Peter Krupa

“Now I want you to realize,” he writes, “that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man…”

I could almost be with him and his lawyerly “If X and Y, then WOMEN ARE INFERIOR,” but then he gives us this chesnut: “For this reason, and because of the angels, the woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa, what angels? You can’t just throw angels into that mix. Where did these fucking crazy-ass angels come from, and what do they have to do with man/woman/God/Christ role assignments?

I’m sure Greek makes it sound more eloquent, but I prefer the English language’s nice, straight-forward way of exposing crack-pots.

Prizio has re-entered the building.

In defiance of law school, he has remained a lovely writer:

On the train, I awoke, and looked to my left. Across the aisle were two people, a man and a woman, good decent midwestern folk, humble and squarish. Nothing spectacular about them, except that she had rested her head on his shoulder and they were napping, or dozing, rocking to imperfections in the track. They were not beautiful people, and yet they were, somehow, unselfconsciously, gently keeping one another warm on the journey. The woman opened her eyes, caught me watching them, and smiled nappishly.

From a Slate.com advice column:

My wife and I married about three months ago and had dated for almost three and a half years before getting married. We both believe sex is for marriage only and abstained during our relationship. She is a virgin. I am not (I made my abstinence decision later in life). It was hard to keep my hands to myself while we dated, but I could do it partly because I knew marriage was on the horizon. Here’s the problem: We have still never had sex… We did discuss this before marriage and I was under the impression that it would happen. In fact, she even thought it would happen during the honeymoon. Every time we tried, she freaked out and started to cry.

I guess this wouldn’t be a problem if the groom were a virgin too, because then they wouldn’t even realize they were miserable. The moral of the story is that unless you live in a club-wielding, pre-modern society where virginity is glorified, fetishized, and given a monetary value, it’s best to get it out of the way before the matrimony so that afterwards you can proceed with the celebratory humping, forthwith.

The Toronto Sutton Place Hotel has been fined C$605 (that’s $540 in real money) after Sean Penn lit up in a meeting room during a press conference. Penn will receive a “sternly-worded letter from Toronto public health officials.”

Toronto officials assure us that Penn is not receiving special treatment as a celebrity. “‘We don’t have a system in Canada where we have preferential treatment for someone who’s famous or rich,’ Ontario Health Promotion Minister Jim Watson told Reuters.”

Clearly, Canadian public servants are either delusional, naive, or cunning.

Dave has a nice post in which he takes on a ridiculous CBS show called To Catch a Predator, which involves a fine combination of cops, statutory rape, unsettling surprises, and Chris Hansen.

Like Dave, whenever I come across some paralyzingly stupid part of American culture, I like to turn and smirk over my shoulder, wink at the rest of the country as if, come on, you guys don’t actually like this… do you?

Increasingly, all I’m getting are millions and millions of blank stares, and I say to myself, so these are the people that make Kelly Clarkson go double platinum.

We thought The Simpson’s was satirizing the present, but we were wrong: it was depicting the future.

It seems the Pope has angered Muslims by reading from some 600-year-old text and implying that the Islamic religion is inherently violent. Muslims around the world are enraged and incensed that someone would try to whip up hate against another religion, and we’re all waiting on pins and needles to see if they’ll oblige and prove the Pope’s point by burning down a cathedral and killing a priest or two.

My favorite newsblurb in the above link is from the Guardian:

Benedict’s offence, of course, was recklessly to quote this 600 year-old expression of the point of view of a medieval Middle Eastern potentate. He didn’t endorse it, didn’t say that it was his own view, attributed it in context. And is now told that he has “aroused the anger of the whole Islamic world.” Most of which, probably, had never heard of Manuel II Paleologue before this morning. Perhaps the pope should be careful of bringing such subversive ancient texts to light.

On the other hand, if you cannot, as part of a lengthy and profound academic lecture, cite a 600 year-old text for fear of stirring the aggravation of noisy politicians half way around the world, what CAN you do? We might as well all retreat into obscurantism. And keep our mouths shut, for otherwise, who knows who we might offend. And if, as a result of the outrage, some Catholics get killed or their churches burned down by offended scholars and textual exegesists it might be thought that Manuel’s original point had rather been made.

“Obscuritanism” is a great word.

As they did with the cartoon fracas, the media again is so far only reporting the story superficially: Muslims, as a group, can’t possibly have gotten spontaneously enraged about the Pope quoting the writing of a 14th century academic nobody. The real story, is that a handful of extremist clerics and other Muslim leaders are apparently channeling these obscure allegations to the masses in order to whip up a nice show for the CNN cameras and trample a few poor rioters in Nigeria. Since the cartoon row, this seems it might become a new pattern in Muslim politics, and no doubt some New Yorker editor is on the phone right now assigning a contributor to write an in-depth piece on the phenomenon.

And if they’re not, they should be.

There’s a nice little scandal brewing involving Slate.com and New York Times columnist Frank Rich. In a 9/11 where-are-we-now column printed on Sept. 10, Rich commented on a photo by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker that, according to Rich and Hoepker, depicts lounging youths who don’t appear to give a rip about the Manhattan skyline smoldering behind them.

Hoepker said he didn’t publish the photo at the time because it was “taboo,” and Rich adds his own six-figure insight into the psyche of the five subjects: “It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it,” he opines. “The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American.”

But Slate.com’s David Plotz quickly called bullshit:

Do these look like five New Yorkers who are “enjoying the radiant late-summer sun and chatting away”? Who have “move[d] on”? Who—in Rich’s malicious, backhanded swipe—”aren’t necessarily callous”? They don’t to me. I wasn’t there, and Hoepker was, so it may well be that they were just swapping stories about the Yankees. But I doubt it. The subjects are obviously engaged with each other, and they’re almost certainly discussing the horrific event unfolding behind them. They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they’re bored with 9/11, but because they’re citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate.

Now two of the subjects of the photograph have e-mailed Slate.com to confirm that Plotz’s analysis is, in fact, the correct one. “A snapshot can make mourners attending a funeral look like they’re having a party,” wrote Walter Sipser, the first man on the right in the photo (click here to see a larger version).

More than anything, Rich’s column confirms his own prejudice, first in his glib analysis of the American character, and second in assuming that the most callous and shallow embodiments of this character are “young people” (at the time of the photo, Sipser was 40).

Also, this little bru-ha-ha illustrates once more that columnists are frauds. Constructing grandiose cultural theories based on dubious anecdotal evidence is something anyone can do, and yet for some reason God decided Frank Rich should get paid the big bucks to do it. Imagine if I only had to post once a week, had a research assistant, and got paid. What a life.

Finally, I’m a little worried that this scandal is even a thing. It seems implicitly agreed by both sides that you are less of a person if you carried on with life as usual after 9/11 - and bizarrely, the terrorist attack is increasingly referred to in similar terms as the Holocaust.

Rich notes that it’s “possible (the young people) lost someone,” as if this was the case with most people in a city of 8 million. Chris Schiavo, one of the e-mailers who was in the photo, notes that she is a third-generation New Yorker and that “it was genetically impossible for me to be unaffected by this event.” The New York Times recently ran an article about the differences between those new to New York and those who were here for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as if the latter group were war veterans or Holocaust survivors.

Not to belittle what happened, but fucking get over yourselves. Real survivors are people who are around to pick up the pieces after a whole city floods or burns down or gets firebombed - when 20,000 people die in an earthquake, or 60,000 people disappear in a mudslide.

Just because you were at home in Queens when a thousand-some people died in a building collapse in Lower Manhattan doesn’t make you a survivor. New Yorkers should count themselves lucky they didn’t have a real catastrophe, then get on with their damn lives.

In a typically smarmy scene in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, Moore walks through a quiet Canadian hamlet, wandering into random houses and surprising the loveably innocent Canadians who are just too pure and naive to even consider locking their front doors. Canadians, he tells us, are peaceful and cuddly, and though guns may not kill people, neither do Canadians.

Today, that scene seems a bit dated, as Michael Moore learns the pitfalls of the argument based on anecdote. It seems that yesterday, one peaceful, cuddly Canadian finally snapped while in range of a whole lot of school-age kids. The tally so far is 19 wounded and two dead, including the shooter, one Kimveer Gill.

The whole thing is a bit cliche, seemingly designed specifically for the limited imagination of newspaper reporters - a black trenchcoat goth guy, obsessed with violent video games and heavy metal, etc., finds some guns and shoots a bunch of helpless kids in a cafeteria. Likely he was bullied too.

We can’t see what Mr. Gill’s dark, dark blog really says because our parents in the mainstream media are too responsible to give us a link, but cleaned-up excerpts show suicidal thoughts, filthy language, and violent fantasies (in other words, a fairly typical blog).

The last post, as reproduced here, was timestamped 10.41am and read, “Whiskey in the morning, mmmmmm,mmmmmmmmm, good !! .” Remind me when I finally go down in my own blaze of glory not to conclude my ultimate piece of prose in this life with an emoticon.

I don’t have time to list all the things that Those With Our Best Interests At Heart will try to ban and/or take away from us as a result of this shooting spree, but a short list will likely include violent video games, dark clothing, weird haircuts, Goth girl/boyfriends, fake vampire teeth, and our Beretta Cx4 Storm semiautomatic rifles.

And Michael Moore? Well, he’s making a new movie about health care in the US. I’m trembling with anticipation. What insightful anecdotes will he think of next?

The following is a little piece I dashed off for a foreign policy newsletter. It traces the tough times Hugo Chavez has been having recently in Latin America. The editors made a few significant changes to my piece, so I thought I’d post this - the original version - for the sake of posterity.

At the beginning of 2006, Hugo Chavez was riding high in Latin America.

In 2004, he had defeated a recall referendum, and in 2005, at the Summit of the Americas in Mar de Plata, Argentina, he had delivered a rock-star-like performance on a side stage that had overshadowed the main event. Later in 2005, Venezuela had been approved for full membership in the Southern Common Trade Group (Mercosur), and oil prices were on their way to $60 a barrel. By the end of that year, Chavez’ good friend and ideological soul mate, Evo Morales, had been elected president of Bolivia by a comfortable margin, and with populist leftist candidates making strong showings in 2006 presidential races in Chile, Peru, and Mexico, Chavez’ Bolivarian Revolution seemed poised to make a clean sweep of the entire region.

But the heights to which he soared at the beginning of 2006 would turn out to be the peak for Chavez.

First, level-headed Chile shrugged off the rising populist tide by sending a conservative and a center-left candidate to the run-offs. Then, in Peru’s hotly-contested presidential run-off between corrupt ex-president Alan García and former soldier and populist rabble-rouser Ollanta Humala, Peruvians reacted strongly against the idea of Chavez meddling in their politics, and association with Chavez actually became a negative. Humala quickly tried to distance himself from his roll model, but it was too late - García beat him out by a slim margin, and suddenly, Chavez’ political capital in the region was down to the dredges.

Since then, Chavez has been in full retreat. In April, in an desperate attempt to regain some clout in the Andean region and force some support for his anti-free trade policies, he withdrew from the Andean Community of Nations, a trade bloc to which Venezuela had been a member since 1973, then offered to rejoin on the condition that Peru drop its free trade agreement with the United States. Peru, however, refused, and Venezuela went on to form a new trade group with Bolivia and Cuba.

Chavez has experienced several other smaller-scale setbacks throughout the year in his plans to unify the region, Bolivia’s much-hyped nationalization of its natural gas resources being one of them. When the military swept in to seize control of the country’s natural gas fields this spring, the elephant in the living room was that the largest stake in those fields was owned by Brazil’s state energy company, Petrobras. While Venezuelan engineers loudly and publicly stepped up to help Morales with the take-over, Brazil stood angrily on the sidelines watching more than $1 billion in investment simply being snatched away by its erstwhile friends.

The final nail in the coffin for Chavez’ dreams of regional unity with himself at the helm was the defeat of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico’s presidential election. By then, association with Chavez had become something of a scarlet letter, and Felipe Calderón, recognizing this, ran an effective smear campaign painting Obrador as a chavista lapdog. It worked, though just barely, and now as 2006 begins to draw toward its conclusion, the Bolivarian Revolution finds itself still swimming in oil, but increasingly alone, with no new converts since Bolivia and a dying ally in Cuba to boot.

Chavez can still be a threat to stability in Latin America, but 2006 has been a rough year, and his plans for regional leadership are all but spoiled. Certain allies like Brazil and Argentina will continue to court Chavez’ favor, but for canny economical reasons, not pie-in-the-sky ideological ones. Indeed, Chavez seems to have realized this, and so in one of the capricious and erratic changes of policy that have come to typify his leadership style, he seems for the moment to have turned his back on regional relationships in favor of jet-setting around the world to make ties with governments of the most dubious nature – Belarus, Iran, Syria, and China, to name a few.

Likely this also has something to do with Venezuela’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council, but who can say for sure what Chavez has in mind. Odds are, even he doesn’t know yet.

Right now I’m reading The Liberators, by Robert Harvey. It’s the story of the liberation of South America from Spanish rule and as such focuses mainly on Simon Bolívar, the brilliant, Napoleon-esque Venezuelan general who through a mixture of determination, genius, insanity, and rhetorical flare managed to free South America from the most gruesome imperial power ever to exist.

Bolívar’s life takes on a contemporary importance considering the current leader of Venezuela - Hugo Chavez - idolizes him to the point of renaming the country the “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” (he would have named it “Bolivia,” but that was already taken). There are some striking similarities in their leadership styles - bold, improbable action; visionary rhetoric; ruthlessness when cornered - that make it clear Chavez is doing his level best to imitate Bolívar.

So yesterday I was quite chilled by a certain moment in the story of Bolívar’s brilliant march from Cartagena to Caracas. At one point, while in a particularly tough spot between several Spanish armies, Bolívar issued the following declaration:

The Spaniards have served us with rapine and death. They have violated the sacred rights of human beings, violated capitulations and the most solemn treaties; committed, in fact, every crime. They have reduced the Republic of Venezuela to the most frightful desolation. Thus, then, justice demands vengeance and necessity obliges us to take it…

… Every Spaniard who does not conspire with the most active and effective means possible against the tyranny in favour of our just cause will be held as an enemy and a traitor to the fatherland; and in consequence will be inexorably put to the knife. On the other hand, an absolute and general indulgence will be granted to those who pass to our army with or without their arms… Spaniards who render conspicuous service to the State will be treated as Americans…

This policy became known as “war to the death.” Bolívar did not, in the end, carry out this full-scale, racial slaughter he had called for, except for on a few gruesome occasions. He actually has an image of being quite magnanimous, and statues of him mounted on his horse generally depict him doffing his hat in a gesture of humility. Harvey, however, theorizes that Bolívar’s statement of total war set an unfortunate example for many of the subsequent atrocities that were to take place in Latin America.

Which brings us back to Chavez and why I find this moment in history so chilling. Venezuela today is divided between rich and poor, East Caracas and West Caracas, chavista and opposition. In considering himself the Bolívar of the poor, Chavez sets up his opposition as the Spaniards, the wealthy and cruel exploiters who must be either join the new call to freedom or be purged from the land.

Is it so hard to believe, then, that Chavez, who idolizes Bolívar, has Bolívar’s for-us-or-against-us call to slaughter in mind?

Bolívar’s revolution was bloody enough. Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution … well, it’s not to be trusted.