Month: February 2003

“Playwright Harold Pinter, speaking at last weekend’s rally, said ‘The US is a nation out of control,’ and ‘unless we stop it, it will bring barbarism to the entire world.’ He said America was ‘a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug.’ When Blair shows up in the pulpit cleaving the air with a scimitar, let me know. When US television broadcasts a speech with Billy Graham hosting an Excalibur replica from the Franklin Mint Collection, demanding the decapitation of Muslims, let me know. When George Bush grips the podium and beseeches American rock formations to give up the location of non-Christians so we can slit their throats, and it’s carried live on national TV by presidential order, drop me a line. It takes a particularly rarified variety of idiot to look at a Jew-hating fascist with a small mustache – and decide that his opponent is the Nazi.” – James Lileks, bleating like a lion.

Yes, some feminist Harvard students destroyed the giant snow willie. Here’s one of them owning up. The letter contains the classic and largely unanswerable statement: “No one should have to be subjected to an erect penis without his or her express permission or consent.” In writing? Even one that’s melting? And what about a flaccid one? The final money quote:

Many women and men, including myself, are the victims of sexual assault, child sexual abuse and rape. The unwanted image of an erect penis is an implied threat; it means that we, as women, must be subject to erect penises whether we like it or not. There was nothing ‘challenging’ or ‘subversive’ about the penis. The only thing it did was create an uncomfortable environment for the women of Harvard University.

Oh, please. Is the Washington Monument safe?

Seems less outrageous now, doesn’t it?

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE I: “There is no other government on Earth with the same publicized aspirations to tyrannical control [as the US government]. Other countries, including Korea, Iraq, Russia, and China, maintain arms to defend their shores against invaders and those who would ‘dominate the weak and intimidate the world.’ The two governments that do not maintain armies and weapons solely for defense are the US Government and Israel, a coalition of pure evil intent on destroying human freedom.” – Ed Lewis, “Liberty For All,” February 16.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE II: “‘The times’ require us to give up some eensy-weensy freedoms, so we can duct tape our houses and our mouths and worry about that Code Yellow which followed 8 useless months of Code Orange. Code Red is right around the corner. Be prepared to give even more away. Ronald Reagan described to us the Republican ideals of what an “Evil Empire” is. I guess the last vestages of the Old Republic has been swept away. Because we have met the Evil Empire Reagan described… and it is us.” – Bob Bankard, Phillyburbs online magazine.

Democracy? Doesn’t look like it. A provisional American-run government, designed to foster reconstruction, humanitarian aid and a fledgling constitution, is a perfectly understandable idea. But a long-term de facto colony is surely asking for trouble – both in terms of actual governance and in terms of American public acceptance. Of course, these plans will change under the pressure of events, but I can’t be the only one concerned that democratic institutions do not seem very high on the Cheney wish-list (and it’s largely Cheney’s construction). The extent of de-Baathification is also critical. Krugman gleefully declares today that only “Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced.” The Washington Post, with a far better track record than Krugman, reports that

Under a decision finalized last week, Iraqi government officials would be subjected to “de-Baathification,” a reference to Hussein’s ruling Baath Party, under a program that borrows from the “de-Nazification” program established in Germany after World War II. Criteria by which officials would be designated as too tainted to keep their jobs are still being worked on, although they would likely be based more on complicity with the human rights and weapons abuses of the Hussein government than corruption, officials said. A large number of current officials would be retained.

Which is it? We’ll see. But the administration needs to be put on notice by its supporters as well as its opponents. Many of us signed onto this war not merely to protect the West from terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, but as an attempt to grasp the nettle of Arab autocracy. If we make no effort to foster democratic institutions, the rule of law and representative government in Iraq, then we will lose the peace as surely as we will have won the Iraq war. And losing that peace means losing the wider war on terror as well.

“If Tina Brown is following Maureen Dowd, does that make her quasi-MoDo?”

POSEUR ALERT: “Like Nepalese religious shrines tendered on cow dung, the blues disc is an ‘opportunity for devotion.’ In the three economies in which it occurs, of the market, of society, and of the self, a disc collection such as James McKune’s or Harry Smith’s becomes a kind of counter-capital, a harvest of illth, like Dickens’s dustman converting what is dispersed, discarded, ruined, and despised to what is recovered, concentrated, and renewed, rendering it at once rare and precious, scandalous and subversive. In the vertical archeology of the social body, it is an edifice of the repressed, making one’s own despised or ruined condition available for contemplation and turning it, by virtue of our irrepressible sociality, into a source of cultural power. ‘Whatever we worship we make sacred.'” – an abstract of an academic paper on blues recordings.

A cartoon says it best.

THE CASE FOR SURRENDER: An American Prospect piece argues that Blair should avoid war because it could lead to terrorist reprisals. Good to see simple fear and cowardice being profferred as a war strategy.

“If, as is looking increasingly likely, Blair loses office over this war, it won’t be because he’s been martyred by a nation of spineless appeasers, or for that matter because we’ve seen too many cartoons showing poodles (wearing a lieutenant’s pips) shovelling elephant shit (the elephant guided by a giant wearing spurs and a cowboy hat). It’ll be because, for years now, he has allowed his spokespeople to tell any lies that, media-wise, seemed appropriate, while assuming that, because he always believes what he is saying at the time, the populace will believe him when he assures them he is sincere. He’s a talented, likeable and quite interesting politician: and a study in what might have happened if Clinton had been granted his deepest wish, and been President during challenging times.” – more insight and doggerel on the Letters Page.

THE DEMS AND GAYS: The Democratic Senators are quite happy to see a rampant homophobe become a judge, while filibustering Pickering. Check out Stephen Miller’s column on the strange priorities of the Democrats:

The lesson: if you are conservative but not anti-gay, look for the Democrats to oppose you with everything they’ve got. But if you’re anti-gay but not otherwise objectionable, that’s just dandy. I guess the Democrats figure no matter what they do, gay liberals will keep supporting them. And, sadly, they’re probably right.

It was a year ago today that the Islamofascists murdered him in cold blood because he was a Jew. The Wiesenthal Center is organizing a small tribute. A better tribute is to continue the war against the forces that murdered him. And, yes, that does mean the terrorist-sponsoring mafia now ruling Iraq.

COULD THE “PEACE” DEMOS PROVOKE WAR? They might if Saddam interprets his current position as unassailable and so forces a sternly negative report from Hans Blix. This drama has had so many twists so far, we’d be foolish to rule out another one.

THE UGLY CONSERVATIVE: A worthwhile piece dissecting the extreme vulgarity and political hate-mongering spewed by right-wing radio host, Michael Savage.

ANOTHER BEEB QUOTE: This time from the BBC’s World Affairs Correspondent, David Loyn: “”If America was engaged in the rest of the world rather than, frankly, wanting to bomb it and, as Yasmine says, take its resources…” No wonder the Economist this week simply categorized the BBC as an anti-war organization, motivated by simple anti-Americanism.

AFTER “WEASELS”: A British tabloid goes for another Chirac analogy.

It’s the most rickety crutch for a female columnist with nothing to say, but that hasn’t stopped both Maureen Dowd and now Tina Brown from throwing baldly sexist remarks at the Bush administration. MoDo recently went on a rant about the “locker-room” taunts and high testosterone in the White House. Brown now gives us this brilliant insight:

Is it just the residue of fashion week that makes me wish there were more, or should I say any, gay men in the Bush Administration? At The Sunday Times in the Seventies one top editor used to shake his head when the paper became too humourlessly high-testosterone and say that what it needed that week was ‘more pooftah power’. In lieu of outright womanhood – except for Condoleezza Rice, who crosses the gender barriers by becoming the most zealous enabler – perhaps an injection of androgyny could be brought to bear on diplomatic relations in this moment of crisis. The Bush crowd’s only management style, like that of many who subscribe to the outmoded cult of America’s Toughest Bosses, is to unzip and thwack it on the table.

Ignore the homophobic stereotypes. (Why is it “gay” to be lacking in testosterone? Or androgynous? Or soft on dictators?) Imagine if a male writer used similarly sexist language to describe, say, Tina Brown’s administration at the New Yorker. Imagine sentences like this: “Wouldn’t it be better if there had been more men at the New Yorker in the ’90s? And I don’t mean Tina’s neutered gay male flunkies. Brown’s flitty attention span, bouts of editorial PMS, hysterical responses to criticism and general whorishness toward publicists and celebrities made for a very menstrual management style.” It would never be written. It should never be written. It’s sexist, dumb and almost meaningless. But in all those respects, it’s indistinguishable from Tina’s latest column.

More evidence that Blix is spitting against a Nor-easter. The “interviews” promised by Saddam haven’t happened. Only three out of thirty have occurred and all those were Saddam-picked scientists with tape-recording of the proceedings.