Edgewise

If you like words and politics and history

This may blow your mind.

Mr. Dylan on Mr. Cool J

In case you missed mention of it, Bob Dylan is DJ on a weekly “Theme Time Radio Hour” on satellite radio.

This was his intro to LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” on the show with a Mother’s Day theme. (II’ll put in some line breaks.)

Here’s LL Cool J

Don’t call it a comeback.

He’s been here for years,

rockin’ his peers,

puttin’ ‘em in fear,

makin’ tears

rain down like a monsoon,

explosions overpowerin’ the competition.

LL Cool J is towerin’.

Why we resist direct talks with North Korea and Iran

Why does the US resist direct talks with Iran and North Korea? This may be part of it:

The Bush Doctrine had two basic tenets: Preemptive Force and Regime Change. The second has gotten relatively little notice, compared with the first. The idea behind regime change is that when a country poses a serious threat to us, say WMDs, getting them to back off of the threat, agreeing to a monitored end to the threatening policy or program, is simply not enough. They will hide their weapons, endlessly string us along, beguile our less vigilant allies. The only real end to the specific threat is to overthrow the government entirely.

I’m not sure exactly why, but the Bush government certainly appears to associate direct talks with settling for a policy change, and forgoing regime change. They fear that in direct talks they may get an offer too complete and comprehensive to refuse, and one which would certainly involve a simple promise of non-aggression from us.

North Korea has loudly made a non-aggression pledge a central issue, saying that without it they need the WMDs for self-protection. Iran has at least implied as much.

The key concession made by the US in ending the Cuban Missile Crisis was our promise not to launch a second invasion (the first being the Bay of Pigs). Some on the right still rue that commitment.

"Squabbling" and "Bickering"

I would suggest that the press should just swear off of the use of “Squabbling” and “Bickering,” especially in headlines. For a while, I thought they were routinely applied only to political differences among foreigners, especially third-world foreigners. But I see they also appear fairly often applied to political differences—even convictions—that arise within the US.

One function of these terms is to justify, even laud, the ignorance of both the writer and the reader about the content and implications of something that, perforce, has to be reported. In every case I can think of, they tell us much about the viewpoint of the writer, and very little about the things described.

Alternate Reality #666

Pertaining to nothing, ran into an article talking about the use of “666” in the marketing for The Omen remake, and it featured the following quote:

“Normally, a marketer is going to be very, very wary about using the devil,” said Robert Thompson, professor of television at Syracuse University in New York state. “But 666 has really emerged in the popular culture as a funny thing you bring up when you’re talking about a kid misbehaving on the playground, you say ‘I bet this one has a 666 on his scalp’,” he said.

And I’ll grant that 666 is a very funny funny thing to bring up, in almost any situation. But that scalp comment — is that really a thing people say?

Adult 1: “Let me part that kid’s hair — I gotta check. He’s a 666-on-his-scalp kind of a kid. Yes, his head-skin almost certainly bears the mark of satan!”

Adult 2: “Ha ha ha! You are so right. About his scalp and its devil-mark!”

Adult 1: “Let’s go burn a goat!”

I dunno.

Mebbe it’s an east coast thing.

The Mysterious Pyramid Coincidence

Bosnian Hill an Ancient Pyramid, AP

[Note: Joke, hopefully, ensues]

So, we have yet another example of the mysteriously universal practice of pyramid building, which took hold at a certain time in every ancient human civilization, in every corner of the world.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence. There was certainly no possible route of human-to-human communication that could have accounted for the spread this practice around the world at that time.

And maybe this is also a coincidence: In every single instance, the pointy part of the pyramid was facing upward, the very direction from which any extraterrestrial guidance of these isolated early cultures would have had to come.

A coincidence? I’m sure.

You Can't Have One, but You Can Have Them All

“Can we get Person A’s phone records, without a warrant?”

No.

“Can we get everybody’s phone records, including Person A’s, without a warrant?”

Sure. No problem.

Can it really be so simple? It’s hard to see why not.

Help document this Presidency

People for the American Way has created an interactive website called WikiThePresidency where anyone can help document the depradations of the Bush administration (or research the same).

We should think, before we don't worry.

“According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released yesterday, 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort.”

Americans appear so far to have been soothed by government reassurances such as this: “The database… includ[es] called and calling numbers and the duration of calls, but nothing related to the substance of the calls.”

This makes it sound very impersonal, unprivate, and abstract. But what about “the substance,” not of the calls, but of the numbers? After all, this pattern analysis would be pretty dry if it just spotted patterns like who makes an inordinate number of two-minute phone calls between 7:04 and 7:13 on Wednesday mornings.

But the identities of the phone numbers, even without the content of the conversations, could really spice things up. Who’s been calling mosques, or peace groups, or gay bars? Is calling the ACLU perhaps a “gateway drug” that marks a high risk of later terrorist communications? Worth some serious data-mining, no doubt. Maybe the government should keep a list.

Besides names, phone numbers have associated addresses. Addresses correspond to neighborhoods, including ethnic neighborhoods. Racial and ethnic profiles will be data-mined that make all earlier profiling seem paltry by comparison. You just have to ask the wrong questions.

Indeed—just in case it should turn out to be useful at some point—the government might want to keep a permanent list of everyone who has ever dialed a phone-sex number. Those people can be risky, vulnerable to blackmail. “What if the truth should slip out?” J. Edgar Hoover had the goods on every member of congress, but never on the entire American population.

Hmm. Vulnerable to blackmail. That could come in handy—to protect the public.

This thing is only in its infancy!

i got the antediluvian de-stroyed de-brised de-scouraged homeland insecurity blues

Sittin’ in a friend’s Uptown shotgun listening to Bobby Lounge bang the ivories singing “do not pass on by” while the dog sleeps and the mockingbirds sing on a softly humid Monday morning. The friends are workin’, a blessing in this post-Katrina, trauma-tized, water-marked, limpin’ and hurtin’ New Orleans. “We Back” says the spray paint on the door but there’s a “for sale” sign on the porch. Uptown gardens are bloomin’, the ginger blossoms spilling over picket fences and “fleur de lis” flags fly from the house eaves in a show of hope from those who got lucky and still have an eave. But the gardens are an island in a sea of debris. Drive the boulevards - Jeff Davis, Broad, Gentilly - and mile after mile of blank, empty, forlorn houses sit waiting for a decision: rebuild, remove, repair. Noboby knows what to do until after the (mayoral) election, after hurricane season, after FEMA payments end, after the levees are repaired, the flood maps re-drawn. Though they weren’t wiped off the grid like the Lower Ninth, neighborhood after neighborhood sits deserted, one house here or there cleared of debris, gutted, and boarded up to wait. A grey water line smears across the city’s houses, and abandoned cars, a line of fate, a binding tie, a fading trail of memory back to old New Orleans.