I am off to bed momentarily, anxious about my travel plans, partnered with a tall gargantuan of a lanky fellow named Shawn, both of us in a situation where we have to make it work, I do not have enough money for the taxi, nor enough change to take the buses back to the city, so I may literally be stranded when I get to Saint Kevin, if I get there, taking longer and longer to orient myself for even a pretense of work, the conventional wisdom in the media is the GOP is in trouble for the midterms due to Trumpian cannibalism of its core values, particularly after Conor's razor thin victory. The dowager leans toward a certain Puritanical cruelty lobbed at Murphy, which she is not exactly positive is a benefit for any district's constituents. I do not know how to evaluate Murphy's experience as a representative, but my argument, one which cuts across ideology, is that Americans seem to equate bad personal conduct with bad governance. This may be accurate when Trump's rhetoric corresponds to questionable policy positions, but I am not so sure who gets laid where matters when it comes to static public unions versus right to work.
Twitter can also be a non-statistical weather vane, and that Rand is reigniting Abu Ghraib is a more pertinent sign of troubled waters, whether or not we're gearing for war with Iran, in lieu of a third world war pivoting on North Korea. Rand's adamant iteration is a fall back position, not entirely true, whether we look at DOD policy or domestic. Americans combine a certain degree of linear simplicity (thinking of Bosch), with an undercurrent of brutishness. I asked the Senator from Kentucky where this histrionic Bush era replay was coming from, didn't expect a response, but landed an interesting debate, even in the face of jet lag, given that our ideological militancy with Islamic factionalism has run its course. The hits France took from Allah's partisans was the lunge of a dying beast. Persia is a different cup of tea, and libertarians have to do better than wave the flag of an innate manifest destiny. That died with the invasion of a country which had nothing to do with 9/11, and Katrina. Good night, as we see what tomorrow brings in its enfeebled journey, if it even gets off the ground, still able to press myself, nevertheless, I'm never to be the same, ever again.
"David, you've killed me!" Donald Sutherland, protesting Nimoy's autonomic miasma.
The 78 remake is somewhat different in subtext from the original 56 Body Snatchers, whose classic delineation is preferable to the muddied liberalism which ushered in the disaster of the Carter presidency. Domesticated, pasteurized kindness, tabulated to Sutherland's empathy enabling, isn't going to achieve jive squat over the ruthless need of a more potent conqueror, hence George W. Bush'es response to Osama bin Laden failed because it was a transference. The actual *enemy* in the aftermath of 9/11 was the Saudi kingdom's buy off of hard line extremism, but the neo-conservatives who had taken over the West Wing, lacked the will to uproot a corrupt oligarchy, and so, 14 years after the fact, we're pea shooting in Afghanistan, which is an ungovernable failed state, destroyed the British Empire's nicely drawn territorial borders for the sake of world order in Iraq, Iran, and another piece of shit country called Yemen, and Obama's carefully controlled airstrikes in 2011 against Qaddafi has essentially destabilized North Africa, while NATO and Putin eyeball each other, pissing in the wind over Kiev, and hoping to avoid a third world war in Syria.
First: If Hillary Clinton is truly responsible for the death of Ambassador Stevens, she should suspend her campaign and leave her party to scramble. Second: the GOP needs to realize that if the US has essentially ceased deploying the army for ground force occupation for anything other than mass die offs in Haiti, then chaos ensues, shit happens, and Secretary Clinton was in treatment for a blood cot derived from a hematoma during the attack on the compound, and the fault, if it lies anywhere, lies at the doorstep of two failed Administrations who have lost the ability to define goals and execute accordingly, because they realize progressives have lost the will for body counts.
Do I have any salient solutions? No, but a good starting point might lie in the realization that the U.N. would survive losing 5 members from the General Assembly. Yemen and Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan and North Korea and Sudan and Somalia need to be dissolved. That's seven, but such niceties like a shared national identity and ethos have long fled the scene. Erdogan would not mind seeing the restoration of the Ottoman Empire's prestige. That's a start. India could reabsorb Pakistan and Bangladesh. Would there be blood? How much collateral damage have we seen already since ISIS has become a cause? This is the sentiment you get on defecating through a second week of a bronchitis flare up for which powerful decongestants like Mucinex have not yet been deployed. I will not elect Hillary Clinton, but if you do, my antipathy may not supersede my suffocation on my own phlegm, but I'll go down fighting, fanatic ablaze to destroy those by whom I've been thwarted.
"The various kinds of sovereignty do not necessarily covary."-- Stephen D. Krasner
Frankenheimer's direction in The Horsemen is not necessarily New Wave, but it could not have been what it is without David Lean coming beforehand, and now stands as a favorite of spastic's hothead youth, previously unknown but for nostalgia television. The cinematography is rich, splendid, in colors of beauty and brutality, its thematic aims not so clearly deciphered, not quite about man's destructive capacity with his livestock either. Who knew camels would kill each other at the behest of their trainers?
Frankenheimer seems to focus solely on man and beast in contention, without tipping the scales one way or the other. It is left for viewers to wonder why Omar's Uraz chooses to cripple himself instead of mending properly after breaking his leg, but it is similar to the way I may choose to bring this to an end and dump myself on the street. Obstinate individuals need the contest, and yet Uraz makes it extreme. After he has a concealed amputation and a victory ride on Jahil, the game trained warrior horse of his father, he rejects his village and goes off with a Taliban-like mountain herder who trains his goat to be a lethal killer at the bong of a drum roll. It is a weird quiet film that admires the defiance of natural anarchy as a way of life, something quietly eroded in progressive sensibility, and yet beneath the surface, the wealth of the developed world is under tremendous strain, analogous to the ephemeral doll like perfection of Leigh Taylor Young in Soylent Green. Given the actual state of civilization depicted on location, it is the actress as a trophy fuck who seems unreal, almost as if doctored for a commercial. Her upkeep must have cost a fortune, and her fate, left to its inferences as Charlton is carried away, wounded, mortally or not, protesting the horror of manufactured cannibalism. I'm not the first person to point out that liberalism unwilling to recognize limits invites catastrophe.
The conception of sovereignty is nonsensical, but some states are more sorereign than others. After 9/11, once I had all the facts, I actually would not have occupied Kabul. We should have wiped out Saudi Arabia, and the subsequent genealogy of events would have been different. Afghanistan, as a state, doesn't seem to function, and as with anything else, nation builders need to get out of the way.
I am not sure why I responded to Jennifer's post. Read it once, trying to make sense of it, skimmed it again, and then responded with macro view impatience about our inability to be ruthless and efficient enough, but if we were that we would not have put Bales in prison, nor castigated servicemen who spoke out loud what we all believe, but remains a breach of manner to say: American and European lives are more valuable than certain Arabic African and some Asian groups. And Google would have banned me long ago for demonic ferocity, although there is a difference in the imagining of mobile savagery and the actual ability of my transfer skills, and I haven't attempted to strangle kimmy for being a stubborn female. The minute I sit up I am subjected to relentless head buts from this relegated feline whose litter could not be saved, and as such I am posting without freshly brewed Italian roast, always unwise, even if kimmy doesn't let up, leaping and dancing, chewing plastic because she wants greens, until, resolute, I sit still.
Islamic State is hard enough, which makes them both admirable and dishonorable. They killed the press on our home turf. I stayed my hand on Foley for being a fool, going into the chaos of Syrian fractures, but killing journalists on the home front, then going after the Jews who remained on European soil, remained French-- there is no honor in this kind of attack, even if Islamic State would argue they are doing what WW2 Zionists did. The Zionists in the aftermath of the Third Reich had a reasonably zealous agenda in the face of a mechanized banal slaughter humans had never seen before, lacking the technical capacity. I don't think recreating a modern Israeli state worked, but comprehend it as a mission statement.
Extremists want a Caliphate? Afghanistan is already a prime example of homo sapiens devolution.
Karina pinged to ask how I was; you could wag a finger: See, you fired her and said she was stupid and she has remained kind. Yes, but I gave her about 300 I wouldn't have given a person of color. The kindness I miss is my childhood physical therapy aide. Mary Anne. She let me sleep over, taught me about scoliosis, which she had, not visibly, and prepared me for confirmation, an innocent attachment to a child vanquished by tunnel visions of loss too difficult to absorb. I don't know what went through her head day after day, watching me tortured in leg braces, locked into a standing table, mailing letters with Eisenhower's bust as an imprint on ten cent stamps. Lesbianism wasn't even a concept, though she was a Catholic woman of the 70's, floral blouses and an auburn beatles bob for a hairstyle.
I need my coffee now.
"The old ram stands down looking over rockslides, stupidly."-- John Gardner, Grendel, p2
What Jennifer argues in her latest Right Turn entry, whose headline was changed, I believe, from the more inflammatory "France goes to war," to the lower decibel of "fallout," since Hollande is a Socialist in the tradition of Mitterrand, and no doubt had the Foreign Secretary call the Grahams who remain on staff with a scold, is that the neocon response to bin Laden's "great blow" was the right tack, despite the fact that thirteen years in Kabul seems to have simply degraded the Taliban into more traditional narco terrorists with whom the CIA loves to waltz, which is not very hawkish. I do not necessarily disagree with Jennifer or The Post on Obama's retrenchment after Bush Administration debacles. My argument is that delicacy to Islamic sensitivity, and Western effeminate dress after centuries of civilizing the natives at the point of a bayonet, is not going to pacify hardliners who supersede Hammurabi, who purportedly was source text for Mosaic law.
I am always against bad process, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 should have led to George W Bush's impeachment, regardless of how well or how badly the Pentagon handled the draw down under our sadly failed Harvard Law president. We cannot occupy multiple fronts indefinitely, even if we are the strongest nuclear power. Americans were once and briefly united after the 9/11 attacks, and if you want tradition, well, successful war presidents unite the country. Congress should have declared war on Al Qaeda. The UN Security Council should have made a deal with the major powers, dissolved Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia. set up zones of occupation, and if those with the tactical force had the guts to do that, whatever the price of going that route, we would not be watching North Africa and the Far East join the long standing enemies of Israel in an implosion.
This all started in 79 with Khomeini and his Iranian revolution. The Ayatollah broadcast his Persian call to arms from Paris, and world leaders held their dicks in their hands, to channel old man Morgan, while the fanatical Imam toppled the Shah. Jimmy might have saved the fellow citizens he served some dignity by exporting Billy Carter as an American radical. The Saudis did the same thing prior to Osama's rise in prominence and bear some of the blame for contemporary tremors.
Jennifer cites John Yoo, attempting to rehabilitate a rationalizing legal hardliner, by having him universalize NATO's Article 5. I doubt this makes Hollande happy. I watched extensive press coverage of the neutralization of the Kouachi brothers and their associate, and then Hollande's entry and subsequent gathering of ministers in the Presidential Palace. The informality of the European bureaucrat anesthetizes sensibility, and briefly entertained the idea of sending Marine Le Pen my resume. Perhaps I should do it on a lark. Why didn't Turkish authorities detain Boumeddiene? The corruption of ionized interests will always be with us, but this too, smells of bad faith.
In essence, Jennifer's urgency for the Obama Administration to reignite Bush's battle lines is misguided, because war takes commitment, national unity. We lost that after Truman fired MacArthur.
"My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man." Dan Fogelberg
Old women. Old unhappy women, wretched like an Olivia Newton John pop song plea. As faulty as our memories may be, the day Elivis died my mother was in my bedroom on my mattress watching the news of it, weeping and I, perplexed, either in wheelchair or kneeling on the floor, with stridency, asked "Mom why are you crying?"
"He was a big singer once, when your father and I were young," weeping in her unhappy indolence of fat, shrewish pale blue eyes, before I was born my mother was a knockout, a near perfect imitation of Sophia Loren. No one used classifications like bipolar disorder, and a trigger was a mechanism for gunpowder ignition. I was born because my mother was friendly with Marie Marinelli, my long suffering aunt, and Marie hooked my mother, my mother in near matricide with her mother, hooked her up with my father, and I was born because my mother miscarried a firstborn son, this attractive Italian couple who knew Fabian, and grew up in the first dawn of conglomeration of superstardom such that Elvis spawned. I was never a fan but I heard the soundtrack of "Falling In Love With You," female rendition, and couldn't work, the baritone of Presley's voice like a tidal wave over the bandwidth of reminiscence, carrying that ballad with the longing of vulnerability, swallowed into the contradictory passion of unity. It is never like that, our desire to envelop in the face of God, yet a corn bred bubba had the voice with the pull of such gravitas.
I wanted Afghanistan wiped off the face of the earth after 9/11. Then after 13 years of war we calmed down, tired of it all, but the Bergdahl swap is an unseemly and sordid business, especially if the lives of soldiers were lost in the attempt to recover their comrade. Kathleen makes a salient argument. That is how she makes a living, without room for now militant reactionaries like me, always diffident about President Obama even when I voted for him, but in this instance, I disagree with the swap. Suspending judgment on the issue of desertion, that I have to do, as how does an American desert in a wasteland where men are patriarchal savages? Men who live on medieval prescripts, addicted to heroin, like dogs, and no better than rheumy eyed dogs?
I met an Afghan girl in high school, a refugee salvaged by Carter. To her, overwhelmed as she probably was, I wonder if I was even doubtlessly human, how I registered in her mind, or what the word cripple amounts to in Farsi. She registered to me, barely, as a foreigner. Too young for the implications, my parents, Nicholas and Joanne, were a stunning couple. Sequins and tuxedo, Sophia Loren and a sharp Kevin Spacey. In his prime, mio padre was more the handsome than Spacey. I do not want to lose my father, falling in love with you. A white man who could sing like nigger, with all the conviction of it, for. I. Can't help. Falling in love with you. Never in my life has this happened, not like it happened for Presley, whose daughter must have had an interesting time of it in the bedroom. Her father dying in a pool of his own vomit, a man who was an international headline in an army uniform, melting in my dead mother's breast, my eyes burn, my histrionic fists beating on Jerry's chest, while he wrote me factual letters from Romania.
Why are you crying, these mine spastic burning eyes?
"Have you ever been to Philly sir? You have to be crazy to live there."-- Nicholas Cage, snickering his way out of involuntary confinement, circa 1984
In the days following 911, like most Americans, I wanted a response, and like most Americans, I did not really give much thought to what it meant, to wipe the Taliban off the face of the earth, indeed, to eradicate Al Qaida, radiate the group with isotopes so that it would suffer the worst kind of slow and incurable poisoning imaginable, and like most Americans, this slog bequeathed to us by Rumsfeld and Cheney, in conjunction with Iraq, has infected American power, weakened our collective blood stream with a persistent influenza, which still battles our white cell count, the victor undecided.
Although the current administration bears some criticism in how these conflicts have been resolved, commitment to any kind of goal lost in the process of leaving it on the shoulders of Karzai, the issue is less ideological and more prone to ridicule. The Chinese secret police quell their internal protest demonstrations more effectively than a democratic superpower and its Nato allies can achieve a goal, to pacify a territory that seems to lack any intuitive understanding of national sovereignty. This adds to the weight of my disdain for Kathryn Bigelow, which is unfortunate, but I will sift my way around to that. It has nothing to do with her importance in being, in the moment, an influential female director who tackles war theatre without apologies, leaving viewers to extrapolate and interpolate the harsh tactical angles, which, if we compare it to Alan Parker's Birdy, illustrates how much war films have changed, and how much studios feel they are willing to risk, perhaps as payback for our shame, or how much Cheney was willing to squander principle to justify the ends, and left us as dirty as the manifest destiny and violence against the indigenous left us with a blood guilt buried in textbooks and forgotten, only pulled out and referenced when liberals feel like kicking me in the teeth.
Birdy is an independent film for which I have a soft spot, personally and artistically. I saw it first with collegiate friend Tom, the memory of our give and take only growing in commensurate value as the years pass and I have no real links, or a bond, with anyone of his like, not for sexual affection, or even love, but the pleasure of his company, the value of aesthetic conversation. If I knew Alan Parker he would probably be a spirited ally, given the motifs he coaxed out of Cage and Modine, their resistance against control, poverty, and a bleak mechanized urban blight only accentuated by the heightened trauma of Vietnam.
Bigelow dispenses with the artifice of metaphorical salve to such wounds, but she should not be the decisive factor in how we repair the Clinton - Bush legacy, and Obama's tepid resolution of such a problematic paradigm. Killing Osama may have involved tactical danger, but it was otherwise a pointless exercise, since we seem to lack a vision for restoring the moral ascendancy of Pax America, and Bigelow gets to amuse herself being a modern GI Joe cocktease who does not condone torture, as if we expect her, and her producers, to say anything else. If her work is admirable, didactic, offers an interpretation to be celebrated, then hey, but to the extent that the public does not care, then the public needs castigation for refusing to be educated. Zero Dark Thirty should be an augmentation, and nothing more than that. Do I object if the Academy awards her? Certainly not, but if you allow her films to define the most successful terrorist plot in human history, then just give it up now, resign from the United Nations, and let the Mexican drug cartels retake our Western territory, and we can govern ourselves as effectively as the Castro's govern their island ninety miles from our shores.
