Hey Joe

Conservatives basically concede at the outset that Palestinains are a step down from humanity on the simian scales, and thus fair game. In this opinion, they are loudly, extravagantly joined by the Peretz-Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party, which is a lot bigger than the proggle-wogglesphere is willing to admit. Our more Progressive friends, meanwhile, stick to a loud line of contentless sympathy for the Palestinian "plight." This usually resolves itself into the tired "honest broker" palaver, in which the United States assumes the role of the FMCS, the Israelis play management, and the Palestinians play the aggrieved minor union. Eventually everyone agress on a wage freeze in the first year, 3% after that, and some relief on minimum hours. Democratic politicians must walk the line between these positions, and so they engage in a lot of one-hand-or-otherism that invariably comes down on the side of overloud reaffirmations of Israel's "right to defend itself."

But from Old MacDonald's farm to the disputed frontiers of central Asia, the "right to defend" oneself is basically taken for granted, so you can be sure when you hear the phrase spoken aloud that something is up. In ol' Fayette County of rural Southwestern PA--coal country--where your IOZ was born and raised, the right to defend oneself was every gun yaboo's phrase for "shoot that nigger crackhead when he strays to close to my property line." The insistence on reassuring ourselves and the Israelis and the world that Israel possesses this right is the giveaway. The mediator is always on the side of management, fellows.

Annals of Epistoffemology

"I can't say that I'm totally pleased with the package, but I do know that it will help stimulate the economy, and if it does not, then there will be more to come," Pelosi said.

All of these truths I'm about to tell you are shameless lies. Here, she knows that this plan, however displeasing, will "stimulate the economy." Then she accedes to the fact that it might not. Then she promises that if it fails, she'll double-down on her displeasure by offering more of it!

Bartleby al-Scrivener

WASHINGTON — With its international mandate in Iraq set to expire in 11 months, the Bush administration will insist that the government in Baghdad give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations and guarantee civilian contractors specific legal protections from Iraqi law, according to administration and military officials.

This emerging American negotiating position faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its fragmented Parliament, weak central government and deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state, according to these officials.

-The Times

I'm not exactly a master carpenter, but I've done some remodeling and fabricated some big set pieces in my time, and I know my way around a circular saw. So you will please pardon my inability to understand how a "fragmented parliament [and] weak central government" constitute a "buzz saw of opposition" . . . or, check: a potential buzz saw of opposition.

If Iraq is a weak, divided, un-self-governing state, which it is, then its hard to see how the Iraqi government represents an impediment to our continued occupation. Dear New York Times: It's a fait accompli. The Iraqis can say whatever they want. They can order us to leave. Thank you, but we'd rather not.

Resistable Force Meets Moveable Object

I am totally down with this Jack Shafer article on the inanity of whining about the inanity of "horse race coverage" in Presidential elections. I mean, hell, it's the only substantive coverage. Partisans who want the press to talk about the "issues" really mean that they want positive propaganda on their candidate's plan to return hope to the mantle of change and change to the belly of progress and progress to the lives of our children and our children to the future, where the little fuckers belong. I mean, Mitt Romney supports abortion and does not support abortion, loves gays and hates gays. Hillary Clinton is for the war in Iraq and against the war in Iraq. Their supposedly substantive utterances are entirely exigent--starless and fatherless, a dark water. They reflect the value of the Universal Whatever, the Categorical Eh.

Give Me Land Lots of Land and the Sunny Skies Above

On the subject of suburbia and exurbia, the question of their desirability to this or that family is to me entirely irrelevant. Do you like your tract house? Cool. More power to ya. No accounting for taste, etc. Yet the notion that flight from urban centers to far-flung residential communities represents some sort of triumph of individualism, some breaking of shackles, some existential rebuttal to Frederick Jackson Turner's old contentions about the closing of the frontier are--and I shall put this as delicately as possible--dumb. Sprawl represents government intervention. It results from a planned and subsidized economy. It results from an agricultural policy that obviates regional farming in favor of national distribution by federally subsidized corporations. It represents a land-use policy crafted for our financialized economy, ensuring lots of new housing starts and lots of equity credit for the "consumer economy." It represents a transportation policy crafted as a back-end subsidy for fuel providers and auto makers.

Some people like living in the burbs. I have no reason to doubt their affections. Let's not pretend, however, that sprawl represents some kind of natural, market-driven, personal-preference-defined extension of individual, economic liberty. As an additional note, let's also not hurl any missiles at those who suggest that sprawl will not remain economically viable. I, for one, don't propose to force you out of your McMansion, fella, nor out of your big-assed car. Circumstances, on the other hand, may have other plans than me.

At the Movies

Last night I watched Danny Boyle's latest, Sunshine, which was largely if not unanimously lauded as that rarity, a thoughtful sci-fi film--perhaps no 2001, but no fucking Star Wars either. It's true that for its first two thirds, the film occurs at a stately pace. I'm not, however, certain that slowness qualifies as thought. The movie resolves itself into an extended trope on . . . something. Loneliness? It could just as easily have taken place in a submarine, and at least sailors are usually good for a little recreational sodomy. There's a great deal of somber meditating on the existential something-or-other of the brightness of the sun. And yes, it's true, that the sun is very bright, especially when you get close to it. The final third of the film takes off from the moment in Michael Bay's Armegeddon when Steve Buscemi, for no particular reason, starts to kill the fuck out of everybody, and some other dude shouts, "Oh no! He's got space madness!" Space madness. Why is it that movies about saving humanity from apocalypse so routinely convince you that humanity ain't worth the effort?

University Spending

I mean, if Congress is pissed about spending practices at universities and feels that they're inconsistent with with the universities' status as non-profits, then why don't they have them audited to review their non-profit status? This newfound concern with "rising tuition" and with endowment spending is all sound and fury, a chance to harangue well-paid university presidents and provosts on a politically popular issue. Harvard is a private institution. It can charge whatever it wants for tuition. Berkeley belongs to the State of California. Maybe they ought to deal with it if they think tuitions are too high?

“Parents, donors and all taxpayers deserve to know how these tax-free endowment funds are being spent,” Ms. Munson [adjunct research fellow at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity] said.

Um, parents, donors, and all taxpayers could start by signing up for free accounts at sites like Guidestar where they could easily review the 990s of every non- and not-for-profit in the country, which may not be the Truth and Nothing but the Truth, but which are certainly a sight better than any corpo Annual Report or Shareholders Report I've ever read.

Lit'ra'chur

I am off to be long-winded in meetings for the rest of the day, and have no further comments on the state of the Republic. Here is the beginning of a story I'm making a vague attempt at writing. Knock yerselves out:

Super

In the beginning it was a familiar story to anyone who’d ever read a comic. Around the world, obeying no law of geographic or demographic distribution that anyone was able to discern, children were being born with—or young adolescents being surprised by the sudden activation of—supremely strange, often quite wondrous abilities. Of course, no one could fly like Superman, or shoot energy beams from his eyes, or move objects with her thoughts alone. Deoxyribonucleic acid is an extraordinary thing, but it does not obviate the basic laws of physics, alas. Yet even without the godlike abilities of the old, popular heroes, it was clear that generations were now coming into the world with powers well beyond the mean of the human race.

As time passed, though, and wonderment gave way to actual observation, it became increasingly clear that superhumanity was not without its attendant sorrows. A young man wept on Oprah as he confessed that, though he could flip a Volkswagen onto its back and hardly grunt at the exertion, he couldn’t hold a glass of water or a girl’s hand, which he would crush even if he used the utmost, conscious delicacy. A psychologist friend of mine had one client, a young woman with the ability to turn her head 360 degrees and to see clearly even in the depths of night, who had developed a tenacious, irrepressible bulimia, exacerbated by the hours she spent with her back to a mirror and her head half-rotated, staring ceaselessly at her own ass. My own cousin Casey was born with what the explosion of new doctors and researchers brought on by the advent of superhumanity called a “feline morphology.” He had extraordinary balance, incredible physical perception. Nearly all of his body was covered in beautiful, soft fur, which he was able to clean using his own long, rough tongue. His hands and feet, though human in design, possessed viciously sharp keratin claws where his nails should have been. He spent his youth scampering up trees with the ease of a kitten, and like a kitten, he found that once up he was unable to come down, and he’d cower in some high forked branch until someone got the fire department.

Well and Thoroughly Fucked

So the boyfriend and I are great fans of zombie flicks, and as he's been working on a big commission and essentially housebound, we've been plowing through the Resident Evil franchise, admittedly influenced by the fact that Mila Jovovovovovovich looks like a really hot little twinky boy if you sort of mentally remove the little boobs. Anyway. Jovovich plays the bad-ass, amnesiac, zombie-kickin' heroine, and some other people play zombie dinner. One of these dudes, who ultimately ends up with a fate worse than zombitude, is some kind of ex-military crusader against the evil corporation that was creating zombies in the first place. Well into the movie, after a bunch of folks have already got eaten up, with the prospects for surivival looking implicitly bleak, and after a whole, voiced-over prologue explaining that the evil corporation makes all its money doing super-secret research for the government and military, the good-guy reformer tells Jovovich, very forcefully, that "These corporations aren't above the law. They're not." Except, um, that they are. Yet this is a common strophe in action/adventure/horror/thriller films: the idea that even though the very premises of the plot should preclude any confidence in the notion that the cops or the courts or the press is going to help, and even though the characters are to a man aware of precisely such mechanics, they nevertheless persist in uttering some form of "You're never going to get away with this!" And, oddly enough, films oven turn on a dime to indulge precisely this fantasy, so that at the end of a film about the total venality of the government, everything is resolved by Congressional hearings. (That's the Bourne series, and I owe this insight to a blog review that I can't find--link appreciated if you recall what I'm talking about.) Fortunately, ResEvil doesn't seem to be heading in that direction. Everyone appears to be well and thoroughly fucked.


UPDATE: Bourne. Thanks, Mr. B.

The Way Things Work

So, the United States invaded Iraq in order to remove the totalitarian dictatorship of a Sunni minority and replace it with something more representative and humane. Now, a zillion years later, we are concerned that our allies, the, uh, Sunni minority, are being attacked by the Shi'ite majority that our invasion, like, totally put into power.

5,000 Square Feet and an SUV

Since World War II, the assumption of American hegemony has never been much in doubt.

-The Times

That quotation will come as a surprise to a lot of old cold warriors, whose bread and butter was precisely "doubt" about American hegemony in the face of "expansionist" Soviet Communism. Well, one doesn't read the Times for history. The notion of a post-Soviet Pax Americana, even a short-lived one, is as ludicrous as it is popular--which is to say, very. There was the first Gulf War and the sanctions régime that followed; there were the Balkan conflicts; there was Rwanda; there was Somalia; there were the first World Trade Center bombings, the USS Cold, the rise of the Taliban/Mujahadeen in Afghanistan; near-war between India and Pakistan; a coup in Pakistan; Chechnya. Some Pax, eh?

It turns out that the United States is not immune fom the tidal forces of history nor exempt from consequences for its own decisions. Yet at the heart of it is a gross misconception:

Some of those interviewed, like Raymond E. Dixon, a Kansas City computer programmer, said they were confident their children would not enjoy the same standard of living they had, calling it a reversal of the American dream.

This notion that the never-ending growth in the square footage of the average American home, the increase in the number of cars and acres per family, and the multiplication of electronic tchotchkes, euphemized as "standard of living," constitute The American Dream has always struck me mostly as a farce. My father, his parents, and his four brothers grew up in one half of a brick duplex in Pittsburgh. The other half was shared by a family with two parents, twelve children and an in-house grandmother, and yet the quality of that life was in almost every way superior to the atomized inanity of the three-car-garage subdivision years later. Hell, even that shitty old duplex was made with real brick and real plaster, had real wood trim, a real porch, walls more than four inches thick. They lived their lives embedded in a neighborhood in a community. They knew people, and not just bland coworkers and some fellow churchgoers who spend a few hours a week together in a converted big box off some highway interchange. The increased standard of living whose passing is now bemoaned by our newspaper-quoted "voters" is marked mostly by an increase in personal misery and isolation. The literature and film of suburban anomie is cliché, and there's too much of it--but it reached that stage for a reason. The suburbs and exurbs are anomic. They represent a failed economic model for the nation, and they more significantly represent a failed human ideal for our society.

Sound, Fury, Nothing

I do a fair amount of finance and accounting in my day job, and every time I open Microsoft Excel, I utter a prayer of thanks to the minor deities destiny that I was an English major. I learned what little I know about money on the job and on the fly, and I now find myself blessedly free of the cant that seems to infect even the mildest, most milquetoast of our CPAs. Finance has dressed itself in an emperor's elaborate new clothes, a vast lexicon of sweet, obfuscatory nothings in which the rather earthy matters of how much money comes in and how much goes out is rendered as a kind of Derridian operetta, full of high notes and rat-a-tat vocalising, short on--how would the master put it?--signification. That's an introduction. Let's digress.

The Times asks:

So, how bad could this get?

Until a few months ago, it was accepted wisdom that the American economy functioned far more smoothly than in the past. Economic expansions lasted longer, and recessions were both shorter and milder. Inflation had been tamed. The spreading of financial risk, across institutions and around the world, had reduced the odds of a crisis.

It was accepted, but I'm not sure about the wisdom part. Self-assurances do not create realities, however much we might wish it were so. The idea that distributed risk has anything to do with the occurence of crisis when the fundamental operating premises of the system were so very fucking wrong to begin with is a misunderstanding of both risk and its distribution. The "risk" that was being spread "across institutions and around the world" was only another imaginary facet of a confidence game--it was the undercarriage protection of the financial products dealership: fictional protection against a chimera of a problem.

The same article, lamenting a coming decline in every American's favorite index, consumer spending, goes on to say:

Consumer spending kept on rising for the last 16 years largely because families tapped into their newfound wealth, often taking out loans to supplement their income. This increase in debt--as a recent study co-written by the vice chairman of the Fed dryly put it--“is not likely to be repeated.” So just as rising asset values cushioned the last two downturns, falling values could aggravate the next one.

Newfound wealth is quite the misnomer. It implies piles of money under a couch cushion, or some windfall from an Oncle americain. As the passage makes clear despite this phrasing, the wealth didn't actually belong to these consumers, but to their creditors, and, financial savant that I evidently am, I note that accounts payable do not go into the positive column in the balance book. When you're deep in a hole, you don't dig deeper to get out.

Scandale with an E

The Glory Days of The New Republic were never especially glorious, but at least it was respectable. Now that the magazine has devolved into a forum where it is repeatedly proven that niggers are stupid, Arabs are violent, and everyone secretly hates the Jews, including most of the Jews who don't work at The New Republic, it's really one of the trashiest, most meritricious rags out there, and I include The National Review and the NAMBLA newsletter and all the printed material from the Mitt Romney campaign in that assessment. Its arts coverage is particularly sad, dedicated to sniffing out Jew Hatery. Ruth Franklin is currently informing us that Irène Nemirovsky, the now-famous French-Russian author of Suite Française, was an anti-Semite . . . and an especially evil, vicious one for her posthumous elevation to Holocaust martyrdom, an event treated as if the executed author were herself responsible.

It is certainly fair to say that Nemirovsky came up with some ugly Jewish characters. It is also true that James Baldwin came up with some pretty grotesque Negroes and Graham Greene some pretty awful Catholics. It's fairly clear that Nemirovksy, an aristocrat by birth from an irreligious family, shared many of the cosmopolitan prejudices of her time. It is also clear that as the war loomed and the Nazis rose in power, she came to deeply regret many of her former literary creations as unfortunate caricatures. Franklin notes this and dismisses it out of hand. Once a self-hating Jew, always a self-hating Jew.

There's actually the seed of a legitimate critique in Franklin's essay. The circumstances of Nemirovsky's death, the late discovery of her manuscript for Suite Française, and the poise and surety of a novel incredibly written even as its own terrible context was coming into being--these have contributed to the overestimation of an otherwise less skilled, less compelling, and less immediate oeuvre. Other critics have made exactly that point, although most of them--rightly--note that one great work is all it takes. Franklin even cites such a writer in unfavorably comparing Nemirovsky to Ford Maddox Ford, whose only truly good book was The Good Soldier, and even that one not so good as your Modernist Lit professor wanted you to believe.

But Franklin isn't interested in constructing real criticism. She's interested in calling Nemirovsky who did, you know, die at Auschwitz, some kind of crypto-Nazi using the crudest means available.

David Golder appeared in 1929. Would it be too much to say that such a book published in such a year was complicit, as many similar books were complicit, in the moral degradation of culture that became one of the causes of the imminent genocide?

Yes, it would be too much.

Némirovsky returned often in her work to her image of the Jew who cannot escape his past. Le Vin de solitude (The Wine of Solitude) is a semi autobiographical novel still untranslated, in which the protagonist . . . bemoans her ethnic surname--"Oh to be called Jeanne Fournier, Loulou Massard, or Henriette Durand, a name that is easy to understand, easy to remember!"--and reproaches her father for his materialism and his Jewishness. Among his friends are Boris, a "little Jew who has come from nothing," and Slivker, "a Jew with jet black eyes, whose arm shakes when he speaks, in a jerky motion, as though he still carried the stack of carpets he must once have sold in outside cafes." This work appeared in 1935, the year of the Nuremberg laws.

And:

The following year, Nemirovsky earned 64,000 francs, or $23,000, from Gringoire, and Hitler invaded Austria.

I think we can be sure that Nemirovsky was not looking to do a simultaneous product roll-out with Wilhelm Stuckart, and that third extract is pure trash: the laziest, crassest, cheapest kind of guilt-by-association. It's as embarrassing as Jonah Goldberg's latest. "Nemirovsky had a right-wing publisher, and Hitler was [sorry, Jonah] right-wing, ergo Nemirovsky profitted from Hitler." Or something. It isn't quite clear what Franklin intends by this crude juxtaposition, and the lack of clarity reflects badly on Franklin's intentions in putting it to paper. She makes a maddening effort to transform a pleading letter from Nemirovsky to Maréchal Pétain into a brief for collaborationism, and again, it is the reaching that reveals the poverty and shallowness of Franklin's critique. Nemirovsky did not act bravely in this regard, but nor was she quite the oddity that Franklin wants you to believe. Many of the wealthy, secular Jews of the French cosmopole behaved similarly in the early years of the war and Occupation; there's ample evidence of it in literature and in histories of the period. It may not be the most commendable or honorable behavior in retrospect, but these were people on the brink of the greatest human catastrophe in history, and we would do well to recuse ourselves from niggling judgmentalism and the self-flattering conviction that we, surely, would have done differently--damn the lives of our families, our communities, the thousand messy considerations of actual life.

Note that of the merits or demerits of Suite Française, the novel that made Nemirovsky the subject of current fame, Ruth Franklin has almost nothing to say, except to point out that it doesn't contain any Jewish characters--a troubling omission for critic out to prove that her subject hated Jews. The greedy, hypocritical characters that Franklin found so troubling as Jewish caricatures do actually appear in Suite, however, in the form of the bourgeoise, falsely pious, Christian Madame Péricand. Franklin laments that the German soldiers in the second half of the book are treated as something other than monsters, an odd complaint, since Nemirovsky was there, and knew them. If Nemirovsky treated some of the Germans with relative sympathy in her portrayals, it is all the more remarkable because even were it not for the fact of the Holocaust, she was neverthelss writing about the occupying power that had just conquered her home. This is an authorial act worthy of praise and wonder, not a cudgel to bash her person or reputation. Suite is not exactly a literary masterwork, but it is an assured, engrossing, terrifying, and terribly sad book written under extraordinary circumstances, a work that offers a valuable contemporary account of life in Occupied France without any of the critical, historiographical, and ideological junk that we've since heaped on the period of that war. Its recovery from loss was a boon to literature. For Ruth Franklin to drag it through the mud in order to make a tendentious argument about Irène Nemirovsky's insufficient Jewishness is for Ruth Franklin to make herself into a moral clown.

Is Our Children Learning

Dear Internet, the World, and Everyone Who Currently Speaks, Writes, Signs, Ideates, or Otherwise Interacts Anglophonically,

To "beg the question" is not to require, suggest, raise, demand, or cause a question. It is a form of logical fallacy in which an argument or proposition is assumed to be true based on its own premises.

Love,
IOZ

Welfare as We Know It

But even as he's got that right, he's also got a responsibility to the millions of Democrats -- and Americans -- who worked on his campaigns and fought in his battles, who sacrificed and toiled so he could have this place in our polity, and who expected he would use it to push for progressivism, not just for his family.

-Ezra Klein

You've got to love that "millions of Democrats--and Americans," as if they're non-overlapping sets. "Millions of people--and women." But what you've got to love more is first the idea that people "sacrificed" to get Clinton into office, and then the notion that they did it for "progressivism." What did all these millions sacrifice of such value? A few hours in a phone bank? Puh-lease. If you want to know why progressivism is so unrelentingly lame, this is the answer.

As for progress and its many-splendoured whatnot, Clinton campaigned on and governed from the imperial center. Hawkish on foreign policy, always ready to lob a cruise missile or two, committed to the reduction in habeas and posse commitatus protections domestically, committed to "welfare reform," committed to a bold project of consensus moderation . . . but he did feel your pain. From Iraq sanctions to the Drug War to the then-incipeint Terror War, Bill Clinton basically represented a continuation in the policies of George, Sr.

But the economy! you say. Yeah. Oil was trading at threepence a barrel or something, there was a huge, speculative stock bubble, and Alan Greenspan was giving everybody zero introductory rate loans. Boy, that's working to our long-term benefit, isn't it?


Hats off, again, to Roy Edroso.

I gotta tell you . . .

Hillary is a brawler. Obviously, I'm no fan politically, but even as a big homo, there is something totally hot about a woman smacking around some puffed-up dude onstage. "I'm just getting started." One of these days these boots are gonna walk over you.

Willing Suspension, Etc.

Roy Edroso at Alicublog gets the goofiness of Jimbo Lileks, um, political economy of Pirates of the Carribean III, but I'm a little disappointed that Roy didn't note the greater absurdity there, which is Lileks complaining that Keira Knightly's swordplay is insufficiently verisimilitudinous. Yeah, but on the other hand, the gigantic pan-Carribean ocean goddess was, like, totally true to life.

Soooooooooo . . .

. . . hows about that economy, huh?

I love the smell of market corrections in the morning. It smells like victory.

Annals of Youfuhmizm

Yet what is happening is less a war than a sustained federal intervention[.]

Well, it sure ain't no Whiskey Rebellion. Turns out, narcotics is a profitable business. Turns out, bribery is effective. God, I love the Drug War.

Push Pauling

Well, Justin Raimondo is, as usual, especially cogent. I'm not sure that Ron Paul, even un-smeared, signifies anything about a broader "libertarian movement," but that's one small quibble. Justin's insight into the character of the Nick Gillespie crowd is dead on. The brief section where he discusses homophobia and homosexuality through the lens of his own queer heterodoxy is especially good and matches my own view on the poverty of that particular charge against Paul. Having whittled down the supposedly racist and homophobic rantings of the notorious newsletters to a few lines written by others, Justin makes a compelling case that Paul is being criticized by self-proclaimed libertarians for his failure to embrace state solutions to social ills: He rejects the Civil Rights Act, ergo he must hate blacks. He somewhere says that AIDS cannot be discussed properly because of its political baggage, a case made previously by no less a leftist than Susan Sontag, not to mention Randy Shilts (as Justin himself notes), and this renders him a Jerry Falwell.

I don't support Ron Paul--nor anyone--for President. Dennis Perrin summarizes that position perfectly well. He says things about abortion and immigration that do smack of the kind of moral statism that I most despise, although many of those comments are tempered by caveats to the effect that these issues are not, in fact, within the purview of the federal government as Paul understands it. That said, the sound of a lot of cossetted Washington hangers-on howling because Ron Paul fails to represent Urban Hipster Libertarianism is thoroughly disgusting. I say that as a faggot urban hipster, too. It reeks of favor-currying and aspirations to acceptability. It stinks of Sistah Soujah. It represents the triangulating rhetoric of go-along moderation that defines our entire class of imperial courtiers. "Court jesters and would-be reformers" in-fucking-deed.

Black Gold

The sheer unreality of America's reality-show reality is starting to get to me. The presidential candidates are bopping around the country comparing and contrasting their "economic stimulus plans," totally irrespective of the fact that ain't none of 'em president just yet. The prevailing attitude is one of blissed assurance that this too shall pass. The economics are pure, chop-shop-Keynsian scrap: a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, an increase in consumer confidence indices, and all will be well, even as we stand in the middle of the greatest trash heap of unsecured debt in the history of the world. For years we printed heedless billions of dollars, gave them out virtually for free, and created hundred percent annual inflation in the housing markets. Does anyone doubt this? Our government and central bank and major financial institutions intentionally pursued a policy of hyperinflation in a single sector of the economy, and even as they offered increasingly exorbitant loans to increasingly uncreditworthy rubes, they reassured themselves that it was "the market"--invisible, ineffible, inerrant--that was causing a shoddy three-bedroom in a second-rate subdivision off a highway somewhere in Maryland to catapult from $250,000 to $350,000 to $600,000 in resale value over the course of forty months or so. How confident they were that they could find some new bozo, a good management type making one-fifty a year, who, so long as he didn't have to come up with a $120,000 downpayment, was all for spending six hundred grand for a shoddy three-bedroom sixty miles from the office park where he worked and consumed rushed lunches at Panera Bread. Like any pyramid scheme, it turned out that the bottom layers couldn't be infinitely expanded, and now the lenders have bought a property for twice or thrice its value. Above and beyond, all those unrecoverable loans and all those projected fees and all that projected interest subsidized vast cathedrals of funny-money investment in the heavenly fiction that is the current American economy. How do you like them bare ruined choirs now, boyo?

You have an entire "way of life" predicated upon the cheap and ready availability of fuel, and you've got American troops occupying nations and fighting countless holding actions in order to stave off the consequences of fifty years of meddling in others' affairs in order to secure perpetual rights to cheapo oil. The "housing boom" was just as fundamentally about the notion that there was always cheaper land, cheaper housing, one more highway exit past the last. You've got the President in Saudi Arabia prostrating himself before the House of Saud--the Clampits of the Middle East--begging for cheaper petrol so that home construction can go on farther and farther from town. You've got the Republican candidates in Michigan telling those poor, poor bozos that we're a-gonna "fix" the American auto industry and make it "competetive again," by which they mean that they are going to figure a way to jury-rig the American economy so as to allow John and Jane to drive big honking gas-guzzling truck-chassis'd boats from Southern PA where they live in a thin-walled three-bedroom vinyl-clad crap-o-sphere to Northern VA where they work in a thin-walled mirror-clad ten-story anonysphere--doing what? Who knows? Who cares!?

The Mac

I keep reading that John McCain has made some kind of comeback, the premise being that the failure of his opponents to insinuate the union of McCain and a Vietcong lady assassin improbably produced a Hottentot terrorist lovechild somehow represents a personal victory for Mac. Then again, I just heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio the other night, and he told me: Friends, this McCain went over to the other side in that cell in Vietnam. Something to that effect. Which is only to note, impolitic though it maybe, that John McCain is a former POW who, if you actually pay attention to him while he is and does, appears to be just as crazy as any other POW-MIA trucker-cap-clad alcoholic at your local Moose lodge. He has this line in his stump speech where he tells you: Friends, I will pursue Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, if I have to, to bring him to justice. This is perhaps the most geographically, cosmologically, astrologically, theologically, mythologically, eschatologically confused metaphor that I've ever heard, although as pure, dog-whistle rhetoric it probably beats Hope and Change. What is it that the press likes so much about this guy? He's an old coot with a bad voice and a headful of reactionary half-notions. The reason he is on one hand able to act as the most "conservative" of senators while on the other hand hooking himself to a constitutionally dubious, entirely ineffectual, unconsidered project of "campaign finance reform" is this precisely--that he's an old coot with a headful of reactionary half-notions. Then again, he's sure to carry on the Reagan legacy, much in debate of late: Hey, Where's the rest of me?

The New Deal? Nah. WWII Rearmament

Worth it just to see Jim "Mad Money" Cramer call Ben Bernanke a moron. If it's true, as Kramer claims, that the impending disaster here is the collapse of mortgage insurers who lack the capital to make good on the staggering number of defaulted and defaulting mortgages--cat-foot eaters and squatters, in Cramer's memorable turn of phrase--then it seems to me that we're in for a worse time than Jim C. is willing to doomsay, and Jim is willing to vouchsafe a fair quantity of doom.

Anyway. You know what's supposed to be good for the economy? War. Keep yer eyez n earz open, kidz. I see some Iranian stimulus coming down the pike.