Head full of sermons, mouth full of spiders.

I really should post more here, but I'm really lacking the energy and desire right now. In the meantime, I have to link to James Kunstler's most recent "Eyesore of the Month,"a Daniel Libeskind tumor that will soon grow out of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto:

"Why are all those people standing around in the foreground gaping at this spectacle? They are from the Royal College of Physicians, trying to figure out a treatment plan. The stuffy old gentleman of a museum has developed a horrendous steel and glass tumor. It has become the "Elephant Man" of museums.
Now, you may ask yourself: why is this sort of thing acceptable to the Guardians of Culture? The answer may be that it sends a truthful but subliminal message (which, alas, we are misinterpreting) that the mis-use of technology has become the fatal disease of civilization.
Interesting to note: the page announcing this on the ROM's own site, does not contain a picture of the new addition. In fact it states: "Daniel Libeskind's winning design (as proposed in the architect's written submission) is entitled The Crystal." Hmmmm. Written submission? Like, he wrote three paragraphs describing the idea without any drawings?"

The other day I picked up a used copy of Martin Amis' Visiting Mrs. Nabokov (and Other Excursions) on the cheap. Flipping through the book, I noticed that there were a few things scrawled in black ink on the back cover. I can't really make it out, so I took a picture of it, and put it up here. If you can decipher the words, leave a comment with your interpretation. The person with the best interpretation will get a high-five and a screamingly over-blown writeup on this here blog.

Here's what I think it says:

1 funnel hung
Musicals of Rummel
JPW School

* NW
Argument Scentz

* Gum hill S Angle Sili

Angie plumber P
Egonmaryfool Caramel

Clearly this makes no sense. Wait! It must be a code! If that's the case, it raises even more questions. Where is this JPW School? Do they perform musicals of Rummel there? Is it on Gum Hill S? Is Angie a plumber, and if so, who is this mysterious "P"? Is Egonmary one person, or a couple? Are they both fools?

I went and saw the Borat movie last night. Most of the people with whom I arrived at the theatre left before the movie was over. I stayed, perhaps out of stubbornness, perhaps out of prurient interest, perhaps out of the fact that I was laughing my head off, and perhaps out of the fact that I was beginning to realize that this was one of the most culturally complex films I'd ever seen, and I wanted to be there until the end.

I've tried to write about the film tonight, but I've had very little success. I've spent hours thinking about it, and had a couple of really great conversations about it - I think the result of all this contemplation is that my thoughts on the matter are too diverse and scattered to combine into one coherent and appropriately succinct blog post. But this film is hugely important - it speaks volumes about who we think we are as Americans, as humans, what we consider humorous, and the role of films (especially comedies) in our culture. I want to write something, but it may take some time to get it out. Given the evanescence of pop-culture phenomena, it may be too late, or at least irrelevant.

In the meantime, there are some interesting reviews out on the ol' www:

The CBC:

The question, of course, is whether or not the Borat movie simply affirms anti-woman-Jew-gay-whatever attitudes or if it flushes them out to vanquish them. That’s a tough question, but one that isn’t served by pulling the film from many of the theatres where it was set to play, which is what Fox suddenly did a few weeks ago. Borat expects a lot of the audience, but in a film overrun with fools, those who don’t even listen to the joke are the biggest fools of all.

Slate:

...in the film's most sobering scenes, Borat's enthusiastic projection of guileless ignorance somehow compels people to disclose their own deepest fears and prejudices. "Do you have slaves?" he asks a group of drunken frat boys who pick him up in their RV. "I wish!" crows one of the lads. A rancher at a rodeo (where, in real life, Baron Cohen was nearly assaulted for singing a pro-Kazakh version of "The Star-Spangled Banner") heartily approves when Borat mentions that gay men in his country are taken out and hung.

The New York Times:

“If the comic can berate and finally blow the bully out of the water,” Jerry Lewis once wrote, “he has hitched himself to an identifiable human purpose.” Sacha Baron Cohen doesn’t blow bullies out of the water; he obliterates them.

Rolling Stone:

Sacha Baron Cohen is a Cambridge scholar from a middle-class and devout Jewish family. Their son, the second of three, wrote his history thesis on the role of Jews in the American civil-rights movement. Not since Little Red Riding Hood have the unsuspecting been duped so hilariously by a big, bad wolf in sheep's clothing.

I think the "In God We Trust" bit on the dollar bill is a little silly. I don't get all bent out of shape about it though, because I think it's such a negligible issue. Perhaps there's the potential that its presence encourages a malignant association of church and state, giving rise to some sort of civil religion, but I doubt it has even that much effect. Nor is it an expression of a latent theocratic sensibility on the part of the government, or anything like that. Even if it were, it wouldn't be a very effective one - I mean, who's ever had their conscience or belief system swayed by slogans on paper currency? I handle dollar bills all the time, and I still can't bring myself to believe in pyramids with incandescent eyes (though I do have several good inductive and deductive arguments against their existence...).

Regardless, I hope they keep the slogan there, just so I can have the schadenfreude-y experience of seeing atheistic folks get their knickers in a twist over it. Boing Boing (where uncritical Dawkins worship has been high, lo these past few weeks) linked to a site where the intrepid Mitchell Kahle describes his evangelistic efforts to make Americans aware of the theistic-tract travesty that is the American bank note.

You see, after a visit to the bank, Kahle makes sure to take a red pen to his cashmoney, thereby obliterating the reference to "God" on the bill. He estimates that he spends at least 50 "Godless" bills per week, which is about 2,500 per year. If bills change hands at least 20 times in their lives, then as many as 50,000 people see these pagan bills every year. Kahle claims that over the past ten years nearly a half of a million people have seen his handiwork. This is evangelism of the sort that would make the Apostle himself green (get it?) with envy. He also brags of the "many" friends that also spill red ink on their money. He claims that the rolls of atheist money-markers number in the "thousands," which forces one to consider that nearly every American has perchance come across these Godless greenbacks.

Though the scope of his God-censoring may be large, he never really states what he wants to achieve through all the effort. But really, with activist activity as lazy as this, can he really hope to accomplish anything?

The article gets more interesting near the end: Kahle states that Americans are "evolving" to reject religion, and that the ranks of atheists are swelling. That the secularist is somehow more evolved than the theist is not so much science as it is superstition, and the claim about increasing numbers of atheists is demographically dubious. Regardless, Kahle thinks that the increasing number of atheists portends a brave new atheistic government, which will be sure to guarantee "individual human rights." Well, he may be correct, but such talk of "rights" merits a return visit to the document that describes the origins of those rights in America: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with... Oh crap. Even if the theistic origin of human rights is ignored, the idea that an atheistic government will necessarily be kinder and gentler is a non-starter. That atheistic governments have trampled all over human rights as severely as any theocracy is evident with even the most tenuous familiarity with 20th century history.

I don't mean to hit the Eugenics! panic button here either, but one does wonder what will happen to the ontologically inferior theists, once the evolutionarily superior atheists take over. Will there be a pen at the zoo for Southern Baptists?

In the end, this affair brought me to thinking about the current state of popular anti-theistic polemics. I have to wonder why so many atheistic treatises these days read less like robust argument, and more like "Chicken Soup for the Atheist's Soul" (or, in lieu of a soul, the "Atheist's Neurons") I mean, if self help is want they need, then fine, go for it. But to gussy up or praise mushy thinking as if it's the vanguard of an atheistic crusade is naive.
Bertrand Russell, where y'at?

There's this cliche that people use to describe their sense (or, perhaps, method) of discovery:

"I put two and two together, and, well..."

I don't like it. Life is never that mathematical, that precise.

*

I feel as if I'm constantly forced to relinquish ambiguity.

*

Though it may not be the most accurate way to assess a situation, sometimes putting things together shows just how much things have fallen apart.
That's funny, in a gallows sort of way.

The war in Iraq is fraught with comparisons to Vietnam. Some of these comparisons work, but the Iraq situation definately falls short in a few major areas. One of these areas is the level of public outcry against the wars. Though we all have inherited a great deal of cultural memory about the pervasiveness of hippies and such, the level of populist opposition to this war far exceeds the opposition to the Vietnam excursion. This isn't just on a global scale, either. Many of the protests against this war in America have been *huge*, especially when one considers the general complacency that governs American political involvement.

Anyhow, another difference I've noticed is that there hasn't been musical opposition to this war as profound as the sort that arose during Vietnam. There's probably myriad reasons for this: corporate control of the music industry, willful stupdity on the part of consumers of pop music, unconscionable enduring support for this war, etc. etc. etc.

Jason Isbell of the Drive-By Truckers has written a fine song about the war though, and you can watch it here. It's impossibly sad, as is much of the Truckers' ouevre, but it's also outspoken against the current administration (however briefly), which is not all that common in southern rock. Please listen.

Poor Noam looks so weary these days. Still, there's fire in this rhetoric - listening to Prof. Chomsky speak is like reading the Old Testament prophets. There's a ferocious and unflinching morality that undergirds his writings and lectures, not to mention a call to wake up and see what's going on in Washington and around the world.



This clip is the first 10 minutes of a lecture given at Merrimack College. It's a pretty succinct history of the actions of various goons and lowlifes in the Bush administration in terms of US policy on Iraq (among many other things). This is mandatory viewing, in light of the impending election.

You can view parts 2 through 7 by following this link.