Fireless and Vacant as Any Hat

Updates below.

Perrin writes: I think Obama has already cemented his legacy, and those who believe he'll dramatically shift direction and do "what's in his heart" are beyond help at this point. Those who grumble in liblog threads about ditching Obama and the Dems in 2012 are also blowing steam, for the system is self-correcting, and once the vampirish Repub candidates start baring their fangs, stray libs will be frightened back into the fold, hoping that the next four years will somehow be different.

True that. I'm not betting against that being me, though I'm gonna try to lose that bet.

Sullivan says what I've been saying forever: If (Obama) ramps up Afghanistan and delays Iraq withdrawal, he will lose his base. If he does the full metal neocon as he is being urged to, he should not be deluded in believing the GOP will in any way support him. They will oppose him every step of every initiative. They will call him incompetent if Afghanistan deteriorates, they will call him a terrorist-lover if he withdraws, they will call him a traitor if he does not do everything they want, and they will eventually turn on him and demand withdrawal, just as they did in the Balkans with Clinton. Obama's middle way, I fear, is deeper and deeper into a trap, and the abandonment of a historic opportunity to get out.

True that. I've said over and over Obama could roast Muslims alive on a spit, gouging out their livers with a poker while screaming Fuck You, Allah, and pigs will call him pussy.

Zizek at Birkbeck College. Consider this: Today's lecture, dramatically entitled 'Apocalypse Today' (a promise or a threat, I wonder), kicks off with Zizek identifying the three modern horsemen of the apocalypse: the techno-digital, the New Age, and the Christian fundamentalist, of which the last of the three is both the most dangerous, the most ridiculous, and also the closest to any kind of desirable emancipatory politics.

True that. If you're American power, who do you fear more, Beckian cranks and Christers or fat and complicit fucks like me? The strategy is to make me more afraid of Beckian cranks and Christers than I am disgusted with the oligarchy, that I hold my nose and tolerate them rather than hold my nose and work with the cranks and Christers to challenge the status quo.

Polny pizdets. To challenge the oligarchy's power, there's more likelihood for success if America's Leftists work with America's christiest, crackerist Right than waiting for help from the Democrats (and more likelihood for success if America's christiest, crackerist Right work with the looniest, most marxist Left than wait for help from the Republicans)?

True that. I voted for X-Boxes for Giftmas and instead got shittier reality shows for the Spring season, bitches! I can get the same shittier reality shows without voting, yo.

• UPDATE! A deadly liar and manipulator.
• UPDATE! Dead Parrot.
• A reasoned response to the question, What's Gone Wrong w/Obama? Fuck reasoned responses: what's gone wrong is he had his chance brand himself as new - regardless of whether or not he actually wanted to enact new - and he chose to brand himself old.
• UPDATE! True this: The fact that Obama is following in Bush’s footsteps – talking to an audience of captive individuals who would be ruined for life by a single catcall – is a sign of how archaic hope for change and reform has become.
• UPDATE!

• Ameritocracy.
• Ameritocracy.
• UPDATE! Bankers take up arms in Class War.
• Waiting for the Political Moment.
• What is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracies. A response.
• UPDATE! Mike Huckabee is a gutless sophist!
• Slapping Berube once, twice.
• 100 proofs we are polny pizdets.
• Come on, Haji, let me keep it.
• The difference between Republicans and Democrats.
• UPDATE! Because Republicans don't think Obama means it like Republicans mean it when he kills civilian towelheads and sandmonkeys, which makes Obama a hypocrite posturing for reelection. Um.
• Palinism. When she's elected in 2012, we'll deserve it.
• Politico fuckwits.
• Politico fuckwits interview Darth Fuckwad.
• Politico fuckwits unwittingly reveal the midgets behind the curtain.
• White House fuckwits respond.
• Where fuckwads dine.
• Your Photoshop of the Day! Who uses Star Trek allusions?

• Oh.
• UPDATE! The Straight Cock Express!
• The problem is, even if 99% of humans are wired to be helpful, the 1% who are assholes will rule the world.

• Top Ten missed Metro stations. How about MOCOCOLLEGE in Rocketville?
• UPDATE! What's wrong with this sentence: Using federal stimulus money, the State Highway Administration has begun a $968,000 project to improve the Md. Route 28 and Veirs Mill Road intersection in Gaithersburg.
• ICC!
• Crisis in Potomac!
• UPDATE! Priest Fight!
• Weast! part one.
• Weast! part two.
• UPDATE! All that matters to Weast!

This past Sunday night we had dinner with Elric's parents at that restaurant in Baithersgurgle, a restaurant that iterations and years ago was once Pappy's Pizza where, during a summer break in 1978(?) between his freshman and sophomore years(?) at Kenyon, someone exceptionally dear to me (and familiar to regulars), to the everlasting and glorious head-exploding of his father, John the Daftist, while working in the kitchen fell in love with a waitress and dropped out of school and has had a full and (give or take two ex-wives and a Sinister Bitch of Doom) happy life. xoxo.

• Friedgen returning, which is as it should be, economically - you can't be buying out a $4M contract with state money while furloughing state workers.
• Berbatov is.... The Continental.
• Do formations have to be symmetrical?
• Thoughts on Friday's draw.
• More thoughts on Friday's draw. Make your predictions on who USMNT draws! Me: Argentina, England, Ivory Coast. Please please please please please England.
• UPDATE! FIFA gave both Argentina and England top seeds (also Germany, Spain, Holland, Brazil, Italy, and home side Bafana Bafana), so they can't be drawn together. USMNT will see one of these eight: France, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, Greece, Serbia, Denmark, Slovakia and one of these eight: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, Algeria, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay.

• I think I did this already, but Silliman marks 2.5M visits. His is one of the irreplaceable blogs.
• HEY! Esposito! decides who gets named, OK?
• Aleksandar Hemon, who edited Dalkey's 2010 European Fiction, interviewed.
• Five Branch Tree has been thinking about C.D. Wright. I confess, keeping up with all the right Wright's (because there are wrong Wright's out there) takes effort.
• New Merwin.
• Morton Feldman.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Animal Collective samples The Dead's Unbroken Chain!
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Bonny Billy sings Death to Everyone!
• KEXP's weekly MP3s of new releases.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment. Yes, again.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment. Yes, again.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment. Yes, again.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

THE DRUNK IN THE FURNACE

W.S. Merwin

                For a good decade
The furnace stood in the naked gully, fireless
And vacant as any hat. Then when it was
No more to them than a hulking black fossil
To erode unnoticed with the rest of the junk-hill
By the poisonous creek, and rapidly to be added
                To their ignorance

                The were afterwards astonished
To confirm, one morning, a twist of smoke like a pale
Resurrection, staggering out of it chewed hole,
And to remark then other tokens that someone,
Cosily bolted behind the eye-holed iron
Door of the drafty burner, had there established
                His bad castle.

                Where he gets his spirits
It's a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical:
Hammer-and-anvilling with poker and bottle
To his jugged bellowings, till the last groaning clang
As he collapses onto the rioting
Springs of a litter of car-seats ranged on the grates,
                To sleep like an iron pig.

                In their tar-paper church
On a text about stoke-holes that are sated never
Their Reverend lingers. They nod and hate trespassers.
When the furnace wakes, though, all afternnon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
                Stand in a row and learn.

 

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever: