A Pirate Looks At Forty

Well, thirty-nine. But you know.

By The Time The Bloggers Get To It, It Isn’t Even News Anymore

...but you’ve got to blog it anyway because you are physically incapable of believing what you are hearing and you know the only way you’re going to be able to process this information is by sitting down and actually typing the words Vice President Dick Cheney shot a guy right in the goddam face.

Generalissimo

Rediscovered this recently, written longhand by lantern-light during a weekend camping trip that turned... well... a little odd...

26 August 2005

Naturally enough, I favor in theory the practice and preservation of ancient folkways and handicrafts—smithery, beadwork, tanning and the like.

But seeing this translate into a freak parade of nicotine-stained trucker caps, one-drop Ojibway saddoes in porno ‘taches and embarrassing buckskins, Civil War re-enactors with hateful bumper-stickers, and a beardy would-be mountain man on his day off from the Ren Faire tromping across the state park parade grounds in his stupid fucking wooden shoes—well, it’s almost enough to make me believe that progress should mean no looking back.

It’s hard to say this without feeling a little churlish.

Of course, hobbies in general tend to strike me this way. Perhaps it is because I am a fox by nature, and know lots of little things, that the hedgehog mindset is so alien to me: but to know a lot about any one thing—be it flint-knapping, model trains, or the Beatles—seems to me an objective sign of a disordered mind.

Such people are necessary, of course—without them, how would our flints get knapped, after all?—but they’re no-one I’d want to have a drink with. Of course they’d probably be drinking mead anyway, which they made themselves with honey from their own hives. That’s the rub: Everything that should be fun, they make so much work.

The Green-Eyed Pundit

So, apparently, whimsy has no place on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Envy-fuelled ax-grinding screeds are, however, apparently hunky-dory on the Web version of a major journal of politics and culture.

I'm beginning to grow weary of The New Republic. There is something worth reading in nearly every edition, but its reflexive sneer is wearing thin. Of course, the bitchiness comes from the top down, and as falleth Peretz, so falleth the Republic—meaning that it's likely to get worse before it gets better.

Playing For Keeps

This New Republic piece about the failed Alito filibuster oozes such horrifying Beltway cynicism that I can hardly get through it without losing my sight to the red mist.

One hatemaking quote, selected almost at random, interrupted only by unavoidable snorts of incredulity...

[T]he Alito nomination had already put vulnerable Democratic incumbents and candidates from red states in an awkward position...

Poor, poor red-state Democrats. I weep hot, bitter tears for them. Here’s the question, though—if you have no desire to actually make a difference on any issue, then why the hell did you go into politics in the first place?

--pulled between pro-Bush voters and the demands of liberal interest groups, activists, and bloggers.

...or, as we used to call them, “constituents.”

Forcing those Democrats to choose sides on yet another vote would only heighten their agony.

Again: huh? Politics is all about choosing sides.

Even Barbara Mikulski, a Kennedy-style paleoliberal, argued that Democrats should worry more about electoral realities than about taking bold stands for their own sake.

Note that “for their own sake”—as if putting Alito on the Supreme Court won’t have political and social ramifications that will affect the lives of ordinary Americans for decades to come. Nice touch... though it gives me reason to suspect that Barbara Mikulski and I have differing views on what constitutes “reality.”

The naked careerism here would be refreshing if it weren’t so tragic. Mikulski’s unspoken assumption is that tipping the Supreme Court to the right for the next two or three decades is not worth losing an election over. To which I ask: If that’s not an issue worth taking a bullet for, then what is? Is anything?

The problem here, as always, is that the Democrats have fallen into the trap of letting the other guys define the issue. As Michael Kinsley points out in a devastating Slate article, Republicans love to paint the Dems as “...mired in trivial lifestyle issues like, oh, abortion and gay rights and Americans killing and dying in Iraq”—or whether it’s a good idea to appoint, for life, a Justice who is so inclined to bend over for the Executive—“while the Republicans serve up meat and potatoes for real Americans, like privatizing Social Security and making damned sure the government knows who is Googling whom in this great country.”

Back to TNR: This bit of Democratic self-loathing just makes me nuts:

At the site MyDD.com, the influential blogger Matt Stoller called Kerry's decision "a classic example of 'get points for trying' politics ... a way for Senators to get credit from the left-wing of the party without having to actually do anything or stop anything."

This seems to me precisely backwards. Forty-two Democratic Senators had reservations about Sam Alito grave enough to make them vote against his confirmation. Only twenty-five signed on for the filibuster. But, y’know, those seventeen others were really concerned. Which is good to know.

But for all their concern, they knew full well that in a simple-majority up-or-down vote, they were going to lose—making a “No” vote into a symbolic gesture of opposition, i.e., points for trying. The filibuster, though, could have actually derailed the appointment, instead of simply registering displeasure with it. It was, in fact, the only way to “actually do anything or stop anything.”

One thing we should have learned by now from the other side: Noble failure is no substitute for winning ugly.

We can no longer afford to look noble—if we ever could. Mencken said it best, I think (as he did so many things)—“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin cutting throats.”

Knives out, boys—it’s a long thousand days ‘til 2009.

Groundhog Day

More political disappointment: Elaborately-bequiffed Rochacha gazillionaire Tom Golisano—Mr. "What happens if wind power becomes obsolete?" hisself—has decided not to run for governor of New York State.

Which is a shame: I was looking forward to a prolonged and self-inflicted public immolation. What makes it worse, is that's Golisano's withdrawal makes it ever more like that the New York GOP will run Bill friggin' Weld instead. Cripes! Didn't we leave Massachusetts to get away from this guy?

Okay, not really. But still. Talk about history repeating. In this case, though, it's a farce both times.

Ceiling

...is now patched and painted.

Resistance as yet refuses to be whitewashed.

The Unfaithful Servant

Learn these names. Know these faces.

Daniel Akaka (Hawaii)
Max Baucus (Montana)
Jeff Bingaman (New Mexico)
Robert Byrd (West Virginia)
Maria Cantwell (Washington
Thomas Carper (Delaware)
Kent Conrad (North Dakota)
Byron Dorga (North Dakota)
Daniel Inouye (Hawaii)
Tim Johnson (South Dakota)
Herb Kohl (Wisconsin)
Mary Landrieu (Louisina)
Joe Goddam Lieberman (Connecticut)
Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas)
Bill Nelson (Florida)
Ben Nelson (Nebraska)
Mark Pryor (Arkansas)
John D. Rockefeller IV (West Virginia)
Ken Salazar (Colorado)

These are the names of the people who yesterday voted to ratfuck you. These are the names of the nineteen Democratic Senators who have forgotten, in their complacency, that the responsibility of the party in opposition is to, y’know, oppose things—to stand up and be counted when the heavy shit starts flying, not to just roll over and let it happen. These are the names of the people who have given up fighting, and who have in the process damaged our democracy in a way that will take generations to heal.

These are the people who just effectively turned America into a one-party state, because they feared the political consequences of doing otherwise.

Pause for a minute to let that sink in.

Ponder the cowardice and the naked, short-sighted self-interest that leads a person to perform that kind of calculus.

These are your servants.

Remember their names. Learn their faces.

Stop the Presses

John Kerry finally grows a spine.

About eighteen months late, by my reckoning, but hey.

Declaration

Part of the reason I haven’t been working much, these last four weeks, goes back to Christmas evening, when I noticed a cold, wet impact on my left shoulder as I sat at this desk, looking at this screen.

Let me backtrack here. For ten years I lived in a place with a leaky roof. It was ten years of scurrying for saucepans and stockpots every time it rained. I went back to the empty house once, in between the time when we moved out and the time they plowed the whole thing under. Livid patches of fungus had bloomed across the ceilings; rhizome tumbleweeds drifted over the carpets, and a fine moldy fuzz crept across the hardwood floors of the hallway and halfway up the walls. My only regret about leaving is that I wasn’t there when they razed the place: I’d have liked to piss on the rubble.

So here I was on Christmas night of 2005, with a steady drizzle was falling outside, and an inconvenient suppuration of my ceiling happening inside. Clearly, this could not stand.

There followed a long and ugly series of events—steely phone calls left unreturned, federal holidays, and a lot of profanity—all coming to a head on New Year’s Eve, when—hey!—chunks of the ceiling started falling down.

Even when a patch was at last applied to the roof, the ceiling had to dry out before it could be repaired. So I spent nineteen days between the visit from the roofing contractor and the arrival of the painting contractor, staring at this:

It became surreal. It was like one of those venereal-horror photographs that occasionally enliven the pages of D’s medical texts. I was supposed to be writing a magazine piece, and my office was turning into a Cronenberg movie. It was, to say the least, a tad distracting.

But that is, as I said, only part of the reason I haven’t been working much—and probably the least important part. The real, big bad sonofabitch that’s standing on my chest and grinding a heel into my nuts is Resistance. Here’s something I read the other day that hit me like a bomb:

What does Resistance feel like?

First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We’re bored, we’re restless. We can’t get no satisfaction. There’s guilt but we can’t pinpoint the source. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up an party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We’re disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves.

The War of Art, Pressfield calls it, with apologies to Sun-Tzu. And to win the war, first you’ve got to realize that you’re in a war.

Well, it’s on, motherfucker. Lock and load.