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Distinctions Without Differences
2008-06-08 04:25:00
Son, do you know why I'm stoppin' you fo'?'Cuz I'm young and I'm black, and my hat's real low?Or do I look like a mob leader, sir? I don't knowWell, you was doin' 55 in a 54License and registration, and step out of the carYou carryin' a weapon on you? I know alot of you areI ain't steppin' out of shit, all my paper's legitWell, do you mind if I look around the car a lil' bit?Well, the glove compartment's locked, and so's the trunk and the backAnd I know my rights, so you're gonna need a warrant for thatWell, aren't you sharp as a tack, what, you somebody important or something?Some type of lawyer or something?I ain't passed the bar, but I know a little bitEnough that you won't illegally search my shit License, registrationI ain't got none, but I got a clear conscience 'bout the things that I doneMr. state trooper, please don't stop meMaybe you got a kid and a pretty little wifeThe only thing that I got's been killing me my whole life
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Thank the Maker
2008-06-08 02:13:00
Hillary Clinton today gave what was described as a concession speech. I have not seen the speech, so I do not know whether she actually said the words "I concede". I assume that she did not. I assume that she "suspended" her campaign, which carries the implicit possibility of a return. I can foresee a circumstance for such an eventuality, but apparently the conventional "wisdom" now holds that her campaign is over.Thank the maker. Madame Clinton's campaign was a top-down affair, centered around the acceptance of her endorsement of a blatantly illegal war of aggression, a crime that was endorsed for the sake of "electability". And thank the maker that it didn't work. Let me put it this way: If Hillary Clinton had voted against the Iraq War, her nomination would have been as easy as it would have been if Barack Obama hadn't run.And why did Madame Clinton vote "aye" for the Mesopotamian abattoir? Does anyone really think that she truly believed in the mission, the threat, the premis...
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Getting Over Ourselves
2008-05-31 21:04:00
You are out of your mind, Paul!Too much learning is driving you insane!Acts 26:24When all of your advisers heave their plasticAt your feet, to convince you of your painTrying to prove that your conclusions should be more drasticWon't you come see me, Queen JaneBob Dylan, 1965"White Guilt" is an insidious elixir that courses unquestioned through the veins of our universities, and it is a phenomena I have witnessed first hand. There is a certain logic to it, since "whites", just as any other group (whether they think of themselves as a group or not), surely have much reason for guilt, being human beings and all.But what is at work here is not a call for historical awareness or overdue confession. It is, rather, and ethos of self-loathing that, in its obsession with atoning for racism, has created a new racism all its own. There seems a reflexive impulse by white academics, charged with shaping the minds of the future, to assume the worst about folks with white skin. This is portrayed...

The Last Taboo
2008-05-31 21:02:00
Pat Buchanan has authored a book that indicates a knowledge of history that is exceedingly rare among the bloviators who dominate our public discourse. As something of an amateur historian myself, it is extremely gratifying to know that somebody out there understands the real import of the World Wars and is not afraid to confront that ultimate taboo: Hitler was rational, and war was unnecessary.Our paradigm of the "good war", the "greatest generation" and so forth is part of a pattern of historical ignorance that, if anything, greatly increases the chances that America will impale itself on the same swords of folly that claimed the European empires.What Hitler was after, and what so few people are capable of acknowledging, were rather rational and limited prizes. He sought simply to reclaim historically German lands that had been ripped from the Reich as part of the punishment meted out after World War I. Hitler was a son of a bitch, a racist, and a Jew-hater, yes, but when one ...
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Distinctions Without Differences
2008-05-29 01:57:00
You can't run from me, KimIt's just us, nobody elseYou're only making it harder on yourselfHere, I'll yell too, "AHH! Somebody Help!"Don't you get it, love, noone can hear youNow shut the fuck up and get what's coming to youYou were supposed to love meNow, bleed, bitch, bleedBleedShe was low down and triflinAnd she was cold and meanThe kind of evil makes me want to grab my submachineFirst time I shot herI shot her in the sideIt was hard to watch her sufferBut with the second shot, she diedDelia's goneOne more round, Delia's gone
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Distinctions Without Differences
2008-05-29 01:48:00
How many retards will listen to meAnd run up shootin' in the school when they're pissed at the teach-er?Her? Him? Is it you? Is it them?"Wasn't me! Slim Shady said to do it again!"Well, look here buddyYou wanna be like me?Go grab a six-shooter, rob every bank you seeJust tell the judge I said it was alright...yeah
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Hill Gets Gored
2008-05-27 17:47:00
Hillary Clinton is right. Hold on, I just threw up into my mouth a little bit...ok... Hillary Clinton is right about the injustice of the Democratic Party's nominating process, which does not mean that she is not also self-serving, self-absorbed, and self-pitying. It does mean, however, that she has a very valid point when she criticizes her party for its disenfranchisement of two major states.One of the lessons of American politics is that the Democratic Party will always find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. Or the face. How did they do so this year? Well, for some bizarre and Byzantine "reason", the party leadership decreed that the millions of Democrats in Florida and Michigan would not be heard.Why did they do this? That's like explaining why the tax code is longer than the history of dirt. There is no logical reason, other than that there is a whole parasitic class of Americans who make their living by taking simple rules and guidelines and weighing them down with foot...
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Check, Please
2008-05-22 01:36:00
Mr. Bush's recent tirade against "appeasement" is apparently going to shape the foreign policy debate between Senators McCain and Obama. After 7 years of observing Mr. Bush, it seems clear to me that he has his kryptonite. Mr. Clinton's kryptonite was the fairer sex. Mr. Bush's kryptonite is history.For, if Mr. Bush knew anything about the history of the nation he has driven off a cliff (there are more than one, so let my stipulate that I am refering to the United States here), he would realize that his predecessors, including Ronald Reagan and his own father, were, by his definition, craven and cowardly appeasers who ignored the lessons of history of groveled at the feet of tyrants in the vain effort to avoid inevitable conflict. In Mr. Bush's world, the only way to avoid war is for America's adversaries to unconditionally surrender their system of government and their perceived national interests in the face of America's manifest superiority and benevolence.The standard ...
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Trappease Artist
2008-05-18 01:46:00
Premier Bush was in Israel this week, which gives me a really uneasy feeling. I just get the sense that Bush feels like he understands Israel in a way that the so-called "experts" could never muster. And forgive me the sin of assumption, but I can't help but know that Bush's knowledge of the history of Israel is extremely spotty.Still, it was right and proper that the American president address the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the birth of modern Israel. What was wrong and improper, however, was Mr. Bush's conduct.Like he so often does, Mr. Bush spoke with a swagger and a sense of clarity and entitlement that is wholly without foundation. "Presumptuous" is perhaps the most apt word. Mr. Bush presumed to articulate the dangers of "appeasement" to the government of a state founded in his own lifetime by Holocaust survivors. I don't think the Jews need such lessons.In an non-veiled attack on Barack Obama, Bush ridiculed communication itself, which he not-so-deftly equ...
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Providence
2008-05-16 01:57:00
Providence 1. (often initial capital letter) the foreseeing care and guidance of God or nature over the creatures of the earth. 2. (initial capital letter) God, esp. when conceived as omnisciently directing the universe and the affairs of humankind with wise benevolence. 3. a manifestation of divine care or direction. 4. provident or prudent management of resources; prudence. 5. foresight; provident care. I've posted some photos below to show what is happening to my home, to Providence. It's the story of what is happening to urban America as a whole. It is a cruel saga, and its perpetrators are clear, however studiously they are ignored. As we increasingly bear witness to the demagoguing of the least, the last, and the lost for the nation's ills, we should reflect on how our cities have really been destroyed. The ultimate culprit, in my mind, is the electoral college. America's urban centers are overwhelmingly situated in overwhelmingly blue states, states which will vot...

The Death of Trust
2008-05-09 05:20:00
There are many dragons for Americans to slay nowadays. Evils and ills arise all around us in economic, political, military, ecological, and moral manifestations. But a breakdown this systematic, this intractable, this predictable must surely stem from one primary fount. And so it is. I'm going to try not to channel anything that could be attributed to Pat Robertson, but America's downfall is due to America's collapse of traditional values.There's nothing controversial about the above statement until we get to the sticky business of defining "values". I'll state it as succinctly as possible: American society used to revolve around a presumption of trust. It no longer is.The 1950's are often bandied about by racists and chauvinists as a golden era. But there is a grain of truth in everything, and in 50's worship, there is much more than a grain. The 1950's was a time when sexual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce were frowned upon by virtually every segment of American society...
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Big Punisher
2008-05-02 18:50:00
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave his first extensive interview as a member of the court last week, and he had some pretty interesting things to say. Scalia is one of those folks who throw doctrinaire leftists into conniptions and, given my wary disdain for the left, I had always sort of assumed it was because he actually defended the purity of the Constitution in a way that foiled the designs of the establishment left.I was led to this suspicion because, in my opinion, there is no mandate in the Constitution for most of the left's social engineering. While my view of the left was not swayed by Scalia's interview, my perceptions of him most certainly were. This man is not a principled defender of limited government and individual liberty. He's an astonishingly condescending and disconcertingly casual blowhard.Two subjects were broached in the interview that carry great historical and moral weight for most serious thinkers but, for Scalia, are the trivial and paranoid refu...
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Rise of the Machines
2008-05-02 18:46:00
It is always in vogue, regardless of time or place, to blame outsiders for one's own ills. Americans, up to and including candidates for president, blame foreigners for the evisceration of the wealthiest middle class in the history of the world, which America boasted for a half century.Since my birth in 1979, the wages of the American middle class has increased by 0%. Not to indulge in "class warfare", but that is a harbinger, is it not? But what was it that really destroyed our middle class? Was it the politicians? Was it the Mexicans? Was it the Chinese? Or, was it the Machines ?It was the machines. Think of this as the slightly less dramatic manifestation of Terminator or Space Odyssey 2001, where humans become so "intelligent" that they invent computers "intelligent" enough to destroy them. Humans that intelligent suffer from a disorder called "artificial intelligence", which they pass to their machines.But when the American middle class goes looking for demons to slay, they sho...
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Uncle Jeremiah
2008-04-29 22:13:00
Jeremiah Wright's latest public performances have drawn him back precisely to where he serves no constructive purpose: the center of the presidential campaign. Having heard much of what he has had to say, I am left with the impression that this man is both very intelligent and unforgivably narcissistic.The most controversial statements that Wright has made and has been challenged to defend are two in number. 1) The American government invented AIDS 2) The American government practices terrorism. These are comments that Obama obviously has to disown, even if Wright insists on inferring that the Senator is doing so for purely political reasons.But what of these two issues? The problem is that the media has lumped together the patently absurd (the American government invented AIDS) with the objectively true (the American government practices terrorism). This slight of hand serves nicely to lump in any who would dare assert that American can do any wrong with those who are utterl...
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What About the Children?
2008-04-26 00:45:00
"What about the children?" is perhaps the ultimate piece of propaganda, propaganda's utility being measured by how irrefutable its premise is. Who could argue against "what about the children?" Who could argue against "we fight for freedom?" Who could argue against "Germany for the Germans?""What about the children?" was the rationale proffered by the federal government regarding its most recent raid on a religious "cult". You have to give it to the feds, they managed to kill dozens of fewer women and children in this raid than in others.The government held that young girls were being forced to marry and bear children against their will. So what did the government do? Did it arrest the men in question and charge them with statutory rape? No, it kidnapped the women and committed the greatest act of tyranny, other than murder, than one can commit; it separated the women from their children.The government decided that it knew better than these mothers how to raise their own children. ...
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The Hawk
2008-04-23 21:06:00
Something utterly unexpected happened during last week's debate between Clinton and Obama: after about an hour, a serious policy issue came up for discussion. Apparently, the moderators thought they could sneak it in after an hour of "who loves America more?" and "at what age do you tell your children Santa is a lie?" and nobody would notice.Even more bizarre than policy being debated at a policy debate, however, was Madame Clinton's prescription for the issue in question, namely Iran. She proposed NATO-like security assurances to our "allies" in the Middle East to thwart Iran's perennial aggression in the region. Which doesn't exist. But, one thing at a time.Firstly, the idea of NATO, in which the United States cedes its sovereignty by promising to go to war on behalf of any one of a number of countries who finds itself attacked by a third party, has obvious constitutional and strategic flaws. NATO, as enacted in 1949 was the first permanent military alliance in the histor...
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What Is To Be Done?
2008-04-23 21:04:00
"What is to be done?" A loaded question and, not incidentally, the title chosen for manifestos penned by Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov (Lenin) and Ali al-Shar'iati, intellectual architects of the Russian and Iranian Revolutions. It is a revolutionary question, and it calls for revolutionary answers. The debate over illegal immigration in this country has come to the point where this is the only relevant question.There has been a demographic revolution in this country during the last decade. That much can not be denied. If it continues to be denied, it will result in a counterrevolution that will incorporate the ugliest tendencies of humanity. This issue must be addressed honestly. Both extremes must abandon their delusions, and they must do so now.First, the left. It is a delusion to imply that the recent wave of immigration is in any way analogous to prior waves.More people have entered the United States illegally since 2000 than entered the United States legally during the peak of immi...

That Which Shall Not Be Felt
2008-04-15 15:41:00
I hesitated to write about Obama's "bitter" comment, because I'm....what's that word...."bitter" that the media harps on such frivolous bullshit as this and calls it "news." But there is something to be said about why this "story" is getting so much coverage. When you look at a picture taken by a great photographer, you should study what it is in the photo. Just as importantly, however, you should study what the photographer did not capture with his lens. The point here is that bias often hinges more on what one ignores than on what one focuses on. How are Obama's comments "news"? How many Americans my age or younger leaked their lifeblood into the Mesopotamian mud the day Obama's words were uttered? 2? 3? 23? We don't know, because the media doesn't care. The media thinks that the most important thing that happened in the world that day was that Barack Obama said something that they thought was "controversial."After we castigate the media for this talk-soup, entertainment-we...
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The Original
2008-04-12 04:16:00
As many movies as I watch, I've managed to avoid writing about them just as I've somehow managed to avoid writing about music. There is a current among movies that I've thought alot about recently, and it even says some interesting, although somewhat formulaic and obvious, things about our society.We love sequels. I love sequels. But I've noticed that my favorite movie series mirror my culture's very identity in many respects. Inevitably failing to recreate the original triumph, it relies on technology, sex, and violence, to maintain its narrative.Rocky. Incredible movie. Gritty is the most relevant adjective. I should cite the original dubya, Joshua Walker, on that one. That movie reeked of authenticity. Pauly and Rocky share a beer in the bathroom. Rocky walks to a shakedown, with nothing but his cigarettes and his racket ball for company. The object of Rocky's romantic fixation is not attractive or personable. Rocky loses the big fight. In the sequels, Rocky gets progressiv...
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Forever Man
2008-04-12 03:43:00
John McCain was a prisoner of war who was tortured and refused early release. We know that. He was shot down while bombing a third world country which didn't get the memo that they had no idea what was best for them. We know that too, although it's hardly polite conversation.As much as I detest McCain's mission (for example, has anyone ever asked John McCain how many successful bombing runs he had? And how many people he thinks he may have killed? And many of those people were civilians? And what gave his government the right to murder foreigners in their own land for discrepancies in economic dogma?) ...as much as I detest the mission, I sincerely respect what this man gave to his country.When McCain was taken prisoner, the relative merits of his mission, which in all due fairness he had no say over, were irrelevant. What became relevant then was the man. And the man proved his greatness. Pay no mind to anyone who would deny the singular courage and dignity of this man.But, he'...
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The Handful
2008-04-12 03:23:00
Five years ago today...the night they drove ol' Baghdad down.I have a nephew that's 5. He's way cuter than Iraq. And I hope he lives in Montreal 13 years from now, if you catch my drift. I'll write an update on the war in 5 years or so.

The Balance
2008-04-10 06:03:00
There is a single balance that governs the success of human interaction, whether between lovers, brothers, or nations. It is the balance between the one and the many. In far too many fora, narcissism sits center stage, and this insidious trend has been adopted as a casus belli by both the Salafists and the Neo-cons. Ironyyyyyyyyy.Everything is relative. To present-day Americans, the 1950's serve as the archetype of bucolic and wholesome community. It is remembered as a time of monogamy, asexual clothing, and domestic bliss. However, to Sayid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual, that very same community reeked of materialism, lust, depravity, and instant gratification.As liberalism failed in the United States, leading to an explosion of the very ills it claimed to aim to eradicate, the neo-cons reverted to Leo Strauss' endorsement of a popular myth. This was hardly a new idea, but it had never been so organized. When liberalism's navel gazing and reflexive guilt produced riots, the neo...
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Waco
2008-04-08 03:16:00
The April anniversaries of the King killing and the Abu Ghraib pictures remind us of watersheds in the shaping of the American psyche. There is another April event that demands our attention, however, the perpetrators of which cannot be explained away as bad apples in the vein of James Early Ray or that criminal mastermind, Lyndie England. That event is Waco .I remember watching the news that night. I was 13, and still without the faculties to doubt the government's version of events. As I revisit the facts now, however, armed with a good decade-plus of aging, travel, love, and heartbreak, I bring a different set of eyes to Waco, and I am horrified by what I find.The Branch Davidians were called a "cult" by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). Two parenthetical notes here. Firstly, alcohol and tobacco go together, but alcohol and firearms do not. Or should not. Secondly, who deputized the ATF to pontificate on matters theological? Utterly unsurprisingly, the media ado...

Before the War
2008-04-08 03:04:00
Still comfortably shy of 30, I am nonetheless already old enough to speak nostalgically of "before the war", a recent yet impossibly distant time when "fellatio" and "lockbox" were the watchwords of government excess. Four years ago, the above pictures were released to the world. More than any other images, the photographs from Abu Ghraib illustrated to me the real cost to the American psyche of perpetual war and perpetual fear. It is one of the singular examples of the slippery slope; we begin by torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, responsible for 9/11 and just two years later we are torturing Omar Rahman, age 14, because somebody claimed that his cousin knew where a mortar casing is buried.Thanks to the inquisitive, though never cynical, influence of my parents, I am less given to shock when government scandals surface. But 4 years ago, when I first saw these pictures, I was shocked. In retrospect I am shocked that I was shocked. I was still managing to live in a world that had been...

King
2008-04-05 01:26:00
The 1960's were in some ways even more violent than the 1860's in the United States. While the number of deaths during the Civil War exponentially exceed the number of American deaths during the 1960's, there were individual deaths among American leaders during that decade that permanently altered the American reality.John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy certainly occupy this tragic pantheon. But Martin Luther King , cut down 40 years ago this weekend, was more powerful than these other men in ways that are seldom acknowledged.Martin Luther King had a larger impact on America than any person who has ever served in the government of the United States. Chew on that. King is the symbol of a moral reckoning that covered more ground in less time than any other moral reckoning in recorded human history.To consider the power of this man, murdered before reaching the age of 40, is a sobering undertaking. A man who lacked the coercive apparatus of any government or any gun shi...

The Anger
2008-04-04 04:48:00
There is an insidious anger seeping through our collective discourse, the likes of which is somewhat common in the history of our republic, but which is peaking in the present. We are losing sight of the humanity of those we disagree with. I am not very old or very wise, but I do know this: if you are capable of treating a stranger as a non-person, as sure as the sun rises in the east, you will treat your brother the same way when an invisible line is crossed."Community", like "love", "liberty", and "dignity", are not bromides. They are not slogans. They are real, albeit intangible, forces that make us what we are. We, in America, are one people. How do I know this? I know this logically, since all Americans cede a considerable portion of their belongings to the state. I also know this as sure as I know how to breathe: people are people, and anyone who would deny another another person's humanity is a scourge upon the earth. The history of the world is, among other things,...
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What Do They Want?
2008-04-01 19:16:00
America's civil religion requires us to treat the question "what does al-qaeda want?" as a non-sequiter, akin to asking "what's the greatest speech ever given by a cantaloupe?"; it just doesn't make any sense. Being an apostate to that religion leads me to want to answer that question honestly, rather than to question the legitimacy of the question itself.The civil religion requires that wherever America is attacked, or wherever American attacks are resisted, the culprits must, by very definition, be nihilism and evil incarnate. Since American motives and actions are held to be universally selfless and beneficent, any opponent of such actions must despise everything that is right, everything that is....American.This delusion is evident when our leaders, without any influential dissent, endlessly parrot the idea that the hundreds of young Muslim men who have committed suicide in the act of killing Americans do so because they despise feminism and representative democracy.There is ...

What A Tangled War We Wage
2008-03-30 01:25:00
I have refrained from writing about the Iraq War for quite some time, primarily because the conflict has taken on the air of a runaway train which most regret letting lose while simultaneously maintaining that an application of the brakes might bring new tragedies in its wake. This is the paralysis a superpower incurs when it defines both shitting and getting off the pot as unrealistic options in the wake of an ill-advised incursion into an alien land.Today, as I write, America's sons are dying in the defense of an Iraqi government dominated by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. How can we explain to American mothers why their sons are dying to defend the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, created and funded by Iran? We can't. And that's not because American mothers are stupid.Since John "So Obviously Qualified That We Shan't Question His Readiness" McCain is still foggy on the difference between Shi'a (Iran) and Sunni (al-Qaeda), how can we expect our...
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An Island of Integrity
2008-03-24 19:19:00
After my mea culpa regarding the JFK assassination, I was drawn to reflect on the 5 year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, presaging Easter and the 4,000th American military death there. There were few mea culpas uttered by supporters of the war on these occasions, those hard-edged realists, those visionary romantics, those brass-balled statesmen. Those war criminals. Asked for a reaction to the fact that two / thirds of the American people consider the war to have been a mistake, Vice-President Cheney reflected, and I quote, "So?" Honestly, you have to respect a guy like that, who does not even bother to insult your intelligence by pretending he gives a shit. It really is rather refreshing. There was one mea culpa penned for the occasion by Andrew Sullivan, quoted below, which I commend for its probity and its honesty, both of which must have come at no small psychological price. I was right about Iraq; I wish I had been wrong. Sullivan was wrong, and he acknowledges thi...
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To Die For
2008-03-24 01:55:00
Capital Punishment is a remarkably unaddressed subject in American discourse today. There are so many things wrong with this policy that I find myself flustered as to where to start.First, morally. Why do we allow criminals to defend themselves? Why are they protected from unreasonable search? Why are we not allowed to beat or threaten suspects? Because we hold ourselves (the state) to be better than the criminals.If we go through the charade of jurisprudence, wherein we claim to treat the defendant with utmost deference, how is it that we can then murder the defendant based on the judgment of a handful of citizens?This is akin to the torture issue; if you are going to execute or torture people, just dispense with the trappings of disinterested justice and stop insulting our intelligence; any state willing to torture or kill prisoners, foreign or domestic, cannot realistically be expected to safeguard any standard of moral conduct.Second, legally. What legal power gives the st...