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Proving once again that there is never a topic so unrelated to hippies that he cannot stretch it into an occasion for hippie-punching, David Brooks uses the announcement that "The Daily Beast" is gobbling up "Newsweek" to explain how hipsters destroyed American culture.
And no, I am not kidding.
According to the David Brooks time-line of Recent American History, there was once a Golden Age of magazining, when every Floyd-the-Barber knew who was singing "il Pagliacci" at the Met that night and every Arnold Ziffle lived and died over the two-fisted exploits of Norman Mailer.
Rather conspicuous by its absence from Mr. Brook's gauzy, expurgated version of Recent American History is any mention of any equally rustic Negro Persons who also spent the 1950s and 60s waiting anxiously by their suburban tract-house mailboxes for the latest news about what Andy Warhol was up to, which starlet Frank Sinatra was banging, and who was holding court at Elaine's. This is because Conservative dogma holds that, except for Rochester and Amos & Andy and some early, pioneering work done by Abraham Lincoln on American Negro 1.0, black people disappeared completely from American history for nearly a century until Reagan discovered the American Negro 2.0 dressed in furs and whizzing through the streets of the Emerald City in a Cadillac all thanks to their wily abuse of the Welfare System that White People had so graciously provided.
(Later, a 3.0 version would go on to open a string of dry cleaners, move uptown and campaign for George H. W. Bush, while a smaller, 3.1 release would figuratively sit on Nancy Reagan's lap
as she explained to the intricacies of United States drug policy. As a note to future historians you must understand that, in the Small Gummint obsessed Conservativeland of today, the terrifying nanny-state implications of the First Lady of the United States coming personally to your home with her Secret Service detail to lecture you on the evils of drug use are no cause for alarm as long as the First Lady is a Republican named "Reagan" and the lecturee is a tiny black person.)
At its gauzy, expurgated, Brooksian apex, American Civilization was run by happy, conformist White Men, spruced up with perky women who vacuumed in pearls and heels, and enlivened by the occasional splash of color here and there: the humble Asians who cooked for the Cartwrights and raised Eddie's Father's son; the noble Mexicans who were all Guy Williams or Ricardo Montalban and just wanted to get along with White People; the scary Red Injuns who were all Guy Williams or Ricardo Montalban and just wanted to kill White People until their Wise Chief found out how awesome White People could be; and a couple of festively encrypted gay people named Paul Lind Lynde (thanks, Tengrain) and Charles Nelson Reilly.
Then some time passed.
Then, out of nowhere, hippies rode into town!
Hippies, with their smelly hair, clitorises, jungle music and marijuana cigarettes! No one knows who they were or where they came from, but for no reason whatsoever they started wrecking the place!
About a generation ago, this earnest self-improvement ethic came under attack. People no longer believed that there was such a thing as a common culture that all educated Americans should study and know. The new ethos valued hipness, not class.
Moreover, the self-esteem hurricanes blew across the landscape. You don’t have to read or listen to boring stuff to possess character. You are wonderful just the way you are.
Bad hippies! Bad!
Also rather conspicuous by their absence are things like the Civil Rights Movement, because Bobo's idiotic Reader's Digest Decline and Fall of White Conformist Suburban Nirvana fantasy could never survive its sharp and terrible rebuke. But that is the advantage of being a Conservative; when facts and history don't in any way square with your stupid ideology, you can just scrap facts and history.
I mean, its not like there are
any consequences to lying on the Right anymore.
And so, down the memory hole goes the Civil Right Movement, followed by the Women's Right Movement, the Vietnam War, the American Indian Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, Watergate and all the other seismic shifts in American culture caused by non-White, non-Suburban, non-Straight and/or non-Male persons taking American democracy seriously enough to stand up and insist that their rights were just as valid and their opinions just as worthy of inclusion in the marketplace of American Ideas as Ward Cleaver or The Lone Ranger.
Also down the memory hole goes any acknowledgment of the fact that the more confident and leisurely pace of an earlier time was made possible by a middle class who were enjoying record prosperity thanks to political and economic trends against which David Brooks' Conservative Movement has waged a relentless, ideological jihad; things like an export economy based on a healthy manufacturing base, a powerful labor movement, massive government spending on public works programs and top-marginal tax rates for millionaires of between 70% (Kennedy) and 90%(Eisenhower).
Also down the hole goes any recognition that the business model under-girding the general-interest magazine world -- like the business models which kept everything from genre-magazines to academia to book publishing to Mom-and-Pop stores prosperous -- has been wiped out. Liquidated by the WalMart mentality and replaced by a two-tier feudal model where The Few at the top prosper and The Many at the bottom barely eke out a subsistence living.
Like David Brooks, I too would love to see a resurgence of all kinds of magazines, including the "general interest". But first, we would have to see a resurgence of the economic environment that was congenial to a...
...magazine that offers an aspirational ideal to the middle manager in the suburban office park, that offers a respite from the deluge of vapid social network chatter, that transmits the country’s cultural inheritance and its shared way of life, that separates for busy people the things that are enduring from the things that aren’t.
Because until the middle class gets a little of its leisure time back, and writers can make something approximating a living plying their trade, the situation is only going to get worse.
(There is, of course, at least one notable exception to the overall bleak outlook for writers: as long as he has an ample supply of Imaginary Hippies to blame for his every itch and ache, and the myth of White Suburban Camelot to wax nostalgic over for 800-words once every three weeks, a certain moon-faced, overpaid New York Times Conservative tripe-slinger will obviously never miss a meal.)
If Da Mare could still hand out bales of cash like Halloween candy to everyone who vexed him, trust me, none of this would be happening: he would have stayed on another term or two, and then named an heir. Period.
But the money did run out. At City Hall they saw it coming years ago, and once the Olympics went South (literally and figuratively), they knew nothing could save them.
Like a banana republic dictator with the rebels at the city gates, rather than sacrificing his own standing and legacy and using the last of his considerable power to make some of the terribly hard choices that would save the City, Hizzoner has instead opted to prop up his Administration by spending down in one year virtually all the money he got from pawning Chicago's irreplaceable municipal assets; money that was supposed to last for most of the 21st Century.
Daley's final budget sails through the City Council
November 17, 2010
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter
Mayor Daley's plan to postpone Chicago's financial day of reckoning — by balancing his final budget with another raid on parking meter reserves and other one-time revenues — sailed through the City Council Wednesday amid warnings that a mid-year crisis could explode on the next mayor's watch.
"The new mayor is going to be forced to make significant cuts in all areas of city services, including public safety, and is going to be forced to raise taxes just to fund the city's pension liability," said Civic Federation President Laurence Msall.
"The over-reliance on one-time revenues and draining of the reserve fund puts the city in a very precarious position. I don't know that the budget approved Wednesday will make it through the entire year without the city having to revisit both its revenue assumptions and its expenditure obligations."
After the 43-to-7 vote on his 2011 budget, Daley denied that he's holding the line on taxes, fines and fees by leaving a financial time bomb on his successor's chair.
"I believe we have protected the city in the future. … We have not kicked the can. We have not placed whoever the [next] mayor is in a difficult position," the mayor said.
Daley made no apologies for the raid that will leave just $76 million remaining from the 75-year, $1.15 billion deal that privatized Chicago parking meters. ...
And so, at long last, Daley's magic bag of tricks is empty, and our Maximum Mayor for Life is taking a victory lap, blowing town and leaving the crushing headaches and painful choices for the next guy.
And because he is leaving, the fixed stars of the Chicago political firmament are crashing into each other and knives which would have been kept sheathed because Da Mare don't like nobody who rocks da boat are now all coming out even before the first debate is held.
Emanuel to face challenge on residency issue MAYOR'S RACE | If his voting status changed to 'inactive,' can he run? Comments
November 18, 2010
BY ABDON M. PALLASCH Political Reporter apallasch@suntimes.com
Next week, a veteran election lawyer plans to file a legal attempt to knock mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel off the ballot for allegedly failing to meet the residency requirement to run for mayor.
The issue is whether, by leasing out his house when he moved his family to Washington, D.C., to be President Obama's chief of staff, Emanuel ran afoul of the Illinois Municipal Code, which requires mayoral candidates to be residents of the towns they run in for a year before Election Day. The only exception is for active-duty members of the military.
Emanuel's campaign presented its own election lawyer Wednesday to argue, as the campaign has for weeks, that this is a "political" rather than legal issue and that Emanuel is in no danger of being knocked off the ballot.
But a Sun-Times survey of the lawyers who make up Chicago's election bar found nearly half think Emanuel is vulnerable.
"The issue is not that he left town -- it's that he rented out the house," said Adam Lasker, who chairs the Chicago Bar Association's Election Law Committee and has no clients running for mayor ...
For the foreseeable future, the job of Mayor is going to be a brutal one and will take a big toll on whoever wins the election.
Which is as it must be: Chicago has earned the long, ugly hangover that is headed our way.
In the castle kitchen, curled up behind a hodgepodge of tea boxes, is a small collection of cookbooks which have come down to me as part of my ancestral legacy.
From the Presbyterian classic "Mix, Munch and Marinade" to my Mom's own, handmade collection for her oven-challenged son, I've got 'em all, people!
This, however, is not one of those. Those are for closers. Only.
This is the late Steve Gilliard's famous Beer Can Chicken recipe which he re-purposed for the Meleagris gallopavo and republished on the "The News Blog Food Blog" four years ago. And I am re-republishing it here in its entirety in part because of a fine conversation I had last night with a friend of mine who is an up-and-coming Chicago media mogul.
The subject was the trend among media owners and their marketing consultants to hunt ever more obsessively for revenue and audience by subsecting their markets ever more microscopically by age, race, ethnicity, faith, gender, sexual orientation, class, political stance, sumptuary code, and so on. And that while inclusiveness as a general principle is certainly a fine thing, becoming too fixated on matching demographics with time slots or column inches can come at the expense of forgetting the reason anyone continues to read or listen to anything: the power of the words and the skill of the writer or speaker.
The converse of this showed up in the wild, young days of the Liberal Blogosphere with people like Digby and Steve Gilliard. An amazing number of people were shocked when it turned out that the person behind the muscular writings of "Digby" was a nice, middle-aged lady. And it was a source of endless amusement among many of us that about once every week or two -- like clockwork -- some prominent troll would clamber to its hind legs and try to get up in Steve's grill about his alleged "racism" (A well-worn GOP tactic in those days was to scream at the tops of their lungs that that anybody who opposed the Iraq War [or thought Michael Steels was a fucking tool] was racist) because it was impossible for them to comprehend that the amazing, prolific, ferocious torrent of prose that came pouring out of "The News Blog" every day was written by some black guy.
Let the People of the Church say "Good writing is where you find it" :-)
And part of Steve's trick in keeping it fresh (other than sheer hard work) was mixing it up. At "The News Blog" you got politics, policy, Rudy Giuliani, tech/geek stuff, dubious dating advice, a rowdy commentariat, history (world and military), the trials and triumphs of Manchester United, Chicago-style hot dogs vs. sucky New York dogs, Yankee-hating, the NY Transit Authority news.
And cooking.
After Steve died there was a lot of very sincere and extravagant "legacy" talk: there were to be books and blogs, endowments and video games and A!Major!Motion!Picture but after awhile all of that sort of evaporated into the air (OK, some of these I made up, but I would pay real money to see Samuel L. Jackson as Steve handling a troll
Or even Dave Chappelle as Samuel L. Jackson as Steve.)
Well, life happens, so instead of a glittering, animatronic-and-laser-effect-heavy "Steve Gilliard Experience" exhibit in one wing of the Smithsonian Museum of Blogosphere History, you get me, rooting around in the old steamer trunks from time to time. And since the subtext last night was "good writing", and the weather said "Thanksgiving", how could I resist a slice of Beer Can Turkey?
Turkey
There are a hundred debates about what makes a great Turkey, brining, frying, injecting.
Well, this is the place to debate the great turkey issues of the day.
Last year, I prepared a Classic Roast Turkey. This year I wanted to provide another variation on turkey and had decided on smoking the turkey. When I received my September 2005 issue of Cook's Country Magazine and found an article featuring Beer-Can Chicken, I decided to modify that recipe to work for a turkey.
The use of a beer can inserted into a chicken is an old barbeque trick to provide flavored steam to the inside of the chicken as it cooks. At the same time, the beer supposely adds flavor to the chicken. Problem is, I don't quite buy it. If the beer is giving off steam, then most of that steam is just going to be water... most of the beer flavor will just be concentrating in the can. However, it seems that it would be sacrilegeous if I used the beer can but left out the beer.
The first step is to brine the turkey. Find a non-reactive (polycarbonate plastic, glass, or stainless steel) container large enough to hold the turkey. Prepare a brining solution of 1 cup table salt to 1 gallon water and soak the turkey in the solution in the refrigerator for four to six hours. (If your turkey has been infused with a solution, then reduce the salt content in your brine or just soak it in a container filled with plain water.)
Pour out the brining solution and rinse the turkey. One convenient way to do this is to position a rack in the sink and place the turkey on the rack to rinse. After the turkey has been rinsed, let it dry by placing it on a rack on a sheet pan in the refrigerator overnight (or for eight hours). Alternatively, use a blow drier on cool setting (no heat) to blow over the skin of the turkey until dry.
In order to prepare beer can turkey, a beer can is necessary. However, a normal 12-oz. beer can, perfect for a chicken, is a bit too small for the large cavity of a turkey. At my local convenience store, I found this 24 oz. micro-keg shaped can of Heineken. It looked to be about the right size, so I bought it.
After pouring the beer into another container (a large measuring cup), remove the top of the can. I used an OXO Good Grips can opener to cleanly remove the top (it took only one pass). Removing the top provides enough surface area from which the steam can rise. The small opening made by the pop top just isn't enough of an opening to effectively provide moisture to the turkey.
Deposit six bay leaves (broken up) and two teaspoons dried thyme into the can. Unlike the beer, the herbs will provide noticeable flavor and aroma while the steam helps keep the turkey moist during it's long cooking process.
Soak a cup of hickory wood chips in some water.
Prepare a spice rub by combining two tablespoons brown sugar, two tablespoons paprika, one tablespoon kosher salt, one tablespoon black pepper, and one teaspoon cayenne pepper. Mix the spice rub well.
Rub the spice rub over the entire exterior of the turkey. Loosen the skin over the breasts and thighs and rub the spices under the skin. Finally, rub the remaining spice rub inside the cavity of the turkey.
Pour half the beer back into the open beer can (reserving half for your drinking pleasure). Not pouring all the beer back reduces the risk of spilling as you transport the turkey to and from the grill. Lift the turkey up and lower it onto the beer can.
Place the turkey on the grill. If using a gas grill, position the turkey over one burner, away from the other burners. Turn the burner under the turkey off and turn the other burners on low. If using a charcoal grill, start the charcoals (you'll need a couple batches of about 100 briquettes each over the course of the smoking). When they're ready, push them to the outer edges of the grill leaving the center available for the turkey. Make a container with aluminum foil (or use a metal wood chip tray) and fill it with the wood chips that were soaking in water. Place the container over the other burner or on the hot coals. My grill was not large enough to cover the turkey without the lid touching it, so I placed a V rack in the middle to prop up the lid. I also inserted a Polder Cooking Thermometer into a thigh to track the temperature of the turkey.
Close the lid of the grill. If the turkey is too tall for your grill lid, find a way to prop open the lid just enough (so the lid is mostly closed, but not touching the bird). Then use heavy duty aluminum foil to cover the gap that's left. The aluminum foil lets out a lot of heat, but will help keep the smoke in long enough to flavor the turkey.
The actual cooking of the turkey is a bit finicky and has a lot to do with your grill and how much cooling air is getting into the grill from the slightly open lid. If you didn't need to prop open the lid of your gas grill, keep the burners on low. However, if you did need to prop open the lid, you might need to turn up the heat to compensate for the heat loss? Don't turn on the burner underneath the turkey - we want to cook it with indirect heat. If using charcoal, after the first one and a half to two hours, you'll need to start a new batch of charcoal and replace the original coals as they lose heat.
Halfway through the cooking, about two hours, rotate the turkey to allow even cooking.
When the thigh meat reaches 160°F (71°C) (about 4-1/2 hours in my example), prepare a simple glaze with two tablespoons brown sugar, two tablespoons ketchup, two tablespoons distilled white vinegar, two tablespoons beer, and two teaspoons of hot sauce (I prefer Frank's RedHot Original Hot Sauce). Brush the glaze onto the turkey and cover. After five minutes, brush on another layer of glaze and allow it to cook until the thigh meat registers 170°F (77°C). If you don't have a thermometer, at least poke the turkey with a skewer to see if the juices run clear. If the fluid that comes out contains traces of blood, continue to cook the turkey
Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and the fuckin' consultants jammed face-first right in your crotch every fuckin' minute or they'll bleed you dry.
Also stab anyone who looks at you funny in the fuckin' neck with a fuckin' pencil.
Except for fuckin' Mike Madigan; that bastid's got a neck stabbin' pencil of his own that reaches all the way to Chicago.
Mike Madigan's 'Republican' Opponent: State GOP Holds Fundraiser For P.J. Ryan
Thursday evening, the Illinois Republican Party is hosting a fundraising event for Patrick John Ryan, the challenger to Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan.
One might imagine the state's Republican establishment getting excited at the prospect of taking down the all-powerful Speaker. In a year with ticket-topping Republicans running well in Illinois, and a nationwide movement energizing the right, it wouldn't be hard to imagine a movement coalescing around Ryan.
If anyone could find him.
Patrick John Ryan has officially raised zero dollars in his bid to unseat Madigan. He has not started a political committee. He did not respond to surveys from the Sun-Times or Tribune about his positions. He does not have a website. His campaign headquarters is his parents' home, where he apparently lives. The one fact that public records verify about him: Ryan has voted in the Democratic primary every year before this one.
Instead of a viable challenger to the leader of a desperately unpopular House, Ryan appears to be the latest in a series of Madigan-picked patsy opponents, chosen to provide token opposition to the Speaker.
For many years, the role of paper tiger was held by Terrence Goggin, another long-time Democratic voter who got on the ballot as a Republican, then politely refused to run a campaign. Goggin, unsurprisingly, lost four consecutive landslide elections to Madigan; in 2002, the Tribune wrote that "Goggin has long been a wholly owned subsidiary" of the Madigan empire. ...
One very important reason Daley held his office for so long was that it suited Mike Madigan's purposes.
In order to continue to keep the terrifying reality of their own grotesque history of failure, crime, racism, hypocrisy, treason, lies and abysmal ignorance at bay, every single day the GOP must take at least one, massive dump on the Truth.
"Politico" is what they use to wipe their asses afterward.
And so what was true in the Age of Bush is still tragically true today:
In these times you can either be a Good American. Or you can be a Good Republican. But you can no longer be both.
Over in the Conservative Expatriate Tree Fort, Andrew Sullivan continues to relish cock-punching the same Movement which made his career possible.
Well good for him.
Still, one of the poor habits that can come with deciding to make one's living biting the ankles of the monster you helped animate seems to be a tendency towards wishful thinking: towards low-balling estimates of how long your unholy creation is likely to rampage around and how many villagers it is likely to trample.
I would suggest that perhaps the conservative movement itself is the most sacred of sacred cows here, and also the greatest impediment to conservatism as a ‘reality-based force in American politics’. More than anything, it is the movement itself which creates these closed information circuits, which revels in anti-historicism and the weaving of conservative illusion. In some ways it is also a great political force, but I also suspect that it is nearing its zenith in terms of both heat and light.
These sorts of movements by their very natures have poor immune systems which is why they guard themselves so fiercely, why they are forced to create alternative narratives, alternate histories. They are brittle. The conservative movement, for all its ferocity and political savvy, is brittle, because it relies too heavily on its own illusions – illusions which have been made in recent years all too convincing by outlets like Fox News.
And when such reality-divorced movements collapse, they collapse very suddenly.
Which may sound nice, and may be a very comforting thought to someone who spent much of his adult life lending aid, comfort and intellectual cover-fire to this despicable movement, but unless Mr. Sullivan means "suddenly" in the "geological time-scale" sense of the word, the idea that "reality-divorced" movements somehow collapse fast once they are punctured by the Large-Bore Needle of Truth is fantasy of the highest order.
The absurdly "reality-divorced" Fundamentalist belief in the Bible as the literal and inerrant Word of God (and the attendant tragedies of rabidly anti-science Creationism, barbarically Levitican views on homosexuality, etc.) has been under continual assault by Reality since the Enlightenment and appears to be as frisky and nuts as ever.
As are more modern, reality-defying cults-turned-churches like Mormonism and Scientology (to name just two.)
The grotesquely "reality-divorced" European fascist movement of the 1930s drew strength from exactly the same sort of witchbag of constant lies, overt racism and seething paranoia about secret plots and internal enemies that now powers the Conservative Movement. It took a World War and the deaths of millions to stop it, and the bloodthirsty fever of it still flares back up again and again like clockwork.
And far from being something brand-new, Mr. Sullivan's own Modern Conservative Movement is itself a direct, lineal descendant of America's own Southern, White, Christian "reality-divorced" racial-purity movement. A Movement which Mr. Sullivan knows full well did not peter out in the face of facts, logic and morality, but instead drew itself up into powerful, proto-fascist nation called The Confederate States of America.
It took four years, the deaths of over 600,000 people and the massed military might of the Union to smash that "reality-divorced" movement to rubble, and yet it still remained an incredibly potent force. Potent enough to hold on, retrench and almost fully re-establish itself as the Jim Crow South 12 years later. Potent enough so that, for the last 40 years, tapping ever-more directly into its dark energy has provided the margin of victory in every major Republican victory.
As Mr. Sullivan knows full well, without America's indefatigable "reality-divorced" racist ideology, the American Conservative Movement would be nothing but rich old men whining about taxes. Without it, there would have been no Nixon. No Reagan. No Bush I or II. And no Andrew Sullivan.
If the Modern Conservative Movement were merely a weird Apocalyptic cult doing its thing in the desert, then sure, once Reality started whacking it with a stick, it would probably fall apart and scatter (except for a few who would live on in the abandoned compound and complain how everyone else had sold out and lost faith.)
But while its beliefs are every bit as "reality-divorced" as Heaven's Gate ever was, Modern Conservatism is backed by vast economic and political interests which seem mor than willing to bankroll its lunacy forever. And if Mr. Sullivan really thinks that mere facts have ever been a threat to illusion-driven, "reality-divorced" weirdos in funny hats as long as those weirdos have a powerful media and a sufficiently large war-chest at their command, then he's not half the Catholic he pretends to be.
I'll give you a little taste, 'cause you've been pretty good.
It's got a bit of foreign policy:
I just got back from Istanbul, which is 98 percent Muslim, and found people who basically want the same s--- we do: a dignified standard of living, a decent life for their family and to be left the f--- alone.
Some sober market truths:
The visual art world here in Chicago is run by pigmies, midgets and Chihuahuas. It's clannish. Access is denied. It's about rich people.
Local folk wisdom:
Ever hear of Chicago Alzheimer's? It's when you forget everything except the grudges.
or the distant echos of the 18-RPM stroke-victim/jingle-jingle version of "Smoke on the Water" that tells you the ice cream man is near, if you wait to make sure your tie is straight or your lipstick is geometrically perfect and don't run over there nownownow, it might be gone by the time you get around to it.
