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Thursday, April 08, 2004

I’m Hennery the Fifth, I am

A couple of days ago I had Bush/Macbeth running on the Altermanian slogan, “something extremely ugly this way comes.” But Scott Newstrom reminds me that the proper Shakespearean obsession for fawning Bush fans has always been Henry V.

Newstrom writes:

A consulting company, Movers and Shakespeares, uses the Bard’s plays to present “Fun, Team-Building, Executive Training, Leadership Development & Conference Entertainment based on the insights and wisdom of the Bard . . . as relevant in today’s world as they were 400 years ago!” (Look closely on the Web site, and you’ll find photos of Donald Rumsfeld and Cokie Roberts merrily reciting in costume.) The writer of the Fortune article wanted me to confirm a few of their claims about what Shakespeare’s plays teach us.

Most of these claims were, on the whole, largely innocuous, if blandly reductive and politically conservative. The leaders of the workshops, Ken and Carol Adelman, are both Republican politicos and thus tend to read Shakespeare as a kind of proto-free-market capitalist.

Must . . . remember . . . to breathe.

Whew!  Yes, you read that right, Ken Adelman.  The same Ken Adelman who told us that Iraq would be a cakewalk, the same Ken Adelman who assured us in the 1980s that we could survive a nuclear war by covering ourselves with dirt.  This Ken Adelman is now leading Cokie Roberts and Donald Rumsfeld in “interactive discussions on ethical problems that face leaders and thinkers today.”

Never mind Prince Hal-- let’s pick someone more appropriate to this administration.  How would Falstaff handle the debacle in Iraq, I wonder?  Let’s start with 1 Henry IV, II.iv, and Falstaff’s account of his bravery back in II.ii:

HAL.  What, fought you with them all?

FALSTAFF.  All?  I know not what you call all, but if I fought not with fifty of them, I am a bunch of radish!  If there were not two or three and fifty upon poor old Jack, then am I no two-legg’d creature.

HAL.  Pray God you have not murd’red some of them.

FALSTAFF.  Nay, that’s past praying for.  I have pepper’d two of them.  Two I am sure I have paid, two rogues in buckram suits.  I tell thee what, Hal-- if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face, call me horse.  Thou knowest my old ward.  Here I lay, and thus I bore my point.  Four rogues in buckram let drive at me.

HAL.  What, four?  Thou saidst but two even now.

FALSTAFF.  Four, Hal.  I told thee four.

POINS.  Ay, ay, he said four.

FALSTAFF.  These four came all afront and mainly thrust at me.  I made me no more ado but took all their seven points in my target, thus.

HAL.  Seven?  Why, there were but four even now.

FALSTAFF.  In buckram?

HAL.  Ay, four, in buckram suits.

FALSTAFF.  Seven, by these hilts, or I am a villain else.

Apply to Bush/Cheney as you see fit.  EPA assessments of Ground Zero.  Medicare overhaul.  National Guard service.  Mercury poisoning.  Troop pay and veterans’ benefits.  Counterterrorism planning.  Accounts of Bush’s activities on September 11, 2001.  WMD and yellowca

WARNING.  Your server’s capacity for satire has been exceeded.  Any attempt to comment further on Ken Adelman, Shakespeare, and George Bush will result in an illegal operation that will shut down michaelberube.com.

Posted by Michael on 04/08 at 05:36 AM
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Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Finally, a war we can win decisively

Brought to you by your very own Department of Justice.  Onward, Christian soldiers!

In the 22nd paragraph, attorney Paul Cambria is quoted as saying, “I think a lot of adults would say this is not what they had in mind, spending millions of dollars and the time of the courts and FBI agents and postal inspectors and prosecutors investigating what consenting adults are doing and watching.”

Which just goes to show you what a decadent secular-humanist bubble people like Cambria are living in.  Those of us who walk in the ways of wonder-working Providence know very well what fate will befall these pro-fornication “adults”:

Tens of thousands of foot soldiers dropped their weapons, grabbed their heads or their chests, fell to their knees, and writhed as they were invisibly sliced asunder.  Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of God.

Forget about the blindness and the hairy palms-- fear the invisibly-slicing-asunder wrath of the Almighty, ye consumers of sexually explicit representations!

UPDATE:  Over at Alicublog, Roy Edroso has just the bumper sticker we’ve been waiting for.  Many thanks to Jeremy Osner for the tip.

Posted by Michael on 04/07 at 03:10 AM
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Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Non sequitur day

It is my considered opinion that Iraq is a bloody mess and that the next week or so will be critical for the entire region and that even if Kerry wins in November he’s going to be faced with a small handful of options each of which is worse than all the rest.

In the NHL playoffs:  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.

Congratulations to my (adopted) St. Louis Blues for making the playoffs for 25 consecutive years-- a record among major professional sports franchises.  Of course, for the first eleven years of that streak, the NHL was a 21-team league in which 16 teams made the postseason, leading the late sportswriter Dick Young to quip that if World War II had been conducted like a hockey season, Poland would have made the playoffs.  Still, in recent years teams have needed roughly 90 points to make the playoffs, and sometimes in the West even that doesn’t cut it.

I know this doesn’t matter to any of you.  But I’m completely overwhelmed with horrible news around the world, and this might be the last gasp for the NHL in its current form.  During next year’s lockout, whenever I want to avoid reports of how the Iraqi resistance is galvanizing Islamists in Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, I’ll be reduced to watching my old videotapes of the New York Rangers’ 1994 Cup victory.

Posted by Michael on 04/06 at 05:21 PM
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News from everywhere

Marc Cooper has a new blog, and it’s about bloody time, too.  I see that Micah Sifry has already commented on it, which is good, because that reminds me that Micah Sifry has a blog too (as I should have noticed long ago).  I’ll be adding these guys to the blogroll, but in the meantime, blogroll right over to their blogs yourself, and say hello.  And if there are any more straggling, earthbound progressive-left writers out there without blogs, get with the program already.

In more traditional media:  Paul Krugman continues, valiantly, to try to keep pace with the flurry of Bush Administration outrages.  This time it’s the new “pro-mercury poisoning” position of the White House:

For some pollutants, setting a cap on total emissions, while letting polluters buy and sell emission rights, is a cost-efficient way to reduce pollution. The cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, has been a big success. But the science clearly shows that cap-and-trade is inappropriate for mercury.

Sulfur dioxide is light, and travels long distances: power plants in the Midwest can cause acid rain in Maine. So a cap on total national emissions makes sense. Mercury is heavy: much of it precipitates to the ground near the source. As a result, coal-fired power plants in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan create “hot spots”—chemical Chernobyls—where the risks of mercury poisoning are severe. Under a cap-and-trade system, these plants are likely to purchase pollution rights rather than cut emissions. In other words, the administration proposal would perpetuate mercury pollution where it does the most harm. That probably means thousands of children born with preventable neurological problems.

So how did the original plan get replaced with a plan so obviously wrong on the science?

The answer is that the foxes have been put in charge of the henhouse. The head of the E.P.A.’s Office of Air and Radiation, like most key environmental appointees in the Bush administration, previously made his living representing polluting industries (which, in case you haven’t guessed, are huge Republican donors). On mercury, the administration didn’t just take industry views into account, it literally let the polluters write the regulations: much of the language of the administration’s proposal came directly from lobbyists’ memos.

New Bush/Cheney ‘04 slogan:  Steady leadership and thousands of children born with preventable neurological problems.

Shorter version for bumper sticker use:  Bush/Cheney:  A Fox in Every Henhouse.

Last and least, my latest essay ("Race and Modernity in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist”wink is now available in your grocer’s freezer, if your grocer’s freezer contains the new Dalkey Archive Press book, The Holodeck in the Garden:  Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction.

Posted by Michael on 04/06 at 07:08 AM
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Monday, April 05, 2004

Iraq

On the home front, Eric Alterman has it right:  those of us who opposed this war were right about every single goddamn thing that matters.  We didn’t predict specific people, places, and atrocities, but we did say, as Eric reminds us, that

The invasion of Iraq will cause, not prevent, terrorism.

The Bush administration was not to be trusted when it warned of the WMD threat.

Going in without the U.N. is worse than not going in at all.

They were asleep at the switch pre-9/11 and have been trying to cover this up ever since.

And they manipulated 9/11 as a pretext for a long-planned invasion of Iraq.

Any occupation by a foreign power, particularly one as incompetently planned as this one, will likely create more enemies than friends and put the U.S. in a situation similar at times to Vietnam, and at other times, similar to Israel’s occupation of Lebanon; both were disasters.

An invasion of Iraq will draw resources and attention away from the genuine perpetrators of the attack on us, and allow them to regroup for further attacks.

Let’s see here . . . we were right on the first count.  We’re looking pretty good on the second count.  Third count, OK.  Fourth count, fifth count, take it away, Richard Clarke and Rand Beers.  Right on the sixth count.  Seventh count, hmmmm, yes, on this one we were right.

But this is one of those things about which it is no consolation to be right.  Check out Zayed’s chilling account of the latest from Baghdad (and here’s Zayed on Fallujah).  And thanks to Marianne Cotugno for the link to Zayed’s site.

Posted by Michael on 04/05 at 02:17 PM
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But can he sing “what a fool believes”?

Everybody’s on about the portrait of buff boxing Jesus that appeared in this Sunday’s New York Times article by David Kirkpatrick.  But I have to say I prefer smirking turtlenecked Jesus, looking here like a young Michael McDonald.

UPDATE:  A reader writes in to exclaim that smirking turtlenecked Jesus has a mullet.  I disagree-- He has too much hair on the sides for a proper mullet.  For the full mullet effect I think we’ll have to wait until Stephen Sawyer gets around to painting Hockey-Playing Jesus.

Posted by Michael on 04/05 at 09:01 AM
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