On
January 31st, Vincent D’Onofrio expressed consternation for the loss
of some followers due to voicing his political beliefs, and with a slight
hedge, I offered a mitigating consolation without mocking him, but admit I’m a
bit taken aback by how soft he seems to be outside of the studio’s insulation,
and perhaps I shouldn’t be, since he is a regional performer with crossover
national appeal. Woods is a little larger, but one thing the two actors share
is a sense of the personable on social media not so readily apparent with others,
and since fame interests me as a contextual problem, with questions about
whether Twitter collapses recognition, engenders it with sometimes detrimental spontaneity,
or not, with Ebert’s dictum that “[Celebrities are] just people,” coming into
play, getting used to the pain of this hard vinyl seat, the physical pain and
despondency in tandem. Mike the prick wants 400 dollars to convert what I’m
sitting on to a base with a cushion, and if I was desperate for a usable chair
in the fall, I’m not only now desperate to rid myself of torture, but the spool
unwinding in my interior doesn’t know how much longer I can stand it. The man
at the helm of Mr. Wheelchair has lied to me fifteen ways to Sunday.
He had another chair for me. Now he doesn’t. He was coming in November to
rectify the problem, then it was December. Then January. Each time he was a no
show. Neither of us trusts each other. A little of that fame utilized to raise
conscious awareness might be useful at present, as I’d rather not take the time
and energy to consult a lawyer about this, and Medicare is its own sweet
draconian process.
D’Onofrio’s
public worry about his drop illustrates that everyone can be affected by “the
numbers game,” of automated models, unless consumed by distress which reduces
its concern: Much to my astonishment, Karina refused to break off our
relationship founded by Craigslist. She returned to Philadelphia for personal
reasons I will not dangle before you with callous indifference, ignored my
indignation, and crashed in upon me with her heart of gold hugs, however
suspect its reliability, so I relented and we’ve made up, just after Amazon’s own
streamlining suggested I might be interested in Breathe, an Indian series with more than one or two parallels
between hero cop with his emotional wounds and his antagonist. Madhavan is
interesting as Danny, a soccer coach whose son is afflicted with cystic fibrosis,
due to more than his unipolar descent into psychopathy. Due to the fact that
this is Bollywood rather than its American cousin, the series whets my
aesthetic curiosity, but this said, I am not convinced this is how killers are
made or pursued in Indian society, but why Danny descends into hell, why he
destroys his own social decency, you’re looking at it right here people. I
could be wrong, but Breathe seems to have its own melodramatic subversion,
damned if I don’t find it funny, even if the logic of his multiple efforts for one fresh donor after the other is unclear.
Her life with hateful snares pursue,/You swore to love and cherish.
The recollection of Dean Acheson's voice was that of encyclopedic reassurance. He and Franklin were in charge, and the lend lease program would buttress Winston's tenacity to survive the crippling blows of Hitler's aggression, but in the late eighties, stifling boredom, raising the hew and cry of "I am not a historian," the events of the second world war were best left to Ronald Reagan's senility and his Vice President's competence in the Oval Office. We're a stupid people, Americans, letting a third party candidate like Ross Perot split the seams, handing over the reigns to the Clintons, who could not imitate JFK's protective smokescreen, and then lurching, badly, on the basis of our vaunted electoral college, to the Texan branded son of the more astute father, who was so incompetent we anointed a mixed race messiah who, instead of actually being a movement president, relegated himself downward. Barack became the [black] president who engendered [white] buyer's remorse, but we are forbidden to phrase it that way, and Clinton fatigue transmuted into Sex and the City marketing. The *historic* vote should have crowned a woman before a half-Kenyan. Indeed. Hillary is virtually a default empress in anticipation-- of what?
We've been here before. However much contempt I have for our primary two party system, and the centrist, self-absorbed bubba liberals that the Clintons are, the breach of protocol over her email account should serve as a dire warning about how Orwellian we've already become. It is a breach of ethics that the most important member of the cabinet used a private server in her diplomatic correspondence? Classified information, however juicy, shocking, sobering, brutal, or realpolitik, is still data. That is all it is. Threat assessments, secrets about deliberate poisonings, conspiracies, plots. That's it. Whatever Madame Secretary wanted to conceal, she did so for the reasons government officials world over dread transparency. It is nothing new, regardless of ideology. We do not look too closely at how things are run outside of our own spheres of knowledge. The majority of us with our enfeebled souls sublimate it. We write books, distract ourselves with theater, culinary arts. If we were all involved, the world would come to a standstill, much like parliamentary debate in the Oireachtas. IRA guerrillas killed British soldiers so that Ireland's legislators could argue with delicious impotence over the empowerment community integration offers hospital patients who clog facilities for lack of home health care packages.
Are we electing Hillary to a third Obama Clinton term? Or is it the Washington press corp?
If I seem to be coming perilously close to saying ugly people should refrain from engaging in sodomy, you'd be within your rights to object such contention is not much of an argument. People do what they wish, at least to the extent that Goozman has not quite replicated Zamyatin's mistrust of urbanism. I am, however, more or less against homosexuals themselves, which the majority of repressed Protestant liberals would now find untenable.
Leaving that issue aside, liberals find the issue of gay monogamy persuasive as an equal treatment argument. I do not. Families are small islets of self denial, regardless of cultural pressures or permissions, and Slate contributors are already pushing the envelope on bringing pedophiles into the tent, with the caveat that they be medically regulated and or castrated through the course of their lifespans until neurologists can repair their minds. If we keep heading in this direction, what is the point of being human? Or would geneticists say this is an evolutionary continuum?
"We have gone from a legal system denominated by common law, divined by courts, to one in which statues, enacted by legislatures, have become the primary source of law."-- Guido Calabresi
It takes hubris to play the dunce, as Ron Perlman does in Quest for Fire, a movie not necessarily conducive for outcasts in our primate social hierarchy. Its carefully staged savagery stunned, as opposed to overawed, in the early Reagan era. Watching on contemporary flat screen technology, a mature savant perceives its carefully circumscribed progressive dictum: tolerance leads to better quality of life outcomes. And this is bullshit, in a naturalistic Darwinian allegory which could not possibly have occurred in Paleolithic Europe. Certainly migrations occurred, and different humanoids may have co-existed with different levels of technical knowledge, but no band of early human hunters survived territorial ambush, attacks by sabers, mastodons, grizzlies, and sexual cross breeding with Nubians, a fight with their own kind, and lived to tell the tale, in the creation of the modern homo sapiens. McGill's Naoh may have been the heir apparent, brave but not stupid, with just the right amount of masculine empathy, but it is Perlman's buffoon Amoukar who has the wisdom to know who belongs where, in the sinews for the right sense of place.
My early progressive educators were wrong; they led me to believe that my status as a token cripple who could mediate between worlds was an economic surety, and this is what angers me. Everyone saw my astute intellectual promise. The suave history teacher who had style, the angry hippie, the loutish philosopher whom ISIS might have decapitated as a subversive, perhaps rightly so. I would have never made tenure, even if I had applied myself to some minute thesis. Then we have the activists who are not activists as I define activism. Whatever their rhetoric, they fail and eject too many of the most challenged invalids they supposedly offer self-determination, and couch progress as decentralized case management. They are no better than Putin, in his attempt to resuscitate an outdated authoritarian model.
In 2009, a twitter user, purported homosexual who thought I might have posed a problem to a woman who stopped following me, urged me to "get help". Cures for battle stress due to a life of attempted annihilation don't exist. Neurological science in the seventies was not as advanced as our current genomic sequencing era, but still, Dr. George Crothers espoused beating brain damage out of those handicapped by cerebral palsy. No one stood up and made any conscientious objection. The parents acquiesced. It took how many years for the state of Pennsylvania to investigate and shut him down? Did my mother have a crisis of conscience because her seven year old came home screaming?
