Postcards from the Counterculture: A Fosco Lives! Special Report

Unless you live in a college town, you may not be familiar with yesterday's 4/20 holiday (it's "clever" because yesterday's date was 4/20). It's that day of the year when pot smokers come together at 4:20 PM to celebrate "cannabis culture" by smoking up--often in public. It is a particularly popular holiday at two major US public universities (as noted in this article in the NY Times): University of Colorado at Boulder and (wait for it) Fosco's own University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). In fact, the holiday has become so closely associated with UCSC that a picture of UCSC's 4/20 event is used to illustrate the 4/20 entry on Wikipedia. (And yes, the above picture is of UCSC's mascot, the Banana Slug, smoking pot.)

The event has always been unsanctioned by UCSC, of course. However, as the holiday has become larger and more public in recent years, the UCSC administration has become more concerned about the questionable PR. This year, UCSC sent an email to the parents of all first-year students asking them to discourage their sons or daughters from participating. As the email suggested (with keen insight into the mind of today's youth):

"I encourage you to talk with your student about his or her plans for 4/20. Ask direct questions about the choices they make and express your expectations regarding marijuana, alcohol or other drug use. Although students may not initiate discussion on this topic, your opinions and expectations can influence their behavior."

"Golly, Beaver, I sure hope you aren't planning to take the pot on April 20th. Remember that anyone who offers you drugs is not a true friend."

But that was just Prong ONE of UCSC's two-pronged attack on 4/20. Prong TWO was to essentially shut down the campus for the whole afternoon, in an attempt to prevent easy access to the Porter College Meadow (traditional home of the gathering). This meant shutting down the bus routes, closing the West Entrance to campus, and beefing up parking enforcement. Of course, there was added benefit of inconveniencing any non-pot-smokers who remained on campus: "Can't get home? Blame the potheads!"

Normally, Fosco would strenuously avoid an event like this, considering that he considers any group larger than twenty-five people to be an unpleasantly large crowd. And when that group is made up of pot-smoking hippies... well, let's just say that Fosco has aesthetic objections to "cannabis culture." However, this year found Fosco in class at Porter College until 4 PM on 4/20. Essentially, Fosco was a within an easy quarter-mile walk of the whole gathering: could his inner anthropologist resist a glimpse of the spectacle? Would a giant crowd of pot-smoking hippies be enough to convince Fosco to stay on campus for an extra half hour?

Yes, of course, I went to look. You would have too. And this is what I saw...

By 4 PM, the people walking toward Porter Meadow had become a steady line (see Monterey Bay in the background?).


It's kind of like watching pot-loving ants, no? And look at the smoke cloud.


Here's a view of the line looking back from the Meadow:


One thing I didn't mention yet: this was the hottest day we've had this year. It was 97 fucking degrees. (And yes, even with my canteen of water, I was regretting the quarter-mile walk by this point--anthropology is hard.) Of course, the heat did give the Santa Cruz Sentinel the opportunity to use the "twice-baked" pun in their coverage, so I suppose it was worth it.

One option for beating the heat was to smoke in the woods that surrounds the meadow:


Other heat-beating options I observed: umbrellas, parasols, shirtlessness, sweating profusely. These photos were taken around 4:05 or so--note the giant crowd and smoke cloud.



For the first time in the history of UCSC's 4/20 event, there were some party-crashers: local Christian nutballs showed up with signs to protest. Seriously!



Don't these guys have something better to do? Like picketing AIDS funerals? Or throwing blood on abortion doctors?

This guy was my favorite:


Who would have thought that God could hate so many things! Luckily, this guy has made a list for us. Can we go to a closeup? Yes?


Let's just take a moment and convert this sign into a list.

People Who Will Be Judged (Presumably Unfavorably) By God

• Sex Addicts (tough luck, David Duchovny)
  
• Baby Killers
  
• Witches
  
• Dikes [sic] on Bikes
  
• Pencil Neck Weak Kneed Gutless Men (hmmm...)
  
• So Called Christians
  
• Pot Smoking Little Devils (Bingo!)
  
• False Religions
  
• Lewd Women (well, duh!)
  
• Porno Freaks
  
• Homos
  
• [something I can't quite read]
  
• [another something I can't quite read]
  
• Sports Nuts (Seriously?)
  
• Perverts
  
• Racists
  
• Money Lovers
  
• Two Faced People (sorry, Harvey Dent)
  
• Rebellious Women
  
• All Non-Homemakers (wow, I bet these guys get lots of dates)
  
• Party Animals
  
• Drunkards
  
• Jesus Mockers
  
• And Catholics...
  

Whew. I don't know about you, but that's the kind of God I could really get into. Watch out, Sports Nuts.

Anyway... the golden moment, 4:20 PM PDT, finally arrived and the smoke got even thicker:






These pictures don't quite capture the moment adequately--for one thing, you can't hear all of the drums. Consequently, allow me to offer the brief video that I recorded (and uploaded to YouTube):



Sadly, I cannot make this experience available to you in "Smell-O-Vision" because, as my college roommate David noted, the whole thing "must have smelled unspeakably awful." I cannot disagree.

All in all, I managed to stave off incipient heat-stroke until about 4:30 when I gave up and walked back to my car at Porter. I wasn't the only one leaving:




Caption: "We'll always have these stupid memories."

Walking back, I passed the only official UCSC presence at the event:



And what did I learn? Well, for one thing, I thought there would actually be a more communal atmosphere at this thing. I had envisioned people passing joints and conversing. Instead, everyone just broke up into their own friend groups--and most of them weren't actually very nice about it. I had kinda been expecting to be offered some smoke (not that I would have indulged), but that didn't seem to be the vibe. I've been to much friendlier football tailgates. And I've had more pot offered to me at concerts.

For another thing, I wonder how many actual UCSC students were there. Walking down, I was in front of a group from Berkeley. In the Sentinel coverage, they interviewed students from everywhere but UCSC: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, CSU-Monterey Bay, Cabrillo College. N.B., some kid from Berkeley was named in the Sentinel coverage as "Skittles." Delightful! Also suprising: I didn't see anyone I knew there. I've been at this school for three years and have a pretty large circle of acquaintances: colleagues, grad students, current students, former students, etc. Of course, it's possible that my students saw and avoided me...

Random 4/20 observations:

• You could not pay me enough to eat the vegan food being sold onsite by the Hare Krishnas.
  
• Hippie guys are not very attractive.
  
• God is surprisingly wrathful. That's probably bad news for my afterlife plans.
  
• Too many people brought their dogs (which are prohibited on campus). And too many of them were pit bulls.
  
• I thought there would be more music (of the non-bongo variety). Where were all the people I saw walking with acoustic guitars?
  
• It was SO FUCKING HOT.
  

All in all, I think I learned some important lessons. And I hope that I have created a precious anthropological record--especially for those of you who wonder what undergrad life is like nowadays.

Oh, and of course, I will NEVER do this again.

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Amazon Glitch Roundup

This has certainly turned into the internet obsession of the day, no? I wrote two posts in haste last night and called for a temporary boycott of Amazon.

More news came out today. I am grateful to the intrepid AEJ for doing updates in the comments here; in fact, I think her comments are so useful that they deserve a place in an actual post. I reprint them, in order, here:

This is an interesting wrinkle - a hacker is claiming credit for this whole thing, saying he created an exploit that takes advantage of Amazon's "Mark this as inappropriate" tag. Of course, I'd be happy to hear that this was indeed not something Amazon did itself, so I'm trying not to allow my preference for this to be true to outweigh reasonable skepticism; still, I would say it's plausible. (Both because this type of filtering would be idiotic as a business move, and Amazon isn't usually idiotic, and because there is a whiff of mischief about the whole thing - from the beginning I've thought this had to be the work of an individual, whether within Amazon or not, rather than corporate policy.)

More at Ars Technica.

This will be my last comment - sorry to keep coming back, but I've been really bothered by this so I keep looking for news and I'm just passing along stuff as I hear it... Anyway, there are now conflicting stories - see these two posts on Salon - coming out of Amazon (not surprising, since as others have noted they hardly want to admit either to being hacked or to doing this intentionally) - but the upshot is that there are apparently something close to 58,000 titles affected and they're fixing it now. Whether someone outside actually found a vulnerability and pranked them or someone in France (really? France is our scapegoat?) mistagged stuff or whatever, I think the possibility that this is a corporate policy is vanishingly small. As the Amazon spokesperson put it, "embarrassing and ham-fisted," definitely; the good news is I think it really was a coding debacle rather than a homophobic salvo. So while I'm still irked, as others have noted, that they haven't just apologized to the writers and readers affected, I'm taking some small solace in the current look of things.

Nice work, AEJ. You've convinced me to suspend judgment for a bit, especially as I agree with your suggestion that that the likelihood of this being a corporate policy is "vanishingly small." Of course, I would like to see all of this get fixed within a reasonable amount of time.

Of course, one of the annoying things here is that we are unlikely to get a thorough and accurate explanation of what actually happened--or, at least we are unlikely to get that explanation anytime soon. Until we know for sure, Gawker/Valleywag offers this handy guide to the possible causes. And if you have wondered whether there are ways to analyze this whole debacle using anthropology, allow me to recommend this post by Ted Gideonse. Ted seems to have taken a page from Obama's book, because (as you'll see in his post) he's clearly the coolest head in the room right now.

There is a good lesson from this, though: gays and their allies are finally mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. We're coming for you next, Mormons!

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Amazon's Attitude Toward Homosexuality

[Fosco thanks his former student Laura for pointing out the following problem.]

Something is seriously amiss at Amazon. As I noted earlier, Amazon has removed many gay/lesbian books from its ranking system because they are considered "adult." While this is repulsive in and of itself, there is a further problem. Apparently, these books are being excluded from searches at the site. Otherwise, how might you explain the results of an Amazon search for the word "homosexuality"? Here is the screen shot (click to see it full-sized):

Yes, it appears that the top search result for "homosexuality" is a book that claims to be a guide to preventing homosexuality. Note, this book's Amazon sales rank is #119,767. And yet, somehow it is the top hit for a search of the term "homosexuality." Does this seem problematic to you? Yeah, me too.

Please join the Amazon boycott until this problem is resolved.

N.B., for those of you who are wondering, the only way to prevent possible homosexuality in your kids is to not have kids. For any parents who are worried about this, I highly recommend that solution.

UPDATE: As AEJ notes in the comments below, this does not seem to be a policy decision on Amazon's part. As of 4/14/09, I am rescinding my call for a boycott. Hooray! I can spend 10% of my income at Amazon again!

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How Will We Know When Judith Butler Cracks the Bestseller List?

Remember when you were a horny teenager and you went to websites like Amazon.com to look for really sexy adult content, like books on Queer Theory? Then, remember how you used to order boxes of those books, hoping your mom wouldn't open the telltale smiling box?

When I was twelve, my good friend C used to keep a dog-eared copy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet under his mattress. Sometimes, late at night, we would read (by flashlight) sentences like the one below, barely able to keep our hands off our pubescent erections:

At the same time, however, just as it comes to seem questionable to assume that cultural constructs are peculiarly malleable ones, it is also becoming increasingly problematical to assume that grounding an identity in biology or 'essential nature' is a stable way of insulating it from social interference.

Wow, I get hot just hearing those words again.

A few years later, I used to sneak out of the house to attend late night "Queer Theory" parties with some of the more sexually-advanced students at my high school. We never had one of our teen orgies without a copy of Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. Trust me, there is nothing that gets teens off like a careful historical study of gay marriage in the Middle Ages.

Okay, okay: why am I doing this whole facetious riff? Well, because, as the LA Times reports, Amazon.com has a quiet new policy of labeling certain books as containing "adult" content. As the LAT blog notes, an "adult" content tag removes the book from sales rankings, Amazon's bestseller lists, and "in some cases, being de-ranked also means being removed from Amazon's search results."

At first glance, this may seem reasonable enough: maybe you don't want your tween coming up with Bukake porn when she's searching for the new Jonas Brothers CD. However, the execution of this policy seems to be suspiciously homophobic. As the LAT reports:

Our research shows that these books have lost their ranking: "Running with Scissors" by Augusten Burroughs; "Rubyfruit Jungle" by Rita Mae Brown, "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel, "The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1" by Michel Foucault, "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison (2005 Plume edition), "Little Birds: Erotica" by Anais Nin, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominque Bauby (1997 Knopf edition), "Maurice" by E.M. Forster (2005 W.W. Norton edition) and "Becoming a Man" by Paul Monette, which won the 1992 National Book Award.

Books that remain ranked include: "Naked" by David Sedaris; "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller; "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis; "Wifey" by Judy Blume; "The Kiss" by Kathryn Harrison; the photobooks "Playboy: Helmut Newton" and "Playboy: Six Decades of Centerfolds"; "Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs; "Incest: From 'A Journal of Love'" by Anais Nin; "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominque Bauby (2007 Vintage International edition), "Maurice" by E.M. Forster (2005 Penguin Classics edition).

Certianly [sic] many of the books that are no longer ranked are no more "adult" than many of those that are -- as the list above shows, the same book, by different publishers, might meet either fate. And Kindle editions of some books remain ranked. "Unfriendly Fire," for example, is #1 in Gay and Lesbian Nonfiction on the Kindle -- even as the hardcover of the book, which was released on March 3, does not show up at all when searched for.

For those of you who are keeping score at home, there is a suspiciously large number of gay-themed books that end up being labeled "adult"--including academic works like Foucault's History of Sexuality.

Fosco decided to pursue this line of inquiry, testing which books in his academic specialty of queer theory/gay and lesbian studies made it onto the "adult content" list. According to my research, the following important academic texts have been removed from Amazon's ranking system:

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Epistemology of the Closet and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
  
• Judith Butler: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'
  
• Lee Edelman: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
  
• Carla Freccero: Queer/Early/Modern (a book that may or may not be by one of Fosco's advisors).
  
• Thomas Laqueur: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
  
• Michael Warner: Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory
  
• Marjorie Garber: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life
  
• Leo Bersani: Homos
  
• John Boswell: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe

Please note that every one of these books is an academic book, dealing with literary interpretation, historical research, or sociological analysis. Some of them are pretty difficult to read--theory-wise, that is. However, there is nothing particularly "adult" about most of these books, unless by "adult" you mean containing language that is over the head of your average teenager (or, for that matter, your average American adult). But that's not what Amazon means, is it?

I suppose it is hard to be too upset about a policy that may prevent teens from learning about obscure academic books. Even so, I would suggest that there are plenty of queer teens who could find books like those of John Boswell to be meaningful and/or useful. A rigorous history that reveals the lies that the Catholic Church tells about the Church's historical attitudes toward homosexuality? For that right teen, that kind of book could even be life-saving.

Even more upsetting is my discovery that Beth Loffreda's Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder is also included in this "adult" list. Loffreda's book is not academic: it's beautiful and sad and political. It's an extended meditation on anti-gay hate and how the Matthew Shepard murder revealed certain fault lines across our culture. It's a complicated book that refuses the easy answers. And it is certainly not "adult" or obscene--unless, of course, you consider anti-gay murder to be obscene (but that's not what Amazon means, is it?). What it is, for everyone--gay, straight, youth, adult, is a must-read. And yet, Amazon has tried to make this book harder to find. I think that is unforgivable.

Though I'm not computer scientist, it's pretty clear that Amazon's identification of a book as "adult" is based on some sort of text-based algorithm that presumably scans the titles or descriptions of books for certain "adult" words. And yes, I recognize that any algorithm of this sort will never provide a perfect discrimination between "adult" and "non-adult" books. What is equally clear, however, is that this algorithm is using words like "sexuality" and "queer" and "gay" to define a book as adult. And that is unacceptable. I'm not demanding that Amazon stop using an automated process to determine "adult" books; however, I do demand that Amazon fine-tune this algorithm to reflect the fact that gay themes are not "adult."

And so, until Amazon can demonstrate that they have improved this practice or until they stop doing this at all, I will not purchase anything from them. Nor will I provide Amazon links at this website. I would encourage you to join me in this project. (Besides, this might provide a good temporary excuse to shop at your local independent bookstore!)

UPDATE: As Jeremy notes below, Amazon is calling the whole thing a "glitch." However, as Gawker reports, there are several reasons to question the "glitch" explanation. One of them being that, before this became a PR nightmare, Amazon called the whole thing a policy decision. Oops!

UPDATE (4/14/09): It now seems pretty clear to me that this was either an honest mistake on Amazon's part or an act of malicious hacking beyond Amazon's control. Consequently, I'm going to re-embed my Amazon links on this site.

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How to Make a Zombie (in One Bloody Step!)

Before he came to UCSC for his PhD in Literature, Fosco did MA coursework at a depressing commuter university somewhere in the snowy Midwest. One of Fosco's professors there was a specialist in the work of prolific contemporary writer Joyce Carol Oates (aren't academic specialties sad sometimes?). This professor once admitted to Fosco that she'd only ever thrown away two books in her lifetime (this is always a fascinating confession for a bibilophile to make; Fosco himself has never thrown away a book--he even has a Book of Mormon floating around somewhere, and you know how Fosco feels about Mormons).

The two books that this book-loving professor discarded were:

• Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (which she accused, not incorrectly, of misogyny)
  
• A Joyce Carol Oates novella entitled Zombie

Naturally, Fosco took this confession as a challenge; consequently, he immediately signed up to do an in-class presentation on Zombie later in the quarter (Fosco can be kind of a dick when he wants to be). Luckily, the professor was a good sport about this.

But the joke was on Fosco: Zombie is a hella disturbing book. Fosco has mentioned before that JC Oates's fiction tends to be "ripped from the headlines." Well, Zombie is her attempt to get inside the mind of someone like Jeffry Dahmer. That mind, and consequently the entire novella, is absolutely terrifying and disgusting. The protagonist of Zombie kidnaps teenage boys and attempts to turn them into sex zombies by lobotomizing them through the eye socket with an ice pick. And if you think that Joyce Carol Oates left out the graphic parts, well, you'd be wrong. There are even drawings and diagrams in the margins of the text. Fosco gets nauseated just thinking about the book again. (Needless to say, Fosco's class presentation was, um, upsetting).

But because it's not enough that this story exists as a novella, someone had to go and write a stage play based on it. This is the recent brief NYT review of the play "Zombie," which is playing off-Broadway this spring--no doubt before beginning a run at Disney's New Amsterdam Theater in Times Square.

The Times review of "Zombie" is off-the-mark, I think. The author notes that

The banality of evil isn’t a new subject in literature or drama, but fiction rarely reveals this much this clearly.

Mr. Connington commits totally to this haunting characterization and leaves us wondering exactly what kind of people are walking the streets alongside us.

As a description of the novella, I think this is absolutely wrong. Zombie is not about "the banality of evil." Just because you cannot tell by looking at someone that he or she is a mass murderer doesn't mean that his or her evil is banal. There is a difference between the kind of evil that is performed selfishly or unthinkingly by everyday members of society (what we might call "banal" evil) and the evil that is perpetrated by homicidal maniacs like the protagonist of Zombie. The zombie-maker may think that his behavior is rational and that his desires are like those of everyone else, but his delusions of normality don't actually make him normal. This is Grade-A crazy evil in the novella, and I refuse to accept that "Zombie" is intended to teach us some lesson about the secret lives of our neighbors. This isn't American Beauty.

Instead, I see the point of Zombie (to the extent that it has anything as clumsy as a "point") to be an exercise in confronting the absolute otherness of evil. We are not meant to "imagine ourselves into" the mind of the protagonist; we are not meant to recognize ourselves in this novella. Rather, we are presented with a terrifying vision of otherness that we are only too happy to resist assimilating. I think this is an interesting project: a narrative that wants to prevent the identification of the reader. However, I don't know what the political/social consequences of such a project may be--especially in this case.

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My Favorite Palin

Fosco has surprised himself recently with the depth of his anger at conservatives who believe that abstinence education has any relation to teen pregnancy (hint: it doesn't). Whether or not babies are a blessing (and Fosco's jury is still out on that one), I just don't understand how people can refuse to support sex education programs that would help women to have babies when they want to. If we all agree that babies should be born into stable homes and relationships (and I don't know who can disagree with that), then I just don't see how this "abstinence only" charade or the "virginity pledge" fraud can be allowed to continue.

The most famous know-nothing on this subject, of course, is Governero Sarah Palin, whose support for abstinence-only programs has famously come home to roost in the uterus of her teen daughter Bristol. But how does Bristol feel about all of this? Is her head in the sand too (next to her mother's)?

Well, thanks to everyone's favorite Bell's palsy-ed lesbian, Greta Van Susteren, we now have the definitive interview with Sarah Palin's SportsCenter-named daughter. And here's the surprise: Bristol Palin isn't as stupid as her mother. And believe it or not, she even speaks in complete sentences (more or less)!

Let's go to the transcript. Now things start out a little rocky for our Bristol. She clearly needs a little time to warm up to her message:

VAN SUSTEREN: You know, it always is sort of a difficult thing, you know, when it's a question of youth, and no one ever really knows what to say to a young person in your situation.
BRISTOL: Yes. I don't know. I just -- I hope that people learn from my story and just, like, I don't know, prevent teen pregnancy, I guess.

As slogans go, this one lacks some punch. I don't really see this on a T-shirt: The Bristol Palin Foundation: Working to just, like, I don't know, prevent teen pregnancy, I guess. I think she needs to talk to some PR people.

But then Bristol starts to get more interesting. Like in this exchange, when she talks about her "choice" to have her baby:

VAN SUSTEREN: What didn't anybody get? What didn't people understand?
BRISTOL: That -- there's a lot of things. They thought that, like, my mom was going to make me have the baby, and it was my choice to have the baby. And it's just -- that kind of stuff just bothered me.
VAN SUSTEREN: And in terms of your mother making you have the baby, I mean, the whole issue of, I guess, the right -- the right to life and choice and things like that.
BRISTOL: Yes. Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: But this is your issue. This is your decision.
BRISTOL: Yes. And would have -- doesn't matter what my mom's views are on it. It was my decision, and I wish people would realize that, too.

Wait a minute--is Bristol Palin saying that she (as a woman) had a choice about whether to have her baby? She talks like that's a constitutional right or something! Women aren't supposed to have that--not in Palin's America!

A little farther into the interview, Bristol has made some progress with her slogan:

VAN SUSTEREN: What do your parents say about teen pregnancy?
BRISTOL: It's not something to strive for, I guess. It's just -- I don't know. I'm not the first person that it's happened to and I'm not going to be the last. But I don't know. I'd love for -- to be an advocate to prevent teen pregnancy because it's not, like, a situation that you want to strive for, I guess.

"Teen Pregnancy: It's not, like, a situation that you want to strive for, I guess." That's a little better. Still could use the touch of a good PR person, though.

But I've been saving the best exchange for last. It starts when Greta Van Pervert asks for some explicit Bristol-Levi sex details:

VAN SUSTEREN: I don't want to pry to personally, but I mean, actually, contraception is an issue here. Is that something that you were just lazy about or not interested, or do you have a philosophical or religious opposition to it or...
BRISTOL: No. I don't want to get into detail about that. But I think abstinence is, like -- like, the -- I don't know how to put it -- like, the main -- everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it's not realistic at all.
VAN SUSTEREN: Why?
BRISTOL: Because -- I don't want to get into details on this.
VAN SUSTEREN: Well, no, I don't mean personally, just big picture, not -- not necessarily about you, but...
BRISTOL: Because it's more and more accepted now.
VAN SUSTEREN: Among your classmates and kids your age?
BRISTOL: Among -- yes, among kids my age.

If you can get past Greta's question about Levi's condom use (and who wouldn't want to know what size he wears), you may notice that Bristol Palin points out that abstinence is "not realistic at all." Finally, I think Bristol Palin has said (badly) something worth saying: ABSTINENCE (or whatever) IS JUST NOT REALISTIC. AT ALL.

And by this point in the interview, perhaps you, like Fosco, are wondering whether Bristol's realization here also signals a shift in Sarah's thinking about abstinence. Has the pregnancy of her beloved teen daughter actually made her rethink her "abstinence-only" approach to sex ed? Has real life experience made a dent in her thick, ignorant cranium? Luckily, this is about the point when Sarah Palin herself "pops in" to answer a few Van Susteren questions. And we are treated to another titbit of Sarah Palin's nuanced worldview:

SARAH PALIN: Exactly. Exactly. So you get behind that, that ideal of, yes, abstinence, you know? Hey, don't get pregnant. Well, get beyond that when it happens, and then you deal with it. Life happens. Life happens and you deal with it, and Bristol's dealing with it wonderfully.

First of all, this woman's grammatical skill makes her daughter Bristol sound like Winston Churchill. But assuming that I'm parsing Sarah's "sentences" correctly, I read her meaning as follows: "First, you teach abstinence until it fails and then you deal with it. Because shit happens." Even purely as a parenting philosophy, this seems like sheer idiocy. But as public policy? You have got to be fucking kidding me. This woman shouldn't be running a 7-11, much less an American state.

And so, on behalf of America, I'd like to apologize to Bristol Palin. Bristol, I'm sorry your mom is a hillbilly idiot who didn't want you to learn about how not to get pregnant. And I'm sorry that people like your mom were in charge of your education in the state of Alaska, thereby preventing you from receiving meaningful sex ed. And as much you love being a mother (and as rewarding as it no doubt is for you--and I sincerely believe that it is rewarding), I am sorry that you didn't get to make that choice ten years from now--when you had a career and a stable relationship and a life.

See you in hell, Sarah Palin.

Jeb isn't the only funny one

Years ago, Fosco had a pretty good therapist (probably the best he's had). This was in Virginia and she was an older woman who had a great appreciation for traditional Southern manners (while, at the same time, being very politically liberal). It was around the time that George W. Bush stole his first presidential election and, naturally, Fosco needed to talk about the whole thing in therapy (remember how crushing it was?).

My therapist and I were both repulsed by GWB's callowness, of course. But to Fosco's surprise, she maintained that George H. W. Bush (Old Bush) was to be admired as something of a patrician gentleman--of the old-school Connecticut variety. My therapist was appalled that someone as honorable and well-bred as Old Bush could have produced someone like Young Bush (and she figured that Old Bush must have been appalled as well).

There is something to be said for this schema, I suppose. After all, there were points during GWB's tenure that Old Bush seemed mildly ashamed of his son. And there were certainly points where Young Bush seemed to enjoy thumbing his nose at the older generation of political gentlemen like his father.

Well, I think we can put to rest the question of Old Bush's gentlemanliness with this clip (from yesterday's Jezebel):



Wow. Yuck. It turns out that guy's not exactly a gentleman. He's actually kind of a dick.

Incidentally, Clinton is exactly right. He could never tell that joke in public. Of course, I'm not sure why he would want to.

Hell Across the Border

Lately, Fosco (like everyone cool) has been reading Roberto Bolaño. His head has been completely lost in the languid and terrifying city that is the centerpiece of Bolaño's masterpiece, 2666 (the city also appears briefly in several other Bolaño novels). He calls it "Santa Teresa," but it is actually meant to represent Ciudad Juárez. In his work, Bolaño has not only renamed Juárez, but has relocated it from Chihuahua (on the Texas border) to Sonora (on the Arizona border). However, despite this geographical sleight of hand, there is a strong attempt at realism in his depiction of the city.

At its heart, 2666 is something of a murder mystery (although the novel is so sprawling, it is probably wrong to try to pin down its "heart"). The mystery is horrifying: the rape, mutilation, and murder of hundreds of young women over more than a decade. What's more horrifying is that Bolaño is not making this up.

As a 2002 article in Mother Jones notes:

And so Mexico's fourth-largest city retains its nickname as "the capital of murdered women." The city of 1.5 million, where an acrid haze of factory smoke and car exhaust hangs in the air, is known for having one of the highest crime rates in Mexico; in 2001 alone, drug traffickers were blamed for more than 60 execution-style murders. But Juarez is most notorious as a place that draws tens of thousands of young women from small, poor towns to take $55-a-week jobs in assembly plants, known as maquiladoras, operated by some of the wealthiest corporations in the world -- companies like General Electric, Alcoa, and DuPont. More than 60 percent of maquiladora workers are women and girls, many as young as 13 or 14.

In Bolaño's novel, the murders are partly the fault of the globalization-driven culture of the maquiladora. (Sadly, even progressive companies, like the one that employs Fosco's boyfriend Oz, have outsourced to Juárez.) However, there are plenty of other factors that have contributed to this holocaust, including government incompetence, apathy, and malfeasance.

Well, because the truth of the world is that things can always get worse, Ciudad Juárez was in the news again last week. According to an article in the New York Times, Juárez is not just an unsafe place to be a young woman; rather, it is now completely unsafe for anyone. The Times article plays up the irony that Juárez is separated only by the Rio Grande river from El Paso, the third-safest city in America. Juárez, on the other hand, is not safe at all:

El Paso still enjoys its status as one of the safest cities in the United States, while Juárez, a city of 1.5 million that has always been rough, has become a battleground for drug cartels. More than 1,550 people were killed there in drug wars last year.

Worse, other violent crimes — carjacking, extortion, armed robbery — have surged as the beleaguered authorities struggle to respond to daily gun battles.

“It’s strange to be the third-safest city in the United States right next to a war zone,” said Mayor John Cook of El Paso, as he gazed at the ramshackle neighborhoods of Juárez.

Let's do the math. Last year in Juárez, 1,550 people were killed (in drug wars alone!) out of a population of 1.5 million. Last year in El Paso, 16 people were killed out of a population of 600,000. If we convert El Paso's murder rate to make it comparable with city the size of Juárez (a city 2 1/2 times larger), there would have been 40 murders in El Paso last year. What the hell is happening in Juárez?

The problem is drugs, as the Mexican government fights a losing battle with drug cartels. The mayor of El Paso suggests that the Mexican government's intervention is actually to blame for the increase in violence, by upsetting the fragile balance of competing cartels and creating a "turf war." Whatever the cause, things are not going to get better:

The mayor of Juárez, José Reyes Ferriz, says his city suffers from a woefully undermanned and ill-equipped police department, despite programs to recruit new officers and purge scores of corrupt ones. Mr. Reyes estimated that Juárez needed at least 4,000 police officers to take back control of the streets. It has only 1,600.

He said the 3,000 soldiers and federal agents Mr. Calderón had dispatched to quell the violence had had limited success. The soldiers, for instance, know nothing about police work and patrol in long columns, which are easily spotted and avoided.

In the past six months, the killings have become more frequent, more brazen and more gruesome. One body was beheaded and hung from a bridge. Others were stuffed in giant stew pots.

Most of the victims have been young men recruited from other towns to fight for the warring drug kingpins. But at least 40 of the victims have been innocent bystanders, among them a few El Paso residents.

“This is a real war and the city, unfortunately, is the theater for this war,” Mr. Reyes said.

In 2666, Bolaño's Santa Teresa is a version of hell. In 2009, the real Ciudad Juárez is even worse.

"The Awfulness of Billy Joel, Explained"

It's Music Monday here at Fosco Lives!

From Slate:
The Worst Pop Singer Ever: Why, exactly, is Billy Joel so bad?

All Fosco can say is "Word."

UPDATE: actually, the other thing that Fosco can say is that he is utterly amazed that one can write an entire article about the awfulness of Billy Joel without mentioning the abomination called "We Didn't Start the Fire."

My Last Night with Bush: Torture Me

By the way, did you notice that the US engaged in torture? Yeah, bummer. Too bad we can't do anything about that.

And here's a plea for why we should do something:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I wonder if wanting to hold people accountable for war crimes is "sophomoric"?

My Last Night with Bush: Feeling Safer Already

Time is running out... And Fosco still has a few last things to say about the Bush Administration!

You may have noticed that the central claim in Bush's legacy talking points is that he "kept America safe after 9/11." This popped up again in his farewell address when he smirked that "our nation is safer than it was seven years ago." (Of course, as numerous people have pointed out, this statement makes it easy to forget that Bush bears blame for 9/11.) But let's try to take Bush's claim at face value: are we safer than we were seven years ago?

I think the answer is clearly "yes."*

*unless you are

• a member of the US Military, Military Reserve, or National Guard.
  
• a postal worker or other mail handler in the Washington DC area.
  
• a resident of the US Gulf Coast (especially if you are poor or Black).
  
• vulnerable to arsenic, mercury, or rat poison.
  
• one of the almost 44 million Americans without health insurance.
  
• depending on your 401(k) for your future retirement income.

Thanks, GWB. Heckuva job!

Hiding a lie in plain sight

This continues Fosco's series of posts on the Bush farewell address.

When you want to slip in a lie about something you didn't do, sometimes it helps to put it in the middle of a list of things you (maybe) did do. Read this one (italics are mine):

Across our country, students are rising to meet higher standards in public schools. A new Medicare prescription drug benefit is bringing peace of mind to seniors and the disabled. Every taxpayer pays lower income taxes. The addicted and suffering are finding new hope through faith-based programs. Vulnerable human life is better protected. Funding for our veterans has nearly doubled. America’s air, water, and lands are measurably cleaner. And the Federal bench includes wise new members like Justice Sam Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Now while we could certainly take issue with several of the Bush claims in this paragraph (Sam Alito is "wise"? Maybe on Planet Dick-tron Five.), there is one that is such a gutsy lie that I'm surprised Bush could say it with a straight face. Well, er, without much more of a smirk than the rest of the speech. It may be the most cynical sentence in his entire address (and that's saying something).

Our "air, water, and lands are measurably cleaner"? You motherfucking liar. There is more CO2 and coal soot in our air. There is more arsenic and mercury in our water. And there is more pesticide and coal ash slurry on our land. And that's not all: if you can stand it, you can read the whole sorry story.

And you know what? It was a completely unnecessary lie. There is nothing to gain by saying it. His conservative base couldn't care less about the environment, and the rest of us know he's lying. Honestly, I think he included this lie because he's just a dick.

For you nervous flyers...

Introducing the newest international terrorists:

Clearly, Obama needs to take a harder line on Canadian immigration.

UPDATE (4:20 PM PST): On Hardball, Chris Matthews keeps referring to the "bird attack." Fosco knew this was more sinister than just an "accident."

Is Jesus Too Nice?

Ideas are resilient things; they never die. Even when an idea goes out of style (no matter how deservedly) it will always return at some point in the future. Otherwise, how to explain the popularity of things like leeches or swing dancing? While this may be comforting news to someone like Fosco who loves out-of-style ideas like Baked Alaska and Communism, it also means that all of history's bad ideas are (at most) only a decade or so away from revival.

Even though Fosco (mostly) believes this theory, he wasn't exactly expecting the recent return of Calvinism. (For those of you who are godless heathens, that's theological Calvinism, not illustrational Calivinism.) Theological Calvinism maintains, among other things, that (and Fosco is no theologian here, so please cut me some slack) individual salvation was determined in advance by God and there is nothing that a human being can do to affect their eternal fate. Some are predestined for heaven; some are predestined for hell. And there's nothing anyone can do about (including understanding why God would even do such a thing).

Calvinists arrive at this conclusion through the belief that there is nothing at all redeemable about humans, that they are corrupted through and through. So naturally, there is no way that a human could ever do anything that would result in pleasing God. Ergo, anyone who ends up in heaven must do so contingent on God's unknowable pleasure, rather than as a reward for anything that could be done on earth. It's kind of like a supernatural lottery. Actually, it's exactly like a supernatural lottery. And as religious faiths go, it's not exactly one of the warm and fuzzy ones.

You might think that such a faith would be radically out-of-touch with any but the most annoying of contemporary Christians. Well, you're right. But it seems that there are a lot more of these annoying people than you expected. According to a profile in Sunday's NYTimes Magazine, Calvinism is making a comeback, especially among youth in major urban centers like Seattle. According to the piece, one of the stars of the movement is Mark Driscoll:

Driscoll, who is 38, is on the cutting edge of American pop culture. Yet his message seems radically unfashionable, even un-American: you are not captain of your soul or master of your fate but a depraved worm whose hard work and good deeds will get you nowhere, because God marked you for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time. Yet a significant number of young people in Seattle — and nationwide — say this is exactly what they want to hear. Calvinism has somehow become cool, and just as startling, this generally bookish creed has fused with a macho ethos.

A macho Calvinism? What the hell would that look like? It's worse than you think:

On that Sunday, Driscoll preached for an hour and 10 minutes — nearly three times longer than most pastors. As hip as he looks, his message brooks no compromise with Seattle’s permissive culture. New members can keep their taste in music, their retro T-shirts and their intimidating facial hair, but they had better abandon their feminism, premarital sex and any “modern” interpretations of the Bible. Driscoll is adamantly not the “weepy worship dude” he associates with liberal and mainstream evangelical churches, “singing prom songs to a Jesus who is presented as a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of time putting product in his long hair.”

Ummm. Okay. Fosco would just like to point out that, based on all the pictures we have, Jesus' hair is a bit too long for product--you really can't style hair of that length. As if product would have held up in that heat, anyway!

Sick of this guy yet? It gets better:

The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”

Richard Simmons! (Incidentally, Richard Simmons is another man whose hair is not amenable to product.) You know, I tend to think that if Jesus was worried about comparisons to Richard Simmons, He probably wouldn't have kept forcing his disciples to weigh in while telling everyone to "love your neighbor as yourself, girl!" I think it's also worth pointing out that Richard Simmons has already sent fifteen people to hell (mostly drifters). But seriously, just when you think Christianity can't get any more homophobic, some nuts go and "out" Jesus.

Of course, all of this macho Jesus shit is going to sound just a little familiar to any of you who have studied Victorian culture. Back then, it was called muscular Christianity and it celebrated physical activity and manliness as Christian virtue. It was also an influential movement in the US. As far as Fosco knows, it wasn't a particularly Calvinist thing; however, in the same way that ideas never die, they also endlessly recombine to form stupid new remixes.

Next week's stupid remix: Jews for Jesus. Oh wait, that's real. Ummm. How about compassionate Conservatism? Oh really? That one's real too? Gee. Maybe "lesbians who love being teabagged"? Does that work?

Decline and Fall

Let me begin by saying clearly and without exaggeration that The New York Times is the record of civilization.

Some of you may find that to be an odd statement; Fosco stands by it. He's not saying the NYT is perfect, nor is he an apologist for its many failures. He generally finds their coverage of things they don't understand to be snide or dismissive. And yes, he recognizes that their sports coverage is really myopic. But despite all of those flaws, there is no other publication in the world that attempts as ambitiously (and mostly succeeds) to tell the story of life in our world. Like I said, the Times is the record of civilization. I just don't see how anyone, even a hermaphroditic skeletal lizard, could maintain otherwise.

And yet, according to an article by Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic, the NYT is already dead and will be decomposing more quickly than any of us could have expected:

[W]hat if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?

Don't laugh. It's actually a serious possibility. More likely, however, is that The Times won't shutter entirely. Rather, Hirschorn lists a number of potential alternatives that will save the paper from complete insolvency. However, none of them will save the paper as we know it. As Hirschorn argues:

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist.

Fosco is very upset about this. Really. And not just because the fiance of one of Fosco's favorite people writes for The Times. No, this is something that will have serious consequences for our society. As Hirschorn notes:

The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.

And suppose that The Times does become an online-only concern. It still won't be The Times as any of us know it:

Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.

[...]

In this scenario, nytimes.com would begin to resemble a bigger, better, and less partisan version of the Huffington Post, which, until someone smarter or more deep-pocketed comes along, is the prototype for the future of journalism: a healthy dose of aggregation, a wide range of contributors, and a growing offering of original reporting.

Now don't get Fosco wrong: he loves The Huffington Post immoderately. But there is no question that a HuffPo-style tabloid/blog hybrid (tablog? blogloid?) is not a substitute for a real newspaper of record. A world without The New York Times will be a world that is a bit less worth living in.

From the Annals of Future Disasters

They say that fire is one of the biggest causes of earthquake-related destruction. If so, then maybe the San Jose Mercury News has some good news today. A new study suggests that, in the event of a large earthquake along the Calaveras Fault, the Anderson Dam in Morgan Hill could fail. What would this mean?

In the worst case, a complete failure of Anderson Dam could send a wall of water 35 feet high into downtown Morgan Hill within 14 minutes, and eight feet deep into San Jose within three hours, under state emergency scenarios.

An eight foot wall of water in San Jose? Kowbunga (dude)! Unfortunately, the surfing won't be totally primo, as the water will presumably be choked with the corpses of Morgan Hillers. Of course, this occurrence isn't super likely:

How likely is a massive quake on that fault that could threaten the dam's integrity?

In recorded history, there have been no 6.6 or larger magnitude quakes on the Calaveras Fault. But one isn't impossible.

In 2003, the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that there is an 11 percent probability of a quake of 6.7 or larger on the Calaveras Fault in the next 30 years, and a 2 percent probability of a 7.0 or larger quake on the fault over the same time.

"If the Calaveras Fault ruptured across multiple segments, you could get an earthquake up to 7.2," said David Oppenheimer, a USGS seismologist in Menlo Park. "I don't think that's likely to occur, but you can't rule it out entirely."

For those of you who enjoy imagining the Bay Area Apocalypse, this should help you out a bit.

Memories of Rummy

Fosco suspects that, when history fully apportions the blame for all of the global evil done by the Bush Administration, the second-largest share (after Cheney's heapin' helpin') will go to Don Rumsfeld. Not that Rumsfeld was as diabolically evil as Cheney; rather, as far as I can tell, he mostly didn't give a fuck. No body armor for the troops? Fuck it. Torture at Abu Ghraib? Whatever. Too-small US troop presence on the ground? Meh. Looting? *Shrug*. And here's some proof, from Fosco's continuing series of excerpts from Vanity Fair's "An Oral History of the Bush White House":

Kenneth Adelman, a member of Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board: So [Rumsfeld] says, It might be best if you got off the Defense Policy Board. You’re very negative. I said, I am negative, Don. You’re absolutely right. I’m not negative about our friendship. But I think your decisions have been abysmal when it really counted.

Start out with, you know, when you stood up there and said things—“Stuff happens.” I said, That’s your entry in Bartlett’s. The only thing people will remember about you is “Stuff happens.” I mean, how could you say that? “This is what free people do.” This is not what free people do. This is what barbarians do. And I said, Do you realize what the looting did to us? It legitimized the idea that liberation comes with chaos rather than with freedom and a better life. And it demystified the potency of American forces. Plus, destroying, what, 30 percent of the infrastructure.

I said, You have 140,000 troops there, and they didn’t do jack shit. I said, There was no order to stop the looting. And he says, There was an order. I said, Well, did you give the order? He says, I didn’t give the order, but someone around here gave the order. I said, Who gave the order?

So he takes out his yellow pad of paper and he writes down—he says, I’m going to tell you. I’ll get back to you and tell you. And I said, I’d like to know who gave the order, and write down the second question on your yellow pad there. Tell me why 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq disobeyed the order. Write that down, too.

And so that was not a successful conversation.

While it's always nice to hear of someone within the Administration who was willing to criticize Rumsfeld, Kenneth Adelman is no prize pig. After all, he's the one who wrote the 2002 Washington Post editorial entitled "Cakewalk in Iraq," which not only promised a quick and easy victory in Iraq but also raised the troops' expectations of a warzone filled with delicious cakes. I don't have to tell you that those expectations have been horribly shattered. In fact, there is little evidence of any cake-related activity in Iraq (nor has there ever been).

(However, Adelman did endorse Obama in 2008, so I guess that's pretty good.)

Noun-Verb-9/11

Here's one more installment of Fosco's favorite selections from Vanity Fair's "An Oral History of the Bush White House" and this one's pretty horrible. If you thought the 9/11 attacks only got hijacked for political purposes later (Hi Rudy!), you may be surprised to find out that it wasn't even 9/12 before some of the more cynical members of Bush's inner circle hatched their schemes. This is testimony from Richard Clarke about the Administration's immediate reaction to 9/11:

Richard Clarke: That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.

And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.

And, of course, you just knew that Karl Rove would have dirty hands on this one:

Scott McClellan, deputy White House press secretary and later press secretary: I remember Karl Rove was out there talking at some events about how we’d use 9/11, run on 9/11 in the midterms, and that it was important to do so.

I don't know why Fosco is surprised by such obscene cynicism anymore, but he still is.

From the Annals of Dastardly Plans

Fosco's ongoing cherry-picking of Vanity Fair's "An Oral History of the Bush White House" continues today with a delightful quote from Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Today's topic is "Dick Cheney: Devil or Demon?"

We had this confluence of characters—and I use that term very carefully—that included people like Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and so forth, which allowed one perception to be “the dream team.” It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was—was going to be protected by this national- security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire. What in effect happened was that a very astute, probably the most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur I’ve ever run into in my life became the vice president of the United States.

He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.

I don't know about you, but I think "devil" is the appropriate answer to today's question. And yet, Uncle Dick just cannot understand why he's so unpopular. Here's a thought, Dick: it's because you're evil. Does that help?