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.

• 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]

(As an introduction, see the seminal Brecher/”War Nerd” article, War Of The Babies.)

One of the great hand-wringings of the xenophobic right (often at cross-purposes with itself, as one sees in our Minutemen regarding Islam with indifference and the hyper-Zionists begrudgingly admitting that Latinos pose no threat to the West)  is the idea of birth-rates. The fundamental assumption is that niceties of personality and ideology can be divined from birth as readily and unchangingly as eye color or handedness. This often produces an apparent contradiction in ideology - simultaneous panicking about both the deficiency of a target ‘culture’ and the rate at which its members give birth. This is pretty much the indicator idea for xenophobia as an ideology - with the exception of the crudest, most superficial and unapologetic racists, they must square away the idea that something besides an inferior genome is at work.
The idea of rampaging Moslems is the animating horror in Europe and among fantasy-Zionists; it is passed off as hard-nosed and realistic, but relies more heavily on fantasy and ideology than the most airy-fairy Wilsonian. Whether or not the data bear it out (it generally doesn’t), one of two presumptions arise: the ignorant set and the dishonest set.

Ignorance

The ignorant set is simply blind to any historical or foreign case of immigration or demographic change. It accepts blindly the idea of continuity to first settlement or, in Europe’s case, a more fantastic but academically sanctioned idea of ethnic autochtony. In this view, one is the product of an endless succession of ancestors exactly like one, living in around the same place in roughly the same way and with roughly the same values and appearance. It’s intuitive at first - most of us know our immediate ancestors well enough and are constantly reminded of how much like them we are in various ways - but it breaks down on even casual investigation. This is why “racialism” or “white separatism” or any other form of I-just-love-my-people-ism is doomed to swift failure - it isn’t an internally coherent ideology and has a profound temptation to indulge in contempt for the other. And so the ignorant set comes to parade out the most popular and respectable slurs for the other, producing a kind of coherence and truth from mass repetition and crowd acceptance.

Dishonesty
The dishonest set, on the other hand, is familiar with the contradictions in this ideology, and is more defensive and dishonest about it. They attach themselves less openly to politics and more to “scholarship” and “opinion”. They call themselves “politically incorrect” and revel in the assumption by their friends in the media, government, and economy that those who spurn their views do so because they are too bold for them rather than because they are disgusting. They view the coherence of reality (which their partially-sealed world allows them to see as alternate) as the result of a political and intellectual conspiracy, and they tend to regard disfavored groups outside of the target group as complicit in this. (This has to be the primary reason for the continuing edge of anti-black paranoia in the elite of the American Jewish community.)

Most of all, though, the dishonest set requires an overweening ideology to produce the appearance of impartiality. They’re not afraid of the looming ropy dick of the swarthy interloper, see, they’re afraid of the destruction of their civilization. And as such, they go to great lengths to confuse “culture”, “religion”, “civilization”, “ethnicity”, and “race”. This, coupled with the 19th-century relict idea of demographics as potential for national military strength, produces the Face Fascists Dolan discusses in the eXile article.

As xenophobia becomes politically profitable, the simpler kinds of cultural elitism, provincialism, and chauvinism come to be tinged with bigotry, to be used as stalking-horses for the cause - and because the dishonest outnumber the idiots, paranoia and a conspiracy-driven mindset set in. Other, unrelated causes are dragooned in or grilled for failing to do so. (Thus the attempt by anti-Latino activists to take over the Sierra Club because Mexicans are bad for the environment, the constant, feigned concern by open misogynists about the welfare of innocent little Paki-factories under the swarthy hand of the impostor Mahomet and his Alcoran, et alia.) And there is no satisfaction at, nor real concern for, the achievement of any one objective. When they have banned headscarves it becomes minarets, when they have banned minarets it becomes teaching in Arabic, when they have banned teaching in Arabic the future of civilization depends on brown children wearing green badges.

Part of the reason that this kind of thing receives social acceptance is that most people are fairly easy to manipulate, and operate mainly in terms of superstitions and personalizations. In Europe especially, the outsider is regarded as a fecund savage who requires foreign support to shit indoors - this image is far easier to accept than challenge, and persists even among those who know plenty of outsiders - because all things being equal people seem to prefer having two contradictory data to replacing one datum with the other, and they have a great facility in selectively reinforcing existing knowledge. It is, if anything, easier for someone to form an indelible image of Muslims as a ticking time bomb waiting to flood civilization in children and circumcise their women if one is on good terms with the Husseins and their two-point-four children — after all, it is easier to refute an idea than an observation, and the Hussseins shouting at each other once is worth as much as a thousand honor-killing stories.

My feeling as regards all of this has always been that the correct response is that of Colin Powell (a career military man whose political ignorance is as much to blame for the Iraq war as anything) - not to refute the image of the outsider but to counter and better it. That the reality of the immigrant is and always has been a hard worker and contributor to the economy, that the immigrant family is one convinced at least that a life exists to be made in the new country, that people like them made America a world power and are all Europe can hope for to do the same. You might never convince a soul that Barak Husayn Dhimmitude is a fiction concocted by liars and bigot, but Kareem Rashad Khan’s story is every bit as easy to tell - and has the advantage, in the long run, of being real.

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?”

I personally tend to identify two poles in the black American community, each with its own praxis, leadership, adherents, and vocabulary: dignity and security. As ideologies proper, I would call them ‘communalists’ and ’socialists’. Both are somewhat loose matches for the ideology as it is practiced, but a fairly pure pair of modern figures would be MLK and Farrakhan. Between Reconstruction and the Brown-CRA period, they represented respectively the cynics and establishment - the socialists’ strivings to provide education and opportunities to the black community were accepted, but regarded as insufficient, by their philonegrist colleagues.

The Civil Rights Era basically involved a massive level of cooperation between the communalist and socialist elements; the NAACP was the prime mover in herding those angry cats. And they tended to stick to their own - King was a product of the Washingtonian middle class and Farrakhan owes an obvious debt to Moorish Science. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the NAACP is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, success stories in social justice in the West. Others had purer motives or practices and fought worse oppression, but within the bounds their founders could expect, they won.

Anyhow, the communalists tend to emphasize independent religion and culture, group pride, historical revision, social dignity, and just order. As that checklist and their opposition to the economism of the socialists suggest, various communalist strains are paleo/neoconservative in outlook and/or identification. (One extreme example, Nuwabian despot and kilopederast Malachi York, pushed his followers aggressively to vote Republican.) There’s significant crosspollination from conservative social groups and ideas - nativism, essentialist ideas of race and gender, homophobia, hoplophilia, anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism, and a general tendency towards what Umberto Eco called ‘ur-fascism’. Of course, these are not necessarily part of any communalist’s outlook, nor are socialists immune to them. One might, if one wanted to be particularly careful, divide them into ’soft communalists’ for whom individual success and personal pride are the primary virtues and the siege mentality isn’t a central factor, and the ‘nationalists’ who tend to follow more extreme ideas.

The socialists emphasize redression of specific wrongs, positive and negative antidiscriminative action, education, improvement of working conditions, improving the distribution of wealth, and maintaining community safety. Because their outlook is more focused on redression and social well-being, they tend to get along with non-black civil rights and social pressure groups far better than communalists. They’ve also been a mainstay of labor politics in America since Reconstruction. They could be divided into liberal socialists (they look after the rafters - the idea being to make sure that members of the community are not kept from achieving and prospering without focusing exclusively on the success of individual people) and progressive socialists (they look after the floor - the idea being to make sure that no members of the community are made completely destitute either by deliberate racist or classist aggression or the vicissitudes of the system).

The latter is the typical foundation-level ideology for black politicians and activists, especially mainstream Democratic ones, and the former tends to be truer of black celebrities. The race riots, bombardment, and rise of the Klan coincident with Booker T. Washington’s self-improvement movement have significantly soured the black collective memory on pure socialist thought, though; pressure is generally towards communalism, as right-wing racists tend to smear black politicians and activists regardless of their alignment and it is much more internally dangerous to be perceived as not radical enough about it.

The career path of the black minister or community organizer involves interacting with people of many ideas and walks of life, and the communalist trend tends to foster aggressive personalization of systemic abuse. Where the socialist identifies their privation with the more general American fat-cat (often explicitly identified as white, although so is the general American fat cat), the communalist sees it in specific persons or groups, and unfortunately that often includes intellectuals and Jews.

The black-Jewish relationship is a complex one. On the one hand, there is the communalist tendency towards anti-Semitism of its own accord. On the other hand, there has since the 40s been a tendency by mainstream and politically conservative Jews to reflexively regard Muslims with suspicion, and black Muslims have always been regarded as a potential threat. Add this to a lot of bad blood between immigrants (especially poorer, working-class ones) and blacks, and the result has been a lingering contempt that nobody is exactly sure of the purpose of, everyone considers unnecessary, and few people are willing to risk their skins tackling.

And partially because of a tendency by older upper-middle-class conservative Jews (who are disproportionately represented among Jews in the media) to behave aggressively towards group slights but instinctively frame, register, and react to them in a political context, the generalized anti-Semitic attitudes - and generalized racist attitudes - of the American lower class present in the black lower class have been significantly overreported. The infamous ‘Hymietown’ remark is perfectly conversant with a lot of New York stereotyping, but because it was Jackson saying it it got repeated to the point of nausea.

A final note on a subject I have always felt intense concern and anger about: Ray Nagin, the comical/literal bete noir of right-wing bigots, has always been a Blue Dog, often on better terms with the Republicans than his own party, and his ‘chocolate city’ remarks fit perfectly into a wider pattern of right-communalist thinking and statements. And like any good Blue Dog or communalist, he is an economic conservative. The disturbing and underreported link between the two groups is underscored by the revelation that told Blanco that Katrina was going to be an unprecedented bureaucratic disaster for Louisiana was Nagin telling her he had been on the phone with Karl Rove.

Wingnuts have been screaming in incoherent rage about Google failing to doughtily honor our honorably doughty greatest troops in Germano-Fallujah, or as “historians” might call it, D-Day.

There’s an entire blogging career’s worth of right-wing dissembling - ranging from subtle delusion to outright and obvious fraud - over the liberation of France; in general, it follows three core tenets which cannot be budged for love nor money:
1) Liberating France is the most difficult thing America or anyone else has ever done.
2) It is owed an eternal debt of gratitude by everyone, which no one is keen on paying.
3) The rest of the world, in fact, doesn’t seem to remember it happened.

To this end, the hoggleurs-goggleur are constantly inventing new grievances to air and shriek about over various topics to do with France, often (but not always) serving some crass, temporal purpose. In the lead-up to Iraq there were a lot of these: Iraq became France by dint of our invading it, the French owed our President unconditional support because D-Day, and so on. Pictures were posted by outraged tourists in Normandy (to begin with, unknowingly fucking around in the one area where, between intense pre-invasion bombardment and fairly loose Allied policy towards rape and pillage, the native population had and continues to have reservations about the national rejoicing over 1944) guffawing at the British, Canadian, and French flags at Juno Beach, along with the other places which would not see Americans until after the war. Where’s America??? Those fancy Jew fucks.

And now those fancy Jew fucks are at it again: Google has chosen to logo-commemorate Tetris instead of D-Day. Above and beyond the complete saturation-bombing with D-Day information, commemoration, and imagery in every Western country for the last and coming week, see, D-Day is so special that
1) It should violate Google’s policy (set well before the first logo-swap) that its commemorations should avoid any seriously military or political overtone.
2) Google should find a special way to represent something in low resolution whose primary expression in popular culture is information-dense maps and photos -
3) - including to people who have never seen those maps and photos and to whom “D-Day” is a collection of words and facts.

Finally, it’s particularly telling that the outrage has been over the commemoration of Tetris: so defined is the right-wing culture by hate objects that it has eluded and continues to elude them that the main reason France and the Low Countries could be liberated from Hitler at all (Italy took two years and a million lives, after all) was the slow, brutal progress of the Soviet army against the vast majority of the German war machine in what will hopefully remain forever the most brutal and violent military campaign in human history.

I’m just saying, you know. If it were Kraftwerk or something I could see being angry, but Tetris? Tetris is awesome.

Besides which, one of its co-developers is one of Google’s senior engineers, so fucking there. Jesus Christ.

Obama’s insistence on speaking to Israeli leaders about the ostensible diplomatic position of the US on settlements for a decade or more has been called “interfering with Israeli politics” by Americans and Israeli reactionaries, and it remains to be seen if it will have any serious backlash in Israel. (Obama is very popular there; Netanyahu less so.)

While to some extent this is because the American discourse on Israel is shaped pretty comprehensively by unswerving ideological and political fealty to Likud (with AIPAC routinely punishing American political actors for adopting positions or rhetoric similar to that of Kadima, Labor, or any other ideological grouping there), there is an ancillary influence that has recently become a critical part of Israeli politics: the new axis of debate.

Much of the debate between right and left in Israel has disintegrated in the wake of heavily US-backed integration of neoconservatism into the national politics. Instead, within Israel the debate is now between the political adherents to Israel as a nation and Israel as an ideology, and right now the latter have more money and control of the government. The latter tend strongly to be ignorant, well-off, ideologically inflexible, and foreign. The last of those seems to be the key: as long as you haven’t been raised from birth in Israel, it’s a lot easier to treat the hatred of the Arab world as either a grand, unending narrative or something arising ex nihilo. Anyone else would see the move from conflicts with states to conflicts with radicals - from surgical strikes to occupation and guerilla combat - and from bombings to rockets as indicative of some manner of change which can be somehow assuaged or at least contemplated.

It’s not for no reason that Avigdor Lieberman, the mover and shaker of the genocidal right, barely speaks Hebrew and makes an electoral strategy of courting Russophones and Americans - and that the overwhelming majority of active settlers are Americans or ideologues, and typically both. For them, and for their lunatic collaborators among the established Israeli population, the Israeli state exists to ensure that as long as you have a mother the Orthodox establishment feels is sufficiently Jewish and white, then you’re entitled to buy land in a subdevelopment and have a dozen children. Queers, secularists, and Arabs are enemies of the state whether or not they know it, and as such gay parades, cremation, and Arab Israeli presence in government and the Army are to be opposed no matter what. The Palestinians don’t exist, aren’t really Palestinian, and don’t belong there anyway, so one of the many things the state has to do to keep property values cheap is exterminate them like insects.

If you’ve noticed I haven’t discussed foreign policy here, it’s because it’s an ideological totem - something external to and not necessary for the fantasists’ creed. While their leaders are perfectly enthusiastic about the old Israeli reactionary project of nuclear blackmail, exaggeration of external threats, and utter disregard for foreign national sovereignty, those exist for the fantasists mainly as a way of adopting a persecution complex - something extremely important to Americans in particular, because the American Jewish experience’s primary activity is imagining your own destruction, an activity which produces a fairly dangerous mindset when combined with a lack of any actual danger to life or limb. (It would be ubiquitous, but Americans are only one of the several immigrant groups the ideologues aim for - and especially for those coming from the more dismal corners of the former Soviet Union, persecution isn’t some exotic thing to transform into ritual - it was big even in the Soviet days, and now it’s how right-wing politicians get elected.)

Israel plays a role in the ideologues’ grand fantasy that it not only should not but cannot in reality. It is a country of millions with citizens of every major creed, race, and walk of life, and the terra nullia created by the violent expulsion of the last rural Palestinians has more or less run out. The choice is between moving into the cities (which seems to  be deeply offensive to the Americans, for whom renting is a form of suicide) desert exurbs (which are an entirely different and less sexy kind of fantasy, banal and Southwestern) and territory whose occupation by Israel has made it a concrete force of evil in the eyes of hundreds of millions of people, which offers it no strategic and little economic value, which its citizens have no concievable claim to and which essentially makes foreign relations with Israel as difficult as with Taiwan. Realists of every political tendency have agreed almost unanimously that the settlements are destructive and need to end yesterday.

The problem is Lieberman and what he represents - not just a radical ideology whose core involves the flat denial of basic, observable reality, but massive foreign support for that ideology based on a common developed or affected ignorance. There will always be Americans coming to Israel and acting as if the place exists to give them a half acre in a stupidly-named suburb; as of right now, it is the policy of both the Americans in charge of dealing with Israel and what is or at least was the major Israeli political party of the realist right to treat that ridiculous fantasy as the national purpose. This, not Israel and more than just Likud, is what AIPAC stands for: Give me Kosher Pines or give the entire country death!