Does Nate Maingard Love The ANC?

"Even as a civilization we are simpleminded."-- Jonathan Weiner, digital location 3450

The post-Mandela ANC may appear to be more humane than the European legacy which evolved into Botha's apartheid, but what is kept quiet, in a "sssh, keep it under your hat mode, is that ethnic black Africans cannot govern Africa according to the principles of inherent natural human rights developed during the Enlightenment. Why? Because black African societies evolved their mores in accordance with totem identification, survival strategies against exotic parasites and malaria, and not all the might of Europe and China and Russia combined is ever going to change a damn thing about that.

Does this mean I side with Arikaners who created the Orange Free State over sweetheart hotties like Nate, who may be wondering why I'm singling him out when he's given the dowager a great deal of latitude?

Ah. Well, things aren't quite that simple. European aggression lucked out in the New World. Natives had a mass die off, and the Aztecs, who were in the best position to fight back against superior European hardware, miscalculated, and as a result, North America eventually took over global hegemony. But Caucasian emigration failed to successfully transplant itself within mainland China and central Africa, and guilt over the Holocaust has gone so far in the other direction that Muslims created a new Fascism.

Granted, Kerry and his counterparts have simmered things down, but what led to the incarnation of ISIL isn't going to fade away simply because Putin is still trying to fend off Anglican satire of Russian backwardness, pretending Slavs are as European as the continent, which Slavic ethnicity isn't.

Radical egalitarianism is a brutal fiction, and the sooner we face up to it, the better. Leave west and central Africans alone, and you know what? I bet they resolve their societies in their own way, and would have done so faster, with more efficiency, than Carter's medical intervention over the guinea worm. What does this have to do with the price of beans, or power sex with Ray Liotta? You know in your heart that behind his comment to TV guide about kissing his informant extra, we avert our eyes from those pictures, don't want to contemplate the grotesque escapades of Hollywood's underside, and even if we did, buying porno invariably uncovers child sex harems. Capisce?

Doyle, as a contemporary of the Boer War on the side of the Victorian Empire closing ranks on what it had left, still peaks a mild interest over that of his autonomic character who "changed the world". (And in a whisper: I have more followers than Weiner, and he's a professor!) So there!

Subdural Hematoma in the Decline of Randy Quaid

"Well, don't you see, he's typical of the man who has married a whore--" Anatole France, reimagined.

Boris Karloff goes without saying, but then came realism, Randy Quaid's temper, De Niro's ferocity coupled to Branagh's need for succor, Peter Boyle's hilarious send up, Jennifer Beals and Sting, Aaron  Eckhart's  relatively recent fizzled attempt. The Revenge of Frankenstein, with Peter Cushing, is a transitional knock-off of Shelley's novel, more minimalist than the time stamped Karloff, it's outer-lying framework, as written by Sangster and James, combines a whiff of vampirism and perpetual reconstitution, with Cushing emanating a false humility and ruthless process, some years before directors suddenly had to display fealty to the Enlightenment transitioning into early Victorian anxieties, treating the novel like scripture. The book endures because Mary Shelley annihilates domestication. Scripts may give Dr. Frankenstein a feminine halter in a tug of war with the hubris of the God complex, but Shelley doesn't dwell on doomed love for long in her fast paced death chase.

Quaid's trappings in the role are of menacing sympathy. Such a creature would be developmentally challenged. What Wickes tapped into in 92 isn't so far removed from Quaid turning dodger of justice across the border today; even when actors snap, they still tap into their greatest strength which now makes them difficult to bridle. There is a wee bit of Frankenstein as creation myth in Vanilla Sky too.

The Cushing reprisal points to where science fiction went after such adaptations, in the analog age: transplantation. It might be far simpler to stay with this macro-biological grafting than manipulating gene switches toward the transhumanism of Weiner's uneven study. Weiner's main problem as an author is he attempts to fuse too many choices.

Pop the Balloon

Jonathan Weiner's non-fiction enterprise was of interest precisely due to his reviewer's diffidence, precisely due to the author's lack of diligence. Initially, I was sympathetic to Weiner's fusion of European culture with the complex science of microbiology. Aubrey Jasper de Grey, featured prominently in Weiner's approach to the science of immortality, is a composite of the British eccentric, and learning about how Aubrey became obsessed with cellular biology is entertaining, but Weiner's attempt to behave like a Renaissance humanist falls apart in this book. He glosses over Francis Bacon and he glosses over Montaigne, and by the opening of part three, who cares about Aubrey's near ascetic compulsion to see humanity defeat death? Many of my readers may wonder if I am play acting at times, since, how can a disabled writer be against homosexuality in and of itself? It is an absurd position, and if the disabled writer wasn't so dissolute and poor, it is at least speculatively a dangerous position to have, and that same disabled writer's racism is unconscionable if she is as clever as she professes to be, but Jonathan's scattered bird pellet approach to his thesis makes the terror of the Inquisition seem almost a rational authoritarian stricture next to the hubris of our 21st century ambitions. We're going to defeat death itself. We're going to enter the transhumanist age of Singularity, and yet we cannot solve the basic economic problems of liquidity for everyone. We all claim we're universally tolerant and cannot mitigate geographical reality, whether it's American inner cities or the fall of Middle Eastern deserts to fanaticism, or the fact that West Africans are  about as brutal governing themselves as Imperial Europeans were in governing them in the colonial age.

In part three of his book, Weiner focuses on how death is a Kantian concern throughout the course of human civilization, as of course, it would be-- but let us say, for the sake of argument, that Weiner and Aubrey are right and within two or three lifetimes, we solve the problem of DNA entropy and the metaphysics of ontology is solved for complex organisms. It would seem to put the very process of living in stasis, which is not how evolution works. We may not be able to answer why life is what it is, which is about surviving to make successful copies of itself, but there is only so much matter to go around, and death recycles finite sources of material, especially water.

There is also the issue of progression. We invented the wheel. We maximized food sources through agriculture and animal husbandry. Created propulsion and artificial wings and learned how to aggregate data through circuitry, pushing the limits of what is manageable even with the extraordinary capacity of the human mind. I'm 53 and I'm rather bored with the fictions of convenience as a shield against calamity. Let's take physics, which says that galaxies behave in predictable ways, and stars burn in predictable increments of time, but what if that predictability was disrupted? What if the Sun stopped behaving as a well heeled middle aged star and something went wrong? The Internet wouldn't amount to much if a massive solar flare stripped away the Earth's magnetic field, hence we shouldn't presume we can exist as a species to witness the end of time itself. Infinity and immortality aren't verifiable concepts, as such. A few million years ago, our primate ancestors were creating the big toe and wrist ligaments that branched us off from gorillas and chimpanzees, and now we spend our time playing God when we aren't otherwise insufferably shallow, and if Weiner even knew my warped skeletal frame was typing this post, he'd probably say "Geez, I really ticked her off." And yes, he has.

Despite a life of regimented unhappiness, I fear death, which is an illogical emotional investment within my suffering, destructive impulses. I'll be gone soon just as Montaigne was at 59, even if I will not be quite sure how, through stresses to my heart, or COPD, but to extrapolate being the child of the postwar generation, and to add what? Two hundred years to that? A thousand? I agree with my father. Once you reach a certain age, you get tired. I do not share the digital optimism of people like Ev Williams, and the reason is simple. Despite all the marvels of human innovation, marvels which at least precipitated my survival, I cannot even satisfy the simple wish to relocate and return to the suburban modality of my youth. It isn't as if I'm aspiring towards the software moguls that populate Silicon Valley, like Bill Gates.

A box of raspberry sugar, blood thinning

The only time viewers see pitless indigence on PBS is in still photographs of how poverty and public health used to intersect, at least in the west. In every documentary on death and dying, however, and my earliest was the Bill Moyers video narrative I honestly should have skipped, because I never forgot the sheer anguish of the veterinarian with ALS, his raw suffering, telling his physician he was going to inject himself with horse tranquilizer, sitting in a power chair seemingly equipped to tackle any civil war the Russian army might see fit to foster, very close to the end, begging his wife not to revive him again. She had him dressed in a polo shirt, rubbing his chest, regressively. I've seen countless of people dying, live and once removed by the camera holder who must record it all, and the midwestern animal doctor, expiring finally as Moyers went into post-production, penetrated, stayed, but there are limits. Nursing home residents get 30 second feeds. Anything else, whether the early Moyers, the various battles with cancer ending in defeat or remission, the muscular dsytrophy deterioration, which seems to be a favorite in the annals of clinical travail, have devoted loved ones tending to the demise of the stricken. This holds true for Atul's upgrade on Being Mortal. We don't get the demented dying alone in a ward, not unless it is a bad melodrama on the Spanish Civil War with Gregory Peck. I'm not faulting Atul on this. To coax viewers along directors need to soften our dissolution with thick sweet loving empathy, and there is real anguish within middle class affluence.

But barring extraordinary luck, most disabled people die in a war zone, not in hospital rooms with palliative care physicians. Literary eras seem to exhaust themselves in the same way, Henry James not immune to this flaw: "The Lessons of the Master," whatever its aim at Victorian marriage, is an over-sweetened pastry, certainly not a masterpiece, sans Portrait with the immortally vibrant Isabel.

With the death of James and Flaubert, as Eliot later stipulated, the novel of manners entered a curious phase of life support, slowly gasping to death, holding onto Victorian conceits in a more droll one-dimensional fashion, at a loss, ripe for the ravishes of Modernism to come: The Good Solder epitomizes this exhaustion with form. Ford creates types, not least among them the English Catholic, so important to Evelyn Waugh in his heyday and then to Jeremy Irons doing a magnificent rendition of Brideshead. In James, a gentleman of leisure is circumspect, engages in mysterious financial speculation. Ford, while still keeping the conventions of the caste, savages it. John Dowell is almost fatally bored with the recriminations of his class, and yet the two dimensional aspects of Ford's voice couched in his fortunately affluent American is what lends this narrative its humor: Florence the weak heart invalid duping her utterly dense husband. It is free public domain reading, Edwardian enriched sarcasm light enough for defeated savants, only able to struggle with Joaathan Weiner's difficult narrative shape for a few pages at a time.

Reviewers did not like Long For This World-- but as I search for interesting imperfections, I'm sympathetic, if overwhelmed at times, by Weiner's bizarre futuristic stretch. I look at Gawnde, the bubbly Asian Indian who wants to ease the writhing of our departure, while I have Weiner's complex and faulty narrative in my head. Do these agendas ever meet and coalesce in some fathomable dialogue?

Though I am not in immediate end stage, I'm dying, frightened, pissed off,  Medical students have no idea how to optimize my outcomes. I stopped seeing them in 2007. I don't want to get locked in syndrome, lingering like a fucking android, barking like a rabid dog at minstrel niceties of urban ineptitude. This was my plan for joining our newly vaunted shared economy, my guerrilla warfare despite the successful prosecution of the group in Georgia for not doing a double take with a real nut case. Can I persuade them to come get me? If you watch Gawande's docu-drama, observe his neuro-oncologist colleague closely and you can see why doctors themselves snap out, not to be trusted. Someone has to do the brain cancer, but the women's face earned my pity.