Ayn Clouter's Blog

(To the tune of "Tomorrow Belongs To Me".)

The sundown towns no longer maintain their signs.
No crosses are burned on TV.
The racists reluctantly learned new lines:
An open society!

Those born since the sixties they cannot recall
The dogs and the noose in the tree.
Their elders agree to forget it all.
What could I grow up to be?

White Citizen's Councils avert not their eyes
Co-opting N.A.A.C.P.,
But my ear hears whispers to organize --
The White House was meant for me.

The Homeland Security powers will be
The tools of my wrath -- you will see
The bigots frog-marched far across the sea
For vengeance belongs to me.

Years ago, I used to hear Birchers (more widespread then than now) talk about the evil master conspiracy trying to rule us all. They were convinced that anyone who understood would oppose those vicious schemes. I, naturally, reacted differently. If these plotters were winning so efficiently, shouldn't we try to join them and be among the winners ourselves? Hence my own political efforts, helping in their small way to rachet down control over the clueless masses.

I was reminded of this today when I read P. Z. Myers' insightful item about torture:

"I'm going to surprise some people and agree that torture is an extremely powerful tool. It's just useless for gathering information. ...

Here is all that torture is good for: inspiring fear in a population."

Exactly! That's why I've been advocating it for years. This should be added to other counterintuitive conclusions that are obvious when you look behind the rhetoric. Such as:

The purpose of war is not foreign conquest -- it is domestic political leverage.

The purpose of "elections" is not giving voice to the people -- it is stifling dissent.

The purpose of "trials" is not finding the truth -- it is changing the subject.

The purpose of common stock is not enriching investors -- it is depriving them of control.

Orwell, who was one of the last millenium's two most misunderstood satirists (Rand was the other), claimed that the object of torture is torture. No, George, that's just a symptom of psychic wear among your minions, and a sign they need to be replaced with new tools. When your inquisitors begin loving their work they lose sight of the bottom line and start engaging in overkill (or in this case, overpain).

Let the hoi polloi know that it's available -- with an occasional random victim, just to keep them worried -- but when it becomes routine it numbs the effect. To paraphrase She Who Must Not Be Named, torture should be unsafe, legal, and rare.

Why is the administration of Our Noble Lame Duck continuing to dribble away its efforts trying to censor science that Ordinary People Were Not Meant To Know, when they could instead be directing research to proving more politically palatable theories? I've had one such inspiration in reading a quote (from an article in *ugh* The Nation about "Toxic Toys") found by the ever-alert Sister Nancy Beth Eczema at Islezbofascist Awareness Week: Scientists, the new pornographers:

The results showed an apparent correlation between women who had higher phthalate levels in their urine and the fact that their male children, within thirteen months of birth, showed "reduced ano-genital distance (AGD)." That measurement of the distance between the anus and the scrotum is a means of distinguishing between male and female rodents and is a key indicator of testosterone levels. Dr. Gray has been seeing shorter AGDs in rats fed phthalates -- now Dr. Swan was seeing it in humans.

Maybe this explains the growing gayness of America. Could that be a symptom of helpless victims of chemically-sabotaged toys which cause testosterone-deprived boys to desperately, albeit subconsciously, seek to bring their genitals closer to their anals, by *ugh* gay sex? And could the phthalate-infected toys be imports from commie China? Anyone remember Arthur C. Clarke's classic SF story "I Remember Babylon", about how Red Chinese pornography by satellite was going to corrupt us all to our destruction? Maybe they found a more subtle way to do that. Forget about lead paint. That was just a false front they could dispense with to avoid suspicion of their real, hidden, more culturally devastating agenda. It's the toys of gender doom -- more insidious than any scheme of Fu Manchu.

PLEASE MAY I HAVE SOME MORE?:

Once again, the Pyrrhic victory of ideology over poetic sense has been exampled by that Laureatess of the Leftness, Mad Kane herself. Despite my helpful corrective suggestions to her in the past, she continues to write what she believes to be haiku, while ignoring the deeper beauty of the medium. Consider her latest barrage at the only President we have, which she describes as "the real reason George W. Bush vetoed SCHIP". It's at "SCHIP Haiku". Go ahead and read it; I'll wait.

...................

Okay, back now? See how she gets so involved in trying to condemn The Decisionator's Decidiating that she forgets the other important aspects required for haiku beside just 5-7-5 syllable patterns. Let's remember: these are supposed to be about nature or the seasons.

To help her improve her efforts in the future as far as form, I have prepared three separate examples. Notice that I have even offered an innovation which the original Japanese masters don't display -- at least not in translation -- namely, rhymes. Naturally, as far as content, she may still be hampered by her bleeding-hearted liberal mushiness, but I have adoped a properly non-left attitude of laisser manger le gâteau to the same subject:

Ripe green tobacco
About to be taxed still more
Saved by Bush veto


Xmas with no crutch
Tiny Tim no Marxist slave
Bush saved him from such


Beggars may suffer
Sans their flu shots in winter
We keep our coffer

BIG NANNY IS WATCHING:

Meredith, N.H. - Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani on Monday accused Democrats of favoring a controlling "nanny government" as he continued his bashing of the rival party.

Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Rudy the Unready hasn't yet learned the lesson of Dick: embrace the maternal substitute, so that if we let the voters grow up they shall not depart from the righteous ways of the Decider. He should learn this theme song, from a movie about the Ultimate Nanny, to the tune of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from Mary Poppins.

We diddle fiddle twiddle your rights away.
We diddle fiddle twiddle your rights away.
Unitary Executive trumps the Constitution.
Try and hold us to the Law,
And we'll get absolution.
Call us in, we'll go "Haw, haw",
For this is our solution:
Unitary Executive trumps the Constitution.

We diddle fiddle twiddle your rights away.
We diddle fiddle twiddle your rights away.
There was a time when we did quake
If Congress said a word,
For fear our funding they would take
If we shot them the bird,
But we have learned a magic term
That stands up like a wall.
We never more will have to squirm
Since we have learned to squall:

Unitary Executive trumps the Constitution.
Try and hold us to the Law,
And we'll get absolution.
Call us in, we'll go "Haw, haw",
For this is our solution:
Unitary Executive trumps the Constitution.

We diddle fiddle twiddle your rights away.
We diddle fiddle twiddle your rights away.
So if the Senate wants to know
The memos we email,
Just let their Chairmen puff and blow:
We do not need to quail.
Branch one and four of this our state
Are both beyond rebuke.
Subpeonas will not be our fate:
Reality's a fluke.

Unitary Executive trumps the Constitution.
Unitary Executive trumps the Constitution!

(Cross-posted to the American Street.)

NEXT TO NATURE, ARTSY:

Ward Churchill is not the only (soon to be ex-) ivory tower dweller who is assaulting the public complacency with subversive essays spitting in the face of our most widely accepted public myths. One of his fellow underminers is an art teacher at Dickinson College named Crispin Sartwell. He had already shown where his heart truly lies by co-editing the revealingly titled Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre -- Feminist, Anarchist, Genius. But Sartwell knows how to appeal to the timid fantasizing geeks on the web before he starts brainwashing them. Consider this from the very first page of his latest book, Six Names of Beauty:

"The Avengers" was a British show, half spy adventure, half surrealist cinema. The lead female character ... was Mrs. Emma Peel, played by Diana Rigg. ... She often wore skin-tight leather jumpsuits a la Catwoman.... And of course Diana Rigg was beautiful, all cheekbones and slim curves. At twelve I believed I was in love with her, and I pictured us together -- not having sex, but just talking and perhaps sharing a chaste kiss.

Perhaps one result of all those summers I spent on my grandparents' farm was a graphically informed awareness, even at twelve, that there was a whole lot more to look forward to sexually than chaste kisses. Yet this boring vision still seems to animate (so to speak) Sartwell's emotive gushiness. His latest enthusiasm is for the bizarre, virtually actionless, YouTube "campaign commercials" of Mike Gravel. This is not because Gravel, the Democrats' answer to Ron Paul, appeals to Sartwell's political tendencies with his anti-Iraq War and anti-Drug War and anti-income tax positions. No, it is because his speechless, wordless "ads" appeal to Sartwell's aesthetic ennui:

Mike Gravel is to political advertising what Ralph Waldo Emerson is to the essay, Walt Whitman to poetry, Jackson Pollock to painting, 50 Cent to bullet wounds. He is the avant garde of the new artpolitical era. ...

These are Dadaist campaign ads, as revolutionary in their context as Duchamp's urinal....

In American politics, language has been so emptied of meaning that silence is the only remaining medium of expression.

Sartwell's anarchist war against any message at all is on full display in the Los Angeles Times at "Mike Gravel's ripple effect". Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has helpfully posted the two videos in question at "Moaning In Glorious Epiphanic Pain", along with some meta-critical remarks, including:

One might wonder why someone who seems bent on running a campaign as performance art did not take advantage of the debates by, for instance, staring silently into the camera when asked a question, and then, if the moderator tried to move on to someone else, saying: Excuse me, I haven't finished yet.

The commenters thereupon pile Pelion upon Ossa by supposedly learned references to poetry:

Note how Gravel's candidacy is itself a commentary upon Eliot's veiled Arthurian reference to how "The nymphs are departed" (175 and 179). Rather than simply aligning his own political views with Eliot's jeremiad and noting that America is the Waste Land, he inserts himself into the poem as the "heir" to the American "throne."

and to comparatively recent Presidential scheming:

Nixon reckoned that, if he appeared irrationally aggressive, it would terrify the other side into concessions.... Gravelian Madman theory goes one step further. Not only would his opponent be unable to predict Gravel's potential countermoves, he wouldn't even be able to predict his objectives. A Gravelian stance in negotiating with Iran might be, say, to move a carrier battle group into the Arabian Sea before demanding that Iran cease production of expanded polystyrene, rubber pipe gaskets and canvas deck shoes. ...

That last poster, by accident, has stumbled closer to understanding the essence of Gravel's endeavor. His ads are not Art, or Literary Reference, but fulfillment of the market demands of those who Really Decide Things For You:

The President in particular is very much a figurehead -- he wields no real power whatsover. ... His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. ... Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have viturally no power at all, and of these few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded.
--Douglas Adams, 1979

Perhaps, some day, I may tell you the web sites of my associates, the surprising other three men and two women who really know. But probably not. Would it not be needlessly cruel to expose you to truths you are not prepared to handle? Even Gravel's tangenital obscurantism may reveal too much.

THERE ONCE WAS A CONTEST AT MAD KANE'S....:

The Poetess Laureate of the blogging world, Mad Kane, is having another limerick-writing contest, complete with a small cash prize. This time the topic is Money. You can read more about it (and make your own entry) at this post.

Since virtually anything I pen is obsessed with politics, I considered which Presidential candidate is most concerned with money. There was no contest: the one who goes on at greatest length about the topic is a Republican. Hence this offering:

Ron Paul's Nonfractionally Reserved Limerick
(Or "War's Just A Side Issue To Me")

There once was an Act which made Legal
The Tender which displayed an Eagle
In the seal on Reverse,
Which did prompt quite a curse
From those who thought Gold should be Regal.