Dirty Poems

Well, they warned me it would happen. There's just too much to be mad about. I've hit my limit.

I started my day by reading the transcripts of Bush's latest speeches. Then I read about how much money we're spending to privatize the torture industry. Then I went to a seemingly interminable meeting, the jist of which was (from my ridiculously wealthy employer):

"We'd like to see better results. But without spending any money or inconveniencing anyone important. So could you just work harder? And with fewer resources? That'd be super. Thanks. Oh, and by the way, we've restructured things - it's too complicated to explain, really - but the long and short of it is, we aren't going to pay you as much as this year as we said we would. That's ok, right?"

I think I've had some kind of aneurysm. I don't smell toast or anything, I am just oddly disconnected and sort of peaceful at the same time. I think I may be drooling slightly, as well.

So I am taking the afternoon off, sitting on my stoop, and reading dirty poems.

Here's a little gem from Robert Herrick:

The Vine

I DREAM'D this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz'd to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way,
Enthrall'd my dainty Lucia.
Me thought, her long small legs & thighs
I with my Tendrils did surprize;
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waste
By my soft Nerv'lits were embrac'd:
About her head I writhing hung,
And with rich clusters (hid among
The leaves) her temples I behung:
So that my Lucia seem'd to me
Young Bacchus ravished by his tree.
My curles about her neck did craule,
And armes and hands they did enthrall:
So that she could not freely stir,
(All parts there made one prisoner.)
But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts, which maids keep unespy'd,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took,
That with the fancie I awook;
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock then like a Vine.

Oh No He Didn't!

Did you hear Bush's speech on Tuesday?

Bin Laden and his terrorists' allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them.

It's one of those moments where I think I must have misheard. Did he mean Stalin? He must have meant Stalin. Or is he actually comparing Lenin to Hitler and bin Laden??

He actually compared a murderous zealot and a genocidal nightmare with Lenin. Lenin with his evil "intention" to provide education and health care to the whole nation?

Wait, maybe I do understand Bush's antipathy.

CFP of the Day

Today's incomprehensibility prize goes to:

CFP: Voyages of Signs: Language, Ideology, and the Human (10/15/06; collection) VOYAGES OF SIGNS: LANGUAGE, IDEOLOGY, AND THE HUMAN
eds. Sanja Bahun and Dusan Radunovic

The phenomenon of language has never ceased to captivate the human imagination. In a wide span from the controversy of its ontological status (the debate over "words and things") to the paradoxes of the language-thought correlation and the ideological (mis)use of language, the multiple ways in which language structures the human have provoked systematic and oftentimes socially radical theoretical articulations. The editors invite contributions for a collection of essays that aims to reassess and reposition the study of language in its intricate relation to ideology and the apprehension of the human subject.

We welcome proposals that deal with, but are not limited to, the issue of the human and the following concerns and authors:

-"semanticizing" Saussurean linguistics in the light of Bouquet-Engler's 2002 edition of Ecrits de linguistic generale;
-language and symbolic power structures: Bourdieu, Latour, Habermas;
-heteroglotic liberation of the human: Bakhtin, Gramsci, and others;
-the socio-linguistic and psychoanalytic subject: Freud, Lacan;
-from philosophy of language to philosophy as language from Plato to Derrida.

I don't know what it is, but that "heteroglotic liberation" sounds pretty freaking sexy. Sign me up!

Hey Feemus, Betcha Can't Work Barbara Stanwyck into a Post About David Brooks

Oh yeah? Watch me....


In his nightmare report from Vietnam, Dispatches, Michael Herr writes:

There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he answered, "It's easy. You just don't lead 'em as much."

The reporters ask a moral question and get a technological answer. It's a simple misunderstanding. The gunner's solution is appropriate to his understanding of what "how" means and what "women and children" means. His job to to achieve a specific goal vis a vis the women and children: they have only an instrumentalized, symbolic existence only for him.

The neocons have a similar problem.

But to back up for a minute: I knew it was coming, and I still wasn't prepared for it.

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, politicians and the media will engage in endless retrospection. Most of it will be nauseatingly self-serving.

Which brings me to David Brooks's latest column, "The Jagged World," in which Mr. Brooks explains to us the "lessons from the last five years." Oh dear.

Brooks structures his column around two imaginative topologies: how he thought the world was five years ago and how he thinks it is now. These are both very instructive.

Five years ago, Brooks looked around and saw that:

People everywhere seemed to want the same things: to live in normal societies, to be free, to give their children better lives.

The word "normal" is instructive. Brooks's view is an essentially normative one: he looked around and chose to see people who wanted to become Americans. Brooks puts absolutely no pressure on his evaluative terms, "normal," free," or "better." He refuses to acknowledge that these might not mean the same things to all people.

Five years ago, Brooks looked around and saw that:

Globalization seemed to be driving events and the integration of markets, communications and people. It seemed to be creating, with fits and starts, globalized individuals, who had one foot in a particular culture and another foot in a shared flow of movies, music, products and ideas.

What Brooks saw when he looked around was the growth of capitalism. He saw in movies and products the potential to liberate the world. Now that this hasn't happened, Brooks doesn't question the value of globalization through the expansion of Western free-market values.

No, instead he mock-chastizes himself for thinking that there were any points of contact between us and them:

People who live in societies where authority is united - as under Islam - are really different from people who live in societies where authority is divided. People in honor societies - where someone will kill his sister because she has become polluted by rape - are different from people in societies where people are judged by individual intentions.

I guess those "different" people just can't be civilized by having a "foot in the shared stream of" Steven Seagal movies. Heathens.

Brooks follows the party line here: Islam can be fully and unproblematically equated with authoritarianism; we are free and they can't understand/hate freedom; Isalm hates women.*

In his zeal to point up the differences between us and them, Brooks leaves out such examples as illegal surveillance (is that a product of united or divided authority?); detentions without arrest; torture. But no matter. Brooks proves his point that we have very different, perhaps irreconcilable cultures.

Brooks mourns his former naivete, his belief that these differences could be smoothed over by the exportation of American movies and political ideals. But the "Islamists" just weren't buying. They were instead, he writes, forming their own ideological businesses:

Yesterday's high-tech entrepreneurs look like pikers compared to the social entrepreneurs of today. Islamist entrepreneurs have quickly built the world's most vibrant and destructive movement by combining old teaching, invented traditions, imagined purities and new technologies. The five most important people in the Arab world, according to a recent survey, are the leaders of Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Microsoft's market conquest is nothing compared to that.

This is Brooks's main failure of the imagination. He can't think of societies or individuals except in terms of the market. He is faced with a moral question and he gives a technological answer. I think the Marxists call this "reification."

Brooks doesn't really see the world differently from how he saw it five years ago. It's a market model. Sure the valence is different - it was good then, bad now - but his vision is essentially the same. If America can't achieve a cooperative merger, then it will need to proceed with a hostile takeover.

This is dangerous thinking. People aren't just consumers/producers in the market, and neither are cultures. It's when we start imagining the world in this way that we begin trying to manipulate these "markets" as though the lives at stake didn't matter.

In James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, insurance agent Walter Huff describes how he came to kill a man. He says that he couldn't help it. Thinking about the insurance system for so long, he just started seeing all the people involved as "the biggest gambling wheel in the world." Seeing all those lives as just part of a system, what was to keep him from trying to "crook the wheel"?

Huff understands that you might think he's being cynical:

If you don’t understand that, go to Monte Carlo or some other place where there’s a big casino, and watch the face of the man that spins the little ivory ball. After you’ve watched it a while, ask yourself how much he would care if you went out and plugged yourself in the head. His eyes might drop when he heard the shot, but it wouldn’t be from worry whether you lived or died. It would be to make sure you didn’t leave a bet on the table, that he would have to cash for your estate. No, he wouldn’t care. Not that baby.

It should be noted, though, that Barbara Stanwyck's "shape to set a man nuts" might also have been an influencing factor.**

Just sayin'.

*No argument, of course, that many Islamic groups advocate the repression and often brutal oppression of women. But to hear the right trying to pretend to advocate for the rights of women while Bill Napoli spills his rape fantasies, while the FDA wants to make all premenopausal women consider themselves "prepregnant," while the President overlooks mercury and wife-beaters in legislation to protect the unborn - well, it just sickens me.

It's a clever strategy, though. It's counterpart is the equally risible (and equally effective) accusation of anti-semitism for anyone who opposes Israeli policy.

**phew - I wasn't sure I was going to get that Barbara Stanwyck reference in. Just under the wire.

Update: David Brooks is Still a Tool

More on today's column later, but here's a classic Brooksism:

Since 9/11, the U.S. has had little success in influencing distant groups.

I'd say we've done a great job in influencing distant groups. I'd say we've been pretty successful in further radicalizing some already scary extremists and we've done a terrific job of alienating almost all our former allies in Europe.

Ah, sweet success.

Co-opted? Me?

The Forbes article mentioned in my last post has made quite a stir. One of the most disturbing responses is from Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Betsy Hart.

Hart doesn't understand "what everyone is getting so bent out of shape about." Her article seems innocuous enough. She writes from the perspective of a career woman who think that Noer may have some good points about the added stress that two careers may place on a marriage.

But there is something creepily ingratiating about her prose. For instance, she writes that Noer's piece "has driven the feminists completely nuts -- easily done, as the typically humorless sisterhood takes itself way too seriously, and in general seems not to like dealing with data."

So feminists are humorless and girls aren't good at math. And presumably WASPs are uptight and blacks are good dancers (Hart leaves no stereotype unturned, accusing feminist critics of "hysteria"). This does nothing to contribute to a reasonable discourse on the subject.

What is does, effectively, is to bully women into shutting up. Better not stand up for yourself, or you'll be called out for being "humorless." Blacks go through the same thing: if a black person points out something that is patently racist, they are accused of imagining injury or of being ideologically motivated.

This deflects, of course, the fact that the original comments were ideologically motivated. And where's the humor in manipulating statistical data? Is it funny to say that two career marriages break up because "the more successful she is the more likely she is to be dissatisfied with you"? Couldn't one as easily write: "the more successful she is the more likely you are to be threatened by her"?

But the name-calling rhetoric deftly turns the tables, and puts the critics on the defensive. "Humorless" is a trump card, like "liberal" or "support the troops," for shutting down discussion.

It's disturbing to see how effective the right is at silencing or neutralizing all opposition. It's even more disturbing to see they do this with the complicity of the opposition.

p.s. I have lost control of my fonts. There is no secret message encoded in the shifts in size and boldness. For some reason, I can't get them to regularize. Repeat: the eagle has not landed. This is just technical difficulty.