This is as dangerous as it gets, Sports Racers. The megalomaniacs-in-charge are faced with criminal indictments this week, as well as a deepening discussion of Lord Cheney’s evil doings. In the run up to a raft of bad publicity, the perch fisherman himself has ordered troops to the border to protect all America from the brown menace to the south.

If, like me, you had an octogenarian father on the email lists of the right wing disinformation artists, you saw this coming. Dad was pumping through lots of jokes about Mexicans plus lots of chain letters that close with the formal request that “God bless America.”

I love my dad, but his inability to use the delete key embarasses the heck out of me. I’ve tried to explain that the racist nonsense he receives from the Friends of Karl is no more than disinformation aimed at distracting us from bad news about the administration. I’ve tried to engage him in conversation regarding my view that the pious platitudes he sends my way are an attempt to organize the credulous among the nominally Christian right in opposition to those of us who would like to pause a moment before unleashing the cancer storm of radioactive poisoning that Bush seems to intend for the world.

This week, look out. If Karl is really being indicted and if Cheney’s complicity in the illegal build-up of false information that led to the war is going to be revealed, well… Bush’s mobilization of the National Guard on the Southern border is going to look a lot like preparation for an Anschluss to our neighbors and the world.

I’m wondering what parts of Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Tamaulipas will be our Sudetenland. How much of Mexico will Bush need to carve off to establish a zone of control and build the camps necessary for containment of the 12 million “illegals” he is sworn to persecute?

Veeblefetzer.

Marcel Proust’s madeleine is the cliché cookie—a highbrow reference that’s penetrated pop culture. - Edmund Levin, Slate (5/11)

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past –
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

- Billy Collins

…I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? - M. Proust

I’m finishing off my complimentary bag of blended dark and medium roast coffee beans from Boca Java, pungently labeled “Blogs of Bravery, the Real Story in Real Time.” Reminds me of the meter of “Sports Racer, What’s your power move?”

Why do the romantic rightists take all the cool blog names? Boots and Sabers… Captain’s Quarters… American Soldier… okay, that last one is an appropriately titled milblog, but still… Occam’s Toothbrush… I wish the left had that kind of inspiration… Power Line… not a left wing blog…

While the left wallows in deep introspection and self improvement, the right advances along a broad rhetorical front that includes claiming the right to be as insulting as necessary to make a point. And yet Ad Hominem, a blog that rightfully should belong to one side or another in the culture wars, belongs instead to the cultured voice of none-other than the Updike character of choice: Rabbit Frenzy.

So perhaps this attempt to read significance into the titles chosen by bloggers is no more than a caffeine fueled conceit. Click the link on the right, order up, and get me some more free coffee. Please.

you live your life as if it’s real

Now to be found on a WordPress blog not too far from your corner liquor store or arab grocery with baklava by the cash register where they’ll make change for your food stamps, sell you Dept. of Agriculture subsidized cigarettes, for real.

I don’t think he brought everything over from Typepad.  I couldn’t find the musical number, “air on a g-string.”  Ah well, to forgive is human, but air’s divine.  Maybe he intends to bring it all forward.  Maybe he has.  Maybe not.  But the sequence itself will be different (*if a sequence can be properly thought to have a self), so I’d hang onto the Typepad link if I were you, until Mena or Queen Ozymandias or someone consigns that content to the bit bucket.