A Gift Denied the Rest of Us When Our Portion Isn't Generous

I'm not frightened of the Crackerstanis: I envy the Crackerstanis. Even if I think their narratives are moronic, they have the management class of Team Republican (and assorted Villagers) shitting their shitty pants. Crackerstanis now think Karl Rove is a liberal, yo. Democrats? They're more frightened of Crackerstanis than fucking retards like me. That? Is on fucking retards like me.

I don't doubt that pissing off Liberals is a strong tenet of Crackerstani faith (I, erm, like pissing off Crackerstanis, yo), but I also don't doubt their belief that America is being deliberately, systematically, ruthlessly, and sloppily clusterfucked by financial overlords is as devout and sincere as mine. I don't doubt if I debated a Crackerstani me, after calling each other names, we'd agree on the disease if never ever ever on its cause or its cure. We might even agree that my thinking him an apeshit christer and him thinking me an apeshit marxist serves our overlords by keeping us dim-witted and easily goaded but ultimately docile mammals.

Which is to say (I'm on Eno-overload) what I've said before: perhaps someone will emerge who can unite the disaffected and angry on both ends of the spectrum, but (a) I deeply doubt it and (b) s/he would never be permitted to succeed.

• Žižek. Žižek, Žižek, Žižek: What are the dimensions of the Žižekian end, then? Living in the End Times certainly acknowledges that we are the subjects of a mode of finality, but produces a Marxian account of this as a concoction of pending environmental disaster, systems of production and exchange imploding under the weight of their own deviousness, and a bereftness of radical thought on the part of the mainstream left. Pointedly, this isn’t a triumphal declaration of market-based liberalism’s inexorable superiority comparable to those made by the right-wing Hegelians of neo-con academia. Here, we’re positioned as observers as the sun sets on the intellectual epoch kicked off by Hegel, witnesses who must now return to his thought, genned up on Marx and Lacan, in order to confront circumstances whose absolutely novel repatterning is marked by nothing so much as a terrorising sense of acceleration. Committed as ever, through his unexpected use of jokes, zanily incongruous pop cultural references, and shaggy dog anecdotes, to estranging the reader from late capitalism’s alleged comforts, Žižek’s task is to galvanise the reader’s imagination into becoming the motor force of a politics equal to the unprecedented knottiness of globalisation and ecocatastrophe.

• Good thing I have access to a university library's stacks.
• The future is rated B.
• Your daily obamapostasy.
• Obamapussy.
• You youngsters aren't old enough to remember when Cal Thomas was a bigger nobody than he is today: We are doing a poor job of fighting the terrorists at home if we continue to allow Muslim immigrants, especially from Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, into America. We won't win this war if we permit the uncontrolled construction of mosques, as well as Islamic schools, some of which already have sown the seeds from which future terrorists will be cultivated. We won't win this war if we continue to permit the large-scale conversion to Islam of prison inmates, many of whom become radicalized and upon release enlist in al-Qaida's army. That would be primarily African-American prison inmates incarcerated for activities Cal Thomas believes should be criminal in no small part because they incarcerate African-Americans.
• Soothe and reassure. Fucking Democrats
• Might not be for twenty years, but the war with China will be horribly awesome.
• Blog post Title of the Day.
• Librarians at the gates.
• Unions and Duchy.
• Silver Line.
• Gaithersburg!
• Freedom, continued. Rather than retype and/or rephrase what I wrote in an email to a friend, let me steal from myself: I haven't read the Franzen. I held it in my hands in a B&N, opened it to some random page, read two paragraphs, and fuck that. IOZ's reading of it suggests I'd hate it, not just for the reasons he dislikes it but because I used to be (or I'm trying not to be) the target audience Franzen seems to have written the book for.
• Another no for Freedom, though BR Myers is an ass.
• Well, this settles whether I'll read it.
• Went on a business lunch yesterday, and the piped-in music channel played both 10K Maniacs and Smashing Pumpkins, neither of which I'd thought of in months if not years. I neither loved nor loathed either, never bought one or the other, but I remember both being BIG! at one time, it's interesting they're so small now.
• This week's new releases w/MP3.

 

LEDGE

Kay Ryan

Birds that love
high trees
and winds
and riding
flailing branches
hate ledges
as gripless
and narrow,
so that a tail
is not just
no advantage
but ridiculous,
mashed verticle
against the wall.
You will have
seen the way
a bird who falls
on skimpy places
lifts into the air
again in seconds -
a gift denied
the rest of us
when our portion
isn't generous.

Eno-overload? Bonus: what's the secret of this song's title?