The most important question, five years after an attempted coup and a year and a day after the provacateur managed to regain office anyway: Who is absent from the reviewing stand this year, Comrade? And who might be next year?
- This son of a tyrant isn't uniquely positioned to make an ass of himself in public, but he does so pretty well even though he's got lots of company. But what a great opportunity for the West to fuck up yet again in that part of the world, where by a conservative estimate it has facilitated (intentionally or otherwise) at least thirty repressive governments in just the last century… specifically including that nation (more than once). Neither that family nor the West learned anything from 1953, or even from 1978: In an age of widespread (not even universal) literacy, you rule either with the consent of the governed… or an iron gauntlet, with spikes on the inside as you peacefully shake hands with your prior foes.
- Or you could just look at lower levels, and see what that kind of attitude can do when it entraps cities. Curiously, the article doesn't even mention the circumstances of the original sale (or, for that matter, who earned commissions or
kickbackscampaign contributions), throwing it away as a "lopsided deal signed in 2008 by former Mayor Richard M. Daley." Apparently, the purpose of the Mayor of Chicago is not to create corruption/stupidity, it is to preserve corruption/stupidity. - In a startling example of how even many of those of good intent regarding politics aren't doing very well at target selection, the Brennan Center for Justice offers nine solutions for political corruption that might be helpful — but are already being evaded. For one thing, many of the proposed constitutional amendments are both impossible (given what it takes to amend the Constitution) and unnecessary, being based not on the Constitution or its discernable core values but upon later judicial (mis)interpretations. Dead presidents have neither free-speech rights nor privacy/anonymity rights; remove the wrong-when-decided foundation of Buckley v. Valeo and about half of this list of reforms becomes unnecessary, at least at the constitutional-law level. Then it would at least be at the still-difficult statutory/judicial level, where there's at least some visibility — if not always accountability, the very point of the ire I share with the Brennan Center.
Simultaneously, however, the list fails to engage with a different kind of corruption that controls the kind that it does. Corruption of the kingmaker(s) is much, much harder to mitigate or remove than even corruption of the king(s). Incompetence is even worse… although it can be really hard to tell the difference — if there is one.
- The world of publishing is a sad, sad mecca of self-sabotage. Whether we're talking about publishing executives trying to be like H'wood producers or authors who believe that no matter how small their output, how audience-negating their subjects, they're entitled to a comfortable middle-class existence just for being authors. In a socialist utopia, all authors and other creators — indeed, everyone — would have that same entitlement. All of those in power would respect both its limits and its minimum ethics, and just might have a sense of humor. And all of the children would be above average. (Sorry, but there is neither a Santa Claus nor a utopia.)
• • •
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me
There lie they and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree
More clove oil for your tea, sir? And please put that book away — there are far too many books distracting people from carefully curated sources of all the information they need.