back at 'cha

Gonna start this bad puppy up again. Blogging, once so 2005, is hot again! And, in the age of the Tweet, it might be the last best hope for literary prose.

Strange bedfellows

I've been thinking it for a while now: perhaps the most unnerving indication of the shift in our political culture is the extent to which Arlen Specter sounds downright reasonable--liberal, almost--simply because he continues to respect the idea of Constitutional limits on the exercise and interaction of executive, legislative, and judicial power. The mind boggles, while I blog. How did this happen? How did Arlen Specter--the same Arlen Specter that tried to carve and serve Anita Hill fifteen years ago--become the lone gunman for reasonable, respectful discourse in the Senate? And speaking of reasonable, respectful discourse: memo to Ann Coulter: your fifteen minutes are about up, and once the rest of us no longer have to live with you, you will still have to live with yourself. Good luck with that.

On other topics, I wish I was Joan Didion. As I revise, I find myself pouring over anything that meditates on the creative process, on writing and art and all that. Didion has a great sense of the grand task of it all, and the melancholy, and the sense that the world has shrunk to just you and your room and your computer screen and chickenscratch. No wonder Sebald had breakdowns after he completed each project.

Michel De Certeau kicks ass too. For different reasons. And his writing--at least in translation--is nowhere near as hot.

Hmmm...

So I read today that US officials expect a terrorist attack in the near future. And they expect that it will be the work of homegrown terrorists. There are any number of reasons to be afraid, most of which have to do with what sort of profiling we can expect in the wake of this strategic revelation.

And Bush has stepped down off the mountain to whip up the gay marriage frenzy again.

I smell mid-term elections approaching.

Has anyone else noticed, though, that despite being the most despised president in, oh, two hundred odd years, with poll numbers that are more appropriate for a five-day weather forecast in January than any sort of viable national politician, this bitch still manages to get like everything he wants passed Congress? What the fuck is that about? Big fence? Sure! Serious military fuck in charge of CIA? Why not! (And why didn't anyone make any stink about the stink Bush and Rummy made about the retired generals critique of Rumsfeld representing an inappropriate military oversight of a civilian position?...)

And to top the damn thing off, why are the fucking New Lefties (whose New Left is now older than the Old Left was when their New Left was new) talking about why isn't there a movement against the war? Fuck you and your Memorex memories. Stop imagining that every day between 1963 and 1971 was a fucking episode of "Eyes on the Prize."

Clearly, I'm tired. Fifty-six days and counting, New York.

Betting the Farm (or, this is something that I'm writing right now, don't ask why)

Among the many notions the engineers of American independence borrowed from the architects of the Enlightenment, few have had the long lasting cultural impact of John Locke’s conflation of life, liberty, and property. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson modified Locke’s prosaic invocation of property with his own poetically apt and potentially expansive “pursuit of happiness,” but even then there was little doubt about his meaning. The Revolutionary generation agreed on few points, and may have maintained a strategic agnosticism on many pertinent issues; in terms of the practical pursuit of liberty and happiness, however, even Jefferson the Deist would bow to the Lockean trinity, and admit that life, liberty, and property were but different faces of the same god. Problems emerged—as did the first political parties—when the early republican government began to consider what form property might take in order to sponsor the greatest general liberty. Would the law be used to defend the property rights of the already propertied, or to promote and facilitate a general acquisition of property and, accordingly, a general diffusion of the attendant notion of full citizenship?

For the last fifty years of his life, Jefferson would find himself on the latter side of this debate, literally or symbolically at the head of a political party that figured property as the royal road to individual self-determination and republican sovereignty, and the family farm as the practical manifestation of the political ideal. The farm, Jefferson reasoned, would enable families to sustain themselves as physically and politically independent; livestock and produce would render farmers virtually self-sustaining, and make trade into a matter of volition, rather than a necessity. “Every household is a manufactory in itself,” Jefferson would write to Adams in a short sociological epistle on Virginian domestic commerce, before learning that the piece of “homespun” Adams had sent him was a treatise on linguistics by John Quincy Adams. (Jefferson was no doubt pleased that both weaving and philosophizing went on under his roof at Monticello.) At the same time, the fences and other physical boundaries of the farm would mark the limits of the law in its capacity to invade the lives of its citizens. For Jefferson and his Republicans, the farm could be, ideally, a place removed from the state, beyond government, beyond tyranny. Considering Jefferson’s personal fortunes, this was a wistful, if radical, train of thought. The liberties afforded Jefferson by his mastery over Monticello were founded upon the tradition of primogeniture and the legally guaranteed intergenerational transfer of wealth, the fortune he had accrued through his marriage to the widowed Martha Wayles Skelton, the rape and reproduction of a population of enslaved laborers, and credit, pure and simple. When Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, he was in debt up to his patrician nose, and quickly going under. Only the well wishes and kindness of his creditors kept him from losing Monticello during his lifetime; after his death, the estate was sold off, and Jefferson’s anti-slavery pretenses fell away as his white descendents were faced with the need for some quick cash.

Some things we already knew, some we suspected

Sasha Frere-Jones apparently tells us that Stephin Merritt is a racist. Go figure. A white pop artist? A white man? An independent musician in New York? Racist? The man who once compared a pretty girl to a minstrel show and a violent crime? How could this be true? What's better than the obviousness of it all are Stephin Merritt's friends jumping to his defense on the basis of his homosexuality and intellectualism. Because clearly, gay people and smart people cannot be racist. I read it somewhere. Neither can socialists, or anyone affiliated with the American labor movement. Or women. Or M. Doughty of Soul Coughing. What's better than all that, though, is that this yet again exposes the critical irrelevance of the New York Times, which seemingly has nothing better to do than dwell upon a blog-off between elite white culture brokers.

That aside, what the hell is Merritt thinking when he goes after OutKast as a representative of the worst of hip hop? Clearly he's not listening to hip hop; at best, he probably has a vague sense of it as a cultural phenomenon. There's much to be said about the ways in which money and marketing have overtaken segments of the hip hop universe and ideas of saleability have served to reinforce long standing stereotypes of African Americans that appear within the genre. From what I understand, Greg Tate is writing a book that seeks to unpack a lot of that. Stephin Merritt, however, was not making such an informed critique; he was lashing out at something he doesn't completely understand, and therefore resents. Frere-Jones was clearly on to something.

The New York Times furthers its downward spiral into irrelevance by reporting today that Nevaeh (Heaven backwards) is now the most popular name for girls in the United States, trumping Vanessa and Sarah (which, as the name of the wife of the founder of monotheism, just wasn't spiritual enough). I'm so glad I live in a country where Fox News is the most cited source of information, and popular culture and religion have blended so seamlessly as to require religious folks to make up new names to convey spiritual conviction when there are already--oh, I'd say about 5,000--names that have something to do with God, the Bible, the Torah, the Talmud, or the Qu'ran. For instance, my own name, which has a long association with the Divine. But no. In the United States, in twenty-first century, Mary is not good enough. Long live Nevaeh. Long live the eternal new.

Minneapolitan

It is official. The countdown has begun. Like MacArthur, I shall return. To the Twin Cities.

if you haven't seen Syriana

It's Monday, January 30, 2006. At 1PM today, the temperature in Prospect Park was fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit.

Nineteen people died in car-bombings in Iraq yesterday.

In other news, today England's commission on global warming released released their report on climate change. According to the best science available, the next century will undoubtedly see the five-degree rise in temperate necessary to melt the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Even if the responsible industrial nations of the world adhere to the 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for which international accords call, we might have reached the point of no return, where even reduced carbon-based fuel emissions will cause irreparable environmental harm.

(If you find yourself wondering why such a report has not appeared in the United States, you might turn to the Sunday New York Times, which reports that the White House leaned on NASA climatologists to keep their similar report and conclusions under wraps.)

In still other news of the day, Exxon saw the largest yearly profits ever for an American company. In 2005, Exxon alone reported a profit of $36.1 billion. Chevron posted $14 billion, and ConocoPhillips posted $13.5 billion.

Jill Carroll continues to plead for her life, while Bob Woodruff is in serious but stable condition after undergoing surgery in Germany.