The Bat-Hummer? Oh GOD.

Has anyone else seen the trailer for the new batman?

It got a bigger gasp than the whole running time of The Village combined. A kid behind me literally left his seat. "Oh Holy SHIT," he screamed. Everyone laughed at this, I think because it rang true with all of us. The youth of the world are thirsting for a return to a time when the Dark Knight was actually dark--and didn't suck.

I thought Frank Miller and Darren Aronofsky finally got around to adapting Miller's kickass Batman: Year One.

They havent. That is annoying. Still, Christopher Nolan is as good as anyone else I can think of to adapt the story and direct it (anyone besides Miller and Aronofsky).

Aronofsky is doing two other graphic novels instead it seems. An adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen (a favorite of my friend Ben, I've never read it) and something called Lone Wolf and Cub, which I've never heard of.

IMDB.com though says Watchmen is slated for 2005 and I haven't heard a thing about it, Lone Wolf is even sooner and nothing at all about it either. Strange.

I'm no insider, but 2004 is running down and the movie doesn't even have a website.

Anyway, this is good news for fans of good comic books, though I really don't like the looks of this:



Nolan has some 'splaining to do.

And who the hell is this guy? Writing Dark City isn't resume enough to be given a batman screenplay, esp. when that resume also includes Demonic Toys. Though he did the three Blades. He's essentially an unknown quantity.

Read the full thing here.

I told myself I wasn't going to get into it

Some of you will be displeased to not find fresh bullshit spewing from this blog three times a day for the next few days. Most of you will be glad.

My brother flew in last night and my parents are coming tomorrow, so my time will be pretty thin, picking them up from the turnip truck and playing big city tour guide.

I saw The Village last night and I want to discuss it so damned badly, but I've got a shit-ton of work to do today so I can get off before my brother locks himself out of my apartment and falls into Puget Sound.

I will say this though, I hate movie marketting more than anything else ever. The Village is less of a horror movie than even Unbreakable was, yet they decided to market it as that. frustrating.

The movie itself was frustrating too.

I'm not sure why, but I have an irrational devotion to M. Night Shyamalan. Less to his work itself(The Village is slightly better than Signs, which was shit) I think, than to the idea of his work, his aesthetic and his storytelling process. He creates modern day fairy tales--fables rich with symbolism. I love that shit. I just wish he'd do a better job of it. I know he has the talent.

The twist, which isn't hard to spot (which you know is coming by default), isn't totally convincing, but it forces you to reflect on the significance of earlier scenes in the way that Shyamalan always does. It scolds you for not paying attention, and makes you remember. It's just messier this time around, he isn't able to tie all the pieces together.

The acting, I think, saves this movie. Adrien Brody is a goddamned G as usual, but his character's subplot is maddeningly irrational. Unfortunately it's also the most important--it's the lynchpin of the whole revelation. That sucks, but it's still decently crafted.

Shyamalan really goes--now that I'm thinking about it--for like 3 or 4 little revelations (I think calling them twists is missing the point a bit--though I did call them that earlier) rather than one big one. I think that might be a good step in his maturation as a filmmaker. If you can't write a great story with an explosive revelation (The Sixth Sense) then it's better to focus more on the story (The Village) than on the revelation (Signs).

So it's good, not great, not Shyamalan good, but good enough.

I wasn't planning on writing this much . . .

Read the full thing here.

Turns out demons are the problem

I was digging around while trying to justify my incorrect usage of succubus to describe Gael Garcia Bernal, when I came upon a page entitled INCUBUS AND SUCCUBUS: DEMONS THAT HAVE INTERCOURSE WITH YOU. Uh . . . perfect? The root page is "Jesus-is-Lord.com" I knew this was going to be good.

To begin, he's good enough to clarify and expand upon some missteps in Websters definition:

INCUBUS - A spirit or demon thought in medieval times to lie on sleeping persons, especially women, with whom it sought sexual intercourse.

SUCCUBUS - In folklore, a female demon thought to have sexual intercourse with sleeping men.

Above definitions came from Webster's Dictionary.

INCUBI - Demonic sexual attacks on females; may be caused by sexual sins, witchcraft spells, curses of lust, inherited curses, can attack children

SUCCUBI - demonic sexual attacks on males, may be caused by the same as Incubi above

Forget medieval times and folklore, these demons are for real! The demons have sex with both men and women as the person sleeps, AND YOU KNOW IT. It's not a dream, and it is not your imagination. [ed. italics are mine, retarded use of capslock is not]

Aparently all those adolescent nocturnal emissions were satanic in nature. This comes as quite a relief. I'd always suspected anything that made my mom eye me like that as she changed my sheets had to be evil (see also, dropping shovel from deck onto little brother's head). Also, shockingly, 9 out of 10 women have been raped by a demon.

This is fascinating. Some anthropologist should study this guy. His Christianity is draped in the superstition and fear-mongering of the 17th century lay preacher. This is Salem, Massachusetts type stuff. This is a world where demonology trumps psychology. Freud was a harbinger of Satan. I love it--though I've lost the link to that one. Rest assured that psychology is one of the many holes through which demons can enter your life, along with Hellivision.

The main page is better. He's got all the usual stuff, but kicked up a notch. This guy is a showman. He has animated gifs. The Roman Catholic Church, like always, is presented as the whore of Babylon, but here it's in slide-show format.

look up pagan Rome's "pontiff", "diocese", "vicar", incense burning, multiple gods (now called saints), goddess worship, and statues. Why do you think this Satanic masterpiece is called "ROMAN" Catholic? Ancient Rome lives on today! The Great Whore still rides the beast in all her monstrous glory!

Well put. I wonder if he worships on Sunday. The problem here, is not his criticism of Catholicism, the finer points of which (the persecution, murder and sexism) aren't exactly news. The problem is that he never turns the critical eye upon himself or Protestantism as a whole.

Among his quotes:

The Bible is like a lion; it does not need to be defended; just let it loose and it will defend itself. -- Martin Luther

He's a big Luther fan; he likes the guy. Other, less famous Luther quotes (from an equally skewed website):

• "What then shall we do with this damned, rejected race of Jews?"
• "The Jews deserve to be hanged on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves"
• "If I had to baptize a Jew, I would take him to the river Elbe, hang a stone around his neck and push him over with the words `I baptize thee in the name of Abraham'."

Maybe he likes Luther because modern Judaism is blasphemous. Now I'm getting kind of pissed off, though I still feel like I'm slumming--like refuting this guy gives him some kind of credibility.

Finally, he donkey-punches the politically correct left with a dose of Jesus' truth:

You're intolerant!

No, the truth is intolerant. 2+2=4, not 5, not 11, not 213. The truth is unbending, it is unyielding, it is exclusive. The truth of God is offensive to the hellbound, sin-loving, want-to-believe-lies man. God hath not left Himself without witness in this perverse and crooked generation--His word is the Holy Bible (King James 1611 for the English speaking peoples of the world). I am not the author of truth, but I know Who is. His name is Jesus and anything that contradicts His word is a wicked lie.

Blam.

He has the obligatory screed against evolution. His biggest ally, apparently, is the Second Law of Thermaldynamics. Take that fake science. Despite having thermaldynamics on his side, he commits the same error all creationist critics of Darwinism I've read do. He assumes the the theory of evolution never evolved past Darwin and Huxley. It's kinda the same problem as taking a series of books of uncertain authorship that were written 1500 years ago, weeding them out from a much larger group of very similar works, then countlessly and horribly hand-translating them and calling the finished product absolute truth. I love that he hates the papacy and believes it to be flawed from the beginning, thinks Peter (upon whose rock [God] would build [his] church) was actually Satan, yet he uses the canon scripture set down by the Council of Nicea in 325AD. There weren't any Protestants back then. The Pope was the only game in town. If he could connect the fucking dots, that would mean that the Bible, in its very essence and composition, is the work of the Anti-Christ. Stupid idiot. You don't have to be a sophomore Philosophy student to shoot holes in that reasoning.

Because of all the reality he's dropping, the site is under constant attack by the worldly henchmen of the antichrist--it almost goes without saying. The work of papist hackers and abortionists abounds:

THIS WEBSITE IS BEING SYSTEMATICALLY BANNED!
INTERNET FILTERING SERVICES ARE
FILTERING THIS WEBSITE SO THAT YOU CAN'T SEE IT!

Is it banned because he's a fundamentalist (truth teller), or, is it because he's an anti-semite? He doesn't seem to ponder that possibility, so neither will we--there are bigger problems afoot:

If you have a problem accessing any of the files resident on our server, try capitalizing the file name, e.g., http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/couldnt.htm
becomes http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/COULDNT.HTM

Strangely, He doesn't mention the obvious, that a demon of capitalization has possessed his server. He must not want to unduly alarm us.

Read the full thing here.

I think I have a learning disability

And I don't say that lightly.

A friend had pointed out a kind of inverse similarity between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. I think he meant they were equally trashy in opposite ways. The latter dripping lavish sin while the former gives off the stench of pseudo-ornate piety. This reminded me of a SciFi novel I'd read and set me about the usual web searching I do when something interests me.

In my search I ran into SLC on Mapquest. I zoomed out to get some geographic perspective.

Then I got really confused.

Then I went and double-checked it on Yahoo maps.

Then the pieces kind of fell into place on a lot of the disparate elements of my life.

For some reason, I never realized that Utah bordered Idaho. I can't really express in words how hugely this changes the way I see this part of the world. It's unbelievable that I've never noticed it before. I grew up 15 minutes from the Idaho border, albeit a different one.

I feel a little dissoriented. I thought I had a pretty good relational idea of where all the states were.

Now all of a sudden the localized map I have in my mind looks like the work of an Enlightenment cartographer, all guilded and utterly distorted. I'm probably giving myself too much credit. My brain map is probably more Ptolemaic. Incidently I wonder if that cartographer, Johan Scotus, is the same John the Scot, or Duns Scotus this jolly abbott forced me to read in Medieval Philosophy. I think the time periods are wrong. Seems like my chronology is screwed up too, completing the spacio-temporal bifecta. That makes me a huge idiot.

This is really digressing, but I would have enjoyed that class much more if I'd read A Confederacy of Dunces before taking it. I would have laughed at the fantastical absurdity of the book initially, then spent twelve weeks slackjawed, watching Kennedy's ridiculous character perfectly enfleshed in this medieval scholar. I have a certain respect to anyone who can devote his whole life--because medieval studies seems to be that kind of thing: a life choice--to studying worldviews no one else has cared about for hundreds of years.

Back to the point. It never fails to amaze me just how important relational geography is to the understanding I have of the context surrounding my life. Hopefully I'm not alone in this.

The next closest example was when I moved to Seattle. I'd been to Redmond previously via several routes: From the west into the Redmond Town Center, from the east to the place I work, and from the south heading to breakfast via a surface street. It always seemed like a sprawling mess. Huge, with each intersection fanning out in 6 directions, the way all roads in Western Washington do. Then one day I came in from Highway 202, the Northwest I think. Along the way I passed some familiar landmarks, the Town Center, the breakfast place, and eventually came to my office. each of these places was within a half-mile of the other. I had a feeling of intense vertigo, kind of like I do now, and everything quietly shifted into place, the map in my mind redrew itself. I felt more complete somehow.

This Idaho-Utah connection clears up a lot, and goes even farther than figuring out Redmond. I had a good friend who went to Ricks College in Rexburg, now known as BYU-Idaho.

I never figured out why there was such a large Mormon population there. Turns out it's closer to Salt Lake City than Spokane is to Seattle. Go Figure. So my mind-map is redrawing itself. More than that though, I also feel a little bit closer to the kid who went to BYU-I, then to Mongolia, then dropped off the radar three years ago--like I understand him better because I have the geography of the situation worked out. I don't know if anyone is going to share this sentiment.

This blog is probably the most indulgent crap I've ever written. I can't expect anyone to enjoy reading this, I just felt like I had to write this feeling down somewhere.

Read the full thing here.

Modern American Asceticism

I got home late last night, ate dinner over a Friends rerun. I was too tired to get up and move to the closet when North Shore started. I still can’t decide if that was a good or a bad thing.

It’s a tough call because I realized something. There are a lot of terribly written TV shows. I mean horrible shows, shows with no redeeming value. Not only is North Shore utter shit, I felt like I was writing it in my head as I was watching. A character would say something, and I could tell, more or less verbatim, how the next however many lines of dialogue were going to go.

For a while I just thought I’d just built up a pretty good understanding of the TV drama formula over the years. I eventually realized that I knew what was coming next because I’d heard the lines before, more or less verbatim, on other shows, other movies, whatever.

The big wedding climax:

Girl: Dad, I never felt that way about Morgan, I felt
that way about Jason.
Girl’s Rich Asshole Dad: Morgan is good for you.
Girl: No, Dad, Morgan is good for you. Why don’t you marry him?

I had the frame of mind to write that little exchange down, I’ve forgotten the rest.

If you’re having trouble placing that last little sentence, you heard it at every recess, everyday of your elementary school life.

I really wish I could remember some more of the conversations leading up to that, the entire hour was bloated with rehashed crap, dialogue that sucked the first time I heard it. Worse, the situations were entirely unbelievable, with two separate staged sex scenes—one of which involved characters who’d never talked before. More or less like this:

Slut who ends up being Rich Asshole Dad’s girlfriend: Blah blah blah, this is the first time I’ve felt free in years, blah blah blah, is there room under that blanket for two?
Guy She Found Sleeping on the Beach: (Feigned surprise) bwa ha (thrust).

That room under the blanket line I actually do remember. Idiotic. Later, there was an instance of fisticuffs between the daughter of the asshole’s fiancée and the man who really loves her. God.

There is a word for this: Cliche. There are really many words for this, but that one sums them all up pretty nicely.

Afterward, I watched The Casino. It also sucked, even for reality TV. It was still better than North Shore by quite a bit.

So I guess that’s the missing link to why reality TV is so popular among executives. It’s not simply cheaper, it's actually better than the end product of some hack writer. You don’t have to pay shit writers to write shit stories around shit dialogue and you get roughly the same sex and violence quotient in more believable surroundings.

Like the Cottontail Ranch.

This is why I stopped watching TV in the first place.

Apropos of the Little Black Book trailer, why does Britney Murphy--in her movies--always look like she’s been chasing Quaaludes with a punch in the face? I mean she's attractive, but she always looks haggard and a little strung-out, like the producers keep her locked in a root cellar when they're not shooting.

Thankfully, Ron Livingston looks like a dream, as always. He remains the celebrity who most closely approximates the nonchalant elegance of arch-friend Ben Kromer.

Read the full thing here.

I'm bored, I hate my blog's title and many other things

Just what I said. I'm supposed to be slogging through all the utter garbage that hasn't sold in the last 3 months and find a way to sell it.

This has, in effect, forced me to do a lot of thinking. I've concluded that I hate the title of my blog. It's not funny. It might have been cutely self-conscious at one time--but probably not. It sucks.

As much as it sucks, it will never be as bad as the Klingon-language bo logh, which is probably just Kingon for blog. Judging by his links, the guy appears to be at least an armchair linguist. I guess he thinks that makes this kind of hobby okay. Well it's not.

The tragedy is that I might be interested in what this person has to say. Blindly clicking his links is promising. Of the ones that aren't in Klingon, there are some discussing civilization as social construct, etc. That's not a tough argument to make, but the point remains, this might be a worthwhile individual, if he didn't speak a fake language.

So now we're into the realm of the metaphysical.

Just what differentiates real language from a fake? Those are
just labels. Labels cause wars.

I imagine any one of the previously mentioned trustafarians saying something like this. They and the Klingon enthusiasts are in league against me.

In the end, I defer to the greater wisdom of the Portland Mercury, whose Frank Burres crystalized in Qaolin what I suspect of most Klingon/Human hybrids:

It is, of course, a strange road that leads one to this place, to a point in life where you apply makeup and a fake forehead, speak a fake language, go by a fake name, and practice twirling a fake sword so you can go to the bars.

Yes, it is a strange road indeed, and it begins in Iowa.

At least that's where it began for Qaolin, who back then was known only as Jim Covill, a struggling Art Education student who dressed less extravagantly, spoke only earthly tongues, and only sang karaoke occasionally in English (and by his own
account, he sucked).

I don't know if it's an image thing for everyone who dresses and speaks like a Klingon (or a Jedi or an Elf), but I bet the percentage is huge.

The blog has a poll with a total of 6 possible responses. Only one is in English. It says, "huh?? What??". Cute. 91% of voters picked that one. The sample is obviously skewed because the poll appears on a Klingon-language blog so obviously more voters will be able to speak Klingon. Still, 91% is not nearly high enough. If society is indeed a social construct, then I'm all in to do some deconstruction.

Incidently, after reading a few more of the non-Klingon links (ex. 1,2,3), I've narrowed my possible grad school fields of study by one. I'm definitely not going to study linguistics. These people are all obsessing over some pointless and picky-flicky minutia. I guess it was too much to hope that all linguists had the gravity of the only two linguists I've ever really read, Wittgenstein and Chomsky--more naive still that I'd assume linguists didn't tell jargon-laced linguist jokes the way engineers tell engineer jokes and on and on.

So thank you bo logh.

I have a feeling I'm going to open my blog tomorrow and it's going to be bare except for some strange tongue scrawled in paint.

It will all seem very mysterious but will turn out to just be "OMG Yr teh sUx" or "Worf for President".

Read the full thing here.

That reminds me

All this revolution talk reminded me of a movie that looks really good. It's called The Motorcycle Diaries and is about Che Guevara's road trip through South America. It was, apparently, a life-changing experience. The film doesn't seem to bother directly with the worldview he would form later in life, though the trip marked the beginning of his Marxist leanings. I'm sick to death of politics; if this is a manifesto piece, rivers will run red with my fury.

That pouty-mouthed succubus you loved the hell out of in Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien, Gael Garcia Bernal, is Che. No one really saw The Crime of Padre Amaro, which is good because it sucked, but he's pretty fantastic in all of those movies.

The trailer I saw starts out with a few quotes, which are wildly divergent and hilarious. Jean-Paul Sartre called him, "the most complete human being of our age." Sartre had a tendency to exaggerate, so I'm going to assume he's not really that great. I wonder, though, is Sartre praising Guevara or deriding everyone else? I'm not sure.

The American Spectator was less ambiguous: "Che is a cultural icon because of his ability to provoke empathy among the spoiled youth of the affluent west."

It's funny, that is exactly how I think of the guy. My first glimpse of Che was that famous picture, Warholized onto a two-tone red and black bumper sticker, on the back of some hemp-festooned kid's twinkling yellow Range Rover. There were also the thousands of shirts and posters all over campus, each with the exact same likeness. Needless to say, his place as the commander-in-chief and defacto messiah of the Trustafarian army has earned him a place of scorn in my heart.

So, at the very worst, this movie will make me rethink my preconceptions of the man himself and his motivations.

At best, though, I see this being the road movie buddy flick I've been pining for since I saw Easy Rider. I tend to get too excited about these kinds of movies. I'm obviously setting myself up for disappointment.

Example: Maria Full of Grace--that was a really hackneyed segue because MFoG has none of the elements that make up a "road movie buddy flick"--I'm just struggling for synergy.

Regardless, I saw it last night and it let me down, but only because I desperately wanted it to be the best movie ever. It's fair to say I was disappointed because it wasn't the movie I imagined it was going to be. Maybe I'm being unfair. Lots of critics are saying that it documents with grim precision and attention to detail the job of the drug mule. It does. And that's exactly my problem with it.

It's entirely too much a documentary, despite being fiction. The camera is too unsympathetic; the screenplay doesn't know what it's trying to say. I hate films that preach too much, that donkey punch you with their message. You leave the theatre feeling cheap and violated, like the filmmakers didn't trust you to extract their urgent message from the subtleties of narrative voice and characterization. So they beat you with it. That bugs me. I have thousands of inferiority complexes and I don't like being talked down to, especially when I'm paying 9 dollars for the honor.

Last night, though, I would have welcomed some abuse. There's a line that demarcates arrogant proselytizing from the complete objectivity that makes a movie pointless. It's a big line. Most movies fall on this line. There is really no excuse for not being on this line. You can land on this line even with standoffish camera work and ambivalent narration, as long as there is emotion in the script. MFoG lacks that big time. Maria never even really fights for herself, how can Joshua Marsten expect us to want to fight for her? This is all the more frustrating because I can see the film Marsten was trying to make, and that film--I think--I would have really enjoyed.

I said before it was too much a documentary, but it's not even that. The characters are so insipid and bewildered by their plight that no one would mistake this for a film documenting real people.

There is little life here, just action.

What life I saw on screen is the direct result of some vitally brilliant acting by Catalina Sandino Moreno. She was almost enough to pull the hulking mass of Marsten's script onto that big ass line--maybe she did, I'll have to think about that. I can't wait for her to get a script that more fully showcases her excruciating amount of talent.

crap . . . it looks like I'm in the 1% of people who didn't think this movie was the second coming. I bet every one of those reviewers has a Che Guevara hoodie somewhere in their closet . . . Only one other guy, Stephen Witty, had more criticism than praise. This is annoying because I don't think I really like his other opinions. Oh well.

Read the full thing here.

Addendum:

I forgot about this, we also have all the significant ports. The East Coast is less thoroughly liberal than the west, but Mike is right about the move to the right being less severe as you head west from NYC. So even if we couldn't hold the east coast as convincingly, that's not a big deal, all the good shit comes from China and SE Asia anyway, one well-placed bomb to the Panama Canal and the conservatives would be in dire straits. They'd have to head south around Argentina y Chile, and I'm betting there are tens of thousands of REI Lifetime Members who know Patagonia like the back of their hands. I see them riding Guanacos across the tundraed plain, stark, craggy mountains rising in the distance like a tide of blue doom. Their light sabers wildly aglow in the half-light as superstitious Chinese sea captains turn back their charges, returning to Shanghai half-crazed, babbling about the man-demons riding furry horses bareback through South America. No, they'll have to find another way to exploit China's cheap labor force, the penguins and llamas are on our side.

Don't worry about Canadian ports, they voluntarily chose universal healthcare--they're on our side by default, especially those in BC. Siding with the Conservatives would eventually lose them their unofficial cash-crop, Marijuana.

Smuggling things via the ol' silk road through Europe wouldn't really work for them either as the conservatives have been bitching for YEARS that Europe is more or less communist (utterly without merit), and we all know how much animosity comes from the mainland of that continent focused directly at one George W Bush. I don't think we have to worry about the Arabian Peninsula for reasons that don't need explanation. That leaves them what, India? A slow boat 3/4s of the way around the world from China? Not likely. And we can get South Africa if we need to, Mandela is a HUGE Che Guevara fan, he can be turned.

Oil could be tough, though. We'd have to secure Alaska right-quick, then put the scientists to work on alternative fuels--and light sabres.

Read the full thing here.

The Revolution Will Be Baumgartenized

This blog, Smacktooth, mentioned an article the author read (which he can't find) about how the polarization of our country is setting us really close to the brink of civil war. That seems a bit far-fetched, though I'm sure someone somewhere wrote an article about it.

Here's his recollection of the article:

The paper talked about the right wings attempts to take over the fundamentals of America again and how they were making giant leaps and bounds under the feeding of George Bush and his administration. The right is well know for stroking the desires of the underclass, like racism, bigotry, and popular anger, and making them seem ok to rally against publicly. Now is as good a time as ever to do it in the post-9/11 environment. America has not had an enemy so easily spotted in ages to gather its forces and opinions against. Now that the uninformed, the uneducated, and the ill mannered can pinpoint a single enemy by the color of his skin, the right has found its launching point and has attacked its issues like a starving dog on meat. "If you're not against them, you’re against us." They've managed to polarize the country in delicate and specific ways not seen on our soil since the first civil war or the civil rights movements of the 60s and 70s, which can now be called a cold civil war.

The paper predicted the election would be close; with rumors flying from both sides of vote fixing that only polarize people into larger groups. Florida would again be a key issue state and where fighting would probably break out first, but in short bursts. It would be escalated by the calling in of the National Guard by Jeb at his brothers urging in the weeks following the election to help the police keep order and ending with the citizens eventually attacking them. The fighting would spread through the bible belt the fastest as the issue would take on people own individual angers and the "believers" would turn on the non. Public violence would die down and flare up for years to come. It wouldn't be a full out fighting civil war because that would involve the turning of massive military units and their commanders. It would most likely be "terrorist activities" against government structures that would unite groups to fight. An "underground militia" would be born and would grow quickly till a national commander was named and he or she would be tagged as equal to bin Laden in Americas common enemy. Assassinations would be common, but mob violence would be sparse in the long run. The economy would suffer from the loss of companies transferring overseas to a more stable location where the government would be more willing to crush revolt, like China or Japan.

This leaves me with some questions. The national head of this underground obviously wouldn't be a public figure, but would he answer to one in a round about way? Would this be to the Republican Party what the IRA is to Shinn Fein or Hamas is to the PLO? Seems unlikely because the connection between the militant groups and the respective parties in both of those cases grew from the feeling of disenfranchisement and futility that came from working through political channels. As the Republicans are currently in power, it doesn't seem like the militancy could grow in that way.

Though it would be a good way to keep power, as Republicans are traditionally considered tougher on crime and better with defense and whatnot. That's only if they could keep themselves distanced from the militants.

So all in all I'm not sure how this militant violence would help the Republicans solidify power . . . though I think the basic point of their catering to an ignorant, prejudiced, fundamentalist base is more or less right on.

The guerrilla angle is more plausible, but way less interesting than an all out lefty vs. righty throwdown. I've been contemplating the logistics of this since smacktooth brought it up. At first I thought our--the left's--chances in full-scale conflict would be pretty slim. I thought we'd get crushed, looking out from my west coast perch over the sea of sociopaths known in the common tongue as the midwest. Plus, other than Clark, I assumed that all military men were Conservatives. So if there was a turning of millitary leaders, most of them would side with the right. Frightening.

Then I remembered an analysis I read in Time--which I can't access here because you have to pay for access to archived articles. Anyways, the gist was that Americans with with college degrees were just as deeply polarized as the nation at large. The divide is more or less along the lines of major. People with liberal arts and sciences degrees tend overwhelmingly to be leftist. Business majors are conservative. Looking at the chief beneficiaries of Bush's tax plan gives proof enough of this.

In that I found hope. While the bible-belters are creating a rigid and labyrinthine bureaucracy charged with running their war machine, the hippy leftists will all form communes dedicated to this and that: effective, eco-friendly weaponry; hemp uniforms; fusion power etc etc. We'd obviously have light sabres. We'd also have the buddhist warrior monks (I'm talking some Shaolin shit, not the Tibetan Buddhists), the yogis--all the crazy eastern religion/martial arts shit. We'd have Tarrantino for rousing soundtracks.

So the trick would be surviving the initial onslaught. Catching and holding them in a war of attrition, probably somewhere in the Rockies is the key. The mountain terrain would leave their hulking tanks ineffective and highly succeptible to the guerrilla campaign by the Forest Service/Green Peace brigade. I imagine some crazy Endor shit going down there, the M1 Abrams tank as useless as the AT-AT walker against the eco-terrorists and forest rangers. Our troops will be better able to handle the psychological trauma of the long mountain standoff because we'll have Tibetan Buddhist chaplains teaching the 8 fold path to the cessation of worldly pain. The Christian Ascetics can come along too.

Once we're deadlocked in the mountains and the seige begins, having most of the scientists and theoreticians will allow us to far outstrip their research and development pace. That's when we get light sabres. These, in the confident and near clairvoyant hands of the buddhist warrior monks, the tide will more or less turn. The yogis will be effective sabboteurs, as they can reverse-digest all manner of contraband and weaponry via the anus and reproduce it at vital moments.

I feel good about our chances.

Read the full thing here.