Fairy Tales

Kia weaves some thinking about Pan's Labyrinth and her reading of Benjamin Constant on usurpation into a rich post, of which this is but a sliver:

When this logic of despotism establishes itself it spreads downward; the whole system is maintained by lesser functionaries who, to prove their competence, must be sharp, resolute and prompt in dispatching threats to order, in neutralizing anything that may undermine their place. While they thus wage a quiet war against external enemies (the journalist who demands information, the writer of protest songs, the dissenting activist, the widow of the partisan denied a pension, the victim of land theft) they are waging another secret war against themselves, against the enemy within. People who are willing to make a sacrifice of their inner selves will naturally turn to making a sacrifice of others. More.

Prepare to launch

"As for Mabuse, it would be impossible to make in the United States: the idea of the superior race, of a race of masters, simply doesn't exist. In Germany, even when you are dead, you must obey, "your corpse must obey." I don't believe there is another people who are as ready to die without knowing why."  Fritz Lang: interviews

numbers game

... the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency. Benjamin #8.

Volcker also understood that financial markets need to be regulated. Reagan wanted someone who did not believe any such thing, and he found him in a devotee of the objectivist philosopher and free-market zealot Ayn Rand. Stiglitz #1

Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Eco #3.


...when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... Source concealed by the New York Times.

When repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top. There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risktaking. Stiglitz #2.

"Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." W

...the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death. Eco #11.

The flood of liquidity made money readily available... But it should have been clear that we were living on borrowed money and borrowed time. Stiglitz #3.

During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. Benjamin #6.

The rating agencies, like the investment banks that were paying them, believed in financial alchemy...Stiglitz #4

Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise. Eco #12

The administration talked about confidence building, but what it delivered was actually a confidence trick. Stiglitz #5

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. Benjamin #8.

The above involved Capitalist Fools, Joseph Stiglitz; Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt, Umberto Eco; On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin. Ayn Rand via Mystic Bourgeoisie.

Mute the Press

It's a little difficult to tell through a search of the New York Times whether it has actually covered certain stories or not. Ok, more than a little difficult, it's totally impossible. Insert your search term and retrieve however many links to "free previews" of stories going back a ways. Since the previews are snips containing the search term, there's often no way to say for sure that the story is actually centered on someone, or just mentions them in passing.

It might be worthwhile to ask how it can be that the News Organ that pretends for all the world to be the authoritative newspaper of record on all newsworthy things can simultaneously withhold from public view whether it even is or is not a source for stories that one might wish to research.

I happened to be trying to see whether the Times has ever done a story about Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. You can do the search yourself, and let me know if you have any better luck. She's mentioned in passing, dissed in a film review, sort of a tangent quote here and there. But her feat of becoming a serious and respected conveyor of news by quilting together hundreds of small, local media to build what's essentially a grassroots national alternative radio and television network -- a story that would seem, in the information age, at least as relevant as the release of a new DVD of Mario Bava films, this story seems to remain to be reported by the Mother of all NewsFitToPrint.

I was checking on whether the Times had gotten around to Goodman after looking at and participating in this thread regarding, in part, the quality of information, the level of public discourse, in the US these days, in light of a pointer there to Umberto Eco's remarks on the nature of Fascism, "Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt."

The question being, how a fifth rate anything like Mr. Geo. W. Bush could talk his way not just into the most powerful position on Earth, but then further wartalk his way right up into his own arse with the most reductive view of reality, the most puerile ideas about life, politics, and co-existence, the most dumbed-down, porcine representations of others and evil and freedumb etc. ever offered to the USian political arena -- clusters of idiotic speech and venal nonthought that would not pass muster in a 5th grade classroom in Boston in 1828. I mean, it makes one wonder.

Wonder, e.g., what illumination was not offered by mainstream media. Yes, it's a blogger's duty to wonder that. But what specifically seemed wonderful is that so many instances of lucidity present themselves, a spectrum of informed visions of life and reality that just don't seem to make it into public consciousness.

When was the last time Naomi Klein, eg, was invited on the nightly news to ask,

When you can create such a booming economy around war and disaster, around destruction and reconstruction, over and over and over again, what is your peace incentive? Democracy Now

(via here)

Klein, Goodman, and a great many others are spectral nonentities, Amurhikan Non-idols. Unsurvivables. They never got to the island in the first place. Gesturing vainly under the giant Mute Button we call Secure Corporate USian Media, or SCUM.

The Times cannot countenance Goodman. Or, it can, but it would then have to make up stuff about why its representation of the world seems so vacuous by comparison. Instead of taking an honest journalistic position that might say, "this journalist's critique is one we should emulate," it's so much easier to just hit mute, and kill any search utility while you're at it.