Chapter 17, Four Seasons in Damascus

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?-- James Joyce, Ulysses, pg 522

Balefully intrigued, I may look at Almost Human beyond the pilot, but it presupposes a successful reintegration of damaged individuals, and this strains credulity, regardless of how futuristic the techniques of law enforcement, and the expenses of production being such that we need preseason press conferences, though perhaps these have always existed since the creation of movie cameras. Despite this blog, and despite the fact that I hope to develop a few articles out of it, and know I am good enough to interview Jodie Foster, I am still studying however, and waiting for a respectful idea to percolate that is different but still publishable, despite all this, I loathe the industry most of the time, despite its significant intersection with literature. If we are not utterly lampooning on the side of Milton Berle and The Three Stooges, or depicting a hackneyed dime novel on the set, these days, we are rigorously imitating the collapse of the United States, and I can see Jay Carney playing himself in a film funded by the MPLA once the dust settles, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia realigns itself with China for regional hegemony.

It is actually about regime change, and I am angry enough to be dangerous. What holds me in check is not physical helplessness, though that is an issue; it is the knowledge that if I wanted to engage in an insurrection I'd lose, and also the understanding that I could not do any better than all the other assholes in politics. If NBC cancels Hannibal I will take to the streets. I understand Syrians are suffering, but the US has been engaged in failed military action in the Islamic world for over a decade. John McCain keeps rationalizing like a caveman hinging on our military superiority. That superiority isn't going to hold or even last very long when the social safety net keeps spitting out shattered lives.

Coefficient Flight to Precision

"Have you ever been to Philly sir? You have to be crazy to live there."-- Nicholas Cage, snickering his way out of involuntary confinement, circa 1984

In the days following 911, like most Americans, I wanted a response, and like most Americans, I did not really give much thought to what it meant, to wipe the Taliban off the face of the earth, indeed, to eradicate Al Qaida, radiate the group with isotopes so that it would suffer the worst kind of slow and incurable poisoning imaginable, and like most Americans, this slog bequeathed to us by Rumsfeld and Cheney, in conjunction with Iraq, has infected American power, weakened our collective blood stream with a persistent influenza, which still battles our white cell count, the victor undecided.

Although the current administration bears some criticism in how these conflicts have been resolved, commitment to any kind of goal lost in the process of leaving it on the shoulders of Karzai, the issue is less ideological and more prone to ridicule. The Chinese secret police quell their internal protest demonstrations more effectively than a democratic superpower and its Nato allies can achieve a goal, to pacify a territory that seems to lack any intuitive understanding of national sovereignty. This adds to the weight of my disdain for Kathryn Bigelow, which is unfortunate, but I will sift my way around to that. It has nothing to do with her importance in being, in the moment, an influential female director who tackles war theatre without apologies, leaving viewers to extrapolate and interpolate the harsh tactical angles, which, if we compare it to Alan Parker's Birdy, illustrates how much war films have changed, and how much studios feel they are willing to risk, perhaps as payback for our shame, or how much Cheney was willing to squander principle to justify the ends, and left us as dirty as the manifest destiny and violence against the indigenous left us with a blood guilt buried in textbooks and forgotten, only pulled out and referenced when liberals feel like kicking me in the teeth.

Birdy is an independent film for which I have a soft spot, personally and artistically. I saw it first with collegiate friend Tom, the memory of our give and take only growing in commensurate value as the years pass and I have no real links, or a bond, with anyone of his like, not for sexual affection, or even love, but the pleasure of his company, the value of aesthetic conversation. If I knew Alan Parker he would probably be a spirited ally, given the motifs he coaxed out of Cage and Modine, their resistance against control, poverty, and a bleak mechanized urban blight only accentuated by the heightened trauma of Vietnam.

Bigelow dispenses with the artifice of metaphorical salve to such wounds, but she should not be the decisive factor in how we repair the Clinton - Bush legacy, and Obama's tepid resolution of such a problematic paradigm. Killing Osama may have involved tactical danger, but it was otherwise a pointless exercise, since we seem to lack a vision for restoring the moral ascendancy of Pax America, and Bigelow gets to amuse herself being a modern GI Joe cocktease who does not condone torture, as if we expect her, and her producers, to say anything else. If her work is admirable, didactic, offers an interpretation to be celebrated, then hey, but to the extent that the public does not care, then the public needs castigation for refusing to be educated. Zero Dark Thirty should be an augmentation, and nothing more than that. Do I object if the Academy awards her? Certainly not, but if you allow her films to define the most successful terrorist plot in human history, then just give it up now, resign from the United Nations, and let the Mexican drug cartels retake our Western territory, and we can govern ourselves as effectively as the Castro's govern their island ninety miles from our shores.

Anticoagulant

"You can do better sister. I'm married." Richard Conte, giving the Eisenhower era bourgeois a tutorial on the benefits of denial.


When I listen to the American left and its moderate counter voices go at it over a film like Zero Dark Thirty, I throw up my hands, if not in despair, then at least, futility. Kathryn Bigelow glamorizes torture, depicts it as no more than a video game, or she does not. We need new gun control legislation, and while we empower everyone, hey, civil rights is not a suicide pact, and potentially violent people like James Holmes need to be contained, so let's take a page from the affluent psychiatrist paraplegic who eschews his other classification as a wheelchair user and return to the good old days of involuntary commitment, while cynicism is the intellectual reserve of the mediocre, like the spastic_dowager, who has taken many risks to leave her scarred psyche bleeding in her amateur neuro image scan without quite crossing the border toward anarchy, which, even if I did, probably would not be taken seriously, while still cognizant enough to know that eradication has been done many times in the course of civilization outpacing our capacity to cope, and that after we get over this massacre, that genocide, we lose more definition, and so what is the use of being slightly more forgiving of Mussolini for being an inept projection of a virile thug. Isn't she funny, the poor little spaz, getting a little attention from Europe, Asia, in fascination? Mockery? Perhaps as a target of exploitation. You don't even know what horror is you little gnome, so why not be more positive and upbeat while the US is in its superpower status, however much it is diffusing?

We have short memories, whether in geological historical time or merely related to the course of human history, and I do not have to spearhead this, and could be nice, engage in the pleasantry of willful blindness and small kindness, when merited, I just have not dropped those dimes.

I have not seen my sister's eldest girl, Nicole, since the death of her granny. She is in a Catholic college now, and do not know what she makes of my rift with her mother, if anything. Stephanie shields her from me, afraid of what I might say about granny's past, or her own mother and father's, for that matter. The topic of my sister's pregnancy termination is a prime example, one of my searing trump cards; it is not that I want to hurt nieces or nephews, but merely that I must refuse the censorship of manner, politeness, merely due to this notion that kids don't know. Parents kid themselves about what kids do or don't know, and I may be wrong, and Nicole's children will live in a better world of radical equality of the kind that frightened Orwell, Huxley, in their totalitarian era.

If anything survives on this rock after we engineer ourselves into --*, natural evolution might want to give the lucky sentient horseshoe toss to the cuttlefish; yes, I know, that is misanthropic mediocrity crying uncle.

We all have better days.