mye Balleſ growethe Fatte & buſtethe preſentlye / Jizze inne thye Face / I doe propheſye
Prophesy is an interesting word, partially because it doesn’t actually mean anything*; it is the verbal form of prophecy, and a fairly predominantly American Evangelical phenomenon. It rests on a wackily fundamental misunderstanding, and it’s everywhere.
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Today is the last Martin Luther King Junior day to be observed under George W. Bush; he is, in spite of himself, an icon for the religious right - in the temple of a sort of Aryan superhero a grand emissary from Mammon incongruously welcomed.
The next one will be observed under Barack Obama; such is the nature of our polity that he represents (for now) the relative left, a man of centrist convictions generally aligned with the neo-liberal movement, a sighted lunatic in a nation of blind lunatics, a Lodge or Rockefeller surrounded by Goldwaters.
I can’t expect, as long as the religious right continues to dominate the media’s picture of ‘religious issues’ and the right-wing power-structure remains in place, that we will see a national candidate, or really even a national figure, similar to King. The Christian left has these days been relegated to the sidelines, pushed into common cause with soft-rightists and eccentrics.
Martin Luther King Junior Day 2009 will be celebrated under an evangelical reactionary, and Martin Luther King Junior Day 2010 under America’s closest equivalent to a Christian Democrat. We can at least take some comfort in the country’s rejection of the alternative.
Any one of the millions of men with sufficiently non-nasal alto voices and severe delusions about the American class system burst into a kindergarten, set a succession of children down on their knees, and told them one of two stories.
1) “Well, we spent years training and outfitting the Georgian army, to the point that they yelled and cheered like Americans as their troops poured into a breakaway area with a long history of ethnic conflict with Georgians and bound by treaty to remain demilitarized. They got as far as the capital, and held it for two days, before foul interloper Putin - completely without warning and cause - invaded, slaughtering armed Georgian innocents en masse and driving thousands of military refugees behind the Ossetian border. But they had done work we could be proud of - in those two days in the capital they left no stone unturned in the Jewish quarter, and it seems that the Caucasian state would have exercised its precious sovereignty to purge Georgia of the last Russophile Semites befouling their territory with Marxism.”
“What’s the moral of this story, strange man?”
“Putin, the swarthy traitor, opposes America in its quest to free Earth of Jewish tyranny.”
2) “Well, after the twin humiliations of the long-demonized Hamas winning Palestinian elections insisted on by Bush and a failed neocon-backed invasion of Lebanon, Israel decided it had had enough of failing and invaded the Gaza Strip in an effort to make the politics of Israel’s Palestinian wards more Israel-friendly. The completely spontaneous combined-arms assault surgically neutralized hundreds of deviously unarmed Hamas militants and eliminated what little infrastructure Hamas, in its perfidy, had built up to circumvent Israel’s democratic, self-determining decision as a free nation-state to completely blockade Gaza to any and all traffic, including “food”, “water”, “humanitarian aid”, and other vital Islamofascist instruments. To this day, Gaza remains under heavy occupation by Israeli forces, a historical first that will surely disarm the nationalist radicals dominating their local politics.”
“What’s the moral of this story, strange man?”
“Don’t fuck with the Jews.”
(BONUS FUN STORIES to come when a cartoon defaming symbols of Israel warrantlessly attacks the Jews for the Israeli state’s behavior; when long-term US ally Uzbekistan makes rootless Bolshevist radicals wear yellow badges to ensure the continued freedom of world markets; and when Israeli dissidents treasonously abandon the quest to destroy Islamofascist children wherever they be born.)
Climate change, on the other hand . . .
It is December 15, 2008. The Las Vegas valley is a city at the same latitude as San Francisco (naturally mild weather) in the middle of the northern Mojave Desert (little rainfall, extreme temperatures). So we do occasionally get snow - except it only sticks at night and in the dead of winter. Las Vegas should only ever get about half an inch deep in snow in late January.
In North Las Vegas, they’re reporting an inch or more. The photos are foggy, with non-evergreens - trees which normally only start to brown and die around Christmas, because we have no autumn - covered in snow.
We’ve been through fog this winter so thick visibility was limited to feet. I know most of you are probably from temperate climates, so I want you to imagine a climate where it is spring and fall for about two weeks, winter for about a month, and summer for the rest of the year. We get so hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk in February. We get torrential rain in the early winter that has been taking place in the first weeks of November.
Before the year is out people will have slipped and killed themselves on black ice around the Strip.
I wish there was something funny I could say about this, but the capital of the Mojave is covered in more snow than New York got at any point in 1999. I love snow and all, but I’m actually pretty fucking terrified right now.
Jesus Christ. While I’m used to how consistently wrong the establishment’s favorite line (back the badge, then backpedal) winds up being, it’s rare to see it revealed wrong so goddamn quickly. The militarization of the convention police departments (especially the RNC’s) was regarded as a necessary precaution against radicals; and even reliable liberals ignored what amounted to the decision of the securitarian establishment to throw the Third Amendment out (evidently out of spite, because Jesus, the third amendment? Was ignoring fishing licensing too much work or something?) - and now we have clear signs that the country plans to have a full division stationed domestically - and live.
Falling empires tend to take one of two trajectories: a grand moment of clarity and the sloughing of the imperial clothes after a bitter external struggle (the Netherlands; France; the UK) or violent, overcompensatory oppression of their home subjects in ways pioneered in the Empire (Russia). I was hoping that we would have the former; turns out that our professional death-squad cheerleaders can’t stand the thought of our dwindling veto power over our subjects’ destiny will be the end of civilians being destroyed with M16s. Sorry, blacks!
THESE United States have provided to the world, as shall doubtless pale in comparison to posterity, the very model of the geometric growth of men and wealth, & all respectable populationists assert that, should we as God made manifest close our shores to the Celestial and Slavic menace, the corrupt fecundity of to-day’s Papist and Deseretman shall be drowned as surely by our swelling numbers as the same heathens shall in good time be drowned in the Colorado & its tributaries in the coming century of good government.
But even this grand growth of the number of Christian men shall not compare to the eternal surge of white betterment by means of the rail-road. I shall withal to all men of good wisdom reveal the nature of the coming rail-transit singularity & conclusively prove that to all human misery, Marxism & Georgism & other anarchists, and alternative modes of transport (including even the grand and glorious tall-ship) the engine bears in its consist a doom as sure as the late end of Massa’s wantless provender for the Negro race. And though we shall doubtless face all manner of challenge and terror in the coming dominion of the steam engine - as those innocents quailing in the pacific Germanies at Napoleon’s relentless sponsorship of the chemin-de-fer would readily confide - it is worth it simply to stand at the boundless frontier of a promised-land free of rivers, women, and the loathsome opium tariff. Join me, your humble & obedient servant and engineer, when next ☞Dancing!!! sees fit to serialize my work.
There is a distinct area which many characterize as ‘Appalachia’ that emerges distinctly when you look at the counties that voted for McCain in 2008 by a higher margin than for Bush in 2004. The strong temptation is to write this off as ‘racism’, but I don’t think that’s technically accurate.
What must be remembered is the regional divide between what in Virginia were known as the ‘tuckahoe’ and ‘cohee’ - between the early Baptist Scots-Irish subsistence pastoralists and later primary truck-workers and the largely Anglican planter aristocracy which wound up decaying and then modernizing into what we know as the Deep South.
These areas were electrified and linked firmly to the outside world in living memory; except for the areas overlapping with the Rust Belt they’ve never had a major stake in American exports or the global economy, and - most importantly - they were never host to any serious attempts at slave-holding plantations, were subject to only extremely sporadic and occasional black migration from the Deep South, and have never seen significant immigration and only very rarely have even seen internal emigration (the large exception being the initial wave of Scots-Irish settlers moving inward as usable tidewater land became valuable for cotton production and the pre-Revolutionary strictures on westward movement disappeared - and those largely settled the westward leg of the Cohee boomerang).
As Tim Krieder suggested in The Pain - When Will It End’s America’s Scum Belt, the motto of the area could well be ‘You ain’t from around here, are you?’ - not exactly hostile, but far from friendly, and a gentle and constant reminder of the area’s fundamental resistance to outside influence. The post-Civil War mainstreaming of pro-Confederate opinion in the area spawned the secondary, ahistoric rallying cry of the secessionist and states’ rights movement - ‘We just want to be left alone’.
Clinton’s campaign, which faced after Super Tuesday a primary map which was nothing like as favorable as she would have needed to cinch the nomination before the convention, realized that there was one reliable way to get the whites of the South, who had (with few exceptions) gained little from racism and didn’t hold the oppression of blacks as near and dear as the Republicans had hoped - pointing out Obama’s exoticness.
Not in general terms, either - he was an elitist! a bold young man, in stark contrast with the region’s tradition of political lifers! Maybe possibly just could be gay, certainly not a member of their church, and by God, a black- just like they have in Richmond!
This was a sound strategy for capturing the region, but the problem is that even coming from a campaign with reasonable liberal bonafides, the entire exercise stank to outside observers of racism. Clinton won Pennsylvania but lost the Carolinas, which should have been clear evidence that she wasn’t going to smash Obama in the border South so badly that the convention would decide anything.
Of course, there’s nothing the Republicans like more than other people’s ideas, and sure enough the McCain campaign decided to plagarize this one. They started drawing contrasts between the Democrats and ‘real Americans’, started calling the tidelanders Communists, started suggesting that Obama wasn’t just black but a dangerous radical.
This didn’t exactly endear him to the High Cohee - after all, they don’t believe they have a monopoly on being Americans, they were (witness Pogo, for Chrissake) pretty indifferent to red-baiting throughout modern history, and they had less objection to blackness per se than its presence in their lives.
But the fallout was incredible. In a moment, the flailing effort to capture the south of Virginia suddenly alienated everyone outside of its panhandle - he was clearly trying to pander to a group that everyone outside of Appalachia saw as ignorant hicks, and he wasn’t even doing it convincingly. You can excuse Clinton’s seeming race-baiting away on it simply being how things work in Appalachia, but a campaign comprising an Arizonan and an Alaskan couldn’t come even close to pretending that. It won him West Virginia, but it cracked the Republican hold on the Deep South - which knew and held in contempt the cohee opinion of their big-city decadence - and it’s probably opened a suppurating wound in the Southern Strategy.
In short: we can excuse away charges of ‘racism’ against the Clinton campaign on this basis. They knew the difference, in a way it would take someone from Appalachia to be familiar with, between hating blacks and holding everything outside the near and familiar world in a sort of sweeping contempt - but that difference never occurred to anyone on McCain’s staff. Huckabee might have been able to pull it off - but McCain’s dog whistle was never even close to inaudible. Heck of a job, Johnny.
