If you, like me, read Salon, you might have noticed a particularly odious recent effort - a well-crafted if fairly obvious concern troll by a Michael Lind. One learns from him that the party for which we vote is the McGovern Party - as opposed to our grandparents’ Roosevelt Party - and this is why the Nixon Party has been faring so well; we’re a bunch of queer eggheads unwilling to take it easy on poor innocent white-collar bigots.

His fundamental thesis is one that, if he actually intended to explore it honestly, is interesting enough - that leftist economic policies have a broad base of support among the public, unlike the more evenly divided world of ’social values’. (He touches on the ones that makes his case best - gay marriage, abortion - without actually touching on the social issues which are as wildly uncontroversial as the minimum wage, like the separation of church and state and the right to non-sectarian schools, that the Republicans back to the hilt as a matter of partisan fealty.) In short, his argument should be Stalinist. I’ve said before that Stalinism is the basic political default for modern society; that Americans fall into this pattern is uninstructive unless one is really looking for Friedmanesque cosmopolitan corporatism. But Lind is no Stalinist; he has been born and raised in the high tradition of Republican (or possibly Blue Dog) slurs on their blood enemies.

The Republican antipathy for the Democrats is almost impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t, as they do, approach politics as professional wrestling. One of its many side-effects is making concern trolling almost impossible to disguise; the vituperation we’ve had for Obama of late is their default behavior towards politicians with the wrong letter in front of their state in the news ticker, no matter what their politics. Educating doesn’t broaden their minds but deepens their habits; it is probably only an accident of learning that he referred to the pre-1976 Democrats as the ‘Roosevelt party’ rather than the ‘Al Smith party’. (If the usage sounds awkward to you either way, it is because you don’t generally identify with a party whose noun doubles as an adjective - which is also why you don’t think of ‘Democrat Party’ as a spectacular laugh riot.)

Why in particular McGovern, though? Simple: he lost. The position the liberal blogosphere falls into at its best tends to be somewhere around Eugene McCarthy’s; McGovern was his day and age’s equivalent of Bayh - conservative, extremely well-established, and from a proudly politically ignorant state. This is why Lind uses him; it allows him to call the Democrats defeatist hippies without actually familiarizing himself with a pacifist or leftist. (It never occurs to him, in his use of ‘the Nixon Party’, to accept that Nixon lied about getting us out of Vietnam; he took a pointless war and made it atrocious - but no, what was important about Nixon was busing.) The modern Democratic Party toes the line drawn by Carter - mawkishly, stupidly ‘bipartisan’; willing to accept for his party equal blame for the horrific damage done by the right; a special kind of Jesus who turns other people’s cheeks and would make giant puppets of prominent moneychangers if it weren’t so gosh-darn extremist. And, importantly - unlike the man who worked to defeat segregation and enfranchise minorities in his first (of three) terms - they’d never take as principled a risk on social principles as LBJ. In short, the modern Democrats - politically conservative, economically apologetically liberal - are the Wilkie Party; the Republicans are the Lindburgh Party. There’s a complete - and violent - analogy. But Lind wasn’t making an analogy; he’s doing nothing but slinging a stupid, catty insult, trying to goad a party whose economics he’s just now comfortable with to the social right to suit him. (Over the aisle, of course - admitting to be a solid Democrat, even if they were to the right of Goldwater, would lose him Beltway pals.)

That was a brief analysis of the man’s intentions in his stupid, poorly-constructed hack job. (For the record - as the first liberal commenter said - proposing that a massive and undesirable change had taken place between 1966 and 1968 which turned us into big queer liberal McGoverns is particularly ridiculous; and claiming that Truman was neutral on ‘wedge issues’ is particularly stupid. He integrated the military, and it caused people like Lind to call the election - and a new age of business-government cooperation - for Dewey.) What remains to be seen is how shit like this works.

Divided We Fall comprises primarily Republicans or social actors primarily identifying with Republicans; they spent two terms of what might just have been the most hard-right government elected by a functioning democracy chiding the Democrats for refusing to play along with Our President. (They like to claim that they didn’t want to but 9/11 changed everything, but they treated Congress the same way when Daschle refused to let Bush slash emissions standards or start a nuclear war with China without a fight.) As the Republicans lost popularity, it became about staying the course, not changing horses in midstream, giving the Surge time to work, and so on - playing along again and again with stupid gimmick after stupid gimmick like a horny schoolgirl before the Sexual Revolution - and now the Republicans have lost power, now the electorate would rather put shitwads like Reid and Pelosi in power than endure even the best the Republicans have to offer, these people - after six years of demanding that the Democrats stop being so shrill and uncooperative as the President stamped on their throats - have suddenly developed a serious concern about partisan gridlock and a terror that the legislature will refuse to get together and pass bills well to the right of the majority’s stated desires.

Two years ago, after the pony they had picked left not just the recently-flooded Katrina or the less-recently-invaded Iraq in a bloody mess but had barely managed to clear the rubble of the World Trade Center, these people were excitedly looking forward to an age of political efficiency, a unicameral government in which the opposition would not wield its perfidious influence in any corner of the state to derail the will of the Chinese American people. By the end of the year, they regenerated an appreciation for bipartisan politics ex nihilo.
They’ve created a state with nearly unlimited domestic power - and now it’s in danger of falling into the opposition’s hands from years of abuse, they’ve become terrified of it.

And there’s always a cheerleading section - they like to pretend that they’re moderates, that they’re on our side, that it’s in our best interest not to hurt ‘em. But they ain’t rooting for Hammer, let me tell you: if the astute observe Lind’s recent steaming dump on Salon, they will notice that most of the responders in the first page have responded to Salon articles an average of three or four times in the last year - and reading their scant past contributions leads to hilarious concern troll retrospectives. (Tucker Carlson was right: David Vitter’s whoring was nothing like Clinton’s filthy consensual fatty sex! Predicting the evangelicals’ distaste for Guiliani is just liberal wishful thinking! Rumsfeld resigning would be just what Hillary and the Democrat Party want! Et fucking cetera.) Evidently Lind has not just put himself forward dishonestly as a member of our coalition; he’s dishonestly brought in a bunch of boosters. (They all post in rapid succession - the first liberal poster’s response time is typical of Salon articles on the front page.)

It reminds me of a right-wing astroturfer group’s efforts at pushing a tax capping law - here it was illegally-worded bills they were busted for, but in other states they were disqualified or censured for flying in petition-takers from out of state. I ran into a woman a block from my home acting like she owned the place; she had been paid $500 to fly down from Denver for the weekend and $5 per signature.

I’ll never forget her attitude - she hadn’t been there a day and she felt I was out of touch with Nevada values. I’m sure we’ll get the warmest of welcomes to the real world of Democrat politics when we confront people like this - they speak with the kind of experience you can only fake with the best seminars.

Fun fact: when pressed by events or Himalayokitsch to think of the Dalai Lama, the massive holes in between the few (and generally inaccurate) things we know about him are generally filled with the biography of Gandhi.

Whether this is a result of completely internalizing the party line or a more simple case of lazy racist conflation of any bald Asian men in strange clothes is left as an exercise to the reader. (Be warned: unlike most such exercises, getting this one wrong is liable to make you reincarnate as a crippled queer.)

As far as I’m concerned, American politics has entered a transitional period - the Republican Party has fallen into a tailspin and the Democrats’ ideology is vague enough that at this point almost anything could happen. In light of this, I’d like to offer a hypothesis explaining the current situation and a sober warning to the right - whose countervailing influence, however unpleasant, is ultimately necessary to purge the left of its unreasonable transitory fetishes. Read more »

A despicable article on Salon, along with its asinine and credulous responses, reminds me again that ‘well’ is quite possibly the most dangerous word in the English language. Medicine belongs to a special category of human sciences in that it is an area of extreme complexity requiring an enormous amount of intellectual investment to understand which everyone nonetheless presumes to hold an opinion on; thankfully, if you observe long enough you learn how to weed out the two more malicious categories of fakers from people who actually know what they’re talking about.

In general, one can divide promoters of pseudomedical woo into two categories - hucksters and dupes. The dupes are, like all dupes, the right mixture of ignorant and arrogant to buy into whatever stupid idea the closest guy with a loud voice is pitching; the hucksters, on the other hand, are experienced frauds whose MO involves obfuscatory language tailored to pitch a useless product. Some hucksters might actually fall into the category of dupes themselves, but - as the Rotten Library observed of Pat Robertson - in general, when they or their loved ones come down with dangerous afflictions, they usually seek out aggressive medical treatment rather than trusting in God, nature, or inscrutable Oriental secrets.

My purpose today is not to take on the hucksters in general; it is to specifically shine a destroying light on the idea of wellness - for in addition to being a stupid replacement for ‘good’ with which you can respond to ‘how are you?’ to indicate you have been to college, ‘well’ is an often-abused power word in pop medicine. In fact, it might just be the most dangerous scientific delusion of our times - there are more audacious ones, after all, but creationism hasn’t exactly killed anyone. Read more »

If only Harry Reid and Barack Obama had been around in 1945; we might have been able to get the real story out of them Nazis.

h/t some guy on Sadly: Numbers racket: Why the economy is worse than we know—By Kevin P. Phillips (Harper’s Magazine)

The interesting thing is that, when you look at the Bush years in the aggregate, for most people the sense that the economy was bullish never came into play. What we had was a deep, painful recession followed by a paper recovery - with new jobs worth half of the ones gone forever, booming numbers principally attributable to tiny economic outliers, and increasing general misery in spite of outward prosperity.

The current numbers are difficult to come to terms with at first - if one accepts the U5/6 figures, for instance, our unemployment rates look typical of West Africa - but we’ve been hit with a number of nagging, terrifying reminders that the worst is yet to come.

The Invisible Famine

It is popular among wingnuts to harp on the one statistic they have to back up their irrational belief in a universally rosy economy - that is, the major obesity problem currently stalking the American underclass. The thing is, they’re wrong by way of being right: the increasing obesity of the poor is an alarming sign, and as everyday goods surge uncontrollably in price it may well grow worse. This is because America is suffering from an invisible famine.

The invisible famine is, like any other famine, purely distributional - while it has been (and will be even further) aggravated by increasing demand for staples and increasing expense for food and freight trucking, the basic issues are economic and social. When one hears that a majority of Americans are overweight - and the number is growing by staggering amounts - it is worth remembering the importance of the binging cycle in weight gain.

The fastest way to gain weight is by a binge cycle; in a binge cycle, a person will go long amounts of time without eating sufficiently and, when food becomes available, will gorge themselves with what presents itself. The reason that we are seeing it become important now is simple - the American wage-earner has seen her or his income rise at a rate beggared by inflation, especially of everyday goods. We work longer hours for less pay than our parents. Alone, this would not by itself produce a binge cycle; but along with losing decent, regular pay, we find ourselves shopping at large, hostile stores in fortified compounds dozens of miles from home. Where food purchases were once a semi-regular event, the act of buying food is now a behavior limited to one or two times a month - if that. Buying food more regularly has, especially with the rise of gas prices and the enormous social and economic push out to the exurbs, become a luxury most Americans cannot afford.

The kicker? This is a national version of a previously local phenomenon. In the Deep South and rural West especially, the supermarket was a much earlier and more tenacious development; communities latched to the poison teat of Safeway and Piggly Wiggly enjoyed the horrible dietary and bodily health the entire country does now, and their local governments - often dominated by Pollyannaish neolibs - openly encouraged the slump in labor standards, employment regularity, and pay that would turn the weekly shop into the half-monthly, the monthly, and bi-monthly. America is under the same masters that lashed the backs of rural California and Georgia now, and suffers from the same disease.

In short, the anatomy of the invisible famine is this: due to increasing homogeneity, poor service, and rising cost from local restaurants - and the increasing reluctance by employers to offer regular breaks or reliable catering - most calories are consumed in a single set of meals late in the day, and there is only a decent amount of wet, fibrous, and ash-rich food in the first week of the month. The fruit rot, and we start eating principally protein, simple sugars, and fat; then the meat goes hard and we’re subsiding on old bread and ice cream for half a month - until the next paycheck comes in, for credit is nowhere near as free as would allow us to actually live on siege shopping. When we are able to buy food again, we eat well and rich; and the bitter irony of the binge cycle is that we can consume enough calories to gain several pounds in a week mostly spent starving. And there, as well, is the horrible irony of the invisible famine: we are growing fat - obese, even - while our lives grow worse than ever before, and the demons who inflict it all on us are praised for it by their hand-fed running-dogs.

We have all of the misery of the rich life, all of the aches and pains of fatness, without the joys of achieving it. We have grown morbidly obese on gruel. Never say that the Man never learns - in this famine, at least, there are no poking ribs to draw the moralist’s camera as the masses starve all the same.

Bears on Fremont Street

The phrase ‘recession-proof’ is a little silly, but it does have a logic all its own. There are in fact several places that can draw business reliably no matter how bad the economy gets - that is, if there’s any hope of it recovering. Las Vegas is supposed to be one of them - after all, we receive tourism from all over the world, and the rich account for a disproportionate amount of our tourist traffic. So no short-term downturn in the US should affect us, right?

Wrong: to the bitter delight of those of us who chose to seek a degree, the local Craigslist is flooded with complaints and terrified mendicants cast out of the casinos’ trough. A truism in Vegas or anywhere else that profits from addiction is this: if you let your kids take a job out of school, they’ll make $70,000 starting out - and they’ll never go back - and they’ll make that for the rest of their life. It’s at least some consolation to the people who are low enough on the ladder that $70,000 is a decent aspiration - while Las Vegas might be all ‘burb, at least we don’t have an inner city. (Well, we do, but it’s well hidden.) The casino jobs are vanishing - under an increasing suspicion that the money isn’t there to offer $60,000 salaries to starting-level valets, that the economy has been too bad for too long to justify taking more people on at more than minimum wage.

I don’t know how well it works as an economic indicator, but I’m inclined to say that nothing good can come from the bear economy stalking even Fremont Street - and nothing good can come of unemployment in the Disneyland of the world.

The main problem I can see with ‘hard’ as a political descriptor is that it conflates two seriously different phenomena. Especially when paired with ‘left’ or ‘right’, there’s a subtle tendency to confuse people with hardline political beliefs from people with a firm commitment to one party or cause or the other.

As a solution, I propose that we use ‘hard’ only to describe the politics, and as for the partisanship we use ‘firm’. It’s a distinction whose time has come, especially with the Republicans dissolving into firm holdouts, with both the hard and soft Right seeming to lose faith in the party organization after Bush and McCain.

Similarly, when the Obama knuckle-under on FISA happened, we saw an interesting divide along the same lines play itself out: firm Democrats generally accepted it, and even rationalized the idea. This includes commentators to the left of Obama himself - Olbermann, say - and excludes even commentators roughly in the political center.

Our tendency to mistake hardline politics for ideological fervor is one of many unfortunate products of domination by one party whose candidates can’t be hard-right enough and one party whose leadership treats hard politics as a sort of demonic possession. The American electoral system accepts the firm right and left, but only the hard right - the hard left shuffles from third party to third party, and it takes us threatening to riot to get the DNC to actually pay attention to us like they do the right-wing Southron idiots voting Democratic out of tribal allegiance.

Incidentally, and speaking only for myself, I endorse what Jeff Rowland said on the subject - that is, Obama pissed me off pretty bad, but he’s still a damned sight better than anyone else currently running. Here’s hoping it’s just an electoral gimmick.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re like me - and face it, you probably will be some day - you came from the 90s, but still have no idea exactly what the fuck it was on about. And for good reason: every time you encounter the decade, it’s through a weird haze of triumphalism, a story in which Zizek and Fukuyama (deservingly, but unrealistically) are reversed in relative respect and influence - and, importantly, the left conducted itself with a sort of flagging dignity, the bearers of a failing torch at last cruelly snuffed out in Seattle; the right chafed at the bit after the oppressive sleaziness of that terrible white Negro Slick Willy and his dancing Jewess Reno - and were time and time again let down by his refusal to carry the Big Stick they so dream of today - his neglect of our national drive to build great nations in the Middle East that would maintain our proud military presence in the world for years to come.

We forget that in those days we - not just the West generally but the left specifically - still indulged people like Stoppard when they put on big, lavish productions in which they pretended that the horrific rapine of Eastern Europe by a mixture of mob bosses and capitalist factota was somehow related to rock-and-roll and youth rebellion; we forget that the bug-fuck idiots who joyfully accept the dominion of Terra-Fightin’ Daddy in exchange for the odd glorious codpiece shots on carrier decks once honestly thought of themselves as some kind of revolutionaries. We remember Nirvana, not the utterly impenetrable and horribly related Rat Pack revival. And with the eXile evidently gone, we need more than ever a clear reminder of what the 90s were - before, like every decade before the development of a continuous news cycle to stamp down any deviations from the treacly Narrative, history itself is fully hijacked by nostalgia-peddlers and cod-Münchhausens.

In service to that high goal, when I have the time and the inclination I am going to share a few gems of the 1990s with you; the venal creatures that put our current regime in office strut about, gleefully exchanging favorite Heinlein quotes and meditating thoughtfully on whether the right side really won at Stalingrad. I will be fully honest with you: piercing the lefty idolatry of the day isn’t really my bailiwick - I’ll leave it to Djur, who has always been dissatisfied with their inexplicable hostility against triangulating a vital center between small-business, large-business, and shell-business interests.

The two particular gems I’ve collected in advance are representative of the whole. One is a trio of pulp book ads - two books with equal titles and evidently similar content about divorce, written from that horrible masculist perspective that we continue to hear paraded through high political and social circles as radical, politically-incorrect acts, set in an exciting alternative world where telling lies to the meek is a bold enterprise - and the weaker of the lot, one packed with idiot name-checking and evidently a bog-standard 90s gun-wank.

The better of the two, and one that I’ve been parading around for my personal amusement for some time now, is a suite of mods for Civilization II (of all the games I play for admittedly sentimental value, hands-down the best (that is Civ II itself, not the mod, which can’t be described unless there is in fact a set of words actual shit uses to refer to itself, in which case it’s whatever word refers to the kind of shit most other shit hates, a kind of intra-fecal ethnic slur, and in skywriting)) designed to portray the wild, hi-tech world of the distant future, 2010. No doubt used principally for this by most people who used it, it ever-so-subtly betrayed a certain Weltanschuung, if I may use the original National Socialist, with a clever system in which Monarchy became Klintonism (or, in one interesting case, KKKlintonism) and various no-doubt vital sound files were used in which some idiot used a horribly fake Southern accent to sound, I don’t know, gallant.

I generally hold kitsch in contempt - it’s usually a classic study in reactionary fuckwads with expensive and deeply ridiculous educations tittering at the common mistakes of the hilariously low-born, and has all the humor value of Nietzsche screaming at the no-good priest-crafting Jews for having a slave mentality spurned by the noble Apollonians. But these are a couple of instructive examples, which is the best kitsch-mongering can aspire to. I present to you the world that actually existed in the 1990s: one dominated by the shrill, second-hand sloganry of America’s simultaneously pitiful and contemptible white underclass - and the smug, wealthy pricks who fed them their preposterous jargon and stage-managed their canned Bunker rage for political and economic gain.

We live in a world where Larry the Cable Guy is supposed to be the contemptibly crass one. I’m simply trying to remind you that there was a time in some distant Camelot where you were allowed to think this of Jeff Foxworthy. Join me later this week as I continue the ambitious project I call I Love The [. . .] The 90s, and we’ll look over the book reviews - and, sooner or later, over that fucking majestic mod-pack. And we’ll win this time, John Rambo, or my name isn’t Bo Gritz.

You just had to go and die on the Fourth of July.

After all that time you spent making America a shittier place, it’s only fitting you’d go and ruin its founding holiday; to clog our papers with obituaries - like the arteries the tobacco lobby (which, hand firmly in ass, darkened North Carolina with your rotting frame for generations) helps to clog all over this green Earth; that you would find some way to make your death as disgusting as your life. That anyone ever mistook you for a human being is a damning indictment on our species; that you were white makes me wish the Irish weren’t these days, or at least that black-face were socially acceptable. I would that Hell existed if only to place you in it, and would more strongly than I do now that Heaven did not just to keep you out of it.

You shat up my country for just shy of eighty-seven years, and if there is any justice in this universe your corpse will just keep on expanding until it bursts, and no coffin ever made will keep the smell of rancid shit from the human waste who come to mourn you.

I’d call you a son of a bitch, Jesse Helms, but Josef Mengele wouldn’t have deserved to give birth to you and Pol Pot wouldn’t deserve to have called you a son. If your mother had the dignity evolution bequeathed to the scarab, she’d have spent every year from 1921 to her all-too-late death suppressing the urge to tear out her own ovaries. God willing, some day we’ll figure out what we can excise to atone ourselves of you.

Via Sadly, No - and, inexplicably, the fucking White House.

(An addendum to Der Ewige Türke.) Read more »