Crypto-fascist Haberdasher

Scorpions in a Bottle, Part I

2007-01-17T01:16:00.000-05:00

The Homeland: Bush and the Congress

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
- George Santayana

Shoot first and inquire afterwards, and if you make mistakes, I will protect you.
- Hermann Goering

...let me give you a word of advice. ALWAYS bet on black.
- Wesley Snipes in "Passenger 57"

[This is the first part of a kinda sorta series, trying to explain any poor gibbering bastards still reading this blog after having put it into mothballs for most of a year, the various factions involved in the Iraq War. I talk about it so much, I practically obsess about it, so I may as well try to convey what little knowledge I have on the subject to, well, the two people I know who check this thing, anyway.]

Can you feel it? That telltale crackling of ozone, stinging your nostrils, setting the hairs on the back of your neck on edge. The peel of far-off thunder, crashing, then receding. It's coming. Press your ear to the ground, tap the jungle grapevine, and you may hear it. The rumble of massive hoofprints, of things enormous and unseen, trundling forward through the underbrush, uprooting trees, stomping huts flat, trammeling everything in their path with an almost admirable and thoroughly monotonous inexorability. It's our One Last Shot. Our Inestimable and Paramount Leader, George W. Bush, Unitary Executive and Commander-in-Chief, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and the Fishes of the Sea, has heard the voice of the electorate, of both parties in the United States Congress, and of his own Iraq Study Group, and decided that he knows better after all.

The Surge is on its way. Well. Such as it is. Bush has cried havoc and unleashed the dogs of war, except that most of the dogs are already out on the hunt, he's just decided to run them for twice as long without letting them rest. You keep the troops deployed for an extra-long tour, you send the ones home supposed to be recuperating back into the shit extra early, and, voila. Twenty-one and a half thousand troops, pulled from out of the ether, like magic. Sprung from dragon's teeth, sewn in the soil. Never mind that some of them are Going Over for their third or fourth tour, of course. Never mind that generals like John Abizaid (outgoing Commanding General, U. S. Central Command) and George Casey (outgoing Commanding General, Multi-National Force - Iraq...detect a pattern) have previously counseled against sending more troops into theater at this time, saying that whatever window of opportunity may have existed for them to make a difference has long since closed. Never mind that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has questioned the need for more troops. Never mind that the so-called Surge, being marketed as some hitherto unprecedented level of commitment to The War on Terra, is really only going to bring us back to December 2005's troop levels. Never mind that Republican Congresspeople are lining up to throw the drowning President a cinder block and perhaps stave off their own inevitable irrelevancy for a term or two. Never mind that the American people themselves are overwhelmingly against this, 89 percent against in some polls, finally, finally, after a seeming eternity of crawling around in a darkened room, blindly jabbing an electrical plug in every direction in the hopes of finding a socket. It looks like people have finally found it. (Of course, some of us had the fucking foresight to keep a flashlight handy, but no need to be a poor winner...)

See, none of that, none of any of that, matters, in the end.

The Decider has decided.

But what, exactly, has he decided?

The conventional wisdom, often a contradiction in terms, has it that Bush is going to run out the clock, perhaps just out of sheer spite, solely to defy the advice from the Iraq Study Group. Maybe it rankled, having to have Dad's lawyers and golfing buddies take him aside and bail him out and fix his screw-ups. Again. Maybe it was too bitter a pill to swallow, and the loss of Congress, rather than chasten him, actually acted to liberate him, free him, let him finally be the Tough Guy Standing Alone that he's always known, deep down, that he was. This is one of Bush's problems. He actually equates low poll numbers and criticism from other Republicans with physical courage, with seeing combat, I think. He actually conflates unpopularity with valor. That's the kind of privilege he's enjoyed his whole life.

But is this really the whole story?

He can't withdraw (defeat, weakness), he can't tread water (low in the polls), he can't give Iraq any real numbers (none left without invoking the dreaded D-word), so this measly, tightfisted, ineffectual, pusillanimous pinprick of a Surge which will do two things: kill Americans faster, and put guns in the hands of pissed-off Iraqis faster. So...what's the logic to it? Beyond pigheaded, dry drunk stupidity, what the fuck is the point of it?

Well, I'm getting to that. Calm down.

Irbil, Iraq, is the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which is still pretending to be part of Iraq even though they issue their own currency, stamps, and passports, train their own militia (the ruthless Peshmerga, more on them in a future installment) that's twice the size of al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi and could probably fuck up any New Iraqi Army unit sent after it, not that they could since Kurdistan refuses to allow any federal troops to set foot on Kurdish soil, but I digress...anywho. Last week, American soldiers raided an Iranian consulate in Irbil. The Peshmerga guarding the building very nearly lit the Americans up, which could have opened up the (inevitable, I think) third front of this two-front war, but miracles happen every so often and no shots were fired. The conventional wisdom being circulated by BushCo and the Weekly Standard is the Iranians detained weren't diplomats, but officers in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran (essentially, the Islamic Republic of Iran's equivalent of the Waffen-SS, a fanatical military formation outside of and rivalling Iran's Regular Armed Forces). The Pasdaran has elements, the Qods Force, that specializes in infiltrating neighboring countries to foment dissent and insurrection, shocking, I know. Last month, similar intelligence of Iranian activity was netted during a raid on the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI (or "Scary" as it's sometimes called) was sheltered by, funded by, administered by, trained by, and supplied by the only other country to have enjoyed the fruits of an Islamic Revolution, namely, Iran. So the notion that the ayatollahs of Tehran are still backing their Arabic pupils is not too fucking hard to grasp, now is it.

ahem.

Now is it.

See, now there you're wrong, as usual. Keep quiet and pay attention. BushCo is putting it out that Iran is not actually supplying and training SCIRI, and their militia, the Badr Organization, even though they created it and want the same goals and like the same TV shows as them, even though they were meeting with SCIRI's leader, no. And they're also saying that Iran is not, definitely not, supplying and training the Peshmerga, even though during the Saddam Era they helped create it, train it, and goaded them on to fight the Iraqi military, no, of course not. These are what are known as "the O.J.s" of Iraq. It's fucking obvious that when you meet with someone you agree with, and have helped before, that you are still helping them. Not to our Dear Leader though. He peers through the fog of our certainties and sees nebulous and tantalizing possibilities. See, actually, Iran (oh, did I mention how much the hardcore neocons, Bush's last supporters, the base of the base of the base, really really please please want to overthrow Iran, too? See, Iraq was the wrong war, they all knew that, what they really wanted to do was go into Iran and "finish the job," stand tall, etc., and this time it would be a cakewalk, this war would pay for itself, ad nauseum...) is supporting Moqtada al-Sadr, you know, that cleric who hates Iran and constantly inveighs against any sign of respect or fealty which his Shia colleagues pay towards Tehran, that Moqtada al-Sadr. The al-Sadr who's desperately trying to outmaneuver Tehran's men in Baghdad. Yes, it's all a clever ruse, apparently. He really loves Iran to pieces. It doesn't make any sense, but it's convenient, since al-Sadr has been the loudest and most consistent voice calling for America to leave Iraq, and his militia, the Jaish al-Mahdi ("Army of the Mahdi"), has fought Coalition forces on and off since 2004. It's convenient, if you want to build a case, or, some might say, sell a story, that Iran is behind all of our troubles.

It makes no sense, but it does. It's what I call Movie Logic. When you watch a mystery, and they introduce a character that seems tangential and unnecessary to the Plot, the friendly neighbor, the girlfriend's roommate, the dentist, whatever, and the camera lingers on said person a trifle too long, gives them too much screentime, dialogue they don't need, well, the informed viewer wonders. Why do I care about this person, who the fuck is he, why am I listening to them yammer on. There are No Coincidences. Just puzzle pieces we haven't matched yet. Tuck it away and remember it later.

Iran is interfering in Iraq. They do have pawns there. They're the al-Dawa Party and SCIRI, and they're the Kurds they sheltered during the Long Night of Baathism. It's obvious. But these are all the factions that tell us to our faces how much they love us, they're so grateful, American Number One, we love George Bush. And besides, who in Tulsa or Sioux City or Des Moines has ever heard of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, or the Badr Organization. Who the fuck even knows what a Kurd is. And here we have this perfectly good, respectable villain sitting right over here in Sadr City, East Baghdad, sent straight down from Central Casting, this murderer, this demagogue, al-Sadr, not overly educated, owing everything he's attained in his whole life to the name and accomplishments of his father (sound familiar?), going on day and night about throwing the Americans out...yes, he hates the Iranians too, but, and I'm just saying, what if...what...if...we said he didn't.

There.

I said it.

And it's not even as direct as that, no conversation like that was ever spoken, no conscious decision to muddy the waters and distort the facts was ever made. It didn't have to be. The interested parties have agreed to accept the lie, en masse, without anyone saying it aloud. To speak it aloud would break the spell, perhaps.

Why do I mention all of this?

Because of the 21,500-strong Surge, all but 4000 are going to Baghdad. Mostly, it seems, East Baghdad, the slums called Sadr City. The Shia part of Baghdad. The stronghold of al-Sadr. I'd say that almost all combat deaths we're suffering are being inflicted by Sunni insurgents, but, that's old news, that's yesterdays news, Osama who. It would be exceedingly difficult, even with the slug-brained American public, to sell them on Iran backing them. (Though they're trying that too.) But al-Sadr, he's a Shia. And he's fought us before. He loathes the Iranians, but two out of three ain't bad. He'll do. We can leapfrog from Sadr City to Tehran, hopefully.

Home for Christmas.

With what troops? you scoff. You're really being paranoid now. Oh, maybe, maybe. Of course, it is a little strange that we've deployed two aircraft carrier groups to the Persian Gulf now (the John C. Stennis and the Dwight D. Eisenhower), though. Maybe al-Qaeda has finally finished building that carrier interceptor fighter/bomber squadron out of cactus spines and camel hides. You never know. I'm sure than Bush hasn't let himself be duped into a fucking jackass play like trying to neutralize Iran's probably non-existent nuclear weapons program and thus commence an all-out Middle Eastern War. He's been great so far so I'm sure the thought never occurred to him.

......

Where does Congress stand on the Surge, then? How do you feel about Cleveland? Still too close? How about hopping on an ice floe and paddling to the goddamned Arctic Circle? Actually, Bush does have some extremely tepid support in Congress. The Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, who looks remarkably lifelike if you dim the lights, has enthused that Bush's plan might not totally be the worst idea ever and possibly has a chance of not failing cataclysmically. At the press conference held to gift the President with this mealy-mouthed "solidarity," McConnell turned to his fellow Republican Senators for support. They found something very interesting to stare at on the other side of the room. One developed a slight cough. A cricket was heard. Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott informed the press corps that he had no responsibilities here whatsoever.

The loudest voice supporting Bush has been The Senate's own Ol' Dirty Bastard, the Rising Phoenix himself, Joltin' John McCain. Of course, he was bleating on in 2005 that more troops weren't needed. And two months ago, when it looked like Bush was going to have to cave in to, you know, reality (ha! right), McCain was saying we needed, oh...about 20,000 more troops in Iraq. This is the right-wing tack on the war: the War was great, it was a fabulous idea - we love the War! - if only Bush/Rumsfeld/the generals/everyone who isn't me, hadn't fucked it all up. This was the McCain Doctrine. Then, Bush, maybe just to stick it to Johnny, said, hey, let's do that, more troops, good idea, glad I thought of it. Now McCain is saying, 20,000 troops is obviously not enough, we need twice that at least. Obviously. And when it crashes and burns, just remember, I said we needed more troops, and it's not my fault. Republicans may have lost Congress, but McCain still seems to be the ranking minority member of the Select Subcommittee on Covering Your Own Ass and Selling Your Soul to Get the Nomination This Time.

There have always been malcontents railing against Bush's Iraq notions, notably Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, another decorated Vietnam vet who seems to call bullshit when he sees it. But lately Bush is losing his hardcore followers too. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a man so pro-life he opposes abortion even in rape or incest, and who has compared the progressive and tolerant socialist nations of Scandinavia to a homosexualized Nazi Germany, has said we shouldn't send more troops over. As Kansas goes, so goes the Red Nation. They are falling away from him one by one, swamping the liferafts as Captain Bush stands on the poop deck and insists that the ship isn't sinking at all, it's just waves. The Democrats, for their part, are being strangely timid. They seem delighted that the game is up, but, even with the deer in their sights they can't bring themselves to pull the trigger and terminate the war by defunding it, or revoking their 2002 authorization of the use of force. It's within their power but they're reluctant. Maybe they can't fully believe they're back in the driver's seat, that it was a fluke, that all it will take is one liberal bill or media gaffe and everything will crumble. They're a little afraid of the spotlight so they're hiding in the center. Well, there are a handful of fighters. John Murtha and Charlie Rangel in the House. Ted Kennedy in the Senate. But for the most part, they seem content to go after their minimum wage and their prescription pill reform and ethics reform, which are all quite important matters, don't get me wrong. But like McCain, the Dems are happy to let Bush hang himself. They'll make noise about the folly of sending more troops, maybe vote on a nonbinding meaningless resolution, and quietly back away and let it all fall on Bush. Oh, and on the poor fuckers who are going to die, or lose limbs, in order to prove a political point. But who cares about them anyway, right, they asked for this. So the war will grind on. And on. And on.

Finally, a word should be said about the "Independent Democrat," Joe Lieberman, Bush's favorite Democrat, Mr. Bipartisan himself. One word will suffice, I think. Preferably a four-letter one. Okay. Moving on.

After being shaken up by the November loss, the neocons have circled the wagons ever closer around the White House. Their poster boy, Donald Rumsfeld, was immediately thrown under the train, prompting the neos to say that they'd never liked him anyway. But Cheney seems to have been quietly brought back into the Inner Circle. Rice, that total fucking incompetent, is going to go down with the ship because her loyalty is her only strength to Bush, it sure isn't her ability as a diplomat. John Bolton has been jettisoned (good riddance). Wolfowitz and Feith are long gone. The government neocons were always hamstrung by their need to once in a while appear reasonable and high-minded. The private sector neos are under no such burden. People like William Kristol, the Propagandist-in-Chief of the Weekly Standard, which is so stridently right-wing it makes the Wall Street Journal look like Pravda; Fred Kagan, resident intellectual thug at the American Enterprise Institute, who helped goad Bush into doubling down and giving it One Last Shot this week; arch-Zionist crypto-fascists (hey, cool word!) like Daniel Pipes and Michael Ledeen, who blithely endorse carpet bombing Iran to get those hypothetical nukes and even coyly suggest that a nuclear first strike on them wouldn't be entirely a bad thing....most of the asylum has been retaken by the staff, but the ones still on the loose are the worst of the bunch, the real fucking crazies. People who want to turn the Middle East into one gigantic oil derrick and let the few remaining Arabs work it for them, people who want to see a Greater Israel from the Suez to the Straits of Hormuz and from Turkey to Yemen, people who rant about the necessity to stop proliferation and then talk about tactical nuclear strikes as if they were discussing what to have for dinner. These are the people that Bush is taking into the Fuhrerbunker with him. And make no mistake, that's where he's going. And he's not going to come out. Not until the Russians storm the perimeter, anyway.

...if you've made it this far, what the hell is wrong with you. This was way too goddamned long. Go get some fresh air.

Coming soon: Part II - The Iraqi Council of Representatives. That should be interesting. For me, anyway, who cares about the rest of you people. Get your own blog.

Pimps to Tradition

2006-10-01T14:11:00.000-04:00

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.
- Miguel de Unamuno

You have the watches, we have the time.
- Haitian proverb

Don't look for it, Taylor. You may not like what you find.
- Maurice Evans' warning at the end of "Planet of the Apes"

I lost an hour yesterday. I've looked everywhere, but I can't seem to find it.

Is it meaningless to worry so over sixty minutes, in a lifetime wasted so far? It almost seems petty. Why fight for your teddy bear after they've burned down your house, after all. And my sedentary, sessile, essentially conservative and timid intellect, at its core willing to cede external reality the benefit of the doubt and let bygones be bygones, has already for the most part engulfed the vesicular meme offered it as an escape, a quaff of hemlock, the veritable Black Capsule itself, and has already absorbed most of it into its limpid cytoplasm, and the matter has been quietly, impotently dropped. But. A nagging doubt tugs at the untucked shirt, demanding attention. I know what I know. I KNOW it. But I have to accept that reality has swallowed me up, sealed me up, broken me down.

A preface:

Yesterday I had to be at work at 5PM. I knew this. I had known this for several days. I awoke originally around 11:30 or 12:00, still somewhat groggy after listless dreams, and dawdled in my room for most of the day, toying with Sudoku puzzles, reading, folding socks, whatever it is that people who are half-asleep do without remembering it precisely the next day. At any rate. I decided to try to grab a couple more hours of sleep before shuffling off to work, and I set my alarm for 4:25, giving myself plenty of time to get ready and go to work.

As my knee had been bothering me somewhat because of the rainy weather, and as I also had a bit of a headache, I took some Advil. The only Advil I had, however, was Advil PM. Now you're rolling your eyes, of course, this is clearly what made you oversleep, why are you wasting my time on this Mickey Mouse bullshit. The thing of it is, as some of you may know, I am a lifelong insomniac. Advil PM and Tylenol PM have never had an effect on me in this regard. Also, I was not falling down propping my eyelids open with toothpicks sleepy. Just a little bit. So I don't validate this accidental overdose theorem.

I heard the alarm go off at 4:25, slapped it down, lay there for a few minutes with eyes closed. Awake. Eventually, I stumbled out of bed and headed for the shower.

It was an ordinary shower, of ordinary length, without incident or noteworthy anecdote.

When I went back to my room and looked at the clock,

it was 5:49.

not four.

not four o'clock.

Five.

In walking seven feet to the bathroom, showering, and walking seven feet back, I had lost approximately sixty minutes of my life.

Had I, in fact, overslept? Had the Advil PM worked, this time? Had I hit the snooze button and just conked out for exactly an hour, and then woken myself up, with not the least sensation of being startled awake as one would expect after an inadvertant nap, without seeing it on the clock, without noticing it? No. The snooze button only gave me nine minutes, I would have to hit it nine times or so. Had I just switched the alarm off? In my panic I failed to notice, perhaps I did, but I think not. I just don't know.

This probably sounds inane and trivial and a foolish reason to revive my weblog after six months' dormancy, but, at that moment I felt a deep, stabbing, icy sensation of terror shoot through me. I was, literally, terrified. There was no explaining this to me. It made no sense. None. People often joke about going crazy, and what they really mean is that they are frustrated. They think about why things aren't going their way and they get angry. It's not madness, just misery. But getting a flat tire, breaking an ankle playing basketball, putting down a cancer-ridden pet, getting an IRS audit isn't impossible, just inconvenient. Perhaps two or four of these at once is improbable, but still not alien to our notions of reality. It's seldom that we're confronted with the nakedly impossible.

I had lost an hour of time.

Last year I read a not terribly good book called FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard. (Bargain section, $4.95.) The upshot was that a rational man had lost four hours of his afternoon, and his hat, and after a day and night of phantasmagorical searching and numerous confusing passages it turns out that he went crazy and killed his wife, or something. And that's why he blacked out the four hours. What-EVER. I breezed through the novel in a day, wishing I had that five bucks back, slapped a green sticker on the spine and slipped it back onto the shelf. Silly, implausible, tidy.

I walked down the stairs yesterday, racing for work (well, shambling quickly, really, that's about my top speed), but I purposely stopped to check the house for dismembered bodies. I found none, but plan to spend this afternoon checking the backyard for recently dug holes.

I played it off at work as misreading my schedule, no one really seemed to care much. By the end of the night my mind, that durable fellow, had shrugged it off, mostly. I must have overslept. No other explanation, really. People's perceptions are so often and so easily skewed and confused. It's completely plausible.

But I didn't oversleep.

I know that.

I had an hour of time stolen from me.

I KNOW that.

And I don't understand why.

Do I look for it?

Will I not like what I find?

What mouldering corpses, what shattered monuments, what secret whispers of madness will be found if you walk around the wrong corner and look under the blanket? Is this the world I've always lived in? Did I just never notice it before?

Is this meant to snap me awake?

Is this a warning to go back to sleep?

Scissors for the Turk

2006-04-04T01:28:00.000-04:00

I've looked under chairs
I've looked under tables
I've tried to find the key
To fifty million fables
- The Who, "The Seeker"

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.
- Rodney Dangerfield

This is all my fault. I had to go and shoot my mouth off (well, fingers) with yesterday's post. A pessimistic dirge about our collective guilt for crimes aided and abetted by our indolence. And just to splash a bucket of fluorescent orange paint across the hood of my dingy charcoal gray hearse, the universe has to make Tom DeLay pull out of his re-election campaign and announce his resignation from Congress.

This is an uncharacteristically good thing for the universe to do for me.

This one little thing gives me the feeblest, barest glint of a slightly better country a year from now. DeLay's fall has been fabulously rapid. Last year he was indicted on several charges of stuff like money laundering and conspiracy to commit same and spitting on the sidewalk on Sunday after sundown. (Actually, that just might be a crime in his congressional district.) The former exterminator hollered about a Democratic district attorney conducting a political assassination, blah blah blah, and lots of idiots - or should I say, lots of conservative Republicans - no, I had it right the first time, lots of idiots bought into that. Those so-and-so Democrats, this is a new low, this is another attack against a white male Christian, the country's most oppressed majority. But. But. Surprisingly, there seemed to be a collective sigh of relief from the House Republicans, DeLay's former flock. (Former because of a Republican rule in the House stating that any party leader or committee chairman would have to step down if under indictment. DeLay had tried twisting their arms to abnegate the rule when his own indictment loomed, but it blew up in his face. Speaker Hastert, the ordinarily mute and lifeless sack of potatoes nominally in charge of the lower house of Congress, actually became a real live boy long enough to voice his disapproval of such a nakedly political measure, as did numerous mutinous deckhands on the good ship GOP, so it failed.) DeLay then took up ventriloquism and attempted to continue to rule the House through his Whip, Roy Blunt of Missouri. "Blunt" is another word for "dull," and both terms also mean "not too sharp." Needless to say, DeLay's tenure as the Texan Boris Godunov was about as lengthy and successful as one of Bush's oil drilling companies. Blunt is boring and stupid, even for Missouri, and got nothing done, and when the Justice Department managed to flip Jack Abramoff, DeLay's good buddy on K Street, DeLay announced that he would be giving up the Majority Leadership post permanently. He tried to keep at least one hand on the wheel, but he had his puppeteering arm lopped off at the elbow with a serrated machete when Blunt lost the Majority Leadership election several months later. (Alright, alright. So he was driving while practicing his ventriloquist act. Maybe that's just what they do down in Texas, leave me and my poor metaphors the fuck alone.)

Things were looking down for the roach killer, but he still hung in there; he easily won the GOP primary for his district, the 22nd of Texas, and spoke confidently of winning a twelfth term. But the cracks were beginning to show. In a country where Congressional incumbents enjoy something like an eighty or ninety percent re-election rate, the most well-known Republican in the House had three opponents from his own party. Not a good sign. And the polls comparing his chances with his Democratic opponent, Nick Lampson, were not filling him with confidence. Not at all. It was starting to look more and more like he might lose. This hadn't happened since Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas Foley had lost re-election during the Republican Revolution in '94, the very victory that had seen DeLay rise to power as the number three man in the House, and the prospect of suffering the same fate must have been too much for him. At least, I'm sure that that's the story that Republicans want to put out. A combination of party loyalty, tinged with just a dollop of human weakness that even the coldest of us wouldn't begrudge our fallen foe. Poor Tom. At least he did the right thing.

Not buying it, sorry.

This guy is a motherfucker. An honest-to-God dyed-in-the-wool two-fisted red-blooded Texas-style motherfucker, and people such as these do not just step aside, they don't cave in, and they certainly don't decide to start doing the right thing at this point without a shotgun poking them in the ribs. As a once funny man, Dennis Miller, opined years ago, nobody finds Christ on prom night. Jack Abramoff, the human albatross around the neck of the entire Republican Party, has come in from the cold, and the next few years are going to see them start to plummet from the skies towards the firmament one by one. Former DeLay aides Michael Scanlon and Tony Rudy, both of whom also worked for Abramoff, have pled guilty to conspiring to block investigations into Abramoff's activities. And now, suddenly, DeLay's bastard prick heart just isn't in it anymore. I have to ask what's about to come out that has DeLay willing to give up his seat in Congress, the one thing he has left now that he's become a political pariah. A video of him jerking off a goat while sodomizing a 12-year old Malaysian boy prostitute? I dunno. Something good like that. Something really incriminating.

I guess it's bad form to revel in another human being's foibles and shortcomings. But fuck it, that's always been a shortcoming of my own. Let the bastard twist in the wind.

Back to the Lab

2006-04-03T05:41:00.000-04:00

Some who did not fight
Brought tales of old to light
- Rush, "Cygnus X-1, Book II: Hemispheres"

A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener with constant use.
- Washington Irving, "Rip Van Winkle"

The sin which makes you sad and repentant is more liked by Allah than the good deed which turns you arrogant.
- Ali ibn Abi Talib

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do.
- Helen Keller, "Optimism"

After keeping my head down and swimming through the chum for a couple months, I decided to bob back up to the surface to steal a lungful or two of acrid air and scope the surface conditions for half a tick. I would have been better off keeping my snout fully submerged. Is there really a need to go into it? My readership being what it is, describing the latest Bad Things Happening In Iraq would be a bit of carrying coals to Newcastle, as they say, or maybe as they used to say, when people used coal more often, I guess. But if a point can be made, it ought to be belabored to the brink of wheezing, incontinent death, I always say. 50 or so Iraqis got snuffed out today, sectarian-style, in a smattering of shootings and carbombings; 42 more were murdered yesterday. Another Shiite mosque was blown up (not, thankfully, a major shrine like the Samarra one to the tenth and eleventh Imams), along with the usual pile of bodies found handcuffed and double-tapped. The Bushite retort to this is to highlight the high number of fatalities in a typical American day of car crashes, housefires, bubonic plague outbreaks, and rabid emu maulings, as if because of the epidemic of sectarian violence no one else is also dying in Iraq of all those other things as well. The reason they're reporting these murders is because they're above and beyond the usual daily butcher's bill of death, you nattering dolts. Jesus. and now, after embracing the Iraqi Shiites, BushCo seems slightly astonished that the religious Shiite parties voted into power might feel more than passing affinity towards the neighboring Shiite theocracy that supported them financially and militarily during their years of persecution and exile. (I don't think anyone could have anticipated the breach of the Baghdad levees.) Our efforts, which were more commands, to choose the next Prime Minister were (surprise!) Ignominious Failure #504, so we're trying to forge a ridiculously unfeasible coalition of fascist Kurds, Islamist Sunnis, secular Shiites, and neo-Baathists to topple the UIA and their Prime Minister-designate, al-Jaafari, because he's too cozy with Muqtada al-Sadr, whose major crime was defeating the United States armed forces by not knuckling under in 2004. Got all that? I mean is any of this a surprise to anyone, really, at this point the Bush Administration has become so thoroughly synonymous with ineptitude and failure that to even recount for the first time the details of their latest display of wanton hubris just seems painfully redundant...animators talk about persistence of vision, wherein the rapidity of transition from image to image is so great that it overcomes the ability of the eye to discern it, and still images bleed together and breathe and move...what we have here, instead, is more like a persistent lack of vision, with individual failures blurring together into a singular and grand unified theory of incompetence, where the overall pattern is so dismally overwhelming that the daily grind of murder and despair loses its power to shock, horrify, and dismay. So pro- and anti-war Americans alike can read (the ones who still do, that is) that 50 Iraqis were murdered during the course of a single day, sigh, curse either the President, the insurgents, or CBS and the New York Times, and go back to their Raisin Bran. We don't really care. I don't really care. If I did, I would be in the streets, wouldn't I? But I hem and I haw, sometimes both at once, and I equivocate and even dissemble (NOT "disassemble," you fucking nimrod), and I don't do what I should do. What's wrong with us? Would any crime be monstrous enough to pull Americans into the streets for longer than a single day, and without the promise of a free concert by Green Day? Because I can't see it happening.

Today, I finally roused myself to see a film for which I had borne moderately high hopes, V For Vendetta, which was based on an excellent comic series by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The film was, of course, a mild disappointment, or perhaps more accurately an interesting failure. But it was not without its ability to move me, in some cases very much so. (Spoiler alert, in case someone reading this wishes to not be spoiled.) The first of the two scenes which particularly affected me was the rather amazing scene when Evey (Natalie Portman) is freed from her cell and discovers that she has been imprisoned and tortured not by the government, but by her friend V, and she collapses in a sobbing heap at his feet as he implores her to understand why he did what he did, why he had to do it, why she was now free for the first time in her life. The second scene was a montage wherein the harried and grudingly loyal detective, the Arkady Renko of the story, predicts that in the climate of fear, uncertainty, and repression that V has brought into existence, inevitably a government agent will cross a line and do something stupid. (A girl, spraypainting subversive graffiti while wearing a copy of V's Guy Fawkes mask, is shot dead by a thuggish plainclothes policeman.) People will only be frightened so much for so long, and after a certain psychological barrier is breached, they will react to this pivotal event not with fear but with rage. (Townspeople who witness this, slowly converging on the officer, some brandishing shovels and crowbars.) The spark will ignite a fire. (The officer waving his badge, then brandishing his gun, to no avail, as he is struck down and beaten.) The government will react the only way it knows how, which will only exacerbate the situation. (Rioters storming police barricades in first one city, then others.) It will reach a breaking point and then there will be no hope of turning back. The character, Inspector Finch, is more finely nuanced in the original story, not just the stereotypical detective consumed by his calling but someone who really did once believe in the order and security that the State offered, and whose allegiance seems sustained by force of habit more than anything else; when we meet him in the film, he is immediately contemptuous of the State which he continues to diligently serve, his every observation and suggestion is met with disdain and sneering disbelief by "the Chancellor," and yet he seems genuinely surprised that his government was responsible for murdering 80,000 people in a sort of biohazardous Reichstag fire. The character, in short, conforms to the obvious telegraphy of movie logic, but makes little sense if you stop to think about him in real world terms. If the Chancellor disagrees with everything he says and every opinion he offers, why does Finch continue to sit in on meetings at the highest rank of government and why is he entrusted with such responsibilities in a world were people are routinely kidnapped and murdered for failures a tenth as slight? If he's inherently moral, and a keen detective, AND he knows that the government casually kidnaps, tortures, and murders people, how can he serve it so loyally without a hint of internal conflict or turmoil? Luckily for Finch, he had the good fortune to be played by the great actor Stephen Rea, who imbues this straw man with far more gravity than his poor scripting deserves. Rea can convey more with a single sad glance than other actors can with 20 pages of exquisite dialogue. At any rate, this scene leapt out at me.

2003 was more than merely three years ago. A lot more. I remember when the streets of the capitals of the world were swollen with protestors, almost ten million people marching to try and stop a war. Imagine that for a moment. In this day and age, when nobody cares about anything, except for the wrong things...ten million people, most of whom had never met one another, all had the right idea, and they did something about it. Or did they do anything at all...the marches meant nothing, here. Absolutely nothing. They were a day of bitching about the tied-up traffic. They were a blip on the news, for those that still pay attention to what passes for the news. Americans are a thoroughly conquered people by now, and we sit and watch things happen to us. There was a brief surge of energy when more than a few of us managed to punch out of the gravity wells of our couches and did something, sort of, but since it didn't immediately set the world on fire, we lost what litle interest we had in the matter in the first place. We deserve this war. We deserve it, because we didn't fight hard enough to stop it. Now we have 2300 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis dead, and we still don't give a shit. We want the war over, we want the soldiers home, and if someone would just do this for us so we could watch it happen on the Teevee, hey, that would be cool, but if not, well, whatever. Our president tells us that we have a minimum of three more years of war, that he can eavesdrop on any conversation he wishes, that he needs to be able to torture people, that he feels free to ignore laws that Congress passes, and we sit here and accept it, occasionally balling our fists in rage, but politely, complacently, so as not to bother anyone else in the room.

I'm not afraid of that cop shooting a girl and sparking a riot someday. Not in America. I'm afraid that the trigger has already been pulled, that the girl is already lying dead in the street, her blood pooling around her pale, still body, and we're stepping over her on the way to the Wal-Mart. We'd rather she was still alive. But what can we do.

That's enough for now. Back down into the murk. More later on something else, maybe.

Flunking Out of the Electoral College

2006-01-20T15:00:00.000-05:00

The spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism, whether governmental or popular.
- Mohandas Gandhi

Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
- Lawrence J. Peter

Vote early and vote often.
- Al Capone

The first time I was able to vote for president, I was too ignorant and addle-pated to make good use of it. It was back during the "Autumn of Love," in the dim and distant year of 1992...seems a thousand centuries ago to me, now...it was a time of sandmen's entrances and of hearts that were both achy and breaky, a time when going into Iraq was a fun weekend outing where nobody got hurt and the good guys easily won, a time when portable phones were slightly smaller than a lunchbox, no one was getting spammed, and everyone was too sexy for everything else. I was 18 years old, and even stupider than I am now, if such a nadir is even remotely conceivable. I was...well...there's no way to ease the blow here, so out with it: I was conservative. Sort of kind of Republican, actually. I know. I know. Stop freaking out. It's not like I shot someone just to watch them die. I blame historical circumstance; I grew up in the Age of Reagan, the son of an indifferently conservative Secret Service agent, and we bombed Libya and invaded Grenada and pushed those Russian commie fucks around with total impunity, because these colors do NOT run, and freedom isn't free, and blah blah blah. I was ostensibly interested in politics and history, but hindered slightly in the pursuit of such studies by a near-total ignorance of both political theory and history, and it was some time before I discovered that bombing Libya in a cheap and careless act of political theater led directly to 189 Americans dying over Lockerbie, Scotland; or that we knocked over a pathetic and embryonic left-wing regime in the Caribbean because 2 days earlier we had lost 241 servicemen in a humiliating terrorist attack in Lebanon; or that driving the Soviet Union into bankrupcy with an exorbitant arms race saddled us with massive debt and left Russia littered with a massive nuclear arsenal that it was now unable to secure or safeguard; and on, and on, and on.

I was what I call a Cosmatos conservative. George P. Cosmatos (1941-2005) was a film director of modest ability who gave us the one-two punch of Rambo: First Blood Part Two (1985) and the even more repellent Cobra (1986), two movies which together crystallized the worldview and Hollywood pseudomorality of a whole generation of American boys born in the 1970s who grew up under Reagan. Ronnie himself quipped once that he made his decision to launch Operation El Dorado Canyon, the retaliatory strike on Libya following a PLO terror attack on USO personnel in Europe, after watching Rambo. Rambo showed Sylvester Stallone, the celluloid embodiment of 1980s foreign policy, battling insidious gook murderers abroad and cowardly skulking bureaucrats at home. The follow-up film was just as loathesome and creepy as it was ridiculous, showing Stallone again gunning down "psychos" left and right, conveniently one-dimensional villains who always drew first and who deserved what they got. These two films, released within a year of each other, really Summed It All Up for kids like me: there's "America," which is where the good and nice and decent (and white) people live, and America has to be protected at all costs from those who would subvert it, corrupt it, destroy it. A red-white-and-blue demi-paradise ringed with enemies, yellow ones, brown ones, black ones, and even some white ones, who are perhaps the least deserving of sympathy or understanding. This was nothing new in American culture, honestly. Thirty years earlier, it would have been John Wayne gunning down Comanches with his Colt Peacemakers; as it was, my generation got Stallone and Schwarzenegger taking out every variety of non-Anglo lowlife with their equally iconic M-16s and RPG-7s. (Ironic that the mantle of John Wayne, who made about two and a half million WWII pictures, should be taken up by an Italian and an Austrian. It's too bad Professor Toru Tanaka never graduated from villainous flunky to action hero, we could have had a former Axis Power trifecta. An Elseworlds tale for someone else to tell, perhaps. Today, it's been subverted even further, with a career in rap music becoming the new prerequisite for B-movie stardom. But let's not lose the plot here.) I wasn't an ideologue deeply devoted to Ayn Rand or Barry Goldwater or The Wealth of Nations, I just liked seeing the bad guys get shot. To be honest, I think the vast majority of Americans who think of themselves as conservatives feel that way. They want the bad guys shot, and taxes to go down. I wish I could see life so simply sometimes.

(Why don't I call it "Stallone conservatism?" Because of a little movie called Rhinestone, that's why. Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton in a rootin'-tootin' country music comedy. Waiter, check please.)

Anyway. 1992. I was in my first year of college, in the Arctic. Close enough, anyway; the University of Maine at Orono, chosen because it was next to the town where Stephen King lived. (Staggeringly stupid, yes. This is not in dispute.) As such, I had to vote by absentee ballot. For a few months, this thing sat amidst the clutter of my desk, staring at me. I was in a bit of a quandary, truth be told. Of course I was still a Republican, a good guy, let's not be ridiculous here, we were the winners and the strong ones. But. College was starting to expose me to deviant writings. I had heard about something called BCCI, I had read a little bit about Iran-Contra, I had seen pictures of the Highway of Death. Things were starting to stir inside my brain. Thoughts I wasn't sure what to make of. Notions that maybe things were...well, not different than what I had believed, but at least a lot more complicated. So I was thinking, maybe I wouldn't vote for Bush. But Democrats were still a bunch of hippie pansies so far as I was concerned. The guy who really made me excited about voting was a tin-horn Texan billionaire named H. Ross Perot, a maverick and an outsider who'd made his fortune the old fashioned way, by locking up government contracts. Perot had decided to buy the White House, and for a brief and shining moment in early 1992 his Zen campaign-without-campaigning looked like it might take him all the way to the Emerald City. But then he started acting all wiggy, saying he didn't want to run because the Republicans were trying to sabotage his daughter's wedding (how weird! well, actually it turned out to be true, but still, odd reason to give up the Presidency), saying he was back in the race in October (a strategy which worked SO well for Gary Hart in '88...who, you ask? exactly), getting folksier and folksier by the second...it was just a dream, but for a while it made politics seem exciting, and I was actually thinking of voting for him, simply based on the novelty of having a three-candidate race in a two-party system. (Looking back, Perot might have been able to stop NAFTA, which would have been good...but given his later autocratic manipulations that strangled the Reform Party baby in its cradle, maybe it's good that he got crushed the way he did.) So. Bush, no; that dope-smoking draft dodger Clinton, hell no; Perot, probably no. I decided I wanted to vote, but I didn't want to bear any blame for electing a bad president, so I gave my vote to the Libertarian candidate, one Andre V. Marrou. No, I didn't remember his name, I had to look it up because he was a nobody who did nothing and went nowhere. I wasn't even sure what the Libertarian Party was about. Christ. I'll bet the shades of Arlington were all delighted that they had died to safeguard my American right to be an idiot.

1996, I didn't vote, because Clinton's re-election seemed a foregone conclusion. By this time I had drifted quite sharply to the left in my political thinking, and if I wasn't quite a Democrat, I certainly had bid farewell to the Republican Party for good. The Dole-Kemp ticket was the last nail in the coffin; a tired, listless candidate who himself seemed to realize he wouldn't win, who didn't seem to want to win particularly, running with a zealous supply-sider who used to be quarterback for the Bills. Oh, and they both hated each other, rather publically. Yeah, I really want them to run the country for four years. It would be like dinner at my house when my parents were arguing. "Honey, would you please ask the Vice President to pass the fucking potatoes." No thank you. Clinton didn't seem all that bad to me, 10 years ago; he'd recovered from the Somalia debacle to show a bit of steel when it came to Yugoslavia (just a bit, mind you), and the antics of Newt Gingrich had really started to sour me on conservatism. But Clinton had it in the bag, so I didn't bother voting.

2000...a lot of people will say they regretted voting for Ralph Nader, but not me. One, I do have some legitimate problems with the Democratic Party, particularly the Democrats of 2000 that saw the moderate Clintonian faction at the height of their influence and power. And two, I don't live in Florida, so it wasn't my fault.

2004, I think it's fairly fucking obvious who had my vote. And it wasn't the Chimp.

This year, we'll be having congressional elections, and I am nurturing some tentative but genuine hopes that the Democrats might retake one or both houses of Congress. But we'll put off any detailed analyses of that for now. I'd like to discuss two foreign elections, one that transpired last month and one set to occur next week.

The results for the December 2005 Iraqi National Assembly elections are finally in. I was going to open by saying that the fact that it took over a month to announce the results might be a poor augury, but then I recalled that it took about that much time to settle our own presidential election in 2000. So I can cut them some slack in that area. However, the results are indicative of some rather disturbing future trends. The United States had, again, bet heavily on the seculars to win, personified by the Iraqi National List, a coalition mostly comprised of secular Shiites led by Iyad Allawi, who was (appointed, not elected) Prime Minister under the previous Iraqi Interim Government (replaced by the Iraqi Transitional Government following the January 2005 elections). BushCo had believed that Allawi was all but guaranteed to win the January elections, but he was handed a humiliating defeat by the United Iraqi Alliance, the more religious Shiite coalition dominated by SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is almost, but not quite, a creature of Tehran. Last January, Allawi's List won 40 seats in the transitional National Assembly; this time around he's been cut down to 25. The big winner, once again, has been the UIA, which Washington does not like, not one bit, as they are quite cozy with our new Worse Than Hitler nominee, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The UIA did not win enough seats to gain an outright majority in the National Assembly, but since they'll almost certainly ally once again with the chief Kurdish bloc, the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan, and since no other party is anywhere near them in seats, this means little. The Shiites and Kurds have been working hand-in-glove fairly consistently since the invasion, on their basic "Fuck the Sunnis as hard as we can" platform; I think inside a few years, once American troop numbers in Iraq dip down to about 50,000 or so, the Kurds will make their move to break away formally, cutting a deal with the Shiites to divy up the oil. The (somewhat) big news this election was the substantially larger participation by Sunnis this time around; it looks like they cut rather deeply into Kurdish seats, and to a lesser extent Shiite seats. There were two major Sunni coalitions, the Iraqi Accord Front (pretty hardcore Islamist, meaning they want an "Islamic" government if not an outright theocracy) and the Hewar National Iraqi Front, which is made up of secular Sunnis allied to Christians and ethnic minorities like the Shabaks and Yazidis. The HNIF won 11 seats in the new National Assembly; the IAF, which seemed to trade their support for the Iraqi Constitution for guarantees of regional and municipal autonomy with regards to implementing several harsher aspects of sharia, or Islamic law, won 44. This almost puts them on a par with the main Kurdish bloc...which may have been the Shiites' plan all along, to raise up the Sunnis while cutting down the Kurds to a more manageable size. If it was their plan, it worked; the DPAK lost 22 seats from the previous election, owing to voting from Sunnis in cosmopolitan areas in northern Iraq (where Sunni boycotts last January ensured Kurdish electoral victory), and to a minor, but noticeable, Kurdish splinter movement. The Kurdistan Islamic Union won 5 seats; they are Islamist, and allied to the Muslim Brotherhood, a delightful bunch of chaps who were supported by the Third Reich to make trouble in British-held Egypt and who probably were behind the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat over the Camp David Accords.

So, let's summarize. The factions that lost ground in the December 2005 elections: secular Shiites, and secular Kurds. The factions that remained dominant, or gained ground: religious pro-Iranian Shiites (still far and away the ruling party), Sunnis in general (but the religious Sunnis winning 4 times as many seats as the secular Sunnis), and religious Kurds. This is a seriously disturbing sign. Across the spectrum, the violent and intransigent elements, who are most eager to go to war with each other, are gaining power and influence. More and more, endorsement from America is costing Iraqi parties electoral standing. Allawi is now a two-time loser; he seems finished. Our former fair-haired boy, the nigh-indestructible Ahmed Chalabi, did not win one single seat in this election, and so seems to be ingratiating himself even more with the pro-Iranian faction. The Sunnis have now joined in the process - and they're led by those most sympathetic to the insurgents. Tolerance, cooperation, mutual understanding...these characteristics are becoming political hemlock in Iraq. And, just for good measure, all Sunnis united to express serious doubts about the legitimacy of the election at all, with widespread accusations of fraud made against the Shiites (accusations that were totally ignored).

To paraphrase King Pyrrhus, another such victory for democracy, and we are undone.

It might be instructive to view an example closer to home. Next week, Canada will hold federal elections, and it's starting to look as if there might be a major shakeup there that won't bode well for us here. Some backstory: the current government in Canada, led by the Liberal Party under Paul Martin, is in big trouble. The Liberals have dominated Ottawa for most of the past half-century, but their fortunes seem to be on the wane after the replacement of an extremely skilled and wily politician (former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien) with a somewhat bloodless and politically inept successor. Think George H. W. Bush following Reagan, or more accurately, John Major following Margaret Thatcher. The scandal currently endangering Liberal power, the so-called "sponsorship scandal," stems back to the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum on whether or not to withdraw from Canada. Chrétien, a Québécois but not a separatist, knew he could not politically survive the embarrassment of having his own province secede from the nation (actually, it probably would have meant the end of his reign as well, since his riding, or district to us Americans, would no longer be a part of the Canadian parliament), and pulled out the stops in winning an extremely narrow "No" vote. Following this, the federal government in Ottawa decided to create a program to foster pro-Canadian sentiment in the historically separatist province, the "Sponsorship Program" (or perhaps Programme? damned Commonwealthers), which would pour money into advertising a pro-federal, pro-unity, pro-Canada message all over Quebec. For the most part, this apparently consisted of putting huge Canadian flags all over Montreal and Quebec City. Not long after its establishment, the Sponsorship Program/me began to lose or, shall we say, misplace, a lot of money. The February 2004 report issued by Canada's Auditor General showed that out of about $250 million spent by the Program/me from 1996 to 2001, roughly $100 million was unaccountable or misspent. Misspent how? Well, advertising firms in Quebec that were affiliated with both the Quebec Liberal Party, and the Quebec branch of the federal Liberal party, sent the government bills for advertising work that was never done. In some cases, Liberal government officials later found work with these firms, or were bankrolled by them. There have also been accusations of outright embezzlement by Liberal Party members of these funds. Chrétien got out while the getting was good, retiring from politics in 2003 and handing off the Liberal Party and the prime ministership to his hated rival, Finance Minister Paul Martin. Now the sponsorship scandal has blown up in Martin's face; he looks particularly bad because he was Chrétien's Finance Minister while this was all happening, and would have been directly aware of this kind of malfeasance. The three other major parties in Canada, sensing an opportunity, passed a vote of no confidence last November which led to the dissolution of the government and a new election.

Now, who fucking cares? you might ask. Well, I care, for one, because it's interesting. But you should care, for another, because it now appears that the sponsorship scandal may hand a victory to the Official Opposition party, the Conservative Party. Canadian politics is a little weird for Americans to follow, being raised in the unchanging duopoly of rotating Democratic and Republican cycles of dominance, but currently there are four major parties in Canada. The Liberal Party, which is mainly centrist with some errant leftist tendencies, has been the top dog (or le premier chien, if you will) for a while now. From the little I know of them, they seem corrupt and without principles for the most part. The leadership, anyway; the actual platform of the party isn't that bad. They recently all but decriminalized marijuana, and gave gay people the right to marry. Their current principal rivals are the Conservatives; having the second largest number of seats in Parliament, they become the Official Opposition. The Conservatives have spent the last decade forming new parties, splitting up, and merging back together again, most recently in 2003, but this time they just might have their act together. The current leader, Stephen Harper, seems tentatively poised to become the next Prime Minister, and this is what is troublesome. Harper wants stronger ties to Washington. Harper is against decriminalizing marijuana and gay marriage. Harper wants to become an active partner in our national missile defense shield boondoggle. Harper, in short, seems like a Canadian Bush; more polite, more educated, less redneck, but nonetheless the leader of a deeply troubling political movement. A victory for the Conservatives would be a feather in Bush's cap; he might find the new willing partner in Harper that he was hoping for in new German Chancellor Angela Merkel - the new conservative leader of a G8 nation that sided against Bush on Iraq (as Canada's Chrétien and Germany's Schröder did). A clean sweep in Britain, Germany, and Canada would finally undo the damage of the "Spanish betrayal" in March 2004, when the pro-Bush People's Party was soundly defeated by the Socialists in the wake of the Madrid bombings. Blair, Bush's junkyard dog, won re-election, and Merkel seemed marginally closer to Bush than her predecessor (although the difference would probably have to be measured in microns), so a win for Harper's Conservatives would be good for Bush. See, the world is moving our way. Would Bush ever be able to wheedle troops for Iraq out of Harper? Unlikely, but, likelier than he would from Martin. The missile defense crap is what's more bothersome, frankly. This system, should it ever actually fucking work, would just pour gasoline on the nuclear proliferation fire. A missile shield would just make an American nuclear strike on some pathetic rogue state that much more tempting. How do you counter an anti-ballistic system? Swamp it with more missiles. We only have the dozen or so built. Best built a fuckload more, then, don't you think? Dangerous. Very dangerous.

Complicating the matter are the two other Canadian parties, the New Democratic Party (leftish, described to me as "Communist" by a close Canadian source who reads this blog) and the separatist Bloc Québécois. The BQ, a federal party, only runs candidates in Quebec province, and is mathematically incapable of ever having a prime minister, which to me is very strange and I don't know why it's allowed, but whatever. They could, however, form a coalition government, or be "partners" with a larger party (supporting their votes but not holding any cabinet seats or agreeing on policy issues). The NDP is probably too small to win control of the government but again could share the power. These two are poised to be kingmakers for this election, perhaps...a Liberal-NDP government is entirely possible, with the NDP taking a lot of Cabinet seats while ceding the PM's chair to Martin. The BQ is mostly left-wing, but above and beyond all else it is focused on Quebec sovereignty, so who the hell knows what they would do. I don't see them joining a Conservative government, but maybe a deal might be cut. Doubtful, though. It looks like the Conservatives might win it outright without the need for such an arrangement.

Democracy is pushed these days as the panacea for all political ills. Oppression and genocide would just disappear if only we could have free and fair elections, or even rigged ones. How innocent people are sometimes. And when I say "innocent," I mean "stupid." Doesn't anyone remember that Hitler was elected?

In the Land of a Million Elephants

2006-01-17T21:18:00.000-05:00

I would've warned you, but really, what's the point?
Caution could but rarely ever helps
Don't be down when my demeanor tends to disappoint
It's hard enough even trying to be civil to myself
- Fiona Apple, "To Your Love"

War is a perversion of sex.
- Alan Moore

She'll come back as fire, to burn all the liars,
Leave a blanket of ash on the ground
- Nirvana, "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle"

Is it weird to actually want to get fired, on some level? I think it is, except...I'm not exactly at that point, but I can see it, not too far off, through the morning haze. Like a rider approaching. I can see the outline of him, or her, or it, through the fog, mist, duststorm, sleet, rain. Approaching at a trot. The Man with No Name, roaming the timeless Italian moonscape of the Never-Was West? Or some eyeless, skeletal Templar, a revenant shade blinded in life to keep his blackened soul from finding its way back from Hell? A herald, a messenger...a blatantly overt symbol, maybe...hmm. Hold on. Nah, it just looks like some guy on a horse. I don't see any guns or swords. ah well.

We peer out at the half-glimpsed and hazy and hope, just for a moment, just for an instant, to catch a flicker of the unreal, a contour of the impossible. Curving claws clacking against mail barding. Ancient weapons gleaming in the noon sun, lovingly honed and oiled, notched upon dead men's bones, flecked with dead men's blood. Yellow fangs, yellow eyes...we don't want to see these aliens canter down Main Street but maybe, possibly, just for a moment, just for an instant, we hope that they would. Or at least, we'd like to hear about it later, after the fireworks are done.

We don't want to get fired, exactly...but...

hmm.

But.

heh.

There is a But, isn't there.

Dame Fortune sometimes visits a boatload of gold bullion and whores on some poor slob digging latrines in Intercourse, Pennsylvania (wonder what they call their high school football team...), and more often unloads a freight car's worth of flaming dragon shit on top of some dunce sanitizing telephones in Bald Knob, Arkansas, but most often of all, I find, is that it just moves the pieces around the board without really adding or subtracting any from play. A job gives stability, economic freedom, provides basic human needs and if you're lucky some creature comforts...it gives you General Wherewithal. It also eats up your time, robs you of sleep, wears your hopes and dreams down to a smooth, round nub...sucks at the marrow in your bones, basically. If you don't like it, of course. There are some people who live to work, rather than work to live. I sincerely wish I was one of them. Maybe it's my diet, my metabolism, maybe it's just stamped into the folds on my brain, but I have never, ever had to cope with a surfeit of energy. Never been a problem for me. Lazy as fuck? Not always. But often. Honesty is the best whatever. And I have friends who routinely tell me of rising at dawn, rushing here and there, spending the day building things, filling out reports, handling orders, rushing to and, yes, fro, 12 hour workdays, 14, 15, and I feel like a fucking sponge, the lowest molluscoid sessile porous blob of snail flesh of which one could possible conceive. I get tired just listening to them telling me what they did. I'd like to blame my job for my lack of get-up-and-go, but again with the honesty; I was like this when I was 12 years old, and it's not as if I spend my day swinging a pickaxe over my head. Maybe it's not the job itself, but the routine of it. Pushing paper or picking cotton, a job eats 45 or 5o hours of your week regardless. It's 50 hours I have to spend outside my own mind, my own concerns, worrying about shit that truly means nothing at all to me. Kissing that off would mean a sudden swell of free time...free time to sit and wonder how to pay my phone bill, my car payment, how to afford shoes and dinner. Free time to pick up and go wherever I'd like, at least until my car ran out of gas. Freedom from bosses that never show up to work but expect you to do their job for them so they can take the credit, freedom from screaming children and testy seniors who live to fuck with you as an antidote to watching the clock and waiting for Death to tap their shoulder, freedom from dumbasses. But that's illusion, of course. What the Hindus call maya - the skewing of one's perceptions, like a thick cloth draped over one's sense of reality, through which one might vaguely see the outlines and edges of the Truth, but never see it truly. Like a rider in the fog.

Take a razor and slice away the maya of your existence, and you'll see it for what it is, and you'll know the truth; the dumbasses, the poltroons, the jackanapes and dullards and curs, the slack-jawed morons that people this planet are everywhere. They're inescapable, and they fuck faster than we can. They're around every corner. And shuffling the pieces on the board won't free you from them. You'll just trade the old ones for new ones. Be it a new job, or unemployment, or a nomadic existence across the highways of the night, there's no Kryptonite for stupidity. There are problems no matter where you go. It all depends on whether you're a "devil you know" person, or a "devil you don't."

I've always preferred the devil I know.

So I'll feel that clammy hand ball up in a fist inside my stomach if they fire me. Or, sorry, if they choose not to hire me for the job I already have. Or whatever gentle euphemism it pleases them to bandy about like a snifter of fine brandy in the parlor of some railroad tycoon, smiling the dagger smile of a rapist as they apologize for being true to their own unscrupulous nature. I'll be nervous about it once it sinks in. And probably depressed, just because it's been a part of my life for so long. And worried about how to take care of myself, not forever, but for the immediate future. I won't enjoy the experience. My world won't end, but it won't be a pleasant feeling, to be sure. Once it sinks in.

But.

But.

Just for a moment. Just for an instant. I'll think of faraway places that I'll never see, of roads snaking off over hills and through deserts, leading anywhere I've ever wanted to go. And I'll see someone standing there, nervous, trembling, taking a deep breath, about to take his first step. Not approaching, but withdrawing, growing more and more obscure. It's hazy. Distant. But if I could see his face, I know I'd see a smile.

The Fall of the House of Hooper

2006-01-16T02:49:00.000-05:00

Sculpture is a celebration of lime and time. The stone I carve is millions of years of age. It is old and stubborn and reluctant to change but change it must for that is the challenge to the sculptor.
- Fred Conlon

My centre is giving way, I cannot move, situation excellent, I shall attack.
- Ferdinand Foch

hahaha. I wasn't sure how to start this, the first entry of 2006. I'm definitely powering through some karmic turbulence at the moment, although the jury is still haggling over whether it'll prove to be some moderate chop that's easily traversed, or a ruthless sequence of implosive air pockets that yanks the intestines out of both starboard engines with a cheerfully, savagely nonchalant grunt, and sends me spiralling earthward, trailing some will-o'-the-wisp death-plume of inky black smoke and shimmering halos of showering sparks, like the phosphorescent arterial spray from a butchered phoenix, and the flicker of mischievous joy I felt at writing this ridiculous and histrionic run-on sentence is hardly worth the risk I incur, or amplify, or magnify, by all but daring aforementioned karmic powers and thrones and dominions (ah, but now I'm mixing up my superstitions, assigning angelic ranks to impersonal universal tensions, but is anyone even reading this still?) to bring down said turbulence upon my poor benighted mind and soul, souls, ka and ba and anima, well, whatever. Whatever you call it. The ectoplasmic demi-dragon that wraps its tail around my spine and rakes it claws across my heart and blows the smoke of dreams over the skin of my brain. Wow, am I floating in strange currents tonight...sorry folks. I'll do my utmost to rein it in a tad or three. Anyway. It's a strange time. Change doesn't come easily to me; I am, by nature and inclination, a sedentary sort, and oftentimes were it not for inertia I wouldn't be going anywhere. But a perfect storm of economic and emotional forces converged on me last October, churned into a froth by eight days of unending rain, and a word of quiet insistence whispered to me by a dear friend, and in an unthinking fit of assertive self-interest I crossed my mental Rubicon and decided to leave my abode of (now) 4 years and return, or retreat, home for a spell. Hopefully a short spell.

Hopefully.

The fear, of course is that sedentary nature. But I don't think it will be too much trouble. For one, I enjoy living on my own. Clarification: I have yet to, actually, technically, live on my own sans roommate(s). But that's not the same as living at home. But it's been over 6 years now since I moved out of the mausoleum, and while I appreciate the opportunity to regroup that this strategic withdrawal affords me on the financial front, I don't relish the prospect of becoming someone's houseguest again. So I'm hoping to remain slightly uncomfortable with moving home. I should be slightly uncomfortable about it. Not hugely. Just slightly. Moving home wasn't the ideal scenario here, but. To be honest, this last year kind of wiped me out. After a couple years racking up debt buying stupid shit I didn't need with credit cards I didn't need, and falling behind on paying them one by one, my credit score had been raped within an inch of its sorry life. And then after another couple years of being sued, pestered by collection agencies, scraping up to pay off creditors, I'd managed to pay almost all of it off. My credit rating, which had settled on the bottom of the fiscal Atlantic like the shattered hulk of some doomed luxury liner, began to shrug off its silty dormancy and show signs, wan and feeble and diminished but unmistakably detectable, of life. Two thousand and five was going to be the year of recovery for me, a year when I could refill the war coffers a bit. I wasn't just treading water; my feet were touching the bottom now. I could start to wade to shore.

It's practically a truth of war that no battleplan survives contact with the enemy. I'm constantly amazed at how things which I already know continue to constantly amaze me.

Christmas of 2004, my car, an ill-advised purchase from a friend, or at least an acquaintance, grunted and died. The car's chief appeal was buying it left me with a sizable chunk of insurance money left over (my previous vehicle had been mistaken for a power pill and mostly flattened, as long-time readers of this blog will note) to fritter away on strippers, DVDs, and Pizza Hut, which of course I promptly did. So when it died, replacing it pretty much wiped out my financial reserves. I was able to secure a car loan with my mother's help as a co-signer, but at a rather usurious rate of interest and over a period of 5 years, owing of course to the previously mentioned bad credit. (That's the strength of this blog, the tightly interwoven continuity. I think that also explains my low ratings, though; we're just not accessible to the casual reader here at C-fH. sigh.) Then, one of my roommates and oldest friends had the fucking temerity to meet the perfect woman and get engaged, and to add insult to injury bought a house and moved out. Fucker. He really let me down. (haha.) Anywho. This one-two punch sort of wrecked any plans for accruing in 2005, and compounded by the humiliation and irksomeness of my forced relocation to living underneath the kitchen sink, I settled in for a long, relaxing stretch of grinding my teeth in my sleep and shuddering every now and then from the occasional bleeding ulcer.

I seem to be circling here. Drifting in circles. But the territory is familiar to me, if just barely; stick with me. I think I can find a way out of here.

So this week I'm off from work, perhaps my last week of vacation, perhaps the start of my unemployment (but that topic's been talked to death, and frankly I'm worn down into indifference at this point, so let's skip it), and half my stuff is downstairs in boxes, and in no time at all I'll be gone from here, gone gone gone. No more patches of mold flaring up across the basement walls in creeping fingers of dead blue-green after every hard rain, no more puddles of rainwater bleeding into the basement carpet. No more parking lot, with potholes, without painted lines, and garnished lovingly with broken glass more often than not. (Four flat tires in four years.) No more driving down Brick Boulevard; no more Brick, probably. Which I'll miss more than I thought I would, actually. I wish I'd spent more time down at the shore while I was here, I wish I'd spent more time hitting on the Russian girl who cuts my hair at Supercuts...I wish I'd scratched a little more than I had and tried to ferret out Bricktown's character. Gotten more of a sense of the place. I'll miss it the way you miss a cast after the bones heal, I think.

Or maybe there isn't that much to miss. The town's not much more than a few highways intersecting around some shopping plazas, when you get down to it. A Barnes and Noble, a Sports Authority, and an autism cluster. Them's pretty much the highlights here.

I'm looking forward to having a door again. And walls. When I moved here in January of 2002, I didn't have a bedroom door at first. Had to tack up an Afghan blanket over my doorframe. They put a door up soon enough, but I lost it again last year. Lost the whole damned room. I've been drifting along with the current for a while now. Sometime this week, I'll tear down the sheets I've draped up around my bed. I'd bury them somewhere, but the ground is too frozen. Maybe that's for the best. It's bad luck to court symbolism so bluntly, I think.

...I almost forgot! The accidental discovery that made me start this post laughing. I was browsing Wikipedia tonight, as I'm wont to do, and I came across the entry for Dover, Delaware. Why would that make me laugh? What could possibly be funny, or noteworthy, about Dover, Delaware? Or Delaware itself for that matter? I joked once that Delaware was a parking lot with a state bird. I don't think I was too far off. Out of boredom, I quickly perused the article, and saw something that made me laugh out loud. The only thing I really knew about Dover is that it's the capital of Delaware. (And on an episode of The X-Files, a computer hacker called "the Thinker" was murdered there after turning over secret Pentagon files to the Lone Gunmen. But that's a fictional fact and it doesn't truly count.) But maybe there was something else distinctive about the place, something that might pique my interest, make me contemplate a visit, charm me, seduce me, make me fall head over heels in love with the town of Dover.

I doubt it.

The nickname of the city of Dover, which appears on all signs leading into Dover, is: "The State Capital since 1777."

That's all that's ever fucking happened in Dover, I guess. And they weren't even the original capital. How sad for that other town. "Welcome to beautiful Schmuckville, Delaware. We used to be the state capital but we lost the coin toss. Don't forget to visit the acorn museum. Please." Holy shit. In retrospect, I think I will retain some fond memories of Brick after all. At least this town has the decency to admit that there's no here, here. And soon my here will become my there. So, so long, Brick. Don't drop your guard around these new tenants; I don't like the looks of them.

No, They'd None of Them Be Missed

2005-12-21T08:37:00.000-05:00

"Did you order the code red?"
"YOU'RE GODDAMNED RIGHT I DID!"
- Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men"

Jesus. I know I might sometimes come across to you, my faithful and beleaguered audience, as being a touch on the cynical side. Now now, no need to dissemble; I know that's the common perception. And truth be told, I myself usually hold that there's still plenty each and every day that saddens, angers, and disgusts me, but nothing left which surprises me.

I thought that was the case, before a few days ago, when the President of the United States stood in front of a room full of reporters and said that he didn't have to obey the law if he didn't want to.

Yeah.

Yeah, that one, I'll admit, took some of the wind out of my sails.

There was a recent cover story in Newsweek decrying our Paramount Leader's apparent isolation and disdain of outside opinions. The cover in question depicted the President, in a rather comical yet wholly fictional conceit, as trapped inside of a bubble, to underscore the thematic assertions of the piece. I suppose in order to counter this kind of criticism, which seems to be growing from a lone anonymous murmur here and there to a steadily rising whisper, Bush's handlers (and I mean that quite literally, men in pith helmets brandishing wooden chairs and horsehide whips) have decided to wind him up and shove him out into the baleful gaze of public scrutiny, even deigning to speak to (ugh) reporters. And not the right sort of reporters either, your Carl Camerons, your Tony Snows, or even the homosexual prostitute Bush's buddies gin up into a Gee Whiz Big Time Reporter with a Pretty Woman-style makeover set to popular music from 1990 - no, they've got him schmoozing with the rabble. Scurrilous newsmongers from the Times and the Post, and even that miserable withered old cunt Helen Thomas. The types with the audacity, the pluck, the moral fiber, the sheer balls-to-the-wall go-for-broke professionalism, to ask the hard-hitting questions the moment that Bush's poll numbers go down so low that they can do it without getting a few mean chain letters calling them liberal eggheads. In fact, Dear Leader is none too pleased with the NYT at the moment. They dared to publish a story alleging that Bush had authorized, at least 30 (!) times, yes, let's repeat that, AT LEAST 30 (!!) TIMES, wiretaps and electronic surveillance of American citizens and residents, inside the United States, without even bothering to petition the secret and arcane Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, even though in over 20 years' existence and after about 15,000 such requests the court has turned down about 6 of them, even though the federal government can get retroactive permission up to 3 days after they begin such surveillance.

!!!!!!!!!!!!

...ever see that movie Scanners? That scene right in the beginning, where Michael Ironside volunteers to be scanned? No? Well, go rent it. Watch the first five minutes. That guy with the glasses, that's me right now.

So desperate was the Chosen One to avoid this story being published, that he took a fairly unprecedented step (for him, anyway; I think Kennedy did it in 1962, but that was during the Cuban Missile Crisis and he was trying to avoid World War Three) of inviting (read: summoning) the Times' editors to the Oval Office to request (threaten, plead, or both) that they not run the story. Bush is not famous for reaching out in this manner. He's Moses on the mountain, he's been given the word of God to carry down to the Israelites and we'd just better not be worshipping golden cows or fucking when he gets here. So this alone is a pretty desperate sign to me. The Times was not having it, and bravely went against the President's wishes and ran the story this past week.

(Yes, there's a catch. There's always a catch.)

Except

(Brace for impact...)

they'd been sitting on the story since October 2004.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Still got that Scanners DVD? Okay, go watch that scene again, on a 61" widescreen TV, in high definition, with 5.1 surround sound. Go watch that, right now. On acid. That's. Me.

So his handlers shove Bush out to the podium, and we all know that this is just not his element, there's no shame in calling a spade a spade - army bases, an audience ordered to cheer, prescreened Regular Folks thanking him for being born, that's his real milieu - and so he gets out there and sets himself to speechifyin' and whatnot, President Matlock, and then they hit him with the big one and them lights were so bright and so hot and he kind of blurted out the truth.

Yes, he authorized those wiretaps. 30 times? More than that, actually. This is a War on Terra™, and shame on reporters for giving the American people facts they don't need. Now the terrorists know that we're tapping their phones! They were wholly unaware of this tactic prior to now. He refuses to let another 9/11 happen on his watch. (He doesn't really need another one, the first one gave him everything he wanted so another one would just be wasted.) He doesn't need to get warrants from the FISC, he doesn't need to reveal exactly whom this program has surveilled, he doesn't need to submit to Congressional oversight, he's the commander-in-chief during the War Without End, and a growing number of Presidential advisors agree that the Constitution implicitly gives him the authority to ignore the very Constitution which is giving him the authority to ignore what's authorizing him. um. To ignore it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bush's poll numbers (which is what really guides presidential policy, let's be honest) were starting to creep up ever so slightly (with Fox News exultantly crowing about Bush's surge to...um...41 percent approval) before this. Will this kick out the final leg of the coffee table? I honestly don't know. People, especially American people, are notoriously stupid, and easy to dupe or distract. If you throw the word "terrorism" at them enough, they'll cheerfully give permission for you to feed their grandmothers into wood chippers. In 2005, terrorists are the American kryptonite. Just the lingering possibility of their presence seems justification enough to enact the most draconian and hysterical of measures. Few seem to stop and think about the possible ramifications of what they're so blithely condoning by their silence. Few can actually spell the word "ramification," or use it properly in a sentence.

Senator Jon Cornyn (R-TX) defended Bush's admission of lawbreaking by quipping, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Senator Russ Feingold's (D-WI) answer: "Give me liberty or give me death."

As I was typing this, I read that one of the 11 federal judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has just tendered his resignation to the Supreme Court's Chief Justice John Roberts. Associates of U.S. District Judge James Robertson say that he was deeply concerned not only with the President's actions, but with the idea that the past 3 years of surveillance permitted by the court may have been tainted or corrupted by illegally culled information. These people are referring to the FISC as a "Potemkin court." You have people like Bob Barr, the right-wing former Georgia Congressman who was sort of the Madame Defarge of the Clinton impeachment, accusing Bush of breaking the law and subverting the Constitution. You have legal analysts on Fox News saying Bush broke the law. I know the American people seldom disappoint my greatly diminished expectations of them, but I'm hoping that just this one time, they fail me by refusing to let this one slide.

Follow the Lady

2005-11-15T20:56:00.000-05:00

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.
- Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"

Inconsistency is the only thing in which men are consistent.
- Horace Smith

Look! Elephant!
- Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Last Action Hero"

It's everywhere you look these days. In shopping malls, school cafeterias, playgrounds and youth detention centers. You can find kids doing it on every street corner and down every cul-de-sac in Anytown, USA. Torture. It's here. It's out of the closet. And it's taking the country by storm.

It's nothing new, of course. Fort Benning, in the great progressive and cosmopolitan southern state of Georgia, is named after a general who fought for the most prominent slave state in modern history, so it's a perfectly appropriate home for what was once known as the School of the Americas. (It used to be based in the Panama Canal Zone, an even more appropriate locale that symbolizes the love and respect we feel for our brown brothers south of the Rio Grande.) The SOA is a Spanish-language training course whose purpose was to "provide professional education and training" while "promoting democratic values, respect for human rights, and knowledge and understanding of United States customs and traditions." No snickering until we're through, please. The SOA hosted maybe 1000 or so "students" each year during its existence, many alumni returning for more advanced instruction in democracy and human rights. Like Harvard or Princeton, the SOA is proud as all get out of their illustrious graduates. Here's a select few of them along with their later accomplishments:

- Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres (boy, with a name like that, you'd think classes on respecting human rights would be redundant!): SOA Class of 1965. Born in Arequipa, Peru, 1945. Lifelong embarrassment over his commie name drove him to embrace right-wing politics with a particular zeal and fervor. Attended the SOA while a military cadet. His career has included a stint spying on his country for the CIA while Peru had a leftist government, which led to some jail time; a lawyer for the Medellín drug cartel's Peruvian interests; a spy for Ecuador, selling classified defense documents to the Ecuadorian Army; and then personal lawyer and chief of intelligence for Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, supervising death squads that went after Fujimori's political opponents as well as enemies of the aforementioned drug baron patrons. Currently in jail in Peru awaiting trial for 63 criminal charges including drug trafficking and murder.
- Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri Castelli: Career Argentinian army officer. A good career to be in, too, after the Argentinian Armed Forces overthrew the civilian government in 1976 and proclaimed an indefinite Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, the first stage of which was the so-called "Dirty War." The Dirty War was the euphemism for a brutal purge of labor activists, political reformers, and anyone the army didn't like. It's estimated that about 30,000 Argentinians became desaparecidos during this purge. Galtieri rose to become army commander-in-chief by 1980, and was embraced with open arms by the Reagan Administration during his state visit to Washington in 1981. When faced with a tumbling economy he decided to win back popular support by invading the Falkland Islands in 1982, a group of guano-encrusted flyspecks in the South Atlantic that remained British possessions largely because nobody remembered where they were. The ensuing three month Falklands War saw another thousand British and Argentinian lives thrown away for absolutely no reason whatsoever. This led to his downfall - murdering 30 thousand socialists and hippies is okay, but lose a war and they never let you hear the end of it. Galtieri died of a heart attack in 2003 while under house arrest awaiting more trials.
- José Efraín Ríos Montt: SOA Class of 1950. In 1954 took part in the CIA-orchestrated coup on behalf of the United Fruit Company against democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán of Guatemala. (Arbenz was nationalizing UFC-owned lands to distribute them to the poor to farm, and UFC asked United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had invested a large portion of his savings in UFC, to intervene to preserve democracy or something.) Rose through the ranks of successive military regimes in Guatemala. In 1978 he converted to the evangelical Pentacostal right-wing denomination the Church of the Word. In 1982 he seized power in another military coup and launched a truly odious spate of oppressions and massacres. Some of his more memorable quotes during his reign include: "The true Christian carries a Bible in one hand and a machine gun in the other," and the classic, "If you support us, we will feed you. If you don't, we will shoot you." During his brief time in power (1982-1983) he managed to step up the genocide of the indigenous Mayan population, killing at least 10,000 in one three-month period alone, and perhaps three times that number overall, and displacing at least a million of them from their homes. Ríos Montt was himself displaced from power in 1983 but remains a fixture in Guatemalan politics, running unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2003.

I could go on all day about this. Manuel Noriega, the drug running CIA agent and dictator of Panama, until we ousted him in 1989 because he stopped taking our orders. Roberto D'Aubuisson Arrieta, whose ARENA party ran El Salvador during the 1980s and whose Green Beret-trained death squads gunned down thousands, including the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, in 1980. Guy Philippe, one of the leaders of the bloody Haitian coup in 2004 that ended when American Marines apparently "encouraged" Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to resign and leave the country with them (some say at gunpoint); Philippe was a former police chief with a penchant for shooting protestors. Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, two anti-Castro Cuban terrorists and sometime CIA agents, who blew up a Cuban civilian airliner in 1976 (killing 73 people, the worst airline terrorist act in the Western Hemisphere until 9/11), and who currently live freely inside the United States. And on, and on, and on. Detractors started calling the SOA the "School of Assassins." This isn't just a few bad apples, to use one of the right's favorite euphemisms for occasions when America is caught doing bad things. This rot is cancerous and systemic; the tree is rotten, the whole orchard is rotten, and by design rather than misfortune. America has never, ever cared about spreading democracy and respect for human rights, even when loudly trumpeting that it was doing so. This isn't a right-left thing either; President Jimmy Carter himself, Mr. Human Rights, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate for 2002, dedicated his presidency to promoting human rights around the world, and yet he continued American arms sales to and military training for the regimes of Somoza of Nicaragua, Suharto of Indonesia, and the Shah of Iran, all of whom were engaged in brutal military repressions or invasions. Maybe he personally loathed these men and their governments; maybe he longed to overthrow them with every fiber of his being. But he kept sending them checks regardless. (There's some dispute as to whether or not he cut off aid to Somoza at a key point during the Nicaraguan Civil War and whether or not this led to Somoza's downfall, but there's no question about his support for the Shah during the Islamic Revolution of 1979, or the genocide of East Timorese that Indonesia carried out during the 1970s.) The American system didn't just encourage military strongmen and unelected presidents in Latin America, Asia, Africa; it required them. Such despots responded to graft and military support like a fat tabbycat to a saucer of cream, and the concessions they granted to American-based industrial concerns allowed corporations to accrue enough profit from cheap labor and cheap or free land to bankroll the congressmen and presidents who kept supporting the Third World dictators, who kept the system going. This is, at its purest, capitalism. This is the American Way.

Senator John McCain introduced the McCain Detainee Amendment to the Department of Defense Authorization bill for FY 2006 on October 2, 2005, and it was passed by the Senate by a vote of 90-9. The amendment has a particular resonance for McCain; in 1967 he was a naval aviator serving aboard the USS Forrestal, when his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over North Vietnam. McCain spent over five years in the Hanoi Hilton. You did not want to spend five minutes in the Hanoi Hilton, let alone five years. So he knows a bit about torture. McCain's amendments calls for all American personnel, military and civilian, to restrict their interrogations of enemy combatants and prisoners of war (if that term ever applies again...) to the guidelines spelled out in the Army's Interrogation Field Manual. Beyond the fact that torture produces skewed and untrustworthy intelligence, McCain has said that torture "corrupts our soldiers." One would think this glaringly fucking obvious, even without the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal. Anyone who's dealt with a small-town cop who pulled them over for no reason at all knows this. Lord Acton's famous quote that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely works backwards as well. Corruption empowers, and absolute corruption empowers absolutely. You give someone a gun and tell them not only that they can humiliate and beat their prisoners while questioning, but that they should do so, and you wind up with Abu Ghraib, Camp Delta, a string of secret CIA prisons across Eastern Europe. Unarmed men chained in fetal positions and left in their own shit for days, legs and arms broken during questioning sessions, bodies kept on ice for months in order to obscure the results of autopsies. 90 United States Senators think that these are all bad ideas, and that if we're going to claim that we're fighting a war against terrorism, we oughtn't use terror.

If Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut were united by time machine and asked to write a story about the Iraq War, they still might not be able to top this next bit. Vice President Dick "Go fuck yourself" Cheney apparently began lobbying for the CIA to be excluded from this amendment. At the same time, the BushCo White House began a full court press bleating loudly and insistently that We Do Not Torture. I imagine the agitprop backdrop within which they like to ensconce Dubya - you know, subtle slogans like "Saving Social Security" (from existing, I imagine), "Stimulating Job Growth Through Outsourcing," "Ignorance is Strength," etc., that adorn every available square inch of his podium and stage, as if to keep him on topic no matter which way he turns his head in annoyance at the occasional probing question - probably read something like "I Didn't See Anything," or "America Loves the Brown People Who Follow the Rules," or "This Way to the Bald Eagle Petting Zoo," or something else equally desperate sounding. I felt a bit squeamish watching their rhetorical yoga; we don't torture, per se, but America is at war and we have to do what we have to do to protect the American people, so we need to exempt the CIA from this amendment which prohibits torture, which we're not doing. Apparently, their unspoken concept is that some easily duped and misinformed Americans might mistake "doing what has to be done" for actual "torture." But really, nothing could be further from the truth. And to illustrate this point, I'd like to direct your attention to this gold watch I'm holding here. Watch it swing back and forth. Slowly. Inexorably. Your eyelids are getting so heavy you can hardly keep them open, can you?

They're either so miserably contemptuous of all of us, or else so appallingly incompetent, that they fail to see the disconnect here.
-We don't torture, fuck no!
-We just want permission to, if we have to.
-Not that we would.
-Not that it's any of your goddamned business.
-Don't you trust us?
-Why do you hate our troops?
This is what passes for a progression of thought among the right-wing today. Bush said in a recent We Do Not Torture torture support rally that, "Any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture." Now...how did he mean this, exactly? It might read that Bush is saying, We only conduct legal activities, and torture is excluded. Or, a more cynically-minded type might read it as saying, Anything we do is allowed by definition, and if it's done by us then it can't be called torture. Or to quote that great Republican statesman of the 20th century, "When the President does it, it is not a crime."

Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, then none dare call it treason. It's a fact that Americans do not torture, because we're the Good Guys. If we're doing it, then it can hardly be torture, now can it? We're not terrorists; we're fighting terrorists. I only mention that in case some of you, understandably, are having trouble distinguishing one side from the other these days. Like I am.

[Epilogue: Oh, and the School of the Americas? After a decade of concerted monitoring and protest spearheaded by a group called SOA Watch, the School was formally closed in January 2001. The Defense Department then transferred the entire SOA staff to its newly-established Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, which taught the exact same curriculum as the SOA. For its part, the Pentagon insists that, well, the SOA's bad name was due to "a few bad apples," and that anyway the abuses have all been corrected, and that now the WHISC doesn't teach torture, and you should definitely take our word for it this time. By the way, I don't see any yellow ribbons on your car. Why do you hate our soldiers so much? You ought be more careful with what you say, especially these days. The War on Terror is going swimmingly, and that's why we all have to be even more careful and loyal, because the more victories we win the more we have to be on guard for the next enemy. We're fighting a perpetual war to preserve our perpetual peace. And that's all you need to know.]

Going to the Mattresses

2005-11-02T00:25:00.000-05:00

We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!
- White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove

You wanna know how you do it, here's how. They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. THAT's the Chicago way...
- Sean Connery in "The Untouchables"

Come inside, the show's about to start
Guaranteed to blow your head apart
- Emerson, Lake and Palmer, "Karn Evil 9 (1st Impression Part 2)"

Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends! We're so glad you could attend. Come inside, come inside...

Wowsers. What a month for God's Party, the GOP. In the House of Representatives, Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted on charges of feasting on the flesh of heathen babies and drinking their blood. No, actually it's just routine Texas-style money laundering. But years ago the Republicans passed a House rule that they wouldn't be led by someone under indictment, so DeLay has been forced to step aside. Literally. He just kinda stepped to one side. Technically, his whip, Missouri Representative Roy Blunt, assumed the post of Majority Leader, but...let's put it this way, their favorite trick is for Blunt to give a speech while DeLay is drinking a glass of water. But it's a nosebleed for DeLay that might (fingers crossed here) result in a total catastrophic brain hemorrhage that results in him collapsing into a twitching heap on the House floor, blood gushing from his nose, ears, and eyesockets as he shits himself and dies. um. Politically, I mean.

Over in the Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist is being investigated by the SEC for his shaky finances. Frist's also a medical doctor (and a heck of one, too; he thinks you can get HIV from someone's tears, and he was able to diagnose Terri Schiavo just by watching a brief video of her) and his family started and is heavily invested in the Hospital Corporation of America. When he entered the Senate he put his investments into a "blind trust," except that Frist received regular updates about this trust and was able to order the sale of a huge chunk of HCA stock weeks before the price plunged owing to poor quarterly results. hmmmm. Also, HCA itself is the reigning champion of Medicare fraud, having been forced to cough up $1.7 billion after decades of ripping off Tricare, Medicare, and Medicaid. So that's where he's coming from.

Also, beyond the Beltway, in terms of human loss October 2005 was I believe the third or fourth month of the Iraq War for the Coalition of the Willing, meaning, America. 94 deaths. And the military is talking about a "new generation" of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that are significantly more sophisticated and effective than those previously encountered, that's being deployed now by the various Iraqi insurgencies. And every so often a general will admit that the insurgencies (note the plurality; too often it's assumed that it's just one enemy, and that's the problem, we have different enemies with different strengths, weaknesses, and agendas, cooperating with one another to varying extents...a Coalition of the Unwilling, if you will...but that's another blog entry) have not been significantly attrited as yet. BUT, we're Turning The Corner™. If I hear that pedantic mantra peddled to us one more time, I'll...well, in all honesty I'll probably just rant here for a bit and then go and watch TV or something. But my lethargy is besides the point. Give it a rest, neocons. Get a new fucking metaphor. We've turned so many fucking corners by now, you might as well make M. C. Escher the chairman of the joint chiefs. Any more corners turned and the United States Army will march straight into a wormhole, outflank their past selves in 2003, undo the fabric of spacetime and then we're all fucked. (Might make a cool movie, though.)

But enough of that hippie talk. BushCo won't be deterred by increasing casualties, because war is not real to them. A few more dead month to month affects them only so much as it influences the poll numbers. No, the real tragedy for them this month was the first indictment in what's being called either "the Plame Affair" or "Plamegate." I hate the kneejerk tacking on of the -gate suffix to any scandal, so I refuse to call it such. SO. The Plame Affair. I hope I don't have to recap it for any readers of this blog, because I'm longwinded enough as it is. Scooter Libby. Or, more properly, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Or to be a stickler for accuracy, Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby. (His seldomly attributed given first name does explain a bit why he voluntarily answers to "Scooter.") Last Friday, special prosecutor Patrick "Fozzie Bear" Fitzgerald got 5 indictments for Libby from a federal grand jury, on counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice with regards to Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame Affair. Coming a day after Bush's cleaning lady withdrew her name from consideration for nomination to the Supreme Court, this was a brutal political blow. The new meme that BushCo began transmitting was that, because Libby was indicted on charges relating to covering up the investigation, rather than the issue being investigated in the first place, that this was a) the "criminalization of politics," and b) actually a victory for Bush because it proves, somehow, that there was no crime in the first place. Of course, they ignore the idea that the investigation has been delayed and prolonged because, you know, of the ongoing perjury, false statements, and obstruction. This parry was so exceedingly feeble that the White House's blade snapped off its hilt.

So this week, they went back to the drawing board. Monday saw some success as Bush named Samuel Alito as his new choice for the Supreme Court. Alito is, um, well...how to sum this guy up...let's see: he thinks that it's okay for employers to fire someone with AIDS for no other reason than this fact; he thinks that Congress cannot legislate the private purchase or ownership of machine guns at all; he thinks it's A-OK for cops to execute a search warrant of an apartment and then subject a ten-year-old girl living there who wasn't named on the warrant to a strip-search. ugh. He's contemptible. Naturally, conservatives were ecstatic. Faux News was shouting from the rooftops that this guy was the bees' knees and that Bush had buried the Plame Affair...that he'd Turned The Corner™, if you will. Day Two of the Great Conservative Counterattack was scheduled to have Bush's speech on how to deal with the threat of a bird flu pandemic (our Dear Leader's brilliant strategy: buy more flu shots). It was the classic BushCo one-two combo: bigotry, then fear. It worked on Kerry, it ought to work now.

Late last night, apparently, the Democratic Senate leadership held a war council to talk about blunting this counterattack. The Minority Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada, is no Tom Daschle. He doesn't sit there and politely take exception to the Republicans rolling over him with a steamroller, as Daschle tended to do after losing control of the Senate again in 2002. Reid so far seems to be a brawler. Consequently, out of nowhere today, Reid interrupted debate on the budget to call bullshit on the Senate Intelligence Committee's stalling on their report on the use of pre-war intelligence by the Bush Administration in the march to war. The committee, chaired by Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas (who slightly resembles John Hurt in the film Contact, except sans British accent), had said in July 2004 that such a report was called for and would be issued in a timely fashion. Shockingly, the report was not issued in time to influence the 2004 election, which was a year ago this week. Senator Reid, in a grand performance of political theater, said, "I demand on behalf of the American people that we understand why these investigations aren't being conducted, and in accordance with Rule 21, I now move that the Senate go into closed session."

All of Washington collectively shuddered at this unexpected political kick to the testicles. Rule 21 is a rarely invoked Senate rule that summons all 100 Senators to chambers, throws out the public and all camera crews, and essentially isolates the body while a particular issue is discussed and settled. It should not be confused with Rule 42, first noted by legal scholar Lewis Carroll, which bans all persons taller than a mile from the courtroom. Muddying the matter further, Vice President Cheney responded to Reid's move by issuing Order 66, which instructed all Clone Troopers across the galaxy to exterminate any Jedi on sight. Finally, Kevin Costner attempted to invoke Law 7, which states that any man may challenge for leadership of the clan, but nobody even saw The Postman and Costner was escorted from the Senate chamber by the sergeant-at-arms.

During the closed session, Reid and a clearly bitch-slapped Frist agreed to appoint three Senators each to a joint investigation of why the Intelligence Committee hasn't issued this report yet 16 months after the fact, and the Senate was opened again a few hours later. Frist held a press conference and whined that he had "never had such a slap in the face" as this. Reid then interrupted the conference to give Frist a wedgie and steal his apple. (I wish.) Senator Roberts, who was obviously deeply embarrassed that the entire Senate had been assembled to line up and throw feces at him in such a public manner, blustered that he was still deeply involved in getting to the bottom of this matter, but he was undercut by the committee's vice chairman, Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who said that there'd only been token work done on such a report. Roberts had spent the months of July and August of 2004 just writing his name at the top of the first page, for example. Weeks were wasted as he claimed his staff was trying to locate his "favorite pen." Now the new six-Senator panel will report back on the committee's progress within 2 weeks, no one's even talking about Bush's bird flu plan (which apparently doesn't even buy enough flu shots for us anyway), and the Democrats seem to have retaken the conch from BushCo.

The main Republican complaint is that Reid pulled this without prior notice, that (gasp) unilaterally calling for a closed session is simply not done. I say bravo, and bravo, and bravo. You don't send engraved invitations to an ambush, and that's exactly what Reid delivered today, a richly deserved ambush. During the Bush years, the Democratic strategy to stay in office has been to go the high road politically, and to agree with the Republicans on things like the war and just hope that they get re-elected. This is, in the words of Dean of Students Ed Rooney, a one-way ticket to nowhere. Reid, Durban and the rest seem to be trying to emulate their elder statesman, octogenarian West Virginian Robert Byrd, who forcefully denounced Bush's war and led a losing fight to rally opposition to that fateful vote in October 2002. Byrd, who strikes me more and more as a modern-day Democratic Cato, was let down by party leadership at the time, by a wavering Tom Daschle who was holding on to the Senate by his bloody fingernails and was scraping and bowing to the alleged wishes of the nation by agreeing to bomb the brown people back into the Stone Age. For his troubles in accommodating BushCo, Daschle lost the Senate in 2002, and his own seat in 2004. Reid doesn't seem to be cut from the same cloth.

Today's action was a political signal from the Democrats: that this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe 2004 wasn't the most important election of our lifetime. After all, Kerry's stance on Iraq was practically indistinguishable from Bush's. But after a triumphant and still totally-fucking-inexplicable-to-me re-election last year, Bush blundered into the Annus Horribilis of 2005 like a breakdancer heading for a minefield, and is looking to end it with two black eyes and a bleeding rectum and being thankful for getting off so easy. The Plame Affair, Frist, DeLay, the shitstorm of scandals in the Ohio GOP...BushCo is bleeding from a dozen flesh wounds now, and there's a real chance that they could lose the Congress next year. Starting tomorrow, there's exactly one year to go. From this point on, it's going to get bloody.

Night Train to Mundo Fine

2005-09-21T06:52:00.000-04:00

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
- James Baldwin

The media often makes me laugh. Not the sweet, summertime shady spot under an old oak tree [with a dangling tire swing and initials carved in a heart], missing-a-front-tooth childishly innocent, trapped in a living Ray Bradbury reminiscence dripping with nostalgia for his Great Depression youth, "I am a child of the Earth Goddess and I bask beneath the night sky and drink in the stars" sort of happiness, no. It's more a "I just stepped on a rusty nail and now it's jutting from the web of skin between my big toe and index toe," paper cut on your gums, out of ammo, ain't that a B, kind of a laugh. On September 19, CNN [meaning Clearly Not Neutral, ha! ha! ha! thanks to loyal reader Rush L. for that jape] was blaring from its website the following headline:

N. KOREA AGREES TO GIVE UP NUCLEAR PROGRAM

The article went on to breathlessly elaborate how George W. Bush had finally, finally, showed us liberals What For and rolled up those magical shirtsleeves of his [the better to tap those eldritch energies, methinks] and Gotten The Job Done. woohoo. Even I was mildly optimistic. Until, that is, I actually got past the opening paragraph.

"Nearly three years after ordering U.N. nuclear inspectors out of the country, North Korea Monday agreed to give up its entire nuclear program," CNN's anonymous stringer in Beijing reported. [Why don't news websites give bylines? It just says that some dolt named Stan Grant "contributed" to this report. Well, bully for you, Stan, but changing a colon to a semi-colon and wiping the actual reporter's chocolate fingerprints off of the copy with a moist towelette doesn't make you Edward R. Murrow. You suck-up, you can't write for shit, just give it up.] Well, hey, giving up its entire nuclear program. That sounds pretty sweet! North Korea is a xenophobic pocket tyranny world-renown for its near-total lack of cuisine [Pyongyang's only 4-star restaurant's specialty of the house is their "Pyongyang Surprise," a lumpy casserole made of porridge, parsley, and iron rations] but they seem to make a darn good, or at least fissionable, nuclear explosive. Luckily for us here in America, they can't possibly use them against us. By us, I mean any Americans not living in the Hawaii-Aleutian, Alaska, or Pacific Standard Time Zones.

[no, I wish I was kidding; analyses differ, but apparently their Taepodong-2 long range intercontinental ballistic missile has a theoretical range of somewhere between 3650 and 6000 kilometers. That's 2268 to 3728 miles to you and me.]

Anyway. Good news right? We don't need to worry about North Korea's striking capacity...as, I'm certain the well-informed and thirsting-for-knowledge American populace was. We can go back to not paying attention. [cough]

hrm...there does seem to be a single gloomy little raincloud in the sky, though: "While the joint statement has Pyongyang giving up nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs, it also acknowledges that North Korea has stated that it has the the right to 'peaceful uses of nuclear energy' and that the provision of a nuclear light-water reactor will be discussed at 'an appropriate time.'" huh. So, they're giving up their nuclear program...but...they want another nuclear reactor. um. Yeah. Something...something doesn't seem to fit here. Let's see...giving up nuclear power...but they want a reactor, which they can't use, because...well, I'm fairly certain that that would be nuclear. uhh...

Oh the heck with it. The heck I say! It would just be defeatist and unconstructive and downright Democratic of me to suggest that this very minor sticking point could in any way prove to be a major obstacle to finalizing denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Right? Right?

Wellllll....maybe not so much.

CNN headline 14 hours later:

NORTH KOREA DEMANDS REACTOR FIRST
Pyongyang: Ending weapons program tied to civilian power

Hey, wait a second. I thought Bush solved the problem? I could have sworn I saw shirtsleeves being rolled up. "North Korea said Tuesday it would begin dismantling its nuclear program only if the United States provides a light-water reactor for civilian power." oh. Oh no. This does not sound good at all. "'Without this physical guarantee of the (light-water reactor), our position is not to even dream of us giving up our nuclear deterrence,' the official KCNA news agency quoted a spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry as saying." Hey. Crap. This is not good at all. I mean this is exactly what happened 11 years ago, when as part of the US-DPRK Agreed Framework we agreed to give the North Koreans two light water reactors to replace their archaic graphite-moderated nuclear plants which were capable of making plutonium. [Got all that? I don't. I'm as lost as you are.]

That whole 1994 agreement was a mess. First of all, it wasn't actually a treaty, just an informal and unenforceable "arrangement." Secondly, no side seems to have followed through on anything they promised. Well, not completely. Part of the Agreed Framework was a US pledge to not use nuclear weapons against North Korea, and so far as I know we haven't actually done that. But otherwise, both sides lied and stalled and reneged. DPRK was supposed to get these new light water reactors to replace their old ones, and while they were waiting for them to be built, we were supposed to ship them fuel oil to make up for the electricity lost from shutting down the old plants. Before that was done, the International Atomic Energy Agency had to sign off on the DPRK as being up to spec for their safeguards and waste storage. Before that, the US was supposed to end economic sanctions and normalize diplomatic relations with the DPRK. Well, I don't think any of that was done. We haven't started exchanging ambassadors, we eased up slightly on sanctions then renewed them in full, the light water reactors that were supposed to go online in 2003 have not even been built, and in total contravention at least of the spirit of this agreement, the North Koreans gave up their plutonium-based program and practically the next day started an enriched-uranium program. Oh, with help from Pakistan. Yes, that Pakistan. So, everybody's an asshole, seems to be the lesson for today.

[Sidebar: Why would our buddies in Pakistan help out those fuckhead North Koreans? Especially since Pakistan has long been a geostrategic ally of the People's Republic of China - mainly because both Pakistan and China agree that they hate India. So why would they help give nukes to that festering wound along China's northeast coast? Answer: because North Korea had some very nice ballistic systems for sale. And Pakistan, while it had been a "secret" [shh, don't tell] nuclear power since the 1970s, was falling behind in the South Asian arms race when it came to ballistics systems. India's Prithvi and Agni series of ballistic missiles were operational and deployed, and Pakistan needed to level the playing field for their upcoming once a decade flare-up with India over Kashmir. Enter Abdul Qadeer Khan, called the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb - picture Dr. Strangelove as played by Omar Sharif. Khan, "unbenownst" to the Pakistan government [that's our story and we're sticking to it, look over there, an elephant!] had sold [or engaged in talks with to discuss the sale of] nuclear research, technology, and quantities of uranium hexafluoride to Libya, Iran, elements of al-Qaeda, and North Korea. Khan confessed to helping give nuclear technology to our enemies in January of 2004, but, don't worry, our loyal ally Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pardoned him in February of 2004. So everything's cool.]

[is anyone still reading this? Christ, this must be boring for anyone who's not me. But I shall continue regardless, because I can't sleep.]

Okay. So the ball, as they say, is in our court. North Korea is really serious this time, they're not kidding, they want that reactor. We promised and they waited and we didn't give it to them and they cried and stomped their feet and told Mom and let about a million of their own people starve to death, and now, they're not going home until they get their reactor. This is largely a matter of face-saving for them, I think. The stakes are higher now, because instead of a nascent nuclear weapons program with potential, they now have [or claim to have] an actual nuclear arsenal. They have a lot more to lose, so they have to try and make a big deal out of this light water reactor thingee. They're not waiting, they want a firm agreement to get it before abandoning the one wild card they have in this poker hand.

All is not lost. We just can't take the bait and let these talks blow up. It's up to our diplomats to suck it up, give them an inch, and, whatever they do, to keep an iron grip on this official, for-real, legally binding commitment to disarm, and not let Pyongyang scuttle the talks and walk away with their nukes. Because if that happens, they're just going to double their efforts at uranium enrichment, because they know that the Emperor is on his way and he's just not as forgiving as Vader. But I for one have every confidence in Secretary Rice and her elite staff of Bush-appointed Republican loyalists.

...hoo boy.

CNN headline September 20:
U.S., RUSSIA REJECT N KOREA DEMAND
Pyongyang: Ending weapons program tied to civilian power

Okay, so. um. I guess this is the Cheney Doctrine in action. "Go fuck yourselves, Stalinist dictatorship with an army of one million plus, and half a dozen nuclear weapons, and the missiles to use them." Greeaat.

Our own Condi Rice, let's hear it for Condi, ladles and germs:

"'We will stick to the text of the Beijing statement and I believe that we can make progress if everybody sticks to what was actually agreed to,' Rice told reporters at the United Nations Tuesday." So, North Korea is really stressing this...but I'm going to pretend that I can't actually hear them. huh? huh? Get it? Now, THAT is something they just don't teach in Secretary of State School. You have to pick that up on the streets.

"'The text of the agreement says that we'll discuss a light-water reactor at an appropriate time. There were several statements afterwards that make clear what that sequence is.'" You should just tell Kim Jong Il that it depends on what the meaning of is, is.

So basically, the "five powers" [everyone but the DPRK] say that A, B, C have to happen before Kim gets Z, and Kim is saying that he must have Z before he can do A, B, and C. Shock. Dismay. No One Could Have Foreseen This.

...except, of course, that this was all COMPLETELY OBVIOUS to anyone who had bothered to read the first news article covering this. Is everyone just fucking stupid, or what? I mean I expect stupidity from the Bush State Department, but CNN is supposed to have at least a couple of smart people sitting around, maybe making coffee for the anchors, I dunno. I don't even want to look at the MSNBC [a division of General Electric; GE - We bring good wars to life!] or Fox News [Sieg heil!] websites, they've probably photoshopped Bush into the Roman triumph from Gladiator in cock-slathering adulation. You know, they never just want to report the facts...it's either the Second Coming of blah blah blah, or Countdown to Armageddon, no inbefuckingtween. It's irresponsible and it tends to erode people's interest and trust. When every story is huge, but the world doesn't seem to change all that much, then ordinary people stop paying attention. I wish I could believe that this wasn't deliberate. When you pare away the sober and serious and complex coverage of news stories, the only audience you have left are the dullards who need a "storyline" to follow, a simple narrative to world events that they can follow and hopefully clap along to. Luckily, these people tend to watch a lot of fucking TV. And then the media can wash their hands and say, "Well, we're giving our viewers what they want." bah.

As for our government itself, for fuck's sake, this is the same retarded square dance we promenaded through over a decade ago, only now we don't even have the threadbare excuse of rose-tinted naïvete. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, the President's TelePrompTer cuts out and he fumbles to finish his sentence with a lyric from The Who because he's so fucking clueless. So after all this hemming and hawing, all Bush's lame-ass insistence on six-power talks, six-power talks, six-power talks will solve all the problems, and make you taller, and richer, and girls will talk to you if you engage in six-power talks...after that sad shuffling about during last year's debates, mocking Kerry for not knowing how grownups handle problems [by making China fix them, apparently], this is the best deal they can provide, the same goddamned warmed-over shit from 1994. I take that back, they seem to be on the fast track to fucking it up even more than the Clinton Administration did. At this rate, unless we bite the bullet, or unless [less likely but possible] Pyongyang gives in, the North Koreans are going to go home, tell the world, "Hey, we tried, not our fault," and churn out warheads like they were...um...easily manufactured items that were something different. And since we jumped out and took all the credit for the so-called breakthrough a couple days ago, if it blows up we're going to get all the blame.

I'm sure that, somehow, in the next few days, we'll find out that the Mayor of New Orleans is really the one at fault here.

Four and Seven

2005-09-11T08:37:00.000-04:00

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
- Noam Chomsky

After a while, I started hallucinating, and developed a tumor. I believe the visions caused the tumor, and not the other way around.
- Brian O'Blivion in "Videodrome"

Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring down the barrel
At the Arab on the ground
I can see his open mouth
But I hear no sound
- The Cure, "Killing An Arab"

A cancer is not only a physical disease, it is a state of mind.
- Dr. Michael M. Baden

This is who we are.
- Terry O'Quinn in "Millenium"

September, so they say, is the cruelest month.

It was a sunny Tuesday morning; I was driving to work. The old reliable Toyota Celica, dirt-brown, seats covered with discarded bank deposit slips, junk mail, chipped CD cases, grimy pennies, pens without caps. I was as usual running five minutes behind, and I had to pull off into a shopping plaza to mail some bills (late) before going to work. I drove up past the laundromat, the liquor store, the hobby shop. Found the mailbox. As I got back into my car it occurred to me that I hadn't turned on the radio yet. I sometimes get lost in whatever it is I'm thinking about, World War II battles in the Pacific or the elections in Russia or my favorite scene from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' brilliant Watchmen, whatever, my mind seems to possess a nigh-infinite capacity for dangerously vacant disgression, and so I drive twenty, thirty minutes in stark silence, then a gear in my head turns and it occurs to me with a static shock how horribly quiet it is.

I turned the radio on.

Another September morning. I hadn't been sleeping much for the past few days, weeks, months. I hadn't really slept all year. What had been solid, adamantine, immutable, was molten, crumbled, melted, dissolved, smashed, annihilated. I knew it was coming. We all knew. I gave up hope some time early that spring, I think...at least this is how I remember it, now, in retrospect. After my subconscious brain has had years to revise and edit and really sculpt the soft clay of my memories into shapes and contours more palatable and pleasing to preserve in perpetuity for posterity. It had been my birthday two days before, and I remember hearing my mother on the phone to someone, who knows who, that week, saying all she wanted was for it to not happen on my birthday, that I'd never be able to get over it if it happened on my birthday.

The night before it happened, I sat in the warm shadows of our living room. His bedroom, now. I was a TV kid; the warmth of the cathode ray tube was soothing, comforting. I didn't have many friends as a kid. [Hell, I still don't.] My mother and father seemed to have mostly complementary schedules and were seldom in the same room together. I don't have many real, Official Happy Family memories. Not that it was bad. It just was...there. An existence, neither good nor bad, at least to my childhood mind. So I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch in the family room, reading, watching TV, looking out the window at our unusually arboreal backyard. The family before us, or perhaps the one before them, had planted trees everywhere in our yard, and even after 14 years most of our backyard was denuded of grass, owing to the overhang of interlaced treebranches blocking out the sun. I'd look out through the sliding glass door and feel...content. Protected. Safe, sort of. Lonely sometimes...a lot of the time, to be honest with myself...but safe. It was like living in a big terrarium. And I was a big turtle. [no snickering.] Content to plod around and live inside the stories I was just starting to realize that I could create on my own. But then, it woke up inside of his brain, and started to eat his memory and his motor functions, and he couldn't climb stairs anymore, couldn't do much of anything, and he took over my safe TV room and it never felt the same in there, still doesn't to this day. I wasn't sure how much of it was from the tumor, which a surgeon had told us was the most persistent and malignant kind of brain tumor one could get, and how much was from the radiation therapy as they tried to sear it out of the tender flesh of his brain. But the right side of his body was limp and dead now, the arm dangling so low that it eventually became permanently detached from its socket, the leg swollen and unbending and useless. First we tried installing a motorized chair along the wall of our stairs, so he could go up and down to his bedroom and the shower and such...but he wanted no part of it, and the chair had a single inaugural elevation and descent and then sat there at the bottom of the stairs and we all tried to politely ignore it. To be honest, I think we were all happy to escape upstairs at the end of every day. We were afraid. I'm a little ashamed to say that I was so fucking grateful to get away from him at night. He was starting to sleep more and more during the day, and he couldn't talk anymore, and I was just so grateful, no more rambling conversations where he got angry with me because he couldn't string a complete sentence together, no more endless repetitions about a delusional summer vacation in North Carolina we were supposed to leave for any day now, no more blank, tearful looks that made me squirm. As the end finally caught up with us, all I could feel was gratitude for his rapid disintegration. I hated myself for that. But I couldn't take much more of it. I needed it to be over. We all did. And the guilt, for wanting that, was eating away at me. The night before it finally happened, I sat there next to his gurney, in front of the fireplace, and held his hand, and touched the waxy, cool skin of his face, and cried, and cried, and cried.

I turned the radio on, to WBAI, a big old commie radio station here in the Tri-State Area that I listen to quite a bit. The person talking, I think it was Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, sounded distracted and upset, and she was talking about some foreign disaster, a plane crash or an explosion or something. I thought that that was terrible, some Union Carbide-scale multinational fuck-up that no one was ever going to hear about, or care about. But I couldn't make out what exactly she was talking about, there was a lot of cross-talk [I think...again, memory plays tricks on you] and confusion, and the signal was a little weak, small community-owned radio station and all, so I decided to go as far away as I could on the dial, content-wise at least, and clicked on WXRK, New York's own K-Rock and home station of Howard Stern. And...much to my bewilderment...and dawning, creeping, horrifying realization...there hadn't been a disaster in Botswana, or El Salvador, or Turkmenistan. I heard bits and pieces of it. The World Trade Center. Both towers in flames. 8 passenger jets hijacked. The Pentagon has been blown up by a bomb, no, another plane hit it. The State Department building has been hit with a car bomb. There are still a dozen planes missing from all radar screens. Fires all over D.C. Mass hysteria in New York City.

And I was hearing about it, the biggest and most horrific event in my lifetime, from Baba Booey, Robin Quivers, and Jackie the Jokeman. If you can imagine a more bizarre and surreal fucking experience, then your powers of imagination far outpace mine, my friend. It would be like hearing an old radio broadcast about the attack on Pearl Harbor, delivered by fucking Abbott and Costello. Is this a joke? Are they shitting us? Howard Stern has just told America that we're at war, what the fuck is this...

Is this it?

Is this my Moment? The defining Moment of my generation? Is this the big one, the cosmic event, the instant which will forever after throw all memories past and future into sharp and remorseless relief? I shook my head. I laughed ruefully. I hit my steering wheel. I swore, furiously and aloud, to myself, to Howard Stern, to people in the cars around me. I looked over while sitting at a red light, and rolled down my window to hear what the fellow parked beside me was shouting. "Turn on your radio!" he screamed, a double-chinned latter-day Paul Revere. I nodded that I had done so, and he moved on to the car on his right, losing himself in his self-appointed mission of dissemination. The light turned green and I peeled out, turning left, driving north. The shock was starting to find the low ground of my mindscape, pooling up in the blasted craters of fury that pocked my brain here and there. I can almost see it now, pooling, swirling, liquid rage, not red, not black, but green, the sick green of neon and antifreeze. Green rage, sweating from every fold of my brain. The rage was my mind's means of keeping me moving, from falling over and sobbing and shouting out and having a major fucking freak-out right there on Route 9. That could come later.

So angry.

So fucking angry...and at the same time...relieved. My father was not an easy man for me to live with; or, at the very least, I was not an easy son for my father to live with. I was, I know, a vague disappointment to the old man. Let's face, I'm just fucking weird most of the time. Quirks and idiosyncrasies that a paltry handful of women find "cute" and "interesting" [an exceedingly paltry handful, godfuckingdamnit], are considered "sissy" and "weak" and "fucking pathetic" by most fathers. And my father, I realize now with Epimethean afterthought, bent over backwards to try and accommodate my sullen introversion. He just wasn't the right person to do it, I guess, and I can only accept so much blame for being who I am until I just say, "Enough, fuck it, I'm not apologizing anymore." My dad used to tell a story, when he was trying to drive home a point on how I'd fucked up in a particular situation, that when I was a kid he used to play catch with me and I'd complain unless the ball was thrown right towards me. This, to him, was the first and ultimate demonstration of me being a poor son, I think. You know it never occurred to him that, hey, maybe I didn't want to play fucking catch, that it seemed pointless and stupid and not fun, a waste of fucking time. Hey son o' mine, let's sit down and tie our shoes, over and over and over again. For about an hour. Because it's fun. Even then I think I lived mostly inside my head, replaying stories, imagining them from different angles, different perspectives, rewriting the endings, changing the characters. I was precocious as fuck, and loved nothing more than to be left at the library for an afternoon. I didn't like other kids. Or adults for that matter. I felt complete, in and of myself, and I didn't particularly feel like I needed to play with anyone else.

[This completeness in and of myself evaporated like a rolling fog the moment that I first noticed girls. But, that's a whole 'nother post.]

I didn't want my dad to die. But now he was, and there was nothing to be done, and I started to consider what my life would be like without him. I had lived in fear of this man for as long as I could remember...needlessly, he had never really so much as laid a hand on me, a few vigorous shakes and knocks here and there notwithstanding, and actually for the longest time I was convinced that the tiny scar on my forehead was a result of his practicing a circus knife-throwing act on me when I was a toddler but I'm fairly sure that I dreamed that, but I once again digress...but he was so imposing, he so dominated our family and thus my early life that I simply could not comprehend our existence once he died. In fact, I was already there...he'd been dead to us for months already, we were just taking care of his body before it died. I'd basically dropped out of college to help Mom take care of him, stopped going to classes, just abandoned that part of my life. Mom had the double treat of dealing with Dad's cancer, and her mother's cancer, at the same fucking time, so I stayed home with Dad while she sat crying in a hospital room in north Jersey. [Just to drive the point home for us, two of our three dogs had to be put to sleep that summer as well, also because of cancer.] None of us wanted him to die. But...the idea of it just popped into my head one day, the slightest niggling notion of it. Of a life...without the Fear. Not any fear. But the Fear of him. The self-imposed Fear I couldn't remember not knowing, that had surrounded me all my life. The Fear of him. Soon, I'd be around, and he wouldn't. And I'd never acknowledge that desire, not consciously, no, never, that was impossible, I didn't want that, I didn't want him to die.

And then.

hmm.

Then.

Then I realized, or rather, I admitted to myself, that I didn't want to kill him, and I didn't want to see him die...but maybe, just maybe...I wouldn't mind being in a world, where he wasn't around anymore.

The shock of admitting that made me sick. Literally.

At first.

And then. I just. Got used to the idea.

And he got sicker and sicker, and the dread began to dribble away, to be replaced by a creeping, indifferent, intolerant...annoyance.

I didn't want to change his diaper anymore. My father was wearing a diaper, did I mention that? Yes, he was totally incontinent by that point. And he drooled. And he stank, because he barely washed anymore, not a full shower at least. He stank like a wino, like some subhuman homeless person, and he couldn't move without me holding him, and his fingers would clutch at me tremblingly and pull at my arm, and sometimes he'd try to say something and it was gibberish. He wasn't my father. My father was supposed to be strong, and take care of us. But he got cancer and he was leaving us and what were we supposed to do now, how could I go on, how could I wake up every day and go outside knowing that the strongest person I ever knew was rotting away? This happened to other people, this wasn't supposed to happen to us, it wasn't fucking fair, I wanted it to stop and it wouldn't stop and I didn't know what we had done for this to happen...there's just nothing worse in the world than to lie awake at night and hear your mother crying in the next room and knowing you couldn't do anything about it. That's about the lowest fucking feeling in all of creation.

He was tormenting us by persisting.

So.

Yes. I wanted him to die.

And when I held his hand that last night, and cried, I think I was crying for myself. And I hated myself even more for that.

I got to work and my mind was in a total fucking tumult. This was Big, Big, Big. Unfuckingbelievably BIG. We were being attacked. This was going to mean a war. I didn't know where we were going to attack, to be honest I think that I envisioned a series of Oklahoma City-type bombings across the country, and bloody FBI raids and shootouts at secluded wilderness hideouts. Maybe carpet bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age [short trip]. I think in one pale and shuddering moment I feared that Dubya would invade Iraq, but dismissed the notion as being too ridiculous even for him. Silly, naïve me.

My two bosses, Walter and Bill, were there, listening to a crappy little radio. We sat and talked. I felt like I was taking this far harder than either of them, but that's probably an unfair assessment in hindsight. The phone rang - our regional director for New Jersey, Dominick, my old boss when I first started working at the theater. Dom's never been what you'd call a drama queen, but this was über-Vulcan, even for him. Boy, how about these attacks. Yeah, well it'll probably be slow today so try and send some people home to save on payroll. Later. Christ, man. I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

Something occurred to me: Brian, my brother, had recently started working for the Secret Service, and he'd been working out of the Service's NYC field office at 7 World Trade Center, not one of the Twin Towers but part of the complex itself. [The building collapsed a little after 5pm EST that day.] I didn't talk to him much, but I started to panic a little, not knowing what to do, how I'd reach him...Mom was off in Ireland [again!] and I didn't think I had his cell number...I was fairly certain that he'd started attending Treasury school down in Georgia that week or the week before, but still. The uncertainty fluttered around in my stomach all day. Work was a friggin' ghost town, although the few customers that did stumble in seemed totally fucking oblivious, one of them even coming over to bitch about his popcorn being stale while we were listening to accounts of the first Tower collapsing, seeming to listen with us for a moment and then resuming his tirade about how the customer is king and is it so hard to have fresh popcorn really. Man. I haven't thought about that guy in years. What a fucking asshole. I wish I could run in to him again, just so I could punch him in the fucking jaw, seemingly for no reason whatsoever, but I'd know. I'd know and I'd laugh. I'd laugh, you fuck. hmm. Anyway. I begged off working that night, using Brian as an excuse, but I just went home and flipped from channel to channel to channel, trying to make sense of everything. Letting it wash over me, letting myself drown in it. The numbing quicksilver tide, sucking me down. I was....empty. Horribly, horribly fucking empty. I can't really describe it any better than that.

That's how I felt during his funeral services. Sitting there, surrounded by people who were almost all strangers to me. Caring, concerned, totally alien faces. Shaking my hand, hugging me, whispering bland clichés meant to comfort, but none of it made any sense to me. It was numbing, overwhelming. Like playing catch. To what end. What was the point. What was meant to be accomplished. Maybe there was no point at all. I wondered if my father had asked himself those same questions, while he still could, before the cancer chewed through his brain like a maggot, before it took his happiness and his dignity and finally his life. What was the point of it all. What was the fucking point.

I still don't know. To this day I don't. To this day, I wander around, aimlessly, without direction, still that scared little boy. A boy wearing the body of a man, like an ill-fitting suit. I feel like I'm in disguise. Like I'm faking it. Is that how everyone feels? Does that feeling ever go away?

It's still September 25, 1998, and my father lies dead in his coffin, looking like a mannequin to me, looking unreal, none of it is real. It's still September 11, 2001, and 3000 people have just been burned to death, and the world itself is on fire, and the flames won't be extinguished within my lifetime. It's September 2005, now, at this moment and forever, and I don't recognize the world, I don't recognize myself in the mirror anymore. I look at the face there and someone else stares back at me. He looks just as confused as I feel.

It's getting cooler out now. Soon the leaves will start to fall. In another 12 days I'll turn 31, for whatever that's worth. I used to really love this time of year.

À Cause De Moi, Le Deluge

2005-09-10T21:20:00.000-04:00

There is no purpose for government except to improve the lives of its citizens, yet as scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality.
- Bob Schieffer

The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.
- Abraham Lincoln

Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.
- "President" George W. Bush, talking about Homeland Security Under Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response Michael Brown's efforts in dealing with Hurricane Katrina

[Preface:

[The title of to-day's word-play, which should be French for, "Because of me, the flood," was meant as a pun on the famous saying, "Apres-moi, le deluge," which means "After me, the flood." It's a saying that I was always taught was said by Louis XIV of France. I remember this very vividly. In 10th or perhaps 11th grade, my teacher, the very young and quite liberal (in contrast to my thickskulled knee-jerk Reaganite conservatism at the time) Ms. Linda Thurston, a 22-ish-year-old Yale grad who was teaching at Freehold Township High School for some strange reason, was giving us a brief overview of European history, or philosophy, or something. Anyway, she gave us the quotes, "L'état, c'est moi," meaning "The State, it is me," and the other one. But in looking for a reference while typing this, I find the quote first attributed to Louis XV, not XIV...and then to Madame de Pompadour, XV's slutty mistress...and then I find some site saying it was said by Prince Metternich of Austria! Fuck! And it was "Apres-nous le deluge," and the context was slightly different, and I'm just fucking pissed off about this. I mean it's like my whole fucking life is a lie now. What else was I incorrectly taught in high school? To what extent has this fraudulent mountebankism determined the low and miserable road I've traversed in the 13 years since they foisted that sham of a diploma on me?]

To everyone who is shocked, just shocked, that this government "finally" made a big mistake and botched the response to Hurricane Katrina...finally, yes...after an unbroken string of successes...to all of you lost, blinkered souls, I offer a compassionate hug, a sad and knowing look, and a hearty, vigorous kick to the crotch. Whether your reproductive organs should lie nestled safely within your abdomen or dangle limply in sacks of skin, they'll feel the fury of righteous irritation, incarnate in a size 12 steel-tipped boot named Freedom. A crushing blow right to the babymaker. Hopefully we can pinch your addle-pated stupidity off with this generation. Just imagine, insignificant ol' me wandering this great land from sea to shining sea, leaving in my wake a groaning, throbbing mass of crushed ovaries and testes. A regular Johnny Ballstomper. Warms the old heart muscle, don't it.

My only hope is that the centrist Democrats finally stop fighting with Dean, who is after all their elected chairman, and let him do what he does best, which is tap into the anger and indignation and sheer fucking bile-choked frustration of American liberals whose hatred of this presidency seems to leave them incoherent and ineffective. Dean was brought down not by the right, whom he never had a chance to fight, but by the middle...the spineless, meaningless, soulless centrists who ape Clinton's tactics but not his passion, and certainly not his connection with Americans. We hate Bush for what he stands for, and the right loves him for that same reason. Because (he seems, anyway) he stands for something. It's as if the commitment is more important than the cause which that commitment serves, as if we'd prefer a dedicated Nazi to an indifferent small-D democrat. And sometimes I think that that's not at all an exaggeration. We've been numbed into such a state of apathy and ignorance that we'd mistake sincerity for good judgment. I'm sure Bush's people sincerely believe what they're doing is right. On some dim reptilian level of his brain, I'm sure Bush himself sincerely believes the things he's told to say and to do. And these people don't seem to realize how sincerely twisted those beliefs have made them. We, the Left, need to stop trying to make the Right like us. They are never going to like us. They are never going to respect us. We need to forget this Model UN bullshit and go after them with brickbats and crowbars. We need to go after Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al the Chicago Way. They pull a knife, we pull a gun. They put one of ours in the hospital, we put one of theirs in the morgue. We need to recognize that we are at war, not with unemployed civil servants who can't feed their families in Iraq, not with mullahs and muftis squatting in a cave in Afghanistan, but with multinational corporations, with the religious right, and with Christian Capitalism itself.

I think if more people knew who Smedley Butler was, and what he did for this country, and were to read his pamphlet War is a Racket, they might at least begin to rub the sleep from the corners of their mind's eyes and look around and notice that things aren't as they should be. We are not living in the world we want. We're living in the world that they choose to give us. Every day I'm more and more convinced of that. They cut our jobs, they pare back our benefits, they tell us it's rough all over and we have to do the best we can. They poison our food and blame us for eating it. Some friends of mine are, or were, quite interested in the works of Ayn Rand, and for a brief time I was as well. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that her system is nothing but a huge apologia for the true Looters, the real Aristocracy of Pull...here in America, they call themselves capitalists, but strip away cultural barriers and they'd feel right at home alongside entrenched Chinese Communist apparatchiks, doling out contracts and property and money to friends, family, lovers, and simoniacs...nothing but a self-perpetuating kleptocracy of bribes and lawsuits and mindless, clammy obsequy...Christ...it makes me so fucking angry sometimes, just impotent with rage and helplessness, watching my country lining up to drink the Kool-Aid, and swallow the poison pill. Because they've convinced themselves that it's a benediction, and not the blandly indifferent execution of a death warrant.

People who say they don't vote because it's a waste of time, are lazy cowards. Yes, money rules this country, and politicians are corrupt, and blah blah blah, that's true but you're still a fucking coward. Our avenues to power have never been broad, they have been since the foundation of this country narrow, and winding, and treacherous, and it's getting harder and not easier, but they remain, and they're ours, and we have no one to blame but ourselves for the mess we're in. At this moment in time I sincerely believe that it's possible for the Republicans to lose control of Congress next year. I really believe that. This is a fuck-up of Biblical proportions, a sugary sweet irony given this President's alleged adherence to Christ, and it could not only cost him Congress, it could unseat him as well. Let's play a game of What If...and I know it's foolish to shoot so high, but if you stole a time machine and turned sidewise in time and found the me of 1995 and told me that the son of that has-been George Bush was going to be president someday, and that he'd plunge us into a war with Iraq, and that the city of New Orleans was going to be underwater, I'd have laughed and laughed and laughed and then asked you where this London police box came from. That would probably precipitate a discussion of what the hell a police box even is, and why did anyone ever think that that was a good idea to have.

[Doctor Who reference. Just forget it. If I tried to explain you'd respect me even less than you do now.]

Anyway. The point is that the wildest political fantasies of yesterdecade seem poignantly naïve and rock-stupid today. And if a President can be impeached during an economic boom because he lied about getting a blowjob from the girl in the mail room, he ought be horsewhipped to within an inch of life for a war and a flooded metropolis. And if we can give the Democrats the political will to retake the House and Senate, I think we can goad them into going for the jugular and unseating this demented boy-king and riding his ass out of Washington on a rail.

Alright. That's all for now. More soon hopefully.

[Update:

[I've compiled a list of suspect "facts" taught to me by various instructors in my high school years, and it seems thus far that they're all untrue:

[The value of Pi is not 58.

[Denmark is not a rectangular state between Wyoming and Montana.

[Hervé Villechaise in all likelihood never even met Ho Chi Minh, nor was he heavily involved with the Viet Cong's opium-smuggling efforts in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle.

[There are not 22 planets in this solar system. (That's 4 too many!)

[As they were separated in history by almost 300 years, Charles Darwin and Leonardo da Vinci never used to go drinking and whoring together in Lisbon. I was really pulling for that one to be true, to be honest.

[The value of Pi is also not two-fifths.

[And finally, Theodore Roosevelt did not shoot William McKinley while playing poker. That's a total fallacy. That one really burns me up.]

The Hypnotized Never Lie

2005-07-26T20:15:00.000-04:00

The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.
- Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Morrison R. Waite, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, May 10, 1886

Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.
- Lord Edward Coke

This administration is not sympathetic to corporations. It is indentured to corporations.
- Ralph Nader

So, for all my semifiery rhetorical flourishes about rights for workers and the threat of corporations (private, unaccountable tyrannies, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky) and blah blah blah, it turns out that I actually work for a pretty horrible corporation that abuses its workers. Well. Back up. We're not necessarily talking about International Telephone and Telegraph overthrowing Allende to protect their Chilean holdings, here, or de Beers sending in platoons of ex-SAS mercs to stamp out tribal flare-ups threatening access to their diamond mines, or Chevron flying in Nigerian death-squads on corporate helicopters to gun down a bunch of folk-singers protesting their despoilment of the Niger Delta, or anything quite so Machiavellian. To my knowledge the company which employs me [a rather large motion picture exhibition company which I think it would behoove me to refrain from naming here...a tip of the hypothetical fedora to my friend Frank, whose paranoia regarding Paramount's Star Trek division is apparently communicable, thanks a lot Frank *] has never turned people out of their homes, had them arrested or had them shot. However. At least in the area of the country where I work, we're pretty strongly anti-union, we pay our employees shit in comparison to other local jobs [supplemented by concession commissions which aren't guaranteed as no one works that position every day, are subject to the vagaries of local attendance and the appeal of that week's film releases, and are constantly being reformulated so as to somehow scrape a few dollars here and there from their bonus at a slowly but inexorably increasing rate], and we tend to either work their asses off or else starve them for hours, depending on what our overlords tell us is this week's most important priority.

Now, in all fairness, this is a "free country" and no one forces anyone to get a job with us, and we do throw them a few perks to entice them to stay with us like a tuition assistance program, a rudimentary health care deal [bare bones, really], schedule flexibility, etc. But still. Every now and then I feel a twinge or three of hypocrisy. What right do I have to listen to the lectures of or read the books of Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, Tariq Ali, Doug Henwood, Joseph Stieglitz, and other anti-globalists too varied to mention, and nod my head knowingly and gnash my teeth metaphorically at the litany of corporation outrages they recount? I'm Management. The lowest rung on the management ladder, but still, Management. I'm one of the Bosses. I've actually fired people before. That's still quite a boggle when I think about it. But the fastest growing sector of our economy [which apparently is booming like it's never boomed before in the history of mankind, according to renowned economists like Newt Gingrich, Bill "Slots" Bennett, and Sean Hannity] is service industry jobs. I know, I know...that's pretty embarrassing for us as a nation, isn't it. But there we have it. We're transmogrifying from a nation of steelworkers, lumberjacks, and carmakers into one of fry technicians and donut glazers. Which I think suits corporations and the Republican and Democratic wings of the Property Party just fine. They get their manufacturing done in Mexico and Malaysia and their cars washed and their food cooked here by low-paid Americans. Subsequently, the old lions of organized labor, unions like the United Steel Workers of America and the United Auto Workers, and the big granddaddy super-union, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the venerable AFL-CIO, find themselves crumbling.

John J. Sweeney has been a part of the labor movement for about 50 years. He made his union bones working for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Alright, I admit it: that sounds kinda gay. But the ILGWU wasn't sitting around playing with dollies, they were fighting and striking to shut down sweatshops. Later on, Sweeney joined the Service Employees International Union, probably the most important union of the AFL-CIO, and rose to become its president. The SEIU was his power base in winning the presidency of the AFL-CIO itself, which he's held since 1995. Well, Sweeney seems like a dedicated union leader [undoubtedly at least a little corrupt, as many of their highest tier of American labor are these days, sadly], but to his discredit, he's not been able to parlay his success at the SEIU into a broader success for the AFL-CIO and for American organized labor in general. [The President of the AFL-CIO is sort of like the Archbishop of Canterbury for North American labor leaders, a "first among equals," even though many big unions like the UAW aren't a part of that organization.] While Sweeney was head of the SEIU, that union almost doubled in membership, which may be more a testament to the rapid transformation of the American job market than to Sweeney's skills at recruitment. But his assumption of power with the AFL-CIO has not seen similar spikes in union membership across the board. Fifty years ago 1 in 3 private sector jobs was a union job, today that's dwindled down to less than 10 percent. The biggest areas of union growth are the service industry and the public sector [the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees was the single largest donor to the Democratic Party this past election cycle]. This is not reassuring to workers in the Rust Belt and farmhands in the Grain Belt.

Recently, the growing, semi-private schism in the ranks of organized labor has exploded into a public power struggle. It's been coming for years, but it really began to build steam following John Kerry's loss last November. The AFL-CIO, to no one's surprise, had backed Kerry, but Sweeney had really pulled out all the stops this time, sensing blood in the water from the Iraq debacle and postulating that maybe the Republicans had overextended themselves and could be caught in the flank and rolled up. [As it turns out, middle America hates faggots and Ay-rabs, so Bush was safely re-elected, or elected, I should say.] And when Kerry lost it was a major blow to Sweeney's prestige. Voices of discontent began to be heard, the loudest of which belonged to his former protege and successor as head of the SEIU, Andy Stern. Sweeney has long been an advocate for electoral activism; let's try and get as many Democrats elected, and they'll help out the unions. Stern feels that this is putting the cart before the horse. Why should Democrats, to whom we've tied our fortunes inextricably, have to cater to an ever-shrinking base of support? They know unions don't have friends in to-day's GOP, they're not going anywhere in their present condition. So they'll gladly cash contribution checks from unions, make a few speeches, and then do 80 or 90 percent of what Republicans would have done anyway. Stern feels that unions need to spend more money on growing themselves - finding new membership, the lifeblood of all union coffers - and then deal with both political parties from a position of strength.

It was all a lot of hot air, with outside observers calling it a power play, a son turning on his father figure, etc. Stern and others formed a "Change to Win" coalition which most assumed was just a way for him to air his complaints publically.

Then last week, the SEIU, along with James P. Hoffa's International Brotherhood of Teamsters, announced that they'd boycott the annual AFL-CIO convention. A few days later, both unions said they were leaving the organization. Now, most of you probably haven't heard about this, because to-day unions aren't newsmakers most of the time. But this is big news. Potentially the biggest thing to hit organized labor in decades, something that will reinvigorate labor or kill it. Millions of workers just walked out of the largest labor group in the Western hemisphere. [And I'm including the Communist Party of Cuba, which rules an entire fucking country. The PCC has less than a million members I think.] Now, the SEIU and the Teamsters have been joined by the Laborers' Union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, the United Farm Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and a quirkily named hybrid union called UNITE HERE [the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union - isn't that clever? - one of whose component unions, if you go back far enough, is Sweeney's old ILGWU]. This is a major, major realignment of labor power. I guess the question is, which faction is right, the Old Guard Sweeneyists or the Young Turk Sternists. Suppose Stern is right. They start to funnel exponentially more funds into recruitment drives and breaking into non-union jobs. Five years down the road, the Change to Win coalition [or whatever the new group calls itself] could be four or five times more powerful than the AFL-CIO is to-day. And that could mean that both parties have to take them seriously from now on. And labor policy affects foreign policy, don't kid yourself otherwise.

Will the rump AFL-CIO drift towards the center and right now? Maybe after Sweeney they'll become the GOP union, an increasingly irrelevant labor aristocracy trotted out to make speeches endorsing candidates and doing little else. Some feel that this is all they're doing now for the Democrats anyway, so what does it matter if they throw in with the Republicans...

Or maybe this schism is going to really hurt labor in the long run. I hope not. But who knows. A lot of people to-day bitch and moan about lazy, corrupt union workers, who get paid to sit on their asses and do nothing and blah blah blah. Yes, of course there's corruption in unions. Like there isn't corruption in major corporations and in government? Unions at least are there looking out for workers' rights, while corporations do everything they can to subvert and whittle away those rights paid for with sweat and blood generations ago, and the government only cares about employees when it's forced to by its constituents. Fine, construction workers are bums, okay, sure. Take a trip back 100 years ago, when these people routinely worked 7 days a week, 15 hours a day, taking years off of their life expectancy with highly hazardous work conditions for low pay and no health care, and when an accident clipped off a leg or a hand or seared their lungs they were kicked out on their asses with nothing. Read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and then tell me about how unions impede capitalism. You know, capitalism ain't all that great. Spend about 15 minutes studying current affairs in Latin America or Africa and you'll find fifty reasons why these people love communism a lot of the time.

I guess we [we, the people of Earth...that's idealistic and naive, I admit it, just deal with it] need to find a way to harmonize and unite the best traits of market capitalism and progressive communitarianism. I used to be a capitalist. I'm not quite a communist. Somewhere in the middle is where we need to be going.

* Just kidding, of course. I've been paranoid for as long as I can remember.

Goodnight Motherfucking Moon

2005-07-25T09:24:00.000-04:00

Life is not so short that there is always time enough for courtesy.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Social Aims"

It was so quiet, you could hear a pun drop.
- Arthur 'Bugs' Baer

The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.
- W.C. Fields in "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break"

Okay, a caveat first and foremost: to-day's story is just me blowing off a little bit of steam, spinning a real anecdote which really doesn't amount to much into a hopefully comical tale of woe, and as such is not intended to be a hidden "slam" or "attack" or any such nonsense. I mean this is the Internet for Christ's sake, hiding something here would be the acme of asininity. I'm just trying to write more these days and I need to sharpen my claws and this is what I happen to be thinking about and so here we are. The subjects to which I shall refer in this entry to my knowledge don't read this weblog, or even know about it, although, hey, I could be wrong. But anyway. If you are reading this, don't throw a hissy, is all. Because then I really will get mad.

Anyways. As I began to relate, to-day's tale is less of a strident and condescending quasi-coherent rant about some perceived fault or shortcoming of society, and more of me bitching about something that bothers me. Lots of things bother me, actually. The fact that, if I awoke in the middle of the night to the cool sensation of gunmetal pressed against my temple, and an untied cravat were thrown at me, and a husky, vaguely European-sounding voice in the darkness told me to tie it...[well, not so much Alan Rickman in "Die Hard," that's too arch and smarmy, but not too Billy Drago/Jeroen Krabbe/Bruce Payne either, though these are all serviceable Eurovillains, at least so far as Direct-to-Airline Studios is concerned...ack, another verdammt tangent]...anyway, were my life to depend upon my ability to properly tie a necktie, I would be dead. This bothers me more than you'd think considering for the past six (6!) years I've had a job where wearing a necktie is part of the dress code. And to this day, I remain unable to tie it without it getting all lopsided and sticking out too much on one side of the knot, requiring constant repositioning. This, coupled with the nascent desire of all my dress shirts to experience the joy of flight, as expressed by flapping their collars heavenward about four times during the course of the average workday, tends to make me look like a buffoon. Alright. Correction. More like a buffoon.

Dimes bother me. That's right. Dimes. Twice the value of a nickel, but so fucking slender and tiny...this has been bothering me for over twenty years. No, this is not something I just made up to try and be funny, because this isn't particularly funny, this is sad and bizarre, but it bugs the living shit out of me. And don't even get me started on the logic of who goes on what denomination of coin and bill. Thomas Jefferson was NOT the second fucking President of the United Fucking States of Motherfucking America, so why in the name of baby Jesus is he on the two-dollar bill? Hmm? Care to proffer an explanation for THAT one, you fuck? No? I thought not. By all rights, we should have a two dollar bill bearing the portrait of JOHN MOTHERFUCKING ADAMS, who was after all OUR SECOND FUCKING PRESIDENT, and perhaps, should it prove necessary and if the rampant homophobia should ever abate in this great land, a three-dollar bill with Tommy J and Monticello and all that jazz. Look, I told you it wasn't particularly funny, don't look at me like I'm some kind of freak. I just want some goddamn equitable and historically accurate currency, is that too much for which to ask, at long last?

Riffing right along, I hate when people tell me that history is their least favorite subject. To wit: the venom and fervor spat upon your monitor screens in the preceding paragraph was basically dredged up when an employee of mine recently identified the president on the two-dollar bill, after much hemming and hawing and knitting of brows and apparent soul-searching, as "Donald Jackson." Yes. That's correct. DONALD Jackson, who by the way wasn't even a fucking president at all, thank you very much. I, perhaps predictably, went a little hard on the kid. I said you get half-credit, because there was a President ANDREW Jackson ("oh yeah! Andrew, is what I meant"), but then that half-credit got totally shot down because this isn't him. He's on the twenty. Oh, right, you knew that. Oh I'm so sure. Just add a zero after the two, Nimrod. Alright, so maybe making him run twenty-two laps around the concession stand ("two for Jefferson, and twenty for Jackson, you fucking Mongoloid") was a tad too disciplinarian, but you know what, ignorance is no defense so far as I'm concerned. People who are old enough to vote, drive, and marry, who can tell you the batting averages of every Yankee without blinking an eye but who stammer and blush like virgins if you ask them who their congressman is, well, these people need to get smacked around every so often, so far as I'm concerned. No sympathy. These people aren't like you and me, they're stupider, but they feel pain less. They're bred that way. I will say this, though: that stupid shit is never going to confuse his fucking presidents, ever again. He's going to be seventy-five and shining shoes in some bus terminal somewhere and you ask him who's on the two-dollar bill, he's going to cry out, clear as day, "Thomas Jefferson!" Right before he starts running.

Okay. All this talk of general annoyances was more or less prefatory to the actual story I set out to tell, but then I got so caught up in the other ones that now I'm not as annoyed as I was. Give me a moment.

...right. Annoyance levels restored. So Saturday night, intel reported heavy chatter with regards to several key words, such as "gaming," "Saturday," and "yes." Using a highly-classified threat matrix as well as some obvious context clues, I pieced together that my roommate was hosting his gaming group that night. I was working anyway and they usually keep to his room so what do I care. Game your asses off. Now, here's the tricky part: wait. I should back up a bit.

Long-time readers of this column remember that for the past few months, I have been without an actual room of my own, owing to the diligence and steadfastness of the Brick Township Fire Marshal. I guess in their defense, if I was actually trapped downstairs when a fire broke out and suffered lethal asphyxiation from smoke inhalation, or worse, burned to death in a fiery conflagration, I'd probably be a little pissed. However, this has yet to happen, so I remain sulky and petulant as I go to sleep each and every night in my makeshift bedroom which actually used to be our dining room. It's empty anyway since our Chris-ectomy this past May, so there's just enough room for my bed, a rickety little folding table, and a bucket in which to catch my tears. "Why do you continue to stay in such a shitty place?" you might rhetorically ask. I'm actually considering moving home for a while but have been loathe to actually take steps to implement this plan, which I've designated Operation Big Fucking Failure At Life. Who knows. Anyway. Tangents. Okay. So I'm sleeping in the open, save for a pair of black bedsheets thumbtacked up like some low-rent semi-private hospital room for Goths, and I get home Saturday night around 2am-ish and hey, there's a nurse sleeping on my couch.

In my living room.

Which is adjacent to the dining room.

Which is now, you know.

My bedroom.

Which of course has no wall separating it from the living room.

Which is fucking moot, anyway, because he's snoring so goddamn motherfucking loudly it would probably pulverize right through that wall like a shaped fucking charge. This is no mere hyperbole, boys and girls. And it only fucking escalated as the night wound into day. At first, it sounded something like a man trying to inhale a bullfrog through a funnel. And I don't mean any run-of-the-mill amphibian off the street here; I'm talking Calaveras County, genetically engineered, no fucking around, mutant size-of-a-fucking-football frog here. I'm talking about a frog that could hoist the hammer of Thor. Firmly wedged into that funnel, being slowly mulched as the inexorable air pressure sucks it in millimeter by bloody millimeter, its death-ribbit a wet, hacking, wheezing crunch echoing through the hushed stillness of the apartment. The kind of wet crunching sound you get when you smack a bag full of hamsters against a concrete wall. If. um. If you're wont to do that kind of thing. Anyway. That's how it started.

Friends, that's how it started.

After an hour spent downstairs on the computer, trying to think of something that might hold my interest for a bit longer that I might look up on the web...let's be honest, basically hiding in my own apartment...I decided enough was enough, I was going to go upstairs, how loud could it be, I'd fall asleep eventually. Well, that plan didn't come off so well, actually. I'm not sure what happened, but the wetness of my houseguest's snoring diminished slightly (my initial theory, that he'd sucked in a couch cushion, the sponginess of which served to absorb some of whatever unholy ichor was gurgling inside his windpipe and esophagus, was disproved this morning when a quick visual inventory showed all cushions present and accounted for), along with a proportional amplification of volume. Maybe the fluid had been dampening the sound, and now that that was gone he could really get this party started. Who knows. So I in my cap crawled into bed and tried to settle my brains for a long summer...uh...reading. I was breezing through Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (which was quite good, and I recommend it) and so I figured I could wait him out. Sooner or later he'd wake up, or quiet down, or. I dunno. Die.

I clicked the light on, which shone a bit over my hospital sheet wall, and tried to lose myself in my book. A few times, he seemed to stir as if on the verge of fully shrugging off his sleepiness and waking up, and I thought perhaps the light from my "room" had woken him up. I wondered if he'd stumble over and ask me to turn the light out because he was trying to sleep. I found myself hoping that this would happen. I sat there, less and less reading my book and more and more choreographing this imaginary and highly theatrical confrontation. [I was hoping it might get to the point where I could throw my drink in his face.] Now, a saner person would imagine a quieter world, where they could sleep, rather than hoping to make someone else feel bad because they themselves have been aggrieved. I tend to do this sort of thing a lot, actually, and I'm sure that it doesn't speak highly of my character. Would I rather be able to justify feeling sorry for myself, and getting others to feel sorry for me, than have a problem go away? Wouldn't it be better to try and solve the problem itself, and not adapt to it and take what cold consolation you could from people's sympathies? I felt on the verge of a minor mental breakthough, and then, of course, the wheezing began again. Really began. I mean the stuff before, that was just the preliminaries. The overture, if you will. Now commenced the main symphony, his Ode to Insomnia. You laugh, perhaps. It couldn't possibly be as bad as you're describing, come now. No. If anything, I'm going easy on the poor guy here. The snoring reached such a passionate crescendo that I became convinced that his subconscious had hijacked the autonomous functions of his body and was desperately crying out some long-buried secret torment using the only means it had to communicate, playing him like some snotty, wheezing bagpipes. ugh. Sorry, that image even bothers me, and I'm pretty sick when it comes to this sort of thing.

Finally, some time just after five in the morning, I fell asleep. Or lost time, or got hiccupped through the space-time continuum or something. Next thing I knew, it was 6:10 am. Subjectively, I had just jumped ahead an hour in time, I had no explanation for it because I certainly hadn't gotten any sleep or rest. And why had I come back to consciousness? Yes, that's right, the snoring. The snoring. Christ on his throne, that word is just too fucking feeble to describe what he was doing. At this point, it was wheezing, phlegmatic, blaring....he was pulling out all the stops with this one, this was his masterpiece, his fucking Ring des Nibelungen...he was winding up his epic, and now, his lungs began to blast out his Gotterdammerung. The sounds...you almost have to reach back to the feverish, frantic prose of a Poe or a Lovecraft in attempting to delineate such an otherworldly, inhuman, starkly alien and profoundly hideous cacophony.

Imagine, if you will, a herd of placid, gentle, timid manatees, languorously frolicking in the warm, salty waters of the Caribbean...playfully chasing one another, quite slowly of course, owing to their greasy, blubbery, uneasily maneuvered masses...perhaps sidling up and nudging one another for sport, or maybe splashing together to start another round of Marco Polo, or the primitive manatee equivalent thereof...snuffling happy little manatee laughs...blissfully unaware, as indeed we the omniscient spectators wished we could be, that the herd has unwittingly floated directly onto the final stretch of the American Powerboat Association-sanctioned 15th Annual Miami Super Boat Grand Prix...dull, stupid sea-cow eyes blinking innocently at the approaching flotilla of shiny mid-life crises gleaming in the hot July sun, a surging, churning, irrevocable, gleaming chrome tide of whirring steel death...they might flop about in panic, or just bob there, unable to comprehend the imminence of their demise, as the armada plows straight over them, 1200hp propellers chopping through and getting clogged by fifteen tons of bloated sea-cow blubber...the whine of straining engines, the low rumbling screams of the manatee, side by side, an awful chorus of mechanized slaughter...the placid, crystal-clear waters of the Caribbean frothing blood-red with the carnage...horrible...just horrible...oh, the humanity...

So anyway. It sounded a little bit like that.

[Was that over the top? I suspect it was. Sorry.]

Whew. Really lost myself in that analogy, didn't I...where was I...oh, right. I eventually fell asleep again, and got some rest, but, I dunno, I think some common courtesy would have been nice. Am I way off base here? It's one thing to say, "Hey, sleep here tonight, not a problem," and quite another to say, "Hey, sleep here tonight, in my roommate's room," [which is what it amounts to, really, never mind whether or not I wanted to watch TV or something in the living room which is where I've been banished by circumstance], "oh, and by the way, why don't you rev this belt sander constantly for the next seven hours too so he can't get any fucking sleep even if he wants to." Although the soothing sound of a belt sander would have been an improvement, honestly. But seriously. Next time, snoring houseguests can sleep in his room.

Alright. I feel a little better now. Thanks for listening, blog. Next time you do the bitching, deal?

In Steam Engine Time, People Build Steam Engines

2005-07-20T22:13:00.000-04:00

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.
- William of Ockham

There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me but I had it surgically removed.
- Peter Sellers

The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in light of their purposes.
- Henry Kissinger

It's amazing that brain can generate enough power to keep those legs moving.
- Gene Hackman in "Superman"

For those of you wondering, if any of my loyal audience remains after YET ANOTHER extended hiatus due to writer's block and a surfeit of indifference (yawn), the title of to-day's entry is YET ANOTHER obscure quote of sorts, from a fella name of Charles Fort. I couldn't track down the exact quote so I didn't want to cheat and pass off some garbled paraphrasing as the man's actual words. I felt I owed to you. The Readers. Aren't you grateful? Yeah, whatever. Don't pretend to care, because I know you're faking it. Anywho. Arbitrary self-inflicted rules for quotations don't apply to entry titles, so I found a way to sneak it in, heh heh. [I guess the idea of outwitting myself isn't really sinister-chuckle-worthy, now that I stop and mull it over. But what the hell, I'll treat myself.] ANYWAY. The point being, the "quote." Well, first a little background bio.

[cue up old-timey newsreel music]

CHARLES FORT: A Life

Charles Hoy [?] Fort was not born in a log cabin in Albany, New York on August 6, 1874. Come to think of it I'm fairly certain that by 1874 there were few or no log cabins in Albany. [This was of course long before the great Albany Log Cabin Renaissance of the 1950s. A short-lived and highly inflammable architectural fad.] When he failed to make a living as a short story writer, he decided to broaden his ambitions and soon was a failure as a novelist as well. He managed to see one of ten novels he wrote make it to publication, but it sold poorly. He then began simultaneous work on two books, cleverly titled X and Y, which were about the sinister machinations of Martians and a hidden South Polar empire, respectively, but grew discouraged when he forgot which book was which and abandoned the project. This proved to be a blessing in disguise, for his next work, The Book of the Damned, was an uncharacteristic success for him. This work was Fort's collection of "damned" facts, that is to say, damned by the scientific and learned authorities of the day, anyway. Anecdotes about crop circles [which reminds me, that movie Signs was a total piece of shit; but I digress], spontaneous combustion, the Loch Ness Monster, how the Mayans invented television, that sort of thing. Perhaps his most famous quote, which usually makes the rounds of various and sundry UFO conspiracy circles, is, "The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property." I guess he was sort of like Robert L. Ripley without the cartooning part. Anyway, Fort had found his calling, and wrote many other volumes of strange facts and factoids, sort of founded a quasi-serious group to further explore the limits of the possible and impossible called the Fortean Society, and basically milked the gimmick onto which he'd stumbled for all it was worth. Many charge Fort with being credulous and trusting to the verge of imbecility, but Fort himself was quoted as saying, "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written." Some would say this reveals the man's naked charlatanism. Others counter that he was trying to topple the scientific orthodoxy of his day, averring that a more flexible, open-minded heterodoxical system of inquiry might be more beneficial to the Scientific Method. Some would then remark that Others had a point, but still, they hated that fucking Fort. Others then called Some losers who were just jealous, and then sometimes a fistfight would break out.

[end old-timey newsreel music]

I know that I had a point to make when I began that...

Oh. Right. The not-quote. It's supposed to be Fort's rather Fortean explanation for why things can be invented at roughly the same time by disparate and far-flung societies with no way to influence one another. To me it sounded like Fort was suggesting that history, or biology, which, if you think about it, is the most basic and primal historical epic of all, flows through and is guided and directed by a series of invisible and almost incomprehensible series of predetermined contours, barriers, and gullies. A broad valley, if not an actual riverbed. I suppose the idea is rapidly approaching obsolescence in the 21st century, when Kikiyu shamans, Ainu whalers, Tibetan lamas and emperor penguins all seem to have cell phones and websites, but still. It might serve to explain the preponderance of certain ideas and ideologies at various points in history, up until and including this very picosecond [now] as I sit here typing [no, now] this sentence [now!].

For example, why Islam? The West, meaning the North Americans and Europeans who like to think they run the planet and aren't often wrong, have fucked with virtually every alien culture they've ever encountered on this entire planet, and the minute we discover intelligent life on Mars will be building spaceships to go and fuck with them. We've conquered, colonized, exploited, harassed, murdered, "sivilized" [that's a quote from Huckleberry Finn, not a rare typo, calm down], emancipated/manumitted, and continued to exploit every brown and black culture the Southern Hemisphere has to offer, and a few Northern ones as well. We're still doing it. Central and South Americans are our modern-day Okies. We let them stream through our deliberately porous borders so they can scrub our toilets and pick our fruit [hopefully not on the same day], and then we evict them and lock them up when they have the audacity to not make the effort to more effectively evade our feeble but politically necessary efforts to stop illegal immigration. [Lazy Mexicans. Can't they take the time to get better forged documents?] Yet it wasn't a ragtag team of Hondurans, Venezuelans and Mexicans who flew jumbo jets into our financial and military capitals 4 years ago, even though I'm sure they could make a case arguing for the justification of it. We don't face a shadowy, stateless, ill-defined coterie of pan-Latino bombers and assassins who lobby for the creation of a Native American absolutist regime stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Strait of Magellan. [And NO, the Zapatistas of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas do not count. They're not blowing up 747s at LAX and La Guardia, they just would like it if their people could afford food and housing most of the time, that's all. They're not exactly the Cobra Crimson Guard.] Nor are we "threatened" [let's face it, al-Qaeda itself is not a threat to America. Americans, yes. But they're just a symptom, not the problem itself] by hostile cadres of Zulus, samurai, or Magyars. It's the Arabs. More precisely, the Islamists, whose primary fuel seems to be Arab nationalism [again, footnote: not that al-Qaeda is nationalist, it's not, it wants to create a multiethnic Sunni caliphate, but if it weren't for the jangled nerves and wounded pride of Arabs who feel exploited and emasculated, there would be no al-Qaeda, in my opinion], but fuck it, let's just say the Arabs. Why is it that they're rebelling against us when the other conquered peoples of Earth have just about gotten used to the chafing of their yokes?

Maybe Fort, in his own oddball way, had a point. In the time of Intifadah, or "Uprising"...well...people start uprisings. Maybe the historical pendulum is starting to swing back. Maybe this is the second real "threat" to American hegemony [the first being North Vietnam, which managed to distort and to an extent impede our imperial designs considerably in its day] or maybe this is a momentary pothole on the road to American annexation of most of the planet. It's hard to say. Just remember: it took centuries for the "barbarian" [meaning "non-American"...ha, sorry, I meant "non-Roman"] peoples to bring down Rome. I'm sure whole generations of Roman citizens weren't even conscious that their entire society was falling all around them. But when it finally crashed, it did so with such finality and impact that it set society back at least five hundred years. Maybe a thousand.

Is it healthy for the human race to have to tolerate the existence of hyperpowers like Rome? And America? When we fall, how long will it take civilization to recover? Or will we try and take them all with us when we go? Look at what we've done in Iraq. The rational, sane, humanist opposition to our presence there has been either marginalized, co-opted, or assassinated. The sadists and the faithful, who are one and the same in my book, are running the Loyal Opposition Show now. And make no mistake about it, the relationship between the Bush White House and the Iraqi insurrectionists is every bit as symbiotic as it is parasitic and cancerous. [Human relations often parallel biological processes, but they just as often invert and defy them.] We want to stamp out the rebels but we need them just as badly, to justify our presence there, to be the butchers and barbarians so that we can be the legionaries of order and law. We need the terrorists to kill our soldiers because the blood of soldiers makes excellent whitewash...it washes away the sins of commanders and commanded alike. We Must Never Forget. Support Our Troops. My Country, Right Or Wrong. Blood is the glue that plasters these mantras to the walls of the decent and civilized world, blood, some of ours but mostly yours, blood, blood, blood. I risk repeating myself, but what I say three times is true: in every war, in every war, there are two sides, and they're not the opposing armies on the battlefield. They are the ones who want the war, and the ones who try to stop it, and each faction has adherents that cross the dotted lines of a map. Bush wanted this war, and so did bin Laden, and Zarqawi and al-Sadr and all the rest. They entered into a silent conspiracy, a compact to which all warmongers swear fealty - to keep the killing going, so that We Can Do Whatever We Want. Societies, in the end, are organized around their ability to make war. Maybe societies themselves, as we understand the term to-day, are the problem. But what is the solution then? An endless string of independent Platonic city-states? Anarchy, which is just a maternity ward for mob rule? I don't know. I truly don't. I don't think anyone has the answer yet.

The problem is that we've all seemed to stop asking the question.

[On a final note, this apparently marks the two-year anniversary of my starting a weblog. I have to be candid and admit that I've written perhaps a tenth the amount of output I'd hoped to produce, and a lot of it is embarrassing and self-absorbed, but some of it isn't so bad as it could have been. Hopefully, in terms of passion, prolificacy, and profundity, the next two years will put the first two to shame. Probably not. But it's a journey, not a destination, right?...]

Dreams Walking In Broad Daylight

2005-05-16T23:56:00.000-04:00

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
- William Butler Yeats

Where you used to be,
there is a hole in the world,
which I find myself constantly
walking around in the daytime,
and falling in at night.
I miss you like hell.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
- Charles Schultz

So. The termination of another lackluster, uneventful, ennui-soaked vacation. And what have I learned, this time?

- Time is perverse. On the one hand that is over here, it doesn't feel as if 8 days has passed at all. It feels like a looong day and a half, maybe. Even though I didn't really do anything except: sleep away a lot of sunlit hours in a fitful restless torpor; eat a bag of Pizzaria Pretzel-flavored Combos and wash it down with a few gallons of iced tea, or as I like to call it, nectar of the gods; watch a few episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; sit around in boxers and a t-shirt with the lights off and the blinds closed and listen to the Doors and write interminably long passages of voiceover narration about man's inhumanity to man, while getting piss-drunk and punching out a mirror; drive up and down Brick Boulevard and Hooper Avenue, and sometimes over to the shore and back, passing the places I had set out to drive to initially, getting angrier and angrier at the feckless, mealymouthed straight-up balderdash (yeah, that's right, I said it, so what? it needed to be said and I don't care how offensive my language is) effluviating from a rotating hydra of right-wing talking heads to which I for some unknown masochistic reason continue to subject myself; oh, and some laundry too. But on the other hand which is over here on the other side of me, it also felt as if I've been away from the world for over a month or four, a minor spell of incarceration for crimes unspecified and unproven and too embarrassingly meager to waste the court's precious time by ennumerating or proving them. I've always been an iconoclast and a misanthrope, and something of a recluse, and yet I'm not much better at being alone than I am at being among people. I think just the mere burden of existing has always been my problem. It's so tedious, such an effort. I sometimes wish that I was able to discorporate my component molecules for a few hours at a time. Just break myself down and not-exist, as a free-floating and formless cloud of disrupted matter. And then, when my internal alarm goes off, molecules knit themselves back together and shrug a structure out of the dust of nothingness and I exist again with a crackling echo of discharged eldritch energy or something equally apropos. And even if it doesn't relax me and harmonize my pagh, it would still make for a handy trick at parties. Hey there's that guy who can disintegrate himself, isn't he interesting, I wonder if he's single.

- I loathe children. Recently, because of a bet I lost with God, I've had to sleep with my bed in what used to be our dining room. I'm only grateful I didn't succumb to temptation and double down, or else I'd also currently be washing my laundry in the sink, brushing my teeth out of the toilet tank, and watching television while sitting inside our garbage can. Anywho. This morning, at circa-approximatish 8 o'clock ante meridiem give or take, a child who is generously still alive began shrieking just outside my apartment, or to be more precise, right outside my "bedroom" window. "Mommy!" No response. Some crying. "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" Silence from the madding crowd. "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" Right about now I started raking my fingers across my pillow, ripping huge jagged rents across it, imagining the spongy chunks of foam rubber caked under my fingernails were actually bloody shreds of this child's intestines. The performance art continued. Mommy, not surprisingly, had no interest in answering her child's sobbing cries; for all I know she'd had a profound realization about where her life was going and in a bold attempt to get on the right track had dropped this kid off curbside and peeled away, heading for the nearest Turnpike exit. The only thing that kept me from acknowledging that I was now awake was the thought that perhaps the child was screaming because her mother had actually been hurt, and needed help, and then I definitely would not be going back to sleep. Police and ambulances and all that shit. Fuck it, let her bleed to death while her child watches in horror for all I care, I am tired. Thankfully, the kid finally shut the fuck up and I dozed back into my increasingly weird and vivid dreamscape [more on that in a future entry, perhaps].

- Writing is hard. Let's see...that story about the haunted hotel room, dead in the water. Story about telepathic advertising, won't even turn over. Alternate historical story set in Libya, can't get past the fifth paragraph. The libretto for my self-composed opera about Jeffrey Dahmer, Nowheresville. [just checking if you're paying attention.] Even that short comic story Rob asked me to write isn't happening to my satisfaction. Why else would I be wasting time writing these nonsensical little soliloquies to you lot? ah, but I kid. I hope you enjoy every last stinking word of this wonderful fucking weblog, you heartless bastards.

Alright maybe that last part was a bit harsh. heh. Kidding. You know I kid. My heart oozes love for all of you, like pus from a suppurating wound. er. Wow. I am now the all-time worst bestower of compliments, Ever. It's official.

...see? I can post here and not have it go on for 15,000 words! I'm terse! Tacit, even! My prose is spare and economical, I'm not a motormouth, I'm not. Damn your eyes for saying otherwise. That's it, I'm leaving. Oh no no no - you stay, and enjoy yourselves, and maybe think about what you've done. I am going to bed.

....

It's not even 9 o'clock post-fucking-meridiem. Goddamnit. If you need me, I shall be in the kitchen pantry, reading by the light of a strike-anywhere match.

Auditioning For Ragnarok

2005-05-12T00:17:00.000-04:00

Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
- Heinrich Heine

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
- Orson Welles in "The Third Man"

I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
- Rodney Dangerfield

There are two things happening in the world that are bothering me at the present time, and I want to talk about them. HOWEVER, in the process of resurrecting this forum and going over older posts, I find in myself a tendency to blather on and on and on nigh-endlessly, and I'd like to try and curb that if I can. Pithiness. That's the goal for today's post. Keep it snappy.

I already know I'm going to fall far fucking short of that, so just shut up. I don't need you to tell me that. Christ. Go get your own fucking weblog, why don't you.

ISSUE NUMBER ONE! On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 representing impossibility and 10 representing complete metaphysical certitude, what is the chance that Kansans will actually manage to summon the moral fortitude and integrity from deep within their chakras, dislodge their collective heads from their collective asses, and stop the American Taliban from trying to rewrite the laws of nature? Answer: 2. And that's being generous. In 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education removed the teaching of evolution and cosmology from their high school curriculum. Meaning that Kansan children weren't going to be taught how the universe came into being, or how the human race came into being. This, however, just wasn't strident, myopic, ignorant, or batshit crazy enough for some people. A group calling itself Families for Learning Accurate Theories [spell out the acronym and cringe along with me] complained that Kansas had abolished evil-ution and cosmology but still insisted on teaching the heretical, anti-scriptural idea that the Earth was spherical. As we all know, the Bible clearly says that the Earth has four corners. [somewhere. I have no idea where it says this, leave me the fuck alone, I'm trying to get through this paragraph without smashing my face through the monitor screen in sheer murderous frustration.] Now obviously, the Earth cannot be spherical and still conform to this passage. Earth must therefore be a huge, oblong tetrahedron.

...excuse me, I'll be right back.

[sounds of the entire inventory of the world's largest china shop being smashed into a billion pieces with an aluminum baseball bat]

...okay, back. As I was saying, Kansas threw out the most fundamental and basic concept in biology from its schools, but then reinstated it in 2001. All across Topeka, Lawrence, Leavenworth and Wichita, millions of people stood upright for the first time in years, and shed their vestigial tails. Supraorbital ridges flattened themselves back against foreheads. and eyes uncrossed themselves as if by magic. [I'd throw in mentions of Hosannas being sung by a choir of angels, but those are the other guys. Let's just say that it was a good day.]

But such secular experiments are the indulgence of a 9/10 world. Here, post-9/11, because the attacks of that day are obviously the most important event in the fucking history of the planet and change all previously accepted standards of decency and behavior and give us license to do whatever the fuck we want because "9/11 - Support Our Troops - Let's Roll!", anyway, post-9/11, the American Taliban thinks that it's been given its own political currency printing press and can just keep pushing and pushing and pushing and ram through whatever heinous legislation it wants by invoking the imagery of those falling skyscrapers and the memory of those three thousand dead. I genuinely believe this - that they consider 9/11 to be a gift from Jesus (although they'd never say so out loud), in that, since they were in control of the government when it happened, it gives them a permanent and self-perpetuating rationale for doing ANYTHING THEY WANT. These are people who literally believe that they are or soon will be living in the End Times. They honestly, seriously, literally expect the Rapture to come in the next few years. How...what...just what the fuck do you even say to such people, how do you confront such madmen beyond the obvious solution of simply smashing them in the face with a shovel and bludgeoning them until they stop twitching? You talk to people like this, and there's this perpetual gleam in their eyes...the slackened and pitiless gaze of the incurious, the self-satisfied, the sort of person who thinks that any questions worth asking have long since been answered and is just waiting for the preordained drama to unfold. Like it's a movie or something. These people are detached from reality. Now, not only are they striking down evolution again, not only are they going to teach that ridiculous junk science theory of "intelligent design" to kids who won't know that it's just a Trojan horse for creationism and evangelical fundamentalism, but they want to reword and redefine the concept of "science" itself. YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP. Reality has yet again surpassed satire. Now they want science textbooks to define science so as to "not limit it to theories based on natural explanations." In other words, to equate science with myth, mysticism, and whatever bullshit we feel like espousing today. In other words, let's defile Aristotle's grave and rape his corpse. And Kansas is going to let these lunatics get away with it. It makes me want to scream.

Yes, I'm safe here in a "blue state," but for how long? How long is the Party of God going to tolerate enemy strongholds before they redistrict us all into a bunch of patchwork Republican-ruled cantonments? Yes yes, the First Amendment and freedom of religion and blah fucking blah. I don't want to hear it. Maybe it is time for open war with these maniacs. They don't want to respect my difference of opinion, why should I respect theirs? Why should I, why should we, the freethinkers who reject religiosity and there are millions of us in America, thank you, why should we allow unknowing children to be subjected to that brain-deadening pabulum? It's not fair to them.

Religion kills the spirit. You'd think that a paradox, but it's not. I personally loathe when someone tells me that they're "not religious, but spiritual." At least religious people are willing to get up and go to church, or temple, or what have you. "Spiritual" people want the security of a loving Father-deity but don't feel like putting any time or effort into it. That's pure intellectual laziness. I think true "spirituality" connotes a love of knowledge and learning, a curiosity and openness about the world, a sense of trust in the innate capacity for the human race to achieve, to accomplish, to propel ourselves forward and do better than our antecedents did and so honor them. I can think of nothing more "spiritual" than the brotherhood of man, of helping others out, of contributing to society. That's the only kind of spirit I can acknowledge - the warmth shared by that Promethean flame burning inside each of us [forgive the arrogance of such an allusion, please], the sum that is far greater than its parts. And when people cheapen and demean that, when they graft their stupid, banal, witless, droolingly insane catalogue of hallucinations and mendacities onto the human psyche and the history of our achievements and call for pogroms and ask for donations, it galls me. It's one of the most viciously anti-social acts imaginable, to me.

I guess it's lucky for these people that I'm powerless. My tolerance for their delusions stems only from my inability to incarcerate them.

wow. That took a lot out of me. I was also going to comment on the recent wave of insurgent attacks in Iraq too. In some ways I feel it's disrespectful for me to rant about our education policies when so many people are dying over there, but the two are connected. They both tie into the sense of destiny with which our current government is totally intoxicated. It's not just religious either, it's ethnic and nationalistic and imperialistic and capitalistic, a whole lot of -istics, it's this absurd notion that God has bestowed Most Favored Nation status on the United States and that we can do no wrong, that by definition Americans are always right. And the sad part is that the worse things are going over there, the more intransigent and righteous these people get. Whatever pain they feel maddens them and sears their resolve into their brains, intermingling with their death-urge, their yearning for martyrdom which burns just as fiercely and brightly as it does in the heart of every mujahedeen that blows himself up in a crowd. It's an inescapable cycle, and that scares me. Since the Interim Iraqi government was named about two weeks ago [not to be confused with the Provisional Iraqi government, or the Coalition Provisional Authority], over 400 people have been killed in suicide bombings. Originally that read "over 300 people," but more news of attacks were posted online as I was typing this. Let's see...the butcher's bill for today, 69 people killed, 160 wounded, most of them recruits for the Iraqi Army waiting in line to be processed. But, clearly, We Are Turning A Corner. There Is Light At The End Of The Tunnel. And some Americans are horrified...and most are blandly, sleepily indifferent, let's not kid ourselves...but there are some who feed off of news like this. It makes them more determined to fight like hell to keep the country that we rightfully stole.

Granted, most of them aren't going to be doing the actual fighting, per se, it's more of a morale-boosting effort on their part. Our man Atrios calls these jackasses the "101st Fighting Keyboardists," and they deserve every ounce of vitriol and scorn they get and an extra dollop of hate on the side.

But a lot of these people are the ones in charge. The ones who don't know well enough to stop throwing good money after bad. The ones who are convinced down to the marrow in their bones that there's a painless way to spin their way out of this, that just one more charge over the top will bring the insurgency crashing down, that inside every Iraqi there is an American trying to get out. They wouldn't even recognize the sarcasm in that last statement, they think it should be perfectly natural that every foreigner should want to be an American. That's an extremely dangerous thing to believe. That's the attitude of the faithful: don't try to understand them, don't try to co-exist with them, convert them. Convert them or kill them. The very existence of disbelief and dissent is an affront to their all-consuming mindset.

There's a scene in the film "Nixon," wherein Nixon makes his historic visit to China in 1972 and meets with Mao. Mao Zedong, arguably the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century. It's one of those scenes where you think, If the actual historical figures didn't say these things, they should have. But honesty like this is rarely spoken aloud, in the light of day no less:

MAO: You know, I voted for you in your last election.
NIXON: I was the lesser of two evils. [laughs weakly]
MAO: You're too modest. You are as evil as I am. We're both from poor families. But others pay to feed the hunger in us. In my case, millions of reactionaries. In your case, millions of Vietnamese.
NIXON: Civil war is always the cruelest kind of war.
MAO: The real war is in us. History is a symptom of our disease.

Maybe it's not just limited to the sickness of religion. Maybe it's a cancer on the human conscience. Maybe we are coming up on the End Times, after all. I'd much prefer Ragnarok. Ragnarok teaches us that we can't sit around and wait for deliverance when the end of the world is upon us. We have to take up arms, and ride out into the fray, and fight for it. But in the end, we probably are doomed to fail, and to die. It's not any more hopeful than the fiery dissolution promised by the Apocalypse, but at least it's more honest.

A little honesty goes a long way, especially during the twilight of the gods.

Attempted Murder, Incorporated

2005-03-16T19:44:00.000-05:00

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
- Hector Berlioz

Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.
- Ed Howe

Look after Mr. Bond. See that some harm comes to him.
- Michael Lonsdale in "Moonraker"

[another long and droning dissertation by me, this time on the perils and pitfalls of assassination.]

Another disappointing Ides of March passes us by. Do people even celebrate this anymore?

Not that I'm in any way endorsing or suggesting that President George W. Bush, of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., 20500, should in any way by any means have some harm come to him. Not only is that wrong...morally...I guess, but it's a federal crime to even threaten the life of the President of the United States punishable by up to five years in prison. Actually I'd be lucky to make it to a comfy stateside federal prison, like, say...Leavenworth...in this day and political climate, they'd probably stuff me into a wooden crate and drop me into Camp X-Ray without a parachute. All kidding aside, assassinating President Bush would be wrong. Even if you could somehow make a moral case for it, it simply wouldn't be a good idea.

Okay. Let's say that Bush is walking down the stairs in the White House with an armload of old jazz records and he can't see his feet and he steps on the slippery carapace of an errant leatherback sea turtle that's somehow found its way into his home, and he slips and goes ass over teakettle down the stairs and breaks his neck. What does that give us? President Richard Cheney. THAT should have sent a icy chill surging through the spinal fluids of all freedom-loving Americans who might be reading this. [yeah, both of them. I need to start posting some porn on this site, maybe that would attract more readers.] Fine, nobody likes Cheney, at least nobody _I_ like. He's the Prince of Darkness, the very archetype of the hunched over, clammy-palmed, reptilian kleptocratic apparatchik who rails against the "fedrul govmint" to the pineys and the hillbillies to grab their votes with both hands while simultaneously abusing governmental authority to line up business deals to wait for him when his tenure expires at 12:00 noon Eastern Standard Time, January 20, 2009. He's a fucking cartoon. He may as well have a twirly waxed mustachio, a black stovepipe hat and cloak, and dollar signs for pupils. But what about further down the line?

Suppose our violent hypothetical rebels take out Bush AND Cheney. Or maybe the cosmic axes just decide to turn against them one fine day. Them that giveth can taketh away. Maybe the same day that Bush steps on that sea turtle, Cheney is shooting up a speedball of smack and chokes on his own vomit. [just go with it.] Who's next on the list?

The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides a lengthy and detailed list of the line of presidential succession. It has never been invoked further down than the office of vice-president, although we came close to having a Speaker of the House of Representatives in the White House during Watergate, when Nixon went a month or two with no veep. But say Bush slips and Cheney ODs. That leaves us with President John Dennis Hastert, currently Speaker of the House. You've probably never heard of him. That's because he's a nobody. Most people agree that Hastert is little more than window dressing. Remember that asshole Newt Gingrich? Well, he was toppled in an internal Republican coup, a fact seldom mentioned when Gingrich bellies up to the screen as a pundit on Fox News. He was to be succeeded by Louisiana's Bob Livingston, one of the loudest voices of outrage and disgust over Clinton's infidelities. Shockingly, though, it turns out that Livingston was a big fucking hypocrite, and resigned from the House before news of his many many infidelities was about to be printed by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. [sidebar: Henry Hyde, the corpulent and heavily-bejowled congressman who chaired the House Judiciary Committee and directly responsible for passing Clinton's two articles of impeachment, was also subsequently exposed as a homewrecker. asshole.] So the Repubs decided they needed a faceless non-entity to put into the Speaker's chair to stay out of trouble when they ran things behind the scenes. Enter Denny Hastert, the Majority Chief Deputy Whip [the highest position appointed by the leadership rather than elected by the party members]. He knew how to take orders. Today the House of Representatives is really run by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay - a former exterminator turned hayseed congressman [can't make this stuff up], a hard-drinking whoremaster once nicknamed "Hot Tub Tommy" who has since found Jesus and blah blah blah, everything you despise about Republicans. So President Hastert might see a White House Chief of Staff DeLay running the executive branch behind the scenes the way he runs the legislative branch today.

But then a block of frozen toilet waste falls out of a passenger jet and smashes President Hastert flat, like a big, fat, green horsefly under a flyswatter. The 25th then turns to...the President pro tempore of the Senate. Who the hell is that? That's the seniormost Senator of the majority party. Currently the President pro tem is Ted Stevens of Alaska. Senator Stevens was born when Calvin Coolidge was president. For those of you who don't know when that was, it was a long, long, long time ago. Women could vote, but, it was still a new thing, men weren't totally sold on it yet. Stevens likes oil companies and they like him. He's been accused many times of trading government contracts for stock tips and insider trading information. In other words, President Stevens would kind of play like a greatest hits medley of the Reagan, Bush, and Bush Presidencies.

But then President Stevens gets mauled by a rampaging sea lion and expires. This is where it starts to get really ugly. Going down the list of succession, we'd be blessed with:

President Condoleezza Rice - Incompetent National Security Advisor who didn't realize that Islamic fundamentalists with hundreds of millions of dollars behind them would want to and could attack America, probably incompetent Secretary of State, board member of the Chevron Corporation who helped guide their policy of using mercenary troops to execute unarmed nonviolent protestors in Nigeria.

President John W. Snow - Bush's brilliant Treasury Secretary who says that deficits are okay, tax cuts are necessary, a weak dollar doesn't mean much, and private accounts are exactly what Social Security needs. Also said that the Iraq War might cost about 10 billion dollars but that's unlikely. [actual cost to date: about $156 billion and counting!] A nitwit and a yes-man.

President Donald Rumsfeld - Dear sweet baby Jesus, no.

President Alberto Gonzales - Our first Hispanic president! Also arguably our most enthusiastically "pro-torture of illegally detained foreign nationals" president. Also got Governor Bush out of jury duty in 1996 so that he wouldn't have to divulge his drunk driving conviction from the '70s. Hey, while we're at it, let's mention that Gonzales was Bush's general counsel as governor, and was responsible for Texas executing more people during that term than any other state. Oh, and he worked for Enron too.

President Gale Norton - Bush's secretary of the interior. Used to be a lobbyist for strip-mining companies, but, don't worry, there's no conflict of interest here. Another kleptocrat.

I'll spare you the rest of the list. It's just sad and depressing.

Our Cabinet really sucks.

So remember, kids: assassinating our highest leaders just devolves executive authority onto the shoulders of their corrupt and incompetant underlings. Better results might be achieved with low-yield bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons that get everyone all at once. Or you could actually read a fucking newspaper every once in a while and take the time to vote and stop watching the MTV. But I know, politics are boring and stuff. Keep telling yourself that while your parents are driving you down to the induction center. You jerkoffs. Oh, and stay in school.

Your Government Are Psychotic

2005-02-10T02:56:00.000-05:00

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting that vote.
- Benjamin Franklin

...in the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them.
- Lin Yutang, "The Importance of Living"

Politics is the entertainment industry for ugly people.
- Mark Turpin

[In the interests of full disclosure, I should warn you: this entry is a pretty long one. You might want to get some snacks.]

The following is more or less true:

Armstrong Williams is an African-American newspaper and radio political commentator on the (neo-?)conservative end of the spectrum. No, I've never heard of him before either. He's made a lucrative career for himself peddling GOP rhetoric and nonsense to "a wide array of African-American and mainstream newspapers," according to his former syndicator, Tribune Media Services. I say "former" because earlier this year his contract was abruptly and unilaterally terminated when it was disclosed that Williams had been paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars by "our" Department of Education to promote the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

[Sidebar - and I'll try to make it brief: Despite the wonderfully Orwellian Newspeak name, the NCLB Act is well-intentioned, or least, it's supposed to look well-intentioned, if not actually successful. It's based on the so-called "Texas Miracle" that occurred in the Texas school system during Bush's governorship of that state, when schools across the state and in Houston in particular showed soaring test scores and plunging dropout rates. The problem is, the Texas Miracle was a lie. It turns out that schools were classifying dropouts as having transferred to other schools, or pursuing GEDs, or returning to their native country or what have you. Some schools had the balls to claim a ZERO percent dropout rate. They kept standardized test scores high by keeping badly performing students from taking the tests. In some cases students passed all of their 9th grade classes, but were forced to repeat the grade two or three times and then promoted directly to 11th grade in order to bypass standardized tests given to 10th graders. Many schools in Houston and across Texas have 9th grades two or three times the size of their 10th grades. And to top it off, principals were given cash bonuses based on meeting certain low levels of dropouts reported and high tests scores achieved. The system was corrupt from the get-go. And that was the basis of the NCLB Act which is now the law of the land. And it isn't even as good as THAT, because teachers across the country are grumbling that not only is the federal government welching on its commitment to fund the provisions of this act, but a little-known provision requires all public schools to provide military recruiters access to all school facilities AND contact information to every student. Not that we're planning a draft or anything. Anyway. Where was I?]

For his part, Williams claimed that he truly believes in the NCLB Act and would have promoted it for free anyway. And yet shockingly he somehow failed to donote his $240,000 fee to a worthy charity. He was probably just about to do it before the news broke, I'm certain. Rod Paige, the Secretary of Education in office when Williams was hired, was - you guessed - Governor George W. Bush's Houston Superintendent of Schools. He's also noteworthy for having referred to the National Education Association, a teachers' union not all that enthusiastic about a number of NCLB provisions, as a "terrorist organization." The NEA responded by firebombing his house. ha! But I kid. Paige has since retired/been fired, and his new replacement, Margaret Spellings, one of the authors of the NCLB, has principally distinguished herself so far by attacking a PBS cartoon for being covert homosexual propaganda. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

Needless to say, it is ILLEGAL!!!!!! with a fucking capital I for the federal government to pay commentators for good press. This is actually what is called "propaganda." Maybe that's why both the DOE and Williams failed to disclose this and it had to be printed in USA Today before they owned up to it? But anyway, this is a one-time deal, the people responsible have left government anyway, and it'll never happen again, and then of course they found another one.

Meet Maggie Gallagher. Gallagher was - that's right - a somewhat prominent right-wing commentator for Universal Press Syndicate who specialized/es in gay-bashing. Gallagher is a dedicated foe of same-sex marriage, going so far as to claim that polygamy (!) is a better environment in which to raise children than same-sex marriage. Yes, that's right. Polygamy. The GOP wants to build us all a bridge to the future, and the future, apparently, looks a lot like 19th century Utah. You can't make this stuff up. Well, in the wake of the Williams payola scandal, a lot of trees were shaken, and guess what fell out? Receipts from the Department of Health and Human Services for payments rendered to Gallagher in 2002 and '03 - about $21,000 - for her to promote the Bush Administration's "healthy marriage" initiative. "Healthy" in this context, as anyone knows, is Bushspeak for "no faggots allowed." While on HHS payrolls, Gallagher wrote numerous articles talking up this initiative and even testified before Congress on its worthiness. So we have the executive branch subsidizing testimony to the legislative branch. Christ. We have a lot to teach those democracy-thirsty Iraqis, don't we...

Wait, don't go. This is all leading somewhere, I promise.

Contestant number three! Michael McManus is - hey! How'd you guess? Yes, he's a right-wing commentator, author of the syndicated column "Ethics & Religion." I feel a little bad for Mikey. Armstrong got a cool quarter-mil and Maggie got 21 grand, but the HHS only coughed up ten thousand dollars for Mike to flog their "healthy marriage" initiative in his column. Needless to say, McManus insists that this was something he believed in, and would have promoted anyway. And needless to say, he still cashed their check, and didn't disclose it.

According to a report, again in USA Today (I should start reading them more often it seems), the Bush Administration has shelled out 250 MILLION dollars to PR firms to push its agenda. I find that obscene. That's twice the annual budget for National Public Radio or the National Endowment for the Arts, two programs about which the Republicans are endlessly carping because it's such a waste of money. Patronage of the arts = bad, financing hacks to talk up political projects = A-okay.

I still haven't gotten to the unbelievable part.

Ever hear of Jeff Gannon? No? Don't feel bad. Until recently, he was the Washington Bureau Chief for the Talon News Service.

[The what now? From their website, http://www.talonnews.com/: "Talon News is a news company which covers political, national, and world news. Talon News focuses on those stories often overlooked by other media outlets." On the left side of the site there is a link to a site called "GOPUSA.com." Hmm. Wonder what they're all about.]

Okay, Gannon. Washington Bureau Chief for Talon News. Chief and sole reporter for the Washington Bureau of the Talon News Service, it seems. According to all reports, Talon has about nine reporters around the country, among them a Christian fundamentalist high-school student, a personal fitness trainer, and a part-time camp director. And yet somehow, Talon Washington Bureau Chief Jeff Gannon - to be more precise, Washington Bureau Jeff Gannon - gets White House Press Corps Credentials and a plum fourth-row seat in the briefing room. Why? Because Gannon is good at playing softball - lobbing easy, Bush-friendly/Democrat-bashing questions for White House Press Secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan to hit out of the park. "Would you characterize the President's plan to save Social Security as 'brilliant' or merely 'inspired?'" That sort of fluff. So fine, the White House is giving press passes to open GOP flacks, no news there. I don't think anyone is really surprised that they'd use the likes of a Jeff Gannon.

Except...there is no Jeff Gannon.

That's not his real name.

It's not easy to get a White House press pass. There are supposed to be rigid, scrupulous, unswerving background checks for each and every reporter who applies. No exceptions. NONE. And here they've given not just access, but preferential access, to a man using a false name from a patently phony press outfit/propaganda arm. So the left-wing blogosphere launched an investigatory blitzkrieg on Jeff Gannon once it was discovered that he was using an alias. Their findings are...well, kind of unfuckingbelievable.

His real name, most likely, is J.D. Guckert. His website, http://www.jeffgannon.com/, is registered to a "J. Daniels" (J.D. Guckert?) and a company called the Bedrock Foundation. In addition to jeffgannon.com, the following other domains are registered to this character...keeping reading all the way to the end...

Conservativeguy.com
Conservative-guy.com
Conservativelegal.com
Exposejessejackson.com
Jeffgannon.com
Theconservativeguy.com
Theconservativelegal.com
The-conservative-guy.com
conservative-guy.com
Hotmilitarystud.com
Militaryescorts.com
Militaryescortsm4m.com

No, you read that right. I'm serious. Guckert/Gannon, a White House Press Corps reporter, is not only a Republican political operative, but is somehow affiliated with an online gay prostitution service. Guckert's AOL profile apparently has a picture of him posing in his underwear.

No, I am not kidding.

Why are you looking at me that way? I didn't make this shit up. No one would believe me if I had.

Unbelievably, it gets even WORSE.

In October 2003, Gannon interviewed Joe Wilson. Wilson, you might remember, is a former ambassador who was sent to Niger by BushCo to look into reports that Iraq was trying to buy weapons-grade uranium from the Nigeriens, or Nigerais, or whatever the people of Niger are called, NO it is not "Nigerians," those are people from Nigeria and I just spent twenty minutes trying to figure this out but I have HAD IT. ANYWAY. Wilson came back and said the evidence was a sham, poorly forged documents, it never happened, etc. Then someone in the White House leaked it out that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent. [This is a felony offense.] All hell broke loose and there was a mini-uproar over this and Bush swore that he wouldn't rest until he found out who in his administration was responsible for this dastardly deed. And he meant it. Seriously. Apparently, he suspects the culprit may be on a golf course somewhere. Maybe getting in nine holes with O.J. Simpson. The road to justice is a long and winding one.

So Gannon interviews Joe Wilson, and in the course of asking Wilson to elaborate on some finer point of his plight, refers to an internal CIA memo which named Wilson's wife as CIA. No other news agency had been given access to this memo. It had not been released or cleared for release. So we have a fake reporter for a fake news agency, with a fake name, with real classified CIA memos, having real gay sex for money with hot lonely guys like you, call now to set up a date. "Gannon" has since been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury regarding his knowledge of this memo. We'll see what happens. I have a sneaking suspicion this is the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

I...really don't know what else to say at this point. The White House is bribing columnists and using gay prostitutes to leak classified information during wartime for the purpose of political revenge. uhhhh. I feel like I'm an advanced alien computer and Captain Kirk just asked me to define "love." This shit just beggars and buggers description. No pun intended.

But my point, after all that preface, was this: the mainstream media clearly needs to do something about its obvious liberal bias.

Excuse me, I'll be right back.

[gunshot]

Semiautonomy and You

2005-01-13T04:50:00.000-05:00

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
- Robert M. Pirsig, "Lila"

Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.
- Friedrich Schiller, "The Maid of Orleans," Act III, Scene 6

...asking for the impossible is one good definition of a revolution.
- Simon Schama, "Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution"

[A brief aside before plunging into the fray. For some reason, when I began this entry, the word "semiautonomous" was bouncing around in my head. The concept seemed a grand contradiction - "semi-"independence and control over your life sounds a bit like quasi-murder or partial pregnancy - so I threw it in there into the title. Not sure if I'll even touch on it in the course of what I write. But my aside. Oh yes. ANYWAY. In consulting the dictionary to check on the exact definition of "semiautonomous" [apparently it's only an adjective, the noun doesn't seem to exist, oddly enough], I found another cool word. "Autonym." Isn't that keen? A pseudonym is a false name, and anonymity means namelessness [implying the existence of the "nameless name," or anonym], but an autonym, well...that's your true name. To publish under your autonym is simply to use your own name, as opposed to the pen name of the pseudonym or the no-name of the anonym. Your real name. And I thought to myself, "Self"...that's how I address myself in these situations..."Self, isn't that strange? A word that no one ever uses, whose definition seems self-evident." An autonym. What would be the possible context in which such a rare vintage of a word might be swished around and imbibed? And I decided that an autonym, more than just one's actual name, ought to be one's secret, unknown, unpronouncable and indelible True Name, the secret name we give to ourselves and never tell anyone, the alias we use in our dreams, the alter ego, the doppelganger, the person we fool ourselves into believing we actually are when no one else is around to see how frail, how foolish, how disappointingly real we are.]

[That's what it SHOULD mean. Autonym. I like my definition better.]

[hrm.]

[I did say it would be brief, didn't I? My apologies. On with the show...such as it is.]

Not sure where to go now. That "aside" really took its sweet time, didn't it? The actual post now is going to feel anticlimactic. And if there's one thing I detest, it's a lack of sufficient climax.

Take my wife. Please!

Maybe I'll just pelt you with Borscht Belt Catskills comedian one-liners and punchlines until you all just leave.

hmm.

What to say, what to say...

Boy, that new ELEKTRA movie looks pretty terrible, doesn't it.

Yeah.

Although Jennifer Garner is pretty hot. So.

But I didn't actually see DAREDEVIL. Let alone that body-switching movie she did last year. So she's not hot enough to get me to watch a shitty movie, I don't think.

....

[glances at watch]

So, what are we, about a half hour into this movie, Joel?

TV commercial tagline I just heard: "Forget everything you think you know about RESIDENT EVIL...." Somehow I don't think that line was written with me in mind. Because I don't know shit about RESIDENT EVIL. Something about zombies, no? Personally, I can't stand when people spend hours playing video games. For one thing, a lot of the time, they're just stoned, and I don't like stoners. Secondly, as a writer [stop snickering back there in the cheap seats! fucking assholes....], I find video games to be something a nascent but growing danger to the art of storytelling. This isn't just some snotty, bespectacled, Ivory Tower knee-jerk reaction against video games, because I don't wear glasses, for one. Video games are visual and textual experiences, and have the veneer of telling a story. But they're not stories, they're only puzzles. Do A to get to B. A doesn't work, try C then. Repeat ad nauseum. Games have no consequences. They allow you to make mistake after mistake and try again, only on the eighth attempt the unknown isn't quite so mysterious, the shocking less so, the horrific merely noteworthy. It's not really a story. I guess it makes no claim to be, so why am I bitching, but still...a few months ago, that second RESIDENT EVIL movie came out, and I can't remember how many people were talking about excitedly! Like they were highly anticipating seeing it! Because, and this is without a hint of irony, they really thought it would make for a good movie! Based on a video game. And then the purists would walk out of the theater and complain that it "wasn't as good as the game." As if they were discussing the works of Shakespeare or Dickens. It just...astounds me.

...

Well that wasn't much of a discussion. Just came across as a cranky old rant. "I don't like video games, I'm old!" "In my day we had PITFALL, and we liked it!" bah. I guess I'm not feeling particularly erudite or verbose to-day. Sorry folks. Next time, I promise, I'll be profound as all get out. Just you wait. You'll see. Top of the world, ma. You'll see.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

2004-12-29T22:43:00.000-05:00

Eighteen hundred years ago in a city of Rome, an influential Christian heretic named Marcion took a look at the world around him and drew a conclusion: The god who created our cosmos couldn't possibly be good.
- Howard Bloom, "The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History"

For the most part disease memes, like diseases, are self-limiting: depressed or defeatist people tend to eschew social interactions, and the healthier parts of the organization reject them and their beliefs. It is not uncommon during periods of societal financial stress to see corporations succumb to defeatism and collapse. Various disease memes have more adapted life-cycles; for instance they make the carriers more effective when carriers are sparse. A simple example is a "yes man," who rises rapidly in a corporation until he is an executive. But a "yes man" cannot function as CEO, and a leader cannot function surrounded by "yes men".
- from the Wikipedia entry "disease meme"

This sword here at my side don't act the way it should
Keeps calling me its master, but I feel like its slave
- Blue Oyster Cult, "Black Blade"

How are you gentlemen !!

Some lowlights from the "news" first, I think. Sure, why not. In response to the utterly fucking horrific death toll from the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, President Bush announced that in addition to the $35 million in aid already pledged by the United States, he had "established a regional core group with India, Japan and Australia to help coordinate relief efforts. I'm confident more nations will join this core group in short order." Which is great. Finally, my president steps up and does something admirable. And I really ought to just shut up there, oughtn't I? Except then I go and read that India has refused any foreign disaster aid, saying it's doing quite nicely on its own, thanks anyway. Well that doesn't make any sense, Bush just said India was a part of the plan. Why do the Indians hate America? We're trying to be Christ-like and their self-reliance is making us look bad. That makes New Delhi objectively pro-Saddam, really, to use the Ann Coulter approach. And then I just had to go and find some article about the upcoming inaugural festivities, and it says that Bush is having not one, not two, not three...keep going...not five...almost there...but seven, SEVEN simultaneous inaugural balls this January...to the tune of $40 MILLION...paid for BY US...for a guy who IS ALREADY PRESIDENT. Oh, and then he ordered a renewed offensive in Iraq. [this sounds like a snide remark but this is actually true. more below.]

81,000 are dead, the corpses keep coming in with no end in sight, and half as many again may die from disease and malnutrition owing to the utter collapse of civil authority and basic administration in the areas affected, most notably in the Indonesian province of Aceh. This province covers the northern part of the island of Sumatra which was the closest major landmass to the epicenter of the quake and whose capital city of Banda Aceh was all but flattened by the 15-meter-high tsunami generated by the quake. I mention this because Aceh is home to the most active separatist, borderline fundamentalist Muslim movement in the world's largest Muslim nation. The chance for America to throw its vast resources into relieving this devastated region and earn us immeasurable goodwill from the Muslim world is manna from Heaven. Forget $35 million. We spend that in a few hours in Iraq. How about a few hundred million. Now. I know, I know, the new meme is "fiscal restraint," which means "pinching pennies except on the things we like." But think back to the good will we had after September 11. That right-wing kleptocrat Jacques Chirac, openly weeping at a press conference over the lives lost. Fucking Muammar Qadhafi (!) personally donating blood as part of a Libyan blood drive to help International Red Cross and Red Crescent. Everything we've managed to piss away with Iraq, regained with this one sweepingly dramatic gesture. To prove the cynics and the critics false, to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a fucking doubt that America steps up to the plate and bears the greater share of the burden when the chips are down, because that's what Great Nations do.

Well, not so much. See, the caterer's deposit is non-refundable, so. Sorry Indonesia. But seriously though, stop being anti-American. We're the good guys. If you promise to thank us for the neglible effort we're making here with your whole disaster of epic proportions thing, maybe we'll send you some of the leftover hors d'oeurves come January 21. Deal?

Also, the Iraqi insurgency has made a major tactical evolution. The ever-reliable Car Bomb seems poised to yield to the House Bomb. Insurgents in west Baghdad made an anonymous tip to Iraqi police claiming to be informing on themselves, telling the police about a safehouse stockpiled with weapons being used by the insurgents. The Iraqi police launched a raid, and found out that the tip was good, solid information - a "slam dunk," even, to quote Tenet - with the niggling omission that the explosives were actually armed, and subsequently detonated by remote, killing about 30 people. The Baghdad neighborhood where this occurred has been described as being "staunchly Baathist," which seems not to mean much these days with the bulk of the hardcore Baathist resistance - scattered clusters of Fedayeen Saddam and Special Republican Guard soldiers organized by former Baath Party apparatchiks and local Baathist mini-warlords - having allied themselves, and to a certain extent assimilated with, the thriving Sunni multi-ethnic religious resistance, the so-called "foreign fighters" led by Jordanian al-Zarqawi. But it's embarrassing and indelicate to criticize Sunni Islam, which is A Great and Noble Religion and We Respect It's Rich Traditions and Please Vote and blah blah blah. Better to link this to Saddam, nobody likes that guy. Adrian Zmed has better prospects for a comeback. So anyway. In we chuck the intrepid U.S. First Cav to the charmingly bemonikered "Triangle of Death," the cluster of Sunni strongholds south of Baghdad. The Triangle is where a large number of insurgents relocated following the debacle of the Second Falluja Offensive in November, where we marched in with great pomp and circumstance and found lots of ricebowls left smoldering on cooking fires and precious few actual terrorists. So good luck with that one, boys. Happy New Year.

blah. Anyway.

I wanted to embark on another of my patented flights of fancy and childlike awe with this article, but it seems the times are grimly insistent. Sometimes history is jealous of our attentions. I'll just talk a little about the concept of Internet memes, about which I spent today reading. The title of today's entry is a particularly persistent meme that raced around the Internet way in the way-back of 2001 but lingers still. Apparently, it's a line of dialogue, ineptly translated from Japanese, from a none-too-memorable video game from 10-15 years ago called "Zero Wing." Something about an alien cyborg menace coolly informing the approaching Earth spacefleet of treachery in its own ranks. It came out, somehow, as "All your base are belong to us." Then the cyborg taunts the incredulous human heroes with the imminence of their demise with the immortal turn of phrase, "You have no chance to survive make your time." More mangled Engrish follows. So...why are we talking about this? Apparently, the phrase bounced from person to person, as memes do by definition. Memes, for those who don't know, are self-perpetuating pieces of information. A catchy song you can't get out of your head and start humming, inflicting it on others. A conspiracy theory that starts getting whispered around. An email telling you how to make lots of money fast, and it's totally legal. Jokes. Religions. These are all memes.

Okay. But. All your base are belong to us?

There's nothing really noteworthy about it, which is why it became so noteworthy, perversely. Some DJ made a techno song sampling this line, some other people made an Internet video for it showing the eponymous line photoshopped into every conceivable context, and there you go. It bounced around the planet. On April Fools Day in some town in Michigan, a group of guys put a few dozen signs bearing this cryptic slogan all over their town one night. The local chief of police thought it was a warning from al-Qaeda. The weird part is that this game was never even sold in America. To these seven guys who spent the whole night pulling off this elaborate prank that maybe a hundred people in the world would get, the joke is so obscure at this point that it's not even a joke anymore, it's just something you know about, from some guy who heard it from some other guy. And yet perversely, as I said, the very distance from the original joke has made it oddly amusing, but in a totally different way. Imagine a tape recording of a Richard Pryor concert, duped about twenty generations, until you can't hear intelligble English. But what you do hear is rather silly-sounding. So you laugh. And you're not sure why you laugh, but you do. And you dupe it again, and distort it further. And the translation and the distortion, depending on the circumstances, sort of generates its own inertia, and keeps something moving that should never have started moving in the first place.

The idea of translation fascinates me, because no two languages are ever one hundred percent compatible. There are always exceptions, contexts, accents, shadings that elude true translation. Ever hear of Omar Khayyam? It's okay if you haven't, it's not as if I'm an expect either. But Omar lived in 11th and 12th century Persia and was an eminent philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. Today we mainly know him for his poetry, however. Except, we don't really know him for HIS poetry. The "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" was most famously translated by an English poet and literary scholar named Edward FitzGerald. FitzGerald, a contemporary of Tennyson and Thackeray, had had little success in his own right. But his translations of Khayyam's many quatrains of poetry, which took many liberties and often little resemble their alleged source material, are strikingly beautiful and mystical. Two men separated by centuries of history, whose works separately are little remembered if at all, but the intermingling of their minds and imaginations produced something unique and sublime. The idea of that simply fascinates me. The germination of ideas, from one mind to the next, so that at a certain point one can no longer discern the original seed from the tree which has sprung up.

I don't really having anything illuminating to offer on this, sorry. Just wanted to muse on it for a bit. But maybe someone will read this tomorrow, or five years from now, and the cogs in her head will turn and click and something that seemed previously remote and inexplicable will now make sense, and she'll write that song or finish that painting or solder that robot together or something. Who knows. When fishing in the ocean of ideas, make sure to use a wide net. You'll catch a lot more boots, but you might haul a mermaid in too.

[What was that? WAY too maudlin, that last bit. Future readers, take note: skip that last metaphor, it was lame. But the rest of the entry's not bad. Also, Soylent Green is made from people.]

For great justice. I'm out. If I don't update before then, happy New Year wishes to all my loyal readers. Both of them.

Look Into the Eyes of the Dragon and Despair

2004-12-27T19:10:00.000-05:00

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
- Aldous Huxley, "Texts and Pretexts"

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.
- Piet Hein

You can say that again, Chewie! This is one Life Day we won't soon forget. Wait, I lost control of the remote cannons. I'm gonna have to run back and operate the aft gun manually.
- An understandably mortified Harrison Ford in "The Star Wars Holiday Special"

[Alright. That last quote does make for a rather jarring contrast with the preceding three. But I like to keep you all on your toes. Who else would lump together Goethe and Han Solo?]

Felicitations! It has been a while, hasn't it? Grab a sit and talk for a spell. I've been quite busy and this is just to inform you all of the many exciting and wondrous developments 2004 delivered to the Hacienda de Flanagan! Please enjoy the enclosed precious photos of Baby's First Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and Boxing Day!

Well. Not really.

I dunno, after my last entry following the election I admit I fell into something of an existential funk. Bush's defeat had seemed an utter certainty to me, something beyond question. I conceded that it would be close...I wasn't totally delusional...but nonetheless, I earnestly and genuinely believed that I was going to see things turn around, I spent the weeks before the election feeling the hairs on my arms stand up, feeling my skin marble over in anticipatory gooseflesh, thinking I could taste that tart ozone flavor that stains the air just before the storm breaks. I thought we could all hear the approaching thunder. I really thought that the lightning of history was about to strike, and that I would witness, if not the beginning of the end, at least the end of the beginning, to quote Winston.

I just couldn't fucking believe it when it didn't happen, and the country rolled on, oblivious, slack-jawed and stupid and trying to explain to its own satisfaction just how in the hell it woke up in bed with the town spittoon when all it did was go out drinking the night before and act really irresponsibly and not pay any attention to what it was doing. I mean, who saw that one coming? She looked like an angel the night before...it's all a bit hazy, to be honest...

So anyway. Not to go off on Rant Number 3457 about how Bush is Evil and Blah Blah Blah, because those are boring and too easy to write. The point from which I'm trying to cop a feel is that the past two months, for many reasons but perhaps chiefly owing to the deadening effect of the election, have been spent by me in something of a malaise. I suppose the impending holiday festivities did not contribute positively to this. I am not a fan of Christmas. Loot aside, it's always struck me as an incredibly fraudulent and false time. You have people who act prenaturally cheerfully and nicely to all and sundry, which means that such kindness is nondiscriminatory and meaningless and a waste of my fucking time, really. Just be honest instead. You have people who get so goddamned consumed with stress over executing the rituals of holiday cheer, buying gifts, getting the tree, coordinating incoming family members, etc., that they always seem to snap and just lose it on the next random person they meet, and that person is always me. These people should be strapped down and forced to watch their children be fed to rabid dogs for their insolence. Lighten the fuck up. It's a stupid holiday, it's not open heart surgery. No one's going to die if the angel on top of the tree is crooked or the cranberry sauce is canned and not homemade. Then you have the oppressors, the ones who try to inflict the holiday on you against your will, who waggle their eyebrows in disdain when you politely decline the opportunity to participate in the office Secret Santa collaboration which they approach with all the gravity and solemnity of the 9/11 Commission, who bitch and moan about how Christians are being persecuted all over again because they can't put a nativity scene on municipal property because of that pesky First Amendment, who get offended when you mention casually that there are no records of Jesus ever having existed and that for centuries Christians believed he'd been born in March anyway. These people will get theirs someday. When the revolution comes they'll be among the first lined up against the wall, as far as I'm concerned. Fuck Christmas.

I did get a nice new coat, though. Thanks Mom.

But, moving on. Now that Christmas is behind me and I've got the calendrical winds to my back, and 2005 is approaching us like a drunken sailor on shore leave in Bangkok pursuing that comely [and sexually ambiguous 13-year-old] prostitute at the end of the bar - stumblingly, unthinkingly, perhaps unwisely, but nonetheless inexorably - I feel once again the flickering surge of positivity, optimism, all that righteous shit coursing through my veins once more. This usually happens about this time of year. Oddly enough, the catalyst for this feeling was my car suddenly dying on the way home from work Christmas evening. Yep. Had to wait in the freezing cold for about two hours for the tow truck to show up. And yet...when it happened, when I felt it clunk to a sudden halt, and the wind lashed against my face as I peered down at the engine trying to vaguely discern the trouble, by spider-sense I suppose since I know fuck-all about cars, and my fingertips started to numb from the cold and the engine just would not turn over, sorry, not happening...I dunno. I felt an oddly compelling placidity seep into me, like warm water into a dry sponge. I mean, my car broke down. Big fucking deal. Ordinarily this would have pissed me off a great deal, and I was pissed at first, but...it just went away. I mean, it's just a problem, you know? Problems get fixed.

There's a great line from Watchmen, the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel masterpiece which is simply the finest comic book ever written, better than most textual novels, and you all really ought to seek it out if you haven't read it yet. But in this world, superheroes are outlawed, and sort on the spur of the moment, but at the same time as the culmination of a long process of emotional fermentation, two of the heroes, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, don their costumes again and fly out into the night and wind up rescuing an apartment building full of tenants from a fire. And they end up soon afterwards making love in the sky over New York City, ensconced within tendrils of dry ice fog and surrounded by jets of flame. And as they lay together afterwards, one of them, Nite Owl, a rich, polite, amateurish dilettante of a man, who never really recovered from being forced underground, admits just how much he missed this, just how drunk on power and excitement and life he feels right now. "I feel so confident it's like I'm on fire. And all the mask killers, all the wars in the world, they're just cases - just problems to solve."

On a smaller scale, the day after my car died, I learned a friend of mine might be pregnant. She's 18 years old and scared to death of how she's going to tell her parents if it turns out to be the case. On a much larger scale, around the same time my engine gave up the ghost going south on Route 9, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake rumbled up across the ocean floor off the coast of Sumatra, unleashing tsunamis that scoured the Indian Ocean from Somalia to Indonesia. Tsunamis aren't a common occurrence in the Indian like they are along the Pacific Rim, which has a sophisticated early warning system to detect and cope with them. The Indian Ocean nations had nothing in place. So far over 23,000 have been reported dead and several millions are now homeless.

Maybe I'm just one of those perverse types who's only really happy, or least, comfortable, when coping with setbacks, rolling with the punches, adjusting and compromising and dealing with things. Maybe that iron forged in the crucible of adversity gleams all the brighter and cuts that much sharper, and maybe I am a terribly melodramatic writer. Who knows. But I feel strangely optimistic again. It's a great feeling. Like I can cope with anything. Like I can accomplish anything.

It probably won't last. But enjoy it with me while it does.

[legitimacy of title currently being challenged in Federal court by Republican Party officials because I didn't want to accept their registered mail]

2004-11-03T16:07:00.000-05:00

As we dreaded. As we feared.

America has spoken, and I for one say bravo. Hurrah for democracy. Voter turnout was heavy, nearly 120 million Americans voted this year, and by a margin of over 3 million votes the Worst President in American History was awarded a resounding mandate.

Three.

FUCKING.

MILLION.

And I couldn't be happier, personally. Now we've shown our true colors. No more "two Americas." No more divisiveness. Now Americans everywhere can feel free to be the spiteful, indolent, violent, vile, ignorant thugs that deep down inside, we all WANT to be. This is a mandate! The people have spoken! The people have said YES to invading Iraq for no good reason (the tally? Americans - 1100 dead and counting! Iraqis - upwards of 100,000 dead and counting!).

- said YES to gutting our most basic environmental regulations, and shitcanning the Kyoto Accords, and letting our children drink impure water and eat mercury-befouled meat.

- said YES to privatizing Social Security so that the nation's wealthiest can glut themselves on a short-lived but potent feeding frenzy in the stock market.

- said YES to the notion that our nation's health care system is the best in the world, so long as you don't examine it through the prisms of infant mortality, life expectancy, and cost per capita.

- said YES to being strenuously, unwaveringly, vociferously pro-life, even though abortions under the Bush Regime have steadily risen. (Maybe, considering where Americans are steering the nation, this is not a bad thing.)

- said YES to ridiculous, laugh-out-loud notions that John Kerry wanted to surrender the right to defend against an attack to an international committee (the "global test"), that John Kerry shot himself to get his war medals while Bush bravely evaded doing stateside national guard duty, that minorities should remember to get out the vote on Wednesday, November 3, that John Kerry wanted to ban the Bible from America.

- said YES to depriving Americans of the basic, inalienable right to marry, just because they're gay.

- said YES to gutting the last vestiges of affirmative action, because after all, racism no longer exists in America, as we all know, and besides those dirty, lazy niggers, and spics, and gooks, are just getting government handouts and stealing my tax dollars and they should be thrown in jail if not killed outright, but not because they're a different color, just because they're poor, and it's all a wonderful strain of social Darwinism which works out for me because I'm white and marginally better off than those filthy mud people.

- said YES to giving multinational corporations who lie to their employees and stockholders and piss away billions of dollars, a slap on the wrist, in addition to continuing to give them tax breaks to subsidize shipping American jobs overseas (this is known, to any sane person who examines the situation, as WELFARE, which is fine for millionaire CEOs and stockholders, because they need more money, but despicable for unwed minority mothers and children, because, fuck them).

- said YES to ignoring the growing stockpile of nuclear weapons held by North Korea, because they have no oil, and can't be used as a counterbalance to Saudi Arabia and Israel, or transformed into one vast complex of military bases from which to launch attacks against Syria or Iran.

- said YES to the wonderful things to come...

A right-wing pro-lifer appointed to the Supreme Court when Rehnquist steps down or dies. A Chief Justice Antonin Scalia. Another right-wing pro-lifer appointed when Sandra Day O'Connor steps down. A neoconservative supreme judiciary for a generation.

More illegal powergrabs in the House of Representatives to entrench a perpetual GOP majority there.

Constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage, and maybe to allow Arnold to run for president, and maybe to end presidential term limits.

School prayer.

Burning books.

National identification cards.

Expansion of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Detention camps.

And I say, good!

We get the government we deserve. We wanted this. We WANTED it. We want to lose our civil liberties, we want to throw poor people into the streets, we wanted to rush headlong into a new Vietnam. So hurray for our side! We did it. We gave ourselves a four-year-long present.

And my new philosophy now, is quite simple, and rather pithy I think.

Here it is:

FUCK AMERICA.

Fuck this country. This country can go straight to motherfucking Hell now for all I care.

People want to give tax breaks to millionaires, hey, go for it. Good for them. They must be better than us, they have more money, right? Let's ban gay marriage. Hell, let's ban gay sex altogether. Give law enforcement agencies power to break into our bedrooms and watch us even more closely. And I think it would be a good idea for us all to pray a lot more. And by good idea, I mean it should be compulsory. Every day.

And Iraq...what can I say about lovely, wonderful Iraq.

Every expert says our military almost certainly voted overwhelmingly for the man who put them in harm's way for stupid, ideological reasons.

So I say...let them stay in Iraq.

Forget about ending the war. Let them garrison those sand dunes for the next 30 fucking years. It's what they want! America's youth WANTS the opportunity to push brown people around, to shoot babies and blow up mosques. America's youth are a bunch of fucking monsters. STUPID monsters. So keep them in Iraq. More of them can get blown up or shot at. It's what they want. They want to give up arms and legs. They want to have screaming nightmares for the rest of their lives. They voted for it! We all did. We gave Bush a three-million-vote margin of victory. Iraq is just the beginning. There's Syria, Iran...of course we may have to start a draft, but hey, I'm 30 and out of shape, I should be alright, so go Bush! Hurray! More victory parades, and eventually, pretty memorial statues for every small town in America. This is what America wants.

We get what we deserve.

This isn't my country anymore.

As soon as it's feasible for me, I will be leaving America, renouncing my citizenship, and not looking back.

Fuck this country.

U.S. News & World Report

2004-08-01T22:44:00.000-04:00

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities.
- John Foster Dulles

The world is a beautiful place to be born into
if you don't mind people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving some of the time
which isn't half so bad
if it isn't you.
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "The World is a Beautiful Place"

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
- Aldous Huxley

I'm starting to suspect that it doesn't matter a whole hell of a lot who wins our next presidential election.

That statement, I'm sure, probably flies in the face of conventional wisdom, in the apparent "polarization" of America these days, and for those of you who know me, my personal unwavering loathing of George W. Bush and his administration. But. Doubts are creeping in to my skull.

How different is John Kerry, really?

He's not going to get us out of Iraq. At least not right away. That's a matter of record. He says he wants to rebuild our relationships with the rest of the world, but he says that largely in the context of getting them to help shoulder the Iraqi burden. And since the straw that broke the camel's back was our going into Iraq...well...you see the difficulties arising here. President Kerry will undoubtedly benefit from at least a small surge in global goodwill simply owing to the fact that he is not Bush. But when it becomes clear that he's basically going to modify Bush's course of action, rather than radically alter or reverse it, the honeymoon is going to end. So we'll end up sending more troops into the quagmire, and it is a quagmire, have no doubt about that. Kerry wants to increase the permanent armed forces by something like 40 thousand enlisted. How? By paying them more and making military service more enticing? Doubtful. That would entail a dreaded "tax raise" that no American wants to hear about because we're Americans and everything should be free for us. The easiest way for us to meet the goal of expanding our military - outside of a draft, that is - would be to, subtly of course, help depress the labor market. Make it a little bit harder for young people to get a job. Make it easier for colleges to hike their tuitions and trim the fat off of the college rolls. Maybe nudge a few companies to go overseas. Help push the "middle" out of the lower middle class and make a four year hitch overseas seem not all that bad. Preposterous, you say. Kerry has said he's going to punish corporations that send jobs overseas. Well. He'll want to, and make a public show of excoriating the Republican Congress for ramming through legisation that helps continue the job exodus to India and Asia, all the while begrudgingly admitting that that's precisely what he needs to help bolster our forces in Iraq, forces which will grow increasingly isolated as one by one we lose our token allies and fail to replace them with substantial military support from Russia, Europe, China, or Japan, because they know better than to get involved in this. Let Americans die to help build a stable Iraq, they say. [Not a democratic Iraq, necessarily. Just a stable one.] As soon as we finally leave, Baghdad will be open for business. They're patient. Older societies often tend to look at the long term first.

The neoconservative theory has been labelled by some as a "reverse domino" theory. A viable democracy in Iraq will somehow nudge Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Israel [er...strike that last one, they're Already Democratic, wink wink], basically all of humanity, that much closer towards democracies themselves. Because a free, liberal, tolerant society surrounded on all borders by autocracies is a great idea. They won't require an constant military buildup to fend off Teheran, Riyadh, Damascus, etc. They won't have to whore their economy out to Japan and the West and send us every last drop of crude in order to keep the borders sealed. No, not at all. The reverse domino theory is, if possible, even more flawed and facile than the domino theory, which as you know was utterly prophetic during the Indochinese conflict when our pullout from South Vietnam saw billions of workers rise up and establish a global dictatorship of the proletariat.

[crickets chirping in the silence]

The democratic domino theory won't work. It simply won't. Historically, the two great examples of so-called "imposed democracy," post-World War II Germany and Japan, don't support this. (Italy, of course, liberated itself from within, twice, overthrowing Mussolini first as leader of the Grand Fascist Council, and then as leader of the Manchukuo-like Republic of Salo, the rump Italian fascist state in Northern Italy; arriving American forces were quite irked to learn that the fascists had mostly been interned already when they got there, and the Italians were grateful to us and wished to return the favor by showing us the quickest way _out_ of the country. Which is probably why we rigged Italian general elections in 1948 and stole their democracy back for a while. BUT. That's off track.) Most neocons point to the story of the crushed Axis aggressors rebuilt into stalwart poles of democracy to bolster their flagging logic in Iraq - undoubtedly not intending to leech the glory of the liberators of Buchenwald and Bataan, heck no, just a coincidence. But Germany spent forty years divided and occupied - yes, both halves. Maybe NATO forces in West Germany were respectful of German wishes to an extent and had a genuine desire to protect and defend the German people from Warsaw Pact aggression - but they were also there to keep the Germans from their bad habits of the first two World Wars. West German democracy flourished due to the umbrella of North American and Western European military protection, and they had as a rallying point the monolithic threat of a single, concentrated enemy - the East. Apply the same model to a near-future Iraq. Now you've got an indefinite military commitment by the "Coalition of the Willing," which is us, to protect Iraq. Permanently. On top of that, you don't have a single threat to Iraq. You've got the anti-Western Baathist radicals in Syria. The Islamic Revolutionaries in Iran. The al Qaeda sympathizers, AND the oil barons resentful of Iraq's new cozy relationship with Big Oil companies, in Saudi Arabia. The Turks, who just don't like anyone, frankly. Israel, which actually likes Iran better than Iraq, democracy or no democracy. The landless para-states like Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, etc. In the face of many enemies, or at least, unfriendly rivals, you're not going to marshal nationwide unity. You're going to fragment. Iraq is going to get carved up into pro-Iranians (in the Shia south), pro-Syrians (in the Sunni triangle), pro-....well, none of them will be pro-Turk, I don't think, so they're covered on that angle. But further scrutiny only widens the gulf between the two situations. (No pun intended.)

Japan similarly fails to live up to this example. Firstly, Japan spent decades as a democracy in name only. The Liberal Democratic Party won every election for about thirty or forty years, and I'm sure that was solely the result of good governance, and not a combination of their cozying up to America without fail, and the steady influx of Yakuza money and influence to keep them on top. Also, we continue to occupy Japan to this day. They're slowly building up their Self-Defense Forces (they can't have an Army, it's in their post-war Constitution; it says nothing about a Self-Defense Force, though) to the point where they won't need us by around the mid-22nd century or so - unless China relocates their country to Antarctica or somewhere. So there's no real drive or incentive to radically democratize the country. Sure, Japanese citizens get in a tiff when our Marines rape 12-year-old Japanese girls. But by and large, compliance with American wishes is an ingrained Japanese habit by this point, regardless of whether the LDP or the latest anti-LDP coalition wins their sham elections. Special relationships transcend any petty ideologies. That's how Tony Blair, who worked for/with Bill Clinton and openly supported Al Gore in 2000, can be such an unswerving apologist for and collaborator with George W. Bush. He doesn't care what Bush stands for, or against, because he himself doesn't stand for much of anything, except the continuance of his own regime.

And to a great extent, it doesn't matter whether or not Bush or Kerry wins. The same people still man the machinery of state. The same memes are still dominant. We want Kerry to change things, to end the war, to roll back the USA PATRIOT Act, to protect Social Security and the environment. Maybe he personally wants these things as well. Or at least, maybe he thinks he does, when he thinks about such things at all. But the tracks of the train of history have long been laid down. Changing conductors doesn't always help. After a certain point, there are only so many ways we can go without derailing.

No Title Because I Am PISSED OFF

2004-07-30T19:06:00.000-04:00

Fuck.

I spent the better part of an hour writing about John Kerry, and Iraq, and Iran, and the Cold War, and I just lost it all. Gone. Without a fucking trace.

Maybe I'll reconstitute it later. But it won't be anywhere near as good.

FUCK!

Oh well.

Notes From the Rim of Obscurity

2004-07-30T08:06:00.000-04:00

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

[SPOILERS: This is another depressing and pathetic "woe is me" entry. Don't expect anything entertaining or thought-provoking. In fact, you're probably just better off not reading it. It's not even sad enough to be heart-wrenching. It's just lame.]

The people I love, the people I want to love, don't love me.

They say they do. But they "love" me. I'm great. I'm a riot. I'm so funny. And I'm always there when they need me. And Someday, I'll Make Someone Really Happy.

Not them. No. Some other woman will have to bite the bullet and take one for the team by having feelings for me.
But I'm great. Really. From a distance. If no one interesting or exciting is around.

I don't know why I waste emotions on people who don't give a shit about me. So, fuck them. I want to withdraw. I want to wither and dry up. I want to atrophy. I want to feel nothing. I want to be numb. Still and placid and numb.

But I can't.

So fuck them.

The punchline is that they don't even bother to read this. So they won't know how I'm feeling. And if they did, they wouldn't say anything. Because they can't be bothered to try. Isn't that fucking hilarious.

blah.

I should probably go and find someone else towards whom I can be supportive and understanding while they're fighting with someone for whom they have real feelings. That way I can act as a surrogate loved one while things are bad, from whom they can withdraw freely and easily once things are patched up with the person about whom they actually care. And in the end, the only reward I seek is that justice has been done. Sometimes if I'm lucky they still talk to me for a while afterwards, even after their relationships are good again, and do their best to withstand the hesitant awkward silences that ensue when I plead for their affection, like a fool. That's very kind of them.

Why do I do this to myself.

Why do I keep caring about people when I feel like they're using me.

Why doesn't anyone, ever, pick, me.

...eh fuck it. Maybe I'm just tired. I'll sleep on it. Night all.

Hermits Have No Peer Pressure

2004-07-17T02:44:00.000-04:00

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
- General of the Army William Tecumseh Sherman

Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.
- Dylan Thomas, "The Hand That Signed the Paper Felled a City"

A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie in the coffin,
It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is blank here, for reasons.
(It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.)
- Walt Whitman, "Sleepers"

If there are any of you at the back who do not hear me, please don't raise your hands because I am also nearsighted.
- W.H. Auden

[Three poets and a general. hmm. Dangerously close to a leitmotif here.]

Firstly, a tip of the bowler to Mr. Whitman, my fellow New Jerseyan and one of my all-time favorite poets. I needed something life-affirming and optimistic, to counterbalance my innate doom-and-gloominess, and his words seemed particularly apt.

When I say "apt" I mean as in "appropriate," "fitting," "germane," "felicitous." Not as in short for "apartment." That particular usage would not itself have been apt.

Just wanted to clarify.

Sometimes I outthink myself.

Anyway...

I sometimes toy with adding the seemingly requisite book and film recommendations to this weblog. Actually I'm surprised I haven't been shut down for not having them already. I don't know that I'd add such a feature permanently, mainly because I want this site to be as bare-bones and amateurish in appearance as possible in order to frighten off meandering flocks of Jehovah's Witnesses and overly solicitous door-to-door lightning rod salesmen. Of course, said stated goal does dovetail nicely with my nigh-absolute ignorance of HTML and web design, doesn't it? But where was I? Ah yes. Recommendations. Well, fuck it. I can do that for once.

Books, are good. I highly recommend reading some. You stupid fuck.

Sometimes movies are good as well. More often than not, though, they suck.

What? You want specific examples? ehhh....okay. All of you, my loyal constituency of two or three readers, should go out and read THE BUYING OF THE PRESIDENT 2004, by Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity. It gives detailed biographical, political, and most importantly, financial histories for all of the declared candidates who sought or are seeking the White House this November. Granted, the race for nominations is all but decided. But it's still fascinating to learn about Joe Lieberman's allegiance to the insurance industry. Or John Kerry's shucking and jiving about his wife's half a billion dollar trust fund as heiress to the Heinz Foods fortune. [sidebar: really don't trust Kerry. strongly suspect the Kerry Administration will be almost as beholden to the powerful agricultural combines and food industry as the Bush Administration is to oil. but. lesser of evils.] Or Dick "Go fuck yourself" Cheney's continuing ties to Halliburton. [Over 400,000 shares of stock options! oh, but it's in a "charity trust." Meaning he won't get it until he leaves office. hmm. Nope, no possible conflict of interest with those shares and Halliburton's continual winning of no-bid government contracts whatsofuckingever, no sir.] Anyway. Interesting reading.

[One glaring omission from the book, because of its publication date, is independent candidate Ralph Nader. For an interesting take on Nader, who really seems to have lost it by this point, here's some articles on Salon.com to peruse: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/01/nader_jacobs/index.html, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/09/nader_murdoch/index.html
In fairness to Mr. Nader, the openly liberal Salon.com seems to be engaging in a bit of a smear, and while not turning a blind eye towards the legal trickeries of the Democratic Party in trying to put a stake through the heart of Nader's campaign is at least winking at it. However. The portrait of Nader that emerges here is at least food for thought. And Salon.com is openly biased, so, they do get points for that.]

Movies, I highly recommend seeing Errol Morris's Oscar-winning documentary THE FOG OF WAR: ELEVEN LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF ROBERT S. MCNAMARA on DVD. Amazing, fascinating look at history, economics, ethics, man's inhumanity to man, etc. I'm sure none of you out there will listen to me though, so just to throw you a curveball, to prove I'm not the predictably stodgy pseudo-intellectual I seem to be, I'll also recommend seeing ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY, in theatrical release as of this writing. I ordinarily eschew stupid comedies like this, but this one was just surreal enough that I liked it. Very odd. Funny though. I guess the lesson to be learned here is, if you want me to recommend your film, put a colon in the title.

Final comment for today:

I read something in entertainment news the other day, about a planned reality show [another! yay! (gunshots)] about Amish youth heading out to the Big City as part of their traditional coming of age ritual, called rumspringa. Anyway. The flap was that some Amish group was trying to block it with protests coordinated from their website.

Their website.

Let's ignore the fact that they even know about UPN's fall line-up, for openers. Maybe they overheard some tourists discussing it. Who knows. But.

Their fucking website?

Are these real Amish people? Have they even read the handbook? I suspect something is rotten in the state of Pennsylvania. [I know. COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania. Go worry about something important, you slack-jawed troglodyte.] But why? Why PRETEND to be Amish? Maybe they're just trying to ingratiate themselves into the Mennonite community in order to gain their trust and steal the fabled Amish hoard of gold? I don't think they have any gold, though. I think they have lots of cows. That's about it. And homemade fudge.

It's all so. Fiendishly inexplicable.

Well. Anywho.

Excelsior!

God Loves, Man Kills...Wait. Strike That. Reverse That.

2004-06-15T06:10:00.000-04:00

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
- Stephen Roberts

Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing.
- Maynard James Keenan

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of him.
- Thomas Carlyle

I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
- Isaac Asimov

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court Minus One (Associate Justice Antonin Scalia recused himself from the case) handed down its monumental decision in the case of Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, which concerned the constitutionality of our wonderful Pledge of Allegiance. At least the Pledge of Allegiance as altered in 1954 from the original text. Anyway. The eight justices rolled up the sleeves of their goofy archaic black robes and boldly asserted that the man responsible for bringing this case to them, California atheist Michael Newdow, couldn't really sue because he didn't have sufficient custody of his daughter. Which of course really cut to the heart of the matter. The First Amendment, separation of church and state - that's just window dressing. The real legal issue here is, does a custodial arrangement of 10 days a month entitle a father to file a lawsuit on his child's behalf? And the court bravely settled that thorny matter for an uneasy American public.

Fucking pathetic.

Like almost all religious people, except for the true diehard fanatics, who are no longer capable of independent thought anyway, if they ever were, the eight Justices chose not to really, sincerely examine the nature of their faith, and the nature of faith itself. Because they, like all "religious" people, are cowards. I think it is this cowardice more than anything else that angers me about religiosity. The basic foundation of every religion ever practiced seems to me to be a total, paralyzing, maddening fear of a rudderless universe. That stark, total freedom seems to drive those who truly contemplate it over the edge. They recoil from it. Shut their eyes to it. Deny it until they collapse in a weeping, gibbering heap. Because they are cowards. Take a man who's a millionaire many times over, a father and a husband, head of a household, leader of a community, a mayor or a governor, a man who's really made something of his life and knows what he wants and charts his own destiny. Scratch the surface of that man's brain and you'll see that he is a fiction. A self-manufactured fantasy, which most people would choose to call a delusion. That successful man is only able to forge his identity construct as a leader and a power because of his inner submission to a greater, intangible, unseen authority figure. Without the support of this imaginary master he cannot cope. He needs the structure and order that such an invisible Fuehrer can provide for him. The size and scope of the universe is too vast for him to encapsulate, so rather than admit that incongruity and compartmentalize it away and not worry about it too much, or make a sincere and earnest effort to contemplate it and understand the physical nature of the universe, they stare into the Rorschach blot of the cosmos until they see what they want to see. "How can all of this have come into existence just on its own?" they muse rhetorically, as if that were explanation enough. Because, to their puny minds, it did just come into existence, springing up around them in the mere twenty, thirty, fifty, eighty years of their existence. Little thought is given to the billions of years of preceding time. Or how many universes existed before this one. They look at the forests and the oceans and ask how this all arose on its own, disregarding the quintillions of worlds that surely exist across the galaxies that lie dead and fallow, life never having taken purchase in their arid soil or acidic seas. These people, simply, are stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. They suck and I hate them. Sorry, I know I was all erudite and stuff a few sentences ago, but even my feeble attempts at eloquence are wasted when discussing such flotsam. I hate every church and every temple, every mosque, every monastery, every shrine. I would defile every patch of so-called holy ground with the spilled blood of my chosen people, the freethinkers, the agnostics and atheists, the questioners of established superstition, the people who power the motor of the world, as someone said once. The people who were burned alive for exercising the human powers of observation and deduction. The people who were disenfranchised and imprisoned and murdered in their sleep for daring to question the validity of whatever cult currently held sway.

These people are cowards and murderers and fools, and their way is cancerous death. Death of the intellect, and death of the conscience. And I reject them now and I will always reject them. America seems to be creeping closer to a quasi-theocracy at the moment. I don't think we'll ever get there; the pendulum here swings back and forth in a wide arc, and unfortunately I'm living in the wrong time right now. I think in a few decades the pendulum will swing back. I hope for that, anyway.

Our Founding Fathers, no matter what the current right-wing thugs want to believe, were largely Deists. That is, they acknowledged the probability of a Creator Urge or Spirit of some unknown and unquantifiable nature, but believed that such a Creator was almost a mechanism of the universe and had no interaction with the world or the human race at all. I don't believe that necessarily, but I can respect that notion at least. It's not without merit. A famous Deist, and a famous Founding Father for that matter, has a memorial dedicated to him along the bank of the Potomac River's Tidal Basin, a placid and inky body of water alongside our nation's capital. It's calm, contemplative - a suitable locale to house a majestic marble encomium to a flawed but passionate champion of free thought. Inscribed along the walls inside this memorial is one of his quotes: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Those words are truer these days then ever before, it feels.

Inside his memorial, the huge statue of Thomas Jefferson stands and stares. He looks agitated, restless, as if in motion, as if waiting for his turn to speak. We wait for his words still. We wait, and follow his gaze, down across the grimy blue-black surface of the Potomac. I think that things are going to get worse before they get better.

Death to All Who Oppose Us

2004-05-27T02:57:00.000-04:00

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.
- Garrison Keillor

Diplomacy is the art of avoiding the appearance of victory
.- Prince Klemens von Metternich

Beware of the young doctor and the old barber.
- Benjamin Franklin

Where next?

There's a fallacy inherent to that question, of course. It assumes that our current project, Iraq, will end as we wish it to end, in other words, that we will crush the fractious indigenies harassing our lawfully imposed proconsul and see the banners and pendants flapping in the wind freely and unfettered...eventually, at any rate. In point of fact, if you haven't heard, the surety of such a prophecy is currently wavering in a snowflake-on-your-tongue, hazy, soap-bubble existence. But hey. We lost more people on D-Day alone than we have so far in Iraq, which obviously means that crybaby complaints about us being in dire straits are greatly exaggerated, of course. We lost more people at Gettysburg, too. Decades of distance between our own present day and such ancient events mean nothing. It's all about numbers. There is no historical inflation.

So. Where next?

"France! Ohohoho, those damned independent-minded frogs, constantly looking after their own national self-interest instead of following orders. Kill 'em all." Ahhh. But it's not as easy as it may sound at first. To begin with, most French are white. Despite America's frequent periods of self-doubt and inner exploration and subsequent emphatic assurances that, yes, racism has been cast onto the dust-heap of history, that we are a color-blind society, et cetera, millions of Americans would probably feel a twinge of unease at the prospect of so many white casualties. And a twinge is all it takes to make a person answer a question the wrong way on a nationwide opinion poll, which is, of course, how decisions are made here, because we're a democracy. [Yes, France is becoming increasingly immigrant, increasingly Arabic, increasingly Muslim. But it's just not happening fast enough. Still too white. She lives...for now.]

And that means Fair Play for Germany, too, despite the trainloads of filthy Islamaniac Turks squatting there and stealing Aryans' jobs. Sigh. Muslims, _and_ Vietnamese! What a sinfully delightful temptation. [Why are the Viet in Germany? Hordes of them were transferred to the German Democratic Republic during the Cold War to drive East Berlin taxicabs and clean Leipzig toilets. Fraternal socialist comrades indeed.] But...Still Too White. One can almost sense American Air Force officers eagerly scanning each new census coming in from Old Europe, waiting for the racial tide to turn so the bombers can scramble.

In fact, let's just forget about Europe altogether.

We could hit Africa. But what's the point, honestly? Half of South Africa's adult population have HIV. In fact, thousands of people across sub-Sahelian Africa die every single day from AIDS-related complications. Let them fuck themselves to death. When the last Tutsi chokes to death on his own blood, we'll roll in and plant a flag in every one of their uranium mines. Well. We'll have someone do it for us, at any rate. Not sure if this containment suit is up to specs.

South America...this was a strong market, way in the way-back of Bush-43-A (pre 9/11). Plan Colombia was still going strong (thank you Bill Clinton!), we were on course to crack that all-important ceiling of 300 military "advisors" helping the Colombians exterminate the strangely-named FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). All we needed to push us over the top was a nice, small, manageable incident. Alas, we were gifted with a huge, completely fucking ridiculously unmanageable incident, and the perps spoke Arabic, not Spanish. But we hung in there, and tried to tie the War on Drugs to the War on Terrorism (terrorists sell drugs!...which they do...but mostly they sell heroin processed from opium grown in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, or from "secret" crops in narco-para-states like Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan, where our allies in the fight to democratize the world tend to boil their opponents in lye if they get too mouthy...) But the fish weren't biting that day, for the most part, so George and Dick threw back the old boots they'd snagged and headed back to home waters. Maybe in the second term...maybe...
I've got it!

"Australia!" It's perfect! All I need is a youthful, 1970s-era Gene Hackman sitting with his feet on the Oval Office desk, making V-for-Victory signs with a cheap stogie clenched between his teeth.

It's high time we settle those Aussies' hash. I'm not sure exactly what it is that they've done, or have failed to do, or might be planning to do, or may have the potential to do. We'll put a stop to it. Huzzah.

Pagoda Superstructures Crown the Obsolete Fleet; or, The Five People You Meet in the House of Dust and Darkness

2004-02-17T23:13:00.000-05:00

That's no moon. It's a space station.
- Sir Alec Guiness in "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope"

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
- Jorge Luis Borges

Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
- Otto von Bismarck

Let's run this idea up the flagpole and see it anyone salutes it...
- Robert Webber in "Twelve Angry Men"

[No idea what the titles mean. We'll grope our ways there eventually. Or not. Science ain't an exact science, after all.]

What year are we up to? 2004, by the local reckoning. That's for Americans and Europeans, of course. The children of Cathay might style it 4702, the Year of the Monkey. [People born under this sign balance equal proclivities towards optimism, intelligence, cunning, and practicality, just like most actual monkeys I know. Except for Professor Bananas. That lazy fuck.] Mohammedans would label this the year 1425...of course, like most people, I tend to keep writing "1424" on checks, well into the month of Muharram ul Haram, or even the first week of Safar! It's quite embarrassing, really. Across the way, their friendly neighbors the Jews consider this the year 5764. I suppose one possible aspect, however small, of the current Arab-Israeli troubles might be attributable to this calendar disparity. The Muslim world is loathe to fall any further behind in temporal matters and thus find themselves on the wrong end of a "millenium gap."

Moving on. Were there any Aztecs left, they might be inclined to tell you that this is currently the xihuitl or solar-year of 5-Tecpatl. Yeah. That makes about as much fucking sense to you as it does to me. Further interrogation of the heathen...er...spirited little aboriginal, might reveal to us that Tecpatl is one of the four daysigns after which Aztec xihuitl are named, and that Tecpatl means "stone knife" and is traditionally associated with the West. By this point he's babbling about a city of gold and do we need our boots shined and his sister is really nice and he thinks she'd like all of us, and we're getting tired of this, and there's always more where he came from, so it's probably a quick thrust of Toledo steel between his ribs to shut his yammering so we can get two minutes of peace and quiet, to hear ourselves think, God's wounds.

Sometimes I get lost in these tangents. Who are you, again?

Time. Time is the fire in which we burn, as Malcolm McDowell said in that horribly bland first Next Gen Star Trek movie, which as I've amply demonstrated above was merely a mangled line stolen from Borges, the father of magical realism, if such a thing can have something so bourgeois as a paternal progenitor without losing that shimmering shower-curtain shroud of surreality that lasts a moment on the optics and a lifetime on the cortex. Time time time. See what's become of me...in ten years I'll be forty, in fifty I'll be dead. In a hundred my bones will be disinterred and laid out to bleach and crumble in the ultraviolent rape of high noon. In a thousand my native language will no longer be spoken on the face of the Earth outside of museums and university classrooms. In five thousand years, eco-fascists will seize control of the Antarctican viceregal administrative complex and declare self-rule and independence from the Lapland hegemonists. In ten thousand, humanity will have collectively lost the pinky toe. In fifty thousand years...

In fifty thousand years, what was old shall be new again.

In a hundred thousand years, the renewed shall return to the mists of obscurity.

In half a million years...

I will return.

I will return in a vessel of fire, and cleanse the world of the unjust and the just alike.

So sin away.

It won't make a bit of difference in the long run.

Take care, all you Video Rangers out there.

P.S. Anyone but Bush in '04. Please. I'm dyin' over here.

Crawling From the Wreckage

2004-02-16T04:59:00.000-05:00

Maman died today. Or, maybe, yesterday. I can't really be sure.
- Albert Camus, "The Stranger"

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying.
- Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb"

Feeling 7-Up, I'm feeling 7-Up...
- from some stupid fucking commercial

So.

Feeling a little better. No. That's not wholly accurate. Let us say, instead, that I'm feeling ever so slightly more removed from the torments afflicting me. Not a great deal. But...slightly noticeably.

I sincerely appreciate the concerns voiced by some who know me. I know I stood mute and indifferent to your emails and phone calls and looks of worry. This was out of embarrassment more than anything else. I do not like talking about things which bother me, personally. I'm more of a Big Picture, Grand Strategy-type intellect, I guess, which is a convenient way to conceal personal cowardice. But I do appreciate the words of those who were worried about me.

Reality is highly improbable sometimes. I find it hard to believe that certain facts remain irritatingly and inconveniently untrue despite my desiring their veracity very much. I shake my head in wonder [not literally...just a saying...don't deviate here] that the world could stray so carelessly and breathtakingly from the dream-contours whose curves and ripples still remain electric beneath my fingertips, ghosts of flesh unspoken and unrealized...it's...jarring. Jamais vu, I suppose one might call it; deja vu's camera-shy antiparticle, the numbing dread that what you are seeing and experiencing and enduring has no precedent, is totally unknown and unknowable to your conscious waking mind. When you close your eyes and you feel your heart thrumming against the ribs inside your chest, and something seems so certain, so definite, that to open your eyes to a totally different reality is tantamount to a slap in the face, a bucket of ice water hurled at you in your sleep, the shock of it acidic and scarring...jamais vu. The never-seen.

Anyway. Maybe jamais vu is the mind's way of scabbing over anguish. Shunting the awful and horrifying back to a semirespectable distance, slathering the nightmares with a thick gauze of obfuscation and imprecision. I have no fucking idea.

But I'm feeling better.

At least, I'm feeling it less.

2004-01-22T18:36:00.000-05:00

I fear that I am losing my mind.

I can't focus on anything else. I sleep too much or I can't sleep at all. I don't want to do anything. I'm having trouble concentrating at work. When I get up, usually late in the afternoon, all I do is think of how to pass the time until I can fall asleep again.

Obviously, my writing is practically non-existent, since I haven't updated this thing in almost two months. I've been working on fiction but it keeps falling apart a page or two in. Like touching a spiderweb.

A few more months of this and I don't know what I will be like. I don't want to become the man I am becoming. I am consumed with jealousy and guilt and loneliness and rage and it just cycles around and swirls around again and again and again. I don't want her to see me this way but I don't want her to be spared the sight either.

I don't know what to do.

I don't know what to do.

This is pointless. I'll stop now.

Turning to the Weather

2003-12-04T08:54:00.000-05:00

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain

There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.
- Paul Joseph Goebbels

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
- President George W. Bush

Pale in the flare light
The scared light cracks & disappears
And leads the scorched ones here
And everywhere no one cares
The fire is spreading
And no one wants to speak about it
- Soundgarden, "4th of July"

I am a crank.

A curmudgeon.

Rapidly approaching hermitism.

I am 29 years old and find myself more and more unable, or perhaps less and less willing, to deal with people, things, events, anything, everything, because it's all just too stupid to believe.

Have we always been this foolish?

Is it the world that has sunken into this mire of idiocy, or is it just that I never noticed it before?

There are times when I am tempted to believe in God. A god, anyway, if not Jesus and his gang. Some creator, some prime mover of that first atom, some divine flame that roared over the face of darkness and forged matter out of nothingness and created everything. It would make things more logical, I think, to realize that the reason that things are as they are is due to the will of some malevolent deity. Not a loving god. I do not concede even the possibility of such an entity. If you are capable of love, then you can't achieve godhood. And if you do achieve that, love becomes irrelevant.

If that makes any sense.

I believe that it does.

I'm reading a book at the moment about Heinrich Himmler. Reichsfuhrer-SS and so forth. A "strangely ordinary man," as the jacket cover describes him. There's a passage in the book referring to Reichskristallnacht, a sick orgy of anti-Semitic looting and violence that erupted across Germany on November 9, 1938:

"The terror experienced by German Jews over the next hours and days cannot be described. Perhaps it cannot be imagined by those who have never found themselves in a suddenly primaeval night hunted or running the gauntlet of a mob baying for blood, with nowhere to turn - the authorities last of all - no succour in the alien darkness."

The alien darkness.

I don't really have a point to make here. No pithy observations, I'm afraid. No jokes. No silly anecdotes. Just an admission of dread. I walk down the streets of the town in which I live and things don't look familiar to me anymore. Everything I see is trying to sell me something. Everything is noise, and smoke, and grime. The constant whir of motion, ceaseless, purposeless motion, and the sky overhead is festooned with fiberoptic wire and power cables. And we think it's normal. We think everything's a-okay.

Somewhere out there, out in that alien darkness, a mob sits, sprawled on the sidewalks, sharpening their blades, wide-eyed, athirst. They go about their jobs, they generally follow the rules, and they wait for the signal, the slightest indication that it is okay to give in to those urges, to stab their neighbors and burn down their houses. We see these people everyday. We are these people, or at least, we're one bad day away from being these people.

I want to live on an island somewhere. Not too warm, not too cold. With lots of books, and a fishing pole. I could make due with that.

Indubitably, Watson

2003-11-25T11:05:00.000-05:00

On Saturday the 5th of October, he addressed two hundred and forty-four representatives of the country & western music industry in the Chattanooga Room just off the Tennessee Ballroom of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. He said to them, "What's astonishing is not that there is so much ineptitude, slovenliness, mediocrity and downright bad taste in the world...what is unbelievable is that there is so much good art in the world. Everywhere." One of the attendees raised her hand and asked, "Are you good, or evil?" He thought about it for less than twenty seconds, smiled, and replied, "Good, of course! There's only one real evil in the world: mediocrity."
- Harlan Ellison, "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore"

You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.
- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs

"Give your evidence," said the King; "and don't be nervous, or I'll have you executed on the spot."
- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Don't be nervous.

Sometimes, I admit, it is difficult to truly discern depression from mania, a concept one cannot truly fathom until one has personally plumbed the murkiest depths of the former and ascended the stratospheric heights of the latter. That truly is the bleakest truism to that state of being so quaintly and euphemistically referred to as "moodiness," "instability," "being a fucking whack job," et cetera, ad infinitum, yada yada. The rapidity of transition, the blurring of the dotted lines. Drug-stained godhood to invertebrate worthlessness in five minutes flat. Imagine if Bruce Banner changed into the Hulk and back again every five minutes. Eventually the horror, the dizzying power of such a transmogrification, would fade into sepia-tinted daguerreotype memory after a few weeks. He'd adjust. The brain is a terrifying enemy in that respect. Given the proper training, and just a pinch of inner strength, it can adapt to just about any tragedy, any perverse contortion of reality. Except, of course, death. And I'm only saying that because I haven't yet died myself. Who knows. Maybe I'll prove able to cope with even that.

Many years ago [no, no, not another flashback....!] I worked at an amusement park which should remain nameless, except that it was called Six Flags Great Adventure, deep beneath the thick jungle canopy of Jackson, New Jersey. One night, our corporate overlords decided to gift their serfs with a "ride party," id est, after the park had been closed to actual human beings [paying customers], we'd be allowed to stay and eat and drink food that had been left over from the day and was being thrown out anyway, and ride all of the rides except for the six they kept closed because they were repairing them or something. I chose to ride my preferred roller coaster, the Great American Scream Machine, which so far as I could discover in my research was designed and constructed in South Korea, and did not actually scream itself. It was a machine, though, and I suppose it duly earned the honorific "great," so it was all gravy with me. Live and let live, I say. So I climbed up the concrete ramps leading to the ride platform, let myself be strapped in, and off the coaster went, dipping down and then climbing, climbing, climbing for that first delicious drop.

Needless to say, as in all anecdotes, things went awry.

The trouble here was that they were simply too accommodating. Ordinarily, a patron would ride the GASM once, then get off. [ha! a delicious pun. now look for a hidden sailboat along the margins!] But since there were no actual human beings here that night, just employees, and not many of us, we could just stay on and keep riding. Well, I elected to do just that. Unwisely. Two, three, four times around the circuit. Feeling fine. Wahoo and all that. Five times. Headache? Maybe. Take a breather, no, not just yet. Six, dizzy. Dizzy now. Steady. Shouldn't have had all those Dr. Peppers. Prune juice churned into a frothy cocktail of death, eating through the lining of my stomach like sulfuric acid poured into a paper shopping bag. That taste, on the back of your tongue. Rancid. Sour-sweet and corrosive. Imagine stomping playfully through a pumpkin patch one crisp October morning and finding the plumpest, firmest, roundest, orangest pumpkin you've ever seen. So beautiful, really. So organically beautiful. Now sit and watch it rot with the magic of time-lapse mental imagery....its beautiful contours shot through with veins of decay, patches of off-green and green and orange-brown and burnt sienna and brown, actual honest-to-God brown, light brown, dark brown, the brown of rotting meat, the brown of mouldering gravestones, that big beautiful pumpkin sinking into the oozing miasmal soup of its own finite duration, like a star shuddering and staggering in its death-throes, rotting, rotting, rotting away, molecules unknitting and flying apart out of spite, rotting, crumbling to mush, right in your hands, right in the back of your throat, that rancid taste, slithering down your throat like a wayward snake, sinking spectral fangs into your uvula, your stomach bubbles up now, unable to take it, and then the next thing you know you're fully conscious again, after graying out somewhere on the second or third loop of your eighth time around, and the car has come to a full stop and up you go, legs moving, somewhere, towards some end, not really anything to do with you, really, and then you lean over the railing and heave up all your hopes and dreams and all those Dr. Peppers too down over the railing, down, down into the depths, and someone opines that maybe that guy over there shouldn't be allowed back on again.

So anyway. Mood swings.

Less vomiting, but ultimately, not all that different at all.

You disagree? Then allow to add this dismal coda to an already dismal anecdote:

After calmly...calmly, I insist...walking to the men's room, wiping the vomit off of my chin, sipping some tepid water from the fountain in a vain attempt to settle my stomach, and resting up for ten minutes, I tried to get back onto the roller coaster. I was refused, of course, possibly because of the traces of vomit still on my shirt, possibly because some kind soul pointed and shouted, "It's that guy who puked all over the walkway!" But after getting sick I still wanted to go back on. This wasn't a situation of climbing back onto the horse after getting kicked off. I've never even been on a horse. I was going from insane rushes of adrenalin pumping through my cerebral cortex [I think...I don't know neurology] to being unsure of where I was to somewhat painful convulsions, bounding right back up to the beginning and starting over. Moodiness, instability, manic-depression, whatever, is somewhat like that. It isn't feeling one extreme, or the other. The sickness lies in the compulsion, or the need, conscious or subconscious, to take that last step and merge the sublime with the ridiculous, the way cool with the bummer, and splice them, suffuse each with the essence of the other and make them essentially indistinguishable. Black and white run into grey. Lifeless, fungal grey.

eh.

But on the other hand, is there any other way to live? Perhaps it's all merely a matter of pacing. I'm not sure that I want to live without emotions. Surak was right, all of those hypothetical millenia ago. Emotion is the most destructive force in the universe, the enemy of reason [and the engine of it as well, paradoxically]. But he was speaking [will be speaking?] on the macro- scale, the scale of societies. Maybe love and hate, and envy and greed and passion and selflessness and lust and caring make the human race ultimately not all that viable outside of our biosphere. Without that total sea change, that evolutionary leap, we won't prove capable of leaving the planet without destroying ourselves, or the moon, or at least fucking things up so poorly that we crawl back into the caves and pray for vestigial tails and protruding supraorbital ridges and maybe to lose our thumbs. Maybe we can't do it. Maybe the so-called "manic-depressive" is a snapshot of the human psyche, an exaggeration rather than an aberration.

But I choose, to the extent to which I'm capable of choosing, to live this way. Preposterous, I know. But I've been inside the grey walls before. There's nothing there. Nothingness is the bleakest mask of madness, and entropy, the entropy of the soul, and I won't have anything to do with it. I will suffer the long nights of loneliness and insanity if it allows me to warm my spirit in the sun of human companionship and lace my fingers in the hands of true love from time to time.

I myself am actually a night owl, and not all that crazy about bright sunlight, but I think the metaphor still applies, really.

Things About Things, and Stuff. And Junk.

2003-11-11T20:25:00.000-05:00

Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love, people lose it! For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life!
- Brian Cox in "Adaptation."

Why do I feel so much better about life these days?

Well, for starters, perhaps that is a slight exaggeration. Life is still pretty awful. Overall, taking a global perspective, life is still one of the worst things about living. Arthritis and stubbed toes and sour milk and bounced checks and mad cow disease, and people eating out of garbage cans, and professional wrestling, and hairline cracks in your windshield, and car bombings, and religion, and deer that wander out onto major highways at three AM because they've reached the end of their rope, apparently. And cancer. And murder. And fat-free Oreos, what's the point? They taste different.

Life.

Don't talk to me about life.

So what's different?

Well, to continue, beyond my grievances with life in general, life in particular isn't all that great either. Uninvolved. Creatively blocked for the most part. Tired most of the time. I ripped a hole in one of my favorite shirts the other day. Out of shape. Not much of a social life at the moment. Crappy job. This afternoon when I stumbled out of bed (yes...this afternoon...don't lecture me) I stepped on a thumbtack and it hurt. I totally blew that audition for Rent. I could go on, but I think at this point the general theme, the leitmotif for my life if you will, has been successfully delineated.

So.

Different?

It's not much.

It's such a tiny little insignificant thing.

Very little.

Invisible to the naked eye, if you ask me.

But.

Well.

I'm probably reading too much into things, I think.

It's quite possible that this is all a surfeit of optimism on my part. I am, after all, world-renown for my gushing optimism. I should probably get that looked at.

But.

I had a talk with her. Frequent readers of this page, well, even they don't really know who she is, except, of course, for her. I suppose one could say that she herself doesn't know who she is, and use that as a springboard for opening a broader discussion on how we as a society and as a race do not know ourselves, and drag in issues of identity and ego, and isn't life fleeting, and we are all mortal, and blah blah blah, but that's another page for another weblog, so go bug them already.

I had a talk with her.

And. Well.

It's not that things are different, per se. Objectively, they're not. Our relationship has not changed. We're still close friends, albeit online friends, who have not actually met and probably won't in the near future, owing to the distances involved and the difficulty in my obtaining a passport given the extremely contagious nature of my condition. (I kid of course. It's not really that great a distance.) However.

However.

heh.

Maybe I'm stupid. But I enjoy being this kind of stupid for once.

Love makes you stupid.

Love robs you of your intelligence, your faculties for reason, and analysis, and logic, and makes you thank it for the privilege, and is there anything you'll be needing today? Please. I insist. Feel free. Look around. Browse. What's mine is yours.

Mi casa es su casa.

I asked her why, and she told me.

And she didn't say the thing which I dreaded the most.

She doesn't love me, not in that way. You know. That way. Such a bland euphemism for such a powerful, awesome, destructive, creative force. She doesn't feel that for me right now. Since knowing me, she said, she's examined things, our relationship, and she made the decision at a certain point that she shouldn't develop those feelings for me. It wasn't practical, there were too many obstacles, she was trying not to hurt me. And I can accept that.

So why am I smiling?

For the longest time, I resented her. Occasionally, I am ashamed to admit it, I hated her. Utterly stupid, of course. How can you hate someone for being amazing? How can you hate something for the joy that it provides you, simply because such joy throws the rest of your miserable life into unremittingly stark contrast? So, because you can't feel that joy all of the time, because you can't have more of it, in more concentrated form, you should pervert what you have, distort it with anger and resentment, refuse it, shut it out, turn your back on it?

No.

No, and no, and never, I say.

I was mad at her for not loving me. I should have been grateful to her for allowing me to feel the way that I feel about her. For giving me someone to love. Love is transformational. Overpowering. I let it twist me for a long time, distort me, fill me with venom, reduce me to caricature. There is no greater form of abuse than to let love darken your spirit in that manner. No greater evil than the instinct for covetousness. If you hate someone for not returning your love, then that hatred will make you someone unworthy of being loved. I heard her explain the practicalities, the reasons for her decisions, and I smiled, and I thanked her for explaining things, and I said that of course we would still be friends, and I knew, I knew, with a certainty of astonishing clarity and unshakable, undoubtable, adamantine corporeality, that I could win her heart, some day. Not through wordplay, or poetic encomia averring eternal devotion; not with anger, or guilt; not with sorrow. I could win her love by earning it. I could make her love me, by being someone worthy of her love. Two thousand years ago a Roman named Lucius Annaeus Seneca, also called Seneca the Younger, also probably called a lot of other names behind his back, mastered the art of saying the simple rather simply and still achieving profundity, and he said this far better than I could ever hope to say it. Si vis amari, ama.

If you wish to be loved, then love.

Post-script:

I suppose there will be those that consider me a fool for deluding myself this way. I call you oafs with lumps of coal in place of hearts. And I quote Seneca again: Aliquando et insanire iucundum est. Translate it yourself, you pikers.

Post-post-script:

You. Darth Maul. Take a hike.

My Power is Beyond Your Understanding

2003-10-21T09:20:00.000-04:00

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
- John Maynard Keynes

It is a sad commentary on the ineptness of democracy that, come election day, my vote carries no more weight than yours.
- Russell Mires

Now I, Skeletor, am master of the universe.
- Frank Langella in the aptly-titled "Masters of the Universe"

The ceasefire between opposing interstellar fleets facing off within the depths of the Coalsack Nebula seems to be holding....for now....leaving me a few free moments to dash off a some scattershot thoughts and musings on matters irrelevant, irreverent, and indeed, irresponsible. Only I've got to stop the alliteration. I've got to. It's the first and most terrifying sign of jungle madness. Not going through that again. Damn near wasted me the first time.

Yes. Those thoughts.

I must warn you:

They are for the most part rather insipid.

I apologize in advance for this.

I'm not sure what's come over me as of late.

hmmm.

As of late.

I like that turn of phrase.

No rhyme or reason. Just sounds pleasing to the inner ear. And perhaps to the anvil and the stirrup and the icepick and the can opener and those other tiny tiny bones that are inside your ear and about which I first read many many years ago in Volume 1 of the Charlie Brown Encyclopedia, whose scholastic standing is truly unequaled in the world of cartoon character erudition, with the possible exception of Hagar the Horrible's translation of the Aeneid, which moved me to tears, not from Queen Dido's heartwrenching and suicidal declaration of love and anguish or any other scene within the text itself, but due to the fact that I don't speak Viking and thus received an F on my term paper. I suppose making up plot points wasn't the best way to get around the language barrier.

How about a fifteen dollar bill? I dunno. I just think it's time. We could put James Buchanan on it, seeing as how he was the fifteenth President, and gay as well. [No connection between being gay and the number fifteen. Just like to bring up historical stuff. Go about your business.] Although except for Washington, we don't really go by that system. I actually once got into a shoving match on a school playground with some kid who insisted that Abraham Lincoln was obviously the fifth President, just look at the money. I don't really remember who swung first at whom. The police were good-natured enough about the whole matter, although their stern warning about hanging around school playgrounds at my age was, I feel, exceeding their mandate just a tad. I know my rights. It was Callahan.

Is purple a flavor? I think it should be. Think about it. Some foods just taste purple, no other way to put it.

I think the next time the Republicans overthrow a Democratic governor and install a puppet by way of a ridiculous recall election, they ought to run Francis the Talking Mule. Or, I guess by this point it would Francis' stuffed and mounted corpse, probably on permanent display at the inevitably titled Francis the Talking Mule Museum and Car Wash, in scenic Yorba Linda, California. Besides the fact that Republicans have apparently been given permission by Jesus Christ to do whatever they want for the next decade, because of all of the brown people and their problems, I think it might lighten the mood for the country as a whole, maybe put a fun face on our gradual slide towards corporate-sponsored religious fundamentalist fascism. It can't be all bad.

Wait.

I've just rechecked the math, and apparently, yes, it can be all bad. Even worse, actually, if you carry the one. So it's back to the Coalsack Nebula for me. Just forward my mail.

Jump, You Bastard

2003-10-18T01:55:00.000-04:00

The reason that some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.
- Salvador Dali

You're perfect, yes it's true
But without me you're only you
- Faith No More, "Midlife Crisis"

I remember once in high school...about a thousand centuries ago...for some reason, in health class, we were being made to watch the film "Dead Poets Society." I cannot remember the ridiculously flimsy pretext for this, other than the fact that it most assuredly was ridiculously flimsy. This is the kind of thing that happens when you expect gym teachers to teach. Anyway. We were watching this movie, and we came to the part where the character of Neil, the overly sensitive budding young actor, has a fight with his father over his desire to act, ending with his father's decision to remove him from the love and the warmth and etc. of the titular society of deceased rhymers and send him to (gasp) med school. Or military academy. Usually in these situations it's military academy. But I don't remember if it was a military academy in this case. If it wasn't, though, it should have been, because then maybe the film could have morphed into this "Taps"-like riff about mutinous cadets and maybe there would have been a little more action in this yawn-fest.

Speaking of tangents...

Anyway. Being incapable of opening his mouth to his father, or demonstrating any moral courage at all that doesn't involve sneaking around and rehearsing for a play when you know darn well that Dad won't like it, idiot, and anyway, the upshot is that Neil decides to kill himself. So he puts on his Puck costume from his play, presumably so that his parents would be totally embarrassed and thus their grief would be slightly mitigated (thoughtful lad), and opens his second-story window to embrace the night air or somesuch. And as he stood there, drinking in the empty night sky and perhaps basking in the applause of an imaginary audience, forming one last fantasy to take with him into death, I heard a group of painfully stereotypical high school jock assholes start to snicker from the back of the room. One of them called on the character of Neil (who, as they might not have been aware, was A) fictional and B) not actually in the classroom with us, save on the teevee) to "jump, you bastard!," which elicited a fresh round of giggles from the room entire, because after all, our parents are upper middle class and life is funny, doggone it.

Without a word, I stood up, marched to the back of the room, hauled the ne'er-do-well up by the collar of his shirt and tossed him headfirst out the nearest open window.

But I kid, of course. The window wasn't open.

What I actually did, besides spend the next twenty minutes vivisecting those nimrods without using anesthesia in a dark, dank cell somewhere in the recesses of my mind, was wonder why people delight in other people's misery. The Germans have a word for this, which really shouldn't surprise anyone at this point. Schadenfreude is defined, by someone, somewhere, as a malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others. Tied in with this concept, which at that point lay undefined and fallow inside my brain, were other general observations with regards to the repugnance of the pack mentality, the tendency towards joyous and enthusiastic conformity that plagues the human condition at all ages but seems particularly virulent and acute during the teenage years, the use of sarcasm as emotional armor to avoid empathizing with others in painful situations, and the fact that sky blue and yellow are awful school colors, especially considering that my high school's "mascot," i.e. "pet" or "slave," is a "patriot," one rather nebulously defined at that. About what is this anonymous patriot patriotic? Being American? Being New Jerseyan? Being a Freeholder? Is he "patriotic" in the same sense as Oliver North, Joseph McCarthy, or Jefferson Davis? What were his opinions with regards to Operation Desert Storm, or the War on Drugs, or Iran-Contra? Would he have taken umbrage at Bertrand Russell's claim that patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons? He most certainly would have disagreed with George Jean Nathan's assertion that patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles. Both bon mots seem to fly in the face of the blood this unnamed patriot shed, or could have shed, or perhaps will shed again, if you take him to be some kind of timeless apocryphal symbol of patriotism, or something, rather than an actual flesh and blood historical figure.

I think he'd probably agree, reluctantly, with old Tom Jefferson's oft-quoted sentiment that the tree of liberty has to be refreshed from time to time with his own blood, as well the blood of tyrants. Of course, there aren't any high schools around with tyrants for mascots.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

hmm.

Who the hell is George Jean Nathan, anyway?

An Immodest Proposal

2003-09-30T10:23:00.000-04:00

That's the way the cookie crumbles; and Peter had an intuitive sense of this paradoxical fatality, which caused him to tell Eldridge Cleaver once, "People who say 'You're either part of the solution or part of the problem' are themselves part of the problem." (Cleaver replied, wittily, "Fuck you.")
- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, "Leviathan"

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
- Samuel Beckett

The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny - it is the light that guides your way.
- Heraklitus of Ephesus

Yesterday I saw:

- Two customers at the local Best Buy electronics superstore, morons by the looks of them, standing and staring in open-mouthed fascination at their own images captured by a tripod-mounted camcorder. They huddled around the grainy image displayed on the monitor, like the magi around the Christ-child's manger, and stared, whispering comments to one another, reaching out with tremulous fingers to caress their demi-selves on the teevee, then giggling as their images aped their every action. They seemed incapable of grasping the connection between their own motions, and the motions of these funny little people on the magic picture box what looked just like them.

- A woman at Barnes and Noble [yet another superstore...suburbia is littered with them], rapidly thumbing through some new Oprah-endorsed life manual by Dr. Phil or another charlatan of his ilk, her desperate eyes looking for the answers to why her life sucks and she's so miserable and nothing makes sense anymore. [So I extrapolated.] Myself, I'd recommend Dostoevsky or Melville for that sort of thing. But murderous Russians and whales don't play out here in the 'burbs, apparently. We can't get enough of telegenic psychiatrists and their home-spun shit-kickin' sagacity.

- A man who'd parked his shiny new car in a fire zone, and locked his keys in the car while it was still running. I laughed and drove off as he peered into the driver's side window one more time, I suppose hoping to discover himself still sitting inside, thus solving the problem. I did that once too. Now it was my turn to laugh.

- A Doberman pinscher, holding a leash in its mouth, walking a Dachshund. Nah, I made that one up. But how funny would that have been? I mean because they're both German. I dunno, it struck me as funny. I don't think pets should be allowed to have dual citizenship either. Make a commitment, Fido.

- At a traffic light, in the car ahead of me, I saw the driver and passenger bolt out of their doors, run around the car in opposite directions and get in on opposite sides of the car. Only the light turned green halfway through it, and the new driver [formerly the passenger, as attentive readers will have noticed] hit the gas before the new passenger was fully inside the car. For the rest of the day, I wondered what private drama had transpired inside that car that led up to that. Old arguments rehashed, wounds reopened, petty jealousies and bickering bubbling up until finally, the driver had had it. "Fine! Fuck it! YOU DRIVE!" And the way in which they both burst out of the car... I was half-expecting them to be covered in fire ants or something. Now THAT would have been a good story.

In his play "Our Town," Thornton Wilder expresses the duality of our time here on Earth. One character, a ghost long reconciled to the fact that her time is over, wistfully recalls life as "awful...and wonderful." The main character, Emily, asks aloud if people "ever realize life while they live it?" Sometimes I find myself in agreement with that. I'll spy something good, and beautiful, like a butterfly shaking its wings dry after emerging from its cocoon, or a rabbit naively hopping right past my feet through the dew-slick grass of the early morning, or a little kid hugging a big floppy-eared dog around the neck, and I'll hold that moment in time, suck it greedily into my brain, let it envelop me, let myself feel good about the universe for an hour or two. But more often than not, I find myself shaking my head in muddled disgust and incomprehension at just how staggeringly vapid and stupid the rest of the world seems to be. Not just that. How nonsensical things seem to be. Maybe the defect is mine. But I look and I listen and I can't seem to divine neither rhyme nor reason out of things. Life is a song sung off-key, sometimes. You want to cover your ears and block it out but you stay until the end for politeness' sake.

I'm not especially mad at this state of affairs. I'm just annoyed more often than not. Millions of years of evolution were endured and thrashed through by generation after generation of lesser organisms, struggling for reasons beyond their ken to reach outward and upward, to climb up, to pull themselves out of the primordial slime, all so that you could stand there and watch yourself on TV, dolt. Enjoy it.

eh. Maybe I'm slightly mad about it. It's not malice, though. It's more mystification than anything else.

I'd like it if for one day, we all took the time to do something important. Turn off the computer, turn off the television, put the book and the magazine down, and do something worthwhile. Something that isn't just another way of making the clock go from four o'clock to nine o'clock, or isn't just a means of forgetting how boring and meaningless everything seems to be as of late.

Just a thought.

Battle of the Pyramids II: Electric Bugaloo

2003-09-29T08:54:00.000-04:00

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good
Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move
- Led Zeppelin, "When the Levee Breaks"

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done.
- Henry Ford

Criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot.
- Bruce Wayne

Giza. Ever been? Nah, me neither. One day, perhaps. When the indigenies demonstrate a little more tolerance towards the godless. But anyway, apparently, among the numerous bowling alleys and tanning salons and vendors of bric-a-brac [hmm...bric-a-bractories?] that dot the lifeless desert sands of Giza, they've also got this honking huge pyramid there, for some reason, I guess for the tourists. But this Pyramid. whoa. Apparently, it's Great. It's mainly attributed to the reign of Khufu, second Pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt, for use as a tomb when he died, which is when most tombs are put to use.

[Khufu was known to the Greeks as Cheops - not sure why, silly Greeks - and also, sometimes, as Suphis. Not sure of the meaning of that final alias. Maybe he fought crime under that guise. hmm. Well. Not crime as we know it, but "crime," wink wink, to the savages of the Nile. "Camel thieves, adulterers not of royal lineage, and Hebrews are a cowardly, superstitious lot. I shall become a crocodile." Or sentiments of similar structure. Upon reflection I am losing confidence in the Pharaoh-as-masked-crimefighter scenario. I don't think ancient Egypt was socially advanced enough to develop comic books, because I think too many Ancient Egyptonians would confuse them with everything else written in hieroglyphs. I think it really requires a Renaissance and an Industrial Revolution or two to develop a concept like the Legion of Substitute Heroes, for example.]

[Actually, I never really understood them. They all sucked. Who'd want to join that group? Except for Polar Boy, who actually had a useful power, which made you wonder why the Legion didn't let him in in the first place. "Let's see, we got this guy over here, Polar Boy, who can freeze things solid and make ice walls and whatnot, and then this guy here, who can eat rocks and dirt and anything, basically, any kind of matter." "Holy shit! Do we even need to put this to a vote? All in favor of the freak who can eat anything, say aye! The ayes have it. What's his name, anyway?" "Matter-Eater Lad." "Hmm. Catchy. Kinda puts it all out there, you know?"]

[um. sorry.]

AHEM. Giza. The Great Pyramid. One figure I read, and it's from a website, so its accuracy is above suspicion, claimed that it took 100,000 people and 20 years to finish it.

Fuck.

I can't conceive of the logistics that sort of endeavor would entail. [Sorry. "Endeavour." I have a constituency in Canada to take into account here.] The closest we of the modern age, and by we, I mean other people and I had nothing to do with it but I'm alive now so I share the credit, have come in emulating, if not replicating, the magnitude of such an achievement, is probably the atomic bomb. No. We did that in a few years. The space race, then. Or the making of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. And those are pale shadows, really, considering all of the advantages we of modernity enjoy over our devolved, stooped-over, barbaric forebears - penicillin, cable modems, Snapple....that they were able to pull together, as a society, well, not really, I don't think they gave the Jews a say in the matter, but the Egyptians as a whole were able to pull together, roll up their sleeves, and pile approximately two million, three hundred thousand blocks of stone each weighing at least five tons on top of one another, all so that one guy, one single guy, could have a nice place to live, when he's dead. Yeah. That's brilliant. I don't have to eat this week. I don't have to feed my family this week. We all have to scrimp and save and pull together so that the boss can have a nice coffin that's visible from low orbit. Lovely. I just love living in ancient Egypt, Jesus fucking Christ.

.......

I don't think that that's how it actually happened, of course. Nobody spoke English back then, they all spoke hieroglyphics. When I was a kid I used to think that to speak hieroglyphics involved acting out the symbols and such. Like a mime. Except you can still talk, that's allowed. And skip the white face paint. And not everyone hates you.

Okay. I'm done now.

Counsel Strenuously Objects

2003-09-24T15:45:00.000-04:00

There's not a man in America who at one time or another hasn't had a secret desire to boot a child in the ass.
- W.C. Fields

I raise my voice in protest.

September 23 is a fine day for a birthday, I agree. Autumnal equinox and all that. Weather's not too hot, not too cold yet. Leaves are just starting to turn colors. I myself have used it as such for, hell, as long as I can remember, really. And that's the whole point.

There were 364 other perfectly good days on which to decide to be be born. I'll just throw some examples out here. May 5. Cinquo de mayo and all that. July 17. Wonderful summer day, not a cloud in the sky, kids laughing and playing in the backyard with that lovable little scamp of a mutt. December 2. Ground packed with snow, mugs of hot chocolate, breath misting in the air, lots of familial warmth. [Plus, it's the anniversary of Napoleon's greatest victory, his defeat of the Russians on the plains of Austerlitz in 1805, but I suppose that doesn't really matter to a heck of a lot of people. Ignorant louts.] August 12, January 19, May 10....May 10! What a lovely day to be born. The possibilities were nigh-endless.

But nooooooo.

[An aside. Do people born on February 29 have any rights whatsoever? I'm serious here. When do they celebrate their birthdays? Are they legally four times younger? That whole scene. Man. Crazy.]

September 23 was my birthday 29 years longer than any Johnny-come-lately, so I don't want to hear it. That's it. End of story.

My birthday.

Mine.

[This delusional rant is my way of congratulating the arrival of a new son, grandson, and nephew to some very good friends of mine. Even if the little thief stole my birthday.]

The Beginning of the End of the End of the Beginning

2003-09-24T15:23:00.000-04:00

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.
- James Joyce, "A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man"

Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.
- attributed [inaccurately so, more's the pity] to Martin Luther, during his hearing before the Imperial Diet of Worms in 1521

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
- Winston Churchill

Another year.

I sometimes resent the arbitrariness of birthdays. Aging is a constant, gradual process. The year doesn't wait 364 days and suddenly expend itself and roll your genetic chronometer ahead in a single frenzied rush. And it's so terracentric. If I'd been born on Mercury, I'd be about 117 or so.

And very hot.

What I despise about birthdays, really, is the "taking stock of one's life" artifice it invariably imposes upon you. The implication being, of course, that it's perfectly acceptable to piss away the rest of the year, so long as you tidy up your room and take the garbage out, life-wise, a few days before the calendar comes to visit. And the sad part is, I can't even bother with that. These days I feel locked in a death spiral. Like Phobos. One of the moons of Mars, Phobos spins around the god of war once every 7 hours, but that's not fast enough. It's too close to its father. Getting pulled a couple centimeters closer every year. In about 30 or 40 million years, it'll either break apart into a ring of debris, or smash down across the Martian plains.

I suppose that's as sufficient an analogy to my life as any right now. Trying to amend a decaying orbit against ridiculous odds. Staving off the inevitability of personal extinction by the attainment of some kind of weak nuclear temporary immortality. Immortality is the wrong word. Augmented longevity, let us say instead. True immortality would be dull and terrifying. But I've no fear of that. Shakespeare isn't sitting in some netherworld, anxiously monitoring my progress, hoping that a low-flying helicopter or a near-sighted deer hunter takes me out and eliminates his competition.

[Hmm. Story idea, that. Nobody steal that. It's mine.]

I really need to take stock of my life. Eventually.

A very astronomically-themed entry today. Not sure why. Saturn has 19 known satellites, you know. And Saturn was the father of the gods.

Yarrgh. Or words to that effect.

2003-09-19T17:55:00.000-04:00

Dyin's the easy way out. They'll have to kill me before I die!
- Graham Chapman in "Yellowbeard"

Imagine my embarrassment at finding out that September 19 has long been recognized and celebrated in a lusty and bacchanalian fashion as International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Here I am, nearly 29 years of age [cough cough next Tuesday cough cough], and I had never heard of such a fete. I blame the bigwigs and the fatcats who dominate the military-industrial-calendar complex for their lackadaisical ignorance and cultural barbarism. Or. um. Look over there. An elephant.

Anywho.

I, myself, seem to be genetically unable to talk like a pirate. Or walk like a pirate. Or even sashay like a pirate.

However, I do have a pegleg. Mine is made of a modern titanium alloy, though, and the anachronistic nature of such may consequently disrupt the verisimilitude, but alas. So make me walk the plank then and send me to Davy Jones' locker.

I must confess to a certain curiosity about the origin of that particular colloquialism. Davy Jones? Is that supposed to be the Devil? That's often the explanation offered, but if that's the case, what caused sailors of ages past to give Lucifer such a pedestrian moniker? It's not particularly frightening. Actually, it sounds bland. But perhaps that's due to my own ignorance of whomever inspired such feelings maritime dread and antipathy. Maybe there was an actual Davy Jones at one time, who wasn't really a murderous psychopath, let alone an associate of fell netherworldly powers. Maybe he was just a dick. Stay with me here. He worked at a port somewhere, and he was always, I dunno, forgetting to turn off the lighthouse after the storm was over, or not packing enough oranges on ships and thus contributing to outbreaks of scurvy, or alwats leaving his powdered wigs lying around when company came over and the rest of the fleet was trying to tidy the place up, or something like that. Not a demon. Just an inconsiderate prick. I suppose, given this scenario, that over the years, as time limped on, tales spread from one generation of sailors to the next, and each time, the bitching and moaning about this stupid fuck named Davy Jones grew worse and worse in the telling, until eventually the element of fear crept into the tales. And with fear came the attribution of power, true malevolent power, to Davy Jones. Until after a hundred years or so he'd risen from dockyard pain in the ass to bringer of storms, father of mutinies, and dark lord of the churning whirlpool that swirls and writhes out past the horizon, teeming with the souls of drowned sailors and fishermen, which he churns with his black pitchfork, or maybe it's an oar, that would make more sense, really, given the maritime motif here, yeah, his black oar churns the whirlpool and thrashes the souls of lost sailors and blah blah blah.

There was a point to this mental excursion, but it has temporarily escaped the mind of your humble narrator.

Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day, everybody.

Somebody Else's Sky

2003-09-17T20:44:00.000-04:00

We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
- Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami, "The Rubaiyat" [Quatrains LXVIII and LXIX]

When you're caught in the merciless vice-like grip of emotional currents you cannot possibly hope to navigate or impede in any way, and you feel the greasy, callused, massive thumb of Kali press down against the nape of your neck while her fingers constrict around your body like anacondas and buckle your ribs just enough to make you scream soundlessly, when you hear the skittering of rats across wormeaten floorboards as the ship lists and lurches suddenly and you feel the panic flutter inside your chest like the thrashing leathern wings of some angry mutant monarch butterfly, and when the stars rise and fall and the cars below streak past in indistinct speedlines to form a churning river of light gleaming up across the night sky, and when you hate everything, and when you wish you hated everything, and when you hate her, and you wish you could hate her, and you wish you could let her go, and when you wish above all other things in this world and all worlds for just a single, flickering, iridescent moment of tenderness from her, when you wish she could find it within herself to reflect back just a tenth, a fiftieth, a hundredth of the care and respect and need and love which you've showered upon her, when you sit in silence and inside you're a seething cauldron, a cyclone, tearing at your hair and mewling and weeping and throwing patio furniture around in an imaginary spectacle, knowing that you'd betray everything you hold to be good and true and sacred for the key to her heart, damning yourself a thousand thousand times and more for abandoning your principles and your pride and your freedom for the spectral ecstasy of that single hallucinatory kiss, for the look of consent in her eyes that washes over you like a hurricane and lifts you high into the stratosphere and makes you feel unconquerable and immortal and makes you seethe with the fires of creation, because she gave you that look, because she kissed you, because you love her, because the universe has meaning now, because the million million years of agony and sadness and struggle has now been gloriously justified....

Well.

When you're trapped in the hopelessly awkward situation of love without reciprocity....worse: when the object of your adoration seems to genuinely value your friendship, and is at a loss as to why that isn't enough for you....still worse: when she insists that you're a great guy, and she's so lucky to have a friend like you, and yes, you're wonderful and you have a lot of great qualities, and in all honesty she is drawn to a lot of things about you, but no, not to you specifically, and no, she can't tell you why that is, and we really should stop talking about this, because it's terribly frustrating for her, and of course you don't want to be the cause of her distress, so you bite your lip and you sit there and you listen to her tell you about the heartache of liking someone she met less than a week ago, who's really smart and funny and introspective and how cool it is to finally meet someone like that, you know, after this nonstop parade of losers who follow her around and can't seem to take the hint that she's not interested, and you bite your lips hard enough to draw blood at the implication but you say nothing, and she tells you how confusing it all is, because he has a girlfriend back home, and she has a big problem with that, because she doesn't do that kind of thing, really, not with someone who's already involved, she's not that kind of a person, except obviously she is, because after a weekend of partying with him she did what she says she doesn't do, so now she's confused, because he's so great, and obviously a super boyfriend to his other girlfriend back home, the one on whom he's cheating, and what should she do? She really wants to tell you all this, even though she knows it's terribly painful for you, even though you tell her, with the words you say and the voice in which you say them, how painful it is for you to hear this, she tells you anyway, because she needs someone to talk to about this, and deep down you fear that that's why she tolerates your company and your sad, misbegotten protestations of affection for her, because you give her an outlet for her problems when she needs that, and you're a fool, you're a fool, you're a fool for suspecting that and being there for her regardless, and you listen to her confusion and her anxieties, and you try through clenched teeth and deadened voice to be polite and give her some inept advice on the matter, and its just a painful mess, because now she feels bad for making you listen to this, and now you feel worse for making her feel bad, and it's all a pointless and futile exercise because you know she's going to continue seeing this guy anyway, because he's so great, he's so wonderful, he's so amazing that despite the obstacle of his current relationship with another woman she happily gives herself to him, which of course tells you that despite your own alleged great and wonderful qualities which she says that she likes and your unflagging friendship and support for her when no one else is around and your lack of someone on whom you could be cheating and the fact that you would never cheat on someone if you'd made a commitment to them anyway, despite all these things, somehow, there's apparently something so repellent and awful and unattractive and boring about you that none of these other things matter and she finds you not the least bit attractive, at all, and of course she's sorry that that's the way it is, but enough about that, you should really try and be witty and sarcastic and smart and all of those other things that she finds entertaining and diverting, because after all, that's why you're around, to be the friend, to be the entertainment, to make her smile, to make her laugh....and you're still a fool, you'll always be a fool, because you tell yourself that that's almost as good as winning her love, and you make yourself laugh with her and you help her pass the time when none of her other friends are around for her, and so what if you cried a little bit when she told you about it, love comes and goes and sex is ferocious and powerful but ephemeral, but friendship, while a lower priority of course, is a little longer-lived, at least for those brief instances when love and sex don't crowd you out...

Does that ever happen to you?

When that happens to me, I take some small measure of comfort in the pointlessness of life. It's a stupid, boring game, and we are the pieces moved around by powers beyond our feeble powers of comprehension. Some would point to gods, others to biological forces larger than any of us. I don't care anymore. Because I'm tired of being the sacrificial pawn used to make someone else queen.

The Cat's Pajamas

2003-08-30T08:44:00.000-04:00

I've been struck dumb by a voice that
speaks from deep
beneath the cold black water.
It's twice as clear as heaven,
and twice as loud as reason.
- Tool, "Undertow"

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

I enjoy spending money rather more than I ought, methinks. I have real trouble hoarding money and am, in fact, currently in debt to the tune of several thousand clams. [In this context, each clam is representative of a single American dollar at the current 2003 value.] It's not that I'm a particularly materialistic person, I don't think. Besides books, which are semi-sacred to me, even the crappy ones, I have little acquisitive desire, really. Some nice clothes every so often. A decent car would be nice. [Or any car at all, at this point.] But I don't have any deep abiding lust for property, or a manse on the bayou, or a Ferrari in which I might snort blow from between some nubile young prostitute's bare breasts while motoring along at one hundred and five miles per hour. I don't need things. I get rather edgy when I've got more than a thousand dollars in the bank, actually.

I think, really, that I'm the sort of person that needs to be in debt. That needs to be, as my dear besotted old dad used to often say, "behind the eight-ball." And this is not solely a matter of moneys...[moneys? monies? you be the judge]...although that's one way in which this particular nature is manifested. I have this psychological need to have something imminent and important hanging over my head. I hate those times, and paradoxically, I need crises like that to help focus my energies. When things seem to be rolling along with nary an immediate crisis blemishing the horizon with its ghastly, hulking silhouette....that's when I decay. Stagnate. Go to pot. Dissipate. Et freaking cetera.

This is not to be confused, mind you, with some insipid Point Break-esque desire for "the rush." I have never entertained a yen to gleam any sort of cube, or thrash or dash or splash or whatever verb is the latest to have been keelhauled and blanket partied into a state of linguistic indentured servitude by the X Gamin' roller-Nazis from the Valley of the Shadow. I'm oft described as "laid-back." Ridiculously, surreally so. I seldom feel the need, the need...for speed. Maybe twice, three times a year, tops. It's just that...I dunno...I have real problems focusing my energies, as I said. Deep-seated psychological problems with it. Problems I'll eventually have to tackle head on and literally rips the heads off of.

...of which I'll have to rip the heads off. bah. Stupid prepositions. Naughty, deliciously decadent prepositions...you must be disciplined....oh yes...

Hey. What're you staring at, show's over. Get lost. Scram.

Put a Brazilian Three-toed Sloth In Your Tank

2003-08-18T06:53:00.000-04:00

Nobody with a good car needs to be justified....I come a long way since I believed in anything. And I come halfway around the world....Where you come from, is gone. Where you thought you were goin' to, weren't never there. And where you are, ain't no good, unless you can get away from it....
- Brad Dourif in "Wise Blood"

I was asked to memorize what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.
- Aleister Crowley

....I don't want no commies riding in my car. [pause] No Christians, neither!
- Harry Dean Stanton in "Repo Man"

SO.

The Universe, that blind, writhing idiot god, has decided for reasons unbeknownst to myself that I should probably not be driving.

Attentive readers will of course recall the previous missive from Your Humble Narrator, wherein was related a scandalous tale of cautions thrown to the wind and Japanese cars twisted and crushed in some bizarre mating ritual. Since that nightmare unfolded and folded back up again, but not into the form of an intricate origami crane, unfortunately, I've been relying for transportation upon the motorcar of ma mere, who's returned to the Motherland yet again for two fortnight's time. However, this car itself is showing troublesome signs of decay, disrupting my timetables at times.

[Since returning to the highways....dunno. It's been somewhat difficult. I don't remember the accident, really, but. Every so often. A shudder of ghostflesh. An unconnected, inexplicable twinge. It's getting better, but still. Sweaty visions of spectral Aerostars and Navigators, prowling the highways like renegade space probes, impelled by alien urges to embed their naked hulls into the tender fishbelly flesh of some young and unsuspecting lethargic atheist...]

I don't enjoy being reliant upon others, for anything. It's entangling and embarrassing and makes me feel weak. I haven't been enjoying this feeling of helplessness. Slowly, very slowly, as I regain my road legs, that feeling has been receding.

For the most part.

But I can't help but look over my shoulders every so often. Eyes peeled. Scanning the horizon for that phantom SUV.

Dangling From the Jaws of the Sphinx

2003-08-06T11:05:00.000-04:00

Even if God really did exist, it would be necessary to abolish him.
- Mikhail Bakunin

That shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity - the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes.
- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

Language is a virus from outer space.
- William S. Burroughs

Notes on a dream sequence I may or may not choose to conjure up and experience some time in the Near Future:
It is on the set of a Game Show. Similar to "Wheel of Fortune," only, it's not a Wheel of Fortune. Maybe it's hexagonal, not round. Not too sure. However, due to the well-known effects of Dream Distortion, all written language within the context of this dream is gibberish, resembling no known characters of any human alphabet. I realize this, as I dream; and, I suspect, on some level, I will realize the fact that I am dreaming. However, as I myself also suffer [?] from the same aforementioned effects of Dream Distortion, my dream-ka or ba or anima or avatar or manitou or whatever will be able to read this strange disjointed dream-tongue, and it really won't have any practical effect on me or the course of the dream, except perhaps to set a surreal tone for the proceedings.

I can vaguely perceive, on the periphery of my vision....no....my perception, I don't exactly see them, I just know they are there...other contestants. They seem out of place, confused; their forms are painted in muted greys and pastels. Chef hats....hockey sticks....police badges and roller skates and cell phones and jackhammers. A pith helmet. Crutches. Lots of details, not too many fully assembled humans. Maybe they're not real. Maybe they're just fragments of people.

The host of the Game Show is not exactly human. He...

No. Later for that.

The motif, or theme, or whatever of the Show is rather vaguely ancient Egyptian, or Sumerian, or Ancient-Civilization-in-Generalish...the whole tableau flickers and shimmers through a backdrop of uncertain torchlight and the smoky haze issuing from braziers and censors....ornate brass chimneys smoldering with the industrial byproducts of the medieval mindset...I sense eyes peering at me through the incense-stained shadows, the frosted-glass cataracts of mullahs and viziers from unpopular cults and impotent courts. Pagan demagogues recast as game show producers. Or vice versa. I hear alien tongues, dead tongues, invocations to fell powers murmured sotto voce...
The host of the Game Show is not exactly human. He....

He looks at me.

And as he flashes that vampire grin at me and my fellow contestants, and turns to the audience and with a smirk and a chuckle begins to once again explain the Rules of the Game, I can hear him invade my mind.

A rasping, reptilian, mirthless laugh, like a fish gasping for water.

The gleam of pale scarlet light from alien moons reflected in curving psychic talons, like smoldering scimitars of bone, slashing and raping my cerebellum in long bloody furrows...he smiles and behind those teeth, teeth the color of mausoleum marble, teeth the color of sunbleached bones, lies and insanities writhe and snarl like snakes. He smiles, and laughs, and jokes and waves and then he's on me, and his jaw dislocates like an anaconda's and his mouth wraps around my head, and I hear bone cracking and I feel acid tongues drilling into my frontal lobe....

And the audience issues a polite smattering of bored applause.

And the temple guards stand rigid as lifeless golems.

And the mullahs claw their cheeks and tear at their beards and consult their shrivelled scrolls of wisdom.
And the hexagon of fortune spins counterclockwise, faster and faster.

And under the canopy of shadows, the Sphinx watches, her vulture's beak daubed in a tasteful smattering of blood and bile and viscera from the twitching corpses of the ignorant; and the entourage crowd around her lionine body and preen and adore her and whisper lies in her ear; and the Sphinx looks at me as the Game Show Host drills into my thoughts and memories, and the queerest expression unfolds across that monstrous face -

Hmm.

And then I wake up.

With a nosebleed.

I don't understand it either.

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday

2003-07-26T17:12:00.000-04:00

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).
- J.G. Ballard

I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
- Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse-Five"

I hitched a ride on a time machine this past Wednesday. It's not as cool as it sounds, though.

My last concrete memory is of Tuesday night, or maybe early Wednesday morning, depending on how you look at it. For my part, it isn't really officially the next day until you've slept and woken up again. The date extends until you sleep. Rather like a business date. But I do recall...sort of...turning my computer off and getting into bed and reading for a bit before falling asleep.

Then.

If I had to reconstruct Wednesday, I'd venture that I slept in most of the afternoon (not exactly a risky wager, that), awoke sometime around 2 or 3, dawdled a bit, then showered and dressed for work. Got in my car. Pulled out of the parking lot onto Hooper Ave, took that down to County Line Road, then turned right onto Route 9 North.
Somewhere along Route 9, while stopped at a light, a time machine hit me doing about 40 or 45 miles per hour. It did not even attempt to slow down, but struck the back of my car with full force. To all eyewitnesses, it bore a remarkable resemblance to a Dodge Grand Caravan.

I woke up in a hospital bed many hours later. I had lost about seven hours of time. I reached behind me to test my first hypothesis, but the lack of rectal bleeding seemed to invalidate the alien abduction scenario. Which made time travel the likeliest answer. My head was throbbing from the aftereffects of involuntary temporal defenestration - a sort of "time travel hangover," I quickly conjectured. This was incredible! I had been propelled almost half a day into The Future! What astounding wonders awaited me here....android chauffeurs behind the wheels of flying cars? Flights to the Moon? Devastating deathray attacks from savage alien civilizations? All this and more could await me here, in The Future.

Thus far, the human race of seven hours hence seems little different than the men and women of my time. I must find some way of going back....I cannot let the world waste this opportunity, this second chance at a Golden Age! Besides, I was hoping to buy some Lotto tickets. Hey, you never know.

"Repent, Weblog!" Said the Ticktockman

2003-07-23T09:00:00.000-04:00

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
"Very deep," said Arthur, "you should send that in to the 'Reader's Digest.' They've got a page for people like you."
- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

For some reason, I seem to be able to ride out the big problems [taxes, bioterrorism, life and romance in the Big City], but the minor setbacks always irritate me to no end, inflicting a wildly disproportionate amount of irritation and annoyance, which infrequently boils up into bona fide rage. Why is this? Different schools of thought remain engaged in heated debate over this issue to this very day; culprits evinced include a childhood wanting for love and self-esteem, some hitherto latent genetic propensity for flibbertigibbetous fussbudgeting, or perhaps the accrued psychic feedback distorting North American culture owing to the dastardly way we colonists allowed ourselves to be led around by the nose during Queen Anne's War. It's all Urdu to me. Anywho, this is all in way of explaining that I was mightily irked to see that the post I "published" at 5:11 am was at first incorrectly attribued, by communist elves, as having actually been posted at 5:11 pm. The magnitude of the scandal. I mean really. I fixed it, but nonetheless, it really sticks in my craw. Hmm. Craw. Anyway. It's a lie, and we have to be merciful.

Hmm. Now I've got scenes from the eerily prophetic 1976 film Logan's Run going through my head. "Carousel is a lie! You can live!" Michael York was so cool in the future back then.

Time for bed. Runner terminated. There is no Sanctuary...

[Craw.]

Marco Polo in Quicksand

2003-07-23T08:11:00.000-04:00

The food in this place is really terrible. Yes, and such small portions. That's essentially how I feel about life.
- Woody Allen in Annie Hall

Bad weather is just like rape - as long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
- 1990 Texas gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams[he lost.]

Is there ever a time
When the state of sleeping willingly leaves my mind
- 311, "Creatures (For a While)"

Is a drug habit really so terrible a vice? No, come back here. I'm pseudoserious here. I've toyed with the notion on and off over the years, not even halfheartedly [ quarterheartedly?], but nonetheless consistently, and I find a consensus slowly building in my mind. My desire is not for pleasure, here; pleasure, in general, makes me rather nervous. Rather, I feel my creative energies waning more and more as I get older and my imagination begins to calcify. Perhaps what is required, nay, preordained even, is a pharmacological jumpstart.

After all, who's to say that this isn't the way I'm meant to write? Maybe I'm incapable of it sober. Deep within my brain, scrawled across the skin of my cerebral cortex like some obscene tattoo, latticeworks of latent creativity lay waiting, thirsty canals shuddering for water, weeping for the liquid fire. The fire that lights itself. Can I provide the match? I think that I used to. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I never had it.

Maybe years of disuse have caused that muscle to atrophy to jelly. Maybe the Prozac, and the Paxil, and the supersize fries, and the bad music and the microwave radiation, and the self-induced isolation, and the insecurities and phobias and the toxic prejudices....maybe it was too much. Maybe I've poisoned myself, irreparably. My brain blistering and bubbling up, as the dreams and nightmares huddling within shudder and stiffen and burst into phosphorescent flames mid-sentence, lips blackening and dribbling like ebon candlewax, faces shucking themselves off scorched skulls, hollow screams rising up and echoing against the yawning vault of my supraorbital ridge. Psychological napalm. Burn it out, pacify it, move in the troops and shoot anything that moves.

Problem is, I have no backup plan. By half-assed conscious design. Cortes has burned his ships, and it's conquer or die, here. [Well. Not die. Death eventually. But the real danger is pointlessness. Ignominy. Death of ego.] I won't allow myself to wake up on my fortieth birthday and still have the same thankless and stultifying job and still be disgusted with the lack of meaning in my life.

But on the other hand...

Writing is fucking hard.

Did it used to be this hard? I don't know.

Maybe science fiction isn't the right place for me. It's fun to visit. But maybe my sensibilities are leading me elsewhere. Surreal tone and characters, but grounded in plausibility. I honestly don't know.

My main source of comfort is in reflecting on the trials and tribulations of PJF, my personal hero. It took him a good forty years just to make it to the level of "Most Promising New Talent." And he still enjoyed a forty-year-plus career. Maybe the key to writing isn't originality, or intensity. Maybe it's just stamina. Who knows. The quest continues...

In Medias Res

2003-07-20T08:14:00.000-04:00

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
- T.S. Eliot

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge.
- Rod Serling

It was a dark and stormy night.
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, "Paul Clifford"

So.

A weblog is many different things. Or rather, if I might amend that definition, it has many different potentialities, of which often one or two are embraced and abused by its hapless creator as its sole purpose. It can be a diary of one's daily events, which may sound vapid and worthless, a dismissive judgement that overlooks the valuable contribution diarists play in our knowledge of history and contemporary events. It is often a confessional, or an apologia. Or a pulpit from whence to froth and rage [to a largely hypothetical congregation] on the evils and misdeeds of the Enemy of the Week, and how If Only, Then. Most of the time, people start these things just to ramble on and on about whatever random thought or image happens to traipse across their mindscape at that particular moment in time, without a thought to following it up or expounding on it at a later date. In this aspect, a weblog functions as a textual analog to the cam- or cassette recorder, paralyzing moments of thought and time with the venom of articulation, allowing later chronological iterations of Self and Others to splay them open from sternum to pelvis, smear their innards across the kitchen table and tear the secret knowledge of the future from their decimated bodies and pulverized viscera....

[hieroscopy: divination gleaned from scrutinizing the freshly torn out entrails of a sacrificial bull, or a human child....hematomancy: divination gleaned from observing the whirls and bubbles and patterns formed in the ritual liberation of copious quantities of blood from the veins of a living animal....]

....the metaphors swagger with the courage born of numbers, now, beating their chests with a killer ape's rage as they howl at me from the jungle canopy overhead, their bellows echoing across the blank pages of my mind. Inchoate armies of fiends and politicians and drug addicts and priests are marching across my skull, demanding their place in the sun. Who am I to say no.

There's one other function of which a weblog is capable, come to think of it.

It can be a howl of rage.

I won't offer you astute readers a Declaration of Principles, like some online Charles Foster Kane, cloaked in shadow to reveal myself. I considered offering a Negation of Principles, ennumerating the things I would not be doing with this weblog, but in the end that too seemed pompous beyond words. So I suppose this first entry is in the end nothing more than a declaration of sentience, if not yet sapience. I Am; I Exist; and I hope one day to Matter.

The odds are rather overwhelmingly against me.

But the only other option is to suffocate.

So there we are.

Well. That wasn't so terrible, I suppose. Hopefully these will get easier to compose as I progress; this inaugural entry took quite a while. It's a journey, not a destination.