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Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Crucial advice for John Kerry

Listen, big guy, you’ve got to stop listening to advice!*

And all you self-appointed Kerry advisors . . . go read Digby today and get your game face on.

I know it’s frustrating.  Some of us desperately wish that our fair country was also a sane country (or a simulacrum of one!  I’m working on it!), like one of those many industrialized nations in which support for Kerry over Bush runs about 85-15 . . . and in which the spectacle of the Republican convention would’ve dropped Bush’s support from 15 percent to 6.  Or we desperately wish that we could have Jon Stewart step in to debate Bush, just once (partly to see W. react to Jon’s summary of his campaign:  “he drove us into a wall-- but hey, he didn’t blink!").  Or we wish that the other party wasn’t controlled by a consortium of mullahs, kleptocrats, and sociopaths who lie with every utterance and sometimes even with random grunts, gestures, and snores. Well, it would be nice.  Maybe next time!  But right now we have to pull the good old U. S. of A. back from the precipice, even if almost half our fellow citizens will despise us for it.  So don’t waste time in kvetching-- organize.

* Except for unsolicited advice from other hockey players, of course.

Posted by Michael on 09/15 at 01:59 AM
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Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Conference report

Thanks, everyone, for your patience with this new site.  I’m sorry about the formatting problems with the posts in the archive—for some reason, Expression Engine reads dashes as question marks and ?’s not at all.  But I don’t have the time right now to go back and fix every one of 250+ posts to this thing.  So I appreciate your patience.

Thanks also for filling me in on the events of the past few days.  But how come nobody asks me how my weekend went?  A conference on “Blogging and Forgery,” hell, you’d think that would be a hot topic around these parts . . . but I suppose you all think that an academic conference is just wall-to-wall jargon punctuated by “questions” that are really comments.

Let me assure you that this conference was different.  Some of you might even have enjoyed it.  It was held on the labyrinthine campus of the University of Tlön and co-sponsored by the International Kerning Society, which was holding its gala fiftieth annual convention in the same hotel.  I can already hear some of you snickering: the International Kerning Society, my ass, you say, they didn’t even have kerning in 1954, so there’s no way they could have a “gala fiftieth annual convention” today. Well, my smug imaginary-interlocutor insta-specialists, you would be wrong.  The International Kerning Society was originally founded to ensure that the music and lyrics of famous Broadway songwriters would be transcribed and archived in both pica and space-proportional fonts, so that there would be no doubt about their authenticity in the decades to come.  The Society has recently been in the news, what with all the speculation that certain officers in the Texas Air National Guard, who were apparently also aficionados of Broadway show tunes (though their families deny this), ordered and used the very same IBM typewriters favored by the Kerning Society for their archival project.  Well, let me put some of that speculation to rest if I can.

The day I arrived at the conference, happily enough, was the very day that an anonymous Freeper apparently—and I stress apparently—created a computer-generated facsimile of the so-called “Killian memos,” thus launching the now-widely-circulated charge that the memos were forgeries.  Terrified that I might have to rewrite my own paper on “Simulation and Simulacra: The Indeterminacy of the Text in the Age of Electronic Transmission,” which was originally all about Tristero, the Weekly Standard, and my recent personal experience at Madison Square Garden of Forking Paths, I spoke to some people in the Kerning Society to get their take on things.

I don’t have time right now to go into all the relevant details, but here are the highlights of our conversation:

One: according to my sources, the Freepers are right about the Killian memos—more right than they know.  The “facsimile” conjured up by their anonymous contributor is not a facsimile at all—it is the original copy of one of the memos sent to CBS.  The likeliest scenario is that Karl Rove travelled back in time with Microsoft Word and composed the memos in 1972 or 1973, stored them in the Vatican Library in the folio of an obscure edition of Wharfinger’s Courier’s Tragedy, then had them mysteriously “discovered” last month and sent to CBS so as to destroy CBS’s credibility on the eve of the Ben Barnes interview on 60 Minutes.  Another theory has it that John Kerry composed the memos himself in 1968-69 on the very same IBM Executive he took to Vietnam (more on this below), and postdated them four years as part of his long-term plan to run for President against George W. Bush in 2004.  But that seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Two: the paperwork authorizing Kerry’s wartime medals consists of forgeries from start to finish.  It’s not merely that Kerry typed up the paperwork himself—the telltale initials “JKW” are the giveaway on this, precisely because they are not Kerry’s initials and are not proportionally spaced—but that the documents themselves could not possibly have been produced by anything other than WordPerfect 12, which (a) did not exist at the time and (b) which has since produced exact copies of Kerry’s alleged “after-action” reports.  Moreover (and this should be dispositive), during the period 1967-71, Kerry routinely and repeatedly forged his own signature on letters, contracts, and checks, eventually inspiring Jacques Derrida to do the same at the end of his essay “Signature Event Context.” Thus, recent right-wingers’ references to the textual machinations of “ink-stained Derrideans” are, again, more right than they know.

Three: it turns out that Iraq really did try to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger after all.  The “forgery” in that case was in fact a cleverly planted ruse, using typefaces available only in the southern Iraqi region of Uqbar and containing obvious giveaways (such as the famous opening, “DEAR SIR OR MADAM I REQUEST YOUR IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE IN HELPING ME MOVE A GREAT DEAL OF NUCLEAR MATERIAL OUT OF MY COUNTRY") that were meant to discredit US intelligence and divert world attention while Iraq sneakily sought to buy yellowcake on eBay (in order not to leave a paper trail, naturally).  In fact, some people believe this “deliberate forgery” scheme is what gave Rove the idea to travel back to the early 1970s and plant the Killian memos.  But right now there isn’t enough evidence to establish the connection, and besides, the jury is still out on those memos, as I’ve already mentioned.

Whew!  Deep breath, everyone—it’s a lot to take in at once, I know.  Still, I hope I’ve cleared up some things that have been troubling everyone lately.  Who knew that the 2004 campaign would involve so many intricate textual minutiae?  And things are just getting interesting—after all, as one of the conference speakers said in the plenary session, “The methodical fabrication of electronic texts is performing prodigious services for archaelogists.  It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.”

I hope the conference proceedings will be published soon.

Posted by Michael on 09/14 at 09:31 AM
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Monday, September 13, 2004

Mysterious shadowy figures have been following me . . .

ever since I got on the plane home from this conference on “Blogging and Forgery.” I gave a paper on “Simulation and Simulacra:  The Indeterminacy of the Text in the Age of Electronic Transmission,” and the room was full of these guys in suits and sunglasses.  Weird!  Even stranger, despite the topic of the conference and the hi-speed connections in the hotel, I haven’t had access to the Internet for three days, and then I come home to find that my former website has been scrubbed completely clean of content.  Also weird!  (My apologies to the ten or twenty recent commenters we’ve lost in the migration to this new, secret site.)

So I haven’t had a chance to look at any blogs since Thursday.  Did I miss anything?

Posted by Michael on 09/13 at 07:05 AM
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Thursday, September 09, 2004

Memorandum from Karl Rove (blogging as me masquerading as David Gelernter aka Tristero)

Re: Now through November

We got off to a good start post-convention.  I know many of you are upset that we went the warm-and-fuzzy route in New York, and you think we should have devoted more time to hitting Kerry hard, really hard, again and again and again and again and again.  I understand your concerns.  But the convention was for the swing voters.  The rest of the campaign is for us.  Those of you who think we’ve pussyfooted around too long—now’s the time to stand up and be counted.  It’s Republican Time.

From here on in, we’re going to tell the American people just what a Kerry presidency would mean for them.  But it won’t be easy—we’ll have to fight the media the whole way.  Today’s New York Times gives us some idea what we’ll be up against.  See Adam Nagourney’s article, which asks whether Dick Cheney went too far the other day in Des Moines when he said, “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.”

Nagourney—who, as many of you have remarked to me, is emerging as this year’s Clymer— leads the article by asking, “Is it possible for a candidate to go too far, and alienate the very voters he is trying to court?”

As if this spin weren’t heavy-handed enough, the Times follows up with an editorial calling Cheney’s remarks A Disgraceful Campaign Speech.

That’s the Times for you.  But we’re not going to sit on our hands while the Democrats run the most negative campaign in history.

Remember the words of Newt’s GOPAC: Never back off.  Never apologize.

Those words won us the House in 1994, and they will win us the White House in 2004.

And Newt still has his eye on the ball.  His quote today is the one point of light in the Nagourney piece, and it’s what we need to steer by:

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker, hailed what he said was Mr. Cheney’s directness, saying, “Dick Cheney has understated the difference in danger to the United States between a Bush and a Kerry presidency.”

That’s your talking point for the next two weeks: Cheney was not over the line.  On the contrary.  Cheney has understated the danger.

Remember, this fight has only begun.  Cheney’s speech was just the opening shot.  In the next two weeks, we’ll be amplifying his remarks as we get more and more specific about just what kind of apocalypse a Kerry presidency would entail.  (And when you speak to our people at Fox, be sure to use the term “apocalypse”—our base will know what we mean.)

By the end of the month, we will show the American people that a vote for Kerry is a vote that consigns their children to agonizing, fiery deaths.

By mid-October, we will produce a hard-hitting 30-second ad that vividly depicts how a Kerry presidency will open the door to bioterrorist attacks involving flesh-eating bacteria.  We plan a major media buy in fifteen states.

By November 1 we will have contingency plans in place for “preventative detention” of likely Kerry voters in key states.  We currently have Mary Walker and Alberto Gonzales working on a draft of the executive order that will give the President the authority to raise the terror alert level to red in specific neighborhoods and for specific households.  It seems pretty clear even at this early stage that the Constitution gives the POTUS the power to order 48-hour “lock downs” for dissidents who threaten our national security, but I’ll keep you posted on this as I hear from Walker and Gonzales. 

We will need all of you in the coming weeks.  Be strong.  Remember, we have the law on our side—and the victory will go to the bold.  (Get it?  Diebold?  Let’s keep our sense of humor about this, everyone!)

Karl, a.k.a. The Shadow

Posted by Michael on 09/09 at 06:04 AM
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Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Busted!

It didn’t take long for hyper-alert postmodern blogger/reader Tristero to discern that my previous post on David Gelernter was in fact a hoax.  Damn Tristero and his whole shadowy underground society!

Here,

(he writes)

in cyber-homage to the great modern masters Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, Bérubé goes to the enormous trouble of faking a right wing screed and then commenting upon it.

In his post, Bérubé discusses an op-ed improbably entitled “Bush’s Greatness,” composed, Michael tells us, by Yale Professor David Gelernter, a real person known for his unusual opinions.  To provide an extra frisson of verisimilitude, Michael even hacked up a very convincing simulation of the Weekly Standard website upon which Bérubé has embedded the complete text of “Bush’s Greatness.” Ars longa, vita brevis, you betcha!

How did Tristero pierce the veil, you ask?  Well, it appears that at a crucial point in the simulation, my parody of right-wing nuttiness simply jumped the shark:

But then, alas . . .

The article becomes too clever by half. “Professor Gelernter” slips into a rant, devoting paragraph after mind-boggling paragraph to an elaborate comparison of the country of Iraq to . . . Kitty Genovese.

The senses reel at the weird, unexpected juxtaposition of images. A woman bleeding to death and screaming, her only witness the immaculate lawns of Forest Hills. Superimposed over her horror-struck features we perceive an hallucination of Islamists, of fascists, of mercenaries, of American neocons, of God knows what else, all of them clamoring for power, all of them crawling on their bellies in an oil rich Hobbesian landscape.

And thus slips Our Satirist’s mask.

For ‘tis a fact: No rightwing nut, no matter how deranged, no matter how clever, would ever come up with such a completely original (albeit idiotic) comparison.

OK, so Tristero nailed me.  No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, who’s once been set his tryst with Tristero!  But, dear readers, even though I know some of you are tired of finding layer after layer of annoying postmodern irony on this humble blog, I confess that I really thought I could pull this one off with impunity.  Honestly, after my post-convention discovery of Roger Simon’s convention coverage, in which I learned that my parodies of Koch-kissin’, Zell-lovin’ bloggers were but pale shadows of the self-parodies of Koch-kissin’, Zell-lovin’ bloggers themselves, I figured I could attribute any number of bizarro-world lunatic ravings to the wingnuts (even a comparison of Iraq to Kitty Genovese!) and nobody would be the wiser.  So with a little help from my English Department colleague Charles Kinbote, I downloaded the Eystein Reality Generator, an open-source device that tinges any website simulacrum with an eerie pale fire, and put together my elaborate Weekly Standard parody in the course of an afternoon.

And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your weird “Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn” cult!!!

Instead, Tristero has gone ahead and ripped off the mask.  And so today I find in my emailbox a “cease and desist” letter from the legal firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, signed by somebody named Metzger.  It reads, in part:

Dear Michael Bérubé:

We have been informed by our client that your weblog has provided a misleading and possibly fraudulent hyperlink to what purports to be the Weekly Standard website, and that you have made available, by means of this hyperlink, an essay which purports to be an article by Yale computer science professor David Gelernter.

Intellectual property law with regard to Internet websites is admittedly unsettled on matters such as this, but it is our opinion that this hyperlink constitutes actionable copyright infringement as well as material misrepresentation amounting to fraud.  By suggesting that the Weekly Standard would publish an essay so deranged as to compare Iraq to Kitty Genovese, you have done material harm to the Weekly Standard and its reputation as a legitimate journal of conservative opinion and political analysis.

We will shortly be in touch with your attorneys regarding this matter.  In the meantime, our client requests also that we advise you to stop doing your William Kristol impersonation at dinner parties.  Mr. Kristol’s smug, supercilious demeanor is an integral part of his distinctive ‘branding’ as a media personality, and may not be imitated, adopted, or parodied without the express written consent of the Weekly Standard.

So thanks a lot, Mr. Tristero sir.  I hope you’re happy now.

Posted by Michael on 09/08 at 10:30 AM
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Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Neighborhood Wingnut Watch

We all know how impossible it’s been to debate the right on Iraq.  They truly believe that Iraq was behind 9/11 (or the anthrax attacks) or that Iraq wanted to help with 9/11 (or the anthrax attacks) or that Iraq was planning something more or less like 9/11 (or the anthrax attacks) at some point in the future, and that’s why they think of Bush as a resolute, heroic president with a spine of steel.  Trust me on this one—when they hail Bush as a straight talker, it’s not because they’re thinking, “I know I can trust George Bush to offer a tax credit to encourage small businesses and their employees to set up health savings accounts and provide direct help for low-income Americans to purchase them, just like he said in his acceptance speech.  Hell, yes.  Bush is just the kind of ‘tax-credit-to-encourage-small-businesses-and-their-employees-to-set-up-health-savings-accounts’ president we need in wartime.” Nope, it’s about Iraq, always about Iraq.  We haven’t been able to make a dent in this one, nor will we.  Here’s why.

When we say, “He based his case for war on Saddam’s possession of WMD and then didn’t let the inspectors do their job,” they say, “Damn right!  Bush would never give the girlie-men of the UN sovereignty over the United States!”

When we say, “He approved the use of torture and created the conditions for the rape, abuse, torture and killing of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, thus ensuring that Al-Qaeda would have a deep pool of recruits in the Arab world for years to come,” they say, “Shit yes!  None of that John Kerry yes no maybe bowl of mush for terrorists!”

And when we say, “He cooked every piece of intelligence on Iraq, refusing to hear from CIA and DIA officials who dissented from the Feith-Wolfowitz fantasy that the war would be a cakewalk and Americans would be showered with roses,” they say, “Now that’s what I’m talking about!!  Bush is a man through and through—he didn’t move until every piece of intelligence was thoroughly cooked.  None of that femmy liberal-elite ‘steak tartare’ intelligence for Bush—when Dubya cooks intelligence, he does it Texas-style!”

OK, now that we understand there’s nothing we could say that would convince them of anything, let’s take a look at a new essay by Yale computer science professor David Gelernter in the most recent issue of the Weekly Standard.

Gelernter opens by noting that Bush’s opponents are even weirder than lunatics:

IT’S OBVIOUS not only that George W. Bush has already earned his Great President badge (which might even outrank the Silver Star) but that much of the opposition to Bush has a remarkable and very special quality; one might be tempted to call it “lunacy.” But that’s too easy. The “special quality” of anti-Bush opposition tells a more significant, stranger story than that.

I should note at the outset that Gelernter’s essay is not one of those faggy affairs in which you’ll find that flip-floppy French “nuance.” In fact, if you skip ahead to the end of the essay, you’ll learn that Bush is a “progressive president in the best sense,” and that opposition to Bush is the work of “reactionary liberals” who “want everything to stay just the same.” Worse still, Gelernter points out, liberals’ attacks on the president and on “uppity white conservatives” are in fact racist attacks.  No, I am not making this up—Gelernter really says that the “liberal elite” has been launching “racist attacks” on Bush.  (And then, as Gelernter should have added, they take another sip from their chardonnay and denounce racism.  What hypocrites!)

But if you skip ahead to the end, you’ll miss the best part—Gelernter’s analogy between Iraq and Kitty Genovese.  I’ll give you a second to go and put on your Mylex “Irony-Off” protective outergear . . .

OK, good.  Now here we go.  Take it away, Professor Gelernter:

For years the Iraqi people had been screaming, in effect: “Oh, my God. Please help me! Please help me! I’m dying!” How could America have answered, “We don’t want to get involved”? We are the biggest kid on the playground. If we won’t help, who will?

I have just quoted the death-cries of Kitty Genovese, who died on the streets of New York 40 years ago. And I have quoted the response of an onlooker who didn’t feel like helping. Her case still resonates in America’s conscience, and tells us more than we want to know about the president’s enemies.

The New York Times ran the story in March 1964.

“For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

“Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.”

The left wanted America to watch Saddam stab Iraq to death and do nothing. That is the left’s concept of moral responsibility in the post-Cold War world.

Miss Genovese screamed: “Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!”

The Iraqi people were dying. The left had no pity. The Bush-haters were opposed to American “arrogance.” The New York Times shrugged.

So let’s think this one out slowly.  Iraq cried out piteously for an American invasion to deliver Iraqis from Saddam.  But the left refused to listen to Iraqis’ pleas—and that’s the left’s concept of morality for you!

(And I should add that this is not a new phenomenon, either.  Surely Gelernter remembers the travesties of the early 1980s, when Donald Rumsfeld’s organization, “Conservatives for Peace in the Middle East,” held a candlelight vigil for Saddam’s victims while Jimmy “Friend to Thugs” Carter snuck into Baghdad in a daring pre-dawn mission and gave Saddam caches of chemical weapons while the rest of the left rolled over and went back to sleep.)

Now, some of you might be shocked and awed at Gelernter’s audacious Iraq-is-Kitty-Genovese gambit.  Sure, one might be tempted to call it “lunacy.” But that’s too easy.  Because it helps to explain why the warfloggers think they can claim the moral high ground even while supporting and defending everything that went on in Abu Ghraib.

Imagine that the U.S. armed forces came to help poor Kitty Genovese—and then she responded by screaming, “I didn’t want to be occupied by the United States” and blowing up about a thousand American soldiers.  Suddenly she’s not a damsel in distress any more, is she, now—no, now she’s a murderous bitch, and the sooner we can slap a Hefty bag over her head and feed her to the dogs, the better.  If Iraq is somehow Kitty Genovese, then the prowar right’s sense of its unique moral virtue and the prowar right’s vicious rage at Iraqis actually enhance each other.

Against a set of assumptions like Gelernter’s, there’s literally nothing the left can do:  if things were to go well in Iraq, that would prove that Bush was right to invade—and if things go badly, as they have gone for over a year now, it proves a fortiori that Bush was right to invade.  Thus we have the mind-numbing spectacle of a war in Iraq that so far has fulfilled nearly every single one of our predictions and defeated nearly every single one of theirs, but their side turns out to be right and just, because it only goes to show that Bush had the cojones to take it to those [innocent, pleading] [vicious, ungrateful] Iraqis.  We came to save them from Saddam, and this is how they repay us?

The logical problem here is, of course, much wider than Iraq—it applies to the entire War on Terra.  If there are no terrorist attacks, that proves that Bush is right, because he is a strong leader who defeats terrorists; and when terrorist attacks occur, they prove a fortiori that Bush is right, because these terrorist scum remind us of what we’re fighting against—unlike the left, which would prefer to let terrorists stab Kitty Genovese to death and do nothing.

And that is why this humble blog suggests that if you do come across one of these “Bush-is-great-because-he-led-the-charge-to-Baghdad” warfloggers in your neighborhood, you should not attempt to reason with him.  He is extremely dangerous, and may in fact attempt to “liberate” one of your female neighbors.  Instead, report his presence to your local liberal blogger for immediate satirization.  If you insist on taking matters into your own hands, you should first establish a Neighborhood Watch to try to fend off particularly delusional warfloggers with concealed irony, pepper-spray parodies, and other weapons of mass derision.  Check out the Doug Piranha Society nearest you for more details.

Posted by Michael on 09/07 at 05:30 AM
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