Thursday, April 27, 2006

Let’s break the department of war.

“…having a great time here in Iraq."
Why, it was the Iraq and roll show with our two fave liars, Condi Rice and Don “I fucked up Tora Bora and I’m fuckin’ proud of it” Rumsfeld, yesterday, and the zombies can beam. It turns out that Iraq is “a tremendous pillar of stability through the Middle East." Who knew? And volcanoes are very good ways to fertilize the soil. That’s why you should always try to farm active ones.

The two can’t stand each other – this happens in a court society in which each player depends upon a differing mix of servility and arrogance to maintain position. Since Rumsfeld’s place in the Bush pantheon seems to be fixed – he’s part of the mission, and the mission is to make America pretty much toxic and unliveable for the next fifty year – Rice has to deal with him like the senile parent that you can’t move out of the house. Rice’s tremendous success in getting the Dawa party to nominate a man with precisely the same positions as Jafari to be P.M. can only be described as a tremendous success leading to tremendous stability in the best of all possible Mesopotamias.

As for the causes of that instability – LI has a long post coming up about the civil war in Iraq. The civil war that was programmed into Iraq. The civil war that is the constitution of Iraq. The American advisors of which are notorious for wanting to split up Iraq way back from the beginning of the invasion. So a bunch of theoreticians and calculators, as Burke called them, descend on this country and not only facilitate its looting, but actively seek to destroy its unity, while taking down the army in order to make it a perpetual dependent of American power. In its long series of foreign policy crimes, Iraq has become a sort of center, an emblem of all of D.C.’s vice and viciousness. Seizing the volunteer army at the grass roots level by whatever means and destroying the power of the executive branch to ever again wield a mercenary force are the proper political responses in this country to this crew of freaks. Let’s break the department of war. Suggestions?

Last night, exhausted by another day of translating, LI went down to the corner store and bought a Lone Star (hey, we are on our downers at the moment). And we started talking with the clerk, first about the Simpsons and then about literature. The clerk is, I believe, Lebanese, and he has not watched a lot of Simpsons, so we told him that it is in the line of classic American literature, Twain and Melville and Hawthorne -- but he said, but I don't read. So he wanted to know what was in Twain and Melville, and we gave some extremely condensed plot summary. But one thing we said he could relate to -- the description of Ahab as exemplifying one overwhelming American trait: "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me," Our inadequate paraphrase of chapter 36. The clerk was most amused to see this customer hopping up and down with his Lone star, misquoting Moby Dick. But who knows, maybe he'll read it some day?

And if that trait makes us reach out and smite the nations -- we can turn it around as well, to strike at D.C. Shall we not strike the government if it insults us?

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask!"

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

roger--I thought it was strange that the big papers announced Rumsfeld's visit the night before, but not till I got up the next day did I hear about Rice going too. Maybe that's usual, may have no significance.

Roger Gathmann said...

Mr. NYP, surely you have worked in offices where one of the bosses distrusts the other? I would bet Rumsfeld heard that Rice was going and decided he'd go too. He wasn't going to have any comments about his thousands of "tactical errors" (i.e. fuckups that he should be fired and jailed for). His behavior, even for him, is too prick-ish for there to be any other explanation.

Anonymous said...

Well, I obviously knew they'd become recently estranged, but since she had so recently been there, I wouldn't have been looking at her going back quite that fast (2 weeks? 3 weeks at most since she glared a jafari, I think?) So it was agreed on among all the obvious parties to give a little oomph to his participation in what was vaguely more her trip, very much like the cross-country trip of Reagan's casket. But what will we get to parallel Nancy's final coffin kiss? How far Nancy has gone from giving the best head in Hollywood (to such little careeral avail) to having no more roles to play--of any kind whatever! I suppose it will be more like the difference in the remake of 'the manchurian candidate' from the original, and Condi will just make sure to make her Sunday afternoon chamber music session after surely doing one of the Sunday morning pissings (another brilliant press release that preceded the opening of David Hare's 'Stuff Happens' no more than 4-5 days at most.)

Roger Gathmann said...

Ah, Mr. Nyp, in a world where both veronica lake and errol flynn still roamed, you give nancy too much oral credit.

However, I imagine historians will say that her reign as president -- 87-88 -- wasn't too bad. She almost got rid of nukes at Rekjavik, and she definitely drove the new detente between Ronnie and Mikhail. More, she cast a cold and assessing eye on the terrible Bush family. From all accounts, she saw them as gross mountebanks, yahoos with pedigrees, corrupt, vicious, little minded, selfish, serial compensators for their internal inadequacies, American Junkers trailing that madwoman, Barbara, and their diseased obsession with their own lack of virility. Nancy had seen their type before.

Anonymous said...

Isn't it sad that we're looking back with a bit of nostalgia to the Reagan Administration? And Nixon? How far we have fallen.

Anonymous said...

Well, Brian, that's probably happening to some people but not to me. Nanbo's shenanigans are always hilariously tacky whenever she does them, both at the time and looking back. I think she wouldn't bow to the queen when she went to Diana's wedding because there was no way that, just because she had figured out how to look down on the Bushes while feeling up Frank Sinatra at state dinners for minor Southeast Asian potentates, it wasn't because she was 5 years older! And when she was 80, she didn't have a cerise colour like that, but there would have been some kind of party--I hope she sang 'It's my party and I'll cry if I want to...'

As for Nixon, no nostalgia, Roger pointed out before that 'Nixon had depths.' That's not nostalgia, because we actually could feel that at the time.

Now, what you're talking about we've been through before. You got to be like Elaine Stritch singing about 'the dinosaurs surviving the crunch' if you don't want to give in to slippery slope invitations--which we all getting in great galore.

Anonymous said...

roger--I think Dowd excellent on Condi today, especially the 'who else but the automaton could make that threat with a straight face?'
about the Security Council. One sees these highly opaque personas at the moment where they play at existing, so that this characterization of Condi puts one in mind of pulsars, those very dense small interplanetary or interstellar objects where time has long since turned hard on itself (or something along those lines.)

Roger Gathmann said...

Mr. NYP, you are ahead of me. Tell you the truth, this was one of those insomnia racked afterdays, so I haven't really absorbed the news, or read the New York times. Although I was on some kind of paranoid high today, which was creative in terms of my burgeoning anti-recruitment graphix thingie with my friend D.

I am spending time doing something I never thought I'd do: going through comic books, looking at layouts. Well, you do something different at every epoch in your life, I guess.

Anonymous said...

roger--do I ever know what those
'insomnia afterdays' constitute. I started taking Melatonin again recently, which usually works now, but it used to make me wake up groggily with morbid thoughts. Anyway, good luck with the anti-recruitment project. I didn't mean to be a pain about Ms. Dowd, but her best things seem to be closeups of the monsters without quite retching--that ties in with others' analysis of the policies, with theories of the 'impersonal oligarchies', of what is left of an 'individual' who is part of this elite begins to look like. I certainly began to be aware of what Ms. Rice's chamber music group must have to tolerate in terms of rigid interpretation that they overlook in terms of 'gifted Secretary of State type who also does good ice skating' when any 'rubato' is called for (and not achieved. But then maybe they just stay off composers who get too languorous for the mechanical but most congenial Ms. Lice.--love, Racial Slur Effect from Vermin Indirect) Dowd's cartoon style is frighteningly accurate at this point, because there's no stretch to get to the style--no need to go through comic books for your layouts, tee hee--you just write what they said!

Anonymous said...

Yo-Yo Ma used to rave about her, you know; so I guess he's probably gotten his lice straight by now. I think I just hate all races, including the underprivileged ones even.

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