New Blog at New Domain
A Slow Motion Move
Happy Thanksgiving
David Horowitz: Verminous Anti-Intellectual Hack
Incompatible Cleansers
Falcon & the Sailor Boy
Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork
Oregano, Thyme, Savory, Peppers & Potatoes & Plato
Feeling a Draft
Militant Christianists
Inculcating Christianist Ignorance
Agent Orange Reparations
Nancy Bauer (A Slow Motion Move)
jd (A Slow Motion Move)
Nancy Bauer (A Slow Motion Move)
Pascale Soleil (A Slow Motion Move)
MJ (David Horowitz: Verminous Anti-Intellectual Hack)
alan (Happy Thanksgiving)
Dan Biston (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
jd (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
Dan Biston (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
jd (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
Inculcating Christianist Ignorance · Nov 13, 07:03 PM
As this article in New Scientist points out, there are real public policy issues involved with the Christianist home schooling movement, but, you know, I can’t help thinking that these brainwashed children are going to fail spectacularly if & when they step outside their subculture. It is a subculture with very poor reality-testing skills & poor reality testing is not a good qualification for success in what remains a secular culture. If there was a cult raising their children to believe that, say, the germ theory of infectious disease was simply a materialist myth & that people got sick because they were possessed by demons, those parents might, at least in jurisdictions outside the deep south, might be considered unfit. Teaching one’s children the junk science of Creationism will make them unfit to participate in the wider society. And I guess that’s all right with me. The idea that Patrick Henry College will produce a generation of Christianist politicians who will be able to get elected to Congress, or even to state legislatures in most places, strikes me as improbable. These people are really not all that well fitted for life outside their protected zones. Over this century, I suspect that the US will develop into two distinct cultures, with Christian fundamentalists retreating into enclaves mostly in the deep south & parts of the mid-west. At the start of the next century our descendants may very well look on Christianist tribal areas as exotic & primitive places for specialist research & eco-tourism.
Comment [9]
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Agent Orange Reparations · Nov 13, 06:11 PM
Vietnam has been asking for reparations for the use of chemical weapons against its civilian population for thirty years. And now the US is beginning to talk about doing something? The use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War is among the most shameful episodes in American military history. Nixon is dead, but Kissinger ought to be tried for war crimes. We should have begun cleaning up this mess twenty-five years ago. Instead, we as a country indulged the fantasies of the black flag cult & demonized Vietnam & the Vietnamese in countless racist films, speeches, & newspaper articles. Who knows, while we’re cleaning up all that dioxin-laced soil, maybe we’ll discover a few fragments of bone or a belt buckle to be sent off for forensic analysis in order to feed the POW / MIA cult’s insatiable hunger for relics.
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Speaking of Youth Culture · Nov 12, 10:14 PM
After our freshman year at the UW, most of my high school friends returned to their parent’s homes for the summer. Not me. My parents had moved to Houston for my father’s work & I would not have gone home in any case. I was long gone. But I remember going to the house of a Jewish girlfriend, Jane, let’s call her, & ringing the bell. When her mother opened the door, she turned her head back over her shoulder & without missing a beat, called out, “Jane, it’s the Messiah!” To this day, that may be the funniest ad lib I’ve ever heard. Here’s the evidence. The photo itself is probably from 1970, the sticker with the date representing the last time I paid student activity fees, I think.
Comment [3]
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Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me · Nov 12, 09:03 PM
After, oh, thirty-five years, I’ve been rereading Richard Fariña’s novel of beatnik / campus / proto-hippie drug culture, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. I’m getting ready to teach a new course, The Literature of American Popular Music, & have to decide on a final book list this week. I remember loving the book when I was twenty. Much more than, say, On the Road, though neither of those books could compete for sheer fucked-up energy with Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King or J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. The protagonists of the latter two novels are a bit older than Gnossos Pappadopoulis, the hero of Fariña’s novel, in years if not in reality-testing finesse. And they pre-date youth culture. One of the interesting things about Fariña’s novel is that it paints a picture of the birth of youth culture. It it a window on the birth of the American teenager as a cultural construct.
It is remarkable how well the novel holds up. Fariña has a genius for both language & narrative. What worries me is whether my students are up for the density of historical & literary allusion. Clarkson students are, alas, hopelessly square & without meaningful literary background. If I teach this book, I’m going to be doing a lot of explaining. Maybe I could set up a wiki so students could collectively decode the slang, drug references, literary allusions, etc. Probably can’t do that in Blackboard, so it would have to be an external link to something freestanding. Might work, though.
Comment [2]
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Social Security Reform? Indeed! · Nov 12, 07:43 PM
This post by David Kurtz at TPM of course points to a true political fact: that gutting Social Security turned out to be a Republican initiative soundly rejected by the vast majority of Americans. But let’s not call what the Republicans were proposing “reform,” okay? The president wanted & still wants to do away with Social Security.
Comment [1]
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Knocking People's Hats Off · Nov 12, 07:36 PM
Remarkable photo-essay here.
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Hanoi Street Kids · Nov 12, 07:22 PM
I’ve lived in Hanoi & the street kids can be a pain in the ass. They can also be charming & helpful. Many of them are homeless. I suppose they sometimes commit petty crimes, picking tourist pockets mostly, but nothing to deserve the treatment described in this article. Here is a picture I took in 2001 at the exact place the BBC piece describes. From their looks, they’re probably from the northern mountains, members of one of Vietnam’s eighty or so ethnic minorities. They were nice kids, just trying to get by. I was in Hanoi when Bill Clinton visited & I don’t remember this sort of sweeping of of street kids.
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Decedent Empires · Nov 12, 12:06 PM
I love the visual arts & in particular I love paintings on canvas. This tradition is so rich in nuance, variation, & sheer mastery that no matter how many times the avant garde writes off easel painting, the practice continues to produce brilliant artists like Richard Diebenkorn, Brice Marden, & generation after generation of painters who refuse to yield the genre to irrelevance. It is, apparently, a deeply sensual medium for both painter & viewer; it keeps attracting both, obviously. And I don’t resent Marden getting rich from painting, nor do I mind Diebenkorn’s heirs profiting from the painter’s genius. There is something there, after all, of worth. How do calibrate the value is another matter. The market for paintings is one way; considering the justice of such prices would represent another approach, but then one would have to monetize justice, probably a bad idea.
Still, the use of paintings as a medium of economic exchange & as markers of social status has always struck me as inimical to the spirit of the art. And, yes, I know that spirit is a cheap substitute of essence & that I don’t really believe that art practices have essences. I just can’t think of another way to put this. Clearly, I am drawing on the Romantic elevation of art to the “spiritual” realm, though that very move tends toward the anti-Romantic separation of art from life. (Perhaps Romanticism is just the dream that life can aspire to the orderly condition of art.) Nevertheless, whatevery my own romantic reservations, the use of artworks as markers of wealth & status is no doubt as old as civilization.
But that is prologue: The recent sale of four Gustav Klimt paintings for multiple millions of dollars seems, at least, historically appropriate. The paintings were made in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (itself a late, last gasp of the Hapsburg Empire) & have now reached the status of fetish in the last days of the American Empire. Late empires seem to produce astonishing works of art, philosophy & poetry. Wittgenstein was thinking in Vienna even as Klimt was painting there, though it is hard to imagine two more disparate sensibilities.
The irony here is that those Klimt paintings have become fetishes of wealth & power in our own disintegrating imperial system.
Sensual & superficial, Klimt’s work has long attracted & repelled me. Golden surfaces & pallid skin tinged with blue. None of Klimt’s pinks look healthy, either, have the flushed look of fever. Sex & death, of course & Klimt is a master of that particular nexus. Klimt’s eroticism is perfect for this American historical moment, which finds the country at war with itself, the frantic, objectifying sexuality of MTV & internet porn ranged against the profound puritanism & homophobia of the religious right, with its self-denial & hypocrisy. That the Klimt paintings went for record prices is not surprising. He’s an artist appropriate to our times, though finally he has little to teach us. His is not a critical sensibility.
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George McGovern, American Hero · Nov 10, 06:46 PM
George McGovern, who spoke the truth about Vietnam, speaks the truth about Iraq:
Withdrawal is not only a political imperative but a strategic requirement. As many retired American military officers now admit, Iraq has become, since the invasion, the primary recruiting and training ground for terrorists. The longer American troops remain in Iraq, the more recruits will flood the ranks of those who oppose America not only in Iraq but elsewhere.
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Sea Urchin Genome · Nov 10, 12:02 AM
Everything that lives is holy, life delights in life (Wm. Blake). Or at least closer to us in evolutionary terms than you might think.
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