lapsedmodernist | (no subject)

This is really retarded.

This week in news makes me feel like the SNL version of "Hardball" host Chris Matthews (way cooler than his real counterpart, obviously) when he just looks like the veins in his head are about to pop from the complete stupidity unfolding before him.

So, item #1 on the agenda is the cartoon referenced in the link above. Apparently what happenned, is the confused, misguided pro-Republican cartoonist Michael Ramirez produced a very confused cartoon, lamenting the "political assasination" of Bush's character (sidebar 1: what political assasination? what's going on in the media now is like an enactment of that supposedly impossible task of smacking one's ass and stroking one's head at the same time). The cartoon portrays Bush with his hands tied behind his back (sidebar 2: hee, i just accidentally typied in "heads" instead of "hands" which is infinitely funnier and far more appropriate, because for once, the old Soviet propaganda anthropomophism about the hydra of world capitalism is pretty on point), with a gun to his head. The gun is held by a man who symbolizes "politics." The backdrop is Iraq. Lending further credence to the theory that everyone affiliated with The Shrubbery is, like Beavis, incapable of operating on any sort of symbolic level, the Secret Service freaked the fuck out, and are considering the cartoon a threat to the UnPresident. I am having very complex emotions over this. I am really torn: on one hand, Ramirez is a motherfucker, the Rush Limbaugh of political cartoonists, so if he gets a new one ripped over this, I won't exactly be shedding tears of sympathy. On the other hand, the commotion says a lot about the zeitgeist of stupidity, paranoia and literal-minded linearity that we have been enveloped in. It also makes me think of that quote by one of Hitler's Little Helpers Hermann Goring--"When I hear the word "culture," I reach for my Browning." For better or worse, the stupid cartoon is a part of the getting-stupider-by-the-minute culture of today, and although this current predicament does not have much to do with Herr Goring's Pol Pot-esque distaste for anything "superstructural," on a more discursive level, the location of the perceived threat and the response methods are similar. It's analogy, not homology, but nevertheless.

Meanwhile, people keep dying in Liberia, and I am, once again, AMAZED at just how pathologically stupid and arrogant BushCo is. Obviously, I stand unsurprised that the humanitarian impulse has not moved the reigning bloodsuckers to deploy troops there, but they are also shitting over the seemingly godsend PR opportunity that, in the discourse of their own insane unlogic, would allow them to spin themselves as a humanitarian protectorate, which they could then retroactively project on Iraq. Sure, that would be a logical fallacy, but what else is new for them? That's certainly not a deterrent in this case. I mean, the whole situation is fucked up on many levels, but I find it unfathomable that a "white man's burden" situation actually arose where the Liberians are begging Bush and "Big Brother America" (here I mean that not in the Orwell way, but rather, in the sense that Liberia was founded by former American slaves, freed in 19th century) to come and save them, Britain is pressing Bush to do an intervention similar to the one Britain did in Sierra Leone a few years ago (in an analogous postcolonial context), Kofi Annan is calling on Bush to deploy peacekeeping troops, but the warhawks just ain't interested. Obviously, I am not shocked that they don't care that West Africa is a destabilized mess, where Charles Taylor, his proxies Foday Sankoh and the RUF, and his guerilla opponents like LURD have been murdering, raping and amputating civilians for years. Diamonds may be forever, but BushCo is only interested in slithering in oil, black as their rotten little hearts. What I am shocked by is the fact that they are so dumb, arrogant and complacent, that despite the mess in Iraq, despite the fact that the elections are a year and a half away, despite the fact that the amount of soldiers they would need to deploy to Liberia, for a humanitarian cause, where they would actually BE WELCOMED by the local population, compared to the amount of soldiers they stranded to be ambushed and commit suicides in Iraq, would be symbolic more that anything else, they are shitting all over the opportunity to have some sort of public/media show of pretending to blot some of the blood trickling down onto their chins form their fangs. I guess the only media image they are interested in is The Shrub with a stuffed crotch.

constintina and I were talking about it last night, and she is right--they are playing Monopoly, and they are building their oil castles on Boardwalk and Pennsylvania Avenue (HA!) and they just can't be bothered with little nationbuilding in little places like Oriental Avenue (and trust me: to Bush, Africa is the Orient).