So the USA is ending its war with Iraq.
At the same time, the President is set to sign a bill that allows the military to detain American citizens indefinitely on American soil without trial or any semblance of due process.
I believe we now know who won the Iraq war.
Hint: not the USA.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
We get letters...
I have been cleaning up my filing system, throwing things out, perusing old manuscripts, rereading letters sent and received.
Most writers are familiar with weird correspondence, simply because there are so many weird people out there.
I submit, for your consideration, a letter sent to my English publisher by one Dominic Pickin, of Brighton. It is dated October 9, 2000. It was then forwarded to me, and I have cherished it in secret for more than ten years.
But that was selfish of me.
So here we go. My transcription is faithful, misspellings and all:
Dear sir or madam, to whom it may concern.
Re Stephen O'Sheas book The perfect heresy.
The general thrust of his argument seems to be if you're sympathetic to the Cathar position your a fool, a crank or even a Nazi. This is reminisent of a point of view I've often heard in nightclubs when a woman declines a mans offer of sex and he says to his mates 'she's a Lesbian' Could you please refrain from giving a platform to appologists for genocide. Thanks.
Yours sincerely
Dominic Pickin
Most writers are familiar with weird correspondence, simply because there are so many weird people out there.
I submit, for your consideration, a letter sent to my English publisher by one Dominic Pickin, of Brighton. It is dated October 9, 2000. It was then forwarded to me, and I have cherished it in secret for more than ten years.
But that was selfish of me.
So here we go. My transcription is faithful, misspellings and all:
Dear sir or madam, to whom it may concern.
Re Stephen O'Sheas book The perfect heresy.
The general thrust of his argument seems to be if you're sympathetic to the Cathar position your a fool, a crank or even a Nazi. This is reminisent of a point of view I've often heard in nightclubs when a woman declines a mans offer of sex and he says to his mates 'she's a Lesbian' Could you please refrain from giving a platform to appologists for genocide. Thanks.
Yours sincerely
Dominic Pickin
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Question of the Day
Beautiful, sunny, warm, creepy December day, and I am walking back home from a seaside park. To get to my place, I have to cross a wide pedestrian bridge spanning an eight-lane interstate.
At mid-span, I notice two young women standing to one side, holding a large sign that can be seen from the roadway. They are post-hipstah twentyish, a bit of hardware in their faces, but not of the Home Depot amplitude popular a few years ago. Their bare arms are purple-green tattoo canisters; their faces, white and impassive.
“Hey!,” I say. “What’s your sign say?”
Dutifully, they maneuver the huge sign to face me. It reads:
Sometimes Saying I Love You Is Not As Good As An Anal Plug!
“Wow!” I exclaim, genuinely impressed. “That’s quite a sign.”
They nod, bored.
“Have you been showing it around town?”
A shake of the head. “No, we just found it.”
“You found it?! Where?”
“Over there.”
A Stieg Larsson arm points further up the bridge to a stone bench, deserted save for two empty beer cans.
We exchange glances. “Well, do you agree with it?,” I ask.
Shrugs. “Seemed like a good idea.” Obeying some unheard signal, the girls then proceed to turn the cumbersome sign back around to face the highway.
I return home.
Now my question is this: Don’t you think these two young women are more socially useful than Lloyd Blankfein?
At mid-span, I notice two young women standing to one side, holding a large sign that can be seen from the roadway. They are post-hipstah twentyish, a bit of hardware in their faces, but not of the Home Depot amplitude popular a few years ago. Their bare arms are purple-green tattoo canisters; their faces, white and impassive.
“Hey!,” I say. “What’s your sign say?”
Dutifully, they maneuver the huge sign to face me. It reads:
Sometimes Saying I Love You Is Not As Good As An Anal Plug!
“Wow!” I exclaim, genuinely impressed. “That’s quite a sign.”
They nod, bored.
“Have you been showing it around town?”
A shake of the head. “No, we just found it.”
“You found it?! Where?”
“Over there.”
A Stieg Larsson arm points further up the bridge to a stone bench, deserted save for two empty beer cans.
We exchange glances. “Well, do you agree with it?,” I ask.
Shrugs. “Seemed like a good idea.” Obeying some unheard signal, the girls then proceed to turn the cumbersome sign back around to face the highway.
I return home.
Now my question is this: Don’t you think these two young women are more socially useful than Lloyd Blankfein?
Monday, November 28, 2011
Musical Madeleine
A few weeks ago my elder daughter had her sixteenth birthday.
Sweet.
But bittersweet, too.
On that day seven years ago – on her ninth birthday – my mother (her grandmother) died.
This year we did not celebrate her birthday on the proper day. Why? Her youth orchestra was performing a concert. A piano virtuoso from Russia had been flown in. The piece to be played was Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
“You’re going to like it, Daddy,” she said after emerging from the final rehearsal that morning. I was surprised, for she never hypes any of her performances. Usually, you can’t get even the shadow of a sneak preview.
So as I took my seat in the auditorium and the birthday girl took hers onstage, I was prepared to be transported.
And I was. Within the first few measures – the spectacular sprint of a beginning to the concerto – I was in Montreal, in the early 1960s. I was sitting in my shorts, playing with a red firetruck. I was the lone child in the house, as my older brothers now went to school. On the other side of room, standing at the ironing board, my mother, her coal-black hair swaying a little as she hummed along to Rachmaninoff.
The LP was Romantic Piano Concertos. She did housework to the strains of such pieces as Variations on a Theme by Paganini, as I studied and restudied the album cover on the floor, in my dad’s armchair, on the sofa (or chesterfield, as they called it). Slashing, vertical, black and white photographs of pianists in ecstasy.
The piece ended. My mother came back to herself, smiled at me from across the room, her lipstick scarlet.
I was on my feet, applauding my daughter.
Thank you, Sergei.
Sweet.
But bittersweet, too.
On that day seven years ago – on her ninth birthday – my mother (her grandmother) died.
This year we did not celebrate her birthday on the proper day. Why? Her youth orchestra was performing a concert. A piano virtuoso from Russia had been flown in. The piece to be played was Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
“You’re going to like it, Daddy,” she said after emerging from the final rehearsal that morning. I was surprised, for she never hypes any of her performances. Usually, you can’t get even the shadow of a sneak preview.
So as I took my seat in the auditorium and the birthday girl took hers onstage, I was prepared to be transported.
And I was. Within the first few measures – the spectacular sprint of a beginning to the concerto – I was in Montreal, in the early 1960s. I was sitting in my shorts, playing with a red firetruck. I was the lone child in the house, as my older brothers now went to school. On the other side of room, standing at the ironing board, my mother, her coal-black hair swaying a little as she hummed along to Rachmaninoff.
The LP was Romantic Piano Concertos. She did housework to the strains of such pieces as Variations on a Theme by Paganini, as I studied and restudied the album cover on the floor, in my dad’s armchair, on the sofa (or chesterfield, as they called it). Slashing, vertical, black and white photographs of pianists in ecstasy.
The piece ended. My mother came back to herself, smiled at me from across the room, her lipstick scarlet.
I was on my feet, applauding my daughter.
Thank you, Sergei.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Medieval Pole Dance
For those of you who live near or close to the pulsing center of the universe, please be informed that you are cordially invited to a reading/lecture to be given by me in Providence at Books on the Square, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 20.
I will be talking about my new book “The Friar of Carcassonne: Revolt Against the Inquisition in the Last Days of the Cathars.” So far reaction has been fairly postive to this latest histo-excursion of mine; I invite you to visit my website – stephenosheaonline.com – for more information on the book.
Suffice to say that it’s a tale told by a fool for history, full of ephemeral victories and changes of fortunes, peopled by malevolent inquisitors, venomous courtiers, and one very very brave man: Brother Bernard Délicieux.
It ends badly. That’s because it’s a true story.
I will be talking about my new book “The Friar of Carcassonne: Revolt Against the Inquisition in the Last Days of the Cathars.” So far reaction has been fairly postive to this latest histo-excursion of mine; I invite you to visit my website – stephenosheaonline.com – for more information on the book.
Suffice to say that it’s a tale told by a fool for history, full of ephemeral victories and changes of fortunes, peopled by malevolent inquisitors, venomous courtiers, and one very very brave man: Brother Bernard Délicieux.
It ends badly. That’s because it’s a true story.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Today's Reading
"Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York."
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Shock Treatment
Montreal’s left-winger is about to take a slap shot…
No, wait.
I feel a gentle breeze on my face.
Strange.
I open my eyes. Yes, there is a breeze.
Not again! I look out the window from my bed, expecting to see trees bending in the gale.
The darkness of 4 a.m. Nothing but silence, the glow of streetlights.
Streetlights?!
Then I hear it. A gentle whir.
I look up. In the dimness, the blades of an overhead fan turning and turning.
Electricity! For the first time since Sunday.
Thanks for nothing, Irene.
No, wait.
I feel a gentle breeze on my face.
Strange.
I open my eyes. Yes, there is a breeze.
Not again! I look out the window from my bed, expecting to see trees bending in the gale.
The darkness of 4 a.m. Nothing but silence, the glow of streetlights.
Streetlights?!
Then I hear it. A gentle whir.
I look up. In the dimness, the blades of an overhead fan turning and turning.
Electricity! For the first time since Sunday.
Thanks for nothing, Irene.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Portrait of a Lady 5
So, Lance Armstronglike, I mount my trusty metallic steed and wheel through the lazy summer heat.
I come to an intersection, a 4-way stop. I am the first vehicle there, the only other candidate is a small red car, with Mass plates, approaching from my right, still twenty feet away from its stop sign.
So I proceed, thinking idly about Eleanor of Aquitaine, for some reason.
Thank god for peripheral vision. And animal reflexes.
The red car guns it, sails through the stop. I slide to a violent halt, fall onto the pavement.
The woman in the car whizzes past, two feet away from me. The window is down. She yells.
“Fuckhead!”
Then drives on.
I come to an intersection, a 4-way stop. I am the first vehicle there, the only other candidate is a small red car, with Mass plates, approaching from my right, still twenty feet away from its stop sign.
So I proceed, thinking idly about Eleanor of Aquitaine, for some reason.
Thank god for peripheral vision. And animal reflexes.
The red car guns it, sails through the stop. I slide to a violent halt, fall onto the pavement.
The woman in the car whizzes past, two feet away from me. The window is down. She yells.
“Fuckhead!”
Then drives on.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Oh Karmada!
So Canada is a safe, sorta William-n-Kate kind of place, right? Maybe not.
May:
I’m at a writers’ conference in Toronto. A friend and I decide to go visit a Very Famous Writer in Stratford, Ontario. We take the Gardiner Expressway, an elevated lakeside highway built too long ago to be safe. I tell my friend that I almost died there, when, in my mid-twenties, I was a courier and had a blow-out. Since there are no shoulders to speak of on the roadway, I had to go out for three-second periods to wield the tire iron and then rush back to safety in front of my car as the traffic whizzed past.
It took an hour to change the tire. I drove to my boss’s place (a print shop) and quit, right then and there. I had been terrified.
It’s curious, I say to my friend as we get off the Gardiner and onto the QEW expressway, I almost died here, in the same stretch of road where I was born.
The brown hulk of St. Joseph’s Hospital looms up on our right as we barrel onward.
Your story reminds me of Andre Dubus, my friend says. Dubus was an American writer of renown who was seriously injured when he pulled over to help someone and then was hit by a car. He was a mess, and died a few months afterwards.
We drive along talking about Dubus. We turn north, onto the mega-expressway that separates the city of Toronto from the mega-suburb of Mississauga. For those of you reading this who do not know Toronto, that city has a Brobdingnagian ring road, at one point encompassing up to 24 lanes of high-speed traffic. I’m not kidding. Heading north, we are on one of these beasts.
Blam!
A blow-out. We look at each other.
I slow miserably, and come to a halt in a tiny V-shaped piece of pavement, where two six-lane expressways come together. It is twenty yards long, at most.
We sit in silence. The car is rocked, literally rocked, by blasts of air from the transport-trailers hurtling beside us, less than than three feet away on either side.
I have to get out and see which tire had blown. The way I stopped makes the driver’s side almost flush with the inside lane of one of the expressways. I check the mirror. Not enough time, not enough time… now! I jump out of my seat, slam the door shut and race to the back of the car. A huge truck honks loudly, insistently, foghorn-like, as it whizzes past at 70 mph.
The flat is the right front tire. On the right-hand side, there is a bit more breathing room, perhaps two feet from the roadway, so I get in the back seat on that side and call CAA, telling them I am a member of AAA.
Sure, they say, we’ll have someone over in a sec.
Fifteen minutes pass. We are rocking in the wash of trucks.
Suddenly, a flashing of lights. A towtruck has maneuvered behind us.
A south Asian man approaches. We have a conversation near the trunk of my car.
CAA will take hours to come. For one hundred dollars I will tow you to a garage.
I demur. Say that CAA promised to come.
Okay, he says, you’ll see.
Forty-five more minutes. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Another truck, another south Asian.
For forty dollars I change your tire.
Deal.
The man squats down, takes out the VW key I’ve given him. Then the tire iron. The bolts have been machine tightened. He strains at them, strains.
He loses his balance, staggers back two paces, into the roadway. I grab his sleeve and pull him toward me.
A transport-trailer opens its foghorn and barrels past an instant later.
The man smiles. Then changes the tire.
I give him eighty bucks, then after waiting ten minutes for an opening, gun the car back onto the roadway.
June:
Celsius or Fahrenheit, it is unbelievably hot. I crawl out of Montreal at rush hour. At last the traffic thins, and progress is made toward the international frontier between Quebec and Ontario.
At the town of Rigaud, on the Quebec side, I stop for gas. The wind whips up suddenly, operatically. I look to the west, the direction in which I will be driving.
The sky is gun-metal green, riven with jagged bolts of lightning.
Scary.
I get back on the road, but the wind builds, with gusts buffeting the car. At times I feel as if I’m driving on two wheels.
Ten feet above the roadway, a tree branch flies past. Not a twig, not a few leaves, an entire, mature branch. I see a sign for an exit one kilometer distant.
But then the rain comes. It is so heavy that you cannot distinguish drops. It’s as if someone is dumping out a bucket from the sky. The volume of water is so great that the curtain of white lightning ahead is extinguished.
Ten miles an hour, five… I inch the car toward the promised exit. Cars have pulled over onto the shoulder, but I want to get into a building, where the wind can’t pick me up and toss me away like a rag doll.
The rain relents, then stops. Good news, yes, but the surrounding sky is now black, green… and yellow and white with constant discharges of thunderbolts. The wind screams.
At last I make the exit. Down the ramp and into a parking lot full of rocking vehicles. A Tim Horton’s donut shop.
I put my shoulder into the car door to open it. I step outside. The wind slams the door shut.
I can hear nothing as I bend into the fury and cross the lot. I stagger, almost lose my balance.
At last I am inside… Where is everybody?
At the back of the shop, employees and customers. White-faced. They are as far away as possible from the big picture windows. Someone beckons me to join them.
Later I read that the funnel touched down about three miles away from us. And headed the other way.
July:
It’s late and I have the munchies. On my walk back to my hotel in Ottawa I decide to spring for a slice at Pizza Pizza. It’s about midnight.
As I am pointing to the slice I want, a scream. Yelling.
Something has happened outside.
The clerk and I go out the door.
A junkie chick is wailing, a man with a backpack is squatting. Before the pair, prone on the pavement, a man.
He is bald, in his late twenties. His shirt begins to swell slightly, then it wells out. Blood. Lots of it.
“Stabbed,” the clerk says.
The crouching figures gently presses his hand on the reddening shirt, as if to staunch the flow. Hopeless.
I take a step forward. There is an open wound in his neck, too. The man is soundless.
A cop car, then another. Sirens. More cops, paramedics, ambulance.
One cop tells us not to leave the scene. He herds us, strangely, even closer to the body as the medics whale away at the victim’s chest in an effort to revive him. We all stand together in a blizzard of police misery lights… blue, red, white, yellow, red, blue…
The man dies.
He is strapped on a gurney and wheeled away.
The police question us. The clerk, who is known to the police (there are drunken late-night brawls at Pizza Pizza every now and then), at last convinces Ottawa’s finest that neither of us could be the assailant nor could have seen the assailant. I was ordering a slice at the time of the incident, inside the shop.
Back in my hotel room, sitting on the bed. I look down.
I get up and go into the bathroom to wash the blood off my sneakers.
May:
I’m at a writers’ conference in Toronto. A friend and I decide to go visit a Very Famous Writer in Stratford, Ontario. We take the Gardiner Expressway, an elevated lakeside highway built too long ago to be safe. I tell my friend that I almost died there, when, in my mid-twenties, I was a courier and had a blow-out. Since there are no shoulders to speak of on the roadway, I had to go out for three-second periods to wield the tire iron and then rush back to safety in front of my car as the traffic whizzed past.
It took an hour to change the tire. I drove to my boss’s place (a print shop) and quit, right then and there. I had been terrified.
It’s curious, I say to my friend as we get off the Gardiner and onto the QEW expressway, I almost died here, in the same stretch of road where I was born.
The brown hulk of St. Joseph’s Hospital looms up on our right as we barrel onward.
Your story reminds me of Andre Dubus, my friend says. Dubus was an American writer of renown who was seriously injured when he pulled over to help someone and then was hit by a car. He was a mess, and died a few months afterwards.
We drive along talking about Dubus. We turn north, onto the mega-expressway that separates the city of Toronto from the mega-suburb of Mississauga. For those of you reading this who do not know Toronto, that city has a Brobdingnagian ring road, at one point encompassing up to 24 lanes of high-speed traffic. I’m not kidding. Heading north, we are on one of these beasts.
Blam!
A blow-out. We look at each other.
I slow miserably, and come to a halt in a tiny V-shaped piece of pavement, where two six-lane expressways come together. It is twenty yards long, at most.
We sit in silence. The car is rocked, literally rocked, by blasts of air from the transport-trailers hurtling beside us, less than than three feet away on either side.
I have to get out and see which tire had blown. The way I stopped makes the driver’s side almost flush with the inside lane of one of the expressways. I check the mirror. Not enough time, not enough time… now! I jump out of my seat, slam the door shut and race to the back of the car. A huge truck honks loudly, insistently, foghorn-like, as it whizzes past at 70 mph.
The flat is the right front tire. On the right-hand side, there is a bit more breathing room, perhaps two feet from the roadway, so I get in the back seat on that side and call CAA, telling them I am a member of AAA.
Sure, they say, we’ll have someone over in a sec.
Fifteen minutes pass. We are rocking in the wash of trucks.
Suddenly, a flashing of lights. A towtruck has maneuvered behind us.
A south Asian man approaches. We have a conversation near the trunk of my car.
CAA will take hours to come. For one hundred dollars I will tow you to a garage.
I demur. Say that CAA promised to come.
Okay, he says, you’ll see.
Forty-five more minutes. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Another truck, another south Asian.
For forty dollars I change your tire.
Deal.
The man squats down, takes out the VW key I’ve given him. Then the tire iron. The bolts have been machine tightened. He strains at them, strains.
He loses his balance, staggers back two paces, into the roadway. I grab his sleeve and pull him toward me.
A transport-trailer opens its foghorn and barrels past an instant later.
The man smiles. Then changes the tire.
I give him eighty bucks, then after waiting ten minutes for an opening, gun the car back onto the roadway.
June:
Celsius or Fahrenheit, it is unbelievably hot. I crawl out of Montreal at rush hour. At last the traffic thins, and progress is made toward the international frontier between Quebec and Ontario.
At the town of Rigaud, on the Quebec side, I stop for gas. The wind whips up suddenly, operatically. I look to the west, the direction in which I will be driving.
The sky is gun-metal green, riven with jagged bolts of lightning.
Scary.
I get back on the road, but the wind builds, with gusts buffeting the car. At times I feel as if I’m driving on two wheels.
Ten feet above the roadway, a tree branch flies past. Not a twig, not a few leaves, an entire, mature branch. I see a sign for an exit one kilometer distant.
But then the rain comes. It is so heavy that you cannot distinguish drops. It’s as if someone is dumping out a bucket from the sky. The volume of water is so great that the curtain of white lightning ahead is extinguished.
Ten miles an hour, five… I inch the car toward the promised exit. Cars have pulled over onto the shoulder, but I want to get into a building, where the wind can’t pick me up and toss me away like a rag doll.
The rain relents, then stops. Good news, yes, but the surrounding sky is now black, green… and yellow and white with constant discharges of thunderbolts. The wind screams.
At last I make the exit. Down the ramp and into a parking lot full of rocking vehicles. A Tim Horton’s donut shop.
I put my shoulder into the car door to open it. I step outside. The wind slams the door shut.
I can hear nothing as I bend into the fury and cross the lot. I stagger, almost lose my balance.
At last I am inside… Where is everybody?
At the back of the shop, employees and customers. White-faced. They are as far away as possible from the big picture windows. Someone beckons me to join them.
Later I read that the funnel touched down about three miles away from us. And headed the other way.
July:
It’s late and I have the munchies. On my walk back to my hotel in Ottawa I decide to spring for a slice at Pizza Pizza. It’s about midnight.
As I am pointing to the slice I want, a scream. Yelling.
Something has happened outside.
The clerk and I go out the door.
A junkie chick is wailing, a man with a backpack is squatting. Before the pair, prone on the pavement, a man.
He is bald, in his late twenties. His shirt begins to swell slightly, then it wells out. Blood. Lots of it.
“Stabbed,” the clerk says.
The crouching figures gently presses his hand on the reddening shirt, as if to staunch the flow. Hopeless.
I take a step forward. There is an open wound in his neck, too. The man is soundless.
A cop car, then another. Sirens. More cops, paramedics, ambulance.
One cop tells us not to leave the scene. He herds us, strangely, even closer to the body as the medics whale away at the victim’s chest in an effort to revive him. We all stand together in a blizzard of police misery lights… blue, red, white, yellow, red, blue…
The man dies.
He is strapped on a gurney and wheeled away.
The police question us. The clerk, who is known to the police (there are drunken late-night brawls at Pizza Pizza every now and then), at last convinces Ottawa’s finest that neither of us could be the assailant nor could have seen the assailant. I was ordering a slice at the time of the incident, inside the shop.
Back in my hotel room, sitting on the bed. I look down.
I get up and go into the bathroom to wash the blood off my sneakers.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Portrait of a Lady 4
Early this morning, in this Al Gore of a summer, I was, as usual, cooking up some green eggs and ham on the sidewalk outside my building.
It was hot.
On the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, a woman in shorts and a tank top was walking her dog. It was a small, malevolent thing, a roll of elastic bands covered with hair.
It stopped, squatted and -- kerplooey! -- had a poop.
When it was finished, dog and owner walked on. Then, about a half-block away, they stopped.
The woman extracted a tissue from her pocket, bent down and wiped the dog's rear end. Then she straightened up and threw the tissue to the ground.
They rounded the corner and disappeared.
I think I'll stop cooking on the sidewalk.
It was hot.
On the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, a woman in shorts and a tank top was walking her dog. It was a small, malevolent thing, a roll of elastic bands covered with hair.
It stopped, squatted and -- kerplooey! -- had a poop.
When it was finished, dog and owner walked on. Then, about a half-block away, they stopped.
The woman extracted a tissue from her pocket, bent down and wiped the dog's rear end. Then she straightened up and threw the tissue to the ground.
They rounded the corner and disappeared.
I think I'll stop cooking on the sidewalk.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Co-Dependence Day
I spent the day celebrating the anniversary of Saladin’s glorious victory over the Crusader scum at the Horns of Hattin, on July 4, 1187.
No, I watched Inside Job, the documentary about the all-American fraudsters who almost brought down the world economy and got away with it.
Actually, I read Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, and realized that the Republican base is just that: base.
Truthfully, I attended a free seaside concert, where the Rhode Island Philharmonic performed Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, a venerable Independence Day tradition that evokes a French defeat, the public dislike of France being the only remaining respectable bigotry.
Okay, I put on Miles Davis and thought, at least there’s that… America invented jazz.
Happy Fourth.
No, I watched Inside Job, the documentary about the all-American fraudsters who almost brought down the world economy and got away with it.
Actually, I read Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, and realized that the Republican base is just that: base.
Truthfully, I attended a free seaside concert, where the Rhode Island Philharmonic performed Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, a venerable Independence Day tradition that evokes a French defeat, the public dislike of France being the only remaining respectable bigotry.
Okay, I put on Miles Davis and thought, at least there’s that… America invented jazz.
Happy Fourth.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Portrait of a Lady #3
My tween daughter and I conducted a bicycle reconnaissance mission of enemy territory yesterday. We glided silently through its alien streets until, creeped out, we decided to sneak back across the international frontier and return to headquarters.
The intersection of Ridge and Pidge Streets (I’m not making that up) marks the beginning of the DMZ, that grey intermediate zone between free, funky Providence and the dark mystery city of Pawtucket to the north.
We crossed without incident, the border guards apparently fraternizing at a strip-mall Dunkin’ Donuts.
Relieved, we made a stop at an ice-cream shop. The tween operative went inside to place the order, while I remained outside with our two-wheeled stealth vehicles.
I thought we were safe.
Across the street, on a park bench, sat a man about my age, kinda preppy, trim grey hair, khakis, white-bread. Beside him, a young woman in an electrifying red dress, low-cut, high-hemmed with a Marilyn flare of scarlet flounces. She had long, raven-black hair, which she shook frequently, dark sunglasses and a smile that flashed like arc-welding even at a distance of about a hundred feet. Her shapely tan legs, crossed now, ended in high-heel leather sandals whose straps climbed the lower half of her calves.
They appeared to be in desultory conversation, two strangers, a middle-aged sparrow with a sex-bomb cardinal, sitting comfortably in the late-afternoon sunlight.
I tried to look away.
I tried. Really.
I knew I had been unsuccessful when the woman stood up. She was looking at me. Then, to my horror, she started walking straight in my direction.
The whole infernal machinery was set in motion as she crossed the few yards of grass to the curbside opposite me. Hips swaying, dress dancing, her red lips forming a slight, knowing smile.
On the curb across the street she performed some mysterious move with her torso that made what little that had been left to the imagination about what lay beneath the red fabric smaller still. Astonishing. The move would have stopped traffic, had it not already come to a mesmerized halt.
She stepped off the curb and crossed the roadway, eternal.
At precisely this moment my daughter emerged from the shop and handed me my ice-cream cone. By the time I had straightened up, cone in hand, the lady in red was but three feet away. A blinding, almost thermonuclear smile… but she did not step up onto the sidewalk. Instead she opened the trunk of the car parked in front of the shop. Her car. She threw in her purse then slammed the trunk shut.
I sat down in a café chair, opposite my daughter. I did not look across the street for a long moment.
But then I couldn’t help myself. The two had left the bench and were walking further into the park, the boring john and the swaying, scarlet woman.
When I turned back to my daughter, she said, “Do you know that lady, Daddy?”
“Sort of,” I replied.
As an archetype, I thought.
The intersection of Ridge and Pidge Streets (I’m not making that up) marks the beginning of the DMZ, that grey intermediate zone between free, funky Providence and the dark mystery city of Pawtucket to the north.
We crossed without incident, the border guards apparently fraternizing at a strip-mall Dunkin’ Donuts.
Relieved, we made a stop at an ice-cream shop. The tween operative went inside to place the order, while I remained outside with our two-wheeled stealth vehicles.
I thought we were safe.
Across the street, on a park bench, sat a man about my age, kinda preppy, trim grey hair, khakis, white-bread. Beside him, a young woman in an electrifying red dress, low-cut, high-hemmed with a Marilyn flare of scarlet flounces. She had long, raven-black hair, which she shook frequently, dark sunglasses and a smile that flashed like arc-welding even at a distance of about a hundred feet. Her shapely tan legs, crossed now, ended in high-heel leather sandals whose straps climbed the lower half of her calves.
They appeared to be in desultory conversation, two strangers, a middle-aged sparrow with a sex-bomb cardinal, sitting comfortably in the late-afternoon sunlight.
I tried to look away.
I tried. Really.
I knew I had been unsuccessful when the woman stood up. She was looking at me. Then, to my horror, she started walking straight in my direction.
The whole infernal machinery was set in motion as she crossed the few yards of grass to the curbside opposite me. Hips swaying, dress dancing, her red lips forming a slight, knowing smile.
On the curb across the street she performed some mysterious move with her torso that made what little that had been left to the imagination about what lay beneath the red fabric smaller still. Astonishing. The move would have stopped traffic, had it not already come to a mesmerized halt.
She stepped off the curb and crossed the roadway, eternal.
At precisely this moment my daughter emerged from the shop and handed me my ice-cream cone. By the time I had straightened up, cone in hand, the lady in red was but three feet away. A blinding, almost thermonuclear smile… but she did not step up onto the sidewalk. Instead she opened the trunk of the car parked in front of the shop. Her car. She threw in her purse then slammed the trunk shut.
I sat down in a café chair, opposite my daughter. I did not look across the street for a long moment.
But then I couldn’t help myself. The two had left the bench and were walking further into the park, the boring john and the swaying, scarlet woman.
When I turned back to my daughter, she said, “Do you know that lady, Daddy?”
“Sort of,” I replied.
As an archetype, I thought.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
How to dine alone
So my new book on a revolt against the Inquisition in medieval France is in the final throes of readying itself for a readership rivaling Lady Gaga’s fan base in numbers. Or thereabouts.
New York e-mails regularly with slings-and-arrows queries about such-and-such a passage, such-and-such a quote. As the story concerns fourteenth-century monks hurling insults at each other from various pulpits and ox carts, thereby causing burghers and burghesses to run over the cobblestones in joyous riot, à la – take your pick – Pamplona or Vancouver, there is a lot of colorful language and overheated rhetoric from the men in the dresses. And their references have to be nailed down, identified, explained, as required in any book of non-fiction histoprose.
A young person of my acquaintance came over for dinner last night. She admired my goldfish, my air-conditioning unit, my attempts to keep squalor at bay. Then she saw my desk. On it sat my computer and an edition of the Holy Bible.
Nothing else.
She looked at me. “What’s with that?”
“It’s for the book,” I said, unthinking. “I’m doing a lot of fact-checking.”
Horror crept across her beautiful Blue-State features. Her gaze darted nervously about the room, as if looking for carry-on bags packed for the Rapture.
“Fact… checking?!”
I then knew what it was like to be damned.
New York e-mails regularly with slings-and-arrows queries about such-and-such a passage, such-and-such a quote. As the story concerns fourteenth-century monks hurling insults at each other from various pulpits and ox carts, thereby causing burghers and burghesses to run over the cobblestones in joyous riot, à la – take your pick – Pamplona or Vancouver, there is a lot of colorful language and overheated rhetoric from the men in the dresses. And their references have to be nailed down, identified, explained, as required in any book of non-fiction histoprose.
A young person of my acquaintance came over for dinner last night. She admired my goldfish, my air-conditioning unit, my attempts to keep squalor at bay. Then she saw my desk. On it sat my computer and an edition of the Holy Bible.
Nothing else.
She looked at me. “What’s with that?”
“It’s for the book,” I said, unthinking. “I’m doing a lot of fact-checking.”
Horror crept across her beautiful Blue-State features. Her gaze darted nervously about the room, as if looking for carry-on bags packed for the Rapture.
“Fact… checking?!”
I then knew what it was like to be damned.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Never Say Neverland
With apologies to Johnny Depp and Justin Bieber.
Never write a bibilographical essay while hungover. Books that were boring become personal affronts; those that were annoying, crimes against humanity.
Never go to online dating sites and state that the principal reason you’re looking for a relationship is to find someone who can apply eczema cream on a place you cannot quite reach. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work.
Never use your turn signal in Rhode Island. It confuses people.
Never quibble with a local about the excellence of Dunkin’ Donuts.
Never invite two French people who do not know each other over to dinner. They usually end up hating each other.
Never ask a soccer mom how her day was, unless you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.
Never say, “Okay, I’ll read your stuff.”
Never get romantically involved with a divorce lawyer.
Never suggest that Harry and Hermione should actually hook up.
Never turn on the tv evening news expecting to learn something.
Never read David Brooks.
Never eat a pizza topped with pineapple chunks.
Never continue a geopolitical conversation with someone who says “the Arab street.”
Never take your hookah into the bathroom.
Never trust anyone wearing a necktie. Especially if it’s the only thing they’ve got on.
Never tell a woman she looks like your mother.
And never ever tell a woman she looks like her mother.
Never write a bibilographical essay while hungover. Books that were boring become personal affronts; those that were annoying, crimes against humanity.
Never go to online dating sites and state that the principal reason you’re looking for a relationship is to find someone who can apply eczema cream on a place you cannot quite reach. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work.
Never use your turn signal in Rhode Island. It confuses people.
Never quibble with a local about the excellence of Dunkin’ Donuts.
Never invite two French people who do not know each other over to dinner. They usually end up hating each other.
Never ask a soccer mom how her day was, unless you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.
Never say, “Okay, I’ll read your stuff.”
Never get romantically involved with a divorce lawyer.
Never suggest that Harry and Hermione should actually hook up.
Never turn on the tv evening news expecting to learn something.
Never read David Brooks.
Never eat a pizza topped with pineapple chunks.
Never continue a geopolitical conversation with someone who says “the Arab street.”
Never take your hookah into the bathroom.
Never trust anyone wearing a necktie. Especially if it’s the only thing they’ve got on.
Never tell a woman she looks like your mother.
And never ever tell a woman she looks like her mother.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Portrait of a Lady 2
I was driving from Moira to Bombay, way way upstate. The sun shone, one of the first warm days of the spring. I passed a herd of bison munching on a dirty bale of hay that had been left for them in a sloping field.
Around the bend, and there over to the left stood a man at a horse-drawn plow. Two boys, his young sons, presumably, scrabbled away at the clods of muck obstructing the forward movement of the plow. The muddy hay of winter lay strewn across their expanse of land, which was unplowed and unplanted. They worked hard in the sunshine. The man wore a straw hat, an immaculate white shirt obscured by a black vest and jacket, and suspenders that held up his stovepipe black trousers. On his feet, leather boots. His boys wore exactly the same thing.
At last a T-junction and I turned west, on the road to the bridge to Canada. This was the Akewsasne Reservation, the heart of Mohawk country. Their Iroquois meeting house, always reliable for militancy, stood by the roadside festooned with a large billboard that read: “Yes, terrorists pass through Akwesasne! They’re called NY State Police, the FBI, US Border Control, ATF agents.”
I drove past a large casino, an IGA complex, a warehouse under construction. On the shoulder of the road in front of the last sat a buggy, with a trestle table set out. The frail black buggy looked like a toy that had somehow been multiplied in size by some 3-d printer. Between it and the table, petticoats flapped in the breeze on a clothesline. A sign read: “Baked Goods For Sale.” A horse was hitched to a post nearby. No more than twenty feet away, at the half-completed warehouse, a couple of young Mohawk men squatted on their haunches, cigarette smoke curling around the yellow hard hats. They appeared to be watching the horse, the buggy, the clothesline and the sale table.
Fifty feet further on, I turned into the parking lot of the Bear’s Den Trading Post, my last stop in the USA, where I habitually get a tankful of cheap gas and a big bag of discount Swedish fish. The post was its usual human kaleidoscope: impossibly huge upstate New Yorkers eating piles of fried things in the diner, ZZ-Top truck drivers with hair stringy and wet from using the showers in the back, French-Canadian families gripping their cartons of tax-free cigarettes while exclaiming loudly about jewelry in the Iroquois fashion store, and the usual bustle of bathroom-bound children.
Before the cooler, there she was. A tall, graceful young woman. On her head was a stiff brown bonnet hiding all of her hair and sloping bell-like down to her chin, where it was fastened by a shiny brown strip of fabric. Wrapped around her shoulders was a black woollen cape that fell down to just above her ankles. Beneath that a full-length navy-blue dress devoid of any grace notes, buttoned firmly up across her bosom and up to her neck, but still cinched at the waist, nonetheless. On her feet, handmade leather shoes, with rough coils of black-dyed cord running through a dozen or so eyelets.
Her arms hung down at her sides. At their end, holding her hands on either side, were two little girls dressed exactly the same way, down to the smallest detail. They must have been three years old, at the most.
The remarkable threesome looked at the sodas, designer water bottles and vitamin drinks, clearly nonplussed. The little girls had obviously never seen the likes of it before. Neither, perhaps, had the mother. The girls’ free hands timidly pointed out things, questioningly. The young woman spoke to them quietly, without reproach, in medieval German.
They moved on to the candy bar, tortilla chip and breath mint display. They stood before it, indecisive. The subdued German continued. From their vantage point in the Iroquois fashion store, the French-Canadian families could now see the woman and her daughters. The twang of their conversation dulled, quieted, fell to a whisper.
At last a decision was made. I got behind the Amish trio in the line to the cash register, my Swedish fish in hand. When it was their turn, the young woman pulled out from the fastnesses of her cape an enormous wad of dollar bills. She stripped a couple of singles off and wordlessly placed them on the counter. A gum-snapping Mohawk girl took them up and gave her back the change.
After paying, I went out to the parking lot. I could see the three walking back along the shoulder of the roadway. The girls still held their mother’s hands, but in their free hands were clutched yellow plastic wrappers, long and lurid. They both held a beef-jerky.
They reached the buggy. The two braves stood up and went back inside the warehouse to work.
Around the bend, and there over to the left stood a man at a horse-drawn plow. Two boys, his young sons, presumably, scrabbled away at the clods of muck obstructing the forward movement of the plow. The muddy hay of winter lay strewn across their expanse of land, which was unplowed and unplanted. They worked hard in the sunshine. The man wore a straw hat, an immaculate white shirt obscured by a black vest and jacket, and suspenders that held up his stovepipe black trousers. On his feet, leather boots. His boys wore exactly the same thing.
At last a T-junction and I turned west, on the road to the bridge to Canada. This was the Akewsasne Reservation, the heart of Mohawk country. Their Iroquois meeting house, always reliable for militancy, stood by the roadside festooned with a large billboard that read: “Yes, terrorists pass through Akwesasne! They’re called NY State Police, the FBI, US Border Control, ATF agents.”
I drove past a large casino, an IGA complex, a warehouse under construction. On the shoulder of the road in front of the last sat a buggy, with a trestle table set out. The frail black buggy looked like a toy that had somehow been multiplied in size by some 3-d printer. Between it and the table, petticoats flapped in the breeze on a clothesline. A sign read: “Baked Goods For Sale.” A horse was hitched to a post nearby. No more than twenty feet away, at the half-completed warehouse, a couple of young Mohawk men squatted on their haunches, cigarette smoke curling around the yellow hard hats. They appeared to be watching the horse, the buggy, the clothesline and the sale table.
Fifty feet further on, I turned into the parking lot of the Bear’s Den Trading Post, my last stop in the USA, where I habitually get a tankful of cheap gas and a big bag of discount Swedish fish. The post was its usual human kaleidoscope: impossibly huge upstate New Yorkers eating piles of fried things in the diner, ZZ-Top truck drivers with hair stringy and wet from using the showers in the back, French-Canadian families gripping their cartons of tax-free cigarettes while exclaiming loudly about jewelry in the Iroquois fashion store, and the usual bustle of bathroom-bound children.
Before the cooler, there she was. A tall, graceful young woman. On her head was a stiff brown bonnet hiding all of her hair and sloping bell-like down to her chin, where it was fastened by a shiny brown strip of fabric. Wrapped around her shoulders was a black woollen cape that fell down to just above her ankles. Beneath that a full-length navy-blue dress devoid of any grace notes, buttoned firmly up across her bosom and up to her neck, but still cinched at the waist, nonetheless. On her feet, handmade leather shoes, with rough coils of black-dyed cord running through a dozen or so eyelets.
Her arms hung down at her sides. At their end, holding her hands on either side, were two little girls dressed exactly the same way, down to the smallest detail. They must have been three years old, at the most.
The remarkable threesome looked at the sodas, designer water bottles and vitamin drinks, clearly nonplussed. The little girls had obviously never seen the likes of it before. Neither, perhaps, had the mother. The girls’ free hands timidly pointed out things, questioningly. The young woman spoke to them quietly, without reproach, in medieval German.
They moved on to the candy bar, tortilla chip and breath mint display. They stood before it, indecisive. The subdued German continued. From their vantage point in the Iroquois fashion store, the French-Canadian families could now see the woman and her daughters. The twang of their conversation dulled, quieted, fell to a whisper.
At last a decision was made. I got behind the Amish trio in the line to the cash register, my Swedish fish in hand. When it was their turn, the young woman pulled out from the fastnesses of her cape an enormous wad of dollar bills. She stripped a couple of singles off and wordlessly placed them on the counter. A gum-snapping Mohawk girl took them up and gave her back the change.
After paying, I went out to the parking lot. I could see the three walking back along the shoulder of the roadway. The girls still held their mother’s hands, but in their free hands were clutched yellow plastic wrappers, long and lurid. They both held a beef-jerky.
They reached the buggy. The two braves stood up and went back inside the warehouse to work.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Dilemma
I was thinking of taking a road trip across the U.S. this summer, but I’m afraid of melted cheese.
Will I starve?
Will I starve?
Monday, May 9, 2011
The Real Headlines
American Government Kills Guest of Pakistani Government
Obama Doctrine Hailed as “The New Frontier Justice”
Man Shot by LAPD for Using Wife as Human Shield; Woman Claims They Were Dancing
White House Hails "Valuable Intelligence" Found in Bin Laden’s Home; Orders Navy SEALS to Raid Graceland in Search of Lady Gaga’s Next Song
Mission Accomplished: National Security Spokesman Lies When Everyone is Paying Attention Then Takes It Back When We Aren’t; 76% of Americans Believe Bin Laden Shot While Throwing a Thermonuclear Hand Grenade
NRA Leader to Visit Abbottabad
Congress Honors Testosterone as "National Hormone"
Metropolitan Diary: Pam Geller Spotted in Tribeca Not Saying Anything; Supporters Fear “Sharia Gag Order”
Report: Pakistani Police Never Answer Someone-is-Blowing-Up-a-Helicopter-in-my-Neighborhood Calls
Report: Pakistani President Pleads With Electorate to Stop Laughing in Disbelief; Press Labels Bin Laden Compound “Costellobad.”
CIA Headquarters to Annex the Rest of Virginia
Mossad to Sue U.S. Navy for Copyright Infringement
OMB Forecasts Euphemism Shortage in American Foreign Policy
Bush Administration Takes Credit for Winning Second World War
UK Tabloids Decry Pakistan Operation as Plot to Diminish Royal Wedding
CNN: LeBron James Said to be Relieved Osama bin Laden Dead
Germomino Watch: Hillary Clinton Rebuked By American Medical Asssociation For Covering Her “Allergic Cough” With Hand Instead of Arm
GOP Mulls Tax Credit for Corporate Helicopters
Sarah Palin Tweets She Can See “Packistand” From Her House
Dick Cheney Claims Saddam Hussein Behind Obama’s Poll Numbers
FOX News: Democrats Plan to Fund 2012 Campaign Through Sale of Bin Laden Death Photos on Muslim e-Bay
John Yoo Criticizes Bin Laden Execution as “Too Painless”
Aftermath: TSA Launches Involuntary Vivisection Program at Nation’s Airports
Al Qaida Denounces Murder of Its Leader, Vows "War on Terror"
NY Times Reporter John Burns Promises to Get a Haircut and Shut Up Already
Guantánamo Renamed Nuremberg
Obama Doctrine Hailed as “The New Frontier Justice”
Man Shot by LAPD for Using Wife as Human Shield; Woman Claims They Were Dancing
White House Hails "Valuable Intelligence" Found in Bin Laden’s Home; Orders Navy SEALS to Raid Graceland in Search of Lady Gaga’s Next Song
Mission Accomplished: National Security Spokesman Lies When Everyone is Paying Attention Then Takes It Back When We Aren’t; 76% of Americans Believe Bin Laden Shot While Throwing a Thermonuclear Hand Grenade
NRA Leader to Visit Abbottabad
Congress Honors Testosterone as "National Hormone"
Metropolitan Diary: Pam Geller Spotted in Tribeca Not Saying Anything; Supporters Fear “Sharia Gag Order”
Report: Pakistani Police Never Answer Someone-is-Blowing-Up-a-Helicopter-in-my-Neighborhood Calls
Report: Pakistani President Pleads With Electorate to Stop Laughing in Disbelief; Press Labels Bin Laden Compound “Costellobad.”
CIA Headquarters to Annex the Rest of Virginia
Mossad to Sue U.S. Navy for Copyright Infringement
OMB Forecasts Euphemism Shortage in American Foreign Policy
Bush Administration Takes Credit for Winning Second World War
UK Tabloids Decry Pakistan Operation as Plot to Diminish Royal Wedding
CNN: LeBron James Said to be Relieved Osama bin Laden Dead
Germomino Watch: Hillary Clinton Rebuked By American Medical Asssociation For Covering Her “Allergic Cough” With Hand Instead of Arm
GOP Mulls Tax Credit for Corporate Helicopters
Sarah Palin Tweets She Can See “Packistand” From Her House
Dick Cheney Claims Saddam Hussein Behind Obama’s Poll Numbers
FOX News: Democrats Plan to Fund 2012 Campaign Through Sale of Bin Laden Death Photos on Muslim e-Bay
John Yoo Criticizes Bin Laden Execution as “Too Painless”
Aftermath: TSA Launches Involuntary Vivisection Program at Nation’s Airports
Al Qaida Denounces Murder of Its Leader, Vows "War on Terror"
NY Times Reporter John Burns Promises to Get a Haircut and Shut Up Already
Guantánamo Renamed Nuremberg
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Portrait of a Lady 1
Yesterday I was waiting for an elevator in the lobby of a retirement home. Beside me, leaning on a walker, stood a little old lady of my acquaintance.
Bonjour, Hélène.
She looked over at me. The penny dropped.
Ah bonjour, monsieur!
We waited together, patiently. I looked at her walker. The last time I saw her she got around with a cane.
Pourquoi?
I motioned to the walker.
She sighed and answered in a French-Canadian accent as thick as goalie’s pad.
Je suis fatiguée. Ben ben fatiguée…
We looked up at the elevator display. It seemed to be stuck on the third floor.
I felt a nudge at my elbow. Hélène held out a newspaper clipping, protected in transparent plastic. She urged it on me.
Regarde-moi ça!
I took it from her. It was from Ottawa’s French-language daily. Yesterday’s edition.
A picture of Hélène, wearing a deranged, gleeful smile. On her head a conical, comical party hat.
The headline read: La Doyenne d’Ottawa!
The caption stated that Hélène Chatelain, the city’s oldest resident, is seen here celebrating her 108th birthday.
We got on the elevator. I placed the clipping face up on the tray of her walker. The door closed.
We looked at each other.
Cent huit?
Her smile was positively demonic.
Zahn witt!... Ben ouais…
I recognized the smile from the newpaper. I looked down at the clipping.
She misunderstood. She thought I was looking at the walker. Reproachfully.
The doors opened at her floor.
Vous savez, monsieur, she apologized. On a beaucoup beaucoup dansé.
Bonjour, Hélène.
She looked over at me. The penny dropped.
Ah bonjour, monsieur!
We waited together, patiently. I looked at her walker. The last time I saw her she got around with a cane.
Pourquoi?
I motioned to the walker.
She sighed and answered in a French-Canadian accent as thick as goalie’s pad.
Je suis fatiguée. Ben ben fatiguée…
We looked up at the elevator display. It seemed to be stuck on the third floor.
I felt a nudge at my elbow. Hélène held out a newspaper clipping, protected in transparent plastic. She urged it on me.
Regarde-moi ça!
I took it from her. It was from Ottawa’s French-language daily. Yesterday’s edition.
A picture of Hélène, wearing a deranged, gleeful smile. On her head a conical, comical party hat.
The headline read: La Doyenne d’Ottawa!
The caption stated that Hélène Chatelain, the city’s oldest resident, is seen here celebrating her 108th birthday.
We got on the elevator. I placed the clipping face up on the tray of her walker. The door closed.
We looked at each other.
Cent huit?
Her smile was positively demonic.
Zahn witt!... Ben ouais…
I recognized the smile from the newpaper. I looked down at the clipping.
She misunderstood. She thought I was looking at the walker. Reproachfully.
The doors opened at her floor.
Vous savez, monsieur, she apologized. On a beaucoup beaucoup dansé.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
The New Steal
Let me get this straight.
You extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. You deepen those cuts over time. You eliminate the capital gains tax. You eliminate the estate tax. 1% of the populace possessing 40% of the national wealth strikes you as fine. Though 50% or 60% would strike you as a more equitable share of the pie for yourselves.
You force the elderly into the private sector to look for health care, the operative words being “look for” not “get.”
You eliminate Medicare and Medicaid.
You defund the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. You slash aid to students, the disabled, education, the poor, the states, international programs, global health initiatives.
You increase spending on the military.
You eviscerate any reform aimed at regulating Wall Street and preventing corporate tax avoidance, offshore banking by bail-out recipients and excessive CEO compensation. At the same time you take away the rights of collective bargaining from public sector unions.
If you don’t get all of this, you shut down the government.
And people vote for you.
Is that about right?
You extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. You deepen those cuts over time. You eliminate the capital gains tax. You eliminate the estate tax. 1% of the populace possessing 40% of the national wealth strikes you as fine. Though 50% or 60% would strike you as a more equitable share of the pie for yourselves.
You force the elderly into the private sector to look for health care, the operative words being “look for” not “get.”
You eliminate Medicare and Medicaid.
You defund the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. You slash aid to students, the disabled, education, the poor, the states, international programs, global health initiatives.
You increase spending on the military.
You eviscerate any reform aimed at regulating Wall Street and preventing corporate tax avoidance, offshore banking by bail-out recipients and excessive CEO compensation. At the same time you take away the rights of collective bargaining from public sector unions.
If you don’t get all of this, you shut down the government.
And people vote for you.
Is that about right?
Monday, March 28, 2011
The Eyes Have It
Paris once had dozens of repertory cinemas. In those folksy medieval days long before netflix and bluray, the owners of those cinemas more or less dictated what people would be talking about in the cafés afterward. The movies could be good, bad, awful, dated, cheesy – but that didn’t matter because the whole point of the evening was to escape from your unheated, closet-sized chambre de bonne apartment for as long as possible.
So you’d have a month where Billy Wilder was the big thing, then Preston Sturges, then maybe Carol Reed or Kurosawa. Sometimes the programming centered on actors, many of them almost entirely forgotten. But you didn’t care… everybody went to old movies all the time.
During one drizzly February in the mid-eighties, my local was running a Robert Taylor festival. I plopped down my five francs and found a seat in the crowded hall. The feature was Ivanhoe, starring Taylor, Joan Fontaine and another Taylor – Elizabeth.
Refresher: Ivanhoe tells the story of a knight home from the Crusades who allies himself with Robin Hood to restore Richard the Lion-Hearted to the throne of England. Along the way, the dashing Ivanhoe has to contend with a Saxon lady, Rowena, played by Joan Fontaine, and with a Jewish girl, Rebecca, played by Elizabeth Taylor.
Okay, so jousts and tournaments and treacheries took up most of the running time, all shot in Technicolor camp and greeted by the audience with occasional snickers. Then came the climactic scene. Ivanhoe has to make his choice. Both women stand before him, Rowena and Rebecca. He chooses Rowena, the Saxon.
Close-up on Rebecca’s face.
The movie was made in 1952. Elizabeth Taylor was twenty years old.
You get the picture.
From the back of the room, a gruff voice, the voice of a homeless man, the words slurred, “Putain de merde!! Il est aveugle, cet enculé?!!”
Which may be delicately translated as: “Holy shit! The fucker’s blind!!”
The explosion of laughter turns to raucous catcalls and whistles as Ivanhoe and Rowena look at each other lovingly. The crowd loses it, joyfully, and the shouts and jeers make the concluding moments of the movie inaudible.
No one cared. Suspension of disbelief had just crashed and burned.
Utterly and completely.
Il est aveugle, cet enculé?!!
So you’d have a month where Billy Wilder was the big thing, then Preston Sturges, then maybe Carol Reed or Kurosawa. Sometimes the programming centered on actors, many of them almost entirely forgotten. But you didn’t care… everybody went to old movies all the time.
During one drizzly February in the mid-eighties, my local was running a Robert Taylor festival. I plopped down my five francs and found a seat in the crowded hall. The feature was Ivanhoe, starring Taylor, Joan Fontaine and another Taylor – Elizabeth.
Refresher: Ivanhoe tells the story of a knight home from the Crusades who allies himself with Robin Hood to restore Richard the Lion-Hearted to the throne of England. Along the way, the dashing Ivanhoe has to contend with a Saxon lady, Rowena, played by Joan Fontaine, and with a Jewish girl, Rebecca, played by Elizabeth Taylor.
Okay, so jousts and tournaments and treacheries took up most of the running time, all shot in Technicolor camp and greeted by the audience with occasional snickers. Then came the climactic scene. Ivanhoe has to make his choice. Both women stand before him, Rowena and Rebecca. He chooses Rowena, the Saxon.
Close-up on Rebecca’s face.
The movie was made in 1952. Elizabeth Taylor was twenty years old.
You get the picture.
From the back of the room, a gruff voice, the voice of a homeless man, the words slurred, “Putain de merde!! Il est aveugle, cet enculé?!!”
Which may be delicately translated as: “Holy shit! The fucker’s blind!!”
The explosion of laughter turns to raucous catcalls and whistles as Ivanhoe and Rowena look at each other lovingly. The crowd loses it, joyfully, and the shouts and jeers make the concluding moments of the movie inaudible.
No one cared. Suspension of disbelief had just crashed and burned.
Utterly and completely.
Il est aveugle, cet enculé?!!
Monday, March 21, 2011
Won't you come home, George Bailey?
The world has changed.
Robbers used to take the money and run. Now they take the money and run the bank.
Churches used to be picturesque outposts of institutional anti-Semitism. Now they’re franchises of the Bangkok red light district.
Schools were joyful factories of drudgery, filled with obstreperous kids and staffed by tough-love teachers. Now they’re a drag on the economy, spreading nonsense about evolution and suckling away at the taxpayer teat.
The business section used to be the most boring part of a newspaper.
Corporations paid taxes.
Spam was something you ate.
White supremacists knew their place.
The United States got into a war only once every decade.
Ke$ha had not yet been born.
Double chocolate-chip mud-pie fudge-infused pancakes did not come with melted cheese and bacon.
Individual mortality inspired literature and philosophy, not lawsuits and twenty-mile jogs in a blizzard.
Self-storage facilities were used exclusively by eccentric collectors who had amassed too much stuff.
Automobiles were a means of transport, not a residence.
Tutankhamen and Omar Sharif represented Egypt.
The Gilded Age was found only in history textbooks.
A special interest meant a hobby, not a lobby.
Soldiers took pictures of themselves raising a flag, not some dead guy’s head.
All other news of the world and the country did not get blacked out when a sports star like LeBron James changed teams or a minor entertainer like Charlie Sheen shot his mouth off.
Israel was sort of cool.
The purpose of a man was to love a woman, not legislate about her womb.
Tyrants, despots and dictators were our bff.
Ignorance was an embarrassment, not a qualification for public office.
Airports were not managed by Benito Orwell.
Vampires were not considered suitable prom dates.
People prayed in private.
Privacy existed.
Robbers used to take the money and run. Now they take the money and run the bank.
Churches used to be picturesque outposts of institutional anti-Semitism. Now they’re franchises of the Bangkok red light district.
Schools were joyful factories of drudgery, filled with obstreperous kids and staffed by tough-love teachers. Now they’re a drag on the economy, spreading nonsense about evolution and suckling away at the taxpayer teat.
The business section used to be the most boring part of a newspaper.
Corporations paid taxes.
Spam was something you ate.
White supremacists knew their place.
The United States got into a war only once every decade.
Ke$ha had not yet been born.
Double chocolate-chip mud-pie fudge-infused pancakes did not come with melted cheese and bacon.
Individual mortality inspired literature and philosophy, not lawsuits and twenty-mile jogs in a blizzard.
Self-storage facilities were used exclusively by eccentric collectors who had amassed too much stuff.
Automobiles were a means of transport, not a residence.
Tutankhamen and Omar Sharif represented Egypt.
The Gilded Age was found only in history textbooks.
A special interest meant a hobby, not a lobby.
Soldiers took pictures of themselves raising a flag, not some dead guy’s head.
All other news of the world and the country did not get blacked out when a sports star like LeBron James changed teams or a minor entertainer like Charlie Sheen shot his mouth off.
Israel was sort of cool.
The purpose of a man was to love a woman, not legislate about her womb.
Tyrants, despots and dictators were our bff.
Ignorance was an embarrassment, not a qualification for public office.
Airports were not managed by Benito Orwell.
Vampires were not considered suitable prom dates.
People prayed in private.
Privacy existed.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Same Old, Same Old...
“It looks to me like if shooting these immigrating feral hogs [from a helicopter] works then maybe we have found a solution to our illegal immigration problem” – Virgil Peck, State Rep. (R), Kansas, 2011
“The Eastern Jew in his homeland knows nothing of the social injustice of the West; nothing of the habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average Western European; nothing of the narrowness of the Western perspective, jagged with factory smokestacks and framed by power plants; nothing of the sheer hatred that, like a life-prolonging (though lethal) drug, is so powerful that it is tended like a sort of Eternal Flame, at which these selfish people and nations warm themselves.” Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, 1937.
“The Eastern Jew in his homeland knows nothing of the social injustice of the West; nothing of the habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average Western European; nothing of the narrowness of the Western perspective, jagged with factory smokestacks and framed by power plants; nothing of the sheer hatred that, like a life-prolonging (though lethal) drug, is so powerful that it is tended like a sort of Eternal Flame, at which these selfish people and nations warm themselves.” Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, 1937.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Daddy Knows Best
I’m worried about a friend of mine. Actually, I’m worried about his daughters. One is fifteen, the other, twelve; nice girls, smiling, innocent, yet I’ve begun to worry that their father deploys parenting techniques that are – how should I put this? – heterodox.
It all began in the summer of 2009. We live in a small New England city, home to a famous art school and an Ivy League university. The local newspaper announced that an attractive young movie star, known to millions of children for her portrayal of an apprentice witch in a famous English film series about a school for wizards, was going to attend our university in the fall. My friend’s daughters were overjoyed, hoping that they might one day catch a glimpse of her.
My friend proclaimed that he would make that happen. To that end, on a hot September afternoon at the beginning of term, he told his girls that they were to walk through the campus and see if they couldn’t spot her. They squealed with delight.
Did I say it was a hot day? As anyone who has ever been on an American campus in fine weather is aware, such meteorological conditions immediately cause a physiological phenomenon known by specialists of exhibitionist psychology as the Mass Garage Sale Erotic (MGSE), wherein scores of unbuttoned and unlaced biomasses loll about on the grass seeking to tan hitherto inaccessible recesses of flesh in the most public manner imaginable. The mean age of an MGSE participant is 21 years, 3 months.
As they passed through the fine wrought-iron gates and entered the quad, my friend said to his daughters, in a strangled voice they had never heard from him before, “Remember, Daddy used to interview lots of famous people, so he knows that movie stars don’t look the same in real life. She could be anywhere.” He gestured to the college green before them, its acres of verdant lawn strewn with recumbent MGSE practitioners, as if a blizzard had passed through and left hundreds of sculpted, shapely drifts on the grass.
His daughters, as instructed, led him through the green. Daddy had told them that his eyesight was failing, so he would have to rely on them. And, remember, to be a movie star, you have to be really really pretty.
They picked their way slowly through the sunshine. Every now and then they halted before someone, just to make sure she wasn’t the actress they sought. It was important to look very carefully, girls…
Most of those subject to such close scrutiny eventually sat bolt upright, a look of disgust crossing their faces as they saw the rheumy eyes of a vacationing Santa upon them, then broke into a smile once they spotted the girls on either side of him. The iPhone to call the campus police was dropped in the backpack as a warm feeling suffused them: Awwww, how cute, I remember what it was like to be a little girl…
The day drew on, but no actress appeared. He sensed that his girls’ disappointment matched his satisfaction. Then, at a distance, he spotted Aphrodite beneath an elm tree.
“That must be her.”
“Daddy, she’s black.”
“Could be a disguise.”
Miss Brazil put down her heavy book, sat up and adjusted her many adjustables. Her face broke into a wide grin. It was different from the awwww smiles of the others.
“When I was a little girl,” she said, “My father used to walk with me on the beach and do the same thing. I was supposed to ask them if they had any lip balm, ’cause Daddy had forgotten it at home.”
My friend laughed softly at the memory. “The beach… lip balm… genius… pure genius…” His voice trailed off, he closed his eyes.
There was an awkward pause. We were in his apartment, sitting on a sofa, under the portrait of a young woman he called “The Etruscan Babe-a-licious.”
In front of us, on the coffee table, lay open the book we had been examining, “Ophelia Unplugged: The Unpublished Sketches of the Pre-Raphaelites.” I was beginning to understand my friend better.
Or so I thought.
The unmistakable scent of vodka filled the room. His fifteen-year-old daughter stood before us, a full martini glass in hand. She placed it on the table.
“See if the three o’clock is better than the two o’clock,” she said expectantly.
He took a sip.
“The grain juice could be a little colder, honey. Try to get it right for the four o’clock.”
She frowned.
“That’s all right, darling. Now make one for him,” he said, turning to me. “You’d like one with juniper juice, right?”
Intrigued, I followed her into the kitchen. On the counter a well-thumbed volume: “Teenage Bartending for Dummies.” In a corner, covered in dust, an AP Chemistry textbook, a World History textbook, and several school notebooks. She had her back to them, hunched over her task, pitting olives.
I rushed back into the living room. “For the love of God, Montresor!” I exclaimed, “She’s just a child!”
He shrugged, lifted a dainty spoon to a nostril and snorted a pinch of snuff.
I turned away, appalled. What was his other girl doing, stomping grapes in the basement?
I looked around. Where was his other daughter?
“At her sewing lesson,” he explained. His fleshy, degenerate lips creased into what I was meant to take as a smile. It made me queasy.
The twelve-year-old was taking a six-month course, 15 hours a day, six days a week, in the unventilated premises of the Providence Perspiration Shop, a vocational finishing school in the fine old tradition of New England manufacturing.
“Her sister packs her a knish for the three-minute lunch break,” he said in answer to a question unposed.
“Good heavens, man!” I shouted. “What about her field hockey? Her fencing? Why on earth should the poor thing learn to be a seamstress?!”
He rose, the hem of his scarlet silk dressing gown tickling a naked Ophelia on the coffee table as he crossed the room to a tall bookcase. He took out a large flat volume, of the format customarily used for fine-art books about the Trump properties.
“You know, I’ve handed in my manuscript,” he said absently, prising open the glossy pages.
My heart sank. No doubt the tiresome fellow was about to launch into another of his long speeches about his latest book, some incense-and-mirrors rumination on the medicinal properties of mead or the best jousting techniques or some other surefire bestseller topic.
To my relief, he said only, “I shall need a seamstress.”
I now saw the book’s cover: “Ecclesiastical Fashions of the High Middle Ages.”
He spoke softly to himself as he turned the pages: “Curate… abbot… bishop… cardinal…” His eyes widened, his breathing became labored. “Pope!” he whispered, “Pope… pope…”
I cleared my throat, loudly, as if entering the rectory of a Catholic church and thereby announcing my presence so that whatever was going on inside would stop.
“This will be my daughter’s first commission,” my friend said, opening wide the book. A double-spread centerfold showed a handsome man reclining, playmate-style, although his entire frame was covered with a cowled white robe, set off with a jet-black scapular.
“Dominican?” I ventured.
“Mmmm.”
“Inquisitor?”
“Grand Inquisitor.”
That was when I noticed the entire ensemble was trimmed with fur.
“Ermine?”
“Sable.”
“But you can’t possibly afford that, my good man! You’ll be a bankrupt!”
He raised a finger, trained his red eyes on mine.
“I know, I know. So I have bowed to the inevitable.” He retreated through a doorway and returned clutching what appeared to be a half-dozen fur stoles.
“Synthetic. Faux-fur boas. They’re for dress-up parties.” He smiled, with easy family-man condescension. “Found them in the tween section of Toys R Us.”
I nodded, impressed.
“Warwick?”
“No, no, noooo,” he tut-tutted. “Attleboro. Just past the Wendy’s.”
“But won’t your daughter… won’t your tween daughter… the seamstress… won’t she want them for herself?”
He stopped short. His mouth fell open. Clearly, the thought had never occurred to him.
The monster.
A girl’s voice wafted in from the kitchen. “Daddy… daddy… we seem to be out of juniper juice. I… I… can’t find any…” Her voice faltered, apprehensive.
My friend recovered himself. He glanced at his watch.
“On your bike, then,” he called out. “Mick’ll still be there. Get a bottle of Gordon’s. Tell him to put it on the tab.”
“Your tab?”
“No, your tab, sweetheart. What do you think your allowance is for? Candy?”
The door closed behind her.
“Kids these days!” he chuckled.
Despite his entreaties, I left shortly thereafter, wondering if my worries had any foundation to them. There are, after all, so very many different ways of growing up. Who was I to say?
I spent the next day in my rooms, lost in thought, the blinds drawn, torturing my canary.
Who was I to say?
It all began in the summer of 2009. We live in a small New England city, home to a famous art school and an Ivy League university. The local newspaper announced that an attractive young movie star, known to millions of children for her portrayal of an apprentice witch in a famous English film series about a school for wizards, was going to attend our university in the fall. My friend’s daughters were overjoyed, hoping that they might one day catch a glimpse of her.
My friend proclaimed that he would make that happen. To that end, on a hot September afternoon at the beginning of term, he told his girls that they were to walk through the campus and see if they couldn’t spot her. They squealed with delight.
Did I say it was a hot day? As anyone who has ever been on an American campus in fine weather is aware, such meteorological conditions immediately cause a physiological phenomenon known by specialists of exhibitionist psychology as the Mass Garage Sale Erotic (MGSE), wherein scores of unbuttoned and unlaced biomasses loll about on the grass seeking to tan hitherto inaccessible recesses of flesh in the most public manner imaginable. The mean age of an MGSE participant is 21 years, 3 months.
As they passed through the fine wrought-iron gates and entered the quad, my friend said to his daughters, in a strangled voice they had never heard from him before, “Remember, Daddy used to interview lots of famous people, so he knows that movie stars don’t look the same in real life. She could be anywhere.” He gestured to the college green before them, its acres of verdant lawn strewn with recumbent MGSE practitioners, as if a blizzard had passed through and left hundreds of sculpted, shapely drifts on the grass.
His daughters, as instructed, led him through the green. Daddy had told them that his eyesight was failing, so he would have to rely on them. And, remember, to be a movie star, you have to be really really pretty.
They picked their way slowly through the sunshine. Every now and then they halted before someone, just to make sure she wasn’t the actress they sought. It was important to look very carefully, girls…
Most of those subject to such close scrutiny eventually sat bolt upright, a look of disgust crossing their faces as they saw the rheumy eyes of a vacationing Santa upon them, then broke into a smile once they spotted the girls on either side of him. The iPhone to call the campus police was dropped in the backpack as a warm feeling suffused them: Awwww, how cute, I remember what it was like to be a little girl…
The day drew on, but no actress appeared. He sensed that his girls’ disappointment matched his satisfaction. Then, at a distance, he spotted Aphrodite beneath an elm tree.
“That must be her.”
“Daddy, she’s black.”
“Could be a disguise.”
Miss Brazil put down her heavy book, sat up and adjusted her many adjustables. Her face broke into a wide grin. It was different from the awwww smiles of the others.
“When I was a little girl,” she said, “My father used to walk with me on the beach and do the same thing. I was supposed to ask them if they had any lip balm, ’cause Daddy had forgotten it at home.”
My friend laughed softly at the memory. “The beach… lip balm… genius… pure genius…” His voice trailed off, he closed his eyes.
There was an awkward pause. We were in his apartment, sitting on a sofa, under the portrait of a young woman he called “The Etruscan Babe-a-licious.”
In front of us, on the coffee table, lay open the book we had been examining, “Ophelia Unplugged: The Unpublished Sketches of the Pre-Raphaelites.” I was beginning to understand my friend better.
Or so I thought.
The unmistakable scent of vodka filled the room. His fifteen-year-old daughter stood before us, a full martini glass in hand. She placed it on the table.
“See if the three o’clock is better than the two o’clock,” she said expectantly.
He took a sip.
“The grain juice could be a little colder, honey. Try to get it right for the four o’clock.”
She frowned.
“That’s all right, darling. Now make one for him,” he said, turning to me. “You’d like one with juniper juice, right?”
Intrigued, I followed her into the kitchen. On the counter a well-thumbed volume: “Teenage Bartending for Dummies.” In a corner, covered in dust, an AP Chemistry textbook, a World History textbook, and several school notebooks. She had her back to them, hunched over her task, pitting olives.
I rushed back into the living room. “For the love of God, Montresor!” I exclaimed, “She’s just a child!”
He shrugged, lifted a dainty spoon to a nostril and snorted a pinch of snuff.
I turned away, appalled. What was his other girl doing, stomping grapes in the basement?
I looked around. Where was his other daughter?
“At her sewing lesson,” he explained. His fleshy, degenerate lips creased into what I was meant to take as a smile. It made me queasy.
The twelve-year-old was taking a six-month course, 15 hours a day, six days a week, in the unventilated premises of the Providence Perspiration Shop, a vocational finishing school in the fine old tradition of New England manufacturing.
“Her sister packs her a knish for the three-minute lunch break,” he said in answer to a question unposed.
“Good heavens, man!” I shouted. “What about her field hockey? Her fencing? Why on earth should the poor thing learn to be a seamstress?!”
He rose, the hem of his scarlet silk dressing gown tickling a naked Ophelia on the coffee table as he crossed the room to a tall bookcase. He took out a large flat volume, of the format customarily used for fine-art books about the Trump properties.
“You know, I’ve handed in my manuscript,” he said absently, prising open the glossy pages.
My heart sank. No doubt the tiresome fellow was about to launch into another of his long speeches about his latest book, some incense-and-mirrors rumination on the medicinal properties of mead or the best jousting techniques or some other surefire bestseller topic.
To my relief, he said only, “I shall need a seamstress.”
I now saw the book’s cover: “Ecclesiastical Fashions of the High Middle Ages.”
He spoke softly to himself as he turned the pages: “Curate… abbot… bishop… cardinal…” His eyes widened, his breathing became labored. “Pope!” he whispered, “Pope… pope…”
I cleared my throat, loudly, as if entering the rectory of a Catholic church and thereby announcing my presence so that whatever was going on inside would stop.
“This will be my daughter’s first commission,” my friend said, opening wide the book. A double-spread centerfold showed a handsome man reclining, playmate-style, although his entire frame was covered with a cowled white robe, set off with a jet-black scapular.
“Dominican?” I ventured.
“Mmmm.”
“Inquisitor?”
“Grand Inquisitor.”
That was when I noticed the entire ensemble was trimmed with fur.
“Ermine?”
“Sable.”
“But you can’t possibly afford that, my good man! You’ll be a bankrupt!”
He raised a finger, trained his red eyes on mine.
“I know, I know. So I have bowed to the inevitable.” He retreated through a doorway and returned clutching what appeared to be a half-dozen fur stoles.
“Synthetic. Faux-fur boas. They’re for dress-up parties.” He smiled, with easy family-man condescension. “Found them in the tween section of Toys R Us.”
I nodded, impressed.
“Warwick?”
“No, no, noooo,” he tut-tutted. “Attleboro. Just past the Wendy’s.”
“But won’t your daughter… won’t your tween daughter… the seamstress… won’t she want them for herself?”
He stopped short. His mouth fell open. Clearly, the thought had never occurred to him.
The monster.
A girl’s voice wafted in from the kitchen. “Daddy… daddy… we seem to be out of juniper juice. I… I… can’t find any…” Her voice faltered, apprehensive.
My friend recovered himself. He glanced at his watch.
“On your bike, then,” he called out. “Mick’ll still be there. Get a bottle of Gordon’s. Tell him to put it on the tab.”
“Your tab?”
“No, your tab, sweetheart. What do you think your allowance is for? Candy?”
The door closed behind her.
“Kids these days!” he chuckled.
Despite his entreaties, I left shortly thereafter, wondering if my worries had any foundation to them. There are, after all, so very many different ways of growing up. Who was I to say?
I spent the next day in my rooms, lost in thought, the blinds drawn, torturing my canary.
Who was I to say?
Monday, March 7, 2011
Torquemada Pop Quiz
See if you’ve got what it takes:
1. The medieval euphemism for torture was
a) Passing the chalice
b) Putting the question
c) Tickling the damned
d) Burning the steak
2. The modern euphemism for torture is
a) National securiosity
b) Enhanced interrogation techniques
c) The Huckabee questionnaire
d) Doing a Jack Bauer
3. Bradley E. Manning, the soldier believed responsible for giving Wikileaks thousands of U.S. government documents, is being made to sleep naked every night because:
a) He has bad fashion sense
b) His guards are taking a life-drawing class
c) Underwear constitutes coddling
d) The Empire has no clothes, either
4. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, 9/11 mastermind, was waterboarded 183 times because:
a) The first 182 times were warm-ups
b) It was a contest sponsored by Waterpik
c) Problematic personal hygiene
d) It was fun
5. The woman in the pictures at Abu Ghraib was:
a) Annie Leibovitz
b) Tonya Harding
c) Lynndie England
d) Barbara Bush
6. The Bush who is most proud of causing excruciating pain is:
a) George W.
b) George H. W.
c) Jeb
d) Kate
7. In which city were the Geneva Conventions signed?
a) Nuremberg
b) Celebration, Florida
c) Wasilla, Alaska
d) The what?
8. In the “torture memo” penned by Bush’s Justice Department, physically violent questioning did not reach the threshold of torture unless it:
a) caused the victim to vote for the Democrats
b) caused suicide
c) caused organ failure
d) caused piano failure
9. The reason people can be found who are willing to torture resides in their:
a) having been altar boys in either Baltimore or Boston
b) having read Ayn Rand
c) having had the Angel Moroni speak to them
d) having lost the Civil War
10. John Yoo, author of the torture memo, recently published a book entitled:
a) War By Other Means
b) War Means Being Mean
c) The Wit and Wisdom of Genghis Khan
d) Check Your Soul at the Door: A Life in Public Service
11. Yoo is presently:
a) a senior adviser to Muammar Gaddafi
b) a possible running-mate for Pamela Geller’s GOP presidential bid
c) a finalist on American Scumbag
d) a professor of law at UC Berkeley
12. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are reluctant to travel abroad because they might face:
a) garlic
b) foreigners
c) smaller lecture fees
d) prosecution for war crimes
1. The medieval euphemism for torture was
a) Passing the chalice
b) Putting the question
c) Tickling the damned
d) Burning the steak
2. The modern euphemism for torture is
a) National securiosity
b) Enhanced interrogation techniques
c) The Huckabee questionnaire
d) Doing a Jack Bauer
3. Bradley E. Manning, the soldier believed responsible for giving Wikileaks thousands of U.S. government documents, is being made to sleep naked every night because:
a) He has bad fashion sense
b) His guards are taking a life-drawing class
c) Underwear constitutes coddling
d) The Empire has no clothes, either
4. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, 9/11 mastermind, was waterboarded 183 times because:
a) The first 182 times were warm-ups
b) It was a contest sponsored by Waterpik
c) Problematic personal hygiene
d) It was fun
5. The woman in the pictures at Abu Ghraib was:
a) Annie Leibovitz
b) Tonya Harding
c) Lynndie England
d) Barbara Bush
6. The Bush who is most proud of causing excruciating pain is:
a) George W.
b) George H. W.
c) Jeb
d) Kate
7. In which city were the Geneva Conventions signed?
a) Nuremberg
b) Celebration, Florida
c) Wasilla, Alaska
d) The what?
8. In the “torture memo” penned by Bush’s Justice Department, physically violent questioning did not reach the threshold of torture unless it:
a) caused the victim to vote for the Democrats
b) caused suicide
c) caused organ failure
d) caused piano failure
9. The reason people can be found who are willing to torture resides in their:
a) having been altar boys in either Baltimore or Boston
b) having read Ayn Rand
c) having had the Angel Moroni speak to them
d) having lost the Civil War
10. John Yoo, author of the torture memo, recently published a book entitled:
a) War By Other Means
b) War Means Being Mean
c) The Wit and Wisdom of Genghis Khan
d) Check Your Soul at the Door: A Life in Public Service
11. Yoo is presently:
a) a senior adviser to Muammar Gaddafi
b) a possible running-mate for Pamela Geller’s GOP presidential bid
c) a finalist on American Scumbag
d) a professor of law at UC Berkeley
12. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are reluctant to travel abroad because they might face:
a) garlic
b) foreigners
c) smaller lecture fees
d) prosecution for war crimes
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Bond. Justin Bond.
When one has spent three years thinking, reading and writing about medieval torture techniques, is there a way to reinsert oneself back into society? Can the thought of the rack and stake ever be entirely banished? Can one join the company of free men and women, enjoy their fresh faces, airkiss their scrubbed cheeks and smile beneath their warm and welcoming gaze, unencumbered by unspoken speculation about their eventual dismemberment? Is there a way, oh lord, is there a way?
Yes, there is a way. Espionage. Secrecy. A mission. Only by feigning involvement in the real world to accomplish an ulterior goal is one able to simulate normalcy and thereby return to civilian life. Call it a stepping-stone, a half-way house, a stairway to sanity.
I got the call last night. Headquarters in Toronto instructed me to procure some valuable matériel unavailable in the socialist hell north of Lake Ontario. I was to get in my car and drive, purchase the items with an unmarked credit card, then, at some later date to be specified, head far, far to the north and somehow sneak the precious cargo of contraband past the vigilance of the Canadian border huskies and their mukluk-shod Mountie masters.
The morning dawned brilliantly sunny, a cold hard day in late winter. Ha, I thought, enjoying the ironies of the cloak-and-dagger. A couple jogged innocently by in the brightness of my rear window, oblivious to the darkness within. I smiled to myself as I turned the key in the ignition, if they only knew…
Business with pleasure, I thought suavely, as I avoided the highway to take a slower, harder-to-tail route. I drove south out of Providence onto Allens Avenue, a.k.a. the Narragansett Bay Corniche, its mixture of tank farms, rusting tugs and mountainous heaps of toxic crud a clever counterpoint to the predictable vista of sea and sky. Then onto bucolic Cranston, a limitless expanse of drugstores and hot dog vendors punctuated by foreclosed clapboard houses and palm-reading shops. When I reached the boarded-up storefront of the place that used to sell week-old grinder rolls and Wonder bread, I knew I had gone too far.
I deftly executed a U-turn and headed to the next stage of my journey: I-95, a ribbon of asphalt stretching from Maine to Florida that is the quasi-mobile home to five million UPS trucks delivering fall-apart goods made in Shenzhen. I merged and soon found myself in familiar company, Massholes passing on the right, Rhode Islanders unfamiliar with the concept of the turn signal, even a few New Jersey plates straining to break the sound barrier, all of the drivers shouting into cellphones and eating something.
I exited at Warwick, Rhode Island, my dread destination Bald Hill Road. Almost immediately it was upon me. Beyond a shivering spinney of leafless trees loomed a sign: Toys R Us.
Yes! There it was… No, wait, it says: Toys R Us Babies R Us. There must be some mistake. I pressed on the accelerator and climbed the bald hill. It had all been too easy, I wasn’t going to be fooled.
Target, Wal-Mart, Chuck E. Cheese, Panera, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, Ocean State Job Lots, Dollar Tree, Payless, T.J. Maxx, Christmas Tree Shops, Petsmart, Dick’s, Rick’s, Applebee’s, Wendy’s, Republic Tax Returns, Sears, Marshall’s, Yankee Candle… I squinted in the sunlight as I passed the succession of parking lots, around which were artfully arranged the depositories of the I-95 deliveries, dancing up and down the hillside like a winsomely choreographed dog’s breakfast.
But no Toys R Us.
I pulled into Trader Joe’s to get my bearings. I knew the place, it was reassuring, the place where people who don’t like to touch food go to buy food. Lettuce, avocadoes, tomatoes, all hermetically bagged, a cheese section kept close to absolute zero, meat ditto, two aisles of starch wrapped in Trader Joe’s post-apocalyptic unirradiable pouches, then, of course, seven aisles of chips and salsa, ground zero for the organic couch potato.
I felt at home. But still a bit dizzy. I made my way hesitantly to the feeding station. A woman there offered me a viscous dollop of guacamole atop a chipotle-mole-mesquite-low-sodium-jalapeno-infused-free-range tortilla chip. It slid down my gullet and restored me to the lethal acuity necessary to carry out my mission.
“Excuse me,” I said quietly, after looking over my shoulder. “There’s a Toys R Us Babies R Us up the road, but isn’t there just a Toys R Us around here?”
“Nope,” she said. “That’s it.”
Within minutes I was in the store, Toys R Us Babies R Us, expectant, hair-triggered.
“Ma’am?” I whispered to the bent lumbar behind Customer Service. “Ma’am?”
She straightened up. Her red shirt could have said Greatgrandmothers R Us.
But it didn’t.
The time had come for disclosure. At least partial.
“I’m looking for…” she stared at me expectantly… “for four pairs of Justin Bieber 3-D glasses.”
Her face folded into a smile.
“I’ll see, hon.”
The wait seemed interminable. I checked out the cases of Duracell on sale, tried not to think about the consequences.
She returned, emptyhanded.
“We’re all out.”
A bead of sweat pearled on my ashen brow. This could not be.
“Can you call your other stores?”
She looked at me, greatgrandmotherly annoyed.
“We have other 3-D glasses, you know.”
I paused, trembling. How much should I give away?
Then I thought of that colleague bludgeoned to death with a hockey puck in the middle of the night, that other bright young thing brought down with arsenic poutine…
“It’s… it’s for these Canadian… Canadian… people I know,” I began falteringly, then raced on. They can’t get the Bieber glasses up there, they’re not on sale at Toys R Can, though they should be able to get them, shouldn’t they? It’s insulting, pathetic, horrible. “Justin’s Canadian,” I blurted out, desperately.
“No kiddin’?”
I sized up my demographic.
“And so was Monty Hall.”
“Really!”
She seized the phone.
After forty rings, Swansea, Mass. picked up. They had one pair.
“I need four,” I croaked.
Attleboro, Mass. had a few of them left.
I thanked my World War One widow and raced out to the lot. Seconds later I was on I-95 racing north, weaving between UPS, Fedex and Da Pasquale Removals, passing on the right, eating quahog tacos and causing a sonic boom. Warwick, Cranston, Providen –
The traffic slowed, crawled, stopped. It was the storied curve near Thurbers Avenue, where accidents should happen and do. I looked helplessly off to the right, then to the left. We had just passed the classy brown and white sign reading “Historic Providence.” But here, like the Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio, stood the shed of New England Pest Control, on its roof a gargantuan blue bug, a sort of winged cockroach of mercy, rocking in the wind and blessing the immobilized motorists. I bowed reverently then looked ahead. No movement.
The Jeep Cherokee with Mass plates in front of me had two bumper stickers. One had written on it in large capital letters: YOU JUST GOT PASSED BY A GIRL. The other was black, with a figure in white, a naked, pot-bellied middle-aged man with tousled, thinning hair, pissing against the wind. Below him, a small legend: “Ex-husband.”
I turned on the radio. First, NPR, talking about irrelevant things, like world events. I switched to another AM band. Much better. Obama is a socialist, he verbally said out loud that he doesn’t agree with, y’know, the democracy in this country, he’s against us, he’s a dictator, least that’s what everybody else can’t see…
I let the window slide down. The redeemer bug rocked in a slight breeze. Ex-husband advanced a few yards. The sun shone. Home.
We crept through Providence. Then on to Pawtucket. The first police presence of the day made itself felt, on the entrances to the bridge spanning the Blackstone River. The bridge, like the Interstate, was built in the 1950s, but successive governments had pocketed the money destined to recovering it every other year in anti-oxydizing paint, and now the bridge stood rusting, close to collapse, able only to support car traffic. Any truck that takes it is subject to a $3000 fine; hence the avaricious cops, the poorly marked detours and the promise to rebuild the bridge with toothpicks.
I swept by these inconveniences, readjusted my silk scarf. I switched to FM. A plangent voice spoke of Skinsational Day Spa and laser vaginal rejuvenation.
Onto Massachusetts. The first exit was marked South Attleboro. My car crested a ramp and was deposited in front of a mall. Petsmart, T.J. Maxx, Best Buy…
I returned to Via America, I-95, and cruised another few miles under the pitiless sunshine. If there was a South Attleboro, there had to be a northern sibling, I thought to myself with cosmopolitan panache. Skinsational also offered acne-scar obliteration.
The next exit was disconcerting. Instead of the welcoming embrace of fall-apart warehouses, here there was New England in all its postcard glory, a snow-specked hillock of pilgrim forest framing a nestled Dunkin’ Donuts. I pulled into the lot, admiring the Ye Olde Mobil Mini-Marte across the street.
A woman came out of the shop, cradling a super-Dunk mocha, ready to mount her mini-van, a reassuring, sensible corner-kick mom. I called to her before she speed-dialed.
“Excuse me. Is there a Toys R Us near here?”
“Why yes!” she said, eager to help. “Take 95 south to Boston and get off on the second or third exit. You can’t miss it.”
Her phone rang. I went into the store. You took 95 north to Boston.
“Right out of the lot, then right at the fourth set of lights. Go about a mile and it’s on your right.”
Buzz-cut with the RedSox cap seemed entirely believable. I asked him for an Old Fashioned, and dunked it. I then drove through neighborhoods with signs marked “Thickly Settled.”
The Toys R Us stood apart, on a hill, in a small two-business mall. Dwarfing it in size was a jug-wine superstore, but, as I was on a mission, I did not tarry.
“I’m here for four sets of 3-D glasses. We called from Warwick.”
The Customer Service lady eyed me. “You Steve?”
I glanced around, Bourne-like, then nodded. Gawd, greatgrandmother had been indiscreet.
She reached under the desk and shoved them at me. Four pairs of 3-D Glasses. I looked at them.
“Justin Bieber?” I said fiercely.
“Wha…?”
“You said you had… four… pairs… of Justin Bieber…?”
She looked at me, perhaps glimpsing the collapsing continent before her, the mountain ranges falling foaming into the sea.
“I’ll check.”
I stuttered into my lapel, knowing that no Blackhawk was picking up the signal. A child wailed. I don’t remember the rest…
She returned. Sweet, middle-aged, fresh-faced, New England, flinty.
“We don’t got none.”
My inner scream was soundless.
Just like in the torture chamber.
Yes, there is a way. Espionage. Secrecy. A mission. Only by feigning involvement in the real world to accomplish an ulterior goal is one able to simulate normalcy and thereby return to civilian life. Call it a stepping-stone, a half-way house, a stairway to sanity.
I got the call last night. Headquarters in Toronto instructed me to procure some valuable matériel unavailable in the socialist hell north of Lake Ontario. I was to get in my car and drive, purchase the items with an unmarked credit card, then, at some later date to be specified, head far, far to the north and somehow sneak the precious cargo of contraband past the vigilance of the Canadian border huskies and their mukluk-shod Mountie masters.
The morning dawned brilliantly sunny, a cold hard day in late winter. Ha, I thought, enjoying the ironies of the cloak-and-dagger. A couple jogged innocently by in the brightness of my rear window, oblivious to the darkness within. I smiled to myself as I turned the key in the ignition, if they only knew…
Business with pleasure, I thought suavely, as I avoided the highway to take a slower, harder-to-tail route. I drove south out of Providence onto Allens Avenue, a.k.a. the Narragansett Bay Corniche, its mixture of tank farms, rusting tugs and mountainous heaps of toxic crud a clever counterpoint to the predictable vista of sea and sky. Then onto bucolic Cranston, a limitless expanse of drugstores and hot dog vendors punctuated by foreclosed clapboard houses and palm-reading shops. When I reached the boarded-up storefront of the place that used to sell week-old grinder rolls and Wonder bread, I knew I had gone too far.
I deftly executed a U-turn and headed to the next stage of my journey: I-95, a ribbon of asphalt stretching from Maine to Florida that is the quasi-mobile home to five million UPS trucks delivering fall-apart goods made in Shenzhen. I merged and soon found myself in familiar company, Massholes passing on the right, Rhode Islanders unfamiliar with the concept of the turn signal, even a few New Jersey plates straining to break the sound barrier, all of the drivers shouting into cellphones and eating something.
I exited at Warwick, Rhode Island, my dread destination Bald Hill Road. Almost immediately it was upon me. Beyond a shivering spinney of leafless trees loomed a sign: Toys R Us.
Yes! There it was… No, wait, it says: Toys R Us Babies R Us. There must be some mistake. I pressed on the accelerator and climbed the bald hill. It had all been too easy, I wasn’t going to be fooled.
Target, Wal-Mart, Chuck E. Cheese, Panera, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, Ocean State Job Lots, Dollar Tree, Payless, T.J. Maxx, Christmas Tree Shops, Petsmart, Dick’s, Rick’s, Applebee’s, Wendy’s, Republic Tax Returns, Sears, Marshall’s, Yankee Candle… I squinted in the sunlight as I passed the succession of parking lots, around which were artfully arranged the depositories of the I-95 deliveries, dancing up and down the hillside like a winsomely choreographed dog’s breakfast.
But no Toys R Us.
I pulled into Trader Joe’s to get my bearings. I knew the place, it was reassuring, the place where people who don’t like to touch food go to buy food. Lettuce, avocadoes, tomatoes, all hermetically bagged, a cheese section kept close to absolute zero, meat ditto, two aisles of starch wrapped in Trader Joe’s post-apocalyptic unirradiable pouches, then, of course, seven aisles of chips and salsa, ground zero for the organic couch potato.
I felt at home. But still a bit dizzy. I made my way hesitantly to the feeding station. A woman there offered me a viscous dollop of guacamole atop a chipotle-mole-mesquite-low-sodium-jalapeno-infused-free-range tortilla chip. It slid down my gullet and restored me to the lethal acuity necessary to carry out my mission.
“Excuse me,” I said quietly, after looking over my shoulder. “There’s a Toys R Us Babies R Us up the road, but isn’t there just a Toys R Us around here?”
“Nope,” she said. “That’s it.”
Within minutes I was in the store, Toys R Us Babies R Us, expectant, hair-triggered.
“Ma’am?” I whispered to the bent lumbar behind Customer Service. “Ma’am?”
She straightened up. Her red shirt could have said Greatgrandmothers R Us.
But it didn’t.
The time had come for disclosure. At least partial.
“I’m looking for…” she stared at me expectantly… “for four pairs of Justin Bieber 3-D glasses.”
Her face folded into a smile.
“I’ll see, hon.”
The wait seemed interminable. I checked out the cases of Duracell on sale, tried not to think about the consequences.
She returned, emptyhanded.
“We’re all out.”
A bead of sweat pearled on my ashen brow. This could not be.
“Can you call your other stores?”
She looked at me, greatgrandmotherly annoyed.
“We have other 3-D glasses, you know.”
I paused, trembling. How much should I give away?
Then I thought of that colleague bludgeoned to death with a hockey puck in the middle of the night, that other bright young thing brought down with arsenic poutine…
“It’s… it’s for these Canadian… Canadian… people I know,” I began falteringly, then raced on. They can’t get the Bieber glasses up there, they’re not on sale at Toys R Can, though they should be able to get them, shouldn’t they? It’s insulting, pathetic, horrible. “Justin’s Canadian,” I blurted out, desperately.
“No kiddin’?”
I sized up my demographic.
“And so was Monty Hall.”
“Really!”
She seized the phone.
After forty rings, Swansea, Mass. picked up. They had one pair.
“I need four,” I croaked.
Attleboro, Mass. had a few of them left.
I thanked my World War One widow and raced out to the lot. Seconds later I was on I-95 racing north, weaving between UPS, Fedex and Da Pasquale Removals, passing on the right, eating quahog tacos and causing a sonic boom. Warwick, Cranston, Providen –
The traffic slowed, crawled, stopped. It was the storied curve near Thurbers Avenue, where accidents should happen and do. I looked helplessly off to the right, then to the left. We had just passed the classy brown and white sign reading “Historic Providence.” But here, like the Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio, stood the shed of New England Pest Control, on its roof a gargantuan blue bug, a sort of winged cockroach of mercy, rocking in the wind and blessing the immobilized motorists. I bowed reverently then looked ahead. No movement.
The Jeep Cherokee with Mass plates in front of me had two bumper stickers. One had written on it in large capital letters: YOU JUST GOT PASSED BY A GIRL. The other was black, with a figure in white, a naked, pot-bellied middle-aged man with tousled, thinning hair, pissing against the wind. Below him, a small legend: “Ex-husband.”
I turned on the radio. First, NPR, talking about irrelevant things, like world events. I switched to another AM band. Much better. Obama is a socialist, he verbally said out loud that he doesn’t agree with, y’know, the democracy in this country, he’s against us, he’s a dictator, least that’s what everybody else can’t see…
I let the window slide down. The redeemer bug rocked in a slight breeze. Ex-husband advanced a few yards. The sun shone. Home.
We crept through Providence. Then on to Pawtucket. The first police presence of the day made itself felt, on the entrances to the bridge spanning the Blackstone River. The bridge, like the Interstate, was built in the 1950s, but successive governments had pocketed the money destined to recovering it every other year in anti-oxydizing paint, and now the bridge stood rusting, close to collapse, able only to support car traffic. Any truck that takes it is subject to a $3000 fine; hence the avaricious cops, the poorly marked detours and the promise to rebuild the bridge with toothpicks.
I swept by these inconveniences, readjusted my silk scarf. I switched to FM. A plangent voice spoke of Skinsational Day Spa and laser vaginal rejuvenation.
Onto Massachusetts. The first exit was marked South Attleboro. My car crested a ramp and was deposited in front of a mall. Petsmart, T.J. Maxx, Best Buy…
I returned to Via America, I-95, and cruised another few miles under the pitiless sunshine. If there was a South Attleboro, there had to be a northern sibling, I thought to myself with cosmopolitan panache. Skinsational also offered acne-scar obliteration.
The next exit was disconcerting. Instead of the welcoming embrace of fall-apart warehouses, here there was New England in all its postcard glory, a snow-specked hillock of pilgrim forest framing a nestled Dunkin’ Donuts. I pulled into the lot, admiring the Ye Olde Mobil Mini-Marte across the street.
A woman came out of the shop, cradling a super-Dunk mocha, ready to mount her mini-van, a reassuring, sensible corner-kick mom. I called to her before she speed-dialed.
“Excuse me. Is there a Toys R Us near here?”
“Why yes!” she said, eager to help. “Take 95 south to Boston and get off on the second or third exit. You can’t miss it.”
Her phone rang. I went into the store. You took 95 north to Boston.
“Right out of the lot, then right at the fourth set of lights. Go about a mile and it’s on your right.”
Buzz-cut with the RedSox cap seemed entirely believable. I asked him for an Old Fashioned, and dunked it. I then drove through neighborhoods with signs marked “Thickly Settled.”
The Toys R Us stood apart, on a hill, in a small two-business mall. Dwarfing it in size was a jug-wine superstore, but, as I was on a mission, I did not tarry.
“I’m here for four sets of 3-D glasses. We called from Warwick.”
The Customer Service lady eyed me. “You Steve?”
I glanced around, Bourne-like, then nodded. Gawd, greatgrandmother had been indiscreet.
She reached under the desk and shoved them at me. Four pairs of 3-D Glasses. I looked at them.
“Justin Bieber?” I said fiercely.
“Wha…?”
“You said you had… four… pairs… of Justin Bieber…?”
She looked at me, perhaps glimpsing the collapsing continent before her, the mountain ranges falling foaming into the sea.
“I’ll check.”
I stuttered into my lapel, knowing that no Blackhawk was picking up the signal. A child wailed. I don’t remember the rest…
She returned. Sweet, middle-aged, fresh-faced, New England, flinty.
“We don’t got none.”
My inner scream was soundless.
Just like in the torture chamber.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Clueless Irrelevant Apparatchiks
Let’s take a walk down memory lane:
In the 1950s and 1960s the Quiet Americans sent from Langley were warned by the departing French that there was no way to beat back Vietnamese nationalists. Hah! What do the Frogs know, anyway?
Egg dumpling on the face, anyone?
In the 1970s, the Sages of Virginia knew their toppling of the Mossadegh regime in Iran twenty years earlier and their subsequent supporting of the Shah to be a splendid policy with no possible blowback. The poor man is sick? Let’s invite him to the US for medical treatment.
Can anyone say hostage crisis?
In the 1980s the Geopolitical Geniuses of suburban D.C. warned that the Cold War would stretch on indefinitely and that America must increase its ICBM capability and its missile defense system in Europe -- as well as work on its Star Wars interceptors as part of a cosmic dartboard deterrence aimed at the eternal Soviet Union.
Enter Mr. Gorbachev.
In the 1990s, having concluded that history was over and the US had “won,” the Best and the Brightest kicked back a bit, concentrating only on making contingency war plans for whichever country they happened to be misreading entirely. Really, there was nothing to worry about, the forces of freedom, the beacon of liber –
Downtown New York City.
In the 2000s, the Global Experts on the Potomac now knew the score: Arab=Muslim=Terrorist. Let’s bomb as many of them as we can, and, while we’re at it, let’s subject granny to a strip-search at Tulsa International. She could be hiding an Arab… sorry, a terrorist.
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya…
It’s 1848 in north Africa (and elsewhere in the “Arab street,” as it is called in the “overpaid parking lot” at Langley), and what’s on offer from the bloated nationalo-securitamus-intelligenciatic-espionnagery octopus soaking up billions of bucks? Nothing. They got nothing.
Who knew? When they bought the wife a new SUV so that they can both get stuck in traffic going to their super-duper, smart-as-nails jobs as experts on world affairs, there was no app for Al-Jazeera in the beverage center.
You had to pay extra.
Who knew?
In the 1950s and 1960s the Quiet Americans sent from Langley were warned by the departing French that there was no way to beat back Vietnamese nationalists. Hah! What do the Frogs know, anyway?
Egg dumpling on the face, anyone?
In the 1970s, the Sages of Virginia knew their toppling of the Mossadegh regime in Iran twenty years earlier and their subsequent supporting of the Shah to be a splendid policy with no possible blowback. The poor man is sick? Let’s invite him to the US for medical treatment.
Can anyone say hostage crisis?
In the 1980s the Geopolitical Geniuses of suburban D.C. warned that the Cold War would stretch on indefinitely and that America must increase its ICBM capability and its missile defense system in Europe -- as well as work on its Star Wars interceptors as part of a cosmic dartboard deterrence aimed at the eternal Soviet Union.
Enter Mr. Gorbachev.
In the 1990s, having concluded that history was over and the US had “won,” the Best and the Brightest kicked back a bit, concentrating only on making contingency war plans for whichever country they happened to be misreading entirely. Really, there was nothing to worry about, the forces of freedom, the beacon of liber –
Downtown New York City.
In the 2000s, the Global Experts on the Potomac now knew the score: Arab=Muslim=Terrorist. Let’s bomb as many of them as we can, and, while we’re at it, let’s subject granny to a strip-search at Tulsa International. She could be hiding an Arab… sorry, a terrorist.
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya…
It’s 1848 in north Africa (and elsewhere in the “Arab street,” as it is called in the “overpaid parking lot” at Langley), and what’s on offer from the bloated nationalo-securitamus-intelligenciatic-espionnagery octopus soaking up billions of bucks? Nothing. They got nothing.
Who knew? When they bought the wife a new SUV so that they can both get stuck in traffic going to their super-duper, smart-as-nails jobs as experts on world affairs, there was no app for Al-Jazeera in the beverage center.
You had to pay extra.
Who knew?
Monday, February 28, 2011
Singin' in the Rain
We are drowning in New England today. Whither the slush of yesteryear?
The madman is still at large in Tripoli, the fool hangs on in Madison, the ferret prances in Paris. What to do with such a day?
I give you William, ninth Duke of Aquitaine, the man who put the beat in the twelfth century. Just in case we thought the cosmic funk was our own invention:
Poème sur Pur Néant
Je ferai vers sur pur néant
Ne sera sur moi ni sur autre gent
Ne sera sur amour ni sur jeunesse
Ni sur rien autre ;
Je lai composé en dormant
Sur mon cheval
Ne sais quelle heure fus né
Ne suis allègre ni irrité
Ne suis étranger ni privé
Et n’en puis mais,
Qu’ainsi fus de nuit doté par les féés
Sur un haut puy.
Ne sais quand je suis endormi
Ni quand je veille, si l’on me le dit
À peu ne m’est le cœur parti
D’un deuil poignant
Et n’en fais pas plus cas que d’une souris
Par saint Martial.
Malade suis et me crois mourir
Et rien n’en sais plus que n’en entends dire,
Médecin querrai à mon plaisir
Et ne sais quel
Bon il sera s’il me peut guérir
Mais non si mon mal empire.
J’ai une amie, ne sais qui c’est ;
Jamais ne la vis, sur ma foi
Rien ne m’a fait qui me plaît, ni me pèse
Ni ne m’en chaut,
Que jamais n’y eut Normands ni Français
En mon hôtel.
Jamais ne la vis et je l’aime fort
Jamais ne me fit droit ni me fit tort
Quand je ne la vois, bien en fais mon plaisir
Et ne l’estime pas plus qu’un coq
Car j’en sais une plus belle et plus gentille
Et qui vaut bien plus.
J’ai fait ce poème, ne sais sur quoi
Et le transmettrai à celui
Qui le transmettra à autrui
Là-bas vers l’Anjou,
Qui le transmettra de son côté
À quelqu’un d’autre.
The madman is still at large in Tripoli, the fool hangs on in Madison, the ferret prances in Paris. What to do with such a day?
I give you William, ninth Duke of Aquitaine, the man who put the beat in the twelfth century. Just in case we thought the cosmic funk was our own invention:
Poème sur Pur Néant
Je ferai vers sur pur néant
Ne sera sur moi ni sur autre gent
Ne sera sur amour ni sur jeunesse
Ni sur rien autre ;
Je lai composé en dormant
Sur mon cheval
Ne sais quelle heure fus né
Ne suis allègre ni irrité
Ne suis étranger ni privé
Et n’en puis mais,
Qu’ainsi fus de nuit doté par les féés
Sur un haut puy.
Ne sais quand je suis endormi
Ni quand je veille, si l’on me le dit
À peu ne m’est le cœur parti
D’un deuil poignant
Et n’en fais pas plus cas que d’une souris
Par saint Martial.
Malade suis et me crois mourir
Et rien n’en sais plus que n’en entends dire,
Médecin querrai à mon plaisir
Et ne sais quel
Bon il sera s’il me peut guérir
Mais non si mon mal empire.
J’ai une amie, ne sais qui c’est ;
Jamais ne la vis, sur ma foi
Rien ne m’a fait qui me plaît, ni me pèse
Ni ne m’en chaut,
Que jamais n’y eut Normands ni Français
En mon hôtel.
Jamais ne la vis et je l’aime fort
Jamais ne me fit droit ni me fit tort
Quand je ne la vois, bien en fais mon plaisir
Et ne l’estime pas plus qu’un coq
Car j’en sais une plus belle et plus gentille
Et qui vaut bien plus.
J’ai fait ce poème, ne sais sur quoi
Et le transmettrai à celui
Qui le transmettra à autrui
Là-bas vers l’Anjou,
Qui le transmettra de son côté
À quelqu’un d’autre.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Bouteille à la mer
Hello again, Dollfaceless, it’s been a while. No, I have not been silent so as to make room for Egyptian facebookers, nor have I been struck by involuntary dumbness brought on by teaparty adherence.
No, my prosaic attentions were lavished elsewhere, and the bittersweet moment arrived this morning: I hit Send, and my constant companion in these two years from bottle to throttle zoomed up into the clouds of copyeditors, layout departments, illustrators and bookbinders, my swarm of pixelated termites attacking some sacrificial lumber in the ephemeral conquest of the page, my titanic achievement commanding awestruck indifference from all within my zipcode, my dog’s breakfast of inspiration running in viscous rivulets down toward oceanic dissolution, my playful friend dancing in front of me on those long nights spent in the arms of Lady Cabernet, my garage-sale mountain of narrative tricks offering solace and sorrow, my servant, my master, my King Farouk… me fookin’ book.
“How does it feel, and what will you do now?” ask the many kind but totally imaginary friends in my head. Go back into therapy now that you no longer live in the fourteenth century? Dust off your Norwegian for the awards ceremony? Try to get a job at Border’s? Purchase a wooden spoon and beat the first desirable woman you see? Buy a giga-pack of Rolling Rock?
I have decided to make a lamb couscous instead.
I will put Maria Callas on the kitchen stereo, manhandle vegetables and permit myself a pinch of satisfaction to accompany the cumin. To complete this small pleasure, while cooking I will leaf through a magazine bought recently in a French-language bookstore: a glossy history special issue entitled Scandaleuses princesses.
So, yes, I did buy a wooden spoon.
No, my prosaic attentions were lavished elsewhere, and the bittersweet moment arrived this morning: I hit Send, and my constant companion in these two years from bottle to throttle zoomed up into the clouds of copyeditors, layout departments, illustrators and bookbinders, my swarm of pixelated termites attacking some sacrificial lumber in the ephemeral conquest of the page, my titanic achievement commanding awestruck indifference from all within my zipcode, my dog’s breakfast of inspiration running in viscous rivulets down toward oceanic dissolution, my playful friend dancing in front of me on those long nights spent in the arms of Lady Cabernet, my garage-sale mountain of narrative tricks offering solace and sorrow, my servant, my master, my King Farouk… me fookin’ book.
“How does it feel, and what will you do now?” ask the many kind but totally imaginary friends in my head. Go back into therapy now that you no longer live in the fourteenth century? Dust off your Norwegian for the awards ceremony? Try to get a job at Border’s? Purchase a wooden spoon and beat the first desirable woman you see? Buy a giga-pack of Rolling Rock?
I have decided to make a lamb couscous instead.
I will put Maria Callas on the kitchen stereo, manhandle vegetables and permit myself a pinch of satisfaction to accompany the cumin. To complete this small pleasure, while cooking I will leaf through a magazine bought recently in a French-language bookstore: a glossy history special issue entitled Scandaleuses princesses.
So, yes, I did buy a wooden spoon.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Tea for One
Having ranked sixth in this year’s top ten list of The Most Influential Beings in the Milky Way (the only other earthling, coming in at #2, was Tonya Harding), I am often asked by friends and admirers – if they can be differentiated – whether I resent not being invited to the White House for state dinners. For the most recent banquet there with the leader of China, for example, neither Tonya nor I was contacted.
I have to say that for all my galactic importance I do not feel the smallest twinge of resentment at such neglect.
The truth is, China does not exist, as I am not there. Neither does New York City, unless I am visiting it, which of course I never will. To those willing to drink deep at my wisdom well, I use the example of the refrigerator. Does the light go out when you close the fridge door? Yes? No?... I see you’re beginning to understand. In the same way, when I am asleep the universe ceases to exist.
In uncharacteristic moments of weakness, I sometimes wish that I could find confirmation of this axiomatic truth from Professor Einstein. Unfortunately, he had the weakness of being mortal. But in all other respects we are similar: hair coloring, personal hygiene and genius.
So, will China eventually matter?
It depends on my mood.
I have so many other things to think about. For example, greasing the semiautomatic that my daughter is bringing to her prom. The Second Amendment is Number One on her dance card. As for the wholly unnecessary verbiage surrounding it, called the Constitution, I will concede that it is the most amazing thing ever produced in the galaxy about the greatest country ever to exist past, present and future and in every dimension up until beyond the infinite. Yet, yet… activist judges have argued that it applies to Mexicans. Whereas, to use one of the Founders’ funny, scrolly words, it was written principally to abolish government.
I have to remember that, aside from myself, perfection is elusive.
Okay, okay, I will admit that sometimes I lose patience. But then I realize I just have to fall asleep to make it go away. Or daydream, back to the days when I played pitch-and-catch with Spikey, my pet stegosaurus.
Do I care about women, you ask? Yes, of course, those wonderful, wonderful helpmeets. Other men my age may think about young women’s vaginas, but I think about their wombs, which are public property. It’s a difficult burden to bear.
Even more troublesome are the brown people. Exactly how much should we bomb them when they’re not there in the first place? As a galactic figure, I have to put it into perspective. And as a free man, unfettered by government, history and perspective, I sometimes wonder if we really need to pay for more armaments.
But then I realize as a one-man militia it is my duty to put the whole country in uniform and attack places I’ve never heard about and therefore don’t exist.
Funny that, no? Lordy, it’s fascinating, this push-me-pull-you world in which we live.
On the one hand, there’s nothing. On the other, there’s me.
I have to say that for all my galactic importance I do not feel the smallest twinge of resentment at such neglect.
The truth is, China does not exist, as I am not there. Neither does New York City, unless I am visiting it, which of course I never will. To those willing to drink deep at my wisdom well, I use the example of the refrigerator. Does the light go out when you close the fridge door? Yes? No?... I see you’re beginning to understand. In the same way, when I am asleep the universe ceases to exist.
In uncharacteristic moments of weakness, I sometimes wish that I could find confirmation of this axiomatic truth from Professor Einstein. Unfortunately, he had the weakness of being mortal. But in all other respects we are similar: hair coloring, personal hygiene and genius.
So, will China eventually matter?
It depends on my mood.
I have so many other things to think about. For example, greasing the semiautomatic that my daughter is bringing to her prom. The Second Amendment is Number One on her dance card. As for the wholly unnecessary verbiage surrounding it, called the Constitution, I will concede that it is the most amazing thing ever produced in the galaxy about the greatest country ever to exist past, present and future and in every dimension up until beyond the infinite. Yet, yet… activist judges have argued that it applies to Mexicans. Whereas, to use one of the Founders’ funny, scrolly words, it was written principally to abolish government.
I have to remember that, aside from myself, perfection is elusive.
Okay, okay, I will admit that sometimes I lose patience. But then I realize I just have to fall asleep to make it go away. Or daydream, back to the days when I played pitch-and-catch with Spikey, my pet stegosaurus.
Do I care about women, you ask? Yes, of course, those wonderful, wonderful helpmeets. Other men my age may think about young women’s vaginas, but I think about their wombs, which are public property. It’s a difficult burden to bear.
Even more troublesome are the brown people. Exactly how much should we bomb them when they’re not there in the first place? As a galactic figure, I have to put it into perspective. And as a free man, unfettered by government, history and perspective, I sometimes wonder if we really need to pay for more armaments.
But then I realize as a one-man militia it is my duty to put the whole country in uniform and attack places I’ve never heard about and therefore don’t exist.
Funny that, no? Lordy, it’s fascinating, this push-me-pull-you world in which we live.
On the one hand, there’s nothing. On the other, there’s me.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Football for Foodies
Tonight the heavily favored New England Patriots lost their playoff game to the New York Jets. Aside from the feeling some empathy for football fans here in Providence, I am especially upset that my free January feasts have come to an end.
Let me explain.
When the Patriots remain in the playoffs, two of my local bars become the answer to cooking at home.
This afternoon I started at a social club – a drinking club, really – run by the Portuguese of the neighborhood. You have to be Portuguese or Cape Verdean to be a member, but you can be anyone to go and drink there. The members, as far as I can tell, are all men – cops, firemen, contractors, electricians, carpenters and a reliably deranged contingent of house painters. The lighting is naked fluorescent, the décor non-existent. These guys have grown up together, so it’s not unusual to hear shouted conversations like this:
“Hey, remember where Joey’s wife is buried?”
“Yeah.”
“Well yesterday Billy was buried just two graves over.”
“No fuckin’ kiddin’!”
Where there is a women present, which is very rare, there is a sort of unspoken chivalrous agreement to tone it down. Tonight there was a sweet redhead there, maybe thirty, which is a rarity of a rarity, so when Tom Brady threw an interception, the tall vociferous, Viking-gone-to-seed house painter who seems to live at the bar stood up and shouted, “Asshole! Douchebag!” Everyone was impressed that he had the presence of mind to leave out the normal adjective such occasions call for and remain polite.
But I digress… As this is a fraternal Portuguese place, and as this is a Patriots playoff game, there is always good food prepared by one or two of the members. Tonight there was a Mediterranean chile, lots of olives and some squid, and a light, not overcreamy seafood chowder.
I took two small bowls then watched the first half. The chowder was sublime. I considered going back for seconds, indeed was encouraged to, but I had other plans.
At half-time I left and went for a walk through the silent, snowy streets. Everyone was inside watching the game. I had to work off my first course.
Just a few blocks away is another communal bar. About twenty years ago, it had to be closed down because the building it occupied was condemned. About 40 guys from the neighborhood – called Fox Point – chipped in and bought the building around the corner. The bar was christened Around the Corner.
Fox Point is a working-class neighborhood of African-Americans, Cape Verdeans, Italians and Portuguese. In front of the bar is a parking lot that can accommodate perhaps six cars. On game days, there are usually eight black Cadillac Escalades jammed into the space.
That is because much of the clientele are big, and I mean big, black guys. They all seem to have PhD’s in football. The always shouted conversations run something like this:
“Look, the man is limpin’! That’s from that hit he took in third year at Tulane!”
“That was fourth year, brother.”
Pause.
“Yeah, right.”
There are black women present, lots of them, dressed to kill. And a lot of slobby white people. Everybody knows everybody. The bartender is a sixty-something bottle blonde shaped like a chest of drawers. She’s very friendly.
And during Patriots playoff games, there is serious cooking going on. Tonight was a choice of Philly cheese steaks or seared pork tenderloin, with baked beans, okra and a crispy salad.
I dug in at the start of the fourth quarter. Delicious.
I am so annoyed that the Patriots are out of the playoffs.
Douchebags.
Let me explain.
When the Patriots remain in the playoffs, two of my local bars become the answer to cooking at home.
This afternoon I started at a social club – a drinking club, really – run by the Portuguese of the neighborhood. You have to be Portuguese or Cape Verdean to be a member, but you can be anyone to go and drink there. The members, as far as I can tell, are all men – cops, firemen, contractors, electricians, carpenters and a reliably deranged contingent of house painters. The lighting is naked fluorescent, the décor non-existent. These guys have grown up together, so it’s not unusual to hear shouted conversations like this:
“Hey, remember where Joey’s wife is buried?”
“Yeah.”
“Well yesterday Billy was buried just two graves over.”
“No fuckin’ kiddin’!”
Where there is a women present, which is very rare, there is a sort of unspoken chivalrous agreement to tone it down. Tonight there was a sweet redhead there, maybe thirty, which is a rarity of a rarity, so when Tom Brady threw an interception, the tall vociferous, Viking-gone-to-seed house painter who seems to live at the bar stood up and shouted, “Asshole! Douchebag!” Everyone was impressed that he had the presence of mind to leave out the normal adjective such occasions call for and remain polite.
But I digress… As this is a fraternal Portuguese place, and as this is a Patriots playoff game, there is always good food prepared by one or two of the members. Tonight there was a Mediterranean chile, lots of olives and some squid, and a light, not overcreamy seafood chowder.
I took two small bowls then watched the first half. The chowder was sublime. I considered going back for seconds, indeed was encouraged to, but I had other plans.
At half-time I left and went for a walk through the silent, snowy streets. Everyone was inside watching the game. I had to work off my first course.
Just a few blocks away is another communal bar. About twenty years ago, it had to be closed down because the building it occupied was condemned. About 40 guys from the neighborhood – called Fox Point – chipped in and bought the building around the corner. The bar was christened Around the Corner.
Fox Point is a working-class neighborhood of African-Americans, Cape Verdeans, Italians and Portuguese. In front of the bar is a parking lot that can accommodate perhaps six cars. On game days, there are usually eight black Cadillac Escalades jammed into the space.
That is because much of the clientele are big, and I mean big, black guys. They all seem to have PhD’s in football. The always shouted conversations run something like this:
“Look, the man is limpin’! That’s from that hit he took in third year at Tulane!”
“That was fourth year, brother.”
Pause.
“Yeah, right.”
There are black women present, lots of them, dressed to kill. And a lot of slobby white people. Everybody knows everybody. The bartender is a sixty-something bottle blonde shaped like a chest of drawers. She’s very friendly.
And during Patriots playoff games, there is serious cooking going on. Tonight was a choice of Philly cheese steaks or seared pork tenderloin, with baked beans, okra and a crispy salad.
I dug in at the start of the fourth quarter. Delicious.
I am so annoyed that the Patriots are out of the playoffs.
Douchebags.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Shut yer pie-hole, Sarah
Happy New Year.
Just had a discussion with a teabagger acquaintance who defended everyone’s right to free speech. Then I asked him this question:
If John Boehner had been shot in the head, after having his district adorned with a gun sight on a map of the United States displayed prominently for months on Howard Dean’s website, would his reaction be any different?
He said no.
Then I said I was the Queen of England.
Just had a discussion with a teabagger acquaintance who defended everyone’s right to free speech. Then I asked him this question:
If John Boehner had been shot in the head, after having his district adorned with a gun sight on a map of the United States displayed prominently for months on Howard Dean’s website, would his reaction be any different?
He said no.
Then I said I was the Queen of England.
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