Propping Up a Papier-Maché Diety

Where oh where to start? We've got the reignition of unrest in Egypt; fresh massacres in Syria ahead of a potential UN Security Council resolution; Russia fucking with said resolution whilst insisting others stop fucking with Russia (an imperative with which not even Russians are content to comply)... so much going so terribly wrong (as though that's news), what shall we examine & precisely curse this day?

Rising tensions with Iran! The sabre-rattling grew to a cacophonous din this past Thursday when a Washington Post piece revealed concerns within the Pentagon that Israel "will strike Iran in April, May or June" - to which Israeli officials replied by complaining about how itchy their trigger finger is getting.

This comes mere weeks after the absurd geopolitical blind item, "Which U.S.-baked Middle-Eastern spy agency is murdering Iranian nuclear scientists?" Mossad has shrugged off these accusations with the deflection that, while it may or may not have blown up a scientist or two, Iranian agents are definitely attacking Israeli covert operatives in retaliation.

Of course, clever commentators will note that Iran's nuclear program is the MacGuffin within this tangled yarn: the real engine of all this amplifying hostility is oil. After all, America & Israel can abide other potentially hostile nations possessing nuclear technology (Pakistan, China, France) but neither America, Israel, the EU, nor any other Occidental nation can allow any one nation a stranglehold upon the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the global oil supply is exported.

And yet that's still just the skin of the issue, not the bone & meat. The biggest war drum being beaten is the survival & primacy of the Petrodollar. For over four years already, Iran's had the gall to establish its own oil bourse and sell crude in currencies other than the dollar. Japan, the world's No. 3 consumer of crude, signed up immediately (a decision which seems very prescient given the dizzy heights to which the Yen has recently risen). Less than a month ago, Russia (the world's fourth-greatest consumer of oil) and Iran announced that they'd ditched the dollar to conduct bilateral trade in their respective national currencies.

But the real game-changer came days later when Indian officials opened talks with Tehran to purchase Iranian oil with gold. Many observers think this move ostensibly gives permission for China - second only to America in oil-consumption - to follow suit. That would mean four of the six oil-hungriest countries on earth had abandoned the dollar as fiat currency. This could become the first domino to tip in the eventual collapse of the American economy. But the choice of gold as the new default currency is what has excited the fertile, frayed imaginations of conspiracy-spinners & online paranoids:

The sale of Iranian oil for gold is a mortal blow to any plans by the globalists to replace the fiat dollar with some other “new and improved” fiat currency. If India and China are allowed to start paying their debts with gold, the next “world reserve currency” could only be gold. No more fiat currencies. No more “spinning money (fiat currency) out of thin air”. No more big governments. No more central bankers.

...I doubt that the globalists will allow the gold-for-oil deal to go through. They won’t attack China or India, but the deal would be easily terminated if Iran were invaded, destroyed and stopped from selling its crude oil to anyone for anything.

...With or without pretext, the globalists will invade Iran as a matter of survival.

Of course, visions of a gold-paved future unshackled from the N.W.O. are as much cotton-candy fantasy as the dollar's worth. The only value that may be assigned to gold that cannot be assigned to any paper currency is physical scarcity, but gold's exchange-value is no less phantasmic.

What is real, what will not evaporate into smoke overnight, and what will put up a motherfucker of a fight is the American empire. Remember, this is a country whose citizens have been known to shoot gas station attendants rather than pay after pumping when prices peak above $4 per gallon. Now imagine what this country would do to avoid the pant-soiling mayhem that would result in hyperinflation & a flood of useless T-bill trash, were certain other nations to buy oil with alternative currencies.



For a succinct (if somewhat maddened) history of the Petrodollar & its geopolitical victims, please read Michael T. Winter's essay over at RT - my personal favourite site for anti-Neoliberal muckraking, though fuck if you'll find a word about any domestic Russian unrest.

Making a Killing

Death, it's been noted, is no surprise. And on a planet packed with 123 people per square mile, the numbers dropping by the day are dizzying. Still, it feels like I wake every other day to find some globally-important figure has slipped - or been shoved off - this mortal coil. A Saudi prince here, an asshole billionaire there. But I was thoroughly unprepared to begin Friday being gawked at by Qaddafi's droopy kabuki corpse-maw. Put me right off the strawberry yogurt I was eating for breakfast.

Surveying the online reaction, I was pleased to see the relative restraint across social media, as braying gaiety over Qaddafi's death was kept to a minimum. Given that Qaddafi was directly, provably responsible for more deaths & acts of international terrorism (cf. the Abu Salim massacre, Pan Am flights 103 and 73, UTA Flight 772, the 1986 La Belle bombing) than Osama Bin Laden was, I'd like to think that everyone had sobered up since the bloodlusty celebrations of Bin Laden's murder. Oh, I'd like to think that, but let's not be naïve - fewer people remember, and fewer still care, about Qaddafi's towering bodycount.

What jubilant chest-thumping there was came overwhelmingly from the liberal media - that is, the meager 10% of the media that actually is liberal. Most visibly, Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart attacked Republicans for refusing President Obama any credit for Qaddafi's demise. Of course, Olbermann & Stewart are correct that when, for example, Marco Rubio applauds the British & French for leading the charge into Libya, the GOP are playing politics by cynical omission, rather than giving credit where it is, in fact, due. But for men who built careers lambasting the illegal brutality of the last administration, Olbermann & Stewart - not to mention their acolytes - are unnervingly comfortable with the fact that their Nobel Laureate President's greatest legacy may very well be, in Stewart's own words, "his ability to rain targeted death from the sky." I can only imagine the righteous tongue-lashing Olbermann & Stewart would have given Bush when he signed Executive Order 13477, which restored the Libyan government's immunity from pending & future terrorism-related lawsuits. But in the mafioso logic of American exceptionalism, there's always room for another murder, as long as our guy is pulling the trigger.

It's this smug, fickle partisanship that makes our elected leaders so depressingly fungible. Meet the new boss...

Same as the old boss.

Own It

As much as I've tried to mediate my media intake since Monday, the consensual tenor of American liberals has been unmistakable: unity! Now is not the time for partisan bickering, point-scoring, or revisionism. Now is the time for America to reclaim its sense of divine purpose, to see its pride bloom phoenix-like, and to (again) nail shut history's coffin! Everyone wave your copy of Team America: World Police in the air like you just don't care!

It's all, of course, disingenuous as hell: liberals are more than happy to engage in the kind of hawkish dick-swinging and self-aggrandizing revisionism for which they've long maligned the right-wing. So great was Obama's coup sans grâce against Bin Laden that much of the American left is gloating that they've beaten the Neo-Cons at their own game.

But chest-thumping machismo isn't a good look for liberals, nor one they're accustomed to, and so there's been the perfunctory lip-service to civil liberties, common dignity, and the rule of law. This in turn produces an aneurysm-inducing level of cognitive dissonance - hypocrisy & self-serving sanctimony so impenetrable that, for example, a single NYT editorial can proclaim that torture "violate[s] the law and any acceptable moral standard" while simultaneously asserting that "the battered intelligence community should now be basking in the glory of a successful operation."

After a decade of having been defamed as cowards, pinkos, pantywaists, apologists, and traitors, and especially now that their guy is in office, American liberals are desperate to occupy the first-person plural within "We killed Bin Laden!" Are they sure they want to put themselves at the center of the story? There is a way for liberals to indulge their id-inflamed glee while distancing themselves from the decade-long horror show preceding Bin Laden's demise. If instead of "we," they said that "a military-mafioso squad of anonymous assassins, operating outside international law, killed Bin Laden," then they'd be mere apologists (as opposed to patrons) of state-sponsored murder.

But that won't do, will it? Claiming Bin Laden's head as a trophy is an all-or-nothing proposition. If liberals are going to wear the broad-shouldered suit of the authoritarian Alpha, then they've got to own it, and I mean all of it: Guantánamo Bay, "enhanced" interrogation, Maher Arar, Abu Ghraib, the Haditha massacre, the Mahmudiyah killings, $1.2 trillion dollars, and at least 919,967 dead. Whoever claims authorship of the Osama Bin Laden's bullet-riddled dénouement signs their name to the whole, gory narrative.

Hope it was all worth it, you bloodlusty exceptionalists.

Breaking News!

After a mere decade of costly, murderous effort, the largest imperial military apparatus in history succeeds in killing diabetic cave-dweller!

Wow, I can already vividly feel how the world's changed for the better.

Yep. Everything's fine now!

Update: I had no idea that a bloodied corpse getting booted out of a blackhawk helicopter over international waters counts as a burial in accordance with Islamic law. You learn something new every day!

The Drift

If Japanese streets are emptier than usual, it's more likely because of the sodden weather than fears of irradiation. Cabin-feverish though we may be, today's national holiday couldn't be better timed. Those of us lucky enough to live outside of eastern Tohoku are depeleted from a week of incessant dread - a hangover minus the happy hedonism that usually precedes the headache.

By now, the excesses of mass-media Cassandras appear obvious even to audiences abroad. The irascible Charlie Brooker did a marvelously caustic take-down of last week's sensationalism. Confessing to some cognitive dissonance from the barrage of conflicting analysis & reportage, Brooker succinctly nailed why all anchors & analysts ought to be taken with a metric ton of salt:

Like most of us, I've no idea whether the fear is exaggerated or not. All I know is that I'm having advanced atomic theory explained to me by people who, last week, were struggling to describe the colour of Kate Middleton's dress.

The chief concern remains assisting the stricken in Tohoku, but throughout the rest of the country, life has largely picked up where it left off ten days ago. From where I sit in central Tokyo, the most immediate threat to my well-being is the precipitous rise in coffee prices.

And so Japan has fallen below the fold. Fair enough that the eyes of the world have drifted elsewhere. Sectarian violence continues in Côte D'Ivoire, the West continues its feeble bet-hedging regarding the democratic uprising in Bahrain, and then of course there's that other oil-rich autocracy descending into blood-swamp anarchy: Libya. Having been a second-banana boogieman for forty years, Qaddafi is finally the world's top-billed despot. If the wanton slaughter of his own citizens wasn't enough to turn news network talking heads, then NATO nations' swift assault on Libya guarantees round-the-clock coverage. After all, when was the last time the French took the lead militarily? That itself is news-worthy.

The speed with which France attacked Libya while fleeing Japan seems paradoxical, but it's all part of Sarkozy's renewed effort to appear authoritative in the run-up to next year's election. Sarkozy's credibility hinges upon his actions in Libya: not only was Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie forced to resign after vocally supporting the since-deposed Tunisian regime, Qaddafi's son is now claiming to have contributed to Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign.

Furthermore, the French government was "stung by criticism they were slow to react to the crises in Egypt and Tunisia." Not only did this ensure military dick-swinging that would be lauded as bold & assertive, it explains why French citizens were the first to be evacuated from Japan following the hydra-headed disasters of March 11. Sarkozy could afford to be ambivalent towards the tumult in Tunisia and Egypt, but he would not survive being perceived as indifferent to French citizens caught in one of the greatest natural disasters in recorded history. However, now the evacuation seems premature and even the aerial assault upon Libya has been called "impromptu." Instead of swift-thinking and determined, Sarkozy risks appearing like (in The Economist's words) he is "policymaking by impulse and improvisation."

Meanwhile, as the newshounds sniff out new scents, a different kind of drift may be occurring in Japan: intercultural estrangement. This is arguably the first Japanese disaster with international consequences since the Second World War, a side-effect of which will be a warp in Japanese-foreigner relations. As countless others and I have noted many times, Japan is arguably the most homogeneous & xenophobic of developed nations (which is really saying something). As such, it's a delicate high-wire act for both Japanese and foreigners to engage each other's culture without retreating to unflattering stereotypes. The foreign community simply isn't large enough to stake its own turf unapologetically, and the Japanese have to tolerate - however grudgingly - those among them who are different.

So it does neither side much good when foreigners collectively lose their cool and stampede the exits like laggard rats. The libidinous pessimism of western media has been perhaps the biggest push out of Japan:

The heightened sense of fear may be due to foreigners consuming an "unfiltered diet" of panic-stricken Western news and worries that the domestic news isn't trustworthy.

Unfortunately, this media-spawned panic spreads virally from foreigners to the Japanese too. After all, when 3,000 Chinese from Tohoku alone have gone home, and the embassies of Japan's major allies - France, Germany, and America - are all encouraging their citizens to evacuate, of course the Japanese are going to wonder what decisive information foreigners are privy to that they're not. Widespread mistrust of the government's candor has persisted since they took several hours to issue a statement after the first explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leaving a vacuum the collective imagination filled with all manner of apocalyptic fantasy.

One of my Japanese bandmates told me tonight that I've become the canary-in-the-coal-mine for our circle of friends. During the peak of last week's confusion, he received a phone call from a friend outside of Tokyo:

"You're alright? Is your girlfriend okay?"
"Yeah, we're both fine."
"And Kentaro? Satoshi?"
"Yeah, they're fine too."
"What about Seb? Is Seb still in Tokyo?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Whew! Well, then, we've got nothing to worry about!"

It's nice to know that I'm thought of as a solid judge of circumstance. But the quickly-decamping foreigner has fast become such a stereotype that it's earned its own ignominious bilingual nickname: the "bye-jin". Clearly, the expat community suffers a considerable deficit in credibility. Ergo, another friend has wisely made his cataclysmal barometer a group of old ladies at his local community center - all with long memories and life experience to match. Once they begin to get rattled, it might be time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

But for now, abandoning a country in its darkest hour does not leave much in the way of goodwill. I wonder how little those that have left really have invested in their lives here, and I can't imagine their Japanese friends will be terribly impressed with their fitful selfishness. If actions speak louder than words, then the point at which someone tucks tail and runs speaks with a megawatt bullhorn. The one possible benefit is that those of us who've stuck it, who've neither headed home nor even withdrawn to some western Honshu hotel, could earn some extra respect from the locals for our solidarity & stoicism.

Who knows. Depending on how this whole episode finishes, our stoicism might very well end up being stupidity & sloth.

If I should die before I wake, would I really notice?

The only thing worse than a dude with a Napoleon complex is a senile megalomaniac and his son the shaved Ewok with both a Napoleon complex and a rusting Soviet arsenal at their command.

I suppose it bears remarking that the neighbours are having a moment. What's the odd artillery shell between (bitter, estranged) brothers, right? Well, now that the global balance of power is - regionally, if not nationally - up for grabs, no government wants to look soft, especially when their assailant is the maniacal, mangy village idiot starved halfway to madness. So, in the international game of King of the Hill, soft power & compromise take a backseat to saloon diplomacy, which is unhelpful to those of us who wish neither to be shot or blown up, nor to shoot or blow up other people.

But I'll be damned surprised if this fracas leads to war. North Korea's only ally is China, while South Korea have been occupied by an American military presence for over fifty years. Both China and the U.S. stand to lose their asses if Sino-American relations turn actively antagonistic: how could American remain in China's financial pocket if Americans stop buying all the cheap shit the Chinese manufacture, which in turn fosters the economic growth that allows China to buy up U.S. debt? Who would want to disturb that glorious Moebius-strip of bitter commercial codependency?

My Country, Right-Wing Or Wrong

A blogipelago to which I'm quite sympathetic - IOZ, Charles Davis, and SMBIVA - have rightly gone apoplectic over Matthew Yglesias' spineless rationale for murderous imperial adventure:

From a Keynesian standpoint, I believe that with the economy depressed it’s better to spend the money in Afghanistan than not to spend it. But it’s kind of nuts that at a time when we “can’t afford” to do all kinds of things, this is what we can afford.

Now, most re-posts of this have omitted that last sentence, which Yglesias would surely feel deprives his argument of moral burden. And what a heavy load it is: how painful & difficult a decision it be to continue a 9-year military incursion based on bloodlust & revenge! Oh, how it pains us good, liberal Americans - if only it didn't make so much sense economically!

Rather than make Yglesias out to be a morally-sensitive, considerate man devoted to reason, that last sentence underscores how morally bankrupt & coldly calculating Beltway liberals are. Human dignity be damned; realpolitik and maintenance of the empire are the rules.

(Especially since the war doesn't actually make much sense economically. As Jon Greenbaum pointed out on Yglesias' own comment thread, "What’s the jobs multiplier on military spending?")

Something I'd like to hear much more, though, is calling out Yglesias for his recurrent Red-baiting. Like any good toady for neoliberal hegemony, Yglesias repeatedly & pedantically warns of the danger posed by (duh-duh-DUH!) international Communism while employing capitalism's logic of dehumanization & alienation (as when he refers to the very human problems posed by China's overpopulation as its "human capital issues.") Now this:

Newt Ginrich's spokesman told Salon in a phone interview today that building a mosque at Ground Zero "would be like putting a statue of Mussolini or Marx at Arlington National Cemetery."

Asked what the 19th century German philosopher had ever done to America, Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler said: "Well let's go with Lenin then." Tyler explained that he was talking about Lenin, who died in 1924, as representative of the Cold War and ideologies opposed to America.

What upsets Yglesias is not the continuing false analogy between fascism and communism, but the implication that Islam is somehow fundamentally anti-American. An idiotic & xenophobic contention, for sure. (Why, what could be more American than blind faith in an expansionist ideology?) But Yglesias' knee-jerk rejection of leftism shows that anti-left reactionism has been so fully woven into America's banal nationalism, it's impossible to even consider socialism as a legitimate political mode.

SMBIVA's Michael Smith is dead-on when he says that, apparently, to "Think Progress" must mean finding "more cost-effective programs of mass murder."

Imperial Violence On a Blockbuster Budget

Several months after the fact, but more scorn can always be heaped upon apologias for military-industrial oppression, am I right?

Unlike the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, I didn't like The Hurt Locker - not that it's utter shit. The script suffers from a post-24 lack of narrative focus, but the film's strengths are plain to see: the actors acquit themselves admirably, and the cinematography is gritty & gripping. But like Quentin Tarantino's magnum o' post-modernism Inglorious Basterds, Kathryn Bigelow's film is a smug tribute to American hegemony. While Tarantino reiterates the United States' claim as the sovereign of narrative (fictional and, it's presumed, otherwise), Bigelow cheerleads the great American pastime of the last half-century: state-sanctioned violence.

As many a writer has been hasty to point out, The Hurt Locker is ostensibly a film expressing America's disillusionment with military endeavour. Instead of the square-jawed stoicism & heroics of WWII epics, we witness the tears, dread, incessant stress, and boderline breakdowns of the modern American soldier. But this doesn't encourage the United States to holster its weapon and retire to the quiet discomfort of being a former imperial power. Quite the opposite: by emphasizing moral ambiguity & displaying its scars (psychic & physical, societal & personal), The Hurt Locker shows that we are intimately aware of the chronic difficulty of military engagement - and yet we accept these hardships because such are the costs of the imperial adventure. We accept these hardships because of our nobility, our conviction, our strength of will. The locals are an anonymous throng of shape-shifty brown folks whose true intentions are foggy & dubious, but we are not so cowardly to deny our mission. Though our methods are flawed, our intentions are good. Though we doubt & struggle, we will not betray our commitment.

This is the same self-assurance of moral superiority that Žižek saw in the "darkening down" of such modern bastions of justice-in-action as James Bond and Batman. The "Boy Scout in blue" certitude of old-school superheroes doesn't reflect the endless complexity of contemporary society. As our iconic lone wolves suffer from all-too-familiar faults (e.g. doubt, vengefulness, lapses in reason) they reassure us that they understand the full scope & equivocality of the situation, while enacting their mission precisely as though there were no obscurity or ambiguity. Before, we enjoyed our violence because it had the full weight of Good & Truth behind it. Now, we enjoy our violence because it is difficult, invigorating, sadomasochism as proof of our dedication & macroscopic understanding. And make no doubt that we enjoy it, as attested by the the absurd slo-mo pimp stroll army recruitment ad of The Hurt Locker's final minute.

Bigelow's next project is slated to be "an adrenaline-filled exposé of life in the notorious triple border region between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay." I'm curious to see how bare she'll strip the scenario of social, economic, and military entanglements so dense it makes Traffic look like a Jim Jarmusch short. No doubt the film will prove that, asymmetric enforcement be damned, America has the intestinal & technological fortitude to make the difficult decisions in the War On Drugs, and the darkly-pigmented locals will be dealt with all the depth & feeling of a first-person shooter.

Forget But Don't Forgive

Today marks the eighth anniversary of what was billed as the game-changing cataclysm of this generation, drawing a hard line between the antediluvian giddiness of the '90s and the steady deterioration of the Bush era, panic now seeping up past our knees as the clamor of some mad-dog future grows closer.

At the time, everyone tried with apparent earnestness to react appropriately, searching for some elusive happy medium between the agreed-upon "inappropriate" extremes of Toby Keith and Cassetteboy. And of course, everyone failed.

Eight years later, "9/11" has been reduced to the most overworked political shorthand (though its translation depends very much on which cipher it's read through), the man purportedly responsible & his semi-nonexistent network remain at large, several other nations have been struck by spectacular & tragic attacks, the most heated online argument remains whether or not there was US involvement in taking down the towers, and half the American population seems to feel their own president is a greater threat to their nation than any foreign entity.

The only certainty, the only thing that hasn't vanished in plumes of dust & a whirlwind of dissonance is the anger. Anger at some amoebic phantom enemy, who strikes without explanation or a list of demands; anger that America learned the wrong lessons and become a greater bully that it had been in years (though not even a decade); anger at the maudlin, melodramatic tones in which the event is discussed; anger at the taboo of discussing the event with anything other than reverent, cotton-soft solemnity; anger at anyone who even appeared to exploit the event for box-office receipts or a political boost; anger at anyone who'd undermine the newfound unanimity of a nation in grief; anger at those who'd invoke God to justify either the event or that which followed; anger at those whose denial of God led to the event and that which followed.

Now, so many of those threads of rage have become interwoven that it's near impossible to remember which one we started with. We certainly can't see where it's going, and we see no way of divesting ourselves of it - nor would we want to. We've been angry this long, we want to be see only red until someone cures us (a miracle!) of our crimson blindess... just to make sure it's all been worth the wailing & gnashing of teeth.

Personally, I'm just exhausted of it. It's a beautiful day outside, so I'm going for a stroll. Meanwhile, here is one of my absolute favourite pieces of music, from Nino Rota's score to Fellini's Il Casanova.



Addendum: Anyone up for a rousing game of Jenga?

What Lessons Not To Learn From Iran

Between the increasing horror in the streets and the clampdown on broadcast media, trying to make heads or tails of the post-"election" chaos in Iran is no mean feat. Needless to say, there've been a lot of bunk conclusions drawn and errant dots connected, so let's take a moment to cut the crap out of the discourse.

Myth: Islam and Democracy are incompatible

This is an understandable fear, given that the line in the sand appears to pit democracy squarely against conservative Shi'ites. Moussavi himself has expressed concern that his nation's faith may be fundamentally antipathetic to democracy. Obviously, Islam is not the enemy of democracy: conservative Islam is the enemy of democracy, much in the same way that any intransigent orthodoxy is the enemy of democracy. No matter which monotheistic mania, putting anyone with an unshakable belief in a supreme being in charge of a country is a bad bloody idea, to which the United States is a living testament. Let's also not forget how prominent strident nationalism is amongst Ahmadinejad's rhetoric and supporters. Nationalism, fascism, capitalism (including state capitalism), religious fundamentalism - pick your -ism and odds are it ain't particularly nonsectarian.

Bad Idea: Overthrow the Iranian gov't

Uh, yeah, well - we did that already, remember? And look what it got us last time: twenty-six years of a garish & irresponsible puppet dictator who was dramatically deposed by the original Mr. Fire-And-Brimstone-Upon-America, Ayatollah Khomeini, whose ascent readied the US (to one extent or another) for the rise of Khomeini's Occidental doppelganger Ronald Reagan (and we know how that worked out). Leaving the fate of Iran in the hands of its own people - whether they're clutching ballots or Molotov cocktails - at least allows the country a chance of escaping either an appointed despot or clerical strongman.

Lousy Analogy: Iranians and Republicans in a photo finish at the Oppression Olympics

Are we fucking joking. Speaking of learning the wrong lesson, apparently Republicans have decided that they lost the last election not because they're cryptofascistic spooks, but because they aren't millenarian/imperialist/batshit enough: aside from attempting to resurrect the ol' Cold War standby of Socialist boogeyman and whipping neo-Nazis into a bloodlustful froth, the Republicans are comparing their minority status to being disenfranchised, clubbed, tear-gassed, and shot by Ahmadinejad's thugs. Jon Stewart extended the analogy to its logical conclusion:

And I wonder if the lack of choice in the congressional cafeteria isn't just a little bit like Auschwitz.

But hey, to be fair, perhaps this is actually a kind of political performance art, a metapolitically ironic gesture on the part of the Republicans that manages to both undermine a Democratically elected leader at home, while bolstering a tyrannical theocracy abroad. That'd be heavy, bro.

Post-Millenium Tension

Here's what I don't quite understand about blogging: how does anyone get around to writing anything whilst wading in this swamp of digital distractions? (And I mean writing, not this blockquoted, hyperlinked juggling of other people's words as a substitute for content generation.) By now, I should have been done this post three days ago, nevermind folding the laundry and scoring a trailer. But how the hell am I supposed to ignore Onion-worthy headlines like "People run for lives as flames explode around them"? Or this Ed Wood-worthy non-sequitor that was so gloriously awkward, I actually rented the movie to see how bad that shit was? I mean, even the really good flotsam in this horizonless sea of 0s and 1s is keeping me from some real-world responsibility.

In a similar spirit, though it's a little late for thanks by now, big up to Carl for pointing everyone in the direction of this fine (though apparently abandoned) blog. Right off the bat, I was taken by the incisive stance Alex adopts whilst pissing on graves:

Hauntology's ghostly audio is seen as form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism. Beached as it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainly a seductive argument... link[ed] to a mood of melancholic defeatism in Western left wing politics.

This is an idea I've stewed in until my hands got pruney and my hair stank of chlorine, but never really got around to writing about. I'm grateful someone finally put it publicly with such immediacy.

As many savory sounds have been channeled via this necrocultural seance (I especially like the notion of "ghost genres"), the obvious term that no one has so far applied to hauntological music is Dead End. The overarching message seems to be, "Give up. Sounds are neither created nor destroyed, they simply change form. Everything's already been done - probably by Eno*." This hasn't sat well with everyone: almost two years have already passed since this suicide of the imagination and insistence on being bored was ruefully dubbed "Transcendental Miserablism" over at Hyperstition. But if the Fukuyaman "End of History" proved patently false in the political realm, why can it not be an equally invalid prognosis for culture?

Where hauntology is as bankrupt as any other stripe of post-modernism is: can a creative philosophy be called such when it lacks the essential act of creation? There's obviously a creative aspect to reconstitution, translation, and deconstruction, but nothing that crackles with the shock of the new. As I've touched on before, part of the blame has to do with the available tools: the focus has shifted from hardware - between the instrument and the amplifier - to software; consequently, sounds are less created now than they are reformatted, simulated, and sampled. Sounds that are not born of air technically do not exist - they are undead, bastard vibrations exiled from their essential medium. This orphaned, unphysical quality is essential to most hauntological music, (re)constructed as it is from ashy samples & decayed soundwaves**, but it also requires hauntological music to be trapped in some bereaved fantasy of "utopias that never were***, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism." In this regard, hauntology is less a meditation on one's own scars than some sadomasochistic chimera about the fresh, stinking-meat wound that produced someone else's scars.

Am I selling short the opportunities offered by music software? I don't think so. Once the novelty of time-stretching and pitch-correcting wore off, the digital domain didn't actually epxand the sonic palette by much. Random-access, nondestructive editing is undeniably convenient, but how much further can nanosecond splicing be pushed beyond "Windowlicker"? (Don't answer that.) In fact, I'd be hard pressed to think of an unheard-of sound produced since the digitally-elongated bellow at the heart of "Come To Daddy".

I wonder if the pervasive pre-millenium tension of the previous decade hasn't led to a serious case of apocalyptic blue-balls. Amid the growing din of millenarian fundamentalists, technophobic survivalists, numerological fruitcakes, and rubbernecking cynics, it was impossible not to anticipate - with some degree of excitement - the systemic aneurysm & subsequent pandemonium of Y2K. It possibly came as a greater shock that nothing happened. The lights stayed on, nothing exploded, and computers only crashed if they were running Windows 98 (and so was par for the course). Since then, people have been desperate to declare every new disaster as the Day the World Changed Forever. Granted, the mere seven years of the new century have already accrued an impressive catalogue of catastrophes: September 11, the Iraq War, Katrina, and the current economic meltdown. But as of yet, very little has fundamentally changed about the way the world works. Hell, Bill Hicks could rise from the grave and (much to his apopleptic chagrin, I imagine) do a verbatim rehash of his early-'90s routines. Could it be that we're all just a bit... disappointed?

(*) - I'm a bit surprised that no one's cited the "Eno mix" of Massive Attack's "Protection" as an obvious precursor to Burial's diffuse, stray-transmission aesthetic.

(**) - Some artists who've been lumped under the hauntology banner, like SunnO))), are a little ill-suited to the "genre," given that they actually originate sounds by tangible means. In this regard, they're better suited to the "post-" (i.e. reductio ad absurdum minimalist deconstruction) prefix.

(***) - Need we be reminded that Burial himself is "too young to have ever gone to a warehouse rave."

Non-sequitorial postscript: Oh, Marnie... Marnie, Marnie, Marnie, I hear you, I dig what you're saying, I can relate, and you're a motherfucker of a guitar player, but... goddamit, just stop singing in that fuckin' cat-in-heat bleat and we can hang, okay? Please?

Is This Not Ideology At Its Purest?

I gotta stop doing this: taking the bait on someone else's blog by responding to someone far over my political horizon, hijacking the comments thread and generally being a bloviating bore. But man, did I blow it this time - I raised the hackles of a 9/11 Truth evangelist. Yeah, one of these guys. And now my keyboard is paying for it in exponential wear 'n' tear.

I've never thought the narrative offered by the US government was entirely satisfactory; I'll even hazard there was actionable intelligence about the terrorist plot that was deliberately neglected by the Machiavellian vampires in PNAC. (Condi could probably back up such a claim.) But every alternate telling of the event - including though not limited to controlled demolition, squibs, stand-down orders, missiles, remote-controlled drones, and, of course, the Jews did it - is equally pockmarked by inconsistency, pseudoscience, and circumstantial evidence. Not that this dulls the fervor of the 9/11 Truth crowd, no sir! The great irony of the "Truthers" is that, as much cross-examination to which they subject the official account, they never betray the slightest doubt about their own conclusions. The last time I saw someone so brassbound of his own convictions, it was, uh... that retarded cowboy fellow who's been running the country for the past eight years.

I can't discuss the 9/11 Truth movement without hearing Slavoj Žižek's de facto motto ringing in my ears: Is that not ideology at its purest? The 9/11 Truth weltanschaaung is a meticulously fantastic, all-encompassing construction to which exceptions or contradictions only prove the rule, which in turn denies the exceptions or contradictions as being such. It's as impregnable and self-affirming as any other ideology, from Adorno's miserablist Marxism to Catholicism to Scientology. In short, it's fucking impossible to entrust with even a modicum of self-skepticism.

So why am I giving more airtime to this armchair-CSI lunacy? Well, I originally intended to use this space to continue the demagogic ping-pong match without co-opting any more of Jodi Dean's comment thread. But I'll save my breath and instead refer you to the article that kicked off this whole melee: the Biblically-long debate between Matt Taibbi and David Ray Griffin hosted by Alternet. Grab a cup of coffee, 'cuz it's over thirty pages long (though the fur doesn't really start flying until Part II). Almost any argument that was made at Dean's blog (or could be made here) is covered somewhere within the article, so give at least a little of your time.

I'll admit my bias out of the gate: Taibbi is one of the most thorough and viciously funny journalists on the beat, though his increasingly frenzied, nouveau-gonzo style reveals (as Tim Krieder noted) "a man whom coverage of national politics has driven to the brink of utter and irredeemable loathing of mankind." But I also have to give Griffin his due: he presented himself as diplomatic, patient, and attentive, ditching histrionics for investigative scrutiny. This is in stark contrast to the usual spittle-hail and witch-hunt hysterics through which Truthers deliver their arguments. Perhaps the 9/11 Truth community might make more headway if their massaged their PR a bit. The hectoring tone, juvenile monitions to "wake the fuck up!", and smug sighing over having to thanklessly point out "the blindingly obvious" aren't exactly endearing.

The mistake Truthers make is like confusing Bush with Batman: the forensic microscopy and fanciful dot-connecting ignores the complete picture. The day the WTC was destroyed, that very afternoon, I was already more terrified about what Bush's response would be. I'll borrow some words from Žižek to avoid sounding monstrously callous:

The U.S. just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Rwanda and Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York snipers and gang rapes, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago.

The attacks were like punching a gorilla in the nose: an irrationally bold gesture of defiance that would temporarily stun the beast, but then set its blood to boil. Run to the hills, motherfuckers.

Bringing this back to my initial point on Jodi Dean's blog, it's not as though any of the various 9/11 conspiracy theories need be proven true to indict the Bush (and Blair) administrations for their heinous offenses. The whole of the American & British cabinets could be dragged into the Hague right now and receive the same charge dispensed at the Nuremberg Trials: planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace. This is without considering the plethora of other disgusting transgressions that are sufficiently well-documented that I needn't recount them all here.

The question might become one of priorities: do we want BushCo. punished for being the amoral, imperialist hegemons they are, or do we want to bicker endlessly over incomplete and corrupt evidence? From a legal standpoint, a 9/11 Truth prosecution of the Bush Administration is unfeasible: in the Taibbi/Griffin article, Griffin's courtroom analogy posits himself as a defense attorney, who needs only establish the shadow of a doubt, which the official 9/11 narrative is certainly not beyond. But then neither is the 9/11 Truth version of the event.

Dismayingly, I suspect the real question at the root of this interminably dull argument is: what do we care about more, 2751 dead in New York City, or (as of today) 4180 Americans, 314 other coalition members, and an estimated 1,273,378 Iraqis? Do we care more about our fellow middle-class Starbucks customers, or a bunch of gun-toting pseudo-barbarians fighting over a beige wasteland? Are we more disturbed by a traumatic schism in our quotidian Western comfort, which we must fill with whatever fragmented fantasy we can possibly cobble together from material scraps, or by an ongoing, slow-burning slaughter of colossal scale that nonetheless is out of our empathic view?

I don't particularly want the answer to those questions - but then, that's probably exactly what a 9/11 Truther would've said about me anyway.

They're American planes...

Classical Liberal VS Lapsed Marxist: Round II (and III)

Once again, Andrew Stevens and I rampaged through Micah Tillman's site with as much wrath and little regard for our environs as Godzilla and Mothra - this time about the comparative collateral damage between Capitalism and Marxism. In the interest of allowing ourselves to stretch out conversationally, I've dragged the discourse back over here. One quick reassurance a la Bill Hicks to everyone rolling their eyes at political cockfighting: don't worry, there's more music-nerd snark on the way.

Any “statistical grudge match” with any kind of intellectual honesty would be forced to conclude that Marxism caused vastly more premature deaths than capitalism ever has. I can only assume that your claim is going to be that capitalist countries cause life expectancies to fall somehow, since a mere body count won’t even get you close.

"A mere body count"... ah, how we value life in the free world! But no, I wasn't referring to life expectancies. Of course, even that isn't an airtight argument for the free market, not the least because most of the countries with greater life expectancies than the US (Japan, Iceland, Sweden, Canada, etc.) have market regulations that would be decried as draconian on Wall Street. The chief difficulty in comparing body-counts between Capitalism and Marxism is that no one has ever been killed in the name of Capitalism as such. Whereas the enforcers and executioners of Communist regimes dispatched dissidents and undesirables under the flutter of red flags, no tanks or helmets have ever been decorated with dollar-sign decals. So it's a delicate yet arbitrary judgment as to how many deaths are on capital's tab. Those who've died of famine or a toxic environment as a result of exploitive trade practices? The victims of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre? The 2 million dead of the Korean war? The 6 million of the Vietnam war? The minimum hundred-thousand of the current Iraq war? The 8 million slaves who died en route to the Americas, to say nothing of the untold millions killed during the procurement of the surviving 11 millions slaves shipped west?

I think it is quite appropriate to measure how good a government is by how few people it gratuitously slaughters.

Well, it's obviously a handy criterion, but if that becomes the chief consideration of a government's worth, that's bloody pathetic (no pun intended). What about access to healthcare? Education? Low unemployment rolls and CPI? No? I'd think that quality of life would be a greater consolation than a simple shurg, "Well, at least the prime minister ain't no Ismail Enver."

...Experiments [in competing ideologies] were East Germany/West Germany, North Korea/South Korea, and arguably Hong Kong/China. In each one of these experiments, the regimes in question started with similar resources and similar, if not identical, cultures.

As "laboratory experiments," these qualify as incredibly sloppy science. Not only had Hong Kong been a British concession for over a century by the time Mao Zedong consolidated power in 1949, but to think a country as expansive & ethnically diverse as China was (or is) even vaguely homogeneous is ignorant. Meanwhile, in Korea, there was violent agitation by left-leaning activists in the south following WWII; had the US not ditched the Moscow Accords and helped install Yi Seungman (a thug who embezzled over $20 million in gov't funds and died in exile) and subsequently reinforced his flagging defenses, Korea very well may have been reunified by Kim Il-Sung. (Kim, of course, was a unimaginative, waffling narcissist responsible for the deaths of 1.6 million of his countrymen.) West and East Germany are the closest to "control" groups by which to compare the success of competing ideologies. Nevertheless, the Soviet "scorched earth" war tactics and its extra-aggressive dismantling of German industry (to compensate for the USSR's desperate economic situation and staggering loss of 26 million lives) bequeathed the GDR a far more tenuous socioeconomic foundation than the West, and a consequent, inherent resentment of its foreign overseer.

Though it goes without saying, I am not an apologist for Mao, Stalin, the Stassi, or Juche. But throughout the Cold War, the single answer to the myriad problems of Communism was: capitalism. And still, the single answer to the myriad problems of Western capitalist hegemony is: more capitalism! As jaded as I may be regarding humans' collective discipline or reason, this as a prescription is, well, insufficient.

Round 3

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Stevens was (again) the sole respondent to my questions regarding whether or not the US is in a recession. I felt compelled to comment not the least because the cited source of "good news" was walking mental laxative Jonah Goldberg, and Tillman seems to take his sources at face-value. A great many people (Tillman included) received the news the 3.3% bump in the US GDP as though it was some ad infinitum forecast of the country's economic health - forgetting about those stimulus cheques and White House Press Secretary Dana Perino's caveat, "No one is doing a victory dance." Mr. Stevens was right to articulate the value of imputed income, though I wasn't so much arguing against its inclusion in the equation as encouraging statistical scrutiny. Take the unemployment rate for example: officially 5.7%, it rises to around 9% once "discouraged" workers, "marginally attached" workers, and involuntary part-timers are included. But then factor in those on Social Security, disability, etc. who've been "bought off the unemployment rolls" and the number crawls closer to 12%. There are other concerning facts to consider: construction continued to hit the brakes at a current rate of almost 16%, and after-tax corporate profits fell by 3.8% after a single-point gain in the first three months of 2008.

The slight skip in GDP is obviously good news, but it'd be foolhardy to dismiss the "doomsayers" so quickly. The benefit of being Chicken Little is that, if you're wrong - hey, no problem! But given that 97% of consensus forecasts in the 1990s failed to predict some sixty different national recessions, perhaps "permabears" like Dr. Nouriel Roubini aren't quite the marketplace miserablists they appear to be.

Owing to Mr. Stevens' relative online anonymity, I initially wondered if I was debating either a veteran business journalist or the star of Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction. No such luck: he's a midwestern economist, judging by his extensive font of financial know-how (not to mention haughty asides deriding "non-economists"). As such, that he indulges an autodidact muso in lengthy exchanges seems explicable only because they take place on "his" turf. Nonetheless, I appreciate that he's the only one who deems my ideas worthy of rebutting on Tillman's site, where my minority opinions (however carefully worded) have apparently earned me troll status. No great loss, though, as that site disappears increasingly up its own skyward nose. Tillman's monocular political skepticism and dull predilection towards grammatical fundamentalism make him sound ever more like the idiot who looks at the finger, not the moon at which the finger points. As much as Mr. Stevens and I may differ in our ideological orientation, his readiness to have an concerted discussion is most welcome.

Been a Long Time

I've got a lot of reading to catch up on. Just as a long-simmering threat exploded into the most imporant geopolitical moment of the past five years, a deadline of which I was previously not told was unceremoniously shat upon me. Consequently, I spent the past week hiding in my headphones, wrestling with amp-emulator plug-ins (spiking 110Hz and 2.7kHz does not a Marshall stack make!) and trying to turn what was a snare drum from a timbale back into a snare drum.

Mercifully, my ears were well-tuned to my clients' particular idiom: I've recently been digging deep into the annals of sweaty, hirsute rawk. Once the whole Adbusters hipster debacle had saturated the blogosphere, I desperately needed to hear some music whose sincerity ripped straight past try-hard into the epically ersatz - and what music better exemplifies balls-out self-belief than vintage heavy metal?

Prog rock. The only thing that trumps a Rayon-locked dude with a Les Paul is a Rayon-locked dude with a Les Paul singing about extraterrestrial dragons.

What's long fascinated me most about pre-thrash heavy metal is its utterly junior-high male mindset. Here's the lay of the land: smoking pot, super heroes, and a cryptomystical obsession with death and Satan. These may seem like quaint and hokey enthusiasms in the era of phonecams and the Nintendo Wii, but throw out every gadget with a microprocessor and see what else there is to do when posessed of that restive adolescent essence. If humour rears its head (and it rarely does), it's typically sophomoric. If a girl enters the picture, it's framed in the same manner that a hormonally hysterical boy would gaze cautiously at the creatures on the other side of the cafeteria: there walks some unfathomable succubus or unattainable Venus! Which is actually the best argument against anointing Led Zeppelin the original heavy metal band: they may have sung songs about Vikings and Tolkien characters, but they also dared vocalise something approximating adult sexuality as opposed to, well, this.

In the introduction to Rat Salad, Paul Wilkinson parallels the history of rock with an average human lifespan: from its goofy insouscience in the '50s, across its mercurial adolescence in the '60s, through the barn-burning death of innocence manifested as the late-'70s punk shitfit, and finally slouching into the slick, careerist adulthood of the '80s. Based on such a timeline, the blossoming of prog rock as a technical & thematic maturation of early metal would correspond to the naive hubris of a first-year philosophy major who's just read Beyond Good and Evil, Siddartha, and/or The Simulacra for the first time. The clumsy gumbo of half-baked New Ageism, cherry-picked Oriental religion, and modernist philosophy; the use of fantastic narrative to make some profound (if foggy) point; the unflinching self-seriousness with which the discourse it carried out - why, it's as though those insufferable freshmen Know-It-Alls you sat behind in the lecture hall started a band!

The student analogy also underscores the class difference between much early metal and first-wave prog: while Black Sabbath were a blue-collar bunch from dingy Birmingham, Genesis were posh Charterhouse schoolboys. Though technical prowess is a prime directive in both genres, it's born of very different social instincts: in metal, of the working-class pride of a well-honed skill; in prog, of an indulgent, academic studiousness. The socioeconomic gap can also account for the lyrical thematic differences between metal (pulpy fantasy and B-movie theology) and prog (packed full of highbrow allusions to psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and philosophy).

Of course, with a little persistence and practice, some of these arrogant geeks actually progress (what is the parent word of "Prog" anyway?) into more difficult, exploratory realms. Their employ of philosophical themes graduates from toe-dipping to something more thorough; their inquisitive disposition often makes them early-adopters of new technology; the best even succeed in breaking new ground.

This creative questing is, of course, not without its pitfalls. Curiosity can still kill the cat, and what we need isn't always more technology. But better to look foolish and take risks than rest on someone else's laurels and give up even trying.

Anyway, click on the mix title to download. If we use Wilkinson's rock lifeline, this mix (at one song per year) would trace some young fellow's development from age 13 through 23. Or something like that.

Hard, Heavy, Heady

1. Fuzzy Duck - "A Word Form Big D" (00:00)
2. May Blitz - "Snakes and Ladders" (01:32)
3. Black Sabbath - "The Wizard" (05:58)
4. Sir Lord Baltimore - "Hell Hound" (10:16)
5. Warhorse - "Vulture Blood" (13:32)
6. Colosseum - "The Machine Demands a Sacrifice" (18:35)
7. Heldon - "Standby" (21:50)
8. Tool - "The Grudge" (35:52)
9. Magma - "Mekanik Zain" (Live; 44:15)
10. King Crimson - "Indiscipline" (01:00:18)

Fasci(oni)sta

A couple of days ago, the popular expat-in-the-Orient blog 不良外人 (a.k.a. Furyogaijin, a.k.a. Fucked Foreigner) excavated a talkshow excerpt of military history enthusiasts dressed in Nazi regalia. As the doe-eyed, helium-voiced hobbyist insists his fetish is pure fashion, a panel of international Japanese residents rips into him for being so blind to the substance behind the symbols. The end of the clip is particularly surreal: one of the exiting hobbyists taunts the audience by snapping off a quick sieg-heil salute (disproving his claimed ignorance), prompting an enraged Frenchman to spring from his seat with intent of something stronger than a verbal reprimand. After he's physically dragged back to his chair, a German (!) panelist admonishes the Frenchman for overreacting, saying, "It's just a symbol, it's okay!"

Now, following their defeat, both Germany and Japan were culturally reindoctrinated and forced into schizoaffective reconstruction by a foreign occupier. The significant difference is that, in Germany, the reindoctrination became the keystone of domestic policy; Japan, on the other hand, has remained at best unrepentant, at worst revisionist with regard to its crimes during WWII. Yet, in spite of these opposite approaches to ingesting (or not) history, hard-right & fascist movements persist in both nations in apparently equal measure. It's harder to track the prevalence of hardcore nationalist & xenophobic group in Japan, if only because there are no "hate crimes" from which to derive statistics. But Japanese fascists (uyoku dantai) are boisterous and blustering enough that they'd needn't turn to violence to influence the nation's internal dialogue. Meanwhile, their German counterparts appear to have been gaining ground with each year since reunification: not only are racists attacks reaching record numbers (to the point of becoming a permenant fixture of quotidian life in some parts of Germany), but neo-Nazis are a growing presence in legitimately-elected governing bodies.

A climate of general intercultural ignorance in both countries works very much in favour of these fascists - but, of course, intercultural ignorance is the stock-in-trade of xenophobes worldwide. But if forced to pick between Germany and Japan the country with the greater potential for a racially harmonious future, I'd say: Japan. This is not to excuse the obvious extant problems (not the least of which are the racist cops), especially in light of Japan's minuscule foreign population (approx. 1.6%) and its extensive history of deliberate isolationism. But Japanese nationalists aren't even the looniest goons in the neighbourhood. The irony is that Japan's lack of contrition for its wartime acts has produced a particularly spineless, neutered stripe of nationalism. Not facing the active popular & institutional opposition that, say, the NPD does means that the uyoku dantai are never forced to exercise any real conviction in the face of adversity. It's the same brand of laziness afforded to Manchester United or NY Yankees fans: when there's no serious opposition, nothing need be sacrificed to the cause. On the other hand, German fascists, racists, and nationalists are as opposed a constituency as it's possible to be (without resorting to crimes against humanity, that is) - and still they persist with psychotically deep-seated defiance and dangerous dedication.

(Also, Japanese fascists are pussies. Seriously. I've had my picture taken striking goofy poses next to them, which earned me a bunch of red-faced rhetoric over the lance-voix but nothing more. It was also two years in Japan before I'd met a foreigner who'd been physically attacked simply because they were foreign - as opposed to five days in Germany. But would I pull the same goading pranksterism on Deutsche skinheads? Hell no.)

There's a grim punchline to all this. Japan is likely the only country where someone strutting around dressed as an SS officer could (maybe) convincingly argue that they're doing so apolitically - not that I'd excuse it. As po-mo manifest, Japan specializes in deconstructing, (mis)appropriating, and refracting symbols. (This is doubtless one reason for the anemic nature of its "hardcore" nationalism: the icons & figureheads of imperial Japan have seen their substance either rotted or gutted.) While European cultures similarly disbelieve in a symbol carrying any innate power, there's a reinvestment in reappropriated symbols here that gives them (often terrible) new life and new meaning. Thus, witness the German neo-Nazi incorporation of the Japanese imperial flag into its design arsenal (skip to the 3:48 mark for a full view). Of course, this is hardly a huge twist, though even if it were strange, strange bedfellows are scarcely so strange under closer scrutiny. I wonder what Momus would make of this...

Speaking of whom, I realize that a full week has already passed since the Adbusters bourgeois-boho flamewar came and went like a five-alarm fire in a toilet-paper factory, but I've been slowly tacking away at some kind of a thoughtful response. Extend your attention spans, and your patience will be rewarded, my friends.

* * *

Elsewhere online, Alan "I Started A Joke" McGee waited out the initial wave MBV-mania before reiterating his too-cool-for-shoegaze contempt for Kevin Shields & Co. In a MySpace bulletin, McGee wrote:

THE NEW MOGWAI ALBUM THE HAWK IS HOWLING VERSUS THE ''NOSTALGIC CABARET'' OF MBV LIVE IN 2008

Finally got time to listen to it and it's even better than the last two Mogwai albums which to me have both been wonderful... Their [sic] is a beautiful irony that the ''nostalgic cabaret'' that is my bloody valentine are throwing at people in 2008 gets critical acclaim in the easily pleased UK press with MBV still playing the exact same set they did 20 years ago and the only trick Kevin Shields has anymore in 2008 is actual volume and double extra pa to numb you and zero new songs.

Hear the new Mogwai record it's beautiful.Mogwai are 2008 My bloody valentine were a joke signing in 1991 maybe they got better..

Maybe as a token of gratitude, Mogwai can hire McGee a proofreader. Nevermind that to hail the genius of Mogwai in 2008 is as bold & iconoclastic as to do the same for, say, Echo & the Bunnymen in 1988. This flailing contrarianism is to be expected of an aging, conservative rockist. Given that, in signing Oasis, McGee may have single-handedly launched the reactionary atavism of Britpop; in that regard, it makes sense that he'd hate something as blurrily sublime and genre-obscuring as Loveless (to say nothing of the macho posturing that he sank a quarter-million quid into a "joke"). I'd even be willing to take him at his word, had he not allowed himself the pusillanimous emergency exit, "Maybe they got better..."

* * *

So it's 88 Boadrum day. I don't actually care, and not for the knee-jerk anti-appropriative reason. Honestly, the Boredoms fuckin' bore me these days - which sounds silly, since they've been doing the same orthodox drum-circle schtick for the better part of a decade now. But please, examine Exhibit A, followed by Exhibit B and tell me that Seiichi Yamamoto's meteoric guitar doesn't make all the difference.

Everybody Else Is Doing It So I Won't

I'm all for a little bloody-minded contrarianism now and then, even if it involves backlash against the new Batman movie, but if it can't be done with the minor courtesy of spoiler warnings, the kid gloves are off. David Cox' humourless dismissal of The Dark Knight has so ruined my morning that I was halfway to titling this post "David Cox is a twat" just to cool my blood.

Like every salaried hack, Cox doesn't even treat his readers to moderately imaginative writing. This aloof exercise in simplistic indignation stumbles right out of the gate, under a title unduly pleased with itself as a bad pun built on cheap consonance and sort-of synonyms. This is followed by a pre-critiqued laundry list of the objects he'll be examining, a cheat-sheet so we can keep up with him - a device as tired and condescending as beginning a trailer with, "In a world..."

The central conceit of Cox' article (that the film wrongly denies any moral authority in the War On Terror) is awkwardly incorrect. He's right in his analysis ("the distinction between good and evil has evaporated") but wrong in his condemnation thereof, not the least because Cox seems to have missed the past seven years. He posits the Joker as Osama bin Laden's onscreen incarnation, and makes 9/11 - but no subsequent events - the moral climate in which all decisions are made. If these cinematic metaphors don't bear up under scrutiny, it's because they're the wrong metaphors to be inferred. When Cox scolds the film's apparent moral ambiguity towards such things as mutually-assured destruction, extraordinary rendition, and total surveillance, he does so with a hubris that ignores that our own governments are engaged in exactly those things. The film is explicitly post-9/11 in its ideology, necessarily acknowledging our betrayal of our principles in their own name. We "have become a monster out [our] very excessive attachment with seeing Evil everywhere and fighting it." If the Joker is an imperfect stand-in for the "boringly purposeful" bin Laden of September 11, 2001, then the Joker is a perfect stand-in for bin Laden as he currently exists in our imaginations: an indefatiguable trickster, a walking embodiment of an anarchistic sadomasochism, an "evil-doer."

For a man who makes his living in the media, Cox is surprisingly unsophisticated in his interpretation of the film: that by presenting the collapse of moral authority, the film endorses it. Yes, let's take everything at face-value, shall we? (This could explain why Cox apparently thinks we occidentals are still possessed of some unimpeachable sense of right-and-wrong: because, after all, we say so!) Of course, if the anomic aside of "Cool, man!" is Cox' idea of piquant "irony," then he's measurably forty-some years behind the curve on symbollic literacy. Sure enough, solemnly intoning that "without morality, there can be no saviours," Cox makes clear his preference for the ol' "Boy Scouts in blue," two-dimensional propaganda for a grey-less worldview. This is the same brand of escapism that led Depression-era audiences to sympathise with unrepentantly spoiled debutantes and dandies: when reality gets ugly, flee into an anaesthetising fantasy anthithetical to real life. But should he find his own enjoyment interrupted, Cox ought to be angry at our governing bodies, not grease-painted fictional action figures, for casting "a smokescreen behind which... some kind of coherent whole can be persistently ducked."

Of course, I might be demanding too much of Cox. We're dealing with a man who fell head over heels for a Francophone exercise in Ed Burns-esque provincial romanticism. Perhaps Cox is just grumpy while he waits for Flash Of Genius, that heart-rending David-&-Goliath allegory balanced upon legal appeals over the patent for friggin' windshield wipers.

Most disturbing in all this, though, is the peak in his libindal scrapbook Cox offers us when expressing shock & disappointment at seeing "Maggie Gyllenhaal drained, astonishingly, of sex-appeal." Great, thanks for that, Davey-boy, now we can all imagine your unsypathetic mastiff/headmaster pout drooling salaciously as Maggie crawls around in a pantsuit-and-leather-leash combo. Nevermind that most of my friends and I always saw Gyllenhaal as a pleasantly unglamourous indie everygirl instead of some ur-sexual goddess. Perhaps Cox is a textbook pervert who willingly accepts any actor, in a role signified as "sexy"/sexual, as innately "sexy"/sexual.

Can we please hand Anna Pickard all the Guardian's AV coverage already?