The Try-Works

The scariest poem I know:

Ballad of the Despairing Husband
Robert Creeley

My wife and I lived all alone,
contention was our only bone.
I fought with her, she fought with me,
and things went on right merrily.

But now I live here by myself
with hardly a damn thing on the shelf,
and pass my days with little cheer
since I have parted from my dear.

Oh come home soon, I write to her.
Go fuck yourself, is her answer.
Now what is that, for Christian word?
I hope she feeds on dried goose turd.

But still I love her, yes I do.
I love her and the children too.
I only think it fit that she
should quickly come right back to me.

Ah no, she says, and she is tough,
and smacks me down with her rebuff.
Ah no, she says, I will not come
after the bloody things you’ve done.

Oh wife, oh wife — I tell you true,
I never loved no one but you.
I never will, it cannot be
another woman is for me.

That may be right, she will say then,
but as for me, there’s other men.
And I will tell you I propose
to catch them firmly by the nose.

And I will wear what dresses I choose!
And I will dance, and what’s to lose!
I’m free of you, you little prick,
and I’m the one to make it stick.

Was this the darling I did love?
Was this that mercy from above
did open violets in the spring –
and made my own worn self to sing?

She was. I know. And she is still,
and if I love her? then so I will.
And I will tell her, and tell her right . . .

Oh lovely lady, morning or evening or afternoon.
Oh lovely lady, eating with or without a spoon.
Oh most lovely lady, whether dressed or undressed or partly.
Oh most lovely lady, getting up or going to bed or sitting only.

Oh loveliest of ladies, than whom none is more fair, more gracious, more
beautiful.
Oh loveliest of ladies, whether you are just or unjust, merciful,
indifferent, or cruel.
Oh most loveliest of ladies, doing whatever, seeing whatever, being
whatever.
Oh most loveliest of ladies, in rain, in shine, in any weather.

Oh lady, grant me time,
please, to finish my rhyme.

And, per a recent conversation about The Proposition with some Try-Works readers:

Scary — “Up Jumped The Devil”

Scarier — “Do You Love Me”

Even Scarier — “Stagger Lee”

Scariest — “No Pussy Blues”

With a hefty thank you to to Try-Works commenter oxana.

You can get an education, CU students. You just can’t get it from CU’s sanctioned classes.

Not one of my favorite documentaries.  But I watched the whole goddamned thing not too long ago for the glimpse of Harry Crews it provided.  So here you are.

Gotta jump left, gotta jump right, can’t stay where he is.

Original here. The summary reads: “View of scaffold used for hanging Native American Sioux captives from the Wounded Knee Massacre, Deadwood, South Dakota.”

The captives would be those who survived the Wounded Knee massacre, when the reconstituted 7th Cavalry got drunk and took their belated revenge for Custer’s ettiquette lesson.

• Star Trek just won’t die. Fuck.
• Ain’t there a Mumbai Al Qaeda chapter that could deal with this?
• “How can Naomi Klein top No Logo, the most influential political polemic of the past 20 years? Her first book forensically studied the bloodstains that have splashed from the developing world’s factories and ‘export processing zones’ on to our cheap designer lives - and it spurred the creation of the anti-globalisation movement. Today, she has produced something even bolder: a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built. She takes the central myth of the right — that, since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have skipped hand in hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history — and shown that it is, simply, a lie.”
• Blue Ash killer cop video. For those of you who don’t know, Blue Ash is one of the more posh suburbs of Cincinnati, a city known worldwide for its killer cops.
• Wasn’t there a William S. Burrough story about a guy with an asshole implanted in his forehead? Well, now it’s actually possible. Possibilities abound. Picture, if you will, Dan Caplis with a pair of testicles hanging between his eyes.
• See 3:10 to Yuma. Best Western I’ve seen since The Proposition. And that’s a mouthful.
• The Denver Post: finding a whole new level of irrelevance.

As usual, it’d be a hell of an interview if Bill Maher’d shut the fuck up.

Along with the other three books I’m currently reading — The Devil in the White City (dumbest fucking book I’ve read in a decade; was supposed to fill in the blanks on a Buffalo Bill obsession I’ve been nursing), The Shock Doctrine (you know what I think of that one) and The Mulching of America (it’s damn good, but it’s my fifth Harry Crews book in the last couple weeks, and I’m getting a little burnt) — I just started Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z. I’m a little skeptical of his notion of ontological anarchism, but it’s fun to read. The reason I picked it up is that I remember hearing that the Ben Ishmael tribe — which I first encountered in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers — is mentioned therein. I’ll probably post more on the Ben Ishmael tribe later, but for now, this caught my eye.

Art Sabotage

ART SABOTAGE STRIVES TO be perfectly exemplary but at the same time retain an element of opacity–not propaganda but aesthetic shock–apallingly direct yet also subtly angled– action-as-metaphor.

Art Sabotage is the dark side of Poetic Terrorism–creation- through-destruction–but it cannot serve any Party, nor any nihilism, nor even art itself. Just as the banishment of illusion enhances awareness, so the demolition of aesthetic blight sweetens the air of the world of discourse, of the Other. Art Sabotage serves only consciousness, attentiveness, awakeness.

A-S goes beyond paranoia, beyond deconstruction–the ultimate criticism–physical attack on offensive art– aesthetic jihad. The slightest taint of petty ego-icity or even of personal taste spoils its purity & vitiates its force. A-S can never seek power–only release it.

Individual artworks (even the worst) are largely irrelevant- -A-S seeks to damage institutions which use art to diminish consciousness & profit by delusion. This or that poet or painter cannot be condemned for lack of vision–but malign Ideas can be assaulted through the artifacts they generate. MUZAK is designed to hypnotize & control–its machinery can be smashed.

Public book burnings–why should rednecks & Customs officials monopolize this weapon? Novels about children possessed by demons; the New York Times bestseller list; feminist tracts against pornography; schoolbooks (especially Social Studies, Civics, Health); piles of New York Post , Village Voice & other supermarket papers; choice gleanings of Xtian publishers; a few Harlequin Romances–a festive atmosphere, wine-bottles & joints passed around on a clear autumn afternoon.

To throw money away at the Stock Exchange was pretty decent Poetic Terrorism–but to destroy the money would have been good Art Sabotage. To seize TV transmission & broadcast a few pirated minutes of incendiary Chaote art would constitute a feat of PT–but simply to blow up the transmission tower would be perfectly adequate Art Sabotage. If certain galleries & museums deserve an occasional brick through their windows–not destruction, but a jolt to complacency–then what about BANKS? Galleries turn beauty into a commodity but banks transmute Imagination into feces and debt. Wouldn’t the world gain a degree of beauty with each bank that could be made to tremble…or fall? But how? Art Sabotage should probably stay away from politics (it’s so boring)–but not from banks.

Don’t picket–vandalize. Don’t protest–deface. When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate. Smash the symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing but the heart’s longing for grace.

The rest.

Mr. Martin was kind enough to do what I’m too fucking lazy to do: procure lying asshole Heath Urie’s statements from CUPD.

You’ll be shocked to note that they’re the kind of self-contradicting horseshit which one usually associates with Mr. Urie’s journalism.

The first statement specifically names me as the guy who assaulted Urie. (At least I’m assuming he means me; the haircut and shirt color’s right, but he’s off on my height by four to five fucking inches.)

Urie stated that he wanted to press charges against the man who assaulted him. Urie stated that the man who assaulted him was about 5-7 to 5-8, white male with facial hair and either shaved head or very short hair, and possibly wearing a green shirt. Lawton added that the male had an accomplice present, a taller male with a pony tail. Lawton showed me an image of the male who allegedly assaulted Urie which he had taken with his digital camera. I could see in the image that the male had a green button-down shirt and short [hair].

So, in the first report, Urie’s so sure I assaulted him that he provides the cops a detailed description. Not only is he sure, but so is Lawton, who was a witness. In fact, Lawton’s so positive of the fact, that he took a picture of me and showed it to the cops.

But then in the second statement, Urie does an about face. Claiming that it was actually Mr. Dillabaugh who assaulted him. And this after he claims Mr. Dillabaugh blew smoke in his face. (I know: the horror.)

One can only assume that, it being Boulder, the tender darling was so affronted by the presence of cigarette smoke that he decided to change his story, naming Mr. Dillabaugh as the principle.

Or something.

Of course, both accounts are ridiculous. But the fact that Mr. Urie and Mr. Lawton are changing their story to fit whomever pissed them off last, speaks volumes about their journalistic ethics.

Boy, I can’t wait for this to hit the courts.

And, it’s the damnedest thing, but my memory’s getting a little overwhelmed by all the conflicting accounts. See, in the heat of the moment, when faced by two sniveling little media pricks, I can’t recall whether it might’ve been me that took Urie by the arm in the first place.

Update: I can’t stop chuckling at Mr. Urie’s oft-repeated assertion that he’ll let the police report speak for itself.

Well, yeah, I guess it does. In a nigh-psychotic, split-personality kind of way.

Updated: Post edited to make a little more sense.

All right, so somehow I seemed to have blundered into some fantastic dreamscape wherein Denver actually has an alternative media source.

And even more fantastic, it’s fucking Westword.

Not only do they include a fairly relevant — albeit a little light on analysis — piece providing a local angle on the usage of trigger-happy mercenaries in Iraq this week, they lead with a profile of two of my favorite people: Glenn Spagnuolo and Glenn Morris. Even though it contains some really, really stupid errors — such as calling Colorado AIM “a tiny, and disavowed, splinter of that original organization [AIM]” — it ain’t a hatchet job. In fact, overall, it’s a fairly fucking impressive bit of journalism, especially compared what’s usually churned out in our backwater burg.

Did I mention I’m talking about Westword?

They even mention anarchism without the obligatory middle-brow, cowtown sneer.

I ain’t gonna start buying stock or anything, but how fucking cool would it be to have an actual, well, alternative to the non-stop, greasy, callous-fisted handjob provided by our local papers?

The throng of demonstrators — 500 according to police, 1,500 according to protest organizers — had taken over the intersection of 15th and Stout streets, unfurling banners and emptying a bucket filled with fake blood and dismembered baby dolls. As dozens of officers in full riot gear approached and camera crews jockeyed for shots, drums and Native American chants steeled the resolve of the protesters. Glenn Morris, who’s been leading efforts against Denver’s annual Columbus Day Parade for almost twenty years, urged everyone who was “prepared to be arrested” to stay close, while supporters cheered from the sidewalks.

But this direct action wasn’t going quite the way the other lead organizer, Glenn Spagnuolo, had envisioned. The original Transform Columbus Day plan had called for as many as a hundred protesters to burst through barricades along the parade route. After this first group of less-resistant individuals — the elderly, the handicapped, people not as willing to risk bodily harm — was swept up by police, a second wave of activists would enter the street and use what Spagnuolo had described as “more hard-core sitting lockdown maneuvers” to stall the parade even longer. But the demonstrators had moved too early; the parade was still three blocks away. Anticipating such a display, officers quickly sealed off a one-block radius and surrounded the protesters with a wall of uniforms.

Now about fifty activists sank to the street in three sit-down circles, using the proper hand grips and leg locks they’d been taught in training sessions. Earlier in the week, Spagnuolo had declared that “the time to talk is over,” since many Native Americans and their supporters consider a celebration of Columbus deeply, unredeemably offensive. But his expression changed from determined to strained as he watched police efficiently dismantle each of the circles and haul the demonstrators off to nearby Denver County Sheriff’s Department buses. If this kept up, their blockade would be over before it even started. Standing near the police, Morris and Spagnuolo — or “the Glenns,” as they’re often referred to by associates — consulted with Russell Means. Even at 68, Means still commands attention as the man who led the American Indian Movement’s militant occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1973. But AIM of Colorado is just a tiny, and disavowed, splinter of that original organization.

“What should we do?” Morris asked. They tried to speak softly, but the screams of a female protester whose leg was in a police pressure hold made talking difficult.

“I say we just rush them,” said Means. “All of us at once. Just like we did back in the old days.”

The Glenns looked at the three-deep line of police, some of them armed with black paintball guns loaded with pellets that release pepper spray. Designing a large protest is never an exact science, and this is especially true among radical groups whose general distrust of centralized authority often makes such efforts an exercise in guided chaos. There are advantages to this model, including adaptability and quick recovery from law-enforcement responses. But it also makes it difficult for those involved in the action to know what the hell is going on.

“What the hell is going on?” one protester, a young woman, shouted at Spagnuolo.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he moved to the sidewalk. “Don’t stand near me,” he whispered to his wife, Barbara. A police sergeant had pointed Spagnuolo out to other officers, who were keeping a close watch on a group of young men who’d wrapped their faces in bandannas. Spagnuolo had a white bandanna hanging around his neck, ready for tear gas. This was one of the precautions he’d urged at a planning meeting; other suggestions including packing a granola bar for a snack during arrest-processing and a credit card to secure bond quickly. He paced nervously along the sidelines. The second wave couldn’t make it into the street without pushing through some cops.

From the 2004 Columbus Day Parade protest, Spagnuolo knew that anyone who instigated contact with an officer, even a bump with a shoulder, would be looking at a much more serious charge than a misdemeanor for refusing to vacate. That year, he and 238 others were taken into custody as part of the orchestrated arrests they’d worked out beforehand with the Denver Police Department. As they peacefully entered the parade right-of-way, they were escorted off and given a citation. The deal was designed to walk the thin line between free speech and illegal behavior. If you scream “Columbus was a murderer!” from the sidewalk, you’re protected under the First Amendment. But if you scream it in the street, are you breaking the law? That was the question that led to Spagnuolo and seven others being acquitted at trial, after which charges were dropped in the 231 other cases. Protesters declared it a major victory. Denver City Council responded by closing the loophole, passing an ordinance that makes it illegal to obstruct lawful events after a police order to move.

This year, the Transform Columbus Day Alliance skipped the advance meeting with police, and the rhetoric was much more aggressive.

As Morris began unbraiding his hair, Spagnuolo told fellow activists to head into the street on his cue. “We’re going to break that tape and take the assault charges,” he said. “That way you guys can follow and take up to the other side and go on lockdown.”

The rest.

Ol’ Truthless has now posted his response to ours yesterday concerning his favorite “Professor,” Thomas Brown: “Confidential to ‘Charley Arthur’: At least he still has a paid teaching job. You?”

Oh wow. We’re crushed. Truthless came up with something we hadn’t specifically predicted (although it might be construed quite accurately as being no more than a variation on the theme of silence).

But, hey, he did prove us right, both when we said that his come-back would worthy of any other pathetic little schoolboy, and when we said it would be still another of his endlessly mounting pile of lies.

As backdrop to the lie at issue in this instance, do recall that there was a fairly lengthy period during which Truthless insisted that somebody calling himself “Moredock” was actually Churchill.

Moredock repeatedly disavowed his Churchillness, but Ol’ Truthless just as adamantly asserted it as “fact.”

It turned out that, just as he’d said all along, “Moredock” wasn’t Churchill. Remember? Well, neither—as we, like “Moredock” before us, have consistently stated—are we.

But, even if we were, Truthless, the answer to your “clever” little question would be “yes.”

As in, Churchill is teaching a class at CU, right? And, according to an article in the “Colorado Daily” you linked to Pirate Ballerina on Oct. 18, CU is still paying him his full salary, right?

See if you can connect the dots there, Einstein.

It gets better. Much better. The classes Churchill’s teaching these days are tuition-free, right?

This means that—correct us where we’re wrong on this, Truthless—a Ward Churchill course IS finally being underwritten entirely on “your dime.” And we’re willing to bet that Professor Churchill’s teaching position pays a helluva lot better than Instructor Brown’s.

Oh yeah, we almost forgot to mention that just about the time the Good Prof’s salary runs out—somewhere around the end of August 2008, we’d say—his suit ought to be going to trial. Which means…

You really should be careful what you wish for, ’cause you might just get it. Then smarter and more honest people will inevitably use it to kick your pampered little ass.

Funny thing about those “facts” Jim Paine keeps peddling over there at Pirate Ballerina. They have an uncanny knack for turning out to be flat-out falsehoods (better known as “lies”). Take, for example, this triumphant announcement by ol’ Truthless on October 19:

“We’ve received a copy of Professor Thomas Brown’s new Plagiary article, “Ward Churchill’s Twelve Excuses for Plagiarism” (as yet unposted except in abstract on the journal’s website), wherein Professor Brown examines the pathetic schoolboy rationalizations Professor Ward Churchill and his less-than-athletic supporters have offered in defense against the multiple charges of plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication that (finally!) got Churchill canned [our deepest apologies to all for having lost a few of Truthless’s more graphic flourishes—like drawing a line through the word ‘Professor’ when it’s applied to Churchill—during our little exercise in cut-and-paste].”

What’s the problem, you ask?

How ’bout let’s start with the reality that Thomas Brown is not and has never been a professor.

It’s true that he spent a brief period as an untenured ASSISTANT professor—which is to say, a professorial apprentice—of sociology at that renowned exemplar of scholarly achievement, Lamar University, located in an equally-renowned hotbed of intellectual ferment: Beaumont, Texas.

Even that falls under the heading of Ancient History, however.

Thomas Brown, y’see, got the boot from Lamar nearly 2 years ago, not long after Churchill filed a research misconduct complaint against him with his dean. And we suspect it didn’t help his situation a whole lot when he was shortly busted again, this time by Try-Works, for posting “anonymously” racist comments about “dumb Asians” out here in the blogosphere, using his university e-mail account.

Talk about “dumb,” eh?

In substance, both the quality of Brown’s “scholarship” and his conspicuously Klannish behavior were too low-rent even for a place like Lamar. So he was “canned” long before our own Good Professor (whose “canning,” unlike Brown’s, is unlikely to withstand legal challenge).

This takes us to our “Where Is He Now?” segment.

At present, ol’ Truthless’s “Professor” Brown is marginally-employed teaching introductory sociology courses at Northeast Lakeview (Community) College in San Antonio, a 2-year lower-division undergrad facility located in an abandoned Albertson’s supermarket and currently boasting a total student enrollment of 2,657.

No shit. We swear we’re not making this up.

“Professor” Brown’s actual rank/status at Northeast Lakeview is that of an untenured instructor, i.e.: one step removed from the adjunct teaching position held by a certain blogmeister—who shall remain discretely unnamed herein—at a certain university situated somewhere in Boulder.

Yet another of Ol’ Truthless’s blatant and seemingly endless misrepresentations of fact—again, otherwise known as “lies”—having been thoroughly exposed, it seems fitting that we close with a prediction: He’ll offer his usual litany of pathetic schoolboy rationalizations—just as he has every other time we’ve caught him cold—whining away about how somebody else was responsible for his “error” (our money’s on the probability that, this time, he’ll try and pin the blame on “Professor” Brown).

Or he’ll adopt a pose of “strict editorial silence” on the matter, hoping that it’ll just blow over (we really wouldn’t count on that one if we were you, Jimmie).

It’ll be a lie, either way.

But, hey, ain’t that why we call him “Truthless”?

This from Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

And that is the post September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy — the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuild bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom — the medium is the message.

In other words, what’s at play ain’t only the oil, but also the entire new market created by disaster response. Think, for instance, of all those McDonald’s opening to serve the 160,000+ troops now stationed in Iraq. Not to mention those 180,000+ mercenaries. Not to mention all the Bechtel and Halliburton employees. Then think of everything else, from building materials to toothpaste, that also have to make their way into the compounds. And think of how they get there.

And then, of course, there are the extraordinary profits being reaped by, well, all those aforementioned mercenaries. And Bechtel. And Halliburton.

And we ain’t even gotten to the oil companies yet.

And all these hyper-profits are contingent on the murder of hundreds of thousands of absolutely innocent civilians. But, hell, that’s the price of business. And we all know what kind of motherfucker we’re dealing with in those companies, don’t we?

Snapple’s banned again.  I can’t fucking take it anymore.

I’ve seen Hank III at least two times — I can’t remember exactly how many — and every fucking time it’s the table thumpin’ smash.

Okay, I have never ever wanted to read a Susan Faludi book, never. But I’ll be damned if I miss this one.

How, Faludi wonders, did smoking out Osama bin Laden in his Tora Bora tunnel somehow morph, on the home front, into a “sexualized struggle between depleted masculinity and overbearing womanhood”? Answering this question takes her from ground zero to the Oval Office, the op-ed page, the Hollywood studio, network television, ’50s sci-fi, “penny-dreadful” Davy Crockett westerns, the daydreams of James Fenimore Cooper, the nightmares of Increase Mather, and the captivity narratives of brave and resourceful pilgrim and pioneer women. Along the way she interviews Jessica Lynch, who was written up first as a heroine of the war in Iraq and then as a victim, although she was neither. (A useful bookend here might have been the Pat Tillman story, about a young man who quit pro football to volunteer in Iraq, only to die from friendly fire that the Pentagon lied about.) She debunks such wishful news media thinking as the post-9/11 rush to matrimony, “patriotic pregnancy” and a baby boomlet that never happened (not to mention articles in this newspaper, less factual than fanciful, about well-educated women opting out of high-powered careers and deciding to be moms instead). She disinters the true story of Cynthia Ann Parker, whose abduction at age 9 by Comanches in Texas in 1836 had to be improved upon by Alan Le May’s novel and John Ford’s film version of “The Searchers,” since Cynthia Ann seems to have ended up preferring her Comanche husband to her Anglo relatives. (In Le May’s novel Faludi finds the original “terror dream” — “the fear of a small helpless child, abandoned and alone in the night … an awareness of something happening in some unknown dimension not of the living world.” And she reminds us of indispensable history books by Richard Slotkin (“Regeneration Through Violence”), John Demos (“The Unredeemed Captive”) and Mary Beth Norton (“In the Devil’s Snare”).

What we gather from these books and Faludi’s is that the script America reverted to in the fall of 2001 was the oldest in our literary imagination, our frontier fear that savages (“dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants”) would seize our defenseless women while our girlie men were watching Oprah. Never mind that 9/11 had nothing to do with gender politics. If we weren’t invincible, we must have been impotent. Somehow, like Cynthia Ann’s kidnapping, “an assault on the urban workplace” (global capitalism’s edifice complex) had to be rewritten as “a threat to the domestic circle,” and so we willed ourselves “back onto a frontier where pigtailed damsels clutched rag dolls and prayed for a male avenger to return them to the home.” Think of the entire nation as a distressed damsel. Think of Homeland Security as Wyatt Earp. Think of hate radio and Fox News as Sergio Leone. Think of geopolitics as a video game. Think of “Death Wish,” “High Noon,” original sin, alien abduction, demonic possession, zombies, vampires, satanic day-care child molesters and job-stealing immigrant hordes.

But after escorting us briskly from witch hunts in Puritan New England to regime change and Manifest Destiny on the Great Plains and lynching bees in the Old South, from hostage-taking by Barbary pirates to sleeper cells in the cold war all the way up to a patriarchal White House and a quagmired Iraq, she concludes with a curse: “There are consequences to living in a dream.” We’ve sleepwalked into hallucination, regression and psychosis.”

The rest.

I’ll never forget the New York Daily News screaming headline about the Jessica Lynch hoax: “Jessica Was Raped!” I knew that line of shit right away. It was Mary Rowlandson, it was Cynthia Ann Parker, and it was a top to bottom racist rape fantasy of the Eldridge Cleaver variety. But that didn’t stop it from being reported everywhere, even in the flash-produced autobiography, wherein the proof of her being raped was somehow garnered from, well, her total lack of memory of anything of the sort.

In the book, author Rick Bragg writes that scars on Lynch’s body and medical records indicate she was sodomized, but that Lynch recalls nothing: “Jessi lost three hours. She lost them in the snapping bones, in the crash of the Humvee, in the torment her enemies inflicted on her after she was pulled from it.”

He adds, “The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead.”

Lynch told ABC News’ Primetime in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday night, that although she doesn’t remember being assaulted, “even just the thinking about that, that’s too painful.”

The rest.

Needless to say, of course, the media was as complicit in this hoax as they were in the rest of the war. But here’s to Susan Faludi. (And, for the record, anyone who namedrops Richard Slotkin is all right in my book.)

Now, if only somebody’ll do something with captivity narratives and the dipshit POW/MIA pop culture phenomenon still lingering from the 1970s. Rambo, anyone?

One of my favorite examples of Holocaust denial is The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. It’s sort of an anti-museum, with no correlation whatsoever to the historical realities one might expect to be at issue.

And, of course, after visiting for a peek at Ben Nighthorse Campbell’s jewelry or whatever, you can then stroll down the street and visit the authorized Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.*

The authorized, legitimated, approved, and duly stamped Holocaust.

Because, you know, we didn’t commit that one.

The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, located on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is a monument to historical amnesia. The blond limestone building, surrounded by indigenous crops of corn, tobacco and squash, invites visitors on a guilt-free, theme park tour of Native American history, where acknowledgment of the American genocide is in extremely bad taste.

The beauty of the architecture and landscaping conceals the hollowness of the enterprise. The first two floors of the four-story building are turned over to gift shops and the cafeteria. The museum provides no information on the forced death marches, authorized by Congress, such as the Trail of Tears, the repeated treaty violations by the United States, reservations, infamous massacres such as Wounded Knee, or leaders such as Tatanka Iyotanka (Sitting Bull), Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht (Chief Joseph), Tashunka Witko (Crazy Horse), or Goyathlay (Geronimo).

“If it does not talk about massive land theft—3 billion acres of stolen land in the continental United States; if it does not talk about broken treaties—over 400 treaties violated by the United States government and its European American citizenry; if it does not talk about genocide—16 million native peoples wiped out by the United States and its citizenry; if it does not talk about residential Christian boarding schools, about the suppression of our languages, our Indigenous spirituality and religious ceremonies, and on and on, it is literally a whitewashed history,” said Dr. Chris Mato Nunpa of the Dakota Nation, professor and head of the Indigenous Nations and Dakota Studies Program at Southwest Minnesota State University. “And then they get our colonized, Christianized Indian colleagues to tell the same story that has been told by the European Americans for generations.”

The rest.

* Apologies, Noj.  Thanks for the copy edit.

There’s a piece about the so-called scuffle reported by the Daily Camera’s Heath Urie at the Ward Churchill guerilla class in today’s Westword. There’s one typo, just so you know. I’m quoted as saying that Mr. Dillabaugh took Heath Urie by the “arms.” That should be a singular “arm.” I told the Westword reporter, Mr. Roberts, the exact same thing I’ve told everyone else: “I put my hand on [Heath Urie] to stop his advance towards Professor Churchill, and the gentleman I was with took him by the arm to escort him out. If that’s Mr. Urie’s idea of assault, I suggest he might be a little too tender for the role of hardened journalist on the mean streets of Boulder.”

But other than that, the article’s just chock full of fun.

Take, for instance, this excerpt, wherein lyin’ asshole Joshua Lawton offers up the kind of ignorance of the rules argument for his shenanigans that makes one begin to wonder if the Daily Camera might be seeking a new photographer in the not too distant future.

Later, Lawton goes on, Urie asked the three men described by Whitmer as young Republicans to take in his recorder, only to learn afterward that this was forbidden.

Ah, so Mr. Lawton only learned “afterwards” that trying to sneak recording devices in the classroom might be a fucking problem. Funny, I thought we’d made that no recording nor media stipulation pretty fucking clear. Y’know, after telling him and his lyin’ asshole partner, Heath Urie, about a dozen fucking times that, well, no media nor recording would be allowed.

Good God, Mr. Lawton, it’s no wonder the Daily Camera put a gag order on you two idiots. If for no other reason than to save you from drowning on your own saliva as you stumble and choke for excuses for your dipshit behavior.

By the way, I still find it pretty interesting that Mr. Urie didn’t mention his shenanigans in his Daily Camera article. His exact line was: “Two men who identified themselves as event organizers turned away three male CU students at the door, calling them ‘agitators.’” No mention ‘tall about his own ploy to sneak recording devices into the room.

But, hell, thanks for admitting it, Mr. Lawton. And consequently, of course, pointing out that your cronie Heath Urie is — all together now — a lyin’ asshole.

That ain’t nothing on their lyin’ asshole boss, though. See, I told Mr. Roberts that I’d sent a letter to the Daily Camera directly after Mr. Urie’s article appeared to set the record straight. And I also pointed out that, even though the Daily Camera pledges to post “all appropriate letters . . .in the spirit of openness” mine never made it. Well, here’s the Daily Camera’s editorial-page editor’s explanation.

When asked via e-mail about the letter on October 11, Clint Talbott, the Camera’s editorial-page editor, responded that it had been omitted because of miscommunication between him and the blog overseer. Before long, Whitmer’s screed appeared above a comment by Talbott that reads, “The Camera disputes this version of events and stands by its reporting.”

A miscommunication that just happened to occur as I called bullshit on Heath Urie’s article? A miscommunication that was reconciled as soon as a Westword reporter asked ‘em about it? That’s the kind of sniveling little assholism that doesn’t even deserve the trademarked Try-Works sneer.

As big a set of lyin’ assholes as those may be, however, they’ve got nothing on the Daily Camera’s city editor Matt Sebastion, who released a statement about the incident that read, “[w]e fully support a journalist’s right to do his job without being physically harmed for asking a simple question.”

Physically harmed? What, did we muss up Mr. Urie’s arm hairs? Bruise his tender ego?

The lyin’ little asshole wasn’t physically harmed. He wasn’t assaulted. He’s a pushy little prick with a head full of entitlement who burst into a room that he wasn’t allowed in, and was told to leave. That’s it.

There was no scuffle, no fracas, just one lyin’ asshole’s foiled attempt at gotcha journalism. And now, being the lyin’ little asshole he is, he’s trying to get revenge with a fantasy assault.

Here’s the same challenge I issued the Daily Camera in my letter:

You said I shoved you, Heath Urie. CUPD pulled me out of the classroom, told me that’s what you said, and that you would be filing assault charges. They had my description; I was the person in question.

Where’s my warrant, you lyin’ little asshole? Either file charges, or admit you’re a lyin’ little asshole.

Update: John Martin’s wormed his way into Michael Roberts’ coverage of the so-called scuffle over on the Westword blog. There’s not much to say, except what’s already been said: i.e., given Mr. Martin’s behavior towards Mr. Dillabaugh’s wife on the day in question, I think Mr. Dillabaugh was more than restrained in his treatment of the creepy little shit.

And, as I just noticed, even the Westword readers ain’t real confused about the issue. Take this comment left by Kane:

wow. If you go to that guy’s blog, it’s pretty clear that he is obsessed with Churchill, essentially to the point of being a stalker. They’re painstakingly detailing all aspects of his life, plus posting photos of pictures of students seen in his vicinity with their names.

They probably have a right to be alarmed by these people if they’re actually creeping up to them in public. I really don’t buy that the kid telling him to f#*k off was making a threat. What did the blogger guy do just before that attracted the attention. Probably hundreds of people watching the O’Reilly factor or listening to radio sent Churchill death threats, so why wouldn’t he feel wary about people coming up in public.

Seriously, everyone else was amused during the week that the Churchill made the news, and wrote a nasty email or two, but everyone with a life has moved on to other things.

By the way, anyone else noticed how tender these little darlings are? John Martin stalks Josh Dillabaugh’s wife, and Mr. Dillabaugh rightly tells him to get fucked, sending Mr. Martin into a frenzy of whiny outrage that still hasn’t ended; Heath Urie gets kicked out a meeting he had no right to be in, and he invents assault charges.

It’s a wonder these poor dears don’t just melt away in the sunlight.

For those few of you who ain’t figured it out from the last post, on the advice of a wise and learned friend, I’ve been real interested in Naomi Klein lately. And according to Amazon, my copy of The Shock Doctrine is in the mail right now.

In the meantime, a short movie about the book, directed by Alfonso Cuarón of Children of Men fame, can be downloaded here (medium quality) and here (high quality).

And if you can’t get enough, Ms. Klein’s handlers have been kind enough to post links to a whole feast of audio and video, here.

From Jim Holt in the London Review of Books.

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.

The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.

The rest.

I used to dismiss any talk about the motivations of George Bush vis-à-vis Iraq as irrelevant.  I was more than willing to concede he had the best intentions, because, really, who gives a rat’s ass?  I figured musing over the river of shit running through his head was just time wasted.  That like any other murderous psychopath, the only thing that mattered was that he was stopped.

Which was, of course, the absolutely dead wrong position to take.

To have any chance of effectively opposing what’s happening in Iraq, we have to be unconditionally clear on what the hell’s happening in Iraq.  Especially as we move towards our regime change here at home.  If we operate under the misconception that our Iraq policy has been a mistake or a failure, then we can be sold a Democratic candidate’s line about fixing it.

But our Iraq policy has been a failure only if you consider stability the benchmark of success.  But what if stability at this stage is irrelevant, or even undesirable?  Starting with that hypothesis would certainly go a long way towards explaining the seemingly ahistorical nature of our Iraq policy to this point.

And it shouldn’t be that hard for anyone to believe that this war has always been all about the oil.  Not to mention the driving of a radical free-market agenda, including the privatization of US combat operations.

Nor that the US government would be willing to turn an entire country into an abattoir, to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Iraq civilians, towards those ends.

To believe otherwise would be truly ahistorical.

As would believing that any of the Democratic contenders will deviate from the current Iraq policy in the slightest.