Look it Up

Jurors deciding whether or not Zacarias Moussaoui should be put to death will have no lexicographical help, a judge has ruled. Apparently the presence of a dictionary in the jury room would constitute "additional evidence." We're sure there's something important here, but we're going to let the prescriptivists and descriptivists sort it out amongst themselves.

Why? Because after reading this seemingly unrelated story, we need time with our own Webster's to find a word that means "We Told You So, and Are Therefore Not Shocked, Just Wondering When These Guys Will Return."

Probably a German dictionary would be more helpful.

Work with Us, People

The more we cast our baleful eye upon the the faux currency reproduced in yesterday's post, the more it troubles us. What the fuck does this thing mean, anyway?

On one level, as a cleverly disturbing publicity stunt, the logic is transparent: "Whose country are you working for, George?" the anti-immigration paleo-conservatives ask. "Are you Mexican or American? This bill, like your service to the United States, is worth precisely 'nothing' to us, your Conservative Constituency, so long as you appear to be doing anything other than simply arresting and deporting [undocumented workers]."

Hell, maybe it's even simpler than that, and what we have here is a thinly disguised insult of the lowest playground variety: a way of attacking the president without actually using offensive racial and national epithets frequently directed at undocumented workers from Mexico, Central and South America.

Perhaps, however, there's something else happening here as well?

Is it an invitation to transpose processes of symbolic exchange and substitution (inherent in the very concept, theory, and praxis of money itself) onto the very different processes of migration and immigration: that is, a reworking of the concept of citizenship itself as an assymetrical process of symbolic exchange? Does it present labor as perfectly free of individual character, but in such a way that we understand not only the worker to be a unit that bears (without possessing) the value of its own labor, but the citizen as such a unit? Why else would the Good People of Bumfuckia require protection from George W. Bush's head, the head of capital, the head in the capitol?

Sorry that we've broken our promise to share our new Rough Guide to American Paleoconservatism, but we can't get past this image. Our attempts to work this through are further hampered by an eye that is leaking pus faster than Dick Cheney leaks classified information -- inhumane we may be, but nevertheless human -- and we've only got two more days of health insurance with which to sort it out.

So work with us, people. We want a goddamned close reading of the George W. Bush "Nada Pesos" bill, and we want your help. Do you think you can simply stroll by, drop in whenever you feel like it, sup at our hermeneutic table and take your leave with nary a fare-thee-well? No, the Swill is a two-way street, and it's about fucking time you swept your side of it.

Fuck! Our eye!

(Tip: do NOT type "eye infection" into google images. Trust us.)

Illegal Tender

Friends, we have spent the last several days considering American Conservatism.

We have, of course, long maintained that the terms "Left" and "Right" are more or less useless for describing most of the formations, deformations, affiliations and sillynations in American politics, and it's no secret that healthy, subtle political differences are unusually difficult to discern amongst the demagoguery and stupidity that passes for mainstream political commentary.

You'll find organized Progressives in Texas and radical religious conservatives in Connecticut -- hell, one of them is getting nervous about his Senate seat right about now -- and that raving Maoist Howard Dean was a fiscal hawk who was loved by the National Rifle Association. Remember, the theory that running up large deficits isn't always a bad thing wasn't invented by Bush and Cheney, but by that fascist theocrat John Maynard Keynes. Yes, things may be more complicated than they appear on the nightly news.

It therefore struck us as a characteristically iconoclastic impulse to move away from the commondreams, the counterpunch, the Democracy Now, and the other sources of alt commentary, and to tour places that the average lib-lab schmuck Wouldn't Deign to Tread.

"What if," we said to ourselves, "Our anti-Statist impulses, roughly resonating with a more or less anarchist-libertarian-socialism, cf. mid-1940s Dwight Macdonald, were to find natural allies in the resolutely anti-Iraq-war factions of the American Conservative movement? There must be some on the Radical Right who are against gay marriage not because they hold particularly odious, retrograde, theologically-derived beliefs regarding sexual conduct, but because they're against marriage per se; because they think States have no business ratifying or denying personal relationships of any sort: gay, straight, or otherwise. There are certainly those on the Radical Left who hold such things."

Well, it wasn't the first time that we were mistaken and disappointed, but we don't want to ruin the surprise: we'll be reporting on our findings in coming days.

In the meantime, the image above is something we found plastered all over the neighborhoods we visited. Turns out that the "hurry-up- and-build-the-big-guarded-fence against the criminal Mexicans" fascist-xenophobe movement is sending them to Republican politicians during upcoming campaign fundraising drives.

Captions and / or close-readings to accompany the "Nada Pesos" bill would be most welcome.

Upon the Overrating of Friendships

Introit

Sorry for the absence, dear friends, and a special apology to all of you who have recently visited whilst seeking guidance on how to build a trebuchet. There were, inexplicably, four of you just today, and we're fairly certain that you left unsatisfied.

Whoever you are, and however you got here, you should know that we hold the destruction of the Fairness Doctrine under Ronald Reagan at least partially responsible for the demise of an already-struggling democracy in the U.S.A. The horsefucker lovers got that photo of an increasingly embattled Katherine Harris, and what did you get, dear lovers of the trebuchet? Bupkus. In the interest of providing equal time to filly-uhs and philias, therefore, we offer you lovers of medieval war engines the attached photo of a particularly fine specimen.

Visitor, beat your dick like it owes you money.

It's been a rough week for the world, friends, and not a particularly easy week here at The Swill. But our problems are not yet your problems, and by now you're saying to yourself: now that I've taken the trouble to visit the House of Long Knives, what corporate or political monstrosity will be cut down to size? While I'm enjoying the pretty photos, what good deed will the Swill's prose accomplish, what ethical or aesthetic system will be retooled into a finely honed fighting machine with every sentence, what particular pleasure will I take from this, the champion of underdog causes?

The answer is: None at all, friends. Na-fucking-da.

A Few Things We Won't Talk About

We won't address the hilarious spectacle of W. encouraging his Chinese counterpart to allow free speech while arresting and charging a woman who spoke too freely. That would be too easy, and nobody gives a flying fuck about paradox or irony anymore in these here parts. (Plus, we'd kind of like to retain the right to imprison and torture members of particular religious sects, just in case we are named dictator-for-life and have the opportunity to visit a few fellow Christians.)

We don't even have anything to say about the emergence of retired military warlards, who -- secure in their pensions and about four years too late -- have decided to pick on poor old Donald Rumsfeld, that scrofulous prick, for mishandling the destruction of Iraq.

Despite your understandable pleas for instructions on how to think about this issue, there are two reasons why we refuse comment at this time: First, and most important, some of you may know that one of the Swill's senior writers loves his grandma, and that the ancestral ranch where said grandmother was born is currently one of two homes owned by Rumsfeld in Taos, NM. We are biased by self-interest and by a particular version of our past that exists only in sweet and radically selective memory. Second, we have yet to conduct a full analysis, and hate nothing so much as hastiness.

After all, pointing out that the invasion of Iraq is a murderous clusterfuck that was totally and utterly unnecessary? Excellent. Emphasizing the misconception that the 100,000 people your tax dollars have blown up in Iraq are the result of a tactical -- rather than an ethical -- disaster? Ummmmm. Further authorizing the voice of the military as the voice of truth in America, while simultaneously eroding the important distinction between civilian and military leaderships? We'll get back to you. [Here the writer further refuses to talk about the epidemic of birth defects among Iraqi children caused by the use of depleted-uranium shells in both Gulf Wars. Including, you know, the one that was a success. - ed]

No, we have nothing to say except Spring is here, and with the emergence of leaves in our little courtyard comes a flood of fond, arborial memories.... (insert wavy lens effect here)

A Recollection both True and Incidentally Allegorical

As a young man, one of the Swill's low-level editors spent some hard months cutting down big, healthy trees to earn a very few bucks. It was dangerous work, a short-handed and dim-witted operation where one had the opportunity to fell trees one day and set chokers the next, but he liked the way that nature would dwarf him with its majesty, remind him how small he was in the world, compel him to recognize his transient insignificance in the shadow of such seemingly timeless endurance.

He especially liked to reflect upon these feelings as the 32-inch bar of his chainsaw was chewing through and destroying the lovely vegetation that had, mere moments before, been one in a long line of quasi-sentient beings in the world that made him feel small and worthless. Take that, nature!

In the end, we suppose that we're concerned with neither trees nor with Spring, nor even with that sonofabitch "Scott" who ran the logging operation, who left town in the middle of the night, who screwed us out of a month's wage, and who will suffer the wrong end of a very bloody bottlewhipping if we're ever fortunate enough to sidle up next to him at a bar to be named later.

No, we suppose that what concerns us is the productive capacity of memory for pleasure or pain, and particularly to render the future prospect of human contact a pleasant or unpleasant one. Which, [If this post hadn't already turned into a maudlin piece of self-indulgent tripe - ed.] we would be happy to explore via a close reading of "The Big Chill," a free screening of which we attended this evening after a large plate of $2 mussels.

A Film We Won't Discuss

Oh My, how we would remind you of what a piece of crap this movie is, how it ruined American cinema by popularizing, if not devising, the obligatory faux-spontaneous-group-dance-singalong sequence, wherein a group of white middle-aged actors get their collective lip-syncing groove on to a Wilson Pickett song.

We would talk about how writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, who attended the screening and who spoke afterwards, served his audience a poisonous disappointment. We would point to or produce the moment when the audience failed to realize that they might well outgrow a variety of beauty myths (after all, beauty is youth, and we'll all get old), but that they would never outgrow the horrifically misguided sense that they should have had a youth that was eager and pure and idealistic. They would never shake the sense that, even if they'd sold out and bought houses and obeyed cops, it was okay because from their various outposts of demi-disillusioned success they might always come together around a funeral and be themselves, just share the love of a eight people who know each other well enough that they don't have to pretend. They will wake up in the middle of the night feeling that their lives, rather than this film, are failures, because they certainly don't have a group friendship that is simultaneously fascinating and deep and loving and trusting and jocular and true.

And neither do you.

The Crux of the Biscuit, or, Synthesize It Yourselves

That gnawing feeling in your gut isn't too much microwave popcorn, friends, it is disappointment. Friendships don't work like that, as everybody should know. You'll never spontaneously dance around a butcher-block over a classic hit from your youth, you'll never realize that you're among a coterie of people who love you whether you're right or wrong, you'll never have a space where you can retreat from the performance of everyday life, and you'll never live a life without wishing that you could retract a confidence that you made in haste. Friendship offers no collective redemption, and if it does then you're probably not paying attention, and watch out for what you deserve.

But we can't talk about that, because there's a few ice-cold bottles of Old Style that are saying nicer things to us than the whole lot of you combined, and even they recognize that it's horseshit: Kasdan, it was horseshit when you wrote it, it's horseshit today. The last five minutes of La Dolce Vita have more to say about friendship than your entire oeuvre; the monster has been dead for three days but it's still looking you flat in the eye, and you can haul it up and sell it off but it won't stop looking at you, or us, or anyone.

Indeed, if we were to speak of it, we'd go so far to say that the whole goddam tragic failure of America in the last forty years can be summed up by the hugely successful soundtrack of "The Big Chill." Consider: in a film about the reunion of friends who met and bonded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, student friends who were politically radical and idealistic and who then bore hopes and dreams for the future as strongly as they now bear wistful nostalgia for the past, their memories and bodies are enlivened and enlisted by the goddamn Rascals instead of The MC-5. Their soundtrack, which they admit hasn't changed since the heady days when last they were ensemble, is defined by the eternal organ of The Rolling Stones and not a drop of Gil Scott Heron.

And that, friends, is a pernicious form of selective memory for a youth that never happened. But it's best not to speak of it. Best not to say anything at all.

Tax Day

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.

- Henry David Thoreau

Pass It On

We're not feeling particularly full of critique today, friends. We may not even be feeling especially angry, a state of affairs which is often cause for worry around the house. Illness of a purely emotional character often follows our brief -- if rare -- flashes of internal peace.

Perhaps there's an easy vernal explanation, as one supposes that one does feels somewhat full of Spring, sumer is icumen in and all that. The impulse to get outside was so strong and the birds so goddamn chirpy that, after a goodlie daye in the librarie, we gladly took up spade and prosecuted some serious redistribution of wealth.

Wealth in this case is another name for our compost pile, our garden's pride and joy, our contribution to a healthy environment, the means by which many a caprese salad will be produced in coming months, a proud steaming pile of rotten crap that is rivalled only by our finished dissertation. If you're not composting, you too are a lazy steaming pile of rotten crap, and the earth hates you. Nothing could be easier, and you should start today.

But composting is so fucking easy, in fact, that you'll need something to read while you wait for your veggies, coffee grounds, and egg shells slowly to transmogrify into clean-smelling earth. Therefore, while you're waiting, here's part deux of Mike Davis' History of the Car Bomb.

Upon Christian Syllogism

Item: The second person in less than a year has been killed by a ride at Disney World.

Item: Contrary to initial reports, RU-486 has been ruled out as the cause of death for one of two women who died after aborting pregnancies.


Conclusion: "Mission: Space" is twice as deadly as RU-486. Ban Disney World immediately.

Upon Prolepsis

We're back, friends, with a mouth full of Havana Club and a raft of spiritual infections antibioticized by the good, friendly people of Canada. Thanks to Phredward for buttering the nuts whilst we were otherwise, &c. Don't you fuss or fret, as we just suspect he'll be making a return appearance.

Anyway, we were pleased to see that the BBC just ran a fine story entitled "How Predictions for Iraq Came True." No, not the PNAC predictions about how Baghdad would look just like Providence, RI with a few short weeks of bombs, flags, and good ol' American know-how... Rather, those rather more troubling predictions lobbed by the Satan First crowd.

We've contacted the BBC, instructing them that they perhaps inadvertently omitted the thoughts of one guy who predicted that this would be a fucking disaster:

I asked my guide to ask about the plebiscite. The old man laughed. Oh yes, they had given out papers in the bazaars, but they were already printed with the vote for the mandate, so that the ignorant should vote for the government without knowing it.

The Americai must tell his countrymen that the people of Iraq would continue to struggle for their freedom and for the principles announced by Sheikh Washiton and Meester Veelson. The last revolt had failed because it had been ill prepared. Next time . . . His voice rose ever so slightly.

John Dos Passos, "Baghdad Bahnhof" 1921

Okay, so perhaps it's a slight stretch to characterize the current spate of torture-executions, car bombs, and general descent into violent factional chaos as a struggle for Wilsonian New Freedom. Then again, it was kind of a stretch to characterize WWI that way.

Vaguely related nota bene: treat yourself to a brief history of the car bomb, aka "The Poor Man's Air Force" by Mike Davis.

A Pretty Good Stab

“I think it better that in times like these/ A poet's mouth be silent,” run the first lines of William Butler Yeats’ “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

A short bit of verse follows, commonly referred to as sarcastic—one way of answering when asked to write war poetry, whatever that is: “for in truth,” Yeats goes on,

We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

“Pleasing” young girls and old men—that’s what writing poetry’s about—and one would half believe Yeats, if one didn’t know how much of his writing is explicitly intended to set “statesmen right,” how un-silent Yeats was on the matter of war.

Which is why one calls the poem “sarcastic,” of course.

And then there’s Wilfred Owen’s way of writing a “war poem.” Almost contemporaneously with “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum est,” a not-too-great description of a gas attack. It ends with this stanza:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Presumably what Owen is up to has to do with getting his readers to enter the poem’s “smothering dreams,” making them “pace,” “watch,” and “hear” the obscene and bitter symphony of war. Both tacks, the faux-quietist-but-actually-sarcastically-engaged Yeatsian version and the poetry-as-vehicle-of-imaginative-horror version one finds in Owen, are grand and well-established. Yet no-one I know is asking us for war poems to-day—not for poems celebrating the so-called “war on terror,” for poems deploring it, for verse that seeks to tease or please us out of thought about the war, as Keats might put it, poems that make readers see, hear, pace, imagine what’s happening on the streets of Baghdad or in Afghanistan.

It would be nice if literary culture mattered enough in the United States to-day that poets and writers were asked to write. But another war was fought on the media-friendly fields of consumer capitalism last century, and what Yeats and Owen would have called “literary culture” rides on the wagon too. Which isn’t to say that one should be nostalgic in time of war for the old, high ways promised by Romantic diction, but rather that one can and should make verse out of obscene gargling, make sarcasm out of pleasure, and take pleasure in sarcasm.

Which is why I particularly admired the cover of the British paper, the Independent: “Iraq: Don’t look Away,” it said, over a particularly gruesome picture of the civil war there. They meant: it’s your responsibility; “pace,” “watch,” “hear” what your “statesmen” are doing.

It’s a pretty good stab at a war poem, even if nobody asked them for one.

Pox Populi, Pox o' the Day

Joseph Grünpeck, Treatise on the Pestilential Pox or French Disease (Augsburg, 1496)

Nice to be in the Swill’s chair just when the shit-we-all-knew-about begins its chunky progress into that great Fan we call History, or its weak cousin, the New York Times.

Yes, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby has deposed that Dick and Dubbya “authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq.” The thing, we might agree, speaks for itself, and Scooter’s taking a (juridical) leak about the Plame-CIA leak is nothing new. The sweet dove of impeachment has fluttered over this White House often enough to become tiresome rather than stirring.

But indulge me just a bit, while I try to add “the leaky scooter” to the weird dictionary of semi-phallic, quasi-fecal nicknames at play in Dubbya’s universe (Karl Rove: “Turd Blossom”; Vladimir Putin: “Pootie-Poot”; Paul O’Neill, the ex-Treasury secretary: “Big O”; Mitch Daniels, Dubbya’s ex-budget director: “The Blade”; Dick Cheney: “Big Time”).

It gives me a positive frisson to find, for instance, that in Scotland, bless their tidy kilts, a scooter is “A syringe, squirt,” coming from the deliciously peaty verb to scoot, which may, the Oxford English Dictionary’s gods of etymology tell us, derive from “cooter, a dialectal form of COULTER,” which is “a simple plough with a single handle used for marking furrows, making drills, breaking up the soil in furrows or between rows of plants.” A squirt sprung or leaked from a Coulter (Ann, you should have told us!). Maybe from the loins of Dukes-of-Hazzard Cooter, or a Florida Cooter Turtle (Pseudemys floridana floridana). A little squib of a thing. Not even up to making its own furrows, in the grand fashion championed by “Big Time” Dick. Just turning over dirt that others have first plowed in.

So what makes Libby’s Scooter leak? If your thoughts ran (or flowed) venereally, grab a baguette! This week the French disease (yes, I know, it doesn’t drip clapwise, until matters get pretty far along) scooted back onto your screen in its most appealing form: millions of infectious French students and unionists lobbing the pavés of Paris at riot-police over a law trying to Americanize the labor-market over there. (In this case, and since we’re man-handling definitions tendentiously, to Americanize means “to increase the uncertainty of employment; reduce the clout of labor unions; disenfranchise young workers: trade new, cheap and inexperienced labor for experienced, established and expensive labor.”)

Ah, douce France! Sweet French disease! Guillotine, Danton, Marat, Robespierre—and sous le pavé, la plage, as the Situationist marchers of May 68 nicely put it. Here’s praying (ironically, bien sûr) that Scooter’s leaky scooter leads us all to the beach.

Upon Substitution

Friends, the rhetorical familiarity of the Swillbilliana to which you are accustomed must be considered, to some extent, as its own reward. We don't claim to offer particularly new insights on the world, or even information that is particularly groundbreaking or hilarious or important.

What we do try to offer is a reassuring sense that water runs downhill, that the Swill is angry, and that the rest of the world is in its place.

Having said that, our own prose sometimes strikes us -- to appropriate Toni Morrison's phrase -- as the third beer: neither as refreshing as the first nor as reassuring as the second, and rather as that which exists to be consumed simply because it is there.

Well, for the next few days you'll be allowed to jump directly to the deeply loved fourth beer, because beer number three -- aka Your Struly -- is on a pilgrimage to Ottowa, where we intend to spread the gospel, collect some free fucking health care, enjoy a more-or-less-non-violent society, and pick up a case of Habana Club while we're at it.

For the next few days, therefore, you can't have us. But we offer you a fresh draught, a new smoke, a little bit of something something, the mastery and drift of s/he who shall remain Phredward.

Phredward: That's the name, wear it out with welcome.

More Democracy

Yes, more democracy, Swillians.

Not in Texas, silly geese: redistricting across the nation (by both parties) pretty much ensures that congressional representatives will continue to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around. Accordingly, we hereby predict that some Republican-to-be-named-later will take the seat currently held (and soon to be relinquished by) cankerous scrotum boil Tom Delay. (For a tidy timeline of events in re: Delay, see here).

No, we're talking democracy by Swill. You see, it turns out that, under Texas law, DeLay "must either die, be convicted of a felony or move out of his district to be removed from the November ballot." And we want your voice to be heard.

Which one of these three do you prefer, dear reader? Specifics (of what he might die, where he might move, and of what he might be convicted) are encouraged.

We personally have already started praying for him. You know, ironically.

Going Quasi-Public

Yes, friends, the Swill's reliably contrarian voice just tapped a bigger market. (First-time readers, insert irony marks around previous sentence. We have no market). Yesterday, we joined a thread on Crooks and Liars with the staggeringly improbable goal of objecting to the language of abuse directed at -- wait for it -- aspiring Florida Senator Katherine Harris and creepy Nazi Ann Coulter.

We're not sure if this makes us principled, or sellouts, or sellouts because we indulged a principle. It just makes us uncomfortable that the most abusive vocabulary netfolks seem to find to describe these loathesome trolls has to do with androgyny, transvestism, transsexuality / transgenderism, and fake boobs.

In short: to call Katherine Harris a "tranny hooker" is an insult to transsexuals, and particularly to sex workers, who actually labor for their money rather than inherit it. To use the term "drag queen" to abuse Ann Coulter is a grotesque insult to drag queens. When rightfully abusing Coulter and Harris, please fantasize about jailing them, shitting upon them, or abusing them in all sorts of non-gendered ways. But fer crissakes pay attention to the collateral damage.

On a totally unrelated note, the number of visitors who arrived at the Swill via google searches for "horsefuckers" has inexplicably spiked in recent days. We thought we'd dealt with this issue in past weeks (see here), but apparently the search engines disagree. So, we've appended the photo above for your delectation.

Maybe you're surfing the web in Bavaria (dieser Photo von Frau Harris ist ganz geil, nein?), Alberta (Great legs on this filly, eh?), Bend, OR (We assume you're a recent arrival from California?), or Oklahoma (We assume you support Tom Coburn - R-OK). Whatever the case, enjoy this image, and in the brief moment of clarity that follows, open the phone book and get some help you sick fucks. Or at the very least remember this moment when you're tempted to vote for a Moral Majority candidate.