Disingenuous grandstanding

*

My congressman, Tim Johnson (IL-I5), is forced by circumstance to masquerade as a somewhat independent, somewhat moderate Republican because an important part of his district includes Urbana and Champaign, home of the University of Illinois. While this is, in my opinion, one of the most redneck Big 10 campus settlements, the university still exercises a liberalizing impact on civic life that Johnson cannot ignore. Virtually a straight party-line voter over the years, he has occasionally been permitted by GOP leaders to break party ranks on votes that might have a symbolic importance to the university community but whose outcome was not in doubt.

I'm not exactly sure what Johnson's motive is for leading an effort in the House to defund Libya military operations, but disingenuous grandstanding must be high on the bulleted list of possibilities. If you review Johnson's voting record, you can see that he's not been reluctant to vote for war funding during his first decade in Washington. I suppose he's trolling for some Tea Party cred. Oddly, any number of liberals and independents might be expected to strongly support Johnson's effort, but for different reasons than are motivating him.

One thing of which I am certain: if the current President were a Republican, we wouldn't be hearing a peep about Libya out of "The Honorable Timothy V. Johnson."

"Considering all options"

*

The Associated Press, via HuffingtonPost, reports that

the U.S. military warned Tuesday it was "considering all options" in response to dire conditions there that have left people cowering in darkened homes and scrounging for food and rainwater.

So a new Coalition of the Willing implements a no-fly zone over Libya by bombing the shit out of the country. Then, due to the "dire conditions" to which Operation: Odyssey Dawn must have contributed to immensely, the omnipresent "U.S. military" seems to threaten pretty much anything in order to make things all better.

I've already registered my complaint, and Gurlitzer's, about the name given to this humanitarian military initiative. Maybe they should have called it Operation: Hey Kid Stop Hitting Yourself Or I'll Kick Your Ass.

In front of our noses

*

In the comments section of last night's post about "Operation: Odyssey Dawn," Gurlitzer observed that the name of this military intervention may be more worrisome than inartful. The name pretty well literally means "the beginning of a long, complicated journey." I wonder whether that amounted to some kind of military Freudian slip or it actually was intended to convey the meaning that Gurlitzer pointed to.

This evening Josh Marshall posted about how many ways this adventure looks like a bad idea to him. As much as liberal-minded people want tyrants like Qaddafi to disappear, and think it's a noble idea to level the "playing field" for his internal enemies, we have many more reasons to reject this kind of thinking: three of the most compelling can be summarized as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Even if the US were the most nobleminded liberal democracy on the planet, it would still not be in our charter to try governing nations that we feel are being run by villains. Where we have national agreement that influencing certain outcomes is in the best interests of global tranquility, then the weapons of choice would be trade, foreign aid, diplomacy, and sanctions. These tools would be applied to help or hinder as required, and executed in the context of a broadly multilateral international consensus. Maybe everyone will be ready for that sometime in the 23rd century.

Another take on Operation: Odyssey Dawn is offered by Duncan Black (i.e., "Atrios"): wars are free, aren't they?! Also, "freedom bombs" may be good for the economy!

Finally, here's a post from Hullabaloo that better gets at the point pertaining to management of the public narrative that I was trying to make last night: they're using centrifuge-grade spin, but the issue is too important to greet with the knee-jerk cynicism we've been conditioned to react with.

Quaint ideas I have

*

It seems that I have a mistaken idea of what the term "no-fly zone" means. I'd understood it to mean that our UN heroes would patrol Libyan airspace and shoot down Colonel Qaddafi's fighters and bombers to prevent them from strafing protesters. But evidently it means that the US and British navies bomb the shit out of coastal cities with cruise missiles. And so begins Operation: Odyssey Dawn... which has to be the worst name given to any military operation in world history!

Setting aside the stupid name for the attack, I do understand the concept of disabling the dashing Colonel's antiaircraft batteries so UN air forces can patrol the skies. But I also understand that Qaddafi's air defense infrastructure is somewhat old and mediocre, and is not considered a high threat to Western nation's superior air power. Cruise missiles are an outstanding modality for causing "collateral damage."

Second-guessing military strategists is not my purpose, though; I'm more interested in the delicate pubic narrative versus the comparatively jarring reports arriving on our computer screens. We're told that the US has been very sensitive about being seen as the ringleader of this military action. In the same HuffingtonPost article linked above, Harry Reid coyly states

"I support the actions taken today by our allies, with the support of several Arab countries, to prevent the tyrant Moammar Qaddafi from perpetrating further atrocities on the people of Libya."

as if the United States has confined itself to cheerleading in the bleachers.

In other news, where the Kingdom of Bahrain and its subjects are concerned, it appears that the United States and European democracies have not even bothered to set up the bleachers. I wonder why.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

I do not wish to lead our British Cousin, Marginalia, down another maudlin path with this evening's musical selection, like I did last time. So tonight I humbly put forth a more robust offering from the spoiled-romance department.



Now I, myself, never had a problem with my girlfriends' "mamas"---they always seemed to adore me...more than their fucking daughters did, actually! In fact, it's too bad that they didn't have "cougars" back then, because I might have made it once or twice! Anyway, I consider this jaunty tune to illustrate another case of a missed Frank Zappa opportunity for a hit radio single. True, the "kill your mama" meme would probably have sent 1970 broadcast sensors into a tizzy, but maybe he could have gotten airplay with it on FM "underground" stations. In my opinion, this track has it all: an aggressive beat, great lummox-rock riff, a zillion instruments on its jazz-rock chart, and humor in both lyrics and arrangement. In a more perfect world, this song---not the embarrassing and tiresome Dinah-Moe Humm---would have been his concert encore crowd-pleaser.

The cover art of the album from which this track is extracted, "Weasels Ripped My Flesh," is also worth remarking upon, and I'm delighted that the YouTuber who posted "Guitar" included it as the visual channel. I remember "freaking out" when I first saw this hilariously creepy cover during the summer of '70, on an excursion to an incense-fogged record store in Piper's Alley, Old Town, in Chicago. Sight unheard, so to speak, I eagerly dug out my $3.25, which was plucked from my hand by a greasy longhair with 8-inch dingy yellow fingernails that sickly curled toward the palms of his hand. (What a jagoff!) Fortuitously, 40-some-odd years later it came to my attention that this album jacket artwork was inspired by the cover of a postwar pulp men's magazine. Scroll down below the song credits to see it, and note the inconspicuous article title at bottom right of the cover.

My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (1970, from"Weasels Ripped My Flesh," Warner Bros. - Reprise - Bizarre MS 2028), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

"Calculated risk"

*

"It would be hard to describe how alarming this is right now."

That's what a high-ranking US official told ABC News about the deteriorating nuclear reactor situations at Fukushima.

The difficulties caused by the evacuations were blamed for "escalating" the chances of a meltdown.

"They need to stop pulling out people -- and step up with getting them back in the reactor to cool it. There is a recognition this is a suicide mission," the unnamed U.S. official was quoted by ABC as saying. 

Yes sir, those "Japs" had better step up to the plate and get crackin' on that suicide mission of theirs so that anonymous high-ranking US officials, not to mention senior samurai at US Westinghouse, may sleep a little easier.

You see, they-all do the calculating and we-all do the risking.

Brutal.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

A rarely heard Beatles slow-dancer; one of my favorites of the era. I don't really remember it charting, possibly because there was too much competition from other Fab Four hits at the same time.



My clearest memory of it is from a 6th grade party in Nicky Bajovich's basement, spring 1965, dimly illuminated and with a certain amount of Crazy Foam being sprayed about for poorly understood psychosexual stimulative reasons. (It was a sweetly innocent era, and rapidly drawing to a close.)

The song was mainly composed by Lennon, and it was one of his least favorites. I disagree.

Yes It Is, The Beatles (1965, B-side of 45 rpm single Ticket To Ride, reissued 2009 in "The Beatles In Mono" box set, Mono Masters disc 1, track 17, EMI LC 0299), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: the YouTube version posted here is from the "Past Masters" compilations, but I cite the mono digital remaster that I have in my library. Six/half-dozen, etc....

"Housekeeping"

*

The posting has been light lately mainly because I have a freelance editing job that will take a month or two. Also, I'm trying to rethink my posting schedule so I'm not always a prisoner to the laptop on Friday and Saturday nights.

As I've implied in recent months, I'm not satisfied with the same blogging model I've been evolving for the past few years. There are plenty (i.e., way too many) of blogs that comment hypertopically on every unprecedented or heinous development domestically and worldwide. Nothing wrong with that, but my feeling now is that there's no way to keep up with it except for full-time bloggers who specialize in domestic politics, military issues, economics, whatever. I don't have the expertise, time, or energy for that. I feel my originality lies elsewhere, if only I can figure out where. So that's what I've been trying to do for the past several months.

You knuckleheads seem to like the music posts, so those will continue. But not necessarily on Friday and Saturday any more. I can have my prayer meetings and fish fries whenever the fuck I please, so that's what I will start doing shortly.

The Fifty50 keyword system is a wreck and always has been, so I'll spend some time trying to curate it so it's more helpful in finding old posts or whatever.

I want to start including more graphical content again because visual arts are important to me and I like to share. Along those lines, comic strips and animation have always been two of my central joys in life, and I find that others often take an interest if provided a helpful context.

Some readers might remember my referring to a project I called the "Model Of Everything," then scaled back to a "Diagram of Everything." That has been percolating in back of the skullbone all along, and I want to give it some more visibility soon. The point of the project, if I can even call it that with a straight face, is to step back as far as necessary to view science, on one hand, and philosophy/religion, on the other hand, as residing within the same reality context... and, in fact, providing indispensable services each to the other. More later. I do not claim that this is a modest or even achievable endeavor. But I do believe that it's necessary for practitioners in each domain to let go of their blinkered outlooks in order to break a tenacious impasse in human evolution. And if anybody can do that, the fuckin' RubberCrutch can!!!

Finally, I'm closing in on an alternative approach to political and economic commentary. It involves taking about 10 steps back from the "dailiness" of everything; contemplating a much longer timeline than political commentators normally do; and squinting like a painter does to blur out nonessential details and better see the true colors of things. The biggest challenge is to avoid getting sucked into the "dailiness" every time we're treated to a new outrage. In my continuing surveys of philosophy and history I'm finding that there's really nothing new going on. I'm interested in the historic conditions that lead to a revolutionary break from seemingly eternal political, religious, and economic impasses. They do happen, and civilization does move forward. Our jobs are to stop worrying about things that we do not individually control, keep our heads down, and squirt our chromosomes into the gene pool if we wish.

Literally speaking

*

I think this FireDogLake blogger takes John Boehner's "machine gun" imagery too seriously, as if this pickled Ohio sad sack was crafting some cunning subliminal message to god-knows-who about who-knows-what. I think a more straightforward interpretation of Bohener's remark is that people of his ilk are every bit as delusional as Colonel Qaddafi. One is left to wonder why the Times and the Post and NPR and [~] use Quaddafi as the gold standard for insanity and megalomania when we have so many competitors right here in the good old USA.

I'll acknowledge that the previous sentence was a mere rhetorical device: no one really is "left wondering" about that for very long.