don’t make it a big deal; don’t be so sensitive
If February were luminescent, the last light of the shortest month would now be waning in Oakland--a beautiful pastel sunset against the frozen Minnesota sky of my imagination. As I type this it is a new month in forty-five states but here March remains several minutes in the future.
The final day of this eventful month by coincidence was the first day I bothered to listen to Tidal by Fiona Apple all the way to its tenth and final track, "Carrion." Don't misunderstand me, the album has its share of filler. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sleep with a mid-90s version of you, and in any case doesn't deserve to ever know what real love is. But the baroque ferocity of the album's ostensibly lounge-y conclusion has inspired A Century of Fakers to usher out February of this late year with a pathetic virtual observance of mardi gras. With a tall boy of Sapporo, three Fiona Apple compact discs and memories of New Orleans from the early aughts to keep me company, I offer you these thoughts on the ostensibly lounge-y yet ferocious month nearly past.
The three top stories in the United States to my mind are the same as they were in January, and in December for that matter:
The stories that successively dominated news cycles this month were, however, none of the above. They were the Vice-President shooting a 78-year old man in the face and the Dubai port controversy. (Thankfully no one in America really cared about the Torino games.) Neither story cast the Bush administration in a particularly favorable light, and so if you read last weekend that a CBS poll found the president's approval rating to be 34%--yet another low for his presidency--you could be forgiven for thinking that things are going badly for the president.
In fact, this rapid succession of pseudo-scandal is a massive diversion from the fact that the Bush administration continues to operate with near-total impunity on the real issues of today: his disastrous Iraq policy remains unchanged, the people who used to comprise the 80%-black population of New Orleans remain criminally neglected six months after a predictable and possibly avoidable human disaster, no one yet has any idea the extent to which the president authorized the National Security Agency to spy on the signals communications of American citizens in their own homes and offices.
A recent CNN/USA Today poll that showed 21% of Americans think it's likely that their phone has been tapped by the government. Combine that with the CBS poll and one can make a case that Americans are not idiots. Just sixteen months after he was reelected with 51% of the vote the president can find support from only 1 in 3 Americans. This would be a liability if the president in any way sought support from the American people. But the president has 35 months left in office, is no longer running for anything and has made it very clear that he does not care what the American people think. Meanwhile, his policies remain essentially unchallenged by the minority party and the mainstream media. In the absence of stories being prioritized, placed in context and followed-up on adequately, President Bush--a tin president if there ever were one--will continue to pass for teflon.
Last weekend we were greeted by U.S. newspapers pronouncing a causal relationship between the bombing of one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines and a nascent sectarian civil war. It was as if the press were searching for a historical moment with which to pinpoint the birth of this civil war (and, sadly for the world, the final throes of a largely tolerable drôle de guerre). The news in February was also dominated by reports of violent protests against anti-Semetic Danish cartoons on three continents. When this wasn't being laughed off as the collective immaturity of a major world religion it was being analysed as a possible opening salvo in the long-predicted "clash of civilizations," a child's fantasy term for global civil war.
Well, no. The bombing of a symbol and anti-cartoonist riots are signs, not causes. Let's hope that for once enough people with enough power can see past the monumental history of the present that is being written for us and can analyse the situation with some sense of epidemiology, not necessarily rationally but without at least resorting to chimeras and fetishes.
The final day of this eventful month by coincidence was the first day I bothered to listen to Tidal by Fiona Apple all the way to its tenth and final track, "Carrion." Don't misunderstand me, the album has its share of filler. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sleep with a mid-90s version of you, and in any case doesn't deserve to ever know what real love is. But the baroque ferocity of the album's ostensibly lounge-y conclusion has inspired A Century of Fakers to usher out February of this late year with a pathetic virtual observance of mardi gras. With a tall boy of Sapporo, three Fiona Apple compact discs and memories of New Orleans from the early aughts to keep me company, I offer you these thoughts on the ostensibly lounge-y yet ferocious month nearly past.
The three top stories in the United States to my mind are the same as they were in January, and in December for that matter:
- Iraq,
- New Orleans,
- the domestic wiretapping controversy.
The stories that successively dominated news cycles this month were, however, none of the above. They were the Vice-President shooting a 78-year old man in the face and the Dubai port controversy. (Thankfully no one in America really cared about the Torino games.) Neither story cast the Bush administration in a particularly favorable light, and so if you read last weekend that a CBS poll found the president's approval rating to be 34%--yet another low for his presidency--you could be forgiven for thinking that things are going badly for the president.
In fact, this rapid succession of pseudo-scandal is a massive diversion from the fact that the Bush administration continues to operate with near-total impunity on the real issues of today: his disastrous Iraq policy remains unchanged, the people who used to comprise the 80%-black population of New Orleans remain criminally neglected six months after a predictable and possibly avoidable human disaster, no one yet has any idea the extent to which the president authorized the National Security Agency to spy on the signals communications of American citizens in their own homes and offices.
A recent CNN/USA Today poll that showed 21% of Americans think it's likely that their phone has been tapped by the government. Combine that with the CBS poll and one can make a case that Americans are not idiots. Just sixteen months after he was reelected with 51% of the vote the president can find support from only 1 in 3 Americans. This would be a liability if the president in any way sought support from the American people. But the president has 35 months left in office, is no longer running for anything and has made it very clear that he does not care what the American people think. Meanwhile, his policies remain essentially unchallenged by the minority party and the mainstream media. In the absence of stories being prioritized, placed in context and followed-up on adequately, President Bush--a tin president if there ever were one--will continue to pass for teflon.
Last weekend we were greeted by U.S. newspapers pronouncing a causal relationship between the bombing of one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines and a nascent sectarian civil war. It was as if the press were searching for a historical moment with which to pinpoint the birth of this civil war (and, sadly for the world, the final throes of a largely tolerable drôle de guerre). The news in February was also dominated by reports of violent protests against anti-Semetic Danish cartoons on three continents. When this wasn't being laughed off as the collective immaturity of a major world religion it was being analysed as a possible opening salvo in the long-predicted "clash of civilizations," a child's fantasy term for global civil war.
Well, no. The bombing of a symbol and anti-cartoonist riots are signs, not causes. Let's hope that for once enough people with enough power can see past the monumental history of the present that is being written for us and can analyse the situation with some sense of epidemiology, not necessarily rationally but without at least resorting to chimeras and fetishes.
posted by N8 at 11:46 PM
2 Comments:
Chimeras rock. John Conyers wants you to help take back the House in '06 and make the minority party the majority. Choose a contested House race (Heather Wilson in NM?)and I'll join you in October.
censorship is fascism
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