Ambrose & Elsewhere

It’s not my practice to get political in this blog, but I feel compelled to point out that something truly weird is happening in the US conservative movement. Here and here Harvey C. Mansfield is openly advocating “one man rule” for “stormy times”, and here we find Thomas Sowell daydreaming about something rather like treason. (Sowell: “When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.”)

Sowell’s weepy piece suggests that he simply cannot bear the thought of the party he favors on the losing side of any argument.

Mansfield is more sophisticated and dangerous, putting forth such polished Newspeak as “A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away.” Strangely enough, I’m not concerned about whether or not the government may “respect” my freedoms as long as it leaves me the use of them.

I wish Mansfield, as an apostle of Leo Strauss, were spending more time reading Aristotle and less time reading Machiavelli. He might come across the concept that “one-man rule” is the least stable of all governments.

In any case, reading these pieces left me wondering: is this how American conservatives want themselves perceived in this run-up to an election year–as advocates of tyranny? If that’s a winning electoral strategy, we’re all in trouble–American or not, liberal or conservative.

The Double Tongued Word Wrester (an online dictionary of neologisms; LiveJournal syndication here) has really been on a roll lately.

bullgeschichte
Part of Speech: n.
Quotation:
“’Bullgeschichte’ is the methodological tool best exemplified by wikipediasts and dilettantes. The method entails taking a little bit of information, usually gained from a scant reading or scanning of a popular magazine like Time or People or Biblical Archaeology Review and then imagining that one is armed with the latest and most relevant information on the subject. Armed with that information, the practitioner of Bullgeschichte then writes a note or a posting to a discussion list or a weblog and insists in spite of any evidence to the contrary that they are alone right and no one else can be.”

The credited author is Dr. Jim West, whose time in U.S. Grant’s Secret Service was obviously put to good use.

Even better, if less useful, is the citation for

endoclaw
Part of Speech: n.
Quotation:
“Surgical originally made a name for itself by creating extra-long instruments to operate on morbidly obese people. These include a device called the endoclaw–or kebab skewer as it is known in the trade. Surgeons use it to skewer fat.”

“Endoclaw” has got to be the name of a supervillain in some comic book universe–if not now, then soon, so he (?) can appear in Spider-Man 4 or the next season of Heroes.

This week’s Writer’s Five.

I punked out on last week’s questions, but I couldn’t pass up the Blade Runner reference in this week’s set. (Answered for Morlock, as usual.)

1 – What would s/he consider the ultimate gift?

Going home.

2 – If s/he could add a day to the week, what s/he name it and why?

They don’t reckon time by weeks in Laent.

3 – Does s/he lick the blood off of his/her wounds or find someone else to do it?

Assuming it had to be done, Morlock would do it himself; his blood would be poisonous to most people.

4 – The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can’t. Not without his/her help. What is his/her opinion of altruism?

He’d flip the tortoise back onto its legs without hesitation if he were sober. He can’t stand the thought of becoming like his rather amoral selfish father. If he were drunk he’d probably get weepy and commiserate with the tortoise, but it might not occur to him to do anything.

5 – What would be his/her song if life had a soundtrack?

“Nowhere Man” by the Beatles. Maybe “The Clocks” from Britten’s Peter Grimes for a closing theme.

Howard Jones (a.k.a. bg-editor) posted an interview this week at the Black Gate website. It’s with an opinionated semi-professional fantasy writer, but the questions are good questions, I think. If I had been thinking straight I would have remembered to mention the incredible art of Chuck Lukacs, which adorns the interview and the Morlock stories in Black Gate. His Morlock has a wounded intelligence I think perfectly fits the character.

The photo of the author troubles me (though I provided it, and it’s a reasonably accurate likeness). I’m not vain about my appearance, but as I get increasingly “fierce and bald and short of breath” it seems to me that I start to look a lot like Dick Cheney.

This is not something that anyone would brag about, and I even had a nightmare about it last night. I was in my grandmother’s house (which I haven’t seen the inside for almost thirty years: she died in 1978, if I remember right), and I was bantering with some people I didn’t know very well in the dream (or at all when I woke). They suggested that my hair was getting Rumsfeldian in its grayness. And I said, “No, no: it’s Cheney I really look like.” And I slumped my shoulders and gave the one-sided smile I share with the VPOTUS and said something foolish in the gravelly nasal quack Cheney uses at his most authoritarian.

The others froze up suddenly and looked behind me. As I turned I saw Cheney standing there with a wounded look on his face. He rushed away and I felt like a monster for mocking him.

Nowadays I have nightmares like this. When I was a lad, resting in my bed of straw after a long day of leaping from crag to crag on my native heath, I had nightmares about vampires, and zombies and soul-killing demons and sinister stone-eyed statues and shadows that inched ever closer as I could not move or speak. I don’t think I’ve exactly traded up.

Here’s hoping for more and better nightmares. While I’m actually asleep, anyway.

I’m not sure my work is of “professional quality,” but because nobody can stop me I decided to post a story for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day. (The “wretch” is sometimes left out, but I feel that it gives the insult more punch. And what’s an insult with no punch?)

It’s a fairly self-contained excerpt, of novella-length, from a Morlock novel. (Warning to those allergic to traditional elements: it has a Dwarf and a joust in it.)

[Cross-posted to the Black Gate message board.]

[edited to add., on July4, 2008]: The novel sold, so I took it down again.

Not bad for an automated quiz: it picked the speech region where I and both my parents were born and raised.

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

Northern. Whether you have the world famous Inland North accent of the Great Lakes area, or the radio-friendly sound of upstate NY and western New England, your accent is what used to set the standard for American English pronunciation (not much anymore now that the Inland North sounds like it does).

Take this quiz now – it’s easy!

We’re going to start with "cot" and "caught." When you say those words do they sound the same or different?

Same, no wait I mean different, maybe, a little bit different… Same Different

[Quiz seen at Rimrunner.]

And ride in triumph through Persepolis!
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles? […]
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
–Marlowe, Tambulaine (Part One)

I’m not one to run around saying (or singing) pointlessly hostile things about Iran, but I do find it a little weird that spokesmen for the Iranian government were screeching (justifiably, to an extent) about Hollywood maligning their ancient heritage just last month, but now the government itself is planning to destroy part of that heritage.

People have to live, and if a dam is needed its placement isn’t necessarily optional. But if a new Tamerlane arises, it looks like he might have to waterski in triumph through the streets of Persepolis. (To be fair, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine would almost certainly have rocked on that.)

The Pantheon dome and its oculus as the Moon and the Earth. (From APoD.)

“Boy meets pig. Boy frames pig as a jewel thief. Boy loses pig, and has all his leather-clad supermodel/cat-burglar sidekicks karate-chopped into submission by pig. It’s practically the world’s oldest story.”

(From the “Inventory” feature at Onion AV Club. The subject was “13 Films With Wildly Mismatched Romantic Pairings,” but the other twelve weren’t as funny, unless you like remembering Bennifer the First.)

At the risk of vexing people who’ve seen enough about the shootings at Virginia Tech, I thought I’d pass on some messages about Jamie Bishop (a German professor at VT and son of sf writer Michael Bishop) from an unlikely source–it surprised me, anyway: the Classics-L listserv.

The messages are archived here and here.

Re the killer:

The images (from photos and video) in Cho’s package addressed to NBC didn’t tell me much. But his words, as he rambled on the soundtrack, suggested to me that the guy might have been schizophrenic. One of the American media’s famous pseudo-conversations is taking place even now about gun control. But if Cho was mentally ill (as seems possible), the real issue here is not whether we need more or less guns.

There are hundreds of thousands of schizophrenics in the US living in private infernos, unnoticed or at least unhelped because their pain turns inward and they hurt themselves or their families, not random strangers. Cho may or may not have been insane, but our treatment of the mentally ill is certainly crazy.