All the kids now tell their friends "I love you." Girls my daughter's age, 12, all say "I love you." And so, sometimes, do boys my son's age, 10. They say it when they part ways after school. They write it in e-mails, in text messages, on Facebook. "I love you." They even say it to their parents. "I love you," they say, and then head off to the movies. "I love you," they say, and then climb on the team bus. It's not something I did at their age, all those years ago, saying and writing "I love you" all the time, and it's not something that the other kids did, either, particularly not outside the home, the family, where love, as we then defined it, didn't exist. Outside the family, people 'liked' each other. Now they love each other. And they say so. Sincerely. With feeling. I've heard it. Authentic feeling. You can think it's a fad, but I've heard it: it's said with feeling.
Three weeks and three days ago my mother died unexpectedly at 71. She was in Iowa, visiting her boyfriend, which she did every year when the state fair was going. One morning he found her on the bathroom floor. She couldn't speak. Her eyes were open, but barely. An ambulance came and drove her to the hospital, to Iowa Methodist in downtown Des Moines (a city that is beige across the board and has terrible traffic at certain peculiar moments but then seems to empty out entirely), where someone ran a CAT scan and discovered a 'sizable mass' in her brain, behind her eyes. A surgeon went in and found an abscess there, 'encapsulated,' sealed off from other tissue, and immediately he drained it of built-up fluid and then bathed the area in antibiotics. The fluid, infected with something, was sent for tests. Hours passed. Night came. My mother remained unconscious, breathing with noisy mechanical assistance. A nurse said she saw her blink when spoken to sometime between four and five a.m. and rated her coma an optimistic '11' on a scale -- an official coma scale -- that runs to 15, for some reason, and starts at 3.
I got there a few hours later from Montana, fighting with my girlfriend the whole way. We fought while we packed, about which supplies to bring and what size containers of liquid -- three ounces or five -- can legally be carried on to planes. We fought on the plane over who was more uncomfortable trying to sleep bolt upright without a pillow. We fought all the way down a hall and up an elevator and down another hall to the CCU, accusing each other of failing to use the sanitizer dispensed from little pumps near all the doorways. Sometimes the sanitizer was a foam, other times it came out as a gel. I liked the gel. As it dried, it cooled my hands. It felt effective. The foam felt weak, a pleasantry.
The right side of my mother's scalp was grey and shaved and there was a run of black staples where she'd been cut. My brother and his wife were standing over her rubbing her wrists and stroking her smooth bare ankles. Everyone was saying the right things. Everyone sounded sweet and stressed and brave. Everyone sounded perfect. We amazed ourselves. We amazed ourselves in the way that people do when they find themselves rising to a grave occasion that they've always known would come someday but didn't practice for out of superstition, because to practice for it might attract it. It turned out that we didn't need to practice, though. We were natural born virtuosos of the deathbed.
Oh God, we were good. It kind of made me sick.
We all went home around eleven that night. My girlfriend and I had a room in a vast Marriott built around one of those plunging central atriums that ought to provoke more suicides than they do and are awkward places to eat breakfast, with all that disquieting space above your heads. I took an Ambien when I laid down and a few minutes later I had a vision of my mother walking behind my girlfriend at a distance of a foot or two but then, as the two of them passed by the TV set, closing the distance and merging with my girlfriend. It was a vision, not a dream, because I described it the instant after it happened to my actual girlfriend, who was awake and who responded by reaching behind herself to feel the space where my mother (I insisted) had physically, or at least visually, entered her.
At six in the morning the phone rang right on schedule and my brother right on schedule said get over here -- don't eat, don't shower, don't think, get over here -- and we, right on schedule, raced over in our rental car and there was the surgeon, all scrubbed and right on schedule, asking permission to go into the skull again and suck out more junk again, more goo, more fluid, he frankly didn't know what it was this stuff (necrotic brain tissue? ordinary pus?) but he sure as hell wanted it out of there this minute ("Your mother will be, if not entirely paralyzed on her left side..." That was in there too somewhere) except that we, the loved ones, right on schedule, and in accordance with the Health Directive kept by my mother always in her purse (she'd worked as a nurse all her life, she knew the truth; the tubes, once they go in, they tend to stay in) told him to please go away and let her die.
Right on schedule.
Which she didn't do.
First she punished us for a while with perfect vital signs until I started laughing, proud of her, proud of her savage creaturely momentum, her mad ungovernable pendulum persistence. Who knew that, despite her pose as my dear mother, my dear autodidact Gibbons-reading mother who once went to Hungary, then crossed it off her list, and then went to Egypt and crossed it off her list, and then learned Italian and crossed it off her list, and Latin and French and The Lives of the Impressionists and the Bob Dylan Songbook and Naguib Mahfouz, was actually, underneath it all, Lou Gehrig, a being of pure brute Newtonian pump and suck.
When it's over you go in a room and sign some papers with people who do their best not to let on that they did this only half an hour ago with people just as brave as you feel you are. (And maybe you are, but if so, then bravery's easy, not a virtue, a reflex, like drawing one's first breath.)
The test came back Streptococcus intermedius and I am afraid I have it and you do too and that it is one of those new mysterious bugs that most of the the time does nothing, just sits or circulates, but that some of the time (and perhaps more often of late, since everything bad seems to happen more often of late) can collect in your brain and destroy you in two days.
Which is why all the kids say "I love you" all the time now, even though, if you ask them, they don't know why. They think it's normal. They think it's what kids always said. It isn't, though. I was a kid once and I remember: We said other things.
Lots of things.
But what?
For Mildred Irene Kirn (Stein), 1940-2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Fight Night in the Situation Room (They Also Serve Who Only Sit And Watch)
How curious that the most arresting image -- and the one most likely to endure -- from The Night We Finally Got Bin Laden has nothing do with the late terrorist mastermind (whose death shots have been embargoed, I suspect, not simply because they might spark outrage but because our government's psy-ops experts would just as soon he be remembered as a flaccid grey shut-in who used 'natural Viagra" and primped before shooting propaganda tapes by dying his beard a specious Wayne Newton black) or the robo-stud soldiers who sent him straight to Hell (their hyper-virile DC comics fearsomeness somehow enhanced by their anonymity) but captured instead a knot of tense officials huddled around an unseen video monitor, watching a mission they'd funded and approved but were powerless, for the moment, to control. In direct violation of the laws of showbiz as codified by Aristotle and perfected by Samuel Goldwyn, the Osama drama's climax was a played as a reaction shot, that is. It was all spectators, no spectacle. The chorus took center stage and the antagonists weren't onstage at all but present only by implication, as the objects of the others' gazes.
Even if footage of the raid emerges, my hunch is that the poster for the production will still favor the static, passive supervisors over the kinetic, engaged participants, partly because the tableaux of their faces tells a range of complicated stories while an action shot would tell just one, and a comparatively crude one. Examine the picture closely. Start with Obama, the leading man, who looks less like a stalwart head of state than a grumpy hostage of circumstances. He seems to resent the fact that this high-stakes dice roll forced on him by the collective, by history, might well break him as an individual, reversing the lucky streak that got him here. Less distressed but appearing slightly bored is the vice president, whose face wears a second banana's dull disengaged look, since the best he can claim if things go well tonight is an assist, and if things go poorly, whatever, he won't lose sleep but he might feel less like waking. As for the general with the laptop, he's a model of disciplined on-task professionalism lightly salted with ironic fatalism. He understands in a wise old soldier's way that victory is just defeat turned shiny side up and every battle short of Armageddon is important to the combatants but is finally only a skirmish. Then there's Hillary, the stunned control freak with her right hand clapped over her mouth. She'll later pretend that the gesture was a nothing, an innocent attempt at cough suppression, but what most observers see and can't not see is a workaholic bureaucrat suddenly confronting the blunt force impact of foreign policy on the fragile human skull.
One of the group portrait's small surprises is that give-em-hell Hillary, who stood firmly by her man as he smart bombed some sense into the Serbians and shelled the encircled Branch Davidians until they died in a mass rush up an imaginary stairway to heaven, comes off as as a humanistic softy compared to the younger woman to her rear who's one of those precocious government studies nerds Obama is always importing from the Ivy League. I don't know her name and refuse to waste time finding it because she's the kind of ambitious, knife-willed woman that I confess I find threatening on occasion and sometimes feel that others should as well. Look at her there, peeking in between the others with her hard, bright, algebraic eyes that plug into her Baby Mozart brain. It interests her, the drama on the monitor, but not directly, the way it does the others. It interests her sociologically, as the key to the rank-based seating arrangement which correlates proximity with power and didn't assign her a formal spot but didn't banish her, either, allowing her to loiter at the periphery as long as she pretends that she's not staying, just pausing on her rounds.
But enough of with the magnifying glass. The picture has been scrutinized for days now and soon it's nuances will be all picked over. What's gone unremarked on, though, is the great broad fact of it as an expression of a critical shift in our dramatic vision of war. Put simply, we've downgraded the action-adventure part -- the shooting, running, ducking stuff performed by a demographically narrow contingent of volunteers with a low cultural profile who figure in our imaginations, increasingly, as depersonalized weapons operators rather than vibrant full-spectrum individuals -- and emphasized the management aspect, recasting it along the lines of power-player, white-collar melodrama whose typical settings are courtrooms, corporate headquarters, and other sites where massive egos clash and titanic strategists plot strategy. Seen this way, war is a matter of high-caste intrigue, which is why the great war photo of the new era leaves out the soldiers, the weapons, the debris, the carnage, and the whole battlefield. That's background now, all that mayhem and that mess. The front has shifted. The front is now the rear.
Right now, today, again, before a group of watchers who we out in the audience can envision quite clearly now that we've studied a photo of them at work, the image of a new target or a new victim is being broadcast onto a large screen from tiny cameras mounted on a drone or in the helmet of a commando. This is war, though it doesn't seem like war. It looks like what we do when we plunk down on the couch at night or when he head out on the weekend to a sports bar. I can't fully articulate my thoughts on this, but I sense that some longstanding human project, perhaps a secret one, a dark one, and possibly one that's uniquely American, has finally been consummated with this development.
Warfare remade to resemble chilling out?
Anyway, mission accomplished, I suppose.
Even if footage of the raid emerges, my hunch is that the poster for the production will still favor the static, passive supervisors over the kinetic, engaged participants, partly because the tableaux of their faces tells a range of complicated stories while an action shot would tell just one, and a comparatively crude one. Examine the picture closely. Start with Obama, the leading man, who looks less like a stalwart head of state than a grumpy hostage of circumstances. He seems to resent the fact that this high-stakes dice roll forced on him by the collective, by history, might well break him as an individual, reversing the lucky streak that got him here. Less distressed but appearing slightly bored is the vice president, whose face wears a second banana's dull disengaged look, since the best he can claim if things go well tonight is an assist, and if things go poorly, whatever, he won't lose sleep but he might feel less like waking. As for the general with the laptop, he's a model of disciplined on-task professionalism lightly salted with ironic fatalism. He understands in a wise old soldier's way that victory is just defeat turned shiny side up and every battle short of Armageddon is important to the combatants but is finally only a skirmish. Then there's Hillary, the stunned control freak with her right hand clapped over her mouth. She'll later pretend that the gesture was a nothing, an innocent attempt at cough suppression, but what most observers see and can't not see is a workaholic bureaucrat suddenly confronting the blunt force impact of foreign policy on the fragile human skull.
One of the group portrait's small surprises is that give-em-hell Hillary, who stood firmly by her man as he smart bombed some sense into the Serbians and shelled the encircled Branch Davidians until they died in a mass rush up an imaginary stairway to heaven, comes off as as a humanistic softy compared to the younger woman to her rear who's one of those precocious government studies nerds Obama is always importing from the Ivy League. I don't know her name and refuse to waste time finding it because she's the kind of ambitious, knife-willed woman that I confess I find threatening on occasion and sometimes feel that others should as well. Look at her there, peeking in between the others with her hard, bright, algebraic eyes that plug into her Baby Mozart brain. It interests her, the drama on the monitor, but not directly, the way it does the others. It interests her sociologically, as the key to the rank-based seating arrangement which correlates proximity with power and didn't assign her a formal spot but didn't banish her, either, allowing her to loiter at the periphery as long as she pretends that she's not staying, just pausing on her rounds.
But enough of with the magnifying glass. The picture has been scrutinized for days now and soon it's nuances will be all picked over. What's gone unremarked on, though, is the great broad fact of it as an expression of a critical shift in our dramatic vision of war. Put simply, we've downgraded the action-adventure part -- the shooting, running, ducking stuff performed by a demographically narrow contingent of volunteers with a low cultural profile who figure in our imaginations, increasingly, as depersonalized weapons operators rather than vibrant full-spectrum individuals -- and emphasized the management aspect, recasting it along the lines of power-player, white-collar melodrama whose typical settings are courtrooms, corporate headquarters, and other sites where massive egos clash and titanic strategists plot strategy. Seen this way, war is a matter of high-caste intrigue, which is why the great war photo of the new era leaves out the soldiers, the weapons, the debris, the carnage, and the whole battlefield. That's background now, all that mayhem and that mess. The front has shifted. The front is now the rear.
Right now, today, again, before a group of watchers who we out in the audience can envision quite clearly now that we've studied a photo of them at work, the image of a new target or a new victim is being broadcast onto a large screen from tiny cameras mounted on a drone or in the helmet of a commando. This is war, though it doesn't seem like war. It looks like what we do when we plunk down on the couch at night or when he head out on the weekend to a sports bar. I can't fully articulate my thoughts on this, but I sense that some longstanding human project, perhaps a secret one, a dark one, and possibly one that's uniquely American, has finally been consummated with this development.
Warfare remade to resemble chilling out?
Anyway, mission accomplished, I suppose.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
HARVARD LAW REVIEW, FIRST BLOOD
After escaping the battle of Tora Bora in the fall of 2001, Osama Bin Laden was said by his pursuers, who made their huge fuck up sound almost like a plan, to have ‘gone to ground.‘ This week, ten years later, when the villain was killed by a land loving team of Navy Seals acting on orders from our collective consciousness that we’d half forgotten issuing, we finally found out what ‘ground’ meant: not an impenetrable mountain lair but a glum cluster of primer-colored buildings resembling a foreclosed-on Motel Six. Government officials and the press tried to magnify the hideout’s stature (and burnish the legend of those who overran it) by calling the place a ‘compound,’ but its insides were just as grubby as its outsides. The room full of soiled bedclothes where the arch fiend codenamed ‘Geronimo’ mounted his last stand -- or fell without a fight, we can’t be sure -- looked like the crib of a meth-head petty thief ducking the pepper-spray goons of Dog the Bounty Hunter.
It had to end somewhere, History’s Greatest Manhunt, but the fact that it climaxed in dull suburbistan next to a training base for the hunters’ allies proved less startling than the discovery that the hunt was still going on at all. Like the Tuesday morning shock of 9/11, the Sunday evening shock of Bin Laden’s death caught America flossing, concluding a tragedy that we’d stopped thinking about with a catharsis that we’d stopped hoping for. It was a moment of spooky historical symmetry, especially as it played out on TV. Down a long hallway that symbolized the past strode a grim-faced first-term president whose skin color, which we still notice despite ourselves, made him look like a figure from the future. Just as we had when Bush spoke way back when, we knew by the time Obama opened his mouth just about everything he had to say, which only heightened our need to hear him say it.
What followed was a patriotic head rush, the first thrilling chill of tribal unity that we’d enjoyed in a decade that felt like three. For an instant, I was ashamed of this euphoria -- after all, a human being had died, and my taxes had paid for the bullets that blew his face off -- but then I relaxed and let myself regress, perversely pleased that geek-era America hadn’t entirely lost the John Wayne ugly streak that separates us from the Belgians. Like the pug-nosed New York City firefighters whose machismo I’d borrowed ten years earlier, the Navy Seals aroused a part of me that I’d kept hidden but never out of reach, much like the hunting knife stashed under my car seat. It appeared that Obama shared my instincts. As he uttered the pitiless words ‘at my direction’ in reference to the lethal raid, his educated features hardened slightly.
Harvard Law Review, First Blood.
There are times when one’s solemn duty as an American is to watch cable news for days on end and track a big story from its early stages as a government-sponsored morality play toward its mature form as a media-driven incoherent muddle. In the earliest version of Black Hawk Up: The Payback, a cowardly Osama with a gun ducked behind an unarmed woman when Team Testosterone tagged him with its red laser dots. How our guys shot around her and brought him down was left unexplained to protect our high-tech secrets. Later on, in a transitional version, the woman declined in prominence, leaving a slow-draw Osama to face the music of a so-called ‘double tap.’ And then, inevitably, he had no gun, though he did make a move consistent with trying to fetch one. Same difference. Our heros shot him in the eye, as the photos of his corpse would prove. If only they weren’t too gruesome to release. At which point, out of nowhere, a dog entered the story.
This swarm of details fuzzed up the big picture, which gradually came to look something like this: the last remaining superpower spends pretty much its last remaining dollar mustering armies, building secret prisons, dispensing billions of dollars in foreign aid, and launching fleets of drones in order to whack a sickly terrorist who spent his days on a dank floor-level mattress making low-grade motivational tapes. Then a courier who we identified after years of reluctant waterboarding smuggled these tapes past a garden of marijuana plants (thank you, Twitter, for this zany grace note) into a Moslem world that barely resembled, thanks to an unforeseen series of revolutions unrelated to religious zealotry, the one that spawned Al Qaeda in the first place and that we feared it would someday dominate.
We finally got our man last week, that’s a natural fact (although we may never know quite how we got him), but here was the trouble: history got him first, reducing him to fat-Elvis, late-Howard Hughes mode. Frustrating side note or devastating irony?
I think we at least deserve pictures of the dog.
It had to end somewhere, History’s Greatest Manhunt, but the fact that it climaxed in dull suburbistan next to a training base for the hunters’ allies proved less startling than the discovery that the hunt was still going on at all. Like the Tuesday morning shock of 9/11, the Sunday evening shock of Bin Laden’s death caught America flossing, concluding a tragedy that we’d stopped thinking about with a catharsis that we’d stopped hoping for. It was a moment of spooky historical symmetry, especially as it played out on TV. Down a long hallway that symbolized the past strode a grim-faced first-term president whose skin color, which we still notice despite ourselves, made him look like a figure from the future. Just as we had when Bush spoke way back when, we knew by the time Obama opened his mouth just about everything he had to say, which only heightened our need to hear him say it.
What followed was a patriotic head rush, the first thrilling chill of tribal unity that we’d enjoyed in a decade that felt like three. For an instant, I was ashamed of this euphoria -- after all, a human being had died, and my taxes had paid for the bullets that blew his face off -- but then I relaxed and let myself regress, perversely pleased that geek-era America hadn’t entirely lost the John Wayne ugly streak that separates us from the Belgians. Like the pug-nosed New York City firefighters whose machismo I’d borrowed ten years earlier, the Navy Seals aroused a part of me that I’d kept hidden but never out of reach, much like the hunting knife stashed under my car seat. It appeared that Obama shared my instincts. As he uttered the pitiless words ‘at my direction’ in reference to the lethal raid, his educated features hardened slightly.
Harvard Law Review, First Blood.
There are times when one’s solemn duty as an American is to watch cable news for days on end and track a big story from its early stages as a government-sponsored morality play toward its mature form as a media-driven incoherent muddle. In the earliest version of Black Hawk Up: The Payback, a cowardly Osama with a gun ducked behind an unarmed woman when Team Testosterone tagged him with its red laser dots. How our guys shot around her and brought him down was left unexplained to protect our high-tech secrets. Later on, in a transitional version, the woman declined in prominence, leaving a slow-draw Osama to face the music of a so-called ‘double tap.’ And then, inevitably, he had no gun, though he did make a move consistent with trying to fetch one. Same difference. Our heros shot him in the eye, as the photos of his corpse would prove. If only they weren’t too gruesome to release. At which point, out of nowhere, a dog entered the story.
This swarm of details fuzzed up the big picture, which gradually came to look something like this: the last remaining superpower spends pretty much its last remaining dollar mustering armies, building secret prisons, dispensing billions of dollars in foreign aid, and launching fleets of drones in order to whack a sickly terrorist who spent his days on a dank floor-level mattress making low-grade motivational tapes. Then a courier who we identified after years of reluctant waterboarding smuggled these tapes past a garden of marijuana plants (thank you, Twitter, for this zany grace note) into a Moslem world that barely resembled, thanks to an unforeseen series of revolutions unrelated to religious zealotry, the one that spawned Al Qaeda in the first place and that we feared it would someday dominate.
We finally got our man last week, that’s a natural fact (although we may never know quite how we got him), but here was the trouble: history got him first, reducing him to fat-Elvis, late-Howard Hughes mode. Frustrating side note or devastating irony?
I think we at least deserve pictures of the dog.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
These Terrible Events and the Matter of their Size
I set my alarm clock late last night (early this morning, actually) to go off three hours after I went to bed. I wanted to know what was happening in Japan and I could only grant myself three hours' worth of suspended vigilance. That's because, minutes before I turned the light off, I read a report about radiation releases at the earthquake-affected nuclear plant. Expert opinion contained in the report, as well as what advertised itself as expert opinion in the appended comments section, suggested that even if there should be a 'meltdown' (a word that I understand chiefly in its vulgar form, as a sort of uncontrollable tantrum, but whose technical, scientific definition I'm enough aware of to be chilled by) there was little to fear in terms of... What, exactly? What are the terms of fear these days?
Deaths?
Deaths-per-Minute?
'Senseless' Deaths-per-Minute?
Second Coming Signs?
Events that are Revelatory of Humankind's Radical Dysfunctionality and Point To A Coming Conmprehensive Trauma?
Even more than an update of the headlines, it was some answer to this question of measurement, some sense of how to calibrate my instruments for registering calamitous news, that I went to bed apprehensively desiring. An earthquake and a tsunami within one day were a lot to take in, but nothing I wasn't equipped for; add in a technological disaster, though, and the whole combo was a bit too much. Natural catastrophes, I had a box for those. Fiery collapsing buildings too, unfortunately. And yes, because I'm old enough, I had a place to put nuclear stuff as well. But all at once? Even Hollywood has failed me here. Though a few of its omnibus CGI apocalypses have served up all of these elements and then some ('Independence Day,' '2012'), the underlying scripts were so contrived that the horrors didn't horrify, they merely impressed.
Meaning this was new, this news.
It feels like there's been a lot of new news recently.
So anyway, when the alarm clock woke me up, my laptop computer was right there by my pillow. I rolled over on my side and clicked. The building around the reactor had exploded. I watched a brief video of the accident. I watched it several times. That's how it works now: the five or ten seconds of critical footage, initially an impressionistic blur, is played and replayed until it yields its message, until its act-structure becomes perceptible. And then, once it has, you can fix a caption on it. Mine in this case was: They Said When it Started It Probably Wouldn't Go This Far, But I Was Absolutely Sure it Would. Or, to frame it another way: What is it about reality lately that bad dreams grasp it better than informed analyses?
Now, a few hours later, things have calmed some. Certain key boundaries have held, it seems. But I still don't know how to graph what's going on. I still lack a unitized basis for comparing Japan to Haiti to Libya to Katrina to 9/11 to what might be coming in Saudi Arabia to what could happen tomorrow in, say, Los Angeles or -- as suddenly seems plausible -- in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Oslo simultaneously. Though maybe not Oslo. Scandinavia still seems safe somehow. Nothing awful ever happens in Scandinavia.
Which, these days, probably assures that something will. And that the something will be something other than the unthinkable somethings that have preceded it.
I suppose what I'm saying is: The Richter Scale, how quaint.
Deaths?
Deaths-per-Minute?
'Senseless' Deaths-per-Minute?
Second Coming Signs?
Events that are Revelatory of Humankind's Radical Dysfunctionality and Point To A Coming Conmprehensive Trauma?
Even more than an update of the headlines, it was some answer to this question of measurement, some sense of how to calibrate my instruments for registering calamitous news, that I went to bed apprehensively desiring. An earthquake and a tsunami within one day were a lot to take in, but nothing I wasn't equipped for; add in a technological disaster, though, and the whole combo was a bit too much. Natural catastrophes, I had a box for those. Fiery collapsing buildings too, unfortunately. And yes, because I'm old enough, I had a place to put nuclear stuff as well. But all at once? Even Hollywood has failed me here. Though a few of its omnibus CGI apocalypses have served up all of these elements and then some ('Independence Day,' '2012'), the underlying scripts were so contrived that the horrors didn't horrify, they merely impressed.
Meaning this was new, this news.
It feels like there's been a lot of new news recently.
So anyway, when the alarm clock woke me up, my laptop computer was right there by my pillow. I rolled over on my side and clicked. The building around the reactor had exploded. I watched a brief video of the accident. I watched it several times. That's how it works now: the five or ten seconds of critical footage, initially an impressionistic blur, is played and replayed until it yields its message, until its act-structure becomes perceptible. And then, once it has, you can fix a caption on it. Mine in this case was: They Said When it Started It Probably Wouldn't Go This Far, But I Was Absolutely Sure it Would. Or, to frame it another way: What is it about reality lately that bad dreams grasp it better than informed analyses?
Now, a few hours later, things have calmed some. Certain key boundaries have held, it seems. But I still don't know how to graph what's going on. I still lack a unitized basis for comparing Japan to Haiti to Libya to Katrina to 9/11 to what might be coming in Saudi Arabia to what could happen tomorrow in, say, Los Angeles or -- as suddenly seems plausible -- in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Oslo simultaneously. Though maybe not Oslo. Scandinavia still seems safe somehow. Nothing awful ever happens in Scandinavia.
Which, these days, probably assures that something will. And that the something will be something other than the unthinkable somethings that have preceded it.
I suppose what I'm saying is: The Richter Scale, how quaint.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
What Would it Be Like to Care About Wisconsin? Imagining an Alternate Political Self
I'd have to be one of those people who think of teachers in the way that Hollywood asks us to in those hit movies where a failing school wracked by ill-discipline at every level is gradually led by a person of simple tastes, unsexy habits, and not-for-profit hair through a painful but redemptive process of acknowledging, pursuing, and satisfying its latent desire for greatness. I'd also have to be able to forget my actual teachers, who often dismissed or ridiculed my overt desire for greatness and whose unprepossessing looks and manners seemed less to suggest nobility of spirit than uncertainty of body.
I'd have to be one of those people who aren't distracted, when watching TV or browsing on the Internet, by lurid celebrity gossip; or, rather, who are distracted by such gossip but know it to be merely that, a lurid distraction, and whose intellectual compass needles reliably return (after some wiggling) to topics such as fiscal years, parliamentary procedure, and collective bargaining.
I'd have to be able to sustain aesthetic interest in Governor Scott Walker's face, a sort of embryonically indistinct contemporary male conservative visage that seems, like a stem cell, capable of growing into the faces of most of Walker's peers, but particularly Mitt Romney's. Which may be another way of saying this: Walker's face appears to be the average of the family of faces that Romney's is the ideal of.
I'd have to be able to shift cultural perspectives and take the state of Wisconsin seriously as a stage for Vital Political Dramas With Ramifications for Our National Future rather than continuing to see it as a comical repository of dated White Ethnic folkways, one of which is belonging to labor unions and others of which are eating sausage and bowling.
I'd have to be one of those people who aren't distracted, when watching TV or browsing on the Internet, by lurid celebrity gossip; or, rather, who are distracted by such gossip but know it to be merely that, a lurid distraction, and whose intellectual compass needles reliably return (after some wiggling) to topics such as fiscal years, parliamentary procedure, and collective bargaining.
I'd have to be able to sustain aesthetic interest in Governor Scott Walker's face, a sort of embryonically indistinct contemporary male conservative visage that seems, like a stem cell, capable of growing into the faces of most of Walker's peers, but particularly Mitt Romney's. Which may be another way of saying this: Walker's face appears to be the average of the family of faces that Romney's is the ideal of.
I'd have to be able to shift cultural perspectives and take the state of Wisconsin seriously as a stage for Vital Political Dramas With Ramifications for Our National Future rather than continuing to see it as a comical repository of dated White Ethnic folkways, one of which is belonging to labor unions and others of which are eating sausage and bowling.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
The Uses of Charlie Sheen, A Wittgensteinian Investigation.
1. As Cautionary Tale.
Acutely problematic. Since Sheen's biography bears little relationship to the experiences of most civilians, it's hard to know how exactly he went wrong or how, under the circumstances (father a hyper-observant Roman Catholic political activist thinking-person's movie star; brother a frozen-in-pop-culture-time non-thinking person's teen-dream idol; face a peculiar demonic composite of both of them that's somehow been robbed of its individuality; ex-wife a robotic sex kitten projection deemed real only for legal and gossip purposes; TV show a fiendishly exploitative mechanism which invites the viewer to superimpose what he knows to be Sheen's degraded consciousness on a generic asshole background of a character), he might have avoided going wrong.
Yes, in theory, cocaine abuse is something human beings should avoid, but Charlie Sheen does not exist in theory. He exists in what one might call a 'problem space' that is singular, novel, and largely incommunicable. Inside of it and according to its rules 'cocaine abuse' may well resemble what we on the outside, in the consensus problem-space, think of as 'light and healthy eating' or 'preparing for the hero's journey.'
2. As Social Media Binding Agent
Marvelously efficient and unlikely ever to be surpassed. In the endless one and a half days since Sheen shrugged off his fictional carapace as the 'star' of Two and a Half Men ( a show so majestically barren of personality, so perfectly clone-of-a-clone-of in style and affect, that it could have made a 'star' of anyone who stuck his live head in the cut-out hole it offered), and launched his new 'reality' career as a live-wire interview subject who was at first authentically unstable but is surely enough of a performer to realize now what the audience expects from him and to deliver it with all his might, meaning he's now both unstable and feigning unstable, Sheen has emerged as the consummate, perhaps defining, subject of social media conversations. He is the great Third Person Outside the Room that allows loosely associated strangers interacting on Twitter etc. to engage in synthetic confidential intimacy.
His any-guy name 'Charlie' helps immeasurably here, but what helps most is this: Charlie too treats "Charlie Sheen" as the great Third Person Outside the Room.
3. As Secret Superhero of the Id
Profoundly influential yet puzzling.
At a time when few of us know first-hand exactly what Total Self-Gratification would constitute if our means and our access to party supplies were infinite, we are left to infer from Sheen's aftermath appearance -- from the graven lines around his mouth and the very small holes in the center of his pupils where the 'twinkle' used to go -- what it's like to do everything you want to anyone you want to do it to in a safe and luxurious environment while you're the highest you can be. It's fun to imagine what Sheen felt, that is, and what it felt like (at one time) to be Sheen. It's a way to connect with our orgiastic selves. It's a way to not have to pretend that cocaine feels bad and that meaningless sex, by meaning whatever we want it to, isn't in fact the most meaningful sex of all.
The problem, though, is that when you look at him, you get this distinct weird feeling that Charlie Sheen is the only person in the whole universe incapable of actually enjoying, actually getting off on in a deep way that really sticks to the neurons afterward, the myriad pleasures of Homo Malibu that were formerly open to Charlie Sheen.
(Describe your own uses of Sheen in the comments section and I will consider them in a future post)
Acutely problematic. Since Sheen's biography bears little relationship to the experiences of most civilians, it's hard to know how exactly he went wrong or how, under the circumstances (father a hyper-observant Roman Catholic political activist thinking-person's movie star; brother a frozen-in-pop-culture-time non-thinking person's teen-dream idol; face a peculiar demonic composite of both of them that's somehow been robbed of its individuality; ex-wife a robotic sex kitten projection deemed real only for legal and gossip purposes; TV show a fiendishly exploitative mechanism which invites the viewer to superimpose what he knows to be Sheen's degraded consciousness on a generic asshole background of a character), he might have avoided going wrong.
Yes, in theory, cocaine abuse is something human beings should avoid, but Charlie Sheen does not exist in theory. He exists in what one might call a 'problem space' that is singular, novel, and largely incommunicable. Inside of it and according to its rules 'cocaine abuse' may well resemble what we on the outside, in the consensus problem-space, think of as 'light and healthy eating' or 'preparing for the hero's journey.'
2. As Social Media Binding Agent
Marvelously efficient and unlikely ever to be surpassed. In the endless one and a half days since Sheen shrugged off his fictional carapace as the 'star' of Two and a Half Men ( a show so majestically barren of personality, so perfectly clone-of-a-clone-of in style and affect, that it could have made a 'star' of anyone who stuck his live head in the cut-out hole it offered), and launched his new 'reality' career as a live-wire interview subject who was at first authentically unstable but is surely enough of a performer to realize now what the audience expects from him and to deliver it with all his might, meaning he's now both unstable and feigning unstable, Sheen has emerged as the consummate, perhaps defining, subject of social media conversations. He is the great Third Person Outside the Room that allows loosely associated strangers interacting on Twitter etc. to engage in synthetic confidential intimacy.
His any-guy name 'Charlie' helps immeasurably here, but what helps most is this: Charlie too treats "Charlie Sheen" as the great Third Person Outside the Room.
3. As Secret Superhero of the Id
Profoundly influential yet puzzling.
At a time when few of us know first-hand exactly what Total Self-Gratification would constitute if our means and our access to party supplies were infinite, we are left to infer from Sheen's aftermath appearance -- from the graven lines around his mouth and the very small holes in the center of his pupils where the 'twinkle' used to go -- what it's like to do everything you want to anyone you want to do it to in a safe and luxurious environment while you're the highest you can be. It's fun to imagine what Sheen felt, that is, and what it felt like (at one time) to be Sheen. It's a way to connect with our orgiastic selves. It's a way to not have to pretend that cocaine feels bad and that meaningless sex, by meaning whatever we want it to, isn't in fact the most meaningful sex of all.
The problem, though, is that when you look at him, you get this distinct weird feeling that Charlie Sheen is the only person in the whole universe incapable of actually enjoying, actually getting off on in a deep way that really sticks to the neurons afterward, the myriad pleasures of Homo Malibu that were formerly open to Charlie Sheen.
(Describe your own uses of Sheen in the comments section and I will consider them in a future post)
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