The Commonplace Book, End of February


“...into a country where the prisons are full
and the madhouses closed.”
(Charles Bukowski)

***
“This nasty, brutish (but unfortunately not short) movie [“Hannibal Rising”] left me feeling was ashamed to be American. First of all: As a folk archetype, a supervillain for our times, this is the best we can come up with? A vaguely Eurotrash schoolboy who eats people's cheeks? And secondly, where do we get off using the trauma of the Second World War as an excuse for Hannibal's (that is, our) insatiable appetite for murder? If pop-culture fantasies really do serve as a psychological X-ray of our collective fears and desires, this is one sorry-ass session on the couch.”
(Dana Stevens in Slate)



***
“(Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot) ... borrows from 1930s sociologist Willard Waller in describing parents and teachers as "natural enemies." Parents zoom in on their own child. When they ask teachers to be "fair," they're really looking for special consideration for their kid. Teachers, on the other hand, have to treat each child as an individual while at the same time attending to the class as a whole. To them, "fair" means treating kids as equals and judging them by the same standards.”
(NYT)

***
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
(Oscar Wilde)


***
"There are 1000 comic books on the shelves that don't contain a philosophy lecture and one that does. Isn't there room for that one?"
(Alan Moore on “Promethea”)

***
“On Israel, [David] Mamet’s problem isn’t timing but oversimplification. That Israel represents so much of what he admires in contemporary Jewish life, that he has become the lineal descendant of another Hollywood figure — Ben Hecht — should not blind him to its faults, nor lead him to caricature its critics. Not all Jewish criticism of Israel is self-hatred, and not all gentile criticism is anti-Semitic. Jews who sympathize with the Palestinians are not necessarily neurotic. Few Jews consider Zionism “criminal,” and are there any who condone suicide bombing? And, by the way, not all Israeli crimes are ‘imaginary.’”
(David Margolick)

***
“The fact that we have Rocky action figures is awesome. But the awesomest thing ever is the fact that we have an action figure of "the meat". We have an action figure of a CHUNK OF MEAT. Coolest/Stupidest thing ever.”
( Pretty, Fizzy Paradise)

***
“One of the drawbacks of liberal democracy is thus revealed: Included among its freedoms is the freedom to forget what once threatened its existence.”
(Clive James)

WARNING: Presidential Armpit Sniffing and Poop Jokes Enclosed

Mardi Gras in New Orleans has the raggedy soul, Rio's got the spectacle and celebration of the body, and Carnival in Venice has its spooky elegance-- but when it comes to scatology aimed at religious and political bullies, Düsseldorf has them all beat. How have we lived without this knowledge? And will I ever be able to scratch these images out of my eyes?






Lessons the Pirates Taught Me


After hundreds of years, piracy was eradicated in the Caribbean when the big powers of the time (Britain, Spain and France) finally agreed to stop harboring them, stop sponsoring pirates against other countries, and stop taking a percentage of pirated loot. There were still "letters of marque" but the practice faded except for a few pockets, I'm told, in Southeast Asia.

Americans who ought to know better, from Eisenhower to Kissinger to Carter, have engaged in state sponsored terrorism, in looking the other way so long as terrorists attacked our enemies, and in taking profit from "outlaw" operations like the Contra "rebel" cocaine profiteers. Wasn't it the CIA in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Iran in the 1950s that led us to this pass? And aren't we even now spending billlions to build a terrorist Disneyland in Iraq?

The United States has itself used terrorists as catspaws for decades. So have the Saudis, and the French, and the Russians, and the Iranians, and Chile, and Argentina, and...

Private interest groups sponsor terrorism as well, offer shelter and wink at their excesses; consider the Miami Cubans who hate Castro so much they don't much care who gets hurt, or anti-abortionists that incite home-grown terrorists to use health care workers as target practice.

This is an ancient practice. Professional criminals often hire "bugs", sociopathic outcasts, as tools to do their dirtiest jobs. Sometimes you can point an assasin in the right direction without ever leaving a fingerprint.

When the nations start to come clean about this history and negotiate OPENLY about taking away the safe harbors, we might start to see terrorism lose its popularity as a tactic, except for the bughouse rogues like McVeigh or Andrew Kehoe, who blew up Bath, Michigan in the Twenties.

The only thing Bush and Cheney have been correct about is that stopping terrorism will take decades-- and they, bless their crippled hearts, have a talent for pouring gasoline onto a fire instead of water.

AND WHO SHALL WE BLAME, THE CYNICAL RECRUITER OR THE NAIVE RECRUIT?



I make a date for golf, and you can bet your life it rains.
I try to give a party, and the guy upstairs complains.
I guess I'll go through life, just catching colds and missing trains.
Everything happens to me.

I never miss a thing. I've had the measles and the mumps.
And every time I play an ace, my partner always trumps.
I guess I'm just a fool, who never looks before he jumps.
Everything happens to me.

At first, my heart thought you could break this jinx for me.
That love would turn the trick to end despair.
But now I just can't fool this head that thinks for me.
I've mortgaged all my castles in the air.

I've telegraphed and phoned and sent an air mail special too.
Your answer was goodbye and there was even postage due.
I fell in love just once, and then it had to be with you.
Everything happens to me.

I've telegraphed and phoned. I sent an air mail special too.
Your answer was goodbye and there was even postage due.
I fell in love just once, and then it had to be with you.
Everything happens to me.

'Everything Happens To Me' lyrics by CHET BAKER


I Miss Eleanor Roosevelt Tonight


Isn't there a German phrase that means homesickness for a place you've never been? I miss Eleanor Roosevelt tonight. Her column, "My Day" appeared in hundreds of newspapers and apparently Max Gaines (father of William Gaines, later to become publisher of EC and MAD) wrote her and asked if she would like to write something for the comics. It was a young medium with a lot of chutzpah. She turned him down, but sent this statement instead.
She visited Appalachia and paid attention to what the children were wearing. She shook hands with a black man. When she inspected hospitals during the war, she spent a 12 hour day and visited with every wounded soldier. She visited prisons. Once when she was at a federal penitentary in Baltimore, FDR asked where Eleanor was. “She’s in prison,” he was told. “I’m not surprised,” FDR said. “But what for?”
In 1958, when she was 74, the Ku Klux Klan announced a $25,000 bounty on her head. She'd been invited to teach non-violent civil disobedience for a civil-rights workshop at a school in Tennessee. There was no Secret Service or police escort, and the FBI told her they couldn't protect her. So she and another old white lady, aged 71, drove through the night with a loaded pistol on the car seat between them. There are times when you can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. This wasn't just FDR's widow, this was Theodore Roosevelt's niece, after all, and hadn't she told the children to train themselves in honesty, self reliance, and the ability to meet any situation?

Max Gaines died in 1947 in a boating accident. He was credited with saving a boy's life when he threw his friend's son behind him just as they were struck by another boat.

Forget About Bringing Sexy Back, I Want You to Stop Calling Me a Traitor



I can't believe I'm posting the lyrics to a pop/country song, either, at least one more recent than Hank Williams, Sr. But I turned in to watch the Police on the Grammies and was profoundly moved by the Dixie Chicks performing this song, and I hope the audience realized the context of what they were seeing and hearing. This is as good a "Fuck, Yeah!" moment as you get outside of fiction or the stage, and the best one we've had since Stephen Colbert praised Our Peerless Leader at the Washington Correspondants dinner last year. Besides, it gives me an excuse to post a picture of (sigh) Natalie Maines. (It's those broad cheekbones, I know it is.)

Dixie Chicks: "Not Ready To Make Nice"

Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting

I'm through with doubt,
There's nothing left for me to figure out,
I've paid a price, and i'll keep paying


I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should

I know you said
Why can't you just get over it,
It turned my whole world around
and i kind of like it

I made my bed, and I sleep like a baby,
With no regrets and I don't mind saying,
It's a sad sad story
That a mother will teach her daughter
that she ought to hate a perfect stranger.
And how in the world
Can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Saying that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should

I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should

Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting

***
UPDATE: They won every award they were nominated for.

Our Every Choice Is Hateful. What, Then, Must We Do?

I am wholly sympathetic with those who want the troops out of Iraq yesterday-- but I want some third alternative to "get out now" and "escalate".

Here is my reason: our country (in spite of my feeble protest) invaded a foreign country, caused the murder of thousands of innocent people and destroyed billions of dollars worth of other people's infrastructure. Having committed these crimes, do we now leave the mess for other people to clean up-- like a certain frat boy has done all his life?

Isn't that why we hated Tom and Daisy Buchanan? "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures... and let other people clean up the mess they had made." There's a reason why that book contains one of the most powerful metaphors ever written to explain America.

Is this George Bush's ultimate triumph as the Antichrist, to make good people in his likeness? Even the people who despise him? "Gee, sorry we killed your cat and your baby and trashed your house, Iraq, guess we better leave now, this party's no fun anymore, still friends?"

This, to me, would be as monstrous as the invasion. Now those of us against the war will do the job that Bush can't bring himself to do, but he will happily spend the rest of his life blaming those antiwar killjoys for ruining his master plan. There's a psychological reason Bush supporters accuse us of hating America, of "wanting the terrorists to win." Psychically, they cannot afoord to admit to themselves that George W. Bush has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaeda ever had. And that they were his enablers.

The men (and women) who ordered this war, and their enablers, should be removed from office and put far away from power, where they can never hurt anyone again-- but the evil that men do lives after them. What, Then, Must WE Do?

ALBERT SPEER IN UGANDA



Went to see "The Last King of Scotland", an excellent, horrific film with real monsters inside. There's been some confusion and quibbling about the filmmakers' statement that novel and film are "based on real people and real events". Let me offer a clarification: the crimes, the criminals and the victims shown in the film are all true. The storytellers have inserted a character, a Scottish doctor played by James McAvoy, to serve as eyewitness and as a exemplar of what happens when you stand too close to The Big Bad and you think it's all a game.

All through the first part of the film, as the doctor lets himself be flattered and entertained into moving in with Idi Amin, I kept thinking of Albert Speer, Hitler's handsome young architect and Minister of Armaments, who later wrote an important memoir called Inside the Third Reich. That book tells us "it is hard to recognize the Devil when he's standing by your shoulder," and the psychology of McAvoy's fictional character is certainly plausible. When I became friends with a elderly German engineer who had been a card carrying member of the Luftwaffe in World War II, he told me that Speer's book came closest to capturing his own experience: he was young and amoral, he had an freshly minted engineering degree but no job, and here came this man offering good pay and an unlimited budget, and lots of interesting little problems to solve...

It's only fair to make the point that our culture really doesn't believe something happened unless it happens to one of us. There's something metafictional about our generation watching a story about a character who thinks this is all one big adventure, that nothing matters unless it matters to him, but never mind. Pursue that route too far, and you start blaming Ishmael for surviving "Moby Dick". If he'd REALLY been committed, he'd have died with the rest of them! ... But then who would live to tell the stories and bear witness?

Gillian Anderson, in a small role as a mission nurse, is the one who first asks the doctor if he's Real or not, and warns him that life isn't a game, that the charismatic Amin might not be a trustworthy playmate. She keeps her integrity, traveling with the wounded and the refugees, while the Scottish doctor runs off to play. When she reappears, it's as a sad face through a bus window, looking back at a small man trapped in Hell.

Kerry Washington, as Amin's doomed wife Kay, is the lonely woman who makes the mistake of trusting the feckless Scot. Kay's death is as it was in the film: Kay was murdered by Amin, and her dismembered corpse displayed in a grotesque pose for her children to see, so that Amin could shout at them about what a bad woman their mother was. The only fictional character in this scene, the Scottish doctor, has the good graces to vomit. He is the audience's representative, standing witness to what this good and beautiful woman was before the monsters turned her beauty into garbage. The explicit nature of this scene, and the children's solemn stare, ought to shame the millionaires who gave civilization the slasher film.

In a moment before he takes Kay as a lover, the swinging doctor says "Fuck it" and hungrily kisses her in spite of the danger to her and to himself. This is the battle cry of our generation who came of age in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. They inhaled their cocaine and made the dealer's life a romance, knowing full well that the high traveled north in the stomach of a campesino, but Fuck the Third World and Chile too, as long those dirty Communists are kept in line and we get our raw materials. Fuck the Rust Belt and Fuck the Cambodians and the Afghans too, who cares what kind of monsters rule over them so long as we stick a finger in Russia's eye-- and then our entire generation of whores had the gall to express surprise when the Third World flew planes into our towers. Is anyone really surprised that Idi Amin lived out his comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia, another wealthy nation that has consistently sheltered serpents in its bosom? Or that no industrial country has had the backbone to forswear the Saudi royals? Perhaps the royal family has embraced our American value of sponsoring dangerous people for so long as they pick on someone else, anyone else but me.

The day she died the neighbors came to snicker: "Well, thats what comes from too much pills and liquor."

Whatever our feelings about a woman who throws her mind away and lets herself become a punchline, the death of Vickie Hogan, alias Anna Nicole Smith seems so, so sad. Am I the only one paranoid enough to wonder about the timing?

Didn't some Frenchman say "I can't hear what you say, because who you are screams so loudly"? Step away from our prejudices about her, and it's all damn peculiar. There's almost 500 million waiting for someone to claim it; the full estate was $1.6 billion. Old Man Marshall's heir, the son who contested the widow's claim, died in June. Smith's 20 year old son dies while dozing in a hospital of a methadone and anti-depressant cocktail without much history of serious abuse. The Marshall family said the court fight would continue. Five months later the boy's mother is dead, after a very public history of substance abuse, self destructiveness and erratic behavior, and depressed about the loss of her son, as all the people appearing on television are quick to politely remind us. This is someone begging to be shoved from behind for the money. And a five month old baby daughter with no clear title to the money and a disputed paternity. That much money, someone could be set for life just catching whatever spills on the ground during the court proceedings. Or is all this just a series of unhappy coincidences? Sigh.

I used to have a girlfriend
known as Elsie
With whom I shared
Four sordid rooms in Chelsea
She wasn't what you'd call
A blushing flower;
As a matter of fact
She rented by the hour.

The day she died the neighbors
came to snicker:
"Well, thats what comes
from too much pills and liquor."
But when I saw her laid out like a queen
She was the happiest corpse
I'd ever seen.
And as for me,
I made up my mind back in Chelsea,
When I go, I'm going like Elsie.

Commonplace Book of Quotations




"Be as gentle as doves, but subtle as serpents."

***
“Miss New Jersey USA resigns after getting knocked-up? I just never thought that, in a country like America, beautiful women with great teeth and giant knockers would be having sex.” (Nerve.com)

***
“If Bush did like to get his nose into a book instead of over the handlebars of his mountain bike, he could glance at Sun Tzu, who said, avoid protracted war and attack cities as a last resort.”
(Alexander Cockburn)

***
“We should not assume that market forces will decide wisely. The market is rigged by manipulation and infantilisation.”
(Michael Bywater)

***
“Some people really are bad people,” said Mark I. Rosen, a social scientist at Brandeis and the author of “Thank You for Being Such a Pain: Spiritual Guidance for Dealing With Difficult People,” “but I don’t think the percentage is as high as people think it is.” Instead, he said, “most people fall into the category of incompetent or oblivious.” (NYT)

***
“Every year young people enter the teaching profession hoping to emulate the teachers they’ve seen in films. ...But when you’re confronted with the reality of teaching not just one class of misunderstood teenagers (the common television and movie conceit) but four or five every day, and dealing with parents, administrators, mentors, grades, attendance records, standardized tests and individual education plans for children with learning disabilities, not to mention multiple daily lesson plans — all without being able to count on the support of your superiors — it becomes harder to measure up to the heroic movie teachers you thought you might be.
“While no one believes that hospitals are really like “ER” or that doctors are anything like “House,” no one blames doctors for the failure of the health care system. From No Child Left Behind to City Hall, teachers are accused of being incompetent and under-qualified, while their appeals for better and safer workplaces are systematically ignored.
“Every day teachers are blamed for what the system they’re just a part of doesn’t provide: safe, adequately staffed schools with the highest expectations for all students. But that’s not something one maverick teacher, no matter how idealistic, perky or self-sacrificing, can accomplish.”
(Tom Moore)

***
“...historical amnesia is common in relation to a president’s mistakes and controversial policies. For example, the museum in the Reagan Library does not mention the Iran-contra scandal.”
(Benjamin Hufbauer, author of Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory)

***
“We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don't give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They're confounded pretty, and that's all we know and all we need to know!”
(H.P. Lovecraft, In a letter to James F. Morton, December 1926)

***
“At the heart of this alchemy is the issue’s, and indeed the series’ presentation of male loneliness and longing as a normal, even integral, component of Peter’s heroism. In fact, I don’t think it would be too much to say that Spider-Man has been, at various points in its history, a romance comic for boys in the guise of an action serial.”
(Jim Roeg, Double Articulation)

***
"The fruits of the toil of millions are baldy stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few … from the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes — tramps and millionaires." (Populist Party Platform by Ignatius Donnelly, Populist Party platform 1882)

***
"The wealth gap in America has long been in the making. In the 30 years between 1975 and 2005, U.S. households in the bottom 80 percent income bracket saw their share of national income actually fall. Those in the bottom 40 percent saw a drop in their incomes when adjusted for inflation. Only the top 20 percent of households experienced an increase their share of the total national income; much of that went to households in the highest 5 percent of the income bracket.... U.S. households in the top 20 percent of the income distribution earn own well more than 80 percent of the nation's wealth.... Households in the top fifth of the income bracket earn almost half of the nation's income."
(National Public Radio, based on Census Bureau figures)

***
“Proposing that Jane Austen was a lesbian or Sophocles a cross-dresser is one way for those who have nothing especially stunning to say about irony or tragic fate to muscle in on the literary scene. It is rather like being praised as an eminent geographer for finding your way to the bathroom.”
(Terry Eagleton)

***
Doing caricatures forces you out of drawing formula shapes. Animation is such easy prey to formula. Animators should constantly caricature in the hunt for new shapes and ideas to keep us from falling into habit.”
(John Kricfalusi)

***
“The Hayes story is a familiar one, and of a kind the art world loves. Not only was he tragically unrecognized but, we now learn, he was also hugely influential. ... [the] artist sinks into an obscurity from which he should now, finally, be raised. But he will not be raised, because there is no Lester Hayes. He never existed. He is entirely an invention of ...the gallery’s directors, Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett, the co-publishers of the magazine Art on Paper, who ... cobbled together all the “Hayes” work from scrap material and cooked up the detailed biography to go with it.
“... Is contemporary art largely a promotional scam perpetuated by — in no particular order of blame — museums, dealers, critics, historians, collectors, art schools and anyone else who has a sufficient personal, professional or financial investment riding on the scam to want to keep it afloat?.... Imagine the consequences if lots of people started creating “fake” art without acknowledging what they were up to? The whole art-as-investment illusion would evaporate. The market would crumble. Art myths could no longer be trusted. The Triple Candie [gallery’s] Hayes biography, in other words, is spun largely from myths and clichés that sell art and artists today.”
(Holland Cotter on the show“Lester Hayes: Selected Work, 1962-1975” at Triple Candie Gallery in Harlem)

***
“She [Molly Ivins, who lived in Austin] loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town ‘that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.’”

President Snerd




Edgar Bergen: Are you listening, Mortimer?
Mortimer Snerd: Uh... Happy Valley?
Edgar Bergen: That's right, yes. Now, just try to imagine it. Can't you just close your eyes and see it?
Mortimer Snerd: Well, I can't see very good with my eyes closed. My eyelids get in the way.
Edgar Bergen: Well, you create a picture in your mind's eye.
Mortimer Snerd: Oh.
Charlie McCarthy: That's not easy for him. His mind gets in the way.

Chucks Gone Wild!

The handsome fellows at top are Yellow-bellied Marmots from the Rockies. They should not be confused with the Golden Marmots of Pakistan, that Herodotus described as "ants bigger than foxes but smaller than dogs that mine for gold". People laughed at the old man for 2,500 years until someone checked it out and found that the ancient Persian word for marmot was translated as "mountain ant", and for centuries the locals sifted for nuggets in the tailings of marmot burrows.

Casual visitors know of my fondness for animals, but close friends and family know of my special interest in the Rodentia. Any holiday named after a rodent is bound to be taken seriously hereabouts, and this entry was late because the weekend was taken up up with solemn Imbolc solemnities solemnly practiced with great solemnity: fasting the night before, greeting the woodchuck with the dawn on February 2nd, making corn dollies in honor of St. Brigit the midwife, putting out bread and butter, and contemplating the pregnant belly of the Great Goddess through the night.





The central pictures show our more familiar woodchuck (Algonquin word) in an unfamiliar pose. I can testify that chucks are sometimes climbers; in fields between South Haven and Kalamazoo I saw one twenty feet up in a tree, looking like he was on salary, and most bizarrely saw a chuck shimmied up top of a wooden fence post, surveying his domain. It's not common, but if you watch any animal long enough and they'll exhibit individual behaviors that show Descartes a mechanistic fool.




These pretty fellows at the bottom are the rarest, the Vancouver Island Marmot. Clear cut logging had a paradoxical effect on them; they expanded into the open areas but then predation thinned out the breeding population that had been concentrated in the mountains. On a smaller scale, they have the same problem the Blue Whale faces-- they're still out there, but it's harder and harder to find one another.