We Are a Bunch of Rubes

Make no mistake. I am pleased that the American people saw fit to elect President the only responsible actor still running for office. I like BHO. I'm a fan. But I have principles that were operative during Bush, and to suspend their operation for a guy I like can only be done for so long before it is unjustified. So, you know, put that in your Situation Ethics and smoke it.

I'm tired of getting played for a fairy; I hope the left does boot Democrat moderates out of the party. There deserves to be an all-do-nothing party, an American Kadima, the USA Patriot Waterheads. Or the Know-Nothings.

And I understand why BHO's situation in Afghanistan is different from GWB's in Iraq. A surge is necessary to stop the bloodletting. We cannot afford to lose in Afghanistan. Unfriendly regional powers, read Iran, will be emboldened by our failure, which I repeat is imminent without the surge. It's going to be hairy.

Wait, those are all the same rationalizations for Bush's surge...my mistake. Will the Afghan Surge work? In Afghanistan, the other key elements of quelling civil war -- paying off militants to form US-legitimized gangs, and the major militant group's discovery that politics is more lucrative than assassination -- are absent.

So let's repeat, 15,000 more US troops are moving into the world's worst country, with an illiterate population of poppy growers, entirely cowed by terror, to hunt an entrenched guerrilla force with a cross-border safe zone, no natural enemies, and no interest in the political process?

Got it. This sort of thing was not OK in 2006. And it's OK now. I totally understand. It's called triangulatin', and I did not just fall off the turnip truck.

But the idea doesn't look ripe for success, and it may not be necessary. 2200 Afghan civilians died in violence last year. That's a bad month in Iraq ca. 2006. Die-hard Al Qaeda members might number 300. We have drones in Pakistan that are both wasting dudes who need to be wasted (let's bracket the why-questions, shall we) and killing some innocents. How does this add up to imperative?

Pakistan thinks enough of itself that it can sign peace deals with militants and pay attention to real threats, you know, like India, or Baluch separatists. I haven't bought the "bomb slips out of Pakistan's hands" theory, largely because I think the Pakistani military establishment sees its long term, existential struggle as being with India. And India has the bomb. You think career men are gonna let some dudes with beards walk off with nuculur weapons? Nope. Then why do we have to shore up Pakistan, crumbling Pakistan? And even if we did need to do so, what good are 15,000 soldiers going to do for a nation of, holy shit, 200 million people?

What good will 52,000 Americans do for an Afghanistan still ruled by Hamid Karzai? Same amount of good 37,000 did.

But I'm not trying to player-hate. BHO is right to have different opinions about different surges. This surge is, it turns out, different from Bush's: it's even worse.
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First, a Note from the Future President

On 28 December 2006, Barry Hussein wrote:

Escalation Is Not The Answer

As the New Year approaches, we are told that the President is considering the deployment of tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq in the desperate hope of subduing the burgeoning civil war there.

This is a chilling prospect that threatens to compound the tragic mistakes he has already made over the last four years.

In 2002, I strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq because I felt it was an ill-conceived venture which I warned would "require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undermined cost, with undetermined consequences." I said then that an invasion without strong international support could drain our military, distract us from the war with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and further destabilize the Middle East.

Sadly, all of those concerns have been borne out.

Today, nearly three thousand brave young Americans are dead, and tens of thousands more have been wounded. Rather than welcomed "liberators," our troops have become targets of the exploding sectarian violence in Iraq. Our military has been strained to the limits. The cost to American taxpayers is approaching $400 billion.

Now we are faced with a quagmire to which there are no good answers. But the one that makes very little sense is to put tens of thousands more young Americans in harm's way without changing a strategy that has failed by almost every imaginable account.

In escalating this war with a so-called "surge" of troops, the President would be overriding the expressed concerns of Generals on the ground, Secretary Powell, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and the American people. Colin Powell has said that placing more troops in the crossfire of a civil war simply will not work. General John Abizaid, our top commander in the Middle East, said just last month that, "I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future." Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff have expressed concern, saying that a surge in troop levels "could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda" and "provide more targets for Sunni insurgents." Once again, the President is defying good counsel and common sense.

As I said more than a month ago, while some have proposed escalating this war by adding thousands of more troops, there is little reason to believe that this will achieve these results either. It's not clear that these troop levels are sustainable for a significant period of time, and according to our commanders on the ground, adding American forces will only relieve the Iraqis from doing more on their own. Moreover, without a coherent strategy or better cooperation from the Iraqis, we would only be putting more of our soldiers in the crossfire of a civil war.

There is no military solution to this war. Our troops can help suppress the violence, but they cannot solve its root causes. And all the troops in the world won't be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down at a table, resolve their differences, and forge a lasting peace. In fact, adding more troops will only push this political settlement further and further into the future, as it tells the Iraqis that no matter how much of a mess they make, the American military will always be there to clean it up.

That is why I believe we must begin a phased redeployment of American troops to signal to the government and people of Iraq, and others who have a stake in stabilizing the country - that ours is not an open-ended commitment. They must step up. The status quo cannot hold.

In November, the American people sent a resounding message of change to the President. But apparently that message wasn't clear enough.

I urge all Americans who share my grave concerns over this looming decision to call, write or email the President, and make your voices heard. I urge you to tell them that our soldiers are not numbers to add just because someone couldn't think of a better idea, they are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and friends who are willing to wave goodbye to everything they've ever known just for the chance to serve their country. Our men and women in uniform are doing a terrific job under extremely difficult conditions. But our government has failed them so many times over the last few years, and we simply cannot afford to do it again. We must not multiply the mistakes of yesterday, we must end them today.

May this New Year bring a turn in our policy away from the stubborn repetition of our mistakes, so we can begin to chart a conclusion to this painful chapter in our history and bring our troops home.

Sincerely,

U.S. Senator Barack Obama

Quick Thoughts...

...hammer the message home in the media: install Rush as the Pope of the Republican Party.
...count on Rush relishing this and continuing to press his advantage as Repub politico after politico slips up, says something non-canon, and has to kiss Rush's oxycontin-dusted ring.
...count on the moderates being absolutely sick of this and edging closer to the Democrats as a result.
...pick up extra seats in 2010 as the Repubs have retreated further into the echo hall of chamber mirrors.

But what don't they count on?

I still say the moderates join the Dems, as is planned. The Repubs continue to become a regionalized party geared toward disaffected whites and the rich. Fine. But the moderates won't like the Left wing of the Dem party too terribly much either. They form like Voltron with the more middlish Dems... split before you know it.

...and America has three parties in a two-party system. Then the fun begins.

Peu Biship, Tim.

Tim Noah, in a piece otherwise devoted to realism vis-a-vis Terrism, passes along the DoJ shibboleth about Aafia Siddiqui, the Bostonian neuroscientist accused of working with Al Qaeda, who was picked up delirious somewhere in Afghanistan with vials of goo in her purse, even when a really quick search brings up evidence that the government's accusations against Siddiqui are "surprising" and "vague."

Noah's calm, measured paragraphs, it turns out, are where hyperbolic media distortions become settled facts.

This has been biship since August, when her face ran on page 1 of the the NY tabloids: Terror Queen! 5 August 2008, DoJ announced the capture of a Pakistani neuroscientist wanted for questioning since 2004. She had been found wandering around the provincial governor's house in Ghazni, Afghanistan. When detained, she just happened to be carrying "liquids and gels" and instructions from the "Anarchist's Arsenal." She then grabbed an M-4, shouted some shit, and was in turn shot.

At the risk of repeating myself, I'd like to make clear: Aafia Siddiqui was picked up by ISI in 2003 and handed over to us. She was accused of being "ready to strike in the next few months," in May 2004. She has now, therefore, in two separate presidential elections, been bandied about as an emblem of the Threat We All Face. She is also married to the guy we're really interested in; she is therefore, a hostage.

My services as a research aide are available, Mr. Noah.
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Panic on the quad?

What panic? The NYT has just revealed that people who teach in the humanities are concerned that no one wants to major in the humanities. And this is more than one more round of paranoid academic turf-war: it is an existential crisis. The fields are "irrelevant," fears Delbanco of Columbia. The NYT itself says, "the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents."

I would love more insight into the threats facing the humanities, but I'm not going to get it from one paranoid academic and one reporter making things up. Is it possible that the humanities appear so easy to ax because the fruits of our labor are impossible to describe to our audience? What is it that you get from the Creative Writing MFA? Isn't cultural studies just an alloy of low-grade lit crit, art theory and 20th c. French philosophy? Seriously, these dudes look like Early Christianity.

It's not time for the humanities to rethink their relationship to the job sphere: that's my task. Employers clearly want excellent written and oral communication skills, which every English major had better have. Employers want an ability to reason, a capacity for drudgery, the ability to summarize discoveries, powers of analysis, etc. The humanities is where you get that.

What the disciplines have to reassess is whether what they're doing actually qualifies as humanities-work. Students in the humanities are leaving with no frame of reference beyond their own lifespans, no history of Europe, horrific, genuinely hilarious "communication skills." I've sat in on art classes that boiled down to nothing more than "I think that idea, it's interesting." We're at the dead end of interest; no accountant cares what you're interested in, unless you make it important to him that he be interested.

Or, you know, in other words, if you play the shit that they like, then the people would come, simple as that.
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First Art Post Ever. Beware.

A quick hit, Kevin, and I'll try to make you aware of how totally fucked up the appearance in town of Christian Tomaszewski was. He's a Pole who works in video and installation. His main body of work is cardboard constructions derived from scenes in cult movies. Devoid of human actors, spare and clean, they are meant to delineate the "cold space" of film, said the man himself.

CT is tall and blond, in typical gear, black pleather jacket, black pants, etc., with an annoying habit of sucking on his face as he watches his own work. I couldn't tell from a distance if this was a smile or an uncontrollable tic. His English is probably as good as mine, and the proof lay in that in his answers to questions he always took the last two words of what you said and just riffed on them, without regard for the meaning of the rest of the sentence. It's possible that that was a coping mechanism for not having functional English, but selah. In either case, it made getting an answer a labrynthine process, full of hedges and diversions.

The work is about the space of film made real; except by CT's own admission, the particularities of the films don't matter, the filmic qualities might as well come from YouTube, and I'm pretty sure he's never seen all of Blue Velvet because his "clip representative of his working material" was an iMovie-edited montage of song sequences from BV.

In the original release, that we all saw in high school, we don't flashback to the scene at "Pussy Heaven," we just watch Hopper beat the crap out of McLachlan. CT was like, "I watched this film 138 times when I was making this." Really. I'm confused: is there a cult investment here, or does he just pick shit up off of YouTube and install it somewhere? Will we soon see a Christian Tomaszewski "Nora, the Piano Playing Cat"?

So that's just one beef: laziness masquerading as intellectual investment. It's bad enough when you do all this work and yet have nothing to say. It's worse when you front like you did all this work, and still have nothing to say.

To continue, in Tomaszewski's words, the work is a lot of effort for no purpose (except the filmic purpose stated above). It is practically about narrative (except no one knows what you mean when you say that; it's a scare phrase). There are no humans in the work (except that there are always humans in the work). There is just nothing at the center of this whirlwind.

So for all you other rubes out there who, like me, heard the words "European" and "Design" and saw visions of an upper-middle-class future and a subscription to Dwell, there's always the very classy Indianapolis Museum of Art...with a fantastically bad flash animation...

Also, check out CT at the Sculpture Center. This was to a word what he said last night in Columbus.

How is the title "On Chapels, Caves and Erotic Misery" anything other than kitsch? This could be some meta-joke about the vaingloriousness of art-making, its empty pomposity, but I fear Tomaszewski is serious, and that "Erotic Misery" is an actual, meaningful phrase for him, not something plucked from a random text generator.

The most telling thing last night was when CT alluded to "different narratives" in the US and Eastern Europe. He couldn't or wouldn't clarify, though he made certain to say he wasn't judging. (Seriously, my people are killing Pakistanis with space robots, and you think I care what you think about American narratology? Please.) But clearly, the things he finds serious (footage of contortionists, cut with drip torture, cut with a guy screwing in a light-bulb, like first year film school) other people have found hilarious.

I'm pretty sure this rules out the meta-joke possibility. Which means he's essentially remaking another montage of pilfered classics, "L'artiste est morte" by Jay Sherman...



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Revenge Via GoogleEarth

(photo: Wally Herger (R-CA) with a local beauty, as it were.) All blessings upon GoogleEarth's Congressional Districts layer for making sweet the meet assignation of blame...

Here are all the House Republicans whose districts contain MSAs with unemployment higher than 10 percent. Note the multiple nominations for California's Herger and Radanovich, and for New Jersey's Frank LoBiondo:

Connie Mack IV, FL-14, Fort Myers FL, 10% unemployment

Fred Upton, MI-6, Benton Harbor MI, 10.1%

Cliff Stearns, FL-6, Ocala FL, 10.1%

Ken Calvert, CA-44, Riverside-San Bernardino CA, 10.1%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Chico CA, 10.3%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, Vineland NJ, 10.4%

Adam Putnam, FL-12, Bradley FL, 10.5%

Thaddeus McCotter, MI-11, Livonia MI, 10.6%

Patrick T. McHenry, NC-10, Lenoir NC, 10.9%

Nathan Deal, GA-9, Dalton GA, 11.2

Greg Walden, OR-2, Bend OR, 11.3

Peter Hoekstra, MI-2, Muskegon MI, 11.5%

Harry Brown, SC-1, Myrtle Beach SC, 11.5%

Jon Mica, FL-7, Palm Coast FL, 11.7%

Kevin McCarthy, CA-22, Bakersfield CA, 11.8%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Madera CA, 11.9%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Redding CA, 12.2%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, OCean City NJ, 12.4%

Don Manzullo, IL-16, Rockford IL, 12.5%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Fresno CA, 13.2%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Modesto CA, 13.9%

Devin Nunes, CA-21, Visalia CA, 14.3%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Yuba City CA, 14.9%

You may, dear reader, assign asterisks, forgiving those Congressmen whose districts are historically depressed (Bakersfield), or which are beachfront communities during winter (Vineland, Ocean City, Myrtle Beach, Fort Myers), or which are economically OK until they get lumped into the MSA of a big derelict city (Livonia-Detroit-Warren).

I of course choose not to issue exceptions. The MSA is a great indicator of city fabric. To isolate statistically Narberth from Philadelphia would be to ignore the real economic ties between the poor city and its rich suburb. Also, as to beaches and other exceptionally depressed zones, you'd think apathy toward his constituents' employment prospects would get a guy fired, period.

Make the dream real...
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