Thursday, June 23, 2016
Thursday, June 09, 2016
Bernadette 1
Bernadette rides next to me in the Fairmont, not speaking. We're traveling at speed along the freeway, and she’s in a rare contemplative mood. She often jabbers away like a relentless engine about different things—real estate values, bus schedules, the foolishness of young women she knows—mostly things I’ve heard many times, but we’ve been apart for two weeks and she's quiet now. I'm content that she doesn’t fill the humming ambience with her staccato rhythms. She just sits there, potato-face forward, harboring her private thoughts as I harbor mine. Miles follow silent miles as we sail along in separate realms through the overripe green of August. It seems good to have her back. I’m cautiously optimistic.
“What are those flowers?” she asks suddenly, piercing the demilitarized zone between us, finding her range. We're passing through lowland meadows where patches of purple wildflowers stand out vividly against the leafy background of trees and grasses. “Loose Strife,” I say with a foreboding that doesn’t seem justified since she’s only asking about flowers, and anyway I’m pleasantly elated that I knew the answer—shocked, actually.
But the ping-pong has begun, the familiar volleying that leads directly to open conflict. “Please stop the car,” she says, in full disarming simplicity. “I would like to pick some of them.” We proceed to have an absurd argument about the dangers of stopping along the highway, where non-emergency stopping is illegal in any case and even the breakdown lane is full of charging SUVs at rush hour, but she doesn't see the difficulty. “They're just wild flowers,” she says, “and you are afraid.”
So there we are, the match is over, and once again I remind myself of her many charms—her funny little ears, her nose that looks like it’s made of clay, the little spikes of hair that frame her face when she's sleeping—but we're only ten minutes from the airport and already I can feel the rings contracting around my arteries. Doctor Rasmussen explained that they become like high pressure fire hoses. At first I thought he was over-dramatizing when he told me how damaging that can be. “You could die,” he said, the tone of his voice falling an octave on the word “die.” But I followed his advice, changed my diet, even switched careers, and now I walk to the stores instead of running errands in the fusty old Fairmont. I no longer spend as many hours at the computer and live a more physical life. There isn’t much more I can do short of taking medication, which of course I’m also doing since that is what everyone does now. It’s the state of things in the medical business. Health is intangible, like happiness, so what’s needed is a product, a physical commodity, and now doctors are not much more than drug dealers who receive a fat bonus for every new prescription, every addict. I know this, yet I reach into the glove box for an Atenolol and wash it down with saliva, doubling my daily dosage and wondering if I can afford one of the newer, sexier drugs.
Sunday afternoon, we're getting ready to go out. I walk into the bedroom in my boxers and sit down on the bed to cool off in front of the Vornado, making some remark about the heat, but she's apparently not listening, because she bends down and turns off the fan. Then she opens the curtains, exposing my striped underwear to eighty or ninety windows around the courtyard. We live in a diorama, like specimens in a museum. “Did you hear me?” I say, jumping up to grab my jeans from the bureau and pulling them quickly over my legs. She has three times the testosterone of the average Caucasian female, which I know with medical certainty since I’ve seen the printout of her blood analysis.
The first thing to go is the phone. I stop paying the bills, and after receiving several dire warnings from the phone company, the line goes dead. Of course it means that nobody can reach me and I find myself cut off from things, but Bernadette can't call me every few minutes from work either so some ground has been gained. Naturally she’s offended. “You don't want to help me,” she says. Eight years of helping her escape from her dangerous crook of a husband and then acquire a green card plus unlimited use of the Fairmont and dozens of repair jobs in the buildings she manages—all that might be considered helping her, but that's an old story.
These are not forgiving times. We now know the truth about history, which is that it was full of bloody and horrifying injustice, with dominant groups subjugating others based on race, sex, religion, hair color, shoe size, every imaginable difference. So now the time has come for those who have been wronged to call in the chips, to step up and correct the accounts. There has been an equalization between the sexes, for example, and maybe I'm a neanderthal since—god help me—there are aspects about the old days I long for, but it has been my experience that women are often unreasonably demanding. First they want your job, which is no great difficulty since most jobs that pay decently are torture, then they want other things and now scientists are working on procreating without sex so it's possible to imagine a world without men. And what is our response to all this? All we can do is run around smashing things like spoiled children. I'm not saying I wasn't around when the shoe was on the other foot, though I was young, and maybe I have forgotten or never knew the meaning of “normal behavior,” but it is now clear that the day will never arrive when I’ve helped Bernadette enough.
I lied. In fact the phone was not the first thing. Several years before, I had denied her physical intimacy—of any kind—and it was when she adjusted to that cozy disaffection that things started to go in a funny direction, to get out of hand, as it were, big time. I understand rationally how this occurred. I had low tolerance for guilt and wanted it to be her decision to leave, but when I flew into a rage and lugged the bed out to the street and leaned it up against a tree for the trash trucks, was that not definitive?
I don’t know, but what she did was to haul her massive sewing table into the bedroom where it took the place of the bed, and of course then her other sewing supplies and fabrics started accumulating. Before I could object, the bedroom became her work room and we started sleeping on the L-shaped couch downstairs in the living room, lying at ninety degrees to one another, with her on one leg of the L and me on the other. It's hard now to believe that I went along with this, harder to understand why we continued sleeping in that arrangement for over six years.
Bernadette specializes in garbology, and never buys anything new. She routes her daily errands through the local streets to pick up discarded items. She knows the trash schedule and goes prospecting on the days when large articles will be waiting out on the sidewalk for the trucks to pick up. Right now she's upstairs, running the big industrial sewing machine that she found down on Fourth Avenue and asked me to cart back home on a piano dolly. The machine rumbles intermittently like a snoring rhinoceros as she masterfully zips together a new outfit from cast-off clothing she found hanging on a fence. My house overflows with fancy broken shoes, short ends of fabric, rained-on self-help books and semi-functional appliances that she has gleaned from the streets. I have four sewing machines in various states of repair sitting in the upstairs hallway, three bread machines stuffed into the little galley kitchen, dozens of pots and numerous extra telephones turning up everywhere, and various other unrecognizable gadgets hiding in the corners waiting to be fixed. All the horizontal surfaces are covered with little piles of worthless treasures. My wonderful apartment, which I spent three years remodeling to accommodate all this clutter, adding two mezzanines in the high-ceilinged rooms and dozens of built-in shelves, drawers, closets, once again feels like one of those junk shops full of third-hand items. I keep telling her this is a problem, over and over, but she must have grown up in a messy house and is comfortable living this way.
“I don't have time to put things in better order,” she explains in a tired voice. I point out that she seems to have plenty of time for sewing. “That's my relaxation, Malcolm,” she replies in a rising tone, using my full name as if she were scolding a child. “I work hard all day while you sit at the computer.” She's not quite yelling, but her raucous staccato can be heard out in the courtyard, and she's got me dead to rights. The tech downturn left me jobless, and I'm now at a point where I should probably move to Bangalore where, with luck, I might earn enough to avoid dying of malaria. It isn't that I mind the handyman jobs I do now, patching holes, fixing things, but the money isn't the same.
Bernadette is obsessed with assembling her special outfits, and I must admit she looks good in them. She knows all about materials and weaves and can even create her own patterns. I have no problem with that, but she applies the same authoritative energy to everything she does, insisting on doing things her own way and criticizing everything I do, especially in the kitchen, where it seems I can't even boil water properly. She doesn’t trust the washing machine either and stands over it like a dictator, turning the dial back and forth to prevent it from following it’s own program. Almost everything she says to me is some sort of critical remark or complaint and I live in terror of what she will say next. My friend Laverna tells me this is just the way she is and I should understand and put up with it, and I do. I clearly do put up with it, but why?
I’m living with a hyperactive policewoman named Bernadette. She’s a member of an elite unit of the Homeland Guard. She gets up every morning and puts on her green uniform, hangs the strap of her impressively compact weapon over her shoulder and goes out in search of infiltrators. She’s fully indoctrinated in the Manichaean dogma of security and fires without hesitation or remorse. With several notches already on her belt, she’s in line for promotion, so there’s a new ambitious edge to her ferocity. Due to the dangers of nuclear terrorism the authorities have loosened requirements for verification, so I must watch my step or she’ll come after me.
“What are those flowers?” she asks suddenly, piercing the demilitarized zone between us, finding her range. We're passing through lowland meadows where patches of purple wildflowers stand out vividly against the leafy background of trees and grasses. “Loose Strife,” I say with a foreboding that doesn’t seem justified since she’s only asking about flowers, and anyway I’m pleasantly elated that I knew the answer—shocked, actually.
But the ping-pong has begun, the familiar volleying that leads directly to open conflict. “Please stop the car,” she says, in full disarming simplicity. “I would like to pick some of them.” We proceed to have an absurd argument about the dangers of stopping along the highway, where non-emergency stopping is illegal in any case and even the breakdown lane is full of charging SUVs at rush hour, but she doesn't see the difficulty. “They're just wild flowers,” she says, “and you are afraid.”
So there we are, the match is over, and once again I remind myself of her many charms—her funny little ears, her nose that looks like it’s made of clay, the little spikes of hair that frame her face when she's sleeping—but we're only ten minutes from the airport and already I can feel the rings contracting around my arteries. Doctor Rasmussen explained that they become like high pressure fire hoses. At first I thought he was over-dramatizing when he told me how damaging that can be. “You could die,” he said, the tone of his voice falling an octave on the word “die.” But I followed his advice, changed my diet, even switched careers, and now I walk to the stores instead of running errands in the fusty old Fairmont. I no longer spend as many hours at the computer and live a more physical life. There isn’t much more I can do short of taking medication, which of course I’m also doing since that is what everyone does now. It’s the state of things in the medical business. Health is intangible, like happiness, so what’s needed is a product, a physical commodity, and now doctors are not much more than drug dealers who receive a fat bonus for every new prescription, every addict. I know this, yet I reach into the glove box for an Atenolol and wash it down with saliva, doubling my daily dosage and wondering if I can afford one of the newer, sexier drugs.
Sunday afternoon, we're getting ready to go out. I walk into the bedroom in my boxers and sit down on the bed to cool off in front of the Vornado, making some remark about the heat, but she's apparently not listening, because she bends down and turns off the fan. Then she opens the curtains, exposing my striped underwear to eighty or ninety windows around the courtyard. We live in a diorama, like specimens in a museum. “Did you hear me?” I say, jumping up to grab my jeans from the bureau and pulling them quickly over my legs. She has three times the testosterone of the average Caucasian female, which I know with medical certainty since I’ve seen the printout of her blood analysis.
The first thing to go is the phone. I stop paying the bills, and after receiving several dire warnings from the phone company, the line goes dead. Of course it means that nobody can reach me and I find myself cut off from things, but Bernadette can't call me every few minutes from work either so some ground has been gained. Naturally she’s offended. “You don't want to help me,” she says. Eight years of helping her escape from her dangerous crook of a husband and then acquire a green card plus unlimited use of the Fairmont and dozens of repair jobs in the buildings she manages—all that might be considered helping her, but that's an old story.
These are not forgiving times. We now know the truth about history, which is that it was full of bloody and horrifying injustice, with dominant groups subjugating others based on race, sex, religion, hair color, shoe size, every imaginable difference. So now the time has come for those who have been wronged to call in the chips, to step up and correct the accounts. There has been an equalization between the sexes, for example, and maybe I'm a neanderthal since—god help me—there are aspects about the old days I long for, but it has been my experience that women are often unreasonably demanding. First they want your job, which is no great difficulty since most jobs that pay decently are torture, then they want other things and now scientists are working on procreating without sex so it's possible to imagine a world without men. And what is our response to all this? All we can do is run around smashing things like spoiled children. I'm not saying I wasn't around when the shoe was on the other foot, though I was young, and maybe I have forgotten or never knew the meaning of “normal behavior,” but it is now clear that the day will never arrive when I’ve helped Bernadette enough.
I lied. In fact the phone was not the first thing. Several years before, I had denied her physical intimacy—of any kind—and it was when she adjusted to that cozy disaffection that things started to go in a funny direction, to get out of hand, as it were, big time. I understand rationally how this occurred. I had low tolerance for guilt and wanted it to be her decision to leave, but when I flew into a rage and lugged the bed out to the street and leaned it up against a tree for the trash trucks, was that not definitive?
I don’t know, but what she did was to haul her massive sewing table into the bedroom where it took the place of the bed, and of course then her other sewing supplies and fabrics started accumulating. Before I could object, the bedroom became her work room and we started sleeping on the L-shaped couch downstairs in the living room, lying at ninety degrees to one another, with her on one leg of the L and me on the other. It's hard now to believe that I went along with this, harder to understand why we continued sleeping in that arrangement for over six years.
Bernadette specializes in garbology, and never buys anything new. She routes her daily errands through the local streets to pick up discarded items. She knows the trash schedule and goes prospecting on the days when large articles will be waiting out on the sidewalk for the trucks to pick up. Right now she's upstairs, running the big industrial sewing machine that she found down on Fourth Avenue and asked me to cart back home on a piano dolly. The machine rumbles intermittently like a snoring rhinoceros as she masterfully zips together a new outfit from cast-off clothing she found hanging on a fence. My house overflows with fancy broken shoes, short ends of fabric, rained-on self-help books and semi-functional appliances that she has gleaned from the streets. I have four sewing machines in various states of repair sitting in the upstairs hallway, three bread machines stuffed into the little galley kitchen, dozens of pots and numerous extra telephones turning up everywhere, and various other unrecognizable gadgets hiding in the corners waiting to be fixed. All the horizontal surfaces are covered with little piles of worthless treasures. My wonderful apartment, which I spent three years remodeling to accommodate all this clutter, adding two mezzanines in the high-ceilinged rooms and dozens of built-in shelves, drawers, closets, once again feels like one of those junk shops full of third-hand items. I keep telling her this is a problem, over and over, but she must have grown up in a messy house and is comfortable living this way.
“I don't have time to put things in better order,” she explains in a tired voice. I point out that she seems to have plenty of time for sewing. “That's my relaxation, Malcolm,” she replies in a rising tone, using my full name as if she were scolding a child. “I work hard all day while you sit at the computer.” She's not quite yelling, but her raucous staccato can be heard out in the courtyard, and she's got me dead to rights. The tech downturn left me jobless, and I'm now at a point where I should probably move to Bangalore where, with luck, I might earn enough to avoid dying of malaria. It isn't that I mind the handyman jobs I do now, patching holes, fixing things, but the money isn't the same.
Bernadette is obsessed with assembling her special outfits, and I must admit she looks good in them. She knows all about materials and weaves and can even create her own patterns. I have no problem with that, but she applies the same authoritative energy to everything she does, insisting on doing things her own way and criticizing everything I do, especially in the kitchen, where it seems I can't even boil water properly. She doesn’t trust the washing machine either and stands over it like a dictator, turning the dial back and forth to prevent it from following it’s own program. Almost everything she says to me is some sort of critical remark or complaint and I live in terror of what she will say next. My friend Laverna tells me this is just the way she is and I should understand and put up with it, and I do. I clearly do put up with it, but why?
I’m living with a hyperactive policewoman named Bernadette. She’s a member of an elite unit of the Homeland Guard. She gets up every morning and puts on her green uniform, hangs the strap of her impressively compact weapon over her shoulder and goes out in search of infiltrators. She’s fully indoctrinated in the Manichaean dogma of security and fires without hesitation or remorse. With several notches already on her belt, she’s in line for promotion, so there’s a new ambitious edge to her ferocity. Due to the dangers of nuclear terrorism the authorities have loosened requirements for verification, so I must watch my step or she’ll come after me.
Agency Sells Shaved Apes as Human Babies
I question the value of all this exercise of language when everyone else is yelling equally loudly. We are all in denial about the terrible things that are carried out daily in our name, such as the drones that are right now circling above watching your every move and sending information about your entertainment choices and refrigerator contents to violent children who sit in front of high resolution screens waiting for you to reveal your role in a terrorist organization. Their judgement is informed by behavior analysis systems and the certainty that all things are resolved by an elderly white man with a long flowing beard who sits on a golden throne.
The drone program that Obama has augmented so drastically beyond what now looks in comparison like Bush's relative restraint is a shocking national disgrace. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be diminished when and if Hillary inherits the title of Commander in Chief. Both President Obama and future potential President Clinton are subject to the same pressure to prove that they're one of the boys.
Bernie Sanders would shut it down.
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The drone program that Obama has augmented so drastically beyond what now looks in comparison like Bush's relative restraint is a shocking national disgrace. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be diminished when and if Hillary inherits the title of Commander in Chief. Both President Obama and future potential President Clinton are subject to the same pressure to prove that they're one of the boys.
Bernie Sanders would shut it down.
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*
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*
Wednesday, June 08, 2016
Letter to Giulietta Masina as Cabiria
Your misery out along the Ostia Road is unrelieved yet you remain hopeful, until your boyfriend throws you into the Tiber to steal your purse, not bothering to stay and watch as you drown. After that moment of extremity, your life is no longer livable. You take small solace in the company of a scruffy chicken, whose feathers you stroke with the consoling affection nobody will offer you, while deep in the valley behind a train rolls smoothly along its way to the happiness of others.
You are so desperately unhappy that you are driven to look for something larger and more genuinely valuable than anything you've ever known, something that will sustain you through life's travails and allow you to enjoy living again. Your desperate search leads you to a fresh discovery of the low-hanging fruit of glamour and celebrity that was as inescapable in the Italy of 1957 as it is in the America of 2015.
No wonder that you conclude that the elusive element that gives life the peculiar value you long for is to be found in the glamorous world of money and class. What choice do you have but to believe in the authoritative promise of Lazardi’s American convertible and the palatial labyrinth of his house? Dogs bark as you enter his earthly paradise and he later seems to favor you as he sits on the edge of his bed in slippers and smoking jacket, but then his bombshell paramour arrives unexpectedly in the wee hours and you end up hiding in the bathroom, forced to escape like the low-class prostitute you're afraid you'll always be.
After the collapse of the illusion of wealth and privilege, what remains is religion, so you join a pilgrimage to the holy shrine, where bells of heavenly promise toll unseen through loud-speakers hidden high in the steeple. You wait patiently for your turn at redemption, your heart full of earnest and holy faith, only to watch in dismay as a cripple throws down his crutches to fall on his face in the dirt and the crowd of anxious supplicants erupts in aggravated rebellion, their hysterical pleas for cures unsatisfied, while peddlers shamelessly hawk religious gee-gaws.
Finally, the cycle of desperation comes around once again to the irresistible possibility that love is the answer. Having sold your little concrete house and everything you own, you walk with the miraculous Oscar through the trees toward the promised land of love and family, but you are moving unavoidably towards the river, and the trees pass by like mile markers on the Via Dolorosa, each tree a discrete increment toward the ultimate realization that love is another illusion, created by a seedy sideshow hypnotist.
You arrive to stand once again on the precipice where your life has no value, begging Oscar to push you in just as your former boyfriend had done. Oscar takes your meager life savings and his cowardly exit leaves you in terminal misery, inconsolable and ready to throw yourself into the water below, but then the faint sound of an accordion arouses your curiosity and last remnant of hope.
Wandering miserably and with great reluctance back toward the road of life, you discover a group of mourners walking slowly in acknowledgement of life’s sadness and distress and the reality of death. A young boy wordlessly invites you to join the procession, and your smile as you fall in beside him is brighter than seems possible for anyone in the world let alone for you, who were desperately suicidal only moments before. Happiness doesn't require money, fame, celebrity, religion or love. It exists in spite of all those things in the way you choose to relate to the world.
You are so desperately unhappy that you are driven to look for something larger and more genuinely valuable than anything you've ever known, something that will sustain you through life's travails and allow you to enjoy living again. Your desperate search leads you to a fresh discovery of the low-hanging fruit of glamour and celebrity that was as inescapable in the Italy of 1957 as it is in the America of 2015.
No wonder that you conclude that the elusive element that gives life the peculiar value you long for is to be found in the glamorous world of money and class. What choice do you have but to believe in the authoritative promise of Lazardi’s American convertible and the palatial labyrinth of his house? Dogs bark as you enter his earthly paradise and he later seems to favor you as he sits on the edge of his bed in slippers and smoking jacket, but then his bombshell paramour arrives unexpectedly in the wee hours and you end up hiding in the bathroom, forced to escape like the low-class prostitute you're afraid you'll always be.
After the collapse of the illusion of wealth and privilege, what remains is religion, so you join a pilgrimage to the holy shrine, where bells of heavenly promise toll unseen through loud-speakers hidden high in the steeple. You wait patiently for your turn at redemption, your heart full of earnest and holy faith, only to watch in dismay as a cripple throws down his crutches to fall on his face in the dirt and the crowd of anxious supplicants erupts in aggravated rebellion, their hysterical pleas for cures unsatisfied, while peddlers shamelessly hawk religious gee-gaws.
Finally, the cycle of desperation comes around once again to the irresistible possibility that love is the answer. Having sold your little concrete house and everything you own, you walk with the miraculous Oscar through the trees toward the promised land of love and family, but you are moving unavoidably towards the river, and the trees pass by like mile markers on the Via Dolorosa, each tree a discrete increment toward the ultimate realization that love is another illusion, created by a seedy sideshow hypnotist.
You arrive to stand once again on the precipice where your life has no value, begging Oscar to push you in just as your former boyfriend had done. Oscar takes your meager life savings and his cowardly exit leaves you in terminal misery, inconsolable and ready to throw yourself into the water below, but then the faint sound of an accordion arouses your curiosity and last remnant of hope.
Wandering miserably and with great reluctance back toward the road of life, you discover a group of mourners walking slowly in acknowledgement of life’s sadness and distress and the reality of death. A young boy wordlessly invites you to join the procession, and your smile as you fall in beside him is brighter than seems possible for anyone in the world let alone for you, who were desperately suicidal only moments before. Happiness doesn't require money, fame, celebrity, religion or love. It exists in spite of all those things in the way you choose to relate to the world.
Giulietta Masina in the role of Cabiria in Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria
Science hotline review (gray-scale version)
In the beginning there was this
dog that barked & did not bark. (Or
maybe it was a cat?) Some number
of years later (I forget), a tiny
object (in Michigan?), a million
times smaller than the width of an
eyelash, was observed doing the
mashed-potato with another small
item somewhere really far away,
like Osaka, or maybe it was Utah.
So like, now it turns out that the
expansion of the universe, Doppler-
gangered to form the bedrock of
latter-day cosmology, is, itself,
actually, like, accelerating?
...at which point someone way in the
back jokes that Republicans are just
Democrats in decline (or maybe it's
the other way around?) and even the
shocking dissonance of the New Music
becomes predictable before modernity
"shits the bed," leaving us with all
the same-old same-old unanswered
questions about life/death & etc.
You might wonder (adding human
dimension to the mystery) how all
this could be remotely tangential to
the price of tomatoes in Pancake Flats,
not realizing that this, too, is among
the prickly issues confronting cutting-
edge (future Nobel-laureate) researchers
in the field of Paradoxical Anomalies.
Speculation, with no further information
available, is most certainly moot, but
your call is important to us! Please
do not be dismayed. Simply allow your
curiosity to flap its stubby little wings
in the face of overwhelming immensity.
Press 1 for more options, or say the
word "macaroni" into the handset of
your telephone.
dog that barked & did not bark. (Or
maybe it was a cat?) Some number
of years later (I forget), a tiny
object (in Michigan?), a million
times smaller than the width of an
eyelash, was observed doing the
mashed-potato with another small
item somewhere really far away,
like Osaka, or maybe it was Utah.
So like, now it turns out that the
expansion of the universe, Doppler-
gangered to form the bedrock of
latter-day cosmology, is, itself,
actually, like, accelerating?
...at which point someone way in the
back jokes that Republicans are just
Democrats in decline (or maybe it's
the other way around?) and even the
shocking dissonance of the New Music
becomes predictable before modernity
"shits the bed," leaving us with all
the same-old same-old unanswered
questions about life/death & etc.
You might wonder (adding human
dimension to the mystery) how all
this could be remotely tangential to
the price of tomatoes in Pancake Flats,
not realizing that this, too, is among
the prickly issues confronting cutting-
edge (future Nobel-laureate) researchers
in the field of Paradoxical Anomalies.
Speculation, with no further information
available, is most certainly moot, but
your call is important to us! Please
do not be dismayed. Simply allow your
curiosity to flap its stubby little wings
in the face of overwhelming immensity.
Press 1 for more options, or say the
word "macaroni" into the handset of
your telephone.
Tuesday, June 07, 2016
Richard Henry Hypnagogia
Two Years Before the Mast, a memoir about a period of Richard Henry Dana's boyhood that was spent aboard a ship, is an extraordinary piece of work. A striking aspect of that memoir is the rhythm of the language in which it was written and the effect it can have on the reader.
I haven't read Dana's book lately but I remember with some accuracy some details about my immediate surroundings when I last read it, including the approximate hour of the day, the season of the year, the feel of the room in which I was lying in bed reading it, as well as the quality of the sounds coming in through the open window behind my head. I even recall some of the things I'd been thinking about before picking up the book. It occurs to me now that the reason that my memory of these details is so vivid might be the curious condition induced in my mind by the rhythm of the writing . (It might be worth noting that the book was also written from memory.)
As one progresses through page after page of description about life at sea in the early part of the nineteenth century, the rhythm of the writing starts to take over and the sentences and paragraphs become like the periodic waves of the ocean. One might even begin to feel a rocking sensation as the boat rises and falls while it moves through the water.
I remember reading that book and falling into a kind of trance in which I stopped actually reading the words on the page and started inventing them instead. There was no perceptible threshold between the act of consciously reading the book in my hands and allowing the flow of language to emerge from a different source somewhere in my own imagination. The story just continued seamlessly on and on for paragraph after paragraph as I watched myself rewriting Richard Henry Dana's account using exactly the same kind of language in the same meter and style and every other aspect of the writing.
Now here's the weird part. That the writing might induce a hypnagogic condition in the reader is comprehensible as an experience one might have that might be reminiscent of the state of consciousness we tend to experience just before falling asleep. What was different about the state that Dana's book produced in me, however, was that I was able to observe myself in the process of having that experience as it was occurring. It was almost as if I had been split into two people, the one that had the hypnagogic experience and the other one that observed it, and the two of these characters existed and worked together in a kind of schizophrenic synchronization that I would like to be able to achieve, as it were, on my own.
Some mysterious aspects of this experience remain opaque to me, but in fact I believe this is what good writers actually do, and the discipline of writing requires that one learns how to perform such self-bifurcation. This aspect of writing might be what Artur Rimbaud was referring to when he wrote the following tiny and brilliant line,
Rober Frost said there has to be some accomplishment, and in his case such accomplishment would certainly include the use of rhyme. His poems provide a demonstration of the way in which rhyme can add a kind of punch to a poem, maybe because poetry has more in common with music than ordinary prose.
Meter, or rhythm, is obviously similar, and of course Frost uses it as effectively as he does rhyme. It is probably the way in which he is able to integrate meter and rhyme that makes his poems so striking and easy to memorize. (It's that music thing again.) So, for example:
But for me, something else about Frost's requirement for achievement is that the effort to comply with it might itself be actually helpful to the process of writing in a way that is not immediately apparent. First, it forces the writer to focus his/her conscious attention on the craft of writing to the near exclusion of all else, and now once again here comes the weird part.
One might think that such a narrow focus on the details involved in the craft of writing would necessarily be at the expense of the content and meaning of the piece one is writing, but maybe the intensity of the technical focus actually liberates a different part of the mind existing under the radar of conscious awareness to freely wander around in something akin to a hypnagogic state, which is, once again, the condition we experience immediately before falling asleep that is so very imaginative and fertile.
So here we are once again where I is another and the two of us work in unison with one unconsciously roaming around the universe and feeding thoughts and feelings and images to the other one who is wholly occupied with writing, writing, writing with an intensity of conscious control that is narrowly directed toward the bright little letters and words appearing on the page (or screen).
I think this might be actually how it works. The discipline of writing involves all sorts of technical knowledge and productive habits that include an acquired sensibility that allows bifurcation of a monolithic personality into separate entities that proceed to cooperate in releasing the flow of precisely controlled language onto the page.
That, in any case, is how I see it, though I'm not a psychologist or neurologist (nor was I an English or French major) and really have no freaking idea what I'm talking about.
I haven't read Dana's book lately but I remember with some accuracy some details about my immediate surroundings when I last read it, including the approximate hour of the day, the season of the year, the feel of the room in which I was lying in bed reading it, as well as the quality of the sounds coming in through the open window behind my head. I even recall some of the things I'd been thinking about before picking up the book. It occurs to me now that the reason that my memory of these details is so vivid might be the curious condition induced in my mind by the rhythm of the writing . (It might be worth noting that the book was also written from memory.)
As one progresses through page after page of description about life at sea in the early part of the nineteenth century, the rhythm of the writing starts to take over and the sentences and paragraphs become like the periodic waves of the ocean. One might even begin to feel a rocking sensation as the boat rises and falls while it moves through the water.
I remember reading that book and falling into a kind of trance in which I stopped actually reading the words on the page and started inventing them instead. There was no perceptible threshold between the act of consciously reading the book in my hands and allowing the flow of language to emerge from a different source somewhere in my own imagination. The story just continued seamlessly on and on for paragraph after paragraph as I watched myself rewriting Richard Henry Dana's account using exactly the same kind of language in the same meter and style and every other aspect of the writing.
Now here's the weird part. That the writing might induce a hypnagogic condition in the reader is comprehensible as an experience one might have that might be reminiscent of the state of consciousness we tend to experience just before falling asleep. What was different about the state that Dana's book produced in me, however, was that I was able to observe myself in the process of having that experience as it was occurring. It was almost as if I had been split into two people, the one that had the hypnagogic experience and the other one that observed it, and the two of these characters existed and worked together in a kind of schizophrenic synchronization that I would like to be able to achieve, as it were, on my own.
Some mysterious aspects of this experience remain opaque to me, but in fact I believe this is what good writers actually do, and the discipline of writing requires that one learns how to perform such self-bifurcation. This aspect of writing might be what Artur Rimbaud was referring to when he wrote the following tiny and brilliant line,
"Je est un autre."the direct translation of which is
"I is another."Note the change of perspective from first person to third that happens immediately after the "I." There are two people existing together in this line.
Rober Frost said there has to be some accomplishment, and in his case such accomplishment would certainly include the use of rhyme. His poems provide a demonstration of the way in which rhyme can add a kind of punch to a poem, maybe because poetry has more in common with music than ordinary prose.
Meter, or rhythm, is obviously similar, and of course Frost uses it as effectively as he does rhyme. It is probably the way in which he is able to integrate meter and rhyme that makes his poems so striking and easy to memorize. (It's that music thing again.) So, for example:
The witch who came, the withered hag,Nowadays there are categories of poetry that don't bother with such formalism, let alone things such as iambic pentameter and the difference between a sonnet and a ballad, etc. (This is not to say that such new forms are devoid of accomplishment.)
to wash the steps with pail and rag,
was once the beauty Abishag,
the picture pride of Hollywood.
too many fall from great and good
for you to doubt the likelihood.
...
But for me, something else about Frost's requirement for achievement is that the effort to comply with it might itself be actually helpful to the process of writing in a way that is not immediately apparent. First, it forces the writer to focus his/her conscious attention on the craft of writing to the near exclusion of all else, and now once again here comes the weird part.
One might think that such a narrow focus on the details involved in the craft of writing would necessarily be at the expense of the content and meaning of the piece one is writing, but maybe the intensity of the technical focus actually liberates a different part of the mind existing under the radar of conscious awareness to freely wander around in something akin to a hypnagogic state, which is, once again, the condition we experience immediately before falling asleep that is so very imaginative and fertile.
So here we are once again where I is another and the two of us work in unison with one unconsciously roaming around the universe and feeding thoughts and feelings and images to the other one who is wholly occupied with writing, writing, writing with an intensity of conscious control that is narrowly directed toward the bright little letters and words appearing on the page (or screen).
I think this might be actually how it works. The discipline of writing involves all sorts of technical knowledge and productive habits that include an acquired sensibility that allows bifurcation of a monolithic personality into separate entities that proceed to cooperate in releasing the flow of precisely controlled language onto the page.
That, in any case, is how I see it, though I'm not a psychologist or neurologist (nor was I an English or French major) and really have no freaking idea what I'm talking about.
Afterthought: Might this be an example of right-brain/left-brain cooperation and is therefore nothing out of the ordinary?
Monday, June 06, 2016
A very brief conversation with Mohamad Atta
Step right up ladies and gentlemen to HEAR the horrifying story and SEE the spectacle of a man who played an infinitesimally microscopic role in the background of the background of the dramatic events that occurred on September 11, 2001. I have an oddly ephemeral connection with those terrible events that I've never actually told anyone about because nobody would believe it since it's exactly the sort of improbable story that one would expect to hear from a garden-variety motormouth bar-room braggart in the wake of such a calamity.
As an example of the kind of thing I'm referring to, one of the claims that would not be at all surprising to hear from such irritating characters would go something like this:
I might stop right there and forget about posting this ridiculous story, but now that I've started I do at least want to get it down properly because I suspect that it might relieve me of the feather-weight burden of having kept it to myself for so long, so let's just get it over with. The absurd facts of the matter are these:
First of all, I did predict the destruction of the towers, and did so in the company of a coworker as we were walking up John Street toward the WTC one afternoon. He was already in awe of my programming prowess (which actually wasn't so hugely impressive by any professional standard), and I can only imagine how his estimation of me might have been augmented by virtue of my prediction having come true.
It's really not such a big deal, however. I worked downtown for 8 or 9 years and ever since the first attempt to bring down the towers had occurred in 1993 I hadn't been able to look up at those Monstrous Monolithic Monuments to the victorious ascendancy of Homo Economicus without wondering if I was in range if one of them fell over in my direction, and I can't have been the only one.
So that's the easy part, but then there's the other little oddity, and that's really all it is, which is that I'm quite certain that I met Mohammad Atta some weeks before the attacks.
So now I've said it, and it's out there in the world, wafting around the wilderness like a helium balloon released from the hand of a child. Everybody has their own personal 9/11 stories and this happens to be one of mine (and it's not over yet).
There I was, boys and girls, on my way to a pizza parlor during my lunch hour, crossing Fulton Street near the intersection with Gold Street when an American-made car that might have been light green in color pulled up beside me and the youngish driver leaned out to ask for directions. There was something distinctive and memorable about his face, and as I leaned toward him to listen to his query I could see three other young guys in the car and I recognized immediately that all of them were of middle-eastern origin, which struck me as unusual. It may not seem strange to anyone who knows that New York is probably the most diverse city on the planet and there are all sorts of people running around all over the city, but I was familiar with that area at that particular time on a normal workday and a car full of young Arab guys did not fit the pattern. To the contrary, it stuck out like a fluorescent elephant trudging along Broadway, but I also felt a twinge of guilt for perceiving them as being strange in some way and I instantly decided to compensate by being as obliging and friendly as possible. All of this ran through my head in an instant as I heard the driver ask in an unmistakably middle-eastern accent,
But in spite of my heightened wariness, I was still resolved to be friendly and, not being an ardent admirer of those towers, I responded in a way that might have expressed the complexity of my sensations at that moment. What I said to him in reply was this:
That's my story and I'm sticking to it. What interests me now is the thoroughness with which I remember both the sequence of events as they occurred fifteen years ago and the nuances of my thoughts and sensations throughout the entire interaction that took place in the space of a few seconds.
As for the question of whether I actually did come face to notorious face with Mohammad Atta in the weeks before 9/11, I think I did, but now that I've taken the step of writing about it I don't think it matters one way or the other, and I don't plan to revisit this topic ever again.
As an example of the kind of thing I'm referring to, one of the claims that would not be at all surprising to hear from such irritating characters would go something like this:
"I saw it comin', remember? I told you it was gonna happen that night when we were in the Blarney Stone and you tripped over that little dog and my second wife started screaming at that guy..." et cetera, blah, blah, blah...Another, and considerably rarer, such hindsight-inspired confabulation might be about something far less likely, such as having come into direct personal contact with Mohammad Atta, the apparent leader of the group that (allegedly) crashed United Airlines jets into the twin towers, such highly unlikely meeting having occurred before the tragedy, obviously, because Atta would have been multifurcated into a number of small organic elements when the light materials of the plane and it's squishier contents encountered the stainless steel structural members that formed the exoskeleton of those buildings.
I might stop right there and forget about posting this ridiculous story, but now that I've started I do at least want to get it down properly because I suspect that it might relieve me of the feather-weight burden of having kept it to myself for so long, so let's just get it over with. The absurd facts of the matter are these:
First of all, I did predict the destruction of the towers, and did so in the company of a coworker as we were walking up John Street toward the WTC one afternoon. He was already in awe of my programming prowess (which actually wasn't so hugely impressive by any professional standard), and I can only imagine how his estimation of me might have been augmented by virtue of my prediction having come true.
It's really not such a big deal, however. I worked downtown for 8 or 9 years and ever since the first attempt to bring down the towers had occurred in 1993 I hadn't been able to look up at those Monstrous Monolithic Monuments to the victorious ascendancy of Homo Economicus without wondering if I was in range if one of them fell over in my direction, and I can't have been the only one.
So that's the easy part, but then there's the other little oddity, and that's really all it is, which is that I'm quite certain that I met Mohammad Atta some weeks before the attacks.
So now I've said it, and it's out there in the world, wafting around the wilderness like a helium balloon released from the hand of a child. Everybody has their own personal 9/11 stories and this happens to be one of mine (and it's not over yet).
There I was, boys and girls, on my way to a pizza parlor during my lunch hour, crossing Fulton Street near the intersection with Gold Street when an American-made car that might have been light green in color pulled up beside me and the youngish driver leaned out to ask for directions. There was something distinctive and memorable about his face, and as I leaned toward him to listen to his query I could see three other young guys in the car and I recognized immediately that all of them were of middle-eastern origin, which struck me as unusual. It may not seem strange to anyone who knows that New York is probably the most diverse city on the planet and there are all sorts of people running around all over the city, but I was familiar with that area at that particular time on a normal workday and a car full of young Arab guys did not fit the pattern. To the contrary, it stuck out like a fluorescent elephant trudging along Broadway, but I also felt a twinge of guilt for perceiving them as being strange in some way and I instantly decided to compensate by being as obliging and friendly as possible. All of this ran through my head in an instant as I heard the driver ask in an unmistakably middle-eastern accent,
"Where is the world trade center?"At this the sense of strangeness I'd been feeling turned sinister and became something more like shocked recognition. My suspicion was at least sharply enhanced if not confirmed, the more so since any idiot or newly arrived terrorist in the downtown area could easily locate those towers by merely inclining his head upwards, and that is what I proceeded to do by glancing west over the roof of the car and up along Fulton Street. What I remember discovering, however, is that the towers were obscured behind the surrounding landscape of buildings and could not actually be seen from where I was standing, which would not have been shocking though I was still slightly surprised.
But in spite of my heightened wariness, I was still resolved to be friendly and, not being an ardent admirer of those towers, I responded in a way that might have expressed the complexity of my sensations at that moment. What I said to him in reply was this:
"Do you want to knock it down? Let me help you!"But then I pointed up Fulton Street and said something like, "It's right over there," at which point the driver thanked me and must have turned right in the direction I'd indicated though my memory of that departure is less certain than the startling fact that when I later saw a picture of Mohammad Atta some time after the day of the tragedy, I instantly recognized him as the driver of that car.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it. What interests me now is the thoroughness with which I remember both the sequence of events as they occurred fifteen years ago and the nuances of my thoughts and sensations throughout the entire interaction that took place in the space of a few seconds.
As for the question of whether I actually did come face to notorious face with Mohammad Atta in the weeks before 9/11, I think I did, but now that I've taken the step of writing about it I don't think it matters one way or the other, and I don't plan to revisit this topic ever again.
THE END
Friday, June 03, 2016
Language spoken at night
Choosing our table away from the noise, we loosen our clothes and fill our lungs like fish returned to the sea, and gradually let ourselves go—to venture across the unknown terrain of themes not talked about anywhere else. We speak of the things that matter most to the highest version of ourselves, the essence of what's left when we're no longer crushed by the weight of concerns or the force of daily coercion. Surprised by our surprise that there's anything there, where fears fall away and truth can emerge whether it's lovely or not. Unconstrained by anything at all, we speak in the language of flame.
Three phases of Quixote
Long ago, possibly as far back as fifty-nine years, we started imagining the characteristics of the people we would have become by now and the places where we would now find ourselves. There was expectation and desire behind our dreams and projections, but whatever it was or might have been, we ended up as something else and someplace other than we'd hoped and imagined.
Is it impossible to imagine we are artists whose highest creation is ourselves? Wisdom of libraries and works in museums might be nothing compared with the magnificent accomplishment of self creation, which seems a wishful observation but in fact might even be factual, the difference between fact and observation being a problem for imaginary Doctors of Philosophy, who chose extended neotony over the terror of useful employment.
We can barely manage to crawl around the course once again before arriving, exhausted and bewildered, at the festive occasion where we allow ourselves to feel lucky that life is good and worth living, even if unobserved due to the familiar obligation and the irresistible regulation of breakfast, lunch and doing the laundry.
Is it impossible to imagine we are artists whose highest creation is ourselves? Wisdom of libraries and works in museums might be nothing compared with the magnificent accomplishment of self creation, which seems a wishful observation but in fact might even be factual, the difference between fact and observation being a problem for imaginary Doctors of Philosophy, who chose extended neotony over the terror of useful employment.
We can barely manage to crawl around the course once again before arriving, exhausted and bewildered, at the festive occasion where we allow ourselves to feel lucky that life is good and worth living, even if unobserved due to the familiar obligation and the irresistible regulation of breakfast, lunch and doing the laundry.
Wednesday, June 01, 2016
A Canterbury Tale 1944 (film review)
This is a propaganda movie, pure and simple, intended to address the resistance of the British populace to the presence of over a million American soldiers on British soil in preparation for Operation Overlord, the long-awaited allied invasion of Nazi-dominated Europe. Every single scene and shot in this movie and every line of dialog is tailored to the purpose of persuading the target audience, the ruffled British citizenry, to go happily to war in defense of glorious British traditions and to accept the dirty and uncultured American soldiers (from places like Brooklyn and Oregon) as jolly-good comrades in arms. It couldn't be more blatant or obvious, and the movie is of interest only as a textbook example of British propaganda. Otherwise, it's complete drivel.
I enjoyed it enormously.
I enjoyed it enormously.
Long Live the Lady! 1987 (film review)
This is the kind of Art-house flick that people will tell you is a masterpiece even though they don't actually understand it. I don't think there's really anything there to understand and even Olmi himself didn't know what the film was about.
The only other Olmi film I've seen was "The Tree of Wooden Clogs," which seemed to me rather plodding and predictable but worth watching for the period and setting and also for the political and social insight into feudal class arrangements. I enjoy the spectacle of period pieces, but this film doesn't bother with that kind of realism. It's more of a long drawn-out fantasy nightmare with maybe some of the same elements of class distinctions transposed into the modern world. There's a thin storyline about the young protagonist who participates in a training program to become a servant at a grotesque banquet celebrating the glory of some monstrous old lady. He has flashback memories from childhood about some sort of religious imagery that seems related to present events, but all that was lost on me.
This movie is intriguing at first but then it drags on and on and never arrives at a coherent story, which becomes very aggravating about half-way through. In the end it all seems rather dated and facile and not very interesting. It's supposed to mean something deep and hidden-meaningful about society (or whatever) but it's not clear at all and by the end I was so bored I didn't care any more and was just glad it was over.
The only other Olmi film I've seen was "The Tree of Wooden Clogs," which seemed to me rather plodding and predictable but worth watching for the period and setting and also for the political and social insight into feudal class arrangements. I enjoy the spectacle of period pieces, but this film doesn't bother with that kind of realism. It's more of a long drawn-out fantasy nightmare with maybe some of the same elements of class distinctions transposed into the modern world. There's a thin storyline about the young protagonist who participates in a training program to become a servant at a grotesque banquet celebrating the glory of some monstrous old lady. He has flashback memories from childhood about some sort of religious imagery that seems related to present events, but all that was lost on me.
This movie is intriguing at first but then it drags on and on and never arrives at a coherent story, which becomes very aggravating about half-way through. In the end it all seems rather dated and facile and not very interesting. It's supposed to mean something deep and hidden-meaningful about society (or whatever) but it's not clear at all and by the end I was so bored I didn't care any more and was just glad it was over.
Le Boucher 1970 (film review)
This film is a work of such blatant charlatanry that it calls into question the meaning of the word 'auteur' as it is applied to the French new wave directors. Such is the awe with which Chabrol was and continues to be regarded (including by Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby) that he apparently felt he could get away with anything. Le Boucher is a film so utterly devoid of dramatic interest that it would be charitable to regard it as a failed experiment that attempted to push the limits of cinematic exposition to an extremity of emptiness. I might forgive Chabrol for writing and producing it if his intention was to demonstrate the boring predictability of bourgeois culture in a place like Perigord, but I'd prefer to spend an hour and a half doing my laundry.
-------------------
Reading over the above, I'm shocked by my ferocity. Was it really that bad? I like a lot of stuff from the Nouvelle Vague, but when it's bad, it's really, really bad.
Margaret 2011 (film review)
This is an extraordinary psychological story that explores the strange way in which guilt turns into anger, a process that is not necessarily straightforward and is therefore beyond the comprehension of just about everyone who hasn't been through a similar experience. Such understanding even tends to be inaccessible for those who have actually been there unless they're very perceptive or very lucky. I am deeply impressed with both the conception and the execution of this film, especially the writing, but all other aspects are beautifully done: the direction, the acting, the music, the cinematography, every element is worthy of the depth of the story. I'm tempted to call it a perfect movie. What more can I say?
My own personal history of blogging
I think I might reconsider this whole blog thing.
Fluorescent Elephant was born eleven years ago for a specific journalistic reason. There was at least a consistent topic, but the postings drifted in non-journalistic directions to other topics. For me there's nothing wrong with that except that the archive of former posts is indexed by month and year and not by category, which makes locating specific elements difficult. It's necessary to traverse the entire chronological listing of months and years to find anything, which might be ok if I had stuck to the original intention, but I didn't.
My focus broadened and become more random, too much so to continue posting to a chronologically-indexed FIFO format. I like the simplicity of Blogger but it isn't flexible enough to be converted into an arbitrarily indexed content management system. Drupal might suit me better but its complexity would distract me from writing. Many people use Wordpress now but I suspect it has the same problem. I have programming skills to use these tools but I don't want to get into PHP coding or anything similar, so I'll have to do research to find something more appropriate. Meanwhile I want to recall the original motivation for all this, which requires an overview that locates Fluorescent Elephant in the proper historical context.
The short version begins with the inauguration of the Bush administration, which resulted from the supreme court decision that awarded illegitimate victory to the Republican candidate in what can properly be regarded as a coup d'etat that denied the will of the American people. That fundamental event set in motion forces that proceeded to create the conditions that enabled the 9/11 airplane attacks, which, with malice aforethought, aligned the country behind an irredentist fantasy of American exceptionalism that a powerful group of latter-day conservatives inherited from the triumphalist contingent of the WWII generation and projected forward in a (desperate?) campaign to maintain postwar American sovereignty over a changing world.
History proceeds from one stage to another, each stage creating the conditions for what follows. To be really clear about the backstory against which Fluorescent Elephant came into being, maybe I should more precisely locate the neoconservative agenda in a historical context of its own that can't be viewed in its proper dimension without a helicopter. Always remembering the requirement for brevity, which can be challenging, let's rise up in our helicopter to see if we can achieve a windy perspective.
Starting with the gradual decline of American influence that became undeniable toward the end of the 20th century, a powerful cabal of neoconservative desperadoes needed to come up with a way to restore the American hegemony that had been established by their forefathers. Endless streams of capital and privilege were directed toward this purpose, resulting in a radical new strategy called the Project for a New American Century, which harkened back to the principal event that established a national consensus for American involvement in WWII, namely the dastardly Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was deemed that another such event was necessary to manufacture a similar consensus and gain the political power to go to war once again for the reestablishment of former American dominance. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were conjured out of the existing world situation in which the Soviet boogeyman had been vanquished and the formerly impotent Islamic militancy was being inflated as the new national enemy.
Incredible as it seems, the project succeeded. Domestic political opposition was crushed. The overall push for war overwhelmed the responsible elements in the news media, which abdicated its responsibility to present an opposing perspective and to tell us the truth about what our cynical government was really up to. It was the most irresponsible and disheartening failure of nerve I'd ever witnessed occurring on such a massive scale in the drearily spectacular landscape of American journalism.
There was an elephant in the room and it was glowing. The major news outlets submitted to the will of the executive branch out of sheer and unforgivable cowardice, just as the democratic congress also did. The only journalists out there who were reporting the actual truth were found in the blogosphere, where brilliant young writers like Josh Marshall, Eric Alterman, Kevin Drum, Jane Hamsher and several others were inventing a new kind of journalism that went straight to the heart of the matter in a stylistically warm and abbreviated format appropriate for web presentation. I was deeply excited by this new trend and threw myself into blogging with passionate intensity. Fluorescent Elephant was born.
Unfortunately, the motivation based on my political outrage tends to subside after a while, maybe because I'm also interested in other kinds of writing. A large percentage of my youth was dedicated to the absorption of the best writing I could find in the Paperback Booksmith, the first bookstore in Cambridge Massachusetts that carried only paperbacks. I was exposed to a great deal of the sort of beautiful language that is found primarily in fiction, and specialized in literature from distant parts of the world. My selections tended to be somewhat exotic, maybe because I had a predilection for the unknown. I read a lot of classic Russian material, for example, and was fascinated by the new crop of Latin American writers. I don't know why it was that I seemed to be less interested in British, French and American writing, though I digested a fair amount of that as well. Maybe I was a poor student and tended to prefer my own literary discoveries to what I was told were the Great Writers of the Western World. (I don't last long in museums either.) However that may be, an ocean of wonderful language became lodged in my head and stayed in there for a number of silent decades. Ultimately, it needed to come out, and the holy political and journalistic purity of Fluorescent Elephant became corrupted by something else.
(Probably none of this is actually true but it's the best explanation I can manage.)
Fluorescent Elephant was born eleven years ago for a specific journalistic reason. There was at least a consistent topic, but the postings drifted in non-journalistic directions to other topics. For me there's nothing wrong with that except that the archive of former posts is indexed by month and year and not by category, which makes locating specific elements difficult. It's necessary to traverse the entire chronological listing of months and years to find anything, which might be ok if I had stuck to the original intention, but I didn't.
My focus broadened and become more random, too much so to continue posting to a chronologically-indexed FIFO format. I like the simplicity of Blogger but it isn't flexible enough to be converted into an arbitrarily indexed content management system. Drupal might suit me better but its complexity would distract me from writing. Many people use Wordpress now but I suspect it has the same problem. I have programming skills to use these tools but I don't want to get into PHP coding or anything similar, so I'll have to do research to find something more appropriate. Meanwhile I want to recall the original motivation for all this, which requires an overview that locates Fluorescent Elephant in the proper historical context.
The short version begins with the inauguration of the Bush administration, which resulted from the supreme court decision that awarded illegitimate victory to the Republican candidate in what can properly be regarded as a coup d'etat that denied the will of the American people. That fundamental event set in motion forces that proceeded to create the conditions that enabled the 9/11 airplane attacks, which, with malice aforethought, aligned the country behind an irredentist fantasy of American exceptionalism that a powerful group of latter-day conservatives inherited from the triumphalist contingent of the WWII generation and projected forward in a (desperate?) campaign to maintain postwar American sovereignty over a changing world.
History proceeds from one stage to another, each stage creating the conditions for what follows. To be really clear about the backstory against which Fluorescent Elephant came into being, maybe I should more precisely locate the neoconservative agenda in a historical context of its own that can't be viewed in its proper dimension without a helicopter. Always remembering the requirement for brevity, which can be challenging, let's rise up in our helicopter to see if we can achieve a windy perspective.
Starting with the gradual decline of American influence that became undeniable toward the end of the 20th century, a powerful cabal of neoconservative desperadoes needed to come up with a way to restore the American hegemony that had been established by their forefathers. Endless streams of capital and privilege were directed toward this purpose, resulting in a radical new strategy called the Project for a New American Century, which harkened back to the principal event that established a national consensus for American involvement in WWII, namely the dastardly Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was deemed that another such event was necessary to manufacture a similar consensus and gain the political power to go to war once again for the reestablishment of former American dominance. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were conjured out of the existing world situation in which the Soviet boogeyman had been vanquished and the formerly impotent Islamic militancy was being inflated as the new national enemy.
Incredible as it seems, the project succeeded. Domestic political opposition was crushed. The overall push for war overwhelmed the responsible elements in the news media, which abdicated its responsibility to present an opposing perspective and to tell us the truth about what our cynical government was really up to. It was the most irresponsible and disheartening failure of nerve I'd ever witnessed occurring on such a massive scale in the drearily spectacular landscape of American journalism.
There was an elephant in the room and it was glowing. The major news outlets submitted to the will of the executive branch out of sheer and unforgivable cowardice, just as the democratic congress also did. The only journalists out there who were reporting the actual truth were found in the blogosphere, where brilliant young writers like Josh Marshall, Eric Alterman, Kevin Drum, Jane Hamsher and several others were inventing a new kind of journalism that went straight to the heart of the matter in a stylistically warm and abbreviated format appropriate for web presentation. I was deeply excited by this new trend and threw myself into blogging with passionate intensity. Fluorescent Elephant was born.
Unfortunately, the motivation based on my political outrage tends to subside after a while, maybe because I'm also interested in other kinds of writing. A large percentage of my youth was dedicated to the absorption of the best writing I could find in the Paperback Booksmith, the first bookstore in Cambridge Massachusetts that carried only paperbacks. I was exposed to a great deal of the sort of beautiful language that is found primarily in fiction, and specialized in literature from distant parts of the world. My selections tended to be somewhat exotic, maybe because I had a predilection for the unknown. I read a lot of classic Russian material, for example, and was fascinated by the new crop of Latin American writers. I don't know why it was that I seemed to be less interested in British, French and American writing, though I digested a fair amount of that as well. Maybe I was a poor student and tended to prefer my own literary discoveries to what I was told were the Great Writers of the Western World. (I don't last long in museums either.) However that may be, an ocean of wonderful language became lodged in my head and stayed in there for a number of silent decades. Ultimately, it needed to come out, and the holy political and journalistic purity of Fluorescent Elephant became corrupted by something else.
(Probably none of this is actually true but it's the best explanation I can manage.)
Monday, May 30, 2016
My own personal girl with a pearl earring
Tracy Chevalier, who wrote "Girl with a Pearl Earring," a historical novel that speculates on how Vermeer's painting of that name came into existence, was only 13 when I stood in front of that extraordinary work of art in the Autumn of 1975 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She wouldn't write that novel for another 24 years, which I might consider fortunate because it enabled me to tell my own story about the painting.
I didn't have to work at it the way Tracy certainly did, however, because for me the story flowed directly out of the painting in the instant I turned a corner in the halls and galleries of the museum and saw it shimmering in front of me in perfect illumination that separated it from everything else so that it occupied my full view and attention. It struck me immediately with the full force of real experience as no other painting has ever done. It did that because it evoked the unbearable grief I had been feeling in my own life due to the breakup of my first (second?) major relationship, which was with a very pretty girl named Pamela.
The proximity of that pain over-determined my perception of Vermeer's painting. I saw with perfect clarity and total absence of any doubt that the beautiful young girl with a pearl earring was turning away from me forever and was taking a last brief look over her shoulder at the man she no longer loved.
Pam had just broken up with me after a year of pleasurable dalliance and/or love (complicated by ambiguity and regret that I won't go into because it would interferes with my memory of the sensation in that moment). The scene of our falling apart might have been lifted out of an episode from a weekday afternoon soap opera, and it was accompanied by a kind of axiomatic corollary, which was that, in order to make a clean getaway, Pamela felt it was necessary to provide a justification for her departure by telling me why she was leaving. For me, the girl with a pearl earring had been caught by Vermeer's photographic portrait in the moment immediately after having spoken the thoughtless and hurtful words.
Compared to the agony of separation, maybe it doesn't matter what Pamela actually said though I remember it with keen precision. Her words would have been all the more unreliable since the next customer of her wonderful charms was already waiting in another tent not far away.
I might now look upon this episode as one of the difficult experiences I had to go through that helped me to change and to grow and become a better person. People often talk about their early heartbreaks as having been painful at the time but constructive ("positively formative") in the long run.
Antonio Machado, who had a talent for coming up with memorable phrases as a leading light of the "Generation of '98," agrees that such experiences are good for people when they happen early in life:
My experience of Vermeer's painting was all my own. It has nothing to do with Vermeer's actual intention or Tracy Chevalier's historical interpretation of how it came about. I try now in vain to re-experience what I felt in the autumn of 1975, but I haven't stood in front of the original painting again either. Maybe if I did that I would dissolve into a puddle on the floor.
I did run into Pamela sometime in the mid-nineties. It turned out we'd been living near one another on Bedford Street in the village. She had long since been divorced from my immediate successor, who had thrown her out after only about a year. Her current husband was a car mechanic and he was in the process of divorcing her too. We went out for a couple of weeks, during which time I learned enough about her (while also recalling the aforementioned ambiguities and regrets) to be quite content that she'd broken up with me twenty years before., because the truth is that Pam was an outrageous slut. I think I'm more open-minded than most people and I don't make stern judgments about that sort of thing, but I'd rather not get tangled up with someone like that again either.
I didn't have to work at it the way Tracy certainly did, however, because for me the story flowed directly out of the painting in the instant I turned a corner in the halls and galleries of the museum and saw it shimmering in front of me in perfect illumination that separated it from everything else so that it occupied my full view and attention. It struck me immediately with the full force of real experience as no other painting has ever done. It did that because it evoked the unbearable grief I had been feeling in my own life due to the breakup of my first (second?) major relationship, which was with a very pretty girl named Pamela.
The proximity of that pain over-determined my perception of Vermeer's painting. I saw with perfect clarity and total absence of any doubt that the beautiful young girl with a pearl earring was turning away from me forever and was taking a last brief look over her shoulder at the man she no longer loved.
Pam had just broken up with me after a year of pleasurable dalliance and/or love (complicated by ambiguity and regret that I won't go into because it would interferes with my memory of the sensation in that moment). The scene of our falling apart might have been lifted out of an episode from a weekday afternoon soap opera, and it was accompanied by a kind of axiomatic corollary, which was that, in order to make a clean getaway, Pamela felt it was necessary to provide a justification for her departure by telling me why she was leaving. For me, the girl with a pearl earring had been caught by Vermeer's photographic portrait in the moment immediately after having spoken the thoughtless and hurtful words.
Compared to the agony of separation, maybe it doesn't matter what Pamela actually said though I remember it with keen precision. Her words would have been all the more unreliable since the next customer of her wonderful charms was already waiting in another tent not far away.
I might now look upon this episode as one of the difficult experiences I had to go through that helped me to change and to grow and become a better person. People often talk about their early heartbreaks as having been painful at the time but constructive ("positively formative") in the long run.
Antonio Machado, who had a talent for coming up with memorable phrases as a leading light of the "Generation of '98," agrees that such experiences are good for people when they happen early in life:
Eran ayer mis dolores como gusanos de sedabut it's different if they occur later:
que iban labrando capullos.
(They were yesterday my pains like silk worms
that went making cocoons.)
Hoy son mariposas negras.I believe I can say with reasonable authority that one such experience is enough to last for a lifetime, though I've lived through enough recurrences to have become a connoisseur of failed relationships and could probably assemble a compendium (given a decent publisher advance).
(Today they are black butterflies.)
My experience of Vermeer's painting was all my own. It has nothing to do with Vermeer's actual intention or Tracy Chevalier's historical interpretation of how it came about. I try now in vain to re-experience what I felt in the autumn of 1975, but I haven't stood in front of the original painting again either. Maybe if I did that I would dissolve into a puddle on the floor.
I did run into Pamela sometime in the mid-nineties. It turned out we'd been living near one another on Bedford Street in the village. She had long since been divorced from my immediate successor, who had thrown her out after only about a year. Her current husband was a car mechanic and he was in the process of divorcing her too. We went out for a couple of weeks, during which time I learned enough about her (while also recalling the aforementioned ambiguities and regrets) to be quite content that she'd broken up with me twenty years before., because the truth is that Pam was an outrageous slut. I think I'm more open-minded than most people and I don't make stern judgments about that sort of thing, but I'd rather not get tangled up with someone like that again either.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Home Heaven
I must dismount down in the Home Depot off Hamilton Avenue because they don't let me ride through the aisles any more, singing at the top of my voice like a crazy fool—a jolly good fellow should old acquaintance be forgot—belting it out like a degenerated opera star and nobody even blinks in this part of town where it’s better not to acknowledge the howling whack jobs.
Listen sweetheart, I’m working on my own shack for a change. I'm Handy Guy the Super Guy, this bicycle my Super Truck, a wire basket on the back and items flowing off the shelves like some Goofy cartoon. Me the handy fool with a screw gun, hanging tough with the Guidos, Brooklyn Visigoths, selected by Darwin for dumb-fuckedness to be the Gods of Drywall, "Forget About It." They should use me for one of those info-mercials, a shopping idiot who buys everything in the store. Let me tell you about electrical, let me tell you about plumbing, this is my own house we’re talking over here so no indulgence goes too far.
I dreamed I carried a four-by-eight sheet of three-quarter A-C plywood naked on my bicycle, howling like a baboon, and I’m not entirely sure it was a dream. Today we’re after minor items, no industrial-strength stuff and I don’t even need a list. I just close my eyes and something’s calling me over there in Paint, three tubes of caulk for the upstairs bathroom, another quart of polyurethane for the stairs, give me a little of that Gorilla Glue, slide over to the electrical aisles to scoop up seven more boxes—four outlets, two switches and a junction, two three-eighths nipples for each, I do electrical in my boxers and not one corner shall be cut because it's my own house this time and
I'm on a mission from the holy church of Obsessive Remodeling. I even told them I’m building a synagogue to avoid paying sales tax. Thou shalt not skimp on small items, for thine is the power and the glory of Home Ownership, let nothing slow your progress toward Do It Yourself Heaven. Yet another fifty-foot roll of grounded cable to reach the bedroom from the breaker box, a dozen of those ducky little 50-watt halogen reflector bulbs. Take me to the station and
put me on a train, haul me over to the ventilation aisle to snarf some four-inch elbows, fasten your seat belts and let me recite the gospel of Fresh Air, ventilation for an asthmatic apartment dweller, roaches crawling out of my ears, I’m an expert on this ventilation topic, recirculation of warm air when the frost is on the window, exhaust the stale gases in the hot season, suck it in up here and blow it out down there, air flow is a question of relative pressure, like water running downhill and who wants to lose his eyesight and manhood sitting at a computer? This is a job for a real man, a Handyman, the word the suits use for an insult but it sure beats trudging on the step machine or hitting golf balls until I turn blue. Pour that concrete, boys, I plan to remodel This Old House until my bank account zeroes out and I'm eating cat food.
Listen sweetheart, I’m working on my own shack for a change. I'm Handy Guy the Super Guy, this bicycle my Super Truck, a wire basket on the back and items flowing off the shelves like some Goofy cartoon. Me the handy fool with a screw gun, hanging tough with the Guidos, Brooklyn Visigoths, selected by Darwin for dumb-fuckedness to be the Gods of Drywall, "Forget About It." They should use me for one of those info-mercials, a shopping idiot who buys everything in the store. Let me tell you about electrical, let me tell you about plumbing, this is my own house we’re talking over here so no indulgence goes too far.
I dreamed I carried a four-by-eight sheet of three-quarter A-C plywood naked on my bicycle, howling like a baboon, and I’m not entirely sure it was a dream. Today we’re after minor items, no industrial-strength stuff and I don’t even need a list. I just close my eyes and something’s calling me over there in Paint, three tubes of caulk for the upstairs bathroom, another quart of polyurethane for the stairs, give me a little of that Gorilla Glue, slide over to the electrical aisles to scoop up seven more boxes—four outlets, two switches and a junction, two three-eighths nipples for each, I do electrical in my boxers and not one corner shall be cut because it's my own house this time and
I'm on a mission from the holy church of Obsessive Remodeling. I even told them I’m building a synagogue to avoid paying sales tax. Thou shalt not skimp on small items, for thine is the power and the glory of Home Ownership, let nothing slow your progress toward Do It Yourself Heaven. Yet another fifty-foot roll of grounded cable to reach the bedroom from the breaker box, a dozen of those ducky little 50-watt halogen reflector bulbs. Take me to the station and
put me on a train, haul me over to the ventilation aisle to snarf some four-inch elbows, fasten your seat belts and let me recite the gospel of Fresh Air, ventilation for an asthmatic apartment dweller, roaches crawling out of my ears, I’m an expert on this ventilation topic, recirculation of warm air when the frost is on the window, exhaust the stale gases in the hot season, suck it in up here and blow it out down there, air flow is a question of relative pressure, like water running downhill and who wants to lose his eyesight and manhood sitting at a computer? This is a job for a real man, a Handyman, the word the suits use for an insult but it sure beats trudging on the step machine or hitting golf balls until I turn blue. Pour that concrete, boys, I plan to remodel This Old House until my bank account zeroes out and I'm eating cat food.
Friday, May 27, 2016
I'm back, sort of..
I ceased active blogging ten years ago and have hardly glanced at Fluorescent Elephant since then. I'm now considering starting again due entirely to surprising encouragement from an old, old friend who expressed interest in my writing and to whom I had sent a link.
For the first time in ages I've reviewed my old entries here and have remembered how engaged with blogging I was back then.
A number of things have happened since 2006, but I don't remember why I stopped making entries. Writing requires a concentrated effort, obviously, and maybe my attention has become too diffused. What was it that happened in 2006 that might have scattered my focus? I'm not sure, but in August of that year I was diagnosed with a heart problem that was serious enough to require open heart surgery. Was that it? I have no idea, and anyway, reasons are important but in the end they don't matter as much as the effects they produce in our lives. (Or is that just the current therapeutic trend?)
But maybe there's a clue after all. Looking at my old blog entries and discovering the changes in the Blogger system, I find some unpublished drafts written back then, one of which goes like this:
But what's this, a self-obsessed Facebook diary?
Ok, so I became slightly addicted to 1st person perspective (albeit with a certain necessary narrative distance) because it somehow allowed me to feel as though I actually existed in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, but now we're getting into murky territory. I've spent a good percentage of my life in that country and I'm comfortable there, but this blog is not True Confessions and such raw personal narration is not my thing.
Meanwhile, another old unpublished entry, about the building I live in, also caught my eye. Something about the feeling it expressed about my relations with children took me back a decade to the way things were in those days.
Since I wrote that entry, the character of the building has changed quite a bit. When prices in this part of the city started rocketing upwards as part of the "Brooklyn renaissance" that accelerated the process of gentrification, old residents took advantage of the opportunity to make a killing and sold out to wealthier buyers in the familiar pattern that's quickly reinforced and enhanced by the big realtors like Corcoran, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, etc.
The new population of residents includes a significant percentage of very wealthy people who regard older residents like me as lower class. We seem to have crossed the threshold beyond which Veblen's concept of "conspicuous consumption" predominates. Below that line of demarcation, it's hard to tell who's richer than whom because having money is considered embarrassing and is therefore hidden behind an 'everyman' style of presentation that includes cargo pants, running shoes and baseball caps.
Beyond that boundary, such self-deprecating restraint is overwhelmed by the opportunity to follow the fashions in glossy display ads that feature whatever the merchandise is wearing this year. The difference is sudden and sharp, almost like the phase change where water turns to ice at precisely 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
I just published that old entry STET, only changing the title to 'Gated' because it describes the character of an earlier condition of exclusivity and privilege. Now I will submit this one to the scrutiny of one or two readers who stumble in here looking for an elephant, and then there's a wacky number from my remodeling days...
For the first time in ages I've reviewed my old entries here and have remembered how engaged with blogging I was back then.
A number of things have happened since 2006, but I don't remember why I stopped making entries. Writing requires a concentrated effort, obviously, and maybe my attention has become too diffused. What was it that happened in 2006 that might have scattered my focus? I'm not sure, but in August of that year I was diagnosed with a heart problem that was serious enough to require open heart surgery. Was that it? I have no idea, and anyway, reasons are important but in the end they don't matter as much as the effects they produce in our lives. (Or is that just the current therapeutic trend?)
But maybe there's a clue after all. Looking at my old blog entries and discovering the changes in the Blogger system, I find some unpublished drafts written back then, one of which goes like this:
It was a dark and stormy night. I was eating cheese and thinking of changing the name of this blog to Choking the Bishop ...but then I thought, Why bother? because it's really just more of the same old bullshit was a dark and stormy night. We were sitting around the campfire when it occurred to me that this blog is the final refuge of my dreams, and what I need to do is get up and leave this dark and stormy night behind.I'm guessing I wrote that sometime after the surgery when I hit a wall of severe depression that might have been accompanied by a failure of confidence and imagination.
But what's this, a self-obsessed Facebook diary?
Ok, so I became slightly addicted to 1st person perspective (albeit with a certain necessary narrative distance) because it somehow allowed me to feel as though I actually existed in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, but now we're getting into murky territory. I've spent a good percentage of my life in that country and I'm comfortable there, but this blog is not True Confessions and such raw personal narration is not my thing.
Meanwhile, another old unpublished entry, about the building I live in, also caught my eye. Something about the feeling it expressed about my relations with children took me back a decade to the way things were in those days.
Since I wrote that entry, the character of the building has changed quite a bit. When prices in this part of the city started rocketing upwards as part of the "Brooklyn renaissance" that accelerated the process of gentrification, old residents took advantage of the opportunity to make a killing and sold out to wealthier buyers in the familiar pattern that's quickly reinforced and enhanced by the big realtors like Corcoran, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, etc.
The new population of residents includes a significant percentage of very wealthy people who regard older residents like me as lower class. We seem to have crossed the threshold beyond which Veblen's concept of "conspicuous consumption" predominates. Below that line of demarcation, it's hard to tell who's richer than whom because having money is considered embarrassing and is therefore hidden behind an 'everyman' style of presentation that includes cargo pants, running shoes and baseball caps.
Beyond that boundary, such self-deprecating restraint is overwhelmed by the opportunity to follow the fashions in glossy display ads that feature whatever the merchandise is wearing this year. The difference is sudden and sharp, almost like the phase change where water turns to ice at precisely 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
I just published that old entry STET, only changing the title to 'Gated' because it describes the character of an earlier condition of exclusivity and privilege. Now I will submit this one to the scrutiny of one or two readers who stumble in here looking for an elephant, and then there's a wacky number from my remodeling days...
Gated
I live in an old factory consisting of four separate buildings arranged in a massive square fortress with a large tree-lined courtyard in the center. The courtyard encloses a lawn that provides a protected zone for small children to romp safely in, and this has become a powerful magnet for a well-to-do class of young families who've been moving out here and who now regard this building as their proper domicile. When I bought my one-bedroom unit several years ago, the residents were mostly teachers and the courtyard was quiet, but now the building has been taken over by all these young couples whose families forked over the vastly higher asking prices and whose children play constantly in the courtyard.
I feel as though I'm living in a giant nursery. On weekdays, while the parents are away at legal and financial jobs in the city, dark-skinned nannies sit sternly on the courtyard benches watching over their unruly urchins. Returning in the afternoons, the parents change into informal clothes and gather in chatty cliques on the lawn beneath my upstairs window. The proud fathers roll in the grass with their babies while the mothers look on and mingle happily with other parents. It's a family scene, an unusually social setting for a residential building. (I often hear the word "community" and see it posted in the entrance hallway.)
Weekends are pandemonium. The courtyard is in a continuous uproar, like a public playground. It's a rare moment when I can't hear the excited screams of happy children, a pleasant cacophony that echoes off the courtyard walls and overwhelms my solitude. I wade through swarms of charming toddlers on my way out to the street and on my return home from handyman jobs and grocery errands. On weekends I hold open the exterior door for the endless parade of young mothers with strollers, bowing my head in silent obligation and with no expectation of gratitude, for I'm an outsider here now. A childless and solitary man is a pariah in the nursery, a social anomaly who's obliged to demonstrate unnatural devotion to all these adorable little creatures who are already overindulged and whose tiny hands yet grasp for the reins of the world.
I feel as though I'm living in a giant nursery. On weekdays, while the parents are away at legal and financial jobs in the city, dark-skinned nannies sit sternly on the courtyard benches watching over their unruly urchins. Returning in the afternoons, the parents change into informal clothes and gather in chatty cliques on the lawn beneath my upstairs window. The proud fathers roll in the grass with their babies while the mothers look on and mingle happily with other parents. It's a family scene, an unusually social setting for a residential building. (I often hear the word "community" and see it posted in the entrance hallway.)
Weekends are pandemonium. The courtyard is in a continuous uproar, like a public playground. It's a rare moment when I can't hear the excited screams of happy children, a pleasant cacophony that echoes off the courtyard walls and overwhelms my solitude. I wade through swarms of charming toddlers on my way out to the street and on my return home from handyman jobs and grocery errands. On weekends I hold open the exterior door for the endless parade of young mothers with strollers, bowing my head in silent obligation and with no expectation of gratitude, for I'm an outsider here now. A childless and solitary man is a pariah in the nursery, a social anomaly who's obliged to demonstrate unnatural devotion to all these adorable little creatures who are already overindulged and whose tiny hands yet grasp for the reins of the world.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Iran — one year later
Like any sane biped with opposable thumbs, I'm thoroughly sick of the pugnacious lunacy of the executive cabal in Washington and the agencies it controls with the pincer-grip of a jealous grandmother. There comes a point where one has to turn one's head away to rest one's blood-shot eyes on something more positive and life-enhancing, and that is maybe a problem we all now have with the Bushites, whose spots haven't changed even after all the catastrophic failures and all the corruption that has been and remains to be revealed. While we're moaning from calamity fatigue and escaping into private fantasy, the public neo-conservative fantasy of world domination continues obliviously forward like the historical fascist juggernaut it recalls, the one that swept across Europe sixty-five years ago and would have continued rolling across Asia if it hadn't been stopped. Now they're planning to go double-or-nothing with Iran and they cannot be stopped even though the consequences have a clear potential to make Iraq look like a food fight at a Labor-Day picnic. Attacking Iran is a self-defeating enterprise on a higher order of magnitude than the Iraq war since it leads (first) to possibly millions of unnecessary human casualties and (second) to a frighteningly enhanced probability of global nuclear warfare.
What will the attack look like? If this operation goes forward it is likely to be sudden and massive, involving simultaneous cruise-missile and bombing strikes on hundreds (possibly thousands) of targets inside Iran. The reasons for the large scale of the operation are not difficult to puzzle out. First, Iran's entire military defense and command and control apparatus and ability to return fire will be targeted, requiring thousands of missile launches and bombing sorties. The second primary objective will be Iran's secret uranium enrichment and nuclear R&D facilities, which are likely to be widely dispersed in hardened underground locations that can only be reached by heavy "bunker-buster" ordinance that might include 140-kiloton (or larger) nuclear warheads. The attack will be enormously destructive, with massive "collateral damage" in human lives lost and civilian infrastructure destroyed in what constitutes a war crime of unprecedented dimension. There's a great deal more to say about the immediate and long-term consequences but my crystal ball clouds over with moral outrage and I can't interpret the swirling pattern. For now, suffice it to say that what follows on the heels of such an attack is chaos.
We like to say that we've learned by grim precedent to put nothing beyond the neocon fantasists, but sweet freaking Jesus, you really have to wonder whether this insane program can be real. After all we have been through in the last six years, is it possible that this lunatic nightmare scenario is really about to occur, or is it just a huge bluff, a Cheney-orchestrated bully campaign that will allow us to feel relieved when the situation deflates and "all" we've got to deal with is the comparatively tame Iraq war? Or is it all just a disinformazia maneuver aimed at convincing the Europeans to stiffen UN sanctions? I don't know the answer, but it does not look good.
Something that seems worth noticing right now is the synchronization of the media blitz informing us of evil Iranian activities with the Petraeus Dog & Pony show in congress about how the famous (and fluorescent) Surge has improved the situation in Iraq. Katie Kouric will be pleased to give you the good news if she knows what's good for her, and God knows there's no shortage of know-nothing Republican wingnuts still clogging the aisles of the hallowed chambers, but I'm trying to convince myself that few members will swallow the Petraeus report since it is so obviously an over-cooked propaganda job that even some of the major lap-dog news outlets are editorializing about how clearly false it is. Given the odd simultaneity of the two PR/disinformation campaigns, it looks as though we're about to get involved in another huge war for the primary purpose of forestalling a congressional mandate to start bringing troops home, maybe with the secondary objective of keeping war burning fiercely over there until the Democrats take over in 2008. (If the Democrats allow this to happen, it will be their war by then and they will deserve it.)
So is that it? Well... FUCK! Whatever happened to congressional democratic resistance to another war? They're the majority of representatives now, so where are Hillary and Obama? Where's Edwards? What have I missed? If Bush gives the order to go ahead with this, will the joint chiefs arrest him and Cheney and bring them before congress for summary impeachment?
Again, I don't know the answers, nor do I have any idea where you're going to be on the morning following Bush's Iran equivalent of the "Shock and Awe" announcement of hostilities, but we can be certain that Richard Bruce Cheney will be sitting comfortably in his undisclosed hidey-hole with his handy defibrillator and a year's supply of heart medications. (I don't have that option and am googling for cheap hotel rooms in Acapulco.)
(I once found one right down on the beach with walls that were made of bed sheets slung over strings that cost considerably less than $1 a night, but things have probably changed since January, 1971.)
UPDATE: And now we get this weird story about nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard a B-52 that was "mistakenly" routed over the continental United States to Barksdale AFB, a known staging area for sending munitions to Iraq. Some folks are interpreting this as a sign that we're moving the nukes for the impending attack on Iran. Maybe so, but it might also be more disinformazia, another planted leak intended to show the Iranians that we mean business, but there seems no point in speculating since we'll never find out the truth though the story does seem to have some related significance. I shudder to think what it might be.
UPDATE #2: Okay okay, Bush-Cheney can't attack Iran because the country is not behind them, right? Hello? Are you there?
UPDATE #3: Wrong. The lame ducks have nothing to lose, and their world view indicates they're quite likely to go ahead with this.
UPDATE #4: There has been some kind of attack by Israel on Syria. I don't know the details, but Syria is Iran's ally amd this is not a good sign. Maybe the Cheney hawks are winning the argument in Washington about how to deal with Iran. Ok, I'm going to stick my head back in the sand now.
UPDATE #5: Let's face it, the Bush administration is unpredictable in this circumstance. On the one hand, it's obvious that they'd be utterly crazy to go through with this attack, but then they easily qualify as loony tunes by any reasonable standard. Also, their foreign policy is such a catastrophic disaster that they're probably desperate enough to try just about anything on the chance that they could somehow pull a scraggly rabbit out of it. It's still an even bet.
UPDATE #6: Seymour Hersh has weighed in, here. It seems that the war plans may have been modified, and Cheney is winning over the moderating influence of the state department. And now we find also that the Lieberman-Kyl amendment, passed by the Senate on 09/26 with a 76-22 majority that urges the Bush administration to identify the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Al Quds unit as a terrorist organization, was written by AIPAC. (Here is the Wikipedia entry.) So much for congressional resistance to the neocon push for another war. (Hillary and Obama? Forget it.)
What will the attack look like? If this operation goes forward it is likely to be sudden and massive, involving simultaneous cruise-missile and bombing strikes on hundreds (possibly thousands) of targets inside Iran. The reasons for the large scale of the operation are not difficult to puzzle out. First, Iran's entire military defense and command and control apparatus and ability to return fire will be targeted, requiring thousands of missile launches and bombing sorties. The second primary objective will be Iran's secret uranium enrichment and nuclear R&D facilities, which are likely to be widely dispersed in hardened underground locations that can only be reached by heavy "bunker-buster" ordinance that might include 140-kiloton (or larger) nuclear warheads. The attack will be enormously destructive, with massive "collateral damage" in human lives lost and civilian infrastructure destroyed in what constitutes a war crime of unprecedented dimension. There's a great deal more to say about the immediate and long-term consequences but my crystal ball clouds over with moral outrage and I can't interpret the swirling pattern. For now, suffice it to say that what follows on the heels of such an attack is chaos.
We like to say that we've learned by grim precedent to put nothing beyond the neocon fantasists, but sweet freaking Jesus, you really have to wonder whether this insane program can be real. After all we have been through in the last six years, is it possible that this lunatic nightmare scenario is really about to occur, or is it just a huge bluff, a Cheney-orchestrated bully campaign that will allow us to feel relieved when the situation deflates and "all" we've got to deal with is the comparatively tame Iraq war? Or is it all just a disinformazia maneuver aimed at convincing the Europeans to stiffen UN sanctions? I don't know the answer, but it does not look good.
Something that seems worth noticing right now is the synchronization of the media blitz informing us of evil Iranian activities with the Petraeus Dog & Pony show in congress about how the famous (and fluorescent) Surge has improved the situation in Iraq. Katie Kouric will be pleased to give you the good news if she knows what's good for her, and God knows there's no shortage of know-nothing Republican wingnuts still clogging the aisles of the hallowed chambers, but I'm trying to convince myself that few members will swallow the Petraeus report since it is so obviously an over-cooked propaganda job that even some of the major lap-dog news outlets are editorializing about how clearly false it is. Given the odd simultaneity of the two PR/disinformation campaigns, it looks as though we're about to get involved in another huge war for the primary purpose of forestalling a congressional mandate to start bringing troops home, maybe with the secondary objective of keeping war burning fiercely over there until the Democrats take over in 2008. (If the Democrats allow this to happen, it will be their war by then and they will deserve it.)
So is that it? Well... FUCK! Whatever happened to congressional democratic resistance to another war? They're the majority of representatives now, so where are Hillary and Obama? Where's Edwards? What have I missed? If Bush gives the order to go ahead with this, will the joint chiefs arrest him and Cheney and bring them before congress for summary impeachment?
Again, I don't know the answers, nor do I have any idea where you're going to be on the morning following Bush's Iran equivalent of the "Shock and Awe" announcement of hostilities, but we can be certain that Richard Bruce Cheney will be sitting comfortably in his undisclosed hidey-hole with his handy defibrillator and a year's supply of heart medications. (I don't have that option and am googling for cheap hotel rooms in Acapulco.)
(I once found one right down on the beach with walls that were made of bed sheets slung over strings that cost considerably less than $1 a night, but things have probably changed since January, 1971.)
UPDATE: And now we get this weird story about nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard a B-52 that was "mistakenly" routed over the continental United States to Barksdale AFB, a known staging area for sending munitions to Iraq. Some folks are interpreting this as a sign that we're moving the nukes for the impending attack on Iran. Maybe so, but it might also be more disinformazia, another planted leak intended to show the Iranians that we mean business, but there seems no point in speculating since we'll never find out the truth though the story does seem to have some related significance. I shudder to think what it might be.
UPDATE #2: Okay okay, Bush-Cheney can't attack Iran because the country is not behind them, right? Hello? Are you there?
UPDATE #3: Wrong. The lame ducks have nothing to lose, and their world view indicates they're quite likely to go ahead with this.
UPDATE #4: There has been some kind of attack by Israel on Syria. I don't know the details, but Syria is Iran's ally amd this is not a good sign. Maybe the Cheney hawks are winning the argument in Washington about how to deal with Iran. Ok, I'm going to stick my head back in the sand now.
UPDATE #5: Let's face it, the Bush administration is unpredictable in this circumstance. On the one hand, it's obvious that they'd be utterly crazy to go through with this attack, but then they easily qualify as loony tunes by any reasonable standard. Also, their foreign policy is such a catastrophic disaster that they're probably desperate enough to try just about anything on the chance that they could somehow pull a scraggly rabbit out of it. It's still an even bet.
UPDATE #6: Seymour Hersh has weighed in, here. It seems that the war plans may have been modified, and Cheney is winning over the moderating influence of the state department. And now we find also that the Lieberman-Kyl amendment, passed by the Senate on 09/26 with a 76-22 majority that urges the Bush administration to identify the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Al Quds unit as a terrorist organization, was written by AIPAC. (Here is the Wikipedia entry.) So much for congressional resistance to the neocon push for another war. (Hillary and Obama? Forget it.)
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
How I became a clown
I was feeling perplexed and uncomfortable. There's a period of depression and despair that follows a life threatening operation like open heart surgery, a bereftness of spirit that doesn't happen right away or suddenly, but builds gradually over several months of recovery until there is no further doubt that you've made it through the ordeal and are going to live. You faced down death, and in the process of doing that, you constructed a strong belief that life has to be worth living. But then you start feeling normal again, and you come to realize that your belief in this life was just a necessary part of the ordeal, that life is actually full of pain and discomfort and might not be worth living after all dependiing on how you live it at every moment. It is a poignant and sorrowful realization, like the loss of belief in a god that you had ardently worshipped all your life.
I missed the passion I had felt so strongly and set out to find it in a dream. I climbed the mountain for a consultation with the master, who looked exactly like Wayne Dyer with a beard and, in fact, was Wayne Dyer with a beard. Sitting at his knees, I asked him what to do. "I don't know," he began. "Do you like bowling?" I told him that I did not. "How about baseball?" Again I answered in the negative. He smoothed out his long gray beard. "I see that you are not a sportsman," he observed. "No," I agreed. "Apparently not." He let out a long endless sigh and got up from his rock to rearrange his robes and consider how to address my profound spiritual and philosophical predicament without loss of prestige or potential future income.
"I have it," he suddenly shouted, leaping into the air with his eyes flashing like Ken Kesey's on LSD, as described by Tom Wolf in The Electric Koolaid Acid Test. "You should don a clown suit and play the accordion for the amusement of the wealthy east-side uptowners!"
"That's brilliant, oh thank you Master!" I replied with heartfelt enthusiasm and gratitude and, as my feet flew without effort back down the mountain trail to the crystaline city, I felt a lightness of heart that I hadn't experienced since the surgeon temporarily removed it from my chest. Firm in my new resolve, I proceeded to follow the wise directives of the Master.
The clown suit was easily taken care of since, luckily for me, Macy's was having a 2-for-the-price-of-1 BIG SALE on clown apparel the following weekend. The accordion, however, was another matter entirely, since I realized that it was necessary for me to learn how to play the damned thing. I bought a beginner's book with training video, but I couldn't seem to acquire the actual instrument because I got hung up on the question of whether to get one with buttons or piano keys. I was inclined toward buttons since I have never managed to conquer an old childhood fear of piano keyboards, but I also understood that a basic familiarity with the intervals between black and white keys forms a foundation for an almost unlimited range of musical experience. The decision is not dissimilar to that of choosing between learning Norwegian or Japanese. Which language would be more useful? In the end I was unable to finally make up my mind and, after another agonized period of indecision, the whole accordion/clown thing just sort of drifted away, leaving behind a remorseful feeling of yet another path not taken, a tributary not followed, a passionate ambition not pursued and a life not fully lived.
On the positive side, the clown suit fits me perfectly. I've thrown out all my other outfits, and people tell me I look pretty good in polka dots.
I missed the passion I had felt so strongly and set out to find it in a dream. I climbed the mountain for a consultation with the master, who looked exactly like Wayne Dyer with a beard and, in fact, was Wayne Dyer with a beard. Sitting at his knees, I asked him what to do. "I don't know," he began. "Do you like bowling?" I told him that I did not. "How about baseball?" Again I answered in the negative. He smoothed out his long gray beard. "I see that you are not a sportsman," he observed. "No," I agreed. "Apparently not." He let out a long endless sigh and got up from his rock to rearrange his robes and consider how to address my profound spiritual and philosophical predicament without loss of prestige or potential future income.
"I have it," he suddenly shouted, leaping into the air with his eyes flashing like Ken Kesey's on LSD, as described by Tom Wolf in The Electric Koolaid Acid Test. "You should don a clown suit and play the accordion for the amusement of the wealthy east-side uptowners!"
"That's brilliant, oh thank you Master!" I replied with heartfelt enthusiasm and gratitude and, as my feet flew without effort back down the mountain trail to the crystaline city, I felt a lightness of heart that I hadn't experienced since the surgeon temporarily removed it from my chest. Firm in my new resolve, I proceeded to follow the wise directives of the Master.
The clown suit was easily taken care of since, luckily for me, Macy's was having a 2-for-the-price-of-1 BIG SALE on clown apparel the following weekend. The accordion, however, was another matter entirely, since I realized that it was necessary for me to learn how to play the damned thing. I bought a beginner's book with training video, but I couldn't seem to acquire the actual instrument because I got hung up on the question of whether to get one with buttons or piano keys. I was inclined toward buttons since I have never managed to conquer an old childhood fear of piano keyboards, but I also understood that a basic familiarity with the intervals between black and white keys forms a foundation for an almost unlimited range of musical experience. The decision is not dissimilar to that of choosing between learning Norwegian or Japanese. Which language would be more useful? In the end I was unable to finally make up my mind and, after another agonized period of indecision, the whole accordion/clown thing just sort of drifted away, leaving behind a remorseful feeling of yet another path not taken, a tributary not followed, a passionate ambition not pursued and a life not fully lived.
On the positive side, the clown suit fits me perfectly. I've thrown out all my other outfits, and people tell me I look pretty good in polka dots.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Personal Possum
Up there in heaven there is a possum, or opossum, who will never forgive me. I'll be rattling the pearly gates and he'll be whispering in Saint Peter's ear about my dastardly vaccuum-cleaner attack.
I discovered him one evening on my return home from work. There he was, fussing and scratching around my little converted garage on Inman Street. At first I thought he was a rat, so I quickly opened the french doors to the brick patio to give him an escape hatch, then I went on the offense, charging right at him. But he didn't behave as expected. He didn't run away or defend himself like a standard rat. He didn't do anything, he just froze right there in the corner looking pretty much like a dead rat, or so it seemed to me.
My first thought was that I'd given the rat a heart attack and he'd expired on the spot. In hindsight it's easy to say that I should have recognized his behavior as playing possum, the characteristic evasive strategy of these harmless little... errr... marsupials? But I'd never knowingly met a real possum or opossum and didn't know that they closely resemble giant rats. (The tail of your common American opossum is particularly rat-like.)
The death act was disconcerting, but I wasn't persuaded and looked around frantically for some sort of missile or bludgeon to ratchet my program for this intruder to the next level. Finding nothing more appropriate than my shiny new vaccuum cleaner, I grabbed it and hurled it at the rat, a violent transgression for which I was instantly punished by the complete destruction of the expensive plastic gadget. Fortunately, I had missed. The rat/possum just continued lying there with no apparent damage apart from the fact that he wasn't moving. (The ability of the possum/opossum to play possum is really impressive.)
At this point, I paused for a moment to reconnoiter the situation, and after some deep thought, the truth finally dawned. I understood that I was dealing with a possum and not a rat. After that important realization, I managed to coax the poor traumatized animal into a cardboard box and carry him out to the patio and release him, where he sniffed momentarily at my habachi to show he wasn't afraid, then trundled off into the bushes, never to return.
I was just completely unfamiliar with possums—or—that is, possums other than Pogo, who is a towering giant among your more literate class of cartoon possums, and is also an old acquaintance with whom I am on intimate terms, having read him since before I knew how to decipher the scribbled characters in those little speech balloons. Pogo and I go way back, but this real-world interloper looked nothing at all like Walt Kelly's creation.
Pogo, Churchy Lafemme, Albert, Miz Beaver and those pesky CIA weasels, etc., are as familiar to me as the members of my own family and probably more so. If I'd known that my real-life visitor was of the order of Didelphimorphia I would have invited him for coffee and popovers and generally treated him like a lost brother. But when I mention Pogo to people around here, nobody knows what I'm talking about.
Walt Kelly was possibly the greatest american artist of the latter twentieth century. It's not an exaggeration to say that Pogo's satirical books and newspaper funnies helped in a substantial way to defeat McCarthyism in the mid nineteen-fifties. My eagerness to decode Pogo's conversations with his fellow Okefenokeeans motivated me to learn to read, and probably helped prepare me for the contradictions and follies of adult life in this swampy world and for the absurdity of our attempts at governance. From my obsessive reading of Pogo I acquired an appreciation for divine nonsense, and those books (of which there are many) might even be the reason I'm not helpless with Asperger's syndrome, or something. Yet the name of Pogo's creator is now already forgotten and his grave obscured with the dust of ages, despite which regrettable fact there might be some people around who can still recall the following immortal phrase:
I certainly hope so, since it's the big lesson of our epoch.
I discovered him one evening on my return home from work. There he was, fussing and scratching around my little converted garage on Inman Street. At first I thought he was a rat, so I quickly opened the french doors to the brick patio to give him an escape hatch, then I went on the offense, charging right at him. But he didn't behave as expected. He didn't run away or defend himself like a standard rat. He didn't do anything, he just froze right there in the corner looking pretty much like a dead rat, or so it seemed to me.
My first thought was that I'd given the rat a heart attack and he'd expired on the spot. In hindsight it's easy to say that I should have recognized his behavior as playing possum, the characteristic evasive strategy of these harmless little... errr... marsupials? But I'd never knowingly met a real possum or opossum and didn't know that they closely resemble giant rats. (The tail of your common American opossum is particularly rat-like.)
The death act was disconcerting, but I wasn't persuaded and looked around frantically for some sort of missile or bludgeon to ratchet my program for this intruder to the next level. Finding nothing more appropriate than my shiny new vaccuum cleaner, I grabbed it and hurled it at the rat, a violent transgression for which I was instantly punished by the complete destruction of the expensive plastic gadget. Fortunately, I had missed. The rat/possum just continued lying there with no apparent damage apart from the fact that he wasn't moving. (The ability of the possum/opossum to play possum is really impressive.)
At this point, I paused for a moment to reconnoiter the situation, and after some deep thought, the truth finally dawned. I understood that I was dealing with a possum and not a rat. After that important realization, I managed to coax the poor traumatized animal into a cardboard box and carry him out to the patio and release him, where he sniffed momentarily at my habachi to show he wasn't afraid, then trundled off into the bushes, never to return.
I was just completely unfamiliar with possums—or—that is, possums other than Pogo, who is a towering giant among your more literate class of cartoon possums, and is also an old acquaintance with whom I am on intimate terms, having read him since before I knew how to decipher the scribbled characters in those little speech balloons. Pogo and I go way back, but this real-world interloper looked nothing at all like Walt Kelly's creation.
Pogo, Churchy Lafemme, Albert, Miz Beaver and those pesky CIA weasels, etc., are as familiar to me as the members of my own family and probably more so. If I'd known that my real-life visitor was of the order of Didelphimorphia I would have invited him for coffee and popovers and generally treated him like a lost brother. But when I mention Pogo to people around here, nobody knows what I'm talking about.
Walt Kelly was possibly the greatest american artist of the latter twentieth century. It's not an exaggeration to say that Pogo's satirical books and newspaper funnies helped in a substantial way to defeat McCarthyism in the mid nineteen-fifties. My eagerness to decode Pogo's conversations with his fellow Okefenokeeans motivated me to learn to read, and probably helped prepare me for the contradictions and follies of adult life in this swampy world and for the absurdity of our attempts at governance. From my obsessive reading of Pogo I acquired an appreciation for divine nonsense, and those books (of which there are many) might even be the reason I'm not helpless with Asperger's syndrome, or something. Yet the name of Pogo's creator is now already forgotten and his grave obscured with the dust of ages, despite which regrettable fact there might be some people around who can still recall the following immortal phrase:
I certainly hope so, since it's the big lesson of our epoch.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Muz be election time, Miz Beaver
People are startin' to kinda wonder what happened to that towel-head we were spozed to be chasin' down in hot pursuit last year, or when was it, five years ago? Whoops, better snip the leader on that dead fish so it doesn't stink up the joint any further. It's time to float a story that el supremo boogey-man has succumbed to some disgustin' disease like, say, typhoid?
Ok good, now back to Iraq.
Whoops, hold your whiskers there, Gin-Rummy, you rascal you, and refocus your peepers on that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad evil-doer, the scourge of the United National Doggy Biscuit Festival. Oh you are such a good boy today! Yes you are! Go fetch me a few of those missile cruisers 'n' submarines, and make it look like, you know, we're serious about this nuclear whatever-whatever, ok? But don't alarm the electorate, and here's a nice doggy biscuit. Wolf! Wolf!
Joking aside, I don't believe the report that Bin Laden is dead of typhoid in a remote area of Pakistan. We've heard it all before. But as to the question of whether the nuclear armada steaming toward Iran is a bluff or preparation for an actual attack, it's anybody's guess. We've actually been promised another October surprise this year. (They're not even trying to hide it any more, as if it was football.) Is that it? A nuclear bombardment of the nuclear R&D facilities of Iran plus conventional bombardment of that country's infrastructure as a last minute booster for republicans in the midterm? God, I dunno, it seems awfully far-fetched, but hey, whatever it takes! I wonder what's really in those missiles? Brioche? Phylo dough? (Reagan sent a cake.)
Ok good, now back to Iraq.
Whoops, hold your whiskers there, Gin-Rummy, you rascal you, and refocus your peepers on that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad evil-doer, the scourge of the United National Doggy Biscuit Festival. Oh you are such a good boy today! Yes you are! Go fetch me a few of those missile cruisers 'n' submarines, and make it look like, you know, we're serious about this nuclear whatever-whatever, ok? But don't alarm the electorate, and here's a nice doggy biscuit. Wolf! Wolf!
Joking aside, I don't believe the report that Bin Laden is dead of typhoid in a remote area of Pakistan. We've heard it all before. But as to the question of whether the nuclear armada steaming toward Iran is a bluff or preparation for an actual attack, it's anybody's guess. We've actually been promised another October surprise this year. (They're not even trying to hide it any more, as if it was football.) Is that it? A nuclear bombardment of the nuclear R&D facilities of Iran plus conventional bombardment of that country's infrastructure as a last minute booster for republicans in the midterm? God, I dunno, it seems awfully far-fetched, but hey, whatever it takes! I wonder what's really in those missiles? Brioche? Phylo dough? (Reagan sent a cake.)
Thursday, September 21, 2006
My big left toe
One day in early August, my big left toe started swelling up and became a red balloon that I couldn't fit a shoe over. It wasn't painful, just big and very red. A friend diagnosed it as Gout, a disease I'd read about in nineteenth century novels but was otherwise unfamiliar with. Gout is known as the "disease of kings" since it results from overindulgence in rich, fatty foods. My friend, a wonderful French cook, knew perfectly well that the only royal meals I consume are at his table, but he couldn't resist the opportunity to suggest that my health problems were the result of my diet. A quick Google search told me that Gout is an extremely painful condition, so he was wrong and it wasn't the cause of my problem. But—what was it?
Another friend, Dimitry, a physician's assistant at Maimonides Hospital, urged me to get my big left toe checked out, but I'm one of the people who thinks it's better to avoid the medical profession whenever possible, so I did nothing, and just hoped the inflammation would subside on its own. For me there are two major problems with doctors:
But I was clueless, though I did finally gave in to Dimitry's insistent prompting and presented myself to the Bellevue ER, where the doctors were amused to discover Lyme disease in their midst, an oddity in the city that none of them had seen before. Bellevue is a large city teaching hospital, and the main Emergency Room teaching doctor kept bringing groups of young acolytes over to stare at the prominent target-shaped lesion on the leeward surface of my body, so much so that the old Cuban stevedore in the bed nextdoor to mine suggested I start charging admission. I was given a three-week course of amoxicyllin and sent home, but I had to return to the ambulatory clinic for several more tests to make sure the Lyme spirochettes were eliminated.
Meanwhile, my big left toe gradually normalized, but my General Practitioner had trouble figuring out whether it had been caused by the Lyme infestation, so he ordered other tests that included an EKG, and that's when they discovered I had a significant heart murmur—or rather confirmed it since the GP had heard it through his deathoscope. He told me the EKG didn't look good, and ordered another round of tests, including an echocardiogram, CAT scan and catheterization. The echo machines are in great demand at Bellevue so it took several weeks to get in there. Now those weeks are behind me, the echo-gram is done, and the cardiologist has informed me that my aortal valve, the valve that meters blood from the left ventricle into the arterial tree, needs to be replaced with stainless steel or pig tissue, so I'm on the launching pad for open heart surgery. (Like... whoop--dee--shit.)
If I decide to get the surgery, I will probably survive, since the statistics for this particular procedure are pretty good and they do it at Bellevue all the time, though there could be complications, but after it's done I won't actually feel better. They tell me that I will notice no perceptible change in my overall health. Of course I also have to find a way to pay for it, and since I am now completely asymptomatic, it is pretty difficult to wax enthusiastic about heart surgery.
Let's review, shall we? Starting with a stupid little inflamed toe, I moved on to being diagnosed with Lyme disease, which is somewhat serious, but fortunately the doctors cured me of that. Unfortunately, they found a potentially fatal problem I hadn't been aware of that, had they not found it, might not actually be harmful and I might be perfectly fine and would not now be facing major surgery. If I don't do the surgery, chances are pretty good that I'll continue living for a long while, though there's also a chance I might not. (The cardio-guy I went to for a second opinion said that I could have it done next year, "but why wait?" He also told me I could drop dead at any moment.)
Am I fortunate that they found this problem, or not? And is it really so important to live a little longer than I would if I don't get my aortal root and heart valve replaced with tissue from a pig? (What kind of pig? A nice friendly pig with a curly tail that has to die for this?) I'm really not sure, but what bugs me even more than imagining what they have to do to temporarily disconnect my aorta without killing me is that I still have no idea what caused the inflammation of my big left toe.
Another friend, Dimitry, a physician's assistant at Maimonides Hospital, urged me to get my big left toe checked out, but I'm one of the people who thinks it's better to avoid the medical profession whenever possible, so I did nothing, and just hoped the inflammation would subside on its own. For me there are two major problems with doctors:
- Medicine is Ivan Illich's prime example of a disabling profession. In his view, our reliance on doctors as experts tends to reduce our ability to look after our own health, so the more healthcare we consume, the less healthy we become, an important point with which I fundamentally agree.
- Doctors always find more problems and tend to suggest drastic solutions. They're like hammers in search of nails. The joke is that if you tell a surgeon you have a headache, he'll recommend a brain transplant.
But I was clueless, though I did finally gave in to Dimitry's insistent prompting and presented myself to the Bellevue ER, where the doctors were amused to discover Lyme disease in their midst, an oddity in the city that none of them had seen before. Bellevue is a large city teaching hospital, and the main Emergency Room teaching doctor kept bringing groups of young acolytes over to stare at the prominent target-shaped lesion on the leeward surface of my body, so much so that the old Cuban stevedore in the bed nextdoor to mine suggested I start charging admission. I was given a three-week course of amoxicyllin and sent home, but I had to return to the ambulatory clinic for several more tests to make sure the Lyme spirochettes were eliminated.
Meanwhile, my big left toe gradually normalized, but my General Practitioner had trouble figuring out whether it had been caused by the Lyme infestation, so he ordered other tests that included an EKG, and that's when they discovered I had a significant heart murmur—or rather confirmed it since the GP had heard it through his deathoscope. He told me the EKG didn't look good, and ordered another round of tests, including an echocardiogram, CAT scan and catheterization. The echo machines are in great demand at Bellevue so it took several weeks to get in there. Now those weeks are behind me, the echo-gram is done, and the cardiologist has informed me that my aortal valve, the valve that meters blood from the left ventricle into the arterial tree, needs to be replaced with stainless steel or pig tissue, so I'm on the launching pad for open heart surgery. (Like... whoop--dee--shit.)
If I decide to get the surgery, I will probably survive, since the statistics for this particular procedure are pretty good and they do it at Bellevue all the time, though there could be complications, but after it's done I won't actually feel better. They tell me that I will notice no perceptible change in my overall health. Of course I also have to find a way to pay for it, and since I am now completely asymptomatic, it is pretty difficult to wax enthusiastic about heart surgery.
Let's review, shall we? Starting with a stupid little inflamed toe, I moved on to being diagnosed with Lyme disease, which is somewhat serious, but fortunately the doctors cured me of that. Unfortunately, they found a potentially fatal problem I hadn't been aware of that, had they not found it, might not actually be harmful and I might be perfectly fine and would not now be facing major surgery. If I don't do the surgery, chances are pretty good that I'll continue living for a long while, though there's also a chance I might not. (The cardio-guy I went to for a second opinion said that I could have it done next year, "but why wait?" He also told me I could drop dead at any moment.)
Am I fortunate that they found this problem, or not? And is it really so important to live a little longer than I would if I don't get my aortal root and heart valve replaced with tissue from a pig? (What kind of pig? A nice friendly pig with a curly tail that has to die for this?) I'm really not sure, but what bugs me even more than imagining what they have to do to temporarily disconnect my aorta without killing me is that I still have no idea what caused the inflammation of my big left toe.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
* WARNING *
Space aliens have landed and are somehow sucking the cortex layers from the brains of randomly selected human earthlings. Theay are replacing our high-level thinking materials with a substance that looks like green jello and appears to contain no neurons but can be remotely accessed by means of undetectable signals from advanced communications equipment located on the dark side of the moon.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Reasonable people & conspiracy
Reasonable people steer clear of conspiracy theories and the characters who espouse them, since they exist in a twilight zone of unprovable conjectures and impassioned beliefs that range from sincere and seemingly rational to batshit insane.
Reasonable people don't frequent the websites that go into the anomalies of 9/11, although such anomalies no doubt exist—the puffs of dust that emanated from the collapsing towers, the too-small hole at the Pentagon crash site, the "ghost plane" that was seen by witnesses in Pennsylvania—all of these things seem suspicious at first but one suspects they can be explained without much difficulty—the wave of downward pressure in the structure of the towers caused the dust puffs, the wings sheared off the plane that hit the Pentagon, etc. In the end, one is left with competing narratives and no authoritative method to distill truth from conjecture, so one simply moves on since the cat needs to be fed anyway and it's laundry day and, etc.
I don't know if the Bush administration was just asleep at the switch on 9/11 or whether they knew something was about to happen and declined to prevent it for political reasons. I strongly suspect the latter, but since I am a reasonable person and lack conclusive evidence, I keep silent.
But then, what about the possibility that the reasonable disinclination to get lost in the conspiracy labyrinth is an obstacle that prevents reasonable people from perceiving the truth? There is always the danger of throwing out the good apples with the rotten ones. After admitting this possibility, the next step along the trail of madness is to understand that the reasonable disinclination to go in for half-baked theories might itself be the cloak that shields the perpetrators from discovery. Maybe they even planned on it from the start. It's simple psychology—do something so outrageous that nobody would ever believe it, then blame a more likely suspect. (This is, in fact, the sort of pernicious policy I tend to associate with the Likud.) The Bush crew is the most mendacious and cynically manipulative administration in US history and it would be naive to put such outrageous chicanery beyond them.
Reasonable people understand that we don't yet know the whole truth about the events of 9/11, but because other major mysteries that engendered conspiracy theories have never been resolved (the Kennedy assassination being the supreme example), there is a tendency to accept the lack of resolution as inevitable, thereby adding another layer to the impermeable cloak of mystery.
Having laid out my credentials as a reasonable person who doesn't go in for wild theories but who remains uncomfortable about official narratives, let me tell you about my own conspiracy theory. I'm not interested in questionable points of evidence. Rather, I look at the major events that have taken place since 9/11 and I notice the overall and continuous de-emphasis of Bin Laden as the evil perpetrator and enemy mastermind, culminating in the following headline in today's New York Times (online version):
U.S. Strategy Shifts Focus From Al Qaeda
On the one hand, for the US to shift focus at this point seems not unreasonable, since many copycat terror organizations have sprung up to follow in Bin Laden's footsteps. Such small and loosely connected organizations represent a new force in the world, one that is irresistibly attractive to dis-empowered people who join them in order to reinvigorate their own dormant sense of imminence and hit back against the dominant forces that have long been oppressing them, especially the US. But these groups have multiplied so enormously primarily as a consequence of the US war in Iraq. If that war had not occurred and the focus had remained on Bin Laden and if Bin Laden had been brought to justice, then these small terror groups would not now have such drawing power on the "Arab street" and all over the Islamic world.
At some point, the following questions need to be asked:
UPDATE (6/2/2016): It's a few months shy of ten years since I wrote the above post, and I'm blogging again. Over the intervening years I've changed my tune on this question of conspiracy because the physical, photographic, anecdotal and recorded bureaucratic evidence in support of conspiracy is now overwhelming and impossible to refute. I believe, along with many thousands (if not millions) of other sane and rational (reasonable) people that it's imperative to reopen the case and to follow all available leads with journalistic thoroughness in full public view, just as it is more vital than ever for the Kennedy assassination to be similarly exposed, but this thankless (not to say hopeless) and arduous work is not going to be done by me. I, the Luminous Pachyderm, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bury my head in the sand.
Accordingly, I am considering changing the name of this blog to "Fluorescent Ostrich."
Reasonable people don't frequent the websites that go into the anomalies of 9/11, although such anomalies no doubt exist—the puffs of dust that emanated from the collapsing towers, the too-small hole at the Pentagon crash site, the "ghost plane" that was seen by witnesses in Pennsylvania—all of these things seem suspicious at first but one suspects they can be explained without much difficulty—the wave of downward pressure in the structure of the towers caused the dust puffs, the wings sheared off the plane that hit the Pentagon, etc. In the end, one is left with competing narratives and no authoritative method to distill truth from conjecture, so one simply moves on since the cat needs to be fed anyway and it's laundry day and, etc.
I don't know if the Bush administration was just asleep at the switch on 9/11 or whether they knew something was about to happen and declined to prevent it for political reasons. I strongly suspect the latter, but since I am a reasonable person and lack conclusive evidence, I keep silent.
But then, what about the possibility that the reasonable disinclination to get lost in the conspiracy labyrinth is an obstacle that prevents reasonable people from perceiving the truth? There is always the danger of throwing out the good apples with the rotten ones. After admitting this possibility, the next step along the trail of madness is to understand that the reasonable disinclination to go in for half-baked theories might itself be the cloak that shields the perpetrators from discovery. Maybe they even planned on it from the start. It's simple psychology—do something so outrageous that nobody would ever believe it, then blame a more likely suspect. (This is, in fact, the sort of pernicious policy I tend to associate with the Likud.) The Bush crew is the most mendacious and cynically manipulative administration in US history and it would be naive to put such outrageous chicanery beyond them.
Reasonable people understand that we don't yet know the whole truth about the events of 9/11, but because other major mysteries that engendered conspiracy theories have never been resolved (the Kennedy assassination being the supreme example), there is a tendency to accept the lack of resolution as inevitable, thereby adding another layer to the impermeable cloak of mystery.
Having laid out my credentials as a reasonable person who doesn't go in for wild theories but who remains uncomfortable about official narratives, let me tell you about my own conspiracy theory. I'm not interested in questionable points of evidence. Rather, I look at the major events that have taken place since 9/11 and I notice the overall and continuous de-emphasis of Bin Laden as the evil perpetrator and enemy mastermind, culminating in the following headline in today's New York Times (online version):
U.S. Strategy Shifts Focus From Al Qaeda
On the one hand, for the US to shift focus at this point seems not unreasonable, since many copycat terror organizations have sprung up to follow in Bin Laden's footsteps. Such small and loosely connected organizations represent a new force in the world, one that is irresistibly attractive to dis-empowered people who join them in order to reinvigorate their own dormant sense of imminence and hit back against the dominant forces that have long been oppressing them, especially the US. But these groups have multiplied so enormously primarily as a consequence of the US war in Iraq. If that war had not occurred and the focus had remained on Bin Laden and if Bin Laden had been brought to justice, then these small terror groups would not now have such drawing power on the "Arab street" and all over the Islamic world.
At some point, the following questions need to be asked:
- Why did the focus shift so early from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein?
- Was Bin Laden allowed to escape Tora Bora? (See here, here, and here.)
- Was it necessary to identify a different enemy (Iraq) so that Bin Laden and all his associations could escape public scrutiny?
UPDATE (6/2/2016): It's a few months shy of ten years since I wrote the above post, and I'm blogging again. Over the intervening years I've changed my tune on this question of conspiracy because the physical, photographic, anecdotal and recorded bureaucratic evidence in support of conspiracy is now overwhelming and impossible to refute. I believe, along with many thousands (if not millions) of other sane and rational (reasonable) people that it's imperative to reopen the case and to follow all available leads with journalistic thoroughness in full public view, just as it is more vital than ever for the Kennedy assassination to be similarly exposed, but this thankless (not to say hopeless) and arduous work is not going to be done by me. I, the Luminous Pachyderm, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bury my head in the sand.
Accordingly, I am considering changing the name of this blog to "Fluorescent Ostrich."
Sunday, September 03, 2006
The failure of "non-existential" war
John Robb at Global Guerillas makes an interesting case for his contention that our conventional methods of warfare are obsolete and that now the western countries are learning that they can't attain their objectives through war because they don't have the will or resources to fight "non-existential" conflicts (wars of choice, not neccesity). He leaves out any discussion of nuclear weapons, maybe because he understands the nuclear option to be self defeating and therefore unthinkable. (I'd like to introduce him to Richard Bruce Cheney, but never mind.) He enumerates the reasons why warfare is not turning out to be the tool of policy that the neocon fantasists imagined, including the fact that conventional military strategy and weapons are futile in the new asymmetric "4GW" conflicts against dispersed non-state organizations like Al Qaeda.
I wonder if any of this new thinking has made it through the endoplasmic filters that have insulated the executive branch for so long. Former President Khatami has been invited to Washington, which is a surprising diplomatic turn. Of course the know-nothing tabloids are already screaming that it represents appeasement, and maybe it's just a short period of (Condoleeza-style) theatrical diplomacy before Cheney gives Rumsfeld the go-ahead to unleash the Weimaraners, but let's be optimistic for a change. I'd be happy to be wrong about the nuclear paranoia, anyway, though I feel quasi-idiotic. Am I crazy or do I have a death wish, or what? And what is all this criticism of Israel? Am I anti-Semitic too? I better watch my step or I might alienate my non-existent readership, and then where would I be?
Hell, that's where, just like that Jehovah's Witness preacher told me the other day on the subway. He was yelling at the top of his voice, warning me that I was in danger of going there, and I probably should have listened to him instead of yelling back:
Labor day update: I keep returning to the notion that the apparent outbreak of diplomacy we're seeing now is nothing more than a kabuki dance intended to show that no stone is being left unturned in the effort to avoid war. If congress flips to the Democrats in November, there will surely be a movement to impeach for the high treason of falsifying evidence to mislead the country into the Iraq quagmire. It could be that the Bushites want to embroil the country in another war so they can wrap themselves in the kevlar cloak of wartime emergency and avoid that bullet of accountability.
I wonder if any of this new thinking has made it through the endoplasmic filters that have insulated the executive branch for so long. Former President Khatami has been invited to Washington, which is a surprising diplomatic turn. Of course the know-nothing tabloids are already screaming that it represents appeasement, and maybe it's just a short period of (Condoleeza-style) theatrical diplomacy before Cheney gives Rumsfeld the go-ahead to unleash the Weimaraners, but let's be optimistic for a change. I'd be happy to be wrong about the nuclear paranoia, anyway, though I feel quasi-idiotic. Am I crazy or do I have a death wish, or what? And what is all this criticism of Israel? Am I anti-Semitic too? I better watch my step or I might alienate my non-existent readership, and then where would I be?
Hell, that's where, just like that Jehovah's Witness preacher told me the other day on the subway. He was yelling at the top of his voice, warning me that I was in danger of going there, and I probably should have listened to him instead of yelling back:
"I'm in hell already!"
Labor day update: I keep returning to the notion that the apparent outbreak of diplomacy we're seeing now is nothing more than a kabuki dance intended to show that no stone is being left unturned in the effort to avoid war. If congress flips to the Democrats in November, there will surely be a movement to impeach for the high treason of falsifying evidence to mislead the country into the Iraq quagmire. It could be that the Bushites want to embroil the country in another war so they can wrap themselves in the kevlar cloak of wartime emergency and avoid that bullet of accountability.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Cooler heads
Considering all the jaw-wagging that's been going on lately about this war and that war and the latest episode of the JonBenet series, it seems appropriate to raise one's voice to the highest possible volume, particularly on those topics about which one has little knowledge. I am, for example, clueless about Iran, so I consider it my duty to make uninformed assumptions about that country and to post them here as an exercise of my constitutional right to make a fool of myself in public.
Iran is a timely topic, since the lovely folks who brought us the Iraq war are now banging the same drum about that country and, just as with Iraq, the case they present for starting up another war is founded on deliberate misrepresentations of intelligence (i.e., lies). Their familiarity with Iran is not greater than mine, but that's ok because any real knowledge about the godless Persian evil-doers could only slow the rush to obliterate them with cleansing nuclear fire, a fully contingency-planned project that is ready to be pulled off the shelf and carried out at a moment's notice. I've read that the nuclear bombs and cruise missiles are already positioned with targeting coordinates punched in, the field commanders briefed and ready to launch... ?
Once again I find myself asking whether we are on the brink of using nuclear weapons. Has the world gone crazy or am I just subject to the intimidating propaganda of the Bush/Cheney bullies? I don't put anything past these frigging assholes after what they've done to Iraq, especially with all this loose talk about readiness to go nuclear.
War may be "a continuation of politics by other means," but militarism is actually a way of life, a modus vivendi that does not so much extend politics as replace it. A reliance on military solutions carries with it a narrow manichaean mindset that is intolerant of any "means" other than itself, any competing methodology that might be used to similar ends, such as diplomacy or negotiation (both synonymous with politics). The most grievous difficulty associated with having at our disposal the world's most powerful military force seems to be that the pressure to use that power for something increases to the point where war becomes just a logical step in the process. During the final stages of that machine-like sequence, an enemy-object is required upon which to release the pressure. If no credible threat exists at that point, then one must be invented, a principle that helps to explain some fundamental motivations for the war with Iraq. Everyone whose salary doesn't depend on parroting the administration line can now agree that there was no compelling reason for that catastrophic war. A false set of reasons therefore had to be first imagined, then prototyped and planted in various hollow trees, and finally mass produced and distributed via compliant media outlets, a process that has come full circle with Iraq and is now being repeated to bolster the next cycle with Iran, albeit with less enthusiasm.
A prominent aspect of our militarized society is that it is teeming with useful idiots who can be counted on to continuously cry wolf about the horrific intentions of various real or imagined enemies. In a different political culture, one that is dominated more by civil society than militarism, such loud-mouthed war mongers would be sidelined or defanged before acquiring influence in the media or attaining powerful positions in government. In our mainstream media and in the hallowed corridors of Washington, these are the people who pull the strings of the marionettes that are driving the rogue elephant around Southwest Asia.
So, the deranged wingnuts are embedded in Washington and are obliged to create credibly dangerous external enemies in order to legitimize their stranglehold on power. There's nothing really new or mysterious about that, though the sheer magnitude of the deception is impressive. What I fail to comprehend is why, after everything we've been through in the five years since 9/11, it continues to be an effective political strategem to scream bloody murder about the horrific intentions of fabricated enemies. Are my fellow citizens really so profoundly dumb and suggestible as to fall for this transparent bullshit again and again, endlessly? Maybe the current election season will answer that question once and for all.
But wait, is the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not the dangerous lunatic we've been told repeatedly that he is? Is he not a fascist who wants to acquire nuclear bombs so he can toast us infidels like marshmallows? Who knows? He looks the part, certainly, but it's important to understand that he's also a product of failed diplomacy in the form of the Bush adminstration's refusal to break bread with the Iranians when they made reasonable overtures in hopes of finding common cause with the US against Al Qaeda (among other objectives that probably included the desire to be considered an entity distinct from the Al Qaeda nexus).
For the sake of clarity, it is the Bush administration and not the mullahs in Teheran that has consistently declined to engage in peaceful negotiations, as is more fully explained here, and in answer to the war party's continuous repetition of the wondrously effective trope comparing Democrats to Neville Chamberlain at Munich, it needs to be pointed out that Hitler's rise to power was similarly the product of an avoidable diplomatic failure in the form of the allies' rigid enforcement of the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty.
(Now there's a question for the What if...? theorizers and Philip Roth-style speculative novelists: If WWII had been avoided by more farsighted policies on the part of the allies, what would the present world look like?)
As historical analysis, maybe all that seems overly breezy, though it's no more so than the shouted accusations of appeasement, but such historical comparisons tend to be thinly-veiled agitprop in any case. Times change, the point being that this embroglio with Iran is the kind of squabble that is probably amenable to garden variety diplomacy of the kind the French just pulled off so brilliantly in defusing the Israeli/Hezbollah war. Their achievement was built up from the simple recognition that both sides needed a dignfied way to step down from lethal hostilities. The same method should work with Iran, but of course the US is as disinterested in negotiating with Iran as it was with Iraq.
Furthermore, though I'm no expert on Iranian intentions, based on the reputation of detente for stability, I seriously question whether an Iranian bomb is so dangerous that it must be prevented at any cost, but even if it were, there is no need to rush to a military solution while Iran is still far from weapons capability and outsiders are uncertain about the details of Iran's program to achieve it. The startup of a heavy water plant yesterday might bring the decision closer but it comes nowhere near to equivalency with Hitler's claim on the Sudetenland. Plenty of time remains in which to engage with the Iranians diplomatically before resorting to extremities.
BUT... any suggestion of diplomacy appears to be moot at this point because Bush has a strong domestic political motivation for going to war, or at least he believes that he has, in addition to whatever triple-bankshot geostrategic designs the neocons have cooked up on Iran. All Bush & Co. needs is the merest excuse to scramble the bombers, and Iran's reaffirmed refusal to discontinue uranium enrichment might prove to be that trigger.
Jimmy the Greek hasn't been answering his phone lately, so we're on our own, percentage-wise. In my estimation, the odds on whether Bush will go for it seem about even (assuming Ahmadinejad doesn't change his position before the Security Council deadline on Friday of this week). A big factor in that probability calculation is Bush's psychological predilection for war, which might tip the scales in favor of attacking Iran as soon as — next Saturday? Is this really a distinct possibility? I certainly hope that cooler heads will prevail at least until Labor Day, since I haven't been to the beach all summer and would like to spend some idle hours floating in my inner tube before the Autumn jellyfish bloom hits Coney Island or the world blows up.
Iran is a timely topic, since the lovely folks who brought us the Iraq war are now banging the same drum about that country and, just as with Iraq, the case they present for starting up another war is founded on deliberate misrepresentations of intelligence (i.e., lies). Their familiarity with Iran is not greater than mine, but that's ok because any real knowledge about the godless Persian evil-doers could only slow the rush to obliterate them with cleansing nuclear fire, a fully contingency-planned project that is ready to be pulled off the shelf and carried out at a moment's notice. I've read that the nuclear bombs and cruise missiles are already positioned with targeting coordinates punched in, the field commanders briefed and ready to launch... ?
Once again I find myself asking whether we are on the brink of using nuclear weapons. Has the world gone crazy or am I just subject to the intimidating propaganda of the Bush/Cheney bullies? I don't put anything past these frigging assholes after what they've done to Iraq, especially with all this loose talk about readiness to go nuclear.
War may be "a continuation of politics by other means," but militarism is actually a way of life, a modus vivendi that does not so much extend politics as replace it. A reliance on military solutions carries with it a narrow manichaean mindset that is intolerant of any "means" other than itself, any competing methodology that might be used to similar ends, such as diplomacy or negotiation (both synonymous with politics). The most grievous difficulty associated with having at our disposal the world's most powerful military force seems to be that the pressure to use that power for something increases to the point where war becomes just a logical step in the process. During the final stages of that machine-like sequence, an enemy-object is required upon which to release the pressure. If no credible threat exists at that point, then one must be invented, a principle that helps to explain some fundamental motivations for the war with Iraq. Everyone whose salary doesn't depend on parroting the administration line can now agree that there was no compelling reason for that catastrophic war. A false set of reasons therefore had to be first imagined, then prototyped and planted in various hollow trees, and finally mass produced and distributed via compliant media outlets, a process that has come full circle with Iraq and is now being repeated to bolster the next cycle with Iran, albeit with less enthusiasm.
A prominent aspect of our militarized society is that it is teeming with useful idiots who can be counted on to continuously cry wolf about the horrific intentions of various real or imagined enemies. In a different political culture, one that is dominated more by civil society than militarism, such loud-mouthed war mongers would be sidelined or defanged before acquiring influence in the media or attaining powerful positions in government. In our mainstream media and in the hallowed corridors of Washington, these are the people who pull the strings of the marionettes that are driving the rogue elephant around Southwest Asia.
So, the deranged wingnuts are embedded in Washington and are obliged to create credibly dangerous external enemies in order to legitimize their stranglehold on power. There's nothing really new or mysterious about that, though the sheer magnitude of the deception is impressive. What I fail to comprehend is why, after everything we've been through in the five years since 9/11, it continues to be an effective political strategem to scream bloody murder about the horrific intentions of fabricated enemies. Are my fellow citizens really so profoundly dumb and suggestible as to fall for this transparent bullshit again and again, endlessly? Maybe the current election season will answer that question once and for all.
But wait, is the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not the dangerous lunatic we've been told repeatedly that he is? Is he not a fascist who wants to acquire nuclear bombs so he can toast us infidels like marshmallows? Who knows? He looks the part, certainly, but it's important to understand that he's also a product of failed diplomacy in the form of the Bush adminstration's refusal to break bread with the Iranians when they made reasonable overtures in hopes of finding common cause with the US against Al Qaeda (among other objectives that probably included the desire to be considered an entity distinct from the Al Qaeda nexus).
For the sake of clarity, it is the Bush administration and not the mullahs in Teheran that has consistently declined to engage in peaceful negotiations, as is more fully explained here, and in answer to the war party's continuous repetition of the wondrously effective trope comparing Democrats to Neville Chamberlain at Munich, it needs to be pointed out that Hitler's rise to power was similarly the product of an avoidable diplomatic failure in the form of the allies' rigid enforcement of the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty.
(Now there's a question for the What if...? theorizers and Philip Roth-style speculative novelists: If WWII had been avoided by more farsighted policies on the part of the allies, what would the present world look like?)
As historical analysis, maybe all that seems overly breezy, though it's no more so than the shouted accusations of appeasement, but such historical comparisons tend to be thinly-veiled agitprop in any case. Times change, the point being that this embroglio with Iran is the kind of squabble that is probably amenable to garden variety diplomacy of the kind the French just pulled off so brilliantly in defusing the Israeli/Hezbollah war. Their achievement was built up from the simple recognition that both sides needed a dignfied way to step down from lethal hostilities. The same method should work with Iran, but of course the US is as disinterested in negotiating with Iran as it was with Iraq.
Furthermore, though I'm no expert on Iranian intentions, based on the reputation of detente for stability, I seriously question whether an Iranian bomb is so dangerous that it must be prevented at any cost, but even if it were, there is no need to rush to a military solution while Iran is still far from weapons capability and outsiders are uncertain about the details of Iran's program to achieve it. The startup of a heavy water plant yesterday might bring the decision closer but it comes nowhere near to equivalency with Hitler's claim on the Sudetenland. Plenty of time remains in which to engage with the Iranians diplomatically before resorting to extremities.
BUT... any suggestion of diplomacy appears to be moot at this point because Bush has a strong domestic political motivation for going to war, or at least he believes that he has, in addition to whatever triple-bankshot geostrategic designs the neocons have cooked up on Iran. All Bush & Co. needs is the merest excuse to scramble the bombers, and Iran's reaffirmed refusal to discontinue uranium enrichment might prove to be that trigger.
Jimmy the Greek hasn't been answering his phone lately, so we're on our own, percentage-wise. In my estimation, the odds on whether Bush will go for it seem about even (assuming Ahmadinejad doesn't change his position before the Security Council deadline on Friday of this week). A big factor in that probability calculation is Bush's psychological predilection for war, which might tip the scales in favor of attacking Iran as soon as — next Saturday? Is this really a distinct possibility? I certainly hope that cooler heads will prevail at least until Labor Day, since I haven't been to the beach all summer and would like to spend some idle hours floating in my inner tube before the Autumn jellyfish bloom hits Coney Island or the world blows up.
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