Apres Levitt et Dubner, et à cher frère Cadre.

When America had industry we were in the unique position of being so big that you could feasibly dump a thousand miles away without creating an international incident. This is why we invented the biggest smokestacks, pumping waste into the air to fall dozens, hundreds, a thousand miles away. Our foundries poured poison into the heartland, and for a time as the Europeans looked at their own pollution problems and extrapolated to our scale, there was a real catastrophe on our hands.

Technology saved us, as it always does. The official history gives credit for smaller stacks and scrubber rims to the market, but the state and its scientist pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. And in time, as Reagan and the finance industry broke the industrial heartland and auctioned it off piece by piece, the need to throw poison into the air slacked off and the Yellow Sea took the acrid burden from Lake Erie. We could at last throw away Silent Spring, which sympathized with mosquitos; everything was all right again.

But Pandora’s box was stuck open wide, and three generations of growth and stagnation made China and ourselves coke and gas junkies. No matter how clean we cleaned our act, our looms and drive-trains were as ominous in their silence as unattended infants. The carbon flowed as the carbon must flow.

The Europeans again looked at their own pollution problems, the summer storm and winter drought and the rising of the sea, and they looked with alarm to us and to China, to Russia and to the second world, and we realized there was a catastrophe on our hands. We had stopped the destruction of the ozone long before we stopped the poisonous haze of sulfur, but the carbon was different, we were told: an integral part of who we were, and if that was to change we would need to gather electricity different ways. The wind, the sea, the sun, the atom - some source of free energy other than the earth’s ancient biomass would be needed.

But the people who survived the American economy had bottom lines to protect, and they saw denial as a better investment than cooptation. For a time there was a crisis as the bearded men who knew why we had seen the hurricanes from Hell were denied by billionaires in baseball caps. Wind farms are an eyesore, said they, and solar power is for fags. What we need is a way to keep on burning ancient carbon forever (for God will always furnish us with more).

Economists saved us, as they always do. To save our cities from the rising sea and the buffeting sky would require India and China to have nice things; what we needed instead was a pump, a giant pump, a big old hose as long as the biggest skygouging smoke stacks ever planned, so big you could pump poison into the air and it’d never come back. But what magical poison would save us from the carbon dioxide? How could we undo the greenhouse flux that had been a part of the Earth’s climate since life began to metabolize oxygen?

Sulfur dioxide, said they. We remembered the name but we couldn’t recall where from; the oil and coal men assured us it was from their pitiable complaints that they had to spend all this money throwing it away - when it could save us from ourselves! The market had finally come through for us, and the economists and their corporate pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. We could at last throw away Michael Moore and Al Gore, who were fat and had beards and sympathized with ecoterrorists. Everything was all right again.

The hose was delivered by the lowest bidder, not really a hose but a massive spire of a fine modern resin. They did a serviceable job, but they didn’t overbuild it; it wasn’t that expensive and we would just build more when this one started to degrade. A mainframe, for now inert, would work out how much sulfur needed to be in the air to maintain a permanent volcanic-style haze, to cool the Earth back down a degree and a half.

At the appointed date the sulfur levels were off by no less than ten percent, but that would be solved in time. There was concern in areas outside the thirty-mile circle in a near-abandoned rez no one could enter without permission that the hose was leaking; the contractors given the job of maintaining it affirmed that emissions were within parameters. The gas we had lost in the sky, said they, must have undergone a chemical change or floated into the sky. More plausible, surely, than some kind of conspiracy to cover up the poor construction of the pump.

Whatever its problems, the sulfur plan had given us back our freedoms - our lives, our liberty, our pursuit of carbon dioxide. We had not silenced the beardos but they no longer mattered; the plan had worked, and if it stopped working we could just build another plant.

Some time later they explained that the pump facility was old, and because of alarmists and nimby-pimbies it was hard to site them where we would have liked; because the sites we got weren’t ideal, didn’t have the access to refineries and strong security we had in Arizona, they were smaller and weaker. It was a sign of the concept’s strength, we understood, that what would work with one twenty-mile hose would work with five or ten. We had a site in Turkey; we had a site in Hawaii; we had a site in Tibet, in Rhodesia and Patagonia, two in the Northern Territory and one in Finnish waters north of the Arctic Circle. They weren’t as efficient as the older site, but they got the job done.

Our greatest fear, that terrorists or Russians or some other monsters would destroy our last hope because they resented the carbon scam being over, never came to pass, and even though dropping Earth’s temperature below its prior levels took until the 60s, the worst of the crisis was over.

The beardos would never be happy about our clever plan, and in their resentful anger they made the inefficient coral and plankton species dying out to be the sulfur-plan’s fault. A well-known blogger with a Harvard bachelor’s told a TV host that the ocean being more acrid than lakes was a big deal, and we laughed and laughed, because it always has been.

When the Arizona stack fell it hadn’t been our primary pump for decades, but that didn’t stop a lot of misguided concern about the carbon production of the Sinobanana’s trucks or new paracoal plants in unihabited Congolese desert. And there were calls for pump regulation by statists, and there were ignorant claims that no living thing had inhabited the Sea of Cortes since before the disaster. But we ignored their foolishness, and when the carbon dioxide production that buoyed our economy rebounded, we replaced the old Arizona pump with cheaper, less heavy stacks in Belarus, Saudi Iraq, and the islands the US had given Cuba in the 30s.

Communism’s corrosive effects linger on, as we all know, and the new plants had a few minor incidents - but those piled up, and before anyone (the beardos’ babbling aside) knew what was happening, we had random tides of dead fish and crop failures. Those failures got bad enough that instigators in Africa readily started riots, producing a real scare as the sulfur production slacked off. In the time it took us to build reserve facilities, the haze dropped badly enough that air passengers reportedly saw the ground at night and the Earth’s temperature had risen again.

Automation had saved us, as it always does. We threw away the local laborers and building inspectors and kept them out with drones and lasers, and we were at last free of their sympathizing with food-moochers and wobblies. The pumps would last a hundred years.

Mammals and bridges lasted fifty, and the Hoover Dam two hundred and twenty. Whether anything else from what we called Earth would write its names on the cosmos before the Sun erased Nixon’s and Gandhi’s I couldn’t tell you.

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.

Something touches every free man deep inside when he reads a line of Hunter Thompson. Some make a career of biting him, although some wind up simply biting the drug-frenzy culture that sprang up around him, aping his carriage or his sense of adventure. That is not what that is. Neither one is. This is just a response.

Thompson cut to the heart of what made Vegas as a business, but like many others he swept in heading east from San Fran, thundered through the high desert and parachuted in. In Fear and Loathing he can barely tell if he is in Boulder City. Someone coming in from any direction but California way could never mistake the two. They lie on opposite sides of an invisible border, one of a dozen identical borders that define life between Kansas City and Yreka.

Reno used to be much the way we were, but we got more high-octane and weird after the decision to sink a major dam into the Colorado on the Nevada-Arizona border became a reality. All of a sudden there was another big wave of spicks and micks and Jocks and polocks and every type of God’s own wop, and once the work was done the mob saw in us the last place in this awful state that labor was a buyer’s market. It was a little vision of Paradise for the thing that would become America after our industry died screaming, a monetarist American Dream. Thompson was looking at it in its hideous caul, back when the Mob still ran things and the casinos had a stake in a good crop of tourists raising real hell.

Reno, though, Reno was sitting on top of Carson City, part of the giant pre-auto cluster-fuck that evolved from Virginia and her sister lodes. It grew out of services provided to silver miners, and you can’t fob off men who work with dynamite and quicksilver with pussy and poker alone. The Biggest Little City On Earth, they call themselves - a sort of vile Moral Majority taunt, a formal craven-call treaty between the Valley Baptists and the Mormon tide. We never got the way that you got in California or Oregon or Washington, even British Columbia and Alaska, the big isolated cities serving a cross-section of humanity and the local religious nuts seething in the wilderness. They got into one of them big cities of ours good and early.

The Biggest Little City On Earth. I mean, listen to that shit. The fix was in, wasn’t nobody lying about it. Johnny Cash could only barely tell, on his clearest days, that you could kill a man there without winding up in Sacramento or Salt Lake.

—

Anyone who has lived here has gone to a casino not just without gambling, but without even the faintest interest in gambling. Until you have, you’re a tourist. It’s where the shows happen, it’s where you find the closest we have to good food, it’s where the theatres and auditoria are. You have to walk through two floors of casino to see a movie in the whitest burb of this Goddamn town. For legal reasons, they have to mark off what is Casino and what isn’t, but the carpet and walls are the same - driving your feet and body inexorably towards video poker. (You see, with the Colorado emptying into the Mexican dirt, we don’t drain to the sea any more. It’s ecologically irresponsible to throw human trash out just anywhere. Thus: video poker.)  You are always either in a cozy little womb or a vast domed arch, and the wombs are falling out of fashion. Caesar’s Palace even has its own meticulously-maintained, obviously false sky - and you shop there. The smoky haze lifts year by year, to the point that this day you could spend all week in even the shittiest purpose-built casino withut getting cancer. You drink to pass the time paying to play a shitty video game; the tables are for Aryans of good pedigree. That hokey Don’t Gamble With Marijuana sign is hardly necessary any more.

—

It’s a common misunderstanding among tourists that the people they see represent part-timers or working stiffs. The ones manning the pulpits are no common monasts but little lords in the making. From the very beginning, the casinos have done all they can to create a class of well-off private eunuchs born into the maroon, grab ‘em out of high school with too much money to know what to do with. The visibles, they’re well-off. They might not like their jobs - God, who does? - but they pay fantastic, and they have no cross-applicable skills; nobody but another casino can poach your lumpenbourgeois. The only other human beings who ain’t in there to play carnival are the help; Eastern Europeans, these days, the predictable casualties of our exported supply-side revolution, but it takes all kinds. Brown a plus. English not required. The American eye is trained to politely ignore them for everyone’s convenience.

The lower-middle-class stiffs are similarly out of sight. They work in support industries, catering and keeping up our Potemkin shops, but that’s the glamor of Vegas. Get Mickey while he’s young, keep him lily-white, and put up with a little labor expense for his glove-wearing ass and everyone will believe you’re the happiest place on Earth. An endless succession of unnecessaries, bellhops and valets and doormen and retainers, taking tips they don’t need to make the clients they’re not doing anything substantial for feel like some kind of decadent Southern patriarch, but with a heart of gold. We’re a town of scraggle-moustachioed Mormon pimps and fresh-faced young idiots with welcoming mouths. No wonder Penn and Teller set up shop here.

—

There are two types of house of worship: the inspiringly oppressive and the sleepily comforting. Cathedrals and chapels. Chapels have gone out of fashion - every church a megachurch, there to remind you that God is bigger and more important than you, and come with top-of-the-line remote-controlled presentation scrollsheets to convince the faithful that He needs your money. That represents a leap of logic it used to be vaguely obscene to even suggest, and it’s one we pioneered out West: business and faith, together at last. Denver worked on the faith, we worked on the business, both animated to new heights in actual depravity by a shared terror Mormonica. We were the last, best hope of what was becoming America.
In Vegas, Disneyland crowded out the mob and cozy, welcoming obscenity of the circus, and unlike those Denver quitters, we never let the side benefits to cancerous growth get in our way. A couple of dudes strung out on speed was all it took to knock Denver out of the good grace of their capitalist God; it only made our Capitalism-God stronger. Family Values muscled out the Family and the figurative circus replaced the real one, and tits sprouted on billboards like mushrooms in rainy weather as the town’s strip clubs and whore houses went moribund. No country for dick suckers here - nobody even notices any more that prostitution is illegal in Clark County, even the ones who spent their entire trip at the Bellagio.

That poor fool Thompson! Still obsessing over a man quaint enough to bug his opponent as our friends in Iran coronated Saint Reagan, still chasing big winners in an era of strutting, regal losers. He never had any damn idea.

—

These days only a few vestiges remain of Vegas as the nerve center of the Man, the place your bosses went on vacation to abandon their puritanical lives. When our mayor, a vaguely corrupt mob lawyer who shilled a specific gin to children, a man who embodies all that the Clark Containment Pact stands against - a drunken old mobby Jew with an irrepressible decadence - inevitably descends from power, he will be replaced almost without fail by some service-industrial laborite or functionaire, either way another moderate Democrat without opinions about developers. A land-developer or one of their white serfs; the way it’s always been in Reno, where all it takes is flipping a truck stop and being a good Temple and Party man to qualify you as Il Duce.

—

The casinos are laying off their wealthy catamites, a seeming first, and everyone has grown proper spooked. The Bush era was good for us, because we’ve become a sort of embodiment of American collective delusion, the kind it doesn’t take drugs or depravity to produce. Our business model has de-evolved exclusively to middle-managers coming back from an illegal hand-job thinking of themselves as pagan chieftains of Turquery, and you can only shine up being a member of the bad luck crowd so far. When the bloom wears off, we’re just another bullshit tourist town.

—

Washoe County used to be one of the country’s more Republican urban counties, and this year it went for Obama by margins typical of the rest of the left coast. This threatens a break, or perhaps represents a cleavage already in progress, in the accepted agreement in Republican politics in Nevada - Reno gets funding and political power under Republican administrations out of proportion to usual rural-resentment patterns as long as they help keep a lid on Clark. In my optimism in the wake of the election, I saw this as a sign that Reno had welched; and so after did the lame-duck Republican government pull UNR funds and other spillover perqs with an unreserved furor. But the reality is that the pact is obsolete. Our civic genius these days is Wynn, representing all the filthy white Dubaihis who banked on the bullshit economy lasting forever. The mayor, not the Governor, is the walking dead.

Goodbye Raoul Duke! Goodbye “Las Vegas”!

There is a specific green color you have never seen on a monitor. There may be a way to approximate it that I don’t know of, but unfortunately I just don’t have any way of showing it to you here. Here is where I have seen it:

- certain particularly green turquoises;
- emeralds cut so as to sit right on the boundary of transparent and translucent;
- A shallow inlet over coarse white sand seen from a height;
- One of the colors in a Paas easter-egg dye kit;
- Copper let to patinate in saltless air.

I’ve always regarded this with a sort of aesthetic familiarity for no particular reason - odd in that, within its own region of our visual spectrum, I tend to prefer darker rather than lighter colors. And because the easter-egg association is the only one I have significant personal experience with - and because it’s been a decade since I’ve colored an egg - there’s a certain nostalgia to its appeal.

As it turns out, the appeal and nostalgia and my inability to just link you to the color have a specific, shared reason: It is outside of the RGB gamut. You can produce it with no standard color monitor. For computerized design (which on the balance I prefer), it is well outside of the toolbox - and as such, most people capable of finding work in graphic design have not used it since the 80s. Not only is it impossible to view on a monitor (and I’ve been glued to one since age 3), it’s impossible to work with on a computer.

To sift through humanity’s intellectual output such as it has been for the last five or so years, one would find vanishingly little evidence that the color was known to us at all.

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.

Although it lacks any statistical punch, Blumenthal’s interviews of American assholes in Israel would seem to suggest the point I made earlier: the Americo-Israeli project seems to disproportionately produce voters in Israel who have no interest in Israel as anything but a political project. I imagine that if one were to poll American Israelis, one would find a disproportionate level of antagonism towards Obama in the wake of Cairo and Netanyahu’s dickery.

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!

Enraged Citizens Stage ‘Tea Party’ Protest Over Tax Increases For The People Who Take Four Fifths Of Their Money Plus Interest

America’s Heroic Businesses Help Millions ‘Go Galt’ In Spite Of Government Interference, Temporary Stipends

“Expert” Testimony From “FBI” On “Torture” Refuted By Special Episode Of 24

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Prophesy is an interesting word, partially because it doesn’t actually mean anything*; it is the verbal form of prophecy, and a fairly predominantly American Evangelical phenomenon. It rests on a wackily fundamental misunderstanding, and it’s everywhere.
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