Had conversations with three good workish colleagues and two email yaps with buddies, lifelong Democrats all and devout -.06%ers still, who each for the first time expressed to me genuine shock and fear Obama might actually lose to Romney. I still offer 4-1 pints on Obama's victory, there's three months of daily shitstorms to go before the conventions and Labor Day and the true beginning of the shittiness, plus he's running against a gaffe machine made out of a cardboard box, plus he can move the country further to the right by 2016 than Romney ever could, which Corporate is more than aware. My reassurances didn't assuage. The jobs news of yesterday morning (and please remember the numbers were cooked, as all administrations cook numbers, to be the rosiest possible without stinking of tilt) (made Obama's cockswording - and all he has is his Muslim-killing cred, the sole issue trending up in his campaign's internal polling - seem even more puny, cowardly, craven) made five obamapostles (and numerous bloogers and pundits) squirm to a revealed possibility the motherfucker just might lose and, most interestingly, each entertained the possibility the motherfucker is in fact a lame motherfucker.
Think about all the things you'd advise Obama to be talking about that he's not talking about, I said to one friend, ask yourself why he isn't. She considered. June 1, 2012, maybe not a paradigm shift for obamapostles, but the day some stopped to consider the validity of the paradigm.
I know I linked to this yesterday, but it bears repeating: The 2012 election should be a referendum between two visions of America. On the left, Obama should say that we’re in a jobs crisis, and that he’s going to do everything in his power to get people back to work — by employing them directly, if need be. On the right, Romney can say that job creation should be left to US companies, despite the fact that those companies are signally failing to increase their payrolls despite their record-high profits. And then the public can choose which side they want to vote for. Sadly, the lines won’t be drawn nearly that cleanly: Obama is bizarrely reluctant to talk about anything which rhymes with “stimulus”. As a result, the current dysfunction — and horribly weak jobs market — is likely to persist for far too long.
In which Rae Armantrout, a poet I admire, talks about musicians I, with the exception of Cohen (though I'm getting there) and Adele (what's an Adele?) run the emotional spectrum from hate to loathe.
Just a shadow. Hardly that. But audible.
Coming out of the woods, whispering
Happily Ever After.
Even in that light—
stars with the skeletons of animals
and old friends—
visible
to the eye behind the one always
left open on the east side of the house,
downhill. Where the coffee trees
and hemp and the graves of old dogs lie,
buried themselves in leaves and left
to the sputtering wind of memory.
& if that's not enough (he says
to himself in the voice of a black-and-white
actor whose name is a moth that keeps
avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue)
to bring you home, well, there
it is again,
already exhausted
by your efforts to make it
comfortable
enough to stay. Impatient,
already headed
back down into the woods, whispering
Once Upon A Time . . .
I would have thought, said L at Thursday Night Pints, that the Kids in the Hall Fine Ham Abounds would be the most posted video at BLCKDGRD, responding to my claim yesterday that The Guy Under the Seats, Episode 9, Roosevelt: A One-Man Show is the most posted. I said, I'm sure the KITH is the most linked to, though I very infrequently post it. I was then asked multiple questions about the blooger, why this, where that, what next, and I wallowed in the bleggalgazing, thanks all! we'll see where it ends, but yes, thanks for the Kind. Did you see Thiessen's column, asked D as I sat down after buying a round, his laughing at liberal hypocrisy over Obama's war crimes? D, said K, you buy rounds the next two nights, we'd dared each other walking in, whoever first brought up motherfucking Obama bought rounds the next two Thursday Night Pints. Most profitable half hour of bleggalgazing, on multiple levels, ever.
Steely Dan as rebel music? I like Steely Dan well enough to not mind if I hear them but not to put them on; I've never understood the intense loathing in which some hold them.
The Guy Under the Seats, BLCKDGRD's Patron Saint of Bleggalgazing, Avatar of Autoblogography, the above the most posted youtube in BLCKDGRD history, today a High Holy Day in Egoslavia.
And since I know at least two of you will ask, have Conspiracy Guy:
Here's Scott Norton, who I link to frequently, on the New York Times piece on Obama the Executioner. While I don't always agree with Norton's conclusions I find him more reliably fair than the majority of writers who work for the old professional progressive warhorses. Please pardon the long extract:
The article also tackles the underpinnings of the CIA’s claims that there have been no, or at least very few, civilian deaths owing to drone strikes recently: “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties. . . . It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” We learn that this approach has been controversial within the administration, with some advisers noting that it seems close to a conclusive presumption of guilt.
This is a very important disclosure. On one hand, it clarifies the basis for the CIA’s no-collateral-damage claim. On the other, it puts the drone program on very tenuous grounds under the laws of war. The U.S. military in Iraq, for instance, has previously disciplined officers who issued rules of engagement authorizing the targeting of all military-age males. A person cannot be presumed to be a terrorist simply because he is male, of military age, and happens to be in the same village as some terrorists—he must be engaged in conduct that makes him a combatant. Applied to targeting, this presumption raises serious war-crime issues. As the Times reports, the administration is currently limiting its use to the counting of persons unintentionally killed when a legitimate target has been struck, which theoretically leads only to false information about the number of innocent civilians killed. But the distinction isn’t actually quite so clear-cut: in deciding on a strike, an estimate of collateral damage has to be included. And if all able males are deemed legitimate targets, that process is being seriously distorted.
The Times piece also considers the question of tactics versus strategy. Much of the controversy surrounding drones has swirled around the decision to target individuals, such as Anwar al-Awlaki, who have gained notoriety, and around the government’s willingness to aggressively deploy drones as a tool in the first place. Less discussed have been the broader consequences of drone assassinations:
[T]he strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda—just since April, there have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan—have also tested both men’s commitment to the principles they have repeatedly said are necessary to defeat the enemy in the long term. Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”
Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010, said that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’—reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” said Mr. Blair, a retired admiral who began his Navy service during that war.
Blair is correct to stress long-term strategy, and it’s a shame that the Times piece fails to develop his point further. Admiral Blair isn’t the only person raising these questions—so, too, is the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, who is mentioned in the piece as having complained that “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people,” and hasspoken out elsewhere about the CIA’s dominance in U.S.–Pakistani relations. The current meltdown in U.S. relations with Pakistan—long considered a vital American ally in the region—is directly related to the drone campaign. The White House, focused as it is on kill data from each strike, doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to the effect of heavy drone use on American relations with states in the region, nor to the broader dynamics of American operations against terrorist groups. Is a drone campaign that eliminates Al Qaeda but turns Pakistan, the nation with the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal, into a bitter enemy really a success story?
OK? Clear? Here's Horton's concluding paragraph, the paragraph immediately below the above paragraph:
With the Times account, more important details about the Obama drone program have fallen into place. The disclosures will offer solace to Obama supporters who have qualms about the program, since the administration is shown scrutinizing individual targets and avoiding strikes that would affect innocent women and children. On the other hand, the drone operators continue to they make lethal misjudgments, and the government’s case for secrecy with the program looks more dubious than ever.
Asked honestly: what the fuck? Rimshot for obamapologists but rimshots for everyone, thanks for playing? And it's the smartest piece on the block? So fucked.
To be honest, I expected more anti-Mormon snideness from pwoggles than I've seen before, though I don't hang out much in pwoggle places as I used to, though the election is months away and Obama doesn't seem in deep danger yet.
It's as if every demon from hell with aspirations
toward interior design flew overhead and indiscriminately
spouted gouts of molten gold, that cooled down
into swan-shape spigots, doorknobs, pen-and-inkwell sets.
A chandelier the size of a planetarium dome
is gold, and the commodes. The handrails
heading to the wine cellar and the shelving for the DVDs
and the base for the five stuffed tigers posed in a fighting phalanx:
gold, as is the samovar and the overripe harp
and the framework for the crocodile-hide ottoman and settee.
The full-size cinema theater accommodating an audience
of hundreds for the screening of home (or possibly
high-end fuck flick) videos: starred in gold
from vaulted ceiling to clawfoot legs on the seating.
Of course the scepter is gold, but the horns
on the mounted stag heads: do they need to be gilded?
Yes. And the olive fork and the French maid's row of dainty buttons
and the smokestack on the miniature train
that delivers golden trays of dessert from the kitchen
to a dining hall about the size of a zip code,
and the snooker table's sheathing, and the hat rack,
and those hooziewhatsit things in which you slip your feet
on the water skis, and the secret lever
that opens the door to the secret emergency bunker.
Smug and snarky as we are, in our sophisticated
and subtler, non-tyrannical tastes, it's still
unsettling to realize these photographs are also full
of the childrens' pictures set on a desk,
the wife's diploma proudly on a wall, the common
plastic container of aspirin, and the bassinette
with the scroll of linen shade at the ready
in case the sun is too powerful: reminders of how
a graduated continuum connects these überoperatically
fat interior lives to our own. We all desire
"more" and "better," Melville adds that final "e"
to the family name, and Faulkner adds the "u," in quest
of a signified gentility. My friend Damien
(fake name) won A Certain Literary Award, and
at the stellar after-ceremony party, in the swank hotel's
swank atrium, he found a leggy literary groupie
noshing caviar under a swankily lush mimosa,
and in under an hour his own swank room could boast
the golden statuette, the evening's loveliest woman, and
the silver serving platter of five-star caviar,
and if you think this story's moral lesson is
that satiation is ever attained, you don't understand
the protoknowledge we're born with, coded into our cells:
soon soon soon enough we die. Even before we've seen
the breast, we're crying to the world that we want;
and the world doles out its milkiness in doses. We
want, we want, we want, and if we don't then
that's what we want; abstemiousness is only
hunger translated into another language. Yes
there's pain and heartsore rue and suffering, but
there's no such thing as "anti-pleasure": it's pleasure
that the anchorite takes in his bleak cave
and Thoreau in his bean rows and cabin. For Thoreau,
the Zen is: wanting less is wanting more.
Of less. At 3 a.m. Marlene (fake name) and Damien
drunkenly sauntered into and out of the atrium,
then back to his room: he wanted the mimosa too,
and there it stood until checkout at noon, a treenapped testimony
to the notion that we will if we can, as evidenced in even
my normally modest, self-effacing friend. If we can,
the archeological record tells us, we'll continue wanting
opulently even in the afterlife: the grave goods
of pharaohs are just as gold as the headrests
and quivers and necklace pendants they used every day
on this side of the divide, the food containers
of Chinese emperors are ready for heavenly meals
that the carved obsidian dragons on the great jade lids
will faithfully guard forever. My own
innate definition of "gratification" is right there
in its modifier "immediate," and once or twice
I've hurt somebody in filling my maw. I've walked
—the normally modest, self-effacing me—below a sky
of stars I lusted after as surely as any despot
contemplating his treasury. The slice of American cheese
on the drive-thru-window burger is also gold,
bathetically gold,
and I go where my hunger dictates.
Can't really comment since I didn't see it: early round cup games are never on TV and dcunited.com didn't stream it, bastards. Here's Benuski, here are some post-game quotes (note that Neal started at left back), here's Goff. The red kits suck.
Here's the big news: United v Phunion at Soccerplex next Tuesday night. Planet says she's going! Woot! plus stanchion pron.
Iannis Xenakis was born ninety years ago today. I feel incapable of documenting my rage before today's clusterfuck, sorry, I know the day is particularly clusterfuckful even by current standards of daily clusterfuckability, motherfucking Emperobama. Here, have my new policy on posting gifs and fine fucking metaphors abounding and my fucking complicity. Don't know why effingblooger won't allow enlarging today after providing it for years but that's also fine fucking metaphors abounding and my fucking complicity. Also too, more Xenakis.
There's a new shitstorm from what I see on twooter. I've heard and seen the name Chris Hayes in blooger and twooter but I couldn't pick his face out of a line-up or his schtick out of a soundbite. I confess I still find myself harnessed to POTUS 12, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna be tethered to motherfucking yapping heads on the plasma screen, help Corporate make money out of clusterfucking the clusterfuck. I heard Bob Schieffer on the local news radio station say, "I think the events of the next five months will determine who wins the presidency," and the morning drive-time morons said, "Good advice, as always, from Bob Schieffer," and I swore from that moment onward I will only listen to that station on the eights and only when I have to. Which I'd done countless times before.
Apparently Chris Hayes said something less than beatifying about those who volunteer to serve in the American Armed Services, and latest fucking shitstorm ensues. I haven't calculated this since the last time, but there are, as of noon EDT today, 171.5 days, 4,116 hours, 246,960 minutes, 14,817,600 seconds until election day, each one of them increasing by that second what you already believe to be true. All of which to say that instead of writing about that I'm going to marvel yet again at serendipity. Hamster sees a performance of Ligeti piano pieces a week ago, yesterday I remember it's the birthday of Rostropovich, last night I'm reminded that Ligeti was born 89 years ago today, here's his Sonata for Solo Cello:
John Cheever born 100 years ago yesterday. It's been at least twenty years since I've read Cheever, mostly because his novels aren't good and I don't particularly like short stories (though I can write short stories but not novels - fine metaphors abound).
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
