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I’m a regular reader of Jim Kunstler’s site where every Monday he unleashes a new blast about America’s rush towards towards a disastrous collision of peak oil, poor urban planning, and corporate and governmental malfeasance. The posts are stirring reads, really great rhetorically and in the details… but they are often enough marked by insanely bad “big picture” moments, where Kunstler hauls the load of shit he has collected up to an entirely unlikely and unhelpful location. For instance, while I’m not going to go into detail, but in the earlier days of the Iraq War he was particularly bad in spots, playing out a counter-productive “sure, the republicans are nuts, but those pansy liberals want to drive their big cars and not fuck with Iraq!” - as if it were ever possible to believe that bringing cheap oil to the homeland was ever the point of this adventure. But since I don’t have time to link you to his posts from this period, I’ll just leave it at the level of a brief mention… It is as if there is something (the professional freelancer’s need to make hay? plain old political perversity?) that makes him skew his otherwise decent stuff in unreasonable directions.

Today’s post is emblematic of Kunstler’s problem, albeit in a less offensive way than usual. Here’s a paragraph from the middle of the piece:

By the way, I believe the stunning failure of responsibility actually can be accounted for, though my theory may not be to everyone’s taste (especially the science hard-asses out there). In a word: entropy. The US has enjoyed unprecedented energy inputs and the result is unprecedented entropy outputs. The protean force of entropy then manifests as degradation in just about everything around us from the immersive ugliness of a landscape overbuilt with WalMarts, Pizza Huts, and vinyl houses, to the sexual perversion available on the Internet, to the surrender of standards and norms by executives in the financial sector. It’s as simple as that. Entropy rules.

“Entropy,” is it, or a very specific and describable, if complex, brand of political economy? What does it mean to blur the finance sector presentism that comes of deregulation and a crisis in profits, the inefficient and corrupt distribution of energy resources, housing speculation and the long history of American resistance to urban planning and transit investment, and (ugh) “sexual perversion” under the sign of “entropy” rather than, say, laissez faire deregulatory capitalism? Even if there is something “entropic” about all that it is going on, Kunstler needs to go a few more steps to tell us how it is so in solid terms. Throwing the metaphor out as if it itself is an argument just turns everything pointless, leads you to flip the page and move on to the next thing.

Further, Kunstler’s tic is such a vividly American gesture - perhaps the most American gesture there is - to construct a thorough and largely accurate representation of all that is wrong with everything everywhere and then to caption this representation with a phrase drawn from the metaphysical (or pseudo-scientifical-metaphysical) rather than the blander, though more operable, phrasebook of political economy? Think of “the war on terror,” just to start. And to take it to a more personal place, think, if you’re ready to squirm a bit, about the form that American academic engagement generally takes, filling the hole where the argument needs to be with decorative, metaphorical stuffing - engaging in a general critique of everything that is always automatically defanged and rendered comfortable inhabitable by a lapse into poor poetry when self-aware purposefulness is the order of the day.

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A very clear rendition of the story of the privatization of US financial aid for college….

Personally, I think a topic-appropriate variation on the following paragraph, which ends the piece, could (should?) come at the end of every single piece that the NYT publishes, even though I’d change "mostly" to "sometimes" or "occasionally."

It’s a sobering lesson in the limits of capitalism. As a culture, we
praise the ability of the market to create the proper incentives and do
more good than not. And mostly that’s true. But there are some things
that are too important to entrust to the profit motive. Shouldn’t
paying for a college education be one of them?

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I think this is actually a good sign. Someone feels that the “threat” of universal health care is worth spending money to combat…

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sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy has a good post up about airports…

Architectures of Control has posted on how Airports are essentially made as unpleasant as possible without inducing the consumer to riot, and much as one would like to imagine them as glamorous Eero Saarinen fantasies, they’re a fantastic example of the cumbersome nature of neoliberalism. Old-school public transport on trains might take longer, but involves no pointless waiting for check in, no little bus to take you from one bit of runway to the other, no nonsense about face creams - just buy a ticket, sit down. One can enjoy a train ride. Planes, after the (always admittedly fun) initial woosh are just deadly dull and pervaded by endless regulation and bureaucracy. The endless queueing, dithering and corporate mean-spiritedness suggests an entire mode of transport based on the experience of 21st century England.

One thing to add here, from the other side of the Atlantic. While Brits are placed in contact with representatives of the national government on a relatively regular basis in one form or another, the withered federal government (which exists, at this point, mostly to fund wars-for-profit, funnel cash to shady conglomerates and abstinence-only religious organizations) in the US has so little presence “on the ground” that the airport is literally one of the few places that most Americans will ever come into contact with the feds. Our schools are locally administrated, there is no federal health care until you’re old, national transit is on its way toward non-existent in the form of Amtrak, etc etc. In short, the only places the average American voter brushes up against the DC government is when she or he fills out his tax forms and when she or he places the shoes and belts and coats and laptops and watches and cell phones in the fucking bins at the security checkpoint.

In a very distinct way, the airport is the federal government’s last remaining point of intimate contact with the general population. I think realizing this goes along way to explaining why, exactly, air travel is the way that it is today in the US, where it has morphed from something that you do to get from one place to another and into a full-on participatory-diorama of fascist discipline. Disney couldn’t design it better…

Last week, headed through the security checkpoint in Florida (no lines, no hurry - everything’s cool), with all of my stuff carefully sorted into the right bins, one of the DHS guards screamed at me as I prepared to walk through the metal detector with my 2 year old in my arms. “HER. SHOES. OFF. NOW!” Because we all know that the sort of inhuman scum that we’re dealing with wouldn’t think twice about using a super-cute toddler as a plastique delivery device, fuses sticking right out of her little sandals. It takes a special kind of submissiveness (and one that I likely wouldn’t have possessed back in 1998 or so, before my post-9/11 training by these folks) not to reply “GO. FUCK. YOURSELF. PIG!” But you don’t. Most mutter to themselves, I imagine, “Well, it’s for our own good, right?” For me, it’s more like “What will my wife say if I end up detained in the airport brig and we miss our flight?” This subvocal discourse is exactly the point - the whole experience seems to have evolved into Disney-type immersive adaptation to police-state doublethink, where our bodies revolt but our minds lock up in the face of “You will go to prison if you… / Better than dying on the plane…”

Of course, the checkpoint is only a prelude to relieved emergence into the departures hall, once you’ve got your shoes and belt back on, and where, at four minute intervals, a voice drums the fact that The current threat level is Orange, or High. The current threat level is Orange, or High. The current threat level is Orange, or High. And once you’re on the plane, there is the special new addendum to the pointless safety play that the flight attendants stage as you taxi toward takeoff: “It is against federal regulations to congregate in space near the door to the cockpit - please wait at your seat until the lavatory is free etc…” The cabin of the plane is momentarily transformed into a space to be filled with a fantasized scene borrowed from movies and reenactments, as you imagine the swarthy guys with the bloody razor blade kicking and kicking at the cockpit door…

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In the wake of the Sopranos finale, I must have sifted through a hundred web launched interpretations of what the final scene… Hey, it’s not everyday that a scholar of modernism with a formalist bent is able to feel like the field of his expertise has made it onto the heavy rotation list of the scroll running across the bottom of the screen that is culture. Of course the interpretations were largely rubbish, an index of poor literary training and the persistence of the very attitudes that modernist Entfremdung effects were aimed at slapping. Occasionally you could find a surprisingly sharp reading from an unlikely corner - the Star-Ledger reader who can barely spell who nonetheless writes something sharp about that fade to black.

Many readings fell in between the two poles. One very memorable one was Wax Banks’s effort, which went for a big kill, only to stumble on its own evidence. He saw

Tony and Carmela as a dark ethnic undereducated mirrorworld Bill & Hillary - the physiques, the complicity-in-adultery, the complex negotiated (and negotiable) attitudes toward social welfare, the calculated united-front marriage, the mysterious deaths of friends and coworkers (I kid). The finale’s final scene made that nasty little parallel clearer than ever before.

You can go check out the evidence issue on the site if you like. But whatever it’s problems, and however frustrated I was with the interpretation as an over-reading at first, the idea has stuck with me over the last week. After all, it’s no wonder that a serious show like this one, bent on a quasi-Balzacian analysis of American culture and political economy (actually… I think the last few episodes made it abundantly clear that it was more Flaubertian than Balzac-inspired, and gloriously so…), that found its start in January 1999 would be preoccupied with Clinton and Clintonism. It starts with schizophrenic relationship of both Tony and Bill to their backward backgrounds - they can’t stop diving back into it, can’t stock speaking the patois, but fit in on the golf course better than the BBQ hut or the sausage shop. That McMansion that Tony drives up (distinctly up, right) to in the opening credit sequence may well be the long-term result of Reaganite policy changes in the 80s, but it was during the Clinton administration that they truly started to fill every acre of rural space left in northern NJ. And of course it goes deeper than that: the more-than-complicit relationship to violence and exploitation that comes of a deathstruggle to simply stay on, no matter what the price. The constant threat that Tony will lose his spot at the top (as well as, in his case, his life) formed the operative tension of the show, right down to the last scene. And like Tony, Clinton never knew whether the killing shot would come from the other family or from someone in his own outfit.

Above all else, the Sopranos from the very start was a show that presented itself as a workplace fiction that couldn’t stop going home to check on the wife and kids. Or it was a family-centered sitcom that couldn’t help but bring the issue of where the money for all the SUVs and Ivy-League educations home. Of course, it wasn’t either - it was both at once. And I don’t need to tell you, however you feel about Clinton, that the mould for this conceit was cast during the sinister and stupid era of the Clintons, whose marriage was the driving political issue of my late adolescence and early adulthood. And true to form, if GWB’s initial campaigning and presidency borrowed heavily from the born-again playbook (where alcoholism + refound salvation = a higher approval among key, dry constituencies than if he had never hit the bottle, never fallen, in the first place), it was the language of therapy, marriage counselling, recovery and relapse that Bill and Hillary both drew on so cynically and so effectively in order to slide by the nets set by their worst antagonists - themselves. (In one of the last episodes, Tony’s shrink’s own shrink and mentor warn her that sociopaths tend not to benefit from therapy, at least not in the intended way. Rather, they learn to use the lessons of therapy as rhetorical tools in order to become all the more effective at the game of socio-pathology… Could it get any clearer than that?)

So anyway, Wax Banks is right. It’s there. And how could it not be. Well and good - a more interesting politico-cultural story to allow yourself to spend sometime with than most of what floats to the surface when lit types try to jump the aesthetic / real politics divide nowadays. The stuff of B list conference papers - maybe I’ll write one myself. And not much more. Or so it seemed for a day or two.

And just when I thought it was safe to put the Sopranos to rest for a bit, I get, as it were, pulled back in.

Just too much, this. It’s not really a mystery that the Clintons would watch the show - they are, I imagine, exactly the target demographic: high-performing NYC area pros, middle to late middle age, high income bracket and educational attainment, etc etc. And at this point in the game, where fund-raising is still the predominant issue at hand, the Tony fan is their core demographic as well. No need to finesse the Iowa ethanol-head or the yankee-cranky New Hampshire schoolteacher yet. So it’s a smart ad on that level. (Apparently, the song that they choose as the campaign anthem is some Celine Dion number. I’ll bet if you asked my folks their favorite musical performer, Celine would come out #1. They’ve seen her in concert a bunch of times, and dad, like me, has never missed an episode of the Sopranos…)

But what is a bit baffling and amazing and disgusting all at once is that, despite all that I’ve said, following Wax Banks’s lead, above, the Clintons would nonetheless consent to embrace this conjunction, sit in the diner seats with the fucking Journey song playing in the background. The folks they are impersonating in this ad are, after all, gangsters. Gangsters, yes, with marital problems, who have achieved institutional and financial priority by nefarious means, and all the rest, but in the end gangsters - what are we to make of tbe easy adoption of something that one would think would be the last thing that the Clinton family would get in bed with, given all the stunning connections above between themselves and our friends from Jersey?

And further, if David Chase’s final turn in the show was meant (this is my sense of it anyway) to bring the viewers, so enchanted by the show’s violence, to some sort of sudden awareness of the strange paradox wherein they are horribly disappointed by the fact that their favorite show failed to kill off their favorite character in its final scene - that not only are they gluttons of televisual violence, they have further determined that this guy that they know and love really in some sense deserves to have the contents of his skull splattered all over his wife’s face in an ice cream parlor, Hillary’s ad, in the act of appropriation, sends this whole issue in a totally new direction… In sitting in the booth of the gangster, Hillary and Bill are not simply much informing us of the wide-spread desire to do them harm, but rather the impossibility of doing them harm, the fact that they are free, despite all of the associative sludge that is conjured up by this ad, to do whatever the hell they want to and still pull through. They use the funny but inappropriate ad about being knocked off precisely because they will not be knocked off. They can take the risk of appearing in plain sight only because it is not a risk - they, like the American public, are completely shameless. What is so great about being shameless, of course, is the ability to hide in plain sight. We catch them out precisely because they have chosen to be caught out, to make a game of it, because the stakes are the stakes of a game, and nothing more.

In short, the final fact of the matter, and the fact that we are being slammed with even harder with than we were with the final fade to black of the Sopranos, is the fact that if Hilary wins the 2008 election (as of now, that’s where I’d put my money, unfortunately) and if she serves two terms, the position of American executive will have been shared between two rival families, and two families alone, for a full 28 years. A father and a son, a husband and a wife. This thing of ours indeed… And any one want to take odds on the last name of the top candidates in 2016?

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AJ (comfortably clear of his dark preoccupation with “yeets” and the war on terror and the sources of his parents’ wealth) is kicked back on the couch with his underage model girlfriend, cracking up as they watch exactly this:

I imagine what drew Chase’s / the writer’s interest to this clip is the hidden-in-plain-sight nature of the R & T Correspondents Association dinner. The significance of clips like this one (as with Bush’s infamous “Dude, who stole my WMDs” performance) is not of course of the “hey, this is what they’re really like when they’re unguarded on stage” variety. Everyone knows that the material will be taped and disseminated, and this is what informs what’s so horrifically amazing about this material. The dissemination of this stuff - the fact that, seriously, the joke is on you about WMDs, the fact that given the opportunity the head propagandist will smear on black face and hop around the stage - this stuff is meant for distribution, meant to send us a message about what power really means, what it means to have the press in your backpocket, and what it means that you have to (or had to) give Imus a handjob on the air if you wanted to be elected president, or even NJ or CT senator.

Just as the Sopranos was always about forcing us to confront the all too visible sources of wealth that landscapes the green, well-trimmed lawns and lifts the entry-way atriums of the NJ mcmansions, so obvious and insistent from the start that the entirety of culture is bent on making or allowing us to forget it, “MC Rove” crystallizes the political structure that grows in that soil, where we see what we see and we know what we see and we can even say what we see, but that’s it. The screen goes black - there will be no denouement, no final twist. Nothing is slouching towards bethlehem to be born.

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Absolutely amazing moment today on tv. I had heard that Cormac McCarthy was going to be on Oprah to discuss The Road - which seemed like an unlikely and interesting thing to see so I taped the show. But as it turned out, the McCarthy section was by far less interesting than the first segment, which featured Michael Moore discussing his new movie about the American health care situation, Sicko.

The moment when it felt like the ground was giving way beneath my feet comes about 1:30 into this video (which is bound not to last on-line, so get it while the getting’s good)…

(The video is, as I predicted, now gone…)

Here’s a transcript of the exchange in question:

O:

OK this is what I was going to say about the film - that I got it in a way that I hadn’t gotten it before. Now don’t you love when that happens. When you just go “Ooo! I got it!” Because you know the word “socialism” really stirs up…

MM:

[Scarily] Socialized Medicine…

O:

Socialized Medicine

MM:

[Scarily] Ooo…

O: And then when you showed the example of [how] we have socialized activities in this country. The fire department - we don’t pay for a fire department. We don’t pay for the police department. We don’t pay for public schools.

MM:

And it’s universal.

O:

We don’t pay for the library. And it’s universal - universal is for everybody.

MM:

Right.

O:

And so the very idea of extending that to the care of people is really something that I have to honestly say that I hadn’t thought about it because I’m one of those people, “I got mine,” so I wasn’t thinking about who didn’t have theirs. Really. Right.

MM:

And we don’t expect the fire department to turn a profit. It would be an appalling thought, and the reason we don’t is because it’s a life and death issue. Well, health care is a life and death issue.

O:

Yeah.

MM:

And that’s why turning a profit has to be removed from the system.

Good Christ, that’s amazing. The slow but distinct re-discovery of what that word, “socialism,” might mean by a figure obviously not associated with words like that. The discovery that we already very much have elements of it all around us, elements that we would never willingly part with. The emergence that a better synonym for “socialism” would be “universality,” rather than “Stalinism” or “gulag” or “bread-lines” that it’s usually equated with, when it’s mentioned at all, in the US. The revelation of the fact that “socialism” in fact provides very simple, but persuasive answers to issues that only at first seem incredibly complex, impossible to repair, and as if natural, inevitable features of our sociopolitical landscape.

In short, I think this little episode renders abundantly clear why exactly socialized medicine is such an important - perhaps the important - issue today in the US. Just as the right has own Overton Window games that they’ve long played with school prayer and vouchers and the like, a nation with a public medical system funded by even a large fractional amount that the US currently spends on health care today would be a nation on its way, I believe, toward a whole branching set of public sector reinvestments.

And it further, Moore’s appearance on Oprah puts to shame ten thousand cute and clever forms of aestheticized intervention - simple, spirited explanation may have set us on a path toward improvement that no act of detournement or deconstruction, no dialectical ruse, nor metatextual abyssalism could accomplish.

This is a sobering, yet inspiring thing to realize, if you’re someone who does what I do for a living.

I’ve really liked Michael Moore for a long time, but he is now officially one of the patron saints of this blog.

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An article on socialist football (soccer) players, their presence, absence, impossibility, etc etc etc.

Over here, it’s tough to think of many good and recent examples. Certainly not “socialists,” as there are no socialists, let alone socialist athletes, here. But John Amaechi, I think, has been saying some fairly lefty stuff, in addition to being gay. Carlos Delgado… Well his case is somewhat complicated and sad. Here’s wikipedia:

Like his hero, Roberto Clemente, Delgado is a well-known humanitarian and peace activist and has been open about his political beliefs. As part of the Navy-Vieques protests, Delgado was actively opposed to the use of the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico as a bombing target practice facility by the United States Department of Defense, until bombing was halted in 2003. He is also against the occupation of Iraq. In the 2004 season, Delgado protested the war by silently staying in the dugout during the playing of God Bless America during the Seventh inning stretch. Delgado does not make a public show of his beliefs and even his teammates were not aware of his views until a story was published in July 2004 in the Toronto Star. Delgado was quoted as saying “It’s a very terrible thing that happened on September 11. It’s (also) a terrible thing that happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, … I just feel so sad for the families that lost relatives and loved ones in the war. But I think it’s the stupidest war ever.” The story was the subject of a media frenzy, mostly in New York, where on July 21, 2004, as was anticipated, Delgado was booed for his passive protest during a game at Yankee Stadium [3]. Angry New York fans booed him and, when Delgado lined out in the bottom 7th inning, fans chanted “USA, USA” even though Delgado, like all Puerto Ricans, is an American citizen. Delgado had explained that the playing of God Bless America had come to be equated with a war in which he didn’t believe. In a New York Times interview, Delgado said this is what he believed in, and “It takes a man to stand up for what he believes.”

After being traded to the Mets, Delgado backed down from his previous stance and stood for “God Bless America.”

I had high hopes, when I first heard that he was coming to New York, too…

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Need to upgrade that last link (to a trailer for Red Dawn) into its own post.

For some of you, the hallucinatory and insane apropos-ness of this film will be old hat. But if you’re not familiar with it: that there is as quick an introduction to the long and almost entirely hypocritical history of US foreign policy towards national movements of self-determination as you’re going to get. And since we’re all talking about this sort of thing, it also is a crystal clear materialization, for the benefit of the baffled, of our gun laws…

A nice summary of this theme in the movie from wikipedia:

The private ownership of firearms is also presented as part of the film’s anti-Communism. Early in the film, a bumper sticker seen on a truck states a classic gun owner’s creed; “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.” The shot moves down to a dead hand holding an empty Colt pistol as well as shots of the same pistol being pried from the dead person’s hand by a Soviet paratrooper, presumably from a police officer or armed civilian gunned down earlier during the invasion of Calumet, Colorado. As the protagonists flee the initial invasion of Calumet, they stop at a local sporting goods store owned by one of their fathers. He tells them to gather supplies and gives them several rifles and pistols along with boxes of ammunition. (The father and his wife are later executed because of the guns missing from the store’s inventory.) In a later scene, a Cuban officer orders one of his men to report to the local sporting goods store and obtain the paperwork of local citizens who own firearms. The Cuban officer specifically refers to Form 4473, which is the actual form used to record the sale of a firearm by a dealer to a private citizen in the United States. These scenes speak to the long-standing issues of government gun control.

Whether these principles apply to the citizens of the states the US has invaded is another story, of course. Relatedly, I’m not sure if I’ve ever really noted the uncanniness of all of the those hoisted AK-47s, until now.

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On the one hand, a wonder advertisement (is this the right word? I don’t really understand in what sort of context this would actually be aired…) from the Scottish Socialist Party (via Ken MacLeod’s site).

It’s just a hunch on my part, and who the hell asked me, but if I were running the coordinated campaigns for the US democratic party for 2008, I’d think long and hard about the virtues of this advertisement: the reasonableness of it, the simple quant. aspect, and, above all else, the sense that government might provide something at once simple and effective and fundamentally transformative to the everyday lives of a majority of the populace. I have a sense that the time is ripe to step away from the eternal jousting field just below the city on a hill and propose ideas that might make everyone’s lives a little bit better. Of course, of course, end the Iraq War - but what we’d really like to talk about are trains and housing complexes and elementary schools and the like.

Christ knows they won’t follow my advice. If they did, and won, and lived up to their promises, I might even stop vomiting to the roof of my mouth every time I am forced to remember where it is that I am doomed to live, likely forever.

But, on the other hand, I took Kino Fist’s recommendation and, um, acquired for myself Chris Marker’s remarkable Grin Without a Cat. Which makes me feel like a complicit statist pig, ready for nothing less than the wall and a bullet, for occupying myself with thoughts of choo-choo trains and well designed terminals instead of, say, forming an avant-gardist guerilla band and fighting socialism into existence.

Ah well. Not really cut out to be an insurgent, I don’t think, despite the fact that I spent my entire pre-pubescence wrapped in camo, hiding in the woods with a plastic rifle. But the thing is, I was always on the side of the bad guys, the guys with lots of air support. The VC were toujours l’autre. And if I ever lacked air support, it was because I was playing out this scenario…

I guess I’ll stick with the trains, but I promise to feel terrible about it as I do.

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at spurious:

The deeds of the world are slowly disappearing. The suburbs will spread everywhere, and the life of us all will be written on the American page. And all writing henceforward will concern the ordinary, the everyday. There will be nothing of which to write but that. And language, meanwhile, will turn over like a sleeper. And all of literature will have been part of its dream. And everything we’ve done, likewise. And when it awakens, it will face us without a face and look at us with no eyes and speak in great long words that will be our words unravelled.

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(started writing this as a comment on this thread at Long Sunday, but it got a bit too long, so it’s over here instead…)

I can report that “nappy” was very much a proud member of white suburban poseur vocabulary in the early-nineties. We used it all the time, or at least the (white) guys I played baseball with did… “nappy-ass” this and that. You could drive a “nappy ass car,” or your girlfriend could be “fuckin’ nappy…” Imus’s “nappy-headed” seems like a bit of a intensification, in that it draws it back to its original source. I don’t think anyone in my crowd actually knew what it meant - that it referred to black hair texture etc…

A parallel thing I’ve been wondering about: why is it that white suburban kid borrowings from black/rap discourse seem to have frozen over the last few decades. When I hear the little poseurs go on and on here at the university, you’d think that I wouldn’t be able to follow what they’re talking about, at least some of the time. But it’s never the case - exactly the same words, syntax, sentiments, intonations. “Yo, them bitches was fly…” sort of stuff. It sounds like I’m back there, 17, waiting for my turn at bat or whatever…

(Sometimes - and I realize that this is likely delusionally self-centered of me - I wonder if the sort of place that I grew up outside of NYC wasn’t actually an incubator for a lot of this white kid fakeo talk that currently defines what I’d call the ESPN demographic of US culture… From our lips to the halls of academe’s better dorms… I’m sure that’s just a strange “effect,” and that it happened nowhere and everywhere all at once…)

Towns like the one where I grew up are interesting places. Unlike the little white kids that I saw while living recent in Brooklyn, who were carefully held away from any possibility of contact with the kids in the projects, etc, kids in certain suburban towns end up brought together in unlikely ways because of way things are organized (i.e. one public high school for everyone, one american legion baseball team for everyone, etc…) Obviously, most suburban towns outside of NYC aren’t like this (and there is a long history of segregation by districting there for sure), but there is a string of semi-urban hamlets - nowadays the places most coveted by new parents fleeing the housing costs in the City itself - that do function in this way to a certain extent…

There were certain nights when I was playing ball that there’d be, say, a scout from Dartmouth or Cornell checking out the pitcher, while sitting next to the scout were our sixteen-year old third baseman’s girlfriend and their two kids. Judging from the newsclippings my mom used to send me from the local paper, half of our team is in and out of trouble with the cops, and the other half (with one big exception - moi) works for finance firms on Wall Street.

What gets even weirder is the relationship between all of this and Imus, and his demographic, which to my mind centers on the <i>parents</i> of people like me. (My dad is absolutely crushed this week - he’s listened for 30 years or so - and just can’t stop repeating PR firm manufactured talking points about Jesse Jackson and “Hymietown.”) Is it that suburban white boy borrowings from black culture have come around the corner to meet the baby boomers at the pass that is ESPN? It is strange to think that my dad’s favorite figure, above all others, in entertainment and information business has gone down for borrowing too liberally from the strange but oh-so-american patois of my youth…

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I was just looking around for something, and came across the transcript of Ari Fleischer’s White House press briefing from March 5, 2003. Obvious, old stuff, I know, and apropos of nothing in particular right at this minute, but horrifying, edifying reading nonetheless…

Here’s an exchange with Helen Thomas:

Q Ari, since there is an atmosphere of the imminence of war in this White House, and since we have no direct access to the President, will you state for the record, for the historical record, why he wants to bomb Iraqi people?

MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, I dispute the premise of your question, first of all. There’s regular — there’s regular access to the President. The President is asked questions all the time. And when the President –

Q He hasn’t had a press conference for months.

MR. FLEISCHER: And when 14 of your colleagues spend 36 minutes asking scores of questions to the President just two days ago –

Q Well, that’s not a news conference.

MR. FLEISCHER: — they asked the President a similar question, although they phrased it a little differently than you did. They asked the President why does he feel so strongly about the need to use force, if it comes to that, to disarm Saddam Hussein. And the answer from the President was that, given the fact that the world changed on September 11th, the threat to the American people was brought immediately to our home and to our shores and to our families, the President thinks it is in the interest of peace to make certain that Saddam Hussein does not have weapons of mass destruction which he can use against us, either by transferring them to terrorists or using them himself.

Q There is no imminent threat.

MR. FLEISCHER: This is where — Helen, if you were President you might view things differently. But you have your judgment and the President has others.

Q Why doesn’t he prove it? Why don’t you lay it out? When have they threatened in the last 12 years?

MR. FLEISCHER: They have attacked their neighbors. They have gassed their own people.

Q Twelve years ago.

MR. FLEISCHER: They have launched attacks.

Q With our support.

MR. FLEISCHER: And September 11th showed the United States is vulnerable to those who would attack us. And one of the best ways to protect the homeland is to go after the threats abroad.

Q You haven’t linked terrorism to Saddam Hussein, in terms of 9/11.

MR. FLEISCHER: It’s not — the threat is what took place on 9/11. You don’t have to make a direct linkage between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 to know that others who are planning can try to do it again, Saddam Hussein included.

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Swifty has a terrific post up over at Long Sunday. I won’t even preview it here - just go take a look….

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I’m not going to bother saying anything clever about this. Not sure there is anything to say.

The Sweden bit happens at the end of part 3 and beginning of 4.

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