Porky Pig vs. the Anarchist

For the record ...

For the record ...

Hearing George W. Bush & Co. say, "We're going to fix the problems in the Middle East" is equivalent to hearing the Three Stooges say, "We're going to fix your house."

To war, to war, to war we're gonna go

Jesusfuckingchrist, we're invading Iraq. What a jolly note.

I have absolutely nothing clever to say, so I'll just quote from the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup ...

Then it's war!
Then it's war!
Gather the forces!
Harness the horses!
Then it's war!

Fredonia's going to war!
Each native son will grab a gun
And run away to war!
At last we're going to
Feet will beat along the street to war!
We're going to war!
At last the country's going to war!
It seems the country's going to war!
At last the country's going to war!
We're going to war!
This is a fact we can't ignore
We're going to war!
This is a fact we can't ignore
We're going to war!

In case you haven't heard before
I think they think we're going to war
I think they think we're going to war
We're going to war!
I think they think we're going to war
We're going to war!
We're going to war!
We're going to war!
We're going to war!

To war, to war, to war we're gonna go!
Oh, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de-ho
To war, to war, to war we're gonna go!
Oh, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de-ho
Oh, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de-ho
Oh, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de-ho
Oh, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de-ho
Oh-ho, oh-ho oh-ho oh-ho oh-ho
Oh-ho, oh-ho oh-ho oh-ho oh-ho
Hooooooooooo

They got guns
We got guns
All God's chillun got guns
We gonna walk all o'er the batterfield
'Cause all God's chillun got guns

Oh, Freedonia
Oh dnya cry for me
Cos I'm comin' round the mountain
With a banjo on my knee

Oh, Freedonia
Oh dnya cry for me
Cos I'm comin' round the mountain
With a banjo on my...

To war, to war, to war we're gonna go!
To war, to war...

To war, to war, we soon will say goodbye
Oh, how we'd cry for Firefly
If Firefly should die
A mighty man is he
A man of brawn who'll carry on
Till dawn of victory
With him to lead the way
Our spirits will not lag
Until the judgment day
We'll rally round the flag
The flag, the flag, flag

Iraq is bad, m'kay?

Why the are we gearing up to invade Iraq? Why are we even talking about it? What’s the big rush?

The stated motive:

The sumbitch actually has weapons of mass destruction.

I think that’s a pretext. So what's the real motive?

The top three possibilities:

A) Al-Qaeda gave us a black eye and set a bad precedent. We need to make an example of some Islamic country. Whipping Afghanistan ain’t good enough. It’s like beating up the runty kid with asthma. Iraq is the baddest kid on the block. So we'll take out Saddam as a show of force, just because we can. This sends out a message to tinpot dictators everywhere: Watch your ass. We can give you the same treatment whenever we feel like it.

B) We want to the Middle East to love us. We’re planning to spread democracy.

C) It’s all about the oil.

My vote would be (A)

R.I.P Joe Strummer

How Many Miles to Babylon?

Finished watching Babylon 5 DVD, first season, in self-indulgent marathon session. Had deliberately not watched it on the tube as I was a Star Trek fan and one space opera at a time is enough. Damn it.

Having watched B5, I realized how much time I'd wasted watching STTNG.

Have always had core problems with Trek. Nutshelled, here are my beefs:

• Trekworld is a media-free universe. Except for one scene in one movie (where Kirk gets sucked out a hole into space — yay!) there are no reporters, news organizations or, for that matter, any future TV shows of any kind. Evidently, all these fuckers in the future do is play around in the holodeck. Writers went the way of blacksmiths.

• The chuckleheads in the future all blindly support the Federation. There are no racist/nativist throwbacks on earth who say "fuck the aliens, fuck this intergalactic peace shit." There's no atavistic "Earth First" organization throwing sand into the Federation's gears and cogs.

• Since it's a media-free universe, nobody ever seems to criticize the Federation. (Captain Kirk, in an apparent violation of the Prime Directive, destroyed the suicide booths on Whackoff-7. Critics are calling for his immediate ...) Nope. No sir. It's one big happy-happy Federation. No arguments here.

• Star Trek's notion of military tactics and strategy are on the level of the kid on the short bus playing checkers with chess pieces.

• The aliens aren't really alien. Ohmygod, it's Q, the deus ex mechanae from beyond dimensions. Gimme a fucking break. There's NOTHING that feels really alien -- like the beings in Lem's Solaris or all of Lovecraft's eldritch nasties. All aliens in the Star Trek universe have two eyes, a mouth, two legs, etc. Basically, we're talking latex prosthetics.

• Aside from not being alien, none of the aliens are better than us. The evolutionary ladder ends at humans. All the aliens we bump into are EXACTLY on our level. Any aliens above us conveniently disappear into another dimension. There's no sense of the galaxy as an ecosystem of intelligences — some much greater than ours.

And, assuming FTL is possible, you would also have to assume some of the intelligences would be OLDER than ours, and would have left the infrastructure of their FTL civilizations all over the place. Nah. Except for the occasional Guardian of Forever, the universe is made up of (A) Uninhabited planets (B) Savages with stone axes (B) Technological civilizations at EXACTLY the same level as earth. (C) Parallel earths.

This shit always bugged me. I always imagined writing sort-of an anti-Star Trek to address these points.

Stracinzky (or however you spell his damn name) did it.

Pattern Recognition

William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition, is finally out. He's done something I always wanted to do but never figured out how to do: write an SF novel set in the present as-it-is.

The angry young punk who wrote Neuromancer seems to have calmed down a bit. PR has its fair share of nasty people, but there's a humanistic glow around it. Gibson is starting to like his characters. You could even accuse him of having a heart. The Pynchon influence still shines like Byron the Bulb on every page.

The plot concerns Cayce Pollard, a woman with a talent for pattern recognition. Her brain knows if a logo is going to move the masses. The price she pays; certain mass marketing graphics give her panic attacks. Especially the Michelan Man.

She's hired to track down the mysterious author of the Footage, a film appearing in dribs and drabs on the Internet with no acknowledged author and expertly erased tracks. Along the way, Pollard tracks down the wheels-within-wheels of multilayered conspiracies that touch on the Russian mafia, product placement, social marketing and the death of her father in 9-11. The overall effect is an Alice in Wonderland tumble into deeper and deeper weirdness. The obvious Pynchon comparison here is The Crying of Lot 49.

The footage author turns out to be a young Russian filmmaker suffering brain damage from the bomb that killed her parents -- high-up figures in the Russian mob hierarchy. The code that hides the shattered author of this fragmented film seems based on a city grid at first; it turns out to be a schematic for the bomb. A haunting image for memory lost.

According to Gibson, we're going to stay lost. Get used to it.

The weirdness Pollard finds is the weirdness of the present, as unimaginable as any SF prognostication. 9-11 emerges as a singularity. After that event, the future becomes unimaginable. Science fiction, as we know it, is now a thing of the past.

Brilliant point, Mr. Gibson.

While we're on the subject, up yours.