Straight Up |: October 2006 Archives

Now for a change of pace: "Notre Dame de Video," a leetle sumzeeng I made for the arts fest TROIS SOIRS PARMI long ago in très gai Paris. Thought you might get a tsk-tsk out of a few video stills.

NDdV ran on a bill with Jochen Gerz's very sober conceptual piece, "La Salle et sa représentation," on March 16, 1972. Location: 19 Quai Bourbon on Ile Saint-Louis, a stone's throw from the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris on Ile de la Cité. Thus the title of the video.

Other artists in the festival, besides Jochen Gerz and me, were Bernard Heidsieck and Françoise Janicot (the organizers); Paul-Armand Gette, Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, Jan Nordahl and Pedro Morais.

I played the video on a 2-inch monitor. It sat shoulder high on a pedestal in the middle of a room as vast as a Louvre gallery. Word buzzed through the crowd. ("Yum, that's quoit noice!") In fact, the best thing about NDdV was the Peeping Tom effect.

More wisdom from le maître Doctorow:

Human rights is a term of great currency in our political language. When introduced, it tended to refer to a person's right to speak freely or to hold any political opinion of his choosing or to be tried swiftly and under due process of law in the event he was accused of a crime -- in general, to any of the collective rights of Americans under the Constitution. But under pressure of worldwide practices, the term has taken on a humbler meaning. Now human rights refers to standards of treatment that you hope to expect of your oppressor after he has taken all your rights away.

Two news reports. One about a former Chilean dictator. One about our Bullshitter-in-Chief. Note the similarities. This from Reuters regarding Augusto Pinochet's arrest for torture, murder and kidnapping early in his regime and this from the BBC regarding the bullshitter's denial that the U.S. uses torture.

Is it possible we'll read one day about the arrest of a former U.S. president on the same sort of charges? (Pinochet is being held "for 36 cases of kidnapping, one of homicide and for 23 cases of torture" committed at a detention center run by his secret police.)

To ask the question implies an answer -- and why, despite claims to the contrary (such as "saving American lives"), the bullshitter's Republican enablers rammed through the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Deadline for Iraq? Rummy Boy says we should "just back off" and "relax." The Bullshitter-in-Chief holds his own press conference, then invites a few friendly journalists into the back room -- excuse me -- the Oval Office, and says, "If we leave, they will follow us here." (Subscription required.)

What struck one of the invited -- Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Journal's editorial page -- was how different the bullshitter's press conference was from his private conversation. In public the topic was Iraq. In the Oval Office it was America. But if you read Henninger's rightly named Wonder Land column, it all sounds like the same bullshit. As Lenny Bruce once said, "Yada, yada. Yada, yada, yada, warden!"

Meanwhile, ever on the lookout to probe deeply, Henninger noticed:

The burden of war ... has not sapped Mr. Bush physically. ... The hair's gone gray, but there is little sign of fatigue in his face or demeanor. I asked how he stays normal: "Prayer and exercise."

Or as Jon Stewart has said, "Worry no more!"

Postscript: A friend writes: "I am not for 'cutting and running.' How about just walking out backwards?"

When you think of E.L. Doctorow, it's his fiction that comes to mind -- all those novels, "Ragtime" most famously, but also "The Book of Daniel," "Welcome to Hard Times," his latest "The March," and so on. But wait a minute! The guy's a terrific essayist.

I've been reading "Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution," an out-of-print collection of his selected essays you can pick up for a buck, which Mugs McGuinness was kind enough to send me. Here's a morsel from one of them -- it's called "The Character of Presidents" -- and it tastes delish:

You and I can lie about our actions and misrepresent the actions of others; we can piously pretend to principles we don't believe in; we can whine and blame others for the wrong that we do. We can think only of ourselves and our own and be brutally indifferent to the needs of everyone else. We can manipulate people, call them names, con them and rob them blind. Our virtuosity is inexhaustible, as would be expected of a race of Original Sinners, and without doubt we will all have our Maker to answer to. But as to a calculus of damage done, the devastation left behind, the person who holds the most powerful political office in the world and does these things and acts in these ways is multiplied in his moral failure to a number beyond the imagining of the rest of us.

Remember that when the Bullshitter-in-Chief's enablers are up for election on November 7.

Given the name of this blog, my staff of thousands dared me:

Nah, that's not me. That's rock climber extraordinaire Chris Mac, a k a Chris McNamara, snowboarding in midair over Lover's Leap (a climb "Rated X") above Lake Tahoe, California. Photo © David Safanda, via Summit Journal, an adventure and exploration magazine on the Web that describes itself as "environmentally responsible." It "weighs 0 grams, pollutes 0 waters, fills 0 landfills, causes 0 deforestation, disturbs 0 wildlife and relies on 0 fossil fuels for dissemination ... leaving no trace."

Postscript: From a friend: "Great photo of the American electorate in flight."

Now for the latest addition to the Ministry of Truth's dictionary of Newspeak, offered on camera by the Bullshitter-in-Chief: "We've never been stay the course. ..."

For the record, note the difference between a skeptical story of the uncourse told with a smile, "Bush's New Tack Steers Clear of 'Stay the Course,'" and a credulous story told with a straight face, "Bush Abandons Phrase 'Stay the Course' on Iraq."

The first, from the Washington Post, begins:

President Bush and his aides are annoyed that people keep misinterpreting his Iraq policy as "stay the course." A complete distortion, they say. "That is not a stay-the-course policy," White House press secretary Tony Snow declared yesterday.

Where would anyone have gotten that idea? Well, maybe from Bush.

The military analysis by Michael Gordon, "To Stand or Fall in Baghdad: Capital Is Key to Mission," is getting a lot of attention from The Huffington Post, not least because it appears above the fold on the front page of The New York Times. Gordon discusses the failure of the military plan to "clear, hold and build" Baghdad, "the center of gravity for the larger American mission in Iraq."

The analysis is not new news. It's basically a wrap-up of what's been happening in the neighborhoods controlled by the militias or threatened by the death squads in the genocidal civil war there. And it's curiously bloodless, making no mention of the death squads or the civil war. Instead it substitutes the antiseptic term "sectarian strife."

But deep in the story there's a revealing comment by the general who commands the American forces in Baghdad that isn't likely to get the attention it deserves. It's revealing because it describes the problem in an analogy that unintentionally compares Iraq to a mud hole, which is a perfect illustration of the military's true take on the country, let alone the so-called mission.

"We can do the clearing," the general tells Gordon. "But once you clear if you don't leave somebody in there and build civil capacity in there then it is the old mud-hole approach. You know the water runs out of the mud hole when you drive through the mud hole and then it runs back in it."

We shall not want:

MIAMI (AFP) -- The top U.S. general defended the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God. "He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country," said Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Methinks the general's cup runneth over.

Postscript: Two weeks later, on Nov. 6 ...

Military Times editorial:
'Rumsfeld must go'

In Austria, of course. From ein treuer Freund:

ach, herr jan -- ve in vienna can't underschtand all uf der fuss, ja? i'm qvite schure dot herr wagner vould haff lufft zuch decor.

But what would R. Mutt have thought?

PS: As noted two years ago on PervScan, urinals with lips were supposed to be installed at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.

I never read Lloyd Grove's gossip column in New York's Daily News. So I dunno how good, bad or indifferent it was. But he seems to be getting lots of mileage out of being dumped, including an op-ed piece in Sunday's LA Times (thank you, Romenesko). Here's what grabbed my eye:

From time to time, distinguished papers such as [T]he New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have ventured into this frisky territory, but have usually ended their walk on the wild side in a hand-wringing identity crisis: Can we be serious journalists and still publish a gossip column?

To "venture into frisky territory" is lame journospeak, far too prim to equate with "A Walk on the Wild Side," the title of Nelson Algren's classic 1956 novel (set among the pimps, whores and con men of Depression-era New Orleans). It's just one more proof of Algren's devaluation.

I've written before that the title of the novel has been "popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue." I should have added journalists, of course, especially headline writers, along with crossdresser boutiques, nature tour operators, animal rescuers, bloggers, nudist surfers, academics, gay activists, and so on.

All of them would have earned a contemptuous chuckle from Algren, if only because of injured pride. But Jimmy Smith's bluesy, laid-back "Walk," though not stellar to my taste, is one use I'm sure he would have approved.

So much goes by so swiftly, there's no point in trying to catch up. But KO's recent editorials must be noted as knockouts. I'm thinking particularly of his special commentary on lying, broadcast on Oct. 5. I presume you've seen it. If not, you missed the single best opinion piece on mainstream television. For that matter, it may have been the best to appear anywhere.

Watch it. Read it. Relish it. The Bullshitter-in-Chief "comes across as a compulsive liar," he says. He "has savaged the very freedoms he claims to be protecting from attack," and "it is now impossible to find a consistent thread of logic as to who [he] believes the enemy is."

It seems to me no accident that "Countdown," Olbermann's daily cable show on MSNBC, has doubled its audience. But if god forbid the Republicans retain control of the Congress after next month's mid-term elections, will MSNBC execs keep him on the air? Or will he be Donahued? Given their lack of principles in the past -- and notwithstanding Olbermann's own comment that "as long as you make them money, they don't care" --- let's hope they're not put to the test.

PS: A friend writes:

I've been watching him a long time & he just gets better. Did you catch his piece on the elimination of habeas corpus, the one where he draws a big red X through one article after another in the Bill of Rights? It's a classic.

PPS: Yes, I caught it. And this, too, the day before, "Habeas corpus sellout," by Nat Hentoff. And just this morning (Oct. 15) the NYT editorial "Guilty Until Confirmed Guilty." Another friend writes, "That Hentoff's piece appeared in The Washington Times gives me hope." Ha. Doan make me laff. The whole shebang is a mockery.

Have you watched this Mozart video? "I can see ole Wolfie," a friend writes, "up there in music box heaven, shittin' his brocade pantaloons!"

Been traveling. Still am.