Blood Guilt Gentility

Even now, I can hardly bear to tell the tale. --McMurtry, in every author's heyday

Despite the time and effort I have put into taxing Safari (outdated) and Chrome, my memory of the mid-nineties, when I was immortal, and actually had a white collar career, suggests that Lonesome Dove had a vibrant currency, but it may not have been the series out of Alberta, where Christianne Hirt, as Hannah Call, is too good to be true. Canadians, being the winsome sops that they are, tried to reference this in the climax to Season One, prior to Baristow developing his bitter streak in the "outlaw years". I only caught a glimpse of Robert Ulrich, in the other variation on the now faded Larry McMurtry franchise of poignant Texan tales, when I had not passed the ladder rung of 35. The show never caught on, though it may have simply been a scheduling conflict. I have been studying the drama only this year, along with Comanche Moon, and admit that the Canadian production is of greater depth and quality than Henry Winkler's partnership with Showtime and Dead Man's Gun, but it still has an undercurrent of being somewhat too holistic, perhaps as a paean to the mythos of American innocence. With this complaint duly noted, however, Eric McCormack more than aptly captures my growing sympathy for the Confederate ideal with his depiction of Francis Mosby. To throw in the usual dowager tire iron, I could almost hate the man for then taking on the part of Will, in that superficial, flinty, metrosexual  comedy, evidence it might be conducive for me to time out the virtual world and fight the barren parameters of my real world existence, but I'll editorialize the white out developed for typing paper on this particular caveat.


Granted, this is a studio presentation of pretty people groomed on the set, costumed to Victorian era corsets, but the voices of Grant, Lee, and General Sherman, can be overlaid on the actor's presentation with some degree of admiration. When it is done right, the power of the aristocratic mien we've lost to industrialization, commercialization, liberalism, is something to be regretted, and Mosby has trace elements of something already entombed in the catacombs during the active years in which the frontier was being subsumed into a superpower that would last approximately 57 years. I date the rise of the United States as starting in 1939, and  beginning to crater around the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Armchair scholars may take any issue with this as they please, as we can say, as well, that American power was predestined in the wealth of the Gilded Age, but I tend to feel the Second World War cemented certainty out of what was before then a likely possibility. I also don't single out the Lewinsky phenomenon to lay blame with the Clintons. The Reagan era ended abruptly with the ouster of Bush 41. Bill and Hillary were only representative of a liberalism that no longer recognized itself, made a feint, and then blindsided neo-conservativism into a grave mishandling of an ideological disaster. I don't think we'll recover, regardless of whether or not Trump is shown the door. I am not attempting to suggest American decline has a genealogy marker, and I haven't read Dr. Ferguson's rise and decline summation of the American Empire. But the Iraq War as solution to September 11th, 2001, opened up a cascade, like a broken vending machine, and the western hemisphere has a yellow underbelly, and my skepticism about China picking up the slack is unchanged. What exactly did the Middle Kingdom do prior to the 17th century other than coalesce the territorial landmass of Asia we currently recognize? I am not talking about gunpowder, or other appropriated technologies. I am asking what the Emperors and mandarins did before the European tea trade at the point of a bayonet? An insulated history, in which non-Han Chinese were "barbarian," still informs what global Chinese leadership could look like fifty years from now. I am not particularly heartened by the picture: it is China which will not allow the Korean peninsula to unify, grow up, develop better living standards. Hong Kong is a game of cat and mouse. I don't know where else to look for a better outcome than to a more realistic stratification of the past, with recognition of the reality of caste. Mammalian primate hierarchy isn't a polite fiction. It is an ecological reality for complex living organisms, hence the character of Francis Mosby, and nobelesse oblige, the uniting force of that within group dynamics to which we unfortunate, and remarkable finely tuned apes always turn: I've written enough in my embittered online voice for today.

It Doesn't Stay in Beijing

Satoshi Uematsu's behavior is also, perhaps, a reflection of knife attacks on the mainland. CPC security services may admit to these instances of violence as a form of nostalgia for Maoist reducation camps, or as a tacit concession toward the consequences of imitating western liberalism (I've also been told there are knife gangs in Britain), but it is a conceptual victory for libertarians. Knife attackers can kill the unarmed, and any form of technology can be deployed toward a nefarious end; I am not sure where this Academy of Governance gets its numbers, but 180,000 instances of admitted civil disobedience in a country with such a significant population density doesn't bode well for traditional "crack downs" of the sort we're used to being fed by media sources. It may not be "five minutes to midnight" just yet, to use the catch phrase of Mark Shields, but to me it seems we're quarter past 11.

What Does Larry Summers want?

Ah, Business Insider clarified the ever fawning economic advisor. Summers gets plenty of op ed space from Wapo, as all formerly prominent policy makers do, and I am rather skeptical still, not of China's rise on the global stage, but as to whether it matters. Sure, the People's Republic obfuscates in a manner that the Western Hemisphere doesn't, but what of it? To a degree we're all in a microcosmic police state, and if the heirs to Maoist apparatchick take over, the denial of propaganda isn't going to save us any more than freedom of expression, as liberty is eclipsed by statutory guidelines. Social Security is not administered according to civil liberties of the people, neither is our byzantine tax code, certainly not housing authorities, and this cuts across the board, from Home Owner's Associations to public housing police states, let alone medical model stricture.

I tried to lie down for my appt this afternoon, and had to force myself up, as my Achilles's heel always rides the forefront: dorm rooms, rehabs, hospital beds, apartment dwellings exactly the same, barring size: Dixon Hall, Diamond Park, this studio, off white and cheap as Chinese drywall. I never had, never will, a stake in ownership, as my father and family did once. I have to forgive my father, because of our home in Folsom. It was a home, a rancher with an individualized presence, like our house in Ridley.

All I have now are laminated floors, imposing cinder block  hospital halls, or transfers to sterile environments much the same as this. Did Alain Delon whine as Frank Riva when Xavier dusted him off and gave him a little flat with adorable cat sequences as only the French can do? I'm going back to bed. Fuck Trudy Richardson and Ken Cantrell. I will find a way to sue Presby for negligence, compliance be damned, however quizzical it seems that Blogger referring urls link back to the Henry James list serv.

As a virtual academic community, it deserves praise as a continuing tributary, but as my matriculation continues to take a pounding, the space to organize the shavings of biographical detail is no longer a kind of monastic security, and the inadequacy of intellectual discipline keeps me away. I doubt I'll ever return-- which is not to convey if my life stabilizes I will not resume researching a proposal.

Senior moments

I thought this Taipei crash video was a game, or the movie based on the game, not for very long, but few a few split seconds I believed it because I have never seen anything like it. Sneaky whisper in the back of my mind asking what the Chinese are up to? Still building the Great Wall after what? 2000 years now they're still worried about barbarians. Not to suggest that China has the technical know how to make MH370 vanish and then cause another trans Asia sea crash and now this, but CCTV is much more cleverer than its Russian counterpart, and the West mews. The West wants to make money in China, so what is a few hundred thousand lives or more, who cares about Party indoctrination? These are all small things, but these small things are looming large. Whether authoritarian or our precious free society, we're losing control of the mechanized complexities we think we have mastered. I really ought to give my fucking notice and head to Texas, even if I'm dead in a week.

Emily Yoffe: White House Procopius

Now David Plotz will never accept a future piece from me, though this does not deter my brain from its Slate bracket file (and much as anything, my Slate byline aspirations need fieldwork), but I shall raise my voice, gently, on the moderate left rollback of the Petraeus imbroglio: If the neo-Eisenhower moderates, a species with no political home to call their own, exhibit character flaws, journalists like Yoffe roll out the tape measure and say let's be adults. Eh. Not so simple. People get hurt, and even if sex that violates commitments to monogamy is no longer criminalized, the state still has an interest in containing adultery. My fling was inconsequential. All of them were, but that does not mean I could not have gotten killed, and I did immerse myself in a pathological marriage between a draft dodger and his wife, unwittingly. Young and stupid, I wanted the thrill of romance, and married men, I discovered, were not afraid of me, and if I was not florid, cranky, and breast fallen, I'd do it all again, but more coolly, smarter. There is a huge difference between the thrill of forbidden pleasure, however, and illicit affairs that damage employment and productivity. And my former supervisor traumatized me, even if she did not mean to do so, by throwing me off my guard, in an email, about her orgasm intensity, and this in spite of the fact that I sought her confidence. I concede that. I enjoyed her company and was lonely and needed work again, but putting all that together became combustible. I did ask her things I feared asking my mother, and that was my mistake, because Linda is an alpha, and like any alpha, her dominance took over, and I became anxious, and the rest is history. That damage will never go away, and I doubt it will for Holly Petraeus either, and her grief is more salient than mine.

Men with power seem to need that urgency inherent in the impetus to spread their seed. We get that, but Petraeus and Broadwell were military officers. The Bush Administration did a great deal of damage creating Homeland Security, adding additional layers to a security apparatus that may not have made us any safer. Obama will not roll it back, but he is more visionary, and as president he should care that intelligence vital to the nation is well managed; it damages his legacy otherwise, carrying over bad ideas from a corrupt and inefficient administration, like Holder being out to lunch with Fast and Furious. Petraeus and Broadwell are human, and Paula was not nuts. She was enamored, and intense, but neither she nor the general are children, and Emily, perhaps Milbank as well, in a more nuanced fashion, treat them as if they were. We joke about the CIA, but we sober up real fast if, say, China takes North Korea off the leash and Seoul finds itself hit with a warhead, si? To serve within the top echelons of power is a privilege, and that should come with certain restrictions on indulgence. Unlike my former boss, Petraeus did take responsibility for his behavior, and then hired a lawyer, which is seemingly at odds with the idea that there are no extraneous legality issues remaining.

Rehabilitating his reputation is one thing, but whisking him back into executive authority is foolhardy, especially if he could not see the implications of having something necessary to conceal before he and Broadwell became lovers.

We tend to believe our republic does a bit more than mirror that Politburo in the east, but what Petraeus and Broadwell did is equivalent to the Communist Party corruption that makes the west feel so superior.