I never thought I would be blessing the conservatism, wisdom and restraint of a Republican House of Representatives, but here I am today, thanking them for refusing to be stampeded over the same penny-pinching cliff as the cowardly, sailtrimming U.S. Senate.

Let me read you a list of Republican Senators who chose to present a bill to the Iraqi people for a "gift" we promised to give them:

Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Colo.)
John Ensign (Nev.)
Lindsey Graham (SC)
Olympia J. Snowe (Maine)
Sam Brownback (Kans.)
Saxby Chambliss (Ga.)
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
Susan Collins (Maine)

Collins and Snowe are from what once was my wing of the Republican Party, when I was still a Republican. For that, I am remorseful. But I will point out that Voinovich, Chafee, and Specter are all missing from this list. At least some fragments of the Republican moderate wing came through.

But look who's up there. Lindsey Graham. Saxby Chambliss. SAXBY FUCKING CHAMBLISS! The man who stomped all over a three-time amputee WAR VETERAN to prove that he was STRONGER ON DEFENSE! Back when I was wavering on whether we should invade Iraq (oh, yes, it happened - I had to be convinced, and I never relished the idea of war), I noted in a moment of new-minted Democratic fury that chickenhawks like Saxby Chambliss ought to have been crucified across the front glacis plate of the first Bradley across the Iraqi international border. Graham is easily in the same class as Chambliss, but he was blessed by fortune and fate with an opponent who wasn't a VIETNAM WAR VET!

So, our friends the new-minted Southern chickenhawks show they're capable of turning into backstabbing, cheese-paring neoisolationists at the drop of a gimmie cap. What a surprise.

Let me take this moment to tell you all

I told you so!

Meanwhile, m'man John McCain has been out there talking to half the papers in the world about his vote against the amendment. Knew we could count on John.

Update: I don't know what to make of Lieberman not voting. On the one hand, his and Byrd's nonvotes would have cancelled each other out, unless I've misread Byrd's stance on the matter. On the other hand, it looks a hell of a lot like sailtrimming, or at least dodging a hard call. It's not a betrayal, but he isn't impressing me with his fortitude.

For chromal, who was worrying over deficits over lunch today, here's Tom McGuire on the medium-longterm economic question. Mostly, it's a roundup over the latest Krugman squawk of "the sky is falling!". I don't really have the chops for this sort of analysis, I can only gaze back at Krugman's historically sub-Galbraithian record, which seems to exceed the usual economist preformative standard of "he's predicted five of the last two recessions".

The Good People of the World and their tactics. Cry "censorship", and silence witnesses. Scream "oppression", and threaten others. Hide. Conceal. Attack. Intimidate. Scurry when unexpectedly exposed.

Christ, do I hate "protests".

Via Instapundit.

Fuck Edwards

I supported Edwards in the past because I liked his take on domestic issues, he was pro-war, and he wasn't burdened with Lieberman's distasteful social conservativism.

He is voting against the $87 billion reconstruction bill. He voted in favor of the UN authorization back in the day. He's willing to play the hawk when it's safe to do so, but is too much of a coward to pay the cost when it's required. This decision convinces me that he has no backbone, and that I can't trust him to do the right thing for the right reasons. It's an abominable act, and it convinces me that the man is unworthy of the White House.

Gephardt, on the other hand, has his heart in the right place. He's done his share of rhetorical tacking on the war, but when it comes to a head, he's a standup guy. Such a shame that Gephardt's an economic disaster. I guess I'm stuck with Lieberman.

Via the TNR Primary

Erin O'Connor links to, and excerpts, a screed by a poet named Tom Henihan against the evils of teaching poetry. O'Connor's agenda is the exposure of the faults of academia, and of course she concentrates on his criticism of academic instruction in creative writing, specifically poetry. I should point out that I have never taken a college course in poetry writing or appreciation. My college English experience was largely in literature, comparative religion, history, and Shakespeare. Maybe that's why I still like poetry, I don't know. O'Connor has her point, and she makes it well. I hold no brief in favor of the academy. But there are other ideas, dominating ideas, that make Henihan's essay... distinct:

Some years ago a guy I knew in Vancouver lost his job at an art gallery. Due to idleness and a lack of direction he fell in with the poetry crowd and of course started writing. His stuff was sloppy and obviously derivative but no one seemed to mind. One night sitting over a beer I cautiously asked him about his creative process. Without batting an eyelid, he told me that he typed other poets work on his computer, moved the verses around and substituted words until he had something that looked like his own. He then enthusiastically added, "This poetry thing is a blast."

What would you say if someone said this to you? Would you laugh and enjoy the joke? Or would you go off to a corner to rail against the barbarians at the gate, the barbarians within the gate, the snickering barbarians burning the shattered splinters of the gate in bonfires between their squalid yurts? I beg you, stop and marvel at the peerless shallows of a mind that is incapable of grasping the humor of that anecdote.

When student poets get up to read they almost always thank their teacher for making poetry fun. Poetry should be protected from fun. There is so much fun in the world it isn’t funny anymore. Poetry is essentially a solemn and devotional form. Funny poetry is a contradiction in terms…it’s the equivalent of kneeling in a church and saying funny prayers or chanting at a funny ritual. I am not saying that there is no room for humour in poetry but I am saying that there is very little room.

The above quote isn't selective. It is representative of the tone of the essay. There is no room for fun in poetry. Poetry is a devotional form. These sentiments makes me want to shout, makes me want to scream, makes me want to write bad haiku about my genitals and scrawl them on the sides of bathroom toilet stalls. No room for fun. What a monstrous, abominable notion.

"I am going with her tomorrow to take pictures of tough women holding big guns. " Salam Pax's first Guardian column since returning to Baghdad. I like what I'm hearing from Salam these days. It sounds... hopeful.

Mickey Kaus comments on a suicide at NYU from the 10th floor balcony of one of those horrible deep-vertical atriums that sadistic architects love to inflict on college campuses. I'm mildly acrophobic, and the University of Pittsburgh's plethora of buildings with vertiginous low-barrier balconies led me to reject that university in favor of Penn State's mostly-horizontal campus. Edges with low barriers over deep drops exert a horrible attraction for me - I find myself leaning backwards from them, as if I'm braced against a wind blowing towards the drop. Unsettling.

George RR Martin's A Clash of Kings has a great passage about this compulsion, featuring a "sky cell" - a jail cell where the wall on the side of a horrible precipice is missing, and the floor slightly sloped towards that side of the cell. The cell had a message scrawled on one wall: "The blue is calling me!".

I can't figure out how to defeat Slate's eccentric formatting of Kaus's pseudoblog - just scroll down to "A second NYU student has died after..."

I finished watching the first Witch Hunter Robin DVD last night. The transfer is supernaturally crisp and clean, considering the dark shadowy palette that WHR uses. If you compare this disc to MediaBlaster's DVD of Weathering Continent or ADV's Devil Lady DVDs, there's just no doubt about it. Both of those counterexamples are full of colorblocking and digital noise in the dark areas and shadows. I don't think I saw a single glitch on my copy of the WHR DVD. Phenomenal job.

One has to wonder if they put the effort into that brilliant encode that they skimped on things like translating credits. Bandai is a Japanese-owned company; what's so hard about stripping the Japanese credits out and replacing them with professional English credits? I don't know, maybe there's an alternate angle for the English dub with English credits; if so, that's pretty damn lame, people. If they just didn't bother - for God's sake, it's 2003! The masters have got to be digital; it's not as if it's some grand chore to remove the credits layer from the opening and ending and swap them out!

The DVD encode really brings out the subtle charms of this show. There's heavy use of computer graphics for background work, especially in the character's office space. The DVD looks better than the digisubs, which is really saying a hell of a lot - I hadn't expected them to exceed what had been a very high level of quality work on the part of the amateurs for WHR.

For those of you hiding under a rock, Witch Hunter Robin is an occult police-procedural show featuring the Japanese branch of a secretive witch-control organization, who take out witches who go wild and use their powers. Our protagonist, Robin Sena, is STN-J's newest member. She's quiet, convent-raised, stone-faced and affects a very stark and anachronistic mode of dress. She's a "craft user", which in the show is a euphemism for a witch who is tolerated by the authorities. She doesn't start out the series as a particularly adept "hunter", as she has virtually no control over her pyrokinetic talent, and blows a number of traps by setting fire to everything but the actual targets.

The show is lacking sex, fanservice, humor, flamboyant villains, hyperviolence, trippy editing, giant robots, and transformation sequences. It's slow-moving, dark, and somber. As such, I can't imagine it becoming much of a breakout hit. It isn't one for the kids. But it is a great show.

James of Infinite Monkeys is calling for the recall of Jesse Jackson as Black Leader. He plans to fund the recall effort by selling "honorary brotherhoods". Via this week's Carnival of the Vanities.

The Carnival of the Vanities is in town. Mike Finley has a story about his fifteen reunion and a meeting with an old school bully. It's brilliant, and scalding. Go read it.

I was at war with the world at that age, but I don't remember any particular bullies. I mean, I was bullied, and I was harsh to weaker kids, but it wasn't a matter of one outstanding bully or anything. The world hated me, and I wasn't too fond of the world, either. I was a weird, mean kid who was too smart for his own good but not smart enough in the ways that matter. I don't have a bully story, I don't have a name I can blame my childhood miseries on. There must have been individual kids, but in retrospect it's all a blur of denim and mullets.

But I remember the kids I picked on. Mark – the rabbity son of the local Lutheran pastor, who was small and the sort of intelligent that is indistinguishable from dim in everyday affairs. [David - got the guy's name wrong initially], who was one of my friends, who carried an air of saintly passivity which was far too easy to take advantage of when I was in a savage mood.

Christ, was I a bully? I don't think so, not in the classic sense of the word. I didn't go searching for victims or anything. But I could be vicious to the stupid and foolish.

I missed my tenth reunion. It was too early, I guess. Fifteen sounds about right - I wonder if they do that back at North Hills?

Damn straight.

I can't express my agreement more forcefully. The UN is weak, and giving it attention and leverage by feeding it ever-more-diluted resolutions and compromises is only going to weaken the prosecution of the war. The UN and those that use it as a proxy have nothing that is worth compromise.

Looking in on the New Blog Showcase, I come across Barnga!, a liberal Texan who's blogging about the Texas Redistricting Catfight. He's fairly terse, but prolific. I haven't read many of his entries yet, but he's blogging off the beaten political path, which is interesting.

There are 120 North Korean-funded Korean schools in Japan. One hundred twenty, with 20,000 students. In Japan. They're "funded" by the North Korean government, by which I take it that they once were funded by the North Korean government, and now float on a part of the massive remittances by Koreans back to the North Korean government. Imagine if there was a large system of Mexican-funded private schools in the US - be pretty damn freaky, wouldn't it? North Korea is nine times as poor in comparison to Japan as Mexico is in comparison to the US (1:28 vs 9:37.6, according to the CIA Factbook, which is the coolest online resource, like, ever). Throw on top of that the idea that these hypothetical Mexican private schools taught la Voz de Aztlan ideology, and you get some idea of the sheer weirdness of this situation in Japan.

This is what you get when you run a racial-identity nation, where you force ethnic minorities into eternal group-identity ghettos. Those ghettos invariably slide downwards into a lowest-common-ideology threat to your polity. Foolishness.

Of course, that article is more upbeat - it's largely about how Korean parents' groups are de-ideologizing the NK schools, which makes sense when you consider that they now, effectively, fund these schools themselves. So my point about ghettoization is, perhaps, overdrawn. But the sheer fact of their existence freaks me out.

Via the Marmot Hole's Winds of Change Korea Wrapup.

"The Stateless Utopia of Toll-Booths"

Matt Welsh has taken Michael Totten up on a mountaintop to show him the libertarian kingdoms of the earth, and he is sore tempted. Michael is wavering, but I'm pretty firm, and Michael's phrase sums it up for me in a few pithy words. I can't imagine a good country without government, a good life without regulation, a good humanity without the nonexistent grace of God. That is to say, libertarian legalities cannot impose a peace; libertarian economics cannot address the commons, and libertarian moralities cannot reconcile individual interests.

Arbitration without coercion is, in the end, arbitrary.

Not all economic interests are atomized.

"An it harm none, do what thou will" will always be read as "Do what thou will" in the absence of coercion.

Greg Easterbrook is a tedious bore when it comes to movies, it seems. I have to wonder if there's something in the water at The New Republic that makes all of its house writers love pointless, ugly European film-making?

We went to see Kill Bill this weekend, Dave and chromal and I. It was a lot of fun, despite what the inevitable "violence bad!" scolds have to say. I'm not going to say it's a particularly good film, but it was one hell of a movie. The only real problem I had with the movie is that Tarantino is batshit crazy, and simply refuses to ever give up the cheap joke. It could have lost about a third of the script and still held together. Even in his flash-and-violence-only film, he still talks too much.

At least he managed to resist the temptation to cast himself. Again.

Update: It seems as if it's Joyless Scold Week over at The New Republic. Whee!

A friend emails me this:

While discussing an article on students' use of 'inapproprate'slang or
cliche phrases in writing papers or evaluations of classic works such as
Hamlet, someone added this comment:


70 b3, 0r n07 70 b3, 7h47 15 7h3 qu35710n:
Wh37h3r '715 n0b|3r 1n 7h3 m1nd 70 5uff3r
7h3 5|1n65 4nd 4rr0w5 0f 0u7r4630u5 f0r7un3;
0r 70 74k3 4rm5 4641n57 4 534 0f 7r0ub|35,
4nd by 0pp051n6, 3nd 7h3m: 70 d13, 70 5|33p
N0 m0r3; 4nd by 4 5|33p, 70 54y w3 3nd
7h3 h34r7-4ch3, 4nd 7h3 7h0u54nd n47ur4| 5h0ck5
7h47 f|35h 15 h31r 70; '715 4 c0n5um4710n
D3v0u7|y 70 b3 w15h'd. 70 d13 70 5|33p,
70 5|33p, p3rch4nc3 70 dr34m; 4y3, 7h3r3'5 7h3 rub,
F0r 1n 7h47 5|33p 0f d347h, wh47 dr34m5 m4y c0m3,
Wh3n w3 h4v3 5huff|3d 0ff 7h15 m0r74| c01|1
Mu57 61v3 u5 p4u53. 7h3r3'5 7h3 r35p3c7
7h47 m4k35 c4|4m17y 0f 50 |0n6 |1f3:
F0r wh0 w0u|d b34r 7h3 wh1p5 4nd 5c0rn5 0f 71m3,
7h3 0ppr3550r'5 wr0n6, 7h3 pr0ud m4n'5 c0n7um3|y,2,3
7h3 p4n65 0f d15pr1z'd |0v3, 7h3 |4w'5 d3|4y,4
7h3 1n50|3nc3 0f 0ff1c3, 4nd 7h3 5purn5
7h47 p4713n7 m3r17 0f 7h3 unw0r7hy 74k35,
Wh3n h3 h1m53|f m16h7 h15 qu137u5 m4k35
W17h 4 b4r3 b0dk1n? Wh0 w0u|d f4rd|35 b34r6,7
70 6run7 4nd 5w347 und3r 4 w34ry |1f3 --
Bu7 7h47 7h3 dr34d 0f 50m37h1n6 4f73r d347h,
7h3 und15c0v3r3d c0un7ry, fr0m wh053 b0urn8
N0 7r4v3|3r r37urn5, puzz|35 7h3 w1||,
4nd m4k35 u5 r47h3r b34r 7h053 1||5 w3 h4v3,
7h4n f|y 70 07h3r5 7h47 w3 kn0w n07 0f.
7hu5 c0n5c13nc3 d035 m4k3 c0w4rd5 0f u5 4||,
4nd 7hu5 7h3 n471v3 hu3 0f r350|u710n
15 51ck|13d 0'3r w17h 7h3 p4|3 c457 0f 7h0u6h7,
4nd 3n73rpr1535 0f 6r347 p17ch 4nd m0m3n7,
W17h 7h15 r364rd 7h31r curr3n75 7urn 4wry,
4nd |053 7h3 n4m3 0f 4c710n..

There's something about wading through this sort of pig-latin gibberishification that makes the language come alive for me - by forcing a limited sort of decoding, it removes the passage from the parts of the mind that read reflexively, and compels one to read the text closely, directly, as if encountered for the first time.

Update: he tells me that it was from this Fark article comments section.

Pixy Misa was blogging from Sydney, Australia's yearly anime convention, Animania. Sounds like they had a good old-fashioned traditional fire alarm, with the whole con out in the parking lot of the hotel, waiting for the all-clear. Apparently Aussie yaoi fans pronounce it "yowie", which is a pretty good bilingual pun if you know that yaoi is originally an acronym, one gag reading of which is "yamete, atashi oshiri ittei!", or "stop it, my ass hurts!" Pixy's going to be posting photos later on. For now, a brief update.

Phil Carter reiterates his arguments (from a military law point of view) for why the Gitmo camp ought to be brought within Geneva Convention compliance. He's got a point (and I don't want to hear word one about death camps. Not one!) in the general scheme of affairs. It weakens our hands to be perceived as not in compliance.

On the other hand, the current series of debacles in the US as the legal system attempts to deal with terrorists doesn't exactly fill me with optimism as to what might be the result of bringing the Gitmo camp into Geneva Convention compliance. I don't want to hear about released internees in the news after the fact.

Via Andrew Olmstead's Winds of War roundup

Slate has a useful article for those of us on the left end of the religious scale. It's a list of seven myths about the "religious right", one of which being the notion of a "religious right". One of the most interesting is the myth that a politician's religious identity isn't important to voters. He pulls out a Pew study that shows that atheists, agnostics, Muslims, and *evangelicals* are at a disadvantage among the average American voter. I took a closer look at that study, and found that Hispanics were equally unlikely to vote for all of the above, at about the same percentage. The numbers more-or-less agree with his conclusion, however: voters prefer people with professed mainstream beliefs like Judaism, Catholicism, and mainstream Protestantism, than secularists or Bible-Belters.

I started watching that Witch Hunter Robin disc, and it turns out that the confusing variance in cover art is just a reversible cover with the other side turned out. Oops.

The His and Her Circumstances boxset (which I will be referring to as Karekano until the day I die) showed up this weekend. It's a very ugly boxset, but I suppose I don't really care. I've never been a packaging-nazi. My backlog of DVDs is starting to pile up a bit - I'm still slowly working my way through that Sailor Moon R set.

The Robin episodes look beautiful, by the way. Sharp, clear; good sound.

Salam is back from London, and mildly pissed at the Jordanians, border guards, and the foreigners who insist on tipping on top of the bribes. He sounds a bit like a park ranger complaining about tourists feeding bears. Good to have him back.

This article was brought to my attention this morning. It seems our wicked, wicked government is raizing the palm groves of poor innocent Iraqis in Dhuluaya.

Patrick Cockburn says so, and Patrick Cockburn is a respectable reporter.

His other articles are full of references to the "Iraqi resistance". Half his articles are datelined "Baiji", or "Baghdad" just after scurrying back from Baiji, one of the most violent and Ba'athist towns in Iraq, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, and notable mostly for oil fires and roadside bombs. But he writes his articles as if it's representative of the whole of Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn says so, and Patrick Cockburn is a respectable reporter.

Well, let's see what Patrick Cockburn is saying as of this weekend.

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers,

"Jazz". What's the chance of Americans playing jazz in this Year of Our Lord 2003? For that matter, have you ever stood nearby a bulldozer in full roar? How much can you hear over the engine noise? Right.

have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

Ooo. Evil. This is phrased officially. Must be coalition policy. Horrible stuff. Except I don't see any sourcing here. Maybe later.

Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons."

Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.

Well, that's sourcing. But it isn't exactly official, is it? Not to mention hearsay. Oh, lookie. There's that "resistance" word again. So much sweeter than "terror bombers and saboteurs", isn't it?

"They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.

Ahah! Sourcing! And its a... sheikh. In the heart of the Sunni Triangle. Well-informed one, too, who knows about Israeli occupation policies. Hrm.

The destruction of the fruit trees took place in the second half of last month but, like much which happens in rural Iraq, word of what occurred has only slowly filtered out. The destruction of crops took place along a kilometre-long stretch of road just after it passes over a bridge.

Wanna bet that road was a favored ambush site? Any takers? Didn't think so. So it wasn't just an arbitrary act. They were clearing an ambush site.

The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."

Hey! We've got official sourcing! But Cockburn didn't do it - he cribbed it from a local Iraqi paper - not a particularly pro-US one, but not voice-of-the-resistance to-the-barricades stuff, either. Let's go look for that article... blast, Iraq Today doesn't seem to have much in the way of archives.

Still, see the ambiguity? He doesn't explicitly make the connection - "punishment=bulldozing". In fact, it definitely seems to leave open the alternate explanation, that the locals weren't keeping bombers and ambushers from hiding in those groves, and they were leveled to reduce the threat to that road.

Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.

That sucks, having to face either bankruptcy or the hatred of evil men. Even more so if it's your cousins. Or yourself.

Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth."

Yeah, not exactly an answer, is it?

Look, it's sad that economically valuable grove land had to be bulldozed under to provide security on a road. It would be even more sad if they had to destroy the villages they thought were hiding the bombers and saboteurs and ambushers. It would be absolutely horrific if they resorted to hangings and assassinations and murders and all the horrors of really dirty COIN war. Destroying a couple of acres of trees is a small price to pay. There are much higher prices to be paid in insurgency war, if it goes on too long or too far.

Sigh. I had one of my little "incidents" on Friday. One of these things where I say something awful, but I can't apologize for it, because it was what I truly thought. Then I get disappointed in myself for being one of those people that thinks that sort of thing, then I get busy trying to fight off a depressive fit, and then I've wasted away half a beautiful weekend because I told a pair of loudmouthed political bigots what I thought of them. I should never play at being a loudmouth; I'm too morose to get away with it.

Which logically means I ought to shut this down. What's a blog but a megaphone? Meh. I'm mostly talking to myself, and Jessica over there. Who was witness to my act of obnoxiousness, and thus probably isn't listening right now anyways.

Which I guess, in the end, is to say I wish I could apologize, but I won't, for the same reason I wish I could belong to a church and pretend that there's something more than wishful thinking and social lies at the bottom of it all. Because social lies make for a more comfortable life, and my pride never lets me tell them.

Days like today, I understand why the religious hold pride to be a sin.

For Mathew Shepard

Oh you fearful wyrms!
Who, stalking in the night
With bat and barbedwire seductions
Prove your manhood with hate
And hunt your peculiar prey.
I wish upon you an inverti March
That the lamb you stalk
Turn on you a lion
Rend you to your bigoted bones
And sow from your teeth
A nation of Georges
Your brethren to reap.

3/26/02

Teacher Magazine (a foundation-baby wonkproduct of the People's Republic of Maryland) has an article that made a minor splash (or at best, a ripple) in the conservative end of the blogsphere, mostly for an offhand comment by a malevolent unnamed teacher at a conference. Go to Porphryogenitus or Best of the Web for the punchline. I initially skimmed the article in spinal-reflexive disgust.

When I went back and read it through without the rage, an interesting thing happened. The article ceased to be a apocalyptically repulsive peacenik propaganda piece and... shifted. Once I calmed down, the peacenik-radical schoolteacher, Colman McCarthy, came into focus. And the best I could muster, was pity. Viewed with dispassion, he's a sad little man, whose high-school students can argue rings around, who's incapable of the most basic sort of logic that even the dimmest high-school-jock possesses. He's an intellectual vacuum, behind which his students swirl in confused vortexes of argument. McCarthy is so weak a presence that his class appears to be a spare study hall.

Once you get into the article, it's clear that a lot of lefty administrators in Maryland have let him take up a spare classroom here or there as an act of leftist charity. The man portrayed in this article isn't the vanguard of bad ideology - he's a sad little laughingstock. At worst, he's a peculiar side-effect of some greater evil, a spinning, directionless eddy of a greater wave. At best, he's a strange aberration and waste of local school taxes. Some of the internal evidence of the article leads me to suspect that most of his "classes" are after-school affairs and community-college irrelevancies. At least two of the schools cited seem to be ones in which his own children were enrolled; I strongly suspect that they gave him a class to make him happy.


The McCarthys of the world aren't a threat to anybody - they're so totally lacking in common sense or capacity that any seventh-grade wallflower could drive them like a herd of sheep. I had someone like McCarthy as a seventh-grade history teacher. He wasn't nearly so lovable as McCarthy was - the class ate him alive. We forced him into a nervous breakdown and retirement.

The article waves at the "peace love and understanding" cliches, but the actual character portrayed undermines the meme being sold. There's nothing to fear from gentle idiots like McCarthy. Radical pacifists aren't a danger. Watch out for the pseudo-pacifists - they're the ones that are dangerous, because they've got the drive to cause trouble. Like the cockroach that Porphyrogenitus and Taranto caught scurrying out from under the lamp at the end, there.

I came across this commentary on Kipling's "Peace of Dives". I hadn't read the poem before, and it's decent, typical Kipling. It also sums up the capitalist-libertarian ideal pretty well. What's dispiriting (and the blogger in question didn't make the catch) was that Kipling was talking about, and writing during, the great Edward peace that came before the Great War. Kipling's argument in the poem is "don't worry about selling all the tools of Satan; the trade itself will keep those tools from ever being used", and that, indeed, describes the British attitude towards munition sales in that period. The world was blanketed with British and German and French munitions salesmen. But Kipling's "wager of Dives" turned out to be a sucker's bet, and the iron chains of trade turned to smoke the second the mobilizations orders were issued. Nationalist fervor was more than enough to overwhelm economic self-interest in Kipling's own time, and "There was never squadron loosed" was shown to be an empty boast. He'd go on to write brave words about "the Minesweepers" and "the Destroyers".

Thanks to Michael Totten for bringing Christopher Luebcke to my attention.

And then I vow to go read Marshall again, and I remember why I thought he was a tool in the first place. No, your examples do *not* prove what you're arguing, you fool. Of the six examples provided of "[CIA] operative", half were ambiguous in nature. That is, unless you're reading with expectations.

1)The Spann example goes against the argument - Mike Spann wasn't a secret agent, he was a paramilitary interrogator.
2)The Haq example is deliberately ambiguous - you can't tell from that if Novak's talking about on-the-ground agents, their handlers, or the analysts somewhere up the tree who would actually *talk* to a pundit like Novak. My guess? This was a direct quote from the Langley hacks Novak cultivates.
3)The Turner example is similarly ambiguous - the operatives referred to as "Central American" seems, from the context, to represent the entire structure - agent to handler to station to section analysts - accused of relying on "unsavory local agents".

The other three are more to the point. Of those, two are from the same subject, and one refers to a review of a spy novel. In contradiction, Marshall offers three examples of "analyst" being used. Hrm. Novak is twice as likely to use "operative" as "analyst". I call "bullshit" from Marshall's own testimony.

Porphyogenitus is starting to pull out of his PLW-induced rage, which is a good thing - when he's not infuriated, he can come up with some pretty interesting ideas. This article is one of them. He's floating a variant on the "echo chamber" idea - that partisans of a certain stripe who only listen to partisans of that same stripe will become less and less comprehensible to the greater polity, let alone their political opponents. It's Porphyrogenitus's contention that the "liberal bias" (whether such a bias exists or not is beyond the scope of the discussion - let me just note that whether there's a bias or not depends on where you're standing) of the media is a *liberal* problem, not a conservative one. A liberal media is a corrective to a conservative - a valuable, contentious feedback mechanism. Similarly, a conservative media would be a corrective to liberals in the same fashion.

An overwhelmingly liberal media means, in this context, that liberals are going to be poorly served with their own biases. They're being lovingly blinded and deafened.

In this sense, the most dangerous threat to conservative America is Fox News. If Joe Conservative lets Fox totally displace the rest of the majors in his viewing habits, he's going to be fitted with a different set of blinkers and earmuffs, but he'll still be just as blinded and deafened as his NPR-listening neighbor Eliza Progressive.

Now that I think on the subject, I'd say that this benefit is only usable by nonpartisan individuals. Partisans can easily get into a defensive mode where the evil biased media is not to be trusted in *any* particular, and go crawling off into their Indymedia or FreeRepublic holes. I'm as prone to this sort of thing as anyone else - I once accused Josh Marshall of building himself an echo chamber, but I have to admit that by refusing to listen to him, I was doing something similar, if not the exact same thing.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that rage is a self-limiter in political discourse. It deafens you. And it's this concern that makes me nervous whenever a blogger I read starts down the demonizing road. Whether it's Josh Marshall ranting intemperately about how horrible Sen. Roberts is, or Kim du Toit's streetlamps, these outbursts serve only to narrow the range of feedback in political exchanges.

Time is reporting that Arafat has stomach cancer. How absolutely biblical:

21: And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them.
22: And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man.
23: And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.
Acts 12:21-23

See also Josephus on the death of the first Herod, and the death of the second, called Agrippa.

The news via Jeff Jarvis.

Fred Ramsey has moved his email newsletter to blogspot. Welcome to the blogsphere, Fred! I look forward to your commentary. For those of you from out of town or not familiar with Fred, he's one of the owners of Webster's Bookstore Cafe in downtown State College, which once was Seven Mountain Books, and originally was the Book Swap of myth and legend. Fred helped found the Penn State Science Fiction Society in 1968, and helped run Paracon back when it ran as a yearly SF con in State College. Fred's running Spring Creek Slammers with Dora McClade these days.

He's way the hell to the left of me in most ways, being an authentic red diaper baby; he tells me that his ancestors were Wobblies back in the day. (Wobblies were union activists with the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a far-left organization that largely went under due to harsh competition from the Stalinist CIO and mainstream AFL.) On the other hand, Fred surprised the hell out of me on Wednesday by telling me he had been disappointed by Connie Lucas's failure to get renominated for the County commissioner race. Lucas is a local theocon Republican and one of the current commissioners; I really was not impressed by what I saw of her in the last election, but Fred insists that she was good in the limited role of a county commissioner.

Anyways! Welcome, Fred, and remember: he who dies with the most links, wins.

Slate is getting into the bad-poetry game, on the occasion of a reprint of a nasty Modernist collection of bad 19th-century formalist poetry called the Stuffed Owl. I am so deficient a student of verse, so inept at autodidactic poetic instruction, that I honestly don't recognize half the names thrown about in this review. I mean, I've heard of Lowell and Pound and Elliot and such, but who the hell is Marianne Moore, or Elizabeth Bishop, or John Ashbery, or John Merrill? What titan of Modernist verse could "Stevens" be, that he, god-like, stands first-nameless with Frost or Crane? Crane? Stephen Crane? Red-Badge-of-Courage and ripe, wacky gothic verse Crane? I always thought of him as more of an Edwardian poet than "Modernist". Or is there some other Modernist Byron whom I should know by his family name alone?

Saw a bumper sticker while I was out getting lunch: "We learn Arabic so you don't have to."

As you can see, I found it a productive night. There was a big turnout at the Slam, and it was an actual slam, with judges and eliminations and the apparatus in whole. I've never actually seen that up to now - I've only been to the damp squibs so far - never one in which the powder, well-dried, burst with a proper detonation. The political angle definitely worked for 'em - they ought to find a cause for every event. Of course, that's a damned cynical approach to the matter (which you'll see if you look below), but it's also an honest truth. Politics worked.

I make for a terrible audience when the rage has me in its claws. I sat and wrote and paid far too little attention to the poets. Amy M. was excellent, although I was confused at first by her slight stature - she looks a lot like a middle school student. David was full of passionate intensity, if a little too full of his gendered identity for my tastes. Bob had a deft and humorous touch with his verse, and they were the only ones to really stay with me.

The slam reminded me, all in all, of the church of my youth, of readings of scripture, homilies, hymns, a benediction, and myself distracted with evolutions of counterargument against the subject of the sermon through the remainder of the service. Well, except for David. My mother's church was never Pentecostal or Gospel enough for me to ever get accustomed to that sort of full-throated testifying in tongues of devotion.

the Book of cummings

Dora read from the book of cummings
And the word was feeling
And feeling was the grace of God
And thinking and believing
And knowing are common and
Caught from the crowd.

Bullshit.

Feeling is the weft
That weaves together the mob
Every mind is itself
But the heart is the commonwealth of man.

The fascist sails the homogenous mob
The populist surfs the heart of the throng
And it is one heart as it is one crowd
And it was feeling that hung Salem
And it was feeling that fired the ovens
And it is FEELING that fouls the soul
With the will of the world
...but it is feeling
That finds messiahs
That founds nations
That frees the slaves

Feeling is angels and devils and demons and all selves as one.

Feeling is a weapon
And it is salvation
Feeling is a stick of dynamite in a
World of candles.
Be careful with your matches.

10/8/03

Contrary

Be an apostle to the atheists
Be a humanist to the Baptists
Be a poet to the boor
Be a thug to the Slam
Be righteous for the vile
Be a pig for the prudes
Be in all things contradictory
And be beholden to every
Breath of air
You goddamn weathervane, you!

10/8/03

Activist

Don't just stand there
Do something
Don't just believe
Feel
Don't stop to think
Shout
Don't work it out
Fight
Don't try to understand
Stand up
Don't wait to listen
Shout 'em down
Don't doubt or fret
Act out
Don't give the benefit
Seize the day
Don't empathize
Demonize
Don't come together
Confront
Don't look for causes
Lash out
Don't be a Poet
Activist!

10/8/03

Party Politics

Neocon, paleocon
What do you care?
Theocon, homocon
What's it matter, man?
Green man, commie man
Don't really matter
Theory wonk, activist
You don't need to care
Cause you gonna
Vote the straight ticket
You don't need to understand
Just vote the straight ticket
Don't worry your little head
Vote the straight ticket

The Party gonna set you
Straight, man.
No need to pay attention
Shepard gonna
Straighten out his crook
Crooks and cops
Freaks and saints
Belief don't matter
Ideas don't matter

Issues?
Trust the ticket
Character?
Trust the ticket
Promises?
Trust the ticket

The straight ticket will set you right
(Just don't ask what's left)

10/8/03

Becalmed

Internet down, and life drags to a halt
Whimper and cry, and groan "not our fault!"
"I'm so sorry" and "We strive to delight"
What good excuses, in creeping half-light?

Pither and pother and stuttering slobber
Drooling and foolish, a momentary delusion
Titter and totter and failure's a bother
Dithering and brutish, efficiency's illusion.

Protestant ethic, an ethnic allusion
Drawn by bias and stir-fried collusion
Possible, curious: hard work's conclusion
Mothered or birthed by short days' occlusion?

Merit and blame sometimes will fail
Circumstance will out, though reason bewail
Justice and faith denied in the tale
This race not to the fast, but always the hale.

12/17/01

I think I like this version more than previous versions of the same bit of doggrel. I've re-written the last section five or six times over the last year and a half, and never been quite satisfied. I imagine tomorrow I'll look at this and be disappointed all over again. Well, that's another day.

Story

The mist crawls in darkness
Hugging the hidden glens
Curling through secret stillness
Hiding among the hummock'd fens

Where once vast forest
Held silence in rest
Small holes in a dry mire
Hides quiet's small nest

Silent corners that know no hands
Crawling vines choking the easy way
Ageless, not old or young or anything of man
Nothing and none and not known by day

This pen rips and shreds the facade
Inked sins tell their own story
Focus frames, tames, renders macabre
Still life stripped, lost, laid in glory

Quiet lies in forgotten gleanings
Blackened hills of slag and steaming
Remnants of broken earth
Rent from ancient hills
Torn and tugged, blasted and burned
Crushed, melted, made and undone.
Bent to some unknown devising
Left to memory, or puzzled surmising

The coal that fired process
The fury that some call progress
Light that lifted the heavy blackness
Might that stirred the sounding swiftness

Ancient days not long ago
Doomed and damned and drawn skintight
Ancestors made to forgo
Born and bred and bleeding in the night

Locked in lives of little light
Horded hopes of muddled heads
Fought hunger in the face of blight
Brief prayers over the muddied dead

Sandy strand, salted lands
Murdered crops by hailstorm slain
Trembling stand, with shaking hands
As flooding rivers reap your grain

Weep and rail 'til floods recoil
Starve with the huddled folk
Now famine's cold coil
Wrapt round life's spoke.

Hunger like a wheel
Crushing all flat
A thief come to steal
What once was fat.

Punish the living and purge the mighty
Strangle summer and steal the riper
Brighter fruit, bind them tightly
Tie up the bough
Save it from the low
Sweep of some solitary reaper.

And with every failure, seed the soil
Stories like spores awaiting new toil
Though sown with weakened hand
Leave hope to reclaim ceded land

The curling crest climbs, climaxing, collapses
Falling foam marks the failing front
Receding waters leaving trough or sand
What human wave once washed
Remembers man
Recalls the rushing wetness
Whirls in memory of the water's unrest
What scope for nothing, when something has past?

The order of motion
The chaos at rest
Dreams that build mountains
And silence's ill rest.

Death flees before the living
Quietness imprisoned
Life drives all before its beginning
Creation becoming
Caught
The quiet melts
Taught
The lesson fades
Brought
And story braids

Man makes himself in every nook
Mocked and mauled and made and meant
Everything in its place, and every place in a book
Seen and strained and salted and saved

Skies of darkness robbed of their fire
Promethean mountains burning with light
Enthroned in brightness, livid bright pyres
Starry hills shining, stolen fury and might

What solace for the formless
Barred by form
Place's great vastness
And burial its home

Locked in light's prison
Held in life's cell
Nothing dies by division
Reduced by a shell

Life lives in the moment
It comes and it goes
Story is a monument
Built to withstand throes

An end to all stories
At climax's behest
Nothing and narrative
At each others breast

Story rides man
Like a jockey rides a horse
Whipping and kicking
Over a known racecourse

What quiet for stillness
What end to rest
When dreams like an illness
Creep into the nest?


6/2/01

This is the first serious poem I wrote, and you can still sort of tell. I keep editing around the edges of it, but I haven't yet succeeded in purging all of the melodrama, ye-olde-englande archaic language, and sentimentalism that bugs me about it. It has some good imagery and a conceit that I like, but the connective tissue is still lacking. If anyone has any constructive criticism, I'd be greatly appreciative. I have stuff like this in mind when I talk about my "bad poetry". There's nothing quite so silly as a poem that takes itself too damn seriously.

The Lewistown Narrows
The mountains roll from Allegheny's wild breast
To the rich orchards beyond the last sharp crest
And some ridges sweet
Like a baby's new bottom
And some mountains solemn
Wooded sloping forgotten

But the mountain over that road
Stands an ill-tempered beast
Deep-wounded and dying
The crows impatient to feast

Draining high meadows
And pine-barren wastes
The sly Juniata
Cuts seaward at last
Onwards to conjunction
With her beau Susquehanna
In a maidenly hurry
She knifes her way east

The mountain in distress
Round his wound to press
Rumbles and shifts
A crumbling moan

This ruin has left
A long small passage
Seven miles run
From Lewistown valley
Onward in darkness
To lowland finale
Seven miles wander
Close by the river
Seven miles darker
Closer still to the victim
A ruinous wound
Walked in deep twilight
Between river and riven
A treacherous path.

The mountain is bitter
And the mountain is blind
And the mountain flings boulders
At its foe in the night

This ambush is ancient
Many ages old
But to the mountain and river
Instants still known

We briefly mayfly in the space in between
Sudden and swift but not easily seen
We cut the road, we cut a clear path
But to the mountain it seems one more goad to wrath.
The river yet higher
To be responded in kind
Rocks and stone showers
From stubbornness mined.

People will build
In all sorts of places
Garages and shacks
And homes by the road

But mountain is hard
And mountain is fierce
And mountain will fling
Boulders without cease

Like a cruel child dropping
Clods on a nest
The blind killing mountain
Will smash in your rest

They put up their fences
They built up these walls
The threw up high nets
To parry the falls

But the mountain is old
And the mountain's hot rage
And the mountain won't notice
Trifles to cage

The garages are crushed
The windows smashed by debris
The doorsteps buried under
By the tidal scree

Decades spend in a
Tumultuous battle
Dwellings buried under
The mountain's death rattle

Some men
With more stubborn than sense
Dig out again
Mended their fence

The ruins still stand
Excavated and proud
And every night's rubble
Cleared in morning's first light

For the narrows are deep
And the mountain too steep
And precious little light
In this passage twilight

And the cars rush by
And the trucks creep slow
Between the rushing river
And the mountain's death throe

For even the travelers
And the wanderers know
That the narrows are danger
And death to take slow

For the passage is narrow
And the road even so
And the boulders will come
When the hard winds blow

The narrows were decked
Through seven slow miles
With white cross reminders
Of the murdering wilds

A hundred of wrecks
Along the narrows hold
A hundred some lives
Lost to a murdering road

The narrows are hungry
And the narrows are dark
And some few who enter
Will never depart

And the slow-motion death of a murdered massif
Still claims new victims in vehicular flight
In this long darkness of the narrows twilight.

1/13/03

OK, before anyone points this out, this poem is wildly exaggerated, mostly for dramatic effect. The Lewistown Narrows are not nearly as apocalyptic as I paint it, here. The buildings are now boarded up and damaged, but mostly due to eminent domain seizure, trespassing, and arson. Your chances of getting through the Narrows unscathed are about as high as, say, getting through the Surekill on a Friday afternoon. On the other hand, it is one of the bloodiest stretches of state road in the commonwealth, so it isn't by any means a particularly *safe* road. The white crosses are a fact of history, also – there used to be dozens of them scattered along the roadside until someone at PennDOT decided they were distracting on a road with more than it share of legitimate hazards. You can still see one or two on the Lewistown end of the Narrows. My contacts at PennDOT assure me that they're working on a replacement highway through the Narrows – thus the eminent domain seizures – but they're talking about staying on the same, narrow, dangerous side of the river as the current road is on. I have no idea how they're going to deal with the rockslopes – unless they're planning on doing some truly monumental dynamiting in an attempt to get the critical slope going in their favor.

Chromal and I went up to the Garman Opera House to catch Lost in Translation while it's in town. The movie is a nice but shambling, shaggy dog of a film. I liked the ambiguous nature of the relationship - it read mostly as "substitute father/child" to me, but there was a bit of confusion to give it bite. Not Murray's greatest movie, but I'm a big Quick Change and Groundhog Day fan, so take it well-salted, yes?

The Garman is a great local theatre. It's about a block from where I live, in the centre of Bellefonte. It faces out on the courthouse square, just up the hill on the High Street extension, so that you can see what's playing when you're walking down Allegheny Street by the Brockerhoff or towards Bishop Street. It's a single-screen theatre, but they get a nice mix of movies, art and action and family fare. They aren't chain-owned, so the ticket price is low - $5 matinee/$6 evening showing.

The building is literally an old opera house; it dates back to the Victorian era that Bellefonte's historical preservation society is so proud of. The theatre has a governor's box, from the days when Bellefonte regularly produced governors like Curtin, Sterling, or Beaver. These days they use it to store extra benches and chairs, and it's firmly locked up. The building is in good shape, having been recently renovated. The owners had intended to have it do double duty as both a playhouse and a movie theatre; I didn't get the whole story, but supposedly some government or pseudo-government industry association told them they couldn't do that for some sort of safety/certification reason. Bellefonte can generally support a single movie theatre, so it can run full-out in that single capacity. Some of their art films probably can't support an entire week of showings, but the State College Aht crowd keeps it above water on those weeks. I'm told that it's financially solvent, and doing pretty good for the owners.

It's nice to be able to just walk across town and catch a movie on a whim. It definitely adds to the charm of Bellefonte.

Colin Powell on the Kay report: "Told you so."

Via Porphyrogenitus, who's in kind of a cranky mood recently...

Since local elections *are* my problem, I've started looking into the county commissioners' race. Not done yet, but I came across this over-the-top libertarian site, which was greatly wroth over a member of a State College planning commission's characterization of a church on College Heights as a cancer upon the neighborhood. An examination of the provided CDT article shows that said planning commission member is a member of that congregation, and had been complaining that the church's expansion of its parking lots was doing damage to his neighborhood's character. So, take Nittany News with a fairly massive grain of salt.

As for the commissioners, Dersham is some sort of distant neighbor of mine, being the owner of Dersham's Sport Center over towards Bishop Street, across from the Catholic church, sort of. I've never actually caught that place open, so I can't report to you how good of a shopowner he is (or isn't, as the case may be). He seems to think that the "barn" his shop is in is "historic", so take off points for goofiness.

Exarchos, on the other hand, is a rock-ribbed fiscal conservative. So much so, in fact, that he seems to think that any increase in local spending or debt is verboten. Given that Centre County is in the midst of a decades-long demographic upswing, and that the perpetual motion machine that is the University is continually pumping new people into the county, this sort of blinkered objection to proper local financing strikes me as ill-advised, at best.

Goreham has an ugly, amateurish site. She seems to be selling herself as the farmers' candidate; this strikes me as a losing bet in a county that's quickly sliding into University-oriented suburbia.

Conklin is the only surviving incumbent in the race. As such, he gets the credit and the bile that the last term has earned. So, he gets credit for the successful push to get rid of the deeply regressive occupation assessment tax; he also gets a lot of brickbats over a continuing tussle over the county prison that I haven't been following particularly closely, nor caring much about, either. He doesn't seem to have his own campaign site - that's a subpage on the local Democratic Party's site, not his own.

I'm currently inclined towards Conklin and Dersham, but that's a pretty "soft" inclination as of now.

Some folks have asked me what I think of the Californian recall situation. I would reply that it isn't my problem, but that I would vote no on recall and then for Schwarzenegger. In general terms, I think that the Californians would do best to hold a constitutional convention and purge the recall, referendum, and initiative elements from their constitution. Adam Sullivan has a radical, counterintuitive, and interesting counter-proposal:

He wants to get rid of the state primaries.

He points out that the open recall election managed to do what the primary system hasn't in several years: produce a viable centrist choice. He further opines that the "play to the base, then run to the centre" structure of the primary-general system *inherently produces skilled liars* as electoral choices. The one who can successfully say one set of things to the committed partisans in the spring and another set of things to the vast pragmatic centre will win the general election. No wonder the system produces sociopaths like Gray Davis.

It's a thought, at any rate. And if California is willing to experiment with it before I subject my own state to such an idea, even better. That's what California is for, isn't it? Our political mine-canary.

I just wanted to pass along this note from Fred Ramsey about a benefit thing they've got going down at Websters this Wednesday:

Amnesty International Slam
7.30pm
October 8
Webster's Bookstore Cafe, 128 S Allen St., State College

Slammaster: Dora McQuaid

This is an open, all ages slam.

This slam will observe National Poetry Slam Rules

All poetry must be original.

Each performance will have a 3 minute time limit.

No props, instruments or recorded music may be used.

The slam consists of a series of rounds. Please bring a minimum of three poems.

Donations welcome and will benefit Amnesty International

This event is part of Penn State's Social Justice Action Month

The Anchor

A distant Lawrenceville summer
Weeks in the hands of psychiatry
My dark drear disturbing
One person too many
On a church-group retreat
In the many-churched
Many-steepled hill-held
Paradise of Warren.

Came to a miserable
Self-despising standstill
As I sometimes do
Sudden flares of minor
Fires burn down to
Self-rage ashes of
Immobile sullen stolidity
The only difference that day –
An unexpected audience.

I don't remember
The trip back to Pittsburgh
Just the interview:

"How often do you feel 'down'?"
Often.
"Have you considered suicide?"
Yes.
"Have you tried to kill yourself?"
Not yet.
And more questions and answers
Not to the point and
None of your business anyways.

I was a hell of a kid
Any way you parse it.
They did good by me
Don't anyone tell you different
I wasn't headed anywhere good
That's by damn sure.

The truth was -
And it's what I told them -
My depression protects me
From my rages and furies.
I was always so full
Spite and judgment
Hate and bile
It burns
It flares
But I'm the one that
Lashes out.

Rage can fountain upwards
In a glittering-red arc
But gravity brings the stream back to
The fountainhead again.

Judgment begets self-judgment
And small outside things
Grow vast turned within.

Yeah, I was angry, alright.
But those internal scorpion-whips
Left me drained, immobile
A rock of rage
Much too heavy for an arm too weak
To pick up or throw.

This bundle of
Inert fury
Was delivered to the
Frontstep
Of St. Francis Juvenile
Psychiatric Unit.
I tell people that I was
Institutionalized
And they look at me in pity.
But I got what I needed there.

I'm not a good man
But I'm not that ticking
Bomb, self-winding
Mechanism turning
Inward and inward and inward
Ever tighter, ever-silent
Until some future outward
Detonation.

The tools for self-defusion
Are small, practical
And very portable.
I won't say that the
Rages don't come
But they do go.
And the knowledge makes
All the difference.

They tell me that St Francis
Is gone
That the high anchor
Holding up that hillside of
Slowly-decaying half-slums
Has been cut loose;
That one day that slipping
Neighborhood will drop
Into the short-lived Allegheny
River's last mile.
But in my mind the anchor
Holds me still
Above the sliding slopes
Of my sudden silences.

10/6/03

A Penn State instructor and poet at the Sunday get-together at Zeno's related a bizarre argument going on in the Penn State English faculty about whether or not Slam counts as "poetry", based on the peculiar notion that poetry once spoken loses its privileged status as such. She said that when she argued against this, her fellow poet-instructor dismissed her to her face as a "niche poet". I asked her what his name was; upon being so informed, I instructed her to tell this bag of suet that I had never heard of him, so clearly he also must be a "niche poet".

My point here, I suppose, is that there are, at best, four living poets which a reasonably well-educated American is likely to have heard of; unless you're a poet laureate, the flavor-of-the-year, or a lunatic anti-Semitic troublemaker, nobody is ever going to hear of you. This is not the Regency, when poets strode the earth like mighty heroes of verse, claymore in hand and laudanum in their veins, bound to conquer or die. Modern-day poets write for themselves; if they're lucky, they might find a handful of fellow-poets to listen, while waiting for their turn at the microphone.

The Zeno Sundays continue to be bull sessions rather than performances. I don't mind, myself - they're good bull sessions. We had a rollicking discussion of local religious affairs and real estate gossip. But I suppose some actual poetry might not be out of order, one of these days. I did get a couple pieces written out while I was at the table. I'll try to get one of them hammered into shape for later today.

My copy of the first volume of Witch Hunter Robin just showed up. Ought to be a good alternative to Sailor Moon R's giggly pastel-palette taffy. If you haven't seen the digisubs, it's a cool, dark anime with a lot of common elements with the X Files. The cover on the DVD I was sent does not look like the one advertised there on Best Prices. I'm not sure if this has something to do with the CD/DVD bundled version that they were offering - I'm a cheap bastard, and went for the single DVD. The DVDs offered on Bandai's Robin-specific site are labeled "Platinum Edition", whatever that means. The one I'm holding isn't; perhaps this has something to do with it? According to Anime on DVD, the only DVD to have been released this week was the "limited edition", the one with the CD. This is definitely not that. I guess Best Prices accidentally broke street?

This make less sense the more I look at it. I suppose Bandai is just Being Bandai, and did something inexplicable and eccentric. They're known for that, in the industry.

New Scientist reports that local Marsh Arabs have begun breaking dams and re-flooding drained marshes destroyed by the Ba'athists in the 90s. This has some NGOs worried that it will backfire in areas where salinization and heavy-metals poisoning of the soil will result in toxic wetlands. If you read the whole article, however, you'll find that the NGOs have evacuated, and that they're carping at a distance. There has been no unrest or violence in the areas we're talking about - the lower Tigris and Euphrates above Basra and along the Iranian border - which means that the NGOs chicken-littled along with the rest of the flock up in Baghdad, and have totally blown their good-neo-colonial-imperialist credentials, if you ask me. The locals know their land, and even the NGO carpers admit that the breaches were in more-or-less the areas they would have prescribed. In the end, I come down on the side of the locals in this one.

Via Norm Geras and Crumb Trail.

Tacitus is on a tour through Africa, and has left his asylum in the hands of the inmates. I don't know, his commenters aren't scary like the Lizardoids of Little Green Footballs, but they're a bit cacophonous for my poor aching ears...

Justin Alexander is the guy running Jubilee Iraq. He's in Baghdad right now, blogging his campaign among the various Iraqi political parties. He's not particularly fond of the American occupation forces, and seems to be your typical middle-left boho. In short, he seems to be coming into this particular issue from the direction of Third-World debt forgiveness, rather than pro-war conviction. His entries make for interesting snapshot glimpses of the various major factions and parties. For instance, I had not been aware that some of the monarchists were hostile to the Governing Council, and still pushing the idea of a Jordan-like Hashimite or pseudo-Hashimite monarchy. The same guy from Voices in the Wilderness that Steve Mumford mentions meeting in the Baghdad Journal piece appears again in this Alexander entry. Interesting.

Via an update to Joe Katzman's Winds of Change article on Jubilee Iraq.

Steve Mumford's third installation of his Baghdad Journal. He's one of the few remaining "embedded reporters", with the 2nd Cavalry in Sadr City in Baghdad. I haven't seen any reports from Sadr City proper since that incident with the flag and the helicopter. It sounds pretty calm from Mumford's point of view, although, as Andrew Olmstead points out in the Winds of War wrapup, it doesn't make the new Iraqi police appear very good - police are portrayed stealing, breaking under fire, and are used as argument-ending bogiemen by the troopers of the 2nd Cav - none of which argues well for the state of Iraqi police in Sadr City.

Note how the Palestine Hotel and downtown Baghdad NGO employees figure strongly in Mumford's moment of doubt. The problems in Iraq are largely (if not exclusively) to be found in Baghdad proper and the Sunni Triangle to the north and west. Late-summer Shi'ite problems in Sadr City and Najaf seem to have receded. This is good news.

The Instapundit is feeling dubious and uncertain about the potential for garage-shop illegal manufacture of firearms. He thinks that it's an argument "too clever to succeed". My neighbors back in the day made their own hand-made single-shot zipgun and a couple single-shot shotguns made out of pipe and the like. But they were also the kids that were missing peripheral bits and pieces of themselves from various accidents, industrial or otherwise. I would expect that this sort of thing would be as accident-prone and dangerous as, say, stills or back-alley abortion shops. Which is itself an argument as valid against total gun control as against prohibition or a ban on abortion, yes?

The more I think about it, the more all three issues are alike in their subconstitutional characteristics. The only real distinctions here is that they enacted a bad amendment against alcohol, invoked extraconstitutional judicial activism in favor of abortion, and are rangling over an old militia establishment for and against gun control. "From my cold dead hands" seems against the spirit of "'A well-regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State...", but so does a totalizing gun control. The three issues are all, at their core, moral issues of control
- alcohol against the self, guns against others, abortion against the biological future. Who should have control?

Steven Den Beste continues on the subject of the Tragedy of the Commons, specifically, the inadequacy of property rights in dealing with the tragedy, and why it's as big of an issue for doctrinaire libertarians as evolution is for Christian fundamentalists.

Excellent Den Beste article about the Tragedy of the Commons, using as examples worldwide fisheries, the Sahara, third-world graft, and European social policy. Den Beste can be prone to silly exaggerations or errors - England can be said to have conquered Scotland only if you're standing on your head and mis-categorizing the '45 and '15 as "conquests" rather than the civil wars they were, to take one recent example - but his general lines of argument are fairly sound.

There's been a heavy dose of sniggering and/or chestbeating in the blogsphere about France's declining influence and inflating pretense; this is only the latest in a series, mostly concentrating on the publishing of three pessimistic French books in recent days. I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but: get a grip. France may not be a first-rate superpower or even power, but it is a truly excellent third-rate player on the world scene. They have aircraft carriers, a large and relatively well-trained army, and the logistical muscle to make themselves heard in other parts of the world.

In a situation where Germany is scaling back their army, and NATO is busting a gut trying to expand its footprint in Afghanistan, France *is* a power that needs to be recognized. You can be sure that China (to name another permanent member of the Security Council) is not capable of intervention beyond its immediate neighbors, or indeed, across something as negligible as the Taiwan Straits. Russia is terminally bogged down in the Caucasus region, and is doing its best to stand its ground in central Asia in the face of increasing American and Chinese influence. India is likewise pinned by its commitments within its own borders and among its neighbors. Brazil is due for one of its periodic disastrous-socialism-driven declines. Japan's pacifism and decade-long economic deflation has punctured its pretense of world-striding influence.

We should not be lulled into the sense that France is a pygmy. It is not. Its economy is bigger than Great Britain's, and it has the bomb. It has diplomatic leverage, some military power, and economic weight. Simply because a power is in *decline* does not mean that it is not *dangerous*.

Via, of course, Instapundit.

Regime change is a risk that every bank should be forced to evaluate when considering a loan to a tyrant or dictator

Jubilee Iraq is an online resource for those that believe that outstanding loans owed to Hussein's creditors are "odious debts" that the Iraqi people should not be compelled to repay. Please be sure to stop by and sign their petition. I firmly believe that the capitalization of tyrants should be a highly dangerous investment for individuals, banks, and sovereignties intent on profiting from dictatorship.

via Winds of Change

Why the UN High Commission for Refugees Is Monstrous

Remember the "Sudanese Lost Boys" resettlement, where do-gooders relocated a couple of thousand orphans from the Sudanese civil war to the United States? What happened to the girls? According to this Slatearticle, the UNHCR - a reprehensible collection of ideologues, incompetents, and shitheels if I've ever seen one - thought it was a good idea to treat the male orphans differently from the female orphans. They put the boys in group barracks under direct supervision, and farmed out the girls to local Kenyan foster homes. The boys stayed in the system, and eventually got shipped to new lives in the States. The girls, left to the mercy of Kenyan fosters, have largely been drafted into varying states of de facto slavery - the lucky ones, servants; the unlucky ones got sold as sex-slaves.

An Instapundit link to Ian Murray's blog brought to my notice the World Climate Change Conference in Moscow, and the big catfight that apparently have broken out there between Russian skeptics and EU true believers in man-driven climate change.

Note how all of these articles don't actually say what was the substance of the controversy between the skeptics and true believers? A number of them are so phrased as to make it sound like an entirely realpolitik conflict without any real dispute. The list of presentations doesn't give many clues, either. Articles that actually mention the dispute touch only lightly on the substance before flitting off to concentrate on cabinet-level discussion from the Russian government. Not helpful. If anyone spots some actual journalism on the subject, please give out a yell, yes?

In a counter-example of the attractiveness of someone singing your suspicions back to you, here's Howard Fineman belting out a grand old number about how the Plame affair is a covert, decades-long fight between the neocons in the White House and the realists in the CIA gone messily public in the most overt of ways. Note also that this is a variant of what I was talking about yesterday - the beltway habit of thought that looks for clues to occulted power-struggles in hidden places.

Which is another way of saying, it sounds like a grand story, but I can't help but think it's just that - a constructed narrative built on god knows what evidence.

Kay's interim report to Congress. NPR was effectively lying by omission this morning as I drove in to work. They definitely left me with the impression that Kay had been reporting failure, that there was no evidence of WMD programs, etc. What the actual text of the report clearly states is that no weapons were found. This is not at all the same thing as the total failure that NPR (and I presume the left-wing of the blogosphere - haven't had time to go out looking yet this morning) was reporting.

1) They've discovered a network of BW facilities that Iraq never reported to the UN, and the UN inspection teams never found.

2) Copious documentary evidence that Hussein fully intended to resume a nuclear program as soon as sanctions & inspections were lifted, and partial, uncertain evidence that he may have lost patience and ordered some sort of limited, piecemeal, largely theoretical resumption in 2000.

3) Evidence and testimony that work in Bt research was intentionally constructed to allow rapid conversion to anthrax production at short notice.

4) Extensive evidence and testimony that there were programs to develop UAVs, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles with ranges far beyond UN limits and WMD capacity. This includes the two "anti-ship" missiles fired at Kuwait during the war, which were cruise missiles representing the completed run of one of two operational cruise missile programs, the other being an up-sized and much more potent variant.

5) Evidence that Iraq was discussing purchase of long-range ballistic missiles from North Korea (probably the No Dong).

Combine all of this with the "bioweapons lab trailers", and this is a significant fraction of what Powell went to the UN with in February. Don't believe the people yelling about "imminent threats". This was what the administration sold us on last winter: dangerous intents and capacities; not "imminent threats". It is alarming that they haven't found the unaccounted-for chemical weapons yet; that is a separate issue. The prospect that those unaccounted-for chemical weapons are being dug up by mercenaries or fanatics is alarming; the "Bush lied! Bush lied!" nonsense-argument is a dangerous distraction from the worry that the missing stocks are in the hands of fanatics or terrorists.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

For those of you living under rocks, Neal Stephenson's new novel is Quicksilver, subtitled "Volume 1 of the Baroque Cycle". This is a fair warning - this is not a complete novel, but rather the first volume in a projected three-volume serial. It is a historical novel, covering events of the late 17th century and early 18th in Europe and the colonies, and so a further warning - don't expect protection from spoilers such as the eventual success of the Glorious Revolution, or the fates of people you bloody well ought to know about, such as Charles II, Isaac Newton, or Samuel Pepys. This all is important because Stephenson's last historical novel, the sprawling and brilliant Cryptonomicon, was vastly popular among the technocrati, which makes the publication of Quicksilver something of a literary event.

Quicksilver is something of a let-down after Cryptonomicon. It almost had to be; much the same way that Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky couldn't possibly measure up to A Fire Upon the Deep. An author rarely produces two free-standing instant classics in succession; most are lucky to produce two in their career lifetimes. So, a third and final warning: don't expect unalloyed brilliance and life-changing relevance.

All that aside, it is a damn good read. Stephenson is incapable of dull writing, and can be entertaining, clever, and illuminating even when he isn't being particularly brilliant. The book is historical fiction, indeed, but Stephenson has as much respect for history as he has for cryptography, math, environmental chemistry, computer programming, and most any other subject: he's more interested in tone, flavor and general outlines than getting the details right. Not that he doesn't know the details - his online Annotations to this book clearly show he's done his research - he just isn't inclined to let a Phanatiqual adherence to dead detail weigh down his story. And so, I strongly recommend that the reader *not* take his or her history from the pages of this historical novel - much of it is not exactly wrong, as it is hrm, in harmonic resonance with actual history. A quick read through the Annotations will show Stephenson admitting that many of his characters are amalgams of various historical personages; he gets away with it by claiming in the annotation that he's writing "slightly alternate history". That strikes me as something of a copout, but I'm willing to let it slide in the interest of entertainment.

And it is an entertaining book - in parts irreverent, solemn, sublime, and hilarious, it is distinctly a book of parts. Stephenson doesn't stay within one style, but slips from present-tense third-person limited narrative to past-tense third-person limited, to various exotic and esoteric styles such as epistolary, cyphertext epistolary, musical libretto, and play scripts. He doesn't do this as a Don Passos or John Brunner would - fragmented and frantic, alienating or alarming - but rather in the spirit of the age - renaissance men feeling out new ways of being, new tempos against new-made clocks. The frantic pace of modernism is yet to come for the players in this book.

Once again, though, I must repeat: a book of parts. It does not work particularly well as a whole - the themes rise and fall - the name of the book, "Quicksilver", is a thematic reference to the new flows of ideas, information, and capital that are beginning to define a new, modern world. But the individual threads are perforce new-woven and don't really make much of a picture, although the attentive reader can see the eventual outlines forming on the tapestry.

Mad as it might sound, I can't help but think that it would have been better if they had held off on publication and waited until the further volumes were finished and published; although that would have made a 2700 or 3000-page novel instead of the current 900-page fragment, it would still have been a complete work, and thus something fully digested.

Still, don't let my critical comments keep you from it; it is full of action, humor, and observation for the educated reader; Stephenson has never been one of those writers who neglected entertainment for heavier subjects. But it is not a book for the young or unprepared; much of the humor is inside-baseball for folks who have done their homework. And in the end, Stephenson writes for the glorification of those that have done their homework - the Robert Hookes of the world who, given the faculties of average men, yet manage to accomplish things far beyond the scope of the average, by dint of application and perception.

I just finished reading Josh Marshall's interview with Wesley Clark. Why is it that Clark have a reputation for scintillating intelligence? This transcript clearly shows a third-rate intellect coasting on a first-class education. Yet I remember him being clear and lucid on CNN during the war. Presentation really is forty percent of evaluation, isn't it?

I don't read Marshall as much as I should. He is a fine reporter, once you discard his abhorrent personality and partisan bias.

Update: And then I read this and remember why I don't read him that much. Because Marshall is totally blinkered by his own biases, and is one of that common breed, to whom nothing sounds so sweet as their own songs sung back to them in a minor key. He clearly demonstrates that any random string of incoherent rambling will sound brilliant to him if it contains a swipe at the Project for the New Century and neocons in general. It also betrays just how similar Clark and Marshall are in their common inside-the-Beltway biases - that reality doesn't really exist, except as shadows cast upon a cave wall, by which we can discern the struggles of cabals within the blinding corridors of power.

An article for those folks who believe that our presence in Iraq is the only reason there's al Queda in Iraq. The initial sweeps in April and May picked up dozens of actual al Queda prisoners in western Iraq, as well as hundreds of jihadis and "mercenaries", according to Bremer & the occupation authority.

Angel premiere last night. Surprisingly laid-back for a Whedon script, but I guess they're a little tired of ye olde End of The World at Mutant Enemy these days. It was a fun episode - but how could it not, with the reintroduction of Harmony the SecretaryAssistant? I love Mercedes McNab so much...

Carpenter is gone from the credits, and Marsters is top-billed. That's a little disorienting - what, is Marsters Carpenter's shadow, that he always ends up taking her slot on Mutant Enemy shows in their fourth season? They shifted from the cavernous mall of last year's season wrap-up at Wolfram & Hart to an executive suite that looks exactly like somebody redecorated one of the old arts buildings on Penn State's University Park campus (Chambers, for those of you who've spent any time in "Happy Valley"). I understand the logistical reasons for doing it (filming in somebody's mall on a weekly basis would cost *you* through the nose, and drive the property owners up a wall), but it is kind of deflating.

They're working the theme of catastrophic, unearned success this year. I wonder how long they're going to play it befuddled and conflicted? It'll be amusing for a few episodes, but it isn't a sustainable conceit, I don't think. Oh, well. I suppose a couple hours of "how exactly did I end up selling out, man?" won't be too unpleasant a way to spend Wednesday nights.

BlogSpeak sounds like it has its malicious-code issue resolved, so I'm putting my comments back up. Welcome back to the desert of the unreal.

Was looking back through my referral logs, when I came across this monstrosity. It's a stalkerblog, a blogspot blog set up specifically to abuse a rather obscure academic blogger I follow, Professor Erin O'Connor. This "Allen" is livid that O'Connor demonstrates the characteristics of both a leftist and a conservative, and deeply offended at the notion that O'Connor admits to having crafted her academic message to further her career. To my mind, this is a spectacular and monumental example of "missing the point". Her entire blog-career has been a mea culpa over that very issue, which she brings up herself.

Anyone who can be so outraged by the existence of a thinker that defies classification is, to my mind, merely demonstrating his clear intellectual and political shortcomings. In short, this "Allen" proves himself to be a partisan, a fanatic, and a fool of the lowest order.

Please, don't take this as an endorsement of O'Connor. I find her too eager to defend alleged instances of conservative or libertarian "academic freedom under attack", and prone to ignore the political-hack nature of too many of her compatriots on the (sparsely populated) academic "right". But this sort of mean-spiritedness is out of bounds, and downright creepy.

Very French moment just now. The secretary called me up front to yell at me for not taking my vacation days. I said "I just took two last week for jury duty!" She said that that was covered separately, and that vacation days stop accruing once you've maxed out, as I have.

Eh, I don't have kids, I don't have a house to take care of, I don't go on expensive vacations, I don't get sick often. What do I need 19 days a year for?

Word is that the upcoming film version of Cold Mountain will feature an extra-textual recreation of the Battle of the Crater. The promise is of a "Saving Private Ryan"-type sequence, rather than the bloodless reenactments of Gettysburg or the execrable Gods and Generals. The news is a little peculiar, due to Cold Mountain's "deserter going home" plot, but welcome if accurate. Glory is the only ACW film I've seen that actually felt like a war, rather than a pageant with blanks.

"They may be destroying their own infrastructure, but they show incredible determination and inventiveness while doing so."

Samizdata's Man in Basra has some thoughts on the Idealist and Realist approach to Iraqi governance, and notes that the Idealists are generally Americans who don't deal day-to-day with actual Iraqis, while Realism is intrinsically, if unintentionally racist. I'd further extend that by noting that active racism is often found in folks that have direct, abrasive contact with the subjects of said racism. Racism is a type of prejudice, and prejudice is often stronger and more assertive when it's been fed a steady diet of anecdote and selective, albeit real, experience.