Thoughts on Stuff

I. I was listening to the Faint earlier today (whom I absolutely love) and realized that this song has developed an eerie relevance viz. the Looming Financial Crisis:


Some lyrics:

as i lay to die the things i think
did i waste my time, i think i did- i worked for life

all we want are just pretty little homes
our work makes pretty little homes

like a cast shadow
like a fathers dream
have a cut out son
what's a worse disease
to get that pretty little home

...

all we want are just pretty little homes
our work makes pretty little homes
agenda suicide, the drones work hard before they die
and give up on pretty little homes

(Caesura mine, lyrics from here.)

Oooh...I've been thinking a lot about the Faint's weird puritanical streak recently, after listening to them in the car-ride home from D.C. last weekend. Sasha pointed out that they kind of hate sex; listening to their corpus, they seem to generally be repulsed by physicality in general. Cf: "Casual Sex," & "Worked Up So Sexual from Blank Wave Arcade; "Glass Danse," "Your Retro Career Melted," & "Posed to Death" from Danse Macabre; and "Erection" & "Birth" from Wet From Birth.
Interesting. They also hate on hipsters (passim) and the pharmaceutical industry ("Symptom Finger"). One could definitely locate them in some sort of thematic and/or moral space close both to the Roman Satirists and to 16th- and 17th-century (and beyond) Christian writers, which is funny, cause they make dance music.


II.
Watching last night's Daily Show just now (on my computer), I was struck by some stuff:

First of all: does Peggy Noonan talk like that all the time? I feel like that'd be kinda draining.
More importantly, Jon at one point accuses McCain (/some abstraction of Modern American Political Discourse) of talking to voters as if we were children. Stewart asks Noonan why McCain can't say "I'll won't let gays get married and we'll try to overturn Roe v. Wade" instead of "I'll pick judges who'll strictly interpret the constitution and won't legislate from the bench." See, Jon: That's how it's ALWAYS BEEN. Appealing to the Founders (in whatever form: Protestantism's doctrine of sola scriptura, Roman emperors appealing to the principles of Augustus, &c.) is one of the most powerful political tactics. And it's hardly a tactic, really. It's really just practical manifestation of the human tendency to advantageously alter the past to suit current situations. "I'll do it the way we used to do it!" is intimately connected to the equally pervasive "Golden Age" meme (which I once heard is generally established as approximately 50 years earlier than "Now," whenever "Now" was. In retrospect, this seems like not far back enough [relatively speaking], and may have possibly only applied to ancient peoples with little established history [nor anything really resembling modern history whatsoever] and very short life spans, but whatever.) The thing that really frustrates me about partisanship is that it blinds people to the bigger picture: the hierarchies and interrelationships that exist between the Haves and the Have-Nots, the Rulers and the Ruled; and the discourses and praxes that maintain and strengthen those structures. McCain has absolutely no need to be forthright about his agenda, that's simply not how it even works. Nobody, except possibly nymphomaniacs with Asperger's, would ever say "Hey, wanna go fuck in my room?" And yet you don't see Jon Stewart criticizing anyone who uses the decades-old "Wanna get high in my room?" line.

III. Who else is excited for the Palin-Biden debate? It's gonna be like watching a puppy running into an electric fence, over and over and over, for 90 minutes. Schadenfreudey!

IV. Yo, it is cold in Brooklyn.