Urgent news for right-wing negro-monitors: chocolate is delightful. It comes in many flavors, all of them delicious, and is appreciated by everyone.

I really never thought I would be in a political dispute over ‘chocolate is delightful’. God knows what else is upside down in that wacky universe of yours.

Djur adds: See this, and also this. The objection to “chocolate city,” in this case and when Ray Nagin referred to New Orleans as such after Hurricane Katrina, is usually justified by claiming the term amounts to reverse racism, but the real motivation is less rational. First, the idea that American cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Washington, and Atlanta could be majority black is terrifying for your average honky racist. Second, to ofays who resent losing the ability to freely use racial slurs in mixed company, a black man using jocular language to describe his brothers is an affront. “If James Brown can be black and proud,” quoth whitey, “why can’t I be white and proud? Why do we have a Black History Month but not a White History Month? If pro is the opposite of con, does that explain why my neighbor’s dogshit is so tangy? Did I just blow your mind or what?”

Of course, I hear this bullshit from professed liberals as well. The answer is simple: there is no white identity outside racism. There is a black identity because of racism. Community among the oppressed is admirable and necessary; community among oppressors is an abomination. As long as the term “chocolate city” has any meaning, it cannot be offensive. Whitey delenda est.

Burma? Nah. China? What are you talking about?

No: the worst human rights abuses ever are those taking place under Mugabe, in which a more or less normal African dictator has expropriated land from white people.

If it was ever necessary to prove how deeply indebted the Anglosphere’s right wing is to their childhood fetishes, here is the final word - nothing freaks them out quite like the colonials revolting, and they have endless stories of this or that Siege (always, curiously, in land that the natives used to have sole rights to twenty years ago) and this or that Rebellion and this or that tragedy. When darkies start oppressing whitey in any fashion, an injustice for the ages has taken place.

Zimbabwe’s regime is autocratic and the expropriation of land is unfair. But the consistent treatment of Mugabe as the worst human being alive is patently ridiculous. Just like the continuous efforts to make any oppressed minority in the Islamic world into Christians (e.g. the (90%+ Sunni) Kurds or Fur), it’s a clear example of people refusing to exercise an ounce of critical thought, moving into the world with nursery-school lies as firm and fixed as laws of nature.

And if there’s no better reason to be found to avoid an American empire per the British one, it’s more than worth the price of forbearance to avoid some honky complaining at our tanned grandchildren that ‘they kicked us out of Iraq, you know’.

I respectfully disagree. While I can’t vouch for the original author, I do feel that two things are both very true and very alarming:

a) The new mode of political discourse involves a replacement of class and race struggle with ‘culture struggle’, and
b) Taking their cues from every other group to consider themselves locked in a culture struggle, the Enemy of the right is a hodgepodge of accusations of elitism, defeatism, and radicalism which smells an awful lot like the ones that used to dominate the negative stereotyping of the Jews.

While the Clintonites’ ‘creative class’ nonsense is more or less innocent of first-hand anti-Semitism, the same cannot be said of the wider conservative culture they take a page from - in which ‘latte-sipping intellectuals’ are closely affiliated with Hollywood and high finance, George Soros is a liberal mastermind instead of a normal philanthropist, and almost every debased coin of the anti-Semitic realm has ‘degenerate/Aryan’ overstruck with ‘elitist/Patriot’.

The ‘creative class’ is a way for a movement that’s always been deeply affiliated with the Little People to avoid alienating the people that keep them little - that is, to pretend that the ‘average American’ matters not because she is poor, but because she is a boor. And it is much easier for the high-powered lawyers and corporate professionals who form the political base of the Clintonites (especially the Clintonites-cum-McCainiacs) to aim for the interests of the boor than the interests of the poor. All they have to do to sastify the boor is to call black people nasty names - and hell, they were doing that anyway.

‘Latte-sipping elitist intellectual’ is a couple of notes away from ‘radical elitist degenerate’, and whether you like it or not someone who believes in the former is usually willing to accept most of the premises of the latter. The only reason that widening ‘anti-Semitism’ has been so repugnant lately is because the main agitators for that widening are jackasses who believe setting fire to Palestinian orphans is an integral part of Jewish identity. Der Ewige Entartete has gone hand-in-hand with der other Ewige for a century now, and denying that is disingenuous.

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.

This list will remain relevant until approximately dawn, but as we see the Democratic contest (and, with it, more or less the general up-ticket election) wind to an end (and Clinton’s eternal optimism aside, it’d literally take someone gunning Obama down to prevent his victory now), I’d like to share how I want to see the ticket to look.

Presidential Platform - Primary issues are expanding social programs, funding every educational mandate, expanding access to higher education and progressivizing the tax code, and cutting down on the supply-side/theocratic red tape introduced to the bureaucracy by Bush. Secondary: an effective minimum wage; a strong effort to end the abuse of immigrant labor (legal and illegal); a large cut in pork-barrel spending in the defense sector. Things which should go without saying but which are not really necessarily campaign issues: major investments into and incentives for private development of sustainable growth and energy; an end to the hiring of mercenary contractors; an end to hiring discrimination among translators and other intelligence operatives; some kind of death ray to ward off Italian perfidy.

Oh, and Iraq: The Obama campaign not only needs to end the occupation immediately on winning the Presidency, but in fact should be smuggling individual soldiers out of the country now. Everyone likes a proactive candidate.

Clinton - Clinton’s powerful base of support means that she should play at least some role in the incoming Administration. The problem is that she seems pretty intent on making herself Someone Important - but her entire campaign has been devoted to suggesting that she’s an experienced, forceful national security / foreign policy candidate.

Vice-President would be a mistake - normal VPs are largely ceremonial representatives and the role of the VP on the campaign trail is (a) involuntary, so there are bound to be points scored off the heated primaries; and (b) servile, a sure shot to alienate Clinton’s ferocious supporters among wealthy middle-aged white skags.
While Richardson’s campaign has bent over backwards to emphasize his suitability in that regard (and he was an early Obama supporter), State would seem to be the proper mixture of important and low-profile to fit Clinton into the campaign, and its mandate is indeed national security and foreign relations. Failing that, Defense is a possibility (although it’d be an unorthodox fit); Attorney-General is also a possibility, but it’s also at odds with what I want to see done with the office.

Vice-President - The choice is essentially between Edwards and Richardson; besides those two, it’s anybody’s guess.
Edwards would produce a fairly balanced ticket; while it’s been suggested that ‘elitist’ has been lobbed at both men, it’s worth saying that Edwards struck a nerve of social populism in the South that many assumed to be dead - the media establishment alienates him at its own risk.
On the other hand, Richardson would balance the ticket in a much less conventional but much more meaningful sense: it’d produce a ticket with two ethnic minority members, balanced between the Mideast and Southwest. Richardson on the VP ticket would help offset the Latino community’s generally conservative politics and their strongly favoring Clinton in the primary - and it would provide the Obama campaign with an anchor in the Southwest, something that would help at least somewhat facing that fucking sun-belt lifer.

If the Obama campaign doesn’t use Edwards as VP, it’d seem wise to make him Attorney-General; the office has spent the last two decades being dragged through the mud something horrible, and Edwards has been a consistently trustworthy character in the last two elections. (It’s worth saying, if he was used as VP, that any retrospectives would show him fighting Cheney - and only a McCain/Ahmadinejad ticket would make that look good for the GOP.)  Especially with the unfortunate rise in right-wing survivalists, a basically amiable Attorney General is going to be a must for the next few terms.
As for Richardson - State, probably.

I’ve also suggested that one of the Daily Show people be used as Press Secretary - given that a major prerequisite for the role now seems to be media presence, it’d almost seem fitting to bring a comedian in to do the job. Yes, it’d be terrible seeing progressive idols dragged through the political mud, but really - the office of Press Secretary wasn’t that nasty before Reagan turned the Presidency into a bullshit art.

Miscellaneous - Various other figures could be usefully employed by a Democratic president. Gore should play at least some role in the new administration; Interior would be worth filling with someone visible, and Gore would make a nice fit for the office.

In general, we needed to do this weeks ago - the Democrats need to have a solid base to lay their platform on. It’s worth emphasizing that the Republicans are so dry on ideas they pretty much dredge up interchangeable party flacks to fill vital roles. Just off the top of my head, I’ve filled four cabinet-level positions - and I’ve barely been watching the news.

It’s time to hammer home that the Democrats are the political future of the country, for better or worse. The Republicans have long since abandoned any pretense of loyalty beyond raw, crass avarice; the Democrats are hardly saints, but they occasionally have the desire to do anything that doesn’t involve making the rich richer.

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.

If the Pope wants to keep up his entire European Christian conservative routine, a good start would be excommunicating Clarence Thomas for blessing the death penalty in the face of its cruelty. His understanding of the law might require him to do so, but that does not abrogate his higher moral responsibility.

The sad truth, unfortunately, is that holding your breath waiting for large churches to get noisy about prominent conservatives like they do, and less appropriately, about prominent liberals (it’s not Kerry’s job to rule on the justice of abortion, for instance) is a pretty reliable way to choke to death. But it doesn’t mean we can’t ask why it isn’t happening.

:.

On the other hand, it’s much more difficult to call Bill Kristol’s surreal take on one of his ostensible religion’s more important holidays sacrilege. After all, it might strike a Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, or For-Jesus Jew as inappropriate, maybe even insane, to associate the Biblical narrative of God’s deliverance from persecution with a military campaign against international terrorism. In fact, were Kristol any of those, that point would be easy to make; but the statement is much more consistent for his personal creed, in which the role of protector and jealous shepherd of the Chosen People - traditionally associated with the all-knowing, all-present one who is called I Am - is actually an official function of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Other traditions of Neoconservative Judaism you might be unfamiliar with: acting out blood libels out of sheer cussedness and contempt for their coreligionists; insisting the prophet Elijah was actually a time-travelling Barry Goldwater; quietly worshipping Jesus, our Lord who is Christ; greedily devouring bacon cheeseburgers every Saturday, then hectoring Liberal children for being atheist queers on their way home from temple.

Timmy is a nine-year-old boy. His father died when he was young, and his mother remarried recently. He and his stepfather get along OK, but they’ve still got a lot of getting to know each other to do. One evening, he wakes up and wants to get himself some Oreos, so he goes over to his mom’s room to ask her if he can open them.

What should he see when he opens the door than his mother and his stepfather banging away. She yells loudly, and he looks back and - continuing to go about his business - grins, snickers a little, gives the kid a big thumbs-up, and tells him to shoo.

His stepfather and his mother laugh it off and keep going, and long story short, he wakes up the next morning feeling refreshed and happy, because good sex will do that for you. Thinking that (as he enjoys doing) he’ll make his wife breakfast before she comes to, he throws on his bathrobe and trots down the stairs.

When he rounds the corner, he sees Timmy with his grandmother spread-eagled on the table, banging the old gray mare. He screams like a little girl. ‘Jesus Christ, Timmy! Oh God - what in the hell is this? You need help!’

Timmy, grinning, laughs: ‘Not so funny when it’s your mom, is it.’

(My dad is really good at what he does - to wit, medicine, engineering, and plumbing the depths of human depravity. That is what you have to thank for today’s inspiring little parable.)

[nota bene: This is a series of personal recollections. My memory is horrible and I vouch for no specific facts or dates; any event I describe occurring I do vouch for, although the specifics of it and when it happened are up in the air.]

Picture the sort of person who will make a weekly habit of beating off to clips of Winston Churchill saying famous things, demonstrating what his admirers mistake for resolve. Put a khaki shirt on him - a paramilitary affiliation, appropriate enough for this Little League fascist. Keep this image in mind. You’ll need it later.

The Boy Scouts were set up out of a megachurch, called - simply enough - Central Christian Church. The Boy Scouts have various classist and authoritarian instincts built into their organizational structure; they are centralized under a single leader, the Scoutmaster, answerable to nobody, and surrounded by lackeys with positions of responsibility unaccompanied by authority. It is the perfect way to teach boys - and their fathers, for that matter - that life, and especially adulthood, is a succession of increasingly burdensome obligations to authority without any personal autonomy; the only possible reward is a larger number of bulliable subordinates. And like good evangelicals, their contempt for women was boundless. The Promise Keepers were in vogue at the time, and their vague, self-congratulatory vows not to beat women for being filthy, stupid animals seemed to stop well short of letting women do anything constructive.

My mother was a cub scout leader, see. My father got involved when he could, but he completely lacked the time - had a busy schedule. And my mother wanted us to have something like the Cub Scouts - complete with camping, useful skills, and opportunity to socialize - in our lives. She ran the den out of our house most of the time, and all concerned were very pleased with themselves.

A succession of moves lead us to a number of boy scout troops. The megachurch one lasted us the longest; it was the one that, as the homophobia rocked the organization (and my parents, who respected Gore a great deal, were bombarded continuously with Bushie urban legends, shitty jokes, and other bullshit spam), drove first me and later the rest of my family out of the Amerikaner Hitlerjugend. (That and I was never particularly good at the bondage stuff.) Read more »

One of my favorite little hobbies is language usage as a sociological instrument, especially political. The topic of dog whistles is especially amusing and diverting to me - but not exactly what I primarily like to look at.

Some words, or some usages of words, are so unusual outside of the context of a political fringe that using them almost immediately identifies you as a member of it, or at least someone who spends time primarily around members of it. This occurs by one of two ways: either it is from popular literature in a certain circle or it is based on a shared ideology that doesn’t really exist outside of that circle. The closer one is to the fringe when learning English (be it as a child or, more prominently, in ESL), the more identifiable one’s politics are this way.

There are a few favorite examples of mine, and I’ll leave aside the growing collection of hobby-horses ridden by over-enthusiastic Slavic neoliberals (’communistic’ and such dated usages clearly denoting a steady diet of Voice of America) for now. My single favorite is the equation to suicide - it’s not a single usage so much as a chain of them (’philosophy/culture/etc. of self-destruction/suicide/etc.’), and it’s very popular among Randroids because Rand herself used it. One of her pithier little bits of nonsense attempts to prove it, and Rand being who she was, you know exactly how this ‘proof’ reads: written with the formal structure and pompous tone of the ancient Greeks the Randies love so much, intending an aura of intellect by cribbing obsessively from these gayest of history’s men and instead falling into ridicule.

To cut it short, she calls capitalism the stuff of man’s nature (invoking Darwin - albeit, and you’ve got to love these people’s relationship with ‘reason’, in a pretty confrontational tenor), considers self-interest vital to survival, and then poses that altruism is self-negation, ergo death.

There is a gaping hole in this argument so simple that only someone with a sexual fetish for the pretenses - that is, that capitalism is reasonable and reasonable self-interest is the only way to survive - could ignore or attempt to work around it. That is: everyone dies. Everyone. Carnegie? Dead, sure. But J.P. Morgan? Also dead. Rockefeller? Dead. The women who made his morning coffee? Dead, and probably later. Bill Gates? Not gonna see 2050.

If you’re religious, and also you have a really warped concept of righteousness, I guess there’s a way around that. But ‘rational’ argument, without recourse to an invisible man who loves the wealthy, fails decisively on this point. If they are cornered with it, they’ll generally gamely struggle for a few minutes before calling everyone else in the room a bunch of suicidal Marxists. And speaking of -ists, there’s another uniquely ideological usage: Day By Day’s brilliant ‘Kantian nihilism’, a phrase that would make any student of philosophy past his sophomore year laugh and which makes no sense outside of the deliciously absurd world of the Randroids - where Kant and nihilists, being mutual enemies of the purely rational St. Ayn, were clearly cut from the same collectivist cloth. (And don’t even get me started on Ayn Rand’s enemies. I’ve got a lot to disagree with Kant about, but her puerile squabble with his legacy over ontology is amazing in its brazen illiteracy - only a peasant who had by some cruelty of fate acquired letters would devote serious energy to slapping at Kant’s nebulous-where-not-banal ontological ramblings, and in doing so think she had given herself the air of a thinker.)

Ah, I could go on about Randroids all day, but that’s not what Djur is paying me for. (Evidently, he is paying me to fight high-powered insiders like Barack Obama and his discouraging lack of a tough foreign policy to fight our homeland’s enemies - probably why I haven’t gotten a check yet.) Allow me to share with you one of my favorite odd usages of the political right: ‘pimp’.

There’s no one specialized form of this, but - true to their hideous nature - the most common one one encounters from wingnuts is ‘welfare pimp’. (I guess some stereotypes die really hard - for instance, all of them if you’re a bigot.) This, which seems to be the horrible, racist ur-form, implies that any politically prominent member of the black community is simply finagling welfare payments for them to ride their lazy race’s decadent, leeching satiation to office. Never mind that in a literal reading of this the only person who could possibly be tarred as a welfare pimp would be history’s most crooked Welfare bureaucrat, for legislators have fairly limited street-level visibility and almost no power over the comings and goings of their local constituency. (Besides the power to get pork funneled - but pork typically being white as the driven snow, you never hear about pork pimps.) This term, which only really makes sense in the first place if one’s definition of ‘pimp’ is ‘cunning and/or exploitative black man’, slowly generalized to imply anyone in the black community doing anything (one heard of ‘disaster pimps’ after Katrina), and later to more general, less specifically racist ends.

I can get behind the usage of ‘pimp’ in a manner so as to imply the pimp to be an exploitative, destructive asshole. And in the Candyland the Republicans inhabit - where you can live like a king on less than $10,000 in a big city, tax cuts increase government revenue, and Party can always find you - anyone basing their political appeal on welfare could indeed be classified as that. But the more general use of the verb to imply any kind of exploitation has to keep in mind that it’s attached to a very, very ugly reality for men, women, and other; black, white, and Jewish; young, old, and fat alike.

You have to be inundated in a world where ‘pimp’ refers to uppity serviles using their limited resources in a shady, devious way to worm their way to the top for the word to completely lose its meaning. It is actively disgusting to refer to a woman pimping her own daughter, and all the more so because the image fixed in many people’s minds of the now-adult Chelsea Clinton is the gangly young girl noted pill enthusiast Rush Limbaugh referred to as a dog. (I remain convinced Oxy is the sort of drug you pop before a high school policy debate in eager anticipation of calling your opponent a statist for refusing to admit ’separation of church and state’ doesn’t appear in the Constitution, but I digress.)

David Shuster is not just an asshole. He’s a crazy, illiterate asshole who let his attachment to the worst political scene in the 20th century override his common sense. Only in the fevered imagination of such a cretin could the standard relationship between a 28-year-old woman and her politically ruthless presidential candidate mother be described using the word ‘pimp’.

Then again, only in that same imagination could the aforementioned mother be considered the same threat to the conservative order of things that the people 'welfare pimp' was shot at represented. I don't know if anyone is ever going to make the vapid beltway heads eat the shit they've been giving rave reviews of for the last eight years, but the optimist in me says they will. I like to think that the plain wrongness of everything they've had to say will eventually bite them in the ass - but then again, I always was a shameless reality pimp.