wrought to its very effacement

Tell me, you don't think America's poobahs' futurists don't know how fucked America's prospects long-term are, that what's at stake is not what kind of crash-landing but how to squeeze the most profit out of that crash-landing?

Hence the new PR wars: the major change in American herd control in my lifetime is the shift from poking the tribes to fight over who's responsible for America's greatness to jabbing the tribes to fight over who's responsible for America's decline.

*

• Greenwald v Klein in a pissing contest is a mismatch, but Glennboy, don't tell me "I'm ambivalent about whether even to acknowledge this obviously disturbed, Cheneyite rant from Joe Klein," cause that sentence's dishonesty undermines the smackdown that follows.
• So many options to skewer Cohen, I choose this one.
• Well, this one too.
• The Complicit General.
• Silence of the anti-war movement.
• Learning the right lessons.
• Blegangst!
• Don't try this.
• Moco identity crisis! (Hint: it's Rockville.)
• ZOMG! Dimitar Berbatov has been "threatened by a gangster for sending flirty texts to his lover, it was claimed last night." According to the Sun, the man in question is a Bulgarian called Georgi "The Head" Stoilov, a man with a reputation for not ever being able to find a swimming cap in his size. More.
• Tonight:

• Metros' asshats.
• You bought the house knowing, dumbass.
• Gaithersburg panopticon.
• Crisis in McMansionstan!
• Thyrophobia, part three.
• New Doctorow reviewed.
• Pynchon and comics.
• Notable birthday I missed.
• Inherent Vice's characters are "half-assed?"
• Atwood has a new novel?
• NEW ASHBERY POEM!
• 36 (mostly excellent) songs for committing suicide.
• 25 (mostly crappy) songs to stop your suicide.
• My Bloody Valentine.
• Dance, dammit.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

*

IN WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Gustaf Sobin

poems are about. yours, though,
yours, it would seem, are
a-
bout the process of their own
depletion: about, one might assume, a-

boutlessness of being, oh nexus of
nobody's, nulla in the knotted
musculature of
its

very mirrors: is what, vaporous, the lids would
with-
hold; seal, if only they
could, beneath the coil of their

clamped lashes. tell, tell the tongue, then, to
its shadows; the
long-

boned breath to those troughed
chaotic landscapes
of
linen. for here, here's what we'd wrought to its

very
effacement. oh blown
effigy, what matters, finally, isn't to be written.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever: