Maliki resigns

The New Neo Posted on by

Maliki’s decision to step aside paves the way for the ascent of Haider al-Abadi, the U.S.-favored candidate attempting to form a new government…

In a statement earlier Thursday from Martha’s Vineyard, where he is on vacation, Obama said he spoke to Abadi “a few days ago,” and received assurances that the new government would be inclusive.

“We are modestly hopeful that the Iraqi government situation is moving the right direction,” Obama said.

My hopes are extremely modest at this point, as well.

Apparently the impetus for Maliki stepping down was that he lost the support of Sistani, the influential Shi’ite cleric:

It was Sistani’s letter a few days ago demanding a new prime minister that sunk him, apparently. Without a Shiite base of support, he had nothing.

So, what will Obama do now? He’s claiming all’s well on the mountain, but the UN begs to differ.

You’d think Maliki’s departure might be an opportunity for Obama to go after ISIS with more vigor, since he cited Maliki’s non-inclusiveness as a stumbling block. I have tremendous doubts that Obama will go in that direction, though.

As for Maliki, he is more fortunate than Diem, at least so far.

[ADDENDUM: More here.]

Being depressed

The New Neo Posted on by

The suicide of Robin Williams has started a lengthy discussion of depression, with those who’ve suffered from it trying to describe its depths, and why depression could drive a man like Williams to do what he did.

Depression is an inherently depressing topic, of course. It’s also one of those things that most people have had some experience with, or at least think they do. After all, almost everyone has been sad.

But that’s misleading. Regular, garden-variety depression is to major suicidal depression as a hangnail is to ebola. And yet, it has superficial resemblances that lead people suffering from the regular type to think they understand the more serious type. But the difference is not just a difference in degree, it’s a difference in kind.

One of the best descriptions of extreme depression I’ve ever seen is a cartoon (yes, a cartoon; humorists are particularly subject to depression) written by internet superstar Allie Brosh. Brosh had everything going for her: young, attractive, funny, talented, immensely successful at something she’d long dreamed of doing, surrounded by a loving family and boyfriend. And yet severe depression claimed her in its potentially deadly grip, and for a long time would not let her go.

Not all intense depressions are alike, so Brosh’s may not describe them all. But it took a not-uncommon trajectory. What was uncommon was her skill at describing it. Intense self-loathing was followed by the absence of feeling, which Brosh perceived as intensely unpleasant and almost unendurable. Although that itself is a feeling of sorts, it is a feeling caused by the lack of feeling; paradoxical but true. Lack of feeling can be experienced as suffering of an intense kind, ennui and deadness and lack of interest in everything.

People tried to talk Brosh out of it, which of course did not work and cannot work:

And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something ”” it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing. You can’t fill it up. You can’t cover it. It’s just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.

What stopped Brosh from killing herself when she starting thinking that death might be a really really good idea? She says nothing mattered, but it turns out that the feelings of her loved ones still somehow mattered to her. So something must have been left in the wastage of her life:

I somehow managed to convince myself that everything was still under my control right up until I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn’t feel obligated to keep existing.

Something loved her—some people, that is, and her dog (Brosh is very into dogs and some of her best cartoons are about them).

It was incredibly hard for her to find the will and strength to keep living. And yet she did:

When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should clarify that I don’t mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and ”” far in the distance ”” I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I’d be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I’d have to turn around and walk back the other way.

The love she received from others was a burden. But it was a burden she shouldered despite her great reluctance to live and her conviction that she could not get better:

The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don’t like can be overwhelming. And the longer it takes to feel different, the more it starts to seem like everything might actually be hopeless bullshit.

When feelings finally returned, they were not pleasant ones, either:

I had not been able to care for a very long time, and when I finally started being able to care about things again, I HATED them. But hatred is technically a feeling, and my brain latched onto it like a child learning a new word.

That was followed by a turning point—which was so silly it’s hard to describe. You’ll just have to read it. Suffice to say that raucous and sustained laughter came from nowhere for a bizarrely trivial reason. For Brosh, that near-hyterical laughter was the beginning of the glimmer of the possibility that her depression wouldn’t last forever.

The police and the citizen

The New Neo Posted on by

I grew up in an area of New York that wasn’t especially high-crime, and my dealings with police tended to be limited to traffic stops.

And yet I feared them because they had the power and I did not. And that was long, long before the current “militarization” of the police began.

In general, I was taught that police were—and personally experienced them as—fair and polite (remember, this was a long long time ago). But that didn’t change my feeling of apprehension, because I knew that if push came to shove they would win and I would lose. That was, and is, a given.

So one of the things I was told, or somehow gleaned, was this: you don’t mouth off to police. You don’t defy them. You don’t even giggle in their presence, as I once did when a highway patrolman in Arizona stopped my then-husband for wobbling outside the lanes on a highway and my husband’s excuse was that he’d been eating potato chips, and the cop said “Don’t eat potato chips and drive.” I thought that was funny, but the officer didn’t.

Of course, I’m not a man. I don’t have to prove I’m not a wimp; in some ways I am a wimp. But it was simply understood when I was growing up that, whether you were a man or a woman, picking a fight with a policeman was asking for trouble because it would be your word against his and that he (it was always a “he” in those days) held almost all the cards.

I also grew up knowing and having sympathy with the fact that police ran great risks, or at least faced the potential of great risks, every day. My father, who was a lawyer, told me when I was very young that police considered domestic calls one of their most dangerous tasks because they were most likely to be assaulted or even killed when answering them. That made a deep impression on me because it was to my mind so unexpected; once I was grown up I found it made sense.

So I always saw the whole thing as a balancing act where the citizen had to be wary of police and the police were understandably wary of citizens. However, in a pinch you could usually call on the police to help you. But still, when a police officer stops me, even though I’m a white woman of a certain age and don’t look like a threat to anyone, I’m very nervous, and I’m careful to remain scrupulously polite and to keep my hands in the officer’s sight and not make any sudden movements.

So this problem is not new, although things have only escalated as the public has become more defiant and violent and the police have militarized. I’m not sure how it could be corrected except for the recording of every encounter with police, which could act as a check on both sides.

Marines on the mountain?

The New Neo Posted on by

I already have extremely high regard for the Marines and special forces. But if this report is true, my regard for them goes up a slight notch, if such a thing be possible:

Their mission: Find a way to get tens of thousands of weak, dehydrated, and dying people off a mountaintop (where the temperature’s well over 100 degrees, by the way) when there are well-armed barbarians waiting below. One option is to lead them down the mountain on foot and into Kurdistan by land, but that’s tricky. ISIS is down there, of course, and the road south to Kurdish territory would take them through territory held by the jihadis. Who’s going to do the fighting if U.S. “combat troops” aren’t available and there aren’t enough Peshmerga to shoulder the load?

It is like a horror movie or an action movie, or some combination of the two. But this is real life.

How to take a selfie

The New Neo Posted on by

Some tips on taking a selfie, especially in a bikini. The main one seems to be to suck in your gut.

Suck in your gut—who would have thunk it?

But alas, there’s a limit to how much a suck can do. So another helpful hint is to be very skinny to begin with.

Or, just don’t take selfies. I came up with that one all by myself.

Maureen Dowd, gameshow aficionado

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the 80s game show “Chain Reaction”?

I do. I liked it because you had to be a bit clever to play, and it was about words. In case you don’t remember, this might refresh your memory:

Maureen Dowd must be nostalgic for the 80s, because in her latest column she shows she knows how to play the game, if a bit awkwardly. She segues (although not seamlessly) from name-dropping based on a single encounter where she interviewed Robin Williams and he riffed on the topic of breasts, to a single remark Dowd made during that interview about journalist Michael Kelly, to a mention of the war in Iraq (where Kelly died), to a trashing of Hillary Clinton for her early support of that war, all in a few sentences:

As our interview ended, I was telling [Williams] about my friend Michael Kelly’s idea for a 1-900 number, not one to call Asian beauties or Swedish babes, but where you’d have an amorous chat with a repressed Irish woman. Williams delightedly riffed on the caricature, playing the role of an older Irish woman answering the sex line in a brusque brogue, ordering a horny caller to go to the devil with his impure thoughts and disgusting desire.

I couldn’t wait to play the tape for Kelly, who doubled over in laughter.

So when I think of Williams, I think of Kelly. And when I think of Kelly, I think of Hillary, because Michael was the first American reporter to die in the Iraq invasion, and Hillary Clinton was one of the 29 Democratic senators who voted to authorize that baloney war.

Dowd can’t stand either Hillary or Bill Clinton, and this has been true for decades. So it’s no surprise that a column of Dowd’s that starts as a tribute to Williams (or at least appears to start as a tribute to Williams) has as its secret end goal a trashing of Hillary. No matter that Clinton was only one of twenty-nine Democratic senators who voted for the war, among them current vice president (and possible Hillary primary opponent) Joe Biden, as well as current Hillary successor John Kerry, and current Majority Leader Harry Reid. And no matter that Dowd’s friend Michael Kelly, although not a senator, was a major booster of the Iraq War.

It’s a testament to how overwhelming the argument for the Iraq War was at the time. But that doesn’t fit the Dowd narrative.

Little is known…

The New Neo Posted on by

…about the Michael Brown shooting, except that a young and unarmed black man is dead, shot by a policeman, and riots have been going on in response.

Was it a case of unjustified police violence, complicated by racism? Or of an officer understandably in fear for his life, defending himself? Why were the young men stopped in the first place? What happened next? Was there a scuffle instigated by one of the young men, in which he tried to get the officer’s gun? Or was that a fiction? What was Brown’s role in the whole thing?

The police tell one story, Brown’s surviving friends another. It’s not clear where the witnesses were, and what they were in a position to see (the shooting happened in broad daylight).

This is a case in which a videotape might have been a wonderful thing to have. In some jurisdictions, such recordings are routine. They could tend to prevent hotheaded responses on both sides, but there apparently was no tape of what happened in Ferguson. Meanwhile, the accusations fly and the incident will be exploited by the usual suspects.

Say hi to the high-low dress

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess I’m out of touch with fashion, because somehow I missed the advent (or is it the return?) of the high-low dress.

Also known as the mullet. Ouch.

I was at a wedding recently, and that’s where I noticed its prevalence. Among the many young women there, a large percentage sported the leg-framing style.

I don’t particularly care for it; it looks like the wearer couldn’t make up her mind, or got her garment caught in a door and half of it tore off. But hey, no one’s asking me.

Plain and elegant (my preference):

hilow1

Or froufrou:

hilow2

The latter reminds me of the can-can, back when showing a little leg meant something:

can-can

Hillary Clinton: throwing Obama under the bus

The New Neo Posted on by

Hillary Clinton’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg features so much criticism of Obama’s foreign policy that the editors of the Weekly Standard have decided to feature lengthy quotes of Hillary’s in an editorial of theirs which is signed, “Hillary Rodham Clinton, for the editors.”

A person could be forgiven for thinking that Clinton was Obama’s opponent during his first term, rather than the most prominent instrument of that foreign policy.

Curious, isn’t it? It would be nice to get Clinton to answer this question: if his policy was so bad, why didn’t you resign earlier with a public statement of how you disagreed and why, when it might have made a difference? How do you explain the depth of your own betrayal and hypocrisy?

Hillary being Hillary, she’d have various lines of spin with which to answer. “Obama’s policies only got really bad after I left.” “I did protest and differ; just more privately” (which she more or less says in the Goldberg interview).

The truth is probably more like this: “I found it expedient to play along with Obama while his reputation was riding high, and now that it’s not—and I want to be his successor—I find the better part of valor is to differentiate myself from him and pretend I had little to do with it. And I trust voters will buy it, because they have the attention span and reasoning power of fleas.”

Actually, I think it most likely true that Hillary did disagree with Obama’s policy in several respects. That makes it even more despicably hypocritical that she played along with it as his eager handmaiden.