The Try-Works

Most of you will recall that I’m an avid T. Roosevelt hater. I’ve often stated that his weird brand of metaphysical racialism, combined with his extermination and expansionist rhetoric, would not be out of place in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. So, since Mr. Martin seems to be calling Ward Churchill a liar for pointing out that Adolf Hitler notes America’s racial expansionism as part of his own model, I thought I’d offer up the following.

Adolf Hitler’s abridged version in Mein Kampf:

In North America, where the population is prevalently Teutonic, and where those elements intermingled with the inferior race only to a very small degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are different from those of Central and South America. In these latter countries the immigrants–who mainly belonged to the Latin races–mated with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this case we have a clear and decisive example of the effect produced by the mixture of races. But in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.

T. Roosevelt’s expanded version which sets the tone for his entire Western expansion epic — of which I’ve read all four volumes, God help me — in The Winning of the West, Volume One:

After the great Teutonic wanderings were over, there came a long lull, until, with the discovery of America, a new period of even vaster race expansion began. During this lull the nations of Europe took on their present shapes. Indeed, the so-called Latin nations–the French and Spaniards, for instance–may be said to have been born after the first set of migrations ceased. Their national history, as such, does not really begin until about that time, whereas that of the Germanic peoples stretches back unbroken to the days when we first hear of their existence. It would be hard to say which one of half a dozen races that existed in Europe during the early centuries of the present era should be considered as especially the ancestor of the modern Frenchman or Spaniard. When the Romans conquered Gaul and Iberia they did not in any place drive out the ancient owners of the soil; they simply Romanized them, and left them as the base of the population. By the Frankish and Visigothic invasions another strain of blood was added, to be speedily absorbed; while the invaders took the language of the conquered people, and established themselves as the ruling class. Thus the modern nations who sprang from this mixture derive portions of their governmental system and general policy from one race, most of their blood from another, and their language, law, and culture from a third.

. . .

It is of vital importance to remember that the English and Spanish conquests in America differed from each other very much as did the original conquests which gave rise to the English and the Spanish nations. The English had exterminated or assimilated the Celts of Britain, and they substantially repeated the process with the Indians of America; although of course in America there was very little, instead of very much, assimilation. The Germanic strain is dominant in the blood of the average Englishman, exactly as the English strain is dominant in the blood of the average American. Twice a portion of the race has shifted its home, in each case undergoing a marked change, due both to outside influence and to internal development; but in the main retaining, especially in the last instance, the general race characteristics

What I find particularly interesting is Roosevelt’s entirely insane notion of blood purity. It is inseparable from Hitler’s.  I have a hard time believing Hitler had not read Roosevelt, and to a large degree, internalized the metaphysical racialism inherent to lebensraumpolitik.

And more food for thought: Hitler and Roosevelt shared points of inspiration, both being avid devourers of the Western romances which exemplified their shared racial vision. (Quotes from Hitler and His Secret Partners, lifted from Blue Corn Comics.)

Hitler drew another example of mass murder from American history. Since his youth he had been obsessed with the Wild West stories of Karl May. He viewed the fighting between cowboys and Indians in racial terms. In many of his speeches he referred with admiration to the victory of the white race in settling the American continent and driving out the inferior peoples, the Indians. With great fascination he listened to stories, which some of his associates who had been in America told him about the massacres of the Indians by the U.S. Calvary.

He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government’s forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations is hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large ‘reservation’ in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease.

. . .

Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said: “For them the word ‘liberty’ means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we’ll obtain no sympathy…There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.” Having been a devoted reader of Karl May’s books on the American West as a youth, Hitler frequently referred to the Russians as “Redskins.” He saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or “Redskins.” “I don’t see why,” he said, “a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.”

Mr. Churchill’s been having fun again, lecturing to a packed-in audience. The usual suspects are howling that every word’s a lie. They’re providing no specific examples, of course, instead using the occasion to do their usual round of frothing at the mouth, hopping up and down, and smacking each other in the genitals with copies of An Inconvenient Book.

While Churchill’s question-and-answer session fostered a hostile and tense environment, his lecture progressed without interruption, save an occasional smattering of applause or murmur of unease.

Though Churchill made national headlines for his commentary about Sept. 11, he spent most of his lecture arguing that the United States’ westward expansion in the 19th century and “extermination” of American Indians was akin to the ideology behind the Holocaust.

“You find in the later pages of Mein Kampf an articulation of Hitler that comes from an analysis of empires,” Churchill said. “He’s examining the other European powers for models that would be an applicable model of the German destiny. He points directly to what he calls the Nordics of North America. The United States is the model.”

Churchill decried the treatment of American Indians, stating the Puritans were “boat people” who deprived them of their land.

“No one was deceived that there was no habitation, no human population in North America,” he said. “[American Indians] were humans who were at best peripheral, at best a utility to those who were anointed superior … who were coming in to acquire that which was theirs.”

In the last 15 minutes of his hour-long lecture, Churchill shifted his emphasis to Israel, arguing that Zionists use the same justifications as did Hitler to perpetrate what he believes is a Palestinian genocide.

“How did it become the Palestinians who bore the onus of responsibility to compensate [the Jews] for what had been done to them by Northwest Europeans?” Churchill asked.

Churchill said radical Zionists conspired with the Nazi regime in order to broker a deal for a Jewish homeland.

“You have active negotiations going on between more radical Zionist organizations, the fascist Italians and Nazis themselves,” he said. “Zionists would collaborate with the Nazis in what would be arranged as guerrilla operations against the British war effort … in exchange for a certain guarantee that there would be a territory set aside in that area for Jews and Jews alone.”

As Churchill concluded his lecture, approximately 10 audience members stood in a line to ask a question. Though Churchill said questions “should be limited to 3.5 seconds,” most audience members ignored his request.

“As a proven academic fraud and imposter, what basis can you claim in coming to a public university, which is funded by the government, which from your speeches and writing you so clearly despise?” asked Pete Markevich, a junior political science major.

Markevich was referring to Churchill’s dismissal by the CU Regents, who had conducted an investigation into claims that Churchill had falsified and fabricated research, lied about his American Indian heritage and plagiarized other authors. Churchill is currently suing CU, claiming he was fired in retaliation for an essay in which he wrote that the “little Eichmanns” in the World Trade Center - an allusion to convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann - deserved to die.

Markevich attempted to explain his question further, but Churchill told him to “shut up.”

“My answer is, far more than you,” Churchill said. “By the way, you want to look at the famous university report? The university has completely withdrawn that from scholarly scrutiny. There is no case other than the ‘little Eichmanns’ thing.”

Markevich responded by asking Churchill to clarify his Sept. 11 remarks.

“Three young high school students were traveling on a plane to an award ceremony. Of course, they never made it,” Markevich said. “They were murdered.”

“By Bush and Cheney,” someone shouted, to wild applause by some of the audience. Churchill smiled and shrugged, but did not comment.

“My question is, were those three students part of a cog in a capitalist machine and were they also ‘little Eichmanns’ who deserved to die as you claimed?” Markevich said.

“That was an amazingly stupid question,” Churchill said. “If you have a reading comprehension above the eighth grade, which you should have, since you appear to be impersonating a student up there, then you’d understand that those three … could not be construed as the technocratic core of the empire, and that’s who I described as little Eichmanns. That’s disingenuous bullshit you just spit out.”

Another unidentified audience member began to ask Churchill why he focused solely on perceived malfeasances by the United States and Israel, rather than Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia. When Churchill attempted to interrupt, the audience member said, to a smattering of applause and cheers, that “was probably why you got fired - you wouldn’t let people disagree with you.”

Tension heightened further when an audience member who identified himself as a University of California professor chastised Churchill.

“You came here propelling the thesis that Zionism, which most Jews consider to be the national movement of the Jewish people, is comparable to Nazis’,” the professor said, citing Palestinian population figures.

“Yes, it is,” Churchill responded.

“I think you failed in your thesis, and I’m in a position to give you a grade,” the audience member responded. “What I want to know is where are the God-damned Jews of Poland and Romania and Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. And they were God-damned! Where are they? We know where the Palestinians are,” the professor said.

“Do you? Do you, professor?” Churchill said.

The debate between Churchill and the unidentified UC professor subsequently disintegrated into a shouting match, though less than half of the original crowd was still present to bear witness to it.

As the professor left the room, Churchill had one final comment for him.

“I’ll be at Berkeley next week,” Churchill said. “See you there.”

The rest.

Update: Hilda and Pablo are roasting the dribbling goons over at PB for the aforementioned disingenuous bullshit. Alway worth a gander.

Update II: Meanwhile Mr. Martin posted the heading “Lies told” on the following portion of the article.   Really?  Name the lie, Mr. Martin.  Otherwise one might have to assume, gasp, you’re the one lying your shriveled little ass off.

While Churchill’s question-and-answer session fostered a hostile and tense environment, his lecture progressed without interruption, save an occasional smattering of applause or murmur of unease.

“You find in the later pages of Mein Kampf an articulation of Hitler that comes from an analysis of empires,” Churchill said. “He’s examining the other European powers for models that would be an applicable model of the German destiny. He points directly to what he calls the Nordics of North America. The United States is the model.”. . .

In the last 15 minutes of his hour-long lecture, Churchill shifted his emphasis to Israel, arguing that Zionists use the same justifications as did Hitler to perpetrate what he believes is a Palestinian genocide. . . .

“You have active negotiations going on between more radical Zionist organizations, the fascist Italians and Nazis themselves,” he said. “Zionists would collaborate with the Nazis in what would be arranged as guerrilla operations against the British war effort … in exchange for a certain guarantee that there would be a territory set aside in that area for Jews and Jews alone.”

Martin Walter, a mathematics professor at CU Boulder, is decrying the ACTA-initiated lack of academic freedom at CU, and begging them to muster up the courage to do better.

Given that CU Boulder’s president, Hank Brown, is a former chair of ACTA, I’m of the opinion you might as well spend your free time driving your fucking face into a plaster wall in hopes of achieving psychic powers, but, hell, hope springs eternal.

If there was ever any regard for academic freedom at CU Boulder, there sure as hell ain’t now.  Thanks to the determination of Mr. Brown and his neo-Stalinist cronies — as well as the invaluable cowardice of the majority of faculty — that institution’s been fucking gutted of any such pretensions.  The kindest thing you can call CU is an over-blown vocational school.

Permit me to address two issues that bear on academic freedom, both of them made current by the last general Boulder Faculty Assembly meeting.

In my many years on the BFA, I never thought that I would experience a mass e-mail from the BFA chair chastising the membership for its aggressiveness and tone. (The body was questioning CU Vice President Michael Poliakoff.) Although it would be folly to expect that this letter of mine will have a salutary effect on CU, I do wish to express my concerns about academic freedom — without exciting animosities and creating enemies — in the hope that the larger community will take note.

Two months after Sept. 11, 2001, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a group founded by Lynne Cheney, issued a report:” Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.” Proclaiming that “citizens have rallied behind the president wholeheartedly … college and university faculty have been the weak link in America’s response.” Apparently American faculty who did not support G.W. Bush were undermining the war effort. To make the point, ACTA published the names of about 100 ostensibly disloyal professors and students, names that they later scrubbed from their Web site. The list, known by many as the Cheney-Lieberman hit list, was sent to more than 3,000 trustees at colleges across the country. In hindsight these “weak links” appear far wiser than the Bush administration.

Many commentators refer to ACTA as “the new McCarthyites.” Privately well funded by righ-twing foundations, ACTA works in concert with neocon groups. According to the May 17, Silver & Gold Record, Michael Poliakoff not only has written for ACTA, but also actively supports it; he has mentioned that leading Democrats (independents?), such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, are ACTA affiliates.

The rest.

One Ms. Mindy Wilson of the University of Georgia was kind enough to leave the following in the comments:

The Georgia Review will be publishing an excerpt from Crews’ second, unpublished, autobiography in the Winter 2007 issue (due out in late December.) The issue also includes an essay about Crews by fiction writer Larry Baker, a selection of letters from Crews to various editors, and a handful of photographs.

I’ll be tracking down a copy through the Denver Public Library. I’ve also, thanks to the kind recommendation of another commenter, Joel, ordered A Childhood, Blood and Grits and Florida Frenzy through Denver’s interlibrary loan system.  I seem to have tapped out the main branch . . .

I’d meant to move on to Larry Brown and Jim Harrison by now, but I’m looking forward to reading the non-fiction stuff.  It was catching video clips of Mr. Crews doing his shtick that got me interested in him in the first place.  I’d heard the name for years, been recommended him, but always resisted for some reason I’ve never been put my finger on.  But then, watching him do his thing on Dennis Miller, I got blown away.  It was like watching the best of the barroom bullshitters I grew up with spin their tales.  Lively, grotesque and not without cruelty, but always funny, and with something primeval lurking just beneath the surface.

Before trying my hand at college, I worked for a while in manufacturing (among many other shitty jobs).  There was this guy on the line next to me who I always think about when I try to think about why I like the kind of literature I like.  He was a drifter and something of a scam artist.  Running up credit cards, passing bad checks, that sort of thing.  He’d been in prison a couple of times.  He wasn’t a very imposing figure.  Not a hard ass or anything, and not real interested in being one.  Nor did he seem that interested in people.  No romantic partner as far as I could tell, and no deep friendships, no family around that he seemed to give a shit for.  He drank some, had a thing for Scotch, but he did it alone.

What he was interested in were books.  The motherfucker read all the time, grinding his way through everything from the classics on up.  And he fucking hated all the Edith Wharton, Henry James type shit, and could rip the upper-crust NY Times bestsellers like Hitch taking on Bill Clinton.  The stories he was interested in had to have stakes.  Not semi-polite comedies of manners — who the fuck lives in that world anyway?  who the fuck wants to? — but stories about the rest of us, who either get pounded out of fucking existence by the day-to-day, or annihilated by our attempts to screw out from under the piledriver, who are one stupid mistake away from absolute ruin.

He’s my sole test market when I pick up a book.  He’s the only motherfucker worth writing for, in my opinion.  And I’m sure he’s already read Harry Crews, but if he ain’t, he’d sure as fuck like him.

That’s a question.  Why is Harry Crews almost entirely ignored by academia?  Another question.  Why doesn’t anyone read his books?

Was he killed by McSweeney’s?

By Oprah?

At the recommendation of the Florida Arts Council, the secretary of state recently named filmmaker Victor Nunez and sculptor Augusta Savage to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Nunez has made humane and luminous movies such as Gal Young ‘Un and Yulee’s Gold. Augusta Savage of Green Cove Springs spent the 1920s sculpting Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, and the 1930s fighting for the inclusion of African-American artists in WPA projects.

Nunez and Savage richly deserve this accolade. But, for some reason, Harry Crews, the great University of Florida novelist, memoirist, teacher and hellraiser, author of The Gospel Singer and A Feast of Snakes and also nominated for the Hall of Fame, got turned down flat.

Full disclosure: I was among the people who wrote letters supporting Harry Crews’ nomination. It’s a no-brainer. He’s the heir of William Faulkner and the godfather of Cormac McCarthy. He’s Maileresque (if Mailer had been born on a tenant farm). He’s the poet of the low-down, the back roads, the broken heart of old Florida. His milieu is the green-shadowed swamps and tar-paper shacks tourists never see, and the hamlets promising not tropical paradise but deer processing, cheap beer and salvation at the Full Gospel Church.

So why was Crews not acceptable? It’s not as if the Hall of Fame pays out big money: the only material reward is your name on a wall in the Capitol. And it’s not overcrowded. The statute (265.2865, if you’d like to look it up) says the secretary of state can pick up to four people per year, as long as they have made “significant contributions to the arts in this state.” Singer Jimmy Buffet’s in; actor Burt Reynolds is in; and dancer Edward Villella. I like margaritas and cheeseburgers as much as the next person, but for 30 years Crews’ fiction has been telling us of the invisible, the poor, the outcast: people who try to survive in the face of deprivation.

I understand not wanting to get close, even in prose, to mules and madness and drunken rages and families so dysfunctional they make the Borgias look like the Waltons. I understand the state wanting to include in the Hall of Fame people who are amiable, school visit-friendly and generally sober. Dead people are good: there’s only so much they can do to embarrass us. Maybe Harry Crews is too scary; he’s not known for decorum and delicacy. Maybe a member of the Arts Council once had the bracing experience of encountering him in a Gainesville bar.

But being a nice guy should not be one of the state’s criteria for recognizing its literary treasures. Was Shakespeare a nice guy? Who knows? William Faulkner, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner, was not a nice guy. He’d get liquored up, say outrageous (occasionally racist) things and hit on teenaged girls. Does it matter? These are artists, not Scout troop leaders or candidates for pastor of the First Baptist Church.

The rest.

Christopher Hitchens, who still brings a smile to my face when writing about the thoroughly inconsequential, tells one of my favorite literary fables.  (And I’ll apologize to all of you who’ve ever had a drink with me before; you’ve heard it.)

In my squandered youth I was a friend of Ian Hamilton, the biographer of Robert Lowell and J. D. Salinger and a justly renowned figure in London’s Bohemia. His literary magazine The New Review was published from a barstool in a Soho pub called the Pillars of Hercules, and editorial meetings would commence promptly at opening time. One day, there came through the door a failed poet with an equally heroic reputation for dissipation. To Ian’s undisguised surprise, he declined the offer of a hand-steadying cocktail. “No,” he announced dramatically. “I just don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t like having blackouts and waking up on rubbish dumps. I don’t like having no money and no friends, smelling bad and throwing up randomly. I don’t like wetting myself and getting impotent.” His voice rising and cracking slightly, he concluded by avowing that he also didn’t like being repellently fat, getting the shakes and amnesia, losing his teeth and gums, and suffering from premature baldness. A brief and significant silence followed this display of unmanly emotion. Then Ian, fixing him with a stern look, responded evenly by saying, “Well, none of us likes it.”

The rest.

Oops.

A group of gunmen killed in U.S. airstrikes in Iraq last week were pro-U.S. fighters, an American military officer said on Sunday, despite the military’s public statements that they were insurgents.

The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said U.S. military officials had talked to Sunni Arab tribal sheikhs in Taji, just north of Baghdad, to express their regret for the loss of life in the attack, which took place last Tuesday.

“There was some confusion and we were not able to turn off the attack quickly enough,” he said of the airstrikes that continued for several hours despite frantic phone calls from local tribal leaders to the U.S. base in Taji.

“We have talked to them and explained our sorrow over the incident and the loss of lives of volunteers trying to bring order to their neighbourhoods,” the officer said.

The incident threatens to derail a carefully constructed relationship between U.S. forces and anti-al Qaeda Sunni tribes in Taji and has put the spotlight on operating procedures for tribal police units the U.S. military is forming around Iraq.

“If they (the U.S. military) do not give us a proper reason for what happened, we will withdraw from the Awakening Council and let al Qaeda return,” said Sheikh Shathir Abid Salim, leader of the anti-al Qaeda group. His brother was among those killed.

The military said in a statement last week that it killed 25 suspected insurgents in operations targeting al Qaeda militants near the capital. Tribal leaders told Reuters U.S. warplanes had mistakenly bombed their men, killing 45.

The rest.

A catchy little jingle for those among you with those magnetic abominations plastered all over your soccer-mobile.

And, yeah, it’s wholly derivative of John Prine’s classic anti-war jingle, as follows, but you won’t catch me complaining.

And speaking of pissing on your Constitutional rights from a very great height, a gang of neo-Stalinist “overpaid, underachieving bureaucrats” at UC San Diego are now designating “free speech zones.” (A term which demands one immediately incinerate the nearest public structure.)

How long until CU Boulder adopts the same, do you think?

My advice to youngsters: if you want an education, if you want open discourse, skip college. Get a library card, read on your own time, and talk to those around you. Higher education in this country is a fucking hustle. Nothing more.

Halfway through a sleep-deprived week of final exams last June, UC San Diego students received what appeared to be a fairly uninteresting campus-wide e-mail from the university administration. With the subject line “Review of PPM 510-1 Section I,” the message did not appear to many students to be the kind of thing that should take priority over, say, a 10-page paper due in 12 hours, or an entire bio-chemistry textbook left to memorize.

Those who bothered to open the e-mail and follow a few links found themselves slogging through the university’s draft proposal of a new policy on “Speech, Advocacy and Distribution of Literature,” a lengthy set of rules and regulations governing use of campus space for rallies and gatherings that critics — such as the ACLU — say will threaten students’ and faculty’s constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly.

Among the guidelines laid out in the document (a “revised” policy that will supersede the school’s current, much shorter policy from 1981) are precise campus maps marking “Designated Public Forums” for the exercise of free speech, a set of requirements for making reservations to hold protests in those areas, hours and decibel levels at which “expressive activity” can occur and-in what has some members of the campus community suspicious about the policy’s timing-a section reminding members of the university staff and faculty to keep their “Personal Political Activity” separate from university activities while using university resources.

The e-mail informed students that the policy would take effect in two weeks, leaving them a small window — the last week of finals and the first week of summer vacation — for submitting comments.

According to an e-mail from UCSD Assistant Vice Chancellor of Student Life Gary Ratcliff, the university’s goal in revising the policy, which has gone unchanged for 26 years, was to “define and clarify free speech and assembly areas and guidelines to ensure that all legitimate campus activities are allowed to occur without disruption. This includes preserving the safety and privacy of all members of the campus community in a way that is consistent with campus policies.”

As for critics’ complaints that the new language will criminalize on-campus rallies, Ratcliff said “the revised policy will have no impact on the ability of students and others to gather together and stage rallies. It will only clarify the guidelines for such activity, which will benefit all members of the campus community…. This policy does not seek to restrict freedom of speech or assembly activities. Like many universities, UCSD has a long tradition of supporting and upholding these types of activities. We do not anticipate that this new policy will impact the political climate on campus or the relationship between students, faculty and the administration.”

But if the week that followed the announcement of the new policy is any indication, the university might want to prepare for a fight with the students. Within 24 hours of the notification, brand new websites and Facebook.com groups devoted to discussing and organizing a student response to the policy had attracted more than 1,000 members. In heated message-board banter, students ranging from would-be anarchists to sorority girls to concerned members of evangelical Christian groups were debating the semantics of what it means to exercise your First Amendment rights on a college campus and sharing the e-mails they had sent to the university about the policy.

“Demand your rights or lose them,” wrote one member of the Facebook group, called “UCSD, defend your freedom of speech NOW!”

“It’s not just about personal views, it’s about our free speech as dictated by our founding forefathers. Do not be silenced, do not let overpaid, underachieving bureaucrats force you to stay silent!”

The rest.

• Thanksgiving is ruined. Now with post-Structuralist proof.
• Graham Greene on Shirley Temple: “Her admirers — middle-aged men and clergymen- - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.”
• Vintage visions of the future.
• “I claim no great knowledge on this subject — level-three SATs perhaps — but Amis couldn’t pass the test for morning playgroup. If my Shetland pony looks like a high-horse it’s only because Amis is trotting round the paddock on a chihuahua.”
• Finally, the perfect X-mas gift for the Rocky Mountain News editorial page editor in your life.
• The Gotham Times. (Posted primarily for the little “Do You Know A Corrupt Cop?” sidebar item.)
• The Ha Ha Times. (Aren’t they all?)

As I linked to not long ago, the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” ought to have all of us, no matter what our political persuasion, building barricades in the fucking street.  Whereas the “Patriot Act” crumpled up the Constitution and tossed it out the window, this motherfucker smears it in dogshit, lights it on fire, and rubs your face in it.

With overwhelming bipartisan support, Rep. Jane Harman’s “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” passed the House 404-6 late last month and now rests in Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee. Swift Senate passage appears certain.

Not since the “Patriot Act” of 2001 has any bill so threatened our constitutionally guaranteed rights.

The historian Henry Steele Commager, denouncing President John Adams’ suppression of free speech in the 1790s, argued that the Bill of Rights was not written to protect government from dissenters but to provide a legal means for citizens to oppose a government they didn’t trust. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence not only proclaimed the right to dissent but declared it a people’s duty, under certain conditions, to alter or abolish their government.

In that vein, diverse groups vigorously oppose Ms. Harman’s effort to stifle dissent. Unfortunately, the mainstream press and leading presidential candidates remain silent.

. . .

But her plan is a greater danger to us than the threats she fears. Her bill tramples constitutional rights by creating a commission with sweeping investigative power and a mandate to propose laws prohibiting whatever the commission labels “homegrown terrorism.”

The proposed commission is a menace through its power to hold hearings, take testimony and administer oaths, an authority granted to even individual members of the commission - little Joe McCarthys - who will tour the country to hold their own private hearings. An aura of authority will automatically accompany this congressionally authorized mandate to expose native terrorism.

Ms. Harman’s proposal includes an absurd attack on the Internet, criticizing it for providing Americans with “access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda,” and legalizes an insidious infiltration of targeted organizations. The misnamed “Center of Excellence,” which would function after the commission is disbanded in 18 months, gives the semblance of intellectual research to what is otherwise the suppression of dissent.

The rest.

Jim Harrison, who’s on my list of writers to read a hell of a lot more of (perhaps following my current Harry Crews tear — or at least after Larry Brown, whom I had slated for the next gorge-fest) on Charles Bukowski.

Charles Bukowski was a monstrously homely man because of a severe case of acne vulgaris when he was young. Along the way he also had bleeding ulcers, tuberculosis and cataracts; he attempted suicide; and only while suffering from leukemia in the last year of his life did he manage to quit drinking. Bukowski was a major-league tosspot, occasionally brutish but far less so than the mean-minded Hemingway, who drank himself into suicide. Both men created public masks for themselves, not a rare thing in a writer’s paper sack of baubles, but the masks were held in place for so long that they could not be taken off except in the work.

Throughout his life, Bukowski held a series of low-paying jobs so dismal that they are unbearable to list, though he did keep a position as a mail carrier for many years. Early on he was a library hound, and there are a surprising number of literary references in his work. (Quite by accident while I was writing this, the French critic Alexandre Thiltges paid a visit. He confirmed my suspicion that Bukowski had closely read Céline.) Even more surprising in this large collection are the number of poems characterized by fragility and delicacy; I’ve been reading Bukowski occasionally for 50 years and had not noted this before, which means I was most likely listening too closely to his critics. Our perceptions of Bukowski, like our perceptions of Kerouac, are muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits who love him to the exclusion of any of his contemporaries. I would suggest you can appreciate Bukowski with the same brain that loves Wallace Stegner and Gary Snyder.

The rest.

The long list for my favorite literary award has been announced.  Stay tuned for more excerpts as I run across them.

Ian McEwan may have been passed over for the Booker, but he may yet end the year with a gong in his hand. Although the climax of On Chesil Beach revolves around the fact that it is, in fact, an anti-climax, it is enough to garner him a nomination for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex award.

He is joined on the longlist of what the organisers call Britain’s “most dreaded literary prize” by Jeanette Winterson with a passage about robotic sex from The Stone Gods; Ali Smith for Girl Meets Boy, and Gary Shteyngart with an athletic description of his crass hero from Absurdistan bedding one of his many conquests (”Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media - a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future”).

The late Norman Mailer makes a posthumous appearance with a passage from The Castle in the Forest in which the male protagonist’s “Hound” is described as “soft as a coil of excrement”. More poetic bawdiness is on offer from Christopher Rush’s life of Shakespeare, told in the Bard’s “own words”, and his maritime-themed description of coitus with Anne Hathaway, in which “I clung like a mariner to her heaving haunches, the deep keel of her backbone dipping and lifting through July, through the green surge of growth … Our vessel ran shuddering onto the rocks, a wave of wetness ran through us, the air was rent with screams and I became aware that the bank on which we lay drenched and grounded was journey’s end, love’s end, the very sea-mark of our utmost sail.”

The rest.

• “Whatever our intent, such rhetoric promulgates the dangerous myth of the ‘universal sisterhood’ of third and first world females. The myth of the ‘universal sisterhood’ of all females is based on bourgeois reactionary essentialist views of gender. First world females are enemies of the third world generally, including third world females.”
• “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.”
• I support the troops who oppose the war.
• Stop supporting the troops. The troops demand it.
• Cigarette butts only. I have no truck with gum-chewers. I leave that to Messrs. Paine and Martin.
• “My books are about killing God.” Which is exactly why I love them. And why I’ve been buying copies for every child of reading age I know.
• Oh, horseshit. You’ve got miles to go before you’ll reach even the least slackjawed counties here in Colorado. We’ve got you out-slackjawed by fucking leagues. (See above.)

Invaluable Try-Works commenter Sybil checks in with the low-down from Ward Churchill’s recent talk in Oakland, here and here.

My favorite line:

Finally, he told a kid that if Cheney had controlled the Sept 11 flights, it would be irrelevant.

Because here at the Try-Works, we’re all about tradition. Have a wonderful turkey day. I’ll be under a table somewhere with a bottle of bourbon — free subscription to the Try-Works if you can guess which brand — and an eight-ball, whiling away the hours with a jagged coathanger and a ball-peen hammer.

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin’ lawmen,
feelin’ their notches.

For decent church-goin’ women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for “Kill a Queer for
Christ” stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody’s allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories– all right let’s see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

Or, even better:

Update: From Shubel Morgan.

Update II: And remember to remind the Iraqi people to be thankful.

Update III: From Lenin’s Tomb.

But, you should read The Shock Doctrine. I finally turned the last page not too long ago, and it never let up. The best book about neoliberalism yet, and by the time I got to the chapter about Sri Lanka and tsunami reconstruction, I was banging my head on the floor, black blood running from my eyes.

If you ain’t sold, check out this interview with Naomi Klein (conducted by John Cusack, of all people), here.

Also, Alexander Cockburn has a rather typical critique of The Shock Doctrine, here. He seems primarily to be taking Ms. Klein to task for not including every instance of capitalist exploitation and unethical business practice known to man. I heard the same theme from Ed Champion, in a really disappointing interview, here. I like Mr. Champion’s interviews a lot, but this one was thoroughly petulant, with the questions running to the borderline inane. (Can you really tie a spike in suicide rates among financial workers to economic crashes? Huh? Really? Couldn’t there have been other factors? Mightn’t their wives have left them? Their dogs died? Were they bottle-fed? And what about IBM? They did bad things too, and that was before Milton Friedman gained prominence? Doesn’t that prove that businesses are, like, inherently evil?)

Anyway, the fact that the book’s being nit-picked to death seems a good indication of its power. After all, trolling for errata is the surest indicator of a lack of substantive response to an argument.

Sound familiar?

One thing I’m finding interesting is the furiously indignant response to Ms. Klein’s work by so many. Her specific analysis is stunning, but, overall, the book is not arguing any radical solutions, not even close. Her argument, as I understand it, is for a Keynesian mixed economy. She doesn’t argue against markets, she just considers those who believe in a purely utopian free market as insane as those who believe in a purely utopian Marxist society.

And for this she’s receiving the kind of venom usually reserved for folks like Noam Chomsky and old whatsisname. That one can be painted as a bomb-throwing anarchist for proposing the private and public sectors ought not be inseparable is only evidence of how violently far to the right we’ve swung in this country.

Anyway, next on my list for current events is Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater, which seems a natural corollary. But I’m also reading Jack London’s The Road, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Harry Crews’ The Mulching of America (still), and a book on cowboy gear called $10 Horse, $40 Saddle, so it may be a few days.

I’m realizing you can split Harry Crews books into two categories: the ones that include a beautiful, buxom young lady who also happens to be a Karate expert, and the ones that don’t.  My favorites are definitely falling in the latter category.  I thoroughly enjoyed Car, the tale of a man who tries to eat an entire automobile (you just have to love it enough to take the pounding and suppress the gag reflex), which has a beautiful hooker for a love interest, but she’s got no karate experience.  Likewise, The Hawk is Dying has a sharp-witted college student who smells vaguely of urine for a love interest, and it’s my favorite so far.  Conversely, I’m having a hell of a time getting through The Mulching of America, and it includes, of course, a beautiful female Karate expert.  As does Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, which is paling rapidly as the weeks go by.

I remember reading somewhere (Harold Bloom?) that sexual jealousy is the ideal topic for the novel, in that to be sexually jealous is to implicitly imagine oneself in a life that is not one’s own; that sexual jealousy is the desire to live more than life, as it were, and that the great human tragedy is that we’re all trapped only in the one life we live.

I probably butchered that, but it’s always stuck with me, and I think it’s the reason I’m having a harder time with Harry Crews’ novels which foreground gorgeous Karate-kicking love interests.  It’s pretty obvious that’s Mr. Crews’ bag: beautiful women who can kick the shit out of most men.  And, as such, it seems like the novels that feature said women don’t have enough at stake.  They’re missing that fundamental desperation necessary to the novels I like.  It doesn’t mean they’re bad.  They’re often quite readable, and very funny.  But the novels penned by Mr. Crews which I like best ain’t about people who get to bag their dream fuck.

For some reason, I just read Salman Rushdie’s Fury, and spotted the same problem.  Sexual tension, sexual jealousy needn’t be foremost in a novel for it to resonate with me, but absolute sexual gratification flattens characters.  As Willie Nelson put it, “ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play.”

Jeffrey St. Clair has a really nice piece on Norman Mailer’s generosity (not something, I’m gathering, usually associated with Mr. Mailer) over at Counterpunch.  I’ve read very little by Mr. Mailer, but I was just given a copy of Miami and the Siege of Chicago which is on my short list.

Hey, we’re all prepping to Re-create 68 in our own way.

I met Mailer for the first time in 1978 in Indianapolis, where he was giving a reading before a thin and bland crowd. Somehow Mailer had offended his host, who had abandoned him after the event. I offered to take him to dinner (secretly hoping he would pay, which, of course, he did) and drive him to the airport for a late flight to Chicago. I was twenty then, and almost certainly not the type of company he may have been longing for that evening. If so, he didn’t let on. He was generous to young writers–generous to a fault, which is how he landed in so much trouble with Jack Henry Abbott.

Somehow we ended up in that architectural artifact of the Seventies, a fern bar. There was so much foliage creeping through the place that it could have been a scene from The Naked and the Dead. I was braced for Mailer to begin draining a vast amount of alcohol, fretted over whether I could keep up and still get him to the airport. Instead, he ordered a nice bottle of French wine, a vintage he said Jimmy Baldwin had recently recommended to him-a minor miracle that such a wine was available in an Indianapolis fern bar. We eased into a relaxed conversation about music, movies and Muhammad Ali, who I had just met a few days earlier in an elevator at the Hyatt-Regency.

At some point, I told Mailer that I was working feverishly on a novel. “Imagine An American Dream, set in a cow town like Indianapolis,” I said.

He laughed loudly.

“Novel?” he said. “Hell, don’t you know the novel is dead? Give it up, Jeffrey. Go write a screenplay or a book about The Clash. Just get out there and mix it up.”

This advice was coming from a man who hadn’t written a novel in ten years. Of course, in the next decade he would publish three big ones, The Executioner’s Song, Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost.

I met Mailer again six months later at Blues Alley, a jazz club in Washington, D.C., where I was bussing tables trying to pay my way through college. Mailer was there to hear the great saxophone player Dexter Gordon, who was then making a radiant American comeback after a decade of exile in Paris. Although Mailer wasn’t sitting at my table, he recognized me, called me over between sets and introduced me to the most beautiful woman in a room of beautiful women. I don’t remember her name, but she looked a lot like the woman who would soon become his wife, Norris Church.

“How’s that novel coming, Jeffrey?” Mailer inquired to my astonishment.

“But … ” I began, trying to explain that I had followed his advice and incinerated 500 pages of my juvenile novel about sex, death and black magic (none of which I knew much about at the time) in the crossroads of America.

“Oh, forget that all that crap. Just write, man. And do it every fucking day.”

The rest.

• “In less than two years, the lease on the largest and most important US military base in Latin America will run out. The base is in Manta, Ecuador, and Rafael Correa, the country’s leftist president, has pronounced that he will renew the lease ‘on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami–an Ecuadorean base. If there is no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.’”
• Letters to the president from his ardent admirer Belacqua Jones.
• “I lived under tyranny and lived under his freedom. I don’t see any difference. I think Bush’s freedom and Saddam’s are alike. We were harassed under Saddam as students, and today’s students are harassed under the new ‘free’ rule.”
• The Rocky has a new look!  Content still sucks!
• Christopher Hitchens groped by publisher.  Not metaphorically.
• Doesn’t anybody edit Clint Talbott?  I mean, “purity’s being vanquished by villainy”?   Christ, somebody beat the baroque out of him.  That’s the sort of purple prose that could get one drummed out of an eighth grade creative writing workshop.  (I get his underlying point, though.  I mean, millionaire Boulderites conspire to steal land from another pair of millionaires, and I should care?  You could carpet bomb the whole yuppie paradise, and I doubt I’d shed a tear.)
• “Take the entire text of the Bible and copy it into Microsoft Word. Then do a Find/Replace command where you find all instances of the word “God” and replace them with something like “Phil”. Now give that text to any four-year-old and ask them who the bad guy is.”