Peter Krupa

At the risk of destroying any chance I might have of winning public office in the near future: Can someone please tell me why Americans spend so much time worrying about terrorism? I’m really impressed how often the topic comes up in all sorts of contexts in U.S. discourse, despite the absence of a sustained pattern of terrorist attacks.

The State Department loves to label distasteful governments/groups - Syria, FARC, North Korea - as “terrorist” or “state sponsors of terror” as if that somehow makes them ideological allies. Occasionally I run across chintzy action TV shows and movies where beefcake characters express their desire to go out and kill “terrorists,” as if such a status were self evident.

Meanwhile the Office of Motherland Homeland Security (tagline: Preserving Our Freedoms) spends billions of dollars every year on weird grants designed to defend against evil in terrorism hotspots like Annapolis, Maryland.

“Since 9/11, tourist areas are targeted by terrorists… ” Sgt. Johnson said. “Annapolis is the capital of Maryland. These days, I guess anything can happen anywhere.

Right! Except these days, nothing is happening anywhere! Spooks and State Department bureaucrats will tell us, hey, we’ve foiled tons of plots since 9/11, and you snot-nosed kids don’t even realize what kind of stuff has almost killed you in the last seven years.

But with the U.S. government’s track record, if hordes of terrorist boogymen really had been trying to blow up the Homeland since 9/11, at least one of them would have succeeded. Really, it can’t be that hard. Also, keep in mind that the people “protecting” us are the same ones who’ve been lying to us since the Mexican-American War, so frankly, I’m not buying it.

The truly interesting thing is how Cold War terminology has carried over into the 21st Century. The American imagination has been encouraged to think in terms of anti-Western “-isms.” Today we have simply flipped one “ideological” threat (communist, communism) for another one (terrorist, terrorism). Seriously, next time you hear a commentator or politician talking about the threat of “terrorism,” just insert the c-word. Suddenly, it’s 1962 all over again.

When you live in a foreign country, you become hyper-sensitive to the preoccupations and foibles and absurdities of your adopted land. Then one day you inadvertently turn that sensitivity on your own culture, looking it square in its lazy-eyed, slack-jawed, moon-shaped face, and you wonder what in the hell is going on.

More to the point, I just had the misfortune to watch a few minutes of an episode of 24. Keep in mind that there hasn’t been a single terrorist attack on American soil (nor a conviction for the planning thereof) for almost seven years, and before that it was another seven years. Yet for some reason, there exists a TV show - a hugely (or formerly hugely?) popular TV show - completely dedicated to the machinations of shady brown men with names like “Ahmed” and “Yusef” who, like an indiscriminate alligator in some one-off horror flick, want to hurt white people living in the suburbs.

A woman on the show literally just called 911 and said, “A terrorist is holding my son hostage.”

A terrorist! A terrorist? As if the 911 operator is going to say, “Of course! A terrorist! Happens all the time!”

Seriously, is this what people in the United States are thinking about? Terrorists hurting their families? For fuck’s sake, this is the lamest terrorist threat in the history of terrorist threats, even below bee-swarms, lightning strikes, nail gun accidents, dehydration, etc. etc.

And yet we have politicians making campaign ads about jihad (”this century’s nightmare“) and idiots in West Virginia who won’t vote for Obama because they think he’s a Muslim! Any more of this and I will respectfully resign.

It’s not so often the editor of The Nation and I agree on something, so mark your calendar. Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in Newsweek (yes, Newsweek still exists) that the recently-deceased William F. Buckley was a damn fine representative of conservatism, even if, in the end, his ideas were kind of repugnant. (For the record, I sort of beat Katrina to the punch on that chestnut by a couple weeks.)

Money ‘graph:

Despite his uncompromising conservative beliefs, Buckley reveled in transpartisan friendships, most notably with the late John Kenneth Galbraith. (One of Galbraith’s favorite phrases—”Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue”—may well have been coined to describe his skiing partner Buckley.) While he could deploy a sometimes vicious wit—which could descend into cruelty—Buckley disdained the kind of partisan shoutfests that too often pass for political debate on our TVs today.

Perhaps the best lesson to be drawn from Buckley’s many “transpartisan” friendships is that the left, like everyone else, has always remained more status-conscious than principled.

I remember when I was a conservative attending Hillsdale College. Just budding, I was. We were conservatives, and we read Great Books and took rhetoric classes, and we told ourselves that we thought with our minds and would have none of the mushiness of the hated liberals, who were full of bad arguments and sundry sleaziness.

I’m no longer a conservative, in fact I’m not really anything. But sometimes I look back, look for that classic rhetoric that conservatives - in my day - prided themselves on, and I’m a little shocked. Was it always like this? Or did something change?

Take Jonah Goldberg. He’s come out with a book called - I’m serious here - Liberal Fascism. Just right there in the title, Goldberg has already made an association fallacy and more or less violated Godwin’s Law.

According to a Slate.com review, Goldberg declares Woodrow Wilson to have been the 20th century’s “first fascist dictator,” and then traces that fascist political DNA all the way up through - wait for it - Bill Clinton.

I have this idea that there was an earlier generation of conservatives that liked to wrestle with ideas and have a good, spirited debate that didn’t devolve into this kind of idiocy. A Golden Age, if you will, when we strove to be like William F. Buckley, not Bill O’Reilly.

Sure, looking back into my imagined Golden Age of conservatives, there were plenty of ideas that I now find distasteful. But at least there was a tradition of real thought behind them, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that I’ve managed to think my way out of being a conservative.

Now today’s conservatives – well, they’ve given Goldberg 3.5 stars on Amazon and pushed the book’s ranking up to number 25.

“This is a serious scholarly work, and it deserves to be read and judged as such,” said one reviewer. “Goldberg is attempting to right a historical injustice.”

The human brain is prone to nostalgic misrememberance, but I swear to God, “conservatism” has gone completely off the rails.

From Slate.com:

For it turns out that the divine hand turns up everywhere, at least in Joel Osteen’s life. God upgrades his reservations to first class on a long international flight; God spares his car in a water-planing wipeout on the Houston interstate; God allows Osteen and his wife/co-pastor, Victoria, to flip a property “for twice as much as we paid for it” in a once-sketchy Houston neighborhood; God swings a critical vote on the Houston zoning board to permit Lakewood to move to its mammoth Compaq Center digs—and God even saw fit 35 years earlier to ensure the engineer who designed the ramps leading to the Compaq Center provided easy parking access for Lakewood. This is a long, long way down the road from the inscrutable, infant-damning theology of this country’s Calvinist forebears—it is, rather, a just-in-time economy’s vision of salvation, an eerily collapsible spiritual narcissism that downgrades the divine image into the job description for a lifestyle concierge.

The pilots of an alien spacecraft, peering down upon our curious little world, would probably find it remarkable that every time there is an earthquake or a tsunami or a plague or a famine or a hurricane on one side of the planet, on the other side people throw an enormous party and call it “fundraising.”

Anyway, on that topic and for the edification of the reader I thought I’d post the lyrics to Do They Know It’s Christmas?, a “Band-Aid II” song from 1984 that is probably earnest but also somewhat offensive and hilariously ethnocentric (I never thought I would use that word, but there you have it):

It’s Christmastime
There’s no need to be afraid
At Christmastime, we let in light and we banish shade
And in our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy
Throw your arms around the world at Christmastime

Feed the world
Let them know it’s Christmastime again 

No. Seriously. People actually sang this song, and recorded it. Like, professional people.

1984 was a different time.

Every so often in this life one runs across a food product that so completely violates accepted norms and categories that it must immediately be purchased and consumed. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Choco Cheese.

No, that is not a plastic-wrapped brick of poop that I have just sliced up on my kitchen countertop. It is cheese. Chocolate cheese. It peered out at me one afternoon from amongst its sibling dairy products at the grocery store.

True that the chocolate/diary combination is not without precedent. We have chocolate chip cookies dipped in milk, we have chocolate milk, we have chocolate cheesecake. Yet somehow, chocolate-flavored cheese (a “block,” according to the packaging) seems to transgress an ancient code of common fucking decency.

What’s next? Sausage-pops? Chicken-flavored caramels? Strawberry gravy? I had thought the era of, for example, boldly adding chopped up root vegetables and green peppers to the jell-o mold had long-since passed on.

The “chocolate flavored cheese” doesn’t give any indication what kind of cheese is being flavored here, although you’d think that might make a difference. I can imagine chocolate flavored Parmesan causing swelling followed by a painful death.

Ona and I had a few nibbles of the Choco Cheese, and to be honest it’s not bad. That is to say, it’s not offensive. If you close your eyes and forget the “block” thing, it tastes a bit like a chocolate cheesecake that has been sitting in a cooler at a university cafeteria for the last 12 hours.

Yet context is everything, and I have a hard time placing Choco Cheese in a context that might make it regularly consumable. Desert fondue? Choco Cheese cookies? Maybe a baloney and Choco Cheese sandwich? Kids have been known to eat worse.

Let me know if you have any suggestions. I would hate to see 190 grams of perfectly good Chco Cheese go to waste.

Blogging is, in many ways, like friendship. For example, if you don’t contact a friend for a good long while, you feel guilty. So you put off contacting that friend more, and feel more guilty, and so on.

Eventually, you just have to contact that friend, and pretend like nothing changed.

…

So! Al Gore’s son just got caught going 100 mph. In a Prius. Possessing pot. We can safely assume that the country’s comedy writers all finished their work early tonight. Also!

New Yorker: This shield-the-kid plot is pilfered from “Terminator 2,” and there are matching nods to “Godzilla” and the recent “King Kong,” but, if you really want to know what “Transformers” feels like, think of a hundred-and-thirty-five-minute, hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar retread of “Herbie Goes Bananas.”

I think we can all agree that more retreads of Herbie Goes Bananas isn’t the worst thing that could happen to Hollywood. Especially if we get Al Gore’s kid to play the lead.

The New York Times has a thoroughly boring story today about rampant recreational cocaine use. Methinks they are a little behind the 8-ball (haha!). I didn’t even go to clubs in New York and I knew this was a thing.

Realistically, however, I should probably cut the Times some slack, since this is an important story to get on record regardless of timeliness. I am a little worried, however, that the story sounds like it was written by Nancy Reagan.

Evidence of (increasingly casual cocaine use) is popping up in music, television and even theater. Indeed, for a generation that has not had its John Belushi to drive home the dangers of drug abuse, references and even use are open, casual, even blatant.

OK, raise your hand if you quit doing coke because of John Belushi. Right.

Here’s the question this story should really be asking: If everyone is doing coke, yet crime is going down, employment is staying up, and New York City remains one of the most desirable, most successful, most healthy, and richest cities in the world… what the fuck is the problem?

This is the real question people should be asking: Is it worth the trouble to keep certain drugs illegal?

Because on the other hand, far from the eyes of nanny politicians and church groups that campaign against exotic forms of artificial stimulation, all sorts of people are getting murdered - in Mexico, Central America, and Colombia - precisely because the drug business is illegal, and therefore run by criminal mafias.*

All so some douche bag on Wall Street can get his fix. He’ll get his fix somehow. Wouldn’t it be better if he could just buy it at the bodega?

* FUN FACT: So far this year, Costa Rican police (along with various U.S. drug enforcement efforts) have confiscated 15 tons of cocaine, trafficked by foreign mafias who are probably paying Tico fishermen way more than they would make catching fish. (Imagine how much the authorities have missed.)

Sometimes my wife needs help with her English. For example. The Spanish word puta connotes something similar to the English word bitch - son of a bitch translates as hijo de puta.

Literally, however, puta means whore, and so occasionally I find myself explaining to Ona that, no sweetie, that woman is not dressed like a bitch, she’s dressed like a whore.

It’s all very cute.