Many Happy Returns

 "I want the whole man!"--Ian McKellan

I would tell you that I have been stalled for many days on a Substack piece about the McCormack Oz race which I would like to finish, with hopefully some relevant insight, before the November election results are tallied, with a Shapiro victory most likely assured as Wolf’s heir apparent, but this is only a partial truth, while I reflect on Patrick McGoohan’s Number 6 caught in a rubber room, an analog rubber room, for making a disruptive choice which the MI6 of nearly 60 years ago didn’t like. McGoohan didn’t create The Prisoner as a critique of the British welfare state, but the boomerang nature of The Village is a great deal like being a rat in a maze of the Commonwealth’s static, and blisteringly deadly Waiver services. Like Enka Kohat's Shubert of 21 years ago, the mind attempts to rally around the cauterized despair burbling about like raspberry jam, knowing it’s doomed, resisting electro shocks, brainwashing, various ruses designed to make the agent believe he can outwit the closed circuit cameras, and those malignant capture balloons, no realism here in this 17 episode carnivalesque farce, but The Prisoner is violent, paranoid, anticipating Guantanamo Bay despite its cartoonish exaggeration. The series withstands age even with the knowledge that the Soviet Union is dead, in definitive terms. While I am surprised at the quick success of Zelenskyy’s counteroffensive, any student of modern Russia knew Putin was in trouble when Shoigu couldn’t bring about Kyiv’s collapse. However long it may be until Putin is deposed, or not, this sinking writer doesn’t think Ukraine is entirely free from the threat of the Russian Bear, but the nail in Stalin’s coffin has been sealed, We can breathe a small sigh of relief.

Chameleons

"What _Call It Sleep_ has in common with these lasting works is a determined sense of art sustaining itself in a fallen world, a time of endless troubles, of political and social fright."-- Alfred Kazin

What Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman share in common is the secular submersion of their identity for commercialization, and this despite the fact that Kirk, surviving his new age counterpart, was better at playing the traumatized Zionist who finally gives in to psychiatric methodology. There is something off in Newman's performance in Exodus, something that is not missing in Hud or The Hustler, those devastating new wave heavies-- and what might be allegorical in Cool Hand Luke, not that I'd be able to ascertain if the southern penal system in the 60's would kill a white man, whose assimilated ethnicity was invisible, over vandalism which signified a personal insurgency. I am wondering if this is why Jewish liberalism is almost invariably an unwritten codicil to American Constitutional protections, not that Nazism won't remain as a faux specter, at least until my sister's great grandchildren begin to procreate.

Hud actually reminds me of one of Balzac's grandiose misers, which might be giving Newman too much credit for his uncompromising western brutalist. 

Fear of Crowds

I joined a literature group on Linked In with over 30k members, and, if I allow myself to get familiar, my posts on Blogger will probably lead to Crucifixion by affluent professionals with children, and I kid with ye not that the anxiety in my chest is palpable. I am the mouth who managed to get banned from Poets & Writers, the New York Times Book forum, that for writing an angry ditty about a crotch on a stick, which was stupid on both ends; the Literature Network decapitated me without so much as a gunshot over the bow; the Jamesians are probably alienated by my impatience with arcane detail (with the exception of their personalities), and I'm moving hell at high tide for a new source list. Twitter shrugs. Twits can tweet fuck if they want to, and no doubt finds the spastic dowager amusing. I don't worry about twitter. Twits pointing guns and threatening airlines are more problematic than my poverty and plight in Philadelphia. Do I stand by my reactionary output? My online travail is a reflection of lifelong victimization, swallowed whole in public welfare America.

Do I cower? Will Blogger close my account before I hit delete if I hit delete? There are more ways to push boundaries than by expressing outrage with expletives worn out from wards of state at the bottom to Under secretaries of state saying "Fuck the EU," on Russian audio capture. 

Hot Air

THE revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk-- the Economist, world authority.

I always do this. Convince myself to stay up and work after cat care, eating, defecation-- which always tires me-- and then manage to fritter my weariness away on an overly focused awareness of the tinnitus giving my ear drum a steady buzzing. The one PBS segment for which Miles O'Brien has my gratitude is his short piece on tinnitus. I do not know if I revolt after this post and push myself, but people, the one division between spastic brain damaged viewpoints and ablest viewpoints which may never be overcome is why you engage in such unnecessary behavior.

This balloon crash is an entirely manufactured tragedy, much like the deaths in Ukraine, which should not be happening. Those 14 page views from Ukraine sober me, because I have a distaste for Euro-centric sectarian deaths, and may get myself in serious trouble by giving Russian security services and the EU a piece of my mind. I'm a powerless, defenseless, unhappy writer living in one of America's oldest cities founded by Quakers, and I receive 14 page views from an Eastern European country killing itself over Russian hegemony and western capitalism. This because I am acerbic and callous, but not acerbic and callous enough not to condemn the Russian Federation for the deaths of Litvinenko and Berezovsky. Their murders represent a misguided savagery, even in a world where brutality is contingent, but not the way Putin's actors go about it. I joined a Linked In group, and if I get active on the site, I'll probably be banned due to this blog-- not that I think much of Linked In. It is less confusing than Google Plus, but what of it. Relatively educated people can be inane.

All technologies have risks, but hot air balloon gliding is an absolutely unnecessary form of flight.

Shards and fissures

I used to believe I'd automatically get myself excluded from the established press if I told the truth about inherent bias, but it is something of which most readers are suspicious of already, not without justification. Let me give a for instance. Eugene Robinson yesterday faults the administration's liberal self-righteousness in villainizing Putin's provocation in the Crimea, and indeed, Eugene's voice sates progressive outrage with the Bush Administration's 9/11 overreach. Nothing wrong with pandering to a liberal base trying to shore up a fading promise Barack Obama represented. If candidate Obama had not aspired to the presidency, one can speculate what he might have done as an inspirational leader on a more nuanced platform.

Like Robinson, I actually remember Grenada. I can neither affirm nor deny that it was an appropriate domino effect for Reagan era spheres of influence, but citing the US incursion on the petite Caribbean paradise doesn't explain Ukrainian turmoil. Neither does citing America's systemic destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. There is a minority viewpoint which doesn't equate Putin with Mussolini, which is not to be blind to modern Russian brutality. I am not unaware of ugly brute force in Russian penal systems, but this doesn't preclude Vladimir from acting out of legitimate national interests.

In that vein, plagiarism is not quite the crime journalists make it out to be, and that was what I was driving at in my column about fraud in my Examiner piece on Glass's inability to acquire a legal license. The editorial chicks who deign to approve or reject my pieces for a certain degree of promotional status didn't like it as newsworthy commentary. Certainly their prerogative, though I stayed up all night researching it, debating a call to the bar association contact. I am on to a thesis which matters, at least in relation to veracity. I do not believe my finished product, as such, does all that badly getting me where I want to go.  

I have to watch a very young Peter Falk play a spree killer for Hitchcock again; it was an interesting rationalization. Past informing the present; Falk did not mind spoofing himself, but he never played his audience false. I miss him. He loved life, tumbling with adversity and coming out of it with a twinkle in his eye. Tassoni had the same propensity toward sardonic affection in his gaze.

The Necessary Martyr Complex

The Russian backed destabilization of Ukraine represents the problem of autonomous regions trying to become nations. Analysts argue over what NATO is willing to do versus what Russia is willing to do to reabsorb the region. NATO, in typical fashion, marches up and down the field with the bagpipes harmonizing over the integrity of national sovereignty without being willing to give Russian re-expansion .a price tag. Putin's team plays spin the bottle in an attempt to reclaim parcels of its former empire. To what end? 

I remember the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a blurry cataclysm during the transition from Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin. There was a Time essayist who emerged during all this heady turbulence to inject a note of caution. Authoritarian regimes could always come back. Al Qaeda and Isis may have emerged as the tumor festering out of Muslim Brotherhood emasculated inferiority, similar to the Khmer Rouge in Southeast Asia. The Communist Party in China remains united. The Castro brothers seem determined that Cuba too remains socialized (as if the US was powerless to change that outcome, because the Bay of Pigs was a blot on Camelot best left buried in JFK's splattered brain), and Putin wants restoration, and yet, this is not the Cold War heating up again. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, these are museum pieces, replaced by Russian war lords and cronies who have ties to Putin's administration, and we've swapped the ominous notion of prescriptive ideology with the gentler concept of state model, yet Ukrainians are dying, and Europeans see the shadow of a fierce some bear on the horizon, as if to distract from more border tensions with the Chinese.

Ukraines have viewed my posts, perhaps marveling that American liberalism is not what it seems, and that it isn't. Few people actually have the luxury of freedom to do as they wish, especially in terms of migration. I do not know what to tell you, and your leaders were perceptive on the issue of  giving up your nuclear arsenal. If you had kept it perhaps Putin would have trekked at a different pace. I do not think you can rely on the European Union, and even if a speculative Republican replaces Obama, that Republican has to acknowledge the reality of your border with your former motherland-- but your blood should not be being shed to restore an imperial mindset no longer applicable. President Nixon's call for a "free Kiev" was strategic. I doubt he envisioned the collateral damage in the embedded feed currently breaking our hearts.