I still can't figure out how to get from the post office to those swings in the park

Chris Hedges asks:

How do we recover what was lost? How do we reclaim the culture that was destroyed by corporations? How do we fight back now that the consumer culture has fallen into a state of decay? What can we do to reverse the cannibalization of government and the national economy by the corporations?

What was lost? It was ever else?

The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham.

Only recently revealed as sham?

Our bankrupt liberalism, which naively believes that Barack Obama is the antidote to our permanent war economy and Wall Street fraud, will either rise from its coma or be rolled over by an organized corporate elite and their right-wing lap dogs. The corporate domination of the airwaves, of most print publications and an increasing number of Internet sites means we will have to search, and search quickly, for alternative forms of communication to thwart the rise of totalitarian capitalism.

Such as?

(And) facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are there.

Alternatively:

Oh, thank God, it's nonpartisan. It doesn't matter your background, your demographics, your race, your political affiliation—it's such a uniting, healthy, fun, awesome activity. It cracks me up going to some running event and seeing some dude who campaigned so hard against me, or a lady who's been blogging some mean comments about me. But we're all there together and we're smiling and we're having a good time because we're going to do something healthy and active. We need more of that. That's what sports are able to do. It's a wonderful kind of diversion from the divisiveness that is politics or that is life. And my parents, they've got so many friends from so many different political bents because of all their years participating in races and organizing races. I was lucky enough to have been brought up in that atmosphere where I see the value in that.

Good luck with that manifesto, Chris.

Meanwhile, Dr Z tempts me to disc on Friday with this invitation:

You could meet Sally, my genetically similar unit.  She's genetically similar to you, but not so much, so you will only like her a little or you will have ambivalent feelings toward her.

That's a worldview I understand.

*

• Yup.
• UPDATE! Yup.
• UPDATE! Yup.
  
• Chasing torture is shadow boxing.

UPDATE! Greenwald, yapping about NPR, taIks of this institution of higher education, from which I have two degrees:

There are several noteworthy developments since I wrote on Tuesday about the refusal of NPR's Ombdusman, Alica Shepard, to be interviewed by me about NPR's ban on using the word "torture" to describe the Bush administration's interrogation tactics.  Given the utter vapidity of her rationale ("there are two sides to the issue. And I'm not sure, why is it so important to call something torture?"), I was momentarily amazed to learn that she actually teaches "Media Ethics" to graduate students at Georgetown University (my amazement quickly dissipated once I recalled that this is the same institution that, until last year, paid Doug Feith -- Doug Feith -- to teach students "national security policy" and that Berkeley Law School has John Yoo "teaching law" to its students; next semester at Georgetown:  Karl Rove teaches Civility in a Post-Partisan Age, Bill Kristol lectures on Accountability in Punditry, while David Gregory examines The Role of Intellect in Adversarial Questioning).

• Abu Biden.
• Your Washington Post editorial page.
• On Iranian John Boltons.
• A Moco giant. More.
• Dead in Fairfax?
• Here's a guy reevaluating his blegology.
• Here's a guy reevaluating his blegology.
• Did anyone notice the new subblegsig? Just curious.
• Firpo?

UPDATE! I'm reading Uncle Fiver:

It's not as if these articles about sports are particularly incisive. Take this month's issue, in which an extract from Grant Wahl's book The Beckham Experiment sensationally reveals that David Beckham may not have had the best interests of LA Galaxy at heart when he retired from football to hang around with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes while occasionally playing soccerball in the MLS for $800m-per-year back in 2007, and that USA! USA! USA! star Landon Donovan got the hump when it was decided that he be stripped of the team's captaincy so that Becks could be given the armband. A cynic might say that one over-rated blue-eyed poster-boy with a glamourous celebrity wife was jealous at being replaced by another. Not that Donovan's ever been good enough to be considered over-rated, although he does win the celebrity wives:

Whoa whoa whoa, Donovan plays heroically at Confederations Cup, blasts the whore Beckham, and is married to a professional actress and model that looks like that?

Phbrtz, aargocalypse.

• Jim suggests possible Infinite Jest urs. (Python-based, yo.) Adding, my reading not slumping, being eaten by need-to, I forget how different summer's schedule is. I still owe you - and want to owe you - CG.
• UPDATE! Read this.
• Is homage imitation seems to be the question, though I confess to never heard of Jim Thompson or the guy that's either paying homage or imitating Thompson.
• UPDATE! Books and the internet.
• My theory is that Hemingway sucks.
• On Sad Music. For me, Chopin's Nocturnes.

*

THE PROBLEM OF ANXIETY

John Ashbery

Fifty years have passed
since I started living in those dark towns
I was telling you about.
Well, not much has changed. I still can't figure out
how to get from the post office to those swings in the park.
Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction,
and my hair is the color of dandelion fuzz.

Suppose this poem were about you - would you
put in the things I've carefully left out:
descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily
people behave toward each other? Naw, that's
all in some book it seems. For you
I've saved the descriptions of finger sandwiches,
and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement
from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.

*

My head, your head, here in Status Symbol Land: