EXCLUSIVE: GOP foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals

Rep. Alan Grayson's appearance on The Situation Room has much to recommend it. On one hand, you have a liberal asserting facts like he means it. On the other hand, the rest of the panel just can't fucking believe it. My favorite moment is when Wolf Blitzer mewls, "But you did insult Republicans!" My second favorite moment is when Grayson calls Republicans "nattering nabobs of negativism." Way to throw that classic back in their faces! My stars, I wonder how William Safire feels about a dirty hippie tossing his precious words around with such reckless abandon!

Oh. Oh that's right. William Safire is fucking dead.

Here is a nice story for me to blog

Unarmed, Legless Man Tased

MERCED, Calif. — The Merced Police Department's Internal Affairs Division is investigating whether an officer twice used a Taser on an unarmed, wheelchair-bound man with no legs.

The man who was Tasered, Gregory Williams, 40, a double-leg amputee, spent six days in jail on suspicion of domestic violence and resisting arrest, but the Merced County District Attorney's office hasn't filed any charges.

Quite probably what we're looking at here is just a lack of training. It so often happens that disabled people are not sufficiently trained to deal with taser-happy cops.

Deep Thought

FUCK PhD exams.

"Stanley Fish is away this week."

How am I supposed to know what he's wrong/annoying about?

Here I Am, Standing Athwart Things Yelling Shut Up

When I read Matt Taibbi's epic send-up of Stanley Fish's "Hooray for religion because Liberalism has not delivered on its utopian promises and Christopher Hitchens is irksome" post of three weeks ago, I was initially disappointed that a main line of attack was on Fish's fancy hi-falutin perfesser talk. There are so many better reasons than jargon and verbosity to distrust academics! Plus that column was riddled with inconsistencies and barely made sense. But with Fish's latest, I'm starting to come around to Taibbi's way of thinking.

This week Fish gave us 1,600 words outlining the contours of "the" "debate" about what law is for. The jist: There is a debate about what law is for! The terms of this debate:

This is the answer to Dahlia Lithwick’s question, what’s wrong with empathy? It may be a fine quality to have but, say the anti-empathists, it’s not law, and if it is made law’s content, law will have lost its integrity and become an extension of politics. Obama’s champions will reply, that’s what law always has been, and with Obama’s election there is at least a chance that the politics law enacts will favor the dispossessed rather than the powerful and the affluent. No, says Walter Williams at myrtlebeachonline [???]: “The status of a person appearing before the court should have absolutely nothing to do with the rendering of decisions.”

Fine, whatever. Fish doesn't actually take a position, because it's better for him to establish two sides with incompatable first-principles just making a lot of noise at each other in "an endless round of claims, counterclaims, accusations, and dire predictions." It's like, willikers! partial, interested, fallible people sure do like to speak their minds ad infinitum, perpetuatin' the human comedy! It is, in his words, "Must-see T.V."

There are plenty of questions that can and will be debated forever. Should NBC cancel "Chuck?" Are English Departments worth it? But the question of whether Sonia Sotomayor deserves to write papers for the Supreme Court will--THANK FUCK--come to an end one day, when she is confirmed (probably after I've gouged my eyes out).

To be fair, Fish wrote this column before Sotomayor was announced as the nominee. But that doesn't let Fish off the hook [rimshot] for saying the debate about her nomination would be interesting. In fact, it has been both utterly predictable and totally gross, and it got that way before she was nominated. It has only gotten more ridiculous, like Krugman says, since Tuesday morning. This debate by which Fish is admittedly riveted has featured John Yoo and Newt Gingrich's Twitter feed. With these fuckers at the table, you're not having a debate. It's not even clear that whatever you're having is taking place in the context of human civilization.

Anyway you can chalk up Fish's column about the nomination as another Times prediction that was immediately proven wrong. Also, I would like to apologize for Stanley Fish on behalf of my discipline.

Lordy.

What, but WHAT, is Stanley Fish doing over there, at the New York Times? Two weeks ago it was, Religion and "science" are totally separate entities with totally different programs and questions, and religion is better.

This week it's, all "scientific" "facts" emerge from within a point of view and set of assumptions which are made on "faith," and therefore we will call science "religion."

FUCK! To think, Stanley Fish has taught in all the fanciest English departments! I can get this shit from my undergrads!

Shorter Stanley Fish

Indeed, much, much shorter SF: If the debate is religion v. knowledge, religion doesn't have to win; it just has to not lose. And then, win! Take that, false positivism.

Cartoons LIE

The 90s Minimum, With Apologies to Joe Brainard

Reading about this thing got me thinking about what the 90s were ostensibly about. This was the decade during which I was aged 9-18 years. So mostly I spent the 90s unconscious. But it was a good time to come to musical consciousness! (Even though I wasn't allowed to watch MTV.) Punkt: much as Nirvana was supposed to encapsulate the 90s ethos, I never got it. I was exposed, I knew I should care, but never made it to caring, even after I listened to the Unplugged CD a dozen times & heard the radio singles ad nauseum. What I remember most clearly about Nirvana is being deeply confused about why some people did some weird guerrilla memorial shit (anonymous flyering) in 8th grade for the first anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide. I was smack in the middle of their demographic, apparently, even thought flannel shirts were the coolest thing since Skidz pants, but...unappealing. Still are, really. I loved Pearl Jam instead, I think because the music was more complex and it seemed like they meant it. Or something. Other musical inclinations: Live, Silverchair, Green Day, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Cranberries, The Verve (a twice-daily listen for an entire year), Blind Melon, The Spin Doctors, Our Lady Peace, and, I swear to God, Sarah McLaughlin. Somehow everything on the radio after Mellon Collie turned to shit. I went to a couple Rush concerts with my dad, and I still have a soft spot for them. White people music! I owned a Naughty by Nature cassette at one point, but it was confiscated, and my mom and I had to have a painful discussion about it. At the time I honestly had no idea what she was so upset about. Sorry hip-hop, I tried. Speaking of white people music: I resisted Dave Matthews until "Before These Crowded Streets," and even then I mostly had him foisted on me. Now I loathe Dave Matthews even more than I did in the heyday of "Ants Marching."

I recall very, very fondly the days of shitty, shitty Yankees teams. I really loved the Yankees. Danny Tartabull, Steve Balboni, Jack Clarke, Pascal and Melido Perez, Andy Stancowicz, and Steve Howe, all amazing jokes. The greatest joke of all, which encapsulates that entire Yankees period, was Andy Hawkins' no-hitter in 1990, which he lost 4-0. Dave Winfield and Don Mattingly past their prime. But Jimmy Key, Jim Abbot, huzzah. I remember people skipping school for the ticker-tape parades when they turned it around in '96 and '98. I saw the Yanks win 5-4 in 18 innings against the Tigers with my dad in 1988, and I will never give much of a shit about people who resent the Yankees' Evil Empire. That said, I was selected to talk at my 8th grade graduation in '95, agonized about it because I had not the slightest idea what anyone wanted me to say, and ended up blathering on about the sad, sad ways in which baseball was big business. Someone should have stopped me.

The X-Files colonized my brain forever. I submit that it's "the 90s minumum" for me, the thing without which the 90s wouldn't have been the 90s. The fact that it didn't survive the 90s and took a turn for the worse in about '98 or '99 helps my argument here. Mutants, visitations, government conspiracies, shadow-government counter- and counter-counter-conspiracies, and the truth out there which I want to believe. A metanarrative about the loss of and desire for a metanarrative. It was a pretty insubstantial decade, I guess. Sophmore year of high school I did a bunch of research on American paranormal & occult thought. The Branch Davidian cult was somewhere buzzing in the background, but I didn't get what was specifically controversial about it. Mostly what I read was Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and like people--not fiction, but essays on "why sci-fi? why the paranormal?" and eventually "why religion?" My takeaway had to do with comfort in the face of mortality (give me a break, I was 16), plus recurring millenial anxiety, which is why postmodern lit resonated in college. (An overarching, dominant thematic concern is coming to grips with the reality of chaos and death & not looking for solace in escape.) The Heaven's Gate cult came slightly later, but it was pretty interesting at the time. I saw the movie "Contact" in the theater and found it incredibly dissatisfying. Let me re-phrase that: I thought it fucking sucked. Punkt: I got that "Reality Bites" was or was trying to be a culturally definitional movie, but as I had not graduated from college or paid any attention to reality television, mostly I was like, what is this piece of mail that Janine Garofalo is so anxious about? It would be pointless to dwell on other movies.

Along with MTV, "The Simpsons" weren't "allowed" either, so great as they are, they couldn't do much for me. Oh, and I wasn't allowed video games. But I was allowed to see "The Wizard!" Christ. MTV, The Simpsons, video games, hip-hop: basically, by parental fiat, I was all but forbidden to share a culture with my peers. As a result, my deepest connection to contemporary culture is literary, but try making small talk about that. This is probably why to this day I often don't know what anyone's talking about. Freud said adulthood is about coming to terms with childhood; part of me feels I've spent my adulthood looking for a childhood to come to terms with. So what are you people talking about?

To put my up-bringing in context: I spent the first half of the 90s as an altar boy, and the second half answering phone calls at the local parish rectory. I hardly have any recollection of time I spent in service to the Church, and I'm certain as anything that it has nothing to do with repression (of buggery).

So but apparently people cared about globalization? Whereas I had never heard of politics. All I knew is that my parents hated some guy called Bill Clinton, whose inauguration I watched on TV in social studies class in 1993. I struggled through The McLaughlin Group with my parents just enough to think the SNL parody was just fucking hilarious. I was in my parents' Caravan in '96 when Clinton was re-elected; my dad switched the radio off. Didn't hear much about him again until the Lewinsky thing, which I wound up reading about a lot. But dining with the extended family involved a lot of righteous talk about how funding things like schools wouldn't solve any problems. I suspect the 90s ended with Clinton's impeachment and acquittal, were buried with the dot-com bust soon after, and there was an interregnum of sorts until "the 90s" culture went from "residual" to non-existent on 9/11. And oh yeah, somewhere in there America Online was invented. Thus ends this incredibly indulgent thick description.

What Would Marx Do?

Now the popular thing for profs to talk about is why grad students should do work which they were previously getting paid for for free.