Billmon:
Bush: So what’s it about, Antonio?
Blair: Well, this guy kills this Arab and then he . . .
Bush: Sounds like one of Clancy’s books. Can I borrow your copy?—
I. Is It Safe?
Back to Main
August 16, 2006
WB: Is It Safe? + Stranger Than Fiction
Comments
So What?
You’re in a bit of a quandry. Sure, you
live in a nice quiet neighborhood, cool
greenery, well kept homes, paved streets,
a nice place to live out your life.
You’ve got a little problem with credit,
you’re about $40T in debt, your Chinese
banker is starting to sniff at your refi
app’s, and hasn’t returned your calls.
Your damn car is a bit of a gas hog,
and you don’t got the go to fill it.
Your kids college ate your life savings,
that and the market going south like that
in 2000 when you’d hocked the house for
shares of Zappata.com. Now the kids can’t
find jobs, and are still living at home.
So you’re getting a few gray hairs, and
can’t seem to get it up anymore. Ouch!
And then there’s the neighbor. Seemed
like a quiet enough guy when he bought
the place, kept to himself, good kids
always into their studies, they really
fixed up the place too.
But his wife is kinda shy, he doesn’t
go to your church, and he’s, you know,
not W-H-I-T-E, so you haven’t invited
him to the neighborhood barbecue.
Well, you’re sitting on your back deck,
drinking a brewski while the kielbasa
grills on the barbie, and you overhear
your neighbor complaining about taxes.
Then you find out from your buddy this
new guy is loaded, cash up the gazoo,
hey, he owns a chain of gas stations!
Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot!
Do you:
A) Introduce yourself, and invite him
over for a potluck so you can meet his
family and chit-chat to pass the time?
B) Knock on his door, ask if you can
borrow his car, and while you’re at it,
ask for a loaner of $50 to gas it up?
C) Declare him an “unfriendly”, kick
his door down, throw him into jail,
rape his wife, lock the kids in the
basement and starve them, then burn
the house down around them?
If you answered C), introducing the
Project for a New American Century!
You’re a true standing-tall Pioneer!
Welcome to the club, Mr. Neo is it?
Posted by: Al Catelli | Aug 16 2006 5:23 utc | 1
More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended.
From here
That this delusional, drug-addled, profoundly ignorant cocksucker can even tie his shoes amazes me.
Posted by: ran | Aug 16 2006 7:40 utc | 2
Mr. Flatworld is pissed:
Mr. Cheney, if we’re in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why have you and President Bush resisted any serious effort to get Americans to conserve energy? Why do you refuse to push higher mileage standards for U.S. automakers or a gasoline tax that would curb our imports of oil? Here we are in the biggest struggle of our lives and we are funding both sides – the U.S. military with our tax dollars and the radical Islamists and the governments and charities that support them with our gasoline purchases – and you won’t lift a finger to change that. Why? Because it might impose pain on the oil companies and auto lobbies that fund the G.O.P., or require some sacrifice by Americans.
Mr. Cheney, if we’re in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why do you constantly use the ‘war on terrorism’ as a wedge issue in domestic politics to frighten voters away from Democrats. How are we going to sustain such a large, long-term struggle if we are a divided country?
Please, Mr. Cheney, spare us your flag-waving rhetoric about the titanic struggle we are in and how Democrats just don’t understand it. It is just so phony – such a patent ploy to divert Americans from the fact that you have never risen to the challenge of this war. You will the ends, but you won’t will the means. What a fraud!
Looking at the evolving situation in Iraq and in Lebanon, it seems to me that the major conclusion to be drawn is this one: Perle/Wurmser’s Clean Break strategy has turned out to be counterproductive. It was meant to split Arab countries into smaller sectarian units thereby rendering them even more demobilized and impotent than the despotic “secular” nation states preceding them.
The opposite has turned out to be the case and Hezballah is the model: it is sectarian, highly mobilized, has a societal project, a concrete Utopia larger than itself and is thus completely geared up for war. The fact that its cadres recite the writings of Imam Ali rather than those by Mao, is secondary. Primary is the degree of mobilization that has been achieved.
Iraq today is a murderous mess, but once the dust settles, it too — especially if divided into autonomous regions — will be much more highly mobilized as a country than it ever was under Saddam.
So it seems likely that the Israelis will soon start pampering the Assad regime, for fear of something much mor threatening.
Mobilization is key in war and Hezballah has achieved a degree that materialistic high-tech Israel can only dream of.
Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 16 2006 13:56 utc | 4
Guthman Bey has raised a brilliant point of analysis.
The Islamic nations are not democratic by nature; they are equal parts tribal and sectarian. As much as all Muslims in the world are part of the umma, or brotherhood of believers, it is even more so with members of one’s own sect of Islam.
There is no inherent problem in this. The problem only arises when you force people to radicalize their thinking, by forcing duress upon them.
When human beings are placed under extreme stress as a society, as in the London Blitz, or the recent foreign-born resource wars in the Middle East, a great deal of superfluous societal norms fall away. When tribe and sect and family are all that remain, they will not be let go of even at pain of death.
Because they are, in the end, all you’ve got left besides the fact you’re still breathing.
Human beings respond this way all over the world. Oppression makes them radical, and immensely strengthens their resolve to resist and strike back.
There would be no Hezbullah if not for Israeli-American oppression. If not for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, Hezbullah would be a civic club.
The more that Western interference and oppression continues in the region, the harder and sharper we forge the swords that will be used against us.
If you can imagine how the Brits felt under Hitler’s bombardment, if you can imagine how all Americans felt after Pearl Harbor, then you can imagine the terrible resolve that fills the Muslim world this morning.
That resolve will not not fade away under further bombardment.
Mr. Cheney, if you use nukes on Persia, you will only make that resolve radioactive.
It’s time for a whole other approach.
Posted by: Antifa | Aug 16 2006 16:34 utc | 6
After reading Antifa’s excellent and insightful comments #6 and with regards to the topic of ‘is it safe’, I thought this would fit like a glove within the boundries of this discussion:
The State of Emergency
Giorgio Agamben
The structural proximity between law and anomy, between pure violence and the state of emergency also has, as is often the case, an inverted figure. Historians, ethnologists, and folklore specialists are well acquainted with anomic festivals, like the Roman Saturnalias, the charivari, and the Medieval carnival, that suspend and invert the legal and social relations defining normal order. Masters pass over into the service of servants, men dress up and behave like animals, bad habits and crimes that would normally be illegal are suddenly authorized. Karl Meuli was the first to emphasize the connection between these anomic festivals and the situations of suspended law that characterize certain archaic penal institutions. Here, as well as in the iustitium, it is possible to kill a man without going to trial, to destroy his house, and take his belongings. Far from reproducing a mythological past, the disorder of the carnival and the tumultuous destruction of the charivari re-actualize a real historical situation of anomy. The ambiguous connection between law and anomy is thus brought to light: the state of emergency is transformed into an unrestrained festival where one displays pure violence in order to enjoy it in full freedom.
The Western political system thus seems to be a double apparatus, founded in a dialectic between two heterogeneous and, as it were, antithetical elements; nomos and anomy, legal right and pure violence, the law and the forms of life whose articulation is to be guaranteed by the state of emergency. As long as these elements remain separated, their dialectic works, but when they tend toward a reciprocal indetermination and to a fusion into a unique power with two sides, when the state of emergency becomes the rule, the political system transforms into an apparatus of death. We ask: why does nomos have a constitutive need for anomy? Why does the politics of the West have to measure up to this interior void? What, then, is the substance of the political, if it is essentially assigned to this legal vacuum? As long as we are not able to respond to these questions, we can no more respond to this other question whose echo traverses all of Western political history: what does it mean to act politically? … (more)
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 16 2006 16:50 utc | 7
Addition to Antifa’s #6 about people determined to resist if under the pressure of something like the Blitz or Pearl Harbor — Christians in Syria were praying in churches for Nasrallah
Syria’s Christians rally behind Hizbollah
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
DAMASCUS (Reuters) – Seventy-seven-year-old Mona Muzaber lights a candle for Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah at the Orthodox Church of the Cross in the centre of Damascus. […] Pray for the resistance, pray for Hassan Nasrallah. He is defending justice,” Father Elias Zahlawi told the congregation at special mass […]
There seems to be growing support for Nasrallah among Lebanese expats worldwide, most of whom are Christians.
– I read a story about rich Lebanese-Venezuelans who were hostile to Chavez on political grounds, but are very appreciative that he supported Lebanon and not Syria right from the beginning
– somebody on “Angry Arab” said that in the church where he grew up, the parishioners who used to be almost on the fascist side, had gotten pretty pro-Hezbollah [I presume he was referring to Maronite Christians who were allies of Israel decades ago].
I guess that is what precision bombing of both Shia and Christian areas will get you. Universal hate.
Posted by: Owl | Aug 16 2006 18:42 utc | 8
This story in today’s Globe and Mail is contrary to my post above — it says that some are growing hostile to both Israel and Hezbollah – but presumably more so toward Israel.
As the returnees took in the scope of the destruction — entire villages laid to waste with barely a building left standing, the dead still being counted — the victorious mood of a day earlier as they streamed back waving Hezbollah flags, quickly evaporated.
In its place rose a deeper-than-ever hatred of Israel, as well as something newer and rarely voiced: anger at Hezbollah for having brought the ire of the Israeli army raining down on their village.
Posted by: Owl | Aug 16 2006 18:59 utc | 9
“Mobilization is key in war and Hezballah has achieved a degree that materialistic high-tech Israel can only dream of.”
Some Israelis realize this themselves. I saw this in Ha’aretz a few weeks ago, written by an old Zionist Labor war horse:
The new elite of capital, which replaced the old elite of service, was not value-based but exploitative. It did not see to the general good but to the personal and class good. Thus, no second Israeli republic was founded here to succeed the ascetic and determined republic of siege that existed until the mid-1980s. Instead, it forged a free-market reality that is not restrained by a valid state-oriented approach. It forged a regime of rampant capitalism and extreme individualism that debilitates any sense of solidarity and enervates the national immune system. It promised peace and again promised peace and turned the empty promise of peace into a dogma. It turned Israel into a pleasure yacht whose captains, drunk with arrogance, and whose owners, intoxicated with corruption, have absolutely no understanding of the great looming storm.
There’s a lot more, much of it along the Orientalist lines of the savage Arab and the need to “do what is necessary to live in the East,” etc. — like Golda Meier’s lines in “Munich,” if you saw the movie, except stripped of any illusions about the “values” of “civilization.”
It’s a brutal piece of writing — so brutal, virtually neo-fascistic, that I decided not to cite it or link to it on my own blog. But there is a core of truth to what the guy is saying: A neo-liberal, consumerist Israel could be at a fatal disadvantage unless the entire Middle East can be converted into neo-liberal, consumerist dystopia. But all the trends are running the other way . . .
Posted by: billmon | Aug 16 2006 19:52 utc | 10
Hi billmon –
Instead, it forged a free-market reality that is not restrained by a valid state-oriented approach. It forged a regime of rampant capitalism and extreme individualism that debilitates any sense of solidarity and enervates the national immune system. It promised peace and again promised peace and turned the empty promise of peace into a dogma. It turned Israel into a pleasure yacht whose captains, drunk with arrogance, and whose owners, intoxicated with corruption, have absolutely no understanding of the great looming storm.
Don’t you think, however, this article is missing something? How about all those billions from the US government that sustain this state? That is not a true neo-liberal economy, at all.
Posted by: 2nd anon | Aug 16 2006 19:59 utc | 11
The claim bush read camus is funny, but also disgusting that any great text would suffer his interpretations. but why the stranger? one could not offer a text of greater verisimilitude of its reader’s character than the stranger. man shoots arab, incapable of empathy or guilt.
wtf? it’s just fucking weird. i know tony snow is trying to put a shit-shine on bush’s “legacy,” but the stranger?
it’s like richard speck reading little women.
Posted by: slothrop | Aug 16 2006 21:22 utc | 12
more like henry lee lucas reads helter skelter.
i don’t get it. are they trying to cultivate the image of a man who, willing to commit the most grotesque crimes against humanity, finds the time to repose in the company of great art to discover what a pig he is, after all?
the grand inquisitor reads city of god. andf then impales virgin.
i just don’t get it.
why not zane gray, leon uris? or harold robbins? a sex scene at the end of exactly every other ten-page chapter.
Posted by: slothrop | Aug 16 2006 21:31 utc | 13
it’s as if our culture can be plundered and reconciled with any ambition for glory and oblivion.
i hate these people.
anna missed should write the definitive aesthetics of our time: art: what’s in it for me? or, the comparative greatness of albert camus, family circus, monday night football? or, waterboarding: performance art in Iraq 2003-2008.
Posted by: slothrop | Aug 16 2006 21:39 utc | 14
I would suggest that possibly Bush has been told that many Christian clergy & writers have found inspiration in Camus’ writing. The Stranger is a fairly straightforward reading if you are going to begin to read Camus.
Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 16 2006 21:45 utc | 15
well well well. here’s your case study, anna missed.
if art is intended to speak the historic specificity of suffering and beauty, then that is the triumph of ideology over all art.
Posted by: slothrop | Aug 16 2006 21:58 utc | 16
oh, anna missed, I also have the epigram for your aesthetic theory: from benjamin:
“the ground of the Third Reich is stamped down hard and firm, and no more grass grows there…”
Posted by: slothrop | Aug 16 2006 22:16 utc | 17
arrow
leave it to the christians to ruin another good story
Posted by: slothrop | Aug 16 2006 22:18 utc | 18
what a fucking inhuman desolation this age of bush is.
Posted by: slothrop | Aug 16 2006 22:19 utc | 19
slothrop – it’s Christians that Bush wouldn’t like much who’ve been most influenced by Camus. People like Rev. William Sloane Coffin have spoken about Camus’ important influence on them, don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him.
Posted by: 2nd anon | Aug 17 2006 1:22 utc | 20
Re: Ari Shavit’s article. (stunning btw).
“…Is there a diplomatic route to blocking the Iranian threat, perhaps by means of a peace treaty with Syria?”
Interesting, they are already courting Syria.
Incidentally in today’s WSJ some Kissinger associate advocated returning the Golan to Syria.
So I guess we have identified a winner. Rice was right, there was no need to talk to Bashar and friends, since they clearly knew what they had to do.
The problem is that Bashar doesn’t give a shit about the Golan, he wants back the Syrian provinces he was forced to leave last year…
Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 17 2006 3:46 utc | 21
@Slothrop – how’s yr. Mom? Was thinking about you today, & wondering if you were busy taking care of her as she regains her strength. It takes so long for anyone, esp. someone elderly to regain their strength after going septic.
Posted by: jj | Aug 17 2006 4:04 utc | 22
thanks jj…she’s hanging in there. I gave her a hopi-translated copy of the stranger. should pick up her spirits.
Posted by: slothrop | Aug 17 2006 16:33 utc | 23
@Slothrop. Good. As a reference point, I’ve been helping an older friend – early 70’s, no heart problems – come back from going septic in January. She’s just now getting close to regaining her strength. 6 mos. is a ballpark figure. I can’t recommend strongly enough that you look around for a good Naturopath nearby as they are The Repositories of knowledge in how to rebuild immune systems so your mom can fight off any further infections.
You might find yourownhealthandfitness.org an excellent repository of such information – google layna berman. (link to her stuff on immune system”)You can hear her programs weekly. Fascinating state of the art medical knowledge on complementary medicine – that is medicine that is far more comprehensive than merely AMA stuff.
Posted by: jj | Aug 17 2006 17:28 utc | 24