Zeitgeist

I've decided that I'm just about ready to give up on the news!

Here in the year 2007 I have to cling to the hope that the past six years, the first six years of the American Experiment in the Third Millennium, are some kind of aberration instead of a period that has really set the tone that's going to persist throughout my adult life.

We're talking about a period in which the favorite for the Republican Party's presidential nomination can say something like this little gem and have it be reported in subsequent days in this fashion, as a kind of gentlemanly disagreement about the rules of cricket.

In a question about torture, he ridiculed the way newspapers portray controversial interrogation techniques like water-boarding and sleep deprivation.

If the media think sleep deprivation constitutes torture, Giuliani said, "On that theory, I'm being tortured running for president of the United States."

McCain, whatever his recent failings, is a veteran and a former POW who knows what he's talking about. He was tortured regularly for an extended period! Giuliani is a plastic man, a cipher, who shrouds his egotistical will to power in a thin veneer of tough-guy posturing. Why does the New York Times pretend that these two people have anything approaching equivalency in a discussion about torture?

There's some kind of deep-seated sickness in the media with respect to the sin of taking sides, which we've seen not just on subjects like torture, but also with respect to Global Warming, the justification for the war in Iraq (and now a new conflict with Iran), the theory of evolution, and more. The American media is at best (and I mean discounting the kind of corruption and inbreeding that Glenn Greenwald spends most of his blog carping about) a huge forum for the expression of the Golden Mean fallacy. Forget that the facts don't take sides. Report the poles and decide that the truth falls somewhere in the middle.

When I read things like that article in the NYT I feel very angry but also very small, because there is nothing that I can do about something so stupid. This is the message going out to America: "The issue of torture is mainly concerned with politicians and representatives of the justice department discussing amongst themselves what actually constitutes torture, and whether or not torture yields useful information to stop terrorism. None of the assertions made by either side can be assigned any kind of value with regard to truthfulness."

But we're not talking about an abstruse political debate! We're talking about Khaled El-Masri, an innocent man abducted and renditioned to Afghanistan to be tortured for months. We're talking about real people, being waterboarded and deprived of sleep for extended periods right now, in secret CIA prisons.

Evan

Pop Art

Here's some stuff I made using the "Graffiti" application of the popular Facebook website, which I'm posting here for the enjoyment of people who don't use the Face-book but might read my blog. Which I think is something like three or four people. Maybe I should send out an e-mail to my family so everybody knows about that, but then again maybe people in my family would find my thoughts off-putting and offensive. It would be awkward at Thanksgiving.

This is the single composition that I'm most proud of.


There's something sublime about it, in the contrast between the heavy, earthbound monster at the right of panel, and the sprightly and whimsical creature at left. Obviously there's some limitations to it, mainly my complete absence of any talent for drawing, but I'm pretty happy with it.

I also drew an entire eighteen-page comic about a couple of colored dots expounding on the subject of modernist alienation, but blogger isn't letting me upload images at the moment, and in any case it might be a little too obnoxious to throw down a solid megabyte of images right here. We'll see, maybe later on.

Er?

I'm just going to pretend that there wasn't even a service interruption in my posting on this blog. It'll be a short one today, and we'll see if I have time in the future.

This was prompted mainly by confusion and outrage after reading one of Glenn Greenwald's own blog posts on the Salon.com. Greenwald is actually now the only political blogger who I read regularly, because he seems to have it together more than most.

Today his article is the second in a series about how the Anti-Defamation League and Simon Wiesenthal Center like to confront newsmakers for comparing current events and such to the Nazis, because that cheapens Nazism and the Holocaust. I think we can see this principle in effect today with respect to 9/11, because whereas I was very impressed by 9/11 the day it happened, lately I've just gotten tired of it. There was a 9/11 related episode of Law and Order (ripped from the headlines!) on rerun the other day, and all I could think about was the Giuliani campaign.

The problem that Greenwald has, is that the ADL doesn't do much denouncing of the neo-cons and Fox News people who throw "Nazi" around as a pejorative. He gives as his prime example a new book by Jonah Goldberg entitled Liberal Fascism, which features a smiley face with a Hitler mustache and apparently accuses all liberals of being Nazis.

From the blurb quoted by Greenwald:
'Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism. . . .

The modern heirs of this "friendly fascist" tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.'

Maybe it's the history student in me reacting with this confusion... but I confused as all hell by this book. I feel like I need to buy it, to understand what is going on in this blurb, or rather check it out from the library or steal it so that I can avoid giving any material support to this Goldberg person. The original Fascists were really on the left? Compared to who? My head is just swimming.