Many Happy Returns

 "I want the whole man!"--Ian McKellan

I would tell you that I have been stalled for many days on a Substack piece about the McCormack Oz race which I would like to finish, with hopefully some relevant insight, before the November election results are tallied, with a Shapiro victory most likely assured as Wolf’s heir apparent, but this is only a partial truth, while I reflect on Patrick McGoohan’s Number 6 caught in a rubber room, an analog rubber room, for making a disruptive choice which the MI6 of nearly 60 years ago didn’t like. McGoohan didn’t create The Prisoner as a critique of the British welfare state, but the boomerang nature of The Village is a great deal like being a rat in a maze of the Commonwealth’s static, and blisteringly deadly Waiver services. Like Enka Kohat's Shubert of 21 years ago, the mind attempts to rally around the cauterized despair burbling about like raspberry jam, knowing it’s doomed, resisting electro shocks, brainwashing, various ruses designed to make the agent believe he can outwit the closed circuit cameras, and those malignant capture balloons, no realism here in this 17 episode carnivalesque farce, but The Prisoner is violent, paranoid, anticipating Guantanamo Bay despite its cartoonish exaggeration. The series withstands age even with the knowledge that the Soviet Union is dead, in definitive terms. While I am surprised at the quick success of Zelenskyy’s counteroffensive, any student of modern Russia knew Putin was in trouble when Shoigu couldn’t bring about Kyiv’s collapse. However long it may be until Putin is deposed, or not, this sinking writer doesn’t think Ukraine is entirely free from the threat of the Russian Bear, but the nail in Stalin’s coffin has been sealed, We can breathe a small sigh of relief.

The Jenga Echo Chamber

The great principle of English law is to make business for itself.-- Charles Dickens, Bleak House

 I may have had money once, briefly, forged on the dried grinds of feral welfare culture, once I left behind Daddy’s rat pack wheeling and dealing, but Bed Bath & Beyond , founded in 1971, encapsulated upper caste suburbia I would have never been able to capture on my own without the right marriage, but that was never forthcoming in the bracketed time young women have to recognize and forge the character of the hypothetical man in question, so the death of Gustavo this past Friday, who wasn’t the retailer’s CFO for any great length of time, is not only reminiscent of the 1929 suicides which ushered in The Great Depression, which arguably didn’t end until the GI Bill picked up pace after 1944, it is also a harbinger of the American upper class warped by a pandemic decompression. Not only will the last boomer deaths signify the loss of what life was like before the digital age, but there never will be a reverting back to normal  after COVID-19, ever, not when otherwise reasonably ambulatory men like Amal emote beyond rationality in such a spectacular fashion. Businesses fail, even in state model economies, and one man’s ruin is not necessarily only one step out of the gutter, beaten to a pulp, horizon eclipsed and narrowed by the weaknesses of age. This same sort of visceral reaction pierced the gut when Robin Williams took his life in 2014. The comedian, however, in the passage of time, had a debilitating diagnosis. Amal had pressure. Some of us should be so lucky to still have a head in the game.