| Oh, those amazing resources at one's fingertips |
[Dec. 12th, 2007|01:21 pm] |
Yes, I can remember the day when library cards were our only recourse, should one wish to find an article about a particular topic.
Despite the limitations of the computer -- for example, a real person has to decide how to categorize thousands of texts -- I am truly amazed at how fun research can be. I'd forgotten that, in my memories of the difficulty of teaching the research paper.
But the necessity of learning research skills can't be denied. First, one must be able to refer to a more-authoritative source than oneself. Second, one must find that more-authoritative source in order to say nearly anything of intellectual merit. That's just how it works.
So, are you interested in Britney Spears? Via CECybrary's EBSCOHost or "Academic Search Premier" type in "Britney Spears" and then select "academic journals," and you'll find this paper from an academic, refereed (or edited by PhDs) journal. I'll share the citation, which EBSCOHost does in MLA format for you.
Hawkins, Stan, and John Richardson. "Remodeling Britney Spears: Matters of Intoxication and Mediation." Popular Music & Society 30.5 (Dec. 2007): 605-629. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 12 December 2007. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,uid&db=aph&AN=27256724&loginpage=Login.asp&site=ehost-live>.
And with the wonders of modern digital technology, I can link the video in this humble blog; I'd embed it, but BritneyTV won't let me.
Yep, that's right. A 26-page academic paper about Britney's "Toxic" song and video. By two real professors.
I just found a source that can help you the next time you decide to say something about the Terrorists. Via scholar.google.com, I found this article: Jerrold M. Post's "Killing in the Name of God: Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda." That's here.
So you thought Google was so great? They don't do the automatic-citation that the CECybrary search engines do.
And is Google a source? No, it gets you to a source. Same thing for Wikipedia. Do not cite Wikipedia, ever.
Anyway, Jerrold Post has a lot of smart things to say about the psychology of Sunni-Arab Fundametalist Extremists, or "The Terrorists." It's quite and amazing read, but did they have to have the "it's" when it should've been "its." To every one a mulligan, I guess.
So, there's a word I used in English 101 class on Tuesday morning that described how to read. "Scavenge!" That's the word. Find what you need, take it, and cite it.
And did you know? "Despite efforts by the international law enforcement community, Al Qaeda's financial network appears to remain strong." You read that right: Al Qaeda's money is tied up in legitimate banks, stocks, bonds, and holdings.
Man, despite his typos, Jerrold Post is awesome. He points out that without killing Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda "would eventually recover and continue" because the organization has "prepared [and] promoted individuals...to leadership positions."
Post also says -- and this describes where the "War on Terror" stands as of now -- "Should Bin Laden disappear, the myth of the hidden imam would probably be infused with mythic power...." Wow.
Post finishes by saying, "Al Qaeda has become a catalyst for an international jihadist movement that will continue to grow independent of the original parent organization."
This has ramifications for the upcoming 2008 elections. The Left has been kind of left out of the terrorism game, but it occurs to me that while America has been discussing whether or not we should use torture if Al Qaeda uses torture, we should've been thinking more strategically. Like: "Should we be as flexible as Al Qaeda in our operations?"
We've been the complete opposite, using Cold War-era military implements to occupy not one but two Islamic countries. And we have had a fool at the helm, saber-rattling against Iran. Woe is America.
I guess what this goes to show is that I love my job, which is getting people to write better, as well as deal in an intellectual manner with the questions of our time.
And the library resources can really get you there: Britney Spears, analyzing Al Qaeda, and with the Opposing Viewpoints resource on CECybrary, a term paper's sources are even more accessible -- under topics like "Iraq," "smoking," "media violence," and "capital punishment," among many others.
Good researching,
Mr. Schenck
Post Script: Here's a gem from the Britney Spears "Toxic" paper:
In the context of television, Max from Dark Angel and Sydney Bristow from Alias (both
undoubtedly modeled on Lara Croft) are equally salient intertextual touchstones.
In all of the above, electronic dance music is an integral component in portraying
heroines as active (even hyper-active) while drawing on the posthuman aura of the
cyborg, which is effectively mapped onto the non-human qualities of the femme
fatale(14). Spears, like Lara Croft and Dark Angel’s Max leaps acrobatically from
buildings and staves off foes with stylized martial arts moves. These women are not
always stronger than the men they come up against but they invariably know how to
out-maneuver them. |
|
|
| _No Country for Old Men_; its ideas and precedents |
[Dec. 5th, 2007|03:11 pm] |
Last night my brother Paul and I saw the new Coen Brothers film No Country for Old Men. Walking out of it, Paul seemed bothered by the nihilism -- or the lack of a satisfactory conclusion -- of the film.
Speaking with him, I said that "It's a one-week movie. Some movies you watch, and you don't think about them again. Other movies you think about for a day. No Country you figure out a week later."
Warning: plot spoilers ahead.
I'm still figuring the film, which has been praised by the critics, but surely has left many filmgoers unsatisfied. Why? The villain, psychopath Anton Chigurh (played marvelously by Javier Bardem), does not die in the end.
Full disclosure: I loved this movie. It is so noirish, and the total (I think) lack of non-diegetic sound results in a surreal realism -- if there is such a thing -- that amps up the suspense of No Country to levels not seen by the horror genre.
There is a philosophic reason for this. Based on a novel by the impenetrable documentarian of violence, Cormac McCarthy, the film forces the viewer to choose between twin endgames: the way of absurd, violent nihilism (represented by Chigurh) or the way of "normal" humanity and optimism (represented by Tommy Lee Jones' character Sheriff Ed Tom Bell).
Down to the level of the character names, Sheriff "Bell" represents the folks that gather in community together, against Chigurh, whose name, pronounced "shi-gur," as is noted in the film, creates a torture of all things sweet: sugar. And Chigurh strikes me as one of the most solitary characters in a film.
The rest of the characters are proles caught in the chase of big money, even the gangster Mexicans whose corpses litter the film, and white businessmen, and especially the film's mouse, Josh Brolin's Llewelyn Moss. As his surname suggests, while he thinks he is running along the road on the same terms as the seemingly supernatural Chigurh, he is prostrate, and fated for tragedy for his hubris -- he believes he can get away with $2 million from a US/Mexico border deal gone bad.
Sheriff Bell views all of this from his distant vantage point, and with attempts at cynicism, but he can make no sense of the human violence he has witnessed. Chigurh's killing spree functions as a horrifying retirement gold watch, and as the film ends, his dialogue seems unimportant (or at least really hard to remember), but his tone is that of the confused viewer with no answers for the cheapness of human life.
Sheriff Bell's vantage point is, of course, ours, and confronted with nihilism and evil, he can only stand motionless as the tentacles of evil surround him. The man cannot even pray for for the innocent to be spared slaughter; Chigurh is still out there, still out there, still out there.
It is true: we are all positioned in such a manner. We know the violence and death of the world, which an intelligent person could term inexorable, methodical, unstoppable. You know the figures -- 6 million dead Jews, 20 million dead Russians, dead Cambodians, dead Iraqis, dead Americans, dead men, women, elderly, children, babies. Dead, dead, dead. Killed and killed.
We avoid confronting this fact of humanity: more will die, and we can do nothing. There are no prayers, there is no stopping this. And things have always been like this: one man killing another, and another man watching.
In its way, No Country for Old Men recalls some of the great works in its confrontation of this theme. Those who say of this film, "I didn't like it," are at some level uncomfortable with how the film, like a slow maze, forces you to agree: Yes, violence has no meaning or logic; the stories we put around it -- Us versus Them -- utterly fail.
Chigurh lives because he is not a real person as much as he is the instantiation of inexorable violence. Animals, and men, kill, and always will.
Upon further thinking, I realized that No Country has a precedent in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Compare the titles -- very parallel in idea and intonation. The Misfit kills the lambs for no reason, and walks off. So does Chigurh.
No Country addresses violence masterfully using Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt or alienation effect. That's why you don't leave with a smile on your face -- no one can with this film, I think.
"I am content," says the villain Shylock says in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. But Chigurh and death's march will never be content. We call this "modernism" or "postmodernism" -- the disposition that assumes this absurdity of human existence.
I could talk much more about the film -- it's the kind to go right back and see in the theatre again. But perhaps I should say that this film doesn't feel like a "Coen Brothers" flick. It feels like a Cormac McCarthy film, and a couple of my fellow graduate students were indignant at reading one of McCarthy's novels, as so too will you be indignant at No Country for Old Men -- delightfully so. |
|
|
| On Reading: Thomas Mann, _The Magic Mountain_, 1924 |
[Oct. 15th, 2007|04:34 pm] |
Naphta smiled. Illiteracy! And now Settembrini had spoken the word he evidently believed would instill true terror, had held up the Gorgon's head and the sight of which everyone would dufifully turn ashen. He, Naphta, regretted having to disappoint his vis-a-vis, for he found the humanist fear of the very word "illiteracy" very amusing. One would have to be a Renaissance man of letters, a verbal dandy, a Gongorist, a Marinist, a fop of the estilo culto, to endow the disciplines of reading and writing with such exaggerated educational importance and imagine that intellectual night reigned where such skills were lacking. Did Herr Settembrini not recall that the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach, had been illiterate? In those days it was thought disgraceful to send to school any lad who did not wish to become a cleric, and this scorn for the literary arts, on the part of the aristocracy and commonfolk alike, had remained the hallmark of genuine nobility; whereas the literary man, that true son of humanism and the bourgeoisie, who could read and write--which nobles, warriors, and common people could do only poorly or not at all--could do nothing else, understood absolutely nothing about the world, and remained a Latin windbag, a master of speech, who left real life to honest folk, which was why he had also turned politics into a bag of wind, full of rhetoric and beautiful literature, call radicalism and democracy in party jargon, and so on and so forth. |
|
|
| Racism and Time; Iraq and Vietnam |
[Sep. 23rd, 2007|06:47 pm] |
The Bush Administration immigration/asylum policy for Iraqis is an abject failure. More and more Iraqis are leaving their violent country, but George W. Bush does not want them in the United States, surely for political reasons -- to keep the war "over there". (Surely the State Department, who controls immigration (or doesn't?), and Condi Rice are doing Bush's bidding.)
And one of the primary justifications for this continued Iraq War is so "we're fighting them over there instead of here".
There is more than a tinge of racism to this sentiment. The recent (Republican-funded) "Freedom's Watch" ads use a mysterious third person to paint our enemies -- "They attacked us," says the maimed vet, with it spelled out authoritatively there right on the screen:
Yep, you know those Iraqi peasants? "They attacked us," I guess. Saddam Hussein must've had something to do with 9/11, then.
All of this makes me wonder: during the Vietnam War, did Asian people, especially Southeast Asians, become a sort of Other -- an Other thought of in racist terms? Tell me, ye who live through that "political hell," as misterskank calls it.
I have to assume that racism defined Americans' perception of the "Viet Cong" Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, because I know that Japanese Americans were placed in concentration camps by President Roosevelt during WWII.
But the Vietnam experience feels different to me. I personally don't perceive that much blatant racism toward Southeast Asians these days. More-generous-than-Bush Johnson, Nixon, and Ford Administrations must have allowed more Vietnamese immigrants, making the "they" more humanized.
The image of the Vietnamese American sympathizers trying to escape on the last helicopter from the US Embassy is emblematic, and forces me to think that I was born only six years after the end of Vietnam. That's almost as long as we've been in Iraq.
I guess the close of these reflections is that racism and xenophobia are alive and well today, and even encouraged and engendered by our federal policies -- "be vigilant," we were repetitively told after 9/11 -- that might as well have meant "be suspicious of your Sikh/Arab/Pakistani/Muslim/dark-bearded neighbor."
There's a law out there to "protect" the (paranoid white) folks that tattled on a group of Islamic imams that happened to be flying on a commercial flight (as if a terrorist would wear all that traditional garb).
The nail in the coffin that seals racist/xenophobic American perceptions of our Iraqi neighbors, probably for decades, is the fact that translators that worked for the Americans in Iraq, who have death sentences over their heads, are not being allowed to seek asylum in the U.S. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's probably millions of Iraqi refugees.
It's just heartless. What a brutal, unthinking, arrogant stench that wafts our American culture under George W. Bush.
The "bring democracy to Iraq" idea is patently ludicrous. If "they" attacked "us," then who's the enemy and who's the ally? And if our allies look like our enemies, so they can't come to the U.S., then what kind of country are we?
One fewer and fewer Americans are being able to recognize.... |
|
|
| Books on the modern political climate of fear |
[Sep. 21st, 2007|01:38 pm] |
On Naomi Wolf's The End of America (from an Amazon reviewer):
Mrs. Wolf then lists the calculus that all dictators employ to aggregate power: "Invoke an external and internal threat; develop the paramilitary force; create a secret prison system; surveil ordinary citizens; arbitrarily detain and released them; harass citizens' groups; target writers, entertainers, and other key individuals for dissenting; intimidate the press; recast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage"; and eventually subvert the rule of law." Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception is another good one, and, I must admit, is the first "Google book" that I have ever seen -- a book with many sections available, but not all. The scrolling function is also much better than that of a PDF.
(Giorgio Agamben) |
|
|
| Academic News: Rumsfeld Hired as "visiting fellow" at Stanford |
[Sep. 21st, 2007|10:33 am] |
Stanford's conservative Hoover Institute is hiring Donald Rumsfeld as a "distinguished visiting fellow".
A Stanford English professor reacts:
But there is also presently, alas, at the Hoover Institution a solid and stolid phalanx of tired and/or discredited Republican politicians, fixers and hacks, of no discernible intellectual substance, whose appointments, as far as one can judge, were made largely on the basis of ideological solidarity rather than analytic or scholarly accomplishment. The intellectual positions (if that is the right term) of these individuals look massively out of kilter with the energy, expertise and diversity of the rest of Stanford. Sadly and unfairly, the effect of this latter group has been to cast a long, distracting shadow across the achievements of the Hoover Institution's dynamic and creditable fellows. In some lights, one looks at the Hoover Institution and feels that it is, truly, the Party of the Elephant's mystical graveyard.
Rumsfeld has done a lot -- SecDef, Congressman, Chief of Staff, CEO of two Fortune 500 companies.
He's also made colossal mistakes that have killed thousands of people unnecessarily. As a public official of the United States, he committed war crimes by allowing torture and sending "combatants" to black sites where they could get real torture. Abu Ghraib was Rumsfeld's responsibility.
So yeah, this appointment is a bad idea. |
|
|
| What on earth? ... |
[Sep. 20th, 2007|01:45 pm] |
Bush: You know, you need to talk to economists. I think I got a B in Econ 101. I got an A, however, in keeping taxes low and being fiscally responsible with the people's money. . . .
That's from here.
What about an unnecessary trillion-dollar war financed by the Chinese?
Bush's false arrogance is such a cliche nowadays. |
|
|
| Note on the written word |
[Sep. 13th, 2007|12:39 am] |
I cruised into a corporate bookstore (Borders) near where I live. After perusing some literature, I thought a Big Lebowski thought.
The Dude: "Oh man, my thinking about this case had become very uptight. Yeah."
Basically I realized that the stuff I read -- on the Internets, mainly -- is not good for much. Libraries are better -- fingering a book, getting an idea, picking up another book.
And now I am in a neighborhood book club, and excited about it. People can be surprisingly receptive about Heart of Darkness.
So, read books. Think about Henry James thoughts on "the artist's soul". And think less about this ongoing disaster:
The Dude abides.
Yeah. |
|
|
| Burning vs. Removing Books |
[Sep. 10th, 2007|02:43 pm] |
"Goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them." -- Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Well, the post-9/11 paranoia may have reached its peak. Because the Bureau of Prisons doesn't want inmates reading the Koran, they're removing thousands of "religious" texts, including Reinhold Niebuhr.
And every David Nelson and Robert Johnson better watch out -- you're on the FAA no-fly list.
Rage Against the Machine:
They don't gotta burn tha books they just remove 'em
While arms warehouses fill as quick as tha cells
Rally round tha family, pockets full of shells |
|
|
| Petraeus: "Gimme an F.U.!" |
[Sep. 10th, 2007|10:52 am] |
The Friedman Unit means a "six-month" time period that never actually materializes.
And now the Bush/Petraeus Beltway Carnival will say there are "signs of progess" and ask for six more months.
Petraeus is a politician.
Our media is so out of touch that it's very frustrating. One annoyance for me are the photos angled and framed to make Petraeus into the second coming of the Marlboro Man. Ooohhh, aaahhh, he's so flinty-eyed!
-----
Another good sign for the Bush Administration: after the Pakistani Supreme Court ruled that a political rival of military dictator Pervez Musharraf could return after exile, he was greeted by paramilitary troops and sent to Saudi Arabia.
Nice choice of allies. |
|
|
| Good God. |
[Sep. 8th, 2007|08:47 pm] |
I almost jumped up and screamed then crumpled and wept when I read this in the newspaper this morning:
Data: Iraq violence down While the statistics raise a number of questions, the U.S. commander prepares for his testimony next week before Congress. By Michael R. Gordon, New York Times
Last update: September 07, 2007 – 9:24 PM
WASHINGTON - The most comprehensive and up-to-date military statistics show that U.S. forces have made some headway toward a crucial goal of protecting the Iraqi population. Data on car bombs, suicide attacks, civilian casualties and other measures of the bloodshed in Iraq indicate that the violence has been on the decline, though the levels remain higher than in 2004 and 2005. Happy happy joy joy! Things are going great in Iraq! "We're makin' progress," just like George Bush said in 2004, three years ago!
CURSES on the New York Times for their credulous line on the Bush Administration's outright lies on statistics.
More people are dying, and more soldiers are dying, and more and more will die as long as the United States military is an occupying force in Iraq.
(Iraqi shot by Americans)
So, I am fuming mad at the New York Times and Michael Gordon for taking on the LIES of the Bush Administration! Lies lies lies! There's nothing I hate more than lies.
My man Marlowe (and Marlon Brando as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now) says it better than me:
You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -- which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -- what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. 
CURSES on this miserable war! America, how many times will you break my heart? |
|
|
| The New Iraq War Fallacy |
[Sep. 5th, 2007|08:27 pm] |
David Brooks' recent NYT column partakes in a highly-touted, celebrated fallacy regarding the hopeless quagmire, George Bush's Iraq War.
The fallacy is that "big successes" are happening in the most hopeless of regions, and that this counts as "big progress".
"We've won Diyala and Anbar Provinces!" they say. "Al-Qaida is on the run!"
My arguments:
1) Al-Qaida never but never was the primary enemy in the conflict, never even accounting for more than 10% of the total violence. True, "Al-Qaida" fomented the Sunni/Shi'a conflict with spectacular terrorist acts, but the source of Iraq's ruin is the civil war between Sunni and Shi'a.
Further, the "Al-Qaida" "terrorists" Iraq "experts" talk about are only partially ideologically aligned with Osama bin Laden, nor, to my knowledge, has it been shown that they receive his funding or training.
In other words, we are not "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here". Regional sectarian violence prevents any meaningful progress in what was once called Iraq.
2) The successes touted are in low-population, rural areas that are the equivalent of Montana for Iraq. Anbar Province, like Montana, lacks cultural diversity and economic importance compared to the country at large (no offense to Montana). Thus, it's really easy to say there's been progress when the primarily Sunni population of Anbar has cut down on terrorism in the area, primarily by forcefully blocking the entry of the Shi'a militias and Shi'a government-sponsored national army.
The biggest questions still remain: what will become of Baghdad and Basra, which are respectively the population center and the economic center? In Baghdad, the ethnic cleansing has gotten less violent but no less successful. In Basra, where most of Iraq's oil is controlled, $15 million a day in oil revenues disappear to fund corruption, militias, and further violence.
3) I agree with the point that the changes have come from the outside, not from the central government. I believe the civil war has lulled. Maybe the US should just get out now, or actively encourage partition, however horrible its consequences may be (confer India/Pakistan).
If anything, political reconciliation is more impossible now than it was in 2003-2006, with the entrenched factional conflicts cemented.
The US role is still that of essentially refereeing a civil war. This is even more apparent since the news that the US is arming both sides in the conflict.
4) All statistical data indicates a lack of progress, and the "positive" data that does not is either cherry-picked, false, or very suspect. Kevin Drum's blog at Washington Monthly has show this.
The big change in the debate has come about because the surge failed, and it failed in an unexpected way.
The original idea behind the surge was that U.S. troops would create enough calm to allow the national politicians to make compromises. The surge was intended to bolster the "modern" — meaning nonsectarian and nontribal — institutions in the country.
But the surge is failing, at least politically, because there are practically no nonsectarian institutions, and there are few nonsectarian leaders to create them. Security gains have not led to political gains.
At the same time, something unexpected happened. As Iraqi national politics stagnated, the tribes began to take the initiative. The process started in Anbar Province, when the local tribes revolted against Al Qaeda. It has continued in Diyala Province and even in Baghdad neighborhoods like Ameriya. In the South, moderate Shiite parties have begun to resist the Sadrists, while in many places local groups that look like mafia families struggle to impose order on their turf.
But: let me conclude. We know this is going to be a ten-year war. So, if we're at the four year and four month point. That's a long way to go.
How many lives, how many limbs, how much tax money, and how much bullshit are we willing to put up with? What a disaster, George W. Bush!!!
A smarter man than me asked long ago, "Why are we in Vietnam?" I second the sentiment: Why are we in Iraq?
-----
Update: Thomas Friedman should shut up and listen to other people. Example:
Scene 2: On my way into Iraq, I had a private chat with an Arab Gulf leader. He said something that still rings in my ear: "Thomas, everyone is keeping you busy in Iraq. The Russians are keeping you busy. The Chinese are keeping you busy. The Iranians are keeping you busy. The Saudis are keeping you busy. Egypt is keeping you busy. The Syrians are keeping you busy..." |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Sep. 5th, 2007|07:07 pm] |
Well, someone died at the UofA again. Sounds like a Native American female student, Mia Henderson, got paired up with an insane roommate from hell, who stole property from her.
Then, we assume, when Mia confronted this insane female, they got in a fight, and somehow Mia suffered a death blow.
I remember a grad student being killed in a "death trap" pedestrian crossing, and I remember a rape that occurred on campus, where a non-student walked into a dorm and did the heinous crime.
My memories of Tucson were warm, but now I am reminded of the volatility and impending violence of the place. God rest Mia's soul, and to all my Tucson brothas and sistas, peace and safety, you all.
 |
|
|
| Collapse for the GOP |
[Aug. 28th, 2007|10:12 am] |
(Idaho Senator Larry Craig)
Whenever I go through the grocery checkout line, I find great pleasure in learning how various female celebrities have "collapsed". Chief among them: Oprah, Elizabeth Taylor, and now Nicole Richie and Angelina Jolie.
I think the term now may be applied to the Republican Party:
"Republican Party Collapses!"
With the departures of Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzalez, it's undeniable that the low approval ratings for Bush are taking their toll. Bush's remaining political card, his "war president" status", is being held on by a string. The Petraeus Report, which will be written by the White House political operatives, will bring "mixed" reviews of the New Strategies in Iraq.
It's actually more violent in Iraq now than last year, and last year was more violent than the previous year, and so on. There's less power, water, and municipal utilities than ever, and more civil war fighters/militiamen. It doesn't matter if "Al-Qaida in Iraq", which is actually 7.3% of the insurgency (as reported by Lt. Col. John Nagl, author of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, on the Daily Show) is being suppressed.
It's a civil war. Did you know that the Middle Eastern derogatory term for pro-American Middle Easterners is "intellectual marine"? The word "marine" is a pejorative. Our presence is hated, and I would hate to have my life on the line for the political survival of DC politicians.
Add to this the controversy surrounding Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who we now know has been a prolific seeker of homosexual sex.
It just goes to show how hypocritical and out of touch the GOP remains. Few in their party can understand the wide range of human sexuality, or even that their own would stray from "normal" sexuality.
The current GOP cannot answer for human sexuality, the Iraq fiasco, and cannot address the health care crisis. Nor can it address the immigration issue, the rising cost of energy, or the skyrocketing federal budget deficit.
The GOP's famed "personal morality" is a joke after Sen Craig, Sen. Vitter (procurer of prostitutes), after US Rep. Mark Foley (lusting after male congressional pages), after Ted Haggard (fundamentalist Christian and gay sex lover), after Jeff Gannon (movement conservative/gay escort), and who comes next?
Larry Craig deserves some sympathy; he's merely a man who has sex with men, not necessarily a gay man. He's probably bisexual.
But it's true. The GOP has collapsed. I hope the Left can capitalize on this. |
|
|
| Three Reviews of New Albums: Wilco, Spoon, White Stripes |
[Aug. 27th, 2007|01:22 pm] |
Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
Wilco's 2007 album Sky Blue Sky combines a more heartfelt and earnest songcraft from Jeff Tweedy with a band that is better than the best jam bands. Guitarist Nels Cline, who usually earns his keep playing jazz, is an absolute wizard whose notes reverberate off of the sentiment of Tweedy's songs powerfully.
Tweedy himself has turned his melodies of pop music ecstasy into cogent investigations of human relationships. Before, in a song like "Reservations" from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the listener would feel a bit depressed. In Sky Blue Sky, that same emotional frailty rests alongside the promise of hope and family.
Tweedy's playful side also comes out, in the hilarious "Hate It Here," which reminds me of Wilco's early, fun music. As a songwriter, Tweedy's strength may be the Janus-face of the speaker of the songs he has created. Different songs all represent differing sides of what it means to be an American adult male in this day in age: being a father, being distant from family, being emotionally spotty, being playful, dealing with war, experiencing domestic life, and of course, the evanescent nature of love.
There's a lot more hope in this album than previously for Wilco, and the band has truly gelled. I love this album, and its influences I also love: "What Light" might be called a sequel to Bob Dylan's "Forever Young," "Hate It Here" is the song John Lennon never got to write (and the "Beatles" guitar sound in that song is so refreshing), and "Impossible Germany" shows that geography can be used as a signifier to express the complex emotions of love.
Wilco's Sky Blue Sky: what a band, what strong songs.
Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
It's sometimes said that Spoon is one of the few bands that one could say is "saving rock and roll," and I agree, but these three albums here reviewed show that rock is not dying.
My favorite thing about this album is that it takes the best of "Spoon-ness" and implants it into each song and each minute sound in the album -- down to the fraction of a second. The purposeful transparency of the studio editing process is one of those Spoon-nesses. Another is the hollering-in-the-street feel of the songs. Each song has the outward energy of meeting interesting new people, and telling stories in bars.
I'd say Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is an attempt at what I'd call "audio collage." One thing that's really difficult is to be both fun and serious, and Spoon does this. These songs are just absolute fun:
3. You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb
4. Don't You Evah
5. Rhythm and Soul
6. Eddie's Ragga
8. My Little Japanese Cigarette Case
9. Finer Feelings
And of course, that's the bulk of the album. The songs represent what it's like to grow older, yet yearn for new experiences, always trying to be cool but knowing you're a dork, and making something lasting that's true.
This album is so "Spoon." My favorite is the "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" 1960s Motor City sound and the "Finer Feelings" narrative of what it's like to leave home (for Spoon, Austin, Texas) and find one's identity changed while memories stay the same.
This album is about hitting the pavement -- "Black Like Me" says "My boots are on the mend / and they ain't walking home / Street tar in summer will do a job on your soul" -- and trying to find something unidentifiable, which, for this band, is a comfort.
White Stripes, Icky Thump
I thought Jack White had reached his artistic height and forgotten something. The last White Stripes album, Get Behind Me Satan, just didn't interest me. The songwriting wasn't there. Then Jack's side project The Raconteurs didn't match his skills or his energy.
Icky Thump sees Jack and Meg return to form, in an album most closely like 2000's De Stijl. Jack's narrative creativity returns, when in "A Martyr For My Love For You" an adult man must tell the teenage girl he loves they cannot have contact. This song could be said to be a sequel to "Truth Doesn't Make a Noise" from De Stijl, since the structure of the songs as well as the narratives are so close. But it's not redundancy if one's copying something that works.
Then Jack White comes up with a musical theme or "conceit" that just should not work, like two songs based on bagpipes, or a song with flamenco horns. And of course, the songs totally work, on the same album where garage rock, bluesy power riffs, and banging drums exist alongside.
More than a return to form, this album feels like the instantiation of the tradition of rock music. Wow. The songs are just excellent -- White talks about the immigration debate in a topical-yet-not way in "Icky Thump" and the hilarious "Effect and Cause" recalls the Southern-tinged acoustic sound in "Your Southern Can Is Mine" from De Stijl.
The phrase "in the pocket" refers to bands that are just together, and in Icky Thump they are in the pocket. Jack and Meg White have returned to the format and the songs that suit them best, and place them in the company of rock music's historical greats.
I especially love Meg's backing vocals. Icky Thump returns us to the sponge that is Jack White -- the sponge that takes everything in and then has something smart to say.
-----
Taken as a whole, these three albums have restored my faith in rock music, and have reminded me of why I scour the internet for good tunes. |
|
|
| Analysis of Thomas Friedman Column, or, Why He Sucks. |
[Aug. 26th, 2007|09:54 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | politics | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | White Stripes, "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" | ] |
I'll post my thoughts above the column:
1) For the Bush Administration to acknowledge mass fatalities in Iraq and to blame bin Laden would not make sense, because Americans would think, "Oh, it's really going worse over there." Or even: bin Laden is winning.
Bush does not want to acknowledge any suffering over there at all. Since the beginning, this war has been about deception -- the start of the war, the American caskets, casualties, and lost limbs, the disinterest of the US media when 500 Iraqis get blown up. But when a killer hits Virginia Tech and the I35W Bridge goes down, it's a "national tragedy." Well, that's true, but if 32 died at VaTech, and eight died on I35W (since I live in Minneapolis, I very easily could have been one of those poor souls), and maybe 600,000+ or so Iraqis and American soldiers have died, where is the real national tragedy?
2) This article makes "Swift-Boating" out to be a good thing. What a moron you are, Tom Friedman. Swift-Boating John Kerry and Max Cleland will be remembered for decades as one of the most disreputable political acts in American history, I truly hope.
3) Duh, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri actually are "resistance" fighters. Their methods match their resources as a non-government international terrorist organization. The Islamic world rightly feels under attack.
If there was no US military presence in Mecca and Medina propping up a corrupt royal family, and if the Palestinian Occupation would be ended on a mutual compromise, it's unlikely that young jihadists would want to kill Westerners for bin Laden. If Americans felt their culture threatened the way Saudi Arabians do (15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi), there'd be a lot of American acts of "terrorism" against the foreigners. We are occupying the middle of the Middle East with an army of 200,000, with fighter jets, nuclear navy ships, and much more.
I'm trying to make reasonable arguments, but one can quickly expect Godwin's Law for making it. "Appeasement!" I hear.
4) The reason the Bush Administration can't paint bin Laden so well is because their total disrespect and misunderstanding of the Islamic world -- this argument is justified, because they invaded an Islamic country for no logical reason. They similarly regard the American public as fools they can manipulate, but fools they understand. The Islamic world -- they just hate them, and went into Iraq to "prove" they could "f" up their stuff just for the hell of it. Which Friedman acknowledged below:
So, to conclude, Friedman had me going with him with this column, and then I thought about it, and I'm still convinced he sucks. And that he really, really sucks.
Op-Ed Columnist
Swift-Boated by bin Laden
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Doha, Qatar
One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush team's war effort in Iraq and against Al Qaeda is this: How could an administration that was so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroad?
How could the Bush team Swift-boat John Kerry and Max Cleland — authentic Vietnam war heroes, whom the White House turned into surrendering pacifists in the war on terror — but never manage to Swift-boat Osama bin Laden, a genocidal monster, who today is still regarded in many quarters as the vanguard of anti-American "resistance."
Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today, or even in Europe and Africa, and it won't take 30 seconds before the words "Abu Ghraib" and "Guantánamo Bay" are thrown at you. Yes, both are shameful, but Abu Ghraib was a day at the beach compared to what Al Qaeda and its Sunni jihadist supporters have been doing in Iraq, yet none of their acts have become one-punch global insults like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
Consider what happened on Aug. 14. Four jihadist suicide-bombers blew themselves up in two Iraqi villages, killing more than 500 Kurdish civilians — men, women and babies — who belonged to a tiny pre-Islamic sect known as the Yazidis.
And what was the Bush team's response to this outrage? Virtual silence. After much Googling, the best I could find was: " 'We're looking at Al Qaeda as the prime suspect,' said Lt. Col. Christopher
Garver, a U.S. military spokesman." Wow.
Excuse me, but what exactly are we fighting for in Iraq, or in this wider war against Islamist extremism, if the murder of 500 civilians can be shrugged off? Even if we don't know the exact perpetrators, we know who is inspiring this sort of genocide — Al Qaeda and bin Laden —
and we need to say that every day.
Ask yourself this: If Osama bin Laden were running against George Bush for president, how would Karl Rove and Karen Hughes have handled the Yazidi murders? Within an hour, they'd have had a press release out saying: "This genocide of Iraqi civilians was inspired by bin Laden. We accuse bin Laden of the mass murder of 500 women and children. Bin Laden has killed more Iraqis and Muslims than any person alive. Support bin Laden and you support genocide against Muslims." And they would have repeated that point on every network, every day.
Why should we care? Because bin Laden and his sidekick Ayman al-Zawahiri care! Read their statements. They care about their image. They do not want to be labeled as "genocide perpetrators." They want to be known as the "resistance," because it affects their street appeal and therefore their ability to recruit and operate.
Sure, some Sunni tribes in Iraq, who are directly threatened by Al Qaeda, have turned against it, but in the wider Arab-Muslim world bin Laden has out-maneuvered Mr. Bush. The man who Swift-boated John Kerry and Max Cleland has been Swift-boated by bin Laden. Mr. Bush is losing
a P.R. war to a mass murderer. Yes, it is not easy breaking through the innate, anti-American tilt of the Arab media, but we have barely tried.
I spent Friday hanging around the newsroom of Al Jazeera here in Doha, on the Persian Gulf. I asked Arab reporters here what would be the results of a popularity poll in the region between Mr. Bush and bin Laden. Mr. Bush wouldn't stand a chance, they said. One big difference
between them, though, added one journalist, "is that Bush's term is about to come to an end and bin Laden is staying in office." An Egyptian analyst here added that liberals in the Arab world who
supported the U.S. democratization effort in Iraq are now dismissed in the Arabic press as "intellectual marines." U.S. marine is now a term of insult.
Bin Laden has created a situation in which the U.S. occupation in Iraq is viewed as entirely "illegitimate" and therefore any violence there by Sunni jihadists against Americans or Iraqi civilians is considered entirely legitimate "resistance."
As The Economist magazine just noted, "This is profoundly mistaken." Yes, military attacks against foreign soldiers who have come uninvited into your country can be called "resistance." "But the mass murder of Iraqi civilians can make no such dignified claim. Under all
established norms and laws of war (and by most accounts under Islamic law, too), the deliberate targeting of civilians for no direct military purposes is just a crime."
So why don't we say that? If you can't win a P.R. war against bin Laden, you have no business fighting a real war anymore in Iraq. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
schencka's journal
