Okay, so that headline is a little misleading: federal tax revenues are the lowest they have been, as a share of GDP, since before the Korean War. You know those checks that Don Draper gets and immediately turns into Cadillacs while poor people wait for Medicaid and the Department of Energy to be invented? He pays more taxes than you. Despite all the sorghum subsidies and porno art grants and million-dollar screwdrivers that have turned the US government into a voracious leviathan bent on devouring our children, the bites are smaller than they’ve been in two generations. Such news seems odd just now, since congresspeople have been describing their employer as a “gangster government,” and a whole national movement of incredibly angry old people has risen to protest our unjust tax burden. Oh yeah—we’re also going to shut down the government over our looming financial crisis. It’s the hottest legislative issue since we had to compromise and give everyone a tax cut last year.
Symbolic: GOP returns styrofoam to House cafeteria
American conservatism has always placed a high premium on the past, but it was not until its victories in the last election that the Republican party made good on its promise to actually reverse the flow of time. In the spirit of fiscal responsibility fuck you, the GOP has reintroduced Styrofoam to the House cafeteria. In theory, this measure will save the American taxpayer half a million dollars per year.*
That it also undoes one of Nancy Pelosi’s pet projects and magically transports all diners to the year Back To the Future came out is just a fun bonus. The more you think about it, the more the switch back to Styrofoam is an incredibly versatile signifier. I submit that the Styrofoam cup is the best symbol yet for the Republican party: it’s white, it seemed like a great idea in the eighties, it’s made of oil, and even though you’re done with it, it’s going to be around for 500 years.
I know, right?
As you may have noticed, Combat! blog existed last week only in a deathlike, remembered state. First of all, thank you to everyone who wrote and urged me to post some blog entries, for Chrissake. Your support makes me feel like people actually read and care about Combat! blog, and also like I could use service outages as an attention-getting device in the future. Here’s what happened: starting Monday, every time I tried to log in I was redirected to a page that explained I did not have sufficient permissions to view that page. This Kafkaesque fuckaround A) persisted all week and B) was apparently due to some corruption in some root directory that I did not possess the WordPress kung fu to fix, and I read codecs. WordPress codecs and their associated support forums are excruciating, by the way. I was going to spend this afternoon building a temporary version of the site with iWeb—which is what we used to do back when we had three readers and iWeb’s notorious Google search limitations were not a major concern—and redirecting our URL to that until I could implement a WordPress architectural fix, but as of an hour ago my login problems are magically gone.
Friday links! Reification of cultures edition

Now that I think about it, Skynrd should probably play more Tea Party rallies. Photo courtesy of moronswithsigns.blogspot.com .
A useful concept from the social theory of revolutions is reification: the degree to which a given system or way of thinking has manifested itself in concrete forms and therefore become resistant to change. The idea of the heritability of property, for example, is highly reified—in probate law, in the use of pratronymics as family names, in the strong association between ethnicity and land. Reification doesn’t just affect socioeconomic systems or broad mores; it can also take hold in cultures, codifying ideologies and systems of behavior so that it becomes difficult for people to leave or join a given culture. In politics, this phenomenon is called 2008 To Present. Since the election of President Obama—an occasion of joy for much of the country and of bitter resentment for a voluble minority—the lines between different cultures and different political affiliations have become increasingly A) sharp and B) congruent. One can predict with great precision what a Republican will think about a given policy proposal, and with great accuracy who will agree with him. The beautiful horror of cultural reification, like watching a lava flow over a rain forest and then set up, is that it has much more power than, say, logical argument. It’s Friday, and today’s link roundup features multiple instances of reification proving more powerful than argument, information, sense or the pleas of elementary schoolchildren. Won’t you abandon persuasive discourse with me?
Army officer ordered to use “psy-ops” on visiting congressmen
First of all, lest you misjudge how it feels to have psy-ops used on you, the p is silent. According to this article in an evidently self-impressed Rolling Stone, Lieutenant General William Caldwell ordered members of his Information Operations unit to use psychological manipulation techniques on senators and congressmen visiting Camp Eggers*
in Kabul. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Holmes claims that Caldwell told his unit to gather background information on John McCain, Al Franken, Armed Services Committee chair Carl Levin and other legislators, in order to use psy-ops tactics to convince them to devote more money and troops to the Afghan War. “How do we get these guys to give us more people?” Caldwell demanded. “What do I have to plant inside their heads?” As one might expect, the Army is prohibited from using propaganda and/or psychological warfare techniques on US citizens—much less members of Congress—and this shit is totally illegal. Also, it doesn’t take a military background check to figure out what will break John McCain’s psyche. Tiger cage: no; woman with nice jawline: yes.




