Functional Defenestration

It’s almost been a Friedman unit since I published anything in this joint so, with due deference to that old standby public service pamphlet, What everyone should know about blog depression, and a head nod to Bertrand Russell's note In Praise of Idleness, here goes some throat-clearing toli.

I. Defanging Satire (or Editorial Genuflections in the Internet Age)

A highly paid editor at The New Yorker is now intervening to neuter the bite of Andy Borowitz's normally savage satire. The first injury came a few months ago with the retitling of the column and RSS feed from "The Borowitz Report" to "Satire from The Borowitz Report" as if to say “we must protect you from being a moron in a hurry”. Then the lasting, almost fatal, wound was the recent move to change the contents of the feed summary, which used to be the first few sentences of the article, to instead actively bash you over the head with a spoiler warning that each article is "a satirical report". Apparently the reader needs to be informed upfront that they are about to read a humorous article and protected from the dire possibility of being spoofed.

In other words, even for the most potent source of written content (and the New Yorker proclaims itself to have "the best writing anywhere"), it now of paramount importance to maintain its listing as a Google News "source" (and now with Facebook's Zuckerberg apparently faking concern about clickbait and fake news and the like, the audience needs to be coddled). The bean counters (and search engine optimizers) have run the numbers and, on the evidence, it is clear that telegraphing an article's intentions, and blunting its impact is worth the downside risk and what, I rather think, is grievous damage to art.

Up until a few months ago, the feed summary would have been the following (a pithy defenestrationof age-old hypocrisy)

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — The pornography industry has likely suffered permanent damage as a result of its unfortunate association with the Texas senator Ted Cruz, industry sources said on Tuesday.

It is soul-deadening to contemplate the considerable effort expended to actively sabotage noble hatchet jobs.

The only concession to art is that the editor didn't additionally prepend "Satire" to article titles as I noticed smaller publications starting to do routinely 12 or so years when Google News started being a dominant source of web traffic.

And here Dear Reader, as I wrote the foregoing sentence and began winding up to a thoroughgoing rant, I realized that I had been down this path before. Indeed I left a community (Blogcritics) back when its writing guidelines started to ask that writers explicitly tag their work and the site started messing with titles. The injunction then was that we needed to telegraph and prefix "Satire" to titles '(if you "make things up" or "bend the truth" notably to make a point, or for comedic effect)'.

Searching through the archives, I even found a cri de cœur written on the topic, Husbanding the Blogcritics Commons, a jeremiad-in-vain as it soon became a case of This Boring Headline Is Written for Google.

It is a disappointing development a decade later, that ostensibly powerful media outlets have thoroughly succumbed, even as one cannot deny their economic logic, pace Buzzfeed. And yet I remain a maximalist on the issue.

The story, I suppose, is about capitalism in the internet age. Per Jeff Hammerbacher by way of Allen Ginsberg, it is a case of "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads". Per contra, we could harken back to Slim Charles's folk wisdom from The Wire: "Game's the same, just got more fierce."

The existential question posed is how do we weigh the competing demands of popularity (as expressed by the Google News imperative) against whimsy (as expressed in satire). Sacrificing whimsy at the altar of attention is not a price worth paying, and I am yet to be convinced otherwise. Needless to say, I dissent.

II. Attention Mongering

Apropos attention, for a good decade, say right up to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and much to my consternation, a note I had hastily written On the importance of biting satire was regularly the top search result on Google about satire. It has since found its proper obscurity, but my unexpected Googlejuice in the interim meant that the occasional student writing a term paper on “why satire matters”, “significance of satire”, “importance of satire” etc. would start mining this blog.

The early web was a great equalizer, one in which my rants occasionally trumped the combined insights of Jonathan Swift, Will Self and the like, hell even the encyclopedic Wikipedia was lagging in the Anglophone internet. Even as Jon Stewart and company started a revival of the satiric tradition in America, the clicks kept coming my way.

I don't know if I ultimately managed to convince 15 readers of the paramount importance of savage satire as opposed to the milder form that Americans favor, but I feel my ultimate insight is worth restating:

I like my satire savage. It should be vicious, biting and deeply heartfelt. The targets should feel a sharp wound. The whimsical and comic artefacts of the best satirists are side-benefits; their purpose is really to serve as social barometers and canaries in the mineshafts of our communities.

III. On Satire

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that that so few are offended with it. But, if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and I have learned from long experience never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I have been able to provoke: for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent.

— Jonathan Swift - The Battle of the Books

Satire is an art form that thrives best on a certain instability and tension in its creator. The satirist is always holding him or herself between two poles of great attraction. On the one side there is the flight into outright cynicism, anomie and amorality; on the other there is the equal and countervailing pressure towards objective truth, religion and morality.

— Will Self - Junk Mail

[Will] Self sees himself paradoxically both as a moral satirist and as a social rebel who is more interested in shocking his middle-class readers than in reforming them. "What excites me," he has said, "is to disturb the reader's fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable"

— Gillian Glover, as quoted in Brian Finney's The Sweet Smell of Excess: Will Self’s Fiction, Bataille and Transgression.

Of all the gifts of the pen perhaps the most fraught with danger is that which resolves itself into satire. It is indeed difficult to distinguish between cynicism and satire, perhaps the former is born of disappointment perhaps the latter is born of humour. Let it remain so and it cannot be called debased, let it become cold and let it die.

— Patrick Braybrooke writing on Hilaire Belloc as Essayist in Some Thoughts On Hilaire Belloc

Instability fundamentally disturbs markets which is why even the threat of boycotts so unmans even the most cynical modern corporations. The reverse of the coin however is that whimsy, that most valuable human concern, and its close counterpart satire thrive as disturbances to the mundanity of life. Reconciling whimsy in all its messiness to the demands of hard-nosed capitalism remains a struggle and yet struggle we must. For better or worse, we must humanize capitalism.

IV. Orphaned Thoughts

I once spent forty minutes on a subway sitting opposite a group of engineers and salespeople that worked at Functional Fenestration. They were attending a conference in Oakland about window hardware and automation, of all things. I was fascinated with their technical argot, the intricacies of the actuators, track and carriage systems and door automation that they were discussing. I marveled at the engineering arcana, and the fact that the windows and doors that we take for granted could have such complexity. Their deconstruction of the merits of some of their competitor's offerings and their strategizing about how to market the new feature of whatever widget they had just come up with (a slide handler if I remember correctly) drew me in. The intensity of the back and forth between the marketers and the technical folks reminded me of a comedy of manners of sorts, office politics writ large. Hypnotized as I was by the language and the context, I immediately imagined a novel or short story, something in the vein of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist and the title came unbidden, Functional Defenestration.

Most ideas are destined to be half-formed and ultimately, I never got beyond the few pages scribbled in my Moleskine, a meditation about a man unmoored by capitalism. The first sentence remains:

Man, it was hard to compete against those guys at Functional Fenestration, they were intense.

Run with it.

Soundtrack for this note

A playlist for those tilting at windmills.

• The Windmills of your Mind by Abbey Lincoln
  My favourite version
• The Windmills of your Mind by Dizzie Gillespie
  Latter day Dizzie was still looking at new standards
• The Windmills of your Mind by Barbara Lewis
  sampled by DJ Premier for Gangstarr's The Militia
• The Windmills of your Mind by Noel Harrison

File under: Small Things, web, attention, capitalism, values, commerce, satire, commons, communities, culture, observation, groups, hustle, marketing, media, rant, whimsy, perception, Dark Matter, Observers are worried, toli

Juicing the Books

My greatest acknowledged vice, according to two of the women most dear to me, is that I drink too much fruit juice. Rather than dwell on this marital and maternal complaint over what is surely a most benign addiction (compare the problems of keeping a fridge full of orange, pineapple and mango juice to alcoholism, the perils of nicotine, drugs, sex, or say dodging bill collectors due to gambling debts with loan sharks and their ilk), I thought that acknowledging it upfront would help explain how I worked myself into a state of righteous indignation over the following article. Well partially at least.

Tropicana Orange Juice Raising Prices

PepsiCo said it was shrinking its most popular size by about 8 percent, while maintaining its price, and raising the price on another size starting in May.

The 64-ounce container of orange juice will drop to 59 ounces. The suggested retail price will remain at $3.59. [snip]

Food and beverage makers react to changing ingredient costs by raising prices, changing products sizes or both. It is a way to protect their profit margins, and in the case of shrinking packages, offer less to shoppers so they can still buy products without having to pay more money at once.

Now far be it for me to complain about my suppliers raising prices. It's not a case of hell hath no fury like a juice lover squeezed. I do understand, after all, that the Florida winter damaged crops this year and that there's supply and demand and all that. Like Bubbles in The Wire, I accept what a working man has to do to make a living. It's all in the game right? No, what got to me was the disingenousness of the thing. That last line in the article is a prima facie lie, an attempt to disguise a price increase with weasel words. Well I started feeling like Bodie: the game is rigged.

You may recall me discoursing on The New Formula - the propensity of companies to tweak processes and often worsen their products in furtherance of the bottom line, a pathological hallmark of latter-day capitalism. I even had a case study showing how spikes in the prices of soybeans directly led to me losing out on my trusty Oil of Olay body wash as, first, the oil maleation process was removed and then, when there was nothing to be tweaked in the manufacturing process, soybeans were removed and the product was relaunched and relabeled "new and improved". Such is life right? Make lemonade when life gives you lemons.

But that was tinkering with process, now they're even messing with my lemonade. With commodities like juice, one would think that there is only so much you can do to process to wring out efficiencies. You can only pay the illegal immigrant labour force so little to harvest, even they need basic food and shelter after all. The gains from fertilizer are diminishing and runoff issues are quite literal. Even the politics of it are confusing; banana republics are expensive these days. Ecuador's going mildly 'socialist' to the dismay of old fashioned Texas businessmen. In all seriousness, the economics of modern day agriculture are fairly well studied and there's precious little slack.

No. It's the package shrinking that gets me. The Tropicana deception, as I called it, this juicing of the books is only the latest in an interesting trend of manufacturers increasing prices but retaining the same size packaging. Bottles or containers are made more convex, given revamped designs to fill the same physical dimensions, the spouts are shaped to pour out more than previously. Throughout the sticker price remains constant in order to fool the indiscriminate consumer into thinking that they are receiving the same product.

This orange deception is the result of literal bean counting in the spirit of airline companies in the 1990s that literally started saving peanuts (reducing the number of peanuts per package distributed in flight - and these days you're lucky to even get any complimentary snacks). We're being nickeled and dimed to death. The sole concession to honesty is in the small print of the labels on supermarket shelves - the per unit price that generations of consumers had to fight for. Regulations that are often meaningless in the marketplace.

Consider liquid detergent in this vein. There is a fine interplay of fluid dynamics between the design of the spouts of modern liquid detergent bottles and the viscosity of the liquid they contain. And this is an engineering and marketing decision, when you pour, sometimes things come out faster than you expect. At other times, it is rather that you have to be quite lithe of hand to steady the bottle as you try to stop pouring - call the result excess runoff if you will to keep with the fertilizer analogue. It's a minor irritation to be sure but the net effect is to make you use more of the product than you expected, a cynical nod towards planned obsolescence. And I've experimented you know, I follow these things closely - for a couple of years I even kept a collection of old bottles of Ivory, Palmolive, Tide and the like. Results? Well each brand tweaked their bottle design and consumer convenience was never in mind.

But let's broaden the perspective here on this mania for manipulation, this drive to extract surplus value. We see this in strategies adopted in modern agriculture - or should I rather say agribusiness: piling on the fertilizer, force feeding animals substances that should alarm even the most jaded, corn everywhere, herding in crowded cages, top-ups with antibiotics when expedient and so forth. No wonder modern farms or say your local meat rendering plant are desolate places. But this imperative has broad applicability. Airline travel is now seen in its true light - convenient perhaps, but an exercise in stress and physical discomfort. The space in economy class of ye regular airline is now so circumscribed as to be cattle tested. The logic indeed is that we're only cattle. "Buy something you stupid consumer" as that poster goes.

But I can understand the perverse incentives. I know that there is a push at the end of each quarter to close deals and I've felt it wherever I've worked no matter how low up the totem pole I might rest. You don't need studies of companies manipulating earnings to consistently beat expectations to know what all this means. When we read about Lehman Brothers doing the Repo 105 dance, it is much the same attitude towards truth in advertising at work. The current encomiums to "do more with less" have their counterpart as we have seen, "sell less for more" is Pepsi's slogan. As someone who owns stock I can understand the profit imperative, as a consumer however, I know it will come back to bite me and in this case, it will bite me in the form of a 59 ounce juice container lovingly designed to fill much the same shelf space as its 64 ounce predecessor.

It's all a shell game and there are now so few scales left to fall from my eyes. I am now eagerly awaiting the new juice containers in May to add to my collection of deceptive latter day capitalist artifacts - an archive of products engineered for the express purpose of juicing the books.

Soundtrack For This Note

• Richard "Dimples" Fields - She's Got Papers On Me (featuring Betty Wright)
  A cautionary tale this one, it's all downhill from here.
• Oran "Juice" Jones - The Rain
  A juice soundtrack should always feature the one and only Oran "Juice" Jones whose oeuvre I've discussed previously. The Rain is about betrayal:

  That's right, now close your mouth 'cause you cold busted. Now sit down here, I'm so upset with you I don't know what to do.

  Hear that Tropicana?
• Eric B. & Rakim - Know The Ledge
  It's all about the inflation calypso isn't it? Well, knowledge is king. Alternatively try Naughty By Nature's Uptown Anthem from the same Juice soundtrack.
• Superchunk - Package Thief Tropicana's theme, punks.
• Masi Asare - Orange Soda
  I'm going to have to go in for soda instead of juice what with all these pricing shenanigans.
• The Juice Crew - The Symphony
  Pound for pound the heavyweight champion of posse cuts.
• Orange Glow by Amel Larrieux
• Atmosphere - Shoulda Known
  From their 2008 album rightly titled When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold

Anyone have any further examples of these newfangled "advances" in packaging?

Disclaimer: I should note that of late I've been mostly buying a brand of juice that is often sourced from South America (typically Brazil) rather than juice from Florida or California - I wonder if I'll return to Tropicana or Minute Maid after this fiasco - can't they have the nerve to simply increase the price? And while digressing, I should also again note that I've started to see pineapple juice from Ghana making it to the supermarket shelves in these California climes. I do applaud the wonders of distribution in this modern age. It's the packaging and advertising that gets me down. Deception innit?

File under: economics, deception, pricing, design, strategy, policy, juice, packaging, irritation, rant, USA, capitalism, marketing, observation, perception, commodities, backlash, snake oil, New Formula, toli

Public Nuisances 63 and 64

Travel this past couple of weeks and considerable jet lag prompt a few entries in an occasional series...

Public Nuisance Number 63

The single greatest improvement in the quality of life for the traveling masses of humanity will be the abolition of those public announcements about "cars left unattended (being) subject to towing". The seven and a half minute frequency of said announcements is a blight on society.

It must drive airport employees mad to hear this business. No wonder bags get misplaced and creative thefts occur. I'd rebel if I had to hear it 72 times a day, 360 times a week, 10,000 times a year. And that is at the laidback airports I've been patronizing where a few hours of flight delays prompted my timing investigations. What, I wonder, is the typical frequency of such announcements, say, at Logan airport in Boston where guilt about terrorists attacks past reigns. Good Lord.

Really, does one need to warn about towing? If you come out on any street and don't see your car, well yes, it's probably been towed, if illegally parked, or stolen, or borrowed if you're lucky. Regardless you're either stupid and/or unlucky. Such is life. Why do you need to be warned? Or is the message intended for a different audience? Is it simply a piece of security theatre deftly designed by security experts to heighten a sense of vigilance, in the best reading, or fear, in the more probable reading. Or is it one of those vestigial announcements that no one questions but that spread inexorably out of bureaucratic inertia. Somewhere a soul dies every time that recording plays. I know that my fortitude was tested...

I can understand the "be on the lookout for suspicious __" or the "don't accept packages" items but that business about towing cars needs to stop. It pollutes our ears. It pollutes our minds. It's that simple. Stop it. Erase that message from the system. Please. Pretty please.

Public Nuisance Number 64

Is there a more diseagreeable verb in the English language than deplane? I believe it is beyond objectionable, nay it is simply indecent in any good company.

Deplane indeed. What's wrong with disembark? The sole saving grace in this sad tale is that board or embark have fewer or the same amount of syllables than emplane which has consequently not seen the same adoption as its obverse (although a Delta employee used it on a recent flight).

But back to deplaning...

May catastrophic bankruptcy befall all airline companies that deploy that verb as part of their linguistic arsenal. Moreover, may the authors of the style guide of said airline companies, those syllabic bean counters who foisted those words on humanity be consigned to a sojurn of no less than six months and a day working at the most gruesome meat rendering factory — I can think of several if consultations are required. Further, may all airline personnel who utter said verb and follow the airline scripts be ignored by their progeny come Mother's or Father's Day.

Deplane! No wonder one hears about air rage even in this post 9/11 world, forget alcohol, I'll deplane you. United Airlines, consider yourself on probation. Continued toli patronage is hanging on a very frayed thread, indeed Jetblue beckons.

Sigh... It's been far too long since my last boycott day. What are you boycotting today?

File under: nuisance, rant, life, language, annoyance, irritation, boycott, indignation, bureaucracy, security, air, travel, theatre, small things, toli

Husbanding the Blogcritics Commons

A open note to those who run the Blogcritics community.

First a question: what is wrong with these headlines?

Satire: Partition - A New Solution For Iraq

Satire: Attack of the Killer Immigrants

Satire: How to Write Good

Satire: No Mexicans, Get Congress On The Job!

Satire: Take Cover, There's a Kennedy at the Wheel!

In your mad rush to "professionalize" the Blogcritics community and "drive traffic" to the site, you are losing the plot.

I have been fairly inactive in the community but I have a few comments on the editorial changes that have been made in our joint.

First what's the deal with not allowing product links in the body of the text... The link is the only currency of the web. If someone goes to the effort to punctuate a point, to explain with hypertext instead of footnotes, that should be celebrated. Instead it's a matter of style. Well we have our style. It's the web style. You don't need a print style to become "an official Google News and My Yahoo! source", those folks are coming to you. Fetishizing search engine reach and arbitrage for attention in the current manner gives cause for concern. That style is not the native web style. You should know better.

Which leads me to my second point, what's the deal with the titles? Why that big Satire prefix? Even the New York Times, and that lady is all about style guides, wouldn't label Calvin Trillin's wit and wisdom as "Satire:". That goes under Opinion or Op-Art or something.

And good titles are important to be sure... it's always worth spending a few minutes getting a good title but then you spoil it all with that nasty prefix. It then becomes a case of This Boring Headline Is Written for Google or shall we say Snooze Headlines

The days of the catchy newspaper headlines full of wit and style and the occasional double entendre are fading to blah as a growing number of news outlets are bowing to the 'bots. Search-engine 'bots, that is, designed to scour online newspapers, magazines, and TV news headlines worldwide to rank and list news items for the likes of Google and Yahoo.

News organizations have been rewriting or distilling the traditional eye-catching headlines with more subdued, logical ones for software to catch. One California newspaper recently renamed some of its sections to make them easier for 'bots to find: "Real Estate" became "Homes"; "Scene" became "Lifestyles"; and the dining out section became a bland "Taste/Food." Ironically, search engines often rework their algorithms to avoid self-serving manipulation by news outlets.

I have been on a tear in recent months with lots of material that could well have featured on Blogcritics. After I'd written each piece, I'd first worry that the title I'd chosen would be changed. If I got over that threshold, I would then compose the draft and prepare to hit submit. Out of habit, I'd check the Blogcritics front page and without fail would see another one of those "Satire:" posts on the site and lose heart. To the extent that I've "lost traffic" in the interim that is a shame. But my writing is about changing the perspective and I can't buy into the primacy of traffic and the disembodiment of my writing. Thus I've been conducting a quiet boycott for the past few months.

I suppose if Jonathan Swift had submitted "A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burthen to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public", you would have jumped in to make it more palatable. I can just see the title after it passes through the Blogcritics satirical filter

Satire: Irish Babies have nutritional value and should be eaten.

Why have titles like these?

Satire: How to Become an Onion Ring Connoisseur

Satire: A Deep Man Running for President

Satire: Q & A With the Bookologist

I haven't read the above articles, but really, why mess with the onion rings or the bookologist?

In your current policy you seem to be conforming to the worst stereotypes of Americans as overly earnest people and the notion that it takes "Old World" decadence to appreciate irony and satire. That hogwash about Puritans, Salem and such. At the very least fix the labeling of satire, categories are there for that, don't telegraph your intentions. Part of the shock of the best satire, the savage satire that I love, is that there is a sting of recognition and discomfort. We don't need to be protected from such things.

I dug the notion of the Blogcritics tagline, that "sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, technology, and politics". That sounds very much like that well-known English word, toli. More broadly, I make a living worrying about community software, hence I can see the classic warning signs of community drift and not just because I am currently drifting afloat in the brackish Blogcritics tide.

The Blogcritics commons is important, it's a community full of people bursting with ideas and wielding their keyboards irreverently. We are the unwashed masses that the energy of the web has unleashed. I love engaging with editors but it strikes me that in trying to tame that horseless carriage, you might neuter it into bland conformity. Consider me part of the dark matter of said community, I'm surfacing for a brief moment to simply say "pay attention to the commons and don't lose your soul". You may claim it's editorial necessity, at the risk of being perceived as deliberately provocative, I'll say it's just the commercial imperative. It appears that it's all about gaming search engines for attention as evidenced in the breathless tomes I read in the Blogcritics mailing list, "the traffic! the traffic!" echoes of that crazy baldhead known as Kurtz. Like that sign I saw on the subway in Boston read:

Buy something, you stupid consumer.

Needless to say I dissent.

The founding mythology of the Ewes, the Ghanaian tribe, my mother's people, is that they were chafing under the reign of an overbearing chief who was restricting them in countless little ways. They aired their complaints in the normal manner in town meetings but were roundly ignored over the years. They made their preparations over months, gathered up their children and belongings, and one night they snuck out through a hole they had secretly dug in the thick walls of the town (a precursor to those walled garden things). They walked backwards so that their tracks in the dust would confuse those who were sure to follow in hot pursuit come morning. It was a long journey until they found their promised land but it was worth it. That is why they don't have chiefs any longer, of if they do tolerate one, why everyone sits on stools at the same level in village meetings.

I am not so sure that clans as a means for social organization is effective - witness the degenerate case of Somalia, but it seems to work for the Ewes. Still they sometimes look longingly at the Akans, my paternal people, with a lump in their throat at their riches and prestige - you may have heard of the Ashantis. Still, things also work in the reverse direction, some of the other tribes look at their entrepreneurial spirit and fearlessness with a touch of wistfulness at the vibrancy that has been lost. And to pursue the analogy further, better financed and more "efficient" or organized sites may garner more traffic but they have far less soul and character. I wonder if you realize the depth of fortitude in your community and how important it is to husband its evolution. From another context, this was my take:

It is in small insignificant items that the tribal instinct is articulated.

Pagerank is not the reason we contribute to Blogcritics despite what you seem to think... Being "official Google News sources" is beside the point. Our irreverent and informed voices are the point.

In any case I've ranted enough, some editor will wordsmith this piece I suppose and make it fit the "official" style guide. I hope I picked a reasonable title, husbanding the commons sounds about right to me, but feel free to prepend some byline that fits the prevailing style (Rant, Nitpick, Satire or something) or maybe this:

Satire: Tempest In Teapot About Title Terminology and Traffic Tendencies

or perhaps:

Satire: Boston Blowhard Boldly Blows Bile on Bubbly Blogcritics Behemoth

With some tongue in cheek, you can consider this note as my raised hand at the village meeting in the blog commons; I've been making my own preparations. I do like the sinister cabal idea and wouldn't want to start walking backwards. Just recently I asked myself

"Must everything be utilitarian? Is a country without whimsy worth worrying about?".

Suffice to say that I'm wondering about Blogcritics in the same vein and those carnival things are looking more attractive. I miss the whimsy in our commons. So please, less of the breathless posturing, leaderboards and such... chill a little on the traffic obsession, and above all don't mess with the satire.

This is the second part of the Boycott Day Trinity: The Son

[Update] This piece is crossposted at Blogcritics although not under the "Satire:" category that I submitted it in; it got the "Opinion" label. The saga of its publication and the discussion that it is raising has given me ample material and incentive to complete a follow-up piece, something I have been procrastinating about for over a year now. The title of said piece is as relevant now as when it was conceived: The Dark Matter of Communities. Somehow it will write itself between world cup matches and an intense day job.

File under: community, soul, commons, Blogcritics, commerce, culture, marketing, attention, web, search, seo, hustle, sad, rant, Ghana, Ewe, Africa, history, mythology, satire, groups, values, organization, behaviour, media, Dark Matter, Small Things, boycott, Things Fall Apart, toli

A Nine Dollar Vibe

I was a charter subscriber of Vibe magazine; Quincy Jones was quite the salesman and saw a budding market for a publication on a music and culture that was becoming ubiquitous. Up until 2000 or so, the writing was fairly sharp although it appeared that the magazine was becoming a forum for a so-called "hip-hop lifestyle". The commercial imperative is keenly felt in the USA. Still at $9 or so to renew, I persevered with the magazine even as I would get increasingly irked (and last year they started an offshoot Vibe Vixens which, other than fulfilling an eye candy and titillation quotient, was similarly vacuous). Quincy incidentally cashed out some time ago (like Berry Gordy, he knew exactly when the gig was up). When we moved to a new apartment last year I allowed the subscription to lapse. For the past few months I've been picking up a copy in bookstores and flipping through in the hope of finding a reason to get back on the bandwagon, $9 is a such a low threshold. Sadly enough this email from my archives is still relevant.

To: mail@vibe.com
Subject: September 1999 6th Anniversary issue

Don't start a piece titled "We're on a mission" with a clear error in the second sentence: as we all know "Feels Good" was on Tony Toni Toné's second album (The Revival), not on their first (the aptly named Who?). Or were you over-excited by your sixth "Anniversary" (a song on their third album, Sons of Soul)...

Not to be pedantic though, the appeal of Vibe in its first couple of years was its incisive and informed writing about a fairly wide range of music. I can't help but comment that that aspect of the magazine has been overshadowed of late. A couple of recent issues were clearly devoid of content; I kept turning the page looking for something, anything, and ended at the end of the magazine.

On the other hand, it's obvious that you are a success given the amount of your pages devoted to advertisements, fashion and celebrity eye candy so maybe I should shut up. Or maybe I won't: consider this a plea for you to get back to some sharp writing and keep on your toes; there's still some good music out there. No more puff pieces.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, For now.

A concerned subscriber

I was ignored the first time and have no illusions that anyone will even care that they've lost my annual $9 contibution especially when others seem to tolerate 3 pages of marginal music commentary amongst 180 pages of advertisements and "lifestyle" bluster. Still I'm a little saddened.

These are the remnants of my Vibe magazine collection. Curiously enough, this is all that survived my last apartment move (at least these are what are in the boxes that I've opened). As you can see these remnants are all eye candy. You have my word that the music reporting was as interesting as the covers. The Maxwell, D'Angelo and Erykah Badu issues were fabulous as was the Chris Rock piece. As regards eye candy the two Toni Braxton issues are collectors items, Toni, Toni Toni! was the title of the middle one. The Foxy Brown, Eve, J. Lo and the two Mary J. Blige pieces were a mixed bag, the music was not as incisive but there was a focus on the culture. The Beyoncé and TLC issues were elegaic while the R. Kelly and Lil Kim bits were pure scandal showcasing the eternal struggle between the sacred and the profane in the music that I love. But that was then, this is now; now there is only eye candy. Thus my hommage to the end of an era and my boycott of the nine dollar Vibe.

It is apparent that best writing on music is now to be found in blogs or various discussion forums. I am old-fashioned enough to like settling down with a good magazine and the occasional meaty book on music or the arts. There are still interesting magazines on literature and the like, why not music? I guess I'm going to have to write my own books since no one wants to cater to my admittedly intense predilection for music.

In all seriousness, what are people reading these days? And if it's not on paper, who should I be adding to my Bloglines' subscriptions?

This is the first part of the Boycott Day Trinity: The Father.

File under: vibe, music, culture, magazine, commercialization, hustle, decline, fall, writing, rant, black, america, hip-hop, soul, lifestyle, Dark Matter, Small Things, boycott, media, Things Fall Apart, toli

Huhudious (or Silly Season)

I can't take it any longer; there are too many huhudious things going on, this silly season has got to end. This is a cry for help. Somebody please help me, help me please. Believe me, I tried to wait until the end of May.

Part 8 of the Things Fall Apart series: an illustration of the B-Movie Theory.

Huhudious Defined

huhudious adj. an outrageous statement or a point of view or behaviour that beggars belief. A close synonym to hubristic, breathtaking and preposterous, with the same notion of brazen, yet insouciant, arrogance on the part of the interlocutor. Pronounced hoo-hoo-dious, this word is a neologism from the people of Ghana, coined circa 1975 when military buffoons were looting the country's finances while claiming they were fighting corruption.

There are unsubstantiated claims of an Akan derivation from the Fante (Fanti) word huhuhu which means big according to some, or hearsay or rumor, according to others. A few "globalization" etymologists have posited a sonic and hence linguistic relationship to the Yiddish notion of chutzpah albeit rendered as an adjective rather than a noun. I tend to discount such connections. More apt is the link to that other Fanti word bohu: to cause fear and concern. Thus huhudious has a sense of something offensively bombastic, calculated to stir anxiety. It is a case of there being no "there" there.

Huhudious was one of my favourite words growing up, and it was a joy to hear whenever it was deployed by The Parents. This was often accompanied with a look of indignation, exasperation and outrage as things in Ghana seemed to be falling apart. It was also soothing to the ear, mellifluous rather than strident. The aural proximity to "woo hoo" conferred a certain celebratory impart to its use; a verbal gotcha in short. Often a few paragraphs away would be that other word, kalabule, or "doing things in shady ways". That word hasn't aged gracefully in Ghana even as the phenomenon it describes continues to be background noise. The dividing line between the two words is like that between gremlins and parasites: no one really gets their panties in a twist about parasites, they're everywhere in life; gremlins however... those are interesting little critters... Thus kalabule implies garden-variety corruption; huhudious doings, on the other hand, are destined to be regaled in conspiratorial gossip or toli as it were. On reflection, it should have been a bittersweet thing that huhudious was said so frequently in my life, but it is often in pointing out malarkey that we are able to deal with this troubled world of ours.

I use it in many different contexts but, rather than give you my take, I'll lay out a few examples of its usage, taken from various Ghanaian newspapers and online forums and perhaps tie it to a few anecdotes that have stuck in my mind over the past year.

A Huhudious Index

Macho * Cheese and Vindaloo * Breaking News * Thundersnow * Editorial Decisions * Crocodile Tears "Don't Bring Yourself" * Anaesthetic * Echo Chamber? * Plagiarist for President * Coronations * The Beatification of Actors * Of Wider Applicability * Awards Ceremony * Photo-ops * "Gitmo-ize" * "Blood" * A Spring Day * A Cautious Experiment * Kingmakers of Redmond * The Chinese are Coming * Bongo Drums * Axis of Hypocrisy * The B-movie Theory * The Full Bolton

Sample Usage I

"But what is all this huhudious media coverage?"

See also: Supremely Supine and White House Press Corps.

Sample Usage II

"A situation that prepared the way for Samuel Kanyon Doe, and then Charles Taylor, Prince Johnson and all the other warlords with huhudious names."

Macho

After my recent huhudious confession of a social bookmarking "affair" to The Wife, this photograph seemed quite appropriate:

Or am I revealing too much about my family life?

Cheese and Vindaloo

In Britain, silly season traditionally starts on the Bank Holiday at the end of May. Last year was no exception, on a page opposite a story about a tragic murder-rape,

was the following: Downhill cheese race goes smoothly

Following a patently ridiculous but 200-year-old tradition, dozens of people put their safety at risk yesterday in Gloucestershire to chase cheese down a 1-in-2 incline.

Chris Anderson, the winner of one of four races, was taken to hospital clutching his prize cheese to his chest after he sprained his ankle.

Anderson, a 17-year-old window fitter, believed the prize worth the pain, although he did not intend to eat the cheese.

But not everyone was happy with proceedings. Vegans branded the event "unethical" and said the cheese should be replaced with a non-dairy alternative.

Yvonne Taylor, chair of the animal rights campaign group Peta, said: "It's just not fair that vegans cannot enjoy the fun of the cheese rolling contest."

I've elided the other photo on the page which was a small photo of the murder victim, captioned "Stabbed..." The caption of the photo on the right was "Chris Anderson leads the cheese racers at the annual run down Cooper's Hill, Gloucestershire. He won the 8lb cheese and sprained his ankle."

Whoever edited that newspaper clearly wanted silly season to start out on the right footing.

In another section of the same newspaper was the news that Blair faces hard fight to keep reforms on track on the response to the French No vote on the European Constitution. You might recall that I addressed the French No vote in The France IBM Connection.

The story went as follows:

The Foreign Office accepts that a British referendum in the wake of no votes in France and Holland would take Mr Blair's so-called masochism strategy to the level of a suicidal mania.

Mr Blair's response is a bit like offering a child a vindaloo curry after they have just said they don't eat spicy food.

Suffice to say that the Brits are well practiced in the art of silly season.

In the American past, silly season traditionally lasted from Memorial Day to Labor Day; the dog days of August are notorious low points in the public discourse. As Andrew Card said apropos the WMD hype and the "bureaucratic reasons" (in Paul "The General's estimate is 'wildly off the mark'" Wolfowitz's words) that bamboozled the US into the Iraq quagmire, "You don't launch a new product in August". It is not just war however, there are also elections, and August is when Swift Boat plots are hatched. We have seen that, in contrast to the Brits, seasons have been abolished in 21st century America which has seen year-round silliness. El Niño, or something, applied to life.

Breaking News

I was sitting in my barber's chair, it was mid-afternoon, conversation had stalled hence we were watching Judge Mathis on the overhead television (I knew of Judge Judy but this was the first time watching Judge Mathis). The topic was a young black man complaining that his lovely white, nubile roommate had been too sexually suggestive and was harassing him with her approaches and the provocative attire that she wore around the apartment they shared. He testified about his sexual discomfort with her friskiness; she obviously couldn't believe that he was now suing her for being herself let alone plainly attracted to him. But this is America and everything gets resolved in courts, after the lawyers, or in this case, the television station, takes their cut.

This being a black barbershop, you can imagine the banter that was going on as we watched. We were clowning the guy with your typical hetero male posturing "I would have hit that in a second... That boy's crazy.. Fine woman like that throwing herself at you... Some people... What is he thinking?... etc". The old men and even the little kids were joining in as they could see the cluelessness of the guy.

All of a sudden there was a Breaking News interruption. Now this was a day that was one of the bloodiest of days in Iraq in 2005, you might remember it even though there has been a disquieting sameness of desolation ever since. It was a day in which there were 10 or more bomb blasts and "spectacular incidents" throughout the country. If I remember correctly, there were other spectacularly bad news items on the economic and social policy front that day. I worried that perhaps this news was of body bags, layoffs or worse, a Presidential speech or anything. About the only thing I could think that could interrupt Judge Mathis (who after all is like King Solomon) was perhaps the Michael Jackson trial (yes you remember that episode don't you? - that was going on at the time).

The newscaster came on. A nice blond talking head, she exuded telegenic, Gattaca-like perfection and vapidity. She said:

"This just in. A seal has been found dead on the shore of Quincy Beach."

That was the extent of story. They didn't have pictures of the seal or even stock footage of the beach, there was no indication on whether this was a rare event, if seals were an endangered species or anything. There was no other context.

"Stay tuned for more details."
Cut to commercial.

Now a certain amount of frivolity is expected during silly season, but as my hair got clipped in my barbershop chair, the entire barbershop cohort couldn't help but shake our heads and say that this breaking news was what the US media has been about for the past 5 years. Our previous barbershop banter about housing prices, job security, Iraq, race, pollution, love, fun, sex, church were all for naught. All these conversations on issues large and small needed to stop because of this breaking news. Oh well...

We never figured out what Judge Mathis's verdict was for the couple because, by the time the TV returned to our regularly scheduled programming, the show had ended. We switched the television set off immediately.

These are strange days: we even mess with Judge Mathis.

Sample Usage III

"Lining up all these men with huhudious titles to perform ceremonial acts."

Note a well-worn quote:

"Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job".

See also: Senate panel says FEMA is beyond repair and should be disbanded.

Oh Katrina. Oh Rita. Oh FEMA.

Thundersnow

I learned a new word last December and saw something I'd never seen before. The word was thundersnow; the event was the presence of lightning and thunder during a severe snow storm.

"They did not foresee the sharp drop in air pressure that created what meteorologists call "thundersnow". A low-pressure system sweeping northward from the mid-Atlantic coast yesterday morning got a boost of low pressure from a system moving east over New York State. Snowflakes provided conductivity, and the result was booming thunder, flashes of lightning, and more snow."

I have traveled across oceans and logged thousands of miles in my lifetime journey as a beast of no nation. Still, at the moment that I saw, with my own eyes, snow falling and lightning striking the ground simultaneously (not to mention those flakes drifting horizontally), I thought the God's must be crazy. At that terrible sound of thunder, I was ready to return home, if indeed home would still have me. Huhudious weather has me Shuffering & Shmilling.

Editorial Decisions

I worked from home on Wednesday, June 15, 2005 and flipped between the BBC America TV newscast and the lunchtime edition of NBC News on television. These are the stories that were reported.

NBC

BBC America newscast

Aruba story - missing woman and the police search on the beach (10 minutes) Terri Schiavo autopsy (10 minutes)

Suicide bomber in Iraq (2nd infiltration of an army camp in 4 days) (4 minutes) Second bomber of the day in Baghdad (3 minutes) Australian hostage has been rescued from his captors after being held for six weeks in Iraq. (3 minutes) A follow-up of the story about Malawi being accused of illicit tear gas trade to sell to Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe government for their campaign to 'drive out the rubbish' displacing at least half a million citizens. (2 minutes) Beheadings in Brazil prison riot (3 minutes) ... any number of other stories... At the 20 minute mark, we had the Terri Schiavo autopsy (2 minutes)

In other news, a seal was found dead on the shore of Quincy Beach. Anyway stay tuned. Gas prices have doubled since 2001.

Crocodile Tears

While we're on the topic of June 2005, remember what was important back then? Too long ago was it? Well I remember. Remember if you will that this was 8 months after a certain election. This was the headline

Yale grades portray Kerry as a lackluster student, His 4-year average on par with Bush's

Apparently because John Kerry got bad grades in his first year at Yale, we should be happy for the intellectual gravitas the 43rd president of the United States brings to the table. Indeed all was well in the land and the assurance the story was supposed to give was that the right decision had been made.

I have no words for the buyer's remorse that apparently is now being felt.

"Don't Bring Yourself"

There's a Ghanaian pidgin expression, "Don't bring yourself", which means pretty much what you'd expect, something like "I don't want to hear it" or "Talk to the hand". The indignant expression is often followed by a scrunching of the cheeks, and grunt that sounds like "Tchew".

Please don't bring yourself with that "we were duped" business. Please don't bring yourself with the more accurate "we were hurt but he's our sonofabitch" line of Realpolitik.

Please. Stand up and be counted.

Don't bring yourself.

Anaesthetic

High Spirits

Josh and Cindy have flown out to Colorado from their home in Circleville, Ohio, with two distinct goals in mind. The first is to get plastered - not a difficult task, as it turns out, because they have been drinking ever since they arrived at Columbus airport at 4am, and it's now pushing seven in the evening. And the second is to get married in front of a whole theatre full of fellow drinkers at a shindig known as the second annual Modern Drunkard Convention.

If no one offers me Prozac, I'm inclined to attend the 3rd Modern Drunkard convention... In other news, the Modern Drunkard magazine has seen its circulation go through the roof and now there are even books: Boys behaving badly score their own literary genre

A new word was coined in America this week: fratire. It refers to a spate of testosterone-fuelled books about belligerence and debauchery, leglessness and legovers, which publishers hope will spawn the male equivalent of chick-lit.

No Comment

A jury awarded $500,000 Friday to a woman who was spanked in front of her colleagues in what her employer called a camaraderie-building exercise.

Echo Chamber?

The Washington Post's Jim VandeHei who like me celebrates small things cut straight to the chase last Friday and asked outgoing White House press secretary Scott McClellan the following as President Bush was traveling to New Orleans:

"My question would be, is there a White House policy that all government TVs have to be tuned to Fox?"

[snip prevarications and bemusement]

"Well, the magic people at the other end of the phone ... I was told, 'We don't watch CNN here, you can only watch Fox,'", VandeHei said.

[more prevarications and bemusement]

You might call this a frivolous journalistic pursuit but there is a method behind VandeHei's line of question: as we know, when Dick Cheney travels to a hotel, his advance team make sure that the "all televisions tuned to Fox News" provision is enforced.

Plagiarist for President

For all the talk about plagiarism these days and the gleeful focus on the fall of "model minorities", say Jayson Blair at the New York Times, that beleaguered young white republican, Ben Domenech at the Washington Post, and that young, nubile and photogenic Kaayva woman, I often wonder why we don't celebrate the gotchas about the more important hustlers.

For God's sake, Russian President Vladimir Putin plagiarized his PhD thesis from two University of Pittsburgh professors. I realize that Russia is a shadow of the old Soviet Union but it bears thinking about. The Russian President, one of the most powerful men in the world, plagiarized his dissertation, and weeks later there is hardly a squeak. And there's a big to-do over a piddling half a million dollar contract.

It all depends on who is doing the plagiarizing I suppose.

There's also the analogy with the way Alan Greenspan dealt with that hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management in the economic sphere. If you're going to use huhudious financial instruments, you should go all out and be as outrageous as you can. If you're going to go into debt, you should borrow as much as you can. You should run up the most irresponsible deficits, as seems to be current policy, or as was the case in the glorious Savings and Loan past (with kind regards to presidential candidate Senator John McCain, proud member of The Keating Five).

The lesson is that you can indeed be too big to fail.

We've all read My Life as a Fake, haven't we? It's all about the hustle.

We live in the era of identity theft.

Coronations

The President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila recently received a curious letter. It was addressed to him by Major General Joseph Kabila. It concerned the latter's resignation from the army so that he could concentrate on campaigning for the presidency.

In case you weren't paying attention, the issue is this: he accepted his own letter of resignation.

See also: How To Hand Over To Yourself.

Do note that it has never been clear who promoted him to the status of Major General of the Congolese Army. I am still reeling at the cheek of this Messiah of the huhudious. But then I recalled that he was only following in the footsteps of Joseph Mobutu aka Mobutu Sese Seko ("The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake").

Still, in sputtering about for historical precedents, I had reach back to the year 1804 and Napoleon's coronation. You might recall the then historically-unprecedented excercise in which, Napoleon huhudiously crowned himself Emperor.

The Beatification of Actors

The Angola dossier that was handed to me last year made a passing mention of CNN celebrating its 25th anniversary with an award for the Top 25 most fascinating people of the past quarter-century.

The usual suspects were there: Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Osama bin Laden, Ayatollah Khomeini and John Paul II who had just passed (he was an actor). I'll pass over Ronald Reagan being number one since nostalgia is pervasive after all, and he was another former actor who had passed away the previous year.

What struck me however was that the 43rd President of the United States was placed fourth in this list. Recall if you will that this was a vote by the editors of CNN and Time magazine. I do realize that these are journalists and not historians hence they might be missing the big picture. Still it gave me pause. Now the 43rd President of the United States is many things to many people. Fascinating is something that not even his relatives, let alone his wife would call him. He doesn't need his staff to compare him to Truman or Lincoln or anything else, the liberal editors of CNN and Time magazine already crowned him.

Of Wider Applicability

At his graduation in 1995, yours truly ruminated on Ghanaian politics instead of drinking champagne.

The utter mediocrity of the jokers who are ruling us boggles the mind. Their idiosyncrasies, pettiness, moral failings, violence or personal corruption aside, they are a truly incompetent bunch. It is sad to say this and maybe other politicians are/will be no better. But since those who rule us set the tone in a country, their impact is felt in our family homes... and all over the country.

This just in: a seal has died on the shore of Quincy Beach. Stay tuned for more details.

Sample Usage IV

"As the trial drew to a close, his lawyers submitted a number of huhudious motions in the case".

Awards Ceremony

It is hard to know where to start when I look at my part of the world. In any case, the winners of the Huhudious Awards 2005 - West African Edition are President Laurent Gbagbo of Cote D'Ivoire, his wife and her death squads, and Blé Goudé head of the Young Patriots. The citation is for ordering the Ivorian Air Force to bombard a French camp and the rebels with which they had supposedly been negotiating with, killing nine peacekeepers and an American aid worker in an attempt to reignite the Ivorian civil war and precipitate a "Rwanda of the West" (as if the experiences of Sierra Leone and Liberia were not enough in our sub-region).

Jacques Chirac's response, delivered 15 minutes after he was informed of the events and the death of his men, was the destruction of the entire Ivorian air force.

It is sad to say, but Gbagbo and company were at it a few months ago, possibly trying to get a head start on the 2006 ceremonies.

Photo-ops

But back to lighter topics: the Sierra Leonean civil war.

It's funny what sets me off and I suppose this is instructive... Nicholas Kristof in an aside in his recent examination of Osama Bin Laden's audio editorial on Darfur, made a quite startling claim that

"Madeleine Albright helped end the horrors of Sierra Leone simply by going there and being photographed with maimed children."

Now on the face of it that sentence is accurate; it meshes well with a sense of piety, broken taboos, and the feelgood factor. There are rhetorical echoes of Princess Diana's selfless humanitarianism towards victims of AIDS and landmines.

Now I have great respect for Madelaine Albright whose achievements and breaking of glass ceilings should be celebrated by all. Similarly I have great respect for Nicholas Kristof and his prize-winning efforts in crusading against child prostitution, ending the Darfur conflict and all around journalistic muckracking in a long and wonderful career. Thus you may ask yourself why I would bring that sentence up in connection with "startling" and all things huhudious. Well...

During her time, first as ambassador to the United Nations, and then as Secretary of State of the most powerful country of the world, Madelaine Albright stood by and let the combination of Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson, the strangest of bedfellows that I can think of, run US policy towards Liberia and Sierra Leone. The foreign policy that those two advocated, and that she implemented, consisted of coddling those murderers Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh in return for logging concessions (echoes of the long legacy of the Firestone corporation and its rubber plantations) and blood diamonds (which have now seen "blowback" as the preferred currency of "those evildoers"). I'll pass over her and her boss' behaviour on the Rwanda issue (active resistance to even minimal intervention by even the Africans: the Ghanaian soldiers who were there on the ground and had to stand by and watch are shadows of themselves these days, Romeo Dallaire is said to have attempted suicide many times; and we know all about those who didn't survive that conflict, and the walking wounded that did). Further, I'll pass over the more insiduous and ongoing policy of selling landmines and weapons systems of all kinds to the continent, that military-industrial complex business (or is it weapons of minimal destruction?).

I view Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson as simply The Quiet American Theory revisited as the loud, oratorical encomiums of Country Preachers in matters outside of their competence. A grifter notion of dissident self-importance, hustler chic perhaps? Madelaine Albright, while receiving accolades as a doyenne of sagacity, should be duly savaged for dereliction of duty. Further, Nicholas Kristof should stick to things closer to home. Travel journalism as foreign policy can be lethal, and the consequent false pieties and celebration of post-facto "I feel your pain" photo-ops are simply huhudious. I appreciate pat notions of liberalism but, too often, they devolve into the rhetoric of 'Chutzpah' Thomas Friedman and his Flat World stylings or Michael Ignatieff's Manifest Destiny. I prefer good old Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations or Francis Fukuyama's End of History garbage to this self-congratulatory nonsense.

Don't bring yourself.

Sample Usage V

A typical newspaper headline:

"Huhudious acts at VRA".

Which reminds me: the scary thing about Condoleezza Rice is that she actually believes it. For others like Dick Cheney and his ostensible boss, it is the plain exercise of power, or perhaps reading one's lines, depending on one's point of view. Those who actually believe in it are far more interesting psychologically because they cause confusion amongst the troops. What was Condoleezza's Road to Damascus moment, I wonder? Food for thought...

Recall, if you will, the derivation of the word huhudious:

ABC "were looting the country's finances while claiming" XYZ

Then you read this: US war costs 'could hit $811bn'

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has soared and may now reach $811bn, says a report by the Congressional Research Service.

"Gitmo-ize"

General Asserts Right On Self-Incrimination In Iraq Abuse Cases

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, a central figure in the U.S. detainee-abuse scandal, this week invoked his right not to incriminate himself in court-martial proceedings against two soldiers accused of using dogs to intimidate captives at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to lawyers involved in the case.

A full general mind you, a "man of honour"... and he hasn't faced any reprimand for his efforts to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. Or rather, when a reprimand was strongly recommended, the Pentagon panel that reviewed it quietly declined to apply it. They couldn't face the heart of darkness. They preferred things fall apart, and an administrative retirement...

"Blood"

I don't know why people are calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation these days. If the President, the Vice President, the Defense Secretary, the Attorney General and those faceless lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel were the ones who instituted the policies of woe that are now causing recrimination and blowback, the more interesting people are the enforcers.

Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone was the chief enforcer and architect of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, erustication and worse. Even if he'll never face the legal consequences, he ostensibly has the proverbial blood on his hands - albeit at a clinical remove and morally sanitized with self-righteous disinfectant.

Maj. Gen. Miller was asked during a May 19, 2004, congressional hearing on the Abu Ghraib scandal if he had talked with Cambone or Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin after Miller's "assessment" visit to Abu Ghraib. Miller replied that he had submitted a written report about his visit to the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, Fla., but had no discussions with Cambone or Boykin. "I had no direct discussions with Secretary Cambone or General Boykin," Miller said.

But three months later Miller told attorneys a different story. As the Chicago Tribune reported in July 2005, Miller said in a recorded statement, "Following our return in the fall, I gave an outbrief to both Dr. Wolfowitz and Secretary Cambone."

"Maj. Gen. Miller's apparent position that he did not discuss the subject with Undersecretary Cambone but that he briefed Cambone on the same subject is a distinction without a difference to me," said Sen. Carl Levin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

If Carl Levin had said "it all depends on what the meaning of 'is' is", he wouldn't have been far from the truth, but he would have scored an own-goal. I suggest however that Senator Levin could have done with the word huhudious.

Like that other Stephen, Hadley that is, of the National Security Council, it is quite entertaining to see the little bureaucratic maneuverings that these seasoned operatives use to cover their behinds.

The cover story for the gruesome atrocities at Camp Nama (their extent is still classified) is a conveniently-leaked "exonerating" note that Mr Cambone supposedly wrote ordering his deputy to

"Get to the bottom of this immediately... In particular I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior".

It is much like the Leaker-in-Chief pointing his finger belligerently and intoning that "I want to know who did the leak". The man who instituted the "pattern of behavior" wants to know if it is part of a pattern of behavior? And then he'll be the one to investigate himself? What a huhudious notion.

I see hooded prisoners, barking dogs, summary beatings, electrical shocks and worse when I read about that huhudious duo, Undersecretary Stephen "Blood" Cambone and Major General Geoffrey "Gitmo-ize" Miller... Continuing my excursions in metaphorical excess, they lie at the bottom of a barrel overflowing with moral turpitude.

But back to lighter topics...

A Spring Day, April 2006

On a day in which it was reported that April was the deadliest month this year for GIs in Iraq...

On a day in which Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay, in his trial for world record fiscal chicanery at Enron, displayed huhudious chops in his defense

The Enron corporate murder mystery is solved. The investors did it.

That is essentially who Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling have blamed by describing the energy trading company’s collapse as a "classic run on the bank" during testimony at their fraud trial in Houston.

Had investors and creditors not run scared as the scandal unfolded in 2001, dumping their Enron shares and refusing to lend more money, the company and its purportedly healthy business wouldn’t have been forced into bankruptcy, the former top two officers of Enron argued.

Bruce Meyerson of the Associated Press called it "blaming the victim", I call it huhudious in the extreme. They've got gruesomely enlarged gonads.

On a day in which the World Food Program announced that it would have to halve the rations for nearly 3 million refugees in Darfur, Sudan due to a "severe funding shortfall"...

3 million refugees? For God's sake, I have no more tears to cry.

On a day in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) submitted its report and George W. Bush took yet another occasion to gleefully rattle sabers about "unacceptable" things in Iran and the "firm resolve" to keep all options on the table...

On a day in which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed that Iran's nuclear programme was 'irreversible'...

On that day, I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh's wistful zinger

"Wars don't start nowadays because people want them. We long for peace, and fill our newspapers with conferences about disarmament and arbitration, but there is a radical instability in our whole world-order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions."

"Well, you seem to know all about it," said Mr. Outrage, "and I think should have been told sooner."

On a day in which the Wall St Journal reported allegations of hookers beeing procured for the "relaxation" of righteous congressmen by contractors in exchange for currying favour...

On a day in which Public Moralist-in-Chief, Rush Limbaugh turned himself in on a plea-bargained and quite lenient "deferred prosecution" of personal addictions and doctor shopping...

On a day in which Saddam Hussein turned 69 years old behind bars, the burning question asked was "whether he had received a birthday cake". The US military spokesman remained tight-lipped and noted only that "He is treated humanely and in full accordance with international standards".

It is clear that Saddam is going to be executed in time for an American election. I fiercely reject the death penalty, I prefer the sight of huhudious tryants of all sorts having to face anonymous judges, rapacious lawyers and bureaucratic process. That spectacle is far more satisfying and cathartic to my mind. Franz Kafka's trial bureaucracy is their just reward.

A Cautious Experiment

Just in time for the 2006 midterm elections, we hear that the new chairmen of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke will play it by ear

The Fed May Stand Back and Watch the Numbers for a While

The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, indicated on Thursday that the central bank was ready for a cautious experiment.

Despite unexpectedly strong economic growth in recent months, and some evidence of a risk of higher inflation, Mr. Bernanke told Congress that the Fed's policy-making committee might pause temporarily in its two-year campaign to raise interest rates.

A cautious experiment huh? Echoes of "voodoo economics"... A huhudious policy more like.

Kingmakers of Redmond

One theory about the result of the 2004 US presidential elections that I haven't seen discussed much is the effect of an unexpected dividend, namely: Microsoft Announces Payouts to Investors Wednesday, July 21, 2004,

First Step Valued At $32 Billion

Microsoft Corp., which has amassed an unparalleled cash hoard of nearly $60 billion from its world-dominating software business, announced yesterday that it would return a large chunk of it to shareholders, much of it through a one-time dividend of $3 for every share held by investors.

With 10.79 billion shares outstanding as of March 31, the company will pay out more than $32 billion in that one stroke

I assume that this was just financial savvy at work, if the election had swung the other way, a few tax loopholes might have been closed and that payday would have been lost. Still, the timing was very interesting and the largesse was unprecedented. As far as I can tell, there was no pressing demand for something that the company had long disdained. I hope some economist can show the effect of that surplus cash on the US economy; to my reckoning, that's like private financing of 8 months of the war in Iraq. Now don't get me wrong, like anybody who owns a mutual fund in America, I got my microdollars that year, and shared some of the fruits of hard work and the occasional monopoly profits.

The Chinese are Coming

The MC named Jin is not a great rapper, he's more of a muckraker and verbal backstreet brawler, the kind who, like Busta Rhymes is a great guest artist on a song but a little jarring at album length. He did manage to tone down his cacophonous inclinations for his most successful and inspired song, the suitably named Learn Chinese ("Y'all gonna learn Chinese"). Some evidence:

President Hu Jintao met with Microsoft President Bill Gates in Seattle before meeting US President George W. Bush during his "inspection tour".

China and Nigeria agree oil deal in which "China will invest $4bn in oil and infrastructure projects in Nigeria".

20 years ago, it was the Middle East that was the terrain for the Great Game. These days it is Latin America and Africa that are the New Frontiers. I love tomorrow but I'm scared of what we have seen so far. Perhaps there is something to be said for relative neglect.

Sample usage VI

"Any figures that will be finally given will be tainted by the huhudious hide-and-seek our elders are playing".

"Jon 'Guilty Pleasure' Swift" explicates this best: Due Compensation at Exxon?

Take Lee Raymond the chairman of Exxon Mobil, who is retiring this year. Although he has been taking some flak from a few pundits who have squawked that his $400 million retirement package is excessive, when you crunch the numbers it turns out that Raymond is grossly underpaid.

Last year Exxon made the biggest profit of any company in history, due almost entirely to record gas prices. Do people think those gas prices just raised themselves on their own? Of course not. Raymond deserves the credit for coming up with the idea to raise gas prices and blame it on global supply and demand. It was a courageous business decision to make in the middle of a war, one that might have backfired.

Bongo Drums

Lobbyist Sought $9 Million to Set Bush Meeting

The lobbyist Jack Abramoff asked for $9 million in 2003 from the president of a small West African nation (Gabon) to arrange a meeting with President Bush and directed his fees to a Maryland company now under federal scrutiny, according to newly disclosed documents.

Who's Omar Bongo you might ask? Omar Bongo has been President of Gabon for 39 years. He is described as that country's "President for life". I suspect only Fidel Castro has had greater longevity in power.

Axis of Hypocrisy

Last year, I tried to promote Arnie, or rather ARNIE, the Axis of Righteous Neocon Infamy and Excess, to no avail. No one liked my neologism. The subtle allusion to the Groping Terminator of B-movie and California fame and to Tom Delay, former exterminator, and now former senator per his legal troubles, was all for nought. Axis of Hypocrisy was a pithier formulation and sadly it remains relevant...

But first a blast from the past, those long forgotten 1980s, that decade of the Bonfire of the Vanities, Savings and Loan, crack epidemics and above-all, Money.

Let's go back to those glorious days when we met gruesome dictators sitting on a pile of oil, and shook their hands firmly and supplied them with weapon systems, closing our eyes while they dealt poisonous gas on their citizens or the armies of those neighbouring Mullahs.

Things have changed a lot in the past twenty years haven't they?

On April 17, 2006, Condeleezza Rice met with Teodoro Obiang Nguema.

Who's Obiang Nguema you ask? That would be Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema. I have much to say about him but it wouldn't be nice and my parents taught me not to give vent to my frustration. Thus I'll let the nice folks at the Washington Post describe him:

A somewhat unsavory and corrupt character who seized power in a 1979 coup, runs a regime regularly condemned by the State Department for human rights violations, including torture, beatings, abuse and deaths of prisoners and suspects. He's gotten as much as 97 percent of the vote in recent elections, he told CBS's "60 Minutes" a while back, but that was because "there is no one left in the opposition."

Human rights groups and, we hear, folks inside the State Department, were beside themselves that Rice would meet with what one advocate called "one of the most brutal, most corrupt and unreconstructed dictators in the world." (We would opt for the lunatic Kim Jong Il, but let's not quibble.)

Sidenote:

• Equatorial Guinea is sub-Saharan Africa’s third largest oil producer.
• Obiang Nguema was famously described as a tropical gangster in Robert Klitgaard's bestselling book of that name.

Ms. Rice unexpectedly changed the protocol for this previously "no-question" photo-op and took "just one question" from the media, predictably it was not about her meeting with the ecstatic president but rather an opportunity to continue rattling sabers about Iran's pursuit of its nuclear program.

Rights Take Backseat to Oil

Searching for energy supplies and allies against Iran, the Bush administration is reaching out to leaders who rule countries that are rich in oil and gas but accused of authoritarian rule and human rights violations.

The presidents of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Equatorial Guinea are all getting special attention. The effort sometimes seems at odds with President Bush's stated second-term goal of spreading democracy.

"I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback as secretary of state than the way that the politics of energy is – I will use the word 'warping' – diplomacy around the world," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this month.

Rice herself drew some fire for welcoming Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema to the State Department as "a good friend".

Strange bedfellows doesn't begin to capture this huhudious life.

The B-movie Theory

I'll stop writing about the B-movie Theory when I stop seeing the daily evidence of its motive force in human affairs (or perhaps when the copyright lawyers come my way). Life is now a matter of political theatre and politics as theatre. I seek solace in the Urban Griot soundtrack which is the only thing that helps me get through these strange days. Until things change, I'll harken back to Curtis Mayfield singing Don't Worry (If There's A Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go). As he sang:

They're all political actors

And Nixon talking about "Don't worry".
He says "Don't worry".

But they all know
If there's a hell below
We're all gonna go

I'm also always going to be singing from the songbook of the prescient Gil Scott-Heron, who was a keen detector all of things huhudious. The song is "B" movie.

We're all actors in this I suppose...

What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer. And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune the consumer has got to dance. That’s the way it is. We used to be a producer – very inflexible at that, and now we are consumers and, finding it difficult to understand. Natural resources and minerals will change your world. The Arabs used to be in the 3rd World. They have bought the 2nd World and put a firm down payment on the 1st one. Controlling your resources will control your world. This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now. They don’t know if they want to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan. They don’t know if they want to be diplomats or continue the same policy - of nuclear nightmare diplomacy. John Foster Dulles ain’t nothing but the name of an airport now.

The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia.

They want to go back as far as they can – even if it’s only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment – someone always came to save America at the last moment – especially in "B" movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan – and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at – like a "B" movie...

A theme song for saber-rallying and selling wars door-to-door...

Put your orders in America. And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupe - cause all of a sudden we have fallen prey to selective amnesia - remembering what we want to remember and forgetting what we choose to forget.

As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation. And here’s a look at the closing numbers – racism's up, human rights are down, peace is shaky, war items are hot - the House claims all ties. Jobs are down, money is scarce – and common sense is at an all-time low with heavy trading.

Movies were looking better than ever and now no one is looking because we’re starring in a "B" movie. And we would rather have John Wayne - we would rather have John Wayne.

I love B-movies. The Wife complains regularly that the Netflix queue overfloweth with B-movies. I wish however that the B-movie stays on the silver screen or living room television and doesn't become policy and real life roadkill. Huhudious events are frequent in the world of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Africans are the long-suffering bar and restaurant owners who pay protection money to the "good" Clint "Blondie" Eastwood, get ripped off by the "ugly" Eli "Tuco" Wallach, or killed by the "bad" Lee "Angel Eyes" Van Kleef. We are those whose children are blessed with stray bullets when filmmakers want to emphasize a passing point. We are the Mexican old ladies running in fear and gathering our loved ones under our long and tattered skirts as we hear that Valdez is coming. The tagline for that movie was "For Three Men The Civil War Wasn't Hell. It Was Practice!". In the words of Angola, that is remixed to "Oh they had themselves a field day of collateral damage". It's fair enough if the B-movie Theory is indeed the nature of the Great Game of life, so long as "I can see the blows coming", in the words of a good friend. Still, I could do without the huhudious posturing.

The Full Bolton

I live in a building with a relative of John Bolton. When we moved in eight months ago, I saw the name on the mailbox, shook my head, and broke out into kotokious laughter - another Ghanaian neologism, an adjective that combines the notions of inspired serendipity and Murphy's Law. Surely it couldn't be? Living in a typically anomic western apartment building, one never gets to know one's neighbours unless one makes an especial effort. But perhaps this is a cultural universal, city life is what it is, and even back home, the ties that bind are being loosened. As it was, I never figured out who this man was... Last week however, as I was picking up my mail, I saw someone idling up and opening said mailbox. I looked askance and took in the haircut, noticing the same insouciant gray mess. I pondered the belligerent look - it's genetic apparently, and looked up and down at the scruffy clothes - it's garden-variety noblesse oblige. I smiled, and said "Good afternoon"; we then exchanged the customary pleasantries. He's a nice guy it seems, and I was as cheery as could be. At the back of my mind however, was a worry about being victim of The Full Bolton or an Italian Job. I hope I left a good impression.

I return to Gil Scott-Heron

[repeat 22 times in an increasingly militaristic manner]

This ain't really your life,
Ain't really your life,
Ain't really, ain't nothing but a movie.

The B-movie Theory: we live in huhudious times and are governed by huhudious rulers; our only escape is nostalgia.

Next in Part 9: The Books of Nima

File under: huhudious, B-movie, neologism, life, humour, language, observation, satire, rogues, rant, politics, economics, perception, culture, media, journalism, England, USA, America, Africa, hypocrisy, irony, Congo, Kabila, Great Game, Cote D'Ivoire, Liberia, Ghana, Iraq, Iran, Stephen Cambone, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, China, Microsoft, Putin, Bongo, Kristof, Bolton, erustication, Things Fall Apart, toli