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Friday, November 04, 2005

Bear facts:  a brief followup

Apparently there is some dispute, in the comments to Wednesday’s post, about the origin of the phrase, “Exit, raped by a bear.” Brian Cook mentioned it (or did he cite it?  I can never keep that distinction straight), provoking Njorl to ask whether “exit” was a noun or a verb.

Well, that was very funny, Njorl, but in fact, “Exit, raped by a bear” is Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction.  It occurs in A Winter’s Tale, Act IV, scene iv, just after Polixenes and Perdita have that conversation about cross-pollinating plants:

You went to jail in the summer.  It is
Fall now. You will have stories to cover—
Iraqi elections and suicide
Bombers, threats biological and the
Iranian nuclear program.  Out West,
Where you vacation, the aspens will
Already be turning.  They turn in clusters,
Because their roots connect them.  Come back to
Work, Perdita—and life.

Exit, raped by a bear.

I hope that settles matters.  Now, who’s up for a fun-filled modern staging of Coriolanus?

Posted by Michael on 11/04 at 03:48 PM
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Thursday, November 03, 2005

35 and counting

So you’ve been reading around on the liberal blogs, and you’re all excited that George Bush is down to a 35 percent approval rating.  I agree, it’s really something: he is approaching Nixonia, the land Tricky Dick charted when he plummeted from 51 percent in January 1973 to 27 percent in January 1974.  And as Josh Marshall points out, “once you get down below, say, 40% you’ve really, really gotta earn every new lost point on the way down.”

The comparison with past two-term presidents in their fifth year is pretty juicy, too:

Clinton 57
Reagan 65
Nixon 27
Eisenhower 58

And there’s more!  As CBS News points out,

Both Reagan and Clinton endured scandals during their second terms. In January 1998, when facing questions about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton’s job approval ratings actually rose, reaching the low 70s, and remained at least in the 60s throughout the rest of that year. President Reagan’s job approval rating dropped by more than 20 points to 46 percent in November 1986, just after public disclosures about the Iran-Contra scandal.

So 35 percent may not quite be Nixonia, but it’s a border country.  Call it Dubyastan.

But dedicated readers of this humdrum blog know that here at michaelberube.com, we don’t just look at polls.  No, friends, we go inside the polls—so far inside, actually, that we come out the other end.  And this time, in our journey through the center of the poll, we found this intriguing item (some scrolling required):

EVANGELICALS’ INFLUENCE ON BUSH’S DECISIONS

Too much
Now 34%
11/2003 31%

Too little
Now 14%
11/2004 12%

About right
Now 25%
11/2004 35%

Yes, that’s right, folks—one in seven respondents believes that evangelicals have too little influence on George Bush’s decisions. And that number has risen in the past year. Honestly, when I saw that, I uttered those three little words—W. T. F.?

Well, because I’m aware that the left hemiblogosphere can be an echo chamber where natterers like me talk mostly to interlocutors of like mind, I’ve spent the day interviewing some of those people.  I call them “the gang of fourteen percent.” And what they have to say might surprise you.  It certainly surprised me.

“I just don’t trust Bush,” said Joseph Smith of Provo in a phone interview.  “Sure, he said that Intelligent Design should be taught in science classes.  But he didn’t deliver when it really counted.  He didn’t point out that according to the Book of Hosea, chapter seven, verse sixteen, ‘they turn to Biology, they are like a treacherous bow, their professors shall fall by the sword because of the insolence of their tongue.’ I was waiting for Bush to call down His righteous wrath on the idolators of Evolutionary Theory, and I came away with a handful of nada.  Frankly, I don’t believe his heart is really in this fight.”

Smith’s sentiments were seconded by Amy McPherson of Los Angeles, who told me she wasn’t sure about Bush’s Supreme Court nominees.  “Roberts, Miers, Alito, whoever they are,” Amy wrote via email, “they’re not what I was looking for.  The President just gets up and says he ‘knows’ their ‘heart.’ But he never comes out and says that their heart pumps the blood of the Lamb.  I don’t know what’s wrong with this country, when a President can’t stand up before the American people and testify that a Supreme Court nominee has been washed in the blood of the Lamb.  In the meantime, I’m praying for the death of John Paul Stevens and the nomination of James Dobson.  But I’m beginning to lose hope.”

Perhaps most compelling was Richard Elieu of Louisville, who abandoned Bush after the revelations of the torture scandals of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.  “That did it for me,” Rich said to me over CB radio.  “When I saw those photographs and read those reports, I just broke down and cried.  Everyone knows you’re supposed to convert the heathen as you flay them or boil them—it’s been standard practice for centuries.  But here we have a President who seems to have forgotten what torture is all about.  I don’t know where we went wrong, but I do know that the President needs to pay more attention to what we’re really trying to tell him.”

It sounds to me like Bush has some work left to do if he wants to convince his base that he’s listening to the right people.  Because otherwise, the next stop on this line is Nixonia.  All aboard!

Posted by Michael on 11/03 at 10:38 PM
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Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Bear life

With characteristic pithiness, Atrios observes,

Between Horny Bear Scooter and Strip Search Sammy I’m really starting to wonder what the hell is up with your modern Republican party.

But that snippet seemed a little too pithy, so I followed the links to Amanda’s house, and she led me to Shakespeare’s Sister, where I read all kinds of things about Scooter Libby’s 1996 novel, The Apprentice, via this “Talk of the Town” item by Lauren Collins in the latest New Yorker.

All of which is prelude to saying that I was just a-skimmin’ the Internets one fall evening when I came across this passage, penned by Scooter Libby himself:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

And I thought, well, now, between Alito’s approval of a clearly unwarranted strip-search of a ten-year-old girl, and Scooter’s little fantasy of ten-year-old girls being raped by bears, yes, there really does seem to be something quite odd going on here.

Now, I know there is no indication whether, in Libby’s novel, the girls are strip-searched before they are raped by bears, and of course I know there’s no paper trail as to whether Alito would approve of such a search.  And I know, from reading the comments at Shakes’s Sis’s place, that there are some readers out there who’ll say, “get a grip already, you liberals!  Scooter Libby wasn’t proposing legislation that would require ten-year-old girls to be raped by bears!  He was merely fantasizing about ten-year-old girls being raped by bears!  Yeesh!  Whatta bunch of literal-minded types you liberals are!  No appreciation whatsoever for the right-wing literary avant-garde!”

But still, the evidence does seem to be piling up, like unto a heap of naked, abject bodies, that there’s something very rotten, very foul living in the heart of the darkness of the right-wing imagination.  James Dobson and his extraordinary lifelong fetish for beating small children with belts and spoons, even when the children are as young as eighteen months.  Rick Santorum and his fears about men having sex with dogs (for John Cornyn, it was box turtles).  Alberto Gonzales and David Addington (Scooter’s replacement!) and the whole prisoner-torture crew.  Rush Limbaugh and his hand-rubbing glee over the Abu Ghraib photographs, likening them to Madonna kissing Britney on MTV.  And, of course, the Abu Ghraib - Guatanamo phenomenon itself, with its PUC-fucking, its serial rapes of women and young boys, its lethal, days-long beatings of kids who just happened to drive by at the wrong time.

Folks, I know it’s a little hard to believe that the party in power is the party of torture, child-beating, and strip searches of innocent prepubescent girls.  You know, next to this stuff, a little abuse of parliamentary procedure here, a crooked Supreme Court decision there, and couple of well-coordinated smear campaigns against critics of the Iraq War look like plain vanilla evil. 

So I asked a couple of scientists and philosophers what they make of all this, and they said, “Michael, we don’t believe in ‘repression’ or the ‘unconscious’ or weirdo psychoanalytic things like that.  Remember, Freud’s work was never empirically verified; strictly speaking, it’s not a science at all.  You literary critics really should stop making up these extravagant ‘explanations’ of human behavior and listen to the neurobiologists.  After all, Alan Sokal proved that none of you know what you’re talking about.”

Well, since they were no help, I turned back to Shakespeare’s Sister, who writes,

What kind of mind comes up with this shit, dreams up scenarios where children are raped by animals to train them in prostitution? Oh, right. A conservative one. One that has toiled under a lifetime of repression, and spent its time dreaming up legislation designed to control the sexual freedom of women and gays. It isn’t enough that men like Scooter Libby must repress their own sexualities; they have to oppress anyone who doesn’t succumb to exhortations to do the same.

They like to say that the sexual liberation of women and gays has some alleged detrimental affect on society, but I don’t see it. What I do see is a collection of perverts whose own sickness pours out of them given the slightest opportunity, and whose fervent belief yet that they are the moral ones encourages them to create a whole other generation of screwed-up people, as they legislate the promotion of abstinence, repression, in sex ed classes.

To which I have to add, remember the good old days, when Newt Gingrich, accomplished womanizer and sick-wife-abandoner, was telling us that Democratic policies were to blame when Susan Smith left her two kids to drown in a car?

I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things.  The only way you get change is to vote Republican.

Well, that was in 1994.  Since then, y’all have voted Republican.  And my, how things have changed.

I’m beginning to think that Hunter S. Thompson checked out last year only partly out of political despair—and mostly because he had the entirely plausible feeling that not even he could plumb the depths of America’s right-wing imagination any longer.

Posted by Michael on 11/02 at 03:24 PM
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