The Death of Meaning, Part Four: I Will Say One Thing, Then Its Opposite, and Then Pretend That Not Only Do the Two Mean the Same, But It Proves Me to Be a Brave Genius in Today's Silly, Weak Media Climate

So, is Islam the problem?

I am, as always, ambivalent about all religions, including Islam.  I wonder where the fatal flaw lies in the way religion encodes itself into culture.  Specifically, Islam is problematic beyond the revolutionary impulses that lead to a martyr fetish: Islam holds sway in some of the most backward, savage cultures in the world.  And yes, I know there are "good" Muslims, just as there are "good" Christians, but the savage patriarchy engendered by many of the followers of Mohammed needs to be held to the cold light of judgement (in exactly the same way that imperialist Christianity must be judged, by the way).

So this guy, Sam Harris, steps up to do that.  And not as some self-righteous Christian, mind you, but as a tried-and-true media liberal.  His point is, very simply, Islam is the problem . . . not religion in general, not culture in general, not the economics of repression and desperation, but Islam, plain and simple:



Well, now wasn't that a ball of confusion.  He insists that Islam is the problem, and that violence is endemic to Islam in a way it is not in other religions.  But, go to the 3:45 mark and watch it again from there . . . first, there is the usual "there are good Muslims" dodge: "I should be clear: in criticizing Islam I'm not criticizing all Muslims".  Why the hell not?  If Islam is a code of death and repression, then there are no "good" Muslims, are there?  "Good" Muslims are the smiling secret agents of destruction, either wittingly or not.  If Islam is a bad religion, then Muslims are bad. YOU DON'T GET TO HAVE IT BOTH WAYS.  He seems to be trying to dodge the paradoxical "good Muslim" problem by saying that moderate Muslims are moderate precisely because they don't take their religion seriously, which is ridiculous and would be refuted by every devout Muslim who believes that the culture of violence, from the stoning of women all the way to the jihad against infidels, is a sin against the prophet.  Either Islam is evil or it's not.  You don't get to waffle with the "good Muslim" dodge when you are trying to make the specific point that Islam is evil.

"But Islam is at a very different moment in its history, and it's as though we're encountering the Christians of the fourteenth century . . . "  Yes, precisely . . . a very good point which, by the way, UNDERMINES YOUR ENTIRE FUCKING ARGUMENT.  There are direct parallelisms between Islam and Christianity . . . hell, at the end of the day, the religions aren't fundamentally different . . . so if Christianity does not contain the seed of death, then neither does Islam.  Conversely, if Islam does, then so does Christianity.  If Christianity has moved beyond its stage of "evil", then so can Islam, which means the "good" Muslims practice the true Islam, not that they're "good" because they don't take the religion seriously.  And it's not really the case that Islam is evil, just that it's not evolved . . . all which means that Islam itself is not the problem, but just some of those who practice it, which is EXACTLY the point he was trying to argue against.

There's a lot of other stuff here that's just ridiculous and wrong (once again trying to separate Islam from other "sane" religions: "The crime of apostasy is punishable by death in Islam" . . . yeah, and Deuteronomy 13:5 says "And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death, because he hath spoken to turn you away  from the Lord your God" - how is that not apostasy punishable by death?), and a lot more that is beside the point.  At the end of the day, it all just turns into the white noise of non-credible language that clogs our brains every day.

Sam Harris, co-founder of "Project Reason", you wasted six minutes and four seconds of my life.  But further, your self-satisfied and self-contradictory blathering lingers in the air like a rancid fart.  You really just need to shut the hell up.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (1)

Ah, the smell of burning wood (2), the nip in the air (3), leaves crunching under foot, and the fall elections . . .

Pah.

I've heard several friends talk about how much they love fall, and admittedly, there is a fuzzy, livable analog quality to a nice autumn day, like a good vintage tube-driven guitar amplifier, nice and clean and clear but with a warm singing edge.  But then . . . there is this election nonsense.  There's nothing more depressing than being reminded that you are surrounded by idiots. (4)

We must, as always, soldier on.

*          *          *          *          *

There is, as always, the hand wringing over negative campaign advertising that surfaces this time of year.  And always, there follows the media analysis piece that informs us that, as much as we may claim to hate negative campaign advertising, it is by far the most effective form of political ad.

Okay, yes, we get it.  Or, wait . . . no we don't.

You see, negative campaigning is not the problem.  On one hand, just think if advertising became a dual of fools hugging their wives (husbands) and kids (pets) superimposed over gently waving American flags: no better, is it?  Think of all the ads you've seen for judgeships, which (theoretically, at least) aren't supposed to take any public positions.  Can you imagine a bigger waste of the airwaves?

Let's look at one particular "negative attack" ad that is running here, in Kentucky's 3rd.  Our beloved Chamber of Commerce (5) is running an ad against incumbent John Yarmuth, one of those cheap ads with stills of Yarmuth and Nancy Pelosi in gray scale zooming in from the background, over all kinds of damning text, the primary point (in HUGE RED BLOCK LETTERS) that Yarmuth votes with the evil witch Pelosi 91% OF THE TIME!  

An attack ad?  Sure it is.  The whole strategy of the Republican establishment this year is to paint everyone with the Pelosi/Obama brush (6).  But really, assuming the percentages are correct (I haven't done the math, but there's no reason to doubt it), it is a completely fair "attack".  Yarmuth is forthright about his support and and admiration of Pelosi.  The ad, though simplistic and jingoistic, is not inaccurate or misleading (7).  If you've got a beef, you don't have a beef with the Chamber, you've got a beef with the whole Obama/Pelosi mush-mouth syndrome.

Negative campaigning is essential when establishing a politician in the public eye. Judicious negative campaigning, combined with a positive agenda for governance, is more than okay, it is essential.  How else does one differentiate oneself?

On the other hand, there is a wrong way to do it.  For that, let's turn to Tea Party Wunderkind Rand Paul and . . . no, wait, it's not Rand Paul being the idiot here, it's his opponent Jack Conway.  Over the course of the campaign, Conway has run ads

• harping on Paul's idea that Medicare needs a $2000 deductible, which is a perfectly legitimate attack on Paul;
• claiming that Paul wants a 23% sales tax, which is most likely accurate, but then conveniently leaves out the fact that Paul wants this to replace income tax, so it is not exactly an added tax burden (8);
• chiding Paul for his non-Kentucky roots, which smells of hillbilly xenophobia;
• exploiting an anonymous and undocumented (but believable) rumor of a prank from his college years in which he supposedly abducted a woman and made here worship the "aqua buddha", which, true or not, is a totally irrelevant and bullshit move.

There is so much that Paul could be attacked on, yet Conway decided to make like the cartoon politician and drag out the most ridiculous dirt he could lay his hands on (9).  I've known right wing rich boys like Paul, and I would bet my next paycheck that he was a sanctimonious dope smoking douchebag . . . hell, I'm not so sure I didn't go to school with a couple fistfulls of his doppelgangers . . . but the idea that somehow all this equates to the idea that Rand Paul was involved in "alternative religion" (nope - he was too vacuous to even imagine it on that level) or that he was critiquing Christianity (nope - he's too cowardly, unlike his namesake) is completely ridiculous.  And, on top of that, dealing with such blatant character assassination (accurate or not) simply puts Paul into the role of victim-writ-large, which is exactly how the "dispossessed" white people that make up the Tea Party feel.

Way to go, Jack.  Make it even easier for the shouts of "Barabbas!" to rock the heavens.

See, the problem is not "negative campaigning", the problem is with manipulation, lies and distortion.  It is a very important distinction to make: we don't need a politics of politeness, where everyone avoids the obvious problems in favor of asserting that "I'm a nice guy (gal) and true American!" . . . but we do need a politics that holds politicians accountable for their words and actions and the interactions between the two.

Ah, accountability . . .

Here in the real world, the phrase "lesser of two evils" unfortunately has a disheartening relevance to it.  And so: vote for a lying asshole or vote for Rand Paul. That is the predicament in which we here in the Commonwealth find ourselves.

Oh well . . . won't be the first time I vote for an idiot, and it probably won't be the last.

Next time: your humble author STEPS to Juan Williams, to find out if he crosses to the other side of the street when he sees me coming in my Hoosier garb.

__________
(1)  I'm being all ironical and shit.  But, since I'm not a good enough writer to convey irony without the aid of an emoticon, and since I'll only use emoticons WHEN I'M DEAD, I'll just have to resort to footnotes.  Are ironic hyperlinks too esoteric?  ; )
(2)  Fort Knox is on fire.  I've heard it was someone is Muslim garb.
(3)  It was over 80 degrees today.  The 24th of October, and it was over 80 degrees.  And there was a hot wind.  Hot winds are rare enough around here during the summer, but October?  F@#k this shit, man.  And Fort Knox is on fire.  There are ashes falling down here.  It burns my throat.  And I've got a fever and a f@#king chest cold.  Just so you know (or miss my Facebook updates).
(4)  Not all of you, of course.  There are many human people.  But there are also the idiots.  Many, many, many, many, idiots.
(5)  Irony.  I don't love them.
(6)  Let's see, white woman, black man . . .
(7)  Actually, the Chamber really seems to be phoning it in on this one.  If you're going to pony up for a TV ad, make it stick . . . Yarmuth, though he votes along with the Democratic majority most of the time, is a fair pace to the left of the "liberal" Congressional Democrats.  It seems that the Chamber could have come up with an ad that announces in red block letters "EVEN MORE LIBERAL THAN OBAMA AND PELOSI!" and have plenty of sound bites to back it up.  And sure, Kentucky 3 is Louisville & Jefferson County, the only even remotely liberal area in Kentucky, but Republican toady Anne Northup managed to hold the seat for ten years before Yarmuth, so the seat is far from unassailable.
(8)  A sales tax is a big problem for the working class, but that's another discussion that has yet to take place & is a bit nuanced for a 30 second campaign spot.
(9)  Is it just me, or is that mainly a Southern thing?

Creative Editing

Found this on a random surf. Wish I could attribute it.

On Slipping Quietly Into Oblivion (Amongst All the Noise)

I'm having trouble with words today,
language a series of one night stands
with nothing to commit to.

The radio means nothing anymore:
there is no place.
It chirps oblivious and shrill,
projecting nothing from nowhere.
I want gifts.
The radio has no gifts for me.

The heads on TV are surrounded with flashing words,
words that have become fickle and whorish,
words that have lost meaning,
like baseball when the snow flies -
displaced, shot through with chattering promiscuity.

Meaning dies a slow death
a cancer patient having each cell in his body replaced,
one by one,
with malignancy.
A death so slow it's mistaken for immortality.

The Death of Everything

1.

Burroughs: "Tear it down, tear it down, tear it all down!"

actually it was "Take it back, take it back, take it all back!", but who's keeping track? Bogus attribution and outright lying is the chic literary device of the first quarter of the 21st century. If this seems like a week attempt then it's because I've come unstuck in time.

2.

This is the death of everything. The title reeks of berets and Sartre, of pretension so mundane it's become a Halloween costume. It's like

DEATH

"oooohhh, scary . . . who the fuck are you trying to kid and/or impress?"

There's the big death, and there's the little death. And a few deaths in between. It's virtually meaningless to talk about death, the big empty. Death is too big; death stands in for its own meaning.

Or not.

3.

I call this blog the death of everything because I want it to be, in a sense, a series of endings. I perceive life/reality as a cycle, a series of cycles, a group of cycles, whatever . . . but unlike circles, there's no smooth continuum, and unlike spirals, there's no controlled (or, sometimes, even logical) motion. As such, you can point at any moment and say "that's the end! DEATH!" and you would be right. Or, you could say "that's the beginning! BIRTH!" and be correct as well. It's all a matter of perspective, you see?

Problem is, everyone wants to be RIGHT. It doesn't work that way. The circles have flat spots, the spirals are less spirals than they are a careening about in scenery that is occasionally familiar, occasionally not.

This is life beyond mathematics, spiritual or actual . . .

4.

Everyone wants a new beginning without an ending. Birth without death.

But it doesn't work that way.

So, lacking rebirth without pain, they choose the status quo. Problem is, there is no such thing as a status quo. Everything is always changing.

You get up every morning at the same time. You eat the same thing for breakfast - say, a bowl of Cheerios. Every day. Same time.

But today, it rains. Yesterday it snowed. The sun will be out tomorrow.

The president got shot. Someone flew airplanes into a large building.

You had sex.

Nothing is ever really the same. But

5.

Somehow, it is. Sartre tries to convince us that just because the sun rose in the east yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday ad infinitum, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will rise in the east again tomorrow.

Sure. I can buy that. But nobody ever lost money betting that the sun would rise in the east.

"The more things change, the more things stay the same."

God, how I hate the old saws, but this one's apropos. It's the spiral, the careening about in scenery familiar and unfamiliar. It's a life of deja vu.

"It takes money to make money."

Less apropos, but I was thinking of Green on Red for some reason, and that line from one of their songs just came insistently barging through. But wait: not so beside the point, it turns out. Because if you expand it to

"Power serves naught but power."

then you are getting closer to the point.

Money serves money. Power serves power. The status quo exists solely to project itself into infinity.

And that, friends, is the source of everything that is burning up our world: the enormous resource drain to power the continual return of the status quo. I don't mean that strictly in the environmental sense (though, indeed, that applies), but a macroeconomic sense, if economy here is expanded to mean the sum total of all exchange. You see, entropy is the natural tendency of the universe

(everything falls apart)

, and it takes energy (or applied energy = power) to fight against the entropy. So, the more mass a given film clip/reality attains, the more power (energy) it takes to maintain the status quo, like holding an ocean liner at anchor. Turns out the status quo is not the mundane, same-old-same-old; but rather, a raging inferno, a nuclear implosion, and energy sink that swallows up everything in its wake.

Entropy, on the other hand, is zen-like. Sometimes horrible, sometimes violent

(ultimate entropy separates atom from atom, fractures nuclei, sends electrons careening from orbit)

but always tending toward the peace of oblivion

(and [need it be said?] no energy/power drain).

The true conservationist does not preserve. The true conservationist is the death of everything.

6.

the death of everything wants to scrape the barnacles off the ocean liner of culture.

7.

Today we have hundreds, nay, thousands of people telling us what's up with this or that. The democratization of message transmission has led to (what can only with extreme charity be called) the democratization of expression. That's fine: it's not as if the voices are any more wacked out, it's just that there's more of them. And besides, some of the most wacked out voices are right there on the top of the "traditional media" pile.

the death of everything strives to break apart the control systems at the heart of the word. This is particularly tricky considering the fact that the operations take place at the level of word. the death of everything is far from pure in this sense, especially when "calmly and rationally" discussing politics

{assuming that this defective, bipolar political monstrosity is somehow a) functioning logically, and b) worthy of "serious" discussion is in and of itself dangerously faulty logic}

or appearing to align itself in the political spectrum.

"Political", here, meaning American politics.

For that reason, the death of everything needs to be taken as a whole. A defective whole, certainly, but hopefully with its moments of

8.

insight? No, death. The breaking apart, the entropy is the thing. Effective in and of itself, the aiming, the focus, the purpose tends to pollute it, but not fatally.

9.

And thus, the circle, the cycle, the . . . whatever. One thing's for sure, after you've looped around, you're not in the same place, even if the deja vu is heavy . . .

10.

Life and death. Death and life. You don't get one without the other. As the ocean liner of this reality trundles along,

11.

becoming more massive and burdened as it goes,

12.

it sinks ever more precipitously to the dark depths.

13.

Our reality is burdened to the point that it is becoming unworkable. It has to be picked apart, torn asunder, loosened up (nuclei split, electrons ejected from their orbits). Something has to die so that reality can live. And, more than just something, it has to be

14.

everything. Anything less than everything would betray an agenda. Everything dies so that all can be reborn.

15.

"Now I die and vanish," you would say, "and all at once I am nothing. The soul is as mortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent . . . " Zarathustra's eagle and serpent

16.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust - Remember always: from ashes you came, to ashes you shall return." Ash Wednesday Invocation

The Death of Meaning Pt. 3: Hyperbolic Destruction

"I will ask you to not hang and lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer" - Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., during a Chicago news conference in which embattled Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich announced his appointment of Roland Burris to the senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

Let's peruse this statement for just a moment: African-American Congressman Bobby Rush says not to "hang and lynch" fellow African-American Roland Burris. One is left to assume that all symbolism of this statement is absolutely deliberate, since no African-American (least of all an African-American politician) would ever make this statement "innocently" - i.e., without knowledge of the full implications of the statement.

As the living witnesses of slavery have faded away, lynching becomes the most visible symbol of the oppression of Africans (though certainly not limited to Africans) in the United States. Lynching is justifiably kept in front of the American populace as a symbol of white oppression. Unlike familiar "hate speech" terms (such as "nigger", "queer", and so on), lynching is an action, rather than a linguistic tool of oppression . . . and, as such, can not be subverted or "reclaimed" in the same way that the affected subcultures try to reclaim such linguistic tools. Irreducible, lynching stands beyond language as an act of simple evil.

"This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree." - Clarence Thomas, responding to a Senate Committee's investigation of sexual harassment charges against him during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Thomas's famous quote starts a little differently, since his is not a simple lynching, but rather a "high tech" lynching: adding the term "high tech" to lynching makes the language more metaphorical. Using the colloquialism "uppity blacks" adds to the metaphorical nature of his high tech lynching. But, right at the point where his rhetoric is the strongest, he reaches for the brass ring: "You will be lynched." By distilling the high tech out of lynching, he moves back from the metaphorical to the concrete. He tries to move back to the metaphorical again later in the sentence ("caricatured [. . .] rather than hung from a tree"), but the lynching is still there in its most concrete form.

To the degree that the social sphere operates in an "ethical" manner (i.e., in a manner codified as "ethical" - the code's actual efficacy can still be open for question), there are concrete markers of evil that will be cited. These markers are irreducible events that are horribly unique and "unthinkable" yet frequently (and paradoxically) cited as measuring sticks for the concept of everyday evil. More common even than lynching references are comparisons of political situations to the Holocaust and of repressive leaders to Hitler. Think, for a minute, how many situations have been compared to the Holocaust: just recently, Bosnia, Darfur, and Rwanda top the list. And how many leaders have been compared to Hitler? Mainstream Western popular thought has put up Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and even tin horn dictators like Ruholla Khomeini and Muammar al-Gaddafi as Hitler surrogates.

"Relating to the Nazi extermination, it exemplifies radical evil by pointing to that whose imitation or replication must be prevented at all costs - or, more precisely: that whose non-repetition provides the norm for judgement of all situations. Hence the 'exemplarity' of the crime, its negative exemplarity. But the normative function of the example persists: the Nazi extermination is radical Evil in that it provides for our time the unique, unrivalled - and in this sense transcendent, or unsayable - measure of Evil pure and simple. [. . .] As a result, the extermination and the Nazis are both declared unthinkable, unsayable, without conceivable precedent or posterity - since they define the absolute form of Evil - yet they are constantly invoked, compared, used to schematize every circumstance in which one wants to produce, among opinions, an effect of the awareness of Evil - since the only way to access Evil in general is under the historical condition of radical Evil." - Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, pp. 62-63

The establishment of radical Evil in this way creates a set that aspires to include all radical Evil. All elements of this set become, by definition, unthinkable and unsayable, like the radical Evil that serves as its model . . . and, as such, they also become irreducible and inaccessible. Anything thrust into this set becomes pure type and beyond scrutiny - which is exactly what those who use these classifications intend.

As what would have to be considered a radical Evil (in and of itself, separate of the set of radical evil as conceived above), lynching can be used to define a set of radical Evil in the manner described above. And, in the above quotes by Bobby Rush and Clarence Thomas, lynching is clearly deployed as a yardstick of Evil. In so doing, Rush and Thomas not only call the game, they set themselves up as judges and arbiters of truth, empowered by the (irreducible) symbols of Evil they utilize.

Obviously reading, listening, and speaking in a social sphere requires a level of sophistication from the actors involved. The majority of utterance is stacked to some degree, and communication doesn't necessarily take place on the surface level: for instance, when my dearly beloved decides she needs a drink from the fridge only after I have left the kitchen, it's doubtful that my death is immanent, no matter how much I claim that she "is killing me". It is here that these utterances (especially the Thomas quote) duck and dart around meaning. Again, Thomas moves between pure lynching and a mixed lynching metaphor. I insist that Thomas wants the lynching to be taken seriously, but (in a lawyerly manner) he leaves himself some wiggle room to claim the lynching as metaphor instead of event. Rush, on the other hand, is nowhere near as equivocal. In either case, the speaker clearly wants his lynching to be taken either seriously or not according to his own judgemental whim. The question becomes very simple: are there any bodies swinging from the trees here? The answer is, alas, no. We are left to assume that either Rush and Thomas are unreliable witnesses/judges, or that lynching as event has lost its singular meaning.

Here, there are actually three axes to the devaluation of utterance: not only is the speaker called into question and the symbol devalued, but the event described has been robbed of its unique character and posited as type. It has been filed away, listed as irreducible, and its irreducibility protects it from examination. The event, unexamined, remains misunderstood by its faulty (hyperbolic and incorrect) definition. So, Burris's exploitation by Blagojevich is misunderstood, as is the exact manner in which a legitimate inquiry into allegations against Thomas got turned into a partisan political circus. Both are unfortunate situations, but neither are lynchings (no bodies!), so we are left without any real concept of exactly what these events are.

Some would say that I am taking this language too seriously; I would say that these exchanges demonstrate a lack of commitment to meaning, if not truth. Burris's entanglement in an unfortunate political situation is in no way a lynching, and Rush is an idiot for using the word. Neither is Thomas's high-tech lynching a lynching proper, and as a Supreme Court Justice, he should have a very clear concept of the power of language. As surely as the commentator who would compare Hussein to Hitler, Rush and Thomas contribute to the death of meaning.

The Death of Meaning Pt. 2: Whopper Virgins

From Burger King, the people who brought you the advert with the hidden camera footage of people freaking the fuck out when they couldn't get Whoppers, as if that was a good thing:

Calm folk who look (at first glance, I've only seen the ad once or twice) indigenous to the mountains of Peru are pulled into a septic beige room in front of a cheap video camera. Cheap furniture and bad camera angles re-enforce the verite motif of the commercial. The idea is that these folk, who have never had fast food burgers before (hence "Whopper Virgins"), make ideal judges for a fast food taste test. Of course, they choose the Whopper over the Big Mac.

Flawless logic, that. It's just like the last time I watched Throwdown with Bobby Flay, he was challenging this cake master in Brooklyn to a red velvet cake bake-off, and the judges they brought in were diabetic Eskimos in New York for a funeral. Or the time I watched Iron Chef Symon take on Chef Rubino in Iron Chef America's "Battle Rabbit", they brought in a bunch of vegans with the understanding that their fresh taste buds unsullied by animal flesh would be the best palate on which to judge rabbit dishes. It seems that Alton Brown was particularly graphic with his discussions of the various operations performed on the deceased coneys that night - sadist!

Beyond that absurdity, there's the blatant overtones of cultural imperialism: "Here, eat this, it's so much better than all that grain and grass you people eat every day! I mean, on the days you actually do eat, since all you poor people are starving all the time!" It's unbelievable how shameless the ad is - the "moderator" administering the "test" is less a disinterested social scientist than he is drug pusher. And, there is that whole "Whopper Virgin" consignment, which implies that, like a virgin experiencing sex for the first time, the juror/victim is entering a titillating world of pleasure and wonder with his/her first bite of Whopper.

When I first saw it, the image that popped into my mind was the pox-ridden blankets the US government gave the indigenous Americans. Indeed, that beige room, with its simulated distance from the perpetrators of the fraud, is a site of infection, and one imagines that the only way to keep the disease (be it simply fast food, or the whole of American culture) from infecting the juror/victim's culture is to cut out the damaged tissue, or remove the victim from his home.

Perhaps most the appalling thing about these commercials is the cold heart of cynicism which engenders them. We have already declared meaning dead; these hucksters introduce credulity as a replacement for meaning - "we have constructed situation x with internal logic y, and who better than us to know, since we are the ones on your TV?" The Burger King takes the destruction of meaning (the only rebellious act left to the masses) as license to divorce truth from meaning once and for all . . . "see, the room is beige, the camera work is crap, these people are wearing their native costumes, so obviously this is true, even if it is not real" . . .

______________________________________________________

If you are writing ads for a fast food joint, you obviously can't say "hey, we know you're a lazy bastard with an appetite and an absolute disinterest in your health, so you may as well stuff your pie hole here", even though that's more or less the clientele you are trying to cultivate. Most Americans are going to eat fast food once in a while, but try to avoid it as much as possible; so in order to come out on top you must reach that clientele that has fast food as their major dietary staple, and make those folk your die-hard customers. There isn't a lot of differentiation in the quality of food between fast food places (barring a few unique items, like the RALLY'S DOUBLE BARBECUE BACON CHEESEBURGER!), so the only way possible to separate your client from that mess is to promote the fetishization of his/her product.

Arby's takes the direct route in their latest commercial: a late-twenties looking guy is laying on his bed in a darkened suburban bedroom, enveloped in an air of giddy anticipation. From behind the bathroom door comes a female voice: "I'm only doing this because it's your birthday" . . . the reference here being sexual, as in the old saw about married guys getting sexual favors from their wives on their birthdays. Anyway, out of the bathroom pops the wife, a cute-in-a-fresh-faced-middle-American-way brunette, wearing a full Arby's uniform and carrying a tray with an Arby's meal to the bed. "Ta-da!" she says, and shoots her hip out almost imperceptibly. A lascivious smile spreads across his lips, he says "Whoa! Me likey!", and a Arby's logo hat springs, boner-like and complete with a "boing!" sound affect, over his head.

Here the confusion between food and sex is much more playful, especially since it doesn't have the subtext of cultural imperialism. The food/sex intertwining is amplified by the American male fetishization of female fast food workers: the woman in the ad is very girl-like and could easily pass for a teenage Arby's worker. A significant portion of the American male population worked at a fast food joint in their teens, and probably had a crush on very similar co-worker at the time. Here the sexual overtones are focused on lost youth and confused with the food on every level possible, making a case for the fetishization of Arby's. And finally, since the sexual overtones of the commercial are so blatant, they subject themselves to the scrutiny of the audience, thereby involving the audience in a decision process, as opposed to burying a Trojan Horse (subtext) in a unidirectional edict (as in the Burger King example above).

Not that Arby's is as pure as the driven snow, but the ad is more like a harmless slightly off-color joke, and less like a cynical attack on the sensibilities of the audience. I actually get a kick out of the ad. Still doesn't make me want to eat at Arby's, but at least it doesn't make me want to boycott them.

The Death of Meaning Pt. 1

I feel sorry for John McCain. I'm not just saying that; I really do. In the past, he has lived up to the way he bills himself for this campaign: for instance, he was the only person to have the balls to go into Michigan during the primary and tell the voters that those auto jobs are gone and never coming back. He came out against the Bush tax cuts. He has demonstrated more compassion for economic refugees (a.k.a. illegal immigrants - see, I can play this word game too!) than most anybody on either side of the aisle. He has fought for real campaign finance reform, though the bills that bear his name are always watered down beyond all recognition. Before he decided to run for President as the Republican lowest common denominator (John the Senator?), he was a stand up guy. Not a shining beacon of intellect, and not someone whom I would have ever voted for, but a stand up guy.

Now, he is completely surrounded by idiots. This is easily the worst campaign I have ever seen, and even if he finds a way to win this thing, I won't change my mind about that. He makes John Kerry's people seem like Nobel laureates. One is left to wonder: what would this election have been like if John McCain ran as John McCain? And maybe chosen someone like Condi Rice or Christine Todd Whitman for his running mate instead of that silly Alaskan woman? Not that I'm a big fan of either of those folks, but at least they have demonstrated a capacity for the job.

But anyway, this isn't a commentary on the campaign. Well, actually it is, but it's so much more . . . This is

the death of meaning, part one.

In our culture's slaughterhouse of meaning, politics is the killing floor (sing with me now, in your best Howlin' Wolf: "I should have quit you, a long time ago"). It is not coincidence that Harry Frankfurt cites primarily examples of political speech in On Bullshit. Traditionally, politicians resorted to mantra-esque sloganeering ("I like Ike!") and simple corruption to bulldoze rational thought and win elections. These days, the game keeps getting more convoluted and ridiculous, starting with Lee Atwater's truth-optional campaigning for Bush Sr., through the Clinton campaign's . . . uh, let's say rhetorical flexibility, to Bush Jr.'s acceleration of the Clinton method to a fine art. Obama practiced the art of rhetorical impenetrability during the primaries, waiting until he was in the driver's seat before choosing a direction (by the way, if McCain is running the worst campaign in recent memory, Obama has the best - and once again, I won't change my mind if he loses). McCain's operatives are trying to work in the best Karl Rove tradition, but they are all silly hacks who, if Sarah Palin's recent rhetoric about "the REAL AMERICA" is any evidence, have the wannabe Timothy McVeighs of the country as their target audience.

But mostly, they're just silly. Yesterday on NPR's All Things Considered, Michele Norris interviewed senior McCain advisor Nicolle Wallace (listen to the whole interview here). In it, she was trying to pin Wallace down on the McCain campaign's claim that Obama is a socialist, a claim that McCain himself backed off of in an interview with Larry King. In a three-and-a-half minute interview, she actually gave the correct answer, which is "John McCain believes that 'spreading the wealth' is something that Barack Obama's tax policies have in common with socialism." A reasonable person in a longer interview might add that there are several functions of the US Government that reflect the influence of socialism, but that Obama wants to move closer to socialism, while McCain wants to retreat from it. Neither McCain nor Obama advocates a move all the way to either end of the spectrum. A reasonable person might also add that the McCain campaign's assertion that Obama is a socialist is common election year hyperbole, and most Americans are sophisticated enough to understand that.

But, unfortunately for McCain, this senior advisor is not a reasonable person. She starts out reasonably enough, talking about how the polls are narrowing in key battleground states, and hitting her talking points about Obama "spreading the wealth". Norris then plays the clip from Larry King and asks Wallace a direct question: "So tell me something: if John McCain does not think Barack Obama is a socialist, why is that message a centerpiece of his recent campaign?" Now, let me reiterate - I don't think this is a "gotcha" question. There is a perfectly reasonable answer to the question that doesn't entail any sort of backpedaling . . . but Wallace proceeded to head toward the stratosphere with her answer. She started by vomiting up her talking points quickly, stumbling over them, and then saying "Joe the Plumber was the first one to use the word 'socialism' to describe Barack Obama's plan and vision in his own words, which was to 'spread the wealth".

Oh please, dear God, not Joe the Plumber . . .

Norris tried to steer the interview back on track by pointing out that Joe the Plumber is not running for president, but John McCain is, and that it seems that the campaign is repeating a charge that the candidate himself does not believe. Wallace starts to get back to the question, but is distracted: "Well, John McCain is saying that the idea of 'spreading the wealth' . . . Oh, Joe the Plumber just got on the Straight Talk Express, speaking of his words and his wisdom and his economic ideas . . . you know, he is someone who shares John McCain's belief that, as a small business owner, and this election is about . . . "

?????!!!!!

What the hell???!!! The economic ideas of Joe the fucking Plumber???!!!

This is ridiculous on so many levels it's difficult to know where to start. First of all, I would bet you one month's pre-market crash income that Joe the Plumber DID NOT WALK ON THE BUS AT THAT VERY MOMENT . . . which means that, as ridiculous as it is to be distracted in the middle of a presumably rather important national radio interview, this was a planned rhetorical dodge, which is even more . . . hell, I can't even find the words. It is indescribably, amazingly, mind-bogglingly ridiculous and strange.

Secondly, this whole Joe the Plumber thing is completely surreal. I mean, this guy stumps for McCain! This guy is so off base that even Shepard Smith (Fox News) called a foul on him for saying (in his role as McCain spokesman) that if Obama is elected, Israel would "cease to exist". Now, if you've got Fox News anchors calling you out on behalf of Obama, you're way off the reservation. It's not unusual for a candidate to have various mascots for a campaign, but you don't let the idiots talk, and especially not with your explicit backing. I mean, we get it, he's a normal guy, a REAL AMERICAN (in Palin parlance), and he's voting for McCain. If I need my toilet fixed, I'll call him. I mean, he must be a damn good plumber, since he makes more than $250,000 a year, which would put him right in line with Obama's tax hike. On second thought, never mind, I can't afford him. Oh, wait, when Obama redistributes the wealth, I'll get my lazy welfare-Cadillac-driving hands on some extra lucre, & then I'll be able to afford him! Oh, Joe the Plumber, is there anything you can't do?

Okay, a bit of a tangent there. Difference is, I'm writing a blog. Nicolle Wallace is a senior campaign advisor (senior!) for a guy who theoretically knows how to surround himself with people capable of running the most powerful country in the world, and she's doing an important radio interview less than a week before the election that will determine the fate of her boss. Is it any wonder that conservatives are depressed that this goat rodeo of a campaign represents their interests? Is McCain losing this election on purpose?

Norris finally managed to get Wallace back on track, and she gave the reasonable answer: "John McCain believes that 'spreading the wealth' is something that Barack Obama's tax policies have in common with socialism." But, she couldn't stay on track for long: "Listen, you go into a restaurant, and instead of leaving a tip, you stiff the waitress and give it to the homeless person outside. It is a noble thing to do, it is spreading money earned by that waitress and giving it to someone outside . . . "

?????!!!!!

Stiffing a waitress to give money to a homeless person is socialism? That's not redistribution of wealth, that's assholery. Anybody who would do that to a waitress (who, without that tip, would be earning sub-minimum wage) isn't a Marxist, they're a douche bag. I understand exactly why this tower of intellect that is John McCain's senior advisor spent so much time to come up with this off-the-cuff analogy: they want all us broke-assed people to think that it's our income that's going to get cut by all this wealth redistribution that Obama plans to do. Wallace's ridiculous little allegory doesn't map, though. It's just stupid. Obama-as-socialist would make sure the diner tips the waitress and tosses some coin to the homeless guy outside. McCain-as-capitalist would argue that, as noble as this may be, the added expense to a night out would actually cause the diner to stay home, thereby putting the restaurant out of business, and in turn putting both the waitress and the homeless person out in the street. See, I can do this, why can't a senior campaign advisor for John McCain?

It's not unfair to call Obama a socialist - certainly hyperbolic, but not unfair. He is talking about making taxation more progressive, which is an idea that has its roots in socialism. Of course, America already has a progressive income tax, thanks to that bastard Bill Clinton*, and in spite of the best efforts of George W. Bush. And, if Obama were really a socialist, he wouldn't have such a lame health care plan. It's just that, post-Clinton, post-Rove/Cheney/Bush, you expect a little more elegance in the manipulation of language. These McCain people are rank amateurs. I never thought an administration could be worse than Bush's, but I'm beginning to see a road map to that particular hell.

Obama made it through the primaries with smoke and mirrors. He relied on nebulous concepts to make himself everything to everybody, leaving the real work (hacking away at the Republicans) to left-wing kamikazes like Dennis Kucinich. I don't like it, but I understand why he did it, and it obviously paid off: I never thought I would see the day someone would out-campaign a Clinton. McCain made his deal with the devil, but this particular devil was out of tricks (and really, he'd been pushing that pacemaker to the red line for over eight years now . . . it's time he rested). Their butchering of truth is visible to most anyone who wants to see. One can disagree with his fellow citizens on philosophy, economics, morals, etc., and still be civil . . . but anyone who falls for this crap is worthy of our derision.

Meaning is dead & buried in an unmarked grave. Pity the fools who still believe it alive.

This has been a bulletin from a Real America that thinks Sarah Palin is a joke. I'm Bill the Appliance Salesman/Bill the hopelessly obscure experimental musician/Bill the grouchy middle-aged white guy who actually thinks people read his silly shit, and I approve this message.

* Before you all write me, I know it wasn't Bill Clinton who instituted the progressive income tax. That was a joke . . . 'cause, you see, the right-wing media machine blames everything on Clinton . . . get it? Pretty funny, huh? Actually, progressive income tax was instituted by notorious left wing wackjob Teddy Roosevelt. Or at least that's what it says on the internet, so it must be true.