If terrible writing...
3:59pm, July 18, 2002: ... is the stymied sigh of the beached upper liberal-establishment mind, the conflicts within its own impulses veiled in pompous fog, what exactly can the left be stuck evading? Cockburn makes a joke of it here, and a good one, but he surely knows he's pretty much an anomaly.

… before truth can get its boots on
2:01 pm, July 18, 2002 : Oh well. Ever vigilant and acute, Sterling straightway emailed me after the post below, his response demonstrating I was being EVEN MORE UNCLEAR than I usually am, and this time unhelpfully so. Since the whiskered old quote = “A terrorist is a liberal with a bomb”, the REAL joke, to work at all, has to be “A LIBERAL is a liberal with a bomb”. Meaning that a nice personality won’t in fact soften the realities of state violence blah blah. The actual West Wing line which pointed my ears was Leo — Jed Bartlett’s second-in-command — talking about his time in Vietnam, how it radicalised him, then making reference to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident as if it had actually NOT been a fabricated US pretext. Of course this could have been very very smart (and realistically cynical) scriptwriting — but if so it wasn’t opened out any. The bottom line of the story in question — jaw jaw is almost always better than war war, because violence cannot but postpone agreeable narrative closure (or something) — depends as usual on the big-heartedness of the man in charge.

Anyway, blame my addiction to cryptic obliqueness on the need for triage, if you want a reason (triage in the sense of me actually finishing and delivering things). I realised this last night talking to Frank K: I detest précis, which I associate with the worst legacy of print journalism, which in turn I associate with the establishment of bourgeois nationalism 200 years ago. “Reading the morning paper is the realist’s morning prayer,” said Hegel long ago: he loved the energetic sharpness of 18th-century journalism, as it injected the hurt world into yr croissant and coffee. More to the point, I detest précis because I’m useless at it: as a tactic it's gone dead, and rots, along with journalism. I tell myself. Thought cannot but postpone agreeable narrative closure: haha I am Hegel.

Delete me now.

A liberal with a bomb is a liberal
12.19pm, June 25, 2002: I like The West Wing. Of course it’s lamentably unrealistic: a quasi-rad-lib’s sentimental dream of what the White House (and America) could be, if only.... Decent, erudite, quick, New Deal-oid and (key part) in control of events. Flirty naughty men who cloak deep principles in charming flippancy; tough, capable women: everyone in sight smart as a whip. No one in hock to the ugly interest groups who put them there: everyone committed, however obliquely or strategically, to bettering the lot of the lowly. Which liberals have NOT been while there since, well, EVER, really (or anyway Roosevelt, who was at least fairly New Deal-oid, I suppose). My theory of rhetorical and propagandistic unreality in TV drama is this: if they show you what you WANT to see often enough, then the gap between this and real life begins subtly to enrage you. Decades of whitewash in police, hospital and court dramas — especially entertaining, well-written, satisfying whitewash — has massively increased dissonance, frustration, impatience and a sense of injustice. The secret secession of millions of minds, from day-to-day faith in society’s institutions, pervades. Mind you, I think it would take about 30,007 eps of The West Wing to produce a similar effect.

just say no
11:57pm, June 25, 2002: It's my wife and it's my life, which is presumably why I don't have either. The paradox of writing is that when you're doing lots, none emerges.