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.

Maverick Jettisons the Constitution

Some will remember that John McCain’s vaunted independence once included more than just a sneering disregard for conservative concerns and bullying impatience with opposition to the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy that is his path of least resistance to power–notably skepticism toward liberal intervention and nation-building. Those days are of course long gone, and the man’s story thus far makes a pretty good case history of how the requirements of ambition gradually strip away the vestiges and substance of republican integrity. To quote one pseudonymous former associate: “This is not the man we knew and admired. Ambition is not a pretty sight.”

The invaluable Glenn Greenwald has documented the rootinest, tootinest Arizonan’s six month conversion from tepid opposition to the unitary executive to a position indistinguishable from the Addington/Yoo model placing the presidency above the law. Today’s New York Times, moving at a more stately pace, has caught up, reporting on the Senator’s now complete embrace of the unitary executive.
Barack Obama, whatever his flaws, represents a distinct choice here, offering opposition to outsized executive power consistent with both his liberalism and the Constitution that is, unlike the dubious personal narrative that is the unfortunate, fatuous basis of his appeal, authentic and principled. Of course, that scraping sound you hear is the Rovian beast sharpening its knives for the fall campaign, and constitutional fidelity may well prove to be political suicide (sadly for what it says about us as a people).

Cougar Mounting Paranoia

The address she gave for our meeting turned out to be one of those pedestrian chain-restaurant/nightspots that perform the unsung service of keeping America’s atomized middle class breeding, if barely.
I found it in an acid-yellow and dun colored building tucked into the armpit created by a loud and forbidding freeway on-ramp on one side and a hibernating bus terminal on the other. The building needed paint and a roof; its saucy name and logo, in dated script and design, once offered so confidently, was now mocked by its sagging, dowdy appearance. My faltering spirits stalled as I assessed the place. Arriving late, I sat in my car in the barren parking lot for ten minutes, staring at a faded American flag hanging lifeless and slack over the bus terminal’s marginal squalor, not sure why I came and entertaining the notion of turning around. Regardless, it was too late; the agents had made me the moment I pulled up.

Once inside the nearly empty bar I immediately found her. Rather she found me; my attention settled on the darkened corner at the far end of the room as if drawn by a force there. Her eyes pierced the gloom like those of a she-wolf in moonlight, managing even at this distance to project her characteristic expression: intrusive, arrogant confidence. I took in a long breath, smiled, and approached.

“I didn’t know they allowed smoking in bars here.” I said, trying to affect nonchalance. I clumsily fell into the glossy vinyl booth, producing an embarrassing sort of noise. I made a show of settling into place by sliding my backside back and forth, but was unable to recreate the sound. Not a word from her and I was already at my characteristic, awkward disadvantage.

“They don’t. You’re late.” She said, only then looking up at me, taking a long draw on her cigarette.
“I ran out of gas. Had to hike a mile with a jerry-can.” I stammered. “Didn’t even have enough to fill it.” I mumbled, not really wanting her to hear.
“Sorry to hear that.” She said unconvincingly.
She was made-up seductively, with rouge, eye-liner and, I suspected, false eyelashes. An aesthetic which is characterized in some all-male environments as CFM, which stands for “come f— me.” She was wearing a low-cut blouse and some sort of enhancing bra. She tilted her head defiantly as my eyes lingered; she had to check her hand, which reflexively rose to assume its typical thumb-and-forefinger cradle for her chin: the long practiced affectation of a “listening” posture. A slight lapse in her usual steel-girder control. Despite myself, I was charmed by this atypical vulnerability. She recovered and redirected her hand, reaching across and patting mine.
“I’ll put this out if it bothers you.”
“No, that’s alright.”
The transformation was jarring. Her style had previously been so studiously conservative that this was the first definitive confirmation I had that she actually possessed breasts. In my mind she was as inseparable from the pantsuit as Gandhi was from his loincloth and wire-rimmed glasses. The stray thought came to mind that the pantsuit serves the same purpose as Mao’s Zhongshan suit: a uniform signifying a discrete aesthetic propounding a particular national identity.
“Is there a waitress in this place?” I said nervously, looking about. Then I noticed them, hopelessly out of place in their conservative suits and aviator-style sunglasses, one lingering near the door, scanning the room, the other attempting to use a potted plant for cover.
“Your detail isn’t exactly blending in.” I said. She smiled.
“Are you kidding? I don’t want them to. If I don’t keep them close by there’s no telling what they’ll get into. I could tell you some stories.”
“Why do you keep them around then?”
“Window dressing, you know. They look imposing enough.” She glanced over at one of them. “Most of the time that is. Somebody has to drive, run errands, clear out the occasional restaurant. You’ve heard the one about the Secret Service agent who locked his keys in his car?”
“No.”
“Took him two hours to get the rest of his detail out.”
I snorted dutifully. Over her shoulder I could see the television, showing a grim-faced newscaster with the Homeland Security terrorist threat graphic alongside. I didn’t note the color-code level. A commercial came on that I knew well, a public service announcement warning against drunken driving. It proceeded through a series of state troopers accosting motorists, blinding them with flashlights, handcuffing one, guiding a drunk’s head into a caged back-seat, finishing with a bull-necked, bow-tied trooper in a Smokey the Bear speaking sternly into the camera. I knew the grating voice-over nearly by heart; it played in my head as I watched, a growling, challenging man’s voice, indistinguishable in tone and temper from that for a commercial for professional wrestling or a motocross exhibition, hectoring us over a shrill, arena rock style song.
“What have you been doing?”
“Not much really. Working a lot. Reading.”
“Reading? I never took you for much of a reader.” She reached across and gave my hand a quick squeeze, drawing hers away with a lingering caress. She laughed, as if abandoning a ruse. “Listen, D___, I know you’re not some sort of virgin.”
“No. But I may as well be at this point.” I said, only realizing as I put my glass to my lips that it was empty. She smiled and, without looking away, raised her hand slightly. The waitress appeared instantly.
“I’ll have scotch on rocks.” I said.
“I’m sorry,” the waitress looked fearfully at H____ as she spoke, “our ice machine is broken.”
“Oh. Okay. Straight up then.”
“Listen,” she said, “those others can’t do what I can do for you. They can’t appreciate a decent, hard-working blue-collar man.”
“I think you’ve mistaken me for somebody else.” I said. “I’m not really in that demographic anymore. Rather it doesn’t exist. It’s out of fashion.”
“Don’t try to affect cynicism with me, D___, I know you.”
“You know what? I think you actually do. But, that ship has sailed. There’s nothing we can do for each other at this point. You’ll go back to your world and I’ll go back to mine. As it should be.”
“Well, there might be something we can do for each other.” She attempted to narrow her eyes seductively.
An Army recruiting spot came on; rangers hurtling out the back of a Chinook helicopter, rappelling down cliffs, technicians manning sophisticated machines. Someone changed the channel: a split screen, showing the two candidates for president, one in an uncomfortably close, fawning shot, his broad smile contorting the the thin skin over his skeletal features into painful looking folds, alternating with shots of hopping, giddy supporters waving signs and clapping wildly; the other an old man before a backdrop bearing the slogan and name of a lobbying institution, gesturing in a half-mechanical, half-narcotic fashion and speaking in a deliberately mild, sedated manner that contrasted with the mad look in his eyes.
“You ever get the impression that things are falling apart?” I said, surprising myself.
She gave me a knowing, empathetic look.
“You have no idea.” She said, with the air of someone relieved of a long, losing struggle. “So, how about we get out of here? I’ve got nothing better to do. What about you?”
“No.” I said, relenting. “I’ve got nothing at all.”

The Last Romantics

MGMT, Time to Pretend

I’m feeling rough, I’m feeling raw, I’m in the prime of my life.
Let’s make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.
I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars.
You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars.

This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do,
get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute?

Forget about our mothers and our friends
We’re fated to pretend

I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms
I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world
I’ll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home
Yeah, I’ll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.

There’s really nothing, nothing we can do
Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew.
The models will have children, we’ll get a divorce
We’ll find some more models, everything must run it’s course.
We’ll choke on our vomit and that will be the end
We were fated to pretend

***

Age’s wisdom is no match for youth’s naivete.

There’s a Draft in Here

This is the mucked-up initial draft of my most recent article in The American Conservative. I’m assuming it’s okay to post it here, seeing as the print issue is ancient by today’s hyper-paced blog-influenced standards:

Rebates and Cheap Dates

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money, or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don’t have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?
– Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

At the end of January President Bush and Congress passed their economic stimulus plan, the central component of which is a scheme by which the US government will borrow and distribute a minimum of 110 billion dollars to low- and middle-income taxpayers, essentially to replenish a fraction of the money still being sucked into the vortex created by the sinking housing market. On April 25 the first wave of these payments went out, four days ahead of schedule; by the end of June some 13 million Americans will receive checks of as much as 1200 dollars. China, still expanding as fast as the US economy is contracting, holds (over our collective head, you might say) over $1 trillion in assets denominated in our faltering currency, $330 billion of that in U.S. Treasury notes.

The stimulus plan will also attempt to pump some monetary air directly back into the housing bubble, increasing limits on government backed loans, $633,500 for FHA and $729,750 for government sponsored entities such as Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, relieving those hardy souls sticking it out near the top of the housing bubble with the option of saving hundreds per month by refinancing their jumbo loans.

So habitual has deficit spending become that even the knowledgeable seem to have forgotten that if you’re in the red a dollar spent is a dollar borrowed, and it’s a dubious economic rationale for a “stimulus” program that sinks you further in debt and reinforces the very habits that put you there. There is an obvious political rationale, and at least one respected old hand of media punditry helped out with an enthusiastic column praising the bipartisan hustle of our legislature that the less astute might have confused for quick desperation.

As after 9/11, the economy is faltering and confidence is shaken, and the people are urged to shop. Pitching in, Wal-Mart is offering to cash rebate checks for free, if you have the unfortunate habit of cashing your checks at Wal-Mart. Uncle Sam wants you. To be a wastrel. (Picture his top-hat unsteadily perched on the tawny conch-shell that shades Donald Trump’s grimly debauched pout).

Once growth became both the means and the end of our de-industrializing economy (now something akin to a perpetual-motion machine) and as the quantification of the net effect on growth of various human actions became, if not a passion the closest approximation of one an economist’s heart can muster, it was only a matter of time before profligacy became civic virtue. We haven’t yet designated frugality vice, but the implication is certainly there.

But it’s the economy we’ve created, not the economy that has created us. Frugality is a form of modesty, after all, and modesty was the first of the old order dispatched by the sexual revolution. Commerce, equally impatient with this inconvenient former virtue, was the guillotine. Vanity reaps the spoils, and is much more at home in the present order. It’s only fitting, seeing as it’s ultimately vanity that put us here. It is understandable therefore that the individual citizen takes no significant shame in maxing out his credit cards and borrowing against his home at the first opportunity, and that he takes little more shame in bankruptcy. He follows the State‘s lead in going into perpetual debt, and the State follows his.

If the State has become a “nanny” it isn’t a very good one, reinforcing our worst habits, and reinforcing them most in those of us who can afford it least. Even in redistributing wealth downward, the government’s plan does the less prosperous half of population the humiliating disservice of singling it out in its peculiar promotion of vice. One could go all day cataloguing the curious inversions of order in our topsy-turvy new world.

Ignorance, or failing that complicity in the economic farce, is also encouraged in the people; the citizen is “given” a “rebate”, drawn from an insolvent treasury, borrowed in part from him, in part from abroad (it‘s not accurate to say primarily from China, as Japan still holds more of our debt, for the moment; yes, China is the second biggest claim on US debt). It is a gimmick embedded in the gimmick that is the tax “refund.”

But to the extent we consider our actions we are frankly and openly accepting the longer term cost of our economic voodoo, incanting away to keep the inflationary zombie animated and moving, making as if it‘s alive. Most habitually expect the next boom to get us out of the hock we are in today with no appreciable level of pain. And the tax rebate is, above all, a plan for avoiding pain, in other words responsibility, no matter how urgent the warning that pain conveys and how overdue its proper corrective.

Government financed make-work once involved building things; the products of FDR’s depression-era initiatives stand as monuments in defiance of their well-documented lack of economic justification. Entire ecosystems were encased in concrete, regions wired with electricity, rivers dammed, bridges built, and all at the surly, stubborn pace of government work. Such grand programs are now out of the question (unless they divert obscene sums into the defense industry), but not because we’ve adopted the conservative virtues of solvency and limited government.

Saving your money and living with your means are now anti-social acts. Economic growth, regardless of its composition or their effects (indeed, concern for the non-economic effects of policy is morally disreputable in current political discourse) trumps all other concerns. No longer content to stay home militarily, making things and balancing our books, we have developed an economy to which thrift and modesty are detrimental, waste and excess beneficial. It’s a perpetual boom mentality attempting to manifest a perpetual boom, through power of will. But until that happens, we’re essentially borrowing money simply to spend it, as our production continually lags our appetite. Our diligent government stands ready to print as many dollars as it will take for as long as it takes. How much longer foreign governments will be willing to do their part by absorbing our excess, is anyone’s guess.

Dennis, still alive, after a fashion

I intend to resume real writing here soon, as well as the fictional thread over at Storyboard. Sanity and order are reasserting control and even now are rapidly reclaiming the psychological territory lost to the rebel forces of sloth and intemperance over the last few months. They advanced quickly but cannot hold their gains, as always (hey, were talking about sloth and intemperance here). As rapidly as they acquired territory they will yield it back to my determined counter-insurgency. The smoke is settling; I can see the landscape of my mind, gouged by bomb blasts and littered with corpses. It’s only a matter now of cleaning up the mess and convincing the population it is safe to return. Until the next assault. The Surge is working through mass arrests, extraordinary rendition, a shameful reliance on air power regardless of civilian casualties (there goes a Hellfire now, obliterating a van full of insurgent impulses–or just wreaking more collateral damage by destroying civilian brain cells) and of course by walling off the emotionally cleansed sectarian neighborhoods of my psyche. Psychological reconciliation proves elusive still, but we’re in this for the long haul. This is the long war!

Well, I’m gone to Detox Mansion
Way down on Last Breath Farm
I’ve been rakin’ leaves with Liza
Me and Liz clean up the yard
(…)
Growin’ fond of Detox Mansion
And this quiet life I lead
But I’m dying to tell my story
For all my friends to read
–Warren Zevon, Detox Mansion

Alternative America Phrasebook

“Your guide to the idiom of mass delusion”

Bush Derangement Syndrome, neoconservative neologism,
1. The inability to sublimate the disdain felt for a criminally incompetent president.
2. Outrage at the crimes and incompetence of same.
3. Undue veneration for the Constitution, the rule of law, truth, common decency, or good sense during the period between January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009.

Unreal, indeed

Read my article on the government’s tax rebate scheme,”Unreality Check”, in real ink on real paper (unavailable online) in the May 19 issue of the American Conservative. Featuring also these more authentic writers:

The Next Fidel
By Peter Hitchens
Hugo Chavez’s socialist program drives Venezuela to the brink of dictatorship.

When the Left Was Right
by Bill Kauffman
Before the Weathermen detonated SDS, Carl Oglesby was trying to build a Middle-American movement.

Less Perfect Unions
by Margaret Liu McConnell
Extending marriage to same-sex couples negates the ideal that no parent should abandon his child.

Turning on to J Street
By Michael Brendan Dougherty
A new lobby redefines what it means to be a friend of Israel.

The Wright Answer
By Steve Sailer
Putting Wright to rest

The Road to Kuwait
By Lawrence Korb
The Iraq exit is clearly marked.

Full Metal Jacket
By Steve Sailer
Robert Downey Jr. in “Iron Man”

Faith of Our Father
By James P. Pinkerton
Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State by Tara Ross and Joseph C. Smith Jr.

Necessary Evil
By John Lukacs
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan.

Ode to Joy
By Peter W. Wood
Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric G. Wilson

Liberalism’s World Wide Web
By Austin Bramwell
Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats by Matthew Yglesias

McCain Missing in Action
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Establishing Obama
By Daniel Larison

Don’t Sweat the TSA
By Fred Reed