Aaron Weber

Morally Reprehensible Human Beings

So, I more or less lost a friend earlier this week when I went from disagreeing with her politics to attacking her personally for holding particular beliefs. It wasn’t a polite thing to do, but I sort of got away from myself, and I just kept punching.
It resonates with the recent discussion about whether Libertarian and Republican politics (for the most part) are just variations on the theme of greedy-greedy-greedy. (Not to say that Democratic politics aren’t frequently the same thing, mind you– lobbies have their own greed, even the lobbies of the left.)

More on hypocrisy, and tending toward lies, discussed by Brad DeLong. Brings up for me the thought that the tax cut business is being pushed just like the war.

Compare: the war was pursued for less than honest and coherent reasons (WMDs being the most obvious fabrication), and it is not a glorious liberation (the looting and the unguarded nuclear waste has if anything made the Middle East more dangerous). So, too, nobody of any account (Mallard Fillmore? Rush Limbaugh?) believes the line that Bush is feeding us about the tax cut– even the conservative journalists say it’s an illogical, sop to the rich and that it’s the sort of thing which could wreck an economy. The Financial Times and the Economist are the sort of publications you’d expect to support the Party of Business. Alan Greenspan says it’s a bad idea. The party rank-and-file disagree with it but are afraid of the backlash from the Bush cronies– they won’t go on the record, because everyone who disagrees with Bush is punished, and punished harshly.

It’s not just a sop to the rich, it’s not just a stupid mistake. It’s a deliberate plan to bankrupt the federal government and forcing it to eliminate its social programs.

And when it’s all over I guess I’ll just have to say I told you so, since I don’t know how to make it stop. Everybody knows the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor and the rich get rich, that’s how it goes, and everybody knows….

My fellow Americans

Man, they make me look bad. I’m a proud American, and I am ashamed of the things that other people do in the name of my country.

Also, note the way they used the word “[pansies]” in brackets instead of the actual gender slur. Nice choice– it conveys the meaning but not the actual word of offense.

Heart of Darkness

I’ve been listening to Sparklehorse and reading Tim O’Brien and Joseph Conrad, and let me tell you, it’s crushing. They’re all about the human capacity for evil, about the barely-contained darkness coiled up in your gut waiting to escape, the capacity of love to turn into anger and resentment and fear and violence. I spent a lot of time last night lying in bed staring at the ceiling and looking into the darkness in myself and just sinking.

Told you so

Now states are legalizing Sunday liquor sales to increase tax revenues. I’ve been in favor of this for ages– it’s a religious ban, so it should be revoked, it will increase tax revenues, and it’s a useless restriction on individual freedom to buy or sell whenever we damn well please.

Dig

I’m beginning to get a reputation among my friends as a crank and a writer of strongly-worded letters to the editor. For example, this letter to the Weekly Dig over its recent AIDS coverage:

I know you’re an alt-weekly, and I guess that means you have to publish
conspiracy theories and faddish pseudo-science. But do you have to go
and deny the link between HIV and AIDS, joining intellectual
heavyweights such as Thabo Mbeki and Spin magazine?

I won’t address the factual errors in your science coverage, which you can find
yourselves by consulting a basic textbook or a high-school Biology
teacher. However, if you do plan on continuing to ignore basic science, I suggest you join Bush and the Kansas educational board and start rejecting evolution and the round earth. I look forward to your coverage of alien abductions, crop circles, the danger of the UN World Government, and the global financial conspiracy run by Jews and Masons. I expected rational debate from an independent voice, not this raving conspiracy nonsense.

Mean Reviews

I like the New Yorker more and more these days, even as I have grown to notice how predictable portions of it are. For example, I laughed out loud several times reading Adam Gopnik’s review of The Matrix: Reloaded. As might be expected, he begins with a pretty comprehensive overview of the impact that the first Matrix movie had on contemporary academic philosophy, and notes that the line “welcome to the desert of the real” comes from Baudrillard. Later, he mentions both novelist Phillip K. Dick and postmodern philosopher Slavoj Zizek in the same sentence.

Once his highbrow credentials are established, he gets to the review:

It would have been nice if some of that complexity, or any complexity, had made its way into the sequel. But — to get to the bad news — “Matrix Reloaded” is, unlike the first film, a conventional comic-book movie, in places a campy conventional comic-book movie, and in places a ludicrously campy conventional comic-book movie. It feels not so much like “Matrix II” as like “Matrix XIV” — a franchise film made after a decade of increasing grosses and thinning material.

As must happen at least once in every issue, there is the mockery of right-wing populism intruding into popular entertainment:

Lambert Wilson appears as a sort of digital Dominique de Villepin — even virtual Frenchmen are now amoral, the mark of Cain imprinted on their foreheads, so to speak, like a spot of chocolate mousse.

And sure enough, he does the gay-icon check:

Then, there are his twin dreadlocked henchmen, dressed entirely in white, who have all the smirking conviction of Siegfried and Roy.

Last, right before he says the redeeming values of the first movie are not besmirched by the banality of the second, he adds the requisite jab at Dubya and Fox News:

… one can even start to wonder whether the language we hear constantly on television and talk radio (“the war on terror,” “homeland security,” etc.) is a sort of vat-English — a language from which all earthly reference has been bled away.This isn’t to say that any of us yet exist within an entirely fictive universe created by the forces of evil for the purpose of deluding a benumbed population — not unless you work for Fox News, anyway.

I agree with everything he has to say, but then again, he doesn’t say much: The Matrix was all about smoking dope and going to Philosophy 101, our president is a moron, and sequels are never as good as the originals. I already knew that, though. As more succinct viewers put it, “Matrix: Reloaded blows donkeys.”

The Magic Words

I am not what you would normally call a sports fan. In fact, last night’s Sox/Rangers game was the first time I’d ever been to a professional sports game of any sort. Not only that, but I live near Fenway and I live with the park’s impact on the neighborhood: trash, traffic, parking lots and bars and schlockerias that cater only to the summer crowds. And don’t get me started about not being able to walk down Yawkey Way on game days.

But inside the park, I understood it. The buzz of thirty thousand people in overpriced uncomfortable seats on an unseasonably chilly night to witness a dream. Yes, I know it’s the team that won, not me. But I don’t care.

But there really is some sort of magic to it. I felt all the excitement of the child who gets to come out onto the green and say “Play Ball” after the anthem and before the first pitch. Well, almost: the kid they had last night stood up at the mic, then froze and fainted, and his parents carried him away.

So, tonight, I can hear the music play, an announcer mumble Nomar or Manny, and the crowd cheering faintly, and I know why, and that makes me incredibly happy.

Author: Aaron Weber