Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Clarification


Friends, we've been overwhelmed by the response to our suggestion (found here) that we embrace and infest neoconservative frames and destabilize them from the inside. We ask that you consider this move not as politics stricu sensu (in Lenin's sense of what people do to one another), but rather as a Preface to Politics: this is what Walter Lippmann called it in 1913, while he was still more or less a Wobbly-sympathizing Socialist and before he became a fluffer for Goldwaterites.

More on this later.

For now, you'll recall that our suggestion was to counter the Republican's "Fight them in Iraq so we don't have to fight them on Main Street, U.S.A." frame by pointing out the tacit admission of what we already know to be the case: that neither Republicans nor Democrats really want genuine immigration reform.

Why? For the same reason that Woody Guthrie wrote "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)": Because there's a whole bunch of fields to be worked, meat to be slaughtered, and lawns to be mowed in this great land of ours, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper to employ people who are scared of being arrested, pay taxes but don't collect benefits, and don't strike for human working conditions. And that's as true for embarassing Clinton powerbroker Zoe Baird as it is for deluded psychopath Tom Tancredo. (Full disclosure: We once cleaned the basement of Ms. Baird and her husband, Yale law prof. Paul Gewirtz. They paid us under the table, though the working conditions were OSHA-compatible. Lemonade was served.)

Yes, despite what you may have heard, there is a strong progressive argument for meaningful documentation of workers. For the moment, we will spare you our critique of the progressives, and keep to ourselves the anarchist conviction that it is borders and states themselves that cause the problems. You've had enough for one day.

Monday, October 30, 2006

Wish in One Hand, Shit in the Other


"And see which one gets full faster."

This was our grandfather's standard response whenever the word "wish" would unsuspectingly creep into a sentence. Kind of a snotty thing to say to a kid, but he had his reasons for being rather unsympathetic toward juvenile, subjunctive desires: he killed a bear at the age of thirteen to feed an authentically hungry family, enlisted at the age of fourteen (to ease burden on same family), and at sixteen endured what was reportedly the longest sustained depth-charging of a submarine during WWII.

Tell that to your kids the next time they get weepy for a new iPod.

Don't tell it to us, however, as we'd rather have the iPod. Furthermore, unlike him, we don't get mean in the vicinity of gin, and that should count for something, even outside of puritanical circles. Just because you killed a fucking bear doesn't mean you get to be a bastard, and just because you were a member of the putatively greatest generation doesn't mean you were the greatest human.

In any case, he's been dead for twenty years, and so far as we know he won't fuck with our wishes tonight. For no particular reason, and in no particular order, we therefore reckon we'll admit the Top Three Things we wish we were doing right now:

Drinking with Hussey in Edinburgh
Using the maul to get through oak and manzanita
Not being able more or less accurately to predict how the rest of our life is going to unfold

If nostalgia is ever mentioned in our presence, we'll rightly denounce that and deny this. But right now, at this late hour, shitting in either one of our hands seems like a pretty poor substitute for what we're wishing.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

He'll Be There All Week

Most Profound Man in Iraq — an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."

How to Fuck with Republicans (pt. 56)


As you know, Friends, there has been ever-so-much talk about how the Radical Right has successfully "framed' the political discourse in the United States.

Rather than "violating every conception of international law since the Treaty of Westphalia by invading a sovereign nation with no plan what to do next," say "The war on terror has many fronts" or "Liberate the Iraqi people." Rather than admitting your belief that "Rich infants should become rich adults regardless of whether they work hard or have talent," say "Repeal the Death Tax" and "Capital gains taxes weaken America."

Easy and fun, but the consequence of such successful "framing," you'll recall, is that people become total fucking idiots who are incapable of critical analysis.

Our point? Well, we just wanted to remind you why we started this series in the first place. Rather than trying to "re-frame" topics so that they're more amenable to Our Way of Thinking, we ask that you accept the frame, own the frame, and then fuck with the frame in its own terms.

Easy and fun!

This week, we have Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), who reminds us that
...defeating al Qaeda [in Iraq] is important, because if we were to pull out before we win, we will embolden every terrorist in every corner of the world, and then instead of fighting them in Iraq, we'll be fighting them on every street in America.
Swill response: "So you admit that you can't secure our borders against illegal immigrants?"

Watch their heads burst with the logic!

Easy and fun, friends, easy and fun. We invite you to join.

Friday, October 27, 2006

This Message Brought to You By Death and Romanticism

Ah, you thought that the treacle-meter at the Swill was already off the chart? Fools. God only knows how low we're capable of sinking.

In any case, to indicate how fucking bored we are with life right now, we took five minutes out of our "work" to post our first video on youtube. Does it depict us manning the barricades, stopping voter fraud, dancing on treadmills or splashing a moneyshot across some highly transgressive target?

Sadly, no.

It does, however, depict leaves falling in our backyard. It's all we've seen for days. In fact, and in all seriousness, the images are secondary to the almost traumatically gorgeous Schumann Lied (based on a Schiller poem), which is sung by the legendary Anne Sofie von Otter: Des Sennen Abschied.

Please, sit back and have a listen. Summer is gone, she sings, and she's really too fucking right.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

This Land is Our Land


Egotists that we are, we simply assume you're interested in our Weltanschauung. Why else are you here? Since we don't really have a Weltanschauung, you'll have to be content with our literal world view.

Therefore, please enjoy the view from the window, at our home, under which our desk sits. We're not sure whether we enjoy it or not.

Monday, October 16, 2006

George W. Bush Speaks Coherently

Dig the leader of the world use the word "mundane" correctly. We always suspected we'd like him better as a drunk.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

We Should Be Mortified


You know, friends, even we are occasionally misguided. I'm not entirely sure what we were thinking by demi-eulogizing the great Freddy Fender -- who is dead and gone from lung cancer (not one of the most pleasant ways to go; write for more details).

No, if we had any sense of ethical priority, we'd have spent twice as much time eulogizing this guy, Ali Partovi. You don't know Mr. Partovi, and he is still alive, technically. He's been incarcerated and tortured in a private Arizona jail for the past five years.

The charges? Ha ha.

The crime? Ha ha.

None of the above. Please read this story before you leave today, and before you're tempted to say something genuinely misguided about how the death of Freddy Fender -- whom you don't know, whom you've never met -- is "sad."

The Next Teardrop Fell

Yes, Freddy Fender had a pretty good run, and -- as far as we know -- he made it through without starving to death or anybody dropping depleted uranium on his children or raping and torturing him without ever being able to see the charges against him. Yes, his was a real pre-9/11 kind of death.

So let's not have any weepy calls for our thoughts to be with his family, or with him, or any such nonsense. Such gestures are silly at best, and possibly verge on the obscene. Let's just watch and listen.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Schmatisticks


Come on. We simply can't believe it. We know that we haven't seen 655,000 dead people in the New York Times or Parade magazine. No, that seems too high to us. Yes, based on our extensive knowledge of the situation, we think that seems a little high.

Furthermore, upon reviewing the statiticians methodology, we've concluded that one simply can't trust numbers, particularly ones we don't understand, which are admittedly almost all of them.

Now, if the people were Amish and there were fewer than five, well, we might wrap our heads around the issue and worry about the state of civilization and shit. But 655,000? That's what Kant referred to as "too much."

You may now return to your regularly scheduled tongue-clucking. We do.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Support the War Effort


Friends, you're well aware that the Swill welcomes people regardless of political affiliation or ideological position. We're deep into truth here, goddammit, or at least we're into rough mobilizations of truth regimes.

Therefore, you won't be surprised to learn that, although the stated stance of the editorial board is staunchly, critically, and immovably anti-war, we have valued staff members who really do support the effort to make Iraq's system of governance look like Rhode Island's. Who wouldn't want to live in Rhode Island, after all?

So, by way of pouring them half a glass of ice-cold "your opinions matter to us," we bring you this public service announcement. If you have access to an email address with an .edu domain, please click HERE for more information on how to help conservative college students help America. It's fun, it's easy, and your country will thank you.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Upon Being Not Surprised

Maybe if they brought Robert MacNeil back, PBS would be less biased than ABC news?

And you thought the reason we supported community radio and Democracy Now instead of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was because Maura Liasson is a FOX (as in News Corp.) and Amy Goodman is a national treasure, the living definition of why there's a First Amendment and why "Journalist" is an honorific moniker that should be selectively wielded by those who are engaged in the struggle to disseminate vital information about the res publica to the publica: criteria that excludes 90% of the U.S. press corps.

Wait. That's what you thought? Because that's actually true. Sorry.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Ramblings Upon the Fucking of Children


That's what the brouhaha is about. A santimonious, repressed, distasteful Republican inviting children to fuck via instant messages, other sanctimonious, repressed Republicans covering for him, one sick and twisted bastard fucking children and then shooting them, and a different sick and twisted bastard just shooting children, but having originally intended to fuck them first.

Jesus Christ, that was our week in America, friends, and it's looking increasingly likely that this is what's going to tumble the most venally incomptent administration of the last 100 years: the figurative fucking of children. Not legalizing torture, not pissing on habeas corpus and repealing the Magna Charta, not exploding the deficit beyond repair, not accelerating the end of life as we know it on earth, not spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fuck up Iraq, not sending cluster bombs over to be dropped on Lebanese day-care centers. Nope. A child (actually kind of a demi-child, since the age of consent in the District of Columbia is actually 16, but we digress).

Why? Well, because -- as our embedding of the Ned Lamont advertisement below will attest -- children are cute, and vulnerable, need adult protection, and the small black ones are sassy and entertaining (Lamont, whom we love, actually looks more like Conrad Bain than Alex Karras). And in just a few short days, the Republicans who somehow had convinced a majority of the voting public that they could protect Der Homeland are revealed as being unable to protect the children in their own office building. As Kos himself -- whose smart, tough work we love and admire -- wrote today:
These people have been in DC too long -- Hastert, Reynolds, Boehner, Shimkus, Lieberman, and anyone that continues trying to defend the inaction of a House Republican leadership that put their own political power above the safety of the House's teenage pages.
Hear, hear. I couldn't agree any more, and I'm willing to go along with just about any narrative that accelerates the supplanting, drawing, quartering, and humiliation of these Republican fuckwits. These are serious times, folks, and after six years it may well be time to have some serious people running the show. These days, Republicans simply aren't serious people. The congenital Republicans whom we know -- and to whom we are related -- are indeed, serious people, and wouldn't vote for Denny Hastert or John Boehner or George Bush with a gun to their head.

But let us be serious, too.

A wide swath of the children living in the District of Columbia are fucked every single day, and neither Denny Hastert nor Bill Clinton nor the George Bushes nor John Kerry has, was, or is going to do a goddamn thing about it. I'm not talking about participants in the Congressional page program, whose parents drop them off at lacrosse practice before making large contributions to politicians who will get them admitted to the program, which turns into college admissions, which turns into, well, lots of things, but sometimes only after they fend off felonious sexual advances (which they can probably get really fast, since they have DSL and stuff).

What, you thought they were admitted to the Congressional page program on the strength of standardized test scores?

No, Dear Reader, we're talking about the children who belong to the 15% of all D.C. residents who receive food stamps, but who don't have a grocery store in their neighborhood; the non-cute, non-sassy black boys who make it past the single worst infant mortality rate in the country, and live in sub-standard housing and attend broken public schools, can look forward to joining the highest per capita prison population in the world. They'll be incarcerated, you see, at a rate 49 times that of their white neighbors.

After recently enjoying the outrage over racist shitwad Sen. George Allen's (R-VA) ill treatment of a University of Virginia student, we even more recently watched The Boys of Baraka. One is a Confederate General from So. California and one a moving documentary portrait of several African-American kids from inner-city Baltimore, who are willing to travel 15,000 miles for a seventh-grade education, and thus attend free boarding school in Kenya for a year. (Spoiler alert: they don't end up at Choate.)

Consequently, we thought about titling this post "The Boys of Macaca," because that would have been a good pun and made us very briefly happy. But we didn't.

Because none of it ends happily. Because Mark Foley will go to a very nice rehab facility and then to a very nice jail, and then will do just fine. The Democrats will or won't take the House back, and will or won't take the Senate back. We're spending time and money and effort to make sure they do just that, but either way Denny Hastert (R-IL) will step down and become a highly paid lobbyist whose kids -- if the twisted goblin fuck ever reproduced -- surely won't attend public schools in the District of Columbia.

Why? Because he's protecting them just fine. There are different kinds of children in the District of Columbia, and some have DSL piped in their bedroom and some have bullets pumped into theirs, and some collect rare stamps and some hope for food stamps, and all of them need protection and they won't get it. The whole world needs to be protected from Mark Foley, and to know this you can look at his voting record rather than his email; this includes Hastert's children and Hillary's children and Al's children, and for now they're probably getting all of the protection they need to be great, happy, well-bred successes in life.

Bet your ass they've been shielded from the sassy black kids who aren't on television.

Learn About Joe Lieberman (I-Amadick)



We hope you enjoyed this spot by Ned Lamont (D-CT). If nothing else, our presentation of it proves that the Swill is kind and humanhearted and can be touched: in a sentimental, figurative, cute way, not in a Dennis-Hastert-has-to-approve-it kind of way.

Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman

Now paste these links into your blog under the link "Joe Lieberman." Why? Because of technology and politics and shit.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Chickenhawks


Thank you. Thank you very much. Try the veal.