Apres Levitt et Dubner, et à cher frère Cadre.

When America had industry we were in the unique position of being so big that you could feasibly dump a thousand miles away without creating an international incident. This is why we invented the biggest smokestacks, pumping waste into the air to fall dozens, hundreds, a thousand miles away. Our foundries poured poison into the heartland, and for a time as the Europeans looked at their own pollution problems and extrapolated to our scale, there was a real catastrophe on our hands.

Technology saved us, as it always does. The official history gives credit for smaller stacks and scrubber rims to the market, but the state and its scientist pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. And in time, as Reagan and the finance industry broke the industrial heartland and auctioned it off piece by piece, the need to throw poison into the air slacked off and the Yellow Sea took the acrid burden from Lake Erie. We could at last throw away Silent Spring, which sympathized with mosquitos; everything was all right again.

But Pandora’s box was stuck open wide, and three generations of growth and stagnation made China and ourselves coke and gas junkies. No matter how clean we cleaned our act, our looms and drive-trains were as ominous in their silence as unattended infants. The carbon flowed as the carbon must flow.

The Europeans again looked at their own pollution problems, the summer storm and winter drought and the rising of the sea, and they looked with alarm to us and to China, to Russia and to the second world, and we realized there was a catastrophe on our hands. We had stopped the destruction of the ozone long before we stopped the poisonous haze of sulfur, but the carbon was different, we were told: an integral part of who we were, and if that was to change we would need to gather electricity different ways. The wind, the sea, the sun, the atom - some source of free energy other than the earth’s ancient biomass would be needed.

But the people who survived the American economy had bottom lines to protect, and they saw denial as a better investment than cooptation. For a time there was a crisis as the bearded men who knew why we had seen the hurricanes from Hell were denied by billionaires in baseball caps. Wind farms are an eyesore, said they, and solar power is for fags. What we need is a way to keep on burning ancient carbon forever (for God will always furnish us with more).

Economists saved us, as they always do. To save our cities from the rising sea and the buffeting sky would require India and China to have nice things; what we needed instead was a pump, a giant pump, a big old hose as long as the biggest skygouging smoke stacks ever planned, so big you could pump poison into the air and it’d never come back. But what magical poison would save us from the carbon dioxide? How could we undo the greenhouse flux that had been a part of the Earth’s climate since life began to metabolize oxygen?

Sulfur dioxide, said they. We remembered the name but we couldn’t recall where from; the oil and coal men assured us it was from their pitiable complaints that they had to spend all this money throwing it away - when it could save us from ourselves! The market had finally come through for us, and the economists and their corporate pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. We could at last throw away Michael Moore and Al Gore, who were fat and had beards and sympathized with ecoterrorists. Everything was all right again.

The hose was delivered by the lowest bidder, not really a hose but a massive spire of a fine modern resin. They did a serviceable job, but they didn’t overbuild it; it wasn’t that expensive and we would just build more when this one started to degrade. A mainframe, for now inert, would work out how much sulfur needed to be in the air to maintain a permanent volcanic-style haze, to cool the Earth back down a degree and a half.

At the appointed date the sulfur levels were off by no less than ten percent, but that would be solved in time. There was concern in areas outside the thirty-mile circle in a near-abandoned rez no one could enter without permission that the hose was leaking; the contractors given the job of maintaining it affirmed that emissions were within parameters. The gas we had lost in the sky, said they, must have undergone a chemical change or floated into the sky. More plausible, surely, than some kind of conspiracy to cover up the poor construction of the pump.

Whatever its problems, the sulfur plan had given us back our freedoms - our lives, our liberty, our pursuit of carbon dioxide. We had not silenced the beardos but they no longer mattered; the plan had worked, and if it stopped working we could just build another plant.

Some time later they explained that the pump facility was old, and because of alarmists and nimby-pimbies it was hard to site them where we would have liked; because the sites we got weren’t ideal, didn’t have the access to refineries and strong security we had in Arizona, they were smaller and weaker. It was a sign of the concept’s strength, we understood, that what would work with one twenty-mile hose would work with five or ten. We had a site in Turkey; we had a site in Hawaii; we had a site in Tibet, in Rhodesia and Patagonia, two in the Northern Territory and one in Finnish waters north of the Arctic Circle. They weren’t as efficient as the older site, but they got the job done.

Our greatest fear, that terrorists or Russians or some other monsters would destroy our last hope because they resented the carbon scam being over, never came to pass, and even though dropping Earth’s temperature below its prior levels took until the 60s, the worst of the crisis was over.

The beardos would never be happy about our clever plan, and in their resentful anger they made the inefficient coral and plankton species dying out to be the sulfur-plan’s fault. A well-known blogger with a Harvard bachelor’s told a TV host that the ocean being more acrid than lakes was a big deal, and we laughed and laughed, because it always has been.

When the Arizona stack fell it hadn’t been our primary pump for decades, but that didn’t stop a lot of misguided concern about the carbon production of the Sinobanana’s trucks or new paracoal plants in unihabited Congolese desert. And there were calls for pump regulation by statists, and there were ignorant claims that no living thing had inhabited the Sea of Cortes since before the disaster. But we ignored their foolishness, and when the carbon dioxide production that buoyed our economy rebounded, we replaced the old Arizona pump with cheaper, less heavy stacks in Belarus, Saudi Iraq, and the islands the US had given Cuba in the 30s.

Communism’s corrosive effects linger on, as we all know, and the new plants had a few minor incidents - but those piled up, and before anyone (the beardos’ babbling aside) knew what was happening, we had random tides of dead fish and crop failures. Those failures got bad enough that instigators in Africa readily started riots, producing a real scare as the sulfur production slacked off. In the time it took us to build reserve facilities, the haze dropped badly enough that air passengers reportedly saw the ground at night and the Earth’s temperature had risen again.

Automation had saved us, as it always does. We threw away the local laborers and building inspectors and kept them out with drones and lasers, and we were at last free of their sympathizing with food-moochers and wobblies. The pumps would last a hundred years.

Mammals and bridges lasted fifty, and the Hoover Dam two hundred and twenty. Whether anything else from what we called Earth would write its names on the cosmos before the Sun erased Nixon’s and Gandhi’s I couldn’t tell you.

Behold this classy ad for some kind of fascist rally or something being held by Michelle Bachmann:

1) Couldn’t you have found something less lynchy than a lasso, what with race being in the news ex. Jackson Jive, a Georgia peckerwood making and promoting a veiled death threat to a representative from another state, and that entire classy NewsMax coup thing? It’s not like you really ever want to ask your constituents to fantasize about lynching the government, but now is a particularly bad time. Oh, who am I talking to.

2) It took me a few minutes to realize this next thing, and I find that depressing. I hate living in Nevada.

3) Madame Sturmtruppefuhrerin, I know you’re really enthusiastic about Real America stringing the coloreds up high, but if I may: in what conceivable way could you take back reins with a fucking lasso?

Something touches every free man deep inside when he reads a line of Hunter Thompson. Some make a career of biting him, although some wind up simply biting the drug-frenzy culture that sprang up around him, aping his carriage or his sense of adventure. That is not what that is. Neither one is. This is just a response.

Thompson cut to the heart of what made Vegas as a business, but like many others he swept in heading east from San Fran, thundered through the high desert and parachuted in. In Fear and Loathing he can barely tell if he is in Boulder City. Someone coming in from any direction but California way could never mistake the two. They lie on opposite sides of an invisible border, one of a dozen identical borders that define life between Kansas City and Yreka.

Reno used to be much the way we were, but we got more high-octane and weird after the decision to sink a major dam into the Colorado on the Nevada-Arizona border became a reality. All of a sudden there was another big wave of spicks and micks and Jocks and polocks and every type of God’s own wop, and once the work was done the mob saw in us the last place in this awful state that labor was a buyer’s market. It was a little vision of Paradise for the thing that would become America after our industry died screaming, a monetarist American Dream. Thompson was looking at it in its hideous caul, back when the Mob still ran things and the casinos had a stake in a good crop of tourists raising real hell.

Reno, though, Reno was sitting on top of Carson City, part of the giant pre-auto cluster-fuck that evolved from Virginia and her sister lodes. It grew out of services provided to silver miners, and you can’t fob off men who work with dynamite and quicksilver with pussy and poker alone. The Biggest Little City On Earth, they call themselves - a sort of vile Moral Majority taunt, a formal craven-call treaty between the Valley Baptists and the Mormon tide. We never got the way that you got in California or Oregon or Washington, even British Columbia and Alaska, the big isolated cities serving a cross-section of humanity and the local religious nuts seething in the wilderness. They got into one of them big cities of ours good and early.

The Biggest Little City On Earth. I mean, listen to that shit. The fix was in, wasn’t nobody lying about it. Johnny Cash could only barely tell, on his clearest days, that you could kill a man there without winding up in Sacramento or Salt Lake.

—

Anyone who has lived here has gone to a casino not just without gambling, but without even the faintest interest in gambling. Until you have, you’re a tourist. It’s where the shows happen, it’s where you find the closest we have to good food, it’s where the theatres and auditoria are. You have to walk through two floors of casino to see a movie in the whitest burb of this Goddamn town. For legal reasons, they have to mark off what is Casino and what isn’t, but the carpet and walls are the same - driving your feet and body inexorably towards video poker. (You see, with the Colorado emptying into the Mexican dirt, we don’t drain to the sea any more. It’s ecologically irresponsible to throw human trash out just anywhere. Thus: video poker.)  You are always either in a cozy little womb or a vast domed arch, and the wombs are falling out of fashion. Caesar’s Palace even has its own meticulously-maintained, obviously false sky - and you shop there. The smoky haze lifts year by year, to the point that this day you could spend all week in even the shittiest purpose-built casino withut getting cancer. You drink to pass the time paying to play a shitty video game; the tables are for Aryans of good pedigree. That hokey Don’t Gamble With Marijuana sign is hardly necessary any more.

—

It’s a common misunderstanding among tourists that the people they see represent part-timers or working stiffs. The ones manning the pulpits are no common monasts but little lords in the making. From the very beginning, the casinos have done all they can to create a class of well-off private eunuchs born into the maroon, grab ‘em out of high school with too much money to know what to do with. The visibles, they’re well-off. They might not like their jobs - God, who does? - but they pay fantastic, and they have no cross-applicable skills; nobody but another casino can poach your lumpenbourgeois. The only other human beings who ain’t in there to play carnival are the help; Eastern Europeans, these days, the predictable casualties of our exported supply-side revolution, but it takes all kinds. Brown a plus. English not required. The American eye is trained to politely ignore them for everyone’s convenience.

The lower-middle-class stiffs are similarly out of sight. They work in support industries, catering and keeping up our Potemkin shops, but that’s the glamor of Vegas. Get Mickey while he’s young, keep him lily-white, and put up with a little labor expense for his glove-wearing ass and everyone will believe you’re the happiest place on Earth. An endless succession of unnecessaries, bellhops and valets and doormen and retainers, taking tips they don’t need to make the clients they’re not doing anything substantial for feel like some kind of decadent Southern patriarch, but with a heart of gold. We’re a town of scraggle-moustachioed Mormon pimps and fresh-faced young idiots with welcoming mouths. No wonder Penn and Teller set up shop here.

—

There are two types of house of worship: the inspiringly oppressive and the sleepily comforting. Cathedrals and chapels. Chapels have gone out of fashion - every church a megachurch, there to remind you that God is bigger and more important than you, and come with top-of-the-line remote-controlled presentation scrollsheets to convince the faithful that He needs your money. That represents a leap of logic it used to be vaguely obscene to even suggest, and it’s one we pioneered out West: business and faith, together at last. Denver worked on the faith, we worked on the business, both animated to new heights in actual depravity by a shared terror Mormonica. We were the last, best hope of what was becoming America.
In Vegas, Disneyland crowded out the mob and cozy, welcoming obscenity of the circus, and unlike those Denver quitters, we never let the side benefits to cancerous growth get in our way. A couple of dudes strung out on speed was all it took to knock Denver out of the good grace of their capitalist God; it only made our Capitalism-God stronger. Family Values muscled out the Family and the figurative circus replaced the real one, and tits sprouted on billboards like mushrooms in rainy weather as the town’s strip clubs and whore houses went moribund. No country for dick suckers here - nobody even notices any more that prostitution is illegal in Clark County, even the ones who spent their entire trip at the Bellagio.

That poor fool Thompson! Still obsessing over a man quaint enough to bug his opponent as our friends in Iran coronated Saint Reagan, still chasing big winners in an era of strutting, regal losers. He never had any damn idea.

—

These days only a few vestiges remain of Vegas as the nerve center of the Man, the place your bosses went on vacation to abandon their puritanical lives. When our mayor, a vaguely corrupt mob lawyer who shilled a specific gin to children, a man who embodies all that the Clark Containment Pact stands against - a drunken old mobby Jew with an irrepressible decadence - inevitably descends from power, he will be replaced almost without fail by some service-industrial laborite or functionaire, either way another moderate Democrat without opinions about developers. A land-developer or one of their white serfs; the way it’s always been in Reno, where all it takes is flipping a truck stop and being a good Temple and Party man to qualify you as Il Duce.

—

The casinos are laying off their wealthy catamites, a seeming first, and everyone has grown proper spooked. The Bush era was good for us, because we’ve become a sort of embodiment of American collective delusion, the kind it doesn’t take drugs or depravity to produce. Our business model has de-evolved exclusively to middle-managers coming back from an illegal hand-job thinking of themselves as pagan chieftains of Turquery, and you can only shine up being a member of the bad luck crowd so far. When the bloom wears off, we’re just another bullshit tourist town.

—

Washoe County used to be one of the country’s more Republican urban counties, and this year it went for Obama by margins typical of the rest of the left coast. This threatens a break, or perhaps represents a cleavage already in progress, in the accepted agreement in Republican politics in Nevada - Reno gets funding and political power under Republican administrations out of proportion to usual rural-resentment patterns as long as they help keep a lid on Clark. In my optimism in the wake of the election, I saw this as a sign that Reno had welched; and so after did the lame-duck Republican government pull UNR funds and other spillover perqs with an unreserved furor. But the reality is that the pact is obsolete. Our civic genius these days is Wynn, representing all the filthy white Dubaihis who banked on the bullshit economy lasting forever. The mayor, not the Governor, is the walking dead.

Goodbye Raoul Duke! Goodbye “Las Vegas”!

(EDIT: Well, supposed to be brief, anyway. You know how I am.)

In my Soc 101 class I had this talented West African professor who had to learn to basically go through the motions, because 101 classes are basically teaching high school. 300 was recent and there was presumptive support for the position that torture be used for intelligence. Fuck yeah, said the man who nearly drunkenly murdered a friend while slaughtering drugged-up game birds, we torture.

As it must eventually, we came up to the Milgram Experiment. They had footage, and it went exactly the way you learn: these people said they wouldn’t hurt someone in X way, insisted they were moral people, and then, under pressure from authority, all but one smoking man - though fretting a little at some point, after the screams stopped - kept on going.

As the actor screamed in pain, started shouting for help, and eventually went silent - and with each expression of worry or anguish on the subjects’ faces - the classroom busted up laughing. The experiment was introduced in detail. It was understood that the subjects thought they were electrocuting a human being to death. Peals of laughter, every time. He watched wordlessly in a sort of shell shock as the students filed out at the end, and in an email I sent to him the next day I apologized for other people’s behavior for what I believe to be the first and only time in my life.

I went home dazed. To this day, the incident remains the most horrifying thing I have ever witnessed, and I watched my grandparents attempt to neglect my severely ill mother to death. At the time I could muster nothing but fury or tears.

This is how I usually end that story, or with the 300 analogy. (I’ve beaten that horse to death by now.) But now I look back on it, I remember the smoker. I don’t recall if they gave his name, but he was a raw-looking chain-smoking man who reacted with outrage to the proceedings. He stopped shocking the man after it became clear he wasn’t conscious. In the interview before they debriefed him, he seemed almost remorseful about it, but insisted that whatever they were after wasn’t worth his conscience. Society does a good job of twisting people into monsters, but there is enough courage in the human animal that some will sooner break than bend. And those fuckers didn’t seem to think he was so funny.

Via Greenwald, here is Digby on the taser and its accompanying rise in social torture and authoritarian police behavior. I link this for two reasons: (A) I agree with her 100% on this and (B) I once supported the development of microwave non-lethal weaponry, at least in theory. I’ve increasingly come to believe that American politics makes it simply too tempting to trust domestic forces with. (Not that, what with indifference for the actual rape of Posse Comitatus instead of imaginary FEMA death camps, that distinction is going to matter long anyway, but we might as well postpone the inevitable.)

• Peter Gabriel’s song “Rhythm of the Heat” (Security, 1982), tells about Jung’s visit to Africa, during which he joined a group of tribal drummers and dancers and became overwhelmed by the fear of losing control of himself. At the time Jung was exploring the concept of the collective unconscious and was afraid he would come under control of the music. Gabriel learned about Jung’s journey to Africa from the essay Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams (ISBN 0-691-09968-5). In the song Gabriel tries to capture the powerful feelings the African tribal music evoked in Jung by means of intense use of tribal drumbeats. The original song title was Jung in Africa.^[56]

Elders are an important information vector in human societies, and a critical one in preliterate ones; they have a long memory, an uncommon education, and a generally high level of respect, time for reflection, and external support. One of the major watersheds between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon was the far more efficient care for the elderly among the latter. More members of your group living to old age meant that you would never live in a society without generations of learned experience. While all other things being equal women tend to live longer, in early man all other things weren’t equal - women had to expend enormous amounts of resources to go through pregnancy and childbirth, and the unprecedented likelihood of death during childbirth made it a risky endeavor.

Menopause was helpful here - it meant that women’s reproductive lives would end past their ability to survive the average pregnancy, costing little in reproductive terms and being of tremendous benefit to society. But there would have been a tremendous social advantage to the existence of spinsters - infertile or minimally-fertile women - in that they would be much more likely to live to old age than their fertile sisters.

While same-sex sexual contact is common among primates and other animals, homosexual pair-bonding is only frequently observed in adulterous species - those with marital bonds often broken by their participants. It probably serves a significant social purpose in decreasing the mating pool without decreasng the number of socially active adults or causing sexual tension; whatever its purpose in reproductive biology, the prevalence of homosexuality in human societies would have a desirable side-effect of producing spinsters, who would significantly boost the average number of elders in a group at any time. In purely natural-selective terms, being homosexual means your relatives are more likely to pass on their genes.

The result of more elders is an increased reproductive incentive towards intelligible speech, mechanical deftness, and innovation, and away from strong instincts. In social terms, it means non-elders live longer and better, have more time to think and participate in culture, and have more information to pass on to their children.

It might be an exaggeration to say that the existence of (near-)exclusive homosexuality is responsible for human civilization, but it might not be. And at the very least, it’s pretty important.

There is a specific green color you have never seen on a monitor. There may be a way to approximate it that I don’t know of, but unfortunately I just don’t have any way of showing it to you here. Here is where I have seen it:

- certain particularly green turquoises;
- emeralds cut so as to sit right on the boundary of transparent and translucent;
- A shallow inlet over coarse white sand seen from a height;
- One of the colors in a Paas easter-egg dye kit;
- Copper let to patinate in saltless air.

I’ve always regarded this with a sort of aesthetic familiarity for no particular reason - odd in that, within its own region of our visual spectrum, I tend to prefer darker rather than lighter colors. And because the easter-egg association is the only one I have significant personal experience with - and because it’s been a decade since I’ve colored an egg - there’s a certain nostalgia to its appeal.

As it turns out, the appeal and nostalgia and my inability to just link you to the color have a specific, shared reason: It is outside of the RGB gamut. You can produce it with no standard color monitor. For computerized design (which on the balance I prefer), it is well outside of the toolbox - and as such, most people capable of finding work in graphic design have not used it since the 80s. Not only is it impossible to view on a monitor (and I’ve been glued to one since age 3), it’s impossible to work with on a computer.

To sift through humanity’s intellectual output such as it has been for the last five or so years, one would find vanishingly little evidence that the color was known to us at all.

O what awful things I must do for Czechoslovakia, thought Vaclav Havel as George Bush ineptly plundered his ass. It had begun as a threesome, but Reagan had to be repeatedly reminded whose mouth he was fucking, got tired, and was now just watching. Unfortunately, as the senior official in the room, he had to be placated.

“Oh yes! Is democracy balls deep in ass!” He affected the absurd accent to avoid being mistaken for Margaret Thatcher. “Yee-haw! Yankee come home!” The former CIA chief was cold and businesslike, the way he had always been.
The silent vice-president quickened in his thrusts, the best sign he had ever gotten that the dismal work was near its conclusion. “Yes, cowboy! Win big game! Win it for Gipper!”

Reagan looked up, his every inch of flesh sagging over something or other, with a newfound twinkle. “Yeah, Ivan! I’m going to soak you like I did Hitler!”
Silence, then, as George climaxed. A few awkward seconds later, Ronald, noticing, made a series of loud, obviously fraudulent noises and gradually worked his half-limp dick back into his pants.

“Is good, gentlemen. Is new dawn for democracy.”
“Please help clean up the President, Mr. Havel.”
“Sure, is okay.” He picked up the toupee, carefully avoiding the obvious sticky patches, and delicately placed it on Ronald’s spear-bald head. He then reached to pull down the President’s fly when suddenly he snapped into activity.

“God damn it Rock I’m a married man! You can’t just suck me off in public any more, and no one’s more sorry about that than - Oh, it’s just the Russky.”
“Am Czech, your majesty.”
“Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Havel looked to the Vice-President, who nodded curtly, and he finally zipped up the elder man’s fly and moved to flee the room.

O what awful things I must do for Czechoslovakia, thought Vaclav Havel.
“Oh, and Vaclav?”
“Yes?”
“Get Klaus and Friedman on your way out, would you?”

Although it lacks any statistical punch, Blumenthal’s interviews of American assholes in Israel would seem to suggest the point I made earlier: the Americo-Israeli project seems to disproportionately produce voters in Israel who have no interest in Israel as anything but a political project. I imagine that if one were to poll American Israelis, one would find a disproportionate level of antagonism towards Obama in the wake of Cairo and Netanyahu’s dickery.