I loved the way he started: “I just wanna let you know. I’m a Christian. I’m a believer. God lives in my heart. And I’m for changing minds, not changing values. Are you with me?” That was intended as an applause line. To call the response indifferent would be so kind as to be irresponsible.
While I'm on the War Between The Republican Factions (as performed by the inmates of the Daily Beast under the direction of Tina Brown) Rich Lowry just came out against the Southern Strategy, & (having read almost to the end) he's pimping a book (which is not linked here as I am not a pimp for Amazon or any other hive of worker exploitation & villainy) about rail-splittin' Abe Lincoln (who, by the way, not only split rails & freed the slaves but invented the luxury automobile); the "stop pickin' on Lincoln" schtick is obviously complete bullshit designed to mess w/ his competition in the Lincoln-book field & is w/o any other meaning.
It is the Lincoln-Hating Right. You can't belong unless you feel a compulsion to write "bloody-minded tyrant" immediately before or after the name "Abraham Lincoln." Some members of this fraternity are old-style Lost Cause romantics, deluding themselves about the “War for Southern Independence,” as some Southerners have been doing since about 1866, while others are a peculiar breed of libertarian.
Libertarianism is supposed to make the Republican Party sleek and modern, but this variant of the creed—associated with Ron Paul—is stubbornly perverse and highly unappealing.
See, no meaning. And no mention of Nixon or the Southern Strategy either, because what could any of that have had to do w/ anything; the libertarians are the real (albeit sleek & modern) racists!! Remember, he needs a reason to mention Lincoln so he can pimp his book; an even-close-to-accurate item comparing the present-day Republican Party to Lincoln would not go over well w/ those who must be pleased. So he concludes by admitting he wasted his time high-horsing it over a bunch of losers.
Operationally, they are pro-Confederacy. Their influence shouldn't be exaggerated. The vast majority of people will never hear of them. They exist only as a small but foul temptation on the right. If American conservatism ever wants to commit suicide, they offer the ready means. And it begins with the root-and-branch rejection of Abraham Lincoln.
And I'm going to do a little high-horsing myself (& laughing) by sharing the title of Rich's opus. Ready? Food & drink out of mouths & away from keyboards? Here it is:
Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream—and How We Can Do It Again, on sale June 11 from Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Really? There are still young rail-splitters? Do not hold your breath.
I should hope that no doubt exists as to this blog's position as regards Imaginative Literature: we dislike it and wish it abolished. "Fiction" of any sort is a chimera and a snare, and the men who write it, I suppose, are wretched fellows who write these things for a drink.
if you add up all the reading that students encounter across
science, mathematics, history, and other subjects, English teachers
could teach no informational text at all, and the student would still
get at least 70% informational text. (Heaven forbid that a history class
should read The Grapes of Wrath to learn about the Depression!). In short, there is no reason, NO REASON, for any English teacher to stop teaching literature.
Except funding.
We hear a lot about how teaching "literature" is a means of enhancing understanding of language, history, psychology, and criminology.
Beyond writing skill, there are the timeless ideas and themes in western
literature that form the backbone of our civilization. Cultural
relativity aside, there is a patrimony to be handed down from generation
to generation that defines who we are, where we’ve been, and points the
way to where we should be going. You are not going to discover this
patrimony in government publications, but in the tangle of the minds of
novelists who bring to life with words a time, a place, a circumstance
that teaches us more than how to be a good writer or get a job in some
government office someday.
Golly.
So, the government ought to beat it into the heads of all the snivelling little drones that Literature exists, and that Litrerature says, basically, Fuck You, Government.
Fair enough, I don't disagree.
Except I'd imagine a lot of hilarious squawking as soon as I started making fun of the word "patrimony."
Three areas the Right should address, financially and intellectually
"As the brainwashed American public & the evil Hollywood producers who wash their brains have no interest in any of my art (For I am an artist.) please give me & my fellow conservative artists money, preferably in the form of a tax-free grant or award (For infrastructure!) so we'll be able to reverse liberal influence in the culture & restore the free market by making movies about what swell dudes businessmen are."
So I was reading the Wonkettes (another place where I write words occasionally) and saw this review of a book about the idea of Southern secession, written by a Northwestern liberal armpit-ty hippie (I assume), which makes the argument that really, the rest of the country would probably be better off if we just gave the South back to wherever we got it from (hell).
Now, I am new around here, but if you don't know yet, I am a goddamned Southerner. Born in Arkansas (I am indeed known among the gays in my town as one of an amazing yet unorganized group of guys who are The Best Guys in town, known as the Arkansas Boys), raised in Tennessee, lived in Georgia, back in Tennessee, etc. I love it down here. That being said, I see books like this and my immediate reaction is "oh yeah, hell yes, fucking get rid of the South. Turn it into the Banana Republic it so aspires to be. Just let me move North first." And it's weird, because as I was reading that book review, it occurred to me that a lot of Southern progressives are like this.
We are well fucking aware that so much of the history that has defined this nation happened on our lands. We feel it all the way back to the Native peoples who were driven/murdered out of their rightful territory, where we pay homage to them by giving our wealthy white neighborhoods names like "Chickasaw Gardens." We who are obsessed with music know how much of our musical heritage comes from this place. We know what kind of magic comes from this part of the country. But at the same time, we deal with the fact that, as the book review describes, this part of the country has been the Grown-Up part of the country's proverbial bleeding, abscessed hemmorhoid pretty much since the nation's founding. We love it, yet we hate it. We cherish being Southern Liberals (Molly Ivins, helloooo.), yet there's a part of us that's right there with the rest of the country saying "Kick it into the Gulf of Mexico. All of it. No one will miss it."
and am I fascinated. What wonderful new ideas does Jim have for us? Could they be something that the Senator & his Congressional colleagues could have a flunky turn into legislation, thereby saving America from itself? (And if so, shouldn't the flunkies be busy typing that legislation, rather than this bulk-purchase boilerplate that DeMint will stick his name on & flog to the sort of marks who get e-mail from REDSTATE.com Marketplace?)
DeMint's newest book, NOW OR NEVER will help voters choose the right candidates at every level of government, especially the president. Few people have more credibility than DeMint when it comes to selecting and electing the best conservative candidates.
Senator DeMint will remind readers how citizen activism, Tea Parties and rallies resulted in a shift of power from Washington back into the hands of the American people. The Washington establishment was stunned by an upheaval from voters that resulted in the election of a new breed of representatives. But the 2010 election only slowed the rampage of government spending and debt. America remains on the verge of financial and cultural collapse.
Vote Republican! (And you might as well let credible endorser DeMint pick for you.) How disappointing. It's certainly no permanent base on the moon as far as big ideas go. Maybe there's something in it about poorhouses & debtor's prisons.
Could there be political & ecomonic favors the cheese-eating surrender monkeys at Hachette Book Group hope he'll do for them in exchange for their publishing this rot? (Hell, they might even have given him an advance. I'd love to know if Hachette makes any money on the deal.) One would certainly expect the great patriot that we know Senator DeMint to be to publish American.
(This review is a stop on a “virtual book tour” for the paperback version of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Game Change, an account of the 2008 presidential campaign. My thanks to Trish Collins for inviting Whiskey Fire to participate. Up next on the “tour” is Mr. Rude Pundit, on Wednesday the 15th.)
Game Change is a shallow and ultimately pointless book, but nevertheless irritating.
The book lacks a thesis, an absence Heilemann and Halperin portentously announce in the first paragraph of their Author’s Note:
The idea for this book arose in the spring of 2008 out of a pair of firm convictions. The first was that the election we had both been following for more than a year was as riveting and historic a spectacle as modern politics has ever produced. The second was that, despite wall-to-wall media coverage, much of the story behind the headlines had not been told. What was missing and might be of enduring value, we agreed, was an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses who (in our judgment) stood a reasonable chance of occupying the White House.
In other words, what a great story! What a spectacle! What a show! Let's now find out about all the juicy backstage drama, the intrigue, the arguments, the fights, the scandalous fucking! (And yes, there is scandalous fucking, for which we can thank John Edwards and Rielle Hunter. Thanks, idiots.)
Because people love that backstage stuff -- the gossip. They eat it up.
Oh and also this stuff might be of some historical value too, because this is very historical history-stuff, ahem. Politics, you know, what fun.
Which is not to say that gossip can never be of significance; for instance, that Strom Thurmond secretly had a black daughter is a fairly revealing detail about Dixiecrat history. But then again, a detail like that only matters if it adds color to an understanding of Thurmond’s political and cultural class, and how that class was comprised of a bunch of absolute bastards. Clearly, I should hope, nobody is diseased enough to care about Strom Thurmond’s sex life for its own sake.
But why do any of the details in Game Change matter?
Halperin and Heilemann never tell us -- very likely because they consider themselves scrupulous journalists, getting all their facts right and i-dotting and t-crossing and so forth, and as scrupulous journalists, it is not up to them to tell you what anything means as far as how the policies and behaviors of these fascinating “characters” might impact real people. They are after all not partisans.
And fair enough, whatever. But all that means is that they have essentially censored themselves. All they can talk about is the game; they can never judge it.
The most glaring, and annoying, symptom of this absence of anything like an argument is Halperin and Heilemann’s constant featherbrained return to the phrase “game changer,” a cliché dressed up as a profundity. They trot this out all the time, like a mystic invocation of Importance: say the words, and poof! Revelation! Meaning!
Yet the trick never quite works. One may perhaps be somewhat underwhelmed to learn that the Obama, Clinton, and Edwards camps all came to the same conclusion about the Iowa caucuses: “looking back at it, they all agreed: Iowa had been a game changer.” No shit....
The cliché-flogging is not quite as relentlessly awful as what Tom Freidman perpetrates, but it's close. Clinton is down in the delegate count even after winning Texas and Ohio, which prompts the revelation that “for Obama to win the nomination would require a magnum-force game changer,” a sentence that deserves to be shot.
Also impressive is how so much of what is here is already well-known, and was well-known at the time. Heck, for every fact or factoid I learned, there were two or three that for some reason didn't make the cut. David Shuster's sexist snipe at Chelsea Clinton is mentioned; Chris Matthews' sexist swipe at her mother is for some reason unmentioned. Perhaps Matthews' blatherings were not considered significantly game-changey, or something. Who knows.
The reason this "game change" stuff is irritating is that the most blindingly obvious implication of the book is that "the game" – American electoral politics as it presently exists and as the authors depict it – is expensive, wasteful, unproductive, stupid, and, flatly, bad for the country.
The Iowa caucuses, for example, are utterly absurd, detested even by the candidates themselves. The rules are arcane, the process inexplicable, the state small. Its electorate is not representative of the country as a whole. Why Iowans, and not, say, New Yorkers, get to exert potent influence over the national choice of who gets to be in charge of the nukes, is a mystery.
Game Change sheds no light in this regard, but we do discover that an angry John McCain once said to his wife, “FUCK YOU! FUCK, FUCK, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!!!” (The authors assure us that since this is in quotes it is a 100% true real statement, and I believe them.)
Also mysterious is the primary/caucus system as a whole. Why is it valuable to watch sleep-deprived candidates spend vast sums of money telling preposterous lies about themselves and each other via television commercials, at least in terms of rationally deciding who will negotiate weapons treaties or propose tax policy?
It tells us nothing: who wins a nomination or an election is dependent upon a multitude of factors, only a very small range of which are in the candidate’s control. McCain was always doomed, probably; the fact that he behaved like a psychotic ancient baby and gave the VP slot to a venomous dingaling who appeals solely to smug ignorant zealots didn’t help his cause, but the economy would have screwed any GOP candidate.
But that fairly elementary observation is not nearly as much fun as the endlessly rehashed minutiae of the campaigns, the offhand remarks, the "gaffes," the whole tedious litany related here by the authors in ardent detail, especially in their gory account of the Clinton/Obama war. As if it mattered.
Now, don't get me wrong; there is certainly a sense in which that whole awful Klingon opera "mattered." But there is a more important sense in which it didn't.
Halperin and Heilemann's description of what happened after the Wall Street disaster in September is revealing. For them, this was Obama's apotheosis, when he started to be really taken seriously by serious people. For their narrative, the most important of these serious people is Bill Clinton, because they need an arc about the Reconciliation of the Warring Camps.That's good theater!
For people who care about the economy, though, it is more revealing that these Serious People prominently included Rob Rubin, Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke, and Hank Paulson; it is a real feather in Obama's cap that Paulson was impressed by Obama's "sobriety and maturity." Oy.
Nothing's changed, changed utterly; a stifling consensus is reborn. And unemployment goes unaddressed.
Equally disheartening in this regard is the authors' account of Clinton's post-campaign discussion with Mark Penn, whom she inexplicably does not hate for being incompetent and awful and costing her the presidency. More disturbing is that she only demoted and didn't fire him for consulting with the Columbian ambassadorduring the campaign about getting a trade deal passed that she opposed -- as did labor. Worse than the political malpractice is the message sent about how being inside is apparently more important than the issue; from a progressive perspective, this is galling, not least because the story is so damn familiar.
Most repulsive of all is that, as Haperin and Heilemann mention at several points in the text, many politicians apparently read Maureen Dowd's drivel and take it seriously.
Game Change shows that what we most desperately need right now is to change the game, because that’s what’s killing us. That's not what Halperin and Heilemann set out to prove, but so what? They didn't really set out to prove anything beyond the breathlessly trivial anyway.
This horsecrap pretty much "writes" itself, & thanks to the miracle of electronics, I don't even have to get up from the chair to pluck it off the wire machines. Two or three (seated) clicks & it can argle-bargle for itself, although it does raise a question: Are we to be subjected to two more yrs. of these drones a-dronin' on about snarky, mean ol' elitists (to name but a few codes for resentment & bitter clinging) & their show-offy cognition?
While Christopher Hitchens looks to politics as a canvas for the great Washington novel, the irony is that politics, for all its noise, just isn’t a big enough theme for a great book. By making “The Exorcist” about good and evil, faith and its loss, and the boundary where science ends and the mysterious begins, Blatty reached deeper than any political novel could (perhaps it is difficult for Hitchens the atheist to grasp this).
I believe the irony here is that a "Washington novel" is political by definition. (And the dig at Hitchens from another goon who's simply horrified at all the "brittle, hateful snark and petty rage." Idiot atheist, no grasp at all.)
Hitchens, like too many other observers, equates Washington with politics. To him a book about the city calls for the drama of geopolitics and power. But Washington is a largely apolitical city. Walk through the 90 percent that does not comprise Capitol Hill and you see it’s a town of churches, jazz clubs, and old neighborhoods — even ones that predate the federal city itself.
Few still anticipate the great Brattleboro, VT, or San Bernardino, CA novel, no matter how many old neighborhoods & jazz clubs those two no-doubt-wonderful burgs may (or may not) have.
Now that the typist (Mark Gauvreau Judge is the author of several books, including Damn Senators and God and Man at Georgetown Prep. His articles and essays have appeared in various publications.) is revealed as a ninny, we can examine how, a yr. later, he's still steaming about one of the truly great outrages of our time, seven minutes (I'll just go ahead & assume he's familiar w/ the exact length of the indignity because he has a recording thereof, & plays it obsessively.) of tea-bagging talk, perpetrated by more-likely-smirking-than-howling (What the hell did any of that mean?) liberal activists. (That rattling sound you hear is a string of pearls being vigorously clutched by Mr. Judge.)
Forty years after “The Exorcist,” it is not the wars or espionage that hack novelists mine for bestsellers that marks our era as much as brittle, hateful snark and petty rage. When the Tea Party movement began a year ago, liberal activists Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox spent seven minutes on the air simply repeating variations on the word “tea bagger,” which is a slang term for a degrading sexual act. Liberals who howl, or more likely smirk, at what they would perceive as the overblown comparison of a sexual double entendre with the devil just don’t get it. The power of the final argument of “The Exorcist” is that it shows that it is not as much in the wars or the natural calamities or the Capitol Hill deals that the demonic is revealed; rather, it is in the smug put-down, the dehumanizing sexual smirk, the cruel — and cowardly — personal attack. These can cut deeper than an actual physical assault.
He probably deserves credit for that first sentence. Two+ wars on the other side of the planet really haven't marked our era, or the era has been so stained that we no longer notice how warped & discolored the picture is.
The last two probably call for an actual physical assault. Perhaps a few Afghanis or Iraqis who have an extra shoe because one of their feet or legs were shocked & awed right off their bodies could toss it at this appalling bastard. Assuming, of course, they have arms left w/ which to throw, or an eye remaining w/ which to aim.
And while Judge isn't sure about what may have happened in 1949,
... a horror novel called “The Exorcist” about a girl who may or may not have been possessed by a demon — or by the devil himself. The book and subsequent movie were smashes.
from paragraph to paragraph (my emphasis),
With the 40th anniversary of “The Exorcist” approaching, I revisited the book for the first time since high school. It still terrifies, probably because Blatty based the book on a real case of demonic possession that occurred in Maryland in the 1940s. There are some dated elements — at one point a character speculates that the trouble with Regan, the possessed girl, may have something to do with the “hippies” who are into the occult and hang out in the bars on Wisconsin Avenue — but for the most part the book deals with themes that are relevant today.
I'll just bet he's all in for exorcism of uppity liberal activists & their dirty, filthy, degrading mouths, but only if a psychiatrist who'll railroad libs into an institution & shut them the hell up w/ drugs & a bar of soap in the mouth can't be found.
Were any of these events real, beyond having really been authorized by Catholic pencil pushers? Some investigation would indicate no. Summarized here, begins here. (Shorter summation: Intransigent teen, crummy family dynamics, mother & maternal grand-mother loony Lutherans who converted & had the young victim baptized a Catholic. In my day -- not that much later -- less-superstitious solutions included threats of shipment to boarding school. Then threats of military school. Recently, officially approved drugs. America's been eating its young for some time now.)
Sudden gasp: What'd I just miss there? A halt to hippie-bashing? Worries about the occult are no longer relevant? Spread the word Brother Judge, spread it far & wide, because a few of your fellow travelers may not have heard yet. Actually, none of them have. And let them know that Godless Communism is no longer a threat, while you're at it.
All this has me wondering if Holy Mother Church is looking to cash in on the fortieth anniversary of The Exorcist, starting w/ ExorFest 2010, or if this was mere reaction to whatever Hitchens typed. (Which is mercifully unavailable on-line, at least to the slothful, but note the nest of vipers it was printed in.)
-- M. Bouffant (Unfinished version. Compare & contrast.)
Are you ready for some revising? Even rightists can't dance around facts forever; one of them just noticed (besides everything the Pres. typed in his book that D'Souza couldn't be bothered to quote, because it would refute his Unified Bullshit Theory of Mystical Anti-Colonialist Influence) that President Obama really hadn't been around his Luo tribesman father during his formative yrs., so a more plausible malign influence should be found, & surprise, surprise, the demon's been right there all along!
I'm not going to dissect D'Souza's argument. [Oh, we knew that! D.D.'s argument is so fragile we doubt if he'd breathe on it. — M.B.] But I would like to add some important information: If Obama is indeed motivated by anti-colonialism, the source may be Frank Marshall Davis as much as, if not more than, Obama's father.
You know where this is going if you're the sort who's amused enough by these people to be reading this, so I won't bother myself w/ Googling Frank Marshall Davis for you. And if Jeremiah Wright & the Weather Underground are more familiar to you than Davis is, it's only because he didn't leave us w/ as many documented outrages ("God Damn America!!") as the other Obama-molders. Typist Kengor, however, dug deep into the Communist files, because, more surprises, he's pimping* a new book himself.
I come to this via a different route from D'Souza. My new book -- released the same day as D'Souza's, coincidentally -- examined the communist movement in the 20th century, and specifically how communists duped progressives and liberals. I determined, definitively, that Frank Marshall Davis was not a duped liberal but a duping communist. I show this at length, quoting Davis's weekly columns from the CPUSA organ, the Honolulu Record, and reprinting pages from Congressional investigations and from Davis's declassified FBI file, including a document that lists his Communist Party number: 47544.
And Kengor rests his case. Talk about having a guy's number! Heh indeedy!
Oddly enough, there is classical leftist revisionism in Kengor's McCarthyite (No, reactionaries, that is not a compliment. It's an insult, if insulting if still permitted.) screed. It's quickly dismissed as evil anti-Americanism, natch, but Frank Marshall Davis raises an interesting point or two about colonialism.
Consider a May 19, 1949 column, "How Our Democracy Looks To Oppressed Peoples," where Davis excoriated the Marshall Plan. Yes, the Marshall Plan.
"For a nation that calls itself the champion of democracy, our stupendous stupidity is equaled only by our mountainous ego," Davis complained. "Our actions at home and abroad are making American democracy synonymous with oppression." He added: "I have watched with growing shame for my America as our leaders have used our golden riches to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world."
Davis characterized the Marshall Plan as a "device" to maintain "white imperialism." This nefarious "oppression of non-white peoples everywhere" was purchased via Secretary of State George Marshall's "billions of U.S. dollars … to bolster the tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland and the other western exploiters of teeming millions of humans."
In another column a few weeks later, on August 18, Davis stepped up the communist attack on "the double-talking Truman administration with its program for World War III." "The Truman doctrine in Greece and Turkey and then the Marshall Plan," were, claimed Davis, "based upon the continuation of colonial slavery by the ruling classes of Western Europe."
In his next column, Davis protested: "I shall not help England and France keep millions of my colored brothers in Africa and Asia in colonial slavery. Yet that is what our dividend diplomats ask of you and me when they demand our support of the bi-partisan Marshall plan."
I can't disagree w/ that. And the horror doesn't stop. Brace yourselves (My emphasis. COMMIES!):
Yet, there's a more sinister element, as suggested by a July 1935 document held in Comintern Archives in Moscow. That document ordered American comrades (like Davis, who, at that point, lived in Chicago), to go to Hawaii to agitate against Hawaii becoming part of the United States. The Soviets wanted the territory as a base of operations. What would be the party line? The document ordered American communists to claim there was a "growing discontent of the masses of the population in the Hawaiian Islands," resulting from "the regime of colonial oppression and the exploitation of American imperialism with its policy of militarisation of the Hawaiian Islands."
So in 1935 Hawai'i was not a Territory of these United Snakes, but a division of the Dole Corporation? Next we'll be told that until statehood was granted, the islands were just floating out there, unanchored, & menaced by sharks & giant octopi.
That was precisely Davis's position when he relocated to Hawaii, whether by orders, by personal beliefs, or both. And it isn't unreasonable to expect he might have shared such thinking with a bright teenager named Barack Obama. Bear in mind, Obama admitted to learning from Davis, including college advice -- his very next step. Obama describes his first days at college as hanging out with "Marxist professors," attending "socialist conferences," and "discuss[ing] neocolonialism."
Rather than heralding the American exceptionalism that sought freedom for the people of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Davis would have passed to Obama a very different narrative about America's place in the world, beginning with its alleged imperial-colonial sins.
This was the wrong side of history, but it was the side of Frank Marshall Davis. The remaining question is to what extent this affected Obama, then and still today.
Should those whose idea of history is to stand athwart it yelling "Commie!" at the top of their lungs ever be taken seriously when they decide which side of history is "right?" I think not.
But that is quite a question Mr. History poses. 30-plus yrs. ago some guy maybe repeated to Obama something he'd typed 20-plus yrs. before that? Since nobody, nowhere knows nothin', no how, 'bout Obama, except what they think he's thinking, based on any wild delusion (but seldom on anything he's actually said & done) there's just no way that remaining question could be answered, is there?
At least not until the President's Executive Order on Hawai'i is issued. Then we'll know whether he's handing it over to the Hawai'ians, selling it back to Dole, or just turning it into Airstrip One & running all the drone attacks in Pakistan & Afghanistan from Pearl Harbor.
*Referred to a man as pimping something! Can I expect an avalanche of mens rights weasels complaining?
