Ron Paul and Republican Platitudes

Watch libertarian congressman Ron Paul’s much-discussed foreign policy critique at last night’s Republican debate in South Carolina here.

Paul’s proposals w/r/t Iraq aside, what he’s essentially saying is that there are specific American policies in the Middle East that contributed to resentment and eventually to the events of 9/11.  This is a narrative which is pretty difficult to substantially disagree with — it’s what Al Qaeda members say in their media, it’s what pretty much anyone who studies the Middle East says.  (Although his reference to the Iranian hostage crisis did sort of throw me.)  So take a look at how Giuliani responds (from the NYT writeup):

 “May I comment on that?” Mr. Giuliani said, looking grim. “That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11.”

Mr. Giuliani was interrupted by cheers and applause. “And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that,” he said.

What Giuliani’s referring to with the “attacking Iraq bit,” by the way, is Paul’s citation of the Clinton administration’s enforcement of the no-fly zones, sanctions, and bombings throughout the 1990s.

I don’t know whether Giuliani actually misunderstood Paul’s point or simply seized the opportunity to do a little grandstanding, perhaps reminding the audience that he was mayor on 9/11, because they’d had a whole three minutes to forget.  But seriously, American policies causing the 9/11 attacks does not mean that Paul thinks that Americans are responsible, that we “invited” the attacks.  It means that we should just, y’know, take some time to think about how other people are going to view and respond to our actions.

Of course, the truly frightening aspect of this exchange was the massive audience response to Giuliani.  It felt like the crowd couldn’t believe their ears while Paul was speaking and urgently needed someone to respond to such heresies.  It was like Giuliani became the spokesman for a vast group of people who feel that there is such a group as “Blame America First’ers” and that America’s virtue needs to be trumpeted at all times.

Further, the whole audience was wholly on board the current Republican truthiness train, if referring to “truthiness” isn’t a little 2006 at this point.  It didn’t matter that Giuliani was blatantly misrepresenting what Paul said – and that no one really bothered to reply to Paul – what mattered was that he was responding to Paul in a way that felt right, the indignant America’s Mayor standing up for freedom – and for the terrorists hating our freedom.

Premonitory Shivers

“Though we say that we cannot read the future, its conditions lie all around us.  They are as if encrypted.  We cannot read them because we lack the key (which will be in our hands only when it is too late to use it).  But we see their coded fragments and must call them something.  Many aspects of our own contemporary culture might be called premonitory shivers: panicky renderings of unreadable messages about the kind of society we are creating.  Our dominating passion, after all, is to give life meaning, even if sometimes a hideous one.”

This passage comes from the first page of historian of China Philip A. Kuhn’s “Soulstealers,” and let me quote the blurb to emphasize how odd it is:

 Midway through the reign of the Ch’ien-lung emperor, Hungli, in the most prosperous period of China’s last imperial dynasty, mass hysteria broke out among the common people. It was feared that sorcerers were roaming the land, clipping off the ends of men’s queues (the braids worn by royal decree), and chanting magical incantations over them in order to steal the souls of their owners. In a fascinating chronicle of this epidemic of fear and the official prosecution of soulstealers that ensued, Philip Kuhn provides an intimate glimpse into the world of eighteenth-century China.

Kuhn’s book is about witchhunts, beliefs, and perhaps most fundamentally the mechanisms of the imperial bureaucracy.  This quote sounds like something a beautiful female mathematician will tell a sex-starved soldier in a Thomas Pynchon book.  (Seriously, if I felt like it and I had my copy of Against the Day handy, I would give you some page numbers, because this is like totally what his new book is about.  Premonitory shivers.  Damn.)

What’s so bizarre — and also sort of great — about this quote is how ahistorical it is.  I’m not denying that it is in some sense a really brilliantly written passage, because it is, or even that I find it meaningful in one way or another, although I tend to feel that it’s more conceptually interesting (and that I’m prone to getting suckered in by that sort of stuff) than a truly profound insight into sociocultural phenomena.  To tell the whole truth, I’m not even 100% sure what it really means.  Truth value aside, it’s just not the sort of thing you expect to see in an academic history book, and further, if I were trying to summarize Kuhn for you, I don’t think I’d get into this conceptual basis at all.  I mean, at gunpoint I could come up with a reading of the book as based in the idea of “premonitory shivers,” but it isn’t the most obvious one, or even one of the most essential.  (Of course, I could just be a moron.)

Still, before I sell the book back to the college bookstore, I want to wonder for a moment what sorts of “panicky renderings of unreadable messages” we’re shivering out into the tangled cultural morass we can never fully unlock.   And seriously, represent for “Against the Day,” kids.

Indecision 2007, 2008

So looks like Roger Clemens is back on the Yanks…basically the guy for whom the expression, “Well, he’s an SOB, but he’s our SOB” was coined. With Clemens’ thrilling vacillation finally over, I guess it’s time to wait for the Clemens of the presidential race, Fred Thompson, (in this annoyingly deliberative, overly compared to Hamlet sense; Thompson’s a few Cy Youngs short) to get his show on the road.

Battleship?

Ah, Clintonian language.  So Bill’s got a crossword in this weekend’s NYT.  Not that this is really some demonstration of intellectual heft or anything, but it really does make you wonder what exactly George Bush will be doing ten years from now.

Scarves

Here’s a fascinating article from the Financial Times about the Turkish crisis:

Turkey is on the verge of a grave crisis. The country’s governing party, which has roots in political Islam, and its secular-minded military are at odds.

The issues at stake are momentous – the presidency of the republic and the future direction of the country itself. But the story of the past few weeks is a tale of misunderstandings, sexism, snobbery, bruised egos and mutinous soldiers, from which nobody emerges with much credit.

One aside that I thought was really fascinating was the discussion of the candidacy of Nimet Cubukcu, one of two candidates considered by President Erdogan for the succession who met with approval from the military brass:

…The other was Nimet Cubukcu, who had the inestimable advantage of being a woman.

General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the general staff, had already made clear the military’s views: the new president had to be secular “not just in words, but in essence”, the general said on April 12. But by April 20, he and his fellow generals appear to have indicated that they were happy with both possible candidates.

Though she is a member of the AKP, Ms Cubukcu does not wear the Muslim headscarf. Neither does Mr Gonul’s wife. That was a significant factor in securing the military’s blessing.

Not being entirely up on Turkish politics, I can’t say if the headscarf is a “wedge issue” in Turkey, their abortion or whatever, although the depiction of the conflict between (military) secularists and (moderate) Islamists would make it unsurprising.  What to me is so compelling about this anecdote is the idea of the headscarf as a tangible visual symbol of what side you’re on–not just an “I Like Ike,” but an icon or absence thereof which is such a potent symbol because it is itself what is being debated.  Half of the population has to make what is in some sense a political choice every morning.  And because of this, the prospect of someone in power–someone who will become a visual presence–who embodies this choice truly does have an interesting appeal.

So anyway, interesting situation in Turkey that doesn’t have all that much to do with that.  We’ll see what happens.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Few things reliably make me as happy as a book that feels genuinely custom-made, as if it were specifically tailored to my interests.  I’m pretty sure that when Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) sat down to write The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, he was attuned to some special frequency broadcasted from my head and my head alone.  (If this book doesn’t turn out so well, I’m going to have to pick up a tinfoil hat to preempt further disappointment.)  It’s like he said, “Well, what does Zack like?” Hardboiled dialogue.  Jewy stuff.  Jewy hardboiled stuff.  Oh My God this is perfect.  And then he said, “Well, now I’m just going to throw other things Zack likes in there for the hell of it.”  Hence, Alaska.  I’m going to quote the Amazon.com review from Publishers Weekly (which actually ends up critical, although for reasons I probably won’t share), a work of art on its own terms, and then get back to reading it, because I have rediscovered happiness.

They are the “frozen Chosen,” two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon’s ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is—deep breath now—a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it’s no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.  The novel begins—the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America—with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt’s plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book’s timeless refrain: “It’s a strange time to be a Jew.” Into this world arrives Chabon’s Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon’s “Alyeska” is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Yes!

Pithy, Pithy

John Edwards joins Zbigniew Brzezinski and assorted other luminaries in criticizing the phrase “War on Terror.”

“This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do,” Edwards said in a phone interview from Everett, Wash. “It’s been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there’s a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don’t think that’s true.”

Pretty hard to really disagree with that assessment.  “War on terror” implies one enemy, portrays the struggle as against an abstraction, and suggests that the conflict we’re engaged in is best resolved through hard power, all of which are highly problematic assumptions at best.

Like it or not, people want some sort of convenient shorthand for the interrelated network of foreign policy endeavors we’re going to be concentrating on for awhile.  Bush and various Democrats have tried substitutes for “war on terror”–remember the halcyon days of “Islamofascism?”–which haven’t stuck, and I have a feeling that Giuliani’s bold strategy of replacing a stupid term with something far, far dumber won’t quite stick:

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tells TIME that the phrase “served its purpose for awhile” but should now be superseded. “I have been referring to it for quite some time as ‘the terrorist war against us’ – not just America, but people who think like we do, basically the ideas of modern democracy,” Giuliani said. “In order to deal with the terrorists’ global war on us, we have to be on offense.”

Yeah, pretty insightful, and also a little frightening, if you think about what ‘being on offense’ is likely to mean in a hopefully-hypothetical Giuliani administration.

Anyway, even if, as the author of the TIME article says, we’re going to have to live with the term ‘war on terror’ for awhile no matter what Edwards or anyone says or does, I do like this move from Edwards quite a bit.  It’s meant to sum up a real break from Bush, not the meaningful and substantive policy differences that all Democrats and some Republicans have, but a really nice bit of political shorthand which says effectively, “I reject all of the assumptions that have gone into our failed policies of the past administration.”  Moving on from Iraq and trying to restore America’s place in the world are of course great and necessary things, but the real problem’s the mindset–the war-on-terror-ism, if you will.

He just better get some better foreign policy advisors.

And Health Care Reform, Uh, It’s Kinda Like The Stanley Cup, Dig?

Rep. Shimkus (R-IL) busts out one of the most tortured analogies I’ve seen in a long career:

Imagine my beloved St. Louis Cardinals are playing the much despised Chicago Cubs. The Cardinals are up by five finishing the top of the ninth. Is this a cause for celebration? Is this a cause for victory? No. Unbelievable as it may seem, the Cubbies score five runs in the bottom of the ninth to throw the games into extra innings. There the score remains until 1:00 AM five innings later. However at the top of the 15th, the Cardinals fail to field a batter. The entire team has left the stadium. … Who wins? We know it’s the team that stays on the field.

So the Iraq War is like an extra innings baseball game, let’s see. That makes Al Qaeda the Cubs, so several high-priced, mediocre free agents are going to sign with them this offseason but they’re still going to finish in the second division, which makes me optimistic already. Hmmm, what else does it imply? I guess the country Iraq is like a stadium, and that means that the Green Zone is a luxury box and Fallujah is that part of the Chicago White Sox field where drunk psychos beat up third base coaches. Actually, this analogy starts to make sense if we pretend Shimkus was talking about the Phillies. Jury’s still out on whether Iraq’s safer than Veterans Field.

Bonus analogies: The Sunnis are like peanuts and the Kurds are cracker jack, the Iraqi Parliament is like those troughs at Wrigley Field where you have to piss, the surge is like a sacrifice fly and a car bomb is a suicide squeeze.

Follow Your Heart

Andrew Sullivan is really getting to the, uh, bottom of this fat lesbians business. Well, he’s down the rabbit hole, and we can only fear where it may lead.

Dinosaur Jr, “Beyond”

So today I grabbed a new album from an old band (which by all rights should never have been recorded in the first place, given the band members’ history, though you don’t really need to me talk about all the J/Lou drama) and I really don’t know what to say about it. Rarely have I heard an album from a band that simply sounds that much like that band.

On one of the best albums of the 1980s, “You’re Living All Over Me,” Dinosaur Jr came up with the brilliant idea of covering some of their favorite R.E.M. and Neil Young songs, except that their versions, instead of including actual notes that you could distinguish from other notes, just sounded like huge stone mountains and buttresses and obelisks made from sludge and fuzz. Meanwhile, J Mascis would mutter or bleat whatever the hell he was saying. It worked beautifully–you could tell that their songs were really, really pretty, somehow, but you couldn’t quite figure out what ‘pretty’ meant because Certified Guitar God (and like a real God, an entity, a thing unto itself, not like the bland, Rolling Stone-venerated types who you have to suppose are really into the whole God thing for the cult priestesses–not that there’s anything unGodly about that) Mascis would be making a thoughtful, eloquent, carefully reasoned argument for noise with his Jazzmaster.

“You’re Living All Over Me” is mostly great songs (including a cover of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” which I never figured out the ironymeter score for, but somehow manages to be really, really good, and I hate the Cure) and a couple terrible ones, and that ratio would get worse over their next couple albums, the solid “Bug,” the decent Barlow-less major-label debut “Green Mind,” and their (pretty much Mascis by himself by this point) eventually descent into wanky, bland and increasingly desperate attempts to get on the radio. Which makes how solid and basic “Beyond” is really pretty surprising. But I don’t really want to talk about “Beyond,” I don’t really have anything to say about it. I want to get back to what exactly these guys were doing so well in the ’80s that makes me so excited when I hear it again. Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot” is about Mascis, and Thurston Moore famously describes the guy better than I ever could:

It better work out
I hope it works out my way
‘Cause it’s getting kind of quiet in my city’s head
Takes a teen age riot to get me out of bed right now

But I think another Sonic Youth song really gets at the sound these guys were making:

Shots ring out, from the center of an empty field
Joni’s in the tall grass
She’s a beautiful mental jukebox
A sailboat explosion
A snap of electric whipcrack

She’s not thinking about the future
She’s not spinning her wheels
She doesn’t think at all about the past
She thinking long and hard
About that high wild sound
And wondering will it last?

“Hey Joni,” like “Teen Age Riot” off of 1988′s “Daydream Nation,” is pretty clearly not about J Mascis. I’d say it’s about meeting a high school crush/girlfriend after years of not remembering each other and various forms of shit luck and finding yourselves immune to temporality for a little lucky while. It also makes me wish Lee Ranaldo wrote more songs. The thing is, it gets at a lot of the things I hear when “You’re Living All Over Me” is playing and that I’m pretty sure all of the rioters in Thurston’s song heard. Note that all of the metaphors in the first quoted stanza are auditory, and then take a look at what kind of sounds they’re describing: gunshots, a jukebox, an explosion, a whip’s crack. Three of the four are violent, but a loud kind of violence, the sort of sound that gets everybody’s attention. And a jukebox–this is the kind of jukebox that only plays Chuck Berry and a scratchy recording of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” and maybe “A Supermarket in California” and spits out any change you give it over a nickel. When you get into Joni’s head in the next chunk of text, she’s “thinking long and hard about that wild sound,” stuck in between the glory of the present and the fear of its fade, but make no mistake, that sound is wild, it’s violent, and yet it’s tender, the kind of noise that wants to reach out and take the hand of this not-innocent girl and just wants her to say yes.

I have no idea whether or not I’m alone in this, but I really have no idea what the lyrics to most Dinosaur Jr songs are, except for “Freak Scene” and maybe one or two others. I put on Dungen’s “Ta Det Lungt” on to write this post and in anticipation of “Tio Bitar,” out 5/15, and I can sing along to that almost as well as I can to “You’re Living All Over Me,” and Dungen’s Swedish. I know the melodies–when they’re on, they’re catchy as fuck–but exactly how they correspond to Queen’s English, well, I missed that. It turns out that it’s actually worthwhile to look some of them up–the sort-of frightening “Little Fury Things,” the haikuishness of “The Lung,” the awkwardly passive “Raisans,” and the unbearably anguished “Tarpit.” A lot of these songs are pretty awkward, and they gain a lot from being mumbled, but there’s a real tenderness and often a real vulnerability underneath the songs. “I’m waiting, please come back.” “Take my fate.” “I’ll be grazing by your window/ please come pat me on the head.” “I’ll be down, I’ll be around/ I’ll be hanging where eventually you’ll have to be/ I’ll just stare and hope you’ll care.” You really do see the floppy, awkward kid of a thousand articles pleading, hoping that these girls won’t give a shit enough to not leave him, hoping to maybe live the same moments that the narrator of “Hey Joni” will look back on when he begs for time to pause.

That’s what I hope comes out of “Beyond” – God knows I have no idea what the lyrical content is, I don’t even know most of the riffs yet. I want to see what happens to that kid twenty years down the road, although I don’t want to do so without the context of some good, noisy pop songs that I’m pretty sure J Mascis stopped writing around 1990 until Lou and Murph showed up at his basement or whatever I hope happened. I know he’s “Almost Ready,” that he’s “Been There All The Time,” I guess, and I know that “Beyond” sounds like Dinosaur Jr. Which is about enough for me, of course, but let’s see what’s under the noise, and then maybe even sing along.