Rhinocrisy

But it won’t get you a good review from Andrew Bacevich. He reads liberal hawk Peter Beinart’s new The Good Fight so we don’t have to:

The Good Fight is insipid, pretentious and poorly written. At points it verges on incoherence. As history, it is meretricious. As policy prescription, it is wrongheaded. Beinart has perpetrated his fraud twice over.

I just wish Beinart would set me up with one of those $600,000 advances. For that kind of dough, I’d happily be insipid, pretentious and almost incoherent. Hell, I do it here for free.

One of the problems with being poorly-read is that the occasional flashes of insight you might have on any particular subject are fragmented and disconnected, and at best represent pinpoints of understanding in what is most probably a vast corpus that has been explored and assembled into a huge body of knowledge and theory by hundreds of people, most of whom were far more clever than you are.

Exemplis gratia: I was about to write something for myself relating to something else^* when it occurred to me that there’s really no mode of writing or speech that allows you to actually write to yourself. You’re always writing to an imagined audience, maybe of a necessity since the whole enterprise of speech and writing involves communication, and one can’t very well communicate something to one’s self without a touch of dissociative identity disorder.

I thought this was a clever bit of insight, and I was about to congratulate myself on it and explore it further when it occurred to me that someone else had probably thought of it sometime in the fifteenth century and written a treatise on the subject. This was so disheartening that I immediately gave up thinking about it. Most of my interesting trains of thought are wrecked in this fashion.

Yes, the U.S. Postal Service, beleaguered by e-mail, abandoned by lovers, relegated to sadly delivering bills, jury summonses and credit card solicitations, still has a niche: carrying misinformed whackjobbery to the United Nations. The good news is these windnuts just donated $39,000 to one of my favorite institutions, one which they consider flatly horrible — the ever-leveling democratic Post Office.

I was just reading my daily dose of Jonathan Schwarz over at Tiny Revolution and it occurred to me that I had a mental image of what he looked like. This would be normal at a blerg like Bob Harris’ or Saheli*’s, where there are photos of the blawgers, but I do it with everyone. When I saw Tom Tomorrow at a book reading, I was suprised at how little he looked like his characters. I expected him to be a white man in a plain beige suit with slicked down hair, sort of a much geekier Tom Wolfe, and to be a bit short and squat. I won’t ruin the surprise for everyone, but let’s just say I was right. He was white. Similarly, I met regular commenter Saurav, who to my eyes was much more hyper, rather than laconic, than I expected, and just generally more of a clean-cut New Yorker rather than a dreadlocked chain-wielding punk. Among other differences.

What about the rest of us? What do we look like? Describe your favorite blawger-you-never met. I want to know. Later I’ll post my description of Schwarz.

A news search for the term “oaxaca” is informative: following a teacher’s union strike in Oaxaca City, three thousand cops attacked demonstrators, apparently opening fire on the crowd and killing up to eleven people. There are zero wire service reports about this; the only place it’s being discussed is in places like Pacifica, NarcoNews, Indymedia, etc. I only got this from my friend Nancy who happens to live there. One presumes that stories like this go unreported all the time. Just banal, routine violent repression of working people.

If the FCC has a comment line where I can demand more smut on TV and radio, I would like to know what it is. This isn’t for my own benefit, as I have no trouble finding sweaty bodies to watch. I am just concerned about the good people at the American Family Association. They need this info, fast.

As it stands, they are using their Internet bandwidth broadcasting video recordings of the most banal, soft-core porn — from prime time — to their eager, hungry audience.

Clearly, the “Family” folks are desperate. Maybe there aren’t good video stores in their small towns, or maybe they haven’t quite figured out the Internets. Or even more likely, they can’t wait through the dullness of prime-time dramas and the bizarrely psychadelic commercials (fairies coming and touching you in the sleep? a woman’s head projecting from your shoulder at all times? a guy with a bunch of stuffed fruit on his head playing cards in the park with people who are trying not to notice? Acid, anyone?) to see action considerably more tame than what I saw today at Coney Island. (Speaking of which, is there a V-chip for the beach?) Instead they go to the Cliff Notes version for the juicy bits. (Via This Modern World.)

The problem comes when they write the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to request more concentrated and revealing porn in prime-time. They keep messing up and using the complaint line, a practice that recently landed CBS with a $3.3 million obscenity fine.

Please, help the Families. Find us the “more porn, please” line at the FCC!

Punk ain’t no religious cult
Punk means thinking for yourself…

You’ll be the first to go
You’ll be the first to go
You’ll be the first to go
Unless you think

I realized yesterday that I had never made my iPod rant here, and what else is a blog for, after all? So here it is.

Sometime back I came to the bus stop and had an epiphany forced upon me. Everyone had something attached to their ear - some had cell phones, but most had those familiar thin white wires, myelinated axon fibers running directly from their ears to their vital nerve centers: the small white boxes in their pockets. Each one of them was being fed their own private stream of sound, covering them in an invisible shell, hermetically sealing them off from the world around them, from the very people they were brushing shoulders with. At that moment I got down on my knees, laid my axe on the ground in front of me and raised my arms to the heavens, swearing by the name of Dyaus Pitr that I would never, ever join that cult.

I am, of course, not the first to note the ill effects of isolation caused by iPods. Andrew Sullivan has a very nice column on the subject in the Times Online, and a private school in Sydney went so far as to ban them. Quoth the principal: “It’s important for kids to be talking to one another at school, socialising and being part of a community. That’s why they come to school, to be connected.”

iPods are an exemplary phenomenon, a poster-gadget for the alienation our society seems to encourage; as a single manifestation they’re probably not, in and of themselves, worthy of close attention or ire. But I’ve always tended to latch onto particular archetypal examples as actual demons - the GAP as the embodiment of monotonous, sweatshop-produced trendwear, or SUVs as destroyers of the environment. This instantly makes my statements weaker, since the implied action (stop wearing GAP clothing, driving an SUV, and listening to an iPod) is not going to stop the problem. It is only indicative of it. Social isolation would continue exist even were everyone to take the buds out of their ears; everyone isn’t going to magically start talking to their neighbors or the guy standing next to them on the bus. But iPods do make things incrementally worse, and it’s really the death of a thousand cuts that we should fear. Catastrophe rarely emerges directly in front of us, roaring and tearing things apart like Godzilla. Usually it sneaks up upon us from behind, so quietly and gradually that we barely notice that the buildings have crumbled, the flood waters have risen, and we’re standing ankle-deep in flotsam and rubble.

There’s a whole host of choices available to us these days that allow us to defect to the hermetic world. Blogs, for example - you can read what you want and ignore what you dislike. Even the opinion you dislike usually comes through the baleen curtain of some ideologically aligned blog - you only have to listen to the echoes, never to the actual source sound. These kind of choices are always easy to make - why would I, indeed, choose the unpleasant, the difficult world that stings me and causes me discomfort? Better to gather the warmest bits of the world around myself and build a nice, soft cocoon, of the sounds I like, of the people I like, of the opinions that are like my own, of the world that is the way that I want to see it, and not as it actually is.

So this is the way we’re going to go: each to our own quiet depths, alone and dead to each other. Bye. Nice knowing you. I’ll see you in your YouTube video clip.

Noah, over at Max Udargo’s blog, has been chronicling his ordeals building that damn ark. Check it out in case you haven’t, yet. Parts one, two, and three, so far.

The don’t-miss-it event of the day. It should already be underway in Australia, sweeping the planet toward western North America, where it will disappear into the ocean … until next time.