Syndicate Winding

Laughing like children, living like lovers,
Rolling like thunder, under the covers. -- Elton John's pap paean to the blues, toward his late career trajectory as a has been.

Predicting the consequences of impaction can be difficult. In the film Brazil, how the system reacts to it is not only absurd, but a detriment to the health of the body politic. Buttle is killed by an over active police response to a clerical error, and the actual subversive, De Niro's Tuttle, is defeated not as the anti-hero who covets efficiency, through a violent constraint. The luckless engineer vanishes in a paper ordinance glut, just as this same complicity to a perceived threat defeats the protagonist Lowry's decency, and annuls his skill at navigating the information systems hardware. Gilliam was right not to personify a central figure such as Richard Burton in 1984, because no one of us understands the modern autocracy we've created, and any anguish it generates.

If we take Simenon's Rico and place it at the post-war end of the spectrum, and we bookend Arlington Road as a fin de siecle warning to the digital age, a warning that is heeded by no one, evidently: In theory, North Korea cedes its foreign autonomy to China, but that stubborn xenophobic sense of Juche may spark a new conflict on the demilitarized zone. Beware the end of history, because it points to the deeper mendacity of the Bush Administration's offense in Iraq. Saddam was a kitten next to the Jong family. Brazil spans the mid-point between the syndicate, and our complicity with it at the dawn of the material age, and the deceptive new world order that Pellington insinuates through Jeff Bridges well played paranoia in Arlington. Everyone is sacrificed. Mob bosses who lose face, the neighborhood boys who gained through the possible necessity of criminality as a living. Even Conte's Eddie, triumphant in the closing sequence, comes off as defanged, possibly still out on a limb should vengeance rear its head. In Brazil, Gilliam turns the tables on those who survive through deliberate ignorance. All those plastic surgery patches hardly amount to bliss, and in Arlington, we discover Robbins and Cusack have strings too, that they are also being played, private contractors in an internal dirty war.

If I leave the Philadelphia public housing system as things stand, in terms of factual reality, I am setting myself up to face incarceration on much harsher terms, and yes, I realize this, but if I do not shake things up, I face the prospect of being parceled out like pork rinds anyway to the self-interest of those coming up behind my fading geriatric twilight. I deserved better within the environs of the most powerful country on earth, even if you find that sentiment prideful in audacity. 

This may not conclude everything I have to offer about collusion, complicity, and the diseases of the intellect it generates, but I am winding down what has been a lengthy rebuttal from my Jamesian scolding. I have been online a very long time, and I have been with this Henry James community the longest. For what it's worth, they have kept me afloat with a mostly delightful arcane sensibility, and I have the fondest affections for them, even when I have hairballs plaguing my colon!

Bon voyage! (I brace.)