Fascism is sexier than communism

Lara Logan, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for CBS News, held forth at some length on the Charlie Rose show on Tuesday night. And in doing so, she deprived me of sleep. Her starry-eyed warmonger vibe was terribly disturbing, her bloodthirsty ranting and raving reminding me of General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove.

Dear God, I thought, I hope nobody else is watching this.

We must, she insisted, finish this war. More troops! (When pressed, she said at least 40,000.) She was adamant that we must track the terrorists into Pakistan and kill them all.

Logan clearly relishes repeating the word "kill"; she didn't use any of the new and improved euphemisms for warfare. I almost expected her to lick her lips in anticipation. I have rarely seen someone so exultant at the prospect of more war, of expanded war. And I realize, she startled me because she is a woman and I have seen advanced war-fever in women so very rarely.

Logan is beautiful, blond and South African. When she speaks of terrorist attacks on convoys, her eyes sparkle with vengeance. She reminds me of the character of Jane in VS Naipaul's novel Guerrillas, a beautiful British woman who also enjoyed being where the action is:

She was without consistency or even without coherence. She knew only what she was and what she had been born to; to this knowledge she was tethered; it was her stability, enabling her to adventure in security. Adventuring, she was indifferent, perhaps blind, to the contradiction between what she said and what she was so secure of being; and this indifference or blindness, this absence of the sense of the absurd, was part of her unassailability.

And this is what is so thoroughly hypnotic about Lara Logan: unassailability. Like Robert Duvall waving away the pesky incoming enemy fire in Apocalypse Now, one intuitively knows Logan will emerge intact, eyes gleaming, from any war she covers... possibly holding some executed terrorist's head aloft, as Judith brandished the head of Holofernes.

On some level, I am stunned that such an openly pro-war political partisan is considered an objective journalist. (If anyone still believes in "journalistic objectivity"--Lara will talk you right out of it.) Then again, it is entirely logical that this is the type of person who wants to charge right into the thick of it. Do we expect anti-war journalists to choose the wartime beat? (Ed Bradley was an exception, may his soul rest in peace.)

Undoubtedly, Lara Logan is a gal who loves her work.

Investigating, I see that Logan is married to a federal defense contractor from Texas whom she met in Iraq. (Well of course she is.) But then I find a series of cool stories on HuffPo about her. Our Lara is a homewrecker! The defense contractor already belonged to someone else when she met him. (And I can tell you right now, speaking of guided missiles, that dude didn't know what hit him.)

Keep your eye on her. She is our very own Tokyo Rose, threatening Al-Qaeda over the airwaves, pumping up the reputation of the US military and encouraging the never-ending storm of war-death to continue. She is a collaborator with the war, and takes a proprietary interest. She unabashedly loves it.

I expect her to enter politics. I predict she will go very far.




~*~

My wonderful blog post title comes courtesy of the late Susan Sontag.

Stay out the way of the southern thing

Left: Kudzu (from The Fruit Fly)

I am from a southern mother, and like Rita Mae Brown, I repatriated as an adult. Moving south was like coming home, only it wasn't.


Being an ethnically-displaced person is strange and oddly transcendent. I think of VS Naipaul, an Indian and Hindu, born in Trinidad. No one else makes India more real to me. He loves India as an insider and outsider, and in his writing, he shapes-shifts, back and forth, inside and out.

I never felt like a yankee. My family was looked down on and called hillbillies, but I had never actually lived in the "hills" at all; I grew up in the city. To me, "hillbilly" meant that my family played in a country-and-western band, and we ate certain foods like cornbread and pinto beans. My grandfather said "shit fire!" which shocked my young yankee schoolmates--one of them asked: what is 'shit fire'? (I had to admit I didn't know, but it was reserved for situations that nowadays would call for a response like "Fuck me!") So I was never a proper yankee, but when I first got here, could not in any way feel like a southerner either. I remember being in tears when I couldn't understand about half of my neighbors, so deep were their accents.

After over 20 years of marriage into a deeply-southern family, I feel that I finally belong.

I can still remember when I first saw kudzu, covering everything like a thick, lush, wavy, symmetrical, emerald-green blanket. Upon my arrival in Columbia, SC, I even took photos of it. I have photos of kudzu snaking up telephone poles and electrical wires; enveloping houses, abandoned gas stations and shotgun shacks, turning everything beautiful, as snow does. Transforming the whole world into green leaves. But there are snakes and other varmints in there. Kudzu chokes other plants and kills them. Southerners cuss the kudzu, and here I was, in my neo-southern repatriated ignorance, wanting to plant more.

Kudzu hides things, as southerners tend to hide things. How fitting that it has traditionally been used in herbal medicine as an alcoholism remedy and to detoxify drug addicts; conditions that thrive on what is hidden.

Some people go to war with the kudzu: goddamn shit is gettin outta my yard if it's the last thing I do! And other people resign themselves to it: you can't kill it. Surrender Dorothy! As an herbalist, I am dedicated to understanding the kudzu, but I daresay, it is the way we once tried to "understand" the Soviets. Shades of "we will bury you!" come to mind. Does the kudzu want to co-exist? Or will it take over?

It's indestructible, and will survive the nuclear war, they tell me, just like cockroaches. Probably.

But I can't help it: I love survivors. Particularly southern ones.