The stiff-upper-lipped people of jolly England gave out at last to the dark onslaught of Europe, surrendering to the decimal Pound and metric measurements and time. As per standards mandated by our new Stalinist overlords in Brussels, subsidies now go to homosexuals and mated pairs of Sikhs and Gypsies.
Andrew O’Hehir, Salon:
Sacha Baron Cohen’s dark political farce
The “Borat” creator’s nutty Arab “Dictator” moves to Brooklyn, falls in love and schools the West in democracy
Finally, cinema’s prayers are answered: a version of The Great Dictator that equivocates about its powerless target!
Madeline Holler, Salon:
Tyranny of cloth diapers
I gave birth at home and breastfed. My mom was drugged up and never lactated. Which one of us got the better deal?
Wow, what an impressive abyss I’ve got here! Better never look at it again.
A.M. Gittlitz, the New Inquiry / Salon:
Punk’s cultural revolution: Pussy Riot’s masked women have become icons of Russia’s anti-Putin movement — and turned the genre on its head
Maybe if we all pray hard enough to the 80s we’ll have another shot at replacing Russians with East Coast bourgeois.
1. While campaigning, Wilhelm Carringford Manley officially went by his nickname “Brick”. In all future references – no less than once per public apperance – he referred to himself as “The Adversary”. Is there anything sadder than trying to choose your own nickname – and failing?
2. When “Brick” destroyed his wife Wilhelmina with a long sledge hammer in front of a helpless joint session of Congress, she did not cry or grimace or even laugh in pain, but looked forward into the middle distance with a strange haunting smile the entire time.
3. His insane decision to boast about scouring Kansas City from the Earth with nuclear fire; his claque of dystrophic eunuchs applauding, as if nothing was wrong with this.
4. What motivated “Brick” to have all American citizens of Indian ancestry interned in camps is still beyond us, even after years of constant vague propaganda. It’s not like they could vote.
5. When duly defeated in an unconstitutional race for a third term, “Brick” had his opponent Bowie Wilkes Brown (D-LA) shot by a Dallas mobster on national television.
6. “Brick” ran unconstitutionally for a third term. On what seems to have been his behalf, every expert asked repeated that the time for law was over and only “Brick” could lead America to the fate she deserved.
7. “One White, One Vote” campaign – obviously illegal. How did he even get away with that?
8. Whistleblowing on his own administration.
9. After #8, his still-baffling decision to relieve his press secretary and mock and torture reporters on live TV.
10. “I am proud to announce I have destroyed all life in Kansas City, Missouri with a nucular barrage” – nucular!! What is this, 2003???
11. “Brick” launching twenty-four warheads totalling 35-50 mT payload at Kansas City, Missouri, killing or grievously injuring ten million people in three states and completely derailing the Super Bowl halftime show.
12. The notorious “I am now imperbious to vullets” gaffe. When even the dystrophic eunuchs crack up, you know you’ve laid one.
13. “Brick” casting an audience that dared to laugh at his “all sixty-two states” mistake into slavery, then forcing the Supreme Court to overturn not only the amendments rendering this illegal but all Amendments.
14. Opening the yawning abyss of Stygia on the shores of Lake Erie – did he not get the memo on his bad PA poll numbers?
15. “The Your Loved Ones Raped Forever In Hell As You Watch Program” – two words: “creative accounting”. Can this administration do anything right?
16. Seizing the crown of Canada from Camerlengo Nordicus Harper’s hands at the big ceremony last year. After all the nice things he had to say about “Brick”, can’t we all agree that was just rude?
17. And enslaving Harper’s entire race in the Flaying Pits – talk about adding insult to injury!
I received news of Trayvon Martin‘s death around the same time everyone else did. It was not until this article, unfairly, that it had any emotional reality to me. Not because of the facts; I knew those, intellectually. Not because of the picture; I was already inclined to view Trayvon as “one of those”.
The Wire has a distinction for them: “stoop kids and corner kids”. They’re both what the culture calls “ghetto”, and they both front tough among friends. There’s no solid reason to think Trayvon was either. Was he “ghetto” at all? We don’t know. To some degree, we can’t know. It’s pretty easy to speculate that even if he was, he wouldn’t be what George Zimmerman would have meant, or claimed he meant, when he said “ghetto”, or a “thug”. A stoop kid. (You try getting a corner kid to wear Hollister, for one.)
This is a distinction predicated on obedience to authority – predicated in-universe by a cop, who has become an educational consultant. This is not an admonition on flying freak flags, which only seem to count when the recipients are white and well-off – the right kind of odd, an accepted kind of off.
This was not a kid who would give his mother shit. This was a kid who could sit still and smile and look like he has a life ahead of him for a picture taken at home, for only the benefit of his loved ones. As far as David Simon or Ed Burns – higher authorities, I consider, than myself, or George Zimmerman, or Florida police dispatch – can tell, that would tend to make him a kid who could comply with orders, or even sufficiently firm requests.
In that sense, then, Trayvon Martin’s death is a travesty. There’s a tragic element of it, in the same sense that each of these murders carries with it a classical tragedy: for the reasonable hubris of respecting themselves as human beings, black youths and adults of all temperaments and profiles are gunned down or seriously maimed on a daily basis by racist forces as cold as indifferent as Zeus, gatherer of clouds – in the person, as simultaneously human and god-ridden as Medea, of the racist murderer du jour. Foreclosures give the homeowners’ association an excuse to turn their backs on illegal promises; a decades-old academic debate is made into a new front in a race war to win a political party votes. A drunk calls the cops on a child, and chambers a round to make sure. Greater forces than any man inspire a paranoid to pick up a gun and avenge himself on a universe where mortals dare to seek justice. Is this not tragedy?
But beyond tragic, there is travesty in Trayvon Martin’s death: an inversion of the anticipated order to the loss of all involved. He did not cross the blood-soaked red lines to make a quick and not exceedingly dishonest dollar selling drugs, or to avenge himself on an enemy with gunplay. He crossed them over puppy love. The years marking out his death do not represent the grim certainties of his life; they were not set in stone from the moment he was born the color he was with the mind he had. If you had asked the people who knew him to write out the year of his death, they would not have guessed the correct decade, let alone the correct year.
And that is what makes it a travesty, objectively: that to no one’s just benefit, this young man had his life cut short.
That’s not what got me about it.
I had heard all of these details before. I had no reason to doubt any of them, and the more I read crystallized my dry, intellectual view. I would not have written any of this; certainly I might have waited on it, let the anger on all sides die down a little, find a better reference than The Wire (which has been much in my thoughts lately; it is a fantastic show with a lot to say), and so on. This is too raw and angry and unsettled to air; it matters too much, and I could be too easily and completely wrong, or worse, have nothing but trivialities to express.
But then I read something, one asinine little detail, and I began asking questions I couldn’t answer – questions like, what stupid career did he still have in mind? Was he ready to even think about death? How far had he gotten with a girl? Had he had his heart broken? How much did he know? What things are there in this life that Trayvon Martin never got to learn? How much life did he have, before it was taken away?
The detail that stuck me, ridiculously, was one that didn’t tell me anything new at all.
“1995-2012″.
My youngest brother was born in 1991.
Life on Titan? A liberal NASA plot. They say there’s life on Titan, then Obambi and the Democrat congress declare it a wildlife refuge and we can’t drill it for oil!
huh huh hhuuuh
I don’t know how many arms these Titanians have, but I know that each one of them is going to end up holding a Democrat welfare check!!
hhhuuh huuuuuh huh
Maybe they know where Obama’s birth certificate is located!!
hhh hhhuhh [choking sound, heavy clump of body striking floor]
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?
1) It was a dark and stormy night, and Pat Boone was depressed about the poor fortunes of his close personal and professional friend Bob Dole. As he prepared to cross the Canadian border and leave this undeserving nation forever, around the corner appeared the surviving Sex Pistols, each erect.
2) 1965: low Earth orbit. Edward White, doomed son of Texas, stepped out of his capsule, his tether carefully spooling him out into the void. While he knew that he could see less this way than he had in the capsule, and that in the grand scheme of things he was still just a high-flying sky-man, his eyes were filled with glory and a hope we know to be forlorn. Today would not be as planned, though: in the corner of his restrained, space-drunk vision he could make out a flash of the different, more beige gray his superiors had warned him of. He mentally reminded himself of his space revolver. He was ready for Leonov. He was ready to kill in orbit, or die in it. What he was not ready for was love.
3)Retirement had been good to President Bush. Nobody made him hang around horses any more, and he got to hang around in Kennebunkport as his station in life demanded instead of slumming it with those lazy-eyed Texan fuckers. He didn’t even have to sit down and shut up when Cheney had something foul to say any more. It had been a good day even before his manservant Sowadjec announced the arrival of today’s guest. Cybernetic boy-jockey in tow, Crown Prince Abdul-Aziz entered the room with a warm greeting, still gloriously toned beneath his assless robes after these long seven years. “Tonight you are the House of Saud’s camel,” continued the conservative heir, offering his hand and a greased velvet glove to his New England colleague.
4) Once again, Lee and John were eager with anticipation, sporting a boner and bonah respectively as the limo streamed into view of the warehouse. But today John’s wife and her Greek lover knew how to keep the safe-word unsaid. Little did either know that they had already begun their last tango in Dallas.
[5] “And thanks to my guests, Ollie North and Bay Buchanan. America salutes you. God bless all of you at home.” Another day, another Hannity’s America, another hundred thousand dollars. But as the swarthy hive took down the set for the night, Sean noticed Colonel North wasn’t leaving — and, as Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch swaggered in with a gleam in their old, wet eyes, Sean realized his endless fidelity was about to be repaid, his love for the GOP consummated. Tonight the Republican Party would make an honest woman of him.
(6) In a sinister dacha in the Crimea, a man in a particularly cruisy wheelchair snickered openly at his own perfidy with his friends Alger Hiss – codename ALES – and Josef Stalin. “Oy,” said Rosenfeldt, “always with the betraying of America’s doughty Aryan allies.” He squealed with girlish delight as he noticed that Stalin’s balls also had tiny, angry moustaches, and then took out his big queer cigarette holder in order to slosh them around in his stupid mouth.
The tea-party assholes have hilariously worthless precedents – Slacktivist’s favorite, because he’s been on a semi-laudable indignation kick lately, is a group of petulant idiots that called itself Indignation in the 50s and 60s. What they represent right now is the right-wing fringe dusting the rust off of its paralegal oppression skills; while they didn’t technically control Bush II or his Barebones Parliament, placating them with shows of state force was a major objective of Republican policy for long enough that they’re now a major component of the GOP as an organization – too major to beat down or ignore in polite company.
Like the fascists before them, the teabaggers’ animating spirit is one which worships authority figures by general acclaim. They were loyal squadristi for Bush, and the unprecedentedly awful selection of Palin was in large part a misguided effort to get their gatekeepers to accept the Republican ticket as a new batch of Bold Leaders worth following off a cliff. Because of what drives people into the political right in modern America – identification with a mythologized white, monocultural rural ‘Heartland’ by people dependent on townships or large cities – Palin’s mob were middle-aged office types pretending to be angry old rural cranks. In groups they indulged in the only thing driving them as an ideology – a deferred culture. These are people who couldn’t tell cow from steer to save their lives and who subscribed to sappy Georgics by wealthy jagoffs; people who imagine black hordes teeming in the inner cities waiting to take their land away but who live and worked in the cities and own the land on which their house sits if any at all; people who had never uttered a word in righteous anger but imagined themselves right-revolutionaries; Aryan separatists without any particular desire to separate themeslves; people who have bought a gun more than once but never a box of ammunition. White-flightists without anything to fly from, Goetz cheerleaders who would not save a fellow man if his mugger was an octogenarian.
It is only among one another, and when accompanied by their ever-indulgent cultural and political authority figures, that they can find cultural satisfaction. The Heartland per se has a rich and varied cultural life, but they want nothing to do with it and would generally mistake the average camper, shooter, or other outdoorsman for a hated DFH. So they must in some capacity attach themselves to leadership figures – little else provides cultural validation for the kind of person who tells others they like country music (I’ve heard this repeatedly, in spite of ‘country and western’ being the preferred term for what they mean) and yet will not sit through a C&W track that isn’t about ragheads.
They’re easy to please, these starved creatures; a lot of liberal writing about Palin misses how profoundly lazy she was even about what she was supposed to be good at – race-baiting. All it took was her butchering ruralist panacea by Hitler admirers to get them shrieking for blood on their own. It has been a hard time for them, because Palin – in spite of their fervent hopes – has been shown weak, and they cannot tolerate that even with all the media-blaming they’re capable of. They’re without a leader and desperate, and every time one comes along it turns out he’s unsuitable – philandering, brown, a terrible speaker, not willing to demand Samantha Smith be exhumed and burned at the stake on whistle-stops. The tea-party movement inadvertently gave them a new, inferior outlet; the idiots responsible, Armey and his 2.0 scene creatures, simply concieved it as another in an endless supply of corrupt Leninist vanguard spectacles; instead it took on a life of its own, a way of reliving that fascist Woodstock that was the Palin campaign.
But the problem is that certain obstacles exist to what the mob can be allowed to do if it has a head. Palin, in her resentful, dim way, understood that; she had Sarah to worry about, and the moment those hick idiots threatened Number One they were out in the cold. Fascist moments aren’t really meant to survive their leaders; I don’t anticipate the teabaggers surviving in any serious form past 2010, because either they will so obviously alienate the rural and exurban populace they parade around in a crude, savage caricature of that the Party will have to crack down, or because the even marginal success of the GOP will lead to an orgy of overreach followed by bone-crushing failure. After all, the mob might be the same type of people, but their manipulators are distinctly subpar, jumped-up frat-boys like Armey instead of the slick, professional corporate thugs that pulled their forefathers’ strings. They don’t have any concept of laying low, their idea of grand strategy owing more to 300 or high-school football than Grant or Caesar.
Even so, the guns are an unsettling development, and worse is the smarmy, evil complex of responses by their unhinged quasi-leaders. Part of the problem is that degradation of those leaders; nobody who actually believes in gun rights would be such an impossible tool as to suggest that carrying at a Presidential function is appropriate, let alone validate that view by trying to make the debate into one about perfidious Wobbly thugs agitating against pre-adult employment. For someone who did, even the best-case scenario that would produce – the gun-toting nuts petering out and the incident simply passing as an awful and singular one – would be a serious threat to public acceptance of their Second Amendment views. The worst-case scenario is like being a Carcano stockholder in 1964.
Their leaders are not ideoogues, or to the extent they are are only second to their allegiance to Number One. But even so, if they were cannier manipulators they would understand how horrible this is for everyone involved, not least of which being them. But they’re not. After all, you have to break a few omelettes to give 110%, don’t be niggardly, huh huh huh. Hut hut hike! You have the floor, Senator Douchefag.
critical links: Gawker’s story, twitter “Skip Gates”
(This article assumes familiarity with events.)
EDIT (7/28): In the interest of fairness, the headline here is formulated based on inaccurate information. More than one peckerwood idiot was involved (at the very least the moronic dispatcher and arresting officer, possibly the other cops at the scene), and the caller was actually very reasonable about it – she was calling the police on the insistence of an older woman who evidently watched two men forcing their way into a house without saying a word and then summoned someone else to call the police for her – so not just a racist cunt but a chickenshit one as well.
The caller not only noticed and pointed out the presence of luggage, but the 911 dispatcher responded dismissively to it (‘What do the suitcases have to do with anything?’) in addition to demanding a racial category for the entrants and botching other details of the call. So I stand by the headline, but I feel it casts aspersions unfairly on the caller and sincerely apologize. As opposed to almost everyone else in this sorry story, she made the best she could of a nasty situation. -ack
1) What the police do is essential, but the Broken Windows school of criminology along with the modern trajectory of American conservatism has turned them into a stalking-horse for authoritarianism; in the new ideology, we always need more police funded better and nothing they do is inappropriate enough to merit criticism. And what they are made to do, rather than keeping the peace and furthering public goodwill, is harass anyone who sticks out, make arrests on instinct rather than fact, and aggressively dehumanize everyone. While the massive influx of police did have a tonic effect on the crime rate for a time, it’s also generalized the antipathy for and fear of the police once limited pretty exclusively to minorities in large cities and the Border South. Worse, that antipathy and fear has become regarded as positive rather than damning.
2) We have all seen this happen over and over again. Some punk kid at a Kerry speech gets tased for acting a bitch; some skateboarder gets tased for using the word “dude” while cooperating fully with an angry officer’s unreasonable scrutiny; a young man having a seizure after enduring a heavy beating is tased repeatedly with electrodes stuck in his nipple and scrotum; riot cops at the RNC casually pepper-spray peaceable demonstrators (including a woman doing nothing but holding a flower), anti-terrorism resources are used to tail and intimidate journalists. We know this is happening. Why do we tolerate it at all?
3) If Henry Louis Gates Jr. wasn’t named that, and wasn’t a Harvard professor, he’d still be in jail and nobody would care.
4) When my dad was some punk kid and social neoconservatism was just the peculiar way things were done west of the Jello Belt, he had feathered long hair and a scraggly moustache; his parents had basically abandoned him and he lived a block from his fiancee in a house he had to take care of himself. One day, shortly after having a cast put on his leg, he was hanging around on his own lawn when a passing police officer, evidently believing his hair meant he was obviously a drug-dealing filthy hippie scum (mind you, it was 1980 or so!), harassed him, and in spite of his cooperation struck him repeatedly on his casted leg, breaking it more severely and inflicting an injury that remains painful to this day for no real reason. If he were black, he probably would have at least spent the night in jail for the privilege.
5) We have all been locked out of our house; we have helped strangers into theirs; and Gates is old and was accompanied by another elderly man helping him with luggage. When would you possibly see that and think anything but “man stuck outside of his house”, let alone call the police rather than asking him? Answer: when he’s black and you’re a racist. [EDIT 7/28 - Hilariously, the lady that watched them break in and move in their luggage didn't even call the police herself, let alone establish the basic contact necessary to either scare off burglars or establish validity of presence.]
6) Even if we take the police report at face value (it overemphasizes his belligerence and omits several details that the lawyer’s statement and the reality of a police-home intrusion both support, i.e. the badge number, basic cooperation, etc.), it’s striking to read its general tone and sense of events – throughout the report, the officer is affronted by this awful man insisting he’s a figure of dignity and importance, this angry black man who calls racism at the first sign of a police officer barging into his own home, refusing to believe he has any right to be there, and automatically gainsaying everything he bothers to explain. In what seems most obviously like a fabrication, he uses broad and political language, overcompensatorily and non-specifically denouncing the officer’s behavior. If this officer has ever heard someone righteously angry, he has evidently never paid attention – he casts an elderly academic who is being harangued in his own home as a typical angry black criminal. In the officer’s version, Gates knows he has done something wrong and is truculent because that’s how those people are. How in the fuck could that even be possible?
7) Finally, note the fashion in which the officer treats the arrest – it’s perfectly reasonable, in spite of how terribly things have gone, to haul this man into custody. He sneeringly describes the pathetic old man whining about needing a cane to walk and the handcuffs being too tight. Shoulda thought about that before you started acting like you had rights, buckwheat.
8) Because this is a fantastic case, the officer responsible may well wind up falling on his sword. (In spite of an inevitable countersurge of hagiographies, aspersions, and race-baiting by the bigotry industry; in the Republican mythology he will become a sort of put-upon Aryan hero, a crass metaphor for the way they believe America thinks about Obama, rather than a jumped-up dipshit.) However, what he did was the result of how all of these cases normally go – the local community at most gets angry, the officer gets a slap on the wrist, the department has his back.
9) So here you have America: a country fallen so far into depraved authoritarianism that the police consider it their prerogative to mock old men for needing a cane on official documents.