matching tracksuits

Sorry, but I had to bump this up to the top. Come on people — this is utterly ridiculous. I’m making a big deal out of a mole hill and nothing?

I live outside the US — Poland, to be exact. Surfing the net, I found a claim that people outside the US couldn’t access Bush’s official web site.

So I tried it.

I get the “Permission to view this website is forbidden for this server” message.

Just what is Bush doing? There is no justification for this, and no logical reason for it either.

Here are some articles about it:

• Wired News
• BBC
• Expatia

According to the Expatia article,

Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, was reported by the BBC on Thursday as saying: “The measure was taken for secruity [sic] reasons.” He declined to elaborate.

Security reasons?! Does al Q have the capacity to strike through IE? First Homeland Security is raiding toy stores (thanks to Thud for this info), and now Bush is shutting down his website for non-Americans? What kind of “security” is this?

There is just no logical reason for this blockage. If Bush’s team can’t “defend” his web site, what makes people think Bush and his gang can defend the country? Setting up a firewall is a lot easier than keeping out terrorists, I would imagine.

There was, in the Expatia article, some speculation as to why this was done:

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated to the BBC that the decision to block usage was made to cut traffic to the site in the run-up to the 2 November poll and make sure the site remains active.

Google doesn’t seem to have this problem, and I would wager they see _a lot more traffic_ than Bush’s site. If this is really a concern, I would suggest to Bush’s technologically savvy web team that they look for a better host.

From the BBC article, further speculation, which puts the previous quote in context:

On 21 October, the George W Bush website began using the services of a company called Akamai to ensure that the pages, videos and other content on its site reaches visitors.

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision might have been taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.

This just doesn’t wash either. How much could this possibly cost? Besides, in addition to campaign funds, Bush has a sizable bank account himself — he could pay for this out of his own petty cash, I’m sure.

Is it a conspiracy to keep non-Americans from viewing the site? I doubt it. Expatica claims that there are ways to get to the site:

bq. However, keen net users have shown that the site can be found at other addresses, including: https://georgewbush.com; http://65.172.163.222 and http://origin.georgewbush.com.

However, none of them worked for me.

They all produced 404 errors.

Polish news agencies reported yesterday that according to a poll (no pun intended), 41% of Poles would vote for Bush and 31% for Kerry.

In the rest of the EU, the numbers were decidedly more, well, decided: 61% of respondents said they would vote for Kerry; 9.8% for Bush.

“Damn liberal Europeans! Kerry probably bought them with money from the oil for food program!”

I’ve been reading Anna Karenina intermittently for a couple of weeks now, and I find it somewhat difficult to sympathize with such characters who are so clearly in an entirely different social world than I. They talk of Society (with the ever-important “S”) and take off abroad on a whim. Hard work for the men is listening to petitioners in their civil service job or riding around their estate to make sure all the peasants are working as directed (maybe occasionally working with them!); had work for the women is dealing with servants’ incompetence. It’s not difficult to see why Marxist ideology took root there as it did, and it’s strikingly evident already in Tolstoy’s mid–19th century Russia. One character even semi-accurately predicts that Marxism will be the new theology, sweeping Christianity off to one side.

And just when you think none of the characters is going to address any of this, Oblonsky, Levin, and Veslovsky head off into the marshes for a couple of days of shooting. Sitting in a peasant’s hut, enjoying his hospitality, they begin talking about the justness of social system when their host must step outside for a while.

“Why do we eat and drink, go shooting and do no work, while he is always, always working?” said Vasenka Veslovsky, evidently for the first time in his life thinking of this, and therefore speaking quite genuinely (582).

Why indeed? Because you can afford it.

The conversation ends with an exchange between Oblonsky and Levin, in which the former admits the inherent injustice in the system, but encourages Levin to accept them nonetheless.

“One of two things: either you confess that the existing order of Society is just, and then uphold your rights; or else own that you are enjoying unfair privileges, as I do, and take them with pleasure.”

“No! If it were unjust, you could not use such advantages with pleasure; at any rate I could not. The chief thing for me is, not to feel guilty” (583).

It reminds me of a similar emotion I experienced a few years ago in Berlin viewing an exhibition of Gauguin’s work:

While at the new National Gallery I was struck with a terrible sense of the stupid futility of all that I was seeing around me. Here we were, the privileged ten or fifteen percent of the world’s population, paying fifteen marks to look at some paintings (created by someone who was, by his own admission, trying to escape reality) while the remaining eighty-five percent of the world’s population is fighting for survival. We spend so much of our time trying to inject some kind of meaning in our lives while they simply try to live. The significance of the Expressionist movement or the impact of Bach’s music on his contemporaries seems pitifully  insignificant when others go to bed hungry every night. Their suffering robbed me of any pleasure I might otherwise have experienced at the gallery. And then I turned this critical light on my own aspirations and once again felt that I would be wasting my life by devoting my time and energy to studying and teaching religion and philosophy. What does it matter whether Berkley is right or wrong about the relationship between perception and existence when people are starving and disease ridden? It’s a simply matter of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — most people don’t get the most basic needs fulfilled while we in the western world scurry about trying to find meaning in paintings and music.

Perhaps Gauguin just doesn’t appeal to me . . .

Why? Because I like to read what “the other side” has to say. I don’t know many conservatives who will sit down and read a liberal column, but that’s just my limited experience. In her latest piece, Ms. Coulter writes,

Among his other pointless carping about the war in Iraq, Kerry keeps claiming the military is overextended. His supporters claim Bush has a secret plan to bring back the draft. Whatever happened to all those gays who wanted to join the military? We haven’t heard a peep out of them lately. How about rounding up a “Coalition of the Fabulous,” Sen. Kerry? And what does his good pal Mary Cheney tell him about that?

Is it just me, or does there seem to be some rather rabid homophobia in that? The implied benefits are:

1. “Those gays” will finally shut up about being able to join the military.
2. A lot of them will get killed in the war — dead gays are always a good thing.
3. All gays speak with a lisp and say everything is “fabulous.”

Perhaps I’m missing an insinuation.

I’m reading intermittently Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary, which was part of a wedding gift that consisted of several Polish classics. I’ve been wading through it for about two months now. I read a day here, a day there, an entry or two in a single day, then nothing for a couple of weeks.

It’s hard going because there’s only so much self-congratulatory discussion on Art (and that capital “A” is critical) that I can handle in one sitting. Gombrowicz was a self-exiled Polish writer who seemed constantly to be growling and grumbling against “timid Polish Art” and such. He’s an Artist with the Capital A because he regards Art (again, that “A” must be there) as something as critical as Air (an equally important “A”), and thinks Disastrous Art will lead to the Downfall of Civilization as surely as bad monetary policy. He does admit once that Art (or even lowly art) is a luxury, but only in a fever of humility that quickly passes.

It reminds me of what Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes in #15 from A Coney Island of the Mind of the adventures, difficulties, and responsibilities of a poet. It’s the ever-popular poem about poetry, in other words. It seems to be a bit of self-flattery, the knight looking at himself in a mirror, admiring his own armor and coming heroism. And taking himself entirely too seriously, the

super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut
truth
before the taking of each stance or step

As if the right words will save the world, and the wrong ones, destroy. The whole poem, for those interested (without F’s beat-poet line indentions):

the
poet like acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a

of his audience
sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and slight-of-foot

above the heads
tricks
and other high theatrics
all without mistaking
any thing
for what might not be.
For he’s

whenever he performs
the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth

Constantly risking absurdity
start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charliechaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair

with gravity to in
eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

before the taking of each stance or step
and death
his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits

I don’t know why it annoys me so much for an Artist to think of himself so seriously. He spends quite a bit talking about how no one understands him, how no one can comprehend what he’s been doing in his various novels that might appear to be unreadable, but in fact are only difficult because we’re not accustomed to such radically different Art.

“What I’m trying to do . . .”

Tom Wolfe commented on this thirty years ago:

Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! Phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed for me for the first time. All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many-thousand Pollacks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer — waiting, waiting, forever waiting for … it … for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there — waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well — how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other words exist only to illustrate the text (quoted in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate).

We have to have it explained to us. And what exactly are they explaining? Back to Pinker:

The political messages of most postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like “racism is bad.” But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.

This is true not only by the artists, but by the critics as well. Try reading a college textbook on film criticism. You’ll find yourself wondering how someone could write something so contorted, so warped — how someone could use so many words to say so comparatively little.

And so where does it leave us in this blog-invested world, where now everyone is an artist and everyone is trying to say something?

He writes with a grin.