Anticoagulant

"You can do better sister. I'm married." Richard Conte, giving the Eisenhower era bourgeois a tutorial on the benefits of denial.


When I listen to the American left and its moderate counter voices go at it over a film like Zero Dark Thirty, I throw up my hands, if not in despair, then at least, futility. Kathryn Bigelow glamorizes torture, depicts it as no more than a video game, or she does not. We need new gun control legislation, and while we empower everyone, hey, civil rights is not a suicide pact, and potentially violent people like James Holmes need to be contained, so let's take a page from the affluent psychiatrist paraplegic who eschews his other classification as a wheelchair user and return to the good old days of involuntary commitment, while cynicism is the intellectual reserve of the mediocre, like the spastic_dowager, who has taken many risks to leave her scarred psyche bleeding in her amateur neuro image scan without quite crossing the border toward anarchy, which, even if I did, probably would not be taken seriously, while still cognizant enough to know that eradication has been done many times in the course of civilization outpacing our capacity to cope, and that after we get over this massacre, that genocide, we lose more definition, and so what is the use of being slightly more forgiving of Mussolini for being an inept projection of a virile thug. Isn't she funny, the poor little spaz, getting a little attention from Europe, Asia, in fascination? Mockery? Perhaps as a target of exploitation. You don't even know what horror is you little gnome, so why not be more positive and upbeat while the US is in its superpower status, however much it is diffusing?

We have short memories, whether in geological historical time or merely related to the course of human history, and I do not have to spearhead this, and could be nice, engage in the pleasantry of willful blindness and small kindness, when merited, I just have not dropped those dimes.

I have not seen my sister's eldest girl, Nicole, since the death of her granny. She is in a Catholic college now, and do not know what she makes of my rift with her mother, if anything. Stephanie shields her from me, afraid of what I might say about granny's past, or her own mother and father's, for that matter. The topic of my sister's pregnancy termination is a prime example, one of my searing trump cards; it is not that I want to hurt nieces or nephews, but merely that I must refuse the censorship of manner, politeness, merely due to this notion that kids don't know. Parents kid themselves about what kids do or don't know, and I may be wrong, and Nicole's children will live in a better world of radical equality of the kind that frightened Orwell, Huxley, in their totalitarian era.

If anything survives on this rock after we engineer ourselves into --*, natural evolution might want to give the lucky sentient horseshoe toss to the cuttlefish; yes, I know, that is misanthropic mediocrity crying uncle.

We all have better days.

Canadian Bacon, Danish Pancakes

"I had already killed one of your officers, in the corner of the blind alley that leads to the tannery, in order to take his automatic, because I wanted one. I did things that were much more shameful. I committed the worst crime in the world, but that has nothing to do with you. I am not a fanatic, an agitator, or a patriot. I am a piece of shit." -- Frank Friedmaier, the spree murderer anti-hero, Dirty Snow


If you are an American, or a western European, you would process a BBC report like this differently than you would a profile on James Holmes and his psychiatric treatment, correct? The latter is the price we pay for the taming of the western frontier, the mythology and fact surrounding that domestication, the conflict between the indigenous warrior cultures and a mechanized European military that bequeathed to us the post modern fragmentation and erosion of moral cohesion. Pedophiles need compassionate case management too, remember. Whereas the tea workers, they merely rose up against authority, possibly horrific, but in terms of survival, and resources, understandable. I do not think the tea workers would have any problem understanding my anger against disability activists and leaders who turned on me, betrayed me, abandoned me, and here I sit, and sitting mainly due to inertia. However, I feel empathy for the manager. A mass acted in concert and burned him to death, and this as an escalation is worse than the glamorization of Pesci's temper, in which part of my impulses believe acting on would provide catharsis. I cry for dead cats, but relish the thought of eliminating hypocritical liars, not sure where the truth lies between those two propositions, as I'd also cut off my hand before touching a firearm, but would like nothing better than deploying my fists against the prevarication, ignorance, and cruelty I've had to carry, obviously not unique in this sentiment, as Simenon understood it as well, to create an interested audience, but also to suggest that aggression has a possibly complicated ambiguity, one that should serve as a warning to materialists who want to reprogram our primate origins through neuroscience. I prefer the post-war Frenchman to Cormac McCarthy, because Cormac leans to the superlative. Simenon carefully punctures it.

In some ways we are all Eddie Rico, the man in the middle with his own secrets. Guy Savage created a good synopsis of the film as a hatchet job as opposed to the novel, which I'd like to read someday, but I am not necessarily hamstrung, at this moment, by lack of access to the text. Karlson's adaptation carries the unease of its own certainty, and that includes the rapid fire pace at which Conte has to negotiate between his own culpability and Kubik's desire to eliminate loose ends, eroding loyalty. Is criminality, at the height of its organized power, any different than case management burrowing in its paradigms to obfuscate wrongdoing and enforcing stigma we can find in any baboon troupe? Not a bad question to ask in the ration of bacon, which presumably does not slow the industrial slaughter of the livestock which gives us such an interesting meat, to quote a culinary chef.