amazing

The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year as Washington has added tens of thousands of additional soldiers to reverse the Taliban’s momentum.

Those deaths have been accompanied by a dramatic spike in the number of wounded...

Military Times, by way of Firedoglake.

As to the citizens of Afghanistan?

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal...

New York Times.

mandate

from Slate.com:

As virtually all constitutional scholars agree, the odds that this suit will succeed are at best marginal. The federal government has vast power to tax and to regulate interstate commerce on a rational basis. The statute's rationale—that a person's failure to purchase insurance has a negative impact on health care delivery and the structure of the insurance industry, so can be taxed—is squarely within that constitutional standard.

I just don't see it. If this is true, then the government could order everybody to buy an anaphylactic pen because not having one would have a negative impact on health care delivery and the structure of the insurance industry.

One of the reasons I haven't had health insurance for most of my adult life is that I refuse to pay a company to cheat and insult me. It makes my stomach knot to contemplate it. Just the thought of it has a negative impact on me and the structure of my life. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do if it's the law of the land in four years. This is not one of the things I ever pictured myself going to jail for.

The Slate article is by Eliot Spitzer, by the way.

news of the day

The optimal conditions for the triumph of the crazy ultra-Right were an old state and its ruling mechanisms which could no longer function; a mass of disenchanted, disoriented and discontented citizens who no longer knew where their loyalties lay; strong socialist movements threatening or appearing to threaten social revolution, but not actually in a position to achieve it; and a move [sic - mood?] of nationalist resentment.... These were the conditions in which helpless old ruling elites were tempted to have recourse to the ultra-radicals... [t]hese were the conditions that turned movements of the radical Right into powerful organized and sometimes uniformed and paramilitary forces (squadristi, storm-troopers) or, as in Germany during the Great [Economic] Slump, into massive electoral armies.... [F]ascism came to power by the connivance of, indeed (as in Italy) on the initiative of, the old regime, that is to say in a 'constitutional' fashion.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991

sin

I watched Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist recently. I first saw it at the Uniondale Mini Cinema on Long Island with my boon college companion, Franklin, sometime after its American release in 1971.

I was a little too young and unformed to grasp the film at that time. I suppose the trials of a self-loathing, self-fearing cipher in Fascist Italy were far from the aspirant experience of a post-hippie lamb such as myself.

One scene did stay with me, in which 13-year-old Marcello is seduced away by a chauffeur, taken to an abandoned villa. Once the boy cannot escape, the man takes off his cap to let his long hair fall around his shoulders. It's shocking against the masculine propriety of the chauffeur's uniform.

I don't think I again had such a sense that a movie character was in deep, deep trouble until I saw Blue Velvet, and we met Frank's idol, Ben - Dean Stockwell in face powder, lip-synching "In Dreams." (Face powder figures in the chauffeur's self-image as well, and for song, Madame Butterfly.)

Is it homophobia that makes both these characters so memorable, so dangerous? That's not something I think I'm much prey to. But after all, Marcello is a boy, and Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan's character) is an innocent, already deeply in danger. And exciting as it may be, the first pass a boy experiences from a man carries a charge of peril, no matter if the boy is excited, or queer, or not.

Marcello, who shoots the chauffeur with his own pistol and escapes, grows up terrified that he will be discovered as a murderer. His defense is to fit in, to conform, to become invisible, never to be distinguished from the crowd.

When his society turns murderous, his safest disguise is as a socially approved murderer, unquestionably a creature of his government. He volunteers to spy on and, likely, kill his old philosophy professor, who has escaped to Paris. He'll mask the old crime with a state-sanctioned murder.

The visual scheme of the film is astonishing. If I had a second life and a couple of years put aside, I'd love to do a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie. For a taste, you can find a dance scene, featuring Marcello alone in a crowd, posted on YouTube.

I also saw something I thought plainly evident in the film, but not acknowledged by the action or the characters, and not referred to by Bertolucci in the DVD interview.

Marcello imagines that his sin was forced upon him by the chauffeur, that all would be different if not for that seducer. The action of the movie supports that belief. He would have been a normal man, a better man, a safer man, if not for that.

But immediately before the chauffeur finds him, we see a crowd of children bullying a boy lying on the ground, who turns out to be Marcello. "Take down his pants" (or something like that), one of them shouts. The children crowd around. Adults, perhaps even parents of some of the bullying children, watch without interfering, reinforcing the sense that there might be something proper in this singling out, this punishment previous to any crime.

I can only think of original sin. Marcello was marked long before his transgression. When he goes to confession (after decades without), the priest tells him, "You, my son, have always lived in sin." Yet this extremely conscious, very visual film doesn't (so far as I can tell) give us a different source for Marcello's actions, in the events of the film and its conclusion, or in his own mind.

It also works to think of Marcello's mark outside of a Catholic context - as a psychological or spiritual flaw sensed by the children and adults - or the kind of need that can draw an attentive child molester. (Marcello's parents are themselves spectacularly flawed.)

Perhaps original sin is so taken as a given by Bertolucci, and by Alberto Moravia, who wrote the book it's based on, that it would have been as gratuitous to point out as breathing or circulating blood. (The book ends differently than the movie, says Bertolucci.)

This sin of omission (if that is what it is) doesn't mar the film. I've given you no spoilers. You can watch it keeping original sin in mind or not, the experience doesn't suffer.

alternate route

I'm surprised I was brought to such a vituperous state by the conclusion of my previous entry. I've always had a kind of naive, immediate reaction to excremental obscenity. I seldom use it and am usually put off by others' use.

I might have rewritten the post, but I really liked the structure (spontaneously created) of employing the timeworn "whore" metaphor, withdrawing it, and promptly comparing our political leaders to something almost universally accepted as loathsome, foul.

You see what kind of person I am? I take account of the possibility that some human culture exists in which shit is not the very bottom of existence, and even leave a little space to ease the pain of the passing scatophile. And I still couldn't convince myself it was over the top to compare our ruling class to shit.

Firedoglake post of the day: Alternate route to calamity.

fiasco

The road ahead, as I dread it:

The first of the "health care reforms" kick in. Most of these apply to the already insured or children of the already insured. The pharminsurance folks will be undermining these bureaucratically and via government puppets, while claiming that the new rules justify any premium increase they declare. Healthbiz stock will continue to rise in value, as it has through every single step of the "health care debate."

Meanwhile the economy, at best, stagnates. Mainstream consensus is little or zero growth in employment for the next year, and since the current administration is part of that consensus, wow, they're right. So when the "Health Care: One Year Later" stories come around, everybody will be just a bit (or a whole lot more) miserable in general, and the great Democratic Party triumph will appear to be even weenier than it is.

By that time, maybe, the Dems will realize that even if they offer the same services to commerce as the Repubs, money would rather have the old, skilled whores than the young types who might drift from the repertoire. Result: the young whores will continue to try to outsuck the old ones, the old ones will continue to have the fanciest furnishings in the whorehouse, and management will prosper all the same.

Nothing here intended against whores, or sucking. Just a handy metaphor. Try a different one.

If the Dems are just fresher turds than the Repubs, why should I care? The Repubs will still be the worst, more disease-riddled, laden with fat maggots. The Dems seem to be happy polishing up their pile of shit, but the Repubs want to mash theirs into every corner of the world, private, public, national, international, orbital.

I guess that's enough shit for the day.

word?

Are any of my friends, other than Kelly, reading this blog?