Shyster of Last Resort, sans Bulgakov

"You read a lot, don't you?"--Tony's disappointed Philadelphia contact

The one character trait that unites Philadelphia's dispersed Italian community is bullshit artistry. My grandfather, his children, my entire tribe, and I have taken my slops, in the agrarian lingo, and splattered the walls. Perhaps I should take a ride into Kensington and see how long it takes to wind up in hospital. I am really giving my notice, and it is not funny, and yet, I'm releasing myself from pretensions I hate, all this over assistance paid by Medicaid. Marie Varenas, who has no online presence whatsoever, except for me and my posts, conveyed, that, as a last resort, EMS could haul me back in to her kitchen, where I waited in my 20ish years on academic probation, because I hated Temple, for Diamond Park to be habitable, nagging Michael Washington, my retched conditions unseen, so long ago, but I really cannot do that again. My uncle who lives there now is functionally senile and circling the drain with his condition, aside from my aunt's.

I have not seen my father's sister since my mother's funeral. She looked like a Spanish version of a generic Joan Rivers on a bad Botox day, and her weight loss after losing her stomach would impact me noticeably, but, if I am able to visit her until I sort this out, she is there. 

Individuals with political positions may feel sorry for my arc, but I could see, in that constituent interchange with Brian and his audience, that politics is primarily a game of appeasement, and I am increasingly treated like a woman who is told to know her place, and behave. I should have sought adjudication when the iron was hot, but I am intransigent, demanding it now, and it will lead to EMS or police carting me off, and after that happens? Yet this conflict is invigorating me. I can see some really hard policy pieces coming out of it, if I can snatch electrical outlets, in some context. I'm pissed, really mentally divorcing myself from Presbyterian Homes, and terrified of shelters, but this isn't simply about compliance. It is about choices. I toured this building with the last Caucasian assistant manager who worked the secondary position, Janice, after I became an Eppi crime victim, and turned her down.

Presby, if it really bases its theology in good works, should have down the right thing and found me another rental agent after my attack. I was working, I had a salary of 23,000 a year, and what eroded my health was my hatred of how this community treated me, a life long hazing and initiation through the facade of social cruelty. Yes, there is no landlord tenant nirvana, but I have been crucified in a community I never selected, nor desired, and my ticket to that drain is on the horizon. I am really breaking some eggs, throwing all my energies into a new plate. It may not be enough.

Triumph of the meek?

"Libertarians believe fewer people should vote."-- John Streck

Despite my skills, not everything is in my immediate grasp, and this pertains to Bulgakov. I do not dislike his classic contribution to the Menippean form, but I bookmarked my e-text in place and started over with The Master and Margarita. Dissident voices have reasons why they need to be decoded-- something that the episode Schotty's Struggle points to in dealing with Germany's legacy. The moral lesson here is more complex than it seems, and skirts the edge of our human abyss with as much guts and more subtly than some of my tirades-- but it also points to why I rebelled against Martin Amis in his promotional tour for his Holocaust novel. We make Hitler's rise, and to a lesser extent, Mussolini's, a man who sometimes looked the other way, an exceptional thing, enshrined, as 9/11, in more sybaritic fashion, is memorialized in the US, but fascist extermination only seems to exceed the human capacity for destruction due to the sheer size of its genocide and its mechanization.

And Hitler is nearly a metaphysical intrigue for authors like Amis, and Norman Mailer-- which is really just feeding the machine. If Adolf was a paranoid schizophrenic, this does not explain his Nietzschean will to power, nor the ability to control his brown shirts. He cannot be dissected that way. Leaders and events converge, and there will always be hate crimes. Pause to consider the developmental spectrum, and the extremist anger of my once activist colleagues; even Stephen Hawking wasn't always shielded from the natural inclination for omnivores to exploit the sick. Omnivores are intelligent opportunists.

Bulgakov is a bit of a puzzle. I do not see orthodoxy in his wonderful subversiveness. He trained as a physician, and it shows in his humor and descriptive ease with cadavers. He too understood materialism and was uneasy with it, and seemed to prefer the aspiration toward salvation that hope embodies. My mistake has been my lengthy pauses. I forget the keynote to the disruptions that create the comic tensions in his dissent. Dangerous in some ways. If this is the profile of the Streck I once knew, he might be gratified. I am not in denial about my age, nor physical vulnerability: What I'm fighting is the welfare system. It's hurt me, and I want these viable months I have to myself, until I decide otherwise, not the Department of Public Welfare-- who essentially wants me to assert a declination of services so that my rental agent can then proceed with its next step, which is nonsensical. In six months I might change my mind.

Medicaid, HMO, I assure you, to doctors I am merely a specimen, their protests to the contrary notwithstanding. They stopped me from dying, treated my lungs, signed paperwork. My quality of life? Polite fictions.

Back To Bulgakov Fog

Rufus Gifford, writing the latest Obama For America email, had me fooled for a moment with his subject line, writing to ask my opinion about why I wouldn't want to have dinner with the president (paranoia about the Secret Service blowing my head off as a spastic enemy of the state in well meaning accident, perhaps?), and why I haven't donated, and the answer to that has been here in my journal account all along, although why I continue to receive party line apparatchik missives is another interesting question, when I am wearied of American politics all together, but it helps to keep my eye on the progressives despite the fact that the right offers me no solutions. Some of you probably think I sound like a mild cripple fascist, and maybe I am to some degree, at this point in my life, the poison of an urban backwater in my veins, but for me, it is not, and never was, about ideological purity.

Through my eyes, the political system under which this country operates is broken, whether it is exemplified by the Bush Administration's aggressive tactics against my vulnerability, or Obama's end term easing of that pressure without removing it, or helping me to find a way out of it. Liberty Resources, and my dated inside knowledge of centers, their unnecessary redundancy, my near total lack of family support on top of this, and public housing, is just a microcosm of the destruction of American mobility, if it indeed ever really existed without the engines of our major wars and unspoken racial/caste systems, an apt two paragraph prelude to say I may never quite understand Mikhail Bulgakov's intentions in The Master and Margarita, at least, not beyond its obvious anti-totalitarian aspects, because I do not believe that lack of faith necessarily implies state model sympathy. Indeed, Rushdie uses schizophrenia to attack Islamic fundamentalism in The Satanic Verses the way Bulgakov uses it in inverse fashion to ridicule Stalinism, and I'm on Rushdie's side, against Mohammed.

Bulgakov is dynamic, and his work has a superb comic timing, but I am still in the first third of the book, perplexed, and may need several readings over time, even to understand and accept in his work what I am inclined to reject about Christian superlative hopes in the Blood of the Lamb. I worried a few more pages over my cappellini and fish, still mentally throwing up my hands at the fucking Russian literary greats . With the possible exception of my limited exposure to Tatyana Tolstaya's soft magical realism, the grand-niece of the other great wingnut Tolstoy, they all drive me crazy.