While We Are Away

We apologize for the silent space. Family drama and a desire for genuinely first-rate microbrews have taken us back to our ancestral lands, where herb, Doug fir, and salmon abound, but where computer access has only come our way intermittently. Es tut uns weh.

Speaking of and in German, may we briefly draw your attention to our masthead? Alert readers will notice the disappearance of the noun "horsefuckers," which used to follow the adjective "venal." Insofar as the noun was intended to refer to neoconservatives, we have been slightly disturbed to learn that a substantial percentage of our readers -- many of whom are located in Deutschland -- were led to the Swill by a google search for "horsefuckers." We assume that their time with our material was unsatisfying, to say the least.

Furthermore, our friend BC remarked, "As a former equestrienne, I object to your use of the term 'horsefuckers' in reference to Republicans. It slanders the horses."

In any case, we're not feeling very creative, and hereby solicit suggestions from our non-bestiaphile readership. What noun should replace "horsefuckers"?

Rome Fell

Please discuss whilst we have the grappa surgically removed from our system.

nunc est bibendum

The Swill is conducting research in Rome. We will return five days hence. We are running late for our plane, and didn't have time to announce this cleverly in Latin, but hereby request commoncrofts to provide a workable translation. Ciao.

Urine Trouble Now!

Yesterday, we realized that longtime readers might welcome a slight shift in tone, and that we would really like to hear from passersby. We therefore decided to celebrate recent free-speech imbroglios with an hilarious joke of our own device. Sadly, we only got as far as "So the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, a Danish Imam, and five-hundred Wobblies walk into a crowded theater" before remembering that jokes have never been our strong suit. We immediately shifted course.

Nonetheless, the intertwined questions represented therein -- viz., what constitutes "proper" aesthetic representation, how to demarcate individual spheres of liberty, and whether the state has a proper role in regulating speech -- are important, and made us nostalgic for one thing: Piss Christ. Rather than commenting, however, I'd like to solicit your thoughts (even so much as a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" would allow us to write off the blog as "research expenses").

We're particularly interested in knowing why, when, and in what terms bodily waste became prima facie not just unpleasant, but politico-theologically offensive. If you're one of those who thinks that Bronze-Age Semitic sky-god lore + Renaissance papal politics should be kept in the American town square, then you presumably believe that people are made in the image of god. You therefore presumably believe that god made urine in his image, too, and that therefore the aesthetically degraded part of "Piss Christ" is not the urine, but the cross itself, no?

We're even worse at theology than at humor, so help us out. If you don't want to comment, at least help by suggesting a relevant joke, the punchline of which is "yellow submarine."

We Do Like Cuban Food, But....

As some of you may have heard, this morning the Sergeant-at-Arms of the United States Senate spent some time with a satire I recently posted. The short piece under consideration involved Senator Joseph Lieberman, blood-libel, and a parody of Pat Robertson's evangelical calls for the assassination of Presidente Hugo Chavez.

You may also have heard, in a totally unrelated development, that we were unable to access our blog for some time after discovering the Sergeant's interest in our prose.

As some of you also know, The Swill's nostalgia for writs of habeas corpus is tied to an ordinary fear of extraordinary rendition: remember, that's what the newspapers call the state-sponsored-kidnapping wherein people are whisked off to be tortured in Uzbekhistan rather than being charged with a crime in the U.S.

Did we mention that you should always pay your taxes?

Consequently, while asserting no causal relationship and while admitting no complicity or liability in any matters whatsoever, we have removed the part about Lieberman. Anyway, all it really meant was that, in our opinion, Senator Joseph Lieberman is a cheap shill for the corporate elite, a low-rent bullyboy who plays upon the worst instincts of fear and jingoism, and should be called a "public representative" only in the broadest, loosest, most degraded sense of the words "public" and "representative." Hardly a new sentiment for anybody who's followed the guy's career.

We hope that somebody with money will send it to Ned Lamont.

Of course we're paranoid. By definition, however, paranoia magically becomes prescience with a single midnight knock on your door. Our next installment will relate purely to shoes. Not allegorical shoes, either. Just shoes.

One More Reason to Love Willie

As if we needed one. Sorry for talking so much shit about the mainstream media, and thanks to Common Dreams, where you can find the whole AP story.

Finally

If you're genuinely interested in gaining a deeper appreciation for the Danish cartoon business, stop reading MSNBC's coverage of it (or my dumbass blog, for that matter). Dig it here. Thanks to our good friend Josh Landis at syriacomment.com for the recommendation (also thanks for the beers, Josh, but that's another story entirely).

Not Exactly A Scoop...

If you're like us and spend more than a reasonable amount of time reading news, political commentary, and nutritional information, you've already seen this. If so, very sorry to be part of the low-grade echo chamber. We're new to the business, and easily tempted by cheap self-gratification. Ahem. Renting a hall to eulogize a recently departed civil rights icon? $50,000. A picture of the Commander in Chief cranking a blaster while the First Lady shoots a death-ray at an Uppity Negro who has dared to make a political statement from the pulpit? Priceless.

If you haven't seen this image, it's from the funeral of Coretta Scott King, and it was taken while the Reverend Joseph Lowery delivered a few choice morsels of eulogy, including the following (now oft-quoted) lines:

We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there [standing ovation]... but Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more; but no more for the poor.

Finally some Christian palaver we can get behind. One-hundred-fuckin-percent. Thanks to JT for the spot-on.

Dark as a Dungeon

Too bad about all the recent mine tragedies, no? Who could have predicted them? Just part of a dangerous business, I guess. Tough work.

Good thing that we have a government to oversee this sort of business -- you know, make sure that at least some decisions are driven by something other than profit-logic. The headlines of the major dailies, after all, tell you that "Feds Mandate More Oxygen in Mines." Hooray! We were all mistaken! We claimed that this is an administration that consistently puts short-term financial windfalls over long-term preservation of infrastructure, environment, and human life, and we were wrong! These recent tragedies have revealed a flaw in the system that we now know we should address. If the American worker needs oxygen three miles underground, by god, he's going to have it!

Too bad most of the papers don't note that it was these same exact federal officials who "four years ago axed a requirement to stock coal mines with spare emergency air masks to protect miners from poisonous gases."

That is to say, praise the Bush Administration for reversing a decision they themselves made four years ago, the results of which directly doomed workers to a horrible death by suffocation. That is to say, they claimed four years ago that such safety regulations were just too expensive (and unnecessary) to mandate, and that such requirements were just another sign that Federal government was out of control. So they stopped requiring extra oxygen masks in mines. And it killed people.

Notice that in Canada they did not reverse these regulations. Consequently, potash miners in a disaster similar to the one in West Virginia all survived. Thank you, Canada!

In the long run, however, I guess eighteen miners is a drop in the gut-bucket for the venal fuckwits who are running the U.S.A. Best not start calculating the WV miners as a percentage of overall killed, at least just yet; we reckon there's more to come.

We Wish We Could Draw

Your days and nights are assuredly occupied, like ours, with the Danish cartoon brouhaha. We're still pretty comfortable with our original analysis: unfettered public speech good, fundamentards bad. Nonetheless, now it turns out that the same newspaper refused to run some Jesus caricatures a few years ago. Sigh. The rationale? It might offend some readers. (Full story here.)

You're not surprised, of course: readership = advertising = $ in the newspaper biz, $ = tax revenues, and one doesn't build such an attractive middle-class society entirely upon tins of butter-cookies. And, while the Danes may not produce nearly as many reactionary jerkoffs as the U.S.A. (cf. The Minutemen), it's not as if Middle-Eastern and African immigration is a non-issue in Scandanavia, where justified smugness is only slightly more attractive than unjustified smugness. "Xenophobia" is currently the second-most popular name for Danish baby girls.

In the end, we have no real solutions to these complicated issues. We do feel, however, that the publishers could at least run a new cartoon. Picture, if you will:

A gas station outside of Las Vegas, where Jesus Christ wearing camoflage performs fellatio on George Bush, while Jack Abramoff in a pimp suit stands counting a fistful of dollars. Nearby, Alberto Gonzalez disguised in a freakishly oversized sombrero sneaks across the California-Nevada border while brandishing a surveillance microphone shaped like the Statue of Liberty. Meanwhile, a ghostly Ronald Reagan refuels an MX missle from a gas pump shaped like a coffin, wondering aloud "Is Tehran still thataway?" The caption reads "Emergency! Somebody call 9/11!"

Why produce and run such a cartoon? Because it would reframe discussions about the role of theology in the secular nation state? Because it would defuse global tensions and help rebuild the embassies in Beirut and Damascus? Because what this world needs is more poignant political allegory?

No. Because we think that would be a fuckin' sweet cartoon.

Check the Date

We are forced to conclude that a mere happy coincidence combined with a facile talent for idealistic emotion enabled the President to pass so plausibly from the defense of self-interest, which was his occasion and elaborated justification of war, to the crusade for democracy which is the ideological form under which it will be fought.
- Max Eastman, June 1917

Fundamentards

Today, ABC news reported that the "US Backs Muslims in Cartoon Dispute."

We personally would have written a different headline: "US Continues to Discourage Freedom of the Press ; encourages self-censorship" has a nice ring. Or perhaps "Fundamentalist Christians in Power Support Fundamentalist Muslims Out of Power; support limited to content of funny pages."

I also would have subsumed a variety of cartoons in my analysis: remember when Mary Worth refused to wear a burka? Who can forget the day when Ziggy stared off into a huge sunset and reflected upon the fact that all the Jews wouldn't just be Left Behind, but actively dropped into the fiery pits of Hell for all eternity?

In any case, we truly appreciated the State Department's spokesman's assertion that "Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this way is not acceptable."

Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds by abandoning the Nuremburg principles and shitting on the U.N. charter, toppling the governments of sovereign nations, imposing Federalism on arbitrarily-delineated, colonially demarcated states, destroying both humans and basic infrastructure and subsequently failing to establish pre-war levels of sewage treatment, potable water, or electricity, on the other hand, is just not only acceptable, it's sound foreign policy. You know, Spreading Freedom and sich.

The entire situation -- protesters, supporters, commentators -- is pretty much dominated by fucktards. Sadly, we don't really get most of the cartoons. Perhaps they're hilarious in Danish.

Legal Analysis

So a few hours after joining the Supreme Court, Alito broke with the terrifying triumvirate of Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts. Surprise!

Intriguingly (since the percentage of Catholics on the Supreme Court is exactly twice the percentage of the U.S. population that is Catholic), he broke with them over the issue of capital punishment. As you know, the Swill very strongly believes that the death penalty is a powerful symbol of illegitimate state power over individuals (and about four hundred other things). This is indeed one of the very, very few positions that we share with the Catholic Church (our reasoning is different, but the results are the same).

Unfortunately, our crack team of legal researchers is on currently on crack, and while we like -- very much like -- this kind of pithy critique, we also want more. After all, as legal historian Michael Klarman has recently demonstrated, the Supreme Court has all sorts of backroom (and frontroom, and courtroom) tactics that are as motivated by Public Relations as by legal scholarship. Perhaps Alito knew that Roberts, et al. were going to lose anyway, and thought he'd kick things off with the appearance of independence.

If you see any good analysis re: Alito's vote, please do share. We're not feeling researcherly today.

Kimchee

Or, if you prefer, kimchi. Either way, it's delicious.

No further information may be divulged at this time.