Field trip to old brooklyn

Here are some images from the Wykoff house and Flatlands Dutch Reform Church, a couple of the oldest buildings in Brooklyn. I took these as part of an assignment. Unfortunately, the light was not good, but I did what I could. Anyway, history buffs might find it interesting. I'll try to get back out there when the light's better.

If you love

More photos here.

Am I missing something? Not bloody likely

Today's Washington Post reports, yet again, the fact that the U.S. is actively planning military action against Iran.

This article is written over and over again, presumably to soften up public opinion, but not once have I ever read any rationale that an attack on Iran would accomplish any positive objective. As far as I can tell, we just want to attack them because we like to kill lots of people in some kind of vague hope that mass murder will somehow relieve our existential frustrations. I have yet to read a single analysis that argues that attacking Iran would make the world a better place. As far as I can tell, all serious people agree that it would make things much worse.

Yea, duh.

Picture of today

Economic opportunities of tomorrow

In an ominous sign for the economy, one of the stenographers at the Washington Post reports that it is showing signs of stability. Given how consistently the Post's stenographers have been wrong when parroting Republican spin, I think it's relatively safe to speculate that the economy must be wildly unstable. Of course anyone who's not a millionaire can see that as plain as the price stamped on a gallon of milk, not to mention a gallon of gasoline. Pretty soon they'll have to implement price controls on gallons of vodka to see America through this mess.

And note that they never really reported that the economy was unstable. It's gone straight from "everything is hunky-dory" to "everything will be hunky-dory real soon."

From a journalistic perspective, it's interesting that this putative news article is almost pure opinion (if not outright fantasy) starting from the first paragraph in which we're reassured that although economic figures are weak, they are not as weak as expected.

Between paragraphs of unadulterated opinion, the Post's intrepid newsman quotes a Federal Reserve spokesman, a compatriot of Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake, a big shot from B of A and someone from a research firm, all of whom agree that the future is ever so bright.

Are there no experts out there that think that economic fundamentals are so fucked up from years of mismanagement and misleading numbers that things will likely get much, much worse? Of course there are, but it's unlikely we'll be hearing it from the stenographers who write the news or play the parrot on teevee. There is a widespread belief in self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to the economy. The powers that be think that happy thinking trumps economic reality.

Who am I to dispute these experts? Well, I'm someone who's seen the price of just about everything I buy go up by about 25 percent in the last week. Someone who gets what's essentially a cost of living raise at work that doesn't begin to cover the increase in the cost of living. In other words, an economically normal American.

But unlike most economically normal Americans, I've lived in Latin America. They have a word there for those kind of price increases and the corresponding devaluation of the currency (I note that the Euro hit $1.60 this week). That word is hyperinflation. Maybe happy thinking will help for awhile, but reality sits in pretty quickly when spending power goes through the floor. And then just when you think it's reached the basement you find that you're living in a high rise and there are a lot more floors for your spending power to fall through.

Me? I've started hoarding Euros. And if I get that old entrepreneurial spirit, you'll soon find me hanging out on Wall Street saying pssssst, I got Euros, only $3, get them today, they'll be $4 next week, better deal than the banks. Change your money with me, señor.

On bullshit

We often speculate about what's wrong with so many people's thought processes. You know who I'm talking about: people like wingnuts and their media parrots. Although they are today's most prominent practitioners of bullshit, the phenomenon is, unfortunately, not limited to them.

I was reading an old article about bullshit in the New Yorker and came across this passage which explains it quite well:

Creating a consensus among their peers is something that hardworking laboratory scientists try to do. But it is also what creationists and Holocaust deniers do. Rorty insists that, even though the distinction between truth and consensus is untenable, we can distinguish between "frivolous" and "serious". Some people are "serious, decent and trustworthy"; others are "unconversable, incurious and self-absorbed." Blackburn thinks that the only way to make this distinction is by reference to the truth; serious people care about it, whereas frivolous people do not. yet there is another possibility that can be extrapolated from Rorty's writings: serious people care not only about producing agreement, but also about justifying their methods for producing agreement (This for example, is something that astronomers do but astrologers don't.) That, and not an allegiance to some transcendental notion of truth, is the Rortian criteria that distinguishes serious inquirers from bullshitters.

Yep.

Springtime in brooklyn

More photos here.

Tough titties

I'm probably not the first to note that, in the wake of the news boobs at ABC's disgraceful performance in the Democratic debate the other night, all the journalistic creatures are rushing to describe Gibson and stephanopoulos's questions as "tough."

Earth to media! They weren't tough questions and neither are you. They were stooopid questions. You, media, are incompetent, if not implicated.

A tisket, a tasket, an economic basket

Although so many noted economists seem to say that the precipitous fall of the dollar in international currency markets has no downside, I'm thinking that simply cannot be. Although I admit that the last non-marxist economics class I took was in high school, I do seem to recall that there was another word associated with a decline in the value of one's money.

The word is "inflation."

And there is also a word, albeit hyphenated, for what happens when a country continues to print vast quantities of cash and spend it like an NBA star in a strip club. That word is "hyper-inflation."

Thankfully, we here in the United States are not subject to old fashioned economic theory. With our historically unique brand of take-no-prisoners get-up-and-go, we have apparently been able to run gargantuan deficits without triggering more than an acceptable smidgen of inflation. And not being an economist, I wouldn't know where to begin to look for evidence to the contrary. I guess I'll just have to trust the assurances of the experts and the government numbers.

In unrelated news, last night I discovered that in the last week that the price of a Pizza in our neighborhood went from $13 to $16 and the giant can of Asahi we get to go with it went from $3 to $4. This blow to our budget was followed closely by the landlord raising the rent by $1200 per year, a steep increase in the price of a metrocard, a significantly larger co-pay for doctors visits, and the cost of our prescriptions going from $30 to $50. Fortunately clothes pins at the dollar store are still a dollar, but the price of laundry detergent went up about 20 percent.

Oh well, all those extra dollars we waste on food, shelter, transportation, health and hygiene will just lighten the load of the suitcase full of money we'll need to go to Europe this summer.

Good ole boys gone bad

Via Atrios I came upon this post at Americablog about a southern GOP congressperson referring to Obama as "boy," as in:

"I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button."

Since I made what was perhaps a similar faux pas the other night, I'm in the mood to ponder these things. I was raised in a southernish culture and, boy I can tell ya, I've had to work really hard over the years to stop saying boy.

I'm not an apologist for the Republican congressperson and am willing to believe him a bad person. Just being a Republican congressperson means he already has 27 strikes against him, if not 27 x 162.

But where I'm from, that sentence could come out of plenty of people's mouth without any racist intent. It's often used as I did above. Something like "Sure is hot. Hoo boy." It's also used to indicate a general state akin to juvenile delinquency as in "them boys got drunk and wrapped their dang ole pickup around a dang ole tree." When it means "nigger" it has an altogether different inflection.

So I don't jump to conclusions over what could be an innocent slip of the tongue. I'm confident the ole boy's voting record is enough to indict him. I doubt if anyone seriously examines that.

The taming of obama

The New York Times reports that Senator Barak Obama has apparently given up his quest for the presidency and become a faithful Democrat.

By Saturday morning, Mr. Obama was trying to contain the political damage after a series of late-night and early-morning strategy calls in which advisers decided he had to acknowledge that he made a mistake.

What was his mistake?

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Mr. Obama responded, according to a transcript of the fund-raiser published on Friday on The Huffington Post Web site.

And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,” Mr. Obama went on. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Ah yes, he accurately described an important part of the culture in the United States which has played an important role in empowering the worst crimes and excesses of the Bush administration and its accomplices.

Can't have that now, can we. No way, Bub. We're number 1! We're number 1!

Anyway, his real mistake is acknowledging that he made a mistake. Although the Bush administration is far and away the worst in American history when judged by all the damage it's done to this country and the world, it has probably been the most effective political operation when judged by it's record of achieving its goals, whether unpopular, illegal or both. And the principle of never apologizing for anything, no matter how outrageous, is one of the cornerstones of that wildly successful strategy. They believe that only the weak apologize. I think if you examine the society in which you live, you'll find that a lot of people share that belief, at least unconsciously.

Me? No. I recognize that the ability to acknowledge one's mistakes and apologize is a sign of strength not weakness. And I think most people would agree with that, at least consciously.

But there is no question either way that it is weak to apologize for something you didn't do, or for doing something you know is right, simply because your rivals demand it. Might as well brand the word "Welcome" on your back an lay down on the porch.

Welcome to the Democratic party, Barak. Don't mind the boots on your back.

Bitter fruits

Today's Times reports that Hillary Clinton has openly joined John McCain and the Republicans in attacks on Democrats.

Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain separately criticized him as being out of touch with the middle class...
Mrs. Clinton issued several statements criticizing Mr. Obama, including ones that contained criticism from Republicans.

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, issued a similar response.

Do people still question my observation that she is a Republican? Yes, yes, I know they do, but you'll see that it will become increasingly more difficult to deny as the election approaches.

You know, I read Bob Somerby and Eschaton and follow the links enough to know that Chris Matthews and Tim Russert are irredeemable clowns, but until recently had never actually seen them. Since getting cable, I've done reasonably well at ignoring the bad cartoonish political coverage, but have to confess that I've paused and watched in horror on occasion.

The other night I saw what must be the most jaw droppingly stupid conversation I've ever seen in my life. Matthews and Russert were discussing when Hillary would drop out of the race. They discussed the conventional wisdom that she would drop out if she didn't win Pennsylvania by a wide margin or if she got trounced in North Carolina. Believing that she would drop out in either of those scenarios is ludicrous enough, but one of them went on to predict that she would drop out after winning Kentucky and some other state in landslides, so she could go out with some victories. I'm not joking. One of those cretins actually predicted that.

I guess it's remotely possible that she would quit the race if she started losing every state by more than 20 points, but I doubt it. If she can't win, she'll stay until the bitter end (and it will be bitter) in order to inflict as much damage on the Democrats as possible. And if the unimaginable happens and she is not allowed to play Kang to McCain's Kodor, I wouldn't put it past her to pull a Lieberman and run as an "independent."

Nice picture

This photo was taken by Phil Mansfield for The New York Times. It is an excellent example of good composition in photojournalism.

It nails pretty much every traditional rule of composition. Note how there are three sets of parallel lines going from left to right and expanding outward across the image. Following those lines from right to left leads your eye straight to the subject, which is placed in one of the prime aesthetic spots. The subject is well-lit and the reflection is a nice touch.

From a photojournalism perspective, when you look at the actual content of the picture, it does a good job of illustrating the story. That, and it tells some other stories on its own.

Personally, if I were looking at it as art rather than photojournalism, I would consider removing the car. The argument for removing it is that it is distracting. The argument for keeping it is that it points right at the subject, further helping to frame it. I'd need to actually do the work to remove it and compare before deciding.

Inklings of a glorious future

I made an unfortunate joke the other night at the dinner table. We were discussing American Idol and how bad the winners were and trying to remember their names and in what order they had won and that led to the revelation that none of us could remember the name of the big fat gospel singing black guy.

I asked if he had died? No, I was assured, he was still alive, just no longer on television. Well, I said, he’s probably reduced to singing at churches on Sunday for fried chicken.

My teenaged daughter gave me a fairly severe degree of “the look.” What? It’s just a joke. Get it? No, I don’t get it. Well hon, you’re just 16. Perhaps it was a bit too sophisticated for a young’un?

That brought about the 16-year-old drama queen stomp off to the room scene, which we see quite often. The rest of us finished dinner, retired to the living room and continuing discussing the mysteries of Paula Abdul.

A few minutes later, the teenaged one stomped into the living room with a thin sheaf of papers. Do you know what this is? she asked. Paper? Yes, obviously, but what is on these papers? Words? I’d guess. Right, she said and threw them down on my lap. This is Barak Obama’s speech on race! You should read it!

I have read it, I said, it’s a great speech. Why do you want me to read it now?

You are making fun of a black man eating fried chicken! And the obese and churchgoers, too!

Ah, of course. I realized right away what she was talking about. The racists’ fried-chicken eating nigger stereotype. I had forgotten about that.

You must understand, although I was raised in a racist environment (as are we all), I was not raised with that particular stereotype. When I was growing up, our family, and just about everyone we knew, went to church on Sunday morning and ate fried chicken at grandma's after church. If the church had some kind of event after the service, they always served fried chicken. So you see, I don’t associate eating fried chicken with any racist claptrap. I associate it with going to church.

Hon, I patiently explained, life would not be worth living if we can’t make fun of fat people and church goers. Then I told the above story of my fried chicken eating childhood and pointed out that my ability to make fun of an obese black church goer eating fried chicken without a smattering of racist intention was evidence that I was already living in a post-Obama speech world.

That led to another dramatic exit, but she left Obama’s speech. I tossed it on the coffee table and we went back to our conversation about Simon Cowell’s hand gestures.

Anyway, back to the big picture. Based on that anecdote and similar stories I’ve read about young people heckling their parents in the name of Obama, I believe I’ve seen a hint of the future. It could very well play out along the lines of what’s happened in our home.

A few days later, the family was gathered around the television watching Hell’s Kitchen, which featured a fat black guy among the contestants. That guy is a joke, said my wife. Aha! I picked up Obama’s speech and threw it at her. You should read that!

Since then the speech has been put to good use every time one of us mentions anything remotely race related. We saw a short guy on the news robbing a convenience store with a machete. Probably a Filipino, said my daughter. Whack! My wife hit her with the speech. I made a disparaging comment about McCain being a tired old white guy. Whack! My son hit me with the speech. And so on.

So you see, this is how Obama’s speech could lead to a politically correct utopia. As the years progress, more and more people will hit each other with the speech when anything that could remotely be viewed as race related is mentioned. Everyone will carry their own copies of the speech to whack people with. Marketers will produce whacking speeches for every target audience. Small children will have Nerf speeches. Teens will sport them like IPods in a veritable rainbow of colors. The intelligencia will carry theirs in pockets of suede while business people carry theirs in leather briefcases. A cult of purists will whack themselves with the speech whenever the name of a color crosses their mind. They will have special thorn laced speeches. Spies and assassins will carry razor edged speeches that they can throw at their enemies, chopping off their heads. The secret police will carry hard edged speeches to whack suspects who will later be made to confess with water soaked speeches shoved down their throats, making them feel like their drowning.

All may not be well, but at least race classification and hatred will be a thing of the past. Everyone will have to content themselves with making fun of fat people and churchgoers. Well, maybe we can include foreigners and the poor.

Photo of today

Another throwaway image from my Dark Brooklyn series.

Photo of today

Once again I find myself using words just to put distance between photos that don't work well right next to each other.

How could you possibly contemplate this triviality from the Dark Brooklyn series when Roy's metaphorical ass is right up there in your face. Perhaps you have more wherewithal than I, and more power to you, but I'm sick of looking at it.

If you keep coming back, you may be seeing a lot more of my Brooklyn portfolio in the coming weeks. I'm kind of obsessing about the Brooklym Museum's upcoming photo show which is currently open for evaluation on-line. If you like looking at photos and have any interest whatsoever in what Brooklyn looks like, it's an interesting slog. Mostly it's what Brooklyn looks like if you're a twenty something artsy person, but I guess that's to be expected. And that's not, in itself, a bad thing. Twenty-something art-respectin folk are inarguably a face of Brooklyn, there's literally hundreds of thousands of us here. It's just unfortunate that more of the other faces were under-represented or not represented at all. The multitude of other communities, for the most part, did not represent. And surprisingly, not a lot of pros did either.

The photo above, before I messed with it, was illustrative of the general tone of a good chunk of the submissions. The new contrasting with the old. Usually there's a crane in the background, but it's hard not to take a picture in Brooklyn without a crane somewhere in the frame. I work very hard to achieve that compositional non-element. You'd be surprised.

Photos of brooklyn

That photo's for Roy, if not of or by Roy. I don't know. It's not my photo. It's an entry for an upcoming show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art called "Changing Faces of Brooklyn" for which photographers were invited to submit a photo representative of that theme. It seems 389 of them accepted the offer.

I've gone through about a third of them. It's a bit generous to describe the work I've seen so far as uneven. The photos include little one hundred word essays which I don't read unless I really like the photo. Of the few gems I've seen, two were from the same middle school. Unfortunately the majority fall more into the category of artist wanna-be with a cheap digital camera. I hate to be harsh, but that's a mirror I've spent quite a bit of time looking in.

Anyway, If you're interested in Brooklyn or art theory, or possibly even photography, you might want to take a look.

Photo of today

I had meant to just post the photo of today, but when I looked at the result I realized that I needed to put some text between the photo of today and the photo that illustrated yesterday's shallow discussion of the cinema.

They just didn't look right so close together.

So I use a few words to put some space between them.

Who says words by themselves are meaningless?

Wow, on further inspection I realize that I need more words to separate photographs that inhabit such disparate color spaces.

So I might as well say a few words about Hillary Clinton. Well, I tried, but it's too difficult. I'll have to save it for a longer post. My feelings about Hillary and the whole history of the Hillary haters is too complex to deal with in a few words while killing time merely to put some space between photographs. But it is illustrative, and I will get to it, someday. No hurry is there, fuck, no hurry at all. The subject isn't going away any time soon.

Paranoid place

Filmwise, I've finally turned things around after going through a horrible stretch of seeing little but Oscar nominated dreck such as Juno, There Will be Blood, and the wretchedly banal No Country for Old Men. But this week has been different. Comparatively, how to put this with as little drama as possible? it's like the crap colored clouds parted and beams of light shone down from heaven.

First, sitting there flipping the channels, I came across an old black and white movie that was just starting. The title, Suddenly, Last Summer sounded familiar and a long forgotten eighties tune started playing in my head. Then the credits rolled. It starred Katherine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. The screenplay was by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal from a play by Tennessee Williams. Wow, the star power! I settled in and gave it a chance.

I was eager to do this because I have had great fortune watching old movies I knew nothing about on two other occasions. Those times were better because I missed the credits. I knew nothing of the backstory.

The first time I got hooked on an old black and white movie it turned out to be Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. The second film I was unexpectedly drawn into and thoroughly enjoyed was Night of the Iguana, not coincidentally, another work by Tennessee Williams.

I've never liked Katherine Hepburn as an actress and her performance in this movie is her usual shtick. Fortunately, she is absent throughout most of the movie. This was the first time I had ever seen Montgomery Clift. I've always been curious about him because of the song. Apparently, he was wasted throughout the filming and it shows, though not in a bad way.

But if you've never seen Elizabeth Taylor when she was a hot young actress, see this film. She is incredible. Even if you've seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she looks much better in black and white. Trust me on this.

The rest of Suddenly, Last Summer looks good too but it is clearly a play that has been filmed. There is very little movement and the story is told in a series of long speeches by three of the four main characters. The other main character, about whom the plot revolves, is dead and doesn't appear on screen until the very end. The drama is figuring out what happened to him. It is some very good drama. Good and twisted, in a Tennessee Williams kinda way. Seems like he might have been reading some Paul Bowles as well.

Paranoid Park, on the other hand, employs an entirely different kind of visual storytelling, almost the opposite of what we see in Suddenly, Last Summer.

The new film by Gus Van Sant would never work as a stage play. Van Sant has an amazing ability to tell a complex story with moving images. He makes you feel the characters, feel the story on such a visceral level that words are unnecessary. I think you could watch the movie without sound and come away with an equal understanding of what happened. I'm not saying that the dialogue is bad. It is well-written and enhances the film. Still, it couldn't be much further away from a Tennessee Williams kinda sensibility as you could get. It is definitely not a talkie. The fact that it would be a great film without a word of dialogue says so much about Van Sant's visual artistry.

Likewise, Paranoid Park has no Taylors, Clifts, or Hepburns. The great majority of the characters, and all of the main ones, are just kids from Portland. The movie is about story, not actors.

And it is a great story. (Spoiler Alert!!!) If I were a hack wanting a blurb, I'd call it a modern day Crime and Punishment. (note that I came up with that on my own. As regular readers know, I don't read about movies before I see them. It turns out that the crew referred to it as Crime and Punishment on Skateboards during the filming. Still, it's not that obvious and it would be very unfair to call it a rip-off.)

And I can't say enough about the cinematography. It is all great, but there is one scene, a shower scene, that must rank up there with anything ever filmed. The visual aesthetics of the drawn-out scene are fantastic beyond any words I could use to describe it and the storytelling triumph of that scene is at least as great. And not a word is spoken. If you read chuckling on-line magazine and pay any attention to the photos I post, I think you will have some understanding of how I feel about Paranoid Park. Van Sant and I, we share an aesthetic.

No golf, no trophy

Surprisingly, Obama gets some amazingly good advice from the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section:

This is why I say, play up Obama's white heritage as much as possible. He needs to start posing with his mother's family a lot more, not the United Nations crew of brothers and cousins he's normally seen running with. Staffers need to start snapping as many pictures as possible of him putting mayonnaise on his sandwiches and shaking hands straight up and down (no more low-fives that evolve into a shake with that pat on the back). He should also be banned from speaking at any kind of Baptist church (not just the United Church of Christ) and should just stick to churches that only use a pipe organ and where folks sing their songs solemnly and straight from a hymnal.

It's probably too late and I fear that advice, while good, is not enough. He needs to play golf. Golf would be the best way to highlight his whiteness and demonstrate his fitness as a chief executive. But if he even knows how to play golf, he apparently doesn't play very often and would most likely just look silly, like Dukakis in a tank. Imagine the wise cracks when he mis-hits and breaks the windows of those pricey white homes that line the fairways.

As you know, I don't see that he has any hope. Hillary's argument against voting for Obama because he is black is a powerful one that will no doubt carry the day. But if he is to have any chance, he should stop being seen altogether with black people. And if he can't play golf, maybe he should go bowling, or play some slots.

Don't get me wrong. Although I note the effectiveness of the Clinton campaign's racist tactics (if implying that we shouldn't vote for him because a black guy can't win, i.e., because he is black, is not racist, then what the hell is?), I do not agree with them. In fact it makes me hope there is a God that will damn her sorry soul to hell for taking down the one intelligent human being that could conceivably have a chance, however minuscule, of turning this sorry country around.

And minuscule is the key word. Already the Clintons arre hinting that they prefer a McCain presidency to an Obama. If by some miracle he is the nominee, chuckling confidently predicts we'll see a McCain, Clintons, Lieberman axis that will stop at nothing to maintain control.

But since I don't believe that miracle is going to happen, I'm sticking with my prediction that Hillary and McCain will be the nominees and they will both choose Lieberman as their running mate.

Photo of today

Big news day so far

The Washington Post breaks two mind-blowing stories on its front page:

Inflation Hits the Poor Hardest
No Income Group Is Untouched, but Staples Are Rising Fastest

Inflation is walloping Americans with low and moderate incomes as the prices of staples have soared far faster than those of luxuries.

Who would have thunk it? I thought only bad things happen to the rich, economically anyway.

And stranger still:

Small Dog Attacks Boy
"Pinkie-Poo" really very nice, claims owner

An out-of-control Pomeranian nipped the heels of you Billy Smith today, drawing no blood, but forcing him to hop around until the dog's owner, Mrs. Jones, could intervene.

And I always thought they were such nice dogs.

Meanwhile, in a small paragraph buried at the end of an article on page 24D we learn that the banks are failing, war is imminent, Charles Krautenhammer continues to resist treatment for the sharp stick up his ass, and a prominent Republican called for the deportation of just about everyone.

Difference in latitude

I couldn't help notice the three major newspaper's play on the content of Hillary Clinton's schedule during her years as first lady. The different approach you see between an independent foreign newspaper and its dysfunctional U.S. counterparts is illustrative of just how fucked up American journalism has become. Following are the headlines, deks, and first graphs.

The Guardian gets to the heart of the matter:

Hillary Clinton missed key presidential moments

· Papers cast doubt on claim of first-hand experience
· First lady was often far from scene of negotiations

On the day that dozens of US cruise missiles rained down on Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country's onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, first lady Hillary Clinton was far from the White House war room: she was touring ancient Egyptian ruins.

In other words, she is full of shit and now she's exposed.

The Times opts for the sleep-inducing lede:

11,000 Long-Awaited Pages of Clinton’s Schedules as First Lady Are Released

WASHINGTON — The National Archives and the William J. Clinton Presidential Library on Wednesday released more than 11,000 pages of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s public schedules for her eight years as first lady.

I'm surprised they didn't mention he was wearing a grey suit when he released the 11,000 pages of information.

In other words, nothing to see here, move along.

The Post tries to find it in its heart to say something substantive, but rambles:

In Hillary Clinton's Datebook, A Shift
Events Less Lofty After Health-Care Debacle

Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in the White House with a schedule befitting a president, packed with policy sessions, meetings with senators and trips to promote an ambitious political agenda. But after the collapse of her health-care plan in 1994, she largely retreated to a more traditional first lady's calendar of school visits, hospital tours, photo ops and speeches on a narrower set of issues.

In other words, we want her to beat Obama, but if she runs against McCain, we'll get her.

If you read beyond the first paragaraph, you can glean some useful information from each of the newspapers, but most people don't even read beyond the headline. Editors know this. By their criteria it's clear that the Guardian wants you to read the story, the Times doesn't, and the Post doesn't know what the hell it's doing.

Chuckling has a dream

I watched Obama’s speech on race relations today. It was a great speech; an unprecedented piece of artistry by a modern day American politician in a presidential race. If Hillary Clinton had an ounce of concern for the future of this country she would immediately quit the race, turn all her money over to Obama and work her ass off to get him elected president. Yea, well, I know what they say about wishes, beggars, and horses. But still, I can dream. And I do.

For many years I’ve been having a dream in which I am lost, either on my way to the airport, or in the airport, and am in a combination state of intense anxiety and crushing depression because every minute that passes, every wrong turn I make, increases the likelihood that I will miss my flight to France.

Even long after the flight is scheduled to leave, I’m still running -- or driving like a wild man in that version of the dream -- in case the flight is delayed and there's still a possibility I could board.

I feel no real hope that I can make the plane, that I can get to France. I feel gut-wrenchingly bad that I can't. Still I keep trying. No other choice occurs to me.

Do I make it? Well, the dream is never resolved, but based on the sick empty feeling I have won awakenint, I suspect not.

I used to discuss that dream, among others, with my psychoanalyst. Or more accurately, I used to discuss it with a psychoanalyst. I wasn’t paying her anything. In fact, she was paying me for some other work, but we talked a lot and I think she just liked to practice.

Anyway, according to her, the dream was my unconscious's way of telling me I was stuck and that all my efforts to move on to a better place were in vain. Frustratingly so. She said that the airport and the flight to France were metaphors for a healthy sexual relationship. Yea, well duh. I didn't need Sigmund Freud to tell me that. She knew that I wasn't getting along with my second wife any better than I did the first.

But what to do? The dream doesn’t give any clue.

When I heard Obama speak these words, I realized that we suffered from that same dream, even if his didn't take place in an airport:

I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

And nothing will change. Exactly. I’ll be running for that plane for the rest of my fucking life and he'll be running for president for the rest of his. I'll never make the plane. He'll never be president. He might as well re-name himself Williams Jenning Bryant. No, he has more sense than that. Maybe Eugene V. Debs II would be more appropriate. Our elections will always be about distractions. They will ever make a lick of sense. No one with any significant combination of brains and morals will ever be allowed to win.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

The promise of our ideals and the reality of their time? Therein, I think, likes the clue. Obama and I. We have the same dream.

What if the airport, the presidency, is not just another metaphor for sex? What if it's really telling us, in plain dreamspeak, to get out of this fucked-up country and move to France? What if that is the solution? Not just for me and mine, but for Obama as well?

The answer is, my friends, that the world would probably be a better place if he made that choice. Let's face it. Obama has already lost the election. Hillary has him branded.

But although he has lost this election, with that speech, he has set himself up to win the century.

Unfortunately, this country is fucked and we are doomed to live our lifetimes being ruled by the only kind of sociopathic morons that can navigate the media horror show in such a twisted way as to be elected president. Obama, clearly, is not cut out for the job. He is a good man with a good brain. He is too good for this country.

So chuckling's advice to Obama is to get on that plane to France. Just wash your hands of this mess. Go into exile. Speak for posterity. The long run is our only chance to win. If the best of this generation were to abandon this poor shade of democracy and spend his life speaking, writing, and acting to bring about the real thing, that would be a powerful act. Much more powerful than sliming it up with John, Hillary, and the boys on radio and teevee.

The weekend in photos

Y'all like pretty boy. Check out the rest of the show.

Oh, and by the way, if you're in the New York area and would like this kind of portrait done for yourself or someone you know, get in touch. We can probably work something out.

An oft-told tale

I saw Macbeth a few nights back in Brooklyn. I am not a Shakespeare scholar so, unlike the play, this review will be short.

Sorry, I couldn’t help the little joke. Although it came in at just under 3 hours, the production moved right along and I was never bored, at least not for long. Had I been able to understand half of what they were saying, I probably wouldn’t have been bored at all.

As long-time readers are aware, I am a shallow critic. Hell, even if you just came here and read the above paragraphs you probably figured that out. I don’t have any grand theories about the stage or screen. I’m not a member of the genius director’s school, nor the great actor’s. Mainly I am interested in story. I can appreciate good cinematography or stagecraft as well. But it usually comes down to I liked it or not.

Why or why not? The answer is almost always found in the writing. Great acting, directing and stagecraft certainly enhance a well-written work, but can rarely, if ever, save a poorly written one.

Macbeth? I thought the stagecraft great and the acting fine. As a writer, it’s difficult for me to do justice to the staging, you really have to be there and see it for yourself. I’ll just say that I liked it. A lot.

The acting? It was marvelous. Frankly, I’m impressed that anyone can memorize so many strange words, much less pronounce them coherently. The actors did both. Well done, I say.

But the writing? I’m sorry Mr. Shakespeare but that play sucked. As poetry, I grant you, it had its moments, But a play is not a poem. The plot is a tired retread of the writer’s better work. The characters are whiny and unsympathetic. Their motivations are a complete mystery. Oh, sure, plenty of people want to be king and you might say that’s an obvious motivation, but you would never get that from the words of Macbeth. More likely he was just motivated to find something else to whine about. The question that drives the plot is “when will someone shut these people up?” The answer? Not soon enough. I tell you.

A big part of what makes me such a shallow critic is that I refuse to do research or consider any kind of historical connotations around a work. I would say “it is what it is,” but then I’d have to bash my brains against a wall for using the cliché of the day, so I’ll just say that I believe that the best criticism comes from total ignorance. I don’t give a fuck who wrote the goddamned play. I don’t care what history has to say about it. If it doesn’t work from a perspective of total ignorance, it just doesn’t work. Well, maybe sometimes, but for now that’s my story.

Yea, yea, yea. I get up on my box and say all that so righteously, right, but in this case I actually did some research.

The thing that struck me most about Macbeth was that it told the exact same story as Richard III except from the perspective of a pathetic whiner rather than an unrepentant schemer. That and Macbeth wallowed in special effects and violence. My thesis was that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when he was young and then grew as a writer and produced his masterpiece -- Richard III.

So I looked it up and, as is not unusual, got it entirely backwards. Richard III was one of his first plays, Macbeth one of his last. That makes sense as well. Apparently in his dotage, Shakespeare cribbed from his earlier, truly great work.

Like many washed up writers, he added violence and special effects to try to cover the lame-assed writing. Where Richard III was fiendishly twisted and direct, Macbeth is loaded up with witches, ghosts, silly prophesies, and sword fights. I’ll be a dollar to your dime that the next remake ends with a mushroom cloud over Dunsinane.

Anyway, although I thoroughly enjoyed the theatre-going experience, I genuinely detested the play. Unlike normal people, however, that made me want to see it again and as fate would have it, TMC had a Shakespeare night and I caught the end of Orson Welles’s Macbeth and the entirety of Olivier’s Hamlet. This was an interesting juxtaposition because just days before I had read an article in an old New Yorker (abstract here), which discussed Olivier and Welles’s claims to greatest Shakespearean actor ever and discussed those very movies.

So for good measure, I actually bought Welles’s Macbeth and watched the Richard III that features Ian McKellen for like the hundredth time. All that to get a little more context.

You must understand. Although poor chuckling is a clown as well as a shallow critic, I am aware in some deep dark corner of what passes for my mind that all serious people consider Shakespeare to be one of the greatest writers ever and Macbeth to be one of the great masterpieces ever produced by humankind. Ninety-nine out of one hundred and five historians included Macbeth as an example of what they would give superior beings from outer space to demonstrate our worthiness to life in this galaxy. So I ask, who am I, poor chuckling, to belittle the master’s masterwork and piss urine most foul on five hundred years of learned critics? And it’s not just Shakespeare upon whom I pee, but the great Lawrence Olivier as well. His Hamlet blew chunks. And Welles’s Macbeth? Let’s not even go there. The headgear was interesting. Beyond that, I shall not speak.

So to sum it all up, if you haven’t seen Richard III with Ian McKellen, go out and rent it immediately. As I said above, I am a story guy and rarely moved by great acting. Well, Richard III is one of humanity’s great stories and McKellen’s acting is possibly the best I’ve ever seen. The staging is quite good as well.

I’m sure if Macbeth were alive he’d whine about it. Richard, however, would dispatch him with a smirk and some pointed snark. Hamlet would also do well to steer clear of good Richard.

Photo of today

The subject of Barak Obama's race comes up so frequently already that if some unforeseeable miracle occurs and he is allowed to run for President as a Democrat, then questions of his "blackness" will dominate the airwaves thirty seven hours a day, eight days a week until early November.

So answer me this: What is the child in the photo above?

Click on it to see a larger image. Then take a moment. Take a breath. Give it a little thought. Try to empathize. We are not talking about a national figure. This is not a blog fight. This is a child.

A little background: both of his parents are college educated professionals. One was born American with a heavy dose of Dutch ancestry. The other is from a somewhat illustrious family in Africa that includes lawyers, professors, high government officials, even an economist. He goes to one of the better schools in the world, not primarily because of affirmative action, but by merit. His friends are a diverse group, their parents have similar bios -- educated, well-traveled professionals, often one parent from a different part of the world. His closest friends are some combination of Chinese, African, Jewish, Italian and other European mixes. In those respects, he is much like Obama. Kinda looks like him too.

So what is he? I have a little experience with this question. On more than one occasion, a small child, much like the one above only younger, has asked me "what am I?"

So what do you say? A child asks you "what am I?" After you've thought about it and decide, or more realistically, speculate, realize that your answer should apply equally to Obama.

I'll tell you how I answer.

Q: What am I?
A: American.

Q: I mean, am I black?
A: No, you are mixed.

That, followed by a little demonstration that everybody's skin is a different shade of earth tone, and that's the end of it. At least through high school. It's really not that difficult.

Or it shouldn't be. But I know it is. At least it used to be.

And that question: what am I? has played a vitally important role in Obama's life. In a fascinating article about his mother in yesterday's NYT, he is quoted as saying:

[I was] “engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.”

I find it so odd that he has that attitude. As far as I can tell he has absolutely nothing "African-American" in his background. Yet he consciously chose to become one. I always read that many kids who are labeled black but are not from an African-American background suffer identity issues and often feel pressure to "be black." What does "be black," or "be black enough" even mean? In that context those phrases seem like code for "poorly educated criminal," or "nigger."

Although reading a politician's self-serving campaign autobiography goes against my deepest moral beliefs, I guess I'm going to have to read Obama's book and find out more.

Was he a black man wannabe or a black man havetobe as he made his way through one of the better prep schools and became a superstar at Harvard? As many point out, the cop who pulls you over for driving while black doesn't know where you went to school. Society decides who we are and an individual with dark skin is black. Would people do well, as Obama has done, to embrace it rather than fight it? (In general I'd say no, but people will obviously decide for themselves)

The larger question, for the kid in the photo at least, is whether things have changed since Obama's character was formed by whatever experiences he had being labeled black by society.

What is he? Yes, he is American. Yes, he is mixed.

And yes, society categorizes him as black. At some point, will he, like Obama, feel great pressure to become so?

The question will never change but it's meanign will. For a child it's what am I (physically)? Later on it becomes what am I (culturally)?

I'd like to find a better way to put it. I am open to suggestions. Middle class educated? Maybe, but the best way I can think of to phrase it so that everyone understands is to say that culturally he is white. So is his 100 percent African parent. And so is Obama.

For the child's sake. For the world's sake, I hope times have changed and those stupid questions are moot. They haven't of course, but I am actually optimistic that they are changing and that ultimately they will change. Although there is still pre-judgement and prejudice against people perceived as black, I believe that it has become much more of a cultural thing these days. I also have quite a bit of experience being pulled over for driving while black. Although the cop doesn't know anything about the victim's education, my experience has been that once they figure it out they treat you well, even perhaps a little better to make up for their initial suspicions. I know there are still Klan types and Nazis out there, but their numbers are small. The great majority of society judges a person more by how they speak than how they look.

That's what Obama's got going for him. I'm not the first to note that he speaks very well. And I think he would actually have a chance if more people heard him speak, but as the campaign goes along, I think that will happen less and less. It's already happening less and less. Instead of hearing the guy talk, we get people talking about the black guy. Is he black enough? Is he too black? Does it help him? Does it hurt? What are the demographics? Is American ready for a black president?

I think when we phrase it like that, when it's all about blackness, we'll find that no, America is not ready. I think we are ready for an extremely talented, well-traveled and well-educated president with a strong moral center, but unfortunately we'll be stuck with one of the Republicans, Hillary or John.

The kid in the picture? Well, here's hoping things are different when his generation runs for president*.


* This wouldn't be chuckling on-line magazine if I didn't add "if we still have any kind of even barely functioning democracy at that time. More likely by that time President George Bush VII will have succeeded President George Bush VI and we'll all be living in cardboard boxes, if not concrete cells.

No news is good news (for Republicans)

The national press, as well as the rest of the chattering classes, seems to have missed the fact that Obama just won two more primaries by landslide proportions. He won Saturday's Montana caucuses by 17 points and Tuesday's Mississippi primary by 24 points.

Doesn't that strike you as a bit odd? Such a well-publicized, closely fought election, few remaining primaries, one candidate gets wiped out in two of them? If Obama had lost by those margins, if he had lost at all, do you think it might have been reported differently? Hmmmmm.

Nonsense about the liberal media aside, I suspect this fits the pattern of the corporate media pretty much openly supporting Republican candidates. I realize I don't get a lot of love for commenting on the obvious fact that Hillary is a Republican. I am open to argument that she is not a Republican, but so far no one has made a convincing one.

And the facts supporting the contention that she is a Republican continue to mount. From the Guardian UK:

According to anecdotal reports in the Mississippi press, the end of the Republican presidential contest saw GOP voters crossing over, and it appears that a substantial number of them voted for Hillary Clinton. The exit polls show that 12% of voters overall were identified as Republicans, and three out of four them backed Clinton - a strong contrast to most previous primaries. Call it the "Limbaugh effect" - after the radio shock jock who urged Republicans to vote for Clinton prior to the Ohio and Texas primaries last week. For further evidence, around one in five of Hillary Clinton's supporters told the exit pollsters in Mississippi that they had a "strongly favourable" opinion of John McCain, while district maps show Clinton's best results in strongly Republican counties. If we assumed that Republicans had voted in similar numbers as in Louisiana and Alabama (only 5% of voters in both states), then without them Clinton's loss in Mississippi would have savage, tipping her toward 30% and an even wider loss in delegates.

Even if you ignore all the rest of the mountain range of evidence, doesn't the fact that Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter actively support her tell you something?

Photos of yesterday

Promised slideshow here.

Photo of today

I had an interesting, though ultimately unsuccessful photo day today. I'll try to put together a little slideshow tomorrow, but for now, this provides a clue.

Photo of today

Remember what it's like, being 9 years old and staring out the window on a rainy day?

Chuckling predicts

Although I've known for some time who each party's nominee would be, I've held off making a public prediction because I was unsure who they would choose as their running mates. Well, I've figured it out, so here ya go:

Democratic Presidential Candidate: Hillary Clinton.
Republican Presidential Candidate: John McCain.
Democratic running mate: Joe Lieberman.
Republican running mate: Joe Lieberman.

Yes, chuckling confidently predicts that both candidates will choose Joe Leiberman as their running mate. He will, of course, accept, though he will decline to give up his senate seat, just in case.

Who will ultimately win? I'll tell you that when you tell me why it matters.

Lord's day (brooklyn edition)

Slideshow here.

Breaking News: Hell just froze over

The New York Times Magazine has a long article about one of my literary heroes, Eduard Limonov. Everyone who appreciates Knut Hamsun or Dostoevsky's underground man should read Limonov's masterpiece "It's me Eddie," in which, coincidentally, he regularly savages the Times. And although many of his articles, particularly the ones detailing the nitty gritty politics of political organizing, are hard to get through, check out the Exile archives. A lot of it is precious.

I don't have time go go into this thoroughly now. Maybe later I'll pick through the archives and point out some good stuff. A lot of it is outrageous and Eddie is easily the least politically correct writer on the planet, but his stuff is worthwhile and his life is one of his better literary works. Very much like Mishima.

Pictures of yesterday

Another Saturday hanging out with the kid in the teeming concrete borough of Brooklyn. That's John Bob doing his meditation exercises in the foreground. Will winter never end?



You can't walk ten feet around here without tripping over an agave of some sort. I took this photo in a particularly bad moment of self-loathing. What next? Pretty flowers?



Some days I hate myself.

Picture of today

A brief introduction to chuckling

In what passes for an exciting development for poor chuckling, a new reader emailed me with some questions about chuckling on-line magazine.

...just looking through your blog: here are things I'd love to hear from you...)

First, you must understand that chuckling on-line magazine is not a blog. It is an on-line magazine. And a fictional one at that. Chuckling is a fictional character and anything he writes is, like, totally deniable.

What is the difference? Well, chuckling on-line magazine pays for content. I can’t pay much, but good writers like yourself deserve money for your work and I’ll pay what I can afford, which, alas, is nothing but a token at this point. As part of the fictional premise of the magazine, everyone who has written for chuckling on-line magazine so far has written under the “chuckling” byline. It is a good premise, I think, but ultimately unworkable. If you want to write for chuckling, either as chuckling or under your own name, please feel encouraged to contact me.

Anyway, I kind of assume everyone that drops by knows me from Alicublog. Roy is the patron saint of chuckling on-line magazine, though he is not a patron in the financial sense of the word and probably not a saint in any sense. So it surprises me when someone asks about my political beliefs. I’ve written extensively in Alicublog comments and regular readers no doubt roll their eyes when I start to explain, again, my take on the current situation. I guess that’s why I don’t write so much about politics here. I just assume everyone knows what I think.

Nevertheless, for the uninitiated (regular readers can roll their eyes now and go look at the pretty pictures), here’s an introduction:

McCain: What do you think?

McCain is a fascinating individual. I have a lot of respect for the complexity of his faults. He is so profoundly damaged that I can’t help liking him.

He’s like a dog that’s been severely beaten over and over again for years, yet continues to wag its tail when the master approaches. I guess the Vietnamese softened him up. Then Bush, Rove, and Cheney fist-fucked him until he liked it. The American people would be insane to elect or allow him to be appointed chief executive. But with Hillary on the ropes, we might as well get used to calling him Mr. President.

Where do you fall on the Dem<---->Rep continuum?

I don’t believe in the two party system. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I don’t think it would be a good thing to have multiple parties. I don’t believe in the American two party system in the same way I don’t believe in Santa Claus or Jesus. Because it’s at least 99 percent mythical. The Republican party is the only party. In basketball terms, the Democrats are the Washington Generals to the Republicans’ Harlem Globetrotters. They’ll appear to put up a fight but they always fold in the end. That’s what they’re paid for.

Is Hilary the Devil or just misunderstood?

She’s a Republican. I don't believe in the devil any more than I believe in Jesus or the chupacabra.

Is Hilary the most powerful thing to ever happen?

No.

Would you vote for her?

No, but I rarely vote for anybody. It’s a waste of time and effort and gives the whole "American democracy" charade a patina of legitimacy. That, plus where I live people are sometimes jailed for voting and I can't take that chance. All that, plus she is a Republican and even if I voted, I would never vote for a Republican.

Hope that helps. Tune in next week for the fascinating story of chuckling's birth in an old-fashioned newsgroup and adolescence smacking around proto-winguts before smacking around wingnuts was cool.

Morning, noon and night

Slideshow here.

Photo of today

Housa bout a little change of pace? What? I can do portraits.

Photos of (brooklyn) today

Yesterday's theme was urban, but today we're just doing normal Saturday stuff around Brooklyn. It may surprise you to learn that we have a few hills and trees here in the big city and that kids go sledding.

It may really surprise you to see that they still deliver seltzer in those old fashioned bottles. I've seen them in antique stores for $40 apiece. In my neighborhood, I see cases of empties on front porches waiting to be swapped for full ones.



In many ways, I've found, Brooklyn today has more in common with small midwestern towns in the 60's than small midwestern towns of today do. In addition to sledding and home delivery, we've got mom and pop groceries all over the place, know most of our neighbors, and can't go anywhere without bumping into acquaintances or meeting people who know people we know.



Doesn't gel with Conservative narrative, I know, but such is life.

Photos of today

Slideshow here. Click on first pic. Goes better with your favorite music.

Cleansing the tongue

In a stunning innovation in Newsspeak, I mean lingusitic cleansing, the New York Times redefined blatant corruption as "confidence in one's integrity" to describe their allegation that John McCain has been fucking his lobbyist and doing her political favors for sex and money.

Note that "political favors" is so ingrained as Newsspeak that it has become almost totally disassociated with its meaning. Poor "corruption's" harshly interrogated letter structure as been linguistically cleansed and now resides in a relocation camp somewhere in the Mideast.

But that triumph of the journalism is not enough for the world's greatest newspaper! Today we get a twofer!

Not content to merely use the word integrity in place of corruption, the Times also officially ordained the term "draw sharp contrast" as official Newsspeak for "go negative." In order to not be repetitive, the style manual allows "draw tough contrasts" as an acceptable euphemism for "slime your opponent" as well.

Computational anxiety

Today's Washington Post reports that parents are rising up like peasants with pitchforks against a new approach to math being used in elementary education across the land.

In Prince William and elsewhere in the country, a math textbook series has fomented upheaval among some parents and teachers who say its methods are convoluted and fail to help children master basic math skills and facts. Educators who favor the series say it helps young students learn math in a deeper way as they prepare for the rigors of algebra...

The program de-emphasizes memorization and drills and pushes students to use more creative ways to find answers, such as drawing pictures, playing games and using objects.

Sounds like my kid's math class, only much more structured.

On the positive side, according to the Post, the new math program raises test scores and prepares children to learn algebra later on. On the negative side -- gasp -- children do not always get the correct answer without having to think about it for awhile. The article doesn't say it, but sometimes they won't get the correct answer at all. My kid's teacher mentioned that in passing at the recent parent/teacher conference. The important thing at this stage (3rd grade), she said, is that they think.

The post gives an example: "There are 28 desks in the classroom. The teacher puts them in groups of four. How many groups of desks are in the classroom?"

I got that right away by dividing 28 by four so I can see how parents could think that it is more important for children to memorize the multiplication tables than to struggle to find their own methods for solving elementary math problems. But at what stage of development did I learn that I could use the multiplication tables to solve a problem like that?

The point is that once you have the thinking skills, the computational skills are easy. Not the other way around.

And my kid's teacher made another good point, which the Post article neglects to mention, when a parent asked her how kids are supposed to do computation if they're not drilled in it? Just like you or I or any mathematician does computation these days, she said, they'll use a calculator.

Duh.

Update: On the other hand, those of you who wonder how kids who aren't taught computational skills in school still manage to succeed, I noticed my wife drilling poor little John Bob on the multiplication tables last night. Probably a lot of that going around.

Photo of today

Reading lesson

George Orwell had some small amount of respect for Rudyard Kipling, therefore George W. Bush is a hero and the Democrats are unfit to govern. This is so because in 100 years everyone will remember the name “George W. Bush” while Denis Kucinich and his lot will be forgotten. It’s right there in Orwell’s essay. You can read it yourself. Trust me on that. And btw, Orwell says Kipling’s not a Fascist so neither are today's Conservatives. Thus goes the “logic” of William Kristol.

Of course Kristol regularly finds evidence that the Democrats are fools, knaves or traitors in the cooing of pigeons or the honking of taxi’s or the pitter patter of raindrops on the windowsill, and more likely than not pulls some dead white guy out of his ass to agree with his reading of the portents, so neither his conclusions nor his “logic” are remarkable. But Orwell was an interesting writer and it’s usually a hoot when a Conservative pulls poor dead Orwell out of his ass to justify some kind of policy that normal readers would recognize as an “Orwellian Nightmare,” so I looked up the good George’s little essay on Kipling to see what it really said and how it actually relates to our current political climate. It’s yet another example of the “intellectual” somersaults Conservatives will turn in order to pretend that the Fascist looking back it them in the mirror is Winston Churchill. Kristol’s attempt to use Orwell’s “defense” of Kipling gives great insight into the mind this particular Conservative pissant, and Conservative pissants in general.

Let’s start with Orwell’s description of Kipling:

It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a 'nigger' with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling's work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct--on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.

Yes, yes, Kristol seems to be saying, we Conservatives are jingo imperialists, morally rotten, and aesthetically disgusting, but like Kipling according to Orwell, we are not Fascists. And the left, well, Orwell nails them:

But because he (Kipling, read Kristol) identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases.

So you see. We don't dislike Bush because he is an imbecilic piece of shit and his policies have proven disastrous. We dislike him because he's a paragon of responsibility. That and because we are hypocrits. Both left and right want the same material things and in order to get them we have to exploit the poor folk at home and abroad. The only real difference between left and right is that the right take responsibility for their actions while the left live in a fantasy land. That’s why the right must govern, however incompetently, and the left can only whine in opposition.

Fortunately, Orwell’s argument that freedom for me requires slavery for thee and thou is just so 19th century. With education, democracy and rule of law, we can overcome the master/slave economic relationship that requires the poor of one country to slave eighteen hours a day to make shoes for the poor of another country. The history of the United States offers strong evidence that rule of law and intelligent economic management can balance regional differences. The European Union’s unwieldy march toward freedom and economic justice provides a current example of how that fight can be won. It’s really not that difficult to figure out intellectually. Pulling it off politically is quite another matter.

And here, Orwell nails Kristol and his empire-building buddies. You know, the realists, the responsibility-takers:

Kipling (read Kristol, Conservatives in general) spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed 'natives', and then you establish 'the Law', which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it.

Yea, I’m sure it’s satisfying for a Conservative like Kristol to pull a dead white guy of Orwell’s stature out of his ass to tell him how superhumanly responsible he and his fucked up warmongering, torturing economy destroying, American hating buddies are, but it requires a lot of skimming or he’s likely to find Orwell’s up his ass in a sense that’s not so pleasant.

Photo of today

More than words

Eric Hirsch Jr. published an informative article on the failure of the No Child Left Behind law in yesterday's Washington Post. He points out that reading scores have shown gains in fourth grade but have not been maintained in higher grades when reading comprehension matters so much more.

I'm sure it won't surprise anyone who follows these education brouhahas that schools are increasingly teaching to the test rather than teaching actual subjects.

...this causes schools, as many complain, to teach to reading tests rather than educate children. But intensive test preparation by schools has resulted in lower reading test scores in later grades. "Teaching to the test" does not effectively teach to the test after all.

But this inability of so many older students to comprehend what they read, despite so many hours studying reading comprehension, is not as mysterious as it may sound.

In light of the relevant science, an analysis of the textbooks and methods used to teach reading and language arts -- for three hours a day in many places -- indicates some of the reasons for the disappointing later results. These test-prep materials are constructed on the mistaken view that reading comprehension is a skill that can be perfected by practice, as typing can be. This how-to conception of reading has caused schools to spend a lot of unproductive time on trivial content and on drills such as "finding the main idea" and less time on history, science and the arts.

Yes, history, science and the arts. Who needs em? Humans, apparently:

Studies of reading comprehension show that knowing something of the topic you're reading about is the most important variable in comprehension. After a child learns to sound out words, comprehension is mostly knowledge. Many technical studies support the assertion that after students can fluently sound out words, relevant knowledge is the crucial difference between students who are good or poor readers.

In other words, a person who knows nothing whatsoever about a subject can understand every word in a paragraph and still have no idea what the pargraph means.

But what can be done? Isn't reading comprehension one of those questions for which there are not answers? Well, no.

Consider the eighth-grade NAEP results from Massachusetts, which are a stunning exception to the nationwide pattern of stagnation and decline. Since 1998, the state has improved significantly in the number of eighth-graders reading at the "proficient" or "advanced" levels: Massachusetts now has the largest percentage of students reading at that higher level, and it is No. 1 in average scores for the eighth grade. That is because Massachusetts decided in 1997 that students (and teachers) should learn certain explicit, substantive things about history, science and literature, and that students should be tested on such knowledge.

Well, duh, you'd think. So how is it that so many experts somehow manage to miss the obvious. You won't be surprised the George W. Bush and the Republicans played their usual role in fucking things up for money. This time in the form of Reid Lyon:

So, again, a tutor of George W. Bush developed a program/policy that imposed a structure on America’s public schools that further complicated the practice of educating children, while funneling federal funds to the profit margins of... friends of George W. Bush.

Whether by design or due to a series of accidents related to the hubris and incompetence of trust fund babies like Bush, vast swathes of our education system no longer teach children in a way that enables them to understand history, social studies, science, or the arts -- essentially the basics necessary for a functional democracy.

As with any great crime, its rarely a bad idea to follow the money and see who profits, in this case by the demise of democracy in the United States and you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that it's the politicians of the one dominant party and so many of the corporations that profit most from a widespread lack of reading and reading comprehension. Unfortunately, those who would profit most from a better an educated commonweal don't know what the words mean and if they do can't adequately distinguish between the constitution, the bible, and the words coming at them from the tv.

Photo of today

There she goes, again

Fascist fascism

Did you know that Leo Strauss, the infamous Godfather of Neo-Conservatism, coined the term Reductio ad Hitlerum, which is Latin for “Jonah Goldberg.” Sorry, that’s not entirely fair. To be a bit more precise, Reductio ad Hitlerum describes the logical fallacy which posits that Hitler (or the Nazis) supported X, therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad. For Goldberg, it should be modified to read ascistsfay oughtthay xay andway iberalslay inkthay xay
ereforethay iberalslay areway ascistsfay, since he is a pig.

We all know that Goldberg is a colossal buffoon and maybe some day he’ll get his own pithy Latin saying to deride his “thought,”, but in the meantime it’s just a bit funny that such a fatuous asshole-buddy of the Neo-Conservative cause is the foremost practitioner of Strauss’s logical fallacy. It makes one kind of hope there’s a hell so that Strauss can contemplate the real world shambles his brain dead followers have made of his thought as he roasts in it. The Nazi’s, you know, picked on stupid fat kids and liberals pick on Jonah Goldberg, so, you know...

But Goldberg notwithstanding, Fascism is typically defined as an extremely nationalistic political philosophy that advocates an autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader and suppression of opposition. Fascist tendencies include a belief in some combination of national, racial, and/or religious exceptionalism, political violence, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, race-based expulsions and brutal invasions and occupations of other countries. Much like the Republican platform.

For the past 65 years or so all we’ve heard about Nazis and Fascists is that those people and their ideology are bad, bad, very very bad. These days one simply cannot describe oneself as a Nazi or a Fascist and run for office or become part of the serious media.

What to do? What to do? This social condemnation of Fascism is a great hindrance to people who otherwise could accurately describe themselves as Fascists. It’s not like Fascist thinking has ever gone away. As you know, extreme nationalism, “executive privilege,” brutal police state tactics, racist roundups and deportations, insane foreign wars and many other trappings of Fascism have become mainstream. Its would-be practitioners simply recognized the need to re-brand.

So what could they call themselves? “Authoritarian” worked okay for our Fascist allies abroad, but wouldn’t play well at home. “Neo-Authoritarian” never had a chance. “Neo-Liberal” didn’t work out for rather obvious reasons. “Neo-Conservative” had a much nicer ring to the Fascist ear, but contained too many syllables for the average Jonah to wrap his little brain around. “Christian Conservative,” even with all those syllables, works for a lot of our Neo-Fascists, but doesn’t include a lot of the more economic focused volk. In the end it seems the best word they could co-opt as the new “Fascist” was just plain old “Conservative.” Extreme nationalism, “executive privilege,” brutal police state tactics, racist roundups and deportations, insane foreign wars, and torture are unquestionably Conservative values these days. Don’t believe me? Just read the Washington Post’s editorial page.

Anyway, I think Strauss recognized the danger that people might call his Fascist crap Fascist crap, and being a very smart man realized that simply not referring to one’s beliefs as Fascist or Nazi-like was not enough, that it would be necessary to take the possibility of calling a Fascist a Fascist off the table entirely. Thus he gives Fascists Reductio ad Hitlerum as a shield which is followed by Godwin’s Law which also keeps the word Fascist at bay, and the linguistic legerdemain eventually degenerates into Goldberg’s fart of a thesis ascistsfay oughtthay xay andway iberalslay inkthay xay
ereforethay iberalslay areway ascistsfay, which essentially says that those who oppose Fascism are Fascists.

So here we are. The stink of Fascism fills the air and it’s considered extremely bad form to call a fart a fart, much less point out who farted.

Part of the problem with calling a Fascist a Fascist is that the Nazis, in addition to being Fascists, were genuinely pathological racist nut cases on a historic scale. Few American Conservatives would advocate, even in the privacy of their empty skulls, killing all the Jews. Many are racists, obviously, but for the most part they’ve learned to keep that shit to themselves and would be happy with separate and unequal rather than gassed and dumped in mass graves.

Still, the success the Conservatives have had taking the word “Fascist” off the table is yet another indication of just how pathetically weak our so called Liberals and Democrats have become. Conservative policies are, by common definition in popular dictionaries and encyclopedias, Fascist. Either intelligent, educated people need to start using the word accurately and educating others to the existence of things such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, or we need to find or create another word with the same meaning. The specific, individual acts of Bush and the Conservatives -- brutal invasions and occupations, war crimes, torture, etc. etc. etc. -- are too numerous to get into a sentence or even a paragraph. That’s why we end up sputtering when we try to list them all. But there is a word that describes Conservative policies accurately. The word is Fascist. It’s in the dictionary. You can look it up.

Ticker tape

After the Giants won the super bowl all of the old photos and newsreel clips I've seen over the years started talking to me saying that I had to go to the ticker tape parade and take some photos. Frankly, I wasn't that enthused, but a New York ticker tape parade is such a hokey over-hyped piece of americana that I couldn't come up with a compelling argument not to go.

Funhouse mirrors

The news tells me that yet another gumman went on a shooting spree, this time at a small college in Illinois. That makes like what, three mass murders in a week? We're becoming like Iraq. Is there some kind of rule that you become what you conquer? Of course our mass murderers are typically white Christian conservatives and their jihads tend to be more personal than their radical Islamic brethren. But still. Blow yourself up in a crowded market or go out in a hail of bullets while shooting as many people as you can. What's the dif? Ain't no dif. Not as much as people think, if they think at all.

Africain american

Photo of today

Writing's becoming difficult. Here's a photo for now. Nothing special, but not without some interest formal elements. Click on it for a larger view.