Achieving Representation

Over the weekend I bought a copy of Thomas Ricks's Fiasco: American Military Adventure in Iraq. I haven't started it yet (only 100 pages left in Mason & Dixon), but I took a dekko at the photos this evening, and came across this thing, which made me throw the book violently across the room and hide under the bed until Wonder Woman assured me it was safe to emerge:


This is a PowerPoint slide from "an official Central Command briefing depicting how the United States intended to progress from 'military victory' to 'strategic success.'"

Before commenting on this horror, I have to make a confession. For several years during the late Eighties and early Nineties, I ran a corporate communications graphics and pubs shop for a Beltway Bandit in the Washington suburbs, during which I came to detest Microsoft's PowerPoint with a hatred I reserve for few things in this world -- it falls somewhere between my loathing for Dick Cheney and Virginia Senator George Allen. But my confession is this: I too have perpetrated information-design horrorshows like the one above. In my defense, the ideas didn't come from my own head but from pointy-haired bosses whose lives depended on communicating with military procurement officials -- and here's the important part -- in their own language.

And above you see the language that these people speak. My sudden, unexpected reimmersion into the clouds of toxic methane and voice-ensqueakening helium emitted by a DOD PowerPoint deck was what sent me scurrying under the bed, promising to be a good boy and never anger Mommy again.

Now, to the PowerPoint graphic itself.

First, let me say, that although it's unrelievedly ugly, stuffed with Tuftean "chart-junk" like meaningless grayscale fades and pointless drop-shadows, dismally unimaginative default typefaces, and hilariously underthought all-caps Pentagon-ese ("aimed pressure to achieve end-state over time"), the chart isn't completely incomprehensible. In fact, a reasonably well crafted paragraph will summarize every point made in the chart. Let's try a retranslation:

The difficulty we will face upon invasion will be a division of the people of Iraq along ethnic, tribal and religious lines. Our task will be to reduce these divisions to form a cohesive whole, which will, in theory, lead to a healthy democratic society. Our expectation is that once we are able, through improved policing procedures, to reduce the incidents of violence attendant on invasion, what was once mere coexistence will lead to cooperation and strategic success. We expect the occupation to occur in three phases: first the invasion itself; a second period in which the US military will govern the country; and a final phase in which Iraqi civilians will assume leadership. During the first phase, we will establish a visible presence and assume responsibility for security and stability. In the second phase, the combined forces of CENTCOM and the Joint Task Force-Iraq will apply pressure to form a government, begin reconciliation among local authorities, and continue to provide stability. In the final phase, responsibility for this pressure will revert to the civil authorities, and we expect a civil society to emerge, and the ethnic, tribal and religious tensions to abate.

And we all know how well that turned out.

The problem with the Pentagon PowerPoint graphic is this: It reduces the monstrously complex problem of invading and occupying a nation-state to a (gigantic, tortured, overwrought) visual metaphor. Those ugly-assed arrows, representing CENTCOM, JTF Iraq and so forth, make the application of "pressure" on the forces of disorder look like some kind of marvelous deus ex machina that will somehow magically turn the centrifugality of post-invasion anarchy into the centripetality of pre-democratic order. That visual metaphor, on first glance so imposing, so inevitable, is in reality a deeply evil and dissembling disguise.

Look again at my paragraph summarizing the graphic. It's absolutely full of holes, of logical lacunae. Are those the true dividing lines in Iraq society, or are the tensions and loyalties more complex than that? What does this "pressure" consist of? What if there is resistance? What is the mechanism by which forced coexistence leads to cooperation? What if the Iraqi civilian leadership has ulterior motives in presenting itself as such? How is reconciliation among local governing forces going to be achieved? How does the newly constituted civil authority view this unearned responsibility for continuation of US military policy? What if there aren't enough troops?

The guys we got running the joint are busy, busy people. They've got no time for reading a paragraph of the complexity I just presented. They need it boiled down, they need it condensed, so they understand your point in a quick glance. You present Rummy with a graf like that, he's gonna throw your beautifully crafted prose out the window of his limo, you overheated stripey-pantsed Ivy-League pinhead! When you're ushered into his presence, you've got eight seconds to get his attention, and if you don't grab him by the short-and-curlies in that time, he's gonna rip your head off and piss down your neck!

Do you expect Rummy to brief the President of the United States with that shit?

Others have blamed PowerPoint itself for the stupefaction of American government. I won't go that far -- software can't make you do anything you weren't already going to do. The simple fact remains that the logical holes in my prose paragraph went unchallenged by the very people whose entire function it is to issue those challenges. They bought the graphic, not the paragraph.

I don't blame PowerPoint. I blame a country that interprets intellectual laziness as "swagger." I blame a country that allows PowerPoint presentations to substitute for actual verbal discourse at the highest levels of government and commerce. I blame a country that rewards incompetence, that expects less and less engagement in inconvenient detail the higher you ascend the ladder -- the higher you go the less you're expected to know -- until you reach the pinnacle, where the mighty and revered godhead knows absolutely nothing at all.

I Believe the Youngsters Call It a "Shout-Out"

Hawk-eyed readers will have already noted the addition of a new item in the Blogroll under "Right Speech" -- The Anecdotal Antidote, a blog-collective helmed by the estimable Mike Versaci.

Mike's manifesto is to present a growing collection of the best writing on the Web while staying away from the sort of subject matter that raises blood pressure and sets brother against brother. The list of contributors so far signed up is impressive (that is, if any list that contains me can be said to be impressive), and includes some of the most salient and interesting voices in Blogovia today. The posts so far include Lance Mannion on Tockett and Crubbs and Kevin Wolf on Firing Your TV, and some other hapless goober put up a profoundly silly poem about paranoia.

I say check 'er out!

He Takes a Moment

I would just like to take this moment to announce that this is my 500th post to this blog.

Thank you, and now back to our regular programming.

An Anecdote of Some Interest

Satanic Majesty stood in the Winner's Circle at Pimlico a giant among three-year-olds.

He had just completed the wholesale destruction of the field in the Argent Dixie Stakes -- its purse of $250,000 traditionally as desperately contested as the more famous Preakness run on the same grounds. Track records from Churchill Downs to Gulfstream Park had earlier that year fallen before his mighty hooves and thrashing haunches, and in some of the Sport of Kings' more louche quarters rumors flew that he must have sold his soul to Old Scratch himself at a Mississippi crossroads in the dead of night.

Whether this transaction ever actually took place was a well-kept secret between the thoroughbred and his owner, Mrs. Evelyn Pudleyshawe-Smythe, a Margaret-Dumont-esque woman of daunting visage and even more daunting décolletage. Mrs. P-S, as she was known among the stablehands she regularly cowed with a haughty glare and a finely honed tongue, was, as she regally declared to overcurious newshounds and the ink-stained wretches of the racing press, not accustomed to invasions of her privacy or revelations of what she deemed fripperies, and so the rumors of Satanic Majesty's origin flew unchecked.

Some gossips were convinced that his lineage included true royalty -- a direct line to the legendary Secretariat, or perhaps Man o' War. Others insisted, on no evidence whatever, that his was a Horatio Alger story, a ragamuffin guttersnipe who had escaped the knacker's yard by dint of a magnificent riderless run around Mrs. P-S's training track after appearing spontaneously out of a misty cornfield one cold November morning.

The truth, as it so often does, lay somewhere in between. Satanic Majesty's dam had been a racer herself, a well-bred but mediocre talent notable mainly for her dreadfulness in the home stretch, during which she faded faster than the shine on a pewter chamber-pot. His sire, however, was an altogether more interesting story. A pacer at a local trainer's facility, a roan stallion whose chief interest in life was oats and unpaid stud service, he had caught the eye of a local thug who wanted a gentle horse for his social-climbing daughter to ride with her country-club pals. The miscreant had backed a trailer up to the trainer's barn one day, claiming to be delivering a load of fresh sugar-cubes, and made off with the horse.

On the getaway, however, an inattentive lackey had taken a corner too sharply, the trailer had come unmoored, and the badly frightened stallion had escaped into the surrounding fields, where he eventually found a ranch, jumped a fence, and sired Satanic Majesty.

Mrs. P-S's avarice turned toward the heady stud fees her world-famous champion would now fetch. As she proudly led the magnificent beast away from the scene of his latest conquest, she summoned the equine genealogist she had hired to ascertain the bloodline of her prized possession. "Well, Hensley?" she enquired expansively. "What have you found?"

"It's not good news, Mrs. P-S," stammered the nervous gene-detective. "Not good at all, I'm afraid."

"What on earth are you talking about, you silly little man! This horse has won every race he's entered, including the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes, and several Breeder's Cup events! You can't possibly convince me that his lineage is anything but perfectly spotless!"

"Yes, ma'am, I agree he's quite a horse, no doubt about that --"

"Then what's the problem? Don't stand there gaping, you ninny -- out with it!"

"Well, Mama's all right, she checks out just fine. Her lineage is pretty much impeccable --"

"Yes, yes! Get on with it!"

"It's Papa. I can't believe what we've uncovered, but I'm sure it's the truth..."

"Say it, man!"

"Ma'am. I'm sorry to have to be the one to break it to you, but --"

"What?"

"Papa was a stolen roan."

Stupid Little Red Car

Wonder Woman's Pathfinder has been in the repair shop since last Thursday -- that's two Thursdays ago, not yesterday -- and I've been forced to drive the dealer's loaner in the interim. The reason for the protraction of the repair is too convoluted to go into, but if that fucker calls me up today and tells me they've delivered the wrong part again, I will not be responsible for my actions, and no jury on the planet would find me guilty.

The car is a Hyundai Accent, a subcompact sedan in a shade of glowing, candy-apple red that should never be seen in public. Its cheap plastic upholstery is spotted with revolting stains of unknowable and best-uninvestigated origin. The windshield wipers are a tattered and useless mess, the windshield-detergent tank was empty on delivery, the battery shows signs of imminent demise, and at any speed above 45 MPH the miserable junker shudders like a dog shitting a peach-pit. This morning, as I negotiated a tight turn, the thing emitted a loud klonk that sounded like a death-knell for the trannie.

I digress for a moment to emphasize: I am not a car-snob. I think defining yourself by what you drive is a little sick, and ostentation in any form offends me -- that's why I'm so revolted by the Accent's screaming red paint. I drove an '87 Chevy Nova (a rebranded Toyota Corolla) until it blew its head-gasket in '96, and replaced that with a Mazda Protégé, which I kept until the family grew to include two large and flatulent dogs, at which point the formal castration of the minivan became inevitable. Now, with the move to the country and intimidatingly rutted and potholed dirt roads, we both drive 4WD vehicles, both bought used. The Pathfinder isn't really much bigger than a Subaru Forester, but with better clearance. I use my Ranger pickup as much as a practical tool -- hauling garden tools, plywood, firewood, topsoil and mulch -- as a conveyance to work.

There are some things I love about rice-burners. They're great on gas (although this abused Accent isn't all that impressive) and the transverse-engine front-wheel drive is absolutely brilliant in snow. You can park them anywhere, and they're pretty zippy on the highway, as long as you're not transporting a piano on the roof or something.

But my unforeseen and nightmarishly extended experience with this filthy little loaner has brought out a sadistic aspect of my personality that frankly surprises me. Every time it bottoms out and grinds its chassis against our nineteenth-century goatpath of a driveway, I grin maniacally and push it harder. I seek out potholes to bash into. Washboard ruts make me cackle. When starting it in the morning, I gun the engine to 5000 revs before oil can make its way into the crankcase. I pop soda-cans in the cupholder, noting with satisfaction the sticky spray misting the instrument panel. On the highway, I keep at just the right speed (62mph, if you're curious) to maximize the off-alignment shuddering, smiling quietly to myself at the thought of the amount of melted rubber I'm leaving on the road.

I fervently hope today is my last day with this stupid little red car. As of last night, the repair shop had only one more thing to fix -- a faulty catalytic converter -- before the Pathfinder is released from durance vile. However, having observed these gooberheads, I'm not holding my breath. I may very well have another weekend with it.

When I got the loaner, the rep and I did the formal minuette around the car, noting all the scratches and dents in its mortifyingly loud exterior. I can guarantee there is no more damage to the paint-job than when I took possession, so I have no fear of reprisal from that quarter. But when I do give it back, I'd love to hand over the key while observing jauntily, "You might want to get the alignment checked: I noticed it shook a bit when I had it around a hundred-and-twenty for a couple hours in the mountains..."

If I am stuck with it for another weekend, I'd love to hear suggestions from my knowledgably evil readers: What else can I do to this miserable little piece of shit before handing it back to its incompetent, maintenance-eschewing, wrong-part-ordering, my-car-keeping-for-a-week-past-its-promised-date corporate owners? Just remember: The paint-job is sacrosanct. Everything else is fair game.

Dig It

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More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Dirty Words

Came across this in director David Milch's commentary on Episode Three ("New Money") of the DVD edition of the second season of Deadwood. I've been impressed with Milch's elucidations on the show in the DVD extras, particularly Season One's -- I was a little saddened to see that Season Two's boxed set offered far fewer of his little professorial-yet-accessible lectures.

(Man-crush??? Your words, not mine!)

The language on the show, you know, the profanity, was quite controversial, but what I was trying to do with that was sort of break down the conventions of language, and show the way language regenerates a meaning which is dependent upon its particular environment.

The reason people in Deadwood spoke the way they did was they were sending a sort of signal about -- this was a lawless environment, and that they would obey no laws even in terms of the conventions of language, as a way of saying I am equal to this environment. Like if you meet somebody in a bar after work, you know, and you haven't seen him before, you're trying to be polite, you'd say "Hey, where are you from?" And the guy says "Oh, I'm from Topeka, Kansas." In Deadwood, if you see someone you don't know, in a bar, you say "Where are you from?" the're liable to kill you -- because these are all people who have, you know, complicated backgrounds, they don't know if you've got a warrant, so... In Deadwood, you say "Where are you from?" they'll say "What the fuck is that to you?" As a way of saying every word is important in an environment like that.

So the first obligation was to sort of break down the viewer's conventional ideas of what words meant, and so I sorta wanted an unrelenting stream of obscenity at the beginning of the show. That first speech of Ellsworth's, you know: The elements of that scene were, first you saw the gold, Swearengen is weighing the gold, then he pours a drink, establishing the nature of this environment, and then once the alcohol is in him then the language changes. He says, "I might have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand before you today beholden to no human cocksucker!" And then he begins to eliminate the elements of the ordering forces in society: "And not the US Government, or the savage fuckin' Red Man, or George Custer himself, had better try and take it away from me!" And Swearengen, by way of affirming the environment, says, "They better not try it in here." Then they address, even the subject of accents. He says, "What's that Limey damned accent of yours, Swearengen? Are those rumors true you're descended from English royalty?" Swearengen says, "I'm descended from all them cocksuckers," which is a way of saying that the invoked content of language, the logic of language, is gone. People are going to lie all the time, and finally when you've obliterated any expectation that the prior meanings you've affixed to language will obtain, then you start to regenerate meaning.

That's why a guy like Wu, for me, is an interesting character, because what I try to do with Wu is, there's a guy who knows like one word of English -- cocksucker -- and yet the viewer, as a result of protracted exposure, is able to understand everything....

Which is to say language generates meaning from context. What begins as what seems like an unremittingly and unrelievedly profane environment in fact is just just finding a new way to organize itself. At the level of language, I was trying to prefigure the theme of the improvisation of society.

There's more than you ever wanted to know about dirty words!

Ah! One other thing: In reviewing Season Two alongside the new Season Three episodes, I've noticed that the burgeoning threat of the Hearst Mining Company's designs on the town of Deadwood has been repeatedly referred to "Leviathan" -- to the point where last week's episode, in which the plutocratic shit truly starts to hit the fan, was titled "Leviathan Smiled."

Yes, of course it's referring to the Biblical whale -- but last night, poking around on Wikipedia on an unrelated matter, it smacked me in the face: Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan!

"Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," anyone? Where you at, Nash? By Banquo's beard, these are some smart cocksuckers.

An Occasion of Self-Loathing

I'm at the mall a few days ago, getting a camera battery for our upcoming beach vacation. A certain eliminatory urge overcomes me, and I ankle it for the men's room to take care of it. The bathrooms are behind the food court, down a hall past the customer-service and security offices. The hall is wide enough to accommodate a comfy couch outside the ladies' room, which I must pass to get to my room.

Just ahead of me, a harrassed-looking mother, two toddlers and a baby-stroller in tow, has seated herself on the couch, a crying infant in her arms, and is raising her shirt (discreetly) and clapping the baby to the life-giving mammalian protuberance. She bears a blanket on her shoulder for discretion, but has not yet lowered it over the baby.

Don't look. Don't look. Goddammit, don't look! It's a bundle of fat and glands, for Christ's sake -- eyes on the other wall! You are an urbane sophisticate in your forties, the father of two who were both breastfed into toddlerhood; you have seen approximately 3000000000000 breasts in your life; if you look at that woman's lactating knocker, exposed for the beautiful and life-affirming purpose of feeding her hungry infant, you will never live it down, goddammit DON'T LOOK!!!!

Woo-hoo! Nipple action!

When I'm In the Middle of a Dream

There was a good discussion about Prog Rock over at Kevin Wolf's place last week. In the comments I allowed as how I thought the adjective "progressive" was largely bullshit, a nonexistent category. I also dislike the term because it implies that only music so labeled can cause music to "progress" -- whatever that means -- and anything not dubbed "progressive" is "regressive" or perhaps "reactionary." I'd also add that when popular music has progressed -- if we define it as undergoing a recognizable metamorphosis from one genre to another, like from jump blues to rock-and-roll, or from rock steady to reggae -- it certainly wasn't self-proclaimed "progressive" musicians who provided the impetus. Those changes are organic, they come from within a musical school, and not from some hothouse laboratory, some Kollege of Musical Knowledge. They come from growth, which is not the same thing as increased complexity.

Forty years ago today, on August 6, 1966, Revolver was unleashed on an unsuspecting -- and remarkably unprepared -- world. It's not been the been the same place since.

Sergeant Pepper is credited with being the first self-consciously integrated rock album -- never mind that the "concept" of the record is actually quite thin: A fictional band concert provides a framing device for the goings-on, and that's pretty much it. (Others have pointed out that it isn't really even the first "concept album"; a good case can be made for The Mothers' Freak Out! and for Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, both of which predate Pepper by at least six months. Nearly as good a case can be made for Frank Sinatra's Songs for Swingin' Lovers!) The songs on Pepper don't comment on or elucidate each other, they don't share a common theme or subject matter, and the album doesn't progress (that word again!) from one point to another -- it doesn't really tell a story.

Revolver, on the other hand, does all of these things. If Rubber Soul, from late 1965, marked the moment that the Beatles began to see the world through the eyes of adults, then Revolver gives us the world as seen by adults who know they are going to die. Death is everywhere on this record -- from Eleanor Rigby's terribly sad, lonely and meaningless end (redeemed only by the accidental intercession of another pathetic character, Father Mackenzie, and made bearable by George Martin's achingly beautiful and empathetic string arrangement) to Lennon's obsession with druggy oblivion in three of his contributions: "I'm Only Sleeping," "She Said, She Said," and "Tomorrow Never Knows." Even "Taxman" has sardonic advice "for those who die."

But if Revolver acknowledges the inevitability of death, the album as a whole resoundingly rejects nihilism. It offers solace in adult romantic love, in psychedelic insight, in the innocence of childhood, and a healthy dose of Doctor Robert's cynicism. The album shows clearly the extent to which not only Harrison but all of the Beatles had internalized the Eastern insight, sympathetic with their own psychedelic explorations, that life is illusory, an extended dream. Lennon's persona in "Rain" (technically not on Revolver but very much a part of it -- even a key to understanding the Beatles' mindset in 1966) asks the vitally important question:

Can you hear me
That when it rains and shines
It's just a state of mind?

If you listen carefully to a collection from Revolver's period like Rhino's Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire & Beyond, it becomes immediately apparent how astonishingly divisive the psychedelic experience was in the mid-Sixties. I haven't done a careful count, but an amazing number of the delicious obscurities in that collection set up an "us-and-them" division -- "us" being those who've had their eyes opened by LSD and "them" being the Squares who haven't. If the eye-opening experience of acid is that life (and, indeed, death) is a series of "states of mind," none of which is more valid or more "real" than any other, then it follows naturally that, as in "Rain," the Squares need to have their eyes opened as well.

But it's Revolver's crowning achievement that it rejects this then-fashionable division in favor of universality. The abject Eleanor Rigby and the hopeless Father Mackenzie feeling his faith dying, these are not people who going to be "saved" by an impregnated sugar-cube -- these are desperate people in need of human compassion. The miserably depressed lover of "For No One," the fragmenting mind, desperate for the innocence of childhood, of "She Said, She Said" -- no glib oh-wow-man insight will work miracles for these people. The "state of mind" of these damaged individuals is far, far more complicated than "rain or shine," and the Beatles were immeasurably compassionate -- adult -- to present them to us in the painfully divided year of 1966.

The songwriting is absolutely masterful on this record. I can't but stand agape in awe of the technical prowess of "Here, There and Everywhere," in particular. The first verse concerns itself with "here"; the second with "there." On the word "everywhere," the song suddenly flowers outward, exploring a new key area, a new instrumental texture. For the rest of the song, the words "there" and "everywhere" serve as hinges to change from the home key to the key of the bridge and back again. A humble device, simplistic, even, but its execution is devastatingly deft. It can't be said enough: This assured and mature songcraft came from a young man who, less than three years before, had written "Hold Me Tight" -- a fine little rocker, one I'd be happy to play in a band -- but in formal layout and harmonic structure trite, trite, trite.

Progression in music is not a matter of more. To view progress as a question of more notes-per-beat, more incoherent harmonic complexity, more mathematically improbable time signatures, is to do violence to the central point of music, which is to draw us together. Revolver stands in its humane universal inclusiveness at the edge of a precipice, just before the world became irrevocably atomized, shattered, shredded by history. We still haven't put the pieces back together.

I fear we never will.

That, My Friends, Was a Bartender

The pedestrian who makes the toddle a couple of blocks south from Penn Station on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan may, if he is alert to such things, spy what was in 1982 the best little Irish pub in New York: the Molly Wee. I carefully restrict my contentious assertion to that year because I haven't been back there in twenty years, having moved on to other places and other times. But in 1982, that was the spot Where Everybody Knew My Name.

I was living in a ground-floor sublet on 28th Street at the time, fresh out of Kenyon and miserably rent-poor -- no, that's not strong enough: I was a rent-pauper. But when a paycheck came in that wasn't already garnisheed by the landlord, I would gather up my roommate John, the gorgeous redheaded colleen who would grow up to become Wonder Woman, and a few other of our circle of cronies, and assemble there to gather wool and get on the outside of the bartender Seamus' Olympian hamburgers and some Guinness.

Seamus was a publican's publican. I was just reminiscing about him with Wondie, and she remembers him as fondly as I do. "He protected me when I was in there," she said. Nobody ever hit on her or did the disgusting things men do to attractive women in bars -- not on Seamus' watch. Once I heard a commotion down at the other end of the bar: a drunk commuter, passing time before the late train left Penn Station for Islip, forgot himself and announced pugnaciously to the world, "Oh, yeah? Well, you don't have to be Catholic to be Irish!" Seamus leaped over the bar -- he was no gazelle, this lumbering, meaty man -- and executed the first and only bum's rush I've ever seen performed outside the comics pages or a Thirties farce -- left hand to the back of the coat collar, right hand grasping firmly the seat of the pants -- and the hapless inebriate crashed out into the Eighth Avenue pedestrian traffic. I don't think the matter under discussion was what caused Seamus to move so fast and so efficiently; I think he was far more offended by the potential breach of the peace.

By 1984 many of us had come to recognize the connection between Manhattan rents and our inability to eat regular meals, and we decamped for the greener pastures of Park Slope and environs. I'm given to understand that nowadays you can't touch the place, but in those days it was blissfully affordable compared to Chelsea. Our connection to Seamus and the Molly Wee slowly faded, but in those magic few moments in October of 1986 when the Mets made it to the World Series, we made it a point to gather the old gang together and watch Game Six in our old haunt.

Somewhere in the early stages of that unforgettable game (for readers uninitiated in the history of baseball, it's agreed among the cognoscenti to be one of -- if, indeed, not the -- greatest, most melodramatic ballgames ever played), the redoubtable leftfielder Mookie Wilson came up to bat. It was a rock-solid tradition among Mets fans that when Mookie batted or made a play in the field, you yelled "Mooooo!" at the top of your lungs. Which is what I, there in the stool under the TV I'd arrived an hour early to claim, did.

Seamus whirled about behind the bar, his face flushed and his eyes flashing. He pointed an outraged finger in my face. "Nobody boos moy Mookie!" he snarled. "You boo moy Mookie in moy bar and you'll foind yourself out of here on yer arse!" Timidly I tried to explain the custom -- a little surprised that he hadn't noticed people doing it before. He turned away from me, plainly disgusted, and began washing glasses.

Some five minutes later, he gently put a shotglass down next to my beer and poured a shot of Old Bushmill into it, quietly rapping the bar with a thick knuckle as he withdrew. That, in all his humane benevolence, was Seamus.

That whiskey was going to prove a problem. It's well known that people who are terrified of flying will occasionally try to allay their fear by drinking heavily during a flight. But the alcohol has no effect, because the terror and tension and fight-or-flight adrenaline far outstrip it. Of course, the instant the plane touches down and the poor bastard begins to feel safe again, the booze comes on like a blow to the back of the head, and the attendants have to pour him off the plane.

Game Six had exactly that effect on me. For the hours it took to play the game, I, and the rest of the Mets fans gathered at the Molly Wee, were tense, silent, concentrated. Knocking it back, of course, punishing the Guinness pretty hard -- but the game was too dramatic for the beer to have much noticeable effect. During Mookie's epic at-bat in the tenth inning, down to his last strike, the entire season riding on his bat, heroically fouling off pitch after pitch after pitch, the adrenaline and tension were unbearable. I think I drank three shots of whiskey during that at-bat alone -- to absolutely no avail.

I do remember the ball down the first-base line trickling through Bill Buckner's legs. I do vaguely remember the sight of Ray Knight crossing the plate, fighting through the gaggle of ecstatic Mets who met him there. I have the dimmest vague, dreamlike memory of standing up to go pee. After that, all is as dark as the grave.

They told me later that I volunteered to go out and hail a cab for those of us returning to Brooklyn. That part I believe. What I do not believe is that I was seen racing up the middle of Eighth Avenue, barking like a dog at the top of my lungs and challenging cars to fights. That just seems out of character.

A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things Lived On

One of our first discoveries on moving out to the country a couple summers ago was that the monopolistic trash-removal company that serves our neighborhood is a pack of chiseling swine. Fifty clams a month they demanded for the privilege of picking up our household trash twice a month and hauling it to the county landfill.

Out of thrift, then, we fired the bandits toot-sweet. We compost our cooking scraps (if you leave out anything with fats or oils in it, the varmints leave it alone), and we recycle glass, paper and cardboard. The price for this simple economy is that about once a month I throw about ten bags of trash into the pickup and make a stop at the landfill on my way to work. Fifteen minutes' work? Worth the candle in anybody's book.

Once a year, however, I deeply -- that's deeply -- regret this decision of ours, and this evening is this year's occasion. As you may have heard (if you're not enduring it yourself), we're undergoing our usual July/August heat-wave, and temperatures broke triple digits today with no relief in sight. Arriving home after work, I parked the truck, intending to load up the overflowing trash to take early tomorrow morning. Wonder Woman donned her dainty rubber gloves to help, and we opened the first of three large rubber cans to begin manhandling its contents into the truck bed.

Putting the full trash-bags into the cans is an interesting illustration of the all-too-human trait of avoidance. You open the top, holding your breath against the resulting olfactory assault, quickly dump the bag in, and just as quickly slam the thing shut, the while thinking, Thank Glub I don't have to deal with that right now! And you go on your way back to your clean, well-lit life, banishing from your mind the dreadful prospect of coping with the accumulated avoidances festering in those noisome cans.

But the piper will be paid, as sure as death and taxes, and when we opened the first can this evening, there the piper was, hand outstretched, demanding the palm be crossed.

I'm not going to try to put you off your feed by describing the sight -- and, more to the point, the smell -- of garbage that's been roasting inside a rubber enclosure for a month of ninety-degree heat. But I could. Oh, man -- I could!

Before beginning, we'd had a moment of indecision. It was dinnertime, the water was boiling for the hot dogs and the tomato salad was ready, but the question was, Which choice was going to be harder on the stomach? Do it before dinner, and risk a loss of appetite? Or do it after eating, and risk the loss of the dinner itself? We chose the former -- perhaps out of that same thrift, I don't know. You hate to lose those Hebrew Nationals -- them's good, if pricey, eatin' -- and if you get too woozy to eat, well, you just put 'em back in the fridge uncooked.

After the hideous chore was done, Wondie came back inside, peremptorily picked up her dinner plate and utensils, put them back in the cupboard and went upstairs to shower -- I imagine she scrubbed real hard. Those little wiggly things will do that to a body. I did manage to choke down a hot dog, on general principles, but with absolutely no enthusiasm for the job.

Out the window I can see the truck now, its miasmatic contents surrounded by a halo of flies, hovering worriedly over the pile of heat-accelerated rot and buzzing the muscidaeical equivalent of "My babies! My babies!" The smell on this still, hot night is horrendous as soon as you leave the front door -- fully twenty yards from the truck -- and it leaves one with a rare but understandable enthusiasm for economic monopoly.

Happy Black Tom Explosion Day!

I have had a recurring dream in which I come to discover the existence of a Beatles album that I'd never heard of before. I'll be yakking along with somebody when they mention, I dunno, "Hungagunga" or something. I stop 'em: Sorry, say what?

Yeah, you know, "Hungagunga," the album that came between "Revolver" and "Sergeant Pepper"? He'll pull out the LP, and bing, there it is: A whole Beatles album that I've never heard of.

I don't know American history to the same nearly autistic extent that I know BeatleTrivia, but I do pride myself on knowing the Broad Outlines. Which is why I feel a mortification not at all dissimilar to the one in my dream, when an enormous gap in my knowledge is suddenly, embarrassingly, revealed to me. I was passing time at Fark this afternoon, and I stumbled across an article that noted that yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the Black Tom Explosion -- something that I had never heard of in my life! From the linked article, in Newsday:

The sound of the blast was unearthly, and the tremor was felt 100 miles away in Philadelphia. The night sky over New York Harbor turned orange. From Bayonne to Brooklyn and beyond, people were jolted from bed as windows shattered within a radius of 25 miles.

The Statue of Liberty, less than a mile from the epicenter, was damaged by a rain of red-hot shards of steel. On Ellis Island, frightened immigrants were hastily evacuated to Manhattan.

Ground zero itself - a small island called Black Tom - all but disappeared, "as if an atomic bomb fell on it," says historian John Gomez.

It was 2:08 a.m. on Sunday, July 30, 1916, when what was then the largest explosion ever in the United States erupted. It destroyed an estimated 2,000 tons of munitions awaiting transfer to ships destined for Britain and ultimately, the World War I battlefields of France.

Evidence pointed to German sabotage, and some historians regard it as the first major terrorist attack on the United States by a foreign party.

"Terrorist attack" is not quite the mot juste here -- "wartime sabotage" would be more accurate -- but let's not quibble over semantics. I lived in New York City (Red Hook, Brooklyn, to be precise) from 1982 to 1987, and had the explosion happened during my time there, it's quite possible my home might have been rained upon by shrapnel from the blast. The Statue of Liberty was badly damaged -- according to Wikipedia, the damage is part of the reason the statue's torch is inaccessible to visitors today.

And yet I'd never heard of the damned thing!

Well, I have now. And so have you.

More info is available at the Wikipedia entry.

There's No Justice

This guy is dead and Charlie Daniels continues to pollute the world with his cow-plod. Is there a better reason to take the pipe?

Via Driftglass.



I believe that's my most excellent buddy Mike Keneally playing slide, but it's hard to tell with all the hair.

In Vino Veritas

(Cross-posted at The American Street)

As a man not entirely unaccustomed to a snort or two, I have to admit to a twinge of sympathy for Mel Gibson. I've never been arrested for anything, I'm glad to say -- despite some deserving efforts on my part -- so I can't credibly speculate about the mental stresses one undergoes when John Law shines a flashlight in one's bleary eyes and intones, in that condescending way they have, "Do you know why I pulled you over, sir?" when one has an undisguisably self-evident snootful.

I imagine the stress is great indeed. Gibson's blood-alcohol level was 0.12%, as reported by TMZ.com (the legal limit in California, where Gibson was arrested Friday, is 0.08%). According to a handy online calculator provided by the University of Oklahoma Campus Police, a 180-pound man would have to drink seven imported beers over a period of two hours to achieve Gibson's Blood Alcohol Count (BAC). (Or six malt liquors, seven glasses of wine, seven Bloody Marys, five vodka gimlets, or four doubles on the rocks -- it's an instructive little toy.)

By his own admission, Gibson is a recovering alcoholic who fell off the wagon on Friday night. People with his condition are notoriously unable to hold their liquor -- I've known a few, and they're no fun at all to drink with -- or even just be around. They're liable to say and do things they will have to apologize for the next day.

Indeed, Gibson has apologized for raving -- on videotape, apparently -- that Jews "are responsible for all the wars in the world," and for demanding of the arresting deputy, "Are you a Jew?" In his apology he said that he had "said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable."

It is important to establish the context of Gibson's revolting babbling. TMZ.com has published the arresting deputy's report (PDF). It's poorly scanned and difficult to read, but the gist is clear enough. The topic of Judaism and its putative responsibility for world unrest was not brought up by the arresting deputy as he clapped the darbys on his collar; the subject was raised for discussion by Gibson himself. He was not responding to something said to him. He thunk it up all by himself.

No matter what your past history with it, it's highly unlikely that booze will make you raise a point, ex nihilo, as Gibson did, unless the idea was simmering just below the surface, waiting for its moment to appear. The distress of being arrested and publicly humiliated for drunken decisions seems to have been that moment.

My ineluctable conclusion is that Mel Gibson, despite his repeated protestations to the contrary, is a demonstrated anti-Semite. In nearly any other case this would simply be sad, an occasion to tut-tut urbanely about hating the sin and not the sinner. But for the author of The Passion of the Christ, all that effort put into convincing the MegaChurched that they were being bussed to theaters to watch a movie that was not conceived in the libel that the Jews killed Christ, has been destroyed beyond repair.

For this, I have no sympathy whatever.

It

Must be something in the water.

Helmut and Kevin have chosen oblique angles to do it, but they both take up the question of sponteneity in music.

Helmut:

Sometimes, in general, you listen to music and feel embarrassed. It's a kind of embarrassment that the musician hasn't hit it, whatever it is, and that you're there to witness the failing at it. This experience is made much worse by earnestness and certainty. I've heard plenty of live music like this - where I felt like bolting out of discomfort with the aural carnage. But you also know that moment when you've really heard it because it hits you hard in the ears, mind, and body.

Kevin:

It's all just pop music, really, and though there are a few pop stars who still attempt more elaborate projects, with mixed results (the aforementioned Joe Jackson comes to mind), your best pop is made by talented people who are not dumbing down their work by making 3-minute pop records (Joe again, most of the time). They instead work within the limitations of the form and come up with something novel, or fun, or new or perhaps even great.

It may be an ephemeral thing, impossible to define, but I don't think it is an accident. It is honesty, openness -- but it is also bloody hard work, discipline. I imagine there's some Zen principle at work here, in that the more you worry at a musical form, the more difficult it becomes, and the key that unlocks the door is Mindful abandonment of Effort.

I've had moments in my musical life (amateur, entirely, pathetically amateur!) when I've had it: Pick up a guitar, and something utterly new and never-before-heard comes flowing out of my fingers. But it's worth noting that those moments always come when I've been playing obsessively for days and weeks on end. Hard work leads to it. It will never come when I've laid the guitar by for a month -- which, I ruefully admit, happens much often than it should. After these hiatuses, I will pick up a guitar and know that it is far, far, far away.

Hey: Helmut takes as his text a record by bluesman Robert Pete Williams. If you like roots music (and if you don't, I don't want to know you), there's an absolutely amazing treasure trove of hundreds of free downloads of everything from '20s piano blues to '30s Calypso waiting for you here. Go stuff it up your iPod. Don't say I don't turn you on to the Good Stuff. Thanks to Employee of the Month for the heads-up.

The Fabulists' Waltz

I may have let it drop a time or two in these premises that I'm a bit in the bag for Thomas Ruggles Pynchon.

I've been rereading 1997's Mason & Dixon, savoring ev'ry rich drop in anticipation of the new novel due out this December, rumored to be titled Against the Day. (If you're pondering a Christmas gift to chuck my way, ponder no longer!)

'Long about halfway through the book I came across this gem, which serves as a raison d'etre for the story, and a defense for the PoMo Twisted History it contains. It is eerily relevant:

Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,— who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government.

Earlier this week after a protracted session with the huge book, I found myself in a melancholy space. My mind wandered a bit, and I fancied myself in a huge, echoing room, with a hand-cranked phonograph in a corner far away, its speaker a great Art-Nouveau jonquil, playing a rather creepy little tootling waltz. Just why the room was empty, whose hand had set down the needle on the Victrola, and whose mind had selected the music is anybody's guess, but I felt compelled to try to reproduce the tinny, reverberant waltz that permeated my daydream.

And so I did. For your pleasure:

The Fabulists' Waltz

A New Groove

My new hero.

Floyd Landis, the winner of this year's Tour de France has osteonecrosis of the hip, the very same miserable little malady that's laid me low for all this time.

Before my operation, I was in Stage Two of the disease, meaning that the ball of my femur hadn't collapsed yet. Floyd's in Stage Four.

In Stage Two, for 24 hours a day it felt like somebody was slamming roofing nails into my hip with a nail gun. I can't even begin to conceive of the pain that Landis overcame, ignored, cycled through. He can't even take the anti-inflammatories I was on to reduce the agony.

A couple weeks ago, Commenter Mike linked to this IHT article about Landis' (to me) insane drivenness that prevented him from submitting to a hip replacement, to preserve his career as a professional cyclist. As I read it I cringed with a combination of sympathy and incredulity that someone would voluntarily endure the agony of osteonecrosis for something as trivial as the ability to push a bicycle faster than everybody else.

The article presents this horripilating picture:

Landis's most useful adaptation, however, came in the form of an idea. It was planted in his head by Kay, who, as fate would have it, suffered osteonecrosis of the shoulder from a college car accident and had gone on to complete six Ironman triathlons. Kay's idea was that it might be possible, through repetition, to wear a useful groove in the bone and cartilage of his damaged joint. "Floyd really liked the groove idea," Kay says. "He never wanted to look at the hip or any X-rays or even talk about the clinical part of things, but he kind of fixated on that idea."

Landis explains: "When the hip does something weird and it hurts, I always imagine that it's cutting a better path in the joint. [GAAAAAA! -- ed.] I'm probably fooling myself, but I may as well imagine something good is happening, since it definitely doesn't help to think that it's getting worse."...

Conversation eventually turned back to the groove theory, specifically to whether this groove might actually exist. Chao, a brisk and cheerful surgeon who trained at Harvard and Northwestern, smiled knowingly and reached for Landis's X-ray. As we leaned in, Chao pointed to a cloudy, half-moon-shaped blur on the rim of the femoral head, just beneath the pelvis. It was 1.5 centimeters long and a centimeter deep; it looked like a tiny pearlescent goblet.

"There's your groove," Chao said, tapping the film with a pen. "It's soft, and the pelvis is pushing down on it. It's a dent." Landis looked at the X-ray intently, faintly pleased at this revelation but distinctly unsurprised.

When I ask him about it later, Landis said: "It was good to see, but it also makes sense to me. There's a lot of friction, a lot of pressure. Logically, that pressure has to go somewhere."

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! My nuts want to creep up into my thoracic cavity, reading that. Landis is due for a new hip very shortly, and I sincerely hope it will relieve his agony. Whether he'll have a viable career as a world-class cyclist remains to be seen, but at least we won't be subjected to the idea of somebody obsessively compelled to exercise a new groove into his destroyed bone.

Pain will do that to you.

(Neddie Update: I walked all the way around the outside of the building in which I work this morning -- brisk, purposeful steps, no rests. Bare trace of a limp. Doesn't sound like much, but it proves to me, I'm damned nearly All the Way Back, baby! Where de wimmin at?)

(Later Edit: Aw, shit. He may have been hopped up. Thanks to Helmut for the heads-up.)

And Sometimes...

...You just have to ROCK.

Really fuckin' hard.

I loved this Johnny Winter song so goddamned much when I was 14. What 14-year-old wouldn't? It ROCKS. Really fuckin' hard. I would piddle around on a little acoustic guitar I had, unable to form so much as a regulation A chord, and dream of the day when I could actually master the riff -- let alone the lead guitar.

Thing about the classic rock guitar riffs: They often sound hard to play, but it's a mortal lock that if you're finding a particular riff difficult to master, you're probably playing it in the wrong inversion or something. Rock guitarists are for the most part really lazy, drunk and stoned bastards, and they have to be able to whip these things out under the most ridiculous conditions -- they're not gonna write something for themselves that's hard to play. They're gonna write something that sounds hard -- but in the same way that physicists subject new theories to the test of elegance and simplicity, a rock riff absolutely must sound hard while being ridiculously untaxing. That's why they put on those stupid rock-and-roll Tortured Suffering Faces while playing them. It's what gets them the Big Blow Job after the gig.

Ahem. Well, enough about that. Mom.

While studying up to record this, I got the riff down pretty cold, but trying to copy Johnny's stunningly deft lead lines, I kept tripping all over my fingers. Those are hard to play -- if you're as familiar with Johnny's version as I am, you'll laugh your ass off when you hear me actually give up in the middle of one phrase in the trading-fours part of the solo -- I just don't have Johnny's chops. So I copied what I could, and the rest in my own flava.

It only took me 30 years to learn it.

Here it is:

Still Alive and Well. (Pops.)

Bass playing's not too shabby either, if I may say so myself. Sorry about the mechanical drums. I don't know any drummers. (Inside Joke.)

Oh, and one admission: I am not now, nor will I ever be, a Great Rock Singer.

An Illusion Created for the Moment

My drive in to work each day takes me through a place called Brambleton, which is one of the seemingly millions of mud-and-Tyvek developments that constitute the Rape of Eastern Loudoun County. At a certain point on the drive, the modest, winding, wooded Ryan Road, which hasn't changed much since about 1945, suddenly opens out -- blannnnnnng! -- and becomes Loudoun County Parkway, a four-lane expressway that blasts its way through the ugliest and loudest suburban development imaginable.

At the very point at which LoCo Parkway begins, is a scene that, for my money, is positive proof that this country is headed straight for the wall with no one at the wheel. One the right side of the road is a shopping mall -- anchor grocery store, Starbucks knockoff, hair salon, what have you. On the left side of the road -- remember, a four-lane divided road where the speed limit is 50 miles an hour -- stands a condo development, what, about 300 units packed together, facing parking lots, the Parkway (now there's a view!), other muddy, denuded bulldozed lots where more of these hideous things are due to go up.

What's even more depressing than the architecture, though, is one simple fact that smacks me in the face every time I pass this way: There is absolutely no way to walk safely from the condo side of the road to the other to go shopping. No overpass, no underpass, not even a zebra-crossing painted on the road.

Even if you wanted to, you couldn't put the kids in a stroller or a bike-trailer and amble over to the Starbucks for a latte and a chinwag with the neighbors.

We've designed ourselves into Hell. A Polis without an Agora.

Joe Bageant drove through Brambleton recently, and had this to say, in another of his powerful and beautiful essays that I could only dream of writing:

...Brambleton is a real place. And today I am passing through it under the slowly arching mid-morning sun, which seems to be the only moving thing today in this development Northern Virginia development. There is not a human or even a car in sight down the long wide streets, just a crystallized silence occasionally nicked by the chirp of an unseen sparrow. My rusted out 18-year-old Toyota truck moving slowly along the streets, with its oxidized paint and a dead air conditioner sticking up from its bed gives all the more impression of some post apocalyptic scene from a not-quite-nameable film. A distinct eeriness pervades the sculpted green landscape and its too-bluish precast artificial stone retaining walls and artlessly placed trees, as though it were a movie set about to be torn down any minute, an illusion created for the moment. And in a way it is. Even something as timeless as a tree becomes a prop in places like Brambleton; they will be landfill in a few years because several feet of top and subsoil were scraped during site preparation. Trees won't ultimately survive in what's left, no matter how much mulch, fertilizer and watering is done. But they look OK now in a place where the average house is six years old, in a planned community with no communal memory, no sense of time's trajectory in which one can sense a future, or a common weal except through changes in real estate prices. CNN Money has called this place, 29 miles west of Washington D.C., one of the best places to live in America.

Joe hits directly some of the themes that I was more obliquely aiming at in this post. It's the same place. "There is a Buddhist principle," says Joe, "to the effect that the dream also dreams the dreamer. And that's what happened with the American Dream, which is why we are all sleepwalking through this escalating nightmare of meaninglessness, unable to shake ourselves awake." (Did I mention Joe's piece is a real cheerer-upper?)

The Great Failure of Poetry

The great failure of nineteenth-century English-language poetry was its near-complete avoidance of the pressing subject of Canadian cheese.

On matters of love, loss, honor and Classical mythology did the Great Poets blather. Your Grecian urns, your Childe Harolds, your country churchyards -- great vats of ink were spilled in their minute and painstaking examination. But did the ins and outs of the Canadian cheese industry ever once provide inspiration for a Wordsworth, a Byron, a Longfellow? I put it to you, sir, that they did not. And frankly, that's their -- and the world's -- loss.

I accuse the chalky pederasts podiatrists pedagogues who chivvied me through my Eng. Lit. classes of a grave omission in my poetical education. For all their paeans to the Romantics and the Classicists, for all their elucidation of the nuts and bolts of spondees, trochees and anapests, never once did they bother to mine the rich vein of laudatory verse about Canadian cheese.

Had they not been so blinkered, so lost in the received wisdom so distressingly common in the Humanities, they might have opened my eyes to the Canadian Cheese Problem -- and to the heroic versifier who burst out of the wintry northern darkness to bring the issue to light.

Ladies and gentlemen, with a baleful glare at those unworthy academics who hid his existence from me for all those years, I give you James McIntyre, the Bard of Canadian Cheese!

According to the rather bloodless Wikipedia entry, McIntyre, locally popular for his tireless boosterism for the Canadian cheese industry, "was called on to speak at every kind of social gathering in Ingersoll [Ontario]." I regularly curse the scientific community for their unaccountable failure to invent a time machine, despite the obvious benefits such a device would accrue us*; absolutely the first use to which I would put one would be to transport myself to a public reading of McIntyre's, to bathe myself in the magnificence of verse such as the following:

Ode on the Mammoth Cheese

We have seen thee, Queen of cheese,
Laying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze --
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed soon you'll go
To the great Provincial Show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

Cows numerous as a swarm of bees --
Or as the leaves upon the trees --
It did require to make thee please,
And stand unrivalled Queen of Cheese.

May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to send you off as far as
The great World's show at Paris.

Of the youth -- beware of these --
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek; then songs or glees
We could not sing o' Queen of Cheese.

We'rt thou suspended from balloon,
You'd cast a shade, even at noon;
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.

Now that, kids, is some poetry. Goddammit, "Toronto" is not an easy rhyme, but look how skilfully it's finessed in the hands of a master!

You too can sample the majesty of McIntyre's prosody. Particularly lissome are Dairy Ode, Prophecy of a Ten Ton Cheese, and Oxford Cheese Ode, but read them all, read them all!

Damn, I'm hungry. Gonna see if I can dig up a chunk of Canuck cheddar...

[Lest we be seen to single out the magnificently awful poetry of our Frozen Neighbor to the North, let's also draw attention to Julia A. Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, whose ineffable skill at bathos very nearly rivals McIntyre's. Enjoy, enjoy! You can thank me later.]

-----
*The benefits this thing accrue us
To see ourselves as others do us!

Friday Fart-Blogging

As regular visitors to the Friendly Confines will no doubt have surmised, I've lately had occasion to frequent the local hospital a bit more than comfort might wish. I've been more than happy to take advantage of the hospital's enlightened policy of free valet parking, tossing my keys to the attendant and either leverambulating in on crutches or simply dragging my osteonecrotic leg behind me into the lobby to the elevators.

One recent afternoon as I was on my way in for yet another appointment, the elevator door opened and its sole occupant, a very dignified, if momentarily distressed, older woman, poured out into the lobby. As she left the elevator, she declaimed, so the assembled waiting crowd could hear clearly, "They're working on the sewers in the basement, oh dear me, dear me...."

She shuffled through the small crowd and ankled her way to the anonymity of the busy lobby. We politely loaded into the elevator, all Alphonse-and-Gaston -- after you, no after you -- and were greeted by the most horrifying miasmatic stench that ever slugged human nostril. I mean, ho-lee Jesus it was awful. Notes of rotting flesh, day-old bile, staphylococcal infection, and sulphurous, rotting eggs. There are human emissions that are relatively benign, reasonably healthy -- not that you'd be forgiven for blasting one out in my car or other confined space -- and then there are the kind that are harbingers that the dealer is absolutely rotting from the inside out, sick, noisome, toxic. This latter form was what now nauseated an entire elevatorful of people.

Now, of course, we had no direct evidence that the poor, sick woman who'd preceded us had laid this particular stinkbomb. But Lordy -- she'd sure acted suspicious. I happened to catch the eye of a fellow victim, and his amused smirk, flared nostrils and mimed choke told everything that needed to be communicated. A small child couldn't suppress a giggle. Some people!

Gratefully arriving at my floor, I hustled off the elevator, once again breathing the relatively benign, antiseptic hospital air, and went about my medical business.

Later, consultation complete, I once again made for the elevator. When it arrived, it was empty -- and the same awful stench assailed me as I boarded! The doors closed behind me, trapping me in a developing social horrorshow. Only then, through my watering eyes, did I spy the small, desktop-published sign that I had missed on my upward trip:

PLEASE FORGIVE ANY UNPLEASANT ODORS
WE ARE WORKING ON THE SEWERS IN THE BASEMENT
WE HOPE TO BE FINISHED SOON!

Well. Isn't this a fine mess.

At this point the only prayer I had of delivery from mortification was to hope against hope that no one was waiting for the elevator on the ground floor. But no. Of course not. A knot of six waited as the doors slid open, expectantly waiting for me to debark. I did so, as quickly as my sore leg allowed, and then started to hustle away from the scene of my humiliation. I heard a woman's voice float out through the closing doors, "Oh my God!" I had an impulse to turn and shout, "Look at the sign! Look at the sign!" but thought better of it.

They'll learn on their way down.

---

It's just now occurred to me that that scene must have played out hundreds of times in that lobby that day. A more perfect illustration of the principle of karma you couldn't hope for.

Little Stupid, Big Stupid

This afternoon I was listening to a podcast of yesterday's Al Franken Show, which featured an hour-long interview with Peter W. Galbraith, son of the revered economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control & Nonproliferation, former US Ambassador to Croatia during the Bosnia conflict, and now author of the new book, The End of Iraq : How American Incompetence Created a War Without End.

It's a bit lazy, I think, simply to dismiss the Current Occupant as box-of-rocks dumb. The stumbling, clumsy language, the frat-boy snigger, the nauseating, phony folksiness -- these traits disarm, they disguise, they even excuse the frightful moral defects that the man possesses. One's reminded how Ronald Reagan's lumbering, bovine stupidity was explained away by his apologists as a Management Style: Sure, he's as thick as an oak plank, but he hires the right people, don't you know, lets them do their jobs. Doesn't interfere. Gotta admire a good manager.

So when fresh evidence of the man's appalling intellectual shortcomings comes to light, a kind of conflict is set up in the head. You remember how comedic ridicule of his casual inarticulacy serves to call attention away from the frank evil that he commits: In many minds, the Little Stupid of "I'm the Decider" serves to overshadow the Big Stupid of the occupation of Iraq. It's when Big Stupid and Little Stupid declare themselves simultaneously that it becomes horrifyingly clear just how deep is the shit we're in.

Here's the exchange that triggers this thought:

Franken: I want to get to this story that you tell. Why don't you tell it? It's three Iraqi Americans [visiting the White House in January 2003] -- are they all exiles...?

Galbraith: They are all exiles, and they include Hatam Muqlis [sp?], who's a lawyer from Indianapolis, it includes Kanan Makiya, a terrific guy who wrote one of the very first exposés of the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime, called The Republic of Fear, and Rend Rahim Francke, who later became the first Iraqi ambassador -- or, technically, representative -- to the United States after Saddam was overthrown.

Anyhow, they're gathered in the White House in January of 2003 [...] and Bush has asked them to tell their stories, and they do, and then what begins is a discussion of what is Iraq going to be like after Saddam is overthrown. And they start talking as anybody would, about the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. And it becomes clear to them that Bush has no clue what they're talking about, and eventually he says, at least according to one of them, "Sunnis? Shi'ites? I thought the Iraqis were Muslims."

OK, let's unpack that, as they say. The son of George Herbert Walker Bush -- who encouraged the Shi'ite uprising against Saddam in 1991 following the first Gulf War and who stood idly by as that uprising was brutally crushed by Saddam (a Sunni), resulting in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites, men, women and children as our troops were ordered to stand by within earshot of the slaughter -- was so intellectually disengaged at this crucial turning point in his country's history as to be utterly ignorant of the recent bloody history of a country that he intended to unilaterally invade six weeks thence, unable to discern between -- no, unable to even identify -- two of the three primary religio-ethnic groups that made up that country.

His own father. He couldn't even be bothered to read the newspaper during the presidency of his own goddamned father.

Little Stupid, meet Big Stupid.

Lazy-rich-guy-who-finds-homework-beneath-him, meet Worst President in the History of the United States of America.

Bonfire for the Crutches

This weekend, unable to contain my curiosity any longer, I hobbled my way up into the garden, to see what damage had been inflicted by the Inexorable Forces of Nature during my medically-enforced hiatus from the world. I had not visited my vegetable children since early June, when the surgeon's hacksaw made an ordinarily routine uphill foray an impossibility.

What I saw horrified me: The IF's of N had wreaked utter havoc on the beds. Weeds three feet high and as thick as a rainforest choked the watermelons, the cucumbers lay under a canopy of festering dandelions and clover, the radishes and spring onions were unrecognizable, and I can't even begin to describe what had happened to the herbs without bursting into tears.

Understand: I had worked like a desperate pig in the days preceding the hip-surgery in hopes of avoiding exactly this discovery. On the day of the procedure, there was not a single plant out of place. Between the rigidly disciplined rows of asparagus, strawberries and rhubarb there lay nothing but black soil and a light dressing of bark mulch. That sucker was shipshape. I had expected to see perhaps a little decay, a little entropy, but this -- this....

Something had to be done. Gingerly, carefully, I laid aside my crutches and sat down in the foot-deep grass and began to pull the worst of the damage out of the cucumbers. No. The position was clumsy, unbalanced, untenable. I had to be on my knees. Very tentatively I raised myself to a kneeling position, favoring the healthy leg. Worked for a bit. Yes, this will do.

After an hour's work or so, I realized I had worked my way several feet from where my crutches lay in the grass. I stood up, my plan to hopscotch over and retrieve them. Then a wild-assed thought occurred to me: Try walking!

So I did. Put the bum leg out in front of me, plunked the foot down in the grass, put some weight on it. The heavens did not open, hellfire did not rain down upon me, and my medico's dire warning of cracking and snapping bone, insufficiently healed, completely failed to materialize. And perhaps most wonderfully surprising of all, it didn't hurt. Took a step. Took another. And another.

I continued to live.

I walked all the way to the house. With each step, I could feel all this Bad Craziness, this accumulated misery, this crust of karma that had congealed around my wounded and incapable body sloughing off and wafting away in the wind. Fuck me, I can walk again!

Now, yes, you'll be telling me, but the Doc said you have two more weeks on those things. Aren't you pushing things too fast?

To which I snap my fingers. I had an appointment with the man this morning, and I ruefully confessed that I had begun walking -- against his express orders. To my mild surprise, he was completely and unreservedly encouraging, and told me that if I was walking I was for all intents healed, two weeks early. Lose the crutches, he told me. Challenge the hip now. Do whatever you like -- gently -- as long as it doesn't hurt. Take a walk. Ride a bike. Work in the garden. Go and sin no more, my son, for you are healed.

It's damned nearly impossible to convey how happy this makes me. While I'm no triathlete or mountaineer, I am a fairly active guy, and a month's imprisonment, during which my leisure hours were spent moldering in front of the television or reading, during which the simple act of carrying a small object from one room to another was an ordeal involving logistical planning and contingency strategies, during which I couldn't so much as go shopping or walk the dogs, wore on my nerves and depressed me. There's nothing so enervating, so emasculating, as forced helplessness.

The first thing I do, I hold a bonfire for those goddamned crutches.

---

PS: I'm gonna miss the Handicapped spot in the parking lot, though. That was cool. The temporary sticker's good through September, and I may just still keep those crutches around for the hot days in the Costco parking lot. You, me, lamppost.

---

PPS: In the same spirit, I just shaved off the beard. Miserable, itchy thing.

I Yam What I Yam

In the cafeteria at work this afternoon, I passed a display case in which stood a wholesome selection of Southern delicacies (the Food Theme this week, for some unfathomable reason).

In a warming tray stood a gelatinous light-brown mass, its exposed parts busily developing a darker-brown sugary crust. I wouldn't have given it a second look, but for the sign that stood next to it:

Candid Yams.

The typo gave me a slight giggle, and, with mild indignation at the sad state of proofreading among immigrant cafeteria workers these days, I cast my lunchtime thoughts elsewhere. But as I hobbled away from the case, a small voice stopped me in my tracks.

"Looks like you've put on a little weight, there, Cap'n!"

I shook my head, blinked once or twice, and turned around.

"You gonna go with that beard? Please don't tell me you're gonna go with that beard. You look like Grizzly Adams, fer crissakes."

Flabbergasted, I made my way back to the display case. I bent down to where the voice seemed to be coming from.

"Dude, that shirt! Nineteen-fifty-six baby-puke yellow? What are you, Cosmo Kramer? Can't you afford anything better? Oops, that's right -- you haven't climbed quite as high on the Corporate Ladder as you'd originally envisioned, so you're probably pinching pennies in the wardrobe area. That's all right, there are plenty of other losers whose shoulders you can cry on. There goes one now."

I glanced to my side. A dear friend passed by, carrying a tray of food.

"Tell you a little secret, there, chum: No matter what she says to the contrary, the Little Woman's probably getting a mite sick of going Tourist Class, if you know what I mean. Guys like you lose gals like that. And another thing --"

I pulled myself up to my full height, stiffened my spine, and tried to assume my haughtiest demeanor.

"I'll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself, sir."

"Oh, yeah? Eat me!"

Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say, but you wouldn't know it by me. I don't mind it lukewarm either. Lukewarm and sweet.

A Meditation on Corporate Strategy Development

By Al Swearengen

Greetin's, friend! If you're looking for Ned, he's in Room Four working out a serious case of the writer's block with a ball of dope and the two new girls in from fuckin' Chicago. To judge from the screeching comin' out of there, the fuckin' dam is being breached admirably, and the cocksucker'll be back to his old ways, haranguing the citizenry in the public fuckin' thoroughfare, in a trice.

Before he retired to ease his tribulation and rest his worried mind, he pulled out his magic-lantern contraption and showed me a missive he'd received from something pleased to call itself the fuckin' Lockheed Martin Corporation, which he referred to as "the guns-and-bombs-and-rockets crowd." Cocksuckers were trying to poach his loyalty to his current employers, painting castles in the air, raising hosannahs to the riches and pelf he'd gain by switching fuckin' loyalties. Having once long ago toiled for a Govvie contractor, Ned allowed Lockheed a puking Chinaman's chance of a successful recruitment, laughing till he choked at the thought of once again working in a place where TQM, the last refuge of the charlatan, holds management in thrall.

He called particular attention to the first sentence of the job posting, which he said made him like to eruct boiling bile on the Gem's spotless floor:

Lockheed Martin's vision is to be the world's best systems integrator in aerospace, defense and technology services; to be the company our nation and its allies trust most to integrate their largest, most complex, most important advanced technology systems.

Vision. Lockheed Martin's got a cocksuckin' vision. In my part of space and time, a vision is what you get when you smoke a fuckin' ball of dope and spend a useful day on a mountaintop contemplating your fuckin' man-giblets, but apparently the meaning of the word has mutated a bit since I had it beaten into me at the fuckin' orphanage.

Was there ever a thing so stupefyingly nauseating as a Corporate Vision Statement? Did ever anything reek more of bad faith, of howling fatuity? Was there ever a greater insult to the English fuckin' language?

You're a fuckin' corporation. You make fuckin' money. End of story. How you go about making the fuckin' money, by fair means or foul, by manufacturing (excuse me: "integrating") Weapons (oh, sorry again: "Systems") of Mass Destruction or otherwise grifting the hoopleheads, is between you and your own soul, but to try to convince the Great Unwashed -- and, perhaps more importantly, yourself -- that your motivations are anything but purely fuckin' avaricious is to paint a great cochineal smile on Wu's pig.

That's the great unspoken truth about us, isn't it. We clothe order, routine, law, in the comforting veil of great ideals and beautiful words and Eternal Fuckin' Verities -- but you strip away the fuckin' gilding and gimcrackery and Corporate Vision Statements and you're left with the One True Freedom that is cherished above all others: the freedom of the Few to strip power from the Many. The only question that remains after that is how long the fuckin' Many will stand for it -- and, if experience is any guide, the cocksuckers'll stand it for a very long time indeed.

We mark in passing this day the departure from this life of fuckin' Ken Lay, the George Hearst of his day (you'll want to follow that link if you're interested in my life and times). We note further that Enron's fuckin' Mission Statement read in part, "We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don't belong here."

I rest my fuckin' case.

Happy Froth of July!

Philadelphia, 1786

"The New Religion had crested better than twenty years before," the Rev^d Cherrycoke explains, "--by the 'sixties we were well into a Descent, that grew more vertiginous with the days, ever toward some great Trough whose terrible Depth no one knew."

"Or, 'yet knows.'" The intermittently gloomy Ethelmer. As so often, the Rev^d finds himself looking for Tenebrae's reactions to the thoughts of her Cousin the University man. "All respect, Sir, wouldn't the scientifick thing have been to keep note, through the years after, of those claiming rebirth in Christ? To see how they did,-- how long the certainty lasted? To see who was telling the truth, and how much of it?"

"Oh, there were scoundrels about, to be sure," says the Rev^d, "claiming falsely for purposes of Commerce, an Awakening they would not have recogniz'd had it shouted to them by Name. But enough people had shar'd the experience, that Charlatans were easily expos'd. That was the curious thing. So many, having been thro' it together.

"You should have seen this place the time Whitefield came. All Philadelphia, delirious with Psalms. People standing up on Ladders at the church windows, Torch-light bright as Midday. Direct experience of Christ, hitherto the painfully earn'd privilege of Hermits in the desert, was in the Instant, amid the best farmland on Earth, freely being given to a town by Burghers and Churchfolk.-- They need only accept. How could a world have remained right-side-up after days like those? 'Twas the Holy Ghost, conducting its own Settlement of America. George the Third might claim it, but 'twas the Ghost that rul'd, and rules yet, even in Deistic times."

"Say." DePugh considering. "No wonder there was a Revolution."

"Hmph. Some Revolution," remarks Euphrenia.

"Why, Euph!" cries her sister.

"How not?" protests Ethelmer. "Excuse me, Ma'am,-- but as you must appreciate how even your sort of Musick is changing, recall what Plato said in his 'Republick',-- 'When the forms of Musick change, 'tis a promise of civil Disorder.'"

"I believe his Quarrel was with the Dithyrambists," the Rev^d smoothly puts in, "--who were not changing the Forms of Song, he felt, so much as mixing one up with another, or abandoning them altogether, as their madness might dictate."

"Just what I keep listening for, 'Thelmer," Euphrenia nods, "in the songs and hymns of your own American day, yet do I seek in vain after madness, and Rapture,-- hearing but a careful attending to the same Forms, the same Interests, as of old,-- and have you noticed the way that ev'rything, suddenly, has begun to gravitate toward B-flat major? That's a sign of trouble ahead. Marches and Anthems, for Triumphs that have not yet been made real. Already 'tis possible to walk the streets of New-York, passing among Buskers and Mongers, from one street-air to the next, and whistle along, and never have to change Key from B-flat major."

"Ah. And yet... If I may?" The young man seats himself at the Clavier, and arpeggiates a few major chords. "In C, if ye like,-- here is something that the fellows sing at University, when we are off being merry,-- 'To Anacreon in Heaven''s its name,-- I'll spare you the words, lest the Innocence of any Ear in the Room be assaulted." Tenebrae has invented and refin'd a way of rolling her eyes, undetectable to any save her Target, upon whom the effect is said to be devastating. Ethelmer's reaction is not easy to detect, save that he is blinking rapidly, and forgets, for a moment, where Middle C is.

The Air he plays to them would be martial in all but its Tempo, being more of a Minuet,-- thirty-two measures in all,-- which by its end has feet tapping and necks a-sway. "Here, I say, is the New Form in its Essence,-- Four Stanzas,-- sentimentally speaking, a 'Sandwich," with the third eight 'Bars' as the Filling,-- that Phrase," playing it, "ascending like a Sky-Rocket, its appeal to the Emotions primitive as an experienced in the Act of--"

"Cousin?--"

"--of, of, Eating, that's all I was going to say...," hands spread in gawky appeal.

She shakes her Finger at him, tho' as the Rev^d can easily see, in nought but Play.

"And this is the sort of thing you lads are up to," he avuncularly rumbles, "out there over Delaware? Anatomizing your own drinking songs, till you be questioning earthly, nay Heavenly, Powers?

*****

"...South Philadelphia Ballad-singers," Ethelmer has meanwhile been instructing the room, "generally Tenors, who are said, in their Succession, to constitute a Chapter in the secret History of a Musick yet to be, if not the Modal change Plato fear'd, then one he did not foresee."

"Not even he." His mathematickal cousin DePugh is disquieted.

"My point exactly!" cries Ethelmer, who has been edging toward the Spirits, mindful that at some point he shall have to edge past his Cousin Tenebrae. "'Tis ever the sign of Revolutionary times, that Street-Airs become Hymns, and Roist'ring-Songs Anthems,-- just as Plato fear'd,-- hast heard the Negro Musick, the flatted Fifths, the vocal portamenti,-- 'tis there sings your Revolution. These late ten American years were but Slaughter of this sort and that. Now begins your true Inversion of the World."

"Don't know, Coz. Much of your Faith seems invested in the novel Musick,--"

"Where better?" asks young Ethelmer confidently. "Is it not the very Rhythm of the Engines, the Clamor of the Mills, the Rock of the Oceans, the Roll of the Drums in the night, why if one wish'd to give it a Name.--"

"Surf Music!" DePugh cries.

"Percussion," Brae, sweet as a Pie.

"Very well to both of ye,-- nonetheless,-- as you, DePugh, shall, one full Moon not too distant, be foung haggling in the Alleys with Caribbean Negroes, over the price of a Guitar upon which to strum this very Musick, so shall you, Miss, be dancing to it, at your Wedding."

--Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon