or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
January 18, 2008
New Tomdispatch
The Corpse on the Gurney
The "Success" Mantra in Iraq
By Tom EngelhardtThe other day, as we reached the first anniversary of the President's announcement of his "surge" strategy, his "new way forward" in Iraq, I found myself thinking about the earliest paid book-editing work I ever did. An editor at a San Francisco textbook publisher hired me to "doctor" god-awful texts designed for audiences of captive kids. Each of these "books" was not only in a woeful state of disrepair, but essentially D.O.A. I was nonetheless supposed to do a lively rewrite of the mess and add seductive "sidebars"; another technician then simplified the language to "grade level" and a designer provided a flashy layout and look. Zap! Pow! Kebang!...
The little group of us -- rewriter, grade-level reducer, designer -- would be summoned to the publisher's office. There, our brave band of technicians would be ushered into a room in which there would be nothing but a gurney with a corpse on it in a state of advanced decomposition. The publisher's representative would then issue a simple request: Make it look like it can get up and walk away.
And the truth was: that corpse of a book would be almost lifelike when we were done with it, but one thing was guaranteed -- it would never actually get up and walk away.
That was in another century and a minor matter of bad books that no one wanted to call by their rightful name. But that image came to mind again more than three decades later because it's hard not to think of America's Iraq in similar terms.
—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at January 18, 2008 03:44 PMI MUST agree, AMERICA needs a new hobby.
Posted by: Mike Meyer at January 18, 2008 08:09 PMBoy, that quote from Calgacus is sooooo good, surprised there ain't a movie made about his life yet.
Posted by: En Ming Hee at January 18, 2008 08:49 PMThe war against Iraq is only going badly if was really about searching for weapons of mass destruction or "freeing" the Iraqi people. If, on the other hand, it was about destroying Iraq as a viable nation in order to please our friends in Israel, to secure control over some of the largest oil reserves in the world and to establish a chain of permanent U.S. military bases "protecting" those oil reserves until they run dry, then the war against Iraq has been a huge success and is going exactly according to plan.
Posted by: Joe Perez at January 19, 2008 02:44 AMI agree with Joe Perez - the War on Iraq is a success, from the point of view of those who planned it.
By the way, this is one reason why I disagree with Erica Jong's argument for Hillary and against Obama:
Obama is as untested and untried as George W. Bush was (and Gore was not). Do we need another president learning on the job? I think not -- even if his heart, unlike Dubya's, is in the right place.
http://tinyurl.com/3bo2nk
Bush's "mistakes" cannot be attributed to his being "untested and untried" because they
(a)were not mistakes - he got what he wanted
(b)were not Bush's - and Cheney surely cannot be accused of lack of experience
I am not endorsing Obama, by the way. As Hillary said in her talk with Tyra on tv, as to how she advises the many women who ask her advice about what to do about their unfaithful husbands,
"'I don't know your reality. I cannot possibly substitute my judgment for yours, but what I can tell you is you must be true to yourself, you have to do what is right for you.'" http://tinyurl.com/3y3yte
As I face the situation of deciding what to do in my state's primary, I find that it feels right for me to vote for Pretty Boy "Breck Girl" Edwards, the ambulance chaser who, in David Brooks' phrases from his column yesterday, "reminds one voter of the sort of person he disliked in high school", and who is "a self-styled proletarian."
