Are you scared yet?

There's a good reason our elections always come around Halloween, because politicians do their damnedest to scare us out of our wits. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, who for years have been donning their Halloween costumes, pretending to be leaders, analysts, aviator-heroes, and in general looking out for our welfare, are still going strong, even if Cheney's ghoul costume is looking a bit ragged around the edges.

Here's Bush's latest scare tactic:

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses," Bush told a raucous crowd of about 5,000 GOP partisans...

Oh, I am so frightened. What exactly does it mean for the terrorists to win? I'd say the terrorists "won" the moment a hubristic Bush Administration set its sights on Iraq and patched together a pack of lies that Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with 9/11. You'd have to say making the United States look stupid and brutal is certainly a point for the terrorists.

So do the terrorists -- and are these all the same people by the way? do they subscribe to the same goals? -- win if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq? Will Iraq become the "Terrorist Republic of Iraq"? Highly doubtful. In fact, you might argue that the terrorists will lose, because they will have lost their raison d'etre, and all their little thuggish tactics will lose the sheen of "resistance."

Does America "lose" by withdrawing from Iraq, or does America lose by continuing in the same failed policies that first led us into an illegal and unnecessary war and then failed to account for any sort of post-invasion Iraq, other than the Cheney-Rumsfeld pipe dream that the Iraqis would strew roses at our troops' feet. I mean, what sort of idiot-logic is that? Here's a scenario: The Chinese invade the United States to topple Bush and then build bases for their soldiers and start patrolling the streets -- oh yeah, and set up their own government full of Chinese government cronies. Perhaps in their misanthropic minds, Cheney and his ilk sit around believing that Democrats and other critics of BushCo would welcome with open arms this liberation at the hands of the Chinese, but I don't think too many normal people would share their perverted vision.

The Iraq War (#2) was started through lies emanating from the highest levels of the Bush Administration. Period. It was a mistake, and I would submit that Bush "lost" Iraq when he ordered the evidence to be manufactured, interpreted, and scrubbed to fit his foregone conclusion that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed.

Now if I get in the car and head in the wrong direction, let's say toward Atlanta when I'm really supposed to be going to Boston, it's really really stupid of me to insist that because I've already headed south I should keep going that way. Yet that's what BushCo keeps insisting we do. I assume the logic is that if your car were equipped with flotation devices and snow-skis, you could eventually reach Boston by driving the entire way around the fucking globe. Really. November 7 may not turn the car around, but hopefully it will slow its acceleration.

Crime in the city.

What does it take to get convicted of bribery in the District of Columbia? Apparently it takes more than providing lavish gifts to a high-ranking city official who just happens to be providing you even more lavish gifts in the form of city leases worth several times the actual value of your properties. It even takes more than that city official pleading guilty to receiving bribes from you. Now that's where it gets interesting: since Douglas Jemal was "not guilty" of bribing Michael Lorusso, should Lorusso try to back out of his guilty plea of accepting "bribes"? After all, if the jury bought the idea that Jemal was simply providing gifts to someone he hardly knew but was in a great position to help him defraud the city government and its taxpayers, shouldn't Lorusso stand a pretty good chance of getting another jury of equally stupid individuals to acquit him of accepting these "non-bribes"?

Meanwhile, in the sad case of Princess Hansen, a juror was replaced during deliberations for relying on numerology to decide the case (it seems more likely the juror was simply trying to scuttle the case, as she apparently declared "she was the savior, there to force a mistrial"). Native Son has a good post on the lack of parenting involved in allowing your 14 year old to "date" a 28 year old and be out and about at 3 a.m.; aside from the abysmal display of parental interest in Princess Hansen's life, the fact remains that the trash who murdered her are still on trial and unlike Jemal, let's hope they face justice.

The root of the Princess Hansen story really is our throwaway society. In this city, a good segment of the population is considered throwaway, either working at jobs that offer nothing more than subsistence wages for the rest of their lives or not working at all because even those jobs are unavailable. This population is thrown into hellholes like the Sursum Corda Projects, and as Chuck D once intoned, "what is a project but another word for experiment?" You learn early on that you either need to keep your head down or jump in headfirst. Back in the 1940's Ann Petry wrote a brilliant novel called The Street that captured the daily dangers that confronted even a diligent parent; it helps readers understand why it is that seemingly simple solutions like "just move away" don't work as a mass solution. It also allows us to recognize that as dreary and neglected as slums are, the people who live there are diverse: some are strong, some are weak, some are good, some are evil, some are wise, some are fools.

However, by and large, this society considers "those people" interchangeable parts in a service economy and who really cares what the conditions are in the Projects so long as I get my #4 Value Meal hot and fresh?

Your future dream is a shopping scheme.

We used to have this thing we revered. It was called the U.S. Constitution. Apparently, a sizeable chunk of Americans do not take the time to read the thing, nor do they really take it seriously as a guideline for civil society. According to a new CNN poll, a quarter of Americans do not think the Bush Administration has gone far enough in curtailing civil liberties.

I'm pretty scared to meet that 25% who are probably the same group of people who believe most of the Bill of Rights -- except of course the 2nd Amendment, which they'll swear up and down is God's own will -- is nothing but a liberal coddling of criminals.

The only good news to come out of the poll is that 39% of respondents believed BushCo had overstepped their bounds. The exact wording on CNN's cite is as follows: "39 percent of the 1,013 poll respondents said the Bush administration has gone too far [curtailing civil liberties]". That's a respectable percentage, but it's astounding to me that 61% of Americans have so little regard for the document upon which our government is based.

Oh well. As long as the malls are open and the shelves well-stocked, we don't need our rights, do we?

Shameless.

Do you think Rush is back on the juice? Yesterday he went after Michael J. Fox, an actor who basically had to quit working regularly and rarely appears anymore because of his Parkinson's Disease. Since Fox had the audacity to get himself involved in a political campaign by appearing in a political ad, Limbaugh dropped the hammer:

"He is exaggerating the effects of the disease," Limbaugh told listeners. "He's moving all around and shaking and it's purely an act. . . . This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting."

Limbaugh's comments show very clearly the utter mean-spiritedness of the "conservative" movement. My wife says it indicates a level of desperation the Republicans haven't felt in a while. I think Limbaugh ought to be happy if the Democrats retake the House and/or Senate: after all, he can run his "America Under Siege" theme like he did during the Clinton administration. Many of you might still remember those dark days when we weren't at war or threatening war with several countries and the country had a budget surplus (and really, why get so histrionic about a moderate Democrat -- it wasn't like Clinton actually was Progressive).

So now we have Rush Limbaugh -- a guy who did fake his medical problems in order to feed his addiction to pills -- calling out Michael J. Fox, whose Parkinson's Disease is well-documented. That my friends is shameless.

Being here again, I can recall...

I'm wondering very much about our relationship to the past. Faulkner wrote that "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." In his summation of Jay Gatsby's story, Nick Carraway observes, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Fitzgerald and Faulkner were both Modernists and we all know the short version of Modernism: alienation from a fragmented world; retreat to the past and/or tradition; formal experimentation; etc.

However, I think the past plays an important role beyond Modernist yearning for a mythical wholeness or a more "pure" culture. Afterall, Shakespeare wrote "What is past is prologue." The Bard's simple phrase establishes the continuity of events, whether world-historical or personal (the Montague-Capulet feud was, of course, none of Romeo or Juliet's doing, yet they were certainly caught up in it).

We're always fighting over the past. The Right wants to lay claim to a certain interpretation of American history, as does the Left (although the Left generally talks in terms of "histories"). Immigration, a fact of this country since before its inception as the United States of America, is constantly under attack from Nativists and xenophobes and downright racists who hearken back to a unified past culture that never actually existed.

Marx argued that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

So I've been stuck thinking about the past lately.

weekend activity

It was homecoming up at PSU, and while I didn't take part in any festivities save go to the game, it was good to be back and to wear proudly my "Class of 1991" alumni pin. Damn I'm getting old.

Although to hear the moronic stadium announcer tell it during the halftime show, the majority of Alums were apparently 70 years or older. During the Alumni Band performance, the announcer read from his corny script: "We remember the dance craze that swept the nation...I'm talking about the Twist!"

WTF.

Even from my lofty vantage point (see below), I could tell that most of the band members down there were probably between 35 and 50, and it'd be far more appropriate to have been playing something from the 1970's or 1980's even. How about "Tusk"? The regular band, in the meantime, plays Bon Jovi's 1986 hit "Living on a Prayer," a single from an album that was released before most of the undergrads were born.



Sure we were up high, and the wind made the temperatures something like 10 degrees colder than they'd been on the ground, but it was a good time even if Penn State played like crap. When Illinois at 2-5, including a home loss to Ohio, comes into your stadium and has a chance to win up until the last two minutes, you can't call it a good game.

PSU's remaining schedule: Purdue, Wisconsin, Temple, Michigan State. We CAN win all four; we SHOULD win three of four; we MIGHT win 2 of 4; we play like we did v. Illinois and we'll win one of four.

UPDATE: As much as I dislike Florida State and believe they're a bit dirty with their hitting, I think it's ridiculous that some Florida State boosters are calling for Bobby Bowden to retire. It's a travesty, and those boosters should be ashamed (however, from what I can tell, the big money boosters really have no shame at any school -- they think they run the show and at some schools, they do).

Life and how to live it.

I saw an old friend the other day and we got to talking about the shifts
in our lives over the last decade: completion of dissertations, birth of
children, and a few other things. He used the term "initiatory
experiences" to indicate those events that couldn't be explained
properly in language: one has to live through them to understand them,
or more correctly one has to live through them to understand those
events not as objects for analysis but rather as lived experience.

I likened it to the perfrct example of Derrida's concept of differance
-- that slippage in language that prevents us from ever achieving a pure
transparency in communication. There is always something that escapes
definition. Which is not to say we shouldn't try to explain or
understand these experienced; it's just that we're better off
recognizing both the necessity and impossibility of our task.

We humans love cathartic experiences and arduous challenges that cannot
be understood outside their experience: running a marathon is not simply
the act of running twenty-six miles, right?