Remember when it was chic to accuse those of us not cheerleading America The Beautiful's Grand March To Liberate Iraq™ of treason? It seems that three years or so after the march to war got started, the debate is slowly, grindingly coming back into contact with reality. And it's not pretty.

The Poor Man Brings It On Home

Appreciate this. Understand that the people killing us in Iraq aren't motivated by Gore Vidal or inspired by Susan Sontag or organized by Michael Moore or in cahoots in any way with any of the right's celebrity piñatas - not literally, not metaphorically, not if you look at it in a certain way, not to any infinitesimal degree, not in any sense, not in any way at all. They do not lead a clandestine international conspiracy of Evil which has corrupted everything in every foreign country plus everything in America not owned by loyal Bush Republican apparatchiks; nor are they members of such a conspiracy; nor does a conspiracy remotely matching that description exist. To think otherwise is, literally and to a very great degree, insanity. It is insane.

And if you really want to help the American war effort, you can join the fucking armed forces and go to Iraq like thousands of others have, and then you can do the best job you can to show them that Americans care about them and want, above all else, for all of our futures to be better and more peaceful than the past, and get paid shit. You will then be my personal hero, really, and I hope you don't get killed or maimed or see or do something that makes you hate everything for the rest of your life, which is a very real possibility. If you, like me, are too much of a coward to risk your life and health on a mission like that, then you can donate to charities which help soldiers (although it is worth looking into where and what kind of help is needed – some places don’t need it as much as others). But the easiest thing you can do is influence the politicians who create the policies – and in some cases the military strategies - which are being carried out in Iraq, but to do this in a useful way you first have to make some contact with reality. Reality is that the situation in Iraq is horrible, the outlook for any lasting peace is grim, and that this has nothing to do with a nebulous, malignant, all-powerful “Left”, and everything to do with the people in power who make bad and stupid policies. You can pull your head out of your ass, stop dreaming up stupid conspiracy theories about how everyone around the world you don’t like is working together to destroy Freedom, and tell them that they need to do a better job. And if they won’t do a better job, the solution is not to get upset at people who aren’t waving their pom-poms or denouncing Saddam single-mindedly enough for you, it is to fire the fuck-ups so we can maybe have some chance at salvaging something from this fiasco.

That's the fucking message. Got it? Good. Now keep it.

I have to admit that one of the reasons I like New York is that I feel like I have a solid handle on how things work between boys and girls in this town. It's home court, where I did nearly all my sexual maturation. I remember being struck when I moved to SF at how confusing things were. It wasn't even that, in the end, I was any less likely to wind up in bed with someone cute. I don't have a good explanation for it, other than to say that I always felt a bit on the defensive in California, whereas being back in the five boros, I feel like I'm in my element.

All of which is neither here nor there. I've been chaste since before we got on the road this summer, and that remains unchanged. But the way things are going, not for too much longer. Mainly I say that because it's clear that on a sub-conscious level (e.g. on a plane not of my choosing) I'm in the hunt. On a conscious level I'm trying a different angle, trying to be intentional about everything, trying to be an initiator with the highest of standards rather than just another 20-something man-slut.

Yes. Judging by the kind of itch I have, someone is going to get it good. My real hope is that all this confidence and adventurism I feel will lead me to something that outlasts the ephemeral. We'll see how it plays out. I think it's going to be fun, no matter what.

FYI -- comments should be working again. This is a half-measure until I can get things cooking with Drupal.

Transportation Alternatives' Parking Spot Squat:

Very cool, not to mention edgy for TA. They're trying to showcase the fact that on-street parking can be put to all sorts of other uses.

Frank made the giant cut-out car. Go Frank!

Transportation Alternatives' Parking Spot Squat:

Very cool, not to mention edgy for TA. They're trying to showcase the fact that on-street parking can be put to all sorts of other uses.

Frank made the giant cut-out car. Go Frank!

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

Quoth Eminem: "This is Bin Laden; look at him noddin'."

This kind of gulag/interrogation thing won't effectively combat network terrorism. It didn't work for the Soviets in the '80s and it won't work for us now. It will, however, serve to further radicalize Muslims against the US. Oh yeah, and it's deeply morally wrong.

There's a great deal of angst in Democratic circles about the party's weakness on national security. But the boys in the Senate are showing signs of chutzpah.

Howdy, Gansta! Here's your script if you have the balls to read it:

"President Bush has played directly into the hands of the terrorists. He let them escape from Tora Bora. He's financed the worlds largest training camp in Iraq at with 1000s of American lives and hundreds of billions of American dollars. He's given them propaganda recruitment gold at Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo and now at in former Soviet Gulags in Eastern Europe.

What's worse, in spite of all the death, all the torture and all the terror alerts, United States citizens are no safer today than they were on September 11th, 2001. In fact, as unsettling as it is to say, it looks like we're less safe. Those who wish us harm are more numerous, more experienced and more organized, while our military is degraded from a foolish and unnecessary war and our emergency response capabilities are still clearly unable to cope with major catastrophe.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for a different approach..."

The proscriptive plan, politically speaking, can be almost anything. There are good ideas out there from the real heads, but nobody is going to be able to enact shit unless prominant national Democrats have the gall to call out the fact that by any objective measure Bush is losing his self-declared war on terror.

Redcross Fundraiser #3 - Thursday November 3rd!

My man the Tressler has been organizing red cross fundraisers off and on for a bit; he's getting more structured about it now, which is cool. This creates an interesting social-capital-building space. It's on the same night as Drinkin' Liberally, so I'll be there around 11 or 12, but I'll be showing. You should think about coming too.

I know my comments are broken. I'm going to switch things up soon. Until then, I will dictatorially control the dialogue here, m'kay?

Quotes from HST in late 1969:

I've been reading "Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist," which is Hunter S. Thompson's collected correspondence from 1968 - 78. Here are some choice bits I came across last night that seemed to echo with contemporary relevance:

On The New Journalism:

But the whole concept of "new journalism" is bogus -- unless we admit that honesty in a journalist is something new. The old, Hearst-style journalists had a privileged relationship with power -- and they paid fr that privilege by keeping a lot of warts and chancres off the public record. This tradition is still strong, especially with big-city newspapers, TV news departments and national newsmagazines...

So the "new journalism" is nothing more than a repudiation of the whole concept of privileged communication between newsmen and their sources... Nixon learned this lesson in 1960 and '62. This year he treated the press like a bunch of scorpions, playing "influential" reporters off against each other and awarding private interviews like gold stars for good behavior. I spent 10 days following him around New Hampshire and by the time I was finally granted an audience I felt almost lucky. This feeling passed very quickly, however, and now -- on the basis of what I wrote -- I have no illusions about getting a job as a White House correspondent. For the same reasons, I'll have a jaundiced view of any correspondent who seems "close to Nixon."

On The First Freak Power Campaign

Hunter and his Aspen-based cohort of anti-development refugees from the coastal cities launched a spur of the moment takeover bid, and came within a few votes of installing a 29-year-old hippie lawyer and motorcycle racer as mayor. This near victory set the stage for Hunter's own campaign for Sheriff.

The idea was to first mobilize our hidden vote -- Freak Power -- and then, using that as a power base, go after the small but very vocal "liberal vote." I was convinced that we could win by putting these two blocks together... and as it turned out I was right: That combination would have won by at least 100 votes out of 1,200 -- but it never occurred to me that most of the local "liberals" would back off at the last moment, leaving us with what amounted, in the end, to an "under-30 vote" and a hundred or so defectors from the old, failed-liberal camp who said, "Fuck it, let's run flat out this time..."

...

Electoral politics is such a foul and rotten game that only a fool would play it except to win and move on to something better.

Quotes from HST in late 1969:

I've been reading "Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist," which is Hunter S. Thompson's collected correspondence from 1968 - 78. Here are some choice bits I came across last night that seemed to echo with contemporary relevance:

On The New Journalism:

But the whole concept of "new journalism" is bogus -- unless we admit that honesty in a journalist is something new. The old, Hearst-style journalists had a privileged relationship with power -- and they paid fr that privilege by keeping a lot of warts and chancres off the public record. This tradition is still strong, especially with big-city newspapers, TV news departments and national newsmagazines...

So the "new journalism" is nothing more than a repudiation of the whole concept of privileged communication between newsmen and their sources... Nixon learned this lesson in 1960 and '62. This year he treated the press like a bunch of scorpions, playing "influential" reporters off against each other and awarding private interviews like gold stars for good behavior. I spent 10 days following him around New Hampshire and by the time I was finally granted an audience I felt almost lucky. This feeling passed very quickly, however, and now -- on the basis of what I wrote -- I have no illusions about getting a job as a White House correspondent. For the same reasons, I'll have a jaundiced view of any correspondent who seems "close to Nixon."

On The First Freak Power Campaign

Hunter and his Aspen-based cohort of anti-development refugees from the coastal cities launched a spur of the moment takeover bid, and came within a few votes of installing a 29-year-old hippie lawyer and motorcycle racer as mayor. This near victory set the stage for Hunter's own campaign for Sheriff.

The idea was to first mobilize our hidden vote -- Freak Power -- and then, using that as a power base, go after the small but very vocal "liberal vote." I was convinced that we could win by putting these two blocks together... and as it turned out I was right: That combination would have won by at least 100 votes out of 1,200 -- but it never occurred to me that most of the local "liberals" would back off at the last moment, leaving us with what amounted, in the end, to an "under-30 vote" and a hundred or so defectors from the old, failed-liberal camp who said, "Fuck it, let's run flat out this time..."

...

Electoral politics is such a foul and rotten game that only a fool would play it except to win and move on to something better.