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See You in 3000 Years
Fire licking at the edges of my retinas, I pound out this screed on a typewriter fueled by equal parts mescaline and Middle Eastern mayhem. The news, a brackish tide of reports, washes over me – the Third Temple, that shimmering mirage in the desert, remains but a pipe dream. Israel, that ambitious experiment in a homeland, seems to be dissolving like Alka-Seltzer in…
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The Edge of history
Fukuyama, bless his optimistic heart, saw the fall of the Berlin Wall as the grand finale, the curtain call on the human drama. History, with a capital H, would shuffle off the stage, replaced by a monotonous, albeit peaceful, epilogue of liberal democracies holding hands and singing Kumbaya. But Fukuyama, for all his impressive polysyllables, hadn’t reckoned with the carnivalesque id that lurks beneath the veneer of…
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Hollywood Debt Obligations
“Hollywood has become a conduit for studios and artists to meet their debt obligations because studios are in great great debt and the job is not so much to make great movies, their job is to make their debt obligation” In the labyrinthine fever dream of Hollywood, where ambition curdles into celluloid and dreams are…
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Bacon Boys
Dig this, man. We’re talking way before the robber barons crapped all over everything. Back when Bacon’s boys spooked the Virginia swells something fierce, they ditched those white indentured stiffs for a whole new bag: black chattel. Seems the poor white trash and the Negroes were getting a little too chummy, what with the hightailing, the hooch-fueled rampages, the pilfered swine, and the whole miscegenation…
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The Grand Design
A shadow play, this whole goddamn American hustle. Big men in their smoke-filled rooms, puppeteers with blood-diamond rings, jerking the strings of a nation built on the backs of the tired and yearning. They spin dreams of El Dorados across the briny expanse, luring the huddled masses with snake-oil promises and the glint of illusory…
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In Praise of the Industrious Poor
Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” – English writer Arthur Young, 18th century 12th April, 1895 A most delightful notion crossed my path today, courtesy of a particularly astute article in The Times. Apparently, a fellow by the name of Arthur Young – a keen…
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Herr Schmidt
Gregor awoke with a jolt, a clammy sweat clinging to him like a shroud. The dream, thankfully, had faded, yet a tendril of unease remained. It was always the same. A cramped, airless office, the walls plastered with maps crisscrossed with nonsensical red lines. His boss, Herr Schmidt, a man perpetually shrouded in an aura of damp wool and stale cigars, stood ranting about purity and Lebensraum. Gregor, however, felt only…
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Non-Euclidean Politics
Trapped in the Symbolic Order: They peddle their ideologies like used cars on a Martian lot – left wing, right wing, all rusted-out Lacaninan signifiers with a Symbolic Order malfunction. Stuck in their pre-Imaginary world, these Euclidean politicians can’t grasp the writhing, pulsating Real of realpolitik. They see the world as a goddamn line graph,…
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Settlers
US: (Slaps a map of the Middle East on the table, points a calloused finger at Israel) Hey you knuckleheads, gather ’round! This here’s how you tame the wild frontier, see? Ain’t no sugar-coating it, that’s how a land gets settled This here’s how you get yourself a piece of the pie, see? None of that…
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