Category Archives: argybargy

Chicken Little had it right

About a month ago [correction: it was in May…] This American life did a program that was THE clearest and best explanation I’d heard (or read) for the Crisis we seemed to be in: The Giant Pool of Money. Last night’s episode of This American Life was another winner: clear, un-partisan, multi-perspectival: Another Frightening Show About the Economy. You really NEED to download it and listen. And I’m adding NPR’s Planet Money to my blog reading…

Yup, this IS well done

Prescience?

From H5N1, on the probable consequences of financial meltdown:

The hot-zone countries will have no money left for anything except their militaries. The developed countries will focus on rescuing their billionaires, moaning about gas prices, and keeping lipstick on their pigs…

Silly Season unreels

I have to keep reminding myself NOT to become embroiled in electoral nonsense that has almost nothing to do with MY life, but I do keep getting sucked in to caring about the events of the passing stream of the Grand Cloaca of the Media.

Can it be that BOTH Rush Limbaugh AND Barack Obama have it exactly right?

Rush: Palin = Babies, Guns and Jesus (quoted here and elsewhere)

Barack: “I think people’s families are off-limits, and people’s children are especially off-limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice president.” (CNN had this one)

These two may be clearer in the context of Doc Searls’ post which cites Lakoff, and reminds me to listen yet again to Christopher Lydon’s conversation with Lakoff which ought to give your ears something to chew upon.

Not irrelevant to the present moment

Tripping along in my leisurely reading of Guy Davenport’s Geography of the Imagination (which, by the way, is mostly about poets and other artsy rapscallions), I came upon this marvelous bit of invective:

True, it was a year in which the country had to turn out a pack of scoundrels, porch climbers, thieves, bullies, liars, and bores from the Executive Branch of the government, a year in which the sludge of usury which forms the basis of our economy began to slither and lurch, a year indistinguishable from any other in the national contempt for the arts. (pg 273)

(Davenport refers to 1974, but…)

Disnification on the Tigris

This in today’s Guardian:

Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad’s International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel, which would not look out of place in Sydney harbour. Then, as twilight falls, a pre-prandial stroll, perhaps, amid the cool of the Tigris Riverfront Park, where the peace is broken only by the soulful cries of egrets fishing.

Improbable though it all may seem, this is how some imaginative types in the US military are envisaging the future of Baghdad’s Green Zone, the much-pummelled redoubt of the Iraqi capital where a bunker shot has until now had very different connotations.

It goes on, if you have the stomach. “Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club” indeed…

Protection rackets

During my years of wandering the Groves of Academe I read many thousands of pages of books and papers, and (I can see now) shuttled from one enthusiasm to the next, driven and drawn, blown and tumbled through a vast array of subjects and quite a few academic disciplines. The file cabinets in the barn hold a lot of the remains of the odyssey, and promise/demand many hours of rainy-day sorting –but perhaps (some would say) might as well go straight to recycling. Anyway, my pantheon of much-admired writers includes Charles Tilly. Today’s Crooked Timber tells me that Tilly has won the Social Science Research Council’s Hirschman Prize, and there’s a link to a pdf of his (1982) essay Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime. I grabbed it and started reading… and was projected back to the Maxell Moment mindspace

that I have so often enjoyed as a reader of fine academic prose. Listen:

Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and external violence. They claim that the prices they charge barely cover the costs of protection. They call people who complain about the price of protection ‘anarchists’, ‘subversives’, or both at once. But consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat, then charges for its reduction. Governments’ provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary, or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket.

Hmmmm. 1982. I’m just saying…