Haunting the Web Since 1999
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. The chain reaction of evil…must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.“
— Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968)
Hello all. I just received word that my aunt Joan passed away this morning after a long struggle with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. She was a warm, funny, and brave individual. I miss her already.
At any rate, I’m flying home to be with my family and attend the services, so updates here will be infrequent to nonexistent over the next couple of days. Have a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving. Update: As of now (Tuesday night), I’m back in NYC…thanks much for the condolences sent over e-mail and in the comments. They were much appreciated.
R.I.P. ODB 1969-2004, definitely the strangest of the Wu.
R.I.P. John Peel 1939-2004…The music world is smaller without him.
“When I was born, the doctor came into the waiting room and said to my father, ‘I’m sorry. We did everything we could, but he pulled through.'” Pull through he did…until today. R.I.P. Rodney Dangerfield 1921-2004.
Many condolences to the family and friends of Aaron Hawkins, a.k.a. Uppity Negro, who tragically took his own life sometime last week. While his site wasn’t in my daily blogroll, I eventually found myself there a number of times over the years, and his posts and commentary were consistently funny, passionate, and well-written. Aaron was an inspired individual, and his loss is tragic. (Discovered on All About George.)
“I become irritated or disgusted only when anyone attempts to enlist these now voiceless dead for their own purposes. Respectful silence would be a far better response.” So writes Slate‘s gone-to-seed Dubya apologist Christopher Hitchens about the 1000 dead soldiers in Iraq. Would that the victims of 9/11 three years ago today were given the same courtesy. R.I.P. [0, 1, 2]
“What happens to your online self when you die?” By way of LinkMachineGo, City Paper delves into Ghosts in the Machine.
So…you might’ve missed this little story in all the D-Day hullabaloo, but apparently former President Ronald Reagan died. Due to my cable issues, I’ve thankfully missed much of the canonization and hagiography of the past few days, although I’m sure the GOP will repeat it all at their upcoming convention anyway.
I know it’s bad form to speak ill of the recently deceased, so I’ll let others handle straightening the record about Ronnie’s not-so-stellar presidency. But, given all the revisionist history out and about at the moment, I do think this is a good time to consider the thesis of Reagan’s America by Garry Wills:
| Much of Garry Wills’s argument in Reagan’s America can be encapsulated by George Costanza’s advice to Jerry Seinfeld, prior to Jerry’s being polygraphed about his Melrose Place viewing habits: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Over and over again, Wills scrutinizes the tales and myths told by Reagan about himself in his private speeches, public addresses, and autobiography, and finds them to be embellished, exaggerated, and – more often than not – patently false. And therein lies his uncanny appeal for so many people: Reagan’s myths are America’s myths…As Wills puts it, “the truth about [America’s] actual behavior, whether on the old frontier or the new, is as threatening to our sense of identity as the terrorist himself.” (452) And because Reagan believes so thoroughly in his own American myths, many Americans could join him in believing them as well…[Wills writes,] “Visiting Reaganland is very much like taking children to Disneyland…It is a safe past, with no sharp edges to stumble against. The more visits one makes to such a past, the better is one immunized against any troubling cursions of a real [American past.] If capitalist ‘conservatism’ canoot be rooted in the real past it works to obliterate, then it will invent a deracinating past, a nostalgia for the new, a substitute history to lull us in the time machine that travels on no roads, reaching goals no one could plan.” (459-460)
In sum, “Reagan gives our history the continuity of a celluloid Mobius strip. We rides its curves backwards and forwards at the same time, and he is always there.” (440) Put differently, the appeal of Ronald Reagan for so many is that he offers us a simulacrum of American history that is both appealingly mythic and appallingly untrue. |
Well, at the very least, the effusive eulogizing going on right now may help topple barriers to stem-cell research. And, no matter what one’s political persuasion, I think we can all agree that helping to eliminate scourges like Alzheimer’s Disease would make a wonderful asset to Ronald Reagan’s legacy.
