bloated cows bob in fetid waters

I might do this if problems in the mid-east were a computer game:

• put US on total war footing, meaning institute draft and redirect tax cuts into military spending.
• stop fighting Taliban in Afghanistan: rather, leave country to them but line Pashtun tribal area border with troops, mines, whatever - no one crosses the border. Leave Taliban left in Afghanistan to criminal Afghan tribal elements to exterminate.
  
• withdraw support of Israel forcing them either into a peace agreement with Palestinians or into a war to solve issue once and for all; recognise Saudi Arabia as a more important ally than Israel - at least for immediate official purposes.
• since preceding would lead to political upheaval in America must stage military coup to secure the country. That should help with the draft I bet. At same time take over Fox broadcasting and bring back Arrested Development - good show.
  
• get rid of Maliki, assassinate Sadr, and back a Sunni strongman in take over of Iraq under a brutal but fair regime of martial law - brutal but fair, I said. It's a computer game! I can do whatever I want. Divide country into ethnic regions. Give Kurds Kirkuk and threaten Turkey with annihilation if they make a fuss.
• use an infantry division to annex a nice northern part of Iran with help of Kurds thus destabilizing Iranian Shia leadership; with Sunni's on my side and Israel acquiescing I can deal with resulting dynamics. Will need at least three carrier groups in Persian Gulf. Might want to drop a small nuke in some deserted part of Iran just to focus their attention.
• use some kind of weather machine to ruin grape harvest in France thus plunging country into absolute despair leading to collapse of European Union and hopefully United Nations along with it.
  
• dissolve NATO and form new alliance - Transoceanic Alliance 'tween Germany, England, North America, Japan and Australia. This will force Russia and China into an alliance and they will feel compelled to come to the aid of Iran.
  
• blockade Iran and cut off trade with China. Things will probably start to get ugly then.
• exit computer game and pick up email.
  

Price of freedom, she said

There was much to recommend to our muses, such as they are, maundering wretches, meddling in trivial nuances and gestures and all the trite tokens of our ways [this sentence, a perfect rendering of the style of Burton, or possibly Hooker - ? - means I believe nothing but intends - distends as well, for the belly is full, portending a likely end state towards which our means contend - this nothingness with such grace and measured charm that what it doesn't mean means everything towards service of that intention] [this sentence too seems to both lack and assume a general organizing principle not fraught by a wayward dalliance with reason] [?] these last several days for the uses of sad [nee antic] commentary.

Not least of which was the Chinese painting a mountain green. A barren mountain, scarred by some industrial use - does it matter which? - baubles, secreted in cereal boxes or happy meals, waiting to be plucked by greedy fat fingers, toyed with for a few brief seconds of this eternal march, and then tossed into yawning garbage bins - a barren mountain painted green. One imagines to mitigate said barrenness with as little care for integrity as possible. Truth is, and the truth is both funny and telling here, no one, not citizen or government official, no one in the sleepy, blighted burg that sits at the foot of the painted mountain knows why the mountain was
painted - don't know and are loath to offer a guess, for fear no doubt of offending whatever august force brought its serpentine wit to bear on what one must assume was the festering barren mountain problem. Interesting times they will be indeed when this Kafka like behemoth of a nation goose-steps [does the Chinese military goose-step? most sincere apologies if not - in my dreams I see them as committed goose-steppers] its way to center left stage of these world affairs and breaths down the neck of that venerable but now one fears fading star, Uncle Sam.

Most important news of the week though was discovery of Roman coin that ostensibly shows that Cleopatra was in fact it seems not the beauty myth has proclaimed her to be. Now, I try to honour truth and its stolid but somewhat sad attendant reality whenever time and circumstances allow for it - but I'll be damned if I'm gonna let any truth mongering wise ass take from me the belief that Cleo was with most glorious certainty the salacious, opium sucking sylph shown in all her slithering, nubile beauty in HBO's esteemed series 'Rome'.

I will serve gladly the causes of reason and knowledge and the various truths they fabricate from out of our most fallen earth - but don't ask this of me. The price is too dear.

gravedigging and the dynamics of an educated workforce

Reading about EFPs in Iraq - explosively formed projectiles - and how they can rip through an Abrams tank and I was wondering how long before this expertise is exported and this lethal modification by the enemy starts showing up elsewhere, namely Israel, which has perfected use of tanks in your whoreson urban asymmetrical war zone - I wonder how or if the math has changed and if we see here the worm progressing through the belly of the King. Or -

Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!

Well, a little ripe perhaps. The Pentagon blames Iran for this modification and immediately people see Bush setting stage for the Persian Gambit - but I don't see this: to me it's just more proof that they plan no such thing: the real use of the rhetoric is to raise the stakes of failure in Iraq, which is assumed and expected, in order to deepen the blame they intend to heap on hapless Democrats. They expect things to fall apart and for Iran to take over and the right wing will hold the left wing responsible for it.

It's sickening and absurd - which was the point of the Gravedigger scene, no? [you could argue it was simply a case of Shakey not liking lawyers very much - true, but that wouldn't necessarily change the intent of the conceit - yes, but...]

But, hey, the Dixie Chicks won album of the year last night at Grammys - so chalk up a victory for liberals there, right? Democrats absolutely dominate the battle space of meaningless award shows highlighting the achievements of vacuous, rich, pretty people. Suck on that Dick Cheney!
Hooah.

expect the worst

There's something of a rush on in America to reform the country's ailing health care system - talk of helping the poor and the forty million uninsured and the many millions more insufficiently insured and of course most importantly relieving stressed businesses that can't afford the rising cost of employee benefits - all very laudable I'm sure and also conveniently a perfect prop for the aspiring leader to hang his or her heart on in a show of sympathy before the cameras and it's assumed the undifferentiated mass of creatures lurking behind.

As I said, no doubt laudable and I'm sure inimitably Christian, what with helping the poor and improving the bottom line - hell, if Christ were an American, and at this point I don't see how he can't be, I'm sure he'd have a health care plan so who am I to be sceptical, faithless good for nothing fop that I am [yes, fop I say, fallen humanist Elizabethan jackanapes! - get thee to an alehouse, whoring wassailer, mocker of all things holy!]

Still, I 'd like to make one point which no one seems to be making or even have noticed: Americans are fat, they have horrible diets, they are addicted to the constant consumption of quick and empty calories as long as those calories are sufficiently larded with various saccharides and lipides, they like to sit for many hours at a time on soft couches watching TV and playing video games, they abjure exercise with the lazy devotion of a fin de siecle French monarch - and they love a bargain. You're telling me that onto the bonfire of these vanities you want to throw the gasoline of cheap and readily available health care? If these people think they can easily fix or reverse or subdue or cover up or make themselves oblivious to whatever damage a non-stop diet of donuts and Dorritos consumed at the foot of their HDTV altars can do then they will most certainly pursue that damage to its logical conclusion and believe me the conclusion they pursueth unto will definitely not look like Angelina Jolie [that seems like a gratuitous mention of a Hollywood starlet, no? Something of a rhetorical letdown, only marginally germane as it were? Why not 'invading hordes of Chinese locusts swarming over the flaccid, cellulite ridden corpus of a fatigued giant'? Nice ring to that].

In a world where ultimately nothing good can happen the wise proconsul will expect the worst and punish his people accordingly.

look on my works ye mighty

CNN spent an hour of its evening telecast last night discussing, analyzing, picking over with vermin like acuity the death of Anna Nicole Smith, a fat, drug addled, possibly retarded ex-stripper who, not content to rest on those laurels, had managed to get some rich old guy to marry her thus making her putative heiress to a disputed fortune and consequent to that glory had now it seems stepped into eternity amidst the gaudy confines of a Floridian hotel suite under the ersatz glare of a gaudy Floridian sun. Led with a full hour on this - that I know of - displacing all other news.

I had thought when earlier in the week a female astronaut, in a delirium stoked by a love triangle with other accomplished, highly intelligent extra-terrestrial types and being so stoked had apparently driven all diapered up cross country with a plan to presumably turn said triangle into a mere vertex with aid of knife and steel pipe, when this paragon of excellence and achievement and hard work shuffled bedraggled and shamed into court [Florida again!] to be charged with attempted murder I had thought then that maybe America had finally turned down that dark road we've long expected and there was nothing left to be dispirited by regarding it.

Leave it to a now erstwhile everything erstwhile stripper slash erstwhile oil heiress to remind me of just how wrong I can be - as if anything else mattered. Despair indeed.

the drunken post-grad conversation

- unless one makes the assumption that Bush plans to bluster out of Iraq with the same reckless, blind, near ignorant faith with which he blustered in, then its hard to see the surge as something legitimate. The number of randomly precise stones that need to fall perfectly into place for that wall to ever get built defies augury.
- yes, yes, we defy augury. Was that Marlowe? He took a cold knife to the eye, drunken papist.
- not a papist. Definitely a drunk. But it wasn't Marlowe.
- well then maybe the administration is a hotbed of game theory enthusiasts. You know, there was that Spanish guy, Cortez I think, and he was conquering various peoples down in the Latin nethers, and he burned all his ships so his soldiers wouldn't consider killing him, you know, and running off home, thus leaving the goatee wearing brigands no choice but to fight. It was a totally reckless, wild scheme - but it worked! [beat] Well, worked for the Spanish fellows; if you were one of the poor, painted, maize eating bastards it didn't turn out to be one of your better days.
- Bush doesn't strike me as the type that would revel in the abstruse arcana of game theory. [beat] Now Rove....
- yes, he's a reveler, for sure. Cold, cunning, lying, manipulative bastard definitely has the gaming spirit.
- you see he propped Bush up in front of a bunch of hissing Dems the other day to act all humble and gracious and approachable and all that shit? Guy just loves playing games with those idiot liberals.
- a real pisser, ol' Turdblossom.

Happy Bus

I am now officially pissed off at those calling for withholding funds as a way to end war in Iraq. I have never heard one person promoting this idea move past the mere promotion of it and explain the details. Forget the dubious constitutionality of it - explain to me how it works? On the most basic practical level it causes chaos amongst the rank and file of the military - end of funding means end of legitimacy and why would any sane grunt put his life on the line for a reason that lacks legitimacy? End of funding quite simply means end of military presence and I have not heard of one person in his right mind who also isn't still having his shoes tied by his mother who thinks that's a good idea. But beyond the somewhat emotionally charged issue of troop morale, the short sightedness of the suggestion is absurd - you rescind funding and Iraq turns into a bloodbath: do you ignore the bloodbath or re-institute funding to quell it? Amidst the chaos the Kurds annex Kirkuk, separate from Iraq proper and Turkey, alarmed by this, enters Iraq: what do you do? Same scenario with Iran: you just let Iran take over? If Saudis decide that's unacceptable and a regional Sunni vs Shia war is threatened, what then? You start funding the war all over again? Call it a different war and fund that?

It's absurd. Calls for withdrawal of funding are simply idiotic and should be met with scorn - and yet they proliferate! Presidential candidates proudly proclaim their love for the notion while rabid acolytes cheer them on - but cheering for what? The promise that they won't have to feel bad anymore about themselves, their country, the world? Are they cheering for the promise of an eased conscience? Are they cheering for an end to the war or an end to an uncomfortable association with it? Idealists on both sides resent the thought of having to compromise their precious notions of how things should be, their identities are too tightly tied to particular modes of thought - which is why those railing against the surge sound just as unglued from reality as those rallying for it. Where is the rational and reasonable dialog that should be taking place? Is such a posture just not politically tenable anymore? Is the perceived hopelessness of it all driving people to extremes of denial?

Or is thoughtful reflection just simply at odds with the mass personality issues afflicting an affluent democracy? As free people in a free society we are burdened with the usually unconscious responsibility, imperative even if you like, of having to think well of ourselves and others in order to get along as it were - in effect it is almost necessary that we give ourselves credit when possibly in fact no credit is due.

In Russia there's a TV show called 'Happy Bus' that airs on a state controlled network and involves two rich and powerful men giving away money and gifts to poor Russians. One of these two men will succeed Putin which is why he has put them on TV in something of a gratuitous competition to see who the ignorant will find most appealing and therefore who is more apt to be the best dictator. Opponents of Putin will not be getting TV shows of their own. That is how democracy works in Russia and Russians don't seem to mind. One is tempted to be scornful of the charade and sure enough hackneyed representatives from legitimate democracies do from time to time step to a podium and spout off something that sounds outraged - but you know I'm thinking there's a lot of people out there riding Happy Buses and they ain't all Russian.

Give it a chance

I will say again that the only logical explanation for the Bush cabal's putative 'surge' is that they don't really expect it to happen and it is intended merely as a rhetorical fulcrum to shift blame over to soft shell Democrats and those irremediable Iraqis. If one was sitting on and ultimately responsible for a situation that was doomed and offered no pain free way of escape and you considered the domestic politics ravenously circling this dire situation as the only battle now worth winning - then indeed it's not improbable, if you were a cold cunning bastard, not improbable that you'd come up with an idea like the surge.

Of course they didn't actually come up with the idea, just borrowed it, assumed it - and then proceeded to substantially gut it, to a degree apparently so cavalier and ill-advised that the chicken hawk academic who did conceive the child has renounced the creature as a bastard foundling that he can no longer recognize as his own - which adds I think credibility to my thesis.

At this point the only people who seem to support the surge are the ones who, like its chief sponsors, do so out of political calculation - which, I should add, I don't necessarily fault them for: politics is the art of lying while pretending to do otherwise [that could describe all art] and only the naive will fail to see that sometimes these lies behave so much like the truth that it can be hard to tell the two apart. What strikes me about those still supporting the surge is not the relative verity of their declamations but rather the argument cobbled together to support such, an argument which essentially boils down to an almost pathetic plea of 'might as well give it a chance'. Even if the chief sponsors had an unblemished record of successes to reference in this war 'give it a chance' would still sound so hollow as to defy recommendation - and these guys don't have any successes to point to! It astounds. Indeed, astounds so much that again I look for the sleight of hand: they use such hollow justification because they know giving it a chance is never going to get the chance to be given, thereby denying critics the chance to ever prove that it didn't have a chance to begin with, ergo it did.

If the shit hits the fan in Iraq as badly as reason would seem to dictate it will this clever little lie of theirs has the potential to look something like a truth come that fateful shit fanning day - and often that's good enough when the war one really wants to win is political.