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From the muted post-horn mailbag

I got the coolest letter from the Kerry people yesterday!  Or at least I think I did.  It‚Äôs hard to tell these days with all these simulacra and forgeries floating around out there.

Dear Michael B?©rub?©:

Thank you for not giving us any unsolicited campaign advice.  We‚Äôre having a hard enough time as it is, trying to stay focused on jobs and health care while Iraq descends inexorably into the abyss.

But in all honesty, we have to say that your blog hasn‚Äôt really been helping lately.  We liked your RNC coverage, but since then, your deliberate post-convention confounding of ‚Äúoriginals‚Äù and ‚Äúparodies‚Äù has left many voters confused, and your strange Mobius-strip exchange with Tristero seems to have eerily anticipated the Killian memo phenomenon, in which ‚Äúthe real‚Äù is dissolved in a bubbling vat of textuality only to appear again in the form of a forgery that tells the truth.  It‚Äôs hard, amidst all this nonsense, to keep people focused on the fact that George Bush is the worst president since James Garfield fell into that coma.  (Actually many of us would prefer Garfield-in-a-coma.  But we can‚Äôt very well say that on the stump.)

Moreover, we believe that your literary/theoretical allusions are costing us critical support among undecided voters.  Not because they‚Äôre postmodern and/or poststructuralist, but because they are finally incoherent.  One day it‚Äôs Pynchon and Derrida, the next day it‚Äôs Borges and Baudrillard, the day after that it‚Äôs Nabokov and a smirking reference to Scooby-Doo Where Are You? And what‚Äôs all this business about show tunes?  Is that a reference to Trent Duffy‚Äôs explanation of Bush‚Äôs bicycle accident this summer ("suffice it to say he wasn’t whistling show tunes")?  Our internal polling suggests that this eclectic post-something blog-soup has cost us six points in Ohio and another four in Wisconsin.  Please, for the sake of the party, knock off this silliness and get back to your often-promised, never-delivered entry on Tom Frank.

Sincerely yours,

The Kerry People

Well, of course I‚Äôm very sorry to have contributed to the general confusion.  I‚Äôm writing that take on What‚Äôs the Matter with Kansas? this week, and right now it‚Äôs part of a talk I‚Äôm going to deliver at Binghamton University next Monday, so I can‚Äôt post it ‚Äòtil I get back from Binghamton‚Äì just in case I have any readers in Binghamton who‚Äôll show up to my talk and say, ‚Äúthis stuff again?  Why did we come to see you speak if you‚Äôre just going to repeat the things you say on your blog?‚Äù

More importantly, the Kerry people have a point about my incoherence.  Internal theoretical consistency has never been my strong suit!  So I think I should open this question to the floor, or whatever passes for the floor in the blogosphere.  It’s time for another Reader Poll!

The Swift Boat Vet/ Killian memo phase of the 2004 campaign is best captured by the figure of:

___ Borges
___ Kafka
___ Pynchon
___ Baudrillard
___ Nabokov
___ Scooby-Doo
___ Derrida
___ Lee Atwater (note that one of the minor titles in the Jerome Kern songbook is “Good Old Atwater”!)
___ I don’t know and I don’t care– in fact, I’m not even sure I want Kerry to inherit the debacle that will face a U.S. president in 2005, and I’m hanging on only because I cannot bear to contemplate a Supreme Court made up of Charles Pickering, Priscilla Owen, and Tomas de Torquemada.
___ Are you ever going to say anything about the NHL lockout?

Over to you, folks.

UPDATE:  In comments, Tim mentions “forged memos that are true and real memories that are false.” Which reminds me-- what about Philip K. Dick?  Some people have lately informed me that the United States now has an android television network that simulates an actual news network, with simulacra of “journalists” and “analysts” who are indistinguishable from real journalists and analysts except by means of the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test (and even then, Voigt-Kampff has an accuracy rate below 70 percent).  This sounds too much like the alternate police station in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, so I haven’t paid much attention to these people.  But could it be true?

Posted by on 09/16 at 01:50 AM

  1. Actually, I think the figure of Bruce Willis’ character in 12 Monkeys best captures the Swift Boat Vet/ Killian memo phase of the 2004 campaign.
    Present becomes past becomes present in an awe-inspiring blur that leaves the common man with the only option of eating spiders and cutting out their own teeth.
    Truth becomes subject to perception (er ... sorry for the Quantum Physics) and perception becomes lunacy, (and thus through the transitive property of equality Truth becomes Lunacy ... sound familiar?) and the safest place is the looooooooooooooooony bin. 
    Seems pretty accurate.
    -Michiel

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  04:55 AM

  2. Damn!  How could I forget 12 Monkeys?  Now I’m going to go around twitching like Brad Pitt’s character all day long.  I definitely should’ve given everyone a “Terry Gilliam” option.  And need I point out that the guy who turns out to be responsible for the release of the virus looks an awful lot like Karl Rove?

    Posted by Michael  on  09/16  at  05:01 AM

  3. I was tempted to say Baudrillard until I realized I don’t know who the hell he is.  A better choice would be Baudelaire because the whole thing smells like one of his sick-ass flowers.  Of course, Derrida is a good choice because, more than anyone else, his name best suits his philosophy.  Borges’ writings, without the balloons, represent well the dream state I enter when considering the state of politics, but perhaps they aren’t nightmarish enough.  Nabokov doesn’t do because love for him is a general theme, not just one between OPGYN and patient.  Kafka’s world is too tightly drawn. Scooby-Doo’s Fred, Velma and Daphne represent the elitist elements of the the Democratic Party, Shaggy the hapless political operative, and Scooby the frightened leftist blogger. Add that to the mind control experiments tried repeatedly by their adversaries and on the surface and you find a good parallel but Scooby-Doo was over in a half an hour I don’t think this election is ever going to end. Pynchon, with his culinary fetishes and random bombs depicts best the mood of this election season.  I’d buy into the Lee Atwater figure only if “Ol’ Man Riber” refers to the Mekong and “Intermezzo” is about one man’s journey away from National Guard Duty.  Check that.  Why do I keep confusing Lee Atwater with Jerome Kern?  In sum, no figure fully represents the 2004 election season and since I think that Charles Pickering was a great American astonomer and wouldn’t mind him on the Supreme Court I must conclude - when are you going to say something about the NHL lockout?

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  05:10 AM

  4. Anti Borges, by being both non-magical and unrealistic. How else can you explain forged memos that are true and real memories that are false?
    Still the NHL lockout is a much more fundamentally important issue than the election. We have had bad presidents before but no hockey? Truely the end is near.

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  05:15 AM

  5. Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance.

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  05:52 AM

  6. I vote for Karl Rove, because he clearly figured out how to instrumentalize the lessons of these authors: forge the truth so you can dismiss it as a lie.  This is a great trick, right: “the Swift Boat Vet/ Killian memo phase” has now framed the election as a choice between a man who completely fabricated his service in Vietnam and a man who not only served honorably in the National Guard but whose service has been besmirched by ideologues who will stop at nothing-- innuendo, distortion, even blatant lies-- in prosecuting their case. Sorcery, I tell you.

    jwb

    Posted by Jimbo  on  09/16  at  06:08 AM

  7. Torquemada on the Supreme Court.  Oooo-eeee!  Kinky!

    Posted by Bean  on  09/16  at  06:17 AM

  8. Spent all morning try to find Binghamton University in a Borges story.  I give up! Where can I find it, Michael?

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  07:05 AM

  9. Shouldn’t be all that hard, Chris-- it’s in the northeastern region of the desert of the Real.  I suggest you check Yahoo! or perhaps Volume XLVI of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia.

    Posted by Michael  on  09/16  at  07:47 AM

  10. I was going to say Borges, with some “garden of forking paths” reference, but then I realized that Unfit For Command was really a rewriting of Quixote. So, I vote Pierre Menard.

    But! The Karl Rove/John O’Neil right-wing mudslinging/truth-creating machine is not unlike Kafka’s torture apparatus. At least, having to listen to/read about is similar.

    By the way, are we talking about “Kerry” or Kerry? I always forget. Maybe I vote Derrida, then. Or Bertrand Russell.

    Can I vote for Seinfeld?

    Posted by Chris  on  09/16  at  08:19 AM

  11. But Seinfeld is too self-aware, no? 

    I have to say that I think it’s entirely appropriate that ‚Äúthe Swift Boat Vet/ Killian memo phase” has completely distracted you, Michael, from discussing what is really important, namely, the lockout.  Your blog really does reflect reality. —No, make that “reality.”

    forged in truth, signed in counterfeit,

    jwb

    Posted by Jimbo  on  09/16  at  08:47 AM

  12. I’m kind of obsessed with how language is being used by this administration (and how poorly prepared the average American is, lately, to understand this—unfortunately).  I’m going to be writing something about it in my own blog.  In the meantime, here’s a link http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/911/cassuto.cfm which I just googled.  Berube, you’re on the front lines!

    Posted by Bean  on  09/16  at  08:52 AM

  13. Did Michael write this post? If you look hard enough, you will see some of the fonts look strange for 2004. This was likely written in Cambodia, circa December 24, 1968.

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  09:47 AM

  14. Pynchon, if only because you seem to relish name-checking The Crying of Lot 49 in your posts…

    Posted by Brad Reed  on  09/16  at  11:09 AM

  15. Hmm . . . now you’ve made me go back and reread the posts from when things started getting really strange back on Sept. 7, and I count four allusions to Pynchon ("Tristero" doesn’t count-- that’s a blog!), three to Borges, three to Nabokov (if you’re interested in true forgeries, it’s worth checking out Pale Fire to catch the discussion of the painter Eystein on page 130), three to The Matrix, three to Monty Python, two to Philip K. Dick, two to Jean Baudrillard, and only one each to Jacques Derrida, Scooby-Doo, and Jerome Kern.  Of course, I may have missed a few-- after all, I didn’t write all these things myself!  At least I don’t remember doing so.  Damn these memory implants.  But the point is that whoever’s writing these posts just can’t seem to make up his mind whether the shadow Bush campaign is postmodern or post-postmodern.  I do know, however, that when people like Brad De Long say, “this is too weird for me”, then I sense that things are getting just weird enough for me.

    Thanks for all your help, folks.  And thanks for the Richard Powers tip, tzuzie!  If I could figure out how to work Prisoner’s Dilemma into this somehow (perhaps with Michelle Malkin’s help), I would. . . .

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  11:37 AM

  16. I think it was Wallace Stevens, who left the Killian papers in a jar in Tennessee, 70 years ago:

    “It took dominion every where.
    The jar was gray and bare.
    It did not give of bird or bush,
    Like nothing else in Tennessee.”

    Or perhaps it was Jello Biafra. That’s what he meant by “Holiday in Cambodia”! It was actually he who was there that Christmas.

    Even scarier, did you know that Jello Biafra is actually Wallace Stevens’ grandson? And I can prove by algebra that he is the ghost of his own father!

    Posted by Amardeep  on  09/16  at  12:38 PM

  17. I’m not sure this site is cleared for allusions to Ulysses, Amardeep.  But you’re very, very close on “Holiday in Cambodia"-- new documents are surfacing that John Kerry wrote the song, as evidenced by the blurred initials “JK” on the original (although-- wait a sec-- that could also be “Jerome Kern").

    Posted by Michael  on  09/16  at  12:44 PM

  18. I will also vote for Pynchon.  Specifically, the down-the-toilet scene in Gravity’s Rainbow.

    Posted by Sean  on  09/16  at  03:32 PM

  19. With all this postmodern literature, I can’t help but plug the fantastic site,

    http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/index.html

    - a place where all the greats have a page. Luckily enough, almost all the ones mentioned in this thread have their own super-subsites, like Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Borges, and Kafka. Check it out!

    And I’d like to submit a hosting of “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”. That Torquemada reference made me giggle.

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  04:51 PM

  20. You are too incoherent for me, Mr Berub?©.

    I will not be reading you any longer.  Ta-ta.

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  05:03 PM

  21. Dang, lost another swing voter right there.  The Kerry People were right!  Hope he wasn’t from Ohio or Wisconsin.  But thanks for the treasure trove of pomo, Tim.  And Sean-- I’ve been down that toilet too.  But I never did the Kenosha Kid.  Love your Bush-Cheney bumper sticker, by the way. . . .

    Posted by Michael  on  09/16  at  05:42 PM

  22. "Garfield-in-a-coma”—wasn’t that a Smiths song?

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  07:15 PM

  23. My vote is for a mix of Deleuze & Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus”, Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle,” De Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life,” and Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s “Love Missile F1-11,” straight up with a lemon twist.

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  07:24 PM

  24. Gaddis & Jack Green come to mind as well, as do my own writings.

    Posted by  on  09/16  at  07:33 PM

  25. I was of the mind that Nick Danger - Third Eye had already determined the motive and identity of the culpable party. Or did I miss something in the Cliff Notes?

    Posted by Kevin Hayden  on  09/17  at  01:19 AM

  26. If it’s Philip Dick, I’d go with The Simulacra, “the story of an America where the whole government is a fraud and the President is an android.”

    Posted by  on  09/20  at  12:58 PM

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