Listics

In this Sunday’s NYT Book Review, Christopher Hitchens blends a review of three nostalgia books on the sixties.  The review has a lazy Hitchens restating the cliches of the era’s cultural pundits - "from Woodstock to Altamont," sexplotation in the Haight,  geodesic domes and back to the outlandishness of narcissistic hippies fantasizing a life withdrawn from urban oppression.  Same-o, same-o, same tired bullshit written by someone who remembers being there and therefore manifestly wasn’t - someone who has been having dinner on that decade for far too long.  Which is to say that the review is major suckage, but the books may not be, may not suck at all… here are three reviews that are simple and honest:

Hippie, by Barry Miles
What’s Going On, Eymann and Wollenberg, editors

[Political disclosure…  I don’t think any of my best friends are Trots, or ever were Trots, or bourgeois individualists masquerading as Trots.  Hitchens’ insights amuse me… his work on Mother Theresa ranks right up there with "Piss Christ" in my estimation.  Hitchens however was a Trot.]]

Here is a short list of UN treaties that the US scorns:

·       Convention on Discrimination against Women·       Convention on the Rights of the Child·       International Covenant on Economic·       Social and Cultural Rights·       Convention on Climate Control and the Koyoto Protocol·       Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty·       Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty·       Biological & Toxin Weapons Convention·       Chemical Weapons Convention·       Mine Ban Treaty·       International Criminal Court

Russ Feingold disappointed the hell out of me when he voted to approve the Ashcroft apointment.  This year he’s going to approve Rice and while he has an excellent rationalization, I’m still disappointed.  The disappointment adds to the anger load somehow.  Here’s a link to a recent Feingold speech on the subject… 

The administration’s record of the past four years suggests a
foreign policy careening out of control, driven by ideologues who want
to test their theories in the laboratory of the Middle East one minute,
by domestic political considerations the next, and by spiteful attempts
to punish those who disagree with their methods the next.

Where
is this going? Who is in charge? Who knows? No one ever seems to be
held accountable for the blunders, the failures, the wildly inaccurate
presentations and projections or the painfully ineffective initiatives.
Congress cannot simply accept more of the same, keep our heads down and
hope that somehow we will muddle through. The stakes are far too high.
Our national security, the stability of the world that our children
will inherit, our troops — even our country’s honor — are on the line.
Congress has an obligation, not to oppose every administration effort,
but to reassert our role in helping to steer the ship of state wisely
rather than recklessly. I look at our foreign policy over the past four
years, and I know that America is so much better than this.

I
look forward to the opportunity to raise these concerns with Dr. Rice
when she testifies before the Foreign Relations Committee, and to
receiving some assurance that she will work with Congress to put our
country’s foreign policy on a better, more effective footing.

wear orange.

The AP reports that  "Wisconsin
will have to end its tax on Internet connections by November 2024 under
a broader bill which will stop states from starting new Internet taxes."

Representative Jim Sensenbrenner is quoted as saying, "State taxation of interstate commerce has
been in the jurisdiction of the Congress since the Constitution was
adopted, and this is state taxation
of interstate commerce, purely and simply."

We can infer that they’re back from this Washington Post article.

The disruption comes as the CIA is trying to stay abreast of a
worldwide terrorist threat from al Qaeda, a growing insurgency in Iraq,
the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan and congressional proposals to
reorganize the intelligence agencies.

I’m not worried though.  I’m sure that the president and Porter Goss, his Republican partisan appointee, are deep in prayer about the whole thing, perhaps even asking themselves, "What would Jesus do?"

There was a day when the sun didn’t set on British soil.  Schoolboys thought that was hot.  So did greed-balls and power-mongers.  Cartographers then adopted the convention of painting the British parts of the map red. 

Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had some deep thoughts about communal ownership of the means of production, and the end of rapacious capitalism as they knew it.  Now you have to remember that they were coming out of a period when children made the best coal miners because they were little enough to get in the narrow tunnels.  Some changes were necessary and perhaps nowhere was the class difference more dramatic than in Russia.  Western monarchies had suffered through the rise of a middle class due to the industrial revolution.  The upper classes in London were content.  Paving and sewers had improved, indoor plumbing and gas light was in vogue.  The lower classes were similarly okay.  Except for isolated cases of famine or pestilence, things were pretty okay in the British Empire.  People had some rudimentary freedoms, including the freedom to flee to the wilderness.

In Russia they had more of a feudal thing going.  Check it out.  This was less than a hundred years ago and their royalty still "owned" the peasants.  Things weren’t really progressing as rapidly in the land of potato based alcohol.  Oh, and mares milk… it’s what’s for breakfast.  Not really.  Mares in the hands of the peasants would undoubtedly have been eaten.

Okay.  So along comes world war one.  The Kaiser wants to fill in more of his color on the map of Africa… that was pretty much the only place that hadn’t been inked in already,.  The French and the Brits thought that was bullshit.  Why should the Kaiser get to claim turf that would so pretty in red?    The Russians didn’t really have a horse in this race, but the Czar was pleased to send some troops  to battle against the Austro-Hungarian forces on the eastern front.  After all, he owned them.  About three million of the Czars troops were killed between 1914 and 1917.  Left kind of a power vacuum.

And there was some discontent back home in Mockba and Petrograd.  The "White Russians" (not to be confused with some alcoholic beverage) were pretty insensitive to the needs of the lower classes (besides letting 3 million of them die in some imperialist bullshit war)… a little black bread with sawdust would have gone a long way to mending fences, but no… the Whites were pretty much of the let-them-eat-cake school. 

Along came the Reds with their hot crimson banners, their cheerful egalitarian patter, and a clear alternative to the Jesus bullshit that weird bearded monks had spread across the countryside.  Russian saints, it is to be admitted were among the coolest and bloodiest.  And Russian iconography pretty much approached Tibetan Buddhism when it comes to gilded and strange.  So you’ve got a prince here and there, and his schtick is buttressed by the monks who know where their cold beet soup is coming from, and the people who are the foundation of all this, the growers of beets, the guys who shovel the horse manure off the streets in the summer and the snow in the winter have had just about enough.

Wham, bam, revolution in the streets, western bankers of course go ape shit because this is a different model and also the Czar probably owed them a few rubles that the comrades were willing to write down because - y’know - they hadn’t borrowed the money.  One thing led to another… a spot of regicide, Winston Churchill making an ass of himself in the Mediterranean and glowering around with his ill-nourished alcohol glazed, tobacco reddened piggy eyes and latching on Communism as a good place to practice more of that playing fields of Eton bullshit since he had failed so monumentally at Gallipoli, but I’m getting to deep here.

The whole point is that the Communists stole the red banner and right thinking imperialists couldn’t be comfortable with red maps anymore because those stinking commies had usurped the symbol.  It pissed them off big time.  And even dancing around the Maypole fell into disuse because of the nasty rat-bastards and their decision to grab may day as their godless commie holiday.

Okay, quick review… the Brits owned red until the communists stole it.  Very semiotic.  The reds beat the whites.  They beat them so bad that it looked like late 18th century Paris with all the blood in the streets and what-not (minus all the corrupt catholics of course).  The commies owned the red flag for eighty or more years, then Meg Thatcher and Bush the First recovered it in the name of global warming when they let their ape-boy Hussein free to burn the oilfields of Kuwait.  We still haven’t figured out why they are so into global warming (and have been for the last 20 years… denying all the science and adding to the greenhouse thing).  Assuming they’re not aliens from another planet sent here to soften us up for an invasion by the lizard people who like it warmer than we do, it must be about the northwest passage and opening shipping lanes for nuclear waste from the reactors of Europe and North America to the new free market dumping grounds in Kamchatka.  I could be wrong but I haven’t been yet.

Here’s the point, okay?  The ridiculous children of the cross who live in the fly-over states and are only waiting for the nuclear holocaust so they live the Handmaid’s Tale scenario that so many of them would find so gratifying  have stolen the red flag.  Somehow, all the thoughtful socialists are afraid to step up and take that bad-boy back so they’ve left the dirty work to me.  Mr. Bush!  Mr. Rove!  Give us back the Red!  All this red state/blue state bullshit is irritating as hell.    We are the reds.  They are the Whites.  Just look at them when they venture out in their plaid Bermuda shorts in the summer time.  The poor bastards look like they’ve been standing in bleach.  yes, they are the WHITES.  We can be the reds again if people will only reassert the good parts of that.

Think about it… Rove and Rasputin:  WHITE.  Hip-hop artists and progressive politics:  RED.  As for the BLUES, well… you’ve got to suffer if you want to play the blues, but the color has no place in a reasonable discussion of politics.

Los Angeles… a week after Bush stole the election.  Tanks in the streets.