Center-right (in Germany)

The MSM is lately trumpeting the German elections having created a “center-right” governing coalition as though that construction has meaning, or at least the same meaning in the United States as it does in Germany. And, of course, it plays to their MSM-preferred storyline that the “split-the-difference” solution is not just better politics, it’s better policy. Which is utter nonsense. But, for context, let’s review just what were the two key issues of the recent German elections:

-modest middle-income tax relief

-work toward a strategy for the eventual withdrawal of the more than 4,200 German troops in Afghanistan

The first is and was a key Obama plank. Everyone, and I mean everyone, on the “right” in Congress voted against that. Some Democrats on the right did too. The second wouldn’t even be on the table of a nationwide election in this country unless you’re Dennis Kucinich, or some other denizen of the “far” left. The fact is, our political spectrum has been radically re-formulated; this began with Reagan and accelerated mightily under W. Bush. Today’s bipartisanship, such as it exists at all, is between left- and right-of center Democrats. This seemingly obvious fact is, as yet, utterly unknown to the MSM. I’ve seriously never, ever seen mention of it outside the progressive blogosphere. It just isn’t said. Keep walking.

Anyway, back in Germany, it would seem the main point of contention comes down to:

the Conservatives disagree with the Liberals on some policy issues, for instance on how much regulation the finance sector needs or on the right balance between strengthening security measures and protecting civil rights.

That (at least) sounds vaguely familiar. Again, though, in the US, the GOP is categorically against any new financial regulation. Hell, Palin is going around saying there’s still too much financial regulation. But, I think we can rest assured: in Germany, “conservatives” are categorically for universal healthcare, support relatively high tax rates (compared to the United States; these very “center-right” Germans support raising corporate taxes, for instance), and are calling for a less aggressive global military stance (again, relative to the US). Does anyone out there believe that any of those policy positions would fly in the modern GOP? At any level?

But, by all means, let’s simplify matters and just pretend that the German-GOP had big gains in the most recent German election cycle. As always, bad news for the Democrat.

The Shahab of Iran

Why, why, why is context never supplied? Oh, right, because it might ruin a perfectly good (and preferred) story. In this case, the NeoCon paymasters of your MSM want you to be terrified of Iran. Likewise, the ever-powerful Israeli lobby. Thus, you are instructed to assume the world is near its end because Iran has tested the terrifying Shahab-3 missile.

But what is it, exactly? It’s a medium-range ballistic missile with a payload capacity of around 700 kg (1,500 lb). It has an operational range of 2,100 km (1,300 mi), meaning it can deliver 1,500lb of whatever about 1,300 miles away. Now, it’s true that payload capacity likely includes highly sophisticated warheads like the those found in a Trident II MIRV. But nobody on this Earth thinks Iran’s nuclear program is anywhere near that level of sophistication. Hell, the United States worries that it’s not near (or soon will lose) that level of sophistication any more. Instead, Iran is (most likely) busily developing Fat Man. It weighed 10,000 pounds and required a modified B-29 for delivery. Even assuming they can halve the weight of a similar design, you’re still at 5x what they can lift off the ground. To continue the rather apt WWII theme, the Shahab-3 is really more consistent with the B-17; it had a range of about 800 mi with a bomb-load of 4,500 lb (2,000 kg). Oh, wait, that’s still almost 4x the payload capacity of this missile. How about a well-regarded, frequently ship-based fighter/bomber of the same era? Well, at 2000lb we’re at least getting close.

It’s also worth noting that the damage potential from a North Korean high-explosive carrying missile of similar capabilities is considered so minor that:

As a result, Washington and Seoul have not placed the highest priority on North Korean short-range missiles in their negotiating strategies

Ultimately, we’re talking about a relatively low-payload, unguided missile. Even if they could rain them down like arrows on Tel Aviv, the damage would be scattered and relatively minor. Think: SCUDs. Or, to close the loop: V2s.

But: more to the point. What, exactly, is the New York Times providing here? Internet, TV, and radio can give us quick-hitting, context-free “OMG Iran is going to kill us all!!!!!!!” stories much more quickly (and probably more cheaply) than can the NYT or any other dead-tree news source. Why in the world do they spend time and resources aping that? To be first? Please. For print media to survive, it needs to be better than this; if any paper-source were churning out indispensable, immediate context and analysis the day after the news initially broke, with long-form analysis a day or two later, don’t you think they’d be just slightly more relevant? And infinitely better for our National Discourse? Instead, they provide us this. More of the same. Truly, a national treasure…

How to Write With Style, by Kurt Vonnegut

givemesomethingtoread:

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings.

This is most of our current problem in the MSM. But, the linked article certainly serves as instruction as to why KV is top three to Lemkin, and, really, should serve as a guideline to anybody writing, well, anything (summarized, but read the whole thing):

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

How to Write With Style, by Kurt Vonnegut

DFW

What I wanted as a reader […] was a chance to shadow him for a spell, and see the world like he saw it.

–3quarksdaily

This post contains spoilers for a while, and then doesn’t, so I’ve marked the end of spoilers.

Book Clubs generally make me sad. Even at their best, what you’re likely to get, the best possible outcome, the thing that makes you go to and leave from a book club is ultimately just somebody else’s opinion on what it was it all meant and, perhaps, the chance to make (er, help) somebody see it your way instead. If the book in question is merely a bit of magical realism masquerading as high literature: no problem. It’s when the book in question is actually good, or even great, that there start to be problems: it’s not cut and dried; style may be an issue; what’s with this complete lack of recognizable paragraphs and or commas? And so forth. But when the book in question is a genuine (and, to my mind indisputable) masterpiece of the late 20th century, and one of the finest American novels you’re likely to encounter that’s also actually in-print and reasonably popular on a broad, everyday culture level to boot, there’s going to be real trouble. People are going to complain about hetero-normative bias in the statements of particular characters made by them (the character) as expressions of their character. Which clearly cannot be allowed, as there are no people with hetero-normative bias still around in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. And so forth. And even if there were, they certainly wouldn’t allow themselves to be quoted saying so in a book written by some all-seeing eye by way of one Hal Incandenza. Book Club People also have a real tendency to miss the most obvious things and radically overstate the importance of the trivial; for all you fags dressed up as girls out there laboring under plainly, painfully false spectation theories: Hal is on DMZ at the beginning of the book. And, no, he didn’t suddenly metabolize something he ate years previous. He took it in the sense of stealing it from Pemulis near the end of the book, and took it in the sense of ingesting a substance at the one time during which it’s been established that he could do so (the break before the Whataburger). He even says so:

‘I cannot make myself understood, now.’ I am speaking slowly and distinctly. ‘Call it something I ate.’

This line is followed directly by the “I ate this” story, which, hey what-do-you-know, is about mold. And it’s well established that DMZ is also a mold. And the description of “cannot make myself understood, now” is almost directly lifted from the way the effects of DMZ are described chronologically earlier in the narrative: the Ethel Merman tunes and all that. Because I thought this was as clear as it could be made without including some diagrams and a cartoon with an angel somewhere around page 700. Seriously, did we all read the same thing? Because it’s really not worth going through if not. And but maybe you should try a little harder next time out, and maybe work on the old comprehension and retention before moving on to chapter books.

John NR Wayne: Quebecois agent of some kind. CT too, apparently, as both are described as graveside for operation dig-up. That’s why Wayne “would have” won the Whataburger in the Year of Glad. Because he isn’t there; mission accomplished, and all that. But we also know that The Entertainment master wasn’t there: “too late.” Orin obtained it long ago. He’s the one sending the tapes as some kind of bizarre vengeance against his mother. That’s why, for instance, the mid-eastern attaché (presumably one of the many Avril liaised with, at least according to Himself’s perception, and to Orin that “truth” is all that matters) receives a tape marked “Happy Anniversary.” The anniversary in question is that of his canoodling with the Moms.

A clockwork orange: The reason Fackelmann is getting the full Kubrick? They’re preparing to show him The Entertainment. We know that Sixties Bob has acquired it from the Antitois (they traded trade a blue lava lamp and a lavender apothecary’s mirror for it); and that the Antitois are involved in a more-moderate-than-the-AFR Quebecois terrorist sect but that they can’t make copies, so this is not the master we’re dealing with here. We know 60’s Bob and his son are furthermore involved in Fax’s Big Score. Why the hell else are they setting up a TP viewer and forcibly opening his eyes? And it’s also the reason why Gately is doped into unconsciousness with the strongest (specifically) Canadian shit there is: so he doesn’t see any of it. What, you thought they were just doing him some kind of substance-tinged favor? And, of course, we know the final outcome was sufficiently gruesome to put Gately off the substances for good.

[/Spoilers]

And but so I’m actually a lot more interested in the book as work than the book as it works, and I want to put some thoughts down while the book still feels like my companion:

I previously knew David Foster Wallace’s writing from his non-fiction work. Entirely. I’d wager that’s most people’s experience, in that he was a far more regularly published writer in that domain. I found him to be almost outlandishly talented in a way that seemed very familiar (but completely unreachable) relative to my own ways of approaching writing, a kindred spirit. In pieces like these, he unleashed a kind of writing that felt intimately familiar to me. As though we had shared many of the same influences, took some of the same essential lessons to heart, and then each set about writing; sharing a certain sensibility that he had honed to a far higher and more elaborate level than I ever had dreamed of doing. Obviously, if we extend that metaphor he’s Mozart and I’m a busker in the streets, but you get the idea. Feeling a strange insight into his methods, I always sensed the gears working, felt like the diversions were too this-is-my-voice-focused, too telegraphed, and so found the totality of it to be often suffocating and even somewhat counterproductive. But still enjoyable. Sometimes in an absolute sense, sometimes in the more cerebral sense of appreciating a job well done.

And so I avoided his fiction. 1000+ pages of heavily footnoted, variably voiced ramblings with a non-linear plot? A few thousand words on grammar was often too much to deal with in any kind of enjoyment-type fashion. And so it went. Until he went and demapped himself, and I felt the profound sadness of one who’s under-appreciated that which they have until it is gone. Along came the notion of an Infinite Summer. A tip of the old cap to DFW, in internet book club form. Resisted, started later, avoided the online forums and discussions like the fucking plague, but read it anyway. Just worked on my side of the street, as they might say. And I shall undoubtedly read it again.

DFW is the writer Pynchon wishes he were. Pynchon, clearly holding his reader in contempt, provides one millimeter of plot or character development surrounded by 14,000 kilometers of absolute blather, sound and fury signifying nothing; followed by another millimeter of progress. Rinse, lather, repeat and you’ve got Gravity’s Rainbow without employing even a single monkey. DFW addressed this topic not once but twice in a 1996 Salon interview; noting his various influences he cites “about 25% of the time Pynchon” (which I would obviously rank as overly generous) and then, separately, more or less spells out exactly why that is:

…one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read.

Quite the opposite, then, in Infinite Jest Wallace gives us tightly wound characters that inhabit the same world, interact with one another directly and indirectly, lodges important details in your brain for a few hundred pages such that, when the time comes, you feel the moment of discovery: ah, this is that. All without a moment of “hey, look here, this seemingly innocuous detail about the different variants of AA meetings is going to be important!” and without a moment’s sense of a book written in linear fashion and then chopped to pieces and reassembled to make it seem more “important” from some perceived but utterly invented difficulty. After reading this book you feel like you’ve known these characters, intimately and for a long time. From inside their minds, and but also from the outside looking in. The level of voice control exerted in Infinite Jest is utterly astonishing; also the language. Complex and varying, sometimes invented out of whole cloth. Large sections of it are essentially free-standing short stories that have little direct impact on the plot; however idiosyncratic they seemed at their varying moments, I can’t think of one that didn’t ultimately lend a fullness of humor, a depth to character, or add some crushingly painful realization into an already claustrophobic and terrifyingly personal story-line. In the hands of a lesser author, it would be poisonous to include a length diversion about M*A*S*H or prison tattoos, but here it’s very nearly always convincing. Eric Strohm puts it nicely:

Of Infinite Jest’s pleasures the most intoxicating is the march and hum of words and sentences which form the environment, ambient noise, and very foundation of any novel. Here they sculpt a sensuous, irresistible terrain. It is no minor irony that the very thrill and rush of language in Wallace’s hands forms a serious habit. And Wallace accommodates the reader’s desire endlessly-a torrent of tales on tennis (junior-level), Dilaudid, film theory, eschatology, alcohol, Quebecois separatism, heroin, Greater Boston, differential calculus, twelve-step recovery, and all things under the sun, told every which way, with perfect pitch to hilarious effect.

DFW his own personal self shows almost alarming insight into his masterpiece:

It’s a weird book. It doesn’t move the way normal books do. It’s got a whole bunch of characters. I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don’t feel like I’m hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, “Hey, here’s this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it.” I know books like that and they piss me off.

They piss me off too. Infinite Jest most definitely did not piss me off and is simultaneously almost impossibly smart. I see that as a fuck you also, by the way. A different kind, but the same term. I’ve found that the really big fuck yous in this life make you want to write. This one made me need to write.

Lastly, I’ll just lift a line that has no real meaning outside the context of people who have read the book, but I think is quite wonderful either way:

And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

I will read it again.

Words

mrgan:

Merlin celebrates writing:

…I clearly remember reading that first line of *Absalom, Absalom!* in 1988 and thinking, “Holy shit, I need to sit the fuck down, turn off The Smiths, and *just read this book*.”

I didn’t think about this for more than five second, but I didn’t have to either. Here’s a paragraph not so much written as shouted from the depths of Limbo:

“You bad woman!” I shout back, while she, turning into the shop, half-contemptuous, half-reassured, flourishes her fist in the air. “You bad woman! I begged you for a shovelful of the worst coal and you would not give it me.” And with that I ascend into the regions of the ice mountains and am lost forever.

It’s from the scariest story I know, Kafka’s The Bucket Rider.

Might I humbly add a paragraph from T. Coraghessan Boyle’s East is East that stopped me in my tracks:

VAST AND PRIMEVAL, UNFATHOMABLE, UNCONQUERABLE, BASTION of cottonmouth, rattlesnake and leech, mother of vegetation, father of mosquito, soul of silt, the Okefenokee is the swamp archetypal, the swamp of legend, of racial memory, of Hollywood. It gives birth to two rivers, the St. Mary’s and the Suwannee, fanning out over 430,000 leaf-choked acres, every last one as sodden as a sponge. Four hundred and thirty thousand acres of stinging, biting and boring insects, of maiden cane and gum and cypress, of palmetto, slash pine and peat, of muck, mud, slime and ooze. Things fester here, things cook down, decompose, deliquesce. The swamp is home to two hundred and twenty-five species of birds, forty-three of mammals, fifty-eight of reptiles, thirty-two of amphibians and thirty-four of fish-all variously equipped with beaks, talons, claws, teeth, stingers and fangs–not to mention the seething galaxies of gnats and deerflies and no-see-ums, the ticks, mites, hookworms and paramecia that exist only to compound the misery of life. There are alligators here, bears, puma, bobcats and bowfin, there are cooters and snappers, opossum, coon and gar. They feed on one another, shit and piss in the trees, in the sludge and muck and on the floating mats of peat, they dribble jism and bury eggs, they scratch and stink and sniff at themselves, caterwauling and screeching through every minute of every day and night till the place reverberates like some hellish zoo.

Words

Observe and Report

Bob Somerby:

… whatever a person may think of Van Jones, he simply wasn’t a major White House player. Glenn Beck ran a largely crackpot crusade against Jones, often disinforming millions of viewers in the process. Jones “went to prison and became a communist,” Beck would constantly say. (That clip comes from his August 4 show.) Cracker, please! That’s “apocalyptic” junk. And guess what? When millions of people get disinformed in such ways, that might qualify as news too!

The Post didn’t report that disinformation—the process by which millions of people were told that Obama had an important “czar” who “went to prison” and “became a communist.” But it didn’t occur to Alexander to ask why the Post was silent about that. We’d say there are two likely reasons:

First, Alexander has absorbed a Republican point of view about whose outlook dominates Washington.

Second, there is no countervailing Democratic point of view! There is no narrative which might have made Alexander think twice before he joined a famous old band. For decades now, conservatives have spread the idea that liberal notions dominate Washington.

The notion was silly by the mid-1990s, of course. But when have Democrats spoken?

Well, Bob, when so-called Democrats with daily access to microphones do speak, they all too often recite internalized GOP talking points. Let’s take just one set of recent examples centered around attempts to remake and refine the United States’ Afghan policy going forward. Here we have (the normally quite good) Mara Liasson, when asked if Bush administration policies have anything to do with Afghanistan as Obama found it:

[Obama] owns the war in Afghanistan

Indeed, Obama did start and then ignore said war in Afghanistan for the better part of a decade. Whatever domestic and military issues that remain to be solved there are totally his fault, and have nothing to do with anything that went before. And, just to let you in on the news of the future, success in Afghanistan (should it come): total NeoCon victory, and was all Bush the whole way, largely despite Obama, and certainly not because of any new policies. Failure, or simply staying mired in the present quagmire, well that was because Obama failed to execute W’s brilliant strategeries.

Now let’s take Juan Williams on the same subject:

[Afghanistan] becomes President Obama’s war in such a way that people would say he has gone back, he has become a war president, and how ironic for a man who ran against the war.

You see, Juan, the problem here is: Obama ran “against” the conduct of the war in Iraq. If anything, he was arguing from day one for a more aggressive, more involved stance in Afghanistan. And he’s repeatedly, repeatedly said that Iraq was a “distraction” from the hunt for al Qaeda and action against the Taliban remnants. You might recall, these are the two groups responsible for the attacks of 9/11. Too bad none of that material was in the GOP’s talking points memorandum for the day.

She must live in mortal fear that there’s somebody in the world living a healthy and productive life.

The Big Dog, Bill Clinton, describes Maureen Dowd via Taylor Branch

[T]he time has come–and in fact, it is long overdue–for them to begin forcefully making the case that being a member in good standing of the party’s Senate caucus means supporting cloture motions on key legislation even if a given senator intends to vote against it.

–Ed Kilgore, Closed Vote; The New Republic

Like Clockwork

Obama directs FCC to adopt “Net Neutrality” (and write any new or revised regulations accordingly). This policy is a 180 from the Bush administration position that can be boiled down to “whatever the big companies want, the big companies get,” and these changes would, without a doubt, foster the sorts of innovations and game-changing uses that people tend to use the word “internet time” as a synonym for (e.g. rapid advance over short time periods and the ubiquitous availability of seemingly all human knowledge to relatively simple front-end tools on computers, and nowadays, mobile devices of all shapes and forms).

Naturally, today’s GOP, ever a friend to the Established Interests is categorically agin it. Kay Bailey Hutchison says:

I am deeply concerned by the direction the FCC appears to be heading.

Indeed, just take a look at these troubling developments:

new network neutrality rules that would require carriers to deliver broadband in a nondiscriminatory manner and to disclose their network management policies. Genachowski also said the FCC would explore the question of whether to extend network neutrality rules to mobile carriers.

[…]

“This means they cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks, or pick winners by favoring some content or applications over others in the connection to subscribers’ homes,” [FCC chairman Julius] Genachowski said in an address before the Brookings Institute Sept. 21. “Nor can they disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that broadband provider. The Internet must continue to allow users to decide what content and applications succeed.”

How can innovation possibly succeed in an environment that encourages open competition and a level playing field? It’s unpossible. The only way forward: Hutchison feels the monopolistic providers of net access as of today “should be unencumbered by consumer protections and basic Internet freedoms.” Indeed they should.Who could possibly want any of those things. According to the GOP, freedom is overrated anyway.

Net neutrality: clearly another example of Obama’s rampant Socialist, command-and-control agenda. By forcing the internet to remain open and free, unchained by secret access rules or “preferred” website providers and tiered service, he’s pursuing the Socialist takeover of said internet by lots of small, innovative, ideas-based companies that leverage terrifying Socialistic Free-Market principles at the expense of the moneyed interests and the various, ossified, copper-wire owning players of today. Why, that’s categorically un-American! Jon Ensign, in a remarkable bit of double-speak, clearly agrees:

In this struggling economy, any industry that is able to thrive should be allowed to do so without meddlesome government interference that could stifle innovation,“ Ensign said in a statement. "We must avoid burdensome government regulations that micromanage private businesses or that limit the ability of companies to provide what their customers want. The Internet has flourished in large part because of a lack of government interference; I see no need to change that now.

Truly, truly remarkable. No other word for it. By writing regulation that permanently opens the internet to competition from all comers, and any size company, by guaranteeing this access for both consumers and businesses we are, in fact "micromanag[ing] private business” and “limit[ing] the ability of companies to provide what their customers want.” Because we know what customers want, now and forever. So long as customers want tiered internet access, and a Comcast-approved network, that is. And, since that’s all they’re offered in most markets through built-in, city-wide monopolies, that must be what they want. Right? Right?