Acephalous

Dear The Media,

I understand why you're reluctant to identify Wade Michael Page as a white supremacist, but I'm an expert in visual rhetoric and I'm here to help you out. Consider the photograph of Page you're currently using:

There are some subtle clues as to Page's ideology hidden in this image. First:

That is a Nazi flag. You can tell because it contains a Swastika in a white circle surrounded by a red hem. It is highly unlikely that someone hung it because it means "good luck" in Sanskrit. Also:

The repeating patten on that guitar strap is the Confederate Battle Flag. It reminds white people of those glorious antebellum days when blacks were in their place and no real American had even heard of Muslims. Also:

That is a Celtic cross. It is the most favorite symbol of the good people at Stormfront.org. Also:

That is the number fourteen. It stands for the Fourteen Words most dear to oppressed white men in America today. Those words are "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children."

So let me assure you: if you have correctly identified the man in the photograph above, you don't need to "speculate" as to whether he was a white supremacist. Because there's no room for speculation. That man in that picture is a white supremacist. Whether his white supremacist beliefs influenced his decision to murder peaceful Sikhs, that may well be a matter for debate. But that man? The one in the picture? He's a white supremacist.

You're welcome.

Who taught you how to mourn?

The conservative reaction to Thursday’s memorial service betrays both their myopia and desperation.  From the opening prayer—some “Indian tribal thing” according to Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff—to the ubiquitous complaints about the audience’s reaction to a speech that even The Corner awarded the highest possible mark, the implication is that there is but a single proper way to celebrate a life and that any deviation from said way diminishes those being memorialized.  The problem with that argument is that it’s false on its face.  Were I to die an Irish cop my life might be celebrated with drink and song.  If I were Ronnie James Dio, my life might be punctuated by heavy metal.  If I were Jim Henson, I would go to my grave to the sound of singing puppets.  Plainly put, if you criticize the way someone runs a memorial service because it differs from how you would, you reveal more about yourself than you might think.

For example, you reveal that you have likely never been close enough to someone of a different religion, race or class to attend a service for or with them.  I can only imagine what critics of the memorial might do if they attended a Jewish one: “Why are these people screaming and ripping off their clothes?  Why is everyone pinning shreds of ripped cloth to their suits?  Who organized all these pins?”  If you actually have been close enough to someone of a different religion, race or class to attend a service for or with them and are still criticizing this execution of this one, you reveal the emptiness of your criticisms and the baseness of your convictions.  By attempting to whip into a frenzy those who have never attended a service outside their ilk, you demonstrate that you care more for the success of your political compatriots than you do those being mourned.

But if a large part of your constituency consists of people who attend mega-churches and you complain about this:

You reveal yourself as a member of the Church of SASQUATCH ISREAL and will never be able to refudiate those who rightfully mock you.

The Big Three of Jewish Libels

Via the incomparable Carl Pyrdum:

My only worry is that in all this hubbub, the indexical value of “blood libel” is being overlooked. The reason why we need a special phrase like “blood libel” to denote lies told about what Jews do with the blood of baby Christians is the sheer number of libels which Jews have had to contend over the years.

He gets to the "ass libel" and the "leper libel" soon enough. (No, neither of us is kidding.)

Andy McCarthy hates being called what his words prove he is.

This post plain confuses me. It opens with a lament:

Having worked for a very long time with moderate Muslims, I can tell you it’s disheartening to be called an Islamophobe.

Then demonstrates that that epithet, along with a few others, is well-deserved:

I have long argued that: (1) Islam is not a moderate doctrine; (2) Islamists who practice terror and are otherwise aggressive toward non-Muslims (and toward Muslims who disagree with them) are not twisting or perverting Islam; (3) this does not mean that the Islamist interpretation of Islam is the only possible viable interpretation; but (4) a concrete theology of “moderate Islam” does not exist (even though there are plenty of moderate Muslims) and therefore it will have to be created; and (5) because it will have to be non-literal and reformist, it will have a tough time competing with Islamist ideology which, however noxious it may be, has the advantage of being firmly rooted in Islamic scripture. Nevertheless, (6) Islamist ideology is anti-constitutional and anti-freedom in many of its core particulars, so that (7) if, instead of letting them pretend to be “moderates,” we force Islamists to defend their beliefs, we will marginalize them—at least in our society, which (8) will empower true moderate Muslim reformers and—maybe—give them the space they need to solidify a coherent, moderate Islam that embraces the West, and in particular the separation of secular public life from privately held religious beliefs.

If "Islam is not a moderate doctrine," how is it that he has "worked for a very long time with moderate Muslims"? How can McCarthy distinguish between "moderate Muslims" like his coworkers and those Muslims who merely "pretend to be 'moderate'"? Where does he believe these "moderate Muslims" come from? Are they Amabo—secret Christians pretending to be Muslim—whose moderate views are the result of never reading the Koran or attending services at a mosque or keeping halal?

McCarthy attempts to dismiss such questions in a parenthetical of dubious explanatory power:

a concrete theology of 'moderate Islam' does not exist (even though there are plenty of moderate Muslims) and therefore it will have to be created[.]

Granting their existence in an aside is purely strategic—if he fails to do so, he will be disheartened again, so he grants their existence, then explains all the many ways in which people like them can never come to exist.

It's the political equivalent of holding up a duck and beaver; explaining that no matter how much you coax them, they refuse to fuck; then astonishing the crowd by pulling a duck-billed platypus out of your hat. You have no idea how that strange beast came to be, nor are you interested—all you want to do is prove that ducks never fuck beavers. Which is an admirable goal, I suppose, if you want to tell the world that your lack of intellectual curiosity is matched in its profundity only by the pride you take in being ignorant.

The ultimate irony, of course, is his claim that this new moderate Islam "will have to be non-literal and reformist." McCarthy openly and unselfconsciously confesses that religious beliefs based on one-thousand-year-old books—or, for that matter, political beliefs based on two-hundred-year-old documents—might be obsolete, if not outright dangerous, when the people who possess them interpret their sacred texts literally.

His opposition to literalism as an interpretive mode is to be commended, or would be, if it extended to the Old Testament or the Constitution. But neither of those texts are "anti-constitutional and anti-freedom," at least not in the Platonic form in which they exist in the minds of people who have never read them.

We're Mormons, Sort of, Every Last One of Us

For reasons I'm reluctant to explain, I've been reading Grant Palmer's An Insider's View of Mormon Origins even though it's addressed "to other second-, third-, and fourth-generation Mormons who will better understand where I'm coming from" (9).  Palmer, as you probably surmised, is himself a fourth-generation Mormon.  But in one of those gossamer dovetailings* that follow any period of sustained research on two entirely unrelated subjects, I think Palmer's attitude toward the Mormon Church (which, if I'm not mistaken, recently excommunicated him) epitomizes the healthy attitude literary critics ought to take toward our pieties.  He writes:

We like to hear confirmations that everything is as we assumed it was: our pioneer ancestors were heroic and inspired and the Bible and the Book of Mormon are in perfect harmony, for instance.  We never learn in church that the Book of Abraham papyri were discovered and translated by Egyptologists or that researchers have studied Native American genes and what the implications are for the Book of Mormon.  Questions about such topics are discouraged because they create tension; they are considered inappropriate or even heretical.  This approach has isolated many of us from the rest of the world or from reality itself in those instances when we insist on things that are simply untrue.

I know the analogy only has so much mileage, but I think it may be an accurate account of the group dynamics propping up once-scientific but still-fashionable theories in the academic humanities.  The analogy also suggests that, like most of  the Mormons I've had the pleasure of knowing, the people doing the propping are earnest, intelligent and hard-working and not at all deserving of the condescending opprobrium sometimes issued from the mouths of self-righteous "rational extremists" like Y.T.**

This Draft Will Be The Death of Me

Or not.  I've taken to saving posts as drafts and then never publishing them, thinking that I'll one day have time to edit them with the attention they deserve.  What I've got in the queue right now are:

• one from the archives about the conspicuous absence of Darwin and evolutionary thought from the polygamy debates in the 1890s (and this isn't a silly "male-male eroticism is absent from the work of anchoresses" article, but a serious and amusing look at the extent to which both sides in the polygamy debate avoided anything that might possibly lead to the mention of Darwin and his magical wonderful theory of evolution)
• a look at the treatment of new historicism in Theory's Empire in which I come to the conclusion that I'm not the new historicist I thought I was, but am one of the other ones, the ones with the white hats and wits about them
• an increasingly long commentary on The Orchid Thief that I'll post after I teach it (lest the ideas get too concretized to allow me the intellectual flexibility I need to run a smooth, productive discussion)
• another installment of A. Cephalous' Refutin' and Rebutin' Walter Benn Michaels Travelin' Extravaganza
• an utterly random post about the way David Simon's Homicide changed the way literary journalists write about group dynamics

Soon as any of 'em done to my satisfaction, you'll see 'em up here bells, whistles and all.  Until then, I take my leave of you, dear readers.

P.S.  I'm also done with John Bruce.  As easy and entertaining as it is to kick the boy, people whose opinions I respect have informed me that not only has he been down, he is down, and he'll remain down for the foreseeable future.  That being the case, kicking him for comedy ain't becoming.  So I'm done.

"Don't get all earnest on us, or next time we TotallyFukk you, we'll remove that thin sheet of protective cellophane."

So threatens Doris to Brad Carrigan in George Saunder's new story Brad Carrigan, American.  I'm ambivalent about "postmodern American fiction," especially when it's a Barthian "satire" that's "satirizing" objects it's "deconstructing" out of existence.  I find Barth blah.  Except for The Sot-Weed Factor, which I love, but only because the objects of its satire--byzantine Dickensian novels and the works of Horatio Alger--are viable satirical targets.  (Reducing the 60's "Cultural Revolution" to a "Campus," as he does elsewhere, then simultaneously satirizing both the revolution and the Academy is mighty clever--and at times hilarious--but, targeting both ensures he'll always miss one.)  So when I discovered the works of George Saunders, I only read them reluctantly.  They're too clever by half, but they're not clever in the Barthian mold; they're clever in the way David Foster Wallace's works are clever.  James Woods' description of Wallace's appeal applies equally well to Saunders:

Still, the relentlessness of his commitment to decomposign his own language can yield an authentic American loneliness, a hollowed space filled only by brand names and the sound of corporate jingling: "In his spare time Terry Schmidt read, watched satellite television, collected rare and uncirculated US coins, ran discriminant analyses of TFG statistics on his Apple PowerBook, worked in the small home laboratory he'd established in his condominium's utility room, and power-walked on a treadmill in a line of eighteen identical treadmills on the mezzanine-level CardioDeck of a Bally Total Fitness franchise just east of the Prudential Center on Mies van der Rohe Way, where he sometimes also used the sauna."

I include the Wallace quotation to bolster Woods' point, a good one, that there're three paths down which contemporary American novelists scuffle.  The first leads to a rejection of contemporary American life in favor of a sometimes superficial (Updike) and sometime penetrating (Roth) analysis of how-we-got-here-from-there.  The second path, blazed by Barth but currently populated with the MFA detritus of the Carter, Reagan, and Bush years, leads to the Funhouse, where everyone wears grotesque ironic smiles and nothing can, does, or will ever matter oustide of charming formulations about how nothing can, does, or will ever matter.  David Foster Wallace and George Saunders pilgrimage the third path; they exploit the techniques of the Barthians to recoup the meaningfulness of life; they write what I'll call "allegories of rationalization." 

What is an allegory of rationalization?  Read the Saunders.  It'll click.  If it doesn't, you can make like Brad and go "up on to the roof, install the roof platform, duct-tape the AIDS baby to the roof platform, then come directly down, borrow your butter, and go home."

EDIT: Just found another of his stories on the New Yorker website.  To wit:

"My Guilty Pleasures"

Those of us in the "literary game" often have "guilty pleasures" that we indulge in when not translating Cicero from the Latin into the German and then back into the Latin, to see how funny it sounds. My favorite guilty pleasure is watching the new TV series "The Bachelor: Who Screws the Best?," in which an ugly, poor, middle-aged married guy has sex with a series of young women who have been misled into believing that he is handsome, young, and rich, after which he decides which of them to propose to, at which time they are notified that he is actually ugly, poor, and middle-aged. I especially loved the moment when Desiree, the series' "bad girl," said, "Well, I thought there was a lot of hair on his back, but, still, I felt we were really connecting."

Also good is the new series "The Bachelor: Actually He Is Dead," in which a group of young women attempt to win the favor of a propped-up, moldering corpse that they have been told is a young, handsome rich guy who is alive.

It's still sort of hard for me to believe that none of them--not the Lawyer, not the Senior Account Rep, not the Homeless Advocate--noticed the team of people behind the bachelor, manipulating his limbs via a system of wires, while a tape recorder on his chest emitted sayings such as "I guess I'm just looking for someone who'll like me for me, even when parts of me fall off" and "Well, as far as my house goes, all I can say is, it's very small and made of wood."

I am also looking forward to the new series "The Bachelor: So What If I'm a Raccoon?," in which a group of young women live for six months in a mansion in the South of France with a raccoon they have been told is a human being who recently came into a lot of money. The last episode, where the young women all gang up on Jake, kill him, make a hat out of his fur, and eat him, promises to be a ratings bonanza. Also worthy of note is the new series "The Hag," in which a very tiny, wiry woman who is over a hundred years old is locked in a mansion in the South of France with three thousand muscular young men, who must fight one another with clubs and mallets to see which of them will be allowed to leave the house. When all of the men but one are gone, she reveals that she is actually a beautiful young heiress, at which time he reveals that he is actually a raccoon, after which she has sex with him, kills him, then makes a hat out of him and wears it to a day spa.

But, if I had to choose, I guess I would have to say that my favorite guilty pleasure is the new series "How Weird Is That?," in which a group of bureaucrats who have never themselves fought in a war are locked in the "Decision House" and allowed to select any country in the world for America to go to war with, for reasons they must invent on the spot. The candid shots of clueless families in the chosen country being blown apart as American bombers pass by overhead, along with the quick cuts back to the Decision House, where a group of young women are deciding which of the bureaucrats to marry (having been told that the bureaucrats are actually leaders of a great nation), make this a real "can't miss" program.