The revolution may be televised...

...you just might not be able to hear it.

Cool Under Fire (or while shooting people, whatever)

Naomi Klein re-spins the cowboy-soldier:

Yes, that's right: Letter-writers from across the nation are united in their outrage--not that the steely-eyed smoking soldier makes mass killing look cool but that the laudable act of mass killing makes the grave crime of smoking look cool. It reminds me of the joke about the Hasidic rabbi who says all sexual positions are acceptable except for one: standing up, "because that could lead to dancing."

(Also, keep an eye out for The Take, Klein's new documentary on Argentine workers' takeovers of their places of employment.)

I'm sure that alcohol has nothing to do with it

BBC Documentary Sparks Student Protest

Hundreds of university students took to the streets of Belfast last night to demonstrate against a BBC documentary that accused them of anti-social behaviour.

Around 400 students gathered in the Holylands area of Belfast following the 10.30pm screening of the Spotlight documentary, which showed students urinating in doorways and being noisy at night, and highlighted tensions between students and residents.

Five years ago, during a trip to Ireland with my then-significant other and her family, I spent a couple of days in Belfast. Others in the travel party who slept less soundly than I assert that one morning around 4 or 5, our lodging was treated to a sodden rendition of "Rhinestone Cowboy" by students returning from a night on the town. If true, this incident alone is cause for Ken Burns-length documentation.

Eat people not turkeys

Come on: who among you doesn't have at least one decrepit relative that can fit in the oven? These guys would appreciate it.

Good riddance...

...or, what is my response to Arafat's passing. Especially during the past few years, he had shown himself to be less a leader of the Palestinian people than a corrupt collar about their collective neck. When Christopher Hitchens isn't stroking his Orwell complex by siding in high contrarian fashion with the most powerful people on earth, he can still write a good column, which is what he's done here as one of the few commentators to acknowledge the deleterious effects of Arafat's stunted, autocratic leadership on the Palestinians while maintaining the underlying legitimacy of that people's struggle for self-determination.

Adam-antly opposed

Woo! DC's Adam Eidinger gets his own breaking news report on Drudge for disrupting today's naming ceremony for the new Washington baseball team.

Lomans fear their Willies

Right-wing legislative entity Sam Brownback, who chairs the Senate Commerce subcommittee on science, recently convened a commission to look into the problem of pornography addiction. In addition to concerns about children's exposure to explicit materials, he offered this compelling piece of anecdotal evidence:

Some of his middle-age male friends limit their time alone in hotel rooms to avoid the temptation of graphic pay-per-view movies, Brownback said.

All joking aside, this is a problem that needs to be rubbed out at once, and no man should be asked to have to handle it alone.

I have to say, though, that these gentlemen who are willing to shell out exorbitant hotel pay-per-view fees for salacious fare are in for some some real trouble should they ever be introduced to cutting edge technologies such as . . . laptops and wireless internet. Hopefully before that happens, they'll be able to, um, get ahold of themselves.

Sing it, Frank

I dusted off the Pixies' Come On Pilgrim ep to give it a few spins at work this week, and so I thought I should share some of their demented wisdom with you dear readers. I'm happy to say that I'll be catching them on their reunion tour in a couple of weeks (although I'm not sure what one does in a venue with...."seats"). Seriously one of the best rock bands ever, as evidenced by the first verse from "I've Been Tired":

One, two, three
She's a real left winger 'cause she been down south
And held peasants in her arms
She said "I could tell you stories that could make you cry"
"What about you?"
I said "Me too"
"I could tell you a story that will make you cry"
And she sighed "Ahhh"
I said "I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed"
"I like Lou Reed" she said sticking her tongue in my ear
"Let's go, let's sit, let's talk, politics go so good with beer"
"And while we're at it baby, why don't you tell me one of your biggest fears?"
I said "Losing my penis to a whore with disease"
"Just kidding" I said "Losing my life to a whore with disease"
She said, "Excuse me, please?"
I said "Please... I'm a humble guy with a healthy desire"
"Don't give me no shit because..."
"I've been tired"

Appropriate before, but amplified now

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

-H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Workers of the world, despair!

This story in today's Post about the elimination of international textile industry job quotas spells bad news for workers in struggling countries that don't start with the letters C-h-i-n-a.

With the new system so close, buyers from companies like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. say they have already set plans to collapse their business from factories in dozens of countries down to a carefully hedged and competitive few -- with China topping the list.

"That's about it," said Andrew Tsuei, Wal-Mart's global procurement chief, who expects to reduce the number of countries where Wal-Mart has apparel deals from around 63, cobbled together based on which countries have room to export under their quota limits, to a mere four or five that can produce as much as Wal-Mart orders. "The overall balance of quality, reliability and price makes China probably the most competitive market in the world."

Take that, homosexual agenda!

I just heard on NPR about a school in Texas that has a tradition of a Cross-dressing Day during homecoming on which students are encouraged to dress as members of the opposite sex. As should be expected, a handful of knuckle-draggers learned about this, kicked up a fuss about promotion of the dreaded homosexual agenda, and the school gave in.

The result? Cross-dressing Day is now Camo Day; students are encouraged to dress like soldiers.

I'm sure the operative policy is don't ask, don't tell.

Finally, I can get that good night's sleep

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A tiny unmanned NASA "scramjet" soared above the Pacific Ocean Tuesday at nearly 10 times the speed of sound, or almost 7,000 mph, in a successful demonstration of a radical new engine technology...

The flight was the last in a $230 million-plus effort to test technology most likely to be initially used in military aircraft, such as a bomber that could reach any target on Earth within two hours of takeoff from the United States, or to power missiles.

(In other news, State Department officials in Djibouti continue to physically and verbally abuse a mangy, rheumatic camel that they hope could one day be used to deliver food and medicine to any town in Africa within five years of departure from its shabby hovel.)

Time for a late-inning rally

With all due respect to apple pie, I think the cliche should be updated to as American as baseball and the socialized risk/privatized profit paradigm. It's been a while since I posted anything here about the plan for a new baseball stadium in the District to house the transplanted Montreal Expos (who, incidentally, may be the only people currently moving south of that particular border). I'm not as steeped in the details of the city government's wheelings and dealings as I should be, but suffice it to say that public funding for privately owned teams is like a pitcher corking an opposing player's bat for him. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'd love to see more professional teams run on the Green Bay Packers model, where the team is owned by the city. I think it's such a cool idea that I'd personally throw in a few bucks to help fund such a team in DC. But alas, reality (often insidiously manipulated in this city by a certain bow-tied corporate fluffer) strikes back hard.

The mayor's plan for financing the stadium relies heavily on a tax to be levied on the biggest businesses in DC. Short of storming said businesses with torches and pitchforks, taxing them on everything down to their last cuff link is one of the best ways to try to level all the various social playing fields that tend to be angled steeply against the non-cuff-linked. But the problem here is one of priorities. The mayor has shown he has the ability to wring extra money out of city businesses, and what does he feel most merits the receipt of that money? Hospitals? Schools? Seat belts and airbags for the Red Line? No. Of course not. Because those are the priorities of average Washingtonians, and the mayor has repeatedly demonstrated his lack of interest in addressing those priorities.

I spent a few hours yesterday handing out anti-public-funding flyers at a grocery store in my neighborhood, and I had exactly one person argue with me. In fact, he wasn't even so much arguing the details of the plan as he was arguing that a stadium, regardless of how it's funded, would create jobs and that refurbishing RFK would require more money than it's worth. Another man responded to the flyer by saying, almost sheepishly, "But I like baseball." I told him that I did too, that I grew up on it, and that most of the anti's on this issue aren't anti-baseball, or even necessarily anti-stadium. What's at stake fundamentally are questions of city government and economics; baseball itself is peripheral. Overwhelmingly, the folks who talked to me demonstrated various levels of cynicism, frustration, and anger about the mayor's plan. I was truly heartened by the number of people who took the time to ask me serious questions about what was going on, including a few who struggled to converse in English. I only wish I were better versed in the details so that I could have been of more help to them.

I'm more hopeful after yesterday that there is an outside chance that the mayor's plan can be blocked by an oppositional citizenry. Polls have shown that two-thirds of District residents oppose public funding for the stadium. If we kick up a big enough fuss...who knows. For now, I'd like to direct your attention to the site of opposition coalition, No DC Taxes For Baseball. I'll try to get myself up to speed on the issue and post any other worthwhile links here.

Fuck the S--th

Comrade Scott pointed this out to me. It's too funny and irreverent and abusive to be classified as liberal whining. I approve.

Mark him down as undecided

"Artomatic 2004: Hanging is Too Good For It" is the title of Blake Gopnik's skewering of this year's Artomatic exhibition in today's Washington Post. An accompanying photo is captioned "Art that should be drawn - and quartered." I have to admit that these quality puns and the over-the-top nature of the piece had me chuckling - for a bit. I've yet to experience Artomatic for myself in my two-plus years in the District, and I'm not sure whether I'll manage to check it out this year either. I do think it's great to have an art exhibition that's basically open to anyone, though I'm willing to concede that such a display is bound to contain a number of works that even my untrained eye could identify as plainly bad. But so what? Gopnik's piece drips with elitism and ignores the fundamental problem of the commodification of art, which creates the problem of competition for space and attention between "high," "serious" art and "low," "amateur" art that he expends precious ink fretting over.

Any time I've found myself in a discussion about the nature of art (visual, musical, etc.), I've enjoyed the complexities involved in arguing about what it is, what it isn't, what it's worth, who makes it, what's their intent, what should be their intent, and so on. (My favorite summary of the topic comes from Marcel Duchamp: "The only thing that is not art is inattention.") There are thoughtful points to be made in favor of evaluating art "objectively" (though my use of quote marks here should make it clear that I'm a partisan of subjectivity), but you won't find them in M. Gopnik's rant:

Imagine living in Renaissance Florence and telling one of your Medici pals that you were going to have the family altarpiece painted by Joe Blow the baker, who felt like giving it a try. It would have seemed a joke. An Artomatic would have seemed sheer lunacy.

Other examples of sheer lunacy in 16th century Europe? Oh, I don't know... democracy, a heliocentric universe, the automobile...

I encourage folks to stop by the exhibit and form opinions (reasonable ones, for Christ's sake) of their own. Artomatic opens tomorrow, and you can find out more about it here.

Eat your "Support Our Troops" SUV magnet

The feature piece in The Nation this week is a dispatch from a military mother tortured by the absurdity and insanity of the war and the reality of her son's participation in it.

Another friend of Nick's was horrifically wounded when his Humvee stopped on an IED [improvised explosive device]. He didn't even have time to instinctively raise his arm and protect his face. Shrapnel ripped through his right eye, obliterating it to gooey shreds, and penetrated his brain...

I go visit him every week, and it breaks my heart to see the burned faces, the missing limbs, the limps, the vacant stares one encounters in an acute-care military hospital. In front of the hospital there is a cannon, and every afternoon they blast that sucker off. You should see all the poor guys hit the pavement. Though many requests have been made to discontinue the practice for the sake of the returning wounded, the general in charge refuses. Boom.

Scotland bans smoking in public

Scene: Scotland. A blasted heath. A cowboy, accompanied by a camel, slinks through the fog. Both weep quietly.

In all seriousness, good for the Scots. I raise my non-alcoholic glass to this victory for public health.

Organ melodies

Drummer says: get in touch with your heartbeat!

Organized sound will bankrupt me

Raise your hand if your love of music expands faster than your bank account. Good, I'm not alone then. While I don't hold it against friends o' mine who, say, buy all 20 discs of the Fugazi live CD series primarily to listen to the between-song banter (you know who you are and you know I'm not that jealous), it would be nice not to feel like I've been going overboard on music purchases - which I have recently.

Ok, I think that's a sufficiently responsible display of remorse, so onto the rock...

[Before I go any further, I have to plug the CD I'm listening to right now by a band called Barbara. Yes, they're a heavy bass and drum duo. Yes, they're Israeli. Yes, this is a live recording called A Blessing From the Angel of Death. And yes, it includes a song called "Hotdog." Pissed off, intense, even catchy, this recording kills.]

Barbara and other heavy stuff that continues to steal my heart notwithstanding, I've been drawn more and more to the mellower side of things, particularly in the electronic camp. People cooler than I have probably known about the fabulous French label Gooom for a while now, but I'm a bit of a johnny-come-lately when it comes to hip indie stuff. I'm only about ankle-deep in their catalog thus far, but I'm hooked. Their records are distributed domestically, which is good news for my ears and bad news for my pockets.

Also worth mentioning in the lazy/glitchy/poppy realm is the German label Morr, whose website features tons of their artists' streaming songs. As far as good old norteamericano music, I can't stop listening to Alias's trip-hop masterpiece Muted, and have been keeping mellow/moody indie rock such as Karate and Songs:Ohia in heavy rotation. In the spirit of "make new friends but keep the old," I've also been sending my hard-earned wage units to the likes of Hardcore Holocaust, Dead Alive, and Robotic Empire.

Last but certainly not least, I finally placed and received my first order from the underground gods and goddesses at SF's Aquarius Records, which I've already raved about on this page. That little package brought me the Barbara CD; the new El-P CD Collecting the Kid, which is a collection of some of his non-album and side project stuff and makes for pretty smooth listening (much less bombastic than Fantastic Damage); the newest Cyann and Ben disc (see Gooom above!), which is phenomenal dark rock/pop with plenty of piano and keyboards; and a disc of the late Italian composer/musician Luciano Cilio's pieces from about 25 years ago, which are somber, minimalistic, folk-inspired works from a troubled artist who killed himself at the age of 33. The sound clips from this record on the Aquarius site really grabbed me.

Oh, and I'm supposed to be getting an education in Swedish music in the mail from a certain dog-loving feral cat. Free CDr's crossing the Atlantic in my direction would help excuse my paying for shipping for his limited edition LP that's hanging out over in Deutschland.

O'Awesome

Like any decent human being, Brent Eyestone, who runs the rockin' semi-local indie/punk/hc label Magic Bullet, hates Bill O'Reilly. And he's putting his money where his mouth is. And probably hopes to put his fist where O'Reilly's mouth is.

ATTN: BILL O'REILLY: I hope you Google yourself and see this little note from me to you. It's real simple: I challenge you to tell me to "shut up" in person (I'm willing to pay the expenses to come to you) and we'll see what happens. If you're not too busy sexually harassing producers with your creepy oversized atrocity of a human head, let's get it on. On your show, on pay-per-view... however you want to do it. Debating, boxing, street-fighting... you name it and I will gladly take you on in any capacity. I guarantee it will be the very last time you tell another human being to "shut up" on the air or in real life.

Brent will be mass-producing stickers bearing the almost painfully accurate phrase, "O'REILLY: SPLOTCHY SHITHEAD." These stickers will be free to anyone who wants them, and will feature the Magic Bullet imprint so as to connect the message with the challenge. Whether you're into the punk rock or not, hop on over to the MB site and support the cause.

Post Election Stress Disorder

This is sad. The last thing we need to be doing is turning guns on ourselves.

The Day the Enlightenment Went Out

Good title, good piece. From today's NYT op-ed page.

Don't be fooled

In the next week or two, we'll hear a lot from "respectable opinion" types that Bush will govern from the center. To suggest this is to demonstrate complete detachment from reality. Don't buy it.

Revelatory polling

CNN is reporting a poll that shows "Just over half -- 51 percent -- of respondents said they were pleased with the outcome of the presidential election; 38 percent said they were upset."

But, isn't 51%, like, the same percentage that... oh, never mind.

Abu Ghraib Nation

Smugness. Arrogance. Parochialism. Violence on demand. It seems that George W. Bush is but a shadow of the US electorate. It was bad enough that he garnered as many votes as he did in 2000, but this election is truly, truly appalling. Say what you will about John Kerry, but every ballot cast for Bush this year was like a postcard sent to a grieving Iraqi family member inscribed with the words We do this because we can. Deal with it.

Let's cut to the chase. Listening to NPR today, practically all I heard about was how "moral values" trumped voters' other considerations at the polls. Something like 18% of voters named this as their top priority. "Moral values" in this country is a transparent euphemism for religion, in particular a reactionary brand of Protestantism which about one third of Americans espouse. That's 95 million people. Bush won the election with 59 million votes. You do the math. I haven't seen exit polling for numbers of evangelicals who voted yesterday, but suffice it to say that this core of Flat Earthers has enormous political power - even after the post-Reagan decline of groups like the Christian Coalition and Moral Majority. There are innumerable bad reasons for voting for Bush, but there is something particularly galling to me about the we-have-the-same-God rationale that was apparently employed with abandon at the polls. If there's one subject on which I am occassionally guilty of allowing my general instinct to respectful discussion and debate to slip into smugness and contempt, it's religion. I am an atheist, which is to say that while I don't know how the universe ended up here or how we ended up in it (like agnostics), I have yet to see a shred of evidence to suggest the existence of supernatural powers (unlike agnostics). Following from that, I consider any argument based on the existence of supernatural powers to be prima facie absurd. So, while my eyes may be rolling as I hear that tens of millions of Americans consider Bush to be the man for the job on Iraq or the economy or...anything, they positively pop out of my skull when I'm reminded that the Enlightenment has yet to reach large swaths of the supposedly most advanced nation on earth.

All of that is to say that if there is a culture war to be fought (really fought, whatever exactly that means), let's embrace it. That doesn't mean eschewing respectful approaches vis-a-vis working people in the so-called heartland who are convinced that their economic interests are being best served by the corporate raiders who happen to share their views on abortion. But I don't want to see one fucking inch given to the religious right as such. I don't want to get along with their ideology, I don't want to make compromises with their ideology, and I don't want to pretend that their ideology has even a shred of merit. If that further "divides" the country, so be it.

Le Onion gets the last word

U.S. Inspires World With Attempt At Democratic Election

"To see a country with such overwhelming problems—problems that affect every last citizen—have so many of its voters feel that they can still influence their leadership... words fail me," said Dae Jung Kim, a North Korean OSC delegate. "Certainly, my report to my own government will emphasize this. I will recommend that my leaders implement such American election-time strategies and tactics as would fit the North Korean model of personal freedom, such as their elegant Electoral College and the inscrutable voting machine."

11/2/04 7:36pm EST

I'm about to exit the workplace and catch the rest of the rat race on the moving picture machine. Hot spots for online updates (aside from CNN, networks, etc.) seem to be Slate, TPM, and the (if not indispensible, at least impossible to ignore) Drudge Report.

Looking forward to:

1) a blip of elation if all of Bush's godawful chickens come home to roost, and
2) renewed battle against the global neoliberal machine

Election Day interview with myself #2

MA: Second time a charm?
Me: One block over, no line, in and out.

MA: This Ashlee Simpson thing...
Me: My faith in art is, basically, shattered.

Election Day interview with myself #1

MA: So, your first trip to the polls today was...unconsummated?
Me: Yeah, I went to the wrong place. Nice day to spend an extra hour in line outside though. I'm going to try again at the proper location in an hour or so.

MA: Did you at least get to listen to a local tv reporter make a fool of himself during your futile wait?
Me: Sure did. Let me first say that at this polling place, the wait was roughly an hour when I got in line. The line stretched along most of a city block, but not a particularly long block, and the line wasn't around a corner or anything. When I was at the front of the line, there was a reporter and cameraperson from Channel 7 doing repeated takes along the lines of "this, as you can see, is the front of the line; we'd like to show you the end of the line, but..." The reporter was testing out different phrasings of this revelatory coverage, sounding really comical. And of course the "but" could easily have been followed by "we're pushing a pre-determined angle - heavy turnout - and plus, we're too lazy to reposition ourselves the few feet away it would take to get an angle that includes the back of the line, which is easily in shouting distance."

MA: What a fucking tool.
Me: Tell me about it.

MA: Last question: do you find it disturbing that when reading the word "cameraperson" in print, the "raper" part really jumps out at you?
Me: Yeah, weird, I was just noticing that too.

Election Day: the nadir of participatory democracy

Whether or not you stop by your local polling place tomorrow, and regardless of who gets or doesn't get your vote, keep these two things in mind:

1) From what is known, and from what can be reasonably assumed and inferred, a second Bush term is the worst of all possible worlds.

2) Voting in a national election is the bluntest and most detached method of creating political change. Recognize that while we pat ourselves on the back for skipping an episode of Dr. Phil once every four years to squeeze our fat lazy asses into a voting booth, American policy is a life-and-death matter to millions and millions of people around the world. I don't think I need to tell you that the Democrats and Republicans sound strikingly similar notes on many issues. We need to stop feeling good about being part of an oasis of "democracy" and start reclaiming that word from the elite, arrogant rulers who pander for our attention every thousand days or so.

Collateral Damage

Recent study says 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion. We're directly responsible for many of them and indirectly responsible for all of them. Obviously the nihilist Zarqawi/Baathist suicide bombings and executions account for a large chunk of the deaths, and regardless of their illegitimacy, they're only happening because they've been triggered - remember "Bring it on"?