The new Harris Interactive Poll (via Blah3), “conducted by telephone within the United States between July 5 and 11, 2006 among 1,020 adults (aged 18 and over),” has found that 50% of US adults think Iraq had WMDs, which is an increase from 36% in Feb. 05.
Also, 64% “say it is true that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda.”
Something pretty cool happened while some of us were distracted by historic electrical power outages: Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill of Missouri overcame a hefty deficit to win the fundraising support poll held by Barbara Boxer's PAC for a Change. Thanks to a last-minute push by McCaskill supporters, McCaskill slipped past Bob Casey of Pennsylvania by a single percentage point. This is heartening and timely; while McCaskill remains in a statistical dead heat with her Republican opponent, incumbent Jim Talent, she trails in fundraising by a more than two-to-one margin. The support from PAC for a Change is welcome news indeed for the McCaskill camp. Thanks to everyone who voted for McCaskill in the poll.
(Cross-posted!)
(Part One here.)
Followers of the sociologist Max Weber tend to say class when they’re talking about the amount of money you have and the kind of leverage it gives you; they say status when they mean your social prestige in relation to your audience; and they say party when they’re measuring how much political power you have, that is, how much built-in resistance you have to being pushed around by shits.There are two unique things about America’s classes. One: No one who’s in any of them wants to talk about them. Two: The illusion that they are surmountable, that any American can move easily between them with a little elbow grease and can-do spirit, limits our freedom.
“X” people are better conceived as belonging to a category than a class because you are not born an X person… You become an X person, or, to put it more bluntly, you earn X-personhood by a strenuous effort of discovery in which curiosity and originality are indispensable. …What kind of people are Xs? The old-fashioned term bohemian gives some idea; so does the term the talented.As I mentioned in the previous post, I imagine there are a lot of Shakers who fall into the X class (or category), because Xs tend to be writers and other creative types, often self-employed, including “actors, musicians, artists, …confirmed residers abroad, and the more gifted journalists, those whose by-lines intelligent readers recognize with pleasant anticipation.” Xs tend to not give a shit about a lot of the trappings that are class identifiers—they’re not house-proud, they’re not fashionistas, they’re not voracious capitalists and collectors of “stuff,” and they often have friends of every class, feeling just as much at home in a McMansion as a double-wide. Some more about Xs:
X people are independent-minded, free of anxious regard for popular shibboleths, loose in carriage and demeanor. …Since there’s no one who they think is worth impressing by mere appearance, X people tend to dress for themselves alone, which means they dress comfortably, and generally “down.”Xs are “as interested in the styles of directors as of actors.” They don’t go to church, even though “they may know a great deal about European ecclesiastical architecture and even about the niceties of fifteen centuries of liturgical usage.” They live where they like, not where they have to, and their houses are old, and understated (if not outright sloppy), and unimpressive, with the “readiest way to describe an X living room is to say that anything recommended in a sound home-furnishings magazine will not appear there,” and its floors are “either entirely bare wood or covered irregularly with thick rugs.” They have ironic décor and tumbling bookshelves and “pursue remote and uncommonplace knowledge—they may be fanatical about Serbo-Croatian prosody, geodes, or Northern French church vestments of the eleventh century.” They are highly verbal, worldly, and curious—and they couldn’t imagine being any other way. And therein lies their salvation.
…X people seldom eat at stated mealtimes, hunger and convenience being their only motivations for eating. Like the uppers, Xs generally eat late rather than early, and their meals tend to last a long time, what with all the prolonged comic and scandalous narrative at table.
…Regardless of the work they do, the Xs read a great deal, and they regard reading as a normal part of experience, as vital as “experience” and often more interesting. …X people have usually “been to college,” but they generally throw out unread, together with other junk mail, their college alumni magazine.
Being an X person is like having much of the freedom and some of the power of a top-out-of-sight or upper-class person, but without the money. X category is a sort of unmonied aristocracy. …X people tend to make their own rules and to get away with so doing, which means that many of them are writers. …Impelled by insolence, intelligence, irony, and spirit, X people have escaped out the back doors of those theaters of class which enclose others. …It’s only as an X, detached from the constraints and anxieties of the whole class racket, that an American can enjoy something like the LIBERTY promised on the coinage.America is designed around class. Neighborhoods, schools, social activities, politics. Even many communities’ churches are delineated by class—St. Joe’s is for the rich Catholics; St. John’s is for the poor Catholics, which everyone knows, but nobody would ever say above a whisper. The color of your color—white, blue, pink—designates your class. The university you attend. The language you use. The labels in your clothes. The car you drive. It’s all about defining yourself, but always in terms of your class.
The society of Xs is not large at the moment. It could be larger, for many can join who’ve not yet understood that they have received an invitation.
Tim Russert interviews White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten about the president's asinine and inconsistent stem cell policies...and it's a total train wreck. It's so bad, in fact, that it probably only could have been saved by a scientific breakthrough dependent on embryonic stem cells.
Oh, the irony.
More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.I’ll direct you to Juan Cole for his assessment, since he knows what the hell he’s talking about, and I don’t. One thing I found particularly interesting in his piece, though, was this:
In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis.
That is why I was so shaken by George W. Bush's overheard conversation with Tony Blair about the war. He clearly thought that it broke out because Syria used Hizbullah to create a provocation. The President of the United States did not know that this war was a long-planned Israeli war of choice.That’s certainly a very real possibility. The other, of course, is that, the overheard conversation wasn’t a mistake at all, and Bush played the dimwit to create plausible deniability about the US Department of Defense’s involvement in this war of choice. It’s amazing how often this carefully choreographed presidency nonetheless results in Bush getting “caught” saying or doing something that feeds the idea he is a bumbling idiot, redirecting attention away from the decidedly non-bumbling machinations of the neocon architects by whom he is surrounded.
…What is scarey [sic] is that Cheney and Rumsfeld don't appear to have let W. in on the whole thing. …Bush thought, if that is all that is going on, then someone just needs to call al-Asad and reassure him that we're not going to take him out, and get him to rein in Hizbullah. And then the war would suddenly stop. No one told Bush that this war was actually an Israeli war of choice and that al-Asad had nothing to do with it, that, indeed, it could only happen because al-Asad is already irrelevant.
“Former Spokane Mayor James E. West, who opposed gay-rights bills but was recalled from office over an Internet gay sex scandal, died Saturday of complications from recent cancer surgery. He was 55.”
I feel really sad about this. I had no love for Jim West, who abused his various positions of authority, including his mayorship, to facilitate sexual relationships with young men, while simultaneously serving to further an anti-gay Republican platform, like assailing domestic partnership benefits for Spokane City employees. He was the worst kind of conservative hypocrite, who maligned and marginalized the LGBT community while living a double life.
But even this hard old heart, resistant as it is to any sympathy for his political scandal, is not unmoved upon his death.
West was a divisive and infuriating figure—requiring the LGBT community and its supporters to mobilize in search of protection against his anti-gay agenda—but pathetic, too. There was, in the end, no one who could save him from himself. West died still trapped in a stranglehold of repression and self-loathing, never having given himself the chance to find real happiness, choosing instead to work toward denying of others that which he denied himself—as if perpetuating inequality would somehow, sometime, legislate homosexuality right out of existence, and take with it that part of himself he hated.
Like so many of his fellow anti-gay crusaders, West never seemed able to regard homosexuality as anything but sex and legal rights, both of which they fervently believe ought to be manageable by the law. They ignore, or refuse to accept, that love in the LGBT community is no more stoppable than in its straight counterpart, and will eclipse any barrier put in its way. Love is a feeling so strong, so essential to our humanity, that poets have spent lifetimes trying to lay it on a page, that artists have endeavored to capture in one still but enduring moment. Operas and books and films and pop songs, so heartbreakingly lovely that they can steal one’s breath, if just for a moment, have been written by people in the thralls of love, or the searing pain of its loss. Monuments have been built, wars have been fought, and some of the greatest happiness ever experienced by humankind has been born because of love. Love’s end can come suddenly, unexpectedly, by death or betrayal or contemptible familiarity, but even the most fragile of hearts are not broken by laws.
That West led a closeted life makes his failure to grasp this notion all the more tragic. One is left to wonder if he ever truly understood the intractable power of love, or if, in denying the truth of himself, he also denied himself the chance to experience it at all. Did he die having ever substituted fake relationships and illicit sex for love, never knowing its splendor? I can’t help but feel sad at the possibility.
(Crossposted at Ezra’s place.)
Belly up to bar, Shakers. Have a drink, leave a link, tell us what you think.
As always, anything goes…but if you’re feeling uninspired and need a topic, you can’t go wrong with modern directors. Who’s a hack? Who’s a saint? Who’s fallen from grace? (I’m looking at you, Oliver Stone.)
Happy Friday.
President Bush's uncompromising support for Israel in its battle with Hezbollah, now backed by Congress, is threatening to isolate the United States even further from the international community.And Cheney turns it into a campaign issue:
It is also putting the administration at odds with fragile democratic governments in the Middle East that it is simultaneously trying to prop up, and sowing increasing anger across the Arab world.
Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday pointed to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah as fresh evidence of the ongoing battle against terrorism that underscores the need to keep President Bush's Republican allies in control of Congress.Let’s follow the logic, shall we? The Bush administration increasingly isolates America by pissing off the rest of the world—including both the people who most want to hurt us and our own allies, which anyone with two functioning brain cells left in their skulls will recognize as a threat to both our national security and our ability to best protect ourselves via enlisted aid, should it be necessary. But the Bush administration are the only people who can keep us safe from this ever more dangerous world in which we find ourselves.
"This conflict is a long way from over," Cheney said at a fundraising appearance for a GOP congressional candidate. "It's going to be a battle that will last for a very long time. It is absolutely essential that we stay the course."
…He faulted Democrats in Congress who have pushed for a timetable for withdrawing Americans from Iraq, saying that would send the wrong message to terrorists.
"If anyone thinks the conflict is over or soon to be over, all they have to do is look at what's happening in the Middle East today," he said.
I've written about this before... and I'm still baffled. I just don't get this. I mean, I really, really cannot fathom what they are thinking.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)- Gore "full of crap," Global Warming a "hoax."
Yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) attacked Al Gore and global warming science, claiming that Gore was “full of crap” on global warming.As the links in the rest of the post show, and in what should come as no surprise to anyone with a functioning brain, global warming is most certainly not a "hoax," and this is something we're going to seriously have to work on if we want to keep this planet livable.
Appearing on Glenn Beck’s radio show and CNN television program, Inhofe said that the International Panel on Climate Climate Change (IPCC), which concluded that global warming was real and caused by humans, used “one scientist.” Inhofe added: “[A]ll of the recent science…it confirms that I was right on this thing. This thing is a hoax.” Watch it:
Meanwhile, in Washington, the Bush administration and many members of Congress have taken a sharply different approach toward air pollution than many New York officials. The issue came to the fore again last week when the Republican head of the Senate environment committee, James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma proposed legislation that would allow the government to suspend some environmental regulations that might affect the recovering and rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Katrina.
I’m re-reading Paul Fussell’s Class at the moment, which is subtitled (on my copy, originally published in 1983): “A painfully accurate guide through the American status system.” It’s a beautifully snarky tract, moving its way through the distinctions and divides of America’s classes with such amusing observations as how one’s language is an unavoidable indicator of one’s class:
Upper: Grandfather died. Muffy is pregnant.
Middle: Grandma passed away. Meredith is expecting.
Prole: Uncle was taken to Jesus. Minnie is in a family way.
Fussell takes on everything: What you drink, how you decorate, what you buy. It’s insanely hilarious, mostly because it’s so true. I highly recommend it.
Anyway, the reason I picked up Class again is because I’m having this strange compulsion lately to spend some times with various social and political books written during (or about) American culture during the Reagan years. (Before Class, it was There Are No Children Here.) It’s amazing how many themes and observations about that time are suddenly relevant again. That could be a whole post of its own, but I just wanted to share this passage, which I would guess may not even be in the edition for purchase now:
Ronald Reagan, of course, doesn’t need to affect the establishment style, sensing accurately that his lowbrow, God-fearing, intellect-distrusting constituency regards it as an affront (which, of course, to them it is). Reagan’s style…registers the sense that if you stubbornly believe you’re as good as educated and civilized people—i.e., those Eastern dudes—then you are. He is the perfect representative of the mind and soul of the Sun Belt. He favors, of course, the two-button suit with maximum shoulder padding and with a Trumanesque squared white handkerchief in the breast pocket, which makes him look, when he’s dressed way up, like a prole setting off for church. Sometimes, for leisure activities (as he might express it), he affects the cowboy look, which, especially when one is aged, appeals mightily to the Sun Belt seniles. One hesitates even to speculate about the polyester levels of his outfits.Sound like anyone else you know?
Jewelry is another instant class-lowerer, like the enameled little Old Glory lapel pins worn by the insane and by cynical politicians working backwards districts.*snort*
Proles take to visor caps instinctively, which accounts for the vast popularity among them of what we must call simply the prole cap. This is the “baseball” cap made largely of plastic meshwork in primary colors (red, blue, yellow) with, in the rear, an open space crossed by a strap for self-adjustment: “One Size Fits All [Proles].” Regardless of the precise style of the prole cap, it seems crucial that it be ugly.On weekends:
That the weekend is now widely regarded as a mere prole entertainment fixture is clear from the vulgar “Weekend” sections of papers like the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, brimming over with commercial features and ads telling the presumably witless consumers what to do. … It should hardly be necessary to indicate that for uppers, who do not have employers or perform steady work, the weekend is not a very meaningful concept, except as it indicates the days when the banks are closed.On collector’s items:
In fact, peddling “collector’s items” to the middle and lower classes has now reached a fine art. Witness the Norman Rockwell plate sold for $20, with suggestions that it will increase in value (!), having been produced in a “limited edition” during only “one hundred firing days”; in that time, obviously, billions of the hideous things can be turned out.On class and catalogs:
[Upper] catalogs offer a disproportionate number of Chinese artifacts (like “ginger jars”), betokening as they do a close connection with the “old” Orient, the archaic one Americans used to colonize, missionary to, educate, and rip off. … But the main indication that a catalog is upper-class is that it sells clothes. If something doesn’t fit or look right when it arrives, for the rich no matter—give it away, either to the Salvation Army or to the servants. Proles can’t afford such risks in their consuming. Even when they do buy clothes from their prole catalogs, the risk is small because the clothes are not sized, as in the His and Her Slumber Suits made of T-shirt cotton-knit printed with the combat camouflage pattern (why? why on earth?) or the similar matched nightshirts (red, or red-and-white striped) reading on the pocket, “Brr, I’m Cold.”On the X class:
X people are verbal. They’re good at languages and take it for granted that it is disgraceful, because merely American and provincial, to remain monolingual. … Soliciting no reputation for respectability, X people are freely obscene and profane, but tend to deploy vile language with considerable rhetorical effectiveness… They may be rather fonder than most people of designating someone—usually a public servant or idol of the middle class—an asshole.Now that really sounds like someone I know. Ahem.
I don't believe in God. I might believe in something, but the whole conscious-force-which-controls-destiny-and-runs-the-world thing, nah, not for me. But every so often, something will happen that makes me wonder...
Like today- I'm rereading Gravity's Rainbow, which is my favoritest book in the world, for the third time, and since I'm not really connected with an literary circles (despite being a brilliant unpublished novelist, there's a certain tragic irony here which I shall wait for another, more appropriate time to properly illuminate), and I'm always curious if writers I like are publishing new work, I pointed my browser to Amazon.com to see if they had any new listings.
Where lo and behold, I discovered I had been automatically subscribed to their blog service (because I'd bought a Gaddis novel a while back), and the first two damn posts on the were about a new Pynchon novel.
Here's the Amazon page, and here's a description from the man himself (there was some question at first if it really was him, but it's been confirmed):
Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.I am so happy right now that I am mildly concerned my head will explode.
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.
--Thomas Pynchon
"I used to be a Republican, before they lost their minds." — NBA superstar Charles Barkley, quoted by the New York Post. (Via Political Wire.)
The Greenhouse Effect: The man who is president lunches in Colorado with soldiers who have recently returned from a war fought in no small part because of America’s dependence on oil, while the man who should have been president travels the world trying to raise awareness about an impending global disaster.
It’s like a big Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of conservative hogwash.
Hey, you got your intolerance in my stupidity!
Jackson Muslims and a statewide interfaith group reacted with disgust Wednesday to reports that the national anti-abortion group Operation Save America burned a Quran during a Tuesday night gathering at a Pearl church.Hey, you got your stupidity in my intolerance!
Imam Shaheed Muhammad of Masjid Muhammad in Jackson said Islam opposes abortion.D’oh!
"We don't support abortion," he said. "I don't know why they would attach us on that issue."
(Via Memeorandum.)
Really. I mean it. Just shut up.
Let me ask you about Rudy Giuliani. We just had a little joust off-camera—I’m always told don’t waste it off-camera. I believe he’s not only running, I think he’s going to win the whole thing come around the next election, the way things look right now.How did NostradamChris the Useless GOP Spunkbucket come to this conclusion? Because “We’ve got a murder problem in Washington, D.C., in Baltimore, in Philly. There’s something going on, it’s not the economy. We’ve got a street problem and isn’t Rudy the toughest cop in the country? … You can walk through the streets when he was mayor, and come home alive.”
