perfidy

Watching Jonah Golberg and Juan Cole go at each other is like watching Max Cleland box Larry Flynt . It sounds like it would be funny to see two wheelchair dudes fight, but in actual fact it's tawdry, exploitative, and leaves everyone feeling dirty and vaguely disappointed that there wasn't more punching. Nevertheless, if you want to, here's the recent rounds.: Cole/Goldberg.

"Thanks" to QandO for the collation and for an energetic fisking of Cole to boot, though I don't necessarily agree and find it a bit unseemly to pile on the weak besides.

[wik] My original post read "John" Cole. John Cole is the blogger at balloon juice, but he's a Steelers fan and therefore not to be trusted.

In loving memory of Minister Emeritus Windy City Mike’s occasional coffeehouse sets back in the halcyon days of college and too many cigarettes, and his audience favorite, “Talkin’ To My Neighbor Ed Blues,” I offer this left-field story of Yemen’s success in fighting terrorism.

In this era of war and mistrust, fueled by mutual distrust, rampant misperception, and the more than occasional exploding object, it is popular to decry the “know your enemy” argument as being a mushyheaded, bleeding-hearted leftist approach to reducing the number of terrorists and incidents of terrorism in the world. Many argue that the only ways to achieve this end are either 1) kill all the terrorists (which earns the A. Jackson Prize for clarity of purpose), or 2) kill all the terrorists we can, meanwhile making sure the social conditions that created them are minimized or eliminated (which earns the W. Wilson Prize for ambition of goal). There are many, many merits to recommend these two approaches, but there are numerous drawbacks as well.

The incomplete success of the Jackson and Wilson plans to combat terrorism has resulted in a situation where, as one Iraqi interlocutor of Michael Totten put it, the best sentiment we can hope for in the Middle East is, “Thank you for coming, now please leave and take us with you.” (or, as Minister Mike once put it, “Yankee go home!... Stay for some mezza?”). As far as that gets us, that’s pretty good, and in fact as good as we can expect. But we still face a situation where, inescapably, no matter what the US does, we’re still the asshole. This is, of course, fine. Pleasing everybody will get us all either dead or in burqas, and sharply reduce the number of opportunities Americans have to be complacent about being #1. But this also means that any help we as a society can get from within the Islamic world to combat terrorism through soft means (those avenues which are shut off to us in our capacity as King Badass/ Great Satan / Corrupter of the World / Main Destination for Everyone’s Emigrants) is welcome.

Which is why this story is so fascinating. A young Yemeni judge named Hamoud al-Hitar has begun engaging in Koranic debates with the terror-inclined zealots arrested in his country, with the aim of talking them out of their terrorist ways.

According to the Christian Science Monitor (linked above), it’s working.

When Judge Hamoud al-Hitar announced that he and four other Islamic scholars would challenge Yemen's Al Qaeda prisoners to a theological contest, Western antiterrorism experts warned that this high-stakes gamble would end in disaster.

Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison, Judge Hitar was inclined to agree. But banishing his doubts, the youthful cleric threw down the gauntlet, in the hope of bringing peace to his troubled homeland.

"If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle," Hitar told the militants. "But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence."

The prisoners eagerly agreed.

Now, two years later, not only have those prisoners been released, but a relative peace reigns in Yemen. And the same Western experts who doubted this experiment are courting Hitar, eager to hear how his "theological dialogues" with captured Islamic militants have helped pacify this wild and mountainous country, previously seen by the US as a failed state, like Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Since December 2002, when the first round of the dialogues ended, there have been no terrorist attacks here, even though many people thought that Yemen would become terror's capital," says Hitar, eyes glinting shrewdly from beneath his emerald-green turban. "Three hundred and sixty-four young men have been released after going through the dialogues and none of these have left Yemen to fight anywhere else."

. . . . . . .

Seated amid stacks of Korans and religious texts, Hitar explains that his system is simple. He invites militants to use the Koran to justify attacks on innocent civilians and when they cannot, he shows them numerous passages commanding Muslims not to attack civilians, to respect other religions, and fight only in self-defense.

For example, he quotes: "Whoever kills a soul, unless for a soul, or for corruption done in the land - it is as if he had slain all mankind entirely. And, whoever saves one, it is as if he had saved mankind entirely." He uses the passage to bolster his argument against bombing Western targets in Yemen - attacks he says defy the Koran. And, he says, the Koran says under no circumstances should women and children be killed.

If, after weeks of debate, the prisoners renounce violence they are released and offered vocational training courses and help to find jobs.

Hitar's belief that hardened militants trained by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan could change their stripes was initially dismissed by US diplomats in Sanaa as dangerously naive, but the methods of the scholarly cleric have little in common with the other methods of fighting extremism. Instead of lecturing or threatening the battle-hardened militants, he listens to them.

"An important part of the dialogue is mutual respect," says Hitar. "Along with acknowledging freedom of expression, intellect and opinion, you must listen and show interest in what the other party is saying."

. . . . . . . .

"It's only logical to tackle these people through their brains and heart," says Faris Sanabani, a former adviser to President Abdullah Saleh and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Observer, a weekly English-language newspaper. "If you beat these people up they become more stubborn. If you hit them, they will enjoy the pain and find something good in it - it is a part of their ideology. Instead, what we must do is erase what they have been taught and explain to them that terrorism will only harm Yemenis' jobs and prospects. Once they understand this they become fighters for freedom and democracy, and fighters for the true Islam," he says.

Some freed militants were so transformed that they led the army to hidden weapons caches and offered the Yemeni security services advice on tackling Islamic militancy. A spectacular success came in 2002 when Abu Ali al Harithi, Al Qaeda's top commander in Yemen, was assassinated by a US air-strike following a tip-off from one of Hitar's reformed militants.

The Monitor notes that terrorist activity has declined markedly in Yemen since this program was begun, though much of the credit also goes to an aggressive government policy against militant Islamic madrassas and training camps. Of course, Yemen has a long way to go from the point of view of the US. It is still a hotbed of anti-Western sentiment and the attendant poverty and desperation that such sentiments are a convenient outlet for. But, if the talking cure is working in Yemen (and I'm willing to bet that a Koranically-focused 'suasion technique will actually stick, will little backsliding), more power to them. Maybe it can work elsewhere too.

I am back from the dead.

Over the weekend I spent some time under the care of the Ministry's crack team of gnostic chirurgeons. Most of them are refugees from our now-defunct Babylon office, and others are... well... let's just say they don't get out much and that's lucky for us all. After exhausting all the powers of modern medical science to no avail, the Ministry's medical staff went to work. Twenty-four hours later, I was miraculously on the mend. Though not without a fight, our in-house healers were able to draw a quantity of fluid from my chest cavity (not without a fight... Linda Blair vomited less than I did... the powers of the old ones are strong... I wonder if this was all to do with that aging invoice I hoped they'd forget...), and I am feeling stronger by the day. Soon, once again, you shall all cower before me.

In my absence, I am both gratified and saddened to see that the innate pettiness of the human spirt has rolled on unabated. In this week's quickie edition of This Week in Exemplary Human Behavior, we focus on the unremarkable: those stories that we could recycle at least twice a year without even trying. Perhaps next week we will see humankind aspire to greater heights of creative cruelty. Or perhaps we will not have to write this feature at all for want of suitably exemplary material. Suit yourself; I know which one I'd put money on.

Spotlight: Massachusetts- Defrocked priest Paul Shanley will die in prison after being convicted of repeatedly raping a young parishoner in the 1980s. Despite the ultimate thinness of the prosecution's case (only one of four victims made it to the trial phase without either being dropped from the case or going into hiding), a jury convicted Shanley on the strength of reportedly repressed memories recovered by the plaintiff. The Boston Phoenix has spent a good amount of time documenting Shanley's deep, deep weirdness-- including, for example, his perplexingly thumbs-up attitude toward bestiality and pedophilia-- which makes a good circumstantial case that the former "street priest" is at least a hobby-level sicko, but one witness' recovered memories do not a case make.

There's so much here to love: a creepshow priest; a jury willing to accept "memory recovery" as ironclad evidence; a diocese who, regardless of this one priest's record, aided and abetted a casual kiddie-toucher ring for decades, privileging their own institutional comfort over the anguish of generations of helpless victims. Nice.

Spotlight: Los Angeles- Home of The the Angels Angels of Anaheim. What is it this time? Natural disaster? Mouthy limo-lib celebrity? Dead rap star?

Nope! It's that old chestnut, appalling police brutality! In a story that will be no surprise to anyone who has ever driven I-5 at rush hour (or seen the Steve Martin classic, "LA Story"), the LAPD ended the stolen-car joyride of thirteen-year-old Devon Brown by shooting him. The Department's defense is that Brown, at the end of the chase, backed his car into a police cruiser in a maneuver that we in Boston like to call "parking a little close." The police chose to signal their displeasure at Brown's novice attempt at full-contact driving by shooting into his car ten times, thereby stopping the car. Oh right-- and killing Brown too.

Like Uncle Jimbo said, "it's all right to shoot anything, as long as you make sure to yell, 'oh God, it's coming right for us!' first."

Spotlight: Iraq- Suicide bomber kills 21. Nothing to say that wasn't said the first 200 times.

Spotlight: Saudi Arabia- Security officials from 50 countries elected to put the fox in charge of the henhouse this week, with the establishment of an international counterterrorism center to be based in Saudi Arabia. Now, I understand that the Royal House of Saud 'n' Waffles has a vested interest in quashing terrorism in their country because all those grassroots terrorist groups kind of suck the wind out of their own state-sponsered terrorist groups but really... do you put the fat guy in charge of the buffet?

Spotlight: Sudan- The UN continues to waggle the Giant Finger Of Blame at Sudan, charging that the Sudanese government really doesn't give a shit about the ongoing genocide within its borders. If the Sudan does not respond to waggling, the organization is expected to move on to Sighing Aggressively. In other news, a new study by the United Nations Commission on Self-Justification shows that sighing saves, on average, 300,000 children a year from dying by machete or Kalashnikhov.

[wik] Did I really say we might never have to do this again? What was I drinking?! Here's some more for you.

Spotlight: Florida- Via Julian Sanchez at Reason.com comes a chilling story of a Tampa couple who systematically tortured their seven adopted children. The official reports cite that the children were, among other things, were "subjected to electric shocks, beatings with hammers and having their toenails yanked out with pliers." One set of 14-year-old twins weighted 36 and 38 pounds respectively, or about a third the normal weight of boys that age.

This height of depravity against children strikes me as a strong argument against God (what God would let this happen?), against evolution (what process of evolution would retain this impulse?), and in favor of enforced eugenics. But ultimately, I think this episode sits alongside many, many others of various stripes, flavors, and varieties as an incontrovertable, ironclad, and urgent argument against Florida.

(A fun final note: According to Florida law, the real threat to adopted children comes from the queers.)

Six weeks sick.
Tired all the time.
A 30 year old with a senior's symptom-- a persistent pleural effusion just hangin' out outside my left lung-- creating shortness of breath and back pain.
Two rounds of X-rays.
Two CAT scans.
Two rounds of blood tests.
A complete physical.

And all I can say for sure is it's not caused by pneumonia or a pulmonary embolism, and that I probably don't have HIV, lupus, or cancer. Probably. Or mono. Probably. Third round of blood tests come back today; if they end up naming a disease after me I'll be pissed.

So please excuse me if I don't post much on the interweb.

7:15 up!
9:00 tax time: pull together W-2s
1:45 CAT scan, Sisters of Mercy hospital
2:45 doc's appt.: tests
4:00 rent due: balance chkbk, rent check to TG
10:00 straight to bed, mister!

We might bicker and cavil and argue about whether or not it's "torture," but can we please agree that regardless of whatever else you may call it, it's cruel and sadistic behavior?

I know I already plugged this dude's album pretty hard, but you really should pop over to moceanworker.com and check out the video for the track called "Chick A Boom Boom Boom."

Now.

Freshly minted Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has a lot on her plate: overseeing the No Child Left Behind program; ordering herself a new stapler; untangling an unspeakable labor-relations miasma with the teachers' unions; coordinating the introduction of new abilities tests and learning standards for public school students of all kinds.

But lucky for her, she's got herself a nose for the important stuff.

The nation's new education secretary denounced PBS on Tuesday for spending public money on a cartoon with lesbian characters, saying many parents would not want children exposed to such lifestyles.

The not-yet-aired episode of "Postcards From Buster" shows the title character, an animated bunny named Buster, on a trip to Vermont - a state known for recognizing same-sex civil unions. The episode features two lesbian couples, although the focus is on farm life and maple sugaring.

Surely the best way to make sure children grow up well-adjusted and intelligent is to hide from them the stunning diversity of the ways people live. That way their minds can grow unhampered by such poisionous things as opinions, controversy, and maple sugar.

So we've got Miss Moral Majority in Education, and a yes-man for the rubber hose brigade in Justice. What's next? Pinkerton for Secretary of Labor?

[wik] I mean, really. Spellings is quite solicitous of people who might be offended by the fact that women can live together (in an arrangement we used to call "spinsters" or "maiden aunts"), and yet. My wife and I are not churchgoing folks, and though we want to make sure that some type of spirituality enters into the lives of our as yet theoretical children, we are deeply ambivalent about how best to do that without being either hypocritical (meaning we insincerely join a church for the sake of the children), or offhanded. The same "Buster" program that shows lesbians engaging in *gasp* sugaring also includes and episode featuring a visit to a fundamentalist Mormon household. My children could be exposed to the sight of highly religious people living in a way that comports with their idiosyncratic and uncommon personal beliefs! Where's the outrage, people?! Where's the outrage?!!!!!

Let me get a little personal here. Go, go fetch a drink and a crying towel; I’ll wait.

Back in 1996, just after I graduated college, I drifted for a time rootless and aimless. After a summer whiled away drinking gin and tonic and reading books, I moved to Pittsburgh for lack of anything better to do. At the time, I wasn't in the greatest shape in any sense, thanks to a late college regimen of heavy drinking, late nights, a succession of (let's call them) 'thorny interpersonal relationships,' and world class self-flagellation. It wasn't a very good time.

Pittsburgh was a good place to be. I met some people and became a regular at a couple of the less reputable drinking establishments in Squirrel Hill. One night I was abducted and forcibly exposed to nudie bars. Thus it went that my first year after college was a time of assing around, personal growth, and various indeterminately enjoyable false starts.

Sometime in the summer of 1996, I picked up Freedy Johnston's album, This Perfect World (Elektra, 1994) on the strength of a review I found in an old music magazine. It came along at a perfect time. I listened to it constantly, sometimes letting Freedy sing me asleep (some would call it passing out) on the couch after last call.

The first song on This Perfect World, "Bad Reputation," seemed to sum everything up for me at age 23. The first verse went, "I know I got a bad reputation, and it isn't just talk talk talk / If I could only give you everything, you know I haven't got / I couldn't have one conversation, if it wasn't for the lies lies lies / And still I want to tell you everything until I close my eyes and suddenly I'm on the street / seven years disappear below my feet / Do you want me now, do you want me now?" Seventy five words contained everything that my little Holden Caulfield mouth had been trying to say for months and months to all my friends and former associates. Right there in music was everything I needed to get off my chest.

Freedy Johnston is very good at that. Robert Christgau called 1992's Can You Fly (Bar/None)

... a perfect album. Not a world-historical album or a ground-breaking album or even a concept album; not an album that will grab you by the neck and change your life. Just a perfect album - thirteen songs, thirteen discrete, discreet little moments that connect lyrically and stick musically

If anything, Freedy Johnston is the master of the musical short story, the Eudora Welty of the rock world. Each one of his songs is a perfectly self-contained snapshot of a moment or a feeling complete with a history and a future (if you care to imagine it) with all the loose ends tied up and not a word wasted. His melodies and arrangements tend to be simple, pleasant and catchy, and his music inhabits the middle ground between simple folk and four-chord rock. In a way he’s the opposite of Springsteen, who is all about the grand gesture, the fist in the air, the tornado and blood on the highway. Freedy Johnston is about the hand on the shoulder, the whispered secret, and the love letter delivered years too late.

The centerpiece of Can You Fly is the title song about a farmer and his son who come across something in their fields. Over a quiet bed of acoustic guitar and mallet percussion, Johnston sings,

Can you hear me?
Now the wind is dead
You fell from the cloud,
In the frozen mud
Can you see me
And my idiot son?
Down in golden light
Thrown out of the dark you came
Down down down down
on a midnight storm.
Down down down down
on a midnight flash.
We've all been looking at you,
I must know, is it true?
Can you fly?
Can you fly?

Can you hear the wind?
Now the light is dead.
You flew from your bed
Woke up on the floor
Can you fly tonight?
From my pointless fence?
Back up to the cloud
Up into the wind you came
Down down down down
on a midnight storm..
Down down down down
on a midnight flash.
We've all been looking at you,
I must know, is it true?
Can you fly?
Can you fly?

Is it an angel? Is it a metaphor? Who can tell? This is a perfect little lyric, utterly descriptive, finely drawn, and full of hidden nuance (Why is the fence pointless? Was it poorly built? Did the crop fail? Were the cows all sold?), and this is what Freedy Johnston does best.

Unfortunately, he didn't do it for very long. To my ears at least, Johnston started on a path of diminishing returns with 1996's Never Home (Elektra, 1997), tracing a career path a bit like Elvis Costello's post-Armed Forces. His albums have their charms, but they cannot help being measured against his first few and often found wanting. For this reason, I found the new Bar/None compilation of early Freedy Johnston demos, amusingly called The Way I Were, particularly intriguing.

Recorded on four-track between 1986 and 1992 (the year he made Can You Fly), The Way I Were chronicles Johnston's early experiments as songwriter and singer. Despite the primitive recordings, the arrangements are tasteful, intelligent, and above all proportional. These are not big songs, and big arrangements would overwhelm them. Strikingly, Johnston's gifts for economy were there from the beginning, as was his unique songwriting voice. At no point does he seem to be ripping off anybody, though rumors of the Pretenders, the Raspberries, and the Replacements surface from time to time.

The liner notes give no clue as to what was recorded when, or in what order the songs came. Thus, it becomes a game for the listener to try to figure out if the neat pop of "She's A Goddess" predates the messy and ridiculous "This Really Happened," or the other way around. The only way tell is by the sound of Johnston's voice-- his tenor warble appears in various stages of refinement on the fourteen tracks here. My best guess is that the more mannered vocal performances are the later ones, after Johnston got his ya-yas out.

But what ya-yas did he have? Early recordings are always dicey affairs. Have you ever heard the Replacements' first record, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out The Trash? It's a boozy punk stew that doesn't even sound like the same band who would within a few years record Let It Be or Tim. It sounds like a bunch of idiots more concerned with chasing tail and taking speed than being a band. By way of contrast, this is the sound of Freedy Johnston's ya-yas:

So it's your birthday
(yes it is!)
Happy birthday!
(thank you!)
Happy birthday!
(yes it is!)
Happy birthday!
(thaaanks!)
(I got some records... from my mom, and I got a couple tickets to see Madonna from my sister, and then... I got-- well I mean, I didn't get-- I kind of went out and spent-- you know, I bought some stuff for myself.)

All this over a loop and a skeletal bass and guitar line. The song is called "Happy Birthday." And yet within a couple years, he would be writing an elegantly drawn song about buying a mail-order bride called "I Do, I Do."

Shine up those city lights, Dust off the Empire State / My baby's flying to the city tonight, I'm gonna meet her at JFK. / Straighten the towers, paint the avenue, she's my Polaroid bride / Won't understand a word I'm telling you, Or the neon signs.

The voice is the same, the sound is the same, but somehow between 1986 and 1992, Freedy Johnston learned how to turn quirk into consequence.

www.freedyjohnston.com

This post also appears at Blogcritics.org. Blogcritics.org is clinically proven to build healthy teeth and bones.*

*Blogcritics.org not clinically proven to build healthy teeth and bones.

Tell me if this doesn't sound like the king of all funny to you!
(And, if you're not careful, you might learn something before it's through. )

[wik] Speaking of Bill Cosby (who the hell mentioned Bill Cosby?), it turns out he's being accused of working blue in real life.