I actually, my mind is full of what’s my son doing right now – what am I going to feed him for dinner – I’m a mom. You know what, today I don’t care if the Holocaust actually happened, I may not care tomorrow, I just want to know that my son is safe from lecherous darkies.
Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon:
Octomom’s tragic new low
Nadya Suleman declares bankruptcy and mulls porn. Now can we stop taking pleasure in her humiliation?
Item! Gossip columns are sick and depraved!
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.
Remember when Presidents had running mates? You know, people who campaigned with them and if they won would replace them on death and if they lost would give them at least an h/j? Wasn’t that a hoot and a half. Join me on a “trip down Memory Lane” to explore the would-be veepsmen, or “Vice-Presidents”, of Wilhelm “Brick” Manley, who is the Adversary, before it was decided by all serious people that the question was settled and none dare question his decisions.
1. Jean-Richard “Rico” Perret (TX)
Why. Widely assumed to be the frontrunner in the veep nom pross (vee-pnoss to experts) and an early primary backer. Good “dumb state” cred.
Why Not. Jean-Richard “Rico” Perret is a failed European clone of Brick Manley, and literally too stupid to legally hold office.
Fun Facts.
2. Lady-Mike “Eva” Essess-Sturmbannfuehrer (MN)
Why. The “Governatrix” was mooted to offer a repeat of 2008, in which choosing Poopsie Gilliam (R-AK) as running-mate allowed Joe “Sore” Loserman (I-CT) to squeak out a humiliating defeat against a black man with a weird name, but also make it with a real girl.
Why Not. Unlike Poopsie, who loves strangers’ money, partying, and also what people on Craigslist describe as “partying”, the Governatrix is a hateful, unlikeable scold and shrew, noteworthy exclusively for the strange niche appeal her psychotic transfusion-influenced prophecy ramblings won her among Republican faithful and the clinically insane.
Fun Facts.
3. Hengh-Hengh Bellavisti (SC)
Why. Hengh-Hengh (“Hengh-Hengh” to her supporters) was particularly beloved for spectacular requirements of fealty, once trying to have Wilmington, NC – not even under her jurisdiction – thrown into the sea for failing to send her flowers on her birthday. A generation of pundits still thinks sadly on the day they discovered they wouldn’t have to live in constant erotic terror that the insufficience of their glorious displays of genteel obeisance to a lumpy brunette in a pantsuit would end in their final public humiliation / sexy shame death. She would have “elevated the tone” in this exact manner.
Why Not. She actually rejected the proposal – grading it a “B minus effort” – on the grounds that “Brick” failed to offer her the Presidency first. Also, her principled refusal to run against a black man for fear that something would happen to her school district scuttled her veepsmanship prospects early.
Fun Facts.
4. Rno “Rino” Pual (TX)
Why. It was conventional wisdom that those mimeographed 1989 KKK newsletters were just what the party needed.
Why Not. Oddly enough, his past as an obstetrician. “Brick” slammed him as a “birth pimp” and refused to shake hands with a man whose hands were covered in runny green shit and placental mass.
Fun Facts.
5. Jimmy-Jim “Jimbo” Traficant (OH)
Why. Mostly of interest in the media, the American Select candidate for Veepsman was only ever considered because he was once a Democrat and that meant the ticket would somehow be good.
Why Not. Look, as much as they love using his big bushy dumb moustache for protective ideological cover among Serious Moderates, do you think even Republicans are dumb enough to take anything Thom “Boy” Friedman says seriously, even for a second? These are people who run and occasionally win campaigns for national office, not people who get their tongues stuck to metal poles every winter. Also, at the time of the election Jimmy-Jim “Jimbo” Traficant was on a fifteen-year bid for exsanguinating a Mexican.
Fun Facts.
Facts.
As we all know, “Brick” Manley chose none of these, and in fact tried to kill them all with a heat ray. Instead, he ran as his own veepsman, and lost, and became President and veepsman anyway!
And the pageant of democracy marches on!
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.
A new age of spite and entitlement is dawning in the West, as the haves, confronted by a yawning abyss of their own manufacture, struggle to find a way to so demonize their opposite numbers at the bottom that they need no justification to remain at the top.
It is observed, including by my own perennial favorite Adam Cadre, that a powerful motivator for this sort of behavior is simple spite – that after a certain amount of privilege accrues, one of the main ways of enjoying it is finding ways to wave it under the noses of those without it. We observe this on a daily basis with money – the whole category of Veblen goods could not exist otherwise.
A trans-Atlantic culture of fat snobbery has emerged on similar terms, with people – blessed by the mix of economic and physical privilege such that they do not, by their normal day-to-day- routine, gain or retain large amounts of weight – basically heaping abuse on the disgusting, morally incontinent fat-asses who inexplicably now form a majority in the US and a plurality in the UK. While the temptation, as always within the framework of choice-based liberalism, is to view obesity as a simple consequence of personal choice, a more coherent view emerges if you construct it in the same manner at least some liberals are willing to qualifiedly accept class or wealth.
(Certainly much more coherent than Jamie Oliver flogging up-market delicacies as a substitute for prolefeed with similar caloric content, and treating the choice as one not just of diet but of morality – as though money were no object.)
But these are not subjects I am touching on in detail today. With the 2011 autumn of rage still sputtering along and still making the odd headline, I would only be adding to a vast stream of noise about money to discuss it; and I have already done too much futile speaking for too long on my left approach to obesity, and a man gets discouraged after a while.
What I am interested in now is a new push against the discipline of mental health.
(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.
Hello there, *campers*. I’m Thuryl, II*D*’s Australian correspondent, here to bring you news from the other side of the world (or, if you are on this side of the world, this side of the world).
Before that little election or whatever it was that you Americans held a few months ago, some of you contacted me about the possibility of moving over here in the event that McCain won. To you, dear friends, I say: you’re ignorant fuckwits who know nothing about Australia. At the best of times, we manage to be slightly less horrible than you. My purpose here will mostly be to show you just how bad we are.
The media over here are already getting tired of reporting on Obama’s inauguration and looking for news further afield. Today, they’ve managed to latch onto a misogynistic lecture by Abu Hamza, an “Islamic cleric” who runs a small Muslim social club about 10 minutes’ drive away from my home. (Wonderful term, that, isn’t it? Don’t bother researching whether he’s widely respected or has any kind of recognition outside his own congregation; just call him a “cleric” and be done with it. Do people go around referring to street preachers as “Christian clerics”?)
Now, this lecture was delivered back in 2003, and Abu Hamza hasn’t done anything much in the public eye since then, so the only purpose anyone could have for digging it up and kicking up a fuss about it today is race-baiting. It’s not as if it’s even a slow news day, for heaven’s sake. Yes, the lecture is pretty repulsive: among other things, it argues that a married woman has no right to refuse her husband’s sexual advances. On the other hand, this is still the Catholic Church’s official position on marriage. The Vatican is a damn sight more influential than Abu Hamza, and yet somehow people find it easier to believe that a Catholic can disagree with the Vatican than that a Muslim can disagree with whichever “cleric” has been trotted out and demonised this week. Or, if you happen to be a Protestant, look at, say, your own Phyllis Schlafly. Civil authorities don’t do much better than religious ones on the issue, either: spousal rape was completely legal in Australia until 1985, and many police still don’t take it seriously.
I seem to recall something in a book I read once about removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in your neighbour’s.
(EDIT: By some inexplicable thinko, I managed to misname the principal subject of this article – and in spite of looking at it repeatedly for some time have only just now realized. Outside of the vague resemblance between ‘k’ and ‘d’ and the fact that this article was dashed out fairly quickly, I can offer no real excuse for this; it is simply unfortunate that it fell into the beginning of a long period of personal infirmity and I didn’t notice earlier. MGC. AK)
1. Lies about George Soros by American right-wing pseudopopulists — the better to induct him into their spooky ethnic villain pantheon, a sort of Captain Planet in reverse — generally paint him the exact way Bernard Madoff is: an intensely communitarian, money-grubbing Jew. He is not quite literally a vampire, but he’s been involved in his share of theft and ethnic palm-greasing.
(POINT OF CLARITY: This is the major bit of this essay I felt somewhat uncomfortable about, if only because the subject of powerful Jews is so mixed up with cultural baggage that people are inevitably going to read this as endorsement of something it isn’t. So for the record, within the financier class Madoff is typical as an aspiring big-man but atypical as a Jew. Most of his colleagues – and I would guess even a majority of people funding Zionist charities in the US – are white Christians, largely evangelical protestants. The main thrust of the domestic Zionist project, in which Makoff involved himself as an aspirant capitalist aristocrat, is basically to set specific parameters on the social pressures on American Jews – and, most importantly, to assimilate them as much as possible into a specific subculture with a somewhat unrealistic, idealized relationship with Israel – a relationship that has become increasingly obsolete and replaced with what they regard as an unwelcome cynicism.)
“The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David [Duke], stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”
former Duke campaign manager, 1990
He is a sort of hypertrophied representative of the worst tendency among the worst, most well-discussed group (the reactionary upper-middle-class) in American Judaism – to live up to its worst stereotypes and fail to live up to the better one. They aren’t a people apart, but they are deeply invested in the idea of it.
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