Limmy.com : Xylophone

This is much fun. Click around. Brits; hillarious what happens to a culture after they get over their imperial apex. I look forward to being a salty old man in post-imperial USA.

In light of the death of Ronald Reagan, I bought HST's Generation of Swine -- which turns out to be mostly a collection of his columns in the SF Examiner -- to get a feel for the era. I spent a lot of my early days on a commune, traveling like a gypsy, going to hippy elementary school, sequestered for some summers on a farm in Iowa, and I wasn't really politically conscious during the Reagan era, except to know that my mom didn't fancy him too much. I picked up enough backwash on my own during the tenure of Bush the elder to realize Dutch was probably not my cup of tea, but Hunter really brings the heat:

The legacy of Ronald Reagan will be different from those of the other three... Richard Nixon was a crook, Gerald Ford was a shameless fixer and Jimmy Carter was an awesome bungler who gave once-proud political values like "decency" and "honesty" a bad name.

But these things are small compared to the horrible stains and half-blotted failures that Ronald Reagan is going to leave on the lives and memories of this sad generation of the 1980s that he once presumed to lead and inspire, while that the same tiem telling a reporter from People magazine, "This generation may well be the one that sees the end of the world."

...

Reagan's children must be proud of him. With AIDS and acid rain, there is not much left in the way of life and love and possibilities for these shortchanged children of the '80s. In addition to the huge and terribly crippling national debt, and a shocking realization that your country has slipped to the status of a second-rate power, and that five American dollars will barely buy a cup of coffee in Tokyo, these poor buggers are being flogged every day of their lives with the knowledge that sex is death and rain kills fish and any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool.

-- H.S.T June 22, 1987

Earlier in the book he noted that white males aged 18-30 voted for Reagan by a 71% margin in 1984. Given that's the generation in power right now (white males aged 38 - 50) it's not terribly surprising that the whitewash of history has come on so strong. Still; a shame that people can't admit they were wrong.

freedom.mov

Oh man.

I'm a supporter of Chris Allbritton and his adventures in Iraq. I gave him money and I read his site. Here's his latest: Car bombings and other musings

So here’s my honest question: Why do you think the media are not telling you the truth out of Iraq? What do you think the truth is? Why do you believe that the truth is what you think it is? And who is the media to you?

Something to consider: there's an important and growing difference between the efforts of individual journalists and the national narrative which is the collective product of the media. Chris sites a good example of journalism from the WaPo, and then wonders if it's television that's runing the reputation of reportage in general. He's mostly right.

What most people end up exposed to is some stray bit of story from some media combine, a single pulled quote from a 700 word story mixed in with some sensational footage butted up against the latest word from the spin room over in the West Wing. This mediated melange, our AVID-enabled later-day chorus, is largely responsible for the public's loss of faith.

This loss is near total for those who turn the corner. Between 2000 and 2004 I went from clicking through to cnn.com to nytimes.com to dailykos.com and never looked back. And why not? For the most part, the news is boring and predictable. It is flaccidly written and painfully devoid of anything but the most jaded conclusions; often lacking even those.

Journalists, men and women like Chris, are coming around to this fact en masse, and the sense of frustration is palpable in the air. "Why don't they trust us?" ask a mostly honest, mostly hard-working group of reporters. The answer is a collection of factors. As I call it:

• The best and brightest among you seem to be more concerned with their personal career arc than getting the story right
• The contemporary voice of journalism is often insulting to an intelligent audience
• The talking heads who represent your most public face are largely a collection of cowards and stooges
• Real journalists have done very little to counteract the corrosive effects of lowest-common-denominator TV infotainment; no one has taken a stand

Serious Journalists beware: you now have millions of fairly smart people running around America who are more of less convinced that they know better and are more courageous than you. They believe this because they never swallowed Bush's war pill, because they turned away in disgust at the moral masturbation which gushed forth after 9/11, because the media assassination of Howard Dean was plainly just that (whether he walked into it or not). Most simply, it is because they've been saying things for quite a while that you are only now coming around to report.

Of course "they" in this sense aren't often bright enough to realize that there are plenty of "you" who were dissenters from the media consensus. However, it's easier to blame your problems on an amorphous mass of people. The stupid left blames the Media just like the stupid right blames Islam. It's comforting in a darkly human way.

But no matter how unfair this all may seem, the problem still exists, and at it's heart the problem is very real. Journalists by in large do not (in my limited personal experience) seem to understand very much, or if they do they take great pains to obscure this understanding. It reminds me of a young girl in high school who pretends to be ditzy so as not to intimidate the boys, only in this case the boys are bent of doing some very plainly terrible things, and she's going along because... well that's the rub then, isn't it?

Tens of thousands of people are dead, our international credibility squandered, billions of dollars wasted, the 21st Century off to a very shitty start, and it can be said with some reason that all this is because nobody in a position of real public authority took a stand against the Juggernaut Media Consensus the Bush Gang managed to conjure out of the ashes of Ground Zero. A lot of us take that kind of personally, and it's a tough rep to beat in hindsight: not standing up to what they did. Ask John Kerry about it if you're ever hanging out.

Chris is doing quite a lot to remedy the issue for himself by taking control of his own voice and his own publishing. For the rest of the circus, there's a split coming between the people who want to make money and entertain Americans who fancy themselves "informed" and those who have a passion for truth and storytelling.

And unfortunately, I don't see reunification coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Ranting demogaugery is and always has been profitable. The question is what the other side can do to regain the trust of their readers. It begins will telling them things they didn't know before, and it's going to take a while.

Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice

Dave Weiner is obviously a smart guy and a visionary. It's also clear that he's a dick. It's too bad that those two traits coincide so often.

And so plans are made and a new season swings into action. The thrill of adventure, of peril, of a worthy adversary. We're stepping up to the next level. I feel that the adventure is back.

It's a day for pictures. First something I came up with while trying to sum up how I feel lately about the war in Iraq:

(click for 4mb printable pdf)

And then I saw this on trampy trampy wonkette (I like foulmouthed empowered women). The dudes who run the world, I guess.

Tomorrow I'm off to Colorado for the weekend to plot the next big move with MfA. Should be fun and I get to fly in a G4 again.

I'm sick of doubt, of being downtrodden, of being self-oppressed. There's enough fucking external oppression out and about these days man, it just won't do to have it coming from within as well. This cop in the head has got to go.

I used to be a more free person, more exhuberent and more honest in the sense of being unguarded and without so much calculation. I recall all the personal progress I made throughout my time in school and I think maybe I should take up yoga again, return to the life of an artist. Perhaps a return to graduate school, or some wild international program.

But I also feel that a lot of what I've lost has to do with an end to innocence, and grad school is a cop out on that tip. Innocence, optimism, maturity, growth, cynicism, pessimism... that shouldn't be a one-way transition. There's been a lot of heartbreak in the past year, I know. A lot of sorrow, and I sort of let it get to me. Lonely nights absolutely crammed with work and worry wear down ones spirit, and without question I been depleted.

Yet I can't cotton to retreat. Not just because it feels like failure. I really don't believe there is any going back. A truly lucky person is gifted to return in triumph with new eyes, but it's foolish to try getting anywhere in reverse.

And so it's time to make a move forward. This situation isn't working out. Something's got to give, and it's unlikely to be my material circumstances. My mindset has got to change. Wild bohemain values, man. Hew to the fucking ethos! Rediscover your love for humanity, for the beauty in souls, for all the tragi-comic ideosyncratic magic of lived experience. This is life; and you do no good by failing to enjoy the world. Be in love wity yr life, reclaim the dignitiy of yr own experience, the most important thing is to stop struggling.

So this is the end of my subterranian life, my homesick blues. No more longing for the past no more. Indeed, it's high time I was a little more bold, a bit more of an explorer.

Glaciers break slowly. Something shocks the system. Fissures spread in the facade, and deep beneath things begin to stir.

Big bike ride yesterday, bounding up to the top of twin peaks. The ocean was clear and the heavy wind coming over the top of the hill was enough to lean into; trust fall with mother earth. Rambled through the city, which is charged with a couple of conferences, some peace marches, and various gatherings of the far out. All that and the normal hustle of a Saturday. Hit the bank, then the Zeitgeist for a beer and a garden burger and calling my mom, then home.

And then out again. Bowling organized by my friend Zephyr and attended by DeanSpace colleagues and other allies in town for the Planetworks conference. Bowling is fun. Then up a hill to a woman named Abigail's house, a friend of Z's, and conversations about free will and public art and the new philosophy and of course politics. It's good. I don't get to talk about free will all that often, and it's something I like to do. Mmm... intellectual stimulation.

Speaking of stimulation, the balmy weather does make the blood run. I'm prowling, and it's getting to be annoying. It's not like a conscious thing I go and do, but rather some mood that just seems to settle over me, where I can't seem to have any interaction with anyone female without feeling an over/under-tone of sexual tension.

This is annoying to me because the desire to fuck obstructs my ability to interact with women as fellow human beings. This is largely a flaw in my own psychology, I think, because there are clearly people out there in the world who have greater libidinous appetites than I do who still manage to move through life without feeling similarly blocked. I think what it boils down to is that somewhere in me I'm uncomfortable with my own desires, and so when these things come up it throws me off balance.

Intellectually, I don't see any reason for my being uncomfortable. Yet there it is. More estrangement from self.

I've had two very odly sexy dreams the past two nights. Friday night's also had strange racial overtones. I dreamt that I was in a grocery store in NYC, picking up my basket off the ground I bumped into a voluptuous half-black pregnant woman, and after speaking a few words she asked me how old I was. I answered 25 and she said, "good, then I can take you home." On the way back to her house, we (or rather she) got razzed by some black men in an SUV. I don't recall if there was any actual sex in the dream, but there was the very clear intent, and a definite feeling of arousal. It was all tied up in some larget bohemian storyline about politics and the occult, I think.

Last night I dreamt -- again as part of some larger storyline that I can't really recall -- that I was making prank phone calls to the police, reporting non-existant bad drivers from a payphone. I stepped out and ran into Caryn Johnson, who was one of my original highschool crushes. There was a similar spark as we kind of both circled back to say high, to catch up, and in the dream I'm standing there with my hands on this woman's hips, getting closer and closer, and then these two kids bust into the picture, a younger boy and and older girl. They're not hers, but somehow she's responsible for them. After that I don't really remember.

So that's kind of odd... two not-really-erotic dreams (but with titlating sexual content) both involving random encounters and children. What would Freud say?

I got some decent pushback on my GOP Team Leader comment from the other day. Rather than just answer in the comments, I'll take the opportunity to go through the process here on the front page.

Not only do I think the Iraqi Body Count (IBC) is too high, it does not support your use of it. For example, when Iraqis or foreign terrorists blow up the ICRC building, the UN building, and other “soft” targets, those deaths go into the IBC database.

Valid, and I thought of that while I was writing it. However, it would seem unlikely to me that more than 2/3 of the Iraqi civilian casualties have been caused by insurgents. Likewise, there are few other force on which one can attribute collateral damage in Afghanistan for.

I personally don’t find it unbelievable that “The war on terror has taken more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Great, we agree! Moving on.

It is completely dishonest to say that “$200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up”. Unless, of course, you are making the argument that despite spending “$200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up” that fewer fatalities (lower fatality rate) have resulted in both countries.

You're making what is called a counter-factual argument, saying that the consequences of not taking an action would have been worse than taking said action after the action has been taken. This is not a way to engage in rational discourse. It is also the same illogic that Bush uses, for instance, to justify his massive tax cuts: "things may be bad, but they would have been much worse if I hadn't done this."

You presuppose of binary view of possibilities, in this case, "war or nothing." This was a big part of how the pro-war faction succeeded. They were able to frame the debate as war vs doing nothing at all, which of course is a completely ridiculous way to look at things.

The real rub with counter-factual arguments is, of course, that there's no way to know what would have happened if alternative courses of action had been taken because the matter is already settled. They're useful in science because you can go back and re-do an experiment, a luxury we don't have in the world of statecraft.

Beyond this, your argument is further flawed in that you equate any innocent lives lost through US non-intervention to innocent lives we directly bring to an end. This is not rational either, unless you want to say that we're responsible for every unjust life lost world-wide in the same way that we're responsible for blowing up a wedding party by mistake.

WWII killed more “innocent civilians” than the attack on Pearl Harbor. Especially in Europe, whose people had nothing to do with the attack on Hawaii (not even a state at the time).

And so the inevitable comparison to "the good war" comes out. This is pure jingoistic masturbation. Comparing the non-threat of Iraq with the very real threat of the Axis powers is bullshit. Don't take my word for it. Ask a vet about it sometime.

I guess, by that logic, we should have just rounded up 3,000 or less Afghani and Iraqi civilians, murdered them, and called it even? Is that the point?

No, but it would seem that's somewhere near the point the GOP is making. The point I'm making, Tim with no email address or home page, is that the notion that the GOP really thinks it's "Unbelievable" that George Soros would get up and say things like this in public is a pretty unbelievable in and of itself.

Further, it would seem to me that the GOP refuses to admit (finds "unbelievable") that there are strong moral arguments against what we are doing right now in Iraq and around the world. It would seem that when such an argument is made the GOP, rather than making any attempt to actually engage in the work of undertanding and justifying what is going on, seeks to marginalize that moral position in any way it can. My point is that I think the GOP is acting in an immoral and untruthful fashion. My point (which was there all along) is this:

This GOP apparatus is an enemy of truth, an enemy of logic, an enemy of compassion and rational thought. They’ve got to fucking go, and decent Republicans are going to realize this sooner or later. You cannot run a good political party on lies, greed racism and religious fervor. (I just added greed, forgot it before)

If, on the other hand, what you're trying to draw out of me is what I would consider to be a better response to September 11th, you might want to read Why War is Not the Answer or Thoughts on an Anti-War Movement, both of which I wrote in the fall/winter of 2002. I haven't given a lot of thought to the matter lately because, well, a course of action has already been taken and I'm more concerned with what is going on than what might have been.