Skip to main content

Tomorrow is a defining day for Salon

Looks like tomorrow Obama will be increasing troop levels. To a large extent, this will be a deciding day for Salon. Most times when criticism has been made of Obama here, it has been hedged by making him seem the good king surrounded by poison-issuing advisors. So we have often enough heard pleas for him to please not listen to some corrupting so-and-so. But though we have evidence (from Sirota, I believe) that it could just amount once again to an instance of good Obama unnecessarily deferring (to his general, in this case), Joan and a number of others have essentially made clear that if he ups the troops, they will be switching to thinking of it mostly as HIS war--evidence, presumably, of his true moving instinct. After tomorrow, the pressure will be on them to evidence this turn away from "poor adviser" talk, from "the difficult task of turning the Titanic around" talk, which has hereto allowed them to believe the primary villains those--like, presumably, right-wing crazies--who have made him unnecessarily hesitant, reluctant to evidence his good nature, his true interest in the progressive reform he has spoken of so inspiringly.

If it continues to be one crazy after another, we have right to ask just how progressive Salon is; if now that the time has come, what it is that gives "them" cold feet; if they have it in them to take the heat being stridenly anti-Obama will bring upon them, from many of their own liberal friends.

Just a note: I don't believe Obama EVIL. I just think he has not been so rosily raised that he can avoid the disassociative trance many Americans seem increasingly compelled to lose themselves in.

Originally posted as a letter in response to: “Praying for Obama’s death” (Salon)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...

The Conjuring

The Conjuring 
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...