Hold 'Em in the Caul, Field

I still think there's something creepy about Holden Caulfield. What's this business of catching children before they "fall" into adulthood-- when the world needs more adults, not fewer? Or Seymour Glass, waking his wife Muriel from her shallow slumber in a particularly ugly way?

I can imagine Holden (if he stays out of jail) ending as a basement-dwelling iconoclast, proud to be smarter, more "authentic" than the rest of us suffering monkeys, part of the cast of High Fidelity or the local comics shop. Given his social class, Holden might end as Jerry Rubin did, praising Charles Manson and then graduating to embrace Reagan and Wall Street, albeit with a Saturday Night Live ironic twist to his mouth. Is it unkind of me to wonder if Rubin was sneering when he was hit by a car?

Am I the only one annoyed by Salinger's twee characters being made of, well, Glass? I know Seymour had a tough war (Salinger himself was part of D-Day), but does that excuse spattering even the silliest of women with a mess of brains? Better to volunteer for pharmaceutical experiments if you want to throw yourself away. Why not rush into a fire, or find a leper colony like Graham Greene's Burnt-Out Case?

The Canadian Phillip Marchand has some thoughts on the American man-child. Salinger himself managed the equivalent of a James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, never sullying his reputation with lesser work (as someone said of Elvis' death, "good career move")-- but not dying, enjoying his royalties in private, apparently a pleasant enough life with friends and family.

I would have liked Holden better if, having rejected the phoniness of straight society, he picked up a shovel and scooped shit at an animal shelter, or sorted clothes for the homeless, or even (cough) tried to teach in the public schools. Holden creeped me out when I first read Catcher in middle school-- I preferred Irving Stone's Michelangelo and VanGogh, or T.H. White's King Arthur: sensitive, maybe doomed, but not likely to surrender.

I still prefer genre writing to the finger-sniffing stories of "New Yorker" fiction. The wounded detectives, from Spenser to Travis McGee to T. Jefferson Parker, expose the truth like Holden but then try to do something about it. Even the silliest super hero, as Michael Chabon makes explicit in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and implies in Wonder Boys, is at least pretending to be a grown up, picking up their imaginary cosmic shovel or rescuing a kitten from a tree to make the world a better place. Salinger reminds me of those people who don't like kittens because they turn into cats.

Commonplace Book: Current Reading

“If there is sin against life, it consists… in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
-- Albert Camus

“The irony is that you have to be somebody before anybody listens to you,” he said. “I wasn’t an expert when I was an expert, and now that I’m not an expert, I’m an expert. It’s kind of curious.”
-- Ed Burns, on his years of teaching and police work before writing The Wire

"I’ve decided that the single worst thing about this illness is its terrible authority. I mean the way it thunders at you, 'This is the reality. This is how it is and how it’s going to be. Any memories of fun or wellness are flukes, delusions. And will never come again. Now you have 20/20 vision and see life for the dreadful mess it really is.'”
-- Dick Cavett on depression

"Mr. [Phil] Gramm said that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was 'probably the most exploited worker in American history' since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the 'billions' he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell."
-- New York Times article


"...Only 8 percent [of Guantánamo detainees] were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority — all but 5 percent — had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.”
-- Jane Mayer in The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals

"The approach to international affairs that has dominated the American foreign affairs community for some years is called realism. The realist view of the pressure for a new international economic order in the seventies was summarized to me this way: There has always been inequality among nations, and if we ignore this flapdoodle long enough... the subject will simply fade away. Even at the height of the interest in North-South... there was a feeling that he should stop wasting his time with such issues-- that the North-South dialogue was the sort of subject that interested 'ex-hippies and women who are worried about babies with diarrhea'".
-- Calvin Trillin in Remembering Denny

"I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing-- tightrope walking comes to mind-- but it's a difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot. In order to take a crack at the third or fourth draft, you have to hold onto an almost insane belief-- insane in that you can't think of any rational evidence to support it-- that what you're working on, by now stupefyingly boring to you, will be of interest or value to others."
-- Calvin Trillin in Remembering Denny

"puerco araña.....puerco araña......ya nooes puerco araña ahora es puerco potterr.."

Society and Sociopaths

A question on a message board about house rabbits-- bonded pairs are common, but apparently bringing a new rabbit into a home where another rabbit is already established is much more complicated than adding another puppy or kitten-- led to questions about etiquette in crowded burrows, and that to this interesting journal entry on the concepts of giri and gimu in Japan.
Japan has a lower crime rate than almost any other modern country (one murder for every 100,000 people compared to 8.7 per 100,000 in the U.S.). The author wonders why Japan, with all its industrialization and alienation (the Marquis de Sade would blanch at the violent fetishism in Japanese pop culture) doesn't produce more sociopaths.

The Captive Princess

[Rapunzel] "begins with two intense cravings: that of a pregnant woman for a plant that grows in a garden next door, and that of a witch for a girl child..."
-- essay by Alison Lurie on the archetypes running around in the fairy tale at The New York Review of Books

The Dark NIght of the Soul

Upon the darkened night
the flame of love was burning in my breast
And by a lantern bright
I fled my house while all in quiet rest
Shrouded by the night
and by the secret stair I quickly fled
The veil concealed my eyes
while all within lay quiet as the dead

Oh Night, Thou was my guide
Oh Night more loving than the rising sun--
Oh Night that joined the lover
to the beloved one
transforming each of them into the other

Upon that misty night
in secrecy, beyond such mortal sight
Without a guide or light
than that which burned so deeply in my heart

That fire t'was led me on
and shone more bright than of the midday sun
To where he waited still
it was a place where no one else could come

Within my pounding heart
which kept itself entirely for Him
He fell into His sleep
beneath the cedars all my love I gave
And by the fortress walls
the wind would brush His hair against his brow
And with its smoothest hand
caressed my every sense it would allow

I lost myself to Him
and laid my face upon my lover's breast
And care and grief grew dim
as in the mornings mist became the light
There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair
There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair
There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair

The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross
Adapted and set to music by Loreena McKennitt

“That which this anguished soul feels most deeply is the conviction that God has abandoned it, of which it has no doubt; that He has cast it away into darkness as an abominable thing . . . and this comes from the sense of being abandoned by God, being chastised and cast out by His wrath and heavy displeasure. All this and even more the soul feels now, for a terrible apprehension has come upon it that thus this despair will be with it for ever. It has also the same sense of abandonment with respect to all creatures, and that it is an object of contempt to all, especially to its friends.” The "Dark Night" got its name from John of the Cross, but something like it happens on almost every mystic path. Meister Eckhart talks about "leaving God for God", losing your personal, tribal concepts of the divine so they can be replaced by something closer to the Real, but sometimes that means God pushes you down the stairs with a helpful hand in the small of your back. Religious bigots like bin Laden or Dobson never feel abandoned at all, never question, and so stay stuck as spiritual infants convinced they have God's unlisted phone number and God (who strangely resembles them in a mirror) "sits up nights to admire them." Their concept of the Divine will always be small and mean and hunched by their own limitations.

Some dark comfort that the talons griping my soul in the dark once drew blood from the shoulder of Athene. If Jesus isn't abandoned in the garden when God ran from the po-pos to let him die screaming desolate on the cross, if some small part of his consciousness thinks he's going to get out of this, he's not really going to die, then it doesn't really count, does it? In shamanic experience, the Dark Night means your helper spirits leave you to have your body get torn apart, eaten and shat out by wild animals, and the task-- unless you decide to just lie there and stay dead-- is to reassemble the bloody chunks into something resembling a human being. One of the northern nations (Cree, I think) used to leave those exhibiting bizarre behavior alone in a lean-to for the winter-- if you reconstituted and were still alive in the Spring, then you were meant to be a shaman, but if you starved or froze to death, then it was just a schizophrenic episode and not a mystic experience at all. Odin lost an eye messing with this stuff, and probably counted himself lucky that it wasn't his left nut.

Oh, to be in New York, with a Hot but Sensitive Sugar Mama and Tickets to See Chiwetel Ejiofor in Othello

If jealousy is green-eyed, what color is envy? Chartreuse, maybe, or viridian. Access, that's what New Yorkers have. I envy East Coasters this week because Chiwetel Ejiofor is appearing as Othello , with Ewan McGregor as Iago. I first saw him as the nameless Alliance operative in Serenity, and my artsy friends as the desk clerk/physician/taxi driver in Dirty Pretty Things.



Never mind my prejudice against most actors and the theatrical profession as shallow, pretty things, the irresponsible babysitters of the modern American soul. Ejiofor's performances are layered, man. He played a nameless, remorseless, True Believer villain in Serenity, one of the biggest one-dimensional cliches in action films, but between Whedon's writing and Ejiofor's performance, the character is frightening and plausible, one of those clean-cut functionaries who were drawn to support dictators overseas because democracy is so messy. When these professionals find themselves being used for specious ends by a Nixon or a Bush, a Cheney or a Kennedy or a fictional Alliance, they rationalize murder-for-hire with a made-up samurai code, and if you understood the big picture like they do, you'd be all too happy to ensure that those little brown people die beautifully. You hate the character's guts and want to see him die for what he's doing to your friends, laugh when he's confounded-- nobody does Brer Rabbit against the monsters like Joss Whedon-- and almost feel sorry for the son-of-a-bitch when his nose is rubbed in the vileness he's defending.

What could an actor like that do with a text as layered as Shakespeare? Both London and New York are giving this Othello good reviews. Apparently Ejiofor catches the sweetness of the character, that part of Captain Othello's soul that forgets about soldiering and discovers joy and tenderness: "O my soul's joy!.... Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee-- And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again." -- which makes it all the more heartbreaking when chaos comes, and he, base Indian, murders a pearl worth more than all his tribe. The New Yorker review noted that Ejiofor was young for the part-- Othello is, after all, an older man finally settling down with the first woman he's known that wasn't the colonel's lady or a camp follower-- but that Ejiofor's dignity carries it off. Imagine what he's going to do with it when he's of an age to fully empathize with Othello's tenderness-- and subsequent horror-- at being granted the grace note of Desdemona in a violent, lonely life.

Maybe next year they can trade parts, with Othello set in a Southern military town, and the insecurities of a po' white Othello risen to military success, but naive about women, who makes the mistake of thinking the whole world honest because he himself is honest. Has anyone ever tried an all-black Othello, with the dynamics of race taken out of the mix? A high-yellow Iago and a dark skinned Othello? I've no idea what Ejiofor would do with Iago, but I'd like to see him try.

Some days I regret not being in the cultural center of things, usually when wading through the slushpile with a manuscript clutched to my breast, trying to forge a connection with publishers and agents. It's both startling and energizing to go to a convention and find myself surrounded by people smarter and more talented than myself, being able to chat with people who have the same concerns and awareness of a larger world than the one between their legs or ears or bellies.

But I don't envy these artists the struggle with brute survival a creative life requires in Chicago, Washington, or New York. A one room apartment costs more than our entire house and modest garden, no parking, no pets, no room for a pet, and certainly not a menagerie. A trip for a gallon of milk is a polar expedition. My buddy Wayne has to endure freezing bus stops, trains, automobiles and shank's mare for a trip to the post office that take me five minutes, fifteen if I decide to walk. Living in a college town helps; between magazine subscriptions, decent coffee beans, an understanding library and newstand, cable and the internets, there's not much intellectual stimulation lacking in Kalamazoo if you've sense enough to seek it out. Our neighboring suburb of Portage, a Republican enclave that never saw a development scheme it didn't want to suck, seems determined to turn itself into Houston North, with asphalt as far as the eye can see, travel times twice that of Kalamazoo, and a corresponding diminishment of lifestyle.

And I wonder if being in the center of things brings a distortion to thought that we escape in the flyover provinces; you only have to turn on five minutes of what passes for network commentary to see that for all their vaunted connections, money and power, their blind spots are greater than ours, with more catastrophic results. The janitor knows more about the boss than the boss knows about the janitor.

How the Boss Made a Monkey Out of Me

The recent headlines about chimps who outperform college students at mental math are somewhat misleading. It's not that these were super chimps, or moronic freshmen. Boxer and Feinstein, two female chimps named for California's senators, played a memory game that asked them to compare numbers and choose the larger number of two sets of objects. Their human opponents-- here's what made the difference-- "were not allowed to count or verbalize as they worked, and they were told to answer as quickly as possible. Both chimps and humans typically answered within 1 second. And both groups fared about the same."

Comparing sets of numbers resembles a task primates might have to perform in nature: grabbing as much as you can before the hyenas chase you away, or the po-pos arrive, whichever comes first. Taking language away from the humans put us on a level playing field with the other primates. "I think of this more as using non-human primates as a tool for discovering where the sophisticated human mind comes from," explains Jessica Cantlon of Duke. "I don't think language is the only thing that differentiates humans from non-human primates, but in terms of math tasks, it is probably the big one," she said.

The snatch-and-grab-it instinct tells us a lot about why so many right wing cranks reject taxation, and vote against their own self interest to support the Republican party while the infrastructure turns to shit around them. Kim Stanley Robinson does the math in his novel Forty Signs of Rain:
“The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.... Sixty four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value.”

".... What's the average income?" Edgardo asked. "Thirty thousand?.... Call it thirty, and what's the average taxes paid?.... Call it ten. So let's see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party."

“.... It's a matter of what you can see," [Frank] suggested. "You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it's given to you. You have it. Then you're forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you've created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.... The only things people understand are sensory. We’re hard-wired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts or statistics just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”

A Brief History of Collateral Damage

A lot of civilians are being killed in this crazy little thing that Bush calls a war. The U.S. military is measuring out other people's lives with coffee spoons. If an American soldier risks killing civilians, up to thirty deaths are acceptable, so long as the strike was against military targets. In the Iraqui war, which even its most ardent lovers admit cannot be "won" by military means, thirty civiian deaths would be counterproductive, if those thirty corpses leave one or two very angry survivors; certainly if my own loved ones were killed by a well-groomed aviator listening to headphones, I'd be dead or in Guantanamo before i'd stop hunting. Why do we expect better behavior from the fellaheen than we do from outrselves?

Time was, with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, you could see the face of the poor bastard you shot, and be sure of your mark. War sure has gone downhill since Napoleon's brother added state terror to his conquest of Spain, and the outgunned Spanish responded with tactics that were given the name guerilla, "little war". The French hussars thought a little shock and awe would cow the Spanish into submission, and of course it did-- only for so long as they kept the eye on weeping fathers and screaming women. The moment the big guy's back was turned, survivors started thinking up homespun ways to make a technologically superior force die very slowly, and very old.

This is a fundamental problem in the use of air force and massive strikes that has never been publically debated in a society that claims to have civilian control of its military. its origins lie in the biplane-era theories of an Italian aviator, Giulio Douhet, who thought you could bomb an enemy into submission by destroying his infrastructure and taking civilian lives. They thought he was a crank during the First World War, even court-martialed and threw him in jail, but starting in the 1920s, when The Command of the Air was published, he found an audience, with Guernica the first experiment.

The first part of Douhet's theory-- that you could destroy an enemy's war-making infrastructure from the air, and force him to surrender-- proved to be true as far as Germany was concerned. In Japan, the atomic bomb forced Japanese civilians to force the emperor to force the military to surrender-- but a close examination, as in the Pacific War Research Society's Japan's Longest Day, proves, beyond the wishful thinking of my gentle pacifist brethren, that the Japanese military was still not going to surrender even after Nagasaki. It was our good luck and a civilian revolt against the samurai generals in charge that forced the emperor to concede. The second half of Douhet's premise has never been openly debated, except in our war colleges. It may be that American civilians, seeing their military adventures as fundamentally altruistic, cannot imagine there would be any organized revenge for an accidental killing.

The 14 Japanese researchers that make up the Pacific War Research Society must be lonely men, since so much of their work puts the lie to dearly held cliches on both sides of the Pacific. You might even find out that the Japanese were working on their ownatomic bomb project at Hungnam, Korea, under Yoshio Nishina at the Imperial Japanese Army's Riken Institute.

In the case of Vietnam, the infrastructure was bombed "back to the Stone Age" many times over, with neutral Cambodia and Laos bombed for good measure, but it did not yield the results described by the Douhet: the Vietnamese simply hunkered down and toughened their resolve. The Luftwaffe could have told them that; Hitler's bombing of Britain did nothing to "weaken the resolve" of the civilian population, but only pissed everyone off and made Arthurian legends out of the teenagers who went up in Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, the firemen memorialized near St. James Cathedral, and Winston Churchill's sad guilty poking through the ashes of Canterbury.

And what is the emotional effect of modern American air power, for those unlucky enough to be standing under it? Are their first thoughts, "Gosh, we'd better surrender", or "Come close enough, you bastard, and I'll put a Stone-Age cap in your high-tech ass"? American audiences, who gasp at the atrocities inflicted on downed Americans in Somalia, apparently lack the imagination to see a Blackhawk helicopter from the Somali's point of view. Americans want always to be loved, and always perceive themselves as acting out of good will, like the Abominable Snowman hugging Bugs Bunny, and are always astonished, hurt, and then angry when they face rejection by the other.

If we are willing to as the Romans did, "make a desert and call it peace", then bombing and collateral damage will suffice; but there are no guarantees about what happens later, when the few survivors grow to manhood.

Poor Tom's A-Cold: King Lear and Empathy

Isak Dinesen told Truman Capote that she judged people by what they thought of King Lear, which is pretty damned intimidating, if you ask me. If actors think of the play as a mountain to be climbed, how much more of a wilderness for us Sunday climbers, who might never make it over the top but become lost in the brambles and ankle-turning boulders around the base of the mountain? Maybe she just said it to scare visitors, or start a conversation.

This is occasioned by the arrival in New York of Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn's production of King Lear, which is mostly getting good reviews. I'd follow these guys most anywhere: Trevor Nunn's film of Twelfth Night is my favorite Shakespearean movie, being less melancholy and easier to bear repeated viewings than Zefferelli's beautiful Romeo and Juliet, and in interviews McKellen "gets" things that most actors miss.

For most of us peasants, the whole last century was a bloody meditation on just the implications of the "flies to wanton boys" speech. Millions were having our wings pulled off and more than enough signed up to do the pulling, whether for Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Pinochet, or on a smaller scale, for Reagan and Kissinger in Latin America. Dinesen hid her Jewish neighbors (Denmark was the only European country to not lose a single Jewish citizen) in plain sight, posing as household servants when the Nazis came to call, "hiding them like winter apples in the cellar", but then in the face of syphylis, failed crops, inconstant lovers and plane crashes, she seems to always have had more style than the rest of us (when the apocalypse comes, I'm standing next to her).

By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end-
Methinks it is no journey.

Myself, I've always been a Tom O'Bedlam/Edgar, not old and never powerful enough for Lear, although of late I've begun to understand all too well Yeats' "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?" I've worked for all too many Gloucesters, the difference being I'll be damned if I rescue them. I dated Goneril, or was it Regan? And Edmund is in charge of Republican strategy and most athletic programs in this country. McKellen says that Lear's a talker, always showing off verbally or muttering in argument with the gods, so maybe I'd better watch my ass.



If you pinned me down to say One Big Thing, with the stipulation that no one's ever done re-reading these plays, I'd have to say this: that the sympathetic characters, whether ragged or royal, Cordelia and Edgar and the Fool, all posess the trait of empathy, an ability to make emotional connection with others. Some of them even come around to forgive the people who drove them off. The villains all have one frightening trait in common: there is not a trace of fellow-feeling or empathy in them. They are as casual about digging out someone's eyes or disposessing an old man or hanging their own sister in prison, as those gods and wanton boys are with the rest of us. And this problem of empathy-- why some have it, and others don't, why some Join the Party in order to escape the demands of empathy for others, why others embrace the world and accept the broken heart that goes with it-- is essential to humanity.

Phillip K. Dick wrestled with this a little in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with the metaphor of androids identical to humans in every way, except for their demonstrable lack of human empathic reactions. This makes them a danger to others, a lesson learned in the aftermath of a nuclear war and the almost complete extinction of animal species (one of the ways androids and humans are tested for empathy is to note their reaction to animal cruelty.) The Hollywood ending of Blade Runner, with the Rutger Hauer android suddenly growing a conscience, runs contrary to the rest of the story and the evidence of the past century, where Nazis can shovel children into a pit and that same evening weep at their daughter's violin recital. How else explain Jeanne Kirkpatrick, as a diplomat under Reagan, dismissing the rape and murder of Maryknoll nuns because they were "sympathizers" somehow with The Enemy? How else explain the willingness of people to use indiscriminate bombs in warfare, whether strapped to their body or from the air-conditioned comfort of a fighter plane?

Maybe I could have bumper stickers printed up: If You Think Empathy's Not Important, the Next Time There's a Holocaust, Call a Psychopath.

Commonplace Book: Quotations, August 2007

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit: “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.”
Horace,The Epistles. Book I: Epistle X

***
Saddam may have been despised almost everywhere, but it was only in the United States that a majority of the population were terrified of what he might do to them, tomorrow. Not surprisingly, support for the war correlated very closely with such fears.
(Noam Chomsky)

***
(from The Onion, July 25)
CHAPEL HILL, NC—A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners.
"We were struck by how an Iraqi reacts to the sight of the bloody or decapitated corpse of a family member in a not unlike an American, or at the very least a Canadian, would," said Dr. Jonathan Pryztal, chief author of the study. "In addition to the rage, bloodlust, and hatred we already know to dominate the Iraqi emotional spectrum, it appears that they may have some capacity, however limited, for sadness."
.... "We are, in truth, still a long way from determining if Iraqis are exhibiting actual, U.S.-grade sadness," Mayo Clinic neuropsychologist Norman Blum said. "At present, we see no reason for the popular press to report on Iraqi emotions as if they are real."

***
“The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.... the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modem style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys.
-- Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”

***
“You never want to be writing the thing you're writing, unless you're actually in it, unless it's just flowing, and you're typing, and you're laughing, and you're crying, and everything's giddy, and you're in the moment. That's the beauty of it. All the rest of the time, all you want to think about is whatever it is you're not supposed to be thinking about. Having said that, most of my best ideas have come while I was procrastinating about something else I was supposed to be writing. So I respect that. If my brain is saying, "You know what? You're supposed to be working on Runaways, but you're in an X mood," I go there, because if that's where the muse is hovering, I'm gonna go visit her. Sometimes you've got to bite the bullet, and be a man, and say, "Just write the script. Come on, find the inspiration. Bring that muse over here." But if I have a little leeway, and it's clearly going one way and not the other, that's what I'm going to follow.”
(Joss Whedon)

***
"We are back where we started. Sending raw materials out, bringing cheap manufactured goods in. This isn’t progress. It is colonialism."
WILFRED COLLINS WONANI, (head of the Chamber of Commerce in Kabwe, Zambia, where a Chinese company once manufactured finished cloth but now exports only raw cotton, quoted in the NYT)

***
“When we live in the science fiction condition, what's left but writing contemporary fiction with the eye for detail and extrapolation that comes from an sf writer?“
(Warren Ellis)

Joss Whedon Interview, Lessons from Bad Writing, & Cultural Notes on Wonder Woman

Joss Whedon being one of the contemporary writers that I admire, an interview with Tasha Robinson at the AV Club is useful and informative not just for Whedon fans, but for all students of the culture. The standard take on writers in Hollywood is Henry Slesar's "success in Hollywood is like climbing a mountain of shit to pluck one perfect rose, and then discovering that you've lost your taste of smell". To my unschooled eye, Whedon has managed to pluck more roses from the pile than most, even compared with the admirable William Goldman and Hal Ashby. If this keeps up, Whedon could have a resume that makes him the Billy Wilder of adventure movies.

As much as I am wrapped up in Whedon's successes, I learn more, as a creative person, from his failures. As much as I admired (and early on, imitated) for example, John D. MacDonald and Robert Heinlein, all I could do was gape and wonder, how'd they do that?, whereas it was easier to decode what didn't work in bad novels, B-movies and crap comics, and so learn what not to do. It wasn't until I matured enough to see MacDonald and Heinlein's flaws that I was able to decipher how they got their affects.

The failures described at length in this interview-- the collapse of Whedon's script for Wonder Woman, for instance, has some interesting things to say about our culture's relationship with feminine archetypes. Try and name a female character in an action film that isn't somebody's girlfriend (the anonymous scream machine) or a soulless-but-hot killing machines (Aeon Flux, Underworld, Linda Hamilton in the Terminator sequels, ad infinitum. (Whedon himself, at a low point in his career, was reduced to tears when he saw what had been made of his script forAlien: Ressurection.) To this day, Greg Rucka's series of Wonder Woman reprints are the only ones I'd recommend with a clean conscience.

Whedon's Wonder Woman sounds like an opportunity to stir fish-out-water social satire together with comic book ass-kicking. His Diana of Themiscrya was a kind of Candide with super-powers, who just doesn't understand why humans are so small and nasty and cruel, clawing one another for top position on a mudball, when they could build a paradise on earth if they just... ? He wrote a scene that worked the magic bracelets into this vision. Whedon even managed to redeem the (I thought) unredeemable Steve Trevor (a character so disliked, I found it difficult to type his name)-- making him the wry voice of struggling humanity, trying to explain to a perfect creature made from clay why children are starving, or this group hates that group, or...

I can imagine all kinds of PG-13 Michael Valentine Smith moments, with an Amazon princess being gobsmacked by human taboos-- remember when Heinlein's character took his first dip on a public beach? Or economic inequities-- I can imagine Diana saving us from Max Lord (DC's young-and-handsome take on Rupert Murdoch) and then baffled as to why this man goes unpunished, why he should have more wealth than the people who do the work that creates his wealth. More difficult to pull off, but interesting, might be the feminist villains-- why does the Cheetah's sexual power turn to bitterness and villainy instead of joy, or Circe's revelling in manipulation and deceit instead of using her power to heal? (This is starting to sound too good to me; I'd better get back to my own work before the long day wanes.)

They Won't Quit. They CAN'T Quit.

So the Senate's going to pull an all nighter; it seems the least they can do, considering the sleepless nights imposed on Iraquis and the untenable position of our troops. The Democrats proposed a pull out starting in 120 days. The Republicans threatened a filibuster. The Democrats, in a bit of jiu jitu, said, fine,let’s sit up all night and talk about it.

The Texans think this is silly, a "slumber party": aid and comfort to the enemy, support our troops, wait until September, you know the drill. Does anyone else feel that the Arabs and the Texans truly deserve each other? The odious Lieberman, standing tall with Mitch McConnell and McCain, thinks this is a terrible idea, all this fussin', 'sides, all this commotion might upset Marse' George. At least one of the soldiers thinks the members of Congress ought to serve a rotation: "they don't have to do anything, they just come hang out with me and go home at the times I go home, and come stay here 15 months with me." Update: The timetable didn't get the 60 votes needed to pass, but it did win 52 votes, up from 39 votes a non-binding withdrawl resolution got last year.

John Mc Cain, bless his heart, keeps talkin’ ‘bout the "chaos": “Failure will lead to chaos, withdrawal will lead to chaos.... I believe that a withdrawal, or a date for withdrawal, will lead to chaos in the region.” The chaos is already here, John. They've already followed us home: George Bush's invasion of Iraq was a recruiting bonanza for al-Qaeda. Sigh... always the last to know.

Carl Levin, one of our senators from Michigan since forever, just wants this open-ended commitment to end: "What we have is a glass called Iraq that has a hole in the bottom, and whatever we put into Iraq, goes right through that hole." I've been puzzled by the dead enders like William Kristol or the mad monk Norman Podhoretz . I'm infuriated by the administration's willingness to keep throwing good lives after bad.

But they will not, they cannot, stop the war in Iraq. All the twenty-years olds in the world will not be enough to feed that maw. To quit would be to admit that everything they've done, and the dollars and the lives they spent, were a waste. We will be in this war until the grownups take the wheel away from the crazies, and then for the next thirty years, Bush and Kristol and the rest will blame the grownups for "losing" Iraq, because we weren't willing to spend a thousand lives more.

I'm Shocked, Shocked That We Don't Have a Word for People Who Should Have Known Better

The great Claude Rains-- and the screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch-- contributed this delightful and extremely useful catchphrase to American politics:

RENAULT
Clear the room at once!

[An angry murmur starts among the crowd. People get up and begin to leave. Rick comes quickly up to Renault.]

RICK
How can you close me up? On what grounds?

RENAULT
I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

[This display of nerve leaves Rick at a loss. The croupier comes out of the gambling room and up to Renault. He hands him a roll of bills.]

CROUPIER
Your winnings, sir.

RENAULT
Oh. Thank you very much.


Renault's demonstration of "chutzpah" matches the classic example of the man who murdered both his parents, and then threw himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds he was an orphan. We also have Richard Pryor's "Who you going to believe? Me, or you lying eyes?"

Renault's protest has its uses, as when politicians discover that veterans are not served well by VA hospitals, that millions of dollars have gone AWOL in Iraq, or that one of their relatives was given a sweetheart deal or that the genetic celebrity they hired as a "researcher" is less than qualified for her post.

What I'm calling for is a new word or phrase that describes the irritation I feel when ordinary citizens express surprise and dismay when the men they elect fail to live up to their campaign promises. Lies that would not fool a child have somehow clouded the judgement of grown men and women who are trusted with a vote and heavy machinery.
But what shall we call it? What internet meme would both mock the voter who should have known better and lead them towards a better way? These are people who would buy a ticket for "Saw" and be surprised by the violence.

My first choice-- though it's not known widely enough, and too subtle to catch on-- is an exchange from "Bebop", one of Langston Hughes' "Simple" stories. Simple has just finished explaining that the rhythms of bop music are are a response to the sounds of billyclubs on folks' heads. "Your explanation depresses me," says the narrator, and Simple answers, with quiet disgust and exasperation at such naivete: "Your nonsense depresses me."

Killer Apes and Mental Illness: the Sons of Abel Versus the Sons of Cain

There are millions of people kept in prison because their behavior is seen as threatening to social order and safety-- and yet the primates that threaten the most lives, even show blatant disregard for innnocent bystanders, are not only free to roam the streets, but lionized by their peers. Because Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ayman al-Zawahiri are seen as enacting the wishes of a group, they surround themselves with armed guards and issue orders that will murder or maim thousands of people who never voted for them, never met them, and wouldn't like them if they did.

Like it or not, we have to share a planet with these gangsters and have to find a way to remove them from power without turning into one of them. If human's outer appearance matched their internal demons, the problem would take care of itself in a few generations: no sane person would want to have sex with them, and the species would die out. But the killer chimps among us are breeding as rapidly as the peaceful bonobos, and the chimps don't mind cooking the books by killing a few thousand bonobos to make the world safer for their bloodthirsty kind. It may be time to talk about the genetic elephant in the room: why are some of us Abel, happy in our own garden, and too many of us worshippers of Cain?

If we can agree that the brain and the nervous system are electro-chemical, that our perception of reality-- and our response to it-- depends on a certain balance of dopamine, serotonin and all their building blocks... And within a given population, there are bound to be variations of that chemical balance in individuals, making (to borrow the ancient personality types) this one choleric, that one sanguine, this one melancholic and occasionally choleric. And just as variations in the pancreas or the thyroid gland can cause life-threatening illness, imbalance outside the normal range in brain chemistry can bring on mania, depression, delusions and hallucinations of the five senses. We've known since at least World War One that not just physical trauma, but repeated emotional trauma can carve channels in the mind that induce post traumatic stress disorder, multiple personalities, and many other illnesses. It may be that the tragedies of schizophrenia and autism might be traced back to a virus.

If all this is so, might there be an unpleasant secret hidden in plain sight: that within a given population, there will be highly organized indiduals who seek power over others and then use that power to wage war on neighboring tribes? That just as humanity wars tribe against tribe, there is an undeclared war in every community between the sons of Cain and the children of Abel?

There are horrible ironies in this relationship. A peace-loving but curious primate named Einstein followed a line of inquiry that made it possible for a desperate, threatened group of his peers to deliver a terrible weapon into the hands of the killer apes. Archimedes of Syracus was killed by a Roman soldier while lost in thought over a problem he had drawn in the sand. Marcellus, the Roman general in charge of the expedition, had given direct orders that Archimedes was not to be harmed-- but as many a commander has learned since then, you can't turn a thousand soldiers loose in a foreign country without a few bad apples and some collateral damage.

The peaceful ape can be provoked to violence, just as any animal can. Many a Cincinnatus has been called from his plow to fight savagely for hearth and home, but then-- the reason the name Cinncinatus is immortal-- when the threat is over, the peace-lover returns to his plow and turns his back on any temptation to power. But the goodwill of a thousand citizen soldiers can be undone in a second by a few rapists, torturers and murderers and the commanders who enable them.

How does a peace-loving soul contain-- or, terribly, eradicate-- his violent brother and his friends? If we were still a small band living in the trees, it would be evident that the violent mobs are scratching each other to death, and endangering our peace-loving children. The political question of the 20th century will look to Mandela and Havel and other martyrs who survived to wield power themselves. We must rescue hostages to fortune, take the dangerous toys away from the violent boys, and discourage our daughters from joining in and breeding with them.

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.

JUNG'S TOWER and PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY, Part Three

[Continued from Part Two]...

.... Four years later, Jung's "testament in stone" reached its penultimate state: "I added a courtyard and a loggia by the lake, which formed a fourth element that was separated from the unitary threeness of the house." This fourth element opens the self up to nature and the sky, to the divine and the cosmos. The courtyard is a part of the house but it is also connected to something far beyond the Self. to look into the eye of God.

Twenty years later, after the death of his wife Emma, Jung made his last addition to the building, an upper story added to the central section. "I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am," Jung explains to himself in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, "I could no longer hide myself behind the 'maternal' [Part I] and the 'spiritual' towers [Part II]. I added an upper story to this section, which represents myself, or my ego-personality."

Why this fifth stage of development in the structure? What more is there to build, after the womb, action taking action in the world, after withdrawal into the self, after the open courtyard perceiving the eternal? There is the final act that mystics speak of as bringing the divine down to this world and rising up to meet it so that the two are one, indistinguishable from one another. This is what the design of the Star of David represents with its two triangles meeting to form a single star: "As above, so below"; "I and the Father are One".

This concept is common to many mystic traditions. In Kundalini yoga, seven "chakras"-- levels of spiritual development-- are imagined at seven points in the human body. The penultimate chakra, on the forehead between the eyes, represents a level of development wherein "God", or the "Universe", has finally revealed itself to the seeker-- but the ultimate chakra is higher still, at the crown of the head, where the mystic becomes one with the divine, no longer separate, beyond polarity. The Christian mystic Meister Eckhardt speaks of "the leaving of God for God for God"-- that is to say, growing beyond one's preconceptions in order to discover the true mystery.

As a caveat, this might be the time to tell the story of the moth who spent all night banging against the glass of a lantern trying to reach the flame within. When he went home the next morning, he told his friends, "I've seen God!", and his friends replied, "You don't look any better for it."

Had Jung attempted this stage of spiritual development at any other time than in his old age, it would have been a gross act of inflation. Coming at this time of life, his acknowledgement of ego is a simple act of recognition, like crowning a piece in the game of checkers when it reaches the other side of the board. "I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am... Earlier, I would have regarded it as presumptuous self-emphasis. Now it signified an extension of consciousness avhieved in old age."

How much of the tower's evolutionary design was intentional, and how much was unconscious? Jung hints that he knew perfectly well what he was doing with this pun made of stone, when he speaks of the marker stone outside the tower: "The stone stands outside the Tower, and is like an explanation of it. It is a manifestation of the occupant, but one which remains incomprehensible to others. Do you know what I wanted to chisel into the stone? 'Le cri de Merin!' For what the stone expressed reminded me of Merlin's life in the forest, after which he vanished from the world. Men still hear his cries, so the legend runs, but they cannot understand or interpret them."

The truly transcendent experience cannot be described; it cannot be adequately translated to others. As the Sufis say, "To taste is to know"-- words are not experience. As the Sufis (and young animals) say, "To taste is to know"-- words are not experience. It is as the naturalist Loren Eiseley explained, after his own transcendent moment involving a wild fox cub, a chicken bone, and a moment of play: "The universe was swinging in some fantastic fashion around to present its face, and the face was so small that the universe itself was laughing... It is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish, but, as Thoreau remarked of some peculiar errand of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society."

Jung's Bollingen is like a magician's tower from fable: the edifice is not just a representation of his temporal power, but synonymous with the magician itself. Unlike the tower made from faery dust, Bollingen did not collapse when its magician died, perhaps because of the integrity of the craftsmanship.

JUNG'S TOWER and PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY, Part Two

(Continued from Part One)
The first expansion of Jung's tower-- what is now the central structure-- came four years after the initial stage. Despite the feelings of "response and renewal" within the first structure, Jung felt that something more was needed, beyond the familial hearth.
In a practical sense, the tower would have to be expanded in order to become useful as a work space, family cottage, guest room, an actual dwelling. Its potential usefulnes expands. This stage of the building can be read as a symbol in stone of the need for the Self to move beyond the castle keep of the womb, beyond its source, into action in the world, to become, as humans must, a socialized animal.

After action in the world, the evolving Self will feel the need to withdraw into itself if only to recharge and rest, to assimilate exxperience and listen for its own voice. Four years later, Jung's tower is extended again-- and hear its personal meaning is fairly well spelled out for us by Jung himself:
"I wanted a room in this tower where I could exist for myself alone. I had in mind what I had seen in Indian houses, in which there is usually an area-- though it may be only a corner of a room separated off by a curtain-- in which the inhabitants can withdraw. There they may meditate for perhaps a quarter or half an hour, or do yoga exercises. such an area of retirement is essential in India, where people live crowded very close together."
Jung keeps the key to this private room well guarded. He meditates, he paints on the wall, he writes arcana in his magician's diary, the so-called "Red Book" containing paintings of his visions-- expressing "all those things which have carried me out of time into seclusion, out of the present into timelessness... a place of spiritual concentration." One of the pictures shown here-- "Shadow Cornered"-- was painted during the depression that followed Jung's break from Freud.
Following to Gaaskell's scholarly stricture, it should be noted that the Greek god informing this third stage of development-- the Spiritual-- is Hermes, the trickster benefactor of alchemists, tricksters, thieves and travelers.

To be Continued...

JUNG'S TOWER and PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY, Part One

C.G. Jung described the stone tower he built with his own hands at Bollingen on Lake Zurich as a "representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired... a confession of faith in stone." The tower's design is something more than an intellectual exercise in spiritual symbolism, more than weekend physical exercise designed to call the intellect back to earth. The tower is also one of the more interesting self-portraits of European culture. The evolution of its design, as related in "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", parallels the evolution of a soul. "At Bollingen," he said, "I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself."

The home built after Jung's marriage was well and good for a proper Swiss physician and family man; the sorcerer-in-training required something more. The tower is, in a sense, a part of Jung himself left behind, like the shell of a chambered nautilus.

The Bollingen stone tower took shape in five stages, corresponding with five stages of consciousness described by mystics of various disciplines as follows:
-- The physical plane, that of our animal flesh;
-- The astral plane, containing the so-called "lower" emotions such as desire and possessiveness;
-- The mental plane, where the higher emotions and the individua personality begin to manifest themselves;
-- The spiritual plane, where the wisdom of nature and the "Holy Spirit" begin to inform the mystic pilgrim;
-- the celestial plane, where a manifest god, God-the-Son for the Christians, Apollo for the Greeks, the discovery of the "god within", the individuated "Self" appears.

Beyond these five stages of spiritual development awaits the unknown, the "Absolute": the God Unknown, the Tetragrammaton, the living archetypes of the Divine.

These five stages, borrowing from G.A. Gaskell's "Dictionary of All Scriptures and Myths", correspond with the gods and symbols of both ancient and modern pantheons. In ancient Egypt, for example, the god Nepthys represented the physical level of development, Set the astral level, Thoth the mental, Isis the spiritual, Osiris the celestial, with Ra as the unknowable archetype over all. It risks academic grasping to fit Jung's homely architecture into such a tight boot, but the pattern does offer intriguing parallels.

Jung tells us that the first section of the tower "represented for me the maternal heart." It is here that the family gathers 'round-- a birthplace, a primal source. Interestingly, Gaskell's study identifies the "physical" stage not just with Nepthys but with the Greek goddess Hestia (in Rome, "Vesta"): the goddess of the hearth.

Continued...

Who Will Ann Coulter Call If She Needs Bail?

Complaining about about right-wing hypocrisy and the pecadilloes of public moralists is like complaining about the heat in July or the snow in winter. I am concerned here with what happens as they fall down the other side of the Wheel of Fortune.

Twenty years ago, a friend of mine had a niece who was just beginning a career in entertainment. My friend was concerned that "the little shit" should be careful whose hands she stepped on as she was climbing the career ladder, because she'd be needing them if she ever slipped and fell down. Despite the odds, her niece has made a living in the arts for the past twenty years; any failures were moderated by other triumphs. I've fallen out of touch, and never heard anything more about the niece's backstage behavior towards housekeeping staff and the spear carriers, but if her career collapses, I'm sure she has a place to sleep.

When I was a janitor, I knew more about the people whose offices and toilets I cleaned than they knew about me. Some I could have embraced as friends; there were others I wouldn't have pissed on if they were on fire.

Now Ann Coulter faces felony charges for voting fraud. There's always been an age discrepancy on her driver's license (unless she voted at the age of 16 in 1980), but now according to a Florida election official's incident report, she tried to vote in a precinct she wasn't registered for and then tried to vote twice in the same race, a no-no loaded with 5 years in prison and a fine. The part of me that feels a little sorry for Malvolio at the end of "Twelfth Night" says this can happen to anyone. I myself have a phobia against filling in forms. If a form requires that I attach other forms, I panic, hide the form under other forms, withdraw into a corner of the room and go into shock like an animal caught in a trap. ("Tharn", the rabbits called it in Watership Down.)

Let her fill in the forms and forget about it, I say. Arthur Anderson, the Palm Beach County elections supervisor, agrees: "We want to give her a chance. She needs to tell us where she really lives." Do as I do-- ask a friend or relative to talk her through the process, promise her a treat when it's done. This is why we pay other people to fill in our tax forms. I assume Miss Coulter became successful not for fame or better restaurants, but so that she could hire a secretary to handle the forms. If it all turns to shit for Miss Coulter, I'm curious to see who her friends turn out to be; she has made a career out of bashing people lower than herself, and they might be the only friends she has left. If she gets tossed into the tank, she might want to rethink her mockery of anti-apartheid activists, her call for a New McCarthyism, and "I think the government should be... engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport... and sending liberals to Guantanamo." All I'm saying is, if I were a Harvard professor or a liberal Supreme Court judge, and Ann Coulter had called for my murder, I'm damned if I'd chip in for her bail.

The president of the National Association of Evangelicals fessed up to buying amphetamines and three years of monthly "massages" from a gay prostitute. The circles I travel in would say "to each his taste" and shrug, except that the fellow is a prominent gay basher with a wife, five children, and a 14,000 member megachurch.

Republican Jim Gibbons in Nevada is having a very bad week including attempted rape, a $300 bar tab (oh, THAT'S only going to get more expensive), and millions in no-bid sweetheart contracts for friends. All of this could just be a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time story, except this is a guy who screams about illegal immigration but hires an illegal for eleven years, then drinks for two hours with a 12-top, spends $300 and leaves a ten-dollar tip.

Republican Congressman Don Sherwood, a married, "family values" conservative paid $500,000 to his mistress if she would just shut up about the strangling incident until after the election.

When my own life hit a rock, it was instructive to find out which of my friends stayed true, while others dropped me as a bore and an inconvenience. One of my "closest" friends couldn't see me because he didn't want to miss Adrienne Barbeau's nude scene in "Swamp Thing". Ordinarily I would sympathize with this excuse, but damn, man, rent the video.

This was not long after he'd taken a management job and started dropping me for golf dates with new friends he openly described as people important to his career. "Le affaire Barbeau" involved an invitation to watch the film with the movers and shakers. None of them were at his funeral. Another friend-- that I might have judged in our first acquaintance as superficial, overly-concerned with bourgeois social propriety-- lent hundreds of dollars with a bohemian indifference as to when I paid it back. "Thus the whirligig of Time," Feste tells Malvolio, "brings on its revenges." We never learn what Malvolio did to Feste to inspire the feud between them; we do know Malvolio could not call upon his friends when he fell from grace because he had no friends.

I envision a day when Guantanamo Bay is packed with every gay, liberal, homeless, black, lesbian Harvard graduate, Arab, elite intellectual, cock-sucking, muff diving, dope smoking, Communist, Socialist, titty baring, Muslim, French, porn-loving, wine-drinking, Bush-hating, flip-flopping, anti-Semitic, Times reading, rap-singing, terrorist-sympathizing lawyer in the country. In that post-apocalyptic America, Ann Coulter is about to be groped by Jim Gibbons and there's no one left alive to answer her 911 call but Alan Dershowitz. And Dershowitz can't come because he's barricaded himself in the bathroom to escape the zombie of Roy Cohn.

No wonder Jesus hung out with the publicans and sinners; they were more humane than the moralists. Now if we could just get Lloyd Dobson to Shut The Fuck Up Already about everyone else's spiritual growth, and worry about his own...

Does President Bush Show Symptoms of Organic Brain Syndrome?

Somethin' not right with the boy. This is one of those topics I'm uncomfortable bringing up; it ought to come from someone in the family. Certainly the question ought not to be raised by someone who despises the fellow, both his speech and his actions. My perceptions are suspect.

Sincerely, without snide intention, my question is this: does the President of the United States, George W. Bush, show in his speech and affect the early signs of neurological disease, perhaps an aftereffect of (by his own admission) 20 years of drinking and using drugs?

First, two cavests. When I was a psychiatric aide and student-- ten years, until life convinced me that I was too thin-skinned to become a therapist-- we used to have "disease of the week syndrome". You learn about something new and start fingering your psyche to see if you might be suffering from echolalia, or hebephrenia, or some Culture Specific Syndrome like running amok. ("When I talk to that Michael Fountain," an alcoholic, prescription abusing psychiatrist once joked to a nurse while I was still in the room, "I don't know whether I'm schizophrenic, or he's schizophrenic, or both of us are schizophrenic.") It's probably a fairly harmless hypochondria among students, and good training, I hope, for a writer.
There's also the danger of projecting a diagnosis onto our relatives and the people we meet. To be fair, even paranoids have real enemies, and sometimes a mother realliy is a borderline personality, an uncle or aunt is indeed a depressive. The sincere student ought to submit himself to psychotherapy, if only to learn the terrain of his or her own personality and preconceptions. (This is a prerequisite for Jungian therapists, and ought to be a requirement for all graduate students in psychology).

I must also caution that my concern is based on intuition and observation from a distance. It's very good intuition, with a good track record when predicting the outcome of current events, September 11 and other people's problems; not so good at protecting me from myself. It's useful for a writer but not reliable or testable; I ususally keep these intuitive leaps to myself. I'm sure the good doctors at Walter Reed are keeping an eye on this and keep their counsel to themselves.

Consider these signs of dementia and Korsakoff's psychosis:
* Difficulty in acquiring new information or learning new skills.
* Lack of insight into the condition. Even a person with great gaps in their memory may believe their memory is functioning normally.
* Inventing events to fill the gaps in memory. This is more common in the early stages of the illness and is known as 'confabulation'.
* Apathy, in some cases, or talkative and repetitive behaviour in others.
The Korsakov's disagnosis is weakened if we consider that alcoholic victims are usually malnourished, not likely in Bush's case. But we know nothing about the synergistic effect of cocaine use during the president's "youthful" indiscretions. This is not someone who drank heavily in his twenties. This is someone who drank heavily until he was forty.

Intranecine politics in the Republican Party has always seemed to me a lot like the turn-of-the-century, small town atmosphere in "King's Row", a roman-a-clef about Fulton, Missouri (and adapted into a film containing Ronald Reagan's best known performance.) Speak no ill of your fellow Republican, keep scandal within the family. Cover-ups, damage control and looking-the-other-way that would put the Clintons to shame, all justified by the perpetrators because the Grand Old Party must be protected from irresponsible criticism. It takes a major crisis for a Goldwater and Hugh Scott to go privately to a sitting president and tell him he has to go.

So far, the president's syndromes are only the stuff of wild internet rumors, with the most grounded discussion by MD Carol Wolman at Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch here and here. The stufff that comes out of his mouth has long been a staple of the Daily Show and YouTube. We could just as well call the president a sociopath: arrogant, insensitive, impatient, erratic, unfocused, overly dramatic, unethical, insincere, remorseless, shallow, and bullying.

To someone familiar with the denials of dysfuntional families, just a few too many people have taken time to assure us (and themselves) that the president is smarter than he looks, more sensitive in private, just a bad public speaker like his father or dyslexic like his brother. All I'm asking is that you keep an eye on him the next time he blinks and struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And remember, when this surfaces years from now, like Reagan's Alzheimer's, that you saw it here first.