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Thursday, April 22, 2004

Kerry/Clinton

I see that Rush Limbaugh’s April 15 speculations about Hillary-as-VP have picked up some commentary from a couple of lefty bloggers I trust, namely, No More Mister Nice Blog and David Neiwert.  OK, it’s last week’s news, but then this week it turns out that Rush’s jocular suggestion that Hillary would have Kerry killed-- “if Kerry wins there’s always Fort Marcy Park"-- is now making the rounds in what passes for conservative “comedy,” as you can find in this Lloyd Grove bit on FoxNews.com pundit Julia Gorin (also linked by Neiwert):

“John Kerry better hope Hillary doesn’t decide to become his running mate. Does he really think she’ll let him live long enough to see the first 100 Days? She’s not waiting four years to become President; she’ll let him get inaugurated, but then he’ll go the way of Ron Brown, Vince Foster and Buddy the dog.”

So everybody’s all up in a lather about these little far-right wingnut assassination fantasies.  Neiwert says “anyone with an ounce of decency in them should be raising hell about this.” But I think you all are missing the point, on two counts.

First and foremost, there’s no way Hillary would have John Kerry killed in Fort Marcy Park.  Remember:  we never use the same strategem twice, unlike our plodding, unimaginative GOP counterparts who just keep tinkering with Democratic Senate candidates’ small planes.  As Ishmael Reed wrote in Mumbo Jumbo, with regard to the Freemasons’ plans to assassinate Warren G. Harding,

They can’t use the lone psychopath emerging suddenly as the President’s party enters the train station.  They used that with Garfield.

Hillary is so much craftier than to redo the Vincent Foster routine.  After all, look how deftly she got Rush himself hooked on drugs!  Even Rush doesn’t realize it-- yet!

Second, most liberals and progressives I know tend to think that when the wingnuts talk about assassination, they’re engaging in projection pure and simple; unable to acknowledge their own murderous desires, the wingnuts attribute them to precisely the enemies they most fervently wish to kill.  I think this couldn’t be more wrong.

Think back to the ur-text of Rush Limbaugh’s murder fantasies, from way back in 1995, long before Ann Coulter had made a career out of such things:

“I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for.” —Denver Post, December 29, 1995 (thanks to Truthout for preserving this one).

Now think of Florida state representative Jennifer Carroll’s little joke, just this past Saturday, about Hillary being assassinated (thanks to Jesse at Pandagon for the link):

Carroll opened her remarks during a discussion of Senate races by making a joke about Clinton. She said the New York senator and former first lady was visited by the ghosts of three presidents - Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln - and asked each what she could do to help the nation.

Carroll said Lincoln’s response was “Go to a theater.” Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater in Washington.

Florida Democratic Party Chairman Scott Maddox and Welch called for an apology.

“I am shocked that an elected official would suggest anything having to do with an assassination of a U.S. senator. She should apologize,” Maddox said. “It’s completely fair to joke about a policies or personal traits, but to joke about assassination is in poor taste.

Carroll said she didn’t think the joke was inappropriate.

“You infer what you want to infer, but I never said assassinate, or kill or maim,” Carroll said.

Point is, people like Carroll and Limbaugh aren’t failing to acknowledge their fantasies of murder; they’re expressing them loud and clear.  This isn’t projection, folks, it’s something else entirely.  And I’m taking the time from my busy schedule to tell you all what it is.

It’s the wingnut version of ‘60s nostalgia.

Seriously.  You didn’t think that conservatives could be nostalgic for the sixties?  Please.  Those were good times for right-wing crazies.  Back then, you know, they didn’t have to mount these tedious, expensive, time-consuming smear campaigns against annoying liberals (oh, the Drudgery of it all).  They could just kill ‘em! Evers, Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney, King, the Kennedys . . . dude, those were the days.

Trust me-- underneath these seemingly brutal right-wing fantasies there’s a core of real pain, a heartfelt lament for a bygone era and a simpler time.

Posted by Michael on 04/22 at 06:18 AM
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Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Home game

Tomorrow at 9, my B league hockey team, the Capitals, plays its final game of the season.  I come into the game with 48 goals on the year, and my team comes in having lost only 9 of its 39 games so far (I’ve played in 29 of those).  We play the team that’s accounted for 6 of those 9 losses; we’ve beaten them three or four times.  Should be a good matchup.

In other news, my son Nick turns 18 tomorrow.

Hmm, what to do.  Final game of the season, Nick’s 18th birthday.  Final game of the season. . . .

I am kidding.  We’re taking Nick out to dinner someplace very nice.  And the Capitals will just have to wait til next year.

I’ll try to get back to the usual mix of serious/facetious blogging later this week.  In the meantime, please wish Nick a very happy 18th.

Posted by Michael on 04/21 at 11:31 AM
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Tuesday, April 20, 2004

On the road agin

So what do I do with myself on these academic versions of business trips?  You know, while Janet is home taking Jamie to school and doing his homework with him at night?  Mostly, work work work.  Sunday I had the afternoon to myself, and read a book manuscript for an academic press.  Answered email at night, after people from Ohio State came and took me to dinner (blackened grouper, thank you, very nice).  Yesterday I did (1) a graduate seminar in disability studies, taught by Brenda Brueggemann; (2) a lunch roundtable on the “utility” of the arts and humanities, based on an essay I published last year; and (3) a two-hour symposium with a dozen graduate students, based on a couple of things I’ve written on disability and a couple of things on the profession of literary study.  The students came with great questions.  Today I’m speaking at this conference.  I have the whole morning to myself, which means answering more email, writing a letter of recommendation, writing a draft of a short essay, replying to my students’ seminar comments, and just a bit of blogging (that would be what I’m doing right now!  with the very same pen you gave me for my birthday!).

But occasionally I do find the time to relax and do nothing useful.  Even though I had a long day yesterday beginning at 6:30 am, I got back from dinner at 9:30 determined to catch the end of the Bruins-Canadiens game 7 and the entire (what a luxury) Flames-Canucks game 7.  The Flames-Canucks series has been beyond belief fabulous, with the Flames coming back from a 4-0 deficit in game six (that’s nearly unheard of, you hockey neophytes out there, especially in these dark times when NHL offensive production has fallen to levels associated with Mini-Mite Soccer Leagues) to lose anyway in triple overtime.  Because I believe that the entire Vancouver franchise should be cosmically punished unto the seventh generation for the Todd Bertuzzi incident, I’ve been pulling for the Flames (also, they haven’t won a playoff series since 1989), but because the game began at 10:30 pm Eastern, I wasn’t sure I was going to have the stamina or the intestinal fortitude to see the whole thing.

So when the Flames’ Jarome Iginla scored his second goal of the game with just under ten minutes to play to put Calgary up 2-1, I thought justice would be done.  (Show of hands:  how many people know that Iginla scored 41 goals this year, tied for the league lead, returning to his 2001-02 form when he was the NHL’s leading scorer, and that he’s a Player of Color?  I didn’t think so.) Imagine my dismay, then, when-- in the waning seconds of the game, after the Canucks pull their goaltender for an extra skater-- Iginla backhands it into Calgary ice, just missing the net, then weirdly steps on his stick and falls, allowing the Canucks’ Markus Naslund to skate the length of the ice and take a last shot on the Flames’ net . . . whereupon the Canucks’ Matt Cooke picks up the rebound and flips the puck over Flames goalie Miikka Kiprusoff’s left shoulder with 5.7 seconds left.  And we go to overtime.

But I don’t.  It’s just past 1 am at this point, and I’m done.  Fearing another triple-overtime game that will end at 3 am, I roll over, turn off the light, and leave the Flames and Canucks to their own devices.

So this morning I learn that the Flames’ Martin Gelinas ended the game 85 seconds into overtime, on an assist from Iginla.  Well, them’s the breaks.  I needed the extra 16 minutes and 25 seconds of sleep anyway.  But this just goes to show you that there really is no such thing as “momentum” carrying over between periods or between games.  The Canucks should have been despondent and flummoxed in game six, losing that four-goal lead; the Flames should have been despondent and flummoxed in game seven, losing game six after coming back from the depths; and the Flames should have been completely deflated in overtime of game 7, after giving up the tying goal in the final seconds.  But the game doesn’t really depend on how the players feel, or on what sportswriters think about how the players feel.  It depends on what the players do.  Simple, no?

And as you’ll remember, I picked the Flames to begin with.  Back on April 7, in fact:  Lightning over Isles in 6; Bruins over Canadiens in 6; Devils over Flyers in 7; Senators over Maple Leafs in 7; Red Wings over Predators in 5; Blues over Sharks in 7; Flames over Canucks in 6; Avalanche over Stars in 7.

So now I confess that I didn’t really think the Blues or the Devils would do it-- those were my Wishful Thinking picks (partly because I wanted to catch the Devils in New Jersey in late May), so I consider myself right nonetheless on those two.  Lightning, Red Wings, Flames, Avalanche . . . right, right, right, and right.  With Boston and Montreal I forgot that the Bruins have played Montreal 3,744 times in the playoffs, usually with markedly superior teams, but haven’t beaten Montreal since . . . uh . . . hmm . . . since maybe Eddie Shore led them to a 3-0 sweep of the Canadiens in 1929 (this was back in the “leather puck” era).  And as for Toronto-Ottawa tonight, yes, I know Ottawa hasn’t beaten Toronto in a series since the days when the games were played outdoors by guys in handlebar mustaches and it was illegal to make a forward pass in the offensive zone.  But even though I remain fond of ex-Ranger Brian Leetch and wish him well as a Maple Leaf, I just can’t root for a team coached by Pat Quinn.  Think of a cheap-shot artist who spends half his time thugging up the ice and half the time whining about the officiating, and you’ve got Quinn Hockey.  Go Sens.

Whoops, that was way too much hockey blogging.  And checkout time is at noon!  But as my friend Laura Kipnis says, checkout times are for other people.

Posted by Michael on 04/20 at 04:36 AM
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Monday, April 19, 2004

Columbus Day

I’m blogging from an remote undisclosed location at Ohio State and . . . damn!  I just disclosed my location.  I hate it when I do that.  Anyway, the Nader post and the Berman post have generated some interesting responses, and I’ll say more about them when I get a free moment.  No, I won’t say anything more about Nader.  I promised.  But I will say something about third-party voting and why progressives should try to do in the Democratic party what the “movement conservatives” have done in the GOP over the past forty years.

In the meantime, the hockey fans among you-- and the slightly larger group interested in gay politics in and out of sports-- should check out this remarkable story from Salon‘s King Kaufman.  My (adopted) St. Louis Blues may have gone down easily to the Sharks in five games-- indeed, without showing any determination in game five other than a determination to cough up the puck in front of their own net-- but Blues stars Doug Weight and Chris Pronger deserve all kinds of props for their response to the possibility that one of their teammates might in fact be gay.

And lest we forget:  nine years ago today, a Certain Ethnic Group struck terror into our hearts, right here on American soil.

Posted by Michael on 04/19 at 07:46 AM
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Friday, April 16, 2004

For a narrower war

Paul Berman in yesterday’s New York Times:

The war in Iraq may end up going well or catastrophically, but either way, this war has always been central to the broader war on terror. That is because terror has never been a matter of a few hundred crazies who could be rounded up by the police and special forces. Terror grows out of something largerń an enormous wave of political extremism.

The wave began to swell some 25 years ago and by now has swept across a big swath of the Muslim world. The wave is not a single thing. It consists of several movements or currents, which are entirely recognizable. These movements draw on four tenets: a belief in a paranoid conspiracy theory, according to which cosmically evil Jews, Masons, Crusaders and Westerners are plotting to annihilate Islam or subjugate the Arab people; a belief in the need to wage apocalyptic war against the cosmic conspiracy; an expectation that, post-apocalypse, the Islamic caliphate of ancient times will re-emerge as a utopian new society; and a belief that, meanwhile, death is good, and should be loved and revered. . . .

The Sept. 11 attacks came from a relatively small organization. But Al Qaeda was a kind of foam thrown up by the larger extremist wave. The police and special forces were never going to be able to stamp out the Qaeda cells so long as millions of people around the world accepted the paranoid and apocalyptic views and revered suicide terror. The only long-term hope for tamping down the terrorist impulse was to turn America’s traditional policies upside down, and come out for once in favor of the liberal democrats of the Muslim world. This would mean promoting a counter-wave of liberal and rational ideas to combat the allure of paranoia and apocalypse.

The whole point in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, from my perspective, was to achieve those large possibilities right in the center of the Muslim world, where the ripples might lead in every direction. Iraq was a logical place to begin because, for a dozen years, the Baathists had been shooting at American and British planes, and inciting paranoia and hatred against the United States, and encouraging the idea that attacks can successfully be launched against American targets, and giving that idea some extra oomph with the bluff about fearsome weapons. The Baathists, in short, contributed their bit to the atmosphere that led to Sept. 11.

Among American pro-war liberals, Berman is as sincere a democrat as they come (though personally I find his account of “democracy” too thin for my liking, as I argued at the end of this review).  And anyone who wants to oppose the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq-- on principle, rather than in pragmatic terms of budgets and bodybags-- really ought to engage arguments like this rather than dismiss them.  But isn’t it looking as if this invasion and occupation is confirming precisely the “paranoia and hatred” Berman speaks of?  Doesn’t it seem possible that millions of Muslims, let alone the liberal democrats of the Muslim world, are going to understand American “interventions” in the Middle East in terms of the actions and statements of the Bush Administration (think Negroponte, think Sharon and his wall-- and that’s just this week alone) rather than in terms of the professions of good will from a handful of hawkish liberal intellectuals?

As Richard Clarke said in his interview with 60 Minutes:  “Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, ‘America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.’ We stepped right into bin Laden’s propaganda.” (Read Marie Cocco’s Newsday article, quoting Clarke, here).

For now and for the foreseeable future, I’m going to proceed on the belief that Richard Clarke knows more about al-Qaeda than Paul Berman does.

Posted by Michael on 04/16 at 04:33 AM
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Thursday, April 15, 2004

Maybe we’d feel differently if a competent guy had stolen the election of 2000

On the post-conference front, casting around for people who haven’t been stunned into silence or incoherent sputtering by Tuesday night’s spectacle:  Charles Pierce has a few searing paragraphs on the subject, prompting once again the question of when the incandescent Mr. Pierce will get himself his own column/weblog.  Pierce links in turn to Slate‘s William Saletan, who seems finally to have gotten point number one, namely, that the Bush presidency is incredible.  As are the myriad pathologies that have prompted the usual array of toadies and hacks to insist that their man’s latest prime-time meltdown is in fact an index of his steely resolve.

But let’s give 52.13% of our fellow Americans a break-- after all, they didn’t vote for this guy.

Posted by Michael on 04/15 at 08:03 AM
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