Whoops Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Screwed up the itals in a post below. Fixed now.

@ 11:07:00 AM, ,

How Many of Us Have Them?

I should, by the way, thank all my friends for their thoughtful, in all senses of the word, notes. Of the half-dozen or so e-mails I've gotten from people I don't know, the most interesting was signed with a name that turned out to be that of the most popular porn star in Hungary.

@ 10:32:00 AM, ,

Another Corner Heard From

It's posts-from-friends day here at WTJ--like when Jeffy draws "Family Circus." Another long one, but a goodie. (I've cut it slightly because there were a couple of points I wasn't sure if the writer wanted repeated...)

I don't follow pundits much, but I hear two arguments repeated: 1. Saddam Hussein used powerful chemical weapons against his own people and, 2. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. I find both irrefutable but these arguments sound defensive to me. Have we accepted that Iraq was not a top threat either by terrorism or nuclear capability? Was this ever a question?

Apparently, yes!

What are the top three states that harbor terrorists? Number one is Saudi Arabia, number two is Pakistan and number three is probably Syria. Did Iraq have chemical weapons? Proven. Did Iraq destroy their chemical weapons in accordance with United Nation mandates? At a minimum, we know that Iraqi scientists retained samples of deadly chemical agents, yes?, even if stockpiles have not yet surfaced.

Did Iraq attempt to obtain nuclear capability? I believe so. But I always try to remember that things never happen in a vacuum. Why did Saddam Hussein try to get nuclear weapons? Saddam Hussein received intelligence, much as we have, that Iran was escalating its nuclear program. You write that Saddam Hussein was "bonkers." We know that Saddam is evil but he may yet be rational.

I suppose the argument is that Iraq was *a* threat, never said to be the top threat in some ranking system. I wish the Bush administration had never augmented its case for war by linking Iraq to terrorists, though.

Those links do exist, however, documented in a recent book and many articles. Did Iraq have a hand in 9/11? Most likely not. But it certainly had contact with the terrorists that did.

...

Too often, nations have not acted to threats when they should of and, in this light, our war against Iraq is a bold move, even if it has an air of being originated by political scientists or a think tank. I don't think it was the right move, though. Perhaps you believe the Bush administration's discrediting of Richard Clarke. I think the man is as smart as a whip, though, and when he says we have become less secure following the war on Iraq, I think I believe him.

Regarding other items, I have no more use for a Michael Moore than I do of a Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, who play with "facts" from the other side of the political spectrum. Would another president have prevented 9/11? Of course not. ...

Good points. I would just add that Clarke has changed his story about GWB's performance at least once.

@ 9:24:00 AM, ,

California Knows How to Party

Moore mail! I got an exceptional note that I'd like to excerpt. Lots of interesting points, but I'll zero in on these:

Throughout the movie, whenever someone on screen would say something
like "Bush is a bad man," the whole crowd would burst into applause.
Over and over again. At one point in the movie, though, Moore shows an
Iraqi woman whose family has all been killed in bombings screaming at
the camera. And she says, pretty clearly of Americans, "I hope bombs
destroy their houses. Then they'll learn!" and people in the house
started applauding. ... We're in real trouble when we start siding with people who want our own houses blown up -- an occasional trope I've encountered since 9/11 and have found terrifying and repugnant. Yes, there is a left fringe of people so consumed with anger and guilt at the actions of their country that they believe the U.S. deserves to be blown up. They are an extreme fringe, and they are fools. They are not the American left.

Nicely said. I would add here that I've found the response by many paleocons to 9/11 just as terrifying and repugnant. i.e., we deserved it for our adventuring throughout the world; or for our moral insouciance. Then there's the nativist wing, which would rather bomb Mexico City than Baghdad. I would note that "mainstream" conservatives (WSJ, National Review, Weekly Standard, Commentary, New Criterion) have rushed to attack those twats loudly and publicly, and write them out of the movement. I wish the mainstream left would do the same for their fringe.

Anyway, if the face of American conservatism were David Brooks, I think we'd all be in a much better position, and there'd be a lot less hate shooting between both sides. I disagree with him on nearly everything, but I really respect him, trust that he's truthful, and enjoy his opinions. Sadly, the faces of American conservatism are Tom DeLay,
George Bush and the like -- dangerous ideologues who seem just as
willing to blow off democracy to get what they want as the liberals you
complained about. You wonder why people assume everything they say is a
lie? Because we believe they've stolen our government, we believe
they're trying to line their pockets, and we believe they would rather
lie, cheat and steal than do things the old fashioned way: through
debate and persuasion and democracy. I can give you a host of reasons
for that, starting with disenfranchising black voters in Florida, going
to strong-arming representatives on the Medicare bill, and ending most
recently with the Abu Ghraib cover-up.

Just to address a couple points at the end:

--What cover-up at Abu Ghraib? The military announced the abuse, and its investigation, with a press release earlier this year. Nobody chose to follow up on it. Then the pictures came out, which had kinky sex appeal, and the media decided it had another My Lai on its hands. Should the army have said off the bat, "You're not going to believe how fucking repellent we are, look at this"?

--"We believe they would rather lie, cheat and steal than do things the old fashioned way: through debate and persuasion and democracy." What about judicial activism on the left, which is a huge sticking point for the right?

To use the latest example: I will stipulate that I am in favor of gay marriage. Pace Andrew Sullivan, I think it's a great idea, for good conservative reasons. Where was the debate, persuasion and democracy in Massachusetts, where courts essentially imposed gay marriage by fiat? Again, I agree with the goal here, and I'm glad that couples now have the right to marry--but judges clearly sidestepped that whole how-a-bill-becomes-a-law thing (and, if anything, opened the door for a backlash against gay marriage). Say what you will about the Federal Marriage Amendment (and, again, I'm not for it) but at least it's being put to a vote.

More broadly, I'd much rather if the debate were about policies rather than the essentialist moral character of one party or another. Personally, I'm a Bull Moose man, but look where they ended up.

@ 9:00:00 AM, ,

Home by Christmas

More responses. My correspondent from yesterday clarifies that he was talking about the War on Terror being the endless one, and that it's bizarre to wage war on a concept. I'd be perfectly happy to call it a war on radical Islam, or Islamofascism, or whatever; for political purposes that's not going to happen, so a War on Terror it is.

As for the endless bit: What, then, do you want? Ignoring for the moment "root-cause" arguments and speculation that Jeb Bush or the Mossad flew the planes into the World Trade Center, we have been attacked; we have been threatened repeatedly with more attacks and have foiled at least several that have been made public; ditto for allied nations.

You can hate GWB nine ways from Sunday, and those facts aren't going to go away. Nor is the fact that the enemy, while sponsored and sheltered by any number of states, not a conventional battlefield opponent that you can beat at a Stalingrad or Waterloo. We've already seen GWB get into hot water for even hinting prematurely (although emphatically not stating) that the tough part in Iraq was over; what, then, should he say about the fight we now face? "Few years, no sweat"? Should I write the Times headline now? Same for terror alerts, which my correspondent also mentioned: If we got no warnings, ever, and another attack came--what then? How many more "Jersey Girls" would be lining up to hoot and bitch in a Senate gallery?

Moreover, we have good reason to think the fighting won't be endless. Look at what we've accomplished so far: the Taliban deposed, and a friendly government installed in its former base of operations. Saddam Hussein in the hands of Iraqis, and his mishegais done with. Libya neutered as a terror threat. The Saudis afraid of their own people. The eyes of the world on Iran's mullahs and their nuclear program. Pakistan's nuclear salesman exposed and his clients on the run.

And, most dramatic of all, a Republican president has publicly repudiated the policy of cozying up to strongmen who give us a strategic advantage, and committed the U.S. to spreading representative democracy around the world. If you want to believe it's all about oil, or about Halliburton selling more toilets, fine; but even if it's just talk, which I do not cede, goddamn if it isn't the best talk you could imagine--and backed up by practical action besides.

It's fine to kvetch about how things are being run, but I think it's completely backward to say we're in a phony fight or the threat is being exaggerated for crass political purposes. Terrorists are not the USSR; they're not going to be held in check by proxy wars and Kissinger--or, for that matter, international committees and protest concerts on the Vineyard. They've said they want us gone, or they want us to follow their diktats. Both are unacceptable.

I don't want my son to die in the sand, and it galls me that other people's kids, who are braver than I'll ever be, have to give up their lives. But I would hope critics of the war could spare at least some blame for the people shooting at them, cutting off their heads and mutilating their bodies--not the strategists in Washington.

@ 8:19:00 AM, ,

The Man Speaks Tuesday, June 29, 2004

An instructive collection of quotes presented by David Brooks. And, just to reiterate one from 9/11/01:

They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the plane's destination of California – these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!

It gets better every time I read it. Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.

@ 10:07:00 AM, ,

Midnight at the Oasis

Dialoguing...an e-mail about my last post. Steyn is disingenuous, Hitch has his problems; I can't judge either because I haven't seen the movie. He also makes the good point that the argument there is a straw man for precisely that reason. Fair enough. You writes your blogs, you takes your chances.

But in the course of that, my correspondent makes an argument about the war in general that I can respond to with confidence.

One of the main thrusts of the movie is that Moore understands the point of Iraq: there's a lot of money in it. One of the others is that by waging a war that has no forseeable end, our populace will be willing to
fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act. And while Bush is indeed portrayed in a burlesque light, Moore also makes clear that Bush has played the country like a master...and Dems did nothing to stop him.

To be honest, I'm not sure if the writer is agreeing with Moore or just describing the movie. In either case, I have a great deal of respect for his (the writer's) intelligence and taste, and I think his points deserve a careful answer. If he's just describing the movie, take it for what it's worth--a secondhand critique and general statement of principle. If it's the writer's position, I'm not trying to attack him personally. I'm trying to do his observation justice by responding to it as fully and thoughtfully as I can after waking up 5 a.m. and already thinking about lunch. If anything, I'd like to creak him a few inches closer to my side of the fence, and pissing him off isn't the best way to do it. So apologies in advance for any tonal offensiveness.

In general, I find the kind of argument made above almost unanswerable--again, whether it's a description of Moore's stance or the writer's. When you break it down, it assumes the worst about people on our side (I refuse to put that in scare quotes) and takes nothing they say at face value--in fact, it assumes most everything they say is a lie, unless they're stupid enough to blurt out the truth. And it completely ignores the very real actions, and very public statements, of our enemies.

One of the main thrusts of the movie is that Moore understands the point of Iraq: there's a lot of money in it.

I just don't see where the money is. Are we talking about oil fields? They're now under the control of the Iraqi people, emphatically NOT the U.S., and they're not being looted by Saddam. And, for that matter, they're not being exploited as part of a massive multibillion-dollar oil-for-fraud ring under U.N. auspices. If we had been after oil, it would have been cheaper simply to buy it from Saddam rather than stick to an embargo for a decade or plunk down $88 billion on fighting a war and rebuilding a country.

If you mean "Halliburton": I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but that's gnostic fantasy-land--something for True Believers, like stories about Bill Clinton smuggling cocaine as governor of Arkansas. I'm not saying Bush and his cronies belong on Mount Rushmore, or are paragons of ethics, but you've got to at least nod at the following:

--Saddam Hussein had shown his aggressive tendencies. He had invaded his neighbors. He had used powerful chemical weapons against his own people. He had shown he had nuclear ambitions (which the Israelis nipped in the bud, once). And he had shown he was a world-class son of a bitch (jails for children, rape gangs, political prisoners' limbs cut off, fed into shredders, etc.)
--For the entire decade of the 1990s, the whole world, including Bill Clinton and vice-mountain-man Al Gore, accepted this picture of Saddam. (Or maybe Bill wanted to use Baghdad as a staging area for his coke deals?) Everyone agreed Iraq was a mess and Saddam was bonkers; it was just a question of what to do about him. Embargo? Blockade? Attack? Inspectors? What?
--Then comes 9/11. Remember the thumbnail of what came before, and what we faced. We already knew what a bunch of fundamentalist cave-men could do with sufficient secrecy and organization. What could an entire state do--a state that had shown hostility toward the U.S. and that was generally accepted to have large-scale chemical weapons? Bush's political enemies are blasting him for not doing enough before 9/11; how can you take that line and blast him for doing too much after?
--Bush chose to attack. You may not agree with his reasoning or his tactics. You may think, as the paleos and far left do, that his Wilsonian ambitions for the region are imperialistic and/or misguided. But coming up with a gnostic fantasy about the whole thing being motivated by a government contractor is unproductive.

One of the others is that by waging a war that has no forseeable end, our populace will be willing to fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act. [the last phrase a reference to Steyn's review]

No foreseeable end: What about the handover of power to the Iraqis yesterday? And their first free election, due in January? True, we will have a presence there for some time. But we were in Japan and Germany for years after the close of hostilities (still are, in fact!) before independent governments were installed. Was that all a scheme to bulk up Truman's haberdashery sales? Can we maybe give the government the benefit of some doubt here?

Populace...willing to fall for any old hooey: This line of argument reminds me of Billy Bragg, who as a socialist made a point of writing songs for and about "the people." Then, in the liner notes to a tribute to Woody Guthrie, he referred contemptuously to "the masses" who wanted happy songs during the Depression instead of the Woodman's pinko dirges. The trouble is, the "people" and the "masses" are usually one and the same. If you agitate on behalf of the former, as Moore does, it's unseemly to call them the latter when they don't do what you want. (Such as fall for Moore's sophisticated hooey instead of the "any, old" variety.)

Moore also makes clear that Bush has played the country like a master...and Dems did nothing to stop him.

I guess that accounts for Bush's staggering approval ratings and all those glowing reports in the major media. And his rampant success at getting his judicial choices confirmed and legislation passed; not to mention hushing up all those official inquiries into his actions and all those public statements opposing him. (Such as a certain Palme d'Or winner.)

Anyhow, enough of my bicentennial minute. I should be writing about laser guns, dammit!

@ 7:27:00 AM, ,

A Major Award! Monday, June 28, 2004

Finally, some good news: The original secret thing wins the industry's top award!

@ 9:54:00 PM, ,

Don't Try and Change My Mind Pt. II

I nearly forgot why I went with that title. I got invited, partially as a gag, I guess, to see the Palm d'Or winner over the weekend. The invitation, also partially as a gag, I guess, was to "challenge myself." This is something I'm perfectly willing to do. A good chunk of my daily reading is stuff I flat-out disagree with, and that makes me actively uncomfortable. If you've got a case to make, I'll listen.

But, for Chrissakes, make a case. A line comes to mind: Robert Christgau (one of the guys I disagree with but read anyway) describing an album of Jim Morrison's spoken-word poetry. Bobby describes the Lizard King as a self-indulgent jerk who would "jack off with both hands if he didn't have to carry a tune." That's my take on the Upper West Side's favorite fatso. I decline to spend two hours and ten dollars watching someone jack off with both hands because nobody's holding him to any rules. Christopher Hitchens, that notorious fascist, put it elegantly in a brilliant review:

Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.

Like he said. If you're making a documentary, keep your feet on the ground and your hands out of your pants. If you can't do that, call it a visual op-ed or an editorial cartoon or something. But don't pretend you're delivering the "real story." It's dishonest and it hurts the discourse.

My tutelary spirit, Mark Steyn, makes another nice point:

Bush has always been the issue for Moore. On September 11 itself, his only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and DC instead of Texas or, indeed, my beloved New Hampshire: "They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the plane's destination of California – these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for 9/11 when Clinton was president and Gore was ahead in the polls, and they'd have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected. Though Mohammed Atta took flying lessons in Florida, he apparently wasn't as exercised about its notorious hanging chads as Michael Moore. Mr Moore is guilty of what I believe psychologists call "projection".

The "Why didn't you terrorists kill the Bush voters?" line is not reprised in the movie, but the strange preoccupations it betrays drive the entire picture. Here's the way it works: if Bush is wearing the blue boxer shorts, they're a suspicious personal gift from Crown Prince Abdullah. If Bush is wearing the red boxer shorts, it's a conspiracy to distract public attention from the blue ones he was given by Crown Prince Abdullah. If he's wearing no boxer shorts, it's because he's so dumb he can't find his underwear in the morning.

So, shortly after 9/11, Moore wrote that footage of one of the World Trade Centre planes showed that it was being trailed by an F-16 – ie, the government could have shot it down but chose not to, so it could hit all those Al Gore voters. Imagine if, on September 11, the USAF had blown four passenger jets to kingdom come. Moore's film would be filled with poignant home movies of final Christmases and birthday parties and exploitative footage of anguished parents going to Washington to demand the truth about what happened that day and an end to the lame Bush spin about "threats" to public buildings.

Midway through the picture, a "peace" activist provides a perfect distillation of its argument. He recalls a conversation with an acquaintance, who observed, "bin Laden's a real asshole for killing all those people". "Yeah," says the "pacifist", "but he'll never be as big an asshole as Bush." That's who Michael Moore makes films for: those sophisticates who know that, no matter how many people bin Laden kills, in the assholian stakes he'll always come a distant second to Bush.

I can understand the point of being Michael Moore: there's a lot of money in it. What's harder to figure out is the point of being a devoted follower of Michael Moore. Apparently, the sophisticated, cynical intellectual class is so naïve it'll fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act.

Again: like he said. A Rocky Horror Show for bein-pensants; a Senior Spring Semester Follies where you get to make fun of the teachers. I've been that kid, and I've been that teacher. The former's more fun, but he doesn't know a goddamn thing. So I'll see you in "Spiderman."

@ 9:32:00 PM, ,

Don't Try and Change My Mind

All right already! I'm getting chided for slow posting. A friend supplies a ready-made idea (from the RNC Web site):

Conservative Punk Team Leader

Despite its reputation as a genre bred from anarchy and an "anti-establishment" mind-set, the punk rock community has always held on to
its core beliefs. However, for too long, punk has strayed from its roots as
a language and lifestyle of intelligence and independent thought--having
once relished its role as an alternative form to the "uninformed mainstream." The Republican National Committee’s Conservative Punk outreach group intends to bring back independent thought and offer an outlet for the promotion of conservatism and support of President Bush's agenda within the punk rock community--both new punks and old--through an open discussion of the issues and concerns of punks nationwide.

To which I say: Balls to you, big daddy. There might be some oblique libertarian angle where the philosophies intersect; but the aesthetics are going to be insurmountable, I think. (Although somebody else told me Iggy Pop backed Reagan in 1980; anybody know the story with that?)

As I said earlier, part of the point of this blog is to show that art and politics can move independently of each other. But I think the RNC reaching out to punks, whoever they may be, will come off as deeply condescending, deeply phony or deeply weird. If the RNC has any appeal to the punk crowd, I think it would be the wary esteem of tough guys on opposing teams. Not much crossover.

In fact, just writing about this at such length makes me feel a little silly, so let me get back to my favorite topic: aesthetics. Tonight's theme: The roots of fascism run deep! The follow is excertped from a 5th-grade report on Winslow Homer by your correspondent (unearthed by Mother WTJ):

Call me traditional. But the reason I chose him was that I simply cannot adjust to 'today's' art. A few strokes of paint, it is passed off as 'expressions' or 'feelings.' No. Homer was an artist who, I believe, was one of the last of his kind. I enjoy 'classic' art, not today's splatches of purple and pink.

I can't remember how much of that was bullshit--probably most of it; the essay was for a DAR contest--but just on style alone I deserved a good cock-punch. I may be redeemed, however, by an entry in my eighth-grade autograph book under HERO: Al Frankin. Now there's a splatch of purple...

@ 8:57:00 PM, ,