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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's Bête Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com
Friday, February 22, 2008
1.
When rock critic Jess Harvell sarcastically called Sasha Frere-Jones, who is white, a race man, I thought, wow, what an asshole.
Then when he called Barack Obama, “Barry,” I thought, I get it -- he’s the George W. Bush of rockcrit! Belittling people by inflicting nicknames on them!
But imputing Bushian levels of assholishness to the guy isn’t right. So when I saw newspaper columnist Maureen Dowd calling Obama “Barry,” I thought, that’s it! Harvell is the Maureen Dowd of rockcrit -- slickly, pseudo-cleverly mean and relentlessly trivializing.
* * *
2.
For some time I have mused on the possibility of Jane Dark / Joshua Clover’s misanthropy taking a turn to Republicanism. He already shares one thing with them: They hate liberals.
In his review of M.I.A.’s recent album (which I haven’t heard), he goes morbidly Cheney-esque some decades sooner than I half-suspected he might. Says Jane, in the context of considering M.I.A. as a “world” musician (and even the pseudo-tough-guy naughty word reminds one of the Veep): “The world fucking wants us dead.”
Out of such monochromatic, simplistic, macho, paranoid delusion was launched the invasion of Iraq.
The “world”'s murderous intention toward “us” largely correlates with the extent to which the U.S. has followed a Cheney-esque foreign policy. And that policy might be summed up -- crudely, but with more truth than the obverse: “We fucking want the world dead.”
A lot of people on the putative left have put considerable effort into eliding the differences between the (moderate, conservative) Democrats and the (rabidly nationalistic, anti-enlightenment, neo-feudalist) Republicans. It’s unpleasant to see someone go from there to repeating crackpot Republican paranoia verbatim.
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