Name Your Assailant

I have little idea why my brother took me off his Facebook account, as in, here we go, again, but I know, in part, he is insecure about the usual family stuff, to paraphrase Ice Tea, about having been born a bastard, and I was also, for me, mildly subversive about maternal aggrandizement on Gretchen's posts: I am not particularly enthralled that my eldest nephew also sprang a leak and had an unplanned pregnancy; nor am I best friends with my sister in law. I am not even certain that the social media giant has been particularly conducive. I got kicked off a Dubai based fuckwit's freelance group without even trying, left another voluntarily. What use is all of this to me? It is a tool, like Twitter, but for me, two tools which do the same thing where the larger is counterproductive isn't necessarily beneficial. In the strange ways of virtual communication, I used a hard nosed analyst's well deserved jab at Manning to talk myself down. 

Let me return to Tom Earle. He had no idea what the internal politics of the disability center were like under Fern Markowitz and Linda Dezenski, and I'm not in the mood to keep reiterating what was going on. If you take LBGT extremists and put them in a room, Jewish princess addendum or not, chaos is the end result. I told you before, these individuals had little love lost between them, and the homosexuals replaced Fern, one of their own, with a soft, blind Latino who delights in toddlers. I realize he was beholden to the board who put him in place. I embarrassed him with a toxic issue which in essence, destroyed my support system, and I'm culpable. I did not do what most women do in these situations and legal up until years later, I stopped caring, went through another homosexual politician, broke down, emailed Toomey, and then the axis shifted. Toomey's doing? I do not know, but support the Senator, nonetheless, and went through this again with Josie on a lesser scale in her little isle at United Spinal Association, all of this within recurring Pennsylvania welfare abuses and rental agent contiguous, and I stress, contiguous, harassment, until I proclaimed myself a racist, fought like one, and damaged quadriplegic remains in a stalemate with authority. Tom, however, did not have to leave the streamers flutter in the vent. He could have investigated, dismissed Linda then, and as a decent man, offered me something, like a fucking transfer. This is why I am angry with him. He's a fucking civil rights attorney, but never mind. Burrow, then threaten me. This is how Nancy Pelosi's "rule of law" works for those who cannot buy tort and didn't meet the deadlines due to the extent of the pain, and I just cannot dig myself out. Maybe, just maybe, I'll find a housing lawyer, but it's a little late for me to recover. I am, after all, one mortal against a cruel institutional paradigm, still attempting to encompass opera, not quite managing, except for Verdi. La Traviata, upon discovery, has an effervescent quality nearly impossible to capture, and Violetta, with the right soprano, is enough to cling to, now and again, were it only I who might have been pursued with passion for who I was, consumption might have freely enveloped me in its inflammatory excretions. This gives concessions to Dumas in his masculine anxiety. So be it.

Corman's Austerity Complex

Rebecca is a grim anatomy of wifehood. -- Nina Auerbach

What conceits does Ray Milland bring to bear on patriarchal assurance? An underlying unease, doubt, and a splintering breakage as doom closes in or threatens to overtake him. He sacrifices the blond goddess in much the same way Jon Avnet seems to be having a dialectical argument with himself over the torture and asphyxiation of Asian women. Avnet needs to cease directing films; his repugnance is different in kind from the cult affections we reserve for Roger Corman. Why do we harbor them? Corman knew how to use the anxiety of our mastery, unlike Nita Farahany, who believes we can regulate our genomic modifications to ourselves. Now now. Dr. Farahany holds her own with the boys and their age old junk swagger, knows her science, and can unravel a red herring, or two, but if we accept the science of Carbon 14 dating and other empirical measures of time, life on Earth is roughly a billion years into existence, and may have died and started again under many big bangs and impactions, not to imitate Liu Xing, so it may not be all that precious in evolutionary terms, but any species ought to be cautious over Utopian manipulation.

Corman takes Milland on jump cuts that Jeff Goldblum would not dream of in remakes of old classics, (though women risk it all for the tight wad and the naughty Jewish lad gone astray for nearly the same reason) and I think it would be difficult for any madman to gouge out his own eyes, but X is the cracker jack at the dawn of medical model hygiene as a police state, and anticipates our own dismantling through magnetic resonance imagining, at least through indirection.

The dilemma for radical libertarianism is that as a philosophy it is already and quite fatally doomed. Google may be a quite playful giant, and it has allowed me to skirt the edges of some not so trollish sentiments. Amazon is just a huge retailer that gets its innovations and conveniences down, though how good it is for complex thinkers is an open question. NSA perishes with American power, regardless of what future interest builds on its technical prowess, but Mitchell's world of corporate holocaust down to the last resort is already here, and it will take over, regardless of Snowden, or the fact that Bradley Manning is an enemy of state because he wants a vagina. 

Wolf bane Intrigue

Al Qaeda planned attacks years in advance, inserted sleeper cells, did reconnaissance. They took the long view, believing that their struggle would take decades, perhaps generations. -- Richard A Clarke, page 227

I cannot recall all of Clarke's testimony before Congress after 9/11, but I remember his demeanor, how it had a manichean aspect. He was very briefly a real American policy maverick, and his policy wonkish book was the first of its kind for me. I purchased the hardback seeking reassurance after the terrorist attack, and finished Against All Enemies in the hospital before my graft surgery, a period during which I often wept conspicuously, and the ward nurse guilt tripped mio padre and immediate family members into paying me a visit. I wanted to go home, then, as now, I want to go home. Mother's side of the familial would tell you that my longing to restore my sense of place and identity is my fault, and it is; they wanted me to move back in with mother before she dropped dead, so that I could relive all my sexual assaults, and I broke off my wedding engagement just weeks before the non-event, and apparently all I live for now is the fucking blog post, alternately violating my own internal decency and then reigning myself in.

Clarke is a competent assessor, but he wrote nothing I did not already know through my assiduous reading of  the papers, or viewing PBS, reading The Boston Review. Last week I wondered where the title had gotten to, but did not panic over its absence. I may have given it away years ago, perhaps to the little whodonnit bookstore on my Chestnut Street corner. Though faded into the pundit netherworld, Richard Clarke did not have to violate national security to bite back the Bush Administration where it counted and get his point across. Looking at Edward Snowden's actions in this light lends itself to being fearful of young white men's paranoia, despite my own bigoted sizzling, displacement, rage at defeat.

Yet the maw this strange young man opened, if not racist, then at least a wound with a stink about the fact that we have a choc-mix centrist left administration in place, is a complex issue, as well as a perplexing event. Americans have to be be able to trust themselves in order to remain a superpower, and the government has to be hard on such people if it is to be able to function, and yet it bewilders sense, what young men like Bradley Manning (though a rage riddled homosexual) and Snowden have thrown away and forsaken, breaching patriotism in real world terms. Does Edward truly believe he will be able to thrive in Ecuador? 

My alienation from the disability *conspirators* I was once in league with is not so draconian, not quite. I was always a writer first, but the game of spy-craft and the nature of intelligence and national interest is a labyrinth that mirrors psychopathy, the zeal of ideology driven a league too far. Literature and Hollywood have thrived on it since both have been in existence.

In the burrowing for my epigram, however, Clarke's evaluation recalls that I have to be true to my own sense of justice, however beaten I may be, whatever length of time it takes. If I cannot finish my protest missive today, I have to remember that I did get a draft off last year, without realizing that Babette Josephs political career had nearly concluded. Staying abreast of office holders is useful.

Snowman Boyce to Snowden

Tense, intriguing, and darkly compelling, The Falcon and the Snowman is a uniquely American story of betrayal. On the face of it, there was nothing to indicate that Andrew Dalton Lee and Christopher James Boyce were anything but two devout Catholic boys growing up in happy, warm families in one of the most affluent suburbs in America, living one version of the American Dream and facing nothing but the best of futures--Lyons Press

Robert Lindsey could assure you with the certitude of his specialization that we have been here before, as it pertains to Edward Snowden. Edward, Bradley Manning, Boyce, they form part of a larger pattern that is a distinct subset in the world of espionage, related, but discernible in motive from the gaming of Ana Montes and Robert Hanssen.

The actions of Snowden, to my nose, are slowly taking on the odor of sour milk; he seems to be a character inside of his own Timothy Hutton morality play, although the NSA's technical capacity and ability is something that I am sure keeps James Fallows awake on his pillow, in addition to this well bred correspondent's other worries.

Some films are distinctions of their auteurs; some films have an educational agenda. The Falcon and the Snowman, in addition to what I have written on it in other posts, is representative, at least through Hutton, of the corrosive effects of delayed ejaculations and rapist rage that ventilates itself in treasonous activities.