[reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language]

Tom DeLay, you don't want to go there. I don't mean going to jail, although that's likely the there where you're going next. I mean: you don't want to go where you're going when you say on some right-wing talk show "that unless he proves me wrong, [Obama] is a Marxist."

Regardez travailler les bâtisseurs de ruines
Ils sont riches patients ordonnés noirs et bêtes
Mais ils font de leur mieux pour être seuls sur terre
Ils sont au bord de l’homme et le comblent d’ordures
Ils plient au ras du sol des palais sans cervelle.

Look at them toiling the builders of ruin
They are orderly, patient, rich, dark and stupid
But they do their best to be alone on earth
On the edge of humanity they fill it with garbage
They ply to the ground their mansions without mind.

- Paul Eluard

[reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language]

There came an astonishing moment in Obama’s victory speech in North Carolina last night  when his accent shifted almost imperceptibly from Ivy-League elitist into something unmistakably black: you could tell from the slightly more open ys at the end of his adverbs ("happile" for "happily"), and the lighter pressure on the ng in his gerunds, half-way between "singing" and "singin’. Why, the man sounded positively Jacksonian : Jesse Jacksonian.

WOID XIX-4. Elitist like me.

Reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language.

I lived in Philadelphia for a number of years and eventually moved back to New York City. I guess I got tired of hearing Philadelphians congratulate themselves for not living in New York City – it seemed a little bit elitist, and elitist in the wrong way.

WOID XIX-3. Stupid White Progressives

reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language

WOID XVIII-42. Slouching towards Washington

reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language

On Election Night 2004 I was periodically checking a blog run by democratic experts on voting statistic. As the polls closed in Ohio and the exit polls came up a cautious jubilation crept in among the bloggers. But as the actual numbers came in a sense of shock swept over them: something was clearly wrong.

Rather, one of two things must have been wrong: either there had been massive voting fraud in the presidential elections in Ohio, or every single sophisticated statistical calculation on this particular site had been mistaken. Within an hour the verdict had come down among the bloggers: their calculations were wrong, the bloggers were all wrong, there couldn’t possibly have been any fraud, oh no. It read like something from a Communist Party proceeding: just as the comrades sacrifice their minds to the Party, so too the Democrats were willing to make their own self-critique in defense of the Institution. Gentlemen do not accuse gentlemen of fraud, and the bonds between democratic gentlemen and republican gentlemen were greater by far than any sympathy for the long lines of disenfranchised voters in Cleveland, Ohio.

WOID XVIII-40. Bullies in a China Shop

Gunslinger, gunslinger,
Where did you go wrong?
When you were a child did the Cheyenne and Sioux
Refuse to be nice and play games with you?
Did you always feel that you didn't belong?

[Words and Music by Katie Lee]

WOID XVIII-38. Moonbats for Obama

crosslinked with WOID: a journal of visual language

In the waning weeks of the German Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre was approached after a performance of his play No Exit. The man explained to Sartre that the Gestapo was looking for him and that Sartre should meet him the next day in front of Saint-Germain-des-Prés at a quarter to noon, because at noon the next day the clock would strike and angels would appear and Peace would descend on Earth. Sartre, who was curious about people and their experiences, walked over to Saint-Germain the next day, where the man was waiting for him. At noon the clock struck, and nothing happened. "I must have made a mistake," the man said, and shrugged, and walked away.

WOID XVIII-22. Planet Marx. NY Times makes it official: Capitalism is failing.

Reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language.

You can always count on the New York Times, the American Izvestia, to give you the Party line on Capitalism. Not on the Wall Street Journal, which like Pravda is mostly restricted to Party insiders and apparatchiki. That explains why admissions of a broad failure in the system are allowed in the Wall Street Journal but almost unheard of in the New York Times.

On Sunday, December 9, the news were gently broken on the front page of the Week in Review section under the headline, "When the Price Isn't Right." It might as well have read, "When the Glorious Five-Year Plan fails."

...joke!

[reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language]

What Li'l Lulu jokes were to the 'thirties! What lightbulb jokes were to the nineties! What economists are to the aughties!

Back by populist demand, it's...
The Free Market Moron Joke!

Q: Why did the Free Market Moron refuse to go on strike?
A: Because getting a pay raise for himself along with better job protection, plus health-care coverage for himself and his family was against his best interests.

Q: What's the Free Market Moron's all purpose, work-every-time, on point counter-argument?
A: Goo...lag....Gu....ga...Goolag...

Q: Do you know why Free Market morons have no sense of humor?
A: Whistle the first few bars and I'll sue you for copyright infringement!

reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language

WOID XVIII-15. "Why did the Free Market Moron..."

Lenny Bruce had it right, almost: There are very few conversations in America that can't be handled with "Yes," "No," and "Imagine if you will a giant invisible hand." Unless it's a blogger's diary on DailyKos, in which case you can skip "Yes" and "No.

WOID XVII-46. Drinking the Manishewitz

In 1183 – or was it 1216, or 1445? – At the conclusion of the Easter sermon, crowds of Christians ran through the streets of Toledo (or York, or Mainz), shouting "Death to the Jews!" I suppose it was a coincidence that the crowds had just stood through a long sermon in the Christian church in which the topic of the evils of Jewry played a prominent part.

So perhaps it’s just a coincidence that in the days immediately following Yom Kippur the streets of New York are filled with rage – against Iran, this time. I’m sitting in a Starbucks, half a mile from the UN, and there’s a young man shouting on his cell-phone, gliding from a conversation about his fast the day before to the size of the tits on his latest date to the casual statement that the CIA should send an undercover agent to murder the President of Iran and maybe he’ll murder Ahmadinejad himself when he comes to Columbia.

WOID XVII-45. War of the Words
reprinted, with permission, from Woid: a journal of visual language

Was it Aulus Gellius, darling? At any rate some minor Latin author once explained the true meaning of the word Liberal, as opposed to the common meaning in Antiquity.  As a rule a "liberal" was a free man (homo liber), someone with the time to read and think and practice the liberal arts, unlike his slaves. In the alternative explanation a liberal was someone freed by reading, not for reading. Aulus told the story of a liberal who was shipwrecked somewhere and managed to survive among the pirates, thanks to his reading knowledge which impressed the pirates greatly, somewhat like Orpheus taming the beasts.

[reprinted, with permission, from WOID: a journal of visual language.

WOID XVII-39. Happy Work Day!

Today for most, and for me, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, we celebrate Work Day. Yesterday we celebrated Labor Day by taking off from Work. Labor under Capitalism is the absence of Work as surely as Vanilla is the absence of Chocolate. That’s pretty much how Marx saw it circa May 1st, 1875, in a letter to the leaders of the German socialist movement. It’s not how the supporters of the American version of Labor Day see, or saw it: every year since 1882, the dialectical antithesis of Work has been hot-dogs, hanging, and maybe reading an editorial in the New York Times about how Labor is weak because this year, like last year and every year before, the workers spend their time off not working instead of parading down the street.

WOID XVII-38. The dogs bay. The caravan passes.

There's an old French comedy in which Gérard Philippe plays a young liberal speaking out for Freedom in an ornate Old Regime salon - the year being 1788.5. Furious, the Lord of the Manor turns to his periwigged lackeys: "Throw him out!" he bellows, but the lackeys keep on listening. "Throw him out? What for?" says one. "You know, what he's saying is pretty interesting," says the other lackey.

WOID XVII-30. Planet Marx [III]: Dialectic Harder

In practice the Yanqui Way of Knowledge never strays too far from the medieval thought-structure of the syllogism: "Mouse is a noun; a mouse eats cheese; hence a noun eats cheese." To put this in contemporary terms: if the phenomenon of cheese-eating occurs every time a mouse and a cheese are in geographic correlation, then other occurrences (such as the essential nouniness of mice) may be said to correlate with essential cheesiness. If, however, we find (after five years on a Government grant) that there is no particular correlation between the presence of a noun and the disappearance of the cheese then we must revise our previous hypothesis, with the help of another grant.

A friend – let’s call him I - was called up a few years ago for Grand Jury, Drugs. It was a thoroughly depressing experience. Cop followed cop, Assistant DA Assistant DA, and every single defendant was indicted. I thought the cops were lying, and the ADAs were pushing for indictments with very little evidence. The worst came a day before a holiday, when everybody was in a hurry to get home and two black men were indicted on the strength of witnesses who had seen "two black men" in the vicinity of the deal. In Manhattan.

WOID XVII-26 PLANET MARX [I]: Marx for Demmies

He was despised, rejected, a scruffy, bearded Jew who spent much of his life in exile. He comforted the downtrodden, yet said he had come to set brother against brother, father against son. After his death his followers expected Paradise on earth, the end of History, but a century later the dream was shattered, the true believers a handful of cultists.