The Try-Works

I apologize for my absence of late. Been busy with ancillary projects. Posting shall pick up, and in the meantime, the finest video ever posted to the web, and I mean ever, from the titans at RAIMD.

Well done, gentlefolk. This is the kind of shit that gets me up in the morning.

(Spotted here.)

Than a country and western song about a rodeo clown done in by faithless love.  A song that includes lines like, “grease paint and tears don’t mix.”

If you don’t like Guy Clark, you can kiss my ass.

If you’re in Atlanta this weekend, I recommend:

Friday May 23rd (7pm) - West End Community Masjid, forum on the importance of Malcolm’s (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) journey with Islam to his work and legacy. Featuring a panel discussion and poets,  hosted by Kalonji Changa.

*FREE EVENT

West End Islamic Community Center
1193 Lucille St.
Atlanta, GA
Corner of Lucille & Holderness

Saturday 24th - Festival Day @ Malcolm X Park
(West End Park)!

An essay from Tim Wise on Hillary Clinton, sexism, and her playing to racists.  A staple of white feminism since white feminism began, after all.

Mr. Wise closes the piece with some of the clearest thinking I’ve seen yet on the subject.

Perhaps the defeat of Hillary Clinton will expose for all the underlying racial supremacy at the heart of much white feminist analysis. Perhaps it will allow the development of a more complete and thorough analysis of patriarchy and the way it interrelates with white supremacy to divide and conquer groups that often have common interests. Maybe it will force white women like Hillary Clinton to confront their privileged mindset, their sense of entitlement (which flows uninterrupted and almost effortlessly from the fount of whiteness to which white women have had access, in spite of patriarchy). Or then again, maybe it will just lead white women to become pissed at black folks, who they’ll be encouraged to view as having “stolen” the Presidency from them.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a group of white liberals had missed the point, after all.

Keep reading.

No, I suppose it wouldn’t, would it?

For your midweek listening pleasure, a couple of hip-hop tunes featuring your favorite outlaw scholar.

• Break the Trance
• Why We Hot

You can find more info about the music here.

Italy has recognized the indigenous Hawaiian Kingdom Government.  From the Free Hawai`I blog.

A letter addressed to Hawai`i Kingdom Government and stamped “Italian Consulate” reads -

“This office on behalf of the Italian Government in Hawai`i acknowledges that there was a prior treaty that was not between the United States nor the State of Hawai`i but between the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Italian government.

“We acknowledge and recognize that the Hawaiian Kingdom exists and is operating at 210 `Iolani Avenue in Honolulu, Hawai`i 96783.

We appreciate your visits to our office and appreciate the relationship that Italy has with the Hawaiian Kingdom and its currently operating government.”

The mighty AngryIndian, who you must read, daily and with great attention, if you ain’t doing so already, takes on Barack Obama.

“[W]ith all the grace of a three-legged elephant during a GOP minstrel show,” indeed.  That’s the best line about Obama yet.

Barack Obama despite vociferous arguments to the contrary is a man of diminishing dimensions.  Whatever “hope and promise” his presidential campaign offered in its early days have long since faded into the predictable political abyss of enthusiastic double-talk, keyword-specific speeches and right-wing media pundit arse-kissing.  Mr. Obama, while highly guilty on all these counts is not out of pocket per se for being a politician and acting as one.  He is instead blameworthy for committing the greatest sin known to U.S. political principles as it applies to African representatives; he is allowing the Europocentric power structure to tear him, his wife and the hard-earned self respect of his people to shreds without a single word of significant protest in favour of American Empire.

In a world where lynching nooses are again on display in the 21st century and young, innocent and unarmed African men can be shot to death by municipal police troops to public and political approval, Mr. Obama is a mainstream closeted White racist imperialist’s dream come true.[i]  He visibly absolves White racist terror publicly, gleefully and unashamedly with a sheepishly becoming “Vote for Me” smile.  Shuffling dutifully with all the grace of a three-legged elephant during a GOP minstrel show, America’s newest “Favourite Negro” Barack Obama is letting “America” and the global community know in no uncertain terms that he accepts their racism, their denials of their xenophobia and that he is more than willing to keep this White supremacist gravy train rolling at home and abroad.

To deny this reality is foolish.  And it is even more imprudent and more to the point embarrassing when the American African intelligentsia commissars not only give him their earnest endorsements but defend him from those within the African community that have the temerity to question his lack of dignity and personal and political integrity in the face of overwhelming racist and anti-Islamic attacks.  It is proper that when forced by circumstance to confront such a situation, the African must look towards him and herself for clarification.  I can find no better an analytical example than the Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon when he observed:

“In every country of the world there are climbers, “The ones who forget who they are,” and in contrast to them, “the ones who remember where they came from.”[ii]

The pragmatism of this statement is beyond reproach and it unfailingly deconstructs the storm of Euro-American angst surrounding the Obama presidential campaign and what it means for the United States and the world.  As this writer has mentioned previously in other articles on the subject, Barack Obama, the half-White and therefore half-human politico wunderkind deeply critical of his pro-African religious mentor and brave hard-hitting apologist for White racism, represents a Get-out-of-Jail-Free playing card for those within the White power structure willing to vote for him.  His candidacy is based entirely on the explicitly revisionist premise that by “allowing” him to get as far as he has in the race for the democratic party nomination, the nagging questions of xenophobia, White privilege and pro-Europocentric institutional bias have been effectively and honourably dealt with.  In reality, the Obama rhetoric of “hope” and “change” only have relevance to Euro-American desires for alteration provided that White privilege and socio-political power remain concentrated within their traditional hierarchal configurations.  And to date, he has not given any of us soberly conscious of who controls what, how and why any logical reason to be convinced otherwise that his presidency would be one of White power with a Brown face.

He is without debate the “Dream Candidate” that promises change without actually disturbing the European socio-political or economic status quo.  His Black face with a White mask tap dance is designed to appeal emotively to slave and master alike, little more.  This is possible because both are so thoroughly psychologically steeped within the historical American paradigms of acceptable class boundaries, race and the dignified acceptance of racialised power disparities that the very suggestion that a “Black” man could actually become the head-of-state of Pax Americana supposedly nullifies the historical and political realities of what makes the United States an empire in the first place.

It is something of an intellectual puzzlement to this writer that after five centuries of unceasing Aboriginal genocide and five recent years of unending and merciless violence against an innocent people already tenaciously clinging to existence because of a series of lies emanating from the Bush White House that the U.S. voting public is still willing to “stay the course.”  And further, I find it an astoundingly hypocritical that a nation that shrieks peace while waging eternal war can still argue its goldenness while mothers, children, the crippled and the intrepid journalists documenting the carnage continue to litter the charnel grounds of the American consciousness.  The untested perception that Mr. Obama will alter this vicious current of American imperialism after numerous media appearances and press statements affirming his determination to maintain and extend American economic and military muscle is childish as best.  At its worst, it is practical confirmation of the existential fallacies that serve to illustrate the moral insincerities of American democracy, foreign policy and reactionary military engagement.

To say that I find Barack Obama troubling is to minimise the dangers I perceive in making a rush to find positivism within a decidedly restricted field of choice.  Ralph Nader aside, it must be said that his call for the broadening of the American political landscape is more than laudable, it is vitally necessary if a real democracy is ever to emerge in the United States.  The fact that large throngs of the U.S. public have historically never had direct access to the political process makes this abundantly clear as does the highly visible indications that a great deal of propagandistic effort and indoctrination goes into “proving” that these privileges do indeed exist.  Mr. Barack Obama, for all his promising oratory of progressive Americanism, is the new poster-boy for why America “works.”  He has officially added his voice to the fib that all Americans matter when one glance at the U.S. without rose coloured glasses shows a very different story.  So to trust him on the basis of his skin tone alone under the assumption that he will enact a nicer, more democratic imperialism at home and abroad is dim-witted political thinking of the highest order.  Especially since his reputation on these issues can only be termed as pathetically compliant to Europocentric capitalism in its most aggressive and virulent form.  He differs little from his other presidential hopeful predecessors in that he talks one game and plays yet another in full view of a hopelessly gullible American public eager for some sort of change that will put more hard currency in their pockets, lower fuel and food prices and allow working people to purchase more material goods that offer an illusory upwardly mobile social advantage.

Obama and his team of sincere kingmakers are more than happy to put on a stern yet objective demeanour when discussing bombing Iran back into U.S. corporate control or how proud he is to give the Apartheid State of Israel more money, more weapons and more moral support in their zeal to effectively eliminate the existence of the Palestinian people from their ancestral territories.[iii]  How this position can be reconciled with “progressivism” escapes me.  He’s only willing to negotiate with Arabs suffering from western Orientalism provided they are willing to continue their function as defenceless walking targets of Arab genocide and following their inability to resist any longer, readily become captive consumer fodder for American manufactured commodities.  Respect for their lives and lands are beside the point.  Empires have never entertained provisions for commonsensical and justifiable resistance to their rule.  Only contempt, vilification and death are accorded to those who dare speak of freedom be they intellectuals, partisans or parents simply and heroically struggling to keep their children alive in times of quarrel.

The rest.

For some reason, KHOW shock-jock Peter Boyles has been conducting a two week long love affair with Re-create 68’s Glenn Spagnuolo.  Following are the .mp3s I could easily identify as including Mr. Spagnuolo.  There are at least two more that I know of.  This is good stuff, and it’s easy to see why a right-winger with a libertarian streak like Mr. Boyles (as opposed to the right-wingers in the local media who typically display a prominent Stalinist streak) would appreciate what Re-create 68’s trying to do.

That ain’t an endorsement of Peter Boyles, he’s still a bigot and a fucking pinhead.  But, y’know, he’s preferable to Caplis and Silverman in the way that the stench of horseshit is considerably preferable to the stench of pigshit.

• May 05
• May O6
• May 07
• May 13
• May 14

(This is a guest editorial from Grad Student.)

As part of my research for my MA thesis, I was watching a documentary on Indian land tenure the other night. I’m not recommending the film to anyone because it’s too long by half and for the most part deadly dull. Still, there came a point at which I was jarred out of my detail-induced torpor by a completely unexpected scene. There, on the screen, was Arizona Senator/Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain holding forth on how “our long history of exploit[ing] Native Americans [began] with the Pilgrims providing a local tribe with some blankets infested with smallpox”!

I replayed the senator’s remarks three times, just to be sure I’d heard him right.

It occurred to me, of course, that among the other accusations recently sustained by an investigating committee at the University of Colorado against Professor Ward Churchill is that he’d “fabricated an historical incident” by describing very much the same Pilgrims/blankets/smallpox scenario as McCain. The professor’s rebuttal, as I recall, was—at least in part—that, he’d been hearing variations of the story from the time he was a grade-schooler, therefore could not have been its inventor, and in any case saw it as falling within the realm of commonly-accepted historical fact.

For their part, the committee members professed never to have heard any such story—making them, as I heard Professor Churchill put it in a subsequent radio interview, “perhaps the only five people in all of North America who haven’t”—implying that he’d made that up as well. Their report, including a finding to that effect, was submitted in May 2006, at roughly the same moment that Senator McCain was making the statement quoted above.

Now, either McCain had been reading Ward Churchill’s material, and had been sufficiently influenced by it that he was simply repeating information he’d encountered therein, or he’d heard the same stories as Churchill and, like the professor, believed them to be a recounting of historical fact. Either way, if I were Ward Churchill, I’d be calling John McCain as a witness during my upcoming lawsuit against the university.

Things shall resume.  Sometime.

(Note: This is a guest editorial by Ward Churchill.)

I’m still chuckling over the bang-up job Law Professor did yesterday in ripping the quivering innards out of Jim Paine’s idiotic contention that the Right’s favorite neonazi inebriate, Joe McCarthy, had nothing to do with blacklisting.

For me, though, the real howler in the latest batch of Painian drivel came amidst his gleeful commentary on the “unexpected pleasure” he experienced upon “learning that Hamilton College stopped payment on Churchill’s speaking fee check” back in the spring of 2005.

The source of this interesting factoid? An “exercise in mythology”—Paine’s evaluation—I published in Social Text a few months back. Well, ho-ho-ho.

We can afford to be charitable with this one, boys and girls. Let’s start by setting aside the fact that most English-speaking folks tend to refer to a “speaking fee check” as an “honorarium” (you can look it up, Bubba). The boy may well have been trying, as would even the most half-assed of editorial writers, to calibrate his prose to degree of literacy manifest in his readership.

And, since it’s obvious that neither Fred or Noj had the least idea what Paine was saying, even when he geared things down to the level of “see Jane run,” it seems appropriate that cut the guy some slack on this score.

Similarly, we shouldn’t poke fun at the glaring illogic of Paine’s managing—in the same sentence—to both declare my article to be an “exercise in mythology” and to gloat over what he obviously takes to be certain of the facts recited therein (hint: “factual” is an antonym of “mythic,” Bubba; do look it up).

After all, a pronounced inability to follow a coherent train of thought has been a hallmark of the “analyses” delivered on Pirate Ballerina since day one, and, given the intellectual impairments of it’s audience, the consistently with which it has offered self-contradictory argumentation has proven to be one of the blog’s most attractive features for readers like PhD Anthro and, er, Mickey Mouse.

No! No, I say. A thousand times no!

We must refrain from indulging in cheap laughs, since, as I’m sure we can all agree, they’re far beneath the dignity of the mighty Try-Works. Besides, they’re entirely unnecessary in this instance.

What’s really funny—at least in my admittedly twisted estimation—is Paine’s open endorsement of what, under Colorado law, adds up to a criminal act on the part of Hamilton’s “liberal” president, Joan Hinde Stewart.

Ho-ho. Talk about a fella stomping on his own dick. So much for your effort to pose as a “law and order conservative,” eh, Bubba? At this point, you’re coming off a lot more like some sort of weird cross between Charlie Keating and Glenn Spagnolo in drag (i.e., Spagnolo stripped of both his moxie and his balls).

Ye gads, man, have you no shame?

It gets better. Since Ms. Stewart’s check-stopping gambit was flagrantly illegal, she—or, rather, Hamilton College—did end up paying me the full and duly-contract amount. It also had to pay my attorney. And it was stuck with the tab for all costs associated with the case, which, to be sure, included a stable of sleek—and very pricey—Manhattan mouthpieces retained to try and stave off the inevitable.

That was in the fall of 2005, Bubba, about six months after the low-rent maneuver rousing all those warm and tingly sensations in your grubby little loins. So stop yankin’ on that pitifully undernourished nub you call a “luv muscle” and listen up. Your miniature woody’s already wilted, and I promise that the tale I’m about to tell will not be told in a manner too turgid for your notoriously tasteless sensibilities.

Here goes (ho-ho).

By the time all was said and done, President Stewart—or “Phoney Joanie,” as she was called by those who knew her best—had taken to emitting eerie howls over her cellphone, the result, it’s said, of noticeably spastic bowels, caused in turn by an increasingly vast sense of despair and personal humiliation—dare I say “degradation and defilement”?—that seems to have grown ever deeper—maybe even worse and worse—as the weeks rolled by.

While the onset of Joanie’s malady generated much astonishment among those unversed in such things, it came as no great surpise to who bothered to examine her situation in a rational manner.

I mean, what other outcome might reasonable people have expected to obtain from the facts that she’d authorized the expenditure of roughly triple the dollar amount the college originally owed me, all to prevent my receiving a cent, only to find herself staring in the face of the ugly prospect that she could even wind up being cuffed and jailed like a two-dollar whore for her trouble?

Well, sure, judge, your honor, sir. You bet. I’ll be happy as a clam to press charges against President Stewart. You know me, judge. I’m up for doing whatever I can to preserve and protect the integrity of America’s academic institutions from morally corrupt sleaze-bags like her. Clearly, there’s not a moment to lose. The sooner this wretched woman is in a holding tank, the sooner we can all breath easier about the example being set for our kids. Where do I sign?

The Great Wheel of Karmic Justice having thus begun to turn in earnest, Joanie was reduced to a frantic spate of telephonic grovelings, imploring me to please, please, PLEASE accept her supplications—not to mention a nice fresh check, certified this time and couriered to my lawyer—rather than having her publicly flogged, shorn, and placed in stocks.

How mortifying do you reckon that must have been for someone who’d figured to establish herself as a Heroine of the Right by putting me quite firmly in my place? Ho-ho.

Worse still, at the point she was compelled to figuratively assume that posture of craven submission most commonly associated with baboons (you can look that one up, too), she’d been unable even to secure the usual quid pro quo agreement that the whole transaction would remain secret.

Really, Bubba, long before her prematurely palsied hand put pen to paper, Joanie knew she’d gone and fucked the monkey, big time. Her defeat was, well, total, her bright future as an omnipotent administrator resembling a turd swirling in a toilet bowl on full flush.

Immediately after the check was sent, Joanie’s deterioration became much more conspicuous, or so I’m told. Her slide into the abyss was grim, amazingly swift, and apparently marked by an unremitting series of barks, shrieks, and moans, eventually subsiding into mewls, then gurgles.

Yes, it’s a savage and brutal story, Bubba, even tragic by some estimations. But, what the hell? Veni vidi vici, right?

I hear that the crumbling husk of what used to be the president of Hamilton College has been subjected to an intensive therapy regime involving regular injections of Ibogaine and constant emersion in icy baths for more than two years now, but, alas, it’s been all to no avail.

The prognostic consensus is that Joanie’s condition has become quite intractable, impervious to treatment, as if she’d chosen to enter a realm of true mindlessness, most likely as a means of freeing herself an intolerably anguished situation from which she saw no other possible escape.

As I understand it—although I might be wrong—the last coherent words she’s known to have uttered were, “Oh my god, they’re laughing at me again… Won’t that man ever stop? Please, can’t you make him just go away?”

What she may have meant by that is of course unknown, but they say the look of horror on Joanie’s face when she said it was simply indescribable, and those unfortunate enough to have witnessed her ghastly visage have suffered recurrent nightmares about it ever since.

Well, maybe not…

But one thing is certain: Whatever Joanie’s actual circumstances, she’s got plenty of company. Several of her peers have tried to run similar scams on me over the past three years, and I’ve got framed color copies of their now-cashed checks hanging like so many coonskins on the wall of my office to prove it. Right beside hers. Ho-ho.

There’s a lesson to be learned from all this, Bubba, but I think I’ll just let you sit around and fester for a while, trying to figure it out. You will, eventually. You can trust me on that score. I know about such things, and I doubt you’re going to find it especially amusing.

Editor’s Note: In a remarkable validation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, it appears that Jim Paine may have at last and no doubt unwittingly stumbled into a useful ecological niche. Hence, we’d like to thank Mr. Paine for the fine job of proofing he did on this article—pro bono, we might add—and note that we have entered the appropriate corrections. This being so, we feel it only fair, since proofing is one of the functions often associated with copy-editing, we hereby reward him for his services by formally crediting him as copy editor. It also seems fair to inform him that, since questions concerning authorship of the article have been raised on PB, the copy editor will be held responsible for any and all plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, misrepresentation contained therein. The basis for assigning such responsibility to a copy editor is of course the bizarre precedent established in the recent Ward Churchill case at CU, heartily endorsed by, among others, Jim Paine.

(Note: This is a guest editorial by longtime Try-Works commenter, Law Professor.)

No matter how often he announces that Dr. Ward Churchill has become “irrelevant,” Pirate Ballerina’s Jim Paine simply can’t stop talking about the man (so, too, PB’s dwindling number of readers, but that’s another story).

Whatever the reason for Mr. Paine’s obsession—anal compulsion? a sexual fixation of some sort?—we should perhaps all be grateful for it, given the richly comical results it often generates.

Take, for example, Mr. Paine’s “analysis” today of an article by Churchill published in Social Text. Therein, Mr. Paine informs us, among other interesting things, that “Senator [Joseph] McCarthy compiled no blacklists.”

This, of course, is an assertion roughly on par with the Right’s current pretense that UC Berkeley Con Law Professor John Yoo’s grotesque distortions of the U.S. Constitution in the “torture memos” he wrote for the Bush regime has “nothing to do with his scholarly integrity.”

Or claiming that Hitler had nothing to do with the Holocaust simply because he never personally ordered it in writing.

In fairness, it may be conceded that likening Mr. Paine to a Holocaust denier is a sense unwarranted, at least in this instance. Far more likely, he simply—and all too typically—had no idea what he was talking about.

By his own admission, Mr. Paine has been prone to confusing the Senator McCarthy whose activities he purports to explain to us—JOE, a right-wing Wisconsin Republican who died in 1957—with Minnesota Senator EUGENE McCarthy, a Democrat and “leftist” antiwar candidate for President in 1968.

Some “expert,” this Jim Paine, similar in quality to those on Fox News who confused the “Mr. Douglas” debated by Abraham Lincoln—a white senator named Stephen—with the black abolitionist leader, FREDERICK Douglas, this week.

So much for the lofty “standards” of the Right.

Anyone wanting to assess McCarthy’s actual involvement in blacklisting might find it useful to begin with the chapter titled “The Academic Blacklist in Operation” in Ellen Schrecker’s fine study, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford University Press, 1986) pp. 265-82.

There are several more good references, for those wishing to delve deeper still. Just let me know. (Sorry, Mr. Paine, but you and yours will actually have to acquire—and read—the books. Mere googling will not suffice.)