Mine

Squishy totalitarianism? If so, does that give me moral permissibility to focus on the micro of my self-interest within the macro? 

Sartwell says

really the various political positions in the u.s. are only inflections of squishy totalitarianism, one reason why political participation is illusory. people like mccain and bush emphasize security state/safety from terrorists, obama economic safety. both are guaranteeing your life. on both, state and economy merge and grow and grow. and each also basically embraces the goals of the other with minor qualifications.

Minor qualifications? Such as more rather than less insurance for poor children, more rather than less money for fire departments and trash pick-up, better funded rather than underfunded public schools, better roads rather than shittier roads? Forty-hour work weeks, workman's compensation, parental leave, paid vacation, I'm shamelessly bribable.

Look, I mostly agree with Sartwell's analysis, but if I agree my participation affects nothing - and my lack of participation affects nothing - in the systemic clusterfuck of advanced post-industrial globalization of whatfuck, does that mean I should opt out of voting my shitty little self-interest? If capital is its own end, its will to self-perpetuating power mechanically voracious, isn't voting for one set of puppeteers who'll buy me off with shabby but real trinkets that make my life .06% less shitty worth my vote?

Which doesn't mean my puppeteers aren't fecking morons nor that I am not a facking rube.

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• World's Shittiest Human is pissed that Obama "apologized" to Muslims, but not nearly as pissed off as he is that Muslims don't appreciate all that he, The World's Shittiest Human, has bled for Muslims.
• Pastor Gerson says body-counts matter. He's the World's Most Despicable Human, the Pastor.
• Praise for Obama, The Two-Faced Liar (h/t Agi)
• Speaking of Obama's two faces.
• Clash of the Titans.
• Why Christers hate us.

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Hey, guess what tomorrow is?

A blogfriend and I have yapped offblog about blogrolls and my blogroll-rules are simple: it's your fecking bleg, do the feck whet you want. As for pointing out new blogs via Skippy's suggestion, I've added some new links to New Toys over there on the left.

UPDATE: Please send me an email if you're blog-rolling me and I'm not blog-rolling you; as co-founder of Blog Amnesty Day Jon Swift says:

my Liberal Blogrolling Policy, which is shared by skippy and many of the other blogs that will be participating in the festivities, is pretty easy to understand: Blogroll me and I'll blogroll you (as long as your blog isn't porn or spam or egregiously offensive).

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• Pertinent questions, reasonable answers.
• Went looking for Hotel New Hampshire for Planet, Irving being a bridge for me as a teen from spy novels to more serious fiction, because Planet (says her father proudly) says she's sick of the teen novels she's been reading and asked me to find something for her to read, and I found the Irving but also found this corpse

Man, I remember the KABOOM! The Magus gave me when I first read it. Daniel Martin, not so much.

• Glaring holes in your reading CV?
• More pondering on the future of books.
• Joseph O'Neill on Updike.
• Hey, new Tom Sleigh poem

ARMY CATS

1.

Over by the cemetery next to the CP
you could see them in wild catmint going crazy:
I watched them roll and wriggle, paw it, lick it,
chew it, leap about, pink tongues stuck out, drooling. 

Cats in the tanks’ squat shadows lounging.
Or sleeping curled up under gun turrets.
Hundreds of them sniffing or licking
long hind legs stuck in the air, 

great six-toed brutes fixing you with a feral,
slit-eyed stare . . . everywhere ears twitching,
twitching as the armor plate expanding
in the heat gave off piercing little pings. 

Cat invasion of the mind. Cat tribes
running wild. And one big pregnant
female comes racing through weeds to pounce
between the paws of a marble dog 

crouching on a grave and sharpens
her claws against his beard of moss
before she goes all silky, luxuriously
squirming right under the dog’s jaws, 

and rolls over to expose her swollen belly.
Picture her with gold hoop earrings
and punked-out nose ring like the cat goddess Bast,
bronze kittens at her feet, the crowd drinking wildly, 

women lifting up their skirts as she floats down
the Nile, a sistrum jangling in her paw.
Then come back out of it and sniff
her ointments, Lady of Flame, Eye of Ra. 

2.

Through the yard the tanks come gunning,
charioteers laughing, goggles smeared with dust
and sun, scattering the toms slinking
along the blast wall holding back the waves 

from washing away white crosses on the graves,
the motors roaring through the afternoon
like a cat fuck yowling on and on.
The gun turrets revolving in the cats’ eyes 

swivel and shine, steel treads clanking,
sending the cats flying in an exodus
through brown brittle grass, the stalks
barely rippling as they pass. 

3.

After the last car bomb killed three soldiers
the Army Web site labelled them “martyrs.”
Four civilians killed at checkpoints. Three on the airport road.
A young woman blown up by a grenade. 

Facts and more facts . . . until the dead ones
climb up out of the graves, gashes on faces
or faces blown away like sandblasted stone
that in the boarded-up museums’ 

fractured English “leaves the onlooker
riddled and shaken, nothing but a pathetic gaping . . .”
And then I remember the ancient archers
frozen between reverence and necessity— 

who stare down the enemy, barbarians,
as it’s told, who nailed sacred cats to their shields,
knowing their foes outraged in their piety
would throw down their bows and wail like kittens.

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My head, your head