TNR, First Peel

"Although I did not share my father's aversion to ugliness--which often led us to associate with stupid people--I did feel vaguely uncomfortable in the presence of anyone completely devoid of physical charm. Their resignation to the fact that they were unattractive seemed to me somehow indecent." --Francoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse, p.8

Scorpion King 3, for a schlock multicultural saga, one which minimizes Eurocentricism to brute force which plods its way though Eastern mysticism, isn't bad for light-hearted distraction, though spastic lost track of the climatic battle with Talus (damn it to hell) because she was busy pruning twitter accounts-- something we'll return to momentarily-- and I wanted to raise an incident from the opening, when Ramusan utilizes elephants to defend his city.

Spastic has mixed feelings about elephants. Padre once rode one at the zoo with Nicky or Stephanie with his legs splayed across the beast, and my mother and I had a pissable laugh moment, even remembering it brings an immediate chuckle-- but when I say mixed feelings, I mean I mourn an ancient, highly intelligent, if inconvenient, herd animal which is apparently doomed, but also, rather powerful, threatening, and a target to be killed and handled with respect, simultaneously. The army of Talus, having breached the wall, spears one of Ramusan's beasts, with an implication of mortal wound, and it upset me, in a militant PETA guerrilla type of provocation, even though I knew it was a movie, and the elephants probably understood they were playing a game at the behest of the huge monkeys who took care of them.

I was trained to study this in film, our sentimentality at our own destructive capacity with other species. There is no hard and fast either or here. Apex predators evolved for a reason, but human conscience and bio-empathy, to use an E.O. Wilson phrase, is one of inherent contradiction between our need to prove time and again our mastery over environment, and our desire to see the majority of mammals as our children, despite consuming them to our taste or eradicating habitat. Environmentalists will invariably lose this battle, and I do not write it lightly. Were it up to me I'd be a male lion breaking the backs of hyenas for sport, in an unadulterated display of power, but since humans are paramount, I'd imagine within a hundred years of my death Africa will have lost its magnificent big game, unless we brutally curtail our own population. That is an exceedingly difficult task, even if we grant our own psychopaths unfettered license.

As to social media, I do not mean to be deliberately hurtful here, but I am increasingly paranoid about mothers with children, and blocked one of my long-standing followers accordingly due to it. I beat my own path, and while mothers are ferocious forces in their own right, I am writing for mature, hopefully literate audiences. High schoolers read at their own risk, and I write this with full realization that I'm rarely "hard core," but I do, euphemistically, tap the brass ring now and then. If I cave in and give myself an FB account, then I may indeed go haywire managing it all, being detritus needs clearing now and again. Mathayus could give Goodell a few pointers about putting two teams in contest that are equally matched in battle. The third and fourth quarters were deplorable. What else is new?

Maggot Larvae

Where I first heard of David Frum? Perhaps Charlie Rose. Moderate conservatives like him always reign in Libertarian militancy toward the two party system with statements such as these. Once you get past a certain age, Brian's dictum evinces itself through politics. The laws of nature tend to repeat themselves. Frum is Douthat is Johan Norberg, is Niall Ferguson, and I happen to be an enthusiast of Ferguson's ideas.

Frum's chastisement presupposes that NSA and the Defense Department are powerful enough to keep rare specimens like myself in check. For a while, but I have serious doubts about what comes after the post-Obama era. I make the assumption that most of my viewers on the outside don't understand Medicaid Waiver services, what a lifetime of entitlement is like against ecumenical insistence on the inherent value of human life juxtaposed against medical warehouses like Inglis House, which belie such pluralistic niceties. Most of us don't dwell on beneath the surface insecurity all the time, not even I.

But I've lived it most of my life, and at 53, it threatens to suck me down the drain; this is the kind of rage which permeates revolutions, velvet, or otherwise. Remember Philip K. Dick's short story about android political candidates? Remember what it signified? But there was also what Dick didn't say about electing representatives, about the limits of political processes.

I'm living off my father's guilt at the moment, and don't like it, having come full circle, little spastic slum dog, repeating the same thing over again, like one of Patricia Highsmith's lesser known protagonists.

I'm never going to vaunt past the sterility of the welfare state, simply because I could not stay inside it to earn a living, and allowed you to read what a vicious maniac its scar tissue has maimed within me, to the tune of Google's reluctant unease. What do I have left to aspire to? Beneath the surface, the entitlement system is like a lava slide. Slow, molten, deceptively destructive. Heavy enough to make the West Wing's security apparatus as thin as a thimble.

Extermination Empathy Breathers

Another nearly xenophobic station signal I receive, WTVE, from Wilmington, just another ghetto striven enclave of row homes, is a retro-throwback broadcast, playing 1960 Japanese analog series I evidently should not have viewed as a child in the assassination rife year of 1968. The B grade tenor of the works falls into the category of fascination with vomit while alienated by Huffington Post Live's millennial chatter, however relevant to those spaces in films we do not see, jump cutting the pace of ennui. The station also airs stomach churning veterinary surgeries, and in one episode, a brawny gator farmer rushed an alligator with a colon blockage into surgery, and the veterinarian euthanized the reptile on the table after dumping its fecal waste it a pan.

How much did this cost the farmer? Wouldn't it have been more humane to shoot the creature and freeze it, ensuring death? We all have affinities, and without truly intending to disparage the farmer, there is going a bridge too far. Gators and crocodiles lay lots of egg clutches, easily replenished, and going through all that evasive butchery for a primitive fresh water predator seems beyond the pall, while we have a fairly affluent dentist behaving like a fugitive. If there is anything on the face of this earth that makes existence an irreparable folly, it is an animal surgeon dumping fecal blockage and then destroying what he couldn't save, much as what we did to ourselves years ago. 

I mourn Cecil, and hope his brother managed to defy the odds, as his tracker asserts, but this isn't really the point. The point is we're asinine stewards unable to manage our own innate impetus. I do not know what doctors told my parents in 1963. I know the story, as in countless other disability tales, I was supposed to die, and African Americans seem predisposed to help me right along with that, intimidating me back into being exploited for their economic benefit, while I lie struggling with withdrawal, losing to years of psychic pain, and no one will do for me what in animal medicine is standard.

I have to endure literal crippling agony, persecuted by motherfucking assholes who can't get better jobs. Zoologists dart and track and study. Industrial farmers engage in wholesale slaughter to keep chronic impoverished failures like me alive, and, in the conservative codex, I am one of those women without children whose fury Walter Palmer is attempting to evade.

But turning Palmer into an effigy isn't going to solve a fundamental exigency. The only thing left to poach when habitat is gone and magnificent stalkers like Cecil are confined into domesticated paradigms for which they were not evolved, are humans, already preying on ourselves. I just can't see my way to optimism of any sort. If I did not mention that kimmy my foster rescue isn't a royal pain in the ass, now might be the time, weary with the responsibility of pet rearing. One I let her go, it is probably over, the degree to which my lifespan might be considerably brutalized by that point.

Perhaps the meritocracy will surprise me, and rescue the manufactured urban spastic racist gradually decelerating, but I'll never be the same as I once was on the ascent.

Cecil, Walter Palmer, and outrage

Liberals may think that a good deal of my anger comes from disillusionment more than the erosion of progressive sentiment, and on the apex predatory scale, that may not be entirely relevant. The private racism I've been privy to in my family used to trouble me, and no, I will not embarrass them, said relatives, with a who's who said what.

I'll vilify myself instead: My father wasn't a monster when his adolescent daughter had the black boyfriend temptation going. I now see African American soft socialism the way my Catholic family does, and bitterly regret what they were trying to tell me when I had leftist religion, because I see what being broken on the progressive spikes jutting out of Philadelphia like Nazi defenses on the beaches of Normandy does to the disadvantaged.

There. You're smart fanatic is condemned-- however, Walter Palmer will face criminal persecution if I have anything to say about it, and with crowd funding sources, I should not marginalize this power. I've conveyed there will be no more killing of apex felines. I meant it, and on this issue I side with the protesters. It is true Cecil was 13 and had to die sometime, but we are now responsible for these pet children. And I will not have it. I will not.

This man will surrender his hunting license and make restitution to the citizens of Zimbabwe. I'm going to see to that. Cecil was our child, and this shall not happen again on my watch. Dr. Palmer tortured an alpha male in a dirty and underhanded way, and I'm not letting this go. This man's recreational hunts are finished. Period. End of story.

On an editorial note, Google has been moving my twitter email in spam. Didn't realize it. I now comprehend loglines! Some of you are thus forgiven. Ominous smile.