Friday links! Terrifying vortex of culture edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

Google image search: "terrifying vortex." Lame.

Ahoy, loyal readers of the once daily Combat! blog. It’s a beautiful afternoon in Los Angeles County, where the hours run away like horses over the hills. One wakes up late, one plans to fetch donuts, one considers one’s appearance and spends 75 minutes bathing and brushing for what turns out to be an irrationally angry Thai woman who seems to have seized control of the Winchell’s by sheer force of personality, one sits down to write Combat! blog and watches like half of The Prestige instead, and before one knows it it’s three-thirty. That makes it an average of five o’clock if you’re lucky enough to be reading this in America, which makes it Friday evening, which basically makes it the weekend. The weekend, as 140-185 of you know, is no time for reading Combat! blog, but for living. As such, we’re keeping our Friday links short and to the point, in the hopes that they will be read between croquet matches and whale-watching dinners over an active, meaningful weekend. Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. Bereft of life—real, experiential life as it is lived by, I dunno, Alaskan wolf hunters probably—we have only culture, and culture, as this week(end)’s links indicate, totally sucks. Behold, a litany of the damned:

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Friday links! Big important issues edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 5 Comments

From our friends at www.lamebook.com. Thank god they blur out the eyes, or someone might recognize this picture.

It’s Friday, and it’s not just the week that’s coming to an end. I don’t want to alarm you guys, but right now is the very last moment of recorded time. Terrifying, isn’t it? The pyramids, the rise and fall of Rome, the revolutions of the Enlightenment and the struggle against fascism, rock and roll, the Jackson 5, Friends—all that is over as of today. Everything is behind us, and we just don’t know what’s ahead. Frankly, this moment has never occurred before, so we don’t have much to go by. All I can say conclusively is that this has been a great week for hyperbole, absurd comparisons, and end-times pronouncements of all sorts. Fortunately, that’s just the kind of thing we at Combat! blog go in for. Incontrovertibly, this has been the last week in human history. Let’s all, like, gaze upon it.

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Friday links! How can I miss you when you won’t go away edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 6 Comments

Goddammit, no.

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time to look back on that which is about to become the week that was. Peculiarly, it’s been a week of nostalgia for the man pictured above. You might remember him from such bold leadership initiatives as turning a budget surplus into a multitrillion-dollar debt, deregulating the financial industry, awarding no-bid contracts to corporate cronies in two wars whose duration currently exceeds that of World War II, and arguing passionately in favor of torture. Or you might just remember that he talked like you and wasn’t black. It all depends on your perspective, and for a president who left office with a 38% approval rating, George W. Bush has enjoyed a surprising resurgence lately. It’s almost as if the good people of America articulated their political thoughts entirely in terms of being against things, and/or had no recollection of events beyond the past year. Of course, it’s also possible that the whole thing is made up; you probably also remember the national media that told us the war in Iraq was going to be quick and easy, then told us that no one could have predicted the problems in Iraq, then pilloried the Bush administration for messing up Iraq before alleging that Obama’s presidency is foundering on his inadequate commitment to same. It’s all a rich tapestry, which has fallen from the wall into a pile of rat feces, and we serfs can only peer upward and try to deduce the movements of the heavens using our astrolabes or whatever. It’s throwback time. Won’t you shudder in ignorant terror with me?

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Friday links! Masters and servants edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments

Apparently Friedrich Nietzsche is the guest editor this week at latfh.com. Also, I'm not sure Rikki Kramp is this young man's given name.

As anyone who has read about the United States in a book will tell you, ours is a country founded on egalitarianism. Let the tottering empires of Europe labor under the notion of a permanent ruling class; America has no king, because America needs no king. Sure, certain of the exceptionally gifted among us will rise to power and prominence, and it’s only logical that those men and women keep their positions for long, illustrious careers. But even from the lofty heights of power they see us at eye level. Ours is not a culture in which a small elect view the rest of us as braying lambs, raised to numbly trot after the herd. No—we live free, with no shepherds to herd us to safety or slaughter. Or, um, maybe that’s totally how it is. Maybe the levers of American power are set hopelessly beyond the reach of any person of average heights, and we live at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Maybe the presidency really is a fifth column with its top higher than our eyes can see, and our only defense is a conglomeration of old families and wealthy industrialists trying desperately to trick us into right action before it’s too late. Both explanations—a nation of free men, a sad school play in which frightened children mumble words they dimly understand—seem equally possible. And either explanation is, after all, self-fulfilling. This week, Combat! blog presents evidence for both sides. Is America still operated by Americans? Or have we devolved into a kleptocracy in which corporate money and political aristocracy compete to see whose views they can make our own? More than most questions, this one depends on how you look at it.

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Friday links! Spades are spades edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

I think this picture is what's been missing from our increasingly tedious Friday visual puns, if you know what I mean.

It’s the end of the week, and TGIFF, you B’s. Maybe it’s just the unseasonably warm weather here in Montana, but I can’t help but feel that a veil is falling away. Ours is an impressively euphemistic society, where bitter spite goes dressed in the robes of parliamentary procedure and cold depredation smiles warmly from the podium. Unlike a lie, though, the truth is there whether you’re talking about it or not, and like the gay director of your church camp, it will eventually out itself. This week was a surprisingly good one for calling things by their right names, to the point that even our usually gloomy Friday links have taken on the rosy glow of…god, I can’t think of the word. What’s that thing that’s the opposite of despair? You know, the thing that rich charlatans laugh at? I know it’s a political strategy of some sort, but I feel like it has an archaic definition, too. Ah, well—I’m sure I’ll think of it, and if I never do I’ll still have consumer electronics. In the meantime, enjoy this week’s link roundup, in which a mighty herd of telling it like it is goes sweeping across the nation, paradoxically leaving a little less bullshit in its wake.

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