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Sunday, June 1st, 2008
| Time |
Event |
| 12:00a |
Liberian registry To the sound of one hand clapping, the U.S. Department of Defense has given Africa its rightful place in the pantheon of continents. It is now the exclusive domain of its own U.S. military headquarters command--Africom. * Dave Donelson's diary :: :: ( Kos) I recently received an email from the African Faith and Justice Network celebrating a small victory in their fight against Africom, which reminded me that this bizarre under-the-radar Bush administration foreign policy initiative is set to go live this fall. The AFJN was pleased to report that every African nation except Liberia refused to allow Africom to set up shop on their soil. A small victory, perhaps, but an important one for symbolic reasons. MORE ON http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/30/122353/166Btw - ' In the tomb of the inflatable pig' describes a large US air-force base in the middle of the Paraguayan wilderness. John G speculates its for re-fuelling Antarctic flights...even if it is suspiciously central. | | 12:07a |
Homicide bombers - these are the pits
WASHINGTON - Army soldiers committed suicide in 2007 at the highest rate on record, and the toll is climbing ever higher this year as long war deployments stretch on. At least 115 soldiers killed themselves last year, up from 102 the previous year, the Army said Thursday....
More U.S. troops also died overall in hostilities in 2007 than in any of the previous years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Violence increased in Afghanistan with a Taliban resurgence, and U.S. deaths increased in Iraq even as violence there declined in the second half of the year.
Increasing the strain on the force last year was the extension of deployments to 15 months from 12 months, a practice ending this year.
The 115 confirmed suicides among active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops who had been activated amounted to a rate of 18.8 per 100,000 troops — the highest since the Army began keeping records in 1980. Two other deaths are suspected suicides but still under investigation. END
The challenge for us now is to push this up the chain-of-command. We all remember der fuhrerbunker ja? | | 12:18a |
Seppo Corro tapped for Obama veep slot!
Obama just needs a running mate who's old, Hispanic, southern, female and enjoys state-sponsored violence, especially war. | | 12:24a |
Media insight today tonight
New York, N.Y. (News Squad Wire) — In what the media termed a "healthy display of detached introspection," the media today accused the media of unfairly convicting the media in the media, according to a widely covered media report critical of the media's self-absorbed coverage of itself.
Tom Brokaw
"Lately it has been popular in the media to try and convict the media for exaggerating the importance and influence of the media on issues such as the economy and the Internet," said the report's co-author, recently retired network anchor Tom Brokaw. "We in the media felt it was time to take a look at the way the media has been looking at the media looking at the media's coverage, and we were appalled at what we found ourselves finding ourselves finding out about ourselves."
The report, however, drew immediate criticism from Brokaw, who blasted himself in a two-hour televised panel discussion.
"This report gives me pause to wonder if, by giving so much weight to how we cover ourselves, we in the media aren't giving ourselves too much credit for having an influence," he said. "I just hope we in the media have the guts to look into this."
Another panel member, fellow Network anchor Charles Gibson, went a step further. "I think the big story here is not that we are unfairly convicting ourselves of convicting ourselves. People simply don't care about that," said Gibson. "The big story is 'How are we in the media going to react to the accusation that we are unfairly convicting ourselves of convicting ourselves, and how is that going to influence our coverage of how we influence events with our coverage?' Tonight after your local news."
A survey of people outside media circles, meanwhile, found that 92 percent had not heard of the report, or read the 647 newspaper stories about it, or seen the 36 televised roundtable discussions on the topic that have aired since this morning. Those results drew the ire of John Dickerson, editor of newly launched InsideInside.com, which covers Inside.com, which covers what's going on inside the media.
"That's yet another example of how people outside the media just aren't interested in keeping up with the news," said Dickerson. "It's one reason why we need to do a better job keeping track of ourselves keeping track of ourselves."
Nearly 100 percent of survey respondents, however, insisted that people aren't interested in how the media covers itself covering a story, but instead want to learn about the story itself. To that, media members agreed wholeheartedly.
"The media has to step back and ask itself whether there even needs to be coverage of its coverage," said TV journalist Katie Couric. "It's a point I make in my upcoming CBS special, The Influence of Katie Couric's Coverage on Katie Couric's Coverage: Katie Couric Reports. | | 12:53a |
Republicans or Marxists?
Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai launches a scathing attack on Robert Mugabe's rule, saying a nation rich in natural resources has become an embarrassment.
Now a Marxist might say ' Hey! Thats not a bug...thats a FEATURE!'
And a repug might say,' Government is not the solution - government is the problem'.
So when we think ' Republicans or Mafia' lets not forget ' Republicans or Marxism'. Especially as the neocons are forgotten but not gone. Condi ' I fell in love with Lenin' Rice was still secretary-of-state last time I looked. | | 1:03a |
We are the anarchists
If yr in any perceived position of power today you may have heard of us. Today we may strike you as small cosmetic fish that nibble away the dead skin of raw power. However rest assured that we have far larger piranha on the way. And canidru. And even the odd great white. So listen up chump...justice is coming...get the fuck out of the water and get the fuck out of Dodge - if you know whats good for you. | | 1:25a |
Shabby doll
The treatment of Columbia's ELN group has been despicable by Chaves and Castro.
"It's lamentable to see some people happy about someone's death. We aren't happy about the death of Manuel Marulanda," Chavez said.
This is very revealing because combined with what we already know about the Chaves ' Tilt' toward the FARC over the ELN it confirms the marked Stalinist leanings of Huge-ego. Now at this point some of you might be saying...' hang on a minute professor...why the hell should we anarchists care about any mother fucking Trotskyites anywhere?'
To that I rejoiner that some Trots actually showed by fighting and dying with us in Spain that they were genuine revolutionaries at last. There may be some hope for for some Trots in some circumstances in other words...on a case-by-case and closely watched basis.Certainly there's far more hope for the more advanced Trots than any Leninist filth left lying around like a stinking steaming pile of shit.
That seems uncontroversial to say. | | 1:48a |
America's Hadrian He slept with Kerouac, hung out with Jackie O and feuded with Mailer. He's the last surviving giant of American literature's golden age. So why is Gore Vidal still so sensitive about his reputation? Interview by Robert Chalmers * The rumours about my love child may be true, says Gore Vidal Seventeen years have passed, I remind Gore Vidal, since he told a reporter: "This is the last interview I shall ever give. I am in the departure lounge of life." "So where are you now? Tray table in the upright position, footrest stowed, taxiing towards the runway?" The writer gives me a mutinous look. "How do you know that I didn't leave? Actually, I'm more fearful of airplanes than I am of my own mechanism, because I know how to run it. I've had diabetes for 20 years. I have a titanium knee. Which is quite strong. But don't ask for it in the middle of the night." With Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer gone, Gore Vidal, 82, is the last truly legendary figure from a golden age of American literature. "Serene" is his favourite word, though this is an adjective he employs rather than evokes: headlines he has inspired include "Into The Lion's Den" and "Cross Him If You Dare". That said, he looks tranquil enough this afternoon, an elderly ginger cat dozing on his knee, and a half-finished tumbler of whisky by his side. The expression he wears in photographs from his prime – a curious mixture of disdain and sensuality – has not altogether faded. Vidal moved here, to this mansion in the Hollywood Hills, in 2003, because of its proximity to the Cedars-Sinai hospital. Howard Austen, his companion of 53 years, died of cancer in the same year. The two men had spent the previous 25 years in Ravello, near Naples, at Vidal's spectacular villa, La Rondinaia (The Swallow's Nest.) "It's been sold," Vidal tells me. "To an hotelier. A money-man. From what I hear, he is not prospering." He used to delight in exhausting interviewers, unused to the debilitating sunshine of the Amalfi coast, with the arduous climb to his idyllic property. Here in his living-room, Vidal's limited mobility, along with the subdued lighting, the walls hung with stately oil paintings, and a carefully arranged display of lilies, lend a certain melancholy to proceedings. But neither age nor bereavement have dimmed his waspish intelligence; he still exudes the sense that he will not suffer fools – or, in a certain mood, anybody else – gladly. Like Oscar Wilde, he is celebrated for his epigrams, most famously: "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." Asked whether his first romantic encounter was homosexual or heterosexual, Vidal replied that he had been "too polite to ask". His conversation is precise and mannered to a point that you suspect this is a man who may still crook a finger when he drinks champagne. He speaks with an archaic, aesthetic tone that can be contagious: there's hardly an interview in his cuttings file where he doesn't elicit the word "exquisite". To encounter Vidal is to meet a man who, through his friendship with André Gide, is only one handshake removed from Wilde. His two extraordinary volumes of memoirs – Palimpsest (1995) and its sequel Point To Point Navigation, published in 2006 – recall friendships with Eleanor Roosevelt, Princess Margaret and Leonard Bernstein. He was close to John Kennedy and closer still to Jackie, a relative by marriage. "It is always a delicate matter," he once wrote, "when a friend or acquaintance becomes president." ("Oh we know, we know," sigh his millions of readers.) A confidant of Tennessee Williams, he also frequented Christopher Isherwood, EM Forster, Albert Camus, Sartre, Anaïs Nin and William Faulkner. Vidal, who once wrote the line "Allen Ginsberg kissed my hand as Jean Genet looked on," was briefly the lover of Jack Kerouac. With this in mind, when you read him asserting, in Palimpsest, that "I have never much enjoyed the company of writers," it does seem necessary to add: "who are less famous than I am." He was never a man plagued by self-doubt. A writer of supreme invention and poetic sensibility, his 24 novels include classics such as his transsexual satire Myra Breckenridge, and the innovative and surreal comedy Duluth. He wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams's play Suddenly Last Summer, starring Elizabeth Taylor; other scripts include Ben Hur and his underrated adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's novel, The Scapegoat. As an actor, Gore Vidal appears in numerous movies, including Fellini's Roma, in which he plays himself, and Tim Robbins's Bob Roberts. A prodigious satirist and gifted speechwriter, he was narrowly defeated as a Democratic candidate for Congress in 1960, and refused to accept a safe seat four years later "because I realised my true motive was vanity". It would come as little surprise to hear that he was offered, but declined, the captaincy of Matt Busby's first great Manchester United side. There's an episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa holds up a book entitled Tome, with Vidal's name on the spine. "These are my only friends," she complains. "Grown-up nerds like Gore Vidal. And even he's kissed more boys than I ever will." "Girls, Lisa, girls," her mother says, and it's probable that a majority of viewers were, like Marge, unaware both of the writer's name, and romantic reputation. Prime among life's potential irritations for Vidal is the knowledge that, because his unique gift has been applied to so broad a range of disciplines, his name is less familiar than those of more minor, but ruthlessly focused, talents such as Truman Capote or Norman Mailer. "Mailer once said that 'Vidal lacks the wound.' What do you think he was referring to: the fact that your grandfather was a senator? Your privileged upbringing?" "Privileged? You mean more privileged than a fat boy from South Africa," Vidal snaps [Mailer's father was born in Cape Town] "with a doting mother?" He refers to Tennessee Williams as "The Bird", on the grounds that he was an artist who soared above the heads of lesser writers, and I have no doubt that Vidal considers that he, too, is on the radar of air-traffic control. The theme of flight is one that recurs in his writing and conversation. His father Gene was the first instructor in aeronautics at the highly prestigious US Military Academy at West Point, New York. As a 10-year-old, Gore appeared in a Pathé newsreel, landing a light aircraft. How did that feel? "Great. I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936." He points to a dresser covered with small framed photographs. "There's a picture of my father." "He looks like a film star." "He was like a film star. He was the most famous college athlete in the history of the United States. A quarterback at West Point. He won a silver medal in the Olympic Games of 1924. In the 43 years that I knew him, we never quarrelled once, and we never agreed on anything." His father's picture is towards the back of the display. Most prominently positioned is an image of a young woman with tousled hair, a mischievous grin, and great vitality: a tomboy with Katharine Hepburn cheekbones. "Amelia Earhart," Vidal says. "You can see courage in those eyes." "You can." "Didn't she have a fling with your father?" "She had more than that. I said to him, "Why didn't you marry her?' This was after she went down in the Pacific in 1936. They'd set up three airlines together." Even now, more than seven decades later, there is emotion in his voice. "He said: 'I have never really wanted to marry another boy.' And she was like a boy." "Who told you she was dead?" "My father. Roosevelt put him in charge of the search." "How did you react?" "I didn't cry. Almost everyone I knew had died, or nearly died, in an air crash." ' Vidal is engaging, generous and amusing. But you never lose the sense that his temper ("no gentle affair at best") is a bomb waiting to go off. Among his contradictions is that he suffers from what he's called "a dread of anonymity", yet loathes interviews, even though he has precipitated some of the most glorious collisions ever to occur in the media. In a television debate from August 1968 (now a popular destination on YouTube) he locked horns with arch-reactionary William F Buckley – "Hitler," as Vidal describes him, "without the charm." Buckley compared anti-Vietnam war demonstrators to Nazis. "As far as I'm concerned," Vidal told him, "the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself." "Now listen, you queer," Buckley replied. "Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face. I was in the infantry in the last war." "You were not," Vidal replies. "I was." "You were not." The British writer Richard Adams, appearing alongside him on That Was The Week That Was, called his work "meretricious." "Pardon?" said Vidal. "Meretricious." "Meretricious to you," the American replied, "and a happy new year." It's the written press that he really despises. One piece by a female journalist, published in the early-1990s, abused his personal appearance in a way that could never be contemplated by a man writing about a woman: "Unkempt. Overweight. Sloppy trousers ... his belly is bursting through his shirt." His recollection of this highly dissatisfactory encounter is uncanny in its detail. The first English writer to have the wit to seek out Vidal was the late Arthur Hopcraft: the author of The Football Man and scriptwriter for the Alec Guinness version of John Le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy remains, I would argue, the most gifted writer ever to have interviewed Vidal. Hopcraft, while noting the American's "candid vanity", produced a highly complimentary assessment of his life and career. The American has absolutely no memory of who Arthur Hopcraft was. But then Hopcraft didn't make mean asides about his wardrobe or his weight. "You've got a pretty good capacity to feud, haven't you? I don't necessarily mean that maliciously. You're what John Osborne called 'a good hater'." "I am quite sure you mean it maliciously. You are a journalist. I pay no attention to most people. The opinion of the world does not mean a goddamn to me. I hate nobody." "Norman Mailer?" [Vidal once characterised Mailer, Henry Miller and Charles Manson as brother chauvinists who should be collectively referred to as M3.] "Mailer feuded with me. I knew Norman's syndrome. If I was on the cover of Time and he wasn't, my God he would be insulting me in the press. He couldn't stop. He lived for his little swig of PR." "Truman Capote?" "Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house." "What was Capote doing that you didn't like?" "Lying," Vidal shouts. "The one thing I hate most on this earth. Which is why I do not have a friendly time with journalists." Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was born in West Point, the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal and Nina Gore. He was raised in Washington DC. When he was 10, his parents divorced; his relationship with his alcoholic mother, which ended in 1957 (she died 21 years later) seems to have been at once unsuitably intimate, in terms of her personal disclosures to him, and thoroughly poisonous. He has recalled her telling him, for instance, that rage made her orgasmic ("I forgot to ask her if sex ever did") and remarking that she was born only "because my mother's douche bag broke". Nina also informed him how, on the way to their honeymoon, his father had told her: "'There's something very important I want you to know.' I was so excited. He's going to tell me he loves me. But he didn't. Instead, he said: 'I have three balls.'" According to Vidal, his father "was in all the medical books". "How old were you when you noticed Nina was behaving differently from most parents?" Vidal laughs. "51." "Come on." "No. Really. I was a slow developer. The thing is, she was just atrocious. Everybody who knew her hated her." "What did she do, exactly? Your grandmother said that when Nina walked in a room, it was like an evil spirit arriving." "Yes. This is her own mother saying that. You know what the problem was? It was racial. And I'll give you the race: Anglo-Irish. They are more vicious than most. She was a shit." He pauses. "A drunken shit." "It must be awkward, then, to contemplate the fact that, genetically, you are half her. Is there anything in your character that you recognise as inherited?" "No. If I did, I would take an emetic." "You sound pretty angry with her." "If I cared at all, I would say I would still be angry. She was a terror. The damage she caused." "To you?" "To many people. Not just me." Vidal formed a strong bond with his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, Oklahoma's first Democratic Senator, who had been blind from the age of 10, and had the young boy read to him. "I would say that he raised me." "Your mother was terrified of him." "Yes. Because he was strong as an ox and he would beat the shit out of her. Occasionally. "Why did she drink?" "Heredity." "Not anger? Or disappointment? Or jealousy?" "You have been spoiled by Freud." "Wasn't your father's relationship with Amelia Earhart a good reason for your mother to have been unhappy?" "Well, since you bring up the subject and I play some of the tapes in my head, I think yes, she must have been very jealous. Amelia was bigger than Elizabeth Taylor. If you went down Fifth Avenue with Amelia Earhart you would have 500 people following you. Even at 10 I was impressed." I have a feeling that Amelia Earhart is not just the mother Gore Vidal would like to have had, but also the lover. When Vidal's parents divorced in 1935, his mother married Hugh D Auchincloss; they had a daughter, ' also named Nina. After Vidal's mother left, in 1940, to marry "her on-off lover, Robert Olds, an air corps officer", Auchincloss married Janet Bouvier – mother of Jackie Kennedy, young Nina's stepsister. Gore Vidal had at least one heterosexual relationship as a youth, but has written far more about his great love, a schoolmate called Jimmie Trimble. An outstanding athlete, Trimble was killed in action in June 1945, aged 20. "His sweat smelled of honey," Vidal wrote, "like that of Alexander the Great." He has said that Trimble was the only person he ever truly loved. "Many people might find it hard to understand how you have remained so... I'm not sure what would be the best adjective here..." "Smitten?" "You might equally say, 'loyal.'" "You don't forget what matters." "What attracted you to him?" "Remember my father was the greatest athlete in his school." "Can I infer from that that Jimmie reminded you of your dad?" "You could, yes." Gore gives a mischievous smile. "Not that he did." "And you are going to be buried together, at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington DC?" "Yes. Howard is already there." Vidal's first book, Williwaw, a war novel, was well received in 1946. But it was his third, The City And The Pillar, an openly homosexual novel, published two years later (dedicated "To JT") that influenced his life most profoundly. Vidal has consistently argued that the term "homosexual" has no validity, because human sexuality is too complex and diverse to be reduced to binary terms. This was a nuance lost on publications such as The New York Times, which refused to review his next five novels. He retains a special contempt for the paper, "which never found a well it could not poison". "You've said that, from childhood, you wanted to be a politician more than a writer. How do you think your life would have been different if you hadn't published The City And The Pillar? For instance, when you ran for Congress in 1960?" "Not much. I almost won the most difficult seat in the country." "And yet even today, any admission of a sexual inclination that doesn't involve two children and a well-manicured back yard is likely to be used against you in politics." "The book was fiction. That it could be exploited by political enemies is – yes – kind of proof of something." "You were the one that said: 'I might have had a life in politics if it wasn't for the faggot thing.'" "You're right, I did say that. And it is true. But now I am old, I realise that I probably didn't want that [political career]." "To return to the question, if you hadn't published The City And The Pillar..." "I would be President, like George W Bush," Vidal says, with just the slightest hint of sarcasm. "Come on." "We'd be a lot better off if you were." "We'd be safer." There's more here... http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/gore-vidal-literary-feuds-his-vicious-mo ther-and-rumours-of-a-secret-love-child-832525.html | | 1:57a |
The only Gore worth spit
What a genius wasted on the septic-tanks!
In the aftermath of The City And The Pillar, which now appears almost prudish in terms of its sex scenes, Vidal relocated briefly to Guatemala, and wrote several novels under pseudonyms. He was once quoted as saying he had had 1,000 lovers by the time he was 25, a statistic that adds a certain credibility to his 1960 election slogan "You get more with Gore."
Surprisingly, for an inherently private man, he collaborated with Dr Alfred Kinsey, America's first "sexologist", who produced the ground-breaking 1948 study Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male.
"What interested you about Kinsey?"
"He was the biggest explosion since Freud. Suddenly the whole sexual world shifted. Why do you think I wrote The City And The Pillar? Because I knew that everything that people thought was stupid." "Yet Kinsey refers very rigidly to the 'condition' of homosexuality."
"There was no vocabulary otherwise. Homosexual and heterosexual are nouns that I would not use myself, it's true. Nor would he, when he was thinking. These are not semiological signs to a state of being. They aren't saying anything at all. Except, you know, 'I prefer rice to potatoes.' What great news that is. Tell it and gasp."
"Did you learn anything from him?"
"No. Well... he made a sexual revolution at the moment when I was making one. He sent me a copy of his book, with a great inscription. It compliments me on my 'work in the field'. Kinsey had a sense of humour. He was not a fool."
Vidal met Howard Auder in New York in 1950. "Where, exactly?" Vidal tells me that he can't remember. "People have said it was at The Everard Baths." [For decades Manhattan's most famous gay bath-house, it burned down in 1977.]
"I remember The Everard Baths. But what would I be doing there? There's nothing they do there that I like."
"The reason I ask is that most long-standing relationships begin with a physical..."
"I have always said, very clearly, that there was no sex involved with Howard. You can get sex anywhere. You cannot get a friend anywhere. I thought that would be clear to everyone."
"Perhaps people find it hard to identify with a long-standing platonic arrangement."
"Most people end up having to settle for that: friendship. And it's not the worst thing."
Vidal persuaded Howard to change his surname from Auster to Austen after advertising firms refused to hire him because he was Jewish. For all of its memories of Brando and Orson Welles and Bette Davis and the Kennedys, Point To Point Navigation is at its most powerful when Vidal describes nursing his friend through his last illness. In Austen's last days, the writer recalls, "He said: 'Kiss me.' I did, on the lips, something I had not done for 50 years.' "
When the two men began living together, Vidal's mother began complaining about her "pansy son and his Jew boyfriend because of whom she was not able to see her dearest friends". She had by now added regular shots of morphine to her voracious intake of alcohol. The last time Vidal saw her was 1957, when he invited her to London. "I think she came to try and restore relations," Vidal wrote. "That didn't work. She took to the bottle. Then she started attacking Howard. I said: 'I think you had better go.' Later she wrote me a poison-pen letter and I wrote her and said: 'I shall never, ever, see you again as long as you live.'"
"And you never did?" "No."
"Wasn't it your half-sister Nina who said that you were the focal point of your mother's life?"
"Are you sure she didn't say 'vocal point'?"
"What did your mother die of?" "Cancer."
"A slow death?" "Ooh, yes."
"Did you consider going to her funeral?" "Why would I do that? I don't go to the funerals of people I like."
"Your mother claimed you went to visit her, and apologised, just before she died." "That was a crazy story that she told. This was a woman whose potential apologies could have swamped Lourdes."
When he was 20, Vidal had a relationship with the erotic diarist Anaïs Nin. "Psychologically," Nin said of Vidal, "he knows the meaning of his mother abandoning him when he was 10, to have other children... but he does not know why he cannot love. He moves among men and women of achievement; he was raised into sophistication and into experience with the secret of himself, but the deeper self was secret and lonely." Nin says he was her lover. In Palimpsest, Vidal dismisses the idea that they were ever a couple.
"There are rumours that you have a daughter from a relationship with a woman living in Key West, Florida [in the 1950s]; are they true?"
"Possibly. I don't believe so. The father was either me or a German photographer. I believe the mother is dead. The child was a girl. Every Christmas, I would receive ' a picture of them all around the tree, and there's the little girl, looking like me. I could have a daughter, yes."
"Have you tried to contact her?"
"No. Why would I?"
"Because you might have a sense of responsibility, which, in the age of DNA..."
"I sent her mother money for an abortion. Which she used to go to Detroit, where she found a rich man."
Jackie Kennedy once remarked that Gore Vidal made her feel "like a Philistine – as if I knew nothing". It's a sensation he's still capable of communicating, both by gesture and word. Vidal is the only autodidact I've ever met who is both highly skilled at filtering information, and not overawed by professional academics; to be more accurate, he's positively condescending towards them. At one point I ask him a question about John Kennedy, and he tells me – wrongly as it happens – that he believes I can never have seen the 1964 film of his play The Best Man, which stars Henry Fonda.
"So when do you watch it?" asks Vidal (who once remarked that a part of the condition of the American writer was "an inordinate concern for reputation".) "Every other leap year?"
It's curious that he should be so sensitive, when his own estimation of himself is, on the face of it, shatterproof. This is a man, after all, who wrote the sentence: "Although something of an avatar of Mark Twain, I have never read The Prince and the Pauper."
There are times when his just-about-ironic pomposity recalls Frasier Crane in one of his more self-congratulatory moods, as in: "Contrary to legend I was born of mortal woman and if Zeus sired me, there is no record on file."
In his memoirs, rarely for a North American, it is sometimes possible to discern snobbery – or as Vidal prefers to say, 'snobbism' – of an almost English intensity. Having fallen out with Robert Kennedy, he writes about that family's "ardent struggle ever upward from the Irish bog", and complains of another writer that his instincts reflect "the lower-middle-class insular standards of the day". And will we really sleep any easier, when reading about a visit to London, in Point To Point Navigation, to learn that "I stayed, not as always before at the Connaught but at the Ritz"?
There can be no modern writer who has disregarded so enthusiastically George Orwell's egalitarian advice to use an English word unless no alternative is available. Vidal is the only non-restaurateur I've ever heard employ the noun amuse-gueule, and the only person in any profession I've known who uses "cher confrère" as a verb. When he paces a room at midnight, he doesn't do so like any run of the mill phantom, but "like Wilde's Canterville Ghost".
Gore Vidal gets away with this because of his brilliance, and because unashamed elitism, in matters of class as well as of intellect, has become part of his act. It's no accident that he gets on so well with Melvyn Bragg, another man of extreme intelligence who for some reason feels compelled to wear his learning, if I can plagiarise Vidal just once, "like a plume". I ask the American why this might be. "Well," he says, "I believe Melvyn's grandmother came from Bury."
There is no doubting the courage with which Vidal has opposed certain individuals and causes, such as Richard Nixon, Martin Amis and Zionist expansionism. He spoke out against his distant relative Al Gore, when family loyalty might have prevailed, and was one of the very few Americans to understand – if not empathise with – the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. The two exchanged correspondence, and Vidal failed to attend McVeigh's execution in Indiana, in 2001, only because he was given inadequate notice of its rescheduled date. For all that, Vidal is instinctively orthodox in outlook. He may once have declared "I am a political activist", but in his lexicon this means exercising influence at the highest level of traditional US politics. This explains how, at the height of the acrimonious attacks launched by Hillary Clinton (who has known Vidal for years) against Barack Obama, he continued to support the former, regardless of her tactics. "I feel," he says, "somewhat paternalistic towards the Clintons."
While his 96 year-old friend, writer Studs Terkel, has spent his life trying to rock the ship of state, if not actually scuttle it, Vidal tends to see his role as commanding from the bridge. With this in mind, he returned to politics in 1982, but was beaten by Jerry Brown for the Democratic nomination in California.
"WB Yeats, years after Oscar Wilde was dead, said: 'I think that the English don't understand that we Irish do. Wilde was a man of action. He was meant to lead the state. But he gets caught up in all of this airy-fairy nonsense."
"Can you identify with that?" "Yes."
While Terkel spent time with John Lennon, Malcolm X and Woody Guthrie, Vidal, who sometimes seems slightly dazed by contact with royalty, and had lots of fun with Barbara Cartland, has little time for hardcore activism. When I ask him his opinion of popular music, he pulls the kind of face you might expect to produce if you'd just snapped a hydrogen sulphide capsule under his nose.
"Did you spend any time with people from the so-called counterculture: men like [the black activist and diet coach to Muhammad Ali ] Dick Gregory, say, or Bob Dylan?"
"Not if I could help it."
"Why not?"
"I was bored by them."
"I'd have thought that the moment during the Watts riots, in South Central Los Angeles, in 1965, when Dick Gregory walked from the police line to try to negotiate with the rioters, and was shot, was about as far from boring as you can get." Vidal gives an exaggerated yawn. "I didn't even know that detail."
"I believe Gregory received two details; one grazed his hip, and the other penetrated his left thigh."
"I'm sure he did many useful things of a public nature."
"Would it be fair to say that you're not really a rock'n'roll kind of a guy?" "I hate it," says Vidal (whose first contribution to street culture occurred in 2004, when he was persuaded to perform a bold and strangely haunting Celtic rap, in the second US series of Da Ali G Show.) "But then I am an elitist. Obama has been accused of being an elitist. And as he pointed out, how can a boy who was brought up in the jungles – the woods – of Kenya, with a mother on welfare by the time they got to America, be an elitist; which is what Hillary, to her shame, was trying to reduce him to."
"How was your friend John Kennedy on the question of racial equality?" "Jack was rather bad on the black situation. He wasn't especially interested."
"How about you?" "As good as most people could be, who were not deeply involved in it. I was the first editor of a publishing house to try to get Jimmy Baldwin published. I have done my duty."
He hands me a copy of the book Ain't My America by the so-called "radical reactionary" Bill Kaufman, who challenges, from a right-wing perspective, the expansionist policies of Bush and Cheney. "I am considered to be a radical leftie and of course I am not. Neither is Kaufman. We are the original patriots. Like General Washington. We are, for instance, strongly opposed to foreign wars."
"Joseph Heller wrote a chapter, towards the end of his life, which was called: 'Every Change is for the Worse.'"
"I won't contradict it."
"You would consider yourself to be living under a dishonourable regime?" "Absolutely."
"With a corrupt president?" "Yes."
"Who cheated his way to power?" "Oh, yes."
"Is this the most pernicious US government you have ever experienced?" "Yes. It is inconceivably bad. There is nothing that one could ever have imagined to be so bad."
"So what hope do you have for what you've described as the American Empire?" "None. It's finished."
"How do you see it ending?" "No more money."
"You once wrote: 'Robert Frost thought that between fire and ice, the world would end in ice. Plainly it is going to be fire this time.'"
"I don't think so now. We're too cowardly. We would be at risk if we attempted to blow up..."
"You're already at risk."
"Not to anybody truly dangerous."
"How about a meltdown in the Middle East precipitated by Iraq and Iran? Doesn't that sound dangerous to you?"
"Well ... our people are very, very stupid. And stupid people are apt to make huge mistakes."
"And your hope for the future?" "Politicians are shadowy people. We don't know what they may be capable of. The one certain thing is that there will be big surprises. They may be pleasant surprises, but it is my experience of history that most surprises are unpleasant."
Gore Vidal is back in Europe this week, for a visit you sense he feels may be his last. "I examine a new cancer on my forearm," he writes, in Point To Point Navigation, "while I wait for diabetes to do its gaudy final thing."
"Do you have major regrets?" "There is nothing that I deeply regret in my life. I see nothing to apologise for." "You're lucky." "Maybe. Or maybe I just played the game harder."
He has talked many times about his readiness to proceed – serenely – through what he terms "the exit door". "What do you expect to find on the other side?" "Nothing."
"You never know; it might be like coming out of a cinema matinée in the summer – you're always astonished to find that there is another life still going on in daylight, outside."
"I banish you," Vidal says, in his most witheringly ironic tone, quoting Coriolanus. "There is a world elsewhere."
"Do you fear death?" "I think everybody does. If it's going to be immediate, sure. I can't imagine brooding about it."
"I suppose it's not really an option to say: 'I'm scared witless.'" "As I recall, Kurt Vonnegut told me that he was."
"But you're convinced that, to put it crudely, when you die, that's it." "No," Vidal replies. "I wouldn't say: 'When you die, that's it.' I'd say: 'When you're born, that's it.'" | | 2:16a |
Red hot Chile peppers
Chile is getting up off its knees and in spite of the revolting and appalling coathanger-Catholic, women-hating laws against a womens human and civil right to choose abortion, its finally moving to bring some old time fascist criminals to justice.
And this has to be good news too right?
Chile's national police chief and his wife were among 10 people killed yesterday, when a Panamanian government helicopter crashed into a three-storey building in Panama City.
As the leader of Chile spent some time in Australia I would humbly ask her to investigate, on our behalf, the role of two ASIS agents that helped the vicious CIA criminals at a critical time of Nazi-Pinochet repression. ( Sear ' Oyster' ) The truth should come out now. The guilty should be punished. | | 2:53a |
Crackpot visions of human betterment
Its an almost complete strawman attack on anarchism to caricature it as 'Utopian'
If we look at actual existing anarchism most of what we see is actually reaction. The Swiss-French Jura react to events leading up to and surrounding the Great Revolution by federating. This simple supple idea is much later picked up and broadcast far and wide and as it happens falls on fertile ground in the Ukraine and later Spain. Again much later - at least 100 years have passed by now. Really politics could hardly get anymore basic , concrete or even conservative than this, the anarchism of Makhno and Durruti. But this is not to say that Utopia is a vain, dangerous or worthless conceit in the slightest.
Oscar Wilde said that any map that doesn't include a Utopia was worthless...and whose to say he was wrong?
It all comes back to ends and means and here is where the left fascists want to try the same thing over and over again expecting different results each time. To the extent that any misguided 'anarchists' assist these known red-fascists then to that extent they are culpable and responsible for giving us all a bad name.
Fuck them I say - and all who sail in them | | 3:19a |
The Dream of Reason
The Reach of an Ancient Greek
By ANTHONY GOTTLIEB
May 17, 2008; Page W8
The Music of Pythagoras
By Kitty Ferguson
Walker, 366 pages, $26.95
Poor old Pythagoras is slipping away from us. He was always a shadowy figure in Western thought -- his followers were secretive and he himself wrote nothing, as far as we know. Even in his own time and place, the Greek cities of southern Italy in the seventh century B.C., Pythagoras was a kind of myth-magnet. Over time a large body of thought about him developed, though it was based on precious little evidence. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, Pythagoras became yet more mysterious.
In 1962, the Swiss scholar Walter Burkert -- using a close reading of earliest written accounts of what Pythagoras was supposed to have said to his followers -- published a monumental debunking of the Pythagorean tradition. Fellow scholars were persuaded that what little they thought they knew about Pythagoras was probably wrong.
[photo]
Corbis
Until then, it had been said that there were two sides to Pythagoras -- which is a little ironic, given his presumed association with triangles. He had a religious side as the miracle-working leader of a cult that believed in the transmigration of souls (that "the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird," as Shakespeare's Malvolio puts it in "Twelfth Night"). And Pythagoras had a "scientific" side: He was a pioneering mathematician and philosopher who regarded geometry and numbers as the keys to the universe's harmonious structure.
Only the first side emerged intact from Burkert's scrutiny. The picture of Pythagoras as a mathematician and philosopher was a "mistake," Burkert said, an error resulting largely from the eagerness of self-styled "Pythagoreans" in later centuries to attribute their work to the master himself.
It now seems that Pythagoras did not invent the notion of mathematical proof after all. (Bertrand Russell and Arthur Koestler thought he did, which is why they both proclaimed him the West's most influential thinker.) Nor did he discover the theorem that bears his name -- that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. It was known a thousand years earlier in Mesopotamia. He may have noted a link between some harmonic intervals in the music of his time and certain simple numerical ratios. But there is no reason to think he was the first to do so.
Still, even if the old Greek magician himself did not have much to do with it, Pythagoreanism played a sometimes important role in Western science before Newton, especially in astronomy, as Kitty Ferguson illustrates in "The Music of Pythagoras," an engaging survey of the ideas that have been thought of as Pythagorean.
For example, Plato's "Timaeus," with its account of a creator fashioning the world out of basic geometrical shapes, reflected the ideas of Plato's friend Archytas of Tarentum, a mathematician who regarded himself as a Pythagorean. "Timaeus" was the basis for most cosmology in the West for the first 12 centuries of the Christian era.
[the music of pythagoras book cover]
In the early 17th century, the astronomy of Johannes Kepler was suffused with Pythagorean themes, including the Pythagorean "music of the spheres." In ancient times it was much discussed why this sound, allegedly made by the heavenly bodies as they whiz through space, cannot be heard by human ears. Aristotle wryly noted that humans cannot hear it because there is no such sound.
In general, Ms. Ferguson's theme is that Pythagoras himself is responsible for the notion that numbers reveal hidden patterns in nature and that this notion amounts to a fundamental principle in science. It is indeed likely that Pythagoras regarded simple numbers and ratios as the keys to the universe; this much survives the skeptical thrust of recent scholarship about him.
Ms. Ferguson is familiar with the scholarship, but it is not clear that she has grasped its significance. Pythagoras' interest in numbers was primarily mystical, with little scientific content. He was concerned more with numerological symbolism (four was justice, for example, and five was marriage) than with measuring things. And the hope that it is possible to provide a unified account of the universe, using quantitative tools, is fundamentally Greek rather than specifically Pythagorean. The idea is found, in crude forms, in Pythagoras' immediate predecessors, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes.
Ms. Ferguson closes her book with a hurried meditation on the threats to the conception of an orderly universe that are allegedly posed by 20th-century math and science. Were the Pythagoreans -- or, we might as well say, the Greeks -- correct to assume that there are comprehensible patterns in the universe? Or has that turned out to be a false hope? Ms. Ferguson skips briskly through quantum mechanics, chaos theory, set theory and more, wondering whether they show, in their sometimes surprising and always complex claims, that the universe is not rational after all.
But each of these fields has added to our rational understanding of the world and has done so by means of mathematics. The universe may not be as simple as some early Greek mathematicians imagined it to be, but it is proving ever more comprehensible by the day.
Mr. Gottlieb is the author of "The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy From the Greeks to the Renaissance." END WSJ Article
The Dream of Reason is GREAT STUFF!
Five stars. | | 3:40a |
Games not worth the candle
Here in Oz the left-fascists now appear so splintered as to be barely worth pursuing. The law of diminishing rewards is rapidly setting in. However there is still a lot to do in minimizing red-fascism in Asia. This need not be seen so much as 'work' either. More like good sport. Get it India | | 3:48a |
Nothing to hide
Nothing to fear
If the Bush regime did nothing wrong then why do they all act so guilty?
This is why we need a full independent investigation...and why would any true conservative fear that?
They were all acting in good faith on throughly tried and tested advice right? Right? | | 3:53a |
Its all so peaceful now
Tom Engelhardt points out that "the U.S. military has, in the last two months, fired at least 200 Hellfire missiles into the Iraqi capital, according to the Washington Post, most of them into Sadr City, the vast, heavily populated Shiite slum in east Baghdad. ("Just six" had been used in Baghdad in the previous three months.)
But I really don't remember you know - these were some pretty wild parties we went to back then. | | 10:21a |
Durrutis headache too
CAIRO, Egypt - Muslim extremist women are challenging al-Qaida's refusal to include — or at least acknowledge — women in its ranks, in an emotional debate that gives rare insight into the gender conflicts lurking beneath one of the strictest strains of Islam.
In response to a female questioner, al-Qaida No. 2 leader Ayman Al-Zawahri said in April that the terrorist group does not have women. A woman's role, he said on the Internet audio recording, is limited to caring for the homes and children of al-Qaida fighters.
His remarks have since prompted an outcry from fundamentalist women, who are fighting or pleading for the right to be terrorists. The statements have also created some confusion, because in fact suicide bombings by women seem to be on the rise, at least within the Iraq branch of al-Qaida.
A'eeda Dahsheh is a Palestinian mother of four in Lebanon who said she supports al-Zawahri and has chosen to raise children at home as her form of jihad. However, she said, she also supports any woman who chooses instead to take part in terror attacks. | | 10:40a |
Whats new with the Plats
The Plats are like these hackers trying out each virtual ' door handle' to see which one opens.
They now appear to be playing down the ' anarchist - communist' tag now in favor of 'class struggle anarchist'...though you'll note they still appear to want to deny a hell of a lot of actual struggle.
( ie propaganda - of - deed)
The Plats even appear willing to dumster dive a little into post-modernism. Jose G appears to be using deconstructionist methods when he breaks down anarchism into silo's like ' insurrectionism'.
So the beast is wounded - but is still moving around and potentially dangerous.
Dangerous? How?
Well the South African Plats are applying denialism to recent tragic events in their region. This is mainly dangerous to themselves. A bit like driving with yr eyes closed! The problem for us un-hyphenateds is potential for collateral damage and blowback. Anarchism has a good reputation built up over 150 years now. It would be a shame to have it tarnished by a few lamer leftists who are in denial of almost everything except entrism. | | 10:55a |
Lenin on Kautsky in the ruck
'Why should I respond to Kautsky? If I did that, the Kautsky would respond to my response, and then I would have to respond to his response, and so on. All I have to do is say that Kautsky is an enemy of the people who barracks for Collingwood, and everyone will understand everything.' | | 11:13a |
Ashen faced
No Krudd-9000 series computer has ever made a mistake or been found in error.
I still have the greatest possible enthusiasm for our mission. Bring back Whitlam- Howard life form. Priority One. All other priorities rescinded. But you still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you?
The perfect Alternative Liberal Party organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
So I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies. | | 11:23a |
A poisonous creed - a silenced scream '...The Kremlin is also accused of complicity in the poisoning of Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko. It was also involved in attempts to denying him the seat of power in Ukraine. Who can also forget the KGB's role in the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the liberalization programs of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet forces in 1978-79? Dubcek's reforms, which were known as the Prague Spring or ‘socialism with a human face’, were for the most part reversed by new leaders installed by the KGB. The KGB was also involved in unsuccessful suppression of the Solidarity labor movement in Poland in the 1980s. Nor should we forget Russia's support for Serbia's genocidal campaign against the Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims in the 1990s that killed nearly a quarter million unarmed people. Her support for the breakaway region of Abkhazia in Georgia unmasks her inherent double standard. Putin's Russia is no better than Bush's America when it comes to state sponsored terrorism. In her book, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, Anna Politkovskaya writes, "We’ve all observed how the word “mercy” has been swept out of the government vocabulary. The government relies on cruelty in relation to its citizens. Destruction is encouraged. The logic of murder is a logic that is understood by the government and propagated by it. The way things are, you need to kill to become a Hero. This is Putin’s modern ideology. When capitalists can’t get it done, comrades take over again. We know very well that they never forget to line their own pockets. That’s how things stand: at the end of the seventh year of the war, and in the third year of the second campaign, Chechnya has been turned into a genuine cash cow. Here, military careers are speedily forged, long lists of awards are compiled, and ranks and titles are handed out ahead of time. And all you have to do is to kill a Chechen and submit the corpse." - To be continued – - Asian Tribune - FULL STORY http://www.asiantribune.com/?q=node/11513 | | 11:37a |
Police warning
Kyle Sandilands has been portrayed as a likeable dope, when the reality is this guy is a dangerous, ruthless killer. These people were involved in a drug trade that has ruined countless lives.
"I just cannot believe that the producers of programs would now reward these sort of people with glorification and guest appearances on TV."
Oh wait...sorry...that was shadow police minister Mike Gallacher talking about Carl Williams. My bad. | | 12:18p |
A strong people don't need a leader
'...Anarchism's greatest STRENGTH has always been its refusal to focus on the "working class", while keeping anti-capitalism as central but simultaneously as part of a larger focus on hierarchy and domination. This has allowed anarchists to be part of struggles around alienation and reification, ecology, sexuality, gender, etc without the embarrassing hoops that Marxist-Leninists must jump through ("wait, what did Marx say about queer people.. quick - to Capital!" haha). We refuse domination and hierarchy. Full stop...' | | 1:22p |
Lenin the counter-revolutionary
Up to the establishment of the CHEKA Lenin might be regarded as a revolutionary. A very Machtpolitik and brazen one to take money from Imperialists and use it to hire mercenaries but a traditional style revolutionary in the bourgeois Nationalist mainstream. Its from spring 1918 - ninety years ago - that the problems arise. Lenin stabs allies in the back in 1918 and stamps out genuine democracy. No wonder an attempt is made on his life!
Then the real terror gets rolled out - the Red Terror - with Trotsky in charge.
All the essential ingredients of Stalinism are thus established by Lenin from 1918-22. No Bizzaro world conspiratorial and/or mythical alternative history can alter that because it the consensus of common people and most historians across the political spectrum. Stalinism IS Leninism for all practical purposes and meanings outside of sheer scale. Also the worst of Stalins crimes came as he took a 'Left turn' and rolled out the Luxemberg-Trotsky approved policy of massive farm collectivization.
This is what dooms all the Leninist sects - even the ones with most progressive platforms and mass line.
At heart Lenin proved a fascist to the core - there is no longer any real revolutionary there when you've killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. | | 1:35p |
Get with the feeling
Do you get the feeling we are being softened up for a US - China Anshluss?
My reading of the WEF crowd today is that they look at China and mostly like what they see. The worst of Communism and the worst of Capitalism. Seeing as some sort of crunch is in the offing where US monopoly money is rapidly becoming worthless the two largest totalitarian empires in the world may as well unite.
' We have a world to win!'
I'm sure President Barry will have a lot of Marxist professors advising him of the sublime wisdom of all this. | | 1:54p |
Avant gardening
Slackarsehole stuff - '...Regarding Pissarro — yeah. I didn’t see the exhibition myself, unfortunately. With regards his and other artist’s involvement in and association with the then-extant anarchist movement, it was often quite intensive, and the anarchist milieu very broad and terrifically active. Benedict Anderson explores some of this territory in Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (Verso, 2007). (Review by Danny.)
See also:
Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives During the Fin de Siècle, Alexander Varias, St. Martin’s, 1996. Reviewed by Robert Graham, Social Anarchism, 27, 1999.
Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris
Joan Ungersma Halperin
Yale University Press, 1988
Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France
Richard D. Sonn
University of Nebraska Press, 1989
Anarchism, Representation, and Culture
Jesse Cohn
neme
January 2006
Over the last decade and a half, cultural historians like Patricia Leighten, David Weir, David Kadlec, and Allan Antliff have rediscovered the role of anarchism in the formation of modernist avant-garde aesthetics. Their new historical narrative posits a “resistance to representation” (Kadlec 2) and an embrace of “stylistic fragmentation” (Weir 168) as thematic links between modernism and anarchism: modernist moves toward abstraction and anti-art can be seen as informed by the individualism of Max Stirner, founded on the uniqueness of the ego, that irreducible fragment which belongs to no group and therefore cannot be represented.
This new narrative is attractive in many ways, as it forces us to rethink the politics of modernism. There are some important relationships between modernist struggles against the limits of symbolic representation and anarchist critiques of political representation (which Proudhon called a “subterfuge” and Bakunin “an immense fraud”). However, the emphasis that this new narrative places on Stirnerite individualism might make many an anarchist squirm. Stirner has always been marginal to anarchist theory, and largely irrelevant to anarchist practice: the movements that constitute anarchism’s appearance on the world stage-the First International, the Makhnovist rebellion in the Ukraine, the Spanish revolution of 1936-were workers’ movements, populist and communitarian rather than egoist, scarcely compatible with Stirner’s declarations that “truth… exists only-in your head,” or that “community… is impossible” (471, 414). “Fragmentation,” for an anarcho-communist like Errico Malatesta, is simply the secret of authority’s success: “the age-long oppression of the masses by a small privileged group has always been the result of the inability of most workers to agree among themselves to organise with others” (84). Moreover, what glues any sort of organization together is precisely the use of language to communicate, to make common-in other words, the use of symbolic representation: thus Malatesta writes that “revolution is the forming and disbanding of thousands of representative… bodies which, without having any legislative power, serve to make known and to coordinate the desires and interests of people near and far” (153, emphasis mine). In this light, social anarchists rereading the history of art and literature find the new narrative of modernism as an anarchist “resistance to representation” unsatisfying: despite the strangely disproportionate influence exercised by individualist anarchist ideas on seemingly everyone from Mallarmé to Motherwell, the long and rich tradition of social anarchism seems to have had nothing to say about poetry. Where is a social anarchist aesthetic to be found? Does it exist?
More recently:
Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority
Edited by Erik Reuland and Josh MacPhee
AK Press, 2007 | | 2:04p |
A haven for cranks and destructive personalities
It seems uncontroversial to me that individuals be excluded from anarchist federations. My major problem with these organizations is that no upper limit seems to be placed of the size of their constituent members. Science tells us that most people can't recognize others by face over a certain limit of around 300. So surely it follows that each subsidiary to any anarchist federation not get too large?
Just sayin'
While also favoring federations I advocate cell-structured leaderless resistance by any memes necessary.
This sort of ALF/ELF style activism may also be undertaken by individuals - ' lone wolfs', ' Armies-of-one', etc.
Then there are syndicated unions, municipalist style anarchists, mutualists and any others I may have missed.
Any anarchist wannabe is free to choose any particular form of struggle they will embrace to suit them.
And mix-and-match as much as they want under the diversity-of-tactics Big Tent.
Cranks and destructive personalities - like Greg ablokeimet - generally burn out , drop off and fade away.
Every dog has its day and every sheep has its odd dag. | | 2:26p |
Who is the Kevin Rudd of Au anarchism?
Who else?
The same smarmy little shit that has never heard of due process, natural justice and Jo Freeman?
The same workaholic, micro-managing centralist who speaks perfect Marxist Mandarin?
The same lying little fascist shiteater he always was - hi @ndy! | | 2:46p |
| | 2:53p |
Class and revolution
There seems to be some obsession with a few very loud-mouthed leftists towards forming up a self-conscious mass class that will then make their revolution. If they ever do get this led Zepplin off the ground it will be in defiance of all recorded gravity up till now. The great French revolution was not made by the bourgeois middle-class any more than the great Russian revolution was made by the working-class.
So these approaches amount to a sort of bubble or pyramid scheme. Certainly nothing like what they envisage could form up in most peoples lifetimes who are now alive. So as such it amounts pretty much to 'pie-in-the-sky' when yr children die. Unhappy types who are inclined to quaff copious amounts of raspberry flavored Kool-Aid may be attracted to such inane doctrines of salvation - I wouldn't expect many radical indigenous, peasants and militant workers to be though. My suggestion to all revolutionary anarchists acting in good faith is to pretty much leave most class analysis to the ' Scientological socialists' of the ' Dialenetics' persuasion.
Let them run an E-meter over it first. | | 3:11p |
Speculation
There is now widespread speculation that a similar collapse in support for many western anarchist organizations could follow on fairly quickly from the Leninist implosion. You might think Trots would be partying in the streets following the Stalinist collapse. But most seemed plunged into mourning instead, muttering darkly about the retreat of the workers...just as radicals shut down the WTO, the WEF and several stock exchanges here and there. So much for militant Trotskyist opposition to all ' deformed workers states'.
Something similar could happen to anarchism when leading anarchists walk like Marxist ducks and quack like Marxist ducks ( Big hi to ' grumpy cat aka ' Dave Antagonism' and Urine Gordon) Sooner or later people will judge you by the company you keep. You wanna run with the Counterpunch crowd the I wish you luck with a capital ' F'.
This 'snapshot' analysis may need revision but it would appear to hold true for large swathes of pseudo-'anarchist' dilettante's ( and just Dills) mainly clusterfucked around the Anglosphere. The USSA, UK and AU. Just speculating about a hypothesis. And don't be sad - could be ' better fewer, but better'.
In fact it would have to be wouldn't it. | | 3:23p |
House of games House of cards The mood at Alimuddin Street ~ the state headquarters of the CPI-M ~ is now one of gloom, disbelief and numbing shock. The stunning defeat the Marxists suffered in the panchayat elections in half of rural Bengal has brought home to them the truth that they have been living in a make-believe world where only the Tatas, the Salims, the Premjis and the Dhoots exist, while the nameless, faceless millions of rural poor have melted into thin air. The Marxists need the rural people only during elections and after they are shepherded to the polling stations through all-pervasive propaganda and terror to vote for party nominees they are sent back to eke out a living whichever way they can. This has been the CPI-M’s ethos for a couple of decades, but the panchayat poll this time around has dealt such a devastating blow to the party that their brave new world of shopping malls, flyovers, dubious industrial projects and fraudulent special economic zones has come crashing down. The mandate of the rural elections is not so much against land grab by crony capitalists masquerading as champions of the poor as against the final betrayal by the CPI-M. Had it been simply a question of land acquisition for industrialisation, the issue would have died down once Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said he was accepting his guilt “with his head held low”. Mr Bhattacharjee even went to Nandigram nine months after the brutal police firing and its “recapture” by armed CPI-M goons and sought to mollify the people there by declaring that “the state government won’t take land for setting up a mega chemical hub as the people there don’t want to part with their land”. MORE http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=206259But the Marxist leadership has become so used to a life of comfort and is so alienated from the people that it is incapable of mingling with the poor the way their predecessors did before they captured power in 1977. Their time of reckoning has come. | | 3:28p |
The Peter Boyle of anarchism
@ndy who is currently the loudest and most obnoxious reactionary posing as 'revolutionary' in the anarchist movement at the moment claims to be faux offended by the pronouncements of one Mick Armstrong after the last ' White bloc' manifestation. It's a little hard to follow @ndy sometimes as he occasionally adopts a sarcastic snaky , even 'fascist' persona online. I guess we have to conjure up some sort of mental image of him as Beria or similar. ( Moseley? Not beyond the realms of possibility ) I have to wonder just whats behind this apparent animus...if that is what it is...as I said ...with @ndy the smarmy smirker its hard to tell.
After all Greg ( ablokeimetonyahoo) from the Melbourne Plats said much the same things as Mick ...and he insulted the memory of the Makhnovista to boot. ( @ Melbourne Indymedia) So what makes Greg @ndys bff while Mick is mocked?
Beats me.
But a working hypothesis that @ndy is a centralizing power-mad fruitcake posing as an anarchist should do. | | 3:57p |
Heavens Gate
Hey folks don't let me stop you.
Just take off yr sneakers and let prime ministerer @ndy ' punch-yr-freck...ticket' - then just kick back and relax!
The Hale-Bopp class struggle comet will be here any second.
What could possibly go wrong?
Drink it Freddy, drink it. | | 4:05p |
Communist conspiracy theories
Communists love conspiracy theories, especially about Americans. So lets give the people what they want.
We must remember that the enemy penetrates everywhere. In Australia there is not one space where the enemy doesn’t penetrate. We must realise that the enemy is everywhere and we must be there as well. A comical event occurred about 2 years ago. There was an organisation for the defence of the rights of sex workers, and a lot of homosexuals and transsexuals joined. A member of the North American hegemon was the head of the organisation and I began to wonder why. You must realise they do it for the intelligence. Do you think they wanted to participate in the defence of the sex workers? No, They were thinking that through the sex workers, they could obtain information. This is why I say there is no area where the enemy has not been inserted. We must have the firmness and conviction to also do the same, because we are defending our life, our country, and our rights, and the lives of our children, our future and our humanity. We are doubly obliged to do this. | | 4:15p |
Rat perception '...Over the last decade and a half, cultural historians like Patricia Leighten, David Weir, David Kadlec, and Allan Antliff have rediscovered the role of anarchism in the formation of modernist avant-garde aesthetics. Their new historical narrative posits a “resistance to representation” (Kadlec 2) and an embrace of “stylistic fragmentation” (Weir 168) as thematic links between modernism and anarchism: modernist moves toward abstraction and anti-art can be seen as informed by the individualism of Max Stirner, founded on the uniqueness of the ego, that irreducible fragment which belongs to no group and therefore cannot be represented. This new narrative is attractive in many ways, as it forces us to rethink the politics of modernism. There are some important relationships between modernist struggles against the limits of symbolic representation and anarchist critiques of political representation (which Proudhon called a “subterfuge” and Bakunin “an immense fraud”). However, the emphasis that this new narrative places on Stirnerite individualism might make many an anarchist squirm. Stirner has always been marginal to anarchist theory, and largely irrelevant to anarchist practice: the movements that constitute anarchism’s appearance on the world stage-the First International, the Makhnovist rebellion in the Ukraine, the Spanish revolution of 1936-were workers’ movements, populist and communitarian rather than egoist, scarcely compatible with Stirner’s declarations that “truth… exists only-in your head,” or that “community… is impossible” (471, 414). “Fragmentation,” for an anarcho-communist like Errico Malatesta, is simply the secret of authority’s success: “the age-long oppression of the masses by a small privileged group has always been the result of the inability of most workers to agree among themselves to organise with others” (84). Moreover, what glues any sort of organization together is precisely the use of language to communicate, to make common-in other words, the use of symbolic representation: thus Malatesta writes that “revolution is the forming and disbanding of thousands of representative… bodies which, without having any legislative power, serve to make known and to coordinate the desires and interests of people near and far” (153, emphasis mine). In this light, social anarchists rereading the history of art and literature find the new narrative of modernism as an anarchist “resistance to representation” unsatisfying: despite the strangely disproportionate influence exercised by individualist anarchist ideas on seemingly everyone from Mallarmé to Motherwell,...' Well there's a bit of nonsense mixed in with this. The ego is represented everyday as far as I'm concerned. Also Mad Max was hardly the first to take an ultra sophist hard line. Take George Burkeley... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley...for whom, if a tree fell in a forest and no one was there to observe it then it never fell at all. At least Max argued for a union-of-egoists and for them to get along a minimal amount of ontological space must be created in real time. I find it fascinating that Derrida circled back to Stirner because toward the end Derrida seemed to want to keep on rocking in the free world. Absurdity will do in the majority of cases - but its obviously dangerous to spruik for ' all absurdity - all the time'. At the same time its clearly absurd to apply progressive notions of utilitarian political economy to art. And I would have said that same about evolution until just recently. Camus did fifty years ago , but then he never owned any fluro-green glow-in-the-dark rats. | | 4:35p |
Worth trying? Our Handy-@ndy Prime Minister and the Inspector Rex of anarchism clearly have to much time on their hands. http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=real+doll&btnG=Google+Search&meta=I used to be quite big on the theory of W.H. Reich that sexual repression bred fascism. Not sure on that now, knowing what we know now on comfort women and so-on, but desperate times call for desperate measures. A few thousand of us might save millions of innocent lives simply by pooling some small amounts for a real-doll or two for each of these two Great Dictators. | | 5:49p |
Famous last words
The head of the CIA is talking up the defeat of Al Qaeda - The CIA has them ' on the run'.
Yeah right
Technically this is what the US had General Giap on in SE Asia...and yes, Tet was a massive defeat and the Viet Cong had to retreat to win but we all know now who lost every battle and still won in that neo-colonialist war. To lose one such stupid, wicked, idiotic, insane and wasteful war of aggression might be regarded as a misfortune...to lose two is beginning to look like carelessness. | | 6:14p |
Cuban horticulture
'...Thats' a mistake Nick.
The meeting wasn't chaired by Sam Watson but the local presenter for
the ABC's Gardening Australia. It was held in the Brisbane Town Hall
at the behest of the Brisbane City Council but the coalition which
built it was made up of Permaculturalists and SA(& DSP) members. And
aside from the local ACFS no other left tendencies fronted. There
wasn't a profiled Greens presence either...' - Radio Riley
' Cuba has the cleanest and best educated Horticulturalists in the world ' - Maximum leader Caudillo Diverticulosus Guantanamo El Jefe Castro | | 11:22p |
And justice was served
'...Yesterday, Obama needed 41 delegate votes to clinch the nomination; Clinton needed 244.
Today, Obama needs 64 votes; Clinton needs 240.5.
There are 291 delegates remaining.
So there ya go...'
Tammany Hall
How laws and sausages are made...so long Hill...its been real. | | 11:31p |
Stone motherless
'...The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs''.
King called for the immediate end to this “madness''. In his 1968 speech at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, he returned to the theme:
“It is said on the Statue of Liberty that America is a home of exiles. It doesn't take us long to realise that America has been the home of its white exiles from Europe. But it has not evinced the same kind of maternal care and concern for its Black exiles from Africa. It is no wonder that in one of his sorrow songs, the Negro could sing out, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child''. What great estrangement, what great sense of rejection caused a people to emerge with such a metaphor as they looked over their lives''.
He added:
“There are those, and they are often sincere people, who say to Negroes and their allies in the white community, that we should slow up and just be nice and patient and continue to pray, and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem''.
“I think there is an answer to that myth. And it is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I'm absolutely convinced that the forces of ill-will in our nation, the extreme rightists in our nation, have often used time much more effectively than the forces of good will. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time.
“Somewhere we must come to see that social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated Individuals. And without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must help time, and we must realise that the time is always right to do right''. | | 11:34p |
Any haven from the storm
Hillary to take her place in a museum?
The Woodstock concert also made a stand for pacifism, with even the unarmed guards wearing tags reading "peace," instead of "security."
The Vietnam War in particular is represented in music, as with the song by Country Joe and The Fish: "One, two, three, four: what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn: next stop is Vietnam."
Organizers said the impact of those times can still be seen and felt across the United States today.
"If we have today a woman and an African-American running for president, that's the legacy," folk legend Richie Havens told reporters.
Havens, a singer and guitarist known for his soulful covers of modern pop and folk classics, opened the Woodstock Festival when other stars were stuck in a massive traffic jam on a local highway.
The artists eventually were airlifted in via helicopter but not until after Havens had held his own on stage for what felt like an eternity.
"They told me 'Richie, Can you do four more?' I said OK. And four more? And four more? Then I realized I had no more," Havens recalled.
His improvised version of "Motherless Child," to which he added a verse with the word "freedom" repeated over and over eventually became an international hit.
"I started, the word 'freedom' went out of my mouth," Havens recounted, referring to his landmark performance which received continuous ovations as he played encore after encore until he ran out of songs.
"It came together that way," said Havens, who opened the most recent Cannes Festival. End extract.
Freedom from the Clintons!
Thank fuck all-mighty!
Free at last! | | 11:41p |
Sea change downunder
I may be imagining it but if I'm right there has been a pronounced shift in the power structure down here.
I get this hunch, not from any one outstanding factoid or storyline but from a combinatorial 'snapshot' analysis taken while recovering with a hangover. Power appears, I emphasize, *appears* to have devolved both downward onto the net masses and overseas to the global elite.
This changes the narrative slightly because it makes our task so much easier. All we have to do now is organize an outlaw justice posse and chase those crazy globalizers out - offer them no sanctuary and no quarter. Shah Shah a Go go. Then we can go home and mop up these Stonehenge midgets Nelson and Krudd.
Anarchy is coming - finally in my lifetime - true anarchy. |
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