Everywhere, too much thought to consuming, consuming, consuming.

Reading this, I realize the only thing I've ever purchased that's made me happier in any way was my camera, which encouraged me to look at the world (and people) around me in a fresh way and enabled me to capture moments and arm my scattered brain against forgetting. The only thing.

But did it make any sense?

Jay Rosen's The Quest for Innocence and Loss of Reality in Political Journalism.

Running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny… That sounds like the Tea Party movement I have observed, so the truth of the sentence is not in doubt. But what about the truth of the narrative? David Barstow is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. He ought to know whether the United States is on the verge of losing its democracy and succumbing to an authoritarian or despotic form of government. If tyranny was pending in the U.S. that would seem to be a story.

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways. I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.
It kept coming up, but David… did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can.

Somehow the reality that this narrative exists as a binding force within the Tea Party movement is more reportable than the fact that the movement’s binding force is a fake crisis, a delusion shared.

What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential.

Our Economy of Kindness from Mother Jones.

Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp. How can you add up the foreclosures and evictions that don't happen, the forests that aren't leveled, the species that don't go extinct, the discriminations that don't occur?

The official economic arrangements and the laws that enforce them ensure that hungry and homeless people will be plentiful amid plenty. The shadow system provides soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional support. In the meantime, others seek to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts over the past half century.

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention. In estimating the true make-up of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.

Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit: it's done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible. Years ago, when my friends started having babies I finally began to grasp just what kind of labor goes into sustaining one baby from birth just to toddlerhood.

Lightbulb hanging over my head, I hope you're never gonna go out.

Two songs for today.

Ben Wilkins' Back of My Head.

And Rachael Goodrich's Lightbulb.

I'm in a Swell Season melancholy. An Aimee Mann funk. A Sam Phillips stew. A classic Smiths bout of whatever it is the Smiths always sing about.

Tuning in: 1989.

We listened to cassette tapes of me, and me and Adam, decorating Christmas trees (or "chimistrees") back in 1989 and 1992. In the 1989 tape, I am two years old. When prompted to sing a Christmas carol, I sing "Away in the manger, no cib [sic] for his bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head... how's that?!" and then go on to summarize the verse about how "the cattle are lowing, the poor baby wakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes" as "nothing to cry about." I also try to convince my parents to hang a very large something (it's not clear what) on the tree and when the problem of size arises, I say brightly, "We can cut it into a little piece!" My parents laughed themselves silly on the tape and in the present, at our kitchen table, remembering what an articulate and relentless little chatterbox I was.

...

I also describe the Christmas tree as "big and hung."

Best That's What She Said in awhile...

Bernd: [Friend] got a nice screwdriver set with a socket wrench and stuff, and it has a flexible thing hat lets you screw things at any angle you want.

Merry Christmas!

But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.




BILLY COLLINS. LITANY.

The slippery brilliance of fish.

Along this promenade walk many Moslem men, mostly youths, some Moslem women, who usually come to sit in black clutches of three or four in the grass under the fruit trees, and many gypsies, men, women and children, who pass through the more stolid Moslem crowds with the slippery brilliance of fish.

REBECCA WEST. BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.





I am glad I am not rushing this book. It's been two months and I've restrained myself so that several hundred pages still stretch out ahead of me.

Wedding recap.

Aftermath.

You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.

Gervais on faith, God and good works.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

The result of Saturday afternoon's cloture motion on the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" will probably be a source of bafflement to future generations studying the issue: You mean that in December of 2010, they will marvel, 33 members of the United States Senate were still so adamantly opposed to the idea of gays and lesbians serving openly in the military that they tried to filibuster it?

And this.

Thai Cashew Chicken

Cook 1-1½ pounds of chicken, cut in bite-size pieces

Add
1 large red onion, cut in thin rings or wedges
1-2 cloves minced garlic
2 tsp. ginger root, minced
2 large green peppers, cut in wedges

Fry until onions are tender.

Add:
½ tsp. ground black pepper
½ tsp. ground coriander
4 tsp. soy sauce
2-3 tsp. fish sauce
3-4 Tbs. water
1 Tbs. lemon juice
½ tsp. ground cumin

Fry for 1-3 minutes.

Add ½ c. cashews

Serve immediately with rice.




Always a great excuse to run to the co-op for the freshest possible ginger.

Glenn Greenwald interviews Nir Rosen.

As a journalist, I'm uncomfortable advising an imperialist power about how to be a more efficient imperialist power.

Under this noiseless drift / The path of trains softly blocked

We're getting married a week from today, so my head/life kind of feel like this!

Wikileaks.

The roads were too greasy and the buses running too late for the debate tonight, but I think that a government that plots and acts without real fear of being held accountable for its actions or revealed in its deceptions is an inherently dangerous thing. There is nothing such a government can't do, no check on its power - not even limits imposed by resources when no one cares that these resources are been expended, wasted, thrown away.



It's snowing, just the same as a year ago when the big blizzard struck and ground the dailiness of Madison life to a stand still and let everything else run giddy and wild.

Every day is a dress rehearsal for her death.

Most depressing this American Life ever.

Long overdue haircut.

Sunday.

Vintage!

The right number is not enough.

From Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

To join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity... It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible. With all of its complexity, history is what we all have, and can all share. So even when we have the numbers right, we have to take care. The right number is not enough.

Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon with the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual. The one very large number that withstands scrutiny is that of the Holocaust, with its 5.7 million Jewish dead... but this number, like all of the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one.