Month: August 2005

RUMBLINGS ON THE RIGHT

Some crotchety remarks from paleo-con Bainbridge and neocon Frum. Money quote from Bainbridge:

What really annoys me, however, are the domestic implications of all this. The conservative agenda has advanced hardly at all since the Iraq War began. Worse yet, the growing unpopularity of the war threatens to undo all the electoral gains we conservatives have achieved in this decade. Stalwarts like me are not going to vote for Birkenstock wearers no matter how bad things get in Iraq, but what about the proverbial soccer moms? Gerrymandering probably will save the House for us at least through the 2010 redistricting, but what about the Senate and the White House?

Hey, we’ve exploded the size of government, legitimized an insolvent nanny-state for a generation, guaranteed a huge future tax increase, missed an opportunity for seriously trying to move toward energy independence, and made the biggest intelligence error since Pearl Harbor. Not bad, eh? The emails on Frum’s blog are very telling about the mood of the conservative base. My own evolving view of what’s happening in Iraq is that there’s still a reasonable chance of a pretty depressingly illiberal constitution, folllowed by low-level civil war, policed in part by young Americans. Better than Saddam? You betcha. Better than a crumbling regime under Saddam’s sons during an Islamist upswing? Absolutely. But a long way from what many of us had hoped for.

THANKS

A huge bouquet of thanks for my four intrepid guest-bloggers, Judith, Frank, Dan and Walter. They were all unique, and all showed, I think, how intimate and individual blogging can be as a medium. I had one of the best breaks of my life, marred only by my highly enjoyable final weekend. Now back to reality …

PEACE ON EARTH: Yet another expression of his version of Christianity from Pat Robertson. Recall that Robertson was on the list fo people consulted by the administration on the Supreme Court nomination. He’s not an outsider, even though every sane conservative says he is the minute he opens his mouth and says something hateful again. He was once a credible presidential candidate. The test of mainstream Republicans’ integrity is if they do not simply denounce this comment but denounce Robertson and his political machine. He is their Michael Moore. Instead, you get mealy-mouthed and exhausted-to-the-bone attempts to blame it on the liberal media.

APOLOGIES

The wonderful idea of celebrating my last weekend of bloggatical got, well, a little out of hand the last two nights, and I’m a little too hung over today to write anything too coherent. Sorry. I don’t know why I leave the big blow-out to the last two days of a vacation but … there you are. See you in the morning … fresh as a wilted daisy.

NAKED SELF-PROMOTION

Andrew said I could do this, so I will, since I live by my pen and I know no other way. My new novel, Mission to America, will be published this October and is available for pre-order on Amazon. It’s my best, what can I say, and anyone who can find it in their heart to buy it will be rewarded with at least as much good karma as they received the last time they dropped fifty cents into a tip jar at a hippy coffee shop. A movie of one of my earlier novels, Thumbsucker, will be released in about a month by Sony Classics. It stars Keanu Reeves (playing funny again, thank goodness), Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Benjamin Bratt, and Vincent D’Onofrio (sp?). The novel, reissued, is available now, and both it and the movie are good, though I won’t tell you which one is my favorite.

I’m going to post again later to sum up this whole disorienting and wonderful experience of filling in for the beloved Andrew, but the short version is this: I learned a lot, was humbled, challenged, and gratified, and I thank Andrew’s fans for bearing with me. I didn’t know a thing about this medium before last Monday and now I know a little more. Thanks everyone.

– posted by Walter

SURE I INHALED

This morning on C-SPAN a caller asked me, after I’d told my seeing-Ted-Kennedy-soused tale, if it bothered me that George W. did cocaine once, or has been alleged to, or whatever. And I said it did, to the caller’s apparent surprise. It also bothers me that Al Gore could admit to marijuana use the way he did while running for president. My problem has nothing to do with the drugs themselves, though, or the use of them, but by the hypocrisy. How come candidates get to admit to crimes that, when they’re elected, they put others in jail for but have not been punished for themselves? The idea of guys who’ve slipped the noose, and are willing to publically admit it, putting others in the noose — by the thousands and thousands — turns my stomach. To my mind, there’s no more vivid demonstration that the drug laws are a cruel farce.

The next time a presidential candidate makes his ritual drug confession, I think they should be given a choice: serve out the prison term or pay the fine that applied when they offended or recuse themselves and their administration from enforcing the same laws. Better yet, let them commit to changing the laws that they were fortunate enough not to have been caught breaking. Fair? I think so.

– posted by Walter

TEARS OF RAGE

Cindy Sheehan screaming about her dead son, the Gaza settlers pleading for their homes, the families of the BTK killer’s victims confronting the monster in court — it’s been an emotional past few days on the cable news shows, like a gigantic encounter session, sort of, or an international Oprah Winfrey show with higher than normal stakes. That sounds facetious, and I guess it is, but an overdose of raw emotion tends to wear on the nerves after a point and invite a defensive mental reaction. Gaza, of course, is a story of deep consequence, but when it’s mixed up with all the other extreme behavior that the cameras are focussing on right now it loses some of its distinctive impact. Life imitates art, and if the reigning popular art form now is reality TV, then we may be looking forward to a period when the news will be dominated by weeping fits, shouting contests, nervous breakdowns, and other raw displays of feeling, some of them premeditated and staged. Certainly the unprecedented run of this Aruba murder on Fox News doesn’t bode well. All hysteria all the time — is that’s what’s coming? Looks that way. (Though Sheehan has every right to her emotion, as far as I’m concerned, since a war that can’t survive a mourning mother shouldn’t be going on at all.)

– posted by Walter

GOOFS

The Randy Weaver incident happened under George Bush Sr., not Bill Clinton, as hawk-eyed readers have pointed out to me. The correct expression is not “I could care less” but “I couldn’t care less.” That covers the f-ups so far, I think. And thanks to everyone who’s shown support for the great state of Montana. Appreciate it. To those who still can’t stand the place and can’t forgive the fact that the Constitution has given us as many senators as California or New York have, write your congressman, not me. And as for Montana being the recipient of more federal dollars per person than other places, I offer this: since the federal government owns a good part of the state in the form of national forests and parks and since the national highway system needs its roads from Seattle to Minneapolis to run continously, without gigantic gaps, we need a few more dollars, perhaps, than our population warrants. The indian reservations take money, too. Then there are the wheat farmers and cattle ranchers, whose operations are subsidized on the basis of their size, not on on the basis of the number of people who work on them. The ag subsidies are controversial and questionable, of course, but the overall fact that Montana sucks up funds out of proportion to the number of folks here has to do with its size, the needs of our federal landlords, the Forest Service and Park Service, and so on.

– posted by Walter

I’LL HAVE A PETROLEUM DOUBLE LATTE

Is this significant? Pretty much all of my life, with occasional moments of imbalance, a cup of coffee and a gallon of gas have been about the same price. A few years ago, coffee took the lead, but recently gas caught up. Yesterday, gas took the lead, however, and I bet it will stay in the lead at least until Starbucks invents a new gimmick such as blending bee pollen with java and infusing it with ionized oxgygen to create a ten-dollar morning super-drink. In fact, yesterday was the day when gas officially became a luxury item for me, much as coffee did a couple of years ago and water did, too, come to think of it.

Meaning that when I fill my tank I feel like I’m treating myself now instead of paying a necessary bill for an unappreciated commodity. Savor this, I tell myself — driving is not a right, it’s an indulgence. (Luckily, I don’t commute to work.) Strangely, this makes me want to buy a car that’s completely impractical and ultra-powerful and drive it only every few days or so in the same way I might go white-water rafting or buy a ticket to a new rollercoaster. In other words, I’m estranged from driving now, but pleasantly so. I’ll do it less, I suspect, enjoy it more, and become the target of new marketing efforts that promote getting behind the wheel as an exotic entertainment experience. “Burn some rubber, crank some tunes, and enjoy the road less traveled. You deserve it.” That will be the new ad from Exxon, perhaps. They might even tout the health benefits of driving, assuming there are any, and I’m sure they’ll find some.

But I’m glad this has happened. I really am. I want the Saudi Arabians to know that I can take or leave their major export depending on my mood.

Posted by Walter

GEO-BIGOTRY

Reading through some of the letters blasted my way, I’ve discovered a form of prejudice that I didn’t know existed until just now. The mere fact that I live in Montana has drawn, from some, such wild bile and spittle that I’m shocked. And it’s hard to be shocked these days. One guy, some nut, said he was tired of being lectured on morality by people from the sticks — people who think of New York as “Jew York City.” What would that be called? Knee-jerk anti-anti semitism? This stupid business of classifying one another according to state-of-residence is exactly what I’m complaining about when I say that political conversation nowadays has gotten awfully tiresome in certain aspects. This red-blue thing isn’t real: it’s a grid put down on the landscape by lazy pundits in order to foster a conflict that isn’t there so the poeple who profit from conflict can work their way with us. It reminds me of the 1990s, when Clinton blew the so-called “Militia Movement” into a threat much larger than it was (turn your guns on Osama, dumbass)and used it as a pretext to set his snipers on hermits in Idaho and religious separationists in Texas.

Here’s what Montana’s like, if anyone’s interested. First, it’s one of the most urbanized places in the country, where most of the people cluster up together due to lack of water in the landscape. It’s full of back-the-landers from the 70s, populist out-of-work miners in cities like Butte whose ancesotrs bloodily started the union movement, ranchers and farmers who keep the land open for their hay and wheat and cattle instead of just selling out and cashing in so second-home types can build their gated developments (though there are more and more of those), and refugees from places like LA who’ve taken their equity out of booming housing markets and put it into modest houses so they don’t have to work in cubicles 24/7. We’ve got a vicious drug problem — crystal meth — and a lot of other contemporary ills that keep us from being the lazy wooded paradise full of smug evangelicals that others picture us as. We legalized medical marijuana last year and if there’s a governing political culture it’s live and let live and don’t make too many rules, because people just break rules, which means more police, etcetera, and a cycle of hypocrisy by which everyone condemns the neighbors for doing pretty much the same things they’re doing themselves. And as state constitutions go, ours is as progressive as they come in terms of civil rights, outdoing the federal constitution.

– posted by Walter