Domo Arigato Mr. Suharto

Image courtesy of Friendly Dictators trading cards

See: Suharto: A Declassified Documentary Obit courtesy of the National Security Archives.

Field Guide To Not Belonging

The following is a list of subcultures, cults and communities, and the simple reasons I wouldn't / can't / don't fit in with them.

Beggars:
I don't like talking to strangers.

Crackheads:
My momma raised me better than that.

Cyberpunks:
Cool only on paper.

Emos:
I'm not in high school.

Evangelicals:
Even if I had the Truth, I wouldn't want to share it with everyone.

Ginos:
I'm not a displaced peasant from Southern Europe just discovering cars and the possibilities of hair product.

Goths:
I like multiple colours, aesthetic diversity, puppies and the laughter of children.

Haxors:
I use computers as a means, not an end.

Hip-hoppers:
I like clothes that fit snugly, words that don't rhyme and the value of humility.

Hippies:
Acid is hard to find, jam bands are muzak and pacifism is unworkable.

Hipsters:
I dislike overbearing irony, music as social badge instead of emotional release, designer capitalism and self-aware white people.

Jews:
I never went to camp and have no media influence.

Juggalos:
I'm not American, a clown, or retarded.

Muslims:
I like alcohol and flagrant displays of women's hair.

Neo-Nazis:
I'm Semitic.

New Agers:
I don't see the point of magic that can't strike down my enemies.

Punks:
I don't have the patience to put that much effort into my appearance, particularly since the only thing more pointless than dressing to shock old people is dressing to shock old people with a uniform that is about as old as they are.

Queers:
I dislike camp, rainbows, high fashion, disco and anal sex.

Rednecks:
I have no appreciation for country music, Nascar, the South or anything but the mustache of Jeff Foxworthy.

Scientologists:
I'm a slave to the psychiatric-industrial complex.

Skaters:
I believe Avril Lavigne's "Sk8ter Boi" was an accurate depiction of the complexities of skater culture.

Skinheads:
I have a big bump on my head.

Socialists:
I believe in the ugliness of human nature.

Steampunks:
I have no proof that steampunks actually exist.

Stoners:
Frequent usage of marijuana is a way to stave off boredom by constantly recreating the illusion that boredom is exciting, to diminishing returns.

Vegans:
I like meat and don't believe base biological urges can be overcome through sheer force of smuggery.

W.A.S.P.'s:
I'm not Anglo-Saxon, Protestant or a rower.

New-Old Benjamin

I'd like to write a book, but I tend to think in terms of fragments. The problem with this approach is that it lacks definitiveness, cannot be packaged and sold and is seen as disposable. But some lines from a review of Walter Benjamin's works gives an interesting alternate model:

A favourite image of his is the rag-picker. In Benjamin’s words: “Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects” . . . Though he fretted about never quite completing anything, in fact he believed in fragments, in projects that evolve but, by definition, cannot be finished. Today he would have been an avant-garde blogger. His notes in tiny script were ends in themselves.

Can this Benjamin be that Benjamin's avant-garde modern-day blogger equivalent, minus the taint of Marxism? Probably not. But it's not a bad ideal.

Epitaph Of The Future

Žižek: The Scrabble Word That Never Was

Slavoj Žižek is one of the few (only?) modern philosophers of the left worth reading. Here are some choice passages from an old interview with Spiked Magazine, with quotations that particularly struck me in bold:

Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du réel', the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.

. . .

Active nihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing itself, is this active self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of the real - the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in self-destruction. On the other hand, there is passive nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just living a stupid, self-satisfied life without great passions.

. . .

I am, indeed, almost tempted to repeat Virginia Woolf. I think it was in 1914 when she said it was as though eternal human nature had changed. To be a man no longer means the same thing. One should not, for example, underestimate the inter-subjective social impact of cyberspace. What we are witnessing today is a radical redefinition of what it means to be a human being.

. . .

Pascal's problem was also confrontation with modernity and modern science. His difficulty was that he wanted to remain an old, orthodox Christian in this new, modern age. It is interesting that his results were much more radical and interesting for us today than the results of superficial English liberal philosophers, who simply accepted modernity . . . This is just another example of how a conservative, as if he were afraid of the new medium, has a much better grasp of its uncanny radical potentials.

. . .

Isn't it symptomatic that multiculturalism exploded at the very historic moment when the last traces of working-class politics disappeared from political space? For many former leftists, this multiculturalism is a kind of ersatz working-class politics. We don't even know whether the working class still exists, so let's talk about exploitation of others.

. . .

Say I am passionately attached, in love, or whatever, to another human being and I declare my love, my passion for him or her. There is always something shocking, violent in it. This may sound like a joke, but it isn't - you cannot do the game of erotic seduction in politically correct terms. There is a moment of violence, when you say: 'I love you, I want you.' In no way can you bypass this violent aspect. So I even think that the fear of sexual harassment in a way includes this aspect, a fear of a too violent, too open encounter with another human being.

. . .

Another thing that bothers me about this multiculturalism is when people ask me: 'How can you be sure that you are not a racist?' My answer is that there is only one way. If I can exchange insults, brutal jokes, dirty jokes, with a member of a different race and we both know it's not meant in a racist way. If, on the other hand, we play this politically correct game - 'Oh, I respect you, how interesting your customs are' - this is inverted racism, and it is disgusting.

. . .

When multiculturalists tell you to respect the others, I always have this uncanny association that this is dangerously close to how we treat our children: the idea that we should respect them, even when we know that what they believe is not true. We should not destroy their illusions. No, I think that others deserve better - not to be treated like children.

. . .

Twenty or 30 years ago there was still discussion as to whether the future would be fascist, socialist, communist or capitalist. Today, nobody even discusses this. These fundamental social choices are simply no longer perceived as a matter to decide. A certain domain of radical social questions has simply been depoliticised.

This is philosophy that's relevant, that's topical, that cuts through fashionable nonsense to zero in on issues that matter. Žižek says Marx "emphasized that we can learn more from intelligent conservatives than from simple liberals." I don't know whether Marx actually emphasized this or not, but either way it represents an all-too lost attitude in the modern political climate. I don't need to hear Rush Limbaugh or watch Michael Moore because I know what they're going to say. And then there's that higher-brow Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, who's said the same tired thing for fifty years. If post-ideological minds from all angles could get together to discuss the sort of issues Žižek discusses here, about the ultra-modern human condition and what it means politically and culturally, we might get somewhere. Doctrinaire multiculturalism and Falwellian theo-conservatism are equally threatening to the free human mind, so why can't free human minds get together to form a fresh alternative? It's certainly not happening in the academia, which has completely abandoned any attempt to actually influence the wider world through a retreat into dead horse-humping obscurantist jargon. I don't know what the solution is, but these are the broader questions.

Potential Death Metal Album Title

"Saudi Justice"

Tracklisting:

1. The Camel Before the Storm
2. Swords of Peace
3. Pictures of Mohammed
4. She Looks Good in Black
5. Dead Oasis
6. Do the Hajj (Headstomp)
7. Dune Buggery
8. The Land of Rape and Stoning
9. Sexual Healing (is Forbidden)
10. Ballad of Prince #756
11. It's a Man's Man's Man's World
12. Prelude to a Beheading
13. Dangling Tendons (One More Cut)
14. Gaping Neck Oil Spill
15. The Blood's Congealed
16. Holding American Hands (Happily Ever After)

Dancing Over Volcanoes

Eric Hobsbawm on life in Weimar Germany:

Even its few years of ‘normality’ rested on the temporary quiescence of a volcano that could have erupted at any time. The great man of the theatre, Max Reinhardt, knew this. ‘What I love,’ he said, ‘is the taste of transience on the tongue – every year might be the last.’ It gave Weimar culture a unique tang. It sharpened a bitter creativity, a contempt for the present, an intelligence unrestricted by convention, until the sudden and irrevocable death. Moments when one knows history has changed are rare, but this was one of them.

It is probably wrong to be envious of living in such a time, given what was to follow. Yet maybe it is possible to live with such a feeling of pregnant possibility again, even if objective circumstances deny it. Marcel Proust noted that not all people living at the same time are occupying the same moment in history. Every year might still be the last. I've always liked that song title of Muse, "Apocalypse Please." I have one of my own, for an unwritten cabaret art suicide jig: "Do the Weimar (Before It All Falls)."

Celibacy & The Village

Being single is kind of depressing. Or rather, the effort it takes to try and change that status is depressing. A whole industry has developed around "rules of seduction," "pick-up artists", etc. but to me it seems like misplaced priorities. As far as I can tell, being successful with women (or people in general really) is a side-effect of something else; be it reputation, wealth, success or intelligence. Kidding about the last one. But seriously, it seems more practical to focus on meta-goals of self-improvement than spending so much time seeking to replicate the results in one area. But what about sex!? Sex is great. But the modern culture surrounding sex? There's one quotation that defines the issue for me, by Malcolm Muggeridge: "Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society." Maybe this makes me less of a man, but I think life has (slightly) more value than being a build-up to orgasm followed by ten minutes of rest and then repeat.

I don't want to sound too righteous. My opinion might be entirely different if I was a handsome Aryan, so I can't blame people who use what God gave them. But for me and most people, I'd guess, it's a rat race and who wants to be a rat; particularly a rat who isn't very fast? It might be different if most people actually aimed to meet interesting people when they go out instead of impressing them. But it's a dress-up show, and I love drinking, but why put any cachet into talking to people who I could only stand talking to drunk anyway? What is there to say that wouldn't be better left unsaid? Everyone thinks you have an agenda, and most people probably do: but the best part about going out is not having an agenda, flowing where instinct takes you. I've followed my hormones instead of my friends before, and it's been a mistake. Desperation for recognition makes you do stupid things. Nonchalance about recognition is psychologically healthier and just as likely to get you recognition anyway.

When you've been with someone for a long time, both your layers of bullshit have been stripped away. This makes sex a lot less dirty (in good ways and bad). When you have just met someone, the bullshit forms protective armour. To penetrate that armour requires large quantities of effort, alcohol and charm. This would be fine except underneath the armour of protective bullshit is usually just more bullshit. And if there's not, there are very few ways to tell without getting yourself covered. And then they'll think you're full of bullshit too. The individual motives may be reasonable, but the end-result is, to quote David Bowie, "No one needs anyone, they don't even just pretend." And this isn't about a certain "type," as faux-subculture-counterculture poseurs are just as bad or worse than the conformists they conform to not conforming to. There should be a club with an asshole/bitch code instead of a dress code, divided into two sections: one for people who want to be hit on, one for those who don't. That might make things more reasonable. Until then, bullshit forever!

You Say You Want A Revolution. . .

Propaganga poster for the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party


Somali famine victims

"The history of revolutions is a record of anticipated futures that never came to pass."
- Andrew Feenberg

Nuclear Orthodoxy

In Praise Of In Praise Of Melancholy

There is a very good essay in The Chronicle by one Eric Wilson, author of the upcoming book "Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy." It explores some themes I've written about previously, probably not as well. I will be sure to purchase it if in the mood. Some choice quotes:

The "wakeful anguish" of sharp melancholia can lead to a shuddering experience, a "fit." This vital moment grows from an insight into the nature of things: Life grows from death; death gives rise to life. This insight animates melancholy, makes it vibrant. But it also intensifies the pain, for it emphasizes this: Everything, no matter how beautiful, must die. Rather than flee from this difficult position, the melancholic appreciates things all the more because they die. In enjoying the beauty of the world, the melancholic himself wants to create beauty, to commemorate his resplendent experience of earth's transient gorgeousness.

Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence. Without melancholia, the earth would likely freeze over into a fixed state, as predictable as metal. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.

Suffering the gloom, inevitable as breath, we must further accept this fact that the world hates: We are forever incomplete, fragments of some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures — we are never pure actualities but always vague potentials — make life a constant struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into the abyss is also our salvation. To be only a fragment is always to strive for something beyond ourselves, something transcendent. That striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of another. Though this labor is arduous — it requires constant attention to our mysterious and shifting interiors — it is also ecstatic, an almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being.

To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is a call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.

Song Of The Night

I like songs that encapsulate unshakable truths with pith and verve. I also like spooky blips and a steady menacing rhythm. The Sound, a criminally underrated British post-punk band of the 80s, deliver both. The singer ended up throwing himself in front of a train, which may not surprise based on a reading of the 3 AM suicide-note lyrics.

May dark clouds pass.

The Sound - I Can't Escape Myself

So many feelings
Pent up in here
Left all alone, I'm with
The one I most fear.

I'm sick and I'm tired
Of reasoning;
Just want to break out,
Shake off this skin.

I, I can't
Escape myself.

All my problems
Loom larger than life
I can't swallow
Another slice.

Seems like my shadow
Mocks every stride.
I learn to live with
What's trapped inside?

The Suicide Bomber As Speedy Ejaculator

A review in the Times Literary Supplement provides some fascinating insight into Islamic and Arab sexuality:

One of the sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad – “Whenever a male mounts upon a male, the throne of God trembles” – sets the mood for Patanè’s story. Penetration is “the crucial act around which Arab eroticism revolves”, he writes, and the speed at which ejaculation is attained is considered “a sign of virility”. Passivity is thought irreversibly to damage virility: the passive partner is “an inferior completely stripped out of the status of ‘man’”, “a ghostly figure wandering in the margins of society, with no chance of planning a life outside society’s unbreakable laws”.

I think to truly understand the culture and politics of a civilization, one must first examine its sexual hang-ups. If an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement is to ever hold, the Israelis must recognize that an image of virility matters in tribal cultures. The settlements in the West Bank represent a dick being waved in the face of a culture obsessed with being the cock of the walk. If you're trying to reach a deal with an enemy who feels emasculated if his woman has her face showing to strangers, you should probably stop waving your dick in his face for a start. Arguments about Arabs having better living standards under Israeli rule than in other Middle Eastern countries may be true, but it is not calculations of rights that motivate a suicide-bomber; it is calculations of honour.

That goes for America's presence in the Middle East as well. The argument shouldn't be just about whether Muslims have reasonable grievances against the West. It may not be reasonable to be offended by American soldiers stationed on Saudi soil in order to deter an Iraqi invasion, but that didn't stop Osama bin Laden from making it his top excuse for 9/11. The prime intellectual contribution of Freud was to remind the Western world that people are not purely, or even mostly rational beings. Ironically many Muslims might agree with his psychoanalytical view of Man as inherently sex-motivated, given that the justification for the hijab is that a man cannot help but sexualize any woman who is not covered in shapeless black robes. Once American foreign policy starts recognizing such basic facts of human nature and cultural psychology, perhaps it will stop using explosive phallic symbols to liberate countries obsessed with being the top penetrator.

Dangerous Geometry: The Ten Most Infamous Triangles Of All Time

10. Red Sea Terror Triangle


9. Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire


8. Golden Triangle of Opium Production


7. The Greedy Triangle


6. The Snatch of Britney Spears


5. Sunni Triangle


4. Nazi Pink Triangle


3. Atlantic Slave Trade Triangle


2. Black Triangle UFOs


1. Bermuda Triangle

Making Improvement

Breaking World News

In the midst of the stagnating peace process in the Middle East, chaos in Kenya, rising tension in Kosovo and instability in Pakistan, it's important to remember the occasional positive diplomatic developments in international affairs. It seems that while no one was paying attention, one of the most intractable of long-running geopolitical problems, the vicious Mongolia v. Nationalist Chinese grudge match, was finally solved:

President Chen Shui-bian on April 23 met with members of the visiting Mongolia-Taiwan Association, which is being led by Mongolian Parliamentarian Aukhetai Murat. . . President Chen furthermore said that after he was elected as president of the ROC (Taiwan) in 2000, work was initiated to amend laws, enabling Taiwan to formally recognize Mongolia as a sovereign nation and not as part of the Republic of China.

This could well be the greatest diplomatic achievement in recognizing the obvious since Mussolini persuaded the Pope to relinquish the Vatican's claims over Italy. If two of the biggest former juggernauts in East Asia (under leaders Chiang Kai-shek and Genghis Khan, respectively) can reconcile, surely there is hope for us all. How about it, Belgium and Congo?

See: Map of territory officially claimed by the Republic of China.

The Hopeless Optimist

Burst my bubble with poison-tipped arrows
I'm better off anyway, lean and narrow.

Quench my fire with piss and vinegar
I'll keep warm asleep by the cinders.

Plant a bomb in the spokes of my machine
It's fully powered by your exploding spleen.

Walk me off the plank, I'll come out alive
Cleaner, refreshed, with a taste for brine.

You say go to hell? I'm already there
High off of brimstone and happy to share.

Endorsement

I am not a Democrat or a Republican. I am a Canadian, the ultimate third party. Given my close proximity to the American border, however, and the fact that I live on this earth, the upcoming U.S. election does affect my future. While many of my countrymen suffer from certain knee-jerk anti-American tendencies, I welcome the United States as an exemplar of what to do wrong and what to do right on every important issue. On the matter of the integration of immigrants, for instance, the United States has done a lot better than Europe and arguably Canada. Yet on other important issues, particularly with regards to fighting terrorism, American belligerence has been unfortunately counterproductive. I'm not of the ilk of Noam Chomsky, those pundits who deride American policy for not being suicidal enough. I do believe that political Islam forms a global threat, and equally that the Iraq war has done nothing but distract focus from where this threat is actually incubating: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The fact that Osama bin Laden is still alive eviscerates Bush's, and by extension the Republican party's, claim to be the party of national defense. Gulf War II was a matter of national offense; in that category the Republicans are the clear frontrunners. But as far as actual national defense, the kind that NATO affirmed, the fight is with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pan-Arabism did not attack America on 9/11; and Saddam Hussein was the decrepit zombie corpse of pan-Arabism in all its failed glory. In my estimation the objects of an anti-terrorist policy should be A) to win over the large section of the Muslim world which can be won over, not to the distant goal of democracy, but to the achievable goal of anti-bin Ladenism and B) to neutralize, or better, help local governments neutralize the section that cannot be won over.

For the first, I think it's painfully obvious that the open sore of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though not the direct cause, is a contributing factor to the appeal of Islamic extremists. Hamas and Hezbollah are aiming to fight to the death, but there is a critical mass of non-zealots who would be willing to live peacefully in exchange for a settlement of some honour. (I.e. an apology and monetary reparations to refugees from Israel's creation, but not their wholesale repatriation.) Many Muslims will wish for the eradication of Israel even with the existence of a Palestinian state, but they will be forced into a losing position by any peace settlement. Iran, for instance, would look increasingly like the crazed maverick it is if after an Israeli peace settlement with its neighbours, it remained the lone stalwart. A stick and carrot approach is the best way to minimize the appeal of terrorism, and the card of peace in the Middle East remains the best carrot available.

The stick is to do anything possible to track down and destroy bin Laden. While he is alive he is a walking advertisement of American powerlessness and hypocrisy. By general consensus he is living in the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sending the British S.A.S. and the French Foreign Legion in to destroy him would send a great message of trans-Atlantic cooperation. Another great message to the world would be if the United States repudiated the party of foreign policy failure, the Republicans, and the Democratic candidate for dynastic emptiness, Hillary Clinton in favour of Barack Obama. Mere symbolism? Symbolism matters. Charisma matters. Opposing the Iraq war from the start matters. Demonstrating the universal appeal of the American dream in the most powerful of ways matters. Although my personal choice would be Nicholas Sarkozy, of all available candidates for United States President, Barack Obama, possibly with foreign-policy veteran Joe Biden as Vice-President, is the best bet.

Layout Change!

Obviously, there has been a layout change. I thought I'd make the place less cluttered, more clear, less madcap, more sober businessman. Fitter, happier, more productive. Any comments or complaints or suggestions are of course welcome. Expect great, great, crazy things to come in the future. But don't hold me to it. Also, I will be pruning the links and co-belligerents sidebars since I'm sure many dead links/dead minds have been inadvertently promoted through my designs. Anyone with an interesting blog who wants to be added: let's talk, why not! This could be the Second Rome of my declining empire, until the Turks come, and they always come.

Symbols To Die For

"A fine symbol has greater weight than a mediocre fact."
- Camillo Pelizzi