Truth In Humor

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent an email that he undoubtedly received as a foreward -- fortunately, he was kind enough to drop the FW: tag, and at least pretend it was something he put a little more thought in that one click of his mouse -- that went something like this:

Do you fancy working for a company that has a little more than 500 employees and has the following statistics?:

• 29 have been accused of spousal abuse

• 7 have been arrested for fraud

• 19 have been accused of writing bad checks

• 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

• 3 have done time for assault

• 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

• 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges

• 8 have been arrested for shoplifting

• 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits

• 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

Can you guess which organization this is?

It's the 535 members of the United States Congress. The same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.

Har har. Funny enough, I suppose. Ah, but the true punchline came home this morning while reading the New York Times.

Senators' Stock Beat the Market By 12 Percent

US senators' personal stock portfolios outperformed the market by an average of 12 per cent a year in the five years to 1998, according to a new study.

"The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors," says the author of the report, Professor Alan Ziobrowski of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.

[. . .]

"The results suggest that senators knew when to buy their common stocks and when to sell."

First-time Senators did especially well, with their stocks outperforming by 20 per cent a year on average - a result that very few professional fund managers would be able to achieve.

[. . .]

A separate study in 2000, covering 66,465 US households from 1991 to 1996 showed that the average household's portfolio underperformed the market by 1.44 per cent a year, on average. Corporate insiders (defined as senior executives) usually outperform by about 5 per cent.

The Ziobrowski study notes that the politicians' timing of transactions is uncanny. Most stocks bought by senators had shown little movement before the purchase. But after the stock was bought, it outperformed the market by 28.6 per cent on average in the following calender year.

Returns on sell transactions are equally intriguing. Stocks sold by senators performed in line with the market the year following the sale.

When adjusted by the size of stocks, the total portfolio returns outperformed by 12 per cent a year on average. The study used a total market index as the benchmark for comparison.

Har Har Har.... ah, the sweet sting of humor.

Fame! I'm Gonna Live Forever!

Look, Ma, I'm famous!

Inevitable, but Infuriating Nevertheless

By now everybody's undoubtedly heard that Bush has finally and officially come out in full support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. How in the world do Republicans think they're on the correct side of this particular issue? Do they really and truly think that the test of time is going to prove them right? Likely not -- since political expediency seems to be the name of the game these days.

For a long time I was totally fine with homosexuals civil unions, but only on the condition that the State let go of the 'marriage' concept altogether. Which is to say, that all couples, hetero- or homo-, when wed, were officially considered a civil union; and that 'marriage' would be afforded its sanctified position outside the realm of simple legality (i.e., for instance, in a church, mosque, or any secular equivalent that one might wish). Realizing, of course, that this would never happen in America, because of its undying love of half-arsed theocracy, I quickly decided that the 'compromise' of letting homosexuals have civil unions, while heterosexuals have marriages, was a pretty egregious class system. All the same, I was willing to live with it, thinking that it might be a step in the right direction -- i.e., that when enough people see that (a) homosexuals can love their partners just as much, if not more, than any heterosexual can, or (b) that their congregations will not be legally required to wed homosexuals, the reason for the civil union / marriage distinction would be mooted entirely. With Bush tossing his hat into the fray, though, especially with this amendment being the one on the table, any hope of even a resigned compromise is out the window. Make no mistake, the Federal Marriage Amendment is a not-too-subtle offensive, and not simply a defense of marriage's so-called sanctity. (As is made pretty clear by Yale Law professor Jack Balkin.)

Whether the Democrats like it or not, this issue will not go away by November. My fear is that Kerry / Edwards / whomever will continue their mealymouthed support of civil unions, in hopes of holding the rabid Right at bay for a while, and in the process lose a vital percentage of their progressive-left vote (again) to this guy.

UPDATE: Thankully, there are a few people, like Nick Confessore, who, unlike me, may be able to see the forest for the trees in this whole mess. I hope he's right on this one.

Relating to a Conversation...

Contrary to the standard idealist argument that conceives ugliness as the defective mode of beauty, as its distortion, one should assert the essential primacy of ugliness: it is beauty that is a kind of defense against the Ugly in its repulsive existence -- or, rather, against existence itself, since, as we shall see, what is ugly is ultimately the brutal fact of existence (of the real) as such.

The ugly object is an object that is in the wrong place, that "shouldn't be there." This does not mean that the ugly object is no longer ugly the moment we relocate it to its proper place; rather, an ugly object is "in itself" out of place, on account of the distorted balance bertween its "representations" (the symbolic features we perceive) and "existence" -- being ugly, out of place, is the excess of existence over representation. Ugliness thus . . . designates an object that is in a way "larger than itself," whose existence is larger than its representation. The presupposition of of ugliness is therefore a gap between an object and the space it occupies, or -- to make the point in a different way -- between the outside (surface) of an object (captured by its representation) and its inside (formless stuff). In the case of beauty, we have in both cases a perfect symmetry, while in the case of ugliness, the inside of an object somehow is (appears) larger than the outside of its surface representation (like the uncanny buildings in Kafka's novels that, once we enter them, appear much more voluminous than they seemed from the outside).

Another way to put it is to say that what makes an object "out of place" is that it is too close to me, like the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent: seen from extreme proximity, it loses its dignity and acquires disgusting, obscene features. In courtly love, the figure of die Frau-Welt obeys the same logic: she appears beautiful from the proper distance, but the moment the poet or the knight serving her approaches too close to her, she turns to him her other, reverse side, and what was previously the semblance of a fascinating beauty is suddenly revealed as putrefied flesh, crawling snakes and worms, the disgusting substance of life, as in the films of David Lynch where an object turns disgusting when the camera gets too close to it. The gap that separates beauty from ugliness is thus the very gap that separates reality from the Real: the kernel of reality is horror, horror of the Real, and what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the Real. Another way to make the same point is to define ugliness as the excess of stuff that penetrates through the pores in the surface, from science fiction aliens whose liquid materiality overwhelms their surface (see the evil alien in Terminator 2 or, of course, the alien from Alien itself), to the films of David Lynch where (exemplarily in Dune) the raw flesh beneath the surface threatens to emerge. . . .

In the case of beauty, the outside of a thing -- its surface -- encloses, overcoats, its interior; whereas in the case of ugliness, this proportionality is perturbed by the excess of the interior stuff that threatens to overwhelm and engulf the subject. This opens up the space for the opposite excess, that of something that is not there and should be, like the missing nose that makes the "phantom of the opera" so ugly. Here, we have the case of a lack that also functions as an excess, the excess of a ghostly, spectral materiality in search of a "proper," "real" body. Ghosts and vampires are shadowy forms in desperate search for the life substance (blood) in us, actually existing humans. The excess of stuff is thus strictly correlative to the excess of spectral form: it was already [Gilles] Deleuze who pointed out how the "place without an object" is sustained by an "object lacking its proper place" -- it is not possible for the two lacks to cancel each other out. What we have here are the two aspects of the real: existence without properties and an object with properties without existence. [my emphasis] Suffice it to recall the well-known scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil in which, in a high-class restaurant, the waiter recommends to his customers the best offers from the daily menu ("Today, our tournedo is really special!"), yet what the customers get on making their choice is a dazzling color photo of the meal on a stand above the plate, and on the plate itself, a loathsome excremental lump: this split between the image of the food and the real of its formless remainder exemplifies perfectly the two modes of ugliness, the ghostlike substanceless appearance ("representation without existence") and the raw stuff of the real ("existence without appearance").

One should not underestimate the weight of this gap that separates the "ugly" Real from the fully formed objects in "reality": [Jacques] Lacan's fundamental thesis is that a minimum of "idealization", of the interposition of fantasmatic frame by means of which the subject assumes a distance vis-a-vis the Real, is constitutive of our sense of reality -- "reality" occurs insofar as it is not (it does not come) "too close." Today, one likes to evoke our loss of contact with the authentic reality of external (as well as our internal) nature -- we are so accustomed to aseptic, pasteurized milk that milk direct from a cow is unpleasant. This "true milk" necessarily strikes us as too dense, disgusting, undrinkable . . .

-- Slavoj Zizek, 'The Abyss of Freedom', p. 21-23

Foiled Again

On Sunday night K. and I were roaming around Glasgow, to and fro, from the Tall Ship to the Necropolis did we go. On our way back, we ran into somebody who undoubtedly has read these. K., because she is far more kind and tolerant than I, accepted one of his pamphlets, entitled Frequently Asked Questions In the Glasgow City Centre, but then promptly put it in my jacket pocket upon walking away. I finally read it this afternoon while eating lunch:

(1) Who Made God?

Would you expect a dog to buy and read a daily newspaper? No! [Yes, the exclamation point was his.] That is not because a newspaper cannot be understood, but because it is beyond a dog's understanding.

In like manner, God is bigger than anything a mere human can grasp. If I could understand Him, He would not be God and I would not be a man!

God had no beginning and will never end. Everything we know begins and ends, but God is greater than that. He is everlasting. God's word to us, the Bible, teaches that God is absolutely holy, with no sin in Him at all. He is just, and loving. He has all power. He is everywhere. He knows everything, and never changes.

God is creator of all things. All design has a designer; behind everything made, there will be a maker; creation must have a creator. This is God. Because He is our maker; we are responsible to Him. He knows what is best for us.

Is it just me, or is this God, the one described here if nothing else, which 'no mere human can grasp', is really quite graspable after all, maybe even a little too much so? I understand the notion of the Bible as 'revelation', but nobody has yet adequately to explain to me how we, again as 'mere humans', can deal with the implications of or interpret said revelation. That is, if it, the revelation, is supposed to point toward something beyond our feeble, consciousness-laden mushy minds, can we really articulate what the revelation is said to reveal?

I was all prepared to inquire about this, in hopes that I might rehearse the section of my thesis on Fichte's notion of Anstoss -- i.e., the unlimited activity of the I's self-reflection via the not-I -- and Schelling's exploration of Freedom. Namely -- how does it happen that God pronounces the Word and thereby discloses himself, appears to himself? Which is to say, how does the In-Itself Freedom of God split from itself, in such a way to be able to identify itself as 'itself'; how does it acquire a distance toward itself and thus clear the space in which it can appear (to itself)?

So, yeah, I was all prepared to go on about this; but, as it was, K. was hungry. Silly woman.

'Mememormee, mememormee . . .'

BEWARE THESE HOOLIGANS TWO.

That's More Like It

Consider this a follow-up to my previous post.

Better Things To Do With $10, Isn't There?

Recently I was asked for an opinion on Mel Gibson's sequel to Braveheart (okay, maybe not), The Passion of Christ. More specifically: 'Do you think it will be anti-Semitic?' My reply did not directly answer the question, mostly because I'm a very poor listener; but, in hindsight, I think it might have done so pretty concisely. My basic response was, and is:

Does the world, Christian or otherwise, really need another literal re-telling of Jesus' death, as depicted in the Gospels?

I mean, really, hasn't this story been done to death already?

I've nothing against religious liturgy, or even believing in the salvific or symbolic importance of Jesus' death, but prattling on about the historical details of such a death at some point borders on a weird, kind of sick voyeurism. The obvious objection to this is that artists have for centuries depicted the passion narratives, and yet I've not yet whined about any of them. The difference is, at least for the best art, is that the literal details themselves are not, in the end, the point. One gets the impression, in fact, that they could have been painted, in full faith, without any knowledge of such details at all. They are usually iconic, sometimes ironically, inasmuch as they beckon an infinite gaze that can never nail things down (pun intended).

I do not get the impression this is the intention of Gibson's film, any more than it was for DeMille's King of Kings, Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, or Lean and Steven's The Greatest Story Ever Told. There's nothing wrong with something not being 'artistic' (i.e., in the way that I privileged above), but purveyors of historical-minded Christological kitsch should not be too surprised or appalled to find it branded as anti-Semitic. Quite simply, it is difficult to tell the story, as depicted in the Gospels, without putting some Jews in a very bad light. By the time the Johannine community was reading the Gospel of John, they've probably been thrown out of the Temple (and thus out of Judaism as such) and, thus were no longer protected from Roman edicts against unsanctioned religions. One might be a little surprised, I suppose, if a little animosity wasn't harbored and comeuppance foreseen. However, in light of the present situation, with history having reversed the roles on several occasions, in dramatically violent sweeps, one would be even more surprised if many contemporary readers did not anachronistically uncover a fair bit of anti-Semitism. Expecting these latter readers to simply 'return to the original context' is the near equivalent of telling victims of trauma to 'forgive and forget'.

I'm not saying the Passion narratives are necessarily anti-Semitic, but neither am I saying that they ought not be read as such. The burden is on the purveyors and guardians of the narratives to find a way to affirm their value in light of their historical abuse. Which is why I ask again:

Does the world, Christian or otherwise, really need another literal re-telling of Jesus' death, as depicted in the Gospels?

Surely one would do far better by watching its horrific retelling, of a sort, in Lars Van Trier's Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. But then again, the adults who will soon be lining up to see The Passion, perhaps even taking their kids, in hopes that the death rattle of Christ will compel them away from sex and evolution, are likely the very same people who signed petitions against The Last Temptation of Christ.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Why should I say anything at all, when I have a kitten and foul-mouthed hedgehogs [that last one, by the way, is not safe for work] can say everything for me.

Happenings

To tell the truth, I'd kill for you
It's sick I know, but after all
My definition of the word:
Love is blind, love is good. ('Love', The Twilight Singers)

I've been telling people, anyone who will listen really, that I dislike Glasgow, that I'm ready to leave this forsaken city for sunnier skies and greener vegetables, that it is time to return to the country that needs me most, that it is time to go home. A part of me thinks it is the weather. Winters here are, in two words, a bitch. Not too cold. Certainly not too sunny. Just the same: day in, day out . . . the same. It's no wonder these people drink themselves to an early grave, or that I very likely have shaven a few off my own life. Or, then again, maybe it's just the really lousy exchange rate. After all, over the past couple of months, the value of my dollar has decreased by about 10% every thirty days; in fact, since arriving a couple of years, it's lost about 45% of its overall value. If I were just buying food every now and then, I might not even notice the hit. But when there's tuition to be paid, it's kind of difficult to be nearly so obtuse.

And yet . . .

It is Valentine's Day, no? If I'm not necessarily going to be any better boyfriend to Katrien, I should at least be a more amiable person in general. With that in mind, I'm not going to mull on these details. There are, for now, more important things to tell you about. Namely, The Twilight Singers. As I mentioned in a previous post, I got a chance to see them in action a couple of weeks ago; what I didn't mention, however, was that for about two hours, they made me absolutely forget not only my present dislike for Glasgow but, oddly, all the intervening years from when I was twenty years old until now. Those college years of mine were spent listening to the Afghan Whigs, thrashing about wildly at their concerts in Cincinnati and Columbus, oblivious to everyone and all. They were, and still are, the best live band I've ever seen. When they broke up in 1999, I decided that was the sign that it was time to put college things behind me -- to move on to more sophisticated things. To a bit of jazz. To classical. Hell, even an opera or two. On January 30th, though, at the King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, I hit a worm hole or something such, and found myself back in 1997, held in complete awe by a pudgy, unremarkable looking gravely-voiced, bourbon-drinking former Afghan Whig frontman named Greg Dulli.

The Twilight Singers are not as good as the Whigs at their height -- the intuitive mix between the band members just ain't there. But the energy, oh yeah, they got that in spades. Greg Dulli on stage is rough sex incarnate: sweaty, grunty, and a little jiggly. He thinks he is the coolest, sexiest thing in the room, and everybody at some point during the show, even if only for a moment, believes it. In the ensuing frottage of singer and audience, you can't help but start feeling the same thing about yourself. People who never dance bootylicious-style, like me, who never scream 'Fucking Aaaaaaaaaa' at the top of their lungs, unlike me, do so. Every room Dulli's bands walk into becomes a party, an intoxicated saturnalia whose hangover you'll greet with a wink and a smile.

You think I'm exaggerating, I know. I'm being hyperbolic, to offset the pissy mood this city sometimes puts me in. The only way you can be sure, though, is to check this band out when they come to your town or a town near you. Do so, and I promise you'll be kicking a boot in any television showing MTV-2, because you will have been truly reminded what rock music could and should be.

Rested. Though Not Yet Ready

January 30th?? Has it been that long since I've graced the halls of Silentio. One hundred apologies to all who've come and have seen little of note. Only one apology to those of you who have come to expect little of note but who come regularly anyway. The reason for my silence, outside of having very little to say, is that I've been hosting a couple of good friends from the States. I've a few things to say, post-trip, but they will have to wait a few more hours at least.

Incidentally, said friends will, we can hope, arrive safely home sometime tomorrow. Upon reading this I have a message, though really I guess it is for you all, even those I don't know because I'm just that kind of guy: Miss you terribly.

Busy Busy

Life has had to take precedence over blogging the past couple of days. Apologies to the newcomers -- the old hands, they know the program, so no apologies necessary for them. I decided that, what with it being my final year here in Scotland, that I really ought to have a current curriculum vitae. Those suckers are hard work, particularly when you are as unspectacular on paper as I am! Not sure how much'll get done this weekend, either, since I'm going to spend much of tomorrow readying my ass to shake at the Twilight Singers gig later that evening. But, we'll see.

Hope you Midwestern / Northeastern Americans stocked up sufficiently for the winter.

Eh?

A Name to Remember

Harold Ford, this is a name to remember -- he may very well be the future face of Democratic politics. Savvy, centrist, pragmatic. And, yes, black.

Need something to attach to his name?

Imagine an America where a 13-year-old girl attending a struggling public school logs on to the Internet or turns on CNBC every day to check her stock portfolio before her parents come home from work. Sound far-fetched? Not if you live in Britain, where Tony Blair's government has established child trust funds for every newborn Briton, beginning with an initial deposit of $400 to $800. The accounts grow with compound interest and with tax-free contributions. When a child reaches 18, the money is hers.

Meanwhile, here in America, President Bush plans to unveil his own series of proposals to create a new "ownership society." But his plan, unlike his British counterpart's, does little to help build the assets of those who have none. At least one-quarter of Americans are considered "asset poor" -- meaning they could survive no more than three months without a source of income.

[. . .]

The president's plan focuses on creating new tax shelters for existing wealth. A wiser policy is to help more people become investors. For $40 billion over the next 10 years -- less money than the president's plan -- we can build upon the British model and establish an "American Stakeholder Account," seeded with $1,000, for every child born in America. Children living below the poverty line could start with $2,000. Additional contributions would reward children for performing community service and completing high school. Upon graduation, the young adult could use accumulated savings tax-free to pay college tuition, purchase a home, start a business or invest for retirement.

[. . .]

Building assets is not about combating inequality. Rewarding hard work, risk-taking and initiative is the American way. The problem is that too many low- to middle-income Americans are accumulating no real wealth despite working harder for longer hours. Without ways to reward work with an asset base that grows over time, it will be nearly impossible for these families to provide a better future for their children.

A true "ownership society" is one where all Americans have a stake. At the same time as we improve education, we should give every family the tools to achieve its financial aspirations. We should give every child an ownership stake in America's future.

You don't even need to agree with the entire editorial to be impressed with the rhetoric -- i.e., a very clever co-opting of Bush's so-called 'Ownership Society' -- and the clarity and specificity of actual, holy hell you mean there' smore than just re-election politics(????), policy. All of which give us something to think about. When is the last time we could say that of Preznit (who pissed off God and got us stuck with this guy?) Bush?

Deeper, Baby! Deeper!

The Congressional Budget Office released its new deficit projection numbers yesterday and, well, it ain't erotic poetry, but it does paint a picture of something squishy, deep, and penetrating to the core. (Yes, I'm just trying to boost my hits with that sentence.) This is, of course, on the hells of Bush's assurance to his Republican constituents (everybody else knew he was lying) in last week's State of the Union address that he was going to cut the deficit in half in the next five years. I don't guess the CBO got that memo.

Max explains:

Around the end of this period [2014], the Baby Boom retirements are revving up and we could transition from trouble to deep doo-doo, as redemptions of Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund assets soak up more income tax revenue.

At that point, President Neil Bush might as well redesign Old Glory to depict Chiquita Banana. That's the shape we'll be in. Or perhaps he will request that the U.S. be annexed as a new province of the Peoples Republic of China. If you don't like it, you must hate America.

For more, see Krugman.

Echo . . . Echo . . . Echo

It may seem repetitive to say the same thing the same thing the same thing over and over and over again. Indeed, it undoubtedly is repetitive. But in an age of digitally shared files and interactive technology, but more importantly in a country where the dominant media has to be shown up by a comedian, repetition is not just a necessary evil, the way the game's played: it is the game itself.

With that prologue out of the way, take it way Mr. Soros:

Even today, many people believe that September 11 justifies behaviour that would be unacceptable in normal times. The ideologues of American supremacy and President Bush personally never cease to remind us that September 11 changed the world. It is only as the untoward consequences of the invasion of Iraq become apparent that people are beginning to realise something has gone woefully wrong.

We have fallen into a trap. The suicide bombers' motivation seemed incomprehensible at the time of the attack; now a light begins to dawn: they wanted us to react the way we did. Perhaps they understood us better than we understand ourselves.

And we have been deceived. When he stood for election in 2000, President Bush promised a humble foreign policy. I contend that the Bush administration has deliberately exploited September 11 to pursue policies that the American public would not have otherwise tolerated. The US can lose its dominance only as a result of its own mistakes. At present the country is in the process of committing such mistakes because it is in the hands of a group of extremists whose strong sense of mission is matched only by their false sense of certitude.

This distorted view postulates that because we are stronger than others, we must know better and we must have right on our side. That is where religious fundamentalism comes together with market fundamentalism to form the ideology of American supremacy.

As Vaara points out, there's a reason the right wing elite hate this guy -- which seems as good a reason as any, I think, for everybody to read his latest book.

Sometimes Things Are Alright

When he walked in on him in early December, he put on some Glenn Miller and then he bent over and said to Mr. Grossman, "Lew, when you're up in heaven with your friend, Roy, and you will be in heaven, you've been in purgatory down here, how would you like to be remembered? I'm a lawyer and I can do anything you need to have done. But tell me, how do you want to be remembered?"

Mr. Grossman looked up at Mr. Keating and whispered, "I want to be remembered." He tried to stop himself from crying.

"You will be remembered," said Mr. Keating, his eyes damp too. "I will always remember you. People ask me about you all the time. And I say, You're a fabulous person. Knows more about music than anyone I know. What else should I say?"

"I don't know," Mr. Grossman said.

"Well, I know. I'm lucky to have you as a friend."

"Yes."

"You mean an awful lot to me."

"You mean a lot to me."

"I know I do. Let's listen to Ella Fitzgerald, shall we?"

The invention of solitude, friendship, and the coping with death. It's all here.

My Nightmare

A German woman married to a Brooklyn schoolteacher had been told that she had all her papers in order when she took a quick trip to show off her infant daughter to her parents in Germany.

But her return home in late December turned surreal and terrifying when Homeland Security officials at Kennedy Airport rejected her travel documents, confiscated her passport, then detained her and the 3-month-old overnight in a room with shackled drug suspects. They let her go only after ordering her to leave the country no later than tomorrow.

After a month of desperate efforts by her American husband, their lawyers and legislators, late yesterday a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department said that the woman, Antje Croton, 36, would be granted a last-minute reprieve. But Mrs. Croton said she had received no written notification. "I'm in a nightmare," she said as she packed yesterday afternoon, having abandoned hope of straightening out the problem. "I feel like I'm in the wrong movie."

[. . .]

He pointed out that other foreigners with fewer resources have been caught in the same kind of bureaucratic confusion ever since the Immigration and Naturalization Service was absorbed by the Department of Homeland Security last year.

Mrs. Croton has lived in Park Slope for five years, and her application for a green card has been pending for nearly two. When her sister urged her to visit Germany, she wanted to take no chances. So in October, she said, she asked immigration officials at 26 Federal Plaza about getting a new travel permit.

According to her account, an immigration official, C. E. Herndandez, insisted that her old permit was still valid, though it had a July expiration date, because it bore a stamp saying "April 2004." Reassured, Mrs. Croton departed on Dec. 9. "I did everything by the rules," Mrs. Croton said.

But on Dec. 22, when she returned to Kennedy Airport at 9 p.m., exhausted after a 10-hour trip alone with her baby daughter, Clara, front-line border security officers barred her way. They said the immigration official had been wrong: the July 2003 expiration, not the April 2004 stamp, applied, and she could not enter the United States.

They interrogated her until 2 a.m., she said, as she wept, tried to nurse her baby and pleaded with officials to call her husband, who was waiting without word in the terminal.

K. (a Belgian national, for those of you not keeping score) and I aren't married or anything yet, but, still, this kind of thing scares the hell out of me.

Our Dear Leader Speaketh

In spite of my better judgment, I just read the transcript from last night's State of the Union address. I am truly baffled, perplexed, completely fucking gobsmacked by the fact that any self-respecting, halfway intelligent person would vote for him in November. I know (and even like!) several Republicans, and even they emailed to say they were cringing last night -- the only thing that got them through the sad incoherent nothingness of the speech (perhaps he's embraced Zen, I wonder) was chanting their fight song: 'War on terror, cha cha cha, foreign terror, choo choo choo . . .' When the biggest selling point of a president is something that most Democrats readily support, albeit in a different, more rhetorically & diplomatically measured form, I really don't see the point of thinking this guy a good buy for your electoral money.

There isn't too much of substance in the speech, and what's there aren't really, in the most technical sense, lies. To use a crass metaphor: I guess it's more a matter of an inmate whispering to you, as his tattoo-scarred cadre of buddies grab your arms, 'I dropped my soap near your feet, can you pick it up for me.' If you don't know the disingenious set up by now, well, you very well will soon. In the case of this administration, it seems, most people who vote for Bush won't realize the effect until after he's gone, where they will then blame whichever Democrat has taken office.

There is, though, a particularly loathsome juxtaposition towards the end. Sets my blood ablaze:

A strong America must also value the institution of marriage. I believe we should respect individuals as we take a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization. Congress has already taken a stand on this issue by passing the Defense of Marriage Act, signed in 1996 by President Clinton. That statute protects marriage under federal law as a union of a man and a woman, and declares that one state may not redefine marriage for other states.

Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage. (Applause.)

The outcome of this debate is important -- and so is the way we conduct it. The same moral tradition that defines marriage also teaches that each individual has dignity and value in God's sight. (Applause.)

Every individual has dignity and value in God's sight, just not the right to legalized love and companionship, insurance coverage, tax benefits, et al. Thanks for the dignity and value, God. As always, you come in handy once again.

A Note

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

Whoooooo . . . jokes about bombs at airports, they sure are funny, aren't they?

A note to every maturity-stunted young adult out there who gets a giggle out of scribbling bomb threats in airplane lavatories or snickering about explosives in carry-on luggage, whereever you may be, your crime is not suspected terrorism -- yes, your weeping parents are right, you are not Osama Bin Ladin. No, yours is something else: it is a crime against humor. When the only person liable to laugh at a joke is you, then it probably ain't worth saying. Jokes are, by their very nature, participatory -- even when they're at somebody else's expense. Otherwise, you are on par with the homeless drunk who tells you the same incoherent funny every day.

In the case of this young Brit, I'm sure her fellow inmates in Miami have a few jokes for her to take back home.

Stream. Of. Conscious

Michael D. and I are trying to talk this guy into speaking at our conference in May as a replacement for Douglas Rushkoff (who, by the way, is conducting a very interesting looking -- FREE!! -- online course called "Theoretical Perspectives on Interactivity" starting Wednesday afternoon).

A Poem For Record Players

The scene changes

Five hours later and
I come into a room
where a clock ticks.
I find a pillow to
muffle the sounds I make.
I am engaged in taking away
from God his sounds.
The pigeons somewhere
above me, the cough
a man makes down the hall,
the flap of wings
below me, the squeak
of sparrows in the alley.
The scratches I itch
on my scalp, the landing
of birds under the bay
window out my window.
All dull details
I can only describe to you,
but which are here and
I hear and shall never
give up again, shall carry
with me over the streets
of this seacoast city,
forever; oh clack your
metal wings, god, you are
mine now in the morning.
I have you by the ears
in the exhaust pipes of
a thousand cars gunning
their motors turning over
all over town.

(John Weiner, from his Hotel Wentley Poems [1958])

I attended a really interesting lecture yesterday on the poetry of John Wiener, and I've walked away a fan. Track this book down today, and get it on one of the best kept secrets of American poetry!

Another Letter to a Young Theologian [Part 2] (the last one, I promise!!; or A Post That I Suspect Only Two People Will Want to Read

In the Christian tradition, the theologian's desire to 'know' God has often taken on the sexually euphemistic notion of 'knowing'. In his study on depictions of the Crucifixion in medieval Europe, Richard Trexler notes that it was customary for Jesus' crucified body to be regarded as a 'volume to be penetrated' ('Gendering Jesus Crucified' [1993], 108-09). Thus one might find Jesus appearing and quickly embracing Rupert von Deutz in a dream, kissing him, and then opening his mouth, 'so that I could kiss him more deeply'. Battista Varani is even more literal with his desired penetration when he expresses the wish to wriggle into Christ's dying body in search of his Saviour's heart.¹

To further consider the character of theology, death as such, of course, is never the end. The character eyes death, but, in order to remain a character, can never make the step beyond. 'Dying is not an event', Martin Heidegger points out. 'It is a phenomenon to be understood existentially' (Being and Time [1962], 284). The 'being-towards-death' that identifies one as an individual, then, is an impossible gift and destination, namely because 'every relation to death is an interpretive apprehension and a representative approach to [one's own] death' (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death [1995], 45). Unwrapping this 'gift of death', we end up only playing with its bows and strings.² '[O]ne never dies now', we hear from beyond the grave, 'one always dies later, in the future -- in a future that is never actual, that cannot come except when everything will be over and done' (Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature [1982], 164-65). The grave matters, then, because this 'beyond' is within, we are forever separated from ourselves, from our beginning and ending.³ That which once seemed familiar or present has actually always been foreign and absent, ever-'becoming' itself in relation to an infinitely other. Consequently, 'identity, which we attempt to support and unify under a mask, is in itself only a parody; it is plural; countless spirits dispute its possession, systems intersect and compete' (Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' [1977], 161). This, however, inevitably leads us to one further question.

Who is the character of theology? Which of the character 'I's steps into character on theology's stage? Its self-imposed split, the 'I Am that I Am', this tear has pained theology beyond measure. 'But what is pain?' Heidegger wonders.

Pain tears or rends. It is the tear or rift [Riss]. But it does not tear apart into dispersive fragments. Pain indeed tears asunder, it separates, yet in such a way that it at the same time draws everything together to itself. Its rending, as a separating that gathers, . . . draws and joins together what is held apart in separation. (Poetry, Language, Thought [1971], 204)

Similarly, theology's character is not, nor has it ever been, transparent. If, as Frank Kermode has suggested, there is 'a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end', all presence is a presentation whose 'subject' is only ever 'becoming' (Sense of an Ending [1967], 4).⁴ This is perhaps what I have been trying to say all along, that this redemptive self-presentation is a necessary fiction, one that I cannot help but regard as thoroughly, albeit peculiarly, theological, as it is being constructed in and as an impossible narrative that is never sure how to begin.

******
¹ Also see Jean Wirth, L'image m?di?vale: naissance et d?veloppements, VIe-XVe si?cle (1989), 323; and 'La naissance de J?sus dans le coeur: ?tude iconographique' (1989), 149?58. Citing Wirth once more, Trexler also notes: 'Long before modern psychoanalytic insights, the genital implications of such penetrations were clear among late fifteenth-century German printmakers, who might, for instance, provocatively place the crucified Jesus' pierced, externalised heart over the space where his genitals belonged' ('Gendering Jesus Crucified', 109).

² Notably, Derrida's title, The Gift of Death [Donner la mort], equivocates between the ordinary meaning ascribed to donner, 'to give', and the idiom, 'to put to death' (as in se donner la mort, 'to commit suicide').

³ Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas (1943), 35. Most of Blanchot's best writing comes when he attempts to reflect on the implications of his own insights. For instance, apropos to the realisation above he reflects:

But what is 'humanism'? In what terms can we define it without engaging in the logos of a definition? In those terms that will remove it farthest from a language: the cry (that is to say the murmur), cry of need or protest, cry without word, without silence, ignoble cry where, perhaps, the cry writes the graffiti of high walls. It is possible, as one likes to state, that 'man passes away.' He fades. He even has always already passed, faded, to the extent that he has always been suited for his own disappearance. But, in passing, he cries; he cries in the street, in the desert; he cries while dying; he does not cry, he is the murmur of the cry (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation [1993]).

⁴ It should not be surprising that Kermode goes on to suggest that 'we may call books fictive models of the temporal world' (54). Cf., '[W]e experience the "fictionalization" of history as an "explanation" for the same reason that we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author. In both we recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the world it seeks to inhabit' (Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism [1978], 99).

One Good Turn Deserves Another

In response to this post, dedicated to me as it is, I in turn dedicate this article to Pat.

A teaser:

Theory is a way of problematizing, of wondering about what we are saying and doing, about what we think we are saying or doing, and whether that is what is really being said or done, or whether something else has silently crept over us and turned it into something else altogether. In theory of the deconstructive sort, one could put "quotation marks" or "scare quotes" around each and every word or fragment or sentence, practice or institution, and problematize it, ruminate over it, worry over it. The trick lies not in knowing when to do that—you always can—but to know when not to do that. It depends upon a Socratic demon that warns us to leave this or that alone for the time being because it would represent a more strategic intervention to worry about something else instead.

Theory is endless suspicion and mistrust. But it is not the jaundiced eyed mistrust that believes nothing and does nothing and that slanders everyone who tries, but the kind of felicitous mistrust that somehow finds a way to cohabit with faith, which mistrusts the present in the name of the future. Theory, and the theory astir in deconstruction in particular, doubts the present because of its faith in the future, its love of the à venir, of what is always and structurally to come, so that the Messiah never actually shows up, since if he does, then he is no longer what is to come. What deconstruction will have done, and the way that it will live on, after Derrida, after deconstruction itself, lies in its insistence on the future, on what is coming, and on the courage it takes to keep the future open. Theory is the endless problematizing of our beliefs and practices, the bottomless suspicion that our current beliefs and practices are unworthy servants of the future, unfaithful to the open-endedness of the future, the anxiety that the present tends to ensconce itself in its presence and to close off what is coming. If there were no theory, there would be no future, just the endless repetition of the same. Resistance to theory is reactionary. To resist theory is to resist the future in order to cling to the present. Theory pries the present open to the future, making possible the coming of the impossible, in the name not of doubt but of faith, not of contempt but of love. To understand the future of theory would require understanding the future of love.

I will, later this week, write a bit more about this.

Religion Outside The Limits of Religion; or Another Letter to a Young Theologian [Part 1]

What is theology's character, you ask? The polyvalence of the question, identifying where it might begin and end, is as dizzying as its implications. Might we strip it bare, the question and theology, to get beneath their textual, textile surface, and behold them in their natural glory? Might we yet behold the question, the problem of theology, in its truth and origin, in its naked nature, as it strives to understand what it can of God? What, though, would be the character of this undressing? Would it be rape or consent, this theology, violence or foreplay? When surfaces are compound, when theology's flesh is textual and textile -- published, bound, and disseminated -- its undressing cannot go simply skin-deep. Pierced and tattooed, theology bleeds, as it is riddled anew with innumerable cuts beneath the surface that go beyond the quick, to the blood and the bone and the sinew. Unable to escape the ontological and perspectival dilemma, the theologian's attempts at meticulous dissection of theology, be it through systemising, narrating, or even deconstructing, crack open the subject's breast plate and reveal a voluminous blood flow of ink.¹

Hegel may best represent the systemically redemptive fetish that, its cries of protest notwithstanding, still grips traditional theology. Through his classic dialectical logic he humbly sought (and, so he believed, achieved) a totalisation of identity-in-difference and thus also the culmination of all philosophical thought. Personal subjectivity, he argues, is 'pure self-recognition in absolute otherness', in which the subject 'relates itself to itself and is determinate, is other-being and being-for-self, and in this determinateness, or in its self-externality, abides within itself; in other words, it is in and for itself? (Phenomenology of Spirit [1977], 14, 18). The subject (or identity), then, is never self-present. Identity becomes itself only in-and-through difference, and difference becomes itself only in-and-through identity. In other words, to affirm itself, identity must negate itself and becomes its opposite, i.e., difference, because 'identity is different from difference'. At the same time, however, because identity is in-difference, 'as difference that is identity with itself', its relation to its other is naturally a subjective relation to itself. (Science of Logic [1969], 413-17).²

It is not a coincidence that in developing the all-encompassing implications of his System, Hegel incorporated the three classical arguments for the existence of God: the cosmological, teleological, and ontological proofs. First, with the cosmological proof, Hegel demonstrated that the finite is not simply identical with itself, but inherently and self-contradictorily, needs the infinite (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion [1987], 2: 254-55). With the teleological proof, he continues, God's purposeful wisdom and activity are demonstrated. Purposefulness, he writes, 'marks the beginning and end of the process . . . hence it is the final end' (ibid. 2:405). Teleological purposiveness demonstrates the consequences of the cosmological argument inasmuch that it is 'fixed', 'exempt from the [dialectical] process', and 'determined by the free self-determining of the subject' (ibid.). Furthermore, the reunion of beginning and ending, of subjectivity and objectivity, Hegel continues, is demonstrated in the ontological proof, which essentially replays the double-negation at work in his System. This unity of subject and object, beginning and ending, in sum, is truth (or the Absolute Idea); and God, in turn, is the realised-eschatological 'essence of all reality' (Science of of Logic, 86).

Though he does not cite Hegel or his philosophical System, Tyler Roberts recognises a similar totalising tendency in the seminal works of two of your favorite contemporary theologians, Stanley Hauerwas and Mark C. Taylor ('Theology and the Ascetic Imperative: Narrative and Renunciation in Taylor and Hauerwas', Modern Theology 9 [April 1993], 181-200). Specifically, he argues persuasively that each fall prey to the metaphysical recalcitrance of narrative. For instance, while Hauerwas claims that self-identity, or, in his suggestive words, 'character', is derivative of one's knowledge of and submission to God, one's knowledge and trust are always already deeply embedded in a preexistent Christian narrative in which humanity recognises itself as 'contingent', 'historical', 'sinful' creatures of God (The Peaceable Kingdom [1983], 27-29, 46-49). According to Roberts, this is the very sort of 'master narrative' of which the postmodern theologian, we who have been made wary by those most incredulous insights by the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Frederic Jameson, and Francois Lyotard, ought to be especially mindful ('Theology and the Ascetic Imperative', 188). Nevertheless, even Mark C. Taylor -- who is as suspicious as they come, especially of beginnings and endings, and who is delighted by the notion of a 'nomadic self' who endlessly errs and sempiternally puns in carnivalesque discourses that would make Bakhtin blush and Zarathusa proud, because that is all one does (Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology [1984], 149-65) -- is undermined by an 'internal narrative':

Once there was a pre-modern subject who embraced faith in God. But in its journey to modernity the subject overturned the God-human relationship, making God its own creation as well as dominating others and hoarding possessions in a futile attempt to secure a foundation for itself and escape from death. But, when the subject recognized this futility and embraced the difference at the core of its identity, it emerged into postmodernity, an eternity of play. There the subject threw off lacerated consciousness, entered the divine milieu, and erred happily ever after. ('Theology and the Ascetic Imperative', 186)

What makes Roberts's essay so compelling is not simply that he questions whether Hauerwas adequately addresses the disruptive interplay of 'history and the world' on the 'unity and plot of the Christian narrative' (ibid., 188), nor that he points out Taylor's slippage back into metaphysics; rather, it is the coherence with which he points out the necessary (i.e., structural) and liminal linkage of theology and narrative. The ramifications of this are, like the best of stories, far from obvious.

Unable to free itself fully from a beginning and an ending, the peculiarities of what Gordon Kaufman has described as its 'imaginative construction', cannot be lost on or in theology. As such, who then is the character of this characteristic undressing? Torn apart, theology's heart still pounds. Is it the character of theology to beg the theologian to peek inside and g(r)asp? Does theology whisper to its spectator, 'All this I did for you. Pulled myself apart so that you might see, and touch, and taste the blood, all that blood and pain for you. You didn't know a heart could pump so much blood, did you? It's endless?' Here, violence and foreplay seem to masochistically merge, and the theologian can only pull away a bloody, ink-stained member. Theology, as such, becomes a sacrament, a spectral spectacle, upon and into which the theologian cannot help but attempt to gaze or probe, a violence from which the theologian, like Bataille's bacchant, cannot be fully differentiated.³

*************
¹ Cf., 'Although it may be obvious to us that the constructive work of the imagination has in this way always been constitutive of theological activity, theologians have seldom understood themselves to be engaged primarily in imaginatively constructing a theistically-focused worldview; on the contrary, they have largely regarded themselves as attempting to express in human words and concepts what the divine King had objectively and authoritatively given the church or synagogue in revelation. The fact that their work was thoroughly imaginative and constructive in character was simply not recognized' (Gordon D. Kaufmann, 'Theology as Imaginative Construct', Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50 [March 1982], 78).

² Hegel explains that 'identity is the reflection-into-self that is identity only as internal repulsion, and is this repulsion as reflection-into-self, repulsion, which immediately takes itself back into itself. Thus it is identity as difference as difference that is identity with itself' (413).

³ Cf., Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-39 [1985], 238:

'I AM joy before death.'

'The depth of the sky, lost space is joy before death: everything is profoundly cracked.'

'I imagine the earth turning vertiginously in the sky. I imagine the sky itself slipping, turning and losing itself. The sun, comparable to alcohol, turning and bursting breathlessly. The depth of the sky is like an orgy of frozen light, losing itself. Everything that exists destroying itself, consuming itself and dying, each instant producing itself only in the annihilation of the preceding one, and itself existing only as mortally wounded. Ceaselessly destroying and consuming myself in myself in a great festival of blood.'

For Something Completely Different

Most of Silentio's readers, for better or worse, but surely not surprisingly, are Americans. For them, this link may prove something of a shock; or, at the very least, a bit perplexing. For those of you from Britain and Belgium, though, this is kind of old news. But, oh ho ho, important all the same.

The topic is, generally speaking, if you've not yet bothered to click the mysterious link, the relationship between the 'sacred' and the 'secular'. More specifically, it is about headscarves in French (and Belgian) public schools -- namely, whether they should be permitted. Your appetite for something new whetted? Go ahead . . . don't be afraid . . . click the link.

Upon doing that, be sure also to note the new home for this post's author, Scott Martens. I've been shamefully slow on getting that announced. For my money, Scott is one of the best bloggers out there. His is not a daily go-to site, not typically anyway, as he, well, has a life. But when he's on, which is most of the time, he's bound to write something that'll make you want to either tear your hair out in frustrating disagreement -- just after he made you scratch it in confusion -- or he'll make you wish you had that idea first. Not for the faint of heart or the short of attention.

A Must Click2

A couple of weeks ago I linked to Dwight Meredith's excellent post on scare tactics used by the tort reform lobby to convince us that America's courts are out of control -- that they're handing money out left and right to the litigious cranks who are sullying the good name of corporate America. Today, he has posted a follow-up. And it is good.

Breathe Deep

I love the smell of an unregulated industry at work. It smells like, like, a slow death.

Two years after President Bush declared he could combat global warming without mandatory controls, the administration has launched a broad array of initiatives and research, yet it has had little success in recruiting companies to voluntarily curb their greenhouse gas emissions, according to official documents, reports and interviews.

At the heart of the president's strategy is "Climate Leaders," a program that recruits the nation's industrial polluters to voluntarily devise ways to curb their emissions by 10 percent or more in the coming decade. Scientists believe these greenhouse gas emissions, which include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, are contributing to a troubling rise in the earth's temperature that could disrupt weather patterns and cause flooding.

Only a tiny fraction of the thousands of U.S. companies with pollution problems -- 50 in all -- have joined Climate Leaders, and of the companies that have signed up, only 14 have set goals. Many of the companies that are volunteering say they did so either because reducing emissions makes good economic sense or because they were being nudged by state and federal regulators.

[. . .]

Many of the companies with the worst pollution records have shunned the voluntary programs because even a voluntary commitment would necessitate costly cleanups or possibly could set the stage for future government regulation, according to industry insiders.

Most of what the administration hopes to accomplish in terms of reduced emissions will not become apparent for many decades to come, experts agree. The president's more immediate goal, announced on Valentine's Day 2002, is to reduce greenhouse gas intensity -- the amount of gas put into the atmosphere per unit of economy -- by 18 percent over the next 10 years. Congress's research arm, the General Accounting Office, concluded in October that Bush's plan would reduce overall emissions only 2 percentage points below what the nation would achieve with no federal program whatsoever.

One more reason that electing anybody, a horse's ass, a pig's right testicle, is better than voting for Bush. (Okay, I exaggerate. Make it the pig's left testicle.)

Out With the New. More of the Same

A couple of days into this new year, 2004, and things of old do not die easily. I'm still in Belgium (one more day)... I'm the same weight I was two days ago (a stone more than last year, I fear)... I'm still listening to the same set of Kate Rusby songs I downloaded upon my arrival... and I'm still reading, for reasons that elude me altogether, about religious pluralism (which is, for those who do not know, the opposite of religious dogmatism, of the sort that says 'I'm right' and therefore 'You're wrong'). In desperate search for something new, but nothing to make me assess all that I have and take for granted -- this is not the time for soul-searching, these cold January mornings in stone houses surrounded by snow -- my mid-morning pancake, caked in brown sugar (mmmm!), was accompanied by the Best Books of 2003 lists in the San-Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. Though I've only read a couple of the books on either list, there is some nice looking stuff in there. A couple of the highlights for me included:

Gilligan's Wake. By Tom Carson. A loopy, exuberant novel-type prose event that sees 20th-century America through the lives of the castaways on ''Gilligan's Island.'' The originals are augmented by culturally significant characters, from Amelia Earhart and Holden Caulfield to Richard Nixon and Maggie the Cat. [Note to one of my Hoosier guest bloggers of old: this looks to be up your alley.]

Oracle Night. By Paul Auster. An up-to-date metasomething novel on a dizzy rotation between life and invention, situated in a writer's notebook; the writer, Sidney Orr, recently very ill, has lost his will to write until he buys an exotic notebook in Brooklyn. Immediately stories begin to proliferate, right from the bottom of the page upward, in a stew of creation and discovery, communication and concealment.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. By Azar Nafisi. Recalls how Nafisi secretly gathered a group of women in her home in the Islamic Republic of Iran every week to study such banned authors as Austen, Fitzgerald, James and Nabokov. The question of "how great works of imagination could help" them negotiate their "present trapped situation" allowed the women's own stories of brutality and hope to entwine with those of the characters they studied. In this account of her experience, personal insights such as the texture of Nafisi's marriage or her relationship with her two children are tucked away within the larger questioning of literature, her students, her friends and the regime.

Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. By Jessica Stern. "Religion is a kind of technology," as Jessica Stern puts it in "Terror in the Name of God." "It is terribly seductive in its ability to soothe and explain, but it is also dangerous." Religious violence springs from a desire to find a clear purpose in the confusion of a world dominated by American capitalism, Stern asserts. A Harvard professor and former government policy wonk, she spent five years traveling around the globe to research this remarkable study, which combines psychological depth with forensic scholarly rigor.

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. By Jon Krakauer. Krakauer's new work is a fantastic read, right up there with "In Cold Blood" and "The Executioner's Song" in its depiction of that strange American blend of piety, violence and longing for the End Times. His book's bizarre tale revolves around the true and horrifying 1984 murder of a young woman and her baby daughter by Dan and Ron Lafferty, two brothers who joined a fundamentalist, polygamist Mormon splinter group and soon began following their own twisted revelations. Krakauer masterfully weaves Mormon history and modern polygamy into a seamless story about the strangest subculture of the American Southwest.

Vernon God Little. By DBC Pierre. A first novel that is smart, ridiculous and funny even though it is nourished chiefly by the Columbine High massacre of 1999; its 15-year-old protagonist, whose best friend has killed 16 classmates, is the focus of the town's lust for retribution. [ed. I've been hearing insanely good things about this. Most Booker Prize winners lose their luster over time, but this one might prove exceptional.]

Out With the Old. In With the New

It's getting late here in Belgium, and I've yet to recover from my evening of hell in Leuven -- it's not worth blogging about, trust me -- but I just wanted to say, because I'm so bad about doing it in person, or on phone, or in emails, Happy New Years everybody. I hope your celebration did not find you stuck in the freezing cold with narry a taxi to be found (and when you thought you found one, the driver turned out to be, in fact, a dick who plead ignorance as to your destination and drove away in haste) and facing the prospect of an hour-long walk to the nearest available warm bed. No, I wish none of that on you.

Oh, unrelatedly, but while I'm thinking about it. I just watched the finale of World Idol, and while it was complete and utter crap, and not even the utter crap that I find enjoyable, part one on Christmas Day more than prepared me for that expectation. Nevertheless, congratulations to the Norweigan troll who won. With luck, we'll all see him on top of every school kid's pencil, his blonde hair baroque with erratic tangles and twirls. Just kidding, he was a good singer. Huzzah!

Imperium

There's nothing incredibly new here, and I'm not sure I agree with it all, but it is well-written summary of reasons of reasons that more people dislike America's foreign policy than like it.

A few highlights:

Finer connoisseurs of human nature have suggested that Arab anti-Americanism stems from a scapegoating campaign meant to divert the people's attention from their own governments' failings. Its motto: Praise your leader for all that is good; blame America for all that is bad. After all, the scapegoat theory goes, isn't US policy unabashedly, overwhelmingly, ridiculously pro-Muslim? (Hint for those who are having trouble with this homework exercise: Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo.) Were it not for decades of manipulation at the hands of shameless leaders, the Arabs would know how good we are.

They would also know how stupid we are. For what else would you call people who give billions in financial assistance to Arab leaders only so that they can better whip their people into an anti-American frenzy? Why didn't the scapegoat theorists tell us earlier? If only we'd known! Of course, one may criticize al-Jazeera for lacking American-style impartiality, be it the fairness and balance of Fox News or the cool objectivity of Clear Channel. But to think that the Qatar-based TV news network is just a vehicle of power intended to keep the restless Arab masses from turning against their governments is borderline delusional. This is not to say that transference of self-pity into loathing of others might not play a role. (After all, John Ashcroft does it all the time.) But to claim that it is the whole story suggests that Arabs in dozens of nations, thousands of miles apart, suffer from some sort of collective mental disorder: A slur that does not even rise to the level of an idea.

[. . .]

When Condoleezza Rice calls us, war critics, racists, she misses the point. We never said that Iraq could not be a democracy. We simply said that Condi and her friends could not make it into one. The most likely outcome for Iraq in the short term is Lebanon-style guerrilla warfare leading to a mini-Saddam or a civil war. It was ugly before. Bush has ensured that it will remain ugly for a long time to come. Meanwhile he has subverted the war on terror by diverting enormous resources away from it and redirecting them toward fanning the flames of anti-American hatred.

Oh, to hope -- to dream -- sanity returns to the American electorate in November.

UPDATE: Related to this essay on America and empire, I've been hearing some good stuff about about George Soros' new book on the subject, The Bubble of American Supremacy. Might be worth a skim if you're interested in this kind of stuff.

Holiday Reading

Yesterday I boarded a plane for Belgium. Regular readers here will note that this is not extraordinary, since I've been doing this for quite some time now. The best thing about these journeys, besides the amazingly good beer that is made available to me, is that I'm afforded many hours of unfettered reading. Rural Belgium, let's say, is not the hotbed of attention-diverting activity. To my horror, though, upon unpacking yesterday I learned that I'd only packed one book for my week's stay: Joseph Stephen O'Leary's Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth -- not the most compelling title or subject, I must confess. One can only blog and read blogs so much, however, so I've been dipping into bits of it. Turgid prose notwithstanding, there is some very good stuff in here -- his is an understanding of 'truth', more rationally aesthetic than philosophical, religious or otherwise, I can get on board with. I'll spare you the details of that, though.

A quote:

[I]t may be doubted whether any of the great traditions is yet ready to face fully the consequences of its historicity. Since Kant, a basic task of thinking has been to face our finitude, to put ourselves back in our skin, to return to where we already are. If the religions refuse to see the real conditions of their historical existence, the reason is that they transfer to their language, epresentations and history the ultimacy that properly appertains only to that supreme reality to which these have served to witness, thus falling into self-idolatry. 'What is basically wrong with humanity', according to Simone Weil, is 'the substitution of means for ends. It it this reversal of the relation between means and ends, this basic madness, which accounts for everything absurd and bloody throughout history'. Only by taking stock of their extreme fragility can those 'means' which are the religions testify to their 'end' -- to that mystery which can be felicitously named in certain conditions, but which eludes any definitive grasp.

[. . .]

What lends urgency to the problem of meaning created by religious pluralism is the pressure of an ulterior problem, that of truth. To appreciate all religions seems to imply that real assent is refused to any. The great world religions lose their appearance of permanence when one treats them as human institutions born in function of the needs of an epoch, deploying the range of their possibilities over time, and now, to a skeptical observer, nearing the exhaustion of their resources. Yet as they broach a millennial threshold the religions seem in better shape than had been foretold, their mighty engines purring, their rich traditions relucent, despite -- or rather because of -- critical contestation and pluralist dispersion. Perhaps the greatest challenge they face is that of assessing, rationally and responsibly, their status and function, so that in addition to arousing faith and devotion they will also continue to illuminate human minds questing for what is not only meaningful but true.

[. . .]

The question 'how true is religion?', may best be met by asking another question: 'how is religion true?' According to what modalities can religious propositions legitimately be expected to make sense? What sort of reference should we expect them to have? Under what conditions are they statements of truth? How does this truth differ from other kinds of truth? To what procedures of verification or falsification should religious propositions be subject? Since religion is not a unitary entity, the answer to these questions is likely to vary from tradition to tradition.

Many people think of religions as 'supreme fictions', poetic interpretations of the world with no objective cognitive content. They plausibly suggest that the reality underlying the fabrications of religious discourse is nothing more than 'the foul rag and bone shop of the heart'. Yet within the constructions of the religious imagination, so easily dismissed as wishful projection, there are found at key points words which rupture the predictable fabcrications and allow a glimmer of the ultimate reality to penetrate.

A vital religion harbours a capacity for stepping outside the circle of inherited concepts to mime their breakdown before what they attempt to designate. This can be done by an act that speaks at a pre-conceptual level, as when Zen Buddhism names some homely object as the locus of ultimate truth, or when Christianity points to some despised neighbour as the presence of Christ. It can be done in a secondary way by inventing new words or words with new meanings ('emptiness', 'charity', 'grace') which spell an overhaul for the entire discourse in which they are inserted. Such creative acts and words are experienced as a step in the direction of lived truth, rather than as defensive moves to prop up a crumbling belief-system. Assessment of the basic revelation-event (as we may call them), and of the detailed historical claims and doctrinal underpinnings that attend them, seems to demand that we exit from religion as conventionally understood to retrieve its heritage in a more discerning, critical mode, making explicit the subversive potential lodged in it.

Not sure why I share that. Consider it my tireless attempt to justify my interest in, if not adherence to, religion.

The Other That is Me

There's all kinds of talk and writing in my part of the academic world about 'the other', and how our response to that which is other than us is one of the key issues for contemporary thinking -- due in no small part to 9/11. Obviously, this is important, and really quite helpful. However, focussing exclusively on the other without often blinds us to the other within -- the other that looks like us, sounds like us. Indeed, is us. When this happens, when we've unreflectively bought the 'marketing of terrorism' presented to us by our governments and our media, when the war on terrorism is an excuse for political maneuvering, we may eventually find that the danger was a whole lot closer all along. Orcinus explains.

'Welcome to Wal-Mart, Can You Spare Some Change?'

I've been harping on this with friends for the past year now -- not sure at all what sparked it -- but people in America -- not sure if the phenomenon is worldwide -- do not have a very firm grasp on relative levels of poverty and wealth. Considering my current level of debt, I'm not entirely sure I do either. Nevertheless, it would take a blind person to not recognize something is fundamentally askew:

If poor Americans were a nation, the population would top Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming and the District of Columbia combined.

That's using the Census Bureau's lowball poverty count of 35 million Americans.

[. . .]

The poverty thresholds for 2002 were $8,628 for a person 65 and older, $9,359 for a person under 65, $12,400 for an adult and child, $14,480 for a couple with one child, and $18,244 for a couple with two children. That $18,244 isn't enough to buy the Patek Philippe gold watch and Hermes purse on the Forbes index of luxury goods.

By the official measure, a senior with just $719 a month in Social Security and other income was not poor. In reality America, many people above the poverty line can't afford housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and other basic expenses, including taxes.

[. . .]

The poverty rate hit its best mark way back in 1973. The 2002 poverty rate of 12.1 percent was 9 percent higher than 1973's. The 2002 child poverty rate was 19 percent higher than its lowest point in 1969.

None of this, perhaps, is news to anybody. Of course, we all know there are a lot of poor people in America. But who are they?

Answer: Wal-Mart employees.

The Walton's combined $102.5 billion – up from $94 billion in 2002 – nearly matches the wealth of the three richest men: Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates ($46 billion) and Paul Allen ($22 billion) and megainvestor Warren Buffett ($36 billion).

The Walton's $8.5 billion wealth gain in the past year is more than the total budget for Head Start, serving nearly 1 million children.

While the Wal-Mart heirs are among America's richest, Wal-Mart workers are among America's poorest.

Wal-Mart's U.S. workers – most without health benefits – average just $8 an hour, compared with $12 in retail trade generally. Wal-Mart's average wage is lower than the 1968 minimum wage of $8.51, adjusted for inflation. Now the world's largest company, Wal-Mart is rolling back wages in the growing areas it dominates from America to China.

Wal-Mart's CEO pay, by contrast, rose 1,767 percent between 1995 and 2003, according to compensation expert Graef Crystal. CEO Lee Scott's 2003 pay package of $29.8 million amounts to more than $3,400 for every hour of every day of the year.

Shopping at Wal-Mart is hell on earth for a reason, folks.

A Holiday Shout-Out

I'm not a huge fan of the song of Desperado, but a good friend of this blog is -- he knows who he is. More importantly, though, he is also a big fan of Johnny Cash. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that I link to this. Happy holidays, Pat.

And Thus Begins a Thesis; or Writing an Introduction After Chapters One and Two

'Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, so rarely ripe or ready. They show up late, these beginnings, bristling with promise, yet labored and doomed. Every last one of them is lovingly addressed: "in the beginning." But if such talk -- talk of the beginning and the ending -- has produced the poles, the boundary markers of a closed totality, if "the beginning" has blocked the disruptive infinities of becoming, then theology had better get out of its own way. -- In the beginning, theology starts again.' (Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, p. 3)

'I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were doing when they begot me.' (Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, p. 1)

'THIS WAS UNCALLED FOR.' (Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

Where to begin? An introduction, in addition to being a formal greeting or welcome -- hello, out there -- is meant to set the tone and the tenor, and to limn the aspirational ambit of a particular project, so as to hint at the chorus of voices and themes that will, in due course and manner, emerge. In so doing, its ending is translated, or in the case of some malignant tomes, metastasises, to its beginning. Typically written after the book's body, and maybe even its conclusion, introductions can often be slightly shady. They are, Mark C. Taylor affirms, 'awkward, embarrassing affairs -- coy games of hide-and-seek, revelation and concealment, appearance and disappearance.' Which is to say, one's conclusion can never be too far very far from the introduction.

Filled with as yet unsubstantiated assertions, an introduction tends to be, according to G. W. F. Hegel, 'a string of random statements and assurances about truth'. The insidious implication of these 'random statements' and 'assurances', he fears, is that they unfaithfully belie truth as an autonomous, constructive particular that illegitimately precedes an author before she attempts to develop an argument or narrative. Such a truth could range from an author's historico-cultural preconceptions and agendas, to the intentions and purposes read into an absent author by her reader. Following his signature dialectical logic, the immediacy of truth this would assume, versus its eventual emergence through the dialectical play of identity-in-difference, is naive irrationalism; as he famously mocks, it is to present the 'Absolute as the night, in which, as people say, all cows are black'. On the contrary, he continues, 'One can say of the Absolute that it is essentially a result, that it is only at the end what it is in truth'. Introductions, then, Hegel sniffs with contempt, are 'not only superfluous but, in view of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and misleading.' Censure of introductions duly accomplished, he thus begins his Phenomenology of Spirit, the mammoth introduction to his vaunted, and often vilified, philosophical system. While I do not make similar systemising claims for my own project here, I dare not miss the importance of his interrogation, nor the instructive irony. After all, appearances do not always deceive, no matter the cliche, for sometimes things are not as they appear.

* * * * * *And so it goes from there. This thing, the thesis, it is finally beginning to take shape.

A MUST CLICK...

Wow, the courts are just outta control with giving stupid people enormous, insane settlements, aren't they? Tort reform!! Tort reform!! We need tort reform!

Don't be so sure.

Oh, to Wish

Man oh man, I wish liberals were more like conservatives and never resorted to cheap, dishonest shots at the opposition.

Then [Tom] DeLay lit into "extreme extremist" Howard Dean who was said to have opposed the war in Afghanistan (he didn't) and was accused of lying for accurately noting that Bush's deficits are the largest in history. In the ensuing dialgogue with Tim Russert [a la Meet the Press] on the subject of balanced budgets, DeLay insisted that Bill Clinton deserves "no credit" for the budgets he signed -- in fact, not a single Republican in Congress voted for Clinton's 1993 package -- and claimed that in the nineties the GOP majority passed the first balanced budget in "well over forty years" when the correct number is somewhat less than thirty. DeLay also claimed that the Bush administration has held spending growth below 4 percent after allegedly big increases during the Clinton years, while in fact spending grew 7.6 percent in 2003, and 7.9 percent in 2002, both figures far higher than anything from the Clinton years. Next he insisted that balancing the budget will require more tax cuts and then seemed to liken the whole balanced budget concept to Communism anyway.

[. . .]

Faced with this massive lies-to-airtime ratio, we got basically nothing from Russert. His only efforts to point out the truth consisted of hypothesizing what "the Democrats would say" in response to DeLay, as though the question of what's in the federal budget was somehow subjective. Russert enjoys trying to trip his guests up by bringing up contradictory statements from the past, but when he's faced with someone who's willing to lie consistently he's helpless. In short -- he's the perfect host for today's Republican leadership.

Strange, That

Just looked at my hits, which I rarely ever do, and only just realised that I get far fewer hits when I actually update my site; whereas the place is booming with activity when I don't update for weeks on end. Yeesh, people, is this a hint? If so, you're going to have to try harder than that!

Join the Fight!

I've been thinking a lot more lately about political action, right -- exhorting you all, each and all, to step into the fray and give of your time and your money. Well, friends, the time has come for a specific plea! We gotta fight for the right to get off with a vibrator in Texas.

It's a court case the likes of which this quiet county hasn't seen.

It brings to the historic Johnson County Courthouse a striking defendant, a feisty female defense lawyer, a media-shy prosecutor, a sting operation by small-town police, talk of an anonymous tipster and a parcel of evidence with names such as the Double Hot and the Nubby G.

Some of the players convened Monday in Judge Robert Mayfield's County Court at Law No. 1 for a first appearance by Joanne Webb, proprietor of Passion Parties and a former elementary school teacher now charged with criminal obscenity for selling products she says "enhance relationships" [ed.: I know what you're thinking: double-ended dildos, right? But, surprisingly, no, the case hingest on a vibrator -- which, yes, was a pretty funny sentence to write.]

[. . .]

Joanne Webb said she was ready to stand up for her right to sell the sex toys.

"Our whole purpose in fighting for it is to keep marriages together," she said. "I'm not looking for what's easy. I'm looking for what's right."

Makes you feel downright patriotic, doesn't it? Forget that Sadaam fella . . . this is America, people, we got vibrators to protect! If they take that from Texans, what'll they take away next? Veggie Tale-themed sex toys. (I don't know if there are such toys, but I had a funny thought last night over a delightfully alcoholic cup of eggnog that a ball gag with that little cartoon tomato on the front would be really funny.) No I say! I've yet to find a legal fund for Ms. Joanne Webb, but surely there must be one out there. She's a feisty one, that Webb, and I think we should all get behind her. (Ahem, no, not w/ the vibrator, you sickos).

Something to Wake Up To

I've been no fan of the Iraqi war, as you well know, but it is difficult not to be happy when a war criminal is arrested. My more cynical friends will say, 'Well, this is just going to help Bush.' Fair enough, and maybe so. More importantly, though, it helps the Iraqi people, who we liberals too often, at least latently and silently, maybe just before we fell asleep or after too many drinks, don't mind see suffering a bit -- so long as Bush was placed in a difficult position. I don't mind playing dirty in politics, indeed I espouse it from the hilltops, but for the most part let's keep it there. Anyway, if S. Hussein has truly been arrested we all should be, even if only ambivalently because of the truly fucked up circumstances that finds us in Iraq looking for him, pleased. Which, of course, is not to say we necessarily must be pleased with how Bush & Co. deal with its repercussions. I have the utmost confidence in them that they'll lose any solidarity on this, too. (By, say, declaring victory once again, installing an amiable strongman, and high tailing it out of the country?)

UPDATE: Speaking of ambivalence.

UPDATE²: Oh, bugger all. Of course, we knew none of this would stem the violence immediately . . . but the difference between preparing for the worst and the worst actually happening is vast.

Crikey!!

Had a conversation with a friend the other day about the flu epidemic in America -- I think she was trying was trying to empathize with me, the sickliest of the sick here in Scotland this year -- so while I was sort of prepared for this article, I still found myself scared witless by this new Fujian strain of the flu. *shudder*

As the virus now spreads from its original epicenters in Texas and Colorado, many of those most at risk of dying from the flu—the old, the very young, and those with underlying medical problems—will not be able to get vaccinated. In addition, because health care workers have been notoriously lax about getting their shots (a mere one-third got vaccinated last year), we could soon be witnessing emergency rooms crowded with people violently ill with the flu and without enough medical staff to care for them.

Is such a drastic scenario inevitable? The virus could die out and not strike other places as hard as it hit the first states, but based on past years, that seems unlikely. Nowadays, doctors can also prescribe four antiviral drugs to treat and prevent influenza—but, no surprise, those already are in short supply because in many parts of the country where the vaccine has run out, doctors already have been using them, and there is no plan for ramping up production. If the epidemic does get very bad, our best defense will be thorough hand-washing and medical masks for health workers and patients brought into hospitals where there are not enough isolation facilities, but we could soon face a shortage of masks as well.

[. . .]

Bad as they are, the difficulties in coping with this year's influenza epidemic are like the tiny tremors in California that remind you of the looming Big One. In the world of influenza, the Big One is a pandemic—a strain of influenza so different from what has circulated before that people have no immunity. That's what happened in 1918 when the flu killed between 20 million and 40 million people worldwide. Pandemics that killed well over half a million also struck in both 1957 and 1968.

La la la la... not reading any more. La la la la la.

Oh, Feel the Power!

It's good to see America's economy is getting healthier by the day. Happy Holidays to each every 378,000 newly unemployed this month!

Hmm...

Never let it be said that the U.S. doesn't know who its real friends are.

The United States government is paying the Halliburton Company an average of $2.64 a gallon to import gasoline and other fuel to Iraq from Kuwait, more than twice what others are paying to truck in Kuwaiti fuel, government documents show.

[. . .]

The cost of the imported fuel first came to public attention in October when two senior Democrats in Congress criticized Halliburton, the huge Houston-based oil-field services company, for "inflating gasoline prices at a great cost to American taxpayers." At the time, it was estimated that Halliburton was charging the United States government and Iraq's oil-for-food program an average of about $1.60 a gallon for fuel available for 71 cents wholesale.

But a breakdown of fuel costs, contained in Army Corps documents recently provided to Democratic Congressional investigators and shared with The New York Times, shows that Halliburton is charging $2.64 for a gallon of fuel it imports from Kuwait and $1.24 per gallon for fuel from Turkey.

[. . .]

She said the contract was also expensive because it was hard to find a company with the trucks necessary to move the fuel, and because Halliburton is only able to negotiate a 30-day contract for fuel. "It is not as simple as dropping by a service station for a fill-up," she said.

A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, Bob Faletti, also defended the price of imported fuel.

"Everyone is talking about high costs, but no one is talking about the dangers, or the number of fuel trucks that have been blown up," Mr. Faletti said. "That's the reason it is so expensive."

Yeah, and we all know those snipers and suicide bombers out there have been oh so discriminate in their target selection thus far, huh? They're singling out Halliburton trucks . . . riiiiiight. War profiteering? What war profiteering?

Iraqi's state oil company, SOMO, pays 96 cents a gallon to bring in gas, which includes the cost of gasoline and transportation costs, the aides to Mr. Waxman said. The gasoline transported by SOMO — and by Halliburton's subcontractor — are delivered to the same depots in Iraq and often use the same military escorts.

The Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center pays $1.08 to $1.19 per gallon for the gas it imports from Kuwait, Congressional aides said. That includes the price of the gas and its transportation costs.

The money for Halliburton's gas contract has come principally from the United Nations oil-for-food program, though some of the costs have been borne by American taxpayers. In the appropriations bill signed by Mr. Bush last month, taxpayers will subsidize all gas importation costs beginning early next year.

Goodie!!

This is Really Good

"The problem today is the apparent impossibility of unifying world politics, of mediating between the polycentricity of our everyday political practice and the utopian horizon of a universally liberated humanity. It is not that we are without utopia, but that we are without paths to utopia. And without a path towards it, without concrete and practical mediation in our field of experience, utopia becomes a sickness." (Paul Ricoeur, "Myth As the Bearer of Possible Worlds," in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers [1984], p. 31)

Ricoeur's definition of 'utopia' is definitely distinct from its more popular use, but either way it's a great passage.