Who’s Bailing What?

When the government first proposed its tax rebate scheme last January, many were quick to point out the money was not ultimately, despite the signature on the check, a payment from the US government, but a loan from abroad, largely from Japan and China. Now that we can confidently anticipate the consensus will quickly form around the presumptive necessity of a bailout of that economically distressed couple Freddie and Fannie, it’s worth noting who is ultimately being bailed out here:

The top five foreign holders of Freddie and Fannie long-term debt are China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. In total foreign investors hold over $1.3 trillion in these agency bonds, according to the U.S. Treasury’s most recent “Report on Foreign Portfolio Holdings of U.S. Securities.”
FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe commented, “The prospectus for every GSE bond clearly states that it is not backed by the United States government. That’s why investors holding agency bonds already receive a significant risk premium over Treasuries.”
“A bailout at this stage would be the worst possible outcome for American taxpayers and mortgage holders, who have been paying a risk premium to these foreign investors. It would change the rules of the game retroactively and would directly subsidize the risks taken by sophisticated foreign investors.”
“A bailout of GSE bondholders would be perhaps the greatest taxpayer rip-off in American history. It is bad economics and you can be sure it is terrible politics.”

I’m not so sure about that last sentence. Define “terrible politics.” Via Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

Keeping Hope Alive

“You know, sometimes we’re not prepared for adversity.”
–The Reverend Jesse Jackson

Could this be the “decrepitude and what promises to be an entertaining public dementia” I so carelessly wrote about last year? It’s always easier to imagine despised public figures suffering personal indignities than to witness it. There’s no pleasure to be drawn from the spectacle of someone’s lapsing faculties causing him and those around him embarrassment, no matter how deserved it may seem to those many (one might argue an entire country) who’ve suffered the demagogy of this ambitious operator, whose greed and vanity were always his most salient features, if only now laid pathetically bare. And make no mistake, the Reverend is not so much outraged at Senator Obama “talking down” to black people as he is resentful at the precocious prince’s seemingly effortless assumption of the highest place atop the system of legal and moral privilege Jackson’s spent a lifetime hewing out of the granite of our great nation without a care for consequences. What fevered tortures the ego, irreducible and irreversible, inflicts on the faltering and fading mind that must contain it.

I do wonder at these ambitious sorts who seem determined to go on scratching and clawing at one another as if they’ll live forever. So few seem to quietly stand down in thoughtful retirement–or perhaps it’s just that these are so much less visible than such as Reverend Jackson. Sometimes I suspect that’s what pathological ambition is in the end, the attempt to will oneself immortal. Somebody throw a cape over the old guy, a la the old James Brown gag, and lead him offstage. For his and our benefit.

(cross-posted at TAC)

Summer Re-runs, Again

Fourth of July, Summertime 08 Acid Flashback Remix

History may be written with blood and iron, but it is printed with ink, and it is made real and dangerous when it is put on film, the alternate literature of our times…History is not over yet, and history collects its debts.

—Gustav Hasford, Vietnam Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

U.S.A is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of law bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.
—John Dos Passos, U.S.A.

Strike me, but listen!

—Themistocles
America is not the answer. This statement does not constitute sacrilege, as we’ve been conditioned to believe. Yet its opposite assertion, the prevailing sentiment of our times, is taken for granted and only rejected by the remnants of the sixties radical Left who haven’t yet gone mainstream, mad or over to the neoconservative Right, where the business of quasi-religious global revolution, still, is so much better.
But this sentiment, that American values and institutions, that is to say America, are the answer to the ills of the world, is sacrilege in the literal religious sense, as well as loosely speaking–against decency, good sense, modesty, those tragically under-appreciated values that compel us to, for instance, recognize the rights of nations to self-determination and liberty. This widely held if little examined faith works through the same means of cultural intimidation as political correctness–is becoming intertwined as an article of political correctness–and is how liberal interventionists and neoconservatives alike have become the useful idiots of adventurous practitioners of machtpolitik–Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, et al. It’s illustrative that there’s not an ideologue in this unsavory triad.

We have become incapable of recognizing the tragic pride of this attitude. This, the closest thing we have to a national religion, is a faith that cannot rise to the level of religion because it requires nothing of us–other than nodding, unthinking acquiescence to power. It combines the worst aspect of religiosity–resistance to contradictory reality, with the worst consequences of secularism–immodesty, intellectual and moral sloth, decadence. We forget ourselves.

Espousing this faith is a requirement for those who seek elective office in America, as well as their most useful demagogic tool. The rhetoric of this exceptionalism is deployed as a means of intimidation by those across the spectrum, whether it is the welfare or the warfare state in which they are invested–of course it is often both, now. On this Independence Day, 2008, America is under siege from Right and Left, two enemies that aren’t so much diametric opposites as they are competing coalitions, factions that share the same thinly veiled contempt for the straight and double-edged sword that is the Constitution. Individuals move back and forth between these groups with ease and no real qualms or difficulties beyond those presented by their particular networks of individual and group alliances. Exceptionalism, hollow, fatuous and vain, is the enemy, ironically, of the people and the republic that it flatters. America is not the answer is not a criticism of America, but a defense of her.

A republic is above all about limits on ambition and power, about containing them, checking them, mitigating them through division. No ambitious man can serve in a true republic without conspiring against its limits. The more ambitious the individual the more he feels this disdain, the more he conspires against it, sometimes in collusion with his political opposites. The longer he serves the greater his contempt. This contempt has become a requirement of power. Personal ambition is the continual, perpetual corrosive that will always, in the end, erode a democratic republic. This is the never-ending struggle. Seeing as ambition is a value unto itself in a country that elevates a Donald Trump or the various growling, sulking absurdities that have taken over hip hop, ambition seems to have gained an irreversible advantage.

This vain conceit of exceptionalism is the American tragedy, the mass self-delusion by which we conceal our motives and crimes, for which we are squandering our inheritance, consuming institutions we’ve allowed to lapse into decrepitude and burning liberties for the paltry warmth of “security”–as if freedom from state power hasn’t always meant sacrificing security (it was a braver nation that accepted this); this delusion could only resolve itself in the hallucinatory paranoia that now has us flailing away at imagined enemies, destroying entire nations and frantically trying to build them back up. Our assault on history even includes its physical artifacts as we degrade the ruins of Ur itself. Unwilling to accept the limits of morality on the ordinary, we declare ourselves extraordinary, determined that America be the answer and all before and outside of it the question, declaring that history no longer applies to us.

Our cathedral is the cinema; its language is cinematic. In this alternate reality that we have the tragic power to will, for a time, upon the world, not only does history end, it has a happy ending, our happy ending, inevitable but somehow still necessitating that we will it into being, no matter how much wealth is expended, how much blood, innocent or not, is spilled, no matter how much capital of freedom and liberty must be spent. America now flatters itself with the ridiculous conceit that it is the hero of the piece that is human history, late in act three and poised to enjoy the denouement of a victorious resolution.

I prefer the nation that accepts the uncertainty of the question to that which preens as the answer. The bravery of the free to the arrogance of the powerful. My America is not complete. America is unfinished. It is a working title, a project, under construction; this thing America hasn’t yet run its course. One might even say it hasn’t occurred yet.

What is a nation? How durable is a nation founded on a proposition the vast majority of its citizens couldn’t define? How much apathy can our nominal republic take? How cheap a currency can be made of citizenship before the nation that backs it is no more? Has that already happened? Have we run off the edge of the precipice of hubris and empire, intoxicated by the sense of flight, soon to be falling?

A nation is a collective memory; America’s is short. How is it we’ve come to allow the president to wage war not on a congressional declaration but on the slippery ruse of an “authorization to use force”; nothing more than a means for congressmen to absolve themselves of direct responsibility while providing the president with imperial powers limitless in scope, duration and conception; a “global war on terror.” War everywhere, forever, not on a nation or an entity but on a tactic; knowing that we’re not actually waging war on a cruel device we have to acknowledge that we are really making war on a sentiment: anti-Americanism. Continual war, waged out of sight of the public and with the blind assent of a self-abnegating Congress. But enough of that, it’s Independence Day.

I have nothing to offer but my hallucinations:
I am hovering above the earth looking down upon us and I see we are dispersed across the globe, physically, ideologically, conceptually. There’s the U.S.A. before me; it’s barely recognizable, an elastic thing that has been pulled at the edges and stretched across the oceans to every reach of the planet; but the center is drawing continually on its fraying edges, edges that are under constant tension, elongating the holes created by the tilting pikes that cruelly spear them into place.

It’s a world littered with expatriates and wannabes, and with those our government sends abroad: lonely sentries manning worthless posts; homesick marines staring into their warm beer in the enlisted club on some Godforsaken island outpost; sailors working round the clock to keep the flight deck of an aircraft carrier going, forever keeping the birds in the air. The time has come to ask, if not why then: how much longer? I wish I could stand on the tallest mountain and call them all home, like a muezzin calling to prayer.
I see the soldiers coming back; streaming home, every simple one of them: jug eared farm boys, once callow suburban kids who’ve seen the worst horrors, swaggering brothers, fearless cholos; seen from my perch above the earth they are like trails of ants as they stream back from every direction, converging on America, converging on home; the guns are dismantled and left behind; moving among them like a wraith I’m looking all the way back across the Pacific; I see a tire swing draped from the end of a decommissioned artillery gun, some Okinawan kids are taking turns walking the barrel like a tight rope; they are silhouetted against a red setting sun. Somewhere a leftover land mine goes off.

Turning back toward home I see there is a lighthouse on a hill, its turret turning steadily, placidly, alternating a blood-filled red, white, and blue light, calling to home; the hillside is black and surging with the returning soldiers. They are marching in a disordered mass, officers and enlisted alike, hats cocked back or thrown aside, uniform shirts left open in front. They are ragged but they are not rabble, you can tell by the look in their eyes, you can tell by their bearing. They have a purpose.

The tall doors to the chamber are bursting, swelling from the mass pushing on them; politicians are fleeing in all directions; the massive double doors are pulsating and expanding like a great wooden heart; bu-bump; bu-bump. The doors fly open and in comes the mass of soldiers, some are hobbled on crutches, some have bandages wrapped about their heads, some walk mechanically on prosthetic limbs; they are running down the chicken-hawks and the neocons; pulling them down as they attempt to climb the curtains, pushing phony tough talking liberals back and forth between them; two of them are playing keep-away with a senator’s toupee. Barack Obama is unconvincingly, nervously affecting street-slang as he lies to a group of black Marines; their faces are impassive as they back him into a table. Beneath it John McCain is hiding, already dutifully drafting the public confession he expects to offer; seeing Obama’s skinny ankle he scowls, growling as he sinks his teeth into it; discovered, he snarls and snaps as he is dragged out into the open.

They are blanketing the Mall; security and police silently join their ranks. The rod-iron gate before the White House falls flat before them like bamboo fence. Inside they are coming through every door, every window; aides and functionaries are clutching like terrified children at impassive secret service agents who stand aside; the mass silently leaves an opening for a tour group to pass through on its way out, a soldier snatches Doug Feith by the collar as he tries to sneak out amongst the tourists, brushing aside the NASCAR ball-cap disguise awkwardly perched on his head; a giant corn-fed farm boy has cornered a red-faced Dick Cheney and has him gently and threateningly by the tie. Someone has Wolfowitz by the ankles, holding him out a window. They fill the oval office. Bush has escaped. Of course. Could it be any other way? They pass through without disturbing the furniture, driving their captives before them. Lagging behind, someone straightens a portrait on the wall.

In the halls of Fox News they are scratching and clawing in their flight, some of the men still wearing their make-up bibs, as the veterans come pouring in, continually flowing in impossible numbers from the elevator doors, as if they were a rising tide of camouflage green and tan flooding the building by way of the elevator shaft; Bill O’Reilly, half finished from makeup he looks like a transvestite who’s removed his wig, pushes a small woman out of the way and goes through a set of steel double doors into the stairwell; but they are coming up the stairs in step, echoing like one giant marching heel, boom, boom, boom. O’Reilly turns and finds the doors are locked, pulling frantically on the handles, whimpering. He has no choice, he flees upward, but they are coming down the stairs too somehow.

In Fresno someone has set fire to Victor Davis Hanson’s vineyards. As if made of rubber, the burning vines are pouring a foul, unnatural black smoke into the sky; their charred remains take on the form of skeletons. Little black cobwebs drift down to the ground. There is a smell of burning flesh. The smell lingers even though I am now viewing everything on a giant screen in America’s last drive-in theatre:

INT. SURBUBAN HOME, DAY
In a home office we see a computer workstation; the computer’s screen shows a typical war blog; we see the war blogger, just his lower half, being dragged out the window as his legs thrash about futilely.

EXT. AERIAL, MANHATTAN FROM ABOVE, DAY
The boulevards are filled with the dark mass of veterans, like a rapidly growing moss overtaking everything.

INT. NEWSROOM
The low ceiling shakes and drops bits of plaster as the veterans advance. Reporters cower under their desks; they are horrified and retching at the smell of death. Two Royal Marines are shaking down Christopher Hitchens; he’s talking like a hyperactive lunatic, trying to bullshit his way out of it; Judy Miller has been turned over to some butch female sailors who force her to march with Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton–she tries to slip one of them a bribe before her hand is slapped down.

EXT. STREET LEVEL, MANHATTAN, DAY
Civilians standing on cars to get a better view watch as the veterans march their captives before them.

EXT. CLOSE SHOT, AGED VETERAN, DAY
He is sitting in a wheelchair, watching the parade, an old army blanket over his legs. Tears are streaming down his face.

EXT. SAME, DAY
The veterans are marching down a street bordered by towering skyscrapers toward the harbor docks. Civilians are following behind them; running children bring up the rear; people are leaning out of windows, some are dumping ticker-tape out the windows, some are waving flags.

EXT. NEW YORK HARBOR, DAY
From a distance we see two World War II era military transport ships, waiting. No one is visible on their decks. They are in black and white against the technicolor backdrop. The captives appear in the foreground, followed and driven forward by their captors, moving toward the ships. The smell of death is lifting. An oversized sun is rising in the east.

FADE

What is U.S.A? I know only a small part of it. It’s an old black Studebaker covered in the dust and bugs of a dozen states; it’s low-rider bicycles, skateboards, pin-ups, cut-off shorts; it’s stupid high school jocks and crazy vatos, sullen, hard-headed brothers and single minded wave obsessed surfers; it’s burnouts chilling and insanely ambitious overachievers; it’s gaggles of picture perfect California girls that radiate sex and vitality.

U.S.A. is the ugly as well: streets filled with idling cars, strip bars and strip malls, spinning rims and vulgar bumper stickers, thumping bass coming from car stereos broadcasting infantile obscenities Doppler-distorted as they pass, spandex and tattoos, crass sitcoms and comic book film adaptations made by committees of accountants and focus groups, vapid celebrities attended by sycophants and watched with slack-jawed placidity by dullards in government subsidized homes on sixty inch plasma TVs planted in the midst of the refuse of their idly rapacious existence as unwashed children run about ignored until they step in front of the screen; it’s people with cell phones to their ears jabbering away emptily—not even they see the purpose in their chatter. They wouldn’t recognize purpose; they would look at you sidelong if you tried to explain relevance to them. They know irony; they know that this thing references that thing but they don’t know the origin of anything.

And everywhere always the noise; television advertisements, airplanes overhead, radio chatter, traffic, sputtering jake brakes, shouting, Friday night football, after hours clubs, video games, shooting ranges, brawling drunkards, crowds, arenas rumbling from across town–the din of it all everywhere at once, an overwhelming, shrill maternal embrace. Is there no silence left in America?

There is; I’ve felt it. It’s in those golden hills at the northern end of California, just before you cross into Oregon, it is perfectly still there; it’s in the early morning in various surprising places, sometimes right in the middle of the city. It’s in countless meticulously created and maintained gardens in suburban backyards. It’s as if there is only the one silence that moves about and sometimes descends on you. It once found me in the early morning on a highway turnout overlooking the Pacific after spending the night sleeping in the back of a broken down truck.

What is America? Right at this moment it’s a twenty year old homesick jarhead taking a harrowing cab ride through a narrow alley in the Far East. It’s a pair of adventurous college girls backpacking through Europe. It’s a twelve year old prodigy inventing a revolution in his father’s workshop without yet realizing it.

America isn’t represented in Star Wars movies and can’t be seen through CGI; it won’t be found in the weekend box office numbers of the latest would-be blockbuster, don’t bother looking there (who the hell cares anymore?); it isn’t seen on Entertainment Tonight or known to the clueless, smirking mediocrities of vox-pop television programs. It isn’t this week’s celebrity affecting a personal revelation described as an act of healing that just happens to coincide with her latest movie’s release. It isn’t the corrosive rot of cross-promotion. How easily we could do without these!

America is John Dos Passos making an epic journey of his life and finding himself back where he started; it’s Walt Whitman wandering the land as unnoticed as a beggar and taking it all in; it’s Ralph Ellison stewing away in his basement; it’s Francis Ford Coppola turning a Renaissance artist’s eye on New York across the decades; it’s Grandmaster Flash discovering scratching; it’s Smedley Butler refusing to ignore what motivates the bloodshed.

America is the dizzying, infinite profusion of countless imaginations left unrestrained. It is the automobile and the airplane; the moving picture screen and the internet. It’s the aggregate of millions of individual ambitions; it’s the vulgarian and the puritan, each holding up his end; it is ugly cel towers and elegant church steeples. It’s an ever-growing number of also-rans and extras, white trash losers with a fatalist attitude, unapologetic and defiant, proud failures like me, lost to the world the moment we passed into it, grateful nonetheless and happily railing away in obscurity–as you see. It is this right here.
It is still, in its conception, in its glorious past and in its tantalizing potential, in the imagination of the people, the greatest republic yet. U.S.A.

note (liveblogging the killing spree)

(updates should be read from the bottom up)

update, 7.1.08:1145
Montana. Not going well. This state is practically empty, of humans that is. Stopped at the side of a remote road to relieve myself and was chased off by what I think was a rutting moose. Relief accomplished. Took my Bushmaster into a country store intending to slaughter everyone; when it seized up on me a couple of middle-schoolers came over and helpfully explained the problem, cleared and rechambered the round for me. One of them said she’d been bugging her parents to get her one of these since she was in grade school. Sort of ruined the mood. I’m heading southeast.

update, 6.30.08:0546
Came to wandering the woods; have no idea how I got here. Have no recollection of the circumstances of the bizarre last update. I’m not even married. The last thing I remember is being driven from the Potato exhibit by an alarmed group of people, begging to be allowed to”join” them, for what purpose I do not know. I’m not sure what that means, I only remembering feeling very desperate. My head is killing me. I’ve got to get out of Iowa. Idaho. Whatever. I’m almost three states into a countrywide killing spree and still no killing.

update 6.29.08:1809
How could I have not known? But then how could anyone have known this without seeing it for himself? My eyes are forever opened. I have beheld it, the World’s Largest Potato; I have marveled at creation, as if at the creation, as if standing before the embryonic, half-formed earth itself. This is no mere vegetable; one is humbled before its mass, awestruck by its glorious, earthen, bulging rotundity, the sort of sculpted wonder no human hand or imagination can fashion; to behold it is to see the hand of the creator manifest in His handiwork; it is primal creation itself, like a Venus of Willendorf crafted by God in His youth overcome by the fever of creation; it is like the egg, entirely self-contained, possessing all that is good and sustaining within. I don’t know how I can go back now; I don’t even recognize my life up to this point. Somebody get this message out to my wife:
MY EYES HAVE BEHELD THE TRANSCENDENT TUBER. I CANNOT GO BACK NOW.
SELL THE HOUSE
SELL THE CAR
SELL THE KIDS
FIND SOMEONE ELSE
FORGET IT
I’M NEVER COMING BACK
FORGET IT

update, 6.29.08:1840
I’m going to waste every potato-worshiping supplicant I find at the sacrilegious shrine of the starchy wonder, like a jihadi rampaging at the wailing wall. Then I’m going blow their blasphemous idol to Kingdom Come. That f*%&ing root gets more attention and respect than I do. Not for long. Soon our names and destinies will be forever intertwined. I am become death, destroyer of novelty attractions. My God, what have I become? Do you people see what you’ve reduced me to? I’m pulling an Oswald on a f*%&ing vegetable! Damn you all!

update, 6.29.08:0547
Just crossed the state line into Idaho–Idaho, not Iowa! Well, that answers that question. Now it’s just a matter of finding my first target of opportunity to make this an official interstate killing spree; there’s a sign for a roadside attraction, “world’s largest potato”. Hmm. Such pride. I know now what I must do. Tuber hubris (tubris?) cannot be tolerated. By the way, does anyone out there know anything about, say, the Mann act or extradition law? Thanks.

update, 6.29.08:0200
Hit a deer. This has never happened to me before. I can’t believe how upsetting it is; very traumatic. A beautiful creature too, a buck with an impressive rack; just magnificent. Couldn’t have happened at a worse time. And I was so psyched; now I’m just utterly devastated. This is no way to begin a cross country killing spree, with the death of an innocent animal. On a wholly unrelated note, just curious you understand, but does anyone know how venison is prepared?

update, 6.28.08:2340
If you’re in the Spokane area you may wish to stay indoors, oh at least until daybreak. I can say nothing further; al Qaeda may be perusing the internet. State line coming up; we’re about to go federal.

update, 6.28.08:1820
Had to turn back (forgot to euthanize the cat) somewhere around Leavenworth, a bizarre reproduction of a Bavarian village in the Cascades (unfortunately lacking in a suitable clock-tower). Did manage to destroy a particularly annoying Hofbrauhaus (six bucks for a Heineken? guess who just made the list). These old Czech surplus explosives are seriously degraded and unstable as hell but, like weak coke, if you just use enough of it you’ll be alright. It’s all about making your mark on your way out, man!

Update II:
twelve hits at 5PM, at least one of which is a google search. That’s good enough for me. Cut sitemeter adrift, cleaned, oiled and test fired the Uzi, sending the neighbors fleeing for cover (heard what I hope was a dog yelp I don’t know), packed up some old Soviet-era Czech explosives that I got for a song from that now defunct operation out of Florida, found an old claymore, what the hell I’m doing with a claymore I don’t recall but it’s going to come in handy when they finally corner me in a motel somewhere in Kansas, a case of Snickers and water and a stop at the ATM and I’m off. I hope I can find a package store this late (friggin’ liquor laws–maybe I’ll make a stop in Olympia on my way out). Oops, I almost forgot to rig the house to explode. Now: I just need you all to email me your addresses so I can personally send each of you a complimentary memorial Untethered mug or t-shirt (supplies limited; XL and XXL only).

Update I:
Eleven hits at 3PM on a Friday (5 eastern!). Eleven. I’m one single-digit day short of launching into a multi-state killing spree here. At this point I’m beginning to wonder what’s wrong with the remaining eleven, who are willing to suffer through these self pitying harangues. No really, it doesn’t bother me.

*

I don’t care that you don’t read this because this is good; and I’m not one to boast. Most of what I’ve written here I look back upon with embarrassment and a twinge of regret. Mostly I think I didn’t quite get it right. This is my nature; the many embarrassments large and small (and for a person of no consequence these are mostly small) that have issued from this mouth over the years are still remembered with bitter mortification, some going back to childhood; just as some now ancient slights in my personal history can still gnaw at this fragile ego. But at the moment I’m looking upon the recent past and thinking: not bad. A start, at least.

Surveying what else is out there at this price confirms this; the early friend of the blog to whom I still owe a debt striking me from his blogroll and the relief I feel for this because then I can finally strike the embarrassment that was his name from mine, posting the minutiae of his life. I still hope to thank him in print one day if these pipe dreams can be willed into reality. I still feel kindly toward him, even as I feel relieved of any association. I remain ready to help him in any way I might, hollow promise though that is at this remove. But any excuse to shorten and refine the blogroll is welcome.

Another friend despises “reading fiction” as a waste of time. Fiction is a feminine practice, slightly decadent and frivolous, apparently. This is harder to forgive. Some of us will never be satisfied until all artifice is wrung out of the culture, until all is made forthright and plain, plain, plain; every work realist, turned inside out under the harsh, even glare of an unforgiving, plodding collective consciousness purged of imagination’s distortions and abstractions, which apparently confuse and repulse them as degenerate.

I can only be thankful to read such tripe, such ignorance, and not hear it coming from someone who is within arm’s reach. What to make of such–words fail; whatever it is, this attitude, a word or phrase has not yet been coined.
I can only think of the bitter regret I feel knowing I will never read all that is out there of value, that I will never fully understand the art because of the limits of time, because of the late start and the engagement with social and political issues that demands all this reading of non-fiction–the same concerns that cannot be illuminated fully without fiction, without the highest form of writing that is the novel. Because of the demands of the mundane one’s life is surrounded less by beauty, more by the merely practical. One has to speak and consume the language of the deal and the bargain. The language of compromise. I don’t pretend it can or should be any other way—yet, still. A hearty f— you to the sentiment of literalism and the mind in which it festers, offered as gently as the vulgarity allows and hoping it doesn’t poison the rest. But it must be said.

The Magical, Mysterious, Absorptive Alchemy of Success

Time, time, time is on my side, yes it is…
–The Rolling Stones

Regarding this Freddy Gray post at TAC, I wouldn’t assume that today’s stenographers of the royal court aren’t correct about the perception, if not the truth, of current events as they will be viewed a generation on, at least here in the States. A stable, oil-producing Iraq garrisoned by US troops and an absence of the “whole cities lost” bogey may prove all this weary and distracted nation needs to shunt the horrors of the war into the memory hole (hands in pockets, looking away in affected nonchalance, whistling, surreptitiously sweeping the carnage into the chasm with the outside of our foot). Today’s crimes will be tomorrow’s heroic mythology. The day after tomorrow and the ultimate sentence of humanity is for suckers in modern America, where things must be compressed to conform to the timetables of individual ambitions.

Consider first the situation at the moment: over 130,000 troops (a number that should be routinely doubled to account for the mercenary force that exists as a sort of creative accounting dodge–of blood, manpower and legality) bogged down occupying a “liberated” nation where there is nary an acre sufficiently subdued to the point that troops can move about in anything but combat strength and where no westerner can expect to survive (at this rate it may very well take a hundred McCain years before a US troop can indulge in liberty outside the wire, another century and perhaps he can find a drink), a trillion spent and counting, more or less, and no exit strategy.

This is precisely the consequence of failure that was predicted before the invasion. Yet it is framed as success by comparing the daily blood loss against the astonishing levels of two years ago, levels that had to abate as the ethnic cleansing we at this point are complicit in as we literally wall Iraqis off from one another, ran its course. Having worn down the foreign terrorist element by arming our erstwhile (and future) mortal enemies among the Sunni, we square off against new ones (the erstwhile “liberated”) among the Shia–with a whole new foreign element in the form of Iran (stop, take a breath), newly ascendant in stark contrast to its position pre-war; a nation with which we are now engaged in a pointless embrace of hostility that seems destined to end in a kiss of death. This Orwellian success is used to discredit those who predicted it, and rehabilitate those political figures who, it appears, have escaped justice for the crime of the century, even if they will spend their retirements in a sort of reverse exile, unable to show their faces abroad for fear of arrest (Don’t it make you proud?). With success like this, who needs failure?

It should appall us that people are even allowed to venture this “twenty years on” argument, as if a generation of horrors visited upon Iraq will be vindicated thereby as the only means by which Saddam and his system were to be retired. Forgotten too will be the haste of the hysteric run-up to war, the increasing rigidity of the Bush administration’s demands leading up to it revealing their fear of peaceful resolution of their trumped up concerns. Already we appear incapable of recognizing the straight jacket that the interwar sanctions regime placed us in along with Saddam. Already there is little cognition of the myriad possibilities unpursued by which Saddam may have been forced out, by which Iraq may have been allowed to progress on its own terms observing its own necessary logic. But that’s always been the point. We’ve been engaged in the very costly process of ensuring that post-Saddam Iraq resolved on our terms, ultimately because of all that oil in the ground, since we liberated Kuwait. Tragedy plus time equals comedy. Failure plus time divided by denial equals success. Reality bites (the dust).

Asylum

A narcotic debauch of two or more months came to a close one month ago. Too small and unexceptional to warrant detail, a mere echo really of the self-inflicted catastrophe that is my past. Aftershocks years after the collision of youth’s flight with reality’s hard ground, growing progressively fainter as they pass through in expanding concentric circles, still plague this impossibly weak mind, each thus far a broken promise of finality. One almost yearns for the more severe and definite concussion from which these pathetic emanations originate. It’s as if it the past still exists out there in some physical reality we do not possess the requisite sense to detect. And of course it does; I can feel its weight even now, its unbearable, exquisite, damning weight. I cherish it even as it crushes me. I worship it as everything I know. This is love.

But thankfully the narcosis was arrested, and by a defiant act of will. Maybe this will be the last, finally. As much as I return to the shame of my past over and over again as to the phantom itch of a severed limb, I do wish to shuck it off finally. To finally turn about and walk forward through life instead of in reverse. If not to resolve then to see resolution for the unfortunate myth it is.
So the recuperation begins, and the physical energy regained feels unnatural, alarming even. I lay in bed and my chest surges, as if some current is passing through it. There is an excess of energy and an attendant inability to concentrate or contain this profusion for any purpose. So this too must be waited out.

And then it strikes, a fever that waylays me. I become a somnambulist, sleeping shameful hours through the day and plodding through my abbreviated waking hours like an astronaut encumbered by his heavy suit and tethered to the safety of his spacecraft–the sleeping world. But the dreams return! The dreams you didn’t even realize you’d sacrificed to your self-abnegation; dreams trivial and absurd, dreams of youth and alternate lives that tease you through the sliver of moonlight that is the dreamworld. Dreams of lives more real than this one spied upon through the transom over the barred door between reality and imagination. Alternate realities that splinter into innumerable mirror fragments when I turn my clumsy shattering gaze upon them.

Feeling better finally, up from the depths, nearly recovered, swept up again in the wake of world, back in time but still off the beat, no matter; devouring this reality, greedily, hailing a world that roars past, over and under and beneath and through me like an electric current, indifferent and glorious; I am overwhelmed by the breadth of creation, absorbed in the mass of God’s love in divine anonymity and exquisite irrelevance. Welcome back.

And back I am, having lost a little more patience, that is to say time, it having been swept into the vortex of self-absorption, dissipated in the implosion of self. Suddenly aware of the hour, of my decaying flesh and mind, of the nearing gallows, waving frantically at humanity near and far, raving like a lunatic (do you see me there, the madman on the streetcorner expending his manic energy into the ether by way of words?). This is my atheist’s prayer. There is no means to express this yearning, I have no faith by which to transmit this love of life and ashamed gratitude for existence, no means of repaying the irredeemable debt incurred upon conception, no currency to transact and no language to communicate, as the infinite weight bears down, inexorably, slowly but soon, any moment now, pressing my insignificant self, this tiny fractional autonomy of coalesced matter that is my entire existence, past present and future, back into the whole of nonexistence–so I must accost you, insult you, hail you like a starving beggar and desperate madman. Don’t be alarmed. Don’t look away. Humor me. See this half-squandered life. Take note of it. Listen to my futile and meaningless plea. The end is near! Relent!


Boards of Canada, Macquarie Ridge

Partial text of recovered captain’s log, circa 1750

Called all hands on deck to address fanciful talk arising from previously noted sudden sightings and inexplicable disappearances of what some in the crew are calling a “phantom ship”.

Interrupted by lookout’s sighting of upper masts in fog bank about a half mile off starboard, due north. Called crew to quarters. Damn poor timing!

All quiet at two bells after sighting. Set course north by northwest to avail ourselves of the cover of another fog bank and put distance between us and first, but it’s moving away from us as fast as the first seems to be trailing. We are exposed with fog all about. Crew increasingly uneasy.

Engaged enemy man o’ war at seven bells. Her position in fog cover no more than a hundred yards off revealed only after we received her broadside. Two guns disabled. Hull breached astern. Mainsail rent by chain shot. Devastating gunnery!

No crew visible on deck of enemy ship, which is of no design I recognize. Magazine set afire. Forced to pull remaining gunnery crew to fight it.

Had to strike sails from and cut loose damaged mizzen. Rudder seized. Gave order to prepare to repel boarders. First mate gone missing. Enemy maintaining distance, giving no signal. Still no man visible on her deck.

Panic seizing crew. Had to subdue boatswain gone mad with fear.

Taking on water fore and aft.

Listing badly to port. Situation hopeless. Gave order to abandon ship. Remaining on board.

Enemy turning away. She flies no flag. Caught first sight of the name on her stern, fading into the fog as she disappeared. It read:
UNTETHERED

The Ecstasy and the Apostasy

I’m just retrograde enough to think that voting for Barack Obama because of the gesture it constitutes, whether to Black America’s or the world’s historical resentment, is an absurd way to go about selecting a president (and the source of a nifty political gimmick for a campaign already low on substance). But one can’t deny the reality of it, and any rehabilitation of our image abroad is welcome. Human nature and the realities of governing being what they are, however, there’s no reason to assume this consequence will remain a positive independent of all else–it may end in resentment as the worldly Wonder Brother, bound by the circumstances of domestic politics and the warfare state, proceeds to disappoint those foreigners that share the youth of America’s vague infatuation with “Change”.

We’re all familiar by now with Edward Luttwak’s “apostasy” essay and the immediate outrage it provoked. The criticisms of the essay seem to impress those who know far more about it than I. But just as no plan survives a punch in the face, no sensible argument, or its rebuttal, survives contact with human emotion. From this Haaretz story about Senator Obama’s immediate sacrificing on the altar of AIPAC whatever capital of goodwill his nomination has thus far created in the Arab world:

The Arab press has often used Obama’s middle name, Hussein, but Al-Watan noted Thursday that he was a murated – an apostate from Islam. Orthodox Islam considers this a violation punishable by death.

An article on the Palestinian Web site Dunya al-Watansaid that many Arabs preferred Obama over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton because they thought he would save them. “They forgot that he is an American Zionist who turned his back on Islam, and that he is hostile to Islam more than the infidels, the Christians and the Jews,” the site said.

We should all be sophisticated enough at this point to know that it isn’t a question of whether Barack Obama is technically a Muslim apostate, but if political/religious figures abroad can and will convincingly portray him as one. This absurd concern is another consequence of empire–like it or not, we are answering to the religious sensibilities of a very angry and growing segment of humanity. We’ve given partial ownership of the polity to world opinion.

Perhaps we should all just agree that the presidency is no place for gestures and our politics run a deficit of substance already, and call it a wash, if for no other reason than human passion may be provoked but not controlled, and is usually best left alone. The key to gaining the world’s trust and respect still lies in being seen as strong, fair and worthy of emulation, and not dictating to them how they should order their societies–but above all, in not destroying their cities and killing their children.