Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The City's End
In The New York Press is an excerpt from Max Page's book The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction. This might be the East Coast counterpart to Ecology of Fear.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Hurricane
Kunstler's latest.
September 15, 2008
A Ripe Moment
It turns out the real hurricane blew through Wall Street last week, not Galveston. This morning, Manhattan is strewn chest-deep with the debris of banking and at this hour (seven a.m.) nobody knows how far, deep, and wide the damage will spread. The fear, of course, is that we are witnessing a classic "house-of-cards" or "dominos-in-a-row," situation, and that the death of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch will cascade into a generalized collapse of the entire consensus of value that supports mediums of exchange.
At least one thing ought to be clear: this has happened due to the negligence and misfeasance of the regulating authorities, namely the Republican Party, and that now all the hoopla surrounding Sarah Palin can be swept away revealing that group to be what they actually are: the party that wrecked America. I hope one or two Barack Obama campaign officials are reading this blog. You must commence the re-branding of the opposition right now. The Republicans must be clearly identified as, the party that wrecked America.
Many things happening this week will be interesting to see and hear, but just now an outstanding question is how on earth can the Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch for $50 billion after assuming the liabilities of the tarbaby known as Countrywide? But that little detail may be lost in the din as other banks and bank-like organizations start crashing like sequoia trees in a national forest.
I wish I knew whether this extravaganza of ruin might settle the question as to whether America goes into hyperinflation or implacable deflation, but the net effect is that money is leaving the system in big gobs. And if not money per se, then the idea of money as represented in certificates, contracts, counter-party positions, and gentlemen's agreements. This is the day that America finds itself a much poorer nation. The capital we thought was there, is gone.
A lot of it was actually translated over the years into Hamptons villas, Gulfstream jets, and other playthings that will now go up on Ebay or some equivalent as we turn into Yard Sale Nation in a general liquidation of remaining assets. Of course, the trouble in a situation like this, where absolutely everybody is trying to pawn off assets, is that there are very few buyers on the scene, so the prices of all these things go down down down. Everything is for sale and nobody has any money.
This was essentially the state of things in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the only escape from that turned out to be the mobilization for war. And in the aftermath of that terrible war, we were the only industrial nation that hadn't been bombed to rubble. What's more, we had a very handsome supply of industrial world's primary resource, oil, at our disposal. So we spent the next thirty years making oodles of things and selling them to people in other lands (lending them the money to buy), until these nations were back on their own feet and solvent. And after 1975, the industrial club picked up a bunch of new members and they all began to clean our clock.
So, as our industrial base waned, and our factories got old and brittle, and our labor force was steeply under-bid by cheaper labor forces, we embarked on a quest for "the new economy." This was represented in successive turns as the information economy, the consumer economy, the high-tech economy, et cetera. They were all ruses, aimed at concealing the truth -- which was that we had become a society no longer producing things of value, no longer generating real wealth. The final act of this farce has been the so-called "financial industry."
That "industry" turned out to be most earnestly devoted to the production of complex swindles. They were so finely engineered that it took twenty years for the swindles to stand revealed, and they were cleverly hitched to the primary thing that the American public vested its identity in: house-and-home. Thus, much of the public finds itself in very real danger of becoming homeless and broke.
We generally recognize that some wicked-massive transfer of wealth occurred in the process of the mortgage fiasco, but it remains to be seen whether any residue of this wealth can actually be retained, as represented by currencies, contracts, and supposed securities. The wholesale settling of debt now underway may leave an awful lot of this stuff with no value.
We should be frightened by the political implications of this Great Implosion of presumed wealth. Some group of somebodies will have to clean up this mess. Moving toward a major election, it is hard to imagine the American people giving the clean-up task to the very group that created the mess -- no matter how many cute little faces Sarah Palin can make on TV. Both parties have so far managed to ignore the gathering crisis of banking and money, but they can't ignore the sequoia trees crashing down around their ankles and shaking the earth they stand on.
At issue now will be the question of legitimacy in all its human social dimensions. Is our money legitimate? Is the authority of our elected officials legitimate? Are our values and ideas legitimate? These are the things that will determine what kind of future we find ourselves in.
So, to begin this process, and to clarify the situation, I urge readers of this blog to identify the Republican Party by its new brand-name: the party that wrecked America. At least, then, we can reinstate one cardinal value into the juddering structure of what we claim to believe: that actions have consequences, that you can't just swindle and loot a society and walk away with the swag.
Spread the word, change the tone of this campaign, and keep posted. This will be a momentous week.
==END OF KUNSTLER COLUMN==
Incidentally, I'm reading The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes.
September 15, 2008
A Ripe Moment
It turns out the real hurricane blew through Wall Street last week, not Galveston. This morning, Manhattan is strewn chest-deep with the debris of banking and at this hour (seven a.m.) nobody knows how far, deep, and wide the damage will spread. The fear, of course, is that we are witnessing a classic "house-of-cards" or "dominos-in-a-row," situation, and that the death of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch will cascade into a generalized collapse of the entire consensus of value that supports mediums of exchange.
At least one thing ought to be clear: this has happened due to the negligence and misfeasance of the regulating authorities, namely the Republican Party, and that now all the hoopla surrounding Sarah Palin can be swept away revealing that group to be what they actually are: the party that wrecked America. I hope one or two Barack Obama campaign officials are reading this blog. You must commence the re-branding of the opposition right now. The Republicans must be clearly identified as, the party that wrecked America.
Many things happening this week will be interesting to see and hear, but just now an outstanding question is how on earth can the Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch for $50 billion after assuming the liabilities of the tarbaby known as Countrywide? But that little detail may be lost in the din as other banks and bank-like organizations start crashing like sequoia trees in a national forest.
I wish I knew whether this extravaganza of ruin might settle the question as to whether America goes into hyperinflation or implacable deflation, but the net effect is that money is leaving the system in big gobs. And if not money per se, then the idea of money as represented in certificates, contracts, counter-party positions, and gentlemen's agreements. This is the day that America finds itself a much poorer nation. The capital we thought was there, is gone.
A lot of it was actually translated over the years into Hamptons villas, Gulfstream jets, and other playthings that will now go up on Ebay or some equivalent as we turn into Yard Sale Nation in a general liquidation of remaining assets. Of course, the trouble in a situation like this, where absolutely everybody is trying to pawn off assets, is that there are very few buyers on the scene, so the prices of all these things go down down down. Everything is for sale and nobody has any money.
This was essentially the state of things in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the only escape from that turned out to be the mobilization for war. And in the aftermath of that terrible war, we were the only industrial nation that hadn't been bombed to rubble. What's more, we had a very handsome supply of industrial world's primary resource, oil, at our disposal. So we spent the next thirty years making oodles of things and selling them to people in other lands (lending them the money to buy), until these nations were back on their own feet and solvent. And after 1975, the industrial club picked up a bunch of new members and they all began to clean our clock.
So, as our industrial base waned, and our factories got old and brittle, and our labor force was steeply under-bid by cheaper labor forces, we embarked on a quest for "the new economy." This was represented in successive turns as the information economy, the consumer economy, the high-tech economy, et cetera. They were all ruses, aimed at concealing the truth -- which was that we had become a society no longer producing things of value, no longer generating real wealth. The final act of this farce has been the so-called "financial industry."
That "industry" turned out to be most earnestly devoted to the production of complex swindles. They were so finely engineered that it took twenty years for the swindles to stand revealed, and they were cleverly hitched to the primary thing that the American public vested its identity in: house-and-home. Thus, much of the public finds itself in very real danger of becoming homeless and broke.
We generally recognize that some wicked-massive transfer of wealth occurred in the process of the mortgage fiasco, but it remains to be seen whether any residue of this wealth can actually be retained, as represented by currencies, contracts, and supposed securities. The wholesale settling of debt now underway may leave an awful lot of this stuff with no value.
We should be frightened by the political implications of this Great Implosion of presumed wealth. Some group of somebodies will have to clean up this mess. Moving toward a major election, it is hard to imagine the American people giving the clean-up task to the very group that created the mess -- no matter how many cute little faces Sarah Palin can make on TV. Both parties have so far managed to ignore the gathering crisis of banking and money, but they can't ignore the sequoia trees crashing down around their ankles and shaking the earth they stand on.
At issue now will be the question of legitimacy in all its human social dimensions. Is our money legitimate? Is the authority of our elected officials legitimate? Are our values and ideas legitimate? These are the things that will determine what kind of future we find ourselves in.
So, to begin this process, and to clarify the situation, I urge readers of this blog to identify the Republican Party by its new brand-name: the party that wrecked America. At least, then, we can reinstate one cardinal value into the juddering structure of what we claim to believe: that actions have consequences, that you can't just swindle and loot a society and walk away with the swag.
Spread the word, change the tone of this campaign, and keep posted. This will be a momentous week.
==END OF KUNSTLER COLUMN==
Incidentally, I'm reading The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes.
Friday, September 12, 2008
The Future?
Vacant McHouse on the outskirts of Saratoga Springs, New York. Construction begun, 2006. Completed, 2008. Never occupied. Never put up for sale. Never cared for. Weeds and saplings taking over the McGrounds. Who knows the tale of woe behind this embodiment of the burst housing bubble? Divorce? Insolvency? Bankruptcy? Repossession? Death? Whoever finally does move into this pre-haunted dwelling will be greeted by one king-hell of a heating fuel bill. The northeast has not yet seen the kind of new house desolation now visible in parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. But the housing bust has long way to go before the median price of a house is equivalent with the budget of the median income.
Decay and promise in Detroit. The "ghetto palm."
This photo is from themotorlesscity.com
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Leslie-Walker in '08
James Wolcott has aptly called Sarah Palin a "Northern Exposure Karen Walker", but has he or anybody noticed John McCain's resemblance to Beverley Leslie, Karen Walker's sworn enemy?
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Saturday, September 06, 2008
An Actual Drudge Report Headline
Swaziland Leader Criticized For Oppulant Lifestyle, Birthday...
13 September update: I've just found EnglishFailBlog.com, through the blog of mrschili, a frequent commenter on Two Blue Day.
13 September update: I've just found EnglishFailBlog.com, through the blog of mrschili, a frequent commenter on Two Blue Day.
Friday, September 05, 2008
Kunstler's View of the Convention
The Political Campaign Mini-Blog
http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_campaign08.html
Sept 4
The Patriot Game - Wednesday
The odious soap opera in Minneapolis gets worse each night, this one like a Sandra Bullock movie produced and directed by the Devil. I tuned in for Rudolf Giuliani's keynote speech, a hyperthyroid exercise in oratorical thuggery, which led directly to the main event, Sarah Palin's acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination.
She quickly proved to be a confident podium performer, but the content and tenor of her remarks conveyed all the petty viciousness and insecurity of the Republican right-wing. As she spoke, the cameras panned around her rapt audience, affording snapshots of the dumbest white people in America, self-congratulatory in their small-town ignorance and brined in a dangerous jingo-patriotism that must make leaders in other nations cringe in amazement at the rhetorical recklessness being served up. Everything about her speech was small-minded, vindictive, smugly sarcastic, and shot through with falsehood (e.g. that the Republicans will "lead America to energy independence"). You wonder how much kool-aid these people have to drink to believe their own bullshit. In fact, watching Ms. Palin's performance, two notions came to mind and lodged there firmly: 1.) That the Republican Party has itself become a vector of terrorism, and 2.) that these are exactly the people I had in mind when I conceived the term "corn-pone Nazis" to describe the worst outcome of an over-stressed society.
In the aftermath, with the whole Palin family bathed in cheering before a giant televised waving flag, the true ethos of this phony spectacle revealed itself: this is the party of losers, and Sarah is their cheerleader. Deep down, Americans feel like losers. Our economy is cratering in an abyss of greed and foolishness. We're exhausting our resources in imperial military adventures. And we're stuck in a car-dependent living arrangement with no future. This bunch doesn't want to face the reality in any of this. They just want to "drill drill drill" so they can keep snowmobiling and rack up more credit card purchases of Chinese-manufactured salad shooters in the WalMart.
Here's an interesting question: if they win the election, will Sarah Palin and her whole family move to Washington when she takes up her duties? What will her husband do there? Who will take care of her "special needs" baby while the mother is learning how to become commander-in-chief of the armed forces and guardian of a nuclear arsenal (plus presiding over the senate)? Will daughter Bristol stay home in Alaska with her teenage husband and their new baby?
Tonight is the climax of this awful spectacle. John McCain gets to explain why the party that wrecked America deserves another term running things in the in the nation's capital.
Sept 3
Pretend-O-Rama in Minneapolis
What a sordid spectacle it was to watch the Republican dignitaries and delegates strain to pretend that John McCain's impulsive Vice-Presidential pick, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, was a great choice, and that the US economy was strong. But as one member of the club explained it, this election is not so much about issues as about feelings. I'll tell you what feeling is expressed overwhelmingly by the Republican script: insecurity. They know they are absolutely full of crap and that a big portion of the electorate is on to them. Hence, all the jingo-patriotism, including their scurrilous motto, "Country First," as if their Democratic opponents were foreign agents. There were moments last night (Tuesday) when the pretending and outright lying got so strenuous, I thought I was at a Pinocchio look-alike contest. These are the people who are locked into defending the mis-investments of the past, in every sense. They will not adapt to the emerging realities of the future, or even entertain the notion that it is necessary. They will also come to be regarded, as this campaign moves into the heart of autumn, and the banks start crashing, as the party that wrecked America. In fact, speaking of feelings, I have a feeling that the Republican party is so morally bankrupt that it might actually explode in factional war after this election, and maybe even blow up altogether. They are the Whigs of our time.
http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_campaign08.html
Sept 4
The Patriot Game - Wednesday
The odious soap opera in Minneapolis gets worse each night, this one like a Sandra Bullock movie produced and directed by the Devil. I tuned in for Rudolf Giuliani's keynote speech, a hyperthyroid exercise in oratorical thuggery, which led directly to the main event, Sarah Palin's acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination.
She quickly proved to be a confident podium performer, but the content and tenor of her remarks conveyed all the petty viciousness and insecurity of the Republican right-wing. As she spoke, the cameras panned around her rapt audience, affording snapshots of the dumbest white people in America, self-congratulatory in their small-town ignorance and brined in a dangerous jingo-patriotism that must make leaders in other nations cringe in amazement at the rhetorical recklessness being served up. Everything about her speech was small-minded, vindictive, smugly sarcastic, and shot through with falsehood (e.g. that the Republicans will "lead America to energy independence"). You wonder how much kool-aid these people have to drink to believe their own bullshit. In fact, watching Ms. Palin's performance, two notions came to mind and lodged there firmly: 1.) That the Republican Party has itself become a vector of terrorism, and 2.) that these are exactly the people I had in mind when I conceived the term "corn-pone Nazis" to describe the worst outcome of an over-stressed society.
In the aftermath, with the whole Palin family bathed in cheering before a giant televised waving flag, the true ethos of this phony spectacle revealed itself: this is the party of losers, and Sarah is their cheerleader. Deep down, Americans feel like losers. Our economy is cratering in an abyss of greed and foolishness. We're exhausting our resources in imperial military adventures. And we're stuck in a car-dependent living arrangement with no future. This bunch doesn't want to face the reality in any of this. They just want to "drill drill drill" so they can keep snowmobiling and rack up more credit card purchases of Chinese-manufactured salad shooters in the WalMart.
Here's an interesting question: if they win the election, will Sarah Palin and her whole family move to Washington when she takes up her duties? What will her husband do there? Who will take care of her "special needs" baby while the mother is learning how to become commander-in-chief of the armed forces and guardian of a nuclear arsenal (plus presiding over the senate)? Will daughter Bristol stay home in Alaska with her teenage husband and their new baby?
Tonight is the climax of this awful spectacle. John McCain gets to explain why the party that wrecked America deserves another term running things in the in the nation's capital.
Sept 3
Pretend-O-Rama in Minneapolis
What a sordid spectacle it was to watch the Republican dignitaries and delegates strain to pretend that John McCain's impulsive Vice-Presidential pick, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, was a great choice, and that the US economy was strong. But as one member of the club explained it, this election is not so much about issues as about feelings. I'll tell you what feeling is expressed overwhelmingly by the Republican script: insecurity. They know they are absolutely full of crap and that a big portion of the electorate is on to them. Hence, all the jingo-patriotism, including their scurrilous motto, "Country First," as if their Democratic opponents were foreign agents. There were moments last night (Tuesday) when the pretending and outright lying got so strenuous, I thought I was at a Pinocchio look-alike contest. These are the people who are locked into defending the mis-investments of the past, in every sense. They will not adapt to the emerging realities of the future, or even entertain the notion that it is necessary. They will also come to be regarded, as this campaign moves into the heart of autumn, and the banks start crashing, as the party that wrecked America. In fact, speaking of feelings, I have a feeling that the Republican party is so morally bankrupt that it might actually explode in factional war after this election, and maybe even blow up altogether. They are the Whigs of our time.
Sarah
There's a young lady from up north who acts cute and charming only when it serves her. ...She has a short temper and is easily agitated by others....
Her name is Sarah.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
apPALINg
With her bouffant and spectacles, Sarah Palin is described as a "naughty librarian." But Librarian.net points out her naughty behavior towards librarians:
...People acutely interested in high level politics in the US who also work in libraries may be interested in this Time magazine article about Sarah Palin. I was very interested in this paragraph.
[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
Usually I’m just happy to see libraries even mentioned in national level politics, but not like this. Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999.
==
This Anchorage Daily News article from February 1997 mentions letters of termination Palin sent to the Wasilla police chief and librarian because of their perceived disloyalty:
City librarian Mary Ellen Emmons will stay, but Police Chief Irl Stambaugh is on his own, Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin announced Friday. The decision came one day after letters signed by Palin were dropped on Stambaugh's and Emmon's desks, telling them their jobs were over as of Feb. 13.
The mayor told them she appreciated their service but felt it was time for a change. ''I do not feel I have your full support in my efforts to govern the city of Wasilla. Therefore I intend to terminate your employment ...'' the letter said.
Palin said Friday she now feels Emmons supports her but does not feel the same about Stambaugh. As to what prompted the change, Palin said she now has Emmons' assurance that she is behind her. She refused to give details about how Stambaugh has not supported her, saying only that ''You know in your heart when someone is supportive of you.''
The three met briefly at Wasilla City Hall Friday afternoon, and Palin called them twice at Stambaugh's home before making the decision.
Palin said she asked Emmons if she would support efforts to merge the library and museum operations. Emmons said she would, according to Palin. ...
The actions have caused a stir in Wasilla, a town of about 4,600. City Councilman Nick Carney, who has been an outspoken critic of Palin, said he received several calls at his home Thursday night and Friday from outraged citizens.
The sudden personnel shift is part of bigger problem of mismanagement in the city, he said, and may prompt a recall petition.
''Before, I told (people) to hold off, but now all bets are off,'' he said. ''I fail to see what good this is doing for Wasilla.''
But Councilwoman Judy Patrick said people voted change when they elected Palin and part of that is changing who is in charge.
Reached at home, Stambaugh said he still doesn't understand why he's been fired. ''There never was an appropriate response,'' he said. ''How did we not support the administration?''
Now he's talking to an attorney. While both Stambaugh and Emmons serve at the mayor's pleasure, Stambaugh said he has a contract that prohibits the city from firing him without cause.
Both Stambaugh and Emmons publicly supported Palin's opponent, long-time mayor John Stein during the campaign last fall. When she was elected, Palin questioned their loyalty and initially asked for their resignations. But Stambaugh said he thought any questions had been resolved....Emmons, who has been the city's library director for seven years, would not comment about the affair.
==
This is a list of the books Palin tried to ban, according to http://messageboards.aol.com/aol/en_us/articles.php?boardId=528628&articleId=1812741&func=6&channel=Member+Guided+News&filterRead=false&filterHidden=true&filterUnhidden=false:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial StaffWitches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth
It's probably an apocryphal list.
...People acutely interested in high level politics in the US who also work in libraries may be interested in this Time magazine article about Sarah Palin. I was very interested in this paragraph.
[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
Usually I’m just happy to see libraries even mentioned in national level politics, but not like this. Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999.
==
This Anchorage Daily News article from February 1997 mentions letters of termination Palin sent to the Wasilla police chief and librarian because of their perceived disloyalty:
City librarian Mary Ellen Emmons will stay, but Police Chief Irl Stambaugh is on his own, Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin announced Friday. The decision came one day after letters signed by Palin were dropped on Stambaugh's and Emmon's desks, telling them their jobs were over as of Feb. 13.
The mayor told them she appreciated their service but felt it was time for a change. ''I do not feel I have your full support in my efforts to govern the city of Wasilla. Therefore I intend to terminate your employment ...'' the letter said.
Palin said Friday she now feels Emmons supports her but does not feel the same about Stambaugh. As to what prompted the change, Palin said she now has Emmons' assurance that she is behind her. She refused to give details about how Stambaugh has not supported her, saying only that ''You know in your heart when someone is supportive of you.''
The three met briefly at Wasilla City Hall Friday afternoon, and Palin called them twice at Stambaugh's home before making the decision.
Palin said she asked Emmons if she would support efforts to merge the library and museum operations. Emmons said she would, according to Palin. ...
The actions have caused a stir in Wasilla, a town of about 4,600. City Councilman Nick Carney, who has been an outspoken critic of Palin, said he received several calls at his home Thursday night and Friday from outraged citizens.
The sudden personnel shift is part of bigger problem of mismanagement in the city, he said, and may prompt a recall petition.
''Before, I told (people) to hold off, but now all bets are off,'' he said. ''I fail to see what good this is doing for Wasilla.''
But Councilwoman Judy Patrick said people voted change when they elected Palin and part of that is changing who is in charge.
Reached at home, Stambaugh said he still doesn't understand why he's been fired. ''There never was an appropriate response,'' he said. ''How did we not support the administration?''
Now he's talking to an attorney. While both Stambaugh and Emmons serve at the mayor's pleasure, Stambaugh said he has a contract that prohibits the city from firing him without cause.
Both Stambaugh and Emmons publicly supported Palin's opponent, long-time mayor John Stein during the campaign last fall. When she was elected, Palin questioned their loyalty and initially asked for their resignations. But Stambaugh said he thought any questions had been resolved....Emmons, who has been the city's library director for seven years, would not comment about the affair.
==
This is a list of the books Palin tried to ban, according to http://messageboards.aol.com/aol/en_us/articles.php?boardId=528628&articleId=1812741&func=6&channel=Member+Guided+News&filterRead=false&filterHidden=true&filterUnhidden=false:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial StaffWitches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth
It's probably an apocryphal list.
Friday, August 22, 2008
What Now? Part Six
(A periodic look at the Big Island's alt-newspapers.)
Hawaii Free Press has finally established a Web presence.
Hawaii Free Press has finally established a Web presence.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Reality Bites Again--Kunstler
Kunstler's latest, reprinted in full:
August 18, 2008
Reality Bites Again
The feeble American response to Russia's assertion of power in the Caucasus of Central Asia was appropriate, since our claims of influence in that part of the world are laughable. The US had taken advantage of temporary confusion in Russia, during the ten-year-long post-Soviet-collapse interval, and set up a client government in Georgia, complete with military advisors, sales of weapons, and even the promise of club membership in the western alliance known as NATO. These blandishments were all in the service of the Baku-to-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which was designed specifically to drain the oil region around the Caspian Basin with an outlet on the Mediterranean, avoiding unfriendly nations all along the way.
At the time this gambit was first set up, in the early 1990s, there was some notion (or wish, really) among the so-called western powers that the Caspian would provide an end-run around OPEC and the Arabs, as well as the Persians, and deliver all the oil that the US and Europe would ever need -- a foolish wish and a dumb gambit, as things have turned out.
For one thing, the latterly explorations of this very old oil region -- first opened to drilling in the 19th century -- proved somewhat disappointing. US officials had been touting it as like unto "another Saudi Arabia" but the oil actually produced from the new drilling areas of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and the other Stans turned out to be preponderantly heavy-and-sour crudes, in smaller quantities than previously dreamed-of, and harder to transport across the extremely challenging terrain to even get to the pipeline head in Baku.
Meanwhile, Russia got its house in order under the non-senile, non-alcoholic Vladimir Putin, and woke up along about 2007 to find itself the leading oil and natural gas producer in the world. Among the various consequences of this was Russia's reemergence as a new kind of world power -- an energy resource power, with the energy destiny of Europe pretty much in its hands. Also, meanwhile, the USA had set up other client states in the ring of former Soviet republics along Russia's southern underbelly, complete with US military bases, while fighting active engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, if this wasn't the dumbest, vainest move in modern geopolitical history!
It's one thing that US foreign policy wonks imagined that Russia would remain in a coma forever, but the idea that we could encircle Russia strategically with defensible bases in landlocked mountainous countries halfway around the world...? You have to ask what were they smoking over at the Pentagon and the CIA and the NSC?
So, this asinine policy has now come to grief. Not only does Russia stand to gain control over the Baku-to-Ceyhan pipeline, but we now have every indication that they will bring the states on its southern flank back into an active sphere of influence, and there is really not a damn thing that the US can pretend to do about it.
We could have spent the past ten years getting our own house in order -- waking up to the obsolescence of our suburban life-style, scaling back on the Happy Motoring, reconnecting our cities with world-class passenger rail, creating wealth by producing things of value (instead of resorting to financial racketeering), protecting our borders, and taking the necessary measures to defend and update our own industries. Instead, we pissed our time and resources away. Nations do make tragic errors of the collective will. The cluelessness of George Bush is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the failure of a whole generation. The Boomers will be identified as the generation that wrecked America.
So, as the vacation season winds down, this country greets a new reality. We miscalculated in Western and Central Asia. Russia still "owns" that part of the world. Are we going to extend our current land wars there into the even more distant and landlocked Stan-nations? At some point, as we face financial and military exhaustion, we have to ask ourselves if we can even successfully evacuate our personnel from the far-flung bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
This must be an equally sobering moment for Europe, and an additional reason for the recent plunge in the relative value of the Euro, for Europe is now at the mercy of Russia in terms of staying warm in the winter, running their kitchen stoves, and keeping the lights on. Russia also exerts substantial financial leverage over the US in all the dollars and securitized US debt paper it holds. In effect, Russia can shake the US banking system at will now by threatening to dump its dollar holdings.
The American banking system may not need a shove from Russia to fall on its face. It's effectively dead now, just lurching around zombie-like from one loan "window" to the next pretending to "borrow" capital -- while handing over shreds of its moldy clothing as "collateral" to the Federal Reserve. The entire US, beyond the banks, is becoming a land of the walking dead. Business is dying, home-ownership has become a death dance, whole regions are turning into wastelands of "for sale" signs, empty parking lots, vacant buildings, and dashed hopes. And all this beats a path directly to a failure of collective national imagination. We really don't know what's going on.
The fantasy that we can sustain our influence nine thousand miles away, when we can't even get our act together in Ohio is just a dark joke. One might state categorically that it would be a salubrious thing for America to knock off all its vaunted "dreaming" and just wake the fuck up.
August 11, 2008
==
Kunstler recently took part in the forum "What is the Future of Suburbia?"
==
In other news, Pervez Musharraf announces his resignations, twenty years and a day after another Pakistani dictator died in a plane crash. And Prachanda was sworn in today as prime minister of Nepal.
August 18, 2008
Reality Bites Again
The feeble American response to Russia's assertion of power in the Caucasus of Central Asia was appropriate, since our claims of influence in that part of the world are laughable. The US had taken advantage of temporary confusion in Russia, during the ten-year-long post-Soviet-collapse interval, and set up a client government in Georgia, complete with military advisors, sales of weapons, and even the promise of club membership in the western alliance known as NATO. These blandishments were all in the service of the Baku-to-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which was designed specifically to drain the oil region around the Caspian Basin with an outlet on the Mediterranean, avoiding unfriendly nations all along the way.
At the time this gambit was first set up, in the early 1990s, there was some notion (or wish, really) among the so-called western powers that the Caspian would provide an end-run around OPEC and the Arabs, as well as the Persians, and deliver all the oil that the US and Europe would ever need -- a foolish wish and a dumb gambit, as things have turned out.
For one thing, the latterly explorations of this very old oil region -- first opened to drilling in the 19th century -- proved somewhat disappointing. US officials had been touting it as like unto "another Saudi Arabia" but the oil actually produced from the new drilling areas of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and the other Stans turned out to be preponderantly heavy-and-sour crudes, in smaller quantities than previously dreamed-of, and harder to transport across the extremely challenging terrain to even get to the pipeline head in Baku.
Meanwhile, Russia got its house in order under the non-senile, non-alcoholic Vladimir Putin, and woke up along about 2007 to find itself the leading oil and natural gas producer in the world. Among the various consequences of this was Russia's reemergence as a new kind of world power -- an energy resource power, with the energy destiny of Europe pretty much in its hands. Also, meanwhile, the USA had set up other client states in the ring of former Soviet republics along Russia's southern underbelly, complete with US military bases, while fighting active engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, if this wasn't the dumbest, vainest move in modern geopolitical history!
It's one thing that US foreign policy wonks imagined that Russia would remain in a coma forever, but the idea that we could encircle Russia strategically with defensible bases in landlocked mountainous countries halfway around the world...? You have to ask what were they smoking over at the Pentagon and the CIA and the NSC?
So, this asinine policy has now come to grief. Not only does Russia stand to gain control over the Baku-to-Ceyhan pipeline, but we now have every indication that they will bring the states on its southern flank back into an active sphere of influence, and there is really not a damn thing that the US can pretend to do about it.
We could have spent the past ten years getting our own house in order -- waking up to the obsolescence of our suburban life-style, scaling back on the Happy Motoring, reconnecting our cities with world-class passenger rail, creating wealth by producing things of value (instead of resorting to financial racketeering), protecting our borders, and taking the necessary measures to defend and update our own industries. Instead, we pissed our time and resources away. Nations do make tragic errors of the collective will. The cluelessness of George Bush is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the failure of a whole generation. The Boomers will be identified as the generation that wrecked America.
So, as the vacation season winds down, this country greets a new reality. We miscalculated in Western and Central Asia. Russia still "owns" that part of the world. Are we going to extend our current land wars there into the even more distant and landlocked Stan-nations? At some point, as we face financial and military exhaustion, we have to ask ourselves if we can even successfully evacuate our personnel from the far-flung bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
This must be an equally sobering moment for Europe, and an additional reason for the recent plunge in the relative value of the Euro, for Europe is now at the mercy of Russia in terms of staying warm in the winter, running their kitchen stoves, and keeping the lights on. Russia also exerts substantial financial leverage over the US in all the dollars and securitized US debt paper it holds. In effect, Russia can shake the US banking system at will now by threatening to dump its dollar holdings.
The American banking system may not need a shove from Russia to fall on its face. It's effectively dead now, just lurching around zombie-like from one loan "window" to the next pretending to "borrow" capital -- while handing over shreds of its moldy clothing as "collateral" to the Federal Reserve. The entire US, beyond the banks, is becoming a land of the walking dead. Business is dying, home-ownership has become a death dance, whole regions are turning into wastelands of "for sale" signs, empty parking lots, vacant buildings, and dashed hopes. And all this beats a path directly to a failure of collective national imagination. We really don't know what's going on.
The fantasy that we can sustain our influence nine thousand miles away, when we can't even get our act together in Ohio is just a dark joke. One might state categorically that it would be a salubrious thing for America to knock off all its vaunted "dreaming" and just wake the fuck up.
August 11, 2008
==
Kunstler recently took part in the forum "What is the Future of Suburbia?"
==
In other news, Pervez Musharraf announces his resignations, twenty years and a day after another Pakistani dictator died in a plane crash. And Prachanda was sworn in today as prime minister of Nepal.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Madonna at Fifty
Her birthday is this Saturday. Camille Paglia considers how Madonna is in the news for everything but her music. As she puts it, "On the pop front, Madonna's life has been passing before our eyes like a decadent German expressionist film."
23 August update: The Drudge Report, where I found this photo, is getting all futless because it shows Madonna's impressively muscled physique.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
The Real Alison Poole
I never liked John Edwards and don't care about his affair. However, this item about his mistress details her earlier life as Jay McInerney's girlfriend and inspiration for the character of Alison Poole.
Lisa Jo Druck was born 20 March 1964 and changed her name to Rielle Hunter (first name pronounced "Riley") twenty years later. Her changing a perfectly fine name to one so pretentiously spelled makes me wonder if her character should have been called Alison Foole.
Lisa Jo Druck was born 20 March 1964 and changed her name to Rielle Hunter (first name pronounced "Riley") twenty years later. Her changing a perfectly fine name to one so pretentiously spelled makes me wonder if her character should have been called Alison Foole.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Quelle Surprise
Yesterday I received my GQ in the mail and found this article on peak oil. GQ, devolving since the late 90s into a lad mag, still has great articles such as these. Kunstler is quoted therein, too.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Hana Yori Dango
The first season of Hana Yori Dango wrapped up last night on KIKU. Nothing indicates if the second season will be shown, but the first is on DVD. Unfortunately, it's region two. (More on DVD region codes.)
Episode Titles
Ep 01: Declaration of war! The thing which is absolutely more important than money
Ep 02: The worst first kiss!
Ep 03: Tears! Good-bye to the person I like
Ep 04: First time coming home in the morning
Ep 05: Confession of life-threatening love
Ep 06: A love triangle of a roller-coaster ride hair-trigger crisis
Ep 07: Battle F4 dissolution!
Ep 08: Now the female high school student's "Top of Japan" decision war
Ep 09: The greatest last present
I wonder if the HDY makers were inspired by The Bodyguard's final scenes, in which Rachel Marron gets off her jet to kiss Frank Farmer goodbye. There's a similar scene, in which Domyoji sees Tsukushi running on the tarmac, calling after him. He goes to her, they argue, then kiss.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Kunstler Reviews The Dark Knight
(Revised 11 August 2008)Kunstler's review of The Dark Knight is overall astute, but I disagree with some of his points, especially this: "The People -- that is, the citizens of Gotham City -- literally banish even the possibility of heroism from town at the end of the movie -- they take an axe to it!" While Commissioner Gordon does smash the Bat-Signal (which he had created in Batman Begins), he does so "at Batman's request, allowing himself to be blamed for the murders carried out by Harvey Dent/Two-Face in order to preserve Dent's reputation in Gotham City." Heroism is evidenced when a prisoner on one of two ferries evacuating Gothamites throws away the detonator to the explosives on the other ferry, while his counterpart on the other boat also refrains from pushing the button. Of course, Batman is preventing the Joker from blowing up both vessels, unbeknownst to the evacuees, but the scene demonstrates people can act morally even under such duress.
Kusntler points out that "Bruce Wayne's personal apartment is one of those horrid glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid exposure to everything external practically screams 'no shelter here!'" But that's not new. In the dystopia We, citizens live "in the One State,[3] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass...". Remember that Wayne Manor (portrayed in Batman Begins by Mentmore Towers) was largely destroyed by a fire set by Ra's al Ghul at that movie's end and is still being rebuilt in The Dark Knight. The apartment Kunstler decries is a penthouse in one of Bruce Wayne's hotels. Yet the penthouse has a secret entrance to a location within the building serving as a temporary Batcave. More on the sets here.
I wonder if others have or will pick up on the themes of concealment and revealment, interiority and exteriority in the movie.
11 August 2008 update: James Wolcott links to Kunstler's review on JamesHowardKunstler.typepad.com, which, unlike Kunstler.com, includes readers' comments. In only 24 days in release, The Dark Knight has become the third-highest grossing movie in American history. The movie's significance will become apparent only in retrospect. For now, people are wondering if it will match or surpass the aptly-named Titanic in box office.
August 4, 2008
Dark (K)night
Note: Posting early this week on account of weekend road trip.
The most striking thing about the new Batman movie, now smashing the all-time box office records, is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the animating element in American culture these days. It must appeal to the many angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.
The rich symbolism in this spectacle represents the tenor of contemporary America as something a few notches worse than whatever the Nazis were heading toward around 1933. We like nothing better than to see people suffer and watch things get broken. The more slowly people are tortured (including the movie audience) the more exquisite the pleasure derived from the act. Civilization offers no consolation. In fact, its a mug's game. Thus, civilization is composed only of torturers and their mug victims.
Gotham City, the setting for all these sadomasochistic vignettes, is a place devoid of comfort. (The suburbs are missing completely.) Even the personal haunts of "the Batman," a.k.a. zillionaire Bruce Wayne, are hard-edged non-spaces. His workplace (cleverly accessed via a dumpster) is an underground bunker the size of about three football fields with a claustrophobic drop ceiling and a single furnishing: the megalomaniacal computer console that is supposed to afford him "control" of the city, but which appears to be, in fact, a completely impotent sham piece of techno-junk, since it can't even outperform a $300 GPS unit in locating things. By the way, Hitler had a brighter sense of decor in the final days of the bunker. Bruce Wayne's personal apartment is one of those horrid glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid exposure to everything external practically screams "no shelter here!"
At the center of all this is the character called "The Joker." Judging by the reams of reviews and reportage about this movie elsewhere in the media, the death of actor Heath Ledger, who played the role, adds another layer of juicy sadomasochistic deliciousness to the proceedings -- we get to reflect that the monster on screen may have gotten away, but the anxiety-ridden young actor who played him was carted off to the bone orchard before the film even officially wrapped, (and therefore deserves extra special consideration for America's greatest honor, the Oscar award, while the audience deserves its own award for recognizing the lovely ironies embroidered in this cultural phenomenon.)
The Joker is not so much as person as a force of nature, a "black swan" in clown white. He has no fingerprints, no ID, no labels in his clothing. All he has is the memory of an evil father who performed a symbolic sadomasochistic oral rape on him, and so he is now programmed to go about similarly mutilating folks, blowing things up, and wrecking everyone's hopes and dreams because he has nothing better to do. He represents himself simply as an agent of "chaos." Taken at face value, he would seem to symbolize the deadly forces of entropy that now threatens to unravel real American life in the real world -- a combination of our foolish over- investments in complexity and the frightening capriciousness of both nature and history, which do not reveal their motivations to us.
By the way, forget about God here or anything that even remotely smacks of an oppositional notion to evil. All that's back on the cutting room floor somewhere (if it even got that far). And I say this as a non-religious person. But the absence of any possible idea of redemption for the human spirit is impressive. In the world of "the Batman," humanity at its very best is capable only of being confused about itself. This is perhaps an interesting new form of dramaturgy -- instead of good-versus-evil you only get befuddlement-versus-evil. Goodness has lost its way in the dark night of the American psyche, as might be understandable considering the nation of louts, liars, grifters, bullies, meth freaks, harpies, and tattooed creeps we have become. The best we can bring to this predicament is the low-grade pop therapy that passes for thinking nowadays in educated circles. Any consideration of the heroic is off the menu here. We can't ask that much of ourselves. It's too difficult to imagine. Meanwhile, The People -- that is, the citizens of Gotham City -- literally banish even the possibility of heroism from town at the end of the movie -- they take an axe to it! -- perhaps indicating that they deserve whatever befalls them or, shall I say, "us."
A few other striking elements of this spectacle deserve attention. One is the grandiosity that saturates the story elements, and the remarkable impotence of it all. The Batman possesses every high-tech weapon and survival implement ever dreamed up, yet they avail him nothing -- except a lot off sickening leaps off skyscrapers and futile hard landings on car roofs, shipping containers, sidewalks, and other human carcasses. I doubt the writers/director Chris and Jonathan Nolan consciously aimed to depict good old American ingenuity as utterly valueless in the face of chaos, but that's the effect. Otherwise, everything in the Batman's world is overscaled and out-of-whack from the size of Bruce Wayne's fortune (what an executive package his Daddy must have made off with, and from which investment bank?!), to the energy expended in so many car chases and explosions, to the super-sized doom-worthy towers of the gigantic, soulless city.
Finally there is the derivation of all this sadomasochistic nihilism out of a comic book. How appropriate, since we have become a cartoon of a society living on a cartoon of a North American landscape, that the deepest source of our mythos comes from cartoons. We're so far gone that real human emotion is beyond us. We're to far gone -- and even without shame -- to care how this odious movie portrays us to the rest of the world. It is already making a fortune out there.
Kusntler points out that "Bruce Wayne's personal apartment is one of those horrid glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid exposure to everything external practically screams 'no shelter here!'" But that's not new. In the dystopia We, citizens live "in the One State,[3] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass...". Remember that Wayne Manor (portrayed in Batman Begins by Mentmore Towers) was largely destroyed by a fire set by Ra's al Ghul at that movie's end and is still being rebuilt in The Dark Knight. The apartment Kunstler decries is a penthouse in one of Bruce Wayne's hotels. Yet the penthouse has a secret entrance to a location within the building serving as a temporary Batcave. More on the sets here.
I wonder if others have or will pick up on the themes of concealment and revealment, interiority and exteriority in the movie.
11 August 2008 update: James Wolcott links to Kunstler's review on JamesHowardKunstler.typepad.com, which, unlike Kunstler.com, includes readers' comments. In only 24 days in release, The Dark Knight has become the third-highest grossing movie in American history. The movie's significance will become apparent only in retrospect. For now, people are wondering if it will match or surpass the aptly-named Titanic in box office.
August 4, 2008
Dark (K)night
Note: Posting early this week on account of weekend road trip.
The most striking thing about the new Batman movie, now smashing the all-time box office records, is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the animating element in American culture these days. It must appeal to the many angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.
The rich symbolism in this spectacle represents the tenor of contemporary America as something a few notches worse than whatever the Nazis were heading toward around 1933. We like nothing better than to see people suffer and watch things get broken. The more slowly people are tortured (including the movie audience) the more exquisite the pleasure derived from the act. Civilization offers no consolation. In fact, its a mug's game. Thus, civilization is composed only of torturers and their mug victims.
Gotham City, the setting for all these sadomasochistic vignettes, is a place devoid of comfort. (The suburbs are missing completely.) Even the personal haunts of "the Batman," a.k.a. zillionaire Bruce Wayne, are hard-edged non-spaces. His workplace (cleverly accessed via a dumpster) is an underground bunker the size of about three football fields with a claustrophobic drop ceiling and a single furnishing: the megalomaniacal computer console that is supposed to afford him "control" of the city, but which appears to be, in fact, a completely impotent sham piece of techno-junk, since it can't even outperform a $300 GPS unit in locating things. By the way, Hitler had a brighter sense of decor in the final days of the bunker. Bruce Wayne's personal apartment is one of those horrid glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid exposure to everything external practically screams "no shelter here!"
At the center of all this is the character called "The Joker." Judging by the reams of reviews and reportage about this movie elsewhere in the media, the death of actor Heath Ledger, who played the role, adds another layer of juicy sadomasochistic deliciousness to the proceedings -- we get to reflect that the monster on screen may have gotten away, but the anxiety-ridden young actor who played him was carted off to the bone orchard before the film even officially wrapped, (and therefore deserves extra special consideration for America's greatest honor, the Oscar award, while the audience deserves its own award for recognizing the lovely ironies embroidered in this cultural phenomenon.)
The Joker is not so much as person as a force of nature, a "black swan" in clown white. He has no fingerprints, no ID, no labels in his clothing. All he has is the memory of an evil father who performed a symbolic sadomasochistic oral rape on him, and so he is now programmed to go about similarly mutilating folks, blowing things up, and wrecking everyone's hopes and dreams because he has nothing better to do. He represents himself simply as an agent of "chaos." Taken at face value, he would seem to symbolize the deadly forces of entropy that now threatens to unravel real American life in the real world -- a combination of our foolish over- investments in complexity and the frightening capriciousness of both nature and history, which do not reveal their motivations to us.
By the way, forget about God here or anything that even remotely smacks of an oppositional notion to evil. All that's back on the cutting room floor somewhere (if it even got that far). And I say this as a non-religious person. But the absence of any possible idea of redemption for the human spirit is impressive. In the world of "the Batman," humanity at its very best is capable only of being confused about itself. This is perhaps an interesting new form of dramaturgy -- instead of good-versus-evil you only get befuddlement-versus-evil. Goodness has lost its way in the dark night of the American psyche, as might be understandable considering the nation of louts, liars, grifters, bullies, meth freaks, harpies, and tattooed creeps we have become. The best we can bring to this predicament is the low-grade pop therapy that passes for thinking nowadays in educated circles. Any consideration of the heroic is off the menu here. We can't ask that much of ourselves. It's too difficult to imagine. Meanwhile, The People -- that is, the citizens of Gotham City -- literally banish even the possibility of heroism from town at the end of the movie -- they take an axe to it! -- perhaps indicating that they deserve whatever befalls them or, shall I say, "us."
A few other striking elements of this spectacle deserve attention. One is the grandiosity that saturates the story elements, and the remarkable impotence of it all. The Batman possesses every high-tech weapon and survival implement ever dreamed up, yet they avail him nothing -- except a lot off sickening leaps off skyscrapers and futile hard landings on car roofs, shipping containers, sidewalks, and other human carcasses. I doubt the writers/director Chris and Jonathan Nolan consciously aimed to depict good old American ingenuity as utterly valueless in the face of chaos, but that's the effect. Otherwise, everything in the Batman's world is overscaled and out-of-whack from the size of Bruce Wayne's fortune (what an executive package his Daddy must have made off with, and from which investment bank?!), to the energy expended in so many car chases and explosions, to the super-sized doom-worthy towers of the gigantic, soulless city.
Finally there is the derivation of all this sadomasochistic nihilism out of a comic book. How appropriate, since we have become a cartoon of a society living on a cartoon of a North American landscape, that the deepest source of our mythos comes from cartoons. We're so far gone that real human emotion is beyond us. We're to far gone -- and even without shame -- to care how this odious movie portrays us to the rest of the world. It is already making a fortune out there.
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