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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The latest indie-publishing news: Don DeLillo, imprisoned in Texas! Ben Watts' soopa-bad hip-hop photography, Laura Flanders on how Bush bamboozled women, and Ralph Nader just called to say he loves you.
Nov 30, 2004 | First, the bad news, which you might have heard.
America recently decided -- and on this point, let's be crystal clear -- that it indeed wanted another four years of George Bush. And even if my man Greg Palast is utterly convinced that the 2004 election, as in 2000, was decided ahead of time by pervasive voter fraud and election commission corruption in more than one state, this election shouldn't have been close at all to begin with.
Bush is, without a doubt, the worst president America has ever had, something it should have been able to figure out if it weren't so deeply involved in the alternate reality fed to it by the scandal-ridden New York Times, bankrupt network television, MTV, and so-called news outlets like CNN, MSNBC and Fox. He should have had his ass handed to him in a gold-encrusted box with a forwarding address in Crawford, Texas, plastered across it.
But he didn't, and the reason is very simple. The Democrats thought they could run with the same lame-ass, lesser-evil strategy they employed in 2000. Problem was, they weren't the lesser evil. John Kerry voted for this baseless war in Iraq, and Democratic knuckleheads like Jamie Rubin, as Arianna Huffington recently pointed out, were even crowing about how the patrician patsy probably would have invaded Iraq anyway, even though the WMD that Colin Powell staked -- and lost -- his reputation on never materialized. Hey, can you pass that peace pipe?
Bush, true to character, didn't waste a moment in making his agenda for the next four years obvious to anyone paying attention (not that too many were, or are). Immediately after Kerry conceded, Bush talked -- in exquisitely blatant language, for those few linguists left alive -- of "capital" he wanted to "spend" before proceeding to bomb the living crap out of Fallujah, something he didn't dare do when the election was afoot. Then Arafat kicked the bucket (nice timing!), erasing another roadblock in the neocon foreign policy. Then Bush made Powell's emasculation official by dumping him for Condi Rice, an unusually close confidant who once accidentally called Bush her husband. Then partisan hack Porter Goss became the CIA's top dog, and made his first order of business a memo that demanded unconditional participation with the administration. Then Bush's party circled the wagons around Tom DeLay, deciding to ignore whatever the Texas courts decided on the corrupt politician's future. Spot a pattern?
But never fear, there is some good news. The remarkably awful "Cop Rock" is finally making the rounds on Trio TV, a boon to late-night potheads everywhere. And, finally, the archive of Don DeLillo, the brilliant author behind the canonical "White Noise," "End Zone" and many more, has finally found a home.
The bad news? It's in Texas.
In a coup reminiscent of Michael Jackson's outbidding of Paul McCartney -- a freakin' Beatle! -- for part of the Fab Four's catalog, an author who was born, raised, employed and housed in New York for decades now has had his personal papers shipped thousands of miles away to a state that could stand to learn more than a few lessons from his work. I'm taking bets on how long it'll be until Bush reads "Libra," DeLillo's novel about Lee Harvey Oswald. The odds heavily favor "never."
