Another glimpse at Perfection

If your point is that American politicians are hopelessly corrupt, and the voters a bunch of easily whipped up partisan dupes, and that since government is ineffective, at best, and should be curtailed and kept small enough to drown in a bathtub, imagine if you could do this.

Contribute unlimited money, tax-deductibly, to organizations created under the odd provisions of a certain law’s section 501(c) (4) to run unlimited ads ensuring that politicians who oppose your agenda know they will be voted out of office if they don’t go along with your program. If they’re conservatives, threaten ’em from the right. If they’re liberals, shoot, it’s even easier to primary those bastards.

The result? A pliable bunch of hopelessly compromised and corrupt American politicians committed only to staying in office, playing to easily whipped up partisan dupes who are already mad as hell and waiting to do something about it. The resulting ineffective government will cause even those who believe in the importance of democracy to cry out to drown the bastards, every one of them, in a bathtub.

A kind of sickening perfection, you have to admit.

Creativity, you say?

“No,” she said, “that’s what you say. Imagining all-consuming creative collaboration that is all in your head.”

“That is what I say,” he said, “its own reward. And all-consuming creative collaboration has not always been in my own head.”

“That’s what you say,” she said.

“You keep saying that,” he said.

“As you say,” said she.

“Listen, I’ve been in rooms many times, people get swept up into working together, given the chance to be part of a creative team. I’ve taken part, I’ve seen it, experienced it many, many times.”

“You are a dreamer. Nobody but you gives a rat’s creatively shaved buttock about creativity for its own sake. Creativity that leads to more tangible things, OK. But even there, it’s more a buzzword or catchphrase — creativity– than something anyone cares about for its own sake. Anyone but a person like you.”

“A person like me….” he said.

“Show me the money, I’ll do something creative for you right now,” she said, “pay to play. I’ll collaborate with you all day, if you got the green to make it worth my while, I’ll riff with you til the cows stop farting up into the ozone. You know what I’m saying? If your idea is so valuable why is nobody paying you for it?”

“I really don’t see the point…” he said.

“My point exactly,” she said. “it’s nothing to talk about excitement, you have to make me excited about it.”

“Oh,” he said, reluctant to take her deeper point, “you’re the one I have to make excited about the excitement of my exciting idea.”

“I am,” she said, “and I am but one of hundreds you need to excite.” She was right, goddamn it, he thought. She’s just the first hurdle in this two thousand hurdle race.

“You have no idea how many more hurdles than that it is,” she said, reading his thoughts with an ease that struck him as supernatural.

“Supernatural my ass,” she thought, “all I had to do was read the words off the screen. This guy doesn’t even realize all this is just writing on a screen.”

“I know that,” he said, his bottom lip coming up to cover the upper one.

Quick, Snide Note to My Fellow Americans

Americans are arguably (and we will argue, by God, and the dumber the argument the readier we are to fuck somebody up over it) the world’s most competitive, unhealthiest, most easily manipulated, most vi0lent, most ill-informed, most opinionated, most likely to kill each other with a gun, most likely to defend the right to kill somebody with a gun, most prone to suicide with a gun, most materialistic, most optimistic, greediest, most distracted and self-involved population, probably of all time. I’m leaving most fearful off the list, and angriest, because while those might also be true, they’re matters of opinion and hard to verify. I’m also leaving off most kind-hearted, idealistic and trusting, for the same reason.

Of course, we Americans are free to fight about any one or all of these snidely unflattering characterizations. We have that freedom here, unlike citizens of a lot of other places. And God bless these United States. I defend our right to be all of these things and more.

Worldwide consumers of fast food and violent American films should not feel smug about America’s faults. We come by them honestly: our national religion is the acquisition of wealth and the refinement of the machine that assists in that acquisition. Wealth, or lack of it, is the measure of everything here– as it is fast becoming everywhere. America was the land where unlimited wealth was advertised, our streets paved with gold; the chance to have more money than anyone else remains a big part of the American Dream, the global dream. The right to compete was guaranteed to all Americans, even if it is, arguably, not always enforced fairly.

This dream was sold to Americans living here and used to lure needed workers here over the years. It was sold deliberately, skillfully, to excellent advantage, from our earliest days. America pioneered Public Relations and modern Advertising, the increasingly sophisticated use of the mass media to shape public perceptions, frame debate, package, brand and sell products, instill values and consumer loyalty. We are the masters of it. Nobody else, until very recently, was even in second place.

As adults most of us can sing many catchy ad jingles we remember from childhood. Few of us can quote a line of Shakespeare or anything from the Bible, but most of us who were around at the time can sing “The One and Only Cereal That Comes In The Shapes of Animals” and know exactly what we’re singing about.

So while it’s true we may be dumber than shit, and arguably in steep decline, as a nation and culture, we’re very, very rich and we can still fuck you up. Yeah. And we will too. What are you gonna do about it?

Heh, I thought so…

You’ve Got to Appreciate Perfection, in any form

I have to admit, maddening as it may also be, the details of some of my current annoyances have a certain mad perfection to them. The devilish invention and sometime symmetry must be admired.

One reason I had such poor sleep the last few nights was that it was probably close to 90 degrees in my apartment. I need to buy a thermometer, it might surprise me to learn that only 77 or 81 degrees feels like ninety. Friends had suggestions: call the landlord (it’s 11 pm…) complain to the City (too much heat? huh?) put a tray of ice in front of the fan blowing hot air (uh… nah.)

I opened the windows, slept in front of a blowing fan, without blankets or sheets over me, without a shirt, with no socks (my usual winter sleeping accessory) and still it was uncomfortably hot. The valve on my radiator? Too hot to handle, and stuck in place anyway.

Last night I fell into a deep, blessed sleep that was interrupted when, three hours before my appointed wake-up, hammering, banging, drilling and stomping began directly over my head. It persisted vigorously for exactly three hours. It stopped abruptly right at the time I’d planned to wake up, literally at the time my alarm had been set for.

I noticed it was quiet, as I tried to go about my business, as I waited for a call back about lunch plans. After learning the lunch appointment was cancelled, and realizing the quiet had gone on long after any lunch break the workers upstairs may have taken, and since even after two cups of coffee I could hardly keep my eyes open, I stretched out to sleep for an hour’s nap.

I fell asleep at once, but less than a minute into my nap, Sekhnet, checking up on me, woke me with a phone call.

I began to fall asleep again when the sound of a pneumatic drill, or that machine the mechanics use in a garage to remove lug nuts, gave a short burst from the air shaft below my window. Literally two seconds of very loud mechanical rattattattattat!!!! noise, followed by perhaps three minutes of complete silence.

Then four or five seconds of the lug nut removal (can’t imagine there are lug nuts down there anywhere) followed by perhaps ninety seconds of silence.

“What the devil?” I wondered, when a hammering began. But the hammerer was as fickle and tentative as the guy with the heavy machine. Three blows, a fourth, then silence. Maybe it was the same guy? Words were exchanged in a foreign language. Perhaps there were two of them? What the hell were they doing down there?

I began to drift off when “BRRRR!!! BRRRRR!!! BRRRRR!!!!!” sounded again, then two hammer blows. More consultation in the unknown language. Silence as they pondered some unknowable mystery. Hammer, hammer. Silence, almost asleep again….BRRRRR!!! BRRRRR!!!! BRRRRRRR! BRR!!! BRRRRR!!!!”

Silence. Sudden very loud hammer blow, once! Silence.

My eyes are crossing as I type these words. I wonder why I am typing at all. I am too tired to wonder very hard. I am thinking about what’s next, what infernally ingenious, fiendishly customized and ridiculous petty annoyance will the universe come up with for me? It’s sure to be a cool one, and perfect for me. Stay tuned.

Friday the Thirteenth Again

Rodney Dangerfield:

When the alarm rang I hit snooze, and the snooze bar came off. I went into the bathroom, the door knob came off in my hand. I was afraid to pee.

It will sound petty and peevish, I know, but I haven’t been sleeping enough the last few weeks. I’m down about 2 hours every night, it seems. I was asked to sleep over in SoHo and take care of my sweetheart’s cat while she was away overnight. I was to stay over and make sure the Baron had his accustomed dinner service, his midnight snack and his continental breakfast.

They are renovating the apartment above. It worked out better than any alarm clock could, for the cat, because it was impossible to stay in bed directly under the hammer blows, drilling and other banging that commenced three hours before my alarm was set for. The cat was happy, he had his late breakfast a few hours earlier than he otherwise would have had I not had such a persistent and energetic alarm clock pound me awake.

I’m not complaining, mind you. I am complaining, let me face that sad fact. Of course, as my father was wont to point out, I’d complain if I was hanged with a new rope. All I need is a couple more cups of coffee and I’ll be fine. Fine, I say. Whoops, the drilling has moved to over my position here at the computador. Excuse me, please, I’ve got to get out into the street for some peace and quiet.

Does the thought of anger make you mad?

Is the subject of anger so infuriating, threatening, hideous in itself that virtually any mention of it will, sooner or later, stop conversation?

Likewise, the subjects of apology, repentance, forgiveness. Do these of necessity, except, among a small, select, wounded population, induce squeamishness and avoidance?

“May I play Devil’s Advocate?” she asks, and without waiting for so much as a nod says “Here’s another either/or. Either your intensity, self-righteousness and over-sensitivity on any subject go beyond the boundaries most people consider decent, made worse by a relentless demand for response, stated or strongly implied, put people to silence, just to make it stop. Or, if what you write is like… oh, never mind.”

What?

“You freak people out, and piss them off, when you… you know, when you act like yourself.”

Hmmmm. Good to know. I’ll try not to act like myself so much.

“That’s not what I mean,” she says.

Corporations are people, with feelings too, sniff, sniff, you judgmental, insensitive bastard. Is that what you mean?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “I mean that you might like to think you are not an angry person any more, that you have made great progress in that area, gained important insights you’ve had the courage and persistence to act on and are just currently frustrated, discouraged and trying not to wake up and smell the napalm, but that doesn’t mean….”

Hold it right there, girlfriend. I was in the middle of a long discussion over the roles of genetic predisposition, nurture and conscious effort to change innate personality traits one is unhappy with. The correspondence reached a certain point and then abruptly stopped on the other end. Silence as loud as the other person yelling “Silence! Enough!” [1]

I stumbled on this line in my notes last night: “the most insidious enemy of death benefits [taking positive lessons from the lives of even difficult departed loved ones–ed.] is the pervasive assumption that personality is fixed by midlife.” source

“Maybe your correspondent believes this pervasive assumption fervently, or hopelessly, as you might say, and has proven to his own satisfaction that struggling for any kind of positive personality change is futile and is just tired of your 2,000 word meditations, your opinionated self-regarding back and forth about the importance of doing things he feels are futile at best– particularly in light of your objectively depressing circumstances and lack of prospects for changing them any time soon. Maybe he’s doing you the kindness of not telling you he finds these attempts to justify your life particularly distasteful. Maybe he’s protecting you by not calling you on what bullshit virtually everything you say is.”

Dad? Is that you, you rascal?

“You will find, son, when times get tough, that I am everywhere. But let me assure you of this: you have made progress, and if I was still alive, still enlightened by the regrets I expressed on my death bed and my wishes to have lived differently, been, in fact, more like you, I’d be very proud of you. Proud that you continue to believe in what you feel is right, in spite of the difficulty of it, despite the deliberate and inadvertent deafness of virtually everyone you encounter these days.”

Must be easier for you these days, to say things like that, being a skeleton.

“Oh, I can’t tell you how much easier it is, now that I’m just bones with dirt between my smiling jaws.”

[1] Of course, another obvious reason for the gap in this particular case is the present lack of time required to thoughtfully reply in a life I know to be particularly emotionally complicated at this moment. This goes as well for each of the other several cases where the subject of anger has been unveiled and then left to languish a bit. –ed

Just watched a JFK documentary on PBS

And watched him deliver, in black and white movie footage, these words from Ireland, in the early summer of 1963, the last summer of his life:

George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life. “Other people,” he said, “see things and say ‘why?’. But I dream things that never were, and I say ‘why not?’”

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask “why not?”

Dig it.

Do You Get It?

Talking approvingly about the progress among the compromises made by the Obama administration to pass the puckishly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the context of America 2015: driven by profit, corporations as people with feelings too, money as speech, ad buys win campaigns, politicians vying at the corporate trough, etc. is like talking about the success of advocates against the spread of slavery in 1856.

“Half of the new territories won’t allow slaves as a result of our hard work here today,” the successful advocate would say proudly, “that’s progress. Not ideal, I know, but given the facts on the ground: slavery perfectly legal under the Constitution, constitutional amendment impossible in a nation divided 50/50 into partisan camps that hate each other, wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an armed war between these two gun toting factions protecting their interests… we were LUCKY to convince Congress not to allow slavery in half the new territories. That’s success today, and we should celebrate instead of looking at the damn glass half empty. Hell, we have enough problems trying to wipe out the buffalo herds so we can destroy the Indian culture on the prairies that we need for Manifest Destiny….”

“Do you fucking have fucking Tourette’s?” she asked me.

“Maybe,” I said, “but doesn’t everybody?”

500 foot foul ball

“Sometimes,” he said, squaring up in the batter’s box and not taking his eye off the old coach who was trying to show off his once major league fastball, “you just feel like hitting the fuck out the ball.” He squinted and fluttered his fingers on the bat handle, the bat remaining steady.

The pitch sailed in high and outside, he made no move to chase it. The coach grunted from the mound. “For Christsake, you coulda hit that.”

“Not 500 feet, Bush. Give me something I can turn around, give the fans a show.” said the batter.

The coach went through an ostentatious series of pitcher’s tics on the mound. Made the motions of loading up the ball, the motions of sneaking these motions past the umps and the opposing team. The batter didn’t smile at this, nor did he feel impatient. He just waited, like a Zen archer getting ready.

The next pitch was reasonable, a strike, with just enough on it to make it a little bit of a challenge. The batter uncoiled and sent it on a rising line toward the lights. The pitcher turned to watch it go, his body language said “fuck!”

The ball landed in the upper deck, in one of the last rows. It had traveled 500 feet. It was foul by about 25 feet. The batter nodded, the pitcher raised his eyebrows. If there had been a fan in the stands he might have jumped up.

Mind Bending Irony

That the loudest cries for freedom, liberty and the right of every man to the pursuit of happiness came from men who held others as slaves… and that these slaveholders cursed the mother country for reducing them to the wretched condition of ‘slaves’ by forcing unfair taxes upon them… and that these men, all the time owning other men, created a republican democracy based on ideals almost unimaginable in their day…. that while they ensured by the construction of their republican democracy that the rabble would not get the final say– by ingenious devices like the Electoral College–

“Do you have a kind of Tourrets, sir?”

Excuse me. Who is asking that?

“Does it matter? Wasn’t it you who not ten minutes ago wrote that the best thing to do when the mind was exhausted was shutting down the computer and clearing the mess on the desk all around the screen?”

Isn’t that a rhetorical question?

“Are you answering a question with a question, rascal?”

Aren’t you?

“I know you are, but what am I? Why are you asking me? Clear your desk.”