Whiskey Fire

Dead Horse Flogging

The Daily Beast brings to everyone's attention Bush 43's attempt at revisionism, which somehow slipped under the radar, almost as if people were sick & tired of the bastard & wanted to hear no more about him. Possibly because of things like this:

A Charge Kept—the title is an answer to Bush’s 1999 campaign biography, A Charge to Keep—was written under duress. By 2008, it was clear Bush wouldn’t be taking the legacy-polishing victory lap typically afforded two-term presidents. The economy was tanking, and John McCain’s campaign said it did not want Bush defending his record, even as that record was being filleted. Feeling they’d someday be vindicated by history, the Bushies turned to literature. They would write a book—a chronicle of “what we inherited, what we did about it, and what we left behind,” says Marc Thiessen, the former Bush chief speechwriter who oversaw the book’s writing.

By 2008 it appears that Bush was more concerned w/ a place in history than the destruction he & his cronies had wrought.

Bush himself was intimately involved in how the book took shape, taking meetings in the Oval Office to review the memos. As he later told his senior staff, “Someday there will be a sober assessment of what we did here. People will realize what we did and say, ‘I didn’t know that.’”

A very sober assessment that Bush was a whiny-ass jerk:

One thing that’s clear is that Bush thinks he was dealt a pretty lousy hand on January 20, 2001. Bush, we learn, “inherited a recession and an economy struggling under a high tax burden.” Fat budget surpluses were “disappearing.” Also: “drug use among high-school-age teens was at near all-time highs.” And this is to say nothing of the “considerable signs of strain” in Latin American democracy; wars “raging” across Africa; the Mideast peace process “descending rapidly into a second intifada”; and children “trapped in schools without challenging academic standards.” Into this stormy world moves the Decider. “The president chose to act,” the book says more than once. It is a tenet of A Charge Kept that Bush always acted. Congress often “failed to act.” (In the book’s calculus, Bush vetoing legislation counts as acting, while Congress nixing Bush’s plans counts as inaction.) If history had unraveled differently, Bush still would have acted: “[E]ven if the 9/11 attacks had never happened, President Bush would have been a steadfast champion of freedom’s cause across the globe.”

Compare & contrast w/ any mention by the current Pres. or his hate-America lib supporters that things were less than perfect w/ the United Snakes on 20 Jan., 2008.

This masterpiece lurked in obscurity at the White House archives in .pdf until a public teat-suckler found it & ran w/ it.

But Hancock also loves scooping up and publishing government memoranda—“gems of the public domain,” as he calls them. Morgan James can publish them without paying an advance or splitting the profit with an author. With this new manuscript, Hancock did no editing. He placed Thiessen’s text wholesale into paperback binding, adding a boldly neutral Bush quote (“We have served America through one of the most consequential periods of our history…”) to the back cover. He priced the book at $12.95. It came out last April, by which time the political class had stopped worrying about Bush’s failings and started worrying about Obama’s. The book had no ad buys, no radio spots, and—of course—no author tour.

As always w/ the perpetual optimists who so love America, things are looking up.

Apprised of the commercial success of his lost literary work, Thiessen laughs. For the Bushie who survived 2008, Obama’s falling poll numbers make it feel like the Bush vindication project is proceeding apace. “The Bush resurgence,” Thiessen says, “is happening sooner than any of us would have imagined.”

Clap louder, fantasists.

M. Bouffant

News Worth Oaf

My attitude towards the immensely tedious Journo-List Scandal is that this general topic is minimal -- it's fuss for profit. (Ezra Klein as Dark Liberal Overlord? The hell? ) Though, strangely, as Greater Wingnuttia has dug in with the make believe about having discovered a there there, they have genuinely come up with some fascinating nonsense. Take for instance this open sewer wound letter from degenerate half-ape (and not the better half, the half that has all the reprocessed badly-digested termite husks stuck to the fur) Brent Bozell:

The following is an open letter sent by MRC President Brent Bozell to Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli on July 28, 2010, regarding the scandal surrounding JournoList, a private listserve group created by blogger Ezra Klein when he worked at The American Prospect and maintained by him after he joined the Washington Post in 2009.

Dear Mr. Brauchli:

The JournoList scandal is getting worse every day and The Washington Post is at the center of it. Blogger Ezra Klein ran the operation and at least three other staffers were members. (Blogger Greg Sargent claims he wasn’t a member after he joined the Post.) In addition, at least one member of Slate and two from Newsweek, also owned by Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, were members.

The almost constant revelations of political activism and journalistic conspiracy raise an enormous number of questions about Post policies, professionalism and ethics. As a conservative, and therefore a member of the movement JournoListers sought to demonize, I feel Post readers are owed full disclosure.

Any understanding of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics makes clear this list and the Post’s involvement violate a number of ethical guidelines. In fact, much of the code seems to have been ignored. Here are just a few examples from the code.

“Journalists should:

·    “Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting,”
·    “Recognize a special obligation to ensure that the public's business is conducted in the open and that government records are open to inspection,”
·    “Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived,”
·    “Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.”

There is only one way for the Post to move forward from this fiasco – through transparency. You need to be forthright about the Post’s failings and give readers enough information so that we know just how serious this really was and what can be done to restore your paper’s credibility.

Fun!

Klein of course was hired though not as a reporter but rather as someone with an Opinion, and the WaPo, dim as the people who run it admittedly are, was presumably aware that he was at the time and has been ever since somewhere basically indistinguishable, ideologically, from Chairman Mao, if by "Chairman Mao" you mean "someone not in fact Chairman Mao who would only look especially far left to the smug dingbats at the WaPo editorial board who have placidly laid their heads on Overton's Sill so as to readily facilitate getting their empty skulls brutally smashed by wingnut ape-men repeatedly slamming shut Overton's Window." 

The revelation that Mr. Ezra communicated via email with similar hippie fellow travelers like the notorious radical bomb-heaver Joe Klein (whose name is an anagram for either "Stalin" or "William Ayres") are certainly not shocking, but nevertheless -- and this is the key bit -- at the same time and simultaneously they are utterly meaningless in regards to the Journamalism Codes Bozell cites, for reasons that involve reading them and thinking about them in a cursory fashion and then desultorily chuckling.

BUT -- and this is the key bit, forget what I said about the other bit being the key bit, this is the key bit -- by Bozell's logic, we are now entitled to Ask Probing Questions regarding the private correspondence of every other writer for the Washington Post who expresses a particular ideology. 

I, obviously, support this.

Do we know that Charles Krauthammer does not correspond with, say, Kathryn Jean Lopez in order to Coordinate Coverage? HOLY SHIT! WE HAVE EVERY REASON TO SUSPECT HE PROBABLY DOES!

Release the emails! Transparency! Rule of law! 

The public demands maximum exposure to the very likely highly intimate personal private emails between Charles Krauthammer and Kathryn Jean Lopez!

... actually, the public just probably threw up in their mouths there a little. But you catch my drift, I'm sure. Grab some antibiotics stat and maybe you can keep from catching anything more lingering.

MAS. Wank Hard. (Fox news, you know, exists. As does, God help us, Politico...)

For the Record

I also think HillBuzz is run by a bunch of crazy shyster assholes. 

Besides everything else, egging on your blog's readers to unearth personal information about your Online Foes is a sure sign you're (a) swine and (b) completely fucking nuts.

And no, George Soros didn't pay me to say this. Shit, I pay him.

Fucking and Idiocy in the American Novel

The pundit-function "Ross Douthat" has, I have learned, been pondering the question of fucking and its role in the modern American novel.

Douthat's thoughts on this issue were inspired by "a long essay in last Sunday’s Book Review" by Katie Roiphe. Maybe Douthat gets Roiphe wrong. (This would not be a surprise, as Douthat gets many things wrong, in the sense that the only time you can't tell for sure he's wrong is when his prose is so deadly boring that you fall asleep reading it and have nightmares about wormy little right-wing zombie twerps coming to life and eating the brains of New York Times editors, which are then regurgitated  in the form of badly digested cod-sociological "insights.") However, for the purposes of this post, I'm ignoring Roiphe.

So be that noted. Moving on. Douthat:

Katie Roiphe defends the Great Male Novelists of yore — the Roths and Updikes, Mailers and Bellows — against their more stringent feminist critics, while contrasting them favorably with their less overtly chauvinist, narcissistic, and sex obsessed male heirs (think Jonathan Franzen or Jonathan Safran Foer or the late David Foster Wallace).

Crucially -- crucially -- by "Great Male Novelists of yore" he means straight white American novelists. (I insist on this point, though it's quite clear from the context, mostly because insisting on such points pisses off the sort of cretins who still think squawking over "political correctness" is still cool even thirty years after sqawking over "political correctness" wasn't especially cool in the first place.)

I wonder, though, if what she describes as the “puritanical” streak in contemporary fiction — an artifact of what Roiphe describes, elsewhere in the essay, as our “more conservative time” — has more to do with the exhaustion of the transgressive impulse than with any real return to the kind of moral-aesthetic strictures that a Roth or an Updike helped to overthrow. A jaded and self-conscious caution about the transformative possibilities of sex, after all, isn’t really the same thing as a revived puritanism — and what’s more, I think, it doesn’t provide anything like the same opportunities for would-be literary adventurers looking for something to push off against.

Updike wouldn’t have been Updike, for instance, if he had started out as a novelist in the age of Lady Gaga and streaming online pornography. “Lolita” wouldn’t be “Lolita” if its shocking story were set in the America of Tila Tequila and “Jersey Shore,” instead of the America of Dwight Eisenhower and the Hays Code.

Whistle, flag, 15 yards for illegal glib literary history. (1) Nabokov completes Lolita in 1953 -- though it's only published for the first time in the US in 1958. (2) Roth and Updike are not in Nabokov's "generation" (if that term even means anything in regards to Nabokov). They are significantly younger, and also were not born in Russia. (Douthat would have a somewhat better case with Bellow, but since he's just bullshitting, he doesn't know this.) Anyway neither Roth nor Updike really makes a splash until 1959-60. (3) The plot of Lolita pretty much ends in 1952; Eisenhower takes office in 1953. (4) Jersey Shore premiered in 1949 as an NBC "reality radio" variety program. True! (5) The Hays Code...? Movies...? Sheesh. Frickin' Douthat. When even Fred Kaplan knows something you don't, give it up, man: in 1959, Grove Press won the right to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Point (5) matters a lot, because of something that I'll call the Douthatian Fallacy, even though he's hardly the first one to articulate it. He's just a convenient handle for familiar cliche. Anyway, the Douthatian Fallacy is that Morality is Measurable in Units of Fucking, or, Fuck-Units. That is, we can go back X number of years, tote up a morality/immorality quotient in terms of what people were allowed to say in public in regards to fucking, and award that age X number of Points based upon what Douthat calls "moral-aesthetic strictures" -- or, Fuck-Units. ("Moral-aesthetic strictures" is a pompous translation of "what you're allowed to say about fucking.") Inevitably, the Modern Day loses and is more immoral because of its disgusting lack of Fuck-Units. Now is the most Immoralist Period in Human History because of the Ease of Porn Access. Which we didn't used to have!

Or something. More Douthat:

In their wild quest to overturn every conceivable taboo, in other words, the Great Male Authors of mid-century may have succeeded a little bit too well. By tearing down every possible stricture on fictional representations of sex, they abandoned their successors to the vicissitudes of a world where anything could be written, but nothing could really shock. Great art depends on walls as well as open doors, on constraints as well as cultural blank checks. And anyone who’s nostalgic for the exhilarating transgressiveness that once animated American literature should probably be at least a little bit nostalgic for the taboos that made transgression possible.

Which sounds nice, but is stripped of historical context. Namely, before 1959, in the United States, novelists (and never mind filmmakers) could not legally try to represent sexuality in their work with any sort of frankness about what they wanted to say.

It's a dodge, conflating "taboos" with a legal regime preventing certain forms of expression via the threat of official sanction. Keep in mind that for most of the last century, books could be and were banned not for representations of homosexual sex, but for saying that homosexuality even exists. Back in the 1950s you couldn't acknowledge in a novel that homosexuals could perhaps be OK folks -- oh, what the hell, who isn't nostalgic for that taboo! Or I mean the legal impossibility of saying same sex desire isn't inherently wicked. Fuck-Units are a silly if popular way of determining the relative "morality" of particular historical periods.

And it's all hooey. As Nabokov once famously noted, if you really want to piss off Americans, write a novel where the atheist dies happy after a long and fulfilling life.

Tila Tequila is a fucking amateur. 

Whiskey Fire Book Club

By Monica_A

You must read "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" by Jeff Sharlet. Once you have read this book, the past eight years will make sense. The banality of Bush. Scary, but informative.

Same Old Fears and Frustrations

I just read Elisabeth Ladenson's Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (it wasn't bad; I might discuss it later). Ladenson reminds me that in his "On a Book Entitled Lolita," Nabokov wrote that apart from the topic of his book, there are two "themes which are utterly taboo as far as American publishers are concerned":

a Negro-White marriage  which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106.

You can tell a lot about a society by its taboos and who it likes to see punished, I suppose is the point.

Hmmm.

Well, Happy Christmas, your arse, anyhow.   

On with the Show

A brief observation on the subject of teaching English:

The most entertaining thing about grading take-home exam essays on Madame Bovary is watching the carnage unfold as students do fierce battle with their spell-checkers over the word "bourgeoisie."

I hereby wish all of my readers many, many "boar joys," and I mean that most sincerely.

That is all. 

The Dialectric

My first "bleg" ever. I swear this is a real quote I came across somewhere, but can't remember where. Maybe in the context of something to do with Frederic Jameson? Anyway, here is the gist of the quote, though I'm sure the wording is all wrong:

Vulgar materialism doesn't explain everything, only 90% of it.

Essentially, "follow the money" doesn't help you understand everything that happens, but it sure does take you pretty far.

I will be so darn grateful for any aid.

Purity

So now we learn that Gunter Grass has admitted that during World War II he was a member of the Waffen SS and not merely a member of an Army anti-aircraft battalion, as he has previously claimed.

I've been thinking about this all day, since I read it this morning. Grass has long been something of a hero of mine. I first read The Tin Drum, his sprawling, harrowing novel of prewar, wartime, and postwar Germany the year after I got my BA; I bought the book secondhand, and I still have that copy. Read the covers off of it, but I still have it. Along with a newer copy that's held up better. I read that book like I was hypnotized; I have a vivid memory of being crushed up against a subway door as the 7 train rattled under the East River, holding the book up over my head because that's the only way I could read it in the rush hour crowd.

And when I was done with the book, I read it again. And then I went out and found Cat and Mouse, and then Dog Years. Dog Years was even better.

I was of course impressed, even through translation, by the dazzling wordplay; even more so, by Grass's nearly unbelievable skill in fictional construction. There really are very few writers who can pull off the trick where every image, episode, sentence, and often even phrase or word chimes with everything else in the book, combining into a ringing thematic whole. Shakespeare does this, for all his and his copiers' sloppiness. Joyce. Add your own, if you know what I'm talking about -- an author who has a book or two that just sings some strange song you long to master, but that you know surpasses you, somehow, and always will. Artistry on the highest level.

Ahem. Nearly forgot I was a death of the author man! Anyway. Grass's stuff rang with me, not least because I knew I was only grasping part of it, that I was missing a lot because of the language and my incomplete understanding of the history involved. Who doesn't like a worthy challenge? But what captured me ultimately was the overwhelming emotional power of the books, an essentially humane power that was generated in no small part by the technical tomfoolery and Grass's very proper utter heartlessness towards his typically unlikeable characters.

The Tin Drum and, even more so  Dog Years, are tightly coiled expressions of horror, shame, guilt, and perversity. They present history as  living nightmares from which there is no awakening. In The Tim Drum you have as its central character and metaphor Oskar, who before and during the war decides to remain three years old forever as his only defense against the history in which he is caught up: how can the resonance of this be missed? Grass allows neither Oskar's self-imposed immaturity nor his status as an "artist" of the tin drum to excuse him from his guilt; the scene where Oskar takes a new drum from the shop of the Jew ruined by Kristallnacht says as much.

And in Dog Years you have the absolutely sickening episode in the very middle of the book, where the narrator of the moment reveals, almost offhandedly, that the smell that has been bothering him and the rest of his fellow soldiers is the smell that wafts off an enormous pile of human bones:

The mound, neatly conical, rose just a little higher than a rusty shaking-conveyor similar to those used in coal-yards and potash mines for piling waste. At the foot of the mound tip cars stood motionless on a movable track. The mound shimmered faintly when struck by the sun. It stood out, sharply silhouetted, when the sky hung low and touched it. If you disregarded the crows that inhabited it, the mound was clean; but it has been written at the beginning of this concluding tale, that nothing is pure. And thus, for all its whiteness, the mound to the side of the Kaiserhafen battery was not pure; it was a pile of bones, and its components, even after processing in the factory, were still overgrown with remnants; and the crows couldn't stop living there, restlessly black....

No one talked about the pile of bones. But everybody saw smelled tasted it.

The shock of recognition here is pretty much unbearable. The sense of utter evil and degradation is palpable, and this is exacerbated when you realize that this is the ultimate source of the black-on-white imagery that has been strangely haunting the entire book: black crows on white human bones. What is ultimately so shattering about these books is how casually we are ushered into a moral universe that looks deranged, but is also strangely familiar.

Oh, we all like to believe in the purity of at least some human endeavors. But for Grass, purity is an illusion,and a dangerous one. Purity is the whiteness of bones. Nothing is pure, is the theme of Dog Years, and believing otherwise is a snare and a catastrophe. Consider humans as evil as a starting point, and reckon accordingly so as to limit the damage they will inevitably do. History has no other lesson.

So Grass was a hero of mine, and now I find that he was less than truthful. He is tainted with evil.

But then, I reflect, he knew that, and and has been saying so for decades. Purity is still the pure white of bones. To honor Grass, dishonor is perhaps the appropriate honor.

These are deep waters.