvee vehicle with something . . . anything! . . . with greater survivability in the streets of Baghdad. It seems that the Humvee, which in its original incarnation had almost no armor, and thus today is the proverbial sitting quacker when Islamic (and other) nutcases start tossing high explosive at’em.

Amusing, in a grim way.

You see, when the Neocon-Bushites took over the government in the coup of 2000, one of the first things that merry band of draft dodgers and absentee National Guardists did was tell the professional soldiers of the country How To Wage War. Chief among these Fuehrer-directives was that war, in the future, would be a matter of speed and maneuver. You don’t defeat the enemy by taking him head-on. You dash around his strong-points, get behind him, attack his command-control-communications, and generally blast him into pieces before he knows what hit him.

Ah, but the professional soldiers already knew that. They’d known since the 1940s, when people like Rommel and Patton proved it hands down. They also knew that those kinds of tactics work . . . in open country, and in conventional warfare. That’s why they were so successful in the first and second Gulf Wars.

BUT, the professional soldiers ALSO knew that low-intensity, asymmetrical, urban war is another kettle of piranhas entirely. There, you have to deal with endless pin-prick attacks, in back alleys and basements, day in and day out. In THAT kind of war, a billion dollar supersonic jet with a smart nuke is pretty damn useless, thank you very much. But a good old sandbag may just save your life . . .

And all of that the soldiers of the Pentagon knew . . .

Wanna guess who wouldn’t listen? Huh? Wanna?

And now we have the products of Neocon wisdom . . . coming home . . . in body bags.

Dutch Treat . . .

Speaking of Islamic extremism (see the entry below this one) . . .

It is now just over a year since Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was allegedly murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, who was allegedly an Islamic extremist and not merely a pig-brained lout with a Jack the Ripper complex. And, interestingly enough, on the anniversary of van Gogh’s death, I heard on the radio several Moslem clerics getting very huffy and demanding the West show greater tolerance. In fact, the implication was that we oughta apologize while we’re at it.

So let me get this straight. You shoot me, and I’m at fault and need to grovel a little.

Okay.

But . . . if that’s the case . . . logically . . . then the reverse ought also be true . . . and if the West wants your friendship . . . then we ought to just nuke the chicken-snot outta ya at the first opportunity.

I mean, if that’s the way the system works.

transfer the tumor

I see in the papers that Iran’s “hard line” president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has suggested that the Holocaust didn’t happen and that “the tumor” of Israel be moved to Europe. Don’t you just love it when a statesman makes a reasonable, rational, constructive suggestion like that? Restores your faith in religious fascism.

Tell you what, let’s follow his lead. I modestly propose that we transfer him as well. Say, to Pluto. Or hell. Whichever.

Then there's historians

Not that I got any business throwing stones . . .

Having met a full share of historians in the last few years, I can now say without fear of contradiction that the average member of my potential profession is so dang tight-asterisked that a good dose of Ex-Lax at the right conference could wipe out the whole breed in a single flushing.

That wasn't nice . . . and this isn't either

Well, maybe that last post (see below) wasn’t quite fair. It’s just that I’m amazed how often it is that when you meet a full professor in postmodern media studies they’re maddeningly pompous, have pot bellies the size of a pygmy hippo, and sport enough facial hair to start their own fuzz farm.

And that’s just the women.

Warthogs on Film

If God did not mean for pompous warthogs with chin whiskers to wear ties and spout semiotics, then why did He invent film studies?

Putting the Fun in Fungus

Notes from the Academy:

Ah, what a wondrous thing is the scholarly life. . .

Where else could you take ANY topic, no matter how obscure or absurd (“Conceptions of Toe-nail fungus among the Byzantines,” “Failed use of semi-colons in Sumerian temple texts,”) . . . stick “Class, race, and gender” on the front of it . . .

. . . and, then, by God! Have a career?

Sorry, Sorry, Sorry . . . and fowl remarks

Sorry for the long delay in posting. You see, among other things I’m a 48 year old graduate student. This means that for the last few weeks I’ve been writing six papers and doing my academic chicken with its head cut off routine. It’s really quite amusing. Assuming, that is, you’re the kind of sicko person who gets into that sort of thing. Sorta like morgue pictures from CSI, but without the giggles.

Prophets and Madness

In my state, we have gay marriage, or at least, we have it for the moment. Various groups are attempting to make it unconstitutional. Indeed, in the paper the other day there was the photo of a religious leader present in town to lead the fight the threat posed to heterosexual weddings by the other sort. The man had a striking face -- the features sharp yet solid, the eyes clear and piercing.

It was, in short, the face of a prophet. A specific sort of prophet. A fanatic. The sort who stumbles out of the desert, bearing with him sunstroke and spleen, declaring his the voice of God, and thus to trouble all humanity with his mighty, gnawing hatred of life.

Notes from the Academy:

It can be difficult for newcomers to understand the language of professors and scholars in the modern academy, particularly when they are progressive, advanced, and insightful. Therefore, I have decided to provide some degree of translation service. Below is a short list of terms and expression as they’re said in academy followed by what they really mean. This will, I know, prove invaluable to all incoming students.

When they say: They mean:

*Genocide : White Male
*Holocaust : White Male
*Racism: White Male
*Murder: White Male
*Rape: White Male
*Plague: White Male
*Famine: White Male
*Tooth Decay: White Male
* Integrity, Honesty, and Righteousness : White Female with an advanced degree from a prestigious women’s college and a small family fortune in the low, but respectable millions. Trust funds preferred.

Oh, and way at the bottom:

Child Care: non-white Female with a brown face and a funny accent who is paid under the table and doesn’t have a green card and whose opinions, of course, do not matter.

Bittermuch on The Professortariat

The late J.J. Bittermuch writes me from the fifth circle (the Wraithful) of Hell:

“The important thing to remember about the professortariat is that academics are strongly rewarded for saying whatever it is that the cultural elite wants to hear. That’s how you get grants and tenure.

“The problem is that there is sometimes a lag between the speaker and the message. That is, when the elite wants a new message, it has to somehow deal with the professors who are already in position, repeating the dogmas that had before been the keys to the kingdom.

“Thus, in much of the 19th century (and again, in the 1950s), it was the academic’s job to say that everything in Western culture was just ducky, thanks, and that the rest of the world should line up and fight Communism and/or learn how to use soap. Which we’d sell them. At inflated prices. Of course.

“Then, in parts of the 20th century, and particularly in the 1960s, when the children of the elite decided they didn’t want to head off to ‘Nam or where-ever, academics got their brownies by being the severest critics of America and the West.

“Now, in the 21st century, the cultural elite has new goals – specifically, to gain control of oil reserves and, if possible, prevent China from doing so. Ergo, we have a new message from the top, and it involves young men marching off to die in gawdawful deserts and maybe, given time, on Pacific beaches.

“The problem is that many of the academics at the Universities still haven’t gotten the word, and they’re out there preaching reform and revolt. So, we have the myth of the “tenured radical” as a result.

“But, of course, there’s no such thing. The ‘tenured radical’ is just trying to do what he’s always done . . . only, he finds himself with his lips puckered in the air, the derriere in question having mysteriously moved to some new location.”

d*amning Detroit

In the paper today I read that the Detroit car makers are concerned that with gas prices just a tad below $4 a gallon and climbing that people might, just maybe, stop buying their SUV, Hummers, and BIG trucks for guys with small wee-wees.

In a word, f*cking duh.

Look, guys, we’ve all known since the 1970s that eventually we were going to run out of oil, or that the Arab countries would get miffed at us and shut off the taps, or that some disaster (like Katrina) was going to take most or all of our production off line.

And what did you do in those thirty years?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

You have refused to develop more efficient cars. You have declined to give any but the most token effort to hybrids. You have staged PR campaigns about hydrogen vehicles, but — let’s be honest — you never had any real intention of putting them on the market or investing in the infrastructure necessary to make them possible. You’ve just gone and on, doing what you had always done, and getting us all deeper and deeper into a hole.

In short, you got yourselves into this mess, and if yours were really profit-making entities in a competitive free enterprise system, then we ought to just let you go chapter 12 the way you damn well deserve.

But there’s the rub. In spite of all your claims to the contrary, you’re not profit-making entities in a competitive free enterprise system. You’re members of a thinly disguised cartel which has managed to dictate how we use energy and how the economy functions. Thus, when you go down, you take us with you.

So . . . I got a modest proposal. Forget chapter 12. That’s for businesses. For you . . . we reserve the consequences of incompetence in government and state-craft.

You’ll love the prison at Guantanamo. It’s so tropical.