The woman.

A news item caught our eye:

"U.S. soldiers fought with suspected insurgents using a building as a safe house in Ramadi on Tuesday, killing one Iraqi man and five females, ranging in age from an infant to teenagers, the U.S. military said.

...

"The battle in Ramadi began when a U.S. patrol discovered a roadside bomb in the Hamaniyah section of the city, and two suspected insurgents fled to a house, where they took up positions on the roof, the military said.

"As coalition forces removed the bomb, the militants fired on the soldiers, who fought back with machine guns and tanks, the statement said.

"Afterward, coalition forces searched the house and found the six bodies, ranging in age from an infant to teenagers, the military said, without providing ages. Another female was wounded but refused treatment, it said."


Ranging in age from an infant to teenagers, then, the five "females" -- "young girls" we suppose would be another way to say it -- and that man of uncertain age lay scattered about the house. And yet for some reason our mind lingers on the one who remained alive, the wounded woman who "refused treatment." We imagine her lying semi-dazed, perhaps half-propped up, or perhaps not, perhaps she is standing, only grazed by a bullet or perforated by flying glass. When she "refused treatment" as "it" said, "it" in this instance referring to the military, such a large thing to be compunded into a single "it," that pronoun ought to be capitalized, was she nobly waving aside offers of help, determined to show that her wounds were no large matter, to show that she understood that the fight for freedom must go on, and that more blood than hers had been, must and will again be shed? Or was she in shock, shaking her head silently, unable to speak, her mind still stuttering over the deaths that had minutes taken place in front of her? Did she cower fearfully, believing that the soldiers were only luring her to prison or some worse horror? Or did she weep with rage, and spit on the awkward young soldier who bent over her with his brow furrowed, chewing his lip nervously, uncomfortably aware that the woman's family, insurgent or no, terrorist or no, had been blown apart just now, just now? The infant too -- her own daughter? A sister, a niece? Or only a neighbor, stopping by or receiving her own visit from next door? The infant was no insurgent or terrorist, not yet, perhaps able to walk but certainly not able to fight, not yet, one day maybe, not yet.

But maybe all was just and these deaths were necessary. Possibly they were all guilty of something. The infant only by association, but still that seems to be enough these days. And maybe freedom and democracy will redeem all one day. But, if that is the case, how long will it be before that woman is able to add up and compare the worth of death and life, understand the arithmetic written out in fire, blood and metal all around her? Can she read? How much of the world has she had time or education to comprehend, up until now? Perhaps she understood nothing, only knew that one day she woke up to find that a great target had been painted on the land, and that bullets were raining down on it for reasons of which she knew nothing, and that her family and friends had transformed, somehow, to criminals in the eyes of some great Other, that It we mentioned, criminals who whatever their crimes had been adjudged worthy only of death, and she with them.

How severe were the wounds for which she refused treatment? Is she alive now? Perhaps she should have accepted the help, if only to try her hardest to live long enough, perhaps, to understand.

Jesus, Lord of War.

From the Raw Story:

"DENVER — In a town in scenic southwestern Colorado, homeowners are battling over whether a Christmas wreath that includes a peace sign is an anti-Iraq war protest or a promotion of Satan...

"Kearns... said he was concerned about the pagan symbolism of the peace sign. 'It’s also an anti-Christ sign. That’s how it started,' he told the Durango Herald."

We assume this explains Satan's popular designation as the Prince of Peace.

Glamour.

This item, posted by Mr. Oliver Willis, truly gladdened our hearts.

Mr. Cheney, quite the pin-up in his lily-white Stetson, can grace your wall for a mere twenty-five dollars.

"Keep track of important dates with the Official 2007 RNC Calendar filled with full-color photographs of President Bush, the First Lady, Vice President Cheney and Lynn Cheney. Each month features fascinating, little-known, GOP Presidential "firsts" with which you can stump your friends and family. This must-have wall calendar is 11" x 17" fully displayed. Makes a great stocking stuffer. Order today! Quantity is limited."

(For a moment a vision popped into our heads of Lynne Cheney wearing short-shorts and cowboy boots, sponging soap across a sports car, her head turned provocatively toward the camera. The moment we had this vision we knew that we must share it with you, our Readers.)

We ourselves do not particularly endorse any political party -- at least until one of them agrees to adopt the Pessimist Agenda. (Before you say anything: no, fearmongering is not the same.) The GOP seems to have more of a penchant for idol-worship these days -- let us not forget the Roman glories of the Reagan funeral -- but is anything more ridiculous on either side than political hero-worship?

Politicans, for most of us, remain a despised breed of hypocrites whom it is our business as Americans to distrust, mock, and degrade. This is as it should be. We have nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing otherwise. The candidate honest enough to acknowledge this, and to present him or herself an as intelligent lesser evil than as a glittering celebrity of virtue, has the best chance of scoring our vote.

Iraq: meet the new phase.

The situation in Iraq has apparently entered a "new phase."

"Addressing the upcoming meetings with al-Maliki, Hadley said, 'We're clearly in a new phase characterized by an increase in sectarian violence that requires us to adapt to that new phase.'"

We're disturbed to hear that Iraq is becoming a trouble spot. As pessimists, we predicted this, but no one likes to be right all the time.

"The adviser rejected suggestions that Iraq had already spiraled into a civil war and said it was unlikely Bush would address with the Iraqi leader the issue of any U.S. troop withdrawals. 'We're not at the point where the president is going to be in a position to lay out a comprehensive plan,' Hadley said."

Strangely familiar information. Question: if the "new phase" happens also to be marked by mismanagement, heedless violence, and near-anarchy, what would be the best way to distinguish it from the previous one?

What is a great movie? Part Three: Who would vote for evil?

(This post is third in a series of which the total number is as yet unknown. We warn you in advance that it will not be appreciated by all -- we certainly do not wish to offend anyone, but our mission is clear and we bravely march ahead. That is our way.)

Let us examine the final minutes of Dracula, A.D. 1972, directed, appropriately, in 1972, by Alan Gibson, for the esteemed Hammer Studios of the United Kingdom:



Quite clearly, this clip has something for everyone: drama, excitement, lust, even a backstory, as indicated by the flashback. Horror fans are treated to a suitably gory dispatch of our villain, admirers of 70s film scores will thrill to the "hip" score, and adolescent boys of all ages will be suitably excited by the enormous breasts that menace Dracula throughout. Most importantly, it features Good (impeccably represented by Peter Cushing as Van Helsing -- he and his astonishing cheekbones are so good that he even seeks to cover the breasts at the end, although not, admittedly, before copping a feel) versus Evil (that tower of darkness Christopher Lee, here in his eighth turn as the Count), and that eternal conflict seems to satisfy all of us -- yes?

This is undeniably one of the weaker entries in Hammer's series, certainly not a patch on their first Dracula (1958, Terence Fisher), and hardly helped by its attempts to update the series (that score, for instance). Yet it is good fun, and we here at DHAIP are not ashamed to say that we would choose it, or even just this clip, over Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings series any day.

Lord of the Rings parts one through three, which also feature Mr. Lee, although in a less rewarding part, deal very strongly with good versus evil. In fact it may be said that they deal with nothing else. Their message, roughly, is as follows: Evil is wrong, and must be resisted, no matter how difficult that proves to be. This message also lies at the heart of Dracula, A.D. 1972, which did not, by our estimates, require 300 million dollars and six months of CGI work to make. (Digitally speaking, those breasts were quite real.) Mr. Alan Gibson was able to pull off the feat for considerably less, and to our mind a great deal more efficiently and entertainingly. DA 1972 runs a mere 96 minutes, as compared to nine hours in the theater, and far, far more on the DVD, for LOTR.

Yet not only millions of viewers, but a surprising number of critics laud The Lord of the Rings as being great films. Even those critics who have lashed out at the Star Wars sequels have gone on to state, almost grudgingly, as if their hands have been forced by genius, that Mr. Jackson's achievement is one of lasting greatness. Certainly it is a technical marvel, but few are claiming immortality for Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow, both quite accomplished in that direction. That alone cannot suffice. The acting is generally quite competent, although the dialogue the actors have been given is no more poetic, or profound, than that employed in a fairly intelligent high-school Dungeons & Dragons session. The musical score has the subtlety of a falling walrus -- there is no subtlety on display anywhere.

Its strengths, it would seem, lie in the boldly primary. We have asked admirers of the films to explain their appeal, beyond that CGI. Their answer, inevitably, is the theme: Good and Evil. The two qualities are extremely easy to recognize, since evil is as ugly as sin itself and Good, for most of the films, wears a white cloak. The one chance at deceptiveness on this score, the treacherous Saruman the white, is played by the aforementioned Mr. Lee -- one might as well attach signs to his chest saying DO NOT TRUST and BADNESS WAITING TO HAPPEN. Dracula at least was sexy, in his bloodshot way. But who would be seduced into joining the side of the orcs, trolls, balrogs, and the now-octogenarian former vampire? Who would vote for evil?

Has film anything really to tell us on this subject? Are we prone to forget that evil exists, and thus need constant reminding? Are, then, the Lord of the Rings films, like the Star Wars series, with its light and dark sides of the Force, or the Dracula movies, or the Omen movies or the Raiders et al, et al, no more than fire-and-brimstone evangelism? Are the advancing armies of the Fellowship in the films' finale truly Christian Warriors? And if so, how many times can we relive Paradise Lost?

Mass culture, even the godless mass culture of the movie industry, is forever trapped in the Biblical: a peculiar blend of Christ symbolism, violence, and the body-worship of Riefenstahl. The Christ who exhorted "Resist not an evildoer" has transformed into the Muscular Jesus of George Lucas, Tolkien and Frank Miller -- be He small as a hobbit or as dark as Batman or as toned as Schwarzenegger, by His signs you shall know him, the Real Superman:





"And now tell me why you always use that expression 'good men'? Is that what you call everybody?"
"Yes, everybody," answered the prisoner. "There are no evil people on earth."
"That is news to me," answered Pilate with a laugh. "But perhaps I am too ignorant of life."

--The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

Kramer Unbound.

"The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than 'that which appears is good, that which is good appears.'"
--Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

There at times seems to be nothing more trite, and inherently unnewsworthy, than the public meltdown of a celebrity. "Celebrities are by definition false creations," we say to ourselves -- or at any rate we do, that's just the way we talk, pay it no mind -- "and are not worthy of our time and attention."

Wrong! (Although that incriminates us, we just realized. Trapped again.) The gaffes of the famous require our closest attention and study. In those moments in which Hollywoodland belches out the offensive, crass, vulgar, and even criminal, reality can be heard, only for a moment, before light music once again muffles all. A few short posts ago we excoriated those who judged O.J. Simpson via television. We do not retract that excoriation, only clarify our reasons: the problem was not that a nation got caught up in a probable dual murder committed by a former football star and B-list actor. The problem was that the same nation failed to be properly thankful to Mr. Simpson afterward. After the endless hours of entertainment and gleeful conversation those paltry murders brought about in the life of our nation, did we give a graceful round of applause, say "well done, sir"? Far from it. We turned on him. We did not respect him in the morning.

(To add insult to injury, Rupert Murdoch has apparently cancelled the "If I did it" special, after discovering that it was "tasteless." We were unaware Murdoch even had that gland.)

Now our beloved Cosmo Kramer, creator of Kramerica, East River swimming enthusiast, dilettante cockfighting impresario, and close friend of Slippery Pete the electrician, has unleashed a truly astonishing volley of racist badinage in a squabble with some hecklers, in one of those useless spaces known as "comedy clubs." An immensely important occurrence, visible here, if you wish:



"Richards retorted: 'Shut up! Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.'"

Remarkable to hear the fifty-seven year old Richards apparently yearning for the age of Strom Thurmond and Orval Faubus. (And incidentally take note of the fleeting applause.) This strange, apparently spontaneous leap in time, together with Mr. Richards' shrill vocal tone, immediately signals us something uncanny is about to happen -- he flies at once beyond "shock humor" to some bizarre semi-buried nostalgia for childhood racial comforts -- a classically Freudian response. "You're brave now, motherfuckers!" He is now living that dream out loud. Following some percussive uses of the term "nigger," he then attempts to play the Lenny Bruce card, murmuring, "those words, those words," but it sounds very much like a foggy but suddenly alarmed brain screaming out: "Quick! Invoke Lenny Bruce! Take your life preserver and swim, you imbecile!" Bruce, before heroin took over, never needed the life-preserver -- his wit was two steps ahead of every provocation. Mr. Richards' wit is here still puffing its way up the basement stairs.

"It shocks you ... to see what lays buried..." Very true, it does, but that's why we're here, yes?

The spectacle tells us, That which appears is good. Mel Gibson, internationally known film actor, director of the immensely popular "holy snuff film" (to borrow Eric Idle's phrase) The Passion of the Christ, and possessor of a famous roguish twinkle, had his amusing incident regarding the Jews and female police officers. Forever will now remain a Brechtian distance between our appreciation of his "work" and our understanding of his mind. Seinfeld, probably the most successful television show in history, an item in constant syndication, and, if we may say so, a genuinely funny American sitcom, will keep Michael Richards alive for us forever, along with his moment of neanderthal arrogance. (In each case, observe the quick, almost instinctive defenses offered by fellow-celebrities for their colleague's behavior. The spectacle imbues them with a dumb animal intuition: the disturbed surface must be smoothed, and quickly, or we'll all be visible.)

That which appears is good, and that which is good appears. These delectably horrible moments loosen the chains that bind us: the chains of "entertainment." Your sports legend is a murderer, your martyr-star is a Nazi, your wacky neighbor is a closet racist. The thug residing in the unconscious will always defeat the outer hero. The false facade is rotted from within by the true nature. And afterwards, when the television, the movie screen, the government, the corporations, and the technocracy all shine their blinding, halogen version of "reality" at us, suddenly we discover we can blink. The thugs made it possible. Thank them for their pains.

Pessimism is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Henry Kissinger announced yesterday that a military victory is impossible in Iraq.

We here at DHAIP don't like to boast, but apparently our understanding of foreign affairs is deeper and more insightful than that of ex-Secretary of State, Nobel Laureate, and popular war criminal Henry Kissinger. We've been saying this since late 2003. That means we have three years more insight than he does. We will now settle back and wait for book deals, comfortable livings on the lecture circuit, and spots on the Trilateral Commission.

We also politely await an apology from every hawk who has claimed, over the past four years (we include a year's worth of run-up to the invasion, since after all the war that was "a last resort" was clearly decided and ready to go for some time beforehand -- which rather begs the question of why its aftermath was not thought out just a little more thoroughly -- this is quite a long parenthetical -- where were we? Oh yes--) that those who questioned the wisdom of this war were being unpatriotic, foolish, cowardly, or "negative." The facts would seem to suggest that we were, instead, prudent and sensible, and that we might have been genuine patriots who truly had the best interests of our country at heart. (While several of our staffers are foreigners, we consider ourselves an essentially American institution. And anyway we make them all speak English. Less confusing.)

We understand that President Bush fired most of the pessimists on his staff prior to the invasion, once again invoking that slur "negative." Blatant discrimination. We say to Mr. Bush: congratulations. Look what it got you.

Best news of the week.

This, which we learned about here.

"Researchers in Timbuktu are fighting to preserve tens of thousands of ancient texts which they say prove Africa had a written history at least as old as the European Renaissance.

Private and public libraries in the fabled Saharan town in Mali have already collected 150,000 brittle manuscripts, some of them from the 13th century, and local historians believe many more lie buried under the sand."

We have long noted that Africa does not get much attention in this country -- our government, so vocally indignant about human rights in the Middle East, has maintained a quite curious silence about the daily Apocalypse faced by the various peoples of Africa. It is interesting to note that 450000 people have died in the genocide in Darfur since 2003, while the conflict that has rocked the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1994 is, if we are to believe Wikipedia and The Economist, " the bloodiest in history since World War II. " Interesting, but judging by the level of U.S. involvement, not particularly relevant. Twenty million Africans have died of AIDS. Ponder that number for a moment -- although when death tolls escalate into the millions it becomes hard to keep numbers in the head -- one's attention wanders. It is apparently much easier to deal with human suffering when it remains countable. Yet consider twenty million individuals, each with his or her own voice and, if you believe in such things, unique, irreplaceable soul. What did they live for? What did they think? What did they know? What conversations we might have had with the endless dead, if only we'd wanted to meet them, thought they were worthy of our friendship, our compassion--

Against tragedy of this scale the discovery of this lost literature may be tiny, microscopic. Yet we submit that anything that can be done to illuminate Africa's history, known to most Westerners only as a mess of colonial abuses underscored by vast swathes of unimaginable suffering, anything that can be done to get the world to look in Africa's direction, bears significance. Numbers do not seem to work. Art, literature, culture -- in these we can read humanity, as clearly as we can read pain in a pair of eyes.

In search of lost time.

We enjoyed this video very much, although in the end it told us somewhat less about the ideas of Marx and somewhat more about how wonderfully socially charged many of the classic cartoons actually were.

The more we ponder it, in fact, the more we have begun to wonder about how our world-view was shaped in our childhood years by popular culture. Many of us here at DHAIP long ago read C. S. Lewis's popular children's series about Narnia, recently converted into that weightiest of commodities, a big-budget movie franchise -- revisiting them in later fits of nostalgia, Mr. Lewis's distinctive blend of bluff pipe-smoking neo-Christianity and cozy British xenophobia suddenly became visible. The passages about Narnia's rival kingdom of Calormen and their God Tash, clear nods to the Middle East, are frankly rather racist. (To quote the ever-invaluable Wikipedia: "The Calormenes are described as dark-skinned people with a garlic-scented breath, who wear turbans and pointy slippers and are armed with scimitars.")

In retrospect, Mr. Lewis's allegories now seem only marginally more sophisticated than the brilliantly revolting Chick Comics, those tiny little pamphlets that can still be found for free across the United States -- often in Shoney's, or Denny's, or wherever large, wholesome Christian families congregate. Their peculiar, hate-filled screeds on Islam, Catholicism, and Freemasonry have enlivened many a Sunday buffet lunch.

Our memories, personal and collective, are battle-zones, containing the cheerful anarchism of the Warner Brothers cartoons, the sly cold war subversion of Boris and Natasha, the monarchic fantasist's pornography of Tolkien and his imitators, the strange New Age fascism of the early Star Wars movies, the imperialist pop of Spielberg. And yet these exist in our recollections as vividly or more than the houses we grew up in, the schools we attended, the friends we made, long ago -- and they have shaped us, adding a thousand tiny details to our imaginations that we can no longer distinguish from memory. Our consciousness is an agglomeration of images which we never saw, people we never knew, and places we never walked in.

"My mind goes on containing a great number of cities I have never seen and never will see, names that bear with them a figure or a fragment or glimmer of an imagined figure... the city high above the bay is also there still, with the square enclosing the well, but I can no longer call it by a name, nor remember how I could have ever given it a name which means something entirely different."
--Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

If he did it.

We won't deny that there was a point in time when we believed that O. J. Simpson was not terribly bright. He seemed to be behaving in odd ways, making unwise statements to the press, and generally compromising his enviable position as the most famous acquitted murderer in the world. And yet now our eyes have been opened, and we understand that Mr. Simpson may be the defining genius of our age.

"Revolting." "Exploitative." Irrelevant terms. From the "penny dreadful" to Jonbenet, murder has been a commodity for far too long to start raising moral objections at this point. It's 2006. We're past that, yes? Protestations of shame are as convincing as a fishnet windbreaker.

But Mr. Simpson has, if we read the signs, taken this a step further -- by commodifying a psychotic game. With films like the Saw franchise and the endless watered-down seventies gore-flick remakes burning up the box-office, the psychotic game possesses considerable brand recognition. By projecting his own sleazy-dopey persona onto the Hannibal Lecter template, hissing "If I did do it, [Clarice,] here's how it happened" through the glass (of the television screen), Mr. Simpson has developed a process for turning his own sickness into money -- a useful skill, and one we would do well to learn for ourselves. It far surpasses whatever it was that he did in football. Our memory has failed us on that and we care too little to look it up.

Since this is purportedly Mr. Simpson's warped form of confession, we will make a small confession of our own. Putting aside moral judgments for a moment, we will confess that after the "Trial of the Century" had ended, when coverage still dominated the news and obliterated any useful information from being learned by anyone on the North American continent, when book deals and sold-out magazine covers sprang up like a thousand flowers from the fertile field of Mr. Simpson's iniquity, we prayed and hoped, night and day, for just one thing: that the REAL killers would be discovered, and that Mr. Simpson's "not guilty" verdict would be vindicated before the eyes of all.

Why? Was it because we were rooting for this shameless murderer? No. It was because we were rooting against you -- by which we mean all those smug, condemning viewers and gossipers, so eager to condemn a stranger, so gleeful at his panicked attempt to flee, so outraged at his escape from "justice," so worked up about everything, all the same fools who even now are tapping their hypocritical disgust at this new offense into their keyboards, as if, for some reason, this ordinary proof of the power of money over the law were somehow different, more worthy of their contempt, than any other -- these people, so sure in themselves, so knowledgable about who really did what, jury or no jury, so altogether better than the crap they insisted on swallowing down, day after day, hour after hour, from the bowels of those worthless news channels. And many of these same fools later on bought into our tapeworm of a president, and his hype-bloated war on a tinpot nothing of a country, because they thought it made them "safer" -- and now all of us have so much Iraqi blood on our hands we have no way left to wipe clear our eyes.

We confess that we wanted every smirking pundit and snickering talk-show host and racist cop and incompetent attorney who ever made a buck off Mr. Simpson's "known" guilt to have to eat crow and grovel to apologize, before the world. We wanted a whole nation to feel ashamed, just for once, at having judged something someone which they, quite honestly, actually knew nothing, nothing at all about -- just what they thought they saw on the screen.

And now Mr. Simpson the probable murderer is still making his own buck on our perverse need to watch, and the WMDs which we all knew FOR CERTAIN were there have vanished as in a duststorm. Yet THEY are still there, those VIEWERS -- hollow eyes still searching their television screens, looking for someone safe to despise.

Al-Qaeda's two cents: another take.

Apparently we were not the only ones who found this slightly odd.

Not to say there's any necessary significance to all this, beyond the terrorists being, as ever, good conservatives. To suppose anything more would probably be rather paranoid. Still, as number three of Thomas Pynchon's Proverbs for Paranoids points out:

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

Wise words, no?

Grassroots psy-ops.

We found this idea rather appealing. Granted, it would be even nicer to see the Amerikansan public for once well-informed, but honestly, what are the odds of that?

It is in the nature of governments to trade in misinformation. In the intent to deceive, there's tragically little difference between the US government and, for example, Stalin -- now, hold on a moment -- before we hear outraged squeals, we are certainly not claiming that the United States is murdering millions of people (although that would be an amusing rumor to spread). We merely suggest that the US leadership would be quite happy having the sort of control over information that Stalin did. They don't, thank goodness, but we feel sure if they happened to find a genie in a lamp....

With that in mind, admit for a moment that it would be rather fun to play at what the CIA used to call "psy-ops" right back at the powers-that-be. How often does the average citizen get a chance to make his or her superiors tremble? Not nearly often enough, we feel. The historian Stanley Hoffman said in 1987 that we face "the reality of a capitalism and a technology that render the individual powerless, except if he is a thief and a terrorist." We're non-violent types ourselves; mightn't it be enough simply to be a skillful liar?

Of course, we have all become so accustomed to the masses of misinformation perpetrated via the Internet that Mr. Z.'s scheme would most likely fall flat. But organized misinformation, we suppose, might be able to, as Terry Southern's Guy Grand was fond of saying, "make it hot for them."

Halliburton is America.

"For almost a century, Halliburton has made an indelible impression on the world."
--from the Halliburton website

"The chief business of the American people is business."
--Calvin Coolidge, 1925

We here at DHAIP issue a demand: the Internet must be stopped! There is simply too much information and all of our eyes have become tired. Here we were, trying to compose a simple little post summarizing the history of Halliburton -- just our way of contributing to the great debate -- and we become swamped with more facts than we can possibly put together and still keep the post at a reasonable length. Brevity is the soul of blog.

We were inspired by the amusing novel Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and its references to Halliburton (or "Golly Burton" as the Absurdi prostitutes are wont to call out to passerby), its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), and the mysterious LOGCAP (Logistical Civilian Augmentation Program) contract, which as Mr. Shteyngart suggests, more or less means that the more Golly Burton spends -- even on useless services -- the more it makes. Which would of course help to explain Golly Burton's reticence on certain topics of late.

That reticence, as well as the Executive Branch's lack of concern on the topic, is not entirely new, of course. "Why this huge contract has not been and is not now being adequately audited is beyond me. The potential for waste and profiteering under such a contract is substantial." This statement was made not in 2006, but in 1966, by a young Republican Congressman from Illinois, named Donald Rumsfeld. Obviously we couldn't make up an irony that rich. We haven't the narrative gift. We understand that he later changed his opinions.

The shoe was on the other foot then, of course -- it was a Democratic President and the war was further east. Brown & Root (already owned by Golly since 1962, although Kellogg hadn't come around yet) was known to US soldiers in Vietnam as "Burn & Loot," for their habit of turning a blind eye to supply theft and sloppy bookkeeping. Thus their reputation for quality remains consistent.

Johnson, of course, was a fan too, having had his 1948 Senate run bankrolled by the pre-Golly Brown and Root, which was only fair, because he, as a Congressman in 1937, had in turn helped secure their first major federal contract, the building of the Mansfield Dam. And gosh darn it if he didn't get Brown & Root and Golly a whole lot more of them later on. It's one of the things that helps makes Texas great.

Golly's LOGCAP came around later, of course, in a rather interesting way. Apparently in 1992 the US Secretary of Defense (Richard Cheney) authorized the Pentagon to commission a report from Brown & Root detailing whether or not contractors might be useful to have around in any wars that might happen to come up. They determined that it would. Shortly thereafter they won their LOGCAP.

This caused a problem a few years later, when KBR, after some mysterious pricing issues involved with the Balkan War, lost the LOGCAP contract to Dyncorp, much to the consternation of their CEO (Richard Cheney). Fortunately, in 2001, with a new President (George W. Bush) and Vice President (Richard Cheney) installed, and clearer heads prevailing, they got it back.

All of this is old news, of course. (Some of our sources are visible through the links, and then of course there's our old friend Wikipedia.) But we at DHAIP have always done our best to promote an understanding of history, and we thought a quick romp down memory lane might be fun.

But what is history? (We're always asking things like that.) We follow link to link and find that in 1962, in addition to purchasing B&R, Golly also picked up Dresser Industies, where a young man named George H. W. Bush had worked for three years as an oilfield supply salesman, possibly because his father Prescott Bush was on the Board of Directors. After George left he founded Zapata Petroleum Corporation, who some seem to feel had connections to the Cuban Bay of Pigs Operation at the CIA, which George H. W. Bush later became the director of....

...and then somehow you've made it to the United Fruit Company and Cuba again and IG Farben and God knows what else....

And then bit by bit you realize that the history of the US, and of the World, was never about the presidents and the generals and the pictures in your textbooks -- you realize that it was always Burn & Loot and United Fruit, Golly and gosh, all our principles, all our beliefs, everything we are and have been and will become, it's all just BUSINESS.

How's that for pessimism?

"She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity that the circuit had... there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning..."
--The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Notes from MC.

Some time ago we presented a strange rewrite of the Bush-Limbaugh interview, prepared by a staffer (whom we shall call MC) who had been driven insane with loathing and disgust by the experience of reading the actual transcript. We are pleased to report that he has been released from the hospital following intensive chemical treatment. He has not yet regained the power of speech, but his tremors have largely ceased, and he follows simple commands well enough to handle copying, collating, and basic filing. Glad to have you back, MC!

With the crayons and paper he was provided in his cell he managed to jot down a few semi-coherent notes hinting at the cause of his breakdown. Though these are barely comprehensible, we have decided to print them more or less as is. They constitute a sort of parable, or a warning. The punctuation and spellings are his own:


i saw bright all at once inside the heart of the castle and i heard drum-drum-drum
and i sawtorchlight men with blood faces some prechristian facepaint and scent of anger thick as incense reekedout that fat
man in the radio booth the little man in germanic crisp suit
his little laugh heh-heh
little altar between them two faces

talkin bout war

ever feel that pissing paralysis that weepingcold seethe that tells you not only you wont
dodge the bullet but you couldnt move to miss the slap couldnt move if you choked if youwantd to even take a breath that
wasnt blown into you

out back of head tubes burble out scarlet smoke
what im trying to say here is
that reality doesnt go any further than that campfire ring that ring of stones they crammedinto the dirt

and those smooth masks almost kissing as they lean in

are all youll ever see itsonewayitsarailroaditsajavelinstuckdeep
try to talk back to them just try

your lips will be frozen,
frozen too


If his recovery continues we hope next week to advance him to data entry. Join us in wishing him well.

Harvey Waxman has a good day.

It's impossible not to detect his glee. We congratulate any public servant who is still able, after years of effort, to enjoy his job.

Al-Qaeda's two cents.

We confess that we wonder sometimes whether the Al-Qaeda management speaks regularly with Karl Rove. They certainly seem bent on saying everything the Republican Party would wish them to:

“The American people have put their feet on the right path by ... realizing their president’s betrayal in supporting Israel,” the terror leader said. “So they voted for something reasonable in the last elections."

A soundbite made for a GOP TV commercial, no? The subtext: America just backed down by voting Democratic.

Assuming they're clever enough (Al-Qaeda, we mean) to understand the PR implications of their own well-distributed tapes, then the rumors hold true: nine out of ten terrorists prefer Bush in office. Fear begets fear, violence begets violence -- and if you're all in the same business then it pays to scratch backs. It keeps business good all around.

Let us as a nation score our first major victory over Al-Qaida by declaring ourselves too intelligent for their childish manipulations. The briar-patch suits them too well.

Corporate culture.

Sometimes it seems that pessimism just isn't enough. Prepare to laugh until you weep or consider suicide, depending on how much you admire the pop group U2.

We confess amusement. Our thanks to our correspondent MD, for directing our attention to this matter.

What is a conspiracy theory?

...but what is a conspiracy theory? (We couldn't leave it alone.) For several years now the White House has been angrily warning us to ignore "conspiracy theories" about why we went to war in Iraq. In practice, then, their definition of the term "conspiracy theory" would include any theory that differs from the reasons they gave themselves: WMDs, 9/11, bringing democracy to the oppressed. Critics of the war have offered many probable reasons, ranging from the Freudian (Bush wanted to one-up Daddy) to the coldly practical (it's the oil, stupid -- which may not count as a conspiracy theory any more, since Bush himself has begun openly admitting it, in the already-discussed Rush Limbaugh interview and elsewhere).

Clearly our definition must be broader than that of the White House. Yet anyone who believes that the administration in any way presented deceptive information to the American people about the war, WMDs, the relation of Iraq to 9/11, etcetera, already believes in a "conspiracy" -- a group of people operating with secret motives, with the intent of committing a deception and/or a crime.

So what definition is accurate? Some conspiracies do exist, after all. We would not call someone who studies the crimes of Watergate, the 1919 World Series fix, or the Tuskegee Syphilis study a conspiracy theorist, only a historian -- but in those cases, of course, what was once theory has since been ratified into fact.

No, what we mean by a conspiracy theory is an implausible conspiracy theory, one we have no rational reason to believe, and which smacks of paranoia. (Granted, this too is subjective. Suppose you knew Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, and he told you, "I think the President of the United States ordered my psychiatrist's office to be burglarized." Talk about paranoia!) Consider the following quotation:

"...so much is known to the world, but what I am telling you is what I have myself discovered. [...] For years past I have been aware of some power behind the malefactor, some deep organizing power which forever stands in the way of the law, and throws it shield over the wrong-doer. Again and again in cases of the most varying sorts -- forgery cases, robberies, murders -- I have felt the presence of this force, and I have deduced its action in many [...] undiscovered crimes [...]. For years I have endeavored to break through the veil which shrouded it, and at last the time came when I seized my thread and followed it...."

Taken out of context, and assuming we do not know at once the source of the words above (some of course will), we see paranoia of the most crippling sort, an almost Poe-like obsession with some intangible evil. Until, naturally, we read the end of that last sentence:

"...until it led me, after a thousand cunning windings, to ex-Professor Moriarty, of mathematical fame."

And suddenly our perspective changes. We trust Sherlock Holmes, the complete rationalist. If he says some unknown evil is standing in the way of the law and protecting forgers and murderers and robbers, well then, would any care to disagree? If Sherlock Holmes said that alien spacecraft not only landed at Roswell but stole away Lindbergh's baby, we'd think twice before calling foul.

Every conspiracy theorist sees himself as Sherlock Holmes: a man who can look at a series of random, bewildering, seemingly unconnected facts and draw between them a pattern -- not just a Jungian soul-map but an existing, material object, a plot. But few are seen that way by others. We, on the left, respect those theorists who tell us, "Of course Bush lied about Iraq, of course Cheney did, they all did." We do not respect those theorists who say, "The media is controlled by leftists and does not tell us the whole truth." We respect those who ask, "Did the Bush Administration exploit, and benefit from, the events of 9/11?" (An obvious truth -- even some conservatives would agree with that.) We do not respect, and in fact scorn, those who ask, "Did the Bush Administration cause the events of 9/11?" -- perhaps less from disdain for their beliefs than fear of being identified with them. Yet if any one question begged the other it would seem to be these two... if only to be sure of that answer "no."

So we try to inhabit that gray area -- ever watchful for true abuses of power, and ever watchful that we avoid the label of "crackpot." But where is that division between the intelligent cynic and the flake? And where the division between the debunker and the bully-boy enforcer of the "official story"?

Brand-new Democratic Congress or no, we are living in a country in which a sizable proportion of the population and its leadership is willing to accept torture, curtailments of human rights (check any political discussion forum and you'll find at least one fool saying, "Maybe we have too much freedom."), unchecked federal wiretapping ("If you're not a terrorist, why worry?") and the merger of government and religion (watch Jesus Camp). America has a sickness, the sort of sickness that very easily worsens into fascism. And if we live in such a state, we must be prepared to ask extreme questions. And expect extreme, and alarming, answers.

(This is a long post, and there's more to say. So in addition to expecting extreme questions and answers, expect sequels.)

Disarming conspiracy theory.

Most of our readers -- hello all! -- are probably unaware of the rigorous, even savage review process each post must undergo before it appears here on the DHAIP site. Arguments last well into the small hours about the most seemingly mundane issues: use of italics, photo choices, the spelling of "tumescence," etc. We do this because we care. About you. The Reader. (Italics approved 4:30 PM Thursday; bold print rejected as "too pushy.")

Thus, in our careful checking process, we have decided to clarify a couple of phrases in our previous post, "A wish-list for a Democratic Congress." It occurred to our board that these phrases could have suggested an unintentionally sinister import, which in a political climate never far from hysteria might create entirely the wrong impression.

First: our mention of the 2.3 trillion dollars gone missing in the Pentagon, the loss of which, as we perhaps too-ominously pointed out, was announced on September 10, 2001. "Curiously," we said, "the item fell out of the news the very next day."

Our detached, dry tone may be open to misreading there. As it happened, the item did fall off the radar the next day, for obvious and tragic reasons, and as a result, it never got the attention (even outrage) it deserved. And trillions of dollars are, after all, trillions of dollars. These kind of numbers add up. And now Mr. Rumsfeld is leaving office with the matter, to our knowledge, never quite cleared up. Is this wise? Has someone checked his pockets? Or suppose it's all just sitting around in a box somewhere. That kind of money could greatly reduce the national deficit. Why not check the basement?

We never in any way meant to suggest that the item was deliberately announced at this highly convenient time. No one can see the future. But this administration has shown itself very canny at the the politics of distraction. If the government perhaps suspected that something might change the subject within the next few days -- you know, from the "noise" they talk about monitoring -- however vague their idea of what that might be, then surely that's worth knowing as well. Yes?

Second: our mention of the anthrax attacks, which we referred to as an "oddly-timed act of bioterrorism." Well, it was. The only known act of bioterrorism on American soil occurred a month after September 11, spread panic for a couple of weeks, killed five people, and then faded so rapidly from the public consciousness that you'd barely know it happened. The strangest and most mysterious act of unsolved serial murder since Jack the Ripper.

Now the fact that these murders occurred at just the time that the word "Iraq" began to be bandied about in the press, with Saddam Hussein's presumed chemical and bio-weaponry first beginning to be marched out as a concern, and with the Patriot Act coming up for a vote, is unavoidably true. After it was speculated, however, that the killer was most likely an American working alone and not a foreign terrorist, the panic began to dissipate, and the crimes themselves stopped for no known reason.

Whatever the reason for that, is it too cynical to suggest that public belief that this was an act of actual international terrorism was highly convenient to the administration's future strategy? And that perhaps a mundane American psychopath was less useful to them than the idea of shadowy minions of Saddam Hussein? And that perhaps -- just perhaps -- the FBI was asked to slow their investigation down just a bit (which turned out to be too much)? That's all we suggest.

Over-cautious? Yes we are. Because we care. We here at DHAIP certainly don't embrace baseless conspiracy theories unless we've concocted them ourselves. (You never know where the others have been.) As taxpayers, we would like our 2.3 trillion dollars accounted for, and as citizens we shudder at the thought of an uncaptured, anthrax-sowing murderer wandering the countryside. What upstanding Amerikansan wouldn't?

A wish-list for a Democratic Congress.

In Montana, Jon Tester has been declared the victor. A recount will most likely be asked for in Virginia. (We here at DHAIP would love to say to the GOP: "Get over it. You lost." They themselves have recited this mantra for the past six years, in reference to the initial "election" of Mr. Bush. The irony would be delicious, but also crass. Let the recount proceed, then... we'll wait. On a related note, I suspect the Republicans are now rather grateful that their attempt to eliminate the filibuster fell through....)

This administration has not been terribly generous with information. Mr. Bush has become more publicly available than he once was, but he clearly doesn't know very much about anything useful. Mr. Cheney, who undoubtedly has more interesting things stored in his memory banks, to date has undergone little pressure from Congress to face the camera and speak. The chance for a deeper acquaintance with our VP, and indeed with the actions of our government, is not one for the Congress to pass over.

Thus, as a polite request to our new batch of legislators, we would greatly enjoy receiving some more information about a few trifling matters.

Of the following excellent list, we ourselves are most interested in these:

3. The scandal: A lawsuit has claimed it is illegal for Dick Cheney to keep the composition of his 2001 energy-policy task force secret. What's the big deal? The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has suggested an explosive aspect of the story, citing a National Security Council memo from February 2001, which "directed the N.S.C. staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the 'melding' of ... 'operational policies towards rogue states,' such as Iraq, and 'actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.'" In short, the task force's activities could shed light on the administration's pre-9/11 Iraq aims.

The problem: The Federal Advisory Committee Act says the government must disclose the work of groups that include non-federal employees; the suit claims energy industry executives were effectively task force members. Oh, and the Bush administration has portrayed the Iraq war as a response to 9/11, not something it was already considering.

...

7. Halliburton's Vanishing Iraq Money

The scandal: In mid-2004, Pentagon auditors determined that $1.8 billion of Halliburton's charges to the government, about 40 percent of the total, had not been adequately documented...

The outcome: The Defense Contract Audit Agency has "strongly" asked the Army to withhold about $60 million a month from its Halliburton payments until the documentation is provided.

...

11. The scandal: According to Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack," the Bush administration diverted $700 million in funds from the war in Afghanistan, among other places, to prepare for the Iraq invasion.

The problem: Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 of the U.S. Constitution specifically gives Congress the power "to raise and support armies." And the emergency spending bill passed after Sept. 11, 2001, requires the administration to notify Congress before changing war spending plans. That did not happen.

The outcome: Congress declined to investigate. The administration's main justification for its decision has been to claim the funds were still used for, one might say, Middle East anti-tyrant-related program activities.

And so on. Trust us, they're all good.

And whatever happened to that 2.3 trillion dollars that Donald Rumsfeld announced on September 10, 2001 that the Defense Department could not "track"? We're willing to bet you've forgotten about that -- curiously the item fell out of the news the very next day. Not to boast, but we did not forget.

And we would be extremely interested in finding out the current state of the investigation into the anthrax attacks of 2001. Remember those? Curiously, in all the furor over terrorism and security, this has become a cold case. Surely this unique and oddly-timed act of bioterrorism can't be thought of as irrelevant. With numerous accusations of foot-dragging and, well, worse, being tossed about by irresponsible types, wouldn't it be wise to settle the matter once and for all?

We've got others -- oh do we have others -- but some action on these matters would be a fine start, no?

Surprise! Rumsfeld "resigns."

"Hey, why all the glum faces?"
--George Bush, 11/8/06

When we mentioned "sudden dismissals" in our previous post, we didn't quite expect a departure quite so quickly, but we'll take it, we'll take it. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld have jointly decided that "new leadership is needed in the Pentagon." Our shock is boundless.

His replacement will be former CIA chief and Texas A&M University President Robert Gates.

Highlights from the press conference:

Bush looks ragged and slightly hung over. He looks, for the first time since his term began, as though he might have lost some sleep. He also seems faintly humanized -- forced into a position of humility, he seems less crazed and more genuine.

When asked about why he recently assured the country that Rumsfeld would remain in office, Bush said, "I didn't want to inject a major decision into the last days of the campaign. The only way to get you to move onto another question was give you that answer."

"People want their Congress to be honest, and ethical. That was a factor in some of the races."

"Somehow it just seeped into their [the American people's] consciousness that I was just 'stay the course.' We're constantly adjusting."

Slightly later... "I think it sends a bad message to our troops when their Commander-in-Chief appears to be constantly adjusting tactics."

"This is not my first rodeo."

Bush shows uncharacteristic skill answering a question about Pelosi calling him "incompetent, liar, and the Emperor with no clothes." We give him credit for grace under pressure. It is the cautious poise of a man who has discovered he is running out of options.

Bush repeatedly mentions the Baker/Hamilton commission. We assume that he has some advance information about its findings -- possibly an escape plan?

Explaining his previous optimism about yesterday's election: "I thought when it was all said and done that the American people would understand the importance of taxes, and the importance of security. The pople have spoken." In other words, it's their fault. He is called on this by a British man, and bristles.

The ending is abrupt -- he appears simply to run out of words. He turns, marches away.... This promises to be an interesting few days.

Good things happen. Bad day for pessimism.

We pride ourselves on being rarely wrong here at DHAIP. (That's the great thing about pessimism -- it's a winner's bet!) But when we are wrong, we admit it, and graciously. Election Day appears to have taken on a positive slant. What can we say? Our Tarot reading must have been off. The Hanged Man did indeed make an appearance, but he proved too little, too late. The Magician fumbled and the Tower has been breached. In our defense we will point out that someone (we won't name names) had spilled gravy on our deck.

At the time of this writing, the Democratic candidates have not only thoroughly seized the house, but are, improbably, neck-and-neck for the Senate. (For personal reasons we have a particular interest in the Virginia race, in which Democratic challenger Jim Webb currently enjoys a whisper-thin eight thousand vote lead. While Mr. Webb has his flaws, he is not, as George Allen is, the winner of the Biggest Horse's Ass in the Senate six years running. Good luck, Mr. Webb!)

The twenty-eight House seats currently lost to the GOP are a shocking enough blow to the existing system -- the loss of the Senate as well would be an unthinkable humiliation to the once seemingly invincible Bush Administration. A great number of highly unpleasant things would begin to happen to the Republican leadership, and depending on what the morning holds we predict a great deal of document-shredding and sudden dismissals in the halls of the mighty.

Now, we are as cynical as the next person about the major parties, and at this point about government in general, but if a Democratic Congress is able to provide a minimum of oversight to a highly unoverseen administration, we here at DHAIP officially endorse it. We do not assume such an eventuality will make the world a better place, but with a little luck it may help keep it from getting too much worse. (But watch out for that Tarot! The Bush presidency is not, unfortunately, over yet!)

For now, the GOP may comfort itself in the words of the great Democratic prankster Dick Tuck, who upon losing his 1964 California Senate race, famously said, "The people have spoken -- the bastards!"

It's almost Election Day.

(Beale is sitting behind the desk, his eyes glazed. On the screens in the control booth he looks so lost as to be ghostly. He begins to speak the moment he is cued.)

We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to GET UP RIGHT NOW. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,

'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:

"I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

--Network, 1976

Saddam Hussein and the November surprise.

"It's a major achievement for Iraq's young democracy and its constitutional government."
--George W. Bush



Truly, what other image could spell out so clearly what it means to "replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law"?

An interesting excerpt from the press:

"You now have absolute proof that you've got an independent judiciary in Iraq," White House spokesman Tony Snow told NBC television.

Snow also rejected any speculation that the administration had influenced the timing of the trial verdict in Baghdad to boost Bush's Republicans in the election.

"I mean, the idea is preposterous," Snow told CNN's "Late Edition," denying that the White House had been "scheming and plotting."

...

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih also dismissed any US role in the timing of the trial judgment, using the same language as the White House spokesman.

"I think it's preposterous," Salih said in an interview with CNN. He said the "judicial process here has proven to be professional."

With two such distinguished personalities assuring on their words as gentlemen that the idea is (all together now) PREPOSTEROUS, why, we would have to be some kind of barbarians to doubt them. Wouldn't we?

A thought: if the sentence is carried out, and Saddam Hussein is "hanged by the neck until he is dead," as the old legal phrase used to put it, will it be televised?

Stay tuned!

What is a great movie? Part Two: lonelygirl15 and You.

(This is Part 2 of a series of n, in which n is an undefined value related to our unpredictable willingness to let it go. Part One here.)

In 1952 a young man named Guy-Ernest Debord created a true cinematic work of art. The following clip constitutes the first four minutes of the film. If you feel able to, we suggest watching it in its entirety. If you are not a fluent speaker of French (we are not -- our only French staffer is currently on vacation), an English transcription of the spoken dialogue can be found here, but the most important quality of the clip is visual.



Assuming you completed your viewing, you will notice that the white screen, at the end, turned black for several seconds. In its entirety the film, entitled Howls in Favor of de Sade, is 64 minutes long -- it consists of a series of white screens, during which voices speak lines of text, alternating with periods of blackness, during which there is silence. The film ends without warning after the last twenty minutes of black screen.

Any irritation you may feel at having four minutes of your time wasted is perfectly justified, and accurately reflects Mr. Debord's intention. More than likely you stopped the clip fairly early on, perhaps read the text instead, or simply gave up altogether. When the complete film was first shown at festivals at the time of its making, billed as "outrageous," "shocking," and "scandalous," baffled audiences often erupted in fury and occasionally vandalized the theater at having been "tricked." To quote art historian Guy Atkins, as quoted in turn in Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces:

"When the lights came up there was an immediate babble of protest. People stood around and made angry speeches... [the] protests were so odd that it was as if Guy Debord himself was present, in his role of Mephistopheles, hypnotizing these ordinary English people into making fools of themselves... those who had just seen the film came out of the auditorium and tried to persuade their friends on the stairs to go home, instead of wasting their time and money. But the atmosphere was so charged with excitement that this well-intentioned advice had the opposite effect. The newcomers were all the more anxious to see the film, since nobody imagined that the show would be a complete blank! Afterwards one realized that Debord's use of silence and emptiness had played upon the nerves of the spectators, finally causing them to let out 'howls in favor of de Sade.'"

The film is a work of art, then, precisely because Debord was not trying to make a great film. He was trying to create a situation: a stirring of savage emotions. This childish prank was ridiculously effective.

Before the release of the immensely successful Blair Witch Project, the filmmakers went to great lengths to cultivate the movie's mystique -- with its convincingly "documentary" look and its improvised, naturalistic performances, the early promotions for the film deliberately obfuscated the issue of the film's "reality." Despite leaks, enough confusion persisted in the public's mind that many of the excited teenagers who crowded into the theaters were under the impression that they had come to see a true, live ghost story captured on film.

Viewed as reality, the movie presents a terrifying situation: three ordinary film students lost in a forest and stalked by unseen forces of murderous evil. One can empathize utterly with their fear, and even the stupidity of their actions. Who among us could think clearly in such a situation? Who among us would not, like Heather, kneeling before her camera in the darkness, be reduced to hysteria and tears?

It was when it was viewed as a movie, structured and created, that disappointment began to set in: the characters, once empathetic, became "annoying" and "amateurish," the camera-work "irritating," the idea "dumb." Note a sample user comment from the IMDB:

"I have been going to the movies for over 35 years....my compliments to the producers of this film....I never thought anyone could actually steal my money....you did!!!! Who was paid to say it was scary?? Who was paid to put this in the movie houses?? When this thing was over..the people around me were mad....and yelling for their money back!!!!!!!Terrible is too nice a word for this piece of nothing!!!!!!"

A familiar complaint.

The film still has its admirers, and is in fact a reasonably well-done example of the genre. But the disappointment engendered by its own engineered expectations created, if not riots, a mini-situation. A similar fuss came up recently on Youtube, in which the videos of a user identifying herself as "lonelygirl15" began attracting attention -- a supposedly authentic vlog created by a teenage girl, containing hints of a cultlike conspiracy surrounding her. When the girl was revealed to be an actress, "lonelygirl15" turned out to be a registered trademark, and the whole to be a scripted project, the "tricked" users who had followed the log (many of whom, judging by the posted comments, seem to have been lecherous adults) unleashed a hail of abusive messages, parody response videos, and outraged protests about "cheaters on Youtube." The "hoax" (if you assume that anything on the site should be believed to be real) made the national press. Needless to say, the videos are still some of the most viewed on the site, despite the continuing torrents of obscene invective.

Are these works of art? The corporate implications of the latter two examples blunt the possibilities: it's all business. Debord's motives were perhaps purer, and something about the sadistic minimalism of Howls still renders it at least quite useful for sparking arguments. But is a truly great film something more than a film? Is it something that, at least briefly, genuinely disorients our senses, and shocks us into becoming, ourselves, the "art?"







"I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it."
--David Lynch

"The unsuspecting folk with whom Borat interacts never see it coming as he lures them into exposing their darkest sides. A gun shop owner responds to Borat's inquiry about the best weapon to hunt a Jew without hesitation: '9 mm.'"
--Scott Renshaw, Charleston City Paper, 11/1/06

"The facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. Let me begin by playing a tape for you."
--Colin Powell, to the UN, 2/15/03

What are the stakes?

The GOP's recent "These are the Stakes" ad, which we featured in an earlier post (and which the folks at Minitrue have rather nicely improved on) has been justly compared to, and almost certainly deliberately refers to, the infamous LBJ nuclear swipe at Goldwater:



A true marvel of fearmongering, even by modern standards. We ourselves can hardly watch it without urinating. The fact that the GOP ad so blatantly evokes its ancestor indicates a) desperation, surely; b) a certain snarky revenge impulse -- after forty-plus years they at last get their own back; and c) something larger and more ominous, which we will try to analyze.

Note the curious similarity of situation: an incumbent Texan president is busily prosecuting a war whose motives are unclear and which grows steadily in unpopularity. Facing a potential for political upset -- in Johnson's case the presidency itself, in Bush's his much-needed Congress -- the warmongerer-in-chief tries, through the miracle of advertising, to convince the people that the other candidate is the dangerous one to have around. Counterintuitive, yes, but it worked for Johnson. It may yet work for the GOP as well. But why on earth would they wish to invite yet another comparison to Vietnam? Do they really think that America has secretly yearned for a second chance at that? Do we?

Watching the parody clip on Minitrue, one notices how well the shadowy sepia-and-black tones of the commercial fit the Orwell decor around it -- for a moment one could be forgiven for mistaking Bin Laden for Emmanuel Goldstein. The look of the commercial eerily suggests Michael Radford's film version of 1984.

What exactly are the Republicans trying to say? Why are they in power? Why have so many people voted Republican in the last decade? What is it we, as a country, deep in our darkest hearts, actually want?

The first few years of the twenty-first century are a psychotic episode in American history, the roots of which lie decades back. We make a call to every armchair psychologist out there in the land-of-the-once-living: present your analysis. Tell us the state of the nation. Tell us what the stakes are.

The Limbaugh/Bush tragedy.

A terrible tragedy has occurred here at DHAIP. One of our staffers, asked to prepare a follow-up report to our previous post regarding the Bush/Limbaugh interview that took place earlier this week, has apparently gone insane.

Several days of repeated knocking at his office door produced no result; when the door was forced, we found him collapsed on the floor, in front of what can only be described as a sort of crude shrine that he had built, on which lay obscenely doctored photographs of the president and the popular radio commentator, surrounded by what appeared to be animal parts, feathers, and old copies of the New Republic. A spot analysis of his state by one of our resident psychiatrists concluded that the negative emotions triggered by reading the transcript -- which is here, but consider yourself warned -- produced some sort of terrible psychotic episode followed by a complete mental breakdown. The whole matter is now in care of medical authorities and the police.

Our thoughts are with him in this dark hour.

He had apparently begun work on some sort of bizarre dramatization of the president's interview before madness gripped him fully. We publish it in the possibility that it will shed some light on his tragic mental state.

Note: This transcript appears to have been altered and edited in certain key places. It is clearly the work of a diseased mind and should not be taken as an authoritative text of the interview. So far as we know, there is nothing "suspect" about Rush Limbaugh's feelings about the president, nor has the president, to our knowledge, ever referred to the Chinese people in derogatory terms. Details about the president's clothing cannot be verified.


(Scene: a radio broadcaster's booth. RUSH waits in breathless, barely controlled excitement. Throughout the following interview he writhes orgiastically in his chair, his lower lip trembling, and pauses occasionally to sniff his own perspiration. Two SECRET SERVICE AGENTS enter and sweep the room, followed by two HERALDS bearing silver trumpets, who blow a brief fanfare. Two liveried SERVANTS then follow, and take kneeling positions on either side of the door. After an impressive pause THE PRESIDENT enters, wearing perfumed silk robes, his head adorned with fantastic plumes, his bare torso invitingly oiled.)

RUSH: Mr. President.

(He abases himself.)

THE PRESIDENT: Hey, Rush, how are you?

(THe servants bring forward a velvet rug, on which the President reclines.)

RUSH: Never better. It's a thrill to have you on the program today and many thanks for making time for us. Your perfume blinds me with its magnificence.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.

RUSH: How are you doing?

THE PRESIDENT: I'm doing great. I really am. I like a contest, and we're in a really important contest, and so I'm doing fine. I feed off the crowds and feed off the enthusiasm and feed off the blood of sacrifice. It's kind of like a reminder of how I got here in the first place.

(The two men laugh obscenely.)

RUSH: Many people, I guess -- in the opposition press, the opposition party, the degenerates -- are incredulous that you are optimistic about the outcome next Tuesday. Why is that? Why are you optimistic? What do you know that they don't? Tell me, tell me, O life-giver.

THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I fully understand that here in Washington people are trying to proclaim the election over with, but I've had that experience before.

(More laughter. Rush excitedly scoots forward his chair, spilling pornographic photographs across the floor.)

So one reason I'm optimistic is I trust the will of the people and not the national punditry. Secondly, I know that we're right on the issues -- low taxes and winning the war on terror and protecting the American people. So I believe if our candidates continue to talk about the strong economy, based upon low taxes, and an administration in a Congress that was willing to give professionals the tools necessary to protect them, we'll win this election.

RUSH: When you go out on the campaign trail or when you're in your... private moments...

(An uncomfortable pause. The President maintains his radiant smile.)

...do you think of the consequences of governing with a Democrat majority in either the House or the Senate when it comes to things like tax cuts and the war on terror?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I really don't think about the idea of having a Democrat-led House and Senate because I don't think it's going to happen. Shall they hoist me up and show me to the shouting varletry? Rather a ditch in Egypt be a gentle grave to me. Rather on Nilus' mud lay me stark naked, and let the waterflies blow me into abhorring.

(A brief silence.)

RUSH: Oh, I know.

THE PRESIDENT: So there's just a different mindset, Rush.

RUSH: Yeah, but you've got a sizable number of Democrats who are trying to stop you from even finding terrorists. The New York Times, some other national newspapers, have published classified secrets of the United States during wartime. Everything from blowing up the financial tracking program that you had, to trying to destroy the Patriot Act, to trying to destroy your Foreign Surveillance Act. The leakers haven't been identified or punished. The American people are outraged about this, Mr. President. I am outraged. I am filled with the drunkenness of hate.

(His eyes shine with animal ferocity. The President adopts a stern expression, his noble brow creased.)

THE PRESIDENT: Obviously as Commander-in-Chief, Rush, I'm deeply concerned about our secrets being made known. There's a Justice Department Task Force or Justice Department group that are in the process of gathering the information necessary to find whether or not they can find the leakers. They will be flayed with stinging nettles.

RUSH: Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Their stripped bodies licked by flame.

RUSH: Oh God, yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Unimaginable torments are being prepared.

RUSH: I can imagine them.

THE PRESIDENT: But all that means is we gotta win on November 7th. People come up to me all the time and say "Thank you for protecting us." Sometimes they kneel to me. I bid them rise, and say unto them, "I'm going to continue to protect you, but I need a Congress that understands the stakes." Osama Bin Laden himself has said that it's just a matter of time before the United States loses its will and retreats.

(Rush shudders as if from a sudden chill.)

RUSH: He frightens me. Those eyes. I have dreams sometimes, terrible dreams--

THE PRESIDENT: Give me a second here, Rush, because I want to share something with you.

RUSH: Glowing eyes in the night.

THE PRESIDENT: Rush, I am deeply concerned about a country, the United States, leaving the Middle East. I am worried that rival forms of extremists will battle for power, obviously creating incredible damage if they do so; that they will topple modern governments, that they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West.

RUSH: Oh God, no.

THE PRESIDENT: People say, "What do you mean by that?" I say, "If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies. You couple that with a country that doesn't like us with a nuclear weapon and people will look back at this moment and say, 'What happened to those people in 2006?' and those are the stakes in this war we face."

(Rush moans in terror. He is sweating terribly. The President lays a hand on his knee to calm him.)

On the one hand we've got a plan to make sure we protect you from immediate attack, and on the other hand we've got a long-term strategy to deal with these threats, and part of that strategy is to stay on the offense.

(Rush breathes deeply and smiles, relieved.)

RUSH: Well, that is extremely visionary. One of the things, if I may make this personal--

THE PRESIDENT: You may.

(A servant smirks knowingly.)

RUSH: --one of the many things I've admired about you is that you see down the road 20 or 30 years. You just illustrated that with your comment. What if down the road 20 years we look back to this time and with 20-20 hindsight realize we blew it. You're not, as far as it sounds to me, you're not going to let that happen. You're going to do whatever it takes to secure victory.

THE PRESIDENT: I am and I fully understand the nature of this enemy. One: they're great propagandists, and two: they truly believe they can cause us to retreat by inflicting enough damage, and three: they're lethal. The recent debate here on Iraq, some say Iraq is a "distraction" from the war on terror. My answer to them is, listen to Osama Bin Laden. He is the seer of all things, the glowing center in the sapphire of eternal wisdom. He says: "Our objective is to defeat America, which will disgrace America, which embolden the terrorists." I hate and fear him, yet I admire him. One may fear the tiger as a death-bringer, but may one not also admire the tiger's magnificence?

(Rush is unable to hide his tumescence. A Secret Service agent coughs.)

RUSH: Mr. President, we hear a lot of things from troops in Iraq, both troops that are there and troops who have returned. To a man and woman, they are shocked, they say, when they get back here, turn on the news, and look at the reporting of how things are going. They think there are tremendous successes that have taken place in Iraq, and it frustrates them. It frustrates me.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me say something about our troops, Rush. I am... I guess "amazed" is the proper word at how courageous our troops are, and I am amazed at the fact that they are so capable, and that they volunteer in the midst of this war to defend us, and these troops deserve all the support of the United States of America, and they understand as well as anybody that we are making progress in Iraq, and they know when their comrades are out there fighting that they're bringing enemies to justice, and, and, and, um, and, the morale in our military is high because these young men and women understand the stakes. Reenlistment rates are very high and recruitment rates are strong, which all says to me we've got an amazing country when we've got people who put on the uniform say, "Put me in. I want to go fight for this country." That's why my voice is so loud in saying to our troops: "What you're doing is noble and important and you're going to win and history will look back and thank you for your sacrifices."

(One of the servants has been reduced to womanlike tears. All present are moved. A great hush falls over the room. When Rush speaks again, it is in an awestruck whisper.)

RUSH: Before we go -- I know time is dwindling -- I must ask you about North Korea, because I find this fascinating. Your critics have been demanding bilateral talks, just the United States and North Koreans. North Korea sets off their so-called nuclear test and now, all of a sudden, after you maintaining the six party talks as being key to solving the issue, it's North Korea who appears to have blinked and you have been proven correct. It's a stunning development that has been greeted with silence, Mr. President. It really has. You stared them down. The United States did. Let me not make this personal. But I have. It's too late. I can't disguise what I feel.

(Rush has started forward. The President makes a quick motion. A Secret Service agent whispers something to Rush, who controls himself with a massive effort. He breathes deeply and speaks slowly and calmly.)

The United States stared them down. You stuck to your guns, as you do on everything, and the way you think is best to be handled is going to happen. Does this mark any kind of a shift, dramatic or otherwise, in our relationship with China?

THE PRESIDENT: Our relationship with China is a very complex relationship, and it's an important relationship. One great opportunity for China, Rush, is to encourage China to develop a society in which there are savers. In other words, a society in which there's a pension plan. Let me rephrase that: a society in which there's consumers, because now there's a society of too many savers. The reason they're saving so much money is because there's not a pension plan or a legitimate healthcare system. The people, those greedy Easterners, they horde the dirty money they have, anticipating there's going to be a bad day. If we can encourage China to be a country of consumers, you can imagine what it would mean for US producers and manufacturers to have access to that market.

(The President's eyes are shining. He is breathing shallowly.)

We could have them, Rush. We could have them. All those billions of little yellow devils. All giving money to us. And they're not the only ones. An interesting statistic is India, for example, has 350 million people in their middle class--

RUSH: Mr. President, we have to let you go, but before I do so I have to share something with you. When I announced yesterday when the schedule was firmed up that I'd be talking to you today, I got tremendous -- I would say inundated -- with e-mails from people asking me to tell you that they're praying for you.

(The president smiles, bows his head with becoming modesty and waves a benevolent arm. A fresh wave of scent fills the room.)

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

RUSH: So I wanted to pass that on.

THE PRESIDENT: My answer to those who say they're praying for me is, one: thank you; two: I'm grateful, and three: it matters a lot, and it's a remarkable country where people from all walks of life and all faiths pray for me and Laura and has made a significant difference in my life and I'm grateful. But this is not new to me. In Kansas, Texas, and Mississippi I have been deified. Temples have been built there, and my statues heal cancer victims. In Idaho the residents create huge wicker effigies of me in which virgins and university professors are burned alive, in propitiation to my anger.

RUSH: Mr. President, thank you for your time, and all the best. I look forward to the next time we speak.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, sir. Thank you.

RUSH: President George W. Bush. We'll be back in just a moment.

(Another fanfare blows. The President rises. The servants gather his train. Rush kneels. The President's assemblage departs. Last to go are the Secret Service, covering the room with their pistols and sowing white blossoms in the President's wake. As the commercial break begins Rush sits in mesmerized silence, still engulfed in the lingering drifts of the perfume, the echoes of the trumpets. He is alone now. Night falls on his soul.)

What is a great movie? Part One: Less Than Zero

We suggest that you turn off the sound on your computer for a moment. Then play this clip.



Now turn your sound on. Playing it again reveals a piano accompaniment, music that attaches itself immediately to the visual and reduces it to quaintness, allowing the mind to sort it into a category: an old silent movie. Our mind's eye then sees Chaplin twirling a cane and Lillian Gish crossing an ice floe. Turning off the sound allows us, paradoxically, to see Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat not as a silent film but as film. It allows us to see it, period, and perhaps understand for a moment the impact of watching projected images on a screen in a theater for the first time, ever.

This list, by theyshootpictures.com, of the "1000 greatest films" is far better than the vast majority of these lists that we have seen -- a very high percentage of the films mentioned are indeed worthy of interest. One need only compare that selection to the IMDB's quasi-democratically-arrived-at list of the 250 best films to understand the problem. Both lists, however, are are products of a need: the first one, to establish an artistic standard that perhaps has ceased to exist, the second, to establish the populist creed that spectacle trumps meaning.

After some thought, our staff have concluded that Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, made in 1896, begins, unintentionally, to lay a trap for reality. It demonstrates, "Reality can be captured and projected for your interest and entertainment." Citizen Kane, tops on the theyshootpictures list, demonstrates, "Reality can be shaped into a comment on reality." The Trap, part 2. By the time of The Godfather, tops on the IMDB list, movies have become primarily about moviemaking itself -- "Reality can be replaced and made more attractive" -- culminating in number 4 on that same list, the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which reality is so far out of the mix that the movie is in fact about absolutely nothing -- which is what many modern filmgoers would say about the plotless, seemingly "meaningless" Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.

These days, especially in the political arena, reality seems infinitely shapeable. We will go a step further. In a technoexistence in which reality can be presented, denied, and forgotten as rapidly as smoke can be blown away, reality -- which is to say unmediated, unfiltered reality -- simply does not exist, in any meaningful form. So we here at DHAIP ask a question -- what is now a greater work of art: to conjure a vision that has replaced reality, or to a record a "reality" that has vanished from before our eyes?

Tell us: which one is real?








"I don't know where he [bin Laden] is. I don't spend much time on him... I repeat, I'm not that concerned about him."
--George Bush, March 13, 2002.

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."
--Guy Debord

"They think that I got no respect, but everything means less than zero."
--Elvis Costello

White House anatomy.

"WASHINGTON - President Bush said Wednesday he wants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to remain in his administration until the end of his presidency...."

In other news, a gall bladder today announced that it would "greatly prefer" that a brain, heart, and spinal column remain connected to it until the end of its life.

Bush rallies the truly base.

We think it is fair to say that we here at DHAIP do not view the world through rose-colored glasses. Yet even we were mildly surprised to come across this information.

Only a few scant days after Mr. Limbaugh sealed his already-firm status as a dreadful, waddling blight upon humanity, the esteemed leader of Amerikansas himself will be stopping by for a quick spot of chat. The commentator in the first link views this as a sign of desperation at the top. We would be more than pleased to accept that explanation, but being, after all, professional pessimists (or at any rate semiprofessional -- our interns are unpaid), we find ourselves wondering: if this is desperation, what can Mr. Bush be desperate enough to think he will gain?

Our current Congress enjoys a solid 16-31% approval rating, making it significantly less popular among US citizens than Holocaust denial. In the face of these numbers, even the once-savvy masterminds of the GOP must realize that rallying the base simply won't be enough. And with Limbaugh's appeal tarnished even among those individuals who found him appealing to begin with --imagine those people for a moment -- can this possibly be a sound move? The past Bush strategy for dealing with the disgraced is to distance himself, vide Kenneth Lay and Jack Abramoff.

Our official position, therefore, is that this is a display of obscene overconfidence. We stand by our past assertion: the GOP do not intend to lose. The ball's in your court, Diebold.

"Here I am again!"

In the vast and uncatalogued research library here at DHAIP headquarters, on a few mildewed shelves in a murky corner, we maintain a sizeable assortment of literature relating to ghosts. In honor of the day we pull down the Ghost Book of Charles Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax (1839-1934). Lord Halifax, in his 95 years of life, was an ardent collector of supernatural anecdotes related to the ancestral houses of the British Isles. A healthy sense of fear is good for longevity.

(Please note that part of our philosophy is one of complete and utter skepticism. We apply that philosophy to everything except that which we find fun. We don't find God and "intelligent design" particularly interesting, so they're out. Ghosts are in.)

The following is an excerpt from a letter sent to Lord Halifax in 1917 by Charles S-----, relating a visit to "an old Georgian house in Deal":


"My experience was horrible, so much so that I have vowed never to have anything to do with spiritualism in any shape or form.

"...a bed was arranged for me in a dressing-room. On a previous visit I had heard that the house was haunted and that all the daughters had seen the figure of someone they called their great-grandmother gliding about. The servants had been terrified, and in consequence of what they saw had refused to stay. I had forgotten this. I was in rude health after my Channel cruise and nothing ghostly was discussed before I went to bed.

"In the middle of the night I awoke, feeling that something uncanny was about me. Suddenly, there appeared at my bedside the phantom of either an old man or woman, of dreadful aspect, who was bending over me. That I was wide awake is beyond all question. I at once became cataleptic, unable to move hand or foot. I could only gaze at this monstrosity...

"Next morning I told my host privately of what occurred. He said he was not in the least surprised, as everybody living in the house except himself had, at one time or another, seen something of the sort.

"Twenty years passed and I had almost forgotten the incident. I had frequently re-visited the house and had seen nothing. Then one day I was I again invited... I was suffering from toothache and on getting into bed was utterly unable to sleep. The room was in a different part of the house from the dressing-room in which I had slept on the occasion of the first visit.

"Suddenly, although it was early summer, I began to feel very cold. I seemed literally to freeze from my feet upwards, and although I put on more clothes, the cold rapidly increased until I imagined that my heart must be failing and that this was death.

"All at once a voice (unheard physically) appeared to be saying over and over again to me, 'Here I am again! Here I am again, after twenty years.' Once more, in an exact repetition of my feeling twenty years before, I pulled myself together and said to myself, 'This time I will see the thing through and definitely prove whether my former experience was an hallucination and whether there really is such a thing as a ghost. I am wide awake beyond all possibility of doubt and only too conscious of a raging toothache.'

"The thing spoke to me mentally: 'Look round. Look round.'

"I now had that unaccountable feeling of horror which all accounts of such manifestations agree in declaring are produced on such occasions. Turning round, I saw in the corner of the room facing me a curious column of light revolving spirally like a whirlwind of dust on a windy day. It was white, and as I gazed, it slowly drew near to me.

"'Here I am again!' the thing kept repeating. I stretched out my hand for the matches at my bedside...."


The story goes on, but we see that by the clock that the stroke of midnight has come and Halloween is technically over. What a shame. Perhaps we'll have more time next year. Needless to say, this book (in two volumes) occupies a treasured place in our collection. We advise that you seek out a copy.

Happy All Hallows'!