While Britney Bravely Battled On

Some other shit happened. Don't worry about it, but be sure to floss.

Upon Unaccountable Associations

You know by now that we often have words for and about the dead. We know by now that our interest in precisely which words apply to precisely which dead can strike some of our slower visitors as, well, creepy.

We don't have time to save the slow, but we do hope that you'll go here and read this piece about dead women. We made it to the end and felt simultaneously ashamed to live in this country and glad that there was somebody else around who felt a lot like we do.

And then...

A metonymic chain. Metomotherfuckingnymic. We won't bother you with the logic, friends. We don't have that kind of time, and you don't have that kind of indulgence. Let us just say that we've been struggling with words: how to express just how little we care about the death of Anna Nicole Smith. And that struggle has led us to an unlikely place:

Please feel free to fill in the associations for us.

Meeting Your Needs ad Absurdumb

Friends, the aptly named "Anonymous" made the bracing -- if factually incorrect -- observation that not only are Foucault and Chomsky both "white" and "male," but that the Dutch audience listening to them was as well.

Let nobody say that the Swill judges harshly, friends, or that we refuse to meet the needs of our readers. No Clear Channel sponsorship or corporate centralization here: your Swill comes straight from, well, you know. The point is that if ye ask, ye shall receive, even if your request relies upon a form of identity politics that we find curious. We report, you deride.

Following Anonymous's incisive, implicit logic, we first offer Dinesh D'Souza arguing that American liberals caused 9/11, and that America could really discourage Al Qaeda if we adopted some of the more "traditional" social positions (relating to women, gays, et al.) advocated by Osama bin Laden. (we'd youtube it, but Viacom say no way).

Next, enjoy Michelle Malkin promoting her book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror. Yes, the book is exactly what it sounds like.


Is our point that there is some sort of correlative -- perhaps causal? -- relationship between degenerated public discourse and the appearance of non-white, non-male cultural commentators? Of course not. Such an assertion would be absurd, and flatly contrary to everything for which the Swill stands, has stood, will stand.

UPDATE: Whom did we originally single out as exemplars of degraded public discourse? Stanley Fish, David Brooks, and Thomas Friedman, all of whom are more or less "white" and two of whom have penises. Read before you speak, friends. Jesus christ.

Our point is that you should think before you speak, whoever you are: Chomsky, Malkin, or anonymous. And that we would like to live in a country and time where informed, intelligent discourse -- rather than low-grade xenophobia and militaristic cheerleading -- made it to the airwaves.

History and/or Nostalgia

Friends, we don't have to remind you about our embarrassing tendency toward maudlin recollection. For all of our cynical misanthropy (read: tough-minded, demystified realism), for all of our disgusted disbelief in Golden Ages and Greatest Generations, at times we long for the days that used to be.

These are dangerous feelings. This you know. This we know. Look at moments of deep nostalgia for a glorious past embedded in particularly engaging narratives of authenticity (combined with the willingness to fuck over a lot of people) and you have one big fucking fertilized egg just waiting to birth fascism. Distrust people who say things likes "That's just wrong to play that note there" or "Real art does something different, what you've done is degenerate" or "Wipe the cowshit off of the Madonna before I wipe out your whole family" or declare any particular moment to be the pinnacle of art or science or music or anything else.

If we ever begin a sentence with a reproving "Back then" you may kill us. We demand it!

Nonetheless, friends, perhaps we may select moments from the past, evaluate them as best we can in terms of our past and our present and the future that has always depended upon them, and decide that those moments represent something of value: the sort of value that one finds conspicuously absent from our current lives.

We'll cut to the chase: if we have to see -- however accidentally, however fleetingly -- the simpering mug of Stanley Fucking Fish representing the current state of the Public Intellectual in America, well, we may just hurt ourselves.

Or somebody else.

How did we arrive here? How did we collectively become so intellectually lazy, so idiotically passive, so incompletely or perversely miseducated, that Thomas Friedman and David Brooks and Stanley Fish are allowed to pass as intellectual muscle?

We don't know. We can't say.

But we can tell you that there are moments when we look back to a different time and different place; when public discourse didn't arrive as grotesquely pre-digested commonplaces and demonstrably false assertions, degraded wishes masquerading as indisputable facts. These are the moments when we attempt to re-imagine a present by re-arranging a past, to employ the powers of selective memory to construct what Lewis Mumford once called The Golden Day , fully conscious that there had never been any such day.

Then again, through the process of constructing our own historical narratives -- our own highlight reel of nostalgia and longing and loss -- maybe we can find that day, and if we do it right perhaps we can even avoid the sort of low-grade totalitarian fantasies of TRADITION that animate the Right Wingnuts.

So here. Enjoy.