Index page
This is really just a hack for creating a place for "timeless" posts.
The Candidate
It was true. B-roll from SPKF coverage spilled across the television screen, and there they were, just under his shirt collar, accidentally revealed by a make-up artist as she tried to relieve his unearthly grey pallor. A steel bolt in either side of his neck, marked with the unmistakeable sooty scars of electrical contact.
The Candidate's long gaunt face displayed no emotion other than, perhaps, the sadness of a very old man waking up to discover that he is in fact still alive. The make-up artist sighed, pouted as she adjusted the Candidate's collar, and went back to trying to scrape gravemoss out from under his fingernails.
My assistants were over in town, stuffing date-rape pharmaceuticals into police officers and reprogramming them into believing they craved sex with bears. I had the house to myself, and it was just as well. This new development required Professional Thought. My hands still shake occasionally, and I spilled much of the necessary nutrients for Brain Work over the cat. So I snorted the cat and began Thinking.
The Candidate selection process for the Party In Opposition had been the usual retard farming. General John ended his political career when he put his arm around an aZian-American kid at a photo-op and grinned, “You know, back in the War, I used to fuck gooks like your daddy right in the lung tissue.” There was a Doctor from Vermont who had a scream on him like Peter Finch in Network and eyes that rolled around inside his head like a stoned Muppet. No-one told him that a President from Vermont is like a Pope from Berkeley. Old Joe Lebensraum had the best shot since Bugsy Siegel at showing America that Jews can be evil truthless dogfuckers too, and it remains my fervent wish that a thousand generations of his ancestors pull themselves out of their graves and bite the little bastard to death. Dennis Kukikikithing, cursed with the look of a Valiumed-up schoolteacher who'd been repeatedly hit in the face with a shovel, registered on the Richter scale of American politics like a fart on the moon. No-one gives a damn how smart you are when it looks like it takes all your strength to open your eyes and not shit yourself in public.
So we were left with The Candidate. A man who was in a War but appeared neither to have eaten babies or indeed prepared them with fire, nor to have introduced his penis into any part of the Enemy. A man with a full head of hair—no-one has yet noticed that the hair appears to belong to an overfed chinchilla—and none of the strange physical tics endemic to professional politicians that can sink a Presidential campaign.
Aside from the bolts.
I mean, there's appearing stiff on camera. And then there's being dead.
The B-roll had been leaked out to me by an acquaintance at SPKF—people send me this stuff thinking it'll galvanise me back into writing. It didn't and won't—if people didn't listen to me before, they damn well won't now—but I confess that I still find it interesting. And this, this was fucking fascinating. The Candidate was leaning sideways. And leaning. And leaning. It was like watching a tree fall over in slow motion. It took the people around him a moment to realise what was happening. There was shouting from his handlers. A short PA with grey pubic hairs in his mouth lurched into the shot, carrying a car battery. The Candidate's collar was pulled down again, and clips were attached to the Frankensteinian bolts. The full whack of the battery was delivered into the would-be next President's neck. As he jerked, his hair shifted, and I saw that the pelt was affixed to his head with a masonry nail. The nail sparked and all the hair stood on end. Somewhere in that foresty mass, an animal's eyes suddenly stared in stark existential horror.
The jolt wasn't enough. Staffers scrambled in, ripping his jacket off, pulling his shirt open. Under his clothes, there was a hideous tangle of long surgical stitches. The Candidate was a patchwork quilt of various decaying skin tones. There was half a tattoo. And three nipples. Two of which appeared to have originally belonged to gentlemen of colour.
A crash cart clattered into the small room. A giggling doctor was masturbating frantically on to the electrical stimulation pads. “It's better than conducting gel,” he laughed, “and it will gift him with my personal Powers. And possibly a few diseases.” A handler punched the doctor in the throat, and the camera captured pus-flecked semen spattering over the Candidate's shoes. It hissed on contact and began to dissolve the leather uppers. The handler stamped on the doctor's liver, screaming like a violated chicken. “You pervert! We are the Party In Opposition. We do not DO sex anymore! This man is going to be President! We could have selected from eight different penises for this man, and we didn't give him ANY!” He snatched up the pads, spat on them, and jammed them into the Candidate's chest. Sadly, he didn't say “clear!” first, and the unlucky make-up artist, doubtless educated by television and hanging on to the Candidate's neck, was instantly electrocuted.
She fell across the Candidate's lap as he revived. Grey eyes rattled around in his grey head and came to rest on the poor smoking woman. His lips moved, gradually baring sharp, stone-coloured teeth.
He began, slowly and inexorably, to eat the dead make-up artist.
“Ah, fuck it,” a staffer was heard to sigh. “It's the first hot meal I've seen him eat in months.”
I looked for the TV remote and couldn't find it. So I repeatedly threw the cat at the screen until it shattered. And then I threw the cat some more until the screen shattered, too. The Hate screamed in my veins. This was the Party In Opposition's best possible shot at unseating a criminal, drug-crippled Fake President who was handed the gig by paid judges and his own mutant family? Why didn't they care? I walked outside. It had gotten late. The sky was red, bright and awful. I sat down on dead grass and watched the sun go down on America.
After a while, I put on my shades.
-- Warren Ellis
(Reprinted without permission, because I understand it to be intended as a publicly distributed work. I'll take it down if I learn otherwise.)
Obituaries
Michaelangelo Antonioni
Yassir Arafat
Syd Barrett
J G Ballard
Jean Baudrillard
Michael Been
Ingmar Bergman
Marlon Brando
James Brown
George Carlin
Ray Charles
Jacques Derrida
Andrea Dworkin
Will Eisner
John Kenneth Galbraith
Spaulding Gray
John Hughes
Molly Ivins
Jane Jacobs
Ted Kennedy
Ephraim Korman
Madeline L'Engle
Russ Meyer
Arthur Miller
Betty Page
Rosa Parks
Pope John Paul II
Richard Pryor
Ronald Reagan (and followup)
Christopher Reeve
Terri Schiavo
Susan Sontag
Hunter S. Thomson
Dr George Tiller
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
David Foster Wallace
Stanley "Tookie" Williams III
Robert Anton Wilson
Stan Winston
The first thousand fallen American soldiers in Iraq
The Kevin letters
Tough decisions
The post that started it all. I note Bush's repeated use of the expression "hard work" during the first Presidential debate. In comments, Kevin suggests that I pay a visit to his blog "for a different perspective on the debate and other things."
Why should I hire you?
A post on Kevin's blog. He argues that John Kerry is a particularly lazy Senator, and therefore unqualified to be President.
The Cowboy vs. The Professor
Another post on Kevin's blog. He argues that though John Kerry --- the "professor" --- is intelligent and knowledgeable, George W. Bush --- the "cowboy" --- has a superior work ethic, and therefore is better equipped for the hard work of the presidency.
All hat and no cattle
My first open letter to Kevin. I answer some of the criticisms that he leveled at Kerry, and suggest that Bush's hardworking cowboy image is only a manufactured image, very different from the reality. I tell Kevin that I find his reading of Bush's and Kerry's personal characters "puzzling," and ask him to further explain how he came to see them that way.
Kevin responds, criticizing Kerry as a flip-flopper willing to say anything to get elected, and expresses concern over Kerry's use of the expression "global test" during the first debate.
Global test
I discuss what Kerry meant by "global test," saying that Kerry used it in reference to the Bush administration's failure to provide a credible reason for our invasion of Iraq.
Kevin responds that he does not accept my reading of Kerry's meaning, and that the problems in justifying the invasion represented an intelligence-gathering failure, rather than deceit on the part of the US.
Honorable?
I explain why I believe that the US's rationale for invading Iraq was deceitful, talking about both the information available and evidence of the Bush administration's deceitful character. I suggest again that Kevin's thinking reflects an assumption that the Bush administration is honorable and that Kerry is deceitful, and ask why he holds those ideas.
Kevin responds that in the examples I cited, Bush was speaking metaphorically and Colin Powell's aides were untrustworthy observers. He describes telltale signs of deceit in Kerry's rhetoric, including vague references to unspecified plans.
Not just semantics
I confess that I'm trying to find underlying reasons why Kevin trusts Bush and distrusts Kerry, and point to examples of these varying levels of trust surfacing in his reasoning. I specifically point to how Kerry's plans are hardly unspecified, but rather well documented on his website. Then I confess that my three main reasons for opposing Bush do not hinge on his administration's deceitfulness: fiscal irresponsibility, Iraq undercutting the war on terror, and torture.
Kevin responds with a range of points. He again paints Kerry as ineffectual and irresolute, and credits Alan Greenspan as having more influence over the Federal budget than the President. On torture, he argues that "torture is bad, but so is terrorism," and suggests that Abu Graib reflects degraded cultural values which represent "the society that Senator Kerry would have us live in."
Red state thinking
In a post not addressed explicitly to Kevin, I quote Mark A.R. Kleiman talking about some good reasons why many Americans distrust liberals. I note the regional character of Kleiman's example of the Civil Rights Movement, saying that this helps explain the anti-liberalism of the South.
Kevin comments on the post, saying that he does not trust liberals because he believes in "personal responsibility," that Kerry's "tax the rich" plans are unappealing, and that it is arrogant for the North to claim moral superiority to the South because many workers in the North were wage slaves.
Vote, but in your own country!
A post on Kevin's blog, in which he asserts that "pasty-face English liberals" who participated in a UK Guardian-sponsored letter-writing campaign to American voters urging them to vote for Kerry "are as much terrorists as those in Al Queda."
In comments, I suggest that he reconsider this statement. Kevin responds that it follows from the logic of John Kerry's reading of terrorism. I comment again, disputing that logic.
Missing the point?
I try to clarify the red state thinking post, emphasize the differences between Southern slavery and Norther wage slavery, and pointedly ask Kevin to clarify some "strange moral points" he has made: that Southern black slavery was equivalent to wage slavery, that the Guardian letter-writers are equivalent to Al Qaeda terrorists, and that the 9/11 attacks justified Abu Graib.
Kevin responded with a defense of his comments, saying that I exaggerated them. He says that I practice a rhetoric of insults in describing his position, and also in accusing the Bush administration of lying.
Commenter Thread asks Kevin to clarify how his link of Abu Graib to Senator Kerry's conceptions of duty and rights. Kevin responds with a discussion of the basis for rights claims, including narrow interpertation of the Constitution's protections. He and I follow up with posts about the language protecting rights in the Constitution.
I give up
Looking in detail at the red state thinking and missing the point? posts and their comments, I confess that parsing Kevin's comments, and attempting to respond thoughtfully, has become demanding and unrewarding.
The Demondoll letters
In this long post, I talked about a kind of communication breakdown that I've noticed tends to happen in interracial dialogue. Some time after well after I posted it, Demondoll2001 posted a provocative comment, eventually prompting our ongoing dialogue.
Dialogue dialogue
The dialogue kicks of with DD raising some questions about sincerity in anti-racist practice and the metaphor of "color." I respond with some ambivalence of my own about color metaphors, and some frustration about identifying effective antiracist practice.
Who am I?
I'm a hyper-verbal urbanite man of letters and adventure. You know the drill: cufflinks, gym membership, esoteric job, thousands of weird books, no TV, INTP.
Things I think are interesting include motorcycles, movies, interaction design, feminist theory, urban planning, natural philosophy, hermetic philosophy, cocktail recipes, haberdashery, and other forms of occult knowledge.
Yes, I wear a coat and tie almost every day, and I have worn my hair long since the Reagan administration.
2000:
2010:
2011:
Miniver Cheevy
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam's neighbors.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
By Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935), from The Town Down the River, 1910
The Modern American Poetry site provides a collection of analysis of the poem.
