June 2006 Archives
I'm beginning to worship Gary Brecher, who writes the "War Nerd" column for The Exile. (Which, weirdly, is a web-based publication for English-speaking expats in Russia.)
He's a hard guy to worship.
As he'll happily tell you, he's an extremely unappealing man. From his picture, and his descriptions of himself, you'd expect him to have his fingers permanently discolored by Cheetos dust. He files his dispatches from the not-at-all-romantic and even-less-a-nexus-of-global-strategy town of Fresno, California. And his perspective on war and warfare, well, it isn't that fun.
His columns are entertaining and interesting, frequently shocking, and they often provoke revulsion. Oh, you think, that's a little beyond the pale.
Of course, what he's writing about is the organized and systematic annihilation of human beings through violence. What's beyond the pale is being interested in this. And his "oh, admit it, you're interested in it too" attitude reminds me of what William S. Burroughs said about capital punishment: let them see what's on the end of that long newspaper spoon.
It was a good career move for John Keegan to write about war with the civility and detachment he did. (No knock on Keegan, a clear-headed and open-minded man who sought out the answers to questions that very few people had thought to ask.) Brecher is, well, a little rough. He is interested in war the way that some people are interested in porn featuring obese women: he recognizes that it's shameful, but his interest is strong enough that he doesn't bother defending it. (Also, unlike porn featuring obese women, warfare intrudes on millions of lives around the world, and however you might feel about p.f.o.w., wouldn't it be nice if the positions were reversed?)
Here's an excerpt (thanks to Google's cache; the original is no more) from UPI's interview with Brecher:
Q. When journalists like Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times op-ed page describes various wars in Africa as "senseless," are they making sense?
A. That's the best question you asked. No, it's absolute BS but nobody calls them on it. If you guys were doing your job, they couldn't get away with it, but they do. When Kristof says "senseless," he means he doesn't WANT TO KNOW about it. He won't even try to think like the people doing the fighting. Try doing that and see if it still seems senseless.
Here you've got one kind of war, the "sensible" kind with uniforms, "rules of war," and big battles like Jena or Verdun. That kind means you stand up and walk into cannon fire, grapeshot or machine-gun fire and massed artillery, and all you get out of it is a few dollars a month, and if you decide to quit on your own, they hang you. How is that sensible?
Now take African war. You have these neighbors you hated since forever, and you decide to do something about it. You get together quiet with the rest of your tribe and jump the enemy village while they're sleeping and kill everybody except maybe the cute girls, then you take all their stuff and burn their houses and take the girls home to be slaves.
Maybe I'm crazy, but that sure makes more sense to me than getting your head blown off for the glory of king and country. Kristof makes a living not even trying to understand how there are people in the world who don't think like him. Nobody wants to see how other people think, it's disgusting.
His columns taken as a whole are bracing and occasionally seem a little unhinged. His hatred of Victor Davis Hanson, for instance:
In his last column for the Fresno Bee, he sneered at people who don't have Ph.D.'s for daring to have opinions about the war in Iraq: "What do a talented Richard Gere, Robert Redford and Madonna all have in common besides loudly blasting the current administration? They either dropped out of, or never started, college. Cher may think George Bush is 'stupid,' but she - not he - didn't finish high school."
Since I never even finished my AA degree, I took that kind of personally. I guess it's my fault for not getting into Yale on pure merit like Bush did. That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson's farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when one of their neighbors threatened them: "Your cicadas will chirp from the ground," meaning, "We'll burn your fucking olive orchards if you mouth off again."
There you have Gary Brecher in a nutshell: he's all pissed-off and demotic and man-on-the-street college-dropout, and then he drops that business about the Spartans in there to remind you that when it comes to warfare, he knows what he is talking about. (And boy, does he make Victor Davis Hanson look bad. Really, go take a look.)
He may be full of shit. But really, just about everything you read by everybody on the war in Iraq is full of shit. At least Brecher understands what shit is.
This means that the grocery store is the worst-case scenario for a certain kind of modern sensory overload: being sold to. It's incessant. Everything your eyes light on in a grocery store is for sale. And while there remain a couple of holdouts to old-style utilitarian packaging (the meat counter comes to mind), for the most part, everything that your eyes light on, from the "artisanal" Safeway baguettes to the SUPER EXTREME NACHO FUCK YOU RAGGED Doritos, is crying out "Buy me! Buy me!"
And then you come to the checkout stands, which, being the primary site of the impulse buy, take this visual assault about as far as it can be taken. What you see there is, for the most part, scraps of a kind of folklore, yelling at you in inch-high yellow-on-red sans-serif headlines about how Brad isn't really the father of Angelina's child, and Jessica has a new date, and all of the other doings of our brain-damaged Olympian gods.
What made last night's slog through the Safeway at 16th and Bryant especially hard to endure was another logical consequence of the low-margin grocery business: understaffing. In this case, there were four checkstands running to service (by a conservative estimate) a hundred customers. It took me, no lie, forty minutes to check out.
And that's not forty minutes having your feet massaged and sipping cognac. No, it's forty minutes of the Kodak kiosk telling you that you, even YOU, can figure out how to use it. It's simple. Just touch the screen to get started. Now. Touch it. Touch it. And then the music (tonight's selection is the Eagles' "Heartache Tonight," oh yes) gets interrupted by the bright voice of a woman telling you about a product that will make you happy, that you need, that's so affordable anyone can have two. (I don't remember what it was.) And to the left, I see the cover of TIME, consisting entirely of a head shot of al-Zarqawi with a red X drawn over his face.
Back during Reagan's first administration, I had the insight that as a nation we were at a turning point. I saw two possible courses. In one, we could collapse into Italy: we could become a once-great nation of discontented grumblers whose government was so terrible all we could do was laugh at it. In the other, we could collapse into the Soviet Union, which would be much the same, only no one would be laughing and the food would be terrible.
It seemed clear to me, trudging in this joyless line last night and picking my way through a landscape of propaganda too ridiculous to believe and too ubiquitous to ignore, what course we have chosen.
It's easy to think that what you're seeing is ideologues at work. But it's not that. Not at all. Ideology is just another tool for the destruction of meaning. It doesn't matter to this administration whether or not evolution gets taught in schools. What matters is that we get accustomed to the idea that truth gets decided by consensus. Because they can't rig the truth, but rigging a consensus is child's play to them.
Even if their ends are not evil -- and I believe they are -- their means are evil. Democracy is predicated on the notion that the voice of the people is both morally and pragmatically superior to the voice of the despot. They are doing everything they can to get the voice of the people to babble about nonsense. And they have had great success.
What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! Where the Baddelaries partisans are still out to mathmaster Malachus Micgranes and the Verdons catapelting the camibalistics out of the Whoyteboyce of Hoodie Head. Assiegates and boomeringstroms. Sod’s brood, be me fear! Sanglorians, save! Arms apeal with larms, appalling. Killykillkilly: a toll, a toll. What chance cuddleys, what cashels aired and ventilated! What bidimetoloves sinduced by what tegotetabsolvers! What true feeling for their’s hayair with what strawng voice of false jiccup! O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement! But was iz? Iseut? Ere were sewers? The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay. Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Once upon a time, this site was azureus.com, named after the blue poison-dart frog, Dendrobates azureus. I came up with that name for no other reason than I needed a domain name and I like the frog.
But other forces were at work. (Googling "azureus" will give you some idea of who and what.) And one of them offered me enough money for the domain that I thought, heck, I don't like the blue poison-dart frog that much.
But I still like frogs. And ever since I first heard it in high school their chorus in Aristophanes's The Frogs has been stuck in my head. As you can see from the above, it got stuck in Joyce's too.
Thus koaxkoaxkoax, which is both relatively easy to remember and unlikely ever to be chosen by anyone, anywhere, as the name of a product or service.
