High Masculine Tones

Epitaph on a tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

-- W. H. Auden

Experimental Jetset Vibraphone






Flash version: try different combinations for Harmonic Relaxation.

Via (the sleeping) Sharpeworld.

Rummy gives a history lesson

Mr. Rumsfeld said he was "reluctant" to encourage uprisings explicitly.

"I guess those of us my age remember uprisings in Eastern Europe back in the 1950s, when they rose up and they were slaughtered," he said. "I am very careful about encouraging people to rise up. We know there are people in those cities ready to shoot them if they try to rise up."

Mr. Rumsfeld, I'm forty years younger than you, but I remember back in 1991 when George Bush the Elder encouraged uprisings in Basra and elsewhere, only to abandon the rebels to Saddam Hussein's gunships. 30,000 to 60,000 civilians in southern Iraq died horrible deaths as a result.

I guess that Iraqis of a certain age remember it as well.

::Andrew Gumbel, The Independent: The people of Basra have revolted before - and been slaughtered for it via The Rational Enquirer

Profiles in disillusion:

"I think I was living in a pipe dream thinking no one would get killed," Shirley Johnson, 79, a registered Republican from Davenport, Iowa, said in a follow-up interview. "But all of a sudden people were getting killed, and I was horrified."

Pam Wallman, 60, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said, "I think the American public was duped into believing that our troops could just go in there, clean everything up and come home in 10 days."

Both respondents were adults during the Vietnam War.
Both seem shocked that war can kill Americans.
Both were hoping for a one-sided killfest.


::NY Times: Opinions Begin to Shift as Public Weighs War Costs

Author Paul William Roberts, author of The Demonic Inferno, is covering Iraq War II for Harper's:

I have been in and out of Iraq more often than the Turkish army these past few days, viewing the war both firsthand and on the surprisingly copious array of television news channels available all over Syria and Jordan. I heard Donald Rumsfeld on the radio discussing "the humanity that goes into" building the kind of weapons of mass destruction that America prefers these days. I saw for myself enough of their effects, the inevitable consequences of their inbuilt humanity, to convince myself that no dialogue is possible with Washington's current leadership.

We no longer speak the same language. To them, terms like "freedom," "humanity," "democracy" and "liberation" signify the opposite of what they mean to me. I resent this theft and abuse of language.

... and he resents his home country's peculiar stance on the war. Most of the pseudo-coalition ostensibly supports the war, yet is not supplying troops or money. Canada has somehow managed the reverse:

had nothing but praise for Canada's stand against the war and support for the United Nations. I didn't have the heart to tell anyone that Canadian ships and servicemen were actively involved as American accomplices as we spoke.

Despite our claims of neutrality, we have 31 troops on exchange with British and U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf -- which gives us a greater presence than the majority of members of the so-called coalition. I felt ashamed at the hypocrisy.

::Paul William Roberts, The Globe and Mail: Hypocrisy stalks the land

I used to maintain a weblog that documented my obsessive net-working post-September 11th. When I mothballed it I assumed that once the inevitable bombing of Iraq began, I would return to my grim labours.

The war-fever cranked up, but my gumption didn't. I've continued my relentless wanderings through the darkest contours of the Internet, and maybe that's my problem. There's no shortage of people's opinions and analyses. The pressure is cranking up, and seems to be spilling out of the media boxes and into our own cocoons. Everywhere I turn, almost everybody seems to be going nuts, in one way or another... A global fever-hum, getting louder and louder, and more than anything I wish somebody would just turn down the volume...

George Soros on a new kind of speculative madness...

I see a parallel between the Bush administration's pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality but reality is distorted by misconception. In this case, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of supremacy the misconception. Reality can reinforce the misconception but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable. During the self-reinforcing phase, the misconception may be tested and reinforced. This widens the gap leading to an eventual reversal. The later it comes, the more devastating the consequences.

... A rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could cause a dramatic reversal. The price of oil could fall; the stock market could celebrate; consumers could overcome their anxieties and resume spending; and business could respond by stepping up capital expenditure. America would end its dependency on Saudi Arabian oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable and negotiations with North Korea could be started without a loss of face. This is what Mr Bush is counting on.

Military victory in Iraq would be the easy part. It is what follows that should give us pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception that has given rise to it. That could happen here.

::George Soros, Financial Times: Bush's inflated sense of supremacy via Cursor

Against my better judgement, I watched a few minutes of the emperor's press conference last night, and was taken aback by his odd tone of voice and speech patterns, notably quieter and slower than normal. Had Rove & Co. coached him to use a gentle presentation -- to soften up the obstinate and maniacal message -- or could it be something else? At least a couple other observers entertained the same suspicion that I did:

Neal Pollack: "George Bush said, seemingly on Quaaludes, that he didn't give a hoot about the the United Nations."

And the Washington Post's TV critic Tom Shales:

Have ever a people been led more listlessly into war? It's tempting to speculate how history would have changed if Winston Churchill or FDR had been as lethargic as Bush about rallying their nations in an hour of crisis. There were times when it appeared his train of thought had jumped the tracks.

Occasionally he would stare blankly into space during lengthy pauses between statements -- pauses that once or twice threatened to be endless. There were times when it seemed every sentence Bush spoke was of the same duration and delivered in the same dour monotone, giving his comments a numbing, soporific aura. Watching him was like counting sheep.

Network commentators by and large tippy-toed around the subject of Bush's curiously subdued performance. But at least Terry Moran of ABC News dared to say that the White House press corps had definitely seen Bush "sharper" than he was last night. Tactfully and gingerly, Moran said Bush seemed to be "trying to keep his mannerisms as cool as possible" as he fielded questions and spoke of ultimatums. The lethargy was contagious; correspondents were almost as logy as Bush was.

... The contrast between the foggy Bush of last night and the gung-ho Bush who delivered a persuasive State of the Union message to Congress not so long ago was considerable. Maybe Bush thought he was, indeed, coming across as cool and temperate instead of bored and enervated, and this was simply a rhetorical miscalculation. On the other hand, it hardly seems out of order to speculate that, given the particularly heavy burden of being president in this new age of terrorism -- a time in which America has, as Bush said, become a "battlefield" -- the president may have been ever so slightly medicated.

He would hardly be the first president ever to take a pill.

A couple weeks ago at the neighborhood magazine shop I was siezed by the uncontrollable urge to purchase a stack of worthy, if pricey, independent publications. To spread the responsibility for my free-spending ways, I urged my partner to pick out one for herself, my treat, choosing something she likely wouldn't buy were she paying for it herself. She chose the inaugural issue of the gobshite quarterly... taking a look at it myself, I was taken aback by the diverse lineup of prominent authors. How many magazines publish Paul Krassner and Andrea Dworkin between the same set of covers?

Another distinctive feature: is publishing the works of authors such as Luisa Valenzuela in the original language and in translated versions, side by side; and an organizational structure scattered about the globe, apparently without a central location in the physical world... though Portland seems to exert a mild gravitational pull.

Credit where it's due, them gobshitters (sorry) are going for it. Worth a look.

There's life in the old boy yet. Some excerpts from Norman Mailer's Only in America:

Political leaders and statesmen are serious men even when they appear to be fools, and it is rare to find them acting without some deeper reason they can offer to themselves. It is those covert motives in the Bush administration upon which I would like to speculate here. I will attempt to understand what the President and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture.

...September 11 altered everything. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For years we had been watching maelstrom extravaganzas on the tube, and enjoying them. We were insulated. A hundredth part of ourselves could step into the box and live with the fear. Now, suddenly, the horror had shown itself to be real. Gods and demons were invading the US, coming right in off the TV screen. This may account in part for the odd guilt so many felt after September 11. It was as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.

... America had been putting up with the ongoing expansion of the corporation into American life since the end of World War II. It had been the money cow to the United States. But it had also been a filthy cow that gave off foul gases of mendacity and manipulation by an extreme emphasis on advertising. Put less into the product but kowtow to its marketing. Marketing was a beast and a force that succeeded in taking America away from most of us. It succeeded in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. One has only to cite fifty-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box with balconies, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways with their vistas into the void; and, beneath it all, the pall of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant's tactile senses, plastic, front-runner in the competition to see which new substance could make the world more disagreeable. To the degree that we have distributed this crud all over the globe, we were already wielding a species of world hegemony. We were exporting the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful American corporations. There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor— only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.

... To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive. Of course, Jesus and Evel Knievel don't consort too well in one psyche. Human rage and guilt do take on their uniquely American forms.

..."Flag conservatives" like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom they didn't give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed.

... To flag conservatives, war now looks to be the best possible solution. Jesus and Evel Knievel might be able to bond together, after all. Fight evil, fight it to the death! Use the word fifteen times in every speech.

There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique to Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. Yes, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. We have our know-how, our can-do. We will dominate the obstacles. Flag conservatives truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must.

If I were George W. Bush's karmic defense attorney, I would argue that his best chance to avoid conviction as a purveyor of false morality would be to pray for a hung jury in the afterworld.