Notes from the Academy

I am amazed at the number of historians whose writing is basically, bottom-line, awful. Sentences go wandering around, passive voice rules, jargon fills every nook and cranny, impenetrable academic-speak and obscurities are the order of the day.

In fact, I’m convinced that most of them secretly want to by Toynbee …who secretly wanted to be Oswald Spengler … who secretly wanted to be one of the German Metaphysicals . . . who secretly wanted to write so badly that no one would notice they didn’t have a single freaking idea in their pointed little heads and were just spouting gibberish for the hell of it.

shoes

I write this (in my head) as I watch a young woman in backless high-heel shoes teeter across a brick courtyard in downtown Boston. She comes within a hair’s breadth of falling at least twice, and then totters unsteadily off along the sidewalk.

I am convinced, now, that the women’s shoe industry is dominated by a sinister conspiracy of orthopedic surgeons drumming up future business, or else of geeky hetero white guys who nobody would date in high school and this is their way of getting revenge on women everywhere.

feathers

J.J. Bittermuch writes me from Hell:

Read in an old Scientific American a while back that some researchers have figured out how to make plastic out of the otherwise useless chicken feathers from poultry-processing plants.

Wonder if we couldn’t do the same thing with left over liberals.

~

And, in almost precisely the same terms.

Sewage treatment and Neoconservatives . . .

But maybe that would come under the heading of hazmat.

There is a species of bully . . .

There is a species of bully . . . most recently manifested as Republicans and Feminists, but found in every age and every movement. . . which starts off with taking a swing at your head with an ice-ax and then, inevitably, dissolves into bewildered fury and cries of “oppression” when you have the audacity to duck.

Blog Whacking

I see in the paper that corporations are beginning to crack down on employees’ private blogs (even when they’re hosted by some other company) because of the possible “legal ramifications” of what the employees might make public.

Oh goody gum drops.

Yet another justification for our masters to muzzle us.

Sort of makes you long for Fascism, doesn’t it? At least it was up front about being a bastard.

I'm back

like it says

Stay Tuned

I'm off to visit my family in New Mexico for a ten days or so. But stay tuned. I'll be back with more drivel soon.

Definitions

Ideology — definition, the learned study of idiots; a field of research whose major question is how can people strive for liberty and well being, and then go out and shoot somebody and giggle. See Fascism, Feminism, Capitalism, Radicalism, Democracy, Vegetarianism, etc.

Female empowerment

J.J. Bittermuch reports from hell:

The woman MBA says proudly: “They’ve found something that will do the work of three men . . . one woman.”

And her corporate master responds with a smile: “And if the silly cow is willing to let us exploit her like that, who are we to object?”

Subalterns

Notes from the academy:

Subaltern historians: in theory, these are (mostly third world) scholars who look at effects on vulnerable cultures of Western colonialism and economic exploitation.

That’s in theory.

In practice it means that the people who were powerful and bloody rich before the British got there, and then got richer and more powerful while the British were there, and own the whole damn country now that the British are gone … announce that they’re victims and you should damn well hurry up with the foreign aid. And while you’re at it, apologize.

In a word . . .

Happy New Year . . .

Let's hope we survive it.

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.