Shavuot

"What if they learn to laugh at God?"-- Umberto Eco

It pierced the blood, the actions of Mevlut Mert, pierced the blood in remembrance of fervor, of devout aspiration which even Roman Catholics are taught to hold at arms' length, the passionate conviction of belief, the struggle of belief, which yet provoked laughter, yes, laughter, at the private gatherings of women in ad hoc prayer groups, speaking in tongues, no descent of the Holy Spirit here, just ridicule, before doing a 180 towards atheism, one which would become a life long dissatisfaction with the explanations of mere biological impetus. Frightening, perhaps, that I do not joke, remain inexorably moved, never having imagined I'd live to see an instantaneous warrior, martyring, out maneuvering, circumventing internal security forces, his fire making the rest, left or right, seem paltry. Most true acts of terror have a yellow streak embedded in them, including Osama's spectacular operatives, despite that it was indeed a historical blow,9/11, one that has an indelible infamy whose repercussions reverberate. The points can be plotted: Al Qaeda strikes, Afghanistan becomes occupied territory; Iraq turns into a casualty of an extended ideological argument, a fruit seller in Tunisia ignites sectarian factionalism which no one outside of policy institutes understands, and in a game of superpower volleyball, Libyan and Syrian territorial integrity ceases to exist, and ISIS too, for all its ruthlessness, has an underbelly of loathsome cowardice. Not this young man, whether or not he followed this Gulen who resides in my state, this unknown figure who is Erdogan's favorite bogey figure, a disruptive element within Turkey's own internal tensions. 
Something inside the breast broke, a floodgate, I believe, ready to take up arms for -- for-- what? Rolling to parish, throwing myself on my knees to light a candle for the soul of a twenty two year old man who was trained to be what he was, fully expecting that the military's attempt to depose the yet again discredited civilian power structure to be successful? I grew up with the military taking over the government in Turkey, never saw anything like Mevlut. Informed as to the after effects of calamity? Certainly, there were the bloody pictures of Sadat, the death of Lord Mountbatten, but never this, a direct strike on the residual Soviet hierarchy. The sheer awe of what zeal can do in striking truth to power restored something to me about the divine, left me shaken with its force, with Orhan's narrative voice superimposed, not that I may ever peruse his work again beyond what Snow offered, since there are limits, within my morbid frame, to my multi-cultural pathways, and I'm not the least interested in writing the typical correspondent analysis of Turkey as the nation of crossroads, a bridge. Why would I care beyond the knowledge of Germany's sizable community of Turkish expatriates?
There are certain levels of empiricism beyond intuitive understanding, despite the ready access to the genealogy of events, to the explanations of the divisions between Muslims over successors. Sides not understood are sides not to be taken, but nonetheless, some actions have the potential for paradigm shifts, to permanently alter perspectives, break the order of things, despite a hastily papering over. Times have changed, and repression of such striking dissent is not as easily accomplished as it once might have been. If I can grieve for such a sacrifice, an alien so many leagues away in a Quakertown backwater overrun by waves of ethnicities subsumed by urban blight, how much more will those closer to these roils in Ankara burn the torch of his memory? Send a prayer for his soul, this Mevlut in black. have mercy on it, as Bashar has had none to spare in his bloody desert.

Genealogy of Insidious Threat

Al Baldasaro has a point, which by reason of association, I am grudgingly admitting Donald Trump does as well. Unless there is classified information about the threat of sedition during the last days of Roosevelt's administration to which we aren't privy, he had Japanese Americans interred as he walked the country into the Asian Pacific theatre without much evidence that Japanese Americans would rise up for their Emperor back home. When it was over, sure, recrimination simmered, reparations were bandied about, but I certainly don't recall Japanese militias rising up to slaughter clueless Protestants busy buying Buick's under Eisenhower.

But since this is the century of digital device, we're all militant victims, even ISIS terrorists with no limits. Pedestrians like Michael Gerson and David Brooks decry Donald's demagoguery, on the one hand, and then vent spleen. "God help us is they get their hands on bio-chemical weapons." This is what Brooks said on the Newshour, doing his job.

Now, of course, things aren't that simple, and people were wrongly abused after they were rounded up under Ashcroft, in the heady winter days of 2002. Reactionary Islamists were matched with reactionary American military personnel, and here we are, how many terrorist acts later. The Obama Administration was liberal with the Tsarnaev brothers remember. And way back in 1987, my long missed friend Tom Reid and I had dinner with an Iranian on a foreign student visa who gave me the heebies, acted out like a repressed homosexual, or spastic made the young man a tad frenetic. It was a bizarre sharing of fettuccine alfredo, as bizarre as the fact that HUD forces me to live with two Afghan refugees of the Taliban, and no one wants the specter of actual camps for hostile aliens, since we'd all have to foot the bill, but don't kid yourself. As diametrically opposed as the noted activist Cassie James and I are, the woman I insulted after she returned from England, we know Fascism is never really far below the surface, unjustly so. I may be wrong about this, but believe Trudy Richardson rationalized attacking me with the Department of Health and Human Services using a "threat of violence" argument with my almost deranged father's sister. 

What threat of violence? One black woman after another exploits me, their white counterparts either indifferent or guilty of bad judgment, and my confrontational anger toward Trudy's dissembling crap is all of the sudden violent? Is there a secret video where I slash the radials on her automobile? The corrosive nature of my bitterness comes from what I've had to sustain in 30 years with this landlord and Philadelphia's corrupt welfare praxis.  It is a more justified trigger than what motivated Timothy McVeigh, but more limited in the scope of its unsated vengeance, limited by the fact that I have no command and control over a militant crew willing to disrupt the paradigm. Systems that keep up Presbyterian Homes always win, until public anger builds to the point that a sea change occurs. In terms of IL corruption, that will be a long time coming.

In terms of ISIS, however, proactive authoritarian crackdowns seem necessary, though the price tag is too high in geopolitical terms. Punish Iran and Saudi Arabia. Therein lies the source, along with taking away the fiction of sovereignty from unstable states, which I've already mentioned. The difference between me and the right wing like Paul Ryan, is I'm willing to pay the price for a real war as a trade off against the worse of fanaticism to come.

Peachy Keen

It is difficult to hold within our grasp that not all historical undercurrents have closure. Tuberculosis was a fungal epidemic effectively beaten back in the 1950's with derivatives of the breakthrough antibiotic of the 20th century, and hygiene campaigns which followed in its wake, but AIDS saw the condition make a comeback. As a terminal illness, it manufactured at least one serial killer in Doc Holliday. Stacy Keach portrays the gambler as an embittered existentialist against Faye Dunaway, in yet another revisionist Western. As a bio pic, in this part, Keach manages to transcend his composite swash buckler who pretends. It might have something to do with necessarily being as large as an embittered legend, liberated in having nothing to lose. Why Dunaway challenges her glamorous hauteur by enveloping herself in a wardrobe of slutty trash remains an unconvincing perplexity, but her Katie Elder is suitable playing off of Keach's manic undercurrent, bumbling their way about the set like paper cut outs, doomed by corruption and conspiracy. The Doc Keach adorns is naive in small ways, able to be taken in by the Mexican inn keeper for a pricey sum, or sold a house incautiously, and yet remains a man of leonine ruthlessness, calling a bluff, or aiming to kill.

To wit, though I am patently indifferent to national politics as having any bearing on Philadelphia as a cesspool of incompetent depreciation, I may rally around Ben Carson. Not to make too much of the contradiction in terms. Certain kinds of experience cuts across identity, and I comprehend, as a life long recipient of institutional stricture, why a black neurosurgeon would become a reactionary defining zones of exclusion. Can he win the nomination? Can he beat Hillary? What the fuck do I know?

But the possibility of igniting a third world war is exciting, so I'll wait in the wings with the fiery torches glaring from my pupils. Maybe I'll send his campaign a few dollars, Joan d'Arc in search of a sword and zeal, the thirst for cleansing purity. I had a difficult Wednesday on 10/14.

Revenge Fantasy

"A Feast for February," is an unpublished constant, a tie to my youth in Dixon Hall, sitting at my desk then in Chester as I am sitting at Tom Reid's desk here on North 23rd street, wishing I could give Riverside's owner a coronary by demolishing his building and perk my engines up after that in a wild chase with federal agents where I'd win, overthrow the constitutional government of the US, to revert to an old idea, the city state, which actually still exists, beneath the surface, if we take the Vatican as the Medieval model for regional principalities. "February" was written before Philadelphia made its substantial contribution, other than medical and institutional torture, to my well endowed social fear, based on the same premise as Quindlen's book, as Michael Apted adapted it in Enough. My protagonist kills a taxi driver in New York who was stalking her. Violently. I don't explain certain things in the story, but like many things when I am on, it was a driven piece, fueled by the hatred of the damage done by the scum my mother allowed to damage her children, fueled by my hatred of knowing I'd never snare a good hippie. A later editor who later changed her mind liked how I depicted violence against women in the piece, hence whatever Trudy Richardson and Ken Cantrell think they observe in my antagonism toward them as rental agents attempting to put me in another institutional portfolio has always been there. I'm simply older, more ready to illustrate my contempt for black competency, regardless of how offensive this is to minorities. Many blacks openly tell me to my face they think I'm possessed, and you do not see that.

J-lo's character goes off grid and wins, kills the misogynist, who has the ability to do what he does to her through the convenience of privilege, and Apted gets canned for a sharply delineated film with a beneath the radar approach-- but he isn't wrong. The law cannot rectify the punishment battered women sustain. Me? I get stalked by Debra Horne and her assessment team, who insist I return to receiving services through a corrupt disability center which expurgates as many people as it lifts, and then I ratchet up the volume, and dare to deny Trudy Richardson a fifth inspection of my unit in as many months, and play a game of send in the clowns with Department of Health civil servants who apparently like naked spastic women. Must get them off, maybe they have a vested interest in fetish porn. 

Apted's solution for Jennifer's working class doormat is a mechanism, a vicarious pleasure for those who cannot create a careful plan for departure. The only thing I can do is seek self-reliant alliances, fall on deaf ears, or sacrifice myself in a noble death, or give up and go wait to die in a home like Inglis. Such options make terrorism appealing, especially when one knows the clock is ticking. If viewers find that frightening, I never had a say in what orthopedic surgeons did to my body. My little brother, relenting to be one of my followers, had some years to get conceived when I was defecating and being deformed in plaster casts, and I've earned the right to end my last viable years as I see fit, even if this means I force the state to kill me.

Out In The Cold

Oh ISIS, this disappoints me. More patrilinear castration. Genocidal carnage is always inefficient. If I wanted a win it was through precision, tactics, not taking the life blood of your own while I recall the face of the Kurdish girl on the Time Magazine cover after a chemical attack during the Iraqi-Iranian war around 1979 when Saddam Hussein entered consciousness as a public figure. My enthusiasm shrivels.

Black listed

And the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen like a gold miner pawing through pay dirt was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said. Maybe shaped like one, but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting. -- Toni Morrison, Beloved, p. 30

Too worn out from viral inflammation which has been a constant since the moronic custodial staff put the heat on in October, I need a gynecologist. I need to be embarrassed by an already speculative infection, dirty cripple spatially trailing in a twenty second dimension above the shoulder, except it is not that simple, not to be clever enough. It is not that difficult to extrapolate the challenge of bodies and hygiene; the stereotype has some truth. Without any true diagnostic training, however, going into blind alleys are unnecessary detriments.

I do not know why I hang on to spastic dowager as an avatar. Google wants me to integrate. Examiner wants me to integrate. AT&T pities me with motherly stern reminders. An Examiner film critic on conference called the handle clever; it is.

Presby has to be dismantled, because the classification engenders schema of further exploitation. Rise up. I implore you. Now that I've incited, I have to lie down with my irritated drying skin. I may have mentioned I have soured on Hahnemann. Temple University hospital is acceptable--not necessarily better than my former nearly bankrupt caretaker, but acceptable. I hate Temple University, something I avoided discussing previously because Jerry told me not to transfer and I did anyway. Why did I get so fucked up over this angry beatnik? I will die with this fucked up entangled scar tissue for a dynamic instructor whose star has dimmed. I'd ask you to shoot me, but I'm too tired to be taken seriously.

Did I mention I worry about getting black balled? I do.

I have pushed the envelope, perhaps sorry probtheme no longer burns in my urethra, (am I?) but I haven't really really pushed. Hmm. Does my savagery shame my conceit? I have to lie down and then find a gyn, caught in the ridicule of examining pubic hair on a daily basis, battling crabs, yeast, discharges, hemorrhages. This manufactures the nihilist.