Uncanny - Looney, even

Though I abhor Christopher Hitchens' politics, especially his position on the invasion/occupation of Iraq, I agree wholeheartedly with his anti-theist views, in that "I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful."

But every now and then something happens that makes me think there may be something to such metaphysical nonsense. To wit: As I was getting out of the shower this morning, for some reason I was thinking about one of my favorite pieces of recorded music: the version of Gerry Hemingway's "If You Like" on his Quintet's CD Slamadam. Lo and behold, not more than 30 minutes later, I hear the tune played on the WNUR Jazz Show (by DJ Mike B, I believe). I thought, "Maybe I heard the DJ say something before I went in the shower about Hemingway or the Random Acoustics label or something like that which would have made me think of that tune" -- but no, he didn't.

This kind of stuff happens a lot. Most memorably, one evening before bed I decided to read an article about the great filmmaker Chuck Jones -- someone about whom I'd never read anything before -- and when I woke up the next morning and turned on the radio, I heard the announcement of his death.

But instead of bending my knees and looking towards the sky, I'd rather just savor the moment, giggle, and move on, thinking "how strange and lovely."

F'n Tommy F.

A year after derailing the Thomas Friedman "globalization train" theory, Matt Taibbi chimes in on a new load of horseshit by that racist neoliberal apologist, whose misguided ideas about political economy are less nauseating than his compulsive habit of opening a Pandora's box of mixed-metaphorical worms and letting them run amok:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible....

Taibbi continues:

In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint. His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

C'mon, Matt -- of course not.

Workers Memorial Day

The statistics are horrifying.
Here's a good idea that will probably get nowhere with our corporatist Congress. But now's as good a time as any to spread the word.

Wall, meet Head

The Daily Show once again exposes the SCLM.

Any wonder how crap like this can happen here?

Well, at least the Head Homophobe hasn't (yet) proposed that we convert abandoned military bases into massive "gay bathhouses." No, these retrofitted facilities will not produce Holy Smoke indicating the cremation of Cher fans, but rather smoke which will merely expedite the destruction of all humankind.

Oh, screw it all -- let's party!! (and they're ruining that as well)

Directorial Range

A real NYT article discusses a new film, The Great New Wonderful, about

a handful of New Yorkers a year after the [9/11] attacks as they struggle to cope with emotions - grief, rage, helplessness - that seem inexplicable, and that have no obvious outlet. The director [is] Danny Leiner - known for the stoner movies "Dude, Where's My Car?" and "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle"....

I don't know if the director is any good, but this will certainly make a Danny Leiner retrospective rather unique -- unless someone discovers that Claude Lanzmann directed this gem.

The Real Deal and the New Pope (aka Benny Pisshitspitnfuck)

A great piece by Bob Herbert on FDR's "Second Bill of Rights" (also the subject of a book by UofC's Cass Sunstein).

Other than Thomas Frank, George Lakoff offers the most insightful analysis of social/political polarization in the U.S. -- not Red vs. Blue, but Strict Father vs. Nurturant Parent, where the key distinction lies in liberals' notion of

Morality as Empathy: Empathy itself is understood metaphorically as feeling what another person feels. We can see this in the language of empathy: I know what it is like to be in your shoes. I know how you feel. I feel for you. To conceptualize moral action as empathic action is more than just abiding by the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Golden Rule does not take into account that others may have different values than you do. Taking morality as empathy requires basing your actions on their values, not yours. This requires a reformulation of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.
***
...conservatives also see morality as empathy and nurturance, but they assign a lower priority to them than liberals do. The result is that nurturance and empathy come to mean something different to conservatives than to liberals. In conservatism, moral nurturance is subservient to moral strength. Thus, moral nurturance for a conservative is the nurturance to be morally strong. For conservatives, moral empathy is subservient to moral strength, which posits a primary good-evil distinction. That distinction forbids conservatives from empathizing with people they consider evil, and so empathy becomes empathy with those who share their values.
***
...[L]iberals too have the metaphor of Moral Strength, but it is in the service of empathy and nurturance. The point of moral strength for liberals is to fight intolerance and inhumanity to others and to stand up for social responsibility.
***
Strict Father morality allows one to impose experiential harm on others in the name of the abstract metaphorical principle that Morality is Strength. In short, strict father morality allows you to hurt people in the name of morality. That violates experiential morality, which is the foundation of every abstract moral system. *** [T]he foundational and empirical pathologies in strict father morality, and, hence, in conservatism, are inherent and cannot be remedied. They make strict father morality an inherently pathological moral system.

His book Moral Politics elaborates on these ideas (though I haven't read it yet). Beyond the religionists who continue to subjugate their entire lives to The Good Book, what is perhaps more problematic is the fact that the political economy infrastructure built by the strict father system (e.g., capitalist oligarchy) continues to be supported by so many people for whom religionist dogma is not the determinative Word. It's like a disease where the virus ("God") has been destroyed, yet the symptoms persist. It may just be too early in the post-telescope/microscope era to expect a full recovery.

"One must choose between God and Man, and all 'radicals' and 'progressives,' from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man."
-- George Orwell

Speaking of Strict Fathers, it's genuinely disturbing to see and hear the reports about the choice of the new #1 Catholic (aka Old Guy in Silly Outfit): A local news report interviewed a grade school kid who said, "Since I'm a Catholic, it's really exciting to hear they chose a new pope." A 10-year-old says he "is a Catholic"?!?! This is how religionists manufacture demand for their commodities of fear and ignorance -- get 'em while they're young.

"Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute."
-- Gore Vidal

Of course religionism has consequences beyond its psychic abuse of the pious and their offspring: Religionism and capitalism feed off each other, perpetuating the "Strict Father" model of oppressive patriarchy, so well exemplified by the late Pope JPII:

His commitment to the patriarchy was total. Not only would the church continue to be completely male dominated, but challenges to the patriarchal family like a woman’s right to choose when and if to have a child—including both contraception and abortion—as well as the right of lesbians and gays to same-sex relationships were to be condemned.

Terry Eagleton was dead-on about Karol Wojtyla:

The greatest crime of his papacy, however, was neither his part in [the child molestation] cover up nor his neanderthal attitude to women. It was the grotesque irony by which the Vatican condemned - as a "culture of death" - condoms, which might have saved countless Catholics in the developing world from an agonising AIDS death. The Pope goes to his eternal reward with those deaths on his hands.

The new guy appears to share JPII's opposition to the "liberation theology" movement that has preached the social gospel and worked for social justice in Latin America.

Pipecock Jackxon's take on these pious patriarchs:

Tic tic toe. Big Ben de time clock is my headmaster. Together we interpretate disaster for the popes, de deacons, and de pastor, for all who don't piss, shit and poop, and spit and fuck (makin' love like it is), hold up them hand and God will strike them with lightning, 'cause He know that they will be committing a sin, that their grandfather and grandmother did in the beginning, tempted by sin.

As George Bernard Shaw said, "Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!"

Speaking of patriarchy, invisible guiding forces, and oligarchical imperialism, Mike Wallace (not the "60 Minutes" guy) wrote an interesting review of a book by Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. Seems like a timely read, given the attempt to destroy, via crisis-mongering, the most successful social welfare program in history:

...there must be many Americans who see the privatizers' ugly effort to divide children from parents for what it is--a menace to contemporary family values. Most people know full well that Social Security has not only been a lifesaver for the old but has provided a measure of independence to the young, shifting some of the burden of caring for aged parents to the country's broad collective shoulders. *** [Fraser's] sweeping historical reconstruction is a powerful reminder that our current economic arrangements are the product of centuries of debate and struggle, not the inevitable legacy of invisible "market forces."

No, those forces are not invisible -- they're very much corporeal. This NYT Magazine piece lifts some rocks to shine the light on the radical anti-democratic ideologues taking over the federal judiciary, including some candidates for the Supreme Court who make Tony Scalia look like a moderate.

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

How 'bout some good news, for a change:
-- Maryland Stands Up to Wal-Mart
-- Union Blues Lift in Chicago
-- Bush Admits Errors, Reaches Out to Global Community... well, maybe not.

"What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
-- Robert F. Kennedy

And, oh yeah, Americans are still killing and being killed in Iraq for no good reason -- especially not the hollow excuse, perpetuated in the military-industrial media, that the U.S. military is there to protect Iraqi civilians from insurgents:

attacks on military occupying forces, and by extension mostly US military forces, accounts for 75% of all attacks. Meanwhile, civilian targets comprise a mere 4.1% of attacks. This reality is at striking odds with the general picture painted in the press of a narcissistic, mindless and sinister insurgency simply bent on chaos and destruction.

Maybe Robert Wilson has a better explanation than George Lakoff for all of this retrograde, destructive behavior:

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

The sun may be shining and the air may be warming, but these are dark days indeed. Forecast: mostly fucked.

"The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force."
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy."
-- Baron De Montesquieu

"When one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares, 'God wills it thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."
-- Napoleon Bonapart

Best Video Ever: contestant #2

Can you guess which decade this video comes from?
I like how he seems to pull the microphone out of his ass.