or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
January 05, 2009
New Tomdispatch
The Ponzi Scheme Presidency
Bush's Legacy of Destruction
By Tom EngelhardtIt may finally be 2009, but in some ways, given these last years, it might as well be 800 BCE.
From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting -- in almost comic strip-style -- various bloody royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the "body count."
So I learned recently by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted those heads and recorded the numbers for the greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries, Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed hands for victorious Pharaohs).
Hand it to art museums. Is there anything stranger than wandering through one and locking eyes with a Vermeer lady, a Van Eyck portrait, or one of Rembrandt's burghers staring out at you across the centuries? What a reminder of the common humanity we share with the distant past. In a darker sense, it's no less a reminder of our kinship across time to spot a little pyramid of heads on a frieze, imagine an Assyrian scribe making his count, and -- eerily enough -- feel at home. What a measure of just how few miles "the march of civilization" (as my parents' generation once called it) has actually covered.
—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at January 5, 2009 11:12 AMIt's written with a combination of Tom's usual perspective-giving multi-sourced brilliance and the near-universal obsessive optimism about the Good Riddance.
My crystal ball has bubbles in it, so I can't tell what them fellers are gonna go do when they move on. (I doubt it'll be just selling book contracts.
Note that some shamed-out Bush officials have apparently been using their newly acquired shadows to accomplish more of what they did before. Some have become openly critical of Bush, though. Perhaps it's time to do a body count and get the real score on that.
Regarding Tom's afternotes: I never could tell whether Riverbend knew the width of her readership, and now I wonder if she has any idea how much we miss her.
Posted by: Joel at January 5, 2009 12:38 PM
