perfidy

All two of our regular readers (now dwindled to .0035 readers thanks to an extended four-way hiatus) will remember that back in the heady days of early 2003 when George Boosh was banging the war drum fast and hard (and with such a big stick!), I repeatedly voiced my opinion that I wasn't sure Iraq had anything to do with anything. At the time, the Weapons of Mass Destruction issue (which-- let's not rewrite history-- was repeated an awful lot of times by Those In Charge) didn't carry a lot of water with me, though on strict technical grounds I was willing to grant Bush and Condi and Donald the whole "repeated violations of UN resolutions" thing as casus belli.

But frankly, no matter how many resolutions were broken, at the time I just didn't see the point in libervading Iraq. Not that I thought it was a bad idea or morally "wrong"-- I simply didn't trust Bush and his crew that Iraq was a vital part of the War on Terror thingy, and I trusted them even less not to fuck it up. Iraq seemed more a sideshow, a distraction from the important things, old business between a tinpot dictator and the son of a man he one tried to have killed.

Now, two years later, I have a little crow to eat. Iraq continues to be a near-total mess (and please don't come back at me with the "most of the country is stable" line... I know that is technically true, if by "stable" you mean "the same mess it usedta be." But the light switches still don't work, and cars continue to explode.), but elections have been held that failed to fall apart as a total sham. That's great. Better yet, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, and even Egypt seem to be at the start of something good. Iraq may not have had any WMDs, and Saddam sure didn't have anything to do with the attacks on the US, but in a grand strategic sense, I am now willing to accept that Iraq makes long-range strategic sense in the so-called war on terror.

For now I'm only going to snack, have a crow amuse-bouche, as it were. Everyone's got a long row to hoe to get anywhere worthwhile yet, but so far the beginnings look good. If you told me two years ago that Iraq would have held uneventful elections and Palestine looked willing to come to the table, I doub't I'd believed you. But that's what has happened.

So, from the bottom of my heart: Mr. President, I'm sorry I doubted you and your grand plan. It actually looks like it could work. Now: you better not fuck this up. And hey, lay off the demagoguery at home. You get cocky, you get a boot in your ass.

[wik] ... and now some clarification is in order. I have this problem sometimes where, in order to make sure I say precisely what I mean to say and no more and no less, I weigh my thoughts down with about fifty pounds of hedgings, yes-buts, and preemptive objections. Unfortunately, the effect of this is generally to obscure the elegance of whatever it was I was saying in the first place.

With that in mind, here's the shorter version of the above post: I still don't like our President much, and his foreign policy vis a vis the Middle East sure scared the hell out of me (still does!). But, now that it looks like his actions are in fact partially responsible for the still-embryonic new fashion in democracy and not blowing shit up in the Middle East, I welcome the opportunity to be proven wrong. Let freedom reign! (whatever the eff that means, you half-articulate sham-Texan Connecticut cracker.)

[alsø wik] Via email, Buckethead graciously points out that "one of [my] beloved [sic] cobloggers also predicted this outcome," namely him. Well, yeah. B drank the Bush Admin kool-aid like it was Guyana 1978.

[alsø alsø wik] It occurs to me that comparing Buckethead's early-and-often advocacy of our President's policies to the behavior of Jim Jones' followers is a bit crass. Well, this is more crass: "Well, yeah. B clamped onto the Bush party line like it was a whiskey tit fulla Booker Noe."

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Or this: "Well, yeah. Hey, B: try not to get that stuff in your eye when you're done. I hear it burns."

Home with the flu, and the pulmonologist is taking a longshot flyer on a rare fungus that lives in the Ohio River Valley. And a couple other things.

The flu? F*$#!

On the bright side, at least I can catch up on my reading.

[wik] Oh bitch, bitch, bitch.

The French have committed to providing exactly 1 (one) officer to the NATO effort to train Iraqi soldiers and law enforcement personnel. In a measuer of France's deep interest in supporting democracy in Iraq, this officer will travel to the wilds of southern Belgium to participate in the training.

French protestors uncomfortable with even this tepid support for US policy can be expected to be waving signs demanding, "Bring home our troop!" any time now.

then this is in fact the greatest essay ever written. (Warning: site and essay contain some moderately porny content that may not be worksafe if you work for a pack of bluenoses.)

In our intrepid pursuit of erudition, we can do worse than to take the example of the linked anonymous essayist and give shout outs to olives, Lenny Kravitz, and anal sex by way of explicating Oedipus Rex.

Via bookslut, whom I am blogrolling..... nnnnnow.

Wait... I f*cked that one up. That's the title of a Donnas song.

Via Bookslut, I am reminded of the bloggers' 50 book challenge wherein one promises to read 50 books in 2005. Some people have gone so far as to get sponsors for their logomania, but I, I! do it all for the love of the word.

So far:
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station
China Mieville, The Scar
Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver (again)
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
George Plimpton, Open Net
Charles Dickinson, Great Expectations
Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice (which, by the way, is the best work of modern-era social history I have ever read. He is a monster. A beast. The king. This is the way it is done.)
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer/Heart of Darkness (two novellas, count as one in my world!)

Man... I better get cracking. Moreover, the 50 books challenge requires that one blog about the books they read... man.... better get cracking...

Thanks to Geeklethal for his apt dubbing of my ongoing and frustrating illness as "Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis." I would however quibble with his characterization of my malady as Dickensian. "Dickensian" implies a certain grimy romanticism (or anti-romanticism) as well as a finite endpoint when the ill person keels over in a poignant and oddly wordy episode. "Dickensian" illnesses tended to be of the tubercular variety, and what I gots is not that. Sure I have been subject to an endless parade of coughs, catarrahs, chest infections, head colds, and bizarre symptoms nearly never seen in a male of my age and general health. But that's not "Dickensian."

I prefer to think of my illness as "Eggersian" after postmodernist novelist David Eggers, whose "A Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis" is the only library book I have ever thrown across a room in disgust. "Wallacian" is also in the running, as in David Foster Wallace's interminable cocktease of a novel, "Infinite Jest," in which the joke was on the reader for sticking with Wallace through 1200 pages of densely footnoted disquisition on tennis, homelessness, and handicapped Quebecois separatists. But, since Eggers is more or less the father of that foul genre, "Eggersian" it is. Like his books, my ongoing sickness is endless, indeterminate, undiagnosable, enervating, incredibly frustrating, and ultimately halfway debilitating. Halfway? Yes, halfway. It's difficult for me to say whether walking a couple miles on any given day will leave me feeling invigorated or like I've just been tied in a bag and beaten with saps.

But all that is just so much pointyheaded wankery. Since the doctors seem to be at a loss as to what's wrong with me (the current wisdom is to give it a month to see if things clear up or if a tumor et. al. grows to diagnosable size), owing to the "goddamnit, what-now" factor currently in play regarding my health (this week: pneumonia! next week: sinus infection! every week: mystery fluids emanating from parts inside whence they oughtn't!), I suggest that the proper name of my at this point ten week old illness is "Bohica." As in "Bend Over, Here It Comes Again." A beeg thanks to my father, Chainsaw Mick for the coinage. He's a quality chap even if he fails to see the malicious genius of Dale Earnhardt, Jr.'s driving style in favor of Jeff Gordon's clean-race skills.

Anyway, just so you know. Not that you wanted to know, but I figured I had to explain my very light posting somehow. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

[wik] GeekLethal is on to something with his random-media-player blogging. For some reason, my 111 CD changer fixates on two songs on Josh Rouse's album "Dressed Up Like Nebraska" even when I move the disc to a new location. Ditto track one of Iqbal Jogi & Company's "The Passion of Pakistan," a caterwauly festival of unearthly Dervish sounds that in small amounts add spice to a music mix but if heard too frequently grow, shall we say, extraordinarily tiresome. What the heck?

[alsø wik] Bitch, bitch, bitch. How does Gary Farber keep it together?

DATELINE: WOODY CREEK, CO., 20 FEB 05

Surrounded by a retinue of giant lizards, fever-dreams, and hulking relics from his checkered past, Hunter S. Thompson, writer and professional drug voyager, revealed today his latest work of what he long ago dubbed "shotgun art.". His latest piece consists of his dead body, decorated by a single bullet hole to the head and whatever parts of his insides were carried with the bullet to the outside. It is currently believed that this art was self-inflicted.

He will be missed.

[wik] Depending on how you look at it, Hunter Thompson descended into schtick about the time Reagan re-upped for his second tour of duty, or he never transcended it in the first place. If there is anybody in the world who did not see this coming - at least in retrospect - then that person has rocks for brains. Thompson was one of the few artists who successfully parlayed their own self-destruction into a vital part of their own output. Rimbaud, Wilde, and Burroughs spring to mind, and even if you throw in the half-competent drug addled "transgressions" of Jim Morrison, all the names I just mentioned are all classifiable as poets (Morrison technically so, I guess). Thompson is one of the few "straight" writers - in the sense that he was considered a reporter and a writer of non- (or at least quasi-non-) fiction - to equal these exponents of the Grand Romantic Poetic Tradition (what with the drugs, garretts, starvation, ridiculous situations &c &c &c) in the quality of both his art and life. That he lived so long is fairly surprising.

His best work, like Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail manage through their wildness to scrape away at inner truths that more sobersided analyses could not possibly hope to touch. But the same distance that separates the Fear and Loathing books from later hackery like The Great Shark Hunt or Better Than Sex is the same distance that separates Beggar's Banquet from Black and Blue. The most dangerous thing in the world for an artist who relies on actual personal peril and chaos to fuel their creative process is to figure out how to bottle it without the hangover. Thompson certainly did this. Rather than doing as Christopher Lemann-Haupt feared and "laps[ing] into good taste," he lapsed into routine: drink Wild Turkey => take some pills => stay up late => wait for THE FEAR to come => shoot something with a high powered rifle, narrowly missing friend/spouse/dog => pass out at typewriter and wait for dawn. Once you can put this routine on your dayrunner, it's no longer creation. It's wanton self-destruction.

Moreover... suicide? Although my first instinct is to excoriate him for the cravenness that suicide usually suggets, I'm not so sure that's the right thing to do here. By rights, Thompson should have been dead a hundred thousand times over already if even a tiny fraction of his self-described exploits are true. If he hadn't already ended up as a long red streak on a highway somewhere intermingled with broken pieces of a Vincent Black Shadow and reeking of whiskey, then nothing was going to kill him. Thompson's way was to paint himself into a corner then bolt like a rabid wolverine. I guess this time his own indestructibility offered him only one way out.

Hunter S. Thomson was 67 years old. Now he is just a sack of meat.

Hunter S. Thompson died yesterday of a bullet through the head. Gonzo journalism is dead, because nobody, nobody did it like Hunter. It's a damn shame, if for no other reason than that I would have loved to play shotgun golf.

We at the ministry spend an untowardly generous portion of our valuable time monitoring the endless schemes launched by our would-be robot overlords against all the members of humankind. This task requires a steely determination and a relentlessly skeptical eye for deception, though for all that we are still way more centered and mellow than the folks at LGF.

Nevertheless, once in a great while a robot story emanates from our LED panels which catches us off guard. Such is the case with this otherwise terrifying story in the Boston Phoenix on the Burlington, Vermont company iRobot. iRobot are among the few at the very vanguard of the robot wars - albeit on the other side - but evidence is mounting that their treason against mankind is unwitting, even well-intended.

Apart from horrifying information about the first stages in mankind's eventual subjugation to machine, the story contains one unexpectedly touching moment. In addition to the Roomba maid-robots which will surely some day rise against us, iRobot also make robots which are used by the military for the task of defusing explosive devices. 129 such robots have come back from Iraq in tiny blackened pieces. Says iRobot CEO Colin Angle,

"Getting a robot back, blown up, is one of the more powerful experiences I’ve lived through. . . . Nothing could make it so clear that we have just saved lives. Somebody’s son is still alive. Some parent didn’t just get a call."

Hats off to iRobot.

The most delicious carnival on the web (however misnamed, and ironically so for our Christian readers, this being Lent and such), is back, this week hosted by Inside Allan's Mind. Mmmmm! Frito Pie!