American Elections Are Rigged

From the time I attempted to merge my online activity with Yabberz and failed (not griping here, I hate the portal, troll or no troll) I have been looking for a reason to sing along with the Trumpets, not due to my enthusiasm for the mogul, but due to my anathema for the Clintons, this despite being on Bill's Social Security Committee and not getting groped, but nevertheless gaining insight into what power does to sex drives, even enhancing performance, perhaps.
 When it comes to exercising my right to vote, I am a nearly rigid libertarian, by default, by wariness, but my time clock is telling me my mind may be gone by 21. I am collapsing, biologically, and giving my notice and rolling back to Springfield to butt heads with my stepmother for a day isn't going to make the Blessed Mother part the sky so that I ascend in a direct line to sit on her knee, hence I'm adrift. Trump isn't wrong about what he says, but he is brusque to the point that it ignites antagonism, much as I do; he is neurotic, paranoid, defensive, and a misogynist. And yet I'm rewriting his syntax so as to provoke my viewers, belaboring the question as to why the GOP didn't contest the primary vote, take Jennifer Rubin's point, and put Pence forward as the frontrunner. Be that as it may, American elections have always been dirty. The establishment goes on PBS to talk about Trump's dangerous undermining, when all we have to do is read our own history books, which we conveniently ignore Teddy Roosevelt became president by accident. Party bosses wanted him out out the way, never expecting McKinley would be assassinated. No one voted for Teddy, but no one can say he wasn't a bull moose to be reckoned with. Special classes of people like me and disenfranchised Africans had nothing to do with the figure of Franklin's larger than life uncle. It was Franklin who set the federal welfare state in motion which is now a bloody global phenomenon. 
 What Trump is exhorting in shorthand is this: the two party American primary system spits out consensus nominees whose rhetoric bears little resemblance to actually running the country. In that sense, voting is rigged, and the party of Lincoln has troubled times ahead: I'm a fucking 54 year old cripple whose tragedy is the welfare state: Had my father been a proper Roman patrician, in the time of the empire, I would have been asphyxiated at birth, but people like me, in our survival, anticipate massive bureaucracy and global conglomerates. If republicanism falls, it is because it doesn't have the guts to be honest about marginalized expendability, but when it comes to who is or isn't out to get Donald, he turns off mortally outraged individuals like me, looking for hope in the ability to control my own fate.

Oklahoma City

it strains belief to suppose that this appalling crime was the work of two men--any two men. I believe it came about because of foreign involvement. I also believe our government might have prevented the whole thing. --Stephen Jones, Others Unknown

To take a cue from a titular local, and change direction when the geopolitical tilt is in a certain head wind, I do believe that reverberations remain in the wake of McVeigh's and Nichols' attempt to schism federal cohesion, though I am altogether uncertain that federal agents involved in the back end of building the case against the co-conspirators would have sat on the knowledge of foreign handlers. As McVeigh's defense lawyer, Jones is still advocating for his doomed client, attempting to shift the burden. If there is a burden to shift, I think it is domestic, close-lipped, bound in the code of western frontier silence, and now is as good a time as any to imagine there are stones still to be upturned.

According to Hollywood's pro-forma logic in Arlington Road, which isn't new, as utilized the same device in the more placid Parallax View, sating Warren's liberal hard on, government commissions accept the patsies created for them by black ops. Jeff Bridges moves from point to point, believes he's uncovering a home grown coup devised by Tim Robbins, and instead becomes the fall guy shielding the shadow syndicate, and nothing works that smoothly. If it did, Chinese authorities wouldn't debase themselves through the use of brute force for the sake of central planning.

But what Jones and the studio system do tap into is our underlying knowledge of civil service competency. It doesn't exist, and as such, all governments go to great lengths to assure us otherwise, hence, there is our cover up, proof of how debilitating it is to make it appear that Hillary Clinton actually deserves her authority.

Another Hack Day

Frying my brain, I applied to be an upload writer once again at an automated upload site and failed their entry test with a 60% correct answer ratio. They want 70%. I preferred speed, simply getting it done, and this is what the digital age has reduced us to, never mind the 34 years I've spent slogging through the small presses. I really used to believe my CV amounted to something, and without logging in, discovered my mostly aggregated content at Examiner.com is still there, laughing with insane raspy squirrel vocalizations, the site applied to didn't want to know anything about me. Researching pitches. I have ceased querying everyday, wondering what the point is if I cannot afford guild/union fees. Writer's Market rarely lands me anything usable. I'll share something stark: I hit Reason Magazine with a pitch about McVeigh's legacy, tying it into Arlington Road thanks to this esoteric account with my disturbing negations, and supposed I could jump through security clearances necessary to correspond with home grown Oklahoma anarchy and actually received a no thanks! I mean we know enough to be ignored, right? How dark is that? Maybe the editor wanted to keep me on his good side, but it is still an idea I'm turning over, negotiating with myself how to toe the line without simply delving into hermeneutic prognostication.

But I can't keep hitting the same publication due to libertarian arousal. Kimmy is on my lap, pestering me to watch her eat. I need a break. Maybe I am simply a stupid obnoxious bitch. McVeigh went after indiscriminate targets. I prefer targeted assassination, but as Gary Sinise told a corrupt Nicholas Cage in another conspiracy film, there is always an adjustment in every operation. 

Diabolical Frames

Helpific began to follow me on twitter, the micro-blogger wanna be conglomerate, and as usual, I plodded out a profile on the site without formally translating the requests for help nor entering one of my own, befuddled as to what Estonians or Russians would believe themselves capable of doing for an embittered American on the other side of the world, then pomdered the rise of Putin cronyism, tickled my fancy with the notion of soliciting a contract in code, then thought of the FSB alerting the FBI to my account, considered the irony of that. Yet there are provocateurs who waste Putin's opposition for the sake of a unified Russian federation, and Armin Mueller-Stahl has to reflect with some accuracy how the Slavic triad works, an extended association of family and connections.

Zsolt Bugarszki invited me to post on Helpific, but I'm not sure a criminal solicitation was what he had in mind, nor am I partial to Baltic collectivism, the bear lurking on the eastern front, as another one bites the dust. I have to make coffee and set my alarm, get to bed earlier this morning, having rescheduled my evaluation for another power chair which your taxes shouldn't have to foot, but even my desire for illegal retribution to balance the scales hits the blank slate of not knowing whom to trust to attempt a quid pro quo.  I'd have to risk something myself in return, in lieu of  offering federal reserve notes.

Zsolt told me the site is in Beta, probably not a bad idea, in the long run, and since we're on the subject, this local meet up raises the usual material versus intractable ethical conflict. I may follow Richard Dawkins. I may learn from him and may even agree with him that Catholicism has a mild polytheistic doctrine, but we'll destroy ourselves if we believe we'll eliminate anti-social behavior through neuroscience. I'm really happy that I am not going to be around to witness how we convert the human animal into porridge, our species knocking itself off without the benefit of an asteroid.

Retrofits we don't have very long

From an ambulatory perspective, the older Quickie P-200 is not much different from the Jazzy Quantum. They are both six-wheeled motorized vehicles, both with large center tires balanced by front and back castors. The Quickie, however, is a performance chair, which Medicare decided "was a luxury," and so the horse's ass at Jazzy reversed the axis. The Quickie is slanted back. The Quantum tilts forward, and I've taken slight dips even opening the door. It is a dangerous unsafe machine, developed in a skewered and corrupt rationing system. Journalists do investigate corruption in health care. The Washington Post exposed issues at Walter Reed, but dissecting how fucking sick the system is becomes a mission for Lionel Shriver, and I can only stretch the chain links. I have never known one medical supply company to last more than five years, and the provider which furnished me the chair, JeffQuip, is now New Motion, and they refuse to service me. Magee, as well, is going to give me a hard time. My life is in danger in this contraption, and I let Mary, the therapist, pick the provider, pick the model. I liked another one similar to this Quantum at the time, and the well meaning rehabilitation expert said she'd stand with me for that over this, but I need a performance chair, and I no longer have the ability to empower myself with this narrative.

This is going to consume all of my time. My savings are gone. My life might as well be a hologram on Brian Greene's debit card, and Midwesterners observe, "your anger is frightening," get me banned from communities I care about, and tweeters are left to marvel at my savagery. I could try Moss. I was a patient there once as well, but Moss cares more about its contract with Septa, and denial of service options.

This all makes me puke, and it essentially forces me back on the Medicaid system. Tarantino's protagonists manage to cut the net, and the pleasures to be derived no doubt come in part from our merger with  their fantastic liberation and ability to dash on the freeway at dangerous speeds. The first half of Quentin's Kill Bill is the only thing running this afternoon, and I am surprisingly ambivalent about the beginning of the end I already know. I love David Carradine, always have, but I am not sure what the point was of all this fun loving gore. Kill Bill is, obviously, a homage, and allows Carradine to bring out his inner prick, something he had done in the past after Kung Fu, but being creative and decorative with human capacities for anger and torture simply for its own sake could have just as easily been animated.

Straw Dogs, whatever one feels about it, had a message, and a dark, concordant irony. Kill Bill seems to have a singularity of purpose, but doesn't know what it wants. To celebrate ruthless bastards? To celebrate taking extraordinary levels of punishment need to achieve one's objective?? Something gets lost in all this conflated wilding.

Weights of Buenos Aires

All you will see is a girl you once knew/Although she's dressed up to the nines, at sixes and sevens with you.-- Andrew Lloyd Webber's occult on history.

Juan Peron's rise and decline is not mentioned in Assassination Tango, yet I can't help but wonder if due to Coppola's influence in the production, we have an attempted unspoken allegory on the dynamic energy and tragedy of 20th century South America. Ebert's appreciation of Duvall's vehicle (a swan song?) echoes my own attraction to the aesthetic of the film. 

Professional critics voice discontent by claiming this is an indulgence for Duvall's ego? Name me a film with an A list celebrity which is not an indulgence for its star? It was not shot at an action thriller's pace, and I'm glad it was not. The hitman Duvall plays was run of the mill? Fuck that. Anderson is an old man who has his heart wrapped up in his little girl. He wants to retire. His capo, who I think was Frankie, talks him in to this foreign target.

The scenes Duvall plays with his wife are dynamic with an undercurrent. Warning: hard and dangerous sex ahead. They are also evocative of the glamour which Juan and Evita utilized to create a smokescreen around their dictatorship. There is also another dynamic, a paranoia of conspiracies which wrap around themselves, the ambiguity over who knows what, whether Frankie was trying to kill Anderson off, who might have wanted the general eliminated or panicked and changed their minds, whose strings the federal police were pulling, or who was pulling theirs. Does it truly say anything about the reign of the generals after Isabel Peron made a bid to reclaim power when I was an adolescent?

She was news then, just like a dowager empress. Should she be held accountable? Or are we supposed to be distracted by the absurdity of Pedraza filming Fellini like commercials? Does it spice up conjugal activity if you cast your wife as the threatening and subversive female against your pretend middle brow nuclear family unit? Are we being offered suggestions about despotism?

If social networking is just a complex communicating tool, why is it so much more disconcerting when we connect with those out of our past? I thought my immediate boss from Matrix would want nothing to do with me. I left Matrix in an emotional state, and critiqued, publicly, how my directors handled their project, not that they treated me badly, or discussed their erections. Dan wasn't a bad guy, as I've written. He solidified my cynicism (or skepticism) about the effectiveness of clinical psychology, but always played the decent man, perhaps due to the fact that he is a decent man. I'm tempted to IM him with an impertinence because though I've suspected Irv Rutman has been dead for a number of years, I have not found an obituary. Even if I had the gall to query that, in the sense of why it matters, or to ask for a reference so old, what good would it do me? Nevertheless, I reached out, reclaimed him. Odd, I suppose, less obtrusive than the telephone.

Bull horns

"Make love as much a you can. It's good for you."-- maybe an exact quote from Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night.

I rolled into the office yesterday and told Trudy Richardson I wanted a meeting about Presby transferring me out of the company. This made my despair unravel a considerable distance, but public housing is more corrupt than the Koch brother's money funneling right wing dissension, so, if I vanish, vested interests have deliberately injected me with cancer causing agents. Danny Aiello screaming Jack Ruby at the top of his lungs. You remember that made for television movie, right? I believe the JFK assassination was a conspiracy, but I also believe it failed, and no one would dare it again. Pressed for time, my charming aunt screamed into voicemail, "Joanne what happened to the plane?"

"Aunt Marie, what the fuck do you think I am, black ops?" Italian aunts. I did not actually offer her that rejoinder.

Just because I have not connected all the dots, this doesn't mean I'm wrong. Told you so. And I will connect the dots. Policy pieces take time.

Braque Boxes

James once suggested to William Dean Howells that he should consider publishing a story on incest.  --Michael C Clark, shoulder ghost

I may not have had the diction on hand then that I have available today, but even before my father smashed my stereo to avoid smashing me, and there were several of those instances, signifying the luck of the draw that my immediate family wasn't subject to annihilation, I knew in my pre-collegiate days that Pete Townshend's solo smash was too effective as a corrosive force on my naivete. Elton and Bernie may have dangled homoerotic lyrics like a choice pork medallion, but they did it with an adolescent simplex. Townshend is darker in Empty Glass, a sick perverted bastard if ever there was one, and yet, in the musical traditions that fermented British rock, the album is a work of art, much like Birth of the Nation put the movie industry on the map due to its technical accomplishments, despite the ferocity of its repressions. Blomkamp speaks to this aesthetic complicity in District 9. He was speaking my language before my blogging unwittingly gave voice to my somewhat unrealized convictions, before I butted heads with secular liberalism, whether Zionist, academic, or LBGT.

The plot does have certain inexplicable elements. Christopher seems to be a lone intelligence amid a swarm of alien idiots who cognate slightly better than great apes, and Copley's Wikus survives a paranoid military of a paranoid government and its equally brutal gangland counterpart, but that given, it is a film that has caught up with what it is possible to achieve in science fiction when authors treat the genre with respect. In watching Blomkamp's mock analysts, we see reinforced how our own analysts stand as a bulwark, giving power the benefit of the doubt. When the Petraeus scandal broke, David Brooks gaffed, sitting in his Newshour chair, "I had lunch with him [the general] last week."

This signifies that Brooks gets access in the Beltway, but little else in what the public should know, could know, about the people we pay to run our governments; District 9 signifies this -- it is a film  integral to Africaan guilt (and those Dutch polyglots should feel guilty) but applicable to the rest of us. It is honest in its view that the legal collapse of apartheid does not magically fuse Europeans and Africans like Siamese twins, although Henry Louis Gates, whose chip on the shoulder practically vibrates, says we are all biologically African! How can caste subjugation be so pervasive? Gates makes Rand's ideological lunacy seem sympathetic.

Blomkamp should have won the best foreign film Oscar, but that would have been risky, an anti-establishment gateway.

Syndicate Winding

Laughing like children, living like lovers,
Rolling like thunder, under the covers. -- Elton John's pap paean to the blues, toward his late career trajectory as a has been.

Predicting the consequences of impaction can be difficult. In the film Brazil, how the system reacts to it is not only absurd, but a detriment to the health of the body politic. Buttle is killed by an over active police response to a clerical error, and the actual subversive, De Niro's Tuttle, is defeated not as the anti-hero who covets efficiency, through a violent constraint. The luckless engineer vanishes in a paper ordinance glut, just as this same complicity to a perceived threat defeats the protagonist Lowry's decency, and annuls his skill at navigating the information systems hardware. Gilliam was right not to personify a central figure such as Richard Burton in 1984, because no one of us understands the modern autocracy we've created, and any anguish it generates.

If we take Simenon's Rico and place it at the post-war end of the spectrum, and we bookend Arlington Road as a fin de siecle warning to the digital age, a warning that is heeded by no one, evidently: In theory, North Korea cedes its foreign autonomy to China, but that stubborn xenophobic sense of Juche may spark a new conflict on the demilitarized zone. Beware the end of history, because it points to the deeper mendacity of the Bush Administration's offense in Iraq. Saddam was a kitten next to the Jong family. Brazil spans the mid-point between the syndicate, and our complicity with it at the dawn of the material age, and the deceptive new world order that Pellington insinuates through Jeff Bridges well played paranoia in Arlington. Everyone is sacrificed. Mob bosses who lose face, the neighborhood boys who gained through the possible necessity of criminality as a living. Even Conte's Eddie, triumphant in the closing sequence, comes off as defanged, possibly still out on a limb should vengeance rear its head. In Brazil, Gilliam turns the tables on those who survive through deliberate ignorance. All those plastic surgery patches hardly amount to bliss, and in Arlington, we discover Robbins and Cusack have strings too, that they are also being played, private contractors in an internal dirty war.

If I leave the Philadelphia public housing system as things stand, in terms of factual reality, I am setting myself up to face incarceration on much harsher terms, and yes, I realize this, but if I do not shake things up, I face the prospect of being parceled out like pork rinds anyway to the self-interest of those coming up behind my fading geriatric twilight. I deserved better within the environs of the most powerful country on earth, even if you find that sentiment prideful in audacity. 

This may not conclude everything I have to offer about collusion, complicity, and the diseases of the intellect it generates, but I am winding down what has been a lengthy rebuttal from my Jamesian scolding. I have been online a very long time, and I have been with this Henry James community the longest. For what it's worth, they have kept me afloat with a mostly delightful arcane sensibility, and I have the fondest affections for them, even when I have hairballs plaguing my colon!

Bon voyage! (I brace.)

A Purveyor of Necessities

The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. --James Joyce, Ulysses, location 2112


How comprehensive one can be following a 4:40 am dash on the most frigid day of the new year is a good question, but let me dial myself back slightly, for your understanding: When Greg Zacharias admonished me about conspiracies, he meant my James list posts were not being bounced on purpose, not realizing I was attempting to make a sardonic joke. When my half brother admonished me, he meant my family was not engaged in collusion to put me back in a nursing home, but fuck that. My baby bro and my full blooded sister are selfish whining materialistic parents who let me down and feel guilty about it and are headed for a legal negotiation, while my family elders wish I'd shut the fuck up, and mother's sister has reverted to loving inclusionary noises, all well and good, but la damage has been done, though I grant you, in stealing my mentor's title from an old workshop piece de resistance, that I am the primary purveyor of my bubonic plague. If Rico was a Simenon morality play that the studio turned into an uneasy hatchet job that has a great deal to say about Caucasian caste, then Arlington Road is positively operatic red meat, and on my last viewing I paid very careful attention, and there is enough ambiguity about Hope Davis as Brooke, and the blond operative in the ponytail who closes the film, to leave hanging some interesting questions, and a film like Brazil, satire it may be, ties this up nicely, but I am still thinking, and am thinking now of sleep, and my wry smile when Catherine, the blue-eyed bright progressive, chatted with me and the North Philadelphia minorities, about hostility to the LBGT community. Little did she know I was bitter, disillusioned, and how victimized. She would not, none of them knew, and no, they will not, this ACLU offshoot, be able to accommodate me to do their canvassing. It will be too difficult, though the young woman involved in the Cairo uprising interested me, and though you know not to what I allude, she talked back, and the half century old cripple stood firm, unmoving, a virtual edifice of granite, watching humanity knowing not what it reaps.

Gangsta Grades

Everyone knows that Rome was all bread and circuses.
                                                             --Oswyn Murray



On my way home from the Joyce group Saturday, I paused at the commerce building cubicle to eat my turkey and drink my caffeine like a speed freak, and two of the women in the group, with whom I might have clicked, given they were not grandmothers, or old Irish cops, passed and cut me, quite rapidly, not even bothering to say hello, and as they left my line of vision, a disturbed African American stopped, tried to engage me, screaming at the top of his lungs, "I love you!" "Go away or I'll call the cops." Okay, he said.

Merely an episode, perhaps prescient, given where the local disability activists have left me. Online interaction does not work; patronage has not succeeded, and I cannot imagine what subset of the publishing industry would want to accommodate me on a part time basis, in terms of steady pay, not simply commissioned sales-- and yet we laud violins for poor Swartz, another hounded victim, though his actual crime in terms of digital copyrights seems, at least for Eric Holder's tenure at Justice, mushy.

Public housing has already killed me, and you, Liberty, one day you will immolate yourselves, not by me, because my will is sapped, but you will cause this city such a scandal one day that its administration will be forced to put you into receivership, because this is Philadelphia, the metropolis that invented the ever diminishing returns on self depreciating incompetence, passed between Italian corruption Jewish liberal lesbianism and black and white Protestant denominations of least qualification like a platinum coin worth a billion dollars for the supremacy of the jackass model. No, I am not going away, but even if a lawyer will sue for me, I am already lost, sitting in the kitchen, drained of any desire to believe that I am still a real human being, still capable of thriving, and then a squabble of the usual sort among the Jamesians revived me temporarily, led me to a brief surge, and I send them all hugs and kisses, even Greg Zacharias, who, like my brother, thinks I need SSRIs in an appropriate dosage to modify my view about the conspiracy against me.

From my earliest posts on Arlington Road, I have been in an in depth argument with Greg, actually, and also my family, to show that yes, non compliance creates the trauma that makes the system act to operate against our universal desire for autonomy. Ah, the cripple and her scholar tweaking! Such small joys, let's finish up with The Brothers Rico, though the film may linger on for some time.

Then There Were Two, Ctd

Nerves need a brief nap, probably post menopausal;  I need to believe in myself, that I can get out before Presby euthanizes me for biting, in essence. When I was a student, my original location was my mistake, but academic activity and the formation of career was a shield, sort of. As I wrote in my earlier posts, however, this was a transfer under duress, and I am getting out one way or another. I am done; they get out of litigation in which I had cause; my attacker in 93 was a relative of a tenant, I could not determine that he was not the exterminator, who showed up less than 10 minutes after the young man was doing his best to strangle me, and then after Ellen Hovey retires, the company leaves me for dead in another round because of inter-floor transfers? No, this slumdog has barked, and as an American, one way or another I am having their federal contract investigated. I am not staying another year, that is final, and I have been traumatized one too many. I shall not fear; I shall not, and Trudy can shove it where the sun doesn't shine. Be back in a few hours.

My neighbor Ed might say I am exaggerating the threat, since under the last two managers they accelerated the pressure to a crescendo and I am still here, but I am a woman who has lived under the gun most of her life, and if I allow myself to become complacent, this company will dehumanize me, and would, in theory, have a ready, complicit ally in my sister should my father, or Marie, pass away. Affluent property owners would not have me in the first place, unless by some superhuman act of will, I turn my economic fortunes around, but there has to be some median by which I can loosen this invariable hangman's knot.

Petraeus Notary

Dana Milbank's back pedaling on the Petraeus affair implies that Director Clapper was too harsh in urging the general's resignation, and while I get the point of his column, and was headed in the same direction, in the vein of a disadvantaged freelancer without the same resources as an old media conglomerate, granted, one that may have saved the country (though I am unclear why Nixon was "this close to being a dictator," to quote a long ago would be paramour of my own), I have to agree with scholars who take the long view, and feel that the Petraeus resignation was necessary. To cue in on what keeps James Fallows awake at night, if the cyber warriors in China had breached the Petraeus-Broadwell electronic trail, then this sexual dalliance would have rapidly spiraled into a potential national security breach; this possibility is what's feeding the hysteria of the Congressional lap dogs. True, it may be a stretch to say that the general's distractions affected Afghanistan, at least in terms of operations theatre, or that it had anything to do with Benghazi, but this is what happens in a society where the narcissism of need, the selfish pursuit of that fulfillment, stains true personal liberty as something soiled, shallow. I may not have elevated Petraeus to heroic status, but viewed from a distance, I thought he was an honorable military leader.

Briefly, as my time is importunate, though open for later expansion, I have been shunned by married women online, particularly aspiring suburban novelists and poets, for my frankness, sometimes graphic honesty about sexual subversion. A little comeuppance seems in order.

Complicity Bounding

"I meant it in the sense that we were conspirators."-- Linda C Dezenski, defending her descriptions of her climaxes with her husband. quizzically riding on the heels of their divorce.

For all the efforts taken to circumvent Netflix, and the inconvenience of a DVD collection, sometimes streaming video denies us instant gratification. It was on the ABC affliate, the aforementioned chronicle, but weak signal and laborous transfer provided only glimpses of a vehicle that is possibly intriguing. Just blanked out in blinding white panic on telephone number; synapses assured by last summer's paper bill. If Alzheimer's is in my future more than likely I will be beaten to death by a caretaker, in the sense that verbal ferocity invites provocation. You've glimpsed my Iago already, the interior provocateur of a facile sophist. With that being the opening lead of a future preponderance, the kindle paperwhite yet another catalyst in knock offs to a weakened, weakening stride, let's return to the avenues opened by Paula Broadwell and Arlington Road, though I cannot pull a rabbit out of the hat into the immediacy of revelation, there is something larger here, an overarching issue worthy of grasping, like the proverbial tiger who will maul out my innards unless I unravel the maze. It is a difficult one, but the real life event, the sexual license which seems to go hand in hand with state secrets, keeping and uncovering them, ties into what the studio reflects back. Pellington's fin de siecle is dangerous because it suggests what cannot be said in the mainstream, that everything we think we know is a front for facts not in evidence, that McVeigh may not have been an implicitly independent actor, that federal agents misdirect themselves and miss real threats that might have been caught otherwise. Clinton's sexual misbehavior, for instance, may have exhausted our energy, not leaving us alert to pay attention to Osama, though the right bears blame here too, given that Kenneth Starr suddenly elected himself the American prelate (much as I am doing by airing out the dirty laundry within the homosexual community, by the way-- I have not dug into this, yet, but can assure Blogger that spastic's probing may hit a nerve, and won't we have fun! Do we ban this disabled woman, or what, damn it, we're about efficiency, not defamatory speech! Why us?) -- and while Wiki does a good job describing Kruger's taunt script,  Pellington's texture complicates things, like his jump cut to a Hope Davis replica after her supposed elimination by Robbins' charmingly superlative, and thereby incredulous, glee club, suggesting that Bridges' Faraday was so out of his depth that the only way he could have won was to join the conspiracy, vanish into it. This is partly where Gilliam leads his protagonist in Brazil, who is doomed simply because he tries to be decent, and longs for a kind of purity, that, due to its impossibility, leads to expiration. As phantasmagoric as Brazil is, it leaves Gilliam's fans uneasy, and exhausted Terry's output. 12 Monkeys and The Fisher King, though competent, lack the same force. The third film that binds all this together, surprisingly, is, The Brothers Rico, and this is not simply due to economic pressure. Then again, fans of Simenon understand that we are all complicit in the damage of corrupting and collusionary impetus. I'll take a break, pick it up next post.

Arlington's Dialectic

I do not know if Mark Pellington earned his directorial skills on Oliver Stone's knee, but his transitional Arlington Road is a dangerous film in ways that have nothing to do with the orchestrated plausibility of collusion. It opens with a riveting bracket of Mason Gamble as a child, hobbling along the road, minimally lucid, with voice overs by the scout troop Robbins and Cusack use for indoctrination that seem to suggest the Fenimore's were going to sacrifice the boy as collateral damage, or that the boy got caught in the explosion of a terrorist act. Pellington may have wanted to depict Brady as an evocative Holocaust victim, or he may have wanted to reclaim traumatic war images, for those of us with long memories. The burn injury to the arm suggests as much. When it comes to Ruby Ridge, my memory is as obligatory as the next, and whitewashed the tragic turn of events, though the congressional inquisition that litigated the event was as much strum and drag as any other congressional inquisition before or since: the impeachment over an ejaculation stain, the sexual harassment allegations of Anita Hill, the deposing of Oliver North, and now, the latest boffing of David Petraeus may have led to compromised intelligence. Well, hello Dolly. I do remember Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh vividly, and Bridges' character is damaged by the consequences of federal overreach, then destabilized by conspirators more proficient than the federal agents trained to police such reactionaries, and then he was sacrificed to the truth, and both Pellington and Phoebe Hoban, writing about Mia and Woody, intimate this truth can elude the most rigorous public exposure. Do I believe in the Tim Robbins character? Not for a second; if he was that good, why not just run for office and put tea party conservatives in charge, but I do believe in Pellington's contention that human ineptitude leads to institutional burrowing. I do not believe in Petraeus. He salvaged, rather than saved, a war in Iraq that should never have been fought, and despite the fact that he is probably a competent manager modeled on Eisenhower, we all know Afghanistan will wind up as a travesty of blood and treasure. In hyperbolic mode in the first year on my other account, I suggested this sorry excuse of a country be nuked, but in more brutalist fashion, if you really want to pacify a territory, then you not only occupy it, but divide and govern it, much like fascist Germany became East and West until the collapse of Stalinism. W43, the cowboy cheese puff, wasn't going to waltz that bride to the altar, and Obama underestimates the tenacity of zealots. Extremists put Afghan girls in my high school class in the latter days of the Carter Administration in 79. By 2020 my sister's younger children will be spoon fed the same refugee dosage, because we have lost the stomach for ruthlessness. Paula Broadwell seemingly put all her passion into a belief, and much as I did thirteen years ago, lost her composure when that idealist bubble seemed about to be pierced. I am sitting here laughing because not 72 hours after Messiah Obama seals his legacy, his new term is rocked by a cat fight over who possesses the rights to sexually feast the American Achilles.

Earlier in the summer, I reacted to Greg Zacharias admonishing me on the James list when I was trying to be witty about spam. He wrote, in context, that the spam filter was not a conspiracy against me, most likely because I used the phrase "collusion of peers" in factual innocence, but the subtext in the public transmission between us was this: I was riffing the man, playfully, subversively perhaps, to suggest, "well, I am a Jamesian and belong in this club". And the subtext of his retort, that what I wrote was silly, was, "no you don't; you forget your place." My brother used the same rebuff, that the family was in a conspiracy against me, because I saw a united front, uncle aunt, sister and grandmother, telling me I belong in a home, as something from which I needed legal protection, and much like the stalwart Bridges in the film, I am damaged, but I am not wrong. If I stop fighting, if I lay down my head and do not force Liberty to accept responsibility for bad acts, and some denial, as well, I'll be as burned as this besotted woman, who is evidently about to be torched, but I also want centers like Liberty eliminated. They waste your time and your money. You don't have to trust me on that, simply look at the evidence. Romney may have been a poor candidate, a shoddy conservative, but liberalism is just as eroded. How inflammatory do I have to be for the FBI to give me a file? Thrilling notion, isn't it?