Laughter in the Ruins

I'm in the midst of watching Bill Moyers' morbidly fascinating, indeed darkly comic, Buying the War, a bell-the-cat name naming chronicle of the corporate media's thirty-month-long lotion squirt for the Iraq Project. One really can't laugh out loud at a process, charted by the indomitable Moyers with video tape, that led to the needless killings of tens of thousands of people. But your humble correspondent is a dark philosopher, and the fat, stupid faces of Murder's Cheerleaders airing and accepting their toxic lies, mainly bought by an earnest, play-dumb, consumerist middle-class electorate, provides a Swiftian kick which I find irresistible. Oh for the wings of a dove, and the distance of another fifty years, I might call the novel (hat tip to Dr. Percy) Laughter in the Ruins.

Actually, Percy's very funny pre- and post-apocalyptic novel Love in the Ruins proposed a southern U.S. suburban society riven by race conflict, dumb religion, and affluent anomie. Things fall apart between the interstate and the golf course while Percy's intrepid and crazy hero, Dr. Tom More, watches and tries to help. It was published in 1972, set in the near future which we living have now passed by, and commences action on the 4th of July.

A wise guy, Walker Percy, whom I had the privilege of once meeting and talking to at length. A conservative Catholic who realized in his conservative Catholic way that the country could not go on for long on its steady diet of E-Z violence and denial. Because of his upperclass Mississippi background, Percy considered the coming fall through a racial frame. Now that it is upon us we can see that it was not race that has undone the country so much as affluence. For the brother you hate is still your brother, a person you may yet grow to accept. The bill collector never was family and never will be.

Now where was I?? Oh yes. . .

There's been a spate lately of well-written and sincere examinations of What Went Wrong With the Press in the year-long lead up to the war criminals' game, now capped by the Moyers report. Here are two (Greenwald and Kamiya) from Salon a couple weeks back. And, after watching the Moyers program, Driftglass recently offered this worthy cri de coeur.

The reason for these moral, ethical, and professional lapses of the press that these three worthies missed, which Bill Moyers has not been able yet to name (I still have the last two segments to view) is a pretty simple cause-and-effect case. Both Greenwald and Kamiya, and it seems to me most hand-wringing media guardians, have the idea that, somehow, the press has been hijacked by operatives of a malign corporate agenda intent on power through lies. This really misses the point.

Point being that the media have no more been hijacked by that Malagcorp than your brain has been kidnapped by your central nervous system. They are extensions of the same body.

Now the heroes of the Moyers documentary are the reporters and editors of the McClatchy (once the Knight-Ridder) press group, who very properly deemed their main obligations were to their readers rather than their advertisers. That is a wonderful, wonderful thing, but an economic judgement nonetheless, and NOT an automatic guarantee of truth and justice. The more craven considerations were, of course, made by the TV networks, arrant pest holes of money, fear and careerism, that trick themselves out as populist havens every goddamn day.

The assumptions, expectations and considerations of these money churning enterprises of the college educated will always be in sync with those of the predominant corporate culture, and always have been. What has gone wrong is not that the press has been kidnapped, but that that corporate culture has begun to make astoundingly bad, serial decisions regarding its very own welfare. You can see it now in the GOP, at the Pentagon, at the U.S. auto companies and media conglomerates. Why?? Well, ha-ha. I have my suspicions which I'll gladly, indeed compulsively, share. But I have already gone on too long this morning.

But Joe "Essential Reading" Bageant knows well, and pretty much nails a large part of it right here.

Decline And Fools

Regrets extended for the layoff here. Your humble correspondent was far from the madding online crowd, in the uncommonly rainy Commonwealth of Puerto Rico this past week. It's always nice to get away someplace to regard the motions of our stumbling republic from something like a safe distance, and Puerto Rico, an utterly lovely isle I'd never visited before, was especially good for that, in that it is at an angle removed yet close by. I have more than a little to say about latin culture and the riches it offers the rest of our empty TV nation, but that will have to wait a bit as we need to attend to the pieces falling apart before considering ways in which they may be put back together.

As you can see, I mainly missed the war of words over the votes for the Iraq funding bill, which should indeed be called the Republican Representatives and Senators Rescue Act of 2007, a lifeline thrown by Democrats Pelosi, Hoyer, and Reid to those in the GOP looking to keep their seats over the next couple elections. The Justice Department scandal(s) have revealed this administration finally and forever as an amalgam of righteously craven, stupid, and incompetent men and women who, if times were flush, would have been cut adrift, or exorcized, from the main party in early '06, or, certainly, after their November crash. But no.

Having predicted this very disaster for the GOP well over a year ago, I can't say I'm surprised by their inability to help themselves, only impressed that so few of those in Washington are acting to salvage anything of their political lives. This band of so-called rugged individualists are linking arms across the burning deck even as the life boats stand rocking empty on the nearby block heads. (Speaking of, that R. Giuliani should uncrate the argument regarding Republicans being better defenders of the nation, which barely worked in '04 and not at all last year, says everything about the brainpower running that prat's campaign.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, flush times, or the lack thereof. Lately I've been thinking that the main reason the jerks in power are acting in such patently, demonstrably dumb ways is the realization, perhaps for most actors inchoate, that the nation is no longer dealing from perspectives of abundance, but rather now pressed against the spectre of scarcity. Affluence allows elbow room in politics, something which kept the Vietnam War cooking with bipartisan support for nearly a decade after it was doomed to failure, and six years after the American public got clearly sick of it.

Nope, the reason we went charging into poor Iraq in the first place was the realization that there wasn't much, so to speak, left in the tank, and the only thing keeping us there now, now that the Iraq project is more unpopular, impossible, and pointless than the Vietnam War ever was, is the wildcatter's dream of hitting it big with the last rig standing. May have worked in the oil patch years back, when a guy gone bust might still have a few bucks left for a cold six and a blowjob, but even as the sick-faced, well-coiffed, self-righteous GOP Hill boobs are huffing, impotently IMHO, about defeatist deadlines imposed by the Dems' bills, all seem to be turning their dead eyes to September, September when it will all be clear if this last throw of the dice is working. Or not.

The stupid press is full of concerned speculation regarding the Democrats' end game, and here I'll suggest to those shitheads in the fourth estate that it is the Repubs in dire need of a strategy. Because all it will take to cap the Democratic campaign is someone, let's say Jack Murtha, to stand up in the House and say, okay, here's your money, to the tune of $2,000,000,000 a week for the next six-eight months, and when you're done spending all that cash - money the country really doesn't have, by the way - and blood, and come back to ask the American people for more of both, John McCain then better be able to stroll the avenues of Baghdad all day without a company of troops and a kevlar wardrobe. In the meantime, keep us posted and we'll see you at the polls.

The Arms And The Mad

The horrible, heartbreaking mass murder in Virginia will engender plenty of dumb lectures, a pile I don't intend to add to. However two details of that day's events are about to be overlooked, and point to something at the heart of the problem which I think few care to consider. The first is that police lost two crucial hours looking for and apprehending the boyfriend of the first victim after being told, correctly, he kept guns. A domestic killing, they all-too naturally thought.

Let that sink in a bit. Looking for an undergrad with firearms? Take your pick. And here I am by no means suggesting that the devastated young man whose girlfriend was murdered was capable of using a gun on a human being. Only that it is passing strange that firearms are held so widely by young people, at an age when the Id holds some real sway over the personality, that Cho's deadly posessions were not, per se, out of the ordinary, even though he was.

Second, and related, is the notion among campus decision makers that classes could go on because the first shootings looked like only a domestic dispute. Let that sink in too. Granted, Virginia Tech has an enormous campus and tens of thousands of students, but that a double-murder in a dorm was not in and of itself enough to cancel classes is really pretty astounding, and should underscore the culture-wide desensitization towards violence, and an insane need to run business as usual, that leads to a variety of disgusting acts public and private every goddamn day.

Nodes In Passing

Anyone besides me notice how the shrunken head of our country has, well, been reduced so as to almost vanish? Seems now many are agreeing with my call from a year and a half back that Katrina ended his presidency. Is anyone besides some nutjob bloggers and radio tools paying any attention to what he says anymore? I don't remember Nixon ever being this pointless.

Looks like the I-Man has gone the way of all flushes and here I wave a heartfelt toodles. Thing is, my lefty comrades now crowing over this result, Imus was also the only highly visible MSM figure who regularly referred on air to the current junta as War Criminals, which, along with his reflexive vocalized contempt for his CBS boss Leslie Moonves, surely allowed his transition to go forward with such dispatch. Tom Watson put the best capstone I've read on the guy's career. Anyway, as we move on keep in mind that endings, when they come, come fast.

Speaking of, I missed by only moments the opportunity last Friday to flip-off the Veep's motorcade as it blew past the corner of Ontario and Orleans here in the City of the Big Shoulders. I was, alas, half a block away as it raced onto the expressway entrance there. I did, though, send as much ill will as possible in its wake. It is worth noting that that waddling blob of hate travels the avenues of our nation with a flashing ambulance bringing up the rear of his tinhorn procession of SUVs, almost like a sweeper cart after the elephant parade. We are ruled by sick men unsure of how much time they have left.

Big Dick was here to bore the Heritage Foundation, a band of failed dreamers, over lunch, impotently threatening the Democrats in the process, though his scary face is still the best in the biz, about their war proposals. Someday soon that fuckhead is going to be loaded into that trailing ambulance for the last time, a symbolic stretcherfull of spite and shitty thinking that will stand for a whole way of life which, like the Veep's cardio system, just ain't working as designed anymore.

NB: I have rotated the fine Rude Pundit out of my blogroll, not for any disappointment with him on my part, but to make way for a less well-known sensibility I've been following with interest for a couple months now, another level-headed midwestern dealer known as Prairie Weather. Go visit sometime.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

Yrs Trly remembers when blues musicians and baseball umpires went to work wearing ties. Here, McKinley Morganfield leads Sonny Boy Williamson on the harp, Willie Dixon, bass, and very likely Pinetop Perkins on pianoforte, in Denmark, or Sweden, maybe England someplace:

Curt Vonnegut

"I will say again what I have often said in print and in speeches, that not one Allied soldier was able to advance as much as an inch because of the firebombing of Dresden. Not one prisoner of the Nazis got out of prison a microsecond earlier. Only one person on earth clearly benefited, and I am that person," said Vonnegut, referring to his bestselling novel. "I got about five dollars for each corpse, not counting my fee tonight."

Slaughterhouse-Five, a measure of of the human spirit, will be read for as long as people read books. From it:

"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

"I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."

The quotes above were lifted from the Tribune's extensive obit.

And Not So Quiet Flows The Don

This might be my last Imus post for a while, as I am running out of japes about the slob's name. I've been meaning to unload a couple posts on other media subjects, but the self-inflicted woes of the I-Man still draw me as a moth to a sweater.

First, Mike Lupica, a writer on mainly sporting topics for the NY Daily News, one whom I admire greatly, and an Imus show regular, had this to say about him this morning. Lupica does not lash his friend as much as brightly illustrate the damage inflicted by his stupid mouth.

Then there is Imus' own on-going distempered apologia as he tries to salvage his niche in commercial thought-space. I wish him the best, all the more so if this is a sincerely ground-breaking process for him. For what this illustrates in a nutshell is how a constant media scrim obscures so much that is useful and beautiful in life while promoting the dumb certitudes that keep the white male order of business in place.

One of those dumb certitudes, one which Imus is still depending on, is the notion that an individual is the best judge of his or her own reasoning soul. I am not a racist he said, probably in all sincerity. Lupica defends him, sort of tendentiously, from this charge as well.

However, this is not a judgement one is qualified to make on one's own, an assessment on par with which hand you write with or if you like pineapple. Plenty of suburban fat heads who only see minorities through the windshield, think that they aren't racists too. Because they like to, because they've never been challenged on the subject, because it's easier then to make jigaboo jokes on the golf course. Racism is not a brand, it is a climate, something Americans, by their nature, have a hard time grasping. Naw. . . Imus will begin doing some real work when he figures out a) that he is a racist and b) it is a judgement really best made by other people, his fellow citizens, on whom the life of his spirit ultimately depends.

Don's Ho

Since so recently name-checking Don Imus, I feel drawn to throw a few ideas into the boiling water he finds himself in now. Don began his career in Cleveland, ridiculing the city's first black mayor Carl Stokes, moved on to WNBC in New York in the early 80s, where he was stablemate of the utterly pointless Howard Stern. That deal imploded and Don had a brief stint on VH1, where he antagonized everyone, before moving to New York's WFAN, the first all-sports talk station in the country, where he has been ever since, MSNBC trucking their cameras into a lavish new studio a few years ago.

Imus is impudent and well-read, which I like, arrogant and closed-minded, which is not so great. His cohort is worse. His announcer and newsreader, Charles McCord is a conservative Christian bore, his producer Bernard McGurk (I now know this is a misspelling, but leave it this way so as not to trouble the search engines) is a racist know-nothing twat, one of those bullet-headed peabrains who chances into a well-paid gig which allows them to keep every adolescent prejudice intact and well-fed. The cast is rounded out by a second-rate character actor who does low-brow imitations of generals, wiseguys, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton.

Yes, hardly a promising set-up, and I stopped listening regularly about ten years ago, checking in occasionally on TV when on the road.

What the cast does not include is a woman or a liberal, either because they'd make easy targets or, more likely, would consistently show up the regular nitwits. This is too bad, of course, because Imus mainly uses his brain-dead conservative enablers as foils who are there to draw out the best and worst of his cranky sensibilities. He chides and berates them, as he does himself, and one senses overall a smart man with a lot of baggage looking to make some sense of a very stupid world of vanity and politics.

Imus long ago began calling the President and VP war criminals, was enraged about the Walter Reed scandal, and did what he could to keep the story in the public eye. In ridiculing Thug life, another regular subject, he was pleased to traffic in the language and stereotypes which, let's be clear, Rap also likes regurgitating, and which mainstream black leaders, like Al Sharpton, also dispair of. That Imus made his hateful comment about the Rutgers women in an exchange with McGurk, who let me say again is the main puddle of piss on the show, should not come as a surprise. Perhaps the asshole producer, stung by the recent decay of the conservative regime he so viciously supports and weary of having his boss ride him about it, led his meal ticket without realizing it into a patch of heavy brier. One can only hope Bernard will pay for the miscalculation with his job.

Imus' predicament has caused some of the MSM sleepers to wake, if only briefly, and opine stupidly that, alas, things have changed. I submit that what has changed is not the clarifying atmosphere of raw talk which once coursed through the halls of a confident nation, laid-low and sterile now by political correctness. No indeedy, what's changed is that people have lost patience with the errant bullshit of arrogant douchebags who spout their hateful nonsense as if they are doing others a service. Call it War Fatigue.

To his credit, Imus seems to understand this (he might be the only radio blabbermouth who has the wit to) has has been acting in an apparently sincere and contrite way. I like how he went on Sharpton's show, and I liked how he fucked up again by referring to you people during it. Sharton apparently still wants Imus canned. While I would not cry at the result, I think Imus, less some baggage and one shithead producer, would be interesting to listen to in the coming months and years as the Republic vomits out the GOP agenda.

Dead Lines

That squalid little man pointed and whined yesterday, trying to gin up some indignation in the heartland over the end of his stupid plans for the country's armed forces. Thing is, he and his cohort have been wrong all down the line since the Iraq project began and he is not going to start being right now. The polls will show his shrunken head on a silver platter in a month's time.

Vastly funny is Mrs. Greenspan's report that the GOP has given the generals 'til August to Get The Shit Done. Ha-ha. Not only are they exactly one August too late to save their worthless political lives, but, demmit, it sounds a lot like a deadline to me. In fact surge is a word that implies a wave pattern, something with temporal beginning, apogee, and terminus. Problem for the War Creeps is that they can't use the words best suited to their plans: Escalation and Occupation. Another problem is that the walls can cave in long before August.

The only logic behind their dumb rationalizing is the GOPuds' reflexive reaching for the narrative reins. Back when the major dailies were run by Ivy Leaguers and the small town papers managed by Chamber of Commerce types, back when money flowed to TV stations as logically as wheat through a North Dakota silo, a reasonably astute conservative politician on the national stage could shape the majority national opinion, so long as policy and events did not deviate too much from certain ideas of propriety and order.

Whoops, much of the above still holds, doesn't it? But the audience has gone elsewhere.

Equally hilarious is the divergent conservative view that the American People are behind the occupation, but are also being traduced into questioning its merits by a perfidious Media. People cannot be wise and dupes at the same time, and I give my fellow citizens more credit than many in the chattering classes for being wise. The GOP can't. They have been fucking the peasants for too long to see that a majority of the downtrodden has begun to object to the specifics of the arrangement.

No, the last constituency the GOP's got is the convention-seeking mainstream media, which is itself beholden to their advertisers' sentiments and expectations. Big news lately is all the money the "leading" candidates have raised, money, of course, destined mainly for long and short spots on TV stations across the broad belly of the Republic. It has, in fact, been such a big story that I doubt its importance altogether. The media is here shilling its wares to the rubes, while this just might be the election where we discover that expensive TV campaigns have gone the way of the whistle stop, that the lines have gone dead.

Nodes In Passing

Breaking news has it that Sam Zell is the new owner of the Chicago Tribune, to which I say Hurray. The linked story is notable for all the bad news about the company and newspaper business in general that, somehow, the editors never got around to listing this clearly before.

Anyway, I highly doubt Zell bought the thing to maintain the status quo of the Trib's often fine reporting (check out this story, which they first broke three weeks ago) coupled with (some might say undercut by) an antique Republican editorial stance. Stripping and selling the parts seems like a lot of effort too, though he will certainly dump the Cubs, a relief for all involved.

Let's put it this way. I don't think Zell bought the company to turn it further to the right, and since readers are leaving in flocks, the current formula is due for a re-think. Is a Brave New World of progressive journalism about to begin?? Beats the hell out of me, lieutenant.

Okay Mets fans, I was not planning on writing about the opener, but it was an especially beautiful game. Glavine was superb, aided by some outstanding fielding (FOUR double-plays, two in very key spots). He saved his best punch for last too, breaking that goon Molina's bat for a pop to second with the bases full. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

I liked how Moisey and Green got the ball rolling last night, two vets turning up for the future Hall of Famer on the mound. Everyone played really well. And I am completely on the skipper's side about putting Smith in in the eighth. Shows confidence, even if his nose got a little bloody. Kid also found out he has one of the best infields in baseball behind him, a very valuable lesson for a rookie setup man to learn.

And, speaking of relief, our Neddie Jingo has rejoined the crowd over at that Chumps of Choice. Nice havin' you back, pard.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

Awww hell, why not one more duet song from Dolly and Porter? A couple-three years down the line: