Maggot Larvae

Where I first heard of David Frum? Perhaps Charlie Rose. Moderate conservatives like him always reign in Libertarian militancy toward the two party system with statements such as these. Once you get past a certain age, Brian's dictum evinces itself through politics. The laws of nature tend to repeat themselves. Frum is Douthat is Johan Norberg, is Niall Ferguson, and I happen to be an enthusiast of Ferguson's ideas.

Frum's chastisement presupposes that NSA and the Defense Department are powerful enough to keep rare specimens like myself in check. For a while, but I have serious doubts about what comes after the post-Obama era. I make the assumption that most of my viewers on the outside don't understand Medicaid Waiver services, what a lifetime of entitlement is like against ecumenical insistence on the inherent value of human life juxtaposed against medical warehouses like Inglis House, which belie such pluralistic niceties. Most of us don't dwell on beneath the surface insecurity all the time, not even I.

But I've lived it most of my life, and at 53, it threatens to suck me down the drain; this is the kind of rage which permeates revolutions, velvet, or otherwise. Remember Philip K. Dick's short story about android political candidates? Remember what it signified? But there was also what Dick didn't say about electing representatives, about the limits of political processes.

I'm living off my father's guilt at the moment, and don't like it, having come full circle, little spastic slum dog, repeating the same thing over again, like one of Patricia Highsmith's lesser known protagonists.

I'm never going to vaunt past the sterility of the welfare state, simply because I could not stay inside it to earn a living, and allowed you to read what a vicious maniac its scar tissue has maimed within me, to the tune of Google's reluctant unease. What do I have left to aspire to? Beneath the surface, the entitlement system is like a lava slide. Slow, molten, deceptively destructive. Heavy enough to make the West Wing's security apparatus as thin as a thimble.

A List Pose

The thought occurs to me that maybe I could one day approach Nicole Kidman's publicist about getting an interview in my own right, even if I cannot make the Henry James Review deadline, and it is quite possible that I will not make it, at the rate I am going. I care nothing about her personal life, and do not necessarily have to meet her in person; it is her art that interests me for a feature, along the lines of The Others (2001) and Birth (2004), if I could develop my own track, not that such a feature article has not been done. Of course it has, I believe in WaPo, and make a note to make a concerted effort to dig it out of archive, but not this morning. Her ex husband is insane, but too high in social status for anyone to admit that as obvious. Cruise and I are exactly the same generation, tail wind to the boomers of whom the gen X are so weary, one of us a self-hating sow always on the verge, the other a sometimes great actor always on, and a cultist, dodging trick wires. I wonder if Tom really has a central core, and knows himself for himself, but I doubt it. I have read some, here and there, about his religion, do not understand it, and a good federal conspiracy would set the Mormons and Scientologists up to kill each other. That's a fun idea.

I might be able to derive secondary material from such an attempted effort toward credibility, while groping toward a thesis in the fog, much as it was created by Amenabar on location.