Que se vayan todos!

"they do not heap conditions upon others or promote themselves as the only 'keepers of the truth'. -- Pope Francis, role playing with Peter Parker.

When spastic was a burgeoning teenager, cable television may have not been in its infancy, but it was still a new and complex technology, one based on subscription, and subscription, as a type of revenue generation, still seems an easier way to generate capital, in contrast to collective models. I looked at the HBO network differently then, persuaded by the logo’s muscle. It was premiere, vintage, and later, when The Sopranos soaked up that exclusivity, I felt left out for not having the means to join in to the sinews of the public conversation. Things have changed. When AT&T awarded me access to the venerable survivor of the streaming wars, I came bearing metaphysical crucifix in hand; from this perspective, treating Iglesia’s 30 monedas with sagacity is difficult. Concessions? Certainly there are concessions. The CW’s lengthy commitment with “The Supernatural” was writing for superficial Americans with one track minds. Every so often, the show runners tipped their hats as a sign of respect. Paramount’s “Evil,” discomfited me slightly more, but interest waned when the series married the Satanic to Minority Report special effects. Iglesia, on the other hand, takes Apostolic witness very seriously, as well as the corruption within the clergy. After three episodes, I asked myself, as a matter of ethical concern, whether or not I should stop watching it. I am rebellious, violent, after all, so who am I to be appalled by lack of Spaniards tender mercies, with not a little assistance from Cosimo Fusco, the Italian who nearly disrupted Jennifer Aniston from her perky little perch? What nags conscience isn’t solely a matter of aesthetics, but how the industry has graduated in portrayals of established faith, and 30 monedas is rather a nasty and convoluted condemnation of the Curia. The first convergence of unease: Iglesia doesn’t mesh modernism with Old World caste and station very well. This may have been deliberate, to offer up foreboding along with the grotesque, but it gives each episode a chunky quality, earthy and hard bitten as we follow Vergara, then ornate and Baroque as Santoro schemes with his ill begotten henchmen. The juxtaposition is queasy. Aldomovar has a much better balance in his excellent horror film. Perhaps Francis might be reminded that indignation can be equally beneficial.

Projectionist Tricks With A Gila

"Every year seems the most terrible."-- James Salter via Edward Hirsch, presumably

I followed The Guardian because I believed it was tougher, more hard nosed, than its counterparts stateside. I stopped utilizing The Guardian as a news source after they followed the lead of The New York Times, or vice versa, and began excoriating "whiteness" as an identity crime, which it isn't, and although I was going to link to the late Kate Wilhelm's rebuttal to her husband's story a little further along in this post, anyone who can read this futurist, and deliberately sexist work of fiction objectively, as a predicate for YouTube can see there is nothing here. Those of European descent simply exploit each other with the same Orwellian damnation as any colonial extraction of scarce resources which has led us to the contemporary crisis in Venezuela. Through my research into the crisis I wince at my typographical error in my imprecation to Pope Francis to use his especial back channels to do something to diffuse the situation surrounding the kleptocracy of the late Chavez, but this contributor. Guardiola-Rivera, is at best mystifying in his hyperbolic antagonism toward Juan Guaido. Why would this young engineer not care about the poor in his own country? He is far too young to be an imperialist, or a crony capitalist beholden to oil. I wrote Guido to Francis while he was spelunking with his new brothers, the Ayatollahs, hence my wince. I do not approve of Bergoglio's leadership, and prefer the besieged Benedict's hawkish saber towards the Islamic mindset. His Holiness absorbed my hardness upon his humility by liking a critique I offered, but he isn't going to rescue civilization on proffered dovetails. IIhan Omar is also an enemy of state, and there is nothing I can do about this incredulous fact. Lashing out about her only puts the bit back in my mouth, tenuously vulnerable as I am. But these jacked up assassins attempting to take out Giffords or Scalise, are rather lamentable in application of their target practice, and the next James Hodgkinson needs to realize our enemy from within has a palpable front and center visibility. I understand intellectual disdain for corporate models that become too successful too fast, I grew up in this academic world, but I also came of age on medical socialism, and it has made me as predisposed as Hodgkinson to want to inflict harm, from right to left, not left to right.
I pitched to The Guardian once, some years ago, perhaps tweeting at them about it. I never say never, and will go anywhere for money, but this media outlet keeps its numbers lower than need be through a green lens partisanship which is far too off putting. It makes The National Review look center left.
But then why do I care about South America? Because, as I implored the Holy Father, I grew up with Peron's secret gravesites, and though bloodthirsty for conflict, it isn't at the expense of Latinos who govern predisposed toward mental retardation.

Pedestrian Faultlines

Bring God’s tenderness and mercy to all those who are discarded by society.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) December 29, 2018

Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout opens with an English cricket game in process at a modern day sanitarium, rather upscale for the decade in which the film was produced. Such ostensible recuperative getaways are still to be found in the 21^st century. Phil McGraw doles them out as a reward for guests who agree to be sensationalized on his daily program. Tim Curry, as the writer receptacle through whom these impressions pour, strolls the grounds, as only the British can saunter, while engaged in a query with the doctor, much like a pretrial discovery, about Crossley’s history, a character sturdily embodied by a then thickening but still commanding Alan Bates, and then meets Crossley himself in the score keeper’s shelter, which looks much like a charming doghouse. They begin to have a conversation about what constitutes insanity, the implication being that Crossley, a superior intellect, is above it all, speaking three languages. We also see John Hurt and Susannah York stroll on what constitutes a Devon coastline, whether before or after the intrusion remains unclear, for at its heart this is a movie about urbanity being supplanted by a more primitive usurpation, much like Philippe Setbon’s Mr. Frost. Setbon’s later Goldblum vehicle is reminiscent of the industry’s somber unease during the Me decade. Western civilization seems triumphant, and yet a medieval hysteria lurks beneath the surface. Everyone wants to do The Exorcist, leading to Setbon’s send up an odd score later. It is only upon reflection that a hamstrung blogger under siege sees a striking similarity in Skolimowski’s and Setbon’s dramatic approach. Mr. Frost has more of a satirical bent, but both projects are about significantly nefarious subversions to pedestrian sensibilities. Robert Grave’s concerns, overlapping with Jerzy’s effects, aren’t so grandiose as to posit Satan in the temporal world. Graves is in pursuit of aggression and warfare through an examination of nomadic culture. In the very opening roll of the credits, which I often miss during this movie’s often cycled airtime, there is a negative image of an actor playing an Aboriginal shaman, or warrior, engaged in intimidating displays. Skolimowski then opens with the close of the film. Susannah York is fully restrained in universally recognized nursing white, with a short black cloak fastened under her chin while she pulls sheets from the bodies of Crossley’s grimaced characters. The bracketing of this scene is probably a concession to Grave’s preferences for formal structure, which is something of a contrast with Doris Lessing’s transitional fluidity. Both writers were pursuing similar themes in the same time frame. Graves would simply be dead sooner, and was more integral to Churchill’s generation than a colonialist like Lessing. What makes Skolimowski’s direction intriguing in The Shout is his willingness not to gift wrap Grave’s intent. Scholastic comprehension may be a breeze under Goldblum’s performance arcs, but Jerzy only provides hints as to why the Fielding’s are coerced into such insatiable gluttony under Bates’s wiles, broken only when John Hurt destroys the stone. Composing has something to do with it, the brutish sound effects Hurt experiments with: amplification of a housefly buzz, or the distortion of cigarette ash, instances of unpleasantness which break barriers. The Shout, like Dog Day Afternoon, and a select handful of other films, is the 1970’s in which I grew up. Something about a cinematography grounded in the nitty gritty, the underlying anxiety that humanity hasn’t truly prevailed, our values counteracted in an instant, make them far move innovative than today’s computer generated animation.

Learning By Obituary

'and love is not a victory march"--Leonard Cohen

Let me give erstwhile Britonian Andrew Sullivan his due: When he was still blogging The Dish, he defended Brendan Eich and his donation on Proposition 8, and that was courageous, and the right thing to do, as people need the right to be wrong, and at the time, I concurred with Sullivan's reasoning. Eich did not publicize his views, did not create hostile environments for homosexuals, and leftist hysteria, as it has been embodied in the criticism of #MeToo, apparently wants us all to blossom into pretty pastels and cat pics rivaling India's population, and Voila, Mary had a little lamb, we all live happily ever after in a glass globe pastoral; being a more sincere apostate in his Catholic faith than I, he also introduced me to Gerard Manley Hopkins, when he was having a bad week with his lungs, led me further afield on David Foster Wallace's painful suicide, and on the preponderance of that alone, aside from his playful screen shot of Amtrak which wasn't meant to marginalize, my antagonism is deplorable. I lost a voice I ceased to respect, no real reason other than anathema for speculative anal penetration, and his destruction of marriage as a sacrament. This is the crux of queer genius. What Proust did for literature, what James did for the novel, what Foucault brought to the table about state control of physical bodies, are invaluable contributions. I know all this, but progressives, by the same token, are actually destroying personal liberty, not expanding it. What's happening on campuses today makes the destruction of Huckleberry Finn look like a table ornament, never mind that Twain worked seven years to perfect his Mississippi dialect, that an African slave is the moral center of the book. We've turned a mere word, nigger, into a form of capital punishment. And I refuse to feel guilty. The black women who run this building deserved what I did to denigrate them, as I have never been allowed, that's right, to be a fully fledged woman who could fulfill her potential. I tried devotion, and all I did in full throttle melancholy youth prior to meeting Jerry was negotiate with Christ, this manifestation of the Father, negotiate and accuse. Why did you allow this to happen to me? Give me a man. Like I want to return to that, playing fiddlesticks, touching among an interior ferocity to be a warrior for God. Priests excommunicate what I represent, even the Argentine, with his gaffes befuddling the flock. I treat His Holiness with respect on twitter, but personally feel he does Catholicism no favors. Of course hell exists, even for atheists who rebel in an unreasoned emotional intensity. Faith carries too high a price, for me, too much sacrifice, and yet, my indifference to homosexual advocacy for itself has been vanquished against the realization that humanity is inexorably unraveling what humanity means. Milo says, if we want to upgrade his rhetoric a notch, that we need new shields, after a fashion. We'll probably get them, as the sanctity of what marriage means, spiritually, is analogous to turning Leonard Cohen's classical lyric into a televised spectacle, sugar coated by a little girl so carefully imitating adult maturity.

I did my research, after the fact. Cohen, as an incongruous Canadian, employing American tropes in modulated Canadian fashion, only came to light for me after his death in 2016. I had no idea Hallelujah was a celebrated classic, a challenge grasped by many vocalists. I wouldn't have thought he could put the challenge of faith in such bold, clever terms, even as I near the end of my life. I am no longer a good human being, not beneath, whatever I fail to read in the crystal of my imagination, I thoroughly believe in limits, and in that for which the Inquisition stood. Sullivan, I doubt, will never realize the backlash of his legacy, and damned himself without anyone's help, but he has sinned in a quite febrile sense, against transcendent majesty of grace. My sin is knowing what I'd do to him for that, if you care to pray for any scalded soul.

Phosphorus Spots

This is the problem with battling a life on whatever entitlement system you can to name. The crisis such as I am having now, these are exceedingly difficult to manage. I have taken a huge hit, over two hundred dollars in additional expenses, with my static life, in an environment which was never one of my own choosing, I can barely nibble any food, remembering my mother coming to Ridley Senior High, where I was parked, as always, in the administrative offices, guidance counselor, perhaps, with the SSI paperwork. I was 16, and had I the benefit of hindsight, to be forthright, I might have stopped my education then and there, with the federal welfare stranglehold. Yesterday, I viewed, come to think of it, one of the last late Law & Order episodes with Waterston and Roache, and the cattish actress who was ADA Connie. The abortion doctor assassination, which, for Wolf's writing team, was powerfully done, in terms of authenticity, and like some of those genetically doomed babies, I should have been allowed to die, instead of incubated, although, even in the incubator, I was supposed to die. Even premature, perhaps it was my destiny, to terrorize ableism. I do not know.

I am still here, of course, but it is too much for me. I may not kill a minority building manager or any of her residents, or a lesbian, or my former supervisor, but I am clinging to the escarpment hidden by rushing waterfalls, and can see my psyche, a spastic psyche, riddled with bullet holes, on some derivative of Thorazine, little more than a maniac, like so many Inglis residents. Yet this L&O episode challenged my extermination of the species as effectively, if not more so, than all the Catholic accounts I follow, and, if I did not know better, Pope Francis might have been tweeting directly to me earlier this morning. For once, this socialist Argentine, of whom I am diffident, reached me as Santo Padre; yet I refuse, like Anne Rice, to flip flop, fall on my knees, and give in to my occasional awareness of a devout fervor. Why? When I did believe, I was too self-conscious to accept all this damned nonsense, the holy spirit, the tongues. I dared to laugh at God, as Umberto Eco raised so dramatically in The Name of the Rose, three years before I ever graced a campus, I laughed at God, and I feel the import of that sacrilegious defiance, and thus force mystery and materialism to co-habituate in my Catholic Atheism. Better to reject divine character than to accept and damn yourself for knowing you can never love it, indeed, hate it, which probably matters little.

This Office 365 download is agonizingly slow, but I threw in the towel  on installing my older 2007 version, and have yet to see if it will take on this expensive, but still ten year old laptop, my feet swollen, tinnitus swirling in my eardrum, powerless, squalid woman, desperate to restore her work, sweating fish oil through her pores. The high school secretary, she had a predication for Sidney Sheldon. I too, find Rage of Angels moves along at a pleasingly taut, climatic pace. Even just sitting here, oblivious to section 202 housing hostilities and jeopardy, I'm suffering, yowling at my poor baby brother for surcease, gratified to engage Gretchen again, even playing along with Facebook humor, I might as well be a writhing succubus: the download is complete, but I have to go to bed, with so little to spare, like a box of food for little kimmy.

Ewe's Juglar

I feel like Upton Sinclair foisting the Federal Meat Inspection Act on her own vernacular. All I need to do is play the pedestrian and my social media rating jumps, and then all I have to do is spit vitriol and subsequently ignore it to console myself. I've learned not to make too much of the automated accordion by now, but I have not changed, and if the building manager had a popular online account, she'd tell you that. Libertarian embrace has made me ferocious, but, to sound like the ghost of Deng, there are only so many ways to slay the cat: and I am not interested in "making a scene" on niume. I have virtually next to nothing against the platform, and would have bolted it three weeks ago if they had mailed me an automated password boot. My issue is with the model, not the people running it, or the users, and this is Google's fault. The Godmother glares at search giant, round 2.1. I let Kwale Powerhouse go because he was a bit too eager to exploit me, and this is what I've learned. Blacks use race to hurt the disabled, yet I ain't allowed to say certain truths without the online world choking on a wingbone (rolls eyes). This is why I am angry with Jerry at a deeper level. I bought his intellectual argument, and it was as much a crock as any conservative hypocrisy. Might as well mention it now and perhaps refine later, but I missed O'Neal's self-pity, so self-evident on Tavis, in his younger self in Hill's genre driven experiment. If Walter Hill knew what thesis I was building on his film, he'd say "girl, pretentious snit is a generous charge," and he'd no doubt be right, but I see what I see, beat slow and steady. I have nothing against Ryan O'Neal; he was the romantic lead who shaped my youth, and recognition notwithstanding, his weariness and mine converge at many points. My ambivalence about him doesn't desire pillage: I care too much about my product, but I don't care about his Sunset Boulevard  melodrama. I care about his creative legacy, the output, biding my time to email his publicist again. He is going to be gone soon, and I need him to let me in, just a bit. Perhaps he dislikes Walter and doesn't want journos on the scent.

Erosion of Authority

In relation to the Holy Father doing his job, I was very nearly rude Friday morning, when the modest bishop of Rome tweeted

The Lord becomes man to journey with us in our everyday lives.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) December 23, 2016

and then bit my tongue. I may prefer that Jorge Mario Bergoglio had more stature, but to behave like a sophist  in the manner of Hebdo Charlie, being so close to the end of my self reliance, has more remorse than reward. It recalled a study I glanced at briefly, about Cervantes needing exile to still be Catholic. During my brother's funeral, I glared at the priest. His homily was dry, circumspect, hasty summary of a turbulent monster boy's life, and I glared at this shepherd, his run of the mill tone. It wasn't personal. Any priest I've ever confessed to is dead, but that day, all things being equal, an exorcist might have had suspicions that a cripple might have needed a cleansing.

When it comes to Donald Trump, we're in another territory, namely, the diminished dignity of his office. I despise the man, and the issue isn't getting myself under surveillance for a vitriolic potty mouth, so much as it might be the price of these libertarian seismic waves: it would cost me nothing to tell Trump to go fuck himself, and no one else has that distinction. Bill Clinton might come close, not that gradations are of any use. It isn't a simple matter of decline, of turning into butt head bitch. Trump is a celebrity jackass whose carnivalesque antipodes have already worn threadbare. The world is undoubtedly at an end, with the bile of repugnance in my throat.

Don your civility, bless the Pontiff, who made due with the modern theatrical circus of godspel in the larnyx of Aretha Franklin. Kick it up, dare to be inappropriate. Go to Christmas mass, be gracious to Philadelphia's lanky shuffling  in their pews. Wear the sneakers the dead pig from the Bronx gave you for a present. Go.  

Viral Transmission

"This is just to test your blood pressure," said Art reassuringly, noticing that the sweating was becoming excessive. As soon as the first slight pressure was applied to the bulb, the man moved. Without warning he screamed in terror and Art was on the floor... The Onion Field, location 459


Joseph Wambaugh's depiction of gay panic is quite different in text than in the screen play adaptation which led to the film, so different even the dowager isn't sold by what is going on in the company Ian keeps on his way to becoming a martyr in the name of law enforcement. In the movie, Ted Danson's Ian is a hastily contrived pastiche, because Wambaugh's underlying concern, as transmuted by the director, is the reverberating impact of justice as a convoluted process. In the book itself, whatever Ellroy's introductory praises, all of Wambaugh's character development seems like a hatchet job, as if he is desperate to imitate Capote and swallows his tongue in the process. This makes Onion Field a fascinating period piece, despite itself, and Wambaugh's hatchet has a nascent driving energy which intimates a command to skip the movie and read the true crime saga in the troubled years of Nixonion paranoia; but the screen writers for the film at least made homosexuality and vice recognizable. Wambaugh, by contrast, seems quite incidentally to border on science fiction.

By 1973 the dowager was growing up in the world, forcibly incarcerated just like Art's patient, and people didn't flip out over a blood pressure cuff due to sexual impulses. They might cry over girls on the ward engaging in mock lesbian teasing, to establish pecking order, as primate groups do, but this curious piece of exposition in the first chapter teeters on the edge of dramaturgic abstract art, as if Michael Rooker's serial killer was introduced on stage by Becket.

If the dowager was inconsiderate to Nick Denton in tweeting her repugnance for Michael Hall's brave and brief exchange with his fictional minority law enforcement officer, it was deliberate, but not quite due to prudent shock. Denton looks ambiguous, the way most radical Britons out of the radical left Labour wing do, and just as most radical Anglo Saxons do, male or female, they reach out to minority short order cooks to make political statements, perhaps covertly, through their sexual liaisons, and Denton does the same thing with his partner, besmirching marriage as a sacrament, defiant and in your face: I'm gay and love a black American. So what? The Western middle class has found a method of appropriating gay difference: elevating homosexual monogamy, even while medical epidemiologists' like Fauci hover in the background. Oh, they don't judge, but they are they failsafes policing sexual adventurism which by normal social standards are still considered criminal, like the use of handcuffs for restraint, for instance. And in a gay cross race relationship, there is always a bit of a hustle going on, cashing in on white privilege. I know it because I've been there, and indeed, could roll out on Market Street in my haggard skirt attire and pick up three black men willing to sleep with me, a broken welfare spastic, but a white broken welfare spastic, nothing more than a reprehensible power play, damning me into abomination territory. I'd like to remind the Holy Father, in this vein, that whatever his Marxist sentiments due to his Argentine background, he is the last Prince on the face of the earth whose statements have world renown impact, and one of religion's remaining functions is to name apostasy for what it is. You are not just a victim's advocate Francis, you carry thousands of years of Roman authority in that burden on your shoulders, and the growing material power of people like Thiel and Denton needs to be countermanded. The battle between them is almost akin to the sins to be plucked out of the Divine Comedy. Denton revels in sexual exposure because he wants to be accepted as a non-deviation, while Thiel blows 10 million on civil tort because he isn't quite gay enough to flout it in a parade, while broken withered crones can't even get a paralegal to do a case assessment on her life long toxic environments and medical model brutality which improved nothing on her original issues wrought by brain damage. Being able to blatantly buy the law simply because an individual created a flicker of a wrestling personality are episodes through which class resentment could trigger serious social unrest.

Corroded Pretty Pennies

"Dear Brothers and Sisters," a proselytizing Sanders email generated from my involvement with Obama for America, unfortunately

If it comes down to a choice between Trump and Hillary, Howard Gutman was fairly confident, in his analysis, that Hillary prevails by three points, which would mean the electorate cements Barack's legacy and gives the Clintons one more crack at the helm. I loathe both front running brands, if we want to contextualize the fame of both contenders in that manner, but if Donald apologizes to Pope Francis, and I'm able to cast a ballot, I simply cannot return to the Clintons. If it is Rubio and Clinton, I simply won't vote; not a matter of questioning Rubio's credentials. The Senator has a book, financial extensions, raises valid points about the quiet minority of immigrants who are on the Visa applicant list, and so what?

Given a choice, the public knows the Clintons, and presumes they will keep the country steady at the helm. If somehow Sanders manages to draw blood and then it's him and Trump, then maybe my vote matters, and I'd have to go with the bombastic charlatan, if he apologizes to the Pope. One might be critical of the Argentine's leftist leanings, but he is the Vicar of Christ, the head of state, and I demand respect for the prince of the Church, however hard and dark I might be.


On the chance that Bloomberg does enter the race, his track record as an executive has already sold itself, and I'd possibly advocate for his candidacy. I do not always agree with his command decisions, but at least he makes them, and offers his constituency a supporting rationale. Both as a writer and an advocate, my failure has been one of local indifference, because what goes on at the lowest rung is the most primal, and I regret it, since the Commonwealth's rust belt status conveys a certain truism about dilapidation, never quite conscious of the fact, until recently that City Council is merely the cabal out of whom lesser forces spring. Rendell became mayor because he was DA, because Goode literally torched his own fortunes. Nutter became mayor against Street's collusion, and became a no blame minority nanny. Kenney looks like a half-witted superintendent, and this doesn't bode well for the city, I fear. Does the First Amendment trump FCC regulatory authority? Doubtlessly not, as the commissioners are terrified of the decency legion.

Brief Retrench

The web rushes me too, and I am not trying to be overly critical of what it does to other online journalists, but I think we all lose, regardless of where we fall on the ideological spectrum, when an agenda like homosexual partners and resources is driven by this lie of equal treatment. On the percentage, homo sapiens is still by and large an omnivorous primate with alpha males and females. Michael Nutter shut the entire city down for Pope Francis, once a seminarian bouncer in Argentina, now cordoned off from people like me for whom his church is so vocal. On the day of his visit I folded after perhaps a 30 second effort to hear the man give mass, and though I made an enormous effort to be unobtrusive, the police yelled at me and a security officer eyeballed me while I zig-zagged to do a little grocery; hairs stood on the back of my neck while SWAT followed a black man to the parking lot adjacent to River's Edge, a condo right next to my public housing unit. Only in America, as the cliche goes.

Now, I am not complaining. If I really wanted access to the Pontiff, I had advance notice and could have engaged in extraordinary rendition, and am fully cognizant of the fact that the poor fellow is trapezing on one lung, but his status is extraordinary, if now as decorative as any type of fame.

I haven't seen Freeheld; do not find in particularly fortuitous that Angela Watercutter's editor ran her article in Wired as is, but I'll assert this: Stacie Andree is ambulatory, correct? Lesbian or not, able to work? What about police officers disabled on the job, or a cop's widowed family strained for resources themselves? I can hear LBGT activists for the wolverines they are, but your disadvantages due to stigma over your sexual preferences is and remains largely cosmetic, and there are larger problems in the world than the lie of equal treatment regardless of sexual orientation.

THE STATE, and let's pause in a moment of respect for my libertarian sympathizers' groan of dismay, still enforces codes of conduct in relation to high risk sexual practices. Ask Fauci if sodomy isn't designated as a high risk sexual practice detrimental to the public health at large. Detective Hester's advocates might say it is just a pension rightfully earned under the terms of her contract with the FOP, and she wanted to provide Andree with a modicum of a security guarantee, but there are more invisible voices on the food chain in the garden state, and if Andree could walk, she could work, and what limited resources Hester did not absorb through hospice, these should have gone elsewhere.

Tunnel vision has its blinders even in the righteousness of progressive empathy.

Courtesy Note

Dolphin Mobility highlighted my Itinerary post, and I do not have enough of a British accent to transmute an Italian "grazie," into a proper British English thank you, even with a modicum of astonishment. 

My recent posts have been rough around the edges, and this is not simply due to a well worn anger at being disenfranchised, since I am battling toxic stress with aging technology, and my ambivalence about Francis swinging the pendulum too far to the left is not beyond the penetration of those columnists still getting paid, but I can whittle a few more planks down to size:

As superlative as JP2's stature was during his tenure, neither he nor his administrators had a good answer for the sexual molesters in problem dioceses, and Benedict may have retired because he was caught between pastoral doctrine, re: predators are sinners and still human, and redress for the victims, and Francis'es election may have been passing the buck on the extension of JP2's  administration.

Hence, Francis may feel his is a reactive papacy to placate the left, which wants a more progressive Vatican less prone to authoritarian crackdown. My response to this is counter-intuitive, in light of my attacks on disability empowerment models, but we need Roman Catholicism and its conservative moral stricture against apostasy, because progressives are on a suicide pact, and Roman Catholicism's firmament against that is a better alternative than ISIS, which is something Western liberalism inflicted on itself.

In much the same way that a substantial minority of those harmed by NCIL members face limits on what reforms can repair within the paradigm, sexual abuse victims cannot simply upend a faith that the Apostle Paul nearly willed into being single-handedly after his conversion. Certainly, the Church is a human institution, but it is an institution whose historical continuity is worth fighting for, and passionately defending.

To those at Dolphin however, I owe you. I feel less alone this morning. Big hug on this side of the pond.

The Itinerary of Eating Our Own

It is rightful and necessary for orthodox believers to pronounce judgment on the works of the pope.-- William of Ockham

There are two pieces of writing about the modern papacy which resonated, were astute, and leaving me cursing for not having made a copy. One was an NYT editorial about the loss of Italian popes, with the reign of John Paul II, signifying the last vestige of the Roman Empire had vanished, leaving me with tears in my eyes for its veracity. The writer, much as I, understood the Pontiff's role as more than just a thorn to Fascism, Communism, and the United States as the evil empire on any given day. The other was a Boston Globe's less immanent interpretation of John Paul II's popularity and the legacy of the Church in its wake.

In my far less sophisticated sensibility, the Vatican needs its temporal power restored so that fanatics can engage in the Crusades 2.0, but let us nuance the hyperbole to the restraint displayed in criticizing a wily Argentine who is not a passable emulator of Paul, John, or the swiftly deceased John Paul I. I felt that man's death with a visceral gut wrenching outcry, still in the suburbs, with the front cover of the empty red slippers. 

One is diffident about Francis, and yet, maybe I should sacrifice the day and get in line to at least listen to l'utimo Santita under whom I'll still be alive. George Will wrote a provocative column Saturday, as is his job, critiquing Francis for being medieval, (though I've yet to read it) and much less controversial than his minimizing the sexual regrets of underclassmen, though he has a point. There is a difference between deflation, regret after we unwisely give in, and otherwise forcible rape. My sense of Francis is that his use of Naomi Klein as a technical advisor is nearly sickening to this blogger's nostalgia for congregation. Ms. Klein might as well be one of Putin's presidential foreign affairs ministers for the restoration of the Warsaw Pact.

The role of the Vicar of Christ is far larger and broader in scope than running around offering apologias for military juntas and the sexual predations of those using the collar as a shield. If I plan to attend the Mass, I'd best get downtown and update my ID, whether it is wise or no. I am still Catholic in this atheism; His Holiness is infallible, like Max von Sydow's fiery Calvinist.

Virgil Swann

"It's simply impossible for us to live with vulgar people. It's a defect, no doubt; it's an immense inconvenience, and in the days we live in it's sadly against one's interest."-- Henry James, The Reverberator

Smallville, recalled due to wanton disregard for sanctity, was too much about being occult eye candy; Welling was a nearly too perfect retrofit to the solid, self-defined, simple back to basics American that Christopher once exemplified and still attempted to exemplify once he became helpless. 

He could no longer exemplify it as a true expression of quadriplegia; his paralysis makes my ability to drag my upper torso across the floor positively invigorating, and I did not get along with him at AccessLife, being my usually contentious self; yet I feel guilty for the deaths of Reeve and his wife. I had nothing to do with either his subcutaneous pressure sore or Dana's lung cancer, and my interaction with the pair was limited, but there is guilt, right here, in this absence, in an empty space that can only be defined as a void.

Superman necessitates the values of the GI Joe American male; no way to get around that without negating what the graphic contours of his abilities represent. In looking back at the series, and adding the conjunction of Leah Remini's troubles, perhaps Scientology had too much influence on the series. It was in spite of myself television. Nothing on, and a utilized package, so Reeve playing off Welling was less effective than it might have been if I had a) understood Swann as the technocratic prophet; cared about L Ron Hubbard's repressed and rigid disciplines (he looks like a man whose lymph nodes overflowed with hedonism), and understood what the guild was doing with superhero encoding. It was bewildering most of the time, involving fantastical degrees of possession, corruption, and Nietzschean will to power.

Not all men, certainly, but most men are failed overgrown children, which is why I am so perplexed about Frank's hurt and don't know what he wants from me. I became intimate with him as a form of proof that I did not want to find a lesbian stick bitch along former supervisor Linda's lines, and also because I was sexually lonely. He was a horrific and revolting mistake, and leads one into certain temptations about the intelligence of the Hispanic male. If he and I had been young, then I could understand, but this was not a pairing out of love. He is a pig with a past of multiple partners and STD risk.

I need new friends; a new fuck buddy might be too much for which to hold out. If Pope Francis is orthodox this is right and a good thing for the Church. It is time. New Crusade. New Zeal. The Inquisition still exists as a matter of scant resource. The office should be reopened, and since I've lived in hell during my half century as a wheelchair user, there is no greater degree of suffering left which I have not previously experienced.

Fervor

"I am only going to say this once; if you do not stop harassing me I am going to contact the police."

As much as I hart poor Joanie across the way, I had to put a stop to the behavior; she was driving her power chair into the vestibule of my building and dialing my intercom, because she needs toilet paper. If I had sales, even if I had only succeeded in completing my hearing loss piece (the editor of which declined my Linked In invite, so there you go; it smarts just a little despite the fact that it was my failure under pressure), I'd give the barnacle tart what she needs, but I myself am in a near constant state of being overwhelmed, and decided it was necessary to shut her down. Do I enjoy behaving toward her as so many have toward me? No. I understand she is lonely. I understand she is looking for support. Frank hates her, and to the degree I hate him as an ex-fiance, I am tickled. But my understanding of Joanie nevertheless necessitates limits on my mercy. I am not getting paid to be the pied piper anymore. Was she harassing me as a matter of criminal liability? Maybe. What differentiates her behavior from my own as it relates to using email to converse, or chasing a personal attendant, or Daniel Schneider ceasing to respond to me once I asked to be removed from his Cosmoetica list, or what differentiates it as a dangerous behavior, is a matter of degree.

Would it alarm Jorge Mario Bergoglio to know that I would kill for Le Santa Sede? Catholic atheists are scary! But it is a basic truth: I would defend the Vatican and the Papacy regardless of the sacrifice; every Pope should be a radical Christian; he is also the last vestige of the Roman Empire, and the college of cardinals would do well to remember that.

I weep for Francis. Sheer zeal.