"'Algonquian women in New England,' wrote William Wood in 1634, were 'more loving, pitiful, and modest, mild, provident, and laborious than their lazy husbands.' Wood imagined that oppressed Indian women would gladly embrace European gender roles with their presumably lighter burdens of female domesticity."
As I limply cast aside the hose of my opium huqqa, ash sprinkling the datemaki sash of my authentic silken Nipponese kimono, I despair: literature is dead. Then suddenly, there is a change. There is a Powellful discovery. Who is Caleb Powell? A question I pondered not two weeks ago — now I have some sense of the answer, of an author who asserted himself in my mind's eye. Thus far, his vision has been inscribed only within a few brave avant garde presses, like Prick of the Spindle, Yankee Pot Roast, and Zyzzyva. I aim to change this."To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
To cite an author he hamfistedly emulated (more or less successfully), Hitchens was Squealer the pig, a silver-tongued correspondent to the middlebrow, flattering of power, contemptuous of the weak, the bashful, the foreign — the sincere. He was a kept man to the bitter end, the part-time iconoclast. As Norman Finklestein recalled, "'The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat,' Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler's seizure of power. 'You always wore it the 'right' way around.'" Hitchens afflicted the weak and comforted the powerful, an abnegation of any public service a gadfly could perform. Though his Oxbridge accent and erudition were crucial in fleecing the provincials he knew the USA was composed of, it was his more American qualities that endeared him to the terminal-stage Republic.
NPR dutifully reminds you that it just can't make the call on the events of the day; it would be unseemly. The verb "seem" triumphantly stomps action and causality into speculation. Immediately thereafter, great wet beltway farts gurgle out to explain the two ways to look at all this uncertainty, with the Brookings Institute "on the left" and the Cato institute "on the right" handwaving away any crazy notions not their own. Sometimes EJ Dionne says something, that poor doomed bastard.
Scaring people with socialism again will be a tougher sell because it's a retread and because the specter of taxing wealthy people to create government jobs for a stagnant economy isn't so spooky in states that have suffered over 10% unemployment and staggering underemployment. A safety net won't so easily represent doom to those still falling. Thankfully, based on the rousing success of "THEY'RE COMING TO THE GROUND ZERO MOSK," the latest lurking horror to send you screaming for the Party of Reagan is "Sharia." Don't take my word for it. Take theirs.
"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
Of course we would misname a strutting punk like Bin Laden "Geronimo"; when you hunt in the high grass, you don't care if you've bagged a gazelle or garbage. They're all something to be torn apart. There is no moral symmetry in which Osama and Geronimo can be compared; a reedy child-murdering sybarite like Bin Laden doesn't deserve to be so much as incinerated in the same sentence as an actual freedom-fighter like Geronimo. The only thing they share is a status as enemy of America, to be disposed of like every other villain. In the eerie silence of falling footsteps pursuing their quarry into a back bedroom, safety off to eject Osama's intellect onto a greasy daybed, the SEALs ran kill-confirmation through their heads, lest they be the lucky triggerman: "GERONIMO... ENEMY KIA."
We're being lied to with all the crude smugness of an Irish Setter with crumbs on his whiskers, oblivious as to who ate all the kaiser rolls off the counter. This horseshit bandage being spun around Osama's powder-burned chancres is enough to make any decent self-loathing American want to attempt a header off the Golden Gate. We have no decoder rings, yet, with the power of elementary deduction, we can cut through the web of lies ensnaring Lady Liberty.
No matter. No one goes straight to the shrink when they find themselves fixated on the idea of carving 666 onto their bus driver's forehead or tearing apart their Keurig machine to see if the CIA has installed a tracking device in the coffee filter. It takes some building up to a point where one can accept they are nuts, and that is what a general practitioner is for — a medical hand who can gently break it to those clad only in tinfoil that it might be worth trying the Thorazine. The calorie-free, sociopathic banality of this Bin Laden hit is similarly more digestible if we first admit: one, that this official narrative does not make a great deal of sense; and, two, that it is a terrifying indication of how little the "War on Terror" has achieved."Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue."
But we must face it: Bin Laden tossed a pocketful of seeds and woke up in a rainforest. He wagged the dog. If anything, the failures of his nearest and dearest efforts, frightfully modest in comparison to the destruction of the American Empire, only serve to highlight the enormity of the scalps he pocketed. Historians will be hard-pressed to find an agitator who castrated an empire using less money and exerting less energy than Bin Laden. His jackal pack induced a full-court psychological meltdown with a disgusting ease. His coalition of Salafist mutants, rejected from polite company in every corner of the Middle East, conspiratorial failures of Arab capital who could've stepped out of a Conrad thriller and kept on bumbling — this was the drifting garbage mound that beggared a superpower.
Again after a major confrontation, the basketball punditry luxuriates in condemning that wandering leader of an uncelebrated franchise, LeBron James. It is no secret that the tide of public opinion has turned against the former boy prince and uncrowned king, but, as with all scurrility and moral cowardice, critics bury the direst of their malignancy amongst the obvious. No one can doubt a visionary ballplayer, but it is because his cause and gameplay are beyond doubt that the whistles blown against him must be dog whistles and the penalties against him all phantom.
The object of terror is to use an enemy's fear to leverage himself into positions into which you cannot put him by direct force. With two-score men, borrowed planes and some lessons down in Florida, a millionaire recluse clown with bizarre hairstyling convictions tantalized and lured a nation of 300 million people into breaking its back economically and militarily on a nation that hasn't been conquered — at anything other than its own pleasure — since the days of Alexander. The economic woes and military overextensions engendered by our lust for vengeance remain. So, too, do the main tools of recruitment for Islamic terrorists, according to a study by the Bush/Rumsfeld Pentagon: American troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as our uncritical support for the state of Israel.Seize an industrial laser — a diamond-bit drill, one of those explosively formed penetrators that wrought so much havoc on soft-skin Baghdad Humvees — because it is apparently going to be a Herculean effort to puncture the Große Lüge that is the Libyan War. Like Austin Powers in Goldmember, we've seen this movie before, and it's not any funnier.
The ogres of Georgetown fleece the country rubes yet again. The labels of "Democrat" and "Republican" are significations as distinct as the difference between Our Gang and The Little Rascals. If you really think the motives for the Libyan War are dramatically different from those of our Iraqi self-immolation, Barack Obama's peals of laughter are only inaudible due to the foot-deep soundproof padding they have blanketing the war room. In the darkened corridors of the West Wing at midnight, the haunting sound of courtier hi-fives and war drum bro-daps can still be faintly heard, echoing off the cranial sinus where this swaggering pig president's soul should nest.
The only Tea Party worth a damn on this whole godawful planet is in Libya. And unlike our morbidly obese Rascal-scootering Glock fetishists ardently fighting for the right to die of untreated diabetes, the Libyan Tea Party is standing and fighting and dying and maybe going to lose. How fitting that a bloody, highly fluid totaler kreig is taking place today in Libyan cities like Tobruk, the same place that another Desert Fox, Herr Rommel, hunted the Brits for months during World War II. As Gaddafi regains military momentum to a degree I thought impossible, his forces sweep through recaptured cities like the sludge of a tsunami, smearing city blocks, whole families annihilated as if by the flick of the Colonel's finger.
I am torn on the issue of external military intervention. Perhaps it could provide Gaddafi the black eye the rebels need to slough him off. But it will mark the beginning of the Libyan War, full stop. And frankly, I doubt the motivations of intervention's most forceful advocates, and you should too. David Cameron is the kind of Tory who drove Lord Byron to die in Greece, and the egocentric Sarkozy still smarts from Gaddafi's role in strangling his beloved Mediterranean Union in the crib.If there's a Middle Eastern dictator most likely to be Ceaucescued, lashed with electric cable to the missus on Christmas morning and Kalashnikoved off this mortal coil, it's Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Leader and Guide of the Revolution, Bedouin Father of Africa, a man with the vanity and physique of John Travolta, but with an even worse record in bombing.
Even Saddam Hussein (believe it or not) led the Arab world in development, achieving ninety-plus literacy rates and nearly-First World medical access, prior to his Iranian misadventures. For a diva like Muammar, this is some rough hummus to choke down. Gaddafi was always the Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes of the Arab League: petulant, a little out-of-place, unbalanced, and jealous enough to burn down that which tested him. And now he's headed out like Left-Eye, hurtling into a ravine spinning over and over, his passengers strapped in and unable to bail out.There was a joke in the mid-nineties among CIA functionaries about how to brief Bill Clinton on the prospect of regime change in Iraq. "Mr. President, we cannot definitively predict the identity of Saddam's successor, but we know his first name: General."
Mubarak was going to survive so long as the Army didn’t view his continued presence as constituting an immediate liability. And Mubarak’s unbelievable Mr. Magoo speech two Thursdays ago — an incoherent word salad of Arab nationalist boilerplate and paternalistic condescension — finally did the trick. The media was awash with leaked assurances that Mubarak was about to submit to the inevitable and bow out, a buzzing zeitgeist playing soundtrack to the odd new images of the day. The Supreme Council of the Egyptian military — which last met, I think, when Ariel Sharon’s tank column was surging towards Cairo during the 1973 War — suddenly convened a televised meeting, in which Mubarak and churlish dungeonmaster Umar Suleiman happened to be absent. Hassan al-Roueini, the general tasked with security in the Cairo Governate, had the most fun assignment: go to Tahrir Square and tell all the protestors, "All your demands will be met today."
The Mubaraks are finished, and have been for over a week. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt thought they would live on, even after death. Staring at Ramses II's mummy in the Egyptian Museum, it is difficult to see how. He certainly seems dead. Yet a fringe of blonde ringlets, rolling over his leathery forehead, is visibly preserved, a final concession to the vanity of an old man. His rotted teeth and crackling blisters are preserved in the jaw. Here was the father of Egypt, his brains pried from his nostrils in expectation of immortality. Since he got dragged out of his Luxor tomb, Ramses has been guarded by Tourist Policemen, like the mustachioed, swarthy sergeant at the front gate giving me two thumbs up. "Obama good!" he beamed.The novice might be alarmed the first time they reach high ground in Israel, at David's Citadel or the Baha'i Gardens, and see black smoke in the distance. There's no stanching it though; it's a natural phenomenon, as dry, weedy ground catches fire under the Mediterranean sun. One of the most contested and targeted sites for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, Mufti's Grove, is a scorched hillside, its olive trees charred cinder and the ground perpetually black, crunchy underfoot. It's as common as a racist cab driver or shwarma-induced diarrhea.
Despite ample warnings that the Israeli home front was ill-prepared for such a disaster — forest fires fed by Hezbollah missiles had wreaked havoc in 2006 — the disaster completely surprised the government. And it came just as the shamelessly far-right wing Revisionist Likudnik government had finally appeared to outflank Barack Obama. Bibi Netanyahu, once frightened by Obama's focus on illegal Israeli settlements, had, with the GOP takeover of the House and the stalling of peace talks, finally appeared to slough the U.S. off his back. As the Obama brood sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, Bibi began Hanukkah picking apart roasted dove in a warm salon. And as the Carmel burned, he had to chew crow, appealing to the international community — even Turkey — for help."Let me tell you about what I saw every morning."
"Every day, walking from French Hill to Mount Scopus" — at this, he gestured beyond the obstructive silver dome of Al Aqsa Mosque, unbelievably close to the plate glass windows of the bistro where we sat — "I looked down at the Temple Mount. And every day, I remembered what it said in Tanakh. Once the Third Temple is built, the fresh water beneath the temple — you know of the tunnels beneath? The fresh water will flow out of the Dome of the Rock, east," he gestured once again towards the Mount of Olives, "down, down, down through Judea and Samaria, down the slopes and into the Dead Sea, which will be made fresh again. The Jordan will flow with this water."
Two powerful dramas ended in the last seven days. The first described an island of miracles to which only some could return, a place of refuge and possibility surrounded by a forbidding sea and malicious forces. Indeed, the Lost finale was a special event destined to be long remembered by fans of television—Vincent the dog lying down beside the hero, Jack Shephard (how appropriate), now at peace, as his spirit moves on to a new challenge.
