Fiery Furnaces - We Got Back the Plague (Single Version)

Why? Oh, I dunno. Just because.

There are many things that have confused me about this administration from a policy standpoint, things that have made me think less "that's horrible" and more "why did they do that?" But this is the first time I've been confused from a purely human perspective. How can you know what's going on in New Orleans, hearing the reports and seeing the chaos, and not personally do something, if you're rich enough to own large vehicles or have the freedom to go down there without losing your job? If you have money, you can rent or buy a boat and bring it down there, or buy up all the bottled water and non-perishable food you can find and fly it down there, or just get in your large vehicle and use it to ferry people to safety. The Superdome has run out of water and food; you can at least do something to help that, even if you don't want to help rescue people from the roofs of houses or stop them from being being raped in the street. If you have the capacity to help, why aren't you, given that, as of last night:

- Soldiers still had not arrived at the city, and people could not be rescued in some cases because they would be shot;
- At one hospital, only 8 people had been taken out;
- Things are exploding and catching on fire. Things are exploding and catching on fire in a fucking flood.


All of this in a city where if you touch the water and touch your face, you stand a good chance of dying. All of this in a city where corpses are sitting out on the streets.


This is ignoring policy issues, stuff like the wetlands being built on and flood-prevention funding being cut, or even present-tense policy like, apparently, a zero-tolerance attitude toward "looting." This is a much simpler issue: when shit is this bad and when they could help, why are individual members of this administration not down there right now, helping out with their not-inconsiderable resources? Especially given that this is what the rest of us are being asked to do?

Anyway, America's failing, blah blah blah. It's all pretty horrible. I'm going away for a while. Don't let everything go to shit while I'm gone, OK guys? And in the meantime, give to the Red Cross (1-800-HELP-NOW works too), they got the Astrodome hooked up amazingly well, looks like.
posted by Mike B. at 10:58 AM 0 comments

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Please go read this article, which Hillary linked to. If you were ever wondering what clap clap blog porn might look like, this is pretty close to the archetype of one variation.[1] It includes the following elements: zombies, American Idol, "subversion," anti-popism, reality TV, pop inclusionism, misguided leftism, and the phrase "24-hour zombie watch." I read it and my brain blinks these big lights in my peripheral vision labeled "MAJOR POST" but it's like it's so perfect there's nothing more for me to say. How can I explicate perhaps the most perfect allegory ever? A bunch of students have impotence[2] issues ("TV makes you powerless to resist it, but somehow we have resisted it--due no doubt to us having broken free of the shackles of civilization etc. etc.--so therefore we must have the power to dress up in zombie outfits and actually frighten people, because those people are sheep! Sheeeep!") and engage in some "street theater" of dubious effiacy (my reaction probably would've been along the lines of, "Oh, awesome, we're covering 'Thriller'!"), only to find, when they actually approach and examine the object of their critique, that it does not seek to destroy but only to embrace, and so they are embraced, and find that they like it. And who doesn't like zombies? Happy endings all around.

I also like the fact that the organizers somehow thought that by using craigslist, an extremely popular public forum, that they would "fly under the radar." Because American Idol people, they are too square to known about an element of revolutionary change like craigslist. Hee.

[1] Another variation would heavily feature bacon. Don't ask.
[2] Just since it's been a while, when I say "impotence," I don't mean erectile disfunction, I mean the feeling of being powerless. Although there's probably an interesting explication lurking there, too.

posted by Mike B. at 11:01 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Carl Wilson's written an excellent review of a book by a punk rocker-turned-policy advisor guy who is apparently well-known north of the border; I know I'm not making that very clear, but go check out the post, he explains it much better. It's kicked up some sort of shitstorm in which the book's author calls him gay, all because of something involving Canadian politics or something. The aforementioned shitstorm is mildly interesting in a way that sort of confirms what Wilson's saying, but it's all beside the point. I read and immensely enjoyed the review because it's ultimately less a criticism of the book itself (or the individual at hand) and more an extremely astute sketch of why folks like myself feel such ambivalence toward being "punk in spirit"--acting all punk rawk is great and all, but:

Neo-cons hated the sixties, and punks hated hippies. In many ways punk anticipated the knee-jerk, know-nothing disdain for collective input and consequence that would become standard-issue conservative politics and culture - extreme individualism and atomized democracy.

How great a leap is it from barfing on old ladies to cutting their pension cheques?

Rush Limbaugh is punk, the Oxycontin-snorting, neo-con version of Henry Rollins. The blithely rude Paris Hilton is punk, kid sister to Courtney Love; much punk music now echoes her entitled, self-involved whine.

Give it a read.

posted by Mike B. at 1:53 PM 0 comments

Good times in the Middle East:

The death toll rose to more than 800 this morning after rumors of a suicide bomber led to a stampede in a vast procession of Shiite pilgrims as they crossed a bridge on their way to a shrine in northern Baghdad...

Health Minister Abdul-Mutalib Mohammed said on Iraqi television that there were "huge crowds on the bridge and the disaster happened when someone shouted that there is a suicide bomber on the bridge."

"This led to a state of panic among the pilgrims," he said, "and they started pushing each other and there were many case of suffocation."

See, the constitutional process is working in Iraq--they've just learned a valuable lesson about the limits of free speech! Oliver Wendall Holmes is content.

posted by Mike B. at 11:59 AM 0 comments