http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/09/john-mccain-fri.html
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/09/bad-touch.html

WHAT THE FUCK

edit:

(also: http://www.enterthejabberwock.com/junk/GoTeamRape.jpg)

A heartbeat away from the Presidency if McCain should win is a woman who is mostly a shameless thief; her instincts are a bandit’s and her loyalties are a mobster’s.

She deliberately destroyed the world’s largest sockeye fishery for no better purpose than the profit margins of some Goddamn mining consortium; she likes to pretend that she’s a loyal Christian but she’s got that same evangelical fixation on her own petty, ridiculous issues - treating a pipeline like an object of saintly veneration, conscripting children (who Jesus of course admires more than anything, so long as they’re white) to pray with her (TV cameras rolling - Heaven forbid we not be noticed in our piety, good Philistines we are) for a fucking pipeline.

I like to say pat things about the terrible mick fuckers who squint on their million-dollar TV programs to convince the audience they’re extra special pious, but they at least have a concept of piety divorced even conceptually from their own bottom line. Palin literally believes God is smiling on her petty graft.

In the course of doing so, of course, she scammed money from the government. The gesture means more than the amount - $600 would seem pathetic to someone like her - after all, she doesn’t share the daily difficulties of the working class, and for her $600 is not a month’s rent but pocket change to be spent on a flight and a lunch; she’s stolen much larger amounts, but they all follow the same basic logic.

She has a basically fascist concept of society - it doesn’t seem at all out of place for her to requisition money to pray for a pipeline in public, nor to spend $400,000 campaigning against common sense or campaign actively against her own government on the basis of its incoherence with her private worldview. She’s been doing it since she was a small-time operative; before she became a fearless Duce for Alaska, she played the same role in Wasilla, waging a D’Annunzian war against a local librarian whose insufficient zeal for censoring moral turpitude revealed too little support for the mayor - in her own words.

Her speeches since she became nationally prominent have all been great fulminations against civil society - grand proclamations of the uselessness of community organizing, the inefficacy of private society and the transcendent beauty of the state. Small wonder she has an Objectivist fan-club devoted to scouring every black mark on her character from the public record - no human being has been as shameless about their political bankruptcy since Rand sang and danced for fascist Italy. She has no concept of power unless it be divorced from the power of life and death; no concept of good unless it be enslaved to the crusade against evil; and nothing but contempt for any people decadent enough to refuse any power to their rightful Leaders.

This is not just another rant about the inexplicable rise of the Basileus of Wasilla, however hilariously it lays bare a truth about the American right too terrible to explain directly. Her fascism - and here the word is so literal I actually feel ashamed for using it on people who simply exhibited surreal enthusiasm for power rather than openly worshipping it - is not so much a governing principle as a malignant worldview, a festering, evil rotting of the soul. Like any other aspiring autocrat, she has no power over the demoniac pull of her ink-black spiritual abyss - she simply feels its compelling claw, understands beyond understanding that eternal urge to triumph through faith.

No: the one thing Palin can understand, the one emotion she can be counted on to exhibit, is contempt for things outside of her domain. Like the nearly erotic terror the idea of art and culture divorced from tradition aroused in the Nazis and their sympathizers, anything that she cannot clump into her own stilted, corrupt experience - the Pinochetian cosmos of greed, grasping Nietzchian wills and impossibly complicit victims - is an impossible beast, something to be set alight and trampled underfoot. Anything that is not part of the rat-race must become fuel for that which is.

This is the common theme we see in what she does where there is no clearly understandable profit motive. We can exercise the benefit of the doubt and suppose that her militant contempt for ANWR might just be the hand of big oil up her ass, and we could similarly paint her willingness to rip her own state’s future as a tourist haven to shreds as the impossible desperation of a miner’s whore in an incipient ghost-town.

But we cannot by these means explain the wolves.

Like that filthy monster Reagan - dead before the public ever knew his name and shambling about even now these four years after his mouldering body at last followed his conscience and memory in giving up the ghost - she hates the world in a way functioning human beings find impossible to understand. Reagan insisted that the redwoods and other precious parts of our nation’s most populous, diverse, and essentially American state were interchangeable logging stock; even that had some surreal, warped basis in economic impulse. But Palin goes beyond this.

She offers men who think of themselves as hunters, responsible men of the world, a hundred and fifty dollars each to destroy wolves. She has been warned by people who understand ecology, even those - like the Republicans for Environmental Protection mentioned by Dolan - who share her culture’s insistence that the place of nature is under the dominion of man. Unlike any other hunters in the first world, the methods she favors - methods that shameless thief’s thief spent $400,000 of the state’s money to encourage at the polls - are mechanically efficient. We are not dealing with boar-stickers or deer-slayers; these women and men are intimate with the idea of death and share a kind of spiritual concern for the animals they destroy. They are often not the most ecologically-minded of people, but they are united by a vague idea of sport.

Palin, aiming to correct their ludicrous inefficiency, suggested they machine-gun the wolves by Cessna. To her, not only is the idea of the wolf repellant but so is the idea of the wolf meeting a human end. She can understand humans preying on big game - even if she does not understand, as ecologists now do and as sport hunters always have, that their fellow predators play a vital role in weeding out the weak and sick and keeping the big game strong - but the idea of something hunting out of hunger is alien to her, and so is the idea of competition with mercy. Wolves must be destroyed; the strong must destroy the weak even when forebearance serves them just as well.

Here, thus, we can record the only principle Palin has ever exhibited in any of her forty-four years: that God put us on Earth to strafe the wolves. I am no Christian, but I’m not sure what Christ would say about this.

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.

Because John McCain is unbelievably McOld (you can probably tell I used to write for the Onion, folks) it has become common on the left to consider attacks on this element of his character ageist.

To some extent, I accept this. (I refuse to accept the right-wing talking point version of it - in general the right only cares about any kind of ism when it’s personally inconvenient to them, and ageism is no exception.) The major excuse I have to justify my trucking in it is this - while he may well be at least partially senile, McCain chooses to be ‘old’ in the way pop culture generally demands it. There’s nothing about being an advanced age that makes computers inherently unapproachable, that keeps you from stringing together a coherent sentence about foreign policy or fills you with murderous contempt for people you’ve never met.

One of my grandparents was born in ‘33 and we spent hours the last time I was up to visit discussing the role the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire had in the current state of the Middle East - and he was a special-needs education professor, not a historian. Even my grandfather on the other side - about McCain’s age and a kind of shameless racist the modern world no longer produces - is willing to engage the foreign suffering our domestic politics cause. One of my grandparents was born in the Arizona Territory and she rarely gets as irascible or verbally confused as the senior senator from Arizona.

In short, yes - dumping on McCain for no better reason than being old is unpleasant and wrong. But just as he does Whitey, he gives the elderly a bad name; he’s been rotten inside his whole life, it’s just that - like a bottle of shit left in a wine cellar - he’s grown only more purulently despicable with age. Letting him use that age - an age shared or exceeded by millions of Americans with minds and souls in far better shape than his - as an excuse to be a horrible human being is as ageist as anything. He’s been treating computers as a fad and brown people as disposable since my parents were in high school; just because he’s gotten nastier and more unusual for both with age doesn’t excuse him.

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.

A monograph on the exciting new directions to be taken by prodding boners in the new American century.
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On the June 18 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, co-host of ABC’s The View, asserted of Sen. Barack Obama: “[I]t bothered me that he seemed for a while more willing to give the fist bump to [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad than our own General [David] Petraeus.” Hasselbeck continued: “It bothers me. It bothers me as a mom. It bothers me as a working woman. It bothers me as a citizen of this country.”

(Via MMFA.)

I promise not to do this too often (and the source’s willingness to jump aboard the Natural Birth bandwagon seems like a matter almost as damnedable), but this NYT article, via Broadsheet, is breathtaking.

Some of you might have known women growing up that had to live through the pre-Roe period. It’s worth bearing in mind that for us (born in 1987 and 1986, respectively), even our grandparents were pretty young when Roe was decided.

Good on the NYT for publishing this. We’re much too blasé about what the Republicans want to take away from us; allowing them to remain as coy as they are about the kind of world they want to see is despicable, and our peers’ children (2002-) need to have something to remind them the consequences of reactionary excess.

If “momism” hadn’t been claimed already by Philip Wylie, I’d gladly snap it up for this modern cult of the mom. As I insufficiently described in IID’s first post, mom is rising up to replace wife as the default identity of women after feminism gouged away at the latter. This isn’t a critique of motherhood, or even of the slang term “mom” — but I’ve certainly noticed that being a mom implies far more in terms of lifestyle than old-fashioned motherhood.

Here, we see an ideal personification of the Mom — pregnant, young, white, chic yet modest, but with a sufficient dollop of pretended grrl power to keep one’s mom from crying in shame. “No men allowed” in this context doesn’t offer a safe space for women to be women — a goal I wholeheartedly support — but instead a way for women to cooperate in reinforcing their essential separation from but dependence on manhood.

For what it’s worth, this isn’t a comment on “CafeMom” or its members. I toil myself in the abattoir called marketing, and I’m keenly aware of the levels of separation involved. A cursory search of the site yields content ranging from the worst neo-momist trash to simple venting to enlightened commentary on identity on motherhood. I’ll end by linking this thread, which beautifully serves to demonstrate the worst in both male and female socialization — man as a domestically helpless penis-worm, and woman as a long-suffering eunuch for Christ. In this world, man is always doomed to be the pursuer, and woman the pursued; man fucks, and woman is fucked. There’s no place for men (straight, gay, or in between) who want to be fucked, or women (likewise) who want to fuck. As a man who sometimes struggles to keep up with the sexual demands of his partner, I am feminized; as a woman sometimes driven to fits of rage by a bout of abstinence, she is masculinized.

Sorry for the long delay in posting. I’ve a post on pie-throwing in the queue, and I hope to deliver it in a timely manner.