Obviously

The Swill is feeling a little perdido. Unmoored. After much consideration, we decided that we needed a creed. Upon more consideration, however, we have realized that a creed would be too complicated to remember, and probably too much trouble to use as a daily gyroscope. It might also run the risk of pretention.

A motto, however, we think we could handle.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Fuck the Spaceshuttles

Here's a tidbit that should surprise no faithful reader of the Swill: we believe that speaking ill of the dead is not just a bad habit, not just a pecadillo, not just a cheap character flaw, but a moral and political imperative. Let the dead bury the dead, the Swill says, and we'll denigrate them when they're gone. The dead don't care, after all, and abusing the memory of even fine, formerly (and literally) upstanding people is one way to remind the Living that we could snap at any moment, that god's not going to punish anybody for anything, and that we'd better court the daily favor of the Living by acting more or less humanely. At the very least, we seek a corrective emphasis on the terrestrial; if our seeming insensitivity dissuades some kid from believing what Wilfred Owen called "the old lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," all the better. If some dead Sago miner's family seeks revenge on the mine owners who made $millions while claiming that Federal safety regulations were too expensive to follow, well, we won't be able to comfort the CEO's family either.

So you can imagine how we feel about the mawkish eulogizing of the Challenger astronauts. Twenty years ago, we were just trying to get a low-grade public education as freshmen in high school, when our already ideologically suspect curriculum was abandoned in favor of -- you guessed it -- an hour sitting in front of cafeteria television screens, watching the white, smokey "Y" formed by divorced booster rockets going their separate ways. Cue patriotic music and all sorts of knowing conversations on the bus about the fallibility of O-rings.

Don't get us wrong: if we were related to or hoping to sleep with or be tucked in bed by one of those folks who got vaporized that cloudless January day, we would assuredly have been devastated. But the idea that this should somehow turn into a national day of mourning and reflection, that the death of seven -- SEVEN!!! -- people twenty years ago should make us collectively reflect upon a nexus of patriotism, sacrifice, and our own mortality proceeds about nine grandmama steps beyond what any sane Simon would say.

What is our relationship to those people? That they each represented about a trillion dollars of lost revenue that might have been spent building conventional infrastructure, attenuating the exhalation of greenhouse gases that is destroying the very atmosphere they were trying to penetrate, or -- I dunno -- FEEDING some starving motherfuckers? The space program has always been a particular boondoggle of a particular moment in the Cold War, and fine: we at the Swill are realpolitikal enough to concede that the space race may -- MAY -- have served a momentary, transient, yet nonetheless salutary function in the prevention of nuclear holocaust. If a gullible public required the language of western expansion and manifest destiny before they'd pick up the tab -- "Human are natural explorers who must seek the bounds of our existence, blah blah blah" -- okay.

Or something.

But sorry. 100,000 dead Iraqis -- killed by the same technology that is funded, guided, produced, and motivated under the rocket's red glare of moon landings and shit -- won't get a millisecond of the weepy national deference that Christa McAuliffe will, and they didn't sign up to explode. As George Romero has recently reminded us, you can kill or steal just about anybody or anything you want, so long as the villagers keep their eyes on the fireworks in the sky.

Pick Up the Phone Goddammit

The Swill has always shied away from mere politics, preferring instead the immediate gratification of direct action. Desperate times call for desperate measures, however, and if you're one of those people who seemed sad when George W. Bush was "re" - "elected," now's the time to stop being a baby and start being a citizen.

Pick up the phone -- right motherfucking now -- call both of your Senators, and ask that they support the filibuster against Samuel Alito. It takes thirty seconds, and it counts.

If you don't, and five years from now you can't buy a condom without getting approval from the judicial, executive, and ecclesiastical branches of government, well, you deserve what you get.

Too Bad He Doesn't Work for the Government

For a few years now, Al Gore has sounded almost like, well, a viable candidate for public office. Gee, just this afternoon he remarked:

...the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then - until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan - one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons - registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: "This material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful."

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is "yes" then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized powers: "If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

As JT asks, "Where the hell was this Al Gore in '00? And why the hell wasn't Kerry talking this way in '04?"

Fuck Hillary. Give me THIS Gore in '08. Read the speech here.

I too Dos Passos

Last week it was the birthday of Jesus and Earl Scruggs, but today it's even better: John Dos Passos is One Hundred and Ten Years old.

When one thinks of the waning days of an indisputable literary giant, one doesn't usually imagine blowing out a single metonymic candle on top of a bran muffin in the white-linoleum cafeteria of a subsidized retirement home in Pocatello, but I imagine that's exactly what old JDP would have done today, if he had not enjoyed the good fortune to die some years ago.

Hell, if only he had felt more warmly about FDR -- and not quite so warmly about Barry Goldwater -- days like this would be a goddamned orgy of feasting for those of us unrepentent strollers down the lanes of the Literary Left. Instead, his memory is alone with an unpublished academic caretaker and a Depends undergarment that desperately wants emptying.

But you did turn on us, John. Perhaps you were right to distrust FDR, whose real goal was to save the rich by spreading them out a wee bit. But in the space of half a lifetime, you went from Big Bill Hayward to Big Bill Buckley, Jr., and lots of your readers will never forgive you.

But I do. And the Swill hereby raises a glass to John Dos Passos, a man who may not have been able to foresee the coming of neoconservatism, but who certainly could wield a pen like a motherfucker, and for a good number of years had more guts than the whole goddamn lot of us.

you suddenly falter ashamed flush red break out in sweat why not tell these men stamping in the wind that we stand on a quicksand? that doubt is the whetstone of understanding is too hard hurts instead of urging picket John D. Rockefeller the bastard if the cops knock your blocks off it's all for the advancement of the human race while I go home after a drink and a hot meal and read (with some difficulty in the Loeb Library trot) the epigrams of Martial and ponder the course of history and what leverage might pry the owners loose from power and bring back (I too Walt Whitman) our storybook democracy
- John Dos Passos, The Big Money

I too Dos, I too.

Mercifully quick schtick.

Okay, I'm already tired of that business. Sorry for it. The first-person plural, the sappy conceit, etc. seemed like a good idea when I was drinking last night -- funny how that works out -- but now seems lame, dumb, sloppy, sappy, and boring. MLA actually is poisonous--turns otherwise nice, interesting people into insufferable pricks (imagine what it does to the insufferable pricks); academia really is filled with a lot of cheap, tiresome hypocrites; until the schtick seems less trite , however, or until I can work through the various analyses that were intended to follow the last post, here's what I have to say:

Allen-Edmonds shoes, the cheaper models of which retail for $300 (the shell cordovan, if you go in for that sort of thing, starts around $425), are worth every penny. Why, you ask?

The average Kenneth Cole oxford--to take a popular example of a dress shoe alternative, which seems like a great deal at a mere $95-- is made from something vaguely approaching leather (though it looks more like rubber) that will neither breathe nor conform to one's foot nor last more than a year or two of regular wear. They are made by slave labor in China, NAFTA-fucked workers in Mexico, or Indonesian and Vietnamese ten-year-olds who are only happy for the job because they don't have to suck Gary Glitter's dick in order to feed their rural families who have been pushed into the economy by IMF loans and World Bank development schemes. Even if the soles don't separate after a few years, the leather is so crappy that it will begin to crease after a few months of wear. I know. I own a pair.

Allen-Edmonds shoes, conversely, are handmade in the great state of Wisconsin in the Good Old U.S.A., or in Brazil by workers who are paid a more-than-living-wage and who have access to a series of educational and health initiatives run by the company. (The fact that the owner of the company is a committed Republican says more about the one-party state than about the ethics of purchasing these shoes). They are made from first-grade cowhide that is traditionally tanned, feature classically conservative styling that will last as long as the shoes themselves (the father-in-law has two pairs that date to the mid-1980s), and walking down the street in them is -- excuse our lack of ingenuity -- like wiping one's ass with a silk shirt.

Like Harris Tweed and those little wooden trains that I always imagined rich kids found under their christmas tree instead of crappy plastic Hungry Hungry Hippoes, they suggest a time when goods were handmade for everybody -- not just boardroom executives -- and thereby reveal a horrible truth: that it is not only easier to have money, it's actually cheaper in the long run to have money (every see how much a $200 washing machine costs at a rent-to-own place? ever think about how much money is saved by preventative health care? etc.).

I wouldn't say I "have money" -- especially not compared to people whose families send them checks outside of christmas or who had the good sense to attend a first-rate medical school instead of a second-tier graduate program in English. But I certainly have a fuckload more than the poor saps who ride the bus into my small college town from the small, formerly prosperous manufacturing town nearby in order to clean the $300,000 houses of professors who write all sorts of books about radical politics, and whose very lives depend upon American society existing and continuing just about precisely as it does now.

In any case, I now own a pair of simple, 5-eyelet captoe bluchers with extensive perfing and a toe medallion, though I need a more complete analysis before I conclude precisely how I feel about them politically rather than sartorially. If you're not kept up at night by analyses, I recommend them. If you travel to Milwaukee, you too can visit their seconds store and purchase them at a 50% discount.

In case men's footwear doesn't grab your attention, how about this? Remember to pay your taxes!

Next up: Vin Jaune de Chateau Chalon, or, Upon a Revelation

Restructuring

Friends, the clockwork regularity--not to mention the almost freakishly prolific output--of The Swill once rendered us the Wunderblog of the onlineworld. You came here seeking informational balm for the wounds that ailed ye. Perhaps you sought puckish remarks upon the quality of local haberdashers? Maybe you needed qualified analysis of matters that were otherwise offered only to Beltway insiders under cover of darkest night. Wonder what we ate for breakfast, whether we prefer three- or ten-speed bikes, or if we attended Junior Prom? Sweet Christ, someone's life depends on knowing the difference between Harris and Donegal tweeds!

Whatever the case, you knew that The Swill to Power offered a safe and reliable information haven, a lighthouse of answers amid a slavering sea of poor imitations and imitators. Yes, Christians occasionally needed to be reminded of their complicity--however unwitting--in the horrors of our day; occasionally we had to remove a remembrance if it we unwittingly violated a privacy or hurt a feeling. But, as indicated by your letters, cards, emails, and telegrams, the Swill nonetheless provided a wittingly vital service, and our striking silence in past weeks did not go unnoticed.

What, you have asked, gives?

What gives are some rather drastic changes in both the personnel and the purpose of the Swill as a practice and as an institution. Our long-standing commitment to The Humanities--if not humanity itself--has long led us to focus a large portion of our limited resources on maintaining a well-staffed Department of Literature. With a number of talented linguists, exegetes, hermeneuts, scholars, critics, and readers, the Department of Literature was intended to perform a very basic task: to render matters literary in manners broadly admirable.

Hewing to the broadest tenets of literary pluralism, we in management kept our noses clear and clean, preferring to let the literary types ply their trade freely and according to their own consciences and compasses. Neither the writers nor their writings were groundbreaking, but they were more or less inoffensive, and rarely gave us cause to re-evaluate their basic mandate. That is, until December of that foul year of Our Lard, 2005. After so much seamless interaction with the lasses and lads of the Literature Department--so chock full of pleasure and profit--what could possibly have occured that would demand such a shake-up?

The answers are manifold and invariably unpleasant, but we'd rather not weigh your doubtlessly burdened lives with tiresome newsroom minutiae. For the moment, allow us simply to delineate the bare facts of a case that is nauseous at every level. Lest you think us venal, first note that we learned these facts only after months of suspicion, after which we finally resorted to the tapping of wires, the intercepting of mail, the occasional nut-punching of witnesses. The most incriminating evidence, however, came after we assigned a trusted operative to observe the Head of the Literature Department at his favorite annual fistfuckfest: The Convention of the Modern Language Association. In coming days, we will elaborate on each of the charges, but for now a simple list should suffice:

1) Attending a professional conference where discussion of increasing salaries and decreasing work occurred roughly eighty-five times as frequently as anything remotely "literary."

2) Approvingly uttering the words "radical politics" while wearing $300 shoes and drinking $6 bottles of Budweiser.

3) Approvingly uttering the words "social change" and "Marxian analysis" while drinking a bottle of 1995 vin jaune (the famed "yellow wine" of Jura).

4) Engaging in a conversation that included the words "Roth IRA".

5) Violations Various.

This is not a show trial, friends. We gave our manager of Literature an opportunity to respond to the charges, to which he offered only the following remark, with the promise of a detailed "defense" as details emerge:

"I tried, friends. I really did try. But I don't think I have much more trying in me. Like Zevon said, 'I had the shit 'til it all got smoked, I kept the promise 'til the vow got broke.' Anyone who knew me shoulda known shit was gonna get broke."

Res Ipsa Loquitur. Stay tuned.