My personal feeling, based on reading Musil, is that earth is a house in a cosmic slum that is being leased by God over and over to any Spirits who can come up with the rent.
More from Andrei Codrescu.
Abdul said: “Trust my white underpants, boys. Follow me.” Then, “Boys, we cannot go on this way. We are too tired, too hungry. Either a car gets us to Iraq, or I take off my white underpants and we surrender.”
Then he took off his trousers, took off his underpants. He put on the trousers again, he secured the underpants to a stick, he made a white flag. He waved it, he screamed: “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, we surrender!” And, while he was waving it, none of us noticed that it did not look like a white flag. That the never-washed white underpants had become very dirty and were no longer white. They were black. So the flag he was waving was not a white flag. It was a black flag. And they shot. They pierced me this way, and they killed Abdul.
The readers who commented on this story didn’t seem to get it, though. But, then, the readership of the Wall Street Journal is rather conservative. In answer to another article, reader Howard Mirkin, who lives in Asia, wrote “Now that’s it’s just about over and the Muslims clerics are making noise, I hope someone reminds them of the consequences–remember what happened to the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. But then they never seem to learn.” Seems like some other people never learn.
Heard about this book from Oprah…but it does sound interesting. “[Azar Nafisi] is grateful to the Islamic Republic, she says, because it taught her ‘to love Austen and James and ice cream and freedom.’ ” Reminds me of the Romanian director who, during the Cold War, had the chance to defect to the US. When asked why he didn’t take the opportunity and become a Hollywood director, he said he prefered political censorship to commercial censorship.
I’m not sure when this article was printed, it seems a few days, if not weeks, out of date. However I include it here as it starts off with an analogy between the Iraqi Invasion and Moby Dick. Unfortunately Jason Epstein does not carry it throughout, ending without a single mention of the White Whale or Ahab in relation to current events. But it does bring up some interesting tidbits, that Freud, Thomas Mann and Max Weber first supported the war. Epstein also makes this memorable sentence, “But on the whole the war was welcomed as wars usually are for the adrenaline they release and the apparent clarity of purpose with which they muffle the complexities of everyday life.” My italics; I think this is particularly relevant. “The apparent clarity of purpose”: the reduction of countries to one-word descriptions, “good” or “evil,” that smother out criticisms of the Bush administration’s handling of the economy and its racist and homophobic agendas, in an all too-complex everyday.
Here’s another imaginative analogy: “For the White House in its imperial mode to have let the [UN] inspectors continue [weapons inspections] would be as if Ahab had wanted not to kill Moby-Dick but merely to tranquilize him and donate him to an aquarium.”
$30
Above is the amount I won tonight at the casino. Then I bought a cup of green tea with my earnings and sat down to read about an article about a crack prostitute - I found this anthology of American literary journalists, with articles about the “common man.” Today also read articles about AIDs among truckers in Africa (I hitched a ride with a truck driver in Ethiopia, so it was doubly interesting) and about a a ten-year old boy.
Went fishing. Well, I read in the grand splendour of the Pitt Meadows. Befriended a golden retriever.
In the parking lot of the supermarket where we bought corn-bait for the fish, we met a lovely, smooth Alaskan Malamute-German Shepherd cross and his owner. “He’s eleven years old,” the owner said, “That’s 77 in human years, the same age as me.” She and her dog were stopping en route from the hospital, where they volunteered. The owner herself repeated many times, “Isn’t she a beautiful dog?” The dog understands, too, that people in wheelchairs are limited in their movements and he automatically leans in to be petted.
The owner cried on her fortieth birthday. Now, however, she laughs at her forty-year-old self.
Beth sent me this link. Lots of updated, um, movie posters and stuff.
Some words of advice from Karen: “Before you get two rabbits, just think you might end up with lots of little bunnies, and their poop stinks!”
Went to the SPCA and had a look at Whiley. Medium?! He’s a big doggie. He looked at me pleadingly, begging me to help him get out.
Over and over I can’t believe how Americans allowed and are allowing themselves to be deceived. There are quite a lot of morons in the U.S., just as there are anywhere else, but there are quite a few smartypants. Does the American smartypants segment of the population amount to a mere 30%? It’s so obvious even Mr. Kamikaze (an Archie Bunker-type, who caused a lot of gasping when he ribbed a Japanese friend and asked him if he knew of any suicide pilots) got it. It seems like a lot of people are just high on their victories. Victories which, oh yeah, were so surprising. So now a majority of Americans claim they’ll support the war even if Saddam’s cache of illegal weapons don’t exist.
I like this Star Wars analogy: Once Bush had chosen the site, there was virtually nothing the Iraqi government could do to avoid war, short of total capitulation. As a demonstration of both America�s military might and his own itchy trigger finger, Bush had decided to make Iraq his Alderaan, the hapless planet in the original Star Wars movie that was picked to show off the power of the Death Star.
�Fear will keep the local systems in line, fear of this battle station,� explained Death Star commander Tarkin in the movie. �No star system will dare oppose the emperor now.�
Continue reading here. I guess this will fill one more volume of The People’s History of the United States.
Oh and the article brings up Caligula too. “Kiesling also grasped the shift to empire � away from republic � that is underpinning Bush’s policies. The career diplomat asked, ‘Has oderint dum metuant really become our motto?’ citing a favorite saying of the mad Roman emperor Caligula, which means ‘Let them hate so long as they fear.’ ”
So Bush wasn’t lying when he said that he was launching a crusade.